In the last 20 years, has there been any speech by Gorbachev that didn’t mention a “new world order”?

Always vague on the meaning of the phrase, Gorbachev instead prefers to let his protégé, Jim Garrison be more specific on the details, as William F. Jasper reported recently.

Jasper also mentions Gorby’s messiah complex:

For many Gorby worshipers, the former Soviet dictator is not only “The Man Who Changed the World” but “The Man Who Saved the World.” David E. Hoffman, who writes for the influential Foreign Policy journal (published by the Washington Post) appears to be one of those. He wrote in a March 1, 2011 article that Gorbachev “may have saved the world.”

Gorbachev has gone the extra mile to cultivate this savior image, regularly comparing himself to Jesus Christ, making reference to Calvary and referring to the “crosses and suffering” and “crucifixion” he must bear. In an interview with the major German newspaper Spiegel he said that the break-up of the Soviet Union “is the pain and cross I shall have to bear until the end of my days.”

Spiegel reports that “he compared his journey to Jesus’s journey to Calvary, when once before, ‘people had spat on their redeemer.’ ”

He is greatly pained, reportedly because though he is celebrated like a rock star throughout most of the world, he is rejected and scorned by most of his Russian countrymen. According to Spiegel:

He concealed his pain with a dash of megalomania. A painting by Russian artist Andrei Myagkov hung in Gorbachev’s dacha outside Moscow where only a few friends were welcome. It showed Gorbachev as a shadow of the savior: Jesus has Gorby’s birthmark on his right hand, which is bleeding.

Jesus, of course, did not jet about the globe socializing with media moguls, corporate titans, central bankers, royalty and celebrities. He did not have his image splashed across magazine covers and television screens, or receive awards and homage from the high and mighty of this world. He was not interested in the worldly power with which Gorbachev and his globalist brethren are obsessed.

I remember coming across the painting in question once in an obscure image shack repository on the internet. See for yourself:

Jeffrey Lord - 10.25.11

Why was the frequently outspoken actress Daryl Hannah suddenly so shy when talking to Sean Hannity?

Why was the always outspoken actress Roseanne Barr suddenly so angry with a celebrity financial website?

And why was the never shy Alec Baldwin twittering cagily in non-denial denial mode?

What could possibly make these three famous activist actors so respectively reticent, furious and coy?

The Occupy Wall Street Movement has received cheers from President Obama, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats, with the President’s union and media allies swarming to support the protest.

What is the question that, according to Occupy Wall Street supporter and Columbia professor Jeffrey Sachs, is driving the movement? Simply put, Sachs sums up the driving force as “economic justice.” It is this that has caused liberals to rally, conservatives to be appalled. The issue is thus joined, and goes precisely to the heart of what kind of a country America will be.

Since “economic justice” is the demand here, let’s explore why liberal actors and Occupy Wall Street enthusiasts Hannah, Baldwin and Barr would suddenly exhibit the behavior they have so publicly displayed. What specifically is the history behind this demand for economic justice, or the division, as it is currently phrased, between the “1%” and the “99%”? How did previous supporters seek to bring “economic justice” for the “99%” to reality? Is there something in the history of this issue that is affecting the behavior of Hannah, Barr and Baldwin, while posing considerable risk to Democrats in the 2012 presidential election?

In 1789 the rumblings of an earlier version of Occupy Wall Street were already in evidence. By 1792 King Louis XVI was under arrest and France was launched on the first serious modern movement dedicated to what is now called “economic justice.” It became known, of course, as the French Revolution.

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Robert Parry - October 30, 2011

In another blow to the crumbling cover-up surrounding Ronald Reagan’s secret dealings with Iran during the 1980 presidential campaign, a key “journalist” who “debunked” the October Surprise allegations in the early 1990s has now been identified by a recent study as a member of a right-wing “misinformation” network.

Entitled “Fear, Inc.,” the 129-page report by the Center for American Progress lists Steven Emerson as one of five “scholars” who act as “misinformation experts” to “generate the false facts and materials” that are then exploited by politicians and pundits to frighten Americans about the supposed threat posed by Muslims.

The report offers a rare glimpse into the right-wing propaganda network that has exploited America’s post-9/11 hysteria and transformed those fears into a powerful political movement to get millions of Christians and Jews to support legislation and policies that target Muslims and their communities.

But the historical significance of noting Emerson’s role in this “Islamophobia network” is that he is revealed to be a propagandist willing to distort information for ideological ends, not the serious journalist that he successfully posed as during the 1980s and 1990s.

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William N. Grigg - October 18, 2011:

As a child, Pinker, says, he thought as a child, embracing anarchism at about the same time he converted to atheism. But as an adult, he has put away childish things: “I was a Rousseauan then; now I’m a Hobbesian.” What this means in practice is that he merely abandoned one sect of totalitarian statism for another.

Rousseau, it should be remembered, was was the author of what he called “The Civil Religion” — a doctrine that would enable the masses, in Rousseau’s phrase, to “bear with docility the yoke of the public good.”

The most important article of Rousseau’s Civil Religion was the absolute divinity of the State; the gravest transgression was “intolerance,” which was regarded as evil not because it injured the rights of individuals, but because it challenged the State’s authority.

According to Rousseau, the ideal social arrangement would be a “form of theocracy, in which there can be no pontiff save the prince, and no priests save the magistrates…. [W]hoever dares to say, ‘Outside the church is no salvation,’ ought to be driven from the State, unless the State is the Church, and the prince the pontiff.”

The State would make belief in its dogmas compulsory, even as it denied it was doing so: “While it can compel no one to believe them, it can banish from the state anyone who does not believe them…..” Apostasy would be a capital offense: “If any one, after publicly recognizing these dogmas, behaves as if he does not believe them, let him be punished by death — he has committed the worst of all crimes, that of lying before the law.”

Related: Temple of Man: Freemasonry, Civil Religion, and Education

The Texas governor has one driving passion: selling off government to the highest bidder

Matt Taibbi - November 2011

Early morning in a nearly filled corporate ballroom at the Cobb Energy Centre, a second-tier event stadium on the outskirts of Atlanta. It’s late September, and a local conservative think tank is hosting a get-together with Rick Perry, whose front-runner comet at the time is still just slightly visible in the bottom of the sky. I’ve put away five cups of coffee trying to stay awake through a series of monotonous speeches about Georgia highway and port reform, waiting for my chance to lay eyes on the Next Big Thing in person.

By the time Perry shows up, I’m jazzed and ready for history. You always want to remember the first time you see the possible next president in person. But as every young person knows, the first time is not always a pleasant experience. Perry lumbers onstage looking exceedingly well-groomed, but also ashen and exhausted, like a funeral director with a hangover.

In a voice so subdued and halting that I think he must be sick, he launches into his speech, which consists of the following elements: a halfhearted football joke about Texas A&M that would have embarrassed a true fan like George W. Bush, worn bromides about liberals creating a nanny state, a few lines about jobs in Texas, and a promise to repeal “as much of Obamacare as I can” on his first day in the White House.

“I will try,” he says, “to make Washington, D.C., as inconsequential in your life as I can.”

Then he waves and walks offstage. The whole thing has taken barely 10 minutes.

I can’t believe it, and neither can the assembled crowd of Georgia conservatives, who hesitate before breaking into polite applause. I feel like a high school cheerleader who just had her leg jizzed on in the back of a convertible. That’s it? It’s over? That was Rick Perry’s stump speech?

“Low energy, low substance,” sighs Justin Ryan, one of the conference attendees. “That’s sort of the candidate in general.”

But this is America, remember, where one should never underestimate shallow. And Rick Perry brings shallow to a new level. He is very gifted in that regard. He could be the Adolf Hitler of shallow.

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Michael Walsh - October 18th, 2011

In case you haven’t figured it out by now, what’s going on in Washington and across the country is the Full Alinsky, brought to you by the same malcontents who have been awaiting this moment for more than 40 years. It’s been a long time wandering in the desert for the Sixties Left, but this is their moment, this is their time, as somebody or other from Punahou once said.

The Great Man himself was already there, agitating and “organizing” for two years by the time I got to Rochester, N.Y., in the fall of 1967 to attend the Eastman School of Music. His target was the Eastman Kodak Co., and his human battering rams were members of the city’s black community, which had exploded in a riot in 1964. In the wake of the unrest, Rochester was already visibly on the slide when Alinsky got there, whipsawing both the black neighborhoods (which had largely been the old Jewish neighborhoods) and the useful idiots of the Rochester Area Council of Churches to hack away at the city’s then-prosperous business community and its WASPy leadership.

Alinsky rode into town on a one-trick pony that the Left has since turned into its warhorse: Agitate one side’s grievances, and appeal to another side’s decency and gullibility in order to provoke the establishment, whose reaction will unite the other two. Then the community organizer charges in on his nag-turned-steed and proceeds to set the rot in motion under the banner of “progress.”

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Bob Yirka - October 20, 2011

Sometimes you just don’t know whether to laugh, cry or be alarmed when hearing about what the boys in secretive back rooms are doing in the name of antiterrorism, or homeland security, or whatever else they wish to call it. This time it seems, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the semi-secret agency charged with coming up with new and cool ways to protect the citizens of the United States from foreign bad guys, wants to hire someone to figure out how vulnerable some people are to “narratives” (oral stories, speeches, propaganda, books, etc. that cause people to think) and then, supplant such messages with “better” messages to head off the path that for such people might lead them to becoming a terrorist.

Called the “Narrative Networks” project, DARPA has released a solicitation for research proposals by those that have both the know-how and the technology to implement such a program, which is divided into two parts. The first part would involve analyzing what happens to people when they hear or see a message. It’s thought that certain messages or images actually cause a change in the brain to accommodate the new ideas.

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Andy Coghlan and Debora MacKenzie - 24 October 2011

AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters’ worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study’s assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York’s Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world’s transnational corporations (TNCs).

“Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it’s conspiracy theories or free-market,” says James Glattfelder. “Our analysis is reality-based.”

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Julie Zeveloff- Oct. 19, 2011

The world economy may still be in the doldrums, but global wealth continues to grow, hitting an all-time high this year of $231 trillion, according to a new global wealth report from Credit Suisse.

And more than ever, that figure is concentrated at the top of the pile. A mere 0.5% of the world’s population owns an eye-popping 38.5% of its total wealth.

As protests against the “1%” continue to rage on in downtown Manhattan and cities across the globe, we’re taking a look at how wealth is distributed and which countries are increasing their share of the world’s richest people.

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Nick Turse - October 16, 2011

They increasingly dot the planet. There’s a facility outside Las Vegas where “pilots” work in climate-controlled trailers, another at a dusty camp in Africa formerly used by the French Foreign Legion, a third at a big air base in Afghanistan where Air Force personnel sit in front of multiple computer screens, and a fourth that almost no one talks about at an air base in the United Arab Emirates.

And that leaves at least 56 more such facilities to mention in an expanding American empire of unmanned drone bases being set up worldwide. Despite frequent news reports on the drone assassination campaign launched in support of America’s ever-widening undeclared wars and a spate of stories on drone bases in Africa and the Middle East, most of these facilities have remained unnoted, uncounted, and remarkably anonymous — until now.

Run by the military, the Central Intelligence Agency, and their proxies, these bases — some little more than desolate airstrips, others sophisticated command and control centers filled with computer screens and high-tech electronic equipment — are the backbone of a new American robotic way of war. They are also the latest development in a long-evolving saga of American power projection abroad — in this case, remote-controlled strikes anywhere on the planet with a minimal foreign “footprint” and little accountability.

Using military documents, press accounts and other open source information, an in-depth analysis by AlterNet has identified at least 60 bases integral to U.S. military and CIA drone operations. There may, however, be more, since a cloak of secrecy about drone warfare leaves the full size and scope of these bases distinctly in the shadows.

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