Reports of the death of journalism

may have been exaggerated. Keith Olbermann delivered a presentation Wednesday on his MSNBC Program "Countdown" which transcended modern newscasting completely. It was, unambiguously, Murrow-like. I was transfixed, and if you haven't seen it, please click below and prepare to have your socks knocked off with pure unadulterated elocution. Democrats, wake up. This is the voice of the New American Evolution. Here's a great article about it: Richard Greene's HuffPo blog on the masterful message and the masterful messenger. Waaaaay to go Keith, and kudos to MSNBC for backing their man.

Recently, I finally saw the movie "The Corporation" [ 1]. After seeing enough movies critical of modern life to not get too depressed, the movie did leave me with a somewhat balanced combination of fear and disgust. However, I realized there must be a way to improve on things. Yes. I am an optimist [2].

When I first studied sociology I learned that social structures can take people and make them into who they are. A prisoner and a prison guard [3] were normal people created by experience is one of the best known examples of institutions creating kinds of people. In relation to the movie, a central theme was that because corporations are legally considered human beings with all the same rights as flesh and bone human beings, and because corporate laws require profit, expansion, and self preservation, corporations [and therefore people] behave in a psychotic manner.

Who killed the Electric Car? It may have been old school electrical engineering as much as the Petro overlords. What better way to create the next-generation Electric Car than by piggybacking off of the Darwinian race to make laptop batteries ever more efficient? Powered by lithium-ion cells and the backing of PayPal cofounder Elon Musk, Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and ex-eBay chief Jeff Skoll, Martin Eberhard has created Silicon Valley's first real auto company:

Terence McKenna described a fractally eschatonic view of history called the "TimeWave" that posited that history was repeating itself in ever faster cycles, culminating in The Big Event in 2012. That's a separate discussion, but a really cool modern example is the profound symmetry between the Nixon Right's war on John Lennon and his peace advocacy at the height of the Vietnam War.

The US vs. John Lennon Movie is coming to theaters in September, and its timing and message could not be more poignant at this moment in time, where the lessons of history have been so predictably forgotten by warmongers and peaceniks alike. It is frightening and yet strangely empowering to hear Lennon speaking out against the Vietnam War amidst the attacks by the Nixon right waged on John Lennon, all set to this classic soundtrack.

CivicActions launched HightowerLowdown.org on Monday. This site follows on our launch, earlier this year, of JimHightower.com and last year's Hightower Roadmap, our first project with Hightower's team.

If DRM wasn't enough to sour the Apple's taste... MacWorld UK reports that iPods are being made in China by 200,000 women housed 100 to a room, denied visitors, living on $50 a month, half of which they have to pay back to the factory for food and lodging.

But at least they have good tunes to listen to at work, right?

Read the Article here...

William Greider argues in The Nation this week that the reigning political ideology has died, that the sea change is already upon us for a complete shift of the political landscape -- a chance that will be squandered if Democrats revert to giving in to corporatist expediencies. Progressives need a solid plan now, or else.

See The Future is Now

Some tidbits:

"The economy exists to support society and people, not the other way around. Only government can liberate them from the harsh rule of the marketplace, the demands imposed by capital and corporations that stunt or stymie the full pursuit of life and liberty in this complex industrial society. This very wealthy country has the capacity to insure that all citizens, regardless of status or skills, have the essential needs to pursue secure, self-directed lives. This starts with the right to health, work, livable incomes and open-ended education, and to participate meaningfully in the decisions that govern their lives. The marketplace has no interest in providing these. It is actively destroying them.

Elizabeth White with Associate Press writes "Prisons and jails added more than 1,000 inmates each week for a year, putting almost 2.2 million people, or one in every 136 U.S. residents, behind bars by last summer." Perhaps our journalists should dig a little deeper to discover who benefits from high incarceration rates. In Dillon Read & Co. Inc. And the Aristocracy of Prison Profits, Catherine Austin Fitts writes...in 1996, when Cornell went public, based on the financial information provided in the offering document provided to investors, its stock was valued at $24,241 per bed. This means that for every contract Cornell got to house one prisoner, at that time, their stock went up in value by an average of $24,261. According to prevailing business school philosophy, this is the stock market’s current present value of the future flow of profit flows generated through the management of each prisoner. This, for example, is why longer mandatory sentences are worth so much to private prison stocks. A prisoner in jail for twenty years has a twenty-year cash flow associated with his incarceration, as opposed to one with a shorter sentence or one eligible for an early parole. This means that we have created a significant number of private interests — investment firms, banks, attorneys, auditors, architects, construction firms, real estate developers, bankers, academics, investors among them— who have a vested interest in increasing the prison population and keeping people behind bars as long as possible.

WorldChanging ran a great post on the GreenScanner, a public database of consumer opinions about the environmental accountability of over 600,000 products.

Basically the Green Scanner is a website that allows a user to enter the UPC from the bar code label on a product and get information about the product. Green scanner focuses on environmental issues around the product, however, there was a great discussion in the comments section of the post about other projects brewing to provide consumers with other information about the products they buy. One of them is GrassCommons. Another similar concept is the Reveal Label, and yet another is the Lowdown on Logos concept from Jim Hightower's organization.

Our client Jim Hightower has been podcasting for 6 years. He just didn't know it! For about the last 6 years, Hightower has been recording daily "Common Sense Commentaries" that air on radio stations around the country. When we started talking to Hightower's organization we realized that these 2 minute commentaries were ready made for podcasting. Earlier this year we relaunched JimHightower.com which features the text transcripts and now downloadable mp3 audio files of each daily commentary. You can subscribe the the PodCast feed either via FeedBurner or iTunes.