The American approach to social control is so much more sophisticated and pervasive that it really deserves a new name.

It isn't just propaganda any more, it's “prop-agenda.” It's not so much the control of what we think, but the control of what we think about.

When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone's talking about.

And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false “intelligence” and selected “leaks”.

With the ground thus prepared, governments are happy if you then “use the democratic process” to agree or disagree — for, after all, their intention is to mobilize enough headlines and conversation to make the whole thing seem real and urgent.   more »

If they can make it out alive,

they get some money, a better

lifestyle and an education

Their role is to secure the oil, the diamonds,

the gold, the water, the guns, the drugs,

and the bling for their masters,

and hope they'll get a cut of the swag

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Keywords: mercenaries, brainwashed, us, killers, programmed, military, soldiers, robot

This summer I’ve been observing carbon culture. In Buffalo I listen to air conditioners hum on 65-degree nights.

Their owners never open their windows, so they don’t know how cool the outside world is, and the magic that a small fan could accomplish.

I’ve been in office buildings that were hypercooled so their inhabitants could wear the standard white collar uniform of jackets and ties on hot, humid days and still be comfortable.

The business class in Miami wears the same coats and they air-condition their buildings to the same temperature despite being in the tropics.   more »

Bricmont begins with the sensible observation that nearly every regime claims altruistic motives for its actions, however self-interested or malicious they may be, and therefore that using a regime's humanitarian rhetoric to judge its intentions is close to useless.

He goes on to provide a damning account of the anti-democratic violence that has been perpetrated by the United States under the rhetoric of "spreading freedom", ranging from the CIA-backed coups in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s to the funding of the Nicaraguan Contras 30 years later.

These examples and others effectively make the point that the United States and other Western powers have always deployed human rights rhetoric in a selective and self-serving manner, ignoring their own abuses and those of allies while using the wrongdoing of unfriendly regimes as an excuse to justify intervention.

What is surprising is not that regimes have falsely claimed altruistic motives for their military actions, but that self-described humanitarians so often believe them.   more »

Consider John Edwards, who the press and Republicans have cast as the heartthrob of the resurgent “left”. The centrepiece of Mr Edwards’ agenda is a call for universal health coverage.

It sounds radical to American ears, perhaps. But Margaret Thatcher would have been chased from office in the UK if she had proposed a health plan as radically conservative as Mr Edwards’ – under which private doctors would supply the medicine, and years would still pass with millions of Americans uncovered.

Mr Edwards wants to lift the minimum wage substantially, and to boost wage subsidies for low-income work besides.

But the outer limits of Mr Edwards’ ambition would leave low income work less generously compensated than the minimum wage and subsidy blend enacted by Britain’s New Labourites Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – arrangements Conservative party leader David Cameron says suit him just fine.   more »

Has the Left been neutered?

It struck me that the greatest taboo

of the antiwar movement is to show the slightest

empathy for the resistance fighters in Iraq

They are never mentioned as people for whom

we should show concern, much less admiration

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Keywords: antwar, support, resistance, fighters, iraq, shia, neutered, sunni