tagged w/ corporate fascism
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Humanity faces a daunting battle against corporate forces that have historically proved willing to employ any means necessary to preserve an evil system. The police brutality and corporate funding aimed at crushing Occupy Wall Street hint of the savagery unleashed by corporations in countries around the world over the past 150 years. Yet the recent crackdown has provided our rebellion with an extraordinary public relations weapon by demonstrating the veracity of our charges against a ruthless system that despises democracy and justice.
The movement sweeping America is our link to a world-wide chain of rebellion. The majority of the world’s population, which for half a century has borne the brunt of neoliberal policies, is finally determined to stop the onslaught of global capitalism, which is the force sustaining most brutal systems on the planet, from the military dictatorships in the Middle East to the neo-feudalist societies now permeating industrial nations.
Since World War II the United States has expanded its ever-present imperial quest to entail global domination. Our government has used nearly every method imaginable to ensure a world order that benefits big multi-national corporations. It dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even though officials such as General Eisenhower knew Japan was about to surrender, to send a message. That message was the same as the one sent in Vietnam—do as we say or suffer a holocaust... Continue reading: http://thebloodycrossroads.com/464/occupy-wall-street-and-the-history-of-corporate-fascism/Humanity faces a daunting battle against corporate forces that have historically... more
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Last time we checked in with PayPal, it, along with MasterCard, Visa and others had blocked its services with regards to donations to WikiLeaks foundation.
Today it is being reported that PayPal has taken further action against another WikiLeaks-related fund, in freezing the account of the Courage To Resist foundation which, in conjunction with the Bradley Manning Support Network, gives donations to the Bradley Manning legal defense fund. The imprisoned Manning is allegedly the source of the US Embassy cables leaked by WikiLeaks.
In a phone call earlier today, PayPal representative Anuj Nayar told me that this action is not WikiLeaks related and that PayPal has only temporarily restricted the fund, “This has nothing to do with WikiLeaks.”
Courage To Resist and PayPal are still in talks, and according to Nayar the former is infringing against PayPal’s policy on 501 3c non-profits, which hold that a non-profit needs to have a bank account associated with their PayPal account. “For the vast majority of none profits this is not an issue,” says Najar.
Nayar also takes up CTR’s claim that PayPal would not un-restrict the account unless CTR authorized PayPal to withdraw funds from the checking account by default, “We can’t do that without the authorization of an account holder, so a) We can’t do it b) We don’t do it c) Even if we did the bank would resist the charge.”
So why make this a WikiLeaks issue? “That’s a question for them,” he says.
The company’s official statement, below:
“Today’s temporary limitation of the Courage to Resist organization’s PayPal account is due to PayPal regulations requiring non profits to associate a bank account to their PayPal account. It is nothing to do with Wikileaks. Back in December 2010, we permanently restricted the account used by WikiLeaks due to a violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity. We’ve notified the account holder of this action. This is not the case with Courage to Resist”
GO TO STORY:
http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/24/paypal-on-cutting-off-courage-to-resist-this-has-nothing-to-do-with-wikileaks/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29Last time we checked in with PayPal, it, along with MasterCard, Visa and others had... more
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By Henry Giroux
Source: t r u t h o u t
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
"Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world."
- Hannah Arendt[1]
A Turn to the Dark Side of Politics
The American media, large segments of the public and many educators widely believe that authoritarianism is alien to the political landscape of American society. Authoritarianism is generally associated with tyranny and governments that exercise power in violation of the rule of law. A commonly held perception of the American public is that authoritarianism is always elsewhere. It can be found in other allegedly "less developed/civilized countries," such as contemporary China or Iran, or it belongs to a fixed moment in modern history, often associated with the rise of twentieth century totalitarianism in its different forms in Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union under Stalin.
Even as the United States became more disposed to modes of tyrannical power under the second Bush administration - demonstrated, for example, by the existence of secret CIA prisons, warrantless spying on Americans and state-sanctioned kidnapping - mainstream liberals, intellectuals, journalists and media pundits argued that any suggestion that the United States was becoming an authoritarian society was simply preposterous. For instance, the journalist James Traub repeated the dominant view that whatever problems the United States faced under the Bush administration had nothing to do with a growing authoritarianism or its more extreme form, totalitarianism.[2] On the contrary, according to this position, America was simply beholden to a temporary seizure of power by some extremists, who represented a form of political exceptionalism and an annoying growth on the body politic. In other words, as repugnant as many of Bush's domestic and foreign policies might have been, they neither threatened nor compromised in any substantial way America's claim to being a democratic society.
Against the notion that the Bush administration had pushed the United States close to the brink of authoritarianism, some pundits argued that this dark moment in America's history, while uncharacteristic of an aspiring democracy, had to be understood as temporary perversion of American law and democratic ideals that would end when George W. Bush concluded his second term in the White House. In this view, the regime of George W. Bush and its demonstrated contempt for democracy was explained away as the outgrowth of a serendipitous act of politics - a corrupt election and the bad-faith act of a conservative court in 2000, or a poorly run election campaign in 2004 by an uncinematic and boring Democratic candidate.
According to this narrative, the Bush-Cheney regime exhibited such extreme modes of governance in its embrace of an imperial presidency, its violation of domestic and international law, and its disdain for human rights and democratic values that it was hard to view such anti-democratic policies as part of a pervasive shift towards a hidden order of authoritarian politics, which historically has existed at the margins of American society. How else to label such a government other than shockingly and uniquely extremist, given its political legacy that included the rise of the security and torture state; the creation of legal illegalities in which civil liberties were trampled; the launching of an unjust war in Iraq legitimated through official lies; the passing of legislative policies that drained the federal surplus by giving away more than a trillion dollars in tax cuts to the rich; the enactment of a shameful policy of preemptive war; the endorsement of an inflated military budget at the expense of much-needed social programs; the selling off of as many government functions as possible to corporate interests; the resurrection of an imperial presidency; an incessant attack against unions; support for a muzzled and increasingly corporate-controlled media; government production of fake news reports to gain consent for regressive policies; use of an Orwellian vocabulary for disguising monstrous acts such as torture ("enhanced interrogation techniques"); furtherance of a racist campaign of legal harassment and incarceration of Arabs, Muslims and immigrants; advancement of a prison binge through a repressive policy of criminalization; establishment of an unregulated and ultimately devastating form of casino capitalism; the arrogant celebration and support for the interests and values of big business at the expense of citizens and the common good, and the dismantling of social services and social safety nets as part of a larger campaign of ushering in the corporate state and the reign of finance capital.
Authoritarianism With a Friendly Face
In the minds of the American public, the dominant media and its accommodating pundits and intellectuals, there is no sense of how authoritarianism in its soft and hard forms can manifest itself as anything other than horrible images of concentration camps, goose-stepping storm troopers, rigid modes of censorship, and through chilling spectacles of extremist government repression and violence. That is, there is no sense of how new modes of authoritarian ideology, policy, values and social relations might manifest themselves in degrees and gradations so as to create the conditions for a distinctly undemocratic and increasingly cruel and oppressive social order. There is no sense, as the late Susan Sontag suggested in another context, how emerging registers of power and governance "dissolves politics into pathology."[3]
It is generally believed that in a constitutional democracy, power is in the hands of the people, and that the long legacy of democratic ideals in America, however imperfect, is enough to prevent democracy from being subverted or lost. And, yet, the lessons of history provide clear examples of how the emergence of reactionary politics, the increasing power of the military, and the power of big business subverted democracy in Argentina, Chile, Germany and Italy. In spite of these histories, there is no room in the public imagination to entertain what has become the unthinkable - that such an order in its contemporary form might be more nuance, less theatrical, more cunning, less concerned with repressive modes of control than with manipulative modes of consent - what one might call a mode of authoritarianism with a distinctly American character.[4]
Historical conjunctures produce different forms of authoritarianism, though they all share a hatred for democracy, dissent and civil liberties. It is too easy to believe in a simplistic binary logic that strictly categorizes a country as either authoritarian or democratic, which leaves no room for entertaining the possibility of a mixture of both systems.
(please read the rest of the article here)
http://www.zcommunications.org/democracy-and-the-threat-of-authoritarianism-politics-beyond-barack-obama-by-henry-giroux
image: http://www.hermes-press.com/fascism2.jpgBy Henry Giroux
Source: t r u t h o u t
Tuesday, February 16, 2010... more
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HEALTH CARE WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE
The masquerade is over!
The "public option" is dead.
Health care reform is now a private option: WHICH FOR PROFIT INSURANCE COMPANY DO YOU WANT? You have to choose. And you have to pay. If you have a low income, under HR3200 government will subsidize the private insurance companies and you will still have to pay premiums, co-pays and deductibles.
The Administration plan requires that everyone must have health insurance, so it is delivering tens of millions of new "customers" to the insurance companies. Health care? Not really. Insurance care! Absolutely. Cost controls? No chance.
You will next hear talk about "co-ops." The truth is that insurance company campaign contributions have co-opted the public interest.
I need your help to spread the word and rally the nation around true health care reform which covers everyone and maintains fiscal integrity without breaking our nation's bank! Your contribution will empower our efforts to continue to fight for the single-payer, not-for-profit health care bill, HR676 "Medicare for All," which I co-authored with Rep. John Conyers. The bill now has 85 sponsors in the House.
The hotly-debated HR3200, the so-called "health care reform" bill, is nothing less than corporate welfare in the guise of social welfare and reform. It is a convoluted mess. The real debate which we should be having is not occurring.
Removing the "public option" from a public bill paid for by public money is not in the public interest. What is left is a "private option" paid for with public money. Why should public money be spent on a private option which does not guarantee 100% coverage nor have any cost controls? A true public option would provide 30% savings immediately which would then cover the 1/3rd of the population who presently have no health care.
Unfortunately, under HR3200, the Government is choosing winners and losers in the private sector; proposing to spend public funds on subsidizing insurance companies who make money not providing health care. This process will insure only the expansion of profits. Gone is the debate over cost.
As a result of current negotiations, the Medicare Part D rip-off will continue for another decade, further fleecing senior citizens. Drug importation has been dropped, so no inexpensive drugs can be accessed from other nations.
Instead we are told the pharmaceutical companies will accept a 2% cut in the growth rate of their profits - they call this cost control!
If the matter were not so serious, it would be farcical: The executive branch pretends that the proposed health care reforms are something they are not. The legislation is being attacked for something it is not. Congressional leadership and the White House defend the legislation, pretending it actually is the very proposal that is being attacked. But it is not.
A commonsense government health care reform policy would insure that every single American has full access to health care by expanding Medicare to cover everyone under a Single Payer System. We are already paying for a universal standard of care, it is just we are not getting it.
I need your help to spread the word and rally the nation around true health care reform which covers everyone and maintains fiscal integrity without subsidizing insurance and pharmaceutical companies and breaking our nation's bank!
My voice in Congress will continue to challenge the special interests who do not want "single-payer" to succeed. I need you to join me in combating the special and corporate interests who spend millions to try to win this Congressional seat. With your help WE will win again. With your help I will continue to represent your concerns, be YOUR VOICE in the United States Congress, and be the voice for health care for all Americans!
With your help, we can accomplish ANYTHING in America. Persistence, dedication, truth and courage will lead the way and win out in the end.
Thank you,
Dennis KucinichHEALTH CARE WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE
The masquerade is over!
The "public... more
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asherp
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2 years ago
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