Since being elected to office in 2013, Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant and her socialist party have been locked in a bitter battle against the city’s moneyed elites, who have poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into a corporate PAC called “A Better Seattle” and saturated television and digital platforms with negative advertising. Sawant is hated because she is effective.
"The question, here, is why democratic institutions aren’t able to stop power-hungry elites who would concentrate power and economic resources.
Rising CEO pay stands in stark contrast to the grim economic realities that ordinary workers are facing nationwide as inflation—driven in large part by corporate profits—erodes modest wage gains and expiring pandemic aid leaves vulnerable families without a safety net.
"Some leftist commentators can barely conceal their enthusiasm for American involvement in the Ukraine war."
"Whatever else is true, the claim with which we are bombarded by the corporate press — the two parties agree on nothing; they are constantly at each other's throats; they have radically different views of the world — is patently untrue, at least when it comes time for the U.S. to join in new wars. Typically, what we see in such situations is what we are seeing now: the establishment wings of both parties are in complete lockstep unity, always breathlessly supporting the new proposed U.S. role in any new war, eager to empty the coffers of the U.S. Treasury and transfer it to the weapons industry while their constituents suffer."
"Our media, the mainstream media industrial complex, is sleepwalking through this moment, in part because they have institutional investment in treating politics as a game. It is not a game. This is not a drill. This is an all-hands-on-deck moment for anyone who cares about the democratic future of this country."
"Today a new sort of reset is setting off alarm bells, one that goes far beyond restoring the stability of the currency. The “Great Reset” being driven forward by the World Economic Forum would lock the world into a form of technocratic feudalism."
We talk about Orwell, Animal Farm, Newspeak and the ministry of information. How Orwell's writings are still relevant for today. Chomsky's book Manufacturing Consent is accurate to this day. We briefly discuss the propaganda model and how the media is used in order to manufacture public consent for wars.
Take water, for example. Every life form on Earth requires H2O, animal or vegetable. We can make more people, more money, more weapons, but we can’t make more water.
The war in Ukraine is intimately linked to the real existential crisis we face – the climate crisis. The latest UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report warns that greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2025, and be nearly halved this decade, to thwart global catastrophe….Triggered by war in Ukraine, soaring energy prices have pushed the US and other countries to call on domestic oil producers to increase fossil fuel extraction and exacerbate the climate crisis. Oil and gas lobbyists are demanding the Biden administration lift prohibitions on offshore drilling and on federal lands.
"This noble effort to put ending poverty on the same high plane with prolonging and escalating war, risking nuclear apocalypse, and destroying any chance of global cooperation on climate or homelessness or disease or hunger rings false."
"Between theory and practice — between the aspirations expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, on the one hand, and the pervasive presence of what King labeled the “giant triplets” of racism, materialism, and militarism on the other — there still looms, even in our own day, a massive gap. [King's Riverside Vietnam] speech address eloquently reflected on that gap, which, with the passage of time, has not appreciably narrowed."
