The Real News Network has the interview video ISIS Born from Occupation of Iraq, not Syrian Civil War.

VIJAY PRASHAD, EDWARD SAID CHAIR, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY OF BEIRUT:
Well, ISIS has had a major breakthrough this week. It took, of course, Mosul, came down south of the Tigris, took Tikrit, which is the hometown of Saddam Hussein and therefore very significant to the three organizations that are working together–ISIS, the Military Council, which is made up of former Iraqi army people, and then the Naqshbandi movement, which is led by a former deputy of Saddam Hussein, Izzat al-Douri. So these three organizations–the Baathists, Iraqi military forces, and ISIS–have taken a vast amount of Iraq in a very short time. But mainly it had been in the north-south axis from Mosul down to near Samarra.

Now they have moved westward. They’ve taken Tal Afar. They’ve already taken small roads that go toward Syria. But the Tal Afar capture has opened a corridor for them that will take them to the major eastern city in Syria of Deir ez-Zor, and from there, of course, right to Raqqah, which is the first major city in Syria that the ISIS organization had taken. So now we have from the borders of Aleppo–major city in Syria–all the way out to Mosul, we have a banner area, a kind of–we have, like, a belt controlled by the group ISIS, helped along in Iraq by former Baathists and former Iraqi military personnel.

Whether you believe Vijay Prashad or not, could his analysis be any worse than that of John McCain and Lindsey Graham? See my previous post Mess O’Potamia – Now That’s What I Call Being Completely F**king Wrong About Iraq.

Maybe Jon Stewart can get through to our Lame Stream Media and to the public for which it stands.

Have they no shame at all?

The Real News Network has the concluding segment Ugly Money Politics – Robert Johnson on Reality Asserts Itself (8/8) in its series. My previous blog post Reality Asserts Itself – Robert Johnson covers the first 7 segments.

The first topic is the problems with the city of Detroit.

Well, in particular in Detroit there are always–I mean, there are many factors in Detroit, demographic decline in the aftermath of the ’67 riots, long periods of white flight, etc. But going back to your perspective on finance, what sends them over the waterfall are very, very large, questionable derivatives trades guaranteeing what are called certificates of obligation that lead to penalties.
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What you’ve seen since the crisis of 2008 is federal cutbacks to state and local governments, which causes the states to, how you say, tighten their belts and cut off the cities or diminish transfers to the city. You then see diminished income tax revenue, sales tax revenue, and property tax revenue associated with the slump. So you go into a budget crisis and you tend to, quote, underprovision for the pension. The annual required contribution is not made. As the funded assets fall in relation to the value of obligations, the tendency is to throw the Hail Mary pass, reach out to higher-yield investments. But that despair is what makes what you might call the temptation to resort to things that turn out to be frauds or, how you say, too good to be true more and more prevalent, which tends deepen the losses.

My point in choosing the above excerpts is to drive home the point of how the financial collapse has drive the federal government to lower aid to the states and localities, and this has driven these entities to either cut back or go bankrupt, or even fall victim to the financial fraud that started it all.

People who don’t understand this path to ruin are often led to believe that it is the fault of the innocent pensioners that the city cannot pay their pensions anymore.

The Real News Network has the interview Chris Hedges Interviews Noam Chomsky (1/3).  For those with an aversion to Chris Hedges, there is very little of him in this video.  It is mostly Noam Chomsky.

The first–it partly was government. The first government commission was the British Ministry of Information. This is long before Orwell–he didn’t have to invent it. So the Ministry of Information had as its goal to control the minds of the people of the world, but particularly the minds of American intellectuals, for a very good reason: they knew that if they can delude American intellectuals into supporting British policy, they could be very effective in imposing that on the population of the United States. The British, of course, were desperate to get the Americans into the war with a pacifist population. Woodrow Wilson won the 1916 election with the slogan “Peace without Victory”. And they had to drive a pacifist population into a population that bitterly hated all things German, wanted to tear the Germans apart. The Boston Symphony Orchestra couldn’t play Beethoven. You know. And they succeeded.

Wilson set up a counterpart to the Ministry of Information called the Committee on Public Information. You know, again, you can guess what it was. And they’ve at least felt, probably correctly, that they had succeeded in carrying out this massive change of opinion on the part of the population and driving the pacifist population into, you know, warmongering fanatics.

And the people on the commission learned a lesson. One of them was Edward Bernays, who went on to found–the main guru of the public relations industry. Another one was Walter Lippman, who was the leading progressive intellectual of the 20th century. And they both drew the same lessons, and said so.

The lessons were that we have what Lippmann called a “new art” in democracy, “manufacturing consent”. That’s where Ed Herman and I took the phrase from. For Bernays it was “engineering of consent”. The conception was that the intelligent minority, who of course is us, have to make sure that we can run the affairs of public affairs, affairs of state, the economy, and so on. We’re the only ones capable of doing it, of course. And we have to be–I’m quoting–“free of the trampling and the roar of the bewildered herd”, the “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders”–the general public. They have a role. Their role is to be “spectators”, not participants. And every couple of years they’re permitted to choose among one of the “responsible men”, us.

I have been listening to Noam Chomsky for years now.  For most of that time I thought of him as an over the top old crank.  Lately, I have begun to see how much closer to reality he was than I was when I used to think about him the way I did.