Originally Posted By PSYKOTROPIK
J'ai joué le premier aussi, les deux sont excellents mais je pense que le deuxième est supérieur, l'histoire et le présentation sont beaucoup amélioré.

Originally Posted By PSYKOTROPIK

The best is when they appear right behind you and scream AARRRRGG! in your headphones.

Permissions for this thread...
» AlexF - God Emperor
» Blisss - Banned From Posting
» Alex_Fuuuu - Banned From Posting

Permissions for this thread...
» Blisss - God Emperor
» AlexF - Banned From Posting
» basdini - Banned From Posting
» M-A-X - Banned From Posting
» Masa - Banned From Posting
» SourUltraFast - Banned From Posting

AMY GOODMAN: The author Gore Vidal has died at the age of 86. A national icon who authored more than 20 novels, five plays, Vidal was one of the best-known chroniclers of American history and politics. He dedicated his work to writing and critiquing the injustices of U.S. society. In a 2004 appearance on Democracy Now!, Gore Vidal talked about the role of democracy in the U.S. dating back to the Constitution.

GORE VIDAL: The word "democracy" is not only never mentioned in the Constitution of the United States, but democracy was something that the Founding Fathers hated. This is not generally known, because it shouldn’t be known, but it is. I wrote a little book about it called Inventing a Nation that Yale published last year.

Our founders feared two things. One was the rule of the people, which they thought would just be a mess. And they feared tyranny, which we had gone through King George III. And so, they wanted a republic, a safe place for men—white men—a property to do business in. This is not ideal, but it’s better than what we have.

So, here we are bringing democracy to the poor Afghans, but only the real democracy, of course, in the prisons, which we specialize in everywhere and which—one interesting thing that came out of all that mess was now the world knows how we treat Americans in American prisons. All that behavior, the humiliation and the violence and so on, that is typical of not so much—federal prisons, somewhat, but state prisons, municipal prisons, detention centers. This is the nation of torture. And those who disagree with me, you can write an angry letter at this very moment, if you can write at all. Sit down and write an angry letter to the commander-in-chief and have him examine the prisons.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, on that note, I want to thank you very much for being with us, Gore Vidal.

GORE VIDAL: I just barely started.

AMY GOODMAN: We end our show with the late and great author Gore Vidal who died Tuesday at the age of 86; complications of pneumonia at his home in Hollywood Hills, California. A national icon who authored some 25 novels, several plays, two memoirs, multiple volumes of essays. He was on of the best known and most prolific chroniclers of American history and politics, dedicating his work to critiquing the injustices of U.S. society. He made two unsuccessful bids for office, in 1960 when he was a Democratic congressional candidate in New York, and in '82 when he campaign in California for a seat in the senate. Described as the less noble defender of the American republic, America's last small-r Republican. I spoke to Gore Vidal many times, but this time, in 2003 with Juan Gonzalez, I want to play an excerpt of the conversation. I asked where he was on September 11, 2001.

GORE VIDAL: The United States is not a normal country. We are under—we’re a homeland now, under military surveillance and military control. The president asked the Congress right after 9/11 not to conduct a major investigation, "as it might deter our search for terrorism, wherever it may be in the world." So Congress obediently rolled over.

There was—I remember Pearl Harbor. I was a kid then. And within three years of it, I had enlisted in the Army. That’s what we did in those days. We did not go off to the Texas air force and hide.

I realized the country has totally changed, that the government is not responsive to the people, either in protecting us from something like 9/11, which they should have done, could have done, did not do, and then, when it did happen, to investigate, investigate, investigate. So I wrote two little books, one called Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, in which I try to go into the why Osama bin Laden, if it were he, or whoever it was, why it was done. And I wrote another one, Dreaming War, on why we were not protected at 9/11, which ordinarily would have led to the impeachment of the president of the United States who had allowed it to happen. They said they had no information. Since then, every day the New York Times prints another mountain of people who said they had warned the government, they had warned the government. President Putin of Russia, he had warned us. President Mubarak of Egypt, he had warned us. Three members of Mossad claim that they had come to the United States to warn us that sometime in September something unpleasant might come out of the sky in our direction. Were we defended? No, we were not defended. Has this ever been investigated? No, it hasn’t. There was some attempt at the midterm election. There was a pro forma committee in Congress, which has done nothing thus far. What are we? Three years later. This is shameful.

The media, which is controlled by the great conglomerates, which control the political system, has done an atrocious job of reporting, though sometimes good stories get in. I’ve worn my eyes out studying the Wall Street Journal, which despite its dreadful editorial policies, is a pretty good newspaper of record, which the New York Times is not. If you read the Wall Street Journal very carefully, you can pretty much figure out what happened that day.

At the time of the first hijacking, according to law, FAA, it is mandatory, within four minutes of a hijacking, fighter planes from the nearest airbase, military base, go up to scramble. That means go up and force the plane down, find out who they are, find out what’s happening. For one hour and 50 minutes, I think it was, no fighter plane went up. During that hour and 20 minutes, we lost the two towers and one side of the Pentagon. Why didn’t they go up? No description from the government. No excuse. A lot of mumbling stories, which were then retracted, and new stories replaced them. That, to me, was the end of the republic.

We no longer had a Congress which would ask questions, which it was supposed—in place to do, of the executive. We have a commander-in-chief who likes strutting around in military uniform, which no previous commander-in-chief ever did, as they’re supposed to be civilians keeping charge of the military. This thing is surrealistic now, and it is getting nastier and nastier as we are more and more kept in the dark about those things which most affect us, which are war and peace, prosperity and poverty. These are the main things that a government should look after and we, the people, should be told about. We have been told nothing. And every voice is silent.

So I wrote two little books, which were then noticed by people who like to look at the internet, and then a few hundred thousand people have bought them. And I don’t come out with conspiracy theories. I never became a journalist. I’m a historian. Because journalists give you their opinions and pretend they’re facts. I don’t give you my opinions, because they may be valuable to my mother, but they are of no value to anybody else. They may be of value to me. But I give the facts as I find them, and I list them. And they’re quite deadly.

This government is culpable of, if nothing less, negligence. Why were we not protected? With all the air bases, fighter planes, up and down the Eastern Seaboard, not one of them went aloft while the hijackings took place. Finally, two from Otis Field in Massachusetts arrived at the Twin Towers, I think at the time the second one was hit. If anybody had been thinking, they would have gone on to Washington to try and prevent the attack on the Pentagon. They went back to Otis, back to Massachusetts. So I ask these questions, which Congress should ask, does not ask, which the press should ask, but it’s too frightened. It’s a reign of terror now.

AMY GOODMAN: The late author, activist, essayist Gore Vidal died Tuesday at the age of 86 from complications of pneumonia at home in Hollywood Hill, California. You can watch all of our interviews with Gore Vidal on our website [ democracynow.org ] Special thanks to our Baltimore crew.

Subject: déclarer une carte perdue ou volée chez VISA Desjardins
Date: Mon, 06 Aug 2012 01:38:27 -0400
From: MON_NOM <MON_ADRESSE>
To: plaintes@oqlf.gouv.qc.ca


Bonjour,

Pour déclarer une carte perdue ou volée chez VISA Desjardins on doit
appeler le 514 397-4415 tel affiché sur la page web
[ www.desjardins.com ]
à cet effet. Le système téléphonique a par défaut l'anglais et on doit
appuyer une touche pour continuer en français contrairement à la
politique de francisation.

Je comprends qu'à votre bureau les effectifs soient limités et des
procédures bafouées suite à des mémos, comme un gouvernement libéral
prime les affaires bien au-dessus des questions de langue nationale.
Toutefois, j'espère que le français pourra retrouver sa primauté dans
cette situation.

Bien à vous,
MON_NOM

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR: It's Thanksgiving week in the United States, and families across the country are getting ready to sit down to their turkey dinners. To tell us what he thinks Americans should be thankful for�or not�we're joined by Gore Vidal in Los Angeles. So, Gore, tell us what you think Americans might want to be thinking about, this Thanksgiving.

GORE VIDAL, AUTHOR AND POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, what we're going through could not be worse for us. The dollar has crashed. The dollar has crashed against the Canadian dollar, which, you know, was always a joke for us. The Euro as risen. And suddenly we are no longer the great currency, and we're something like $25 trillion in debt.

JAY: If you go back to Thanksgiving in the mid-, late 1940s, during the time of McCarthyism, another period where certainly the media and outspoken people were hard to find. How do you compare? What was it like back in those days?

VIDAL: McCarthy was just one stupid senator from Wisconsin who'd got loose. We had a cowardly president, Eisenhower, but he was a very good president in the sense that he did try to represent the country. He tried to represent our institution. At the end of Eisenhower's reign, he did something extraordinary: he warned us against himself. That doesn't happen often with dictators, whether they are allowed or not allowed. We allowed him to be dictator because he'd done a good thing during the war, operating in London, operating and trying to keep all of the British and the American and so forth troops together. But he had realized he was a real conservative. He realized the harm that his regime was doing and the regime that had produced him, which was World War II continued. What did he do as he was leaving office? He warned us against the military-industrial complex. And he said, �My fellow Americans, you've got to realize that this comes with a price. Their control financially over everything in our country, from the universities to the civilian economy to the military. This is bad news for the United States. There are no voices speaking out.

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR: The economic structure of television makes what I'm going to ask difficult to accomplish. But do you think television journalists have learned anything from this last four years?

GORE VIDAL: Well, they've always been lazy, and they're not used to getting to the heart of problems, of matters. They're not used to investigating anything. Socrates tells us that the unexamined life is not worth living, and that is an absolute truth. Those who want to examine life don't go in for journalism, because they're not allowed to. So they've got to be very careful. They have to think about tenure if they're at a university. They've got to think about, you know, the publisher and advertisers. So it's a difficult row to hoe, and we have no intellectual tradition of any kind in the United States. I even told Arthur Schlesinger, �You know, Arthur, one Schlesinger does not make a spring.� He was horrified.

JAY: What do you think is the significance of what we're trying to do?

VIDAL: Well, I'm all for it. I wouldn't be sitting here today if I didn't like the notion. And it's apt to catch on. It's when the news starts to break, how two presidential elections, 2000 and 2004, were stolen and The New York Times would not review the book written about it by Congressman Conyers, nor Washington Post, nor Wall Street Journal, the great instruments of news were silent. Well, they're saying, �We don't give a goddamn about the United States. Just stew in your own juice. Leave us alone. We have corporate figures to add up now, and we have certain things we want to put in place, and we may have a couple of candidates for you dumdums, but you probably won't like them.� You know, I've been around the ruling class all my life, and I've been quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country. And the Republican machine became so good at transmitting its own feelings about the world to the enemy, to the liberals, once anyone, any of the right wing hear what I just said, he'll say, �Oh, the liberals have always hated America. We know that. They despise family values, because they're only interested in gang bangs and drugs and so forth.� This is the way they deal. And whenever they have a real coward for president, like Bush himself, and you have a hero like Kerry, �Oh, he's a coward. Didn't you know that? We've got five guys who were in Vietnam with him.� What they do is whatever is their transgression, whatever are their faults, they lie and apply it to the other person. That confuses everything. If I were an average voter in the United States, I wouldn't know who was telling the truth, whether Kerry really had run away and didn't get purple hearts, or whether Junior, you know, had actually learned how to fly a plane.

JAY: And television news covers the lies like news.

VIDAL: Yes. It has a lock on it.

JAY: You've been touring the country after your new book.

VIDAL: Well, no, I was touring it before the last congressional election to raise money for the Democratic Party. Not that I like the Democratic Party, but we have to have the semblance of a second party to get rid of these others.

JAY: What do you hear from people?

VIDAL: Well, I've never heard cries of rage so loud. It's when I'm in New Mexico or West Virginia. I've covered the whole country by now.

JAY: Our project's fundamentally motivated out of our own concern for what the future holds, especially in terms of what democratic rights we do have and the way the media has played such a destructive role. What do you think is the potential for what we're doing? What do you make of the project?

VIDAL: Well, the potential is enormous. There's not anyone with an IQ above, you know, lowest room temperature who isn't interested in something like this. Everybody is on to the con act of our media, that they are obeying bigger, richer interests than informing the public, which is the last thing that corporate America has ever been interested in doing. So I think, you know, the sky's the limit to the amount of audience you can get. And one of the secrets is, aside from telling the truth�which most people in America hate because they've been brought up on advertising, and they think the truth is just something irrelevant, irrelevant, you know. Everybody lies. You know, I love that line. So it's alright to steal the election. Well, that isn't what the world's about. And I think it's really come down to we're going to be blown up one of these days. We have now acquired so many enemies with so much power in the world that, well, they're going to take a couple of cracks at us. I would rather have Real News here telling us just where it was they struck, where it is, intelligence says they may strike again, and maybe why they're doing it�we blew up their mosque, we killed their president, or whatever it was that set them off. What our fictional news does now�and this is--all it is is fiction, whether it's CNN or CBS or NBC, it's all fiction. The people making this junk know that. The viewers suspect it. But where are they going to turn to? Where are they going to find out? They can't all go out and get a, you know, subscription to The Nation, which would help straighten them out, at least in print. So you're going to be the only alternative, and the word will start to spread. Look at the speed with which, you know, just by telling jokes, John Stewart and company, got the attention of everybody. And now they say, well, most of the real news that the people know about they get from the satirizing of it that Stewart does. And very funny he is, too. In other words you build a better mousetrap, and the mouse will come to your door.

JAY: Thank you.

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR: How significantly different would a Clinton White House, Obama White House, or an Edwards White House�how much can they do? How much do they want to do differently?

GORE VIDAL: Too broken, The first thing you have to do is get back habeas corpus. You've got to get back the Magna Carta, you've got to get back our legal system, you've got to get back the pillars of the Constitution, and they're gone. Republics don't restore themselves.

JAY: There's a group of ex-Reagan conservatives that are waging a campaign exactly along these lines, saying the Constitution must be reclaimed. In fact, they're making more of it than the leadership of the Democratic Party is.

VIDAL: Well, do they have the same constitution in mind? Or do they have something else in mind? One never knows with marginal groups. I think the Reagan people just believed in you make as much money as you can, and screw everybody else.

JAY: This gang seems to be. They're certainly talking the talk of wanting to defend habeas corpus and the Constitution. But more my point is we're hearing very little of this from the Democratic Party.

VIDAL: Well, there's Dennis Kucinich, there are a lot of people, Senator Leahy, Congressman Conyers, there are a lot of people who understand the Constitution and understand the risks of dictatorship, because we're right on the edge of it. I tell people, Europeans, that say, you know, �What do you think of the regime?� I said, �Well, what they've done is interesting. Symbolic.� I said, �I was born eighty years ago in a country called the United States in America, and I now live in a homeland.� It's an expression we haven't heard since Hitler. Since they don't know anything about language or politics or thought or anything else, they think this is a wonderful way of explaining the United States defending itself against its numerous inscrutable enemies. They hate us. We don't know why. Well, if we didn't blow up their cities, they might feel more kindly towards us. Two plus two is not possible in the United States of Alzheimer's.

JAY: What do you see in the next ten, fifteen years?

VIDAL: Bankruptcy for the nation, which will put an end to these insane wars. We can't afford one. I know in Washington, I mean, the entire Bush gang is longing to reconstitute the army with another million men, and it can't find a million men. And the American people, although they can be easily tricked, they're not stupid, and they're not enlisting.

JAY: Those who've been more or less running the world for the last fifty, sixty years or more, how do they deal with the situation where they might not run the world anymore?

VIDAL: Well, martial law would be the first step that they would take to get back their powers. It's always a good one, always an easy one. They have all sorts of models, they think, in Abraham Lincoln, but he certainly ruled with dictatorial powers, but the Constitution allowed him to do that, and he was faced with the dissolution of his country, which he cared a lot about. There's nobody in this administration who knows anything about the United States. They don't know the history. They certainly do not wish the people well. If you ever talk to Republicans privately about that�this is elected officials�their opinion of the people, their contempt is so total. And if you're on their side, you're a softhearted liberal or you've been taken in.

JAY: What do you see as the response coming from the people in the next ten, fifteen years?

VIDAL: Well, I think, bankruptcy, depression.

JAY: How will people respond?

VIDAL: Well, there could be rioting. Certainly when we saw what happened in the late 20s, early 30s, institutions collapsed, banks collapsed, and Roosevelt's swift actions followed by the brains of Lord Keynes changed the whole economic structure of the West, much less the United States. So we were lucky between Keynes and Roosevelt to have had two such extraordinary men who did have our interests at heart or at least appeared to.

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR: This idea that this undemocratization or growth of fascism is incremental: What are the other signs of it in American society?

GORE VIDAL: Well, it's been the monopolizing of great wealth, which tends to happen in basically unjust societies and undemocratic societies. We have plenty of would-be democrats, would-be liberals, and would-be progressives. But how do you organize? The Democratic Party is a machine to get votes for its people, none of who should probably be elected to the high offices of state. That's all. The Republican Party is fundamentally crooked and might well be outlawed one of these days. Le Pen, you know, in France, who is an out-and-out fascist, the French have managed in some clever way to contain him. I mean, he's always running for president; his votes never seem to show up. I don't know how they do it, but we've got to do that with the Republican base, the religious right. We don't want them running the country. Nobody does. Certainly not the founding fathers. And I think we have to ride herd on them and make sure they do not seize the state.

JAY: Well, they kind of did, and�.

VIDAL: Of course they did. They took advantage of 9/11 and so on.

JAY: How do you assess this danger to democracy of the organization of the hard right alliance of evangelicals?

VIDAL: Well, you have to work out what it is. They are a little splinter. They can't summon many voters at any given time. They are a minority of a minority of a minority. They have everybody buffaloed because the great corporations like them and pay money to their candidates for sheriff and senator. And they're playing big-time politics. Yes, indeed. But the average person doesn't like them. You know, any time I want to get applause�and I lecture across America in state after state after state�when I fear things are getting a little low, I always say, �And another thing: Let us tax all the religions,� I bring down the goddamn house with that. And any politician would if he had sense enough to do it. The people don't like their tax exemption.

JAY: I went to church in Nashville, evangelical church. I was there for a four and a half hour service. And in four and a half hours the words �poor� or �poverty� did not cross anyone's lips.

VIDAL: No. They might have fallen off the lips.

JAY: My understanding of Christianity is the fundamental criteria you'll be judged by to enter salvation is your attitude to the poor, which doesn't get talked about much. But there was an interesting thing. I met a man there who's married to a friend who has quite progressive politics, but he's a believer and goes to the church. And he said 20, 25 percent of the church does not support the right wing politics and didn't vote for Bush.

VIDAL: I'm sure of that.

JAY: There's an interesting fracture in terms of the honest people who believe in the values espoused and what's getting expressed at the political level.

VIDAL: Well, remember, all that area from which the Gore family comes was solid Democrat and progressive under Roosevelt for several decades. So they just didn't become Republicans because they all wanted to be bankers. They became it because they didn't like black people, and they thought the Democrats were pushing integration too fast. And that's how the great split came about, to the shame of the whole country.

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR: There's a lot of taboo subjects in the media, and even sometimes in the society.

GORE VIDAL: Particularly in the society.

JAY: Yeah. But one of them is trying to draw any historical lessons from the rise of fascism in Germany, in Italy, and say there's anything in common�.

VIDAL: I'm not joking when I refer to our country as the United States of Amnesia, although I was corrected recently by Studs Terkel out of Chicago. And he said, �Gore, it's not the United States of Amnesia; it's the United States of Alzheimer's.� I stand corrected.

JAY: Fascism in Germany wasn't a coup; it was a many-year process. [crosstalk] feel normal. I'm not suggesting we're living in an equivalent period, but there are lessons to be learned about�.

VIDAL: But it is equivalent. I mean, don't be shy of saying that. The response to the Reichstags Fire is precisely that to 9/11, which was invoked by this administration's people. �And if we don't fight them over there, we got to fight 'em here.� This little fool. How are they going to get here? Greyhound bus? I mean, he is so stupid himself that he assumes everybody else is equally stupid. If he had been really elected, I would say everybody else was stupid, but he wasn't.

JAY: But the party that was really elected went along with most of what he did until very recently.

VIDAL: Oh, he didn't do much of anything. They went along applauding it because they were getting huge contracts for Haliburton.

JAY: No, I'm talking about the leadership of the Democratic Party went along with the Patriot Act, went along with the war in Iraq.

VIDAL: Have you ever found them? You know where they live?

JAY: The leadership of the Democratic Party?

VIDAL: They�re like rocks. You know, they're not visible. There's some obviously good people in the party. I like Dennis Kucinich, I like Senator Leahy. There are some very good people in Congress. And lets hope they start doing some oversight. But I'm not very sanguine.

JAY: In the period between 9/11 and Katrina, where in Katrina some cracks started to appear in the Bush armour, we saw a kind of capitulation by American media and all the opposition political leadership. And you saw a face of America that we might see more of.

VIDAL: After all, you are in opposition to American media, and so am I. And we know how false it is, and how corrupt it is, and how engag� they are for mischief, making money for the ownership of the country. There's nothing to be done about them. And no wonder, even when the American people might ever again, which I doubt, have an uncorrupted presidential election. 2000 was corrupted. 2004 was corrupted. I don't think we'll ever get to know the people's voice, and the people have no voice because they have no information. That is why you're doing useful work here. That's why I'm chatting with you here. That could be useful, to tell them actually what happens around the world. That poor guy running for Congress, everybody jumped on him, particularly [inaudible] people. He suggested that our foreign policy might have had something to do with 9/11, that we were deeply disliked in the Muslim world for other reasons. It's the same presidential, I guess. �Do you believe in evolution?� said this idiot. I mean, to reveal the leadership of the United States hasn't made it to the 20th century, that our leadership is as ignorant as that. Five of them said, no, no, thinking little lord Jesus was going to vote for them.

JAY: It's in these moments of crisis, like terrorist attack, that you start to see people's colors.

VIDAL: Yellow.

JAY: In Britain as well, and I was really taken aback. After the bus London bombings, Ken Livingstone�red Ken Livingstone�was asked, was there any connection between these bombings and UK foreign policy, and he said there's no connection whatsoever. This is just people that hate our way of life.

VIDAL: Yeah, that's the new lie that they like to tell. Well, that's Bush allover. They just hate us. Why? Nobody has to ask them why. He doesn't know why. �Well, they envy us, our form of government.� Who envies us that can of worms we've got in Washington? And it's been many years in the United States since I have seen a Norwegian coming to get a green card.

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR: In this period after World War II and this sort of feeling of world supremacy, domestically we see McCarthyism.

GORE VIDAL: Well, McCarthy kind of misread the tarot cards. You know, he thought it was a simple matter of conquest. Probably the only thing he basically cared about was Ireland, because he was an Irishman. And he liked the British Empire being kicked in the butt by Americans. So anything that would, you know, do them in or do in, you know, Dean Acheson, the secretary of state, who seemed like an Englishman. I think he did a lot of, you know, ethnic one-up-man ship. But no. Well, first of all, we were taken over by big businesses, we always have been, but this time it was pretty severe because the stakes were greater. Somebody said, oh, the kid last night who was interviewing me, Adam something, he said, you know, �Certainly the United States is basically an altruistic country. Look at the Marshall Plan.� I said, �What's altruistic about seizing control of western Europe? It seems to be very much part of an imperial plan.� Oh, he couldn't believe it. He just thought we did it out of goodness of heart. Now, he's a very bright guy, writes for The New Yorker and so on, yet he's been so misled. And he reads a lot of history; he's very intelligent. You cannot get through the density of the propaganda with which the American people, through the dreaded media, have been filled and the horrible public educational system we have for the average person. It's just grotesque.

JAY: There's this fundamental belief, religious belief, that America's foreign policy since World War II has been a fight for freedom.

VIDAL: Well, it never was. And the belief that we're a democracy. That means you know nothing about the Constitution. The people who made the Constitution hated democracy. Some of them put up with it better than others. Jefferson was pretty good on the subject. The others just loathed it.

JAY: But certainly there's more democracy in the United States than there was in Hitler's Germany.

VIDAL: Well, I suppose that if you're being tortured to death by Mao Tse-Tung, it's much better to be with Paul Revere in front of a fireplace in Concord, New Hampshire. I mean, you can sort out [crosstalk]-

JAY: No, but there are stages of this process of democracy or lack there of.

VIDAL: The Federalist Papers are very clear. Whenever one of the founding fathers and one of the people who was inventing the Constitution, they start to get apoplectic at the mention of Athens, the mention of Pericles, the mention of democracy. They go on and on about mobs, and we don't want this, and we don't want that. We're an oligarchy of the well to do. We were at the very beginning, when the Constitution was made, and we're even more so now.

JAY: But within that context there is more or less right of free assembly. There is more or less right of free speech. Of course, you have more free speech if you own a television network than if you don't.

VIDAL: Well, yes, as you'll find out with The Real News.

JAY: But there are some constitutional rights here that you wouldn't have seen�.

VIDAL: They've been eliminated one by one over the last four years.

JAY: That's my question.

VIDAL: When habeas corpus was removed, I think they attributed it to certain desires of the USA Patriot Act. When they got rid of that, they got rid of Magna Carta. When you get rid of that, you get rid of our liberties. The only good thing England ever left us was Magna Carta. Magna Carta guarantees due process of law. You cannot have your life removed, you cannot have your money removed, your freedom removed, except by a trial by jury of your peers, and you could be represented by a legal�. That's been eliminated. Sixth Amendment is gone. The speed with which it was done is sort of miraculous, because this is a screw-up administration�they can't do anything properly. There are those who keep quoting me, because I had said, well, they'd had enough warnings about 9/11 to have done something. Well, that's the CIA's warning. They did nothing. So I have to face this every now and then. �Well, you said that Bush was in favour of it. And can you prove that?� I said, �Of course I can't. How would I know?� I do know that he is so incompetent; this was a great, successful mission conducted by some crazed religious zealots.

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR: One of the principles of US foreign policy coming out of World War II was to establish a single-superpower world, was one of the reasons for the dropping of the nuclear weapons, to tell the world, a shot across the bow, if you will, that this is going to be a single-superpower world.

GORE VIDAL: I don't think it was that well thought out. We had single-handedly won World War II. The Russians don't agree with this because without their land armies we could never have liberated Europe from the Nazis. So the Russians paid a great cost in life and treasure, as they like to say. And they won the ground war, we won the air war, and we won the sea war. And that was about it. But we grabbed all the credit for everything, as we are wont to do. Europeans have always noticed we come in very, very late into their European wars. And if they followed the advice of people like me, we would never have come in to go to war abroad as we did in World War I, as we did again in World War II. But by '45 when the bombs were being dropped or considered, we lacked Franklin Roosevelt. He was the emperor. He knew exactly what he was doing. He made a number of agreements with Stalin at Yalta. All Stalin asked for was to be treated as a normal superpower, which is what they were. Roosevelt did not have any nonsense going on in his head about the sanctity of Christianity, the sanctity of capitalism versus communism. I don't think he ever gave such topics a thought. All he knew is we had won the war, and he was going to decolonialize. Now, that is the great Roosevelt message. He told Churchill at Yalta, he said, you know, �Now we're winning, you know, the war in Europe.� Pacific war was still going on. �But now that we're winning it, you know that you're going to have to give up India.� �Oh, yes, of course, we always knew that. And one day we'll really give it up.� And he said, �No, no, no, you're going to give it up right away. And France is going to give up Indochina. Sumatra and Java are going to be let go free by the Dutch.� And he said, �I don't care what this does to European powers. I'm ending colonialism, because without a clean sweep, United States is meaningless.� I mean, Roosevelt was a great statesman, and he knew a lot about geography, and these other jokers didn't know it. And so it came to pass that Churchill had to give up India, grumbling all the way. At this famous lunch, a lot of witnesses there, Churchill apparently turned to him. He thought this man was his friend, but emperors have no friends. And he said, �What do you want me to do? Get on my hind legs like your little dog, Fala, and beg?� The emperor said, �Yes.� You don't take on emperors in their own empire. Roosevelt had done what he set out to do. Why did he set out to do what he did? He had lived through World War I, and he'd come to Washington as assistant secretary of the navy under Woodrow Wilson, one of the wooliest headed presidents we ever had. I mean, he makes Harry Truman look like Einstein. He tried out the League of Nations, which he didn't know how to set it up. He antagonized half the Senate and then wondered why they voted against him. Roosevelt had learned his lesson from Woodrow Wilson. So he sets up the United Nations. Wisely, he put Eleanor Roosevelt, who was in many ways a better statesman than he, in charge of just seeing that it got off to a good start, because he suspected he was dying and indeed did die. And she nursed it along. And it was a very good thing until American right wingers got a hold of it, 'cause they had to complain about foreigners. You know, foreigners are bad people. They don't wash, and they never pay back their debts.

JAY: Roosevelt was planning his vision of the American empire?

VIDAL: Of course he was. One of the first things he did was tell Churchill, goodbye, India. You're out of the empire business. There are no empires. He didn't say we're going to be the only one, because he was too tactful and too manipulative. Somebody might have said, no, you're not. But he set everything up in the post-war world.

JAY: He makes the deal with Ibn Saud on a boat off Great Bitter Lake.

VIDAL: Yeah, on his way back from Yalta on a battleship. And Ibn Saud, the king of Saudi Arabia, came aboard and spent the entire day. And here's Roosevelt, a dying man, saying, you know, �I'm rather looking forward to coming here after the war. I can help you with many things.� He was going to help him with the price of oil, I suppose. And Roosevelt was still very vigorous; it's just his flesh gave out. And so he came to die at Warm Springs, Georgia. A sad day.

JAY: That deal with Ibn Saud seemed to set the pattern for the next fifty, sixty years of Middle East regional policy.

VIDAL: Well, and the conflict with the Brits, because the Brits were in Iranian oil. Amoco, whatever company merged with British oil, petroleum. And the Brits could think of nothing else. And Roosevelt thought, well, I'll preempt that sooner or later with the American alliance with the Arabians. And they quite liked each other, the two old kings. And they sat there and divided up that sphere of influence. Then Roosevelt was dead, and Ibn Saud was never a great player, and so that was the end of that.

JAY: But it did set some of the pattern, of this use of Wahhabism and the Saudi royal family in the Middle East politics.

VIDAL: Well, I don't think Roosevelt knew anything about the Wahhabi Muslims. He didn't do a lot of research. But he had great instincts. He knew where the oil was, and he knew where the power was, so he accommodated the power of the royal family there, and he smiled benignly at the oil wells.

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR: Was the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the closing curtain of World War II, or the opening act of the Cold War?

GORE VIDAL: Probably the opening act of the Cold War. It was also the end of the American republic. Every single important military commander on the American side pleaded with the new president, our great Augustus, Franklyn Roosevelt, had died in I think it was April of '45 and was succeeded by a no-brainer called Harry Truman, who didn't know what he was doing. But he had learned certain notes. He'd been vice president for a few weeks only. Roosevelt had never told him about the atomic bomb. So he arrives as president, and advisors, all the people connected with the bombs, wanted to drop them so they'd spent their money well. Truman thought it was a good idea because he thought that we needed an enemy. We'd had Hitler and Nazism. Stalin and communism�even better. And while he was at Potsdam with his first meeting with Stalin, he gets news from Alamogordo, New Mexico that the atom bomb works. He's overexcited 'cause he's going to give it to Stalin, 'cause he was a good American who never really read a book, except for some very simple children's stories about American history. So he thought, looking at Stalin, here's the enemy, just made for us. We could militarize the economy; we could increase the army. Then word comes: the bomb works. As Leslie Groves, who was a student at West Point of my father. And Groves, very pompous fellow, and quite full of himself. It was Oppenheimer who should have been filled with himself, because Oppenheimer really gave us the bomb�with great misgivings. When the explosion went off in the New Mexican desert, he was almost in tears. This is Dr. Oppenheimer. And he said, lo, behold, I am Shiva, the destroyer of worlds. Then the decision was made�there was a very good book by a man called, Gar Alperovitz, on the decision to use the bomb. At least Truman had the good sense to consult his military camp commanders. Every last one of them, including the mad Curtis Lemay�Dr. Strangelove, General Strangelove�said, don't do it. Eisenhower in Europe, the commanding general there, Nimitz, the commanding admiral in the Pacific, they said, don't you do it. We'll be hated by the whole world. Japan is defeated. Everybody knows it. The emperor has been writing Truman letters asking for surrender. Truman, who didn�t really � much like the current president, he didn't know anything about foreign affairs, but he knew he had two weapons, he had two aces in the hole, or however they say it, poker, and he's going to play them. And he played them. And at the cost to our reputation. I mean, the meditations of Eisenhower on how horrible this would be for the United States. I think he suspected he'd already be an American president by then, and there was going to be nothing but trouble. There's been nothing but trouble for us ever since. Truman went on with this grotesque adventure, and we have gone on in the wake of it, and the Cold War begins.

Youtube Downloader
Download Now CNET Secure Download

CNET Editors' Rating:
4.5 stars

Outstanding
Average User Rating:
3.5 stars out of 3,361 votes

See all user reviews

Quick Specs

Version: 3.9
File size: 5.16MB
Date added: July 02, 2012
Price: Free
Operating system: Windows XP/Vista/7
Total downloads: 109,657,724
Downloads last week: 199,332
Product ranking: #3 in Download Managers

Youtube
BadJoJo
BBC.co.uk
Bing Video
[ Blip.tv ]
Bofunk
Break
CollegeHumor
Crackle
DailyHaHa
DailyMotion
EbaumsWorld
ESPN Videos
Facebook
[ Filecabi.net ]
FunnyOrDie
Gaytube
GodTube
Google Video
Hentaimedia
keezmovies
LiveLeak
Livevideo
MegaPorn
MegaVideo
MeFeedia
Metacafe
Myspace Video
Pornhost
Pornhub
PornoTube
[ Raajje.tv ]
Revver Vodpod
RedTube
Sevenload
Shufuni
Slutload
Spankwire
Stickam
[ Streetfire.net ]
Tangle
ThatVideoSite
TNAflix
Tontuyau
TotallyCrap
Tube8
[ Ustream.tv ]
Vevo
VideoClipsDump
VideoJug
Videu.de
Vimeo
VodPod
Worldstarhiphop
Xhamster
XNXX
Xtube
XVideoHost
XVideos
Yahoo Video
YouJizz
YouPorn
YourFileSite
Yuvutu
Zorpia

Currently broken / on the to-do list:
AOL Video
Hulu
[ Nick.com ]
Spike TV
Yahoo Music Videos

Originally Posted By MASA
How 'bout you stick to your coke and your free booze and your ladies and your guestlists, superstwat?

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore.

We're continuing our series of interviews about the American governing elite and where they're leading all of us. The U.S. presidential elections we're focusing in on. And in this segment, we're going to talk about Mitt Romney and the Republican Party with Jeff Faux, who now joins us from our studio in D.C. He's a distinguished fellow at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. He's written extensively on the economy and neighborhood development and globalization. And his latest book is The Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class. Thanks for joining us again, Jeff.

JEFF FAUX, AUTHOR: Good to be here, Paul.

JAY: So, once again, if you haven't watched the other parts, you should, 'cause we're just going to pick up the discussion. In the last segment, we talked about President Obama's vision. And now—or lack thereof or lack of implementing thereof. And now we're going to talk about Mitt Romney and his economic vision. And I expect he would probably do a little better at implementing the vision he articulates then President Obama did. So kick us off with what Romney is saying and what you make of it.

FAUX: Well, you know, Romney, like his opponent, is saying what he thinks he needs to do to be reelected, but of course his basic proposition is dissolve the New Deal, bring us back to where we were sometime in the past, which is romanticized, where business decisions determine the future. I don't think Romney is going to be quite as draconian as some of the people in the House of Representatives, but who knows?

You know, it's not that you're voting—you're really not voting so much for a person as you're voting for a group. And in Romney's case, the death of the liberal Republicans in the Republican Party means that all the people who are going to take the jobs in a Romney administration are going to come from the extreme right. And, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if Romney turns his back on some of the most extreme cost-cutting, budget-cutting proposals of the Republican right. But it is going to be an age of super austerity. Presumably, Romney comes in with a Republican majority. It's going to be, in a way, the George Bush economic program, which was to give away what was—what's left of the government treasury to the business community. So it's pretty reactionary.

Labor unions in particular are going to do a lot worse under Romney than they did under Obama. The Democrats are not against labor unions. They're kind of for them. But they haven't been doing much to help them, even though they depend on it. The Republicans, on the other hand, clearly are against the unions.

JAY: Alright. So Romney's thesis is get the private—unfetter the private sector, stop all this money being tied up by governments, so the same amount of capital, supposedly, is now going to be available to the private sector to invest, and it's going to be better for workers 'cause there'll be more jobs and all of this. And so what is your sense of that? And how will ordinary workers with jobs—and also those without jobs—how will they do under all of this?

FAUX: Well, under Romney the lowering and the decline of real incomes and wages is going to be accelerated. I mean, the social safety net, which is very important to bolster workers' bargaining position, is going to be lowered drastically; if not, it's going to disappear. Unions are going to be under attack. I mean, they're already under attack. And the Obama people can be helpful in specific kinds of instances. Without that, the trade unions are going to be up against the wall. And if you have four years or eight years of this kind of reactionary Republican regime, you can kiss trade unionism in America goodbye. Now, I happen to feel like in the long run unions are inevitable. They'll come back. But it could be your grandchildren who will finally form the labor union after eight years of Romney.

It's not like—the position of the United States is a lot more vulnerable than it was under George Bush. You know, we saw what happened under Bush. The crash of 2008, the crash of 2009 is an inevitable result of that kind of social Darwinist economics.

JAY: And what do you make of, you know, the section of the working class that should know better? And I don't mean necessarily workers in small towns and rural areas that traditionally have, you know, been a little more Republican for various reasons, but there seems to be some inroads being made in the urban working class, which should know better and are still—there's sections seem to be considering voting for Romney. And, you know, some of these votes are so close between Obama and Romney that it kind of boggles my mind what is going through the heads of these people. As much as I'm critical of Obama, like you've mentioned, Romney will be a disaster. And what is going through the—why is Romney having some success with these people?

FAUX: Yeah. Well, we'll see how much success he has. But I think to the degree that he has, it's, one, because people—the working class in urban areas has not seen the recovery, has not seen the improvements. Wages have declined, and we still have high unemployment among all segments of the working class, which is 80 percent of our population, so that they haven't seen that.

I don't think, by and large, the average American spends a lot of time thinking about economic policies. What they sort of get quickly on the TV is here's one guy; and the press says, well, that's his argument: here's the other guy; the press says, that's his argument.

Trade union workers will still vote Democratic.

But there's something else going on, I think, in among the average American voter, and that is there's some denial. If you ask—the polls have shown, if you ask the average American, do you think the next generation is going to be worse off than this generation, you get overwhelming majorities yes. But then if you ask, do you think you personally are going to be worse off, the answer is, oh, I'm going to be okay, my kids are going to be okay. There's a disconnect that's going on, and I think in part it's because they haven't been inspired by anything political, and they're sort of coming back and internalizing all of this and hoping that whatever happens, they're going to be okay. This is a common psychological, you know, problem of denial.

JAY: They also seem to have had some success in getting sections of private sector workers in on blaming public sector workers, and then that also has electorial implications.

FAUX: Yes. Jay Gould, who was the robber baron of the late 19th century, once said he could pay half of the working class to kill the other half of the working class. Now, I don't think that's quite true, but there is a—the sophisticated Republican conservative program that we know has been—being operated since that famous memo of Lewis Powell to the Chamber of Commerce in the early 1970s, the propaganda about the world which pits private sector employees against public sector employees and have as—trade unionists in New York, for example, backing cuts to pensions for public workers. That's what happens. When you undercut the trade union movement, you isolate it and fragment it, you get internal conflict.

JAY: There's another part of it, is there not, that as well, President Obama and the leading Democrats, you know, they fight somewhat in defense of this idea of government and public sector, and in the campaigns there's some of that kind of language used. But during this last four years, the Democrats—certainly under Clinton, too—they buy into some of the underlying assumptions that they actually share with the Republicans, which gives it a kind of credibility. And then what are people left with? Then it's just, okay, I like this guy or that guy, you failed, let's try him. I mean, nobody has any ideological moorings anymore.

FAUX: Right. I think one of the great tragedies and failures of the Democratic Party is that ever since Clinton—and, quite frankly, even at the end of the Carter administration they bought into the propaganda campaign against government. And so you have Obama repeatedly saying, well, we're not for big government. You got the disaster of that health care plan, when you and I and most Americans know that the only way to deliver health care and get those insurance costs down and the prescription drug costs down is to have a single-payer program for this country. That's clear. And if Barack Obama and you and I were sitting in a bar, I believe that's what he would tell us. Instead, in order to avoid the big government issue and not confront it and not deal with it, instead they develop this sort of Clintonesque, complicated piece of legislation that no one can understand, and it becomes terribly, terribly vulnerable.

This is a big country. We have big problems. We need big government to solve them. The idea that we could solve these problems that face the American middle class with a government the size of Honduras's is insane. And yet that is the ideology that the Democrats themselves keep reinforcing.

JAY: Which opens up a whole 'nother line of questioning on the democratization of this government, 'cause if it's going to be big government that plays a role and government at all kinds of levels that is a big piece of the answer to all of this, then, of course, so is democratization of all of this, because right now big government can also mean big bailouts for banks—it may not mean anything good for ordinary people.

Anyway, we're going to continue this discussion. There—not right away, but Jeff is going to come back soon, and we're going to pick up another series of talks. We're also going to, if Jeff agrees—and I think if I do this while we're live, he's going to agree—he'll come back for maybe some live Q&A with viewers.

FAUX: Ah. Sure. I'd love to do that.

JAY: Okay. So we'll—maybe the next time you come in, we'll let everybody know, and we'll take people's questions, and we'll make that part of format.

At any rate, if you want us to keep doing this, don't forget there's a "Donate" button somewhere around this video player. And if you don't click on that "Donate" button, we can't keep doing this. Thanks again for joining us on The Real News Network.

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore.

We're continuing our series of discussions about where the American governing elite is leading us all. Now joining us from our D.C. studio is Jeff Faux. He's the founder and now distinguished fellow of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., an activist, economist, a writer. His latest book is The Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class. Thanks for joining us again, Jeff.

JEFF FAUX, AUTHOR: Great to be here, Paul.

JAY: So if you haven't watched part one or part two, then you should, because we're going to just pick up the discussion from where we left off. So first we're going to talk about the U.S. presidential elections. We'll start with President Obama. If we need another segment, then we'll do Romney. Or we'll fit them both in here. We'll see how it goes.

But let's just start from this. When President Obama ran in 2008, he seemed to understand what a rational economic policy would be in order not to kind of continue this spiral of lack of demand, low wages, no infrastructure, and so on. And now, four years later, there's still some of that rhetoric, but I don't think we saw a heck of a lot of it. We saw him make a commitment to the Employee Free Choice Act, EFCA, that would allow more unionization, which in theory would have led to higher wages. And they gave up on that, it seems to me, from day of the inauguration. Anyway, so let's talk about President Obama's vision and actual practice in terms of where this economy's going.

FAUX: Yeah, I agree that when he ran and in the initial few months of his term he did seem to understand it, and I have to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he did. And he was often quite eloquent about it. I thought in his inaugural speech, when he used that biblical quotation—he said, now we must put away childish things—I thought that was a brilliant image. And after that he kept talking about we need to—we can't rebuild the economy on a pile of sand; we need to build it on a foundation of rock, etc. And he, I think, or at least some of the people around him, if you had a few beers and the press wasn't there, would admit that they know what to do. And knowing what to do is investing in infrastructure and education and research and development; it's having a trade and investment policy that's aimed at the interests of the American worker, not the American foreign investor; shrinking Wall Street. All of this stuff, you know, they know has been written a number of times. I've written a couple of books on this myself. By now it's clear what we need to do.

But Obama gets in, and suddenly the world of the elite, financial elite especially, closes in. He picks the advisers who were part of the Clinton team—Summers and Geithner, who's a Wall Street—they're all Wall Street people. So if you put these people in charge of the economy, it is no surprise that you're going to get what we got, which was subsidies and a lifeboat for Wall Street, and drowning for a whole lot of other Americans.

JAY: Right. I mean, you'd have to think this is mostly campaign rhetoric, then. It's not like he didn't know what Wall Street wanted. To a large extent his candidacy began on Wall Street. These guys were raising money for him on Wall Street years ahead of time, and he knew how much of his campaign depended on that. And clearly he's hearing—and you can see from the team he appointed it was the—you know, as you said, it was the Wall Street economic team. So it makes you think this is all just—you know, it's not like he doesn't know, but he uses it to campaign, not to govern.

FAUX: Yeah, yeah. I was—if I can say this, I was inspired to write this book by a book that the American historian Barbara Tuchman wrote in 1984. It was called The March of Folly. And it's a sort of a history of political folly over the last 2000 years. And she defines folly as not stupidity, but looking at the evidence, knowing what is the right thing to do, and going ahead and doing what you wanted to do anyway, and to the result with the destruction of your institution, your country, etc.

JAY: Yeah, look at World War I and World War II.

FAUX: That's—exactly. So this is something that we see in history. It's got a historic context.

So Obama, in my view, is Clinton II. I mean, we saw it for eight years in Bill Clinton, the rhetoric, the "I feel your pain," a little populism, a better program than the Republicans (there's no question about that), but not enough to solve the problem of the average American working family. With Obama it is the same.

And, you know, you can make the case—and I think it's right—that Romney and the Republican right would be a complete disaster. So it's a defensive decision here, voting for Obama to avoid something worse.

But it's very hard to convince yourself that over the next four years, should he be reelected, we're going to see anything dramatically different from the last four years. I can tell you, the day after election day they're going to be sitting around in the White House and saying not, oh my gosh, we're going to have to—you know, it was the labor unions that elected us, it was the middle class people angry about the economy who elected us; we're going to have to do something about that. They're going to be sitting around and saying, boss, we obviously did the right thing for the first four years, because we got reelected. And that—.

JAY: Which is what the fundamental, primary mission was, to get reelected.

FAUX: That's right. That's right. And, you know, you can sort of step back and say the Republican Party wants to drag us back to the 19th century, the Democratic Party at its best wants to keep the gains that were made in the 20th century. But neither of them are seriously looking at what this country needs to do in order to be prosperous and survive and have the middle class survive in the 21st century.

As I said before, we abandoned future in our politics back in the Reagan years, and we haven't put it back together. Now, where is the vision? Now, people—you know, that's a misused word. But, again, back in the 1970s, people were thinking about what America should look like 20 years from now. You know, there's an old saying that if you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there. Well, any road is getting us where we're going, because there's no sense of what this country should be like 20 years from now.

JAY: Except there is a vision, in a sense, I think you could say, both developed in European elite and the American elite and Canadian elite, which is what's happening. The vision is: we don't need to give—we don't need a compromise—the New Deal compromise anymore because we have so much pressure and leverage against European and North American workers now that the vision is what we're seeing. We can have a low-wage economy. We're going to still make a killing because there's so much money to be made in the rest of the world. And that's the vision.

FAUX: Yeah. There is no—there's nothing after the day after tomorrow, because, as I said before, they really do not see that as their job or their interest. What they see is the opportunity to get quick—and quick is very, very important—to get quick returns now. What happens five years from now, ten years from now, they're gone. You know, they're in the south of France. They're going to be doing what the rich and powerful always do [crosstalk]

JAY: Okay. Let me just go back to one point, 'cause we spend a lot of time on The Real News Network being very, very critical of the Obama administration. And, of course, we're very critical of Romney and the Republicans. But you made a point, and I don't think we explore that point enough on The Real News, which is that you said the Democrats are a little better, that the Republicans will be a complete disaster. So in terms of the Democrats being a little better, what are some examples of that?

And let me just add one thing, which is partly a comment and a question. I guess it's in the interests of that section of the American elite whose electoral alliance is based on unions and urban workers—they got to do something or they lose their base, where the Republican allies in the population or the right wing of the working class, rural people and such, they don't have to do the same things to get elected. So it's within that section of the American elites' interest to do something. And so what's the something that makes them a little better?

FAUX: Yeah. Not very much. I think the something is a little better on social services. The something is much better—the Democrats are much better on social issues that the big money doesn't care about. They don't care about gay marriage, they don't care about things like that. So on those issues the Democrats have more room.

But on the economic question, you ask yourself—when Obama got elected, you could've asked him just that same question: well, what are you going to do for the people who elected you, so that four years later they will be enthusiastic about you? And the answer was to ignore that. In a way, the Republicans are more attentive to their working-class supporters, that is, the people who care about gay rights and guns and things of that sort, than the Democrats are. There is no excuse for—and there's no political logic for a Democratic Party that depends so much on trade unions to have stiffed them the way Clinton did and stiffed them, as you just mentioned, the way Obama did.

So you're asking yourself: so who is it that they're responsive to? And they're clearly responsive to the money. And money in—the big money in politics is now—I don't have to tell your listeners—is now rampant. We were at the edge of a plutocracy perhaps a few years ago. Now we are in it. And, you know, money doesn't—is not the total answer here, but it is most of the answer. So the Democratic Party comes out at election time and rolls out the populism, but the people who are bankrolling them—and labor can't match business anymore—the people who are bankrolling them and the people who will get the jobs as assistant secretaries and undersecretaries and secretaries all are coming from the big-money sector.

JAY: Okay. Next segment of the interview, we're going to talk about Mitt Romney and the Republican bid for the presidency. Please join us for the next segment of this series of interviews on The Real News Network.

[...]

So we have gone from the notion of a service economy taking over from manufacturing and an industrial base. Now it turns out that globalization can outsource anything that you can do with a computer. So it's the lawyers' jobs who are being outsourced, it's the accountants jobs that are being outsourced, the market research jobs that are being outsourced, all the kinds of jobs that these kids who are now graduating from college with twenty, thirty, forty thousand dollars worth of debt thought they would have.

So we're looking at an era in front of us, Paul, where the twentysomethings who work at Apple for $12 an hour—and if you ask them, they'll say, well, this is just temporary; I'm waiting for, you know, something to come along so I can get back on a professional career path, waiting for the recovery. Well, the twentysomethings are going to turn into thirtysomethings and fortysomethings with dead-end jobs, because the policy of both parties at this point—and it's a little better under the Democrats than it is under the Republicans, but the basic policy is the same, and that is America is going to compete in the world on the basis of lower and lower wages.

[...]

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore.

There's been some debate amongst the American governing elite about America's place in the world and its declining power. Barack Obama went to Australia not long ago and declared that America will continue to be an Asia-Pacific power. And the issue of the Brzezinskian grand chessboard is still very much on their mind. But what does this maintaining America's position in the world mean for ordinary Americans? Who's going to pay for all this? When it comes to competitiveness, it really means wages, although that word doesn't get talked about very much, not in the mainstream press or in the halls of Congress.

Well, it does get talked about in a piece written by Jeff Faux, and he's now joining us. Jeff is a founder and distinguished fellow of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. He's an activist, economist, and writer. He's written extensively on issues from globalization to neighborhood development, and his latest book is The Servant Economy: Where America's Elite is Sending the Middle Class. Thanks very much for joining us, Jeff.

JEFF FAUX, AUTHOR: Oh, it's great to be here, Paul. Thank you.

JAY: So, I mean, clearly we are dealing with a different world. And it's not just that it's militarily different, in the sense that China's now somewhat of a power, so is Russia and—back somewhat of a power—I mean, nothing on the scale of the United States, but the geopolitics and chessboard has changed somewhat. But where it's changed a lot more is with this massive industrial capacity in areas of the world where 20, 30 years ago there was nothing like it—advanced technology, high-quality production, very low wages. And America wants to maintain its competitiveness in all of this. So talk a bit about that and what that might mean for ordinary Americans, and maybe what the word competitiveness means.

FAUX: Well, I think—start from what I think is the basic assumption, and that is the United States can no longer satisfy the three great dreams that have driven American politics over the last decades. The first dream is the dream of Wall Street and business for unregulated access to speculative profits. The second dream is the dream of the military and foreign-policy elite and the military-industrial complex for global hegemony. The third dream is the dream of ordinary Americans for a rising living standard.

Now, we can have one out of three, certainly. Two out of three, maybe. Three out of three? No way. So in effect the decision is being made right now—or has been made—by this country's elite.

There's a lot of talk in Washington, as you know, about the grand bargain between Republicans and Democrats over budgets and taxes. But the real deal has already been cut. The average American income in real wages is going to decline over the next 10 years, 15 years, as far into the future as we can see. Now, this has been coming for a long time. It's not just about the recession and it's not temporary. As you probably know, for the last 30 years we've had stagnant wages in America. After wages rise steadily since World War II, they flattened out after 1979 and essentially have been flat.

So the question is: if wages were flat, how come everything looked so good? That is, people went to shopping centers and bought cars and houses during those 30 years that ended in 2008. And the reason is two. One, family incomes kept up because we sent more members of the family to work, usually the wife. Now there are more women than men in the labor force so that that strategy for most people is exhausted. The second is debt. People weren't getting raises, but they were getting access to cheaper and accessible credit. That has evaporated with the collapse of the financial sector.

JAY: Jeff, before you continue, let me ask: so if this process more or less began in the '70s, why? What happened? Why? If you could—you know, to some extent one could say that third dream of ordinary Americans, you know, to own a house, send the kids to college, not to be terrified of losing their job, to some extent that's—dream was still possible, at least in the early '60s.

FAUX: Oh, yeah. And the reason—.

JAY: So what happens?

FAUX: Yeah. There are three things that happened since the end of the '70s. The data starts from 1979; the kink in the curve starts from 1979. One was globalization, and by that I mean, essentially, exposing American workers to a very brutal and competitive global labor market before they were prepared.

Second, the weakening of the bargaining position of the average American worker. A lot of that had to do with the decline of unions. But it affected union members and nonunion members. The second thing that happened was the weakening of the bargaining position of the average American worker. This was not just about weaker unions, but weaker unions played a key role, not just for union members, but for people who aren't union members. Because unions were strong—or certainly stronger than they are now—the threat of unionization kept the bosses and kept the employers from cutting wages too much, cutting pensions too much, even though they would have liked to. So weaker unions, weaker bargaining positions [crosstalk]

JAY: And is weaker unions and bargaining positions linked to number one, which is globalization and the threat of moving offshore?

FAUX: That's right, certainly linked to number one. And number three, later, was the shredding of the safety net, the real value of the minimum wage, and the kinds of New Deal protections for labor that have been frayed away over the last 10 or 15 years.

But on the first, on globalization, there's something very important here to remember, and that is it not only affected working people, but it changed the culture of the American elite. You know, if you go back to the early part of the 20th century, labor and capital were in fierce struggles. But both labor and capital knew that they needed each other and were stuck in the same country. So, you know, when Henry Ford raised the wages of his Ford employees to $5 a day, the Wall Street guys said, Henry, what are you doing here? I mean, you can't pay—you're spoiling these people, you're paying them too much. And Henry Ford, who was a SOB union buster, said, look, I've got to pay them enough to come in to make the cars, but I also need to pay them enough to buy the cars. So it was an economy in which, while there were labor and capital disputes, we were all in it together.

What happened—what's happened since the 1980s is that globalization, the deregulation of trade and investment, has allowed the American commercial and economic elite to roam the world in search of lower wages, in search of government subsidies by Third World countries, etc.

JAY: Yeah, so you now have a situation where they saved GM and Chrysler, but workers'—starting worker wages go from, what, $26 to $14 an hour, and you probably couldn't buy a new car at $14 an hour.

FAUX: Exactly. And unlike Henry Ford, the people who run the Ford Motor Company today, you know, have other people they can use to sell their cars to. And so high wages, which we sort of learned after the 1930s were good for the economy because it created consumer demand and consumers bought the goods that were being produced, high wages in America are no longer what they were. They're now a threat to multinational corporations who still produce and sell things. And that's been a critical change.

JAY: They also seem to no longer think they need an educated workforce. I used to—in the '50s and '60s, all this talk about, you know, America will compete because it's going to be the most educated working class and this and that, they don't seem to care anymore. The public school system can go to hell and they don't seem to care.

FAUX: They don't care. But that's sort of the last excuse of the political governing class. I mean, whether it's, you know, Barack Obama, George Bush, Bill Clinton, they're all the so-called education presidents, and their answer to this decline in living standards and wages is not to worry, just go get an education. Barack Obama was in Florida about a year ago touring the country, saying the way we're going to compete in the world is to out-educate everyone.

Well, first what's obvious: that we're shrinking the schools, we're laying off teachers, kids can't go to college because it costs too much. But second, which is really important, we are not creating jobs for educated young people. You go into Apple, in the Apple Store, there is the future. And it's not the technology. It's in all those smart college-educated kids working as retail clerks for $10, $12 an hour. The Bureau of Labour Statistics—government agency—projects that between 2010-2020, the largest, fastest-growing occupations in this country, of the ten largest and fastest-growing, only one requires a college education.

JAY: Well, Jeff, we're going to pick this up in part two, and what I'll be asking in part two is it seems to me while this may make sense for Apple and it may make sense for a lot of individual companies to drive wages down and have more and more service jobs, as an economy somebody's got to be making money to buy all this stuff, and that seems to be where the rub is. So join us for part two of our series of interviews with Jeff Faux on The Real News Network.

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome back to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore.

This is part two of our series of interviews with Jeff Faux about where exactly is the American governing elite leading the American middle class—or some might say American working class, which seems to me to make more sense, because if there's a middle, there's an upper and a lower. And I don't know where all that leads. But, anyway, where are we being led?

Now joining us from our D.C. studios is Jeff Faux. He's a founder and now distinguished fellow of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. He's an activist, economist, a writer who's written extensively on globalization and neighborhood development. And his latest book is The Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class. And just we're going to also post underneath this or in our column section a piece that Jeff wrote called "The Hunger Games Economy", which is a pretty good summation of many of the things we're talking about. Anyway, thanks for joining us, Jeff.

JEFF FAUX, AUTHOR: Great to be here.

JAY: So we left off the last discussion. Essentially you have this service economy being developed, and even in the industrial economy, too, except for a few privileged—very privileged sectors, and those privileged sectors seem to be disappearing. What I mean by that is the really higher-paid industrial wage—I mean, it's not that the whole economy's becoming service, because where there is industrial production, they are breaking the back of unions and wages and they are continuing to have industrial jobs. They just don't pay much anymore, whether it's the auto industry or in Wisconsin, places like Harley-Davidson and others, this trend across the country of two-tier contracts, where the older workers kind of can keep their wage, but they get rid of them as fast as they can and hire new people at half the rates. So one way or the other, the wages are going down, demand is going down. So who's supposed to buy all this stuff?

FAUX: Well, they don't—they're not worried about the U.S. consumer as much as they were before. Ford, GM, General Electric, IBM, Microsoft, Apple, their long-term projections and their long-term interests are in the rest of the world. But there's still a lot of business here. The difference is they don't feel any responsibility for making sure that wages are enough for Americans to buy. Their experience over the last 30 years is that Americans will go into debt in order to buy their goods so they don't have to pay the wages that are enough to support a family.

JAY: But that only goes so far. Like, you had the subprime mortgage thing. You know, they are able to get, you know, hundreds of thousands of people, mostly African-Americans in poor cities who had never really had credit before, they were able to embroil them in credit and draw them into the system. But there's a point where it crashes because they can't pay the loans off. So, like, there's no long-term gain there.

FAUX: Yes. Well, that's only if you think that they're concerned about the long term of their institution. For the most part, the people at the top are interested in getting their money back and getting their profits in as short a period as they can. You know, again, in the old days, Henry Ford worried about what the Ford Motor Company was going to be like 10 or 15 years down the road. These guys don't. By that time, they will be retired. They have gotten their bonuses, they will have gotten their high salaries, and, you know, let somebody else worry about it.

The change in the culture of the governing class, the business part of the governing class, has really been quite dramatic in the last 30 years. The short-term focus now pervades American business, which is why you had this crash in 2008 and 2009, $12 trillion lost, and you still see the people who did it doing very well. I mean, they know they're going to be bailed out by the U.S. government, whether it's Obama or Romney, and so they don't have the long-term concern that they used to have.

JAY: Okay. Now, in the first segment, you talked about the three American dreams: the dreams of Wall Street to have unregulated speculative profits (and they're—seem to be fulfilling that dream pretty well); the dream of those people who control the industrial-military complex to make maximum return on their capital (and of course there's lots of overlap between that and finance anyway); and then the third dream, of ordinary Americans, to have a, you know, relatively stable life and maybe a house and kids and college and stuff. And you point out in your article, well, two out of three maybe, but the deal's done, the third is going to be sacrificed. So talk about that.

FAUX: Yeah. If you look at the economics literature and what the economists who work for the administration and the big companies are saying, they're waiting for—they're telling us to wait for the recovery. Well, we've been in this recovery for about three years now, and it turns out that this is the recovery. Eight percent, 9 percent unemployment, that is the recovery in this new era that we're in. And it reflects the decision at the top not to come to the rescue of the American middle class but to come to the rescue of Wall Street, number one, and number two, to keep its own dream of America being the global policeman.

So we have gone from the notion of a service economy taking over from manufacturing and an industrial base. Now it turns out that globalization can outsource anything that you can do with a computer. So it's the lawyers' jobs who are being outsourced, it's the accountants jobs that are being outsourced, the market research jobs that are being outsourced, all the kinds of jobs that these kids who are now graduating from college with twenty, thirty, forty thousand dollars worth of debt thought they would have.

So we're looking at an era in front of us, Paul, where the twentysomethings who work at Apple for $12 an hour—and if you ask them, they'll say, well, this is just temporary; I'm waiting for, you know, something to come along so I can get back on a professional career path, waiting for the recovery. Well, the twentysomethings are going to turn into thirtysomethings and fortysomethings with dead-end jobs, because the policy of both parties at this point—and it's a little better under the Democrats than it is under the Republicans, but the basic policy is the same, and that is America is going to compete in the world on the basis of lower and lower wages.

JAY: Now, the issue of wages never gets talked about. And it's not like they don't understand it. It was interesting at the Toronto G-20, the final statement. At The Real News we did a lot of reporting on both the police violence at Toronto G-20 but also the substance of what was decided there. And the final document, it's very clear they understand the need for demand and higher wages. They just want it to happen in China. They don't want it here. There was nothing about raising demand in Europe and North America. It's Asia that's supposed to raise wages. So it's not like they don't get it.

FAUX: Right. And, in fact, the Chinese can't do it all themselves. So it goes back to this question of who is responsible for the long term. And the answer is: nobody. It's not like this system—they've figured out how to keep this system going. They don't care if it goes forever. All they care about is if it goes enough for them to pile up what they need—retire or quit and they'll be okay. I have talked to people on Wall Street who would just express that. You know, the long-term demand, what's—you know, the growth of the American economy, the competitiveness, that's not their business. But they are the ones who make this decision.

And I think there's a—in a sense what happened after Reagan, who was elected in the '80s, is that the sense of the future disappeared from American politics. I mean, in my book I go on to the history of this, how in the 1970s when the energy crisis broke and it was clear to many people that this was a signal that the United States was no longer automatically king of economic hill, so they were discussions, there were proposals for long-term planning agencies, there were—issues of energy, of course, were a big deal. And it was not only among elites. Around the time of the bicentennial celebration, 200 years of the American Revolution, there were cities and towns, states all over the country who were starting to think about the future and having a politics of that. And there were debates and there were commissions about—seems quaint now, but how—what their town or what their state would look like in the year 2000. So there was a sense in the 1970s that this was all starting to fall apart, and people were getting concerned about it and looking towards the future.

But the future disappeared from politics after Reagan got elected. You remember, Reagan came in and he ripped out the solar panels that Jimmy Carter had put into the White House. The future would not be shaped by democratic government; the future would be shaped by the market. And that's what we've got now. And we're still under Reagan's shadow. Obama and Clinton are under Reagan's shadow.

JAY: Alright. In the next segment of our interview we're going to talk more about President Obama and Mitt Romney and the U.S. presidential elections and what vision either of them have, if any, for the American economy. Thanks for joining us on The Real News Network.

#9 Haiti is plagued by impenetrable bureaucracy
[...]
The $2 billion that came into the country following the 2010 earthquake did little to alleviate corruption and meandering bureaucracy.

Labour rights

[...] skilled Dominicans are paid $24 a day Haitians receive only a tiny fracion of that ($1.06). The International Textile, Garment and Leather Workers' Federation has alleged that Grupo M "employed armed thugs to beat and intimidate workers who try to form independent trade unions in its factories."

Originally Posted By BAG_OF_FUUUUUU
you clearly don't know shit about politics or nation building

Haiti needs farms and industries to rebuild itself. Not UN tents and food rations.

Originally Posted By BAG_OF_FUUUUUU
The excessive UN/charity presence (basically mass welfare) is not helping though. People become dependent on it, they need to be independent.

Originally Posted By MAX_X2
Sans blague, on dirait que vous faites juste ça dans vie, bitcher. En fait, vous bitcher plus que la plupart des filles que je connais (exception faite de Basdini, Nathan, Rawali et Bonusbeats).

Originally Posted By RAWALI
but if you do have an artistic vision than wouldn't you want to have access to art school to get some techniques down and be able to put your ideas on canvas...

Originally Posted By NATHAN
you can't teach someone to have good taste in music, and I don't think at the school they tell people ''this is a good song, this is a bad song'' ... and if you can't tell what peole like in your prefered style, you probably shouldn't be DJing anyway xD

Originally Posted By NATHAN
the mistakes prove it ain't pre-recorded! hehehe

Originally Posted By BONUSBEATS
way to protest in a country where freedom of speech allows people to protest without them having to riot against the police or army

Originally Posted By ZITAUU
graceamsalu12@yahoo.com
Hello
I saw your profile today and it was so good to me.u know that i am interested to be a friend first.please i will like you to contact me direct to my e-mail address, (graceamsalu12@yahoo.com) so that i can give you a full introduction of my self with my pictures ok. i will be waiting for your mail to my e-mail address(graceamsalu12@yahoo.com) as you know
there is no age,race,colour and religion bar in knowing each other thanks.
cares Grace.12

Originally Posted By BAG_OF_FUUUUUU
it's pretty much been killed with contagious amounts of stupiditus.