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Another Way ‘Democracy’ Is Rigged in America
Eric Zuesse
Did you know that if a given political party already has an incumbent in a particular political post, it’s standard practice in the United States for a political party to prohibit its voter-list to be purchased by anyone who’s not an incumbent office-holder in that party — including by someone who wishes to challenge or contest within that party the incumbent, in a primary election?
Only incumbents have access to that crucial list — crucial for any candidate in a primary election (unless there is no incumbent who is of that party).
Here’s an example:
Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, a long-time unquestioningly loyal operative of Hillary Clinton, was selected by the Democratic President Barack Obama (though she had condemned Obama while he was running against Clinton in 2008) to run the Democratic National Committee, so that Obama’s Administration will be continued with little change by his (chosen) successor (just a change of the President’s name, and only a bit more of a neo-conservative on her foreign policies than he was). However, Ms. DWS has a very low approval-rating from her constituents, and a Bernie Sanders supporter wants to contest against her in a Democratic primary. But, he says:
Last week, I called the Florida Democratic Party to request access to the voter file database and software known as VAN that is routinely used by Democratic candidates across the country.
The global refugee crisis: humanity's last call for a culture of sharing and cooperation
Rajesh Makwana
The real crisis is not the influx of refugees to Europe per se but a toxic combination of destabilising foreign policy agendas, economic austerity and the rise of right-wing nationalism, which is likely to push the world further into social and political chaos in the months ahead.
Razor-wire fences, detention centres, xenophobic rhetoric and political disarray; nothing illustrates the tendency of governments to aggressively pursue nationalistic interests more starkly than their inhumane response to refugees fleeing conflict and war. With record numbers of asylum seekers predicted to reach Europe this year and a morally acceptable humanitarian response nowhere in sight, the immediate problem is more apparent than ever: the abject failure of the international community to share the responsibility, burden and resources needed to safeguard the basic rights of asylum seekers in accordance with international law.
U.S. Government Blames 9/11 on Iran, Fines Iran $10.5B; Iran Refuses to Pay
Eric Zuesse
On March 14th, Iran announced that it will never pay the $10.5B that a U.S. court demanded it pay for the 9/11 attacks.
The same Bill-Clinton-appointed judge who had ruled, on 29 September 2015, that Saudi Arabia has sovereign immunity for 9/11 and so can’t be sued for it, ruled recently, on March 9th that Iran doesn’t have sovereign immunity and fined Iran $10.5 billion to be paid to 9/11 victims and insurers; but, on March 14, Iran’s Foreign Ministry said Iran won’t pay, because, as the Ministry’s spokesman Hossein Jaberi Ansari put it, "The ruling is ludicrous and absurd to the point that it makes a mockery of the principle of justice while [it] further tarnishes the US judiciary’s reputation.”
Syrian Kurds Declare Autonomous Northern Region
Stephen Lendman
Syria’s Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) officials meeting with Arabs and other northern Syria ethnic groups in Rmeilan, in Syria’s northeastern Hasakeh province, agreed on establishing area autonomy, short of declaring independence - acting perhaps with tacit US support.
Turkey remains adamantly opposed, a foreign ministry statement saying acting unilaterally has no validity.
Syrian UN envoy/head of its Geneva III delegation, Bashar al-Jaafari, said his government intends preserving the nation’s sovereign independence and territorial integrity.
Exposing the Libyan Agenda: A Closer Look at Hillary’s Emails
Ellen Brown
Critics have long questioned why violent intervention was necessary in Libya. Hillary Clinton’s recently published emails confirm that it was less about protecting the people from a dictator than about money, banking, and preventing African economic sovereignty. The brief visit of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Libya in October 2011 was referred to by the media as a “victory lap.” “We came, we saw, he died!” she crowed in a CBS video interview on hearing of the capture and brutal murder of Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi.
But the victory lap, write Scott Shane and Jo Becker in the New York Times, was premature. Libya was relegated to the back burner by the State Department, “as the country dissolved into chaos, leading to a civil war that would destabilize the region, fueling the refugee crisis in Europe and allowing the Islamic State to establish a Libyan haven that the United States is now desperately trying to contain.”
Are Both Trump and Sanders Falling for a Dirty Trick from Clinton?
Eric Zuesse
On Saturday, I provided a transcript of a remarkable allegation by a gifted private investigator who has a background not only as a crackerjack reporter about political dirty tricks in both Parties, but formerly as Richard Nixon’s top dirty-trickster himself, and who has recently turned against the Republican Party’s establishment and become a Trump supporter: he hates both Hillary Clinton and the Republican Establishment candidates, because he has become rabid against their shared hypocrisies, which know no Party (and that is certainly true). He said, alleging his inside sources (which he really does have, and which has made him so formidable in the past), that Hillary Clinton worked with George Soros and the son of Peter Lewis, and one unnamed member of Congress, to arrange for black supporters of Bernie Sanders in Chicago and elsewhere, to go violent at Trump rallies, so as to draw public contempt upon both Hillary’s current opponent, Sanders, and her general-election opponent Trump. It’s a brilliant tactic, if it is the real explanation for those incidents, but, shockingly, both Trump and Sanders are playing along with it — even if Hillary’s team aren’t behind it (in which case, they’d both be unprincipled, not merely stupid, for not condemning anyone at any political rally who incites violence at any political rally — which neither of them has yet clearly done).
America’s Laughable ‘News’ Media
Eric Zuesse
As of Friday March 4th, democracy ended in Turkey, but you’d hardly have known it by reading the international ‘news’ at the major (and at most of the minor) U.S.-based ‘news’ sites, as of around 4PM Eastern time in the U.S., nearly a day after the event. Nor has it been announced even now, ten days after that historic event occurred.
Here was the ‘news’ coverage the next day, March 5th, 24 hours after the event:
The New York Times World News section online buried nearly a third of the way down the main page, "Turkey Seizes Newspaper, Zaman, as Press Crackdown Continues,” immediately below “Gunmen Kill 16 at Nursing Home in Yemen.” The news report didn’t even mention that the government-seizure of Turkey’s largest newspaper and its associated equivalent of America’s AP news-service constitutes the signal event in Turkish President Erdogan’s ending of his country’s democracy. It’s like: when did the NYT ever report that George W. Bush had lied about the evidence he had regarding “Saddam’s WMD”? Never.
Proof that Ignorance Drives Clinton’s Voters
Eric Zuesse
Although no organization that predictively polls the Democratic Presidential primaries has sampled the question (or its equivalent) “What is the most important reason why you prefer that candidate?” the assumption by political pundits has always been that, regarding Hillary Clinton voters, perhaps the most important reason for their choice of Clinton over Sanders is that she would be a stronger candidate against the Republican nominee in the general election than Bernie Sanders would be. The widely presumed argument there is that Clinton “has more experience” and is more “mainstream” than Sanders, whom ‘too many people’ consider to be ‘outside the mainstream’ because he is ‘farther left’ than she, who is the more ‘centrist’ of the two Democratic candidates.
Trump Falsely Blamed for Disrupting His Own Rallies
Stephen Lendman
A previous article suggested agent provocateurs were involved in Chicago last Friday disruptively - confirmed with Soros-funded MoveOn taking credit.
Its executive director Ilya Sheyman promised similar disruptions and violence at future Trump rallies, saying he “should be on notice” henceforth. He thanked Chicago ruffians enlisted to stoke violence and disrupt last Friday’s event.
MoveOn’s activism is phony. It shills for the Democrat wing of America’s one-party state, funded by George Soros and perhaps other predatory corporate interests, unconcerned about harm to ordinary people, focusing solely on money and power.
Claiming it represents “democracy in action” and progressive politics belies its dirty business as usual agenda.
Global Economic, Political and Military Configurations
James Petras
Introduction
Mapping the emerging global economic, political and military configurations requires that we examine regions and countries along several dynamic policy axis:
1.Capitalist versus anti-capitalist
2. Neoliberal versus anti-neoliberal
3. Austerity versus anti-austerity
4.War command centers and war zones
5.Political change and socio-economic continuity
6.New Order and political decay
Though many of these dimensions overlap, they also highlight the complexity and influence of local and national versus global power relations.
We will first identify and classify the regimes and emerging movements, which fall into each of these categories, and then proceed to generalize about current ‘global’ trends and future perspectives based on approximations of the real correlation of forces.
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