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Reflections on Michael Moore’s Capitalism
Jim Miles
The thrift in me allowed me to wait until Michael Moore’s “Capitalism - A Love Story” came out on second run theatres - it was well worth the wait. The powerful effect that Moore has on his audience derives from the personal stories he relates combined with a sense of humour that highlights the bizarre nature of our capitalist society. The stories of the evictions, the factory shutdowns, the “Dead Peasants”, and the visuals of corporate towers juxtaposed against abandoned and rotting houses gives a powerful visceral message to the viewer. The statistical information flipped past the viewer in a matter of seconds, all that was needed to underline the numbers behind the emotional reality of unemployment without much of a future.
Downward Manipulation is an Uneconomic Aberration
By Robert Singer
Free enterprise, also called free market, is an economy governed by the laws of supply and demand, not restrained by government interference, regulation or subsidy.
Command economy is basically a slave enterprise where supply and price are regulated by the government rather than market forces.
The only thing I will agree with about the “law of supply and demand” is that supply at a downward-manipulated price, can create demand.
Surveillance Societies
by Sarah Meyer
Research does not include either marine surveillance, medically-related surveillance and only little of the expensive drone surveillance in the US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
1. INTRODUCTION
HENRY PORTER, much respected columnist for the Observer, was the main inspiration for this research on surveillance. Porter has had an impressive career, which includes being the London editor of Vanity Fair.
FBI Kills Islamic Cleric, Arrests Followers, for Being Muslims at the Wrong Time in America
by Stephen Lendman
Luqman Ameen Abdullah
On October 28, New York Times writer Nick Bunkley wrote the following:
"Federal agents (today) fatally shot a man they described as the leader of a violent Sunni Muslim separatist group in Detroit." Targeted was Luqman Ameen Abdullah "whom agents were trying to arrest in Dearborn on charges that included illegal possession and sale of firearms and conspiracy to sell stolen goods."
The Times echoed FBI allegations that Abdullah "began firing at them from a warehouse (and) was shot in the return fire...." Ones also that he said:
Humankind’s future: social and political Utopia or Idiocracy?
Roland Michel Tremblay
By some coincidence in the last three days I read Men Like Gods of H. G. Wells and watch the films Idiocracy, City of Ember and WALL-E. They all deal with humankind’s future, a very bleak future that could possibly become the ultimate Utopia or perfect world, not before another world war, the extinction of humanity, and survival of a few humans to come back to Earth from space, or emerging from underground to start anew. Is this what we can expect of our future, imminent self-destruction?
Should we be planning colonies and ship them into space or below ground, like, right now? Is it because we feel the end of humanity is fast becoming, that we are far reaching the end of all our broken institutions, that suddenly the topic of our future, or lack of it, is so pro-eminently featured even in children’s films? The topic is not new, H. G. Wells’ discourse in Men Like Gods is so up to date with what is happening today, even though it was written in 1923, that one must believe nothing has changed socially and politically for the last 100 years.
What Physicians Know
Joel S. Hirschhorn
I had a long conversation with my favorite physician, who has operated on me twice successfully. He is an incredibly kind person without an ounce of greed or pretense. Like other physicians I have spoken to, he spoke eloquently about the terrible times he consistently has with private health insurance companies.
While he praises Medicare for its simplicity and certainty, he has absolutely nothing positive to say about private insurers. They take up huge amounts of time of him and his staff, trying in every possible way to deny services to their customers (his patients) and also to pay as little as possible to him. His endless struggles with the insurance companies make his life miserable. Meanwhile all he cares about is giving his patients the very best care and not making them suffer because of their insurance carriers.
GOLDSTONE TELLS MOYERS / ISRAEL GUILTY OF WAR CRIMES
Allen L Roland
Bill Moyers interviews Judge Richard Goldstone
Highly respected Judge Richard Goldstone, who is both a Jew and a Zionist, rightfully condemns Israel's policy of collective punishment of a people under effective occupation, destroying their means to live a dignified life as well as the trauma caused by the kind of military intervention the Israeli government called Operation Cast Lead:
The highly anticipated Goldstone human rights report has exposed Judge Goldstone to both universal acclaim as well as some strident and bitter criticism ~ mainly from the Israeli far right ~ however, late last week, the UN's Human Rights Council officially endorsed his findings.
Dear Jon and Message to The Media
eileen fleming
On 10/28/09, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart did what the mainstream media has failed to report about-the rapidly growing global nonviolent solidarity movement of resisters to the occupation of Palestine, by hosting a Palestinian politician and American Jewish scholar and activist author.
The News Media should be interviewing Dr. Mustafa Barghouti & Anna Baltzer, Jon's job is to entertain us, but once again, he lead the mainstream media to where many of US already are.
Jon also performed under duress from 'friends' who put him under pressure to censor the highly anticipated appearances of Dr. Barghouti and Baltzer. As of this writing on October 31, 2009, The Daily Show forum conversation regarding the BB show has attracted 21,059 reads to its first page and over 500 messages.
Legislating inequality: Last year in California, this year in Maine?
Mary Shaw
A lot of Americans pay very little attention to the off-year elections, like the ones that will take place on Tuesday, November 3. After all, we're not electing a president, or members of Congress. This year's election is mostly about judges, school board members, and a handful of state governors.
However, there are often some ballot measures that merit a greater turnout than they usually see. This time around, the one I'm watching most closely is the Maine referendum on same-sex marriage.
The Lungs of the Earth
by Andrew Glikson
Figure 1. A plot of global mean temperature (increase above pre-industrial
time in degrees C) vs atmospheric greenhouse gas (GHG) concentration
(in CO2-eqivalent, a value which includes the effect of methane). The
assumed climate is 3+/-1.5 degrees C per doubling of CO2-e. The field I, II,
III, etc. correspond to the IPCC’s various emission scenarios. IPCC Climate
Change 2007: Synthesis Report, figure 5.1 ipcc.ch/graphics/syr/fig5-1.jpg
The recent warning by Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Director of the Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact: “We are simply talking about the very life support system of this planet” [1] is consistent with the lessons arising from the history of the Earth’s atmosphere/ocean system. A rise of CO2-e (CO2-equivalent, including the effect of methane) above 500 ppm and of mean global temperature toward and above 4 degrees C, projected by the IPCC [2], Copenhagen [3] and Oxford [4] scientific reports, as well as reports by the world’s leading climate science bodies (NASA/GISS, Hadley-Met, Potsdam Climate Impact Institute, NSIDC, CSIRO, BOM), would transcend the conditions which allowed the development of agriculture in the early Neolithic, tracking toward climates which dominated the mid-Pliocene (3 Ma) (1 Ma = 1 million years) and further toward greenhouse Earth conditions analogous to those of the Cretaceous (145–65 Ma) and early Cenozoic (pre-34 Ma). Lost all too often in the climate debate is an appreciation of the delicate balance between the physical and chemical state of the atmosphere-ocean-land system and the evolving biosphere, which controls the emergence, survival and demise of species, including humans.
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