AMERICAN DUPLICITY

DANNY HAIPHONG—AOC has tacitly supported imperialism by regurgitating the State Department’s narrative of humanitarian imperialism on nearly every major instance of U.S. aggression. She has labeled Venezuela a “failed state” but has yet to demand an end to U.S. sanctions under Joe Biden. On Palestine, AOC has offered a variety of word salads when questioned on her opposition to Israeli colonialism . She has also professed her loyalty to the CIA-backed Dalai Lama . These instances of capitulation to imperialism have only aggravated frustrations held by progressives and leftists who rebuke her tendency to privilege spectacle over meaningful political action in the fight for a so-called “progressive” agenda.

GLENN GREENWALD—But none of the swooning over this new Facebook heroine nor any of the other media assaults on Facebook have anything remotely to do with a concern over those genuine dangers. Congress has taken no steps to curb the influence of these Silicon Valley giants because Facebook and Google drown the establishment wings of both parties with enormous amounts of cash and pay well-connected lobbyists who are friends and former colleagues of key lawmakers to use their D.C. influence to block reform. With the exception of a few stalwarts, neither party’s ruling wing really has any objection to this monopolistic power as long as it is exercised to advance their own interests.

RON UNZ—Preconceived notions sometimes crack and crumble a bit before they finally collapse. For years I’d begun to see claims about the past use of biological weapons floating around the Internet, but the collapse only began in early January when I read a remarkable 12,000 word cover story in New York magazine. The author was Nicholson Baker, a prominent writer and liberal public intellectual, and he made a detailed and rather persuasive case that instead of being natural, the Covid virus devastating our country and the rest of the world was artificial, the product of some lab. As an intelligent layman rather than a scientist Baker’s expertise on the topic came from the many years of research that he had undertaken for Baseless, his 2020 book documenting America’s own extensive biological warfare program.

Nearly all of Baker’s very long article concerned the Covid issue, but a few facts from that book were mentioned here and there, and these greatly surprised me. Apparently during the 1950s our biowarfare program had been assigned a priority and importance comparable to that of nuclear weapons development, and the project had also resulted in numerous accidents, many of them fatal, which was hardly something I’d ever seen mentioned in my introductory textbooks. So the actual history of the topic was apparently far more complex than I’d realized.

“Major corporations love to tell us how committed they are to addressing the climate crisis and building a sustainable future, but behind closed doors, they are funding the very industry trade groups that are fighting tooth and nail to stop the biggest climate change bill ever,” said Kyle Herrig, president of watchdog group Accountable.US, which compiled the analysis.

None of the companies contacted by the Guardian would rebuke the stance of the lobby groups they are part of and none said they would review their links to these groups.

“Hiding behind these shady groups doesn’t just put our environment at risk – it puts these companies’ household names and reputations in serious jeopardy,” Herrig said.

PEPE ESCOBAR—Knights overwhelmingly state the obvious: “Chinese power must be contained”. They sell the current, serial imperial debacle as “grand strategic moves”, in a quirky, lost in translation mixed salad of Gramsci and Lampedusa: a “new order” (engineered by the Empire) is being born via “everything must change so everything may remain the same” – privileging the Empire.
Other Knights even propose the ludicrous notion that the current POTUS, an actual zombie remote-controlled by a teleprompter, is capable of conceiving a “foreign policy for the middle class” , as if the MICIMATT would ever approve a scheme to “advance prosperity in the free world as a whole”. The “free world” has just been stunned by the “prosperity” offered to Afghanistan during 20 “bombing to democracy” years.