More than 100 Chilean organizations, trade unions and social organizations, who have come together under the banner of Social Unity Roundtable, made a new call to take to the streets Monday to continue their calls for an overhaul of the country’s constitution and economic and political models.
ERIC ZUESSE—What else can we call it when a publisher does what the New York Times did when it published the Pentagon Papers and was ruled by the Supreme Court in 1971 (New York Times Co. v. United States) to have been protected by the First Amendment, but the publisher this time has been kept for years in various types of imprisonment without trial, and by now has been so destroyed that, in this, his first court appearance to defend himself, he seems to have been drugged, but for whatever reason “When asked to give his name and date of birth, he struggled visibly over several seconds to recall both.” “It was a real struggle for him to articulate the words and focus his train of thought.” The event occurred on October 21st.
ALASTAIR CROOKE—What the precision strike has done is to shatter the ‘vessel’ of the US posing as somehow ‘guardian’ of the Gulf, and guarantor of the crude oil lifeblood feeding into the veins of a fragile world economy. This to say, it was a precision strike aimed at the prevailing paradigm – and it scored a direct hit.
JEFF COHEN—Since naked service to corporate elites and “trickle-down” promises don’t sell anymore to an insecure middle class, right-wing leaders like Trump (and Europeans being cultivated by Steve Bannon) are now “populist” and “anti-elites” – openly tapping into racism while scapegoating immigrants for society’s problems…
JOHN SPRITZLER— Yes, a revolution to remove the plutocracy from power and create an egalitarian society without oppression will involve some violence, inevitably. But if a revolution is ever going to succeed in the United States it will be because a huge revolutionary movement develops and it gains the support of a critical mass of members of the military, so that when ordered to attack the movement those soldiers refuse and use their weapons to defend the movement from those who would attack it violently. This is what happened in the February, 1917 revolution in Russia that led to the Czar abdicating. A similar thing happened in Iran, which is why the Shah, even though he thought he had the largest military force in the region, had to flee the country. A revolution most certainly does not mean half the population shooting the other half.