http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=5584168&mesg_id=5584168:hi: :bounce:
Moyers Journal Torture discussion with Bruce Fein and Mark Danner
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/05012009/watch.html"We have to confront this issue, whether we're going to live by a rule of law. 'Cause it's the same issue arose, Bill, with regard to the electronic surveillance. "Oh, the FISA statute's handcuffing our ability to gather intelligence. To heck with the law, we'll just go ahead and do it." No, in this country, if we want a republic to exist, you have to change the law. That's the difference between a civilized country, and one that's arbitrary and capricious. That's what we're fighting about."
Sicko: Michael Moore Interviews Doctor in UK
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOZmvaFfjtkSicko - Chilling Excerpt by Tony Benn
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnserZOf1-4&feature=related •"There are two ways to control people: Frighten them and Demoralize them"
•"This notion of "choice" that capital always goes on about. If you're shackled in debt you don't have the freedom to choose."
•"An educated, healthy and confident nation is harder to control."
•"They're poor, they're demoralized and they're frightened. So therefore they think perhaps the safest thing to do is take orders and hope for the best."
Tony Benn accuses John Bolton of US/UK Warcrime
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DO87jib5o8wReaganomics vs. Obamanomics: Thom Hartmann mixes it up with Reagan biographer Craig Shirley
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7ar-JGG9d8The Lethargy Virus - by Ralph Nader
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/05/02"Let’s put it this way—the gravest terrorists in the world today are viruses and bacterium and their astonishing ability to mutate, hitchhike and devastate human beings. Yet despite small outbreaks—such as the SARS virus from China—we collectively seem to be waiting until the “big pandemic” before we come to our senses and redefine national security and national defense."
Causes of the Crisis - by James K. Galbraith
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/05/01-3"The idea that capitalism, for all its considerable virtues, is inherently self-stabilizing, that government and private business are adversaries rather than partners; the idea that freedom without responsibility is a viable business principle; the idea that regulation, in financial matters especially, can be dispensed with. We tried it, and we see the result.
*
"It would not be right to blame any single person for these events, but if I had to choose one to name it would be a Texan, our own distinguished former Senator Phil Gramm. I'd cite specifically the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act-the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act-in 1999, after which it took less than a decade to reproduce all the pathologies that Glass-Steagall had been enacted to deal with in 1933.
*
"This was the abandonment of state responsibility for financial regulation: the regulation of mortgage originations, of underwriting, and of securitization. This abandonment was not subtle: The first head of the Office of Thrift Supervision in the George W. Bush administration came to a press conference on one occasion with a stack of copies of the Federal Register and a chainsaw."
New UN Report Shows the US Combo of Torture and Impunity Thrives in Iraqi Prisons - by Jeremy Scahill
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/05/01-12"Part of the deadly serious problem with the Obama administration's position on (not) holding accountable CIA torturers, their lawyers and the Bush administration officials who authorized and ordered all of these crimes is this: It sends a message to other governments that if Washington does it, we can too. Especially governments completely created by the US government."
Debt is Not Money - by Thom Hartmann
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/04/13"Everything predicted by the enemies of banks, in the beginning, is now coming to pass. We are to be ruined now by the deluge of bank paper. It is cruel that such revolutions in private fortunes should be at the mercy of avaricious adventurers, who, instead of employing their capital, if any they have, in manufactures, commerce, and other useful pursuits, make it an instrument to burden all the interchanges of property with their swindling profits, profits which are the price of no useful industry of theirs."
--Thomas Jefferson letter to Thomas Cooper, 1814.
"Are we standing at the edge of a Great Inflation (like Weimar Germany), a second Republican Great Depression, or a return to the middle class prosperity of the Roosevelt/Eisenhower New Deal era? Until Americans understand the difference between "money" and "debt," odds are its going to be one of the first two, at least over the next few years."
Michael Moore's 'Sicko' by CHRISTOPHER HAYES
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070716/hayesWill Obama Reboot Capitalism Anew? - by Thom Hartmann
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/04/23-4Over six million people are now out of work, and unemployment figures released today show that now-record number is continuing to climb. Meanwhile, still-profitable American corporations manufacture goods for American consumption using Chinese labor and pay virtually no income tax by keeping their profits offshore.
A hundred years ago, Republican President Theodore Roosevelt tried to reign in some of the most toxic behaviors of capitalists that he found incompatible with modern democracy by pushing through congress a law that banned the practice of corporations giving money to politicians. He slowed down the robber barons a bit, but three consecutive Republican presidents in the 1920s led us straight into the Republican Great Depression.
Franklin Roosevelt, his distant cousin, rebooted capitalism in the 1930s, ushering in an era of regulated capitalism - embraced by Republicans like Eisenhower and Democrats like JFK - that brought us the largest, strongest, and most stable middle class ever seen. We also became the world's economic superpower, as the world's largest importer of raw materials, exporter of finished goods, and banker to the world. We imported iron ore and exported televisions and cars and washing machines. The rest of the world was in debt to us. A worker with a high school diploma could find a job that paid enough to raise a family and have a safe and comfortable retirement.
The Reagan Revolution of the 1980s was the third "rebooting" of capitalism in the 20th Century, and continues to this day. Scorning the "regulated" part of "regulated capitalism," economic Reaganites from the Gipper himself to GHW Bush to Bill Clinton to GW Bush flipped our economy upside down. Today, after just thirty years of "free trade" and "right to work" and other oxymoronic nostrums applied as policy, we've become the world's largest importer of finished goods and the world's largest debtor. We now export minerals to Asia, and import back from them televisions, cars, and washing machines.
So now the big question: Will Obama reboot capitalism anew? Will he move us into a new realm of capitalism, back toward regulated capitalism, or continue the slide toward a poverty-ridden Dickensian economy that Reagan started?
At the moment, nobody knows.
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