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To Fail, US Economic Imperialism, Working Class, and related newsletters.
A Call to the People by George Monbiot:
From: Robert McAfee <robertjmca1@gmail.com>
Date: September 19, 2013, 5:36:29 AM CDT To: Robert McAfee <robertjmca1@gmail.com>
After more than a quarter of a century of environmental
campaigning I’ve come to see that the only thing that really works is public mobilization: the electorate
putting so much pressure on governments that they are obliged to take a stand
against powerful interests. It doesn’t matter what weapons governments use to
confront these interests: what counts is their willingness to use them. A
system which undermines public involvement, boosts the power of the financial
markets and reduces love and passion and delight to a column of figures is
unlikely to enhance the protection of the natural world.
Nos. 9, 10, 11, 12 at end.
Contents #13
Dick, Moyers & Co.: Victims of US Capitalism in
Scheer, Predatory
Takeover, The Great Stickup
Taibbi, Big Banks Price-Fixing
Dick, Warrior Capitalism
Taibbi, Everything Rigged
Leech, Capitalism Genocidal, Rev. by Sethness
Richard Wolff
Kroll, 2012 Elections and Billionaires
Remedies
Gibson, Public Banking
Contents #14
Leibovich: US Capitalism
Cox: The Market as God
Moyers: Freeland, Taibbi, Income Inequality
Birdsell: Poverty
of Working Poor
Ockert: SNAP
Handouts Help Short-term
GLOBAL
Hedges: Global US
Capitalism, World’s Elites vs. World’s Poor
Trainor: And
Climate Change, 180 Degree Turn Needed Now
Bennett:
Faulkner:
Over-accumulation of Capitalism:
Defenders of a
Modified Capitalism
Admati and Hellwig: Changing the Banking System
Haque: Changing the Economic System
Strong and Mackey: Conscious Capitalists Can Solve World’s
Problems
Welch: Positive Vision Needed
Contents #15 Nov.
22, 2013 (11 essays)
DEREGULATION/MONEY COUP AND DESTRUCTION OF DEMOCRACY
Frontline, JPMorgan Fined $13 Billion, the Price of
Business as Usual
Hedges (2 essays on disintegrating
Moyers & Company:
Interview of Heather Gerken and Joyce Appleby
Moyers & Co., Interview of Gretchen Morgenson, Author
of Reckless Endangerment
Nichols and McChesney,
Dollarocracy
Gotesdiener, A Dream
Foreclosed: Black
NEW SUSTAINABLE, ECONOMICALLY
JUST, DEMOCRATIC SYSTEM
Senator Sanders, Morally and Economically Sound Budget
Speth, Manifesto for
a New Economy
Appleby, Libertarian View of Flexible Capitalism
Brown, Costa Rican (and North Dakotan!) Public Banking
MOYERS 10-13-13
Moyers interviewed two excellent people this morning: Heather Gerken on the drive by the rich and their tools to
deregulate the country, and Joyce Appleby in the scientific revolution against religious dogma between the
time of
HEATHER GERKEN on the COUP D’ETAT AGAINST
REGULATION.
Discussed the history and consequences of the efforts by
wealthy individuals and corporations, organizations like the Heritage
Society, and individuals like Ed Meese, Koch brothers, Carl Rove to eliminate
regulation of money in politics. The
majority of the present Supreme Court has become their powerful ally. Citizens
United is one catastrophic culmination, and the present McCutcheon case will sweep much more
away. Now a handful of people can
determine the government’s agenda and even specific laws. Money Is Power means it controls the three
branches of government.
Also discussed effective way deregulators have successfully
used the First Amendment Free Speech clause.
Money has become protected speech.
Gerken reminds us that another principle—equality—is equally
important, if we are to have a democracy and not a plutocracy.
MOYERS &
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04:16
15:58
Gretchen Morgenson on Industry Influence
from BillMoyers.com PRO 1 year ago
Moyers
talks with Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter and columnist
Gretchen Morgenson on how money and political clout enable industries to
escape regulation and enrich executives at the top.
MOYERS AND WINSHIP, CORPORATE CRIMINALS AND MEDIA LIES
Friday, October 25,
2013
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The
Lies That Will Kill
by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship
 News Corp. headquarters in
"The problem: ideology and self-interest trump the facts or
even caring about the facts, whether it’s banking, Obamacare or global
warming."
Say what? Pure whitewash, and Murdoch’s
minions know it. That $13 billion dollars is the settlement JPMorgan Chase,
the country’s biggest bank, is negotiating with the government to settle its
own rip-off of American homeowners and investors — those shady practices
that five years ago helped trigger the financial meltdown, including
manipulating mortgages and sending millions of Americans into bankruptcy or
foreclosure. If anybody’s been robbed it’s not JPMorgan Chase, which can
absorb the loss and probably take a tax write-off for at least part of it.
No, it’s the American public. In addition to financial heartache we still
have been denied the satisfaction of seeing jail time for any of the
banksters who put our feet in cement and pushed us off the cliff.
This isn’t the only scandal JPMorgan Chase is juggling. A $6
billion settlement with institutional investors is in the works and criminal
charges may still be filed in
Nor
is JPMorgan Chase the only culprit under scrutiny. Bank of America was found guilty just this week of civil fraud,
and a gaggle of other banks is being investigated by the government for
mortgage fraud. No wonder the camp followers at Fox News, The Wall Street Journal,
CNBC and other cheerleaders have ganged up to whitewash the banks. If justice
is somehow served, this could be the biggest egg yet across the smug face of
unfettered, unchecked, unaccountable capitalism.
One face in particular: Jamie Dimon, the chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase. One of
Murdoch’s Fox Business News hosts, Charlie Gasparino, claims the Feds are on
a witch hunt against Dimon for criticizing President Obama, whose
administration, we are told, “is brutally determined and efficient when it
comes to squashing those who oppose their policies.” But hold on: Dimon is a
Democrat, said to be Obama’s favorite banker, with so much entree he’s been
doing his own negotiating with the attorney general of the
But that’s crony capitalism for you,
bipartisan to a fault. Rupert Murdoch has been defending Dimon in his media
for a long time. Last spring, when it looked like there might be a
stockholders revolt against Dimon, Murdoch was one of many bigwigs who rushed
to his defense. He tweeted that JPMorgan would be “up a creek” without Dimon.
“One of the smartest, toughest guys around,” Murdoch insisted. Whether
Murdoch’s exaltation had an effect or not, Dimon was handily reelected.
"Ignorance will kill democracy as surely as the big money
that funds and encourages the media outlets, parties and individuals who spew
the lies and hate."
Over
the last few days, The Wall Street Journal, both Bible and supplicant
of high finance as well as one of Murdoch’s
more reputable publications — at least in its reporting — echoed the “UNCLE
SCAM” indignation of the more lowbrow Post. The government just wants “to appease their
left-wing populist allies,” its editorial writers raged, with a “political
shakedown and wealth-redistribution scheme.” Perhaps, the paper suggested,
the White House will distribute some of the JPMorgan Chase penalty to
consumers and advocacy groups and “have the checks arrive in swing
congressional districts right before the 2014 election.” We can hear the
closet Bolsheviks panting for their handouts now and getting ready to use
their phony ID’s to stuff the box on Election Day with multiple illegal
ballots.
Such fantasies are all part of the Murdoch News Corp. pattern, an
unending flow of falsehood and phony populism that in reality serves only the
wealthy elite. Fox News is its
ministry of misinformation, the fake jewel of the News Corp. crown, a 24/7
purveyor of flimflam and the occasional selective truth. Look at the pounding
they’ve given Obama’s healthcare reform right from the very start, whether
the non-existent death panels or claims that it would cause the highest tax
increase in history.
While
it’s true that the startup of Obamacare has been plagued by its website
nightmare and other problems, Fox News consistently has failed to mention
Republican roadblocks that prevented the program from getting proper funding
or the fact that so many states ruled by Republican governors and
legislatures — more than 30 — have deliberately failed to set up the
insurance marketplaces critical to making the new system work. Just the other
day, Eric Stern at Salon.com fact-checked
a segment on Sean Hannity’s show. “Average Americans are feeling the pain of
Obamacare and the healthcare overhaul train wreck,” Hannity declared, “and
six of them are here tonight to tell us their stories.”
Eric
Stern tracked down each of the Hannity Six and found that while their
questions about health reform may have been valid, the answers they received
from Hannity or had decided for themselves were not. “I don’t doubt that
these six individuals believe that
Obamacare is a disaster,” Stern reported. “But none of them had even visited
the insurance exchange.”
And
there you have the problem: ideology and self-interest trump the facts or
even caring about the facts, whether it’s banking, Obamacare or global
warming. Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists say that climate change
is happening and that humans have made it so, but only four in ten Americans
realize it’s true. According to a new study in the journal Public Understanding of
Science, written by a team that includes Yale University’s Anthony Leiserowitz,
the more that people listen to conservative media like Fox News or Limbaugh,
the less sure they are that global warming is real. And even worse, the less
they trust science.
Such
ignorance will kill democracy as surely as the big money that funds and
encourages the media outlets, parties and individuals who spew the lies and
hate. The ground is all too fertile for those who will only believe whatever
best fits their resentment or particular brand of paranoia. It is, as an old
song lyric goes, “the self-deception that believes the lie.” The truth will
set us free; the lie will make prisoners of us all.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
Journalist
Bill Moyers is the host of the new show Moyers & Company,
a weekly series of smart talk and new ideas aimed at helping viewers make
sense of our tumultuous times through the insight of
Michael
Winship, senior writing fellow at Demos and president of the Writers Guild of
America-East, is senior writer for Bill Moyers' new weeke
JOHN NICHOLS AND ROBERT MCCHESNEY, DOLLAROCRACY
1.
'Dollarocracy':
How Special Interests Undermine Our Democracy ...
Nov 8, 2013 - The United States has
experienced fundamental changes that are dramatically detrimental to
democracy. any honest assessment of
Watch The Nation Videos
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A Dream Foreclosed / One of the top 12 Great Reads of
Summer 2013—Ms. Magazine
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A Dream Foreclosed / One of the top 12 Great Reads of Summer
2013—Ms. Magazine
Black America
By Laura Gottesdiener
Foreword by Clarence Lusane
Release date: Aug 13, 2013
Paperback | $14.95 | 208 pages
Available now fromZuccotti
Park
Distributed to the trade by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution
Foreword by Clarence Lusane
Release date: Aug 13, 2013
Paperback | $14.95 | 208 pages
Available now from
Distributed to the trade by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution
Compelling and lucidly told
stories .... A riveting book
NAOMI KLEIN, author of The Shock Doctrine
Instead of bottles and
bricks thrown at protesters and marchers,
the weapons of choice have been
usurious mortgage contracts and signing pens. The language of segregation and
interposition has been replaced with false narratives of getting a piece of the
American pie and property ownership as freedom. The evil of ‘states’ rights’
has given way to the perniciousness of bankers’ rights. For many families in
the black community, home mortgages became new shackles, ending dreams and
futures.
—from the foreword by CLARENCE LUSANE
—from the foreword by CLARENCE LUSANE
With A Dream Foreclosed, Laura
Gottesdiener, a Brooklyn-based investigative journalist, offers a thoroughly
researched picture of the housing crisis within the context of the broader
financial collapse, showing that the true cost is not in real estate value but
in human tragedy—especially the mass displacement of American families and
dreams.
Gottesdiener’s “page-turning testimony” reminds us that not a
single Wall Street banker has been arrested for the countless predatory loans,
acts of fraud and foreclosure abuse that have contributed to the more than ten
million people being evicted from their foreclosed homes since 2007—with
millions more foreclosures in progress. That ten million people have been
thrown out of their homes (the equivalent of the entire population of Michigan
Through real-life stories of four
American neighborhoods fighting against foreclosure, A Dream Foreclosed gives
voice to the silenced population most affected by the global economic crisis.
What makes the book so compelling is that Gottesdiener profiles four heroic
families who not only challenge the big banks when threatened with foreclosure
and eviction—they organize their neighbors and win. Her main subjects, Bertha
Garrett in Detroit, Martha Biggs in Chicago, Griggs Wimbley in North Carolina,
and Michael Hutchins in Tennessee, all embody the spectacular possibilities
that emerge when everyday people challenge corporate power.
SEE INTERVIEW IN EXTRA! (Nov.
2013), “Laura Gottesdiener on Foreclosures.”
“Ten million Americans have lost their homes to foreclosures. . . .”
SENATOR
SANDERS
Bernie Sanders, Budget Deal Must Be Morally and
Economically Sound. Reader Supported News
Sanders writes: "As a member of the U.S. Senate Budget Committee, I am more than aware that a $17 trillion dollar national debt and a $700 billion deficit are serious problems that must be addressed. But I am also aware that real unemployment is close to 14 percent, that tens of millions of Americans are working for horrendously low wages ..."
READ MORE
Sanders writes: "As a member of the U.S. Senate Budget Committee, I am more than aware that a $17 trillion dollar national debt and a $700 billion deficit are serious problems that must be addressed. But I am also aware that real unemployment is close to 14 percent, that tens of millions of Americans are working for horrendously low wages ..."
READ MORE
America
·
James Gustave Speth
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Honorable
Mention, General-Non-Fiction category at the 2013 Green Book Festival sponsored
by JM Northern LLC
Visit the America
In this
third volume of his award-winning American Crisis series, James Gustave Speth
makes his boldest and most ambitious contribution yet. He looks unsparingly at
the sea of troubles in which the United States now finds itself, charts a
course through the discouragement and despair commonly felt today, and envisions what he calls America the
Possible, an attractive and plausible future that we can still realize.
The book identifies a dozen features of the American
political economy—the country's basic operating system—where transformative
change is essential. It spells out the
specific changes that are needed to move toward a new political economy—one in
which the true priority is to sustain people and planet. Supported by
a compelling "theory of change" that explains how system change
can come to America , the
book also presents a vision of political, social, and economic life in a
renewed America .
Speth envisions a future that will be well worth fighting for. In short, this
is a book about the American future and the strong possibility that we yet have
it in ourselves to use our freedom and our democracy in powerful ways to create
something fine, a reborn America ,
for our children and grandchildren.
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James
Gustave Speth is Distinguished Senior Fellow at
Demos, and Professor of Law at Vermont
Law School
JOYCE APPLEBY
Author of Shores of
Knowledge, The Relentless Revolution of
Capitalism, Inheriting the
Revolution, and more.
Shores of Knowledge was the focus of discussion, which recounts how curiosity liberated people
from dogma during the “age of enlightenment.”
She was upbeat regarding the present resurgence of dogmatic religion in
the US
Capitalist Chameleon
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Review
By STEPHEN MIHM
Published: January 22, 2010
What is the nature of capitalism? For Joseph
Schumpeter, the Austrian-born economist whose writings have acquired a special
relevance in the past year or two, this most modern of economic systems
“incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly
destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.” Capitalism, Schumpeter
proclaimed, cannot stand still; it is a system driven by waves of
entrepreneurial innovation, or what he memorably described as a “perennial gale
of creative destruction.”
Getty
Images (1930s)
THE RELENTLESS REVOLUTION
A History of Capitalism
By Joyce Appleby
494 pp. W. W. Norton
& Company. $29.95
Schumpeter died in
1950, but his ghost looms large over Joyce Appleby’s splendid new account of
the “relentless revolution” unleashed by capitalism from the 16th century
onward. Appleby, a distinguished historian who has dedicated her career to
studying the origins of capitalism in the Anglo-American world, here broadens
her scope to take in the global history of capitalism in all its creative — and
destructive — glory.
She begins “The Relentless Revolution” by
noting that the rise of the economic system we call capitalism was in many ways
improbable. It was, she rightly observes, “a startling departure from the norms
that had prevailed for 4,000 years,” signaling the arrival of a new mentality,
one that permitted private investors to pursue profits at the expense of older
values and customs.
In viewing capitalism as an extension of a
culture unique to a particular time and place, Appleby is understandably
contemptuous of those who posit, in the spirit of Adam Smith, that capitalism
was a natural outgrowth of human nature. She is equally scornful of those who
believe that its emergence was in any way inevitable or inexorable. . . .
In the
book’s final chapters, Appleby traces the many species of capitalism that have
evolved
in the postwar era, in places like the United States, Japan, France, Germany,
Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea. Many of these success stories reveal that government intervention, far from being
inimical to capitalist enterprise, can help sustain it. That’s even true of the
United States: between 1941 and 1960, she observes, the government’s share of
R. & D. funding went up 13-fold until it supplied a whopping 64 percent of
the country’s research funds; government contracts to companies like I.B.M.
spurred many innovations. The Internet, vehicle for so much entrepreneurial energy,
was the product of government sponsorship.
Alternative
paths to capitalist success have only multiplied in recent years. In
the closing pages, Appleby chronicles the startling rise of China China
Appleby ends with the event that defines our
particular moment in the history of capitalism: the financial crisis. She doesn’t pull any punches in assigning
blame, from bloated executive compensation packages to rampant deregulation of
the financial system. Despite her libertarian leanings, she believes government
can and should exercise some restraints on these excesses.
That prospect makes her optimistic about the
future. “There is no reason to think that societies won’t continue to modify
and monitor their economies in pursuit of shared goals,” she writes. “A
relentless revolution, yes, but not a mindless one.”
Stephen Mihm is the author of “A Nation of
Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States
For the
complete review go to: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/books/review/Mihm-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Public Banking in Costa Rica: A Remarkable Little-known Model
by
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 Ellen
Brown, Op-Ed, NationofChange, Nov. 12, 2013: In |
Contents #9 Nov. 12,
2012
Hedrick Smith, Who Stole
the American Dream?
To Schneiderman:
Prosecute or Resign
Taibbi, Why Government Doesn’t Fight Wall Street
Barofsky, Bailout on
TARP
Nader: Where Were the Whistleblowers?
Freeland, Plutocrats
Reich, Book on US Capitalism
Reich, Interviewed About US Capitalism
Survey: Confidence in
Capitalism Declines
Wolf: Global
Financial Fraud
Looking Back at Capitalist Greed, PBS: Remember the Triangle Fire
Contents #10
Ha-Joon Chang, About
Capitalism
Gibney Video: Park Avenue , 1%
of 1%:
Hacker and Pierson: Winner-Take-All
Politics
Bybee, War on Wages
Foster and McChesney, Monopoly-Finance Capital
Pollin, Full Employment
Wenz, Progressive Taxation
Mondiot, Unregulated Capitalism and Climate Change
Williams, Socialism
Contents #11
Taibbi, Lies about Bailout
Ad Busters on US Capitalism
Ad Busters on Canadian Capitalism
Moyers & Co.
Programs
Richard Wolff’s Books
Jim Wallis, Serving
the Common Good
Contents #12
Animated Film on Nature of Capitalism
Connaughton, Why
Wall Street Always Wins
Moyers Interviews Sheila Bair and Richard Wolff March 22
Stagnation
Tunnel People and Economic Collapse
Dauvergne and Lister,
Corporate Takeover of Sustainability
Smil, What We Have Taken from Nature
Blinder, Cause and Cure of Economic Crisis
Leopold, World of Top Hedge-Fund Managers
Garson, How the 99% Lives in the Recession
Here is the link to all OMNI topical newsletters:
http://www.omnicenter.org/newsletter-archive/ Many of OMNI’s newsletters expose the
liabilities of US
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