Gary Null and Richard Gale — Who are the True Progressives?

Each day we hear right-wing pundits excoriating president Obama and the Democrats for being progressive. They ridicule progressivism as being socialist, for favoring the redistribution of wealth and resources, for challenging the bank-driven free market agenda, and for advocating stricter regulations on Wall Street and the multinational corporatocracy. They accuse progressives of embracing Big Government and a mindset of entitlement on steroids.

On the Left, the Right is equally mocked continuously. A perfect example was Keith Olbermann’s “Worst Persons” segment, which pilloried all conservatives as neocon Republicans. Any mention of support for a third party candidate, such as Jill Stein, Rocky Anderson or Gary Johnson, is vehemently attacked by the Democratic Left. It continues to rail against Ralph Nader for causing Al Gore and John Kerry to lose their elections against Bush.

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Chris Mooney - Conservatives Attack Scientific Findings About Why They Hate Science (Helping to Confirm the Science)

Two months have passed since my new book, The Republican Brain, was published, and so far it has gotten a lot of media attention. However, the coverage has followed a noteworthy pattern: while progressives and liberals seem intrigued about what I’m saying, the so-called “mainstream” media—the CNNs of the world—have shied away from the subject.

What’s up with this? Well, a book with conclusions closely related to mine—Norman Ornstein’s and Thomas Mann’s It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism—seems as though it is being handled similarly by some in the press. And perhaps there’s a reason: Centrist (aka “mainstream”) journalists might well prefer that the findings of these books not be true.

You see, if I’m wrong, then the press can happily go on doing what it has always done: Splitting the difference between the political left and the political right, and employing “on the one hand, on the other hand” treatments that presume we’re all equally biased, all equally self-interested...just in different directions.

The trouble is, I’ve presented a substantial body of scientific evidence suggesting that this simply isn’t the case. More specifically, the science I’ve presented suggests that the political right and left are quite different animals; that they perceive the world differently and handle evidence differently; and most importantly, that the polarization and the denial of science in modern American politics are fundamentally the fault of the authoritarian right. (Mann and Ornstein argue something very similar about today’s Republican Party.)

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http://www.alternet.org/story/155646/conservatives_attack_scientific_findings_about_why_they_hate_science_%28helping_to_confirm_the_science%29

Jack A. Smith - American Politics: THE ELECTIONS WON'T BRING PROGRESSIVE CHANGE, SO WHAT CAN?

Less than six months before the November presidential elections in an exceptionally distressed United States the narrow, unpleasant parameters of political possibility are emerging. Two alternatives confront the American people, both to the right of center

1. If President Barack Obama is reelected, with the Democratic Party retaining control of at least one chamber of Congress, there probably will be four more years of economic stagnation, high unemployment, increasing poverty and inequality, more wars, erosions of civil liberties and global warming.

2. If Mitt Romney is elected, with the right/far right Republican Party dominating either House or Senate, every particular of the travail afflicting the country today will be multiplied, with emphasis on fulfilling the desires of the 1% at the expense of the 99%.

What else could be expected during the present conservative era? Paul Krugman, the liberal Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist, recently described Obama, whom he supports, as having ruled like "a moderate Republican circa 1992." Viewing the ultra-conservatives, African American professor and left intellectual Cornell West detected "creeping fascism."

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http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=31042

Rob Kall - 15 Playbook Strategies Corporatists and Conservatives Use to Strip Mine America and Erode Democracy

There is a playbook with a collection of tools and strategies conservatives use to erode democracy and strip mine the treasures, assets and strengths of the USA. They are almost always masked as changes aimed at serving democracy, the constitution, rights or capitalism. They are not separate. They are not coincidental.

Naomi Klein described a systemic approach to strip mine nations and weaken freedoms in her profoundly important book, Shock Doctrine. This article continues, in that tradition,  to list ways that the the Right is exploiting and despoiling America for corporations that are not at all loyal to the US and that do not care about the people of the nation.

When you see one of these approaches being employed or if you are victim to one of them, you should be aware that they come from the same play book.

These include:

De-regulate-- To increase profits or power, eliminate regulations that protect people, workers, the environment. Glass Steagall was a case of de-regulation that dreaded trillions of economic suffering on the middle class. Every day there are thousands of lobbyists aiming at deregulating ecological, economic, worker and many other  protections. 

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http://www.dailycensored.com/2012/05/22/15-playbook-strategies-corporatists-and-conservatives-use-to-strip-mine-america-and-erode-democracy/

Danny Schechter - DEFAMATORY POLITICS IN AMERICA; Not Letting The Facts Get In The Way of A Vicious Attack Against Candidates and Whistle Blowers

Listen to Danny's weekly show "The News Dissector" every Friday at 1pm (Eastern Time)

Increasingly, politics is a game driven by often-invented beliefs and myths that are firmly detached from facts and their interpretation.

The parties and their factions live not only in parallel universes but worlds of information that are driven mostly but what they think will work in pandering to their bases and the public.

Even as progressives complain that Barack Obama has moved right even if he occasionally talks left, the hard-core right-wing see him a black revolutionary shaped by Reverend Wright’s black liberation theology with allusions to Malcolm X and Kenyan communists thrown into the mix to “prove” their case.

Never mind that Obama threw his one time mentor Wright under the bus in 2008, or that his policies rarely speak of the needs of a black community suffering under the burden of high joblessness, foreclosures and growing poverty.

In fact, real black revolutionaries like Cornell West and so many others find the President a sell-out and embarrassment even if their community embraces him more as an identity issue.

The recent plan by Wall Street trader Ed Ricketts to recycle the alleged Obama-Wright conspiracy into an defamatory political ad campaign spoke more to his ignorance and fears than any truth-based assessment. Had the New York Times not exposed it, this $10 million dollar race-based smear would have moved forward.

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http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30997

Robert Naiman - Would It Make a Difference to Progressives if Norman Solomon Goes to Congress?

A key paradox for progressives of our national political life goes something like this: everybody complains about Congress, but nobody does anything about it.

Of course, it is far from true that nobody is doing anything about Congress. Lots of people are doing something about it. But if you hold the complaints of progressives about Congress in one hand, and the level of progressive activity to change who is in Congress and what they do when they get there in the other, there is a big mismatch. The level of complaint should provoke a much higher level of activity to do something about it.

Every four years it is revealed that at the end of the day, the overwhelming majority of progressive-minded people in the U.S. are pragmatic idealists. They are people who have one eye on the horizon, and the other eye on the next practical step that can help get us closer to the horizon - or stop us from being pushed further away, which amounts to the same thing. The overwhelming majority of progressive-minded people will vote in the fall Presidential election, and they will vote for Obama; not because they think that doing so is the beginning and end of political engagement, but because they think - correctly - that it is the political choice in the context that best serves the interests of pragmatic idealists.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/05/22-7

Mural Found On Walls a First for a Maya Dwelling; Painted Numbers Reflect Calendar Reaching Well Beyond 2012

A vast city built by the ancient Maya and discovered nearly a century ago is finally starting to yield its secrets. Excavating for the first time in the sprawling complex of Xultún in Guatemala's Petén region, archaeologists have uncovered a structure that contains what appears to be a work space for the town's scribe, its walls adorned with unique paintings -- one depicting a lineup of men in black uniforms -- and hundreds of scrawled numbers. Many are calculations relating to the Maya calendar.

One wall of the structure, thought to be a house, is covered with tiny, millimeter-thick, red and black glyphs unlike any seen before at other Maya sites. Some appear to represent the various calendrical cycles charted by the Maya -- the 260-day ceremonial calendar, the 365-day solar calendar, the 584-day cycle of the planet Venus and the 780-day cycle of Mars, reports archaeologist William Saturno of Boston University, who led the exploration and excavation.

"For the first time we get to see what may be actual records kept by a scribe, whose job was to be official record keeper of a Maya community," Saturno said. "It's like an episode of TV's 'Big Bang Theory,' a geek math problem and they're painting it on the wall. They seem to be using it like a blackboard."

The discovery is reported in the June issue of National Geographic magazine and in the May 11 issue of the journal Science.

Read More:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120510141953.htm

Josh Stearns - No News is Bad News for Nonprofit Journalism

America is unique among democratic nations in its nearly complete reliance on commercial media to inform our communities, educate our children, and hold power to account. The media system we have is no accident. At every point in history when technological change challenged the incumbent media establishment—from radio to TV to the Internet—policy decisions have concentrated media in the hands of a few commercial stakeholders. Unfortunately for the burgeoning nonprofit journalism sector, history seems about to repeat itself.

Right now, the Internal Revenue Service is considering whether journalism and media organizations should be eligible for nonprofit status. That may sound odd given that nonprofit journalism has been a part, albeit a small part, of American media for decades—think Mother Jones, NPR, the Christian Science Monitor, even the Associated Press. YES! Magazine itself has operated as a nonprofit since its founding 16 years ago.

Nonetheless, a whole cadre of new journalism start-ups like the San Francisco Public Press, Worcester Wired, and Monitor Oklahoma have been waiting months—some even years—for the IRS to approve their applications for nonprofit status.

How did we get here?

At the end of the last decade, it was becoming increasingly clear that the advertiser-driven commercial media model was not producing the full extent of news and information our communities need. Job cuts decimated newsrooms, companies closed foreign bureaus, and the number of journalists covering statehouses had shrunk to almost zero in many places.

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http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/no-news-is-bad-news-for-nonprofit-journalism

Jamie McClelland - POLICE CLAMP DOWN ON INDEPENDENT ONLINE MEDIA: FBI Seizes Server from Progressive Internet Service Provider

In an attack on our infrastructure, our movement and the democratic Internet, the FBI seized a server yesterday from one of our cabinets in a colocation facility.

The server is owned by our sister organization, Riseup, and is managed by ECN, a progressive technology provider in Italy.

While the seizure of any equipment is pernicious and damaging, the pointlessness of this seizure suggests an inclination toward extrajudicial punishment and an attempted crackdown on the very possibility of anonymous speech online.

The FBI has told us they are investigating bomb threats targeting the facilities and people at the University of Pittsburgh. They appear to believe that one of the servers used to transmit these threats was an anonymous e-mail server operated by ECN. Anonymous remailers have no logs or traces of who used them, so the FBI will not get any useful information from the stolen machine.

Seizing this machine serves no useful purpose in tracking down or stopping the bomb threats, but it has many serious negative implications. Anonymous e-mail is an important part of the Internet. One of the benefits of Internet technology is the ability to communicate world-wide, and this communication is fundamental to the struggles of the world's people to address many of the world's ills. In a period in which our society has seen massive losses of privacy in which just about everything we do on-line can be tracked, logged, studied and used for all kinds of purposes, anonymous Internet-based communication tools provide shade from the intrusive searchlights of ubiquitous surveillance.

Read More:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30420