the quadrennial horse race…
“…is really designed to do two things: weed out dangerous minority opinions, and award power to the candidate who least offends the public while he goes about his primary job of energetically representing establishment interests.”
READ ON @ ROLLING STONE
a UK news outlet has a solution for the disconnect between the issues american citizens care about and the coverage emphasis on primary elections:READ ON @ GUARDIAN
prez 4 sale
“The Montana Supreme Court restored the state’s century-old ban on direct spending by corporations on political candidates or committees in a ruling Friday that interest groups say bucks a high profile U.S. Supreme Court decision granting political speech rights to corporations.”
READ ON @ WPOST
thanks to the U.S. supreme court’s 2010 “citizens united” ruling, corporations and labor unions can make unlimited contributions to election campaigns, without full disclosure. why does this matter?
CONSIDER THE SOURCE.
on december 31 2011 the first judicial stand against the opening (by the federal U.S. gov) of the corporate campaign-financing floodgates was taken by the montana supreme court.
the center for public integrity provides historical context and background on corporate influence over election campaigns in the U.S.
READ ON @ iWATCH
DO YOU CONSIDER MULTI-BILLION MULTI-NATIONAL CORPORATIONS AS DESERVING OF THE SAME RIGHTS OF FREE SPEECH ENDOWED TO YOU BY THE FIRST AMENDMENT? shout out @FTH_ISHT or at FTH on fbook.
15 years before sopa…
one among us issued a “warning that a combination of government surveillance and the corporate commodification of language would eventually restrict free speech online…. At the time, in an atmosphere of little meaningful government regulation of the internet, it sounded crazy; DNS was a power structure, sure, but that in and of itself was of interest only to dedicated anarchists. With SOPA, however, the danger is suddenly much more real.”
READ ON @ ARTFAGCITY
have this author’s “anarchists” of yesteryear become today’s prophets? has a specialist in internet technology transformed from a conspiracy theorist into a forecaster of that which we prefer not to believe possible or rational? is it really too much to believe that corporate regulation of an open medium of expression and communication will lead to the culling of ideas and the elimination of channels which threaten or ideologically oppose that power structure? and why does the U.S. government contract out this process, thereby encouraging it?
tedx baghdad as microcosm
“Sometimes I wonder if we are the broken link in the chain, and will our generation be able to pass along this message of a great civilization to the ones to come.”
READ ON @ ALJAZEERA
