Chris Hedges – Let’s Get This Class War Started

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“It is not a new story. The rich, throughout history, have found ways to subjugate and re-subjugate the masses. And the masses, throughout history, have cyclically awoken to throw off their chains. The ceaseless fight in human societies between the despotic power of the rich and the struggle for justice and equality lies at the heart of Fitzgerald’s novel, which uses the story of Gatsby to carry out a fierce indictment of capitalism. Fitzgerald was reading Oswald Spengler’s “The Decline of the West” as he was writing “The Great Gatsby.” Spengler predicted that, as Western democracies calcified and died, a class of “monied thugs” would replace the traditional political elites. Spengler was right about that.

“There are only two or three human stories,” Willa Cather wrote, “and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.”

The seesaw of history has thrust the oligarchs once again into the sky. We sit humiliated and broken on the ground. It is an old battle. It has been fought over and over in human history. We never seem to learn. It is time to grab our pitchforks.”

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Web Reading List #2 [9-11-2013]

‘Mesh’ Your Way to a Safer Internet
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Meet the Hackers Who Want to Jailbreak the Internet
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Google and the NSA: Who’s holding the ‘shit-bag’ now?
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F.T.C. Says Webcam’s Flaw Put Users’ Lives on Display
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Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange: our new heroes
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NSA and Israeli intelligence: memorandum of understanding – full document

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