Category Archives: divide and conquer

Why ‘I Have Nothing to Hide’ Is the Wrong Way to Think About Surveillance

Posted on by
4

verizon-we-can-hear-you-now

A common defense of mass surveillance used by apologists is “if you have nothing to hide, why worry?” Nevermind that there’s many things that are perfectly legal that we might not “hide” but choose not to reveal indiscriminately (ie. credit card numbers, medical records, nakedness, etc.), we may in fact have something to hide but not even know it. As noted by Moxie Marlinspike of Wired.com:

If the federal government can’t even count how many laws there are, what chance does an individual have of being certain that they are not acting in violation of one of them?

For instance, did you know that it is a federal crime to be in possession of a lobster under a certain size? It doesn’t matter if you bought it at a grocery store, if someone else gave it to you, if it’s dead or alive, if you found it after it died of natural causes, or even if you killed it while acting in self defense. You can go to jail because of a lobster.

If the federal government had access to every email you’ve ever written and every phone call you’ve ever made, it’s almost certain that they could find something you’ve done which violates a provision in the 27,000 pages of federal statues or 10,000 administrative regulations. You probably do have something to hide, you just don’t know it yet.

He also makes a compelling argument for why we should have something to hide:

Over the past year, there have been a number of headline-grabbing legal changes in the U.S., such as the legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington, as well as the legalization of same-sex marriage in a growing number of U.S. states.

As a majority of people in these states apparently favor these changes, advocates for the U.S. democratic process cite these legal victories as examples of how the system can provide real freedoms to those who engage with it through lawful means. And it’s true, the bills did pass.

What’s often overlooked, however, is that these legal victories would probably not have been possible without the ability to break the law.

The state of Minnesota, for instance, legalized same-sex marriage this year, but sodomy laws had effectively made homosexuality itself completely illegal in that state until 2001. Likewise, before the recent changes making marijuana legal for personal use in Washington and Colorado, it was obviously not legal for personal use.

Imagine if there were an alternate dystopian reality where law enforcement was 100% effective, such that any potential law offenders knew they would be immediately identified, apprehended, and jailed. If perfect law enforcement had been a reality in Minnesota, Colorado, and Washington since their founding in the 1850s, it seems quite unlikely that these recent changes would have ever come to pass. How could people have decided that marijuana should be legal, if nobody had ever used it? How could states decide that same sex marriage should be permitted, if nobody had ever seen or participated in a same sex relationship?

…We can only desire based on what we know. It is our present experience of what we are and are not able to do that largely determines our sense for what is possible. This is why same sex relationships, in violation of sodomy laws, were a necessary precondition for the legalization of same sex marriage. This is also why those maintaining positions of power will always encourage the freedom to talk about ideas, but never to act.

Read the full article here: http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/06/why-i-have-nothing-to-hide-is-the-wrong-way-to-think-about-surveillance/

The East German STASI regime also put their citizens under mass surveillance allegedly for their own good. The information collected was used as leverage by authorities to force informants to betray friends, neighbors and family members.  Trust throughout the society crumbled and eventually the government itself crumbled.

On Ourselves in the Othernets

Posted on by
Reply

52-psychedelic-art-300x289

Though a month old, this piece by Chris Arkenberg of URBEINGRECORDED was one I found to be nonetheless thought provoking (I’ve added my own commentary in italics following the original paragraphs):

Ourselves in the Othernets

So dig: in about 20 years we went from knowing rather little about the world beyond what we directly experienced and what we gleaned through books and pictures and the occasional documentary or foreign movie, to having immediate on-demand insight into any facet of the globe you could imagine.

True, though I miss the sense of community and unique curation of some of the old physical media brick and mortar establishments.

And many you couldn’t imagine. The sheer amount of visibility into humanity is simply astonishing. And it’s this informational shift, this too-much-bloody-perspective that is really amplifying the change and disruption and anxiety through which we grapple with the unfolding narrative of our species.

I would argue that the disruption is amplified not just from too many perspectives, but from the cognitive dissonance caused by conflicting data and the struggle to discern which has a closer correlation to reality.

You see, humans are still basically tribal animals. We like what we know and we fear what we do not. Geography, bloodlines, race, and class are among the sociocultural elements that bind us when we share them and separate us from those who fall onto a different end of the spectrum. We cast the differences and the things we do not understand into the Other. The Other becomes the boogeyman, the shadow, the unknown that is presumed to be a threat (because it’s safest to first assume that things are threats and then let information persuade us otherwise).

Good description of unfortunate xenophobic and threat response tendencies that are all too easy for manipulative leaders to exploit.

This innate fear of the Other makes it easier to wage economics and wars on those folks over the mountain or beyond the sea. You can much more easily demonize or dehumanize people who have no discernible face, casting them into the Other without further regard. They’re different from us. They don’t like the things we do or worship the same gods. It’s our right as better, more civilized beings to have their oil/water/food/women/etc. In general, this made it easier to get down to business without the impediment of worrying about our impact on the savages. [Insert any relevant aside about colonialism or how the prosperity of the West has been built on the backs of cheap resources and labor in the Third World.]

At the same time, fear of the Other can blind us from seeing psychopaths and sociopaths who may look no different from ourselves. In fact, since they tend to be more adept at blending in, manipulating others, and seeking personal gain at expense of others, it’s no surprise many such people end up in positions of power.

And then the steady march of trade made it incrementally easier and easier to see bits of the Other. Radio emerged, then the telephone and television. But even those were mostly local or regional. Globalization reinforced shipping lanes and supply chains and people started engaging the overseas Other to figure out how Toyota managed to bust the asses of US automakers or how the Chinese could subsidize western luxury with cheaper manufacturing. And meanwhile, creeping along the copper lines, the internet was starting to form.

Depictions of the Other in media doesn’t necessarily help when society is exposed to predominantly negative images of certain groups. And early forms of globalization have been around at least since the colonial era previously mentioned and the global slave trade of the 17th century. It seems government and big business have always welcomed the Other…as cheap labor.

The early adopters really started to engage the web around 1993-1995. A few years later you could buy a cell phone that wasn’t the size of a brick but still a lot of folks who needed mobile connectivity just used a more affordable pager – a one-way ping that sent you running for a pay phone to respond. But by 2000 a lot of people were online and within another 5 years many of them had cell phones. Apple landed the smart phone revolutions and now, as of 2013, it’s not hyperbole to say that *most* people in the world have cell phones and sms. Many of them have internet access – at least enough to fill add hubs to regions still mostly lacking. And this penetration of digital eyes is especially high amongst the western nations so adept at justifying imperialism by demonizing and dehumanizing the Other. Ahem.

It’s amazing how fast these changes occurred. Penetration of “digital eyes” may be high among imperialist nations yet demonization of the Other continues largely thanks to corporate/government influence of mass media. Fortunately independent/foreign news and media offer a counterbalance to increasing audiences as corporate media declines.

Any analysis of the contemporary context we live in must therefore consider this fundamental reframing of such a core psychological construct. [IMHO.] The Other is collapsing into the known. We now see so much of the people, cultures, and races and interests and classes and… and basically the Other looks a lot like us, doesn’t it? Consider for a moment what it means for borders and national identity when our affinities are inherently borderless; when we make Facebook friends with people scattered all across the globe; when the streets of Bagdad (pre-post-Saddam) surprisingly looked a lot like the streets of Northridge or Minneapolis; and when the art and music and writings and media blend more and more across frictionless digital channels, reconfiguring to speak about the shared lives of humanity more than any isms or schisms. Well, call me a global-mind liberal tree-hugging old softy but it actually makes me feel better to see the barriers of culture and nationalism crumble a bit under the weight of the innate human need to connect and share and collaborate and remix. We’re still tribal, sure, and culture is valuable but the tribes are getting bigger and more distributed, and at the same time there are more and more niches in the Long Tail waking up to assert their *own* culture, however deep it may be in the sub-genre taxonomy.

From my perspective it’s a little simplistic to say the Other looks like us. In some cases they may, but the internet can also expose the extremes of different cultures and subcultures as well. It’s often a positive trend to be able to relate more with the Other, but it’s also important to acknowledge differences. And even though the Other may look like us, they may not think like us. Case in point are political/economic elites and the top 1%, who more people used to identify more with. Whether because they’re more corrupt than ever because of greater political/economic power or because of greater awareness of their harmful policies revealed mostly through the internet and independent media, they’re increasingly recognized as a new type of Other.

The impact of this shift and the crazy pace at which it’s happened has injected a tremendous amount of instability into the global system. And it’s all been carried along the sudden Cambrian explosion of computation and connectivity spreading into every nook and cranny it can find, wiring it all up and transforming the layers above. The sense of rapid change and the exponentiation of technological progress is probably not going to be a temporary or transitional event. It’s looking more likely that we’re steaming up a steep curve that’s elevating change from a passage to a condition. It’s the new normal within which we live our lives.

Can’t argue with that.

This is why I’m a bit sanguine on fears of NSA totalitarianism or rumors of grand conspiracies slowly wrapping us all up for the impending boot on our necks. I don’t believe in monoliths. There’s too much instability in the system for any one controller to reign it all in. Instead we live in a world of too many competitors – governments, transnationals, corporate multinationals, NGO’s, ideological blocks, cartels, super-empowered individuals. Even within organizations it’s all Game of Thrones and balkanized silos. They’re all vying for control but the outcome will not be any single winner. It will be a dynamic patchwork of power structures that, like any good ecosystem, will mostly keep each other in check. Mostly. Sometimes some of them align around a goal, other times they break apart and fragment.

This is where I do disagree. The scenario described would be an improvement over our current situation and may be where we end up eventually, but we’re not there yet. There might seem to be many conflicting factions but a closer examination reveals them to be different cards held by a relatively small number of players, and why wouldn’t these players cheat or conspire to retain their positions of power? A couple years ago a study from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich did a comprehensive analysis of 37 million companies, 43,060 transnational corporations and share ownerships linking them. They discovered that global corporate control has a dominant core of 147 firms with interlocking stakes. Together they control 40% of the wealth in the network. A total of 737 control 80% of it all.

The dystopic (realist?) balance to this sanguinity moves among the machines and the algorithmic mycelium wending its way through our networks and our devices and more and more of our lives. The opportunities for embedded governance when we all have a chip and an IP and a personal node on the net are indeed considerable. A geofenced life is a fenced life nevertheless, even if the prison is invisible. We humans may overcome our prejudices just in time to unite against the emerging Other of machine intelligence. There may yet be a Matrix scenario ahead of us though I suspect it won’t be possible for quite some time. Humans are fallible and, for now, we fallibly program the machines, lending de-rezed bits of our slippery minds to their cognitive computation. But what is the logic, the perspective, when the machines wise up and suddenly our dissent is regarded as a malfunctioning program throwing up a little flag on the network that can then be dispatched without ever requiring that humanly-fallible oversight? Perhaps then they just crawl into your mindtank and intermediate your pathetic shreds of freewill.

Among the emerging “True Other” I would include along with machine intelligence psychopathic government and corporate systems and the individuals who flourish within such systems.

But, you know, this is why we write programs to protect us. And why there are teenagers who are better at cracking things open than any would-be monolith will ever be at keeping them closed. This is the generational dance of evolution. The young are always one step ahead. It’s like a failsafe built-in to the species. Some inchoate balancer that makes sure nature maintains the upper hand lest we slip up and give it all away to fascists and imperialists and corporations and algorithms. And I suppose this is my faith, after all. That there is a failsafe. That we won’t let it all slip into ruin. Or at least, if we do, it will be the ruin of nature asserting its claim on us all, consuming civilization back into the womb of the Mother to be reconsidered and redrawn for the next momentous round of parthenogenesis. Maybe a little better and a little more suited to this world. Hopefully the music will be as good.

I must admit I have no idea how the future will turn out, but this proposed possibility is more hopeful than a number of likely outcomes.

Why Generation Y Should Be Unhappy

Posted on by
3
The reason why young people are so unhappy, as explained by Tim Urban of "wait but why"

The source of youthful discontent in a nutshell, according to Tim Urban of “wait but why”

Pseudo-sociological trend pieces are a dime a dozen these days, but a recent one called Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy stands out because it’s apparently been the center of much intergenerational debate on social media. I found it interesting because many of the critiques of “Generation Y” are similar to those used against previous generations such as “hippies” and “slackers” (and also just about anyone who questions the status quo).

To set up the argument, author Tim Urban constructs a strawman caricature called Lucy who’s a member of Generation Y, “the generation born between the late 1970s and the mid 1990s. She’s also part of a yuppie culture that makes up a large portion of Gen Y.” Given that the middleclass has been in decline for some time now, I’m not sure why anyone would think yuppie culture makes up a “large portion” of Gen Y. He even created a pejorative acronym for people like Lucy: “Gen Y Protagonists & Special Yuppies, or GYPSYs. A GYPSY is a unique brand of yuppie, one who thinks they are the main character of a very special story.” The reason for the unhappiness is reduced to an equation: Happiness=Reality-Expectations

Though overly reductionist, the equation makes sense because one can increase happiness by raising one’s reality or reducing expectations. However, like most people who support the status quo and/or get all their information from corporate sources, Tim mostly focuses on why Lucy needs to lower expectations because to raise reality would take collective action and systemic change (and no, “picking yourself up by the bootstraps” is not enough). It’s much easier to condemn the individual with typical attacks leveled against young people and idealists who voice grievances: you’re overly ambitious, you think you’re special, and you have a faulty perception of the world.

To be fair, he seems to be trying to describe not an entire generation, but a specific type of person of the generation (perhaps an annoying coworker?). However, at a time when tuition rates and student debt are at an all time high and so many people just out of college are unemployed, underemployed, or stuck in unfulfilling dead-end jobs they’re overqualified for, it’s easy to see why such an article might strike a collective nerve. And funny pictures with trite platitudes like “The current world is bubbling with opportunity for an ambitious person to find flowery, fulfilling success” or “You can become special by working really hard for a long time”, won’t make them feel any better.

There are countless better explanations for rising levels of unhappiness and discontent not just among Generation Y, but for 99% of the country. The biggest factors are explained succinctly in the videos below:

Government Shutdown: Hate the Players, Hate the Game

Posted on by
2

Today marks the first day of the latest government shutdown due to failure of the House and Senate to agree on a spending bill. The main point of contention was Obamacare, which Republicans fought to repeal or delay. This conflict can be seen as a symptom of political polarization which, as multiple studies have shown, increases as economic inequality increases. This might seem counter-intuitive to those aware of how both parties receive money from the same corporations. Still, they get paid varying amounts from different corporations and they need to at least appear to be responsive to needs of constituents. Differences between the majority of Democrat and Republican representatives are analogous to differences between neoliberals and neoconservatives. There’s subtle differences in approach and emphasis but both ultimately serve the corporate-security state.

Many will blame the shutdown on Republicans who oppose Obamacare, but will it really increase access to affordable healthcare? It may have been better to delay implementation in order to work out glitches in the bureaucracy and computer systems. Obamacare has already had the unfortunate side-effect of businesses replacing full-time positions with part-time positions, and without any controls over the rising cost of premiums we should expect to see further rate increases. There may be minor improvements but far less than what would have been provided through single-payer and public option alternatives. If we had a Medicare-for-all system as Green Party candidate Jill Stein proposed, we’d have a system people already support providing comprehensive coverage with far less bureaucratic waste and at a fraction of the cost.

One of the many sickening aspects of the government shutdown is that government agencies that truly need to be shutdown, like the NSA, CIA, FBI, DEA, etc., remain essentially untouched. What will be shutdown or reduced are services related to health, work safety, food assistance, housing, education, parks and museums, regulatory agencies, and labor. Once again, money junkies in power have demonstrated their incompetence at doing things they care little about (ie. providing jobs and services that actually help poor and working class people). However, they have proven to be extremely good at funneling more money to themselves and their cronies while consolidating power. On the surface, the shutdown may appear self-defeating, but both parties can benefit by blaming the other side and can more easily push through questionable legislation in an atmosphere of crisis. Just like the sequestration last Spring, it’s a form of austerity which benefits big banks while screwing over average citizens.

Does the Government Only Label Bad Guys As Terrorists?

Posted on by
2

Perhaps, if one’s definition of a “bad guy” is so broad it becomes meaningless.

Among the findings in this must-read article recently posted at Washington’s Blog, Does the Government Only Label Bad Guys As Terrorists?, the following characteristics could get you labeled as a terrorist by the  government:

As you can see the list is pretty long, but sure to get longer as the government becomes even more corrupt, ineffectual, and fearful of revolt. Having such a loose definition of “terrorist” will do nothing to make anyone any safer (except perhaps the wealthy elite). In fact, it will only discourage dissent and encourage obedience to the corporate state which ultimately endangers the health of society.

fusion-center

Geopolitical Motives Behind Kenya Mass Shooting

Posted on by
Reply

Western corporate news has predictably portrayed the recent massacre in Kenya as a senseless terrorist attack by “Muslim fanatics” of Al Shabaab, a Somalian Al Qaeda franchise. If their motive was solely religious, perpetrating a large-scale slaughter drawing international condemnation would be a self-defeating act. Unfortunately, propaganda and mass social conditioning has led many in the West to accept that Muslim terrorists “hate us for our freedoms” and will do anything to wipe out everyone but themselves. Of course this is a stereotype and is no more true than saying fundamentalist Christian or Jewish terrorists want to kill all Muslims. The reality of terrorism is much more complex and convoluted (and often involves covert intelligence agencies).

Tony Cartalucci of Land Destroyer Report puts the Nairobi mall attack in context, describing how in 2011 the Kenyan military participated in attacks against Somalia with U.S. and French forces. But this wasn’t the first attack against Somalia the U.S. was involved in. According to Cartalucci:

Before using Kenya as a proxy for US aggression in Africa, and amidst two decades of unilateral, covert military operations, the US had backed two Ethiopian invasions into Somalia. The first US-backed invasion, under then US President George Bush, was carried out in 2006. USA Today reported in its 2007 article, “U.S. support key to Ethiopia’s invasion,” that:

The United States has quietly poured weapons and military advisers into Ethiopia, whose recent invasion of Somalia opened a new front in the Bush administration’s war on terrorism.

The second US-backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia, under US President Barack Obama, was carried out in 2011 – coordinated with Kenya’s 2011 US-French-backed extraterritorial adventure into Somali territory. The UK Independent’s December 2011 article, “UN-backed invasion of Somalia spirals into chaos,” reported that:

Kenya’s invasion of Somalia, hailed by the West and the UN Security Council, was meant to deliver a knockout blow to the militant Islamist group al-Shabaab. Instead it has pulled Somalia’s regional rival Ethiopia back into the country, stirred up the warlords and rekindled popular support for fundamentalists whose willingness to let Somalis starve rather than receive foreign aid had left them widely hated.

It was in fact this US-backed military invasion that served as the alleged motivation of the Al Shabaab terrorists who attacked Kenya’s Westgate Mall this week.

In the same article, Cartalucci describes in detail how and why the same terrorists the U.S. is funding and arming in Syria are behind the massacre in Kenya. He also provides a concise description of what Al Qaeda really is and how they support the objectives of Western superpowers:

Al Qaeda: The Perfect Pretext to Invade, The Perfect Mercenary Army to Covertly Wage War

Al Qaeda, for the West, serves as the ultimate geopolitical tool. It can be used as a pretext to invade, as well as a nearly inexhaustible mercenary army to carry out ruthless terrorist campaigns and even full-scale war as seen in Syria and Libya, to achieve Western objectives. Additionally, the omnipresent, nebulous nature of Al Qaeda serves as justification to strip away the rights and liberties of people at home, across Western civilization – perpetuating a climate of fear within which the seeds of very profitable war can be sown and continuously reaped.

How profitable? A Harvard’s Kennedy School research paper titled, “The Financial Legacy of Iraq and Afghanistan,” places the total expenditures of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars alone somewhere between 4-6 trillion dollars. That isn’t 4-6 trillion dollars that went into a black hole. That is 4-6 trillion dollars that went to the Fortune 500 corporations that engineered and sold these conflicts to the American public in the first place.

Read the full article here: http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2013/09/kenyan-bloodbath-reaping-benefits-of-us.html#more

“All Wars Are Based on Deception” – Sun Tzu

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve been thinking of Sun Tzu’s line from “The Art of War” a lot lately because of the blatant lies about Syria currently being pushed by U.S. government officials and the corporate media. The quote is just as true today as it was in ancient China. Another quote that applies to our current situation is “Those who don’t know history are condemned to repeat it.” (Edmund Burke). There’s much truth to that, but it’s only part of the story. I would add that those who profit most from major historical events such as wars and stock market crashes are motivated to recreate the conditions to repeat them. And those who only learn the winner’s version of history and are ignorant of the truth are more likely to be okay with it and let it happen. That’s why I encourage everyone to read an important article by Michael Rivero called “Fake Terror – The Road to War and Dictatorship”. It outlines how lies and deception were used to start wars from 70 BC Rome to America in the 1990s (though the lying has ramped up quite a bit since then) . Even wars we think of as being “good wars” like World War 2 are not exempt, as explained in this excerpt from the article:

Roosevelt needed an enemy, and if America would not willingly attack that enemy, then one would have to be maneuvered into attacking America, much as Marcus Licinius Crassus has maneuvered Spartacus into attacking Rome.

…The first step was to place oil and steel embargoes on Japan, using Japan’s wars on the Asian mainland as a reason. This forced Japan to consider seizing the oil and mineral rich regions in Indonesia. With the European powers militarily exhausted by the war in Europe, the United States was the only power in the Pacific able to stop Japan from invading the Dutch East Indies, and by moving the Pacific fleet from San Diego to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, Roosevelt made a pre-emptive strike on that fleet the mandatory first step in any Japanese plan to extend its empire into the “southern resource area”.

…To enrage the American people as much as possible, Roosevelt needed the first overt attack by Japan to be as bloody as possible, appearing as a sneak attack much as the Japanese had done to the Russians. From that moment up until the attack on Pearl Harbor itself, Roosevelt and his associates made sure that the commanders in Hawaii, General Short and Admiral Kimmel, were kept in the dark as much as possible about the location of the Japanese fleet and its intentions, then later scapegoated for the attack. (Congress recently exonerated both Short and Kimmel, posthumously restoring them to their former ranks).

But as the Army board had concluded at the time, and subsequent de-classified documents confirmed, Washington DC knew the attack was coming, knew exactly where the Japanese fleet was, and knew where it was headed.

On November 29th, Secretary of State Hull showed United Press reporter Joe Leib a message with the time and place of the attack, and the New York Times in its special 12/8/41 Pearl Harbor edition, on page 13, reported that the time and place of the attack had been known in advance!

The much repeated claim that the Japanese fleet maintained radio silence on its way to Hawaii was a lie. Among other intercepts still held in the Archives of the NSA is the UNCODED message sent by the Japanese tanker Shirya stating, “proceeding to a position 30.00 N, 154.20 E. Expect to arrive at that point on 3 December.” (near HI)

Read the complete article here: http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/ARTICLE5/index.php

Exploiting the Dream

Video

Reply

Black Agenda Report recently posted two excellent commentaries on the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. More specifically, the hypocrisy of the corporate media’s treatment of King and his ideas after his death, and the Obama administration’s desecration of the commemoration on the eve of another war.

From “Dr King was a Man, ‘The Dreamer’ is a Zombie”:

The week spent commemorating :”the Dream” is a great way to forget the real past, ignore the real present and avoid responsibility for the future. It’s a great excuse to assemble stars and celebrities and politicians, to pretend that the rise and prominence of the black political class was the foreordained outcome of the historic Freedom Movement in which the real Dr. King lived, worked and died. It’s a great distraction from the fact that apart from their own careers, the black political class, right up to and including President Obama, have achieved very little in the way of substantive victories for our people in the last four decades.

For me, one of the lessons of Dr. King’s career and that of “the Dreamer”, who was born after the flesh and blood man was murdered, is the willingness of establishment media to rewrite history even as it’s being made, to blunt popular consciousness, to erase past sins, to stunt and limit our vision of the better world we know is possible. The Dreamer is a zombie, immortalized in a monumnet paid for by Wal-Mart, Boeing, Bank of America, British Petroleum and other corporate criminals. The folks I ran with four decades ago, and run with today disagreed with Dr. King, but we admire him. We never had much use though, for “The Dreamer.”

Read the full commentary here: http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/dr-king-was-man-%E2%80%9C-dreamer%E2%80%9D-zombie

From “The Dreamer With a Kill List”:

Just before launching yet another unprovoked war to preserve the empire, Barack Obama stopped by the Lincoln Memorial to star in the commemoration of the 1963 March on Washington. He was joined by former presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, the men most responsible for pulling the Democratic Party deep enough into the corporate camp to afford the billion dollar elections that brought Obama to power. The pretense was that the presidents were there to show solemn respect for the Movement that defeated official American apartheid. The truth is, they came to take possession of the occasion – a gift from their minions in the Black Misleadership Class, who believe nothing has value until it is blessed and possessed by Power.

…It is inconceivable that Dr. King would share the stage with a president who was at that moment preparing a savage and illegal attack on a sovereign country. Dr. King’s voice has been censored and his dream vandalized, repackaged and presented as a gift to a corporate agent with a Kill List.

Read the full commentary here: http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/dreamer-kill-list

Black Agenda Report also just posted this episode of Black Agenda TV, an example of a independent journalism far superior to corporate cable TV in terms of substance and professionalism. One of the highlights is an in-depth interview with Dr. Cornel West.