Book TV: Panel on Finance (tags)
Participants at the Los Angeles Times Panel on Finance: Anat Admati; Helaine Olen; Nomi Prins
Queer Democrats Make Defeating Prop. 32 a Priority (tags)
The predominantly Queer San Diego Democrats for Equality voted August 23 to make defeating Proposition 32 a priority race in the November 6 election. Proposition 32 is an effort to destroy the ability of organized labor to raise money for political campaigns, and it's being sold deceptively as a campaign finance reform measure even though its principal sponsors are multi-million dollar donors to Republican candidates and super-PAC's. On the eve of Women's Equality Day, the club also heard from professors Dr. Sue Gonda and Carla Kirkwood on the history of women's struggles for equality and their links to the Queer rights movement.
Paul Ryan's budget plan would destroy the middle class (tags)
Exploding inequality of incomes and assets, trillions for wars of adventure, trillions to fraudulent banks and speculators, corporate tax evasion, mass unemployment, environmental destruction, structural and tax justice are ignored. The rich are enriched and the poor impoverished.
Copyright Hypocrisy and the Assault on the Internet (tags)
When the producers of the hit film "The Adjustment Bureau" tried to stiff the daughters of Philip K. Dick, who wrote the story on which the film was based, out of their rights payments on the ground that the story's copyright was invalid, they unwittingly exposed the hypocrisy surrounding the entertainment industry's aggressive attempts to stop so-called "Internet piracy." Bills like the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) in the House and PROTECT IP in the Senate would destroy Internet freedom and turn ISP's into content police in the name of continuing a copyright system that is no longer technologically sustainable.
The business sector of the U.S. — particularly the giant corporations that dominate our economy — literally regard themselves as above the law. Not only do they pay millions of dollars in legal bribes to politicians under the guise of “campaign contributions” to gain legislation that makes them BILLIONS in additional profits, they merrily disregard existing laws on issues ranging from labor to the environment to health and safety and paying their taxes. And a U.S. population brainwashed by decades of Right-wing propaganda extolling the private sector and the “free market” as good, efficient and honest — and damning the public sector as ineffective and hopelessly corrupt — has led most Americans to see government, not corporations, as their real enemy.