Opinion

“But what of the price of peace?” asked Jesuit priest and war resister Daniel Berrigan, writing from federal prison in 1969, doing time for his part in the destruction of draft records. “I think of the good, decent, peace-loving people I have known by the thousands, and I wonder.

The Logic of Profit over People Let us not be naive. If President Trump recently called on his adoring followers to “liberate” states like Michigan, Virginia, Maryland and Minnesota, which all happen to have Democrat governors, this is not about freeing people from the supposed tyranny of lockdown and social distancing measures. What the gun […]

The IMF now predicts that China next year will have the highest rate of economic growth since 2011, which was the last time when China’s GDP growth-rate exceeded 9% (at 9.6%). China’s growth-rate had averaged around 9% between 1978 and 2011, then slid to around 6.5%. If the IMF is correct, then 2021 will be the first time in a decade that the country’s GDP growth-rate is restored to its former long-time norm.

The Great Gray Hope has bowed out of the presidential primary race, leaving tottering Joe Biden as the last Democrat standing. What Bernie Sanders accomplished electorally was remarkable, revealing both how far a progressive can venture and the limits proscribing further advancement to the left within the Democratic Party.
Sanders pushes the limits of the system

John Lennon, prolific as a writer as much as a performer, wrote this:
Working Class Hero
As soon as you’re born they make you feel small
By giving you no time instead of it all
Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be
They hurt you at home and they hit you at school
They hate you if you’re clever and they despise a fool
Till you’re so fucking crazy you can’t follow their rules
A working class hero is something to be

Enhanced transcript on an interview with PressTV
Background
Cuba complained recently that a shipment of test kits, masks and respirators, donated by the Chinese Alibaba group, didn’t arrive because the American company tasked with transportation feared breaching US sanction rules. Washington imposed an embargo on Cuba in 1962 after the island nation nationalized its oil industry. The measures have been denounced by the United Nations 28 years in a row.
PressTV:  What are your views on this?

Perhaps some of us were harboring naïve hopes. We were thinking: If it became obvious that China and its government are doing things much better than the West, many of the ‘opposition figures’ in Hong Kong, including the most hardened rioters, would see reason, repent, and once and for all change their minds.
Nothing like that has happened.

Soon there might be silence. The liberation of Prague, as well as the liberation of Auschwitz and/or Warsaw by the Red Army, will be forgotten. At least in Europe, even in Eastern Europe, where it took place.

Capitalism’s “invisible hand” gives us the middle finger with ever more contempt these days.

With anti-statist paranoia and acts of vandalism now part of the coronavirus crisis in the UK, in one outrageous video sent to me by a friend (I will not produce it, due to the responsibility to prevent the spread of false information) a British man denounced the virus as a hoax.