The global war on journalism

Click here to access article by Mike Head from World Socialist Web Site. 

By targeting journalists, as well as the individuals leaking the damning information, the Australian government is directly following the lead of the Trump administration’s charging of Assange, a journalist and publisher, with 17 counts under the US Espionage Act, for which he faces life imprisonment and possibly the death penalty.

The Trust Project: Big Media and Silicon Valley’s Weaponized Algorithms Silence Dissent

Click here to access article by Whitney Webb from MintPress News. (This post was by Caren, an activist from Titanic Lifeboat Academy. She kindly offered to write the introduction for me when my computer was not functioning yesterday.  As you can see, it is much better than I could have done.)

Whitney Webb's exhaustive examination of intelligence agencies' infiltrating and dominating capitalist mainstream "news" is the latest effort to expose this symbiosis. From Carl Bernstein's 1977 Rolling Stone cover story, to Der Spiegel journalist Udo Ulfkotte's 2017 book which has been fully censored in the West, to William Arkin's ("Top Secret America") year-end email which Glenn Greenwald recapped January 3, 2019 in The Intercept, to the entire career and martyrdom of Julian Assange, valiant attempts have been made to alert a sleeping public to the fact that money/power will protect itself by controlling news, what passes for "truth" and "reality," and the behavior of the people who consume both.  Webb's article focuses on their latest weapon designed to make thinking easier by doing it for you:  a refined, Orwellian-titled Prop-or-Not upgrade called The Trust Project.

Superbugs in the Anthropocene: A Profit-Driven Plague

Click here to access article by Ian Angus from Monthly Review.

The subject of superbugs is not new, but this author explains why such antibiotic-resistant bugs have appeared. 

Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) is a global health crisis driven by a pharmaceutical and health care system that puts profit before people. In addition to devastating climate change, the Anthropocene may be defined by epidemics that medicine cannot cure.

But this was not inevitable. As Angus further explains:

Those who hailed the first antibiotics as miracle drugs were not wrong. What those chemicals could have been was a way to work with nature, to use natural processes to overcome diseases that had plagued us for thousands of years. Used with appropriate humility and careful stewardship, in conjunction with a global drive to eradicate the conditions that cause infectious diseases, penicillin and its successors could have been boons to humanity for centuries. But that would have required a radically different economy and society.

With ruling capitalist classes' obsession to obtain profits instead of human welfare, such a result was inevitable along with all the other assaults on our habitat that has produced the threats of climate destabilization, environmental pollution, and species extinctions.

Capitalism always operates in the short term and its defenders always insist that new technology will solve any problems that might arise. For several decades, antibiotics seemed to confirm that superstition—for every drug that stopped working, new ones were discovered. But that did not last. The early discoveries were low-hanging fruit and searching the higher branches has been hard and largely unsuccessful.

Mainstream economists like to claim that the market solves all—if there is a need, customer demand will produce solutions. But today, when bacteria have found ways to resist every available antibiotic, most pharmaceutical companies have abandoned the search for others. Not because new antibiotics would not be profitable, but because they would not be profitable enough. Big Pharma makes double-digit profits from drugs it sells for thousands of dollars a dose to patients who must take them frequently for many years. Antibiotics just do not fit that business model.

Video: “Plutocracy V: Subterranean Fire”. Capitalism and the Historical Trampling of the Working Class

Click here to access this article by Kim Petersen and a nearly two hour film that portrays accurately the true history of workers in the USA. (This post has been forwarded to me by an alert activist.)

This history has been expunged from history classes in public schools and probably most private schools. If you want to recover what our capitalist masters have censored from our worker history, you simply must view this film.

Articles recommended for Wednesday, June 5, 2019

• Unstable polar glaciers lose ice ever faster by Tim Radford from Climate News Network.

• [Small investor] Americans Should Be Gravely Concerned with this Wall Street Court Case by Pam Martens and Russ Martens from their blog Wall Street on Parade.

• Media Gloats About Censoring Opinions of 37% of Americans by Ted Rall from The Unz Review.

• More Police Raids As War On Journalism Escalates Worldwide by Australian Caitlin Johnstone from her blog. 

• Rachel Maddow's Full Meltdown Over Julian Assange! featuring satiric comedian Lee Camp on RT (via YouTube) ridiculing America's favorite mainstream pundit, Rachel Maddow.

Dr. McPherson explains AME at Open Secrets Book Store, San Rafael, CA April 23, 2019

Listen via YouTube his nearly 82 minute address and some questions that he responds to:

The ecosocialist path to 1.5°C sustainability

Click here to access article by Richard Smith from Real-World Economics Review Blog. (I wrote up an extensive commentary on this article, but lost it somehow. This is the reason for this rather late post.)

Here is the latest article by Smith who has co-founded System Change not Climate Change and whose work entitled "Capitalism and the Destruction of Life on Earth: Six Theses on Saving the Humans" forms one the basic foundations for my blog (the other is Power and Powerlessness by Susan Rosenthal). 

Because Dr. Richard Smith is a specialist in the physical sciences and having been educated at an American university, he is limited in his understanding of what it takes to overthrow a well-entrenched social-economic system and the ruling class that benefits from it. If after reading his article, you still believe that the ruling capitalist class will accept his proposals, I have a bridge to sell you (def.). 

I am convinced that our ruling masters have been so addicted to their system which has delivered to them so much power and wealth that they are completely unfit to accept such proposals and act on them. The dire environmental threats we are now facing were well-known to them in the 1970s, and since then our masters have only promised to do something much like an alcoholic who promises to quit drinking (alcoholic beverages). It was clear to many activists in the 1970s that only a revolution could save humans; and I held out hope that the events in the 1960s and 70s (the numerous assassinations, the Anti-Vietnam War Movement, Civil Rights Movement, etc) would enable a revolutionary movement to form and grow. Obviously this did not happen. 

Then I began a blog 10 years ago posting articles that I imagined might alarm people sufficiently to create a revolutionary movement. That did not happen. All we have now are the Extinction Rebellion and the Green New Deal movements; and as revealed by Cory Morningstar in her excellent series entitled "The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg", these movements are led by capitalists or their agents to insure that the rising chorus of environmental concern does not interfere with "business as usual", and hopefully will provide even greater opportunities for more products, such as electric cars, in order to reap ever greater profits and power.

As I have recently quoted Karl Rove, a prime influential in the Bush Jr. administration, it reveals the secret to the capitalist success to maintain their rule in spite of the fact that it can only end in the extinction as humans and many other species:

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

Rove means by this quote that the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire has created an updated version of fascism that includes the ubiquitous control of all significant ideological institutions by infiltrating agents in all media corporations, academia, and even Hollywood to create our understanding of the world--a comprehensive false consciousness. Now most people are led around like dumb sheep into the chutes of nuclear war annihilation or into the nightmare of climate destabilization. Honestly, when I look at all the facts, they won! But, as we shall soon see, it is a Pyrrhic victory.

The Dismemberment Of Yugoslavia 20 Years On

Click here to access article by R. S. Ahthion (he is clearly British) from Medium.

Little did the American people, who were busy amusing themselves with distractions, know that this well-doused in self-serving propaganda campaign to justify the attack on Yugoslavia in 1999 by using NATO's air force, would be the start of much more aggressive campaigns in other countries and to secure their control of the energy-rich Middle East. (But first our masters had to arrange for the 9/11 project to be accomplished to put ordinary Americans in a fighting mood.) He continues on to reveal the hypocrisies and lies of the justifying propaganda campaign.

Later Ahthion argues that "market socialism" and Yugoslavia's ties to the neoliberal institutions like the IMF and World Bank weakened and prepared the way for this nation's destruction by the Empire's army, NATO. (He refers to the Empire using the bland phrase "western nations".) He also argues that after the Soviet Union disintegrated, the directorate of the capitalist Empire ("western nations") arrogantly began more aggressive campaigns to rule the world. They no longer needed Yugoslavia to counter the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia's brand of socialism had to be destroyed. And, as they say, the rest is history.

US-Iran: Inverted Reality, Real War

Click here to access article by Tony Cartalucci from New Eastern Outlook. 

In an article packed with important links that support his thesis that the USA is engaging in actions that will lead to a real war while serving up propaganda that is loaded with lies. Well, as a well-acknowledged imperialist advisor to Bush, Jr., Karl Rove, once admitted that the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire was in the propaganda business of creating realities while pursing the domination of the world:

We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

In other, more succinct words, as a dominant actor in the capitalist world, and their ubiquitous control of nearly all media, our imperial masters will create realities that powerless critics can only study and react to.

The Unrelenting State

Click here to access article by Craig Murray (British) from his blog.

I have been led to believe that the Empire's tenable and increasing tenuous position is expressing itself in the controllers of this Empire to increase their desperate attempts via their disinformation agents to crush those who, like Assange, have broken through their fabricated "realities" and published accounts online that totally deconstructed their "realities".

Signs of Assange's decreasing health while in the custody of the British government may be a perfect example of the desperation that is driving governments of the Empire to use extreme measures. Murray appears convinced that this is the case with Assange.

I confess to feeling an amount of personal relief after his arrest that at least he would now get proper medical treatment. However there now seems to be no intention to provide that and indeed since he has been in Belmarsh his health problems have accelerated. I witnessed enough of the British state’s complicity in torture to know that this may be more than just the consequence of unintended neglect. That the most lucid man I know is now not capable of having a rational conversation is extremely alarming.