Norman Solomon, CounterPunch:

While outsized profits keep benefiting the upper class and enriching the already obscenely rich, the cascading effects of extreme income inequality are drowning the hopes of the many.

Corporate power constrains just about everything, whether healthcare or education or housing or jobs or measures for responding to the climate emergency. What prevails is the political structure of the economy.

Class war in the United States has established what amounts to oligarchy. A zero-sum economic system, aka corporate capitalism, is constantly exercising its power to reward and deprive. The dominant forces of class warfare — disproportionately afflicting people of color while also steadily harming many millions of whites — continue to undermine basic human rights including equal justice and economic security. In the real world, financial power is political power. A system that runs on money is adept at running over people without it.

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Both parties continue to champion what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism.” When King described the profligate spending for a distant war as “some demonic, destructive suction tube,” he was condemning dynamics that endure with a vengeance. Today, the madness and the denial are no less entrenched. A militaristic core serves as a sacred touchstone for faith in America as the world’s one and only indispensable nation. Gargantuan Pentagon budgets are taken for granted, as is the assumed prerogative to bomb other countries at will.

Ian Sample, Guardian:

‘There’s no good reason to think that life in VR will be meaningless or valueless,’ says Chalmers.
Photograph: Aleksandr Zamuruiev/Alamy

It is hard to imagine humans spending their lives in virtual reality when the experience amounts to waving your arms about in the middle of the lounge with a device the size of a house brick strapped to your face.

But this is where humanity is heading, says the philosopher David Chalmers, who argues for embracing the fate. Advances in technology will deliver virtual worlds that rival and then surpass the physical realm. And with limitless, convincing experiences on tap, the material world may lose its allure, he says.

Chalmers, a professor of philosophy and neural science at New York University, makes the case to embrace VR in his new book, Reality+. Renowned for articulating “the hard problem” of consciousness – which inspired Tom Stoppard’s play of the same name – Chalmers sees technology reaching the point where virtual and physical are sensorily the same and people live good lives in VR.

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Henry Giroux, Truthout:

The current political moment is dominated by a massive propagandistic machine, fueled largely by right-wing social media platforms that undermine the promise of hope and its foundational political and educational elements that wed truth and the search for justice to action through mass collective struggles. This is a powerful ocular-image-based pedagogical apparatus that both erases history and distorts it. Manufactured ignorance now parades as news, performs as spectacle, and in doing so, sabotages both the truth and democracy itself. Politics has become a form of ethicide — a disavowal of social responsibility and the removal of political, discursive and economic actions from social costs.

The challenging times in which we now live operate as hope’s antithesis by spreading the ideology of regressive individualism, consumerism, deregulation and anti-intellectualism while reproducing a model of gangster capitalism that empties politics of its democratic possibilities. We live in an age in which radical hope faces the challenge of a number of fundamentalisms rooted in economic, religious and educational forms of repression, all of which characterize a brutal form of gangster capitalism. Accentuated by a growing inequality, uncertainty, fear and distrust of the public good, capitalism hides its ruthlessness and criminogenic power relations by saturating U.S. culture with depoliticizing narratives which echo the fatal notion that it “has no alternative.” In doing so, it has deepened the gulf of shared fears and learned helplessness that enable the formative culture that supports a rebranded fascist politics.

San Francisco Chronicle:

When restaurateur Eugene Lee learned that Oakland students had created an online petition last week demanding school district officials provide KN95 masks to help protect all pupils during the omicron surge, he sprang into action.

Lee, whose restaurant Noodle Belly is opening Saturday in Oakland’s Fruitvale district, reached out to Mayor Libby Schaaf, who put him in touch with Oakland Unified School District officials. This week, he donated 10,000 KN95 masks to the district and another 15,000 to the city for emergency workers.

“It was a no-brainer for me,” said Lee, who also owns a roofing supply store in San Francisco.

Part of what makes America great – you don’t read about German noodle restaurant owners donating masks to the city of Berlin now do you?

Evelyn N. Farkas, Defense One:

The only way to reassert the primacy of international law and sanctity of international borders, and contain Russia, may be to issue our own ultimatum. We must not only condemn Russia’s illegal occupations of Ukraine and Georgia, but we must demand a withdrawal from both countries by a certain date and organize coalition forces willing to take action to enforce it.

To be sure, nuclear-armed Russia is far more powerful than Saddam’s Iraq.

Farkas served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia under Obama.

Richard Falk, CounterPunch:

America never purported to become a substantive democracy that extends effective social protection or universal human rights to all of its citizens in the manner of many European countries that have upheld a quite different social democratic contract with their citizens. In that sense, the most basic freedom of all for US citizens, although not inscribed in parchment or openly proclaimed, has been preserving the right of every citizen to fail, a right substantially upheld through times of prosperity and hardship, reflecting the boom and bust bedrock cycles of capitalist theory and practice. The mixture of a cult of individualism together with minimally regulated capitalism is as much a part of constitutional order as are elections and the rule of law, but rarely avowed.

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A sophisticated interpretation of January 6^th would be to regard it as a long-deferred payback by Republicans for the alleged abandonment by Democrats of this right to fail, including attendant flirtations with the New Deal safety net of social protection, demonized by the Republicans at the time and ever since as ‘crypto-socialism.’