Hot Potato Mash

A DAY AT THE BEACH WITH HEROES OF PEACE

"A Day at the Beach with Heroes of Peace" was a special live KPFK/Pacifica broadcast that took place at Arlington West in Santa Monica on Sunday. The top video is a short mashup (5:45) I made of some of the event highlights and videos of most of the speakers follow.

VIDEO EXCLUSIVE: Presidential Candidate Ralph Nader Says A Close Election Will Be Decided By Political Parties

Presidential candidate Ralph Nader held a press conference in Los Angeles on Saturday where I asked him on behalf of Brad Blog about whether the upcoming election would turn out any differently than the 2004 election which Nader believes was hijacked by the Republican Party and the 2000 election which the Supreme Court decided. The video is above (2:37) and the transcript of our exchange follows below:

Alan: In 2004 you said that the Republican Party was able to “steal the election before election day” and that the “election was hijacked from A to Z”. And in 2000 the Supreme Court decided the election. Do you have any reason to believe that 2008 will turn out any differently.

Ralph Nader: If the 2008 election comes down to one or two states that are very close in the polls between the candidates, the way you can predict the outcome is simply to ask one question – who controls the state government. If it’s the Republican Party or if it’s the Democratic Party. Whoever controls the state government can maneuver a win whether by the distribution or maldistribution of voting machines, deregistering people, all kinds of ways. There are now 50, 100 ways that the state government in a close election can throw the election in the direction of the party that that state government reflects.

And so to answer your question, if it comes down to that close margin, whether it’s Florida or Ohio, they can do it again. But Ohio is now Democrat. Florida is still Republican.

We have a political system that is vulnerable to continual theft, to continual confusion for the voters, to continual failure to keep an accurate paper trail in order to double check.

Why don’t we simply adopt the Canadian system where in that vast country they have a paper ballot, they have small precincts with no more than 500 voters, and by 11pm that night they know who won and who lost. And if there are any questions, the paper ballots are the verifiable material.

Why are we into this huge electronic miasma with different kinds of machines? Why? Because it is big business. Because it is a procurement item that is growing by the billions every four years. And whenever you get a procurement item that interferes with election integrity you have politicians that are crooked and companies that seduce them into this kind of dishonesty.

And it isn’t just taking money. It is dishonesty in not having the best available electoral technology or electoral ways of counting votes accurately.

The entire press conference (31:06) with Ralph Nader and his running mate Matt Gonzalez

“The Good Fight: Declare Your Independence and Close the Democracy Gap” (Ralph Nader)

Cross-posted at Brad Blog

Technorati Tags: democracy, democrats, election, Matt Gonzalez, recession, republican

VIDEO EXCLUSIVE: ABC News Democratic Debate Protest In Los Angeles

UPDATE: Face The Nation's Bob Schieffer on Patriotism and Flag Pins (h/t Think On These Things)

Technorati Tags: ABC News, Barack Obama, Charlie Gibson, coporatism, Disney, George Stephanopolous, mashup, media, msm, news, Propaganda, public opinion

The Bush Admin Cares About Corporations Not People

Elizabeth de la Vega writes about worker safety in, “Bush's OSHA: No Laws? No Crimes”:

Unfortunately, OSHA started becoming anemic during the 1990s, and now it is positively spectral. With fewer employees than it had 30 years ago, yet twice the number of workplaces in its charge, OSHA would need 133 years to inspect every business over which it has jurisdiction.

The far more serious problem with OSHA's performance, however, is that, under the Bush administration, it has deliberately avoided setting any significant industrial standards. (To be precise, it has set one, regarding the permissible level of workplace exposure to the known carcinogen hexavalent chromium, but only after a court ordered it to do so.)

OSHA's abdication of its duties is not a matter of incompetence. It is, as Rep. John Barrows (D-Georgia) pointed out in a March 12, 2008, Workforce Protections Subcommittee Hearing of the House, Education and Labor Committee, a purposeful unwillingness to act. Or, to put it more colorfully, as Barrows did:

“When you've got an agency that don't know its job or don't care about its job, or has all kinds of reasons for not doin' its job, it's a little bit like goin' bird huntin' and havin' to tote the dog.”

OSHA's failure to enact mandatory standards has not only been fatal to its mission; it has been fatal to the workers.

Sadly, we will never know how many thousands of lives have been lost as a result of the Bush administration's lax approach to worker safety.

Technorati Tags: bush, OSHA

NOW on PBS: Fighting Over Forests

Will a Bush Administration effort open hundreds of thousands of acres of public land to private development? 

Part 1 (9:04)
 
Part 2 (8:24)

DISCLOSURE: Producer of the NOW segment is a relative.  Also check out an older mashup I made from an older Bill Moyers' piece on mining companies...

Have You Thanked A Mining Company Today (4:34)

Holy Fascism Batman!

Today, more than 23,000 representatives of private industry are working quietly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The members of this rapidly growing group, called InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public does—and, at least on one occasion, before elected officials. In return, they provide information to the government, which alarms the ACLU. But there may be more to it than that. One business executive, who showed me his InfraGard card, told me they have permission to “shoot to kill” in the event of martial law.

Read the rest of this really scary article at The Progressive.

UPDATE: Video Below

“You Have No Rights: Stories of America in an Age of Repression” (Matthew Rothschild)

VIDEO MASHUP: Thought Control - The MSM's Role In Silencing Anti-War Voices

Cross-posted at Brad Blog

YOU CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE... So Do Something!

Glenn Greenwald at Salon may be the best and most important political “blogger” on the internet today. Among other things he has been admirably leading the fight against the absurd and utterly shameful (not to mention anti-American) idea of granting retroactive immunity for past law breaking to the telecom industry in the currently being debated FISA bill.

Most of the telcos including AT&T and Verizon have been breaking the law -- since before 9/11 -- by helping the Bush administration spy on Americans. The one exception was Qwest which, rather coincidentally, subsequently lost major government contracts and had its CEO investigated for three years by the SEC and FBI before he was finally charged with insider trading.

While the immunity debate is ongoing and the outlook for the rule of law is not good, the fact that there has been any debate at all is largely because of bloggers like Greenwald and the good folks at fire dog lake who inspired the masses into taking action. To this point Greenwald writes words that every American should heed:

There is never any shortage of super-sophisticated cynics to come along and say how none of this matters, how it's so pitifully naive to think that any difference can ever be made, how the System is so Corrupted and the Deck So Stacked Against Us that everything is doomed and defeat is the inevitable option. And there is an element of truth to the premises of that defeatist mindset. The principal reason blogs exist, after all, is precisely because all other institutions intended to provide some adversarial check on what our government does -- the establishment media, the “opposition party,” the Congress -- typically do the opposite: they serve as enablers of it rather than checks on it. That's all true enough.

But what incidents such as this one conclusively demonstrate is that it is always possible, if enough citizen intensity is mustered and the right strategy is formulated, for citizens to disrupt and defeat the best-laid plans of our corrupt political establishment. There's a comfort and temptation in denying that truth. Those who insist that defeat is inevitable and All is Lost are relieved of the burdensome task of trying. But defeat occurs because the right strategy isn't found, not because it is inevitable.

So to borrow the catch phrase from the great progressive video site, Brave New Films: “psssst...Do Something!”

'There Comes A Time When Silence Is Betrayal' - Martin Luther King, Jr.

VIDEO EXCLUSIVE: Senator John Edwards Stirring Speech At Los Angeles Rally

Senator John Edwards took his presidential campaign to Los Angeles yesterday, speaking to a crowd of about 1,000 at the Southern California Public Service Workers' headquarters. While Edwards spent the bulk of his nearly 20 minute speech going after special interests, corporations and lobbyists, he also took a few shots, without naming anyone, at his main Democratic challengers:

“You don't bring about change by shuffling papers, and you don't bring about change by just giving a speech. We have to actually have some guts, some determination and some fight if we want to bring the change that America so desperately needs.”

Edwards also said that he was the “underdog” and challenged the crowd to start a grassroots movement on his behalf that will spread across the country like a “tidal wave of change.”

LET DENNIS KUCINICH DEBATE MASHUP: MSNBC Propaganda, NBC Censorship, GE War Profits & The Killing Of Our Democracy

In a promo airing on MSNBC Chris Matthews states that “politics at its best is a battle of ideas where one person with some guts and belief takes on someone else with some guts and belief and those who watch get to decide who is right”.

Unfortunately, those who watch the January 15th Democratic debate in Las Vegas will not see one of the gutsiest candidates since NBC recently revamped its own rules in order to kick Congressman Dennis Kucinich out of the debate. One can't help but wonder if this is because of some of Kucinich's ideas - bring the troops home now and vehemently anti-war - are anathema to NBC's parent company, General Electric (GE), which is also a large military defense contractor.

At a minimum, the exclusion of Kucinich certainly makes Matthews a hypocrite. As he says, “those who watch get to decide who is right”, not those who run media conglomerates. Should one feel inclined to ask Matthews to stand by his words and let the people decide, his email is hardball@msnbc.com.

You Won't See This Interview On TV

A fascinating interview of Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul by John Stossel for ABC's 20/20 will not be shown on ABC. Unfortunately, Paul gave a few too many honest answers and touched on a few too many taboo subjects for the mainstream television audience so you'll have to watch the piece on the internet.

Stossel's lame excuse:

Despite relatively low poll numbers, Paul has had a big influence on the presidential campaign. That’s in part because he’s raised a ton of money, and in part because of the passionate following he has on the Web. It’s one reason we’re posting my interview with Paul only on the Internet, where the debate about Paul is very active. In fact, he’s the most Googled presidential candidate.

Matt Simon explains what is going on at the Huffington Post:

This really provides a nice illustration of how the controlled media operates, because it really isn't all about the ratings. This interview, in which Paul articulates his controversial views on drugs, prostitution, gay marriage, health care, foreign policy, and the proper role of government in society, would have received terrific ratings. What's more, it would have served the public interest by giving viewers a clearer view of this once-unknown candidate's proposals. And whether his ideas are good or bad, shouldn't they at least be understood prior to dismissal?

When a long-ignored philosophy begins gaining currency in in the marketplace of ideas, it's the role of free media to explore those ideas, explain them, and evaluate them on their merits. Unfortunately, the authors of the First Amendment did not anticipate the media conglomerates of today and the control they would exert over discourse. They also failed to anticipate that millions of federal dollars a year would someday be spent on propagandistic advertising in major media, and (for example) they did not anticipate that the federal government would strong-arm the television industry into including politicized drug messages in their shows (as in the CSI episode where the well-liked Dr. Robbins makes some absurd statements against medical marijuana). But for whatever reason, the polls clearly show that citizens are fed up with government in general, and it's easy to see why Paul gets his support from disaffected voters from across the political and apolitical spectra. The one thing most have in common is that they looked to the internet for answers.

Everybody knows that Paul's popularity is strongly linked to the Internet, but why is that the case? Could it be that for the first time since before William Randolph Hearst, who used his newspaper empire to whip America into a frenzy over marijuana, a free medium has emerged in which ideas can compete on a much more level playing field? And could at least some of those ideas be winning?

If ABC claims to be operating in the public interest, on what grounds can it reasonably suppress this unusually thought-provoking interview?

It's not and it can't.

VIDEO INTERVIEW EXCLUSIVE: Peace Activist Start Loving

Start Loving is a peaces activist and humanitarian who finds the spread of empire through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq immoral. As such, he feels a duty to wake the conscience of the American people. And in an effort to draw more attention to his cause, Start Loving is now camping out 24/7 in front of the House Office Buildings across the street from the Capitol. When I interviewed him on October 22, 2007, Start Loving was three weeks into a hunger strike.

Part 1 (1:49)

Start Loving: “There needs to be a shift on Capitol Hill from a focus on stuff to a focus on people. We in these Houses [Congress] couldn't really care less about the 50,000 lives of our children of the United States that have been destroyed in Iraq so far. I mean some tiny sliver of each of the Congressmen cares but it is certainly not at the forefront of their minds and that's a crime of humanity. The two million people in Iraq that have been killed, before the war and after the war, should be central to our agenda -- figuring out how to ameliorate that, but it's sideline. So, I'm here to be a vote that our priorities need to shift from stuff, careers, corporate profits to a focus on what's priceless which is human life.”

Part 2 (4:54)

Start Loving: The third unmentioned party is the group that I think are the true patriots of this country, the men and women in uniform, that have been brainwashed into thinking that they're fighting for freedom and democracy in Iran and all they are fighting for are corporate profits for Cheney, Bush and their cronies. My proof of that is who would doubt that if people on Capitol Hill, to keep the war going, had to send their children to the war, it would stop in a nanosecond. Or, the other proof, I think, most people would agree if they thought about it, if the war corporations were told they could continue supplying armaments but there would be no profit - all their profit would be stopped - it would stop in a heartbeat. This is not a patriotic war, this is a war of profit and greed.“

Part 3 (3:09)

Why does Congress care so little about our troops in Iraq?

Start Loving: ”Whereas nobody understands the phenomenon exactly, it's fair to say the human being can become intoxicated on things other than substances. That the spirit of empire, the spirit of power, the sense of power, the sense of power over others, is tremendously intoxicating and like any intoxication it changes your mind. It disables certain parts of your nervous system and empowers other parts. It disables conscience, humanity, heart, compassion and it empowers self-engrandizement, and lust, and desire for more more more. It really dehumanizes us, the spirit that dehumanizes us. Our culture is optimized for that because that is how you get people to buy stuff, by ignoring people in need benignly, of course, thinking that we are great people. But, in fact, ignoring people in need and more and more looking out for me and hiding behind the rationale that I'm taking care of my biological children. But that's really just license to ignore everybody else.

And it took me a long time to understand this about people like Dr. King. He was always as pained about the agony of the oppressor as of the oppressed. And if they ever woke up, he seemed to think and realize, to their inhumanity, they would be horrified and they would never want to be that way. Well, that's how I think it is with Congress.“

Part 4 (1:58)

Why haven't the American people galvanized to put a stop to the Iraq war?

Start Loving: ”The analogy of how fire starts. It starts with a match but it can become a huge blaze. And to start that blaze you need dry wood. I think that the American populous may be going from being really wet wood, just totally in the grip of empire and selfishness, may be drying out a little bit. With the issues that are confronting them.“

Part 5 (3:05)

Would you label yourself an optimist or a pessimist?

Start Loving: ”Facing the truth of your current situation, and if it's a horrible truth facing that squarely, and at the same time developing a vision of how things should be and need to be. And if you can hold both of those within you, it is the ultimate release of energy, and power, courage, commitment.

I neither try to see things worse than they are or better. I want to see the truth of how they are so that I can mobilize myself appropriately. And it's a horrible phenomenon, I was just talking to my friend Rick about how I used to be a devotee of NPR, I can barely stand listening to them anymore. The poor guys have been destroyed by right wing elements I think. But all they want to talk about is pablum and they want to talk everything in cheery voices and how nice everything is... Well, it's not nice. Half the world is living on a dollar day. People in Palestine have been in basically concentration camp conditions for thirty-forty years. Four million people killed in Congo so that we can have cheap electronic parts. You know, Haiti, just a horror. And on and on and on and on. I don't suspect I come across as being depressive. I'm not, I'm very much alive. And that life comes from this needn't be, this shouldn't be. And I want to pay whatever price I can with my life to wake us up. Because none of us want it to be this way. None of us, if we could be awakened from our inhumanity.“

Part 6 (5:41)

What is the significance of the three crosses on your head?

Start Loving: ”The cross in the middle is the name I've adopted because nothing else I could call myself is relevant, which is 'Start Loving'. And the two on either side are 'stop starving' - and it's the active verb - it's starving others of AIDs drugs, of education, I mean, how do we have our military today? We starve these poor and middle class children of the opportunity to go to college, of decent education, so that there only option to climb is to go into the military. We've starved people around the world of AIDs drugs and other basic resources. And when that doesn't work we kill them. So the other one says 'stop killing.'“

Part 7 (1:47)

How long will you continue with the hunger strike?

Start Loving: ”Things will only change in this country when the populous stands up. If there is an honest history in the future, if we have a future, it will not blame congress and it will not blame Bush and Cheney for what's going on. It will blame the American people for being so apathetic at such a horrible time of need.“

Blackwater In Hot Water

This ought to be interesting:

The Iraqi government said Monday that it was pulling the license of an American security firm allegedly involved in the fatal shooting of civilians during an attack on a U.S. State Department motorcade in Baghdad.

The Interior Ministry said it would prosecute any foreign contractors found to have used excessive force in the Sunday shooting. It was latest accusation against the U.S.-contracted firms that operate with little or no supervision and are widely disliked by Iraqis who resent their speeding motorcades and forceful behavior.

Interior Ministry spokesman Abdul-Karim Khalaf said eight civilians were killed and 13 were wounded when security contractors believed to be working for Blackwater USA opened fire in a predominantly Sunni neighborhood of western Baghdad.

“We have canceled the license of Blackwater and prevented them from working all over Iraqi territory. We will also refer those involved to Iraqi judicial authorities,” Khalaf said.

Me thinks that the days are numbered for those working in Iraq's Interior Ministry.

More on the incident

Keith Olbermann Special Comment - War Today, War Tomorrow, War Forever

So sad and so true. Olbermann catches George W. Bush in a lie that Norman Solomon warned about a month or so ago.  Mainly, lying about future drawdowns in an attempt to placate the weary masses so that they do not take to the streets and demand a change. Why go to all that trouble when even the president sees change around the corner? It's not!

If the Bush administration, the military industrial complex and the ruling elite get their way, we will have war today, war tomorrow and war forever.

And that won't change until the profit motive changes or when the people wake up and demand that the government represent them.