Commentary
Commentary
Why You Should Never Vote for Joe Biden
David Swanson: The endless arguments for lesser-evil voting that are part of the standard quadrennial performance make sense up to a point. I thought Bernie Sanders fell within that range in which they made sense. ... People, with very few exceptions it seems, cannot do lesser-evil voting on a single day without having it take over their identity and influence their behavior. But even if they could, they’d still be telling Democrats: Do not bother with me, I’ll vote for you no matter what. ... I don’t think lesser evilists are evil. ... I think they’re failing to recognize the side effects of the treatment they’re prescribing for our ills...
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Apr 9, 2020, 3:42pm
Commentary
Change Love and the Need for Unity
Graham Peebles: Much needs to change in our world ... New and just socio-economic and political systems are required together with positive values that encourage the good ... Mankind needs to learn to share, to live more simply, to cooperate and to create a world free from conflict, and the planet needs to be allowed to heal. ... The belief in separation is firmly held and is constantly perpetuated by the structures of the day – social, economic, educational, and so on – it conditions relationships, is a source of deep seated psychological conflict and fear and cloaks the truth...
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Apr 6, 2020, 2:16pm
Commentary
Russophobia Immune to Global Solidarity
One would think that given the global emergency it would be entirely apposite to put aside antipathies and hostilities in order to work together as common human beings motivated by solidarity, compassion and a sense of survival. Lamentably, and bizarrely, this seems not to be the case. ... This week, Russia sent a huge cargo plane to the US with medical equipment to fight an escalating epidemic of the deadly disease. ... Pathetically, however, the humanitarian aid was cynically twisted by diehard Russophobes who dismissed it as “a propaganda coup” ... the persistence of Cold War ideological mindsets – seemingly immune to the necessary common response to overcome the Covid-19 emergency – is a depressing sign of failure in political and moral leadership...
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Apr 3, 2020, 12:54pm
Commentary
The Fury and the Folly: We Need a Vaccine to Stop Endless War
Robert C. Koehler: The fury of the virus illustrates the folly of war. ... We must “silence the guns; stop the artillery; end the airstrikes ... to help create corridors for life-saving aid. To open precious windows for diplomacy. ... We need a permanent halt: to war, xenophobia, the false divisiveness of national borders. ... Yet when I think of what will save humanity from the looming pandemic—and from everything else that endangers them, including themselves—I can see this much: Developing a vaccine requires studying and understanding the virus, not waging war against it...
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Apr 3, 2020, 12:22pm
Commentary
This Is Not A War: Pandemic Presents Opportunity To Rebuild A Sense Of Common Good
Michael Marder: “This is not a war.” ... we should say unequivocally ... this will help to search for an alternative way of grappling with the coronavirus crisis, of inspiring people for collective and individual action, and – ultimately – of bringing about a better world after the current pandemic winds down. ... Since the 1960s, governments around the world (beginning with the United States) have been extending the discourse of war beyond the context of military hostilities traditionally understood. ... war on poverty ... war on drugs ...war on terror ... war became total, engulfing all reality ... peace is not at all contemplated in hostilities against terror or a virus...
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Apr 1, 2020, 12:37pm
Commentary
Reagan-Era Medicare Changes Leave US Vulnerable to COVID-19, Experts Say
David Holthaus: The shortage of beds, masks, ventilators, and other life-saving equipment that is now putting American lives at risk can be traced back to federal healthcare reimbursement changes that were initiated during the Reagan administration and have continued ever since, experts say. ... Specifically, this cost-cutting trend began in 1983, when Congress changed the reimbursement system for Medicare ... “For too long, just-in-time hospital management practices have prioritized profits over stocking enough supplies and staffing enough nurses,” Castillo said. “This has eroded the ability of our nation’s hospitals to properly prepare for emergencies like pandemics.”...
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Mar 31, 2020, 2:38pm
Commentary
How My Dad Predicted the Decline of America & It’s Time to Reimagine America
William Astore: My dad was born in 1917 ... His prophecy - “I had it tough in the beginning and easy in the end. You, Willy, have had it easy in the beginning, but will likely have it tough in the end.” ... This should be a time for a genuinely new approach ... If ever there was a time to reduce our massive and wasteful military spending, this is it. ... isn’t it time for the U.S. to begin dramatically reducing its military “footprint” on this planet? ... Bring back the draft, just not for military purposes. Make it part of a national service program for improving America. ... isn’t it time for all Americans to recognize that global pandemics and climate change make a mockery of walls and go-it-alone nationalism ... we must unlearn what we have learned ... we must extend our love to encompass nature, our planet...
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Mar 30, 2020, 3:27pm
Commentary
Coronavirus and the Collapse of Our Imaginations
Jonathan Carp: Now is our time. Now is when we present the ideal of a society ordered to human well-being to our friends and neighbors. We need not fret about the details of a new order. The future is created in the making; the methods are discovered in the process. What we must do is insist that the fearsome Economy be devoted to the people, that our families are more important than our jobs. ... But are we capable of imagining such a thing? ... Now is our chance to smash the whole thing up, and demand better. Make the money printer go brrrrr. Work from home. Don’t work at all. We are worth more than our jobs, and we deserve better than we have...
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Mar 29, 2020, 11:58am
Commentary
Coronavirus Crash: Worse Than Great Depression?
Thom Hartmann: The coronavirus crash has turned the fact that we don’t make anything in America anymore from a topic for philosophical and political debate into a crisis in our hospitals causing people to die and endangering our frontline health care workers. ... Even worse, there’s nothing to catch us as and after we fall, because we don’t have a manufacturing base to fall back on like we did the last time a crisis like this happened—in the late 1930s. .... Most of our medical supplies and prescription drugs now come from China, for example, and that’s producing a crisis in our hospitals because China isn’t exporting N95 masks, ventilators and respirators like they were just six months ago...
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Mar 28, 2020, 11:58am
Commentary
A National Crossroads: The Needs of the Many or Wants of the Few?
Thomas Neuburger: The U.S. is at a national crossroads of world-historical proportions. Thanks to the COVID-19 epidemic we're headed for a collision, a heavy-engine oil train pileup, between two competing imperatives — does the nation serve the pathological wants of the few who control it or the immediate and existential needs of the many who live in it? ... The few — the bankers and profiteers; investors and CEOs of all kinds and stripes; their well-paid enablers in the media and professional classes — think the corona virus emergency will pass and "business" (our modern, rapacious way of doing it) will eventually return to normal. ... Thus for them, the current crisis represents once-in-a-generation opportunity for theft on the grandest of scales, the plundering of public goods and control in the time of greatest emergency....
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Mar 26, 2020, 2:51pm
Commentary
Cuba’s Coronavirus Response Is Putting Other Countries to Shame
Ben Burgis: Cuba is caricatured by the Right as a totalitarian hellhole. But its response to the coronavirus pandemic — from sending doctors to other countries to pioneering anti-viral treatments to converting factories into mask-making machines — is putting other countries, even rich countries, to shame. ... The country combines a completely socialized medical system that guarantees health care to all with impressive biotech innovations. .... Even outside of temporary emergencies, Cuba has long dispatched doctors to work in poor countries with shortages of medical care. ... Cuba’s admirably humane and solidaristic approach to the coronavirus should humble those who insist on talking about the island nation as if it were some unending nightmare...
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Mar 23, 2020, 4:18pm
Commentary
Top 10 Reasons the U.S. Government Is Blowing This
David Swanson: Recognizing that a problem that has grown severe in other countries could grow severe in the United States would require thinking of the United States as existing in the same world, susceptible to the same forces, as everyone else. ... Recognizing that there are crises that can’t be addressed by shooting or bombing anyone would have led to different preparations and different emergency responses. ... There is widespread belief across the political and ideological spectrum in the United States that one can invent reality...
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Mar 19, 2020, 12:52pm
Commentary
China Locked in Hybrid War with US
Pepe Escobar: Among the myriad, earth-shattering geopolitical effects of coronavirus, one is already graphically evident. China has re-positioned itself. For the first time since the start of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in 1978, Beijing openly regards the U.S. as a threat ... Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, voiced in an incandescent tweet the possibility that “it might be US Army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan” ... The working hypothesis of coronavirus as a very powerful but not Armageddon-provoking bio-weapon unveils it as a perfect vehicle for widespread social control — on a global scale. ..
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Mar 18, 2020, 2:31pm
Commentary
Sugar and Spice and Everything Vice: the Empire’s Sin City of London
Cynthia Chung: The 2008 crisis put in the spotlight the psychopathic level of greed, vice, apathy and short-sightedness from those who wanted to play into the City of London and Wall Street casino houses. ... Since the general public tends to consist of decent people, there is a widespread difficulty in comprehending how entire economies of countries have been hijacked by these piranhas. ... It is no secret that much of the “finance” that goes through the City of London and Wall Street is dirty ... That is, the world is so evidently run by criminal activity that at this point we have become dependent on its dirty money to keep afloat the world economy...
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Mar 16, 2020, 4:24pm
Commentary
The Fed, The Virus & Inequality
Nomi Prins: Recent years have taught us that the official responses to crises will ultimately help Wall Street and the markets, while leaving real people behind again ... In a world that’s seen a dramatic rise in isolationist politicians and policies, the coronavirus reminds us that we still share a planet where not everything is controllable by brute force or posturing. ... The reality is that an economy based on a kind of inequality once unknown to Americans is at a crossroads and the coronavirus seems to have infected it. ... The prevailing narrative then (and now) was that this “cheap money” would incentivize banks to lend and that companies would use those loans to invest in the future and in their workers, a grand experiment, it was claimed, to spur economic growth for real people. ... What happened in practice was a staggering increase in global inequality...
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Mar 14, 2020, 12:38pm
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