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The Republicans have failed at governance in Arizona. Failed formulas pushed by Republicans Al Melvin and Vic Williams have done harm to their constituents. Melvin and Williams are faithful followers of the Phoenix GOP. They choose to reward corporations with tax breaks at the expense of children and families. These actions have worsened the economic crisis and caused disruption and suffering in our state. The stakes in this election are high. It's time to bring new leadership to the Capital. We need change that will put our state on the right track. Democratic candidates Cheryl Cage for Senate and Rep. Nancy Young Wright have worked tirelessly for education and for innovative solutions that will enable our state to succeed.
Arianna Huffington has made a strong case that America is no longer the innovation leader. She cites statistics that show the United States as 18th out of 24th and falling in educational achievement. Arizona ranks 50th in education. No wonder we are failing as a nation to promote policies that improve the stakes for labor and business to thrive whenever obstructive Republicans won't budge from their nineteenth century mindset.
How bad does it have to get before Republicans recognize what failure is? The Republicans in the Arizona legislature are behaving in lockstep as if they are entitled to govern and have consistently locked out voices that are crying for relief and a restoration of opportunity. The Republican dogma is blind to the fact that corporate welfare is eroding the very foundations not only of democracy, but capitalism itself. Their "Hell No" game playing, abandonment of government responsibility, and refusal to deal with the crisis in the face of reality has thrust us upon the road to ruin. These two scholars take a comprehensive look at the history and causes of the economic crisis and the central role innovation must play to pull our country back from the brink.
BuzzFlash.com's Review (excerpt)
March 2010
Each month or so, BuzzFlash is privileged to have nationally syndicated progressive talk show host Thom Hartmann review a progressive book or DVD exclusively for BuzzFlash. See other progressive premiums at The BuzzFlash Progressive Marketplace. See all of Thom's reviews for BuzzFlash at "Independent Thinker"Thom Hartmann's Review -- Exclusively for BuzzFlash -- for March 2010:
"Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction"
By Barry C. Lynn
Reviewed by Thom Hartmann
This book is about power. It documents how practices that were illegal at the opening of the Reagan administration have not only been legalized but used extensively to consolidate economic and political power in a way that threatens our very republic. It’s almost impossible to overstate its importance.
Most adults in America have, at one time or another in their lives, played the game Monopoly.
Monopoly started out as a game invented by Elizabeth Magie and patented in 1904 (she sold her patent to Parker Brothers in 1935 for $500, and they incorporated it into the modern Monopoly game, which was patented that year by Charles Darrow). The goal of the game is to buy up every business and property available, and through the monopoly ownership of all business and rents, over time bleed every other player into poverty.
Magie was a political activist who wanted to create a way to inform the average person of how concentration of ownership of property and aggregation of rents over time would lead to the concentration of wealth in a few hands with the rest of the population experiencing widespread poverty.
Today people like Mitt Romney and T. Boone Pickens play the game in the real world, impoverishing real people and destroying real businesses while taking all the cash they can for themselves.
As Barry C. Lynn (no relation to Barry Lynn of Citizens United for Separation of Church and State) writes in meticulous detail, the free enterprise of the founding era of this nation has, twice in our history, morphed into a cancerous economic state. Monopolies are not free enterprise, they’re not even good capitalism.
When one particular set of cells in a body rise up and decide to take to themselves all the nutrients in the body, growing without limit while robbing every other organ and cell of its necessary nutrients, we call that cancer. When it happens in a political and economic system, it’s called monopoly.
This is only the second time in American history when we’ve faced such a concentration of wealth and power, of business and money, and of the political control that flows from it.
Continue reading here
Capitalism Hits the Fan DVD: How Did the American Dream Turn Into the Nightmare on Wall Street?
By Richard Wolff
BuzzFlash.com's Review (excerpt)"Capitalism Hits the Fan" is a DVD at its most basic (a lecture as if you were back in college) brimming with an electrifying explanation of how the "American Dream" evolved into the "Nightmare on Wall Street."
Our guide (lecturer) is economics Professor Richard Wolff of the University of Massachusetts. As much as we have read at BuzzFlash about the economic meltdown, Wolff shed a new comprehensive perspective on the Wall Street bubble (now bursted) at the expense of the decline of the middle class.
Wolff tautly strings together an economic theory (some of the observations with which we might differ)that offers a persuasive explanation of how Wall Street exploded by increasing our indebtedness as individuals and as a nation, at a time when wages remained stagnant.
Continue reading here.
For more information visit the Media Education Capitalism Hits the Fan Website
