Category Archives: Bigotry

The Corporate Media’s Attempt to Kill the Occupy Movement

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. . . Since September, the mainstream press in the US has systematically ignored and demonized the Occupy movement. The nakedness of the class bias in this case, however, was especially jarring: the size and significance of the protests were downplayed, reports of police brutality were largely ignored, and the movement was portrayed as violent and dangerous. Many of the most prominent US news outlets, such as The New York Times, practically ignored the protests altogether. These shameful distortions by the corporate press display the function of the media as an organ of the rule of “the 1 percent,” and reveal how threatened elites are by organized, direct action and democratic participation.

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The Tea Party, a movement which serves rather than threatens corporate interests, has received front-page coverage in virtually all of the nation’s national newspapers for events that were smaller and less significant than this week’s May Day protests. Yet, a truly substantial social movement with genuine emancipatory potential and a broad base of support among Americans is largely considered un-newsworthy by the corporate press. When the demonstrations were covered, crude caricatures masquerading as objective news ruled the day.

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Howard Dean: Republicans ‘Don’t Like Latinos,’ Serve Only Their ‘Corporate Masters’ (VIDEOS)

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Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean (D) lit into the GOP Tuesday night, attacking what he described as the party’s willingness to abandon Latino voters and instead express concern only for corporate interests.

“[Republicans] don’t care what anybody says except for themselves and their corporate masters, like the Koch brothers. They have one master, and that’s money,” Dean told MSNBC’s Ed Schultz. “They don’t care about the average working American, all they care about is the corporations who are giving them all that money to put them into office. … So who are they going to serve?”

Continue reading and watch videos . . .

FFRF’s ‘Quit the Catholic Church’ ad in today’s Washington Post

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Click on image to enlarge.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation’s full-page ad, “It’s Time to Quit the Catholic Church,” runs in today’s Washington Post (A-5 Main), urging liberal and nominal Roman Catholics to “quit” their church over its war against contraception.

The provocative ad asks: “Will it be reproductive freedom, or back to the Dark Ages? Do you choose women and their rights, or Bishops and their wrongs?”

The ad is similar to the full-page ad that appeared in The New York Times in March, which is still creating shockwaves among conservative religionists. The Washington Post, unlike the Times, accepted FFRF’s punchy headline, “It’s Time to Quit the Catholic Church.”

Additionally, FFRF has placed the full-page ad with a splash of color on the back of the Washington Express, handed out for free to Metro riders and D.C. residents. Express distributors will be wearing the ad on their vests.

“It’s a disgrace that U.S. health care reform is being held hostage to your church’s irrational opposition to medically prescribed contraception,” the ad states. “No political candidate should have to genuflect before the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.”

Continue Reading . . .

Will a Militarized Police Force Facing Occupy Wall Street Lead to Another Kent State Massacre?

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[May 3d] is an ugly anniversary in American history: 42 years ago, National Guardsman opened fire on anti-Vietnam protesters at Ohio’s Kent State University, killing four students. Ten days later, Mississippi police fired on civil rights protesters taking refuge in a women’s dormitory at Jackson State University and killed two more students.

Four decades later, as police across the country deploy paramilitary tactics developed for fighting foreign terrorists on Occupy and some May Day protests, and as campus police ratchet up responses to tuition hike protests, we must ask, is this where things inevitably are headed—toward deadly confrontations between overly armed police and angered protesters, or just as likely, innocent bystanders caught in a crossfire?

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The Kent and Jackson State anniversaries underscore many questions. When and where will a fatal police overreaction take place? Who will be the victim? What will be the reaction, including from politicians who helped to unduly militarize the police? 

This scenario is not an accident waiting to happen. Police use undue force all the time, where the consequence is the armed police shooter kills an unarmed victim. It has happened many times in 2012, according to statistics compiled by the government, just not yet at an Occupy or student protest.

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Nuns on the Run: Why is the Vatican cracking down on dissident American nuns?

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Nuns aren’t what they used to be. Go to the website of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious [LCWR], an umbrella organisation that represents around 80 per cent of American convents and religious sisterhoods, and there isn’t a wimple or a rosary in sight. Instead you’ll find a group of women who could be members of the WI [Women’s Institute]: greying, wearing sensible sweaters, full of purpose.

Probe further and you may detect a whiff of New Agery along with the calls to social activism. The organisation hosts conferences with titles like “Women of spirit: creating in chaos”, “Embracing the dream” and “Religious life on the edge of tomorrow”. “We welcome new ideas and new ways of living religious life into the future,” proclaims the LCWR mission statement.

A section entitled “Resolutions to Action” gives some insight into where they think their priorities lie. The latest is entitled “We are the 99 per cent — the Occupy Movement”. The one before that proclaims “Economic Justice Advocacy Critically Needed.” There are calls to reduce the world’s carbon footprint and to eliminate global hunger. One is highly critical of WalMart. There’s a resolution calling for an end to capital punishment in the USA , but you look in vain for the kind of campaigns most closely associated with organised Catholicism; against abortion, contraception or gay marriage.

While no-one would claim that campaigns against global poverty are contrary to Catholic teaching — Pope Benedict’s major encyclical Caritas in Veritate was after all devoted to the subject — the LCWR’s emphasis stands in stark contrast to that of the male church leadership in the United States, currently waging war on the Obama administration’s contraception mandate in the name of religious freedom.

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Noam Chomsky: U.S. and Europe ‘committing suicide in different ways’ (VIDEO)

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In an interview with GritTV’s Laura Flanders, author and MIT professor Noam Chomsky discussed the potentially bleak future facing both the United States and the European Union. Both, he said, are facing historic crises and are going about trying to resolve them in exactly the wrong ways.

According to Chomsky, we are currently living in a period of “pretty close to global stagnation” but that the world’s great powers are reacting to the lack of growth in exactly the wrong manner. “The United States and Europe are committing suicide in different ways, but both doing it.”

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It’s also a mistake, he said, to treat the Republican Party as a genuine political party rather than the “lock-step” policy arm of the superrich. Of course, the wealthy can’t sell the idea of a plutocracy to the population outright, so they mobilize the socially conservative base by stoking the so-called “culture wars.”

Chomsky has a new book, Occupy, about the Occupy Wall Street movement, what it says about society and humanity’s way forward through this time of economic and social stagnation. He calls OWS “the first major public response to 30 years of class war” and believes that the movement’s greatest success has been the introduction of the inequalities of everyday life into the public dialogue.

The nearly half-hour discussion ranges over a number of topics, but keeps coming back again and again to the importance of individual engagement in society and the political system, and the power of Occupy as a force for social and political change.

Watch the full interview here . . .

Fascist America: Have We Finally Turned The Corner?

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The author offers one of her periodic assessments of America’s potential to go fascist. And the news is better than it’s been in years.

Political Research Associates estimates that, at any given time in our history, roughly 10-12 percent of the country’s population has been bred-in-the-bone right-wing authoritarians — the people who are hard-wired to think in terms of fascist control and order. Our latter-day Christian Dominionists, sexual fundamentalists and white nationalists are the descendants — sometimes, the literal blood descendants — of the same people who joined the KKK in the 1920s, followed Father Coughlin in the 1930s, backed Joe McCarthy in the early ’50s, joined the John Birch society in the ’60s, and signed up for the Moral Majority in the 1970s and the Christian Coalition in the 1990s.

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The conservatives know that the demographic trends are not on their side, and that whatever limited advantages they enjoy now are receding with every election cycle that passes. Right-wing America is old, white, rural, and religious — a cohort that’s shrinking with every passing year, and is even now in the process of being swamped by a tide of voters who are younger, urban, ethnically diverse, and largely non-churchgoing.

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