Category Archives: Video of the Day

Video of the Day: The Rap on Rap

Leave a reply

Jon Stewart has a look at the manufactured outrage on the right over the rapper Common reading a poem at the White House. You can see a portion of his slapdown here. As with driving, it is now apparently an offence to Rap While Black.

What the clip doesn’t include, however, is Stewart’s own rap on the issue, which is a nice reminder that it really is a form of “flyting.” You can see the entire segment at Comedy Central (in Canada, at the Comedy Network).

While we’re at it, it should be added that even the most reptilian demagogue understands that Common is well known to be an exceptionally gentle man who has always called for peace and tolerance. This is still more barely coded racism from the RNC/FNC conglomerate, whose agenda (sinecured angry clowns like Rove and Hannity aside) seems increasingly to be advanced by indignant bleached blondes.

Some representative work from this very dangerous black man after the jump.

Continue reading →

Video of the Day: “There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are only dollars”

Leave a reply

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5B1uF9gmkVw

Everyone remembers Howard Beale’s “I’m mad as hell” speech from Network. But, while less viscerally memorable, this speech by Beale’s corporate nemesis, Arthur Jensen, is the movie’s darkly revealed core.

Network got it exactly right about the decline of television news into infotainment based upon already discernible trends in the early 1970s, right down to the frenzied pursuit of profit, whatever the social cost, as represented now by Fox News. But the movie also got it right about transnational corporatism, whose fundamental principles are lucidly laid out in the clip above.

Government representing the actual interests of actual citizens is a threatened species, which is suggested by the hoarding-insect behavior of an increasing number of politicians. Our votes are gradually devolving into the means by which the more cynical elements of the political class gain access to power (typically through progressively unhinged demagoguery), and whose single-minded purpose is to promote commercial interests at the expense of everything else, including the institution of government itself. Conservatives especially know that, just as it is easier to lie than to tell the truth, it is much easier to cut taxes to the richest of the rich than it is to reclaim that lost revenue from them somewhere down the line. Just look at the Bush tax cuts in the States. Those “temporary” cuts are, at the moment, the single greatest threat to an economy that could shed its deficit burden almost completely just by letting them lapse as they were supposed to do in the first place. As it is, the current Republican “debate” on budget cuts revolves around dismantling Medicare while, of course, providing still more top end tax cuts.

It promises to get worse before we can think about it getting even marginally better. Most of the population is still living in a world where political authorities are trusted to a minimally acceptable degree. It seems they will only be disabused of that misplaced trust one bloody insult and injury at a time. People understandably want to feel that their elected representatives have some residual sense of duty to them. On the right side of the political spectrum most notably, it’s getting harder to find any sign at all to suggest that might still be true.

The world we live in is looking more and more like the dysfunctional state described in the monologue above: no national or personal interests, just corporate ones in a multi-national sacrifice-ritual of saps who think they have elected governments to (snicker) “represent” them. Our elected officials are more openly go-getters in the exciting new world of transnational economies, where national wealth is just one more resource to cheat out of the suckers who haven’t figured that out yet.

So watch the clip above. Listen to what is said, and see if you don’t recognize it as a frighteningly rendered version of a world that is already way more familiar to us than it should be. (As sometimes happens, this video cannot be embedded: click on the image and hit the YouTube link.)

Video of the Day: “America is not broke”

Leave a reply

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgNuSEZ8CDw

Michael Moore in Wisconsin, yesterday

A sample:

America is not broke.

Contrary to what those in power would like you to believe so that you’ll give up your pension, cut your wages, and settle for the life your great-grandparents had, America is not broke. Not by a long shot. The country is awash in wealth and cash. It’s just that it’s not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the uber-rich.

Today just 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined.

Let me say that again. 400 obscenely rich people, most of whom benefited in some way from the multi-trillion dollar taxpayer “bailout” of 2008, now have more loot, stock and property than the assets of 155 million Americans combined. If you can’t bring yourself to call that a financial coup d’état, then you are simply not being honest about what you know in your heart to be true.

And I can see why. For us to admit that we have let a small group of men abscond with and hoard the bulk of the wealth that runs our economy, would mean that we’d have to accept the humiliating acknowledgment that we have indeed surrendered our precious Democracy to the moneyed elite. Wall Street, the banks and the Fortune 500 now run this Republic — and, until this past month, the rest of us have felt completely helpless, unable to find a way to do anything about it.

Meanwhile, child poverty in the U.S. is drifting toward 25%, fourth among OECD countries, just behind Turkey, Mexico and Poland, and just ahead of Latvia, Spain and Lithuania.  These are the statistics of a second world country.

And there are still tens of millions of Americans who think America is the best country in the world with nothing to learn from anyone, because the really important metric is that the top 400 individuals possess more wealth than the bottom 150 million.

Video of the Day: “The Koch brothers are out to bust unions”

Leave a reply

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQuNrPg1paM&feature=player_embedded

Shepard Smith — apparently the only employee at Fox News who doesn’t follow Roger Ailes’s policy to lie — weighs in on the Wisconsin union busting effort and explains why it can be called that. Americans seem to have picked up on what’s really going on here: in a poll released yesterday, 61% said that they would oppose an effort in their state to deny unions collective bargaining rights. Decency trumps ideology. Maybe we can cautiously begin to expect more of that.

Video of the Day: “The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class”

Leave a reply

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akVL7QY0S8A

Elizabeth Warren — special adviser to President Obama on the development of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — is probably one of the most capable and decent people to serve in government in a very long time.  She defies expectations when it comes to the pre-programmed yackety-yak of garden variety Washington power brokers.  It is a startlingly refreshing experience to hear her address economic issues honestly and with a degree of respect and concern for the public interest that the public always deserves but almost never gets.

Above is a lecture she gave at UC Berkeley that predates by a year the collapse of financial markets in the fall of 2008.

(Thanks to Hugh McLeod for the tip.)