We too are powerless. We have undergone a corporate coup d’état in slow motion. It is over. They have won. If we want to wrest power back, to make the consent of the governed more than an empty cliché, we will have to mobilize, to carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience to overthrow—let me repeat that word for the members of Homeland Security who may be visiting us this afternoon—overthrow the corporate state. And maybe, once we have freed ourselves, we can free the people of Gaza.
For the past month, the news in Israel/Palestine has been filled with reports of more and more people killed, the vast majority of them Palestinians. As much of Israeli society is swept up in the fever of the most recent war on Gaza, there are those voices that refuse to accept a present, or future, filled with violence, occupation, fear and hostility. One of those voices belongs to Udi Segal, a 19-year-old Israeli from Kibbutz Tuval, who was sent to jail on Monday for refusing to enlist in the Israeli military.
Over the weekend, the British media was awash with the blood-splattered Tony Blair’s self-serving attempts to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. The coverage was sparked by a new essay in which Blair claimed that the chaos in Iraq was the ‘predictable and malign effect’ of the West having ‘watched Syria descend into the abyss’ without bombing Assad. Blair advocated yet more Western violence, more bombing
The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia three years to the date of Mr. McGovern’s brutal and false arrest at GWU during a speech of then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. After the arrest, the PCJF uncovered that then 71-year-old McGovern was put on a “Be On the Look-Out” list, and agents were instructed to stop and question him on sight. The reasons cited included his “political activism, primarily anti-war” — a clearly unconstitutional order.
Hicks was about ideas. When he railed about television as a soporific drug to lull the populace into a state of complacency and consumerism, or the Rodney King trial, or his more psychedelically inspired visions of a universe of vibrations, he was selling an agenda. He was punching at the establishment and the status quo and his stand-up was a statement saying our world can be better if we start thinking and questioning it.
Each member state of the coalition has its own interest in this [Syrian] war and believes it can be satisfied, even though these interests are sometimes contradictory.
But the most important issues are economic: huge reserves of natural gas have been discovered in the south-eastern Mediterranean. The center of this deposit is near Homs in Syria (more precisely, at Qara).
Who commemorates the outbreak of war instead of the arrival of peace? Who would want to have parades and celebrations to remember 1914 instead of 1918?
Gove does. Cameron does. But the people of 1918 did not.
Clapper and many others who have come out of the military discern no difference between terrorists and reporters, and by reporters I am not referring to the boot-licking courtiers on television and in Washington who masquerade as reporters. Carry out an interview with a member of al-Qaida, as I have, and you become in the eyes of generals like Clapper a member of al-Qaida. Most generals I know recognize no need for an independent press. The munchkins who dutifully sit through their press briefings or follow them around in preapproved press pools and publish their lies are the generals’ idea of journalism.
I believe that the architects of the plan (Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and others) were so sure that the anti-Muslim, anti-Mid-east feelings among Americans brought on by media lies over the past 25 years would allow them to get away with almost anything. If they created a big enough lie they could get the American people to “go along” with their plan.
There was a time before the NSA was able secretly to collect personal data about us all, all the time. There was a time when it was much harder for our governments to know what we were up to. There was a time when they struggled to control the flow of information.
2013 was not a good year for the pro-war lobby in the West, but in America, those in favor of military interventions are looking to make it easier for the president to formally declare war.
Inequality permeates the social system, taking multiple forms, themselves integrated, because the essential capital-accumulation process requires invidious distinctions, actualized in terms of power arrangements, across the board. Savaging the social safety net, cushioning the profits of JPMorgan Chase, targeted assassination in Yemen, a resurgence of racism, anti-immigrant feeling, gender discrimination in all its phases, a half-trillion dollar military budget in the next go-around, all of these form constituents—along with much else—in the systemic organization of inequality.
