No Doubt

A central premise of conventional media wisdom has collapsed. On Thursday, both the New York Times and Politico published major articles reporting that Bernie Sanders really could win the Democratic presidential nomination. Such acknowledgments will add to the momentum of the Bernie 2020 campaign as the new year begins—but they foreshadow a massive escalation of anti-Sanders misinformation and invective.--NS

No doubt.  Fake leftists, pragmatists and women from 2016 are still out there, attacking Bernie and his supporters at every opportunity. A big bitch among the establishment Dems was Bernie's supposed insulting treatment of the super-delegates. Never mind they were card-carrying Clintonite/Wall Street capitalists.  I'm actually quite shocked that Clinton hasn't, to date, jumped into the fray.  I guess her desperation has finally run its course.

Hopefully.

Bernie or Liz has to win just to restore some sense of stability to the country.  Even Liz is shaky, but at least the women would have their day, finally. I'd be down with that.

Remember the ridiculous lineup of Republicans in '16?  That's what the Democrats look like today. Pete Butthead is the Jeb Bush of his Party. And Joe Biden is as dumb as Rick Perry, so there it is.


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Australia is Burning

Australia is on fire.


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Can We Talk?

Global finance capital has seized control of the economies of most nation-states. The citizens watch, helplessly, as money and goods are transferred with little regulation across borders. They watch as jobs in manufacturing and the professions are shipped to regions of the global south where most workers are paid a dollar or less an hour and receive no benefits. They watch as the taxes of the rich and corporations are slashed, often to zero. They watch as austerity programs dismantle or privatize utilities and basic social services, jacking up fees to consumers. They watch as chronic unemployment and underemployment devastate workers, especially the young. They watch as wages stagnate or decline, leaving working men and women with unsustainable debts. This economic tyranny lies at the root of the unrest in Hong Kong, India, Chile, France, Iran, Iraq and Lebanon as well as the rise of right-wing demagogues and false prophets such as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, President Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.--CH

Like Paul Street and many other left intellectuals, Chris Hedges is convinced that the only way to defeat the malignant cancer (power) of corporate neoliberalism, unleashed on the global populace since the end of World War II, and particularly since Reagan, is an actionable non-violent street mobilization of the masses.  Such movements have arose around the world already in recent months.

Where, wonder Street and Hedges, is the U.S. movement?  The faux "resistance" of mainline Democrats seeking to retake power from Donald Trump and Republicanism doesn't count. Voting itself, in the U.S. construct, cannot be depended on for anything more than a continuation of the ruses of false hope and change.

The age of trickery has to change via massive global protests--from the bottom up.


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Army/Navy Game Blues

The ultimate demonstration of U.S. militarism is made annually in the good old game of American football.  And of course, nothing is quite so emblematic of that as the Army v. Navy game.  It is the one game of the year that I, as a football connoisseur, find the most drab, boring, reprehensible, and disgusting spectacle ever invented for the edification of the common man.

There are many reasons why I despise this game, not the least of which it is that it is always ugly. It is ugly in its aesthetics, ugly in its style, and ugly in its blind worship of all things military.  (Well, of course it is, it is the Army/Navy game.)

Packed into the stadium at kickoff, the assembled future brass, and likely sprinkle of "sacrificed" officers--against the multitude of enlisted poor--cheered uproariously for the introduced U.S. near-dictator and fascist POTUS, Donald Trump. (If that doesn't convince you that this game is whacked out, nothing will.)

It causes one to ponder: perhaps former Army history professor Maj. (Ret.) Danny Sjursen should have built an outpost in his classroom and fought off  to the last soldier--Japanese-style--the invading generals who wanted him out now!

But, so much water under the bridges southeast of Normandy in 1944!

Speaking of the pro game (I didn't but you did under your breath). Here is a fantastic piece.  Read it.


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Pilger Visits Assange

I set out at dawn. Her Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh is in the flat hinterland of south east London, a ribbon of walls and wire with no horizon. At what is called the visitors centre, I surrendered my passport, wallet, credit cards, medical cards, money, phone, keys, comb, pen, paper.--JP

Degrading, disgusting, despicable; Assange as Her Majesty's political plaything.


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Sanders Spanks Obama

Centrists are terrified that if the Democratic nominee is far to the left of Biden and Obama, they will be forced to coalesce around a candidate who represents a threat to the establishment of which they are a part. The unflappable Sanders brushed aside Obama’s criticism in an interview with The New York Times, saying, “When I talk about raising the minimum wage to a living wage, I’m not tearing down the system. We’re fighting for justice.” On the health care front, he added, “When I talk about … ending the embarrassment of America being the only major country on earth that does not guarantee health care for every man, woman and child, that’s not tearing down the system. That’s doing what we should have done 30 years ago.” His words resonate with the millions of Americans who are struggling every day, but they grate on the nerves of those who have thrived in our unequal society.--SK

Obama went to the mountain top, pulled his pants down, and pissed all over democracy.  True story.


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Street: Taking it to the Streets

If we are serious about getting rid of the demented fascist oligarch and his insurance policy, Pence, then we are going to have to join and expand an authentic opposition, a real popular resistance in the streets. The effective and meaningfully democratic way to remove Trump is not through elite procedures designed by 18th century slaveholders for whom democracy was the ultimate nightmare. It is through sustained mass civil disobedience—through rebellion by and for those whom the American ruling class fears and hates the most: the working-class majority.

The sooner Trump can be forced out, the better. Curiously enough, impeachment makes the need to form a grassroots movement to overthrow the Trump-Pence regime more urgent than ever. Now that he’s looking at impeachment and a Senate trial, there’s no telling what Trump and his heavily armed minions might do. He has enormous means of mass destruction and mass distraction at his neofascistic fingertips.

We need Trump and Pence out now, not some time next year. The way to make that happen is with a mass movement that will not only sweep him from power but challenge the richly bipartisan racist, sexist, imperial and eco-cidal class rule system that hatched the Trump regime in the first place.--PS

Every day, starting now, would have to look like the scene above.


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Tweet Watch

Who would have guessed that an orange septuagenarian, with the prop at his fingertips, could have turned his opinions into a daily laugh track?

He's a talented grifter no doubt. It's dress up time. Who do you want to be today?

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Big Bad Beavs

Oregon State is suddenly playing with poise and confidence. The Beavers host Washington tonight. Coach Jonathan Smith has the program headed in the right direction.

Washington has tortured OSU for years. Would be fun to see the improving Beavs knock Washington over.


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80

Happy 80th birthday to Charles Deemer, the longest and most solid RBP contributor. Like he has often said, it's a miracle.

The picture?  He loves Oregon women.


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Situation Room

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Altuve Walk-off

This Astro is a pure animal at the plate. The ALCS MVP.


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Preacher Chris on Morality

We live in an age of radical evil. The architects of this evil are despoiling the earth and driving the human species toward extinction. They are stripping us of our most basic civil liberties and freedoms. They are orchestrating the growing social inequity, concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a cabal of global oligarchs. They are destroying our democratic institutions, turning elected office into a system of legalized bribery, stacking our courts with judges who invert constitutional rights so that unlimited corporate money invested in political campaigns is disguised as the right to petition the government or a form of free speech. Their seizure of power has vomited up demagogues and con artists including Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, each the distortion of a failed democracy. They are turning America’s poor communities into internal militarized colonies where police carry out lethal campaigns of terror and use the blunt instrument of mass incarceration as a tool of social control. They are waging endless wars in the Middle East and diverting half of all discretionary spending to a bloated military. They are placing the rights of the corporation above the rights of the citizen.--CH

Happy Columbus Day!


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good god almighty

For the first time in half a century, the political left in the U.S. is ascendant. Bernie Sanders is holding his own in the primaries. A group of well-considered programs to save the environment and provide good jobs and health care for all is gaining political traction. And the need is dire. The climate is warming, the seas are polluted and fished out and industrial agriculture threatens to end life on the planet. So, it’s time to change the subject?--RU

My goodness gracious, read all of this one and every last one.  Then take out your checkbook and deliver a donation so that this online genius might go on for another year.

It's your duty.


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Ratta-tat-tat

The impeachment of Donald J. Trump is coming. What to make of it? It’s hard not to enjoy watching the Malignant One (Trump) squirm and lash out like a wounded animal. There is no public humiliation too great for this sorry excuse for a human being, this racist, sexist, eco-cidal and fascist bastard who endangers the world with his presence in its most powerful office. Trump’s noxiously racist, sexist, Nativist, plutocratic, corrupt, and environmentally disastrous regime has done great damage to basic democratic and human norms, civilizational decency, social justice, and prospects for a decent future. All of that and more makes it impossible for any self-respecting leftist or progressive not to want to see him disgraced and removed. The Trump-Pence regime must be forced out of office as soon as humanly possible.--PS

The greatest lede ever!  Now that's cutting to the quick.


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A Double-Dose of Danny

Sorry, liberals, but Nancy Pelosi’s newly announced impeachment inquiry will not end Donald Trump’s presidency prematurely, no matter how badly Democratic voters may want it. Even if he’s found guilty in the House, a Republican-controlled Senate is sure to deny Pelosi the requisite 67 votes needed to remove him from office. Maybe that isn’t such a bad thing, either. After all, evicting Trump would elevate a bonafide Christian fascist to commander in chief in the person of Mike Pence.--DS

A litany of poor presidents.  Impeach everything.

There is a widespread belief that American history is best viewed in a linear context. The United States, the narrative goes, began as a flawed experiment in democracy—replete with slavery and bigotry at the start—but has gradually and consistently improved into a more perfect union, a millenarian nation on its way toward serving as an example for the world, a “city on a hill.” Minorities, according to this notion, may have once been oppressed but have gained equal rights and equal protection under the law; America might have conquered Indian and Mexican land but has long since set aside its imperial ways. As such, both at home and abroad, the U.S., though still imperfect, is a force for good in the world.--DS

Debunking the shining "city on a hill."


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Guilty as Charged

Impeachment is as much a political tool as a legal one. If Democrats feel they need the Ukraine story as a legal hook to start the process, that’s one thing — but I hope they won’t forget to make a political case against these much more egregious abuses along the way.

Otherwise they risk sending the message that the worst thing a president can do isn’t to attack the people or the planet, but a fellow elite.--PC

I'm with Peter Certo.   Had Congress a backbone, there is enough to bring the emolument clause of the 25th Amendment into play...


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Our Neighbors to the North

The corporate elite are deeply concerned about the rise of socialist politics, whether my election and reelection as a socialist City Councilmember in Seattle, Bernie’s self-described democratic socialist presidential campaign, or AOC’s election to U.S. Congress. Our victories in Seattle, including our historic $15 minimum wage law and landmark renters rights wins, and the growing national fight for Medicare for All and a Green New Deal, are all completely unacceptable to the ruling class.--KS

Amazon versus the Socialists in Seattle.


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The Weight

My old friend rp sent this my way, so now I'm sharing with y'all.  It's amazing.


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Justice?

Dear Yoko Ono,

Years, years, and years ago, in 1980, a pathetically deranged man murdered the love of your life. You were walking home, into the Manhattan building where you lived, and suddenly this man, seeking the world’s adoration, gunned down your husband, John Lennon. Mark Chapman was given a 20-to-life sentence. After almost four decades, he remains in prison. You want to keep him there for the rest of his life.--SD

A good letter, written with tremendous heart.

Yet, I'm not sure how I would react if some sleaze bag cold bloodily killed my family.  I would like to think that I could see some light, a road to redemption, a change that 40-years might induce in a human being.

I'm against the death penalty, but when we talk about the U.S. justice system we are talking about something few of us really understand.  Prisons are brutal and inhumane, as this letter conveys with clarity.  Should an incarcerated killer--one who has turned docile in advanced years--suffer torture by the state when the intent is clearly vengeance and nothing more?


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The Professor

As we move past the anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks, it helps to be aware of the changes in U.S. political culture that have transformed this nation over the last two decades. I teach a history class at Lehigh University, “The War on Terrorism in Politics, Media, and Memory,” which is billed as examining the “meaning” of this war, via an exploration of “personal experiences and critical perspectives on the war,” as depicted in official rhetoric, the news media, and popular film.--AD

It's nice to see DiMaggio back on the pages of CP.  If I had money I'd enroll in his history/poli sci classes.  Seems like he's a hella prof.

Yep, that's what we need, more good teachers. Oh, and open tuition.


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On Manson and Didion

What is clear for Didion is that the gruesome violence of the Tate-LaBianca tragedy denoted the end point of the decade, the wages of a strange, unhinged time. Her recounting of the era centers upon the Manson slayings as the grim culmination of all that messy campus activism, dissolute rock musicians, black nationalism and strange new communes popping up like dandelions. In Didion’s telling, “no one was surprised” that five people had been slaughtered in Roman Polanski’s Benedict Canyon mansion—a curious note to strike about a crime that continues to shock to this day.--DO

A good read.


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Clarity

Capitalists seek to maximize profits and reduce the cost of labor. This sums up capitalism at its core. It is defined by these immutable objectives. It is not about democracy. It is not, as has been claimed, about wealth creation for the working class. It has nothing to do with freedom. Those capitalists, especially in corporations, who are not able to increase profits and decrease the cost of labor, through layoffs, cutting wages, destroying unions, offshoring, outsourcing or automating jobs, are replaced. Personal ethics are irrelevant. Capitalists are about acquisition and exploitation.--CH

Chris Hedges is back, refreshed, clear-headed after a long vacation, and ready to rumble on the pages of Truthdig.


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Either/Or

Criticizing the media has become a sensitive issue for many on the left in the age of Trump. With an authoritarian president in office who seeks to discredit the media at every turn and regularly calls the press the “enemy of the people,” being too critical of the journalism business in 2019 can feel a bit like kicking someone when they’re down. Journalists in and beyond the U.S. not only must deal with a hostile president who attacks reporters and publications that don’t offer a steady stream of fawning coverage, but they are also grappling with the fact that their industry is in rapid decline.--CL

This essay makes excellent points about two differing critiques of the U.S. media by the left and right in today's political discourse.

The right regularly labels mainstream news outlets as "liberal," or "socialist," which is absolute  bullshit.

Nudging closer to the truth, the left's critique of big media marks them as capitalist stooges and collaborators.

An interesting read. 


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Fifty Years Ago, They Said No

Fifty years ago this fall, a campus upsurge turned opposition to the Vietnam War into a genuine mass movement.

On October 15, 1969, several million students, along with community-based activists, participated in anti-war events under the banner of the “Vietnam Moratorium.”

A month later, 500,000 people came to a Washington, D.C. demonstration of then-unprecedented size, organized by the “New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam.”--SE


A new book documenting the Vietnam era GI antiwar movement.


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Of Interest

Ontology is important. We need to define what is right-wing and what is populist. Some of the appeal of Trump, of Nigel Farage, the leader of the Brexit Party in Britain, is the very non-right-wingness. The apparent standing up for the little man, standing up for the worker against big business, against the bankers and the establishment—Trump played that card very well in the Rust Belt of the United States. Nigel Farage played it very cannily in similar places in the Brexit referendum in Britain. The support they garnered was not in fact right-wing, but left-wing. It was an anti-capitalist critique of the kind of finance capitalist model that has beggared millions of people and whole areas of your country and mine. When they say populist, I wonder if they really mean popular. I am attacked as a left-wing populist. But what does that actually mean?--George Galloway to Chris Hedges

A leading British socialist speaks with Chris Hedges for Truthdig.


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The Original Rules of College Foot Ball

On Nov. 6, 1869, the first-ever college football game was played between the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) and Rutgers College. The game bore little resemblance to college football as we know it today, with a far different set of rules designed to minimize scoring and maximize the bone-crushing -- and often deadly -- violence that characterized the sport's early years. A century and a half later, we've uncovered the original rulebook that was used for that first game, which provides a fascinating glimpse into the sport's rudimentary beginnings and reveals just how dramatically it has changed over the past 150 years.--SE

With another season of my favorite American game straight ahead and barreling at us like a berserk fullback (a seldom used position player of long ago) bent on annihilation, it is past time to review the original game's rules and purpose.

As Law Two Sec. D reads: "The main point of Foot Ball is maiming."

There you have it, the once written--and now secret--rule of the modern game, which many fans today refer to as "war."


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Leary

This turned up in my inbox this morning, with a request to get it into the hands of an important third party. I've never paid much attention to Denis Leary, but perhaps I should have. This is pretty damn good.


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Sweet Writing

+ Many of the liberals talking the loudest about “white supremacy” on MSDNC have only known its privileges, thus they would have us believe white supremacy resides only in the vile minds of the KKK and Aryan Nations, instead of the racist forces operating inside the banks, the school boards, the police, the FBI, the Pentagon that degrade, impoverish and kill people every single day.--JSC

St. Clair nailing it, per usual.

DiMaggio, Levine and Street, et al., put it out there.  The old gang never gets old.


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Send Her Back

(click on image to enlarge)

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Her Belligerence: Night of the Long Knives

Pelosi later met with Ocasio-Cortez, but that did little to repair the damage. Lost in the media hubbub was the reality that Pelosi didn’t only express thinly veiled contempt toward four deeply progressive congresswomen; she was also conveying a similar attitude toward millions of Americans who share their political outlooks, while many have been drawn into political engagement due to their achievements. As our letter put it, “Dismissive comments about new progressive members of Congress have given the impression of a disdainful attitude toward like-minded progressives and Democratic activists across the country.”--NS

Yep, it sure sounds like Pelosi bought herself all the power a lil' ol' California multi-millionaire thinks she's entitled to and resents uppity leftist women from progressive districts challenging her empire.

Pelosi gives me the same indigestion that Hillary Clinton always has.  I can't look at her without belching.  Listening to her causes all the oxygen around me to be sucked away by evil monsters that crawl from her fleshy old face.  Drowning has a more favorable feeling. I feel like I'm being waterboarded. I'm covered in gasoline and someone nearby holds a match. I'm in a nightmare and the worst enemies of my past have surrounded me. They're armed with kitchen knives.  They're closing in step by step.  I won't survive this one.


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American Slaughter

Democrats, on the whole, are smarter than Republicans, but they are more base and servile, more pusillanimous, and a whole lot more hypocritical. Republicans are worse, of course. One could gaze upon them and despair for the human race, even before Trump made them worse still. But Democrats! What’s not to hate?--AL

Andrew Levine sprays his Uzi-like intellect around the room.

The assault continues from every direction.


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Weekend News

Anyone with normal sensibilities who does not tune the world out completely cannot help but find the Trump presidency disorienting and upsetting – not only because the fate of the planet is in the hands of an illiberal, willfully ignorant, inept, sleaze ball with a Mussolini smirk, whose modus operandi is to stir up racial animosities, and who delights in gratuitous displays of cruelty towards black and brown people, but also in the way that people feel in the course of a nightmare from which they cannot awaken.--AL

A Mussolini smirk, and more.

The good stuff doesn't stop.


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It Must Be Thursday

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Perfect

The next 10 days of summer!


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Fascist Surge

The terror of the unforeseen becomes ominous when history is used to hide rather than to illuminate the past, when it becomes difficult to translate private issues into larger systemic considerations, and people allow themselves to be both seduced and trapped into spectacles of violence, cruelty and authoritarian impulses. Reading the world critically and developing a historical consciousness are two important preconditions for intervening in the world. That is why critical reading and reading critically are so dangerous to Trump, his acolytes and those who hate democracy. Democracy as both an ideal and site of struggle can only survive with a public attentiveness to the power of history, politics and the rigor of informed judgments and thoughtful actions. It can only survive when we are willing to engage the power to think otherwise in order to act otherwise.--HG

If you cannot connect the dots between Nancy Pelosi's rhetoric around "the squad" (she bitched them out in private and public spaces) and Trump's full-on overt racism, you've missed the point, i.e., you haven't comprehended how totally consumptive the drift to fascism is in our current polity.

Henry Giroux goes into the depths.

The setup.


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Big News!

Alongside and consistent with other privilege- and power-serving missions, so-called mainstream corporate media’s role is to keep the populace focused as best it can on relatively trivial matters and diverted from the most urgent topics of our time.--PS

Street with a truthy mouthful.

Democratic hopefuls will be back at it over two nights in Detroit later this month; more or less the same twenty candidates as in June, presumably again at ten a pop. The composition of the two groups will be determined later and, as before, left to chance.--AL

Levine takes a deep dive into the future.


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Gene Faulkner

www.genefaulkner.com


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Sunday Sermon

In the exclusive Truthout interview below, renowned public intellectual Noam Chomsky — one of the world’s most astute critics of U.S. foreign policy in the postwar era — sheds considerable light on the current state of U.S. foreign policy, including Trump’s relations with the leaders of North Korea, Russia and China, as well as his so-called “Middle East Peace Plan.”--CJP

Get your political religion on.


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Alternatives

The United States’ Independence Day celebrations are marked each year by gaudy displays of red, white and blue, violent-sounding fireworks and inaccurate claims of America being the world’s greatest country.--SK

I'm pretty much disgusted with all U.S. national celebrations, but July 4 slightly edges out Thanksgiving for the biggest slice of my antipathy.

Sonali makes a reasonable request in this piece.

Instead of watching military tanks roll through the streets of Washington, D.C., in Donald Trump’s fascistic tantrum of a July 4th celebration, consider spending Independence Day reflecting on those writers, activists, even soldiers, who, decades ago and today, have bravely spoken out against the horrors of forever war.--IN

Another suggestion.


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A Profile in Courage

Democrats, liberals, progressives—call them what you will—don’t really do foreign policy. Sure, if cornered, they’ll spout a few choice talking points, and probably find a way to make them all about bashing President Donald Trump—ignoring the uncomfortable fact that their very own Barack Obama led and expanded America’s countless wars for eight long years.

This was ever so apparent in the first two nights of Democratic primary debates this week. Foreign policy hardly registered for these candidates with one noteworthy exception: Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard—herself an (anti-war) combat veteran and army officer.--ex-Maj. Danny

If he does nothing else in his career but be a powerful voice for peace, Danny Sjursen will have served his country well.


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Why Not Liz?

To avoid being divided and conquered in 2020, progressive voters must choose between Warren and Sanders, their two leading, if not only, alternatives to the Democrats’ establishment candidate. Are there strategic differences between them relevant to making that choice that are accessible now?--RH

A lengthy and cogent case for Liz Warren. I always argued that Bernie's leap onto Hillary's lap was stupid and denigrated all the goodness that his base conjured before his misdeed.

He didn't listen to me.  Imagine that...


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Going After Kurt Schrader and Others

Since getting to Congress a decade ago, “moderate” Democrat Kurt Schrader has defeated Republican opponents by comfortable margins that grew to double digits. As for primary challenges, the closest one fell short by more than 40 percent. But 2020 could be quite different. Schrader’s slightly blue district — which includes much of the Willamette Valley and the Oregon coast — will see a primary contest pitting the incumbent against a self-described progressive with an electoral toehold on the southern outskirts of Portland.

Mark Gamba, now in his fifth year as the mayor of Milwaukie (pop. 20,000), is running to replace Schrader. “He likes to pretend that he’s reaching across the aisle to get things done,” Gamba told us, “but it almost always goes back to the corporations that back him financially.” Schrader, a longtime member of the Blue Dog Coalition, gets a lot of money from corporate interests, including from the Koch Industries PAC. Last year, only one House Democrat was ranked higher on “key issues” by the US Chamber of Commerce. During 2017 and 2018, one-third of Schrader’s House votes were aligned with Trump. And like Trump, he’s not a defender of young Dreamers who have grown up undocumented in this country; he was one of a few dozen House Democrats to oppose the 2010 Dream Act.

Gamba intends to make climate a central issue of the campaign to unseat Schrader — who, he says, “has been notably absent on any substantive climate policy.” A professional photographer who often went on assignment for National Geographic, Gamba advocates for “a Green New Deal or some other powerful response to climate change which is broad-reaching, deep and meaningful.” (Only four House Democrats have a lower lifetime environmental score than Schrader.) Gamba also supports Medicare for All, while his opponent “is quietly but actively opposing Medicare for All or any law that actually cuts into the profits of the pharmaceutical and insurance industries.”

Some of Gamba’s other campaign priorities include “beginning to rectify the vast and growing income inequity by increasing the taxes on the rich including capital gains; protecting the unions which have been slowly and purposefully eroded; beginning to slow the spending on the military-industrial complex; dramatically increase funding for education: pre-K through college.” If all that sounds like a certain political revolution, it’s no coincidence. “I endorsed and campaigned for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary,” Gamba recalls. In that primary, Sanders came out well ahead of Clinton in the district Gamba hopes to represent in Congress.--NS, et al.

This article highlights 15 corporate Dems that need to be put out to pasture.  A Sanders-like "revolutionary" steps up in Oregon to take out Kurt Schrader.


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Grenfell Tower

A divided population is more easily controlled. It turns its venom on itself. The march of corporate totalitarianism intends to transform all of us into serfs regardless of our religious beliefs or ethnicity. It skillfully manufactures scapegoats—immigrants, Muslims, black people and others of color, dissidents, the poor—so the rising fury of a betrayed population will vent against a demonized target. This disease is as far advanced in Britain, which looks set to get the Trump-like Boris Johnson as prime minister, as it is in the United States. It is spawned by the same ideology, neoliberalism, and the same corporate forces that have seized political and economic power and orchestrated social inequality. These forces are, to us and to the ecosystem that we depend on for life, forces of death. The Grenfell fire is a harbinger of a day when greed will rule, human life will be cheap and the rule of law will be meaningless. Those who lost friends and family in the fire, or who witnessed the disaster, know a truth about corporate power that the rest of us must quickly learn.--CH

The Grenfell fire two years on.


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Made Me Laugh

Hillary is a rightwing Democrat or, to hear liberal pundits tell it, a “pragmatic progressive” or “progressive pragmatist” or whatever their favored euphemism happens to be. Biden is a rightwing Democrat too — they call him a “moderate” or a “centrist.” To distinguish him from Hillary and other influential Clintonites, it would be more helpful if they called him a “doofus.”--AL

Andrew Levine is not your usual stodgy old entrenched-leftist academic.  He can be hilarious, and often is.

The whole enchilada.


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Scheer Intelligence

“I’d like to think that I was always bold on active duty,” Sjursen tells Scheer in the latest installment of “Scheer Intelligence,” “but the reality is that I was censoring myself. You know, there is a degree of fear and harassment, and it’s very passive-aggressive stuff. But the book was a labor of love [that] tears apart the notion of American exceptionalism that brought us to Iraq, to a folly."--DS

Robert Scheer interviews the former Maj. Danny, who will soon have his doctorate in history


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We Cannot Forget

Just after dawn on March 16, 1968, a company of U.S. Army infantrymen, led by Capt. Ernest Medina and spearheaded by Lt. William Calley, entered the small hamlet of My Lai in Quang Ngai province, South Vietnam. The villagers, mostly women and children, had no idea what was coming that day. If they had, they’d have fled.

Despite facing zero resistance and finding only a few weapons, Calley ordered his men to execute the entire population. In all, some 500 Vietnamese civilians were executed, including more than 350 women, children and babies. Other senior leaders in the chain of command had advised the soldiers of Charlie Company that all people in the village should be considered either Viet Cong or VC supporters. Medina and Calley were ordered to destroy the village. They did so with  brutal precision and savagery.--Maj. Danny

People my age and older cannot forget.

I argued that I was a pacifist and conscientious objector in front of my draft board comprised of World War II veterans whom I didn't know. I lost that argument. I went off to college with a student deferment in my pocket. I was in the first draft lottery. I won with a middling high number. Deferments were wiped away. Then Nixon abolished the draft. I'd escaped. 

Five years later, I was a community organizer watching television in Maine. Saigon was falling and helicopters were ferrying people from rooftops to aircraft carriers offshore.  It was the end of "peace with honor." The U.S had spread death and destruction in Southeast Asia for nothing.

It was the beginning of whatever it is we have become today.

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rp thomas

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Racial Nightmare

It has been more than 30 years since a rape and attempted murder occurred in New York City that became known as the Central Park Jogger case. The crime itself was indescribably vicious; the miscarriage of justice that followed—with five African American and Latino boys who became known as the Central Park Five framed for the crime and sent to prison—remains a blight on the criminal justice system. The five boys spent years behind bars, losing their youth in the process. Eventually, their convictions were vacated after the actual perpetrator confessed in jail. His confession was supported by irrefutable DNA evidence. When the teens were first arrested, Donald Trump, then a New York real estate developer, actively campaigned for the death penalty for the young defendants, taking out full-page ads in all of New York City’s major newspapers. To this day, ignoring all evidence, President Trump maintains that they are guilty.--AG and DM

I watched this earlier in the week.  It is, as the authors of this piece say, essential viewing. A liberal use of Trump's racism fits nicely into the narrative, and excellent acting by the young cast is inspiring.


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A Return from Holiday

I've been on holiday.  I visited most of the other planets in our solar system and some far away beyond your imagination. Anyway, I'm back now, no wiser, but perhaps healthier. Like any cheap political philosopher in memory, I failed to glean much from the lies humanoids tell each other. Next year I think I'll go to Spain and call it good.


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Killer Mike (Reagan)

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Life During War Time

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A Day in the Life

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Maddie Scherr

The women's team at Oregon has the best class in the nation coming in next year, including a 5' 11" wing player who has Sabrina-like mad skills.

The Lady Ducks made it to the Final Four this year.  With the No. 1 2020 recruiting class coming together like it is, something is definitely cooking in Eugene.

Check it out.


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The Doomsday Machine

By 1969, as the war progressed under Richard Nixon, I saw such evil in government deceit that I asked myself, “What can I do to shorten a war that I know from an insider’s vantage point is going to continue and expand?” When the Pentagon Papers were released in 1971, the extent of government lies shocked the public. The retaliatory crimes Nixon committed against me out of fear that I would expose his own continuing threats—including nuclear threats—ultimately helped to bring him down and shorten the Vietnam War --DE

Up close with Daniel Ellsberg.


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The Talented Mr. Fish

In a nutshell.


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Sickening

The militarizing of empathy is repeatedly employed by mainstream media in their airing of heartstring-pulling stories of soldiers’ surprise homecomings. There are the soldiers dressed in disguises: like the father, after a year in Afghanistan, arriving home in a fire truck, decked out in firefighting gear and gas mask.  Kneeling before his two daughters, he took off his gas mask, and the surprised daughters cried out, “Daddy!,” and hugged him, “with tears of joy,” much to the delight of a gathered crowd.--Rev. WA.

All too true.

You can't even watch a damn sporting event these days without the militarization angle.  The over sized flag on the floor, the fatigues and medals flashing under the lights. The insistence on our "heroes" protecting us from some menace drawn up by Wall Street and the Pentagon. The bullshit piling up like the bodies of all the innocent in the foreign countries the U.S. thinks it is wise to invade and annihilate.

All in all, it's a sickening scene.


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U.S. Warlords

These are dangerous men with a dangerous agenda--Vijay Prashad


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