Tag: video

Legalize Democracy | Full Documentary

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LEGALIZE DEMOCRACY is a short documentary by Dennis Trainor, Jr. about the movement for a constitutional amendment to abolish in its entirety two illegitimate, court-created legal doctrines—the concept of “corporate constitutional rights” (sometimes known as corporate personhood) and “money equals political speech.”

Produced by and for Move to Amend, the national grassroots campaign to amend the US Constitution to unequivocally state that corporations are not people and money is not speech, This documentary details a history of Supreme Court decision that gave corporations constitutionally protected rights and established that money is free speech.

For more information about Move To Amend, go here. To get  DVD, go here.

Full Movie: Legalize Democracy

Written and Directed by Dennis Trainor, Jr.
Produced by AJ Russo and Dennis Trainor, Jr.
Cinematographers Messiah Rhodes Paul Westlake
Color, Titles, and Graphics AJ Russo
Original score Goldi
Post Audio Engineer Tom Hutten
Additional Camera Arthur Louis
Executive Producers Pamela Brown, Daniel Lee, Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap, Egberto Willies

From TopDocumentaryFilms.com
The most dangerous threat to democracy in the United States of America is the mistaken belief that they actually practice one… because democracy is not a noun, it’s a verb. “Demos” means “the people”, and “kratia” means “rule”, so the word democracy means “the people rule.” We have the trappings of democracy… you just get to go and pull a lever every 2-4 years only for candidates that have been pre-approved and pre-selected by the ruling elite.

But when it comes to actually participating in a meaningful way in how the society is organized, how much pay you might get, whether or not you get healthcare, whether the country goes to war or not, whether we should address the climate crisis… in those kinds of questions the people never have an opportunity to participate.

For example, if in the debate around the healthcare had there not been elected officials with a commitment to pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies, if the priority wasn’t making sure that there were profits for people that make drugs and sell drugs, and people who provide medical care as insurers, if they weren’t the priority but the ordinary people don’t you think that would’ve been different?

The prison system along with the education system and the healthcare system are three things among many others that should never have a profit motive attached. The democratic self-government experiment started in the United States over 200 years ago and has gotten completely corrupted. The real people are not been listen to.

When considering the still unfolding history of the United States the words of journalist Molly Ivins ring true: “It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America.” In other words who, according to the laws and cultures, gets to be considered a person.

A Bold New Chapter in the Climate Justice Movement | Acronym TV 018

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Part 1: (00:59) A dispatch from The People’s Climate March featuring interviews with 
Immortal Technique (Hip Hop legend) 
Kshama Sawant (Socialist City Council member
Jill Stein (for Green Party Presidential candidate),
Pat Scanlon (Vets for Peace)
 Art Shegonee (Federation of United Tribes), Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese (Popular Resistance)
and other artists, activist, children, and street revelers!

Part 2: (10:18) A dispatch from the Flood Wall Street day of action, featuring exclusive footage, analysis and interviews with Clayton Thomas-Muller (Idle No More), Tim DeChristopher (Peaceful Uprising), Andy Bichlbaum (The Yes Men), Arun Gupta (Counterpunch), and Flood Wall Street organizer Goldi Guerra.

Part 3: (20:04) Jill Stein Interview.

A day before the People’s Climate March drove 400,000 people into the streets of New York City, Jill Stein sat down with Dennis Trainor, Jr of Acronym TV and outlined what she sees as the coming green revolution.
“The U.N. has sold us out,” says Stein “The UN has become the apologists for false solutions (like) nuclear power, fracking, and so-called clean coal,” says Stein. “The U.N. has sold us out, and it is really important that we take a new direction, with a very clear goal (…) one which puts people, planet and peace over profit.”

GITMO: A Concentration Camp in Small Town USA

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Obama’s Drones Made Simple

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Originally Posted at PopularResistance.org

Before the 2012 election, Obama told John Stewart of The Daily Show: “one of the things we’ve got to do is put a legal architecture in place, and we need Congressional help in order to do that, to make sure that not only am I reined in but any president is reined in terms of some of the decisions that we’re making.”
In a development that will shock nobody, no such legal architecture has been put in place to “reign in” Obama or any future POTUS.

Obama’s drone wars have killed more than 2400 civilians in countries that pose no threat to us and with whom we are not at war, and continue to mock international law and the U.S. constitution.

Among those targeted and killed have been United States citizens.
So what version of legal twister could the White House staff come up with to justify the President to be judge, jury, and executioner of people- including American Citizens- all over the world? For those of you (including Obama, apparently) who justify our drone wars as self defense, then let me ask you this:
How do you define self-defense? Think about it for a second.

Perhaps we should frame the question differently: Under what conditions can we justify the use of violence in our personal lives? I’m certainly no legal expert, but say a person breaks into your house looking to do you harm. Before you know what has happened, they have killed your brother. Sequences of nerve cells fire off shooting adrenaline and cortisol into your bloodstream. Somehow your mind remembers, and your body approximates, some middle school karate kata and you render the intruder defenseless. Scrubbing the blood drippings from your carpet, you call the police, and some form of justice is administered.

We would all agree that is self-defense, yes? A justified (in the moral and legal sense term) use of force.

Now imagine it is years later that it is you breaking into someone’s house. It is not the home of the person who broke into your house, but it is in the same zip code.

Well it might be.

Actually, it is a few zip codes away from the where the person who broke into your house lives, but you want to make sure no one from this zip code ever breaks into your house again. And actually, you are not personally breaking in, your highly armored remote control plane is. You are sitting at home in yourSponge Bob underwear controlling the weapon with an x-box controller stuffing your face with Cheetos and scratching your groin.

You hover quietly for a few days, just staring at the resident, and then without warning you press a few buttons on your joystick and fire at the resident of the home, who – after all, lives in the same zip code as that person who broke into you’re your house all those years ago. You are more accurate with this rocket launcher compared to the shock and awe megaton bombs you used to drop in this neighborhood (or was it another neighborhood?) but this rocket business is still pretty messy and things get pretty broken and lots of people die.

Today, your rocket launcher fires, goes through the a window next to the residents head and hits an elementary school outside, killing the lucky and maiming many more.

This does not morally trouble you, and you are able to sleep easy at night knowing that no one from that zip code has broken into your home since you began your campaign in that zip code.

An international committee awards you a prize for promoting peace in the world, and you have an extra spring in your step having won an election for the second time that will allow you to oversee that kill list for another four years while enjoying restful nights sleep in a large white home at 1600 Pennsylvania avenue.

Obama out Orwelled Orwell | Lee Camp Interview

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Originally Posted at PopularResistance.org

Barack Obama may as well have delivered his 5th State of the Union address to and for the Superstate Oceania, the fictional empire mired in perpetual war from George Orwell’s 1984.

No, Obama did not come directly out and tell us that war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength so much as he embodied those ideas in a nuanced, measured performance that inspired the political pundits like Chris Matthews to wax poetic like a Theatre critic praising an aging stage actor who was able to find the old magic one last time.

Lee Camp and I discuss the (actual) state of the union, Obama’s “all of the above” energy policy as it relates to jobs, corporate profits and the climate crisis, and how blindly “supporting for the troops” is unhealthy for children and all other living things.

Lee Camp (bio)
Lee is comedian, writer, and activist. He is the host of the popular Moment of Clarity, which is now a video series, a book, and a full show. His stand up comedy has garnered praise from who’s who of comedians and activists alike.

Open Letter to The 85 Richest People on The Planet (cc: Kevin O’Leary) VIDEO

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Originally Posted at PopularResistance.org

Responding to the Oxfam report that concluded that the world’s 85 richest people own the same amount as the bottom half of the entire global population, self appointed spokesperson for the global elite, and celebrity Judge on the reality show The Shark Tank Kevin O’Leary,applauded the news, stating that is  “fantastic news (…) the motivation everybody needs (…) it inspires everyone to want to be like the 1%” and scoffing at the idea of “re-distribution of wealth” stated, “ I celebrate Capitalism.”

His remarks inspire this open letter to the 85 Richest People In The World.

Dear 85 Richest People In The World,

Thank you for your time.

I’m well aware that time, in your world, is money. Given that one member of your peer group, Warren Buffett, made $37 million per day in 2013, breaking down to a mind blowing $1.5 million an hour, I image the value of the 5 minutes or so you are granting me now, depending on where you rank in your elite group of 85, is somewhere in the neighborhood of $100,000.

So thank you. It means a lot.

We know that some of Mr. Buffett’s public statement’s show the possibility for a worldview, even among the rarefied air of your little 85 club, can be a little more compassionate and nuanced that the remarks of Mr. O’Leary.

In the interest of time, I’ll respond to Mr. O’Leary’s outlandish remarks in three broad areas: equity, sustainability, and wealth redistribution.

WEALTH REDISTRIBUTION

Mr. O’Leary dismisses the notion of wealth redistribution. Here in the United States, we live in one of the most unequal countries in the world, when measured in terms of wealth inequity. Are we to believe that this well documented and growing wealth divide is a random force of nature? A statistical glitch? Because you deserve it? Or is it possible, that billionaire Stanley Druckenmiller had it right in a television interview called the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing program:

 

“[T]he biggest redistribution of wealth from the middle class and the poor to the rich ever. … I mean, maybe this trickle-down monetary policy that gives money to billionaires and hopefully we go spend it is going to work. But it hasn’t worked for five years.”

 

Given this, help me understand how the global elite differs from pirates?

EQUITY

Kevin O’Leary sells us the lie that if we all just fight hard to get up to the top, we could be in your little club. Is it really your opinion that you all really work harder than the rest of us in a manner quantifiable to the skewed amount of wealth you have amassed? Can Mark Zuckerberg, or Sergei Brin any one of the Walton’s work much harder than an 11 year old kid who work 14 hour shifts in some rat infested tin shed of a factory in Bangladesh making the clothes that find their way onto the backs of every 11 year old American kid who wants to grow up to be the next Zuckerberg? You clearly cannot answer yes in good conscience. The system that requires millions of poor people working 70 hours a week to feed the fire of constant economic growth is, for this reason and scores more, not only unfair, but morally unjustifiable.

SUSTAINABILITY

The furnace that feeds the global Corporate capitalist system is also, I think you might have heard, heating up the planet. The human species, according to 98% of climate scientists are in dire straights. Imagine yourself strapped to a conveyor belt moving slowly towards a giant band saw, while the forces of darkness are shoving cyanide coated in fruit flavored mentos down your throat and chasing it with diet coke. You see, capitalism and carbon dioxide are a lot like mentos and diet coke. The main difference is that the latter gives you viral videos; the former is accelerating the extinction of the human species.

Fear not, you notorious 85, though you are now recognized for the pirates that you are, no one I know is demanding that you walk the plank. What we do demand, however, is a system that is sustainable, and equitable that does in fact re-distribute much of the wealth you have stolen from us.

I look forward to you response. You can reach me on twitter.