Global

Two recent local news stories offer compelling, if baffling, insight into the priorities of the media in and around Columbus. On August 22, the media descended on Ohio State University to learn the future of Urban Meyer following the football coach’s handling of a domestic abuse scandal involving one of his assistants.

Two days later, the same news outlets failed to appear at the Franklin County Board of Elections to learn the fate of a citizens’ initiative to protect Columbus, and thus Central Ohio, from the toxic and radioactive dangers of fracking. During this hearing, the board would decide whether to place on the ballot the Columbus Community Bill of Rights (CCBOR) proposal to “establish a community bill of rights for water, soil and air protection” from fracking operations and its waste. Strangely, the same media that comprehensively covered Meyer and his football program demonstrated little interest in an issue that affects the health of all Central Ohioans and their environment.

Ayanna Pressley just won a Democratic Primary in a Democratic Congressional District in Massachusetts.

While most candidates for Congress have websites completely devoid of any mention of foreign policy whatsoever, Pressley has one with a substantive position on foreign policy.

Over the past 17 years since 9/11/01, the title question has plagued the tens of thousands of committed groups of highly intelligent and thorough truth-seeking scientists, physicists, architects, engineers, pilots, ex-military officers, ex-intelligence agents, firefighters, demolition experts, psychologists, medical professionals, etc, etc who have absolute proof that the official Cheney/Bush White House story about what happened on 9/11/01 was a “Big Lie”, that was so easily perpetrated on a fearful, gullible and mainstream media-saturated public that was very willing to suspend their critical thinking skills and throw their trust onto authority figures that would tell them what they were supposed to believe, even if it was contrary to what they actually saw with their own eyes. Unfortunately, those pseudo-authority figures that have the power to dominate the media, also have a long history of being serial liars - and they have hidden ulterior motives and a willing mainstream media machine on which to perpetuate the lies.

Hollywood is known around the world as a “company town” for the motion picture industry and television, but Los Angeles is also a music Mecca. In January 1972, Aretha Franklin recorded the live album “Amazing Grace” with Rev. James Cleveland’s Southern Californis Community Choir in south L.A., and it became one of America’s bestselling gospel recordings of all time. After her death on August 16, to pay homage to the “Queen of Soul”, selections from that legendary Atlantic Records album were performed on the evening of August 30 at a sonorous, loving Gospel Music Tribute Remembering Aretha Franklin.

According to an ABC News / Washington Post poll, 49% of a sampling of the U.S. public wants impeachment begun (they don’t specify when, but presumably any moment now) against Trump, while 43% do not. There are almost certainly millions of additional Democrats who would move into the pro-impeachment column if that party’s leaders did so. Same with Republicans. Many more Independents might also jump on board if the case were publicly made and momentum built to make conviction in the Senate seem plausible in an age when absolute loyalty to partisanship goes unquestioned.

On Friday, September 7th at high noon on Erie Blvd., north of Monroe St., in Schenectady, NY, the graphic above will be up on a giant billboard, and people will gather to discuss and promote the message.

Joe Biden:

Today Senator John McCain is being buried together with the young woman who leaked the transcript of these funeral proceedings. John would have been honored to know that he was posthumously connected to such swift and cost-saving justice in protection of our national security — which I think should more than compensate for his being buried together with someone he would have referred to as lowlife scum. Can I get a Praise Jesus?

John McCain and I worked together with many of you and I believe every single media outlet that has been permitted into this holy cathedral today to launch and prolong a war in which we did so much damage to the world in so many ways, that my own son was killed by our open burning of all kinds of toxic waste, and I’ve barely even registered that fact. Hell, it’ll be years before it occurs to me that a lot of Iraqi people probably died too. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t use that word in a church. I mean Iraqi lowlife scum.

Remarks at Verterans for Peace Convention, St. Paul, Minnesota, August 26, 2018

There are a lot of things named Kellogg around here, and few who know why. The two biggest names in the news in 1928 were those of future white supremacist Charles Lindbergh and of Frank Kellogg. One of those names has lasted longer.

The author at Frank Kellogg’s house

Frank Kellogg was a U.S. Secretary of State, and probably the one most worth teaching people about.

Developing the tradition charted by C. Wright Mills in his 1956 classic The Power Elite, in his latest book, Professor Peter Phillips starts by reviewing the transition from the nation state power elites described by authors such as Mills to a transnational power elite centralized on the control of global capital.

Thus, in his just-released study Giants: The Global Power Elite, Phillips, a professor of political sociology at Sonoma State University in the USA, identifies the world’s top seventeen asset management firms, such as BlackRock and J.P Morgan Chase, each with more than one trillion dollars of investment capital under management, as the ‘Giants’ of world capitalism. The seventeen firms collectively manage more than $US41.1 trillion in a self-invested network of interlocking capital that spans the globe.