This cartoon is from Michael Moore’s film Bowling for Columbine (2002) that looked at America’s obsession with guns. Given the recent spate of killings in the US and the rise of heavily-armed militias that seem to be seeking to confront the government, this may be a good time to re-release the film.
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US imperialistic power is overtly demonstrated by its massive military that can be used to easily overpower most nations, though we have seen that controlling the aftermath is much more problematic. But a major source of US power is exerted more covertly, by controlling the financial centers of the world. Note how it uses that power to annex the assets of countries it has conflicts with and prevents them from having access to international capital or denying them the lines of credit and insurance that are necessary for trade.
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How do I know? Because I heard it from one of the people who is closest to god, and that is Rick Santorum, the once and future and forever candidate for the US presidency. What happened is that when he was asked by Buzzfeed about Bruce Jenner’s announcement that he was transitioning to a woman, this is how his reaction was reported:
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Ramzy Baroud writes that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s naked personal ambition for power has resulted in him ripping off the veil that covered the ugly realities of Israeli policies that enabled the leaders of Israel and the US to claim that they shared common values and allowed them to stall indefinitely on giving Palestinians their rights.
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When Bernie Sanders appeared on ABC News yesterday, it became clear that the interviewer wanted to goad him into attacking Hillary Clinton directly and then get her to respond in kind because that will enable them to create the kind of narrative they are most familiar with, that of a mud-slinging race and the effect of those attacks on poll numbers. But Sanders is smart enough not to fall for that. Instead, by focusing his attacks on the billionaire class that dominates US politics, Clinton is affected only to the extent that she is part of that class. It will be interesting to see how she reacts.
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The Israeli group Breaking the Silence has released a new report of testimonies given by some Israeli soldiers that reveals the depth of the atrocities inflicted by the Israeli army on the people of Gaza during its assault last year. In that operation known as Protective Edge 1,462 civilians, among them 495 children and 253 women were killed. Some may recall the infamous video of four boys being massacred as they played on a beach.
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As was to be expected, the Hobby Lobby case was just the beginning. The infamous verdict by the US Supreme Court in that case that for-profit companies need not comply with the Obamacare provisions that their health insurance companies cover birth control if they have religious objections laid the groundwork for further conservative assaults on women’s health and reproductive rights.
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The recent killing by drones of two Americans held hostage has opened up the debate once again about this policy. President Obama has felt obliged to apologize for their deaths. Of course Americans have been killed by drones before and there have been many, many innocent civilians killed also but since they were Muslims, they did not count and president Obama, who seems to love the drone assassination program, never felt obliged to apologize for any of those many deaths except in an oblique way.
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As bystanders increasingly start recording police interactions with the public using their ubiquitous smartphones, the police have responded by sometimes ordering them to stop (though courts have held that people have a right to record as long as they are not interfering with the police actions), confiscating the cameras and destroying the videos, or sometimes even destroying the cameras by smashing them on the ground.
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The biggest issue that the US faces is the attempt by the oligarchy to take over complete control of all aspects of the country. What is clear is that they want to go all the way and remove anything that stands between them and unbridled profits. This means dismantling regulations that protect the public interest, underfunding regulatory agencies so that they cannot even enforce what regulations are left, removing any oversight under the guise of cutting down the bureaucracy, changing the tax structure to benefit the wealthy even more, and divert to themselves all the funding that goes to the mass of people in the form of public education, public services, and social welfare programs, under the guise of making government more efficient or preventing ‘moochers and looters from exploiting the system.
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