AlternativeRadio

Corporations are riding high in the saddle. With their friends in Washington they are raking it in. That certainly is the case with the tax law passed by Congress in late 2017. If you look at the details it is warmed over trickle-down economics. While most workers will get crumbs, the big winners will be corporations. And along the way, the deficit will go way up. Corporate tax contributions to the federal budget has been declining for decades and this bill will make it worse. The right-wing plan seems clear: Cut taxes on corporations and then reduce and eliminate programs like Social Security, food stamps, Medicare and Medicaid because there is no money. As the saying goes, the rich have gotten richer and the poor poorer. Inequality has soared into the stratosphere. To bring it down we need a concerted grassroots movement.

The juvenile justice system is off the rails. It is in urgent need of reform. The U.S. incarcerates roughly 2 million children every year, even though 95 percent of them have not been convicted of a violent crime. Too many of them are held in adult facilities. The systemic problems range from racism to brutality and extreme sentencing. Thousands of kids, many of them suffering from trauma come of age behind bars. Two-thirds of them have mental health issues. They are subject to physical and sexual assault. Children are up to 36 times more likely to commit suicide after being housed in an adult jail or prison than children incarcerated in juvenile facilities. The Equal Justice Initiative says confinement of children in adult facilities is indefensible, cruel and unusual punishment and should be banned.

Julian Assange, Jonathan Heawood & John Pilger - Propaganda, Facts & Fake News, Part I & Part II We live in an era of fake news. Fabricated reports go viral on social media. Totally false stories are concocted then tweeted and retweeted. Fantastical theories and wild claims are circulated in cyberspace. It's as Orwell says in 1984, "The lie became truth." There is a lot of fire and fury inflaming the news cycle. The term fake news is an all-purpose smear, used by the president and his supporters to deride and dismiss reporting they don’t like. A recent study found that Facebook was by far the platform through which people used to get to a fake news site. The report also noted that older, less educated people were particularly susceptible to fake news. Are facts up for grabs? How are we to navigate the mine laden waters of propaganda and fake news?

Julian Assange, Jonathan Heawood & John Pilger - Propaganda, Facts & Fake News, Part I & Part II We live in an era of fake news. Fabricated reports go viral on social media. Totally false stories are concocted then tweeted and retweeted. Fantastical theories and wild claims are circulated in cyberspace. It's as Orwell says in 1984, "The lie became truth." There is a lot of fire and fury inflaming the news cycle. The term fake news is an all-purpose smear, used by the president and his supporters to deride and dismiss reporting they don’t like. A recent study found that Facebook was by far the platform through which people used to get to a fake news site. The report also noted that older, less educated people were particularly susceptible to fake news. Are facts up for grabs? How are we to navigate the mine laden waters of propaganda and fake news?

Jordan’s borders were drawn by British imperial cartographers after WW1. It was then called Trans-Jordan and sparsely populated. Today, it has a large Palestinian population, many of them refugees from the naqba, catastrophe, of 1948 and the 1967 war. In recent years it also has had a huge influx of refugees from Iraq and Syria. Jordan is ruled by a hereditary Hashemite king who has absolute power. There are internal tensions in the country that so far have been kept under control. The Palestinians, lack political power but dominate the economy. The kingdom’s alliance with the U.S. makes some Jordanians very uncomfortable. Jordan’s neighbor Israel, the highest recipient of U.S. aid, continues to build more settlements on Palestinian land in defiance of international law while Washington approves. The Middle East and U.S. involvement in that region continues to be a major source of global instability. Interviewed by David Barsamian

The history of the anti-government and anti-democratic politics that have transformed the U.S. in recent years is largely obscured from view. The radical right’s agenda includes: suppression of voting rights, privatization of everything from schools to Medicare to Social Security to public lands, elimination of unions and limiting majority rule. Core beliefs also include: there is no problem tax cuts won’t solve and that the best kind of regulation is no regulation. Let industry decide. And the intellectual godfather of this extreme right-wing thinking? Someone you’ve probably never heard of. James McGill Buchanan, a Nobel Prize-winning economist. And the money to promote his ideas comes mostly from billionaire Charles Koch. These ideological positions have moved from beyond the fringe to where they are openly discussed and legislation is proposed. If these forces get their way democracy will be in chains.

In liberal democratic societies, it has long been understood that the use of force to control the population is generally not a viable option. Therefore, controlling what people think is critical. Thus, an elaborate system of propaganda is needed. For that system to be effective it must appear invisible. In totalitarian states there is no ambiguity. Citizens know they are getting the party line. But in countries like the U.S., where ownership is private and formal censorship is absent, there is an appearance of a free flow of information. However, that flow passes through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print.

Neoliberalism is an odd term when you think about it. It is hardly new and it is not particularly liberal. It has been a great economic success story-for the 1%. The detritus of neoliberalism litters the landscape from smashed unions to shredded safety nets, and deregulation of everything from airlines to banking to telecommunications. And how does one measure the human costs of shattered dreams and broken lives? The consequence? A backlash. Many working people are angry. Keep squeezing them and they will be prey for charlatans and demagogues who exploit their vulnerability and fear with scapegoating and false promises. As The Nation magazine observes, “Alongside growing economic inequality, we have suffered growing political inequality, with a Princeton study declaring that the influence of ordinary citizens on policy is ‘negligible.’ The United States,” The Nation says, is becoming “an oligarchy.”

What is fascism? Michael Parenti, author and historian says, “Fascism historically has been used to secure the interests of large capitalist interests against the demands of popular democracy. Then and now, fascism has made irrational mass appeals in order to secure the rational ends of class domination.”  Fascism flourishes in times of economic insecurity and cultural backlash. Opportunistic politicians offer up a platter of racism, xenophobia and hyper-nationalism. They stoke fear and resentment using simplistic slogans such as “Drain the Swamp” and “Build the Wall.” In the U.S. today, there is a whiff fascism in the air. Witness the march of white supremacists with torches held high in Charlottesville chanting “Blood and Soil,” an old Nazi slogan and “Jews Will Not Replace Us.” The president called them “very fine people.”

It’s most likely historians will mark the War on Terror, declared by George W. Bush in 2001, as when the U.S. went into precipitous decline. The rapid military expansion into multiple countries was classic imperial overreach. The era of the U.S. as the sole superpower is drawing to a close. China is challenging U.S. global hegemony. And it is doing so primarily on the economic front. It lets Washington spend trillions on wars and the pricey weapons to fight them. China, in the meantime, is constructing long term economic partnerships and alliances with countries all over the world. It is also building up its military but will not risk a war with the U.S. China had a bad couple of centuries, but it’s back, big time. The trends all point to 2030 when China passes the U.S.