The People's Poet!

The People's Poet!
Right on, kids!

Wednesday 27 May 2015

Our Mania for Hope Is a Curse - Chris Hedges

Our Mania for Hope Is a Curse

"The naive belief that history is linear, that moral progress accompanies technical progress, is a form of collective self-delusion. It cripples our capacity for radical action and lulls us into a false sense of security. Those who cling to the myth of human progress, who believe that the world inevitably moves toward a higher material and moral state, are held captive by power. Only those who accept the very real possibility of dystopia, of the rise of a ruthless corporate totalitarianism, buttressed by the most terrifying security and surveillance apparatus in human history, are likely to carry out the self-sacrifice necessary for revolt.

The yearning for positivism that pervades our corporate culture ignores human nature and human history. But to challenge it, to state the obvious fact that things are getting worse, and may soon get much worse, is to be tossed out of the circle of magical thinking that defines American and much of Western culture. The left is as infected with this mania for hope as the right. It is a mania that obscures reality even as global capitalism disintegrates and the ecosystem unravels, potentially dooming us all."


... continues.

Friday 22 May 2015

Introducing Agency, the World’s First Anarchist PR Firm

Introducing Agency, the World’s First Anarchist PR Firm


From Konbini - by DJ Pangburn

Since time immemorial, anarchism has had a PR problem. Its many ideological strands have never truly controlled their respective images and terms of debate in the public consciousness. Instead, for over a century this ground has been ceded to politicians, mainstream media and big business, who have separately and collectively framed anarchism as — to borrow the term once leveled against Throbbing Gristle — “wreckers of civilization”.

This, however, might change now that anarchism has a PR collective. Founded by Jen Angel and Ryan Only last October, the fittingly named “Agency” aims to insert the anarchist perspective into mainstream news and public

dialogue, and more effectively communicate its ideas to the masses.


...read more...

Why The Media Ignores Jeremy Hammond While Praising Edward Snowden

Why The Media Ignores Jeremy Hammond While Praising Edward Snowden


The mainstream media has devoted hundreds of articles to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the subject of the Oscar-winning documentary “Citizenfour,” but it’s not devoted the same level of attention to many other whistleblowers and political prisoners, like Jeremy Hammond, no matter how sensational the facts they revealed.

In November 2013, a federal court sentenced Hammond to 10 years in prison for his part in the hack of Strategic Forecasting, an Austin, Texas-based corporate intelligence agency, also known as Stratfor. Working on behalf of Lulzsec, an infamous subgroup of Anonymous, Hammond leaked 5 million private emails taken from Stratfor to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, a release that came to be known as the Global Intelligence Files, or GI Files.


read more ...