[Probably not safe for work.]

This is your moment of clarity #186: Did you know there is a soon-to-be-passed trade deal that's being called "NAFTA on steroids"? Did you know over 600 corporate lobbyists are being giving the keys to a backdoor around our laws? You probably didn't know about it because it's being kept top secret.

Keep on fighting,

-Lee

[more at LeeCamp.net]

A special programming note from Senior Writer Michael Winship:

"As you probably have figured out by now, because Hurricane Sandy hit New York City and its surroundings with such a mighty punch, the Moyers & Company production team has been – literally, as Joe Biden would say – scattered to the winds. Many of us are still without power and light and unable to get to our studio or offices (On top of which, our offices were closed because of the building’s proximity to that high rise crane collapse you might have heard about, but that’s another story.)

As Bill said via phone earlier today, “We all live at the whim of Nature and Nature always has the last word.” And so this weekend we’re airing a repeat program as our Hurricane Sandy Special Edition: the very first of our Moyers & Company broadcasts, which initially aired in January and remains as relevant and powerful heading into Election Day as it was then.

The program spotlights the book Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer – And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class and its authors, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. Bill Moyers notes that right from this very first broadcast we said that our series would focus on income inequality, corruption and the undue influence of Corporate America on a government bought and paid for by big business. Together they’re the proverbial elephant in the room politicians refuse to acknowledge – “all but unmentioned in the presidential debates and barely discussed throughout this long and painful election campaign” – but the source of the dysfunction and inertia that paralyze Congress, the White House – and the nation.

If you‘ve missed this edition of Moyers & Company, we hope you’ll watch before you cast your ballot on Tuesday. And if you’ve already seen it, take another look and remind yourself as you prepare to enter the voting booth of how we’ve been maneuvered by Wall Street and Beltway insiders, politically engineered into a state of inequality and the disproportionate power of a very few."

In its premiere episode, Moyers & Company dives into one of the most important and controversial issues of our time: How Washington and Big Business colluded to make the super-rich richer and turn their backs on the rest of us.

Bill’s guests – Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, authors of Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer — And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, argue that America’s vast inequality is no accident, but in fact has been politically engineered.

How, in a nation as wealthy as America, can the economy simply stop working for people at large, while super-serving those at the very top? Through exhaustive research and analysis, the political scientists Hacker and Pierson — whom Bill regards as the “Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson” of economics — detail important truths behind a 30-year economic assault against the middle class.

Who’s the culprit? “American politics did it– far more than we would have believed when we started this research,” Hacker explains. “What government has done and not done, and the politics that produced it, is really at the heart of the rise of an economy that has showered huge riches on the very, very, very well off.”

Bill considers their book the best he’s seen detailing “how politicians rewrote the rules to create a winner-take-all economy that favors the 1% over everyone else, putting our once and future middle class in peril.”

The show includes an essay on how Occupy Wall Street reflects a widespread belief that politics no longer works for ordinary people, including footage we took at the OWS rally from October – December 2011.

Full transcript of the show below the fold...

Continue reading »

"People are 3,615 times more likely to report a UFO sighting than they are to commit in-person voter impersonation, according to national data."

Ana Kasparian and Cenk Uygur recently discussed just how common voter fraud is as Republicans across the nation pass "Voter ID" laws.

Though 37 state legislatures, many of them Republican-led, have passed tighter voter-ID laws to toughen up on perceived instances of fraud, a new analysis shows that the feared offense almost never occurs. A review of 2,068 cases of alleged fraud over the past 12 years showed that despite there being 146 million registered voters in the U.S., there were only 10 cases of voter impersonation at the polls since 2000—a finding that undercuts the case made by those who say IDs must be more tightly regulated to ensure fair elections.

Good morning, today is Monday, July 23, 2012. So...who's in charge of the coffee today? Hello?

Via:

ALLIES of global hacker group Anonymous have put on their masks and picked up litter in a Tokyo park as a protest against tough illegal download laws.

The 80-strong collective said yesterday's busy bee was a protest against Japan's tougher laws against illegal downloads.

In light rain, they took part in an "anonymous cleaning service" for one hour in a park and on pavements in the shopping and entertainment hub of Shibuya, a change from the group's trademark website attacks.

They were dressed in black and wore masks of Guy Fawkes, the central figure in England's 1605 Gunpowder Plot to blow up parliament, which have become a symbol of protests by the loosely linked alliance around the world.

The group said that cyber attacks are the work of other global Anonymous networks in the global internet community, and that they prefer "constructive and productive solutions."

"We want to make our fellow citizens aware of the problem with a productive message."

“This spontaneous and popular movement is not swayed by any political organization, but is propelled by and is a response to the national and collective urge from our hearts. We can produce democratic, fair laws to end extreme poverty…”

These sentiments can be heard at any given Occupy rally, but they were spoken in Spain. They could have also come from Greece, or Ireland, or Italy, or any of the European countries where social services and fair wages have been strangled by extreme austerity measures. The renaissance of activism that’s swept this country was sparked far from our shores.

Before Occupy Wall Street began last September, Tunisia and Egypt revolted, the Middle East and North Africa had its Arab Spring and parts of Europe had been in tumult for years. Occupy Wall Street marks the end in a long line of revolution, at a time when humanity seems to have reached a critical mass of discontent. Last year Time Magazine declared The Protestor “Person of the Year.” Financial Times called 2011 “The Year of Global Indignation.” Perhaps 2012 will be the Year of the Occupier.

[Via]