TED RALL—On Sunday, October 23rd “About 1,500 women and allied men marched on the Pentagon on Sunday to demand an end to perpetual war and the funding of education, health care and other social needs instead,” reported Joe Lauria of the progressive website Consortium News. Mainstream/corporate journalistic outlets memory-holed the event with a total media blackout.
LIBERAL BETRAYALS
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SCOTT PARKIN—Technology and profit driven solutions were the planet-saving theme of the week. Crowds of adoring greens, many the staff of the nation’s liberal environmental non-profit complex, cheered when Brown announced that California would put its own satellite to monitor climate change into the atmosphere. Financial firms committed to fund climate action to the tune of $32 billion. Cities committed to go carbon neutral by 2045. Companies committed to rapidly shift to renewable energy.
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JASON HIRTHLER—As Chris Hedges remarks, we still have the “iconography and language” of democracy, but we are made to “kneel before the dictates of the marketplace” and “structure our society around the primacy of profit.” We are left with an institutional “facade.” Which is why it is so proper to treat with derision the reeling hysteria of politicians who claim, in comical hand-wringing interviews, that “our democracy” is under attack.
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GLEN FORD—“Because in an age where there’s so much active misinformation and it’s packaged very well and it looks the same when you see it on a Facebook page or you turn on your television,” said Obama. “If everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made, then we won’t know what to protect.” Or, as he put it later in an interview with David Letterman: “One of the biggest challenges that we have to our democracy is the degree to which we do not share a common baseline of facts.”
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The “Grievance Studies” hoax exposes postmodernist charlatans
16 minutes readERIC LONDON—The weaponization of identity politics is directed down the social ladder as well. By advancing the lie that white workers benefit from “white privilege,” for example, the proponents of identity politics argue: the spoils of Wall Street should not go to meeting the social needs of the working class, including white workers, who face record rates of alcoholism, poverty, opioid addiction, police violence and other indices of social misery. Instead, the world’s resources should go to me. It is this visceral class hatred that serves as the basis for absurd and reactionary arguments like those advanced in the hoax papers.