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By John W. Dean
$18.16
By Rachel Corrie
$16.29
$23
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Blue whales are changing their tune, medieval trial-by-floating-or-drowning turns out to have been shockingly accurate, and President Obama may have trouble with working people because he’s so damned upwardly mobile—all this and more on today’s list.
Posted on Feb 5, 2010
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Original image: Flickr / LukaIsntLuka
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A progressive communications firm in Maryland is planning on sticking it to the Supreme Court by running for Congress. After all, if corporations have the same rights as individuals, why can’t they run for office?
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By Ruth Marcus — In opening the floodgates for corporate money in election campaigns, the Supreme Court did not simply engage in a brazen power grab. It did so in an opinion stunning in its intellectual dishonesty.
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By Chris Hedges — Corporate forces, long before the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, carried out a coup d’état in slow motion. The coup is over. We lost.
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AP / Alex Brandon
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In his weekly radio address, President Obama showed his dismay at the Supreme Court’s decision to remove corporate campaign finance limits, warning of a pending deluge of special interest money into our democracy—a subject he knows quite well as he continues to fight for health care reform.
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Background: Suburbanbloke (CC-BY-SA)
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By Amy Goodman — A landmark class action case is under way in a New York federal court, with victims of apartheid in South Africa suing corporations that they say helped the pre-1994 regime.
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blogspot.com
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In a move to quell public outrage, President Obama has ordered the government’s “pay czar” to cut by 90 percent the multimillion-dollar salaries that executives of seven bank and auto companies are receiving, citing the fact that these firms are entirely dependent on U.S. taxpayer money for financial survival.
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AP / Charles Dharapak
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By Chris Hedges — The right-wing accusations against Barack Obama are true. He is a socialist, although he practices socialism for corporations.
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AP / Rick Rycroft
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By Chris Hedges — Our most potent political weapon is food. If we take back our agriculture, if we buy and raise produce locally, we can begin to break the grip of corporations that control a food system as fragile, unsafe and destined for collapse as our financial system.
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Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges talks about his new book, “Empire of Illusion,” with the Philadelphia Inquirer. The book connects cultural decline with the transformation of America into a “corporate state run by and on behalf of corporations rather than citizens.”
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AP / Mark Lennihan
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By Chris Hedges — Positive psychology, which claims to be able to engineer happiness, is a quack science that justifies the cruelty of unfettered capitalism, shifting the blame from the power elite to those they oppress.
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By Rep. Dennis Kucinich — In mid-May, President Obama secured a deal with the health insurance companies to trim 1.5 percent of their costs each year for 10 years, saving a total of $2 trillion. Just two days after the announcement at the White House, the insurance companies reneged on the deal that was designed to protect and increase their revenue at least 35 percent.
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AP photo / Jacqueline Larma
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By Chris Hedges — The commercial exploitation of Michael Jackson’s death was orchestrated by the corporate forces that rendered him insane. He was infected by the moral nihilism and personal disintegration that are at the core of our corporate culture. He was a reflection of us in the extreme.
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cnbc.com
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SEIU President Andrew Stern and Wal-Mart have joined forces, breaking with most other companies to support President Obama’s plan requiring employers to provide health insurance to workers. The thing often forgotten is Wal-Mart’s horrible record on health care and its current move to make about 40 percent of its employees part-time and thus ineligible for benefits.
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AP photo / Bebeto Matthews
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By Chris Hedges — The modern world, as Kafka predicted, has become a world where lies become true. And facts alone will be powerless to thwart the mendacity spun out through billions of dollars in corporate advertising, lobbying and control of traditional sources of information. The lines between artists, social activists and journalists have to be erased.
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amazonaws.com
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After at least 54 people were killed in a bloody roadblock protest earlier this month, native groups in Peru have won a commitment from the government to revoke laws that opened the Amazon to foreign oil and gas companies to exploit indigenous land for resources.
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By Amy Goodman — Ken Saro-Wiwa and Alberto Pizango never met, but they are united by a passion for the preservation of their people and their land, and by the fervor with which they were targeted by their respective governments.
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By Amy Goodman — Twenty years ago, the Exxon Valdez supertanker spilled at least 11 million gallons of oil into Alaska’s pristine Prince William Sound. The consequences of the spill were epic and continue to this day, impacting the environment and the economy.
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At last, a revisionist takedown of our 40th president, portrayed as an empty suit too often lauded by the common people he betrayed.
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By Marie Cocco — Sorry to rain on the inaugural parade, but we need to find a better way to pay for these things. The financing of President-elect Barack Obama’s big day is just as much of an embarrassment to the country as the financing of inaugurations past.
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flickr.com / Presidential Inaugural Committee
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While Barack Obama banned corporations and big donors from funding his inauguration so as to not trammel the public celebration, the big event’s multimillion-dollar bill is instead being footed by Wall Street executives and other financial employees acting as fundraisers. Abracadabra—no more special interests.
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By Marie Cocco — Today’s brainteaser: Name the top female executives who were forced to go before Congress, explaining why their companies made multibillion-dollar mistakes that helped wreck the economy but nonetheless deserve billions in taxpayer bailouts.
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AP photo / Douglas Healey
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By Chris Hedges — The multiple failures that beset the country can be laid at the feet of our elite universities. Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford, along with most other elite schools, do a poor job educating students to think. They focus instead on creating hordes of competent systems managers.
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USAF / Staff Sgt. Samuel Rogers
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By William Pfaff — Barack Obama has no choice but to accept responsibility for America’s foreign policy crises. But why should he accept them on the distorted and even hysterical terms by which the Bush administration has defined world affairs since 2001?
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AP photo / Kiichiro Sato, file
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By Chris Hedges — The swelling numbers waiting outside homeless shelters and food pantries around the country have grown by at least 30 percent since the summer. If Barack Obama continues to turn to the elites who created the mess, if he does not radically redirect the nation’s resources to assist the working class and the poor, we will become a third-world country.
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AP photo / Morry Gash
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By Chris Hedges — War is a poison. It is a poison that nations and groups must at times ingest to ensure their survival. But, like any poison, it can kill you just as surely as the disease it is meant to eradicate.
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goodguide.com
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You may have knocked on doors for Barack Obama, but it’s possible you gave money to John McCain. GoodGuide has a tool that sorts donations by party, logo and industry. Tech companies seem to prefer Democrats while food companies love Republicans. The banks, of course, throw money at everybody.
Posted on Nov 7, 2008
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The New York Times / Doug Mills
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On Friday the House approved, after initially rejecting, the $700-billion bailout package for the financial industry in what is likely to be the most expensive government intervention in the nation’s history. This, of course, only slightly surpasses another notable “government intervention”—the nearly $600 billion spent in the war in Iraq.
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By David Sirota — In the imminent confrontation over the Employee Free Choice Act, an almost embarrassingly modest proposal, corporations are actually billing themselves as the underdog—the poor, overmatched peasant David against the Philistine monster Goliath.
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Michael Phelps’ million-dollar bonus for making Olympic history is chump change compared with the hundreds of millions he is expected to rake in over the course of his career. What does swimming have to do with credit cards? Visa is prepared to spend millions to convince you the answer is “a lot.”
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By David Sirota — If you believe the chatter, Barack Obama is desperately seeking a white guy—any white guy—to be his running mate. Hopefully, he doesn’t choose Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh, whose only major accomplishment is helping to bend his party to the will of corporations.
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news.bbc.co.uk
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The British government is planning to “significantly reduce” the country’s online file-sharing of copyrighted content, by at least 50 percent, in the next three years through a sequence of warning letters, Internet account suspensions and ultimate expulsion from Internet access.
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By David Sirota — History books teem with six-word phrases, from the comforting (“Nothing to fear but fear itself”) to the inspiring (“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”) to the embarrassing (“Read my lips, no new taxes”). But the six words “on the basis of union membership” could be more momentous than any of those.
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By Amy Goodman — The nominating conventions have become elaborate, expensive marketing events, but most people don’t know the extent to which major corporations fund them, pouring tens of millions of dollars into a little-known loophole in the campaign-finance system.
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namtheun2.com
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The World Bank is being criticized for a persistent lack of environmental focus in an internal review of its lending activities. The new report rails against the environmental degradation caused by many bank-funded projects in poor countries that harm local communities in the name of “development.”
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AP photo / Mark Lennihan
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By Chris Hedges — The decline of newspapers is not about the replacement of the antiquated technology of news print with the lightning speed of the Internet. It does not signal an inevitable and salutary change. It is not a form of progress.
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By Amy Goodman — Food riots are erupting around the world. Behind the hunger, behind the riots, are so-called free-trade agreements, and the brutal emergency-loan agreements imposed on poor countries by financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund.
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Flickr / Joe Crimmings Photography
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By Chris Hedges — The corporate state is our shadow government. Candidates who aspire to higher office get corporate money if they promote corporate interests. Barack Obama’s campaign message, filled with lofty promises of change and hope, is also filled with repeated reassurances to the corporate elite.
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By Amy Goodman — It’s the deadliest conflict since World War II. More than 5 million people have died in the past decade, yet it goes virtually unnoticed and unreported in the United States.
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AP photo / Jim Cole
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By Chris Hedges — Why isn’t Dennis Kucinich treated as a viable candidate? Because, Hedges argues, it’s all too easy for the comfortable to dismiss him.
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Despite opposition from Congress and the public, the FCC has decided it’s in the nation’s best interest to relax decades-old ownership rules that prohibit media giants from owning newspapers and broadcasts outlets in the same local market. The idea behind the old rules, crazy as it sounds, is that it’s probably not a good thing to get all of your information from the same place. The FCC’s three Republicans and America’s media conglomerates disagree.
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By David Sirota — Henry Kravis is the king of private equity, the Wall Street sector that buys and bleeds companies. He and his ilk, to preserve their huge tax advantages, are making sure that millions of Americans won’t get a fair deal.
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Freespeech.org has this entertaining take on the privatization of the Internet, a medium that was once public, open and collaborative, but has since been taken over by corporate juggernauts. It’s not something we all think about, but it wasn’t so long ago that the Internet was organized around information and education, as opposed to shopping.
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Britain’s biggest union will meet with the United Steel Workers, a North American organization, to discuss the possibility of a merger. The resulting international mega-union would be one of the largest in the world. The head of the British group has previously expressed a desire to form “a single global trade union movement capable of challenging the might of multinationals.”
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By Amy Goodman — What do Osama bin Laden and Chiquita bananas have in common? Both have used their millions to finance terrorism.
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fcc.gov
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Jonathan Adelstein, one of five FCC commissioners, speaks with Truthdig about the battle to control America’s airwaves, the value of an open and fair Internet and his initial thoughts on the XM-Sirius merger.
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