Category: Uncategorized

Victory on SOPA: Lessons Learned

How the media enable the Republican tax agenda

By Mike Lofgren, Nieman Watchdog, Commentary, January 18, 2012

Mike Lofgren, the former Republican congressional staffer who recently decried the descent of the GOP into lunacy, blames the press for not holding politicians accountable for their budgetary flimflam in the service of the rich. The result: A miserably misinformed public.

The media doesn't seem to understand the basics about budgets — and the inescapable relationship between aggregate revenues, aggregate spending, and total deficits. Either that, or reporters just choose to play dumb. The end result is the same, however: Journalists don't probe deeply — or they probe when it is too late to matter — into budget proposals and their real-world consequences (as opposed to regurgitating the talking points politicians issue to “explain” them). They are also generally unaware of easily obtainable historical data and historical trends, and how these predict the likely outcome of current fiscal policy choices.

Read full article with graphics.

Phi Beta Iota:  There are exactly two honest plans out there, one is Ron Paul's Plan to Restore America and the other one is from We  the People Reform Coalition that adopts the Automated Payment Transaction (APT) Tax that REPLACES all other taxes, is super-progressive, and explodes the revenue pie by placing a TINY tax on all stock and currency transactions.  The media is partially corrupt, partially inattentive, and partially stupid.  Romney is a fraud, so is Obama, and if the theater plays out as we anticipate, Jeb Bush will rise from the ashes of the totally corrupt Republican Party–whether that will inspire a third wave that trashes the two-party tyranny remains to be seen.

The Copyright Cartel's Enforcers: The FBI

What happens when a government hollows out?

Answer:  Private interests take control of the machinery of state to enhance and protect their profitability.

In some cases, this results in simple looting (like the US mortgage fiasco and EU meltdown).  In others, Byzantine laws and rules are enacted that crush innovation and trample personal rights.

Unfortunately, based on this measure, the US and the EU is well on the way to becoming hollow.  There's no going back.

Take today's example.  At the behest of the Copyright Cartel, the US Justice Department's FBI raided the offices, seized the assets, and criminally indicted/arrested the senior management of the Hong Kong based firm, Megaupload.  The crime?  Copyright infringement MAY have happened on this extremely popular file sharing site. 

What?

And this was on the heals of the attempt to pass the global censorship bills SOPA/PIPA.  Here's an amazingly lucid video, by the new media professor Clay Shirky, on what those bills actually do and the contorted thinking behind them.

The first example Clay provides has the feel of the last days of the USSR.  A government/private enforcement regime, so intrusive, it stops kids from doodling on birthday cakes.  Wow!

Dear friends,

I know this is framed in U.S. terms, because that is where I and most of the people on my list live. I hope, if you are not living in the U.S., that it can be adapted to the country where you live – because the impact of corporate power on our political lives is now a global phenomenon.

Coheartedly,
Tom

Strategies to rein in corporate power?

EXTRACT:

My own preference, of course, would be to find a co-intelligent approach. I can imagine advocates of these various strategies coming together around one integral strategy – one that includes and/or effectively transcends most or all of the different strategies – a super strategy more powerful and wise than anything currently being proposed. If the diverse strategists cannot do this among themselves, perhaps someone could convene a deliberation in which the deliberators are dozens if not hundreds of the most influential activists and organizations whose work is impeded by corporate power. The advocates and opponents of the various strategies would then present their arguments to these powerful political players. With help – perhaps with Dynamic Facilitation – these leading activists and organizations would then discover or design a strategic vision they could all agree on, which embraced the values of all the approaches in a synergistic way.

In the meantime, here are the strategies I see:

LIST ONLY–to read descriptions and links read full article.

1. Community declarations of independence from corporate domination.

2. A Constitutional amendment to declare corporations are not natural persons and therefore don't have the civil rights of persons.

3. A Constitutional amendment to require that all campaigns for federal office be financed exclusively with public funds and prohibit any expenditures from any other source, including the candidate, and prohibit independent support or opposition ads.

4. Congress declares that the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, do not have jurisdiction over political matters (as per the Constitution) and simply reassert Congress' Constitutional right to manage elections.

5. Pass federal laws that reduce the range of corporate political power without directly tackling the underlying challenge.

6. Promote the capacity for citizens, communities and states to generate empowered public wisdom which, to the extent it is developed, can create a wise We the People capable of resisting any attempt to control them unjustly or unwisely.

7. Reduce the power of giant corporations by building alternative (mostly local and green) economies.

8. See if corporate domination will die from a million cuts or mosquito bites.

Read full article.

Occupy Wall Street looms over wins vs. SOPA bill, oil pipeline and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker

Juan Gonzalez

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS, January 19 2012

This nation’s fast-growing populist movement against unbridled corporate power scored an astonishing trifecta this week.

In the span of just a few hours on Wednesday, three vastly different protest movements all achieved startling success the same way: by mobilizing the fury of tens of thousands of ordinary citizens.

Kissinger vows to China: “Jeb Bush Will Be Next President”

Sorcha Faal

WhatDoesThisMean.com, 18 January 2012

A shocking report prepared by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for Prime Minister Putin on the just completed meeting between China’s Vice Premier Li Keqiang and former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger states that the Chinese were told that former Florida Governor John Ellis “Jeb” Bush, brother to the former US President and son of another, will be elected as the next American leader despite his currently not even being on the ballot.

Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping met with Jeb Bush yesterday at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing where both pledged to advance cooperation between their two countries and, this report says, agreed that once Bush had taken office a ‘new era’ would begin in US-China relations.

According to this report, Kissinger told Keqiang that the Republican Party election process to select their nominee to run against President Obama was “completely manipulated” to ensure that their 2012 Convention would be “deadlocked” thus allowing for Jeb Bush to be nominated as a “consensus candidate” and thus his parties leader.

Continue reading “Mini-Me: Kissinger to China on to Russia: Jeb Bush Will Be Next President, Out of Deadlocked Convention”

Huh?

Black America Paralyzed, Powerless, Irrelevant: Year 4 of the Obama Era

Bruce A. Dixon

Black Agenda Report, 18 January 2012

Next week will mark the third anniversary of Barack Obama's inauguration, and the unveiling of his fourth budget. Already White House spokespeople admit that it will be bad news for black and poor Americans. In three years this president has investigated and prosecuted not a single Wall Street banker or institution, not held up the wave of foreclosures a single week, not addressed the issues of black unemployment or black mass incarceration. But black America has silenced itself to protect the career of the First Black President.

Three years ago this week, more than 2 million souls, at least half of them African American, converged upon the nation's capital. They came, in what my colleague Glen Ford called the Great Black Hajj of 2008, to witness and celebrate the swearing in of the nation's first African American president. They wept and danced and sang and prophesied. They marveled at how far they had come. It was, their leaders assured them, the beginning of a new day.

Three years later, it's clear that this is indeed a new day, a new era. But for most of black America, it's not the one they hoped for. Nobody expected urban poverty would begin to vanish overnight, or that millions of acres of lost black farmland would be restored. But promises were made, and expectations were justifiably high, not because Barack Obama had promised to investigate Wall Street, prosecute banksters, or stop the imperial wars and illegal foreclosures, but because humans do have the right to expect justice at home and peace abroad, whether their leaders deliver these things or not.