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

Friday, June 8, 2018

Seymour Hersh: The CIA Is Filled With Criminals

Click here to access a fascinating recent interview with Hersh conducted by Elon Green, Columbia Journalism Review, posted on Reader Supported News

This interview was obviously taped and is full of disjointed comments and slang that you would find in any conversation between good, knowledgeable friends, and it presupposes a level of fairly sophisticated understanding of Hersh, his background and history of reporting scandalous events that are rarely covered by other journalists. To those of you who have acquired such an understanding, this is a most fascinating interview ... and Hersh promises more revelations of our thoroughly corrupt, gangster-capitalist government.

Wednesday, June 6, 2018

Hiding the real number of unemployed

Click here to access article by Pete Dolack from Systemic Disorder. (I started to post this in the morning, but as luck would have it, too many important tasks demanded my attention.)
Your government believes that exhausting your unemployment benefits is a cause for celebration — because you are no longer unemployed!

Huh? Well, there is a slight of hand here. Only working people who are receiving unemployment benefits are counted as “unemployed” in official statistics issued by countries around the world. Thus the actual unemployment rates are much higher than the “official” rates, generally about twice as high. Most governments make it difficult to find the actual rate, and the corporate media does its part by reporting the official rate as if that includes everybody.

Then there is the matter of how much of a given national population is actually engaged in paid employment, another useful number difficult to discover. Finally, we can consider wages, both how fast they might be rising as compared to inflation and whether they are increasing in concert with increases in productivity.

To cut to the chase, things ain’t so hot. But you already knew that, didn’t you?
The dedicated researcher give us the real scoop on what is happening regarding unemployment statistics in the USA and several other countries in the world. Did you suspect that ruling class governments often lie? 

Tuesday, June 5, 2018

John Pilger and Courage Foundation announce “urgent campaign” to free Assange

Click here to access article from World Socialist Web Site.

Citizens of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your ignorance (how you are ruled by self-serving interests)!

If we cannot protect one of our own who has sacrificed so much to reveal the lies of self-serving sociopaths, then we don't deserve any better than we presently have--never-ending wars and precarity.

Read about another person who has been victimized for telling the truth.

Whoever Controls The Narrative Controls The World

Click here to access article by Caitlin Johnstone from her blog. 

This Aussie journalist illustrates how the capitalist ruling class promotes people who spread their lies about the world, and likewise how people who refuse to do so are fired. 

She uses two examples: in one case MSNBC found a Black women, who has a record of telling lies, to host one of their "news" programs; and the other a self-admitted propagandist, Richard Stengel, from the State Department whose career illustrates how people who serve the interests of the ruling class easily go back a forth through the proverbial revolving door between government and corporations in evermore responsible and well-paid positions--in this example, Time Magazine, a media corporation. The latter is shown on a clip on the Jimmy Dore Show promoting the use of propaganda on a forum sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relation, a prime Deep State actor. These are excellent examples of the control by the US capitalist class over information that ordinary Americans are allowed to hear, read, and view.

Monday, June 4, 2018

Some excellent articles I missed while attending to my personal projects

  • Capitalism and Democracy: Where Is The Left? by Christopher Black from New Eastern Outlook. In this article the Canadian humanitarian and international criminal lawyer aptly describes the bourgeois or capitalist version of "democracy" that deceives so many people:
    ... working people have no say whatsoever in the control of the economy and their well-being. They are forced instead to play an insulting game in which various parties of capital offer them candidates to choose from, in what are called “elections,” but which in fact are selections, that is, a system of appointing, through the illusion of the popular will, pre-selected candidates of capital to carry out capital’s agenda while candidates that represent the interests of the majority who have to work for a living are not permitted to be heard or are marginalised and ridiculed.
    And Black goes on to ask some very serious questions related to "where is the left". 
  • Will Oil End the American Century? by F. William Engdahl from New Eastern Outlook. He sees sanctions and the reversal of the Iran Nuclear Agreement as a desperate attempt to maintain the power of the US Empire and its debt laden dollar. Also on the same subject read an article entitled "Africa Speculates Joining Russia, China, India and EU – Escalating De-Dollarisation Of Oil Trades" from True Publica. The oil trade in US dollars is a primary lynch-pin of US foreign and economic dominance. 
Because of the huge war debts the US racked up in the Vietnam War, Nixon was forced in the 1970s to remove gold from backing the US dollar. The solution was provided by Nixon and Kissinger and the 1974 agreement with that medieval kingdom of Saudi Arabia whereby the Saudi monarchy agreed to sell their vast supplies of oil only in US dollars in return for protection by the Empire. And this marriage of convenience between the US ruling class and the feudal monarchs of Saudi Arabia has continued to this day.
  • USA in a Debt Trap Death Spiral by F. William Engdahl from New Eastern Outlook. The author segues with this piece the threats to US economic power related to the increasing debts by corporations, the government, and the American people. Tyler Durden explains the Moody warning that Engdahl refers to.