ERIC ZUESSE—he only comprehensive and scientific study which has ever been done of whether the U.S. is a democracy or instead a dictatorship, was published in 2014. It studied the period during 1981 through 2002, and it found that, “In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes.” Consequently, for example, prior to our invasion of Iraq in 2003, our opinions of “Saddam’s WMD” were simply being manipulated by the controlling owners of U.S.-based international corporations (including their ‘news’media, which they advertise in and/or also own), just as those same super-rich individuals (most of whom are Americans) have controlled whom the nine people will be who rule from the Supreme Court, about what the U.S. Constitution means, and doesn’t mean (and this judicial panel, of course, also decided Bush-v.-Gore, to which Chait blames America’s dictatorship).
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An obsessive warmonger in the age of unrestrained American imperialism, Rachel Maddow is not just a pestilence in the corridors of so-called journalism, but as an influential media pontiff to masses of brainwashed liberals, constantly pushing for some sort of horrid confrontation between the US and Russia, the world’s two most heavily armed nuclear powers, a danger to everything that lives. In this special compilation, Jimmy Dore takes the full measure of this corrupt, shamelessly careerist or probably utterly deranged woman. Or all of the above.
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ANDRE DAMON—Now, 17 years after September 11, 2001, Washington is preparing a major new war to protect fighters aligned with the very organization charged with carrying out the attack on the World Trade Center. This seemingly bewildering about-face expresses the real nature of the so-called “war on terror.” Leaving aside the unexplained circumstances surrounding the 9/11 attacks themselves, from its outset it was meant to dragoon public opinion behind wars of aggression long planned by Washington. The day after the 9/11 attacks, the World Socialist Web Site explained that “From the standpoint of the American government, the crusade against terrorism has been far more a campaign of propaganda to justify US military violence around the world than a conscientious effort to protect the American people.”
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CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—ThinkProgress is part of a very large and diverse branch of progressive punditry whose ultimate job is to help centrist empire loyalists feel like leftist revolutionaries, and since 2016 one of the many appalling consequences of this bizarre environment has been the embracing of Iraq-raping neoconservatives like Kristol and Max Boot by Democratic Party loyalists.
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FW ENGDAHL—The Washington-orchestrated coup d’etat in Ukraine in February, 2014 was explicitly aimed at driving a bloody and deep wedge between Russia and Germany. At the time, Ukraine was the prime energy pipeline link feeding the German industry with Russian gas. German exports of everything from machine tools to cars to high-speed locomotives to build the rapidly-recovering Russian economy was transforming the geopolitical balance of power in favor of an emerging German-Russian-centered Eurasia to the detriment of Washington.
