US humorist Lewis Black on being invited to host the annual White House Correspondent’s Dinner, via Avedon Carol
Then there’s CPAC: The Unauthorized Documentary, a tour of the US hairtrigger loony Right’s premier annual fundraising conference, from that very plucky and good-looking fella Max Blumenthal, of The Nation. Notable features are Michelle Malkin, unable to comprehend that if you have to issue an errata slip, it’s likely your work’s not exactly reliable, and David Horowitz, coming over in person as exactly as obnoxiously as one might expect.
All great fun, but it’s easy to forget when pointing and laughing at the ridiculousness of Washington and its voracious attendant suckerfish that the policies of the corporate right have real world consequences.
The last video is of Belgian firefighters in pitched street battles with the police last week: all over Europe, where the neoliberal economic policy of opening up public services to privatisation by multinational corporations like Group4, Wackenhut, Brown & Root, Serco…. the list goes on and on… is being vigorously resisted by normally peacable public servants. [Sorry about it being in German, it was the only embeddable clip I could find.]
If you’re a public servant and have ever wondered about the police’s loyalty to their fellow taxpayer-employed colleagues, wonder no longer. This is the purely market-driven world the US corporate right and their EU allies want for everyone and resistance will be met with force if necessary, as this video shows. Where public services like firefighting and justice are made subject to the rules of the free market the police will always act in their own interest and side with the highest bidder. Someone has to pay for all those nifty riot guns, paramilitary outfits, deadly anti-personnel toys and all that overtime.
