Chris Hedges: No way within the system to vote against corporate capture of the United States

Chris Hedges asserts that Americans are seeing through the plutocratic mendacity that currently governs them, and that's why they are taking to the streets. The Occupy protests we are seeing are not at all like the Tea Party, which is "bankrolled by the most retrograde elements in American society." What we are now seeing on the streets is genuine, and we need it, given the "continuity" that is apparent from the Administrations of George W. Bush to that of Barack Obama. The commonality of interests against the corporate state is a "unifying force" and we will now see whether we can stand together to take back our country.

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How corporations buy state Attorneys General

This is the formula for how big money corporations defang state Attorneys General. This story of corruption is presented in a highly detailed well-written piece at Huffpo concerning the firing of two up and coming Assistant Attorneys General who we're gunning for the bad guys on mortgage fraud cases. Once you connect the dots, you can see that these good-guy Assistants were canned because they were trying to do their jobs well.

Many cite the forced departure of Clarkson and Edwards as a vivid example of how mortgage companies and law firms successfully exploit connections to Florida's attorney general to soften legal probes, insulating themselves against the consequences of alleged law-breaking.

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The so-called Iranian terrorist plot

About a year ago, I was speaking to man whose son was serving in the U.S. military in Iraq. Without any provocation the man announced to me that we ought to simply drop a nuclear bomb on Iran and "take care of that problem once and for all."   I was not surprised to hear such a blunt call for such widespread sterile violence. I'd heard talk like this before on AM talk radio, and I've heard it since. I'm well-aware that many of our conservative citizens and politicians are wired up in this Manichean/essentialist way, where all people residing in the Middle-East are suspect (or worse) and America is the greatest nation in the history of the entire galaxy, no matter that it refuses to take care of its own while burning $2 billion/week in Afghanistan. I've heard far too many people speak simplistically of burning millions of Iranians in a nuclear fire, all the while racking up such a proposed mass-murder with a shrug after labeling it "collateral damage."   This is what it's now like in the horror-carnival that much of America has become. For those of us who are able to pull our minds out of tribal mode even a bit are witness to hordes of blindered fellow citizens who have been turned intensely incurious by a mass media obsessed with conflict pornography and urged on by psychopathic politicians. [More . . .]

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