BRUCE LERRO—For the most part, the use of electronic media, especially television, had a debilitating impact on political rhetoric. The number of outdoor speeches declined as the politician was followed by television cameras inside the studios. The public now had to make much less effort to hear a speech as they could now watch it on television. For various reasons, over the years the attention span of the public got shorter and shorter in part because there was a lot to see on television and also because the pace of life quickened.
AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE
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PEPE ESCOBAR—The plenum proved once more that “socialism with Chinese characteristics” – or, for the recalcitrant, Chinese-modified capitalism – is “people-centric”. The supreme values are national interest and the people’s interests – attested by the fact that large private corporations remain under the strategic control of the CPC.
It’s idle to try to find in the final communique at the end of the plenum any restrictions on private capital on the path to “universal prosperity”. The key point is that the role of capital should always be subordinated to the concept of “socialism with Chinese characteristics”.
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The Big Lie is pushing the US Empire and its vassals toward social pandemonium, nuclear confrontation, or both
22 minutes readBILLY BOB—Trump is nothing more than a callous, self-interested salesman, selling us the idea that he is a genuine Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, or Ho Chi Minh, while he simultaneously upholds the lie that socialism is evil. I mean, what a fucking farce all of this is. Trump is trying to sell us on revolution while he must simultaneously pander to the inculcated biases of the masses and affirm that history’s actual and authentic revolutionaries, were “bad”. This is the pathetic state of Western society: The lines that divide the people against themselves, to the benefit of the oligarchs are imaginary and not based on any sort of actual fundamental political or economic reality. What a monumental brainwashing success this has been and what an accomplishment for their system of indoctrination, confusion, and control. They have succeeded in destroying the minds of the masses and they have divorced the masses from reality itself.
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PAUL EDWARDS—What he can and must be blamed for is his long, disgraceful, and devious career as a phony, smarmy, glad-handing flack for Big Money as the Senator from MBNA, his vulgarly cynical two-faced record on race relations, his Chickenhawk cheerleading for every military crime and folly, his rah-rahing for our fubar debacles in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and finally, now, in his dotage, funding and embracing mass murder by Nazi Israel in Gaza and a grossly evil proxy war in Ukraine that bids fair to trigger World War III.
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ALEKS—Much of what we will discuss in this article will deal with the number of Russian casualties, as alluded to in the introduction. Russia suffered a horrendous number of dead soldiers within the first few weeks of the conflict, maybe up to 10,000. That’s the price of big arrows on modern battlefields with full intelligence/information/reconnaissance/artillery/drone coverage of the battlefields.
However, (up to) 10,000 dead is still a price that would have been worth paying to achieve the goals in Ukraine without going into a full-scale war. Had there been an agreement in Istanbul that would have terminated the conflict, ensured the rights of Russians in Ukraine, and kept Ukraine out of NATO and NATO out of Ukraine, one could remotely argue that “it was worth it.”
We all know what happened instead. As with all agreements that are not guaranteed with a gun on the West’s head, the West will ignore or scrap it at will. As happened with the Istanbul agreement.