Commentary

Commentary
The Corruption of the Law
Chris Hedges: Louis D. Brandeis - “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” ... The supposed clash between liberal and conservative judges is largely a fiction. The judiciary, despite the Federalist Society’s high-blown rhetoric about the sanctity of individual freedom, is a naked tool of corporate oppression. The most basic constitutional rights—privacy, fair trials and elections, habeas corpus, probable-cause requirements, due process and freedom from exploitation—have been erased for many... [ Visit Website ]
Aug 21, 2017, 2:29pm

Commentary
No, Affirmative Action Isn’t Keeping White Students Down
Jessicah Pierre: There’s a saying: “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” ... Now, Trump’s Justice Department is trying to rally that base by arguing that affirmative action hurts white students. ... This argument assumes that students of color no longer face discriminatory barriers. But if you read the news, it’s obvious that this isn’t true. ... African Americans still face economic strains due to racial bias. A 2011 study, for example, found that the median white household wealth remains about 16 times greater than average black wealth.... [ Visit Website ]
Aug 21, 2017, 2:09pm

Commentary
Breaking the Steer
John Andrews: Men had better be without education than be educated by their rulers; for then education is but the breaking of the steer to the yoke. ... So the education system keeps peddling the same old rubbish about great kings and queens, emperors and presidents, generals and admirals; and the priests keep peddling their mythical fantasies; and the mainstream media churn out “news” stories about today’s great leaders, seamlessly connected to yesteryear’s great leaders, together with their blockbuster movies, and musical pap distractions reinforcing the same old/same old ... Is it really any wonder that the 99% understand the world exactly the way they’re supposed to understand it?... [ Visit Website ]
Aug 18, 2017, 2:39pm

Commentary
President Trump’s ‘White Blindness’
Robert Parry: The blindness of President Trump regarding racial bigotry – and indeed that of many white Americans – is that whatever they say to the contrary, they really don’t appreciate the evils of slavery or the ensuing century of lynchings and segregation. ... The dishonesty of Trump’s “history” argument – and its well-worn use by Confederate apologists – is underscored by the obvious fact that statues and other honors are meant to transform historical figures into icons to be emulated. ... On Jefferson Davis’s authority, Confederate soldiers were permitted to summarily execute African-American Union soldiers upon their surrender, a practice that was carried out in several notorious massacres... [ Visit Website ]
Aug 18, 2017, 12:43pm

Commentary
Why the GOP Sides With the Klan and the Nazis
Thom Hartmann: The Republican Party has basically one goal and one reason for existence right now: to protect and promote the interests of the rich and powerful, be they billionaires or the big corporations that spawn them. ... You see, when you’re running a scam and need a lot of rubes to win elections, you don’t ever, ever, ever diss your rubes. This is why the GOP won’t talk (other than a few who aspire to higher office) about white supremacy. ... [ Visit Website ]
Aug 16, 2017, 4:03pm

Commentary
A Dangerous Nuclear Ignorance
Jon Rawski: Michael Shermer’s recent piece in Scientific American recalls the “necessity” of using atomic weapons against Japan and makes comparison to the current US-North Korea conflict. Rather than actually examine the roots of this conflict and the moral issues surrounding nuclear issues today, Shermer reduces Korea to four sentences and spends the remainder of the article in “counterfactuals and moral thought experiments” about Japan. ... Today, every person on earth lives with trace amounts of radiation, the result of decades of nuclear testing... [ Visit Website ]
Aug 15, 2017, 10:56am

Commentary
Charlottesville Is Just More Evidence America Was Born and Raised on Racism and Violence
Kali Holloway: Remember that Donald Trump froze funds that were supposed to go to groups fighting neo-Nazi violence. Remember that the Department of Justice recently announced that its civil rights division will be focusing its energies not on the precipitous rise in anti-black and anti-Muslim hate crimes that followed Trump’s election, but on “affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants.” ... Remember that what happened in Charlottesville was not the unforeseen fallout from the 2016 presidential election, but exactly what Trump promised and what 63 million people voted for... [ Visit Website ]
Aug 14, 2017, 2:23pm

Commentary
New Files Confirm the JFK Investigation Was Controlled by the CIA — Not 'Botched' as Some Pretended
Jefferson Morley: Lie #1: All CIA information was furnished to the Warren Commission. ... Lie #2: The CIA wasn’t initially interested in Oswald. ... Lie #3: The CIA did not share any information about the Oswald-AMSPELL (CIA-funded anti-Castro group, the Cuban Student Directorate) contacts or AMSPELL's conspiracy theory with JFK investigators. ... French president Charles de Gaulle and Cuban president Fidel Castro ... both astute men of power and had both survived CIA-backed assassination plots. De Gaulle and Castro agreed JFK was killed by enemies in his own government... [ Visit Website ]
Aug 13, 2017, 5:09pm

Commentary
A New Angle in Abu-Jamal’s Case
Dennis J Bernstein: The decades-old case of convicted police killer Mumia Abu-Jamal has always centered on whether the legal process was rigged against the black political activist, an argument that has new life ... About a year ago ... it was found that it is a conflict of interest and a denial of a fair and impartial appeal process to allow a judge to sit who had previously been personally involved in a significant fashion in the earlier prosecution of the same case. ... one of the justices who became the Chief Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, Ronald Castille, had been the prosecutor in Philadelphia ...and was the district attorney who was in charge of all the appeal issues on Mumia’s case at the time that dealt with his Black Panther membership, the rigging of the jury selection to keep blacks off the jury, and various other issues. In all significant issues of Mumia’s case, Castille was the person who argued the decisions should be upheld... [ Visit Website ]
Aug 12, 2017, 3:14pm

Commentary
“The Palestine Exception”: War on BDS is now a War on American Democracy
Ramzy Baroud: The US government is declaring war on the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The fight to defeat BDS has been ongoing for several years, but most notably since 2014. ... Senate Bill 720 (S.720), also known as the ‘Anti-Israel Boycott Act’, was largely drafted by the notorious and powerful Israel lobby in Washington, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). ... The US Congress is beholden by Israel’s interests and by the ‘stranglehold‘ of AIPAC over the elected representatives of the American people. ... Thus, it was no surprise to see 43 senators and 234 House representatives backing the Bill... [ Visit Website ]
Aug 10, 2017, 10:40am

Commentary
The United States and the Crucifixion of Yemen
Paul Street: The Saudi-led bombing campaign has devastated much of Yemen’s basic infrastructure, putting 7 million Yemenis at risk of famine. Cholera, a prominent 19th century disease, has become epidemic there, thanks to the collapse of water sanitation. ... “For the almost two years since the war began, the U.S. has been a vital ally to Saudi forces. Like many of our conflicts over the decades, it’s mostly a proxy war we’re fighting here. ... The U.S. supplies surveillance, targeting and other intelligence data to the Saudis. It refuels Saudi planes and sells the Saudis weapons, including more than $20 billion worth of arms in 2016 alone. ... [U.S.] support is more of an attempt to repair an important relationship than it is a show of overwhelming support for the Saudi cause.” ... [ Visit Website ]
Aug 8, 2017, 11:53am

Commentary
Memories of Futility: The Passchendaele Method of War
Binoy Kampmark: "So fruitless in its results, so depressing in its direction was the 1917 offensive, that ‘Passchendaele’ has come to be synonym for military failure, a name black-bordered in the records of the British Army. ... A century ago, wave upon wave of men were shredded, pulverised and drowned according to misplaced notions, killed by obsolete ideas in what was the Third Battle of Ypres. ... Harry Patch, the supercentearian “last Tommy” who died at the venerable age of 111 in 2009, put the case flawlessly: “I felt then, as I feel now, that the politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle the differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalized mass murder.”... [ Visit Website ]
Aug 7, 2017, 10:51am

Commentary
Neocons Leverage Trump-Hate for More Wars
Robert Parry: The enactment of new sanctions against Russia and Iran – with the support of nearly all Democrats and Republicans in Congress – shows how the warmongering neocons again have come out on top ... Part of the reason for this ... is the degree of dominance that the neoconservatives have established in the national news media – as op-ed writers and TV commentators – and the neocon ties to the Israel Lobby that is famous for showering contributions on favored politicians and on the opponents of those not favored ... the prospects for advancing the neocon agenda of more “regime change” wars and coups have grown – and the neocons can claim as their allies virtually the entire Democratic Party... [ Visit Website ]
Aug 5, 2017, 3:18pm

Commentary
CIA confirms the US has its eyes on Venezuela's oil
SUSAN GREY: RECENT comments show the CIA is still working for regime change in Venezuela and encouraging the right-wing governments of Mexico and Colombia to do the same. In a Q&A session at the Aspen Institute think tank, CIA director Mike Pompeo said he was “hopeful that there can be transition in Venezuela” .. US interference in Venezuela takes many forms, including not only political pressure, sanctions and propaganda, but also funding of right-wing opposition activity through organisations such as the National Endowment for Democracy. In 2016 alone more than $1.6 million (£1.2m) was channelled to opposition groups for dozens of projects thinly disguised as efforts to promote political awareness or participation... [ Visit Website ]
Aug 3, 2017, 4:29pm

Commentary
Why Technology Will Not Solve Our Criminal Justice Problems
Jennifer L. Lieberman: when a jail in Tennessee promotes sterilization by offering reduced sentences to men who volunteer to have vasectomies, we have to pay attention. The problem is not that one jail implemented a terrible eugenicist policy; it is that stakeholders in the criminal justice system are consistently looking for scientific and technological solutions to social problems, forgetting that—as fivethirtyeight contributor Laura Hudson writes— “technology is biased too.” ... In the context of criminal justice, America’s faith in technological interventions is worse than misplaced; it is dangerous... [ Visit Website ]
Aug 2, 2017, 5:22pm

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