Kokesh Banned from Ron Paul Festival

Editor's Note:  The following exchange between Adam Kokesh and Webster Tarpley seems to mark the beginning of Kokesh's reassessment of the Paul Campaign.  Whether co-opted or initially conceived as a honeypot to draw and weaken opposition to the Romney machine, the Paul campaign has succeeded in leaving millions disenfranchised by this political process. 



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The following instructions regarding Adam Kokesh are contained in the packet of information for volunteers being trained to help at Ron Paul’s Sun Dome Rally–expected to draw over 10,000. The event will be broadcasted live on CSPAN Sunday afternoon.

UK poor being lured into more debt

Al Jazeera

Campaigners say the so-called 'Pay Day loans' are targeting poorest in the society affected by austerity measures.



As the saying goes, someone always makes a profit out of a crisis, and Britain's high streets are filling up with these little enterprises.

Many British citizens who have been affected by the austerity measures have been lured by these money-lending firms which claim to offer short term solutions.

But a growing number of people in the UK are getting further into debt. Campaigners say the so-called 'Pay Day loans' are targeting the poorest in the society.

Laurence Lee reports from Wigan in the northwest of England.

Capitalism Is The Crisis: Radical Politics in the Age of Austerity

In a September 20, 1912 article in the New York Times titled “The Age of the Superlative,” a writer admired the fact that a French aviator had achieved an altitude of 18,635 feet and that the new Equitable Life Insurance building, erected on the spot where the old one had just burned down, “is sure to be the biggest in the world.” Nothing could be done about the vast amounts of wealth dedicated to breaking such records. “We know well that there are better kinds of glory,” the writer soberly concluded, “but the age of the superlative must take its course.”

We live in an age of the superlatives as well, ironically being touted as the Age of Austerity by the state-capitalist oligarchs. But the superlative qualities of our age mark a world in decline. Consider some of our superlative achievements:

• Scientists have renamed this era the Anthropocene, to denote the unprecedented impact humans are having on the planet, an impact that is driving the sixth mass extinction in the history of the planet.
  
  
• The US financial “crisis” of 2008 was the largest private sector theft of public money in history, an estimated $16 trillion, followed by an aggressive global “austerity” push that targets the poor, the middle class, and people of colour to pay for the systemic fraud that caused the crisis.
  
  
• The US income disparity gap between rich and poor is the greatest of any industrialized country.
  
  
• For the first time in US history, student debt exceeds consumer debt. Never has a young generation of Americans seen this much debt, and consequently they await a life of serfdom in the capitalist order.
  
  
• The global 2011 Billionaires List recorded a record number of billionaires and combined wealth.
  
  
• There are more slaves today than at any time in human history.
  
  
• Worldwide military spending reached a record high in 2011.

And those are just a few records.

Notice a trend?

The world is dying, and capitalists are making record profits as it dies. There are more slaves and billionaires than ever before. The military-industrial complex is the largest it has ever been.

In this context, poor and working people have been asked—well, told—to reduce their expectations for the future and for their quality of life in the present. The word of the year for 2010 was “austerity.”

The systemic fraud of 2008—a comma in the run-on sentence of capitalist exploitation—for which the poor are being asked to pony-up was not some hiccup in the benevolent functioning of capitalism: it was fraud, in an economic system predicated on fraud and massive exploitation. They stole trillions from the global poor, in particular from racialized people in the US. Now they want us to pay for their crisis.

I decided to make a documentary film about austerity, about a year and half ago, because I was perplexed by the absence of a mass rebellion against capitalism in North America, especially in the aftermath of 2008, and because I believe if we don’t stop the austerity agenda we will collectively be

That may sound like hyperbole, but consider the trends in the statistics above and the near-complete control corporatism has over the existing political institutions.

In the US, several states have begun to repeal workers’ rights (or what’s left of them) and pass laws allowing state governments to default on state pension plans, plans already made venerable by their investments in the same marketplace now trying to destroy them.

President Obama, hailed by some liberals as the progenitor of change, has continued the same policies of economic and military imperialism as his predecessor. His top advisers upon taking office were a collection of silk-suited thugs from the very same investment-banking coterie that pulled off the heist in 2008.

One of the objectives of the capitalist Age of Austerity is to break what remains (and that’s not saying much) of organized labour, most of which exists in public sector unions. In Canada, Harper’s hostile treatment of the postal workers’ union indicates an embrace of the austerity agenda: workers’ rights, such as they are, will not be respected. Recent layoffs at Environment Canada, and the regressive agenda of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, suggest a massive evisceration of public services in Canada is on its way. Some union heads estimate as many as 30,000 civil servants may be axed.

The bankers and finance capitalists caused the crisis. Now public services such as education, health care, environmental protections, and essential infrastructure are going to pay for it. Unless, of course, we fight back.

I asked academics, activists and authors to define “austerity” and to suggest how we might fight back. The result is Capitalism Is The Crisis: Radical Politics in the Age of Austerity, a feature documentary that examines the nature of capitalist crisis, and some of the places where people have confronted capitalism including Greece, the G20 summit protest in Toronto, and the exhibition of mass solidarity in Madison, Wisconsin.

In the film, Chris Hedges (author of Death of the Liberal Class) and Derrick Jensen (author of Endgame) discuss the pathological character of capitalism. Hedges describes the BP executives as “executioners” at the helm of a system that will “kill most of us” if it is not stopped. I held a conversation with the unlikely pair back in July 2010, during the BP oil spill.

York University political scientists David McNally and Leo Panitch discuss the context for the current crisis of capitalism, which Panitch calls the “first great depression of the 21st century.” McNally suggests the Age of Austerity may last for “a generation.”

I talked to a variety of radicals. Michael Hardt, the Duke University professor who co-authored Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth with Tony Negri, discusses an autonomist Marxist reading of the Great Depression and FDR. In some sense, we have to see ourselves as the crisis. We have to acknowledge that we have agency, that we can determine the outcome of this ongoing social war.
Max Haiven, a professor from Halifax, talks about the social ways in which debt narrows the radical imagination, leading to a mass forgetting of anti-capitalist movements of the past, and produces gestural and ineffective forms of resistance.

Ajamu Nangwaya, a graduate student at the University of Toronto and a former VP of CUPE Ontario, warns us not to be confused by the apparent resurgence of Keynesian economics in mainstream media discussions. The ruling class, he says, will do whatever it takes to preserve the system. The embrace of Keynesian economics by some capitalists is not an endorsement of socialism.

Queen’s University professor Richard J.F. Day talks about the long history of capitalist accumulation. He also comments on Harper’s probable agenda at the G20 summit crackdown.

I don’t want to give away the entire film here. Actually, I do (below). But I hope you will watch it and join the fight against austerity. This is not a fight that can be won through electoral politics. It requires a mass social movement, and it requires that capitalism be erased from the face of the earth forever.

Now is not the time to “restore the middle class,” the message from Big Labour; now is the time to restore human dignity and prevent the current crisis from being our last, by building an alternative to capitalism. We need a revolution, not a reformation.

It may be their crisis, but it’s our problem.

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Criminalizing poverty: During economic crisis, new laws crack down on America's poor, homeless

Deseret News

The number of laws criminalizing poverty increased during the recession as the housing and homelessness crisis in America worsened.

Since 2006, there's been a 7 percent increase in laws prohibiting camping out in public places, an 11 percent increase in laws prohibiting loitering, a 6 percent increase in laws prohibiting begging and a 5 percent increase in laws prohibiting aggressive panhandling, according to a recent report by The National Coalition for the Homeless.

At the same time, after a double-digit jump in 2008, homelessness increased by an average of 2 percent from 2009 to 2010, according to the U.S. Conference of Mayors' Task Force on Hunger and Homelessness. Among families with children, homelessness increased by 9 percent. An average of 27 percent of homeless persons did not receive assistance last year because there weren't enough beds or shelters would not accept children.

"In this economy, cities are facing really tight budgets, so they may not be able to build up or fund housing to meet the need," Tulin Ozdeger, civil rights director for the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, told USA Today. "Many people are being forced to live out on the streets."

In an essay published this week in The Guardian, Barbara Ehrenreich, author of the New York Times bestselling book "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America," tells the story of a 62-year-old disabled veteran who was dragged from a homeless shelter to jail because he had an outstanding warrant for "criminal trespassing," which is how Washington, D.C., defines sleeping on the streets.

In some areas of the country, Ehrenreich wrote, cities are even beginning to crack down on do-gooders who want to hand out free food to the homeless. Las Vegas passed an ordinance forbidding the sharing of food with any "person whom a reasonable ordinary person would believe to be entitled to apply for or receive" public assistance. In Florida, Gainesville law limits the number of people soup kitchens may serve daily. In Phoenix, zoning officials have stopped a local church from serving breakfast to homeless people.

The phenomenon of criminalizing poverty isn't limited to the homeless, though. Kaaryn Gustafson of the University of Connecticut Law School compared applying for welfare, which may entail mug shots, fingerprinting and lengthy interrogations about child paternity, to "being booked by the police."

Britain’s Riots: Thuggery, Looting, Lawlessness... By the Ruling Class

Global Research
Finian Cunningham

After a conflagration of arson attacks, riots and looting in several British cities, including the capital, London, there is a sense of order having been restored from a massive mobilisation of police forces.

There now follows the tracking down and prosecution of individuals involved in the mayhem. Conservative Prime Minister is leading “the fight back” to punish anyone who has inflicted damage and destruction to Britain’s society.

The events have visibly shocked the political establishment of all parties, police chiefs and the mainstream media. But what should be more shocking is the myopic and incredibly banal commentary that is being offered to “explain” the outburst of street disturbances and violence.

As pundits sit in comfy television studios trading inane insights about the “evils” of individual immorality, criminality, dysfunctional families, gang culture – in the background, so to speak, are the glaring signs scrolling across the screens of the cause of this societal breakdown. And yet the preponderant signs escape the mental radar of pundits and politicians alike.

The fact that the capitalist economic system is in worldwide meltdown is not even registered in the mainstream commentary. This is the system that the mainstream political parties have facilitated and fawned over, whether Labour, Conservative or Liberal, and which has resulted in social devastation across Britain while the corporate and financial elite has ransacked economic resources. This system of legalised looting has been going on for decades, but certainly took on a precipitous dynamic starting with Cameron’s Conservative predecessor Margaret Thatcher in the early 1980s. Labour’s Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were merely purveyors of the same dynamic.

In surveying today’s Britain, Karl Marx words are so right: “An accumulation of wealth at one pole of society indicates an accumulation of misery and overwork at the other”. That is the hallmark of capitalism in today’s Britain, the US and Europe.

All other problems are largely secondary in causation. Crime, racist policing, disorder, the lack of police budgets to restore order (so ironic), alienation and self-destruction, and so many other ills including the mobilisation of resources to fund illegal wars – most of our present day problems flow from the tap root of dysfunction that is the capitalist economy.

Speaking in the House of Commons Thursday, Prime Minister Cameron's “explanation” for the outbreak of street disturbances across England demonstrates a total ignorance and poverty of understanding on his part of the nature of the breakdown in his society. He blames it on “criminality pure and simple” and “pockets of sickness” and “lack of individual morality and responsibility”.

This view is largely echoed in the British political establishment of all parties and the media.

The looting, thievery and lawlessness that Cameron so condemns is but the reflection at the street level of British society of what is taking place on a much greater scale at the upper echelons of government and the economy.

Despite the appearance of pinstripe suits and well-groomed accents, we can, if we are honest, see decades of looting and thievery of economic and financial resources by corporate elites aided and abetted by Labour and Conservative governments. The taxpayer bailout of corrupt banks initiated by Labour PM Gordon Brown and now overseen by Cameron, paid for in large part by austerity in public spending cuts, is but the latest manifestation of official robbing of the majority to swell the already outrageous wealth of the ruling elite class.

Danger of US default shows failings of the free market

A resurgence of right-wing economics driven by ideology and special interests threatens the global economy.

JUST a few years ago, a powerful ideology - the belief in free and unfettered markets - brought the world to the brink of ruin. Even in its heyday, from the early 1980s until 2007, American-style deregulated capitalism brought greater material well-being only to the very richest in the richest country of the world. Indeed, over the course of this ideology's 30-year ascendancy, most Americans saw their incomes decline or stagnate year after year.

Moreover, output growth in the US was not economically sustainable. With so much of national income going to so few, growth could continue only through consumption financed by mounting debt.
I was among those who hoped that, somehow, the financial crisis would teach Americans (and others) a lesson about the need for greater equality, stronger regulation, and a better balance between the market and government. Alas, that has not been the case. On the contrary, a resurgence of right-wing economics, driven, as always, by ideology and special interests, once again threatens the global economy.

 

In the US, this right-wing resurgence is threatening to force a default on the national debt. If Congress mandates expenditures that exceed revenues, there will be a deficit, and that deficit has to be financed. Rather than carefully balancing the benefits of each government expenditure program with the costs of raising taxes to finance those benefits, the right seeks to use a sledgehammer - not allowing the national debt to increase forces expenditures to be limited to taxes.

This leaves open the question of which expenditures get priority - and if expenditures to pay interest on the national debt do not, a default is inevitable. Moreover, to cut back expenditures now, in the midst of an ongoing crisis brought on by free-market ideology, would simply prolong the downturn.

A decade ago, in the midst of an economic boom, the US faced a surplus so large that it threatened to eliminate the national debt. Unaffordable tax cuts and wars, a major recession, and soaring healthcare costs quickly transformed a huge surplus into record peacetime deficits.

An Unbelievable Video Of Police Brutality In Greece

Business Insider

Today was a perfect commercial against capitalism: Markets surged on the same news that made people riots in the street in Greece today.

Note: Some in the comments are taking umbrage with the description of "capitalism." We're not talking about some free-market ideal here, just the current market system, with its love of bailouts and euphoria whenever anything good happens to the banks.

The blog LOL Greece has a fantastic post today about the collapse of Greek democracy, and the meaninglessness of the bailout, when freedoms are lost and police have carte blanche to strike at protesters.

Don't think that's what happened?

Check out this video.