Comments of the Week: Reality Check Edition

It’s time, once again, for our roundup of some of the week’s most considered, insightful and just plain well-put posts from Truthdig’s comment community. And once again, we’d like to emphasize that this is only a handful of the entries that our editors read and enjoyed in recent days. They’re presented here to show our appreciation and to keep the discussion going.

Several of this week’s picks were of the straight-and-to-the-point variety. First up is this succinct bit of media criticism from NJHope that appeared under a story about collusion between the Obama administration and big banks vis-a-vis the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Not ONE WORD of this on the Front page or anywhere I could find in the NY Times.

Always a good impulse to notice what doesn’t qualify as “all the news that’s fit to print.”

Here’s a longer, heartfelt reality check from Ted Apelt — written in response to one of Robert Reich’s least popular recent columns — that sums up well what the typically more attuned former (Bill) Clinton aide missed in his appraisal of the presidential contest:

I really don’t think that the Robert Reich has any idea of the hatred and rage that oppressed people like me have towards the Clintons (both of them), Obama, and the Democratic Party. They have sold us out. They talk like they are on our side, and make us think that they are “fighting for us”, but then we get NAFTA, CAFTA, the bank bailout (with NO jail time for the criminals who stole from us!), and other atrocities that go on and on and on while they rake in millions of dollars from our oppressors in payment for their part in screwing us over again and again while we work longer and longer hours for less and less. Let me tell you something: ENOUGH IS ENOUGH AND WE ARE NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANY MORE!!! This is why Bernie (and Trump for that matter) is so popular, and why I am Bernie or Bust – I am more anti Hillary than I am pro Bernie, and I WILL NOT VOTE FOR HILLARY CLINTON, even if it means holding my nose and voting for Trump.

Democratic Party, listen up. This your final warning. Selecting Hillary Clinton as your nominee will hurt you badly. Do not do it. Seriously.

That warning is officially on the record. Next comes Michael Valentine’s commonsensical take on why Donald Trump wasn’t exactly given a hero’s welcome by some of San Diego’s Mexican population when the Republican presidential hopeful paid a recent visit to their city:

Well what did anyone expect?

You label Mexicans as rapist then go to San Diego, a city with the world’s largest international boarder crossing with Mexico. For some reason the Mexican Americans take exception.

What indeed. Now we’ll travel past the U.S.’s northern border for a bit of citizen journalism in the form of a report from Canada via Rudy Haugeneder, posted under this story about Donald Trump’s close circle of staffers, aides and advisers:

However, Trump’s support is relatively strong and getting stronger, perhaps and increasingly likely enough to become the next president, as illustrated by the comments of a social friend in the limo and taxi industry in Victoria, BC — a hotbed of American tourists — who says that of the hundreds upon hundreds of Americans he has talked to this year and in recent weeks, they, talking about their country, unanimously support and endorse Trump. Not a single person, he says, supported Hillary, and the overwhelming majority strongly opposed her with many saying — including, strangely, Iranians — they endorsed Trump’s anti-Muslim immigration position. My friend who supports Hillary and would vote for her if he was an American, is dismayed.

Last, we have Terrell’s comment posted Sunday under Chris Hedges’ latest column, “Lock Up the Men, Evict the Women and Children.” This one covers quite a bit of material in a relatively short statement, making connections with which Hedges would no doubt agree:

Capitalism is a fascist system, often mischaracterized as one of freedom by the privileged intelligentsia. Property rights and the protection of commerce are the main concerns for capitalist states. Capitalism, through its history, demands constant state violence. It demands genocide. It demands war. It demands the brutal suppression of labor. It demands a prison state. At no point in capitalism’s history was it not spilling blood.

The globe today is nothing more than a corporate supply chain. Cheap labor and cheap resources in the South, and mass consumption in the North. Slavery is tied to the chips in our electronic devices, the clothes on our backs, and the chocolate we feed our children. Puppet governments, wars, failed states, destabilized regions, and terrorism are all essential to the global capitalist order. This is the reason there is no peace candidate running in the two major parties.

The poverty portrayed in this article is not abnormal in capitalism. It stretches around the country, from rural areas to inner cities to decaying suburbs. It exploits the most vulnerable members of society. It shuts the water off for thousands of families in Detroit. It poisons others who have access to water. It lowers the minimum wage in Puerto Rico to $4.25 an hour. It profits off of mass incarceration and mass deportation. It allows 45,000 people a year to die from not having access to healthcare.

And if that isn’t enough, it is killing the planet.

Schooled. Back in session next Sunday.

–Posted by Kasia Anderson