Click here to access article by David Ruccio from Real-World Economics Review Blog.
Ruccio's research shows clearly what some conscious Americans already know.
The United States is more than six years into the officially designated and much-vaunted economic recovery from the Great Recession. But most Americans wouldn’t know it.
Although the banks were rescued by the One Percent using the people's treasury, the people remain mired in the swamp of debts. Meanwhile the One Percent continue to instigate wars as another means of fueling their capitalist engines of profits and power.
Most people don't know this because they rely on corporate media via the boob-tube to define their realities for them.
Click here to access article by William Bowles from Investigating the New Imperialism.
Bowles uses a play on initials throughout most of his essay to highlight the Christ-like adoration of Jeremy Corbyn, Britain's new Labor leader, who, according to his supporters, will deliver them from the evil of capitalism.
I’m really torn writing this, for on the one hand, Jeremy Corbyn’s (JC) sudden materialisation in the midst of a rampant, Victorian-style imperialist England, like Doctor Who landing in the Tardis, it’s difficult not to join in the euphoria currently sweeping through what’s left of the left in England...and bow down before JC, an almost Christ-like apparition right in the middle of the gangster capitalists in Armani suits who rule us.
By initially quoting from a warning issued by an 1885 socialist activist, William Morris, he goes on to argue that this warning is as true today as it was in 1885. British political activists have since then not heeded this warning; instead they followed leaders who promised that by working within the system of capitalism they could gradually overturn it and achieve socialism.
Click here to access article by Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich from Global Research.
Lying in support of the political agendas of the Empire is a common practice among all major Empire media corporations. But a recent article published in the liberal Guardian from an unnamed source from the Guardian's Tehran Bureau, who the author identifies as "CP", about the awful sexual harassment she, the Bureau correspondent, experienced in Iran was simply too much for this author to ignore because she had been in Iran and her experience was radically different.
...as a scholar of US foreign policy I pay close attention to propaganda. Misinformation is nothing new to me and I don’t like to spend my time and energy responding to all the lies. But this particular article by CP hit me hard because I happen to be in Iran at the moment and in the same exact location/neighborhood she mentions in her tall tale. And t had it not been for the fact that the evening prior to reading her story I had been talking to my husband in California telling him that never had I felt more safe and comfortable walking alone and eating alone in a restaurant than I did here, I would have dismissed CP’s propaganda. But CP’s lies had a personal effect on me and I could not let it rest — especially in light of Tehran Bureau’s malicious history.
Click here to access article by Conor Lynch from CounterPunch.
The best contribution that this article makes to our understanding of our world is its exposé of capitalist media coverage of the rise of Jeremy Corbyn in British politics. I think he also mixes some distortion into history by his review of history which suggests that capitalism went from 1) extreme inequality to 2) some kind of equality and is now returning to extreme inequality. This interpretation, which I find very common among today's liberals and some leftists, is false; and I believe is rooted in a strictly middle class perspective.
The mixed economy policies of the mid-twentieth century limited the excesses of capitalism that Marx had identified — the economy was more stable, while the middle class grew extensively. Along with the political shift, however, capital has become too strong and mobile, and our global economy has very much returned to capitalism of old — more or less a new global gilded age.
So it seems that the thought of Karl Marx has returned, and “Karl Marx admirers” are entering the mainstream — but is this really such a surprise (or a bad thing)? The problems of capitalism that he wrote so extensively about have returned, and capital is stronger than before.
Although he doesn't make this interpretation explicit, he only looks at the fortunes of the middle class when he describes his historical perspective. (I always feel the need to define "middle class" because like many other political terms such as "liberal", the terms have been obscured and/or modified by the ruling capitalist class. The middle class are those who serve in the capitalist system as its managers, highly skilled technical people, and other highly paid professionals who are employed to make their system work.)
Thus the middle class was threatened by the collapse of the capitalist economy in the 1930s, but was sustained by the social welfare policies of the F. Roosevelt administration and Keynesian policies in general until WWII. The war which really rescued capitalism by promoting so much economic activity in weapons industries and the subsequent destruction of so much capital in the world, capitalist economies led by the US reaped a bonanza by replacing this lost capital with new capital, and after that by the development of new technologies which created new products for consumption.
However this bonanza was only secured for the capitalist classes which they shared a little with their indispensable middle classes. The concentration of wealth and the dramatic development of technology (think automation, information technology, etc), especially in the US-led Empire under the neoliberal stage of capitalism, have all led to the decline of middle class occupations. This is also reflected in the accelerating costs of an advanced education which is required to turn out highly skilled people-they don't need nearly as many. Because the middle class are now being threatened by this concentration of wealth and capitalist ownership of these technologies, they are only now recognizing the existence of inequality and writing about it.
Click here to access article by Garry Leech from CounterPunch.
This report from an independent journalist feels almost like a tour of Cuba for those of us who cannot afford to travel there. It is also offers a lot of reassurance to us ordinary people that Cuba is not going on a capitalist road to deliver their labor and resources to a tiny class identified as capitalists whether Cuban or foreigners.
When the Cuban government announced in 2010 that it was going to lay off more than half a million public sector workers, the US mainstream media proclaimed the failure of socialism and a shift towards capitalism. The Cuban government’s reduction in the public sector workforce was viewed in the same light as the austerity measures implemented by capitalist nations throughout the global South under neoliberalism. But such analysis highlighted a fundamental misunderstanding of Cuban socialism that is common in the Western mainstream media.
However Leech points to one current threat to their society which could deliver Cubans to a capitalist world of inequality and social injustice:
Younger generations in particular, those too young to recall life prior to 1959 and who take many of the revolution’s social achievements for granted because they have existed since they were born, are inundated with capitalist propaganda in the form of Hollywood movies and TV shows as well as on the Internet. They are being seduced by the capitalist consumer dream—and this, perhaps more than anything else, poses the greatest threat to Cuba’s socialist model.
Such media entertainment has seduced much of the world to support capitalist governments. Thus this threat must not be underestimated.
Click here to access article by Mitchell Prothero from McClatchy News.
McClatchy News as a minor mainstream US media service which occasionally departs from the larger mainstream media corporations by offering pieces like this. The author simply reports on the interviews he held with people who had direct contact with ISIS terrorists and with actual ISIS terrorists.
It is more damning evidence that US imperial agents played a major role in creating ISIS terrorists. Here the focus is on one contingent coming from Georgia and nearby Chechnya who served CIA backed destabilization campaigns which succeeded in Georgia using a "color revolution" strategy but failed in Chechnya where they used mostly terrorism.
Click here to access article by Catherine Shakdam from MintPress News. (Note: the article appears to end in several places--be sure to read the entire piece.)
I'm offering this piece as another effort to understand (see also this piece) what is happening in Lebanon, Syria's next-door neighbor.
In stark contrast to the Arab Spring movement, the narrative of which was hijacked by the old political guard, even if in opposition to the actual regime, Lebanon has introduced a new revolutionary tone to the Levant, one which is defiantly non-partisan and proudly secular. Where Egypt, for example, fell prey to the old Islamist narrative under the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood, Lebanese protesters have risen beyond religious, ethnic and social divides to promote their shared values and expectations.
In the past I have expressed the view that US media coverage is almost entirely managed in support US Empire imperial policies. Thus when I apply this to the current protests over garbage collection in Lebanon, I must conclude that they are organic and not an application of a "color revolution" strategy that Empire agents have so often used to destabilize governments. From my observations, mainstream media coverage of this protest was strictly limited by presenting it as narrowly about garbage, and coverage only lasted about two days. This is in stark contrast to their coverage of the "Arab Spring" protests to which US media gave extensive and ongoing coverage.
This author sees the garbage protests as only a symptom of a much deeper opposition to the extreme capitalism that exists in Lebanon.
Where Egypt, Tunisia and Libya’s democratic aspirations were crushed before they could blossom, the Levant is not playing any faction’s game. Neither financed by any particular group nor sold out to any self-serving agenda, this budding revolution remains organic and popular — at least for the time being.
Going one step further than their Arab Spring revolutionary counterparts, Lebanese are calling for more than just reforms. Many want to wipe the slate clean to better redefine how their institutions should be organized and under what authority.
Click here to access article by Ajamu Baraka from CounterPunch.
Although I applaud the debunking of Sen. Bernie Sanders' candidacy and the criticism of his supporters, I have several problems with this article. My basic problem seems to be related to political concepts. This is partly due to the gradual shift of the political spectrum to the right in the US since WWII up until the economic crash of 2007-2008. Since then it is becoming more difficult to identify people in the liberal and left end of the spectrum.
After WWII the radical left was seriously diminished in its influence. Immediately after the war the capitalist ruling class launched an attack on labor unions and many of the New Deal social welfare policies in an attempt to rollback the gains that the left made in the US during the 1930s. They focused these attacks most viciously on radicals by purging them from labor unions, academia, and Hollywood--and they were successful. What I mean by "radicals" are those people who were fundamentally in opposition to, or seriously questioned, capitalist rule and organization of society.
For the past two and a half centuries since its founding, the USA has been a capitalist organized nation. Beginning with the concentration of wealth by capitalists in the late 19 century, there have been people on the left side of the political spectrum who have opposed this type of organization of society. Moving to the right of this spectrum, we find "liberals". These are people who support the capitalist organization of society, but oppose various harmful consequences: especially wars and social injustice. Moving further to the right we find traditional conservatives who want low taxes, the rule of capitalist law, and preserving the status quo. Now moving to the extreme right we find what was often referred to in the past several centuries as "reactionaries", however I think that a more up-to-date and accurate term is "fascists". Some liberals are confused by this shift to the right of the political spectrum by identifying themselves as "leftists". I believe that the author of this article does this with his many references regarding the left, and I believe that he and others he refers to are "liberals".
In this article he vilifies other "leftists", who are really liberals, for supporting Bernie Sanders' candidacy. He correctly identifies their ignorance about what Sanders' advocates in foreign policy. Sanders is a Zionist. Every policy that promotes the power of Israel in the Middle East is fine with Bernie Sanders.
The confusion, about the current political spectrum (since 2007/2008) that I referred to earlier, exists today because I think that the political spectrum is currently in a state of flux. The conflicts, contradictions, and lies that have been exposed in capitalist rule and the many threats to the biosphere as a result of capitalist operations are causing many people to consider questions about the capitalist system.
Click here to access article by Wayne Madsen from Strategic Culture Foundation.
...the official story is that 19 Arab hijackers armed only with box cutters managed to, in a few hours, defeat a command, control, communications, and intelligence system that cost the United States trillions of dollars to build. That is worthy fodder for any Hollywood fantasy movie. Unfortunately, the U.S. government continues to insist that the American people buy this "Alice in Wonderland" nonsensical story.
Click here to access article by Steve Keen from Real-World Economics Review Blog.
I'm not sure that this post is appropriate for my audience who I am targeting as generally educated and capable of critical thinking. This economic blog's leadership and readership are economists who are fed up with conventional economic theory, and are exploring new ways to think about economic issues. Because it is designed for economics specialists, the blog uses a short-hand way of communication that cannot be easily understood by generally educated people (this includes myself). I don't regard them as having a radical perspective on their subject, but because they are seriously questioning traditional economic theory, they are making some progress in understanding why capitalism is so dysfunctional.
This author investigates the excessive use of debt in China to keep their economy going at its accustomed fast pace, and the recent crash that ensued. From this examination I think we can learn a primary reason how capitalist economies experience periodic crashes which have such a devastating impact mostly on working people.
My understanding of China's economy is that it is mostly capitalist but supervised and managed by China's Communist party. As such the Communist managers appear to have fallen for Western methods of pumping the economy by permitting their bankers to use debt issued to capitalists as a stimulus. Although I have seen some evidence that the Communist managers want to shift to a consumer economy, the prime motivation for owners of capitalist enterprises is to maximize profits which conflicts with Communist intended policies. Capitalist want to keep their labor costs as low as possible which makes it very difficult for worker-consumers to purchase the products they make. This is an excellent illustration of capitalism's direct conflict with societal goals because capitalism only serves capitalists not societies as you have likely been taught.
But I digress a bit because Keen's focus is narrowly on the issuance of debt to prop up China's economy. It must be kept in mind that only upper income people and capitalists in particular--he refers to all of these people as "speculators"-- take on debt, and they have been lapping up debt in huge amounts to gamble in their capitalist casinos.
What does this dramatic unwind of the over-levered Chinese stock market imply for the real economy? As I noted in last week’s post (“China Crash: You Can’t Keep Accelerating Forever”), the previous Shanghai stock market crash in 2007 didn’t qualify as a harbinger of crisis, because private debt had been both low (relative to the West) and relatively constant (at about 100% of GDP since 2000). It was a crash where speculators themselves were either overwhelmingly cash-financed, or got their debt from less volatile sources than margin debt.
This time is different....
Click here to access this 40:11m audio interview with Michael Hudson from This Is Hell.
"We've moved into a central planning economy - exactly what the free market people warned would invite socialism - but our economy is being planned, not by governments or elected representatives, but by Wall Street."
Economist Michael Hudson explains how finance became capitalism's driving force and why an increasing amount of American life is being dedicated to sustaining unsustainable debt values, then gives a radical history lesson in debt economics - from ancient Sumer to the University of Chicago - that suggests the only way to end a debt crisis is to end the debt itself.
Although very helpful in understanding current economic issues, it's not clear to me how radical Hudson's views are. He indirectly attacks current capitalist practices by frequently referring to "Wall Street" or the FIRE (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate) sector and how this sector is currently misusing debt to transfer wealth to itself from the productive sectors of the economy. So, what is one to conclude?
He seems to suggest, like many liberals, that we simply must stop this sector from exploiting the real productive economy and presumably restore capitalism to a form prior to this neoliberal stage. And if so, how could this be done? Or, is he playing it safe, like so many others, in order to preserve his career in academia by limiting his attack on capitalism and narrowing his focus to this current stage of capitalist development?
In any case this interview is rather packed with insights as to what is destroying the economic life for the One Percent and increasing the concentration wealth exclusively for the Ninety-Nine Percent. However he studiously avoid two subjects: the political implications of the current extreme concentration of wealth: how wealth inevitably expresses itself as power for the capitalist class. Most of all, he avoids the implications of a finite planet for capitalists. Because capitalism is now coming up against the limits of a finite planet, it is now much easier for this class to extract its wealth and power this way than the old industrial way.
Click here to access article by Dr. P. Wilkinson from Global Research.
The author reviews the history of the Labor Party since WWII and finds that there were many tendencies to compromise its radical politics. This was rationalized by especially the Fabian socialists as a gradualist approach to wear down capitalist rule. However, what has occurred is a gradual deterioration of any form of radicalism, instead the Labor Party over time has evolved into a party that has completely supported imperialist policies of the US.
He concludes his analysis with this statement:
Jeremy Corbyn will have to face this monster, not only in the House of Commons but also in the mass media and the Internet. He will have to face the decades of Anglo-American political and economic incest, not that only manifested in the past century’s wedding of US plutocracy with British aristocracy. He will have to face the overarching military control over Europe exercised through the NATO command structure. Not least of which he will have to contend with the power of Finance Capital, entrenched in multi-national corporations and their “independent” agents, the central banks and multilateral banks—IMF, BIS, World Bank et al.
To do this it will be necessary to sandblast the layers of deception that make “markets” seem natural and rational while presenting human needs as irrational and even irrelevant. To do this will undoubtedly create conflict with Britain’s liege-lord, the US.
I hope Corbyn has superhero powers, because he will need them to overcome these forces unless he and, most importantly, his followers adopt a truly radical organization characterized by bottom-up authority structures along with working class media and even educational institutions.
Click here to access article by Tim Radford from Climate News Network. (Please read the comments following the posting of this article.)
German and US scientists have worked out how to melt almost all the ice in Antarctica, raise sea levels by up to 60 metres, and flood cities that are now home to more than a billion people.
The answer is simple: just burn all the planet’s remaining fossil fuel resources, which would pump another 10,000 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere in the form of the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide.
That is precisely what is happening and will continue to happen under capitalist rule.
Click here to access article by Colin Todhunter from his blog East by Northwest.
...Jeremy Corbyn has at least succeeded in opening up a debate about some of the issues outlined above, something that has for too long been absent within mainstream politics. Given the nature of those issues, however, and the deeply entrenched power of pro-Washington think tanks, global capital and the British Establishment, which despises anything or anyone with even a moderate leftist agenda, it would be very easy to get carried away with Corbyn’s victory and inflate what he could realistically be expected to achieve.
At last--a leftist Brit who provides a more level-headed assessment of Jeremy Corbyn, the new Labor Party leader in Britain! I follow several other left British websites who are all going ga-ga over Corbyn like he was the second coming of Christ! (For the latest examples, see this and this.) He is unusual and, I think, genuine, but even the limited reforms he offers to modify capitalist rule cannot be tolerated by the existing larger Empire of which Britain is an important part. And, I don't think that these conventional British leftists realize that they are contributing to the delusion that elections in a capitalist state really matter anymore. Unless a left movement materializes to use Corbyn's popularity to organize a genuine egalitarian bottom-up opposition that can, in cooperation with many other such organizations throughout this globalized world, really overturn the rule of the capitalist classes integrated under the banner of the US-led Empire, they will be merely indulging in more fantasies.
I don't think that many of the leftist Brits are fully conscious of the viciousness of the Empire's capitalist directors. They haven't experienced the many assassinations that we have here in the US, the nerve center of the Empire. If the British ruling class subsidiary of the US-led Empire are unable or too civilized to prevent or eliminate Corbyn from exercising effective changes in British policies, you can be dead certain that the US ruling class directors have no such inhibitions.
Click here to access article by Ghassan and Intibah Kadi posted on A bird's eye view of the Vineyard.
It is not uncompassionate or inhumane to ask legitimate questions when one smells a rat, and generally speaking, when Western mainstream media are having a frenzy, there is normally a huge dead rotten rat waiting to be uncovered. It is not uncompassionate and inhumane to ask questions even when the subject matter is refugees and when human suffering is so obvious. Quite the contrary indeed, if someone is using human suffering in order to score political, or even worse, financial gain, then such a culprit should be exposed.
These are my sentiments precisely! Empire media is nothing but a branch of the ruling class and they use it to manage the consent and dissent of ordinary people in support of Empire policies. This has been demonstrated over and over again: the most recent examples were the widespread media coverage of the color revolutions in Egypt and Ukraine, and the carefully managed media reports of many "terrorist" events especially in the US and most recently in Paris.
Click here to access article by Ghassan Kadi posted on A bird's eye view of the Vineyard.
This author appears to offer a very fresh, unique perspective on the current situation in Lebanon (which in US media appears only as garbage protests) and nearby Syria. His perspective includes what I recognize as an accurate history of the region: French and European colonialism marked by the old divide and conquer strategies. Based on this analysis, he goes further to make some startling predictions.
Click here to access article by Aldo Orellana López and Sian Cowman from Foreign Policy in Focus via Uncommon Thought Journal. (I am posting the article this way because I encountered problems with FPIF's website.)
As corporations and governments around the world scramble to access harder-to-reach fossil fuels in fracking wells and tar sands, the struggles of communities on the front lines of this expansion of extractivism are becoming more extreme — and more visible.
And so is the backlash against any who resist.
Indigenous peoples who find themselves “in the way” of extractivist projects are increasingly finding their territorial rights, among others, violated.
A particularly salient example is playing out in Argentina.
This is also happening in Bolivia and Ecuador regarding fossil fuels, and in Honduras and Guatemala (see the latest example here) with metal mining.
Click here to access article by Tony Cartalucci from New Eastern Outlook.
Catastrophes that are meant to look “sudden” and “unexpected” as well as “unstoppable” but are in fact, allowed to unfold within an operational theater completely controlled by the US and NATO constitutes instead a conspiracy – pitting desperate and/or exploited refugees intentionally sent out of Turkey and into Europe, against a manipulated, fearful, and ill-informed Western public.
This piece is a sophisticated effort at summarizing evidence covering events in the Mid-East and North Africa (MENA) region over the past decade. This means that only people who have been following alternative media for at least the last decade will understand both his supporting references and his arguments.
By connecting many dots, Cartalucci sees the current refugee crisis plaguing many countries in Europe as partly a result of Empire destabilizing actions in the region, and partly facilitated by them in support of their designs to remove Syria as a long irritating thorn in their side as a part of their project to control the strategically important MENA region and beyond.
It is the familiar and updated version of the "strategy of tension" strategy that is now being applied to the current effort to remove the Assad regime in Syria. What is so amazing to me is the boldness of the deception: capitalist Empire directors are attempting to use their media to narrowly frame coverage of this current refugee crisis to exclude all linkages to recent Empire instigated wars in the region and to promote another war campaign. Cartalucci makes clear what is really happening:
The recent refugee crisis is being used for precisely this same purpose [to induce widespread tension and fear]. In fact, while a false debate is being managed by the Western media and Western political figures to either unconditionally accept the refugees or unconditionally reject them, the only singular narrative both sides are being made to agree on is that instability across MENA is to blame and more bombing is the answer.
Our Empire masters have no doubt been encouraged by their past successes in fooling the public using the most unbelievable concocted stories beginning most dramatically with the Kennedy assassination up until the fables about 9/11 and beyond.
Cartalucci sees this attempt a little differently:
...the fact that social engineers would be tempted to use a vast number of refugees created by their own foreign policy indicates that their ploy in and of itself is indicative of immense, irreversible geopolitical rot.
Click here to access article by Larry Chin from Global Research.
The false flag operation of 9/11 was not an “intelligence failure”. It was the greatest “intelligence success” and criminal operation in history.
Click here to access article by David Swanson from Washington's Blog.
It will be very interesting to see new British political drama featuring Jeremy Corbyn's Labor Party unfolds in the next scene. I am not very well informed about British politics, so I hesitate to express my views on how this drama will unfold. If his supporters think that the war criminals directing the Empire will let elections determine anything, they are in for some profound shocks. Unless Corbyn and his supporters construct a radical political organization from the bottom-up (a revolutionary organization) instead of merely trying to win power via capitalist managed elections, this drama will end with a series of disasters: a more disillusioned liberal-left public, more deep cynicism, apathy, and/or assassinations.
Click here to access article by Paul Craig Roberts from his blog.
Millions of refugees from Washington’s wars are currently over-running Europe. Washington’s 14-year and ongoing slaughter of Muslims and destruction of their countries are war crimes for which the US government’s official 9/11 conspiracy theory was the catalyst. Factual evidence and science do not support Washington’s conspiracy theory. The 9/11 Commission did not conduct an investigation. It was not permitted to investigate. The Commission sat and listened to the government’s story and wrote it down. Afterwards, the chairman and cochairman of the Commission said that the Commission “was set up to fail.”
Click here to access article by Nick Turse and Gabriel Karon from TomDispatch. (Note: if you wish to skip the introduction by Tom Engelhardt, you will need to scroll down to the article.)
In contrast to today's contribution by Tony Cartalucci, Turse, who is associated with the liberal Nation Institute, refuses to connect the dots of evidence he cites about the increase of US Special Forces' operations and the increase in terrorism throughout many countries in Africa. Instead Turse and Tom Engelhardt, in the introduction, take only a cynical view of this relationship.
I invite readers of this article to connect the dots.
Click here to access article by Nafeez Ahmed from Insurge Intelligence.
“The big corporate powers via Global Compact and the rich nations have already agreed on what the fig leaf will look like,” said Ladha. “Whatever the SDGs end up saying will, by the very logic of the system they serve, promote a growth-at-all-costs, neoliberal game plan of trickle-down economics and climate destruction.”
But Ladha’s colleague, Joe Brewer, emphasised that this apparent sleight-of-hand is ultimately about the power of ideology. Neoliberal capitalism prevails as the default position not just because of a conspiracy of the powerful, but because it is already everywhere. Everyone, even the less powerful, find it difficult to imagine a world outside capitalism — and so the assumption is that such a world is simply not an option:
“The logic of neoliberal capitalism is now the water people swim in culturally. It is largely invisible and most don’t realise how their minds default to the dominant commonsense frames of economics discourse.”
Yet the science is increasingly incontrovertible: capitalism’s endless growth paradigm is unsustainable. The post-capitalist era is dawning. And the frog — in this case, the human — is boiling in a dying paradigm of its own construction that has far outlived its usefulness.
