Patrice de Bergeracpas

TONY KEVIN—There are only two kinds of news about Russia now permitted in our mainstream media, including the ABC and SBS: negative news and comment, or silence. Unless a story can be given an anti-Russian sting, it will not be carried at all. Important stories are simply spiked, like last week’s Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, chaired by President Putin and attended by Prime Ministers Abe, Mahathir and Modi, among 8500 participants from 65 countries.

FRANK LEE—German big business, therefore, likely does not want to see its exports blocked in order to appease US geopolitical ambitions. And there is little sympathy among most of the German public for the ongoing US/NATO occupation. The decline of the SPD and CDU and rise of the AfD are indicative of this trend.

JASON HIRTHLER—Hong Kong is ablaze. Venezuelan streets are thousands-strong with Bolivarians. Gilets Jaunes crowd the cobbled avenues of French capitals. Hondurans are rattling their neoliberal conman. Yet we hear only about the flour-pure pleas of innocent Asians whose petrol bombs bear the stamp of democracy, but not of a Latin demos chanting to loose the chains of imperial sanctions. Only those uprisings that can be suitably cloaked in free-market groupthink are cast in the spotlight.

STEVEN SAHIOUNIE—Since 2014 Saudi Arabian authorities have reported over one hundred Houthi missile interceptions. The Houthis are known to own the Scud-B and -C missiles, the North Korean Hwasong variants, the Tochka missile, the Qaher-1 missile, the Zelzal-3 ballistic missile, and the C-802 anti-ship cruise missile. The Houthis have proved themselves to be a formidable force through their possession of powerful missile systems, and have domestically developed technology furthering their arsenal.

PHILIP A. FARRUGGIO—Trump and his backers, the true ‘ Deep State Military Industrial Empire’, have succeeded in sucking in millions of blue collar and white collar Amerikans. They play upon the covert and sometimes overt racism that many white citizens have. The Republicans, for generations , have used the tactic of ‘ Keep the black and brown skins away from our neighborhood and our schools… and our children’  to get the votes needed. Of course, along with that undertone of rhetoric, they also played the Fear Card of terrorism, both overseas and of course right here at home. It was they who concocted the use of the word Homeland to mirror what Goebbels used ( Fatherland) to trumpet German ethnocentrism . As with the Nazi mindset, the Republicans always celebrated Amerika having a strong military. How many times has this writer have had to hear ‘ Thank you for your service’ when the embedded mainstream media interviews a military person?