millions of poor people worldwide

Climate Change Costs Lives http://www.oxfam.org.uk/get_involved/campaign/climate_change

Climate change costs lives. With
your support and our know-how, we can sort it Here and Now.

Oxfam provides simple, effective solutions to the poverty and suffering climate change is already causing millions of poor people worldwide. http://inspirationalvideo.org/

Also by EI

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capitalismalovestory

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/9/24/after_20_years_of_filmmaking_on

http://my.opera.com/dcimagery/blog/ my!!!! racial profiling Obama's historic presidency engendering hypocrisy

http://my.opera.com/azimagery/blog/ my!!!! mirrors and smoke machines

Naomi Klein Interviews Michael Moore on the Perils of Capitalism

By Naomi Klein, The Nation
Posted on September 25, 2009, Printed on September 25, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/142871/

Editors Note: On Sept. 17, in the midst of the publicity blitz for his cinematic takedown of the capitalist order, filmmaker Michael Moore talked with Nation columnist Naomi Klein by phone about the film, the roots of our economic crisis and the promise and peril of the present political moment. Listen to a podcast of the full conversation here. Following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Naomi Klein: So, the film is wonderful. Congratulations. It is, as many people have already heard, an unapologetic call for a revolt against capitalist madness. But the week it premiered, a very different kind of revolt was in the news: the so-called tea parties, seemingly a passionate defense of capitalism and against social programs.

Meanwhile, we are not seeing too many signs of the hordes storming Wall Street.

Personally, I'm hoping that your film is going to be the wake-up call and the catalyst for all of that changing. But I'm just wondering how you're coping with this odd turn of events, these revolts for capitalism led by Glenn Beck.

Michael Moore: I don't know if they're so much revolts in favor of capitalism as they are being fueled by a couple of different agendas, one being the fact that a number of Americans still haven't come to grips with the fact that there's an African American who is their leader. And I don't think they like that.

NK: Do you see that as the main driving force for the tea parties?

MM: I think it's one of the forces -- but I think there's a number of agendas at work here. The other agenda is the corporate agenda. The health care companies and other corporate concerns are helping to pull together what seems like a spontaneous outpouring of citizen anger.

But the third part of this is -- and this is what I really have always admired about the right wing -- they are organized, they are dedicated, they are up at the crack of dawn fighting their fight. And on our side, I don't really see that kind of commitment.

When they were showing up at the town-hall meetings in August -- those meetings are open to everyone. So where are the people from our side? And then I thought, wow, it's August. You ever try to organize anything on the left in August?

NK: Wasn't part of it also, though, that the left, or progressives, or whatever you want to call them, have been in something of a state of disarray with regard to the Obama administration -- that most people favor universal health care, but they couldn't rally behind it because it wasn't on the table?

MM: Yes. And that's why [President Barack]Obama keeps turning around and looking for the millions behind him, supporting him, and there's nobody even standing there, because he chose to take a half measure instead of the full measure that needed to happen. Had he taken the full measure -- true single-payer, universal health care -- I think he'd have millions out there backing him up.

NK: Now that [Montana Democrat Sen. Max] Baucus' plan is going down
in flames, do you think there's another window to put universal health care on the table?

MM: Yes. And we need people to articulate the message and get out in front of this and lead it. You know, there's close to a hundred Democrats in Congress who had already signed on as co-signers to [Michigan Democratic Congressman] John Conyers' bill.Obama, I think, realizes now that whatever he thought he was trying to do with bipartisanship or holding up the olive branch, that the other side has no interest in anything other than the total destruction of anything he has stood for or was going to try and do.

So if [New York Democratic Congressman Anthony] Weiner or any of the other members of Congress want to step forward, now would be the time. And I certainly would be out there. I am out there.

I mean, I would use this time right now to really rally people, because I think the majority of the country wants this.

NK: Coming back to Wall Street, I want to talk a little bit more about this strange moment that we're in, where the rage that was directed at Wall Street, what was being directed at AIG executives when people were showing up in their driveways -- I don't know what happened to that.

My fear was always that this huge anger that you show in the film, the kind of uprising in the face of the bailout, which forced Congress to vote against it that first time, that if that anger wasn't continuously directed at the most powerful people in society, at the
elites, at the people who had created the disaster and channeled into a real project for changing the system, then it could easily be redirected at the most vulnerable people in society; I mean immigrants, or channeled into racist rage.

And what I'm trying to sort out now is, is it the same rage or do you think these are totally different streams of American culture -- have the people who were angry at AIG turned their rage on Obama and on the idea of health reform?

MM: I don't think that is what has happened. I'm not so sure they're the same people.

In fact, I can tell you from my travels across the country while making the film, and even in the last few weeks, there is something else that's simmering beneath the surface.

You can't avoid the anger boiling over at some point when you have 1 in 8 mortgages in delinquency or foreclosure, where there's a foreclosure filing once every 7.5 seconds, and the unemployment rate keeps growing. That will have its own tipping point.

And the scary thing about that is that historically, at times when that has happened, the right has been able to successfully manipulate those who have been beaten down and use their rage to support what they used to call fascism.

Where has it gone since the crash? It's a year later. I think that people felt like they got it out of their system when they voted for Obama six weeks later and that he was going to ride into town and do the right thing. And he's kind of sauntered into town promising to do the right thing but not accomplishing a whole heck of a lot.

Now, that's not to say that I'm not really happy with a number of things I've seen him do.

To hear a president of the United States admit that we overthrew a democratically elected government in Iran, that's one of the things on my list I thought I'd never hear in my lifetime. So there have been those moments.

And maybe I'm just a bit too optimistic here, but he was raised by a single mother and grandparents, and he did not grow up with money. And when he was fortunate enough to be able to go to Harvard and graduate from there, he didn't then go and do something where he could become rich; he decides to go work in the inner city of Chicago.

Oh, and he decides to change his name back to what it was on the birth certificate -- Barack. Not exactly the move of somebody who's trying to become a politician. So he's shown us, I think, in his lifetime many things about where his heart is, and he slipped up during the campaign and told Joe the Plumber that he believed in spreading the wealth.

And I think that those things that he believes in are still there. Now, it's kind of up to him.

If he's going to listen to the [Robert] Rubins and the [Tim] Geithners and the [Robert] Summerses, you and I lose. And a lot of people who have gotten involved, many of them for the first time, won't get involved again.

He will have done more to destroy what needs to happen in this country in terms of people participating in their democracy. So I hope he understands the burden that he's carrying and does the right thing.

NK: Well, I want to push you a little bit on this, because I understand what you're saying about the way he's lived his life and certainly the character he appears to have. But he is the person who appointed Summers and Geithner, who you're very appropriately hard on in the film.

And one year later, he hasn't reined in Wall Street. He reappointed [Fed Chairman Ben] Bernanke. He's not just appointed Summers but has given him an unprecedented degree of power for a mere economic adviser.

MM: And meets with him every morning.

NK: Exactly. So what I worry about is this idea that we're always psychoanalyzing Obama, and the feeling I often hear from people is that he's being duped by these guys. But these are his choices, and so why not judge him on his actions and really say, This is on him, not on them

MM: I agree. I don't think he is being duped by them; I think he's smarter than all of them.

When he first appointed them, I had just finished interviewing a bank robber who didn't make it into the film, but he is a bank robber who is hired by the big banks to advise them on how to avoid bank robberies.

So in order to not sink into a deep, dark pit of despair, I said to myself that night, That's what Obama's doing. Who better to fix the mess than the people who created it? He's bringing them in to clean up their own mess. Yeah, yeah. That's it. That's it. Just keep repeating it: There's no place like home, there's no place like home ...

NK: And now it turns out they were just being brought in to keep stealing.

MM: Right. So now it's on him.

NK: All right. Let's talk about the film some more.

I saw you on [Jay] Leno, and I was struck that one of his first questions to you was this objection -- that it's greed that's evil, not capitalism. And this is something that I hear a lot -- this idea that greed or corruption is somehow an aberration from the logic of capitalism rather than the engine and the centerpiece of capitalism.

And I think that that's probably something you're already hearing about the terrific sequence in the film about those corrupt Pennsylvania judges who were sending kids to private prison and getting kickbacks. I think people would say, That's not capitalism, that's corruption.

Why is it so hard to see the connection, and how are you responding to this?

MM: Well, people want to believe that it's not the economic system that's at the core of all this. You know, it's just a few bad eggs. But the fact of the matter is that, as I said to Jay, capitalism is the legalization of this greed.

Greed has been with human beings forever. We have a number of things in our species that you would call the dark side, and greed is one of them. If you don't put certain structures in place or restrictions on those parts of our being that come from that dark place, then it gets out of control.

Capitalism does the opposite of that. It not only doesn't really put any structure or restriction on it. It encourages it, it rewards it.

I'm asked this question every day, because people are pretty stunned at the end of the movie to hear me say that it should just be eliminated altogether. And they're like, Well, what's wrong with making money? Why can't I open a shoe store?

And I realized that [because] we no longer teach economics in high school, they don't really understand what any of it means.

The point is that when you have capitalism, capitalism encourages you to think of ways to make money or to make more money. And the judges never could have gotten the kickbacks had the county not privatized the juvenile hall.

But because there's been this big push in the past 20 or 30 years to privatize government services, take it out of our hands, put it in the hands of people whose only concern is their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders or to their own pockets, it has messed everything up.

NK: The thing that I found most exciting in the film is that you make a very convincing pitch for democratically run workplaces as the alternative to this kind of loot-and-leave capitalism.

So I'm just wondering, as you're traveling around, are you seeing any momentum out there for this idea?

MM: People love this part of the film. I've been kind of surprised, because I thought people aren't maybe going to understand this or it seems too hippie-dippy -- but it really has resonated in the audiences that I've seen it with.

But, of course, I've pitched it as a patriotic thing to do. So if you believe in democracy, democracy can't be being able to vote every two or four years. It has to be every part of every day of your life.

We've changed relationships and institutions around quite considerably because we've decided democracy is a better way to do it. Two hundred years ago, you had to ask a woman's father for permission to marry her, and then once the marriage happened, the man was calling all the shots. And legally, women couldn't own property and things like that.

Thanks to the women's movement of the '60s and '70s, this idea was introduced to that relationship -- that both people are equal and both people should have a say. And I think we're better off as a result of introducing democracy into an institution like marriage.

But we spend eight to 10 to 12 hours of our daily lives at work, where we have no say.

I think when anthropologists dig us up 400 years from now -- if we make it that far -- they're going to say, Look at these people back then. They thought they were free. They called themselves a democracy, but they spent 10 hours of every day in a totalitarian situation, and they allowed the richest 1 percent to have more financial wealth than the bottom 95 percent combined.

Truly they're going to laugh at us the way we laugh at people 150 years ago who put leeches on people's bodies to cure them.

NK: It is one of those ideas that keeps coming up. At various points in history it's been an enormously popular idea. It is actually what people wanted in the former Soviet Union instead of the Wild West sort of mafia capitalism that they ended up with. And what people wanted in Poland in 1989 when they voted for Solidarity was for their state-owned companies to be turned into democratically run workplaces, not to be privatized and looted.

But one of the biggest barriers I've found in my research around worker cooperatives is not just government and companies being resistant to it but actually unions as well. Obviously there are exceptions, like the union in your film, United Electrical Workers, which was really open to the idea of the Republic Windows Doors factory being turned into a cooperative, if that's what the workers
wanted.

But in most cases, particularly with larger unions, they have their script, and when a factory is being closed down, their job is to get a big payout -- as big a payout as they can, as big a severance package as they can for the workers. And they have a dynamic that is in place, which is that the powerful ones, the decision makers, are the owners.

You had your U.S. premiere at the AFL-CIO convention. How are you finding labor leadership in relation to this idea? Are they open to it, or are you hearing, Well, this isn't really workable? Because, I know you've also written about the idea that some of the auto plant factories or auto parts factories that are being closed down could be turned into factories producing subway cars,
for instance. The unions would need to champion that idea for it to work.

MM: I sat there in the theater the other night with about 1,500 delegates of the AFL-CIO convention, and I was a little nervous as we got near that part of the film, and I was worried that it was going to get a little quiet in there.

Just the opposite. They cheered it. A couple people shouted out, Right on!Absolutely!

I think that unions at this point have been so beaten down, they're open to
some new thinking and some new ideas. And I was very encouraged to see that.

The next day at the convention, the AFL-CIO passed a resolution supporting single-payer health care. I thought, Wow, you know? Things are changing.

NK: Coming back to what we were talking about a little earlier, about people's inability to understand basic economic theory: In your film, you have this great scene where you can't get anybody, no matter how educated they are, to explain what a derivative is.

So it isn't just about basic education. It's that complexity is being used as a weapon against democratic control over the economy. This was [Alan] Greenspan's argument -- that derivatives were so complicated that lawmakers couldn't regulate them.

It's almost as if there needs to be a movement toward simplicity in economics or in financial affairs, which is something that Elizabeth Warren, the chief bailout watchdog for Congress, has been talking about in terms of the need to simplify people's relationships with lenders.

So I'm wondering what you think about that.

Also, this isn't really much of a question, but isn't Elizabeth Warren sort of incredible? She's kind of like the anti-Summers. It's enough to give you hope, that she exists.

MM: Absolutely. And can I suggest a presidential ticket for 2016 or 2012 if Obama fails us? [Ohio Democratic Congresswoman] Marcy Kaptur and Elizabeth Warren.

http://www.capitalismalovestory.com/

NK: I love it. They really are the heroes of your film. I would vote for that.

I was thinking about what to call this piece, and what I'm going to suggest to my editor is America's Teacher, because the film is this incredible piece of old-style popular education.

One of the things that my colleague at The Nation Bill Greider talks about is that we don't do this kind of popular education anymore, that unions used to have budgets to do this kind of thing for their members, to just unpack economic theory and what's going on in the world and make it accessible.

I know you see yourself as an entertainer, but I'm wondering, do you also see
yourself as a teacher?

MM: I'm honored that you would use such a term. I like teachers.

Naomi Klein's latest book is The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

http://www.naomiklein.org/video-audio

© 2009 The Nation All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/142871/

http://pittsburghendthewar.org/

Money for Human Needs, Not for Wars
and Occupations

– Environmental Justice for the Earth and its Inhabitant –

Jobs and Health Care for All

Bechtel Group, Inc. defense contractor money from oil, gBechtel Group, Inc. defense contractor money from oil, gas & chemicals and from government contracts

Carlyle Group military-industrial complex the billionaire George
Soros

Corporatocracy Boeing and Lockheed Martin, - World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization,

Halliburton_Company world's largest providers oil and gas and military services industries - $2.7 billion Iraq - Walter Reed by awarding a $120 million contract.

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http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/

"War is mankind's most tragic and stupid folly; to seek or advise its deliberate provocation is a black crime against all men. Though you follow the trade of the warrior, you do so in the spirit of Washington--not of Genghis Khan.

For Americans, only threat to our way of life justifies resort to conflict."      

Dwight D. Eisenhower - Graduation Exercises at the United States Military Academy, 6/3/47

PRESIDENT OBAMA'S PROMISES TO KEEP

After 8 long years of the Bush Administrations lawless ways, we applaud Barack Obama’s vows to bring the United States back into compliance with international law. We ourselves pledge to hold President Obama accountable for fulfilling his promises. These are promises to keep and we will hold him to them! Join us in pledging to hold Obama accountable to his promises.

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/9/15/as_obama_escalates_war_in_afghnanistan

http://www.youtube.com/user/mediagrrl9

Activists Call for Near-Term Withdrawal of Foreign Groups

The coming weeks hold critical significance for the US occupation of Afghanistan. The Senate is expected to vote on the Obama administration’s $128 billion request to fund war operations in Afghanistan and Iraq for the coming fiscal year. Next week, the Obama administration will unveil a report on whether US benchmarks for success in Afghanistan are being achieved. It’s widely believed President Obama will receive a military request to escalate the Afghan war with thousands of additional troops. The apparent congressional unease over a troop escalation comes near Friday’s eight-year anniversary of the vote authorizing the attack on Afghanistan. We speak to Norman Solomon of the Institute for Public Accuracy on his recent trip to Afghanistan and CODEPINK’s Medea Benjamin.

Norman Solomon, Executive Director of the Institute for Public Accuracy http://www.accuracy.org/ and the co-founder of Fairness & Accuracy http://www.fair.org/ in Reporting. Earlier this month, he returned from a five-day trip to Afghanistan.

http://www.warmadeeasythemovie.org/

Medea Benjamin, longtime peace activist and founder of CODEPINK. http://www.codepink4peace.org/ This week the group is delivering a petition to Congress calling for a US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. The petition is called “Take Action Against the War.”

Obama's War

http://i1.democracynow.org/features/obamas_war

Don't Get Rolled

http://www.DontGetRolled.org

Once upon a time, corporate titans
bankrolled our elections with no limits. There were no social safety nets, no real labor laws, and no voting rights for most Americans. There were the haves and have nots. This fall, a century of modest limits on corporate influence in politics could be completely rolled back, crushing progress on health care, the environment, energy, economic recovery … on everything!

The Supreme Court on September 9
hears a case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, that reopens the question of unlimited corporate money in our elections. In a stunning move, the Court will reach back and reconsider two other pivotal campaign finance cases settled long ago. The potential result?

A century-old pillar of campaign
finance doctrine could be swept away. Sound like a good idea? Sounds so very last, last century — except this time it wouldn’t be the robber barons — it would be the giant, multinational corporations buying our politicians outright.

Don’t let our elections and progress get rolled by corporate power! PLEDGE TO PROTEST! Pledge to protest getting rolled on September 9!

Everyone can protest — check out our ideas for actions. We want to collaborate and share your stories, pictures, and videos! Send your pics and YouTube links to action@citizen.org.

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Untold Truths About the American Revolution By Howard Zinn, July 2009 Issue

There are things that happen in the world that are bad, and you want to do something about them.

You have a just cause. But our culture is so war prone that we immediately jump from, “This is a good cause” to “This deserves a war.”

You need to be very, very comfortable in making that jump.

http://howardzinn.org/

The American Revolution—independence from England—was a just cause. Why should the colonists here be occupied by and oppressed by England? But therefore, did we have to go to the Revolutionary War?

How many people died in the Revolutionary War? Nobody ever knows exactly how many people die in wars, but it’s likely that 25,000 to 50,000 people died in this one. So let’s take the lower figure—25,000 people died out of a population of three million. That would be equivalent today to two and a half million people dying to get England off our backs. You might consider that worth it, or you might not. Canada is independent of England, isn’t it? I think so. Not a bad society.

Canadians have good health care. They have a lot of things we don’t have. They didn’t fight a bloody revolutionary war. Why do we assume that we had to fight a bloody revolutionary war to get rid of England? In the year before those famous shots were fired, farmers in Western Massachusetts had driven the British government out without firing a single shot. They had assembled by the thousands and thousands around courthouses and colonial offices and they had just taken over and they said goodbye to the British officials. It wasa nonviolent revolution that took place. But then came Lexington and Concord, and the revolution became violent, and it was run not by the farmers but by the Founding Fathers.

The farmers were rather poor; the Founding Fathers were rather rich. Who actually gained from that victory over
England? It’s very important to ask about any policy, and especially about war: Who gained what? And it’s very important to notice differences among the various parts of the population. That’s one thing were not accustomed to in this country because we don’t think in class terms. We think, “Oh, we all have the same interests.” For instance, we think that we all had the same interests in independence from England. We did not have all the same interests. Do you think the Indians cared about independence from England? No, in fact, the Indians were unhappy that we won independence from England, because England had set a line—in the Proclamation of 1763—that said you couldn’t go westward into Indian territory. They didn’t do it because they loved the Indians.

They didn’t want trouble. When Britain was defeated in the Revolutionary War, that line was eliminated, and now the way was open for the colonists to move westward across the continent, which they did for the next 100 years, committing massacres and making sure that they destroyed Indian civilization.

So when you look at the American Revolution, there’s a fact that you have to take into consideration. Indians—no, they didn’t benefit. Did blacks benefit from the American Revolution? Slavery was there before. Slavery was there after. Not only that, we wrote slavery into the Constitution. We legitimized it. What about class divisions? Did ordinary white farmers have the same interest in the revolution as a John Hancock or Morris or Madison or Jefferson or the slaveholders or the bondholders? Not really. It was not all the common people getting together to fight against England. They had a very hard time assembling an army.

They took poor guys and promised them land. They browbeat people and, oh yes, they inspired people with the Declaration of Independence. It’s always good, if you want people to go to war, to give them a good document and have good words: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Of course, when they wrote the Constitution, they were more concerned with property than life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

You should take notice of these little things. There were class divisions. When you assess and evaluate a war, when you assess and evaluate any policy, you have to ask: Who gets what? We were a class society from the beginning. America started off as a society of rich and poor, people with enormous grants of land and people with no land.

And there were riots, there were bread riots in Boston, and riots and rebellions all over the colonies, of poor against rich, of tenants breaking into jails to release people who were in prison for nonpayment of debt. There was class conflict. We try to pretend in this country that we’re all one happy family. We’re not. And so when you look at the American Revolution, you have to look at it in terms of class. Do you know that there were mutinies in the American Revolutionary Army by the privates against the officers?

The officers were getting fine clothes and good food and high pay and the privates had no shoes and bad clothes and they weren’t getting paid. They mutinied. Thousands of them. So many in the Pennsylvania line that George Washington got worried, so he made compromises with them. But later when there was a smaller mutiny in the New Jersey line, not with thousands but with hundreds, Washington said execute the leaders, and they were executed by fellow mutineers on the order of their officers. The American Revolution was not a simple affair of all of us against all of them. And not everyone thought they would benefit from the Revolution.

We’ve got to rethink this question of war and come to the conclusion that war cannot be accepted, no matter what the reasons given, or the excuse: liberty, democracy; this, that. War is by definition the indiscriminate killing of huge numbers of people for ends that are uncertain. Think about means and ends, and apply it to war. The means are horrible, certainly.

The ends, uncertain. That alone should make you hesitate. Once a historical event has taken place, it becomes very hard to imagine that you could have achieved a result some other way. When something is happening in history it takes on a certain air of inevitability: This is the only way it could have happened. No. We are smart in so many ways. Surely, we should be able to understand that in between war and passivity, there are a thousand possibilities.

Howard Zinn is the author of “A People’s History of the United States.” The History Channel is running an adaptation called “The People Speak.” This article is an excerpt from Zinn’s cover story, "Just Cause Does Not Equal Just War." in the July issue of The Progressive. http://www.progressive.org/zinn070309.html

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http://www.youtube.com/user/federaljackdotcom
FEDERALJACK.COM is an alternative news web site. We cover anything from police brutality to the New World Order takeover of the free world. We have no corp sponsors and are totally user supported. We offer the truth so people can get a real idea of what is going on. Many people are asleep, and its time to wake them up. Knowledge is power & the difference between slavery and freedom. Educate yourself. MEDIA FAIL: MSNBC pushes Government Propaganda about H1N1 Vaccine Swine Flu Warning & Update http://www.federaljack.com/2009/08/24/swine-flu-vaccine-linked-to-paralysis-leaked-memo-reveals/

The Shock Doctrine

http://steetsblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/200000-veterans-homeless.html

http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2009/06/schwarzenegger-s-shock-therapy-poor-pay-sins-rich

Naomi Klein

http://www.democracynow.org/ 2 Corinthians 8:9 - For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.

Video: Schwarzenegger’s Shock Therapy--The Poor Pay For The Sins Of The Rich

By Avi Lewis - June 16th, 2009 Now that Washington has ruled out an immediate bailout for California, we know who will pay the ultimate price for the crisis born on Wall Street: the state’s most vulnerable citizens. And with many states facing similar crises, this could be a preview of where the country as a whole is headed.

California is facing a $24.3 billion dollar budget gap, and the governor wants to attack it with cuts to social programs alone. If Schwarzenegger has his way, the price will be paid by 1.9 million people who lose their health care coverage, 1.3 million who lose basic welfare, thousands of state workers who get fired, schools that lose $5 billion in funding, having already survived brutal cuts earlier this year.

I just spent a week in LA and Sacramento filming a documentary on the crisis for Fault Lines, the show I co-host on Al Jazeera English Television. We interviewed teachers who are on hunger strike against the cuts, students organizing protest marches, health care workers and their patients, politicians from both parties, undocumented immigrants and the talk show hosts who demonize them (Californians will know the John and Ken Show…)

What we discovered (beyond some priceless video of Arnold Schwarzenegger introducing Milton Friedman’s TV series on PBS in 1990, is that thanks to the quirks of California’s system, the state is a Petri dish for some of the most virulent strains of American political culture.


Around the world, government is seen as the last hope to stimulate a comatose economy. In California, anti-tax, anti-spending, and anti-government sentiments are converging: California is facing a de-stimulus package of epic proportions.

Watch both parts of my half-hour documentary below, and check out AJE live, 24 hours day, at livestation.com.

Fault Lines, California: Failed State, Part 1:	Fault Lines, California: Failed State, Part 2:
A Film by Avi Lewis & Naomi Klein	Featured Activist Campaign G20: No More Business as Usual Day of Action, Central London Friday, September 4

http://my.opera.com/azimagery/blog/2009/09/04/american-casino-movie

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http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2009/04/lexicon-disappointment

A Lexicon of Disappointment

By Naomi Klein - April 15th, 2009

Published in The
Nation

All is not well in Obamafanland. It's not clear exactly what accounts for the change of mood. Maybe it was the rancid smell emanating from Treasury's latest bank bailout. Or the news that the president's chief economic adviser, Larry Summers, earned millions from the very Wall Street
banks and hedge funds he is protecting from reregulation now. Or perhaps it began earlier, with Obama's silence during Israel's Gaza attack.

Whatever the last straw, a growing number of Obama enthusiasts are starting
to entertain the possibility that their man is not, in fact, going to save the world if we all just hope really hard.

This is a good thing. If the superfan culture that brought Obama to power is going to transform itself into an independent political movement, one fierce
enough to produce programs capable of meeting the current crises, we are all going to have to stop hoping and start demanding.

The first stage, however, is to understand fully the awkward in-between space in which many US progressive movements find themselves. To do that, we need a new language, one specific to the Obama moment. Here is a start.

Hopeover. Like a hangover, a hopeover comes from having overindulged
in something that felt good at the time but wasn't really all that healthy, leading to feelings of remorse, even shame. It's the political equivalent of the crash after a sugar high. Sample sentence: "When I listened to Obama's economic speech my heart soared. But then, when I tried to tell a friend about his plans for the millions of layoffs and foreclosures, I found myself saying nothing at all. I've got a serious hopeover."

Hoper coaster. Like a roller coaster, the hoper coaster describes
the intense emotional peaks and valleys of the Obama era, the veering between joy at having a president who supports safe-sex education and despondency that single-payer healthcare is off the table at the very moment when it could actually become a reality. Sample sentence: "I was so psyched when Obama
said he is closing Guantánamo. But now they are fighting like mad to make sure the prisoners in Bagram have no legal rights at all. Stop this hoper coaster--I want to get off!"

Hopesick. Like the homesick, hopesick individuals are intensely nostalgic. They miss the rush of optimism
from the campaign trail and are forever trying to recapture that warm, hopey feeling--usually by exaggerating the significance of relatively minor acts of Obama decency. Sample sentences: "I was feeling really hopesick about the escalation in Afghanistan, but then I watched a YouTube video of Michelle in her organic garden and it felt like inauguration day all over again. A few hours later, when I heard that the Obama administration was boycotting a major UN racism conference, the hopesickness came back hard. So I watched slideshows of Michelle wearing clothes made by ethnically diverse independent fashion designers, and that sort of helped."
http://www.federaljack.com/2009/08/21/first-lady-requires-more-than-twenty-attendants/

Hope fiend. With hope receding, the hope fiend, like the dope fiend, goes into serious withdrawal, willing to do anything to chase the buzz. (Closely related to hopesickness but
more severe, usually affecting middle-aged males.) Sample sentence: "Joe told me he actually believes Obama deliberately brought in Summers so that he would blow the bailout, and then Obama would have the excuse he needs to do what he really wants: nationalize the banks and turn them into credit unions. What a hope fiend!"

Hopebreak. Like the heartbroken lover, the hopebroken Obama-ite
is not mad but terribly sad. She projected messianic powers onto Obama and is now inconsolable in her disappointment. Sample sentence: "I really believed Obama would finally force us to confront the legacy of slavery in this country and start a serious national conversation about race. But now he never seems to mention race, and he's using twisted legal arguments to keep us from even confronting the crimes of the Bush years. Every time I hear him say 'move forward,' I'm hopebroken all over again."

Hopelash. Like a backlash, hopelash is a 180-degree reversal of everything Obama-related. Sufferers were once Obama's most passionate evangelists.
Now they are his angriest critics. Sample sentence: "At least with Bush everyone knew he was an asshole. Now we've got the same wars, the same lawless prisons, the same Washington corruption, but everyone is cheering like Stepford wives. It's time for a full-on hopelash."

In trying to name these various hope-related ailments, I found myself wondering what the late Studs Terkel would have said about our collective hopeover. He surely would have

urged us not to give in to despair. I reached for one of his last books, Hope Dies Last. I didn't have to read long. The book opens with the words: "Hope has never trickled down. It has always sprung up."


And that pretty much says it all. Hope was a fine slogan when rooting for a long-shot presidential candidate. But as a posture toward the president of the most powerful nation on earth, it is dangerously deferential. The task as we move forward (as Obama likes to say) is not to abandon
hope but to find more appropriate homes for it--in the factories, neighborhoods and schools where tactics like sit-ins, squats and occupations are seeing a resurgence.

Political scientist Sam Gindin wrote recently that the labor movement can do more than protect the
status quo. It can demand, for instance, that shuttered auto plants be converted into green-future factories, capable of producing mass-transit vehicles and technology for a renewable energy system. "Being realistic means taking hope out of speeches," he wrote, "and putting it in the hands of workers."

Which brings me to the final entry in the lexicon. http://www.youtube.com/user/mediagrrl9

Hoperoots. Sample sentence: "It's time to stop waiting for hope to be handed down, and start pushing it up, from the hoperoots."

This article was first published in The Nation

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http://www.democracynow.org/2009/9/4/republican_gomorrah_inside_the_movement_that

http://www.republicangomorrah.com/excerpt.php

Fromm’s analysis in Escape from Freedom provides an eerie but prescient description of the authoritarian mindset driving the movement that has substantially taken over the modern Republican Party: the Christian right.

Over the last five years,
I interviewed hundreds of the Christian right’s leaders and activists, attended dozens of its rallies and conferences, listened to countless hours of its radio programs, and sat in movement-oriented houses of worship where no journalists were permitted.

As I explored the contours of the movement, I discovered a culture of personal crisis lurking behind the
histrionics and expressions of social resentment.

This culture is the mortar that bonds leaders and followers together.  Inside the movement initiates refer to it cryptically as “The Family,” an exclusive sect. The Christian right as a whole is called “the pro-Family” movement, and movement allies are known as “friends of The Family.” In an actual family, blood ties are required; however, joining the Christian right requires little more than becoming “born again,” a process of confession, conversion, and submission to a strict father figure.

The movement’s Jesus is the opposite of the prince of peace. He is a stern, overtly masculine patriarch charging into the fray with his sword raised against secular foes; he is “the head of a dreadful company, mounted on a white horse, with a double-edged sword, his robe dipped in blood,” according to movement propagandist Steve Arterburn. 

Mark Driscoll, a pastor who operates an alternative Christian rock venue from his church, stirs the souls of twenty- something evangelical males with visions of “Ultimate Fighting Jesus.” This same musclebound god-man starred in Mel Gibson’s blood-drenched The Passion of the Christ, enduring bone-crushing punishment at the hands of Jews and pagans
for two hours of unrelieved pornographic masochism.

A portrait of virility and violence, the movement’s omnipotent macho Jesus represents the mirror inversion of the weak men who necessitated his creation. As Fromm explained, “the lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness [italics in original]. It is the expression of the individual self to stand alone and live. It is the
desperate attempt to gain secondary strength where genuine strength is lacking.”

The movement’s macho Jesus provided purpose to Tom DeLay, a dallying, alcoholic Texas legislator transformed through evangelical religion from “Hot Tub Tommy” into a dictatorial House majority leader known as “The Hammer.” Macho Jesus was the god of Ted Haggard, a closet homosexual born-again and charismatic megachurch leader, risen to head of the National Association of Evangelicals, preaching the gospel of spiritual warfare and anti-gay crusades.  And he was the god of Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., an eccentric millionaire whose inheritance of massive wealth literally drove him mad, prompting his institutionalization, who found relief as one of the far right’s most reliable financial angels.

Macho Jesus even transformed the serial killer Ted Bundy, murderer and rapist of dozens of women, who became a poster child for anti-pornography activists with his nationally televised death row confessional.

The movement’s most powerful leader embodied the most severe qualities of his followers’ god. James Dobson is a quintessential strict father whose influence has been compared by journalistic observers to that of a cult leader. Unlike most of his peers, Dobson had no theological credentials or religious training. He was a child psychologist who burst onto the scene with a best-selling book that urged beating children into submission in order to restore the respect for God and government that America’s youth had lost during the 1960s.

Dobson leveraged his fame and wealth to build a kingdom of crisis that counseled the trauma-wracked Middle American masses with Christian oriented solutions to their personal problems. Then he marshaled them into apocalyptic morality crusades against abortion and homosexuality. When his Christian army reached critical mass, Dobson set them against the Republican establishment, flexing his grassroots muscle to destroy the ambitions of moderates such as Bob Dole and Colin Powell, and propelling movement figures such as DeLay and George W. Bush into ascendancy.

As Dobson consolidated his status as Republican kingmaker, the destructive tendencies of his closest allies began exploding, plunging the party into Gomorrah-like revelations of bizarre sex scandals and criminality. Ranging from DeLays misadventures with the felonious super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Christian right operative Ralph Reed to Haggards gay tryst with a male escort to Senator Larry Craigs bathroom stall come-on to an undercover cop, the scandals never ceased to surprise people who had once envisioned the Grand Old Party as a bastion of “family values.” Piled atop the Republicans disastrously handled occupation of Iraq and response to Hurricane Katrina, these sordid scandals ended the twelve-year experiment with Republican rule of the Congress in 2006.

In the chaotic 2008 Republican presidential primary, the Republican base split its vote between Mitt Romney, the economic conservative, and Mike Huckabee, the social conservative, creating space for John McCain, distrusted by all factions, to emerge. McCain wished to have as his running mate an independent-minded politician who could garner votes outside the Republicans increasingly narrow sphere of influence. His intention was to name Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, who had been the Democratic candidate for vice president in 2000. But the movement rejected his appeal to pragmatism, threatened a full-scale revolt, and demanded to vet his running mate as a condition for support. From the Last Frontier of Alaska, a self-proclaimed hardcore pro-lifer and prayer warrior

Governor Sarah Palin, was summoned to deliver to McCain the political elements he had once labeled agents of intolerance.

Through Palin, archetype of the right-wing woman, the movement’s influence over the party reached its zenith. As a direct result, however, the party sank to its nadir, suffering crushing defeats in the presidential and congressional races. Palins candidacy mobilized the Christian right elements that McCain alienated, but she repelled independents and moderate Republicans in droves, winnowing away the partys constituency in every region of the country except the Deep South. Palin fatally tarnished McCains image while laying the groundwork for her potential resurrection and that of the movement in the presidential contest of 2012.

The Christian right reached the mountaintop with the presidency of George W. Bush, shrouding science and reason in the shadow of the cross and the flag. But even at the height of Bushs glory, in his 2004 campaign, a few isolated moderate Republicans warned that the Republican Party was in danger of collapse. Of course their jeremiads were ignored. That year, Christie Todd Whitman published a book titled Its My Party Too, decrying the takeover by what she called the “social fundamentalists.

A member of a distinguished and wealthy eastern Republican family, with deep ties to the party, she had been governor of New Jersey and head of the Environmental Protection Agency under Bush, only to quit when fundamentalist ideologues substituted right-wing doctrine for science in its studies. After the 2008 Republican debacle, Whitman pointed out that even though McCain was not considered a champion of the religious right, his percentage of so-called “values voters” increased by 3 percent over Bushs in 2004. McCain, the last Republican moderate on the national stage, had lost among “moderate voters” by 21 points to Obama.

As soon as Obama took office, the movement camped in the wilderness prepared to take political advantage of the worst economic troubles since the Great Depression by injecting a renewed sense of anti-government resentment. As most people agonized and even panicked over the sudden economic collapse, the Christian right’s peddlers of crisis lifted their hands to the heavens. They had a whole new world of trauma to exploit, more desperate and embittered followers to manipulate, and maybe just maybe another chance at power.

Republican Gomorrah is an intimate portrayal of a political, social, and religious movement defined by an escape from freedom.” As Erich Fromm explained, those who join the ranks of an authoritarian cause to resolve inner turmoil and self-doubt are always its most fervent, rigidly ideological, and loyal members. They are often its most politically influential members as well. President Eisenhower described the mental stress and burden that animates such movements. His admonition to beware the danger posed to democracy by those who seek freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning these tremendous complex and difficult questions should be as memorable in history as his caution about the military-industrial complex in his farewell address.

The characters I have profiled may not represent a majority in terms of sheer numbers, but through their combined power, they reflect the dominant character of the movement and, by extension, of the Republican Party they have subsumed. That party has ignored Eisenhowers warning and realized his darkest fears.

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John Pilger The Invisible Government"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-uq7O1RqQQ

The Invisible Government by John Pilger I wasn't going to mention

The Green Berets when I sat down to write this, until I read the other day that John Wayne was the most influential movie who ever lived. I a saw the Green Berets starring John Wayne on a Saturday night in 1968 in Montgomery Alabama. (I was down there to interview the then-infamous governor George Wallace). I had just come back from Vietnam, and I couldn't believe how absurd this movie was. So I laughed out loud, and I laughed and laughed. And it wasn't long before the atmosphere around me grew very cold.

My companion, who had been a Freedom Rider in the South, said, "Let's get the hell out of here and run like hell." We were chased all the way back to our hotel, but I doubt if any of our pursuers were aware that John Wayne, their hero, had lied so he wouldn't have to fight in World War II.

And yet the phony role model of Wayne sent thousands of Americans to their deaths in Vietnam, with the notable exceptions of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Last year, in his acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the playwright Harold Pinter made an epoch speech. He asked why, and I quote him, "The systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought in Stalinist Russia were well know in the West, while American state crimes were merely superficially recorded, left alone, documented." And yet across the world the extinction and suffering of countless human beings could be attributed to rampant American power.

"But," said Pinter, "You wouldn't know it. It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest." Pinter's words were more than the surreal. The BBC ignored the speech of Britain's most famous dramatist.

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Bechtel Group, Inc. defense contractor money from oil, gas & chemicals and from government contracts

Carlyle Group military-industrial complex the billionaire George Soros

Corporatocracy Boeing and Lockheed Martin, - World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization,

Halliburton_Company
world's largest providers oil and gas and military services industries - $2.7 billion Iraq - Walter Reed by awarding a $120 million contract.