Chris Hedges, Talk at Church of All Souls, NYC, February 7, 2012

Occupy vs. Bilderberg

Bilderberg 2012: the technocrats are rising at this year's annual conference

From The Guardian

What a difference a year makes. Occupy Bilderberg? I love it. TheOccupy movement seems finally to have realised that the problem isn't the 1%, it's the 0.001%. It's the guys and gals and whatever David Rockefeller is who are meeting in Chantilly, Virginia, at the end of the week. Many hundreds of protestors have pledged to show up. And who knows, they may just manage to drag the mainstream news media with them.

Historically, one of the biggest problems people have had with Occupy is that its aims and demands have been a little, shall we say, "diffuse". Not the case with Occupy Bilderberg. That's the nail getting hit squarely on the head. Occupy Bilderberg is keyhole activism. Picking the exact right spot and sticking the scissors in.

"We refuse to pay for the banks' crisis" was the cry from OccupyLSX back in the autumn. They demanded an end to "our democracy representing corporations instead of the people." What Bilderberg represents is the fact that our democracy IS our corporations. And politics is just the wake behind a shark fin.

Time to go fishing.

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Guest Post: Corporate America Really Really Cares About Its Employees (Really) - A Distributed Rant

Guess what corporate establishment? Everybody is learning to fking hate you and wait for you to be totally wiped off the earth...

From Zerohedge



Corporate America Really Really Cares About Its Employees (Really)

Scrape away the Human Resource Department rah-rah about "our mission" and how much your loyalty is "valued," and what's left? A paycheck and a sucking sound.

Let's state the heretical obvious: Corporate America, you suck. We could count the ways--subverting democracy via your lobbying and campaign contributions, your sabotage of competition via regulatory capture, and so on--but what really matters is how you treat your employees.

We know: you really really care about your employees. Really. The propaganda would be laughable if it wasn't so bald-faced. Do corporate managers really believe in the Big Lie theory, that the bigger the lie, the easier it is to sell?

Here is reader C's experience of Corporate America's transition to wonderfulness and caring. An outlier or "what everybody inside knows"?

I occasionally read your postings linked to Jesse's Cafe Americain and I just want to confirm what you posted about corporate bankruptcy. (The Bankruptcy of Corporate America) I was disappointed with the Reagan administration which imo was the beginning of the takeover of our government by corporations and elites. Still, having a new family, I was fortunate to get an union job at the big telco and now work in the belly of the beast.

At first it was a great place to work, proud of our knowledge & expertise helping customers, but after 2-3 mergers, the overlords have increased our workload 100% (shutting down depts. in other parts of the country and giving us their work), reduced benefits, monitor everything and have rolled out methods & procedures that have totally dehumanized the workforce; we're just button pushers. Nearly everyone there is now miserable and it's a soul crushing, mind-numbing existence. Sorry that I have nothing good to say about it all, just hoping & praying for it get swept away and that my preparations to be free of the system work out ok.
Correspondent K.R. recently submitted this account, and some advice for young people:

In March 2000, I was working for a fairly large biotech company in pharmaceutical development, many of my co-workers were PhD's. When I got out of my car in the company parking lot one morning I saw many of my coworkers walking back the their cars. I asked "what's the matter?" What we discovered that morning is that if your swipe card that gave you access to the building did not work you were laid off. If your card worked and the door opened, you still had a job.

Best advice I could give a young smart person? Skip the corporate rat race altogether. Do not get car payments, mortgages and all the other debts that chain you to your debt enslavement. Enrich your life, work for yourself or for an important cause. Nobody should waste their life on corporate Amerika...


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Ron Paul, Ralph Nader agree on ‘progressive-libertarian alliance’

From Prison Planet and Raw Story.


In this corner, a libertarian, tea party hero who ran several campaigns as a candidate for US president on the Republican ticket. And in that corner, a progressive icon of the left who also ran several campaigns for the US presidency but on the Green Party ticket.
One might think the two men, seemingly ideologically opposed to one another, would rather argue than help one another.
However, on Wednesday’s broadcast of Freedom Watchon the Fox Business channel, Judge Napolitano sat down for an amiable interview with Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) and Ralph Nader to discuss a progressive-libertarian alliance in the 112th session of respective chambers in Congress.
Nader, who has recently called this coalition “the most exciting new political dynamic” in the US today, explained that it works well because both groups stand against corporatists who believe government should be run in the interests of corporations...

The Masochistic Circle

I was listening to the Alex Jones radio show yesterday when a caller called in to say that his mistrust of congress was so strong that he was concerned about ending the Federal Reserve because then their powers would be back in the hands of congress which he didn't trust.

I thought the caller was demonstrating something which is at the very crux of the problems we have today in the USA. Americans are living out what one could describe as a masochistic circle, constantly falling for politicians that undermine the power of the people, their democratic rights and their representative voice in the government. This in turn worsens the government which gives them even less faith that government can do any good at all, so perversely the people actually end up supporting handing over more power to the very corporate manipulators and the international big business 'mafia' that acts against their best interests. I think I said it best in the chart below. I am open to any suggestions or critical comments on this representation that I hope might help understanding at least one side of the dilemma which we face in the US.

Click on the chart below to enlarge it.







See also The American Dominatrix

Democracy Game Over - The Nine Are Abroad

The recent ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court to allow corporations to donate at will to political campaigns in the U.S. by drawing on First Amendment rights intended for individuals is obscene. I'm not surprised however since my view of the state of this country is grim indeed. It seems as if these black robed agents of doom have truly decided that corporations 'deserve' rights at a time when individual rights are being taken away. The evil generation is pushing, pushing pushing...at all sensible foundations.

I know I've read all the opinions about how this represents "freedom" for the corporations. Who the hell wants to give giant corporations the power to advertise at will against their political opponents? Are you all mad? Yes you are. That's my opinion. Should corporations have voting rights as well? Why not just do away with democracy altogether and let the corporations rule over us completely? The only silver lining I have read about is where some claim that this law will change little since corporations already spend as much as they want for their candidates in covert ways anyway.

Corporations are for-profit organizations by nature. They are NOT individuals. The blurring of this obvious distinction seems to be more then just an intellectual mistake, but rather (like the FBI manipulation of Bin Laden's face to look like a political opponent) an in your face act of bravado evil, and a smiling admission of having sunk to new grotesque depths.

Justice Kennedy writes of a democracy for corporations in his majority opinion:

"Favoritism and influence are not … avoidable in representative politics. It is in the nature of an elected representative to favor certain policies, and, by necessary corollary, to favor the voters and contributors who support those policies. It is well understood that a substantial and legitimate reason, if not the only reason, to cast a vote for, or to make a contribution to, one candidate over another is that the candidate will respond by producing those political outcomes the supporter favors. Democracy is premised on responsiveness.”

He is speaking of a democratic responsiveness towards corporations, not individuals. The 'rights' of the corporation are his concern. One commentator describes this in an article in this way:

"according to the Supreme Court, when corporations spend billions manipulating elections and obtain the desired results, this is “democracy.” This Orwellian characterization of democracy could have been dictated by the hedge funds, financial institutions, insurance companies and pharmaceutical corporations that routinely inject billions into American politics in return for favors from both corporate-controlled parties."

Even if you believe the skewed and bizarre notion that corporations should have democratic 'rights', (And I can see the idiots making this brilliant point over a latte in the Harvard Law School cafeteria) still there is nothing democratic in letting them spend as much as they want. Individuals are limited as to what they can spend, why shouldn't Coke Cola, JPMorgan or Chevron also have limits?

Eugene Volokh says in a New York Times opinion section that corporate money has always been in politics anyway, in the form of media corporations. Sure, but that is bad enough! The corporations already control the media. Now you want them piling money into non-stop advertising to grease the wheels even more for their bought and paid for politicians?

It must be noted, despite how much the corrupted, weak and misguided fake democrats have caved in to lobby pressure in a thousand and one ways, it is the old seething bile mouthed brontosaurus of right wing fake conservatives on the court who are bringing on this totalitarianism of corporations.

One Ring to Rule Them All.