We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Friday, January 17, 2014

NATO’s Ukrainian target: The Black Sea Fleet - Rick Rozoff

Click here to access article and 15:10m audio recording posted originally on Voice of Russia.

This posting can be either listened to or read in transcript form. It is the third and final segment of an interview with Rozoff in which he makes predictions about the Empire's global moves in the years ahead--Ukraine is only one target. Rozoff is highly qualified as a specialist on all matters relating to NATO and widely respected. 

For those of you who, under the influence of US major media reporting during the Cold War years, might dismiss this because of its Russian media source, I argue that one can often learn much from sources outside of the US because they have greater latitude as to what they report and discuss without fear of sanctions from their own ruling class. 

I learned this lesson in my foreign travels and even my visits in Canada where I viewed TV programs on US political issues that would never make it onto US TV channels. And, using the same logic, I would take any reports from this Russian source on Russian domestic political and economic issues with a grain of salt

Unfortunately, we still live in an era of competing capitalist nations and ruling classes, and we are likely going to see the same vicious competition for access to raw materials, markets, and cheap labor as we witnessed in the terrifying years of the last century which featured world wars both hot and cold and many regional wars. So long as this system of capitalism exists and we allow it to exist, we will always be plagued by the violence of wars and the poverty of class exploitation.