Click here to access article by Alex Gorka from Strategic Culture Foundation.
General Valery Gerasimov, the chief of Russian General Staff, said that Russia’s patience is waning over the situation in Syria. ....
.... In an unusually harsh statement, John Kerry warned Russia on June 15 that US patience on the Syrian conflict and the fate of its President Bashar Assad was running out.
Click here to access article by Michael Jabara Carley from Strategic Culture Foundation.
Absolutely excellent! Carley reviews the history of relations between the West and Russia/Soviet Union since the Russian Revolution of 1917 in order to provide an understanding to lessor informed minds about the present conflicts between the West and today's Russia.
I have read a considerable amount of this history, but Carley gives additional details to this history that I found absolutely fascinating. And he provides numerous original posters to illustrate this history.
Essentially this very accurate history suggests that the West regarded the Russian Revolution has bringing to power a system that was in extreme opposition to capitalism, a system that had provided capitalists in the West with so much wealth and power. The Soviet Union was the ultimate apostate that rejected private ownership of an economy--blasphemous to the religious-like devotion of capitalists to their system! This single event became a prime factor in understanding the rest of the history of the 20th century. In this 21st century the global domination agenda of the neoliberalist Empire does not tolerate any challenges from countries that aspire to be independent. It is this that drives the US-led Empire's aggressive actions against present day Russia (and China).
Because I don't want to burden readers of my blog with too much, I will post the second and concluding part tomorrow. But if you, like myself, are too curious to wait, here is the second part.
Click here to access article by Bill Van Auken from World Socialist Web Site.
The author offers his views on the recent leaked State Department memo.
The so-called "rebels" backed by Washington are not only in a state of shambles, but are turning the guns supplied by the CIA and the Pentagon against each other.
The cease-fire, which the State Department dissidents claim to want to enforce through military escalation, has been used by Washington to funnel more weapons to the Islamist militias, reposition their forces and blunt the Russian-backed Syrian army offensive. It has not, however, succeeded in shifting the tide of battle in support of the Western-backed forces.
Thus the need for what the State Department operatives call “a more militarily assertive US role in Syria, ...."
Click here to access article by C. J. Hopkins from the Consent Factory, Inc.
Who knows how many parts this will have and the author ain't tellin'; but it appears to be most clever and amusing, and besides, we may learn a few things. It appears to be a self-parodying kind of thing combining elements of cults and hacktivist culture. While we are dedicated to figuring out how to stop the extinction of humans, we need a little break from time to time to amuse ourselves in order to maintain our sanity and restore our forces for the coming challenges.
Click here to access article by Paul Street from CounterPunch. [A note was added to the commentary at 6 PM Seattle time.]
Wow! Street give us so much in this rather lengthy review of musical production which is being heavily subsidized by the rich so that every kid in the New York area will see it. I can imagine that all the schools, especially the public schools, will be herding their students in mass to the local theater to attend this performance. It is a musical play done to rap music that transforms American history into pure capitalist indoctrination about one of the key "Founding Fathers", Alexander Hamilton.
Hamilton agreed with Jay that “those who own the country ought to govern it” – govern it in accord with their own specific class interests, sold as the general interest of “all classes of people.”
In contrast to this fake version of American history, Street gives us the true history of the antidemocratic capitalist founders--and I bet that you never received this lesson in the schools you attended. He also sees Obama's presidential performance as essentially continuing this Hamiltonian love of the rich and powerful, but in a slicked up version that comes with a shiny veneer of virtuous concern for ordinary Americans. You see, the science of "public relations" did not exist back in Hamilton's day.
(Note: there is one slight error in his otherwise accurate history of the period. Ordinary revolutionary soldiers were paid in scrip called "Continental currency"--Street referred to this paper money as "bonds"--while officers, of wealthier backgrounds, were paid in gold. The British during the American Revolutionary War also printed up volumes of this money in order to undermine this currency. After the war as the soldiers returned home, they found that this money was nearly worthless or about 5%-10% of its face value. In a desperate attempt to put their former economic lives together they began selling it at these rates in exchange for gold or silver. Meanwhile Hamilton and his friends decided that the new government under the Constitution would honor these scrips at face value, but they didn't let anyone know except their friends and relatives among the rich set. The latter made a killing on buying up this nearly worthless scrip and later selling to the government at par value. So you see, our early "Founding Fathers" established a grand tradition of fleecing ordinary people of their wealth.
My history is based on books by Charles Beard, the noted
historian and political scientist of the early 20th century, in his
seminal work, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, and his book entitled Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy.)
Click here to access article by Tony Cartalucci from New Eastern Outlook.
Once upon a time humans lived in small nomadic groups that supported themselves by hunting and gathering roots and fruits that nature supplied. Cooperation was essential for their survival. This type of existence last for the first 98% of nearly 200,000 years of humans as we know them today. In the last 2%, roughly around 10,000 years, many of these groups started to learn how to grow crops which enabled them to remain in one location.
This was revolutionary in that it marked the beginning what we now know as civilization: written language that could pass knowledge within and between human societies and to the next generations. Humans soon learned how to efficiently provide for their needs and to secure their safety from the hazards of nature.
Because they were poorly socialized or mutants (I don't really know), some humans soon realized that they could acquire all their material needs by the use of violence (or the threat of violence) and later deception. They soon took control of societies and evolved into ruling classes that dominated the rest of the cooperative humans. By evolving into nations with governments and all the trappings of laws, agents of enforcement, courts, these ruling classes transformed the more personal form of violence (or the threat of violence) into new and improved impersonal forms, often referred to as political power, and gave them a veneer of legitimacy. And, as they say, the rest is history.
Cartalucci in this essay describes how contemporary ruling classes called capitalists have perfected a third way to acquire power and wealth: induce with their wealth, or bribe, others to serve their interests. He focuses on one of the prime organizations, the National Endowment for Democracy, and illustrates how the capitalist ruling class has used this deceptive front organization to serve their interests of wealth and power in Thailand where he has lived for a number of years.
Supposedly liberal-progress NGOs around the world taking money
from corporate-financiers, warmongers, and right-wing ideologues
embodies perfectly the notion of a fraudulent front used to conceal
criminal intentions under the guise of a noble cause.
Click here to access article by Colin Todhunter from East by Northwest.
Todhunter, who knows India very well having lived in the country for a number of years, gives us an illustration of how neoliberalism works its magic to plunder a country for the benefit of transnational corporations while leaving many people in dire poverty.
The long-term plan is for an urbanised India with a fraction of the population left in farming working on contracts for large suppliers and Wal-Mart-type supermarkets that offer highly processed, denutrified, genetically altered food contaminated with chemicals and grown in increasingly degraded soils according to an unsustainable model of agriculture that is less climate/drought resistant, less diverse and unable to achieve food security. This would be disastrous for farmers, public health and local livelihoods.
Click here to access article by Wolf Richter from Wolf Street.
Well the Brits did vote to leave the European Union in spite of all the scary stories and threats. That could never have happened in the USA because our masters would manage the elections to produce a positive outcome (for them). Richter finds some people who claim that in Europe this vote will be ignored just like many others or until they vote right.
...Daiwa’s prediction that a Brexit vote may not lead to a Brexit is well-founded in the EU’s gloriously democratic history: referendum results when people voted the “wrong way” have been disposed of one way or the other every time.
Also Bernhard of Moon of Alabama doesn't think that Brexit will be permitted by Empire masters in an article entitled "The #ReverseBrexit Campaign Has Begun".
Click here to access article by Tim Radford from Climate News Network.
Capitalists are very much like alcoholics who are experiencing the final stage of cirrhosis of the liver and told by their doctor that death would soon follow. Better informed capitalists know that they have been living off of the benefits of very cheap energy, fossil fuels, and they are only going to get much more expensive in the future. Meanwhile their system needs to grow or die--and they refuse to concede the latter. Much like alcoholics capitalists engage in various fantasies about new cheap fuel sources. Just in the past decade I remember two such forms that were widely publicized as the answer: hydrogen and fusion fuels, but I haven't heard anything about them for several years. Now we learn of this bionic leaf fuel source.
The wiser capitalists know that they cannot keep their enterprises expanding on a finite planet, so they also tend to fantasize about traveling to other planets. Billionaire Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, has purchased his own space travel company, Blue Origin, complete with rockets and facilities apparently with this in mind. I imagine the fantasy must be that once they're through trashing this planet, Bezos and others will throw it in the cosmic dumpster, and head for another planet.
Click here to access article by Finian Cunningham from Strategic Culture Foundation.
I recently mentioned that I don't like to indulge in speculations about recent events, but there are major exceptions. I really do think it is important, even critically important, to speculate with reason and evidence about future major geopolitical actions of the "deep state". Because the deep state functions in secret in the various ruling class "think tanks" (the Council on Foreign Relations, Brookings Institution, etc.) and secret agencies (CIA, NSA, etc.), we have no choice but to intelligently speculate on what this governing class directorate is going to do so that we can effectively respond.
We can only do this by examining the overt clues that corporate media supplies us with. I recently made an attempt to do this by considering two events that have received considerable coverage in corporate media: vigorous opposition to Donald Trump and the recent deliberate leak of State Department staff who advocate more aggressive actions against Syria. Cunningham focuses on the latter and the key role that Saudi Arabia has nefariously played in supporting the policies and actions of the US-led Empire's directorate. He makes a compelling case that the US ruling class directorate are likely to use a military effort to solve the Syrian crisis in the near future, probably under the next administration. This, of course, will put the US on a dangerous collision course with Russia.
Washington’s dissent on Syria is thus a signal for ramped-up war. It may be put on hold for a few months, but it seems almost certain that a wider war is being prepared. And that’s largely because US regime change objectives in Syria have been thwarted up to now. Failure begets petulance.
Click here to access article by an editor of Media Lens (based in Britain).
The writer makes a devastating attack on mainstream media which always defends business-as-usual and the capitalist trajectory that is leading us over the cliffs of a nuclear conflagration and climate destabilization. This may be radical politics 101, but we can't ignore reality: most people are so habituated to corporate media and naively believe that it offers an accurate lens on reality. Thus I see the final paragraph as an understatement of the year:
...relying on journalists in the corporate media, not least the BBC, to exercise such responsibility is a forlorn hope. We should reject the elite media which exists to serve elite interests. Instead, we need to develop and support alternative means of informing and empowering the public in the vital struggle for climate protection, peace and equality. [emphasis added]
Click here to access article by Pete Dolack from Systemic Disorder.
"God, I love this guy!" That was my reaction after reading this article. With this piece Dolack rose in my pantheon of political thinkers to the very top. Read it and see what you think.
With the Pentagon and its NATO army testing and provoking the Russians on a daily basis and the advanced weapons of war that exist now and are on the planning boards, we who follow these terrifying events are more concerned than ever that capitalism will cause our extinction even earlier than Mother Nature will.
When we think of existential threats to our descendants’ world, we tend to focus on global warming, environmental degradation and the looming collapse of capitalist industrialism, of the impossibility of infinite growth on a finite planet. That is properly so, and these do seem to be the gravest challenges that will face us across the 21st century. But technology applied to perfecting military killing machines is within the human imagination. ....
...in a world of vast inequality, of an industrial and financial elite willing to do anything, even put the planet’s health at risk, for the sake of acquiring more wealth, the potential for evil applications of technology are ever present.
One more reason, if we didn’t already have enough, to bring into being a better world, one built for human need and environmental harmony rather than private profit. We then wouldn’t need to endure a mad pursuit of fetishized technological advancement; instead we could harness technology for the greater good as necessary. Barbarism remains the likely alternative.
Click here to access article by Nancy Romer from New Politics.
I think this is an excellent descriptive summary of what occurred in this conference of Bernie activists--and Romer should be congratulated. That is the only thing that I can write in a positive sense about it. My immediate reactions: the conference was one part grieving over the loss of their hero in the primary elections and one part inspiration to move on--where to move on was left undecided, but it appears that most people left with this hopeful answer: we need to wait to see what Bernie says.(!)
Then I had some secondary reactions. I noticed that the attendees did not seem very representative of the vast numbers of Sanders' supporters--there was marked disproportionate number of older people in attendance. It was highly organized by the organizations of nurses, unionists, and professional liberals who imposed a top-down control of the convention. The latter people allowed the testimonies of "bottom" people to vent their sorrows as a way of "healing", as they would put it. But as I would put it, it was a method designed to defuse the grieving so that people could move on to the next stage which would be the necessity to support Hillary in the final presidential election.
This is "new politics"?! This political movement would be an hilarious joke if it didn't have such dire consequences for real change at the center of the Empire.
Click here to access article by Joseph Richardson from CounterPunch.
Why is it that many people who consider themselves left-wing have such difficulty grasping that the EU is a deeply reactionary institution? The mere fact that those running the EU present it as an internationalist venture dedicated to the creation of a world free of nationalist enmities does not make it so. If we want to examine the EU in its proper light, then we should ignore the high-flown rhetoric in which its supporters indulge, and consider its actual record. [emphasis added]
Click here to access article by Linda Farthing from New Politics.
Evo Morales’ government has suffered two significant electoral setbacks in the past year and is currently mired in scandal, which has put its long term projections – planned for up to 2025 - into question. Why is one of the America’s most progressive government’s stumbling at this juncture?
It appears that another left experiment, Bolivia and its MAS party movement, in South America is coming to an end like what has already happened in Argentina, and is happening in Venezuela and Brazil. Farthing attributes this to the usual reasons for reformist type movements to succeed over the long term:
Undoubtedly the MAS has lost sight of its original path in part because of the deals it cut with the wealthy landowners in the east. Increasingly the traditional elites don’t see the MAS as a threat, and in fact, as an ally in expanding the agricultural frontier. Political opportunists of every stripe have joined the party, as the state structure has always been perceived as a lucrative source of jobs and opportunities for corruption.
All this has seriously weakened the MAS and its original agenda, but allowed it to stay in power. Like so many others before them and so many yet come – in Bolivia and everywhere else, the MAS’s principal objective has transformed over time into staying in power. The rationale is familiar: retaining power is seen as the only way to ensure that the ‘process of change’ as the MAS agenda is called, will continue.
Because these experiments in left-reformist governments never rid themselves of their capitalist sectors, I never held out much hope for them. They are compromised from the beginning and often with the collusion with capitalist ruling classes who see them as very co-optable (to use a new word that expresses a very useful concept). I believe their failures have implications for real political change: only revolutions that thoroughly replace capitalist ruling classes with bottom-up authority structures can be successful in the long run.
But I also think that it is true, as Soviet leaders like Lenin and Trotsky first realized, that a thorough anti-capitalist revolution in one country is not viable. The Soviet leaders knew that their chances of succeeding were slim if the Soviet revolution was not soon followed by a revolution in (especially) Germany. There was a German revolutionary party led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht that tried to take power in 1919, but they were assassinated and the movement was crushed.
Thus revolutionaries are left with only one promising solution. Only a fairly well coordinated series of revolutions in many countries can overcome the highly organized and managed international power of capitalism that is represented most aggressively by the US-led Empire.
Click here to access article from TeleSur.
Here's the latest report from the continuing protests and insurrections in France, and it appears they have spread to Belgium.
by cartoonist Carlos Latuff. Thanks to Pete Dolack for alerting us to this meaningful cartoon.
Click here to access article by Ismael Hossein-Zadeh from Global Research.
In defense of its unjust and destructive system, capitalists must use massive amounts of deception to hide the grossest crimes they commit against the rest of humanity. This author sheds much light on their transformation of the most virulent class form of dominance, fascism, into mostly a curse word used against various opponents in order to hide this obscene intrinsic feature of capitalist class rule whenever this rule is threatened. And he explains what fascism really is:
...fascism is a social-political strategy or tool that is employed by big business, or the ruling capitalist class, to simultaneously pacify the discontented public and fend off radical, socialistic developments.
Click here to access article by Ben Norton from Salon.
The 4th Amendment:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
The judges of the Supreme Court appointed by our masters in the ruling class have taken us down another step into the hell-hole of a police state. Recall that all of these Amendments known as the Bill of Rights were only added by the rich land speculators, owners of slave plantations, and merchants (all reverently referred to by many as the "Founding Fathers") after they met widespread opposition to their newly proposed Constitution (See my post and commentary here which provides much of the history) in order to get it ratified by the states.
Click here to access article by Moti Nissani from Veterans Today.
Nissani doesn't just believe in exposing the lies of our masters in the Empire's ruling capitalist class, he likes to go on the offensive by bringing evidence to bear on conspiracies that suggest they are guilty of major crimes. This article provides an illustration.
Although I don't usually post articles that are speculative, he carefully constructs a case that our masters may be guilty of assassinating Jo Cox, a member of the British parliament, by examining patterns of past assassinations based on historical facts, and especially in the context of "cui bono" (who benefits). The examination of these patterns are, in themselves, worthy of our attention.
Nissani concludes his investigation with this statement:
For my part, I don’t claim to know who killed Jo Cox; I only know who the prime suspect is. A genuine investigation, it seems to me, would have started with this question: Who has been “helping” Tommy Mair? Sadly, this is the one question that will never be asked by our rulers and by their lackeys in the press, government, police, and fake dissident camp.
Click here to access article by Robert O'Harrow Jr. and Shawn Boburg from The Washington Post. (Revised for clarity at 10:10 AM and 7:30 PM Seattle time on Tuesday, June 21st.)
It's rare that I post articles from mainstream corporate media. But I think that this piece might be an indication where a dominant section of the ruling class directorate exists. Forget about which candidates will assume the office of President of USA. It is the dominant section of the ruling class that we must try to ascertain for it is they who will determine the course to be followed by any president. Permit me to digress a bit by illustrating my argument with what happened during a dark period of US history.
I still remember the 1950 days of hysteria provoked by the McCarthy hearings in which they successfully instilled fears in ordinary Americans about a plague of communists who were infesting our government with the aim of taking it over. The campaign was very much like the more recent fear campaign the ruling class has waged about "terrorists". There is nothing like fear to get ordinary Americans to go along with the agendas of the capitalist ruling class.
This was after the US, which completely dominated the UN, managed to get nominal UN support for a US war against North Korea. This campaign of hysteria about communists came to be known as the McCarthy period, and was motivated by two concerns: to get Americans to support ruling class war aims in Korea, and to further prepare Americans to support a growing right-wing imperial agenda.
The first victims were Hollywood actors. Ronald Reagan starred as the principle witness and named names of people with left-wing views. Then they made teachers swear loyalty oaths, destroyed the careers of many people who they smeared with the communist label, barred immigration of people who were tainted with communist sympathies, and made it easier to deport naturalized citizens who were suspect of left-wing leanings (Walter-McCarren Act). Corporate media played a major role in whipping up this hysteria.
(Robert Parry adds even more damning material to this period's right-wing activities in an article entitled "How Roy Cohn Helped Rupert Murdoch".)
The history provided by these two articles gives us much information
on the early actions of the growing fascist forces in the US whose
intentions from the beginning were to build an empire, the US-led Empire
that we see today with 1000 military bases all over the globe, fighting
endless minor wars, and threatening major wars.
With these historical diversions I am trying to construct an argument that the leading organs of corporate media can sometimes provide evidence of where the dominant sections of the ruling class exist. So I believe that it is significant that very little of the material reported in this article, which I find quite revealing, was made available by corporate media during this period or since. So why now?
I strongly suspect that they are trying to whip up sentiment against the candidacy of Donald Trump because the dominant section of the ruling capitalist class wants Hillary Clinton as the formal head of the government. They have been grooming her for this role for many years and they likely see her as a most useful and compliant agent to accomplish their global agendas.
To me this backing of Hillary Clinton and opposition to Trump indicates that the dominant section of the ruling class is not ready yet to turn toward a more overt form of control over dissidents to their policies. The backing of Clinton suggests to me that they are inclined to "stay the course" by implementing the same policies as those during Obama's administration: neoliberalism, use of soft power to subvert unfriendly or independent governments, more false-flag operations, more hostile military actions against Russia and China designed to intimidate them, and the use of corporate media to indoctrinate Americans in support of their policies and actions.
While the 50 co-signers in the State Department advocating more aggressive actions against Syria is worrying, I think that this action has a source in the hardcore and aggressive neocon faction of the ruling class directorate and will not be acted on under Hillary's administration. Of course, things could change radically given that a large section of the American population suffers a lot of disillusionment from the recent election exercise and may act in ways to threaten this current dominant faction of the ruling class.
Click here to access article by the Center for Citizen Initiatives delegation from their website.
While 50 people from the State Department appeared to have gone insane, there are others who are working for peace and trying to get the US to stop violating international laws.
Click here to access article by Ryan Koronowski from Climate Progress.
Last December, the world agreed in the historic Paris climate accord not to burn most fossil fuels. To do that, some of the lowest-hanging fruit is halting the investment of hundreds of billions of dollars into the most expensive and extreme fossil fuels: coal, Arctic oil drilling, tar sands, deep offshore drilling, and liquefied natural gas (LNG) export.
So how is the world doing?
“Needs improvement” would be putting it charitably, according to a new report looking at the world’s biggest private-sector banks, which are still funding the industries that drive climate change to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.
Of course, banksters are among the top capitalists who really govern our nation and much of the world through their Empire. And people who own and control banks (including the Federal Reserve, Bank of England, etc) and create money know that their support of profit-making enterprises requires energy, and the the cheapest energy are fossil fuels. Banksters, or their agents, like to go to climate conferences such as the one held last December in Paris because it is good public relations. At the latter meeting they came up with all kinds of nice sounding unenforceable promises that they have no intention of fulfilling.
When a few attorney generals in various jurisdictions try to go after major fossil fuel corporations, they find themselves victims of legal suits filed by these corporations. Read "Exxon Sues Second Attorney General In Response To Fraud Investigation". This major international corporation is using constitutional rights that were designed for people (see Citizen's United, 2010) as the basis for their suit.
Click here to access article by Brenda Ekwurzel from Union of Concerned Scientists.
The US National Weather Service heat index forecast for June 18, 2016 looks scary. It indicates a dangerous situation that everyone who lives in the red areas in the map below should take steps to prepare for. I am not kidding. Extreme heat can be life threatening if not taken seriously.
