Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

The 30-minute speech I gave last month at the Symphony Space in New York is now available on video, and is posted below in three YouTube segments (the first segment also contains the 4-minute introduction of my speech). The speech pertains to the evolution of my views on media criticism, the nature of media propaganda and what drives it, and what can be done to combat it. A DVD of the entire event -- featuring the three other speeches: from Amy Goodman, Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore -- is available at FAIR's website. I want to note one example, from today, that vividly illustrates many of the themes I discussed in that speech.  It is found in the following passage from this Reuters article on Obama's escalation of the covert war in Yemen and his targeting of U.S. citizen Anwar Awlaki for assassination: A U.S. official confirmed to Reuters that a U.S. strike last Friday killed Abu Ali al-Harithi, a midlevel al Qaeda operative, which followed last month's attempted strike against Anwar al-Awlaki, the leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Whether Awlaki has any operational role in Al Qaeda at all is a matter of intense controversy.  The U.S. Government has repeatedly asserted that he does, but has presented no verifiable evidence to support that accusation.  But what is not in dispute is the notion that Awlaki is "the leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula."  He unquestionably is not, and never has been, as multiple Yemen experts have repeatedly noted.  The Reuters claim is factually and entirely false. Whatever one's views are on Obama's assassination program, targeting U.S. citizens without due process obviously raises extraordinary and vitally important questions.  As The New York Times' Scott Shane put it when confirming Awlaki's inclusion on Obama's hit list: "The Obama administration has taken the extraordinary step of authorizing the targeted killing of an American citizen. . . . It is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an America

We no longer have freedom; there is only the appearance of freedom. We are consumed by an endless and vague war on terror in which the perfidiousness of our enemy, whose number, location and nature are never clearly defined, justifies the shredding of constitutional rights, torture, kidnapping, detentions without charges or trials and an occult-like battle against an absolute evil. And if you think the state intends to limit itself to the persecution of Muslims, especially once there is an increase in domestic unrest and instability, you know little about human history.

The madness that is the proposed tax repatriation holiday is continuing and gathering steam. More and more members of congress are coming out of the woodwork, scratching their chins in contemplative consideration as it were, pretending that they've just realized what a great day a corporate tax holiday would be - not that they've taken gazillions of dollars from the firms lobbying for it or anything. The latest convert seems to be Nevada Democrat Shelley Berkley. Berkley's plan is to offer a pseudo-holiday - not the full-fledged happy-ending massage the companies wanted (i.e. a reduction from 35 percent+ to 5.25 percent) but a mere ten-point shave: Representative Shelley Berkley, a Nevada Democrat, is the latest lawmaker to consider legislation allowing multinational companies to send offshore profits to the U.S. at a reduced tax rate. Her proposal, which was confirmed yesterday by Berkley's communications director, David Cherry, would allow companies to return profits to the U.S. at a 25 percent tax rate, 10 percentage points below the maximum statutory rate. Most companies publicly supporting a holiday, such as Duke Energy Corp., have spoken favorably of the 5.25 percent rate that is being offered by Representative Kevin Brady, a Texas Republican. One thing that people must understand about this tax repatriation business is that it's a wholly bipartisan affair. It's not solely the work of evil Republicans. This is a scheme that requires heavies in both parties to help ram the knotty, hard-to-sell legislation through. On the Democratic side, unsurprisingly, the main actor is going to be Chuck Schumer. John Kerry is also involved with this nastiness. Barbara Boxer led the 2004 effort and the failed 2009 campaign to get a holiday, and is rumored to be lurking somewhere in this business. Note that Cisco, a California corporate heavyweight and one of the companies lobbying most ravenously for this tax holiday, has been a consistent lifelong contributor

I get a little bored repeating over and over that our short-term deficit is almost entirely not Barack Obama's fault. It's mostly the fault of the Bush tax cuts, the Bush wars, and the financial collapse that happened during the Bush presidency. At this point, though, this is more in the nature of a religious debate than a factual one, and conservatives are going to keep repeating the same tired disinformation about the deficit regardless of any evidence one way or the other. Still, just on the off chance that a few people are still persuadable on this, it's nice of CBPP to update its chart showing the source of the deficit over the next decade. (Farther out than that, Medicare is largely responsible for most deficit projections.) As you can see, by 2013 or so, virtually the entire deficit is due to Bush-era policies/disasters. So cut this out and post it on your refrigerator.

Washington is in the grip of a fever. It's hard to find a word other than lunacy to describe what's going on. We are veering toward potential economic catastrophe. And Congress is hung up on a debate that shouldn't be occurring. It is debating an imaginary problem that conjures scary future scenarios but ignores dire existing circumstances. The consensus proffered solution to the imaginary problem would damage our country and further weaken our economy. Democrats and Republicans are at loggerheads, but they are disagreeing primarily about how much harm they want to impose. That's a very consequential disagreement, but it ignores the fact that we don't need to impose any harm at all.

The Washington Post brings the unsurprising news that Iraqi leaders have agreed to begin talks with the U.S. on allowing the foreign military occupation of their country to continue beyond this year - re-branded, naturally, as a mission of "training" and "support." The move comes after an increasingly public campaign by top White House and military officials to pressure Iraqi leaders into tearing up the Status of Forces Agreement they signed with the Bush administration, which mandates the removal of all foreign troops by the end of 2011.

Indian Stock Markets are very volatile in very nature but regardless of it everyone tried to predict the daily movements in the markets on his own. Not everyone can do this perfectly, so it requires a specialist's job to track the stock and commodities markets and thus make a conclusion about the market directions. Forecasting or predicting the markets is an art in itself. Trade4target have best tools but a man without any software's or any other modes may just predict the better way. http://www.flickr.com/photos/trade-4-target

Indian Stock Markets are very volatile in very nature but regardless of it everyone tried to predict the daily movements in the markets on his own. Not everyone can do this perfectly, so it requires a specialist's job to track the stock and commodities markets and thus make a conclusion about the market directions. Forecasting or predicting the markets is an art in itself. Trade4target have best tools but a man without any software's or any other modes may just predict the better way.

Tap water spiked with naturally-occurring lithium has been shown to curb suicide

"Eric Fischl ... created this bronze sculpture of a woman plummeting to her death, basing it on the many people who did just that during the 9/11 attacks ... ... Immediately, members of the public began complaining about the upsetting nature of the piece, and administrators at the center quickly covered it in cloth and hid it behind a screen." Right, because we wouldn't want to make mass murder look like something horrible? Watching policy getting made to appease those who don't get the point.

Numerous media outlets -- The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and NPR, among others - last night published classified files on more than 700 past and present Guantanamo detainees. The leak was originally provided to WikiLeaks, which then gave them to the Post, NPR and others; the NYT and The Guardian claim to have received them from "another source" (WikiLeaks suggested the "other source" was Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a former WikiLeaks associate who WikiLeaks claims took, without authorization, many WikiLeaks files when he left). The documents reveal vast new information about these detainees and, in particular, the shoddy and unreliable nature of the "evidence" used (both before and now) to justify their due-process-free detentions. There are several points worth noting about all this:

As usual, there are multiple events from just the last 24 hours vividly highlighting the nature of America's ongoing -- and escalating -- posture of Endless War:

In the last few days, the conservative movement has formed its response to Occupy Wall Street. The mere fact of conservative opposition isn't very surprising - obviously, conservatives aren't going to love a left-wing movement filled with counterculture types assailing the rich and big business. What's more interesting is the nature of the conservative response. There is hardly any direct intellectual engagement or forceful restatement of pro-market principles. Instead what we see is a series of evasions.

It seems to me that the OWS movement is moral in nature, that occupiers want the country to change its moral focus. It is easy to find useful policies; hundreds have been suggested. It is harder to find a moral focus and stick to it. If the movement is to frame itself, it should be on the basis of its moral focus, not a particular agenda or list of policy demands. If the moral focus of America changes, new people will be elected and the policies will follow. Without a change of moral focus, the conservative worldview that has brought us to the present disastrous and dangerous moment will continue to prevail.

"The truth is that Trump is a natural extension of Republican politics, set in motion long ago and amplified over the years. The presumptive GOP nominee represents a terrible amalgam of Fox News punditry and GOP extremism, both of which are inextricably bound to the party establishment - regardless of how hastily Limbaugh and others try to distance themselves from accountability for it."