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Octafish
Octafish's Journal
Octafish's Journal
April 23, 2015
Who decides whom to kill?
Since when does a President get to be judge, jury and executioner for American citizens?
Will the drone program be extended to wipe out domestic terrorists, too?
Will political opponents of such a program and common citizens who protest such government action be considered domestic terrorists?
From what I can find, the answers to all of those questions is classified secret information.
As secret government doesn't allow oversight by citizens, it is un-democratic and un-American.
April 23, 2015
If Mitt likes it, it's gotta be "good."
Speeding Democracy in the ''Right'' direction! Hoozah!
If Mitt likes it, it's gotta be "good."
April 23, 2015
In Cold War, U.S. Spy Agencies Used 1,000 Nazis
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
The New York Times, OCT. 26, 2014
WASHINGTON — In the decades after World War II, the C.I.A. and other United States agencies employed at least a thousand Nazis as Cold War spies and informants and, as recently as the 1990s, concealed the government’s ties to some still living in America, newly disclosed records and interviews show.
At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, law enforcement and intelligence leaders like J. Edgar Hoover at the F.B.I. and Allen Dulles at the C.I.A. aggressively recruited onetime Nazis of all ranks as secret, anti-Soviet “assets,” declassified records show. They believed the ex-Nazis’ intelligence value against the Russians outweighed what one official called “moral lapses” in their service to the Third Reich.
The agency hired one former SS officer as a spy in the 1950s, for instance, even after concluding he was probably guilty of “minor war crimes.”
And in 1994, a lawyer with the C.I.A. pressured prosecutors to drop an investigation into an ex-spy outside Boston implicated in the Nazis’ massacre of tens of thousands of Jews in Lithuania, according to a government official.
Evidence of the government’s links to Nazi spies began emerging publicly in the 1970s. But thousands of records from declassified files, Freedom of Information Act requests and other sources, together with interviews with scores of current and former government officials, show that the government’s recruitment of Nazis ran far deeper than previously known and that officials sought to conceal those ties for at least a half-century after the war.
In 1980, F.B.I. officials refused to tell even the Justice Department’s own Nazi hunters what they knew about 16 suspected Nazis living in the United States.
CONTINUED...
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/27/us/in-cold-war-us-spy-agencies-used-1000-nazis.html?_r=0
PS: Thank you, Surya Gayatri. The NAZI era will not end until they all are exposed and prosecuted and their ideology discredited. So far, only Democracy has proven effective.
Don't forget the NAZIs that CIA forgave and recruited.
Aleksandras Lileikis was a Nazi officer implicated in 60,000 Jews’ deaths. He later worked for the C.I.A. before immigrating.In Cold War, U.S. Spy Agencies Used 1,000 Nazis
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
The New York Times, OCT. 26, 2014
WASHINGTON — In the decades after World War II, the C.I.A. and other United States agencies employed at least a thousand Nazis as Cold War spies and informants and, as recently as the 1990s, concealed the government’s ties to some still living in America, newly disclosed records and interviews show.
At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, law enforcement and intelligence leaders like J. Edgar Hoover at the F.B.I. and Allen Dulles at the C.I.A. aggressively recruited onetime Nazis of all ranks as secret, anti-Soviet “assets,” declassified records show. They believed the ex-Nazis’ intelligence value against the Russians outweighed what one official called “moral lapses” in their service to the Third Reich.
The agency hired one former SS officer as a spy in the 1950s, for instance, even after concluding he was probably guilty of “minor war crimes.”
And in 1994, a lawyer with the C.I.A. pressured prosecutors to drop an investigation into an ex-spy outside Boston implicated in the Nazis’ massacre of tens of thousands of Jews in Lithuania, according to a government official.
Evidence of the government’s links to Nazi spies began emerging publicly in the 1970s. But thousands of records from declassified files, Freedom of Information Act requests and other sources, together with interviews with scores of current and former government officials, show that the government’s recruitment of Nazis ran far deeper than previously known and that officials sought to conceal those ties for at least a half-century after the war.
In 1980, F.B.I. officials refused to tell even the Justice Department’s own Nazi hunters what they knew about 16 suspected Nazis living in the United States.
CONTINUED...
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/27/us/in-cold-war-us-spy-agencies-used-1000-nazis.html?_r=0
PS: Thank you, Surya Gayatri. The NAZI era will not end until they all are exposed and prosecuted and their ideology discredited. So far, only Democracy has proven effective.
April 23, 2015
We Lucky Molecules
Exclusive: As American neocons and other war hawks push for endless war in the Mideast and now eastern Europe, the resulting chaos is straining the capacity of civilization to meet basic human needs and raising the risk of nuclear war, what would be a tragic ending to the Universe’s luckiest molecules, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
ConsortiumNews.com, April 22, 2015
Scientists don’t know how many atoms and molecules there are in the Universe, but it’s clear that the vast, vast, vast majority find themselves locked in lifeless form – perhaps consumed by the fire of an exploding nova, or sucked into a black hole going who knows where, or simply frozen in the dark reaches of space.
A tiny, tiny, infinitesimal minority found themselves on Planet Earth and even there, the vast, vast majority remained in inert form – as rocks or water – or may have edged their way into the simplest life forms as amoeba or plankton or made it up to vegetation as a tree or a flower.
Relative to the total number, an extraordinarily few molecules have achieved intelligent life and fewer still formed themselves into human beings with the intellect to comprehend many of the mysteries of the Universe. As far as scientists know, we may be the only beings anywhere capable of this feat. Despite decades of seeking signs of intelligent life across the Universe, none has been found.
So, it may be that we – the seven billion or so of us humans who live on Planet Earth in the Twenty-first Century – represent the luckiest of molecules. We get to appreciate the magnificence of Nature, not only the beauty of budding trees and blossoming flowers, or the stark snow-covered mountains and the pounding ocean waves, but via modern technology like the Hubble Spacecraft, we get to see deeply into space to observe the colorful, surrealistic displays of distant galaxies.
Yet, what those photographs also tell us is that, as awe-inspiring as the Universe is, it is fearsomely hostile to life. Some parts of the Universe are extremely hot amid burning gases of giant stars but most of it is extremely cold, a black and bleak emptiness.
The odds of finding ourselves on a tiny piece of the Universe – with the delicate, almost impossible balance between hot and cold, a sphere spinning at the right speed in the perfect location with a moon to pull at the oceans and a large planet situated as a shield between us and waves of giant asteroids rampaging through space, with an atmosphere to further protect and sustain us, and all the other stunning improbabilities of Planet Earth – those odds are below any imaginable calculation. It’s safe to say the chances of us being here – having advanced enough to know as much as we do – are very close to zero.
We are, indeed, very lucky molecules. But there is, of course, a downside to our luck. As living things, we are also dying things. And our consciousness makes us aware of that inevitability. Plus, there are even more painful aspects of life, watching loved ones suffer with illness or from hunger or as victims of violence.
There can be a sense of senselessness to the human existence. There is wholly unnecessary destruction, driven by greed or fear or ideology or religion. We have seen plenty of that in human history and especially over the past century, a time of world wars, human-caused global pollution and advanced instruments to deliver death, even the potential to exterminate all life on the planet.
Science has not only enabled us to understand our possibly singular place in the Universe; science also has helped us master the capability to make Earth just one more barren rock floating through space.
That risk of ending the extraordinary run of luck experienced by those relatively few molecules that found their way onto Planet Earth and then into the bodies of human beings remains the greatest challenge of our time. Yet it is a challenge that is often treated cavalierly, as something to be ignored or even taunted, as politicians, pundits and pretend patriots push the human race toward endless war, daring the chance that one side or another might take the extra step and unleash nuclear conflagration in some ultimate game of chicken.
Journalism’s Role
In my life’s role as a journalist, I have always believed that ignorance presents the greatest danger for humanity touching off such a cosmic catastrophe. Sometimes the ignorance can be self-imposed by people not wanting to know facts that make them uncomfortable or that contest what they have been trained to believe. Other times, the ignorance is imposed from the outside as propaganda to manipulate a population into a desired response, usually to get in line behind some warmongering leader.
Though there’s not much a journalist can do about the first type of ignorance – besides making reliable information available and hoping that people will open their eyes to it – the most daunting and crucial professional challenge is to pierce through the second kind of ignorance, the intentional twisting of reality to elicit a dangerous response from a population.
But success in countering propaganda has become increasingly difficult as its practitioners have become more sophisticated in their management and control of information and as their methods of disinformation delivery have grown more varied. Now, the false information can come from a dominant news outlet but also from an upstart Web site that has the look of independence but is actually bought and paid for by powerful interests.
Propaganda can come from entities of the Right, the Left or the Center. It is hard, if not impossible, to know who to trust and who is reliable. That is why I have always tried to stay true to the bedrock principles of journalism, precepts as basic as “show, don’t tell,” laying out the information in a way so the reader is enlightened but also can draw his or her own conclusion. Stories should be engaging, not lecturing.
After all, despite journalism’s sometimes lofty goals – empowering the people so they can make democracy work or act to prevent unnecessary killing and suffering – journalism is fundamentally a pedestrian profession. It is the job of assembling facts and applying common sense to those facts. And, there must be no preference for one outcome over another, just a commitment to figure out what happened as best you can. Or, put differently, you might say: “I don’t care what the truth is; I just care what the truth is.”
A journalist also should be humble, recognizing that something as grand as “truth” is rarely revealed. We almost always have to settle for a more limited understanding, though one that can keep expanding as more facts become available. The best we can usually do is give people an honest framework for understanding what is happening around them, even if it’s an imperfect or limited depiction.
But the more people understand about the realities of the world, the less vulnerable they are to the propagandists, those clever folks who disseminate ignorance in the superficial form of information and then use that ignorance to dominate the people. The true calling of a journalist is to give the people as many facts as possible and thus the tools to detect and negate the propaganda.
All this goes to the overriding principle that there is nothing more important to a democracy than an informed electorate and to the counterpoint that the most effective way to defeat democracy is to misinform the people. And, as the world hurtles toward more and more wars and ever worsening crises, there may be nothing more important than exposing the lies, exaggerations and prejudices that undergird most conflicts.
As President John F. Kennedy said in perhaps his finest speech – at American University on June 10, 1963 – “For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.”
In an age of environmental fragility and nuclear dangers, the human race must finally recognize its common interests and cooperate in the common cause of averting unnecessary chaos and conflict. We must in the end realize that we are among the luckiest molecules in the Universe – and act accordingly.
SOURCE w/links: https://consortiumnews.com/2015/04/22/we-lucky-molecules/
Thank you for putting it into words, Mr. Parry!
We Lucky Molecules
On Earth Day 2015, a reminder about what really counts from Robert Parry.We Lucky Molecules
Exclusive: As American neocons and other war hawks push for endless war in the Mideast and now eastern Europe, the resulting chaos is straining the capacity of civilization to meet basic human needs and raising the risk of nuclear war, what would be a tragic ending to the Universe’s luckiest molecules, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
ConsortiumNews.com, April 22, 2015
Scientists don’t know how many atoms and molecules there are in the Universe, but it’s clear that the vast, vast, vast majority find themselves locked in lifeless form – perhaps consumed by the fire of an exploding nova, or sucked into a black hole going who knows where, or simply frozen in the dark reaches of space.
A tiny, tiny, infinitesimal minority found themselves on Planet Earth and even there, the vast, vast majority remained in inert form – as rocks or water – or may have edged their way into the simplest life forms as amoeba or plankton or made it up to vegetation as a tree or a flower.
Relative to the total number, an extraordinarily few molecules have achieved intelligent life and fewer still formed themselves into human beings with the intellect to comprehend many of the mysteries of the Universe. As far as scientists know, we may be the only beings anywhere capable of this feat. Despite decades of seeking signs of intelligent life across the Universe, none has been found.
So, it may be that we – the seven billion or so of us humans who live on Planet Earth in the Twenty-first Century – represent the luckiest of molecules. We get to appreciate the magnificence of Nature, not only the beauty of budding trees and blossoming flowers, or the stark snow-covered mountains and the pounding ocean waves, but via modern technology like the Hubble Spacecraft, we get to see deeply into space to observe the colorful, surrealistic displays of distant galaxies.
Yet, what those photographs also tell us is that, as awe-inspiring as the Universe is, it is fearsomely hostile to life. Some parts of the Universe are extremely hot amid burning gases of giant stars but most of it is extremely cold, a black and bleak emptiness.
The odds of finding ourselves on a tiny piece of the Universe – with the delicate, almost impossible balance between hot and cold, a sphere spinning at the right speed in the perfect location with a moon to pull at the oceans and a large planet situated as a shield between us and waves of giant asteroids rampaging through space, with an atmosphere to further protect and sustain us, and all the other stunning improbabilities of Planet Earth – those odds are below any imaginable calculation. It’s safe to say the chances of us being here – having advanced enough to know as much as we do – are very close to zero.
We are, indeed, very lucky molecules. But there is, of course, a downside to our luck. As living things, we are also dying things. And our consciousness makes us aware of that inevitability. Plus, there are even more painful aspects of life, watching loved ones suffer with illness or from hunger or as victims of violence.
There can be a sense of senselessness to the human existence. There is wholly unnecessary destruction, driven by greed or fear or ideology or religion. We have seen plenty of that in human history and especially over the past century, a time of world wars, human-caused global pollution and advanced instruments to deliver death, even the potential to exterminate all life on the planet.
Science has not only enabled us to understand our possibly singular place in the Universe; science also has helped us master the capability to make Earth just one more barren rock floating through space.
That risk of ending the extraordinary run of luck experienced by those relatively few molecules that found their way onto Planet Earth and then into the bodies of human beings remains the greatest challenge of our time. Yet it is a challenge that is often treated cavalierly, as something to be ignored or even taunted, as politicians, pundits and pretend patriots push the human race toward endless war, daring the chance that one side or another might take the extra step and unleash nuclear conflagration in some ultimate game of chicken.
Journalism’s Role
In my life’s role as a journalist, I have always believed that ignorance presents the greatest danger for humanity touching off such a cosmic catastrophe. Sometimes the ignorance can be self-imposed by people not wanting to know facts that make them uncomfortable or that contest what they have been trained to believe. Other times, the ignorance is imposed from the outside as propaganda to manipulate a population into a desired response, usually to get in line behind some warmongering leader.
Though there’s not much a journalist can do about the first type of ignorance – besides making reliable information available and hoping that people will open their eyes to it – the most daunting and crucial professional challenge is to pierce through the second kind of ignorance, the intentional twisting of reality to elicit a dangerous response from a population.
But success in countering propaganda has become increasingly difficult as its practitioners have become more sophisticated in their management and control of information and as their methods of disinformation delivery have grown more varied. Now, the false information can come from a dominant news outlet but also from an upstart Web site that has the look of independence but is actually bought and paid for by powerful interests.
Propaganda can come from entities of the Right, the Left or the Center. It is hard, if not impossible, to know who to trust and who is reliable. That is why I have always tried to stay true to the bedrock principles of journalism, precepts as basic as “show, don’t tell,” laying out the information in a way so the reader is enlightened but also can draw his or her own conclusion. Stories should be engaging, not lecturing.
After all, despite journalism’s sometimes lofty goals – empowering the people so they can make democracy work or act to prevent unnecessary killing and suffering – journalism is fundamentally a pedestrian profession. It is the job of assembling facts and applying common sense to those facts. And, there must be no preference for one outcome over another, just a commitment to figure out what happened as best you can. Or, put differently, you might say: “I don’t care what the truth is; I just care what the truth is.”
A journalist also should be humble, recognizing that something as grand as “truth” is rarely revealed. We almost always have to settle for a more limited understanding, though one that can keep expanding as more facts become available. The best we can usually do is give people an honest framework for understanding what is happening around them, even if it’s an imperfect or limited depiction.
But the more people understand about the realities of the world, the less vulnerable they are to the propagandists, those clever folks who disseminate ignorance in the superficial form of information and then use that ignorance to dominate the people. The true calling of a journalist is to give the people as many facts as possible and thus the tools to detect and negate the propaganda.
All this goes to the overriding principle that there is nothing more important to a democracy than an informed electorate and to the counterpoint that the most effective way to defeat democracy is to misinform the people. And, as the world hurtles toward more and more wars and ever worsening crises, there may be nothing more important than exposing the lies, exaggerations and prejudices that undergird most conflicts.
As President John F. Kennedy said in perhaps his finest speech – at American University on June 10, 1963 – “For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.”
In an age of environmental fragility and nuclear dangers, the human race must finally recognize its common interests and cooperate in the common cause of averting unnecessary chaos and conflict. We must in the end realize that we are among the luckiest molecules in the Universe – and act accordingly.
SOURCE w/links: https://consortiumnews.com/2015/04/22/we-lucky-molecules/
Thank you for putting it into words, Mr. Parry!
April 21, 2015
Thank you, brentspeak. As a longtime Democrat, I've noticed those candidates who are well-funded seem to get ahead. For some reason, once in office they tend to represent the interests of the monied sections of society over those of the People, coincidentally.
KRB
Thank you, brentspeak. As a longtime Democrat, I've noticed those candidates who are well-funded seem to get ahead. For some reason, once in office they tend to represent the interests of the monied sections of society over those of the People, coincidentally.
April 19, 2015
The Propaganda System That Has Helped Create a Permanent Overclass Is Over a Century in the Making
Pulling back the curtain on how intent the wealthiest Americans have been on establishing a propaganda tool to subvert democracy.
Wednesday, 17 April 2013 00:00
By Andrew Gavin Marshall, AlterNet | News Analysis
Where there is the possibility of democracy, there is the inevitability of elite insecurity. All through its history, democracy has been under a sustained attack by elite interests, political, economic, and cultural. There is a simple reason for this: democracy – as in true democracy – places power with people. In such circumstances, the few who hold power become threatened. With technological changes in modern history, with literacy and education, mass communication, organization and activism, elites have had to react to the changing nature of society – locally and globally.
From the late 19th century on, the “threats” to elite interests from the possibility of true democracy mobilized institutions, ideologies, and individuals in support of power. What began was a massive social engineering project with one objective: control. Through educational institutions, the social sciences, philanthropic foundations, public relations and advertising agencies, corporations, banks, and states, powerful interests sought to reform and protect their power from the potential of popular democracy.
SNIP...
The development of psychology, psychoanalysis, and other disciplines increasingly portrayed the “public” and the population as irrational beings incapable of making their own decisions. The premise was simple: if the population was driven by dangerous, irrational emotions, they needed to be kept out of power and ruled over by those who were driven by reason and rationality, naturally, those who were already in power.
The Princeton Radio Project, which began in the 1930s with Rockefeller Foundation funding, brought together many psychologists, social scientists, and “experts” armed with an interest in social control, mass communication, and propaganda. The Princeton Radio Project had a profound influence upon the development of a modern "democratic propaganda" in the United States and elsewhere in the industrialized world. It helped in establishing and nurturing the ideas, institutions, and individuals who would come to shape America’s “democratic propaganda” throughout the Cold War, a program fostered between the private corporations which own the media, advertising, marketing, and public relations industries, and the state itself.
CONTINUED...
http://truth-out.org/news/item/15784-the-propaganda-system-that-has-helped-create-a-permanent-overclass-is-over-a-century-in-the-making
Here's how much of the nation's press were magically transformed from watchdogs into lapdogs:
The Powell Memo (also known as the Powell Manifesto)
The Powell Memo was first published August 23, 1971
Introduction
In 1971, Lewis Powell, then a corporate lawyer and member of the boards of 11 corporations, wrote a memo to his friend Eugene Sydnor, Jr., the Director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The memorandum was dated August 23, 1971, two months prior to Powell’s nomination by President Nixon to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Powell Memo did not become available to the public until long after his confirmation to the Court. It was leaked to Jack Anderson, a liberal syndicated columnist, who stirred interest in the document when he cited it as reason to doubt Powell’s legal objectivity. [font color="red"]Anderson cautioned that Powell “might use his position on the Supreme Court to put his ideas into practice…in behalf of business interests.”[/font color]
Though Powell’s memo was not the sole influence, the Chamber and corporate activists took his advice to heart and began building a powerful array of institutions designed to shift public attitudes and beliefs over the course of years and decades. The memo influenced or inspired the creation of the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Cato Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy, Accuracy in Academe, and other powerful organizations. Their long-term focus began paying off handsomely in the 1980s, in coordination with the Reagan Administration’s “hands-off business” philosophy.
Most notable about these institutions was their focus on education, shifting values, and movement-building — a focus we share, though often with sharply contrasting goals.* (See our endnote for more on this.)
So did Powell’s political views influence his judicial decisions? The evidence is mixed. [font color="red"]Powell did embrace expansion of corporate privilege and wrote the majority opinion in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, a 1978 decision that effectively invented a First Amendment “right” for corporations to influence ballot questions.[/font color] On social issues, he was a moderate, whose votes often surprised his backers.
CONTINUED...
http://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_lewis/
Thankfully, to help spread light when the protectors of the First Amendment won't, Maria Galardin's TUC (Time of Useful Consciousness) Radio. The podcast helps explain how we got here and what we need to do to move forward, starting with putting the "Public" into Airwaves again:
Alex Carey: Corporations and Propaganda
The Attack on Democracy
The 20th century, said Carey, is marked by three historic developments: the growth of democracy via the expansion of the franchise, the growth of corporations, and the growth of propaganda to protect corporations from democracy. Carey wrote that the people of the US have been subjected to an unparalleled, expensive, 3/4 century long propaganda effort designed to expand corporate rights by undermining democracy and destroying the unions. And, in his manuscript, unpublished during his life time, he described that history, going back to World War I and ending with the Reagan era. Carey covers the little known role of the US Chamber of Commerce in the McCarthy witch hunts of post WWII and shows how the continued campaign against "Big Government" plays an important role in bringing Reagan to power.
John Pilger called Carey "a second Orwell", Noam Chomsky dedicated his book, Manufacturing Consent, to him. And even though TUC Radio runs our documentary based on Carey's manuscript at least every two years and draws a huge response each time, Alex Carey is still unknown.
Given today's spotlight on corporations that may change. It is not only the Occupy movement that inspired me to present this program again at this time. By an amazing historic coincidence Bill Moyers and Charlie Cray of Greenpeace have just added the missing chapter to Carey's analysis. Carey's manuscript ends in 1988 when he committed suicide. Moyers and Cray begin with 1971 and bring the corporate propaganda project up to date.
This is a fairly complex production with many voices, historic sound clips, and source material. The program has been used by writers and students of history and propaganda. Alex Carey: Taking the Risk out of Democracy, Corporate Propaganda VS Freedom and Liberty with a foreword by Noam Chomsky was published by the University of Illinois Press in 1995.
SOURCE: http://tucradio.org/new.html
If you find a moment, a kennedy, here's the first part (scroll down at the link for the second part) of a wonderful web-based radio program on Carey:
http://tucradio.org/AlexCarey_ONE.mp3
It's also important to remember there once was a vibrant media environment, with thousands of daily newspapers and independent radio and tee vee stations. Today a small handful of companies provide almost all the "news."
Thus, They do their evil communication work running the Mighty Wurlitzer.
They -- those with money and power -- hate Unions.
So they use their broadcast media to reinforce certain false perceptions, like unions make the crapola of life cost more, union members are dirty people who need to shower, unions are communism's way of infiltrating Murka, etc.
Wanna Know Why We the People Really Don't Know Squat?
Corporate McPravda owns the airwaves.
And Corporate Tee Vee is still where most Americans get most of their information, including their ideas about these two statues. Wonder what people would think were they to learn from the tee vee what pater and fils have really done with their power?
The Propaganda System That Has Helped Create a Permanent Overclass Is Over a Century in the Making
Pulling back the curtain on how intent the wealthiest Americans have been on establishing a propaganda tool to subvert democracy.
Wednesday, 17 April 2013 00:00
By Andrew Gavin Marshall, AlterNet | News Analysis
Where there is the possibility of democracy, there is the inevitability of elite insecurity. All through its history, democracy has been under a sustained attack by elite interests, political, economic, and cultural. There is a simple reason for this: democracy – as in true democracy – places power with people. In such circumstances, the few who hold power become threatened. With technological changes in modern history, with literacy and education, mass communication, organization and activism, elites have had to react to the changing nature of society – locally and globally.
From the late 19th century on, the “threats” to elite interests from the possibility of true democracy mobilized institutions, ideologies, and individuals in support of power. What began was a massive social engineering project with one objective: control. Through educational institutions, the social sciences, philanthropic foundations, public relations and advertising agencies, corporations, banks, and states, powerful interests sought to reform and protect their power from the potential of popular democracy.
SNIP...
The development of psychology, psychoanalysis, and other disciplines increasingly portrayed the “public” and the population as irrational beings incapable of making their own decisions. The premise was simple: if the population was driven by dangerous, irrational emotions, they needed to be kept out of power and ruled over by those who were driven by reason and rationality, naturally, those who were already in power.
The Princeton Radio Project, which began in the 1930s with Rockefeller Foundation funding, brought together many psychologists, social scientists, and “experts” armed with an interest in social control, mass communication, and propaganda. The Princeton Radio Project had a profound influence upon the development of a modern "democratic propaganda" in the United States and elsewhere in the industrialized world. It helped in establishing and nurturing the ideas, institutions, and individuals who would come to shape America’s “democratic propaganda” throughout the Cold War, a program fostered between the private corporations which own the media, advertising, marketing, and public relations industries, and the state itself.
CONTINUED...
http://truth-out.org/news/item/15784-the-propaganda-system-that-has-helped-create-a-permanent-overclass-is-over-a-century-in-the-making
Here's how much of the nation's press were magically transformed from watchdogs into lapdogs:
The Powell Memo (also known as the Powell Manifesto)
The Powell Memo was first published August 23, 1971
Introduction
In 1971, Lewis Powell, then a corporate lawyer and member of the boards of 11 corporations, wrote a memo to his friend Eugene Sydnor, Jr., the Director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The memorandum was dated August 23, 1971, two months prior to Powell’s nomination by President Nixon to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Powell Memo did not become available to the public until long after his confirmation to the Court. It was leaked to Jack Anderson, a liberal syndicated columnist, who stirred interest in the document when he cited it as reason to doubt Powell’s legal objectivity. [font color="red"]Anderson cautioned that Powell “might use his position on the Supreme Court to put his ideas into practice…in behalf of business interests.”[/font color]
Though Powell’s memo was not the sole influence, the Chamber and corporate activists took his advice to heart and began building a powerful array of institutions designed to shift public attitudes and beliefs over the course of years and decades. The memo influenced or inspired the creation of the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Cato Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy, Accuracy in Academe, and other powerful organizations. Their long-term focus began paying off handsomely in the 1980s, in coordination with the Reagan Administration’s “hands-off business” philosophy.
Most notable about these institutions was their focus on education, shifting values, and movement-building — a focus we share, though often with sharply contrasting goals.* (See our endnote for more on this.)
So did Powell’s political views influence his judicial decisions? The evidence is mixed. [font color="red"]Powell did embrace expansion of corporate privilege and wrote the majority opinion in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, a 1978 decision that effectively invented a First Amendment “right” for corporations to influence ballot questions.[/font color] On social issues, he was a moderate, whose votes often surprised his backers.
CONTINUED...
http://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_lewis/
Thankfully, to help spread light when the protectors of the First Amendment won't, Maria Galardin's TUC (Time of Useful Consciousness) Radio. The podcast helps explain how we got here and what we need to do to move forward, starting with putting the "Public" into Airwaves again:
Alex Carey: Corporations and Propaganda
The Attack on Democracy
The 20th century, said Carey, is marked by three historic developments: the growth of democracy via the expansion of the franchise, the growth of corporations, and the growth of propaganda to protect corporations from democracy. Carey wrote that the people of the US have been subjected to an unparalleled, expensive, 3/4 century long propaganda effort designed to expand corporate rights by undermining democracy and destroying the unions. And, in his manuscript, unpublished during his life time, he described that history, going back to World War I and ending with the Reagan era. Carey covers the little known role of the US Chamber of Commerce in the McCarthy witch hunts of post WWII and shows how the continued campaign against "Big Government" plays an important role in bringing Reagan to power.
John Pilger called Carey "a second Orwell", Noam Chomsky dedicated his book, Manufacturing Consent, to him. And even though TUC Radio runs our documentary based on Carey's manuscript at least every two years and draws a huge response each time, Alex Carey is still unknown.
Given today's spotlight on corporations that may change. It is not only the Occupy movement that inspired me to present this program again at this time. By an amazing historic coincidence Bill Moyers and Charlie Cray of Greenpeace have just added the missing chapter to Carey's analysis. Carey's manuscript ends in 1988 when he committed suicide. Moyers and Cray begin with 1971 and bring the corporate propaganda project up to date.
This is a fairly complex production with many voices, historic sound clips, and source material. The program has been used by writers and students of history and propaganda. Alex Carey: Taking the Risk out of Democracy, Corporate Propaganda VS Freedom and Liberty with a foreword by Noam Chomsky was published by the University of Illinois Press in 1995.
SOURCE: http://tucradio.org/new.html
If you find a moment, a kennedy, here's the first part (scroll down at the link for the second part) of a wonderful web-based radio program on Carey:
http://tucradio.org/AlexCarey_ONE.mp3
It's also important to remember there once was a vibrant media environment, with thousands of daily newspapers and independent radio and tee vee stations. Today a small handful of companies provide almost all the "news."
Thus, They do their evil communication work running the Mighty Wurlitzer.
April 19, 2015
Eric Zuesse
Huffington Post, 11/18/2013
EXCERPT...
This is how anti-abortion murderers and CEO crooks finally secured all their sought-for exemptions from "bankruptcy reform," which offered only Republican "tough love" for the middle class and poor - and an outright kick in the teeth to people bankrupted by medical bills, by job loss, or by divorce, the three biggest causes of bankruptcies, which studies showed accounted for almost all filings. (In fact, nearly half of all personal bankruptcies were due simply to medical expenses; and because of this new law, most of those cases would henceforth produce something akin to slavery capping the patient's misery.) Still, a large share of the total dollars involved in bankruptcy cases were assets held by the very few super-rich going bankrupt, and the Republican "bankruptcy reform" protected those bankrupts, so that MBNA and the other banks which had pushed so hard for this legislation received only limited real benefit from it. Perhaps the executives of those banks, who were protecting themselves from risks they were imposing upon others, were even more concerned to protect themselves in the event that they might need bankruptcy protection themselves, than they were to enhance the bottom lines of the companies they managed. This was a failure of their fiduciary obligations.
SNIP...
On 30 September 2002, BusinessWeek reported (p. 112), concerning the new U.S. bankruptcy law that seemed about to be passed in a Republican Congress and supported by the Republican President, "The legislation is especially harsh on lower-income debtors."
The lobbyists who actually shape - if not write - the laws, are hired by the relatively few people who have the financial wherewithal to employ lobbyists' services. Those lobbyists are real soldiers in this authentic class war. And most of the other real soldiers consist of the think tanks (like the Heritage Foundation, and the American Enterprise Institute), and the numerous political action committees, that the conservative rich hire to indoctrinate, and to pump money into, the election campaigns of their supportive politicians.
For example, was it pure coincidence that the biggest single contributor, at $240,675, to the G.W. Bush 2000 Presidential campaign, was MBNA Corp., the bank that lobbied the hardest for this bankruptcy "reform" bill? (Enron gave Bush less in that campaign, but was his top career giver, because Enron had financed Bush's Texas rise.) Was it coincidence that, in addition, MBNA's CEO, Charles Cawley, personally raised $369,156 from others for Bush? Another MBNA executive, Lance Weaver, was also a Bush "Ranger," having raised over $200,000 for Bush. After all, Bush's Democratic predecessor, President Clinton, had vetoed similar Republican legislation. But, ironically, the corruptors ended up being defeated this time around, by their own internecine war on this matter: when big-business bucks went up against Religious-Right bucks and votes, the whole deal crumbled. It turned out that violent anti-abortion protesters were seeking a special exemption in the new bankruptcy bill, to protect their assets from bankruptcy seizure by their victims (such as by abortion-doctors they shoot), but the banks (allied with Democrats on this point) opposed such an exemption. The Religious Right, and big business, customary allies, split here, and so the entire bill bombed.
However, this legislation was revived after Republicans increased their majority in the Senate in 2004, and the biggest barrier to passage in its reincarnation consisted of some of the corrupt executives themselves, who were determined to shield their personal assets from possible civil suits by stockholders and by others, including corporate creditors. Thus, on 2 March 2005, The New York Times headlined "Proposed Law On Bankruptcy Has Loophole: Wealthy Could Shield Many Assets in Trusts." The main sponsor of this revived bill was, of course, a Republican senator, who claimed ignorance of that provision. How odd, then, that his bill would protect banks against only poor deadbeats, while letting the richest ones off. So, whom had these banks been lobbying so hard to protect themselves from? - it was from the kinds of people they never met and didn't want to meet: the middle class and poor. Bankers seemed far less interested in protecting their institutions against people such as themselves. After all, they're God's People; and, as for debtors who might have to lose their homes in order simply to pay catastrophic medical bills, or whatever - God is evidently not so fond of those people anyway. Thus, on 8 March 2005, the U.S. Senate voted 53 to 46 to defeat a proposed Democratic amendment which would have removed the bill's shield for anti-abortion murderers. Republican Senator Orrin Hatch called this amendment a "poison pill" aimed solely to protect deadbeats by blocking passage of "bankruptcy reform." The next day, another Democratic amendment aimed to preserve a longstanding bankruptcy provision, which even the SEC acknowledged to be necessary in order to prohibit corruption by investment banks in certain bankruptcy cases. As the Washington Post headlined March 10th, "Senate Delays Action on Bankruptcy: Bipartisan Amendment Would Limit Advice By Investment Banks." It reported, "Earlier yesterday, five other proposed changes to the bill were voted down. ... [Among the] amendments that were defeated, largely along party lines, [was one] would have given elderly people more protection to keep their homes during bankruptcy."
Passage of this bill, and its signing into law by President Bush, represented Republican victory at the end of a lengthy campaign by large banks against their non-wealthy customers. The final version of this bill passed the U.S. Senate on 10 March 2005, vote #44, at 6:12 PM, and 74 Senators voted for it, and only 25 voted against it -- all 25 were Democrats (see this record of the roll-call vote: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/109-2005/s44).
Each and every Republican in the U.S. Senate voted for it. The only Senator who avoided voting was the Wall Street Democrat Hillary Clinton, who was the only one of the 100 U.S. Senators shown as "Not Voting" on this legislation - so that it could pass but without her vote being recorded on it. Even the senior Senator from her own state of NY, Chuck Schumer, who was well known to support Wall Street on almost everything, voted "Nay" on this monstrosity against the middle class. There were 54 Republicans in the U.S. Senate, and 54 of them voted "Yea" on this. There were 45 Democrats: 19 were "Yea," 25 "Nay," and 1 "Not Voting." There was one Independent Senator (former Republican James Jeffords of Vermont): 1 "Yea." So, on this bill, which had 100% Republican support, and which was opposed by 25 of the 45 Democrats, or by 56% of the Democrats, Hillary was a no-show.
CONTINUED...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-zuesse/why-hillary-clinton-shoul_b_4293469.html
Take the Credit Card companies' influence on the Bankruptcy Bill of 2002
Why Hillary Clinton Should Not Be The Democratic Presidential NomineeEric Zuesse
Huffington Post, 11/18/2013
EXCERPT...
This is how anti-abortion murderers and CEO crooks finally secured all their sought-for exemptions from "bankruptcy reform," which offered only Republican "tough love" for the middle class and poor - and an outright kick in the teeth to people bankrupted by medical bills, by job loss, or by divorce, the three biggest causes of bankruptcies, which studies showed accounted for almost all filings. (In fact, nearly half of all personal bankruptcies were due simply to medical expenses; and because of this new law, most of those cases would henceforth produce something akin to slavery capping the patient's misery.) Still, a large share of the total dollars involved in bankruptcy cases were assets held by the very few super-rich going bankrupt, and the Republican "bankruptcy reform" protected those bankrupts, so that MBNA and the other banks which had pushed so hard for this legislation received only limited real benefit from it. Perhaps the executives of those banks, who were protecting themselves from risks they were imposing upon others, were even more concerned to protect themselves in the event that they might need bankruptcy protection themselves, than they were to enhance the bottom lines of the companies they managed. This was a failure of their fiduciary obligations.
SNIP...
On 30 September 2002, BusinessWeek reported (p. 112), concerning the new U.S. bankruptcy law that seemed about to be passed in a Republican Congress and supported by the Republican President, "The legislation is especially harsh on lower-income debtors."
The lobbyists who actually shape - if not write - the laws, are hired by the relatively few people who have the financial wherewithal to employ lobbyists' services. Those lobbyists are real soldiers in this authentic class war. And most of the other real soldiers consist of the think tanks (like the Heritage Foundation, and the American Enterprise Institute), and the numerous political action committees, that the conservative rich hire to indoctrinate, and to pump money into, the election campaigns of their supportive politicians.
For example, was it pure coincidence that the biggest single contributor, at $240,675, to the G.W. Bush 2000 Presidential campaign, was MBNA Corp., the bank that lobbied the hardest for this bankruptcy "reform" bill? (Enron gave Bush less in that campaign, but was his top career giver, because Enron had financed Bush's Texas rise.) Was it coincidence that, in addition, MBNA's CEO, Charles Cawley, personally raised $369,156 from others for Bush? Another MBNA executive, Lance Weaver, was also a Bush "Ranger," having raised over $200,000 for Bush. After all, Bush's Democratic predecessor, President Clinton, had vetoed similar Republican legislation. But, ironically, the corruptors ended up being defeated this time around, by their own internecine war on this matter: when big-business bucks went up against Religious-Right bucks and votes, the whole deal crumbled. It turned out that violent anti-abortion protesters were seeking a special exemption in the new bankruptcy bill, to protect their assets from bankruptcy seizure by their victims (such as by abortion-doctors they shoot), but the banks (allied with Democrats on this point) opposed such an exemption. The Religious Right, and big business, customary allies, split here, and so the entire bill bombed.
However, this legislation was revived after Republicans increased their majority in the Senate in 2004, and the biggest barrier to passage in its reincarnation consisted of some of the corrupt executives themselves, who were determined to shield their personal assets from possible civil suits by stockholders and by others, including corporate creditors. Thus, on 2 March 2005, The New York Times headlined "Proposed Law On Bankruptcy Has Loophole: Wealthy Could Shield Many Assets in Trusts." The main sponsor of this revived bill was, of course, a Republican senator, who claimed ignorance of that provision. How odd, then, that his bill would protect banks against only poor deadbeats, while letting the richest ones off. So, whom had these banks been lobbying so hard to protect themselves from? - it was from the kinds of people they never met and didn't want to meet: the middle class and poor. Bankers seemed far less interested in protecting their institutions against people such as themselves. After all, they're God's People; and, as for debtors who might have to lose their homes in order simply to pay catastrophic medical bills, or whatever - God is evidently not so fond of those people anyway. Thus, on 8 March 2005, the U.S. Senate voted 53 to 46 to defeat a proposed Democratic amendment which would have removed the bill's shield for anti-abortion murderers. Republican Senator Orrin Hatch called this amendment a "poison pill" aimed solely to protect deadbeats by blocking passage of "bankruptcy reform." The next day, another Democratic amendment aimed to preserve a longstanding bankruptcy provision, which even the SEC acknowledged to be necessary in order to prohibit corruption by investment banks in certain bankruptcy cases. As the Washington Post headlined March 10th, "Senate Delays Action on Bankruptcy: Bipartisan Amendment Would Limit Advice By Investment Banks." It reported, "Earlier yesterday, five other proposed changes to the bill were voted down. ... [Among the] amendments that were defeated, largely along party lines, [was one] would have given elderly people more protection to keep their homes during bankruptcy."
Passage of this bill, and its signing into law by President Bush, represented Republican victory at the end of a lengthy campaign by large banks against their non-wealthy customers. The final version of this bill passed the U.S. Senate on 10 March 2005, vote #44, at 6:12 PM, and 74 Senators voted for it, and only 25 voted against it -- all 25 were Democrats (see this record of the roll-call vote: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/109-2005/s44).
Each and every Republican in the U.S. Senate voted for it. The only Senator who avoided voting was the Wall Street Democrat Hillary Clinton, who was the only one of the 100 U.S. Senators shown as "Not Voting" on this legislation - so that it could pass but without her vote being recorded on it. Even the senior Senator from her own state of NY, Chuck Schumer, who was well known to support Wall Street on almost everything, voted "Nay" on this monstrosity against the middle class. There were 54 Republicans in the U.S. Senate, and 54 of them voted "Yea" on this. There were 45 Democrats: 19 were "Yea," 25 "Nay," and 1 "Not Voting." There was one Independent Senator (former Republican James Jeffords of Vermont): 1 "Yea." So, on this bill, which had 100% Republican support, and which was opposed by 25 of the 45 Democrats, or by 56% of the Democrats, Hillary was a no-show.
CONTINUED...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-zuesse/why-hillary-clinton-shoul_b_4293469.html
April 18, 2015
Stepping into the deepest, widest and stickiest Big Muddy anybody ever heard of.
U.S. Army Trainers Arrive in Ukraine
by Andrew Roth
The New York Times, APRIL 17, 2015
EXCERPT...
The White House rebuffed a request for weapons from President Petro O. Poroshenko of Ukraine in September, announcing an additional $53 million nonlethal aid program instead. Mr. Obama has signaled privately that he is reluctant to arm Ukraine despite increasing pressure from both parties in Congress.
Russian officials regularly blame the West for provoking the conflict in Ukraine, and in February, Mr. Putin said he had proof that the West was already providing weapons to Kiev. State and pro-Kremlin news networks have broadcast many lurid and dubious accounts of Western interference, including breathless stories of dark-skinned and English-speaking paramilitaries terrorizing local residents in eastern Ukraine.
In a statement, Maj. Jose Mendez, an operations officer for the 173rd Airborne, said the training would focus on “on war fighting functions, as well as training to sustain and increase the professionalism and proficiency of military staffs.”
Several dozen British soldiers began conducting military training last month, and Canada and Poland have pledged to send military trainers this year.
SOURCE: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/18/world/europe/us-army-trainers-arrive-in-ukraine.html?_r=0
President Obama's almost all alone on this. The Pukes and PNAC Dems are gung-ho for war. Putin says, "Bring 'em on."
Remember your Orwell: "WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH."
Remember who was left out of participating in the secret government shelter with Smirk and Sneer on September 11: Democrats. Do you honestly believe they'll hold the blast-proof 30-ton door open for you while the H-bombs are vaporizing the nation's cities?
U.S. Army Trainers Arrive in Ukraine
Stepping into the deepest, widest and stickiest Big Muddy anybody ever heard of.
U.S. Army Trainers Arrive in Ukraine
by Andrew Roth
The New York Times, APRIL 17, 2015
EXCERPT...
The White House rebuffed a request for weapons from President Petro O. Poroshenko of Ukraine in September, announcing an additional $53 million nonlethal aid program instead. Mr. Obama has signaled privately that he is reluctant to arm Ukraine despite increasing pressure from both parties in Congress.
Russian officials regularly blame the West for provoking the conflict in Ukraine, and in February, Mr. Putin said he had proof that the West was already providing weapons to Kiev. State and pro-Kremlin news networks have broadcast many lurid and dubious accounts of Western interference, including breathless stories of dark-skinned and English-speaking paramilitaries terrorizing local residents in eastern Ukraine.
In a statement, Maj. Jose Mendez, an operations officer for the 173rd Airborne, said the training would focus on “on war fighting functions, as well as training to sustain and increase the professionalism and proficiency of military staffs.”
Several dozen British soldiers began conducting military training last month, and Canada and Poland have pledged to send military trainers this year.
SOURCE: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/18/world/europe/us-army-trainers-arrive-in-ukraine.html?_r=0
President Obama's almost all alone on this. The Pukes and PNAC Dems are gung-ho for war. Putin says, "Bring 'em on."
Remember your Orwell: "WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH."
Remember who was left out of participating in the secret government shelter with Smirk and Sneer on September 11: Democrats. Do you honestly believe they'll hold the blast-proof 30-ton door open for you while the H-bombs are vaporizing the nation's cities?
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