Daily Topics - Monday April 19th 2010

Hour One - Nomi Prins www.nomiprins.com SEC files civil suit against Goldman Sachs
Hour Two: Defending the KKK...really? Thom challenges their attorney www.aclu-em.org
Hour Three: "Earth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet" Award winning Environmentalist/Educator/Author Bill McKibben www.billmckibben.com
Comments

We have a great citizen cable in Austin, ACAC Austin Community Access Center. An old show Alternative Views by Frank Morrow and Doug Kelner was my basic education in progressive politics and opened my eyes about the corporate media. This was from late '70's to early '90's.
and the worms added valuable protein.

@Robert S. try marinating your mushrooms in yogurt, you'll find the concoction quite potent.
@Robert S: but how do you drown-out the worm screams?

@Maxrot,
Blue honey is interesting as well. But seriously, check this out:
Noam Chomsky Has ‘Never Seen Anything Like This’
Noam Chomsky is America’s greatest intellectual. His massive body of work, which includes nearly 100 books, has for decades deflated and exposed the lies of the power elite and the myths they perpetrate. Chomsky has done this despite being blacklisted by the commercial media, turned into a pariah by the academy and, by his own admission, being a pedantic and at times slightly boring speaker. He combines moral autonomy with rigorous scholarship, a remarkable grasp of detail and a searing intellect. He curtly dismisses our two-party system as a mirage orchestrated by the corporate state, excoriates the liberal intelligentsia for being fops and courtiers and describes the drivel of the commercial media as a form of “brainwashing.” And as our nation’s most prescient critic of unregulated capitalism, globalization and the poison of empire, he enters his 81st year warning us that we have little time left to save our anemic democracy.
“It is very similar to late Weimar Germany,” Chomsky told me when I called him at his office in Cambridge, Mass. “The parallels are striking. There was also tremendous disillusionment with the parliamentary system. The most striking fact about Weimar was not that the Nazis managed to destroy the Social Democrats and the Communists but that the traditional parties, the Conservative and Liberal parties, were hated and disappeared. It left a vacuum which the Nazis very cleverly and intelligently managed to take over.
I thought the Nazis downtown pathetic, nonetheless, if we collectively allow them to assemble, it remains our responsibility to protest their hateful rhetoric.

@Harry,
Jimi, Pink Floyd or the Good Ol' Grateful Dead...? Never was an issue for me.

@Robert S. good Chomsky, I have to disagree with him on one point though, I don't find his lectures, speeches, interviews, etc... the least bit boring.
I confess, I wasn't in Germany during the '20's, I know that the Munich Putsch did little in '23, but even at that time, other extreme right wing groups were coalescing and seizing power, as well as left wing groups, that didn't attract front line soldiers as well as the right wing groups. A lot of assassinations, armed conflict, and street battles ravaged post war Germany. The likelihood of a right-wing organization taking over by force was almost a given from the get-go. I don't know how much Chomsky looks at just the political structure vs. the pseudo revolutionary street level actions taking place simultaneously (though politicians of that era were not shy about clinging to whichever group they thought they could ride to power with).
I believe the key to the issue though, is economic stability. I don't know if Chomsky would agree with that or not.

@Robert S. I almost forgot all about one of the most important ingredients to the ruthlessness of the NAZI party (though I did allude to it). One thing that party had, that modern movements don't have, is veterans from one of the most gruesome and heinous wars ever to be visited on mankind. Veterans that had lived in ditches among their rotting dead comrades and enemies, men that would go over the top to certain death, against machine guns and artillery shells and prepared to fight hand to hand. There's a reason why the German's version of fascism went so far, it was born in the trenches of the Western front, and it was not satiated by victory, it was exacerbated by defeat. Talk about PTSD, and bringing the war home.

In Hell there is no light at the end of the tunnel. In the hereafter there is no time and space.Life in the hereafter is eternal.

one aspect of the immigration debate that is neglected is the fact that most of the undocumented farm workers are indios-mexicans, guatemalans, hondurans etc. but still indians. the Ladinos or European/Mexicans are for the most part members of the upper-middle class or members of the 28 families that own Mexico and therefore have no need to immigrate illegally.
@Robert S. no, I wasn't at the Rally, I forgot all about their pathetic attempt to get attention. Frankly the NAZI Party doesn't really concern me. They are far from the virulant party formed in Post War Germany, in part because their is no collective humiliation and ongoing suffering that Germans went through during the '20's. The allies learned their lessons from the end of the Great War, we didn't keep the boot to their neck after WWII, half so much as it was done in 1919. The fertile ground for the NAZI sentiment in Germany, just isn't here.... yet. That being said, in the '30's the American National Socialist Party was gaining ground, so was the Communist party (incidently the Communist party was quite strong in Germany in the '20's too), desparate times, lead people to desparate measures. I'm hoping that we are indeed climning out of our current depression, I'm worried that the prevailent political theory to deny we're in a depression, will lead to not doing enough to get us out. If you're really concerned about the modern NAZI party and KKK, then push your political rep's to do something to fix the economy.