Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry are attacking Mitt Romney from the LEFT? And for the ten-year anniversary of Guantanamo Chris interviews former Guantanamo detainee Lakhdar Boumediene. Joining Chris on the panel are executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights Vincent Warren, former director of policy planning at the U.S. State Department Anne-Marie Slaughter, executive director of The American Values Institute Alexis McGill Johnson, and Grist.org writer David Roberts.
-Brett Brownell (@brettbrownell) is video and web producer for Up with Chris Hayes.
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Guess what? The national Democratic who would speak up against predatory capitalism cannot be Senator Sanders, socialist-Independent from Vermont. And Guantanamo can't be closed not only because of legislation from congress, but because the president himself signed it. Also - from last week - President Obama ended the Iraq War not simply because he promised to, but because he just couldn't get legal immunity for our troops anymore.
I love your show but please stop carrying water for Obama - hold his feet to the fire instead.
The reason the Guantanamo provision was in the Defense budget was because the Tea Party won big in 2010. The Tea party won big because progressives could not be bothered to get out the vote.
What the president signed was the defense authorization bill, not anything restricted to the subject of the detention camp. The fact of the matter is that the House will not compromise on Guantanamo any more than they will on increasing the national debt limit.
The president cannot do anything on Guantanamo without agreement from Congress. Why didn't they when they had control before 2010? Look at that vote in the senate: 90-6.
Why?
Sobering and moving Gitmo segment. Vince Warren was a perfect guest for the panel.
What a disaster.
It would be great if your show would really look deeply at what forms of Capitalism are indeed healthy/positive. I have serious doubts that such forms exist. Productive and beneficial for an elite few, for sure, and for a small number of people just outside the power elite, and then somewhat beneficial for the middle class (though at great costs).
Capitalism, as far as I can see, has competition as a significant base essence -- and the research on competition shows mostly greatly negative effects. Competition (and thus Capitalism) is corrosive.
Alfie Kohn's book...
NO CONTEST: THE CASE AGAINST COMPETITION
...deeply explores this issue. It would be great for you to have Alfie Kohn on your show to talk about this.
Healthy competition is a oxymoron, and largely nonexistent. In competitions most people lose, and people succeed in proportion to the number of people one defeats.
If we ask the question, "How do we make the US economy grow?" would you just immediately start answering the question without looking closely at the premises built into the question? Do we want the US economy to GROW? What about having it be SUSTAINABLE instead of grow? Doesn't the question assume we want the US economy to exist? And HOW do we want it to exist? And who, exactly, is "we"?
Same thing with "capitalism" and "competition." Our thinking on these concepts are so deeply engrained that we tell ourselves there are good and bad forms of these things, but I think we too often assume there are good forms of both that exist, when in fact, they don't actually exist. To me, saying there are good forms of Capitalism and Competition, that's like saying there are some good forms of cancer, or good forms of tyranny.
The competitive/consuming thing that is the capitalistic way of engaging in the world is destroying the planet and generating strife. As author Michael Parenti argues (who is another person who would be great to have on your show), most countries in the world are capitalist, and most countries are poor and getting poorer. It is only with popular struggles AGAINST capitalism that prosperity arose; for example, not too long ago we had child labor, no 8-hour work day and 40 hour work week, no worker safety laws, no weekends, no minimum wage... and it was the fight AGAINST capitalism that brought these things about, and thus greater prosperity.
So isn't it true, in fact, that the more we fight against capitalism (in general, and in good ways) the more we prosper and the more the planet is related to in sustainable ways?
Sorry, had a typo in my comment: obviously, it should be "an oxymoron" not "a oxymoron"...
When discussing capitalism the "Darwinian" narrative is active. We think in terms of a brutal, survival of the fittest kind of view of nature. In fact there is a great deal of species survival value associated with capacities for empathy, self sacrifice and communal service. Somehow these survival traits are not highlighted in typical capitalistic texts, but the fact of the matter is that the business environment is far less productive when these traits are not strongly expressed.
I understand and agree there is much about competitiveness that do not align with social goods. But I don't think you would argue the case that ignoring meritorious effort is socially good either.
We have examples of misbehavior of businesses all around us and I don't mean to imply the evil that you point to is not significant. But you say something more- that capitalism is inherently a negative force comparable to cancer or tyranny. I could not disagree with you more.
It is simply a stupid myth to think that to make money you have to brutalize others or do things that hurt the social fabric.
For example, I was at a university library in the early 80s and wandered into a room with some odd computer equipment. Being a microcomputer geek, I asked some questions and learned to my shock that the printer in the corner did braille, was broken and was too expensive for me to try and fix (it cost $20K new). I was flabbergasted, because printers at the time could be had for $300. Certainly these weren't capable of making deep impressions in heavy paper, but I was pretty sure I could modify an existing impact printer that could do the job. I left and over the next week made some calls trying to pin down who bought these printers, getting a rough idea of how many sold worldwide and who the producers were.
I was convinced the people were producing these printers were nuts and that there was both a social good I could fulfill as well as an activity that might sustain my activities on other projects. Out of 10 projects, maybe one was a hit, a few were ho hum and the rest disastrous money sucking losses.
You take risks. You take risks. You pull in your horns if you create too many losers.
I produced the braille printer by reverse engineering the software control of an existing printer, and rewriting it so that it would translate to braille on the fly performing various abbreviations and so on that a human transcriber would normally do. The production cost of the printer was 1/20 the cost of the printer I saw, and schools in the US and Europe started buying them like crazy. Due to budget constraints, schools could not afford to pay braillists to transcribe lessons. This device was cheap enough for even small school districts to buy and a teacher could simply take a copy of their lesson material and have it printed out and delivered to them. Many blind students learned much more/ would not necessarily have to be segregated away from their friends into specialized schools for the sightless. Competitors looked at what I did and realized that they could build products a lot cheaper than they were. I educated them by showing them what morons they were being.
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The product would not have been possible without capitalism. Within about 3 years it was obsolete, and I was about back to break even due to the failure of some other projects.
People go into business for a lot of different reasons, but all we hear about is how people go in to extract as much money as they can extract in a parasitic fashion from their fellow man. It just isn't always the case. My example of altruism in not so uncommon- go talk to folks who have set up NGOs. There are lots of other motives. Some people really groove on seeing their customers eat their food. My grandfather was especially happy when he could restore broken down antique mechanisms- He felt like he was preserving parts of a wonderful past.
People figure out how to make money doing things they like, and most people don't like treating other people badly.