This week we take a look at how the Washington Post challenges some sequester spin. And CBS pokes fun at Iranian claims about Argo–but are the Iranians right that Argo is fiction? Plus George Will has some thoughts about stop-and-frisk policing.
In universities, the disciplines under attack are often also the very areas of study that critique neoliberalism and the capitalist system. This critique can cover not just universities but society as a whole. These areas of study give students skills to articulate an alternative — a new political vision for the world — and can put the attacks they face in a global context.
It will be the sixth time the Espionage Act has been unleashed against the source of an official leak of classified information under the Obama administration - more than the total number of times it has been deployed under all previous presidents since it was enacted in 1917.
Although there is no quantifiable measure to determine the cut-off point of the incredible patience demonstrated by the Greek population so far, empirical data seem to suggest that we are approaching rapidly a violent crisis caused by desperation, rage, and collective agony at the obvious dead-end about the bankrupt country.
At a time when sequestration is about to take a big bite out of the Pentagon budget, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) will be sending thousands of its citizen lobbyists to Capitol Hill next week to make sure Israel is exempted from any spending cuts.
The US Supreme Court heard a case on February 19 that is interesting perhaps not even so much because of the topic at hand but more because of the level of absurdity involved. It feels like we warp-sped our way into a parallel universe where the laws of nature are entirely different from those on earth.
That is to say, the court should never have been in a position to hear the case, but it has created the legal space for itself, aided and abetted by Congress and the US patent system, to hear it anyway.
Politicians have been able to get away with this disgusting behavior because there are very few independent voices telling the truth about what’s happening. Many labor and progressive groups are consciously lying about the dynamic, placing blame squarely on the Republicans, thus allowing the Democrats not to be held accountable for their pandering to the corporate elite’s demand to use austerity to attack the social safety net. In reality both parties are jointly attacking working and poor people via austerity, on a city, state, and national level.I have seen so much misinformation regarding the automatic cuts (sequestration) and the framing of this issue as Democrats versus Republicans. And what I've seen in mainstream media is mostly concern over support for military needs. For example, see this.
Capitalism in the phase of monopoly-finance capital is more prone to economic stagnation, and at the same time more intensively destructive of the planetary environment. For humanity today, facing both climate change and a more generalized planetary ecological catastrophe, due to the crossing of critical planetary boundaries, there is no choice left consistent with long-term survival but to leave capitalism’s burning house. Hansen’s climate-change exit plan represents the crucial first step that must be taken if irreversible climate change is to be avoided. But it is not by any means the last step. A real solution demands a radical alteration in social priorities—the kind of revolutionary transformation that could occur at unimagined speed if the population were once to reach its own social-environmental tipping point.
In what’s being described as a Kafkaesque decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled a group of human rights organizations and journalists cannot challenge the government’s warrantless domestic surveillance program because they can’t prove they are targets of it. The American Civil Liberties Union and a coalition of human rights groups and journalists filed the lawsuit in 2008 hours after President Bush signed amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which gave the National Security Agency almost unchecked power to monitor international phone calls and emails of Americans. We’re joined by the ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer, who argued the case before the Supreme Court.
...the CIA created the myth of the “father of the nation” fighting for the “freedom” of Tibet. The Dalai Lama may have ceased to be politically important, but the myth created around him survives.
In what amounts to a massive shock for the Italian and European elite, the anti-establishment Movimento Cinque Stelle led by populist comedian Beppe Grillo won nearly a quarter of all votes in this week’s Italian elections. In this article, the Bologna-based writers’ collective Wu Ming responds to the mainstream media’s interpretation of Grillo’s electoral success as a ‘radical repudiation of austerity’, and argues that Grillo is in fact instrumental in protecting the Italian status quo.
“People today are being transformed into animals. They are filled with fear and anxiety. I am searching for the reasons behind this metamorphosis.”
For Syrian artist Mohammed Abbas, these thoughts were triggered two years ago by the political and social situation around him. Seeing a flock of sheep, he was transfixed by how much the animals’ behavior, their unified actions and loss of individuality, reflected the mutations in people he saw.
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society,” Bernays wrote in Propaganda. “Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”The colonization of our minds by propaganda agents of the One Percent is the primary reason that we have failed to overturn a system and class rule that should have been overturned a century ago. Thus, I have long argued (since the late 1960s) that the only way to overturn the system of capitalism which provides our ruling class with so much power and wealth would be the development of alternative independent media and education organized by the 99 Percent. If we continue to fail to do this, we can only look forward to a future of more concentration of wealth amid widespread poverty, endless wars, police state measures, and climate destabilization.
The report documents 34 of those violations which on-the-ground reports link directly to the 15th Battalion. These violations include extrajudicial executions, force disappearance, torture, excessive use of force, abuse of authority and threats. There are indications that many other human rights violations have been committed by the soldiers of the 15th Battalion, and have yet to be documented.
The U.S. military has been training soldiers from the 15th Battalion and providing the unit with various forms of material assistance since 2008.
Scientists are surprised by how extreme these changes have been with a relatively small amount of warming. That has prompted some to speak out politically to urge emission reductions. On Monday, a group of Canadian and U.S. scientists pleaded with the Canadian government to stop the expansion of the Alberta tar sands oil projects and take real steps to reduce carbon emissions.I don't like the one sentence paragraphs, which likely have been designed to fit well with tweets on hand-held electronic gadgets, as a writing style especially if used to explain a phenomenon. Having made that point, I recommend this report of new scientific findings from Europe to explain how extreme weather patterns happen.
The old ideological mechanisms that for decades had persuaded most US citizens -- that economic hardship was the result of individual decisions and personal failures -- left growing numbers dissatisfied. The old scapegoats (immigrants, the poor, minorities, foreign powers, etc.) raised to deflect systemic criticism have been working less well than in the past. In their place, the notion is rising that today's economic problems are systemic, that capitalism itself is the problem. Systemic criticism is returning into the public consciousness and into public debate in ways not seen in the US since the 1930s.
...Dr Weil describes the alternative – namely critical thinking standards – to neo-liberal education standards. This post summarizes a discussion that is robust in the academic literature but totally absent from the corporate media.It sometimes appears to me that Weil does not understand that societies are systems made up of consonant inter-dependent subsystems. I've taken the time to peruse some of the earlier segments of the longer essay at its original posting on the Daily Censored, and I've found observations of his that indicate that he knows that the current conservative pedagogy is designed for a capitalist society, where one dominant class exploits others for its wealth and power. Here are some examples:
Unless otherwise noted, these are very brief reviews of many of the movies sent to me as a member of NY Film Critics Online or seen at a press screening, all in conjunction with our awards meeting held in December. ...I group the films by recommended, not recommended, and unwatchable—the last category defined by my inability to stomach more than 15 minutes or so. I make no pretensions to reviewing for a general public but offer my opinions for that narrow segment of the population with a taste for low-budget neorealist narrative films with nonprofessional casts and bold documentaries directed against one capitalist injustice or another.
Those 6,000-plus Academy voters simply could not resist a plot loosely based in facts in which a patriotic and resourceful Hollywood saves the CIA. And with a certified Hollywood ending as a bonus. Thus, predictably, this was Hollywood awarding an Oscar to itself, to hyper-nationalism, to American heroes and of course to good (Americans) over evil (Iranians).
Chrysanthopoulos says that the government has hired Blackwater, the American private military firm infamous for its activities in Iraq, which now goes by the name "Academi", along with five other international for-profit security outfits. Explaining why this has happened, he says bluntly: “The Greek government does not trust the police whose salaries have also been cut."
Europe’s 2013 protest season finally kicked off this week. On Saturday, three days after the umpteenth general strike paralyzed Greece, a “citizens’ wave” of indignation washed over Spain with hundreds of thousands of protesters swarming onto the streets of Madrid and over 80 cities in yet another major popular outcry against the ongoing financial coup d’étât. In Madrid, clashes broke out and at least 40 were arrested after police sought to disperse protesters who had once more encircled Parliament.
In simple terms, cultural hegemony refers to the way in which the powerful shape a society’s norms, values, and other institutions, and how that particular shaping becomes accepted as default, natural, perpetual, and inevitable. That is, people tend to regard the way we currently run things in society as the only way to run things in society. Instead of regarding our background systems as just one set of institutions among thousands of possibilities, people appear to think of them as default constants.This is a powerful insight on how a ruling class shapes all subordinate institutions of a society, and through their power this class restricts how people think about these arrangements.