Here is an extremely insightful report by Glenn Greenwald detailing the federal government’s involvement in the ‘pre-emptive’ arrests in St. Paul and the detaining of hundreds of people, including journalists, without warrants and/or on the flimsiest and extreme of charges. One example of the absurd and capricious nature of these kinds of criminal charges include the ones being levied against two producers for “Democracy Now!” who were arrested on charges of “probable cause for riot”. Throw in the ‘pre-emptive’ detainment and confiscation of all the equipment from organizations such as I-Witness Video and you have the kind of absurd Orwellian thought-crime prosecution we are used to hearing about in China and Burma, not the United States. This is nothing short of the state being an instrument of political repression.

Deputies coordinated searches with the Minneapolis and St. Paul police departments and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

Today’s Star Tribune added that the raids were specifically “aided by informants planted in protest groups.”

COINTELPRO here we come.

We love to proclaim how much we cherish our “freedoms” in the abstract, but we despise those who actually exercise them. The Constitution, right in the very First Amendment, protects free speech and free assembly precisely because those liberties are central to a healthy republic — but we’ve decided that anyone who would actually express truly dissident views or do anything other than sit meekly and quietly in their homes are dirty trouble-makers up to no good, and it’s therefore probably for the best if our Government keeps them in check, spies on them, even gets a little rough with them.

After all, if you don’t want the FBI spying on you, or the Police surrounding and then invading your home with rifles and seizing your computers, there’s a very simple solution: don’t protest the Government. Just sit quietly in your house and mind your own business. That way, the Government will have no reason to monitor what you say and feel the need to intimidate you by invading your home. Anyone who decides to protest — especially with something as unruly and disrespectful as an unauthorized street march — gets what they deserve.

———–

During the Olympics just weeks ago, there was endless hand-wringing over the efforts by the Chinese Government to squelch dissent and incarcerate protesters. On August 2, The Post gravely warned :

Behind the gray walls and barbed wire of the prison here, eight Chinese farmers with a grievance against the government have been consigned to Olympic limbo.

Their indefinite detainment, relatives and neighbors said, is the price they are paying for stirring up trouble as China prepares to host the Beijing Games. Trouble, the Communist Party has made clear, will not be permitted .

Would The Washington Post ever use such dark and accusatory tones to describe what the U.S. Government does? Of course it wouldn’t. Yet how is our own Government’s behavior in Minnesota any different than what the Chinese did to its protesters during the Olympics (other than the fact that we actually have a Constitution that prohibits such behavior)? And where are all the self-righteous Freedom Crusaders in our nation’s establishment organs who were so flamboyantly criticizing the actions of a Government on the other side of the globe as our own Government engages in the same tyrannical, protest-squelching conduct with exactly the same motives?

Good question.

Read The Full Report (Includes Video)

A colleague of mine from the Alliance For Community Media recently commented on these goings ons as well, and posted some good informational websites regarding the situation.

The civil rights violations taking place in St Paul over the last 24 hours are quite shocking. Residences housing activists and independent media folks are being raided by Marshals with warrants that pretty much allow them to take everything in the place. You can read one of the warrants at the IMC site below (it’s hard to imagine that a court of law actually issued this - that’s how far this country has degenerated).

Updates at:
http://twincities.indymedia.org/

Fun video at:
http://twincities.indymedia.org/videos/2008/aug/rnc-emergency-dispatch

We live in the United States of America, not the so-called People’s Republic of China. Let’s start acting like it.

From Tom J’s letter to his friend and colleague James Madison, September 6, 1789. He seems to have been reading from another friend of his, Thomas Paine, as this reflects some points made by good ol Mr. Paine. Jefferson made repeated references throughout his life to the need for each generation to change the law according to their needs. He stated on more than one occassion that each generation should have its own constitutional convention. By this benchmark we are indeed LONG overdue.

From his Letter To Madison…

On similar ground it may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation. They may manage it then, and what proceeds from it, as they please, during their usufruct. They are masters too of their own persons, and consequently may govern them as they please. But persons and property make the sum of the objects of government. The constitution and the laws of their predecessors extinguished them, in their natural course, with those whose will gave them being. This could preserve that being till it ceased to be itself, and no longer. Every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force and not of right.

It may be said that the succeeding generation exercising in fact the power of repeal, this leaves them as free as if the constitution or law had been expressly limited to 19 years only. In the first place, this objection admits the right, in proposing an equivalent. But the power of repeal is not an equivalent. It might be indeed if every form of government were so perfectly contrived that the will of the majority could always be obtained fairly and without impediment. But this is true of no form. The people cannot assemble themselves; their representation is unequal and vicious. Various checks are opposed to every legislative proposition. Factions get possession of the public councils. Bribery corrupts them. Personal interests lead them astray from the general interests of their constituents; and other impediments arise so as to prove to every practical man that a law of limited duration is much more manageable than one which needs a repeal.

This principle that the earth belongs to the living and not to the dead is of very extensive application and consequences in every country, and most especially in France. It enters into the resolution of the questions Whether the nation may change the descent of lands holden in tail? Whether they may change the appropriation of lands given antiently to the church, to hospitals, colleges, orders of chivalry, and otherwise in perpetuity? whether they may abolish the charges and privileges attached on lands, including the whole catalogue ecclesiastical and feudal? it goes to hereditary offices, authorities and jurisdictions; to hereditary orders, distinctions and appellations; to perpetual monopolies in commerce, the arts or sciences; with a long train of et ceteras: and it renders the question of reimbursement a question of generosity and not of right. In all these cases the legislature of the day could authorize such appropriations and establishments for their own time, but no longer; and the present holders, even where they or their ancestors have purchased, are in the case of bona fide purchasers of what the seller had no right to convey.

Read a complete online copy of the note Here

An interesting review of a book about the founders of America. Lord knows there is a huge amount of attention given to these people, often through a mythological filter (thus the deification of the by referring to them in capitals like “Founding Fathers”) in order to serve modern manifestations of fundamentalist nationalism, rather than through a sober historical one (which would better serve as a beacon of guidance for transcending and continuing the work, rather than simply trying to replicate and live in the world like it was still 1787).

Joseph J. Ellis has penned this book, “American Creation”, which puts some healthy new perspective on what the real value of the American story is to our current and future generations. The key point is in the way the original creators of this nation saw their work as only a step in a process, not a definitive declaration of the end all and be all of political wisdom. It helps to belie the absurdity of those who claim to be ‘originalists’ and who worship the constitution like it was holy writ, unchangeable and untouchable, contradicting the very nature and purpose of the political society the Revolution meant to establish in this country.

If at this point I were to note the familiar contradictions of the birth of the nation — chiefly the triumph of liberty, but only for propertied white men — and say that Ellis has written an entertaining account of, as his subtitle has it, the “triumphs and tragedies” of the founding, there would not be much new for me to say, or for you to read, either in this review or in Ellis’s book. It is difficult to imagine an educated American who does not know that the Revolution was selective and that the Revolutionaries, many of them slaveholders who were complicit in the bloodthirsty treatment of Indians, were flawed and imperfect.

But Ellis rescues his enterprise by going beyond the familiar critique of the founding to explore a point that remains underappreciated: that America was constructed to foster arguments, not to settle them.

———–

For the new American Republic, Ellis writes, “government was not about providing answers, but rather about providing a framework in which the salient questions could continue to be debated.”

———–

In a way, the fragmentary nature of the book mirrors one of Ellis’s key points. The past itself is fragmentary, and the fundamental task for any generation at any given moment is to bring order to intrinsically chaotic forces and events. History is messy because life is messy, and politics is provisional because life is provisional. Ellis shares the founders’ tragic sensibility, finding redemption in seeking the good rather than in achieving the perfect. The wisdom of the American founding lies in the recognition that the former is possible, and the latter is not.

“Unlike mathematics, in politics there was no agreed-upon solution reached by sheer brainpower and logic,” Ellis writes, “but rather an ongoing and never-ending struggle between contested versions of the truth.” Making it up as one goes along, then, is in the best tradition of the American Revolution.

As the decades passed and the founders died off, John Adams grew amused — in a John Adams kind of way — by the deification of the Revolutionary generation. “I ought not to object to your reverence for your fathers” he wrote an admiring younger correspondent, “but to tell you a very great secret, as far as I am capable of comparing the merit of different periods, I have no reason to believe that we were better than you are.” Perhaps so, but what Adams’s generation did with its moment was to create the means by which subsequent generations, including our own, could argue about ends in a largely peaceable way. “It was patched and piebald then,” Adams said of the founding, “as it is now, ever was and ever will be, world without end.”

Read the complete text of this insightful review from The New York Times Here

This has been a pretty tough year for most people in every dimension. Notable tipping points are seeming to have been reached on just about every front. From the most personal of circumstances, as well as the professional, to the most global, with sweeping events overtaking international and economic affairs, including the very fate of continued life on this planet becoming a crisis issue no longer deniable or avoidable except by the most selfishly immature amongst us.

In the face of these tectonic shifts in our situations it can be easy to become overwhelmed, even distraught at the prospect of confronting these changes with the positive insight and energy necessary to overcome these challenges. In light of this, Rebecca Solnit offers this encouraging list of reading to help galvanize the spirit and renew one’s faith in our humanity with The Secret Library of Hope: 12 Books to Stiffen Your Resolve. It’s hard not to sense and have hope in our ability to overcome the challenges we all face, both personally and collectively, when one takes the time to learn and understand that though things are difficult and it seems like humanity hasn’t really gotten anywhere, we actually have and people have been challenging and overcoming entrenched power time and time again throughout human history.

It is time for us to shift away from operating out of defensive reaction, and instead act out of creative response to these sometimes seemingly insurmountable challenges. It is time to focus less on identifying what is wrong, since it has become abundantly clear to most that things are indeed not working the way they should for the benefit and best interests of all, and focus the majority of our energy and intention upon creating what is right for the world. This is a point reiterated by Solnit when she describes dissent in this country having “become largely a culture of diagnosis rather than prescription, of describing what is wrong with them, rather than what is possible for us.”

It will be encouraging to see if people in the world can make the effort in the coming new year similar to the kinds we have seen humanity exhibit in the past as described by Solnit’s review, which is a recommended read to all those questioning our ability to face what the future holds, and whether humanity has it in us to live with more honesty and compassion, helping to provide for our ability to live authentic, meaningful and fulfilling lives in it by making sure that we providing for others.

Happy No Fear to all for 2008.

- Andy Valeri, USTV Media

The specter of full fledged authoritarianism in this nation of ours isn’t so hypothetical.

The president of the United States just issued a public pronouncement declaring, as a matter of U.S. policy, that a single man has the authority to detain any person anyplace in the world and subject him or her to secret interrogation techniques that aren’t torture but that nonetheless can’t be revealed, as long as that person is thought to be a “supporter” of an organization “associated” in some unspecified way with the Taliban or Al Qaeda, and as long he thinks that person might know something that could “assist” us.

But “supporter” isn’t defined, nor is “associated organization.” That leaves the definition broad enough to permit the secret detention of, say, a man who sympathizes ideologically with the Taliban and might have overheard something useful in a neighborhood cafe, or of a 10-year-old girl whose older brother once trained with Al Qaeda.

This isn’t just hypothetical. The U.S. has already detained people based on little more.

Any wonder why we at USTV Media have so often referred to the Bush/Cheney gang as the Busheviks and this country as the USSA? It’s not so funny anymore.

Read the LA Times piece Here

It doesn’t get much more succinct than this. Laid out here in black and white, coming to the fore by the publisher of the Wall Street Journal. Often it seems like a struggle to understand how people can reconcile the disconnect between the stated American principles of governance with actions of the Bush administration.

Fact is, they don’t have to because they don’t believe in American principles of government. They don’t believe in the idea of America. They seem only to be interested in using its power for their reactionary and regressive beliefs. The Bush regime and their acolytes in America truly are ‘counter-revolutionaries’ to the notion and purpose of the American Revolution.

Read this fascinating and disturbingly revelatory post Here

There is no shortage of books these days analyzing what contemporary U.S. society gets wrong: Illegal wars of aggression, a cavalier attitude toward potential ecological collapse, narrow-minded religious fundamentalism, widening economic inequality, and lingering racism, sexism, and homophobia. Look too closely at this society, beyond the self-congratulatory triumphalism, and it’s not such a pretty picture.

But one of the criteria on which the United States ranks high in the world is legal protection for freedom of expression. Our legal regime built on the First Amendment’s protections of freedom of speech and press is not perfect, but over time the scope of real expressive liberty has expanded, as popular movements and progressive legal thinkers have demanded that liberty and crafted the rules for making it real in day-to-day life.

That’s why Ronald K.L. Collins’ and David M. Skover’s The Death of Discourse is so chilling: The book details why our traditional approach to freedom of expression — the ideas that led to this expansion of liberty, ideas that are admirable in so many ways — is ill-equipped to cope with either the contemporary challenges we face or the future. In fact, this traditional approach to freedom of expression may well be hastening the collapse of the culture.

Could it really be that grim? Is this the nature of the modern crisis: Even what we have learned do well is going to contribute to our demise? When the first edition of the book was published in 1996, my answer was a painful, but tentative, yes. As the updated edition is published, I am ready to drop the tentativeness. Collins and Skover identify a key question in mass media, law, and philosophy that we can no longer afford to ignore: Has this system of freedom of expression, when combined with a predatory capitalism, made it more difficult to maintain a healthy and sustainable culture?

As they phrase the questions: “If today’s First Amendment represents a way of life, what kind of life? If it represents freedom, what kind of freedom? And if it represents the triumph of democracy, what kind of democracy?”

My answers: An obscenely affluent way of life rooted in narrow conceptions of human flourishing; freedom defined in narrow terms by the pathological individualism of contemporary capitalism; and a democracy that is broad in theory but so narrow in practice that the majority of the population no longer takes electoral politics seriously

Collins and Skover explain that we face both Orwellian and the Huxleyan threats in the First Amendment arena. The former are rooted in the nightmare vision of the novel 1984, in which thought and expression are constrained by the direct repression of the state and no meaningful freedom is permitted. The latter describe the equally nightmarish vision of Brave New World, in which people are flooded with a pacifying array of amusements so that freedom becomes irrelevant.

Our First Amendment jurisprudence is rooted in the fear of that direct state repression, and for good reason; human history is replete with examples of that repression, including dramatic and recurring examples from U.S. history. Collins and Skover point out repeatedly that concerns about the use of state power against individuals and groups who dissent can never be ignored, and they re-emphasize the importance of that in the second edition, keeping in mind the post-9/11 experience of the Patriot Act and the Bush administration’s rejection of due process for thousands of prisoners in the United States and abroad.

So, without dismissing the threat of government suppression, they highlight the perhaps greater danger of a passive and placated public. While we have secured expansive rights against government repression: “Now our free speech system equates electronic self-amusement with enlightened civic education, the marketplace of items with the marketplace of ideas, and passionate self-gratification with political self-realization.”

Collins and Skover identify these primary threats:

1. “the difference between the old principles of political speech (rational decision-making, civic participation, meaningful dissent) and the new  practices of an electronic entertainment culture (trivialization, passivity, pleasure).”

Freedom of expression is crucial to self-government, but mass media have developed in ways that undermine people’s capacity to participate meaningfully in the formation public policy. That comes both from the flood of entertainment — the modern equivalent of the circus in “bread and circuses” — that so easily diverts people from the public arena, and the steady degradation of the intellectual level of so-called television journalism, especially on the cable talk shows.

2. “the difference between the informational principles of commercial speech (marketplace of economic ideas) and the imagistic practices of a mass commercial advertising culture (marketing of items).”

Whatever one’s evaluation of the morality or sustainability of capitalism, freedom of expression is crucial to a functioning market economy, but the manipulation industries (marketing, advertising, and public relations) undermine a real market system. The hundreds of billions of dollars spent on commercial propaganda make a mockery of any notion of markets based on information and rational actors; the whole system is designed to suppress honest information and promote irrational behavior.

3. “the difference between the lofty principles of artistic expression (self-realization) and the low practices of a pornographic culture (self-gratification).”

Freedom of expression is crucial to self-realization and the exploration of the psychological and sexual, but the emergence of a mass-marketed pornography has led not to deeper understanding of those aspects of our lives but a coarsening and cheapening of intimacy.

Collins and Skover recount these threats honestly and recognize that we face a paradox, dilemma, and conundrum, which track with the three threats:

1. The paradox: “In the modern mass entertainment world, the traditional First Amendment may have to destroy itself to save itself. With governmental regulation of the amusement culture, First Amendment protection is likely to collapse into First Amendment tyranny. Without such control, First Amendment liberty is likely to collapse into First Amendment triviality.”

2. The dilemma: “In the commercial marketplace, communication in the service of sober economic reason is overwhelmed by communication in the service of compulsive pecuniary logic. To preserve reason in the marketplace, the First Amendment must steadfastly deny such protection for modern mass advertising. To preserve freedom in the marketplace, the First Amendment must zealously affirm laissez-faire values.”

3. The conundrum: “In pornutopia, deliberative discourse dies and is reincarnated as image-driven eroticism. On the one hand, governmental regulation to keep pornutopia at bay is likely to become increasingly futile. On the other hand, governmental indifference to the lure of pornutopia is likely to recast the First Amendment in wanton ways.”

The authors also do us the favor of admitting defeat in the face of these challenges. Rather than pretending there are easy resolutions, they leave readers to ponder the complexity of the questions and face the painful reality that there is no quick fix. This is not a set of problems that can be remedied by tweaking existing public policies. Instead, a conceptual revolution of sorts is needed, and to date no viable candidate for a new framework for the First Amendment is on the horizon. That may seem depressing, but better to understand the nature of the problem and acknowledge the limits of our current intellectual tools than to pretend that illusory solutions are real.

Though my own research and political activism dovetails with Collins’ and Skover’s thesis, I would offer two friendly amendments to the analysis.

First, a much clearer discussion of the nature of capitalism is necessary to launch that new conceptual framework. Here, the intellectual tools are in place from centuries of left critique. Simply put: Capitalism is inconsistent with democracy, sustainable economic activity, and the preservation of the best elements of human nature.

Capitalism is a wealth-concentrating system that inevitably concentrates power. Minor modifications in the system are possible to check the most grotesques abuses of that power, but in the end there can be no meaningful democracy in a corporate-capitalist society.

Capitalism is based on a notion of unlimited growth on a finite planet. Capitalist economic systems are not the only ones that have drastically drawn down the ecological capital of the planet, and again, minor modifications can be made to slow the assault on the biosphere. But in the end, capitalism is the end.

Capitalism draws out and rewards the worst aspects of human nature. We all are capable of a range of behaviors, and systems push people in specific directions. Capitalism pushes people toward greed, an obsession with a narrow concept of self-interest, and treatment of other people as objects.

In short, any serious discussion of what a system of freedom of expression might look like in a healthy, sustainable, fulfilling society must come to terms with the depravity of capitalism. The fact that we live in a society that has adopted precisely the opposite evaluation — every day extolling the alleged virtues of capitalism — simply means there is a lot of intellectual and political work to be done.

On the issue of pornography, Collins and Skover pay inadequate attention to the feminist critique of pornography that emerged in the 1980s. This perspective demonstrates that the threat of pornography (and of all the sexual exploitation industries, including stripping, prostitution, and sex trafficking) comes from the marriage of capitalism and patriarchy. That is, pornography does not exploit everyone equally; it is a reflection of a society that is rooted in the dynamic of male domination and female submission, and one of many practices that helps keep that dynamic in place. This is more readily evident today than when the first edition was published, as the products of the pornography industry have become steadily more degrading toward women in the presentation of a vision of male sexuality that is saturated in cruelty.

But these concerns are relatively small in the face of the service Collins and Skover have provided in The Death of Discourse. They not only face difficult realities but resist the temptation to imply there was a golden age in which all was well with the state of U.S. democracy and culture. But one need not pine for a non-existent golden age to see the contemporary threats. Yes, the use of bread and circuses to divert people is not new, nor is the domination of those who concentrate wealth, nor are the patriarchal gender relations at the heart of pornography. But the contemporary manifestations of these forces are troubling, not just because of the consequences in the world but also because of the culture’s unwillingness to confront the fundamental issues.

What is scary is not just that we face problems, but that so many people see the system that produces the problems as a grand and glorious success. Before a society can figure out solutions to problems, it has to recognize the nature of the systems that produce the problems.

The history of the First Amendment is a story of people bravely struggling against concentrated power to secure the blessings of liberty. The future of the First Amendment will depend on people being brave enough to confront the destructive forces inherent in the system.

Our First Amendment heroes of the past have been the radicals willing to stand up to the police officer’s clubs and risk jail. Their courage was admirable, and our debt to them is clear. Our First Amendment heroes of the future will no doubt someday be called upon to take radical actions, but it is difficult to anticipate those actions until we are further along in the conceptual revolution needed. Our first act of courage is to face honestly the state of the society.

These First Amendment struggles are not only crucial because of the centrality of expression in human life, but also because similar paradoxes, dilemmas, and conundrums are all around in political, economic, and social life. When we face them honestly, the triumphalism of the culture gives way quickly to a sinking feeling in our guts: We’re heading in the wrong direction, at increasingly rapid speed, with less and less time to change course. We face crises that demand a sense of urgency, yet also require a fundamental shift in the culture that can’t happen overnight. We need to act, now, but with an understanding that the necessary change is down a road that we have not yet built.

Those who continue to mouth the platitudes of the past will be quickly forgotten. Our future First Amendment heroes will be the people who help us find way through the challenges and onto that road.

——————-

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a member of the board of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center, http://thirdcoastactivist.org. He is the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege and Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (both from City Lights Books). He can be reached at: rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu. 

As most of you have heard, Cindy Sheehan recently ‘resigned’ as the unofficial face of the anti-war movement. Her post Here at the Daily Kos will make you weep well-founded tears for this country.

My friend Maddi posted these bittersweet but moving and unfortunately accurate words in regards to Sheehan’s letter.

What a sad, sad statement from Cindy. That she sacrificed so much comes oozing through her words, and yet she exudes a “fire” which will never burn out. We the people in the United States have comfortized ourselves into no-think. How awful for us and for our kids and their kids. And yet, it is a good thing that Cindy finally realized all her standing and writing and urging and pushing and money was for naught. This country we all have loved is on the downhill slope we’ve been stuck on since shortly after the founders floundered. Which makes us flounderers of the 1000th degree. Her words also make me realize that we are not meant to proselytize nor drag the masses into our way of thought. That seems to be the fruitless way to go. The propaganda of right and left ultimately kills off ideas and spirits. In the stages of grief, and in the 10-step program that “Bill” started we might have some sparks that will light our ways. Who will find the many ways? Who will experiment? Who will step up to the plate with new ideas? Where are you hiding?

Maddi, Cindy Sheehan, and a growing number of others are coming to grips with something that I have been confronting for many years myself, some of which was apparant through the work with UnCommon Sense TV. Trying to do what one could, use what one could, use the resources available, to do anything possible to awaken a consciousness in people, in our fellow humans, to understand what is happening around them, to them, by them. This in order to address these critical problems before they became any worse, and caused any more damage and hurt than they already have.

But alas, there comes a time, filled with heartbreaking realization, that one can only truly help where the other is ready and open to being given those gifts of recognition and an authentic willingness to truly accept what is happening and what really needs to be done to make for a better life, a better world. And America is simply too deluded, too comfortable in its ways, and most importantly, too AFRAID to be able to accept the truth that so many of us, in this instance the likes of Cindy S., so passionatly struggle to get them to understand. Whether it is for one’s country, one’s society, neighbors, or even one’s personal relationships, you can only give so much before you have nothing left to give, because the gift was not returned in a way that is fulfilling, rejuvenating and sustaining. And if it is not able or willing to truly receive what you giving, (or if it is not the right thing at the right time), then there comes a time you have to just let it go the way it’s going to go, and make sure that you do not let yourself become another casualty of the very problem that you are trying to confront.

Maddi’s closing sentiments are especially resonant, as to finding new ways, asking who will experiment and who will step up to help lead with new ideas and new visions. That is encouraging during these very troubled times of great stress, tumult and transition for so many in so many ways. It is in the air, and Cindy Sheehan is just one example of our need to reach the end of tolerating old ways, and relying on old processes that no longer work, and are even designed not to work and will fail to get us where we say we want to truly go as a society and as individuals. And the very first, and most important factor in all of that and in beginning to break through this current era, is through honesty and truth. If there is anything our nation, our politics, our very selves need it is authenticity. If we truly hold anything dear, there is no greater gift one can give it and no greater way one can serve it than by giving it your honesty and truth. That is the highest form of love anyone can express, one that rises above all fear in its path, and is something we all could be well served to be striving to achieve. It is a big part of that plate to step up to that Maddi refers to here.

- Andy Valeri, USTV Media

George Carlin turns off the snooze button on those slumbering in the American dream, delivering one of the most direct and devestatingly accurate criticisms of the current state of affairs in America today. It especially deconstructs why public education systems are so lacking and what the true meaning of Bush’s “Ownership Society” really entails. No beating around the bush here. Highly recommended.

Warning: This short video contains language which may not be suitable or acceptable to all members of our audience.

Watch The Video

Bill Moyers lays it on the line here, and does a decent job in providing a cursory summation of the course of American history over the past few decades. His rhetorical analysis here is a powerful indictment as to why our nation has been led to the brink of this sorry state. Some of the most direct and provocative portions of this are where Moyers rips into the hijacking of Jesus by the servants of privilege for a philosophy of greed.

In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America: the struggle to determine whether “We, the People” is a spiritual idea embedded in a political reality - one nation, indivisible - or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others.

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When powerful interests shower Washington with millions in campaign contributions, they often get what they want. But it is ordinary citizens and firms that pay the price and most of them never see it coming. This is what happens if you don’t contribute to their campaigns or spend generously on lobbying. You pick up a disproportionate share of America’s tax bill. You pay higher prices for a broad range of products from peanuts to prescriptions. You pay taxes that others in a similar situation have been excused from paying. You’re compelled to abide by laws while others are granted immunity from them. You must pay debts that you incur while others do not. You’re barred from writing off on your tax returns some of the money spent on necessities while others deduct the cost of their entertainment. You must run your business by one set of rules, while the government creates another set for your competitors. In contrast, the fortunate few who contribute to the right politicians and hire the right lobbyists enjoy all the benefits of their special status. Make a bad business deal; the government bails them out. If they want to hire workers at below market wages, the government provides the means to do so. If they want more time to pay their debts, the government gives them an extension. If they want immunity from certain laws, the government gives it. If they want to ignore rules their competition must comply with, the government gives its approval. If they want to kill legislation that is intended for the public, it gets killed.

I’m not quoting from Karl Marx’s Das Kapital or Mao’s Little Red Book. I’m quoting Time Magazine. From the heart of America’s media establishment comes the judgment that America now has “government for the few at the expense of the many.”

We are talking about nothing less that a class war declared a generation ago, in a powerful polemic by the wealthy right-winger, William Simon, who had been Richard Nixon’s Secretary of the Treasury. In it he declared that “funds generated by business… must rush by the multimillions” to conservative causes. The trumpet was sounded for the financial and business class to take back the power and privileges they had lost as a result of the Great Depression and the New Deal. They got the message and were soon waging a well-orchestrated, lavishly-financed movement. Business Week put it bluntly: “Some people will obviously have to do with less… .It will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more.” The long-range strategy was to cut workforces and their wages, scour the globe in search of cheap labor, trash the social contract and the safety net that was supposed to protect people from hardships beyond their control, deny ordinary citizens the power to sue rich corporations for malfeasance and malpractice, and eliminate the ability of government to restrain what editorialists for the Wall Street Journal admiringly call “the animal spirits of business.”

Looking backwards, it all seems so clear that we wonder how we could have ignored the warning signs at the time. What has been happening to working people is not the result of Adam Smith’s invisible hand but the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual propaganda, the rise of a religious literalism opposed to any civil and human right that threaten its paternalism, and a string of political decisions favoring the interests of wealthy elites who bought the political system right out from under us.

Amen.

Read The Full Speech Transcript