Forum Post: Moyers on Corporate Coruption - Excellent News
Posted 10 years ago on May 26, 2013, 3:13 p.m. EST by gsw
(3410)
from Woodbridge Township, NJ
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
Shines The Light on Apple -- pays .5 percent tax rate.
Banks Getting Even More Too Big To Fail , watch out taxpayers!
Wall Street Has Learned Nothing! Shameless!
All these people saying they are wealth creators.... Getting free ride, above the Law!
Why? Lobbyists Push Special Rules through Congress.
Governed by Corporations!
Collusion between financial and political elites, increasing wealth gap.
http://billmoyers.com/episode/full-show-going-to-jail-for-justice/
DeChristopher — who was released less than a month ago — joins Bill to talk about the necessity of civil disobedience in the fight for justice, how his jury was ordered to place the strict letter of the law over moral conscience, and the future of the environmental movement. Bidder 70, a new documentary chronicling DeChristopher’s legal battle and activism, opened May 17. DeChristopher is co-founder of the grassroots environmental group Peaceful Uprising.
Also on the show, Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Gretchen Morgenson tells Bill that, five years after the country’s economic near-collapse, banks are still too big to fail, too big to manage, and too big to trust. Stockholders’ reaffirmation of Jamie Dimon as JP Morgan Chase’s chairman and CEO this week — despite a year of accusations and investigations at the bank — is further evidence, she says, of an unchecked system that continues to covet profits and eschew accountability, putting our economy and democracy at risk. Morgenson also discusses how behemoth companies like Apple manipulate the system and avail themselves of the biggest tax loopholes money and influence can buy.
Corporations write our legislation. They control our systems of information. They manage the political theater of electoral politics and impose our educational curriculum. They have turned the judiciary into one of their wholly owned subsidiaries. They have decimated labor unions and other independent mass organizations, as well as having bought off the Democratic Party, which once defended the rights of workers. With the evisceration of piecemeal and incremental reform—the primary role of liberal, democratic institutions—we are left defenseless against corporate power.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/rise_up_or_die_20130519/
We stand helpless before the corporate onslaught. There is no way to vote against corporate power. Citizens have no way to bring about the prosecution of Wall Street bankers and financiers for fraud, military and intelligence officials for torture and war crimes, or security and surveillance officers for human rights abuses. The Federal Reserve is reduced to printing money for banks and financiers and lending it to them at almost zero percent interest; corporate officers then lend it to us at usurious rates as high as 30 percent. I do not know what to call this system. It is certainly not capitalism. Extortion might be a better word. The fossil fuel industry, meanwhile, relentlessly trashes the ecosystem for profit. The melting of 40 percent of the summer Arctic sea ice is, to corporations, a business opportunity. Companies rush to the Arctic and extract the last vestiges of oil, natural gas, minerals and fish stocks, indifferent to the death pangs of the planet. The same corporate forces that give us endless soap operas that pass for news, from the latest court proceedings surrounding O.J. Simpson to the tawdry details of the Jodi Arias murder trial, also give us atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide that surpass 400 parts per million. They entrance us with their electronic hallucinations as we waiver, as paralyzed with fear as Odysseus’ sailors, between Scylla and Charybdis.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/rise_up_or_die_20130519/
There is nothing in 5,000 years of economic history to justify the belief that human societies should structure their behavior around the demands of the marketplace. This is an absurd, utopian ideology. The airy promises of the market economy have, by now, all been exposed as lies. The ability of corporations to migrate overseas has decimated our manufacturing base. It has driven down wages, impoverishing our working class and ravaging our middle class. It has forced huge segments of the population—including those burdened by student loans—into decades of debt peonage. It has also opened the way to massive tax shelters that allow companies such as General Electric to pay no income tax. Corporations employ virtual slave labor in Bangladesh and China, making obscene profits. As corporations suck the last resources from communities and the natural world, they leave behind, as Joe Sacco and I saw in the sacrifice zones we wrote about, horrific human suffering and dead landscapes. The greater the destruction, the greater the apparatus crushes dissent.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/page2/rise_up_or_die_20130519/
More than 100 million Americans—one-third of the population—live in poverty or a category called “near poverty.” Yet the stories of the poor and the near poor, the hardships they endure, are rarely told by a media that is owned by a handful of corporations—Viacom, General Electric, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., Clear Channel and Disney. The suffering of the underclass, like the crimes of the power elite, has been rendered invisible.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/page2/rise_up_or_die_20130519/
It is time to build radical mass movements that defy all formal centers of power and make concessions to none. It is time to employ the harsh language of open rebellion and class warfare. It is time to march to the beat of our own drum. The law historically has been a very imperfect tool for justice, as African-Americans know, but now it is exclusively the handmaiden of our corporate oppressors; now it is a mechanism of injustice. It was our corporate overlords who launched this war. Not us. Revolt will see us branded as criminals. Revolt will push us into the shadows. And yet, if we do not revolt we can no longer use the word “hope.”
Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” grasps the dark soul of global capitalism. We are all aboard the doomed ship Pequod, a name connected to an Indian tribe eradicated by genocide, and Ahab is in charge. “All my means are sane,” Ahab says, “my motive and my object mad.” We are sailing on a maniacal voyage of self-destruction, and no one in a position of authority, even if he or she sees what lies ahead, is willing or able to stop it. Those on the Pequod who had a conscience, including Starbuck, did not have the courage to defy Ahab. The ship and its crew were doomed by habit, cowardice and hubris. Melville’s warning must become ours. Rise up or die.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/page2/rise_up_or_die_20130519/
https://movetoamend.org/
DeChristopher is a member of the Green Shadow cabinet.
You are so happy with this greenshadow cabinet.
For heavens sake = WHY ???
Doesn't seem like they are very active or very successful in putting people into office to take government away from the corrupt.
America is the powerhouse of the planet, its not going to happen overnight.
There are over 100 GPs in elected positions and 150 LPs in office throughout the country right now.
Again, its not going to happen overnight. But a lack of movement by the general population is no reason to continually attack and berate anyone attempting to create something that functions along the lines of other things you claim to support.
Damned right it's not happening overnight. Gp = general practitioner? Lp = lesser practitioner?
Practically no one knows of this group or their actions - so - how many decades or centuries before they really get down to accomplishing something?
Thats hard to say, I don't have a crystal ball.
But it will happen eventually, it always does, and we are clearly on the trend of the big two dying off according to registration statistics, so probably sooner than later at this point. The only thing the big two have going for them at this point is the ability to rig the system, thats really about it.
Hopefully the groundwork continues to be laid and then it happens. Again, I dont have a crystal ball.
You are a real dope. Your group is making no progress in putting people into office - are pretty much an unknown entity.
And you are happy that the 1% is being left with next to no opposition.
Thats about the level of support we got during ows from people like you as well.
And yet still, here you are, to tell me and everyone else how stupid we are.
17th track "(We will endlessly argue meaningless "public self defeating" circular logic)"
We will endlessly argue meaningless "public self defeating" circular logic
We get that from the rethuglicans.
We will tell you that we have something good.
But when asked what that is - we can't formulate a straight answer.
So we will go back to arguing a meaningless self defeating circular logic.
Like:
Don't vote because that won't help - just protest instead because that will make everything better all by itself.
And if you don't accept that and refute it - we will gang-up on you and stinkle team you relentlessly - because that proves that we are right and you are wrong. It goes hand in hand with our meaningless "public self defeating" circular logic.