A Trip to the Moon (French: Le Voyage dans la lune) is a 1902 French black and white silent science fiction film. It is based loosely on two popular novels of the time: From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne and The First Men in the Moon by H. G. Wells. The film was written and directed by Georges Méliès, assisted by his brother Gaston. Méliès had intended to release the film in the United States to profit from it; however, Thomas Edison’s film technicians secretly made copies of it and distributed it throughout the country. Méliès never profited from it and eventually went broke. (read more)
Month: June 2012
September 15, 2009 — BBC — The Iraqi man who threw his shoes at former U.S. President George W. Bush, has been released from jail in Baghdad, his brother has told the BBC.
Journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi’s act of protest made him a hero in large parts of the Arab world and beyond.
Zaidi was convicted of assaulting a foreign leader.
The TV reporter’s three-year prison sentence was reduced to one because he had a clean record. He was released three months early for good behaviour.
Zaidi’s family has been preparing to hold a party for him and he has received offers of money, jobs and even marriages from sympathisers across the Arab world.
His brother, Dargham al-Zaidi, says the journalist was beaten while in prison, suffering a broken arm, broken ribs and internal bleeding. Those allegations have been rejected by the Iraqi military.
The previously little-known journalist worked for the private Cairo-based al-Baghdadia TV.
As he flung the shoes, Zaidi shouted: “This is a goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people, dog. This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq.”
His action was celebrated in internet games and on T-shirts and some people have offered him their daughters in marriage.
We were all thinking it, now here’s your chance.
If I understand what heâs saying ..the current economic crises can be traced back to the Reagan Administration. In 1980 they deregulated the Savings and Loan industry ..which put the business of making home loans in the hands of amateurs. Then, in 1987 ..the Reagan Administration had to bail out the Savings and Loan industry when it collapsed under the weight of itâs own incompetence (and unbridled greed). The Federal government allowed the Savings and Loans to package questionable loans, and sell them as stocks ..or mortgage-backed securities. It was mortgage-backed securities that helped make the housing slump of 2006â2007 ..go global in 2008 ..and wipe out investment houses from Bear Stearns to Deutsche Industriebank
90 percent
of the big fish
in the oceans are
gone…
we ate them.
- Labels: greed, ignorance, ocean, overfishing, overpopulation
On January 21, 2010, with its ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are persons, entitled by the U.S. Constitution to buy elections and run our government. Human beings are people; corporations are legal fictions.
We, the People of the United States of America, reject the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United, and move to amend our Constitution to firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights.
The Supreme Court is misguided in principle, and wrong on the law. In a democracy, the people rule.
We Move to Amend.
“. . . corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires. Corporations help structure and facilitate the activities of human beings, to be sure, and their ‘personhood’ often serves as a useful legal fiction. But they are not themselves members of âWe the Peopleâ by whom and for whom our Constitution was established.”
~Supreme Court Justice Stevens, January 2010
sign the petition at (movetoamend.org)
- Labels: corporations, corruption, fascism, money, power
Fascism is one word for what we’re seeing
As FDR knew, it’s actually capitalism without boundaries, and it’s apolitical.
Article by: BONNIE BLODGETT
It’s a well-known fact that as a young man Ronald Reagan supported Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
An acquaintance of mine who happens to be a prominent politician and who knew Reagan personally says that Reagan later was “absolutely certain” that, had FDR lived to preside over postwar America, he would have “seen the light.”
Reagan himself saw the light — got his first glimmer, anyway (his full conversion to conservatism came later under the guidance of a hard-nosed labor negotiator) –while working for the Screen Actors Guild, an organization crawling with Commies. Most had joined the party to protest the fascism that had gripped Germany and was about to subjugate Europe.
Whether FDR would have flip-flopped remains an open question, but I doubt it. Roosevelt had a more nuanced understanding of economics than Reagan did. He knew that fascism is capitalism without boundaries, that both fascism and communism (with a small “c”) are apolitical, and that economics trumps politics every time.
Born into wealth, FDR understood that Wall Street traders had a gambling mentality and that outwitting the feds was part of the game. In 1934, he set out to level the playing field. His Securities and Exchange Commission ushered in the longest stretch of financial stability in U.S. history.
Most Americans in the 1950s paid scant attention to any of this, thanks in part to the sense of security FDR had provided by ending the Depression and winning the war. To them Stalin was the new Hitler. After all, hadn’t Stalin annexed the entire eastern bloc in a brazen, Nazi-style power grab?
Something else FDR understood, having fought with the Soviets and having sat beside their leader at Yalta, was that those countries were the spoils of a war that took 40 million Russian lives.
Fast-forward four decades. By the time Reagan imperiously commanded Gorbachev to “tear down that wall,” the evil empire had already imploded. It was in its death throes. The U.S. president relished his opportunity to turn the Russian people’s suffering into a live-action morality tale.
The longer the bread lines in Moscow, the more he mocked the austerity that such images displayed. To Reagan, the lesson could not have been simpler. Get out those credit cards, America, and turn up the thermostat. The Cold War’s over and the good guys won.
The private sector saw an opportunity, too — in the president’s giddy enthusiasm for unfettered capitalism. On the home front, deregulation removed pesky governmental red tape and impediments to the consolidation of everything from banking to agriculture.
Americans for the most part enjoyed their spending spree. And why not? The stock market was booming. Banks were turning home ownership into a bet you never lose.
Few seemed alarmed by the S&L crisis, the tech bubble, Enron, Tyco et al. — or even knew that President Bill Clinton, in a failed effort to soften Republican positions on other issues, repealed the Glass-Steagall Act and set the stage for the mortgage crisis by turning the financial sector into what Charles Ferguson, whose scorching critique of Wall Street, “Inside Job,” won Best Documentary Film at last year’s Oscars, calls “the predator elite.”
Ferguson believes that a coalition of corporations and big banks has “captured and neutralized” elected officials. Campaign spending has soared by a factor of more than 300 since the late 1970s, and private-sector interests have outspent public-sector interests by “between 50 and 100 to one.”
Former U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley is also concerned. He spent $1.6 million to get elected in 1979. The seat Bradley held for 17 years cost his successor $65 million. And that was before super PACs. The winning candidate, a billionaire, financed his own victory.
Reckless spending at all levels of society caused the current recession, but if it weren’t for Republican spin, bought and paid for by the predator elite, the average American would have long since figured out not just that housing prices don’t always go up but how ill-advised were the Bush tax cuts, deregulation, and the leveraging of everything but Grandma.
They’d see that it wasn’t socialism that brought Europe to the brink of bankruptcy but American-style capitalism — real-estate deals and other high-risk ventures facilitated by something called the credit default swap that was all the more effective for its inscrutability.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy is learning the hard way that inscrutability is fascism’s ultimate weapon. His was the swing vote in the Citizens United case. He wrote the majority opinion granting corporations the same free-speech rights as people.
In the real world, that means unlimited spending on right-wing political causes and candidates. Kennedy insisted that along with such freedoms would come certain responsibilities: He required that all contributors identify themselves.
But economics trumps politics every time. Our democracy is now in its death throes. Enforcement has been deemed more trouble than it’s worth. (bonnieblodgett.com)
In the decade since the 9/11 attacks, Congress has been willing to do almost anything to ward off more terrorist strikes. It has given the government broad authority to hunt, hold and try suspected terrorists. Trouble is, the law is written so broadly that the government would have little difficulty applying it to virtually anyone.
The latest example is a provision in the annual defense authorization bill that would allow the U.S. military to detain anyone indefinitely without charges or trial â even U.S. citizens â if the president determines they’re suspected of being terrorists or having aided terrorists.
One would hope no president would ever abuse that authority, but the Founders saw enough of a threat to protect against it constitutionally. The Fifth Amendment guarantees that “no person” can be “deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.” It is the bedrock protection Americans have always had against a rogue government. It’s one of the rights that sets the U.S. apart from countries where the dictator decides what the law is. Why should it be so casually discarded? (read more)
- Labels: fascism