BP Oil Spill Confirmed as Worst in US History; Environmental Groups Challenge
Continued Oil Operations in Gulf Excluded from New Moratorium

Although President Obama has extended the moratorium on new deepwater drilling
permits for six months and halted operations at thirty-three deepwater wells in
the Gulf of Mexico, some oil rigs are continuing their operations. The Center
for Biological Diversity has filed a lawsuit to halt forty-nine offshore
drilling plans in the Gulf of Mexico that were approved without full
environmental review. Meanwhile, the group Food & Water Watch is leading an
effort to shut down the Atlantis, another BP oil rig in the Gulf. The group
warns an oil spill from the Atlantis could be many times larger than the current
spill and even harder to stop. [includes rush transcript]

Read the Whole story at Democacy Now

Milton Friedman and Noam Chomsky can agree on one thing. Free markets kill democracy.
In fact, neoliberalism is specifically designed to kill democracy. A Virtual Parliament of investors and lenders will vote against government programs that benefit the people by attacking the currency.

Think of an attack on the currency as a bad day on Wall Street, exactly like when stocks fell after the Wall Street bailout failed to pass in the House of Representative the first time around

Neoliberalism is the defining political economic paradigm of our time - it refers to the policies and processes whereby a relative handful of private interests are permitted to control as much as possible of social life in order to maximize their personal profit. Associated initially with Reagan and Thatcher, neoliberalism has for the past two decades been the dominant global political economic trend adopted by political parties of the center, much of the traditional left, and the right. These parties and the policies they enact represent the immediate interests of extremely wealthy investors and less than one thousand large corporations.

An excerpt from "Noam Chomsky: Manufacturing Consent" in which the MIT linguistics professor criticizes the issue of concision in the US media.

Noam Chomsky explains why “that feeling of helplessness” and “impotence” is the natural response to American democracy.

The hopes and prospects for peace aren't well aligned -- not even close. The task is to bring them nearer. Presumably that was the intent of the Nobel Peace Prize committee in choosing President Barack Obama.

The prize "seemed a kind of prayer and encouragement by the Nobel committee for future endeavor and more consensual American leadership," Steven Erlanger and Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote in The New York Times.

The nature of the Bush-Obama transition bears directly on the likelihood that the prayers and encouragement might lead to progress.

The Nobel committee's concerns were valid. They singled out Obama's rhetoric on reducing nuclear weapons.

Right now Iran's nuclear ambitions dominate the headlines. The warnings are that Iran may be concealing something from the International Atomic Energy Agency and violating U.N. Security Council Resolution 1887, passed last month and hailed as a victory for Obama's efforts to contain Iran.

Noam Chomsky Libertarian Socialism

World-renowned intellectual Noam Chomsky has been pushing change in language, politics and culture for decades. The controversial expert on modern language explains why "the smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum

Watch the FULL program at FORA.TV -> http://fora.tv/2009/10/06/Noam_Chomsky_Philosophies_of_Language_and_Poli...

The Resort to Force, Excerpted from Hegemony or Survival

As Colin Powell explained the National Security Strategy (NSS) of September 2002 to a hostile audience at the World Economic Forum, Washington has a "sovereign right to use force to defend ourselves" from nations that possess WMD and cooperate with terrorists, the official pretexts for invading Iraq. The collapse of the pretexts is well known, but there has been insufficient attention to its most important consequence: the NSS was 

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media" Recorded at the Memorial Union Theater on the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison, Wisconsin

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media" Recorded at the Memorial Union Theater on the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison, Wisconsin Part 2

Noam chomsky on what constitutes a democratic society.

Israeli forces began a devastating bombing campaign on the Gaza Strip without warning at 11.30am on 27 December 2008.

Codenamed Operation "Cast Lead", its stated aim was to end rocket attacks into Israel by armed groups affiliated with Hamas and other Palestinian factions, which continued to launch a barrage of indiscriminate attacks against Israeli civilian centres throughout the duration of the campaign. 

By the time unilateral ceasefires were announced by both Israel and Hamas on 18 January 2009, some 1,400 Palestinians had been killed, including some 300 children and hundreds of other unarmed civilians. Large areas of Gaza had been razed to the ground, leaving many thousands homeless and the already dire economy in ruins. Three Israeli civilians had been killed and scores of homes in southern Israel damaged.

Noam Chomsky speaks to Paul Jay on the Obama - Geithner plan. Chomsky says that "they're simply recycling, the Bush-Paulson measures and changing them a little, but essentially the same idea: keep the institutional structure the same, try to kind of pass things up, bribe the banks and investors to help out, but avoid the measures that might get to the heart of the problem."