Here we go again. Listener democracy at the Pacifica radio network is in deep jeopardy again because the same people who violently shut down WBAI in 2019 and forced an expensive referendum that was soundly defeated in 2020 have forced a second bylaws referendum. Having lost last year’s referendum by a 2-to-1 margin — losing […]
The fight for independent, non-corporate radio flares up again
There is nothing that capitalists won’t grab if they see a possibility to grab a profit. Not even the most basic needs for human life, such as water, are exempt. A favorite tactic for grabbing what had once been in the public domain and converting it into private profit is the “public-private partnership.” A tactic […]
Private sector is “efficient” only at extracting money from public
“If there is one group that deserves our deepest contempt it is the liberal elites, those who posture as the moral arbiters of society while abandoning every value they purportedly hold the moment they become inconvenient.”
Chris Hedges: American Requiem
This clip sums up our current state pretty well. It’s nothing new to anyone who has been paying attention, but ideology can blind people. Even people watching this clip who have “trump derangement” symptoms might miss what Chomsky is saying. This is corporate power stealing as much as they can and killing with impunity. Listen to every word and sentence. If you don’t truly understand, a word, concept, or expression of an idea, research it.
For example, Chomsky mentions Greg Palast. Greg has a new book out detailing how trump will steal the 2020 election. What most people don’t know is that Greg has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that trump stole the 2016 election. Is it new that a u.s. election has been stolen? No. But most people are unaware of that fact, and for the strangest of reasons, even most on the left have discussed the trump win as legitimate. Discussing voting and elections is fine, but assuming any aspect of the voting and elections process is not corrupt and at the bare minimum broken (which Chomsky does briefly mention of course) will get us nowhere. In fact, discussion untied to action will get us nowhere. The inextricably connected issue of corporate power run amok, using the state as its play toy and free money machine, killing and decimating the systems we need to live, was here before trump and it will be with us long after he is dead and gone, so it is far from simply an issue of voting the monster out so “everything can get back to normal.”
While the republicans are as dangerous and horrific as Chomsky states, just blaming the republican party for this is disingenuous, or misguided to say the least. Chomsky does mention that we De facto have one party rule: the business party, but then he singles out republicans. It is good and right to point out how unhinged they are, but the Dems should be mentioned in the same breath.
As some might know, Chomsky has angered some on the left for always advocating for the lesser of two evils vote when it comes to the presidential election. He has doubled down on this with biden. It’s hard to take issue with Chomsky personally because he has been consistent in this view his entire life. He holds this view because he doesn’t ascribe all politics to voting. He identifies as an anarchist after all. His assumption is that people who do more politically than just walk into a booth for a couple of minutes every two years will just vote and then get back to being actually politically active. A problem with this message is that people misinterpret it to mean voting is all they have to do. Another issue is that it assumes a “free and fair” voting and elections system and tacitly promotes that idea. Yet another and possibly most obvious flaw in this logic is that when you vote for the lesser of two evils, things keep getting worse.
While it’s true that trump is in unprecedented territory, it is also true that he could not have gotten there or done as well for himself and capitalists without the last 40 years of the Dems enthusiastically implementing the neoliberal project, which is essentially class war by the rich on almost everyone else on the planet. Just in the last four years, the Dems have given this administration essentially everything it wanted, from keeping children in concentration camps, to war, from packing the courts with the federalist society judges Chomsky mentions in the clip, to more money for the military – the list goes on and on…They have not simply acquiesced to republican power, they largely agree with them when it comes to the implementation of u.s. power and because they have largely been purchased and directed by corporate power, they serve the same master: capital.
It’s important to understand everything Chomsky mentions here and it’s important to understand that voting will not “save us.” We are too far gone for that. I address the “what is to be done” question in many posts here. Essentially, in the last 50 years, the left has crumbled from within while being crushed from without. Not only has it been unable to mount a challenge to capital, it has been unable to re-win the fights it won in the past that, for the most part, the bipartisan implementation of the neoliberal project has reversed.
There has been a weak resurgence of the left since around 2011 and it has gained some steam over the years as material circumstances have continued to worsen for the majority of people, but it hasn’t been enough and in many cases it has been on the wrong path. As moribund and weak as the left is, it is our only hope to survive long term. The left has been unable to (and often refused to) organize itself, unify, and internationalize. Without everyday people (as Cornel West calls us) getting involved on the left, joining and forming organizations, and then unifying those organizations (eventually internationally), the corporate assault on everything we hold dear, including the means for life itself, will continue. If people want to see the changes they say they believe in they will have to become radical. Radical just means change at the root. We have to uproot the system of capitalism. The good news is that it will take a relatively small portion of the population to do it. The bad news is that the left has to be turned in to something new and is resisting it in many ways. It’s bleak. It’s up to us no matter what. It’s almost a cliche at this point, but Gramsci said, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” And as Chomsky just said again, time is running out.
Good luck to us all.
Disappearing World Forum Q&A Session with Arundhati Roy, held at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS, 2013
One could write a never-ending book about all that is contained in and around this event so it will be difficult to write anything short here. I could say something romantic about ugliness and beauty, about the drama of our existence, of exploiter and the exploited, of greed and resistance to that greed. Or about the possibility that we humans are flawed in our very DNA and evolution and may never be capable of collective peace and goodwill to all. I could say history is never in the past. I could say ideology is profound, especially when it has almost unlimited power driving it into plastic labile minds. I could say capitalism is a fundamental threat to the survival of almost all living things – especially humans. I could say corporate neoliberal rule is designed to exacerbate the logic of capitalism which is ceaseless accumulation and the commodification of all things. Or I could focus on the institution and histories and ideologies and power relations that brought those specific questioners there at that particular time. Or I could focus on Arundhati and all she is representing and all the superlatives that would flow from there. All of the strength, intelligence, elegance, beauty, all of the eloquence, patience, and fortitude. Or I could point out her seeming prescience about our current state of affairs, which was actually a clear-eyed left analysis that has been on the right (correct) side of history for generations, along with common sense ideas like fairness, justice, right and wrong…and feelings, like passion and empathy. Well, the never-ending book won’t start now, so here ends this bit of thought and feeling, digitized, and published for those few who will come across it.
At this point the choice for liberals is clear, but it’s clear the liberals asking the questions still don’t get it – or they do get it, but are so steeped in the venality of capitalism and neoliberalism they are confused. Yanis is frequently called a radical and liberals have consistently dismissed him as unrealistic, though it’s clear they are willing to listen more now than they have been in the past. If liberals still think Yanis is a radical they are sadly mistaken. He is offering the moderate way forward. I don’t know how big his organization is at the moment and it’s yet to be seen if it will gain enough traction to become viable in Europe, but if self-proclaimed liberals can’t get behind someone like him…well, I’ll leave it to you to complete the thought.
The minuscule level of left gains since 2008 have not moved the needle much – and “The Resistance” is a sad joke. The next manufactured crisis the financial “industry” will bring down on us will make people more extreme in every direction. The currently comfortable might then wonder why they didn’t try to do more when they had a chance – or more likely, they will do what they have been doing: the ol’ see no evil routine and/or keep head in sand/up ass and/or continue to support the right wing (and yes, that means most Dems, or whatever party you want to substitute in your country). Simply pressing a button or filling out a form every two or so years has never been and will never be enough.
When confronted with any of this, the first thing I always hear from liberals is, “well what can I do?” You know what I never hear them say? “Instead of binge-watching tv and letting corporate news wash over me every night, I took a day to research who was already organizing and doing something and then I went out and met people and actually tried to do something.” Never hear that. I’m not saying that will change our current trajectory, because a lot of those people thought they were doing something by knitting pussy hats, but I am saying being a liberal was never a good thing and in the last forty years those liberals who thought voting was the be all and end all of politics, voted for right-wing neoliberals over and over. They voted for the lesser of two evils and eventually got the current u.s. president, or macron, or may or erdogan, or take your pick…
It’s too late to say time to wake up. That time has passed. Organize locally, find left organizations that are national and international, and if they aren’t, make them international. And don’t stop until it’s world-wide. A perfect test case would be teachers. You may have noticed teachers organized to strike in some of the poorest states in the u.s. They realized they could do something and then they realized they could talk to other teachers in other states. They called for a reduction in their health insurance costs, they called for raises for all state employees and for the major corporations sucking the wealth from their states to actually pay taxes. The next step, though literally no one is saying this, is to talk to teachers in other countries. Form organizations and then join up with other organizations to form something massive and worldwide. Think about how many teachers there are in the world, think about how many nurses there are… If unions were democratic and had the ideals of the I.W.W., they’d be doing the same, or better yet, they’d be welcoming groups with open arms of solidarity and sharing resources. (To be fair, some are more democratic than others and some are doing better work than others, but no big union is working for real internationalism). If you’re in a union, democratize it, and then make it international.
Well, I could go on, but I don’t have the time or energy. About three to ten people will read this. It’s more venting than anything else, though it is not satisfying in any way, shape, or form. I’m writing this as a poor person in the richest country that ever existed in the history of the world. You know, the country where about half the people are poor and a paycheck away from the street – if they even have a paycheck. The one where millions have no health care, and the ones who do find out it’s inadequate when they actually need it because there is a massive corporation between them and well, living. The one where mass shootings happen every week. The one with a record number of people in prison. The country who went from a deporter-in-chief sending people to die in countries the u.s. helped turn into corrupt regimes with gangs and putting women and children into for-profit detention camps, to an avowed racist deporting people and putting them into for-profit detention camps – or let’s just be honest and call them what they are: prisons. Of course this is the land of for-profit prisons. What do you need for more profits? You guessed it, more prisoners… The land of poisoned earth, air, and water. The land of mass surveillance, mass homelessness, mass killings. The one bombing the world into oblivion, selling the most weapons of any country. Selling them to the dictators it props up and attempting to overthrow democratically elected politicians it calls dictators. The one at endless war in multiple countries. The one with the homeless drug addicted veterans with PTSD it denies services to. The one where people who literally want to kill regulatory agencies are in charge of them. The one with the militarized police who harass and kill with impunity and think they are an occupying force in their own country. The one whose federal courts are packed with hanging judges and where the supreme court rules corporations are people and reverses voting rights for people of color. The one with hungry kids, the one with all the wannabe fascists (sometimes on the street and often in churches and government). The one whose corporations don’t pay taxes while grinding austerity and privatization is loosed on everyday people by the politicians the corporations purchase. The one with the most effective propaganda since the third reich. The one with current and former students carrying almost 1.5 trillion dollars in student loans – that the government is making money on. The country where people who should be building a future are forced to spend 50-80% of their income on rent – if they have a place to rent, Again, if they even have income… Ok, time to stop, because this list could fill many volumes.
The u.s. didn’t invent death and destruction and making war on it’s own people, but it has exported its capitalist, neoliberal version of these things all over the world. That alone gives the people of the world a shared struggle, if they choose to come together and fight this insanity. Yanis is proposing and trying to work for a way forward. Is it “the” way? Impossible to say, but I can say that it is moderate. Increasingly, our collective options for change are being narrowed and will, more and more, be determined by extreme situations created by extreme people with extreme ideas. The only way forward is collective action on a worldwide scale. Liberals are afraid of radical change, so they turn away from the left, but guess what we’ve been living through instead? What liberals have, let’s be generous and say unwittingly, helped to bring about? Right wing extremism. Ironically, for liberals to get the peace and equality they say they want and believe in, they will have to become radicals. Radical change, just means change at the root. Fundamental, systemic change, not tweaking a totally corrupt system around the edges while more and more people suffer every day. Yanis is proposing to start with moderate change that will stabilize global capitalism so we can then calmly implement some kind of collective ownership. Again, I won’t go into the arguments for and against, I am simply saying this seems like radicalism to liberals, but the political spectrum has been dragged to the right by right-wing extremists for forty years, which means liberals are on the right, fascists are to their right, and Yanis is simply proposing moderate old school social democratic changes. If you aren’t choosing to support that and you’re not doing anything that could be called organizing the left, you are choosing the right-wing extremism that is the status quo.
In the past few years, capitalists (corporations, the filthy rich, finance, insurance, oil, big pharma, big ag, and war mongers, to name a few) have significantly stepped-up their buying of governments worldwide. They have been busy putting the money they’ve stolen from us to use, purchasing politicians and imposing neoliberal policies on us all.
At the core of those policies is privatization. Privatization involves transferring the ownership of public wealth from the people to private for-profit corporations. That, along with the 2007-08 crisis, has resulted in a massive transfer and consolidation of wealth that literally kills, criminalizes, impoverishes, and controls, whilst making the rich, much, much richer.
Another tenet of neoliberal ideology (or tactic if you prefer) is the imposition of austerity. Essentially, austerity takes away critical resources from citizens – especially the most vulnerable. This goes hand in hand with a perennial corporate favorite: deregulation. Deregulation weakens regulatory agencies and gets rid of laws that protect citizens by either weakening them or replacing them wholesale.
The all-out assault on the UK by neoliberal corporate power has been extreme. It has killed thousands and impoverished many more. It is remaking the entire society before people’s eyes. It is difficult to overstate the rapidity and viciousness with which this is taking place. And if you are an average citizen outside of the British Isles, you probably have no idea it’s happening at all.
Mark McGowan, AKA The artist taxi driver, AKA Chunky Mark, is a working class bloke in London. He has been watching it all happen with shock, horror, and disbelief and is just trying to make sense of it all. He shoots videos in his cab before he starts work in the morning and posts them on youtube. Over the years, he has also managed to interview people from almost every walk of life. This movie is a collection of those commentaries and interviews.
From what I’ve been able to glean, Mark is a concerned citizen, father, artist, activist – and has a pretty good sense of humor to boot. He’s smart, sincere, frightened, concerned, and wants justice. What comes through again and again is his empathy, his humanity. He wonders aloud what many of us think every day: why are the people in power so sadistic and why aren’t the rest of us doing something about it? He screams and rants and rages quite loudly, and a bit more than occasionally. I’ll leave out any discussion of how much might be performance because I think it is his genuine immediate reaction to what is happening – and because I think it’s appropriate. It seems a much more human response than what I see from most people. He may or may not realize it, but his pauses and sighs have an even bigger impact than the yelling. But I digress…
Though you may not be familiar with UK politics, much of what Mark is covering should sound very familiar. It should be obvious by now that this corporate neoliberal agenda is not unique to the UK. In fact, neoliberalism as we know it was born in the u.s.a. (at the University of Chicago to be exact). While the u.s. doesn’t have an NHS to dismantle, it’s healthcare was given over to corporations long ago. Schools are another matter. The neoliberals have been busy here demonizing teachers, attacking unions, and attempting to privatize public schools. State pensions (which most americans don’t even possess) have been raided (through fees, budget cuts, legislation, and fraud) and everyone who has a pension is funding speculation. That money is at risk of being lost. (For those of you reading this in the future: Yes, the derivatives your pension fund helped inflate into a massive toxic bubble that burst are the reason they’re giving for cutting your pension.) The corporate neoliberal model is being imposed all over the world: India, Turkey, Brazil – most of Europe…the list is long. Just look for bought-off politicians selling off the state to corporate “interests” and media imitating the u.s. and the picture should become very clear.
Of course this film and Mark’s youtube videos aren’t the be all end all source for information, but I like Mark’s DIY spirit, his frustration, his sense of urgency, his passion and humanity. Things sorely lacking from most people I see.
Caveats: For those with delicate sensibilities, there is a lot of swearing in this film. If you’re still living in another century it may be time to travel to the present. As I said in the beginning, Mark is just a guy trying to understand what’s going on. I think he has done a damn good job of zeroing in on root causes, but – as with most people – he is just as susceptible as the next guy to occasionally trodding down the wrong path. For example, Alex Jones makes a very brief appearance in the cab. He is an american “shock jock” who mixes wacky conspiracy theories with facts and dangerous ideas; so, in the end, it’s best to dismiss him totally. There are so many people with sane analyses, there is really no reason to pay him any attention except as comic relief.
Max Keiser also makes an appearance. While Max does offer some good analysis of financial criminal behavior, he is a capitalist and he shares the libertarian utopian idea that if we only had “true free markets” we could have good capitalism (but in the meantime, he is a regular old capitalist). If one knows enough to see through that and can suss out the useful bits of his analysis, have at it – but really, there are hundreds of other more reputable sources out there who aren’t selling their own bitcoins, etc…
So, with those caveats, watch the film to be entertained, see a slice of life, and hopefully get a sense of what’s happening, because whether you know it or not, some version of everything detailed in it is probably happening where you live.
~ Cheers
This is from 2013. As far as I know, Sweden has continued to impose neoliberal “reforms” on its people. If anyone has an update (from any sector), feel free to leave a comment.
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I think the question of whether the establishment media is racist is directly tied to whether “the country” is racist. If it was explored deeply enough, it would illuminate quite a few fundamental truths of this big confused country. There are so many aspects to these topics, that many books could be (and have been) written about them, so it will be difficult to limit this discussion to a few tweets. Maybe I’ll write on it for a bit, extract some tweets, and then give you a link to it.
Racism has been a significant element in american media from the beginning. From omission to gross caricatures, from mischaracterization to enforcing and re-enforcing stereotypes, to outright lies. When you include the entertainment industry, the racism goes off the charts. Donald Bogle is a great source for this. In news media, the list is just as long and damaging. There are endless historical examples of papers actively promoting slavery, and when they couldn’t promote slavery, they promoted racism. Yes, even in the north. When they couldn’t actively promote racism, they became more subtle, but the effects were often the same. For an indication of how far the media had come by 1967, I would cite the Kerner Report. By ’68 I would just cite reality. For a more contemporary view, just look at what the establishment media tried to do to Ferguson. It was so bad, so quickly, that the protesters stopped talking to CNN. Of course, they didn’t really ever want to talk to Fox, for obvious reasons, and the other major sources didn’t come out looking much better. And that was just the protest. The way the media reported on Mike Brown (and every other victim of police violence) was sickening and reprehensible, and yes, racist. Could I open up a paper or roll you a clip of that very kind of reporting this year? Of course.
You say most reporters aren’t racist, but somehow, when they’re reporting for the establishment media it often comes out racist. In Ferguson, Don Lemon would be a perfect example of how this happens. Another aspect of racism is that, more often than not, no reporting gets done when there is not a crisis or some event that could be presented as something a white audience could perceive as negative. When is black and brown life acknowledged at all when it’s not sports, entertainment, or a so-called riot? Omission of black and brown life in general may actually be the starkest comment on the racism of this country and its media. And why am I using these terms? Because black, brown, white, red, etc., are how this country has divided people, and it is how a racist system encourages and forces us to identify. Racism is the air we breathe.
Does all of this have to be “fed inorganically by media elites”? Of course not. I think Herman and Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent” explains perfectly how this happens as a function of propaganda. You could say racism is part of the propaganda and/or that racism in the media functions in the same way propaganda does. That would be another discussion, but certainly germane to this one.
From wikipedia:
“Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, proposes that the mass communication media of the U.S. “are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion”, by means of the propaganda model of communication.[1] The title of the book, Manufacturing Consent, derives from the phrase “the manufacture of consent,” employed in the book Public Opinion (1922), by Walter Lippmann…”
As I generally agree with this analysis (the analysis is the book), I wholeheartedly disagree with your statement that, “Overall, in fact, I think media elites are a force for pluralism, which is why they are so resented and blamed by the right.”
I think the right (a designation I will comment on shortly) came up with “the liberal media” as a propaganda tool and many people who identify as right-wing believed it much more than than the cynical creators of the phrase. I think it worked better than they ever could have imagined. It is a smoke-screen – or maybe more accurately, smoke and mirrors. That is, it is the perfect tool of misdirection while performing your magic trick of moving everything to the right. You create an enemy while you actually benefit from that enemy. In other words, it keeps the discourse within certain bounds and forces people to the right – and forces people who identify as liberal into a defensive posture.
So, getting to that rightward turn brings us to your obama point. The election of obama was extraordinary by every measure. I believe obama was elected in a time of crisis, and that crisis occurred after america had been collectively traumatized by bush the second and his goons. While a record number of voters turned out the first time for obama, only about half of the people eligible to vote do so at any given time – and actually fewer most of the time. Not only are many people of color disenfranchised, but the majority of all people who could vote in this country choose not to. This leads to another discussion, so I will try not to digress too much. That being said, I don’t discount that obama is perceived as black and was elected twice. He is white. Well, he is just as much white as he is black – but we call him black because, as I said above, racism is the air we breathe. It goes back to the “blood quantum” and “one drop” rule, methods of determining the “race” of an individual, which of course had legal and social consequences.
To digress a bit more, I have personal experience of obama’s hometown and school. His school is a training ground not only for the professional class, but for the elite. What it means to be black in Hawaii is quite different than the mainland. He learned what he could in Chicago, but, well, I won’t continue. Suffice it to say, he is not now, nor has he ever been, connected to the black working class. He went from elite K-12 to elite universities, and then to elite office. Everything I just stated shows personally and in his policies – or lack thereof…
Aside from the positive symbolism (which I don’t discount), he has, on balance, been an extremely right-wing president. He has extended and doubled-down on many bush era policies, He is drilling everywhere and building new nuclear weapons to the tune of tens of billions of dollars, he oversees a drone program and has expanded (with the help of hillary) war to many countries. Obamacare is actually romneycare (a “health” program developed by right-wing think tanks) and it’s true effectiveness has yet to be proven (no cap on rates, tens of millions still uninsured, often unaffordable even with subsidies, many cases of insufficient coverage). Race to the top was an unmitigated disaster and he supports onerous testing, common core, and charter schools, which is de facto privatization. He has deported and imprisoned more undocumented refugees than any other president, and he has prosecuted more journalists and whistle-blowers than any other president. Ever. As you know, it has had a chilling effect on journalism overall. I won’t even get into how black people have fared under his watch, but I will say, they haven’t recovered the wealth that was stolen from them in the manufactured crisis – but the banks that stole it are fatter than ever. Coincidentally, they lost a lot of voting rights too, but I can’t blame him personally for that because it was a supreme court ruling. Really though, the cherry on top, the thing that trumps, if you will, everything, and reveals his true allegiances (the ones that will make him a very rich man), is that he is a passionate supporter and promoter of the TPP. The TPP has been described as NAFTA on steroids. I don’t think that goes far enough, because that corporate crafted series of international laws will actually chip away at nation state’s ability to stay sovereign entities. In very clear ways, it empowers corporations to rule the world and to use the coffers of states and taxpayer money to enrich themselves.
How is any of that “incremental change in a centrist republic?” This is a neoliberal corporate oligarchy – the development of which is the “change that is provoking this reactionary anger.” Any anti-racist activism is also a response to this (and to historical racism, that is part and parcel of the present racism). Totally aside from their overt racism, the GOP began alienating their base long ago by going fully corporate to the full exclusion of all working people. As soon as it was clear they had completely turned their back on the majority of the american population, they began looking for even more extreme constituencies than, say, the evangelicals and other fundamentalists they first went to when their political future was in question. Ironically, they abandoned their old base by forwarding a bi-partisan turn toward neoliberal policies like NCLB, cutting benefits, escalation of the drug war, the creation of the prison industrial complex, and NAFTA – which did more to undermine their base (and the big D Democrats base for that matter) than anything before or since. I’m not even including the trillions spent on war and weapons that is also rubber-stamped by both parties. Of course, reagan and his thugs set much of this into motion before most of those horrors were perpetrated. The irony is that the base they alienated was ripe for tea party recruitment. The koch brothers and fox sponsored a lot of that organization, but the raw fear and rage was already there because of the GOP’s original betrayal. Of course, it’s hard to call it a betrayal because the GOP never cared much for the worker. The point is, the rise of DT is a direct consequence of that original and continuing betrayal. As I stated, this is largely the result of a bi-partisan embrace of the neoliberal project, which is an expression of the logic of capitalism: ceaseless accumulation and the commodification of all things. That project is right wing and by it’s very nature racist because it exacerbates capitalism and all of the tactics used by capitalists to plunder and accumulate more capital. Divide and conquer through creating and exploiting difference, prey on the poor and the weak (and now what’s left of the middle class). That is the logic that is motivating every branch of government (and many governments all over the world), to say nothing of the corporations who pay for them.
As I tried to emphasize, I think we have been dragged to the right through a bi-partisan neoliberal consensus that continues unabated today. Has there been some resistance? Not much, but I hope that resistance grows and makes connections world-wide, because neoliberalism is a world-wide project. India and UK are two of many examples. The neoliberal assault on the UK is profound and totally unreported by most media. There is also a strong argument to be made that the imposition of neoliberalism in the so-called middle east and all over Africa contributed to the unrest that sparked the arab spring.
To wrap this up, I don’t believe every american is racist. I don’t believe every person in the media is racist. I don’t believe every member of the elite is racist, but, we are surrounded by racism and it pervades all of our institutions. It is systemic. Do I think there has been progress from slavery to now? Of course. Do I think the relatively small gains made through civil rights movements have been undermined and contained from the beginning and significantly rolled back in the decades since – despite the election of obama? Hell yes. I tried to present some supporting arguments here, though, there are many, many, more.
In thoughtful discussion,
your,
21st Century Poet
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In the fall of 2006, Glen Ford, Bruce Dixon, Margaret Kimberley and Leutisha Stills of CBC Monitor left Black Commentator, which Ford had co-founded and edited since 2002, and launched Black Agenda Report.
Check it out. Well worth your while…
Excellent news and analysis at The Real News Network and teleSUR English
“This post is a round-up of the current issues in the never-ending saga of ObamaCare, Rube Goldberg device (an example for those who came in late[1]). There are three current issues:
1) The new and improved ObamaCare website. Does it make “smart shopping” possible? Spoiler alert: No.
2) The collapse of ObamaCare co-ops. Was it pre-ordained when ObamaCare was passed? Spoiler alert: Yes, but there’s unexpected hope.
3) The current court challenge to ObamaCare, Sissel. What does it tell us about Democrats?”
(There’s plenty more to cover — premium increases, for one, as well as the actual policies made available — but these three issues are the hot stories right now.)
– By Lambert Strether of Corrente at nakedcapitalism.com
21st Century Theater 