Hope for the end of neoliberalism in Chile

Chile was where US imperialism had one of its darkest chapters, in a history of dark chapters, where in 1973 the Richard Nixon-Henry Kissinger team first tried to destabilize the economy and then had the CIA instigate and support a military coup that violently overthrew that country’s democratically elected government and murder its president Salvador Allende because he was advocating socialist policies. The US installed the brutal dictator General Augusto Pinochet who then implemented the neoliberal agenda that the US seeks to impose via outright fascists, theocrats, and other authoritarians.

Chileans are celebrating the possible end of neoliberalism in that country that had been written into their constitution by the Pinochet regime.

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Bob Garfield fired from On The Media

I am a regular listener and supporter of the public radio show On The Media whose co-hosts over its 20-year history have been Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield. I have frequently linked to clips from the show, most recently just yesterday. Hence I was shocked to learn later that same day that Garfield has been fired from the show.

Bob Garfield, host of the public radio show and podcast On The Media, has been fired. According to a statement from New York Public Radio, an outside investigation found that Garfield violated the company’s anti-bullying policy. Garfield was the subject of a similar investigation in 2020 that resulted in, “disciplinary action and a warning about consequences if the behavior continued.”

On Twitter, the veteran journalist and critic denied that he was fired for, “bullying, per se but for yelling in 5 meetings over 20 years.” Garfield continued, “the provocations were just shocking. In time the story will emerge and it is tragic.”

I found Garfield to be a good interviewer with a droll sense of humor and and sharp sense of irony. His laid back manner on air did not prepare me for the charge that he had a bullying attitude, which just shows that one never knows how closely the public and private personas of people mesh.

Israel is increasingly recognized as an apartheid state

While Israel’s supporters keep claiming that it is a democracy, the reality is that it is an ethno-religious state that privileges the rights of the Jewish community over even its non-Jewish citizens and treats the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories in a manner that can only be described as an apartheid system. Gaza is rightly described as the world’s largest open-air prison. In addition, Israel practices collective punishment, legalized discrimination, forcible ethnic cleansing, and destroys the offices of Palestinian media outlets, all of which automatically disqualifies it from claiming the right to be called a democracy.

For the longest time, the Israel lobby in the US has managed to keep this ugly reality under wraps by lobbing the explosive charge of anti-Semitism at anyone who pointed out the truth. They were aided in this by a political and media establishment that would faithfully parrot the official line that Israel was seeking peace with the Palestinians, that a two-state solution was the way forward, that the US government was a neutral party seeking to broker peace, and that it was only the intransigence of the Palestinians that was holding back a solution, all of which have been manifestly false for a long time.
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John Oliver and Samantha Bee on combating gun violence

Oliver discussed how pernicious so-called Stand Your Ground laws are, since they seem to give a license to many people to shoot at the slightest provocation.

Meanwhile, Bee points to some hopeful grassroots groups that are trying to reduce the number of gun deaths and injuries, such as Moms Demand Action that seeks to combat the NRA at the local level and violence interrupters who try to identify potential dangers in their local communities before they occur and step in to mediate conflicts.

The ongoing war on the working class

Ronald Regan’s ‘welfare queen’ rhetoric propagated the myth that many Americans are lazy good-for-nothings who would take any opportunity to not work, a slander on working people that did not seem to hurt his popularity with the working class, perhaps because many people believes it to be true of other people, not themselves. The reason for pushing that myth was to justify cuts in benefits to the poor (“It is for their own good, so that they learn the value of work.”) in order to give tax cuts to the rich. Neoliberal Democrats like Bill Clinton also seized on it continue the cuts, in the name of ‘ending welfare as we know it’.
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The slow disillusionment with Trump continues

While Trump seems to have a lock on the Republican party establishment, we should not assume that his support among the Republican base is also rock solid. There are of course die-hard people who will never desert him, as there are in any cult, but others will peel away with time as they slowly come to realize that he is a paper tiger who talks big but cannot deliver.

The case of one Proud Boys leader illustrates this phenomenon.

Proud Boys leader Ethan Nordean lashed out at President Donald Trump, accusing him of misleading his supporters and then deserting them despite their unwavering loyalty.

“We are now and always have been on our own. So glad he was able to pardon a bunch of degenerates as his last move and s— on us on the way out,” Nordean said in an expletive-laden message about the former president. “F— you trump you left us on [t]he battle field bloody and alone.”
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“I’ve followed this guy for 4 years and given everything and lost it all. Yes he woke us up, but he led us to believe some great justice was upon us…and it never happened,” Nordean wrote on Jan. 20, after Proud Boys members were charged, “now I’ve got some of my good friends and myself facing jail time cuz we followed this guys lead and never questioned it.”

Expect to see more such cases.

The pro-Israel propaganda machine is beginning to sputter

Nowhere is the propaganda system in the US on full display than when it covers the way that Israel treats the Palestinians. There is a full-throated attempt to minimize the war crimes of Israel and maximize the threats posed by Hamas.

As an example, on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday, their analyst Domenico Montenaro said that the US has been viewed as a ‘neutral third party’ in the conflict until Tump moved more in in favor of Israel. The idea that the US has been a neutral party is laughable on its face, a delusion that exists only in the minds of establishment journalists who are afraid of running afoul of the Israel lobby in the US that is swift to attack those who step outside the bounds of allowed discourse. The reality is that the US has for decades been joined at the hip to Israel, providing support and cover for its apartheid and ethnic-cleansing policies.
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The US political and media establishment lies in defense of Israel

Chris Hedges writes that pretty much everything that emanates from Washington and Tel Aviv and the mainstream media about the situation in Gaza is a lie, with only a few reports and analyses presenting anything remotely close to the truth.

Nearly all the words and phrases used by the Democrats, Republicans and the talking heads on the media to describe the unrest inside Israel and the heaviest Israeli assault against the Palestinians since the 2014 attacks on Gaza, which lasted 51 days and killed more than 2,200 Palestinians, including 551 children, are a lie. Israel, by employing its military machine against an occupied population that does not have mechanized units, an air force, navy, missiles, heavy artillery and command-and-control, not to mention a U.S. commitment to provide a $38 billion defense aid package for Israel over the next decade, is not exercising “the right to defend itself.” It is carrying out mass murder. It is a war crime. 
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The brutality of chain gangs

Even though I am aware of the utterly barbaric way that prisoners are treated in the US incarceration system, I keep coming across new things that can still shock me. Take this account by Winfred Rembert who was born in 1945 and died this past May, about his experience in a chain gang, where the prisoners do very hard labor in public areas, often alongside roads.

As a teen-ager, he got involved in the civil-rights movement and was arrested in the aftermath of a demonstration. He later broke out of jail, survived a near-lynching, and spent seven years in prison, where he was forced to labor on chain gangs.

He was released in 1974 and took up painting, depicting in stark ways his memories of the horrors he endured. Here he describes one example.
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