Good Morning 99percenters!
Some news and Lonnie Mack

'Privacy Critical to Human Freedom': Snowden, Poitras, and Greenwald Talk NSA
Though Snowden beamed in remotely, conversation hosted by New York Times brings together trio that revealed vast secretive surveillance network to global public

During a unique conversation hosted by the New School and the New York Times on Thursday, the three people most responsible for bringing the story of mass global surveillance programs orchestrated by the U.S. National Security Agency were brought together for the first time since they first met in a Hong Kong hotel in 2013.

Filmmaker Laura Poitras and  journalist Glenn Greenwald sat with the New York Time's media columnist David Carr on stage while the whistleblower himself, Edward Snowden, appeared via videolink from Russia where he remains under asylum protection.

CitizenFour, the documentary film by Poitras which tells the story of Snowden and the NSA revelations he first entrusted to her and then Greenwald has now won numerous awards and been nominated for the upcoming Acadamy Awards. Discussing both the making of the film and her investigation into the world of NSA surveillance, Poitras described how once you recognize how "pernicious and ominous" the world created by the NSA has become, "it does give you that sense of not being able to sleep" because you come to understand "how deep these powers go."

Greenwald, who along with his colleagues at the Guardian, won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Snowden documents, said during the talk, "The realm of privacy is critical to human freedom, to political activism and is something that we've always sought out."

The real tragedy of the Vietnam War
Fifty years after the conflict began, America is still fighting brutal, indiscriminate wars under false pretenses

The 1960s — that extraordinary decade — is celebrating its 50th birthday one year at a time. Happy birthday, 1965!  How, though, do you commemorate the Vietnam War, the era’s signature catastrophe?  After all, our government prosecuted its brutal and indiscriminate war under false pretexts, long after most citizens objected, and failed to achieve any of its stated objectives.  More than 58,000 Americans were killed along with more than four million Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians.

So what exactly do we write on the jubilee party invitation? You probably know the answer. We’ve been rehearsing it for decades. You leave out every troubling memory of the war and simply say:  “Let’s honor all our military veterans for their service and sacrifice.”

For a little perspective on the 50th anniversary, consider this: we’re now as distant from the 1960s as the young Bob Dylan was from Teddy Roosevelt.  For today’s typical college students, the Age of Aquarius is ancient history.  Most of their parents weren’t even alive in 1965 when President Lyndon Johnson launched a massive escalation of the Vietnam War, initiating the daily bombing of the entire country, North and South, and an enormous buildup of more than half a million troops.
In the post-Vietnam decades, our culture has buried so much of the history once considered essential to any debate about that most controversial of all American wars that little of substance remains.  Still, oddly enough, most of the 180 students who take my Vietnam War class each year arrive deeply curious.  They seem to sense that the subject is like a dark family secret that might finally be exposed.  All that most of them know is that the Sixties, the war years, were a “time of turmoil.”  As for Vietnam, they have few cultural markers or landmarks, which shouldn’t be surprising.  Even Hollywood — that powerful shaper of historical memory — stopped making Vietnam movies long ago.  Some of my students have stumbled across old films like Apocalypse Now and Platoon, but it’s rare for even one of them to have seen either of the most searing documentaries made during that war, In the Year of the Pig and Hearts and Minds.  Such relics of profound antiwar fervor simply disappeared from popular memory along with the antiwar movement itself.