Media Roots Radio- US Imperialism, Spying, Self-Censorship, Building Communities by Media Roots

MEDIA ROOTS- This discussion covers US imperialism: wars, costs, media and government propaganda; the culture of self-censorship and the erosion of privacy in the US; information as power and how communication is an important tool to strengthen and build communities.

Bangkok, Thailand July 15, 2011 - Associated Press reports that, "U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton says the Obama administration has decided to formally recognize Libya’s main opposition group as the country’s legitimate government. The move gives foes of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi a major financial and credibility boost."

In an act of utter desperation as the brutal, though entirely ineffective Libyan rebels flounder in their NATO-backed offensives against Libya's ruling government in Tripoli, the US has now recognized the Libyan rebels as the country's "legitimate government" allowing the US to directly fund, arm, and support with US troops, the Al-Qaeda tied war criminals operating out of Benghazi. The recent farcical move indicates that France's Foreign Minister Alain Juppé has failed in his threats and posturing to get Libya's Qaddafi to stand down, and that the NATO-backed war of aggression is about to reach new heights of brutality most likely including the involvement of US, UK, and French troops on the ground.

Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez and Syria's President Bashar al-Assad hold
a joint press conference at the presidential palace, Damascus, 21 October 2010

Chavez to Assad: We should speed up the birth of a new world order

http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2010/07/28/ahmadinejad-us-israel-plan-to-attack-at-least-two-countries-in-the-middle-east-within-the-next-three-months/

Ahmadinejad: US, Israel plan to attack at least two countries in the Middle East within the next three months

news.ReOpen911.info by Spotless Mind
Translated by DJDaveMark
December 1st, 2008

The administrators at Change.org have deleted the idea for a new investigation into 9/11.

They declared that a new investigation into the attacks – which gave the Bush Administration the power to spy on it's own citizens, to torture, to launch two preventative wars based on lies and more generally to trample all over the Constitution – was "outside the scope" of the site's stated mission and therefore didn't meet their criteria for "specific policy solutions". It doesn't matter how many people want to know the Truth about 9/11, they refuse to have the idea promoted and discussed on their site.

Because of this censorship, the Change.org site has shown that it isn't a "social platform" but, rather, just another gatekeeper of 9/11 Truth.

When the idea was pulled, it was by far the most popular, comfortably occupying the top spot, totaling at least 660 votes (twice the amount of the next best rated idea) only 48 hours after being submitted. On a side note, the other proposed ideas had a 3 week head start, and the 9/11 Truth idea was only just warming up.

Why (pretend to) ask the citizens for ideas then simply delete the most popular? It seems like all of this is more of a joke than a wishful expression for democracy…

Here is the e-mail received by everyone who voted (and to whom we thank for voting):

40 and 4

April 04, 2008

Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world.
-Martin Luther King, Jr. Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence
April 04, 1967

Martin Luther King, Jr, delivered his brilliant speech: Beyond Vietnam at the Riverside Church in NYC exactly one year before he was killed, 40 years ago on April 4, 1968, on that infamous balcony in Memphis, Tennessee. His most famous speech is the brilliant I Have a Dream that he delivered to the mass of people who gathered in front of the Lincoln Monument in DC for a Civil Rights' gathering in 1963. Dr. King's Beyond Vietnam speech, however, clearly makes the connections between poverty, racism and militarism and was very threatening to the out of control war machine that was waging a bloody, bloody catastrophe in Vietnam. Dr. King was an effective orator and great organizer, but when he gave his Beyond Vietnam speech, (which many of his colleagues begged him not to give) he became a threat to the pigs of war.

In the near future Canadians will be asked to choose a new government based on Canada's support of the Afghanistan mission. The Conservatives want to extend the open ended mission till 2011 and beyond. The Liberals want to change it to a peace keeping mission after one year and the Bloc Quebecois and the New Democrats want out completely.
You may have noticed that none of the above parties are questioning the validity or the justification of the mission. We all know it was undertaken as a result of 9/11 and we all know the official story of 9/11 has been proven a mass of lies and disinformation.
I realize that south of the 49th parallel, this is not news but I would like to urge concerned citizens in Canada as well as our friends around the world to use this opportunity to ask questions and demand answers of our elected representatives as well as journalists.
Here are a few I have come up with;
Why should young Canadian men and women fight and die on foreign soil for the cause of expanding the American empire?
Why should Canadian taxpayers bear the cost of advancing the American empire, while wealthy International Corporations enjoy the return on our investment?

An Absence of Will

Under constant manipulations, lies and propaganda, a nation of courage has become a nation of cowards. A nation that once questioned its leaders now falls lockstep behind them, blindly following criminality and corruption. A nation that once stood for protests, strikes, marches, sit-ins, challenging the government and seeking accountability now prefers sitting comfortably on couches or chairs, watching the world pass by through television sets or laptops, some becoming arm-chair activists, most simply rotting away their lives, preferring the life of a couch potato, passively ignoring the destruction of rights and freedoms, silently acquiescing to myriad number of crimes against humanity, and obediently shopping, purchasing and consuming according to the dictates of the corporatist world, their new god the Almighty Dollar commanding them to congregate at the Cathedrals of Consumerism, the Malls of Materialism, told to do their job and be good consumers, spending what little they have, even consuming with money that they do not have, and must therefore borrow.

Manifestations of Intent

Can you smell the smoked fumes of a discombobulated economic engine that has ceased to function, its synergy spitting and sputtering, its many parts thrashed by the claws, and vices, of neoliberal capitalism? Can you feel the dismantling of the economic spark plug, the American consumer, as our livelihoods are sacrificed to the greed, and incompetence, of the establishment and as the value of our lives is further enslaved to the Almighty Dollar and its puppet masters?

Can you hear the roar of authoritarian Machiavelli-types, of which many exist, cheering as the Constitution is discarded like yesterday’s trash, its principles and foundations burned inside the incinerator of fascism? Can you hear the searing of one of the greatest documents of governance ever created by man as it goes up in flames thanks to the kerosene thrown at it by American corporatists in power, its ashes slowly scattering into the realm of nothingness?

9/11 and Empire Radio, 9-11 pm CT Tues. 1/14/07 http://www.wtprn.com

My first-hour guest will be John Perkins, author of the bestseller Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, and the new The Secret History of the American Empire. Perkins pulls back the curtain on the way the world is really run (by financiers, not politicians) through usury and black ops.

Second hour guest: Abid Ullah Jan of http://www.dictatorshipwatch.com/, author of six books and countless articles, whose analysis of empire complements Perkins.

John Perkins is on the record expressing doubts about the official story of 9/11--doubts that I hope he'll expand upon in this interview!

http://mujca.com/hitman.htm

BookTV on CSpan2 1/21/06
Featuring John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man Taped at Politics & Prose Bookstore, Washington DC, 1/10/06
Excerpt from the Q & A session

Guns & Butter
Wednesday, August 15, 2007, 1:00pm

From Cold War to Class War

Interview with financial economist and historian, Dr. Michael Hudson. Liquidity crisis in the banking system; wiping out of credit; demise of the dollar; stock volatility; hedge funds; sub-prime lending, real estate tax versus labor tax, etc. Dr. Hudson has been appointed Chief Economic Advisor for the Kucinich for President campaign, and is writing a new tax policy for the United States. He is President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends, a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and author of "Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire". Visit his website at www.michael-hudson.com.

KPFA 94.1 FM Berkeley 1pm PST, and streaming and archived at www.kpfa.org

www.gunsandbutter.net

http://www.ichblog.eu/content/view/728/1/

Neocon Imperialism, 9/11, and the Attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq
Tuesday, 27 February 2007
By David Ray Griffin

My purpose in publishing this essay is to introduce a perspective, relevant to the debates about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, that thus far has not been part of the public discussion.

02/27/07 "ICH" -- - -One way to understand the effect of 9/11, in most general terms, is to see that it allowed the agenda developed in the 1990s by neoconservatives—-often called simply “neocons”---to be implemented. There is agreement on this point across the political spectrum. From the right, for example, Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke say that 9/11 allowed the “preexisting ideological agenda” of the neoconservatives to be “taken off the shelf . . . and relabeled as the response to terror.”1 Stephen Sniegoski, writing from the left, says that “it was only the traumatic effects of the 9/11 terrorism that enabled the agenda of the neocons to become the policy of the United States of America.”2