CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—And what’s interesting is that these same facts could have remained exactly as they are and allowed the exact opposite narrative to be constructed. If her plutocratic owners had wished it, Rachel Maddow would have spent every night over the last two years warning everyone that Donald Trump is taking dangerous actions against Russia that threaten to wipe all life off the face of the earth, and it would have worked. If Trump had continued making these escalations in our hypothetical alternate timeline while the mass media was constantly selling the “Trump’s going to get us all killed in a nuclear war with Russia” narrative, all the same blue-checkmarked Twitter pundits you see yelling at Tulsi Gabbard today would be yelling about the dangers of nuclear war in our alternate timeline.
AMERICAN STUDIES
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The fallacies and evasions of the Green New Deal
20 minutes readThe sweeping nature of the resolution, however, has generated understandable popular interest and support among workers and youth. The Green New Deal proposes “to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions,” “to create millions of good, high-wage jobs and ensure prosperity and economic security for all people,” and “to invest in the infrastructure and industry of the United States.”Ocasio-Cortez has raised some of the chief concerns of the bottom 90 percent of the income ladder in America, who comprise the working class. They face a daily struggle to survive and provide for their families, while the richest 10 percent, and especially the top 1 percent, 0.1 percent and 0.01 percent, monopolize an ever greater share of income and wealth.
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The Beto O’Rourke campaign for the Democratic Party presidential nomination: “Nothing will come of nothing”
15 minutes readDAVID WALSH—“Betomania” is a media concoction intended to deceive the population. Coinciding neatly with his presidential bid announcement, Vanity Fair magazine put O’Rourke—on a rural dirt road, dressed in jeans and in the company of a black Labrador—on the cover of its March 13 edition. The cover reads: “Beto’s Choice—‘I want to be in it. Man, I was born to be in it.’ His road to 2020 begins.” Those who fall for this sort of nonsense…
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PHILIP A. FARRUGGIO—Only a fool will deny that most of what our government labels as Al Qaeda or ISIL or whatever fanatical Islamic group is out there, would not even fit inside of a sports stadium with their numbers… IF we never attacked, invaded and occupied Iraq. Ditto for Afghanistan, where the Taliban had offered to turn over Bin Laden after 9/11. No, those two nations had to be controlled. Why? Well, as to Iraq, Hussein was going to begin selling his oil in Euros and not in the dollars he always traded in. Of course, Iraq’s oil reserves were massive and needed to be controlled by us.
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The guilty silence over the jailing of Chelsea Manning
11 minutes readANDRE DAMON±None of the dozens of professional moralists employed by the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal who make it their business to publicize “human rights” violations to promote US imperialist interests have written a single column protesting the imprisonment of Manning.These newspapers regularly report on the alleged imprisonment and mistreatment of journalists, whistleblowers and dissidents at the hands of the United States’ geopolitical rivals Russia and China. But when it comes to the jailing of a courageous whistleblower in the United States, they are silent.