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FBI Whistleblower on Comey and Clinton
“Comey is neither saint nor villain but someone who has been around the block. As an acting Attorney General, he’s actually been in his nominal boss’s Loretta Lynch’s exact position and knows how the political pressures as well as media disclosures (i.e. leaking to the public) work. Although he wasn’t really challenging mass surveillance of American citizens or the CIA’s use of torture back March 2004 in Ashcroft’s hospital room, he did stand up to John Yoo’s (presidentially ordained) pettifoggery establishing a form of martial law after 9-11, based on (fascistic) ‘imperial presidency’ war powers.
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“Historic” U.N. Vote for Nuclear Ban
“The United States, which led the opposition, had hoped to limit the ‘Yes’ vote to less than one hundred, but failed badly. The final vote was 123 For, 38 Against and 16 Abstentions. The ‘No’ votes came from the nuclear weapons states, and U.S. allies in NATO, plus Japan, South Korea and Australia, which have treaty ties to the U.S., and consider themselves to be under the protection of the ‘U.S. nuclear umbrella.’
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Clinton’s America: Wall Street in the Saddle
“Among the emails sent to John Podesta that were posted by WikiLeaks is an article I wrote for TomDispatch on the Clintons’ relationships with bankers. ‘She will not point fingers at her friends,’ I said in that piece in May 2015. ‘She will not chastise the people who pay her hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop to speak or the ones who have long shared the social circles in which she and her husband move.’ I also suggested that she wouldn’t call out any CEO by name. To this day she hasn’t.”
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Israeli “General’s Son” Facing Sentencing, on U.S. Election
Peled’s sentencing takes place on Nov. 8th — Election Day in the U.S. He says, “The 2016 elections give Americans an opportunity to speak up against the $38 Billion boondoggle in foreign aid to Israel. Israel is a fully developed country that neither needs nor deserves foreign aid. Much of this money will go to activity that contravenes U.S. laws, yet both major candidates wholeheartedly support it.”
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Coup in Venezuela?
“The fact is that democratic institutions in Venezuela have been expanding, even to including methods of direct democracy, like the commune. Far from being a dictatorship, Venezuela had the opposition win the legislature last year — and now the opposition seems set on using that to overthrow the democratically-elected Venezuela government.
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Affordable Care Act: “Imploding and Beyond Repair”
“Premium increases for 2017 under the Affordable Care Act are being reported in a number of states (e.g. 59 percent in Minnesota up to 119 percent in Arizona), typically associated with reduced choice of health plans as more insurers exit the market. The costs of health insurance and health care already exceed $25,000 a year for a family of four on an average employer-sponsored plan as these increases become unaffordable and unsustainable for a growing part of our population.”
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Iceland: Pirate Party Victory?
Fontaine said today: “This time around, we have a party dominating the polls that is touting itself as a genuine alternative to the old order, and the international press has been quick to run with this narrative. If you read the platform of the Pirate Party, there definitely is a lot about it that pushes against the grain; in particular, their emphasis on government transparency, direct democracy and increased democratic participation, and finishing up that new constitution already.
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AT&T&Time&Warner vs Democracy
It could also spur a new wave of mergers between other content and distribution companies, encouraging an already highly concentrated media system to become more consolidated. In the coming weeks and months, we will no doubt hear from industry representatives that such a merger would provide many public benefits. But historically this has rarely been the case.
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On the Stealing of U.S. Elections
As for voter-eligibility, it is deliberately narrowed through the time-honored practice of using ‘states’ rights’ to impose racist agendas. Most states deny voting rights to ex-convicts, a practice that currently disenfranchises some six million citizens, disproportionately from communities of color. More recently, targeting the same constituencies, many states have passed onerous and unnecessary voter-ID laws.
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Clinton’s “Incredibly Dangerous” Nuclear Brinkmanship
Blog
“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