Wal-Mart, McDonald’s = Freeloading Corporatists

As I was reading about my home state’s plan to charge companies that don’t provide health insurance coverage for their employees, I couldn’t help but notice that Wal-Mart and McDonald’s are 2 of the only 4 companies in Massachusetts that have more than 1,000 employees receiving public health benefits.



According to a 2003 AFL-CIO study, while an average of 66% of employees are covered by their company’s health plan, an atrocious 46% of Wal-Mart employees are covered by its health insurance plan.

And even if you are lucky enough to be part of the 46% minority of Wal-Mart workers who are covered, you’re going to pay an exorbitant about for your coverage: while the average large company employee pays roughly 16% to 25% of their own health insurance premium, at Wal-Mart you will pay an outrageous 42%!

In Massachusetts, this translates to:

An average large company employee will pay roughly between $55 and $86 per month (or, $660 to $1,032 per year) for an individual plan. It’s between $119 and $186 per month (or, $1,425 to $2,232 per year) for a plan insuring a family of 4.

A Wal-Mart worker will pay about $145 per month (or, $1,720 per year) for an individual plan—if you are even covered at all! It’s roughly $313 per month (or, $3,756 per year) for a plan insuring a family of 4.

Who pays for all of these uninsured workers? You bet we do!

You think Wal-Mart has great prices? Just remember, if you shop at Wal-Mart, you’re paying A LOT more for that tool set or pair of shoes than you think. The costs are just cleverly hidden in your own health insurance premium and your tax dollars, so you don’t realize you’re paying it. You pay these increased costs simply because Wal-Mart and McDonald’s are unwilling to play by the rules and pick up their share of the tab for their employees’ health insurance coverage.

What can we do to stop them from taking money from us through our taxes and insurance premiums? DON’T BUY FROM THEM ANYMORE! It’s that simple. Vote with your wallet--make them change by not giving them your hard-earned money!

These companies are bullies that are more than happy to have us, the taxpayers, subsidize their operating costs. Anti-worker Wal-Mart flexes its economic muscle wherever it sets up shop to force its competitors to pay their employees lower wages and benefits in order to compete with Wal-Mart's race to the bottom. With Wal-Mart's growing influence and dominance in the market, this means more and more employees will be paid less, provided less benefits and we, the taxpayers, are left with more and more of the bill.

Bully-Mart: ALWAYS LOW PAY AND BENEFITS. Always. McBully’s: I’m Hatin’ It.

Smart companies have begun to realize that they will see higher productivity from their employees if they are respected and treated well. For it is only when workers feel the company they work for is looking out for their needs that they will be loyal and willing to go above and beyond to contribute back to the company.

WorldCom Ex-CEO Found Guilty

The Ex-CEO of WorldCom (the company that just kept on stealing) has found Guilty!

The authorities had been looking for this rare, little maggot called Guilty for a long time. Now they can thank ex-CEO Bernard Ebbers for finding it.

Ebbers wanted to keep the maggot for himself, just as he wanted to keep all the money he stole from WorldCom, but it wasn't meant to be.

So, now Mr. Ebbers gets to spend up to 85 years in prison.

Party Down

Like the Democrats during the 1970s, today's GOP is hidebound and out of touch.

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells

The following article was written before the election, but is incredibly relevant despite that:

In late July, on a gauzy, impossibly hot Washington evening, I met a friend of mine in a quiet sushi restaurant a few blocks from the White House. My friend, a conservative aide to an even more conservative senator, is from the suburbs of Atlanta; his favorite word is "ignorant," by which he means some combination of insufficiently educated and totally deluded, and which he usually uses to describe Bill Clinton's foreign policy, or his ex-girlfriend, or a particularly memorable English professor. On this particular night, though, he was using it, liberally, to describe the Republican congressional approach to policy-making, on issue after issue.

I hadn't expected this line from him. My friend is the kind of tough-minded partisan who screens dates for political affiliation and who says that whenever he gets weeping calls from retired constituents about too-expensive prescription drugs, he thinks to himself, "You should have saved more then, shouldn't you?" A year ago, he was gearing up for a life on the Hill; now, he's taking the LSAT and planning for law school. He won't vote for Bush this year, either, a choice he says was "unthinkable" 12 months ago.

"What's infuriating," he told me, "is that it's hard to know what the party stands for beyond defending a bunch of interests. I mean, look at the leadership--who do you have? Frist? Hack. DeLay? Hack. Hastert? Total hack. I can't figure out if the administration are hacks or just don't care. John Kerry's running on budget deficits--that's supposed to be our fucking issue." He started slamming his hand against the table. "In 15 years, the whole federal budget blows up because of Medicare, this ridiculous prescription-drug benefit that no one even likes, our taxes go through the roof, and the economy breaks down. And this time, it's gonna be our fault."

This has been the summer of Republican discontent--a rare moment of finger-pointing and introspection after some in the party began to examine the sum product of four years in power, and concluded that, judging by their own principles, the GOP should have done much, much better: In late May, the libertarian Cato Institute hosted a conference on the legacy of the Republican revolution of 1994, a decade later. Dick Armey, the retired House Majority leader who helped engineer the 1994 takeover, was the keynote speaker, and he was decidedly glum. The party, he said, has reverted to "doing the wrong things so we can get reelected to the right thing." Newt Gingrich, who followed Armey, told the audience that their revolution had reached a tipping point in the late 1990s, when it had traded in ideology for interest groups. These were criticisms that Gingrich and Armey had been voicing privately for months, but such a public airing had a bracing effect. "When you want to talk to people outside of government to get perspective on how you're doing in terms of conservative principles, you talk to Gingrich, you talk to Armey, and maybe there's a third guy, but I can't think of him right now," a senior aide to a conservative Southern congressman told me in August. "People paid attention."

Within a month, the floodgates seemed to open. The right-wing pundit Robert Novak wrote a June column blasting "runaway spending" by Republicans in Congress. In a July speech before the National Press Club, Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, often described as a possible '08 presidential candidate, tore into his party for a legislative attitude where "nothing can get done unless every Congressman has something to take back to his district." Meanwhile, on the Hill, internecine squabbles had stalled major legislation on energy, tax reform, and highway funds. The Wall Street Journal, interviewing House Speaker Dennis Hastert about the legislative logjam, caught him in a contemplative mood: "The American people don't want us pointing fingers," he told the paper. "They want us to do something."

Yet as Congress closed shop for the summer, divisions between Republicans had meant the House couldn't pass a 2005 budget, a depressing signal of failure. Meanwhile, the percentage of Americans who disapprove of the job being done by Congress, which had been hovering around 40 for the past five years, leapt to 52. Several polls taken in the spring and early summer showed that voters preferred Democratic positions to Republican ones on every single domestic policy issue. And the grinding, bloody fight in Iraq had some of the war's strongest GOP proponents throwing up their hands in disgust at the administration's failure to plan for the post-Saddam occupation. Indeed, by late summer, a few Republicans who could politically afford to--such as retiring Rep. Doug Bereuter (R-Neb.)--were openly questioning the wisdom of the whole venture, as were a majority of the American people.

With John Kerry still leading most campaign polls, conservative despair began to take on a more hysterical tone, and epic scope. "The era of small government is over," warned David Brooks in The New York Times, shortly before the Republican national convention. "We'll let slip a thinly disguised secret," wrote Andrew Ferguson in The Weekly Standard. "Republicans are supporting a candidate that relatively few of them find personally or politically appealing." Even Pat Buchanan, in his vampy style, warned of a coming "civil war" within the party.

Such open hostility subsided during the GOP convention, damped down by the balloons and the president's rising poll numbers. Still, the summer's feud was like a peek inside a volcano: It offered a glimpse of the eventual eruption. The attacks on the party and its leaders came, scattered but forceful, from all parts of the GOP; though most critics shared a bill of complaint, each faction had its own recipe for salvation. The Armey-Novak conservatives wanted the party to renew its commitment to the small-government principles of 1994 and 1980. Brooks and the moderates looked to 1904, to the strong government conservatism of Theodore Roosevelt. Both groups were wishing for a kind of soul transplant: If the party could just reclaim its essence, they hoped, the current drift might be resolved.

But both of these historical analogies are hopeful fantasies about what the GOP might someday become, not reasonable guesses at the near future. The truth is, for all its apparent strength, the modern Republican Party has worked itself into a position of profound and growing decay. Worried Republicans are right to look to the past to help sort out their future. But the right date isn't 1994 or 1904. It's the late 1970s--and the party to look at isn't the Republicans, but the Democrats. Like the Democrats of that period, the current version of the Republican Party is supremely powerful but ideologically incoherent, run largely by and for special interests and increasingly alienated from the broader voting public. Today's GOP is headed for a profound crackup. The only questions are when, exactly, the decline will start--and how long it will last.

Full employment and oil shale

American political parties, like great empires, often seem strongest at the moment before they fall. Just as the principles and ideas that have built the new order triumph, their relevance and practicality begin to fade as new conditions emerge. Yet true believers will cling ever-tighter to the old ways of thought, and those who cling tightest are granted the greatest moral authority. Meanwhile, the constituencies that the ascendant party once rallied to its cause become powers unto themselves: parochial, imperious, demanding, and hard to discipline. Soon party leaders begin to confuse the agenda of their constituencies with the interests of the nation, and the act of governance becomes less a crafting of solutions than a division of the spoils.

This is the state of the GOP today, but it also describes the condition of the Democrats two-and-a-half decades ago. It can be hard to remember these days just how powerful and dominant the Democratic Party was in 1976. Like the Republicans in 2000, they had just elected as president a moderate, evangelical Southern governor, defeating the successor to a morally flawed president by promising to restore integrity to the Oval Office. Like the GOP today, the Democrats found themselves in control of all three branches of the federal government--the Democrats had near-veto-proof majorities in both chambers of Congress--as well as the majority of state legislatures. Organized labor, its power not yet decimated, was squarely in the Democratic camp, while the corporate lobbying sector offered significant support for the simple reason that Democrats ran everything. Just as the GOP in 2000 tended to look at the Clinton administration as an unfortunate detour on the road to a permanent Republican majority, so Democrats in 1976 looked back on the Nixon years as a temporary aberration from the natural order in Washington, one Democrats had and always would dominate. It wasn't just that the party was powerful; the Democrats, returning to the capital in the winter of 1977, thought their principles put them on the right side of history, and the country had come back around to seeing things their way.

But for all the party's political power and institutional strength, it was in an intellectual rut, returning again and again to ideas that had long ago stopped working. Like any party, the Democrats then were a coalition of factions. New Deal economic constituencies (labor, farmers, industrial and energy interests) coexisted with newer liberal-left, socially-conscious groups (environmentalists, rights-conscious black and Hispanic organizations, feminists, Naderites) that had emerged from the tumult of the 1960s. These various factions often disagreed vehemently. Environmentalists clashed with autoworkers over fuel-efficiency standards; building trade unions were at war with civil rights groups over affirmative action. Scoop Jackson Democrats wanted Washington to take a tougher line with our Soviet enemies; human rights doves wanted Washington to take a tougher line against our tyrannical allies, such as Ferdinand Marcos. What all of them could agree on, however, was the vital importance of big government. Each wanted more spending for its programs, more robust regulations, and a stronger hand for Washington in the market to restrain the forces that threatened its own interests. Big government was the glue that held the Democratic coalition together. It was also the moral cause that defined the party, and in 1976, that cause seemed beyond dispute. Even Richard Nixon had created the Environmental Protection Agency and instituted wage and price controls to fight inflation. The argument seemed over. Big government had won.

But of course, the argument was anything but over. An increasing number of voters were becoming aware that government was failing to make much headway against the major problems of the day. The economy remained weak, energy costs were rising, and social chaos was spreading in the cities. A few reform-minded Democrats and intellectuals were starting to rethink the premises of big government liberalism, to wonder if there might be less expensive and bureaucratic--and more effective--means to traditional liberal ends. Carter was inclined to agree with them. But such thinking was anathema to the party's liberal leaders and most powerful interest groups, and they were positioned to stop it.

When Carter took over as president, the nation's most pressing--and consuming--problems were economic. Growth and worker productivity were low, unemployment and federal deficits were high and rising, and, by midway through the president's term, inflation and interest rates were compounding at more than 10 percent annually. Carter's plan was to balance the budget, slashing spending enough to also provide for a $15 billion tax cut which would act as an economic spur. Congress rejected the package, insisting instead on an economic stimulus package (which Carter reluctantly signed) consisting of $15 billion for public works projects, urban aid, and education, the kind of program that reeked of 1933. This pattern was repeated throughout Carter's term, as unions fought the president's calls for voluntary wage controls to combat inflation, and Congress resisted Carter's repeated attempts to balance the federal budget. The president proposed a budget for 1980 designed to restore fiscal austerity and cut spending to keep the deficit for that year under $30 billion. Congress insisted on restoring the cuts, and by the end of the process, the budget was more than $60 billion in the red.

The second great challenge the Democrats faced was an OPEC-induced surge in energy prices. Carter came in with some good and some bad ideas about how to alleviate the energy crisis. Democrats in Congress rebuffed the president's best plan--Carter's attempt to lift the price controls Richard Nixon had imposed on domestic energy. But congressional Democrats eagerly adopted his bad ideas, including the creation of the Department of Energy, which would become perhaps the most dysfunctional agency in Washington. House Speaker Tip O'Neill set up a task force to speed along passage of the authorizing bill, getting the agency running in a matter of months. Congress happily signed on in 1980 when Carter asked it to set up the Synthetic Fuels Corporation. The program ultimately spent $88 billion subsidizing American oil and gas companies to try to extract petroleum out of oil shale, an enterprise only slightly more cost-effective than trying to wring water from a stone. The SynFuels concept dispensed a lot of taxpayer money to a lot of Democratic interest groups but did nothing to solve the energy crisis.

The third major challenge was to halt the continuing increase in crime, poverty, and family breakdown, especially in the cities. Carter put forth a training program for AFDC recipients, an early stab at welfare reform. Congressional Democrats insisted instead on broadening the AFDC beneficiary rolls and threw in another public works program for good measure. Then lawmakers advanced the Humphrey-Hawkins act, a resolution that made government-guaranteed full employment the goal and policy of the United States--this even though no one knew how to guarantee full employment short of expanding expensive and corruption-prone government make-work efforts like the CETA program. The left-liberals held both political power and moral sway: When Reps. Ron Dellums (D-Calif.) and John Conyers (D-Mich.) walked out of meetings with the president because he wouldn't commit to full employment policies for urban blacks, they were cheered for their principle.

But Carter's downfall wasn't assured until a pair of foreign policy bungles in the year before the election. First, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, which hawks charged was the result of the administration's soft attitude towards Moscow's military threat. Then, in November 1979, the Iranian revolutionaries who had just overthrown the U.S.-backed shah took about 90 hostages in the American embassy in Tehran. After initial negotiations stalled, the State Department, and the party's human rights liberals, wanted Carter to talk with the hostage takers. The Defense Department, and the party's hawkish wing, wanted the president to bomb Iran to force the revolutionaries to give up the hostages. Carter tried a middle course, the disastrous helicopter rescue mission known as Desert One. These two foreign policy failures proved the last straw for neoconservatives and many national security voters, convincing them that the Democratic Party was simply too weak and compromised to defend effectively the nation and helping to drive them to the Republicans.

By 1980, many liberals were in open revolt against Carter, abandoning him to support Ted Kennedy's ultimately-doomed primary challenge even as the public was sending unmistakable signals that it was sick of Kennedy-style big government. The number of Americans who agreed with the statement that "the best government is one which governs least" had risen from 32 percent in 1973 to 59 percent in 1981, and liberal positions on crime and welfare were similarly unpopular. Towards the end of his term, Carter did manage to push through his energy deregulation legislation and to install the monetarist Paul Volcker as Fed chairman. These acts eventually succeeded in bringing down oil prices and the inflation rate--to the political benefit of Carter's successor, Ronald Reagan.

Earmarks and zygotes

Fast-forward a couple of decades, swap a few particulars, and the same patterns fit the current state of the Republican Party in Washington. The GOP came in to office in 2001 with control of all branches of government, and with a similar confidence in their long-term prospects. Over the last few years, such party operatives as Karl Rove, Grover Norquist, and Tom DeLay have cowed Democrats with chesty, blustering talk about a "permanent majority." But like the Democrats circa '76, Republicans entered Washington three years ago under an ideological banner that had already lost its relevance to most Americans.

Twenty years earlier, a policy agenda of tax cuts and smaller government made practical sense for the country. Reagan succeeded in cutting taxes, and his successors, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, eventually got government spending under control. By the 2000 election, upper-bracket tax rates had been steady for two decades at a rate far lower than they were through most of the previous 50 years, and the federal government's share of GDP was 18.4 percent, well below where it had been during the Reagan administration. While short-term, broad-based tax cuts still made sense as a recession-fighter, the big challenges America faced--chiefly the unrecognized danger of terrorism and the coming retirement of the baby boom generation--could not be solved with further tax and spending cuts. If anything, the opposite would be called for.

But this budgetary reality had little effect on the movement conservatives who by 2001 dominated the Republican Party. Instead, they embraced the small-government/low taxes paradigm even more tightly, with a moralistic fervor not unlike that which moved liberals in the 1970s to a ferocious defense of big government and high taxes against all logic. Politically, cutting taxes provided for Republicans a unifying force similar to that which spending had provided the Democrats: It was the one policy that almost every part of the often-fractious GOP coalition--libertarians, cultural conservatives, multinationals, small business owners, investors in Wall Street, the energy sector--could agree on. And for the party's strategists, tax cuts were the route to a permanent GOP majority. The promise of a new rate reduction every year--first rate reductions, then dividend cuts, then corporate breaks--would keep K Street pliable. And eventually, a shift in the tax burden from the wealthy and corporations onto the backs of the middle class would (or so the theory held) cool voter demand for more government, thereby undermining the Democrats' reason for being.

Whether or not the GOP's tax strategy will pay dividends this fall is hard to say. On the one hand, the president has been able to warn voters that Kerry will raise taxes (which he will, on upper-income Americans). On the other, $3.25 trillion in long-term tax cuts, mostly for the wealthy, has yielded what has so far been at best an anemic recovery and a half-trillion dollars in structural deficits as far as anyone can reasonably predict. This has meant that voters, by September, preferred a Democrat on the economy over a Republican by 54 percent to 37 percent. The rejection even extends to tax cuts, historically the domestic topic on which the GOP scores the biggest advantage; Gallup polls throughout the summer found voters preferring Kerry to Bush on the issue.

Meanwhile, as tax receipts have plummeted, federal spending has increased by more than 6 percent per year since 2000. Most, if not all, of this spending--for the military, for homeland security, and for prescription drugs for seniors--was necessary and had broad public support. Yet it has panicked conservatives, who cannot accept the historical reality that, as Sebastian Mallaby wrote in these pages last month, when advanced societies grow wealthier, the share of GDP devoted to government inevitably increases ("The Deficit Conquers All," September 2004).

Instead of facing this reality, the average congressional Republican has acted like a preacher hooked on prostitutes, publicly inveighing against the sin while personally wallowing in it. There is no greater measure of spending indiscipline than "earmarks," targeted spending provisions attached to appropriations bill. The number of earmarks has tripled since Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in 1994.

Further crippling the GOP's spending discipline has been the same tendency that affected the Democrats two decades ago: confusing the agendas of its favored interest groups with the interests of the public at large. Where the Democrats created ineffective public works bills and the ludicrous SynFuels program, the Republicans have put forth an energy bill that has collapsed under the weight of its own energy-sector subsidies, and a Medicare prescription-drug benefit so indulgent of the pharmaceutical and HMO lobbies that barely a quarter of seniors support the bill. Meanwhile, energy costs remain high, Medicare premiums are rising, and polls show that on energy and health-care issues, voters prefer Democrats to Republicans by wide margins.

Two decades ago, Democrats granted moral authority to identity-group liberals, who, in their admirable zeal to fight discrimination, soft-pedaled evidence that the country was growing more tolerant, and refused to consider that factors other than racism might explain, say, lagging minority test scores. As a result, Democrats defended unpopular quota-style affirmative-action programs and bilingual education. Today, Republicans bow to the supposed moral superiority of Christian conservatives, who, though living in the most religiously-minded and tolerant country on earth, persist in feeling persecuted. The GOP lets these groups lead them by the nose--even when, as on stem cell research, it puts them in the position of defending the unpopular and morally dubious argument that millions of Parkinson's patients should be denied a major hope for a cure in order to prevent the destruction of a few zygotes with zero chance of ever becoming humans. Two decades ago, Carter's overly cautious foreign policy helped convince millions of security-minded Democrats to abandon the party. Now, Bush's incautious foreign policy may be driving millions of Republicans the other way.

The Republican Mondale

Of course, Carter and Bush are not necessarily bound to the same fate, in part because of their very different personal characteristics. Carter was a micromanager who, while president, famously drew up a schedule for the White House tennis court; Bush says he doesn't bother to read the newspapers. Carter governed by consensus and was prone to abrupt policy changes; Bush makes snap judgments and rarely changes course. But the greatest difference between the two, and the one with perhaps most enduring consequences, lies in their attitude towards the self-destructive, retrograde tendencies within their own parties.

Jimmy Carter fought against his party's worst instincts, lost, and in losing made himself look weak. His failure to win reelection convinced his party's liberal wing not that they should have been more open to Carter's reforms, but that they had been right all along. In 1984, Democrats rejected the progressive centrist presidential bid of Gary Hart in favor of liberal stalwart Walter Mondale, who in turn chose as running-mate a liberal New York congresswoman, Geraldine Ferraro, to form a ticket that carried one state in 50. By 1988, the Democratic landscape started to shift; the party nominated a pragmatist governor, Michael Dukakis, and a conservative Texas senator, Lloyd Bentsen, as his running mate. But Dukakis, tone-deaf on crime and defense, fit too easily into a right-wingers' caricature of a Northern liberal, and he, too, lost badly. It wasn't until 1992 that the party finally put a Southern centrist, Bill Clinton, at the top of the ticket. And it took Clinton eight years of cajoling and fighting with his party's liberal base (who put up big fights over welfare reform and the president's fiscal conservatism) to put the Democrats more-or-less squarely behind moderate policies. Changing a party takes time.

By contrast, George Bush has embraced his party's worst instincts, thereby winning its support and making himself look strong. This image of strength, plus an ineffective opponent, might be enough to win him reelection. But ironically, a Bush win will have the same effect on the GOP as Carter's loss had on the Democrats: It will convince the ideologues that they were right. For that reason, moderate Republicans who truly want to take back their party must secretly hope--indeed, many do--that Bush loses.

A different kind of GOP isn't hard to imagine, at least in the abstract. In The New York Times Magazine last month, David Brooks sketched out a reasonable vision of what he calls "progressive conservatism." Brooks wants the GOP to embrace a slightly larger government, to value balanced budgets as highly as low taxes, to stop doing so many favors for business, and to focus on entitlement reform, national service, improving teacher quality, and promoting marriage in the ghetto. This is the vision of the Republican Party that belongs chiefly to its rump reformist wing: John McCain, Colin Powell, Rudy Giuliani, and others. It's not a bad platform, and Brooks is probably right that the Republicans would command more votes and run the country better if they hewed more closely to it.

But there are two problems with this vision. First, Brooks's "progressive conservatism" is far closer to the majority Democratic position than the Republican one. Second, it is almost impossible to see the current GOP accepting it any time soon, even if Bush loses in November. A Bush defeat--especially if it is accompanied by Republican loss of the Senate--would certainly lead to some version of the "civil war" Pat Buchanan and others have warned of. In that war, McCain and other moderates will enjoy some "I told you so" authority. But it is hard to exaggerate how weak, small, and out of step the moderates are with the rest of the party machinery--even with those who are furious with the GOP leadership. It's hard to imagine Tom DeLay waking up in January and suddenly deciding to become a champion of bipartisanship. Dennis Hastert and Bill Frist are probably not going to stop giving business lobbies the run of Congress--with two decades of history and habit pointing them the other way. The Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation are not likely to abandon the low-tax/small government agenda that lured all of their scholars and is written into their bylaws. Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh aren't suddenly going to turn into reasoning pragmatists, even-handedly comparing economic models and different proposals for school reform. Perhaps most importantly, with virtually all of Congress running for reelection in politically safe districts where they need only draw the votes of stalwarts, it's hard to imagine GOP voters insisting on an immediate, rapid change in ideological direction.

Political parties don't abandon their most cherished ideas, break with their most powerful interests, or dump their most entrenched leaders for high-minded civic reasons. They do so only when they lose elections again, and again, and again. And if history's any guide, that is going to be the eventual fate of today's Republican Party.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells is an editor of The Washington Monthly.

Worst President Ever

Lies, Lies and More Lies

Want to stop the lies, liars and the lying liars who tell them? Tired of being perpetually lied to, day after day? Sick of hearing the liars say we should "stay the course" when you know so much is going so wrong because the liars are telling so many lies?

Then, VOTE FOR CHANGE NOVEMBER 2ND! You have the power to fire the liars purportedly representing us!

Click HERE to view a short video clip demonstrating why we must vote the liars out of office.

You will need QuickTime Player installed to view the above video clip. If you do not yet have QuickTime Player, click HERE to download it for free.

Cheney The Liar

Above: Edwards and Cheney the Liar sat together at a "prayer breakfast" February 1, 2001. Cheney the Liar said at the breakfast, "Congressman Watts, Sen. Edwards, friends from across America and distinguished visitors to our country from all over the world, Lynne and I are honored to be with you all this morning."

LIAR!



Above: Cheney the Liar is standing on the left, next to Senator Edwards, as the junior Senator from North Carolina, Elizabeth Dole, is sworn into office, January 2003.

LIAR!!

Contrary to what Cheney the Liar said in the debate last night, of COURSE Edwards and Cheney the Liar have met before!! What a pathological LIAR!

Click HERE to learn more about how Cheney lies.

The Emperor Has No Clothes!

Holy crap, Thursday's presidential debate was HILARIOUS!

It was hysterical to watch such a lopsided debate--with Shrub just repeating himself over and over and over...making awkward gestures, facial expessions...and showing the world what he truly is--a rich, selfish, bratty son who knows ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ABOUT ANYTHING!

To watch Kerry is to see true leadership and intelligence, which is no more abundantly obvious than when he's in the same room as Shrub discussing the issues.

Hell, I had to check to make sure I hadn't mistaken the challenger for the incumbent Shrub was so unpresidential! Shrub is our current president? Kerry is the challenger? WHAT?

Click HERE to learn more about the 1st debate.

Apathetic Incompetence

On September 30, 2004, President George Bush went on national television to debate foreign policy with Senator John Kerry.

Did he look like someone you’d trust with your future? Did he seem decisive? Did you feel reassured? Did he seem clear, coherent, credible?

DID HE SEEM AS IF HE EVEN HAD A CLUE?

John Kerry has demonstrated he has the courage, compassion and credibility to lead this country during a difficult time. We trust him to take the job seriously.

THE EXCUSE PRESIDENT

Excuses, excuses, excuses...

President Shrub blames everything and everyone else for anything that goes wrong.

As John Kerry said today, "This president has created more excuses than jobs"!

"The president wants you to believe that this record is the record of the victim of circumstances, the result of bad luck, not bad decisions," Kerry said in his speech. "Well, Mr. President, when it comes to your record, we agree -- you own it."

"He chose and he chose and he chose, and every single time it was middle-class Americans who paid the price," Kerry said. "George Bush accomplished all this in only four years. Imagine what he could do in another four years."

"His is the excuse presidency -- never wrong, never responsible, never to blame ... no, it's not our fault; no, there's nothing wrong; no, we can't do better; no, we haven't made a single mistake," Kerry said.

Shrub is the EXCUSE PRESIDENT

Click HERE to learn more about Dubya's excuses.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt

"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any controlling private power."

-- President Franklin D. Roosevelt

September-October Surprise

Well, here it comes--don't say you never considered such a cynical attempt from President "Dubya" Hoover to win the upcoming election because nobody predicted it.

It's now being reported that the capture of Osama Bin Laden is near...woa! I'm shocked! 2 months or less before the election and they miraculously capture Bin Laden!!!!

Shrub, Rove et. al. are the creepiest, most repulsive creatures ever to walk this earth who will stop at nothing to get their hands on power and money. I have nothing but pure hatred and vitriolic anger for this disgusting and nauseating administration.

People--wake up!! These guys will stop at NOTHING to gain power!! When will you finally wake up and see it! The truth is staring you right in the face!! They have no interest in your well being nor mine--only power and money...it's that simple.

Please, for your sake--for everyone's sake--WAKE UP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!



Click HERE to find out more about this revolting story.

Yoshi Tsurumi - Shrub's Harvard Economics Professor

Yoshihiro Tsurumi is an expert of International Business Strategy, International Trade and Investment, International Transfer of Technology, and U.S.-Japan Comparisons of Economic, Industrial, and Corporate Structures.

He is a scholar in the fields of industrial policy, international transfer of technology and global business. He is a leading consultant to the International Monetary Fund and many government and multinational firms.

He is currently a Zicklin School of Business professor of marketing at CUNY (City University of New York).

Tsurumi was also one of President Shrub’s professors at Harvard Business School from 1973 to 1974.

What does he think of Shrub?

He remembers Shrub as an "intellectually shallow, pathological liar without any moral compass." He states, "either he was clowning in class or if he’s called on (I often do that) he makes all kinds of flippant statements. Very shallow. Most of all those flippant statements are nonsensical. But often he revealed his strong biases against the medical, Medicare, social security anything the United States has built up since the Great Depression."

He goes on to say Shrub was, "terrible. Intellectually very shallow. But more importantly immature, but lacking the sense of responsibility, compassion, always indulging in denials when he is called on in his lies. And lies came very easily to him. For example, one statement that he made still stuck with me. We were discussing how the United States Government should help the lower income group or people on the fixed pension to adjust themselves to the high energy costs during the oil crisis, to bring in the fairness into the US economic policies. And he raised the issues and he said, “People are poor because they are lazy.” Those are the lies."

Funny thing how Shrub is PROUDLY, EXTREMELY LAZY and yet--he somehow got his greedy little hands on a lot of money! Gee, how did that happen?

Click HERE to listen to the interview these quotes are taken from.



Above: Yoshihiro Tsurumi, economics professor at CUNY-Zicklin School of Business.

Click HERE for a piece of an interview with Yoshi Tsurumi taped just this morning (9/3/04). He comments on Shrub's acceptance speech last night and goes on to say Shrub shouldn't be 'president' of ANY type of organization, much less the United States.

Finally, you know how Shrub is really good at getting others to do his dirty work for him? Tsurumi explains how our Commander in Chief used to do the same exact thing at Harvard. And Tsurumi does some dirty work himself by grading the President’s acceptance speech. Click HERE to listen to the clip.

Open Letter to Shrub

From Michael Moore of the movie, "Fahrenheit 9/11," the following is an open letter he wrote to President Shrub:

Thursday, August 26th, 2004

It Takes Real Courage to Desert Your Post and Then Attack a Wounded Vet

August 26, 2004

Dear Mr. Bush,

I know you and I have had our differences in the past, and I realize I am the one who started this whole mess about "who did what" during Vietnam when I brought up that "deserter" nonsense back in January. But I have to hand it to you on what you have uncovered about John Kerry and his record in Vietnam. Kerry has tried to pass himself off as a war hero, but thanks to you and your friends, we now know the truth.

First of all, thank you for pointing out to all of us that Mr. Kerry was never struck by a BULLET. It was only SHRAPNEL that entered his body! I did not know that! Hell, what's the big deal about a bunch of large, sharp, metal shards ripping open your flesh? That happens to all of us! In my opinion, if you want a purple heart, you'd better be hit by a bullet -- with your name on it!

Secondly, thank you for sending Bob Dole out there and letting us know that Mr. Kerry, though wounded three times, actually "never spilled blood." When you are in the debates with Kerry, turn to him and say, "Dammit, Mr. Kerry, next time you want a purple heart, you better spill some American red blood! And I don't mean a few specks like those on O.J.'s socks -- we want to see a good pint or two of blood for each medal. In fact, I would have preferred that you had bled profusely, a big geyser of blood spewing out of your neck or something!" Then throw this one at him: "Senator Kerry, over 58,000 brave Americans gave their lives in Vietnam -- but YOU didn't. You only got WOUNDED! What do you have to say for yourself???" Lay that one on him and he won't know what to do.

And thanks, also, Mr. Bush, for exposing the fact that Mr. Kerry might have actually WOUNDED HIMSELF in order to get those shiny medals. Of course he did! How could the Viet Cong have hit him -- he was on a SWIFT boat! He was going too fast to be hit by enemy fire. He tried to blow himself up three different times just so he could go home and run for president someday. It's all so easy to see, now, what he was up to.

What would we do without you, Mr. Bush? Criticize you as we might, when it comes to pointing out other men's military records, there is no one who can touch your prowess. In 2000, you let out the rumor that your opponent John McCain might be "nuts" from the 5 years he spent in a POW camp. Then, in the 2002 elections, your team compared triple-amputee Sen. Max Cleland to Osama bin Laden, and that cost him the election. And now you are having the same impact on war hero John Kerry. Since you (oops, I mean "The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth!") started running those ads, Kerry's poll numbers have dropped (with veterans, he has lost 18 points in the last few weeks).

Some people have said "Who are you, Mr. Bush, to attack these brave men considering you yourself have never seen combat -- in fact, you actively sought to avoid it." What your critics fail to understand is that even though your dad got you into a unit that would never be sent to Vietnam -- and even though you didn't show up for Guard duty for at least a year -- at least you were still IN FAVOR of the Vietnam War! Cowards like Clinton felt it was more important to be consistent (he opposed the war, thus he refused to go) than to be patriotic and two-faced.

The reason that I think you know so much about other men's war wounds is because, during your time in the Texas Air National Guard, you suffered so many of them yourself. Consider the paper cut you received on September 22, 1972, while stationed in Alabama, working on a Senate campaign for your dad's friend (when you were supposed to be on the Guard base). A campaign brochure appeared from nowhere, ambushing your right index finger, and blood trickled out onto your brand new argyle sweater.

Then there was the incident with the Crazy Glue when your fraternity brothers visited you one weekend at the base and glued your lips together while you were "passed out." Though initially considered "friendly fire," it was later ruled that you suffered severe post traumatic stress disorder from the assault and required certain medicinal attention -- which, it seems, was provided by those same fraternity brethren.

But nothing matched your heroism when, on July 2, 1969, you sustained a massive head injury when enemy combatants from another Guard unit dropped a keg of Coors on your head during a reconnaissance mission at a nearby all-girls college. Fortunately, the cool, smooth fluids that poured out of the keg were exactly what was needed to revive you.

That you never got a purple heart for any of these incidents is a shame. I can fully appreciate your anger at Senator Kerry for the three he received. I mean, Kerry was a man of privilege, he could have gotten out just like you. Instead, he thinks he's going to gain points with the American people bragging about how he was getting shot at every day in the Mekong Delta. Ha! Is that the best he can do? Hell, I hear gunfire every night outside my apartment window! If he thinks he is going to impress anyone with the fact that he volunteered to go when he could have spent the Vietnam years on the family yacht, he should think again. That only shows how stupid he was! True-blue Americans want a president who knows how to pull strings and work the system and get away with doing as little work as possible!

So, to make it up to you, I have written some new ads you can use on TV. People will soon tire of the swift boat veterans and you are going to need some fresh, punchier material. Feel free to use any of these:

ANNOUNCER: "When the bullets were flying all around him in Vietnam, what did John Kerry do? He said he leaned over the boat and 'pulled a man out of the river.' But, as we all know, men don't live in the river -- fish do. John Kerry knows how to tell a big fish tale. What he won't tell you is that when the enemy was shooting at him, he ducked. Do you want a president who will duck? Vote Bush."

ANNOUNCER: "Mr. Kerry's biggest supporter, Sen. Max Cleland, claims to have lost two legs and an arm in Vietnam. But he still has one arm! How did that happen? One word: Cowardice. When duty called, he was unwilling to give his last limb. Is that the type of selfishness you want hanging out in the White House? We think not. Vote for the man who would be willing to give America his right frontal lobe. Vote Bush."

Hope these help, Mr. Bush. And remember, when the American death toll in Iraq hits 1,000 during the Republican convention, be sure to question whether those who died really did indeed "die" -- or were they just trying to get their faces on CNN's nightly tribute to fallen heroes? The sixteen who've died so far this week were probably working hand in hand with the Kerry campaign to ruin your good time in New York. Stay consistent, sir, and always, ALWAYS question the veracity of anyone who risks their life for this country. It's the least they deserve.

Yours,

Michael Moore

mmflint@aol.com

www.michaelmoore.com

P.S. George, I know you said you don't read the newspaper, but USA Today has given me credentials to the Republican convention to write a guest column each day next week (Tues.-Fri.). If you don't want to read it, you and I will be in the same building so maybe I could come by and read it to you? Lemme know...

Poverty in U.S. Grows

Some 1.3 million Americans slid into poverty in 2003 as the ranks of the poor rose 4 percent to 35.9 million, with children and blacks worse off than most, the U.S. government said on August 26, 2004. Despite the Bush-purported "economic recovery," the percentage of the U.S. population living in poverty rose for the third straight year to 12.5 percent--the highest since 1998--from 12.1 percent in 2002, the Census Bureau said in its annual poverty report. The widely cited scorecard on the nation's economy showed one-third of those in poverty were children.

This is the third year in a row that the number of people living in poverty rose--cooincidence that is exactly the number of years Shrub has been in office? You can certainly draw your own conclusions on that.

Click HERE to learn more about how the middle class is sinking into poverty to the delight of the greedy.

John Edwards, our next Vice President

If you didn't get the opportunity to watch John Edwards as he accepted his Vice Presidential nomination last night, click HERE to do so.

If you prefer, you can just listen to the audio by clicking HERE.

Barack Obama and Ilana Wexler

If you watch or listen to just a few people's words from the Democratic National Convention, 2 that I would wholeheartedly recommend are:



Barack Obama is a very moving and exceptionally bright Democratic Senatorial candidate from the state of Illinois. He is the son of a Kenyan and Kansan and has a very compelling story to tell. Click HERE to watch him tell it. If you prefer, you can just listen to the audio of his speech by clicking HERE.



The other very short speech I highly recommend listening to was delivered by Ilana Wexler, the 12-year-old founder of the national "Kids for Kerry" organization. Click HERE to watch Ilana. If you prefer, you can just listen to the audio of her short speech by clicking HERE.

More Public Servants and Celebrities

Today, while again working at the Democratic National Convention here in Boston, I spotted a few more public servants and others who many are familiar with.

Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), who represents the 6th Congressional District of California covering all of Marin County and part of Sonoma County north of San Francisco deep in the heart of the famous California wine country and towering Redwood trees, took time to talk with a few of us volunteering at the Ritz Carlton-Back Bay. It wasn't a lengthy conversation, but she definitely left a really positive impression on me!

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who was the first female to take this post, also took a few moments to say "hi, how are you?" as she headed out of the hotel after attending a Women's Luncheon there.

Here are some of the people I spotted today:



Above: Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (1997-2001).



Above: Rep. Lynn Woolsey, Democratic Congresswoman from California.



Above: Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, Democratic Congresswoman from Ohio.



Above: Rep. Henry Waxman, Democratic Congressman from California.



Above: New York State Democratic Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.



Above: Dave Barry, humor columnist from the Miami Herald.

I also saw Robert Novak, infamous conservative columnist.

Public Servant and Celebrity Sightings

On a lighter note...

While I was working my first shift at the Democratic National Convention here at the Ritz Carlton-Back Bay in Boston today, I spotted or came in contact with the following public servants and celebrities:



Above: James Carville, author, Democratic Political Advisor/Analyst, CNN Political Commentator and co-host of CNN's show, "Crossfire."



Above: Rep. John Lewis, Democratic Congressman from Georgia who fought for Black Civil Rights with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr in the 1960s.



Above: Larry King, host of CNN's show, "Larry King Live."



Above: Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Democratic Congresswoman from California.



Above: Paul Begala, author, Democratic Political Advisor/Analyst, CNN Political Commentator and co-host of CNN's show, "Crossfire."



Above: Rep. Harold Ford, Jr., Democratic Congressman from Tennessee.



Above: Tom Delonge of the band, "Blink 182."



Above: Rep. Robert Matsui, Democratic Congressman from California.



Above: Rep. Patrick Kennedy, Democratic Congressman from Rhode Island, and son of Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts.



Above: Mark Warner, Democratic Governor of Virginia.



Above: Anita Hill, infamous figure from the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings.



Above: Gary Hart, former Senator from Colorado.



Above: David S. Broder, Washington Post Political Writer.

The Victims of War

Above: Iraqi child with extreme hydrocephalus, and defects of cerebral nerves.



Above: Iraqi child with extreme hydrocephalus, and defects of cerebral nerves.



Above: Severe malformation of face. This condition is sometimes refered to as 'Zyklopie.'

HAVE YOU HAD ENOUGH?

These Iraqi children have had enough war, too!!

They are suffering from birth defects resulting from their parents' exposure to radioactive dust from exploded American and British shells manufactured with depleted uranium.

What is depleted uranium? It's essentially nuclear waste. While the term 'depleted' implies it isn't particularly dangerous, in fact, this waste product of the nuclear industry is 'conveniently' disposed of by producing deadly weapons.

Depleted uranium is chemically toxic. It is an extremely dense, hard metal, and can cause chemical poisoning to the body in the same way as can lead or any other heavy metal. However, depleted uranium is also radiologically hazardous, as it spontaneously burns on impact, creating tiny aerosolised glass particles which are small enough to be inhaled. These uranium oxide particles emit all types of radiation, alpha, beta and gamma, and can be carried in the air over long distances.

Depleted uranium was first used on a large scale in military combat during the 1991 Gulf War, and has since been used in Bosnia in 1995, in the Balkans war of 1999 and, most recently, in the 2003 Iraq war.

These children now have to live with our hasty decisions to load our weapons up with depleted uranium and bomb the countries they're born into. This is SERIOUS AND VERY REAL, people, and not even the top public official in the United States can admit our most recent invasion of Iraq was wrong. LOOK AT THESE PHOTOS--look at what our government's decisions do to people!

If you didn't previously experience even a shred of doubt about war and, more specifically, the 2003 war in Iraq, ask yourself what the children in the photos above think of war.

Don't Be A Sucker for Corporate Propaganda

Take a look at THIS SHORT VIDEO to learn a little bit about how to arm yourself against today's sophisticated propaganda, which is commonly called "public relations" or "advertising."

Learn how propaganda firms manipulate the news, information and public opinion in an attempt to shape your behavior and to ensure you consume and purchase as many "things" as possible.

Don't let these propaganda firms manipulate you any more! Click HERE to learn how it works and what you can do to arm yourself against propaganda.

Click HERE to learn more about John Stauber and The Center for Media and Democracy, which he founded.

New Movie: "The Corporation"

The following is a description of the new movie, "The Corporation," which recently hit movie theatres in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia after becoming an unprecedented box office hit in Canada:

One hundred and fifty years ago, the corporation was a relatively insignificant entity. Today, it is a vivid, dramatic and pervasive presence in all our lives.

Like the Church, the Monarchy and the Communist Party in other times and places, the corporation is today’s dominant institution. But history humbles dominant institutions. All have been crushed, belittled or absorbed into some new order. The corporation is unlikely to be the first to defy history.

In this complex and highly entertaining documentary, Mark Achbar, co-director of the influential and inventive MANUFACTURING CONSENT: NOAM CHOMSKY AND THE MEDIA, teams up with co-director Jennifer Abbott and writer Joel Bakan to examine the far-reaching repercussions of the corporation’s increasing preeminence.

Based on Bakan’s book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, the film is a timely, critical inquiry that invites CEOs, whistle-blowers, brokers, gurus, spies, players, pawns and pundits on a graphic and engaging quest to reveal the corporation’s inner workings, curious history, controversial impacts and possible futures.

Featuring illuminating interviews with Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Howard Zinn and many others, THE CORPORATION charts the spectacular rise of an institution aimed at achieving specific economic goals as it also recounts victories against this apparently invincible force.

In THE CORPORATION, case studies, anecdotes and true confessions reveal behind-the-scenes tensions and influences in several corporate and anti-corporate dramas. Each illuminates an aspect of the corporation’s complex character.

Among the 40 interview subjects are CEOs and top-level executives from a range of industries: oil, pharmaceutical, computer, tire, manufacturing, public relations, branding, advertising and undercover marketing; in addition, a Nobel-prize winning economist, the first management guru, a corporate spy, and a range of academics, critics, historians and thinkers are interviewed.



LEGAL “PERSON"

In the mid-1800s the corporation emerged as a legal “person.“ Imbued with a “personality“ of pure self-interest, the next 100 years saw the corporation’s rise to dominance. The corporation created unprecedented wealth. But at what cost? The remorseless rationale of “externalities”—as Milton Friedman explains: the unintended consequences of a transaction between two parties on a third—is responsible for countless cases of illness, death, poverty, pollution, exploitation and lies.

THE PATHOLOGY OF COMMERCE: CASE HISTORIES

To more precisely assess the “personality“ of the corporate “person,“ a checklist is employed, using actual diagnostic criteria of the World Health Organization and the DSM-IV, the standard diagnostic tool of psychiatrists and psychologists. The operational principles of the corporation give it a highly anti-social “personality”: It is self-interested, inherently amoral, callous and deceitful; it breaches social and legal standards to get its way; it does not suffer from guilt, yet it can mimic the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism.

Four case studies, drawn from a universe of corporate activity, clearly demonstrate harm to workers, human health, animals and the biosphere. Concluding this point-by-point analysis, a disturbing diagnosis is delivered: the institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism fully meets the diagnostic criteria of a “psychopath.”

MINDSET

But what is the ethical mindset of corporate players? Should the institution or the individuals within it be held responsible?

The people who work for corporations may be good people, upstanding citizens in their communities—but none of that matters when they enter the corporation’s world. As Sam Gibara, Chairman of Goodyear Tire, explains, “If you really had a free hand, if you really did what you wanted to do that suited your personal thoughts and your personal priorities, you’d act differently.“

Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface, the world’s largest commercial carpet manufacturer, had an environmental epiphany and re-organized his $1.4 billion company on sustainable principles. His company may be a beacon of corporate hope, but is it an exception to the rule?

MONSTROUS OBLIGATIONS

A case in point: Sir Mark Moody-Stuart recounts an exchange between himself (at the time Chairman of Royal Dutch Shell), his wife and a motley crew of Earth First activists who arrived on the doorstep of their country home. The protesters chanted and stretched a banner over their roof that read, “MURDERERS.“ The response of the surprised couple was not to call the police, but to engage their uninvited guests in a civil dialogue, share concerns about human rights and the environment and eventually serve them tea on their front lawn. Yet, as the Moody-Stuarts apologize for not being able to provide soy milk for their vegan critics’ tea, Shell Nigeria is flaring unrivaled amounts of gas, making it one of the world's single worst sources of pollution. And all the professed concerns about the environment do not spare Ken Saro Wiwa and eight other activists from being hanged for opposing Shell's environmental practices in the Niger Delta.

The Corporation exists to create wealth, and even world disasters can be profit centers. Carlton Brown, a commodities trader, recounts with unabashed honesty the mindset of gold traders while the twin towers crushed their occupants. The first thing that came to their minds, he tells us, was: “How much is gold up?“

PLANET INC.

You’d think that things like disasters, or the purity of childhood, or even milk, let alone water or air, would be sacred. But no. Corporations have no built-in limits on what, who or how much they can exploit for profit. In the fifteenth century, the enclosure movement began to put fences around public grazing lands so that they might be privately owned and exploited. Today, every molecule on the planet is up for grabs. In a bid to own it all, corporations are patenting animals, plants, even your DNA.

Around things too precious, vulnerable, sacred or important to the public interest, governments have, in the past, drawn protective boundaries against corporate exploitation. Today, governments are inviting corporations into domains from which they were previously barred.

PERCEPTION MANAGEMENT

The Initiative Corporation spends $22 billion worldwide placing its clients’ advertising in every imaginable—and some unimaginable—media. One new medium: very young children. Their “Nag Factor“ study dropped jaws in the world of child psychiatry. It was designed not to help parents cope with their children’s nagging, but to help corporations design their ads and promotions so that children would nag for their products more effectively. Initiative Vice President Lucy Hughes elaborates: “You can manipulate consumers into wanting, and therefore buying your products. It’s a game.“

Today people can become brands. And brands can build cities. And university students can pay for their educations by shilling on national television for a credit card company. And a corporation even owns the rights to the popular song “Happy Birthday.” Do you ever get the feeling it’s all a bit much?

Corporations have invested billions to shape public and political opinion. When they own everything, who will stand for the public good?

THE PRICE OF WHISTLEBLOWING

It turns out that standing for the public good is an expensive proposition. Ask Jane Akre and Steve Wilson, two investigative reporters fired by Fox News after they refused to water down a story on rBGH, a synthetic hormone widely used in the United States (but banned in Europe and Canada) to rev up cows’ metabolism and boost their milk production. Because of the increased production, the cows suffer from mastitis, a painful infection of the udders. Antibiotics must then be injected, which find their way into the milk, and ultimately reduce people’s resistance to disease.

Fox demanded that they rewrite the story, and ultimately fired Akre and Wilson. Akre and Wilson subsequently sued Fox under Florida’s whistle-blower statute. They proved to a jury that the version of the story Fox would have had them put on the air was false, distorted or slanted. Akre was awarded $425,000. Then Fox appealed, the verdict was overturned on a technicality, and Akre lost her award. [For more information on the case see www.foxbghsuit.com]

DEMOCRACY LTD.

Democracy is a value that the corporation just doesn’t understand. In fact, corporations have often tried to undo democracy if it is an obstacle to their single-minded drive for profit. From a 1934 business-backed plot to install a military dictator in the White House (undone by the integrity of one U.S. Marine Corps General, Smedley Darlington Butler) to present-day law-drafting, corporations have bought military might, political muscle and public opinion.

And corporations do not hesitate to take advantage of democracy’s absence either. One of the most shocking stories of the twentieth century is Edwin Black’s recounting IBM’s strategic alliance with Nazi Germany—one that began in 1933 in the first weeks that Hitler came to power and continued well into World War II.

FISSURES

The corporation may be trying to render governments impotent, but since the landmark WTO protest in Seattle, a rising wave of networked individuals and groups have decided to make their voices heard. Movements to challenge the very foundations of the corporation are afoot: The charter revocation movement tried to bring down oil giant Unocal; a groundbreaking ballot initiative in Arcata, California, put a corporate agenda in the public spotlight in a series of town hall meetings; in Bolivia, the population fought and won a battle against a huge transnational corporation brought in by their government to privatize the water system; in India nearly 99% of the basmati patent of RiceTek was overturned; and W. R. Grace and the U.S. government’s patent on Neem was revoked.

As global individuals take back local power, a growing re-invigoration of the concept of citizenship is taking root. It has the power to not only strip the corporation of its seeming omnipotence, but to create a feeling and an ideology of democracy that is much more than its mere institutional version.

© Copyright 2003 - 2004, Big Picture Media Corporation MMIII

Click HERE to locate where THE CORPORATION is playing at a theatre near you!

Click HERE to watch the movie trailers.

The Corporation wins Audience Award at Sundance. Read More

Fox News: UNfair & UNbalanced

Fox News is clearly a propaganda machine for the radical conservative agenda, but it continues to use the slogan "Fair & Balanced." Finally, Fox News is being challenged.

Featuring "interviews with former Fox employees and leaked policy memos written by Fox executives," the film "Outfoxed" is "an obsessively researched expose" by Hollywood director Robert Greenwald, who shows how the network "distorts its coverage to serve the conservative political agenda of its owner, the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch."

In one scene, Fox News's chief White House reporter Carl Cameron is shown hamming it up with President Bush, telling the president that his wife was campaigning for the Bush-Cheney ticket.

As LA Times columnist Tim Rutten wrote, Fox has become "the most blatantly biased major American news organization since the era of yellow journalism." The movie highlights a trend whereby the broader right-wing media is parroting the conservative line on everything from the war to the economy to coverage of the presidential campaign – leaving facts and objectivity by the wayside.

"Outfoxed" examines how media empires, led by Rupert Murdoch's Fox News, have been running a "race to the bottom" in television news. This film provides an in-depth look at Fox News and the dangers of ever-enlarging corporations taking control of the public's right to know.

The film explores Murdoch's burgeoning kingdom and the impact on society when a broad swath of media is controlled by one person.

Media experts, including Walter Cronkite, Jeff Cohen (FAIR) Bob McChesney (Free Press), Chellie Pingree (Common Cause), Jeff Chester (Center for Digital Democracy) and David Brock (Media Matters) provide context and guidance for the story of Fox News and its effect on society.

This documentary also reveals the secrets of Former Fox news producers, reporters, bookers and writers who expose what it's like to work for Fox News. These former Fox employees talk about how they were forced to push a "right-wing" point of view or risk their jobs. Some have even chosen to remain anonymous in order to protect their current livelihoods. As one employee said "There's no sense of integrity as far as having a line that can't be crossed."



Click HERE to watch the movie trailer.

Click HERE to learn more about "Outfoxed," or to purchase the DVD.