On last Friday afternoon, because of clear skies and good weather, Germany was at one point producing 22 gigawatts of solar power, a new record. Today (Monday) is a holiday in Germany, and electricity needs will be only a third of normal. So, for a couple hours this afternoon, all Germany’s electrical power needs will be supplied by renewable energy. That must be a first for an industrialized, G8 country.

Germany has defied the predictions of those who said that mothballing its nuclear plants would cause it to produce more CO2. Its carbon dioxide production was down 2% in the past year. It replaced 60% of its formerly nuclear-generated electricity production with renewables, and became 5% more efficient in using energy.”

http://www.juancole.com/2012/05/21355.html

2. ““Militants”: media propaganda

To avoid counting civilian deaths, Obama re-defined “militant” to mean “all military-age males in a strike zone”

http://www.salon.com/2012/05/29/militants_media_propaganda/singleton/

The Slaves That Time Forgot

They came as slaves; vast human cargo transported on tall British ships bound for the Americas. They were shipped by the hundreds of thousands and included men, women, and even the youngest of children.

Whenever they rebelled or even disobeyed an order, they were punished in the harshest ways. Slave owners would hang their human property by their hands and set their hands or feet on fire as one form of punishment. They were burned alive and had their heads placed on pikes in the marketplace as a warning to other captives.

We don’t really need to go through all of the gory details, do we? After all, we know all too well the atrocities of the African slave trade. But, are we talking about African slavery? King James II and Charles I led a continued effort to enslave the Irish. Britain’s famed Oliver Cromwell furthered this practice of dehumanizing one’s next door neighbor.

The Irish slave trade began when James II sold 30,000 Irish prisoners as slaves to the New World. His Proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies. By the mid 1600s, the Irish were the main slaves sold to Antigua and Montserrat. At that time, 70% of the total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves.

Ireland quickly became the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants. The majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white.

From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English and another 300,000 were sold as slaves. Ireland’s population fell from about 1,500,000 to 600,000 in one single decade. Families were ripped apart as the British did not allow Irish dads to take their wives and children with them across the Atlantic. This led to a helpless population of homeless women and children. Britain’s solution was to auction them off as well.

During the 1650s, over 100,000 Irish children between the ages of 10 and 14 were taken from their parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and New England. In this decade, 52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to Barbados and Virginia. Another 30,000 Irish men and women were also transported and sold to the highest bidder. In 1656, Cromwell ordered that 2000 Irish children be taken to Jamaica and sold as slaves to English settlers.

Many people today will avoid calling the Irish slaves what they truly were: Slaves. They’ll come up with terms like “Indentured Servants” to describe what occurred to the Irish. However, in most cases from the 17th and 18th centuries, Irish slaves were nothing more than human cattle.
…
None of the Irish victims ever made it back to their homeland to describe their ordeal. These are the lost slaves; the ones that time and biased history books conveniently forgot. “

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=31076

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/05/has-the-u-s-government-ever-protected-drug-smugglers.html

2. “The Authoritarian Mind

Yet another Afghan family (and a bakery in Pakistan) is extinguished by an airstrike: unleash the justifications

All of this is so widely tolerated, even cheered, among large factions of the American citizenry due to three premises:

(1) I have absolutely no idea who my government is continuously bombing to death by drone, but I assume they deserve it;

(2) when my government extinguishes the lives of entire families, including small children, as it often does, I know it’s all for a just and important cause even if I can’t identify it; and,

(3) we have to stop the Terrorists, because they keep killing innocent civilians.

That’s the Authoritarian Mind, and it appears everywhere the Imperial Mind does.”

http://www.salon.com/2012/05/27/the_authoritarian_mind_2/singleton/

How was I even awarded this medal? Any service member who served in active duty after 9/11 was awarded this medal for NATO’s Global War on Terror. Why? If you didn’t know it, terrorists are everywhere, anywhere, and can strike at any time. Even in Omaha, Nebraska, where I waited to be deployed. Terrorists could have been there and so I was awarded this medal.

I threw back my medal because there is no ‘global war on terror’. For that to be true, I’d have to be afraid. But, I am not afraid and I reject the peddling of fear that our leaders and media have fostered for more than ten years. When our nation becomes afraid, we are forced to do things we would rather not – like spend trillions of dollars on endless wars. Tragically, more than three thousand innocent people were killed on 9/11 at the hands of criminals and political terrorists. In response, our national leaders fabricated a war of lies that led to the death of thousands of US service members. We’ve been responsible for the death of 33,000 civilians living in Afghanistan. Tragedy beget massacres when we responded with fear and military might. And after 9/11, fear came to rule as true courage was sidelined.”

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/05/25-3

2. “As An Encore to Bailing Out the Big Banks, Government to Backstop Derivativees Clearinghouses … In the U.S. and Abroad

… Which Will Lead to Bailouts and Encourage Even More Fraud

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/05/as-an-encore-to-bailing-out-the-big-banks-government-to-backstop-derivativees-clearinghouses-in-the-u-s-and-abroad.html

“Money for Jobs and Education! Jobs and Education, Not War and Occupation!”

This slogan put forth by several US social movements is profoundly wrong and harmful—both in terms of morality that’s actually in the interests of humanity, and in terms of a scientific understanding of imperialism and war.

Why should antiwar demands focus first and foremost on the war’s impact on Americans and their lives—and not on the victims of U.S. aggression: Pakistanis murdered in U.S. drone strikes, Iraqis rounded up and tortured by U.S. forces, Afghans seized and terrorized in night raids, and countless others? Aren’t their lives every bit as precious as the lives of those who happen to live in the U.S.?

“Money for jobs, not for war” argues that American lives are more important than other people’s lives. This logic goes right along with—and amplifies—the mindset relentlessly fostered by the system’s rulers and their media machine: that American lives come first. This is the very mindset the rulers count on to justify and build public support (or acquiescence) for their predatory wars of empire.

The slogan also promotes the idea that the political powers-that-be—if pressured by enough people—could scale back their military, stop attacking other countries, and instead use the money for jobs, education, and other social welfare programs at home. But that’s not how the system actually operates! Wars, invasions, and occupations are not policies of one set of politicians or another, or arbitrary choices made by this or that president. At this stage in history, capitalism is a global system, with the U.S. the world’s most dominant capitalist-imperialist power, presiding over a worldwide empire of exploitation. This empire rests on the domination of the oppressed countries where the vast majority of humanity lives, and on control of labor, markets, and resources. This entails the violent suppression of the masses of people in the dominated areas—and also entails fighting off challenges from other imperialists as well as rising forces in those countries that stand in the way. This requires a monstrously huge military that is deployed worldwide, with bases in over 100 countries, and wars when necessary.

The wars for domination in the Middle East, Central Asia, and elsewhere don’t “interfere” with the functioning of U.S. capital—they’re absolutely essential to it, and to the U.S.’s overall global dominance. This is why the U.S. rulers are compelled—and willing to—spend trillions on the military, including during periods of severe economic and fiscal stress, no matter who happens to sit in the White House or Congress.

This system of global capitalism-imperialism headed by the U.S. is the main source of the horrors that torment so many across the globe—from the ethnic cleansing and slow genocide of the Palestinian people by the U.S. and Israel, to the mass incarceration and slow genocide of Black people in the U.S.; from the rape of the planet to the systematic degradation and violence against women—here and around the world; from the extreme deprivation and starvation faced by billions across the planet to the growing poverty and desperation faced by millions in the U.S.

The rulers in these imperial metropoles distribute some of the spoils of empire to provide a higher standard of living than in the oppressed countries and buy social peace and loyalty at home (which “Money for Jobs, Not For War” encourages). People in the U.S. should reject that foul pact! The vast majority in the U.S. have a profound interest in making common cause with oppressed people worldwide, not in siding with “their” rulers. That means fostering a morality that declares: “American lives are not more important than other people’s lives!”—not pandering to American chauvinism, which strengthens the system responsible for so much misery. It means people shouldn’t appeal to those on the top to “spend more on jobs,” but to clearly and unequivocally demand a STOP to the horrors the U.S. is committing around the world.

Through this process of actively opposing U.S. aggression and the “America Number 1” mindset fostered to justify it, people can and must be won to increasingly see that this capitalist system and state is utterly un-reformable and that it’s going to take revolution to get rid of it, end its predatory wars once and for all, and bring into being a whole new system and state that is in the actual interests of the people in the U.S. and around the world.”

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=31024

Yet throughout the social turmoil and profound socio-economic erosion of living and working conditions, the dominant ideology informing the movements, trade unions and political opposition is reformist: Issuing calls to defend existing social benefits, increase public spending and investments and expand the role of the state where private sector activity has failed to invest or employ. In other words, the left proposes to conserve a past when capitalism was harnessed to the welfare state.

The problem is that this ‘capitalism of the past’ is gone and a new more virulent and intransigent capitalism has emerged forging a new worldwide framework and a powerful entrenched state apparatus immune to all calls for ‘reform’ and reorientation. The confusion, frustration and misdirection of mass popular opposition is, in part, due to the adoption by leftist writers, journalists and academics of the concepts and language espoused by its capitalist adversaries: language designed to obfuscate the true social relations of brutal exploitation, the central role of the ruling classes in reversing social gains and the profound links between the capitalist class and the state. Capitalist publicists, academics and journalists have elaborated a whole litany of concepts and terms which perpetuate capitalist rule and distract its critics and victims from the perpetrators of their steep slide toward mass impoverishment.

Even as they formulate their critiques and denunciations, the critics of capitalism use the language and concepts of its apologists. Insofar as the language of capitalism has entered the general parlance of the left, the capitalist class has established hegemony or dominance over its erstwhile adversaries. Worse, the left, by combining some of the basic concepts of capitalism with sharp criticism, creates illusions about the possibility of reforming ‘the market’ to serve popular ends. This fails to identify the principle social forces that must be ousted from the commanding heights of the economy and the imperative to dismantle the class-dominated state. While the left denounces the capitalist crisis and state bailouts, its own poverty of thought undermines the development of mass political action. In this context the ‘language’ of obfuscation becomes a ‘material force’ – a vehicle of capitalist power, whose primary use is to disorient and disarm its anti-capitalist and working class adversaries. It does so by co-opting its intellectual critics through the use of terms, conceptual framework and language which dominate the discussion of the capitalist crisis.
…
Language, concepts and euphemisms are important weapons in the class struggle ‘from above’ designed by capitalist journalists and economists to maximize the wealth and power of capital. To the degree that progressive and leftist critics adopt these euphemisms and their frame of reference, their own critiques and the alternatives they propose are limited by the rhetoric of capital. Putting ‘quotation marks’ around the euphemisms may be a mark of disapproval but this does nothing to advance a different analytical framework necessary for successful class struggle ‘from below’. Equally important, it side-steps the need for a fundamental break with the capitalist system including its corrupted language and deceptive concepts. Capitalists have overturned the most fundamental gains of the working class and we are falling back toward the absolute rule of capital. This must raise anew the issue of a socialist transformation of the state, economy and class structure. An integral part of that process must be the complete rejection of the euphemisms used by capitalist ideologues and their systematic replacement by terms and concepts that truly reflect the harsh reality, that clearly identify the perpetrators of this decline and that define the social agencies for political transformation. “

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=31018

“WAR & POLICE STATE GOOD FOR BUSINESS: Defense Contractors Look for Return on Investment With National Defense Authorization Act

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=31006

2. “WH leaks for propaganda film

The administration takes a break from its war on whistleblowers to provide classified information to filmmakers

So let’s review the Obama administration’s rules: leaking classified information is a grave crime — espionage! — when done to blow the whistle on serious government corruption, deceit and illegality, and it merits decades in prison. But when it’s done to enable Hollywood to produce a propaganda film glorifying the great and “gutsy” Commander-in-Chief, then it is a noble and patriotic act.”

http://www.salon.com/2012/05/23/wh_leaks_for_propaganda_film/singleton/

http://tv.globalresearch.ca/2012/05/hillary-clinton-admits-us-government-created-al-qaeda

2. “The Police State Is Here”

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31396.htm

The Financial Crisis could Destroy Western Civilization

The US financial system and, probably, the financial system of Europe, like the police, no longer serves a useful social purpose.

In the US the police have proven themselves to be a greater threat to public safety than private sector criminals. I just googled “police brutality” and up came 183,000,000 results.
…
In the US free market economists unleashed avarice and permitted it to run amuck. Will the disastrous consequences discredit capitalism to the extent that the Soviet collapse discredited socialism?

Will Western civilization itself survive the financial tsunami that deregulated Wall Street has produced?

Ironic, isn’t it, that the United States, the home of the “indispensable people,” stands before us as the likely candidate whose government will be responsible for the collapse of the West.”

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30960

“Congressmen Seek To Lift Propaganda Ban

Propaganda that was supposed to target foreigners could now be aimed at Americans, reversing a longstanding policy.

The new law would give sweeping powers to the State Department and Pentagon to push television, radio, newspaper, and social media onto the U.S. public. “It removes the protection for Americans,” says a Pentagon official who is concerned about the law. “It removes oversight from the people who want to put out this information. There are no checks and balances. No one knows if the information is accurate, partially accurate, or entirely false.”

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mhastings/congressmen-seek-to-lift-propaganda-ban