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

Monday, July 20, 2020

Posts that I especially recommend today: Monday, July 20, 2020

Although this article concentrates on one bank, it is clear that the author only points to Goldman Sachs as an example of major banks and corporations in the USA as an example of the wide effects on different social-economic classes in the USA, "the land of the free and the home of the brave".
Although I am aware of the social and economic inequalities of my existance in the USA, I learned much more from reading a book entitled The Capitalists of the 21st Century. I also learned that I was unaware of the full extent that transnational capitalists have enriched and empowered themselves at the expense of ordinary US citizens. And, the same is becoming true to citizens throughout the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire. 
When you read this book, you will learn about major self-serving capital organizers--BlackRock appears to be the worst--that have owned governments throughout the Empire, regard corporations as commadities to bet on in their casino on Wall Street, that have created news corpoations as propaganda organs, and as a result are imposing enormous suffering on ordinary people. This book explains why top members of this ruling class regard ordinary people, who they have brainwashed and lied to (the biggest lie is that they pretend to care about our health), as "dumb fucks" and "deplorables". These "giant vampire squids" that have tentacles in all our institutions are quite different from the major corporations and banks that ruled most of the world in the 20th century. 
I won't do a review of the book because Norbert Häring has already done this for me, but I have added it to my recommended list of books and I urge you to read it.
(Note: To my consternation, my paperback does not include an index, and I am unable to determine if a hardback edition contains an index or not.)
  • CoronaShock and Socialism from Tricontinental and re-posted by Titanic Lifeboat Academy, a sister website. (Note: I thank an activist for alerting me to this fine article.) My reaction: The contrast regarding the effects of the coronavirus pandemic in other countries with mixed economies to what is happening in the USA is stark. Not only people in these countries are suffering very limited effects of the virus, but they are not suffering the economic and social effects that people in the advanced capitalist country like the USA are suffering.
Christoforou and Alexander Mercouris assemble the evidence of the Deep State's obsessive effort to remove the Trump administration, but they do not point to a "Deep State", the real government of the USA. They go on in a dramatic fashion to point to "plotters" that are creating an "existential crisis" for the US government and the American people. They miss the greater significance of internecine strife among the capitalist ruling class because the American people voted the wrong way in 2016 for the chief executive officer of the USA. Because of this obsession with Donald Trump, a renegade capitalist who refuses to take orders from the Deep State, the latter are now pursuing a reckless course of action with the Covid-19 pandemic (among other reasons) to undermine his chances for re-election in November's elections.)
The US-Ukraine Foundation hosted notorious neo-Nazi militant Diana Vynohradova in a webinar this month. While legitimizing Ukrainian white supremacists, the think tank has forged close ties with foreign policy elites in Washington. 
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