Commentary
Commentary
A United State of Delusion
Patick Lawrence: Americans are caught in a kind of national psychosis, wherein little of what is said about foreign conduct — from Germany to the South China Sea — can be taken at face value. ... One can go on listening to the “peace and stability” song as long as one likes. It amounts to a dreamy lullaby at this point — an illusion that will continue to lead America in inadvisable directions as long as we insist on entertaining it. ... All nations entertain illusions about themselves to one or another extent. ... But none matches the U.S. as it acts so thoroughly according to what it wishes to be so as against what is...
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Aug 4, 2020, 2:16pm
Commentary
Free Joy Powell! America’s Political Prisoner for Fighting Police Brutality
Linda Ford: If you protest against police brutality in America, you are definitely going to get brutalized by the police. ... If you led a movement against police brutality in Rochester, NY in 2006, like Rev. Joy Powell did, you will be set up on felony burglary and then murder charges, and spend a long time in prison—doing very hard time as a female, African-American, political prisoner. ... Powell’s activism against police brutality and racism resulted in her being framed for serious crimes. ... falsely charged with burglary in 2006, and convicted—getting 16 years—and then, in 2011, convicted of killing a man back in 1992, given 25 years to life, with no credible evidence and witnesses who later admitted to lying...
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Aug 3, 2020, 3:13pm
Commentary
The SECRET Purpose of Trump’s Threat to Delay the Vote
Greg Palast and Zach D Roberts: The real purpose of the threat by our Twittiot-in-Chief to delay the election is to lay the groundwork for massive challenges of mail-in ballots. ... Officially, 1,913,369 ballots were challenged and thrown away in 2016—that’s how Trump stole the last election and how he will steal 2020…they will question your mail-in ballot signature, the color of your ink—and if you put an “X” instead of filling in the little bubble—they’ll junk your ballot. ... According to the US Civil Rights Commission which investigated in Florida, the chance of your ballot being challenged and uncounted is 900% higher if you’re Black than if you’re white...
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Jul 31, 2020, 4:18pm
Commentary
Shifting Business Models of Higher Education
Henry Kamens: I suspect some colleges and universities will go under in the wake of COVID 19, as they faced with bankruptcy and are having to deal with lower enrollments too. ... The capitalist model is in dire straits, some claim is even falling, especially the business model for higher education. ... But it is it really worth obtaining higher education, especially now. Tuition and other costs are high and the job market is restricted, and why pay top dollar for distance learning? ... Most colleges and universities are tuition-dependent. ... Remaining closed in the fall means losing as much as half of our revenue. ... Education, like many other institutions, has become nothing but another huge over-bloated scam and the return on investment is not as much as it is touted....
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Jul 25, 2020, 3:37pm
Commentary
To Fight Racial Inequality, We Have to Attack the Power of Corporations
Paul Heideman: Since the uprising against police brutality and racial injustice erupted in late May, corporations have been falling all over each other to prove their anti-racist bona fides. ... Unfortunately for the marketing consultants behind these moves, fewer people are buying what they’re selling. ... From environmental racism to the “predatory inclusion” of the housing market, corporations’ very reason for existing leads them to decimate the life prospects of black Americans. Attacking racism will require attacking corporate power ... forcing them to stop their relentless drive for profit...
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Jul 23, 2020, 4:32pm
Commentary
World is Changing, but United States Policy Retains its Dangerously Unchanged Nature
James ONeill: Media commentary in recent weeks has focused on the alleged plan of United States president Donald Trump to vacate US troops from Afghanistan. ... the reasons why they will not voluntarily do so, remain the same today as they did 19 years ago. ... Afghanistan accounts for about 90% of the world’s heroin production ... 75% is exported, flown out on United States military aircraft for sale where the revenue provides a significant contribution to CIA “off the books “income. ... (And) Afghanistan shares borders with seven countries, none of whom could be accurately described as allies of the United States ... The resurrection of Russia in the 21st-century and the inexorable rise of Chinese economic power in the same period has created a situation the United States barely understands...
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Jul 20, 2020, 2:31pm
Commentary
Prison: Therapeutic Centers Or Academies of Crime?
Graham Peebles: With 2.2 million people behind bars America has the highest number of prisoners in the world; 655 people per 100,000, in Russia its 615 per 100,000. ... At the other end of the scale is Norway, a world leader in prison reform. ... total prison population is 3,207, equating to 60 people per 100,000 – over 10 times lower than the US ... These stark statistical differences reflect alternate approaches in the judicial system ... “We make sure an inmate serves his sentence but we also help that person become a better person. We are role models, coaches and mentors.” ... Staff and inmates take part in activities together: “they eat together, play volleyball together, do leisure activities together and that allows us to really interact with prisoners, to talk to them and to motivate them.”...
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Jul 17, 2020, 3:59pm
Commentary
Don’t be Fooled by the Cancel Culture Wars
Chris Hedges: The politically correct speech and symbols of inclusiveness, without a concerted assault on corporate power, will do nothing to change the system. ... The cancel culture — the phenomenon of removing or canceling people, brands or shows from the public domain because of offensive statements or ideologies — is not a threat to the ruling class. ... Corporations have seized control of the news industry and turned it into burlesque. They have corrupted academic scholarship. They make war on science and the rule of law. They have used their wealth to destroy our democracy and replace it with a system of legalized bribery...
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Jul 13, 2020, 2:00pm
Commentary
How to Sustain Momentum for the Anti-Racism Movement
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: You can’t be in the business of social reform without a deep reservoir of hope and faith in the general goodness of people. And some of my faith has been rewarded in recent days ... The cry for civil rights is like a rubber band: Intermittent passionate public support stretches it forward, despite those anchored in the past pulling it backward. ... It’s exhausting and frustrating trying to convince such people that systemic racism pervades all aspects of American life. It’s like talking to a flat-Earther. Proof is useless. ... Now what we need is a way to measure improvement...
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Jul 7, 2020, 4:11pm
Commentary
COINTELPRO: how the US state dealt with the last radicalisation
Sadia Schneider: Twenty-one-year-old Black Panther Party deputy chair Fred Hampton and his comrade Mark Clark were assassinated in a 1969 pre-dawn raid in Chicago. ... he was betrayed by William O’Neal, his bodyguard and the Panthers’ head of security, who was an FBI informant. ... Another right-wing provocateur on the payroll of the FBI, Gary Thomas Rowe, helped plan and carry out a Ku Klux Klan attack on the Freedom Riders ... Rowe was in the car with Klansmen when they shot and killed civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo outside Selma, Alabama. ... was likely responsible for the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham that killed four African American girls. He was given immunity by the FBI and was never convicted of any crimes...
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Jul 6, 2020, 4:03pm
Commentary
Policing Is Not a Public Good
Ravi Mangla: From the beginning, policing in this country has primarily protected the powerful. Maybe now that can change. ... For decades, we’ve been told that policing is a public good: available to all, for the benefit of all. But in practice, that’s never been true. ... Boston merchants were the first to persuade lawmakers in 1838 that a full-time, publicly funded police force would serve the “collective good.” In reality, they wanted to get the public to pay for protecting their shipped goods and routes.... What if public safety were a public good? ... It would mean funding nonviolent tools to de-escalate and respond to safety concerns. ... engaging community members in collective decision-making...
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Jul 2, 2020, 2:29pm
Commentary
Joseph Goebbels’ Followers Shaping Policy in Washington
Vladimir Odintsov: Recent events clearly show that, owing to efforts of the current US political elite, teachings of Propaganda Minister of Nazi Germany, Doctor Paul Joseph Goebbels, have taken root in the United States and are being actively propagated in various spheres of work and life. ... The author is referring to the stoking of racial tensions and hatred in the past decades in the United States, and to CIA’s “black sites” all over the world, where, just as in Nazi Germany, detainees were tortured and perhaps continue to be tortured to extract “confessions that authorities wish to hear”. ... In addition, the United States has been using targeted killings of political opponents as a tool. The widely-publicized assassination of Major General Qasem Soleimani in Iraq is one of the most recent examples....
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Jul 1, 2020, 5:14pm
Commentary
NYPD Enforcement of Low-Level Broken Windows Offenses Accounts for Huge Department Expenditures - Marked by Extreme Racial Disparities
Matt Sutton: New York City criminalizes drugs and low-level broken windows offenses at a startling rate ... 2019, NYC spent an estimated $96 million enforcing drug arrests and violations, and an estimated $456 million enforcing low-level broken windows offenses, which accounted for 28.5% of all NYPD arrests and violations issued for the year. ... In 2019, there were more than 21,000 drug enforcement arrests and violations in New York City, with two-thirds being for only possession of marijuana, a controlled substance, or paraphernalia. ... more than 45% of people arrested or cited for drug offenses in NYC were Black ... 38.8% were Latinx ... Only 11.7% of people arrested or cited for drug violations were white, yet white people comprise 47.2% of the city’s population...
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Jun 24, 2020, 2:32pm
Commentary
Meet BlackRock, the New Great Vampire Squid
Ellen Brown: BlackRock is a global financial giant with customers in 100 countries and its tentacles in major asset classes all over the world; and it now manages the spigots to trillions of bailout dollars from the Federal Reserve. The fate of a large portion of the country’s corporations has been put in the hands of a megalithic private entity with the private capitalist mandate to make as much money as possible for its owners and investors; and that is what it has proceeded to do. ... If the corporate oligarchs are too big and strategically important to be broken up under the antitrust laws, rather than bailing them out they should be nationalized and put directly into the service of the public...
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Jun 23, 2020, 2:35pm
Commentary
Defunding 'Justified' Murder
Robert C. Koehler: This is what defunding the police is all about: defunding a system that sees social order as obedience to armed authority; that is growing increasingly militarized; that has no complex understanding of human behavior; and that has deep roots in white racism ... “Racism is like the corn syrup of society. It’s in everything.” (Trevor Noah) ... Defunding the police is part of an enormous process of social reorganization. ... reinvesting socially in programs that help people improve their lives, as opposed to punishing them for breaking various rules; and envisioning public order as something that involves the public itself ... Leads to: U.S. Rep.Barbara Lee’s new resolution before Congress, calling for a $350 billion cut in military spending—almost half the Pentagon’s bloated annual budget...
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Jun 19, 2020, 2:23pm
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