Time for an American Glasnost

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Time for an American Glasnost

Postby conniption » Sun Aug 29, 2021 7:51 pm

Did no one listen to Bernie back in 1989...?

The Harvard Crimson

Time for an American Glasnost

By Bernard Sanders
November 28, 1989


THE news from the Soviet Union is breathtaking. Events which no one would have predicted 10 years ago are now occuring at lightning speed.

Glasnost; perestroika; free speech; open parliamentary debate televised before millions of viewers; the beginning of organized political opposition to the Communist Party; mass strikes and demonstrations by workers and ethnic minorities; serious publications dealing honestly with the nation's sordid history which had been covered up for deades by official lies. And more.

Whatever the reason (and now is not the time to explore those reasons) enormous credit must be given to Mikhail Gorbachev and the current leadership of the Soviet Union for helping to bring about an extraordinary, non-violent revolution which is forcing citizens of the Soviet Union to rethink, in almost every way, the basic foundations of their na$ion.

And now let me make a proposal, a proposal which will, undoubtedly, offend many readers--but which has to be made. In my view the time is now for a glasnost in the United States--a soul searching for our own basic truths, a major debate over our current values, an honest analysis of the real structure of our society and the creation of a mechanism to search out our dreams for the future.

The history of the United States and the nature of our society are very different from that of the Soviet Union. But if the citizens of our country believe that this nation does not exist under the blanket of the Big Lie, and that many of the most important issues facing our people are not openly and seriously discussed, they are sorely mistaken. We are told every day by the politicians, and the media how "free" we are. Unfortunately, we are not given the freedom to explore that assertion. We need a glasnost!

LET me raise four issues (out of many) at the heart of our existence as a nation which, within the context of an American Glasnost, need to be debated from this country to the other. These issues, which today receive virtually no public attention at all, need to be discussed vigorously within the Congress, the state legislatures, the city halls, in every streetcorner and wherever Americans come together.


Within the United States today, the richest one percent of the population now owns over half the wealth in this country and the richest 10 percent owns over 80 percent of the wealth (excluding home ownership). The gap between the rich and the poor is growing wider. Further, with the recent "merger mania" and the incredible growth of huge, multinational corporations, a handful of corporate executives now exercise unprecedented power over the economic life of the nation.

Question 1: Do we need radical changes in our economic system to provide a fairer distribution of wealth and economic decision-making?


In the United States today, over half the eligible voters no longer vote for President and far fewer vote in off-year state and local elections. In fact, the United States now has the lowest voter turnout of any industrialized nation in the world, with the vast majority of poor and young people not voting. Further, in 1988, 99 percent of incumbent members of Congress were reelected. This strongly suggest that, due to the power of incumbency, our system of representative democracy has broken down completely and that election to Congress is now tantamount to lifetime tenure--a House of Lords.

Question 2: How do we create a real democracy in which the average citizen has the opportunity to vote in elections in which meaningful choices are presented? Further, how do we create a political climate in which citizens play an active role in the affairs of their community?


It is now widely perceived that the major political parties in our country, the Democrats and the Republicans, have no basic ideological differences and are, in reality, two wings of the same party--both dominated by Big Money.

What does it mean to the concept of honest political "debate" when, in the 1980's both parties supported huge tax breaks for the rich and large corporations, when both parties supported major cutbacks in funding for education, housing, environmental proection and desperately-needed social services, when both parties supported major increases in military spending and the 8-year-old C.I.A.-Contra was against Nicaragua?

Question 3: Do we need a new political party in this country which represents the interests of working people, poor people, minorities, women, environmentalists, peace activists and all people who are not being adequately represented by the Democratic and Republican parties?


For a free society to function effectively, people need full access to information. As part of the recent "merger mania," the ownership of the mass media in the United States has been concentrated to an alarming degree in the hands of fewer and fewer large corporation. Independent newspapers and magazines have been bought out by major chains, and the radio and television networks are controlled by such powerful companies as General Electric (which now owns NBC).

It is not difficult to argue that commercial television today is largely censored and tightly controlled. It is virtually impossible for serious writers to produce a program for television which would deal with ideas hostile to the interests of the owners of the networks or to corporate sponsors.

Question 4: Finally, how can we create a media in this country which allows for a wide diversity of viewpoints, when ownership of the media is currently in the hands of very wealthy and powerful corporations which are primarily concerned with protecting their own economic interests?
_______

Bernard Sanders, who from 1981 to 1989 was the only socialist mayor in America, is the former mayor of Burlington, Vermont. He is currently a fellow at the Institute of Politics (IOP) at the Kennedy School.

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1989 ... st-pbtbhe/

~~~

Fast forward to 2021...

Club Orlov

The Afghanistan Rout and American Glasnost’

Dmitry Orlov
2021-08-28

Recent events have forced me to interrupt regular programming to bring you a report on the developments in Afghanistan and what I believe they portend for the US. The US and NATO have finally left Afghanistan after a 20-year occupation. At this point, they are still retaining a toehold at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, from which they are attempting to repatriate their nationals along with those Afghanis who served the occupation. These collaborators now fear for their lives from the Taliban, who have swiftly taken over almost the entire country in what was probably the most bloodless regime change operation thmat part of the world has ever experienced.

The US occupation of Afghanistan was rationalized based on an entire edifice of lies. At its foundation lay the lie of Nineleven. Above it towered the lie of fighting terrorism (while training and equipping the terrorists). Somewhere along the way the lie of aiding Afghanistan’s development into a vibrant, modern democracy with gender equality and other bells and whistles was added to this already stupendous structure (while the only actual development was that of the heroin trade). And, of course, overlaying all of the above was a truly staggering amount of corruption and theft.

If you believe the official narrative, Osama bin Laden was a sort of latter-day Jesus who repeated the miracle of loaves and fishes except with skyscrapers, knocking down three of them (WTC 1, 2 and 7) using just two airplanes. Another of his miracles was to make an entire passenger jet, piloted by an amateur, pull some truly stunning aerobatics that no passenger jet has pulled before or since, then ascend unto heaven through a wall of the Pentagon, engines, seats, luggage, bodies and all, leaving behind a small charred opening plus a part of a cruise missile that apparently had been hidden on board and that was subsequently carried away wrapped in a tarp on the shoulders of some very nervous and displeased-looking gentlemen in office attire. Another plane full of passengers left a smallish charred pit in the ground and recordings of rather scripted-sounding cell phone conversations held while the supposed plane was in an area lacking cell phone coverage. Bin Laden orchestrated all this mayhem by satellite phone, or by telepathy, without ever leaving the comfort of his cave in Afghanistan. I encourage you to believe this narrative because believing the alternative may cause you to lose your mind. Many people already have.

And if you wish to be stubborn and refuse to believe the official narrative, then it becomes quite plausible to think that Nineleven was a lavish American hoax: that the three skyscrapers were mined by some Americans, that the Pentagon was hit by an American cruise missile fired by some more Americans and that Osama bin Laden was a CIA agent who made grainy videos and scratchy audiotapes to inspire America’s pet terrorists (branded Al Qaeda, later rebranded ISIS/ISIL/Daesh/Islamic Caliphate). Osama was looking forward to a comfortable retirement somewhere in friendly Pakistan—a retirement that was cut short by an attack by a group of navy seals some time after his death from kidney failure.

Why would the Americans do this to themselves? Why, to rule the world, of course! They had bought into Douglas Mackinder’s cockamamie “heartland” theory, according to which whichever world power controls the heartland of Eurasia will control the world. If you think that controlling a pile of rocks inhabited by ornery, warlike natives whose minds are stuck in the middle ages is not conducive to ruling the entire world, then you are definitely smarter than the average turnip, but still not good enough to be one of America’s brilliant geopolitical strategists.

The developments of Nineleven provided the rationale for the 20-year US/NATO military occupation of Afghanistan, which cost over $2 trillion and caused half a million or so wrongful deaths. This was by no means a bargain—putting a hit on someone doesn’t cost anywhere near $4 million a pop, especially not in Afghanistan, which is very poor and awash with weapons. A conservative assumption is that much of this money was simply stolen. Indeed, seeing reports of erstwhile Afghani president Ashraf Ghani fleeing the country in a helicopter so overstuffed with cash that a lot of it had to be abandoned on the tarmac is a clear indication of how funds were being allocated in the course of the US occupation.

It is officially known that a little over half the money went to fill the coffers of four defense contractors—Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing and Northrop Grumman. Their products were freely used over the entire expanse of Afghanistan, resulting in fabulous amounts of collateral damage. Some also went to arm the Afghani military, which surrendered to the Taliban without a fight, weapons and all, except for 22 military jets and 24 military helicopters which fled to Uzbekistan along with 585 soldiers. This hardware, including top of the line Black Hawk helicopters with all the recent gadgets installed, will now be picked over, and probably laughed at, by Russian experts. (The purpose of US weapons procurement is not to produce effective weapons but to make profits for Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing and Northrop Grumman.)

But, you may ask, What about the fruits of controlling the heartland? What about controlling the whole world once ensconced there? Once there, the Americans discovered that Afghanistan didn’t offer much of anything except ornery natives and poppy fields. And while the former were of no use at all as far as securing world domination, the latter, turned into heroin, could be used strategically to weaken the whole of Eurasia by turning its population into a bunch of junkies. To this end, Afghanistan was turned into the world’s heroin factory, producing 85% of the estimated global heroin and morphine supply, a near monopoly. Prior to the US/NATO invasion of Afghanistan, poppy cultivation had been banned by the Taliban, so this was entirely a Western achievement.

The plan was to have Afghani heroin ooze out all over the surrounding Eurasia by camel caravans traversing huge uninhabitable deserts, and some of this indeed happened, but it quickly turned out that there was more money to be made by airlifting it out using US military transport planes flying to Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, which became the major heroin transshipment point. And so a lot of the heroin ended up in the US and in the EU, to a point where there are over 10 million opiate addicts in the US and deaths from opiate overdoses in the US alone amount to half a million a year and growing fast, with drug-related deaths the leading cause of death among the non-geriatrics. But it seems that these are just the opioid addicts who stand up to be counted, whereas opiate abuse is far more widespread and, judging from rapidly dropping overall life expectancy, quite severe.

A good question to ask is: What will happen to the heroin addicts after the Taliban once again clamp down on poppy cultivation. It will be easy for them to do now that there are no US/NATO troops guarding the poppy fields. They will make up the revenue shortfall by selling trophy US weapons on the black market. The probable answer is that the junkies will switch (and already are switching) to the synthetic opiate fentanyl, which the Chinese are happy to provide in arbitrarily large quantities. Any suggestion that the Chinese might want to stop doing so may lead to a polite mention of the Opium Wars and a suggestion that what goes around comes around. At one point a quarter of the Chinese were addicted to opium; let’s see if Americans can beat that record. To be sure, Afghani heroin is not alone to blame for the epidemic of opiate abuse in the US. The Sackler family did a great deal to construct a veritable conveyor belt that first hooked people on prescription pain killers, then abandoned them to street drugs once the prescriptions ran out. But Afghani heroin qualifies as a major US policy boomerang, alongside many others.

Another good question to ask is: Whence the urge to dominate the world by seizing control of the heartland and inundating it with heroin (and Afghani refugees)? There is certainly the need to keep the military-industrial complex humming and funneling money to congressional election coffers, and then there is the general megalomaniacal ambition of various Washingtonians of both parties, but that’s far from all. The overarching need to disrupt, degrade and generally wreak havoc is a key element of America’s overall business plan, which is to continue to live beyond its means simply by printing money.

The only way to make this business plan work is for the US to present itself as an island of stability in a chaotic world and a financial safe haven where the world’s thieving oligarchs can safely launder their ill-gotten gains. Once this plan fails, the US will fall through third-world-dom and straight into an endless Civil War reenactment with live ammo. Hence all the current Sturm und Drang over the US/NATO hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Because who cares about Afghanistan? Sure, it has heroin, but fentanyl is even more potent and doesn’t involve all the messiness with growing poppies and harvesting and processing poppy juice. And excuse me if I don’t believe that dead US servicemen or US nationals left behind qualify as some sort of national tragedy; it’s what typically happens in a hasty retreat. And when have Americans not abandoned their local allies? The Kurds of Northern Syria, which retreating Americans abandoned to the ever-so-friendly Turks, are the last example that springs to mind; but how many Americans still remember even that far back. It’s simply what Americans do—always.

This hasty retreat signals, somewhere in the deep subconscious (because the realization is too painful) the end of the something-for-nothing economy on which the US has increasingly come to depend since Nixon took the US dollar off the gold standard 50 years ago. This disease may have been slow to develop, but it is chronic, incurable and invariably fatal. The 2021 US federal budget is $6.8 trillion and the budget deficit is $3 trillion, meaning that out of every dollar spent 44 cents are printed into existence. This is a hospice care-level dosage of financial morphine.

At this point no amount of financial morphine will allow the American patient to arise from his bed, yank the IV from his arm and go and wreak even more havoc in the world, sowing fear and chaos. The fear and chaos are now right within the US itself. The $753.5 billion the US is spending on defense in 2021 is more than the next nine highest-spending countries spend combined, but it’s not enough to cause sufficient mayhem to scare the entire world into continuing to honor the US dollar in international trade or to invest in dollar-denominated assets; all that’s left is financial inertia and a bit of excitement around the world’s largest market bubble which the US federal reserve is desperately blowing.

The mental anguish produced by this situation results in dire media images from the Kabul airport. Ignored is the fact that the rest of Afghanistan has suddenly become rather placid, with bright-eyed, bushy-bearded Taliban lads armed with the latest and greatest US weapons patrolling markets and street corners. ISIS-K, America’s pet terrorists in Afghanistan, of the Bin Laden/Al Qaeda pedigree, have gone quiet. They used to regularly organize bomb blasts in Kabul, routinely killing hundreds of locals, but now the only place where they still blow people up is at the airport, which is also the only area still under American control.

The Americans were nice enough to share their clever battle plan with their NATO allies, which is why Lord Pederast of England and Madame Petite-Pute of France (I can’t be bothered to look up their actual names) went public with news of this terrorist attack well before it transpired. Thirteen US servicemen died; many more locals died because surviving US servicemen opened fire on the victims. Nobody got court-martialed and nobody resigned; this is business as usual. Why the boys of ISIS-K were charged with this mission is obvious. The Americans need a reason to cut short the evacuation of their nationals and their local Afghani servants, as demanded by the Taliban, and now they have an excuse: the safety of their servicemen is paramount.

The American retreat from Afghanistan was inevitable, but what has amazed and appalled the entire world is the simply unimaginable boneheadedness ham-handedness of the operation at every level. Compared to the Soviet withdrawal, it is a profound national humiliation. The Soviets withdrew in battle order, flags flying, and left behind a functional government that stayed in power for another three years, successfully resisting Western efforts at overthrowing it, and only fell when Soviet support stopped because the USSR had collapsed—essentially because of Gorbachev’s treason. But the Afghanis remember and still like the Russians, still call them “Shuravi” (Soviets) and are grateful to Russia for everything that it had built there. The Russian embassy in Kabul is fully staffed and functioning normally, maintaining well-established channels of communication with the Taliban. In contrast, over their 20-year occupation the Americans have built nothing, destroyed much, and are by now almost universally hated and despised.

I believe that the extreme and apparent incompetence of the Americans in Afghanistan is the result of the corrosive effect of lies. A foundation of lies is inevitably a shaky one and can only be kept from crumbling under carefully controlled circumstances. For instance, a certain shady oligarch may promote a certain vaccine as effective against a certain virus whereas his real intention is to stop population growth by making women sterile. This works because corporate structures can be organized around a management strategy known as mushroom theory (keep them in the dark and feed them shit). But it doesn’t work for an entire sprawling military empire, where the truth inevitably leaks out, contradictions mount and morale plummets. One lie always deserves another, and then the making of mistakes, the efforts to fix mistakes and the efforts to hide mistakes all become largely interchangeable. At one point the CIA’s terrorists were battling the Pentagon’s terrorists in Syria. That was really awkward and hard to hide. Luckily, the Russians fixed that problem by bombing them all into oblivion.

The Afghanistan occupation started with the horrendous lies of Nineleven, continued with the ridiculous, contrived excuses for the invasion and then went on for 20 long years, each much like the previous, with each year’s lies piling on top of the previous years’ lies. America had to stay because of the terrorism caused by the terrorists whom they first organized to fight the Soviets, then kept as pets. And now speaking the truth in America is akin to shouting fire in a crowded theater. Poor old Joe Biden, his brain ticking ever more loudly, struggling to form a coherent sentence, laboring under the crushing load of these lies, can do no better than assume the fetal position right in the middle of a press conference. Can you imagine what Bedlam would break out if he were to suddenly stop lying? I shudder to think! Stocking up on thorazine beforehand would seem prudent. But such a bout of American glasnost’ seems all but inevitable. Sooner or later the truth will spill over this giant dam brimming with lies. The ensuing flood is sure to sweep away everything in its path.
_______

https://cluborlov.wordpress.com/
conniption
 
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Re: Time for an American Glasnost

Postby conniption » Thu Sep 16, 2021 10:24 am

conniption » Sun Aug 29, 2021 4:51 pm wrote:The Harvard Crimson
Time for an American Glasnost
By Bernard Sanders
November 28, 1989


>snip<

And now let me make a proposal, a proposal which will, undoubtedly, offend many readers--but which has to be made. In my view the time is now for a glasnost in the United States--a soul searching for our own basic truths, a major debate over our current values, an honest analysis of the real structure of our society and the creation of a mechanism to search out our dreams for the future.

>snip<
_______
Bernard Sanders, who from 1981 to 1989 was the only socialist mayor in America, is the former mayor of Burlington, Vermont. He is currently a fellow at the Institute of Politics (IOP) at the Kennedy School.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1989 ... &#91;/size]



Club Orlov
The Afghanistan Rout and American Glasnost’
Dmitry Orlov
2021-08-28

>snip<

The Afghanistan occupation started with the horrendous lies of Nineleven, continued with the ridiculous, contrived excuses for the invasion and then went on for 20 long years, each much like the previous, with each year’s lies piling on top of the previous years’ lies. America had to stay because of the terrorism caused by the terrorists whom they first organized to fight the Soviets, then kept as pets. And now speaking the truth in America is akin to shouting fire in a crowded theater. Poor old Joe Biden, his brain ticking ever more loudly, struggling to form a coherent sentence, laboring under the crushing load of these lies, can do no better than assume the fetal position right in the middle of a press conference. Can you imagine what Bedlam would break out if he were to suddenly stop lying? I shudder to think! Stocking up on thorazine beforehand would seem prudent. But such a bout of American glasnost’ seems all but inevitable. Sooner or later the truth will spill over this giant dam brimming with lies. The ensuing flood is sure to sweep away everything in its path.
https://cluborlov.wordpress.com/&#91;



Simone Biles and Other Olympians Testify on Larry Nassar Sexual Assault Investigation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdPa8gRvA0o
C-SPAN
973K subscribers
36,397 views • Streamed live 23 hours ago • Former Olympic gold medalist Simone Biles along with McKayla Maroney, Maggie Nichols and Aly Raisman testify before the the Senate Judiciary Committee on the FBI’s investigation of USA Gymnastics Team Physician Dr. Larry Nassar. Later, FBI Director Chris Wray and Inspector General Michael Horowitz will testify. https://www.c-span.org/video/?514546-...
conniption
 
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Re: Time for an American Glasnost

Postby conniption » Thu Sep 16, 2021 8:15 pm

Episode 407 – False Flags: The Secret History of Al Qaeda — Part 1: Origin Story

Corbett
• 09/11/2021 •

Video Here:
Watch on Archive / BitChute / Minds / Odysee or Download the mp4 video / mp3 audio

We all know the story of bin Laden and Al Qaeda, the story that was repeated ad nauseam in the days, weeks and months after the catastrophic, catalyzing events of 9/11. So often was that story repeated that the hypnotized public forgot that it was, at base, just that: a story. . . .

Transcript Here: https://www.corbettreport.com/episode-4 ... gin-story/


________


John Lennon "Gimme Some Truth" (1971)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRFLn5v4hN4

Mark Parker
Mar 14, 2019

"Gimme Some Truth" (originally spelled "Give Me Some Truth") is a protest song written and performed by John Lennon. It was first released on his 1971 album Imagine. "Gimme Some Truth" contains various political references emerging from the time it was written, during the latter years of the Vietnam War.

Lennon recorded "Gimme Some Truth" on 25 May 1971 at Ascot Sound Studios. Overdubbing of his lead vocal on 28 May 1971 was also captured on film.
conniption
 
Posts: 2480
Joined: Sun Nov 11, 2012 10:01 pm
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