A govenment of the people, by the people, for the people is not a two-party plutocracy where corporations and the uber-wealthy control the government and control the very narrative we hear every day. It's a war between personal freedom and liberty versus authoritarianism and tyranny.
The use of the courts to erode our civil liberties, as well as expand the ability of the state and corporations to commit fraud and other crimes with impunity, has been accompanied by a campaign to silence the handful of activist attorneys who defend those demonized by the government. The state has imprisoned the great civil rights attorneys J. Tony Serra, who has served two terms behind bars, and Lynne Stewart. And it looks as if Stanley L. Cohen is now on the list. When lawyers who defend the unpopular must suffer severe punishment at the hand of the government, the judiciary is a farce.
Cohen has furiously battled back against the excesses of state power for 25 years. He has worked as an attorney for the leaders of Hamas, including Mousa Abu Marzook, whom Cohen prevented from being extradited to Israel after he was detained at Kennedy Airport in New York. Cohen represented the Kuwaiti-born cleric Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, who was the son-in-law of Osama bin Laden and a spokesman for al-Qaida. Abu Ghaith, who requested that Cohen handle his case after he was extradited from Jordan to the United States, was sentenced in September to life in prison. Cohen has represented hackers, Occupy activists, the homeless, anti-war protesters, Muslim clerics, American Indian activists, Weather Underground members including Kathy Boudin, members of the Black Liberation Army and some of those who were charged in the 9/11 attacks. He brought a federal suit in Washington, D.C., to bar Israel from receiving U.S. aid, charging that the Israeli government carried out a “program of killing, torture, terror and outright theft” against the Palestinians. He defended the PayPal 14 in Northern California, a Muslim radio station in South Africa and the accused in a “terrorist” case in Romania and has an ongoing case against Egypt in the African Union for its closure of the Rafah border crossing into Gaza. He often worked on cases with Lynne Stewart, who was convicted of supporting terrorists by passing to the press some messages from her client, the blind sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, was disbarred as a result and was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison before being released in 2013 because she has cancer. Cohen was a protégé of the attorney William Kunstler, with whom he defended Mohawk Indians who mounted an armed uprising in 1990 on a reservation in Quebec. Cohen had to reach his clients, who were surrounded by Canadian army troops, in a canoe. He was indicted by the Canadian government for his work on behalf of the Mohawks during the uprising and charged with “seditious conspiracy,” although he was later cleared. The FBI has carried out raids on his home and his law office, confiscating his electronic equipment. And he is banned in Israel and Egypt because of his defense work.
Cenk Uygur (http://www.twitter.com/cenkuygur)
host of The Young Turks gives an update on TYT's progressive petition
primary campaign. Cenk has decided to extend the deadline for petitions
to reach 1000 signatures to Nov. 4th. For more info go to http://www.tytnetwork.com/petitions.
Are you dissatisfied with Hillary Clinton as the presumptive democratic
nominee for President in 2016? Are you hoping for a more progressive
candidate? We want to know who you want, email us your choice of
candidate at petitions@tytnetwork.com once we receive your choices we
will publish petitions for your candidates at http://www.tytnetwork.com/petitions.
We'll leave your petitions up on our website until November 4th, at
that point any candidate who has reached 1000 signatures on their
petition we believe should be taken seriously as a legitimate
progressive challenger to Hillary Clinton, we will leave those names up
on our website indefinitely to see how many signatures those petitions
get. Email your choice for a progressive challenger to Hillary Clinton
at petitions@tytnetwork.com
Originally posted 7/6/12. As relevant today as it was then.
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Neoliberalism is a set of economic principles that explains US foreign policy since WWII and current trends in US politics. American corporations have used and
continue to use the ideology in countries around the world by:
Removing trade restrictions on the target country: eliminating quotas, import duties and export duties.
Instituting a floating rate currency in the targeted country by removing controls, subjecting its currency to international markets and traders.
Removing all rules and regulations that serve to protect the country and its people. (Goodbye labor and environmental regulations.)
Reducing the country's income tax rates to bare minimums. And as a consequence:
Gutting government spending including social programs (austerity measures). And as a consequence:
Controlling, subverting, diverting or placating the citizens. Outside of the above, of course.
Obviously corporations that "invade" the "host" country are the prime beneficiaries of neoliberalism.
Debt Slavery
There is a corollary to neoliberalism that ends up as debt slavery and it works as follows:
Corrupt the government into undertaking expensive infrastructure
projecting based on unsustainable growth.
When the country falls behind in its debt payments, creditors swoop in with their neoliberal demands.
Neoliberalism,
which is known under a plethora of different monikers: globalization,
austerity measures, neofeudalism, mercantilism— explains the crises in such countries
as Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain (PIIGS). If these neoliberal
policies sound familiar, you're right. The chickens have come home to the good ol' USA to roost.
Which leads to the fact that American companies aren't really American companies in any meaningful sense of the word. See:
US
corporations have closed down their manufacturing plants in the US and moved
them to a more favorable location sometimes disassembling plants piece by
piece and reassembling them half way around the world. The US labor
market suffers as a consequence as this creates unemployment and downward pressure on
wages. With less capital in the US, Americans have less money in their pockets to buy
the products that keep the economy churning. It's a completely unsustainable situation. If the US
government had its citizens' best interests at heart, it would do something to correct the situation. As the transported manufacturing plant thrives and the host country's economy grows, manufacturing costs rise. It's not long before the corporations start to look for cheaper and more lucrative markets to exploit. The plant is closed down and moved to a new country. Of course, as a result, the previous host country's economy collapses, wrecking havoc on the people who have left farming to work at the plant and no longer have the ability to feed themselves. But, hey, there is no loyalty in business. After all, business is business and business must
grow.
Sociopathic system
Such
a system is unsustainable. It is sociopathic when CEOs sacrifice longevity for
short term profits or sacrifice their company's viability for
short-term bonuses. It doesn't matter if the
people making the decisions are sociopaths if the system acts as if it's a sociopath. The end result is the same. Lacking empathy and the ability to love,
sociopaths gravitate to to business and politics for something that they
do understand: winning the game. It is no wonder that the frequency of sociopaths in CEOs is four times the frequency of sociopaths in the general population.(Source: Forbes)
CEOs' Club
The CEOs' club is the "Business Round Table." At best, it's an old boys' club and, at worst, it's a criminal, corrupt, colluding network. It is here
they set their general strategy for maintaining their power and
control. From here, they share that strategy with politicians, their pro-corporate media allies and not-for-profit
NGOs. Although it all sounds like a big conspiracy, it's all done out in the
open. It's perceived by the general population as acceptable and legal.
Membership has it's privileges
From CEOs and their friends sitting on each others' boards,
to appointing their board members to vote shares of shareholders who
didn't exercise their right to vote, the CEOs have a stranglehold on the
corporation that have been entrusted to them. Average CEO pay for 2011 was $9.6 million while the median US worker garnered only $39,300. (Source.) That's 244 times the media worker for US CEOs. In 1965, CEOs earned 24 times the amount of an average worker. (Source.) US CEO compensation is also grossly higher than international CEO pay. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark! Or the US, as the case may be.
Bonuses and bailouts
For a well connected US company, profits are privatized (they keep them) and losses are socialized (bailouts are provided courtesy of the rest of the country). To make matters worse, when CEOs know that the government will bail out the company if it gets into trouble, it incentivizes CEO into risky behavior. And worse still, if CEOs know that they won't be prosecuted for criminal behavior, it incentivizes criminal behavior.
Gaming the system
Ownership of the government is very
rewarding! You can prevent anti-trust investigations, prevent breakups,
and put smaller, more efficient companies out of business through dumping or by corporate takeover. You can make illegal activities legal,
prevent criminal investigations, collude and continue to merge with
other companies unabated. Members of the CEO club take turns filling high level government positions, often self-dealing for themselves and
their companies. Again, it's a blatant disregard for their fiduciary duty and certainly not in the public interest. For anyone who paid his dues while
in government, a lucrative position awaits in private industry. The
revolving door is extremely profitable! The system is also cunningly manipulated in the way regulations are created. Regulatory agencies and the big corporations negotiate the proposed regulations. Often, the regulations are devised to be prohibitively expensive for small businesses and, thus, serve the big corporations. In addition, there are loopholes for the wealthy and well connected, especially when it comes to taxes.
The result of this paradigm shift in power is this:
Which begs the question, "'How could this have happened to us?"
Some point to the Powell memo in 1971, some to Eisenhower's warning of the Military Industrial Complex in 1961. Some point to a shift in politics when the Democratic Party started soliciting corporate donations. Chris Hayes in his new book, Twilight of the Elite notes a shift in the 70s from economic equality to equality for minority groups in the areas of gender, race, sexual preferences. While Hayes argues that economic equality and demographic equality now have to be combined, I feel there was a deliberate attempt to concede non-economic concessions as opposed to economic concessions. There are other factors as well going back to the creation of semi-secret/semi-autonomous organizations such as the Federal Reserve, CIA, NSA and FBI. Even FDR, who has been often credited with saving capitalism in the US, led the way for corporatism in the future: big government working in conjunction with big business. See: Third Way or Third Reich?
At any rate, at some point, CEOs were no longer concerned for the "public good" and focused entirely on "profit."
How did we get here? In the past, after all, liberal politicians did
make it their business to advocate for the working and middle classes,
and they worked that advocacy through the Democratic Party. But they
largely stopped doing this in the '70s, leaving the interests of
corporations and the wealthy nearly unopposed. The story of how this
happened is the key to understanding why the Obama era lasted less than
two years.
I’ve spoken to lawmakers who went in as a freshman and were told that
they had to start dialing for dollars on their first day of office.
They didn’t get to look around and get acquainted; they were already
dialing for dollars.
BILL MOYERS:
Do you think these ads make us stupid?
MARTY KAPLAN:
We start stupid. The brain is wired to be entertained. We don't pay
attention to the words. We pay attention to the pictures and the drama
and the story. If it's pretty, if it's exciting, if it's violent, if
it's fast, that's where we are. So the fact that these mini dramas are
being used to get us to vote for one person or another is just like what
we all learned propaganda was used for and thought we learned our
lessons from in World War II. They are propaganda. And propaganda is
irresistible. If it were resistible, people wouldn't do it. (Watch the entire episode here.)
...the percentage of big-money winners in U.S. House races was actually 85
percent, or nine points lower. And the percentages of U.S. Senate seats
and state legislative seats won by the deeper-pocketed candidate have
been consistently lower in recent election cycles. On balance, we rate
the statement Mostly True.
There's a simple solution: get money out of politics. One solution is to have 100% publicly funded elections. Another solution is for the government to equalize campaign contributions. For example, candidate A raises five million and candidate B raises 10 million. The government then steps in to give candidate A five million to equalize the campaign contributions. To deal with this expenditure, the government can tax all political contributions to create the equalization fund. This was recently discussed on Up with Chris Hayeshere.
Some orginizations whose mission is to get money out of politics:
Mitt Romney, as part of his five point plan, would like to dramatically increase trade and restore economic freedom. You can be sure that he plans to balance the budget through austerity measures and not higher taxes for corporations or the wealthy. Is this not the neoliberalist agenda? See: Mitt Romney Interview With Brian Williams 7/26/12 or watch this clip:
