The super-rich are feeding off the U.S. and killing it

Click here to access article by Paul A. Alter from Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. 

Germany had the financial backing of the Krupp family [and the Bush family, the Dulles brothers, etc]; we’ve got the Koch family. Germany had Goebbels to spew out the propaganda; we’ve got Rupert Murdoch. Germany had Hitler; we’re waiting. But the last election, putting the nation even more firmly into the hands of the political party owned and operated by the super-rich parasites, is a virtual guarantee that the man on the white horse will appear.

Worse yet in American history of the 1930s was a coup attempt by the right-wing of the US ruling class to take over the US government. However, thanks to a loyal American general the coup was stopped. Also, it appears that the US ruling financial and industrial class of the 1930s were not sufficiently ready for capitalism's pure political form of class rule--fascism. They still preferred working their influence through the filters of their bourgeois democratic institutions: their version of "democracy" and "the rule of (their) law". Because the liberal wing of the capitalist ruling class was very sympathetic to the coup plans, they went to extreme lengths to cover it up and protect those members of their class who supported it.

However, what Prescott Bush and associated ilk failed to do in the 1930s, his son and grandson and associated ilk did accomplish in the following 80 years. We now have what these early plotters wanted: a hidden government (aka deep state or shadow government) that is directing the affairs of our nation using the official government as an elaborate facade much like you see in Hollywood westerns to keep the gullible public believing that they have democracy and a legitimate rule of law. However, we still haven't arrived at overt fascism. 

For example, I couldn't be maintaining this blog if we did have overt fascism. Still, maybe this blog and other similar ones are irrelevant as long as ruling class media can keep people in ignorance. I think that all the machinery of fascist rule are now in place just in case their fake democratic institutions and management of information fail to safeguard their interests in which case our ruling masters won't hesitate to use them.


(For more information, I suggest to start by reading The Plot to Seize the White House by Jules Archer and War Is a Racket by Gen. Smedley Butler. Or if you don't have time to read books, view this 29:12m video which captures much of this history in summary form. For an excellent discussion of bourgeois democracy in today's world, I recommend reading an article entitled "Corporate Oligarchy or People’s Democracy: Countering the Elite Agenda" by Ajamu Baraka.)

Capitalism: The Inner Battle

Click here to access article by Georgie Wingfield-Hayes posted in Occupy Wall Street. 

Capitalism is a ... constructed story, a collection of social perceptions that create a dominant world view. But that’s all it is—a world view.

 It’s easy to see capitalism as a system external to ourselves, but it’s much harder to acknowledge the stories we carry inside of ourselves that create and reinforce the values that sustain it.

Transforming capitalism requires that we step outside of ourselves and examine our own roles objectively. That’s never easy, but it can help to look through someone else’s eyes.

In the rest of the article he attempts to do precisely that, and I think he is quite successful.

Dirt: the Movie -- a film review

Click here to access article by Dr Stuart Jeanne Bramhall from her blog The Most Revolutionary Act.

(This former Seattle psychiatrist and civil rights activist is now a political refugee (from FBI harassment) who is now living and working in New Zealand.)  

New Proposal Would Provide Grand Juries with Eyes

Click here to access article by Andy Borowitz from The New Yorker. (satire)

On the heels of an initiative to provide police departments with body cameras, there is growing support for a plan to supply grand-jury members with eyes, advocates for the plan said on Wednesday.

Defending Dollar Imperialism

Click here to access article by Mike Whitney from CounterPunch.

I think that this blogger, also from Washington state (same as myself), has the best current grasp of the underlying Empire strategies behind Saudi Arabia's oil-price war. To accomplish this, he draws on the investigations of other important geopolitical analysts and adds his own contribution to the giant puzzle--support of the US dollar as the backbone that is propping up the US Empire. 

...gas [from the GCC) will also be denominated in dollars which will shore up demand for USDs thus perpetuating the petrodollar recycling system which creates a vast market for US debt and which helps to keep US stocks and bonds in the nosebleed section. And that’s what this is all about, preserving dollar supremacy by forcing nations to hold excessive amounts of USDs to use in their energy transactions and to service their dollar-denominated debts.

As long as Washington can control the world’s energy supplies and force the world to trade in dollars, it can spend well in excess of what it produces and not be held to account. It’s like having a credit card you never have to pay off.

Meanwhile, here in the US the media is providing cover for this strategy with stories about a price war against US shale oil producers to protect Saudi market share. As usual, this is nonsense to hide the real objectives: destroy Russia's economy, damage Iran's and others such as Venezuela, and secure the US dollar. While the price war will hurt smaller US oil companies, it must be kept in mind that there are many figures in the ruling class who are tied to major oil companies that see this as an opportunity to buy out the failing smaller oil companies at bargain prices.

Why the Guardian axed Nafeez Ahmed’s blog

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

I've regarded Ahmed's Guardian articles as some of the most insightful in relation to Middle Eastern issues found in the blogosphere. Thus, I was not surprised to read this piece of news. Taking into consideration that Israel plays a key role in maintaining the Empire's interests in the Middle East, Cook explains why an Empire publication cannot allow too much insight to interfere with the interests of the Empire:

The problem with Israel is that its place in the global order – alongside the US – depends on it being a very sophisticated gun for hire. It keeps order and disorder in the Middle East at Washington’s behest and in return it gets to plunder the Palestinian territories and ethnically cleanse the native population. It’s a simple story but not one you can state anywhere in the mainstream because it questions not just a policy (the occupation) but Israel’s very nature and role as a colonial settler state. 

Although The Guardian allows more critical coverage of Israeli affairs than most mainstream media corporation, Ahmed strayed a bit too far from their protective bias toward Israel.

Given that Israel’s character, as a colonial settler state, is the story, the Guardian effectively never presents more than a fraction of the truth about the conflict. Because it never helps us understand what drives Israeli policy, it – along with the rest of the media – never offers us any idea how the conflict might be resolved.

And this is where Ahmed tripped up. Because his piece [arguing Israel's true motivation behind the recent Gaza invasion], as the Guardian’s editors doubtless quickly realised, implicated Israel’s character rather than just its policies. It violated a Guardian taboo.

Cook continues on by describing his own experiences with censorship at The Guardian.

(I signed up as a crowdfunder at $1/month to support his continued investigative journalism.) 

America’s dark imperial legacy: It goes much deeper than George W. Bush

Click here to access article by Robert W. McChesney from Salon.

It seems that after the publication of the book entitled Capital in the Twenty-First Century by the French sociologist, Thomas Piketty, all of a sudden it has become fashionable among North America's academics and leftists to make references to capitalism in a more critical fashion but without really examining the deadly dynamics that drives the system. 

One such person is McChesney who has recently authored the book Blowing the Roof off the Twenty-First Century: Media, Politics, and the Struggle for Post-Capitalist Democracy. Others on my list include such people as the economic historian Richard Smith (from New York, not to be confused with Richard A. Smith of the Institute for Policy Research & Development, London), Naomi Klein, and "Cassiodorus" (a pen-name).  I think that their critiques of capitalist society are muted because of their long experience in academia and their more immediate interests of protecting their careers from the threats of their capitalist overseers. They tend to hang-out online in websites such as the following: Climate&Capitalism, Daily Kos, TruthOut, MR Online, FireDogLake, and Salon.

Although I haven't read McChesney's new book, I offer this piece as a sample of this sort of critical thinking, and which might suggest a preview of what he offers in his book. Such a "radical" view, I argue, examines closely the trees while ignoring most of the dynamics of the forest. 

My critique of these critics is not intended to put them down, rather my intention is to see the weaknesses of their views and to strive for something better. I offer this criticism as a plea to especially young Americans that we must get serious about changing the system, if we are to survive. Either we get serious about overthrowing the system and establishing a socially just and sustainable system, or else we should prepare ourselves to descend into a living nightmare of fascism, wars, and catastrophic climate destabilization. Time is rapidly running out on humanity.

In this piece McChesney looks at our "dark imperial legacy" as originating with Charles E. (General Electric) Wilson who later became Sec. of Defense under Eisenhower. He throws in concepts like "military Keynesianism" to dress up his essay in academic jargon, references some radical authors, offers two quotes from other observers making reference to a ruling class to give his essay some radical cachet, but otherwise ignores an overview of the inherent and compulsive drive to power that the system of capitalism inculcates in those who practice capitalism. Thus, the reader is left to imagine that individuals such as Charles Wilson and George Bush are to blame for aberrations in a system that is basically sound. Hence, it only needs to be reformed to make it function right.

Auditioning for Wall Street

Click here to access article by Pam Martens and Russ Martens from Wall Street on Parade. 

Yesterday, Wall Street on Parade reported on how the corrupt tentacles of Wall Street have engulfed the mindset of our newly minted law school graduates.

Getting one’s resume noticed from those of a stack of competitors previously meant using a good grade ivory linen stock instead of cheap white copy paper. Today, the word is apparently out that getting one’s resume noticed at a major Wall Street bank requires advertising one’s special knack, inside track, or secret sauce for ripping off society for the profit advantage of the big dogs on Wall Street.

Israel's Secret

Click here to access article by David Swanson from War Is a Crime.

Swanson provides an excellent introduction to a new film entitled "On the Side of the Road" to depict Israeli holocaust of Palestinians by drawing on our own history of extermination of native Americans. This history is kept secret from Israeli youth as is our own history regarding native Americans.

Israel is that imagined United States, just formed in our grandparents' day, two-thirds of the people driven out or killed, one-third remaining but treated as sub-human. Israel is that place that must tell forceful lies to erase a past that is never really past. Kids grow up in Israel not knowing. We in the United States, whose government gives Israel billions of dollars worth of free weapons every year with which to continue the killing (weapons with names like Apache and Black Hawk), grow up not knowing. We all look at the "peace process," this endless charade of decades, and deem it inscrutable, because we've been educated to be incapable of knowing what the Palestinians want even as they shout it and sing it and chant it: they want to return to their homes.

The Biggest Scandal in America Is Its Controlled Press

Click here to access article by Eric Zuesse from RINF Alternative News.

I have remarked on this issue for years and also argued the necessity of an organized alternative media controlled by the grassroots. So, I welcome others who are now becoming aware of the controlled nature of mainstream media. I have a perspective of 60 years as an adult activist who started noticing blatantly skewed monolithic mainstream media coverage when the latter were covering issues related to the Cuban government after their revolution in 1959. Of course, I was keenly aware that the media under ownership and sponsorship of major corporations have always to a more limited extent provided biased coverage, however this trend of propaganda skewed coverage increased during the Vietnam War, and accelerated most dramatically since 9/11. What I now see today are symptoms which suggest that major media are under tightly organized and centralized control, something like what Orwell described as the "Ministry of Truth" in Nineteen Eighty-Four. 

So, the question remains as to how major media is so well managed and coordinated to produce such monolithic propaganda. I read in Sibel Edmond's recently published outstanding book of political fiction, The Lone Gladio, in which she has CIA personnel located in every major media outlet. This makes complete sense to me because there have been many reports in the past of journalists paid by the CIA in such books as The Mighty Wurlitzer by Hugh Wilford. On pages 226-227 he writes:

Estimates of the number f U.S. reporters who carried out secret assignments for the CIA vary: in 1973, the Agency itself conceded,in the face of questioning from newspaper publishers, a figure of "some three dozen"; a congressional inquiry conducted in 1976 concluded that the total was more like fifty; a year later, Carl Bernstein calculated that as many as four hundred American journalist had worked for the CIA sin 1952.

Now, I think it is likely that CIA personnel sit at the highest levels of management in media corporations to insure that the organizations report the news "correctly".

Police in Utah kill more people than gang members do

Click here to access article by German Lopez from Vox.

There's not much reliable data on how often police kill civilians nationwide. As my colleague Dara Lind explained, the data collected by the FBI on police shootings should be treated as a minimum count, since it's voluntary and therefore incomplete. But the data does give a good idea of who is targeted by police — and there are some clear racial disparities.

I also recommend this article accurately entitled "Corporate-Fascist America: Former Philadelphia Police Captain Says Cops Are Mercenaries for Corporations".

Arms or Diplomacy: U.S. Foreign Policy Planners Divided over Ukraine Strategy

Click here to access article by Steven MacMillan from New Eastern Outlook.

I think that MacMillan overstates his argument. Aside from the two influential people he mentioned, Kissinger and Mearsheimer, I haven't seen any other evidence of division. To be sure, I was surprised to read their dissenting opinions in ruling class oriented publications, but I think they constitute a minority of two.

With no end in sight for a lasting resolution to the crisis in Ukraine following the Western coup in Kiev, U.S. strategists are increasingly becoming polarised over future policy in the region. The belligerent and antagonistic policies of the war-hungry neoconservative movement are pushing the world closer to war with Russia, while other major geopolitical figures in Washington are advocating a de-escalation of the situation and an inclusion of Russia in serious dialogue.

The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy

Click here to access article by Prof. Edward Curtin from Global Research. 

With The 2001 Anthrax Deception, Professor Graeme MacQueen, founding Director of the Center for Peace Studies at McMaster University, calls us back to a careful reconsideration of the anthrax attacks. It is an eloquent and pellucid lesson in inductive reasoning and deserves to stand with David Ray Griffin’s brilliant multi-volume dissection of the truth of that tragic September 11th. MacQueen makes a powerful case for the linkage of both events, a tie that binds both to insider elements deep within the U.S. government, perhaps in coordination with foreign elements.

Inequality and Liberal Democracy: A Disturbing Association

Click here to access article by Walden Bello from TeleSur. 

I think that this is a very important essay by a scholar whose focus as a sociologist has been on the social-economic arrangements of capitalist society. He has also the experience of serving in a "liberal democratic" institution, the Philippine Congress. 

Notice that I put "liberal democratic" in quotes. I absolutely hate the terms used by capitalist authorities to describe their system. This is because all of their so-called "democratic" forms have been used only to hide the actual realities of capitalist class rule, and one important reality is the inequality that the system creates as recently exposed by another sociologist, Piketty. They must of necessity hide these realities behind a huge facade which consists of such verbiage, false ideas, and capitalist values. These are inculcated in all of us by comprehensive indoctrination in their educational institutions and reinforced daily by their corporate media coverage of information, and even experienced in a more subtle form in our entertainment. 

For example, let us consider only one important component of this brainwashing--consumerism. This emphasis is because capitalism's main focus is about the accumulation of wealth and its concomitant power through the compulsive production of goods for consumption. The production of goods to meet material needs has becomes irrelevant. Hence, the institution of advertising to drive consumption. Have you noticed the ubiquitous messages urging you to shop? Shopping has become a requirement of being a good citizen especially during this time of year. 

Of course, another way to create demand for goods is to destroy those already produced through war. We have seen, and are now seeing plenty of that in this age of never-ending wars.

In this essay Bello has clearly demonstrated that he has transcended this brainwashing experience. The rest of us must also, if we are to prevent the coming holocaust of humanity.

...liberal democratic systems are ideal for the economic elites, for they are programmed with periodic electoral exercises that promote the illusion of equality, thus granting the system an aura of legitimacy, while subverting equality in practice, through money politics, the law, and the workings of the market.  The old Marxist term “bourgeois democracy” is still the best description for this democratic regime. [my emphasis]

To reverse the process requires not just an alternative economic program based on justice, equity, and ecological stability but a new democratic regime to replace the liberal democratic regime that has become so vulnerable to elite and foreign capture.

So, I don't understand why he, and others like him, continue to use capitalist terms which hide the realities which he now recognizes. Part of the process of overcoming our brainwashing is to use terms that reveal these realities rather than hide them.

Oil Price Crashes, Who Really Wins?

Click here to access article by Bill Holter from Global Research. 

To be clear, this is another piece of speculation on the dramatic oil game that Saudi Arabia is playing. Given that their crashing of oil prices will have major and unpredictable effects in various countries (see this, for example) throughout the world, it is imperative that we try to understand this phenomenon. I think that this could very well be a world changing event.

I’d like to address the outright crash of the oil market this past week.  The hope was the Saudis would cut back on production to stabilize prices somewhere in the $80+ range.  This was not to be as Saudi Arabia announced no cutback whatsoever …oil then fell over 10% in one day on Friday and actually traded to a $65 handle.  First and most importantly, oil is THE biggest and most widely used commodity on the planet.  For a market of this importance to outright crash or rise over 10% in one day, unintended consequences not seen or anticipated can be expected at some point.  

U.S. shootings by police, prison conditions trouble U.N.

Click here to access article by John Zarocostas from McClatchy news service.

This piece represents a sign of the times that we are now in. Isn't ironic that the US invades, or it sponsors others to invade, other "evil-doer" states for "humanitarian" reasons? Well, if you hadn't noticed, we are now living in Orwellian times. 

Such a report would have been unheard of in my youth. It is just one more indication of the police state that the United States of America has evolved into. Like the proverbial boiling frog who while in a pot of warm water hasn't noticed the gradual heating of the water to its near boiling temperature, so have we, the American people, reached this extreme state of affairs. 

A U.N. anti-torture panel that’s investigating the United States said Friday that it was deeply concerned by what it described as the high incidence of police brutality and shootings--especially against African-Americans--in the U.S., was troubled by what it called harsh conditions in many prisons and was worried about the interrogation methods used on detainees.

Forget Zombies. The Real Threat to Humanity Is Robots

Click here to access article by Gar Smith from Global Research.

Smith alerts us to a rapidly growing threat to working people in this excellent and timely article.

Diligent observers of new technology predict the Advent of the Automaton will have an impact as great—or greater—than the rise of Industrial Agriculture or the invention of the Internet.  

Under capitalism what could be a blessing for all people is turned into a major threat for all people...except for those who own the machines. Unfortunately, Smith's shortsightedness sheds no light on the real solution to this contradiction: a revolutionary rearrangement of the economy to serve people instead of merely a tiny segment known as investors or capitalists.

And worse still, the Pentagon is getting into the act by imagining and planning robot wars.

Will Russia, Germany save Europe from war?

Click here to access article by Pepe Escobar from Asia Times Online. 

To look on the world as a global chess game played by various ruling classes always seems insane to me. After further reflection, I declare that such a view is a form of insanity. 

But after even more reflection, I have to admit that we are living in an insane world in which the Ninety-Nine Percent passively accept rule by elites who control nuclear weapons and have their own interests apart from the rest of us. This is the fundamental insanity driving all the others. Hence, the only ultimate solution is radical democracy in which ordinary people have control of their communities and societies that includes the control of their economies. 

However, until that times comes--if ever--we must consider the logic of an insane world. Escobar is doing exactly that in this article. Yet, as Escobar argues that there is a kind of balance of terror which will save the world of humanity a few more years, I know that inevitably there will be a time when the balance of terror (or, at least the perception) will favor one set of elites over others. Then we will be in deep doo-doo.

Are the United States, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Russia on a mad spiral leading to yet another war in Europe? Is it inevitable? Far from it.

The Broader Implications Of The Events In Ferguson, Mo.

Click here if you wish to access the cartoon by Gregory Crawford directly from World News Trust. 

Of course, the real "death figure" is the rule by a tiny elite whose arrangement of society includes their private ownership of the economy which, in turn, gives them power over all institutions including the police and courts. It is in their interest to promote racism, to instill fear in some people from the threat of others, as a strategy to divide and control the American people. 

After all, it worked very well in the Middle East where Sunnis and Shias have been killing each other since the US invasion. The British found this useful in Ireland by pitting Catholics against Protestants, and in India by pitting Muslims against Hindus. It's an old strategy used by ruling classes down the ages.

 

Obama: A Placebo for Civil Liberties

Click here to access article by Wayne Madsen from Strategic Culture Foundation.

Barack Obama has served as nothing more than a placebo for steadily-eroding civil liberties in the United States. What was billed as the "most transparent" administration in the history of the United States has turned into its most opaque, with Obama prosecuting more government employees for violating the 1917 Espionage Act than any of his predecessors combined. The "crimes" of those being prosecuted were simply communicating to journalists the malfeasance and law-breaking of the federal government.

Obama was also billed as the first African-American president of "post-racial" America. 

Madsen also makes some very cogent observations about Michael Brown's murder by Officer Wilson.

Prosecutor Manipulates Grand Jury Process to Shield Officer

Click here to access article by Marjorie Cohn from TruthOut.
  
The grand jury case, in which Missouri Police Officer Darren Wilson's killing of an unarmed, 18-year-old African American Michael Brown was investigated for a possible indictment, is an excellent illustration of how the ruling class misuses another construct of the "rule of law", a grand jury, to prevent one of the enforcers of their class rule, Officer Darren Wilson, from being tried by a more rigorous justice system embedded in a standard jury trial. The political use of the grand jury system is a common practice whenever ruling class interests are involved in order to lend legitimacy to their flagrant abuse of any sense of justice. It is most frequently used against left-wing dissidents. (See my previous posting and commentary related to grand jury practices in the US.)

In this article by Cohn posted on TruthOut, we see an archetype of a liberal take on this incident. You will see that there are no class interests involved. 

In a virtually unprecedented move, St. Louis Prosecutor Robert McCulloch in effect deputized the grand jurors to sit as triers of fact as in a jury trial.

In a normal grand jury proceeding, the prosecutor presents evidence for a few days and then asks the grand jurors to return an indictment, which they nearly always do. Of 162,000 federal cases in 2010, grand juries failed to indict in only 11 of them, according the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

This miscarriage of justice is seen initially as limited to an official prosecutor McCulloch who "has a history of bias in favor of police". Then in the final paragraph Cohn uses a quote to refer to a need for "systemic change", but it's clear that the quote is only referring to racism which has been the major theme emphasized by liberal media such as TruthOut. This emphasis plays into the ruling class's favorite strategy of "divide and rule". The ruling capitalist class would love to cultivate more divisions among working Americans by instilling fear in "white Americans" of the threat of African-Americans and other marginalized groups.

So-called 'counterterror' fusion center in Massachusetts monitored Black Lives Matter protesters

Click here to access article from PrivacySOS.

There are many, many other examples nationwide of these so-called fusion centers getting caught red handed monitoring protest movements and dissidents, conflating First Amendment protected speech with crime or terrorism. The fusion centers, meanwhile, have never once stopped a terrorist attack. It’s not clear what beyond monitoring dissidents and black people—through so-called ‘gang’ databases—these fusion centers actually do.

It's clear from the above last sentence that the author has difficulty in de-coding ruling class language. 

Alan Watts: What Is Wrong With Our Culture?

Click here if you wish to access this 5:06m video directly from its posting on Raging Bull-Shit.



What Watts portrays in this video is the culture of capitalism. The fact that he hadn't realized that this social-economic system lay behind this culture, leads him into a kind of magical thinking expressed toward the end of the film: "Be the change you wish to see in the world." 

Although magic is a delightful pastime that children often enjoy, we as adults must use our brains and our accumulated knowledge to understand that culture is to a considerable extent shaped by fundamental societal arrangements necessary to satisfy our material needs. Thus, if we don't like the culture, we must not engage in such magical thinking; instead we must change the system, capitalism, which is shaping the culture. Once we understand that the single driving force behind this system is to accumulate wealth and power for those that are clever at the game of capitalism, and that the game inevitably results in fewer and fewer people holding more and more wealth/power, poverty for the vast majority, wars, catastrophic climate destabilization, etc, then we will understand what really needs to be done to insure our happiness and security.

AP: U.S. Mercenaries Working With Al-Qaeda No Scandal - Just A "Difficulty"

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

Ten weeks behind Moon of Alabama the Associated Press is recognizing the southern attack on Damascus. They get paid for (not) reporting, I don't.

.... U.S. trained, supplied and supported mercenaries are openly cooperating with Jabhat al-Nusra which is al-Qaida's Syria branch. This is not a "conspiracy theory" of some nutcase but official AP reporting.

The people accused of bringing down the world trade center on 9/11 are openly working with U.S. (proxy) forces. And what does AP make of this?

Victims of Colombia's Civil Conflict Exceeds 7 Million: Media Yawns

Click here to access article by Daniel Kovalik from TeleSur.

Kovalik reports on some "inconvenient" truths about another close ally of the US ruling class.

...a notable fact in the Victims Unit report is that "that the majority of victimization occurred after 2000, peaking in 2002 at 744,799 victims." It is not coincidental that "Plan Colombia," or "Plan Washington" as many Colombians have called it, was inaugurated by President Bill Clinton in 2000, thus escalating the conflict to new heights and new levels of barbarity. Plan Colombia is the plan pursuant to which the U.S. has given Colombia over $8 billion of mostly military and police assistance. 

So, who are the victims? According to Human Rights Watch:

Human rights defenders, trade unionists, journalists, indigenous and Afro-Colombian leaders, and IDP [internally displaced persons] leaders face death threats and other abuses.