A revolutionary model: an introduction (part 1 of 4)

by Ron Horn -- edited for clarity at 8 PM on Sunday, May 21, Seattle time. (Edited for clarity again on July 14th.)

In this series of articles I am proposing a potentially revolutionary project: an independent US media organization to serve the needs of North American audiences for the truth about foreign and domestic actions and policies. More and more North Americans are becoming aware of the issue of "fake news" reports issued by media corporation. Thus I think the time is ripe for a more aggressive effort to present news and analysis of critical issues that now threaten the very existence of humans. But first I need to introduce my political and philosophical beliefs for this project to insure that it is rational and offers a reasonably good potential for not only averting the twin threats of a nuclear war conflagration and climate destabilization, but also offers the potential to lead to more peaceful relations and environmentally sustainable progress.

What we have experienced since the dawn of capitalist rule starting about three hundred years ago is the increasing power and wealth of a decreasing proportion of humans. Capitalism is based on the private ownership of an economy, and the inevitable logic of the system is the ever increasing concentration of wealth by fewer and fewer people.  But what I wish to emphasize in this proposal is that the system has a much worse consequence for the vast majority of humans:  concentrated wealth serves a distorted psychological need of domination and control by only a tiny class of owners of economic property which leaves the vast majority of humans feeling powerless. The solution is constructing a revolutionary model that increases the influence of people over their own lives.
 
To be sure, there are a number of other consequences resulting from this type of rule as many critics of the system are well aware: many wars (which now appear never-ending), periodic economic crises, widespread poverty, alienation in the workplace, etc. Probably worst of all is the additional specter that is now haunting humans: the likely destabilization of the Earth's climate because of the contamination of the atmosphere and oceans with accumulating carbon, due to the mad pursuit of profits, that will end in the extinction of humans.

However, to propose a revolutionary model to prevent all these consequences from interfering not only with the potential for human happiness but to preserve us as a humans species, I think we need to go further back in our history to discover what constitutes our essential qualities as humans as a foundation upon which to build a successful revolutionary model that frees us from all ruling classes.

We know from recorded history (roughly starting about 10,000 years ago) that we humans have suffered to live under oppressive class rule since the beginning of civilization. Because this period of class rule, which was brought about initially by violence or the threat of violence, and supplemented thereafter by all sorts of ruses ("divine right", "there is no alternative", etc.) has continued so long, most people now believe that class rule is the natural order of societal arrangements. Most people are completely unaware the extent of the damage this has done not only to their material well-being but to their mental capacities. Most people simply accept the false notion that they must look to leaders in the ruling classes to govern them otherwise chaos and mayhem would reign in which societies would descend into some kind of law of the jungle. This notion, of course, is based on capitalism's concept of humans as essentially self-seeking individuals.
 
Most people have completely forgotten about their natural abilities as creative, social beings capable of ruling themselves. These natural abilities sustained them throughout roughly 98% of human existence (use the label "human nature" to find articles posted on my website that support this concept).  Many anthropologists remind us that originally humans lived in small groups of hunting, fishing, and gathering societies where all adult members participated in decision making. However since the dawn of civilization when people permanently settled in agricultural communities, some people using violence, or the threat of violence, started taking control over others which led to control of entire societies which, in turn, over time deteriorated into masters and subjects, tiny ruling classes and the subjugated vast majority. Since then, the participation of humans in decision-making, otherwise known as real democracy, has been only a dream of ordinary people. (Have you noticed how capitalists love to use the word "democracy" in their propaganda?)

The ability to have influence over one's life is a key feature of human nature, but its perverted form is the power to control others for one's own benefit. This perverted form is expressed with a contemporary meaning by author Peter Robb who wrote in his book Midnight in Sicily:

The colossal wealth brought by the drug trade brought no improvement to the lives of those who risked their necks for it. The furtive enjoyment of a fast car or a gold Rolex or expensive clothes was cold comfort in a life of hiding, sexual misery, mistrust, the constant fear of betrayal and death. The old mafia reward hadn’t been wealth but power. ‘Giving orders is better than fucking,’ was an often-heard mafia saying.

Mafia, or organized crime, is only a crude form of capitalism. All ruling classes ultimately rely on violence, or the threat of violence, most of which is buried and obscured in the recorded history of not only capitalist societies, but since the beginning of ruling classes shortly after civilization was established.
 
This power over people and the self-centered drive to accumulate wealth are both found in exaggerated form in capitalism, however power is a far more addictive drug than wealth accumulation. I've also found this to be true from personal experience I had with a very wealthy family headed by a CEO of a transnational corporation. The CEO had everything he and his family could want, but he only enjoyed the thrill of decision-making, much like the "high" of a powerful drug, rather than the enjoyment of his wealth. (This was also argued by Jim O’Reilly, a retired banker, educated in Britain, and now resides in Colorado, whose blog I followed back in 2011-2013.) 

Wealth is mostly used in today's capitalist societies as a means to exercise power over others. Today we see billionaires who use their wealth in various ways--some even criminal--to influence not only people in government, but throughout society. Wealth used as power can be seen in the very legal framework of corporations (a quintessentially capitalist institution): the owners' formal influence, as stockholders, varies according to the number of corporate shares owned by them. But I argue that they mostly use this wealth in combination with other capitalists to control the rest of us, and in the capitalist countries that make up the US-led Empire, by insuring we are well indoctrinated in the virtues of capitalism through their control of education, media, and entertainment. 

Our ruling masters in this transnational ruling class nowadays reserve the use violence (or the threat) on not only those who resist their rule (whether domestically or on foreign countries), but on nations and people who wish to pursue an independent course of action. Accordingly, we see daily reports of wars: wars by proxy terrorist armies, well hidden ("in the interests of national security") subversive attacks to destabilize nations, and outright invasions and occupations. Domestically we see the armed guardians of capitalist rule killing mostly minorities with no accountability to any system of justice; and those they don't murder, they lock away in a vast prison system.

The damage of roughly 10,000 years of class rule has had a deleterious effects on the vast majority of humans to sustain themselves psychologically as well as materially in a healthy and just manner, however I argue that these capacities still exist, but only need the removal of class rule and time to blossom once again. 

But there is far more at stake than simply the full expression of our humanity. Those alive today, mostly the young adults, are tasked with saving our human species from the twin possibilities (some say probabilities) posed by the imminent threat of a nuclear war and/or the eventual extinction of humans due to ravages imposed on our habitat by the compulsive drive of capitalists to grow on a finite planet.


(This continues in Part 2a)

The Special Council Inquisition - Bad For Trump - And All of Us

Click here to access article by Bernhard from Moon of Alabama. 

This is bad and the Trump administration should have pulled all strings to prevent it. Such investigations NEVER stick to their original, limited tasks but extend further and further. The order the Acting Attorney General wrote includes language which allows for nearly unlimited digging in "any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.” It will thereby continue until -inevitably- some dirt will be found that can be blown out of all proportion and lead to prosecutions or impeachment.

And he concludes with this ominous statement:

Trump believes that better relations with Russia are important for the well-being of the United States, Pence would likely pursue an anti-Russian policy.

That, I believe, is the real issue here. There are no unbeseeming relations between Trump and Russia. Russia had little, if any, influence on the 2016 election. There was no "Russian meddling". But Trump's somewhat more friendly behavior towards Russia, which he campaigned for, is disliked by the-powers-that-are.

We can now expect a very long drawn special council investigation with lots of media leaks and reporting. It will drown out all other important issues. It will likely end badly for Trump and badly for peaceful global power relations. 

The Pathologization of Dissent

Click here to access article by C. J. Hopkins from CounterPunch. 

With this post I am departing from my practice of posting (and commenting on) only current articles (less than one month). While perusing the web this morning, I found this piece (which I missed back in October) by one of America's most erudite and politically perceptive writers. It struck me as most illuminating,  and not at all out of date. It's as relevant today as it was last October 27th when it was published. 

The corporate media is sending a message … a message aimed at a much broader audience than undecided American voters (assuming such creatures really exist). The message is, “get with the fucking program, or get stigmatized as an anti-Semite, or a racist, or a Russian spy, or whatever.” The message is, “drop the populist rhetoric, shut the hell up about the Wall Street banks, and the corporations, and the ‘one percent,’ and … actually … forget about politics completely, except for identity politics, of course. Go ahead and knock yourself out with that.” The message is, “you’re either with us or against us … and it doesn’t matter why you’re against us, or what it is you think you’re for. Right, Left … who gives a shit? It’s one big Basket of Deplorables to us.”

This piece is about the accelerated war on truth which I see has having started after 9/11, the most politically pivotable event since WWII. I also see this accelerated, desperate war on truth as an early sign of the disintegration of the US-led Empire, a transnational capitalist empire that is ruled by a network of major capitalists from countries aligned with the US and Britain and formed after WWII. 

However I don't take any consolation in my view that it is a sign of its disintegration. I see that this ruling network is so addicted to wealth and power that they, like many ordinary addicts, will seek self destruction (and ours) in a nuclear conflagration in a final effort to maintain their addiction. I also look around and see the vast majority of us as either too powerless, ignorant, confused, isolated, or too co-opted codependents to stop this final genocidal conflagration. 

Guns and Butter, May 10, 2017, F. William Engdahl and The Gods of Money

Click here to access an interview with F. William Engdahl on Bonnie Faulkner's Guns and Butter program broadcast from KPFA in Berkeley, California. (Note: This interview is used as a fund raising event to raise money for the station and the program. Thus the actual interview is interrupted in the middle for 12 minutes and for 3 minutes starting at about 50:00m, followed in the final 7 minutes with Faulkner reading passages from Engdahl's book. Thus the interview lasts only about 38 minutes.)

Faulkner interviews Engdahl about his book The Gods of Money in which he focuses most of his comments about the historical highlights of the private control of US money through the central bank (The Federal Reserve) and the powerful impacts that this had on US history.

Marx on Life After Capitalism

Click here to access a 55 minute interview with Peter Hudis conducted by Sasha Lilley on the program Against the Grain broadcast by KPFA, a listener sponsored radio station in Berkeley, California. 

Rather than reproducing the rather confusing introduction to this interview with Hudis provided by KPFA, I will provide a more revealing introduction given by Jason Schulman in his review of Hudis's recent book Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism from Logos.

Hudis makes plain from the beginning of Marx’s Concept that he will not be visualizing the technical details of socialist society, nor does he pretend that Marx ever offered a comprehensive blueprint for such. His aim is modest: “to see what implicit or explicit indications [Marx’s work] contains about a future, non-alienating society.” Hudis makes it clear that—contrary to those who would enlist Marx’s support for an imagined “market socialism”—that value, or the computation of wealth in monetary terms, is seen by Marx as specific to capitalism and as incompatible with a classless society. The retention of value-production would render “socialist” society unable to overcome capitalism’s “inversion of subject and predicate, in which the products as well as the actions of people take on the form of an autonomous power that determine and constrain the will of the subjects that engender them.” ....

Marx famously criticized other anti-capitalists of his day, most notably anarchist forefather Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, for their failure to acknowledge the centrality of alienated labor to capitalism, and Hudis stresses the importance of alienated labor in explaining the oppressive and defective nature of the official Communisms of the 20th century, which he claims merely changed wage- and property-relations in order to produce a “state capitalism” wherein a ruling class imposed forced labor on workers.

Syria is the dam against more bloody chaos

Click here to access article by Jonathan Cook from his blog.

Today, Israel’s vision of the region is shared by other key actors, including Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, and Turkey. The current arena for destabilisation, as I warned, is Syria. But if successful, the Balkanisation process will undoubtedly move on and intensify against Lebanon and Iran.

All of these actors have their own geopolitical interests in destabilizing and fragmenting Syria, and the US Empire stands behind them urging them on and funding proxy terrorist armies. This effort to destabilize Syria appears likely to be a pivotable event in the Empire's grand design to control the entire world, not merely the Middle East as Cook implies. But not only for that reason, the transnational capitalist classes that control this Empire have thus far invested so much effort in terms of wealth and grossly deceptive propaganda into this project in combination with numerous other aggressive moves by their NATO army in Europe, against North Korea, the South China Sea, etc., that they will not give up without an enormous struggle. Russia, China, and host of other nations also see Syria as a contest that must not be lost without posing an unacceptable threat to their own security. This situation could very easily end up in a nuclear conflagration. We live in very dangerous times.

To aware activists this presents a challenge to engage in activities to undermine the weakest component of this imperial plan--the Empire's grossly deceptive propaganda war on their own populations. So far they have engaged in mostly individual efforts; but because time is rapidly running out, they must organize and consolidate their efforts so that they can be much more effective in the battle against the disinformation and propaganda that agents of the Empire are using to neutralize their home populations while pursuing dangerously aggressive efforts in multiple areas of the world.

Dr. Edward Rhymes interviews Eva Bartlett regarding Syria

Click here to access the audio interview from Rhymes Media Group. Here is all the bio I could find about Edward Rhymes.

Already I'm departing from my decision to post only essential articles, etc. on my website. I confess I'm a hopelessly addicted fan of Canadian journalist Eva Bartlett. This is one of the best interviews of her that I've listened to so far. Listen to this 50:36m interview to see if you agree with me that she is one of most sincere journalists around. If you agree, I urge you to subscribe to her email service so that you won't miss any of her activities.

War and Empire: the American Way of Life

Click here to access article by Paul Atwood from CounterPunch. 

The title of this article is also the title of Atwood's book which is being translated in Farsi for the Iranian audience. As such it is primarily intended for the latter, but it also offers an excellent overview of the imperialist history of the United States as propelled by capitalist interests of wealth and power, and specifically the launching of the US imperial project after WWII with emphasis on the consequences for Iran. The article, and presumably the book, emphasizes the power of US institutions of indoctrination (education, corporate media, and entertainment (especially Hollywood) to deceive ordinary Americans into believing that government policies and actions were always benevolent or "in the interests of national security" if they provided media coverage at all.

I confess I haven't read the book or even heard of it. I believe that is another piece of evidence to illustrate the latter phenomenon: the book simply was ignored by all corporate media and received scant coverage in alternative media. I notice that I did post one article by Atwood back in 2012, and in my commentary I criticized him for his lack of references to capitalism and instead using circumlocutions to refer to capitalism's role in shaping US policies and actions. This is certainly not the case in this article I posted today. Although his book was mentioned in the 2012 article, I had assumed that he used the same style in that book as he did in the article.

I was very happy to see that he is no longer using circumlocutions to hide the fact of capitalism. It has been one of the purposes of my website, which I started in late 2009, to eliminate such practices by authors on the left. In 2009 I was appalled by this practice and other similar practices which tended to obscure political reality particularly in relation to the post war project of global domination that was planned and carried out to a great extent by the capitalist ruling class in the US and their partners-in-crime abroad in the Empire.

The End of the Age of Protest

Click here to access article by Jeffrey St. Clair from CounterPunch. 

I am directing in this post to only the first part down to where he writes "The time for protests is over." In this first part he argues that we are now in the era of action, by which he explains consists of the following:

Action is standing arm-in-arm before water cannons and government snipers on the frozen plains of North Dakota. Action is hanging from a fragile perch 150-feet up in Douglas-fir tree in an ancient forest grove slated for clearcutting, through howling winter storms. Action is chaining yourself to a fracking rig in rural Pennsylvania or camping out in the blast zone at a Mountain Top Removal site in the hills of West Virginia. Action is intervening when police in storm trooper gear are savagely beating a defenseless woman on the streets of Portland. Action is jumping into the Pacific Ocean with a knife in your teeth to cut the vast trawler nets ensnaring white-sided dolphins and humpback whales. Action is stopping bad shit from going down, or trying to.

His (gay?) partner, Alexander Cockburn (deceased in 2012) and St. Clair lived near Arcata, California where he gave a talk which was a version of this article. From this I infer that St. Claire still lives in nearby Petrolia, CA where he shared a residence with his late friend Alex Cockburn. As you may know, Cockburn and later St. Clair joined him as editors of CounterPunch for many years. As co-editors they earned a reputation of being rather radical in their views. Cockburn's nuclear family were well educated and descendants of quite wealthy and highly educated people on the left. 

However I always felt that the two editors were always a bit too liberal for my taste in politics, and wondered if these two iconoclasts were more dilettantes than serious critics on the left. This piece doesn't alter this perception.

It seems to me that it is not only that I sees protests as futile, but also "actions" such as St. Clair writes about. I think it is time (maybe even past time) to think about revolution, and I intend to do just that in the remaining time I still have before returning to nature. Hopefully I might even influence other people to do just that like I have influenced people to write about "capitalism" instead of using euphemisms or circumlocutions as substitutes. (See my commentary here and the comments section for this post.)  

The Horror! The Horror! (parts 1 and 2 of 3?)

Click here to access part 1 and this link to access Part 2 of a series of articles by Jim Quinn of The Burning Platform. 

I’m constantly amazed by the ability of those in power to create a narrative trusted by a gullible non-critical thinking populace. Appealing to emotions, when you have millions of functionally illiterate, normalcy bias ensnared, iGadget distracted, disciples of the status quo, has been the game plan of the Deep State for the last century. Americans don’t want to think, because thinking is hard. They would rather feel. For decades the government controlled public education system has performed a mass lobotomy on their hapless matriculates, removing their ability to think and replacing it with feelings, fabricated dogma, and social indoctrination. Their minds of mush have been molded to acquiesce to the narrative propagandized by their government keepers.

Quinn makes many good points about the gullibility of Americans and the adept skills by what he calls the Deep State to manufacture the consent and dissent of Americans. The Deep State serves the interests of the transnational capitalist class who control the US-led Empire regardless of who occupies the White House or Congress. However, I don't agree with everything he writes.

First. his reference to the "Deep State" is based on Mike Lofgren's views in his book (of the same title). Although I have not read his book, I have read some of Lofgren's articles and find his conception of the "Deep State" much too vague and as only a relatively recent phenomenon in the US. Read my commentary posted in this piece regarding his concept.

Second, his reference in Part 2 to the Fourth Turning as some kind of explanation for our current state of affairs. This book apparently sees history as running in cycles. Thus, we shouldn't worry about the extinction of humans due to the degeneration of capitalist rule into a nightmarish nuclear Armageddon or worry about the destabilization of our climate and the resulting destruction of our habitat. It's just another historical cycle that humans will live through.

Reporter Actually In S-Y-R-I-A Exposes Media Lies About Everything

Click here if you wish to access Jimmy Dore's interview with Canadian journalist Eva Bartlett directly from The Jimmy Dore Show via YouTube.

I'll introduce this interview with a message by Eva Bartlett from her website (actually check this link out because it offers other relevant links. Also at around 2:00m in the interview she refers to an important article by Steve Gowans entitled "The Revolutionary Distemper in Syria That Wasn’t".)

Very pleased to have been on Jimmy Dore's show. I have a lot of respect for Jimmy, unabashedly speaking truth on Syria and many other issues--in fact, he has paid a price with Youtube demonetizing his videos. [On that note, how you can support his work: ▶Become a PATRON▶  https://www.patreon.com/jimmydore]

 

De-escalation Zone Memorandum – Decisive Step Towards Peace in Syria?

Click here to access article by Firas Samuri from Global Research. (Added a link to additional post from RT at 7 PM Seattle time.)

Following the results of the fourth round of Syrian talks in Astana the representatives of guarantor-states (Iran, Russia and Turkey) signed a memorandum on de-escalation zones in Syria.

....

The memorandum, which comes into effect on May 5, envisages the cessation of hostilities between the sides, conditions for returning refugees, the restoration of destroyed urban infrastructure and the access of humanitarian organizations. Moreover, the checkpoints to control the movement of civilians and the ceasefire regime will be created along the de-escalation zone borders.

It is notable, that the agreement doesn’t apply to Islamic State and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham terrorists, it doesn’t depend on whether they are inside a zone or not.

Moreover, the flights of the U.S.-led International Coalition are strictly forbidden in the area. The airspace will be also controlled by the guarantor-states.

The agreement has received endorsement by various important actors involved in the Syrian conflict including UN officials and even luke-warm approval by US officials. 

Although this subject is not directly related to the purpose of my website, it is of interest to many US activists who are interested in the advanced revolutionary ideology of Syrian Kurds as I outlined in a previous post, and also how this latest agreement might dovetail with US officials who would like to see Syria fragmented. The Duran has very recently run a series of articles discussing the implications of this Memorandum worked out by Russia, Turkey, and Iran in Astana, Kazakstan. See this, this, and this. Also, added at 7 PM Seattle time, this post from RT entitled "Are airstrikes possible? Mixed signals from Washington on Syria safe zones".

Capitalist health care for workers

by political cartoonist John Jonik.

The Deep History of US, Britain’s Never-Ending Cold War On Russia

Click here to access article by Finian Cunningham from Strategic Culture Foundation. (Thanks to Caren in northwest Oregon for this article.)

In this article Cunningham makes an excellent argument that the Cold War was just the continuation of hostility toward the Soviet Union, now Russia. I have argued this many times in my commentaries (see this, this, and this). That is why I make the Russian Revolution as the single most important event of the 20th century. The majority of the policies of the Western capitalist nations after this event in 1917 were a direct reaction to this event. The only disagreement I have with Cunningham is this statement of his:

Leaders like President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill appeared to be genuinely committed to defeating Nazi Germany.

I disagree with the inclusion of Churchill. According to James M. Burns and his biography of FDR, this was certainly true of Roosevelt who had developed an early antipathy to Germany in his childhood while attending a school in Germany for a short time and on other visits to Germany. However Churchill was an arch-imperialist of the old school, and he was of the British capitalist ruling class clique that wanted to crush the Soviet Union. From the beginning he vigorously opposed opening a second front in western Europe to take the pressure off of the Soviet troops. FDR along with Stalin wanted this to happen in 1942, but because of his opposition it didn't happen until June of 1944.

Now with Russia refusing to go along with the US in its plans for world domination, the US ruling class along with the rest of the capitalists in the Empire (NATO countries) have reactivated the old Cold War.

Eva Bartlett discusses the power outage and daily abuses in Gaza

Click here to access a 36:04m video interview (the link is broken, now find the article here) with Eva Bartlett, an independent Canadian journalist, posted on the ANC website.

Bartlett in her emailed introduction to this interview stated:

May 1, 2017, ANC Report
Thanks Ry Dawson for having me on to talk about the hell that is life in Gaza, as well as the struggle of Palestinian political prisoners, and solidarity with Syria.

(*Please note: webcam might be closer than it appears... Sorry for the close-up, some sort of setting or his recording program issue, I suppose.*)

It looks to me like the Israeli ruling class has long decided to engage in a slow motion genocide of the Palestinian people, especially those living in the Gaza Strip.

If you would like to know more about Bartlett, her experience in Syria, and her and Sheehan's views about corporate media, you might listen to her nearly one hour interview conducted by Cindy Sheehan. 

Contrast the work of Eva Bartlett with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now. Goodman has always appeared to function as a "gatekeeper" of issues that are not discussed such as any questioning of the official story of 9/11 and she has never interviewed such critics on her show. Although in the past she has done some interesting interviews of left-liberal critics such as Noam Chomsky, Julian Assange, and Seymour Hersh, it appears from a recent interview with journalist Anand Gopal that she is now functioning as another propaganda outlet for the Empire's ruling class. Perhaps Discover The Networks gives us all the information (there appears to be a misprint on the top of this linked page which leads you to the wrong website) that we need to know about Democracy Now. For one particular view of the interview with Gopal, I direct you to this commentator who responds to an article posted on Moon of Alabama.

Slavehood 2017

Click here to access article by Peter Koenig posted on The Saker. 

This author who has an unusual history writes a very scathing essay about Western civilization that is now under the control of the US Empire.

As people of western nations, we are enslaved to an all-engulfing neoliberal fascism – to a predatory economic. Corporate lie propaganda drip-feds our brains. We haven’t even noticed it. We are enslaved to so-called ‘leaders’, put in office by obscure foreign masters of deceit – the ever-stronger corporate controlled propaganda machine – the six all controlling Zion-Anglo media, whom we believe whatever lie they vomit – because it is more comfortable to believe a lie than to confront the truth – that’s self-imposed slavehood.

That’s how far we have gone.

A North Korean Perspective on Reunification

Click here to access article by Roland Boer from his blog Stalin’s Moustache. (Boer appears to be an avid Australian traveler and cyclist.)

Since the DPRK (North Korea) is in the corporate news, and full of the usual misrepresentation, I thought I would reprise a section of an article I wrote a couple of years ago on Korean reunification – from the perspective of the north.

Reunification been a consistent policy of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea since its earliest days.

He also writes about his travels at another blog, Voyages on the Left, and the recent posts are about his interesting experiences in China.

"Free lunch" for the rich!

by political cartoonist Dan Wasserman.

Call for Professional Integrity Goes Unheeded

Click here to access article that I received from Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth (AE911Truth).

This article reports on a meeting of professional association of architects, American Institute of Architects, in which they voted overwhelmingly to reject a new investigation of the collapse of Building 7 in the 9/11 attack.

Representatives of the American Institute of Architects’ local and national governing bodies voted overwhelmingly against supporting a new investigation into the total collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 (WTC 7) at the Institute’s annual business meeting held in Orlando on April 26, 2017.

Resolution 17-5, which was sponsored by 70 AIA members — and which initially had the backing of more than 200 members before the AIA introduced a rule late in the process that required handwritten signatures from sponsors — garnered 4% of the vote from delegates.

The 4% tally was a setback to concerned AIA members and activists who had hoped to continue the upward trajectory that saw support for a reinvestigation grow from 4% in 2015 to 11% last year.

The architects who have been pushing for this investigation presumably also belong to the AE911Truth. I believe that there are strategic reasons that the latter organization has been vigorous pursuing a new investigation of Building 7. Because it was not struck by any planes, if a new investigation should report that this was an impossibility, then it would strengthen their position to open an investigations of the obvious controlled demolitions that brought down the other two buildings that were hit by airplanes.

This vote is another illustration of highly skilled people in the upper middle class not wanting to antagonize the ruling class because they enjoy a high income and many perks that goes along with professional status. I have exposed the privileged role of this class in earlier commentaries of posted articles this year: see especially this and this.

There is an abundance of evidence that Buildings 1 and 2 of the World Trade Center were also brought down by controlled demolition methods in opposition to the official story. I think that most of the evidence points to the 9/11 disaster as history's most dramatic false-flag event (see this and this for starters). The most plausible explanation for the event is this: it was engineered primarily by Israel's Mossad in close collaboration with the CIA and Saudi Arabia, which supplied the Muslim "terrorists", using their advanced drone technology, which Israeli scientists pioneered, to guide the airplanes into the buildings. This was the "Pearl Harbor" event referred to in "Rebuilding America's Defenses", a paper produced by a major ruling class "think tank", the Project for the New American Century. This false-flag event was necessary to bring the US into conflicts with the moderate Muslim countries that were the bitter enemies of Israel. And as you can see, it worked so successfully.

The Existential Question of Whom to Trust: “The Looming Threat of World War III” [commentary edited for an error]

Click here to access article by Robert Parry from ConsortiumNews. (Edited for an error regarding Chris Hedges--thanks to Caren of northwest Oregon. See first comment.)

The existing rewards-and-punishments system, which punishes truth-tellers and rewards those who deceive the public, has left behind a thoroughly corrupted information structure in the United States and in the West, in general.

Across the mainstream of politics and media, there are no longer the checks and balances that have protected democracy for generations. Those safeguards have been washed away by the flood of careerism.

The situation is made even more dangerous because there also exists a rapidly expanding cadre of skilled propagandists and psychological operations practitioners, sometimes operating under the umbrella of “strategic communications.” Under trendy theories of “smart power,” information has become simply another weapon in the geopolitical arsenal, with “strategic communications” sometimes praised as the preferable option to “hard power,” i.e. military force.

This former career journalist who worked for Newsweek and the Associated Press condemns his colleagues in journalism careers, but it turns out he is referring only to journalists who work for major media corporations. For people on the real left, it is a given that journalists working for major media must serve the ruling capitalist class or else they leave or are fired. Doug Valentine in his book The CIA as Organized Crime cites an example of a fake report (p. 123) submitted by Chris Hedges who was a journalist for the NY Times based on the testimony of two dissidents coached by the CIA to support the Empire's propaganda agenda to prepare the public for the eventual invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Parry concludes his essay by writing:

But the question is: whom to trust? And this is no longer some rhetorical or philosophical point about whether one can ever know the complete truth. It is now a very practical question of life or death, not just for us as individuals but as a species and as a planet.

The existential issue before us is whether – blinded by propaganda and disinformation – we will stumble into a nuclear conflict between superpowers that could exterminate all life on earth or perhaps leave behind a radiated hulk of a planet suitable only for cockroaches and other hardy life forms.

Nowhere does he refer to journalists such as Eva Bartlett, Vanessa Beeley, Jonathan Cook, and the journalists who work at TeleSur, Newsbud, Mint Press News, etc, all of whom work for little compensation while often risking their lives. These are the people to trust, and we need to support their work!