ALASDAIR MACLEOD—This will take the geopolitical conflict with China and Russia to a new level. Their own intelligence services will almost certainly be fully aware of the American Deep State’s congressional manoeuvres. It might explain the timing of Russia’s pre-emptive announcement, that it has missiles capable of delivering a punch at Mach 20. It might also explain China’s recent announcement of its intention to increase military spending, even though the timing is likely to have been set by the recent National Peoples’ Congress.
CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM
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ERIC ZUESSE—So: The federal-debt issue is killing Trump politically. His voters don’t much care whether he starts World War III by his respecting and appointing such people as the super-neoconservative John Bolton. Bolton’s being loathed by “The libbys” (liberals) convinces Trump’s followers that Bolton is “the right man for the job.” By stark contrast, they’re rabid against Trump’s signing the Government’s budget bill. And, to them, that’s a much bigger issue than whether there will soon be a WW III.
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Boris Johnson’s Putin-Hitler comparison is a provocation too far
12 minutes readJOHN WIGHT—Indeed, with the investigation into this crime still ongoing, the only people who are certain of Russian state involvement is a political class in Britain that is acting not in the interests the British public but instead the interests of the country’s aforementioned establishment press, combined and in cooperation with a murky and evermore influential network of neocon think tanks.
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GLEN FORD—According to the official numbers, Brazil’s police kill 4, 224 civilians a year. Alves asks us to “imagine a country where twelve civilians are ‘legally’ killed by the police on a daily basis.” Seventy-six percent of the dead are Black, meaning nine Black men or boys are killed by Brazilian police every day (99 percent are male). Alves notes that these statistics “do not count the ‘disappeared’ and ‘unknown’ that have turned poor and predominantly black urban communities in Brazil into macabre geographies.”
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JOHN STEPPLING—Meanwhile the US lurches toward military conflict with nuclear powers. Conflicts that would wipe out humanity. At the least the US is manufacturing a new Cold War. Perhaps that provides a certain comfort. People are given an external enemy to hate, an enemy on which to focus their frustration, resentment, and aggression. The system encourages managed protest about issues that are themselves of little consequence. Gun control for one. Nobody talks about the MILLIONS of dead at the hands of the US military over the last twenty years. Nobody protests 900 military bases globally. What are those bases there for? Oh, to protect us….from *enemies*.