1. 12-Year-Old Actress’s Rape Scene
2. Fuck the "Free Market!" Capitalism Doesn't Work
3. Green Party Leader: "Seize the Moment!"
4. Capitalism in Convulsions
5. Don't Say the 'N' Word [Nationalization]
6. Capitalism in Crisis: Deja Vu All Over Again
Interview with the director
Dakota Fanning will turn 13 next month, and she has
a short answer for anyone who questions her decision to play
a 1950s girl who gyrates in her underwear, wakes up
as her naked father climbs into her bed, demands that
a prepubescent boy expose himself to her in exchange
for a kiss and, finally, is raped by a teenager
who lures her with tickets to an Elvis concert:
She’s growing up. Get used to it
Disgusting! Outrageous! [Right-Wing Source]
A federal investigation is being requested by the No More Child Porn campaign, as well as Concerned Women for America, into the new Dakota Fanning movie "Hounddog," which was made more than a year ago and debuted at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival but kept investors at bay with its graphic sex scenes.
"This is a body of work that sexualizes children. This movie is rated 'R,' begging the question: If a child cannot see the movie, why should a child star in it?" said a letter sent to U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey and Deputy Assistant Attorney General Larry Rothenberg.
A copy of the letter also was sent to Empire Film Group, which eventually picked up distribution of the film and whose spokesman Dean Hamilton-Bornstein called it a "coming-of-age drama that deals with serious issues that should resonate with audiences."
there are a number of objectionable scenes involving sex and nudity, including:
* Lewellen (Dakota Fanning) tries to talk a 10-year-old boy into showing her his penis by promising him a kiss if he does so.
* Lewellen (Dakota Fanning) sits in a tree nude talking to an adult male.
* Daddy (David Morse) sneaks into Lewellen's (Dakota Fanning) bedroom as Lewellen lays in bed in her underpants. Later on he climbs in her bed nude.
* A 12-year-old girl watches her father undress.
* Daddy (David Morse) pleasures himself as his daughter (Dakota Fanning) watches until he completes the act.
* There are upshots of little girls' underwear, aged 8 and 12.
* A 12-year-old girl is raped by a young man in the darkness. Screams and a few images are shown.
* A 10-year-old boy watches a young milkman rape a 12-year-old friend.
* A 12-year-old girl is told to remove her clothes by a young man (Christoph Sanders) and she then proceeds to do a seductive Elvis dance for him.
* A 12-year-old ties two nearly nude children together with snakes and forces them to touch one another at gunpoint.
* Lewellen (Dakota Fanning) stands in front of the full length mirror, takes her clothes off and looks at herself in the mirror.
* Lewellen (Dakota Fanning) and Buddy (Cody Hanford) have just finished swimming in the creek when they run to a shed and strip naked. They begin kissing and fondling each other.
Sounds pretty interesting to me. Unsurprisingly America's reactionary forces are up in arms. Any depiction of teenage sexuality causes convulsions in the backwoods of American culture.Fuck the "Free Market!" Capitalism Doesn't Work
In his speech Wednesday in Nevada, Obama declared that the tumultuous events on Wall Street represented a “final verdict” on the “economic philosophy” of McCain and the Republicans, while proclaiming his conviction that “our free market has been the engine of America’s great progress. It’s a market that has created a prosperity that is the envy of the world.”What “free market’ is he talking about? It is “free” only in the sense that society exercises no control over its predatory and socially destructive misallocation and misappropriation of the wealth created by the working class.
In a serious crisis, all talk about the evils of “big government” and the virtues of “self-reliance” and “private initiative” is dropped and a vast expansion of government power is carried out to intervene in the “free market” in order to rescue the financial aristocracy, with the American people footing the bill.
As for American prosperity being the “envy of the world,” people around the globe are watching with horror and disbelief as millions of Americans are kicked out of their homes, poverty and unemployment worsen, and the country’s infrastructure collapses—while corporate CEOs rake in eight-figure salaries.
The devastating crisis that is gripping Wall Street and the world’s financial markets is a verdict on this “free market.”
The capitalist system, based on private ownership of the productive forces, production for profit and the subordination of all social needs to the accumulation of private wealth, is threatening to unleash a catastrophe upon the working class in the US and around the world.
One thing is certain, the plans to rescue Wall Street that are now being prepared with Democratic support will be paid for by working people, through the destruction of their jobs and living standards and the gutting of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and what little else remains of social benefits in America.
Cynthia McKinney [Green Party Leader: "Seize the Moment!"
We the people must now seize the time! We have always had the capability of determining our own destiny, but for various reasons, the people failed to elect the leaders who provided the correct political will.There was always some corporate or private special interest that stood in the way of the public good. And they always seemed to have the power of the purse to throw around and influence public opinion or our elected officials. The very foundation of the U.S. economy is crumbling underneath our feet.
This represents a unique moment in U.S. history and we must now seize the time for self-determination--for health care, education, ecological wisdom, justice, and all the policies that will make a difference in the lives of the people including an end to all wars, including the drug war!
The crisis was staved off for a time for some of our major finance engines when they were able to obtain bridge funding from certain sovereign wealth funds.
That option grows increasingly dim as The Federal Reserve is becoming the lender of last resort. This means that the people are becoming the owners of the primary instruments of U.S. capital and finance.
This now means that the people have a say in how these instruments are to be used and what their priorities ought to be.
The people should now have more say in how their tax dollars are spent and what the priorities of government and the public sector must be. We the people must now set our demands to ensure and promote the public good.
Now, as we ponder the importance of this moment to do good and serve the needs of the people, some politicians have already figured out their answer for us: win or steal the next election, prepare for more war, and leave it to others to try and figure out what to do next.
While banks are failing all around us and the U.S. taxpayer is drenched with news of billion-dollar bailouts for *selected* companies, the Congress, which has utterly failed in its twin responsibilities of setting policy and Executive Branch oversight, plans to adjourn instead of setting new policies; lessening the impact of the economic freefall on innocent victims; or stopping war, expansion of war, new war, and occupation.
This crisis does not have to be treated as merely a "market correction," or the result of a few rotten apples in an otherwise pristine barrel.
This crisis truly represents the opportunity to introduce fundamental changes in the way the U.S. economy and its political stewards operate.
Responsible political leadership demands that the pain and suffering being experienced by the innocent today not be revisited upon them or the next generation tomorrow.
But sadly, instead of affirmative action being taken in this direction, the Bush Administration ratchets up the drumbeat for war, Republican Party operatives busily remove duly-registered voters from the voter rolls, and our elected leaders in the Congress go home to campaign while leaving all of us to fend for ourselves.
For the Administration and the Democrat-led Congress, I declare: MISSION UNACCOMPLISHED. For the public whose moment this is, I say: Power to the People!
Capitalism in Convulsions
In the space of just two momentous weeks, the landscape of global finance has been dramatically transformed. Bush’s administration has mounted a multi-billion-dollar rescue of the financial system at the cost of inflicting severe damage on the US model of free-market capitalism.Heavy costs will be inflicted on the American taxpayer, who is now subsidising Wall Street – and indeed financial institutions around the world – in a bail-out of unprecedented size.
What we are experiencing is the extraordinary socialisation of finance. Your children's children will read about this past week on their 'rise and fall of capitalism' websites.
This is what happens when an overleveraged global financial system unwinds. Borrowing is being forcibly reduced across the world after the greatest credit bubble in history.
It amounts, says David Roche of Independent Strategy, a research boutique, to a “tectonic shift from leverage to thrift as the means of financing growth and the concomitant dramatic reduction in global imbalances such as the US current account deficit”.
The reality is that the financial system has been operating as if it were an off-balance-sheet vehicle of the government. Private-sector companies and individual bankers have been making huge profits in the bubble.
Their risk appetite has been enhanced by previous bail-outs and, in the case of Fannie and Freddie, by the government’s implicit guarantee. Yet their market pricing does not reflect the potential cost to the system of their own collapse.
This inability to handle externalities has again been apparent in the markets over the past two weeks as speculators have engaged in short-selling strategies against AIG and the investment banks in the US and HBOS in the UK.
This threatens the financial system because the rating agencies respond to the consequent falls in share prices by cutting credit ratings, so jeopardising the victims’ ability to fund the business.
Once again, property has been at the heart of a financial debacle, in spite of the assurances of central bankers that a nationwide fall in US house prices was an impossibility.
Yet the peculiarity this time lies in property being wrapped in complex financial products that few could understand.
Don't Say the 'N' Word [Nationalization]
It started with the so-called "mortgage meltdown." It then expanded to the "credit crunch.' Now we are facing a potential "economic meltdown."What is left out of the seemingly ever-expanding economic collapse is that it is all part of the same thing - deregulated, free market capitalism on a rampage. However, what is becoming clearer now than it was last spring is that we may be nearing the corporate end game.
From the 1980s forward we have seen merger mania. Where virtually all areas of economic activity have gotten increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.
Along with the mergers, has been a growing wave of political support (both neo-conservative and neo-liberal) for unfettered capitalism has grown and (hopefully) crested.
It is now clear that the unfettered capitalism is supported only to maximize the extraction of wealth (from people and nations) and that any losses will be "socialized" back onto those same victims.
Now the economic leviathan players are eating each other up, with an assist from that self-same "neo" government.
JP Morgan gets an assist from the Fed (a private company backed by U.S. tax payers) to purchase Bear Stearns, The Fannie and Freddie are brought back under federal control.
Then we have the sinking of Lehman, and Bank of America buying Merrill Lynch. Now American International Group (AIG) is receiving a massive bailout from the Treasury.
It is very interesting that the word "nationalize" (in the case of Freddie, Fannie, and AIG) is apparently prohibited. I guarantee you that if Chavez, Morales, or one of a hundred other presidents, took such moves they would be soundly decried by both the U.S. government and its lapdog media.
The question remains whose pockets Fannie, Freddie, and perhaps AIG, will ultimately end up in.
Meanwhile, those mega-financiers who remain standing when the economic tsunami has ultimately passed will definitely be even more concentrated than the current elites are. Of course, this means that it will be even more important to "protect their interests" in terms of profit-making, and ensure they will not fail (with common people's money).
Now the plan is floating for the U.S. government to take over all of the "bad" debt. Thereby relieving the crooks of the burden of their actions.
People should be very glad that the Republicans were not able to privatize social security. As is clear from the collapse unfolding before our eyes, those savings would have gone up in smoke regardless of how savvy individual investors are.
However, I would not be surprised to see the plan floated again as it would bring a massive cash infusion into Wall Street - a move that would light up the eyes of the financiers.
What we are seeing is the effects of unfettered capitalism. The mantra of the neo-conservatives and Friedmanites is to let "markets" run unchecked by oversight and limitations.
The results of that is the unfettered expropriation of wealth and resources. When money and profit are the only consideration, then life (individual's and the planet's) is not even on the radar screen. This was indirectly reinforced by McCain's recent repetition of "the fundamental of the economy are strong."
When he tried to elaborate on that, he said that the "fundamentals" he was referring to were the hard work and ingenuity of the U.S. workforce. What that translates into is that the workforce is still there for exploitation.
Caapitalism in Crisis Deja Vu All Over Again
Had Marx and Engels lived to see the day! The counting houses of global finance in freefall, traders going to the wall, and now Washington seemingly intent on nationalising its entire banking sector.As stock markets crash around the world, what we are now witnessing is an old-fashioned, full-throttle crisis of capitalism, and no event was more inclined to lift the mood of communism's founding fathers...
After a series of capitalist crises, the final hope lay with the 1860s cotton famine.
Then, as now, the crisis of capitalism was US driven, with the civil war leading to a blockade of the south by the north, curtailing cotton exports into Lancashire. Hundreds of thousands of workers were sacked.
"You will readily understand that all the philistines are in a cold sweat," Engels reported in 1865 as the Liverpool docks emptied and 125,000 unemployed mill hands wandered the Manchester streets.
"A lot of people in Scotland are finished as well, and one fine day it's bound to be the turn of the banks, and that'd be the end of the matter."
But it was another false dawn, as the British working class stoically endured further immiseration. By which time Engels had pretty much given up on them. "The English proletariat's revolutionary energy has completely evaporated," he concluded.
While few would expect any such militancy from laid-off bankers, what remains of the Marxist movement today is brimming with optimism that the financial crisis sounds the death knell of capitalism.
With almost Alistair Darling-like doom, the International Committee of the Fourth International has declared that "the contradictions within the world capitalist economy are now reaching the point where the type of financial catastrophe and social and economic devastation experienced in the 1930s is not only possible, but is increasingly likely".
I'm not so sure. The uncomfortable truth is that capitalism - assisted by a pliant state - has historically managed to extricate itself from similar crises and emerge ever more virulent.
Marx died trying to explain away precisely such incongruities, while Engels chose a different route: building up a remarkable stockmarket portfolio while complaining about tax on his dividends. The final crisis has a little way to go.
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