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 LappĂ©, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Saturday, December 1, 2018

Assange Never Met Manafort. Luke Harding and the Guardian Publish Still More Blatant MI6 Lies

Click here to access article by Craig Murray from his website. (Thanks go to a concerned activist for alerting me to this article.)
Assange is not a whistleblower or a spy – he is the greatest publisher of his age, and has done more to bring the crimes of governments to light than the mainstream media will ever be motivated to achieve. That supposedly great newspaper titles like the Guardian, New York Times and Washington Post are involved in the spreading of lies to damage Assange, and are seeking his imprisonment for publishing state secrets, is clear evidence that the idea of the “liberal media” no longer exists in the new plutocratic age. The press are not on the side of the people, they are an instrument of elite control.

Foreshadowing, Ritual and Symbology in Film

Click here if you wish to access Bonnie Faulkner's 56 minute interview with Jay Dyer directly from her website. (As you may know, she was even too "controversial" for the censors at KPFA, a listener sponsored radio station in Berkeley, California, and as a result she has gone independent.) I regard this as a "best post".
Jay Dyer discusses his book, Esoteric Hollywood: Sex, Cults and Symbols in Film. We take an in-depth look at Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut and Clockwork Orange; Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby, The Ninth Gate and Chinatown; The Manchurian Candidate and The Parallax View, as well as television programs The Lone Gunman and G.I. Joe, with special emphasis on predictive programming, mind control and the influence of the military and intelligence on Hollywood productions.
In the following interview Dyer explains the thesis of his book as being the focus on the connections of a society's power structure on art, particularly film-art in today's capitalist societies. 

Friday, November 30, 2018

CNN Fire Marc Lamont Hill After Slamming Israeli Policies In UN Speech

Click here to access article by Robert Inlakesh from AMN (Beirut, Lebanon).

This report illustrates what happens to people in mainstream media who don't follow the scripts imposed on them by the ruling class of capitalists.
DAMASCUS, SYRIA (2:30 A.M)- CNN announced the termination of their contract with an American scholar, this Thursday, following a speech delivered – by the scholar – before the United Nations.

Prominent scholar and activist, Marc Lamont Hill, has been fired from CNN. The move by CNN, came following a speech delivered by the scholar before the United Nations. The speech, delivered on the 70th anniversary of the declaration of Human Rights, slammed Israel’s illegal mistreatment of the Palestinian people.

The Real Red Pill

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

This piece portrays a scene in an American bar where six guys and a bartender try to sort out what is real and what isn't about the world today. Only if it were real! I may be too cynical, but I think it is only wishful thinking, more blue pill stuff for people pretending to take the red pill. God (or Allah), I hope I'm wrong!

It seems to me that such a conversation can only be found in fiction. The vast majority of people like their illusions. They depend on them to cope with their very challenging lives. When supposedly ordinary people such as Steve, Greg, Ed, and old Pete try to argue that such illusions are fake and present some real truths about our existence, people such as Ian and Bill get upset and try to shut them up. This is the real truth (red pill) about humans that explains why most of them ignore the plight of people like Julian Assange who has revealed that their capitalist masters are nothing but war criminals who constantly lie to them. That's "The Real Red Pill" version of reality.

Our capitalist masters know this secret about human weakness. Thus, they keep feeding us lies to maintain their self-serving domination over us.

Thursday, November 29, 2018

An Unredacted Interview with Comedian Lee Camp

Click here to access article by Whitney Webb from Mint Press News
Taking on the biggest issues in politics was not on Lee Camp’s mind when he first got into comedy. The American comedian — now known for his incisive political commentary and humor — first started writing jokes when he was just 12 and began performing at 18, focusing first on “standard observational comedy” that was aimed more at lifting people’s spirits than opening people’s minds.

However, as Camp continued to perform, he became more politically aware and wanted his comedy to cover the “darker issues.”
From there we learn about the details of the increasing political nature of his comedy (he has been compared to George Carlin of fairly recent decades), and we learn about a totally unredacted, uncensored one-hour show he has done to promote his political comedy that you can access for a small charge.

Why You Should Care About the Julian Assange Case

Click here to access article by Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone.

The reason Taibbi comes up with are sprinkled throughout the article:
Although Assange may not be a traditional journalist in terms of motive, what he does is essentially indistinguishable from what news agencies do, and what happens to him will profoundly impact journalism.

Reporters regularly publish stolen, hacked and illegally-obtained material. A case that defined such behavior as criminal conspiracy would be devastating. It would have every reporter in the country ripping national security sources out of their rolodexes and tossing them in the trash.


... in terms of what an Assange prosecution would mean for journalism in general. Hate him or not, the potential legal consequences are the same.


... a prosecution that uses the unpopularity of Assange to shut one of the last loopholes in our expanding secrecy bureaucracy. Americans seem not to grasp what might be at stake. Wikileaks briefly opened a window into the uglier side of our society, and if publication of such leaks is criminalized, it probably won’t open again.

There’s already a lot we don’t know about our government’s unsavory clandestine activities on fronts like surveillance and assassination, and such a case would guarantee we’d know even less going forward. Long-term questions are hard to focus on in the age of Trump. But we may look back years from now and realize what a crucial moment this was.
It seems to me that most Americans look on the activities of "their" government as crazy and corrupt most of the time, and thus ignore what the government is doing by focusing on their own private lives. The underlying assumption is if they ignore it, it will go away and essentially not impact them. This assumption, I am convinced, is a gross error that will likely be the end of all of us, one way or another. 

With Azov Sea Events Stealing Spotlight, US Gathers Huge Military Force in and Around Syria

Click here to access article by Arkady Savitsky from Strategic Culture Foundation

If you are unaware of the latest mischief that the US-led Empire (USA, Britain, France, plus the Zionist state of Israel) has been up to near Crimea (Sea of Azov), get up-to-date with two articles I posted here, then read this article. You see, the Deep State (see my commentary here) which guides the policies of the Empire, never sleeps in its objective to maintain the re-constituted colonial powers under the new capitalist Empire as a dominate power in the world. 

The author spots, and brings to our attention, the buildup in the Mediterranean by forces of the Empire, and wonders what this is all about.
The concentration of US military in the region is a worrisome sign. This huge force has gathered for something much more serious than just training. With the events in Europe grabbing public attention, the situation creep in Syria is staying under the radar. It shouldn’t be. Something is definitely being cooked up.
Perhaps the perceptive geopolitical analyst, Stephen Gowans, is right when he wrote back in September the following:
The United States has a new strategy for Syria, according to The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. The new direction, however, is simply the old, largely unrecognized, one, transformed from a de facto status to official one by presidential authorization. In other words, an aggressive US policy on Syria will continue to be implemented—one the US president had, for a time, openly mused about reversing, but has now accepted. 

The latest regarding Julian Assange--two articles

Wednesday, November 28, 2018

U.K. and Ecuador Conspire to Deliver Julian Assange to U.S. Authorities

Click here to access article by Gareth Porter from Truthdig.

Porter reports the ongoing conspiracy by Empire agents to eliminate the truth-teller Assange, and analyses baseless propaganda pieces by Empire publishers to justify his persecution.

What is the Assange case all about

Click here to access article by Marcello Ferrada de Noli, Professor Emeritus, Founder and chairman of Swedish Doctors for Human Rights, posted on The Indicter

The author includes a propaganda piece ostensibly written by a former FBI agent and published in Newsweek, a prime media source for the US Empire, which reads:
As an FBI operative working a mission against Russian military intelligence, I often struggled with this incomplete picture. Even though I spent hours in front of Oleg Kulikov, a Russian intelligence officer posing as a United Nations diplomat, his importance in the intelligence wars was unknown to me. Working with a small three-person team, I was constantly reminded that my job was to work Oleg, not to think about the larger questions of who he was and why he mattered.

I was to focus on the objectives at hand.  I was ok with this for one simple reason: trust. I trusted that the endpoint of our mission was truth, and whether or not I was in on every decision being made, I trusted we were all moving toward that shared goal using a common set of rules and ethics. I also trusted the people I worked with. I trusted them to keep my secret work secret, which meant I trusted them with nothing short of my life. 
Notice that he "trusts" the authorities which under our hierarchical system are our masters in the capitalist ruling class, and the piece suggests that readers do likewise. Our masters have lied to us about the assassinations of Jack and Bobbie Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, many community leaders like the Black Panthers, the student protestors at Kent State and Jackson State, about the wars they have engaged in like the Vietnam War, Iraq War, the Syrian conflict, etc. (the list is endless), and the false-flag attack of 9/11. They wouldn't be able to tell the truth if their lives depended on it. Unfortunately, this well-paid dupe is highly representative of the American people in general. He trusts his masters, narrowly views the task at hand ordered by his "superiors", and performs his duties for which he is well rewarded. Then, no doubt, he returns home to his family and watches entertaining TV shows. This is the sad story of most Americans.

Tripled climate cuts needed to fulfil pledge

Click here to access article by Alex Kirby from Climate News Network.

Guess what? Well, another report generated by scientists and distributed through a United Nation's agency says what was obvious from day one about the voluntary 2015 Paris Agreement:
The world is not yet living up to its undertaking to tackle global warming, and it will have to make tripled climate cuts − at least − if it is to do so, a report says.

The emissions gap − the difference between the global emissions of greenhouse gases scientists expect in 2030 and the level they need to be at to honour the world’s promises to cut them − is the largest ever.

The 2018 Emissions Gap Report is published by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). While it is still possible to keep global warming below 2°C, its authors say, the world’s current pace of action to cut emissions must triple for that to happen.
Thus, the capitalist ruling classes who dominate the world have "enjoyed their cake and ate it, too". They lulled workers all over the world while pursuing the accumulation of wealth and power--the health of our planet be damned! These ruling classes are so thoroughly addicted to their drugs that any appeal to reason is futile. They are late stage drug addicts: they can only go after more drugs of wealth and power that their system of capitalism supplies them to satisfy their addiction. Meanwhile, most of humanity believes their lies (think the Paris Agreement) and go back to their ordinary lives while the rest of conscious humanity, which unfortunately is a tiny minority, can only sit back, powerless to do anything about it, and wonder how much time is left before the next catastrophe strikes them.

Revenge Is Mine Saith Washington

Click here to access article by Paul Craig Roberts from his blog. 
For eight years Julian Assange’s life has been lived in a Kafka Police State. He has been incarcerated first under British house arrest and then in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London, despite the absence of any charges filed against him.

Meanwhile, the entirety of the Western world, with the exception of former Educadoran President Rafael Correa and a UN agency that examined the case and ruled Assange was being illegally detained by the UK government’s refusal to honor his grant of political asylum, has turned its back to the injustice.
I think that Roberts is correct with his statement that the "entirety of the Western world ... has turned its back to the injustice". It appears that capitalist ideologists are correct to argue that humans are basically selfish and look only after their own interests and comfort. Only a few people like Roberts--and he has served the ruling capitalist class--have some faint notion of morality left in them.

The British people are ultimately responsible for the fate of Julian Assange who struggled so heroically to bring the truth to ordinary people of the world about the crimes of their masters. Because he is imprisoned in London, it is clear to me that only concerned British citizens can free him.  Recently I surfed all the left-wing British websites/blogs I could find on the web, and found none that dealt with his desperate situation.   

Tuesday, November 27, 2018

Recommended articles for Tuesday, November 27, 2018

  • Beware the Trumpenleft! by CJ Hopkins from his blog.  This master satirist ridicules a number of targets, but mainly propaganda by mainstream media. To show that his satire has a serious purpose, he writes:
And this is where this “Trumpenleft” malarkey fits into the ruling classes’ broader campaign to eliminate any kind of critical thinking and force people to mindlessly root for their “team.” See, the problem with us “Trumpenleft” types is not that we support Donald Trump. For the record, none of us really do. Some of us think he us a dangerous demagogue. Others of us think he is a blithering idiot. None of us think he’s Fidel Castro, or that he cares one iota about the working classes, or about anyone other than Donald Trump.

No, the problem is not that we’re on the wrong team; the problem is that we are asking people to question the propaganda of the team that we’re supposed to be on, or at least be rooting for. We are asking people to pay attention to how the global capitalist ruling establishment is going about quashing this “populist” insurgency (of which Brexit and Trump are manifestations, not causes) so they can get back to the business of relentlessly restructuring, privatizing, and debt-enslaving everything, as they’ve been doing since the end of the Cold War. We’re asking folks, not to join “the other team,” but to pay close attention to how they are being manipulated into believing that there are only two “teams,” and that they have to join one, and then mindlessly parrot whatever nonsense their team decides they need to disseminate in order to win a game that is merely a simulation they have conjured up (i.e., the ruling classes have conjured up) in order to inoculate themselves against an actual conflict they cannot win and so must prevent at all costs from ever beginning … which, they are doing a pretty good job of that so far.

The detention and isolation from the world of Julian Assange

Click here to access article by Stefania Maurizi from la Repubblica (an Italian website).
They are destroying him slowly. They are doing it through an indefinite detention which has been going on for the last eight years with no end in sight. Julian Assange has become one of the most widely known icons of freedom of the press and the struggle against state secrecy. Recently, his detention in the Ecuadorian embassy in London has been joined by isolation, strict rules and various forms of pressure which seem to have no other purpose than to break him down. A grip meant to destroy his physical and mental ability to resist until he either breaks down or he steps out of the Ecuadorian embassy, unleashing the beginning of his own end. Because if he does step out, he will be arrested by the UK authorities, and at that point the US could request his extradition so that they can put him in jail for publishing classified US documents. Julian Assange is in extremely precarious conditions.

After eight months of failed attempts, la Repubblica was finally able to visit the WikiLeaks founder in the Ecuadorian embassy in London ....

Monday, November 26, 2018

Competition Is Dying, and Taking Capitalism With It

Click here to access article by Jonathan Tepper from Bloomberg. (Edited for clarity at 5:45 PM CT.)

Tepper is unwittingly supporting Marxist views of the intrinsic course of the development of capitalism. I have no doubt that this is because of his education about such matters that were restricted to ideological interpretations of history that students are exposed to in US higher education. Thus, the author concentrates on remarks made by an early ideologist of the capitalist religion, Adam Smith and his work The Wealth of Nations.
In 1776 Adam Smith wrote “The Wealth of Nations,” and the American Continental Congress declared independence from Britain. Smith complained bitterly about monopolies. He wrote of the East India Company: “… the monopoly which our manufacturers have obtained … has so much increased the number of some particular tribes of them, that, like an overgrown standing army, they have become formidable to the government, and upon many occasions intimidate the legislature.”

Among the reasons the Continental Congress cited for separating from Britain in the Declaration of Independence was, “For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world: For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent.” The Boston Tea Party was in response to the East India Company’s monopoly on tea.

“The Wealth of Nations” and the Declaration of Independence were bold statements against the abuses of monopoly power. Americans wanted entrepreneurial freedom to build businesses in a free market.
The elites at the eve of the American Revolution found that the British Crown's monopoly of the East India Company and other restrictions by the British (because they saw America as a colony that should serve the British Empire) interfered with their businesses interests. These early American elites like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison had control of a very rich continent, but they were faced with two major problems: they were bound by British restrictions which limited their exploitation of these riches. The other major obstacle was that labor was necessary to acquire these riches. Earlier they made up for this lack by importing slaves from Africa. At some point this American ruling class saw the need to establish their own nation in order to obtain the riches and power they thought they deserved. To accomplish this they needed the help of free labor, and the latter were soon enlisted in the Revolution by such stirring propaganda pieces like the Declaration of Independence, the writings of people like Thomas Paine, and Patrick Henry. After the revolution succeeded, they quietly forgot about the radical ideas contained in these writings.

Tepper bemoans the development of a few giant corporations that control an industry and can ignore customer demands for service and quality. He argues that this situation is not capitalism, and thereby ignores all the Marxist literature and common sense about capitalist enterprises and their need to grow and combine in order to reduce competition. His grasp of history is that of an elementary school kid who has been fed only propaganda to justify capitalism. Hence, his regard for the system is very much like a faith-based religion: Adam Smith is Jesus Christ and The Wealth of Nations is the Bible.  

Sunday, November 25, 2018

The Fate of Julian Assange: Chris Hedges Interviews Consortium News Editor-in-Chief Joe Lauria

Click here to access the 27:54m video which is posted on Consortium News, or watch it below.

Chris Hedges and Joe Lauria examine the issues related to the continuing confinement of Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy and the well-documented intention of the agents of the US Empire to get him and do what they can to destroy him. It's clear from what the two discuss is that this is without legal precedent or legal foundation, but the power of elites or ruling classes have only occasionally been stopped from having their way. The rule of law which is often touted by capitalist ruling classes as a virtue of their rule will be easily dispensed with whenever their rule is threatened. The Anglo-American Empire is now being threatened like it has never before. Only the "distracted" people can stop them now from persecuting Assange and, above all, themselves.

If it were only the well-being of Assange that was at stake, people could ignore this persecution (and still survive). However, so much more is at stake. If the people continue to fail to act, they will permit the acceptance of fascist rule and the insane actions of an extremely threatened ruling class. The Empire's capitalist class knows it, but there are doubts about what the "distracted" people will do. Rarely have so much been at stake historically in a persecution of an individual by powerful elites.