The Greanville Post —Vol. VII- 2013

Things to consider—

Since early 2011, Obama's been waging proxy war on Syria. Imported death squads masquerade as freedom fighters. The scheme's familiar. It repeats. It reflects US imperialism's dark side. In the 1980s, CIA-recruited mujahideen fighters battled Afghanistan's Soviet occupiers. Ronald Reagan called them "the moral equivalent of our founding fathers." He characterized Contra killers the same way. —Stephen LendmanFor over a century now US ambassadors have acted as fifth columns in the nations they are embedded in, their role chiefly to foster corporate and plutocratic power and coordinate machinations against any truly pro-democratic government.•••••"The dead end identity politics of SF Pride, which sells out a peace hero like Bradley Manning to curry favor with the American ruling class, is what I had in mind. The empire loves your tameness, irrelevance and cowardice, SF Pride. You don’t bother the American ruling class — a five foot two, 105 pound soldier does because he has a conscience and because he didn’t make comfort the guiding principle of his life...." —Randy Shields

Rise Up or Die
By Chris Hedges Joe Sacco and I spent two years reporting from the poorest pockets of the United States for our book “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.”We went into our nation’s impoverished “sacrifice zones”—the first areas forced to kneel before the dictates of the marketplace—to show what happens when unfettered corporate capitalism and ceaseless economic expansion [...]
Red State Hypocrites: Inhofe and Coburn
Salon [1] / By Joan Walsh [2] Just a week ago, Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe suggested that President Obama might be impeached over the Benghazi non-scandal. Now, Inhofe must watch as Obama declares Inhofe’s state a disaster area and promises Oklahomans “all the resources they need at their disposal.” Did you like this? Share it:
The Shame of the Fourth Estate
From our archives: articles you should have read when they first appeared but missed. The mainstream media’s long-time kid-glove treatment of Andrew Breitbart led directly to the unjustified ouster of Shirley Sherrod. By Charles Kaiser [Originally: July 26, 2010 ] This piece was first published by the Hillman Foundation. Let me make this utterly clear: What you [...]
Michel Chossudovsky: Time for a counterpropaganda front
Editor’s Note: The Western left, and the American left in particular, have been scandalously myopic and inadequate in organizing against the corporate media. The goal from the start should have been to neutralize the effects of the corporate media, since without that the great battles to win over the American majorities would be impossible. This [...]
What the Syrian Constitution says about Assad and the Rebels
By Stephen Gowans, What’s Left The idea that the uprising against the Syrian government is inspired by a grassroots movement thirsting for a pluralist, democratic state is a fiction. The opposition’s chief elements are Islamists who seek to establish a Sunni-dominated Islamic state in place of a Syrian government they revile for being secular and [...]
ARCHIVES: The U.S. Left and Media Politics
Articles of compelling importance you should have read but missed the first time around. Robert W. McChesney, Monthly Review, a fraternal organization ••• American democracy is in deep trouble. Cynicism and distrust of the political system, fueled at least in part by imposed ignorance, have grown steadily in recent years. There are several reasons for [...]
The Unseen Lies: Journalism As Propaganda
JOHN PILGER: One of my favorite stories about the Cold War concerns a group of Russian journalists who were touring the United States. On the final day of their visit, they were asked by the host for their impressions. “I have to tell you,” said the spokesman, “that we were astonished to find after reading [...]
Dissent or Terror: New Report Details How Counter Terrorism Apparatus Was Used to Monitor Occupy Movement Nationwide
MADISON, WI — DBA Press and the Center for Media and Democracy today released the results of a year-long investigation: “Dissent or Terror: How the Nation’s Counter Terrorism Apparatus, In Partnership With Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street.”The report, a distillation of thousands of pages of records obtained from counter terrorism/law enforcement agencies, details [...]

BOOKS— Subversive thrills: Where Le Carré doesn’t dare to tread

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Jun 062012

by William T. Hathaway and Paul Carline

Graham Greene, John le Carré, Ludlum, and now Gaither Stewart.
The spy thriller genre veers closer to the truth

The Trojan Spy, by Gaither Stewart, 424 pp
Punto Press, 2012 / Paperback $17.95; electronic format $6.99.

While Bush probably would have approved, many shady intel ops could have escaped his knowledge. Clandestine police and intelligence activities are today so extensive that they constitute a form of power accountable to no one, except their own internal bureaucracies, and perhaps not even that.

Gaither Stewart’s The Trojan Spy takes the thriller genre an important step forward, advancing it from the work of his predecessors John le Carré and Robert Ludlum. Le Carré and Ludlum rebelled against the conventions of the classic spy thrillers, which assumed that we’re the good guys who are under attack by bad guys so evil that we’re justified in bending the rules to save ourselves from them. In that world, lies, deceit, sabotage, and even murder are sometimes necessary to defend peace, justice, and the American (or Western) Way against (pick one, depending on when the book was written) Nazis, communists, or terrorists. Continue reading »

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The Diamond Jubilee: A glorification of wealth and privilege

BATTLE OF COMMUNICATIONS, CLASS STRUGGLE, CONSERVATIVES & REACTION, CULTURE & CRITICISM 5 Responses »

Jun 062012

By Robert Stevens, WSWS.ORG, a socialist organization
Thank you, WSWS.ORG. All captions by the editors of TGP.

Elizabeth II, at the top of the British pecking order. Like the Pope, what has she done to deserve all this ludicrous adoration?

For days, the British public has been subjected to saturation coverage of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations.

This diet of carefully choreographed royal propaganda, which included minute-by-minute coverage of Sunday’s 1,000-boat pageant on London’s river Thames and an official pop concert at Buckingham Palace, ensured that any serious news was all but excised.

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OpEds: Turning Our Backs on Unions

ACTIVISTS & HEROES, BATTLE OF COMMUNICATIONS, CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM, INTERLOPING IGNORAMUSES, PLUTOCRATS, PROPAGANDA, PUTRID CORPOMEDIA Comments Off

Jun 062012

Editor’s Note: The Wisconsin defeat of Scott Walker’s recall drive yesterday reminds us, once again, of the immense power of money in American elections, a poisonous antidemocratic role that is fed by the old four-headed hydra:

corrupt politicians who will not enact campaign reform rooting out disparities in money by making elections short, open, proportional and, above all, with a legislated egalitarian block of media time accessible to all legitimate candidates;

a corporate media system that deliberately ignores and fails to campaign for campaign election reform, demonstrating for the millionth time that entities owned by the corporate rich will never do the public’s bidding, especially when it comes to enabling popular power, or losing obscene revenues;

a conspicuous lack of presidential leadership to correct the situation (indeed it would be miraculous under the present system, since the White House occupants emerge from the business-as-usual cesspool and are vetted by the system to endorse its rotten rules);

the power of well-oiled political propaganda to swing elections even in contests where the issues had been vociferously laid out for the masses to understand. Apparently, the Koch & Co. money is far more powerful than the many demonstrations by unionists and people in general. Come election day—and without ruling out vote nullifications—apparently we still find in this nation enough idiots and clueless people willing to pull the levers against their most obvious self-interest.

The above should NOT be read as an endorsement of Tom Barret, who, while a Democrat, is a corrupt machine politician who even in the heat of the campaign was sending code signals to its patrons that a program of “responsible austerity” was the only way out of the crisis. Coming from a Democrat, the pseudo opposition to Republicans and business priorities in general, such pronouncements should not surprise us.—P. Greanville Continue reading »

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Many topics to choose from

There’s violence and there’s violence

Revolutionary Violence vs Institutionalized Violence

"There were two 'Reigns of Terror,' if we could but remember and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passions, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon a thousand persons, the other upon a hundred million; but our shudders are all for the "horrors" of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief terror that we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror - that unspeakable bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves..." —Mark Twain, writing about the French Revolution.

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