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

Monday, April 23, 2018

Recommended articles for 4/23/2018

  • US Decries Chinese High-Speed Rail in Laos by Joseph Thomas from New Eastern Outlook. I had to laugh over the allegations made in the Quartz article. It was another example of the psychological defense mechanism of projection, that is, attributing a characteristic to others that one uses so often. The ruling class of the USA is expert at using the "debt trap" to subjugate others after many years of practice. They have used this practice not only subjugate nations, but their own population as well. People in the USA have been thoroughly conditioned to accept debt, and there are very few without debt. I think that this is a prime method of control of dissidence.
  • Capitalism is not the problem by Cameron Pike from A bird's eye view of the Vineyard. This represents a desperate attempt to defend the system of capitalism. I think it represents the thinking of those who have been successful in lesser business enterprises, the current Russian ruling class, and the thinking of "The Saker" (Andrei Raevsky) at this website. Raevsky, by his own reporting, is a descendant of a military officer who was active in the Russian Revolution who fled to Switzerland when the opposition backed by many Western capitalist nations was defeated. This military officer, no doubt, was part of the opposition to the Bolsheviks and likely identified with the embryonic Russian capitalist class during the early 20th century. 
Pike's defense of capitalism is quite shallow, amateurish, and typical of most North American political liberals. I'm not sure it is worth the effort to criticize it. In any case, I don't have the time to do it now--maybe sometime in the future.
The lawsuit filed by the Democratic National Committee (DNC), naming WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange as co-conspirators with Russia and the Trump campaign in a criminal effort to steal the 2016 US presidential election, is a frontal assault on democratic rights. It tramples on the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which establishes freedom of the press and freedom of speech as fundamental rights.

Neither the Democratic Party lawsuit nor the media commentaries on it acknowledge that WikiLeaks is engaged in journalism, not espionage.... 
Surprise, surprise! (sarcasm) 
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