If the problem of the media is the linchpin of the system whereby public consent is obtained for the operations of domination systems currently wreaking havoc on the planet, then enabling the public to see through the legitimating veil with which mass media and mainstream news cloak contemporary social reality is the key to undoing it.  --  If consumers are to become citizens once again, they must, like Dorothy, pluck away the curtain that shrouds the Great and Magnificent Oz and reveal him for the fraud that he is.  --  In his presentation of the introductory chapter of a recent Ph.D. thesis on “the news story as rhetoric,” UFPPC’s Fred Moreau argues that the Appraisal framework that Australian linguists have in recent years developed from M.A.K. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics offers a powerful tool for accomplishing these tasks....


Michael Klare, author of Resource Wars and Blood and Oil, reviews five recent book on peak oil in the Nov. 8, 2004, Nation.  --  UFPPC’s book discussion series Digging Deeper will take up a number of these books.  --  By way of background, you’re invited to come to the Mandolin Café on the last four Mondays in January for the discussion of Daniel Yergin’s standard history of the global oil industry, The Prize. ...


For the Christmas season, some thoughts on the coy, courageous, but always humane subversiveness in teachings of the rebel Jesus, from Walter Wink.  --  “To risk confronting the Powers with such clown-like vulnerability, to affirm at the same time our own humanity and that of those we oppose, to dare to draw the sting of evil by absorbing it-such behavior is unlikely to attract the faint of heart. But to people dispirited by the enormity of the injustices that crush us and the intractability of those in positions of power, Jesus' words beam hope across the centuries. We need not be afraid. We can assert our human dignity. We can lay claim to the creative possibilities that are still ours, burlesque the injustice of unfair laws, and force evil out of hiding from behind the facade of legitimacy.” ...