This is sad. Did you know Obama is going to ban fishing in the United States? The Tea Partiers are rightly concerned about the criminal class taking this country for a ride, but I’ve got to ask where have they been the last eight years before the Obama administration? The pervasive influence of Faux News at work again. One should never underestimate the power of propaganda in a modern, technological society.

This is pretty disturbing stuff. Released by WikiLeaks, this classified US military video shows the slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad — including two Reuters news staff. Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack back in 2007. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.

The incidents captured in this released video material are no real surprise to those knowledgeable about life on the ground in that war torn country. It is unfortunately par for the course for what has been going on in Iraq since its invasion by American and British forces in 2003 (an aggressive act initiated under disingenuously manipulated pretexts, which is a criminal act unto itself).

For more information visit the special project website at www.collateralmurder.com

Dan Murphy of The Christian Science Monitor filed this report upon the initial release of the video…

A video released on the Internet Monday by WikiLeaks, a small nonprofit dedicated to publishing classified information from the US and other governments, appears to show the killing of two Iraqi journalists with Reuters and about nine other Iraqis in a Baghdad suburb in 2007 that is sharply at odds of the official US account of the incident.

Read the complete CSM report Here

Noam Chomsky provides some lucid analysis about why remedying the problems with health care system seem to be such an unsolvable issue in American politics. This is of particular relevance considering the ongoing debate currently raging over the issue in America today.

Though this year’s list of Academy Award-nominated documentaries is one of the strongest they’ve had in years, I’m hoping to see the award for feature-length documentary go to Burma VJ: Reporting From a Closed Country (along with the short doc category award going to my good friends Steve Bognar and Julia Reichert for their film The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant).

Burma VJ is a tremendously effective and important film about citizen media activists in Burma and the extraordinary risks they take to document government repression. The insights and lessons it provides for exposing not just the violent oppression of the military regime in Burma, but the influential power that grassroots, citizen-based media activism can have in confronting such oppression on the national and international political stage in the defense of human rights is transformative.

The video journalists and individual activists whose work is featured in this film took great personal risks to get this story out to the world. A number of them are currently incarcerated as a result of their roles in the Saffron Revolution. Some have been arrested and imprisoned by the government to lengthy sentences.

Please help the effort to free them by Signing The Petition To Free The Burma VJ Political Prisoners.

Watch a feature news story and interview with the film’s producers on Democracy Now!).

Watch an Interview with Burma VJ director Anders Østergaard and Khin Maung Win, Deputy Director of the Democratic Voice of Burma.

Another commie liberal attacking America’s true economic achievers…

Warren Buffett’s Statement to Congress on Estate Taxes

Mr. Chairman, Senators, I appreciate the opportunity to express a few views on the estate tax.

I will limit my remarks to three points.

The first relates to the intellectual dishonesty employed by those who use the phrase ‘death tax.’ This term is clever, it is Orwellian, and it is, if you’ll pardon the expression, dead wrong.

More than 2.4 million Americans will die this year. About 12,000 of them will leave an estate that will be taxed when the exemption goes to $3 million, as Senator Grassley mentioned. It will be 9600 estimated and it’s been 19,000 when the exemption was (lower.)

That means that 99-and-a-half percent of estates will be tax-free. You would have to attend 200 funerals to be at one at which the decedent’s estate owed a tax. Indeed, far more people who die receive a large tax benefit. I don’t think that’s generally understood. Namely, a stepped up basis on appreciated assets.

If people insist on renaming the estate tax, it would be more appropriately labeled the ‘death present.’

The second point I would like to make is that in a country that prides itself on equality of opportunity, it is becoming anything but that, as the gap between the super rich and the middle class widens in dramatic fashion…

Twenty years ago, 1987, it took $220 million dollars to make the list. Now it takes $1.3 billion, about a six-for-one increase. The total wealth of the list in 1987 was then $220 billion. Now it’s $1.54 trillion, exactly a seven-for-one increase.

Tax law changes have benefited this group, including me, in a huge way. During that same period, the average American went exactly nowhere on the economic front. His income went from a median $26,061 to $48,201, almost exactly the increase of the CPI during the 20 years.

He’s been on a treadmill while the super rich have been on a spaceship.

Watch The Video/Read The Complete Transcript

Great to see this issue get such direct reference and dissection via a national media platform. It is unfortunately becoming of even more relevance these days, what with the Supreme Court ruling giving corporations nearly unlimited carte blanche rights to purchase the American political process.

“Corporations do everything people do except breathe, die and go to jail for dumping 1.3 million pounds of PCBs in the Hudson River.”

Watch The Video on the Colbert Nation website.

Sunday talk show pundit and syndicated columnist George Will outdoes himself with this stellar performance in the service of the governing (and owning…same thing) elites of America.

“Now, some people are saying, oh, corporations, that means Microsoft will be buying ads. Microsoft’s trying to sell software. They’re not interested in getting into political fights.”

Well, in a way he’s right. Corporations have no interest in political fights, the same way mob families would prefer not to have to wage war against each other, as it is detrimental to business. And after all, as a colleague of mine pointed out, there’s no need to fight over someone you already own. And campaign donations don’t necessarily determine votes, they just determine, in the end, who gets to cast them. You don’t need to bribe ideological and economic allies. We are replete in data showing how in the near unanimous majority of time, those who spend the most within a campaign cycle attain the office. As the adage goes, we don’t have elections, we have auctions.

George Will’s assertion is not only blatantly disprovable, but is desperately at odds with basic common sense. However, he does reveal, whether inadvertently or not, one basic truth here…

“[The Supreme Court decision is a vindication of free speech rights] because the court recognized the obvious, which is that you cannot disseminate political speech without money. And, therefore, to restrict money is to restrict the dissemination of speech. To that end, they have freed up the amount of money that will be spent.”

Yes, in our society money is indeed, speech, and so we live with a political system inherently undemocratic, and one in which those with the most money get the most speech, in both quantity as well as, and possibly more importantly, volume.

Watch/Read The Full Video Transcript

Perhaps ABC and Mr. Will should consider including some more lucid and informed perspectives on the issues such as these, before they continue to blather on with their platitudes towards the “market of ideas” in our political arena.

A video on the Supreme Court ruling granting corporations unfettered access to our political system, and for organizing a movement for a Constitutional amendment to counter the egregious growth of corporate dominance over our political system.