Elections have become auctions, and nearly every issue is paralyzed by the overwhelming influence of money. But you knew that. The real challenge is how to fix what has become one of our nation's most pressing political challenges. If you're hoping our leaders will prioritize this issue, you'll be disappointed. Look to the website of President Obama's new advocacy group...
According to a report yesterday in Bloomberg Businessweek, former 2012 Republican Presidential candidates Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich were very close to forming a “Unity Ticket” back in February of 2012, in an effort to knock Mitt Romney out of nomination contention. After Santorum claimed the Iowa caucus and three other primaries in early February, the talk of forming a...
They say when a population puts pressure on a corrupt system, the system pushes back. So it’s not surprising to see the Harper Government crackdown on dissent, but the level of his attack on democracy is so great that even Stalin and Mao would be impressed. After alread
Power is not to be conquered, it is to be destroyed. It is tyrannical by nature, whether exercised by a king, a dictator or an elected president. The only difference with the parliamentarian ‘democracy’ is that the modern slave has the illusion of choosing the master he will obey. The vote has made him an accomplice to the tyranny that oppresses him. He is not a slave because...
The Federal Communications Commission is pushing a plan to gut its 30-year-old newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership ban . This proposal would allow one company to own a local paper, two TV stations and up to eight radio stations in a single market. Advocates of more media consolidation argue that allowing TV stations and newspapers to merge is critical to cutting costs and saving local...
Following wins for marijuana legalization in Washington and Colorado on Tuesday night, a former Seattle police chief and a former Denver police officer sat down with Raw Story to discuss what the laws will actually do and how they think things will change. “Today is a great day for America!” exclaimed Tony Ryan , a 36-year veteran of the Denver police force. “It’s...
Sandy has blown climate change back on the agenda – and many believe the White House was wrong when it decided in 2009 that climate change was not a winning political message [as opposed to the opportunity of the clean energy economy]. Barack Obama: a 2009 off-the-record event marked a strategic decision by the White House to downplay climate change. (Photograph...
I live in a purple part of the country (Virginia) and move in academic circles, so of course I know many, many people who will be voting for Obama. It is impossible to know, but if I sodomized the Easter Bunny in front of their children the look on my Obama-voter friends’ faces could scarcely be much different than the look they get when I say I am voting for Jill Stein. “But...
democracynow on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free As President Barack Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney square off in the first presidential debate in Denver on October 3, Democracy N
I think they should spend five or ten minutes on it -- seeing if there’s a point in taking part in the carefully orchestrated electoral extravaganza." Recently, on the Matthew Filipowicz Show, I had the privilege of speaking to Professor Noam Chomsky at his MIT office. We discussed many aspects of activism including how he felt activists and progressives should approach...
“Democracy has been kidnapped. On 25 September we are going to save it.” ~Occupy Congress Everything you see in the video was organized through social media. A few facts: Tens of thousands of protesters Unemployment in Spain is nearly 25% At least 1,300 police were on hand to handle the protest Leaders of protests outside of parliament can be jailed up to one year...
Editors Note: This document was loosely translated from Spanish, so you can expect the translation will be a bit off in parts Manifesto #25s surround the Congress We, ordinary people are fed up to live with the consequences of a system conditioned by and forced to adapt itself to the markets, which is in every respect insupportable, and has led us to be victims of a large scale...
I’ve written about or linked to a great deal here “chronicling Mitt’s mendacity” — to borrow Steven Benen’s phrase. Mitt Romney says many, many things that are not true. He says this despite being in possession of the correct facts of the matter. Which is to say that Mitt Romney lies. A lot. He lies more than any other national candidate for office in my...
One of the most profound changes that occurs when modern schooling is introduced into traditional societies around the world is a radical shift in the locus of power and control over learning from children, families, and communities to ever more centralized systems of authority. While all cultures are different, in many non-modernized societies children enjoy wide latitude to learn by free...
One of the most entertaining yet unsurprising aspects of Occupy Wall St has been the response from traditional media. Whether intentionally playing dumb or genuinely clueless, the mainstream media has failed to inform the public and substantially address the key issues. But why did tens of thousands of people risk arrest all over the world to set up encampments and protest the status quo?...
Meet the anthropologist, activist, and anarchist who helped transform a hapless rally into a global protest movement David Graeber likes to say that he had three goals for the year: promote his book, learn to drive, and launch a worldwide revolution. The first is going well, the second has proven challenging, and the third is looking up. Graeber is a 50-year-old anthropologist—among...
To all those in the United States currently occupying parks, squares and other spaces, your comrades in Cairo are watching you in solidarity. Having received so much advice from you about transitioning to democracy, we thought it’s our turn to pass on some advice. Indeed, we are now in many ways involved in the same struggle. What most pundits call “The Arab Spring” has its...
The last refuge of Obamaphiles is that no matter how many times the First Black President double-crosses us by cutting Medicare and Medicaid, no matter how completely be betrays his voters by ignoring black unem ployment, by deporting one million Latinos, by protecting the banksters responsible for the foreclosure crisis and by invading, bombing, occupying and subverting even more countries...
A corporation that contributed $1 million to a political action committee supporting the presidential bid of former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney has been dissolved just four months after being formed . The company's fold, and its relationship to the Romney campaign, provides a vivid example of how secret campaign cash is being funneled into the political system in the wake of the...
A new filing in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case includes a copy of the Ohio Secretary of State election production system configuration that was in use in Ohio's 2004 presidential election when there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush. The filing also includes the revealing deposition of the late Michael Connell. Connell served as the IT guru for the...
The main purpose of this book is to try to persuade revolutionaries to shift the sites of the anticapitalist struggle and to select new battlefields. I identify three strategic sites for fighting - neighborhoods, workplaces, and households - that I believe will not only enable us to defeat capitalists but also to build a new society in the process. The advantage of this shift is that it...
In Manufacturing Consent (1988; and updated in Herman,1996). Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky claim that because media is firmly imbedded in the market system, it reflects the class values and concerns of its owners and advertisers. According to Herman and Chomsky, the media maintains a corporate class bias through five systemic filters: concentrated private ownership; a strict bottom-line profit...
Editor’s Note : The following report includes adapted excerpts from David DeGraw’s book, “The Road Through 2012: Revolution or World War III.” If you think what’s happening in Egypt won’t happen within the United States, you’ve been watching too much TV. The statistics speak for themselves. In previous Revolution Roundups [22] , before we were...
The riots of 2010 are over and a new year is upon us. It has been over seven months since the convergence against the G20, which saw grassroots organisations and anti-authoritarians mobilize in a groundswell of active resistance, only to face a brutal counterattack by the state. And while we have suffered the loss of our comrades’ daily presence to the grasp of the state’s...
For the first time in human history almost all of humanity is politically activated, politically conscious and politically interactive ... The resulting global political activism is generating a surge in the quest for personal dignity, cultural respect and economic opportunity in a world painfully scarred by memories of centuries-long alien colonial or imperial domination... The worldwide...
Today, the Federal Communications Commission blessed the merger of Comcast, the nation's largest cable and residential Internet provider, with NBC-Universal. The Justice Department immediately followed suit , removing the last obstacle to the unprecedented consolidation of media and Internet power in the hands of one company. (FCC press release here ) You should be afraid and mad
A small network of hedge fund executives pumped at least $10 million into Republican campaign committees and allied groups in last year’s elections, helping bankroll GOP victories that changed the balance of power in Washington, according to a review of campaign records and interviews with industry insiders. The review by the Center for Public Integrity and NBC found that some of the...