Commentary
Commentary
Celebrating the British Monarchy Is in Poor Taste
Basav Sen: Consider: As the global media obsessed over the royal succession, one-third of Pakistan, a former British colony, lay submerged. ... As part of British India, Pakistan and the Indian subcontinent were ruled by the British East India Company, and then the crown itself for centuries. ... Indian economist Utsa Patnaik has calculated that the British empire plundered a staggering $45 trillion worth of resources from South Asia ... In short, colonial plunder is a major driver of climate change and the poverty that’s left the most affected countries struggling to adapt to it. ... Helping these countries today should be seen as fulfilling a responsibility and as compensation for harm, not charity...
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Oct 1, 2022, 5:06pm
Commentary
Pandemic? Great Reset? How about ... a beginner’s mind?
Mickey Z: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities. In the expert’s, there are few.” ... Has there ever been a more urgent time to embrace many possibilities? ... The beginner’s mind is basically the polar opposite of today’s social media algorithms, mainstream news headlines, and popular political discourse. ... There is no one right way to inhabit a beginner’s mind. After all, it is not a destination. It’s all about the process, the learning, and those moments of epiphany made possible by not closing off your options... so re-activate your inner child. ... The experts [sic] have gotten us into this mess. ... It’s time to give beginners their opportunity to shine...
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Sep 27, 2022, 12:38pm
Commentary
US Hypocrisy Knows No Limits
Dave Lindorff: President Biden’s condemnation of Russia at the UN on Wednesday, where he claimed Russia had violated the UN Charter by invading Ukraine, a country he ludicrously posed “no threat” to its larger neighbor, is epic hypocrisy coming from the leader of a country that not long ago invaded and destroyed Iraq based on a total fraudulent claim ... How many nations has the US invaded illegally, just since WWII? ... The point is, the US, the primary violator in the world since World War II of the UN Charter, not to mention the primary perpetrator of massive war crimes against civilian populations over that period...
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Sep 26, 2022, 2:33pm
Commentary
Debt is a Form of Social Control
Briahna Joy Gray: To be indebted means to lack freedom. ... Elites love certain government handouts for the rich. ... Paycheck Protection Program loans ... were completely forgiven ... went to businesses and properties owned and rented out by the Trump Organization and Trump son in law Jared Kushner... and Khloe Kardashian, Tom Brady, and Reese Witherspoon ... Biden’s cancellation of some student debt is a good thing. ... but didn't live up to campaign promise ... They Don’t Want You To Be Free ...elites of both parties have a deeply vested interest in preventing mobility for working people ... “able to exploit their employees without their employees having any recourse.”...
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Sep 18, 2022, 4:48pm
Commentary
Colonel Larry Wilkerson Interview: An Objective Look at U.S. Foreign Policy
John Rachel: When war is so profitable, it is a certainty there will be more of it. The Ukraine conflict is a glaring and present example. So long as these conditions persist, war is inevitable. ... what I assert is necessary is cooperation, collaboration, and comity — achieved largely through diplomacy ... no single nation — not even an empire — can manage alone. I refer to the new crisis of nuclear weapons and the now fifty-years-old crisis of a dramatically changing climate. ... We must forge new nuclear weapons arms control to replace all the treaties we have abandoned ... And every nuclear weapons state — all nine of them, including Israel and North Korea — must be included...
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Sep 15, 2022, 4:34pm
Commentary
Michael Hudson On Debt Relief, Inflation, Ukraine And More
Ben Norton: So what do you think about this decision by Biden to forgive a little student debt? ... Biden has been the most hostile, personally hostile, as well as just serving the banking interests in opposing the interests of students ... this is a slap in the face ... the effect of debt is to leave less in the budget for actual spending on goods and services ... there has been no enforcement of monopoly prices ... So essentially companies have been using their monopoly power to charge whatever they want ... We’re in a deregulated economy ... What’s at issue is how we are going to restructure the entire world economy ... to make sure that the United States, with our European partners, can impose this neoliberal, financialized economy over the entire world...
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Sep 11, 2022, 4:06pm
Commentary
An Interview with Dr. Rick Staggenborg, Soldiers for Peace International
John Kendall Hawkins: ...anybody who’s working for social justice is working against war. Because when you accept any kind of social injustice, it’s just normalization of deviance, and eventually even war becomes thinkable. And it’s the most outrageous injustice. ... There’s a whole establishment that looks out for itself, that’s very powerful. They don’t make a move unless it serves the interests of the international bankers, for instance. ... one of the goals of the global economic elite is to strip states, where they want to supersede nations, and strip them of their assets ... in the United States is they want to privatize all medical care...
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Sep 8, 2022, 3:13pm
Commentary
The ‘Noble Lie’ of a Democratic West
Jonathan Cook: What if our democracies are built not on reason and virtue but greed and depravity? ... too many of us have accepted so credulously that we are spreading humanitarian goodwill abroad through our militaries’ bombing campaigns, and why we are so indignant when foreigners prove ungrateful to receive our incendiary offerings ... the “noble lie” at the heart of Western democracy ... establishment power adapted to guard itself from the popular will ... Only those prepared to maintain the system to the ruling elite’s best advantage were ever supposed to be elected ... Smear campaigns — fabulous conspiracy theories, whether about anti-Semitism or Russian collusion — are designed to bypass the democratic will and restore elite control...
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Aug 30, 2022, 12:24pm
Commentary
Deliberate Misrepresentation: Western Media Bias Makes Israeli War on Palestinians Possible
Ramzy Baroud: While US and western mainstream and corporate media remain biased in favor of Israel, they often behave as if they are a third, neutral party. This is simply not the case. ... Take the New York Times coverage of the latest Israeli war on Gaza as an example ... misleading moral equivalence is one of the biggest intellectual blind spots for western journalists ... they create false parallels between Palestinians and Israelis, as if a military occupier and an occupied nation have comparable rights and responsibilities. ... Per the logic of their media coverage, Israel does not launch unprovoked wars on Palestinians and is not an unrepentant military occupier or a racist apartheid regime...
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Aug 27, 2022, 4:39pm
Commentary
An Engineered Food and Poverty Crisis to Secure Continued US Dominance
Colin Todhunter: The war in Ukraine is a geopolitical trade and energy conflict. It is largely about the US engaging in a proxy war against Russia and Europe by attempting to separate Europe from Russia and imposing sanctions on Russia to harm Europe and make it further dependent on the US. ... Despite the ‘green agenda’ currently being pushed, the US still relies on fossil fuel-based energy to project its power abroad. ... It is not the first time the US has engineered a major crisis to maintain global hegemony and a spike in key commodity prices that effectively trap countries into dependency and debt...
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Aug 25, 2022, 10:18am
Commentary
The Economy Should Serve People. Not Vice Versa.
Hamilton Nolan The economy’s job is to work for people. It is not the job of people to sacrifice themselves on the altar of the economy. ... The simple step of asking what the economy is doing for us — rather than what our lives are contributing to the economy — can go a long way toward reframing how we all think about this. ... behind every mainstream economic analysis is a set of poisonous assumptions that exist to tranquilize us ... If you arrange your economy, as we have, for the purpose of producing corporate profits, a permanent rise in inflation is bad. .... If human flourishing is our primary goal, the most obvious response to inflation is to ensure that people have enough money to cope with rising prices...
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Aug 22, 2022, 4:16pm
Commentary
Those Angry at Rushdie’s Stabbing have been Missing in Action Over a Far Bigger Threat to our Freedom
Jonathan Cook: Julian Assange faces charges under the draconian Espionage Act only because he made public the gruesome truth about Western military actions in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. ... Assange’s right to free speech has been ridiculed, ignored or at best supported weakly and equivocally because he exercised it to hold up a mirror to the West, showing exactly what our governments are doing, in secret, in many of those same far-off lands. ... Assange’s right to life is threatened by Western governments because he questioned the moral basis of their power...
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Aug 19, 2022, 3:59pm
Commentary
If We Want Humanity to Survive, We Must Cooperate With China
Nathan J. Robinson & Noam Chomsky: War between nuclear-armed powers should be unthinkable. The deterioration of U.S.-China relations threatens the whole world, and treating China as an enemy is suicidally deranged. ... we should recognize that the idea that China poses a military threat to the United States itself is so absurd that Lyle Goldstein says it is “almost a joke in national security circles,” ... It is necessary for China and the United States, two major economies, to sort out crucial issues together, like global warming, pandemics, and nuclear weapons ... the U.S. must cease to consider global control a “vital interest” and must accommodate and respect the interests of others...
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Aug 15, 2022, 2:47pm
Commentary
Roaming Charges: Gaza by Bomblight
Jeffrey St. Clair: The bombing of Gaza has become ritualized. Israel no longer even feels compelled to offer much of a rationale. Gaza is bombed because Gaza exists. As long as Gaza exists, it shall be bombed. Gaza’s existence is a threat to the idea of the Israeli state. ... Yet the objectives for the bombing of Gaza will never be realized. Gaza cannot be eliminated. Gaza will exist. Therefore it must always be bombed. ... Israel defines itself by what it is not. Israel is not Gaza. The more Israel bombs Gaza, the more deeply it becomes its true self...
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Aug 13, 2022, 12:49pm
Commentary
Can We Please Have an Adult Conversation about China?
Vijay Prashad: A new kind of madness is seeping into global political discourse, a poisonous fog that suffocates reason ... a deep suspicion and hatred of China ... a country of 1.4 billion people, an ancient civilisation that suffered, as much of the Global South did, a century of humiliation ... Since then, Chinese society has been deeply transformed by utilising its social wealth to address the age-old problems of hunger, illiteracy, despondency, and patriarchy ... As with all social experiments, there have been great problems, but these are to be expected from any collective human action ... attempt to isolate it is socially dangerous ... Walls need to be knocked down, not built up...
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Aug 11, 2022, 10:46am
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