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By Annell Fontenot

11/10/07

The average American has an addiction: television. We love to watch gorgeous celebrities, reality show personalities, gourmet chefs and athletes.

Like an obedient dog being given treats we salivate over flickering images. Clips of action, tenderness, conflict and sex fill the screen and rapidly affect our body and mind.

The power of these images is rarely examined by the average individual. However, due to its mind-altering nature we must make a rigorous assessment concerning the power of television.

Television is a thief. It robs the human spirit of creativity, achievement, originality and motivation. The brain becomes passive and the intellect dull.

According to scientists, after 30 seconds of watching television the brain produces Alpha waves are associated with a comatose state, whereby the brain suppresses mental activity.

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By Steven Jonas

11/11/07

One of the principal lessons that Karl Rove learned from his master teacher Lee Atwater was that he who controls the agenda wins the debate and, in grander terms, the election. Rove has been positively brilliant with this tactic, from 2000 onwards. True Bush policies and programs have never been on the agenda, whether in that first election or any of the subsequent ones. Rove has been able to do this on both the grand and the lesser scales. And so we come to the debate over torture and Judge Mukasey, and the agenda for that debate. I have no way of knowing whether Rove is still active on a day-to-day basis with the Bush White House. My suspicion is that he is, for these tactics have Rove’s fingerprints all over them.

What have they been able to do? They have been able to confine the whole discussion in the Congress and the bulk of the media to just what is the definition one particular torture technique known as ‘waterboarding.” Is it or isn’t it torture is the total matter for debate. It happens that it has been used by torturers, most of who were only too happy to have potential victims know what they might face, since the time of that “Instrument of God’s Will” known as the Spanish Inquisition. (Although the Inquisition was originally designed to “inquire” as to whether a particular resident of Spain after the official Expulsion of the Jews by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492 was a Jew or not, it came to be more broadly used against a wide variety of persons perceived by its Catholic masters as “enemies of the church.”) The technique has been used by a variety of repressive and oppressive regimes, not the least of which was the German Nazis, as a frank method of torture of chosen victims. There is no record of either the Inquisition or the Nazis ever claiming waterboarding or any of their other techniques of choice were not torture. As I said, they wanted to make sure everyone knew exactly what went on in their chambers of horror.

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“This overt lowering of expectations suggests that the Bush administration knows well that the conference will not deliver peace; neither Abbas nor Olmert seem equipped for such a task. Moreover, the administration has displayed virtually no signs of being an honest broker; its unreserved and unconditional backing of Israel is stronger than ever. The conference will likely be a media spectacle in which participants will reaffirm their commitment to peace, Israel’s security, condemnation of Palestinian terrorism and so forth.”

By Ramzy Baroud

11/9/07

After years of marked absence, the Bush administration has finally decided to upgrade its involvement in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The announcement of a Middle East peace conference in Annapolis, Maryland has raised red flags for anyone who has learned from past experience how unbalanced and insincere peace efforts actually can lead to further violence. And it requires little cynicism to ponder how genuine these current efforts are.

It has been suggested that President Bush — whose actions have thus defined his legacy as that of a war president — wishes to leave on a more positive note. We heard the same argument in mid 2000 when President Bill Clinton facilitated ill-prepared talks, the failure of which sparked tension and violence, which were of course blamed solely on Palestinians.

Others argue that the conference is motivated not by a desire for lasting peace, but by the wish to further isolate Hamas – the party that was democratically elected by a decisive majority in the Occupied Territories’ legislative elections in January 2006.

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By Charles Sullivan

11/9/07

We are living in extraordinarily dangerous times, when evil, rather than justice, prevails. The schoolyard is terrorized by thugs and punks with names like Bush, Cheney, Limbaugh, Robertson, Clinton, Rockefeller, Rice, Rumsfeld, Perle, Kristol and Giuliani—pedigreed people all.

In an inconspicuous corner of the schoolyard, the good people—and they are legion—keep to themselves, afraid. No one wants to be hurt; and the thugs and punks are dangerous, even criminally insane people. They have terrible weapons and criminal gangs who patrol the schoolyard to intimidate and terrorize, looking for those who talk to others; looking for signs of organization and resistance. The good people have witnessed their maiming and killing countless times. They have every reason to be afraid.

An aberration of nature, the blood of the punks and thugs is not red like ours; it is green, the color of money. They have an insatiable thirst for blood—our blood; the blood of all innocents. Blood money is their currency. Through some kind of strange alchemy, they are able to convert blood into money to own the world.

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By Carolyn Baker

11/9/07

Originally published at Speaking Truth to Power

I recently had the opportunity to view a lecture by Michael Parenti whom I consider a foremost expert on imperialism. Parenti began his lecture with the use of the word “stochasticism” which essentially means random, non-deterministic, based on conjecture or guess. A simpler way of summarizing it is, “stuff happens.” It is, in fact, the polar opposite of “conspiratorial.” In the lecture Parenti went on to criticize those who refuse to admit that the United States is imperialistic and who explain its imperial adventures around the world as something that “just happened.” Generally, those in academia who rationalize U.S. imperialism are astute, incisive thinkers on other issues, so one is perplexed by the obtuseness they demonstrate around the topic of imperialism.

In the same way, I have been bewildered by a singular stochastic perspective of Naomi Klein in her brilliant, exhaustive, superbly-documented book The Shock Doctrine. In it Klein builds an intricate and convincing case for the use of various techniques of trauma applied to societies and individuals during the twentieth century and continuing into the current moment for the purpose of perpetrating what has become one of her hallmark phrases, “disaster capitalism” Yet two pages in the book left me aghast. The first is Pages 11-12 which refer to September 11, 2001 and state:

The Bush team seized the moment of collective vertigo with chilling speed-not, as some have claimed, because the administration deviously plotted the crisis but because the key figures of the administration, veterans of earlier disaster capitalism experiments in Latin America and Eastern Europe, were part of a movement that prays for crisis the way drought-struck farmers pray for rain, and the way Christian-Zionist end-timers pray for the Rapture.

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Britches in the arms of an ALF member, with stitches removed. This stump macaque became famous when animal liberation “terrorists” raided the lab where she was being subjected to frivolous experimentation, and found her eyes had been sewn shut as a form of early maternal and sensorial deprivation. As a critical part of the establishment complex, a lot of universities work hand in glove with corporations, the military and other institutions in projects that the public would readily disallow if properly informed.

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BY WILL POTTER // Dateline: “Green is the New Red: How the Bush Administration Is Using Terror Laws to Prosecute Nonviolent Environmental Activists,” Counterpunch, May 04, 2006.

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A version of this article was also published by Earth First Journal and Green is the new red blog

The Red Scare was less about evidence than really great PR. Joseph McCarthy and crew flacked one word so relentlessly, so virulently, that it became a political albatross to hang around anyone’s neck. The true meaning of the word fell by the wayside: communism became a fluid brand to slap on the enemy of the hour.

Now, Green is the new Red.

The administration is slowly replacing communists lurking in every shadow with terrorists. And terrorism may become an even better brand than communism for demonizing dissent. In March, six green activists found themselves among the first victims of a new front in the War on Terror, and of an old PR game.

They were convicted on “animal enterprise terrorism” charges — that’s right, terrorism — for campaigning to shut down an animal testing lab. On June 7, they will be sentenced: two defendants face up to a year in federal prison, and others likely face five to 10 years.

Did their terrorist campaign involve anthrax? Pipe bombs? A plot to hijack an airplane? Nope. They ran a website. They posted news about the campaign — legal actions like protests and illegal actions like stealing animals from labs — and unabashedly supported all of it. Since the feds haven’t been able to catch the saboteurs, they’re now cracking down on those in the spotlight. Think red baiting, with a green twist.

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By Susan Rosenthal

11/8/07

Want to know a secret? A healthy human mind is incompatible with capitalism. Let me explain.

Science tells us that the mind cannot be reduced to an activity of the brain. The mind is created and sustained in a complex dance between human beings. Cut off from social relationships, the mind loses its ability to function. Evidence for this comes from socially-deprived infants and from adults kept in isolation or subjected to sensory deprivation.

For more than 95 percent of human history, people lived in small, cooperative societies. Over the past few thousand years, our species underwent an amazing cultural evolution. Our brains did not change biologically, but how we used them did. As people pooled their experiences and accumulated knowledge from one generation to the next, their minds developed. And as their minds developed, they created new social arrangements to meet their changing needs.

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By Stephen Lendman

11/8/07

The Islamic Republic of Pakistan was established in August, 1947 when its majority Muslim population separated from British-controlled India and became a sovereign state. Since then, the country has been plagued by wars, political instability, and a series of military coups as it continues stumbling unsuccessfully toward democracy.

Nominally, Pakistan is a federal democratic republic (declared in 1956) under a semi-presidential system and bicameral legislature consisting of a 100 member Senate and larger lower house National Assembly. The President is considered head of state and armed forces commander and chief (in a civilian capacity) and is elected by the Electoral College of Pakistan comprised of both houses of Parliament and the Provincial Assemblies. The Prime Minister is Pakistan’s head of government, is elected by the National Assembly, and is usually the largest party’s leader.

This is how government is supposed to work in Pakistan, but things are never that simple there. In its entire 60 year history, democracy has been a sham under various elected and military regimes. Musharraf is just the latest military one after he ousted elected Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in an October, 1999 coup. At the time, few people were surprised as tensions between elements of Pakistan’s ruling classes had been building for months. Sharif had grown increasingly unpopular and had Musharraf not deposed him other opposition forces might have done it.

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“Suggested I resolve the me inside me. Present a persona to the world. Let go of destroying my life.”

By Adam Engel

11/8/07

The University. Master’s degree in Business Strategies: “abstract advertising,” “imaginative marketing,” “creative propaganda.” Selling stuff.

The poet, Rothbardt, taught poetry, great poetry, The Masters, to hacks like me for rent money; he also taught Undergraduates majoring in “liberal” arts — for these he had hope. Young, not yet corrupted, possibly real scribblers among them to follow — Him.

I was of the former, enrolled in the University’s prestigious MBS program, considered the finest in the country, its strategy to use “real” poets, artists, scholars, like Rothbart, to teach hack copywriters, like me, literary techniques of The Masters to float product on pillowy clouds of “ideal.” That, or conjure sweet soufflés of agit-prop for Government; sell obedience.

Graduation postponed dependant on submission of Final Thesis. Prisoner of Final Thesis. Writer’s block. No degree, no nothing until I birthed a book of market strategies and advertisements for imaginary campaigns on behalf of imaginary clients. For this I suffered “writer’s block?”

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Cuba’s sin, which the United States of America can not forgive, is to have created a society that can serve as a successful example of an alternative to the capitalist model, and, moreover, to have done so under the very nose of the United States. And despite all the hardships imposed on it by Washington, Cuba has indeed inspired countless peoples and governments all over the world.

By William Blum

11/7/07

In a sound-bite society, reality no longer matters

Last month, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni told assembled world leaders at the United Nations that the time had come to take action against Iran. “None disagrees,” she said, “that Iran denies the Holocaust and speaks openly of its desire to wipe a member state - mine - off the map. And none disagrees that, in violation of Security Council resolutions, it is actively pursuing the means to achieve this end. Too many see the danger but walk idly by - hoping that someone else will take care of it. … It is time for the United Nations, and the states of the world, to live up to their promise of never again. To say enough is enough, to act now and to defend their basic values.”[1]

Yet, later the same month, we are informed by Haaretz, (frequently described as “the New York Times of Israel”), that the same Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni had said a few months earlier, in a series of closed discussions, that in her opinion “Iranian nuclear weapons do not pose an existential threat to Israel.” Haaretz reported that “Livni also criticized the exaggerated use that [Israeli] Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is making of the issue of the Iranian bomb, claiming that he is attempting to rally the public around him by playing on its most basic fears.”[2]

What are we to make of such a self-contradiction, such perfect hypocrisy?

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