March 20, 2016

Chris Hedges: The Mexicanization of the United States (trade deals and neoliberalism)

from truthdig:


The Mexicanization of the United States

Posted on Mar 13, 2016
By Chris Hedges



[font size="1"]Workers at one of the maquiladoras in Juarez, Mexico, raise flags in 2013. Under the North American Free Trade Agreement, such factories have proliferated, but critics of the pact say its effects have been economically devastating on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. (Ivan Pierre Aguirre / AP)[/font]


The neoliberal ideology that is the engine of corporate capitalism spews its poison around the globe. Constitutions are rewritten by judicial fiat in a mockery of democracy. Laws and regulations that impede corporate exploitation are abolished. Corporations orchestrate legally sanctioned tax boycotts. Free-trade deals destroy small farmers and businesses along with labor unions and government agencies designed to protect the public from contaminated air, water and food and from usurious creditors and lenders. The press is transformed into an echo chamber for the corporate elites. Wages stagnate or decline. Unemployment and underemployment soar. Social services are curtailed or abolished in the name of austerity. The political system becomes a charade. Dissent is criminalized. The ecocide by the fossil fuel industry accelerates. State enterprises and utilities are sold to corporations. The educational system mutates into vocational training. Culture and the arts are replaced by sexual commodification, banal entertainment and graphic depictions of violence. Infrastructures crumble.

The working poor—sacrificed on the altar of corporate profit and suffering job losses, bankruptcies, foreclosures, harassment and arrest—watch helplessly as their dreams for themselves and their children evaporate. Some are forced into an underground economy dominated by drugs, crime and human trafficking. Some turn to opiates to blunt the despair. (Heroin use in the United States has doubled since 2007.) Suicides mount. (There are more than 40,000 a year in the U.S.) Hunger spreads. (Some 48.1 million Americans, including 15.3 million children, live in food-insecure households.) The state, to prevent unrest, militarizes the police agencies and empowers them to use lethal force against unarmed civilians. It fills the prisons.

From Mexico to Greece to the United States, the scenario is the same, varying only in degree. Neoliberalism and globalization create a vast race to the bottom. Duplicitous political elites, epitomized by Barack Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton, are or will be highly compensated for doling out trillions in “quantitative easing” to banks and other financial firms while delivering credulous voters to the corporate guillotine. Everyone and everything, including the natural world, is transformed into a commodity to exploit for profit.

The corporate pillage, as the Argentines have recently discovered, is limitless. The new Argentine president, the right-wing Mauricio Macri—put in office by corporate backers—has agreed to pay billions to a handful of hedge funds that bought up the country’s debt for a pittance and then demanded full repayment. Paul Singer’s Elliott Management alone will make $2.4 billion, as much as 15 times its initial investment.

The corporate looting is impervious to regulation or reform. It will continue until there is nothing left to exploit or is halted by popular revolt. It is creating frustrated and enraged populations that are being seduced in the United States, Europe and elsewhere by demagogues and protofascists. “Fascism, like socialism,” the economist Karl Polanyi wrote, “was rooted in a market society that refused to function.” Left unchecked, the present system will usher in a dystopia ruled by criminal power structures, including Wall Street, and inflict tremendous suffering and poverty on societies rent apart by global warming as well as internecine and nihilistic violence. Mexico is not an anomaly. Mexico is the future. ....................(more)

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_mexicanization_of_the_united_states_20160313

March 11, 2016

Thom Hartmann: Time To Purge the DINOs From the DNC... Starting With the Chair

March 10, 2016

Thom Hartmann: Time To Purge the DINOs From the DNC... Starting With the Chair

Published on Mar 9, 2016

According to one Michigan mayor - pro-Bernie audience members were threatened that they would be thrown out of Sunday's debate if they didn't stay quiet. It's just one more strike against the embattled Chair of the DNC - and it's time she step down.

March 10, 2016

TYT: Hillary's Biggest Fails At The Univision Democratic Debate

March 9, 2016

This reality became abundantly clear when I was voting yesterday.......

"CNN's exit polls provided an indication of why Sanders won -- a huge 81%-18% edge among voters age 18-24."

I live in Lafayette Park, a condo- and apartment-dominated neighborhood on the eastern end of downtown Detroit that's a natural magnet for all the millennial professionals who are moving into the city from the burbs. Talked to a lot of millennials waiting to vote, and just around the neighborhood -- ALL of them. ALL, not most, were Sanders supporters.

And the millennials, who are generally viewed as more concerned about Snapchat posts than voting, were out busting their proverbial asses volunteering for Bernie over the weekend. Democratic turnout in Michigan was up, unlike in other states, and that was entirely fueled by millennials.

So kudos to Generation Y. As GenXers, we understand a little bit about "the soft bigotry of low expectations."

March 9, 2016

Young Arab-American Muslim voters helped fuel Sanders' win

from the Detroit Free Press:



Standing outside a precinct in the south end of Dearborn that's more than 90% Arab-American Muslim, Shiab Mussad handed out slips of paper in English and Arabic urging voters to support Bernie Sanders.

"He's for people like us, people like me," Mussad, 22, explained Tuesday as voters ambled toward Salina School, which sits close to the Ford Rouge plant. "I got thousands of dollars of college debt, and he talks about making college affordable, giving me a fair shot. That resonates a lot with me, with young voters."

Mussad was motivated by Sanders' message to print out bilingual pieces of paper that he hoped would persuade Arab Americans to vote for the senator from Vermont. While young voters at the polls Tuesday afternoon at Salina said they were for Sanders, Mussad had a tougher sell with older Arab Americans at the precinct, some of whom said they supported Hillary Clinton.

.....(snip).....

On Monday afternoon, Sanders spoke to a packed theater that included many Arab-American Muslims, including several women wearing hijab, the Islamic headscarf, who sat behind him as he addressed the crowd. He was introduced by Detroit native U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., the first Muslim elected to Congress. Sanders met before the speech with the publisher of the Arab-American News, which endorsed him last week.

The narrative of Arab-American Muslims in Dearborn supporting a Jewish candidate was one that struck many on social media as a symbol of unity at a time of division on the campaign trail. On Tuesday, Sanders won Dearborn 63% to 37% over Clinton. ....................(more)

http://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/2016/03/08/spotlight-arab-american-muslim-voters-engage-issues/81486692/

March 9, 2016

TYT: Michigan's Muslim Vote Delivers Sanders Big Primary Win

March 8, 2016

Rahmbo, at it again.

(In These Times) For years, Mayor Rahm Emanuel has been trying to convince Chicagoans that their city, one of the centers of global capital, cannot afford quality public schools for their children. Again and again, the mayor has cried budget crisis to justify closing schools, laying off educators, cutting special education, and bullying the teachers union.

But now, as Mayor Emanuel reads from the same playbook yet again, like the boy who cried wolf, people have stopped buying his story.

A big reason why the mayor's tale of budget crisis rings false is the large sum of money sitting in the city’s tax increment financing (TIF) funds. Due to a lack of transparency in these funds, it is hard to know exactly how much money is uncommitted to specific projects, but the estimated amount ranges from $100-350 million. Unlike most cities, which plan development and then find the funding for it, Chicago first takes the money, then decides who deserves it.

TIFs are a bit difficult to wrap your head around, but what’s most important to know is that the money essentially becomes a slush fund for the mayor to use at his discretion. This approach cuts out all community accountability and decision-making. And especially in a city with a political history of cronyism like Chicago’s, it means that clout and connection enter into the equation, moving decisions away from what is good for the neighborhood to instead what is good for an individual developer or elected official. ...............(more)

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/18934/rahm-emanuel-tax-increment-financing-tif-chicago-public-schools-cps

March 8, 2016

TYT: Hillary Will Flip-Flop On TPP Again If Elected

March 8, 2016

WashPo’s Obvious Bias: 16 Negative Stories About Bernie Sanders Published Over 16 Hours

http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/washpos_obvious_bias_16_negative_stories_about_bernie_sanders_20160308





The progressive media watchdog FAIR counted as the Washington Post reached what the group is saying “has to be some kind of record” by posting an onslaught of articles attacking the Vermont senator.

From FAIR:

In what has to be some kind of record, the Washington Post ran 16 negative stories on Bernie Sanders in 16 hours, between roughly 10:20 PM EST Sunday, March 6, to 3:54 PM EST Monday, March 7—a window that includes the crucial Democratic debate in Flint, Michigan, and the next morning’s spin ...

All of these posts paint his candidacy in a negative light, mainly by advancing the narrative that he’s a clueless white man incapable of winning over people of color or speaking to women. Even the one article about Sanders beating Trump implies this is somehow a surprise—despite the fact that Sanders consistently out-polls Hillary Clinton against the New York businessman. ... The Washington Post was sold in 2013 to libertarian Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who is worth approximately $49.8 billion.

Despite being ideologically opposed to the Democratic Party (at least in principle), Bezos has enjoyed friendly ties with both the Obama administration and the CIA. As Michael Oman-Reagan notes, Amazon was awarded a $16.5 million contract with the State Department the last year Clinton ran it. Amazon also has over $600 million in contracts with the Central Intelligence Agency, an organization Sanders said he wanted to abolish in 1974, and still says he “had a lot of problems with.” FAIR has previously criticized the Washington Post for failing to disclose, when reporting on tech giant Uber, that Bezos also owns more than $1 billion in Uber stock.

For those of you who’d like a refresher on what The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald called the “7 Stages of Establishment Backlash” click here.

It’s probably safe to say U.S. media is now somewhere between stages 6 and 7 on that scale, which Greenwald describes as:

STAGE 6: Issuance of grave and hysterical warnings about the pending apocalypse if the establishment candidate is rejected, as the possibility of losing becomes imminent (you are destined for decades, perhaps even generations, of powerlessness if you disobey our decrees about who to select).

STAGE 7: Full-scale and unrestrained meltdown, panic, lashing-out, threats, recriminations, self-important foot-stomping, overt union with the Right, complete fury (I can no longer in good conscience support this party of misfits, terrorist-lovers, communists, and heathens).

— Posted by Natasha Hakimi Zapata