/news-amp-politics

Americans Who Don’t Want War With Iran Must Speak Out Now | Alternet
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President Trump’s comments at the United Nations General Assembly urging the withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal sounded familiar to our guest, Jeffrey Sachs. “The last time we had this kind of rhetoric was George W. Bush with the axis of evil,” Sachs said. “It was immediately followed by the Iraq War, which was the most disastrous single step of American military action and ’diplomacy,’ or anti-diplomacy, in modern times. So this is a setup, again, for war, for conflict. And it is extraordinarily ignorant and dangerous. Iran is in compliance with the agreement that was reached.”

JEFFREY SACHS: —bewildered. But after the deal was made, Iran had elections, and the moderate president, Hassan Rouhani, was re-elected, despite opposition from hardliners. And the U.S. response is to provoke. Now, why is this happening? Because two U.S. allies—Israel and Saudi Arabia—are luring our ignorant president into this kind of vehemence. This is Israeli and Saudi policy, Saudis because of the Sunni-Shia conflict and battle for regional power, Israel because of its own narrow concerns. And all the United States is doing, Trump is doing, is being lured into this and making the U.S. unsafe and making the world unsafe. It’s shocking.

JEFFREY SACHS: I believe the American people who do not want war—and we need to avoid war—need to speak out right now, because I believe these are the drumbeats of war. We’ve heard them many times before. Our government absolutely is war-oriented. We have a deep security state which believes in overthrowing other countries. We have a secret army called the CIA, which is engaged in covert wars all over the world. And we have a president who is openly provocative, openly gunning for war, it seems, with these two countries and heaven knows how many more.

#Guerre #Politique_USA #Iran

Robert Reich : #Google Is Proof Positive That #Big_Money Is Poisoning Our Politics | Alternet
▻http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/robert-reich-google-proof-positive-big-money-poisoning-our-politics

This is not just a problem created by right-wingers like Koch. Wealthy progressives are exerting as much quiet influence over the agendas of think tanks and universities as wealthy conservatives.

« #progressistes » #politique

Mark Zuckerberg Might Be the Most Dangerous Presidential Candidate Who Isn’t Yet | Alternet
▻http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/mark-zuckerberg-might-be-most-dangerous-presidential-candidate-who-isnt-ye

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There are some very good reasons why Mark Zuckerberg should not be allowed anywhere near the presidency. For a start, he will lose—to Trump or to whatever other monstrosity the Republicans run against him. He can only embody the politics of bland aspiration and imperious technocratic mumblings, alienating the left and inflaming the right. Second, with the entire media basically functioning as a command economy run by Facebook, Zuckerberg in office would constitute a conflict of interests and a potential for corruption so vast it would make any of Trump’s misdeeds look like minor accounting problems. Third, it would entrench the long slow rot of electoral politics, permanently establishing the nuclear codes as the private property of TV clowns and gussied-up motivational speakers. Fourth, he keeps on describing Facebook as a “community” based on “friendship,” rather than what it is—a social utility that occasionally reveals itself as a seething plasm of technologically mediated dislocation. Finally, the tech industry is a hive of inflated egos and reckless self-regard, widening the wealth gap, steadily consigning most of the human population of Earth to the status of surplus flesh, and it must not be let anywhere near political power.

All of these are very good reasons. But they’re not the most pressing or the most urgent. The real reason all Zuckerberg’s dreams of power have to be crushed now before they bear terrible fruit is this: in the 13 years since he first launched Facebook, he never gave us the dislike button.

It says a lot about his style of leadership. He knows what’s best for us, and he’ll do it, and what we think doesn’t really matter. But it’s more fundamental than that. Commenting on his refusal to add the dislike button, Zuckerberg said, “Some people have asked for a dislike button because they want to be able to say, ’That thing isn’t good.’ That’s not something that we think is good… I don’t think there needs to be a voting mechanism on Facebook about whether posts are good or bad. I don’t think that’s socially very valuable or good for the community to help people share the important moments in their lives.”

He wants to deprive people of their ability to say no.

More simply, this is not how society or politics really work. They do not form a kind of harmonious totality, where we all start from the same place and reach upward. Politics is a sphere of competing interests, agonisms and class struggle, in which the success of one set of aims always means the defeat of others.

#Facebook #Politique_USA #Zuckerberg

Steve Bannon, Destruction Machine: He’s Back to Trying to Rebuild a Right-Wing Media Empire | Alternet
▻http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/steve-bannon-destroyer-world

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Bannon is, however, highly influential among Trump supporters, although not as much as when he was building the Trump mystique. As conservative talk show host and Never-Trumper Charlie Sykes has been pointing out for some time, Trumpism is not a movement — it is now a full-fledged cult of personality in which the president’s followers believe themselves to be under siege from the same forces Donald Trump rails against: the media, political correctness, elites of both parties, liberals, racial and ethnic minorities. The more they see Trump being attacked the more they identify with him.

#Extrême_droite #Alt_right #USA
Nonetheless, as I pointed out on Friday, Bannon is a professional propagandist with a feel for the right-wing Zeitgeist. We can expect that he will be a player going forward. He told people different things in his manic series of exit interviews, at once claiming the Trump presidency was effectively over and promising to go to war on its behalf. But it’s pretty clear that Bannon is going to war for Bannon, and for a movement that he apparently believes still exists outside of Trump: “In many ways, I think I can be more effective fighting from the outside for the agenda President Trump ran on,” Bannon told The New York Times. (Emphasis mine.) “And anyone who stands in our way, we will go to war with.”

7 Pundits Who Spread the Myth of Trump’s Working-Class Voter Base | Alternet
▻http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/7-pundits-who-spread-myth-trumps-working-class-voter-base

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Following Donald Trump’s ascent to the U.S. presidency, both liberal and conservative pundits and commentators have circulated a dangerous myth that the white working-class propelled Trump to the White House. This has led the media to blame poor and working-class whites for the rise of Trump, which is an oversimplification and misevaluation of how we arrived at the current political moment.

As data from NBC indicates, during the 2016 primaries, more than one-third of Trump supporters had incomes of over $100,000, and two-thirds of Trump supporters earned over $50,000 a year, or above the median national household income. In other words, Trump’s base is not the working class, but what might be called the petit bourgeoisie: small-business owners, property owners and inheritors, technicians, electricians, plumbers, policemen, firemen, and other highly skilled workers.

This is not to say that poor and working-class whites didn’t turn out for Trump in large numbers—they did—but rather that working-class whites should not be seen as the core of Trump’s constituency.

#Politique_USA #Classe_ouvrière #élections

The Republican Party Is Ready to Sell Off Your Internet Privacy at a Level That Boggles the Mind | Alternet
▻http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/republican-party-ready-sell-your-internet-privacy-level-boggles-mind

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Trump’s new Chairman of the FCC, Ajit Pai, recently co-authored what is either an intentionally or naively deceptive op-ed in The Washington Post.

Pai suggested that when Republicans in the House and Senate – without a single Democratic vote in either body – voted to legalize your Internet Service Provider – your ISP – to sell your personal (and you-thought-private) browsing information and the content of your emails and video-viewing to anybody they choose, they were actually working to “protect” your privacy. He knew this, he wrote, because critics of the GOP policy “don’t understand how advertising works.”

Pai’s argument is basically that if Google can sell or use your information, then Comcast, AT&T, Time-Warner, etc., should be able to, too.

But there’s a fundamental difference. If you don’t want Google to sell or use your information, you can use a search engine (like www.duckduckgo.com) or an online store that promises not to.

But your internet service provider sees everything you do on the internet, right down to the keystroke level. They can monitor every VOIP conversation, make note of every search or purchase, and transcribe every email or IM. Just like your phone company, before Title II, could listen in on every one of your phone calls.

#neutralité_internet

Can the Science of Lying Explain Trump’s Support ? | Alternet
▻http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/science-lying-explains-trump

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But Trump’s political path presents a paradox. Far from slowing his momentum, his deceit seemed only to strengthen his support through the primary and national election. Now, every time a new lie is exposed, his approval rating doesn’t seem to waver very much. How does the former reality-TV star get away with it? How can he tell so many lies and still win support from millions of Americans?

Journalists and researchers have suggested many answers, from simple ignorance to an aging electorate addicted to fear-mongering cable news. But there is another explanation that no one seems to have entertained: It is that Trump is telling “blue” lies—a psychologist’s term for falsehoods, told on behalf of a group, that can actually strengthen the bonds among the members of that group.

This research—and those stories—highlight a difficult truth about our species: We are intensely social creatures, but we’re prone to divide ourselves into competitive groups, largely for the purpose of allocating resources. People can be “prosocial”—compassionate, empathic, generous, honest—in their groups, and aggressively antisocial toward outside groups. When we divide people into groups, we open the door to competition, dehumanization, violence—and socially sanctioned deceit.

Most scholars point to political and cultural polarization as the biggest cause. Research by Alexander George Theodoridis, a political scientist at the University of California, Merced, shows that “partisanship for many Americans today takes the form of a visceral, even subconscious, attachment to a party group.” According to his studies, Democrats and Republicans have become not merely political parties but tribes, whose affiliations shape the language, dress, hairstyles, purchasing decisions, friendships, and even love lives of their members.

Scientists call this kind of reasoning “directionally motivated,” meaning that conclusions are driven by feelings, not facts—and studies find that this is our default mode. As right-wing radio talk host Rush Limbaugh implied in the wake of a lie-riddled presidential press conference, facts don’t matter. What matters is what’s “in your heart.”

That’s why, when the truth threatens our identity, that truth gets dismissed. For millions and millions of Americans, climate change is a hoax, Hillary Clinton ran a sex ring out of a pizza parlor, and immigrants cause crime. Whether they truly believe those falsehoods or not is debatable—and possibly irrelevant. The research to date suggests that they see those lies as useful weapons in a tribal us-against-them competition that pits the “real America” against those who would destroy it.

It’s important to note that Democrats have shown themselves to be susceptible to the effects of polarization and anger as well. During the antagonistic Democratic primary, lies proliferated within the party about Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and their supporters. Many Democrats fell for those lies for the same reason people fall for all blue lies: because they helped their cause, providing ammunition for their battle against the other side.

Who tells the story matters. Study after study suggests that people are much more likely to be convinced of a fact when it “originates from ideologically sympathetic sources,” as the paper says—and it helps a lot if those sources look and sound like them.

#post-truth #mensonge #psychologie

The Christian Right’s Origins of Fake News and ’Alternative Facts’ | Alternet
▻http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/christian-rights-origins-fake-news-and-alternative-facts

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As we’ve moved from an election dominated by fake news to a new Trump administration run on the principle of “alternative facts,” it’s worth taking some time to ponder what seems to be contemporary conservative credulity. We should certainly be reminded of the term “truthiness” that Stephen Colbert invented in October 2005 to capture some of the pronouncements of the George W. Bush administration. As he explained then, truthiness was the truth that “comes from the gut,” not from actual facts—“the truth we want to exist,” that feels right.

And the way fake news tends to get better reception among conservatives than liberals, even by a two-to-one margin, has also been recognized. (When one fake news creator was interviewed, he explained, “We’ve tried to do similar things to liberals. It just has never worked, it never takes off. You’ll get debunked within the first two comments, and then the whole thing just kind of fizzles out.”)

To see this connection, it bears recalling what it meant to be a Christian “fundamentalist” in the early 20th century. Christian fundamentalism was characterized in particular by its rejection of two theologically disturbing bodies of knowledge that emerged from the 19th century: the theory of evolution, and the historical-critical method of Bible scholarship. While mainstream Protestant and Catholic churches have had considerable success in coming to terms with these expert knowledge consensuses, Christian fundamentalism is defined primarily by its rejection of them.

The historical-critical method of Bible scholarship meanwhile threatened the idea of scripture as the inerrant, uniform word of God. [...]Fundamentalist Christians rejected these accounts. But more importantly, fundamentalists critiqued the methods, assumptions, and institutions of the expert elites. Fundamentalists questioned the biologists’ and Bible scholars’ suspension of the question of God’s supernatural intervention.

This alternative knowledge—the forerunner of today’s alternative facts— took the form of creationism and an alternative Bible scholarship demonstrating the Bible’s inerrancy and traditional authorship.

This alternative educational and media ecosystem of knowledge was galvanized and mobilized when the Christian Right emerged in the late 1970s to influence the Republican Party. There were two long-term consequences for our fake news world. First, theologically and politically conservative Christians learned to distrust the proclamations of the supposedly neutral media establishment, just as they had grown to suspect the methods and conclusions of elite experts like scientists or historians. And second, they learned to seek the truth from alternative sources—whether a church sermon, Christian media (newspapers, books, radio or television shows), or a classroom in a Christian college.

In the following years, the areas of rejected expert knowledge has grown to include climate change, the efficacy of abstinence-only sex education, and even the supposed link between vaccinations and autism. One could make the argument that even issues that don’t appear to have any religious resonance at all—such as the efficacy of supply-side economic policies, or the idea that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction and ties to Al Qaeda—are likewise successful partly because of this conservative cognitive training in the rejection of mainstream media and the cultivation of other sources of information, like Fox News at first, but also now websites like Breitbart, 4chan, Infowars, and others.

The goal of “fake news” and “alternative facts” goes beyond providing different data. Their purpose is actually to destroy the notion that there could be impartial news and objective facts. Maria Bustillos calls this endgame “dismediation,” “a form of propaganda that seeks to undermine the medium by which it travels.”

Trump Adviser Stephen Miller Championed Big Tobacco’s Alarming Lies | Alternet
▻http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/stephen-miller-tobacco-truther-lies

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Two op-eds address the health effects of smoking tobacco and the “unrelenting health fascists” who regulate where one can smoke. In one piece that drastically minimizes the health risks of smoking, Miller, then a self-identified smoker, advances ideas that are patently false. Claiming “it is safer for college kids to smoke than to drive,” he overlooks a few key facts: Today, smoking kills 480,000 people in the United States each year, “more than AIDS, alcohol, car accidents, illegal drugs, murders and suicides combined.” While some college smokers may be able to quit long-term, most regular smokers who try to quit are not successful. In contrast, car crashes killed about 31,000 people in the U.S. in 2007, the year Miller wrote his opinion piece.

Miller relies on several articles published by the "renowned Cato Institute,” a libertarian think tank funded by corporations and wealthy conservatives. And guess what? The Cato Institute has received funding from major tobacco companies RJ Reynolds and Philip Morris. Miller cites a Cato article that even the conservative American Council on Science and Health called “unscientific and inflammatory.”

#tabac #post-truth

Elizabeth Warren Forcefully Challenges Labor Secretary Nominee on Overtime, Paid Sick Leave and Sexual Harassment Rules | Alternet
▻http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/warren-turns-heat-puzders-ploys

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Tom Hayden’s Legend Started With the Prescient and Still Relevant Port Huron Statement
By G. Pascal Zachary / AlterNet
▻http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/tom-haydens-legend-started-prescient-and-still-relevant-port-huron-stateme

On the eve of a presidential election, Hayden’s death serves as a reminder also of the limits of electoral politics. The Port Huron statement called a for a revolution in political consciousness, not merely an alteration in the people in power. “Men [and women] have unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity,” Hayden wrote. “It is this potential that we regard as crucial and to which we appeal, not to the human potentiality for violence, unreason, and submission to authority.”

The #FDA Now Officially Belongs to Big #Pharma | Alternet
▻http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/fda-now-officially-belongs-big-pharma

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It is hard to believe only four senators opposed the confirmation of Robert Califf, who was approved today as the next FDA commissioner. Vocal opponent Bernie Sanders condemned the vote from the campaign trail. But where was Dick Durbin? Where were all the lawmakers who say they care about industry and Wall Street profiteers making money at the expense of public health?

#conflit_d’intérêt

Who’s Buying ISIS’ Oil? | Alternet
By Vijay Prashad / CounterPunch
December 10, 2015
▻http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/whos-buying-isis-oil

On December 2, Russia’s Deputy Minister of Defense Anatoly Antonov made a strong statement about Turkish complicity with ISIS. The charge sheet is long and detailed. It mentions many aspects, but the most incendiary is the accusation about “ISIS oil.”

ISIS controls Iraqi oil fields near Mosul. They have been making millions of dollars each day by selling oil from these fields. How does ISIS get the oil from the fields in Mosul to the market?

What ISIS has done is to use the old networks that have smuggled oil from the Kurdish Regional Government without any consideration given to Baghdad’s sovereignty over that oil. This had been a point of contention for decades, since the Kurdish region began to exercise autonomous control of the north. Kurdish oil was sold to smugglers who would cart them in tankers across the border into Turkey. In Turkey the trucks would run the length of the country to the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. From Ceyhan, which is a port run by the Turkish government, the oil is purchased by transporters whose ships go to Malta, where the oil is transshipped to destinations such as Ashdod (Israel). This has long been a bone of contention between the Iraqi government, the Kurdish Regional Government and the Turkish government. It was documented by Tolga Tanış in his book Potus ve Beyefendi (2015). Tanis accuses Berat Albayrak, son-in-law of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, of involvement in this illegal scheme. ISIS has merely replaced the Kurdish Regional Government in the new arrangement.

#Pétrole #EI #ISIS

Who Are the Biggest Killers in America? The Numbers Will Shock You | Alternet
▻http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/who-are-biggest-killers-america-numbers-will-shock-you

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Reiman concludes that this means "workers are more likely to stay alive and healthy in the face of the danger from the underworld than from the workworld.”

Hillary Clinton Tells Israeli Billionaire and Mega-Donor She Will Support Israel, Fight Palestinian Movement | Alternet
▻http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/hillary-clinton-tells-israeli-billionaire-and-mega-donor-she-will-support-

Israeli-American Haim Saban is one of America’s richest men, the owner of numerous media and entertainment outlets — and a big Democratic donor. When the Democratic National Committee needed a new building, he coughed up $7 million to fund it, “one of the largest known donations ever made to an American political party.”

What does Saban want for all that money? “I’m a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel,” he said.

In order to pursue this objective, Saban has been pouring money into Hillary Clinton’s super PAC, $2 million by one estimate. This week, Hillary returned the favor. She wrote a long letter to Saban praising Israel and pledging to fight the Palestinian-led boycott movement, which seeks to use economic pressures to end the occupation of their territories.

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The Latest Outrageous Example of the Pentagon, DEA and Private Companies Conspiring to Track Everything You Do | Alternet
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A parting observation: the current emphasis on Constitutional freedom neglects the other pillar of the Constitution: equality.

Concentrating intently on liberty while eschewing the complementary notion of equality leads to the sort of ugly practices that preceded the Civil War. In fact there are those who would argue that society is currently progressing towards something worse, a reality by the way that the financial elite are well aware of.

When the public’s collective misery reaches a tipping point, and people begin to mobilize, the digital panopticon of the ruling class will be leveraged to preserve social control. They’ll do what they’ve always done, tirelessly work to maintain power and impose hierarchy.

Surveillance Valley: Why Google Is Eager to Align Itself With America’s Military Industrial Complex | Alternet
▻http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/surveillance-valley-why-google-eager-align-itself-americas-military-indust

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Google isn’t a traditional Internet service company. It isn’t even an advertising company. Google is a whole new type of beast that runs on a totally new type of tech business model.

Google is a global for-profit surveillance corporation — a company that tries to funnel as much user activity in the real and online world through its services in order to track, analyze, and profile us: It tracks as much of our daily lives as possible: who we are, what we do, what we like, where we go, who we talk to, what we think about, what we’re interested in. All those things are seized, packaged, commodified, and sold on the market.

It’s an amazingly profitable activity that takes bits and pieces and the most intimate detritus of our private lives — something that never really had any commercial value and turns it into billions of pure profit. It’s like turning rocks and gravel into gold. And it nets Google nearly $20 billion in annual profits.

At this point, most of the business comes from matching the right ad to the right pair of eyeballs at jus the right time. But who knows how the massive database Google’s compiling on all of us will be used in the future?

In the past few years, Google has aggressively intensified its campaign to grab a bigger slice of the insanely lucrative military-intelligence contracting market.

It’s been targeting big and juicy federal agencies — the U.S. Naval Academy signed up for Google Apps, the U.S. Army tapped Google Apps for a pilot program involving 50,000 DoD personnel, Idaho’s nuclear labwent Google, the U.S. Department of the Interior switched to Gmail, and the U.S. Coast Guard Academy went with Google, too. Google even entered into a partnership with the NGA, a sister agency to NSA to launch its very own spy satellite called GeoEye-1 — a spy satellite that it would share with the U.S. military intelligence apparatus.

Study Says Ethanol Does Not Qualify as a ’Renewable Fuel’ | Alternet
▻http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/independent-study-says-ethanol-does-not-qualify-renewable-fuel

The peer-reviewed study, which cost $500,000 and was paid for with a federal grant, concludes that biofuels made with corn byproducts release 7% more greenhouse gases in the early years compared with conventional gasoline. Thus, they don’t even come close to meeting current federal standards to qualify as a renewable fuel source.

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to Kindly Fund Research into Student-Worn Bracelets Monitoring Teacher Effectiveness | Alternet
▻http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/bill-and-melinda-gates-foundation-kindly-fund-research-student-worn-bracel

The Gates just keep pumping money into educational research teachers don’t want or need.

Noam Chomsky: Obama’s Policies Are Creating Terrorism Around the World | Alternet
▻http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/chomsky-obama-creating-terrorism-around-world?akid=10591.1838262.VOqwF9

Video: NSA spying justified as preventing terrorism, when it is the administration’s policies that are ensuring terrorism.