Page Text: BY Jeffrey St. Clair
Putin may have been tempted, lured, baited or even duped into invading Ukraine. He may have been lied to by his own generals and spymasters. He may not be the grand strategists so many thought. But he alone pulled the trigger. His tanks crossed the border. His bombs destroyed city blocks, hospitals, train depots. His army is occupying foreign ground. Excuses can be made. But they only mitigate his crimes, they don’t exculpate them.
BY Steve O’Keefe
David N. Bossie, the Citizen in Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court case that opened the floodgates to unlimited corporate cash in American elections, the author of take-down books against the Clintons and puff-books for Donald Trump, whose 2016 presidential campaign siphoned plenty of unlimited corporate cash – that David Bossie – has released a new movie called Rigged complaining about unlimited corporate cash in the 2020 election. Rigged makes a case that the 2016 election was stolen by Mark Zuckerburg and other corporate donors who ran successful get-out-the-vote drives to ensure all Americans would be able to exercise the franchise. In hindsight, Bossie, Trump, Steve Bannon and Ted Cruz don't like that and think "it shouldn't be allowed," to quote Donald Trump being interviewed by Bossie in the film. By saying it "shouldn't be allowed," Rigged gives up the game, admitting that it is currently legal for big corporations and wealthy individuals to give unlimited money to nonprofit organizations to increase voter turnout. It's legal because of David Bossie's dark-money-driven efforts to make his organization, Citizens United, producer of Rigged, a black cesspool of billionaire patronage.
BY David Price
A few years ago I filed Freedom of Information Act requests for FBI, CIA, and US State Department files held on the murdered anti-apartheid activist, Ruth First. My interest in Ruth First was initially raised because so much the research she did for her activist writings was based on anthropological forms of participant observations. She researched her books and articles by living amongst the people she wrote about, and her analysis brought the sort of bottom-up perspectives gifted ethnographers strive to produce. Some of her approach appears to have come from her personality, but some of it also came from her academic training at the University of the Witwatersrand in the 1940s, which included anthropology courses; and she later wrote about the formative impact on her life of doing field research for her books and articles documenting the brutalities of her Apartheid. Ruth First was born in Johannesburg in 1925, to immigrants Tilly and Julius First, whose socialist political orientation shaped her early critique of apartheid. As a university student, Ruth First’s exposure to sociological critiques of power relations and anthropological methods of bottom-up inquiry shaped elements of her later work. She joined the Communist Party and helped form an activist group known as the Federation of Progressive Students, which challenged the basic assumptions of apartheid. She worked as a social worker, labor union organizer, taught in black schools, and learned the craft of writing reporting for various newspapers including the Communist Party’s Johannesburg paper The Guardian. Though The Guardian was banned in 1951, she created new journalistic outlets to publish important series of articles showing South Africans and the world the realities of apartheid. Her investigative journalism often involved simple, but dangerous, through stints of fieldwork observation she spent significant stretches time in rural settings, documenting the daily degradations of life in South Africa. She also chronicled problems facing the African National Congress (ANC).
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