February 20th, 2008 by Manila Ryce
The border fence isn’t just an insanely stupid idea to solve a perceived “problem” to our national security and economy. It also comes with the added bonus of destroying the environment and violating the land rights of indigenous tribes and other peoples too. Xenophobia comes with a heavy price tag.
However, what’s just as interesting as the people who are getting screwed over by this waste of time and money are the ones which aren’t.
January 22nd, 2008 by Manila Ryce
In a word, yes.
Michael Ratner is an attorney who has represented Gitmo prisoners, is an adjunct professor of law at Columbia University Law School, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and a co-host of Pacifica radio show Law and Disorder. Much like the rest of us, Ratner is simply shocked that Canada would so publicly bend over for the United States when the entire world knows we engage in torture. Amnesty International has also criticized Canada for taking the US and Israel off the list for purely political reasons. The Canadian role of lap dog was made painfully clear when Canadian foreign minister Maxime Bernier shamelessly apologized with his tail between his legs, saying the list “wrongly includes some of our closest allies. I have directed that the manual be reviewed and rewritten.”
January 21st, 2008 by Manila Ryce
Sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church on April 30, 1967.
“The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a period of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.”
- Dante
January 4th, 2008 by Manila Ryce
Since diversity is the lifeblood of any functioning democracy, I should be saddened that our options for the presidency are being limited so soon, but lets face it, Dodd and Biden really didn’t bring anything new to the table. These two senators have experience up the yin yang, but their messages never differed enough from the so-called “front-runners” in this fixed race. Dodd is Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee that regulates the financial and banking industries, and raised about one-fourth of his funds from them. Biden is Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and tried to win votes by explaining that almost everything his populist anti-war rivals wanted to do was unrealistic. Though definitely admirable contenders, they weren’t exactly a break from the status quo.
As you well know by now, Obama won the Iowa caucuses with 38%, Edwards came in second with 30%, and the “inevitable” Hillary Clinton followed close behind with 29%. So what do these results say about the American people? Not a damn thing. First of all, it’s Iowa. Secondly, the caucuses are an entirely undemocratic process where “the media is a co-conspirator in the con“. And third, um… it’s still fucking Iowa!
Even with the homogeneous demographics of Iowa being as far away as they are from the major concentrations of Democratic voters nationally, these results truly say more about the handful of special interests who shaped this scheme than Iowans themselves. Any “journalist” who tries to squeeze any more meaning out of these results is selling you something. And therein lies the role of the Iowa caucuses, to act as fodder for media propaganda. The power of the caucus doesn’t lie in its ability to predict, but to convince. The corporate media will use these results to convince us that these are our opinions. We will be told that we actually do want Obama as president, and that these results are undeniable evidence that we support the exclusion of Kucinich and Gravel from ABC’s debates. In reality, these are the results of a screwy process controlled by a handful of influential white people. If other Democratic presidential candidates were as honest as Kucinich and Gravel have been about Iowa, they’d rail against this tyranny within the Democratic Party rather than play into such a detrimental lie.
So even though I’m not entirely saddened to see Dodd and Biden go, I am sad that they left specifically because of this sham. Their decisions to bow out now only give credence to the idea that Iowa matters. We can only hope that their supporters are more enlightened than they are to ignore this soap opera and flock to Kucinich, Gravel, or even Richardson.
December 26th, 2007 by Manila Ryce
Guest Norman Solomon writes about Beck’s enthusiasm for “full disclosure”:
Our segment, the producer said, would focus on a recent NBC news report praising the virtues of energy-efficient LED light bulbs without acknowledging that the network’s parent company, General Electric, sells them. I figured it was a safe bet that Beck’s enthusiasm for full disclosure from media would be selective.
A few hours later, I was staring into a camera lens at the CNN bureau in San Francisco while Beck launched into his opening. What had occurred on the “NBC Nightly News,” he explained, “was at best a major breach of journalistic integrity.” And he pointed out: “The problem isn’t what NBC is promoting. It’s what they’re not disclosing.”
Professional Jackass Glenn Beck had Norman Solomon on his show to dish the dirt on who owns the other corporate media empires, never suspecting that Solomon might actually criticize CNN on its own turf. Solomon is a media critic, longtime associate of FAIR, and founder of the Institute for Public Accuracy. This clip may not be suitable for younger audiences since Solomon is seen teabagging CNN with his giant brass balls for marketing itself as the “most trusted name in news” without disclosing the fact that it profits from war and has billions at stake in internet deregulation and net neutrality. It’s worth remembering that CNN also shapes our presidential debates through the filter of an AIPAC mouthpiece to keep a truly anti-war candidate from becoming president.
h/t Brasscheck TV
November 27th, 2007 by Manila Ryce
Brian Joseph, who works for the Center for Community and Corporate Ethics, sent this story to me. He states that Kevin Bacon’s publicist is upset that activists are targeting a fellow “liberal”. Yeah, attacking a liberal Hollywood-type is almost as crazy as attacking a “liberal” like Hillary Clinton! That fashionable title of being a “liberal” doesn’t buy you a free pass to profit off the misery of others. Capitalism and liberalism are opposing forces. It’s time the real Left stand up to Hillary, Gore, and all the other corporate mouthpieces who are selling liberalism like it’s a brand name.
…Meet Marlenny Franco. A textile worker in the Dominican Republic and the mother of a new born child, Marlenny stood up to her bosses at the Hanes factory where she works to stop discrimination against women and unsafe conditions. The company retaliated by firing her, along with many others who protested. And now students are holding Kevin Bacon accountable.
The connection? Kevin Bacon is a paid celebrity spokesperson for Hanes, helping to sell the company’s t-shirts and underwear through a high profile ad campaign. The students are asking Bacon, who has a reputation for liberal politics, to use his status to help stop labor abuses at Hanes overseas textile plants.
The students, who are part of a national organization called United Students Against Sweatshops, confronted Bacon in New York at the premiere of his film “Death Sentence.” According to Connor X, a Columbia University student who held a banner at the protest reading “Kevin Bacon: Tell Hanes to Stop the Exploitation of Workers,” Mr. Bacon came up to the protesters and promised he would look into the situation.
But since then, say the activists, there has been no follow-up from Mr. Bacon’s camp and the situation at the factory has only gotten worse. In response, the activists have launched a national campaign, with student protesters showing up to challenge Mr. Bacon at events across the country - from the Emmy awards, where they say their protest won a brief glimpse on national TV, to small-town concerts by the Bacon Brothers, the rock band led by Kevin Bacon and his lesser known brother Michael.
In keeping with the times, they have even launched a website, titled Six Degrees of Exploitation.com, and a group on Facebook, which boasts nearly 1000 members, all to shine a light on conditions at the Dominican factory.
The students’ claims about sweatshop conditions at the Dominican Hanes factory are backed up by an investigation by a leading labor rights monitoring organization, the Worker Rights Consortium, which counts 175 colleges and universities among its members. The organization released a report in June, finding that workers at the TOS Dominicana factory, owned and operated by Hanes, are subjected to unlawful forced overtime and psychological abuse and that the company has systemically fired workers who have chosen to join together in a union.
The situation is indeed disturbing. Workers at the Hanes plant earn about $1.25 an hour. Workers interviewed for this article reported that they had to borrow money most weeks just to cover food, rent and medicine for their families, and often had to forgo extra expenses such as telephones. With such low wages, many workers reported that to make ends meet they had to work extra shifts, amounting to up to 72 hours in a week.
Please visit Six Degrees of Exploitation.com to sign a petition.
Update: A look at the working conditions in the Hanes/Wal-Mart factory:
November 16th, 2007 by Manila Ryce
As if you needed convincing, the latest Democratic debate proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the corporate media controls our electoral process and Americans are sick of it. CNN is not in the business of reporting reality, but in shaping it. For example, take the scheduled Hillary vs. Obama title fight the corporate media has been promoting since the last “debate”. These are the two worst candidates the Democrats have, yet CNN insists that everyone else is unelectable. The network decided that we should spend over one-third of the debate time on the two richest candidates arguing over their non-existent differences. The only differences which exist between Obama and Hillary are between the collective mission statements of their corporate sponsors. We would have been just as well served listening to an argument between Coke and Pepsi.
Rigging the debate and undermining our democratic process is a disservice to the public interest and nothing short of treason. At about the 6 minute mark in the first video, even the members of the audience started yelling out that Wolf should allow the other candidates to speak. You know you’ve stepped in a major pile when even a Vegas audience, familiar with gamblers, drunks, gangsters, pimps, and prostitutes, is disgusted by your unethical behavior. With such an obvious agenda, CNN is no more a valid news source than Faux News, and Blitzer no better than O’Reilly. Whether it’s an obvious branch of the Republican Party or a station which claims to be politically neutral, a corporate network is always spinning the story for the benefit of their shareholders. Both MSNBC, and now CNN, have made that clear by barring Mike Gravel from the debates.
If you’re short on time, here’s the best clip out of the entire debate from our main man.
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