The totality of the workings of our world today - succinctly wrapped up and synopsized in four minutes, courtesy of the year 1976.

There was a time one could receive Academy Awards for openly declaring this kind of awareness to large masses of people. Today if you try to speak this on the street it just gets you pepper sprayed, baton’ed or kettled by cops in places like New York, Oakland, or London.

UnCommon Sense TV - “David Barsamian: Occupy The Economy” Presentation by David Barsamian, producer and host of the internationally syndicated Alternative Radio program, at a public gathering at The Little Art Theatre, in Yellow Springs, Ohio, October 23rd, 2012. A noted journalist and author, Barsamian touches on a whole host of important issues, from the state of today’s media, to the increasing militarism in America’s foreign policy, and more. He gives particular focus the structural economic issues raised in the book Occupy The Economy: Challenging Capitalism which he co-authored with Richard Wolff, Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and currently a visiting professor at the New School in New York. Wolff has also taught economics at Yale University, City University of New York, University of Utah, University of Paris I (Sorbonne), and The Brecht Forum in New York City.

For more on Richard Wolff’s insights and perspectives as to why “capitalism has hit the fan,” watch this insightful interview with Wolff by Bill Moyers.

So, do you think the news you hear might be pre-scripted from some kind of centralized source? We have spent a fair amount of our time at USTV Media focusing on issues surrounding the media, the control of it, the processes and effects of propaganda, etc… With things like This, can you wonder why? If you can script this kind of conformity on gas, you can do it on much more substantive topics like war, Wall Street criminality, torture, the nature of Occupy Wall Street, and on and on… This kind of coordinating a nation-wide effort for keeping the news “on message” is the main focus of my writing about The Pentagon Military Analysts Program.

Glad we fought a revolution to be rid of this kind of thing.

We have met the enemy, and it is us.

The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) got a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) grant in 2006 to buy a stingray. The original grant request said it would be used for “regional terrorism investigations.” Instead they’ve been using them for just about any investigation imaginable.

In just a four month period in 2012, according to documents obtained by the First Amendment Coalition, the LAPD has used the device at least 21 times in “far more routine” criminal investigations. The LA Weekly reported Stingrays “were tapped for more than 13 percent of the 155 ‘cellular phone investigation cases’ that Los Angeles police conducted between June and September last year.” These included burglary, drug and murder cases.

Of course, we’ve seen this pattern over and over and over. The government uses “terrorism” as a catalyst to gain some powerful new surveillance tool or ability, and then turns around and uses it on ordinary citizens, severely infringing on their civil liberties in the process.

Stingrays are particularly odious given they give police dangerous “general warrant” powers, which the founding fathers specifically drafted the Fourth Amendment to prevent. In pre-revolutionary America, British soldiers used “general warrants” as authority to go house-to-house in a particular neighborhood, looking for whatever they please, without specifying an individual or place to be searched.

The Stingray is the digital equivalent of the pre-revolutionary British soldier. It allows police to point a cell phone signal into all the houses in a particular neighborhood, searching for one target while sucking up everyone else?s location along with it. With one search the police could potentially invade countless private residences at once.

Read the Complete Report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation

Free markets are good, essential even, to the workings of a truly free society. However, when one applies ‘market’ principles to society itself, then everything becomes for sale. Including the law. And when the law and law making are determined through financial clout, you get this. Crony capitalism, a rigged game, a plutocratic banana republic. America is becoming the biggest banana republic on earth, and we seem politically unable to stop it, because we have way too many people under the spell of a political philosophy that defines any civic constraints over a financial transaction, including one for the purchase of one’s politics, as akin to “communism” or some such. Thus, we reap the society of absurd injustice that we inhabit today.

For more on this, watch this interview from Bill Moyers talk with Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, authors of Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, as they argue that America’s vast inequality is no accident, but in fact has been politically engineered.

Tom Engelhardt at TomDispatch.com delivers another straight on look at the de-evolution of the American republic into a militarized police state. As he astutely points out in this piece; “Maybe it’s time to face the facts: this isn’t your grandfather’s America.”

It seems we’ve been trying to face up to that for over a decade here at USTV Media. Whether it’s done any good or not, well, the fact that we are at this point today would tend to leave one shaking one’s head in the negative. Regardless, the truth-telling goes on as best as possible, as evidenced by this must-read dissertation from Mr. Engelhardt.

Since the al-Qaeda leader was aware of the relative powerlessness of his organization and its hundreds or, in its heyday, perhaps thousands of active followers, his urge was to defeat the U.S. by provoking its leaders into treasury-draining wars in the Greater Middle East.  In his world, it was thought that such a set of involvements — and the “homeland” security down payments that went with them — could  bleed the richest, most powerful nation on the planet dry. In this, he and his associates, imitators, and wannabes were reasonably canny…

In the meantime, he — and 9/11 as it entered the American psyche — helped facilitate the locking down of this society in ways that should unnerve us all.  The resulting United States of Fear has since engaged in two disastrous more-than-trillion dollar wars and a “Global War on Terror” that shows no sign of ending in our lifetime. (See Yemen, Pakistan, and Mali.)  It has also funded the supersized growth of a labyrinthine intelligence bureaucracy; that post-9/11 creation, the Department of Homeland Security; and, of course, the Pentagon and the U.S. military, including the special operations forces, an ever-expanding secret military elite cocooned within it.

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And yet, in these years, what might have remained essentially a nightmarish fantasy has become an impending reality around which the national security folks organize their lives — and ours.  Ever since the now largely forgotten anthrax mail attacks that killed five soon after 9/11 — the anthrax in those envelopes may have come directly from a U.S. bioweapons laboratory — all sorts of fantastic scenarios involving biochemical attacks have become part and parcel of the American lockdown state.

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In the process, they oversaw the building of a National Security Complex with powers that boggle the imagination and freed themselves from the last shreds of accountability for their actions.  They established or strengthened the power of the executive to: torture at will (and create the “legal” justification for it); imprison at will , indefinitely and without trial; assassinate at will (including American citizens); kidnap at will anywhere in the world and “render” the captive into the hands of allied torturers ; turn any mundane government document (at least 92 million of them in 2011 alone) into a classified object and so help spread a penumbra of secrecy over the workings of the American government; surveil Americans in ways never before attempted (and only “legalized” by Congress after the fact, the way you might backdate a check); make war perpetually on their own say-so; and transform whistleblowing — that is, revealing anything about the inner workings of the lockdown state to other Americans — into the only prosecutable crime that anyone in the Complex can commit.

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What it means to be in such a post-legal world — to know that, no matter what acts a government official commits, he or she will never be brought to court or have a chance of being put in jail — has yet to fully sink in.  This is true even of critics of the Obama administration, who, as in the case of its drone wars, continue to focus on questions of legality, as if that issue weren’t settled.  In this sense, they continue to live in an increasingly fantasy-based version of America in which the rule of law still applies to everyone.

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Here’s the kicker.  According to the Post , the “legal principles” a White House with no intention of seriously limiting, no less shutting down, America’s drone wars has painstakingly established as “law” are not, for the foreseeable future, going to be applied to Pakistan’s tribal borderlands where the most intense drone strikes still take place.  The CIA’s secret drone war there is instead going to be given a free pass for a year or more to blast away as it pleases — the White House equivalent of Monopoly’s get-out-of-jail-free card.

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The drone strikes, after all, are perfectly “legal.”  How do we know?  Because the administration which produced that 50-page document (and similar memos) assures us that it’s so, even if they don’t care to fully reveal their reasoning, and because, truth be told, on such matters they can do whatever they want to do.  It’s legal because they’ve increasingly become the ones who define legality.

It would, of course, be illegal for Canadians, Pakistanis, or Iranians to fly missile-armed drones over Minneapolis or New York, no less take out their versions of bad guys in the process.  That would, among other things, be a breach of American sovereignty.  The U.S. can, however, do more or less what it wants when and where it wants.  The reason: it has established, to the satisfaction of our national security managers — and they have the secret legal documents (written by themselves) to prove it — that U.S. drones can cross national boundaries just about anywhere if the bad guys are, in their opinion, bad enough.  And that’s “the law”!

As with our distant wars, most Americans are remarkably unaffected in any direct way by the lockdown of this country.  And yet in a post-legal drone world of perpetual “wartime,” in which fantasies of disaster outrace far more realistic dangers and fears, sooner or later the bin Laden tax will take its toll, the chickens will come home to roost, and they will be able to do anything in our name (without even worrying about producing secret legal memos to justify their acts).  By then, we’ll be completely locked down and the key thrown away.

Read the Full Essay

Robert Parry delivers this insightful take on the state of the American Constitution in today’s society. He does a good job in expressing the differences between how the Left and Right perceive the constitution today, and use it within the context of American political debate.

Especially revealing is how it unveils the falsity behind the whole fealty to a “strict constructionism” among so-called “constitutionalists” in American politics today. Of particular note is the point made, one I have often referenced myself, about how many self-professed proponents of “states rights” are eager to reference the constitution in defense of their political ideology, yet neglecting to recognize that the adoption of the constitution was in effort to curb (and in some respects dramatically so) the independent sovereignty of the states.

There are two major schools of thought about the U.S. Constitution. One from the Left argues that it’s an outdated structure that should not be allowed to inhibit actions necessary to meet the needs of a modern society. And one from the Right, that only a “strict constructionist” reading of the Constitution and respect for the Framers’ “original intent” should be allowed.

But the problem with these two views is that neither is logically consistent or honest.

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While the Left tends to view the Constitution as an irretrievably flawed document (albeit with individual liberties that the Left loves), the Right has made political hay by presenting itself as the Constitution’s true defenders. The Right argues for what it calls “strict construction” and “original intent.”

Yet, even right-wing Supreme Court justices who wax eloquently about “originalism” will twist the Framers’ words and intentions when ideologically convenient, such as when Antonin Scalia inserted restrictions in the Commerce Clause — during his opposition to the Affordable Care Act — although James Madison and the Framers left the congressional power to regulate interstate and national commerce unlimited.

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Similarly, when Scalia and four other Republican justices wanted George W. Bush in the White House, they suddenly discerned in the Fourteenth Amendment’s demand for “equal protection under the law” an “original intent” to ensure Bush’s Florida victory in Election 2000 — though the amendment was adopted after the Civil War to protect the rights of former black slaves, not white plutocrats.

Thus, the U.S. Constitution has become something like a secular Bible, with people using different parts to justify whatever their desired positions already are. Instead of letting the words of the Constitution guide their governance, they let their governing interests dictate how they interpret the Constitution.

But the Right — much more than the Left — has built a cottage industry around this practice, sending well-funded “scholars” back in time to cherry-pick (or fabricate) quotes from the Framers to support whatever the Right wants done.

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The Right also understands that national mythology is a powerful force, very effective in manipulating Americans into believing they are standing with the Founders even if the history has to be falsified to achieve that emotional response. Many Tea Partiers, it seems, will eagerly eat up a stew of bad history served by the likes of Glenn Beck.

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[B]y recreating the Founding Narrative so it jumps from the Declaration of Independence in 1776 directly to the U.S. Constitution in 1787, the modern Right has learned that it can convince ill-informed Americans that the Constitution was devised as a states’ rights document with a weak central government, when nearly the opposite was the case.

Read the complete article Here.

On a related note, is this must-read historical overview from Robert Parry on how America’s False History Allows the Powerful to Commit Crimes Without Consequence.

Human Rights: Not Just for Humans (& Corporations) Anymore?

Corporations have the same rights as people. But do our communities and natural ecosystems have any rights? Thomas Linzey and Katherine Davies argue that in order to defend our bodies and our environment, they must be given rights under the law. Conversely, we must challenge the assertion of the primacy of rights by non-living entities, such as corporations.

The National Radio Project spotlights this issue in one of their recent reports produced in this edition of Making Contact.

It features an excellent presentation by Thomas Linzey from CELDF, whom friends of UnCommon Sense TV Media will know through our many previous references and affiliations with them and their work. Linzey and the work of his associates has served as a notable inspiration to the focus and direction of our own work at USTV Media.

Special Thanks to Pirate Television for the video.

Writer and historian Steve Fraser delivers this must-read overview on the nature of debt, its manipulation, and resistance to it, throughout American history; and why this story is so relevant to understanding today. The history of debtors prisons in America is especially revealing.

Debt remains, as it long has been, the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of capitalism.  For a small minority, it’s a blessing; for others a curse.  For some the moral burden of carrying debt is a heavy one, and no one lets them forget it.  For privileged others, debt bears no moral baggage at all, presents itself as an opportunity to prosper, and if things go wrong can be dumped without a qualm.

Those who view debt with a smiley face as the royal road to wealth accumulation and tend to be forgiven if their default is large enough almost invariably come from the top rungs of the economic hierarchy.  Then there are the rest of us, who get scolded for our impecunious ways, foreclosed upon and dispossessed, leaving behind scars that never fade away and wounds that disable our futures. 

Think of this upstairs-downstairs class calculus as the politics of debt.  British economist John Maynard Keynes put it like this: “If I owe you a pound, I have a problem; but if I owe you a million, the problem is yours.”

After months of an impending “debtpocalypse,” the dreaded “debt ceiling,” and the “fiscal cliff,” Americans remain preoccupied with debt, public and private.  Austerity is what we’re promised for our sins. Millions are drowning, or have already drowned, in a sea of debt — mortgages gone bad, student loans that may never be paid off, spiraling credit card bills, car loans, payday loans, and a menagerie of new-fangled financial mechanisms cooked up by the country’s “financial engineers” to milk what’s left of the American standard of living.   

The world economy almost came apart in 2007-2008, and still may do so under the whale-sized carcass of debt left behind by financial plunderers who found in debt the leverage to get ever richer.  Most of them still live in their mansions and McMansions, while other debtors live outdoors, or in cars or shelters, or doubled-up with relatives and friends — or even in debtor’s prison. Believe it or not, a version of debtor’s prison, that relic of early American commercial barbarism, is back. 

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Debt would continue to play a vital role in national and local political affairs throughout the nineteenth century, functioning as a form of capital accumulation in the financial sector, and often sinking pre-capitalist forms of life in the process. 

Before and during the time that capitalists were fully assuming the prerogatives of running the production process in field and factory, finance was building up its own resources from the outside.  Meanwhile, the mechanisms of public and private debt made the lives of farmers, craftsmen, shopkeepers, and others increasingly insupportable.

This parasitic economic metabolism helped account for the riotous nature of Gilded Age politics. Much of the high drama of late nineteenth-century political life circled around “greenbacks,” “free silver,” and “the gold standard.”  These issues may strike us as arcane today, but they were incendiary then, threatening what some called a “second Civil War.”  In one way or another, they were centrally about debt, especially a system of indebtedness that was driving the independent farmer to extinction.

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From one presidential election to the next and in state contests throughout the South and West, irate grain and cotton growers demanded that the government expand the paper currency supply, those “greenbacks,” also known as “the people’s money,” or that it monetize silver, again to enlarge the money supply, or that it set up public institutions to finance farmers during the growing season.  With a passion hard for us to imagine, they railed against the “gold standard” which, in Democratic Party presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan’s famous cry, should no longer be allowed to “crucify mankind on a cross of gold.”

Should that cross of gold stay fixed in place, one Alabama physician prophesied, it would “reduce the American yeomanry to menials and paupers, to be driven by monopolies like cattle and swine.”  As Election Day approached, populist editors and speakers warned of an approaching war with “the money power,” and they meant it.  “The fight will come and let it come!”

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But the age of primitive accumulation in which debt and the financial sector had played such a strategic role was drawing to a close. 

Today, we have entered a new phase.  What might be called capitalist underdevelopment and once again debt has emerged as both the central mode of capital accumulation and a principal mechanism of servitude.  Warren Buffett (of all people) has predicted that, in the coming decades, the United States is more likely to turn into a “sharecropper society” than an “ownership society.”

In our time, the financial sector has enriched itself by devouring the productive wherewithal of industrial America through debt, starving the public sector of resources, and saddling ordinary working people with every conceivable form of consumer debt.

Household debt, which in 1952 was at 36% of total personal income, had by 2006 hit 127%.  Even financing poverty became a lucrative enterprise.  Taking advantage of the low credit ratings of poor people and their need for cash to pay monthly bills or simply feed themselves, some check-cashing outlets, payday lenders, tax preparers, and others levy interest of 200% to 300% and more.  As recently as the 1970s, a good part of this would have been considered illegal under usury laws that no longer exist.  And these poverty creditors are often tied to the largest financiers, including Citibank, Bank of America, and American Express.

Credit has come to function as a “plastic safety net” in a world of job insecurity, declining state support, and slow-motion economic growth, especially among the elderly, young adults, and low-income families.  More than half the pre-tax income of these three groups goes to servicing debt.  Nowadays, however, the “company store” is headquartered on Wall Street.

Debt is driving this system of auto-cannibalism which, by every measure of social wellbeing, is relentlessly turning a developed country into an underdeveloped one.  

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are back.  Is a political resistance to debt servitude once again imaginable?

Read the full article Here.

Beware the hollow calls for “austerity” and “debt reduction,” without first understanding the meaning of “debt” and the motives of those making for such calls.

Ian Ruskin, author and actor of the one-man play To Begin the World Over Again: The Life of Thomas Paine, presents Paine on the topic of God and religion. Paine was not in opposition to belief in the transcendent power of the almighty creator, just the prostitution of such faith by power for its own material ends.

You can also watch Ruskin as Paine discuss the nature of GOD AND CREATION.

Ruskin as Paine…
“I have been much maligned, misunderstood and misused by our America, and many people, of all political and philosophical persuasions, have seen fit to quote and to misquote my words. This matters little in regards to the man Thomas Paine, but it matters much in regards to the ideas of the man Thomas Paine. And therefore, to correct some of these misunderstandings…”