Shadows Of Liberty

Disclose.tv - Shadows of Liberty




When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon. 

 -Thomas Paine


Some folks can talk on and on about sports & the latest celebrity gossip with great enthusiasm, but when it comes to reflecting on things that really matter, what you invariably get are blank stares and some regurgitated, undigested crap. The major news outlets- NBC, FOX, ABC, CNN, CBS are the major pushers of this crap meant to lead everyone astray & turn us into mindless consumers (as opposed to thoughtful citizens). It's all by design and it is hugely profitable. And what is good for business is good for everyone, right? Ah yes....BE STUPID might as well be the mantra of our time. Look around and witness how many have fallen victim to its spell...

OneLove

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Musings

OneLove

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Reading Rant: "Ties That Bind: Tales of Love and Gratitude" by Dave Isay

This book/audiobook celebrates StoryCorps’ ten year anniversary. Ties That Bind goes to the heart of the project’s great mission which is to share stories that are a testament to family and to the diversity of American experience..The first StoryCorps recording booth opened in 2003 in New York City’s Grand Central Terminal. Some 100,000 people have since recorded interviews with their loved ones in StoryCorps booths across the country. Their voices are recorded onto a CD for the storytellers and preserved at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. The clip above showcases StoryCorps founder Dave Isay and highlights some of his favorite stories from the past decade. "It’s such a privilege to be able to tell these stories," Dave Isay says. "What I hope happens is...that it kind of shakes you on the shoulder and just reminds you, through all the nonsense, this is what’s important, this is what’s really important."

Amen...

OneLove

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Peaceful Blessings to All

A voice from the dark called out,

“The poets must give us

imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar

imagination of disaster. Peace, not only

the absence of war.”

But peace, like a poem,

is not there ahead of itself,

can’t be imagined before it is made,

can’t be known except

in the words of its making,

grammar of justice,

syntax of mutual aid.

A feeling towards it,

dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have

until we begin to utter its metaphors,

learning them as we speak.

A line of peace might appear

if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,

revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,

questioned our needs, allowed

long pauses. . . .

A cadence of peace might balance its weight

on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,

an energy field more intense than war,

might pulse then,

stanza by stanza into the world,

each act of living

one of its words, each word

a vibration of light—facets

of the forming crystal.

("Making Peace" bY Denise Levertov  from Breathing the Water )

OneLove

:::MME:::

Money on the Mind

A UC Berkeley study published earlier in 2013 showed links between wealth and selfish, anti-social behavior. This confirms what most folks have known for eons. Compared with their poorer counterparts, wealthier participants consistently took more candy from children, cheated at games for petty cash prizes, lied during negotiations, stole at work and endorsed unethical behavior. Lead researcher Paul Piff said the findings across 30 studies on thousands of people across the U.S. didn’t apply just to people who were wealthy in real life. Those who were made to feel wealthy in laboratory games began to behave in accord with the findings too. “We found consistently with people who were the rich players that they actually started to become in their behavior as if they were like rich people in real life,” Piff stated. “They were more likely to eat from a bowl of pretzels that was positioned off to the side. They ate with their mouths full, so they were a little ruder in their behavior to the other person.” The effect worked in the other direction too. “If I take someone who’s rich and make them feel psychologically a little less well off, they become way more generous, way more charitable, way more likely to offer help to another person.” And in those scenarios, the “rich” subjects routinely showed a lack of insight into the conditions that enabled their success. “You, like a real rich person, start to attribute success to your own individual skills and talents,” Piff continued. “And you become less attuned to all of the other things that contributed to you being in the position you’re in.” Furthermore, the results did not break down along political battle lines. “Our findings apply to both liberals and conservatives. It doesn’t matter who you are. If you’re wealthy, you’re more likely to show these patterns of results.”

OneLove

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Project Censored 2014: Top 25

 #25:Israel Gave Birth Control to Ethiopian Immigrants without Their Consent

#24 Widespread GMO Contamination: Did Monsanto Plant GMOs Before USDA Approval?

#23 Transaction Tax Helps Civilize Wall Street and Lower the National Debt

#22 Pennsylvania Law Gags Doctors to Protect Big Oil’s “Proprietary Secrets”

#21 Monsanto and India’s “Suicide Economy”

#20 Israel Counted Minimum Calorie Needs in Gaza Blockade, Documents Reveal

#19 The Power of Peaceful Revolution in Iceland

#18 Fracking Our Food Supply

#17 The Creative Commons Celebrates Ten Years of Sharing and Cultural Creation

#16 Journalism Under Attack Around the Globe

#15 Food Riots: The New Normal?

#14 Wireless Technology a Looming Health Crisis

#13 A Fifth of Americans Go Hungry

#12 The US Has Left Iraq with an Epidemic of Cancers and Birth Defects

#11 Bush Blocked Iran Nuclear Deal

#10 A “Culture of Cruelty” along Mexico–US Border

#9 Icelanders Vote to Include Commons in Their Constitution

#8 Bank Interests Inflate Global Prices by 35 to 40 Percent

#7 Merchants of Death and Nuclear Weapons

#6 Billionaires’ Rising Wealth Intensifies Poverty and Inequality

#5 Hate Groups and Antigovernment Groups on Rise across US

#4 Obama’s War on Whistleblowers

#3 Trans-Pacific Partnership Threatens a Regime of Corporate Global Governance

#2 Richest Global 1 Percent Hide Trillions in Tax Havens

#1 Bradley Manning and the Failure of Corporate Media

More censored news from previous years here.

Stay open...

OneLove

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So This Is Christmas by Johnathan Carp

Christmas is now a commercial frenzy, a profusion of overplayed songs and overwrought sentiment, mixed with pleading to remember “the reason for the season” and to “keep Christ in Christmas.” But there’s something else that’s being lost and perhaps was never emphasized enough to begin with, something I think we need now more than ever- Christmas as a holiday devoted to peace on Earth, and goodwill towards all.

The longing for peace runs throughout the religious celebration of the holiday. On the first Sunday in Advent, the liturgical season leading up to Christmas, the Catholic Church reads from its pulpits the words of Isaiah, looking forward to the day when “they will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.” The words are so familiar as to be cliched, but this call is truly a radical call, a call for not mere disarmament but the abolition of militaries and the abolition of war.

As a child I remember lisping along to Psalm 46, which celebrates the coming of a time when God would “make the wars cease,” when we would see God “break the bow and shatter the spear” and “burn the shields with fire.” Just the other day we again watched the classic “A Charlie Brown Christmas” and heard Linus tell of the coming of an age of “peace on Earth, and goodwill towards men.” These words are the “sigh of the oppressed,” the longing of a people much abused in the power politics of the ancient Near East, but they still speak to us today. The spirit of Christmas should be a spirit of peace.

Today, though, we are nowhere near that ideal. Just recently, the president of the United States ordered the murder of an entire wedding party in Yemen and then passed off his vicious act as an innocent mistake. (Obama, a self-professed Christian, would do well to remember the words of Psalm 110, which promises that God will “crush the rulers of the Earth” for their vile deeds.) Today Bethlehem, according to the Gospels the site of the birth Christmas celebrates, is in the midst of a prolonged and brutal sectarian war, and wars still rage the world over, destroying the lives of both the participants and the passive victims caught in the middle.

Today our brothers and sisters in Pakistan are hunted by drones, our friends in Syria are beset by the government they have and others who want to become their government, and in the Congo a brutal war that has destroyed the lives of millions of our fellow human beings rages still. This is Christmas, and we have no peace, and we can have no peace so long as we bow down before the “princes of this world” and forget that our struggle is always “against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world.”

I am not trying to salvage the religious content of Christmas or to convert you to the Catholicism of my youth. Indeed much of the traditional meaning of Christmas involves passively waiting for the coming of some savior to bring us peace. I reject that, and say instead with Tolstoy that the Kingdom of God is within you, that we must work ourselves, today, to bring about peace on Earth. We cannot wait for a savior to come. We must be the angels singing of the coming of an era of peace, and we must be the salvation of our people.

                                                                  *********

OneLove

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How to Make Money Selling Drugs

                                                Documentary: How To Make Money Selling Drugs


This is quite an eye-opener. Every well-informed and sensible person knows that the War on Drugs is a sham. As you watch this riveting documentary, bare this in mind: Drug policy in the US is about social control. That’s the name of the game. Most of the people arrested for marijuana, for example, are young black and Hispanic men, and most have no prior criminal convictions even though most of the users and sellers of drugs are white. As I said, social control. 

 OneLove

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Poet's Nook: "Coded Language" by Saul Williams

Whereas, breakbeats have been the missing link connecting the diasporic
community to it's drum woven past
Whereas the quantised drum has allowed the whirling mathematicians to
calculate the ever changing distance between rock and stardom.

We do hereby declare reality unkempt by the changing standards of dialogue.
Statements, such as, "keep it real", especially when punctuating or
anticipating modes of ultra-violence inflicted psychologically or physically
or depicting an unchanging rule of events will hence forth be seen as
retro-active and not representative of the individually determined is.

Motherfuckers better realize, now is the time to self-actualize
Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the
unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.

Equate rhyme with reason, Sun with season
Reject mediocrity!
Your current frequencies of understanding outweigh that which as been given
for you to understand.
The current standard is the equivalent of an adolescent restricted to the
diet of an infant.

The rapidly changing body would acquire dysfunctional and deformative
symptoms and could not properly mature on a diet of apple sauce and crushed
pears
Light years are interchangeable with years of living in darkness.
The role of darkness is not to be seen as, or equated with, Ignorance, but
with the unknown, and the mysteries of the unseen.
Thus, in the name of:

ROBESON, GOD'S SON, HURSTON, AHKENATON, HATHSHEPUT, BLACKFOOT, HELEN, LENNON, KHALO, KALI, THE THREE MARIAS, TARA, LILITHE, LOURDE, WHITMAN, BALDWIN, GINSBERG, KAUFMAN, LUMUMBA, GHANDI, GIBRAN, SHABAZZ, SIDDHARTHA, MEDUSA, GUEVARA, GUARDSIEFF, RAND, WRIGHT, BANNEKER, TUBMAN, HAMER, HOLIDAY, DAVIS, COLTRANE, MORRISON, JOPLIN, DUBOIS, CLARKE, SHAKESPEARE, RACHMNINOV,
ELLINGTON, CARTER, GAYE, HATHOWAY, HENDRIX, KUTL, DICKERSON, RIPPERTON, MARY, ISIS, THERESA, HANSBERRY, TESLA,PLATH, RUMI, FELLINI, MICHAUX, NOSTRADAMUS, NEFERTITI, LA ROCK, SHIVA, GANESHA, YEMAJA, OSHUN, OBATALA, OGUN, KENNEDY, KING, FOUR LITTLE GIRLS, HIROSHIMA, NAGASAKI, KELLER, BIKO, PERONE, MARLEY, MAGDALENE, COSBY, SHAKUR, THOSE WHO BURN. THOSE STILL AFLAMED, AND THE COUNTLESS UNNAMED

We claim the present as the pre-sent, as the hereafter.
We are unraveling our navels so that we may ingest the sun.
We are not afraid of the darkness, we trust that the moon shall guide us.
We are determining the future at this very moment.
We now know that the heart is the philosophers' stone

Our music is our alchemy
We stand as the manifested equivalent of 3 buckets of water and a hand full
of minerals, thus realizing that those very buckets turned upside down
supply the percussion factor of forever.

Let your children name themselves and claim themselves as the new day for
today we are determined to be the channelers of these changing frequencies
into songs, paintings, writings, dance, drama, photography, carpentry,
crafts, love, and love.

We enlist every instrument: Acoustic, electronic.
Every so-called gender, race, and sexual preference.
Every per-son as beings of sound to acknowledge their responsibility to
uplift the consciousness of the entire fucking World.
Any utterance will be un-aimed, will be disclaimed -will be maimed- 
two rappers slain


(Use your cipher to decipher.....)

OneLove

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Michelle Alexander on Getting Locked Out of the American Dream

Man, I love this woman! 

See also Anatomy of an American City....American Justice 101....A Great Injustice Has Befallen Us

 OneLove

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The War On Democracy

Democracy is defined as a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections. It is tragically laughable now to be reminded of this given the way democracy in the US. has evolved. Karl Marx was wrong on many things according to many historians, but he was spot -on when it came to the nature of democracy in capitalist societies:

In any given historical period, the ideas that people generally think are the best and most important ideas are usually the ideas of the people in charge. If you have a lot of money and own a lot of property, then you have the power to propagandize your worldview and you have incentive to avoid appearing as if you're propagandizing your worldview. 

In other words, the ruling ideas of every epoch are the ideas of the ruling class. And just who is the ruling class in the US? Take a look at the following to get an idea.

.
And to those who aggressively hold on to their illusions, my pity. 

 OneLove

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Musings

OneLove

 :::MME:::

Consumed - Is Our Consumer Culture Leading to Disaster?

“We're consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra...”

 --Chuck Palahniuk

You cannot control your own population by force, but it can be distracted by consumption 

--Noam Chomsky

“This is the postmodern desert inhabited by people who are, in effect, consuming themselves in the form of images and abstractions through which their desires, sense of identity, and memories are replicated and then sold back to them as products” 

- Larry McCaffrey

“We no longer live life. We consume it.” 

― Vicki Robin

We can pay the ecological debt by changing economic models, and by giving up luxury consumption, setting aside selfishness and individualism, and thinking about the people and the planet Earth.

-Evo Morales 

“We have created a manic world nauseous with the pursuit of material wealth. Many also bear their cross of imagined deprivation, while their fellow human beings remain paralyzed by real poverty. We drown in the thick sweetness of our sensual excess, and our shameless opulence, while our discontent souls suffocate in the arid wasteland of spiritual deprivation.” 

―Anthon St. Maarten

“Mindful consumption is the object of this precept. We are what we consume. If we look deeply into the items that we consume every day, we will come to know our own nature very well. We have to eat, drink, consume, but if we do it unmindfully, we may destroy our bodies and our consciousness, showing ingratitude toward our ancestors, our parents, and future generations (66).” 

― Thích Nhất Hạnh

The mystical nature of American consumption accounts for its joylessness. We spend a great deal of time in stores, but if we don’t seem to take much pleasure in our buying, it’s because we’re engaged in the acts of sacrifice and self-definition. Abashed in the presence of expensive merchandise, we recognize ourselves … as suppliants admitted to a shrine.

-Lewis H. Lapham

The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one’s own destruction, has become a “biological” need.

-Herbert Marcuse

We are taught to consume. And that's what we do. But if we realized that there really is no reason to consume, that it's just a mind set, that it's just an addiction, then we wouldn't be out there stepping on people's hands climbing the corporate ladder of success.

-River Phoenix 

Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, deriving life by the death of others.

-Leonardo DaVinci 

                                                                 ********

OneLove

:::MME:::

The Hunted and the Hated: An Inside Look at the NYPD's Stop-and-Frisk Policy

"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things"


Let's blow one common myth away: The police do not have the duty to protect & serve any of us. I think many people have caught on to this, actually. Well, at least the people who bother to get their news from sources outside of the controlled, myth-making outlets. And indubitably, the Black & brown folks who have been shedding light on police corruption & brutality for decades. Thanks to modern technology, their complaints/critiques have turned out to be true. The young man at the start of this clip was smart enough to record the daily torments at the hands of New York's finest! Hundreds every year are killed by the police, and the majority of them are unarmed, not involved in any criminal activity when they were killed.& the majority of them were young, and either black or Latino. The mass media does its job perfectly in molding the mindsets of many. Too often I hear folks say that the people who have been stopped and frisked and are being gunned down are somehow criminals or connected in some way to illegal activity. Here are some more myth-busters compiled by the New York Civil Liberties Union:

Myth #1: Stop-and-Frisk reduces crime and keeps people safer.

“[Stop-and-Frisk] is a program that is effective… you used to not be able to walk down the streets of this city safely and today you can walk every neighborhood during the day and most neighborhoods at night. .” – Ray Kelly

FACT: No research has ever proven the effectiveness of New York City’s stop-and-frisk regime, and the small number of arrests, summonses, and guns recovered demonstrates that the practice is ineffective. Crime data also do not support the claim that New York City is safer because of the practice. While violent crimes fell 29 percent in New York City from 2001 to 2010, other large cities experienced larger violent crime declines without relying on stop and frisk abuses: 59 percent in Los Angeles, 56 percent in New Orleans, 49 percent in Dallas, and 37 percent in Baltimore.

Stop-and-Frisk abuses corrode trust between the police and communities, which makes everyone less safe. Don’t believe us? Then listen to NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly in 2000: “[A] large reservoir of good will was under construction when I left the Police Department in 1994. It was called community policing. But it was quickly abandoned for tough-sounding rhetoric and dubious stop-and-frisk tactics that sowed new seeds of community mistrust.”

Myth #2: Mayor Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk policies cut the number of murders in half.

“Over the past 10 years, there were 5,430 murders in New York City, compared with 11,058 in the decade before Mayor Bloomberg took office. That’s a remarkable achievement — 5,628 lives saved — attributable to proactive policing strategies that included stops.” – NYPD Spokesperson Paul Browne

FACT: The murder drop happened before Bloomberg took office and before the explosion in stop-and-frisk. The year before the mayor took office there were 649 murders in New York City. In 2011, there were 526 murders. This 19 percent drop is important, but to suggest that murders were cut in half because of stop-and-frisk is simply wrong.

Further, stop-and-frisk has not reduced the number of people who fall victim to shootings. In 2002, there were 1,892 victims of gunfire and 97,296 stops. In 2011, there were still 1,821 victims of gunfire but a record 685,724 stops.

Myth #3: Stop-and-Frisk gets guns off the street and, therefore, prevents murders.

“There’s no denying that stops take guns off the street and save lives.” –Ray Kelly

FACT: Guns are found in less than 0.2 percent of stops. That is an unbelievably poor yield rate for such an intrusive, wasteful and humiliating police action. Yet, stop-and-frisk has increased more than 600 percent under Bloomberg and Kelly. And the rate of finding guns is worsening as the NYPD stops more innocent people each year.

Myth #4: Stop-and-Frisk is not discriminatory.

“ [B]lacks made up 53 percent of the stop subjects and were 66 percent of the violent crime suspects in 2011... For Hispanics, 34 percent were stop subjects and 26 percent were violent crime suspects.” – NYPD Spokesperson Paul Browne

FACT: Comparing police stops to violent crime suspects is bad math. Only 11 percent of stops in 2011 were based on a description of a violent crime suspect. On the other hand, from 2002 to 2011, black and Latino residents made up close to 90 percent of people stopped, and about 88 percent of stops – more than 3.8 million – were of innocent New Yorkers. Even in neighborhoods that are predominantly white, black and Latino New Yorkers face the disproportionate brunt. For example, in 2011, Black and Latino New Yorkers made up 24 percent of the population in Park Slope, but 79 percent of stops. This, on its face, is discriminatory.

We have to put an end to this bullshit....

OneLove

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Holiday Cheer from The Heart of Darkness

Happy Holidays!

OneLove

 ::MME::

MME's (Double) Jam of the Day

The dynamic duo of R&B, Babyface and Toni Braxton are back! Their highly anticipated album, "Love, Marriage & Divorce" is sure to blaze through the charts when it drops next year on Valentine's Day (a wicked irony of sorts). Babyface has always been the silent partner behind Toni's rise to fame and fortune, writing and producing most of her hits. Now he is sharing the limelight with this stunning siren making grown folk music at the highest level! Check out more Babyface-penned hits here. 

OneLove

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Seven Ripoffs That Capitalists Would Like to Keep out of the Media by Paul Buchheit

What capitalism likes to keep quiet about itself would fill a book... or an evening news hour. 

 Tax-avoiding, consumer-exploiting big business leaders are largely responsible for these abuses. Congress just lets it happen. Corporate heads and members of Congress seem incapable of relating to the people that are being victimized, and the mainstream media seems to have lost the ability to express the views of lower-income Americans. 

1. Corporations Profit from Food Stamps

It's odd to think about billion-dollar financial institutions objecting to cuts in the SNAP program, but some of them are administrators of the program, collecting fees from a benefit meant for children and other needy Americans, and enjoying subsidies of state tax money for services that could be performed by the states themselves. They want more people on food stamps, not less. Three corporations have cornered the market: JP Morgan, Xerox, and eFunds Corp.

According to a JP Morgan spokesman, the food stamp program "is a very important business to JP Morgan. It's an important business in terms of its size and scale...The good news from JP Morgan's perspective is the infrastructure that we built has been able to cope with that increase in volume.."

2. Crash the Economy, Get Your Money Back. Die with a Student Loan, Stay in Debt.

The financial industry has manipulated the bankruptcy laws to ensure that high-risk derivatives, which devastated the market in 2008, have FIRST CLAIM over savings deposit insurance, pension funds, and everything else.
But the same banker-friendly "bankruptcy reform" has ensured that college graduates keep their student loans till they die. And sometimes even after that, as the debt is transfered to their parents.

3. Almost 70% of Corporations Are Not Required to Pay ANY Federal Taxes

 

And that's even before tax avoidance kicks in. The 'nontaxable' designation exempts 69% of U.S. corporations from taxes, thus sparing them the expense of hiring tax lawyers to contrive tax avoidance strategies.
The Wall Street Journal states, "The percentage of U.S. corporations organized as nontaxable businesses has grown from about 24% in 1986 to about 69% as of 2008, according to the latest-available Internal Revenue Service data. The percentage of all firms is far higher when partnerships and sole proprietors are included."
In recent years the businesses taking advantage of the exemption include law firms, hedge funds, real estate partnerships, venture capital firms, and investment banks.

4. Lotteries Pay for Corporate Tax Avoidance

This means revenue comes from the poorest residents of a community rather than from billion-dollar corporations. Many of the lottery players don't realize how bad the odds are. Fill out $2 tickets for 12 hours a day for 50 years and you'll have half a chance of winning.

Some astonishing facts reveal the extent of the problem. Low-income households spend anywhere from five to nine percent of their earnings on lotteries. A Pennsylvania survey found that nearly half of low-income residents planned to gamble at a newly-opened casino. America's gambling losses in 2007 were nine times greater than just 25 years before.

5. The National Football League Pays No Federal Taxes

One of the most profitable organizations in America, with billions in tickets, TV rights, and merchandise sales, and with an NFL Commissioner who earned more money than the CEOs of Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, and AT&T, is considered a non-profit. It has a tax-exempt status.

It gets even worse. While the individual teams themselves are not exempt from federal taxes, they enjoy multi-million-dollar subsidies from their states for new and refurbished stadiums. Fans - and non-fans - of the Washington Redskins, the Cincinnati Bengals, the Minnesota Vikings, the Seattle Seahawks, the San Francisco 49ers, and the Pittsburgh Steelers are among those who pay taxes for their hometown football fields. New Orleans taxpayers paid for leather stadium seats. For the Dallas Cowboys, a $6 million property tax bill was waived.

A Harvard University urban planning study determined that 70 percent of the capital cost of NFL stadiums has been provided by taxpayers, rather than by NFL owners.

6. Live on Park Avenue, Get a Farm Subsidy

A disturbing but fascinating report called "Farm Subsidies and the Big Dogs" lists Washington, DC, Chicago, and New York City, in that order, as the worst offenders.

• In New York, "Many entities receive the federal subsidies at their downtown office buildings, such as 30 Rockefeller Plaza, or at their million dollar residential condos."
• In Chicago, "Nearly every neighborhood in the city receives federal farm subsidy payments - including the Gold Coast, Downtown-Loop, Lincoln Park, and even the President's neighbors in Hyde Park."
• In Washington, "Even U.S. Senators are receiving farm subsidy checks."

Perhaps more of us should become farmers. In Florida, according to Forbes, "anyone could legally qualify their land as farmland by stocking it with a few cows." Wealthy heir Mark Rockefeller received $342,000 to NOT farm, to allow his Idaho land to return to its natural state.

7. Profit Margin Magic: Turning a dollar into $100,000

Which costs the consumer more, printer ink or bottled water? Calculations by DataGenetics reveal that the ink in a $16.99 cartridge comes to almost $3,400 per gallon. The cost of a gallon of cartridge ink would buy enough gasoline to run the average car for over two years.

Water seems to cost less, until the details are factored in: we're paying for our own public water, which we've given away almost for free, and which comes back to us in no better condition than when it started.
For every 100,000 bottles sold, Nestle pays the proceeds from ONE bottle to those of us (the taxpayers) who own the water.

So This Is Capitalism..

Consumer-exploiting, tax-avoiding, profit-maximizing, responsibility-shirking, winner-take-all capitalism. An economic system which, as Milton Friedman once believed, "distributes the fruits of economic progress among all people."

                                                                          ******* 


OneLove

:::MME:::