On This Day in 1964

Zinn Education Project:

One June 21, 1964, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman were murdered by the KKK with help from the deputy sheriff near Philadelphia in Neshoba County, Miss. While their case received national attention, there were many more people murdered while seeking basic democratic and human rights. Learn more about the history of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi: http://bit.ly/14NLcaz Also, listen to the Democracy Now! broadcast: "After Over Four Decades, Justice Still Eludes Family of 3 Civil Rights Workers Slain in Mississippi Burning Killings" http://bit.ly/LFXWZc

BoA Whistleblowers Bombshell: "We were told to lie."

"Senior managers provided carrots and sticks for employees to lie to customers and push them into foreclosure. Simone Gordon described meetings where managers created quotas for lower-level employees, and a bonus system for reaching those quotas...Employees were closely monitored, and those who didn’t meet quotas, or who dared to give borrowers accurate information, were fired, as was anyone who 'questioned the ethics … of declining loan modifications for false and fraudulent reasons,' according to William Wilson." ~David Dayen

Word: Senator Frank Church on the NSA, 1975

Thanks to Undernews for the reminder.

"That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything. Telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology. I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capability that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return." - Senator Frank Church, 1975

Word: Lewis Mumford

"The pathology of the Power Complex expresses itself publicly in two forms: magnification and mummification. As with the colossal statues that dominated the palaces of ancient Egypt and Babylonia, the same effect is produced for the more ephemeral absolute rulers of our own time in blown-up photographs, while by radio, television, and telephoto the image of Big Brother, by sheer repetition and multiplication, becomes inescapable. But the end product of this fraudulent inflation is a mummy: a corpse preserved in Egyptian fashion, placed in a tomb for public worship." ~from The Pentagon of Power, by Lewis Mumford

Though used bookstores will occasionally carry Mumford in their stocks, sadly many people nowadays don't know him or read him. Which is not surprising, given the short memories of the chattering nabobs of either end of the political spectrum.