LARRY WILKERSON—How can [Iran] threaten anything the United States has in the Strait, in the Gulf, or in the region, when we have so much superiority? And Saudi Arabia and other countries allied with us have so much superiority. Israel has so much superiority. It’s all make believe. It’s John Bolton make believe. It’s Mike Pompeo make believe. And the fact that Donald Trump goes along with it, makes him an idiot.
WENDELL POTTER—They do. And they still do. The Affordable Care Act did nothing to change that. In fact, I think it’s gotten even worse, because it did–the Affordable Care Act did do some good things. But I knew as soon as it was passed that the insurance companies would do other things to make sure that they met Wall Street’s profit expectations. That is the most important thing to these companies. And I can assure you that it’s the case. I, for 10 years, was responsible for handling financial communications to the media. And I know that what is most important is meeting Wall Street’s financial expectations every three months when you announce your earnings. And if you miss it by a penny, earnings per share, then you’ll see the value of your stock more than likely take a hit.PAUL JAY: And a lot of these executives own a lot of stock.
ERIC ZUESSE—Those international hostilities are just great for the billionaires’ corporations, such as Lockheed Martin, but they bring billions to the billionaires and nothing but increased taxes and death and disabilty to the public and to our soldiers — and vastly worse to the people who live in the tragic lands where we are sanctioning or invading, or doing regime-change by means of coups. So: they hire the distractors.
CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—(Quoting Tulsi Gabbard): “Yeah,” Gabbard said when asked to clarify if she was also saying that she’d give Edward Snowden a presidential pardon, adding, “And I think we’ve got to address why he did things the way that he did them. And you hear the same thing from Chelsea Manning, how there is not an actual channel for whistleblowers like them to bring forward information that exposes egregious abuses of our constitutional rights and liberties. Period. There was not a channel for that to happen in a real way, and that’s why they ended up taking the path that they did, and suffering the consequences.”