by n0madic, posted on Saturday, October 20th, 2012 at 3:34 pm
This short video clip features a comment made by Ed Schultz on Friday while in Freeport, Illinois, broadcasting live from Bainport, the site of the protest by Sensata workers and their allies over the closing of the profitable plant by Bain Capital in order to move it to China.
Ed’s comment was a simple and straightforward one: “I’m a capitalist, but I think you can cross the line between being being a capitalist and being a greedy son of a gun that hurts middle class families across America.”
The video was shot, however, by a tea party activist by the name of Ulysses S. Arn, who describes himself as “the conservative movements warrior poet.” He labeled it: “Laugher of the Week: MSNBC’s Ed Schultz ‘I’m a Capitalist'”.
Apparently conservatives like Arn think it’s laughable for a capitalist to believe that any such lines can be crossed. And it’s becoming increasingly clear that Mitt Romney thinks the rules don’t apply to people like him, either.
Perhaps it’s time for us to start calling “free market” ideologues “laissez-faire capitalists” once again, and remind ourselves why we came to the conclusion that a regulated marketplace was needed in the first place.
Gerald Epstein, Political Economy Research Institute, and Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst): Financialization of the economy has been developing since the late 19th century and is now at historic Levels
Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin (authors of The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire): As long as effective demand remains low and banks demand austerity to protect their assets, the crisis will deepen.
Part Two: The Crisis and Who Has the Power
Major structural change or effective short term reforms requires addressing democratic decision making starting with making banks a public utility.
Filmmaker Dennis Trainer Jr. on his new film and the challenges facing the Occupy Movement.
http://www.Occudoc.org
written, produced & directed by Dennis Trainor, Jr
contact dennistrainorjr (at) gmail (dot) com
http://www.twitter.com/dennistrainorjr
http://www.facebook.com/dennistrainorjr
Associate producer/ co-editor/ graphics/ color & titles: AJ Russo
https://vimeo.com/ajrsuper8
What happens when you force communities, families and entire ecosystems to kneel before the dictates of the marketplace? You get what Chris Hedges, co-author with Joe Sacco of Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, calls “sacrifice zones.” From Appalachia to North Dakota to Camden, New Jersey, these zones, ravaged by the excesses of capitalism, prefigure our collective future.
by n0madic, posted on Thursday, August 30th, 2012 at 1:27 pm
from Democracy Now!
… the old-school industrialists, like Mitt Romney’s father, they were men and women who built communities. They had factory towns. They were very anxious to leave, you know, hard legacies that people could see: hospitals, churches, schools—you know, the Hersheys of the world, the Kelloggs. But these new owners have absolutely no allegiance to American workers, American places, American communities. Their only allegiance is to the investors and to themselves. And so, it’s not at all uncharacteristic to have these situations where people are pleading for their jobs or they’re saying, you know, “We’ll tighten our belts, if you just make this concession and keep us.” That’s irrelevant to the Mitt Romney/Bain Capital/Carlyle Groups of the world. They’re entirely about making profits. And if that means shipping jobs to China or eliminating jobs, that’s what they’re going to do. And that’s the new generation of corporate owners in this country. — Matt Taibbi
A new article by reporter Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone sheds new light on the origin of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s fortune, revealing how Romney’s former firm, Bain Capital, used private equity to raise money to conduct corporate raids. Taibbi writes: “What most voters don’t know is the way Mitt Romney actually made his fortune: By borrowing vast sums of money that other people were forced to pay back. This is the plain, stark reality that has somehow eluded America’s top political journalists for two consecutive presidential campaigns: Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time. In the past few decades, in fact, Romney has piled more debt onto more unsuspecting companies, written more gigantic checks that other people have to cover, than perhaps all but a handful of people on planet Earth.”
by Pam Verner, posted on Monday, June 25th, 2012 at 7:00 am
It was 1921. He was a young man with a bunch of hopes and dreams, just barely twenty, and entering this country from Sweden with a trunk as his only possession. He came from the farms of Sweden hoping to some day buy a farm in America. Someone there had told him it might be possible to own a farm here. It was a wild dream really, but one in which he believed.
In Sweden he knew it was an impossible dream. All the farms and all the land was owned by a small group of large moneyed families and rented out in parcels to tenants. Reuben’s family had been tenant farmers for generations and generations, able to eke out a living but never able to build a secure foundation from which a family can grow. As far back as records can document, no one in his family had ever owned any of the land they farmed.
And so for over two decades in America, Reuben toiled the land. Milked the cows. Learned to read and write English. Fell in love. Married a farmer’s daughter named Rose. Had three boys. And did buy that farm.
The short-term work of strikes and sensational displays of worker power will not be enough to dislodge capitalism’s grip on our lives, says Professor Gayatri Spivak of Columbia University. These short-term tactics must be paired with the longer-term efforts of education and organization. This educational work, Spivak insists in this video, is “not really the pedagogy of the oppressed, it is indeed the pedagogy of the liberated, because if you do not have training in the practice of freedom, when you win… it will not last.”
