Saturday, January 21, will be the second anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. FEC, a controversial decision which opened the floodgates to unlimited corporate spending on elections. Occupy Phoenixville will be calling attention to that decision and its implications by screening and discussing the award-winning documentary, The Corporation.
Occupy Phoenixville/Films For Action will kick off its documentary film series on January 21, 2012 by showing “The Corporation” at 6 pm at the Schuylkill Friends Meetinghouse.
2010 Oscar Winner for Best Documentary, 'Inside Job' provides a comprehensive analysis of the global financial crisis of 2008, which at a cost over $20 trillion, caused millions of people to lose their jobs and homes in the worst recession since the Great Depression, and nearly resulted in a global financial collapse. Through exhaustive research and extensive interviews with key financial...
Environs and Films For Action present a film screening of King Corn, with guest speaker Simran Sethi and co-director Curt Ellis.
Having just finished reading Black Elk Speaks, Leonard Peltier's recent letter brings the plight of Native Americans over the last two centuries into present focus. Someone reading the 1932 classic today might easily believe that while it is a tragic tale of America's bitter origins, it is a story firmly rooted in a past that we have long moved on from. This view, sadly, would be mistaken. As...
Sometimes, the mainstream press does a good job, and today's investigative feature in the New York Times serves as an excellent example of what all journalism should look like: journalism that puts the people's interests above corporate interests.The Times has compiled an interactive database that shows water pollution violations in all 50 states. A look at documented violations in Kansas totals...
Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi On "How Goldman Sachs Has Engineered Every Major Market Manipulation Since The Great Depression"The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.Any attempt to...
Fourteen minute video featuring straight talk from veterans and their family members telling what is missing from the sales pitches presented by recruiters and the military's marketing efforts.
CIA director Leon Panetta told the New Yorker: "When you read behind it, it's almost as if he's wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point." News commentator Ed Schultz said today that Cheney is wishing for a terrorist attack on the U.S.What should we make of all this? Well, everyone knows that Cheney is ruthless: Cheney is the guy who pushed for torture...
The Senate Commerce Committee appears to be poised to confirm Julius Genachowski, President Barack Obama's choice to head the Federal Communications Commission.In a hearing that lasted around 90 minutes Tuesday afternoon, Democrat and Republican lawmakers praised Genachowski, with committee chairman Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) going so far as to say he was "thoroughly impressed" with the...
Montana Senator Max Baucus, the chair of the Senate Finance Committee, is the Senate’s point man on healthcare reform. A new article in the Montana Standard finds that Senator Baucus has received more campaign money from health and insurance industry interests than any other member of Congress.
It may not be as exciting as the Thrilla in Manila, but its outcome will have far more impact on the lives of tens of millions of families across the country. The story is straightforward. President Obama had stepped up to challenge the insurance industry in order to reform the health care system in the United States. Specifically, he is proposing to create a public health insurance plan, like...
As of last Monday, the Kansas Governor, Mark Parkinson, traded a 900MW coal fired plant for a tepid state energy policy, and the Legislature went along. The agreement first of all forces the Secretary of KDHE to issue Sunflower Electric an air quality permit, and it also limits his authority to issue air quality regulations beyond the Federal EPA guidelines. In return, it creates a...
With the release of the U.S. Senate's report on the Bush Administration torture program, it is now incontrovertibly clear -- and officially established by the highest, most respectable Establishment institutions -- that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and a host of other top officials deliberately, willingly, and with malice aforethought, established a system of interrogation...
For some time now, many Americans have wondered how Congress, the elected body that the nation’s Founding Fathers saw as the bulwark of liberty, could have been so thoroughly unwilling to, or incapable of challenging the dictatorial power-grabs and the eight-year Constitution wrecking campaign of the Bush/Cheney administration.There has been speculation on both the far left and the far right, and...
Should President Obama have the power to shut down domestic Internet traffic during a state of emergency?Senators John Rockefeller (D-W. Va.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) think so. On Wednesday they introduced a bill to establish the Office of the National Cybersecurity Advisor—an arm of the executive branch that would have vast power to monitor and control Internet traffic to protect against...
Last September Ecuador approved a constitutional amendment that protects the rights of Pachamama, Mother Earth. By affirming the rights of nature, “where life is reproduced and exists,” Ecuador is offering the world a way out of one of the blindest of the many blind alleys Western thinking has created.
As our 44th President prepares to enter the Oval Office, bank lending has seized up, some of the nation’s largest banks are on life support, and the big three automakers are bankrupt. Housing continues to crash, and so does the economy.Little wonder that Obama is being compared to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who entered the White House in similar financial straits in 1932. Even before taking office...
Though Citicorp is deemed too big to fail, it's hardly reassuring to know that it's been allowed to sink its fangs into the Mother Zombie that the US Treasury has become and sucked out a multi-billion dollar dose of embalming fluid so it can go on pretending to be a bank for a while longer. I employ this somewhat clunky metaphor to point out that the US Government is no more solvent than the...
Here we stand in the wake of the virtual financial tsunami, followed by the giant bail out. In the words of the next generation, I guess you could say, "we should have known better." We just witnessed a full week of Wall Street experts on television threatening the American people, and President Bush threatening Congress, claiming that “to do nothing” will result in a economic...