Anonymous
Based on the work of Noam Chomsky

Renowned critic and always MIT linguist Noam Chomsky, one of the classic voices of intellectual dissent in the last decade, has compiled a list of the ten most common and effective strategies resorted to by the agendas “hidden” to establish a manipulation of the population through the media.

Historically the media have proven highly efficient to mold public opinion. Thanks to the media paraphernalia and propaganda, have been created or destroyed social movements, justified wars, tempered financial crisis, spurred on some other ideological currents, and even given the phenomenon of media as producers of reality within the collective psyche.

But how to detect the most common strategies for understanding these psychosocial tools which, surely, we participate? Fortunately Chomsky has been given the task of synthesizing and expose these practices, some more obvious and more sophisticated, but apparently all equally effective and, from a certain point of view, demeaning. Encourage stupidity, promote a sense of guilt, promote distraction, or construct artificial problems and then magically, solve them, are just some of these tactics.

Read more »

Stephen Lendman

A Palestinian boy drinks water in the southern Gaza Strip
town of Rafah Oct. 21, 2009. Palestinians face dire water
shortage because of both bad management and Israeli
restrictions. (Xinhua/Khaled Omar)

Water is essential to life. Denying it is criminal. Water and sanitation are recognized as indispensable human rights.

In July 2010, the General Assembly's Resolution 64/292 affirmed it. It called on member states and international organizations to:

"provide financial resources, build capacity and transfer technology, particularly to development countries, in scaling up efforts to provide safe, clean, accessible and affordable drinking water and sanitation for all."

Dozens of countries incorporated water rights in their constitutional or statute laws. Most, however, haven't fulfilled promised goals.

In her 2002 book titled, "Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit,” activist/ecologist Vandana Shiva called water rights natural and "usufructuary....water can be used but not owned."

It belongs to everyone as an essential "basis of all life. (U)nder customary laws, the right to water has been accepted as a natural, social fact."

Read more »

Paul Craig Roberts

The Obama regime opposes military detention, because detainees would have some rights.

During an interview with RT on December 1, I said that the US Constitution had been shredded by the failure of the US Senate to protect American citizens from the detainee amendment sponsored by Republican John McCain and Democrat Carl Levin to the Defense Authorization Bill. The amendment permits indefinite detention of US citizens by the US military. I also gave my opinion that the fact that all but two Republican members of the Senate had voted to strip American citizens of their constitutional protections and of the protection of the Posse Comitatus Act indicated that the Republican Party had degenerated into a Gestapo Party.

These conclusions are self-evident, and I stand by them.

However, I jumped to conclusions when I implied that the Obama regime opposes military detention on constitutional grounds. Ray McGovern and Glenn Greenwald might have jumped to the same conclusions.

Read more »

Saki Knafo & Adam Kaufman

Melanie Butler was watching a news clip about Occupy Wall Street in late September when she noticed that all of the demonstrators talking to the reporter were men. "I just kept waiting," she said. "I was counting in my head. Finally a woman came on." The final count: one woman, nine men. "I was enraged," Butler said. "But I knew from myself that when there were reporters in the park or a press conference was called, I wasn't saying, 'I want to speak.' And I'm not a shy person."

Butler, 30, is an organizer for CODEPINK, an anti-war group founded during the run-up to the Iraq War by a cadre of female activists, including Jodie Evans, who ran Jerry Brown's campaign for the presidency in 1992. (Medea Benjamin, another founder, has blogged for The Huffington Post.) Its members are known for their high-profile disruptions of congressional hearings, which occasionally result in arrests, and for their color scheme, which Butler described as disarming. As she put it, "It's really hard to be angry at someone who's wearing a neon-pink feather boa."

After seeing the news clip, Butler held a media training just for women, and it was there that she learned that the problem was even bigger than she'd thought. "It wasn't just the media," she said. "Women were having trouble speaking out anywhere, in any of the discussions."

Butler and Evans stood in Zuccotti Park recently talking about their efforts to get more women involved in the movement. Evans wore a knee-length pink jacket, a pink scarf covered with peace signs, a pink shoulder bag, a floppy pink hat, a pink hip-pouch containing a pink iPod, and a black T-shirt with a Grace Paley quote in pink lettering that read, "The only recognizable feature of hope is action."

Butler was dressed more conservatively: jeans, olive-drab parka. She did have on a pink scarf, which she said she'd found in a box of pink clothes in CODEPINK's New York office.

Read more »