Commentary
Commentary
Why Does the U.S. Hate Iran? Think Oil and Strategic Power
Paul Street: Saudi Arabia does not permit free speech, free association, trade unions, national elections or political parties. Dissenters are imprisoned, tortured and executed. Women are kept in a horrifically subordinate position in Saudi Arabia, arguably the mostly sexist and reactionary nation on the planet. ... Iran, by contrast, is a comparative regional paragon of human rights and democracy. ... The United States remains deeply allied and entwined with autocratic governments ... American control of the flow of capitalism’s critical raw material, oil, garnered the U.S. critical leverage over Europe, Japan and other nations. Middle Eastern oil was the great lever, and U.S. planners knew that other rich nations were more dependent on that oil than the U.S. That’s still the case today...
[ Visit Website ]
Jun 23, 2017, 4:57pm
Commentary
Invisible Empire Beneath the Radar, Above Suspicion
Jason Hirthler: To the modern ear, yellow journalism sounds a lot like “fake news,” with its ceaseless reliance on anonymous sources, fake experts, misleading interpretations, and scare tactics. Yellow journalism and fake news are both euphemisms for state propaganda, typically employed to mask the machinery of empire. Whatever we name it, state deceit is in any case slated to grow more pervasive ... As Noam Chomsky said, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”...
[ Visit Website ]
Jun 22, 2017, 10:07am
Commentary
What Would an American Police State Look Like? Are Your Eyes Closed?
William Boardman: A country doesn't need a monolithic totalitarian government to have an effectively working police state. The United States has had a partial police state in place since before it existed as a “free country.” Slavery required a police state structure to maintain “order.” Segregation required a police state structure. Ethnic cleansing of native peoples required police state management that still exists, most obviously in North Dakota, but also across the country. Fear of immigrants has fostered police state responses, especially under the Trump administration. Fear of Communists has produced police state responses since 1917, most notoriously during the 1950s McCarthy era....
[ Visit Website ]
Jun 19, 2017, 10:52am
Commentary
It Doesn't Take a Russian to Hack an American Election
Harvey Wasserman: Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach set in motion a Jim Crow/Crosscheck purge of hundreds of thousands of mostly black, Hispanic and Asian-Amrican citizens prior to the election in at least 29 states. ... Now Trump has appointed Kobach to an "Election Integrity" Commission. His co-commissioner is J. Kenneth Blackwell, who as Ohio Secretary of State helped steal the 2004 presidential election. ... The electronic flipping techniques Blackwell used in Ohio 2004 are part of the “black box voting” syndrome documented by Bev Harris. No Russians needed. ... It may seem like borscht, but election theft is American as apple pie...
[ Visit Website ]
Jun 17, 2017, 3:14pm
Commentary
Nuclear Weapons Ban? What Needs to be Banned Is U.S. Arrogance
Diana Johnstone: the United States, the only power already guilty of nuclear manslaughter, continues to perfect its nuclear arsenal and to proclaim its “right” to launch a “first strike” whenever it chooses. ... The United States naturally calls for boycotting the nuclear arms ban conference. ... The current anti-Russia hysteria is nothing but a symptom of that mentality, which finds any challenge to US world domination to be intolerable. ... The United States with its nuclear arsenal is like a demented maniac with delusions of grandeur. The delusions are institutional rather than individual...
[ Visit Website ]
Jun 16, 2017, 3:12pm
Commentary
The Problem Isn’t Willie Pete, The Problem is War Crimes
Thomas Knapp: The New York Times reports that US and/or US-allied forces in Syria may be using white phosphorous (Willie Pete) munitions in the assault on Raqqa, capital city of the Islamic State in Syria. The use of white phosphorous in war is a perennial complaint among human rights activists. And while it’s valid as far as it goes, it misses a larger and more important point. ... The problem with bombarding Raqqa, or any other populated area, isn’t that it’s being done with white phosphorous, it’s that it’s being done at all. In addition to Islamic State combatants — fair game, so to speak — the area is full of civilian non-combatants. Killing them is a crime...
[ Visit Website ]
Jun 14, 2017, 4:54pm
Commentary
How Vladimir Putin Sees the World
Robert Parry: American journalism has shifted to a new paradigm in which the major news outlets view it as their duty to reinforce whatever the establishment narrative is and to dismiss or discredit any inconvenient facts or alternative analyses. ... Today, The New York Times, The Washington Post and the rest of the mainstream media permit only the narrowest of alternative views to be expressed or they just pile into the latest groupthink whole hog. ... So, that is why director Oliver Stone’s four-part series of interviews with Russian President Vladimir Putin on “Showtime” will surely draw near-universal outrage and ridicule from the big U.S. media...
[ Visit Website ]
Jun 13, 2017, 4:27pm
Commentary
The Age of Anger
Chris Hedges: The nihilism and rage sweeping across the globe are not generated by warped ideologies or medieval religious beliefs. These destructive forces have their roots in the obliterating of social, cultural and religious traditions by modernization and the consumer society, the disastrous attempts by the United States to carry out regime change, often through coups and wars, and the utopian neoliberal ideology that has concentrated wealth in the hands of a tiny cabal of corrupt global oligarchs. ... The dispossessed grasp the true message of the West to the rest of the planet: We have everything, and if you try to take it away from us we will kill you...
[ Visit Website ]
Jun 12, 2017, 11:27am
Commentary
If It's All About the Trump Brand, Let's Jam It Up
Naomi Klein: Well, that didn’t take long. On Monday, the Trump Organization announced plans to launch a chain of three-star hotels to target the millions of Americans who voted for Donald Trump but could never afford his gilded hotels, condos, or clubs. ... In Trump’s world, voters are future customers, campaign donors are future investors, and election results are a rich vein of consumer data. ... There are ways to undercut this: by making Trump look less like a boss (think #PresidentBannon), and by hurting his bottom line by boycotting and otherwise bruising his brand...
[ Visit Website ]
Jun 9, 2017, 12:55pm
Commentary
Reality Winner is a Whistleblower
Jesselyn Radack: Reality Winner, the 25-year-old Air Force veteran and NSA contractor charged with mailing classified material to a news outlet, is a classic whistleblower. ... A whistleblower is a current or former employee who reveals what she reasonably believes evidences fraud, waste, abuse, illegality, or a danger to public health and safety. The individual can disclose their concerns to their superiors, Congress, an interest group representative, or the media. Unfortunately, often nothing gets fixed when employees report internally ... They have continued to advocate for the causes they believe and against the injustices they faced: surveillance reform, ending torture, accountability for war crimes. The least we can do is protect them...
[ Visit Website ]
Jun 9, 2017, 12:21pm
Commentary
Britain Ponders (Again) the Benefits of Concentration Camps
John Andrews: Sometimes it’s quite breathtaking to see just how far to the right British political opinion has been led. We really are just inches away from becoming a totalitarian fascist state ... A recent report revealed that senior figures in both the police and army are pressing to have internment camps built in Britain where thousands of people could be locked-up indefinitely without charge or trial. ... Not only have previous British governments already used concentration camps – in South Africa, and Northern Ireland – the Brits have also specialised in false flag operations for centuries...
[ Visit Website ]
Jun 7, 2017, 3:47pm
Commentary
Using terror as an excuse for more terror
Editorial: The "war on terror" championed by Theresa May and Donald Trump doesn't protect anyone from violence and instability. It makes the world more dangerous and deadly. ... The vast brunt of the atrocities has fallen on the people of the Middle East, where the U.S. military machine and the government's support for sectarian and reactionary political forces has reduced the once-modern society of Iraq to a chaotic shambles, torn Syria apart, plunged Iran into a desperate economic crisis, and left Libya, Yemen and other nations in desperate straits ... The two sides in this conflict--the architects of the global "war on terror" and their Islamist adversaries--are part of a vicious circle...
[ Visit Website ]
Jun 7, 2017, 1:09pm
Commentary
The Six Day War and Israeli Lies: What I Saw at the CIA
Melvin Goodman: On too many occasions in U.S. history, the use of force has been justified with either corrupt intelligence or just plain lies. Such was the case in the Mexican-American War; the Spanish-American War; the Vietnam War; and the 2003 Iraq War. The checks and balances that were needed to prevent the misuse of intelligence were not operative, and Presidents Polk, McKinley, Johnson, and Bush deceived the American people, the U.S. Congress, and the press. ... In 1967, Israeli officials at the highest level lied to the White House about the start of the Six-Day War...
[ Visit Website ]
Jun 5, 2017, 11:12am
Commentary
War Monuments Are Killing Us
David Swanson: Washington, D.C., and much of the rest of the United States, is full of war monuments, with many more under construction and being planned. Most of them glorify wars. ... Almost none of them teach any lessons from mistakes made. ... Beyond the lack of monuments for peace agreements and disarmament successes, where are the monuments to the rest of human life beyond war? In a sane society, the war memorials would be one small example of many types of public memorials, and where they existed they would mourn, not glorify, and mourn all victims, not a small fraction deemed worthy of our sorrow...
[ Visit Website ]
Jun 1, 2017, 5:28pm
Commentary
The Numbers Don’t Lie: White Far-Right Terrorists Pose a Clear Danger to Us All
Mehdi Hasan: Compare and contrast: Islamist terrorists are depicted as wild-eyed fanatics driven to kill by their religious faith or ideology, while far right terrorists — be it the shooter of two Hindus in a bar in Kansas in February, or the killer of nine black worshippers in a church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015, or the murderer of six Sikh worshippers in a temple in ... the state of Wisconsin in 2012 — are almost always “mentally ill.” ... Leading conservatives, and even some liberals, are keen to downplay the danger that they pose and to divert and deflect attention away from home-grown white extremists...
[ Visit Website ]
May 31, 2017, 3:02pm
|
FountainofLight.net