ED CURTIN—So yes, I do think most people are victims. No one chooses their parents, or to be born into poverty, or to be discriminated against for one’s race, etc. No one chooses to have their genuine experience poisoned from childhood. No one chooses to be born into a mad society. This is all true. Some are luckier than others. Suicides, fast and slow, are victims. But not just victims. This is not about blame, but understanding. For those who commit to lives of slow suicide, to the squelching of their true selves and their consciences in the face of a rapacious and murderous society, there is always the chance they can break with the norm and go sane. Redemption is always possible. But it primarily involves overcoming the fear of death, a fear that manifests itself in the extreme need to preserve one’s life, so-called social identity, and sense of self by embracing social conventions…
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From George Orwell to Robert Conquest to Solzenytsin, very few people have bothered to check the sources on which they base their sweeping anti-communist ‘conclusions’. Professor Grover Furr, a talented linguist and Historian, with an interest in the USSR, Stalin and the communist movement, has done just that, and it is his evaluation of ALL the sources and ALL the footnotes that allows him to reach an authoritative opinion on the true value of these ‘bibles of anti-communism. It turns out that the overwhelmingly reactionary Polish and Ukrainian sources are ALL biased, or outright fabrications.
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Dateline: 15 Jun 2018 Disinformation scarred campaigning in elections in the Indian state of…
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CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Trump-induced amnesia has erased much of the memory of this, but Democrats haven’t always been so goddamn terrifying. They’ve always been phony, and they’ve always been the other half of America’s oligarchic military-industrial complex problem, but before they lost their marbles in 2016 they did at least try to pretend to be vaguely progressive sometimes instead of basing their entire platform on attacking political opponents for trying to get along with Russia or North Korea. A reversion to the way things used to be, when Rachel Maddow was just a garden variety partisan hack instead of a psychotic amalgamation of all the worst aspects of Glenn Beck, Alex Jones and Joseph McCarthy, would be a welcome relief.
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ERIC ZUESSE—Basically, the IG’s report said that the Obama Administration had failed to enforce the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act of 2009. This bill had been passed overwhelmingly, 92-4 in the Senate, and 338-52 in the House. All of the votes against it came from Republicans. (Perhaps Obama was secretly a Republican.) The law sent $165 million to the DOJ to catch the executive fraudsters who had brought down the U.S. economy, and it set up the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, and had been introduced and written by the liberal Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy. President Obama signed it on 20 May 2009. At that early stage in his Presidency, he couldn’t afford to display publicly that he was far to the right of every congressional Democrat, so he signed it.
