Commentary
Commentary
Juneteenth Is About Freedom
Dale Kretz: Today, as we celebrate Juneteenth, we should remember not only the struggle against chattel slavery but the struggle for radical freedom during Reconstruction — snuffed out by the reactionary forces of property and white supremacy. ... "Sharecropping emerged as a compromise between wage slavery and actual slavery." ... Juneteenth is worth celebrating for its promised end to human bondage, but its history also reminds us of the “counterrevolution of property” waged against the revolution that was the American Civil War..
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Jun 19, 2021, 2:07pm
Commentary
Why we must confront the history of U.S. Native boarding schools if we hope to heal
Naomi Ishisaka: The U.S. had 367 Native boarding schools, run by religious organizations or the U.S. government. Over 70 still operate today, the oldest continually operated one being Chemawa Indian School in Oregon. By the 1930s, an estimated two-thirds of Native people attended boarding schools at some point in their lives, according to a 2008 story in The Seattle Times. ... The first U.S. government-run, off-reservation boarding school was Pennsylvania’s Carlisle Indian School. Founded in 1879 by Capt. Richard H. Pratt, his infamous motto, “Kill the Indian and save the man,” spoke volumes about the true purpose and brutality of these institutions...
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Jun 18, 2021, 11:36am
Commentary
How the Death Penalty Discriminates
Robert Davis: States are reflecting on the racist history of capital punishment, but most lawmakers have done nothing about it. ... Year over year, the number of people on death row has steadily declined. But there are still about 2,750 U.S. prisoners facing the ultimate penalty, up from less than 500 in the 1960s ... The number of people of color on death row ... grew from 45.6 percent of the total prison population in 1980 to nearly 60 percent by 2019. ... The report (“Enduring Injustice”) also suggests that implicit biases in prosecutors, judges, and jury members may play a role in the unequal distribution of capital punishment ... Personal biases certainly exist in some legal circles, but the report says biases can also exist geographically...
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Jun 16, 2021, 12:26pm
Commentary
Wall Street Is Thirsting for Your Water
Chris Roberts: While water in the West becomes scarcer and droughts more frequent and more severe — thanks in part to changing weather patterns and rising temperatures triggered by carbon emissions — Wall Street views water as an “asset class,” a commodity like stocks, bonds, and real-estate that can generate enormous returns for shareholders, even in severe droughts. Or maybe, especially in water shortages. ... Institutional investors like One Rock are snapping up water rights just like others are snapping up rental properties to lease back to Americans at a profit .... examples of “rentier capitalism,” in which the owner of a commodity can charge more for delivering the same service if there is less supply...
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Jun 15, 2021, 12:44pm
Commentary
Democracy? A Good Idea? Maybe We Could Try It Sometime
Jaime O’Neill: The fact is that the powers-that-be have always feared the will of the people. We've always been an autocracy, and the more autocratic we've become, with so many rich, privileged, and reactionary people able to keep democracy on a short leash ... We might have a better shot at becoming a democracy if we actually tried it. ... It would require prying the claws of the oligarchs off of damn near everything they control, eliminating the corruption inherent in the way we finance elections ... Maybe the first step toward a real democracy would be to cut the crap and take an honest assessment of where we've been and where we are...
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Jun 7, 2021, 11:33am
Commentary
The Etymological Animal Must Slip Out of the Cage of Habit to Grasp Truth
Edward Curtin: Life is full of slips. ... But slipping is also good, especially when repetition and conventional thought rules people’s lives as it does today .... Jim Garrison of JFK fame said that we live in a doll’s house of propaganda where the population is treated as children and fantasies have replaced reality. ... I believe we need to disrupt our routines, break free from our habits, in order to clearly see what is happening today. ... We need to slip away for a while ... Disburden our minds of its old rubbish. Become another as you go walking away. Find a park or some natural enclave...
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Jun 4, 2021, 3:44pm
Commentary
Why Infrastructure is So Much Bigger Than Just Infrastructure
Robert Freeman: Biden’s infrastructure plan is ambitious. But reporting about it doesn’t begin to capture just how important it is to the U.S.’s success, even survival. There are five paradigm-bending dimensions that make infrastructure so much more important than infrastructure alone. They are like the five spokes on a wheel of national renewal. ... The beauty of pursuing a rebuilt infrastructure is that it brings with it the solution to the other four spokes of national renewal: plenty of good-paying jobs; adaptation to the new century’s new energy paradigm; a climate fix; and saving democracy. ... the fundamental source of conflict in the debate over infrastructure: not whether it is needed; not whether it is possible; not whether it is affordable; but whether existing loci of power are dispossessed in the process....
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Jun 1, 2021, 11:44am
Commentary
How Billionaire Foundations Fund NGOs to Advance US Foreign Policy Goals
Rick Sterling: A Case Study from Nicaragua ... US foreign policy is increasingly promoted by billionaire funded foundations. ... Because many of these super-rich individuals made their wealth through investments and speculation, most do not like a planned economy, socialized services beyond the private sector or greater government control. ... Grants are given to projects, campaigns and organizations which align with their long-term goals. ... “He who pays the piper, calls the tune.” ... Nicaragua is a good example. ... Washington is not just hostile but actively trying to undermine, destabilize and replace the Sandinista administration...
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May 24, 2021, 4:14pm
Commentary
Chernobyl Alert and The Doomsday Clock
Robert Hunziker: Chernobyl rises from the ashes. ... A recent ... “Surge in fission reactions in an inaccessible chamber within the complex” is alarming scientists that monitor the ruins of the Chernobyl ... Along those lines, the world-famous Doomsday Clock, ... The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (“BAS”) ... has set the famous clock at 100 seconds to midnight ... because: (1) widespread mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic in nations worldwide (2) little progress in eliminating nuclear weapons (3) insufficient mitigation of destructive climate change, and (4) threats to national security by rightwing extremists...
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May 22, 2021, 3:05pm
Commentary
As an Occupier, Israel Has No Right to “Self-Defense”
Bashir Abu-Manneh: By invoking self-defense, Israel changes the conversation from its colonial crimes against the Palestinians to the injuries it has itself incurred as a result. ... Yet it is precisely because Israel is denying Palestinians their human rights, including the right of self-determination, that it cannot claim self-defense as a legal justification for the use of force. ... Israel has used disproportionate, indiscriminate, and unnecessary military force in violation of international law. It targets civilian structures, kills hundreds of children, wipes out whole families, and inflicts widespread destruction and collective punishment on a whole besieged population...
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May 16, 2021, 2:59pm
Commentary
Chris Hedges: Israel, the Big Lie
Israel is not exercising “the right to defend itself” in the occupied Palestinian territories. It is carrying out mass murder, aided and abetted by the U.S. ... The Israel lobby spies in the United States ... wages public smear campaigns and blacklists defenders of Palestinian rights ... has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to manipulate U.S. elections ... use massive cash donations to buy politicians ... Israel’s educational system, starting in primary school, uses the Holocaust to portray Jews as eternal victims. This victimhood is an indoctrination machine used to justify racism, Islamophobia, religious chauvinism and the deification of the Israeli military...
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May 14, 2021, 2:17pm
Commentary
Ripping off workers without consequences
Alexia Fernández Campbell & Joe Yerardi: Thousands of U.S. companies illegally underpay their workers. The Labor Department rarely punishes them. ... Companies that hire child care workers, gas station clerks, restaurant servers and security guards are among the businesses most likely to get caught cheating their employees ... Major U.S. corporations are some of the worst offenders. They include Halliburton, G4S Wackenhut and Circle-K stores ... Their victims toil on the lower rungs of the workforce...
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May 5, 2021, 3:23pm
Commentary
GOP Still Wants to Pretend the Preservation of Slavery Wasn’t a Major Reason for the American Revolution
Chris Orlet: This idea—that the protection of the institution of slavery was instrumental in the origins of the American Revolution—has been kicking around for decades. ... Benjamin Franklin was determined to violently break with Britain, but he was having great difficulties getting the loyalist southerners on board. ... the answer was dropped in his lap in the form of a British court case, Somerset v Steuart (1772), which recognized that the petitioner, an enslaved person named Somersett, was a human being, and not “lost property.” ... Southern colonists found themselves between a rock and hard place. Remain part of the British Empire and eventually see a complete ban on slavery, or sign up for Franklin’s revolution...
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May 3, 2021, 2:41pm
Commentary
Voter Fraud and the Myth of E Pluribus Unum
John Kendall Hawkins: Turns out this individual determination of vote validity is crucial in presidential elections. ... Greg Palast has delineated the four key ways that votes get de-validated and not counted: stop registration; if they cancel anyway, then cancel their rego; prevent voters from getting to the polls; and, if all fails, then find a way to invalidate their vote (hanging chads, smudges, various anomalies). ... Palast says a favorite way of manipulating an election is dumping mail-in votes. ... In 2016, he says, more than 500,000 mail-in votes were tossed, overwhelmingly Democratic. ... No state—not Georgia, not Florida, not Ohio—comes even close, for sheer number of ballots disqualified, than The Golden State—thanks to the sticky fingers of its Democratic Secretary of State, Alex Padilla....
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May 2, 2021, 1:52pm
Commentary
Information-Management in the U.S. Dictatorship
Eric Zuesse: Instead of fearing to be held to account like the Nazis were at Nuremberg, America’s tyrants face no such international prosecutions whatsoever. Only good leaders become assassinated in America. ... The dictatorship manages information both by deceiving the public to believe what the regime itself knows to be actually false (such as that Saddam Hussein might be only six months away from having an atomic bomb) ... At least regarding international news-reporting, the highest percentage of fake-‘news’ is in America’s mainstream ‘news’-media ... This is a class-war ... And the lower classes are only victims in it...
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Apr 24, 2021, 3:53pm
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