20110913

west and chomsky and bears, oh my

Democracy Now strikes again and again, cutting through some of the maudlin and indulgent wallowing that has blanketed the media over the past week.

Take a moment, America: Breathe, and get some perspective.

First, an episode covering some other significant events that occurred on the 11th of September in Chile, India, Guatemala, Haiti, and Attica, NY.

Noam Chomsky patiently spends the hour rehashing the same old thing (same old thing, that is, to those of us who have been listening, not to diminish the significance of his work; those of you who have not been listening all these years, may find something new or surprising), reissuing his ten-year-old book 9-11 ("the definitive counternarrative," says Amy Goodman, several times) with a new essay, "9-11: Was There an Alternative?"

Catch the unaired portion of the interview here.

Finally, Cornel West compellingly addresses the "Attica Is All of Us," commemoration of the uprising's brutal end. (Sorry, can't find stand-alone .mp3; please watch video at the foregoing link - ed.). An excerpt:
And we live now in revolutionary times, but the counterrevolution is winning. The counterrevolution is winning. The greedy oligarchs and plutocrats are winning. One out of four corporations don’t pay taxes, been gobbling up billions of dollars. And yet . . . 42 percent of America’s children live in poverty or near poverty. That is sick. It’s a moral obscenity. It’s a national disgrace. And yet, we have a political class, no matter what color they are, that won’t say a mumbling word about that poverty. Why? Because it sits outside of the give and fro between a right-wing, mean-spirited Republican Party, run by the oligarchs and the plutocrats, and a spineless Democratic Party, that’s got ties to the oligarchs and plutocrats, and the poor people get left out. They get invisible, disposable.