in the time remaining, to help us understand how the man-made system of capitalism will lead to the extinction of our human species, and so many others.
Many of us today do recognize that the Earth and its resources are limited, yet too many people still cling to the notion that modern science and technology will enable us to defy physical limits. In the Middle Ages, alchemists sought in vain for a “philosopher’s stone” that would convert base metals into gold. They never succeeded. Why? Because what they were looking for did not, and could not, exist, because its existence would have violated the physical laws governing the universe.
It's clear that he recognizes that we live on a finite planet, but he still proposes the same solution, direct population control methods, that have been tried for many decades with little in the way of results to show for this type of program. I accuse him of looking toward a solution that defies social laws or realities that govern human societies. I'm referring to the lack of social justice in class structured societies that undermines the health and safety of its citizens. This I firmly believe is a well-guarded secret that social scientists in capitalist societies refuse to acknowledge for reasons that I will shortly explain. I was first tipped off about this secret fact by a professor who specialized in population studies. I went to her back in the late 1970s because I wanted to take her course which was officially filled up. In one part of our interview she disclosed to me in rather hushed tones that existing population controls methods were missing the point of the reasons for the resistance by the targeted populations: large families were necessary to provide social supports for families that were otherwise missing in class structured societies. It is possible to find such documented evidence to support this argument, but one must look hard and long in population studies to find it. I quote one such source, page five from a book by Mohammed Sharif entitled Poverty Reduction - An Effective Means of Population Control:
There are studies that show that children are not liabilities but assets to poor parents--they contribute to the family's current income and provide old-age security to the parents [he lists eight such studies]. Children, especially male children begin working at age as early as six year and by age 12 they completely pay off to their parents the total cost of their upbringing and in additions enough to cover the cost for one of their siblings [cites one study]. This suggest that larger the number of children, the greater is the net income for the parents and higher is the standard of living.
In the absence of any organized system of social security, during old age parents have to depend on supports from their children. This is especially so because people who live by the day and have no assets other than their physical labor are unable to save for their old age.
Hence it is clear that the only real solution for over-population is a people's revolution to insure that their societies are run "of, by, and for the people". It is for that reason that this secret must be suppressed by capitalist authorities and that capitalist controlled websites such as Post Carbon Institute like to run such articles while ignoring the evidence that these programs don't work.
Neoconservative pundit Robert Kagan and his wife, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, run a remarkable family business: she has sparked a hot war in Ukraine and helped launch Cold War II with Russia – and he steps in to demand that Congress jack up military spending so America can meet these new security threats.
This extraordinary husband-and-wife duo makes quite a one-two punch for the Military-Industrial Complex, an inside-outside team that creates the need for more military spending, applies political pressure to ensure higher appropriations, and watches as thankful weapons manufacturers lavish grants on like-minded hawkish Washington think tanks.
However, I think that Parry puts much too much emphasis on these individual actors at the expense of a deeper analysis to reveal that what is happening is a class war between an advanced capitalist class that looks to imperialism to solve its inherent problems of debt and economic stagnation and a working class that is deceived by this ruling class into passivity toward their imperialist adventures.
Yet, if it weren’t for Nuland’s efforts as Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, the Ukraine crisis might not exist.
Do you really think that removing this "family business" would really change anything? Still, Zionist influence does help to see this how this faction's influence does magnify the huge problem of the Empire's trajectory toward conflicts that could easily result in a nuclear war.
To his credit Parry concludes his essay with a more balanced statement:
To be fair, the Nuland-Kagan mom-and-pop shop is really only a microcosm of how the Military-Industrial Complex has worked for decades: think-tank analysts generate the reasons for military spending, the government bureaucrats implement the necessary war policies, and the military contractors make lots of money before kicking back some to the think tanks — so the bloody but profitable cycle can spin again.
The only thing that makes the Nuland-Kagan operation special perhaps is that the whole process is all in the family.
The possibility of an Iran nuclear deal depressing weapons sales was raised by Myles Walton, an analyst from Germany’s Deutsche Bank, during a Lockheed earnings call this past January 27th. Walton asked Marillyn Hewson, the chief executive of Lockheed Martin, if an Iran agreement could “impede what you see as progress in foreign military sales.” Financial industry analysts such as Walton use earnings calls as an opportunity to ask publicly-traded corporations like Lockheed about issues that might harm profitability.
...there are several reasons to suggest that the prospect of flourishing alternatives is now brighter than before. Syriza’s rhetoric, although having been watered down significantly during the last couple of years, and especially after the recent elections, originally stems from a truly radical left background which is hard to discard totally. Furthermore, the legacy of the Greek “Indignados” in 2011 and the explosion of grassroots solidarity ventures that followed throughout the whole country, in combination with the clear delegitimation of the previous political order, indicate that a simple return to an austerity driven future will not be tolerated.
This trend is evident by the fact that after the first, largely symbolic actions of the new government, its approval rate has increased significantly, encompassing broader parts of the electorate which hadn’t voted for Syriza. Finally, possible political coalitions with potential governments in other countries of the European south, notably Podemos in Spain, are now more likely than before. .... This view of Syriza transforming Europe may be nothing but a social construct, but social constructs do affect reality too!
In the run-up to last year’s United Nations Climate Conference in Lima, Peru, a particular headline kept popping up, an attempt to once again establish a particular meme in the mind of global elites as well as wider populations: friends, the line goes, you’re right to worry about climate change, but...what you really, really shouldn’t do, is start believing that worrying about climate change should make you worry about trying to end economic growth’. Economic growth, so the story goes once again, can in fact be made to work very nicely with climate protection, if only it’s done the right way.
Müller examines the differences between the two movements and then finds a common path that both can merge on that can effectively fight the above position of capitalist elites.
The subject of money and debts has long been obscured by people who benefit from people's ignorance: bankers and other financiers who make up the core decision-makers of capitalist societies. Their control of money as sovereign debt is a layer of activity superimposed on
normal capitalist practices which exploit the labor of people and
natural resources of our home, the planet Earth. They reap enormous benefits in terms of wealth and power from our ignorance of how money and debts are created. Bankers are not especially clever people, but they have learned over several millennia how to control the issuance of money and to have their money backed by the power of the state. They are then called central banks which is a bank owned by a consortium of banks and granted a monopoly by a government to issue its money. Major bankers have been able to achieve this feat and get away with it because they are the core part of any capitalist ruling class. They play a key role in what gets produced in any society, and of course, what gets produced is always the most profitable to them regardless of consequences to society. War is the most extreme example.
For more information to help you to understand money creation, I recommend two other sources. The first, called Wizards of Money [broken link--try this] is organized as a series of (audio) lessons designed by someone by the pseudonym of "Smithy". (Transcripts can also be accessed under the "Reference" column.) Smithy has degrees in mathematics and economics, and she works as a consultant calculating investment risk for financial institutions. For this reason, she can't reveal her real name. I also highly recommend a book entitled The Lost Science of Money by Stephen Zarlenga, but it is rather expensive. The latter book traces the 2000 years history of the development of money that has evolved into what we have today.
Not only do the demonstrations in Frankfurt serve to re-politicize the ECB and its monetary policy; they are also laying the groundwork for the emergence of a transnational movement against the rule of finance, bringing the resistance to austerity right into the heart of the European crisis regime.
Ernsting examines the most advanced uses of renewable energy as practiced in Scotland and Denmark and reaches the following conclusion:
Any meaningful response to climate change must involve rapidly phasing out fossil fuel use while protecting remaining ecosystems, including healthy soils, and restoring and allowing as many damaged ecosystems as possible to regenerate. Wind and solar power, depending on where they are sited, can be amongst the ‘lowest-impact’ and ‘lowest-carbon’ forms of energy, so their expansion will indeed need to be supported. But ‘lowest-impact’ is far from ‘low impact’, and lower carbon is nowhere near ‘zero carbon’. Nor, as we have seen, is it realistic to expect such forms of energy to replace current fossil fuel use, and certainly not in the time necessary to prevent the most disastrous effects of climate change. Moving towards a low-energy society remains the only path for avoiding a climate catastrophe. [my emphasis]
This conclusion obviously means that we must end capitalism and move immediately to a sustainable social system if we as humans are to have any hope of survival.
Torture and massacres and now beheadings seem to be the hallmark of the US's NAFTA partner to the south. If it is true that you can judge a person or entity by the company they keep (beheaders in Saudi Arabia, neo-Nazis in Ukraine, etc), we are in deep doo-doo.
I regard Richard Smith as one of the leading authors who best exposes the fatal flaws in capitalism. He authored the foundation article for this website entitled Capitalism and the destruction of life on Earth: Six theses on saving the humans.
Smith in this brief article introduces his new book entitled Green Capitalism: The God that Failed. (Unfortunately for people like me who prefer to read hard copies, this one is published only in a digital format [for $10].) With reference to this new book, he writes:
I show that the theorists and proponents of no-growth or de-growth like Herman Daly or Tim Jackson are correct in arguing that infinite economic growth is not possible on a finite planet but that they’re wrong to imagine that capitalism can be refashioned as a kind of “steady state” economy, let alone actually “degrow” without provoking economic collapse. There are further problems with this model, which I also investigate. I show that the theorists and proponents of “green capitalism” such as Paul Hawkin, Lester Brown and Frances Cairncross are wrong to think that tech miracles, “dematerialization,” new efficiencies, recycling and the like will permit us to growth the global economy more or less forever without consuming and polluting ourselves to death.
Its final collapse and the resumption of the war is probably some weeks away. Both sides will want to use the spring and early summer to reorganise and refit their forces before fighting resumes in earnest. At that point however the fighting will resume. Given the balance of forces it will end with another Ukrainian defeat and another militia victory. Ukraine's downward spiral will continue until the process ends in the only way it can with the collapse of the present government in Kiev.
With the Empire's German vassal, Angela Merkel, too weak to oppose the Empire's plans to engage Russia in a never-ending war of attrition, the resumption of the war is inevitable. Only the united opposition to the war by the people of Europe can stop it.
Click here to access article by Pete Dolack from Systemic Disorder.
Dolack explains how capitalists issue deceptive reports about unemployment in order to legitimate a system of endless growth that is creating this unemployment; and thereby causing workers worldwide over time to enjoy less and "owners" to enjoy more of worker productivity while destroying the very biosphere on which humanity depends. The end result?
We have only one Earth. And that one Earth is in the grips of a system that takes at a pace that, unless reversed, will leave it a wrecked hulk while throwing ever more people into poverty and immiseration. That this can go on indefinitely is the biggest fantasy.
There is so much deliberate confusion and obfuscation purveyed in Western media about the nature of the numerous conflicts in Syria and adjacent areas. Draitser makes a constructive contribution toward understanding the geopolitical realities of these conflicts.
The US-NATO-GCC-Israel alliance has not needed to put its own boots on the ground to achieve its strategic objectives. Instead, it is relying on irregular warfare, proxy terror wars, and small-scale destabilizations to achieve by stealth what it cannot achieve with military might alone.
But it remains paramount for all those interested in peace to make these connections, to understand the broad outlines of this vast covert war taking place. To see a war in Syria in isolation is to misunderstand its very nature. To see ISIS alone as the problem is to completely misread the essence of the conflict. This is a battle for regional hegemony, and in order to attain it, the Empire is employing every tool in the imperial toolkit, with terrorism being one of the most effective.
The United States cannot allow Russia reap the benefits of its own vast resources. Oh, no. It has to be chastised, it has to be bullied, it has to be sanctioned, isolated, threatened and intimidated. That’s how the [capitalist] system really works. The free market stuff is just horsecrap for the sheeple.
Russia is going to have to deal with chaotic, fratricidal wars on its borders and color-coded regime change turbulence in its capital. It will have to withstand reprisals from its trading partners, attacks on its currency and plots to eviscerate its (oil) revenues. The US will do everything in its power to poison the well, to demonize Putin, to turn Brussels against Moscow, and to sabotage the Russian economy.
Divide and conquer, that’s the ticket.
What Whitney really explains is that in this advanced stage of capitalism, the Empire's capitalist directors really have no choice but to impose chaos on Russia. But, the knowledgeable and peace loving workers of the world have choices, and they need to start making them now.
Engdahl and Pepe Escobar are the champions of what they describe as a new multipolar world. It is a world where multiple centers of capitalist ruling classes exist where no one is dominate. They see the BRICS as one set of countries which can offset the power of the existing US Empire. I and other leftists only see this as a replay of the 20th century in which capitalist ruling classes vied for world dominance. To be sure, capitalist ruling classes in Russia and China do not as yet exhibit evidence of imperial designs, but that is only because of their recent emergence as powerful players.
Yet, I find what Engdahl reports about the new generation of young Russians to be very interesting. They have roots in both a highly centralized, bureaucratic socialism and capitalism. Who knows in what direction they might take Russia?
Something remarkable is taking place in Russia, and it’s quite different from what we might expect. Rather than feel humiliated and depressed Russia is undergoing what I would call a kind of renaissance, a rebirth as a nation. This despite or in fact because the West, led by the so-called neo-conservatives in Washington, is trying everything including war on her doorstep in Ukraine, to collapse the Russian economy, humiliate Putin and paint Russians generally as bad. In the process, Russia is discovering positive attributes about her culture, her people, her land that had long been forgotten or suppressed.
The American leftist truth-seeker spent his life going through various iterations of political orientations to arrive at what he refers to as Libertarian Municipalism as the political unit of what he calls Communalism in which confederated libertarian municipals would replace the state, a capitalist construction. Today his ideas are clearly influencing radical leaders in many strife ridden areas of the world such as Kurdish Rojava area of Syria (see this), the FARC revolutionary movement in Columbia, and among leftist Greeks who are fighting for their very survival.
Libertarian municipalism is...based on the proposition that we now have the technology for a post-scarcity economy—one that can potentially abolish mindless toil and possibly most of the work that enters into industrial production today. In such a world, the communist ideal of “from each according to ability, to each according to needs” would be historically and technically feasible. ....
The world is changing now at a pace that is absolutely stunning. If capitalism does not destroy the biosphere, then in possibly thirty, certainly fifty years the world that survives will be changed beyond our imagination. Not only will the peasant world be gone, but so too will much of the “nature” we often call “wild.” The automation of industry will probably reach incredible proportions, and the earth’s features will be vastly transformed.
Yes, indeed, this latest Empire imperialist adventure has been covered over with a thick layer of lies like manure spread over a field to encourage plant growth--only here it was applied to deceive the American public into going along with their latest adventure targeting Russia. Unbeknownst to most Americans are the ongoing provocations that the Empire directors are using to intimidate Russia. Butterfield lists many of them. I follow such NATO hair-raising provocations through the Stop NATO website.
Throughout Europe, the Baltic and Central Asian states bordering Russia, and even on U.S. soil, an unprecedented volume of provocative war games are underway, all clearly threatening Moscow.
Why? Because the real aim of the U.S. power play in Ukraine is to establish NATO military power on Russia’s border, with the aim of fomenting regime change aimed at breaking up the Russian Federation into pliable, profitable pieces that can be easily dominated by Wall Street and its European junior partners.
The hubris involved in the US suggesting that Iran’s missiles could inflame sectarianism or cause civilian casualties is nothing short of staggering. But none of the idiots engaging in this hand-wringing will ever be forced to account for the real source of sectarian tensions and civilian casualties in Iraq.
Stirring up sectarian tensions has been a primary strategy of the Zionist-conservatives (euphemistically known as neocons) that have taken control of US foreign policies in the Middle East since 9/11. All actions toward this end have been supported by these ideologues whose interest was/is to encourage Muslims to kill other Muslims.
Before the US-British invasion of Iraq the relations between Muslim sects were very much like the various denominations of Christians in the US. But soon after the invasion we started reading reports of mysterious bombings of mosques in Iraq and the blame put on other Muslim sects. Then there was the mysterious report of British soldiers dressed up like Arabs who were arrested by Iraqi police for carrying numerous weapons and explosives. Following their arrest they were just as mysteriously rescued by the British army using tanks in an assault on the prison where they were being held. No official explanation was ever offered and the story soon disappeared down the capitalist media black hole.
Welcome to the end of Brenton Woods and the Washington Consensus that defined the world money systems around U.S. controlled institutions and the U.S. dollar as the sole reserve currency.
I am perplexed by this and similar reports (see this and this), and most authors blithely see this as the end of the US dollar as the world's dominate currency. My surprise is compounded by such staunch American vassals as Britain, France, and Germany also joining the new financial institution organized by China. Because the US dollar is an integral part of maintaining US Empire rule, it doesn't make much sense. See if you can make sense out of it. I will await further commentaries from other financially well-informed people.
Zuesse puts together the mountain of evidence, much of it captured on videos, to show the history of US preparations to overthrow the legitimate government of the Ukraine on the border of Russia. Then he goes even further by presenting evidence of US grand designs for world domination following WWII when Operation Gladio program was established to counter any left-wing political party aspirations in Western Europe which Zuesse sees as the origins of the old Cold War. The violent overthrow of Ukraine by US operatives is the start of the "New Cold War" with Russia. Unfortunately, he muddles his analysis by using a term from another social system and from another era: "aristocracies". This diverts attention away from the accurate designation of the current social system known as capitalism and avoids targeting capitalists as constituting the new ruling class who vie with other capitalists for world domination. Thus, history is reduced to ghoulish actors engaging in satanic acts because...well, that's what "evil-doers" do. A constructive alternative would be to analyze such events within the framework of capitalist dynamics by examining what it is about capitalism that produces such devious aggressions and wars against independent countries.
Last July, the MH-17 tragedy quickly became a lightning rod in a storm of anti-Russian propaganda, blaming the deaths personally on Russian President Vladimir Putin and resulting in European and American sanctions against Russia which pushed the crisis in Ukraine to a dangerous new level.
Yet, after getting propaganda mileage out of the tragedy – and after I reported on the growing doubts within the U.S. intelligence community about whether the Russians and the rebels were indeed responsible – the Obama administration went silent.
In other words, after U.S. intelligence analysts had time to review the data from spy satellites and various electronic surveillance, including phone intercepts, the Obama administration didn’t retract its initial rush to judgment – tossing blame on Russia and the rebels – but provided no further elaboration either.
This strange behavior reinforces the suspicion that the U.S. government possesses information that contradicts its initial rush to judgment, but senior officials don’t want to correct the record because to do so would embarrass them and weaken the value of the tragedy as a propaganda club to pound the Russians.
While the government is attempting to cast it as a cybersecurity measure, the bill is only designed to allow companies to share your information with the government and other companies. It also allows the government to turn over your information to private companies.
The spying bill is named the “Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act” [CISA]. Only one senator voted against the bill, and it passed in the secret committee with bipartisan approval. It still seems the only thing the parties can agree on is taking away your rights and establishing control systems to keep you in your place.
Click here to access the links to the KPFA (listener sponsored radio station in Berkeley, CA) interview (approximately 1 hour) and the transcript. (I updated my commentary, 8AM 3/16/2015)
Former Canadian ambassador and UC professor Peter Dale Scott has studied and reported on the "deep state" for a least 50 years. The concept of a Deep State ("shadow government", etc.) is one which functions outside of the purview of the public. This is an essential component of the US contemporary capitalist class rule which originally came to power in 1776 proclaiming democratic themes as a way to enlist the help of the working class against the British aristocracy and monarchy.
Thus after achieving class power, they were saddled with this democratic ideology ("government of the people, by the people, and for the people") and have had to deal with it ever since. The main way was to secure their power of money and property from any interference from government. In the US the first step was to replace the Articles of Confederation which permitted far too much democracy with the US Constitution which gave the embryonic capitalist class much more direct control. Since then this new ruling class used indoctrination as an essential way to insure that people growing up would be thoroughly immersed in capitalist values. In the 20th century this class secured control of most information that reached the public by increasing their ownership of media under giant media corporations.
Following WWII the US capitalist class embarked on a project of world domination and thus had to establish more insidious methods of parallel private networks of authority to function whenever public opposition and government posed problems for their interests. The Deep State, as used by Scott, is a term applied to the latter form of power and it essentially applies to the Continuity of Government project whenever the rule of major capitalists is threatened.
There is the settled condition of the deep state and then there is this
moving force that has been instituting change, particularly since 9/11
but as far back as Iran-Contra, and that is things which are done under
the cover of Continuity of Government planning, COG planning. This is
what Oliver North was doing in the mid-1980s when he was asked, very
astutely, if he was planning for suspension of the US Constitution. And
the answer was – he didn’t get to speak the answer. A gavel came down
from the chairman – the Democratic chairman, I may say – that we
couldn’t go into this in a public session. But yes, he was planning for
the suspension of the Constitution and I can name three ways in which I
think it has been since suspended.
This is where I part company with Scott who very specifically and
narrowly focuses on this project. My concept of a Deep State is much
broader. It is an informal, class-based network of major capitalists and
encompasses all the levers of power from powerful think tanks such as
Council on Foreign Relations, Brookings Institution, Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace, Trilateral Commission, Rand, Ford Foundation,
etc, and the Federal Reserve to their more operational organizations
such as the CIA, NSA, etc, National Security Council, CIA infiltrated
media corporations, etc. None of the participants in these organizations
are voted into membership by the people. Their influence on what the
government does is rarely covered in corporate media. How this complex
of organizations mediate and operationalize their decisions remains a
mystery.
Existing microeconomic theory is proven false by a now overwhelming body of empirical evidence. ....
.... The source of microeconomic theory is actually the need those aristocrats felt, to “justify” their wealth. That’s what produced this theory – the theory that’s now known to be false (but that remains helpful to today’s aristocrats and is thus still financed heavily by them).
Our historical account starts by describing the attempt by the DuPont brothers and other American aristocrats in 1933-34 to overthrow FDR and to replace him by a dictator patterned upon the neo-feudalists (“fascists”) Hitler and Mussolini.
Referred to here is the little known historical incident of the attempt to overthrow the US government by right-wing American capitalists (some funded the Nazi Party in Germany) using retired General Smedley Butler. This history has been widely suppressed by our masters so that few Americans are aware of it. You can learn the details in an excellent book by Jules Archer entitled The Plot to Seize the White House.