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.
Click here to access article by Eric Zuesse from Strategic Culture Foundation. (Added the last two paragraphs to my commentary at 11:30 AM and 8 PM Seattle time.) Zuesse, like all well-indoctrinated academics and other upper-middle class people (in general), consider bourgeois (capitalist) "democracy" as the real thing. These people were rather easily seduced by the extra privileges and income given them by the ruling capitalist class in order to keep the capitalist system functioning and give it a superficial appearance of legitimacy and authenticity as a "democracy". Millions of Americans now regard what we formerly had as "democracy" and believe the current lies of the government and corporate media because of their work for the ruling capitalist class. Only recently some of them have discovered a growing police state, evidence of a growing fascist government, and an increasing promotion by the ruling class of foreign wars and subversion of legitimate governments. A few of them, like Zuesse, are coming out of their privileged woodwork to criticize what is happening, and in this piece about the profusion of lies by the government. However, he seems to blame the victims.
Something’s deeply wrong here. Government by deceit, cannot be a democracy. And, yet, the public still don’t get the message, even after it has been delivered to us in history-books. By then, it’s no longer in the news, and so only few people really care about it. The message of history is not learned. The public still accepts the ongoing lies — the new lies, in the new ‘news’, for the new atrocities.
This paragraph reveals the underlying superior attitude of this class toward the classes below them. They wrote the largely fake history in these books and taught capitalist ideology to impressionable young people in public schools and colleges. Such deceit is an integral part of the divisive ideology that the ruling class superimposed on members of the upper middle class (academia and public school administrators are members) to justify their privileges.
Elsewhere in the economy we see these upper-middle class "professionals" pleasing their capitalist masters (Zuesse always refers to them as an "aristocracy" thus hiding the system which has given them so much power) and bosses in corporate media, Hollywood, corporations, and government in order to live a luxurious lifestyle compared to that of workers "below" them who are steeped in debt and working two or three jobs in order to survive.
Click here to access article by Tony Cartalucci from New Eastern Outlook. Read this and note how the author carefully documents, although in some cases belatedly, the following conclusion about the Deep State's promotion of terrorist armies. Therefore, John Bolton is not some kind of rogue government figure, but a key figure in carrying out the interests of the Deep State consisting of top financiers and corporate officials, the network of top capitalists and assorted followers who promote imperial interests regardless of administrations.
While exposing John Bolton’s complicity in the material support of egregious terrorists and his efforts to use them as armed proxies against Iran in a war he has attempted to promote and instigate for years is important, it is equally important to expose, confront, isolate, and extinguish the influence of the corporate-financier interests that have underwritten and directed Bolton’s efforts and the efforts of countless others working to drag the United States, its allies, and the rest of the planet into another destructive conflict.Understanding that efforts to remove MEK from the US State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organizations list and prepare them for their role as armed proxies against Iran transcended the administrations of George Bush, Barack Obama, and now Donald Trump exposes the continuity of agenda – regardless of who occupies the White House or US Congress – advanced by these unelected corporate-financier interests.
Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un: Make Korea United Again! by Federico Pieraccini from Strategic Culture Foundation. As I see it, the world's population mostly consists of pawns as in the game of chess, and our ruling classes, armed with nuclear weapons, play deadly games of chess in which the outcomes threatens our survival as a human species. See how the author elaborates on, and reaches, the following conclusion in the latest chess game played by our masters:
... while Moscow and Beijing have multiple reasons for seeking an agreement between Pyongyang and Washington, both are aware that the US has no intentions of abandoning its presence in South Korea. The meeting between Kim Jong-un and Trump is a well-designed trap prepared by Moscow, Beijing and Pyongyang, maybe over many months or even years. The most realistic objectives are to further isolate Washington in the region, to bring Beijing and Seoul closer together, and to drive a wedge between Seoul and Washington.
Why are so many Americans indifferent to the savage slaughter of millions of people around the world carried out by their own government under a long string of presidents? Why were they stone-cold silent during eight years of Obama’s many wars and drone killings of which he boasted? Why are they silent in the face of the Trump administration’s continuation and expansion of those wars and its push for a nuclear war with Russia? Why this incestuous turning in and away from the bloody havoc their government keeps afflicting on the world?
And why all this denial while focusing on the pornographic media spectacles of Stormy Daniels (the porn queen turned “Adult Film Actress”), Monica Lewinsky, and a host of others paraded before the cameras to distract and entertain a population of spectators?
I, like many people, wonder why. What follows is an attempt at an answer ....
Click here to access this 55 minute interview with historian and author Mark Lause conducted by Sasha Lilley of KPFA radio, a listener sponsored radio station in Berkeley, California. This interview with Lause offers you the real history of cowboys and labor and their often violent conflicts with capitalists and their bosses in the late 1800s.
The cowboy is a mythified character in American society, conjuring up rugged individualism and masculine brawn, values dear to American capitalism. But historian Mark Lause suggests that when we think of the cowboy, we should think of a precarious wage worker.
Countries Worldwide Expel Russian Diplomats in Show of Unity from WNYC Radio. This is a program I heard on the OPB [Oregon Public Radio] radio this AM, thick with outrageous anti-Russia lies. The woman interviewed on the program is from the Washington Institute, an Israeli lobby/propaganda machine masquerading as a "think tank". It's a veritable who's who of war-mongering Ziocons.
Of special interest is the following 19:12m video produced by Channel 4, included in the article, regarding the nefarious activities of Cambridge Analytica: After reading/viewing the above material, I think that the article would have been better titled as "Our Fake Fake Democracy". It is a double fake because bourgeois or the capitalist version of democracy is mostly fake; but our ruling masters no longer find this version useful to hide their class's sins, so they have created this carefully managed fake version of bourgeois democracy. To better understand this "brave new world" we have entered, I recommend learning a new word: "hypernormalization".
Click here to access article by "The Saker", a Russian-American from his blog A bird's eye view of the Vineyard. The author is aghast at the likely direction we are headed in--a nuclear war with Russia, and baffled by the indifference of the people living in the USA. He argues that the situation is much worse than during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and I remember that--I was terrified!
The truth is that the situation today is infinitely worse than the Cuban missile crisis. First, during the Cuban missile crisis there were rational people on both side. Today there is NOT ONE SINGLE RATIONAL PERSON LEFT IN A POSITION OF POWER IN THE USA. Not ONE! Second, during the Cuban missile crisis all the new was reporting on was the crisis, the entire planet felt like we were standing at the edge of the abyss.
Today nobody seems to be aware that we are about to go to war, possibly a thermonuclear war, where casualties will be counted in the hundreds of millions.
I'm not so terrified today because I have seen this coming for a long time. I have been fortunate to live a full life. I, and many other independent voices, have done everything we could to alert our fellow Americans to this danger and the longer term danger of catastrophic climate destabilization. But capitalist/fascist sociopaths rule the Empire, and it appears that no one or nothing will stop them. The people are like sheep going down the ramp into the nuclear-war slaughterhouse.
Click here to access article by Joseph Thomas from New Eastern Outlook. (Edited for much needed clarity around 4:18 PM and 5:08 PM Seattle time.)
While the US does this often under the guise of promoting “democracy,” it is clearly engaged in precisely the opposite. While democracy is generally understood as a process of self-determination, through US soft power, the process is co-opted and abused to allow Wall Street and Washington to determine the policies and direction a targeted nation takes rather than its own people.
Often times victims of US soft power are youths who are indoctrinated in university programmes or targeted by US-funded fronts posing as nongovernmental organisations (NGOs).
Thomas provides a very good analysis of "soft power", with emphasis on Asia, as one of the weapons (in addition to military force and subversive efforts by the CIA) that has been used by the US-led Empire since the end of WWII. With the USA having escaped severe damage in WWII in the Anglo-American war against capitalist rivals of the Axis powers for global dominance, the new Empire's ruling class, which was largely a merger of US and British capitalists, decided that what was needed was the addition of soft power to obtain global dominance in addition to the terrorist methods of Operation Gladio (see part 1 and part 2 of what appears to be an excellent 10 part series).
This new program of management of consent/dissent, which the US ruling class had so successfully applied to their own population to sell products, used an upgraded version to convert the beliefs of subjugated populations (as well as their own population) to align with their own more global interests of profit and power. Thus, they placed heavy emphasis on propaganda, infiltration of foreign media corporations, the establishment of NGOs to monitor and promote these programs, and "educational" programs which attracted youth from all over the world.
With the rest of the world lying mostly in ruins, this project did not meet much opposition with the exception of the Soviet Union and Maoists in China that were soon successful (1949) in overthrowing the capitalist ruling class in China led by Chiang Kai-shek. Hence, a vendetta, which became known as the Cold War, was waged against "communism" using every institution of this new Empire.
