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, March 23, 2019

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Trump and the War to Save “the War”

Click here to access article by Gordon Duff, a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War, from New Eastern Outlook.

Duff exposes the Global War on Terror (GWOT) scam, for what it is:
Lo and behold, a great threat looms over the Middle East. There is nothing worse for the US and its select allies, Britain, France, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Germany than peace breaking out. Yet exactly that, the “threat of peace” is taken as far more devastating than terrorism.

America’s biggest enemy in the Middle East today isn’t ISIS, for those who pay attention, more effort has been made by the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and to be honest about it, a host of other nations as well, to save ISIS and al Qaeda from the “axis of evil” than any military effort since Vietnam.

We are, to be honest still, in our eighth year of a war to keep terrorism alive.
And he asks a final unanswered question:
Why would someone want discord and suffering on a global scale? Is money and power really worth it?
This is another confirmation of the theme I have been hammering for the past several years: the capitalist ruling classes behind the Empire are a driven lot. They are thoroughly addicted to the power that capitalism delivers to them via concentrated wealth. Because of this addiction to power, this question becomes irrelevant. The addiction must be satisfied regardless of the consequences which are horrendous. The real question is: are we ordinary people going to tolerate this any longer? Are we prepared to endure whatever "slings and arrows" that we might experience in the immediate future in order to save us from horrors that await us in the long run?

The unfortunate headline implies that Trump is behind these policies. Trump is only one addicted figure among a whole class of capitalists largely within the borders of the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire.

Friday, March 22, 2019

The Surrealism of the Information War

Click here to access article by Gilbert Mercier from News Junkie Post. (Edited for clarity on 12/30/19!)

Mercier first argues that information in this advanced age of technology has failed to live up to its potential of spreading truth; instead under the rule of the capitalist classes (he only implies this) truth becomes like a commodity used to manipulate us to serve the interests of this ruling class. 

Then he launches into a rather profound dissection of truth using the metaphors of the color spectrum and optics to show that truth can not be absolute. I believe that truth is relative to the class interests of any proponents as long as our societies are ruled by socioeconomic classes. I also believe that his analysis implies that real truth is absolutely democratic in that we all must strive to see the truth about our existence and the truths must spread in an egalitarian fashion based solely on its merits. We humans have thus far used scientific methods, which we developed, to eliminate many falsehoods, but science has also been shaped by ruling classes. Thus, ruling classes use information technology not to liberate our minds, but to manipulate truths to maintain their rule and the socioeconomic system that sustains their rule (capitalism in the present age).

Ultimately ruling classes, which are always self-serving and owe their ultimate existence to the control of instruments of violence, must be eliminated if humans are to continue to exist. This is because they will always distort truth to serve their interests of securing power and wealth. Because capitalist ruling classes under the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire increasingly see threats to their rule, chief among them is that their system of capitalism fundamentally is in contradiction to a sustainable planet, they are now totally engaged in spreading fake information in order to maintain their rule. Read the article to see if you agree.

US policy failure reopens Iraqi-Syrian borders and the Iran-Beirut road

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

Now that the author has gained respect as an astute and honest geopolitical analyst of the Middle East, I no longer have to argue that he is eminently qualified to describe the current US Empire moves in Syria and their effects. 

Sometime around 2010 the Empire strategists decided to employ a chaos strategy (which was honed in previous operations against Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, etc.) to cause a regime change in Syria because that government would not cooperate with Empire's strategy to punish Russia and to prevent further economic ties between Russia and Europe, specifically involving oil/gas pipelines

First, they constructed a phony proxy army which consisted of mostly violent people from the prisons of Saudi Arabia and its satellite states, and riff-raff across the world. This proxy army was funded by Saudi Arabia and its allies, and supported in various ways by the Empire's European satellites, Israel, and Turkey (the latter for mostly different reasons which Russia used to separate Turkey's geopolitical interests from the Empire's). 

Added to the Empire's chaos strategy is the protection and support given to the Syrian Kurds in order to fight against their own proxy army. The Syrian Kurds had held out hopes to have their own territory carved out of Syria, and likely they dreamed of extending it to the Kurdish areas of Iraq. Thus, the Empire's very complicated strategy used various military and political actors for their own objective: to destabilize Syria and cause regime-change. The truth which has been highly fragmented by various independent journalists can now be told after the failure of this grand chaos strategy. Magnier makes a valuable contribution to that effort in this article.
He [Trump] finally ordered his forces to do so after long months of inaction, during which the US effectively offered protection to the terror group and allowed tens of thousands of ISIS militants to move freely to attack the Syrian Army and its allies along the Deir-ezzour al-Bukamal axis. [northeastern Syria]

The significance of Trump’s decision to finally move against ISIS cannot be overestimated. Since 2014 the US has been engaged in a phoney war against ISIS, pretending to fight this brutal takfiri group while in fact allowing it to expand and killing Syrian Army soldiers who actually fought the group. Throughout this time the US has used ISIS as a pretext for the US military presence in Syria. The US did bomb ISIS occupied Raqqah and destroyed it; it then made a deal to deport many thousands of ISIS partisans. But the ongoing Battle of Baghuz marks the first time the US has really fought ISIS. To his credit, Trump is now doing what the US has only pretended to do for five years: actually fighting ISIS. This spectacular and drawn out campaign allows Trump to take credit for defeating ISIS, although for half a decade the forces actually fighting ISIS have been the Syrian Army, Russia, the Iraqi PMU/Hashed al-Shaabi, the Iraqi Army, Lebanese Hezbollah, and Iran.

Thursday, March 21, 2019

Recommended articles for Thursday, March 21, 2019

Mueller-Dämmerung

Click here to access article by C.J. Hopkins from his blog Consent Factory, Inc.

In this article the inimitable satirist aims his weapon on the expected Mueller report and the effects it could very well have.  After this, he warns us about the "End of Everything". 
What might  ... be the End of Everything, or might lead us down the road to the End of Everything, is if otherwise intelligent human beings continue to allow themselves to be whipped into fits of mass hysteria and run around behaving like a mindless herd of propaganda-regurgitating zombies whenever the global capitalist ruling classes tell them that “the Russians are coming!” or that “the Nazis are coming!” or that “the Terrorists are coming!”
The Russo-Nazi Terrorists are not coming. The global capitalist ruling classes are putting down a populist insurgency, delegitimizing any and all forms of dissent from their global capitalist ideology and resistance to the hegemony of global capitalism. In the process, they are conditioning people to completely abandon their critical faculties and behave like twitching Pavlovian idiots who will obediently respond to whatever stimuli or blatantly fabricated propaganda the corporate media bombards them with.  

16 Years After Iraq, the US Has Become a Nation of Passive Neocons

Click here to access article by Whitney Webb from Mint Press News (based in Minneapolis).

During this anniversary of the US Empire's invasion of Iraq in 2003, Webb argues that we Americans have become much like our Neocon (Ziocon) masters in the latest iteration of the capitalist ruling class: we simply don't care.
Sixteen years have passed and the memory of the Iraq War is distant for many, save for the millions of people — Iraqi and American alike — who saw their lives destroyed by one of the greatest lies ever sold to the American public.

Yet, while plenty of Americans sleep easy thinking that such an atrocity as the invasion and occupation of Iraq could never happen again, the U.S. government has continuously been involved in many smaller, equally disastrous wars — both seen and unseen — largely thanks to the fact that those who brought us the Iraq War remain both respected and still present in the halls of power.

Indeed, the only thing the domestic outrage over the Iraq War seemed to accomplish has been a massive effort waged by the government and the corporate elite to engineer a public that doesn’t complain and doesn’t care when their government meddles or invades another country.
The ruling class engineers this lack of caring by 1) controlling our thoughts about what is happening in the world; and 2) by keeping us dumbed-down, distracted, and entertained.

Captain Marvel: Money, feminism, militarism and previously “independent” filmmakers

Click here to access a review of the latest corporate-produced film by David Walsh, one of the best film reviewers in the world, posted on World Socialist Web Site.

Walsh exposes the latest film offering by a major corporation with US Air Force support for what it is: a widely promoted film to keep you distracted, entertained, and dumbed-down about the real, dire issues facing humans. The film is loaded with the latest identity politics strategy of  our masters in the capitalist ruling class:
Captain Marvel is truly “corporate entertainment”—i.e., the very process by which it came into being prevents it from being entertaining or enlightening in any meaningful fashion.

This type of large-scale, officially sponsored filmmaking, whose success is avidly promoted and tracked by the media and business publications in particular, inevitably intersects and overlaps with other aspects of American establishment culture. In the case of Captain Marvel, this means militarism and feminism specifically.

The US Air Force was involved in the production of Captain Marvel. 

“Into the Storm” [Au coeur d'une revolution populaire]: A Short Film Devoted to Yellow Vests Act 18 in Paris

Click here if you wish to access a 23:35m film by French camera operator Julien Rogue and introduction directly from Stalker Zone

You won't find this material on any corporate or so-called "public media" like PBS, NPR, BBC, etc. because the ruling capitalist class wants to keep you dumbed-down and easily controlled.
French camera operator Julien Rogue, who was present on March 16th in Paris when the Yellow Vests made it clear to Macron that his fake “grand debate” will not succeed to sweep national discontent under the carpet, has made and published a 24-minute film entitled “Into the storm: At the heart of a popular revolution”, the introductory text of which is translated and presented below…
A film created in the heart of act 18 of the Yellow Vests in Paris on March 16th 2019. I bring you with me on this totally incredible day, where chaos mixes with hope, witnessing extraordinary violence, immersion in the heart of Paris, but also, through the spectrum of my lens, to relive this day, which will go down in the history as one of the most violent of the Yellow Vests movement. I wanted to make a summary of what I experienced during act 18 in Paris, but then… I didn’t have the words.

So, in the face of so many things to say and so much to describe, I preferred to leave room for images, showing all that I could film through this film.

Wednesday, March 20, 2019

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The Yellow Vests: a leftist movement which does not want to be called leftist! [Part 3 of 3]

Click here to access article by Dimitris Konstantakopoulos, a Greek journalist, posted on United World (based in Turkey). 
It is precisely because of their willingness to succeed that the “masses” isolate anything that could divide them or have a negative impact on the movement’s further development. For example, despite the fact that 70% of the demands of the movement are identical to the political programme of the left-wing “France Insoumise”, the Vests have so far prevented it from playing any significant role in their activities, keeping their distance from it.

Hence, in France, at present, we see the development of a movement which seems to be very “left-wing” in terms of principles, ideas, demands, values or slogans, but which does not wish to be called “left”.

Besides, the “radicalism” of French society, as in other western countries, is manifested towards both the “radical left” and the “radical right” and in the ranks of the Yellow Vest movement one can find supporters and even cadres of parties from both ends of the political spectrum, as well as apolitical citizens. Thus, if the Yellow Vests were to start expressing any political party preferences, they would automatically lose part of the support they enjoy, becoming an easy target for their opponents and undermining their struggle.

A Conspiracy Theorist Confesses to his Petty Crimes

Click here to access article by Edward Curtin from his blog.

Curtin with his tongue very much in his cheek confesses to his petty crimes of formulating conspiracy theories. 

Be sure to access the link to the CIA’s 1967 secret Dispatch. Yes, here is documented proof that a secret, a publicly unaccountable branch of the government has been engaging in psychological warfare on American citizens to counter any questioning of the Deep State's nefarious activities. Shocking! (sarcasm)
Specifically, in April 1967, the CIA wrote a dispatch which coined the term “conspiracy theories” … and recommended methods for discrediting such theories.  The dispatch was marked “psych” –  short for “psychological operations” or disinformation –  and “CS” for the CIA’s “Clandestine Services” unit.

The dispatch was produced in responses to a Freedom of Information Act request by the New York Times in 1976.

The dispatch states:

Venezuela — Interview with Stalin PĂ©rez Borges: “It will be very difficult to defeat us.”

Click here to access the interview posted by Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal. 
(Because the interview was first posted in Spanish on February 7, it must have occurred before then.)

A representative from this website interviewed an important union leader from Valencia, an important industrial center in Venezuela. I believe he offers an important analysis of the Empire's latest effort at "regime change" against the government of Venezuela together with the internal problems and possibilities of resistance from the Chavista forces which have grown over the past 20 years. (Having said that, I think you can skip Borges' rather confusing and lengthy answer to the question "What did you think of the recent meeting of members of the Citizens’ Platform for the Defence of the Constitution with Juan GuaidĂł?") 
Before commenting on the current political crisis, how would you describe the social and economic crisis in Venezuela today?

This question leads to a very long answer, so I apologise if it gets tiresome. The economic and social crisis has grown exponentially for about five years now, and has got to this rotten state of hyper-inflation that we’re barely coping with, and which is breaking world records. This is the cause for the huge discontent that we have at this stage and for the important change in the correlation of political power in this juncture. In my opinion this is a consequence of three fundamental facts: two of them circumstantial, and one structural.
 

Tuesday, March 19, 2019

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JPMorgan Managing Director Dies Suddenly; Has Links to Other JPM Deaths

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

The Martens have been covering banking issues for a long time, and Pam Martens have noticed a strange recurring incidence of bankers, particularly bankers employed by JP Morgan, jumping out of upper story windows to their deaths and other rather strange suicides. She has also noticed the strange silence that accompanies these suicides.
... when it comes to JPMorgan Chase and law enforcement, there does not seem to be a morsel of curiosity over the continuing sudden deaths of its computer technology workers – no matter how high up the corporate ladder they rank or how many floors they are alleged to fall to their death.

Monday, March 18, 2019

Venezuela: The Next Syria?

Click here to access article by Donald Courter from United World (based in Turkey). (updated)
We’re being led to believe it’s all doom and gloom in Venezuela. The mainstream media is rapid-firing reports of a deepening humanitarian crisis. An evil dictator, Nicolas Maduro, is holding his country hostage from democracy, they say, while his people starve. Venezuelans are reportedly fleeing by the thousands while the government blocks «aid» shipments from the U.S.’ ally, Colombia. And almost every day, a quick google search will bring you new «news» articles claiming Maduro will be overthrown by his own people sooner than you can say "Hands Off Venezuela".
You may also be interested in an article entitled "Venezuela Coup Leader's Oil Plans Revealed: GuaidĂł Hopes to Privatize State-Controlled Industry" by Ben Norton from The Grayzone.

The new faces of Jewish-American resistance to Israel

Click here to access article by Azad Essa from MiddleEastEye.net

The author provides quotes from many young Jewish-Americans regarding their opposition to Zionist policies and actions, and the Zionist government in Israel. You won't hear these voices in US corporate and so-called public media. 

You may also be interested in the latest post entitled "‘Rule of law’ states defend Israel’s cold blooded murder of peaceful demonstrators while trying to rob Venezuela of its oil" by Stephan Gowans in which he writes:
... Israeli murderers gun down Palestinians who peacefully demand what is due to them as human beings, and this passes without comment by the self-proclaimed defenders of the rule of law. In Western capitals, the only discussion about Israel is one pivoting on the contrived concept of the ‘new’ anti-Semitism, an all too transparent ploy to suppress criticism of Al Capone’s crimes, while John Dillinger gets on with robbing Venezuela of its treasure trove of oil and gold.

Mar 15 walks: I don't see a 'crisis' in Caracas? Where does MSM get their info? [post updated]

Independent journalist Eva Bartlett recently traveled to Venezuela to see what economic conditions were like, and she in this video via YouTube compares her experience with the Empire's propaganda issued by corporate and so-called public media corporations like NPR and BBC. 

This is likely the first of many reports by Bartlett regarding the situation in Venezuela.



You may also be interested in another report entitled "On the Ground in Venezuela vs. the Media Spectacle" from independent British observers who have been on the streets of Caracas and other places in Venezuela.
British photojournalist Alan Gignoux and Venezuelan journalist-filmmaker Carolina Graterol, both based in London, went to Venezuela for a month to shoot a documentary for a major global TV channel. They talked with journalist Paul Cochrane about the mainstream media’s portrayal of Venezuela compared to their experiences on the ground.

Sunday, March 17, 2019

On Contact: Extinction Rebellion [segment 2 of the interview]

Click here if you wish to directly access Chris Hedge's interview with the British head of Extinction Rebellion from RT America. (Segment 1 largely deals with the objective of Extinction Rebellion and its global strategy to non-violently deal with the overwhelming signs of man-made altering of ecosystem to the point that we now face extinction if we continue emitting carbon into the atmosphere. You can skip segment 1 if you are already aware of this threat.)
Some environmental activists argue the only way to stop the impending ecocide is to carry out nonviolent acts of civil disobedience to shut down the capitals of the major industrial countries, crippling commerce and transportation until the ruling elites are forced to publicly state the truth about climate catastrophe, implement radical measure to halt carbon emissions by 2025, and empower an independent citizens committee to oversee the termination of our 150-year binge on fossil fuels. UK-based group Extinction Rebellion has called for nonviolent acts of civil disobedience on April 15 in capitals around the world to reverse our “one-way track to extinction.” Joining Chris Hedges in the second part of a two-part discussion from London is Roger Hallam, the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion.

In this segment of the interview, both participants emphasize the non-violent nature of the protests. I think this is completely naive. They both see the need to be realistic in proposing their strategy of massive non-violence, but in doing so I think they are being unrealistic about the drugged rule of their adversaries.

Throughout my many years of warnings about the threat of extinction, I have always emphasized the drugged nature of our adversaries in the dominant capitalist ruling classes that make up the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire. The organization of the Empire reflects their own makeup of the latest iteration of capitalist rule (neoliberalism): the transnational character of their rule and the globalization of their activities based on the old cornerstone of capitalism--the sanctity of private ownership of the economy using a hierarchical system of authority. Because of this hierarchical system that they necessarily employ, a relatively few people that makeup this ruling class determine how the rest of humans will participate in their societies. Most important of all is that this capitalist system is fundamentally in conflict with our biosphere, but their addiction to power and the basic conflict between capitalism and a sustainable planet prevents them from acknowledging that fact.

I insist that we recognize the drugged nature of these people: they are thoroughly addicted to power that the system of capitalism delivers to them. Addiction is a strong word, but I use it deliberately to indicate the reality of their irrational behavior that is inevitably leading to the extinction of all of us whether capitalist or ordinary people.

The unrealistic nature of the strategy that Hallam is proposing is based on massive participation to shut down the capitalist organization of most of the world's economies. Both Hedges and Hallam wrap themselves in the completely unrealistic righteous clothing of non-violence. But we are not dealing with rational people. We are confronting a very powerful and addicted tiny class of people who have demonstrated over and over that they will stop at nothing to preserve their power. Thus, we must not advocate the violent overthrow of this regime, but be ready as best we can to confront their violence with our own violent power in defense of our objective--a sustainable planet. To do anything less is to accept defeat which means our disappearance from the Earth. We won't have a second chance at devising a new strategy. We must put everything into this effort to save ourselves if we want to continue our very existence as a human species.