.................RATIONAL THINKING.................. مرا جهل در کامِ دیو میبَرَد.............از آن دوستی میکنم با خِرَد
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/02/opinion/biden-foreign-policy.html?searchResultPosition=1
12/2/2020
There’s a lot we still
don’t know about how President-elect Joe Biden and his foreign policy team will
approach the world. But this much is clear: They believe in American
“leadership.”
In a 2015 speech, Antony
Blinken, Mr. Biden’s choice to be secretary of state, employed some version of
the word 21 times. This spring, Mr. Biden wrote an essay in Foreign Affairs
titled “Why America Must Lead Again.” Last week, when he introduced his
national security nominees, he said that “America is back, ready to lead the
world.”
Let’s hope not. In the post-Trump age, “leadership” is a misguided, and even dangerous, vision for America’s relationship with the rest of the globe.
Marx wrote all of his analyses and criticisms of capitalism well over one hundred and fifty years ago. Since then the capitalists have been working overtime to discount and demonize his assessments of capitalism as a system that exploits and indeed enslaves workers in order to profit from their labor. Our big business rulers have used their monopoly over state power and the mass media to inoculate the population against Marx’ ideas and strategies, which have historically been used to organize the workers and their allies throughout the world, and thus threatened the unchecked power of capital. Our corporate rulers have sought to discount Marx’s ideas as wrong or irrelevant for our times. But if this is so, then why not show this by widely presenting these ideas for discussion and debate? After all, do we not have “democracy” and “free speech” here in the “exceptional “US? Is not our system of education a “market- place for ideas?”
To be a nuclear scientist in Iran is to be in danger. During the past decade, up to this week, at least four had been killed in vehicle bombings and shootouts, and several others have been targeted but survived. On Friday, the alleged architect of Iran's military nuclear program joined the ranks of the slain. Armed assassins gunned down Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in his car in an ambush in Absard city, outside the capital Tehran.
Biden’s transition team is filled
with war profiteers, Beltway chickenhawks, and corporate consultants
11/14/2020
KEVIN GOSZTOLA
A glance at the
Biden-Harris agency review teams should provide a rude awakening to anyone who
believed a Biden administration could be “pushed to the left.”
An eye-popping array
of corporate consultants, war profiteers, and national security hawks have been
appointed by President-elect Joe Biden to agency review teams that will set the
agenda for his administration. A substantial percentage of them worked in the
United States government when Barack Obama was president.
The appointments
should provide a rude awakening to anyone who believed a Biden administration
could be pressured to move in a progressive direction, especially on foreign
policy.
If the agency teams are any indication, Biden will be firmly insulated from any pressure to depart from the neoliberal status quo, which the former vice president has pledged to restore. Instead, he is likely to be pushed in an opposite direction, towards an interventionist foreign policy dictated by elite Beltway interests and consumed by Cold War fever.
Link: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/55875.htm
By Phillip Giraldi
November 15, 2020
Donald Trump was much troubled during his 2016 and 2020 campaigns by so-called conservatives who rallied behind the #NeverTrump banner, presumably in opposition to his stated intention to end or at least diminish America’s role in wars in the Middle East and Asia. Those individuals are generally described as neoconservatives but the label is itself somewhat misleading and they might more properly be described as liberal warmongers as they are closer to the Democrats than the Republicans on most social issues and are now warming up even more as the new Joe Biden Administration prepares to take office.
To be sure, some
neocons stuck with the Republicans, to include the highly controversial Elliott
Abrams, who initially opposed Trump but is now the point man for dealing with
both Venezuela and Iran. Abrams’ conversion reportedly took place when he realized
that the new president genuinely embraced unrelenting hostility towards Iran as
exemplified by the ending of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and
the assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad. John Bolton
was also a neocon in the White House fold, though he is now a frenemy having
been fired by the president and written a book.
One Third of Biden's Pentagon Transition Team Hails From Organizations Financed by the Weapons Industry. The president-elect is drawing from hawkish think tanks funded by arms companies.
In July 2019, while campaigning for the Democratic nomination for president, Joe Biden declared in a foreign policy speech, “It’s past time to end the Forever Wars, which have cost us untold blood and treasure.” But the president-elect — who as vice president oversaw wars in Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan and more — is already embracing personnel with strong ties to the military apparatus driving this endless combat.
از شماره دسامبر ماهنامه "کشفDiscover "،
صفحه ۱۳
در سال ۱۶۱۰، زمانیکه گالیله تلسکوپ تازه ساز خود را به سمت آسمان نشانه گرفت، به جهانی پی برد که تا آن زمان ناشناخته بود. او ستارگان بیشماری را در پهنه راه شیری دید که تا آن زمان از چشمان غیر مسلح پوشیده بودند. کیهان در آن لحظه بطرز وسیعی گسترش یافت. حدود سه قرن پس از آن، زمانی که دانشمندان تلسکوپی ساختند که نشان داد که راه شیری تنها یکی از "جزایر عالم وجود" بود، کائنات بار دیگر بطرز وسیعی گسترش یافتند. از آن زمان به بعد، با توسعه در پیشرفت های تلسکوپی، جهان قابل دید به ۹۲ بیلیون سال نوری که در بر گیرنده دو تریلیون کهکشان است، وسعت پیدا کرده است. و همچنان اختر شناسان در شگفت میباشند که پیشرفت آن قسمت از این جهان که از دید ما خارج است، چه اندازه است.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/11/02/biden-a-war-cabinet/
11/2/2020
“Let’s bring decency and integrity back to the White House.” I can’t count the number of times I have heard and read this phrase uttered by U.S. expats here in Paris, France. As one of many American expats living here, of course I share in the desire for an end to a Donald Trump presidency. But at what cost? And will a Biden presidency — which promises a return to “normalcy” — really merit the sigh of relief that so many think it will? Below I summaries some of the most troubling information I have uncovered about some of the most likely foreign policy picks for key positions in a Biden cabinet.
دموکراسی چیست؟ کشورهای خاورمیانه به عنوان ممالکی با دولتهای دیکتاتوری شناخته میشوند، که اکثرا یک نفر یا یک خانواده یا یک قوم آنها را اداره میکنند. کشورهای غربی، از طرف دیگر به عنوان ممالکی با دول دموکرات به ما معرفی میشوند. ولی آیا این چنین است؟ پاسخ به این پرسش را باید با نگرشی به طرز حکومت این کشورها یافت. کشورهای عربی که یک خانواده (ملک فیصل به عنوان نمونه) آنها را اداره میکنند دقیقا چنین مشخصه ای دارند. انهایی که دولتشان از طریق آراء مردم برگزیده میشوند، تحت نظر رهبری که در بالای دولت نشسته است (مانند خامنه ای) عموما از طرف گروه خاصی حمایت میشوند، و یا رییس جمهور مادامالعمر هستند (مانند مصر)، و یا اشراف و یا طبقه مذهبی و یا مالی آنها را به آن مقام میرسانند. جالب است که دقیقا همین طرز حکومت را میتوان در کشورهای غربی نیز جست.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/27/us/guns-2020-election.html?searchResultPosition=2
Oct. 27, 2020
By Dionne Searcey and
Oct. 23, 2020
By Hugh Iglarsh
Link:https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/23/advertising-vs-democracy-an-interview-with-jean-kilbourne/
There it is, on
page 56 of Jean Kilbourne’s book Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We
Think and Feel: the graphic that stopped me cold and made me
realize just how prophetic was her work (originally published in hardcover in
1999 as Deadly Persuasion: Why Women and Girls Must Fight
the Addictive Power of Advertising). It was an ad for a German
marketing firm, contained within a decades-old issue of the trade journal Advertising
Age. Beneath a corporate cornucopia of All-American legacy brands
and products – Levi’s, Pepsi, Camel cigarettes, a Chiquita banana, a Big Mac,
etc. – was the caption, “Let’s make America great again.”
With its depiction of American “greatness” as a collage of
heavily advertised commodities, the ad would have seemed crass and stupid when
it first appeared, but hardly remarkable. Now, of course, that cluster of words
and pictures glitters with irony and implication. The caption of this homage to
consumerism suggests a link between the slick hucksterism of the ad business
and the fanatical nationalism of the MAGA cult. Is the connection real? If so,
how does the Trump phenomenon – that cheesy mash-up of reality TV and Triumph
of the Will – relate to the marketing and PR that saturate
American culture and consciousness? Is Trump’s ugly but compelling political
spectacle, which hogs the media foreground, an outgrowth of the inescapable,
desensitizing background noise that is advertising?
By
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/23/opinion/Trump-biden-debates.html?searchResultPosition=1
Oct. 10, 2020
By
While reading that
President Trump had claimed $70,000 in highly dubious tax
deductions for hair styling for his television show, I kept
thinking about a homeless African-American woman named Tanya McDowell who was
imprisoned for misleading officials to get her young son into a better school
district.
McDowell was sentenced to five years in prison in 2012, in part for drug offenses and in part for “larceny” because she had claimed her babysitter’s address so her son could attend a better school in Connecticut.
As the world makes slow if uneven progress on social and environmental performance, the United States is falling behind its peer nations, among the few countries to see its Social Progress Index (SPI) score decline during the past decade.
Recent global statistics disclose number of Coronavirus cases and fatalities as a result of that. A quick view is presented below. Special attention is to the cases per one million and comparison of countries in this respect.
By: Medea Benjamine and Nicolas JS Davies
If the Democrats manage to push Joe Biden over the finish line
in November’s election, he will find himself presiding over a decadent,
declining empire. He will either continue the policies that have led the
American empire to decadence and decline, or seize the moment to move our
nation into a new phase: a transition to a peaceful and sustainable
post-imperial future.
The
foreign policy team Biden assembles will be key, including his choice for
Secretary of Defense. But Biden’s rumored favorite, Michele Flournoy, is not
the gal for this historic moment. Yes, she would break the glass ceiling as the
first female Secretary of Defense, but, as one of the architects of our endless
wars and record military budgets, she would only help to steer the American empire
farther down its current path of lost wars, corrupt militarism and terminal decline.
By: Cass R. Sunstein
Link: https://getpocket.com/explore/item/it-can-happen-here?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Many accounts of the Nazi period depict a barely imaginable
series of events, a nation gone mad. That makes it easy to take comfort in the
thought that it can’t happen again.
Liberal
democracy has enjoyed much better days. Vladimir Putin has entrenched
authoritarian rule and is firmly in charge of a resurgent Russia. In global
influence, China may have surpassed the United States, and Chinese president Xi
Jinping is now empowered to remain in office indefinitely. In light of recent
turns toward authoritarianism in Turkey, Poland, Hungary, and the Philippines,
there is widespread talk of a “democratic recession.” In the United States,
President Donald Trump may not be sufficiently committed to constitutional
principles of democratic government.
