Posts Tagged ‘ defy

You’ve Been Brainwashed

You May be Brainwashed by Corporate Media if You:

… believe the 5 corporations who own almost all of the media in the U.S. are liberal.
… believe $300 billion of U.S. tax money, allocated for the war and reconstruction in Iraq is actually going to Iraq .

… are unaware Iraq had 650 million barrels of oil in reserve just before the war in Iraq .

… are unaware 198 million in Iraqi dollars is missing from the Iraq treasury from the period the U.S. was in control of Iraq .

…are unaware that war is exceptionally profitable for a small number of investors

… believe Halliburton’s no-bid contracts have nothing to do with former CEO, former Vice President Dick Cheney.

…are unaware that the Iraq war is the biggest case of war profiteering in human history

…believe Saddam Hussein or Iraq had anything to do with Al Qaeda or Osama Bin Laden

…are unaware that the U.S. has killed more than 10,000 innocent women and children in Iraq with cluster bombs and depleted uranium munitions.

… believe depleted uranium weapons are not radioactive or deadly weapons of mass destruction (they are 12% less radioactive than nuclear weapons grade uranium and very deadly).

… believe wealthy, warmongers can also be true Christians.

… are unaware stem cell research threatens the pharmaceutical industry by curing and preventing diseases which drug companies profit from by treating with drugs.

… are unaware the pharmaceutical industry is based entirely on treatment and is threatened by cures and prevention.
(see health & environment section on these forums and http://tracker.conspiracyresearch.org)

… are unaware the Food and Drug Administration does NO testing of food or drugs. They only set guidelines and review the testing corporations do of their own products.

… are unaware the Medicare Prescription Drug and Modernization Act has been ‘re- estimated’ to cost U.S. taxpayers $1.3 Trillion (not the original $243 billion or the ‘adjusted’ $400 billion), and only pharmaceutical corporations and HMOs benefit from the increase.

… are unaware the Boston Tea party was a protest against corporate corruption (East India Company).

… are unaware our founding fathers intentionally made sure that corporations had no power over people or our government.

… are unaware corporations have fought aggressively and systematically over the past 200 years to increase their power and influence over our government.

… are unaware U.S. corporations are now protected under the 14th amendment as a legal ‘person.’

… are unaware the definition of fascism is: ‘The marriage of corporation and state’ — Benito Mussolini.

… are unaware well known U.S. corporate interests attempted a military coup against Franklin Roosevelt in 1933.

… are unaware most corrupt and wasteful government projects are run primarily by corporate contractors.

… are unaware ‘less government’ means paying corporate contractors three times what we pay government workers to do the same work.

… are unaware American corporations behave very differently in other countries.

… are unaware Enron and others were NOT investigated until they collapsed under the weight of their own greed.

… are unaware Bush’s massive tax cuts were invested overseas to build sweat shops, factories and other facilities, where our jobs have been outsourced.

… are unaware outsourcing American jobs weakens labor unions and keeps wages low and corporate profits high .

… are unaware weak enforcement of immigration laws lowers wages in the U.S. and increases corporate profits.

… are unaware ‘Free Trade’ means ‘Slave Wages’ to poor people in Honduras, Bangladesh, China, Malaysia, Burma, Cambodia, Dominican Republic, Colombia, Philippines, Thailand, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Nepal, El Salvador, Guatemala, Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and others.

… believe America is hated all over the world because of our freedom.

… believe the massive U.S. national debt (now 8,385,490,844,524.85) created by Republican presidents Reagan, Bush and Bush does not seriously threaten the future of our children and grandchildren.

… are unaware massive national debt ensures the expansion of poverty, which keeps wages low, which increases corporate profits.

… are unaware widespread poverty keeps wages low and corporate profits high.

… are unaware weak gun control laws perpetuate violence in poor neighborhoods which expands poverty, reduces wages and increases corporate profits.
… are unaware abortions go down only when we reduce poverty, expand healthcare and improve education.

… are unaware that making abortion illegal expands poverty which reduces wages and increases corporate profits.

… believe the Michael Jackson trial deserved more news coverage than the genocide of 400,000 people in Darfur , Sudan.

… believe Social Security is the biggest priority in America .

… are unaware privatizing Social Security would be a massive give away to experienced Wall Street investors that would also destabilize Social Security.

… are unaware that NOT funding ‘No Child Left Behind’ is dismantling funding for schools in poor neighborhoods, which expands poverty, lowers wages and increases corporate profits.

… are unaware the Healthy Forests Initiative has led to massive clear cutting of prime lumber and almost none of the forest fire prevention that it was sold on.

… are unaware the Clear Skies Initiative has increased pollution.

… are unaware Tort Reform will absolve corporations of massive negligent liabilities for things like asbestos exposure, pollution, mercury poisoning, hazardous waste, mad cow disease and all sorts of dangerous products and practices.

… are unaware mercury pollution (mostly from coal fired power plants and medical vaccines) has caused an epidemic of Autism, ADD and ADHD in the U.S.

… are unaware the Bush administration is dismantling three decades of US environmental protection.

… believe global warming is a rumor or conspiracy.

… are unaware ‘Global Warming’ is causing colder weather because the melting ice caps are cooling the gulf stream. (CO2 levels account for only 0.054% of our atmosphere, and CO2 levels always rise approx 800 years after a hot spell. Nothing to do with human intervention at all… Global Dimming, on the other hand, has reduced overall sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface by 10-60% since 1950)
i.e., buy a wind turbine.

… believe the science of evolution is less valid than literal fundamentalist interpretation of creationism.

… believe the UN scandals could have taken place without the largest, most influential member and host nation being involved.

… believe making a war monger ambassador to the UN will help prevent more wars.

… are unaware that expanding equal rights to any segment of the population (including gay people) also expands economic opportunity and puts pressure on wages, which would reduce corporate profits.

If you believe Fox News is fair and balanced, you have been brainwashed by corporate owned media

Truthdig – Reports – Go to Pittsburgh, Young Man, and Defy Your Empire

Go to Pittsburgh, Young Man, and Defy Your Empire

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Posted on Aug 31, 2009
AP / Jack Dempsey

Shock troops and “free speech zones” have become the norm at mass gatherings in modern America.

By Chris Hedges

Globalization and unfettered capitalism have been swept into the history books along with the open-market theory of the 1920s, the experiments of fascism, communism and the New Deal. It is time for a new economic and political paradigm. It is time for a new language to address our reality. The voices of change, those who speak in powerful and yet unfamiliar words, will cry out Sept. 25 and 26 in Pittsburgh when protesters from around the country gather to defy the heads of state, bankers and finance ministers from the world’s 22 largest economies who are convening for a meeting of the G-20. If we heed these dissident voices we have a future. If we do not we will commit collective suicide.

The international power elites will go to Pittsburgh to preach the mantra that globalization is inevitable and eternal. They will discuss a corpse as if it was living. They will urge us to remain in suspended animation and place our trust in the inept bankers and politicians who orchestrated the crisis. This is the usual tactic of bankrupt elites clinging to power. They denigrate and push to the margins the realists—none of whom will be inside their security perimeters—who give words to our disintegration and demand a new, unfamiliar course. The powerful discredit dissent and protest. But human history, as Erich Fromm wrote, always begins anew with disobedience. This disobedience is the first step toward freedom. It makes possible the recovery of reason.

The longer we speak in the language of global capitalism, the longer we utter platitudes about the free market—even as we funnel hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars into the accounts of large corporations—the longer we live in a state of collective self-delusion. Our power elite, who profess to hate government and government involvement in the free market, who claim they are the defenders of competition and individualism, have been stealing hundreds of billions of dollars of our money to nationalize mismanaged corporations and save them from bankruptcy. We hear angry and confused citizens, their minds warped by hate talk radio and television, condemn socialized medicine although we have become, at least for corporations, the most socialized nation on Earth. The schizophrenia between what we profess and what we actually embrace has rendered us incapable of confronting reality. The longer we speak in the old language of markets, capitalism, free trade and globalization the longer the entities that created this collapse will cannibalize the nation.

What are we now? What do we believe? What economic model explains the irrationality of looting the U.S. Treasury to permit speculators at Goldman Sachs to make obscene profits? How can Barack Obama’s chief economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, tout a “jobless recovery”? How much longer can we believe the fantasy that global markets will replace nation states and that economics will permit us to create a utopian world where we will all share the same happy goals? When will we denounce the lie that globalization fosters democracy, enlightenment, worldwide prosperity and stability? When we will we realize that unfettered global trade and corporate profit are the bitter enemies of freedom and the common good?

Corporations are pushing through legislation in the United States that will force us to buy defective, for-profit health insurance, a plan that will expand corporate monopolies and profits at our expense and leave tens of millions without adequate care. Corporations are blocking all attempts to move to renewable and sustainable energy to protect the staggering profits of the oil, natural gas and coal industries. Corporations are plunging us deeper and deeper as a nation into debt to feed the permanent war economy and swell the military budget, which consumes half of all discretionary spending. Corporations use lobbyists and campaign contributions to maintain arcane tax codes that offer them tax havens and tax evasions. Corporations are draining the treasury while the working class sheds jobs, sees homes foreclosed and struggles to survive in a new and terrifying global serfdom. This has been the awful price of complacency.

Protests will begin several days before the summit. Many of the activities are being coordinated by Pittsburgh’s Thomas Merton Center. There will be a march Sept. 25 for anyone who, as Jessica Benner of the center’s Antiwar Committee stated, “has lost a job, a home, a loved one to war, lost value to a retirement plan, gotten sick from environmental pollution, or lived without adequate healthcare, water, or food. … ” There will be at least three tent cities, in addition to a Music Camp beginning Sept. 18 that will be situated at the South Side Riverfront Park near 18th Street. Unemployed workers will set up one tent city at the Monumental Baptist Church on Sept. 20 and five days later will march on the Convention Center. The encampment and the march are being organized by the Bail Out the People Movement. The Institute for Policy Studies, The Nation magazine, the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, Pittsburgh United and other organizations will host events including a panel on corporate globalization featuring former World Bank President Joseph Stiglitz, along with a “People’s Tribunal.” There will be a religious procession calling for social justice and a concert organized by Students for a Democratic Society.

 

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