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After four years of frontline reporting and research, The Grayzone’s Anya Parampil unveils her forthcoming book, Corporate Coup: Venezuela and the End of US Empire.  Based on four years of original investigative work and interviews with diplomats from across the globe, Corporate Coup uses the case of Venezuela to examine the West’s blueprint for modern regime change war: the hybrid diplomatic assaults, economic terrorism, covert destabilization tactics, and information warfare that the US and its allies unleash against all governments […]

The post Announcing ‘Corporate Coup: Venezuela and the End of US Empire’ by Anya Parampil first appeared on The Grayzone.

The post Announcing ‘Corporate Coup: Venezuela and the End of US Empire’ by Anya Parampil appeared first on The Grayzone.

Same old, same “too old” Stop the handwringing, okay? Mehdi Hasan Sunday night addressed the press promotion of the “Biden’s too old” narrative. Meantime, President Joe Biden, 80, is out bicycling. Had a conversation just yesterday with a voter who brought up the “Biden’s too old” concern. Why? Because the media’s all aflutter with it and one thing Democrats are good at is self-doubt. Listen, the next general (not just presidential) election is 14 months out. Between now and then much can happen, usually does, and probably will. Yes, it’s important for Democrats to hold the White House. But it’s also important that they retain the Senate, take back the House, and regain strength in state legislatures where Republicans are running laboratories of autocracy. I’m focused on keeping this lunatic out of North Carolina’s governor’s mansion. The irony is that however tight polls suggest that race looks today, it’s a long way to Tuesday, November 5, 2024. Between now and then, there is a lot of work to do.

How’s that for retribution? The FB post below deserves a wider audience. Sara Robinson is a futurist friend who’s written for Orcinus with David Neiwert and for America’s Future and AlterNet. She commented a few weeks ago on Vivek Ramaswamy’s plans for “revolution” in Washington, D.C. Ramaswamy’s pitch is another riff on Republicans’ and the Heritage Foundation’s plan to “Schedule F” away the “administrative state” both by replacing tens of thousands of career civil servants with MAGA ideologues and by killing off entire agencies. Think of the Trump administration on steroids. For the MAGA faithful who still believe their spray-tanned savior was cheated of his rightful kingship by the deep state, eliminating 75 percent of the federal workforce may hold retributive appeal.

It runs in his family… On Sunday night Donald Trump threw down the gauntlet at the feet of Rupert Murdoch and his sons, Joe Biden and the “WSJ heads.” He posted this cri de guerre on his social media platform Truth Social: In a phony and probably rigged Wall Street Journal poll, coming out of nowhere to soften the mental incompetence blow that is so obvious with Crooked Joe Biden, they ask about my age and mentality. Where did that come from? A few years ago I was the only one to agree to a mental acuity test, & ACED IT. Now that the Globalists at Fox & the WSJ have failed to push their 3rd tier candidate to success, they do this. Well, I hereby challenge Rupert Murdoch & Sons, Biden, WSJ heads, to acuity tests! He added: I will name the place and the test, and it will be a tough one. Nobody will come even close to me! We can also throw some physical activity into it. I just won the Senior Club Championship at a big golf club, with many very good players. To do so you need strength, accuracy, touch and, above all, mental toughness. Ask Bret Baier (Fox), a very good golfer.

They weren’t all human

Trump “memorializes” 9/11 He is currently in business with Saudi Arabia’s LIV golf, happy to whitewash their past as he did when he proclaimed MBS innocent of ordering the death and dismemberment of Jamaal Kashoggi. His first trip as president was to genuflect to their king. And his son-in-law delivered so much to the Saudi government while he was in the White House that they gave him 2 billion dollars in thanks immediately upon leaving office. Also this, when he called in to a radio station on the morning of 9/11 and bragged about how he now had the tallest building in Manhattan, which was, naturally, a lie:  “I mean, 40 Wall Street actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan. And it was actually – before the World Trade Center – was the tallest. And then when they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second-tallest, and now it’s the tallest.” As multiple fact checks later pointed out, this was not true. The Wall Street building had not been the tallest building in lower Manhattan in the 1970s, when the Twin Towers were constructed, nor was it the tallest in the area after 2001.

Of aliens and alienation The United States pulled itself together again somehow after the trauma of the Civil War. Or rather, slavery ended formally only to be replaced by a system that rendered the South’s once-enslaved persons free in name only for another 100 years. What persisted was one nation with two systems deeply divided by culture. Those war’s psychic wounds were thinly disguised behind monuments to the Lost Cause that the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) spent decades planting across indivisible nation. Meanwhile, the Invisible Nation enforced white supremacy for nearly a century. The North won the Civil War, but the South won the peace, at least regionally. The trauma of electing the country’s first black president in this century reopened the wounds to white pride that never fully healed after Appomattox. Donald Trump, his own psychic wounds worn on the outside, exploited that grievance to win the presidency immediately following Barack Obama’s White House tenure. Talk of a second civil war persists among Trump’s red-hatted brownshirts and did so even before Trump lost reelection in 2020. A New Lost cause was born.

Indicted former president gets a mixed welcome All the red was not for him. There were chants of U-S-A when TFG arrived Saturday at Jack Trice Stadium for the Iowa-Iowa State football game. But other football fans gave Donald Trump a less than warm welcome. The New York Times: The former president entered the game to a mix of applause and audible boos, as a plane with a banner reading “Where’s Melania?” flew overhead — a nod to the absence of his wife from the campaign trail. Some attendees gave him the middle finger from the stands while he looked on from the glass-paneled box from which he watched the game.

And it’s not Tuberville Wisconsin just re-elected this person.

This from Eric Loomis at LG&M struck me because I just love the fact that unions are finally getting some traction after all these years. It’s a wonderful development and I have high hopes that this new generation will be successful in reforming the workplace through collective action. However, they do need to keep their eyes on the prize: As a labor person who is not one of these lefty labor-intellectual types who think that the real goal of the labor movement or the left should be to “emancipate” ourselves from labor entirely, I am not of the utopian type frame of mind. I admit that my brain mostly works within the 20th century socialist framework much more so than the 21st century left-libertarian-individual freedom framework. So when I see odd collective bargaining demands from workers who are more of the individualistic mindset, it kind of breaks my brain. Workers can collectively bargain for whatever they want. But I am trying to imagine walking to negotiations and trying to work out the demands of these Philadelphia coffee shop workers. I am going to present here what the employers’ lawyer says, which you can dismiss if you would like.