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, February 23, 2019

The Crisis of Science

Click here to access article by James Corbett from The Corbett Report.

I have followed Corbetts's political libertarian views (and others like him)--"the government is the cause of all problems"--for some time, and I found these people quite fascinating. Such people have been so thoroughly trained to eliminate the system that is at the root of nearly all things social and economic--capitalism--that they have problems rationalizing their understanding of such problems. Libertarians (in America) are like ostriches with their heads firmly in the sand. They simply cannot recognize the system of capitalism that underlies all things social and political (see this and this). Like gravity, capitalism in their view is simply a fact of nature. 

In this Crisis of Science podcast which he goes into at length, he often cites commercial interests as being the root cause of the corruption of science. He does refer to government agencies that collude with private interest, but stops short there. Corbett doesn't offer solutions, and says that "this isn't simply a problem of money" that is at the root of the crisis. He refers to the crisis as "having social-political and structural roots". (If he only knew!) He promises to examine various proposals to solve this crisis in the next podcast. I can't wait.

(If you are scientist or academic, I recommend this article entitled "The Commercialization of Science and the Struggle Against It" by "Denys Bondar, a young Ukrainian scientist working in one of the famous North American universities" [Princeton] from LeftEast, a website based in Bulgaria.)

Friday, February 22, 2019

Growing power: Mega-Mergers and the fight for our food system

Click here to access article by Katie Sandwell from the Transnational Institute (TNI).

Download this PDF document and learn about how mergers of agricultural corporations are leading to just a handful of corporations that exercise almost total control over what we eat. Yes, it's corporations über alles under capitalism!
Giant corporations have taken control of our food. Today, just a few companies control what we eat and how it is produced. For them, food is money: companies and their shareholders aren’t interested in what food means to the people who grow and eat it, or what farming means for the environment. They are interested in the profits they can make from it.
The situation is not good, and it is getting worse: since 2015 a number of “mega mergers” have been proposed, or taken place. Six companies controlled most of the international trade in seeds and agricultural chemicals in 2015. In the last two years, these companies have begun the process of merging and re-arranging themselves into just four colossal corporations. The larger these companies grow, the less we can control them. And the less control we have, the harder it is for us to build the kind of food system that more and more of us want: one that recognizes the value of people, respects the planet, and provides decent, dignified work.

Profits Are Up!

Click here if you wish to access the cartoon directly by Stephanie McMillan from her website.  (I thank an activist for alerting me to the latest cartoon of hers.)

The Inconvenient Truth of Modern Civilization’s Inevitable Collapse

Click here to access article by "xraymike79" from his blog Collapse of Industrial Civilization.

This author returns from an absence of nearly a year to summarize scientific data which show clearly that we, as a human species, are in a "dire" situation. Because of his his extended absence I thought that he had given up his long effort to warn humans of this threat. However, he seems at one point to hold out some hope for a future of humans if only we can reduce our birth rate.
By far the most effective way to reduce future emissions and resource consumption is to reduce human birth rates, yet the global population is still increasing at about 90 million people per year despite the geographic shift in fertility rates.
This "effective way" is not effective at all which he readily admits. I am not a scientist, but I can read, and have read many scientific articles on the subject. I now think there is very little chance that humans can survive. Our atmosphere has become so loaded with carbon that there is a baked-in effect that will increase global warming for many decades even if we stopped completely all carbon emitting now. But I don't know that, and nobody knows that for sure. 

Hence, in the meantime we must use the most effective means to combat this threat by ending the rule of a tiny segment of humans and their system which has caused so much devastation--and not only wrecking our biosphere. We have seen disastrous global wars in the 20th century followed by endless wars so far in the 21st century. We have also seen entire populations uprooted and migrating to other areas of the globe to escape such disasters. We have also seen the growth of concentrated wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people who use this wealth to increase their power over our lives. The obvious solution is to rid ourselves of their system of capitalism!

Thursday, February 21, 2019

Europe pays the price of a US decision: where will European ISIS go?

Click here to access article by Kuwaiti-born independent journalist Elijah Magnier from his blog.

Another independent journalist discloses another dirty and very open secret of the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire. Anyone who refuses to believe the fictional realities as presented by the Empire's corporate media already knows this dirty secret because there have been hundreds of reports from independent sources to confirm it. Yes, the Empire and its allies (Saudi Arabia and its satellites) have emptied their prisons of deviants, trained them to become terrorists, outfitted them with weapons and brand-spanking new Toyota trucks, and launched them into Syria to destabilize the government. Now that ISIS, the Empire's terrorist mercenary army, has been defeated, almost nobody wants them. This poses a quandary for most members of the Empire and their allies. The Empire also used Kurds for this purpose and now they are abandoning them. There are no crimes that our capitalist masters will find unacceptable if it serves their interests of power and profits.

Wall Street’s Banksters Are Clandestinely Trading the “Digital Gangster” Stock of Facebook

Click here to access article by Pam Martens from Wall Street on Parade.

Martens was referring to this report issued by a committee of the British Parliament which referred to Facebook as a "digital gangster" which had little effect of the price of Facebook's stock.
Yesterday, the U.K. Parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee released a 108-page report based on its 18-month investigation into digital disinformation campaigns that provided granular details on Facebook’s thuggish business model, inferring at one point that the U.S. should investigate the company under its Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).

The report minced few words about Facebook or its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, writing that the company and its management were “ ‘digital gangsters’ in the online world, considering themselves to be ahead of and beyond the law.”
And, she goes on to cite other historical examples of corporations that have been legally convicted of law violations, but whose stock has greatly increased. The lesson of this story is that getting rich "by hook or by crook" is perfectly acceptable in today's amoral capitalist world. Hence, all sociopaths are attracted to the world of today's capitalism like never before. They have infiltrated every institution and are in control of every institution. We are now seeing the results all around us in terms of acceptance of extreme inequality, imperialist wars, and the lack of concern about climate destabilization.

Bernie ‘Looked the Other Way’ on Wasserman Schultz, Florida Election Rigging

Click here if you wish to access the video and brief introduction from 21st Century Wire.
The is abundant evidence that election rigging has been rife in South Florida’s notoriously corrupt Broward County. Former Florida congressional candidate Tim Canova exposed the DNC election fiddling through a series of independent investigations, following his challenge to former disgraced Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Talk Show host Jimmy Dore interviews Canova about the controversy, and also explains how Bernie Sanders remained quiet on the matter in order to placate the Democratic Party elite. Watch:

Tuesday, February 19, 2019

Counterpunch Shadowboxes and Loses

Click here to access article by Edward Curtin from his blog Behind the Curtain

Another very astute observer of political power events in today's capitalist class rule has been rejected and disappeared by the editors of CounterPunch, one the oldest online, "alternative", American blogs. I have long held doubts about their dedication to truth when the truth leads one to question the very foundations of the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire: the ruling capitalist classes and their obsession with power and profits.

He attacks the editors of CounterPunch as "gatekeepers" after he describes the way that corporate media's use highly trained people who will follow orders by presenting only news, information, and analysis that serve the interests of the capitalist ruling class:
In the fight for truth in the public arena, similar subterfuges occur.

To battle honestly in the open forum, to argue to and fro squarely, is often prevented in advance by eliminating an opponent’s voice from the debate.  This is the typical method used by the corporate mass media that stack the deck with sycophants and refuse dissidents a place to voice their ideas.

Then there is the masquerade of fighting an opponent who is really a collaborator and benefactor, whose punches one counters in a game of shadow boxing meant to convince the audience that the fight is real and you are on their side.  Some alternative media use this technique because they are gatekeepers for the power elite.

How One of America’s Premier Data Monarchs is Funding a Global Information War and Shaping the Media Landscape

Click here to access article by Alexander Rubinstein and Max Blumenthal from Mint Press News

Others have written articles on the insidious influence of billionaire Pierre Omidyar, but this piece provides an in-depth examination of his influence over disinformation about our world that ordinary people of the USA and beyond receive. But even these crimes are excelled by his efforts to organize and fund information and analysis organizations that purport to be progressive. Such organizations tend to attract honest journalists in order to limit and shape independent reporting. Ordinary people of the world are no match for the skills and expertise that billionaires are able to purchase to promote their interests of profit and power and the monster Empire that they have created.
Omidyar’s political empire consists of a web of organizations overseen by its center of administration: the Omidyar Group. Each outfit appears to be an independent entity with its own staff and directors. Taken together, however, these organizations pursue a mission that reflects the vision of the billionaire behind it.   

Monday, February 18, 2019

Johnny Versus The News Man

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

What a beautiful fantasy! Well, if reality is sometimes too distasteful, we can always resort to fantasies.
... one day the News Man announced that Freedomocracy was going to War. All other recourse had failed with the Evil Dictator, he said, and everyone receiving a notice on their pocket Screens was to report to their Enlistment Stations immediately.

But nobody went. Everyone refused to fight this new War, and everyone refused to support the people who were trying to start it. The tangle of lies fell away completely, and everyone saw what was really happening with clear eyes. The people rose up together, and soon even the police joined them, and it wasn’t long before the News Man appeared on the Screen for the last time.

Then the people began creating a country which really works for them instead of keeping them poor and tricked all the time.

Sunday, February 17, 2019

Who Rules the Anglosphere?

Click here to access article by Moti Assani from Veterans Today. (Updated on 2/18/2019 at 8:44 AM to add a clip from The Jimmy Dore website.)

The author rounds up a lot of observations about what a number of people know: there is an invisible government that controls the puppets of our official government behind the curtain. This super-secret group goes by various names: deep state, shadow government, oligarchs, etc. (He prefers "Controllers".) Nissani states the obvious, that is, what's obvious to most astute observers:
Humans have always known that water exists, even though they were often ignorant of its constituent parts. The same goes for the Invisible Government: Truth-seekers have excellent reasons to believe it exists, although information about its internal structure and the identity of its members remains as elusive as they are.
Read what he discovers about this very elusive bunch who control so much of our lives. As I learned many years ago from Jim O’Reilly, a retired banker who now lives in Denver, the rich don't merely seek to accumulate more money for itself, but they seek the power that concentrated wealth gives them.

You may be interested in another article of Nissani, the title of which is essentially a corollary of this one entitled "Why voting in the US may be an exercise in self-delusion" from The Greanville Post. He goes on to elaborate on the "Controllers", or the Deep State. Another video that may interest you is from The Jimmy Dore website that illustrates US corrupt elections.

Reshaping the Middle East: why the West should stop its Interventions (Part 2)

Click here to access article by Elijah J Magnier from his blog.

This Kuwaiti-born independent journalist provides a summary of the past decades of US, Israeli, and Saudi interventions in the Middle East, and the consequences are not good for the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire. He reaches several conclusions after he poses the question: So, what has this global intervention brought about?

The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent: “The Inconvenient Truth” Behind Youth Cooptation

Click here to access series of articles by Cory Morningstar with Forrest Palmer reposted on Deep Green Resistance News Service

I don't pay much attention to corporate media sources because they are all about deceptions, and instead I focus on news and analysis by reliable independent sources. So, I occasionally miss the scams being committed by our masters in the capitalist ruling class. This post is a result of receiving this morning an article from Climate Code Red (Australian website) which lauded Greta Thunberg and her followers. I knew that Morningstar and Palmer have been running a series of articles on her backers (incidentally, I haven't seen any other exposé of this fake operation other than the series run by Morningstar and Palmer), but I was discouraged by the tome-length articles that they, as usual, write and post. However, this morning's post by Climate Code Red, which has previously run excellent pro-environmental articles, had me concerned. They were obviously taken in by our masters in the capitalist Empire.

As a result of this experience, I admit I didn't read all of the series by Morningstar and Palmer, but I scanned them together with many other articles which supported the astonishing rise of teenager Greta Thunberg as an environmental celebrity. After hours of research I reached a conclusion: there is another sheep-herding operation going on to shepherd those concerned about climate destabilization into the chute that leads--well, maybe not to the slaughterhouse of managed elections as Bernie Sanders did--but to the control and diffusion of the growing worldwide concern about the obvious signs of weather extremes--the first signs of climate destabilization.

At this stage we can only point to the supporters behind this celebrity status of Thunberg and the many other manifestations of this sheep-herding operation. Morningstar and Palmer provide an exhaustive (exhausting?) list of the promoters. The following is only a sample of what the authors found: worldwide coverage from media corporations, and their capitalist backers have managed to have Thunberg appear at the UN Climate Conference; at Ted Talks, at Davos, and they have used her celebrity status to spawn other organizations supposedly concerned about climate destabilization: The Green New Deal (Democratic Party), We Don't Have Time (movement), Sierra Club's Sunrise Movement, and NGO supporters like the World Resources Institute. The articles goes into considerable detail about the capitalist associations of the directors and backers. 

It's patently clear what is going on. The hoi poiloi (ordinary people) are once again being played for fools. In contrast to what we've seen in the past: devastating world wars, but this time it will result in human extinction.