Fight for 15 Official Video: Fight for it- A.D, Arsonisto, Brittany & LV...

"We are Calling for Fundamental Transformation of U.S. Capitalist Society"

The privacy crisis

Here's Ben Wizner, director of the ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project in a recent interview aired on Bill Moyers:

"But I do think that there is pushback. There is bipartisan pushback. This is an issue that is at least as important to people on the libertarian right as it is to people on the liberal left. There is this fundamentally American notion of being left alone unless you do something wrong that is jeopardized by dragnet surveillance, which captures information on everyone, in case we might do something wrong."

We can only hope that it's not too late for the American people to take back at least enough privacy from the surveillance state to be able to have any meaningful say in their own government. At least the Snowden revelations have awoken many citizens to the fact that they have lost the rights they thought were guaranteed by the 4th amendment.

Letitia James speech at inaugural as Public Advocate of New York City Ja...

Henry Giroux tells us to wake up and take back our world from the parasites

Henry Giroux has been a strong advocate for defending high-quality public education from the profiteering privatizers here in the U.S. Here he argues that only a free and independent citizenry, educated outside of the corporate sphere of influence, will be able to reclaim our democracy. http://www.truthdig.com/report/page4/cultures_of_violence_in_the_age_of_casino_capitalism_20131219

As power becomes global, unrestrained by the politics of nation states, it has become more arrogant, less controllable and more vicious in its pursuit of resources, profits and wealth. This predatory ruling financial class are the new zombies - parasites sucking the blood out of everything they come in contact with while spreading misery, suffering, and death all over the globe. One consequence is that more and more individuals and groups are becoming imaginary others, defined by a free floating, largely unaccountable capitalist class that inscribes them as disposable, redundant and irrelevant…. This grim reality has produced a failure in the power of the civic imagination, political will, and open democracy. Casino capitalism destroys those institutions that generate the capacity for critique, dissent, thoughtfulness and collective struggles. In its place, it has erected a series of cultural apparatuses that revel in idiocy, celebrity culture, conformity and infantilization…. The struggle against casino capitalism must begin as not only a struggle over power, but as a concerted and widespread attempt to make education central to politics, to address what it means to change the way in which people see things, learn how to govern rather than be governed, and embrace a collective sense of agency in which history and the future is open.blockquote>

The Liquidation Of Our Future Could Be Stopped If We Just Do One Thing -...

Pathetic Spectacle

Charles Hugh Smith sums up neatly the dismay many of us feel when confronted by the antics of our national politicians:

All we have left in the U.S. is a deeply impoverishing Political Theater of the Absurd. Policy, theory and governance have all been reduced to competing stage performances in the Theater of the Absurd. The actors are transparently given to farcical overacting in exaggerated dramas drained of meaning; they proceed through the cliched motions as if the audience hadn't seen the same charades overplayed dozens of times before. "Government shutdown" and "debt ceiling" may have engaged audiences starved for entertainment in a bygone age, but now they exemplify a theater that is so impoverished it can only re-stage tired formulaic dramas with a savage appetite for incompetence and buffoonery.

So what should we do? I think the time for trying to elect better politicians within this corrupt system has passed. We need to recognize that our interests simply aren't represented in this corporate-friendly regime. Our attitude should be akin to those of colonized populations biding their time until they can reclaim their own land. Collaborate with the regime as little as possible and support our own independent attempts to build communities and institutions that promote sane, healthy living. Continue to resist oppression, but begin to construct a new, more humane society on the scorched earth of the ravaged world left to us by the greedheads.