Isaiah's THE WORLD TODAY JUST NUTS "Hollywood V. Reality."
It's a good call.
Know what's a bad call?
Black YOUTUBERS promoting Jimmy Dore.
I don't believe Jimmy Dore's a racist. But I don't believe Black YOUTUBE needs to be promoting him.
You do get that it's easier for a pedophile to get on Jimmy's show than it is for one of us, right?
He's had Scott Ritter on last month. A convicted pedophile. A registered sex offender. Three times arrested for it and sent to prison for it.
But Ritter's White.
He'll put a convicted pedophile on his program -- without ever telling his audience about that aspect of Ritter's past -- before he'll put one of us on.
I am getting sick of seeing all the Black YOUTUBERS bringing Jimmy on as a guest.
He does not return the favor.
When you bring him on your show, you are giving him a 'Black pass' and acting as if we, the Black community, should support him.
Nope.
Not when he can't bring us on as guests, not when we're not part of his supporting cast.
I'm not saying attack him, I am saying it's a one-way street and we need to back up and get off it.
"Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):
Tuesday, May 24, 2022. An Iraqi refugee reflects on the current US government propaganda and much more.
Democrats are limited in what they can do regarding the Supreme Court and ROE V WADE -- SEVERAL DRIVE-BY E-MAILS TO THE PUBLIC ACCOUNT MAKE THAT CLAIM.
FALSE.
They
can codify ROE. They can get the votes. You horse trade, you do
whatever you have to but you secure 51 votes. It isn't that difficult
and when you look at great Congressional leaders -- in the past, of
course, there hasn't been a great leader in Congress in decades -- you
see that they did that. by impeaching Clarence Thomas.
That's one option.
Another is eliminate five votes.
Supposedly,
to hear Democrats in Congress on MSNBC, his wife was involved in
January 6th, was involved in trying to sway electors, was this and was
that. Are thy just flapping their jaws or are they serious?
Her
actions reflect upon her husband because he's got a lifetime post and
he's clearly failed to recuse himself on cases where he should have.
So
if they're just flapping their gums then they need to shut up. But if
they mean what they're saying, they need to move forward with
impeachment.
My guess? If they're forced to put up or shut up, they'll shut up.
The answer is to make it law and they can do that. It doesn't appear that they want to.
Moving over to Iraq . . .
At WSWS, Barry Grey speaks with an Iraqi refugee about the current US attack on Russia:
Barry Grey: I would first like to get your response to the present
war being waged in Ukraine and the attempt by the US and NATO to present
it as a war for freedom, democracy and national sovereignty.
Adila:
As a refugee from Iraq, having been born at the dawn of the Iraq War
and my parents, my family having lived through the 13-year sanctions
imposed by NATO and the US, we are not foreigners to the propaganda
surrounding war.
In recordings of President Bush’s old speeches we
hear repeatedly how the US invasion and occupation was a war against
terrorism, a war to protect the people of Iraq and the Middle East from
the weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein supposedly had.
President
Bush at a Washington D.C. event made a joke about the weapons of mass
destruction, saying, “We’re still looking for them.” It was kind of like
him making a mockery of the propaganda he upheld for so many years and
then later retracted in a laughing statement, after having essentially
murdered over 625,000 children between 2003 and 2006.
The propaganda that is being pumped out today in support of the war
against Russia in Ukraine feels like a repeated episode. The same
emotions are being evoked—that the war is being fought to preserve
freedom. Images of children running away or in bomb shelters are used to
insinuate that we need to act fast. The propaganda is being used to
push the largest corporate enterprises to place sanctions and holds on
their businesses in Russia.
Even my university—I go to the
University of Michigan in Ann Arbor—has basically divested from Russia.
We as Arab and Muslim students have been fighting for the divestment
movement since 2002 on this campus, to divest against the apartheid in
Palestine. We were always told this is complicated, it cannot happen,
you cannot place sanctions on a place because of political views.
But
this is exactly what is happening now and you see how it is happening
so quickly and easily. All of the corporations and the politicians who
are funded by these corporations are showing us how easy it is to divest
resources from that region.
BG: The remarks by Bush to which you
referred were at the White House Radio and Television Correspondents
Association Dinner in 2004 and ironically you just had the one the other
night where Biden congratulated the press for lining up 100 percent
behind the government propaganda and refusing to allow the slightest
dissenting view on the war against Russia. And in the name of press
freedom, they are sanctioning the banning of Russian artists, musicians,
media outlets and even cultural treasures.
What is the reality,
from your own experience in Iraq and that of your family and since then,
of American militarism and imperialism?
Adila:
I was born in 2002 in Raffah Hospital, central city Baghdad. It’s where
my mother was born and her mother before that. It is a really old
hospital and one of the really well known hospitals in Iraq.
But
after 1990, when the US and NATO placed sanctions against Iraq,
essential food, water and medication was not able to reach Iraq for some
13 years. The medical devices were not updated. No medications,
including epidural anesthetics, were allowed to be imported into the
country.
When my mother gave birth to me, it was her first birth
and she had complications during birth. She was in a very bad condition.
She had an emergency C-section. I was born in breech, she was in labor
for 12 hours without medication and during the procedure she was also
unmedicated. So she felt every single cut of the scalpel, every single
pain that came with childbirth through a C-section.
My mother is
one of hundreds of thousands of women who had to undergo the same
ordeal. The death toll we have for the sanctions, before the violent
occupation that began in 2003, circles around 623,000. But Iraqi data
analysts and physicians expect this number to be around a million.
There
was an immense death toll. I think it is referred to as the essential
death toll, which means the death toll that we know can be attributed to
the violent deaths that occurred. It does not include the slow death
from famine, it does not include all the children and mothers who died
in childbirth as a result of the ban on medications and imported
devices.
One day in 2003, when I was a couple months old, US
soldiers barged into my family home and took seven of my uncles and my
father and my grandfather to Abu Ghraib prison. They were held there for
some time. They were tortured, electrocuted, sexually assaulted,
whipped. My father lost an eye.
My father and my uncles were released after several years and pardoned. They were told, “Oops! Sorry, wrong name.”
Bully Boy /bush came out from under his rock last week.
AP offers, "The 75-year-old former president jokingly blamed the mistake on his age,
shaking his head and correcting himself, drawing laughter from the
crowd." It's not a laughing matter. Arwa Mahdawi (GUARDIAN) notes:
Tell you what, I’m not laughing. Nor are a lot of Arabs.
I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the depravity and horror of
the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Iraqi prisoners of war – many of whom were
innocent people who were arrested by mistake – were violently tortured by US and UK troops. Hundreds of thousands of civilians died. The entire country was left in ruins.
And the suffering continued long after the occupying forces left. The
US military’s frequent use of munitions containing depleted uranium in
Iraq, along with military hardware abandoned by troops, poisoned the
environment and the population. Even now babies are being born with
severe birth defects linked to the invasion. “Doctors are regularly
encountering anomalies in babies that are so gruesome they cannot even
find precedents for them,” the lead researcher of a 2019 study said.
“The war has spread so much radiation here that, unless it is cleaned
up, generations of Iraqis will continue to be affected.” So, yeah,
please excuse me if I don’t find Bush’s slip-up particularly funny.
You know what’s even less funny? The fact there has been zero accountability
for any of the architects of the Iraq war. Sure, some of the military
personnel were convicted of crimes relating to torture of Abu Ghraib
prisoners, but the people who were really in charge have faced no
consequences whatsoever. Bush himself has had his reputation whitewashed in recent years;
he has transformed himself into a cuddly grandpa figure who paints and
pontificates about “unity”. As for his coterie of enablers, most of them
went on to high-paying jobs and prestigious positions.
Before
anyone starts making excuses for the architects of the Iraq war (“how
could they have known?”), let me remind you that it was clear from the
start that the war – and the flimsy weapons of mass destruction excuse
used to justify it – was a sham. In February 2003 millions of people,
including myself, in at least 650 cities around the world took to the
streets to protest the US-led invasion of Iraq. It was the largest one-day global protest in history.
Ordinary people could see the war was immoral and probably illegal –
and yet there is a concerted effort in some quarters to rewrite the war
as a deeply regrettable lapse in judgment that nobody at the time could
really have been expected to get right.
Tamara Qiblawi (CNN) adds, "To add insult to injury, the US has not yet issued an apology to
Iraqis, and almost two decades after the invasion, some — at least
those in Bush's audience on Wednesday — are still laughing about it." Chip Gibbons (JACOBIN) advises,
"If Bush is not going to stand trial for war crimes, he should at the
very least have the decency to avoid appearing in public as a moral
authority on unjustified invasions. Instead, as Bush’s recent gaffe and
his audience’s clear amusement at his misstatement demonstrate, neither
Bush nor US society has ever really reckoned with the consequences of
his imperialist crusade." I remember bumping into Chip all over the
country back when he was helping to push back against the hideous
PATRIOT ACT. Just tossing that out there because when I saw the byline,
I smiled remembering many interesting conversations over the years. I
look forward to reading his upcoming book on the FBI. At WSWS, Patrick Martin notes:
The World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality
Party opposed the Iraq war from the very beginning, condemning the
support for the war, not only by the Bush administration and the
Republican right, but by the bulk of the Democratic Party. It was the
leading Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, then-Senator
Joe Biden, who played a central role in pushing through the
Authorization for the Use of Military Force that provided a
congressional rubber stamp for the illegal invasion.
In a series
of articles in May 2007, the WSWS summed up the devastation inflicted by
the US conquest and occupation of Iraq, branding it “sociocide,” the
deliberate destruction of an entire society, and pointing out that under
both Bush and his father, American imperialism had carried out crimes
of the type previously associated only with fascist regimes. We wrote:
Iraq,
once among the most advanced countries of the region, has been reduced,
in terms of basic economic and social indices, to the level of the
poorest countries of sub-Saharan Africa.
What is involved is the
systematic destruction of an entire society through the unleashing of
violence and criminality on a scale not seen since Hitler’s armies
ravaged Europe in the Second World War.
Less than a third of the
population nationwide has access to clean drinking water, and just 19
percent have a functioning sewage system. Both the water and sewage
systems were damaged heavily by US bombardments in the 1991 Persian Gulf
War and the 2003 invasion…
On average, Iraqis receive only eight
hours of electricity a day, with even worse conditions in Baghdad, where
most of the capital’s seven million people get only six hours or less
of service daily.
We
noted the 150 percent increase in the infant mortality rate from 1990
to 2005. Half of all Iraq’s children were suffering from malnutrition;
only one-third were attending school. Half of Iraq’s doctors had fled
the country. Per capita GDP was half that of 1980, and Iraq’s
state-owned industries had been privatized and shut down, with the loss
of half a million jobs, by an ideologically motivated campaign of the
Iraq occupation authority set up by the US in Baghdad. The WSWS concluded:
The
premeditated destruction of an entire society carried out on the basis
of lies and in pursuit of the financial and geo-strategic interests of
America’s ruling elite constitutes a war crime of historic proportions,
punishable under the same statutes and on the basis of the same
principles as those used to condemn leading figures of Germany’s Third
Reich at Nuremberg.
Those responsible for launching the war in
Iraq consist not merely of the right-wing Republican cabal grouped
around Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. They include also the
Democrats who enabled this war, the heads of US energy conglomerates and
finance houses that hoped to profit from it and the chiefs of the media
monopolies that promoted it. All of these layers, constituting the
political establishment and financial aristocracy of the United States,
are guilty of the same fundamental crime for which the Nazis were
prosecuted nearly 60 years ago: the plotting and waging of a war of
aggression. It is from this principal crime that all the multiple crimes
and horrors inflicted upon the Iraqi people have flowed.
It
is not a matter of justifying Putin’s reactionary attack on Ukraine to
point out that the war he launched has produced nothing like the level
of destruction inflicted by the US in Iraq.
The
Iraqi people suffered and continue to suffer and their country remains
occupied. Millions of dollars, billions, have gone to destruction. The
country is no betr off but the real point of war is never to make lives
better. Chris Hedges (SCHEERPOST) explains how there's always money for war:
The United States, as the near unanimous vote to
provide nearly $40 billion in aid to Ukraine illustrates, is trapped in
the death spiral of unchecked militarism. No high speed trains. No
universal health care. No viable Covid relief program. No respite from
8.3 percent inflation. No infrastructure programs to repair decaying
roads and bridges, which require $41.8 billion to fix the 43,586 structurally deficient bridges, on average 68 years old. No forgiveness of $1.7 trillion in student debt. No addressing income inequality. No program to feed the 17 million children
who go to bed each night hungry. No rational gun control or curbing of
the epidemic of nihilistic violence and mass shootings. No help for the 100,000 Americans who die each year of drug overdoses. No minimum wage of $15 an hour to counter 44 years of wage stagnation. No respite from gas prices that are projected to hit $6 a gallon.
The permanent war economy, implanted since the end of World War II,
has destroyed the private economy, bankrupted the nation, and squandered
trillions of dollars of taxpayer money. The monopolization of capital
by the military has driven the US debt to $30 trillion,
$ 6 trillion more than the US GDP of $ 24 trillion. Servicing this debt
costs $300 billion a year. We spent more on the military, $ 813 billion for fiscal year 2023, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined.
We are paying a heavy social, political, and economic cost for our
militarism. Washington watches passively as the U.S. rots, morally,
politically, economically, and physically, while China, Russia, Saudi
Arabia, India, and other countries extract themselves from the tyranny
of the U.S. dollar and the international Society for Worldwide Interbank
Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a messaging network banks and
other financial institutions use to send and receive information, such
as money transfer instructions. Once the U.S. dollar is no longer the
world’s reserve currency, once there is an alternative to SWIFT, it will
precipitate an internal economic collapse. It will force the immediate
contraction of the U.S. empire shuttering most of its nearly 800
overseas military installations. It will signal the death of Pax
Americana.
Democrat or Republican. It does not matter. War is the raison d’état
of the state. Extravagant military expenditures are justified in the
name of “national security.” The nearly $40 billion allocated for
Ukraine, most of it going into the hands of weapons manufacturers such
as Raytheon Technologies, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, BAE
Systems, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing, is only the beginning. Military
strategists, who say the war will be long and protracted, are talking
about infusions of $4 or $5 billion in military aid a month to Ukraine.
We face existential threats. But these do not count. The proposed budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in fiscal year 2023 is $10.675 billion. The proposed budget for
the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is $11.881 billion. Ukraine
alone gets more than double that amount. Pandemics and the climate
emergency are afterthoughts. War is all that matters. This is a recipe
for collective suicide.
The following sites updated:
