AMERICAN PARTY DUOPOLY

PHILIP A. FARRUGGIO—Trump and his backers, the true ‘ Deep State Military Industrial Empire’, have succeeded in sucking in millions of blue collar and white collar Amerikans. They play upon the covert and sometimes overt racism that many white citizens have. The Republicans, for generations , have used the tactic of ‘ Keep the black and brown skins away from our neighborhood and our schools… and our children’  to get the votes needed. Of course, along with that undertone of rhetoric, they also played the Fear Card of terrorism, both overseas and of course right here at home. It was they who concocted the use of the word Homeland to mirror what Goebbels used ( Fatherland) to trumpet German ethnocentrism . As with the Nazi mindset, the Republicans always celebrated Amerika having a strong military. How many times has this writer have had to hear ‘ Thank you for your service’ when the embedded mainstream media interviews a military person?

MAX BLUMENTHAL—The NED’s first success was the defeat of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua’s 1990 elections, replacing it with the neoliberal party of Violeta Chamorro.

Since then, the NED’s advanced US interests in countless countries: it helped swing a Russian election for Boris Yeltsin in 1996, it drove a failed coup attempt in Venezuela in 2002, it orchestrated a successful one in Haiti in 2004, and another one in Ukraine in 2014, which paved the way for neo-Nazis to move into the mainstream.

PEPE ESCOBAR—The situation has now reached a point where there’s plenty of chatter across the Persian Gulf about a spectacular scenario: the Houthis investing in a mad dash across the Arabian desert to capture Mecca and Medina in conjunction with a mass Shiite uprising in the Eastern oil belt. That’s not far-fetched anymore. Stranger things have happened in the Middle East. After all, the Saudis can’t even win a bar brawl – that’s why they rely on mercenaries.

MICHAEL KRIEGER—The truth of the matter is incentives rule the world, and if we look at some of the most pernicious and predatory areas of our socio-economic reality, including (but not limited to) the financial sector, the defense industry, intelligence agencies and healthcare, we find a slew of incentives that handsomely reward sociopathic behavior, while penalizing ethical, conscious action beneficial to society at large. Notice it’s always the whistleblowers who end up imprisoned or hunted down.

PATRICE GREANVILLE—For well over a century now the savage capitalist way of life—make that “the American Way of Life”— has dominated and grotesquely misruled healthcare in the United States, its abuses by now legendary.  Big Pharma, a key component of the notorious triad comprising doctors, hospitals and the pharmaceutical industry, has long exploited its de facto and virtually unchallenged monopolistic position to extract superprofits from a disorganised and profoundly misinformed public, a public with no real representation in Congress, nor in most state legislatures.