Orphans of the American Dream

"There is nothing in 5,000 years of economic history to justify the belief that human societies..."

Tue, 21 May 2013 17:45:46 -0400

“There is nothing in 5,000 years of economic history to justify the belief that human societies should structure their behavior around the demands of the marketplace. This is an absurd, utopian ideology. The airy promises of the market economy have, by now, all been exposed as lies. The ability of corporations to migrate overseas has decimated our manufacturing base. It has driven down wages, impoverishing our working class and ravaging our middle class. It has forced huge segments of the population—including those burdened by student loans—into decades of debt peonage. It has also opened the way to massive tax shelters that allow companies such as General Electric to pay no income tax. Corporations employ virtual slave labor in Bangladesh and China, making obscene profits. As corporations suck the last resources from communities and the natural world, they leave behind, as Joe Sacco and I saw in the sacrifice zones we wrote about, horrific human suffering and dead landscapes. The greater the destruction, the greater the apparatus crushes dissent.”

- Chris Hedges (via azspot)

quickhits: Republicans love free enterprise, the...

Sun, 19 May 2013 22:30:24 -0400

quickhits:

Republicans love free enterprise, the entrepreneurial spirit — right up until they hate it.

Slate: From the state that brought you the nation’s first ban on climate science comes another legislative gem: a bill that would prohibit automakers from selling their cars in the state.

The proposal, which the Raleigh News & Observer reports was unanimously approved by the state’s Senate Commerce Committee on Thursday, would apply to all car manufacturers, but the intended target is clear. It’s aimed at Tesla, the only U.S. automaker whose business model relies on selling cars directly to consumers, rather than through a network of third-party dealerships.

The bill is being pushed by the North Carolina Automobile Dealers Association, a trade group representing the state’s franchised dealerships. Its sponsor is state Sen. Tom Apodaca, a Republican from Henderson, who has said the goal is to prevent unfair competition between manufacturers and dealers. What makes it “unfair competition” as opposed to plain-old “competition”—something Republicans are typically inclined to favor—is not entirely clear. After all, North Carolina doesn’t seem to have a problem with Apple selling its computers online or via its own Apple Stores.

Still, it’s easy to understand why some car dealers might feel a little threatened: Tesla’s Model S outsold the Mercedes S-Class, BMW 7 Series, and Audi A8 last quarter without any help from them. If its business model were to catch on, consumers might find that they don’t need the middle-men as much as they thought.

According to the report, “Apodaca received $8,000 in campaign contributions from the North Carolina Automobile Dealers Association last year, the maximum amount allowed by state law.” He has not responded to a request for comment.

Ironically, this sort of thing is almost exactly what Ayn Rand complained about in her novel Atlas Shrugged — a business group and the government were forcing an industrialist to share his process for producing a new alloy, using “unfair competition” as their reasoning. I suppose it hadn’t occurred to her that they could ban it for the same reason.

The GOP has taken to praising Rand in recent years — especially post-Tea Party. Like so much else Republicans say, that praise is obviously horseshit.

How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet

Sat, 18 May 2013 18:31:15 -0400

How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet:

Flickr is still very valuable. It has a massive database of geotagged, Creative Commons- and Getty-licensed, subject-tagged photos. But sadly, Yahoo’s steady march of incompetence doesn’t bode well for making use of these valuable properties. If the Internet really were a series of tubes, Yahoo would be the leaking sewage pipe, covering everything it comes in contact with in watered-down shit.

It’s time for ordinary people to take back the media. Help...

Fri, 17 May 2013 19:09:27 -0400

It’s time for ordinary people to take back the media. Help us democratize the Tribune Company. Free the Press.

BLM Fails to Comply with Court Order, Refuses to Change Transparency Policy

Fri, 17 May 2013 18:05:01 -0400

BLM Fails to Comply with Court Order, Refuses to Change Transparency Policy:

climateadaptation:

ecowatchorg:

“It is inconsistent with BLM’s position as a public agency and steward of our public resources that it continues to put up such a fight to withhold information about the corporations interested in extracting public resources.”

More fracking shenanigans from the Obama admin. National parks and public lands, managed by the Bureau of Land Management, are slated to be aggressively fracked for short-term gain. And the BLM’s policies aim to hide information from the public.

Time to Abolish Left vs. Right

Wed, 15 May 2013 16:48:06 -0400

Time to Abolish Left vs. Right:

‘If we’re going to fight a binary struggle, it should be populist vs. corporatist. That’s the only real division in this country right now. Are you on the people’s side, or on big money’s side?’ Carl Gibson, RSN

400 ppm

Fri, 10 May 2013 20:29:57 -0400

400 ppm:

Yesterday, for the first time in human history, concentrations of carbon dioxide, the primary global warming pollutant, hit 400 parts per million in our planet’s atmosphere. This number is a reminder that for the last 150 years — and especially over the last several decades — we have been recklessly polluting the protective sheath of atmosphere that surrounds the Earth and protects the conditions that have fostered the flourishing of our civilization. We are altering the composition of our atmosphere at an unprecedented rate. Indeed, every single day we pour an additional 90 million tons of global warming pollution into the sky as if it were an open sewer. As the distinguished climate scientist Jim Hansen has calculated, the accumulated manmade global warming pollution in the atmosphere now traps enough extra heat energy each day to equal the energy that would be released by 400,000 Hiroshima-scale atomic bombs exploding every single day. It’s a big planet — but that is a LOT of energy. And it is having a destructive effect.

azspot: Jen Sorensen: Fly Air Air

Thu, 09 May 2013 18:56:30 -0400

azspot:

Jen Sorensen: Fly Air Air

Who Has Your Back? 2013 | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Wed, 01 May 2013 21:18:57 -0400

Who Has Your Back? 2013 | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Book of the Month, May 2013

Wed, 01 May 2013 10:00:34 -0400

Freethinkers by Susan Jacoby

At a time when the separation of church and state is under attack as never before, Freethinkers celebrates the noble and essential secularist heritage that gave Americans the first government in the world founded not on the authority of religion but on the bedrock of human reason.

In impassioned, elegant prose, Susan Jacoby offers a powerful defense of more than two hundred years of secularist activism, beginning with the fierce debate over the omission of God from the Constitution. Moving from nineteenth-century abolitionism and suffragism through the twentieth-century’s civil liberties, civil rights, and feminist movements, Freethinkers illuminates the neglected accomplishments of secularists who, allied with tolerant and liberal religious believers, have stood at the forefront of the battle for social reforms opposed by reactionaries in the past and today.

Rich with such iconic figures as Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Clarence Darrow — as well as once-famous secularists such as Robert Green Ingersoll, “the Great Agnostic” — Freethinkers restores to history generations of dedicated humanist champions. It is they, Jacoby shows, who have led the struggle to uphold the unique combination of secular government and religious liberty that is and always has been the glory of the American system.

Abby Martin looks at recently disclosed documents that show how...

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 10:25:39 -0400

Abby Martin looks at recently disclosed documents that show how the federal government has been using a secret cyber security program to monitor online traffic despite existing federal anti-wiretapping laws.

The Great Lakes Community Climate Program

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 20:36:14 -0400

The Great Lakes Community Climate Program:

climateadaptation:

Interesting project in the Great Lakes. It provides climate adaptation related grants, training, and information for GL residents.

Freshwater Future developed the Great Lakes Community Climate Program to provide training and ongoing support to community groups and citizens to enable them to incorporate climate adaptation into their work.

The program includes three components: training on climate adaptation for community-based groups, a resource toolkit, and a grants program. Freshwater Future partnered with EcoAdapt to offer climate symposia in cities in the Great Lakes region and to develop a Great Lakes Climate Adaptation Toolkit for community use.

Via CAKEX

"The search for profit, when it’s unconstrained and free from public control, will naturally..."

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 20:15:46 -0400

“The search for profit, when it’s unconstrained and free from public control, will naturally try to repress people’s lives as much as possible. The executives wouldn’t be doing their jobs otherwise.”

- Noam Chomsky

Abby Martin talks to Michelle Richardson, Legislative Counsel...

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 21:57:00 -0400

Abby Martin talks to Michelle Richardson, Legislative Counsel with the ACLU, about the renewed push for CISPA, and how its implications could be worse than the Patriot Act.

"There are many other examples. Take the term special interest. The well-oiled Republican PR systems..."

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 19:44:21 -0400

“There are many other examples. Take the term special interest. The well-oiled Republican PR systems of the 1980s regularly accused the Democrats of being the party of the special interests: women, labor, the elderly, the young, farmers – in short, the general population. There was only one sector of the population never listed as a special interest: corporations (and business generally). That makes sense. In PC discourse their (special) interests are the “national interest,” to which all must bow.
The Democrats plaintively retorted that they were not the party of the special interests: they served the national interest too. That was correct, but their problem has been that they lack the single-minded class consciousness of their Republican opponents. The latter are not confused about their role as representatives of the owners and managers of the society, who are fighting a bitter class war against the general population – often adopting vulgar Marxist rhetoric and concepts, resorting to jingoist hysteria, fear and terror, awe of great leaders and the other standard devices of population control. The Democrats are less clear about their allegiances, hence less effective in the propaganda wars.”

- Noam Chomsky

"We have to grasp, as Marx and Adam Smith did, that corporations are not concerned with the common..."

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 17:19:18 -0400

“We have to grasp, as Marx and Adam Smith did, that corporations are not concerned with the common good. They exploit, pollute, impoverish, repress, kill, and lie to make money. They throw poor people out of homes, let the uninsured die, wage useless wars for profit, poison and pollute the ecosystem, slash social assistance programs, gut public education, trash the global economy, plunder the U.S. Treasury and crush all popular movements that seek justice for working men and women. They worship money and power.”

- Chris Hedges (via azspot)

Prison Labor as Modern Day Slavery

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 17:12:17 -0400

Prison Labor as Modern Day Slavery:

American companies that once looked to places like Mexico and China for cheap labor are bringing those jobs back to the U.S. Why? Because prison labor is much, much cheaper. Paid between 93¢ and $4.73 per day, and collecting no benefits, prisoners are a cheap labor source for about 100 companies (source).

What does this have to do with you?

If you have insurance, invest, use utilities, have a bank, drive a car, send a child to school, go to a dentist, call service centers, fly on planes, take prescription drugs, or use paper, you might be benefiting from prison labor.

If you’ve bought products by or from Starbucks, Nintendo, Victoria’s Secret, JC Penney, Sears, Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Eddie Bauer, Wendy’s, Proctor & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Fruit of the Loom, Motorola, Caterpiller, Sara Lee, Quaker Oats, Mary Kay, or Microsoft, you are part of this system.

One of largest tar sands oil spills has taken place in a small...

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 17:19:32 -0400

One of largest tar sands oil spills has taken place in a small town in Arkansas. Exxon has gotten the FAA to declare it a no-fly zone, and they’ll be the first to tell you it’s not “oil” but instead a toxic substance called “bitumen.” This is the smallest of what we’ll see if the Keystone XL pipeline is approved by Obama.

Book of the Month, April 2013

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 10:00:33 -0400

From the editor and magazine that started and named the Occupy Wall Street movement, Meme Wars: The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics is an articulation of what could be the next steps in rethinking and remaking our world that challenges and debunks many of the assumptions of neoclassical economics and brings to light a more ecological model. Meme Wars aims to accelerate the shift into this new paradigm that takes into account psychonomics, bionomics, and other aspects of our physical and mental environment that are often left out in discussions of economics.

Like Adbusters, the book will be image heavy and full-color throughout. Lasn calls it “a textbook for the future” that provides the building blocks, in texts and visuals, for a new way of looking at and changing our world. Through an examination of alternative economies, Lasn hopes to spur students to become “barefoot economists” and to see that a humanization of economics is possible. Meme Wars will include contributions from Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Samuelson, George Akerlof, Lourdes Benería, Julie Matthaei, Manfred Max-Neef, David Orrell, Paul Gilding, Mathis Wackernagel and the father of ecological economics Herman Daly, among others.

Based on ideas that were presented in a special issue of Adbusters entitled “Thought Control in Economics: Beyond the Growth Paradigm / An Activist Toolkit,” Meme Wars will help move forward the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Corporate Welfare – Employees Paying Taxes Directly To Corporations

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 14:46:05 -0400

Corporate Welfare – Employees Paying Taxes Directly To Corporations:

In his recent book, The Fine Print, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston explains the laws that allow corporations to go to war with the American working class. In an interviewwith Alternet, he said the following:

It’s now up to 21 states. In 21 states, they’ve passed a law that says that taxes withheld from your paycheck, for the state, can be kept by the company. Now, every employer doesn’t get this windfall — you have to have to get a deal from the government to do it — 2,700 big companies, every big company you’ve ever heard of, General Electric, Procter and Gamble, Deutsche Bank, you name it, they’ve got these deals, where they get to keep the taxes. Billions of dollars are diverted this way. You know the best thing for the companies about this?

The workers don’t know, because once the taxes are withheld, the state government treats you as having paid your taxes. You paid your taxes. They just then give a credit to let the company keep the taxes. I’ve called journalists. I’ve called union people who negotiate union contracts. And they say, “What are you talking about?” I showed them the work I’ve done. They go, “Oh my God!” They have no idea that this is what’s happening, and the fact that it’s spread from the 16 states when I first wrote about this and it’s now grown to 21 – eventually, all of the 44 states with income taxes are going to allow this, if we don’t put a stop to it.