EVVAGELOS VALLIANATOS—In the midst of this anxiety, our toleration of diversity in political discourse is fading. Large media will not publish critical opinions about controversial pesticides, industrialized farming or about taxing the rich or bringing to an end wars and the ecocide of corporate America.Presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders has been branded “socialist” because he is proposing corporations and rich Americans pay modestly higher taxes; that young Americans deserve free public university education; that the country needs a minimum wage that boosts workers above poverty.I have examples of being interrupted in conversations and called names. Some readers of my articles threaten me. Several times people have said to me: “Why don’t you go back to Greece?” This started in my undergraduate student days, decades ago.I must be saying things that get people excited or angry.
Default Editor Patrice de Bergeracpas
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The Yellow Vests of France: Six Months of Struggle
15 minutes readRICHARD GREEMAN—Fortunately, in the past few weeks the League for the Rights of Man and other such humanitarian groups have at last turned out to protest police brutality, while committees of artists and academics have signed petitions in support of the Yellow Vests’ struggle for democratic rights, condemning the government and media. At the same time, Yellow Vests are more and more converging with Ecologists (“End of the Month/End of the World/Same Enemy/Same Struggle”), feminists (who play a major role in the movement). Workers have also played an important role, many of them active as opponents of the bureaucracy in their unions.
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CRAIG MURRAY—In Sweden, prosecutors have applied to the Swedish courts to issue a warrant for Julian’s arrest. There is a tremendous back story to that simple statement.The European Arrest Warrant must be issued from one country to another by a judicial authority. The original Swedish request for Assange’s extradition was not issued by any court, but simply by the prosecutor. This was particularly strange, as the Chief Prosecutor of Stockholm had initially closed the case after deciding there was no case to answer, and then another, highly politically motivated, prosecutor had reopened the case and issued a European Arrest Warrant, without going to any judge for confirmation.
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TOM LUONGO—At some point one has to realize that a particular policy has failed and cut a deal. The Council of Europe bowed to internal pressure as five years of rising Euroskepticism and stagnating exports to a formerly strong market for most of Europe, especially mighty Germany, finally pushed them to end the grandstanding.It’s too bad psychopaths like John Bolton never understand this.This is the necessary first step to defying the U.S. over sanctions this summer when they come up again. And, what’s the point, anyway? Blocking one pipeline only to empower two others is just idiotic.
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The Police Were Created to Control Working Class and Poor People, Not ‘Serve and Protect’
20 minutes readSAM MITRANI—The police were not created to protect and serve the population. They were not created to stop crime, at least not as most people understand it. And they were certainly not created to promote justice. They were created to protect the new form of wage-labor capitalism that emerged in the mid- to late-19th century from the threat posed by that system’s offspring, the working class.This is a blunt way of stating a nuanced truth, but sometimes nuance just serves to obfuscate.