ANTI-NEOLIBERALISM

P. GREANVILLE—For those who understand what’s really going on, how the liberal mainstream establishment has rolled out one of the most outrageous campaigns of defamation and putschist disinformation in modern history against both Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, indeed a case without parallel in the entire history of US media, this particular Taibbi piece does not make for enjoyable reading. It is disingenuous, at best.

RON ARONSON—Sartre’s notion of freedom asks that we take responsibility for situations we did not create, and then makes us responsible for what we do about them.

Michael Parenti answers a question about Bernie Sanders. A fair evaluation.

GAITHER STEWART—The stability of that world was nonetheless shaky. The West was engaged in more serious matters than democracy: capitalism searched desperately for new markets for its survival. America’s expansion however was hampered by the nuclear-armed evil empire behind that wall in Berlin. The USA ousted from Southeast Asia, the British Empire out of India, the French out of North Africa. The whole globe whirled. Where it would stop nobody knew. Neither the US government, nor the CIA, nor European Communists even imagined a traitorous Gorbachev coming to power in Russia. No one suspected that the dissolution of the USSR was just around the corner. No one would seem more surprised (and I sometimes believe disappointed) than the CIA.

GARY KOHLS—Interestingly, the US Chamber of Commerce, which has an active chapter in Duluth, seems to have close relationships with some of the above institutions. The Chamber website states that it opposes the domestic and international adoption of the precautionary principle as a basis for regulatory decision making. The Chamber of Commerce explicitly states that one of its strategies is the “education” of consumers, businesses, and governmental policymakers about the “regulatory implications of the precautionary principle”.