We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

On big politics, Western media spews propaganda - war correspondent John Pilger

Click here if you wish to access the source of this video interview (and transcript) with John Pilger who offers his views on a variety of current issues on RT. Pilger is one of the world's foremost independent journalists.



Because I spend so much time surveying and accessing sources of reliable information on the web regarding major world issues, I particularly liked his response to one of the interviewer's questions: "Do you think we’re getting reliable information from the conflict zone in Ukraine?"
Pilger: No, it's impossible to get an informed cover of pretty well anywhere [in] the world, unless you navigate your way through, these days, through the internet. If you don't navigate, and you sit in front of your television set, then you're likely to be given propaganda. It's always been that way - it's probably now more intense, but we do have alternatives now. We do have the internet, but as I say, it requires that research. Otherwise, we sit in front of the TV, or we pick up a newspaper, and we're not so much informed as when we're monitoring it or deconstructing it - that's what I do as a journalist. We live in an age of intense propaganda.
However, I keep wondering when our masters will succeed in interfering with internet access as they are now trying to do by allowing corporations to buy faster access which means slower access by independent websites. I predict that you will see more complaints, indirectly engineered or not, about the slow access of many streaming video services like Netflix; and then this issue will be used to justify corporations buying faster online speeds. The legal foundation for this has already be prepared by the courts as reported in the Huffington Post article: "last month's federal appeals court ruling...struck down Federal Communication Commission rules known as net neutrality."