Authoritarianism

When I ran Sire Records and then Reprise bands often asked me if I would be the executive producer of their album. I never felt comfortable doing it-- showing that kind of perceived favoritism when I was responsible for all the bands and all their albums-- so I would routinely say "no, thanks." Except once. That once was a band I had signed to Sire, Body Count. My boss, Seymour Stein, had already signed the ground-breaking rapper Ice-T to the label but when Ice put together a punk/metal band, he brought it to me. I loved the live shows I had seen around L.A.

In the video above, Bernie Sanders was addressing the Culinary Workers Union at their convention in Las Vegas yesterday. He made a powerful speech about how the right wing oligarchs and plutocrats divide working people up so that they can dominate American politics. “We are not living in a democracy when 60 percent of Americans are not voting, while billionaires like the Koch brothers are spending hundreds of millions to buy the United States Senate. That's called oligarchy, not democracy… The Koch Brothers are trying to buy the Senate. This is not what democracy is supposed to be about.

Yesterday I happened to pass a TV set while a nice MSNBC was trying to get through her job by interviewing Hisham Melhem, the thoroughly Americanized Lebanese journalist and Al Arabiya News Washington bureau chief.

My grandfather, a Socialist, always warned me to never trust the Democratic Party as a real alternative to the fascists (which is how he referred to Nazis, Republicans, Southern Democrats and any other parties on the right). In the last week, we've been looking at how the Democratic Establishment and the Republican Establishment banded together to defeat Alan Grayson's amendment against militarization of local police departments.

"The Chinese government's use of lethal force was no accident.

Countries who seek to gain control over their people through the Internet have their own agendas. They are in search of larger governmental control or even censorship online.
– Marietje Schaake, European Parliament Member, February 2014

Stanley Milgram's experiments on obedience to authority are among the best known social science experiments ever done and we've looked at them before, primarily on the context of what kind of a person will agree to torture another human being-- and what kind of a person will refuse.

School’s Out: Escaping the Cycle of Compulsory Public Education and Unlearning Authoritarianism