Tens of thousands of progressive activists are converging on Detroit this week for the U.S. Social Forum to envision a better future. In the fight for social justice and sustainability, health and health care are at the forefront. During the meeting, the Washtenaw Reds plan to launch a free clinic in Detroit. They envision the facility as a center of healing and a nexus of political organizing. The USSF also features workshops on reproductive justice and drug policy issues. Urban farming and food justice are also key items on the agenda, Paul Abowd of In These Times reports.

Prof. William Black’s damning assessment of FinReg: that’s it’s entirely lacking in reforms that would prevent accountancy and control frauds; goes perfectly with a report in Slate.com (h/t maxkeiser.com) confirming the assertions made by self-confessed Economic Hit Man John Perkins: How do we build our empire? With covert economic hit jobs. Doesn’t that make control fraud our official (covert) policy?

Pepe Escobar, in a May 8, 2010 AntiWar Radio interview with (the other) Scott Horton, answers, again, the trillion dollar question: why are we fighting bogus holy wars in Eurasia? It’s the dominance, dammit!

CTuttle, commenting on the previous DCM diary, Deconstructing Myths of America: Pepe Escobar Special Edition pt1, makes two points most difficult to challenge: A) “Pepe [Escobar] is the man;” and B) Gareth Porter ain’t too shabby, either. As evidence, watch Porter’s July 12 and 14, 2009 videos for The Real News Network.

by Zach Carter, Media Consortium blogger

Congress returns from its April recess this week with financial reform at the top of its to-do list. With millions of Americans still bearing the brunt of the worst recession in 80 years, Congress needs to start protecting our economy from Wall Street excess, and repair the shredded social safety net that has allowed the Great Recession to exact a devastating human cost.

Big banks are an economic parasite

Glenn Greenwald, in his 2/23/2010 post to his blog, Unclaimed Territory, at Salon.com, thoroughly busts the “fake Left, go Right” shtick of the Democratic Party described by Jeff Cohen, in his 2/03/2010 interview with TRNN’s Paul Jay, featured in the 2/18/2010 entry in this series, Deconstructing Myths of America: The Myth of the Missed Housing Bubble.

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.

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.

On November 6, 2008, the day after President-elect Barack Obama chose U.S. Rep. Rahm Emanuel as his incoming chief-of-staff, David Swanson, founder of AfterDowningStreet.org, was interviewed by Paul Jay on The Real News about the importance of the hire.