JASON HIRTHLER—Nobody does reputation destruction better than Washington and its amplifiers in the press. It is a tradecraft long practiced by beltway PR savants. As Iago limned while soliloquizing his duplicity, “When devils will the blackest sins put on / They do suggest at first with heavenly shows”. This is the case with countless color revolutions spawned by American taxpayer largesse funneled to comprador proletariat in the target country, all of it swept up in a whirlwind morality tale narrated by corporate media. That it happens so frequently, and so convincingly for so many Americans, is testament to our historical naivete and media illiteracy.
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JEFF COHEN—I checked the post-debate news coverage. As in the Carlin joke, I found many references to the partial score: the $30-32 trillion estimated cost of Sanders’ legislation. But not the other score: the more costly estimate of sticking with a system in which health insurance is provided by for-profit corporations.
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JEFF COHEN—Since naked service to corporate elites and “trickle-down” promises don’t sell anymore to an insecure middle class, right-wing leaders like Trump (and Europeans being cultivated by Steve Bannon) are now “populist” and “anti-elites” – openly tapping into racism while scapegoating immigrants for society’s problems…
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ED CURTIN—Hedges omits mentioning the Clinton administration’s dismantling wars against Yugoslavia, including 78 days of non-stop bombing of Serbia in 1999 that killed thousands of innocent people in the name of “humanitarian intervention,” wars he covered for the New York Times, the paper he has come to castigate and the paper that has a long history of doing the CIA’s bidding.
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ROBIN DAVERMAN—The Chinese government has zero interest in stopping Hong Kong’s “popular protest” or riot. The big picture is that Hong Kong has been viewed as an increasing case of cancerous growth since 2008, for two reasons. Both are “long-term fatal”-kind of diseases. One is that it’s a prime case of “rentier economy” that Mr. Martin Wolf just wrote about in Financial Times. Martin Wolf: why rigged capitalism is damaging liberal …Basically rent-seekers (real estate cartel) squeezing blood out of rocks and choking off healthy competition and innovation. The other is that it’s too big of a Tax Haven for Mainland cash.
