CONSERVATIVES & REACTION

BILL VAN AUKEN—”Bergoglio (the new Pope Francis) was ideologically predisposed to backing the mass political killings unleashed by the junta. In the early 1970s, he was associated with the right-wing Peronist Guardia de Hierro (Iron Guard), whose cadre—together with elements of the Peronist trade union bureaucracy—were employed in the death squads known as the Triple A (Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance), which carried out a campaign of extermination against left-wing opponents of the military before the junta even took power…”

MoA—That is the reason why Micah Zenko calls the political indifference to social health “the gravest national security threat”. It was Bill Clinton’s ‘welfare reform’ that systematically impoverished people. The current opioid crises developed under the Obama administration and it did nothing to stop it. Obama ‘reform’ of the health insurance system shunned the ‘public option’ which would have given insurance to anyone who can not afford the commercial offers. With many Democrats firmly in the hands of big pharma there is little hope that change will come from their side.

ALLUM BOKHARI—We also see attacks on free speech, with governments and politicians across the west pressuring Silicon Valley to suppress its critics. An unaccountable, unelected elite can sweep away a person’s livelihood in minutes, and cut their political message off from millions of American citizens. As I wrote in my column two weeks ago, the overarching trend is the gradual destruction or delegitimization of every tool, digital or otherwise, that non-elites use to express their preferences. Does that sound like a free society, or a controlled one?

In a practical sense, the forming of the defense committees will mean that one spokesperson from each of Venezuela’s 50,000 communal councils will undergo training with the country’s Bolivarian Militia units. Those selected representatives will then form a link between the Venezuelan state’s militias and the communal councils, which since 2006 have organized groups of 20 to 400 families across the national territory.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—I barely write about the Democratic Party anymore because Russiagate madness has made it completely worthless and boring to talk about. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t make it any more interesting because a breath mint in a barrel of pig turds is still a barrel of pig turds. The only thing that would possibly make it interesting and worthwhile is if progressives, including Bernie Sanders, stop advancing longstanding neoconservative agendas against Russia and actually turn their energy toward manifesting the values they claim to stand for.