ROSA LUXEMBURG—On the ninth of November, workers and soldiers smashed the old German regime. The Prussian saber’s mania of world rule had bled to death on the battlefields of France. The gang of criminals who sparked a worldwide conflagration and drove Germany into an ocean of blood had come to the end of its rope. The people – betrayed for four years, having forgotten culture, honesty, and humanity in the service of the Moloch, available for every obscene deed – awoke from its four-year long paralysis, only to face the abyss.
CAPITALIST SICKNESS
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This week on CounterSpin: Some corporate media appear agog that militarized federal agents—deployed with a mission reflected in Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s comment that city streets are a “battlespace,” filled with what acting Homeland Security chief Chad Wolf called “violent mobs”—would go ahead and tear gas protesters in Portland, Oregon, even though Portland’s Democratic mayor, Tom Wheeler, was among them. Outrageous, sure, but we’re a bit beyond outrage now, aren’t we?
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ANGEL GUERRA—The combative and diverse Chilean social movement that began with the outbreak of October 18, 2019 is grouped in the Social Unity, a large front of popular organizations that before the pandemic flooded avenues and public spaces, but has been able to find at this stage other ways to demand the satisfaction of their demands, including digital networks, symbolic presence in the streets and also strikes of essential sectors. For example, a national strike of waterfront workers was decreed, as a form of pressure, at the same time that the chambers of deputies and senators were debating the right to withdraw 10 percent of pensions.
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GLEN FORD—The Covid-19 epidemic proved beyond all rational doubt that decades of bipartisan privatization and austerity had destroyed the U.S. “public” health care system, rendering the nation structurally incapable of coping with the viral onslaught. The late and geographically uneven lockdown succeeded only in creating Great Depression levels of unemployment without halting the spread of the disease, which has now devoured over 133,000 lives , with Blacks and Native Americans succumbing at five times the rate of whites, and Hispanic Americans dying at four times the frequency of whites.
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CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—If you choose to make the end of perception management your foremost priority, that means you push for government transparency at every opportunity and support any movement to take away secret hiding places from the powerful.
It means opposing the way the powerful bolt shut all the doors on public scrutiny of their behavior, smear anyone who speculates about what they might be up to as a crazy conspiracy theorist, and imprisons anyone who leaks information about what they’re really doing to the people.
It means you support whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden who help shine light on the things power tries to keep hidden in the dark.
It means you support WikiLeaks and Julian Assange and any journalist who helps expose the secrets of the powerful.
It means you fight the empire’s propaganda machine at every opportunity to break public trust in its manipulations.