...what’s with a generation that accepts punch after punch and then insults on top of the beating, barely raising a peep in protest? How could anyone under 40 support capitalism? Why aren’t they organizing, striking, picketing and marching?
With minimal media interest, the US African Command (Africom) has deployed troops to 35 African countries, establishing a familiar network of authoritarian supplicants eager for bribes and armaments. In war games, a “soldier to soldier” doctrine embeds US officers at every level of command from general to warrant officer.
Let’s reinvent this upcoming Veteran’s Day as a way to honor all the activists who fought before us and blazed a path.
Around the world, the message is loud and clear. People are saying we are no longer to be mere consumers, passively accepting the commercialized visions of a future handed down to us, with corporate values and political candidates sold to us like many brands of toothpaste. This is a voice resonating in all these movements around the world and calling for deep systemic change.It seems to me that the "voice" is much quieter here in the US than in the rest of the world--and that worries me.
Feel this blow as a coup de grâce: The NSA not only, we now know, hoards data on our every communication, but, we now learn, wants to have broader surveillance dragnets and deeper spycraft capabilities in place to defend that other great villain of the past decade — Wall Street. The nexus of power and control linking Washington, Silicon Valley and Wall Street was made almost cinematically complete in comments from NSA Chief Keith Alexander to lawmakers this week.The general knows who really runs this country and pays for his services, however he needs to take a course in public relations to become as skilled as Obama.
To discuss the ongoing crisis in Syria, the reasons why the United States abandoned its plans for attacking Syria and the future of civil war in the embattled Arab country, Iran Review conducted an exclusive interview with prominent political scientist Prof. James Petras.
Mainstream media is called mainstream media for a good reason. This is because they reflect the position of mainstream thinking at a precise moment in time, i.e. a majority of the population at a specific point in history. In reality, they reflect the majority of the population as much as they influence it. To one extent, the media know very well just how far they can go without without generating a negative reaction from viewers; to another extent, they try to push the limit further and further because they also know that this is the best way of increasing their ratings.Mazzucco seems to suggest that mainstream media is only concerned about ratings, otherwise it is a neutral player in presenting news, information, and opinions. If my interpretation is correct, he totally misses the vital function of mainstream media in capitalist society which is to shape all news and views to reflect ruling class interests. They are a critical part of the ruling One Percent. If it weren't for them, the ruling class would be forced to operate an expensive police state apparatus, which, of course, they have now constructed anyway just in case their propaganda organs fail to sufficiently dumb down their citizens.
That “Mom” is in fact a sitcom that expects us to amusingly mainline the normative message of the show – that pathological, intergenerational dysfunction among the underclass is normal and amusing.... The show suggests that we should make a quip and carry on....
A climate plague affecting every living thing will likely start in 2020 in southern Indonesia, scientists warned Wednesday in the journal Nature. A few years later the plague will have spread throughout the world’s tropical regions.
Look at what Obama would like to do: Obama would like to keep the government funded and keep us paying interest on our Treasury debt. But he would also like the old Bowles-Simpson “Grand Bargain” of cuts to Social Security and Medicare. He came into office talking about that, and he hasn’t really lost his drive to do it. So he’s got what is essentially an orthodox austerity agenda, which would please most of the mainstream parts of Wall Street and the Fortune 500.See also this article from World Socialist Web Site entitled " Amid government shutdown, Obama signals cuts to Social Security, Medicare".
1) The War on Terrorism … or whatever
Pity the poor American who wants to be a good citizen, wants to understand the world and his country’s role in it, wants to believe in the War on Terrorism, wants to believe that his government seeks to do good … What is he to make of all this?
2) “Omission is the most powerful form of lie.” – George Orwell [Blum fills in an event missing from US history books that happened in Greece after WWII.]
3) The latest step in the evolution of America’s Police State [Here he reports on an incident in which a German was too critical of US government spying and the Empire's response. Only one newspaper in the US reported the incident.]
Different political representatives of the capitalist-imperialist class have different ideas on what should be done politically. They differ over how the masses should be led to think and act, what reforms should or should not be made, and overall what should be the “acceptable limits” and governing assumptions of political discourse and ideological principle. They struggle this out through elections, the media, and in other forms. (This function also includes allowing the masses to undertake action for some reforms to deal with their conditions, to make the state seem legitimate in their eyes, and to confine their thinking to how to keep a fundamentally exploitative, oppressive, and unjust system running, rather than overthrowing it.)As I see it, the two capitalist groups differ as to how to manage the increasing government debt. The dominant segment wants to continue with business as usual: creating more money, provide some token medical coverage to ordinary Americans to keep the hoi polloi pacified, and to continue their military dominance of the world. The rebel group led by the Tea Party understandably want to stop borrowing money from foreign governments, and to a lesser extent from The Fed. And, they don't want money spent on ordinary Americans in any form. Otherwise, they have few problems with spending money on domestic surveillance, militarizing local police forces, military weapons, and incursions throughout the world.
Xi stressed over and over again that China favors one FTA to cover all of the Asia-Pacific. And as far as Beijing is concerned, that won't be TPP - which is essentially a major US corporate racket that will lower tariffs across the spectrum to the sole benefit of US multinationals and not small and medium-sized firms in developing countries, all this under the cover of a dodgy "highest free trade standard".In any case, all these free trade agreements favor the profit-making interests of corporations and capitalists who participate in the agreements versus the health and welfare of workers across the world. They provide an end run around national laws which still include some protections against exploitative and hazardous corporate practices.
In the first part of this essay series on 'Empire Under Obama,' I will aim to establish some fundamental premises of modern imperialism, or what is often referred to as 'international relations,' 'geopolitics', or 'foreign policy.' Specifically, I will refer to George Orwell's writing on 'political language' in order to provide a context in which the discourse of imperialism may take place out in the open with very little comprehension on the part of the public which consumes the information; and further, to draw upon Noam Chomsky's suggestion of understanding international relations as the application of 'Mafia Principles' to foreign policy. This part provides some background on these issues, and future parts to this essay series will be examining the manifestation of empire in recent years.There are two basic ways that humans can relate to each other and to nature: one, on the basis of equality, respect for each other and all life forms, compassion for those who suffer or are disadvantaged; or two, on the basis of dominance and submission where a few people contend for dominance over others and nature, and the others submit for fear of consequences or sometimes out of sheer ignorance due to the concealed nature of the activities of the dominant ones.
...when attempting to weaken or overthrow a nationalist-populist regime, the empire will resort to multiple forms of attack including (1) corruption (buying off government backers) (2) funding and organizing opposition media, parties, business and trade union organizations, (3) organizing and backing disloyal military officials to violently overthrow the elected government (4) support employers’ lockouts to paralyze strategic sectors of the economy (oil)(5) financing referendums and other ‘legal mechanisms’ to revoke democratic mandates, (6) promoting paramilitary groups to destabilize civil society and sow public insecurity and undermine agrarian reforms; (7) finance electoral parties and non-governmental organizations to compete in and delegitimize elections; (8) engage in diplomatic warfare and efforts to prejudice regional relations; (9) establish military bases in neighboring countries, as a platform for joint military invasions.He then finds a perfect illustration of the application of these methods in the historical relations between the US and Venezuela over the past 30 years.
The opposition to Morsi began to coalesce in early May, when a group of young organizers launched Tamarod (Arabic for “rebel”), a grassroots initiative founded on a simple yet powerful idea: a petition declaring a vote of no confidence in the president and a call for early presidential elections.
....
“The story of Tamarod is the story of the co-optation of a popular movement,” says Mona El-Ghobashy, an Egyptian professor of political science at Barnard College. “It was this grassroots, fragmented, atomized initiative by definition, and the military saw an excellent opportunity and piggybacked on it....
Given Ibrahim's tendency to question official narratives, and what struck me as his kind-heartedness, I was surprised this summer when I read an interview in an Egyptian newspaper in which he seemed to wholeheartedly support the crackdown on supporters of ousted President Mohamed Morsi — hundreds of whom were killed by army and police over the summer — and to unquestioningly accept the military leadership's presentation of itself as at the service of the people.Ibrahim is an example of many of those Egyptians who currently support the Al-Sisi regime because they understandably want order restored--a welcome change from the violence ridden society of the past year. (Also, I see hints of the allure of identifying with powerful people in some of Ibrahim's statements.)
There have been numerous reports surfacing which allege sitings of snipers being used against Muslim Brotherhood protestors (see this, this, and this).
Over the past several years I've been noticing reports of unknown snipers being spotted in many other troubled areas of the world. I recall Mahdi Nazemroaya, a Canadian journalist, who reported about snipers while trapped in a hotel in Libya in August 2011. (See first video regarding a video phone interview with Nazemroaya in article that I posted on August 22nd at segments 0:55 - 1:18 and 4:55 - 6:55m.) See also this and this.
It seems that this is a standard destabilization tactic used against targeted countries by agents of the Empire. In Egypt I think it is likely being used to terrorize the Muslim Brotherhood into submission or to incite a civil war, and to cause the rest of the population to turn to the Army to secure peace regardless of the policies of the latter. This Empire terrorist strategy is known as the Salvador Option.
A powerful new documentary film “Seeds of discontent” was launched this week to draw attention to the role of a Swedish investment firm, Dutch pension fund and Norwegian church endowment firm in land grabbing in Mozambique.Here is the trailer for Seeds of Discontent that you can view now or after reading the article posted on Climate Connections about the film.
“Cases like this one are happening every day, all over the globe” argues Philip Seufert of FIAN International, member of the Hands off the Land Alliance. “Communities are confronted with investors who arrive and promise a lot to them: jobs, ‘development’, money, a bright future. But what really happens then is that communities find their valuable land no longer available for farming, people have to work under bad conditions for the investors, communities get divided against each other and all the nice promises turn out to be empty.Of course, capitalists always promise "jobs" when they try to sell you on some project requiring a community's approval. Here in the US this lie seems to almost always work. But the reality under capitalism is that the last thing they want to promote are jobs. They, and their system, are all about profits. Jobs are cost items on their financial statements, and the way to create more profits is to eliminate as many jobs as possible.