Chris Hedges:

There is a fatal disconnect between a political system that promises democratic equality and freedom while carrying out socioeconomic injustices that result in grotesque income inequality and political stagnation.

Decades in the making, this disconnect has extinguished American democracy. The steady stripping away of economic and political power was ignored by a hyper­ventilating press that thundered against the barbarians at the gate — Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, ISIS, Vladimir Putin — while ignoring the barbarians in our midst. The slow-motion coup is over. Corporations and the billionaire class have won. There are no institutions, including the press, an electoral system that is little more than legalized bribery, the imperial presidency, the courts or the penal system, that can be defined as democratic. Only the fiction of democracy remains.

In der ČSSR hatten die Häuptlinge des ZK einen neuen Parteichef aus dem Hut gezaubert, einen Funktionär Ohne Namen: Alexander Dubček. Dieses Häschen­krokodil der Nomenklatura verkündete etwas Unglaubliches. Der neue Slogan hieß: Sozialismus mit menschlichem Antlitz. Im ersten Moment spotteten wir über diese offensichtliche Tautologie, wir witterten einen liberalistischen Maskenball der Stalinisten. Doch bald dämmerte auch mir und beseelte uns alle, dass dieser junge Parteisekretär Dubček das Paradoxon offenbar kindlich ernst meinte. Nicht etwa kleine Freiheiten sollten gnädig gewährt werden, nicht also Freiheit als Falschgeld im Plural, sondern die Freiheit im Singular! Konkret: Meinungsfreiheit, Pressefreiheit, Versammlungs­freiheit. Die neue Maske war ein Menschengesicht!

In der DDR-Presse kein Wort darüber. Nur über Radio Prag hörte ich, dass die Opfer der Prager Schauprozesse des Jahres 1952 rehabilitiert wurden. Rudolf Slánský war auf einmal kein hingerichteter Konterrevolutionär mehr, sondern ein Märtyrer. Das konnten keine Propaganda­tricks sein, keine stalinistische Entstalinisierung à la Chruschtschow, denn es ging viel tiefer als die halbherzige Liberalisierung nach dem XX. Parteitag der KPdSU 1956. Dubček betrieb offenbar eine echte Demokratisierung. Als uns klar wurde, dass der große Bruder Breschnew tobte und der kleine Bruder Ulbricht Galle spuckte, als die Brüder des Warschauer Pakts immer hysterischer geiferten, da ahnten wir, dass eine neue Zeit angebrochen war. Allerdings – was Wunder! – fand in Prag eine Revolution von oben statt, also eine Art guter Staatsstreich echter Kommunisten im Apparat der Partei.

Unser DDR-Herz lachte, und wir spekulierten auf einen noch unbekannten Dubček auch bei uns in der DDR, im Politbüro der SED.

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Rudi Dutschke erzählte mir von seinem Streit­gespräch mit Studenten in Prag im April des Jahres und wunderte sich über deren »hysterische Angst« vor einem sowjetischen Einmarsch. Die tschechischen Studenten verstünden seine Auffassung von Marxismus nicht, für sie sei Marxismus gleichbedeutend mit Unterdrückung.

Die Raubtiere im Politbüro der SED waren wirklichkeitsnäher als Dutschke. Sie zitterten vor dem lächelnden Menschengesicht ihres Genossen Dubček.

—Wolf Biermann, »Warte nicht auf bessre Zeiten!«, (Berlin: Ullstein Buchverlage GmbH, 2016), 212-215.

BBC:

Foreigners must tell the Israeli defence ministry if they fall in love with a Palestinian in the occupied West Bank, according to new rules.

If they marry, they will be required to leave after 27 months for a cooling-off period of at least half a year.

It is part of a tightening of rules on foreigners living in, or wanting to visit, the West Bank.

Palestinians and Israeli NGOs have accused Israel of „taking restrictions to a new level“.

The new rules are due to come into force on Monday.

The regulations laid out in a lengthy document include a demand on foreigners to inform the Israeli authorities within 30 days of starting a relationship with a Palestinian ID holder.

New restrictions on Palestinian universities include a quota for 150 student visas and 100 foreign lecturers, while there are no such limits in Israeli ones.

Mike Davis, Guardian:

But we’ve passed the tipping points in so many ways, and we’re doing so many of the wrong things. It’s not just global warming, and drought, it’s the fact that two-thirds of the new homes built in the American west are in high fire-hazard areas, and the Democrats refuse to talk about a moratorium on construction or even rolling back construction in the urban-wildlife interface. It’s easier for politicians to say they’re supporting electric vehicles. Greenwashing has reached a disgusting extent. Our ruling classes everywhere have no rational analysis or explanation for the immediate future. A small group of people have more concentrated power over the human future than ever before in human history, and they have no vision, no strategy, no plan.

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You can’t expect to die at a very heroic moment. It’d be nice to die in 1968, or with the liberation of Europe in 1945. You’re on the barricades in 1917, 1919. Go out of life with the red flags flying. But despair is useless.

Associated Press:

U.S. life expectancy dropped for the second consecutive year in 2021, falling by nearly a year from 2020, according to a government report being released Wednesday.

In the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, the estimated American lifespan has shortened by nearly three years. The last comparable decrease happened in the early 1940s, during the height of World War II.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials blamed COVID-19 for about half the decline in 2021, a year when vaccinations became widely available but new coronavirus variants caused waves of hospitalizations and deaths. Other contributors to the decline are longstanding problems: drug overdoses, heart disease, suicide and chronic liver disease.

“It’s a dismal situation. It was bad before and it’s gotten worse,” said Samuel Preston, a University of Pennsylvania demographer.

Craig Murray:

In short, it turns out Marx was right. The crisis of capitalism is now upon us. Neoliberalism (another word for designing state systems deliberately to lead to incredible concentrations of wealth amid general poverty) is coming to the end of its course. There are no palliative measures that will make the situation bearable. A radical change in the ownership of assets is the only thing that will address the situation – starting with public ownership of all energy companies, from hydrocarbon extractors like Shell and BP, through gas, electricity and fuel generators and manufacturers, distributors and retailers.

Nationalisation should be done properly, without compensating shareholders. If I had to choose between compensating the shareholders and imprisoning them, I would imprison them. I suggest we do neither.

That is only one sector and only the start. But it is a good start.

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The splitting of the political left by identity politics has been the go-to weapon of the state for several decades now. The replacement of horizontal class solidarity by vertical gender solidarity being the most obvious tool, epitomised by the notion that it was better to elect the multi millionaire, corrupt, neoliberal warmonger Hillary Clinton than the class politics espousing Bernie Sanders, simply because the warmonger was a woman.

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The Ukraine war is unusual in the attempt to enforce wartime levels of unanimity of narrative on the population, in western countries which are not only not combatants in the war, but not even formally allied to Ukraine. The United States was a party to the Vietnam War, but it was still possible for Americans to criticise that war without having all media access banned. Today you cannot criticise Ukraine in the state or corporate media at all, and your social media access is likely to be severely restricted unless you follow the official propaganda narrative.

This is the Establishment’s strongest method of control – the labeling of opposing opinion as “misinformation” or “disinformation”, even when there is no genuine evidential base that makes the official “facts” unassailable, as with Douma or the Skripals. To ask questions is stigmatised as traitorous and entirely illegitimate, while official journalists simply regurgitate government “information”.

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The neoliberal phase of super-capitalism has run its course. The gap between the wealthy and ordinary people has become so extreme that, even in the West, ordinary people no longer can afford to live decently. Consumerism has desperately depleted natural resources and accelerated climate change. The policy of perpetual war has finally undermined the world economy to a fatal degree.

The situation is not sustainable, but the global elite have no intention to give up sufficient of their massive wealth to make any difference. They seek to control society through the propaganda model and through increasing state repression of dissent, allied to an assault on “incorrect” thought by censorship of the internet and by populist demonisation. “Left” causes such as identity politics and protection from offence have been weaponised to support this suppression.

There is no democratic outlet for popular anger. The “opposition” parties which people can vote for are all under firm neoliberal, warmonger control. Democracy has ceased to present any effective choice that offers any hope of real change. The revival of interest in organised labour and the willingness of young people to engage in direct action in the field of climate change offer some avenues for activism, but it is too little, too late.