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New Trump Nominee and the Pentagon Accounting Scandal
“Shanahan was ‘cleared’ by the Pentagon of charges that he favored his old employer in contract awards by the Pentagon. Shanahan oversaw the first ever complete audit (not!) of the Pentagon last year which ended in a blowout failure on Nov. 15. In announcing the failure, he made light of it, saying ‘We expected to fail,’ and asked the press corps to give the Pentagon credit ‘for trying.’ This is laughable. For 20 years they have stonewalled Congressional orders to develop an auditable budget — something every other federal agency and department has had to do and has been able…
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Racism of the Venezuelan Opposition
“From 2007, several or more Afro-descendants have been burned alive by the violent sectors of the opposition. There were regular depictions in elements of the opposition of Chavez as a monkey — they highlight his curly hair and big lips as part of the racialized nature of their outlook. Skin color is a substantial indicator of privilege in Venezuela.”
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Trump State Department in “Wholesale Violation” of Law at Venezuelan Embassy
“The Trump State Department, working with and through the Secret Service and the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, is engaged in wholesale violation of civil rights, constitutional rights, and international law. The State Department has authorized violations of core provisions of the Vienna Convention — an unprecedented step that will have global repercussions. Even in times of war diplomatic missions have remained protected between countries. Law enforcement is allowing and facilitating acts of violence and terror against peace activists inside and outside the embassy refusing to arrest members of the right-wing mob who commit assaults in plain view. The State Department…
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Scrutinizing the Bolton/Pompeo/Trump Threats to Iran
“Donald Trump’s key advisers are looking for an excuse for an air attack on Iran, and they have now taken a big step closer to their publicly announced objective. Pompeo and Bolton both threatened war with Iran last September over a few mortar shells landng in the vicinity of … the U.S. Embassy and a consulate in Iraq, blaming Iran-backed militias that are fighting ISIS. Now they have broadened the rationale for war to include any attack on an ally’s interests — after consultations with the Israelis last month.”
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Environmental Disasters and Their Beneficiaries
“‘Denial’ is what they broadcast to the public. To the captains of industry, Pompeo is confirming that climate change is indeed taking place and is something to rejoice in! However, the very ice-melting that makes him salivate will lead, at the same time, to the submersion of coastal regions — including major population centers — around the world.” Wallis added that this might result in “opportunities” for “disaster capitalism” that are economic in nature, but “perhaps more significantly, would provide pretext for tightening the screws politically.”
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Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation
“The way sentences are constructed and the word choices made (‘militant,’ ‘retaliation,’ etc.) frame the story in such a way that the story is told before it even really begins, because the words have done their work. (Once you hear that a state is ‘retaliating’ for ‘militant’ rocket fire, what more do you really need to know? And how different would it be if you read that the rockets were being fired in ‘retaliation’ for years of occupation?). ‘Militant’ is used to describe Palestinians but not Israelis (who are presumably peaceable).”
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At Venezuelan Embassy: U.S. Government Ignoring Vienna Convention, “Facilitating Right-Wing Mob’s Illegal Acts”
She said today that the peace activists at the Venezuelan embassy “remain lawfully present until divested of that right, which has not happened. If they were not lawfully present law enforcement would be able to take lawful steps to have them leave, but instead it is trying to force them to leave by allowing and facilitating a right-wing mob to commit repeated illegal acts — directly in front of law enforcement who repeatedly allow such criminal acts — in an effort to besiege and embargo the embassy. If the State Department or the police had probable cause to assert they…
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Issues with Mueller: Was There a Russian “Attack”? Why Didn’t He Question Assange?
“Mueller begins, on Page 1, with this assertion: ‘The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion.’ Maybe so, but Mueller, who is not averse to editorializing and contextualizing elsewhere in the report, gives readers no historical background or context for this large generalization. In particular, was the interference — or ‘meddling,’ as media accounts characterize it — more or less ‘sweeping and systematic’ than was Washington’s military intervention in the Russian civil war in 1918 or its very intrusive campaign to re-elect Russian President Boris Yeltsin in 1996 — or, on the other side…
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Time to Pursue an International Cyber Treaty?
“Harvard University political scientist Joseph Nye cites the precedent set by the 1972 Incidents at Sea Agreement that sought to limit behavior on the high seas that might lead to escalation and war. Says Nye, ‘Skeptics object that such an arrangement is impossible, owing to the differences between American and Russian values. But even greater ideological differences did not prevent agreements related to prudence during the Cold War.'”
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Venezuela: U.S Sanctions Killing Tens of Thousands
Wesibrot and Sachs, two noted economists, co-authored a just-released report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research estimating that U.S. Sanctions on Venezuela are responsible for tens of thousands of deaths.
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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