Bill Moyers, Moyers & Co., on what Occupy is accomplishing

Ask Bill from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

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Greece headed toward default; Austria and France to be downgraded by S&P

from the ft...

Greek debt restructuring talks collapse

Talks over Greece’s debt restructuring collapsed on Friday, an unexpected breakdown that makes it increasingly likely Athens will become the first government of a developed country in more than 60 years to suffer a full-scale default on its debt.

In a statement, lead negotiators for Greek bondholders said that the latest offer made by Athens “has not produced a constructive consolidated response” from “all parties” – a clear reference to International Monetary Fund conclusions that bondholder losses must be increased significantly or a second Greek bail-out would have to be bigger than the agreed €130bn.

and then there's this, also from the ft...

S&P set to downgrade two eurozone nations

The credit rating agency Standard & Poor's is set to downgrade two triple A-rated eurozone nations, with one government official naming France and Austria. The other triple A-rated nations, including Germany, are expected to escape downgrade.

This has yet to be confirmed by the agency or the governments.

can't we please just get the global financial and economic collapse over with so we can figure out how to move on...?

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Fuzzy the Conciliation Caterpillar presents Obama vs. Obama

mark fiore...

Take a look at the two (or more) Obamas and pick your favorite! Join Fuzzy the Conciliation Caterpillar in investigating Obama's record. At least one Obama is always right! Dig deeper into his record on gay marriage, terrorism, civil liberties and more!

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Terrorism is the most meaningless — and thus most manipulated — term of propaganda; it’s always what They do and never what We do

glenn on the assassination of iranian scientists...

Does anyone have any doubt whatsoever that if Iran were sending hit squads to kill Israeli scientists in Tel Aviv, or was murdering a series of American scientists at Los Alamos (while wounding several of their wives, including, in one instance, shooting them in front of their child’s kindergarten), that those acts would be universally denounced as Terrorism, and the only debate would be whether the retaliation should be nuclear, carpet-bombing, or invasion? As always, Terrorism is the most meaningless — and thus most manipulated — term of propaganda; it’s always what They do and never what We do.

* * * * *

Regarding the question of who is responsible for the spate of scientist murders and explosions in Iran, it is true that there is no dispositive evidence on that question; that’s one of the benefits of conducting most consequential governmental action behind a wall of secrecy: no public accountability. But as the links above demonstrate, there is strong circumstantial and even direct evidence that (a) Israel is involved and (b) the U.S. has engaged in substantial covert acts of war aimed not only at the Iranian nuclear program generally but at Iran’s nuclear scientists specifically.

That all of this is done with total secrecy and no oversight by design enables deniability, if one is eager to embrace that. Newsweek‘s neocon national security reporter, Eli Lake, even went so far yesterday as to suggest the “possibility” that Iran is behind these acts of violence: because, as is well known, countries love to murder their own nuclear scientists and blow up their own nuclear facilities (Lake, of course, is right that it’s a “possibility” that Iran is behind this; as I replied: “Another possibility: maybe Senegal, or Singapore, is killing Iran’s scientists – or maybe Martians don’t like their nuclear program”). But by far the most likely explanation is that Israel is responsible, and one would have to be deliberately gullible — to the point of extreme self-delusion — to believe that the U.S. not only has no knowledge of or complicity in a spate of assassinations by its closest client state in a nation in which it has exhibited an intense interest, but also has no ability to stop it if it chose to (at the very least, the U.S. frequently sanctions state sponsors of Terrorism; if it objected to Israel’s acts, wouldn’t it do that here?).

Whatever else might be true, Israel and the U.S. are certainly the leading suspects behind these killings. And that is what explains the vehement resistance against calling this Terrorism.

nobody can tell me that this spate of killings isn't deliberate, targeted assassination... who's behind it is questionable but it's hard to imagine that either israel or the u.s. - or both - don't have something to do with it...

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The cartoonist tries to figure out what's funny about the Republican candidates

i guess it's only funny insofar as any of us find bigotry, deliberate ignorance, pandering, denial, delusion and lying funny...

equally not funny is that they are being paid attention to as if they had anything worthwhile to say...

and to think that one of them - most likely the pathetic one-percenter from massachusetts - will be our next president...

and, even if the incumbent is re-elected, we'll simply have to continue dealing with this...



i just don't know how i can handle this kind of excitement...

we are s-o-o-o-ooo screwed...

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Bill Moyers talks about his return to TV with Stephen Colbert

as i posted the other day, moyers returns to television on sunday with moyers & co...

from the colbert report...

Bill Moyers believes that capitalism is out of control and there can be no people's democracy as long as corporations are considered people.

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

isn't it amazing that some of the best reporting on television is coming from a comedy show...?

i'm also reminded that the late, great molly ivins back in july 2006 proposed that bill moyers run for president... can you imagine what kind of impact moyers would get if he mounted a primary challenge to obama in even a single state...? what a message that would send...!

Molly Ivins: Run Bill Moyers for President, Seriously

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Why we absolutely must proceed non-violently

lurking immediately below many of the fears of the occupy movement, one of which is being co-opted by one of our political parties, is the profound fear of being co-opted into using violence...

gene sharp, the near-hermit who has authored what are called the handbooks of the "color revolutions" and is known for his espousal of non-violence (see here), talks with rt... he calls occupy a "symbolic protest"...

worth watching...

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Yay...! Bill Moyers is coming back to TV this weekend...

i had read about this earlier but am so very delighted to see it happening...“

Bill Moyers Journal” ended in April 2010 because Mr. Moyers, now 77, said he needed a break from the incessant demands of weekly television. But there’s no sign he is easing up this time around.

The new show, which begins this month on public television stations, has a different name, “Moyers & Company,” and a warmer set, featuring a blue-and-green background. But much will carry over from the old program, including Mr. Moyers’s thoughtful interviews with thinkers who wouldn’t otherwise get much television face time and a focus on the country’s most pressing political and economic questions. “I’m coming back because in tumultuous times like these I relish the company of people who try to make sense of the tumult,” Mr. Moyers writes on his Web site, billmoyers.com.

In an interview in his sprawling new Manhattan office he said that during his break he explored the possibility of a documentary on Lyndon B. Johnson, the president he served as press secretary, but decided that “today is more interesting than yesterday.”[emphasis added]

i repeat... yay...!

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Occupy NH holds a "die-in"

check the last sentence... some "explanation," eh...?

from truthout...

"Live free or die," the man instructed, and they all promptly died.

This was Monday's "Die-in," an Occupy New Hampshire event in the parking lot of the campaign headquarters of President Barack Obama. The death certificate lists the name of deceased as "democracy, freedom, liberty and the 99%." Cause: "The influence of Wall Street money." The protesters were demanding the campaign staff explain, among other things, President Obama's heavy reliance on corporate cash to fund his re-election effort. The campaign explained by calling the cops to break up the protest.

obama is the president... he don't have to explain SHIT to you...!

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Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it

i've always felt this way about the super-rich... they've always lived in their separate little worlds but i don't remember that they have ever had a larger impact on the rest of us as they do now...

mike lofgren, truthout...

I am unaware of a well-developed theory ... about how the super-rich and the corporations they run would secede from the nation state.

I do not mean secession in terms of physical withdrawal from the territory of the state, although that happens occasionally.(i) It means a withdrawal into enclaves, a sort of internal immigration, whereby the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well-being except as a place to extract loot. Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it. If one can afford private security, public safety is of no concern; if one owns a Gulfstream jet, crumbling bridges cause less apprehension - and viable public transportation doesn't even show up on the radar screen. With private doctors on call, who cares about Medicare?

To some degree, the rich have always secluded themselves from the gaze of the common herd; for example, their habit for centuries has been to send their offspring to private schools. But now this habit is exacerbated by the plutocracy's palpable animosity toward public education and public educators, as Michael Bloomberg has demonstrated. To the extent public education "reform" is popular among billionaires and their tax-exempt foundations, one suspects it is as a lever to divert the more than one-half trillion dollars in federal, state and local education dollars into private hands, meaning themselves and their friends.(ii) A century ago, at least we got some attractive public libraries out of Andrew Carnegie. Noblesse oblige like Carnegie's is presently lacking among our seceding plutocracy.

In both world wars, even a Harvard man or a New York socialite might know the weight of an Army pack. Now, the military is for suckers from the laboring classes, whose subprime mortgages you just sliced into CDOs and sold to gullible investors in order to buy your second Bentley or rustle up the cash to employ Rod Stewart to perform at your birthday party. Courtesy of Matt Taibbi, we learn that the sentiment among the super-rich toward the rest of America is often one of contempt rather than noblesse; Bernard Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot, says about the views of the 99 percent: "Who gives a crap about some imbecile?"

[...]

The real joke is on the rest of us. After the biggest financial meltdown in 80 years - a meltdown caused by the type of rogue financial manipulation that Romney embodies - and a consequent long, steep drop in the American standard of living, who is the putative front-runner for one of the only two parties allowed to be competitive in American politics? None other than Romney, the man who says corporations are people. Opposing him, or someone like him, will be the incumbent President Barack Obama, who will raise up to a billion dollars to compete in the campaign. Much of that loot will come from the same corporations, hedge fund managers, merger and acquisition specialists and leveraged buyout artists the president will denounce in pro forma fashion during the campaign.

The super-rich have seceded from America even as their grip on its control mechanisms has tightened.

the super-rich have always thought of themselves as global citizens, for the most part not constrained by national boundaries and free to rape and pillage wherever in the world there was money to be made...

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Both parties need to be driven into the wilderness of history and the rule of law has to be rescued from the oblivion they sent it to

james howard kunstler blogging in clusterfuck nation...

Occupy Wall Street will seem like a mere harvest dance when we look back from the uproars later in 2012. Both organized parties have managed to banish the rule of law in America. Both parties need to be driven ihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifnto the wilderness of history and the rule of law has to be rescued from the oblivion they sent it to. What group of clear-thinking adults can get behind that simple project? What voices will resolve out of the phenomenal noise of gadget America, with its deafening tweets, incessant advertising, instant messaging, idiotic robo-calling, and ever-present flat-screen assault on the senses?

I discern the distant sound of rebellion, a spirit that won't be appeased by bytes of Disney-babble from the pandering snouts of Romney, Santorum, Gingrich, Paul or Obama. They are interested only in keeping a set of suicidal rackets going. All the yammer about "freedom" and "liberty" is hollow when the rule of law is AWOL. This ripe time is the natural moment for a true opposition to rise. A few months from now neither major party will have a credible candidate or a plausible platform of ideas. This will be painfully obvious. What angels and demons will rush into that awful vacuum?

truly, we are watching a horror show...

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Fuck you, Larry Summers

health, education and social protection need MORE capitalism...?

Lawrence Summers: We need smart reinvention not destruction

Lawrence Summers opens an FT series on the crisis in capitalism, its failings, challenges, weaknesses and the prospects for reform.

It is not so much the most capitalist parts of the contemporary economy but the least – those concerned with health, education and social protection – that are in most need of reinvention, he says.

why does this total disgrace to humanity keep getting a forum...?

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The buying of the President 2012 - Mitt Romney's top contributors

and who, may i ask, do you think mitt will feel most obligated to if he is elected...? i venture to say it would not be the peasants and serfs...

from opensecrets.org...

This table lists the top donors to this candidate in the 2012 election cycle. The organizations themselves did not donate , rather the money came from the organizations' PACs, their individual members or employees or owners, and those individuals' immediate families. Organization totals include subsidiaries and affiliates.

Goldman Sachs	$367,200
Credit Suisse Group	$203,750
Morgan Stanley	$199,800
HIG Capital	$186,500
Barclays	$157,750
Kirkland & Ellis	$132,100
Bank of America	$126,500
PriceWaterhouseCoopers	$118,250
EMC Corp	$117,300
JPMorgan Chase & Co	$112,250
The Villages	$97,500
Vivint Inc	$80,750
Marriott International	$79,837
Sullivan & Cromwell	$79,250
Bain Capital	$74,500
UBS AG	$73,750
Wells Fargo	$61,500
Blackstone Group	$59,800
Citigroup Inc	$57,050
Bain & Co	$52,500

by contrast, the largest contributor to barack obama is microsoft at $171K...

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