Moore: A bit softheaded about Obama’s true nature. A case of cynical calculation or terminal naiveté?

You’ve Seen the Movie — Now It’s Time to ACT!

Editor’s Note: We fully appreciate and support Michael Moore’s social change efforts via mass education, but we also categorically disagree with his misguided confidence in the Democratic party as a tool for progress, and, especially, Barack Obama. We also have quite a few doubts about the notion that activists might take over the Party, a “boring from within strategy” that has often proven illusory.

Thursday, October 22, 2009  [print_link]

Friends,

It’s the #1 question I’m constantly asked after people see my movie: “OK — so NOW what can I DO?!”

You want something to do? Well, you’ve come to the right place! ‘Cause I got 15 things you and I can do right now to fight back and try to fix this very broken system.

Here they are:

FIVE THINGS WE DEMAND THE PRESIDENT AND CONGRESS DO IMMEDIATELY:

1. Declare a moratorium on all home evictions. Not one more family should be thrown out of their home. The banks must adjust their monthly mortgage payments to be in line with what people’s homes are now truly worth — and what they can afford. Also, it must be stated by law: If you lose your job, you cannot be tossed out of your home.

2. Congress must join the civilized world and expand Medicare For All Americans. A single, nonprofit source must run a universal health care system that covers everyone. Medical bills are now the #1 cause of bankruptcies and evictions in this country. Medicare For All will end this misery. The bill to make this happen is called H.R. 3200. You must call AND write your members of Congress and demand its passage, no compromises allowed.

3. Demand publicly-funded elections and a prohibition on elected officials leaving office and becoming lobbyists. Yes, those very members of Congress who solicit and receive millions of dollars from wealthy interests must vote to remove ALL money from our electoral and legislative process. Tell your members of Congress they must support campaign finance bill H.R.1826.

4. Each of the 50 states must create a state-owned public bank like they have in North Dakota. Then congress MUST reinstate all the strict pre-Reagan regulations on all commercial banks, investment firms, insurance companies — and all the other industries that have been savaged by deregulation: Airlines, the food industry, pharmaceutical companies — you name it. If a company’s primary motive to exist is to make a profit, then it needs a set of stringent rules to live by — and the first rule is “Do no harm.” The second rule: The question must always be asked — “Is this for the common good?” (Click here for some info about the state-owned Bank of North Dakota.)

5. Save this fragile planet and declare that all the energy resources above and beneath the ground are owned collectively by all of us. Just like they do it in Sarah Palin’s socialist Alaska. We only have a few decades of oil left. The public must be the owners and landlords of the natural resources and energy that exists within our borders or we will descend further into corporate anarchy. And when it comes to burning fossil fuels to transport ourselves, we must cease using the internal combustion engine and instruct our auto/transportation companies to rehire our skilled workforce and build mass transit (clean buses, light rail, subways, bullet trains, etc.) and new cars that don’t contribute to climate change. (For more on this, here’s a proposal I wrote in December.) Demand that General Motors’ de facto chairman, Barack Obama, issue a JFK man-on-the-moon-style challenge to turn our country into a nation of trains and buses and subways. For Pete’s sake, people, we were the ones who invented (or perfected) these damn things in the first place!!

FIVE THINGS WE CAN DO TO MAKE CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT LISTEN TO US:

1. Each of us must get into the daily habit of taking 5 minutes to make four brief calls: One to the President (202-456-1414), one to your Congressperson (202-224-3121) and one to each of your two Senators (202-224-3121). To find out who represents you, click here. Take just one minute on each of these calls to let them know how you expect them to vote on a particular issue. Let them know you will have no hesitation voting for a primary opponent — or even a candidate from another party — if they don’t do our bidding. Trust me, they will listen. If you have another five minutes, click here to send them each an email. And if you really want to drop an anvil on them, send them a snail mail letter!

2. Take over your local Democratic Party. Remember how much fun you had with all those friends and neighbors working together to get Barack Obama elected? YOU DID THE IMPOSSIBLE. It’s time to re-up! Get everyone back together and go to the monthly meeting of your town or county Democratic Party — and become the majority that runs it! There will not be many in attendance and they will either be happy or in shock that you and the Obama Revolution have entered the room looking like you mean business. President Obama’s agenda will never happen without mass grass roots action — and he won’t feel encouraged to do the right thing if no one has his back, whether it’s to stand with him, or push him in the right direction. When you all become the local Democratic Party, send me a photo of the group and I’ll post it on my website.

3. Recruit someone to run for office who can win in your local elections next year — or, better yet, consider running for office yourself! You don’t have to settle for the incumbent who always expects to win. You can be our next representative! Don’t believe it can happen? Check out these examples of regular citizens who got elected: State Senator Deb Simpson, California State Assemblyman Isadore Hall, Tempe, Arizona City Councilman Corey Woods, Wisconsin State Assemblyman Chris Danou, and Washington State Representative Larry Seaquist. The list goes on and on — and you should be on it!

4. Show up. Picket the local branch of a big bank that took the bailout money. Hold vigils and marches. Consider civil disobedience. Those town hall meetings are open to you, too (and there’s more of us than there are of them!). Make some noise, have some fun, get on the local news. Place “Capitalism Did This” signs on empty foreclosed homes, closed down businesses, crumbling schools and infrastructure. (You can download them from my website.)

5. Start your own media. You. Just you (or you and a couple friends). The mainstream media is owned by corporate America and, with few exceptions, it will never tell the whole truth — so you have to do it! Start a blog! Start a website of real local news (here’s an example: The Michigan Messenger). Tweet your friends and use Facebook to let them know what they need to do politically. The daily papers are dying. If you don’t fill that void, who will?

FIVE THINGS WE SHOULD DO TO PROTECT OURSELVES AND OUR LOVED ONES UNTIL WE GET THROUGH THIS MESS:

1. Take your money out of your bank if it took bailout money and place it in a locally-owned bank or, preferably, a credit union.

2. Get rid of all your credit cards but one — the kind where you have to pay up at the end of the month or you lose your card.

3. Do not invest in the stock market. If you have any extra cash, put it away in a savings account or, if you can, pay down on your mortgage so you can own your home as soon as possible. You can also buy very safe government savings bonds or T-bills. Or just buy your mother some flowers.

4. Unionize your workplace so that you and your coworkers have a say in how your business is run. Here’s how to do it (more info here). Nothing is more American than democracy, and democracy shouldn’t be checked at the door when you enter your workplace. Another way to Americanize your workplace is to turn your business into a worker-owned cooperative. You are not a wage slave. You are a free person, and you giving up eight hours of your life every day to someone else is to be properly compensated and respected.

5. Take care of yourself and your family. Sorry to go all Oprah on you, but she’s right: Find a place of peace in your life and make the choice to be around people who are not full of negativity and cynicism. Look for those who nurture and love. Turn off the TV and the Blackberry and go for a 30-minute walk every day. Eat fruits and vegetables and cut down on anything that has sugar, high fructose corn syrup, white flour or too much sodium (salt) in it (and, as Michael Pollan says, “Eat (real) food, not too much, mostly plants”). Get seven hours of sleep each night and take the time to read a book a month. I know this sounds like I’ve turned into your grandma, but, dammit, take a good hard look at Granny — she’s fit, she’s rested and she knows the names of both of her U.S. Senators without having to Google them. We might do well to listen to her. If we don’t put our own “oxygen mask” on first (as they say on the airplane), we will be of no use to the rest of the nation in enacting any of this action plan!

I’m sure there are many other ideas you can come up with on how we can build this movement. Get creative. Think outside the politics-as-usual box. BE SUBVERSIVE! Think of that local action no one else has tried. Behave as if your life depended on it. Be bold! Try doing something with reckless abandon. It may just liberate you and your community and your nation.

And when you act, send me your stories, your photos and your video — and be sure to post your ideas in the comments beneath this letter on my site so they can be shared with millions.

C’mon people — we can do this! I expect nothing less of all of you, my true and trusted fellow travelers!

Yours,

Michael Moore

MMFlint@aol.com

MichaelMoore.com

The mask of legitimacy is slowly crumbling, as the current world paradigm, based on lies, selfishness and short-term thinking continues to spawn crisis after crisis and war after infernal war…

BY PETER PAVIMENTOV [print_link]

It is interesting that some of the banking community abroad are running scared of the people’s moral opinion on the bank rescue by public funds and its resulting recovery of the speculative sector whereby enormous bonuses are once again being paid. Even the Governor of the Bank of England, not a minor office holder, counsels a breaking up of those banks too large to fail. And the American president makes again misleading compensatory noises about the salaries of the officers in those institutions who apparently did not pay the government back.

This unease is also slowly penetrating to the Wall Streeters, who as usual remain fully blind to public opinion. But one must expect here the normal psycho-terrorism to be applied, scaring those whose life existence is threatened and already diminished by the drain of the economic strength of this country. What do the financial rapists care how many businesses go out of existence, or how much government reduces social support for those who worked hard most of their lives for these benefits? War and a strenuous effort to keep the creaking colossus of capitalism going, informs the leading lights of extortion whether in lower Manhattan or in Washington, D.C.

Never has the misalignment of the economy been so starkly evident as today, much more so than in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when the masses of the poor were less informed and less educated than now. That is the threat with which the present power holders must cope and all their propaganda in the pre-bought media will not save them, because the carefully constructed edifice of received opinion is now dangerously leaning over.

America has ever been the country of personal anarchism, where individual assertion was part of the national character, where a basic cynicism underlies reluctant acceptance of imposed rules and where one may hope this contrariness may save this nation and the world. Though nationhood is a misnomer as well as an outdated notion, despite its lingering on more people become aware that there is little difference in humanity whether one is born in Topeka, Kansas or in Isfahan, Iran, but artificial borders between countries remain in place as ordained by the military and economic overlords.

However the realization that propagandized thinking is a thing of the past penetrates more and more Western minds which can only be to the benefit of those submitted to Western aggression. Colonialism in whatever form is over and the sooner this will be clear to the oppressor classes, the easier and quicker their fate will be, because rebellion is in the air. It is a process that unlike previous eruptions of class societies will move slower like tectonic plates shifting in our earth, a slowness which could be unfortunate for the health of our planet, but come it will. The suspension of belief is a process that cannot be forced but must be allowed to grow by itself, even though it can reach spontaneous combustion at a certain point. Like the nefarious warlords in the Pentagon, who for their reason to exist like nothing better than to create international tension, the many profiteers and others who push their own idealistic conservative programs in this corrupt government, are appearing to be more and more redundant.

This is because there are sure signs that voters have become aware that the two factions of the same power cabal play footsie with each other and that the one faction called misleadingly the Democrats is in fact the one possibly most deleterious to the public’s economic welfare.  No rational government has laws that politicize the judiciary nor should such excesses be tolerated like a Supreme Court of judges appointing a president. Therefore as this government has proven to be inimical to the people’s interests, it needs to be removed, not by votes as it is clear that voting is a spurious exercise, but by popular mobilization. How this will be effected is unpredictable, but it is a historical imperative. One cannot unfortunately predict or even steer popular movements with certitude, and each has its own impetus and character. The breaking up of Federal power is very much needed at this late stage and a breaking up of the United States into smaller units desirable because smaller units allow for more egalitarianism and input from the people. States by themselves never declare war, nor can they exert undue economic pressure. How then true democracy and equality can be reached is left to common consent in each state after this suffocating and all pervasive structure of capitalism is abandoned with its extortionate first commandment to compete, a slave ring around everyone’s neck causing antagonism and alienation unworthy of the human soul.

Should humanity finally see the light despite the dense fog of propaganda, rewarding some and abandoning most in our social world will be a thing of the past and when everyone is allowed input in how societal rules are constructed and applied, the ills of capitalism will be gone. Transforming the Res Publica into a form of tribalism is truly the most rational goal at present, even if perceived by a mere handful. After this difficult stage is completed we may at last deal with the problems such a transformation will undoubtedly bring with it. No human social organization is ever ideal, expecting that would be a step backwards, but maybe now the swell of discontent is rising, the breaking up of institutional injustice could be a near event for this country as well as a salvation for all those it now attacks and tortures unrelentingly.

PETER PAVIMENTOV is a senior columnist with The Greanville Post.

[print_link]

In this struggle against the health insurance mafia and the White House and Congressional pimps that seek to (by artifice) prolong the reign of the former, citizens must unite and seek redress also via NON-ELECTORAL avenues. The Mobilization for Healthcare for All is a spearhead in this budding movement, one of the many streams currently building as a result of the complete bankruptcy in political leadership we witness in America today. American-stye imperial crony capitalism is devouring us all. The for-profit healthcare insurance sector is one of its tentacles and it must be cut.—PG

Sit-In for Single Payer THURS OCT 15th

by Dollars and Sense  [print_link]

Obama remains one of the chief obstacles to Medicare for All. He has blocked the path from the start (along with the Democratic top echelons), and provided equivocal leadership.

A coalition called the Mobilization for Health Care for All will be holding sit-ins THURSDAY, OCT 15th at insurance company offices across the country tomorrow (as part of an ongoing campaign) to press for a single-payer health care system—not this ridiculous give-away to the insurance companies that Congress is contemplating. I signed up to participate—you should too. Hat-tip to Mark Engler, whose brother is one of the organizers, through the Center for the Working Poor. —CS

On September 29th in New York City, the Mobilization for Health Care for All launched a national campaign of “Patients Not Profit” sit-ins at insurance company offices to demand an end to a system that profits by denying people care. We want the real “public option”: Medicare for All, a single payer plan that cuts out the profit and puts patients first.

Together, through this campaign, we can turn the tide and win the fight for health care for all. To succeed, we need to organize sit-ins in as many cities as possible in the month of October. The campaign began in New York City on September 29th and continues in Chicago on October 8th and in cities across the country on October 15th. After the 15th, we will continue to organize actions in as many cities as possible until we win health care reform that ensures that the insurance companies no longer stand between the American people and the health care that we need. It’s time to cut out the profit and put patients first with Medicare for All.

Insurance companies are the real death panels in America. They make billions in profit and millions for their CEOs while millions of Americans have no health insurance and over 45,000 die every year because they can’t get the care they need. That’s more than 120 people every day. These insurance companies deny care to their members and the American people for profit.

America deserves better, and that’s why we voted for change. But the insurance companies are spending millions to confuse and scare the public to keep us from ending their grip on our health and our money. With teabagger town hall protestors and the right-wing noise machine on their side, they’re winning. We can’t let that happen. It’s time to take the fight to the real villain in the health care debate.

When the civil rights movement faced a similar challenge in the struggle to end segregation, nonviolent civil disobedience moved the nation and made reform possible. Just like the lunch counter sit-ins did for the civil rights movement, we have to make it impossible for the media and our country to ignore how outrageous the status quo of private insurance is for the American people.

It only takes a small group of people to do a sit-in in your community, but our actions can inspire every American who has been abused by the insurance companies and believes it’s time for real reform to fight for it. This campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience will continue until the insurance companies no longer stand between the American people and the health care that is our right.

Already, doctors, nurses, patients, and people just like you are signing up to be one of the 1000 ordinary but courageous people who will launch this nonviolent battle to end private insurance abuse and win health care for all. Join us! We can’t wait any longer—every day more people die because of the insurance company death panels.

Sign up to sit in and join the battle today!

Labels: Center for the Working Poor, health care, health care reform, Healthcare NOW, Prosperity Agenda

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10/13/2009 03:43:00 PM