Unreported

Listen to the new episode of Citizen Radio and subscribe to the free podcast.

Allison and Jamie discuss corporate tax-dodgers, the poop…er…pope retiring, William Shatner being the man, this MRA who has a sad because of teh feminists, and how ex-cop Christopher Dorner is now a target for drones.

Citizen Radio is a member-supported show. Visit wearecitizenradio.com to sign up and support media that won’t lead you to war!

Listen to the new episode of Citizen Radio and subscribe to the free podcast.

Ecuador grants aslyum to Assange, CNN’s reality TV, The Dawood military hospital scandal, corporations pay more to CEOs than they do in taxes, and the Times Square shooting.

Citizen Radio is a member-supported show. Visit http://wearecitizenradio.com to sign up and support media that won’t lead you to war, and keep CR Productions growing!

Listen to the new episode of Citizen Radio and subscribe to the free podcast.

Allison and Jamie talk about the insane Olympics opening ceremony, and all the ways in which the Olympics has become a corporate charade funded by taxpayer dollars. Also, The Real News reports on a Georgia prison hunger strike.

Special announcement: Check out Thrive Food Direct, and use the code “CitizenRadio” to receive a discount. Your purchase will go towards a Maniac receiving FREE meals!

Citizen Radio is a member-supported show. Visit http://wearecitizenradio.com to sign up and support media that won’t lead you to war, and to keep CR Productions growing!

Listen to the new episode of Citizen Radio and subscribe to the free podcast.

Amanda and Samhita, hosts of Opinionated, join the show to discuss feminism, immigration, and SCOTUS rulings on Arizona’s SB1070, corporate spending in elections, and prison sentences for juveniles.

Special announcement: Check out Thrive Food Direct, and use the code “CitizenRadio” to receive a discount. Your purchase will go towards a Maniac receiving FREE meals!Citizen Radio is a member-supported show.

Visit http://wearecitizenradio.com to sign up and support media that won’t lead you to war, and to keep CR Productions growing!

Listen to the new episode of Citizen Radio and subscribe to the free podcast.

Plus, check out a special BONUS episode of Citizen Radio from this morning’s OWS protest.

Citizen Radio has joined the resistance at Occupy Wall Street so this is an interview show with some of the protesters at Liberty Park.

Special announcements: Jamie will be performing in the following places…

Australia: October 20 @ Trade’s Hall in Melbourne, Friday October 21 in Sydney @ The Manning Bar, and October 22 @ Brisbane Power House.

Listen to the new episode of Citizen Radio and subscribe to the free podcast.

Citizen Radio joins Majority Report’s Sam Seder (@samseder) and Naomi Klein (@naomiaklein) at Occupy Wall Street to talk about the occupation, the establishment media’s failure to cover the movement, and what the protesters are doing right.

Special announcements: Jamie will be performing in the following places…

NYC: See Jamie at Gotham Comedy Club October 11th at 9:30. Buy tickets here.

Australia: October 20 @ Trade’s Hall in Melbourne, Friday October 21 in Sydney @ The Manning Bar, and October 22 @ Brisbane Power House.

Listen to the new episode of Citizen Radio and subscribe to the free podcast.

Troy Davis denied clemency, end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, Yahoo censors #OccupyWallStreet emails, corporations target college students, CNN allows the Tea Party to craft political event, the world watches 750,000 Somalis starve, drug cartels fund political officials, and Dangles adopts his cleverest disguise yet.

Special announcements: Jamie will be performing in the following places…

Toronto: Dark Comedy Festival September 29 & 30 @ 8PM and October 1 @ 10:30PM.

NYC: See Jamie at Gotham Comedy Club October 11th at 9:30. Buy tickets here.

Australia: October 20 @ Trade’s Hall in Melbourne, Friday October 21 in Sydney @ The Manning Bar, and October 22 @ Brisbane Power House.

Listen to the new episode of Citizen Radio and subscribe to the free podcast.

Listen to the new episode of Citizen Radio and subscribe to the free podcast.

In which Alternet’s Sarah Jaffe (@seasonothebitch) explains in five minutes why the economy is broken and the poor masses should be revolting. Other topics include: the Verizon strike, Ohio’s anti-union S.B. 5, the decline of labor, and how workers are now starting to fight back. The Koch brothers and ALEC hoped to crush unions, but what they’ve actually done is empower them.

Read all of Sarah’s wonderful writing at Alternet.

Citizen Radio is a member-supported show. Visit http://wearecitizenradio.com to sign up and support media that won’t lead you to war!

It’s easy for the liberal blogosphere (“the professional left”) to fall into the trap of hyper-focusing on President Obama’s actions. I mean, there’s so much to rightfully bitch about: the unfulfilled promises, the capitulation to the GOP, the endless bashing of his progressive base, and so on. Many people have written me, asking if I think a third-party candidate (a Ralph Nader, Ron Paul, etc.) is the solution to all our woes. In short, I reply, no. The presidency, while certainly an important position, the most powerful person in the whole, wide world, is but a single player in a much larger, rotten system.

Let’s fantasize for a moment that we do have President Nader. He’ll still have to deal with a center-right Congress, and a right-wing Supreme Court. All of his super awesome proposals will still be shot down by the conservative “checks” in the “checks and balance” system, and those checks will still be controlled by cash from corporations, entities inherently the enemies of pro-labor and pro-left wing ideologies.

Even if we had President Nader  the system would still remain broken.

Here’s a recent example. A former senior analyst from Moody’s has come forward to explain that the ratings agency is rotten to the core. J. Harrington says the primary conflict of interest at Moody’s is that the company is paid by the same “issuers” (banks and companies) whose securities it is supposed to objectively rate. “It incentivizes everyone at the company, including analysts, to give Moody’s clients the ratings they want, lest the clients fire Moody’s and take their business to other ratings agencies.”

This follows Matt Taibbi’s article about how the SEC, another supposed sentinel regulating body standing between the corrupt practices of corporations and the American people, has been burning its old investigations as part of official policy, essentially covering up Wall Street’s crimes.

Oh, also, the S&P, another credit rating agency, downgraded U.S. credit right immediately before the DOJ launched an investigation into its inflated ratings of toxic mortgages. What a strange coincidence.

I could go on. In short, there is systemic corrupt corporate influence infecting every level of the U.S. government. Yes, this affects the presidency as well (nearly a third of Obama’s reelection campaign funds come from the finance industry, and before that, Obama out-raised Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani on their home turf during the presidential race,) but this problem existed before President Obama. The regulating and rating agencies didn’t fall apart overnight under the tutelage of a single Democratic or Republican president.

The Corporatocracy arose from a steady chipping away at regulations – from a regular dismantling of unions, corporation tax laws, and upper-income taxation. This problem is massive, and it can’t be fixed by voting for Corporate Shill A or Corporate Shill B every four years. This has been stated before, probably more articulately, but I felt the need to reiterate it when I see smart, capable bloggers obsessing over the every movement of President Obama as though he alone can fix or destroy the country.

And I don’t want to sound like a Nihilist either. I get tons of mail from super excited, engaged voters who want to know what they can do to help get the country back on the right path, and my goal here was not to shit on their shining dreams. I usually suggest two things: 1) Focus on smaller elections, and 2) Copy the Wisconsin model of resistance.

First, It’s much easier to win a county or state-wide elections backing Progressive candidates against a Blue Dog than it would be to, say, get Dennis Kucinich elected to the presidency.

Now, resisting the Corporatocracy is a much more complicated matter. Publicly funded elections are obviously a good long-term goal, and essential to any true democracy, but that’s an extremely lofty objective, one that will take a long, long time to achieve, and things are falling apart in the immediate, so it’s important to begin resistance post-haste. And it’s important to realize what we’re up against. Corporate hyenas will brutally fight to keep control of their political puppets. They know they’re fighting for their very survival, and without the marionette show we call the U.S. government, they can’t have their lovely corporate tax holidays, bailouts, and lavish CEO pay.

The best option citizens have left to immediately reject the corporate influence in their own lives is to peacefully physically resist things like the anti-collective bargaining legislation in Wisconsin. When protesters occupied the state Capitol, the nation’s media paid attention, and the overwhelming popular rejection of Gov. Walker’s policies resulted in two state seats being recalled, quite the achievement considering only twenty attempts to recall a state legislator have ever been made since the advent of recall laws in the early 20th century. The same thing is happening in Ohio where Gov. Kasich now realizes he badly miscalculated when assessing the public’s response to yet another anti-labor attack.

The labor wars are a perfect microcosm of the larger struggle in America. Real workers, who make real products for really low wages and really crap benefits instead of pocketing billions by shuffling around bits of paper, are up against enormous corporate interests operating behind the shell group (and Koch brothers-funded) ALEC to disseminate anti-union legislation to fifty states. Obviously, workers will never be able to financially rival the largest corporations in the world, so their only hope is to resist as they did in Wisconsin and Ohio, and to back any candidate (local and national, alike) who voice their opposition to this kind of open class war.

This Daily Show montage really cracked me up because it shows how paranoid the right is about a “class war” being waged against them, but the class war had been around for decades, and the corporate class fired the first shot. It’s only now, when the poor serfs finally began resisting, that Neil Cavuto noticed and promptly shit his pants.

Anyway, all of this isn’t to say the blogosphere shouldn’t criticize Obama. I do that all the time, but there’s a super huge problem with the corporate influence in the U.S., and by constantly focusing on the acts of Obama, the blogs are giving a false impression that this can all be fixed if we just “hold him accountable,” or sign an online petition, which isn’t true.