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

Sunday, January 24, 2021

Posts that I especially recommend today: Sunday, January 24, 2021

  • That’s All Folks! by CJ Hopkins, a master satirist who offers his take on the exit of Pres. Trump from the White House and related matters.  
  • Catherine Austin Fitts on The State of Our Currencies featuring James Corbett and Catherine Austin Fitts discussing solutions at a high level of abstraction via 33:34m video from The Corbett Report. My reaction: I don't normally post such discussions, but this post sounds so promising. Because their discussion is such a high level of abstraction, I can't understand most of what they are talking about. Can you? But I will be patient and wait for further clarification.
In this article Ehret is doing an obvious parody of a "deprogrammed" Trump supporter which is showing signs of becoming the latest fake theme in today's "news" provided by media corporations in America (see also this post). 
Matthew Ehret is developing of following. He is becoming a "political genius" by increasing numbers of acolytes of America and abroad. He joins a list of several other "geniuses" (James Corbett, Derrick Broze, etc.) of American politics who are proposing to lead the way out of the political mess the country is in. Ehret's articles are posted on popular critical websites like Strategic Culture Foundation and Fort Russ News (the latter appears to be posting exclusively his articles). Let me be clear--I don't share this current fawning and fashionable trend. I occasionally post articles authored by these people that shed some light on current problems. Although these "geniuses" function as good critics of American politics, they don't offer any effective solutions to this growing crisis of capitalist rule.
Ehret is another carefully guided well-read person whose mind has been prepared by 75 years of Empire "education" that forbade any reference to Marxist thought or ideas. In 1963 I graduated from a major university with a BA degree in political sociology, but I was never assigned a reading by Marx or Marxist oriented writers! I had to use the university's library to read such literature.
  • Faces of Lockdowns by Amelia Janaskie, Jenin Younes, and Taleed Brown from American Institute for Economic Research. (Note: This post features three people from New York City who comment (via video) about the effects of the pandemic on the people they serve and on themselves. None of the three videos are longer than 12:04m. If this interested you, you may also be interested in a video on how the lockdown is affecting French students.)
Although ordinary people in this article credit Hugo Chávez for their communal structure, I think that such people should be credited for the realization of bottom-up control of their nation of Venezuela come true. They have been severely tested by the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire and have passed the test.
In a two week visit in late 2005 in which we visited various communes and listening to officials, I wasn't impressed by their support. I don't think that the bureaucrats that were appointed by Chavez truly believed that such a project was possible--even Chavez didn't take the communal structure seriously enough. Chavez too often used the communal structure as a political base for his elections, and I found some of the officials in his government unaware of the details of the communal structure. My commentary in 2010 reveals my doubts about the Venezuelan radical experiment.

But thanks to ordinary people like Lemus and Sifontes, the nation is on the way to implementing the dreams of Chavez and the people of Venezuela.
Gen Z activists worldwide are answering a call to arms, as climate change continues to be a looming existential threat. Biologist and author of “The Gen Z Emergency” Dr. Reese Halter explains how our click-happy consumer culture has fueled the decline of global ecosystems. The youth of 2021 are taking matters into their own hands, acknowledging the failures of their predecessors to combat ecological extinction events.
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