torture and tyranny

Bradley Manning needs our help. Our country needs our help. Integral Activism is here to help you help us all.

Jefferson was THE MAN while Hartmann and Gingrich agree on the tyranny of the judiciary. The world gets crazier all the time.

econ-nom-twits

There's a voice of sanity in the congress. Louise Slaughter seems to understand that trade policy directly affects employment in the USA. Now if only she and Bernie would come out and condemn Rupert Murdoch like Citizens for Ethics are doing.

And then there is Bankrupting America...which claims to be unbiased, but appears to be a right wing propaganda front. I watched two videos that failed to meet my grade. The first was "Unemployment" which failed to mention trade policy/agreements and the second was "The Debt Ceiling" which failed to cite the history of revenue collections. Two lies of omission is too many for me to consider any credibility there.

Richard Wolf seems to be better informed or more honest.

Trade policies are important, they can be a matter of national security. So can that quasi-military.

More than a dozen polls reveal what Americans think about new taxes. You won't see republicans representing any majorities.

Gotta check out this guy some more.....

cancer in the body politic

Most people feel that the political system of the USA is systemically corrupt. Approval ratings for Congress have never been this poor. Unfortunately, there are few who understand the full scope of the problem. Fortunately there are a significant number of people who understand specific aspects and have solutions that could be implemented if we are able to raise the political will of the people.

One of the greatest hurdles we face in curing this cancer is adequately educating enough of our citizenry. The medicine can only be administered if the people demand appropriate reforms.

What makes the overall problem so insidious is that it is a combination of factors, some that we have only recently begun to identify. Factors include:

• Campaign Finance
• Election protocols/systems
• Corporate Personhood
• Revolving Doors/Lobbying
• Media consolidation and interlocking directorates

The corrupting influence of Big Money has always been a threat to the integrity of good governance. It was a concern of the Founding Fathers and has been a concern of good statesmen throughout history. It is the cumulative effects from centuries of corruption that has resulted in the cancer of our body politic.

We have been infected by the merchants of doubt.

maximum offensiveness

Jesus Fucking Christ is impressively offensive.

This isn't offensive, just sad. Too bad that the integral movement petered out. Look at the date on this last post from Integral Options Cafe. So sad..

14 characteristics of fascism

what else...there are those working to form a new contract for the American Dream. Check out the patriotic millionaires telling congress that they're happy to pay more taxes.

I just happen to like this, but I might have lost avalanchers and weird worm and wahoha and define american..chilloutpoints and what else...2leep.com says it connects bloggers

If regular church isn't your thing, then you might like this monster. Pastafarian, I like that! Scientific American urges us to keep evolving and has a little bit about the evolution of the eye which I thought evolved five separate times.

Another blast from the past is the Southern Poverty Law Center that has published a piece, Electoral Extremism: 23 Candidates on the Radical Right. Crazy thing is that we have to read Aljazeera to read the truth. Murdoch is facing some heat and if you'd like to stoke the flames just click here.

Here's a good chart illustrating the rise in anti-abortion legislation led by the republican war on women,

Building dreams

Hopefully, We The People can Rebuild the American Dream. We cannot wait for a hero to do the hard work for us. Inequality in America hasn't been this bad since the great depression and Brzezinski warns us of the consequences. Inequality is a fertile ground for corruption and crime and civil discontent.

At least Murdoch is facing some heat and maybe loosing some revenue for unethical behavior by his media monster in the UK. Media Matters is who Fox is gunning for which is why we should support them.

Once again I realize how corrupted corporate media has become. MSNBC may be the most liberal of the corporate infotainers, but when I tuned in to Morning Joe I heard the same old revenue vs spending cuts debate. It may be a vast improvement from six months or a year prior when the whole issue was solely framed as a spending problem. Some of us realized that we should be speaking of the revenue problem and I'm glad to see that Jeffery Sachs is speaking the liberal truth, but very, very few understand that we have a tariff problem. Yeah, tariffs are part of revenues, but more importantly they are the part of trade policy that affects where manufacturing is employed.

We really shouldn't vilify corporations for shipping our jobs overseas because they are just responding to trade policies. Before Reagan took office tariffs were about 20% and now they are about 2%. A picture is worth a thousand words so just check out this chart. It might have been posted by a liberal but he didn't make it. Here's another chart from a different source. They look about the same and allude to a story linked below.

So I thought that I should do a little more homework on the matter and found Hartmann's Rebooting the American Dream, chapter one. He claimed that Alexander Hamilton's 11 point plan could easily be found on the web and it was.

This caught my attention, "Had the Founders, like Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Andrew Jackson, or Ulysses S. Grant, applied for loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), they would have been denied: all of them believed in high tariffs and a heavy control of foreign investment and considered “free trade” absurd." - Hartmann's Rebooting....
What I found so interesting was mention of the IMF and the role of that institution in promoting the interests of big money and not the common man.

Absurd is the republican assertion that they're concerned about American jobs. They're more concerned about the wallets of billionaires and keeping loopholes open so the top 1% can maintain and build more wealth than the bottom 90% of Americans. The American Journal of Public Health just released an article about the ill effects of inequity.

And then there's TAPI....security and insecurity

America, home of the con, is it worth working for? I just love a good chart so here's one depicting the Bush tax cuts.

$2 trillion

What can $2 trillion buy? A plan to terraform the Sahara? A plan to save the world?

Considering that there are $1,000 trillion worth of junk derivatives floating around the world financial markets, we should be able to find $500-600 billion a year to transform the world energy markets. Big Oil isn't going to like that plan. They could invest in a blue carbon sink fund, but really, is greed the only viable incentive to do anything? One thing for sure is that I don't trust this organization. They run tons of ads on Sunday mornings during the talking heads, so they must be a front group for big polluters.

The International Trade Union Confederation is calling for the Banksters to pay. At least there's somebody who's outraged.

Yeah, that figure was about right. Derivatives dwarf the world's GDP. If it wasn't so tragic, it might be funny where one has to go to find this story. Do you wonder why such a big story gets so little corporate press?

I don't know what this is, but I might want to go back and check things.

I sure hope the the President is playing chess and won't screw the seniors with SS cuts and tying benefits to CPI. There are enough people with voters remorse these days. One can only hope that elections aren't rigged by ALEC and Diebold.

We need more like Matt Taibbi...go to Tabblog to see for yourself.

Cracker crackdown

It sure seems like a conflict of interest for a congressman to bet against the value of the dollar, but that is what Eric Cantor may have done. Heck, it seems like treason to be, but the letter of the law says that senators have immunity or something crazy like that. And yeah, it's just part of a fund, but come on man... you can hear what Thom has to say about it and read other pertinent stuff by clicking here.

Georgia cracked down on illegal immigrants and as a result the farmer are short about 11,000 skilled harvesters. They're trying to use prison labor but it is reported that it takes 3-4 unskilled worker to do an equivalent job. Georgia still has a long way to go to also become Too Big To Nail.

Too bad presidents don't talk like this anymore. They used to warn us about the monied interests. Jefferson wrote of the danger in 1816, "I hope we shall take warning from the example and crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
and that was before the industrialization and the rise of corporate culture.

What else has been censored from our awareness.