VAW’s Ron Kovic’s antiwar speech (March 19, 2011)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQ–vZxOqu8[/youtube]
RON KOVIC interview (Vietnam Vets Against the War)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJjj-mDsGo4[/youtube]
The plague of positive think, corporatethink for fools
Barbara Ehrenreich: The Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
By Emily Wilson, AlterNet
Posted on October 10, 2009, Printed on March 7, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/143187/
© 2011 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
Ehrenreich: Give me reality any day.
Ehrenreich, the author of 16 books, including Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch, which examine the blue- and white-collar job markets, took on what she sees as an epidemic of positive thinking in her new book: Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.
Ehrenreich believes this has permeated our culture and that the refusal to acknowledge that bad things could happen is in some way responsible for the current financial crisis.
Emily Wilson: At the beginning of the book, you talk about going to be treated for breast cancer and being told to think positively. Was that what started you thinking about this?
Barbara Ehrenreich: That was my first exposure to positive thinking as an ideology. I was just astounded and dismayed by it. Here I was in a real crisis in my life, and people were trying to market pink ribbon teddy bears to me, and where I thought I would find sort of sisterly support on the Internet, I found instead the constant exhortations to be cheerful and to embrace my disease [she laughs].
EW: What is the difference between being told to try and stay upbeat and to have a good attitude and positive thinking?
EW: Were the doctors telling you that?
EW: You write about how positive thinking started with Mary Baker Eddy and Phineas Quimby and how it was a response to Calvinism.
BE: It had ceased to be seen as a healing method, although that comes back. By the time I encounter it, breast cancer has come back into the health area. But in the early 20th century there was, for the first time, scientific medicine and the beginnings of some sorts of effective treatments. That kind of closed a door for the positive-thinking movement, which then increasingly in the 20th century addressed itself to prosperity and wealth and success.
EW: You write about the connection you see between positive thinking and the subprime-mortgage meltdown. Talk about that.
We often blamed the victim, the rather low-paid person who wound up with a subprime mortgage, but they were even hearing it from their preachers if they went to one of these megachurch, positive-thinking preachers who said God wants you to have a larger house.
Far worse, and on a far larger scale, was the role of this ideology in the corporations and in the finance industry.
I have traced how positive thinking became the corporate culture in America. It was mandatory to be positive.
So you had companies who would literally fire people for being negative, negative in the sense of maybe raising too many questions, maybe expressing a doubt.
One example is the man who was the head of the real estate division of Lehman Bros. in 2006 and told his CEO that he thought the whole housing thing was a bubble and they should start getting out, and he was fired for that.
BE: How about a little realism? How about not seeing the world so totally colored by our own wishes and emotions? For the positive thinker, that means everything looks rosy and everything is going to be all right no matter what, so you have to block out the little warning signs.
EW: Do you think the recession is gong to be an antidote to this?
EW: Anything else you want to say?
Emily Wilson is a freelance writer and teaches basic skills at City College of San Francisco.
Crossposted at: http://www.alternet.org/story/143187/
Liberated Libya Rejects US Intervention {VIDEO}
TRANSCRIPT
The Real News Network (TRNN)
[print_link]
JIHAN HAFIZ, BENGHAZI, LIBYA: There is already talk of US military intervention in Libya. Here in Benghazi, Libyans overwhelmingly reject this possibility.
UNIDENTIFIED (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): You need to understand there are political issues going on in Libya now. The entire Libyan population is insisting against US intervention or any involvement of foreign powers within Libya.
HAFIZ: The residents of Benghazi criticized leaders who have maintained good relations with Gaddafi even after the bloodshed, from Europe to Latin America.
TEXT ON SCREEN: Berlusconi, your friend is a tyrant dictator.
UNIDENTIFIED: South America actually know probably even more than the Middle East and North Africa what dictatorship is, so we advised them to really be cautious about what they hear from their leader.
HAFIZ: Meanwhile, the rebels celebrated a new-found unity with Arab nations. They raised the flags of Egypt, Tunisia, and Palestine.
TEXT ON SCREEN: We support the Libyan people and the 17th of February Revolution. Long live a free and independent Libya!
HAFIZ: This truck coming from Egypt is loaded with donated food, 16 tons of pasta, rice, oil, and sugar. Inspired by Arab revolts in neighboring Egypt and Tunisia, the Libyan people here are welcoming this food convoy from Egypt.
CROWD: The Egyptians have arrived!
John Pilger: Obama is a corporate marketing creation {VIDEO}
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3hZjwWe6Rc[/youtube]
Al Jazeera Promotes Libya's "Crown Prince" Who Calls for Military Intervention in Libya {VIDEO -text}
Is wonderful Al Jazeera suddenly
veering into non-dependability, like many other media sources?
By Yoshie Furuhashi
[print_link] Crosspost http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/furuhashi250211p.html
Al Jazeera received a lot of kudos for its exciting coverage of the intifadas in Tunisia and Egypt. Many of us in the West in particular found it to be a useful source of information, since the Western media’s coverage of them, largely shaped by imperialist preferences as always, was quantitatively lesser and qualitatively worse than Al Jazeera’s.
1) uprising in Bahrain, made up of 100,000-strong demonstrations in a nation whose population is only about 800,000. Having paid close attention to Al Jazeera’s role in the Arab Revolt, As’ad AbuKhalil criticized its about-face in his blog Angry Arab News Service:
National Front for the Salvation of Libya, an outfit funded by the CIA and Saudi Arabia during the Cold War, as credible sources of news and views, much as the Western media have been doing.2
“the international community to help remove Gaddafi from power and stop the ongoing ‘massacre’.” By the “international community,” of course he doesn’t mean those of us who might organize protests at Libyan embassies or that kind of thing. He means the great and not-so-great powers that may be persuaded to deploy their armed forces in Libya.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjdUS36_-oE[/youtube]
sections of armed forces have already joined the revolt, isn’t what’s going on in Libya now less the regime mowing down unarmed protesters than a civil war between two armed camps, each controlling large territories with valuable resources?)
large parts of it — if foreign powers get to enter the country at the urging of its would-be king, to take it all away from you again? Is Al Jazeera for revolution . . . or counter-revolution?
Women at the vanguard of a political strike! Chants for unity across sects! Muslims and secular leftists out in the streets together!
“Deadly ‘Day of Rage’ in Libya” (quoting “Mohammed Ali Abdellah, deputy leader of the exiled National Front for the Salvation of Libya,” Al Jazeera, 18 February 2011); “Libya’s Lucrative Ties” (interviewing “Dr. Mohamed al-Magariaf, the co-founder of the National Front for the Salvation of Libya,” Al Jazeera, 22 February 2011); “Libya on the Brink” (interviewing “Ibrahim Sahad, the secretary-general of the National Front for the salvation of Libya,” Al Jazeera, 23 February 2011); صحيفة ليبية تهاجم قادة “التجمع” بتونس (Al Jazeera, 21 January 2011); ليبيون يطالبون بتنحي القذافي (Al Jazeera, 14 February 2011).
Yoshie Furuhashi is Editor of MRZine.