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Consider This....
Britain: the Anti-Semitism Debate
Conn Hallinan: Does the British Labour Party and its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, have an “anti-Semitism problem,” or has the Party’s left wing been targeted by the Israeli government for its support of the growing boycott and divestment movement that challenges Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian land? A group of Israeli lawyers and social activists would like to know the answer to that question ... Corbyn has long been a leader in the fight against racism and played a key role in helping to bring down the apartheid regime in South Africa. He has also made it no secret that he makes common cause with the Palestinians and supports the Boycott and Divestment Sanctions (BDS) aimed at forcing Israel to withdraw from the Occupied Territories. ... Polls show the Labour Party is considerably less anti-Semitic than the Conservative Party, and it appears that anti-Semitism has declined since Corbyn took over...
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Sep 18, 2018, 2:25pm
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The End of Animal Farming Is Not An Impossible Dream
Karen Dawn: Children are now growing up in a world where veggie burgers taste just like meat, and true meat burgers, grown from cells, are soon to be on supermarket shelves. ... Pat Brown, maker of the impossibly trendy, entirely plant-based, Impossible Burger, told attendees to mark their calendars: By 2035, he predicted, all meat will be produced without slaughter. ... Impossible Foods, like its main competitor Beyond Meat, is creating plant-based burgers aimed at the meat-loving market. Both companies, founded by unrelated Browns, Pat and Ethan respectively, are mission based. They hope, in Pat Brown’s words, “to save the world from the biggest environmental catastrophe that it faces, which is the insanely destructive impact of the meat industry.”...
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Sep 13, 2018, 3:18pm
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The Slaves Rebel
Chris Hedges: The only way to end slavery is to stop being a slave. Hundreds of men and women in prisons in some 17 states are refusing to carry out prison labor, conducting hunger strikes or boycotting for-profit commissaries in an effort to abolish the last redoubt of legalized slavery in America. ... Prisons in America are a huge and lucrative business. ... Private corporations exploit prison labor in at least 40 states. In some cases these workers are paid next to nothing. They have no benefits, including Social Security participation, and cannot form unions or organize. ... Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote that “the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” ... Prisons are not primarily about crime. They are about social control. They are about profiting off black and brown bodies...
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Sep 3, 2018, 12:10pm
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A People’s Definition of Capitalism
Jason Holland: Capitalism in a truthful word: Exploitation. ... Through decades of red baiting and condemnation of any alternative system that doesn’t drive monetary resources to the few at the expense of the many we’ve arrived at a state of indoctrination where people cannot see past the wall of propaganda that has been projected in Plato’s cave. ... Capitalism is a system based on gaining leverage over someone and then exploiting that leverage. Much like a game of chess you are trying to corner your opponent’s options to the point there are no options left except for the options you allow. This is how business is done in capitalism...
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Aug 29, 2018, 2:17pm
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The Anti-President
John Steppling: The U.S. is now a endless machine for war profiteering and endless war itself. Simultaneously a hyper Imperialist machine directed toward global hegemony. Domestically it is a McCarthyesque empire of propaganda and censorship and mass incarceration. On both fronts it is a machine for channelling money directly to the ruling class. ... The United States is sinking under the weight of its contradictions, ideologically, and it’s also materially crumbling. ... And it is economically propped up in part by those trillions of dollars associated with the defense industry. ... The homeless encampments around every city in America are the legacy of so called American Century. That is the end of the line for Western capital and rugged individualism. The postscript to Manifest Destiny is a nation of absolute misery, over medicated, and trying hard to NOT see the misery around them...
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Aug 25, 2018, 10:02am
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Economists ‘Can’t Understand’ Why Workers Can’t Get Paid More in a ‘Booming’ Economy
Dave Lindorff: Mystery of the underpaid American worker ... These poor financial journalists and the economists they quote as their sources are all struggling because their models, and everything they learned in school about market theory, says that if labor markets are “tight,” meaning that there are few jobs available to unemployed workers, it should drive up wages of those who have jobs ... Perhaps in some magic world where workers and bosses were operating basically as equals in some mystical “free marketplace,” that might be true, but it ignores things like power relations and labor law, the pernicious role of the new digital age where a worker’s employment record is immediately available for inspection by any potential new employer ... We’ve got tens of millions of people classified as “working” who are actually under-employed and would like a full-time job but cannot find one...
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Aug 7, 2018, 11:34am
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UFOs: Proven “Beyond Reasonable Doubt”
Graham Peebles: In December 2017 the New York Times (NYT) revealed details of a hitherto secret defense program set up to investigate reports of unidentified flying objects (UFOs). The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) was funded ($22m) by Congress and led by Luis Elizondo, a senior military intelligence officer. It ran from 2007 to 2012 when, the Pentagon claim it was closed down, but Mr. Elizondo, who resigned in 2007 said the program “carried on for another five years.” ... For decades western governments have suppressed data and publicly denied the existence of UFOs, mainstream media approaches the subject with cynicism ... A fog of ignorance and cynicism has blinded humanity to their true nature and the reality of life; it is time to reject such narrow definitions and look with an open, attentive mind, at oneself and the mysteries of life...
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Aug 4, 2018, 12:51pm
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Going Native: Kneading My Soul
Mark Anthony Rolo: Old-time Indian women would fry bread in the early morning and at the end of the day. I often wonder if they found solace in making the bread, like my mother.... I would stare at my mother from a distance, watching her floured hands pushing that bread over and over. She would knead for what seemed like forever. She never spoke. Her eyes were closed. Years later, I realize how kneading bread dough took her into another sphere, a peaceful place where her soul drifted away from the demands of whining kids and an abusive, drunkard husband. ... It took me decades to recognize how kneading the soul is so vital. While lost in kneading, the world just seems peaceful. There is a lingering glow of this feeling even after I’ve slipped my bread into oven...
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Aug 1, 2018, 4:11pm
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Democratic Socialism Is About Democracy
Shawn Gude: But here’s what I’d emphasize: democratic socialism, at its core, is about deepening democracy where it exists and introducing democracy where it is absent. In countries like the US, that means increasing the scope of popular control in the political arena and broadening it out to include the social and economic spheres. ... It is the quite radical idea that ordinary people — not experts, not elites, not their “betters” — can rule themselves. It is the word we use to describe the flattening of steep hierarchies, the shattering of structures that confer undue wealth and power and privilege...
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Jul 26, 2018, 11:15am
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Inside WikiLeaks: Working with the Publisher that Changed the World
Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi has worked with WikiLeaks for nine years on the Podesta emails and other revelations ... WikiLeaks is rather unique from many standpoints. As a media organization publishing exclusively secret or otherwise restricted documents on “invisible powers,” such as intelligence agencies, which citizens do not normally perceive as directly relevant to their lives, there is little doubt that WikiLeaks has the full force of the State against it. ... Thanks to WikiLeaks, it has been possible to reveal the true face of the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq (Afghan War Logs, Iraq War Logs Filesand Collateral Murder), the identities of Guantanamo detainees (Gitmo Files) ... No one can say how it will end for Assange and his team: if they end up in jail in the United States, it will be the first time that an editor and a media organization are imprisoned in the U.S. for their work, at least not since John Peter Zenger in Colonial America...
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Jul 20, 2018, 3:36pm
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Imagining an Economy That Serves the 99%
Tim Koechlin: The United States is among the richest societies ever. But despite all of its productivity, all of its abundance, and all of its potential, the US economy does not adequately meet the needs of the human beings who give it life, rely on it, and live and die by it. We can do way, way better. ... “we can’t afford it” means, more precisely, that we can’t afford a more generous economy without (a) raising taxes on corporations and the 0.1% (b) cutting defense spending (c) rationalizing our health care and criminal justice systems (d) borrowing money to invest in smart infrastructure improvements (e) raising taxes on middle class Americans (to help pay for education, health care, social security, public spaces, and more) and/or (f) trading off some economic growth for improvements in the quality of our lives...
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Jul 12, 2018, 11:42am
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New Study Confirms That American Workers Are Getting Ripped Off
Eric Levitz: Over the past 12 months, piddling wage gains — combined with modest inflation — have left the vast majority of our nation’s laborers with lower real hourly earnings than they had in May 2017 ... Explanation: American policymakers have chosen to design an economic system that leaves workers desperate and disempowered, for the sake of directing a higher share of economic growth to bosses and shareholders. ... President Trump spends a great deal of time and energy arguing that American workers are getting a rotten deal. And he’s right to claim that Americans are getting the short end. But the primary cause of that fact isn’t bad trade agreements or “job killing” regulations — its the union-busting laws and court rulings that the president has done so much to abet...
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Jul 7, 2018, 4:28pm
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Lawrence O'Donnell Breaks Down Why Police Get Away With Murder
Aliza Worthington: (Interview) ... 1984 - the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional to make it legal to shoot fleeing felony suspects ... 35 years ago, if there were guns in that car, and the dead body was over there, the police would have taken the guns out of that car, put it in the hand of the dead victim and there would have been no video of that. That video camera and the awareness that there are these video cameras prevents them from doing some of these things but what's true of it all, though, is the spirit of trying to get away with it once a mistake has been made is still there and it controls virtually everything that the police do after the fact. ... There is a tremendous public bias in favor of police. ... People believe the job is much more dangerous than it is...
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Jun 25, 2018, 4:08pm
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'He's a Political Prisoner': Standing Rock Activists Face Years in Jail
Sam Levin: Under Trump, who has had financial ties with the pipeline company, the US Department of Justice has pressed forward with six cases against Native Americans. North Dakota prosecutors meanwhile have pursued more than 800 state cases against people at Standing Rock, including 165 still pending, according to the Water Protector Legal Collective, a legal support team. ... Red Fawn Fallis was originally accused of shooting at law enforcement, facing a potential life sentence. The case moved forward even after it was reported that a paid informant for the FBI had developed a romantic relationship with her during the protests and was the owner of the gun she allegedly fired. Prosecutors eventually dropped the charge in exchange for her pleading to lesser offenses, and on Monday, she is expected to receive a seven-year prison sentence...
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Jun 23, 2018, 3:28pm
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How We Can Really Make America Great
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: America’s most dangerous enemy is not terrorism, war or immigration. The greatest threat to our country is ignorance. ... Critical thinking isn’t just for political purposes — it also has practical career and life applications. ... Educating our children on how to deal with political and intellectual dishonesty — and on how to make decisions based on corroborated evidence — is a necessary form of self-defense. It protects children from social or political brainwashing and provides them with the intellectual means to form their own beliefs. ... It is the responsibility of every American to form opinions based on gathering as much information as possible, evaluating that information for veracity and then using logic to form conclusions devoid of personal prejudices...
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Jun 8, 2018, 2:03pm
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