Forum Post: The airwaves are opening! In 2013
Posted 11 years ago on April 28, 2013, 2:02 p.m. EST by BradB
(2693)
from Washington, DC
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
Two Years Ago, President Obama Quietly Signed A Radical Media Bill. It’s About To Go Live.
The airwaves are opening! In 2013, nonprofits, labor unions, schools, and community groups will have a historic opportunity to apply for free licenses to build and operate FM community radio stations nationwide.
Here's a little song I wrote
You might want to sing it note for note
But don't worry, be happy
In every life we have some trouble but when you worry you make it double
Don't worry, be happy
Don't worry, be happy now
Don't worry, be happy
Don't worry, be happy
Don't worry, be happy
Don't worry, be happy
Ain't got no place to lay your head
Somebody came and took your bed
But don't worry, be happy
The land lord say your rent is late
He may have to litigate but don't worry, be happy
Look at me I am happy
Don't worry, be happy
Here I give you my phone number, when you worry call me, I make you happy
Don't worry, be happy
Ain't got no cash, ain't got no style
Ain't got not girl to make you smile but don't worry, be happy
'Cause when you worry your face will frown and that will bring everybody down
So don't worry, be happy
Don't worry, be happy now
Don't worry, be happy
Don't worry, be happy
Don't worry, be happy
Don't worry, be happy
Now there is this song I wrote
I hope you learned it note for note like good little children
Don't worry, be happy
Listen to what I say, "In your life expect some trouble, but when you worry you make it double"
Don't worry, be happy, be happy now
Don't worry, be happy
Don't worry, be happy
Don't worry, be happy
Don't worry, be happy
Don't worry, don't worry, don't do it, be happy
Put a smile on your face
Don't bring everybody down like this
Don't worry, it will soon past whatever it is
Don't worry, be happy
I'm not worried, I'm happy
Brad; Whooohoo. Let's make Mueller into a Whistleblower. Pressure him to leave his post. Then let's see if he rips on the administration, Eric Holder, and all others.
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/fbis-longtime-director-faces-criticism-bureau-again-122025633.html
Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel, author of the new best-seller, “What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets,” and his earlier classic, “Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?”
Today “almost everything can be bought and sold.” Today “markets, and market values, have come to govern our lives as never before. We did not arrive at this condition through any deliberate choice. It is almost as if it came upon us,”
Capitalism is killing our morals, our future
Commentary: In a Market Society, everything is for sale
By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch, April 27, 2013,
SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Yes, capitalism is working ... for the Forbes 1,000 Global Billionaires whose ranks swelled from 322 in 2000 to 1,426 recently. Billionaires control the vast majority of the world’s wealth, while the income of American workers stagnated.
For the rest of the world, capitalism is not working: A billion live on less than two dollars a day. With global population exploding to 10 billion by 2050, that inequality gap will grow, fueling revolutions, wars, adding more billionaires and more folks surviving on two bucks a day.
Over the years we’ve explored the reasons capitalism blindly continues on its self-destructive path. Recently we found someone who brilliantly explains why free-market capitalism is destined to destroy the world, absent a historic paradigm shift: That is Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel, author of the new best-seller, “What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets,” and his earlier classic, “Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?”
For more than three decades Sandel’s been explaining how capitalism is undermining America’s moral values and why most people are in denial of the impact. His classes are larger than a thousand although you can take his Harvard “Justice” course online. http://www.justiceharvard.org/ Sandel recently summarized his ideas about capitalism in the Atlantic. In “What Isn’t for Sale?” he writes:
“Without being fully aware of the shift, Americans have drifted from having a market economy to becoming a market society ... where almost everything is up for sale ... a way of life where market values seep into almost every sphere of life and sometimes crowd out or corrode important values, non-market values.”
Sandel should be required reading for all Wall Street insiders as well as America’s 95 million Main Street investors. Here’s a condensed version:
In one generation, market ideology consumed America’s collective spirit
“The years leading up to the financial crisis of 2008 were a heady time of market faith and deregulation — an era of market triumphalism,” says Sandel. “The era began in the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher proclaimed their conviction that markets, not government, held the key to prosperity and freedom.”
And in the 1990s with the “market-friendly liberalism of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, who moderated but consolidated the faith that markets are the primary means for achieving the public good.”
Today “almost everything can be bought and sold.” Today “markets, and market values, have come to govern our lives as never before. We did not arrive at this condition through any deliberate choice. It is almost as if it came upon us,” says Sandel.
Over the years, “market values were coming to play a greater and greater role in social life. Economics was becoming an imperial domain. Today, the logic of buying and selling no longer applies to material goods alone. It increasingly governs the whole of life.”
Examples: New free-market capitalism trapped in American brains Yes, it’s everywhere: “Markets to allocate health, education, public safety, national security, criminal justice, environmental protection, recreation, procreation, and other social goods unheard-of 30 years ago. Today, we take them largely for granted.”
Examples ... for-profit schools, hospitals, prisons ... outsourcing war to private contractors ... police forces by private guards “almost twice the number of public police officers” ... drug “companies aggressive marketing of prescription drugs directly to consumers, a practice ... prohibited in most other countries.”
More: Ads in “public schools ... buses ... corridors ... cafeterias ... naming rights to parks and civic spaces ... blurred boundaries, within journalism, between news and advertising ... marketing of ‘designer’ eggs and sperm for assisted reproduction ... buying and selling ... the right to pollute ... campaign finance in the U.S. that comes close to permitting the buying and selling of elections.”
Why should you worry? Capitalism breeds corruption and inequality
But the 2008 crash challenged our faith in free-market capitalism: “The financial crisis did more than cast doubt on the ability of markets to allocate risk efficiently. It also prompted a widespread sense that markets have become detached from morals.”
Then comes the big question: So what? “Why worry that we are moving toward a society in which everything is up for sale?” Two big reasons concern Sandel:
First, inequality: “Where everything is for sale, life is harder for those of modest means.” If wealth just bought things, yachts, sports cars, and fancy vacations, inequalities wouldn’t matter much. “But as money comes to buy more and more, the distribution of income and wealth looms larger.”
Second, corruption: “Putting a price on the good things in life can corrupt them ... markets don’t only allocate goods, they express and promote certain attitudes toward the goods being exchanged.” Also “corrupt the meaning of citizenship. Economists often assume that markets ... do not affect the goods being exchanged. But this is untrue. Markets leave their mark.”
Warning: Morals are new commodities auctioned to highest bidder
Sandel warns that our new dominating capitalist mind-set is crowding out “nonmarket values worth caring about. When we decide that certain goods may be bought and sold,” they become “commodities, as instruments of profit and use.”
But “not all goods are properly valued in this way ... Slavery was appalling because it treated human beings as a commodity, to be bought and sold at auction,” failing to “value human beings as persons, worthy of dignity and respect; it sees them as instruments of gain and objects of use.”
Nor do we permit “children to be bought and sold, no matter how difficult the process of adoption can be.” The same with citizenship ... jury duty ... voting rights ... “we believe that civic duties are not private property but public responsibilities. To outsource them is to demean them, to value them in the wrong way.”
Many things should never be commodities.
America transforms from mere market economy to new market society
Sandel’s core message is simple: “The good things in life are degraded if turned into commodities. So to decide where the market belongs, and where it should be kept at a distance, we have to decide how to value the goods in question — health, education, family life, nature, art, civic duties, and so on. These are moral and political questions, not merely economic ones.”
Unfortunately, we never had that debate during the 30-year rise of “market triumphalism. — we drifted from having a market economy to being a market society.”
And “the difference is this: A market economy is a tool ... for organizing productive activity. A market society is a way of life in which market values seep into every aspect of human endeavor. It’s a place where social relations are made over in the image of the market.” The difference is profound.
Not only did the debate never happen. It may never. Why?
Today’s “political argument consists mainly of shouting matches on cable television, partisan vitriol on talk radio and ideological food fights on the floor of Congress,” says Sandel, so “it’s hard to imagine a reasoned public debate about such controversial moral questions as the right way to value procreation, children, education, health, the environment, citizenship and other goods.”
Can we change? “The appeal of using markets to put a price on public values, is that there’s no judgment on the preferences they satisfy.” Debate is unnecessary. Markets don’t “ask whether some ways of valuing goods are higher, or worthier, than others. If someone is willing to pay for sex, or a kidney ... the only question the economist asks is ‘How much?’ Markets ... don’t discriminate between worthy preferences and unworthy ones.” Markets may never draw the line, but do politicians, in secret?
What is certain: Capitalism is eliminating moral values, as Nobel economist Milton Friedman and capitalism’s philosopher Ayn Rand had been preaching to the generation.
The good professor is a great teacher, with only one glaring flaw in his logic: he’s too idealistic, too quixotic. You don’t have to be a fatalist to know that without a total economic collapse, market capitalists — including 1,426 billionaires, Wall Street bankers, hedgers, lobbyists and every other special interest getting rich off the new market society — will never voluntarily surrender their control over the American political system.
Rather, they will blindly continue down their self-destructive path with an absolute conviction they are divinely guided by the Invisible Hand of Adam Smith, and perhaps even God.
Meanwhile, we have no choice but wait patiently till the collapse, anxiously aware that our bizarre political system will just keep degrading America’s moral values, pricing, buying, selling, trading morals like commodities, because in the final analysis everything has a price and everyone has a price in our hot new exciting Market Society.
Paul B. Farrell is a MarketWatch columnist based in San Luis Obispo, Calif. Follow him on Twitter @MKTWFarrell.
They control Corporate Media, the Cost of Living & Learning forces people to Loyalty to a Career and usually to the Government or a Corporation. Besides the Church Committee in the 1970's revealed Operation Mockingbird.
We know there is a required relationship between the CIA & Banking to fund their operations, buy weapons, buy planes, start new companies out of Panama or Off shore some where.
We know that Congress Colludes and Commits RICO Violations in exchange for Fake Investments that make them "Rich" through Wealthy Americans, Executives, & Bankers. And congress polices themselves on insider trading and expensive gifts... so there is no higher authority over congress.
We know Congress will no longer Investigate:
1) Big Defense Contracts that are over Budget or just horrendously expensive. MIC Wins and sometimes demands new contracts for themselves.
2) Congress won't investigate Big Campaign Contributors no matter if it is a pedophilia Network, Human Slavery, Massive Mortgage Fraud, Systemic Derivatives Fraud or whatever.
3) Congress won't investigate banking Executives on Wall Street or the corporations themselves for Money Laundering, LIBOR Price Rigging, ISDAfix Price Rigging, or gold & silver Price Fixing.
4) Congressional Intelligence Committees feel like they are so special and privileged that they will agree to anything at all... and they probably treat all their contacts like royalty for letting them be part of the plan or even just part of the small plan.
5) Congress will never investigate the 2008 Financial Collapse, the Massive & Systemic Fraud, the global risk of US Derivatives, the US Risk of Private banking, the US Risk from huge money creation and rehypothication of assets by Wall Street Investment Bankers.... and Really 9-11 was never investigated by New York City, or US Congress.
6) Congress Never Investigates anything to do with US Wars like Vietnam & Iraq to take responsibility and prevent the same moral misstates. Because deep down many people side with War Hawks and want to be able to use American War Power whenever they want to & How they want to.
7) Vietnam War's Phoenix Program isn't really any different from Drone Strike Assassinations, or smart bomb Assassinations. Congress doesn't want to look at Morality except to tell you what to do with your body, what to eat, what kind of sex or sexuality to have, and whether you can have an abortion or be fat.
8) Drones are another Military Industry. Congress doesn't want to look at how Industries influence society & the Police State today. Phone Companies have the capability of spying on people... perhaps the Phone Lobby pushed congress for big Billion dollar contracts to benefit their partners & themselves (CIA, FBI, NSA, DHS, DIA).
9) Remote Pilot Auto-Pilot Technology & Remote Control Technology at least goes back to the 1980s. They even made 2 James Bond Movie about it (helicopter & insect drones). That is 30 years of development that could have flown full sized planes into the Twin Towers. Looks like another partnership between Finance, Congressional Intelligence, DARPA or CIA or some new CIA Contractor Proxy.
10) Boston Massacre was simple compared to 9-11 or the 2008 Financial Crash.
FTC, Federal Trade Commission was formed to prosecute and regulate Anti-Trust Law and to Protect the Public Consumers from Fraud.
I think the FTC should Sponsor and FM Radio Station for OWS Issues as well as OWS Issues on TV, Cable, & Satellite to educate about Economics, Jobs, Wages, Loss of Wealth, Con Games by banks, Loss of US Wealth to Financial Schemes, etc. 24/7 educational programing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Trade_Commission
True the SEC now has jurisdiction over Anti-Trust in Banking, the Money Trust.... which is infiltrated by the CIA through William Casey. Still the FTC is supposed to help & protect people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Casey (Former OSS Agent, Former Director of CIA, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission from 1971 to 1973;[3], He then served as Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs for 1973-74).
And George Tenet has Infiltrated also to Banking
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Tenet (Former DCI from July 1997 to July 2004,February 2008, he became a managing director at the merchant bank Allen & Company).
How is Dick Doing?
Richard Cordray - Director, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau[6]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Cordray
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Consumer_Financial_Protection_Bureau
The jurisdiction of the bureau includes banks, credit unions, securities firms, payday lenders, mortgage-servicing operations, foreclosure relief services, debt collectors and other financial companies, and its most pressing concerns are mortgages, credit cards and student loans, according to Director Richard Cordray.[1][2]
Currently, the SEC Commissioners are:[7]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Financial_Institutions_Examination_Council (Responsible to ensure vigilant supervision of Financial Institutions, to ensure strong regulations are in place, and to train US Financial Institutions)
The Council was established March 10, 1979, pursuant to title X of the Financial Institutions Regulatory and Interest Rate Control Act of 1978 (FIRA). Members below:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (FRB),
the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC),
the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA),
the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC),
the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)
http://codes.lp.findlaw.com/uscode/12 (USC Title 12 Banks & Banking) http://codes.lp.findlaw.com/uscode/12/34/3301 Chapter 34, section 33
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Stability_Oversight_Council
Jack Lew Director US Treasury
Mary Jo White, nominee SEC
Gary Gensler, Director CFTC
Ben Bernanke, Federal Reserve Chairman,
Thomas J. Curry, Director OCC
Richard Cordray, Director CFPB
Martin Gruenberg, Director FDIC
Edward DeMarco, Director FHFA
Debbie Matz, Director NCUA
S. Roy Woodall, Jr., Independent Insurance Rep on FSOC
Origins, Antitrust law originated in reaction to a public outcry over trusts, corporate monopolies that dominated U.S. manufacturing and mining. Trusts took their name from the quite legal device of business incorporation called trusteeship, which consolidated control of industries by transferring stock in exchange for trust certificates.
http://iris.nyit.edu/~shartman/mba0101/trust.htm
Oil and steel, the backbone of the nation's heavy industries, lay in the hands of the corporate giants John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan.
1) restraint of free trade
2) naked Restraint - general restraint of competition
3) ancillary restraint - Time & Geography
4) economic philosophy of laissez-faire
5) rival businesses formed cartels to fix prices and control output
6) stop other merchants from entering the market 7) view that - cartels are thoroughly bad 8) Sherman Anti-Trust Act 1890 outlawed trusts altogether
9) that restrained interstate or foreign trade or formation of Monopolies
10) intended courts to play the leading role in promoting competition and attacking monopolization
11) Teddy Roosevelt, Trustbuster, would lead from Executive Office
12) Clayton Act 1914 - four practices illegal
13) price discrimination, tying and exclusive-dealing contracts, corporate mergers, interlocking directorates---boards of competing companies, with common members
14) Clayton Act exempted unions from the scope of antitrust law
15) Federal Trade Commission Act 1914, FTC is to interpret and Enforce Anti-Trust Law
Enforcement of antitrust law depends largely on two agencies, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which may issue cease and desist orders to violators, and the U.S. Department of Justice's Antitrust Division, which can litigate. Private parties may also bring civil suits.
Who can force the US to Investigate and Prosecute Fraud and Price Fixing such as LIBOR, Gold Prices, Silver Prices, and ISDAfix price Fixing?
Partly the answer has to be
1) People with financial Interest,
2) People who may have been hurt by the Big Boys,
3) People who represents a big Interest or constituency,
4) People who Invest in the USA, US Bonds, US Equities, US Derivatives
5) People who have pride in the old USA
6) People that would like to see the American Dream Restored
7) People that want US Pensions & Retirements to Endure
8) People that have Retired
9) People that have kids, that taught kids that the USA was good
How well do you think the Congressional Ethics Committees are doing?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Congressional_Ethics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_Committee_on_Ethics
The current membership[16] of the OCE Board of Directors includes:
David Skaggs, Co-Chair
Porter Goss, Co-Chair (Former CIA Director, Holy Crap)
Yvonne Burke
Jay Eagen
Karan English
William Frenzel (GATT, (WTO), NAFTA, SS Privatization)
Allison Hayward
Abner Mikva
112th Congress House Committee on Ethics
Jo Bonner, Alabama, Chairman
Michael McCaul, Texas
Mike Conaway, Texas
Charlie Dent, Pennsylvania
Gregg Harper, Mississippi
Linda Sanchez, California, Ranking Member
John Yarmuth, Kentucky
Donna Edwards, Maryland
Pedro Pierluisi, Puerto Rico
Joe Courtney, Connecticut
Kind of Audit of US Wage Gap, GINI index, and Discussion about Oiligarchs and US Elites and how we refuse to call them Oligarchs and Recognize Our Situation.
Why Does No One Speak of America’s Oligarchs? By Yves Smith
March 25, 2013 "Information Clearing House" -"Naked Capitalism"
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34410.htm (Click link for the whole article)
Outstanding!!!!!!!!!!
Really? Australians have had this opportunity since I can remember FM coming online. Our 4ZZZ student's radio had a roster so you could sign up for a spin of the discs (yeah, we had vinyl back then) and they made some really cool rap songs lampooning crooked politicians.
Army says no to more tanks, but Congress insists By RICHARD LARDNER, Associated Press Apr 28, 2013.
senior Army officials have said repeatedly, "No thanks."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_TOO_MANY_TANKS?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2013-04-28-08-58-08
Yet in the case of the Abrams tank, there's a bipartisan push to spend an extra $436 million on a weapon the experts explicitly say is not needed.
"If we had our choice, we would use that money in a different way," Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army's chief of staff, told The Associated Press this past week.
it's no coincidence that the champions for more tanks are Rep. Jim Jordan and Sen. Rob Portman, two of Capitol's Hill most prominent deficit hawks, as well as Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown. They said their support is rooted in protecting national security, not in pork-barrel politics.
-Look after watching the Military for 30 years... I don't feel sorry for employees at General Dynamics getting Laid off.
-Defense Spending is still setting records in my eyes.
-Defense Employment is too high and adds little to the overall US Economy, add little to a true GDP or even the current GDP Measurement. Reagan found out that GDP growth through defense spending was too expensive, see article written by Saint Louis Federal Reserve Director under Ronald Reagan.
Time and long past time to be making plowshares or something else with peaceful and prosperous/healthy applications for society.
instead what will happen is a massive expansion of the right wing talk radio. it is always strange to me that there is no alternative history view news show even on youtube with an anarcho-socialist losers of history slant. all we get are alex jones and adam kokesh who are hardly listenable.