EDITOR—Soiled diaper on D-Day. Who is actually running the US, asks investigative journalist Anya Parampil, because it clearly isn’t Joe Biden. The oligarchic nature of the US government, its hidden behind the throne corporate forces and billionaires, should be the concern of every thinking American, says Anya Parampil, in this chat assessing the dangers and possibilities for ordinary Americans as they go through a process of social and political chaos and disintegration with no clear understanding of the personalities involved nor the actual outcomes. As most readers of this publication know, the duopoly only offers “lesser evil” candidates, and each round of elections the choices are worse. Is there any consequential daylight between Trump and Biden?
GLOBALIZATION or CORPORATIZATION
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Youhoo! Tucker! Here is why Putin calls for denazification (which you called “the dumbest thing I ever heard of”).
by Don Hank53 minutes readDON HANK—It eventually dawned on me that this Russophobia to which I was exposed – and didn’t know its name yet – was only part of a bigger phenomenon that I call Westernness, which is in fact an infectious psycho-social disease, ie, primarily a way of thinking and functioning, one of whose symptoms is a general recalcitrant mediocrity and incompetence that in America has spread throughout academe, the professions, politics (in particular), the military, the think tanks, intelligence agencies, the media, Big Religion and the general populace. But it is also a sociopathy, making it invisible to the wide public.
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NATO headed for Nuclear war with Russia? Scott Ritter, Steve Starr, and Jose Vega with Diane Sare
by Diane Sare7 minutes readEDITOR—The panel discusses the colossal moral turpitude and imbecility of today’s leadership in the “collective West”, constantly starting wars and other acts of hostility against scores of nations that reject their imperialist rule, and why the populations subject to their criminal, undemocratic rule need to push for a new kind of political system assuring freedom and democracy instead of a fake democracy restricted to the super-rich elites. ONLY that can assure people all over the world a chance at surviving nuclear war and other catastrophes brought about by a decadent imperial system.
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PATRICK LAWRENCE—There is no need to wonder what causes this departure from observable facts, diabolically purposeful as it often is, and what comes of it. This may seem an unprecedented moment in human history, but there are, indeed, many precedents. Barbara Tuchman told us all about them in The March of Folly (Knopf, 1984): These grand lapses reflect an absence of intellect, vision, and principle at leadership level and lead ineluctably to failure and one or another kind of mess. The Ukraine case, the preoccupation in Munich last week, could not possibly make this clearer.
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MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, in order to maintain the system, you can’t have a rivalry to neoliberalism. There must be no alternative in the United States. Why is it fighting against China? China is an alternative. Russia is an alternative. If the world sees that the US and NATO, Europe are shrinking, and Eurasia is going way ahead, then there obviously is an alternative, and people are going to ask, what makes the Eurasian multipolar development so different from the world that the United States is trying to create, a neoliberal, financialized, privatized world ruling by force and by client military oligarchies?