Commentary
Commentary
We Need a Martin Luther King Day of Truth
Edward Curtin: “Nothing in all the world is more dangerous,” warned Dr. King, “than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” ... Educating people about the fact that U.S. government forces conspired to kill Dr. King, and why, and why it matters today, is the greatest service we can render to his memory. ... William Pepper’s decades-long investigation not only refutes the flimsy case against the alleged assassin James Earl Ray, but definitively proves that King was killed by a government conspiracy led by J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI, Army Intelligence, and the Memphis Police, assisted by southern Mafia figures. ... “He who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery,” King told us, “Freedom is still the bonus we receive for knowing the truth.” ...
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Jan 21, 2019, 10:37am
Commentary
Racism Is A Far Too Common Experience For Native People
Ivan Star Comes Out: Racism has abandoned its murky corners as 2018 comes to an end. ... This unfounded hatred was once done secretly, now it is out in the open. The national government has become an obvious nesting site for this violent bigotry. Also, it is obvious to see that it has infiltrated all levels of local government, including courts, police, jail, and social services. These bigots are of European Caucasoid origin, educated, illiterate, elderly, young, rich and poor. ... A tiny ray of hope for regaining some dignity in this country is that not all white-skinned people are bigots. However, the groundless hatred is consuming morality. ... Modern scholars have now uncovered the hidden historic fact that since 1492, that 80% to 90% of the original inhabitants of North, Central, and South America perished...
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Jan 19, 2019, 12:12pm
Commentary
Saving America and the World by Slashing US Military Spending -Shut down the war machine!
Dave LIndorff: The time has come to cut the US military down to size. ... By all accounts, the US accounts for more than a third of all global military spending. ... Let’s be honest: The United States faces no significant threat from any nation in the world. ... The reality is that it is the US which is the most threatening and destabilizing force in the world today. ... It is simply madness that has led us to this point. Madness by a ruling elite that only cares about grasping an ever larger share of the national and global wealth ... There is an urgent need for the US, and for the people of this self-described “indispensable” nation to wake up from our torpor, to throw off our fear-induced and greed-driven obsession with military spending, and to turn both inward to the need to develop a humane and sustainable society that benefits all its members, and outward to become a cooperative and non-threatening member of the global community of nations...
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Jan 18, 2019, 2:32pm
Commentary
Countering the smears against the Women’s March
Jen Roesch: By all measures, the Women’s Marches — the first of which set the tone for protest during the Trump era with the largest single day of protest in U.S. history — should be looking toward their greatest success yet. ... Instead, the organizers have come under intense attack, and the marches themselves, scheduled for this weekend, are experiencing a crisis. ... In this case, the real threat of anti-Semitism is being cynically exploited to smear the leaders of the Women’s Marches ... the chorus of condemnation has been largely orchestrated by right-wing and Zionist voices, inside and outside the broad left, with the aim of undermining some of the more radical politics of the Women’s March organizers, particularly around the question of Palestine...
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Jan 17, 2019, 2:59pm
Commentary
The Government Shutdown Makes You Think About Socialism
Charles Andrews: Many people are cynical about government, with good reason. They see leaders who don’t care about getting a job done, who just maneuver and finger-point and yell to puff themselves up and put someone else down. ... The shutdown of the federal government has done at least one good thing. It showed us that 800,000 rank-and-file workers who make the federal government go every day do a vital job. ... Basically, socialism means that we will run our economy in institutions that work for society, not for the profit of rich owners. Basically, socialism means no rich and no poor, a good wage for every job, full employment, and common prosperity for all. ... That sounds a lot like an expansion of the bulk of the federal government ... The shutdown demonstrates that the American system of government is crumbling. It served business well for more than 200 years while it kept the population from considering alternatives. No longer...
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Jan 14, 2019, 2:24pm
Commentary
Ten reasons to support the LA teachers
Danny Katch: MORE THAN 33,000 members of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) are on strike today, shutting down the country’s second-largest school district which serves almost half a million students. ... Educators are demanding that the Los Angeles United School District (LAUSD) fund schools that working-class students deserve — including smaller classes and more support staff like librarians and counselors — plus an end to privatization schemes that siphon off taxpayer money to fund privately run charter schools. ... Number one: Los Angeles has really rich people and really poor schools ... California spends annually only $10,291 per student (compared to $75,560 for each person it imprisons). ... Number two: ...but educators are fighting for more than just money ... lower class sizes, fair pay, less testing and more teaching, accountability for charter operators and co-locations, respect for early and adult educators, and more nurses, counselors and librarians to support our students....
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Jan 14, 2019, 2:10pm
Commentary
The Scott Warren Case is Part of a Crackdown on Aid to Migrants
James Goodman: He offered food, water, and clothing to migrants on a deadly stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border. Now he’s facing twenty years in prison. Humanitarian groups fear the situation will only get worse. ... Warren is one of nine volunteers with No More Deaths facing misdemeanor charges of trespassing and abandoning “property”—specifically, food and water left for border crossers—and for operating a vehicle on the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. ... While the relationship between the Border Patrol and humanitarian groups has long been uneasy, everyone recognizes that providing water to border crossers can save lives. But the Warren felony prosecution and pending misdemeanor cases suggest the agency is taking a more aggressive position against those who provide support for desperate immigrants....
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Jan 11, 2019, 12:12pm
Commentary
What Are We Working For “At Eternity’s Gate”?
Edward Curtin: Ever since I was a young boy, I have wondered why people do the kinds of work they do. I sensed early on that the economic system was a labyrinthine trap devised to imprison people in work they hated but needed for survival. ... Studs Terkel book - "Working" ... This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence – to the spirit as well as to the body. It is about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting matches as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around. It is, above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations. To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us. ... “I paint to stop thinking and feel I am a part of everything inside and outside me,” says Vincent Van Gogh ... If we could make working a form of such painting, a path to human solidarity because a mode of rebelling, what a wonderful world it might be...
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Jan 9, 2019, 3:54pm
Commentary
It’s Time to Bring Back the Corporate Death Penalty
Thom Hartmann: The good citizens of California have been wondering out loud who killed 86 of their citizens in the Camp Fire, along with dozens of other Californians over the years in other fires. Now both federal and state prosecutors are focusing on a likely suspect: Pacific Gas and Electric. ... California’s largest private, for-profit corporate utility appears to have killed a number of people over the years, in many cases because of negligence apparently prompted by a desire to jack up corporate profits. ... As a corporation, they play by different rules than you or I. ... Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) has already been nailed for “speeding”—ignoring laws that require them to operate in a way that’s safe—and people have already died, on multiple occasions. ... (Just One Example) - PG&E was found guilty for the 2010 San Bruno pipeline explosion that injured more than 50 people and killed eight. They were fined $1.6 billion and are on probation now....
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Jan 8, 2019, 11:42am
Commentary
“Are You Serious?” Awards, 2018
Conn Hallinan: The Golden Sprocket Wrench Award goes to Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest arms manufacturer, for its F-22 Raptor Stealth fighter, a fifth-generation interceptor said to be the best in the world. ... That is when it works, which isn’t often. ... The Golden Parenting Award goes to the U.S. State Department, for trying to water down a resolution by the UN’s World Health Assembly encouraging breastfeeding over infant formula. ... A Lancet study found that universal breastfeeding would prevent 800,000 infant deaths a year, decrease ear infections by 50 percent, and reduce gastrointestinal disease by 64 percent. ... The Blue Meanie Award goes to U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for blocking medical supplies to North Korea...
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Jan 7, 2019, 11:28am
Commentary
Veteran NBC/MSNBC Journalist Blasts the Network for Being Captive to the National Security State and Reflexively Pro-War to Stop Trump
Glenn Greenwald: William Arkin has worked with NBC and MSNBC over the years and continuously since 2016. But yesterday, he announced that he was leaving the network in a long, emphatic email denouncing the networks for their superficial and reactionary coverage of national security, for becoming fixated on trivial Trump outbursts of the day to chase profit and ratings, and — most incriminating of all — for becoming the central propaganda arm of the CIA, the Pentagon, and the FBI in the name of #Resistance, thus inculcating an entire new generation of liberals, paying attention to politics for the first time in the Trump era, to “lionize” those agencies and their policies of imperialism and militarism. ... The network consists of little more than former CIA, NSA, and Pentagon officials as news “analysts”; ex-Bush-Cheney national security and communications officials as hosts and commentators; and the most extremists pro-war neocons...
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Jan 4, 2019, 2:48pm
Commentary
What is It About the the American Character?
Joseph Natoli: “What is it . . . about the American character that allows the long con of our politics to go on and on. . .?” ... How do we base our party politics on letting “the voices of the people be heard” when they have been conned by leaders who “treat the bulk of American people with the very same contempt” they treat blacks? ... The will of the people, in America, has always been at the mercy of an ignorance not merely phenomenal, but sacred, and sacredly cultivated: the better to be used by a carnivorous economy which democratically slaughters and victimizes whites and Blacks alike. ... Trump has taken ownership of the dark side of the American character but he has, in a folksy expression, also owned up to its existence, its origins, affinities and triggers...
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Dec 28, 2018, 11:59am
Commentary
Banishing Truth
Chris Hedges: Seymour Hersh, the greatest investigative reporter of his generation, uncovered the U.S. military’s chemical weapons program, which used thousands of soldiers and volunteers, including pacifists from the Seventh-day Adventist Church, as unwitting human guinea pigs to measure the impact of biological agents including tularemia, yellow fever, Rift Valley fever and the plague. He broke the story of the My Lai massacre. ... Yet he begins his memoir by the candid admission, familiar to any reporter, that there are crimes and events committed by the powerful you never write about, at least if you want to keep your job. ... Reporters embedded with military units in Iraq and Afghanistan routinely witness atrocities and often war crimes committed by the U.S. military, yet they know that access is dependent on keeping quiet. This collusion between the press and the powerful is a fundamental feature of journalism...
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Dec 27, 2018, 2:32pm
Commentary
Trump, the Quintessential American
Chris Hedges: Donald Trump is part of the peculiar breed Herman Melville described in his novel “The Confidence-Man,” in which the main character uses protean personas, flattery and lies to gain the confidence of his fellow passengers to fleece them on a Mississippi River steamboat. “Confidence men,” as Melville understood, are an inevitable product of the amorality of capitalism and the insatiable lust for wealth, power and empire that infects American society. ... American culture is built on a willful duplicity, a vision we hold of ourselves that bears little resemblance to reality. ... The more debased the nation becomes, the more it seeks the reassurance of oily con artists to mask truth with lies...
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Dec 17, 2018, 5:40pm
Commentary
There But For Fortune...
Jaime O'Neill: Since the fire that wiped out Paradise and Magalia drove us from our home on the otherwise perfect fall morning of November 8, I've thought about the homeless every single day. Lest it occur to you to think of what a great guy I must be to worry about others at such a time of personal upheaval and loss, let me disabuse you of any such notion. ... For nearly three weeks after the fire, I was for all intents and purposes, homeless. I wasn't reduced to sleeping in a damp and grimy sleeping bag, nor did I have to ask strangers for a handout, but I was humbled, nonetheless, with a daily feeling of humiliation at being displaced, literally a refugee. ... When I see the truly homeless now--and I see them every day--I cannot escape an entirely new sense of kinship with them. And when I see pictures of desperate homeless families running with their crying children at our border from the billowing tear gas, I feel shame for the mercilessness and lack of basic compassion that is now redefining us as a people...
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Dec 12, 2018, 4:32pm
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