EDITOR—Socialist activist Kshama Sawant lays out a new, better formulated strategy for third parties seeking to demolish the reigning and stunningly corrupt duopoly: Not to act simply as “alternative parties,” but as “oppositional parties” at all times. The 2024 election, with its horrific historical backdrop of two major wars (one an indisputable and revolting genocide in Palestine supported by the US political and media establishment), imploding governance in the US and much of vassal Europe, and an incurable economic crisis detonated by imperialism’s inability to resolve the overproduction crisis, offers third parties like Jill Stein’s Green Party a unique opportunity to test this approach by helping defeat the candidacy of Democrat party nominee Kamala Harris, says Kshama Sawant. And we think she is absolutely right. People who regard themselves as on “the left” must completely abandon the duopoly, and avoid the Democrat Party curse, the proven historical graveyard of all progressive movements.
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PAUL EDWARDS—It’s not complicated. The Empire, like every empire before it, does nothing—absolutely nothing!—for its impotent people. It sucks all the money out of the country, curtails and cripples all opportunity and benefit, contributes nothing to the general welfare (promised in the Constitution), cons and diddles its citizens with idiot “entertainment”, and offers them only reflected glory from the mass murder its War Machine inflicts on the world.
When you have a government that does nothing but cheat its people, and lie to them as if they were defective children; one that does nothing to elevate or support them; one whose chief aim is to exploit their labor and energy and keep them down; one whose whole purpose is to deceive them into idolizing their abusers, and paying for that privilege on their knees, then you have no government at all: you have baldfaced, brutal tyranny.
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EDITOR—Garland discusses the increasingly toxic relationship between the US empire and its vassals around the globe, disciplining the EU, for example, where Washington blatantly ordered the destruction of the Russo-German Nord Stream 2 pipelines, ordered a detachment and active hostility toward China, and has insured the economic and political subjugation of the continent using local and regional straps (Macron, Schultz, von der Leyen, etc.). Garland stresses that Washington has maintained a firm grip on Western Europe (including its “Eastern European” zones, such as Poland, the Baltics, etc.) despite the apparent surge of leaders and parties seeking political independence and sovereignty. Brexit, he reminds, was an effort for the Brits to regain their sovereignty from the EU machinery clearly dominated by the US, but now they see that the problem is much more serious and deeper, as things have significantly gotten worse after Brexit and the downfall of the Tories.
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EDITOR—Israel’s latest airstrike on Iran does not impress Ray McGovern. In this chat he explains his reasons, and why he thinks the power equation in the Middle East has changed or is about to change—for the better. Ray came to Washington from his native Bronx in the early Sixties as an Army infantry/intelligence officer and then served as a CIA analyst for 27 years, from the administration of John F. Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush. Ray’s duties included chairing National Intelligence Estimates and preparing the President’s Daily Brief, which he briefed one-on-one to President Ronald Reagan’s five most senior national security advisers from 1981 to 1985. Ray is an expert in Russian history and culture, and a man who chooses to live by honouring moral integrity, which he does not see his compatriots in high places doing now or even when he was young and thought they did.
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CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Liberals are freaking out because The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post chose not to endorse a presidential candidate this election cycle, which is silly. Newspapers shouldn’t endorse political candidates. How is this not obvious to everyone?
It’s absolutely ridiculous that news outlets endorsing political candidates is a thing at all. The first job of a real journalist is to have an adversarial relationship with those in power, regardless of who wins.
