Hedges: This Time We’re Taking the Whole Planet With Us

Today, as we consider whether Baker City needs tighter control over the behavior of citizens at Council meetings (today's Baker City Herald print edition), whether wolves have a right to inhabit their historic lands, whether the public workers in Wisconsin have a right to organize, whether the national budget should be reduced on the shoulders of the poor or at the expense of military empire, whether Americans have the right to truthfully blow the whistle on the military, whether President Obama should arm the Libyan rebels and declare war on Gaddafi by instituting a no-fly zone, and etc., Chris Hedges reminds us of the greater historically-based context of a pending planet-wide collapse. Laugh it off if you must, but you do so at your own peril. His warning is nothing new, as wise men and women have been warning the same for several decades, but at least take some time to consider it, because the warning signs, even if hidden from view by the popular corporate media and scorned by your beloved leaders, are everywhere.
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This Time We’re Taking the Whole Planet With Us
Mar 7, 2011

By Chris Hedges

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As food and water shortages expand across the globe, as mounting poverty and misery trigger street protests in the Middle East, Africa and Europe, the elites do what all elites do. They launch more wars, build grander monuments to themselves, plunge their nations deeper into debt, and as it all unravels they take it out on the backs of workers and the poor. The collapse of the global economy, which wiped out a staggering $40 trillion in wealth, was caused when our elites, after destroying our manufacturing base, sold massive quantities of fraudulent mortgage-backed securities to pension funds, small investors, banks, universities, state and foreign governments and shareholders. The elites, to cover the losses, then looted the public treasury to begin the speculation over again. They also, in the name of austerity, began dismantling basic social services, set out to break the last vestiges of unions, slashed jobs, froze wages, threw millions of people out of their homes, and stood by idly as we created a permanent underclass of unemployed and underemployed.

The Mayan elite became, at the end, as the anthropologist Ronald Wright notes in “A Short History of Progress,” “… extremists, or ultra-conservatives, squeezing the last drops of profit from nature and humanity.” This is how all civilizations, including our own, ossify and die. The signs of imminent death may be undeniable. Common sense may cry out for a radical new response. But the race toward self-immolation only accelerates because of intellectual and moral paralysis. As Sigmund Freud grasped in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” and “Civilization and Its Discontents,” human societies are as intoxicated and blinded by their own headlong rush toward death and destruction as they are by the search for erotic fulfillment.
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Read entire article:
This Time We’re Taking the Whole Planet With Us
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Bradley Manning could face death: For what?
Bradley Manning

Bradley Manning could face death: For what?
BY GLENN GREENWALD

Under 104(b)—almost certainly the provision to be applied—a person is guilty if he “gives intelligence to or communicates or corresponds with or holds any intercourse with the enemy, either directly or indirectly” (emphasis added), and, if convicted, “shall suffer death or such other punishment as a court-martial or military commission may direct.” The charge sheet filed by the Army is quite vague and neither indicates what specifically Manning did to violate this provision nor the identity of the “enemy” to whom he is alleged to have given intelligence.