WEI LING CHUA—It took China 15 years of negotiation with the US before the US allowed China to enter the WTO in 2000. During that time, the West was happy to transfer polluted and labor-intensive industries to China: they were happy to allow China to set up factories to assemble iPhones for Apple. Why not? Apple pays the price of a cappuccino to the Chinese factories for each iPhone assembled while selling the iPhones back to Chinese consumers and the rest of the world for hundreds of dollars per unit of iPhone.
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CHRIS HEDGES—Durham’s 306-page report, sent to Congress by Attorney General Merrick Garland earlier this week, is even more excoriating. It concludes that the FBI engaged in a witch hunt — code-named Crossfire Hurricane — orchestrated by Hillary Clinton’s campaign that was aided and abetted by senior FBI officials who loathed Trump. The Clinton campaign provided bogus information to the FBI about ties between Trump and Russia, including a charge made by Michael Sussmann and Marc Elias, the General Counsel to the Clinton campaign, that there was a secret channel between the Trump Organization and the Russian Alfa Bank.
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ERIC ZUESSE—Ether Russia will win the war in Ukraine, or else America and its allies will, because there is no longer even the possibility for an ending to that war by any sort of mutual agreement between the two sides: it won’t be a negotiated settlement. For one side it will be victory; for the other it will be defeat.
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CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Journalist Max Blumenthal tweeted about Patel’s remarks, “According to this State Dept flack, Julian Assange’s jailing is justified because he ‘harmed US national security.’ But Assange is not an American citizen. By this logic, the US can kidnap and indefinitely detain any foreign journalist who offends the US national security state.”
It is good that activists and journalists have been doing so much to highlight the US empire’s hypocrisy as it crows self-righteously about its love of press freedoms while persecuting the world’s most famous journalist for doing great journalism. Highlighting this hypocrisy shows that the US empire does not in fact care about press freedoms at all, save only to the extent that it can pretend to care about them to wag its finger at governments it doesn’t like.
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ALEX RUBINSTEIN—The covert nature of Ukrainian drone attacks inside Russian territory makes them difficult to tally on an authoritative basis. A reporter for the British state-funded BBC pressed a Kiev official to provide such data to no avail while participating in “a training session for Ukraine’s latest group of drone pilots in a secret location on the outskirts of Kyiv.” The BBC filed its dispatch from the heart of Ukraine’s “Army of Drones” on April 25, just two days after the alleged SBU-directed aerial assassination attempt on Russia’s president.
