Browse Topics

War On Truth

The Secret Battle For The American Mind — An Interview With John Stauber

Public relations is now inseparable from the business of lobbying, creating public policy, and getting candidates elected to public office. The PR industry just might be the single most powerful political institution in the world. It expropriates and exploits the democratic rights of millions on behalf of big business by fooling the public about the issues.

Liberation Marketing And The Culture Trust

Liberation marketing takes the old mass-culture critique — consumerism as conformity — fully into account, acknowledges it, addresses it, and solves it. Liberation marketing imagines consumers breaking free from the old order, tearing loose from the shackles with which capitalism has bound us, escaping the routine of bureaucracy and hierarchy, getting in touch with our true selves, and, finally, finding authenticity, that holiest of consumer grails.

Us And Them

Time was when I knew the racists were the lunch-counter owners who refused to serve blacks, the warmongers were the generals who planned wars and ordered the killing of innocent people, and the polluters were the industrialists whose factories fouled the air, water, and land. I was a good guy, boycotting, marching, and sitting-in to protest the actions of the bad guys.

The Joy Of Sales Resistance

This is a book about sales resistance. We live in a time when technologies and ideas (often the same thing) are adopted in response not to need but to advertising, salesmanship, and fashion. Salesmen and saleswomen now hover about us as persistently as angels, intent on “doing us good” according to instructions set forth by persons educated at great public expense in the arts of greed and prevarication. These salespeople are now with most of us, apparently, even in our dreams.

Sunbeams

You are sitting on the earth, and you realize that this earth deserves you and you deserve this earth. You are there — fully, personally, genuinely.

Chögyam Trungpa

Conjuring Tibet

Turning youths loose on actual or possible dissidents was probably the shrewdest and cruelest of Maoist strategies. Here were True Believers, lacking life experience to complicate their thoughts, still endowed with the primal cruelty of children. Having internalized the rhetoric of the Cultural Revolution, they were empowered to indulge in any form of torture, from breast amputation to castration, secure in the righteousness of their cause.

A Charm Against The Language Of Politics

Celebrating A Massacre

U.S. bomber pilots destroyed or incapacitated eighteen of Iraq’s twenty electrical power plants. The link between that and children dying today was explained by the Harvard team: “Without electricity, water cannot be purified, sewage cannot be treated, waterborne diseases flourish, and hospitals cannot cure treatable illnesses.”

A Good Life

We were in the kitchen, listening to the radio — Norma preparing dinner, Mara studying for exams — when the bulletin came over the air. The United States had just gone to war with Iraq. Mara, not quite fifteen, looked up in astonishment. Norma put down her knife and wept.

The Ethics Of Photography

An Interview With John Rosenthal

It’s hard not to see that a photograph is an act of aggression, no matter who is taking it. You’re stopping people from the flow of their lives, you’re cropping them from the space in which they live and have their being, you’re juxtaposing them with something that they didn’t know they were next to.