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

Saturday, September 16, 2017

I Have Zero Sympathy for Jemele Hill

Click here to access article by Teodrose Fikre founder of the Ghion Journal

If you are not already familiar with Teodrose Fikre, I would like to introduce a blogger who I believe offers a very unique perspective on the current oppressive state of affairs in the hope that he can contribute to our understanding of reality and better enable us to change it into something which can benefit us all. I was recently exposed to this author by watching him on RT's Redacted Tonight show where he was interviewed by Lee Camp.

In this article (that includes videos) he begins with illustrations of co-opted African-American media celebrities in order to introduce his views of racial and related issues which range from the mundane (like immediate issues that we all face while trying to survive in capitalist America) to the profound (racism).
Let me say from the outset that I do not know Jemele Hill outside of seeing her on TV. She could be a great human being and she deserves my respect for succeeding in a business that has always been dominated by male figures. As a sport analyst, she does a great job of presenting her audience with facts and figures in ways that Grantland Rice [would be] proud....
The reason I say this is two fold. The primary reason is the fact that Jemele chose to present the ills of the world through a partisan prism and in the process, either willfully or ignorantly, is actively perpetuating this system of “us versus them” mentality that is the root of our problem as a society. She is doing the same thing that the rest of the jackals in the Corporate State Media are doing; by appending all the excesses of this repressive ideology of capitalism and institutionalized nepotism on Trump, she gives cover to the invisible hands of malice that is bleeding all of us. 

Thursday, September 14, 2017

NATO’s Anarchist Brigades

Click here to access article by Thierry Meyssan from Voltaire Network
Presented in the West as the realization of a friendly utopia, the brand new « Rojava » is in reality a colonial state, designed and cemented in blood by Washington. This time, the plan is to expel the populations of the North of Syria and replace them with people who were not born there. In order to implement this ethnic cleansing, the Pentagon and the CIA have mobilised combatants from the circles of the European extreme-left. Thierry Meyssan reveals this insane project which has been ongoing for the last eighteen months.
In this article Meyssan, a French intellectual and political analyst, has presented much new information about the strange appearance of the US backed Kurdish rebels fighting in northern Syria. Although he uses undocumented information to support many of his arguments, the logic of his arguments fit very well with other independent sources that have carefully examined this phenomenon. 

I, too, for the last four or five years have been following these Syrian Kurds after rather romantic coverage of them appeared on the web (see this, this, and this), and was initially much impressed by these latter reports because Syrian Kurdish spokespeople always asserted that these Kurds want to continue to be a part of Syria but under a looser federation arrangement. Now I'm not so sure particularly after I learned that they were backed by the US and the US has established numerous military bases in the territory under Kurdish control (see this, this, and this).  

If what Meyssan reports is true (and I think it is), then this is another illustration of the sophistication of US's secret services to deceptively use people to serve their many nefarious agendas, and in particular, their Ziocon agenda to balkanize Syria.

US sent weapons to Syria through Ramstein military base - report

Click here to access article by Rebecca Staudenmaier from Deutsche Welle.

More news is leaking out regarding weapons supplied by the US Empire to their terrorist proxy forces in Syria--this time sourced from German newspapers.
Washington's air base in southwest Germany was used for a time to store and send weapons to Syrian rebels, according to a German news daily. If the report proves true, the US could have violated German law.

The US military has been using its massive air base in western Germany to arm rebel groups in Syria without Berlin's permission, according to a report from German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung published on Wednesday.

Wednesday, September 13, 2017

The Other 9/11: Unremembered and Unatoned

Click here to access article by Steve Brown from CounterPunch. (Modified at 4:30 PM Seattle time.)

Ruling classes always write their own self-serving histories, and our present capitalist ruling class is no different. Lest we forget about our ruling class's overthrow of an elected president of Chile, which you won't be exposed to in schools and corporate media, I thoroughly recommend this article:
On Monday, we saw the usual yearly outpouring of articles and editorials from mainstream media commemorating the tragic attacks of September 11, 2001, which killed 2,996 people and wounded 6,000 more. [my link]

Not that such memorials aren’t appropriate. They are simply insufficient. They fail to commemorate another 9/11 tragedy, one that took place 28 years earlier, in 1973 — not in America, but in Chile — and which caused the death – not of thousands, but of tens of thousands — while torturing and exiling 200,000 more.

I refer to the brutal coup d’état that overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende....

Israeli Website Claims ISIS Commander Revealed As Mossad Agent

Click here to access article by Whitney Webb from Mint Press News

Smoking gun (def.) evidence found linking Daesh (ISIS) to Israel's Mossad.
There has long been speculation regarding ties between the Israeli government and the terror group Daesh, otherwise known as the Islamic State. Such speculation has been fueled by Israel’s reference to Daesh as a “useful tool” and its acknowledgment that it views a Syria under complete Daesh control as preferable to the continuation of the current Syrian government. It is supported as well by the extensive aid and even medical treatments that Daesh militants have received from Israel. However, allegations have recently emerged that could suggest that the connection is even deeper than previously believed.

Reagan Documents Shed Light on U.S. ‘Meddling’

Click here to access article by Robert Parry from ConsortiumNews

Parry has done some sleuthing by examining recently declassified documents to discover much of the history behind the setting up of NGOs as subversive organizations to be used by covert agencies to promote the interests of the Empire in other countries. He starts with The Asia Foundation, but soon discovers other NGOs organized in a similar fashion.
“Secret” documents, recently declassified by the Reagan presidential library, reveal senior White House officials reengaging a former CIA “proprietary,” The Asia Foundation, in “political action,” an intelligence term of art for influencing the actions of foreign governments.

The documents from 1982 came at a turning-point moment when the Reagan administration was revamping how the U.S. government endeavored to manipulate the internal affairs of governments around the world in the wake of scandals in the 1960s and 1970s involving the Central Intelligence Agency’s global covert operations.

Instead of continuing to rely heavily on the CIA, President Reagan and his national security team began offloading many of those “political action” responsibilities to “non-governmental organizations” (NGOs) that operated in a more overt fashion and received funding from other U.S. government agencies.

Gold Oil Dollars Russia and China

Click here to access article by F. William Engdahl from New Eastern Outlook

I frequently post articles by Engdahl because I think he has a firm, but limited, grip on economic reality. I write "firm, but limited, grip" because he is a gold bug--the term I prefer is "gold fetishist". Apparently the terms apply to China and Russia. It is a fact that many, if not most people, have this fetish about gold, but it is likely the most polluting of mining industries. 

Gold has limited uses outside of gold fillings and replacement teeth (even these are being replaced by ceramics) and computers. It's not even used as money because it is so inconvenient--try buying groceries or gas with it. But countries still like to pollute the environment by digging it up and processing it with the worst polluting chemicals like mercury, and then store it forever in vaults (usually deep underground) to claim that their money is backed by the magic of gold.

Engdahl also doesn't see that the Empire's advanced capitalist system has anything to do with the irrational and suicidal policies that it is currently pursuing. 
The only factor keeping the dollar from total collapse is the US military and Washington’s deployment of deceptive NGOs around the world to facilitate plundering of the world economy.
However to his credit, he explains how this is affecting the policies of Russia, China, and other countries to develop their own economies.

[Russian Revolution series, part 4 of ?] September 12: New York Times hails Kornilov

An excerpt from a longer detailed article from World Socialist Web Site entitled "September 11-17: After the Kornilov Affair".

The New York Times backs Kornilov
The New York Times hails the would-be butcher of the Russian Revolution, General Lavr Kornilov, in its September 12 lead editorial, exposing once again the fraud that America is interested in “making the world safe for democracy.”

“He is,” the New York Times writes, “merely the representative of those forces which, long blamably quiescent, have at last coalesced to stop the rapid deliquescence of Russia, to keep it a nation, to stop its dissolution, to save it, in a word.”

The leading publication of American liberalism condemns Russia as “reel[ing] in drunken frenzy over the precipice of socialism into the abyss of anarchy.” It instead celebrates the most reactionary elements in Russian society, including “the whole force of Cossacks … under the leadership of General Kaledines [sic],” as well as “the peasant proprietors enroll[ed] in the Knights of St. George.”

The Times condemns Kerensky for failing to openly embrace Kornilov—though it remains silent over its previous calls that Kerensky himself assume dictatorial powers. Kerensky “had his choice to make, and when the test came, he preferred to throw his lot in with socialism,” the Times writes.

Tuesday, September 12, 2017

America’s Long War: US Tightens the Noose on China

Click here to access article by Sean Stinson from The Greanville Post
With the generals now in charge of the White House and Vice President Pence waiting in the wings, one wonders what plans lay in store for Trump. The obvious danger is that if he is removed, the resulting backlash from his support base could trigger an internal collapse and perhaps even civil war. The recent events in Charlottesville are nothing compared to the kind of hell which could spill over onto the streets in response to such a betrayal. Meanwhile the doubling down of troop deployment in Afghanistan, the unlawful search and seizure of Russian diplomatic property, wild threats against Venezuela and war games on the Korean Peninsula are signs that global stability is also under threat, perhaps more so than at any time in the last 70 years.
This is the best geopolitical analysis that I have seen recently regarding the Empire's policy of containment directed at China. While our economic and diplomatic attacks on Russia are overt, the policies of the Empire against China are very much under the radar of most of alternative media.

Grand strategy proposals among Empire capitalists offer another illustration of how capitalism functions. Capitalism is always a contest between capitalists for more profits and power, and since the beginning capitalists learned that colluding with others usually along national lines, much like neighborhood street gangs, could be of mutual benefit to gang members. This kind of development largely accounts for WWI and II. 

Since WWII, facilitated by the technological advances of our age, the US-led Empire's gang became transnational.  It now consists largely of capitalists whose countries US controlled since the end of WWII. This includes capitalists from the former British Empire, the rest of Europeans countries, Israel, Japan, and South Korea. (I exclude the Gulf states because our close cooperation with these medieval rulers are informed by a collusion of special geopolitical interests.) The Empire's rivals are primarily Russia and China. Under the threat posed by Deep State actors, Trump seems to be lashing out in all directions to appease them and save his administration instead of concentrating only on the containment of China as Bannon advised.

However, the containment policy is still on and political developments in southeast Asia, according to Stinson, will now play a crucial role for the Empire in containing China, specifically with regard to the latter's Belt and Road plans.

The Unspoken Truth behind the Colin Kaepernick Story

Click here to access article by Edward Curtin from The Greanville Post. 


Curtin reminds us that America's favorite sport, football, serves not only to entertain us but to induce positive inclinations toward violence and dominance. It is no coincidence that the military often shows up at such events so that we look on favorably at their activities that promote the interests of the Empire's capitalist class while causing so much suffering throughout the world.
...the unspoken truth in the Kaepernick story is that football is the war sport par excellence, extremely violent, and deeply tied to the spectacle of cruelty that dominates American society today and that has caused so much suffering for black people and other people of color for centuries.

Monday, September 11, 2017

Why I Don’t Speak of 9/11 Anymore

Click here to access article by Edward Curtin from The Greanville Post.
I have concluded – and this is impossible to prove definitively at this time because of the nature of such propagandistic techniques – that the use of all these words/numbers is part of a highly sophisticated linguistic mind-control campaign waged to create a narrative that has lodged in the minds of hundreds of millions of people and is very hard to dislodge.
Although this violates my usual policy of posting current articles (within a month), it seems of appropriate on this anniversary of the seminal event, which many believe was contrived by our masters in the capitalist ruling class, to reproduce this year old article in which Curtin (and others) points to unusual linguistic patterns that suggest a well planned brainwashing of the American people to terrify them into accepting their nonsensical narrative as to what happened on September 11, 2001 and to prepare them to accept much more interventionist policies by US military forces throughout the world. 

If Curtin's (and others) theory is correct--and I believe it is--our capitalist masters have pulled off the most brilliantly successful false-flag deception ever recorded in history. But more and more knowledgeable people are coming forward to challenge their story of what happened, and it remains to be seen if they have generated a hurricane-force backlash that will ultimately destroy them.