Republicans

Don’t bother, they’re here, already performing in the center ring under the big top owned and operated by The Umbrella People.

A recent POLITICO piece entitled “He’s Destroyed Conservatism: the Republican Case Against Trump’s GOP” features an extensive interview with one Stuart Stevens, a long-time political adviser and operative who worked to get a great many Republicans elected.

Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism,  1951

Spreading faster than COVID-19 among those on the portside, warnings of a fascist-style coup by Trump are rampant this presidential campaign season. Should Trump fail to carry the Electoral College, Noam Chomsky admonishes, “he could send Blackshirts out in the streets… preparation for a plan to try to bring the military in to carry out something which would amount to a military coup.”

The current pandemic continues to have a large negative impact on most aspects of our lives. Over 20.6 million have been infected and almost 750,000 have died worldwide (about 5.3 million infections and over 168,00 deaths in the US) due to this pandemic. Besides these horrific impacts, this pandemic has also made clearer the failure of the bipartisan neoliberal economic approach that puts profit before people and planet.
Pre-pandemic

In a recent interview Noam Chomsky declared that there “was a big difference” between Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon in the 1968 presidential elections, a difference “you could count in several million corpses in Indochina.” But, Chomsky added, “a lot of the young people on the left said, “I’m not going to vote for Humphrey. He’s a corporate Democrat. I can’t sully my hands on that.

Eric Zuesse
Here is why federal criminal indictments of former Obama Administration officials are likely before September 4th:
As I have previously documented, the case is overwhelming that extremely serious crimes were, in fact, committed and covered-up, and the only real question now is how high up in the Administration they went — possibly up to Barack Obama and Joe Biden, but that’s the big question.

Eric Zuesse

Positive COVID-19 Test (Shutterstock)
The US is at a moment of truth. This week, Congress has to face up to a pandemic that is out of control and an economy that is collapsing. The Republican’s and Democrat’s proposals show they will fail this test. The people will need to protect themselves and lead from below.

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at Strategic Culture
The great investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald gave an hour-long lecture on how America’s billionaires control the U.S. Government, and here is an edited summary of its opening twenty minutes (the best part of it), with key quotations and assertions from its opening — and then its broader context will be discussed briefly:
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