A variety of links to articles/interviews/speeches on current topics that may be of interest.

The full 30-minute attack ad called “When Mitt Romney Came to Town” is out, and it is really hardcore. Dolloped with a hint of xenophobia (Romney speaks French in the film twice), the film features the roadkill from the freight train of vulture capitalism, the workers who had the misfortune of getting caught up in a Bain Capital leveraged buyout. Romney is portrayed as such an unyielding greedhead that Gordon Gekko would blanch.

Dayen’s news roundup from Monday night, December 5, 2011. Important things happening everywhere except our own Congress.

When people believe things that are obviously untrue, and obviously not in their best financial interests, it means that Oligarchy has asserted control of the market in ideas.

“Black Monday,” September 19, 1977, was the day 34 years ago when the shuttering of the Youngstown Sheet and Tube steel mill threw 5,000 steelworkers onto the streets of their decaying Midwestern hometown. No local, state or federal programs offered significant help. Steelworkers called training programs “funeral insurance”: they led nowhere since there were no other jobs available. Inspired by a young steelworker, an ecumenical religious coalition put forward a plan for community-worker ownership of the giant mill. The plan captured widespread media attention, the support of numerous Democrats and Republicans (including the conservative governor of the state at the time), and an initial $200 million in loan guarantees from the Carter administration.

So much is going on here that it is hard to become affiliated with it all. I was in the streets marching to K Street when I heard about the pepper spraying of protestors at the National Air and Space Museum. I was marching on my way to the White House when Ralph Nader spoke to the crowd in the plaza.

The rich are planning to hang onto their wealth and domination, and that is bad for at least 1.8 billion people.

In this segment, I emphasize the importance of having a real vision of the world we wish to see; if we don’t have an answer to the question “If you don’t like capitalism, and you don’t like state socialism, then what do you want?”, then there’s no reason to take what we’re saying seriously.

In this segment, I explain how we may be moving beyond the liberal model which seeks to regulate capitalism to something more egalitarian, participatory, and decentralized, grounded in the emerging new economy. Here, as in my book America Beyond Capitalism, I call this possible new system “the pluralist commonwealth.”

On April 6, all but one of the Republican members of the US House of Representatives rejected a Democratic amendment that would have put the chamber on record backing the widely held scientific view that global warming is occurring and humans are a major cause. The following day the GOP-led House voted 255 to 172 to strip the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to regulate greenhouse gases. It is remarkable that in 2011, a majority of Republicans in Congress reject the indisputable, scientific consensus that human activity is altering the climate.