Unreported

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Citizen Radio discusses the Tea Party debates, including the shocking “let him die!” moment, and the anti-HPV vaccine hysteria. Also, the number of poor Americans is at an all-time high, racists aren’t very bright people, and Scrubs is a very bad show.

Special announcement: Saturday September 17th is the Occupy Wall Street (#OccupyWallStreet) protest: https://occupywallst.org/

Special announcement 2: Tomorrow’s guest is the brilliant Naomi Klein!

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

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

Citizen Radio reflects on 9/11, Jamie’s wisdom tooth adventure, Obama’s jobs speech, and answers some mail about guns.

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

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

While Greece, Spain, and Portugal are being told to shut up and take their medicine, Citizen Radio discusses how one country, Iceland, fought back against austerity…and won. Also, the U.S. seeks to rebrand the Arab Spring, CR answers some of your mail, and then discusses some of the protests (immigration, tar sands) the MSM failed to cover.

Special guest: Sigur Ros.

Citizen Radio is a member-supported show. Visit http://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.

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.

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

President Obama gives a speech focusing on the deficit over mass unemployment, London burns, defining the term “looting,” dismantling the “real men eat meat” myth, religious employers might soon be able to determine if they feel like paying for women’s birth control, and Gov. Perry fails to pray the baddies away.

Citizen Radio is a member-supported show. Visit http://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.

Revisting the Park51 community center controversy, atheism and religion, exploring the cause of the UK riots, U.S. widens its drug war into Mexico (featuring private mercenaries), Iraq giving the U.S. money, and Allison explains why we probably can’t trust the crew at S&P.

Citizen Radio is a member-supported show. Visit http://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.

Lisa Lampanelli (@LisaLampanelli) joins the show to discuss her controversial act, eating addiction, bullying, taking on the God Hates Fags people, and more. Firedoglake’s David Dayen (DDay) then chats about Elizabeth Warren’s replacement on the CFPB, the batshit crazy debt ceiling negotations, and how credit rating agencies are taking America hostage.

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

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

CEO pay continues to skyrocket despite everybody else’s recession, the post-Katrina racial killings trial begins, Bradley Manning is one of the last sane men, Pennsylvania cuts $900 million from public schools, Jamie reminds everyone that Obama’s invasion of Libya is still illegal, and Citizen Radio answers your Listener Mail!

Jamie will be at the Steve Allen theatre July 18! Get tix here.

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

You guys, I never realized how hilarious Alan Greenspan is…

Today’s competitive markets, whether we seek to recognise it or not, are driven by an international version of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” that is unredeemably opaque. With notably rare exceptions (2008, for example), the global “invisible hand” has created relatively stable exchange rates, interest rates, prices, and wage rates.

Yeah, except for that incident in 2008 where the word’s economy plunged from the heavens like a fiery meteor, everything has been awesome. Oh, and apart from all those other times that happen around “every three years,” according to Larry Summers.

Over the past 20 years major financial disruptions have taken place roughly every three years, starting with the 1987 stock market crash; the Savings & Loans collapse and credit crunch of the early 1990s; the 1994 Mexican crisis; the Asian financial crises of 1997 with the Russian and Long-Term Capital Management events of 1998; the bursting of the technology bubble in 2000; the potential disruptions of the payments system after the events of September 11 2001 and the deflationary scare in the credit markets in 2002 after the collapse of Enron.

And I suppose wages have indeed been stable if by “stable” Alan means stagnant inside the United States for over thirty years. Also, too, international prices are stable unless you’re a poor brown person looking to buy bread, in which case stab your neighbor and try to steal his flour because the invisible hand of the market is coming to crush you.

Alan must have temporarily blacked out and forgotten he already confessed back in 2008 that he placed too much faith in the ability of markets to correct themselves, and that his belief in deregulation had been shaken. Somewhere between 2008 and 2011, however, the markets went back to being God’s perfect tools.

Of course, I think Alan means the invisible hand has created relative stability for a small clan of plutocrats while everyone else throws elbows to secure the crumbs left behind.