As regular readers know, while I have little hope that the Democratic party will do anything at all to challenge the power and greed of the oligarchy, I dread the thought of Hillary Clinton becoming the party’s nominee as that would make the oligarchy’s task that much easier. But Glenn Greenwald says that there is actually plenty of genuine enthusiasm for her candidacy. You just have to know where to look.
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Thanks to reader boadinum, I learned that the Al Jazeera program with the above title about the attack on the USS Liberty on June 8, 1967 was freely available on YouTube (see the embedded link at the end of this post) and I watched it yesterday. It was a fascinating program that had a lot of new information that was not made public before. The producers had correspondence, tape recordings, and interviews with survivors and government officials that reveal the sequence of events and what the discussions were prior to and after the attack.
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When commenting on the election results, I noted the low turnout of around 36%, the lowest since during World War II ,and said that I was curious as to the reasons why. It turns out that the Pew research organization has conducted a post-election survey to gauge the opinions of people on a range of issues concerning the election and one was the reasons they gave for not voting.
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The Hill reports with surprise something that could have been easily predicted. Under the headline “Obama veers left after red wave”, it says:
President Obama has taken significant steps to the left since his party’s devastating losses in the midterm elections.
In a surprise, he announced a major deal on climate change with China during a trip to Beijing Tuesday. That followed another unanticipated move — a Monday statement pressuring the Federal Communications Commission to adopt new net neutrality rules for the Internet.
The moves are helping to rally a dispirited Democratic base while re-establishing Obama’s political leadership after he was sidelined during the midterms.
The likelihood of the report on torture being released by the US Senate, even in a limited and highly redacted form, is becoming increasingly unlikely. The main (but small) hope for transparency and accountability advocates is that outgoing senator Mark Udall uses his immunity as a member of Congress to put it into the Congressional record.
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The Associated Press reports that president Obama feels ‘liberated’ by losing the senate to the Republicans.
White House officials say Obama’s optimism reflects a president who feels liberated by even the limited prospects for striking deals with a Republican Congress and relieved about shedding the narrow Democratic majority that would have guaranteed Washington stayed locked in a stalemate.
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It used to be that in the Catholic Church, one could buy indulgences to provide absolution for one’s sins, giving an advantage to rich people trying to get to heaven. Although the church has discontinued that deplorable practice, the US government still seems to believe in it. Cora Currier writes that the US government makes secret payments to the relatives of civilian victims of its drone strikes while publicly maintaining that the dead are militants.
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Harry Belafonte was given an honorary Oscar, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, at a ceremony last week. The 87-year old actor and singer took the opportunity to deliver a powerful speech on racism and justice and human rights.
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Last Tuesday, senator Mark Udall of Colorado lost his bid for re-election. He now faces a choice. He can fade away into the political sunset or make a significant contribution. How? By going on the Senate floor during the lame duck session from now until the end of the year when he formally leaves and reading into the congressional record the CIA torture report that has been kept concealed up until now.
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One of the ways you can tell that much of the major US media functions as a propaganda system is the way that inconvenient stories are sent down the memory hole. One such story is when Israel attacked a US warship the USS Liberty during the six-day war in 1967, killing 34 US servicemen and leaving the state-of-the-art intelligence gathering ship to be disposed of as scrap. The motives for the attack were never made clear and the US government seemed to have little interest in taking any action against Israel for that act.
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