Thursday, July 27, 2017
Fireball
As noted at KUOW-Seattle, Chemical Safety Rules that save oil refinery workers’ lives are characterized by President Trump as “obsolete.” The United Steelworkers union–that represented seven workers at the Anacortes Tesoro refinery at the time of the 2010 explosion that took their lives–has sued the EPA to revive the rules.
Thursday, July 20, 2017
Strategic Manipulation
As noted at INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a report published in June by the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute calls for the U.S. government to invest in more surveillance, better propaganda through “strategic manipulation” of public opinion, and a “wider and more flexible” U.S. military.
Ideology and Interests
The Atlantic examines the growing rift between Reagan Republicans and GOP core constituencies of older, white, blue-collar rural inhabitants dependent on Medicare, and the working poor reliant on Medicaid.
Monday, July 17, 2017
High Crime
In an investigative podcast about military atrocities against Third and Fourth World peoples in the way of mega-plantations, ProPublica reports on
the criminal conduct of the World Bank. Focused on palm oil plantations
in Honduras, where in 2009 President Obama supported the military coup enabling ‘sweatshop state’ development, the investigation is the latest revelation about the New Economy lauded by the UN in conjunction with uber-capitalists like Bill Gates.
Saturday, July 15, 2017
The Protestant Media Complex
In Residual and Resurgent
Protestantism in the American Media (and Political) Imaginary, Stewart M.
Hoover examines the evolving moral culture in the US, and the Protestant vision
for America. In this essay, he discusses relations between religion and media, in
particular the recurring Protestant anxieties over the progress of modernity.
Domesticating the American private
sphere under a Protestant moral regime, he notes, relies on an imagined past. As Hoover
observes, that imagined past “provides a powerful symbolic framing of values
and ideals for received, commonsense, traditionalist readings of American
cultural history,” evident in the fact that 75% of Trump supporters saw the
1950s as the ideal decade, the one they wanted to bring back.
