GUY BENSON—Strzok’s misconduct was sufficient to cause career FBI bureaucrats responsible for internal review processes to recommend a multi-month suspension and a demotion. The Bureau’s senior leadership evidently determined that this relative wrist-slap would send the wrong message about accountability, and hinder their urgent efforts to restore public trust in federal law enforcement. So they fired him. Strzok’s defenders are claiming this decision was politically-motivated (quite a rich allegation, considering the circumstances of his ouster), but that explanation doesn’t hold much water. It’s true that Trump’s incessant tweets constitute prima facie pressure, but the claim that top DOJ leaders are more or less doing President Trump’s bidding should seem a bit silly to anyone who’s watched Trump’s months-long public harangue against those very same people for…not doing his bidding.
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CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—The plutocratic empire is held together by sheer narrative control, by the ability of ruling oligarchs to control the stories people tell each other about what’s going on in the world. The fact that trust in plutocrat-owned media is at an all-time low and people’s ability to network and share information is at an all-time high has not escaped the attention of our rulers, and they are doing everything in their power to stop us from sharing unauthorized ideas and information with each other.
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PETER KOENIG—Washington will not let go easily – or at all, to re-conquer Venezuela into the new Monroe Doctrine, i.e. becoming re-integrated into Washington’s backyard. Imagine this oil-rich country, with the world’s largest hydrocarbon reserves, on the doorsteps of the United Sates’ key refineries in Texas, just about 3 to 4 days away for a tanker from Venezuela, as compared to 40 to 45 days from the Gulf, where the US currently gets about 60% of its petrol imports. An enormous difference in costs and risks, i.e. each shipment has to sail through the Iran-controlled Strait of Hormuz.
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G H ELIASON—Forget about the DNC. The hackers may have spent months surfing the US secret servers downloading and delivering top secret diplomatic files to their own government. The people entrusted with this weren’t just sloppy with security, this is beyond treason.
It doesn’t matter if it was Seth Rich, though I hope it was ( for identification’s sake), who downloaded data from the DNC servers. The reasons supporting a leak are described by the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). This shows clearly why the leak to Wikileaks is much more plausible than a hack for the files taken in what is commonly called the DNC hack. This leak was one “hack” of many that was going on.
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J KISHORE—The growing interest in socialism terrifies the ruling class. It coincides with initial expressions of the resurgence of class struggle, from the teachers strikes that spread throughout the country earlier this year and threaten to emerge again as the schools reopen over the next several weeks, to the mass opposition among UPS workers to the concessions contracts supported by the Teamsters union, to growing anger among auto workers, Amazon workers and other sections of the working class.
