It was clear all along that decades long betrayals of the working class by the Democrats, culminating with the abject demagoguery of Barack Obama, would present the masses with no choices, except false ones or outright calamity in 2016. Obama and his DNC clique had a huge opportunity to knock out the Repugs indefinitely in 2008, when that party, thanks to George W Bush and his malignant excesses, was plainly on the canvas. Instead, what they did is extend a hand to the GOP and accelerate its rehabilitation so the charade could continue. Just one major reform, like single payer health insurance, would have made the Dems unbeatable for generations. But even that easy accomplishment was too much for a party crawling with prostitutes. The upshot in the rigged field of US elections was Trump. In this interview, John Pilger pretty much asserts the same thing: It was the Democrats that made Trump possible if not downright inevitable
March 18, 2018
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CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Jeff Bezos is worth 131.5 billion dollars as of this writing, and he is getting more ambitious, not less. He doesn’t need that money to buy more stuff; it isn’t about money for him. It’s about power. The impulse to rise to the top of your monkey tribe is an impulse buried deep within our evolutionary heritage, and when that impulse isn’t checked by empathy for your fellow man it creates an unquenchable drive to grow and grow in invincible power no matter what kind of suffering that creates.
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JIM KAVANAGH—So my guess for bad outcome three of TrumpKim talks: A successful meeting that results in an accord on the Korean peninsula and an increased threat of American military attack elsewhere. There are four venues where such aggression is at risk, but I think Venezuela is the Goldilocks target. Not too small: It’s a significant country, after all, with the largest oil reserves in the world, and a long-standing progressive government that’s been a big thorn in the gringo boot on Latin America for almost twenty years. Not too big: It’s no military match for the United States, and nobody’s going to start WWIII to defend Venezuela.
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JOHN R HALL—In the early days of Yellowstone National Park, wolves and other mammals of prey lacked any kind of government protection from hunters. Wolves kill livestock and compete with hunters for game animals, so they have been traditionally vilified, victimized, and eliminated. Seven decades without one of the most voracious predators in the ecosystem resulted in explosions of antelope, deer and elk populations, overgrazing of grasslands and elimination of vast stands of aspens, willows, and cottonwoods. This process cascaded down through the food chain, resulting in drastic reductions in species of birds and mammals of all descriptions. Receding grasslands and forests resulted in meandering rivers and a transformation of the landscape.
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JOHN PILGER—Will this cease under a Corbyn government? The preferred model – Robin Cook’s “ethical foreign policy” – is revealing. Like Jeremy Corbyn, Cook made his name as a backbencher and critic of the arms trade. “Wherever weapons are sold,” wrote Cook, “there is a tacit conspiracy to conceal the reality of war” and “it is a truism that every war for the past two decades has been fought by poor countries with weapons supplied by rich countries”.
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