ERIC ZUESSE—After the recent French Parliamentary elections, the current French President, Emmanuel Macron, who has often been ruling by decree, will do so even more than before. As the Iranian journalist in Paris, Ramin Mazaheri, recently said: “Elections at just 46% turnout are a hair’s breadth away from not having democratic credibility, but that must be added with [to] the constant use of the 49-3 executive decree and the certainty of a Brussels’ veto for any legislation they don’t like. It combines to modern autocracy – rule by an oligarchical elite.”
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KIM PETERSEN—I grant that Chomsky is indeed a polymath, but is he an expert on military operations? Scott Ritter and Brian Berletic (The New Atlas channel), on the other hand, are Americans steeped in militarism. Berletic is a former US marine and Ritter is a former intelligence officer for the US marines. Both of them explain the Russian strategy in shaping the battlefield. The reason for this is to minimize Russian casualties and Ukrainian civilian casualties. This is unlike American Shock and Awe warfare where “collateral damage” (as killing of civilians by US military is trivialized) is accepted to attain US military objectives.
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RAMIN MAZAHERI—The Yellow Vests is a political party that is invariably labeled as “far-left” and “extreme left” in the mainstream media (although I rank them as simply “left”), and which is led by Jean-Luc Melenchon, who to the mainstream media is invariably a “far-left firebrand”. How can this be true and yet the Yellow Vests are also right-wing xenophobes? They are leftist in economic and political ideology yet far-right racists in cultural matters? What an absurdity and falsehood!
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Glenn discusses the recent origins of AOC’s political career, and how much she has already distanced herself from her initial anti-establishment positions. The charitable interpretation is that AOC could not resist the forces of corruption that define the US duopoly, but that would require us to see at least some attempt on her part to oppose such forces, instead of simply caving in almost at once. The fake left co-optation rhetoric continues, of course. And the same goes for the rest of the “Squad” and the notorious Bernie Sanders.
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It’s symptomatic of the degeneration of the so-called left in the US that it is libertarians like Rand Paul who are getting the credit for opposing the US government blatant effort to completely control political speech.
