Monday, March 29, 2021

Posts that I especially recommend for Monday, March 29, 2021

  • How the Rich Distort Politics by Rod Driver from his weblog Elephants in the Room. My reaction: Read this if you still have doubts about the sustainability of capitalism.
  • It’s Time to Bust the Tech Talent Pipeline by Isobel van Hagen from Current Affairs. (Note: Read this article if you want to know about the latest CIA effort to recruit young students into serving the capitalist ruling class's Big Tech corporations.)
Palantir, the CIA-backed software startup, provides near-omniscient “crime-predicting” military surveillance for U.S. intelligence operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. It has also built technology accused of creating racist feedback loops in “predictive policing” software. The company, which recently went public, was co-founded by Peter Thiel—the Trump-backing venture capitalist billionaire who, in a display of comic book-style villainy, literally wants to inject himself with young people’s blood.
Shea's argument is correct that the CIA's Western firewall is complete in the sense that they control all major organs of media corporations and that they will use this giant propaganda machine, combined with AI, to ever greater efforts to confuse people and propagandize people within the USA and throughout the world. 
 
However, I disagree with his allegiance to Stalinism and his identification of the latter with Marxism/Leninism. Stalinism is a worn-out version of Marxism-Leninism which created a bureaucratic class under Joseph Stalin's paranoid control in the Soviet Union.  
 
The Russian people saved themselves from being slaves of capitalism under the control of German Nazis which were strongly supported by international capitalists. This is the basic reason that his type of rule ended with his death and all pretensions of working class control vanished with Stalin's disappearance. With the failure of the classic fascist nations in WWII, mostly English-speaking capitalists emerged and organized their own fascist empire after the war under the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire.
 
However, the peoples of Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and all the exploited peoples of planet Earth have risen from the ashes of WWII to confront this powerful, hegemonic Empire, and it looks like they are going to win. But their win will be a Pyrrhic victory because the victors will then face the onslaught of a destabilizing climate. The latter will result in the inability to support human and most other life forms due to the devastation of the environment and, finally, the destabilization of the climate caused by capitalist rule over the past several centuries.
 
The strength of this article is in the descriptions of the fact that the CIA has taken over the control of major media corporations and has turned them into a media of 24/7 Empire propaganda. 
This article contains one expression of Russian and China fantasies, but totally ignores the reality of the climate crisis. 
 
After WWII some nations which had devastated economies and other underdeveloped nations rose under the difficulties of the Cold War to form mixed economies which combined forms of capitalist enterprises under the guidance and supervision of socialist ruling classes. China was a prime example and the first to combine the two systems. These were compromises that suited the advanced capitalists of the Empire because they initially were able to profit from China's cheap labor. The Soviet Union soon collapsed and reformed with a largely mixed economy, and the two nations led the way to lead all other nations wanting to be independent from the burdens of serving exclusively the nations of the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire.
 
China and Russia are leaders of this mixed economy movement throughout the world, but I believe they are indulging in fantasies of their own much like the more purely capitalist countries of the Empire. Although members of both ruling classes are expressing more concern about the developing destabilization of the climate, they are both pursuing capitalist development policies. Thus, those nations of the Empire have their Great Reset fantasy; but Russia and China have other fantasies that largely ignore the developing climate crisis, but necessary for their dedication of independence from the hegemonic Empire.