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ED CURTIN—So we are reassured that the new head of NPR, the chief of all U.S. propaganda, is a champion of a free press.
Perhaps NPR will soon enlighten the American public by interviewing its new head honcho and asking him if he thinks Julian Assange and Chelsey Manning, by exposing America’s war crimes, and Edward Snowden, by exposing the U.S. government’s vast electronic surveillance programs of its own citizens, deserve to be jailed and exiled for doing the job the American mainstream “free press” failed to do. What NPR failed to do.

JOHN R. HALL—It occurs to me now that all those protests were just good physical exercise, and little more.  Even less successful if you were among those who got arrested, gassed, or had their heads busted in the process.  The thing is…fixing one small piece of a system that’s already hopelessly broken is an act of futility.  Women’s rights?  Forget it.  Gay rights, minority rights, immigrant rights, gun control, equal internet access…all just lounge chairs on the deck of the Titanic, and no matter how you arrange them…you know the rest.

ED CURTIN—The ruling ideology since the fall of the Berlin Wall, or even earlier, is postmodernism. This is the ideological embellishment that the brutal neoliberal attack on Western societies’ welfare (that was launched in the late 1970s) required in order to attain a “human”, “liberal” and “progressive” face. This coalition between an economic policy that serves the interest of a tiny minority, and an ideology that appears to “include” everybody is what Nancy Fraser has aptly called “progressive neoliberalism”.

ED CURTIN—The Spaniard, Ignatius of Loyola, was a soldier seriously wounded in war at the age of thirty. He subsequently underwent a religious conversion. He founded the Jesuit order eighteen years later and was sainted in 1556, sixty-six years after his death.

ED CURTIN—Our universities have become human “resources” departments (as people have become commodified resources like copper or nickel) for financial capitalism and the whole complex that ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern calls “the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academe-Think-Tank (MICIMATT) complex, in which the corporate-controlled media play the sine-qua-non today.”