PHILIP A. FARRUGGIO—What was always the case in our Amerika is the total disconnect between the mainstream media, professional sports, politicians and the public. Many of us, this writer included, looked upon those on the other side of the camera as so distant from us. They were almost like Gods to we regular working stiffs. Once upon a time, a time when things were much more ‘ even Steven’, sports figures, media journalists / broadcasters and even some politicians were closer in class to we working stiffs. In baseball I can remember when most of the players on my favorite team, the Brooklyn Dodgers, had to find jobs during the off season to pay the bills. Really!
AMERICAN STUDIES
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Announcing my new book – I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China
9 minutes readRAMIN MAZAHERI—It seems amusing and hypocritical that a book about socialism is only being sold on Amazon, which is perhaps the most cutthroat capitalist corporation today. All I can say is: we tried. Amazon has bought up so many parts of the modern publishing industry, like CreateSpace, that there simply are no real options for us. We are looking, though.Bottom line: the most common phrase heard among leftist authors is, “just get the ideas out there”, because leftist ideas are so harshly repressed in the West, both formally and informally. And it’s not like we’re in this for the money.
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GLEN FORD—The FBI has never attempted to question Wikileaks founder Julian Assange about the nature of the delivery, even though Assange is easy to find, locked up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London. Neither have they attempted to speak with Craig Murray, a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan who claims to have accepted the hand-delivery of data on the campus of American University, in Washington, DC. The reason the FBI has avoided talking to the most important witnesses in the case, and that they never inspected the DNC server, is obvious: they know that the whole Russiagate story is bogus.
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Freedom Rider: Julian Assange and Robert Mueller
11 minutes readMARGARET KIMBERLEY—Manning and Assange reveal the hypocrisy and hollowness of liberal America. Their disputes with Donald Trump are more about style than substance. Trump’s tweets against the media will engender outrage but the continued persecution of Julian Assange raises few eyebrows.The true evil of Russiagate goes further than the exposure of a compliant corporate media or cynical politicians. Russiagate has been used to further the interests of the surveillance state, neoliberalism and imperialism. The new attack on Assange should be understood as the most dangerous aspect of Russiagate. The Democratic Party wants to stifle dissent and make certain that there will be no Wikileaks in the future. That is why this dead issue will be kept on life support for as long as possible and why very few people will speak up for Assange and Manning.
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A necessary revolution in discussing China’s Cultural Revolution: an 8-part series (1/8)
32 minutes readRAMIN MAZAHERI—Most Westerners are as uninterested in China’s CR as they are in their own rural areas. I am certain this is true, because as a journalist I am 100% aware of my field’s failures in reporting on, from, or about rural areas. What’s worse, Western journalism has exacerbated their urban-rural divide by reporting from a starting point that rural areas are not morally equal to urban areas. This is a major shift from previous times: for example, during the US Revolution the farmer-citizen was Thomas Jefferson’s ideal man, and their Electoral College was created in part to ensure rural voices are not drowned out by city-slickers.