CHRISTOPHER BLACK—Reasonable people ask what can be done about the aggressive policies of the United States leadership. Russia and China talk about containment of the threat, renew calls for peaceful diplomacy, support dialogue with Iran to reduce the imminent danger of war in the Persian Gulf, with Venezuela, with respect to all the nations attacked occupied or threatened by the United States. But the Trumps and Obamas, the Bushes and Clintons of the American world, respond with all the more arrogance and fall all over themselves as to who among them is the most bellicose, the most ready to go to war to “make America great again, the most able to “support the spread of democracy,” that is, their rule over the world.
Monthly Archives
August 2019
MintCast Interviews Doug Valentine, Author of The Phoenix Program and The CIA as Organized Crime
4 minutes readMintCast co-host Whitney Webb interviews author, investigative journalist and poet Douglas Valentine about his extensive work on exposing the dark underbelly of the CIA and some of the agency’s most notorious covert programs.
Webb and Valentine begin the interview discussing how Valentine’s journalistic work on the CIA led him to be spied on and even threatened by the agency and how being a dissident journalist in the 1990s compares to being one now. Valentine argues that, in the present, efforts to outlaw criticism of the state of Israel are like a gateway that will soon lead to the prohibition of criticism of the U.S. government and its intelligence agencies, the CIA among them.
WHITNEY WEBB—While President Trump is clearly connected to both Epstein and Cohn, Cohn’s network also extends to former President Bill Clinton, whose friend and longtime political advisor, Richard “Dirty Dick” Morris, was Cohn’s cousin and close associate. Morris was also close to Clinton’s former communications director, George Stephanopoulos, who is also associated with Jeffrey Epstein. [George Stephanopoulos has a cushy sinecure now at ABC, while pretending to practice journalism. It pays to serve the superrich.—Ed]
JASON W MOORE—The Capitalocene argument therefore rejects anthropocentric flattening — “We have met the enemy and he is us” (as in Walt Kelly’s iconic 1970 Earth Day poster) — along with economic reductionism. To be sure, capitalism is a system of endless capital accumulation. But the Capitalocene thesis says that to understand planetary crisis today, we need to look at capitalism as a world-ecology of power, production, and reproduction.
Only in America: I am terrified of single-payer systems as implemented in socialist countries. Can this happen in the US?
3 minutes read
MARTIN COHEN—But of course, those damned socialists come between you and your doctor, right? Well, no. I walked in without an appointment for the equivalent of what in the states is “urgent care.” No record, no file. So, just like in the U.S., I had to fill out a form – damned bureaucracy! But in the States, that form can be 25 pages, while the damned socialists only had one page and 5 questions! Name, address, phone number, emergency contact, reason for visit.
