Democracy Of The Rich

Whenever speaking of politics or government in the United States, the word democracy is heard several times. Sometimes it is combined with some adjectives, such as “the largest” or “the greatest”. There is no doubt that no country in the world has such a vast and untarnished democracy as the United States. However, no one asks who the beneficiary of this democracy is. The term is Greek, and it means the vote or the rule of the people. The question is who these people are.

Preparing taxes, I came across with elimination of some deductions, that was passed by congress on December 22, 2017, under Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The interesting common place among all the enacted status is their titles, which is usually the opposite of what the act is for. For example, this one is not to cut taxes, but to cut deductions, several of them at once, which would increase one’s taxes.

What Your Taxes Are Paying For in Israel

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/12/opinion/israel-palestinians-gaza.html

NICHOLAS KRISTOF

Saying Hamas must pay a “very heavy price” for belligerence, Israeli bombs destroyed a 13-story apartment building in Gaza that had a Hamas presence. And saying Israel “ignited fire” and is “responsible for the consequences,” Hamas launched more rockets at Israel.

We’re now seeing the worst fighting in seven years between Israelis and Palestinians, and again a basic pattern asserts itself: When missiles are flying, hard-liners on each side are ascendant. Civilians die, but extremists on one side empower those on the other.

Israel Is Carrying Out Mass Murder, Aided and Abetted by the US

Friday, May 14, 2021

by

Chris Hedges

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/05/14/israel-carrying-out-mass-murder-aided-and-abetted-us

Israel is not exercising "the right to defend itself" in the occupied Palestinian territories. It is carrying out mass murder. It is a war crime. 

We Could Have Greened Half the US Electrical Grid With $2.26 Wasted on Afghan War

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/04/19/we-could-have-greened-half-us-electrical-grid-226-wasted-afghan-war

Juan Cole- 4/19/2021

The Costs of War Project at Brown University has just brought out a new report on Afghanistan. The September 11, 2001 attacks were launched from Khost and Qandahar in Afghanistan by al-Qaeda, though it is not clear that this organization of Arab expatriates informed their Taliban hosts of what they were planning. The operation involved hijacking commercial airliners and using them as massive suicide bombs. It cost $500,000 or so to pull off, and killed nearly 3,000 persons. We could have avoided our war dead in Afghanistan and our wounded warriors by just getting out in the summer of 2002, in an enormous savings to our country in blood and treasure.

New Wind and Solar Up 50% Globally in 2020

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/04/18/new-wind-and-solar-50-globally-2020-china-beats-us-over-4-1

Juan Cole- 4/18/2021

The new report on 2020 by the International Renewable Energy Agency reveals that the world's renewable energy generation capacity increased by an astonishing 10.3% in 2020 despite the global economic slowdown during the coronavirus pandemic. It beats the previous record for an annual increase in this sector by a healthy 50%.

USA, Inc.

The largest corporation in the world is USA Inc. Not only it is the leading company, but it also is the most influential and the most tightly protected for-profit-organization in the world. The corporation has close to ten thousand owners and co-owners worldwide. The largest military in the world, by far, protects this conglomerate and all its subsidiaries all around the world. With more than 800 military posts in over 70 friendly (!) countries, it is a daring prospect to try to undermine this company. Of course, there are other entities (countries) that have been competing very carefully, due to their special circumstances. One of them is Russia, that is not economically a challenge for the Big Brother, but has not submitted to it either, due to its history. The other one, China, became an economic power taking advantage of the opportunities provided by the United States. Of course, these countries and some other few that have not become America’s plain field, are not considered “Normal” by American establishment, and there have been plans to convert them through smaller and weaker ex-alliances. This has been the case for Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Libya, Syria, with a prospect for a few others, such as Iran. Justifications for such military and covert actions are planned so intelligently (with the aid of majority Americans’ trust in their governments) that such excuses can easily be consumed by American public.

A Model Businessman- Philanthropist

1929     “He should be the most thanked man in the world,” said the New York Times on his seventy-fifth birthday. No buccaneer like many self-made moguls, this enormously wealthy man sought more than money. He was George Eastman, founder of Eastman Kodak, the pioneer of roll film and the simple box camera. His company slogan: “You press the button, we do the rest.” By creating an affordable product that helped preserve memorable moments, George Eastman richened people’s lives.

Who's Rising and Falling on Planet Earth?

 

Dilip Hiro

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/04/20/whos-rising-and-falling-planet-earth

Published on

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

by

TomDispatch

Like his immediate predecessor, Joe Biden is committed to a distinctly anti-China global strategy and has sworn that China will not “become the leading country in the world, the wealthiest country in the world, and the most powerful country in the world… on my watch.” In the topsy-turvy universe created by the Covid-19 pandemic, it was, however, Jamie Dimon, the CEO and chairman of JP Morgan Chase, a banking giant with assets of $3.4 trillion, who spoke truth to Biden on the subject.

Throughout Trial Over George Floyd’s Death, Killings by Police Mount

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/17/us/police-shootings-killings.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage

By John Eligon and Shawn Hubler

• April 17, 2021

MINNEAPOLIS — Just seven hours before prosecutors opened their case against Derek Chauvin, a former Minneapolis police officer charged with murdering George Floyd, a Chicago officer chased down a 13-year-old boy in a West Side alley and fatally shot him as he turned with his hands up. One day later, at a hotel in Jacksonville, Fla., officers fatally shot a 32-year-old man, who, the police say, grabbed one of their Tasers. The day after that, as an eyewitness to Mr. Floyd’s death broke down in a Minneapolis courtroom while recounting what he saw, a 40-year-old mentally ill man who said he was being harassed by voices was killed in Claremont, N.H., in a shootout with the state police. On every day that followed, all the way through the close of testimony, another person was killed by the police somewhere in the United States. The trial has forced a traumatized country to relive the gruesome death of Mr. Floyd beneath Mr. Chauvin’s knee. But even as Americans continue to process that case — and anxiously wait for a verdict — new cases of people killed by the police mount unabated.

The Force That Can Help Amazon’s Workers? Amazon’s Shoppers.

April 10, 2021 

By Farhad Manjoo

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/10/opinion/amazon-warehouse-workers-rights-unions.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

Here are some of the ways that people who have worked inside Amazon’s warehouses describe the experience: “The job crushed my spirit and crippled my body.” “The lowest point in my life.” An “isolating colony of hell.” “They’re killing people mentally and physically.” “I began to hate my day-to-day life.” “The way Amazon pushes people is not moral.” “I had whole days where I didn’t talk to anyone.” “The systematic devaluing of human bodies.”

In City After City, Police Mishandled Black Lives Matter Protests

 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/20/us/protests-policing-george-floyd.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage

By Kim Barker, Mike Baker and Ali Watkins

• March 20, 2021Updated 6:15 p.m. ET

For many long weeks last summer, protesters in American cities faced off against their own police forces in what proved to be, for major law enforcement agencies across the country, a startling display of violence and disarray.

Has Biden’s Description of Putin as a Killer Finally Dispelled Kremlin Hopes for Good Relations?

 http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56472.htm

Paul Craig Roberts

March 20, 2021

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded to Biden’s unacceptable characterization of Russia’s president as a killer by stating that Biden had made it clear that “he doesn’t want to normalize relations.”  In the Kremlin does hope burn eternal?  It has been obvious to me for many years that Washington does not want normal relations with Russia or any country. Washington wants a hegemonic relationship with Washington as the hegemon and Russia as the obedient puppet as Russia was during the Yeltsin decade.

2021 Update: Half of America In or Near Poverty

 https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/02/22/2021-update-half-america-or-near-poverty

Paul Buchheit

Poverty, as defined by the World Bank, is a "pronounced deprivation in well-being." This describes the millions of Americans who are unable to pay for medical treatment; who suffer the stress of delinquent rent and mortgage payments; who see a steady decline of jobs that pay enough to support a family; and who are victims of the surge in drug and alcohol and suicide "deaths of despair" that continue to increase among poor Americans during the COVID-19 crisis.
The facts and numbers from numerous sources reflect the reality of deprivation in America, and help to confirm what has been called the "sharpest rise in the U.S. poverty rate since the 1960s."

How This Country Fails Its Most Vulnerable

 https://tomdispatch.com/how-this-country-fails-its-most-vulnerable/
POSTED ON FEBRUARY 23, 2021
Copyright 2021 Rajan Menon

Economic crises shine a spotlight on a society’s inequities and hierarchies, as well as its commitment to support those who are most vulnerable in such grievous moments. The calamity created by Covid-19 is no exception. The economic fallout from that pandemic has tested the nation’s social safety net as never before.

Between February and May 2020, the number of unemployed workers soared more than threefold — from 6.2 million to 20.5 million. The jobless rate spiked in a similar fashion from 3.8% to 13.0%. In late March, weekly unemployment claims reached 6.9 million, obliterating the previous record of 695,000, set in October 1982. Within three months, the pandemic-produced slump proved far worse than the three-year Great Recession of 2007-2009.

Things have since improved. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced in December that unemployment had fallen to 6.7%. Yet, that same month, weekly unemployment filings still reached a staggering 853,000 and though they fell to just under 800,000 last month, even that far surpassed the 1982 number.

We Must Fight the System, Not Each Other

Link:  https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/02/14/we-must-fight-system-not-each-other

Published on

Sunday, February 14, 2021

by

Common Dreams

Once I saw the connection between domestic and international injustices of our societies and capitalism, I found myself awoken after years of sleeping in the belly of the beast.

by

Elaheh Farmand 

Once a year on our immigration anniversary, my mother and I reflect on our journey from Iran to the United States. In the past, we would celebrate the freedoms we were given in America, embrace the struggles we endured as immigrants to settle in a new home, and learn not only a new language, but also a new way of living, a new culture, a new dream.

But if you ask me to celebrate this immigration today, I would tell you how bittersweet it is to be an American, how disappointing it feels, and how my heart aches with disappointment and rage. Sometime in late 2019, I began learning about the destructiveness of capitalism: its ravaging of our planet earth, imperialism—its disastrous twin—fighting to keep it from collapsing. Once I saw the connection between domestic and international injustices of our societies and capitalism, I found myself awoken after years of sleeping in the belly of the beast.

No One Is Listening: A Country Divided Against Itself

 By Philip Giraldi

January 15, 2021

The U.S. may morph into two nations with the increasingly impoverished helot “deplorables” under the heel of the empowered social justice warriors.

In a recent article Catholic University professor Claes G. Ryn wrote “Few people are really open to persuasion in any case—not just on political subjects but on any subject about which they care and on which they have adopted certain views. Diehard partisans for a certain outlook will refuse to have their beliefs questioned, and so will many others. They will be no less dismissive of a document challenging their opinions if it is full of footnotes and appendixes. Such a document will, indeed, make them resist it even more. As for the relatively few people who are truly open-minded, they will not find another person’s observations dispositive. They will, as they should, want to consider the evidence on a contested matter for themselves.”

9/11 Was the Prelude. 1/6 Is the Holy Grail

 Jan. 14, 2021 By Pepe Escobar

Whether civil war is coming will depend on the degree of stoicism prevalent among the Deplorable multitudes.

I hear the sons of the city and dispossessed

Get down, get undressed

Get pretty but you and me

We got the kingdom, we got the key

We got the empire, now as then

We don’t doubt, we don’t take direction

Lucretia, my reflection, dance the ghost with me

Sisters of Mercy, Lucretia my Reflection

9/11 was the prelude. 1/6 is the Holy Grail.

9/11 opened the gates to the Global War on Terror (GWOT), later softened by Team Obama to the status of Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) even as it was suavely expanded to the bombing, overt or covert, of seven nations.

9/11 opened the gates to the Patriot Act, whose core had already been written way back in 1994 by one Joe Biden.

1/6 opens the gate to the War on Domestic Terror and the Patriot Act from Hell, 2.0, on steroids (here is the 2019 draft ), the full 20,000 pages casually springing up from the sea like Venus, the day after, immediately ready to roll.

And as the inevitable companion to Patriot Act 2.0, there will be war overseas, with the return in full force, unencumbered, of what former CIA analyst Ray McGovern memorably christened the MICIMATT (Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think Tank) complex.

And when MICIMATT starts the next war, every single protest will be branded as domestic terrorism.

Ripe for Fascism: A Post-Coup d’Trump Autopsy of American Democracy

 By: NOLAN HIGDON – MICKEY HUFF

January 14, 2021

For the past few years, the corporate/establishment news media oft analyzed Donald Trump’s presidency in an historical vacuum, ignoring the decades-long, bipartisan embrace of neoliberalism that helped bring about his successful candidacy while focusing sensationally on his cult of reality TV personality. Such bread and circus tunnel vision misses the bigger picture. Trump, even with all his faults, is a symptom of a much larger pattern brought on by increased privatization of the public sphere, especially in the realms of education and media, which go back over half a century, particularly the past forty years. With the continued degradation of these key pillars of our society, our civic and information literacy has suffered greatly at a time when the world has become more complex, and our country more unequal. As a consequence, we have become more partisan, more divided, and more estranged from one another as a society. We argued this in our book, United States of Distraction, and unfortunately our thesis continues to ring true.

The Empire Is Not Done with Julian Assange

 By: Chris Hedges

January 5, 2021

Shortly after WikiLeaks released the Iraq War Logs in October 2010, which documented numerous US war crimes — including video images of the gunning down of two Reuters journalists and 10 other unarmed civilians in the Collateral Murder video, the routine torture of Iraqi prisoners, the covering up of thousands of civilian deaths and the killing of nearly 700 civilians that had approached too closely to US checkpoints — the towering civil rights attorneys Michael Ratner and Len Weinglass, who had defended Daniel Ellsberg in the Pentagon Papers case, met Julian Assange in a studio apartment in Central London, according to Ratner’s newly released memoir “Moving the Bar”.

America’s Defining Problem In 2021 Isn’t China: It’s America

A new essay casts doubt on the China threat as promulgated by our nation's ruling elite.

JANUARY 4, 2021

ANDREW J. BACEVICH

Writing in the journal Palladium, Richard Hanania has produced the first must-read essay of 2021. A research fellow at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, Hanania is part of an emerging generation of young scholars who reject the increasingly dubious verities of the Cold War and post-Cold War eras. Their arrival comes not a moment too soon.