Blogosphere
Blogosphere
Freedom Rider: Russiagate and Black Misleadership
Margaret Kimberley: Black people should be first in line when it comes to casting doubt on the work of intelligence agencies and federal prosecutors. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) ought to uphold the proud tradition of defying corrupt law enforcement. Instead they prove themselves to be happy tools of the neoliberal war party, a bipartisan construct that includes the Democrats. ... Robert Mueller is no different from his prosecutor colleagues across the country. They lie. They over charge and force innocent people to plead guilty. They “squeeze” defendants with threats of draconian sentences and get them to turn on other people or even to tell lies themselves. ... After more than one year of investigation Mueller succeeded only in proving that Paul Manafort is a crook and that Donald Trump, Jr. is stupid. ... The goal is to make excuses for the Democratic Party elite, explain away their failures which led to Donald Trump’s election...
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Jul 18, 2018, 3:13pm
Blogosphere
7 TRUTHS ABOUT IMMIGRATION
Robert Reich: 1. A record high of 75 percent of Americans now say immigration is a “good thing” for the country. ... 2. America needs more immigrants, not fewer, because our population is rapidly aging. ... 3. Historically, new immigrants have contributed more to society in taxes than they have taken from society in terms of public assistance. ... 4. Most immigrants don’t take jobs away from native-born Americans. To the contrary, their spending creates more jobs. ... 5. Trump’s claim that undocumented immigrants generate more crime is dead wrong. Both legal and undocumented immigrants are significantly less likely to commit crimes than people born in the United States...
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Jul 14, 2018, 11:04am
Blogosphere
No Trump, Germany doesn’t Get 70% of its Energy From Putin; it gets 41% from Renewables
Juan Cole: Germany gets about 9% of its energy from Russia ... This year, Germany has so far been getting 41% of its energy from wind, solar, biomass and hydro. Wind alone provides 22 percent. ... Solar panels provided another 8.2 percent of Germany’s energy, and biomass provided a similar proportion. ... If it were not for Germany’s “energy switch,” it would have no choice but to make up that 41% of energy coming from renewables by importing *more* natural gas from Russia, becoming more geopolitically beholden to Putin. ... Germany is not only escaping a deeper dependency on Putin, but also cleaning up its air and avoiding millions of tons of carbon dioxide emissions ... The US should be doing so well!...
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Jul 12, 2018, 11:52am
Blogosphere
Freedom Rider: British Collusion and Criminality
Margaret Kimberley: “Collusion continues not between Trump and Russians, but between intelligence agencies, the media and American politicians with hidden agendas.” ... Most people believe that Donald Trump owes his presidency to Russian activity because they have been told this repeatedly for the past two years. There was indeed high level collusion taking place in the 2016 presidential campaign but it wasn’t carried out by Trump. It was Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee who acted in concert with intelligence assets in the United States and in the United Kingdom. ... “While the public are fed a steady diet of tales of an unfree press in Russia, it is the British press which has been censored by its government.”...
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Jul 11, 2018, 3:25pm
Blogosphere
Will the Price of Oil Collapse within a Decade, Driven off Cliff by Electric Vehicles?
Juan Cole: One of the reasons that Saudi Arabia’s plans for an Initial Public Offering (IPO) on its ARAMCO oil have not actually materialized is that investors are not dummies. Saudi Arabia’s oil is an asset with no future value, and the future in which its price collapses is nearer than the oil companies think. (I would argue that if you figure in the cost of coming climate lawsuits, oil already has a negative value, but is certainly already worthless). ... we now have a pretty solid estimate for the beginning of the end of oil: 2030 at the latest. After that, it is a long or short spiral down to a cost set by the world need for hydrocarbon-based fertilizer and other lesser uses of oil (none of which come near to generating volume and prices similar to gasoline for automobiles)...
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Jul 8, 2018, 1:38pm
Blogosphere
Freedom Rider: Ocasio-Cortez and the Left
Margaret Kimberley: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a living Rorschach test for leftists. ... The Democrats are the putative party of progressives but over the years they have morphed into a center right formation that differs all too little from the far right Republicans. ... Ocasio-Cortez is expected to be all things to a desperate group of people. She both benefits from her connection to Bernie Sanders and is tainted by his sheep dogging for the Democrats. Yet she is rightly held up as a hopeful sign by people eager to see even a small chance of progressive politics taking hold. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is actually not the only issue for debate. The discredited Democratic Party and the inability of leftists to mount a successful attack against it should also be a focal point of discussion...
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Jul 5, 2018, 2:52pm
Blogosphere
Rethinking the Fourth of July
Bill Bigelow: ... Textbook authors and popular history writers fail to portray the great mass of humanity as active players, agents on their own behalf.” Instead, textbooks credit Great Men — Washington, Franklin, Jefferson — and render all others as “mere followers.” ... Washington wrote to Gen. John Sullivan on May 31, 1779 - The Expedition you are appointed to command is to be directed against the hostile tribes of the Six Nations of Indians, with their associates and adherents. The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements, and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more."...
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Jul 3, 2018, 3:16pm
Blogosphere
The Seventh Exclusion: Great Moments in American Racist Immigration History
Juan Cole: The travel ban upheld by a narrow majority on the Supreme Court causes untold heartache to Iranian-Americans, Yemeni-Americans, and other groups designated for exclusion. It also injures the First Amendment of the US constitution, which forbids the state to take a position on good and bad religion. ... US history is replete with racism as public policy. It has been more often our history than not ... Just as the Ku Klux Klan took over the Democratic Party in the 1920s, including the whole state of Indiana, so white nationalism has taken over the Republican Party today, including the GOP majority on SCOTUS...
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Jun 27, 2018, 12:33pm
Blogosphere
The American March to Inequality: Why the UN Alston Report Alarms the Trump Plutocrats
Juan Cole: It is no surprise that flacks for the plutocrats in charge of the US like Nikki Haley are squawking about the report on American poverty just issued by UN Special Rapporteur Philip Alston. It throws loads of light on how unequal a society America is, how it is marching rapidly toward even greater, Third World levels of inequality, and how peculiar the US is, as a land of rapacious robber barons and 40 million completely marginalized poor. ... The Trump tax massacre was intended to take even more from African-Americans and Latinos and other minorities and transfer it to the largely English, Scottish, German and other Northern European business elite (the wealth of some of whom began accumulating in the nineteenth century through slavery or criminal activities)...
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Jun 23, 2018, 2:52pm
Blogosphere
Not only Is Trump’s Refugee Policy Morally Wrong, it is Illegal in US and Int’l Law
Juan Cole: In essence, the Trump administration is attempting gradually to abolish the acceptance by the US of asylees, in stark contravention to US treaty obligations (and hence to domestic US law). ... Relief Web - “It is cruel and unnecessary to prosecute asylum seekers for crossing borders without authorization. Moreover, under Article 31 of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, to which the United States is bound by its accession to the 1967 Refugee Protocol, parties ‘shall not impose penalties, on account of their illegal entry or presence, on refugees who, coming directly from a territory where their life or freedom was threatened ... enter or are present in their territory without authorization, provided they present themselves without delay to the authorities and show good cause for their illegal entry or presence.’” ...
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Jun 21, 2018, 2:46pm
Blogosphere
Freedom Rider: Democrats Unhinged by Korea
Margaret Kimberley: The Democrats like war, interventions and United States hegemony. They always have. If anyone wants proof they need only look at their collective hissy fit regarding the Trump and Kim summit. Part of the reaction is caused by fear of Trump getting credit for a foreign policy achievement. But Democrats are also true believers in imperialism. The last thing they want to see is any reduction in the American military presence in Korea or anywhere else. ... There are many parties to thank for bringing about a possibility of peace in the region. The two Koreas themselves, the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea in the north and the Republic of Korea in the south have made great strides towards peacefully co-existing. Their neighbors China and Russia have also played a role in minimizing tensions...
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Jun 20, 2018, 3:58pm
Blogosphere
The corporate media’s world of illusions
Jonathan Cook: The Great Western Narrative has been developed and refined over centuries to preserve a tiny elite’s privileges and expand its power. The role of journalists like me was to keep feeding these illusions to readers so they would remain fearful, passive and deferential to this elite. It is not that journalists lie – or at least, not most of them – it is that they are as deeply wedded to the Great Western Narrative as everyone else. ... Once one is prepared to step through the door, to discard the old script, the new narrative takes its hold because it is so helpful. ... On the other side of the door lies a truth that humans are all equally human. ... The conclusion from this is that the way to change our societies fundamentally for the better depends on a change in our consciousness...
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Jun 16, 2018, 2:12pm
Blogosphere
Freedom Rider: A Tale of Two Summits
Margaret Kimberley: There were two summits of world leaders held very recently. The one which got Americans’ attention was the Group of Seven (G7), comprised of Canada, the United States, United Kingdom, France, Italy, Japan, and Germany. ... Vladimir Putin was on the other side of the world in Qingdao, China where the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) was also meeting. ... made up of eight Eurasian nations including not only China and Russia but also India and Pakistan. ... The United States is not the center of the world. China is the center of the economic world and Russia is its intimate friend. ... The order needs to be upset but not by any of the G7 leaders. They have created problems for most of the world’s people. ... The party held in China was also worthy of attention. A multi-polar world is a reality whether Americans know anything about it or not...
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Jun 13, 2018, 3:28pm
Blogosphere
War Crimes: Israeli Snipers Kill Palestinian Nurse, Injure 100, at Gaza March of Return
Juan Cole: “Israeli forces shot and killed a 21-year-old Palestinian woman paramedic on Friday, as she was treating injured protesters during ongoing demonstrations along the Gaza border with Israel, in the southern Gaza Strip. ... For the Israeli Army to shoot unarmed Palestinians who posed no danger to anyone simply because they were in a zone declared off limits within Gaza is a war crime. Shooting unarmed civilian nurses is certainly a war crime ... Since 30 March, at least 118 Palestinian demonstrators have been martyred — and thousands more injured — by Israeli army gunfire near the Gaza-Israel security fence.”...
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Jun 2, 2018, 12:03pm
Blogosphere
China’s Green Shift is Positioning it to Overtake US in Energy Technology, Security
Juan Cole: Chinese adoption of solar panels is the major cause for the rapid decline in their price since 2012, and that this price drop will continue ... By generating its own electricity through renewables and by switching in a big way to electric cars, China is preparing for a vast reduction in its imports of hydrocarbons. In turn, that move makes China less vulnerable to hydrocarbon blackmail or blockade and increases its energy security. ... the US still imports nearly half of the oil it needs to run its economy, and some of those imports come from unstable places like Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. On transportation (the major use of petroleum), the US is highly vulnerable. ... The turn to wind and solar is thus not only about the environment (though the Chinese government was increasingly facing urban protests if it did not clean up the air and switch from coal). It is also about energy security and the forging of new industries in which China can show its technological innovation chops...
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May 26, 2018, 11:38am
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