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By ITBT Staff
Editor’s note: The Coffee Party movement posted this on their Facebook page today with the following intro: “Since Planned Parenthood has become ground zero in the fight over the budget, please watch this powerful, viral video. Imagine a reality-based, not an ideology-based, discussion about the budget!”
Co-incidentally, showing up on our wall right next to this video was the following status update by our friend Matthew Arnett with KRKC News in King City, California: “Maybe if Republicans read the study on unwanted babies becoming democrats, they will leave the funding to planned parenthood alone and quit holding the budget hostage over stupid petty politics.”
Needless to say, we “liked” Arnett’s update.
By Christine Hall
We haven’t always been a nation of consumers.
I remember when Americans were customers. We bought things because we wanted them or needed them. We would have laughed in the face of anyone with the audacity to suggest that it was our patriotic duty to consume, as Bush did after 9/11. If we were faithful to a brand, that faithfulness was brought about by value or product superiority. Companies worked hard to persuade us to become their customers, and they knew better than to insult us by assuming we were forced to use their products no matter what.
Continue reading When Customers Became Consumers
By ITBT Staff
Editor’s note: We just don’t get it. You would think that the people at the helm of companies ruled by greed would be aware that when they pollute, they’re not only pumping your earth and my earth with poisons, they’re also poisoning their earth as well. Do they not care about the world on which their children and grandchildren will live?
By Reg Hartt
“There is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequal people.” – Thomas Jefferson
We live in a world that runs on a war based economy. Wars create jobs. When we have peace people find jobs scarce.
I first discovered this several years ago when a man at one of my screenings of Leni Riefenstahl’s film, Triumph of the Will, after hearing me speak, gave me a copy of Jerry Mander’s book, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television.
Continue reading “The man who speaks of the enemy is the enemy himself.”—Bertholt Brecht.
By ITBT Staff
This video contains some facts for you to add to your arsenal the next time you need to convince someone who thinks we’re in great financial shape. Warning: don’t watch this if you’re having a bad day or are depressed.
By Christine Hall
To hear the conservatives tell it, our economy will nosedive if the rich are required to pay an iota in taxes more than they do now. Indeed, we are led to understand the rich already pay more than their fair share, that their taxes need to be lowered so the middle class and the poor can shoulder more of the burden.
It’s understandable why folks under 30 might believe this argument. If the tax rate on the rich, defined by the Obama administration as those earning more than $250,000, is rolled back to nearly 40%, the rich just might not have the money to invest in businesses and create the jobs our country so badly needs. Never mind the fact that the rich aren’t investing in businesses and creating jobs anyway, even though the tax rate for high rollers is historically low.
Continue reading The Rich & Taxes: A Post-Modern Myth
By Christine Hall
Lincoln didn’t tell us the whole truth when he said, “…you cannot fool all of the people all the time.” What he didn’t say, perhaps because it didn’t occur to him, was that you can fool a majority of the people all of the time, especially in the age of television and now, the Internet. Unfortunately, a majority is all that matters in a democracy. Democratically speaking, four sane people and six psychotic sickos means rule by the insane. Governments in the United States have been operating on this principle for quite a while now.
Over the last six decades, since the onset of the post World War II economic boom and the beginning of television on a mass scale, we’ve become a nation in which six out of ten of us believes we can find happiness through owning things. We’ve become materialistic on a scale never before seen in human history. All of our inner turmoils are solvable through ownership. Happiness comes from purchasing a new car, a new set of clothes, or the newest most cutting edge technological item.
Continue reading The Government We Deserve
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