We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Sunday, September 17, 2017

CIA vetoes Chelsea Manning’s Harvard fellowship

Click here to access article by Eric London of the World Socialist Web Site.

London provides us with another dramatic illustration of how one of the Deep State's secret operational organizations, the CIA, impacts decisions in the institution of higher education. This is generally true of all institutions simply because the capitalist system is not merely an economic system, but a comprehensive social-economic system that was created (centuries ago) by a relatively tiny class of capitalists and exists for their many benefits of profit and power. In this piece he reveals that Harvard withdrew a fellowship (def.) from Chelsea Manning only days after the CIA gave strong evidence of their opposition.

(As an aside, I must take this opportunity to point out a flaw in this article which is prevalent in nearly all of the articles published by this website. I write "nearly all" because several days ago I found one exception to this rule which very much surprised me. I am referring to their usual practice of omitting any links to evidence to support their arguments from other websites. It is a common fear among bloggers that if you provide such links, readers will be diverted to other websites and might never return to the original one. Such practice conforms to the strong tendency among Trotskyists to believe that they are the font of all political wisdom, or the vanguard that we should uncritically follow. I, of course, am critical of this perspective and practice in spite of the fact that I have a general respect for the accuracy of their views expressed on their website which I have followed since it began in the middle 1990s.)