Wednesday, November 4, 2020

Posts that I especially recommend today: Wednesday, November 4, 2020

  • Shredding journalistic credibility from RT via their YouTube channel. (Note: This post is a video-interview with Matt Taibbi that is largely conducted by Chris Hedges, although the latter sometimes offer his views on the journalistic deterioration of the NY Times (and media in general) about which both agree.) My reaction: This is a perfectly normal development in capitalist societies (because of "growth imperative") which reveals an increasing concentration of ownership of all corporations in fewer hands. So, they should not be surprised or dismayed by a similar develop in media corporations. In other words, the end game of capitalism is a few owners who receive overwhelming power and wealth from their concentration of ownership and control of economic property. This is precisely why such a social-economic class have been sooner or later referred to as a "ruling class".
  • Election Chaos Unfolding Exactly As P̶l̶a̶n̶n̶e̶d̶ Predicted & We’ve EVERY Reason To Question COVID featuring Ryan CristiĆ”n from The Last American Vagabond. (Note: He rants about all the deceptions related to the elections, his own experience with censorship, the pandemic, and various other tricks committed by agents of the ruling class to influence Americans to believe that we live in a just society and have a democracy.  As usual, he offers two formats: an audio presentation and a video presentation, both around one hour. The audio format leaves out the extended silence of the video.) 
My reaction: I don't ever mean to denigrate his efforts, because I think he is genuinely very concerned about these issues and wants to wake us up and also be concerned. The only problem is that, as I written in the past, he takes so much of our time trying to accomplish this. But more importantly, he, as is fashionable nowadays, argues that oligarchy is the problem. This is a very convenient way to obscure the issue of capitalism behind an inevitable result, that is, the rich getting richer ("oligarchy") and the poor getting poorer (and powerless) that such a social-economic system creates. Obscuring this behind "oligarchy", erroneously suggests that we can reform the system (which is responsible for these deceptions) by electing people who will pass legislation that will ensure a more equitable society via regulating corporations, tax policies, etc. Only a recognition that the oligarchy is an inevitable result of the system of capitalism and a ruling class of capitalists, who constantly try to fool us, can we organize effective efforts to change the system by removing private ownership from the present economy, the cornerstone of capitalism, and replace the latter with a system that ensures that the economy sustains us all within the complex web of nature.
  • "Capitalism" Is No Longer Attractive to Capitalists by Charles Hugh Smith from his weblog Of Two Minds. My reaction: He tries to "disown" capitalism by arguing that it has morphed into "monopoly-state-socialism for the wealthy, a kleptocracy incompetently cloaked by a rigged simulacrum market in which risk and losses are transferred to the debt-serfs and tax donkeys and the 'socialism for the rich and powerful' is enforced by a pay-to-play simulacrum democracy and kleptocratic, totalitarian central bank, the Federal Reserve." This development is inevitable, but it is not what he labels as the system. The real system that drives the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire is the end stage of capitalism--fascist capitalism. We're not totally there yet, but it is presently developing into the nightmare of neofascism. His description of the present system as "monopoly-state-socialism for the wealthy" is simply the last stage of capitalism known as fascist capitalism.
  • We're Being Incinerated | Extinction Rebellion UK, a 6:01m video from YouTube's Extinction Rebellion channel. My reaction: I notice that the speaker cannot even name the system when he says at 0:50m "there's a fundamental problem with that socioeconomic system that needs to be sorted". This is a fundamental reason why activists cannot solve major issues such as poverty, ill health, extreme inequality, climate destabilization, etc.
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