Global
I read the news – invasion of Iraq! twentieth anniversary! – and struggle to transcend the abstraction of my remorse. A million killed? Half a million? The mortality stats vary depending on the source’s politics.
But beyond the numbers looms an indifference that defines what is called “news.”
“Today, 20 years after the president ordered the airstrikes that rained down on Baghdad on the night of March 20, 2003, the war is widely seen in Washington’s power centers as a lesson in failed policymaking, one deeply absorbed if not thoroughly learned.”
Just reading those words – a paragraph in a New York Times analysis of the invasion, two decades later – instantly turns a citizen into a spectator. A lesson of failed policymaking! We’re talking about murdering children, for God’s sake, annihilating a social structure, driving millions of people out of their homes and shattering their lives. Somehow the term “failed policymaking” doesn’t do it justice.
Householder and an associate face up to 20 years in a VERY rare instance of a corrupt official actually being convicted of selling the government to a corporation—and an atomic one at that.
We briefly discuss the crucial Supreme Court race in Wisconsin, where the Democratic party as usual appears fast asleep.
FRANK KNAPP of Businesses for Democracy tells us how his sustainable cohorts are fighting for the right to vote and other basics of a free society.
Then WENDI LEDERMAN introduces us to MAYA VAN ROSSUM whose Green Amendment proposes the revolutionary strategy of appending to state constitutions the core right to a clean environment.
Maya’s pathbreaking work aims to force state governments to acknowledge—UNDER THE LAW---the ability of human beings to protect their survival on a planet being brutally assaulted by corporate greed.
Maya’s strategy and successes are an inspiration and a guidepost to those working for environmental justice and global sustainability.
As hundreds of thousands, throughout Israel, joined anti-government protests, questions began to arise regarding how this movement would affect, or possibly merge, into the wider struggle against the Israeli military occupation and apartheid in Palestine.
Pro-Palestine media outlets shared, with obvious excitement, news about statements made by Hollywood celebrities, the likes of Mark Ruffalo, about the need to “sanction the new hard right-wing government of (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu”.
Back in 2021, we had the revelation of emails from the German Interior Ministry which showed that it enlisted scientists to scare the population.
Last year it, was revealed that the Covid statistics had been falsified by Dutch Health Minister Hugo de Jonge by inflating the numbers.
And now we have the revelation of over 100,000 WhatsApp messages from former British Health Minister, Matt Hancock. The British “Daily Telegraph” has put them online as "The Lockdown Files”.
From all these revelations, it has been shown time and again that the coronavirus was no more deadly than other cold and flu viruses. As we know from flu and colds, these can be fatal to vulnerable, very old people. For anyone under 80, these viruses are almost never fatal. So it was with Covid-19. It was a common cold virus.
Minister Matt Hancock had a discussion with then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson, via WhatsApp about this low mortality rate. He wrote that this was a problem because it meant that vaccination targets would not be met.
This is from one of the people I’m least likely to bother quoting:
“We need a national divorce. . . From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrats’ traitorous America Last policies, we are done.”
The words are those of our fellow American, Marjorie Taylor Greene, sputtering unhinged right-wing comedy for all the country to hear. The point she’s making, of course, is anything but unique. The right-wing chorus of snarling contempt is everywhere, focused essentially on a single word, which is the darling enemy of the moment: Woke.
The sixteenth-biggest bank in the US has just suddenly and dramatically collapsed and is being bailed out by the federal government. This may or may not be a precursor for a cascading series of other bank collapses, but with subprime (aka "variable rate") mortgages being more popular now than they have been since 2007, I smell an imminent financial crisis.
This is not the only thing that makes me think about Occupy Wall Street, and the autumn of 2011, especially, but it's one of them. Witnessing the fizzling-out of another very youthful and multiracial movement that took over the streets throughout the US more recently reminds me a lot of the last time I had that experience, in the wake of Occupy.