Today’s issue of The Guardian has a long and fascinating article by Luke Harding that gives a biography of Edward Snowden, tracing his life story and how his views changed over time from being a loyal CIA operative to the point where he felt that he had to leak all the NSA and GCHQ documents. [Read more…]
Sometimes I despair at how people can seem to lack the kind of normal human instinct that should kick in when asked to do something that seems so obviously wrong. Take what happened at an elementary school in Utah. [Read more…]
The website Politico is a mixture of news and gossip based on anonymous sources that seems to have access to well-connected members of the oligarchy and to the government-media establishment, so its most useful function is to serve as a window into the thinking of that group of people. Hence it was with some interest that I read the piece titled Why the rich are freaking out that says that some of the very rich see writing on the wall that disturbs them. [Read more…]
Samantha Bee of The Daily Show interviews various people about raising the minimum wage. The rich person she speaks to displays the arrogance, callousness, and cluelessness that have come to typify that class. These people seem to have no sense of the growing anger against them. They seem to feel secure that the power of the state can protect them. They don’t seem to realize that all societies, even the US, have a breaking point. [Read more…]
I reported earlier about a federal judge who had slapped down the government over the way they abused their no-fly lists to harass people who had little or no recourse, because they were not told they were on the list or how they could get off it. [Read more…]
In the talk given on Monday by Robert McChesney, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign about his new book (co-authored with John Nicholls) titled Dollarocracy: How the Money-and-Media Election Complex is Destroying America, he spoke about the race against the clock that is driving recent political developments. [Read more…]
Fox News blowhard Sean Hannity took umbrage with some remarks made by New York state governor Andrew Cuomo that Hannity interpreted to mean that the governor wanted extreme conservatives to leave the state. We have seen a spate of rich people recently whining about how people are being mean to them and they think it is all very unfair. Tom Perkins is one of the most extreme of the lot, saying that criticisms of the wealthy are similar to Nazi Germany but he is by no means alone. [Read more…]
In reading about Pete Seeger on the web yesterday, I came across his testimony when he was hauled up before the House Un-American Affairs Committee in August 1955. This was the infamous Congressional committee that would order people to appear before them and quiz them about their political affiliations. If the people were willing to ‘prove their loyalty’ by renouncing their prior beliefs and associations and naming other people as being either Communists or fellow travellers or sympathizers, they would get lenient treatment. But if they did not, they would be accused of being pro-Communist. The committee targeted members of the entertainment industry, seeing them as being influential in shaping public opinion. Pete Seeger and his group The Weavers were blacklisted in the early 1950s. [Read more…]
Last evening I went to talk given by Robert McChesney, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. He is a prolific author on the media and politics and he was speaking about the ideas in his new book (co-authored with John Nicholls) titled Dollarocracy: How the Money-and-Media Election Complex is Destroying America in which he argues that the idea of ‘one person, one vote’ has now become ‘one dollar, one vote’. [Read more…]