Edward Bernays, the American nephew of Sigmund Freud, is said to have invented modern propaganda. During the First World War, he was one of a group of influential liberals who mounted a secret government campaign to persuade reluctant Americans to send an army to the bloodbath in Europe. In his book Propaganda, published in 1928, Bernays wrote that the “intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society”, and that the manipulators “constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power in our country”. Instead of propaganda, he coined the euphemism “public relations”. The American tobacco industry hired Bernays to convince women that they should smoke in public. By associating smoking with women’s liberation, he made cigarettes “torches of freedom”. In 1954, he conjured a communist menace in Guatemala as an excuse for overthrowing the democratically elected government, whose social reforms were threatening the United Fruit Company’s monopoly of the banana trade. He called it a “liberation”. Bernays was no rabid right-winger. He was an elitist liberal who believed that “engineering public consent” was for the greater good.

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SurveyUSA polls one of the suburban districts that will be key to the Democrats’ ability to hold the House in 2010, this time Tim Bishop in (NY-01). Bishop holds a 2 point lead over potential GOP challenger Randy Altschuler, who was already up on the air with ads. Unlike Snyder and Driehaus’s GOP-leaning districts, Bishop’s district has a +3 PVI Democratic advantage. Party affiliation in the district is 27% GOP, 33% Democratic and 39% Independent. When asked how they feel about a health care bill which forces them to buy insurance or pay a penalty, 66% of Independents say they are opposed and 48% say they are strongly opposed

so not the economy, not the idiotic mosque debate in nyc, not any other reason the pundit class pulls out of their ass .. its because the health care bill — with no public option and no medicare buy-in and a requirement to buy shitty health insurance from the private sector — is hugely unpopular with independents .. as Jane writes, “Well, we warned you” – mab .. read more
UPDATE: Markos Moulitsas weighs in at Daily Kos — “It’s a slow motion car wreck in the works, and the best the White House and its allies can do is complain that we didn’t clap loudly enough”

the U.S. government fund and build a new mosque at Ground Zero covering the entire World Trade Center site, with twin minarets looming above in memory of the Twin Towers’ destruction … This mosque should house a 9/11 Truth Museum .. It could include such artifacts as .. pieces of airplane wreckage from earlier crashes that were planted at the alleged 9/11 crash sites, WTC structural steel samples showing melting and evaporation caused by explosives, videos and other objects seized from the Israeli Mossad team that filmed and celebrated their colleagues’ destruction of the World Trade Center, unflattering wax figures of such 9/11 villains as Dick Cheney, Larry Silverstein, and Benjamin Netanyahu, and samples of nanothermite-laden World Trade Center dust

Taibbi also lets his many reader know that Barrett is a “former Fullbright scholar from Wisconsin .. who at one point was a professor at UW” – mab .. read more

The Catfood commission is not legitimate. It was stacked with people who knew their job was to fulfill Pete Peterson’s dream of rolling back the New Deal and waging war on the social safety net. It is a committee of oligarchs designed to circumvent electoral repercussions for those who oppose the will of the vast majority of the American people, both Republicans and Democrats, who don’t want to see the federal budget balanced on the backs of the nation’s senior citizens. President Obama, it is not just Alan Simpson who needs to go. It’s time to shut down the entire commission. Sign the petition: Tell President Obama to Can the Catfood Commission

has anyone else besides me noticed that instead of rolling back Bush/Cheney atrocities we’re pathetically fighting to hold the line on social security and net neutrality?! good times – mab .. read more

Sometimes, those stereotypes turn out to be true. Namely, that the more homophobic a man is, the more likely he is to have his own conflicted sexuality. A secure man, the story says, doesn’t care what gay men do in their bedrooms. Unless he’s the Chair of the Republican National Committee … The wholescale attempts to deny to gay people their civil rights, even, in some cases, their very right to existence, all happened under the watch of a man who now acknowledges that he is gay

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Despite being willing to stop in at an occasional cocktail party, President Obama could not care less what the Neoconservatives say, want or do… But being a Neocon means never having to say you are sorry, or that you were wrong, and it means never giving up on the dressing up of illegal and aggressive wars … Thus, in 1998 at the height of their impotence, the Neocons got up a hawkish letter with the support of the Republicans in Congress, insisting that President Clinton go to war against Iraq. It was absurd and monstrous. Iraq had been reduced to a poor weak fourth-rate power, its economy devastated, its children dying in droves, by US and UN sanctions pushed by the Neocons and their allies. Only five years later, under a different administration, they got their wish

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Two FCC Commissioners and one US Senator [Al Franken] slammed the Google-Verizon joint policy agreement and strongly endorsed the principle of net neutrality last night at a hearing before hundreds of citizens in Minneapolis, giving the Chairman of the federal agency Julius Genachowski all of the support he would need to regulate broadband Internet, if he so chose

Genachowski is Obama’s guy at the FCC — it’s very depressing to me that this issue is even up for debate – between this and proposed cuts to social security (the “Catfood Commission”) I’ve pretty much had it with the Dems – mab .. read more

But the major change in relationships took place in 1967. Just take a look at USA aid to Israel. You can tell that right off… Similarly, the attitude towards Israel on the part of the intellectual community — you know, media, commentary, journals, and so on — that changed very sharply in 1967, from either lack of interest or sometimes even disdain, to almost passionate support. So what happened in 1967? Well, in 1967, Israel destroyed the source of secular Arab nationalism — Nasser’s Egypt

and why was the US threatened by Nasser’s “secular Arab nationalism”? All together now .. OIL !!! – mab .. read more

Why is it that Germany and other European countries are able to support a strong system of economic support for their people in good times and bad? For decades, the US economic press and punditry have been predicting the end of what they deride as Socialism in the European Union. It requires a heavy tax burden for everyone, and a lot of government spending, which the corporatists in the US hate. So why hasn’t the German system collapsed? Why does it have the support of all major German political parties?

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On May 12, 2009, I attended a briefing at the White House as part of a group of grassroots activists and community artists. Mike Strautmanis, Chief of Staff for the Office of Public Liaison and top White House advisor Valerie Jarrett, made some remarks about how community activists have a seat at the table as the Obama Administration sets the agenda for change. I raised my hand. Sometimes, I said, the role of advocates isn’t to be inside at the table, but entirely outside the room, “creating the political space needed for change”. Strautmanis bristled visibly.

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I guess I was naïve in thinking that The Atlantic and its American-Israeli writer Jeffrey Goldberg might shy away from arguing for yet another war – this one with Iran – while the cauldrons are still boiling in Afghanistan and Iraq. Even world-class chutzpah must have its limits, I had thought

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Gibbs echoes the oft-heard refrain that George Bush left such a mess, and people expect too much change too fast. But if Obama were actually fighting for the change he promised and losing because of overwhelming opposition, the “progressives” Gibbs is whining about would be behind him 100%. The problem is not that he’s fighting corporate America and losing. The problem is that all too often, it’s obvious that he’s fighting for the other side

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The Democrats have been concerned about a lack of enthusiasm on the part of their base headed into the midterm elections. These sorts of rabid, caricatured, Fox-News-copying attacks on the Left will undoubtedly help generate more enthusiasm — more loud clapping — for the Democrats. I know I’m eager to go canvass and clap for Democrats after reading Gibbs’ noble, inspiring vision. If it were Gibbs’ goal to be as petulant and self-pitying as possible, what could he have done differently? Perhaps one day the White House can work itself up to express this sort of sputtering rage against the Right, or the Wall Street thieves who destroyed the American economy, or the permanent factions that control Washington

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When the plutonium bomb exploded above Nagasaki it made the uranium-type bomb dropped on Hiroshima obsolete … Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., once said in an interview that the “nastiest act by this country, after human slavery, was the bombing of Nagasaki.” But Nagasaki was “forgotten” from the very start, thanks to a blatant act of press censorship … The reporter was George Weller .. for the now-defunct Chicago Daily News. His startling dispatches from Nagasaki, which could have affected public opinion on the future of the bomb, never emerged from General Douglas MacArthur’s censorship office in Tokyo .. Following his hospital visits, [Weller] would describe “Disease X,” and victims, who have “neither a burn or a broken limb,” wasting away with “blackish” mouths and red spots, and small children who “have lost some hair.”

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Does anyone doubt that once a society ceases to be able to afford schools, public transit, paved roads, libraries and street lights — or once it chooses not to be able to afford those things in pursuit of imperial priorities and the maintenance of a vast Surveillance and National Security State — that a very serious problem has arisen, that things have gone seriously awry, that imperial collapse, by definition, is an imminent inevitability?

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“Everyone agrees that the recession is over.” – Larry Summers, director of the National Economic Council; “Of course not.” – Outgoing Council of Economic Advisers Chairwoman Christina Romer, when asked if the recession was over. The two senior White House economic advisers made their comments on the same day … If you’re on Wall Street, and you’ve seen the stock markets recover and the banks go from virtual insolvency two years ago back to record profit numbers now, then like Summers you’ll think “everybody agrees” that the recession is over. If however you’re just some schmuck looking for a job somewhere outside the Beltway and/or lower Manhattan, and you’re noticing that the only easy job openings this year were temp gig taking census surveys (and even those have dried up), then your view of things is going to be no way the recession has ended, “of course not.”

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Out here in Great Recession-land, we read with great interest of your success with getting all of your lovely friends (all the ‘right’ people, I’m sure) to contribute to your little charity plan… I do have to say, though, that I am more than a little bit disappointed with you both in terms of the direction of this. Considering how you got the money, it does seem a little bit ungracious. Now don’t misunderstand me (deep breathing, Warren; it really does help): Both of you have worked hard for the money (don’t you love that song; I just can’t stop dancing when I hear it). And so did all of the lovely little munchkins who worked for your companies, too. I’m sure they feel a certain amount of ambivalence about this, considering how many of them you boys have let go, outsourced, and downsized out of house and home so that you could transfer those thousands of jobs to India and China

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For years, Internet advocates have warned of the doomsday scenario that will play out on Monday: Google and Verizon will announce a deal that the New York Times reports “could allow Verizon to speed some online content to Internet users more quickly if the content’s creators are willing to pay for the privilege.” The deal marks the beginning of the end of the Internet as you know it

did anyone notice that this is happening right in the middle of the good news barrage re gay marriage?! — one hand giveth… – mab .. read more

This morning Joe was awakened by his alarm clock. Thanks to patents, which remove incentives to interoperability and modular design, the clock was designed to be thrown away rather than repaired…The clock was powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the US Department of Energy — a regulated monopoly operating on the same cost-plus markup accounting system as most other public utilities, including the military contractors who gave us the $600 toilet seat. Joe then took a shower in the clean water provided by the municipal water utility; Joe’s water bill reflects a rate structure which provides below-cost water for large-scale industrial use and agribusiness. Joe watched the news on the kind of legacy broadcast media described by Edward Herman, which thanks to the FCC licensing monopolies is controlled by a handful of corporate gatekeepers. He watched it while eating his breakfast of General Mills cereal … [it just gets better]

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We write to alert you to the likelihood that Israel will attack Iran as early as this month … We had long since concluded that Israel had been exaggerating the Arab “threat” – well before 1982 when former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin publicly confessed: “In June 1967, we had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that [Egyptian President] Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.” Israel had, in fact, prepared well militarily and also mounted provocations against its neighbors, in order to provoke a response that could be used to justify expansion of its borders. Given this record, one would be well advised to greet with appropriate skepticism any private assurances Netanyahu may have given you that Israel would not surprise you with an attack on Iran

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Our nation’s prohibition about marijuana has cost the country billions, resulted in a massive increase in incarceration rates, funded criminal syndicates, yet failed to stop people from using marijuana. It is a failed costly and misguided policy that must end now. We are a group of all individuals of all ages, backgrounds, and political leans that share the simple convince that the marijuana prohibition must end. That is why we are promoting the legalization and sensible regulation of marijuana through grassroots organizing and direct democratic action

.. Here’s the Website