Media critiques dept.—

The video on this page offers a textbook example of how far establishment liberals and especially Democratic party apparatchiks are likely to go to defend the status quo. The subject is a tete a tete between MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, one of the wiliest operators at MSNBC, and Glenn Greenwald on the question of NSA’s unwarranted surveillance powers. What makes this video different is that the exchange is analyzed, almost blow-by-blow, by a team of libertarians affiliated with the School Sucks Project, an initiative we are neither implicitly endorsing nor disavowing at this time, as we need more information to take an educated position. As our audience knows, we don’t often use libertarian materials on this site. Fact is, we have little patience with most libertarians’ ahistorical, knee-jerk defense of savage laissez-faire capitalism. But fairness at this extreme hour requires us to say this: while centrist liberals and Democrats have proved once more pathetically useless in standing up for the rights of the masses against the government’s creeping intrusions, and failed to criticize Obama’s escalation of the war in Syria (some, not content with standing silent, like abject Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) have actually joined the Snowden backlash), prominent libertarians like Ron Paul have held true to their antiwar stance, stepping up to denounce the sinister doings of the national security state. There’s a lesson here somewhere, but I’ll delay comment on that. Meantime, tell us what you think. —P. Greanville

By Joe Giambrone, politicalfilmblog

“I know everything that is said and done.  And thought!”-Emperor Tiberius, Caligula (1979)

Edward Snowden (2013)

The genius of the American political system is that each administration is significantly worse than the one that preceded it.  The effect is historical revisionism in the public mind.  Nixon looks downright cuddly next to the abuses of Cheney/Rummy/Bush and company.  Now Bush Jr. is starting to look like a civil libertarian when compared to the current Snoopmeister In Chief.  As we plummet toward official Satanism, with a state unrecognizable and patently evil at its core, we can at least cling to the notion that things weren’t as bad as now in some past golden age.  Then we can look around and fight amongst each other, assigning blame to the nearest uninformed yahoo, rather than to the high priests of human sacrifice and global misery and destruction.

We now have an utterly exposed fraud of a system unrecognizable as a democracy, but clearly within parameters of what George Orwell conjured up and Hitler before him.

A series of disclosures comes regularly from defective cogs, little technocratic machine parts, which no longer spin as directed.  Edward Snowden’s classified leaks are the icing on top of a shit pile so towering as to be visible from orbit.  As Snowden warned, “the greatest danger to our freedom and way of life comes from the reasonable fear of omniscient State powers kept in check by nothing more than policy documents.”

That is the modus operandi.  Secret memos have replaced debate, law and Constitutionality.

“If I wanted to see your e-mails or your wife’s phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your e-mails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.”

–Whistleblower Edward Snowden

Snowden, a private contractor, a computer systems “analyst” at Booz, Allen and Hamilton, is recently out of a job.  But that doesn’t seem to have stopped his employer from rolling forward with the mission, no matter what that mission actually entails.  Buzzfeed reports that Snowden’s old job is open for candidates to apply.  So if you’re a hacker with questionable morals and scruples, you are encouraged to take the keys to the kingdom.  There you will be able to “wiretap anyone, from YOU or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president…”

Someone, somewhere in a uniform adorned with various gaudy medals, might ask why some off-the-street computer punk could get hired to wiretap his entire life, and with what oversight or legality?  If said punk decides to wiretap high-ranking military officers, what then?  And the President of the United States?  And federal judges?  What sort of Frankenstein’s worst nightmare has the National Security Agency concocted over there, and in what possible ways do such gaping security holes constitute “national security?”  This is quite the opposite, in fact, a national insecurity on a scale unprecedented in all of human history.

Thanks for letting us know, Snowden, but, you’re still enemy number one to be silenced.  Like Manning, and Assange, Kiriakou, Binney and Sibel Edmonds.  You’re not supposed to tell the public. You see, the US government considers the public a hostile force to be propagandized, controlled, manipulated, kept ignorant, persuaded, sold, taxed, recruited or locked up.  This is the triumph of “western democracy.”

Not a lot is new here, but the naked illegitimacy of the office of the president is a welcome development indeed.  As the buck stops in the Oval Office, perhaps we can begin there with handcuffs and actual warrants for arrest that respect the 4^th, 5^th and 6^th Amendment rights of Mr. Obama and company.

“I am not a crook!” said a former crook.  But today, the very notion that the president is a crook has been defined out of existence as a “conspiracy theory” the wild, insane ravings of the lizard cult people awaiting the mother ship.  For it is quite impossible for the president, or anyone else in government, to conspire to break the law.  Such a thing goes against the divine.  A religious aura surrounds the hallowed grounds of the White House, a place so sacred as to be beyond the worldly temptations of normal mortals.

As no US government official is currently capable of breaking the law, the tin foil adorned crowd must simply be shunned and silenced, ridiculed into irrelevance.  Impeachment is another quaint anachronism.  After all, there was no blowjob.  No one lied about semen.  Bodily fluids were not spilled.

This is simply a policy disagreement.  Policy is, in the end, whatever the government decides to have typed up in a memo.  This memo’s relevance to the law and to the rights of the citizens has been engineered completely into irrelevance.  Memo trumps Constitution.  Ask Diane Feinsetin.  They have a “program” and the program is approved by them – so what’s the problem?

The lunatic conspiracist and enemy of the state Edward Snowden claims, “The government has granted itself power it is not entitled to. There is no public oversight. The result is people like myself have the latitude to go further than they are allowed to.”

Well what does he know, really?

“…I can’t in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.”

-Edward Snowden

Senator Mike Rogers disagrees.  End of story.  End of investigation – of the NSA – not of Snowden of course.

Can some rogue leaker take down the illegitimate surveillance state?  Doubtful.  Have the people awoken?  Remains to be seen.

Can they do anything about it?  Will they?  Will they be asleep again by Sweeps Week?

“A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.”

– Edward R. Murrow

Let me ask you, couch potato man, how many more Edward Snowdens will throw away their careers, their life savings and flee for the rest of their lives in order to save your sorry freedom that you don’t even value yourself?  Why should they?  Are you worth it?  Are you even on the right side of history? Ignorance, in the hyper-information age, is rather pathetic, don’t you think?

The world of knowledge is at everyone’s fingertips, often 24/7, and yet they actively choose to know very little.  They wallow in trivialities and banalities choosing ignorance 9 times out of 10.  How long can such a people remain free?

Should they?

“I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under.”

-Edward Snowden

Beer, Breasts and Cat Videos, that new reality show debuts at 9pm.

Joe Giambrone publishes Politcal Film Blog (@polfilmblog), and he dares anyone to try this Hell of a Deal.

By Phil Rockstroh

Throughout the course of human affairs, scheming elitists — let’s call them the Plundering Class — have devoted their days conceiving strategies and executing agendas that serve to enrich the fortunes of a ruthless few (namely themselves) by an exploitation of the harried and hapless multitudes. They scheme, hire silver tongued flacks and muster soldiers to do their biding, while, all too often, the rest of us squander the fleeting days of our finite lives in their service. They plot while we hope. They hoard the bounty of the world while we hoard resentments (generally misplaced upon those equally as power-bereft as we are). 

“The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.” — Ernest Hemingway

Yet we vulnerable nobodies are free to lie the truth, while self-impressed schemers merely lie. We can live artfully, while they have enclosed themselves in prisons of artifice.

[pullquote] Sometimes, in art, one must lie — create artifice — to trudge in the direction of truth. Yet when governments lie, and those lies, in time, are regarded as historical fact, the lies may become fixed in place, as obdurate as marble monuments, in the collective mind of the populace, even as the culture that was created by those lies comes apart by the wisdom-bereft actions of an ignorant public. [/pullquote]

They wage wars of choice to gain power, acquire plunder, and leave a wasteland of rubble and ashes in their wake. They pursue economic agendas that exploit the things of the world (and that includes rendering the inner landscapes of all concerned a psychical wasteland…and, yes, that includes their own). This is the meaning of the overused (yet terrifying in its implications) term…losing one’s soul i.e., the dismal state of affairs of having a soulless agenda — but not a life. The soul — being an ever persisting, always dying multiverse of living images — cannot be reduced to a PowerPoint presentation. You cannot conceive and execute a scheme that will suffuse the hours of your life with resonance, depth and meaning, but you can scheme (as is the mode of mind and the modus operandi of the Plundering Class) your way into creating a hell on earth. In this way, the elites of our soul-decimated age have been successful beyond their most self-deceiving expectations.

Is not the relentless shallowness of the corporate/consumer culture a type of a lie — and a pernicious one at that? Not even taking into account the effects of being plied and pummeled by the relentless legerdemain of a nearly all-enveloping commercial media, a stultifying social milieu has evolved in which the individual is coerced, by means, both overt and subliminal, to construct a false self, a cipher persona, in order to adapt to the demeaning demands of corporate authoritarianism.

A tyranny of the reasonable is in place under corporate hegemony, in which the unique and unruly nature of human character is deemed inappropriate to a workplace environment — an outright affront to the “team player” esprit de corps of the corporate state. Thus, those adapted to embodying the lie inherent to living a superficial life are considered a company asset (until, of course, perennial rounds of downsizing begin) while truth-tellers carry qualities of the chronically unemployable, and whistleblowers become objects for federal prosecution.

Yet, there is a place, an indomitable domain within you that allows you to live with truth…that allows you to live so deeply within your authentic nature that you can live beyond yourself. Finding this place is crucial: For if you cannot bear what is true (often uncomfortably so) about yourself, it is impossible to discern the true nature of others.

Consequently, life is reduced to a series of provisional deceits. The ability to love becomes atrophied. The world becomes a prison constructed of petrified longing and misapplied aggression. One falls easy prey to peddlers of false hope and propagandists who promote wars based on lies.

In contrast, it is essential to maintain a sanctuary within where shame cannot trespass — where your luminous (but inhuman) daimon is allowed rendezvous with transitory, mortal longing — where the daimon’s outrageous demands cross-pollinate with grim, earth-shackled realities, thus allowing for not only the bloom of radiant possibility but the ability to apprehend a self-serving lie and nip it in the bud.

This is the place where love is born and abides. It stands before us, every moment of every passing hour. It takes an acquired, all too common myopia, to lose sight of it.

Not all truths are created equal. At times, true statements can be launched with malevolent intent. Such declarations of fact should be avoided for the sake of all concerned (e.g., “Your child was served with a large dollop of the ugly gene distributed so generously in your family”). In contrast, calling out an insidious lie told in the pursuit of a selfish agenda serves the benefit of all, but the promulgator of the self-serving fiction (e.g., a lie such as: “Evidence indicates that the despotic ruler of (fill in the blank of a resource rich or strategically located nation) has become a threat to life and to the liberty of the world at large; therefore, we have no choice but to invade with the full force of our military might and establish the democracy that decent people everywhere yearn for”). The same applies to convictions borne of convenient self-deception (e.g., “I support the troops deployed in the aforementioned invasion…or else people might accuse me of supporting the terrorists”).

For an individual, by far, the biggest danger in trafficking in transactional lies arises from losing awareness of the demarcation point between where the lie starts and you begin — your existence reduced to a fixed smile (and a clutch of hidden resentments) that announces the presence of a counterfeit life. By losing the recognition that you are lying, your life becomes a lie. 

Often, a comforting lie can be as insidious as an outright prevarication. Building a worldview based on comforting lies translates into a habitual muting of the senses — a white noise of the mind takes hold drowning out the unique music that forms the core of one’s consciousness…obliterating, the quality Kabir averred is: “The flute of interior time [that] is played whether we hear it or not. What we know as ‘love’ is its sound coming in.”

“Where else,” the poet asks, “have you heard a sound like this?”

Sometimes, in art, one must lie — create artifice — to trudge in the direction of truth. Yet when governments lie, and those lies, in time, are regarded as historical fact, the lies may become fixed in place, as obdurate as marble monuments, in the collective mind of the populace, even as the culture that was created by those lies comes apart by the wisdom-bereft actions of an ignorant public.

Through it all — and despite the efforts of even the most relentless prevaricators — the mysterious nature of life – its unfathomable vastness, its endless intricacies, ambiguities, gradations of truths and variability of outcomes — provides life with a redemptive quality. The phenomenon allows us, although not often enough, to avoid the hubris of claiming we are privy to all-encompassing, monolithic truth, for, as history reveals, that way lies oppression, stagnation of imagination, murder and madness.

Few things mitigate a compulsion to lie as does admitting bafflement and committing to a sustained attempt to learn to live within the unfolding mystery inherent to earthly life. Said mode of being should not be confused with the unfortunate fate of drifting through life as a wishy-washy cipher. Conversely, the approach allows one to remain open to, thus be enriched by, a wide range of life-enhancing, certainty-shattering, wisdom-garnering experiences.

Moreover, a tenacious angel resides in states of absence. To remain connected to the heart of existence, we must continue to love those things that have been irretrievably lost to us. Accepting one will never be privy to omniscience allows seeds of possibility to take root in the cracks and fissures of the soul that have been wrought by heartbreak.

Antithetical to the overreach of empire and the dynamic of addiction inherent to the consumer state, limits allow us to love the things of the world that stand before us. A kind of deliverance is achieved by arriving at the demarcation point yawning between What Is Gone Forever and Things That Can Never Be. This is one of the locations of the soul where grace approaches us — a junction where we have been waylaid by circumstance and pierced by grief.

Consequently, we are held in place long enough to not habitually rush past beauty.

The individual who finds an implicate order within — who keeps hold of the golden thread of his true nature as he wends through the baffling labyrinth of social convention and official deceit — will make an ally of fate. His true name will be emblazoned upon his heart and will ring across the devouring abyss of a conformist age.

In bleak contrast, how can a people whose consciousness and concomitant mode of being was forged in a furnace of cultural perfidy be capable of building anything of enduring worth? The facile fades, even as the lie that gave rise to millions of deceitful heirs lives on (e.g., The citizenry of the U.S. who have shunted from consciousness and expunged from memory, the millions of slaughtered human beings (from Central America to Central Asia, from Southeast Asia to the Persian Gulf) resultant from the imperial ambitions of the nation’s ruling elites).

We claim we know who we are. We believe the fictions we spin regarding our identity and our interactions with the world. But, to a large degree, we are composed of the very things we are unaware of about ourselves — the things that we find too uncomfortable to admit inform our actions and form the foundation of our fate.

Propagandists, corporate and political, know this: They know how to manipulate those resistant to self-awareness, by plying them with flattering lies and pummeling them with contrived fears. These overpaid, professional liars know how to trap us in cages constructed of our cherished convictions. This is why, as a general rule, human beings prove so easy to control.

If you find what you have been habitually avoiding, you might blunder upon who you are.

Antithetical to the process of self-awareness: The quintessence of duplicity we know as corporate man is not interested in connection nor exploration; he craves control. He is not moved by mystery; he has an agenda. He does not know life; he possesses a facile contrivance of being.

But the currents of time will erode his counterfeit world. He will be left with nothing, because, in the long run, he will only possess his own emptiness.

Yet, you cannot force truth upon the deceived. If a deluded soul is fortunate enough to stumble upon it, he will have found it beneath the rubble of his collapsed convictions. His most treasured, now shattered, verities will glint like shards in moonlight, as irascible circumstance has forced him to question all he insisted was true.

This is the means by which wars are avoided. Here is located the point of departure where a subversion of a corrupt order begins.

Phil Rockstroh is a poet and political observer living in New York City. 

Exposing the faux left in Europe

By Johannes Stern, wsws.org

The “Marx Is Muss” [“Marx is a must”] congress taking place this weekend in Berlin is a shabby operation organised by the Marx 21 group aimed at promoting right-wing and imperialist policy under a pseudo-left garb. Marx 21 is a faction inside the German Left Party, with links to the International Socialist Tendency.

The congress is one of a number of well-organized and well-financed events that enable bourgeois politicians, young careerists and academic cynics to “network” and prepare their next political manoeuvres. These forces have nothing in common with genuine socialist politics and the political and social struggles of the working class.

A central focus of the congress is to mobilize support for the Left Party, and a Social Democratic Party (SPD)-Left Party-Green coalition government following the German parliamentary elections due in September. One discussion at the congress is entitled “Red-Red-Green—A vision for change?”

One of the main speakers at the gathering this weekend is Left Party chairman Bernd Riexinger, who has in advance of the election declared his readiness to back the SDP candidate for chancellor, Peer Steinbrück. Another attendee is Tom Strohschneider, editor of the Left Party’s journal Neues Deutschland, which regularly promotes so-called red-red-green alliances.

That Marx 21 is even prepared to discuss the possibility of a SPD-Left Party-Green government reveals its anti-working class character.

Such a government would not pose a “left” alternative to the current conservative government under Angela Merkel. Rather it would continue and intensify the attacks on the European and German working class.

When the SPD and Greens criticise the Merkel government they do so largely from the right. In regard to foreign policy, these parties criticise Merkel for not taking part in the imperialist war against Libya and complain she has not done enough to support the preparations for war against Syria. At home, they complain that the government demands massive cuts in Europe while not doing enough to impose austerity measures in Germany.

The agenda for the congress makes clear that Marx 21 would actively support a red-red-green government precisely because of its right-wing policies.

The main speaker at a panel dedicated to the “debt ceiling” is Axel Troost, the financial expert of the Left Party. Troost is an outspoken advocate of the debt ceiling, which is one of the primary means of implementing social cuts, layoffs and privatisations in German federal, state and local administrations. Troost has described the recent approval of the debt ceiling by the Left Party in the state of Saxony as a “practical success” and “great progress”.

The conference participants will consider political and economic perspectives aimed at impoverishing the working class in Germany and throughout Europe. One meeting called “Does the left advocate the salvation of Europe?” deals with the dispute currently raging in the Left Party and its European allies as to whether the euro should be preserved or replaced by the old national currencies. From the standpoint of the working class, both variants would have devastating consequences and mean the continuation of austerity, merely through the medium of different currencies.

The overtly right-wing character of the congress is reflected in its support for imperialist intervention in Syria. Marx 21 is one of the most vocal supporters of the aggression organised by the great powers to topple the Assad regime and of preparations for war against Iran.

Coinciding with the Israeli bombing of Syrian territory and the stepping up of preparations by the US and the other powers for military invasion, Marx 21 is intensifying its propaganda for war.

At the Berlin congress this weekend, Marx 21 member Frank Renken is due to discuss the “progressive nature” of the Syrian opposition. By concealing the real character of the Syrian rebels, consisting mainly of Islamist extremist terrorists, Marx 21 is helping to mobilize support for the rape of Syria. The financing and arming of the Syrian rebels by the US and reactionary Gulf monarchies do not go far enough for Renken. In a recent article, he lamented that “the rebels do not have tanks, helicopters or aircraft” and had received “very few portable infrared-guided anti-aircraft missiles”.

The list of international invitees at the congress also provides a glimpse into its class character. Alex Callinicos, professor of European Studies at King’s College London and a leading theorist of the International Socialist Tendency, personifies the transformation of former petty bourgeois radicals into stalwarts of imperialism.

Callinicos and his co-thinkers, in response to the revolutionary mass struggles in Egypt and Tunisia in early 2011, initially gave their support to the Egyptian military and the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, which then suppressed the working class. He is on record attacking opponents of a war against Syria for displaying “reflexive and unthinking anti-imperialism”.

Other speakers come from Greece’s Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA), which plays a key role in the massive social attacks being imposed on the Greek working class. In common with Germany’s Left Party, SYRIZA defends the European Union and the trade unions, which are decisive instruments of social counterrevolution in Europe.

Based on its hypocritical and shallow criticism of austerity measures, SYRIZA has emerged as the party with the second-highest level of electoral support in Greece. The organisation has used its increased influence to suppress any independent movement of the working class and reassure international investors that Greece would repay its sovereign debt.

SYRIZA, Marx 21 and the Left Party speak for affluent and complacent middle class layers who are moving sharply to the right as the crisis of capitalism escalates. Rather than regarding the offensive launched by big finance to wipe out social gains as an opportunity to fight for socialism, these elements regard the crisis of capitalism as an occasion to advance their own careers as bourgeois politicians. They expect to be handsomely rewarded for their increasingly open support for imperialist war and attacks on the working class.

Leading representatives of Marx 21 such as Christine Buchholz and Nicole Gohlke hold seats in the Bundestag [German parliament] for the Left Party and enjoy the high salaries paid to parliamentary deputies. The German bourgeoisie is well aware of and acknowledges the services of such petty bourgeois ex-radicals. Notably, Buchholz is a member of the Bundestag’s Defence Committee. Not only is she well informed about Germany’s military-strategic planning, she has taken an active part in its development since joining the committee in 2007.

The class divide separating the well-heeled middle class from workers is also expressed in a theoretical rejection of Marxism. On its congress web site, Marx 21 contemptuously declares that “Marxism must not just consist of Marx, Engels and Lenin”, but that “revolutionary Marxists can also learn from the ideas of [Jean-Paul] Sartre, [Hannah] Arendt and other radical thinkers”.

Pseudo-left tendencies such as Marx 21 have now moved so far to the right they no longer conceal their hostility to the working class behind empty, pseudo-socialist phrases. They openly embrace philosophies and concepts such as Sartre’s existentialism and Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism, which reject Marxism and the independent and revolutionary role of the working class.

Workers seeking to oppose the relentless attacks on their living standards and the threat of new imperialist war must treat the politics and philosophy of Marx 21 with contempt. The education of a new generation of revolutionary Marxists requires a relentless struggle against the type of politics and philosophy advanced at this weekend’s congress.