What is the difference between the corporate media and the independent media?

We truly are at a crossroads.

This article portrays the forces of the white, reactionary right who are trying to turn back the clock on civil rights in this country.

One progressive’s look at the fundamental questions the progressive ideology has to answer in order to truly advance.

Matt Taibbi and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently summarized the mythos of Wall Street types. Taibbi’s analysis is nearly perfect, except that he falls prey to the fashion of dressing up our psyches in outdated APA-style vestments. The word for the function he describes is “mythos.”Ayn Rand is credited with being the queen of the myth of self-interest as the highest social good. Her tome, Atlas Shrugged, is the bible of Gordon Gecko-type greedheads. Ellis Weiner calls it a “deeply adolescent piece of science fiction.” It’s the myth that shapes the cosmos of Wall Street in the minds of bankers even before they act in it.

There they go again, the think-tankers who make the myths that make way for the battle tanks (by intending the patriarchal cosmos that grows the neo-feudal societies that grow the psycho Perkinsian economic hit men (EHM) who’ve been jacking us into war after bogus holy war are already salivating at the chance to jack Haiti to hell and back all over again. How? With their new and improved weapons of disaster capitalism. If you’re going to jack a nation, first you gotta make myths.

TRNN Senior Editor Paul Jay and University of Massachusetts-Amherst Professor Jame Crotty get to the the heart of the recent financial collapse by examining not just the data points of executive compensation, but far more importantly, the mythology that makes us believe that the prophets of everlasting profit are our proper masters of the universe.

A working definition of the intellectual. Separating intellectuals from look-alikes. Most culture-watchers agree intellectualism has almost disappeared in America, but they disagree on causes. It’s not just a change in fashion; there are real pressures against it. This essay rejects some of the common explanations (television, the rise of religious fundamentalism, materialism, the rise of conservatism, and poor schools) as incomplete, and replaces them with better explanations: events sequel to the cultural upheaval of the 1960s, the university, technical specialists, the rise of relativism, the rise of psychotherapy, the resurgence of Social Darwinism, and the rise of trash culture. What’s the loss if we don’t have intellectuals? The revival of intellectualism is both a remote and precious possibility. Remedies.

The power of myth is to shape the cosmos in which we believe ourselves to be enacting this absurd theater of life. What myths have we, and how are they shaping our world even before we act in it? Is the cosmos (and ourselves along with it) just a god-forsaken mechanism, the behavior of which ever and always is determined by outside forces? Or is their more to being human than can be explained in APA-style?

As John Pilger wrote recently in New Statesman, “The new “ism” was Americanism, an ideology whose distinction is its denial that it is an ideology.” That is, America has a state religion: faith in force as measured in dollars. In this new video from The Real News Network, Senior Editor Paul Jay and professor of economics Robert Pollin bust the myth of the dollar-powered military machine as the best of all possible economic engines.