The music and lyrics of Bob Dylan have been an important part of my life for almost two decades now. With today’s news that he has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, I’ve decided to us it as an excuse to share the lyrics to his timeless 1963 classic: Masters of War.
I recently watched the 2015 Noam Chomsky documentary, Requiem for the American Dream, and it was excellent. I highly recommend everyone watch it since it provides a historical roadmap for how positive change happens. Lessons that we will all need to put into practice in the coming years if we want to take the world off its current collision course with disaster.
With Chomsky already on my mind, I was excited to see an article published yesterday at AlterNet titled, Noam Chomsky Unravels the Political Mechanics Behind His Gradual Expulsion From Mainstream Media.
Here’s what we learned:
The geopolitical situation across the world continues to deteriorate to a very worrisome degree.
The New York Times reported the following earlier today:
WASHINGTON — An American warship stationed off the coast of Yemen fired cruise missiles on Thursday at radar installations that the Pentagon said had been used by Yemeni insurgents to target another American warship in two missile attacks in the last four days.
The strikes against the Houthi rebels marked the first time the United States has become involved militarily in the civil war between the Houthis, an indigenous Shiite group with loose connections to Iran, and the Yememi government, which is backed by Saudi Arabia and other Sunni nations. The strikes were approved by President Obama, said Peter Cook, the Pentagon spokesman, who warned of more to come if American ships were fired upon again.
Below are some excerpts from Michael Tracey’s latest article: The Real Deplorables.
Enjoy.
The real “deplorables” generally aren’t the people whom Hillary denounced as wholly “irredeemable,” or at whom economically secure commentators fulminate on a regular basis. More obviously “deplorable” are Hillary’s fellow financial, political, economic, and military elites who wrecked the economy, got us mired in endless unwinnable foreign wars, and erected a virtually impenetrable cultural barrier between everyday Americans trying to live fruitful lives and their pretentious, well-heeled superiors ensconced in select coastal enclaves. It is thanks to the actions of this “basket of deplorables” that we’re in the situation we’re in, where an oaf like Trump is perilously close to seizing the presidency.
At a recent Trump rally in Lancaster County, Pa., I was bemused to encounter a coterie of local Amish people who’d traveled there together by bus. Asked why they backed Trump, the overwhelming response was that Amish folks just wanted to preserve their traditional way of life (which they saw as under siege) and perceived Trump as enabling them to carry on with it. Some told me they supported Trump not because of some overweening disdain for their nation’s fellowmen, or immigrants, or even coastal liberals, but because they felt that the federal government was intruding on their ability to properly run their small farms.
Just in case you aren’t aware of just how irrelevant Hillary Clinton and her team thinks you are, we learned the following from the Wikileaks Podesta emails.
The Hill reports:
Senior Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin argued to top staffers that Clinton should consider not taking questions from the press for fear of overshadowing her presidential campaign’s message, according to emails released by WikiLeaks.
“Can we survive not answering questions from press at message events[?]” Abedin, who serves as Clinton’s campaign vice chairwoman, asked in a May 2015 email, according to Politico. “Her [David Dinkins Forum] speech and immigration message broke through because we didn’t take questions.”
Well this is interesting.
The Hill reports:
A Democratic elector in Washington says that if his party’s presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, wins the state, he may shirk his duty to cast his vote for her in the Electoral College.
“How can I say and do and be who I am and then cast a vote for somebody that’s the same as [GOP nominee Donald] Trump?” Robert Satiacum Jr. asked Politico in an interview published Wednesday.
In the run-up to the passage of Obamacare, President Obama repeatedly assured the American public that “If you like your healthcare plan, you can keep your healthcare plan.”
Here are just a few examples (is that Jon Corzine grinning enthusiastically at the 20 second mark?):
Interestingly enough, as much as I didn’t like my healthcare plan, I was planning on keeping it. Until I received a letter telling me I couldn’t from United Healthcare. Indeed, they weren’t too subtle about the entire thing, making it perfectly clear what was about to happen.
There’s an ongoing humanitarian disaster happening in one of the poorest countries on earth — Yemen. Yet you won’t hear much outrage about it from the media, and you won’t hear moderators asking questions about it during the debates. Why? Because close U.S. government ally and Clinton Foundation mega-donor Saudi Arabia is the one committing the atrocities, with American made weapons and assistance.
Reuters reports:
The Obama administration went ahead with a $1.3 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia last year despite warnings from some officials that the United States could be implicated in war crimes for supporting a Saudi-led air campaign in Yemen that has killed thousands of civilians, according to government documents and the accounts of current and former officials.
State Department officials also were privately skeptical of the Saudi military’s ability to target Houthi militants without killing civilians and destroying “critical infrastructure” needed for Yemen to recover, according to the emails and other records obtained by Reuters and interviews with nearly a dozen officials with knowledge of those discussions.
What a Trump supporter thinks of the latest Wikileaks dump is irrelevant to the outcome of this election. On the other hand, what progressive Bernie Sanders supporters think, is of meaningful significance. As such, I recommend listening to the following analysis by Jordan Chariton, a reporter for The Young Turks.
Enjoy.
Trump and Clinton mainly treated the audience and their questions as an annoying interlude to their dispute, flashing fake smiles before launching into their next tirade. Both candidates came off like divorcing parents interrupted by their concerned kids, thus angering them further. The final questioner even asked Clinton and Trump to say something nice about each other.
It was sad and it was a bit scary.
Did Trump win? It’s hard to say if such a debate, where two ultra-rich New Yorkers yell at each other about tax avoidance can be won — but if it can then Trump did win, in my view. He won by hammering home every point repeatedly, commandeering the town hall’s narrative and forcing Clinton constantly on the defensive at every opportunity. Trump won by sucking up all the oxygen in the debate hall. He won by taking the debate to the absolute maximum of serious, alarming accusations and showing how Clinton would only respond to it by saying mean things he had said.
Trump may be a king of flip flopping, but he still made Clinton look worse. This debate will be seen as a particularly big win for Trump among voters unimpressed by the media’s perceived crusade against their beloved real estate tycoon.
– From The Hill article: Trump Plays the Berserk Card for the Win
With his back completely up against the wall and everything on the line, Trump did exactly what he had to do last night to stay in the game and shift enough people’s attention away from the damaging audio released on Friday. Trump’s primary purpose in this debate couldn’t have been to shift the entire election back in his favor, that would’ve been virtually impossible outside of Hillary literally collapsing on stage. His primary objective was to stem the bleeding, and provide justification to those still open to the idea of “voting against Hillary Clinton” in this election. I think he did that.