Commentary
Commentary
The Fossil Fuel Industry’s Dark Money Is Getting Even Darker
David Sirota & Andrew Perez: A fossil fuel company admitted it made $9.5 million worth of political expenditures to advance its corporate interests — and a Delaware court is helping hide the details. ... The situation is unfolding in a Delaware federal court, where Extraction Oil & Gas declared bankruptcy earlier this year. ... the Denver-based company asked the judge for permission to redact — and keep sealed — information about $9.5 million worth of political donations it has made since 2018. ... bankruptcy cases have been one of the few venues where the public can learn about dark money political donations...
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Oct 29, 2020, 3:35pm
Commentary
70 Years after China and the DPRK Defeated the United States in Korea
Kim Petersen: This year, 2020, is the 70th anniversary of the Chinese People’s Volunteers (CPV) army entering the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) to help in, what the Chinese call, the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea. ... The DPRK has never attacked the US. It is only the US, when it intervened in a Korean civil war, that attacked the DPRK. ... It was war in which the US used biological and chemical weapons. ... if the US had not insisted on splitting the Korean peninsula, the casus belli of reuniting the two Koreas wouldn’t have existed...
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Oct 26, 2020, 2:12pm
Commentary
American Militarism Marches On: No Discussion or Media Coverage of Washington’s War Against the World
Philip Giraldi: One of the more interesting stories carefully hidden by the smoke being generate by civil unrest, plague and personal scandals is the continued march of American militarism. ... The story is particularly compelling as neither main party candidate is bothering to talk about it and there is no discussion of foreign policy even planned for the final presidential debate. ... the sad part is that it is deliberate collusion on the part of government and media to make sure the voting public remains unaware the extent to which the United States has in reality become a pariah, a full-time bully in its foreign relations...
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Oct 23, 2020, 3:48pm
Commentary
Journalists Should Stop Relying on Cops’ Lies
Ravi Mangla: An investigative report by USA Today earlier this year into police misconduct turned up “at least 2,227 instances of perjury, tampering with evidence or witnesses or falsifying reports.” ... Body-camera footage and bystander videos are revealing the wide gulf between what police say happened and what actually happened during a violent encounter. ... Above all, journalists need to put statements from law enforcement under a magnifying glass and treat them as the unreliable sources they are...
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Oct 20, 2020, 1:59pm
Commentary
End Worker Surveillance
Athena: Today, workers are subjected to an unprecedented level of workplace surveillance and control. From voice monitoring to tracking applications, these systems are being introduced into workplaces that are already stacked against low-wage workers, creating an environment ripe for exploitation. ... Surveillance gives corporations more power over workers. ... When combined with automation that dictates the pace and type of work, it results in a more dangerous, punishing, and precarious workplace...
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Oct 16, 2020, 2:58pm
Commentary
Chris Hedges: Trump’s Barrett Nomination Another Step Toward Christian Totalitarianism
The Christian Right ... What it does not want examined is her abject subservience to corporate power, her hostility to workers, civil liberties, unions and environmental regulations ... Her version of Catholicism is at odds with most of the positions championed by Pope Francis and traditional Catholic teaching on women’s rights, voting rights, immigrant’s rights, health care and environmental protections. ... The Christian fascists are not finished. Brick by brick they are building a Christian fascist state...
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Oct 5, 2020, 4:23pm
Commentary
Our Tax System Allows and Encourages Massive Rip-Offs Like Trump’s
David Sirota: It’s tempting to turn the new reporting on Donald Trump’s tax shenanigans, paying only $750 in taxes in 2016 and 2017, into a story about Trump as a singular villain. He’s despicable, but he could only get away with it because we live under a system that allows the wealthy to rip off $266 billion from the country every single year. ... Trump’s tax returns are a towering example of both one charlatan’s scammy behavior and a tax system that encourages such behavior. ... Are we prepared to ... change the tax code so that it no longer helps the rich fleece America?...
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Sep 28, 2020, 2:41pm
Commentary
Police Bureaucracy and Abolition: Why Reforms Driven by Professionals will Renew State Oppression
Shakeer Rahman – Brendan McQuade: The idea behind these reforms is that policing can be tamed through paperwork and rules. This whitewashes the harm of surveillance, which will be used for racial domination no matter if it is lawful or unlawful, no matter if “accurate.” ... Abolition is decolonization. More than just ending policing and prisons, it’s a practice of building a new world. Those institutions are weapons of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, but they aren’t the only ones. Abolition requires dismantling all the weapons made using those ideologies...
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Sep 17, 2020, 3:09pm
Commentary
Escalation in Portland
David Rovics: I’ll try to set the stage ... Prior to Trump, prior to the pandemic, Portland was a city experiencing multiple crises ... Between the last two censuses Portland lost more than half of its Black population due to gentrification ... During that time, Portland also achieved #1 status in the nation in terms of the numbers of Black people killed by the police, per capita ... Portland also achieved the status as the most rent-burdened city in the country ... Long prior to Trump, Portland was a hotbed of conflict between fascists and antifascists, between militant believers in white supremacy and militant antiracists...Portland was a national home to organized racism for a long time...
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Aug 31, 2020, 11:26am
Commentary
Americans, War – Slow Learners
Patrick Armstrong: Nothing short of genius can account for losing so consistently given the enormous resources available to American forces. In light of this very low level of military competence, maybe wars are not our best choice of hobby. ... The American military’s normal procedure is to overestimate American power, underestimate the enemy, and misunderstand the kind of war it is getting into. ... Bombing is the America way in war. ... The American way of warfare assumes unchallenged air superiority and reliable communications. ... The fact is that, over all the years and all its wars the U.S. has rarely had to fight anybody its own size or close to it. This has created an expectation of easy and quick victory....
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Aug 29, 2020, 2:39pm
Commentary
This Looks Like the Beginning of a Civil War
Robert C. Koehler: The American racial divide—at least one side of it—is armed. Indeed, the original Civil War, I fear, never ended. For the next century, it was called Jim Crow and was simply part of the national norm. ... while it may well be OK to shoot someone in the back without “knowing the facts” (e.g., who is this person?), rushing to judgment afterward can cause harm. We’re waging a civil war here, but let’s keep it fifty percent peaceful, OK? ,,, The problem here is that the whole thing remains in us-vs.-them mode: Even peaceful protesters face armed police purporting to guard the city against them ... This is half a civil war. Some of the participants are police and some are vigilantes. They are armed and desperate for enemies..
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Aug 28, 2020, 3:50pm
Commentary
The “Obama Inspiration Syndrome”
Peter Bloom: ... 2020 Democratic National Convention ... There is a troubling moral and political hypocrisy to these proceedings ... How can a Party that celebrates its military aggression around the world credibly portray themselves as deliverers of peace? ... former President Barack Obama gave a full throttled defense of the Republic ... Almost completely unnoticed though was that the vast majority of these offenses (attributed to Trump) either occurred or were started in his administration ... What this "Democratic" demagoguery leads to is a bolstering of the very neoliberal corporate status quo that gave birth to Trump ... Obama and Trump are thus each in their own ways inspiring reaction against the prospect of real systemic change that could reinvigorate and truly save our democracy...
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Aug 21, 2020, 12:17pm
Commentary
The Great Election Fraud: Will Our Freedoms Survive Another Election?
John W. Whitehead: The system is rigged, of course. ... It is a heavily scripted, tightly choreographed, star-studded, ratings-driven, mass-marketed, costly exercise in how to sell a product ... Americans only think they’re choosing the next president. ... we’re arguing over which corporate puppet will be given the honor of stealing our money, invading our privacy, abusing our trust, undermining our freedoms, and shackling us with debt and misery for years to come. ... Unless we do something more than vote, the government as we have come to know it—corrupt, bloated and controlled by big-money corporations, lobbyists and special interest groups—will remain unchanged....
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Aug 19, 2020, 2:13pm
Commentary
Do Americans Dream of Capitalist Sheep?
Hiroyuki Hamada: It’s capitalism after all. Those political parties for the rich and powerful know how to sell exploitation and subjugation by their good cop/bad cop marketing. If you don’t buy this, you get Trump. But if you buy what they sell, you get Biden, an imperialist with the crime bill, Patriot Act, and the rest of the schemes for the rich and powerful. ... We should all learn from experiences of revolutionaries and history of resistance against the capitalist domination, and see ourselves and our communities in such contexts...
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Aug 17, 2020, 11:39am
Commentary
Lights! Camera! Kill! Hollywood, the Pentagon and Imperial Ambitions.
Matthew Hoh: Right away, at the movie industry’s founding, the US military was heavily involved in the business of Hollywood and in ensuring Americans had an understanding of American history and society, and the world, as befitted the American military and government. .... Hollywood and the Pentagon are not only symbiotic, they are the composite products of a US Empire that survives through the continual application of warfare, both against foreign populations and its own people ... The Pentagon and CIA, by subsidizing those in Hollywood that go along with it and punishing those that don’t, create and sustain the reality of a dangerous and hostile world, one in which violence is necessary to be a force for good, to protect and uphold the civilized world...
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Aug 15, 2020, 2:22pm
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