Ruth's Report: CONVO COUCH and Mickey Z

First up, a video from THE CONVO COUCH.

And I also want to recommend Mickey Z's latest at DISSIDENT VOICE:

Thanks to useless lockdowns without a shred of science to support them, about 10,000 additional children are dying each and every month from hunger.

Here it comes…

Deadly treatment protocols designed to enrich the elites were imposed upon hospitals and thus, patients — causing nearly one million deaths in the U.S. falsely attributed to Covid-19.

Wait for it…

In 2020, workers lost $3.7 trillion while billionaires gained $3.9 trillion. Some 493 individuals became new billionaires, and an additional 8 million Americans dropped below the poverty line. This is the largest upward transfer of wealth in the known history of the world.

Read the article in full and use the links. It is very disturbing. Very.

This is C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot" for today:

Wednesday, April 6, 2022. We live in a world that demands questions and should be demanding accountability.

Let's start with some truth from Christian Parenti at GRAY ZONE:

For two years the left has championed policies of surveillance and exclusion in the form of: punitive vaccine mandates, invasive vaccine passports, socially destructive lockdowns, and radically unaccountable censorship by large media and technology corporations. For the entire pandemic, leftists and liberals – call them the Lockdown Left – cheered on unprecedented levels of repression aimed primarily at the working class – those who could not afford private schools and could not comfortably telecommute from second homes.

Almost the entire left intelligentsia has remained psychically stuck in March 2020. Its members have applauded the new biosecurity repression and calumniated as liars, grifters, and fascists any and all who dissented. Typically, they did so without even engaging evidence and while shirking public debate. Among the most visible in this has been Noam Chomsky, the self-described anarcho-syndicalist who called for the unvaccinated to “remove themselves from society,” and suggested that they should be allowed to go hungry if they refuse to submit. [1]

In Jacobin, a magazine claiming to support the working class in all its struggles, Branko Marcetic demanded the unvaccinated be barred from public transportation: “one obvious course of action is for Biden to make vaccines a requirement for mass transport.” [2] Journalist Doug Henwood has scolded the unvaccinated with: “Get over your own bloated sense of self-importance.” [3] But Henwood has championed shutting down all of society in the name of safety, while refusing to engage counter-arguments – a combination that suggests a bloated sense of self-importance of his own.

Other left intellectuals, like Benjamin Bratton, author of a Verso book on the pandemic called Return of the Real, are notable for hiding amidst academic blather: “the book’s argument is on behalf [of] a ‘positive biopolitics’ that may form the basis of viable social self-organization, but this is less a statement on behalf of ‘the political’ in some metaphysical sense than on behalf of a governmentality through which an inevitably planetary society can deliberately compose itself.” [4] This is, as the late Alex Cockburn once said, “what dumb people think smart people sound like.”

Even the American Civil Liberties Union – long a bastion of objective thinking and civil liberties absolutism – has supported the mandates, lockdowns, and censorship. David Cole, the group’s legal director, debased himself in the New York Times with a tortured op-ed explaining how everything the ACLU stood for over the last 100 years suddenly did not apply during the season of freakout and overreach. [5]

The pandemic brought out a lot of ugly in some people.

What we really needed was Michael Ratner to povide the voice of warning that he so foten did when rights and liberties were under attack, when the people were under attack. Naomi Wolf, who saw eye to eye with Michael on many civil liberty manners, tried to raise issues and was attacked and deplatformed for it.

There were serious conversations that should have taken place and because she dared to rasiet hem, she was attacked, her words distorted and the corporate press ridiculed her. I'm sure they would have tried something siilar with Michael but I would've hoped that he had enough frineds who were willing to step up and refuse to allow him to be disappeared from the conversation.

Whole rights were removed and people were attacked. All the while, I don't remember the people working to malign Naomi also taking the time to note the real crooks -- the ones making money off the pandemic.

Kevin Reed (WSWS) notes:

In the second year of the pandemic, the chief executives of the top US corporations are on track to set new compensation records while the wages of their workers were reduced. This is the conclusion drawn by several analyses of pay data submitted by a group of S&P 500 corporations to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as part of their annual filing requirements.

On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal reported that median pay for CEOs rose to $14.2 million last year, up from a record $13.4 million in 2020. The report said that half of the companies reported median wages for their workers increased in 2021 by 3.1 percent. However, this is less than half of last year’s inflation rate of 6.7 percent, and it means that these workers took an effective paycut.

The Journal report noted, “Most CEOs received a pay increase of 11 percent or more, and pay rose by at least 25 percent for nearly one-third of them.” It also reported that for one-third of the companies, median employee pay declined last year.

These figures are based on a review by the Journal of “pay data for more than half the index from MyLogIQ LLC.” MyLogIQ is a provider of SEC compliance services and has access to the government agency public filings database.

But Naomi Wolf, not these greedy opportunists, was the one villified?

I watched a NETFLIX special the other day -- or I tried to watch it. Ronny Chieng was funny in his previous special. So, with SPEAKEASY, I tried to endure it and hoped he'd turn it around. After eight minutes, I couldn't stomach anymore.

How brave he must feel to ridicule people. Not the powerful, of course. Cowards like him never ridicule the powerful. Instead he goes after We The People. A man with no science background wants to ridicule others for asking questions regarding science. A man raised under a totalitarian system has obviously instilled those lessons and feels no need to fight for democracy or free speech. He instead tries to shame We The People and tells people to shut up and go along with what they are told. How dare they ask questions, why, they are like the person who skips calass all semester and then shows up for the last day of the semester and is failing the final and screaming that it doesn't make sense and is just too stupid for words.

Do you ever have that dream, where you wake up and it's a final and somehow you managed to miss the entire semster of a class?

It's a nightmare I have repeatedly and that's, in part, because it did actually happen to me.

Because I wouldn't go along with what others had planned for me, I had to pay my own college costs (not the end of the world, many have to do the same). As a result, I always worked at least two jobs each semester in addition to classes. The last or the second to the last semester, I had 16 hours of classes and was working three jobs. I went to the first two weeks of a class and that was it. It was the second to the last semester. It was December when the final rolled around.

Sorry, Ronny, but I aced thefinal. I didn't scream or whine.

I guess that's how it happens in your world. Not in mine.

and in mine world, we don't attack people for daring to demand answers and acountability from tehir government. As you mock the so-called stupidity of others, I hope you grasp in a few years, just how stupid and pathetic and craven you sounded.

I don't care who is in the White House, people should always demand accountability, they should always question their government. That's what a democracy is about.

Children say inappropriate things. Especially when they're trying to be funny. That's why I don't supoprt anyone using the n-word. A seven-year-old watching Dave Chappelle (a great comedian and a friend) thinking he's cool and wanting to be like him just knows the laughs came when he said this or that. They copy it with no understanding of, for example, the historial harm of that term, the n-word. They don't get it, they don't have the history to understand it. They ust know that DAve's cool, Dave said it and it' got laughs. Huge laughs. So they mimic.

I bring that up because the post-Jon Stewart version of THE DAILY SHOW is pure and utter garbage. And Ronny has worked there. His squeals were apparently funny there. He'd squel about some Republcian and they'd love it. And, like a child, he didn't really understand what was getting the laughs. So now he makes a fool of himself in his NETFLIX special that is so undemocratic, it's practically a parody. It's the sort of thing you'd see some boot licker perform in the movie V FOR VENDDETTA with Natalie Portman. And because Ronny's high pitched squeals struck comic gold in the past, he assumes he knows how to make people laugh. He might be making some people laugh, but I worry about their state of mind.

People need to be held accountable. Jacob Crosse (WSWS) explains:

In recent days, a longstanding investigation by the Department of Justice (DoJ) into the taxes and financial affairs of Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, has become the subject of prominent news reports in the mainstream press. The reports, nearly all citing anonymous sources within the DoJ, confirm that the investigation, which began during the Trump administration but was not disclosed by Hunter Biden until December 2020, has broadened in scope.

As of this writing, no official charges have been made against Hunter Biden or any other member of the Biden family.

Prominent articles on the federal investigation into the younger Biden’s international business dealings began to appear in mid-March. On March 16, the New York Times reported that the president’s son recently paid off an outstanding tax liability of over $1 million. Nevertheless, “a grand jury continued to gather evidence in a wide-ranging examination of his international business dealings, according to people familiar with the case,” the newspaper wrote.

Subsequent reports, citing sources within the DoJ, confirmed that witnesses with close ties to Hunter Biden, including former business and romantic partners, are being interviewed by a federal grand jury located in Wilmington, Delaware. Among them is former business associate and fellow Yale University alumnus Devon Archer.

Archer was sentenced to 13 months imprisonment in February for his participation in a fraud scheme, following his conviction in 2018. The operation involved defrauding the Oglala Sioux tribe of roughly $60 million in bonds.

While Hunter Biden was not involved in Archer’s fraud case, the former friends and business partners both sat on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings, which, the DoJ has confirmed, is under investigation.

Hunter Biden was appointed to the Burisma board, despite having no experience in the field, during the period when his father, then vice president, served as the point-man for the Obama administration’s imperialist operations in Ukraine following the US-backed Maidan coup of February 2014.

Burisma paid Hunter Biden roughly $50,000 a month between 2014 and 2019. The money was wired to a Delaware-based corporation called Rosemont Seneca Bohai LLC, which was owned by Archer and registered by him on February 13, 2014. The company, according to a September 2020 report by Senate Republicans, acted as “a shell entity” to receive an estimated $3.5 million in payments from Burisma to Archer and Hunter Biden. In the same report, the Republicans detailed Hunter Biden’s business dealings in China.

People need tod emand answers.

It appears the Biden family, while pretending to be in public service, was trading on Joe's name and his public service for years. It ceratinly explains how a man who served on the public dime for his entire career ended up out of ofice with millions and millions of dollars. It's graft. It's corruption. And , in a democracy, politicians have to answer for that.

Ronny wants everyone to shut up and just go along. This as the US government is pimping another war. Andre Damon (WSWS) reports:

In yet another major effort to escalate NATO’s proxy war against Russia, the Biden administration is seizing upon claims by Ukrainian officials of a massacre by Russian forces in the Kiev suburb of Bucha to implement a new round of sanctions and undermine any effort at a peaceful settlement of the war.

“I got criticized for calling Putin a war criminal,” US President Joe Biden said Monday. “Well, the truth of the matter, you saw what happened in Bucha. He is a war criminal.” Biden added, “We have to continue to provide Ukraine with the weapons they need in order to fight.”

The American government, along with the media, proceeds according to the principle: first the conclusion, then the investigation. Biden, who more than one year after the January 6 coup attempt cannot make up his mind whether Trump is guilty of a crime, has already decided that Russian President Vladimir Putin is guilty of “war crimes” in Bucha.

The actual facts, however, do not prove the conclusion. Russian troops withdrew from Bucha right after the Kremlin promised to dramatically reduce its forces in the direction of Kiev in peace negotiations last Tuesday. For days, no significant civilian casualties were reported. On Saturday, Ukrainian forces—including members of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion—entered the town, and a torrent of reports were unleashed in the Western press about alleged atrocities.

The images shown widely only indicate that bodies were found, but not who killed whom, when and under what circumstances. While video evidence has emerged of Ukrainian forces executing and torturing unarmed people, no similar evidence has emerged for Russian troops.

Given the systematic use by the United States of false allegations of atrocities to justify wars all over the world, and absent clear and convincing evidence, there is no reason to view the claims of a massacre in Bucha as anything other than war propaganda, aimed at enraging the population to justify military escalation.

Even if it were established that Russian troops fired on civilians—and that has not been established—that would not mean that they were acting under the instruction of the Russian government.

In the world Ronny promotes in his new special, you don't ask questions, you just go along.

Actually, that's the formula for a disaster -- as most people already know -- people far wiser than Ronny.

Sergeant Tim Gordon is home and I'm very glad of that. I'm also glad that Sgt Jake Pietsch, whom we noted earlier this week, is home as well.

I hope people who learn of those two returning from Iraq grasp that US troops remain on the ground there. And I hope that they grasp this is troop rotation, not a withdrawal. I hope they question why, all this time later, US troops are on the ground in Iraq and, maybe, they question why two members of the National Gaurd were there to begin with?

A lot of actions shold be raising questions but the Ronnys of the world are bothered by that. I'm bothered by the people who don't ask questions. Demadning accountability is more of a civic duty.

Some argue voting is a civic duty. At THE HILL, Kipp Jones reports:

A number of Democratic Party strategists spoke to The Hill seven months ahead of the November midterms. One of them concluded the party is doomed.

With record gas prices and four-decade high inflation pricing some Americans out of basic commodities, party insiders weighed in. The consensus was President Joe Biden and Democrats are in serious trouble.

Worried about not only losing a majority in the House, but also in the Senate, top strategists spoke of the issues Democrats face in convincing Americans to turn out and vote for them in the fall.

Bill Galston, who advised former President Bill Clinton, said Biden’s approval numbers can only go so high right now.

“My hypothesis is that, unless and until inflation comes down appreciably, that there’s going to be a ceiling on his job approval that’s a lot lower than the White House wants it to be,” Galston said.

Gallup senior editor Jeff Jones concurred. “High gas prices are one of the biggest anchors on presidential approval,” Jones said.

Biden’s approval rating is hovering at a round 40 percent. The RealClearPolitics average shows 41.0% approve of Biden’s job performance, while 53.8% disapprove.

The Biden administration has repeatedly attempted to attribute pain at the pump to Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine. There was a consensus among experts that the message is not helping the president with voters.

When you fail to deliver, when inflation rises and your predecssor at least gave out toekn, tiny checks hwile you do nothing, when you have the nerave to try to normalize a possible food shortage in the us, maybe you've done enough harm to yourself and to your party.

We'll wind down with this.

INew content at THIRD:

The following sites updated: