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.
CONSERVATIVES & REACTION
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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.
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A Political Primer (leaflet): What’s being hidden in plain view
26 minutes readERIC SCHECHTER—Regulations can’t make a kinder, gentler guillotine. The problem is not good institutions run badly, but bad institutions, founded on bad principles. We can’t end ecocide, poverty, war, and other problems until we replace our society’s real principles — hierarchy, property, and separateness — with a better Foundation: harmony and consensus. It’s a fool’s errand to try to make the lies of freedom and democracy come true, for those “principles” can’t really work.
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PATRICK MARTIN—The 2018 elections could well see a similar process, but in reverse. Angered by the tax cuts for the wealthy and big business, the gutting of social programs like Medicaid and food stamps, the attacks on immigrants and democratic rights more generally, and Trump’s threats of military violence and even nuclear war, millions of working people, however reluctantly, will go to the polls to cast their ballots for the official “opposition,” the Democratic Party, which does not actually oppose Trump at all.
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RICHARD EDMONDSON—You would think that the Kagans would be concerned about the prominence in the new government of people like Tyahnybok. In 2005 the Svoboda leader co-signed an open letter to then-President Yuschenko calling for a parliamentary investigation into the “criminal activities of organized Jewry in Ukraine.” He also asserted at one time that Ukraine is run by a “Moscow-Jewish mafia,” and complained that “Germans, kikes, and other scum” were undermining the country. Equally he has expressed solidarity with Stepan Bandera and other Ukrainian insurgents who took up arms in World War II to fight “Muscovites, Germans, Jewry and other filth,” as he put it.