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, August 24, 2019

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Ruling class magazine censors all articles covering the Epstein scandals

By Ron Horn

While reading Whitney Webb's excellent article this morning, the thought occurred to me that I should look at the coverage of the Epstein scandals by Vanity Fair, the monthly magazine that the rich ruling class like to read because their coverage is largely devoted to flattering them, their culture, and the latest gossip among members of their class. 

Recall that I commented on the use of censorship to identify the coverage of events that our ruling capitalist class wants us to know (whether engineered or not). Also, in my post of Brenner's article he was astounded by the coverage provided by media corporations of the Epstein scandals:
Why have the howls of outrage not echoed through the media? Why has the trumpet’s call to action been silent?  Why haven’t the halls of Congress resounded with denunciation and the demands for justice.[?]
Then I read Elizabeth Voss's article. Ultimately these memories and Voss's article led me inexorably to examining Vanity Fair's coverage of this scandal. I looked first in their August online issue and then on their September issue which has just come out. Nada! (def.#4) It appears that because Epstein had so many friends in the ruling class that they chose not to embarrass them by (not) covering this major scandal. 

Friday, August 23, 2019

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The Missing Howls of Denunciation Over Major Sex Trafficking

Click here to access article by Michael Brenner from Consortium News.

Brenner is confused by the differential treatment in the Epstein affair, and has no answer for his own questions: 
Why have the howls of outrage not echoed through the media? Why has the trumpet’s call to action been silent?  Why haven’t the halls of Congress resounded with denunciation and the demands for justice.[?]
Well, let me offer a answer. Those of you who have been following my blog already know the answer, so my answer will be for all the others. 

My answer will provide a key answer to most of the world's problems, and the Epstein story, and the way it is being handled, will provide an excellent illustration of the primacy of social-economic class.

The factor of social-economic class determines so much of our existence, and accounts for so many problems we are faced with. That is precisely why ordinary people, after grasping the real nature of their problems, have gone on to organize revolutions against their ruling classes. And, this is the fundamental reason why academics, promoted by the ruling class, have frequently aided in the suppression of this factor.

The French Revolution and the Russian Revolution are prime examples. Both were ultimately contaminated within and destroyed from without. In the former case, the revolution was directed against the aristocracy and monarchy. The French Revolution contained the embryonic capitalist class of people who, with their superior education and skills, eventually dominated the revolution and took control of it. This class were also aided by Germany, who invaded France during the Revolution. In the case of the Russian Revolution, the new socialist revolutionaries were hampered by the necessity of relying upon educated/trained people, who had largely aristocratic and bourgeois class affiliations, in government positions. But a major factor in the ultimate deterioration of their Revolution was the constant opposition by the existing capitalist nations, including military invasions. This resulted in a deformed ruling class of bureaucrats, and eventually led to the collapse of the socialist experiment in the Soviet Union. To sum up, history during the past roughly 10,000 years has been overwhelmingly determined by class struggles. This view is the contribution of Marxists whose teachings have been thoroughly suppressed contemporary capitalist societies for obvious reasons.  

This Epstein event furnishes us with a prime example of this phenomenon. Benner's exposes the startling inconsistency of treatment in this crime which involved members of the ruling class. The legitimate issue of inequality regarding certain segments (women, gender identity, etc.) of contemporary societies have been used by the ruling capitalist class primarily as distractions from the recent gross crimes committed by the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire. Because Epstein served the ruling class by furnishing them with overt and virtual sex slaves, such crimes have been ignored in past; and if they succeed with the Epstein event, they will quash any substantive punishment for those members of the ruling class who participated in these crimes. 

Thursday, August 22, 2019

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  • A GI Rebellion: When Soldiers Said No to War by Steve Early from CounterPunch. (After WWII our ruling class masters accelerated the use of academics to re-write our history. This post represents an attempt to restore one segment of our history.)

House Niggers Mutiny

Click here to access article by Israel Shamir from The Unz Review.

Shamir uses the insightful concept invented by Malcolm X (Google which "owns" YouTube has removed a better video) to explain how and why ordinary people often identify with their oppressors. It's because it pays well in terms of wages, careers, perks, etc. I don't for a minute refuse to acknowledge that there are legitimate reasons that motivate some of the Hong Kong protesters (as the WSWS website has done); but if they think that aligning themselves with the powerful Hong Kong billionaires will ultimately be good for them, they are severely deluded. There are always legitimate reasons for some members of the working class to join these protests, and subversive agents of the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire always cynically use such reasons to recruit people to participate in protests. 

Nowadays, one of the ways to identify such cynical actions by our masters is to notice which events their media corporations cover. When they provided so much coverage of the "color revolutions" in Egypt, Ukraine, and the rest, they did this because the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire's subversive organizations, like their CIA and NGOs, wanted to destabilize such countries and install more favorable regimes in terms of the geopolitical interests of the capitalist Empire. Hence there has been no coverage in major media (that I've seen) about the 40 weeks of ongoing protests in France against the austerity measures of that government, but there has been extensive coverage of the Hong Kong protests for obvious reasons. 

Monday, August 19, 2019

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Woodstock and the American counter-culture

Click here to access article by Philip Ferguson from Redline (New Zealand).  (updated to a limited extent)

I was astonished at the accuracy of the description of  the American counter-culture that grew out of the Beat culture of the 1950s and continued with the hippie culture throughout the 70s and a bit beyond. (I was near or in San Francisco for much of the hippie counter-culture scene.) I, who had been influenced by Marxist writers, often wondered about how this essentially cultural movement could be harnessed to challenge the existing class structure in the USA. As it turned out, the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements only radicalized some fringe movements like the Black Panthers and Weather Underground

It seems now, which I often suspected then, that the ruling capitalist class was sufficiently powerful to contain this counter-cultural rebellion within certain limits. Certainly the Anti-Vietnam War Movement was somewhat helpful in bringing the war to an end, but that is the extent that imperialist capitalist ruling class was thwarted in the USA. Most of the energy that fueled this movement was the draft which at that time required every young man to participate in the war, except for those with draft deferments. 

One must keep in mind that after WWII the very intact US economy was booming, and our ruling class shared its benefits, to a limited extent, with its worker wage-slaves. During the Vietnam War, in order to pacify US citizens, our masters sustained our economy with the Guns and Butter program. However, the Vietnam War nearly bankrupted the nation after our capitalist masters lost this costly effort to re-establish the US Empire's domination of southeast Asia. But under the growing US/Anglo/Zionist Empire and their neoliberal strategy, our masters survived and flourished, and went on to fill our atmosphere with carbon and commit many other crimes against humanity in their mad pursuit of profits and power.

Such a historical view influenced me recently to view the movement of human history as being primarily materialist in the philosophical sense (this was what Marx was trying to do). Over my lifetime I was primarily interested in determining the reality of our class system of capitalism in order to use it to attack the system and liberate a true democracy. But this was an idealist view of reality. Now using a materialist view of human events suggests that human extinction is the inevitable fate of humans. Because the operations of capitalist countries, mostly under the domination of the Empire, has so loaded the Earth's atmosphere with carbon that despite any efforts that humans might make in the future, I'm convinced this fate is now baked-in (def.). Fortunately, I won't be around to see most of the calamities that lie ahead.

At 4°C of warming, would a billion people survive? What scientists say.

Click here to access article by David Spratt from his weblog Climate Code Red (Australia).

Read the article, but I especially want to direct you attention to the video included in the article showing an interview with Roger Hallam, the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion that is so active in Britain, conducted by a talking head of the BBC, a major media corporation, that hires this person to suppress the messages of such people as Hallam simply because their messages might interfere with capitalist operations. You will automatically see that the talking head performs his assignment well by constantly asking red-baiting questions and interrupting Hallam who tries to answer them. 

The questions of BBC's talking head--it doesn't matter what is name is because there are thousands of working people who are willing to sell their soul and their children's future by taking his place in order to enjoy a decent salary and perks--are filled with all kinds of capitalist ruling class sorts of language in order to impose a false meaning on reality: "democracy" as the nature of our governance and leading questions which might provoke answers that will discredit Hallam in the eyes of people who have been thoroughly indoctrinated (inoculated) against any kind of ideas that might threaten capitalism. 

As an employee (wage slave of the ruling class) the talking head is directed to do this in defense of the ruling class's exclusive rights of ownership of economic property (capitalism) versus the survival needs of the powerless wage slaves. It is clear that our masters in the ruling class are so thoroughly addicted to power and wealth, which act like powerful drugs, that they must suppress such voices as Hallam in the ruling class's fake version of democracy (bourgeois democracy).

Sunday, August 18, 2019

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