Politics News
HIGHEST BIDDER
"Politics is the entertainment branch of industry." - Frank Zappa
SORRY, YOUR JOB'S BEEN OUTSOURCED !
Seems like the Democrats and Republicans are two wings of the same party ? Are modern democracies reduced to being but a choice between 2 merely identical political philosophies? One being in the right corner & the other in the far-right ? What is this duopoly, found in most modern democracies, serving for ? Who is pulling the strings and laughing all the way to the bank while the standard of living of the middle class plummets ?
"Every 10 days $2 billion is removed from the U.S. Treasury and placed in the accounts of Halliburton, Blackwater and all other war profiteers that are getting rich off the misery of Iraqis and Americans. Every 10 minutes an Iraqi civilian is injured or killed in a war that George Bush says will not end until he leaves office. Every 10 hours an American soldier is killed in a war that George Bush says will not end until he leaves office. " / An Alleged "Two Party System" By Ed Ciaccio
"Private interests have looted the treasury, and the administration has sanctioned unrestrained fraud and corruption. We have watched Congress and the press become weak and willing handmaidens to those who would rip apart the fabric and laws of our democratic society. We hunger for the restoration of hope, common sense and purpose." - Jann S. Wenner 10/26/07 RS40
SORRY, YOUR JOB'S BEEN OUTSOURCED ! Thousands of manufacturing jobs have moved to countries that skimp on wages and regulations. Now the service sector is also at risk. NAFTA granted strong legal protections to corporate investors while offering only token protection of worker rights and the environment. Predictably, NAFTA produced a 50% increase in the number of factories along the Mexican border, where wages typically run 70 cents to $1 an hour.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
"The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, the judges. And they own all the big media companies so they control just about all the news and information you get to hear. They spend billions every year lobbying to get what they want. Well we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everyone else. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well informed, well educated people. That's against their interests. They want obedient workers." - George Carlin
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Comments (6)
Here's a potent article out of New Zealand that brings some pieces of this sad tale together.
I would have flagged this if it had been posted under 'Opinions'.
INDEED...
We LOST!
Thinking For Yourself Is Now A Crime!
Video
The bill will, in short, create massive terrorism in the United States. But the perpetrators of terrorism will not be Muslim terrorists; they will be government agents and fellow citizens.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19002.htm
Got it under opinions.
Lawmakers Probe Lucrative Severance Pay for CEOs Tied to Subprime Crisis
The House Oversight Committee has begun probing the lucrative severance and compensation packages awarded to CEOs involved in the subprime mortgage crisis. Angelo Mozilo, the co-founder of the mortgage giant Countrywide, is one of several CEOs who has been invited to testify before the committee in February. Last week, Bank Of America announced it was purchasing Countrywide, which holds one in six home loans in the U.S.
The Los Angeles Times reports Mozilo stands to make upward of $115 million after the sale goes through, even though Countrywide was at the center of the subprime mortgage scandal.
White Noise, I like this story. It's good stuff.
Our actual economic disaster is the direct result of 30 years of dereglementation & greed gone wild…
Highest Bidder goes a long way explaining what’s wrong…
Economics Journalist Robert Kuttner on the “Most Serious Financial Crisis Since the Great Depression”: “This is the Result of Rightwing Ideology and the Political Power of Wall Street”
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/1/23/recession
The place to start is to recognize why this recession is different from all other recessions. This began and is continuing with a collapse in credit markets, and the collapse in credit markets is, in turn, the result of deregulation gone nuts. <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />Lastly, this occurs on top of thirty years of increasing insecurity on a whole bunch of fronts: the greater risk of losing your job, the greater risk of having your paycheck not keep pace with inflation, rising energy costs, rising tuition costs, rising health insurance costs. All of the things that make you middle class have become more difficult to attain in the past thirty years. So you’ve got a three-layer cake here. You’ve got this thirty-year history of flat or declining living standards for most Americans, you’ve got this terrible weakness in financial markets, and you’ve got this housing collapse. The great experiment in deregulation really started under Carter in the late 1970s. It was Carter who started the deregulation of trucking and natural gas and broadcasting. And the whole ideology of deregulation and the practice of deregulation was unfortunately bipartisan. This did not just happen. This was not an accident. This was the agenda of business, particularly Wall Street, going back thirty years. And if you look at the history of this, the Great Depression discredited free-market ideology, because it was such a colossal practical failure. Nobody in the 1930s could argue with a straight face that free markets worked. And so, we had a whole mixed economy, a regulatory structure invented during the New Deal, that really lasted thirty or forty years. By the ’70s, for a variety of reasons, big business had recovered a lot of the political power that it had lost in the Depression. And both parties, beginning with Carter, continuing with Clinton, became enablers of the kind of deregulation that finally has come home to roost in this crisis. So now we’re learning, painfully, for a second time a lesson that we never should have had to learn twice, that markets don’t regulate themselves. Markets, left to their own devices, create grotesque inequality, ruin the environment and ruin the economy. And we’re seeing that unfold.