CAPITALIST SICKNESS

MICHAEL K SMITH—Abbey called himself a racist in Confessions of a Barbarian, though he defined the term as an aversion to being dominated by a race to which one did not belong, which definition would render nearly all of humanity “racist”: “Am I a racist? I guess I am. I certainly do not wish to live in a society dominated by blacks, or Mexicans, or Orientals. Look at Africa, at Mexico, at Asia.” Abbey was aware of the contributions of Western colonialism and imperialism to the widespread misery found in those regions, but argued it was but “Western guilt neurosis” to assign primacy to them in accounting for Third World conditions in the late twentieth century.

CHRIS MARSDEN—Just one year before Osborne’s attack, the fascist Thomas Mair murdered Labour MP Jo Cox. As he repeatedly shot and stabbed her, he shouted, “Britain first! This is for Britain. Britain will always come first.” Cox was killed just one week prior to the referendum vote on Britain’s continued membership of the EU. She was a high-profile supporter of the Remain campaign.Politics in the UK is increasingly frenzied. The ruling class is split into warring factions fighting over whether they should leave or remain in the EU, but the orientation of the entire ruling class is ever further to the right.

FRANK SCOTT—The World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Fort Knox Foundation and other responsible caches of individual global wealth are in crisis meetings to deal with this new problem of people demanding a fairer shake from the system of minority rule, often called democracy in places with elections allowed to the commoners so long as they vote for representatives of that minority rule.

PHILIP A. FARRUGGIO—For that minority of us who reject both this Military Industrial Empire and its Two Party ‘One Party ‘system, we are marginalized and ostracized. For that smaller segment of our grouping that holds to most of the conspiracy theories of empire… Wow!! We are just simply crazy!  Factor out the way out theories of aliens inside the Illuminati, the shape shifting reptilians, the One World Socialist government of the Fabian Society, or the Jews behind all our world wars etc. That is not what this writer is speaking about

PHILIP GIRALDI—As an ex-CIA case officer who worked on the Iran target for a number of years, I was shocked when I read the Times’ article, primarily because it sounded like a repeat of the fabricated intelligence that was used against both Iraq and Iran in 2001 through 2003. It is based on the premise that war with Iran is desirable for the United States and, acting behind the scenes, Israel, so it is therefore necessary to come up with an excuse to start it. As the threat of terrorism is always a good tactic to convince the American public that something must be done, that is what the article tries to do and it is particularly discouraging to read as it appears to reflect opinion in the White House.As I have been writing quite critically about the CIA and the Middle East for a number of years, I am accustomed to considerable push-back from former colleagues. But in this case, the calls and emails I received from former intelligence officers who shared my experience of the Middle East and had read the article went strongly the other way, condemning the use of both fake and contrived intelligence to start another unnecessary war.