There’s little doubt that if the Obama administration ever managed to bring NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden before a jury on American soil, the unfolding drama would quickly become the trial of the new century.
But despite all of its bluster, is the administration really eager and ready for such an undertaking? The answer, surprisingly, may be “no,” and for one simple reason—the trial of the century could also quickly devolve into the embarrassment of the century.
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.
The ‘mainstream media’ – that curious collection of elite-run, profit-maximising business interests sometimes known as ‘the free press’ – performs a similar perceptual trick. In reviewing comparable crimes by the West and its official enemies, it is able to flick between perceiving virtue in ‘our’ criminality where only wickedness is found in ‘theirs’. Indeed, though ‘our’ crimes may be as bad, as cynical, or worse, ‘their’ crimes are consistently perceived as being far uglier.
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.
[D]irect action, as Dr. King understood it and practiced it, meant bringing a social institution or the society itself locally to a halt, to make the system scream, just like its victims screamed, to bring contradictions to a head, so that everyone could see what the real problem was, that is, to confront authority. And that’s not understood in terms of what King’s legacy is.
Journalist Chris Hedges has written that the current liberal class is “expected to mask the brutality of imperial war and corporate malfeasance by deploring the most egregious excesses whiles studiously refusing to question the legitimacy of the power elite’s actions and structures. When dissidents step outside these boundaries, they become pariahs. Specific actions can be criticized, but motives, intentions, and the moral probity of the power elite cannot be questioned.”
I know that corporations are amoral, profit-driven entities that have no compunction about destroying the planet if they can make a quick buck first. I also know that our political systems have been almost entirely captured by these corporations.
As preliminary Iran Nuke deal is finalized and set to go into effect next Monday, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is pushing for Congress to pass new sanctions against Iran which would violate and likely nullify the historic agreement
The Metropolitan Police Service want their water cannon; they want it by this summer. Previously only employed on the streets of Northern Ireland, the introduction of water cannons is keenly supported by London Mayor, Boris Johnson, to apparently combat a repeat of the 2011 riots
Channel 4’s attempt to stereotype and demonise all of Britain’s 2.49 million unemployed by focussing on just 6 carefully chosen people and showing them in the worst possible light in their programme Benefits Street last night was so successful that Twitter exploded with threats of violence and even death against the participants
On the same day that the government announced it was scrapping the £180-million-a-year Social Fund for the destitute, a new survey showed that the big US internet companies operating in Britain have increased their UK sales last year by 18 per cent but paid even less tax to the Treasury than the year before.
On March 8, 1971, a group of eight Vietnam War protestors broke into a Federal Bureau of Investigation field office in Media, Pennsylvania and stole hundreds of government documents that shocked a nation.
The stolen memos, reports and internal correspondence provided the first tangible evidence that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was systematically targeting and harassing hundreds of American citizens then known collectively as “the New Left.”
