Democracy Now! - the people's news

The New York Times has a really nice article about the news show Democracy Now!. I am a faithful viewer of the broadcast, which airs live Monday through Friday at 8am EST on 950 stations.

In the article, the author brings up this point:

Last week, no United States television network covered the filing of a lawsuit in Canada by four men who said they had been tortured during the Bush administration and who are seeking Mr. Bush’s arrest and prosecution. But one of the men, Murat Kurnaz, a former prisoner at Guantánamo Bay, was interviewed at length by Ms. (Amy) Goodman and her co-host, Juan Gonzalez.

So typical. Leave it to the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM - thank you, Ray McGovern for that phrase) to leave the ex-President alone, even though there are millions around the world who believe this person is a major perpetrator of serious war crimes.

Thank goodness we have Amy Goodman and her crew to keep us informed of what is really going on. Not just what the FCM want us to know while keeping from us what we need to know.

Obama should look here before there

During President Obama's statement regarding the death of Qaddafi, he had this to say (emphasis mine):

And we call on our Libyan friends to continue to work with the international community to secure dangerous materials, and to respect the human rights of all Libyans –- including those who have been detained.

First of all, this is awfully patronizing. What... The Libyans were just about to violate the rights of THEIR detainees, but thank goodness Obama was there to shake them out of that sensibility? Of course, this is just more of the "American Exceptionalism" attitude that is thrust upon a world deemed beneath the U.S political insiders.

But more importantly, let's look at a glass house here. What human rights have we, the U.S., respected to those detained by us?

Have those imprisoned in Guantanamo had due process? I think not. Were they not tortured? And anyone who says that they have had their rights respected is either simply lying or grossly ignorant.

Chomsky on Obama and Social Security

Noam Chomsky was on Democracy Now! Tuesday the thirteenth. He was on for the full hour (after the news headlines, of course), and he had some very interesting things to say. Here are a couple of thoughts that I found of particular note:

AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, what is your assessment of President Obama, whether we’re talking about his new jobs plan or whether we’re talking about his foreign policy?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, I can’t say that I find it disappointing, because, quite frankly, I never expected anything. Actually, I wrote about it before the primaries, just based on his record on his website.

But I find this the most interesting thing he had to say:

AARON MATÉ: Noam, you mentioned entitlements, and obviously this is an issue that’s come up a lot in the deficit debate. Governor Rick Perry, the Republican presidential hopeful, has called it a Ponzi scheme. But even Democrats seem to buy into this narrative that it’s in crisis. Can you address that?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Social Security is not in any crisis. I mean, the trust fund alone will fully pay benefits for, I think, another 30 years or so. And after that, taxes will give almost the same benefits. To worry about a possible problem 30 years from now, which can incidentally be fixed with little—a little bit of tampering here and there, as was done in 1983—to worry about that just makes absolutely no sense, unless you’re trying to destroy the program. It’s a very successful program...

...But I think, myself, that there’s a more subtle reason why they’re opposed to it, and I think it’s rather similar to the reason for the effort to pretty much dismantle the public education system. Social Security is based on a principle. It’s based on the principle that you care about other people. You care whether the widow across town, a disabled widow, is going to be able to have food to eat. And that’s a notion you have to drive out of people’s heads. The idea of solidarity, sympathy, mutual support, that’s doctrinally dangerous. The preferred doctrines are just care about yourself, don’t care about anyone else. That’s a very good way to trap and control people. And the very idea that we’re in it together, that we care about each other, that we have responsibility for one another, that’s sort of frightening to those who want a society which is dominated by power, authority, wealth, in which people are passive and obedient. And I suspect—I don’t know how to measure it exactly, but I think that that’s a considerable part of the drive on the part of small, privileged sectors to undermine a very efficient, very effective system on which a large part of the population relies, actually relies more than ever, because wealth, personal wealth, was very much tied up in the housing market. That was people’s personal wealth. Well, OK, that, quite predictably, totally collapsed. People aren’t destitute by the standards of, say, slums in India or southern Africa, but very—suffering severely. And they have nothing else to rely on, but what they—the, really, pittance that they’re getting from Social Security. To take that away would be just disastrous.

It's really sad that the Mainstream Media will not have anything to do this giant of our time. Not even Rachel Maddow (I even emailed her about having him on. Of course, no reply back.) or Keith Olberman. I would love to hear their reasons for not giving Chomsky air time. Is it just them or their media overlords?

CNN: Sex is "worse" than severe bodily harm

Here is a prime example of what's wrong in our society. Today, a little after 1:00 EDT, CNN anchor Randi Kaye was relating the story of the Miami University scandal. Convicted swindler Nevin Shapiro lavished money on the Hurricanes' football team for years.

As Kaye related what money Mr. Shapiro lavished on the players, she said this:

The alleged gifts are jaw dropping. Listen to this. They include hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, cars, jewelry rides on his yacht, paid trips to high-end restaurants and nightclubs. But that was just the start.

Now comes the really bad part of her quote (Emphasis mine):

Shapiro also said the players were offered bounties for injuring players on opposing teams. But what's even worse, the former booster says he paid to get prostitutes for players...

"What's even worse"? Are you telling me that paying to have a young, virile college athlete spend time with a hooker is WORSE than paying the same player to hurt and possibly MAIM another human being?

What a pathetic comment on our society. What I don't know is if the writer of the piece was pandering to the viewing audience, thinking that CNN's demographic actually thinks that sex is WORSE than severe bodily harm, or if the writer himself (or herself) actually thinks such a bassackward thought.

If it's only in the writer's mind, he/she is one sick puppy and needs a reality check (Therapy, as well?). If the line was specifically targeted for the audience, CNN must really think that we're more hung up on sex than violence and the Corporation is preaching to the choir. Either way it's absolutely despicable.

As George Carlin said:

I'd rather have my son watch a film with two people making love than two people trying to kill one another.

It is the responsibility for CNN and all the media to keep that in mind when covering their stories.

"Entitlements" is a dirty word

Last week, my brother and I were lamenting that the word "entitlements," representing Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, etc., had such a negative connotation. We felt that it should not be used when discussing these issues.

Well, yesterday, Miles Mogulescu over at the Huffington Post coincidentally addressed this issue. I agree with him wholeheartedly!

Every time someone else in a discussion starts to talk about "Entitlements", they should say, "Oh, you mean the Middle Class Safety Net." Whenever someone talks about the need for "Entitlement Reform" or "Entitlement Cuts" they should say, "Oh, you mean shredding the Middle Class Safety Net."

He eloquently puts forth the reason he, my brother and I dislike the word:

It has the ring of spoiled children who are entitled to something that they don't really deserve. It's also not accurate. The middle class pays for its Social Security and Medicare with their payroll taxes during their working life so that they have something to fall back on in their old age. They're "entitled" to it, not because they're spoiled children asking for treats from daddy, but because society promised it to them in return for 40-50 years of having payroll taxes deducted from their paychecks.

He challenges the media to quit using it:

To win the political debate, Democratic office holders; liberal news hosts like Lawrence O'Donnell, Rachel Maddow, and Ed Shultz; progressive websites like The Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and Talking Points Memo; liberal columnists like Eugene Robinson, E.J. Dionne, and Paul Krugman; and progressive publications like The Nation and Mother Jones, have to change their political vocabulary.

Hear, Hear! I vow NEVER to use that word again. From now on "Middle Class Safety Net" supplants the "E" word in my lexicon. I challenge anyone who reads this (the few who do) to do the same and to pass it on to all of your family and friends, and, if you're a political writer, incorporate the phrase into your writing.

Anyone remember 90% income tax?

Richard Wolff, author of Capitalism Hits the Fan, was a guest on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! last Thursday. Below is a very telling quote from the interview. I highly recommend you seeing the whole thing. It's in transcript form, plus there is an video of the interview as well:

The most amazing thing to me is that we talk about fixing a government budget that’s in trouble, and we don’t talk about the revenue side in a serious way. That is an amazing thing. If you look at what happened to the American budget over the last 20 or 30 years, the culprit is obvious. We have dropped corporate taxes. We have dropped taxes on the rich.


Let me give you a couple of examples to drive it home. If you go back to the 1940s, here’s what you discover, that the federal government got 50 percent more money year after year from corporations than it did from individuals. For every dollar that individuals paid in income tax, corporations paid $1.50. If you compare that to today, here are the numbers. For every dollar that individuals pay to the federal government, corporations pay 25 cents. That is a dramatic change that has no parallel in the rest of our tax code.


Another example. In the ’50s and ’60s, the top bracket, the income tax rate that the richest people had to pay, for example the ’50s and ’60s, it was 91 percent. Every dollar over $100,000 that a rich person earned, he or she had to give 91 cents to Washington and kept nine. And the rationale for that was, we had come out of a Great Depression, we had come out of a great war, we had to rebuild our society, we were in a crisis, and the rich had the capacity to pay, and they ought to pay. Republicans voted for that. Democrats voted for that. What do we have today? Ninety-one percent? No. The top rate for rich people today, 35 percent. Again, nobody else in this society—not the middle, not the poor—have had anything like this consequence.

So, over the last 30, 40 years, a shift from corporate income tax to individual income tax, and among individuals, from the rich to everybody else. To deal with our budget problem without discussing that, putting that front and center, making that part of the story, that’s just a service to the rich and the corporations. There’s no polite way to say otherwise. And there’s something shameful about keeping all of that away and focusing on how we’re going to take out our budget problems by cutting back benefits to old people, to people who have medical needs. There’s something bizarre, and the world sees that, in a society that has done what it has done and now proposes to fix it on the backs of the majority."

As for the current "crisis," it's very simple. At the end of it, the rich will be richer and the poor will be poorer.

What we're looking at is Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine tactics: Create a crisis, panic the people through media ("Stock Markets Tremble As Debt Ceiling Debate Rages In Washington" - headline in HuffPO), then push through the agenda (cut SS/Medicare/Medicaid, etc.) saying, "We HAD to do it to save the planet."

Have we ever had a moment's peace?

I really like what Patrick Smith, who writes the Ask the Pilot blog over at Salon:

I hate sounding conspiratorial, but it often feels as if these warnings serve little purpose beyond keeping the American populace frightened and easily manipulated, lest it regain consciousness and dare interrupt the torrent of cash pouring into the coffers of the security-industrial complex.

Personally, I don't think this idea is that conspiratorial. The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein is a great source to explain how this works.

For decades now our politicians have been utilizing the "Fear Factor" to push their agendas. I remember spending two thirds of my life under the umbrella of "The Cold War." Any day the Russians were going to drop their atomic bombs on us. We just HAD to HAVE a "mutually assured destruction" scenario to maintain the balance and thwart those bad guys. Thus, our Military/Industrial Complex (MIC) churned away accumulating massive profits as we constantly built up our weaponry.

Of course, once that threat was finally gone(Whew!), we felt relieved that it was over, and we could have peace across the land. Wrong!

Obviously, for the MIC, a new threat had to be found to keep the massive profits humming right along. Welcome to the nebulous, shadowy world of "Terrorism"! Now this is perfect! Its can never be fully extinguished. Someone, somewhere in the world will be hating the U.S. at any time. Voila! We now have a never-ending story for which the MIC can forever profit. Good one!

So here we are. The bottom line is what Mr. Smith says:

Nobody will admit what's obvious...that we cannot protect ourselves from every conceivable threat.

However, that is the sacrifice we must make if we are to be an open and free country.