URI AVNERY—I remember this joke every time Binyamin Netanyahu utters his blood-curdling threats against Iran. The struggle with Iran heads his agenda. He warns of the danger of an Iranian effort to produce nuclear weapons and implicitly threatens her with our “secret” nuclear arsenal. Why? God knows. I search desperately for a reason for the Israeli-Iranian conflict, a struggle of life and death, and do not find any. Nothing. Niente. Wars between nations are based on conflicts of interest. Are there any conflicting interests between Israel and Iran? None whatsoever.
AMERICAN BRAINWASH
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NICK PEMBERTON—For this reason alone I wish Trump would have lost. We are now back to square one: believing that the Democratic Party can save us. Conor Lamb may look like a harmless lamb, but he is laying (and lying) with the wolves of the Republican Party, who are led by a disturbed child named Donald Trump. A bipartisan agreement is the most dangerous thing in Washington.
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It was clear all along that decades long betrayals of the working class by the Democrats, culminating with the abject demagoguery of Barack Obama, would present the masses with no choices, except false ones or outright calamity in 2016. Obama and his DNC clique had a huge opportunity to knock out the Repugs indefinitely in 2008, when that party, thanks to George W Bush and his malignant excesses, was plainly on the canvas. Instead, what they did is extend a hand to the GOP and accelerate its rehabilitation so the charade could continue. Just one major reform, like single payer health insurance, would have made the Dems unbeatable for generations. But even that easy accomplishment was too much for a party crawling with prostitutes. The upshot in the rigged field of US elections was Trump. In this interview, John Pilger pretty much asserts the same thing: It was the Democrats that made Trump possible if not downright inevitable
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CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Jeff Bezos is worth 131.5 billion dollars as of this writing, and he is getting more ambitious, not less. He doesn’t need that money to buy more stuff; it isn’t about money for him. It’s about power. The impulse to rise to the top of your monkey tribe is an impulse buried deep within our evolutionary heritage, and when that impulse isn’t checked by empathy for your fellow man it creates an unquenchable drive to grow and grow in invincible power no matter what kind of suffering that creates.
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JIM KAVANAGH—So my guess for bad outcome three of TrumpKim talks: A successful meeting that results in an accord on the Korean peninsula and an increased threat of American military attack elsewhere. There are four venues where such aggression is at risk, but I think Venezuela is the Goldilocks target. Not too small: It’s a significant country, after all, with the largest oil reserves in the world, and a long-standing progressive government that’s been a big thorn in the gringo boot on Latin America for almost twenty years. Not too big: It’s no military match for the United States, and nobody’s going to start WWIII to defend Venezuela.