PROGRESSIVE INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM: “We Should End Our War on Drugs Like Portugal Did” ☮
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Category Archives: Politics
PROGRESSIVE INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM: “AG Nominee Jeff Sessions: An Old-fashioned Southern Racist” / The Ring of Fire / Sam Seder, and Heather ‘Digby’ Parton ☮
Heather ‘Digby’ Parton joins Ring of Fire’s Sam Seder to talk about the nomination for US Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his hostile background towards voting rights; mainly those of African-Americans.
PROGRESSIVE INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM: “Jeff Sessions Testifying Before the Senate Judiciary Committee ” / HuffPost Politics ☮
It wasn’t pretty.
PROGRESSIVE INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM: “When Fear Comes” / truthdig / Chris Hedges / 01.08.2017 ☮
Alexander Solzhenitsyn in “The Gulag Archipelago,” his profound meditation on the nature of oppression and resistance in the Soviet gulags, tells the story of a man who was among prisoners being moved in the spring of 1947. The former front-line soldier, whose name is lost to history, suddenly disarmed and killed the two guards. He announced to his fellow prisoners that they were free.
“But the prisoners were overwhelmed with horror; no one followed his lead, and they all sat down right there and waited for a new convoy,” Solzhenitsyn writes. The prisoner attempted in vain to shame them. “And then he took up the rifles (thirty-two cartridges, ‘thirty one for them!’) and left alone. He killed and wounded several pursuers and with his thirty-second cartridge he shot himself. The entire Archipelago might well have collapsed if all the former front-liners had behaved as he did.”
The more despotic a regime becomes, the more it creates a climate of fear that transforms into terror. At the same time, it invests tremendous energy and resources in censorship and propaganda to maintain the fiction of the just and free state.
Poor people of color know intimately how these twin mechanisms of fear and false hope function as effective forms of social control in the internal colonies of the United States. They have also grasped, as the rest of us soon will, the fiction of American democracy.
PROGRESSIVE INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM: “New Year: New Pie?” / Jonathan Pie ☮
Pie vows to stop swearing and start listening.
PROGRESSIVE INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM: “Strategies of Resistance with Michael Gecan” / RT America / On Contact with Chris Hedges ☮
On this week’s episode of On Contact, Chris Hedges discusses strategies of resistance with Michael Gecan, author of “Going Public: An Organizer’s Guide to Citizen Action”. RT Correspondent reports on the godfather of community organizing, Saul Alinsky.
POLITICAL COMMENTARY: “Thanks Obama ” / Liberal Redneck / Comedian, Trae Crowder ☮
I hit the porch one last time (THIS porch; I ain’t quittin, just movin) to pour one out (into my mouth) for the best president to ever shit between two Jordans.
CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIAN BIGOTRY: “Ellen Cancels Famous Gospel Singer After Anti-Gay Comments” / The Young Turks / Cenk Uygur, and Ana Kasparian ☮
Ellen DeGeneres has decided to rescind a show invitation to famous gospel singer Kim Burrell after a video of Burrell saying homophobic things was released online. Ana Kasparian and Cenk Uygur discuss Kim Burrell’s bigoted comments and Ellen’s response.
PROGRESSIVE INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM: “The Impact of Noise Pollution on Your Health” / The Young Turks / Cenk Uygur, and Ana Kasparian ☮
What type of impact does noise pollution have on your health and well-being? Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian of The Young Turks discuss the impact of unwanted sound on your health. Read more here: http://www.motherjones.com/environmen…
“If you’re a tree frog or an ovenbird in mating season and you happen to live in the 83 percent of the continental United States that lies within 3,500 feet of a road, bummer for you. Not only are you more likely to collide with an SUV, but you’re going to have a harder time finding a mate. Research suggests that human-generated noises also mess with nesting behavior, predator-prey dynamics, and sleep patterns. In other words, wildlife gets stressed out by noise.
So do we, it turns out—and the world is getting louder. Scientists define “noise” as unwanted sound, and the level of background din from human activities has been doubling roughly every three decades, beating population growth. Road traffic in the United States has tripled over the last 30 years. By 2032, the number of passenger flights is expected to be nearly double the 2011 figure—at peak hours, planes are even audible overhead 70 percent of the time in the remote backcountry of Yosemite National Park. And while that’s obviously a nuisance for animals and visitors seeking a restorative experience, this growing anthropophony (a fancy word for the human soundscape) is also contributing to stress-related diseases and early death, especially in and around cities.”
PROGRESSIVE INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM: “Defying Donald Trump’s Kleptocracy” / truthdig / Chris Hedges / 01.01.2017 ☮
President-elect Donald Trump, left, applauds as his pick for Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, right, speaks during a rally at DeltaPlex Arena, Friday, Dec. 9, 2016, in Grand Rapids, Mich. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
The final stages of capitalism, Karl Marx predicted, would be marked by global capital being unable to expand and generate profits at former levels. Capitalists would begin to consume the government along with the physical and social structures that sustained them. Democracy, social welfare, electoral participation, the common good and investment in public transportation, roads, bridges, utilities, industry, education, ecosystem protection and health care would be sacrificed to feed the mania for short-term profit. These assaults would destroy the host. This is the stage of late capitalism that Donald Trump represents.
Trump plans to oversee the last great campaign of corporate pillaging of America. It will be as crass and brazen as the fleecing of the desperate people, hoping for a miracle in the face of dead-end jobs and ruinous personal debt, who visited his casinos or shelled out thousands of dollars for the sham of Trump University. He will attempt to unleash a kleptocracy—the word comes from the Greek klépto, meaning thieves, and kratos, meaning rule, so it is literally “rule by thieves”—one that will rival the kleptocracies carried out by Suharto in Indonesia and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. It is not that Trump and his family will use the influence of government to increase their wealth, although this will certainly take place on a massive scale; it is that hundreds of billions of federal dollars will be diverted into the hands of cronies, sleazy bankers, unethical financial firms and scabrous hedge fund managers. The pillars of the liberal state will be obliterated.
Always Question Authority 