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Progressives Vote to Extend Patriot Act
“Members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus capitulated to the surveillance state last week, by supporting a continuing resolution that included a three month extension of Patriot Act mass surveillance authorities, which they claim to oppose. As Ed Snowden revealed, the NSA and FBI were using Section 215 of the Patriot Act to obtain the records of virtually every phone call made in the U.S. It was due to expire in December. The CPC could have demanded serious reforms, or forced the law to sunset. Instead, they gave in. On the bright side, activists now have three months to hold every member…
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Pope Francis in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Condemn Possession of Nuclear Weapons
Pope Francis will travel to Hiroshima and Nagasaki this weekend. On Sunday, he will give a public address at the ground-zero site of the nuclear attack on Nagasaki. … “Twice in 2017, in diplomatic contexts, Francis made remarks that moved the Church away from its support of nuclear deterrence and toward advocating for the abolition of nuclear weapons and condemning their ‘very possession.’” … Clare Grady — one of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7 Activists convicted of three felonies in federal court last month for entering a major U.S. military instillation in 2018 to “symbolically disarm” its Trident nuclear submarines…
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Biden’s Falsehoods on Medicare for All
“The Medicare for All Act of 2019 has 119 cosponsors — majority support of Democrats in the House. … Bernie said it best: ‘We have a system where we spend twice as much on health care as any other country, but we have 80 million uninsured and underinsured. … 500,000 people go bankrupt because of medical-related issues.’ Defending the status quo isn’t going to solve this crisis. Defeatist attitudes and right-wing, Big Pharma-funded talking points won’t win the transformational change we need.”
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Sweden Drops Assange Case, Wikileaks Publisher Faces 175 Years in U.S. on “Espionage”
“Mr. Assange arrived in Sweden two weeks after WikiLeaks published the Afghan War Diaries, the first of a series of four groundbreaking WikiLeaks publications attributed to whistleblower Chelsea Manning. …It is the first time the U.S. has applied the Espionage Act to a publisher. …The Trump administration is seeking a 175-year prison sentence for the same journalistic work that has won Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks dozens of journalism prizes. …The Trump administration’s prosecution of Assange [would] deal a fatal blow to the First Amendment in the United States and set back press freedoms globally.”
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Trump’s Violations of Law and Pelosi/Schiff Impeachment Agenda
“Obviously war crimes are impeachable offenses. Trump is Commander-in-Chief and has become an accomplice to the war crimes he is pardoning. These are just the latest illegal actions by Trump that the Congress is refusing to address. Also, just yesterday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed that Israeli settlements are legal, which is obviously false. They are clearly illegal and violate the Fourth Geneva Convention because they constitute a population transfer under occupation. U.S. funding for that is aiding and abetting clear violations of international law and war crimes.”
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Biden vs. Middle Class?
“In 2008, a month before Biden was elected vice president, [John] Hynansky [of Winner Auto Group] made his biggest political donation: $28,500 to the Democratic National Committee. The next summer, Biden told a roomful of Ukrainian leaders in Kyiv, ‘My very good friend John Hynansky, a very prominent businessman from Delaware, is here.’ That fall, Winner won its first U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) loan, in the amount of $2.5 million. …Given the Trump family’s penchant for mixing personal and official business, it’s tempting to dismiss the Biden clan’s affairs as no crime, no foul. But Biden’s friends and…
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Buttigieg Attacks Medicare for All, Gets Cash from Industry
“Pharmaceutical, health insurance, and hospital industry donors have flocked to [Pete Buttigieg] all year. As of mid-2019, he was second only to Donald Trump in overall campaign cash from donors in the health sector. Among Democratic candidates, he was second to former Vice President Joe Biden in terms of pharmaceutical and health insurance donations. …A Sludge review of Buttigieg’s recent third-quarter campaign finance report shows that as he rails against Medicare for All, executives and other managers in the health sector have kept the money flowing.”
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Bolivian Coup Targeting Indigenous People
“Bolivia’s far right has exploited the power vacuum and stoked anti-indigenous sentiment. Since Morales’s resignation, many officials down the line of succession for the country’s presidency have resigned as well, to protect themselves and their families, leaving Jeanine Añez Chavez, a conservative opposition leader and second vice president of the Senate, poised to take over Bolivia’s presidency. (Añez is married to a leader of a Colombian conservative party with historic ties to paramilitary groups.) Luis Fernando Camacho, a right-wing evangelical lawyer from Santa Cruz who has largely led the opposition movement over the last three weeks, has spouted extremely violent…
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Top Bolivian Coup Plotters Were School of the Americas Grads
“Kaliman sat at the top of a military and police command structure that has been substantially cultivated by the U.S. through WHINSEC [Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation], the military training school in Fort Benning, Georgia known in the past as the School of the Americas. Kaliman himself attended a course called ‘Comando y Estado Mayor’ [Command and General Staff] at the SOA in 2003. …At least six of the key coup plotters were former alumni of the infamous School of the Americas, while Kaliman and another figure served in the past as Bolivia’s military and police attachés in Washington.”
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Israel Bombs Palestinians as Twitter Censors Them
“This alarming act of censorship is another indication of the complicity of major social media firms in Israel’s efforts to suppress news and information about its abuses of Palestinian rights.”
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“With a tiny staff, it has managed to place on the air and in newspapers, points of view otherwise excluded from the national debate.”
Howard Zinn