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Political Corrections"The National Security State uses fascism to protect capitalism while they say they're protecting democracy from communism."—Michael Parenti 1st, 2nd & 4th RA files are from Pacifica Radio
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"We're seeing an enormous increase in inequality in the United States and in the world. There's a massive reallocation of wealth from people who do productive work to people who simply have money. The figure that helps to underline just how extreme this inequality is becoming is the observation that 358 billionaires in the world have combined assets roughly equal to the combined annual income of the world's poorest 2.5 billion people (that's nearly 1/2 of the world's population), and that concentration is continuing... 90% of the value of shareholder equity in the United States is owned by the richest 10% of households. 47% is owned by the top 1% of households. The bottom 80% of households own 2%." David C. Korten
"The global economy has become like a malignant cancer, advancing the colonization of the planet's living spaces for the benefit of powerful corporations and financial institutions. It has turned these once useful institutions into instruments of a market tyranny that is destroying livelihoods, displacing people, and feeding on life in an insatiable quest for money. It forces us all to act in ways destructive of ourselves, our families, our communities, and nature. Human survival depends on a community-based, people-centered alternative beyond the failed extremist ideologies of communism and capitalism. This alternative is already being created through the initiatives of millions of people around the world who are taking back control of their lives and communities to create places where people can live and grow in balance with the living earth. When Corporations Rule the World provides an agenda of national and global reforms by which we may reclaim our power to localize our economies while globalizing our consciousness." —David C. Korten
Based on excerpts from When Corporations Rule the World by David C. Korten | |||||||||
| In the quest for economic growth, free market ideology has been embraced around the world with the fervor of a fundamentalist religious faith. | |||||||||
| Proponents of corporate libertarianism regularly pay homage to Adam Smith as their intellectual patron saint... Ironically, Smith's epic work The Wealth of Nations, which was first published in 1776, presents a radical condemnation of business monopolies sustained and protected by the state. | |||||||||
| We should be more than skeptical of an economic model that calls on us to give up all loyalty to place and community, says we must give free reign to securities fraud and corporate monopolies and deny workers the right to organize, and tells the poor to run faster and faster after a train they have no chance of catching—so that a few hundred thousand people can become multi-millionaires by destroying nature and depriving others of a decent means of livelihood. | |||||||||
| Communism called for all power to the state. Market capitalism calls for all power to the market—which in a globalized economy means rule by global corporations and financial markets. Both ideologies lead to the concentration of power in distant and unaccountable institutions. | |||||||||
| So sacred have growth and free trade become in our modern culture that only rarely do we find the courage to ask why they should be given precedence over the needs of people and nature? | |||||||||
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Needless to say, it hasn't been easy to create an economic system able to produce 358 billionaires while keeping another 1.3 billion people living in absolute deprivation. It took long and dedicated effort by legions of economists, lawyers, and politicians on the payrolls of monied interests to design and implement such a system. It required a radical altering of the dominant culture and the restructuring of many important institutions. It will take a similarly committed effort on the part of civil society to design and put in place an economic system supportive of economic justice and environmental sustainability.
A Citizen Agenda to Tame Corporate Power, Reclaim Citizen Sovereignty, and Restore Economic Sanity | |||||||||
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Based on documents from http://treesandpeople.lbutv.slu.se/welcome.html |
| "Oligarchy? A government resting on a valuation of property, in which the rich have power and the poor man is deprived of it." —Plato, The Republic - Book VIII |
The colonists did not make a revolution over a tax on tea. They fought for many reasons, but chiefly to create a nation where citizens were the government and ruled corporations.In 19th-century America the penalty for abuse or misuse of corporate charters was not simply a plea bargain or corporate fine, it was revocation of the charter and dissolution of the corporation.
- The corporation is an artificial creation and must not enjoy the protections of the Bill of Rights.
- Corporate owners and officiers must be liable for all the harms they cause.
- No corporation should exist forever.
"In 1886, in a stunning victory for the proponents of corporate sovereignty, the Supreme Court ruled in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad that a private corporation is a natural person under the U.S. Constitution—although the constitution makes no mention of corporations—and is thereby entitled to the protections of the Bill of Rights, including the right to free speech and other constitutional protections extended to individuals."
"Thus corporations finally claimed the full rights enjoyed by individual citizens while being exempted from many of the responibilities and liabilities of citizenship. Furthermore, in being guaranteed the same right to free speech as individual citizens, they acheived, in the words of Paul Hawken, "precisely what the Bill of Rights was intended to prevent: domination of public thought and discourse." The subsequent claim by corporations that they have the same right as any individual to influence the government in their own interest pits the individual citizen against the vast financial and communications resources of the corporation and mocks the constitutional intent that all citizens have an equal voice in the political debates surrounding inportant issues." David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World
Ending Corporate Governance
We The People Revoking Our Plutocracy
"What Reagan did was he lowered the taxes on upper income people and then he didn't stop spending for the Pentagon and what have you. So he went back to those same rich people and borrowed the money back and paid them interest on their loans, where before he got the money for nothing in taxes. So that's just the way the rip-off works." —Jerry Brown
The alternative to intellectual property is straightforward: intellectual products should not be owned, as in the case of everyday language. That means not owned by individuals, corporations, governments, or the community as common property. It means that ideas are available to be used by anyone who wants to. Against intellectual property
"In reality, most people in America live in a police state,
and are completely unaware of it." George Gordon
A person laboring full-time for minimum wage is contributing less to "The Economy" than a prisoner sitting in an expensive-to-run prison. Join us as we explore the ominous development of a profitable Police State in America Law Enforcement Growth Industry "If one were to judge these men (legislators) wholly by the effects of their actions and not partly by their intentions, they would deserve to be classed and punished with those mischievous persons who put obstructions on the railroads." —Henry David Thoreau Land-Mine Legislation Did you know that you qualify for another, much more powerful vote than the one you cast on election day? Your Jury Powers exceed that of the judge, the President, and the Congress. The final check and balance against tyranny and a legislature gone mad belongs to the People and is called: Jury Nullification
"Our covert agencies have converted themselves to channels for drugs. They have perverted our system of justice." Senator John Robert Kerrey, D-Nebraska
The Illegal Search For Self-Awareness
by Alexander Shulgin
Comments on prohibition
by Abraham Lincoln and Albert Einstein."It's mind boggling. We tax Americans billions to fight drugs, and we're in bed with these guys." Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato, R-New York
Here we have the biggest drug story of the day. Imagine the screaming headlines: "U.S.
Government The World's Leading Drug Peddler." It would surely sell papers. But
the story passed virtually unreported, and with not a hint of the obvious conclusions.
The war on (certain) drugs
by Noam Chomsky
"Public Law 99-570, the Controlled Substances Analogue Enforcement Act of 1986, boldly penetrates into areas of governmental control over research undreamed of by any National Socialist ("Nazi"), Communist or other dictatorship; presuming to declare any "human research with new drugs" unlawful unless explicitly approved by the federal government! The situation has degenerated to such a point that the late federal Judge J.G. Burciaga, in ruling against the United States government in a criminal case involving drug law, stated:
"The tattered Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures and the now frail Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination or deprivation of liberty without due process have fallen as casualties in this 'war on drugs' ... today, the 'war' targets one of the most deeply held fundamental rights—the First Amendment right to freely exercise one's religion." [774F.Supp.1333(D.N.M. 1991)]
While the original impetus for anti-drug legislation in the U.S. involved questions of imperialistic struggles for world dominance, not to mention economics and racism, it triumphed on the tide of reformist zeal of fundamentalist religious minorities intolerant of diversity. Albeit tricked-up as 'Public Health Laws' addressing so-called 'crimes against health,' contemporary drug prohibition is merely the modern expression, disguised by secular circumlocutions, of the millennial Pharmacratic Inquisition, as Justice Burciaga sagaciously noted.
We must not lose sight of the fact that, like the decree of the Spanish Inquisition in Mexico in 1620, contemporary drug legislation, whatever its justification, inexorably has the effect of prohibiting ecstatic, experiential religion while simultaneously promoting exsanguinated, desacramentalized simulacra of religion. The secular American state is clearly comfortable with purely symbolic, Christian non-religion, but feels rightly threatened by ecstatic religion grounded in individual religious experiences, which lead people to examine their own assumptions and motivations, and those of their churches, and those of their governments - the difference is between blind obedience and eternal, sceptical questioning and distrust of authority.
"The social logic for the prohibition of drugs is not a public-health logic, but a truly religious logic, a logic of hatred towards the pleasure and experiences they bring or are said to bring. Drugs are really reproached with opening doors leading to artificial paradises" (i.e., virtual realities).
STRANGE DAYS
"A drug ring associated with the Contras sold large quantities of cocaine in inner-city Los Angeles in the 1980s at the time of the crack explosion there. Some of the drug profits from those sales went to the Contras. Given our government's involvement with the Contras, I believe this is a major public policy issue worthy of further investigation." San Jose Mercury News Executive Editor Jerry Ceppos
Dark Alliance: The Story Behind the Crack Explosion
by Gary Webb, San Jose Mercury News Staff WriterCrack The CIA
GNN's award-winning video expose of America's federal drug cartel.
CRACKWATCH
A Secret History of the clandestine establishment of Narcocracy in the AmericasCrack and the CIA, CounterSpin interviews Gary Webb in RealAudio
The CIA's complicity with drug lords, CounterSpin RealAudio"What drug users are up against is prejudice, backed by a power structure which benefits from the lowered social status of the oppressed group." —Aaron Wilson
Proemium from Jonathan Ott's Pharmacotheon presents a comprehensive rational plan for drug policy revolution!
"A 'machiavellian' mass society valuing wealth-aquisition and typified by exploitative relations must, inevitably, be a violent society, using force to protect the 'haves' and the 'hope to haves' from the 'have nots' and outsiders. Such a society will destroy itself because its greed will cause it to consume its own resources and even its own people. No self-restraints can effectively be imposed because the society's very nature, its internal dynamic, is to consume. Its voracious appetite will cause it to literally eat itself. When sufficiently weakened, other similar social monsters will finish it off—if anything remains." Jack D. Forbes
- Crime and the Drug War
- War on Drugs: Censoring the theft of the American Dream
- Shooting Up in Public: Control Freaks, Pushers, and a Nation of Junkies
"The United States has conducted two nuclear wars. The first against Japan in 1945, the second in Kuwait and Iraq in 1991. The first nuclear war fissioned a plutonium bomb and one made of uranium. The second nuclear war utilized depleted-uranium weapons, but nuclear fission was not involved." —Dr. Helen Caldicott"One fact of the Persian Gulf War seems to have been recorded in invisible ink: the United States is the first nation in history to have intentionally bombed an operating nuclear reactor." —Suzy T. Kane, Metal of Dishonor: Depleted Uranium
"Let's look back a little bit and remember that we just went through 8 years, 1980 to 1988, in which the White House was occupied by a third rate actor who everybody knew was asleep and had about as much to do with policy as the Queen of England has to do with policy in Britian. The media kind of put on a pretense for a while that he was part of it, but as soon as he went back to the ranch the pretense was over. How many interviews have you seen with Reagan since he left?" Noam Chomsky"Ronald Reagan pledged to have his budget balanced by his last year in office. By the way, when this was said back in 1979 the Federal debt was about 750 billion dollars. It's now about 4.7 trillion." —Jerry Brown
"Ronald Reagan was the greatest president of the twentieth century." —Rush Limbaugh
"He represents one of the few times that uselessness
has taken an organic form in this century."
Critical Art Ensemble in The Technology of Uselessness
POWER TO THE PEOPLE!
