Ralph Nader criticizes Obama’s lawless militarism

On Democracy Now, Ralph Nader criticized President Obama's stark militarism:

Responding to President Obama’s State of the Union address, longtime consumer advocate and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader says Obama’s criticism of income inequality and Wall Street excess fail to live up to his record in office. "[Obama] says one thing and does another," Nader says. "Where has he been for over three years? He’s had the Justice Department. There are existing laws that could prosecute and convict Wall Street crooks. He hasn’t sent more than one or two to jail." On foreign policy, Nader says, "I think his lawless militarism, that started the speech and ended the speech, was truly astonishing. [Obama] was very committed to projecting the American empire, in Obama terms."
Nader argues that Iraq was not a victory (as Obama claimed), given that we have allowed one million Iraqis to die and essentially destroyed the country. He has sent American soldiers on "lawless militarism" and then draped them as though they were Iwo Jima heroes. Nader calls Obama a "political coward," because he was unwilling to even mention the Occupy movement, the major citizen movement of our time. Obama cannot utter the word "poverty," but refers only to the "middle class," which is shrinking into poverty. Nader asserts that Obama's claims that he will prosecute financial fraud are vapid, given that he hasn't done anything significant in this area for years, and he hasn't pushed for the necessary financing to staff a meaningful financial crimes unit.

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Christianity and communism

What do Christian scripture and Communism have in common? At Daylight Atheism, Adam Lee explains:

The Bible goes so far as to say that the first community of Christians weren't just socialists, but communists:

"And all that believed were together, and had all things common; and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need."

—Acts 2:44-45

By some accounts, this verse is what inspired Karl Marx's dictum, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." Irony of ironies: Communism began in the pages of the Bible!
The above is an excerpt from a post titled "Why We Should Tax the Churches," and Lee develops this theme in detail, dovetailing with the modern-day struggle between the 1% and the 99%. He isn't shy about bluntly stating why:
Even when it begins among the poor and disenfranchised, religion almost always ends up being co-opted by the wealthy and powerful and used as a convenient excuse to justify inequality.

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3 Idiots: “Aal Izz Well”

This may not be the perfect forum for a review, but the film "3 Idiots" is about education versus training, science versus engineering, fear versus hubris (and the happy medium), life and death, love and despair, laughter and tears. And it has colorful Bollywood dance numbers, too! I rented it on a whim, as it was billed as a movie about too-smart engineering students versus the educational system. I was puzzled when it began with English subtitles during the (Indian accented) English dialog. I remembered a 1990's PBS/BBC series on the English language, when some of the impenetrable-to-me accents of the U.K. had no subtitles, but the perfectly intelligible-to-me Cajun and Ebonic dialects did. But as the blend of Hindi and English became apparent, I saw the need. I loved this movie. Once one gets into the esthetic swing of Bollywood productions, it makes perfect sense when serious issues become silly dance numbers, and all characters are played as borderline caricatures. One can observe the essential cultural differences between our familiar American dilute-Christian one-life-to-live and anyone-can-become-president attitude and the Indian institutionalized attitude that reincarnation is the only way to improve your lot except through extraordinary means. Why I think this is appropriate to this forum is the take on education. The protagonist has a scientific mindset that is often at odds with engineering philosophy and even more with institutionalized education. The system of teaching to the test is questioned, as is the principle of square pegs hammered into round holes. Vocation versus avocation is central to this, and expounded toward the end. The 3 Idiots - Official Trailer has embedding disabled, but preview is fun even without subtitles. You get the idea of how English and Hindi have merged in their culture. I defy you to watch it and not have the songs "All izz well" and/or "Zoobi Doobi" stuck in your heads.

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The breadth of the corporate state

Chris Hedges explains that the corporate state has not merely confiscated our political system. It stretches much further into our lives. See the following video starting at minute 5:30, where Hedges explains that affected systems include communication, education and culture. In fact, there is an assault upon liberal institutions that once made meaningful political reform possible, such as labor unions and our great universities, the latter of which are oftentimes run as corporate entities uninterested in teaching the humanities and extolling an artificially narrow analytic view of what it means to be "intelligent." What modern education excels at is training up systems managers who strive to be hyper-deferential to authority. Modern education no longer strives to teach students how to think, but rather what to think. Hedges has a "dark" view of what's going on, essentially that the corporate state is "harvesting" what is left to be had of America "on the way out the door." (min. 28:00). At this critical time, there is no mechanism for changing the system by way of voting--Hedges argues that there is no way, in light of the corporate loyalties of Barack Obama, to vote against Goldman Sachs in the upcoming presidential election, which is using tax money to re-inflate the bubble before the next crash. Lawrence Lessig prefers to use all of our resources for reforming the system, "even if there is zero chance of success." Both men are big supporters of the Occupy movement.

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