G H ELIASON—The inadequacies Ukraine faced in 2014 and display today show how quickly inept, bumbling leadership can turn to vile criminality. The Ukrainian Diaspora volunteer battalions like Donbass, Kiev1, Dniepr, Azov, etc, almost immediately turned to rob, raping, murder, and torture in the towns and villages they came across. They weren’t fighting forces but they had military weapons and hardware with no real leadership and a very cultivated drunk and drugged up nationalist perspective.
READ ONCategory: ROTTEN ESTABLISHMENT
Three Cheers for the Decline of the Middle Class
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.
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When Bernie Sold Out His Hero, Anti-Authoritarians Paid
BRUCE LEVINE—Wilson’s venom for Debs was such that even after the end of the war, Wilson announced, “This man was a traitor to his country and he will never be pardoned during my administration.” Wilson even denied a pardon for Debs when it was recommended because of Debs’s poor health by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer (notorious for his “Palmer Raids,” incarcerating and deporting dissenters). It was the Republican president Warren Harding, following Wilson, who commuted Debs’s sentence in 1921.
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Russian military plane with 14 on board disappears during Israeli strikes on Latakia
RT.COM—Air traffic controllers at the Khmeimim Air Base “lost contact” with the aircraft on Monday evening, during the attack of Israeli F-16 fighters on Latakia, said the MOD. The plane was 35 kilometers off the coast of Syria when it vanished. Russian radars also registered the launch of missiles from a French frigate in the Mediterranean on the evening of September 17. Fourteen people were on board the plane at the time of the disappearance. A search and rescue mission is underway. The Ilyushin 20 (IL-20) surveillance turboprop plane is an Electronic Intelligence (ELINT) platform, equipped with a wide range of antennas, infrared and optical sensors. The aircraft’s SLAR (Side-Looking Airborne Radar) and the plane’s satellite link allows the Russian military to monitor Syrian skies in real time.
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