"Revenge of the Electric Car" (video)

Wisdom Quarterly

(LA Times) In 2006, when director Chris Paine released "Who Killed the Electric Car?" the story of GM's short-lived, battery-powered EV-1, the villains were many, but consumer apathy played its role. With "Revenge of the Electric Car," Paine's entertaining follow-up, top GM exec Bob Lutz gives much credit for the company's 180 to consumer outrage. Wall Street might want to take notice of how quickly tides can change. "Revenge" follows the three-way race between GM, Nissan, and Silicon Valley rogues Tesla Motors to bring an electric model successfully to market... More

• Whip My Hair (Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen)
• Santa Rosa Democrats

War in Iraq Ends! (almost)

Actually, US Promises to End its War on Iraq...later

I didn't end the war on Iraq. I ramped it up. But now I'm promising to end it. Vote for me.

Spoofing The Times with the hard truth

"The message we're getting, to be frank about it, is, 'Don't let the door hit you [on the @$$] on the way out,'" a senior military official said in a conversation on Sunday.

Iraq War Ends With a Whimper, Not a Bang
Yochi J. Dreazen (The Atlantic Home, senior correspondent for military affairs and national security, National Journal)

The Iraq War is rapidly winding down, and no one -- American or Iraqi -- seems inclined to talk about it.

The Iraq War began with Pentagon officials boasting about an initial offensive that would "shock and awe" the enemy, then-President George W. Bush flying a military plane to an aircraft carrier for a high-profile address to thousands of cheering troops, and round-the-clock coverage on the nation's TV networks. Eight and a half grueling years later, the deeply unpopular conflict is set to end with a whimper, not a bang.

[Notice the graph does not flatten out to zero troops but reveals a permanent presence as part of the US military-industrial empire, with its largest base in Mesopotamia. So the war will "end," but we will leave behind ~50,000 troops.]

Washington and Baghdad's failure to agree on a troop-extension deal means that virtually all of the 43,000 U.S. troops now in Iraq will stream out of the country over the next six weeks, bringing a quiet end to a conflict that began with so much bombast.

Radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has called for public rallies on Jan. 1 to celebrate the U.S. withdrawal, but the idea hasn't gained much traction with other Iraqi political leaders. For now, there are no formal ceremonies planned in Iraq to mark the end of the U.S.-led mission there or to commemorate the thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed in the conflict.

Iraqi officials have also rebuffed the U.S. officers at many individual bases who have proposed low-key events in which the American flag would be lowered and the Iraqi one raised to mark each facility's passage into Iraqi control. More

• Iraq War Ends?
• Dear Kitty. Some Blog

How Corporations Became People (video)

(Bozasonic) "The Corporation," full movie. Corporations are people? Corporations are not people. "They have no 'soul' to save, no body to incarcerate." They do have a profit motive.

"The Corporation" is a classic Canadian documentary exploring how we ended up with business entities that are legally bound to place "profits before people." How are we to assess a corporation's "personality"?

The documentary concentrates on North American corporations, particularly those from the United States.

The film was written by Joel Bakan and directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott. It is critical look at the modern-day "limited liability" corporation, considering its legal status as a class of PERSON. And it evaluates its behavior towards our society and the world at large the way a psychiatrist examines a patient.

The exploration goes through specific examples. It has been shown worldwide -- on TV, DVD, file sharing, and free downloading. Bakan wrote a book, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, during the filming of this documentary.

Showing the development of the contemporary business corporation, the movie follows the definition in court. Corporations went from legal entities that originated as government-chartered institutions engaged in public functions to commercial institutions entitled to most of the legal rights of a human being, US citizen, and now multinational body with no allegiance to the US.

They gained personhood as a result of an 1886 case in the US Supreme Court. Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite referred to corporations as "persons" having the same rights as human beings based on the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution. The film's assessment is effected via the diagnostic criteria in psychology's Bible (DSM-IV).

FBI consultant and professor of psychology Robert Hare, Univ. of British Columbia, compares the profile of the contemporary profitable business corporation to that of a clinically-diagnosed PSYCHOPATH.

The film is in vignettes examining and criticizing corporate business practices. It establishes parallels between the way corporations are systematically compelled to behave and the DSM-IV's symptoms of psychopathy, i.e. callous disregard for the feelings of other people, the incapacity to maintain human relationships, reckless disregard for the safety of others, deceitfulness (continual lying to deceive for profit), the incapacity to experience guilt, and the failure to conform to social norms and respect for the law.

(otherwords.org)

The topics covered include:

• the Business Plot in 1933 where the popular Gen. Smedley Butler exposed a corporate plot against US Pres. Franklin Roosevelt
• the tragedy of the commons
• Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower's warning people to beware of the rising "military-industrial complex"
• economic externalities
• suppression of an investigative news story about bovine growth hormone on a Fox News Channel affiliate TV station
• the invention of the soft drink Fanta by the Coca-Cola Company due to the trade embargo on Nazi Germany
• the alleged role of IBM in the Nazi holocaust (see IBM and the Holocaust)
• the Cochabamba protests of 2000 brought on by the privatization of Bolivia's municipal water supply by the Bechtel Corporation
• general themes of corporate social responsibility
• the notion of "limited liability"
• the corporation as a psychopath
• and the corporation as a person.
  

(H5N1XD) "The Corporation," short form