Bill Moyers: Weapons of Mass Distraction
Bill Moyers interviewed Marty Kaplan who heads the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California on how the choice of media stories helps keep Americans politically somnambulant.
Read more...Category Archives: Politics
On the Poor Definition and Measurement of Corruption
Sadly, we’ve entered into a world where the word “corruption” has become inadequate to describe the many and varied practices of profitable abuse by the powerful and connected of their inferiors. Like the popular (and sadly apocryphal) accounts Inuit with their numerous words for “snow,” we need more refined and granular terminology to describe various types of corruption. Hugh uses “kleptocracy” but that’s a name for a system of governance, not particular behaviors within that system.
Read more...“Immigration Reform” = “Surveillance Reform” as Military Tactics Move Inland From US Borders
Yves here. The latest post at TomDispatch, Creating a Military-Industrial-Immigration Complex, How to Turn the U.S.-Mexican Border into a War Zone by Todd Miller, describes how the US border with Mexico, which is being defined more and more generously, has become an R&D lab for US security operations, as well as a new profit opportunity for defense contractors, who are looking for ways to repurpose combat equipment for domestic use. To put none too fine a point on its, the police state will be perfected on illegal immigrants or in-the-wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time Americans mainly of color, and then deployed on the rest of us. The 17 city paramilatary crackdown on Occupy was just the warm-up act.
Read more...Yanis Varoufakis: Europe Resorts to Authoritarianism to Paper Over Banking and Austerity Failures
Yves here. Because the European slow-motion train wreck is turning out to be particularly slow, it’s almost become background noise in the US, almost a lesser version of the now two lost decades in Japan. But what is happing in Europe is less benign and less likely to be able to continue anywhere near that long.
Read more...Michael Hoexter: Politically Fashionable Carbon Gradualism vs. Reality
Obama has unfortunately been backed by a segment of the environmental and policy community that believes or wants desperately to believe that fracked natural gas is cleaner and otherwise preferable to coal. But it’s already too late for this and other “carbon gradualist” strategies to be viable.
Read more...Wall Street and Unions Have Knives Out Against Spitzer’s NYC Comptroller Run
Nothing like the prospect of someone with a high profile and a track record of going toe to toe with powerful interests and rich enough not to be beholden to party machinery to bring out all sorts of hacks and score-settlers.
Read more...Your Tax Dollars at Work: What Force Feeding at Gitmo Looks Like
The Guardian presented this video by Human Rights organisation Reprieve and Bafta award-winning director Asif Kapadia, US actor and rapper Yasiin Bey (formerly known as Mos Def), which is based on leaked military documents describing the standard operating procedures for these force-feedings.
Read more...Quelle Surprise! Crappy Labor Market Leads to Rise in Public Perception of Unions
In a new article at the Prospect, Harold Meyerson tells us that unions are getting higher marks than they did a few years ago:
Read more...“Les Français sont comme les chihuahuas” (#Snowden)
By Andrew Dittmer, who recently finished his PhD in mathematics at Harvard and is currently continuing work on his thesis topic. He also taught mathematics at a local elementary school. Andrew enjoys explaining the recent history of the financial sector to a popular audience
Although the incident occurred several days ago, the responses among French readers were so extraordinary that they merit further attention. For many, the incident represented an unmistakable turning point:
There is a certain concept of the world that is disappearing definitively.
And so I have selected a representative sample of these responses, both from Le Figaro (center right) and Le Monde (center left), and formed them into a conversation:
Read more...UN Accuses Israel of Torturing Palestinian Children
This Real News Network report discusses two human rights violations against Palestinian children that were first publicized by an Israeli organization and have since been investigated by the UN: abusive confinement and prosecution, and using them as human shields.
Read more...Heartburn in Washington: India Calls Iran “Critical” to their Energy Future
It is no secret that the South and East Asian economies have chafed under the multi-layered sanctions adopted by the United States, European Union and United Nations Security council against Iran for its civilian nuclear activities. India is now pushing back.
Read more...Why Have Student Loans At All? Let’s Get the Burdens of Debt off College Students’ Backs — And Make Wall St. Pick Up the Tab
Higher education used to be free for millions of Americans. A transaction tax on the financial houses could help make it free again
Read more...Summer Rerun: Why Don’t Americans Take More Vacations? Blame It on Independence Day
If you think Independence Day came to be a national holiday as an organic expression of pride in our successful rebellion against England, you need to think twice.
Read more...Gaius Publius: A Primer – What’s in a “Tar Sands” Pipeline?
In the wake of renewed interest in the Keystone Pipeline project and the likelihood that Obama will eagerly approve it unless we stop him, there’s a lot of interest in what actually flows through those pipes.
Read more...EU Antitrust Authorities Sue 13 MegaBanks Over Credit Default Swaps Collusion to Stymie Exchanges
Ooh, here we thought bank reform was dead, and an unexpected front opens up.
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