It's not religion. It's just a pure autocracy. I was in the periodontist's
office yesterday, getting a bone graft, and as the periodontist was working on
me, she and her assistant were discussing current events. And then, when I was
able to talk, I joined the conversation. The thing is, whenever I'm out in the
world, which isn't often these days, and I hear people talking about what's
happening, or I participate in such conversations, I'm horrified. Everyone on
the left is living in some kind of bubble. The periodontist was saying that she
told her son that it's fine to make as much money as he can, but the reason to
make a lot of money is to give it away. Well, I suppose that's OK. But I
pointed out that the very rich people who give their money away, seem to think
that just because they're rich, they have a right to determine how the money
should be used and how the world should change and the fact that they're rich,
doesn't make them smarter than the rest of us. And they were talking about
Thanksgiving and how I'll be able to eat because all the food that's served on
Thanksgiving is soft. I agreed, but I pointed out that while we're all eating,
we should be thinking about how the US and Saudi Arabia are about to starve one
million Yemenis to death. And the dental assistant said, "Well isn't that
because of sanctions or something?" I assured her that it isn't, and that the
Yemenis have never done anything to us. She then said, "Well, the Saudis are
our allies." I asked if she knew the nationality of the people who attacked the
World Trade Center and she did. She knew that most of them were from Saudi
Arabia. I pointed out that Saudi Arabia had supported ISIS. She didn't believe
me. She thought that Russia was supporting ISIS in Syria. So then I asked if
she knew about the two branches of Islam. She did. And I then explained which
branch Russia was supporting. Both women were disturbed about the tax bill.
But the dental assistant is most concerned that she pays local taxes and the
pot hole in her street hasn't been fixed. I talked about infrastructure and she
told me there's no problem because a bridge in the city is being repaired. Now
you need to realize that most people on Long Island get their news from Newsday
and TV, and they received their education or miseducation, in local schools.
Most are white and would be considered by everyone, except for Carl and Roger,
to be lower middle class. And by the way, Trump won on Long Island. The
periodontist is a different story in terms of education and income, and she is
more socially liberal. But I'm sure she supports Israel and the Democratic
party. She did mention shopping at Whole Foods, which tells you a lot.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Friday, November 17, 2017 1:04 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: RT America Torched In Witch Hunt '17
What ever became of the "Loyal Opposition"?
Folks wonder why I am down on religion. But here it is in it's most blatant
form. There can be only one absolute "Right". When an Empire becomes an
absolute dictatorship, there can be no "Loyal Opposition", because there is
only the "Truth Everlasting, as set out by the Empire. Our Sunday Schools have
softened us up to accept this Absolute Authority.
Inch by inch the foul waters of censorship creep higher and higher.
Soon we will be inundated by it, and all free thought will be labeled as
Sabotage. Even that "liberal" network, NPR has moved quickly to the Right of
Center.
And to think, some of us thought that 1984 was "make believe".
Carl Jarvis
On 11/15/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
RT America Torched In Witch Hunt '17
RT-America-12-Nov-2017
By Chris Hedges, truthdig.com
November 14th, 2017
Above Photo: Chris Hedges in a screen shot from his RT America
program, "On Contact." (RT America)
In one of the most horrendous blows to press freedom since the
anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s, the U.S. Department of
Justice has forced the news broadcaster RT America to file under the
Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).
The assault on RT America, on which I host the show "On Contact," has
nothing to do with the dissemination of Russian propaganda. It is
driven by RT America's decision to provide a platform to critics of
American capitalism and imperialism, critics who lambast a system of
government that can no longer be called democratic. And it is
accompanied by the installation of algorithms by Google, Facebook and
Twitter that divert readers away from left-wing, progressive and
anti-war websites, including Truthdig. The World Socialist Web Site
has seen its search traffic from Google fall by 74 percent since
April. Google, in a further blow, this month removed RT from its list
of "preferred" channels on YouTube. Twitter has blocked all
advertising by the channel.
Put the censorship campaigns together and the message is clear:
Left-wing critics, already marginalized by the state, must be silenced.
It would seem, given how we are locked out of the corporate media and
public broadcasting, that the assault is overkill. But the ideology
that sustains the corporate state, the "free market" and neoliberalism
has lost all credibility. The corporate state has no counterargument
to its critics. The nakedness of corporate greed, exploitation and
repression is transparent across the political spectrum. The
ideological fortress erected by corporate power and sustained by its
courtiers in the press and academia has collapsed. All it has left is
a crude censorship.
Complicit in this censorship is a bankrupt liberal class. The
institutions tasked with defending press freedom-including the ACLU,
Human Rights Watch, the Committee to Protect Journalists and PEN-along
with major news outlets such as The New York Times, have served as the
corporate state's useful idiots. Only a handful of journalists,
including Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer, grasp and decry the very
real danger before us.
The charge that RT and these left-wing sites disseminate "foreign
propaganda" is the beginning, not the end, of a broad campaign against
press freedom. Once this precedent of state censorship is normalized,
far more tepid and compliant media outlets will be targeted. Max
Blumenthal wrote two good pieces on AlterNet about the puppet masters
behind the censorship campaign. [Click here and here.]
The venom of the state toward its critics was displayed in a report by
the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), "Assessing Russian
Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections," issued Jan. 6. In
the report, seven pages were specifically directed at RT America, much
of the language focused on the journalist Abby Martin. Martin became
one of the best-known critics of the corporate state during the Occupy
movement. Her show on RT, "Breaking the Set," which had been off the
air for nearly two years when the report was published-a glaring error
for an intelligence community awash in budgets of tens of billions of
dollars-was denounced as a disseminator of "radical discontent." The
report complained that RT gave airtime to third-party candidate
debates. The document attacked RT hosts for asserting that the
two-party system does not represent the views of at least one-third of
the population and is a sham. It excoriated the network for covering
Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street and fracking.
The report charged:
RT's reports often characterize the United States as a "surveillance state"
and allege widespread infringements of civil liberties, police
brutality, and drone use.
RT has also focused on criticism of the US economic system, US
currency policy, alleged Wall Street greed, and the US national debt.
Some of RT's hosts have compared the United States to Imperial Rome
and have predicted that government corruption and "corporate greed"
will lead to US financial collapse.
The "Alice in Wonderland" quality of the report would be laughable if
it was not so ominous. The United States, in fact, is a surveillance
state. Civil liberties have been eviscerated. Police brutality is
endemic. Our drone wars have made us state terrorists. The economic
structure serves the wealthiest corporations and oligarchs. Wall
Street is run by a criminal class. Our debt is unsustainable,
especially once the dollar is no longer the world's reserve currency,
and like all decaying empires we are headed for collapse.
The DNI report clarifies what the ruling elites fear-not fake news but
the truth. And the truth is that the elites have destroyed the country
and are traitors to democracy.
The DNI report was followed by a congressional hearing on "Extremist
Content and Russian Disinformation Online," held Oct. 31. Executives
of Facebook, Twitter and Google were grilled about their roles in
distributing fake news and extremist content that in the words of
Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley included "spread[ing] stories about
abuse of black Americans by law enforcement." The executives promised
to double down on their censorship, and they did so.
The ruling elites are desperately trying to shift the focus away from
the cause of the political insurgencies on the left and the right:
extreme social inequality. It is for this reason that critics who
highlight and explore the roots and causes of social inequality must
be discredited or silenced. If social inequality is accepted as the
driving force behind the decay of the American state and the mounting
rage of much of the population, then the structures that profit from
this inequality will come under assault. All the elites have left is
to paint their critics as "agents of a foreign power."
The United States increasingly resembles a totalitarian state. Our
anemic democracy is on life support. A reasoned debate about social
inequality or the crimes and misjudgments of empire is becoming
impossible. This presages a frightening future. There will be many
"good" Americans who, when the history of this moment is recorded,
will be responsible. And one day, to their surprise, they too will be victims.
