Reading Rant: "Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities" by Craig Steven Wilder

Slavery is a weed that grows on every soil ~Edmund Burke

Slavery is a weed that grows on every soil.
Edmund Burke
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/slavery.html#8xjDqm0T6pit58f0.99

Slavery is a weed that grows on every soil.
Edmund Burke
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/slavery.html#8xjDqm0T6pit58f0.99

Slavery is a weed that grows on every soil.
Edmund Burke
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/slavery.html#8xjDqm0T6pit58f0.99

Have you ever felt like there was just too little time to read all the books you would like to devour? I feel like that all the time. It almost feels like the more books I read, the less I think I know and that just feeds the drive to read even more voraciously. Kinda weird but I will live with it inescapable cycle. I heard this clip on my way to work today and quickly scribbled down the name of the book to add to my long-ass list of books to acquire in the near future. We all know that slavery built America from the ground up, but there are so many interesting twists and turns to this story that beg for further study and reflection. This book, "Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities", is but one of many twists in the holocaust of slavery. I really look forward to reading this one.

OneLove

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Russell Brand Takes Aim

This is exactly what more celebrities should be doing once they acquire a certain level of power and influence, in my opinion. He makes more sense than the bent-over politicians in office. I said the same for Immortal Technique a few months back when he was critiquing Wall Street.Seems like most folks simply sell their souls for money and comfort & this is exactly what is going to end us, is it not?

OneLove

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The Dissolution of the West

This man tells it like it is! Check out his work here. 

Stay alert..

OneLove

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Toni Morrison on Language, Evil & 'The White Gaze'

(You can skip the first 16.13 minutes to get to the meat & potatoes.....) 

 OneLove 

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The Genius of George Carlin

Quickly: Can anyone name one comedian today who can speak truth to power like George Carlin?

Actually I know of only a handful - Dick Gregory, Bill Maher, Jon Stewart and the right-wing blow-hard, Dennis Miller. This type of rebellious comedy is rare. Carlin attacked all the cherished ideals most Americans harbor & highlighted America's  ugly and sometimes hilarious truths. Arguably, Carlin was one of the finest social philosophers of our time. His stuff will never grow old.....My only issue with his critique of modern times is his belief that human -induced climate change cannot be proved. Although his perspective is interesting and is shared by many climate change deniers, it is short-sighted and scientifically baseless.

"I’ve given up on the whole human species. I think a big, good-sized comet is exactly what this species needs. You know, the poor dinosaurs were walking around eating leaves, and they were completely wiped out. Let the insects have a go. You know, I don’t think they’ll come up with sneakers with lights in them, or Dust Busters, or Salad Shooters, or snot candy".....Classic!!

OneLove

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George Orwell's Final Warning

(This clip was ripped from the 2003 television docudrama "George Orwell - A Life in Pictures..")

OneLove

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A Fisher's Journey

Fisheries are collapsing around the world. This is especially worrisome to me as I am from the Caribbean. In certain areas of Belize and Mexico, fishers - in collaboration with scientists, government officials and others - have made remarkable progress in reviving their fisheries and conserving their way of life. A Fisher's Journey documents the journey of  an Antuguan fisher named Dalston Samuels to Belize and Mexico. The next time you go  Red Lobster or ingest a delicious plate of red snapper over coconut ginger rice at home, think of what we are doing to our oceans and spread the word.

We have to turn this around.

OneLove

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Requiem 2019

As usual, because of us, whales are dying off. There is no end to our short-sightedness. Leave it to us that on the last day of our own extinction, we will still be entrapped in our foolishness. 

OneLove

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Brug

Synopsis: A man considers his world grey and inanimate until he encounters beauty in the form of a fish. When the fish tragically disappears, the man is left in despair & agony - life has lost all meaning. Life in modern times?

 OneLove

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Poet's Nook: "Brother, I’ve Seen Some" by Kabir

Brother, I’ve seen some

     Astonishing sights:

A lion keeping watch

     Over pasturing cows;

A mother delivered

     After her son was;

A guru prostrated

     Before his disciple;

Fish spawning

     On treetops;               

A cat carrying away

     A dog;

A gunny-sack

     Driving a bullock-cart;

A buffalo going out to graze,

     Sitting on a horse;

A tree with its branches in the earth,

     Its roots in the sky;

A tree with flowering roots.

This verse, says Kabir,

     Is your key to the universe.

If you can figure it out.

OneLove

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The Wealth Of Nations

Africa's so-called growth is heavily dependent on exports of goods like oil, which siphon wealth out of the country (Photo: The Global Poverty Project)The World Bank is admitting that so-called economic growth in Africa, rooted in privatization and resource extraction by foreign companies, is not benefiting the vast majority of the continent's people.

This comes from an institution widely criticized for pushing these very policies of 'growth.'

Despite Africa's much-vaunted 'growth' over the past decade, deep poverty and inequality are “unacceptably high and the pace of reduction unacceptably slow,” reads Africa's Pulse, an analysis released Monday by the World Bank. "Almost one out of every two Africans lives in extreme poverty today," and by the year 2030, a vast majority of the world's poor will be located in Africa, the report finds.

Francisco Ferreira, Acting Chief Economist for the World Bank Africa Region, states, "Africa grew faster in the last decade than most other regions," with a steadily climbing GDP noted in the report. Yet, this so-called growth is highly dependent on relatively few commodities sold for export, including oil, metals, and minerals. "Nearly three-quarters of countries rely on three commodities for 50 percent or more of export earnings," the report reads, with countries like Angola and Nigeria depending on oil for up to 97 percent of all exports.

"[H]igh dependence on one or a few commodities makes Africa’s resource-rich countries vulnerable to sharp movements in prices of these commodities,” explains Punam Chuhan-Pole, Lead Economist of the World Bank’s Africa Region and author of Africa’s Pulse.

Furthermore, this wealth is siphoned off to foreign investors, with 2012 exports to the EU and U.S. reaching $148 billion, and exports to BRIC countries reaching $144 billion that same year.

Overall privatization is skyrocketing, with Gross fixed capital formation rising from 16.4% of GDP in 2000 to 20.4% in 2011, indicating the expansion of business assets.

"Higher economic growth does not automatically translate into higher poverty reduction," the report states.

"[The report's Findings are] unfortunately pretty typical of what we've seen in global terms, particularly in the global south, where increases in economic growth overlook how citizens are impacted and reinforce the power of elite elements," said leading scholar Stephen Zunes in an interview with Common Dreams. "Economic structures are still rooted in neo-colonial model."

"Historically, the World Bank has pushed big mega-development projects that basically increase the rate at which you take stuff out of country, and increased the push for exports of raw materials and increases in consumer goods that only elites can afford," he added.

"The problems of resource extraction in Africa are many," writes Godwin Uyi Ojo in Pambazuka News. "Collectively, they are bleeding Africa dry."

OneLove

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The Big Fix

One of the world's biggest environmental crimes has been more or less forgotten. This documentary, fhe Big Fix , takes a detailed, daring look at what happened in the Gulf of Mexico with BP's Macondo offshore oil drilling rig. The story and facts that emerge are quite disturbing and well worth remembering.


OneLove

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Musings

OneLove

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The History of Our World in 18 Minutes

Great presentation! Read up on David Christian here.

OneLove

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Racism, Colonialism And Exceptionalism By John Scales Avery

"What makes America different, what makes us exceptional, is that we are dedicated to act." (Barack Obama, speech, September, 2013)

 

It seems to be possible for nations, and the majority of their citizens, to commit the worst imaginable atrocities, including torture, murder and genocide, while feeling that what they are doing is both noble and good.. Some understanding of how this is possible can be gained by watching the 3-part BBC documentary, “The History of Racism”.

The series was broadcast by BBC Four in March 2007. and videos of the broadcasts are available on the Internet. Watching this eye-opening documentary can give us much insight into the link between racism and colonialism. We can also begin to see how both racism and colonialism are linked to US exceptionalism and neocolonialism.

Looking at the BBC documentary we can see how often in human history economic greed and colonial exploitation have been justified by racist theories. The documentary describes almost unbelievable cruelties committed against the peoples of the Americas and Africa by Europeans. For example, in the Congo, a vast region which which King Leopold II of Belgium claimed as his private property, the women of villages were held as hostages while the men were forced to gather rubber in the forests. Since neither the men nor the women could produce food under these circumstances, starvation was the result.

Leopold's private army of 90,000 men were issued ammunition, and to make sure that the used it in the proper way, the army was ordered to cut off the hands of their victims and send them back as proof that the bullets had not been wasted. Human hands became a kind of currency, and hands were cut off from men, women and children when rubber quotas were not fulfilled. Sometimes more than a thousand human hands were gathered in a single day. During the rule of Leopold, roughly 10,000,000 Congolese were killed, which was approximately half the population of the region.

According to the racist theories that supported these atrocities, it was the duty of philanthropic Europeans like Leopold to bring civilization and the Christian religion to Africa. Similar theories were used to justify the genocides committed by Europeans against the native inhabitants of the Americas. Racist theories were also used to justify enormous cruelties committed by the British colonial government in India. For example, during the great famine of 1876-1878, during which ten million people died, the Viceroy, Lord Lytton, oversaw the export to England of a record 6.4 million hundredweight of wheat.

Meanwhile, in Europe,almost everyone was proud of the role which they were playing in the world. All that they read in newspapers and in books or heard from the pulpits of their churches supported the idea that they were serving the non-Europeans by bringing them the benefits of civilization and Christianity. Kipling wrote: “Take up the White Man's burden, Send forth the best ye breed, Go bind your sons to exile, To serve your captives' need; To wait in heavy harness, On fluttered folk and wild, Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child.” On the whole, the mood of Europe during this orgy of external cruelty and exploitation, was self-congratulatory.

Can we not see a parallel with the self-congratulatory mood of the American people and their allies, who export violence to the whole world, but who think of themselves as “exceptional”?

John Avery received a B.Sc. in theoretical physics from MIT and an M.Sc. from the University of Chicago. He later studied theoretical chemistry at the University of London, and was awarded a Ph.D. there in 1965. He is now Lektor Emeritus, Associate Professor, at the Department of Chemistry, University of Copenhagen. He can be reached at avery.john.s@gmail.com

OneLove

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The Crisis of Representation and the Liberation of the Self By Nozomi Hayase

Half a year into Obama’s second term, it has become clear what has been done under his watch. He brought to the world massive banking fraud, drone attacks, indefinite detention, assassination of US citizens and an unprecedented war on whistleblowers. The rhetoric of hope and change has finally and undeniably revealed its true colors. Prominent dissident intellectual Noam Chomsky has remarked how Obama’s assault on civil liberties has progressed beyond anything he could have imagined. All of these tell-tale signs mark the slippery slide toward totalitarianism that seems to now be escalating.
 

Edward Snowden’s NSA files unveiled to the world mass global surveillance and the fact that the USA has become the United Stasi of America. The decay of democracy in the United States is now undeniable, as all branches of the federal government have begun to betray the very ideals this country was founded on. The exposed NSA stories have had a serious global impact, challenging the credibility of the US on all levels. Under a relentless secrecy regime, the criminalization of journalism and any true dissent has become the new norm.

In recent months, a pattern of attacks on journalism has unfolded. Examples include the APA scandal of the Department of Justice’s seizure of telephone records, the tapping of Fox News reporter James Rosen’s private emails and the British government’s detention of David Miranda, partner of the Glenn Greenwald, the primary journalist breaking the NSA story. On top of these recent developments, a media shield law has moved forward in Washington. The Senate Judiciary Committee passed a bill that narrowly defines what a journalist can be, thus taking away First Amendment protections from new forms of media. All of this points not only towards deep threats to press freedom, but to a general trend toward excessive state control and a centralization of power.

The American corporate media takes all this in stride with a business-as-usual attitude that carries the meme of “Keep Calm and Carry On”. After the NSA revelations, author Ted Rall posed the question on everyone’s lips: “Why are Americans so passive”? Obama’s blatant violations of the Fourth Amendment have reached far beyond Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal in 1974 that led him to resign under threat of impeachment. In the midst of Obama’s aggressive persecution of those who shine light on government crimes, where are all the courageous Americans? How have the people allowed such egregious acts by the government against the Constitution?

As scandals of the NSA continue to shed light on a further subversion of basic privacy within the internet, the drumbeat of war — as Obama prepared for an attack on Syria — seemed to be no coincidence. Although Snowden’s revelations began to stir up debate and efforts for reform across the country, compared with mass protests breaking out in countries like Turkey and Brazil, the scale of the response has been relatively small and hasn’t reached the full swing needed for meaningful change. One can ask: do Americans even care or are they so defeated and disempowered by a corporatized war machine they feel there is nothing they can do at all?

The Slowly Boiling Frog and the ‘Good American’

One of the reasons for public passivity is the normalization over time of radical politics. The metaphor of the slowly boiling frog comes to mind. A frog would not jump out of a hot pot if the temperature slowly rises over time. The frog’s instinctual reaction to boiling water can be compared to an innate sense within us that detects dangerous, radical or controlling agendas and blatant unconstitutional and illegal actions of governments or corporations. Our sense to feel the changes of temperature in the habitat of this supposedly democratic society has been rendered dull and has eventually been incapacitated altogether by subversion and perception management.

This control of perception is seen most blatantly in US politics, with the manufactured pendulum between a faux right and left. For instance, the handling of the issue of raising the federal debt ceiling in 2011 illustrates this machination of perception control. Michael Hudson, President of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends, spoke of how the rhetoric of crisis is used to rush through profoundly unpopular and otherwise impossible agendas:

Just like after 9/11, the Pentagon pulled out a plan for Iraq’s oil fields, Wall Street has a plan to really clean up now, to really put the class war back in business … They’re pushing for a crisis to let Mr. Obama rush through the Republican plan. Now, in order for him to do it, the Republicans have to play good cop, bad cop. They have to have the Tea Party move so far to the right, take so crazy a position, that Mr. Obama seems reasonable by comparison. And, of course, he is not reasonable. He’s a Wall Street Democrat, which we used to call Republicans.

The definition of liberal can move as opponents shift views. There is a false partisanship that slowly makes the public feel comfortable with what are actually quite radical and inhumane ideas and actions. This subversive form of perception management appears to have reached its height with the current presidency. This administration, with its crafted image of the ‘progressive Obama’, has successfully co-opted the left and marched it into supporting neoconservative policies that they once claimed to reject.

Glenn Greenwald, for instance, has described Obama as much more effective in institutionalizing abusive and exploitative policies than any Republican president could ever dream of being. He points out, for instance, how “Mitt Romney never would have been able to cut Social Security or target Medicare, because there would have been an enormous eruption of anger and intense, sustained opposition by Democrats and progressives accusing him of all sorts of things.” On the contrary, Greenwald continues, Obama would “bring Democrats and progressives along with him and to lead them to support and get on board with things that they have sworn they would never, ever be able to support.”

In his Death of the Liberal Class, Chris Hedges called the election of Obama a “triumph of illusion over substance”, and “a skillful manipulation and betrayal of the public by a corporate power elite.” Hedges points out how Obama was chosen as the Advertising Age’s marketer of the year in 2008 and that “the goal of a branded Obama, as with all brands, was to make passive consumers mistake a brand for an experience.”

This subversive form of control seems to have evolved beyond the political tactics of the past. During the Bush era, manipulation was much more blunt. Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, outlined the state’s use of public disorientation during crises and catastrophes for purposes of manipulation. Klein shows how, from natural disasters to terrorists attacks, the state exploits crises by taking advantage of the public’s psychologically vulnerable state to push through its own radical pro-market agenda.

A prime example of this Shock Doctrine was the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. After the 9/11 implosions of the Twin Towers, a climate of fear was manufactured using the rhetoric of a “war on terror”, accompanied by the repeated images of those towers collapsing. This, in turn, was followed by Secretary of State Colin Powell’s shameful performance of deceit at the UN Security Council about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction. Before the public recovered from the horrendous tragedy, the nation was rail-roaded into an illegal war.

Obama’s manufactured brand has until now been quite effective in hiding its real intentions and those of its corporate overlords. The late comedian George Carlin pointed to the emergence of creeping total government control, saying that “when fascism comes to America, it will not be in brown and black shirts. It will not be with Jack-boots. It will be with Nike sneakers and smiley shirts.” Under this guise of a liberal president, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and constitutional scholar, Obama seems able to get away with policies unheard of since the last attempt at building up an imperial totalitarian state. The pretense of liberalism normalizes the most extreme policies with glib rhetoric of national security, thus neutralizing any oppositional force. In responding to recent NSA leaks, Obama justified the state’s espionage campaign as a vital part of the government’s counter-terrorism efforts, remarking that privacy is a necessary sacrifice for assuring security.

What has unfolded in the US political and social landscape is a kind of numbing of the senses. The machinations of public relations, tawdry distractions and manufactured desires create an artificial social fabric. It is as if a layer of skin has been added around the body that prevents us from having direct contact with the real fabric of our immediate environment. Entertainment and corporate ads desensitize us. They create a lukewarm feel-good political bath replacing authentic human experience with pseudo-reality. This artificially installed skin intermediates our experience of actual events. It misinforms those inside the boiling pan, and prevents them from getting to know the world through direct experience.

Martin Luther King, Jr. once said that “history will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of good people.” History has shown how many people remain silent while witnessing the most egregious crimes against humanity. During the rise of Hitler in Germany, it was the ‘Good Germans’ who became bystanders, supporting by default the horrendous acts of one man and allowing him to dictate life and death within an entire nation.

At the ceremony of the prestigious German whistleblower prize in Germany, the acceptance speech from Edward Snowden was read by security researcher and activist Jacob Appelbaum. Appelbaum spoke to the audience of how he now lives in Berlin because in his home country of the United States, true journalism has become a dangerous trade. He conveyed the importance of not forgetting history and asked all Germans to share with Americans their history and experience with totalitarianism.

Numbed people of nations in the grip of fear easily lose connection with reality. Once we are divorced from our own senses, we come to rely on these signals from outside and regard them as our own. This creates a blind obedience to perceived outside authority, and in face of abuses and injustice it is all too easy to become passive and silent. No one person or nation is immune from this and the American people are far from an exception. As Snowden put it, we now live in a global turnkey tyranny. The key to overt fascism has not yet been turned, but smiley faces are everywhere. In the slowly boiling water of the United States of Amnesia, it may be that many are now becoming the ‘Good Americans’ who won’t speak up before it’s too late.

The Empty Self and Representation As a New Authority

 

How have the American people lost touch with reality? What made them so vulnerable to manipulation and political and media misinformation? No doubt the corporate media played a large role in the controlling of perception, yet there is something deeper at work. The root causes of the passivity and apathy of the populace can be better understood by looking into a particular configuration of self that has emerged in Western history.

In Constructing the Self, Constructing America, psychoanalyst Phillip Cushman analyzed how in the post-WWII United States, modern industrialization broke down the traditional social bonds and restructured the reality of community. Out of this, he argues, a specific configuration of self emerged. Cushman called it “the empty self” — “the bounded, masterful self” — and described how this empty self “has specific psychological boundaries, a sense of personal agency that is located within, and a wish to manipulate the external world for its own personal ends”. Cushman further characterized this empty self as one that “experiences a significant absence of community, tradition and shared meaning — a self that experiences these social absences and their consequences ‘interiority’ as a lack of personal conviction and worth; a self that embodies the absences, loneliness, and disappointments of life as a chronic, undifferentiated emotional hunger.”

Cushman argued how this new configuration of self and its emotional hunger was indispensable to the development of US consumer culture. Stuart Ewen, in his classic, Captains of Consciousness, explored how modern advertising was used as a direct response to the needs of industrial capitalism through its functioning as an instrument for the “the creation of desires and habits”: “The vision of freedom which was being offered to Americans was one which continually relegated people to consumption, passivity and spectatorship.” Ewen saw this in the economic shift from production to consumption and in the personal identity shift from citizens to consumers.

It did not take long for this covert manipulation of desires to be widely used for advancing certain economic or political agendas. Through unpacking his uncle Freud’s study of the unconscious, the father of modern corporate advertising — Edward Bernays — gained insight into the power of subterranean desires as a tool for manipulation. In Propaganda, Bernays put forth the idea that “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.” This deliberate work of controlling perception came to be understood as propaganda, and has been identified as “the executive arm of the invisible government.”

How does this invisible force of governance work? How is such an effective manipulation of desires on such a mass scale accomplished? It has to do with mechanisms of the unconscious; desires and drives that most people don’t even know exist. Psychoanalyst Carl Jung took Freud’s discovery of the unconscious and examined the phenomena he identified as projection. Jung described how one meets one’s repressed materials in the form of projections outside and that this projecting is carried out unconsciously.

The marketing and PR industries channel our psychological needs, then convert them into specific desires for certain products or political candidates. This manipulation of desires relies on the ability to craft effective images of products that would induce the involuntary process of projection from the individual. Whether it is images of elected officials or celebrities, the latest laundry soap or high definition TV screens, images outside present themselves as something that speaks to internal desires. They quickly appear before us as desirable objects and the representation of unconscious desires. Representation thus becomes simply an externalization of those unconscious and internal desires and emotions that are mostly unknown to us.

The manipulation of desires in a form of representation squashes our capacity to create images. Instead, images are imposed upon us from the outside. We lose connection with our own desires and, not knowing the real roots of our emotions and drives, we are cheated in the act of determining our own actions. Activity of imagining is interrupted and short-circuited to a finished product as multiple ways of manifesting our desires are narrowed down to the simple act of consuming. We become passive and end up carrying out the will of others.

Representation places the source of legitimacy outside of oneself. Whether it is a corporate brand name, political party, an ideology or slogan, one looks for objects of representation through which something inside can be projected out onto the world. A good example is seen in the US political system, in the so-called representative form of government: the system of electing officials to whom power is delegated to enact changes on behalf of the people. Another example can be found in the operation of corporations, where individuals, through the purchase of company stock, become shareholders and supposedly indirectly influence the direction of the corporation. The theory is that the corporation as an entity could represent their economic interests.

Many began to regard these outer forms as possessing intrinsic authority, giving them power to govern and influence their own lives, when in reality what underlies both cases is simply something that represents what lives in us unconsciously. The mechanism of representation harvests a mindset that makes people believe real solutions to problems can only come from somewhere outside, often from those very people who are divorced from and not really affected by any of those problems.

With the advent of consumer culture and the apparatus of image manufacturing that further reinforced the conditions of the empty self, the notion of representation has come to form a new authority. Unlike the traditional authority of churches and the nuclear family, in representation an authority is internalized and its force of control becomes more unrecognizable to those under its governance. Cushman noted that “Tte only way corporate capitalism and the state could influence and control the population was by making their control invisible, that is, by making it appear as though various feelings and opinions originate solely from within the individual.”

This is seen most clearly in electoral politics, where candidates are pre-approved and outcomes are manipulated, yet we are made to believe we are actually making rational, independent and individual decisions about who best represents our common interest — when in reality there is no real choice and we often end up voting against our own self-interest.

Beneath the universally celebrated idea of freedom lies the false freedom of an illusion of choice. We no longer connect with the source of our desires. Our human needs have become intermediated and manipulated by corporate interests. What is engineered in the guise of individualism is actually a new form of conformity. When the forces of control became invisible through the merging with the self, it became much more difficult for us to challenge the legitimacy of unequal power relations, or even to recognize them for what they are.

Crisis of Representation and Autonomy of Self

The centralized control and coercive power of the state and corporations lies in their ability to sustain the image of representation through careful manipulation, by creating a strong emotional bond within individuals. This bond of representation gives those in power access to unconscious desires. Those who control the image of representation can then generate motives and impulses and govern the will of a mass of people seemingly without exercising direct control over them. The media have played a crucial role in the control and distortion of these images of representation, hiding the real actions of those who claim to represent us. TV commercials allure us with images of perfect products and suitable political candidates — products and politicians are sold as a solution to everyday problems.

Yet some signs of deep change are arising. Images of representation are no longer so easily held. Many who use social media and who are used to sharing information are suddenly beginning to challenge the monopolized image and single-message echo chamber of the consolidated media. When one is surrounded by a multiplicity of images that are not produced by or mediated through outside powers, the projection that once mesmerized us can no longer exercise its traditional power. As a result, the legitimacy of these external forms of authority is now being challenged. Waves of whistleblowing have emerged in recent years, from Chelsea Manning to Edward Snowden, combined with the power of social media and courageous journalist like those at WikiLeaks, who continue to counteract the propaganda.

Recent protest movements around the world have been challenging the perception of authority of the nation state and its governance models as well. The year 2011 marked the beginning of worldwide uprisings. Movements from abroad found resonance in North America. Inspired by people’s struggles overseas, the disfranchised American rose up, taking to the streets at the centers of wealth and corruption. Occupy Wall Street, which began in the fall of 2011, captured the imagination of the public. From Brazil to Turkey, Egypt to Bosnia and Bulgaria, new insurgencies are still rolling in, challenging the legitimacy of “representative” governments worldwide. What these movements from below reveal is how in virtually every corner of the globe, democracy — as we have known it so far — is in crisis.

Jerome Roos, a PhD researcher at the European University Institute, synthesized the waves of revolutions since the Arab Spring of 2011 and sees them as a symptom of the global legitimation crisis of representative institutions. Pointing out a number of characteristics commonly shared in those seemingly isolated events — such as disengagement from the existing power structures and the end of political parties — he suggests that “only radical autonomy from the state can take the revolution forward.”

People are moving more and more outside of electoral politics. A call is arising for a new type of governance, for a real democracy where each person participates directly and manifests their own voice. This is a political act, but it is also much more. The current crisis of democracy is a crisis of representation. Images that perpetuate illusions about ourselves can no longer sustain our humanity. From Mubarak to Morsi, from Bush to Obama, the false images and masks of leadership are beginning to fall away as people begin to disengage with the charlatan faces of recycled puppet leaders. The mirror that has for too long reflected back false promises is now being shattered. What happens when people’s faith in institutions crumble? We are seeing chaos and destruction as never before.

In this crisis of representation, for the first time we are left with ourselves, empty and hollow, yet truly with ourselves. In this nakedness lies the possibility for true freedom. Only when our emptiness is fully confronted and accepted can we find our true autonomy. Only with emotions and desires that are truly our own can we guide the world into a future that springs from the depth of our imagination. Who am I? Who are we? What do we want? The rejection of false representation is a rejection of artificially imposed identity. Around the world, the message is loud and clear. People are saying we are no longer to be mere consumers, passively accepting the commercialized visions of a future handed down to us, with corporate values and political candidates sold to us like many brands of toothpaste. This is a voice resonating in all these movements around the world and calling for deep systemic change.

The thirst for real democracy is a thirst to be free. It is the spirit that drives us to find our true aspirations within. Our self is empty. When society loses its grip and leaders become devoid of morals and compassion for humanity, we need to declare autonomy from all those outside who try to allure us and who promise to fulfill our dreams. By connecting back with our own desires and passions we can fulfill the void of the empty self and transform empty slogans into real action. Only then will it be possible for us to become the authors of our own lives, transform history and take charge of our common destiny.

 

Nozomi Hayase is a contributing writer to Culture Unplugged. She brings out deeper dimensions of socio-cultural events at the intersection between politics and psychology to share insight on future social evolution. Her Twitter is @nozomimagine.

OneLove

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Glenn Greenwald Exposes The Bullshit

You gotta love the way Glenn Greenwald  blasts this idiotic BBC interviewer out of the water. She represents what the corporate media has come to - complete buffoonery. No wonder so many people have no idea of what is really going on in the world. 

OneLove

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The Last Charge of the Master Race: The South’s “Lost Cause” Addiction by Ishmael Reed

I watched a Chris Hayes’ panel on Thursday, October 9, 2013. They were discussing the government shut down and the debt ceiling. No one mentioned that the faction standing on the ledge and threatening to jump if it doesn’t get its way was sent to Washington by people who hate blacks. Hate Muslims. Hate Mexican Americans. Hate Gays. Hate themselves. But hate blacks mostly.

So what do Tea Partiers have in common? They are overwhelmingly white, but even compared to other white Republicans, they had a low regard for immigrants and blacks long before Barack Obama was president, and they still do.

The patriarchs who own the media have decided that a discussion of white racism is a real market turn-off for those whom they want to buy the gas guzzlers they advertise. These whites, who belong to political lonely hearts clubs like the Tea Party, have been dazzled by the propaganda promoted by billionaires and their hired mouths that the “gummitt” is taking their money and turning it over to blacks. But the racist line that somehow the government is using the money of whites to finance blacks who, in the words of Eric Cantor, who Earl Shorris might call a Jew without mercy, are using “the safety net as a hammock,” was there from the beginning. Rick Santelli, who is called “the lightning rod” of the Tea Party, during his famous stock exchange rant, implied that whites were paying the mortgages of black deadbeats. During the recent presidential primary, Rick Santorum said he didn’t want to take white people’s money and give it to blacks. During the same campaign, Newt Gingrich, who supports the view held by Dinesh D’Souza, who had to resign recently from a flat earth Christian “college” over a family-values scandal, that the president was indoctrinated by Jomo Kenyatta. Gingrich, a serial hypocrite called Obama “the food stamps president” and “entertainer-in-chief,” conjuring an image of the president as a white-lipped minstrel adorned with white gloves, which is probably why Gingrich was hired by CNN’s Jeff Zucker, who created an atmosphere at NBC for women described by Ann Curry as “cruel.”

The three haven’t studied the history of the capitalist system’s attitude toward blacks from the 1860s Reconstruction Freedman’s bank, which went bust, losing the assets of the “emancipated” slaves, even though the government at the time guaranteed their deposits–the government reneged–to now, when Bank of America and Wells Fargo have been charged with systematically sending toxic loans into black and Hispanic neighborhoods.

When I moved into an Oakland inner city neighborhood in 1979, it was 95 percent black. As a result of these sub prime loans, which led to foreclosures, blacks have vanished from North Oakland; they’ve been replaced by young whites arriving from San Francisco, where the rents and mortgages are high. Before World War II, countries like Germany and the Soviet Union decided which undesirable ethnic groups had to be replaced with those whom they favored. Now the banks, with the complicity of the federal government, make those decisions. The bankers are the new Feudal Lords.

Santelli and his Tea Party allies are ignorant of the fact that the banks, while encouraging the development of assets by whites, have expressed hostility toward economic opportunities for blacks, historically. For decades whites have received low interest loans from the FHA; its attitude toward blacks has been one of red-lining. The public sector, while coddling whites, has shared the bank’s attitude toward black development. FDR saved his class, threatened by a communist take over, by admitting millions of white ethnics to the middle class and whiteness, which until now staved off a revolution. But the crazies in the Tea Party and other groups don’t care about this agreement and so the one percent is threatened by the white grass roots more than at any time since the 1940s, when thousands marched in May Day parades. FDR made a deal with the Dixiecrats that denied these benefits for blacks. Currently, the same southern states are refusing to expand Medicaid based on the propaganda point that it’s another black giveaway, which has been accepted by white Tea Party members many of whom depend upon Medicaid.
 
As a result of this vindictive action by southern governors, millions will remain impoverished and lack health insurance. Show off public intellectuals are always quoting de Tocqueville’s take on America. Here’s the observation of another foreigner. D.H. Lawrence. He said “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer. It has never yet melted.” He could have had Ronald Reagan, Eric Cantor, The Koch brothers, Newt Gingrich, the A.E.I. and Manhattan Institute in mind.
 
Here’s a profile of the Tea Party from the NYT:

 “A University of Washington survey has found that Southerners and conservatives are more likely to support the Tea Party.
“What’s more, the director of the survey says his data show that the Tea Party might also be about race. Those who think the government has done too much to help African Americans are 36 more likely to support the Tea Party.
“While it’s clear that the Tea Party in one sense about limited government, it’s also clear from the data that people who want limited government don’t want certain services for certain kinds of people. Those services include health care,” said Christopher Parker, the assistant professor of political science at the UW who directed the survey.”

Communists joining a common front with FDR led to many blacks abandoning the communist party, one of the many united fronts that have caused a rift between the white and black left, historically. (This pattern continues. Currently, progressive whites are praising Rand Paul. MSNBC Progressive Joan Walsh, who calls me “pernicious” in her new book, says of  Rand Paul, who opposes a woman’s right to choose,” that she admires his “consistency,” and “integrity.” Given Rand Paul’s position on Civil Rights under a Paul presidency blacks might have to integrate lunch counters again.)
 
Even though the black president “has leaned over backwards” to please whites, to the consternation of black critics like Cornel West and Tavis Smiley, those who will go to any extreme to delegitimize a black president will not let up. Their hatred is inexhaustible. Approaching the psychotic, which is why I subtitled my book, Going Too Far essays about America’s Nervous Breakdown. Carl Bernstein, Lawrence O’Donnell and Bill Maher and a few other white commentators get it, but not only are these extremists  holding the government hostage but the media as well. They’re scared to say that white racists are threatening the survival of American civilization. CNN even entered into a business deal with the Tea Party Express. Jeff Zucker, the new CNN chief, whose market driven memo about the government shutdown is that both parties are to be blamed, a line repeated nightly by hacker Piers Morgan nightly, caters to this element by hiring Mark O’Mara, an attorney who got Zimmerman off by putting out pre trial lies about Trayvon Martin, and Newt Gingrich, who has made comments about the president of a racist nature.
 
On Saturday, October 12, CNN cited the eugenics-minded Manhattan Institute in an effort to undermine the Affordable Care Act. The press also aides the enemies of blacks by using photos of blacks to buttress the argument of people like Santelli and Cantor. The Times ran a front page photo of a black person receiving advice about The Affordable Care Act, which conveys the idea that it’s a black program. The media do the same with food stamps, and other government programs. I’d say that ninety five percent of the photos accompanying crime, dysfunction and  dependency are photos of blacks, which must have surprised those who happened to view a photo of whites, appearing on MSNBC on Oct.10, seeking  food supplies, which had been depleted as a result of the Dixiecrat government shut down. These whites must have been shocked to find that they’ve been fed a line, that the only “useless food eaters,” a term employed by the Nazis, were black, even according to top public intellectuals like David Brooks, who congratulated “whites with high fertility rates” for voting for George Bush.

Maybe we can determine the attitude of the Republican Party by examining what Paul Ryan is reading. He was inspired by Ayn Rand, the hypocrite who advocated selfishness while receiving Medicare and Social Security. He wows the beltway media so that they ignore his reading list. Now he’s reading, The Bell Curve, by Charles Murray.
 
Murray’s “research” was  financed by the Pioneer Fund, whose Nazi ties have been well documented. To support his argument about black intellectual inferiority, Murray, a Scots Irish individual, a group that Benjamin Franklin called “white savages,” uses the kind of evidence that is deployed by mediums in seances. But his “research,” which was hailed by the mainstream media has influenced public policy. This would explain why schools are being closed in black districts. Using Murray’s “theories” which were embraced by the New Aryans at Commentary, the New Republic and the New York Times Book Review, black kids are uneducable. Why waste money on educating them?
 
Another Republican philosopher is Raymond Canttell, who, like the Pioneer Fund, has fantasies of the Master Race. But in an age of television gas ovens are uncool and so he advocates “Genthanasia”– a term that he coined to mean the “nonviolent intentional phasing out of a culture or group” Genthanasia, the non-violent elimination of undesirables. This would explain the GOP’s attitude about food stamps, which might mean forty million people might not be able to feed their families in November. Genthanasia includes the whimsical incarceration of blacks and Hispanics. Bonding them over to private prisons (a solution offered by Neo Liberal Gov. Jerry Brown, who dazzles the Northeast media even though he presides over one of the most barbaric prison systems in the world), which gross about five billion dollars per year in profits. It would explain ethnic removal, which is happening to blacks throughout the nation.
 
Millions of whites have been suckered into a collaboration with the one percent in exchange for modest  concessions. They apparently  aren’t aware of the U.S. Census report that forty percent of those living in poverty are white! A large segment of the Tea Party is government dependent. Now, the latest word from Charles Murray, the courier from the one percent Big House to the rest of us, is that whites are also entangled in pathologies and so even these concessions might be withdrawn.
 
The communist party in the United States failed because these white millions will always choose race over class and the majority of women among them, like the white women jurors in the Zimmerman case, and the majority who vote for Republicans, will always choose race over gender. Fifty years after the advent of the modern feminist movement, white women still vote in the majority for men who wish to limit their choices, perhaps because their media appointed leader is Gloria Steinem, who slimes black men, while dating people like Henry Kissinger. These are facts that progressives continue to ignore as they cling to their class trumps race argument, a fairy tale that ranks with Jack and the Beanstalk.
 
So how far will white supremacists go? I wasn’t surprised to learn from Luke Russert, reporting on Oct.10th, that while some Northern, midwestern and coastal  Republicans wanted to ease up on their demands, the southerners were willing to go off the ledge and take the country with them. They are tempted to inch toward the ledge’s edge as Koch pawns, these wretched Tea Party members, like those who threatened to harm the president Sunday, after listening to an ugly speech by Ted Cruz, look up from below, shouting jump! JUMP! Or other speakers who are creating the kind of atmosphere of hate that greeted JFK when he landed in Dallas. The southern death cult that Mark Twain wrote about is alive and well.
 
One report describes the typical Tea Party member as an over fifty year-old white man. These are people who have such a rage against a black president that they jeopardized their retirement funds by sending representatives to Washington whose reckless actions caused a downgrading of the country’s credit rating. Washington journalists, who are gagged by their owner’s advertisers, who play golf and do lunch with those whom they cover, have forgotten that Standard and Poors blamed the downgrade on Republican actions.
 
How far will they go? Anybody who takes a glance at the Civil War might discover how far. I recently saw an exhibit on the Civil War at the Metropolitan Museum. I checked out the photos captured by George Barnard, Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner and Timothy O’Sullivan. Photo after photo showed bodies stacked up, being prepared for burial in common graves, limbs piled up in wheelbarrows. One of the most gripping was black gravediggers posing with three skulls.
 
Though pro South historians for whom Stonewall Jackson fought for “ an honorable cause,” and a southern senator who recently called  it “the war of Northern aggression,” all of the states that left the union gave slavery as the reason. Others say that the war was fought over states’ rights, a scheme that Thomas Jefferson cooked up. He feared that his slaves would be federalized. Rarely mentioned is that the war was fought to uphold white supremacy, the way that millions of whites, insecure in their own lives, can achieve their daily dopamine boost.
 
The confederate army could have recruited thousands of native American allies, the  Chickasaw were more enthusiastic about killing blacks than the southern whites were, but felt that they were too good to fight alongside them. When it was proposed that blacks be recruited after the horrific defeat at Gettysburg, the confederate soldiers said the same thing. Too stuck up to fight alongside blacks. What was the outcome of the war for white supremacy? Six hundred forty thousand killed and hundreds of thousands of casualties. The question becomes how many more trillions of dollars and millions of lives lost in wars  launched against the “inferiors” of the white supremacists will the rest of us, blacks, whites, yellows, reds and browns have to support, underwriting this psychological meth called white supremacy. Which personal sacrifices will millions of us have to make as we are ensnared in their latest lost cause, their long twilight struggle against diversity. The Civil War was their sacred “Lost Cause.” Their fight against integration was a further “Lost Cause.” The  Civil War Lost Cause threatened the survival of the Union. Now they threaten the survival of the world economy.

Ishmael Scott Reed (born February 22, 1938) is an American poet, essayist,songwriter, playwright, and novelist, as well as being an editor and publisher. Reed is known for his satirical works challenging American political culture, and highlighting political and cultural oppression.






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Musings

There are two parts to the human dilemma. One is the belief that the end justifies the means. That push-button philosophy, that deliberate deafness to suffering, has become the monster in the war machine. The other is the betrayal of the human spirit: the assertion of dogma that closes the mind, and turns a nation, a civilization, into a regiment of ghosts--obedient ghosts or tortured ghosts."

 - Jacob Bronowski

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:::MME:::

Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus

"The Truth, when you finally chase it down, is almost always far worse than your darkest visions and fears." - Hunter S. Thompson: Kingdom of Fear 

A deeply-probing excavation of the foundations of  Christianity and the surprising depths of the Roman influence on this tradition. Many uncritical believers will find this documentary quite disconcerting, but it need not be so if approached with an open mind. 

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:::MME:::

Crossroads: Labor Pains of a New Worldview

Some very thought-provoking ideas in this documentary....Many of these ideas have been stated before by Native Americans, African story-tellers & various mystics from the many faith traditions. This is but another representation of the same essential truths that have sustained various cultures the world over. Make some time to check it out.

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:::MME:::

Seymour Hersh on Obama, NSA and the 'pathetic' American Media by Lisa O'Carroll

Seymour Hersh

Seymour Hersh has got some extreme ideas on how to fix journalism – close down the news bureaus of NBC and ABC, sack 90% of editors in publishing and get back to the fundamental job of journalists which, he says, is to be an outsider.

It doesn't take much to fire up Hersh, the investigative journalist who has been the nemesis of US presidents since the 1960s and who was once described by the Republican party as "the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist".

He is angry about the timidity of journalists in America, their failure to challenge the White House and be an unpopular messenger of truth.

Don't even get him started on the New York Times which, he says, spends "so much more time carrying water for Obama than I ever thought they would" – or the death of Osama bin Laden. "Nothing's been done about that story, it's one big lie, not one word of it is true," he says of the dramatic US Navy Seals raid in 2011.

Hersh is writing a book about national security and has devoted a chapter to the bin Laden killing. He says a recent report put out by an "independent" Pakistani commission about life in the Abottabad compound in which Bin Laden was holed up would not stand up to scrutiny. "The Pakistanis put out a report, don't get me going on it. Let's put it this way, it was done with considerable American input. It's a bullshit report," he says hinting of revelations to come in his book.

The Obama administration lies systematically, he claims, yet none of the leviathans of American media, the TV networks or big print titles, challenge him.

"It's pathetic, they are more than obsequious, they are afraid to pick on this guy [Obama]," he declares in an interview with the Guardian.

"It used to be when you were in a situation when something very dramatic happened, the president and the minions around the president had control of the narrative, you would pretty much know they would do the best they could to tell the story straight. Now that doesn't happen any more. Now they take advantage of something like that and they work out how to re-elect the president.

He isn't even sure if the recent revelations about the depth and breadth of surveillance by the National Security Agency will have a lasting effect.

Snowden changed the debate on surveillance

He is certain that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden "changed the whole nature of the debate" about surveillance. Hersh says he and other journalists had written about surveillance, but Snowden was significant because he provided documentary evidence – although he is skeptical about whether the revelations will change the US government's policy.

"Duncan Campbell [the British investigative journalist who broke the Zircon cover-up story], James Bamford [US journalist] and Julian Assange and me and the New Yorker, we've all written the notion there's constant surveillance, but he [Snowden] produced a document and that changed the whole nature of the debate, it's real now," Hersh says.

"Editors love documents. Chicken-shit editors who wouldn't touch stories like that, they love documents, so he changed the whole ball game," he adds, before qualifying his remarks.

"But I don't know if it's going to mean anything in the long [run] because the polls I see in America – the president can still say to voters 'al-Qaida, al-Qaida' and the public will vote two to one for this kind of surveillance, which is so idiotic," he says.

Holding court to a packed audience at City University in London's summer school on investigative journalism, 76-year-old Hersh is on full throttle, a whirlwind of amazing stories of how journalism used to be; how he exposed the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, how he got the Abu Ghraib pictures of American soldiers brutalising Iraqi prisoners, and what he thinks of Edward Snowden.

Hope of redemption

Despite his concern about the timidity of journalism he believes the trade still offers hope of redemption.

"I have this sort of heuristic view that journalism, we possibly offer hope because the world is clearly run by total nincompoops more than ever … Not that journalism is always wonderful, it's not, but at least we offer some way out, some integrity."

His story of how he uncovered the My Lai atrocity is one of old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism and doggedness. Back in 1969, he got a tip about a 26-year-old platoon leader, William Calley, who had been charged by the army with alleged mass murder.

Instead of picking up the phone to a press officer, he got into his car and started looking for him in the army camp of Fort Benning in Georgia, where he heard he had been detained. From door to door he searched the vast compound, sometimes blagging his way, marching up to the reception, slamming his fist on the table and shouting: "Sergeant, I want Calley out now."

Eventually his efforts paid off with his first story appearing in the St Louis Post-Despatch, which was then syndicated across America and eventually earned him the Pulitzer Prize. "I did five stories. I charged $100 for the first, by the end the [New York] Times were paying $5,000."

He was hired by the New York Times to follow up the Watergate scandal and ended up hounding Nixon over Cambodia. Almost 30 years later, Hersh made global headlines all over again with his exposure of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

Put in the hours

For students of journalism his message is put the miles and the hours in. He knew about Abu Ghraib five months before he could write about it, having been tipped off by a senior Iraqi army officer who risked his own life by coming out of Baghdad to Damascus to tell him how prisoners had been writing to their families asking them to come and kill them because they had been "despoiled".

"I went five months looking for a document, because without a document, there's nothing there, it doesn't go anywhere."

Hersh returns to US president Barack Obama. He has said before that the confidence of the US press to challenge the US government collapsed post 9/11, but he is adamant that Obama is worse than Bush.

"Do you think Obama's been judged by any rational standards? Has Guantanamo closed? Is a war over? Is anyone paying any attention to Iraq? Is he seriously talking about going into Syria? We are not doing so well in the 80 wars we are in right now, what the hell does he want to go into another one for. What's going on [with journalists]?" he asks.

He says investigative journalism in the US is being killed by the crisis of confidence, lack of resources and a misguided notion of what the job entails.

"Too much of it seems to me is looking for prizes. It's journalism looking for the Pulitzer Prize," he adds. "It's a packaged journalism, so you pick a target like – I don't mean to diminish because anyone who does it works hard – but are railway crossings safe and stuff like that, that's a serious issue but there are other issues too.

"Like killing people, how does [Obama] get away with the drone programme, why aren't we doing more? How does he justify it? What's the intelligence? Why don't we find out how good or bad this policy is? Why do newspapers constantly cite the two or three groups that monitor drone killings. Why don't we do our own work?

"Our job is to find out ourselves, our job is not just to say – here's a debate' our job is to go beyond the debate and find out who's right and who's wrong about issues. That doesn't happen enough. It costs money, it costs time, it jeopardises, it raises risks. There are some people – the New York Times still has investigative journalists but they do much more of carrying water for the president than I ever thought they would … it's like you don't dare be an outsider any more."

He says in some ways President George Bush's administration was easier to write about. "The Bush era, I felt it was much easier to be critical than it is [of] Obama. Much more difficult in the Obama era," he said.

Asked what the solution is Hersh warms to his theme that most editors are pusillanimous and should be fired.

"I'll tell you the solution, get rid of 90% of the editors that now exist and start promoting editors that you can't control," he says. I saw it in the New York Times, I see people who get promoted are the ones on the desk who are more amenable to the publisher and what the senior editors want and the trouble makers don't get promoted. Start promoting better people who look you in the eye and say 'I don't care what you say'.

Nor does he understand why the Washington Post held back on the Snowden files until it learned the Guardian was about to publish.

If Hersh was in charge of US Media Inc, his scorched earth policy wouldn't stop with newspapers.

"I would close down the news bureaus of the networks and let's start all over, tabula rasa. The majors, NBCs, ABCs, they won't like this – just do something different, do something that gets people mad at you, that's what we're supposed to be doing," he says.

Hersh is currently on a break from reporting, working on a book which undoubtedly will make for uncomfortable reading for both Bush and Obama.

"The republic's in trouble, we lie about everything, lying has become the staple." And he implores journalists to do something about it.

(What a f***** up time we are living in......)

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:::MME:::