RIGHT-LEFT STRUGGLE

Revolts are arising all around the world and it can be hard to keep track of them. We speak with Andre Vltchek, a photographer, writer and documentarian who travels all over to cover world events. He brings a deeper understanding of the conditions that have given rise to the protests, the historical context of those conditions and outside forces that may be influencing them. We discuss Lebanon, Hong Kong, China, and the Uyghurs, which are completely propagandized in the United States; and Chile, where people are facing violent state repression and a deeply neoliberal government that has existed since the US-led coup by General Pinochet in 1973.

Lee Camp easily and eloquently lays out the American rationales to destroy ANY nation that chooses a non-capitalist way, doubly so if that nation is rich in some critical natural resource.

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TED RALL—Most cops are conservative. Quite a few are far, far right. “Federal law enforcement agencies in general — the FBI, the Marshals, the ATF — are aware that [right-wing] extremists have infiltrated state and local law enforcement agencies and that there are people in law enforcement agencies that may be sympathetic to these groups,” said Daryl Johnson, lead researcher on an Obama-era DHS report. The FBI was concerned, Johnson said last year, but local police departments don’t seem to care.

CHRIS WRIGHT—How can society ever get to this point? Evidently only through upheavals so painful that it becomes clear there is no other option. Revolutionary change on such a scale happens only by means of unprecedented crisis, which is to say social discontent so extreme that half-measures are cast aside as pitifully inadequate. As long as a large middle class exists to serve as a bulwark of social stability and relatively conservative politics, the requisite crisis will not happen. Society has to polarize between a tiny minority of ultra-rich and a huge majority of unprotected, insecure, ecologically vulnerable, politically desperate people whose violent discontent propels the “revolution” forward.