Mandy: Great blog!
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Penny: I'm glad I found your blog (from a comment on Think Progress), it's comprehensive and very insightful.
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Alison: Loquacious as ever with a touch of elegance -- & right on target as usual!
"Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it."
- Noam Chomsky
Totally in your face manipulation by bought-and-paid-for U.S. corporate media
they don't even make any pretense of reporting news any more... it's all about telling you how to think because, god forbid, you should do any thinking on your own... two headlines from today, july 8... the new york times, our "paper of record"...
you don't have to read either article... all you have to do is glance at the headlines and walk away with seeds of doubt implanted because that's the entire intent...
The key to
the police state operations of the US in the 21st century is to
repress pro-democracy citizens and pre-empt any mass movement
without undermining the electoral system, which provides
political theater and legitimacy. A police state ‘boundary’ is
constructed to ensure that citizens will have little option but
to vote for the two pro-police state parties, legislatures and
executives without reference to the conduct, conditions and
demands of the core, inner and outer circle of victims, critics
and activists. Frequent raids, harsh public ‘exemplary’
punishment and mass media stigmatization transmit a message to
the passive mass of voters and non-voters that the victims of
repression ‘must have been doing something wrong’ or else they
would not be under police state repression.
The key to
the police state strategy is to not allow its critics to gain a
mass base, popular legitimacy or public acceptance. The state
and the media constantly drum the message that the activists’
‘causes’ are not our (American, patriotic) ‘causes’; that
‘their’ pro-democracy activities impede ‘our’ electoral
activities; their lives, wisdom and experiences do not touch our
workplaces, neighborhoods, sports, religious and civic
associations. To the degree that the police-state has ‘fenced
in’ the inner circles of the pro-democracy activists, they have
attained a free hand and uncontested reach in deepening and
extending the boundaries of the authoritarian state. To the
degree that the police state rationale or presence has
penetrated the consciousness of the mass of the US population,
it has created a mighty barrier to the linking of private
discontent with public action.
[...]
Ideologically, the police state depends on identifying the
expansion of police powers with ‘national security’ of the
passive ‘silent’ majority, even as it creates profound
insecurity for an active, critical minority. The self-serving
identification of the ‘nation’ and the ‘flag’ with the police
state apparatus is especially prominent during ‘mass spectacles’
where ‘rock’, schlock and ‘sports’ infuse mass entertainment
with solemn Pledges of Allegiance to uphold and respect the
police state and busty be-wigged young women wail nasally
versions of the national anthem to thunderous applause. Wounded
‘warriors’ are trotted out and soldiers rigid in their dress
uniforms salute enormous flags, while the message transmitted is
that police state at home works hand in hand with our ‘men and
women in uniform’ abroad. The police state is presented as a
patriotic extension of the wars abroad and as such both impose
‘necessary’ constraints on citizen opposition, public criticism
and any real forthright defense of freedom.
Defining "terrorism" and deciding who's behind a "terrorist" attack prematurely as a form of propaganda
of course i've been following the situation in syria and the damascus suicide bombing without the slightest notion of who are the good guys and who are the bad guys (although i am strongly leaning toward the belief that both sides are pretty bad)... i also have no firm idea of who is propping up the assad regime and who is giving support to the rebels... that both the u.s. and israel have their hands in the matter up to their elbows i think is almost a given and that both of them would certainly like to see a regime emerge, no matter how brutal or totalitarian, that would befriend the u.s., tolerate israel and serve as a buffer to iran as well as turn a cold shoulder to russia and china, is hardly in doubt... it's also very interesting to note, as glenn points out, that news reports on the damascus bombing have pointedly avoided labeling it as a "terrorist" attack...
so, how utterly convenient to have the "terrorist" bulgarian bus bombing suddenly occur that, without preamble or investigation, israel can blame first on iran and, on further consideration, iran via hezbollah... israel and the israel-besotted neo-cons steering u.s. foreign policy would like nothing better than to turn loose the dogs of war in the region and will go to any lengths to make it happen... this is just another thing they can point to but, cynic that i am, would not put it out of the realm of possibility that mossad is behind it... true, it's hard to conceive of israel killing its own citizens but, given the total nutcases in charge, it's not out of the question... glenn, as always, does a masterful job of dissecting the meaning and justifiability of terrorism in the bulgarian bus bombing in similar fashion to the job he did a few days ago with the damascus suicide bombing which, added to the analysis of "terrorism" he has been doing all along, provides a much-needed perspective on the reality of events...
In a televised statement Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu said the attack was "perpetrated by Hezbollah, Iran's leading
terrorist proxy," as part of a global campaign that has reached a dozen
countries on five continents.
But he offered no evidence. Israel's U.S. Embassy said Wednesday that it
had no proof that Iran was the instigator of the attack.
Noam Chomsky: 'The Occupy movement just lit a spark'
'If you're rich and powerful you never have enough'. In this full-length interview, Gary Youngetalks to US historian and philosopher Noam Chomsky about why the Occupy
movement is so important, where it goes from here, and how it will
affect the election.
John Pilger was born and grew up in Bondi, Sydney, Australia. He
launched his first newspaper at Sydney High School and later completed a
four year cadetship with Australian Consolidated Press. "It was one of
the strictest language courses I know," he says. "Devised by a
celebrated, literate editor, Brian Penton, the aim was economy of
language and accuracy. It certainly taught me to admire writing that was
spare, precise and free of cliches, that didn't retreat into the
passive voice and used adjectives only when absolutely necessary. I have
long since slipped that leash, but those early disciplines helped shape
my journalism and writing and my understanding of moving and still
pictures".
Like many of his Australian generation, Pilger and two
colleagues left for Europe in the early 1960s. They set up an ill-fated
freelance 'agency' in Italy (with the grand title of 'Interep') and
quickly went broke. Arriving in London, Pilger freelanced, then joined
Reuters, moving to the London Daily Mirror, Britain's biggest selling
newspaper, which was then changing to a serious tabloid.
He
became chief foreign correspondent and reported from all over the world,
covering numerous wars, notably Vietnam. Still in his twenties, he
became the youngest journalist to receive Britain's highest award for
journalism, Journalist of the Year and was the first to win it twice.
Moving to the United States, he reported the upheavals there in the late
1960s and 1970s. He marched with America's poor from Alabama to
Washington, following the assassination of Martin Luther King. He was in
the same room when Robert Kennedy, the presidential candidate, was
assassinated in June 1968.
His work in South East Asia produced a
iconic issue of the London Mirror, devoted almost entirely to his world
exclusive dispatches from Cambodia in the aftermath of Pol Pot's reign.
The combined impact of his Mirror reports and his subsequent
documentary, Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia, raised almost $50
million for the people of that stricken country. Similarly, his 1994
documentary and dispatches report from East Timor, where he travelled
under cover, helped galvanise support for the East Timorese, then
occupied by Indonesia.
In Britain, his four-year investigation on
behalf of a group of children damaged at birth by the drug Thalidomide,
and left out of the settlement with the drugs company, resulted in a
special settlement.
His numerous documentaries on Australia,
notably The Secret Country (1983), the bicentary trilogy The Last Dream
(1988) and Welcome to Australia (1999) all celebrated and revealed much
of his own country's 'forgotten past', especially its indigenous past
and present.
He has won an Emmy and a BAFTA for his
documentaries, which have also won numerous US and European awards, such
as as the Royal Television Society's Best Documentary.
His
articles appear worldwide in newspapers such as the Guardian, the
Independent, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Mail &
Guardian (South Africa), Aftonbladet (Sweden), Il Manifesto (Italy). He
writes a regular column for the New Statesman, London. In 2001, he
curated a major exhibition at the London Barbican, Reporting the World:
John Pilger's Eyewitness Photographers, a tribute to the great
black-and-white photographers he has worked alongside. In 2003, he was
awarded the prestigous Sophie Prize for '30 years of exposing injustice
and promoting human rights.' In 2009, he was awarded the Sydney Peace
Prize.
His latest film is The War You Don't See (2010), which was premiered in London both in the cinema and on telelvision.
Glenn: Like all propaganda, [the U.S. use of the word "militant"] is designed to deceive the citizenry in order to compel acquiescence to government conduct
yes, i know i tend to be a little heavy in citing glenn in my posts but he's one of the few observers i turn to regularly who happen to have a consistent, firm grasp on reality...
[T]he word “militant” is being aggressively distorted by deceitful U.S. government propaganda that defines the term to mean: any “military-age males” whom we kill (the use of the phrase “suspected militants” in the body of the article suffers the same infirmity).
How
is it possible to have any informed democratic debate over a policy
about which the U.S. media relentlessly propagandizes this way? If drone
strikes kill nobody other than “militants,” then very few people will
even think about opposing them (and that’s independent of the fact that
the word “militant” is a wildly ambiguous term — militant about what? —
though it is clearly designed (when combined with “Pakistan”) to evoke
images of those who attacked the World Trade Center). Debate-suppression
is not just the effect but the intent of this propaganda: like all
propaganda, it is designed to deceive the citizenry in order to compel
acquiescence to government conduct.
what most people in the u.s. fail to realize is just how massively we are propagandized on a daily basis... it hits us from every direction, 24/7, from the ceaseless ads on tv for prescription drugs ("ask your doctor if it's right for you") to the critical importance of checking our credit scores to news stories obsessing on celebrities, the the all-pervasive focus on violence... then, besides the in-your-face kind of propaganda, there's the more subtle and insidious kind that simply fails to report on anything of substance or, if something of substance is being reported, omitting all relevant context thus ensuring that any real understanding is virtually impossible... i was lunching with a friend and colleague this week who, bless his heart, is one of the few who understands just how little we are told about what's really happening in the world... i probably wouldn't be so aware of it myself if i didn't spend so much time poring over multiple sources and trying to fit the pieces together... (whether that's healthy or not is for a later discussion...!)
Glenn: To avoid counting civilian deaths, Obama re-defined "militant" to mean "all military-age males in a strike zone"
glenn comments on the latest revelation about the covert activities of our sociopathic leaders...
I’ve written and said many times before that in American media discourse, the definition of “militant” is any human being whose life is extinguished when an American missile or bomb detonates (that term was even used when
Anwar Awlaki’s 16-year-old American son, Abdulrahman, was killed by a
U.S. drone in Yemen two weeks after a drone killed his father, even
though nobody claims the teenager was anything but completely innocent:
“Another U.S. Drone Strike Kills Militants in Yemen”).
This morning, the New York Times has a very lengthy and detailed article about President Obama’s counter-Terrorism policies based on interviews with “three dozen of his current and former advisers.” [...] The article explains that Obama’s rhetorical emphasis on avoiding
civilian deaths “did not significantly change” the drone program,
because Obama himself simply expanded the definition of a “militant” to
ensure that it includes virtually everyone killed by his drone strikes.
Just read this remarkable passage:
Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.
Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple
logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a
top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good. “Al
Qaeda is an insular, paranoid organization — innocent neighbors don’t
hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns
and bombs,” said one official, who requested anonymity to speak about
what is still a classified program.
This counting method may partly explain the official claims of extraordinarily low collateral deaths.
In a speech last year Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obama’s trusted adviser, said
that not a single noncombatant had been killed in a year of strikes. And
in a recent interview, a senior administration official said that the
number of civilians killed in drone strikes in Pakistan under Mr. Obama
was in the “single digits” — and that independent counts of scores or
hundreds of civilian deaths unwittingly draw on false propaganda claims
by militants.
But in interviews, three former senior intelligence officials expressed disbelief that the number could be so low. The
C.I.A. accounting has so troubled some administration officials outside
the agency that they have brought their concerns to the White House.
One called it “guilt by association” that has led to “deceptive”
estimates of civilian casualties.
“It bothers me when they say there were seven guys, so they
must all be militants,” the official said. “They count the corpses and
they’re not really sure who they are.”
For the moment, leave the ethical issues to the side that arise from viewing “all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants”; that’s nothing less than sociopathic... [...] By “militant,” the Obama administration literally means nothing more than: any military-age male whom we kill, even when we know nothing else about them.
They have no idea whether the person killed is really a militant: if
they’re male and of a certain age they just call them one in order to
whitewash their behavior and propagandize the citizenry (unless
conclusive evidence somehow later emerges proving their innocence).
Gareth Porter: None of the official line on bin Laden is true
gareth porter has one of the more credible reputations in investigative journalism and in this truthout exclusive, blows the lid off the inflated and conflated mythology being dispensed as fact...
A few days after US Navy Seals killed Osama bin Laden in a raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a "senior intelligence official"
briefing reporters on the materials seized from bin Laden's compound
said the materials revealed that bin Laden had, "continued to direct
even tactical details of the group's management." Bin Laden was, "not
just a strategic thinker for the group," said the official. "He was
active in operational planning and in driving tactical decisions." The
official called the bin Laden compound, "an active command and control
center."
The senior intelligence official triumphantly called the discovery of
bin Laden's hideout, "the greatest intelligence success perhaps of a
generation," and administration officials could not resist leaking to
reporters that a key element in that success was that the CIA
interrogators had gotten the name of bin Laden's trusted courier from
al-Qaeda detainees at Guantanamo. CIA Director Leon Panetta was quite willing to leave the implication that some of the information had been obtained from detainees by "enhanced interrogation techniques."
Such was the official line at the time. But none of it was true. It
is now clear that CIA officials were blatantly misrepresenting both bin
Laden's role in al-Qaeda when he was killed and how the agency came to
focus on his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
In fact, during his six years in Abbottabad, bin Laden was not the
functioning head of al-Qaeda at all, but an isolated figurehead who had
become irrelevant to the actual operations of the organization. The real
story, told here for the first time, is that bin Laden was in the
compound in Abbottabad because he had been forced into exile by the
al-Qaeda leadership.
i am not going to immediately claim that everything porter reports in this story is true - after all, how could i? - but i will go so far as to say that it's completely plausible... and, if it is true, what a glimpse it provides behind the smoke and mirrors of our government and its campaign of endless war...
Many have compared the coordinated propaganda campaign now being disseminated about The Iranian Threat to that which preceded the Iraq War, but there is one notable difference. Whereas the American media in 2002 followed the lead of the U.S. government in beating the war drums against Saddam, they now seem even more eager for war against Iran than the U.S. government itself, which actually appears somewhat reluctant. Consider this highly illustrative, one-minute report yesterday from the nightly broadcast of NBC News with Brian Williams, by the network’s Chief Pentagon Correspondent Jim “Mik” Miklaszewski, which packs multiple misleading narratives into one short package:
I just saw this two-minute ABC News report from Diane Sawyer and Brian Ross that sinks to even lower depths than what I highlighted yesterday. It has to be seen to be believed. It’s a perfect museum exhibit for how empty-headed American media stars uncritically recite whatever they are told by government officials, exaggerate or fabricate bad acts by the designated Enemy du Jour while ignoring and suppressing the precipitating acts of America and its client states, and just generally do whatever they can to keep fear levels and war thirst as high as possible. This is nothing short of irresponsible propagandistic trash:
The security and surveillance state has a vast arsenal and array of tools at its disposal. It operates in secret. It dissembles and lies. It hides behind phony organizations and individuals who use false histories and false names. It has millions of dollars to spend, the capacity to deny not only its activities but also its existence. Its physical assets honeycomb the country. It can wiretap, eavesdrop and monitor every form of communication. It can hire informants, send in clandestine agents, recruit members within the movement by offering legal immunity, churn out a steady stream of divisive propaganda and amass huge databases and clandestine operations centers. And it is authorized to use deadly force.
How do we fight back? We do not have the tools or the wealth of the state. We cannot beat it at its own game. We cannot ferret out infiltrators. The legal system is almost always on the state’s side. If we attempt to replicate the elaborate security apparatus of our oppressors, even on a small scale, we will unleash widespread paranoia and fracture the movement. If we retreat into anonymity, hiding behind masks, then we provide an opening for agents provocateurs who deny their identities while disrupting the movement. If we fight pitched battles in the streets we give authorities an excuse to fire their weapons.
[...]
We must assume we are targets. And we must fight back by relying on our strength, which in the great paradox of resistance movements is embodied in our weakness. This does not mean we will avoid being repressed or persecuted. It will not keep us safe from slander, lies or jail. But it does offer the capacity to create internal divisions in the apparatus of the oppressors rather than permit the oppressors to create internal divisions within the movement. Divided loyalties create paralysis. And it is our job to paralyze them, not allow them to paralyze us.
the assumption that we are targets is both a safe and a correct assumption... there's a big difference in basing an assumption on multiple observations of reality and making an assumption based purely on paranoia...
i watched the classic canadian documentary on noam chomsky yesterday... i'm familiar with most of chomsky's ideas it contains but the films is still essential grounding on what's taking place today...
glenn takes on the spin-fortified crap that passes for news on npr (yes, virginia, npr is a government spin-machine right along with all the rest of 'em) and also paints a picture of how military-spawned drone technology is rapidly coming to a neighborhood near you...
Even leaving aside the issue of weaponization (police officials now openly talk about equipping drones with “nonlethal weapons such as Tasers or a bean-bag gun”), the use of drones for domestic surveillance raises all sorts of extremely serious privacy concerns and other issues of potential abuse. Their ability to hover in the air undetected for long periods of time along with their comparatively cheap cost enables a type of broad, sustained societal surveillance that is now impractical, while equipping them with infra-red or heat-seeking detectors and high-powered cameras can provide extremely invasive imagery. The holes eaten into the Fourth Amendment’s search and seizure protections by the Drug War and the War on Terror means there are few Constitutional limits on how this technology can be used, and there are no real statutory or regulatory restrictions limiting their use. In sum, the potential for abuse is vast, the escalation in surveillance they ensure is substantial, and the effect they have on the culture of personal privacy — having the state employ hovering, high-tech, stealth video cameras that invade homes and other private spaces — is simply creepy.
But listeners of NPR would know about virtually none of that. On its All Things Considered program yesterday, NPR broadcast a five-minute report (audio below) from Brian Naylor that purported to be a news story on the domestic use of drones but was, in fact, much more akin to a commercial for the drone industry.
going back to the subject of npr, i've long since accepted the fact that npr has been consciously and carefully shaped into just another government propaganda outlet... i still listen to it when i'm out and about in my truck because, despite its serious shortcomings, it's preferable to the rest of the mindless stuff that comes over the radio... but i've been known to scream at the top of my lungs while driving down the interstate while listening to the garbage that they're passing off as news... thank god for the internet...
United Nations weapons inspectors released a trove of new evidence on Tuesday that they say makes a “credible” case that “Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear device” and that the project may still be under way.
The long-awaited report relies on evidence whose scope and depth is far greater than any the agency has made public before, and represents the harshest judgment that the International Atomic Energy Agency has ever issued in its decade-long struggle to pierce the secrecy surrounding the Iranian program. The findings have already rekindled a debate among the Western allies and Israel about whether increased diplomatic pressure, sanctions, sabotage or military action could stop Iran’s program.
robert parry offers a rapid response as well as some context on the bogus "authority" behind this equally bogus return bout of u.s. and media hyperventilation on iran, the same guy who sold us a bill of goods on iraq's non-existent wmd...
The American public is about to be inundated with another flood of “expert analysis” about a dangerous Middle Eastern country presumably hiding a secret nuclear weapons program that may require a military strike, although this time it is Iran, not Iraq.
In the near future, you will be seeing more satellite photos of non-descript buildings that experts will say are housing elements of a nuclear bomb factory. There will be more diagrams of supposed nuclear devices. Some of the same talking heads will reappear to interpret this new “evidence.”
You might even recognize some of those familiar faces from the more innocent days of 2002-2003 when they explained, with unnerving confidence, how Iraq’s Saddam Hussein surely had chemical and biological weapons and likely a nuclear weapons program, too.
For instance, back then, former United Nations weapons inspector David Albright was all over the news channels, reinforcing the alarmist claims about Iraq’s WMD that were coming from President George W. Bush and his neocon-dominated administration.
Today, Albright’s Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) is issuing a flurry of alarmist reports about Iran’s nuclear bomb progress, often accompanied by the same kind of satellite photos and diagrams that helped persuade many Americans that Iraq must possess unconventional weapons that turned out to be fictitious.
imho, this is nothing more and nothing less than another fabricated diversion to get us to stop focusing on real issues and keep us cowering under the bed in fear of yet another boogeyman... (pay no attention to ows... look over here at what iran's doing...!)
what's particularly disturbing about this turn of events isn't the patently propagandistic nature of the breathless revelations, it's the leaking scuttlebutt about israel's plans for attacking iran which would be ever so much worse than iran actually having the bomb...
It's the 1 percent that pay for elections, not the 25 million workers suffering from Congressional greed and incompetence
the ability of our super-rich elites to use their bought and paid for elected puppets and media shills to manipulate us and pit us against each other knows no bounds...
It is truly impressive how the Washington elite have managed to make these modest protections for the country's working population (the 99 percent) into the greatest problem facing the country. The obsession with cutting these programs is occurring at a time when we have more than 25 million people unemployed, underemployed or who have given up looking for work altogether. One might think that Congress would convene a supercommittee to get people back to work rather than figuring out a way to undermine programs that people need, but it's the 1 percent that pay for elections, not the 25 million workers suffering from their greed and incompetence.
Since almost no one can be immune to the hysteria that the media have created around the cost of these programs, it is worth putting it in some context. Starting with Social Security, the latest projections from the Congressional Budget Office show that the program can pay all benefits through the year 2038 with no changes whatsoever.
Even if we never did anything, the program would be able to pay more than 80 percent of scheduled benefits well into the next century. Since the value of benefits is projected to rise through time, 80 percent of the projected benefit in 2040 is considerably higher than the average benefit received by retirees today. Therefore, the often repeated comment that there will be nothing there for our children or grandchildren is a telltale sign of ignorance or dishonesty.
[...]
The public should realize that "generational warfare" is an agenda that was deliberately designed by the 1 percent to distract the rest of us from the class war that they have been successfully waging over the last three decades. Rather than have a public debate on the policies that have redistributed so much income upward, the 1 percent want to pit children against their parents and grandparents, forcing them to fight over crumbs.
it's truly astounding to me that, given the state the world is in and the many issues of real substance we have facing us as a human race, that the appointed stooges of our elites can, in what only amounts to unbelievable arrogance and deliberate denial, sit in washington and deliberate how best to destroy the precious little bit that remains of our social contract...
this was waiting for me in my inbox this morning...
Interesting - 23 days straight of growing protests outside Wall Street of people with placards and organized marches that is spreading to other points in the country. All saying it's time for financial reform and to bring to justice the banking and wall street people that have not been convicted of the financial collapse of the country. Have you seen much in the papers on it or on the TV?! I haven't. It was a piece on CBS Sunday Morning.
i have repeatedly suggested that his attachment to traditional news media doesn't serve him well in the "keeping informed" department... he thinks he's in touch with what's going on but he's not, and what he IS in touch with is so loaded with corporate, propagandist spin, it's sometimes almost impossible to hold a discussion with him...
tom tomorrow on the same subject (courtesy of daily kos)...
To worry about Social Security makes absolutely no sense, unless you’re trying to destroy the program
and why would you want to destroy social security...? chomsky makes the point that i have made since i started this blog back in 2005... our super-rich elites are bound and determined to destroy any semblance of the social contract... a social contract implies an underlying principle of the common good, a principle that is completely antithetical to those who are deeply committed to accruing every last scrap of money and power to themselves...
Social Security is not in any crisis. I mean, the trust fund alone will fully pay benefits for, I think, another 30 years or so. And after that, taxes will give almost the same benefits. To worry about a possible problem 30 years from now, which can incidentally be fixed with a little bit of tampering here and there, as was done in 1983—to worry about that just makes absolutely no sense, unless you’re trying to destroy the program. It’s a very successful program. A large number people rely on it. It doesn’t pay munificently, but it at least keeps people alive, not just retired people, but people with disabilities and others. Very low administrative costs, extremely efficient, and no burden on the deficit. The effort to try to present the Social Security program as if it’s a major problem, that’s just a hidden way of trying to undermine and destroy it.
Now, there has been a lot of opposition to it since the 1930s, on the part of sectors of extreme wealth and privilege, especially financial capital. They don’t like it, for several reasons. One is that for the rich, it’s meaningless. For anyone who’s had a fairly decent income, it’s a tiny addition to your retirement but doesn’t mean much. Another is, if the financial institutions and the insurance companies can get their hands on this huge financial resource—for example, if it’s privatized in some way or vouchers— that’s a huge bonanza. They’ll have trillions of dollars to play with, the banks, the investment firms and so on.
But I think, myself, that there’s a more subtle reason why they’re opposed to it, and I think it’s rather similar to the reason for the effort to pretty much dismantle the public education system. Social Security is based on a principle. It’s based on the principle that you care about other people. You care whether the widow across town, a disabled widow, is going to be able to have food to eat. And that’s a notion you have to drive out of people’s heads. The idea of solidarity, sympathy, mutual support, that’s doctrinally dangerous. The preferred doctrines are just care about yourself, don’t care about anyone else. That’s a very good way to trap and control people. And the very idea that we’re in it together, that we care about each other, that we have responsibility for one another, that’s sort of frightening to those who want a society which is dominated by power, authority, wealth, in which people are passive and obedient. And I suspect—I don’t know how to measure it exactly, but I think that that’s a considerable part of the drive on the part of small, privileged sectors to undermine a very efficient, very effective system on which a large part of the population relies, actually relies more than ever, because wealth, personal wealth, was very much tied up in the housing market. That was people’s personal wealth. Well, OK, that, quite predictably, totally collapsed. People aren’t destitute by the standards of, say, slums in India or southern Africa, but ver many are suffering severely. And they have nothing else to rely on, but the pittance that they’re getting from Social Security. To take that away would be just disastrous.
if we honestly believe - and practice - that we are here to take care of each other, that the principles enshrined in the declaration of independence, the u.s. constitution and the message of jesus in the gospels are the only ones worth living by, we pose a profound threat to the principle of social darwinism and our handlers must stomp it out wherever it appears...
since i spend a great deal of my time outside the u.s., i am well aware of the sharp distinction professor cole draws between the drivel masquerading as news that we're fed in this country and the real news those elsewhere in the world receive...
Americans live in a late capitalist society where the rich have gotten many times richer and the middle class has gotten poorer, where Wall Street bankers have stolen us blind and blamed us for living above our means, where persistent unemployment is worse than in the Great Depression, where most politicians and some judges have been bought by corporations or special interests, where authorities actively conspire to keep people from voting, where the government spies on citizens assiduously without warrant or probable cause, and where the minds of the sheep are kept off their fleecing by substituting celebrity gossip, sex scandals, and half-disguised bigotry for genuine news.
In the Arab world, masses of 20-year-olds have challenged their corrupt politicians and manipulative billionaires in the streets, demanding transparency, an end to arbitrary secret police, and free and fair elections untainted by influence-peddling and plutocracy. I have Arabic satellite t.v. on in the background most of the day, with its dramatic stories of personal risk and human tragedy and bold challenge to a rotten status quo. And I channel surf over to the American cable news and mostly find fluff or de-contextualized reports or, frankly, propaganda.
An alternative look at NEWS THAT MATTERS: current events, politics, opinion, perspective, discussion, analysis, issues, debate, and insight - national and global.
