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SNOWDEN We attended a sneak peak preview of the new Oliver Stone film last night. After the film, Stone, Snowden, and the two lead actors (Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Shailene Woodley) discussed the film and some of the issues. Snowden has said this is a pretty realistic depiction of what happened. We recommend the film. These issues are still with us. It's showing in La Crosse at the Marcus Theater on Ward Avenue. (You may also be interested in the 2014 HBO documentary, Citizen Four, streaming online).
A new effort to get a pardon for Snowden before Obama leaves office is taking off now (and includes Bernie Sanders). Meanwhile, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein says she will immediately pardon Snowden if elected.
Meanwhile, back in North Dakota, the "police" are arresting journalists now and the truck of supplies and donations for the Standing Rock Proctectors is leaving La Crosse Ho-Chunk Three Rivers House on Friday.
A Harvard business professor has put out the alarm that this election season the big economic issues are not being discussed properly. "The confused national discourse about our economy and future prosperity in this election year is our worst nightmare. ... There is almost a complete disconnect between the national discourse and the reality of what is causing our problems and what to do about them. This misunderstanding of facts and reality is dangerous, and the resulting divisions make an already challenging agenda for America even more daunting.”
Always the optimist, the always great Chris Hedges describes how, after all the sound and fury of the Sanders "revolution," we are still squarely trapped in the corporate elites' maze. "The multibillion-dollar extravaganza of our electoral Circus Maximus is part of the smokescreen that covers the ongoing devastation of globalization, deindustrialization, trade deals such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, endless war, climate change and the intrusion into every corner of our lives by the security and surveillance state. Our democracy is dead. Clinton and Donald Trump do not have the power or the interest to revive it. They kneel before the war machine, which consumes trillions of dollars to wage futile wars and bankroll a bloated military. To defy the fortress state is political suicide. Politicians are courtiers to Wall Street. The candidates mouth the clichés of justice, improvements in income equality and democratic choice, but it is a cynical game. Once it is over, the victors will go to Washington to work with the lobbyists and financial elites to carry out the real business of ruling."
John Atcheson says this election kabuki theater is the result of the "Oligarchy [being] hoisted by its own petard. "In short, here’s what the three studies tell us: The Oligarchy has run a silent coup and now controls the country – including both parties; they’ve used their power to feather their own nest; and Americans realize it, and they rightfully resent it."
Somehow we have ended up in a dystopian parody of a reverso world somewhere between the George Orwell's 1984 and The Matrix. Now what?
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