How Clinton Lost, by the Numbers, and More

Image source

In order to understand how Trump became president, it is helpful to look at the actual numbers. The following statistics are taken from the United States Election Project.

Voting Eligible Population¹:
2008: 213,313,508
2012: 222,474,111
2016: 231,556,622

^1. As distinguished from Voting Age Population, which is a much higher number.

Votes cast for highest office (nearly always less than votes cast):
2008: 131,304,731 (61.6% turnout)
2012: 129,070,906 (57.9% turnout)
2016: 119,500,978 (53.1% turnout)

It's important to note how voter turnout has declined since 2008 when the excitement for "Hope and Change" was fueling one of the highest turnouts (by percentage) in the last couple decades. Turnout this time was pathetic--seemingly representing the unfavorable ratings of both candidates (Clinton 59% and Trump 60% as of August 31, WSJ).

Votes Won:
2008: Obama: 69,498,516 (52.9%)
2012: Obama: 65,915,795 (51.1%
2016: Clinton: 59,861,516 (47.7%)

2008: McCain: 59,948,323 (45.7%)
2012: Romney: 60,933,504 (47.2%)
2016: Trump: 59,639,462 (47.5%)

In all three elections, the Democratic candidate took the majority of the vote--yet, this year, Clinton lost the Electoral College, echoing 2000 when Al Gore beat George W. Bush in votes and still lost the Electoral College. According to Derek Thompson at The Atlantic:

Donald Trump won the electoral vote due to a margin of about 100,000 votes spread across Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. This critical difference represents about 0.04 percent of registered voters, a statistical speck.

The real issue is that voters did not support Hillary Clinton as they had Obama. Trump received fewer votes than either McCain or Romney and still managed to win the Electoral College because Clinton, although receiving more votes than Trump, received a whopping 6 million fewer votes in 2016 than Obama received in 2012, and nearly 10 million fewer votes than Obama received in 2008.

This would seem to indicate that the most liberal or progressive voters, who long proclaimed their refusal to vote for Clinton, kept their word and stayed home (or voted 3rd party).

Third Party Role

Many had hoped this might be the year of the 3rd party candidate, especially in the spring. But the final numbers reflect an essential binary system in this country: Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson won 3% of the vote and Green Party candidate Jill Stein took 1% (both of these are considerably, however, from 2012, when Johnson received 0.9% percent of the vote and Stein took 0.3% percent). Overall, roughly 5 million people cast votes for third party candidates this year.

In Florida, with 29 Electoral College votes, Trump bested Clinton by nearly 129,000 votes in the state, while Johnson and Stein took home more than 268,000 votes between them. Winning Florida would not have been the difference-maker for Clinton, but this outcome was likely repeated in many swing states. There are echoes of the 2000 election that Al Gore lost (also winning the popular vote but losing the electoral college), when Ralph Nader (Green Party) won nearly 100,000 votes in Florida while Democrat Al Gore lost the state by just 537 votes--that was the difference maker in that election.

Here are the six states won by Trump where the 3rd party vote could have shaped the outcome (from the Hit and Run Blog at Reason.com):

Arizona: Trump beat Clinton by four points; Johnson and Stein between them collected 5 percent. But most of that went to Johnson (3.8 percent), so it's unclear whether Trump or Clinton was hurt more by the other options on the ballot.

Florida: Trump eked out a win by just 1.4 percent here. Johnson, Stein, Castle, and Rocky De La Fuente of the Reform Party between them collected 3.2 percent. Enough to cover the spread, but how many of those votes would have otherwise gone to Clinton? Stein got only .7 percent.

Michigan: Trump won this ordinarily blue state by about .3 percent, and Stein got 1.1 percent, so Democrats who feel all Green votes are rightfully theirs are going to be seething at her over this one. Meanwhile, Johnson got 3.6 percent.

Pennsylvania: Trump won by about 1.1 percent. Stein's .8 percent isn't enough to cover that spread; Johnson's 2.4 percent is, but again we don't know whether he was drawing more from Trump or Clinton.

Utah: Trump beat Clinton here by about 17 percent. Sounds like a pretty big victory, but it's still less than McMullin's 20.9 percent. In this case you could make the case that the real spoiler was Clinton: If she weren't on the ballot, nearly all of her supporters surely would have preferred McMullin to Trump, perhaps allowing the independent to deny the Republican six electoral votes.

Wisconsin: Here, on the other hand, Stein's 1.1 percent is just enough to bridge the 1-percent margin between the winning Trump and the losing Clinton. But then what does Johnson's 3.4 percent do to the results—or, for that matter, the nearly half a percentage point that Castle won while running to Trump's right?

It seems that between Florida, Michigan, and Wisconsin, the 3rd party votes could have swayed the election in Trump's favor. But that seems less than genuine.

Clinton could not garner anywhere near the enthusiasm among liberals and progressives that Obama generated, and add that to her image (even among Democrats) as a liar who is both greedy and disingenuous about it, and she shot herself in the knee. Or rather, she shot her own party in the knee, and perhaps again in the groin and the chest for good measure. Because, in her mind, IT WAS MY TURN, DAMN IT!

Where Do Democrats Go from Here?

As a progressive and not a Democrat (I have no party loyalty--my vote is based on values choices), the biggest thing that cost the Dems the White House is Clinton's insistence that it is her turn, which began when she lost to Obama in 2008, upsetting her plans and forcing her to wait. So she waited, and over the next 8 years she locked the party down to the point that only Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley (who never was relevant) dared challenge her.

The Democratic National Committee (DNC), as Wikileaks as shown, was in Clinton's pocket to the point that DNC leaders were handpicked by Clinton, first Debbie Wasserman Schultz (who was later forced to resign), and then Donna Brazile (as interim-director of the DNC).

Wasserman Schultz was running the DNC when it cut off Sanders' access to the DNC voter database for a supposed access violation by the Sanders campaign. Sanders sued and was quickly allowed full access once again. However, emails made public by Wikileaks show that the DNC (which was in full support of Clinton) was also gathering info about Sanders voters for their database. Hmmmm....

Later, it was Brazile, while still working for CNN, who provided debate questions in advance (see here and here) when Clinton faced off with Sanders.

What would have happened if the system had been fair? It is quite possible, with the youth vote supporting him, Sanders would have defeated Clinton just as Obama had in 2008. But Clinton had learned her lesson, there was no way she was not going to control EVERY detail of the primary election so that she came out on top.

You can search by topic for specific emails on this at The Heavy. You can read ALL of the DNC emails made public here (July, 2016) and here (Podesta).

The Independent (UK) makes a strong case that Sanders would have defeated Trump in a head to head match. The numbers from polls taken in the spring support that conjecture. For example:

A poll by NBC News-Wall Street Journal on May 15 said Ms Clinton would beat Mr Trump by three points, but said Mr Sanders would win by 15 points.

A CBS News-New York Times on May 3 gave Ms Clinton a six-point advantage over Mr Trump, but said Mr Sanders would win by 13 points.

At the same time, Fox News said Ms Clinton would lose to Mr Trump by three points, but said Mr Sanders would win by four.

Emphasis added.

Ah, what might have been. Instead, we have at least four years of the most hateful, divisive president in my lifetime. If we thought George W. Bush was bad, we will soon be looking back at Bush as the "good old days."

If there is one lesson the Democrats can learn from the fiasco that was the Clinton campaign, it is to listen to the voters. The GOP did that (against the wishes of the establishment) and they won the White House. Will the Dems learn from this disaster? If history is any proof, likely not.

Peter Gøtzsche - Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare

I came across this book kind of by accident yesterday, but it looks to be an important book ("Prescription drugs are the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer"). Peter C Gøtzsche is a Professor of Clinical Research Design and Analysis, and Director, The Nordic Cochrane Centre, and Chief Physician, Rigshospitalet and the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is highly respected in the field, having published more than 50 papers in "the big five" (BMJ, Lancet, JAMA, Annals of Internal Medicine, and New England Journal of Medicine) and his scientific works have been cited over 10 000 times.

Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare (August, 2013), 320 pages; also available as an ebook for the Kindle, here.

Here is the publisher's ad copy for the book, an interview with the author, and a link to a sample chapter.

From the Introduction

'The main reason we take so many drugs is that drug companies don't sell drugs, they sell lies about drugs. This is what makes drugs so different from anything else in life...Virtually everything we know about drugs is what the companies have chosen to tell us and our doctors...the reason patients trust their medicine is that they extrapolate the trust they have in their doctors into the medicines they prescribe. The patients don't realise that, although their doctors may know a lot about diseases and human physiology and psychology, they know very, very little about drugs that hasn't been carefully concocted and dressed up by the drug industry…If you don't think the system is out of control, then please email me and explain why drugs are the third leading cause of death…If such a hugely lethal epidemic had been caused by a new bacterium or a virus, or even one hundredth of it, we would have done everything we could to get it under control.'​

Prescription drugs are the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer.

In his latest ground-breaking book, Peter Gøtzsche exposes the pharmaceutical industries and their charade of fraudulent behavior, both in research and marketing where the morally repugnant disregard for human lives is the norm. He convincingly draws close comparisons with the tobacco conglomerates, revealing the extraordinary truth behind efforts to confuse and distract the public and their politicians.

The book addresses, in evidence-based detail, an extraordinary system failure caused by widespread crime, corruption, bribery and impotent drug regulation in need of radical reforms.

The author and publisher have no liability or responsibility to any entity regarding loss or damage incurred, or alleged to have incurred, directly or indirectly, by the information contained in this book.

Benefits

• Peter C Gøtzsche reveals how drug companies have hidden the lethal harms of their drugs by fraudulent behaviour, and denials when confronted with the facts.
• Addresses a general system failure caused by widespread crime, corruption and impotent drug regulation in need of radical reforms
• Evidence-based and fully referenced for further investigation of key issues and provides an in-depth level of knowledge in this area.

Sample Chapter

• Free chapter from Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How big pharma has corrupted healthcare

Alliance for Natural Health, Exclusive Interview:

• Interview with Dr Peter Gotzsche, author of Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime

We wanted to learn more about this important new book from the author himself. so we put together a list of questions to which Dr Gøtzsche was kind enough to respond by email. The questions and answers are reproduced below with minimal editing by ANH-Intl.

Dr Peter Gøtzsche, author of Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How big pharma has corrupted healthcare

ANH-Intl: What do you think is the single biggest threat to the safe practice of medicine that ensures the delivery of the highest quality care and best possible outcomes?

PG: That we have allowed the industry to be its own judge. As long as testing drugs is not a public enterprise, performed by disinterested researchers, we cannot trust what comes out of it.

ANH-Intl: How important are non-pharmaceutical approaches to the combat of escalating rates of major chronic diseases, such as heart disease, cancer, type 2 diabetes and obesity?

PG: Non-pharmaceutical approaches can be more important than drugs. Exercise works equally well for diabetes and depression as drugs and, in contrast to drugs, it has many other beneficial effects. Psychotherapy for depression doesn’t make people dependent on drugs and doesn’t turn transient problems into a chronic disease when people cannot stop taking their drugs. Most important of all, we need to tackle the food industry and ban junk food and junk drinks.

ANH-Intl: What is your opinion of the AllTrials initiative in terms of its potential to significantly improve the objectivity of the medical literature in future?

PG: I have campaigned for access to all data, including the raw data, from research on patients for many years. In 2010, we succeeded in gaining access, for the first time in the world, to unpublished clinical study reports at the European Medicines Agency, which had the effect that the Agency changed its policy from one of extreme secrecy – like the current FDA policy – to one of candid openness. This was to the drug industry’s great chagrin, as its business model hinges on publishing flawed research.

ANH-Intl: Similarly, do you think a sea-change in medical student education is needed to deliver better health outcomes, especially for chronic degenerative diseases?

PG: Yes. There is far too much focus on drugs as the solution to everything and far too little focus on their harms, and the education by necessity builds on flawed research, as this is what gets done and published.

ANH-Intl: Towards the end of your book you state that “What we should do is...identify overdiagnosed and overtreated patients, take patients off most or all of their drugs, and teach them that a life without drugs is possible for most of us.” Can you please explain this a little further? Should the removal of drugs be accompanied with any new modality, and if so which ones might be among the most important?

PG: Removal of drugs should usually not be accompanied by the introduction of other types of treatment. Many patients would gain a better quality of life if their drugs were taken away from them. What we need is to remember Brian McFerrin’s song: “Don’t worry, be happy”. We shall all die, but we should remember to live while we are here without worrying that some day in the future we might get ill. It is daunting how many healthy people are put on drugs that lower blood pressure or cholesterol, and it changes people from healthy citizens to patients who may start worrying about their good health. This can have profound psychological consequences apart from the side effects of the drugs that the patients don’t always realise are side effects, e.g. if they get more tired or depressed after starting antihypertensive therapy or experience problems in their sex life.

ANH-Intl: What can the public and patients do to help redress the situation? Are they effectively disempowered or are there things they can do to help build a more functional healthcare system?

PG: First of all, the public needs to know the extent to which they are being deceived in the current system, e.g. few people know that prescription drugs are the third major killer. If drug testing and drug regulation were effective, this wouldn’t happen.

ANH-Intl: Numerous problems with the medical literature are cited in your book, among them unpublished trials, fiddled statistics, unsuitable comparators and other methodological weaknesses and the preponderance of academic ‘flak’ in the form of weak, industry-sourced publications designed to muddy the waters. Bearing this in mind, what advice would you have for anyone wishing to locate high-quality published data?

PG: There are very little high-quality published data. Neither the drug industry nor publicly employed researchers are particularly willing to share their data with others, which essentially means that science ceases to exist. Scrutiny of data by others is a fundamental aspect of science that moves science forward, but that’s not how it works in healthcare. Most doctors are willing to add their names to articles produced by drug companies, although they are being denied access to the data they and their patients have produced and without which the articles cannot be written. This is corruption of academic integrity and betrayal of the trust patients have in the research enterprise. No self-respecting scientists should publish findings based on data to which they do not have free and full access. 

ANH-Intl: Are there any classes of drug, as opposed to individual products, for which, in your opinion, there is no valid scientific or medical justification for their use in healthcare?

PG: There are several classes of drugs, e.g. cough medicines and anticholinergic drugs for urinary incontinence, where the effect is doubtful but there is no doubt about their harms, which in my opinion means they should be withdrawn from the market. There are many other types of drugs that likely have no effect. All drugs have side effects, and it is therefore difficult to blind placebo-controlled trials effectively. We know that lack of blinding leads to exaggerated views on the effect for subjective outcomes, such as dementia, depression and pain, and it is for this reason that many drugs, which are believed to have minor effects, likely aren't effective at all.

There are also classes of drugs where, although an effect has been demonstrated, their availability likely does more harm than good. I write in my book that, although some psychiatric drugs can be helpful sometimes for some patients, our citizens would be far better off if we removed all the psychotropic drugs from the market, as doctors are unable to handle them. Patients get dependent on them, and if used for more than a few weeks, several drugs will cause even worse disorders than the one that led to starting the drugs. As far as I can see, it is inescapable that their availability does more harm than good.

ANH-Intl: The chapter in your book entitled “Intimidation, violence and threats to protect sales” begins as follows: “It takes great courage to become a whistle-blower. Healthcare is so corrupt that those who expose drug companies’ criminal acts become pariahs.” Have you experienced any blowback since publishing the book?

PG: No, quite the contrary, as people have praised the book. I don't hear from the drug industry of course, but I have seen blunt lies about the book being propagated by drug industry associations and their paid allies among doctors.

Medium Exposes Big Pharma's Corruption and Unethical Behavior

Two recent articles in the online magazine Medium expose the unethical behavior and internal corruption of Big Pharma - which is not new information, but in these cases (testing drugs on the homeless and disgraced, addict doctors running drug trials), the story is kind of frightening.

It's no wonder that so many of the Next Big Things in pharmacology end up, a few years later, being implicated in causing disease and even death.

The Best-Selling, Billion-Dollar Pills Tested on Homeless People

How the destitute and the mentally ill are being used as human lab rat

By Carl Elliott

Photographs by Jeffrey Stockbridge

Illustrations by Matt Rota

Two years ago, on a gray January afternoon, I visited the Ridge Avenue homeless shelter in Philadelphia. I was looking for poor people who had been paid to test experimental drugs. The streets outside the shelter were lined with ruined buildings and razor wire, and a pit bull barked behind a chain-link fence. A young guy was slumped on the curb, glassy-eyed and shaky. My guide, a local mental health activist named Connie Schuster, asked the guy if he was okay, but he didn’t answer. “My guess is heroin,” she said.

We arrived at the shelter, where a security guard was patting down residents for weapons. It didn’t take long for the shelter employees to confirm that some of the people living there were taking part in research studies. They said that the studies are advertised in local newspapers, and that recruiters visit the shelter. “They’ll give you a sheet this big filled with pills,” a resident in the shelter’s day room told me the next day, holding up a large notebook. He had volunteered for two studies. He pointed out a stack of business cards on a desk next to us; they had been left by a local study recruiter. As we spoke, I noticed that an ad for a study of a new ADHD drug was running on a television across the room.

If you’re looking for poor people who have been paid to test experimental drugs, Philadelphia is a good place to start. The city is home to five medical schools, and pharmaceutical and drug-testing companies line a corridor that stretches northeast into New Jersey. It also has one of the most visible homeless populations in the country. In Philly, homeless people seem to be everywhere: sleeping in Love Park, slumped on benches in Suburban Station, or gathered along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, waiting for the free meals that a local church gives out on Saturdays.

* * * * *

Why Are Dope-Addicted, Disgraced Doctors Running Our Drug Trials?

By Peter Aldhous
Photographs by Grant Cornett


At around 7 p.m. on February 28, 2003, a 66-year-old woman showed up at the Pioneers Memorial Hospital in Brawley, a small Californian town not far from the Mexican border. She was seen by one of the doctors on duty in the emergency room that night, a man named Michael Berger. He learned that the woman, identified as “B.P.” in a later investigation, was in pain. A cramping sensation in her right thigh was radiating down her calf. Records show that she had a weak pulse in the same leg, and was short of breath. Her right foot felt numb.

Berger had options. He might have reviewed B.P.’s medical records, or tried to reach her primary care doctor to learn more about her history. He might have ordered an ultrasound or an x-ray. Either scan could have revealed the blockage in the artery in B.P.’s right leg. But Berger didn’t do those things. After consulting with a colleague, he sent B.P. home, with instructions to rest, drink plenty of fluids and take painkillers and blood-thinning meds. When she returned to the ER two days later, her leg was pale and cold—too far gone to save. She was flown to a larger hospital in San Diego, where surgeons removed the limb above the knee.

Berger’s career did not improve much afterwards. One day in 2004, he turned up for work impaired, a situation he blamed on taking sleeping pills. Other problems were noted when his employers asked a team of doctors to review his performance: failing to properly monitor patients after prescribing them dangerous drugs; prescribing excessive amounts of painkillers to his wife; a series of incidents while driving, which may have been related to his own drug use.


In 2008, the Medical Board of California put Berger on a seven-year probation. It was an unusually lengthy sanction, and it included limits on his ability to prescribe narcotics, and a requirement that he take regular blood tests to check for drug abuse. By then his career as an ER physician was effectively over: The California Emergency Physicians Medical Group, which employs ER doctors at Pioneers and dozens of other hospitals across the state, had handed him an indefinite suspension. Already his mid-60s, you might imagine that Berger would have taken these sanctions as a cue to slip into retirement.

But that’s not what happened.

Read the whole article.

 

From AlterNet, via Truthdig, Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, Chris Hedges looks at the loss of Constitutional Protects, largely due to the cooperation of the Obama administration, the industrial military complex, and the corporatocracy.

Here is the key quote from the article:

The goals of corporate capitalism are increasingly indistinguishable from the goals of the state. The political and economic systems are subservient to corporate profit. Debate between conventional liberals and conservatives has been replaced by empty political theater and spectacle. Corporations, no matter which politicians are in office, loot the Treasury, escape taxation, push down wages, break unions, dismantle civil society, gut regulation and legal oversight, control information, prosecute endless war, and dismantle public institutions and programs that include schools, welfare, and Social Security. And elected officials, enriched through our form of legalized corporate bribery, have no intention of halting the process.

The system has already been rigged to the point that there is little we can do, as citizens, to change this state of affairs.

By the way, Hedges newest book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

Chris Hedges: We're Losing the Last Shreds of Legal Rights to Protect Ourselves from Oligarchy

A ruling elite that accrues for itself total power, history has shown, eventually uses it.

May 5, 2014 | Chris Hedges


Photo Credit: WeAreChange; Screenshot / YouTube.com

The U.S. Supreme Court decision to refuse to hear our case concerning Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which permits the military to seize U.S. citizens and hold them indefinitely in military detention centers without due process, means that this provision will continue to be law. It means the nation has entered a post-constitutional era. It means that extraordinary rendition of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil by our government is legal. It means that the courts, like the legislative and executive branches of government, exclusively serve corporate power — one of the core definitions of fascism. It means that the internal mechanisms of state are so corrupted and subservient to corporate power that there is no hope of reform or protection for citizens under our most basic constitutional rights. It means that the consent of the governed — a poll by OpenCongress.com showed that this provision had a 98 percent disapproval rating — is a cruel joke. And it means that if we do not rapidly build militant mass movements to overthrow corporate tyranny, including breaking the back of the two-party duopoly that is the mask of corporate power, we will lose our liberty.

“In declining to hear the case Hedges v. Obama and declining to review the NDAA, the Supreme Court has turned its back on precedent dating back to the Civil War era that holds that the military cannot police the streets of America,” said attorney Carl Mayer, who along with Bruce Afran devoted countless unpaid hours to the suit. “This is a major blow to civil liberties. It gives the green light to the military to detain people without trial or counsel in military installations, including secret installations abroad. There is little left of judicial review of presidential action during wartime.”

Afran, Mayer and I brought the case to the U.S. Southern District Court of New York in January 2012. I was later joined by co-plaintiffs Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, journalist Alexa O’Brien, RevolutionTruth founder Tangerine Bolen, Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jonsdottir and Occupy London activist Kai Wargalla.

Later in 2012 U.S. District Judge Katherine B. Forrest declared Section 1021(b)(2) unconstitutional. The Obama administration not only appealed — we expected it to appeal — but demanded that the law be immediately put back into effect until the appeal was heard. Forrest, displaying the same judicial courage she showed with her ruling, refused to do this.

The government swiftly went to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. It asked, in the name of national security, that the court stay the district court’s injunction until the government’s appeal could be heard. The 2nd Circuit agreed. The law went back on the books. My lawyers and I surmised that this was because the administration was already using the law to detain U.S. citizens in black sites, most likely dual citizens with roots in countries such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen. The administration would have been in contempt of court if Forrest’s ruling was allowed to stand while the federal authorities detained U.S. citizens under the statute. Government attorneys, when asked by Judge Forrest, refused to say whether or not the government was already using the law, buttressing our suspicion that it was in use.

The 2nd Circuit overturned Forrest’s ruling last July in a decision that did not force it to rule on the actual constitutionality of Section 1021(b)(2). It cited the Supreme Court ruling in Clapper v. Amnesty International, another case in which I was one of the plaintiffs, to say that I had no standing, or right, to bring the NDAA case to court. Clapper v. Amnesty International challenged the secret wiretapping of U.S. citizens under the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. The Supreme Court had ruled in Clapper that our concern about government surveillance was “speculation.” It said we were required to prove to the court that the FISA Act would be used to monitor those we interviewed. The court knew, of course, that the government does not disclose whom it is monitoring. It knew we could never offer proof. The leaks by Edward Snowden, which came out after the Supreme Court ruling, showed that the government was monitoring us all, along with those we interviewed. The 2nd Circuit used the spurious Supreme Court ruling to make its own spurious ruling. It said that because we could not show that the indefinite-detention law was about to be used against us, just as we could not prove government monitoring of our communications, we could not challenge the law. It was a dirty game of judicial avoidance on two egregious violations of the Constitution.

In refusing to hear our lawsuit the courts have overturned nearly 150 years of case law that repeatedly holds that the military has no jurisdiction over civilians. Now, a U.S. citizen charged by the government with “substantially supporting” al-Qaida, the Taliban or those in the nebulous category of “associated forces” — some of the language of Section 1021(b)(2) — is lawfully subject to extraordinary rendition on U.S. soil. And those seized and placed in military jails can be kept there until “the end of hostilities.”

Judge Forrest, in her 112-page ruling against the section, noted that under this provision of the NDAA whole categories of Americans could be subject to seizure by the military. These might include Muslims, activists, Black Bloc members and any other Americans labeled as domestic terrorists by the state. Forrest wrote that Section 1021(b)(2) echoed the 1944 Supreme Court ruling in Korematsu v. United States, which supported the government’s use of the military to detain 110,00 Japanese-Americans in internment camps without due process during World War II.

Of the refusal to hear our lawsuit, Afran said, “The Supreme Court has left in place a statute that furthers erodes basic respect for constitutional liberties, that weakens free speech and will chill the willingness of Americans to exercise their 1st Amendment rights, already in severe decline in this country.”

The goals of corporate capitalism are increasingly indistinguishable from the goals of the state. The political and economic systems are subservient to corporate profit. Debate between conventional liberals and conservatives has been replaced by empty political theater and spectacle. Corporations, no matter which politicians are in office, loot the Treasury, escape taxation, push down wages, break unions, dismantle civil society, gut regulation and legal oversight, control information, prosecute endless war and dismantle public institutions and programs that include schools, welfare and Social Security. And elected officials, enriched through our form of legalized corporate bribery, have no intention of halting the process.

The government, by ignoring the rights and needs of ordinary citizens, is jeopardizing its legitimacy. This is dangerous. When a citizenry no longer feels that it can find justice within the organs of power, when it feels that the organs of power are the enemies of freedom and economic advancement, it makes war on those organs. Those of us who are condemned as radicals, idealists and dreamers call for basic reforms that, if enacted, will make peaceful reform possible. But corporate capitalists, now unchecked by state power and dismissive of the popular will, do not see the fires they are igniting. The Supreme Court ruling on our challenge is one more signpost on the road to dystopia.

It is capitalism, not government, that is the problem. The fusion of corporate and state power means that government is broken. It is little more than a protection racket for Wall Street. And it is our job to wrest government back. This will come only through the building of mass movements.

“It is futile to be ‘anti-Fascist’ while attempting to preserve capitalism,” George Orwell wrote. “Fascism after all is only a development of capitalism, and the mildest democracy, so-called, is liable to turn into Fascism.”

Our corporate masters will not of their own volition curb their appetite for profits. Human misery and the deadly assault on the ecosystem are good for business. These masters have set in place laws that, when we rise up — and they expect us to rise up — will permit the state to herd us like sheep into military detention camps. Section 1021(b)(2) is but one piece of the legal tyranny now in place to ensure total corporate control. The corporate state also oversees the most pervasive security and surveillance apparatus in human history. It can order the assassination of U.S. citizens. It has abolished habeas corpus. It uses secret evidence to imprison dissidents, such as the Palestinian academic Mazen Al-Najjar. It employs the Espionage Act to criminalize those who expose abuses of power. A ruling elite that accrues for itself this kind of total power, history has shown, eventually uses it.


~ Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, writes a regular column for Truthdig every Monday. Hedges also wrote 12 books, including the New York Times bestseller “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (2012)," which he co-authored with the cartoonist Joe Sacco. Hedges's most recent book is "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle."

I'm not as hopeful as Lessig about the progress of political reform (I suspect hell will freeze over before there is any REAL political reform). But Lessig knows things I don't know - lots of them - and he makes some interesting arguments. I hope he is correct.

Lawrence Lessig: The unstoppable walk to political reform

March 2014

Seven years ago, Internet activist Aaron Swartz convinced Lawrence Lessig to take up the fight for political reform. A year after Swartz's tragic death, Lessig continues his campaign to free US politics from the stranglehold of corruption. In this fiery, deeply personal talk, he calls for all citizens to engage, and offers a heartfelt reminder to never give up hope.


This talk was presented at an official TED Conference. TED's editors featured it among our daily selections on the home page.



Lawrence Lessig - Legal activist Lawrence Lessig has already transformed intellectual-property law with his Creative Commons innovation. Now he's focused on an even bigger problem: The US' broken political system.

Jonathan Rowson - Who owns information: The defining battle of our time?

I am HUGE proponent of open access/Creative Commons publishing, especially for news and research (in all fields). If we are ever to have a true cultural commons, then we should have access to the information for which (many times) our tax dollars pays.

As the quote from Alan Swartz (below) makes clear, knowledge is power, but it is only power by keeping access controlled tightly so that others cannot have that same knowledge, thereby neutralizing the power.

This excellent article comes from Jonathan Rowson at The RSA.

Who owns information: The defining battle of our time?
January 22, 2013 by Jonathan Rowson

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas. - George Bernard Shaw

Could our major problems have a discernible ‘form’ that is somehow more fundamental than their content? If there is some sort of pattern, wouldn’t it make sense to target the pattern as a whole, rather than individual issues piecemeal? Marxists might say that Capitalism as such is the underlying problem, but I don’t think we have to endorse that view to look for what Bateson once called “the pattern that connects“.

We will shortly be publishing a report examining Iain McGilchrist’s work that argues there is a discernible pattern relating to the distinctive phenomenologies of the two brain hemispheres. The claim is that many of our major problems relate to the fact that the ‘inferior’ (though definitely important) left hemisphere is slowly usurping the (wiser but more tentative) right hemisphere at a cultural level, with the consequence that we live increasingly virtual and instrumental lives, and may not even realise what we are losing. The details of that discussion are coming soon to a screen near you, but there are other ways to conceive the form of the problem.

Who controls information?

“Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves.” – Alan Swartz.

When you start to think deeply about our major challenges – including climate change – you quickly run into various vested interests that get in the way of solutions, and many such vested interests are preserved through unequal access to information – academic, technological, legal, environmental, political, financial and so forth. Information should be a public good, and benefits larger numbers when it is shared, but perhaps the main way that vested interests perpetuate their power is through the control and protection of information. For instance what do Shell tell us about their research into drilling in the Arctic, and how can we know it represents full disclosure? What if a doctor prescribes you medicine and you can’t access the relevant primary research because you run into a pay wall? What if the most promising components needed for a technological breakthrough on clean energy are patented by a small group, and therefore thousands of scientists can’t follow that path of inquiry?

“(American) politics is filled with easy cases that we get wrong. The scientific consensus on global warming is overwhelming, but we abandon the Kyoto Protocol. Nutritionists are clear that sugar is unhealthy, but the sugar lobby gets it into dietary recommendations. Retroactive copyright extensions do nothing for society, but Congress passes them over and over.Such control of information is deeply related to financial dependency. Those who control information are supported in their control by law and lawyers. An excerpt from a talk by Harvard academic and activist Lawrence Lessig captures the centrality of this point.

Similar errors are made in other fields that have the public trust. Studies of new drugs are biased towards the drug companies. Law professors and other scholars write papers biased towards the clients they consult for.

Why? Because the trusted people in each case are acting as dependants. The politicians are dependent on fundraising money. They are good people, but they need to spend a quarter of their time making fundraising calls. So most of the people they speak to our lobbyists and they never even hear from the other side. If they were freed from this dependence they would gladly do the right thing.

The scientists get paid to sign on to studies done by the drug companies. The law professors get paid to consult.

How do we solve it? We need to free people from dependency. But this is too hard. We should fight for it, but politicians will never endorse a system of public funding of campaigns when they have so much invested in the current system. Instead, we need norms of independence. People need to start saying that independence is important to them and that they won’t support respected figures who act as dependants. And we can use the Internet to figure out who’s acting as dependants.”

At the risk of simplification, the underlying problem is that the inequality in power is perpetuated by the unequal access to information, and this is a self-perpetuating problem because those with power based on information use it to create dependants, and these dependants thereby develop a vested interest in protecting the information that forms their livelihood.

Why did nobody tell me about Aaron Swartz?

I started to think about this when I realised, sadly, that I never knew the pioneering cyber activist Alan Swartz while he was alive. He recently ended his own life at the age of 26 under enormous legal and political pressure, but is viewed by many as a hero of our times who was driven over the edge by an excessively zealous witch hunt. He was known for being prodigious and hyper-intelligent, but is perhaps best known and admired for the way he swiftly conjured enormous political capital to prevent the SOPA (Stop online piracy act) law in the US which he speaks about so clearly and compellingly here (highly recommended viewing). In essence he prevented the passing of a law that would have radically undermined people’s capacity to connect and share information online, and the way he did so is inspiring, because it looked like he was facing impossible odds.

A friend and former RSA colleague Jamie Young remarked that if I was going to write about Alan Swartz, I should also mention the UK’s Chris Lightfoot who was a similar character fighting a similar kind of battle – a broadly political fight about who rightfully controls information- and also took his life at a young age. The RSA has raised similar questions before, for instance by hosting Evgeny Mozorov who’s talk on why Dictators love the internet was turned into an RSAnimate.

What follows?

What all these thinkers share is a belief that the access to information has much wider implications that people typically realise. As Professor Shamad Basheer puts it in the Spicy IP Blog We live in “a world where the powers that be conspire time and again to reassert hegemony and re-establish control in a digital world whose essential DNA is one of openness and sharing.”

The main take-home point for me lies in the gap between the social norms of sharing and openness online, with the economic and legal norms relating to the perpetuation of property rights and power that have been formed before the digital age. In Aaron Swartz’s case, this battle unfolded in his heart and mind to a tragic extent, but the more I think about it, the more it seems like an enormously important battle between the public good and private ownership that will be defined largely by the political will of the relevant institutions – which in turn is shaped by us (that’s what Lessig was getting at above about the need to shape social norms).

It may not make sense to ‘take sides’ as such, and there are certainly ways to protect intellectual property that are more canny and proportionate. (As an author of three books, all of which have been PDFed and sold cheaply by Xerox merchants online, I am also a kind of ‘dependant’ with a vested interest here).

Whatever you think, I would ask you to reflect on the opening quotation by George Bernard Shaw. Ideas need each other to flourish, but they can’t meet when they are help in captivity, and they will ultimately need some form of power to free them.

On Anniversary of Citizens United, Group Says Occupy the Courts

From Common Dreams . . . . I'm not sure that there is much we can do about the Citizen's United decision. We need Congress to overturn the decision with legislation, and they will NEVER do that (they are the only people who benefit from the decision). The Court will not - and probably is not able to - reverse their own decision in the absence of a case that justifies the reversal.

On Anniversary of Citizens United, Group Says Occupy the Courts

“Corporate personhood and money equals political speech are court-created doctrines"

- Common Dreams staff

The coalition Move to Amend has called for a day of action today to occupy federal courthouses across the country, including the U.S. Supreme Court, to mark the second anniversary of the Citizens United vs. FEC ruling.

 

CNN reports on the timing of the action:

The event is being held around the two-year anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which removed many limits to corporate spending in federal political campaigns, organizers say.

The 2010 ruling made it legal for groups to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money for a candidate, as long as the group does not coordinate with the candidate or contributed directly to his or her campaign.

It allowed for the rise of Super PACs, which can raise unlimited funds from corporations.

Politico reports:

“Why the courts? Because frankly folks, that’s the scene of the crime,” said David Cobb, an organizer of Friday’s protests. “Corporate personhood and money equals political speech are court-created doctrines. We the people never decided it; our elected representatives didn’t decide it; ordinary people like me and you never decided it. The court created these doctrines and it’s going to take a movement to overturn it.”

One tweeter's picture this morning shows barricades going up around the Supreme Court building.

Documentary - The Marketing of Madness: The Truth About Psychotropic Drugs

Cool documentary on the pathologizing of being human by the mental health and pharmaceutical industries. I think this film goes a little too far in some ways, but the overall message is valid.

The Marketing of Madness is the definitive documentary on the psychiatric drugging industry. Here is the real story of the high income partnership between psychiatry and drug companies that has created an $80 billion psychotropic drug profit center.

But appearances are deceiving. How valid are psychiatrists’ diagnoses-and how safe are their drugs? Digging deep beneath the corporate veneer, this documentary exposes the truth behind the slick marketing schemes and scientific deceit that conceal dangerous and often deadly sales campaigns.

In this film you’ll discover that… Many of the drugs side effects may actually make your ‘mental illness’ worse. Psychiatric drugs can induce aggression or depression. Some psychotropic drugs prescribed to children are more addictive than cocaine. Psychiatric diagnoses appears to be based on dubious science. Of the 297 mental disorders contained with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, none can be objectively measured by pathological tests.

Mental illness symptoms within this manual are arbitrarily assigned by a subjective voting system in a psychiatric panel. It is estimated that 100 million people globally use psychotropic drugs.

The Marketing of Madness exposes the real insanity in our psychiatric ‘health care’ system: profit-driven drug marketing at the expense of human rights.

This film plunges into an industry corrupted by corporate greed and delivers a shocking warning from courageous experts who value public health over dollar.

@Google: Lawrence Lessig: Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It

Uploaded by AtGoogleTalks on Nov 16, 2011 - Lawrence Lessig offers hope to reform our corrupt system. I like his ideas, but the partisan divide is great right now that I can't see this happening.

Lawrence Lessig: Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It

In an era when special interests funnel huge amounts of money into our government-driven by shifts in campaign-finance rules and brought to new levels by the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission-trust in our government has reached an all-time low. More than ever before, Americans believe that money buys results in Congress, and that business interests wield control over our legislature.

With heartfelt urgency and a keen desire for righting wrongs, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig takes a clear-eyed look at how we arrived at this crisis: how fundamentally good people, with good intentions, have allowed our democracy to be co-opted by outside interests, and how this exploitation has become entrenched in the system. Rejecting simple labels and reductive logic-and instead using examples that resonate as powerfully on the Right as on the Left-Lessig seeks out the root causes of our situation. He plumbs the issues of campaign financing and corporate lobbying, revealing the human faces and follies that have allowed corruption to take such a foothold in our system. He puts the issues in terms that nonwonks can understand, using real-world analogies and real human stories. And ultimately he calls for widespread mobilization and a new Constitutional Convention, presenting achievable solutions for regaining control of our corrupted-but redeemable-representational system. In this way, Lessig plots a roadmap for returning our republic to its intended greatness.

While America may be divided, Lessig vividly champions the idea that we can succeed if we accept that corruption is our common enemy and that we must find a way to fight against it. In Republic, Lost, he not only makes this need palpable and clear-he gives us the practical and intellectual tools to do something about it.

Michael Collins - The War on You

Over at thepeoplesvoice.org, Michael Collins has posted an interesting - and angry - article about the ways The Money Party (the 1% who control 90% of the wealth, depending on which studies you believe) are manufacturing the "debt crisis" as a way to further dismantle any and all forms of compassionate governance.

The War on You

July 31st, 2011

By Michael Collins

Let the word go forth from Washington! The corporate rulers occupying our nation's capital have declared war on just about every citizen.

Have no doubt: those in the upper ranges of the top 1% of wealth in this country (aka The Money Party) want to kick you to the curb.

They want to reduce your social security and make you go broke paying for medical care.

They want to lower your wages and trash your retirement.

They ignore the clear facts that we've had negative job growth since 2000 and the situation is just getting worse.

They want to ship jobs, factories, and entire businesses overseas and give companies that do that a big fat tax credit for doing so.

They've been given so much for nothing for so long. Now, they're ready to take it all. It's their time!

The most recent assault is the ridiculous debate about raising the debt ceiling. There should be no debate. Failing to raise the ceiling right now means deliberate default on debts, refusing to pay bills the government can pay. It's called fraud.

The pressing need to fix the budget is a separate issue. Reduced spending and increased revenues should come through broad public involvement and open debate. It mandates that the rulers behave like adults.

But this crisis isn't about putting together a real budget. It's about creating a budget that punishes you, your family, and friends. It's about taking your attention away from your vital interests to maximize income and control by The Money Party.

Were the leaders on either side of the debate serious, the Bush era tax cuts would be restored. These cuts on the top 1% were temporary. Guess what? Congress lied. When the temporary tax breaks ran out a few months ago, they were revived and renewed just when we had the greatest need for revenues.

The Money Party won't give up its wars either. Iraq and Afghanistan have added $4 trillion to the national deficit of $14 trillion. Why not stop the wars? How hard is that to figure that out?

Getting rid of Bush tax cuts for the super-rich, ending the wars, and moving out of the recession/depression would be huge steps toward balancing the budget. But that won't happen with this Congress and this president. Why? That would cost the financial elite money for taxes and lost income for all those weapons they sell to support the wars.

The Attack on You Began in Earnest Just Years Ago

Congress repealed Depression era banking regulation that kept your banks from risky investments in 1999.

Congress enacted legislation in 2000 that allowed extremely risky investments in real estate and other derivatives, illegal for nearly a century.

In 2001, the big banks and Wall Street celebrated its newly purchased freedoms with a decade-long binge of fraud and risky investments. Like a greedy con artist, they took everything they could from people here and around the world until there was no more to take. We have now hit the wall thanks to them.

The outrageous expenses of wars based on lies caught up with us and shoved the deficit to new heights. The tax cuts for the top 1% took away revenues needed to balance the budget.

The money they steal from the Social Security surplus is no longer enough. They want to keep the tax in place for us and take an even bigger rake-off.

This crisis is manufactured by the ongoing greed of The Money Party. It is funded by the US Treasury. You pay for it, all of it.

End

This article may be reproduced with attribution of authorship and a link to the article.

Tags: Politics, government, greed, corruption, economics, The War on You, Michael Collins, thepeoplesvoice.org, debt crisis, federal budget, taxes, debt ceiling crisis, debt ceiling talks, medicare, president obama, social security, tea party

Global Research - 4th of July: Is the United States a Representative Democracy or a Mirage Democracy?

While everyone generally spends the 4th of July celebrating all that is great about the United States, while ignoring that our rights and freedoms are progressively being removed, I offer this article from Global Research as a reminder that we have a lot of work to do if we want to remain a free people.

4th of July: Is the United States a Representative Democracy or a Mirage Democracy?

by Kevin Zeese

Global Research, July 4, 2011

A Question for Reflection

It is a shame to have to ask whether democracy is a mirage in the United States, no doubt most Americans would rather be celebrating U.S. democracy than questioning it. But the reality of the disconnect between government and the people has become so stark it is impossible to ignore.

Gallup reports that Americans belief in our form of government and how well it works is now at only 42% (in 2002 it was at 76%). Less than a quarter of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing, yet because of manipulation of the political process, the drawing of voting districts, the impact of campaign money and the power of incumbency, more than 90% will be re-elected.

A major problem is the two party duopoly acts much like a two party dictatorship. Despite nearly 60% of Americans wanting a third party and only 35% believing the two parties do an adequate job, the two parties work together to prevent more choices on the ballot. They have put up road blocks to independent challengers through ballot access laws, campaign finance rules, exclusion from debates and the winner take all electoral system. The corporate media plays an important role of keeping independent candidates off the air so people do not hear about their existence or positions. As a result only the two parties, both funded by the corporate oligarchy, and their corporate-approved candidates appear on most ballots. Most Americans end up voting against their interests for what has commonly become known as voting for ‘the lesser evil.’

The courts, which play an essential role in applying constitutional limits on government in the U.S. Republic, have become a tool of the financial elite, actually weakening elections further. They have issued rulings that further empower the money-class in their control of democracy. The court has allowed unlimited spending by corporations and individuals in the Citizens United decision; and recently found the Arizona Clean Elections Act unconstitutional. Thus striking two blows for the wealthy – they can spend as much as they like, but government cannot provide matching public funds for elections.

President Obama, rather than pushing for clean elections, is going from big donor event to big donor event to become the first candidate to run a billion dollar campaign. More and more Americans recognize that his health care policy, which re-enforced and expanded the power of the insurance industry, likely resulted from their $20 million in donations to his first campaign. Obama kept single payer out of the debate despite years of polls showing large majorities of Americans want single payer and vast evidence showing it is the best model to control costs and the only model to provide health care to all. The insurance company’s profits came before the necessities and preferences of the people. We see people from Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan and other big financial institutions not only being bailed out but being put in the Obama administration rather than prosecuted for crashing the economy despite strong evidence of criminal wrongdoing. These are two examples of many. Obama has advocated corporatism on every issue and is now going to those special interests to fund the most expensive campaign in history.

In the United States more and more recognize the disconnect between government and the needs of most Americans. They see how crony capitalist policies lead to the largest wealth divide we have known with increasing poverty, joblessness, underemployment and insecurity. At the same time the Congress, Treasury and Federal Reserve funnel trillions of dollars to the big banks, but demand cuts for programs that would create jobs, fund state and local government, build the infrastructure, provide basic necessities and protect the environment. This is the first generation of Americans who see that their children are likely to be worse off than they are.

What can Americans do to create a representative democracy and shift the power to the people from major corporations? In fact, the U.S. is not the only country facing the problem of oligarchy. One example that has not gotten a lot of attention in the U.S. media is Spain. The people have been in revolt since March 15^th. Hundreds of thousands have taken control of public spaces across the country. Their protests continue and more major protests are being planned. The Spanish movement has been only minimally reported in the U.S. commercial media, perhaps because some of the complaints are so similar to what we hear in living rooms, schools and restaurants when Americans talk among themselves.

Here’s a sampling of what they are saying in Spain:

• Politicians and economic powers have perverted the democratic ideal.
• A professor from Barcelona explains – the political structures, instead of protecting our welfare and living standards the government is doing the opposite. It is the institutional machine that is creating mass unemployment, precarious employment and unprecedented limitations on future hopes and expectations.
• Another says the political parties have lost touch with the people. They have limited the exercise of democracy to every four years and have stripped democracy of its true meaning.
• “They have reduced us to nothing. They tell us go vote, go vote, go vote – you go vote, pal.”

The Spanish call themselves Real Democracy Already (Democracia Real Ya (DRY)). Like Americans they live under a two party system. There are other small parties, but they are shut out of real participation. The statement of DRY speaks mostly about creating a true democracy. They say: “Democracy belongs to the people (demos = people, krátos = government) which means that government is made of every one of us. However, in Spain most of the political class does not even listen to us. . . Lust for power and its accumulation in only a few; create inequality, tension and injustice. The obsolete and unnatural economic model fuels the social machinery in a growing spiral that consumes itself by enriching a few and sends into poverty the rest. . . The will and purpose of the current system is the accumulation of money, not regarding efficiency and the welfare of society. Wasting resources, destroying the planet, creating unemployment and unhappy consumers. Citizens are the gears of a machine designed to enrich a minority which does not regard our needs. We are anonymous, but without us none of this would exist, because we move the world.”

Sounds familiar, like echoes of conversations many Americans are having. As a result thousands of Americans have joined www.October2011.org. This is a movement to demand an end to corporatism and militarism. Like the Spanish, the Greeks, Tunisians and Egyptians, among others, October2011, will be taking over a public space, Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC beginning on October 6. This day is the beginning of the 11^th year of the Afghanistan War and that week is the beginning of a new federal fiscal year with an austerity budget for everything except the military. October2011.org has written the activists around the world seeking a common agenda of economic justice and real democracy letting them know that their revolution is our revolution. It seems much of the world is waking up to the need to topple the oligarchy at the same time.

Like Spain, October2011.org is led by individuals, not organizations. People from a wide range of issues see the common problem of corporate control of government preventing the change America needs. This includes ending the ongoing wars, reducing the military budget, better pay and jobs for workers, Medicare for all, reversal of the degradation of the environment, ending the wealth divide and putting in place a clean, sustainable energy economy, among others.

The solutions to the critical issues facing the country are evident to many but the corporate interests who profit from the status quo prevent real change. The electoral system is closed to all but the corporate parties. To transform the government into one that puts the peoples interests before those of the economic elite, will require a showing of power. It will require an ongoing, independent movement that demands real change and has the power to insist on it. On October 6^th a major step to showing the development of such a movement and demanding real change begins. Join us.

In Spain, the protesters sing to the tune of “If You’re Happy and You Know It”:

They call it democracy but it isn’t
Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes
They call it democracy but it isn’t
Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes

Are the people of the United States ready to face the reality of the corruption of U.S. elections and the lack of representation and do something about it? History is knocking. The time is now to answer.

Kevin Zeese is on the steering committee of October2011.org and a peace and economic justice advocate.

Kevin Zeese is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Kevin Zeese

Tags: Global Research, 4th of July, United States, Representative Democracy, Mirage Democracy, Politics, government, democracy, corruption, corporations, two-party system, Americas, third party, corporate media, campaign finance, Constitution, Arizona Clean Elections Act

Documentary - Not for Sale

Cool little short film (a little over an hour) on the takeover of our lives by corporations - the blurb says that the "state loses power at the same rate as businesses gains it" - sounds about right.

ABSTRACT: A Documentry of the Observatorio for Corporate Social responsibility, coproduced by Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED).

Not for Sale

People all around the world are becoming increasingly dependent on a small number of large multinational businesses. Monsanto controls 90% of the production of genetically modified seeds. Microsoft holds an 88.26% market share of the software industry, followed by apple with Mac who hold 9.93%. Everyday, 150 million people throughout the world, buy an Unilever product without even realising it. McDonalds, serve 58.1million meals a day around the world. 51 of the worlds 100 biggest economies are businesses. The state loses power at the same rate as businesses gains it. Globalisation has created a context which requires a redefinition of the rules for global 21st century society.

Within this context rises the debate of Social Corporate Responsibility or of (CSR) companies emerging at the starting point from which they can re-establish the balance between economic development, sustainable environment and the social development needed in order to build the new society that we long for. Even though a gradual interest in Coporate Social Responsibility is being created, as much in business circles as in social circles, the process is still slow.

It is time that we consider the type of society which we wish to build and what role we are going to play in its development. We must assume the role of consumers, workers and of public opinion involved in the application of responsible practices in all aspects of business activity.

Financed by: Cajasol Foundation

Tags: Business, Globalization, Crisis, Multinational, Corporate Social Responsibility, CSR, Human Rights, Economy, Tax haven, Cajasol Foundation, business, corporations, globalization, corruption, Not For Sale

Deborah Mattinson - Talking to a Brick Wall - Why We Need a New Politics

Nice lecture from the folks at RSA.

Talking to a Brick Wall - Why We Need a New Politics

06 Jul 2010

Leading political pollster Deborah Mattinson discusses democratic renewal and citizen engagement with Polly Toynbee and Tessa Jowell.

Download video for iPod (MP4)

Tags: Deborah Mattinson, Talking to a Brick Wall, Why We Need a New Politics, democratic renewal, citizen engagement, Polly Toynbee, Tessa Jowell, culture, society, Politics, apathy, corruption

Orion Jones - Oil Soaked Animals, Government and Media

This brief article from Orion Jones at Big Think is a pretty clear and honest assessment of the situation in the Gulf - and an indictment of the system in which those who are tasked with investigating the offender (BP) are financed by the target of their investigation. How honest are they likely to be?

I have too horrified by the images to say much here, but now the horror is becoming rage at a system that so willingly allows the destruction of an entire ecocsystem and the idiots who want to protect the irresponsible politicians and corporations who created the circumstances in which this disaster could happen. Below the main article is a piece from AlterNet on how the GOP is siding with the oil companies and apologizing for Obama demanding they take care of the people whose lives have been taken away by the loss of fishing in the Gulf.

Adding insult to injury, BP is funding a front group (Gulf of Mexico Foundation) claiming that oil spill jobs are better than ‘normal’ ones, and that storms will clean up the spilled oil - millions of gallons of the stuff.

Oil Soaked Animals, Government and Media

Orion Jones on June 20, 2010

The blithe feathers of our nation’s patrimony are now literally weighed down by oil, but our government and press already exude the sticky toxins of petroleum. In a sense, petroleum companies are big shareholders in the American political and media machines, and the extent to which change is possible will depend on a willingness to bite the hand that feeds. Perhaps BP CEO Tony Hayward’s reticence during his recent congressional testimony was born of a smug knowledge that his company owns a good deal of stock in both the U.S. Congress and the nation’s press.

Open Secrets, whose mission is to track money in U.S. politics and its effect on elections and public policy, details the amount of money received by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who is currently investigating BP, from oil and gas companies. In 2010, members of the committee received a combined $1,227,455. The ranking Elephant on the committee, Joe Barton, who stuck his oily foot in his foul mouth by apologizing to BP, received over $100,000 last year, the second only to an Elephant from Missouri, Roy Blunt.

BP, of course, is only one company representing the sizable oil and gas lobby. The industry reaches into its deep pockets to fund a variety of interests, including PBS, a standard of American mainstream journalism. Recently, though, companies like ExxonMobile and Chevron have gone stealth, knowing that any press is bad press at a moment when public anger has been stoked to flame—a particularly dangerous element to oil and gas companies.

Michael Getler, an internal critic at PBS, has written about the issue on his blog at the PBS website. BP, it seems, was funding PBS in 2006, but is no longer a sponsor. As for ExxonMobile and Chevron, they “have minimized their profiles as underwriters of some popular PBS programs as the crisis continues.” Getler goes on to say that “corporate identification continues, as does the financial support of the sponsor, but its prominence on the screen is reduced. This means the normally longer and more descriptive visual and spoken messages are replaced simply by a logo, for example, keeping the company's head down but allowing PBS to make sure it continues to identify its underwriters.”

The large corporations that sponsor PBS are no angels and have included Toyota, Monsanto and Bank of America. But PBS insists that none of their sponsors have a sliver of editorial control and that were they to petition for some, PBS would walk away. It is the difficulty of finding underwriters, however, who are willing to accept the low-profile advertising PBS requires that makes is difficult for the broadcasting company to be more selective about accepting companies as sponsors.

The question about passive influence remains—the possibility of corporate sponsors like ExxonMobile and Monsanto having a subconscious influence on PBS programming. Active vigilance is needed to guard against this influence and should be expected to the same degree across news organizations and government bodies, not only of companies like PBS who already do a better than average job.

This piece from AlterNet outlines the GOP corruption in standing behind BP and claiming that Obama is wrong to demand that BP set aside some of their incredible profits to help those whose lives have been taken away.

The GOP finally takes a stand. And it’s standing behind “Big Oil” and not the “small people.”

Texas Republican Joe Barton on Thursday apologized to British Petroleum and it’s Chief Executive Tony Hayward. He said he was ashamed that the U.S. government demanded a “$20 billion shakedown” from the private company. He said the $20 billion fund that President Obama directed BP to establish to provide relief to the victims of the oil disaster was a “tragedy in the first proportion.”

“It creates a terrible precedence,” Barton said.

Days prior, Republican Michelle Bachman called it a “redistribution of wealth,” repeating a common phrase she has used to characterize health care reform, mortgage remodifications, and just about any policy the Obama administration puts forth. Around that same time, Rush Limbaugh, the mouthpiece for the GOP, called it “a slushfund.”

He is the highest-ranking Republican on the Energy Committee and has recevied more than $1.4 million in political contributions from the oil industry, according to nonpartisan government watchdog croup, Opensecrets.org.

So, clearly Barton has much to apologize for.

But the good thing is, he’s provided some audibles for what is has been blatantly apparent to me, but largely ignored in the mainstream media. And that’s the fact that the deepwater oil spill is symptomatic of theRepublicans philosophy as it relates to energy. He apologized, because in his world view, BP has done nothing wrong. A piece of equipment failed, the environmental damage they caused is simply collateral damage. All that matters ultimately is the profitability of the company.

Barton is not alone in his apologetic cow-towing to big oil. Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, another Republican servant to big oil, has repeatedly attempted to minimize the effects of the oil spill and make excuses for BP. This is the Governor of Mississippi, many of whose Gulf Coast constituents lives have been ruined by this company’s recklessness.

According to Barbour, forcing BP to make full restitution to the Gulf’s workers will do only one thing, and that’s reduce its profitability, which will in turn give them less money pay out damages. Make sense?

“All of these ultra-free-market, regulation-and-bureaucracy-hating conservatives agree, by the way, that President Obama and the federal government are just as blameworthy as BP, Halliburton and the other corporations in charge of Deepwater Horizon — because federal agencies didn’t regulate them stringently enough. Regulation is very, very bad, except when Obama doesn’t do enough of it,” wrote salon.com.

Well said.

Who out there honestly believes if there were a Republican in the White House right now, that they would have forced BP to pony up with $20 billion to pay out to “the small people” who have been devastated by this corporate mess?

• Barbour, who has aspirations on the White House, would have likely bailed out BP as opposed to get them to take responsibility for their actions.
• GOP is responsible for 97 percent of all flagrant violations found in the refining industry over the past three years, according to the Center for Public Integrity.
• Most of these citations were classified as “egregious willful” by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
• That April 20 platfor m blast which led to the spill killed 11 workers.
  

Let’s take a look back at BP’s horrid track record, courtesy of ABC News:

• Back in 2007, a BP pipeline spilled 200,000 gallons of crude into the Alaskan wilderness. They got hit with $16 million in fines.
• “The Justice Department required the company to pay approximately $353 million as part of an agreement to defer prosecution on charges that the company conspired to manipulate the propane gas market.”
• In two separate disasters prior to Deepwater Horizon, 30 BP workers were killed and more than 200 have been seriously injured.
• “According to the Center for Public Integrity, in the last three years, BP refineries in Ohio and Texas have accounted for 97 percent of the “egregious, willful” violations handed out by OSHA”
• OSHA statistics show BP ran up 760 “egregious, willful” safety violations, while Sunoco and Conoco-Phillips each had eight, Citgo had two and Exxon had one comparable citation.

This is who the GOP chooses to stand up for? Republicans are outraged because someone has the gall to make demands of private industry? And even still, the libertarian, let the “free market reign free” folks out there are complaining about the overreach of the U.S. government?

This proves our government’s reach is not nearly long enough. This proves how much there is left to do, when it comes to dismantling pro-industry, pro-corporate stranglehold that private industry has on our government. I’m no communist or socialist, but you cannot expect corporations to behave altruistically, and one primary purpose of the U.S. government — in addition to protecting us from foreign enemies — is protecting us from multi-national corporations.

See the story.

Meanwhile, from ASPO/USA:

In a sickening Interview with Forbes Magazine BP Chief Tony Hayward says the Gulf spill might help the BP and the oil industry to make increased profits of up to 20% by 2015, which would mean record profits for the British oil maker.

Tony Hayward tells Forbes that he is “he’s sleeping well these days” and Forbes reports that he is nice and fresh, almost relaxed in his makeshift corner office at BP’s emergency response center in Houston.”

Click here to continue reading the story from Alexander Higgins blog.

Tags: energy, Environment, greed, Politics, corruption, BP, Gulf of Mexico, oil spill, Tony Hayward, GOP, Big Think, Orion Jones, Obama, Deepwater Horizon, ecosystems, destruction, Gulf Coast, fishing industry, oil industry, government