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Trump and Modi
“The theatrical display of camaraderie between President Trump and Indian Prime Minister Modi in the ‘Howdy Mody’ event in Houston is representative of the shared bonds between two of the leading icons of ultra-right wing, xenophobic, quasi-fascist, nationalist tendencies emerging in the world today. The Hindu supremacist political party of Modi, the BJP, is a mirror image of the white supremacy that Trump’s ideology epitomizes. Modi and the BJP’s genealogy is of course based on a century of fascist mobilization and thought, inspired by European fascism.”
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Climate Protests: * Amazon * War
“The U.S. military is one of the biggest polluters on earth. Since 2001, the U.S. military has emitted 1.2 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases, equivalent to the annual emissions of 257 million cars on the road. The U.S. Department of Defense is the largest institutional consumer of oil ($17B/year) in the world, and the largest global landholder with 800 foreign military bases in 80 countries…As the environmental crisis worsens, thinking of war as a tool with which to address it threatens us with the ultimate vicious cycle. Declaring that climate change causes war misses the reality that human beings…
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Last Year Teachers, Now GM Strike
“A successful strike at General Motors could persuade UAW members that the union is willing to take significant risks to fight on behalf of its members, potentially opening the door to more organizing in the anti-union South, where many auto plants have migrated…’We are the architects of showing a better way, showing the light and that’s what I think would be really beneficial if UAW was successful,’ says UAW staff representative Mark Barbee.”
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Israel: “Apartheid Vote”
“…this was an apartheid vote with an apartheid outcome. Any conversation about the election needs to include the context of millions of Palestinians who have no vote over who rules them…While Netanyahu not being around is a pleasant prospect, Cahol Lavan [Blue and White] must be understood as a rightwing party with less corruption issues. It will be easy for people less deeply steeped in it all to feel complacent/less urgent if there is a less belligerent face on the government; And for those of us outside of Israel, who have gotten [accustomed] over 10 years to the Netanyahu playbook,…
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New Advisor is “Bolton Lite”
“Will O’Brien work to get the U.S. out of Afghanistan? Or will he expand/facilitate war with Iran? Track record suggests latter…This is still a triumph for Pompeo, who gets a State guy in there and a weaker NSA than [with] Bolton. Pompeo is achieving Kissingerian levels of power in national security…”
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Medicine for All
“Forcing pharmaceutical companies to compete with a public alternative that does not answer to Wall Street and its demands for profit extraction would transform the market in ways that empowering the federal government to negotiate prices for a subset of drugs would not. It would also mean that patients with chronic diseases like diabetes would not be forced to ration their medication because a drug company executive felt compelled to jack up its price hundreds of percentage points above cost.”
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Why Would Saudi Arabia Get Attacked?
“Easy to think of a rationale, with the U.S. (along with the Saudis) working to destroy not only [Iran’s] petroleum system but their whole economy, a consideration that seems to be left out of commentary that reflexively accepts that what the U.S. is doing, however shocking, cannot really be that bad, perhaps an error in judgment. The Houthi also have more than enough reason.”
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Trump Threatens War With Iran: Why is Congress AWOL?
“It’s certainly true that Congress is charged with deciding whether or not to declare war. But the Congress has failed to live up to its responsibility as the U.S. is waging war in Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Niger and elsewhere without a constitutionally mandated declaration of war. The U.S. government is also providing critical assistance to Saudi Arabia in what is effectively a genocidal war in Yemen.”
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Beyond the Wall “Debate”: The “Bipartisan Border Industrial Complex”
“Joe Biden was not telling the truth when at the debate on Thursday he said that the Obama administration did not ‘lock people in cages’ or ‘separate families.’ The statement is an impossible one given the nearly 3 million deportations during the eight years of Obama, the most ever by a sitting president, among other things. With his denial what Biden tried to do was extract himself from a vicious border and immigration enforcement system that the Obama administration both bolstered and helped normalize.”
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Biden: New Level of Iraq War Lies
Presidential candidate Joe Biden is now claiming about the 2003 Iraq invasion: “Yes, I did oppose the war before it began.”…Tracey also writes: “When I reminded Biden that if he opposed the war all along, he could have joined 23 of his Senate colleagues in voting against authorizing it, he replied: ‘No, no, because they argued against authorizing the ability to get the United Nations to go back in with inspectors. We needed the Security Council to get a vote to put inspectors in to determine whether or not there was any nuclear activity going on.'” This statement is wrong…
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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