Note: I am planning a first road trip to the US east coast probably immediately after Labor Day, September 6, from my home in southern Minnesota. (Most of my adult life was on the west coast.) If any of you regular followers would like to meet me on this road trip, I will try to accommodate you in my itinerary. The arrangement would at least consist of a brief meeting over a beverage of your choice at a location near you or at your home. Please contact me if this interests you at my email address: goatmeal36@yahoo.com. Ron H.
- Sen. Ron Johnson: 5 Questions for FDA About Pfizer Vaccine Approval from Children's Health Defense.
- Will You Love Your Servitude? by Dr. Joseph Mercola from Waking Times.
- 💥The System Isn’t Broken, It’s Fixed by Mickey Z. from Dissident Voice (based in Canada but independent and international in scope). This is a best post.
If you declare “the system is broken,” just about everyone will agree with you for one reason or another. But what if it’s not broken? What if it’s running exactly as it’s designed to run? A minuscule percentage of humans make the rules and thus reap virtually all the material rewards. The rest of us suppress our desires, our individuality, and our dreams in the name of survival — in its most meager sense. We’re wounded and intimidated into submission, too programmed and fearful to even think about rebellion… let alone solidarity with all the other victims.
- Can Human Solidarity Globalize? from Great Transition Initiative. (Note: This is a complex post starting with Richard Falk's essay, followed by panels (Debating the Prospects and Making It Happen) each of which offers other essays in response to Falk's essay. I obviously haven't had time to read each one so I don't know if anyone offers important insights--I'll leave that up to you.)
- Military Contractor CACI Says Afghanistan Withdrawal Is Hurting Its Profits. It's Funding a Pro-War Think Tank. By Sarah Lazare from In These Times.
- Afghanistan and the Sham of Democracy Promotion by Jim Bovard from The Libertarian Institute.
- US-China relations at crossroads by M. K. Bhadrakumar from his weblog Indian Punchline.
It is an open secret that the defeated ISIS fighters were airlifted from Syria by what is known in local folklore as Daesh Airlines who are today the cutting edge of the ISIS-K. Hamid Karzai himself has spoken about unmarked helicopters under cover of darkness dropping strangers in remote areas. And this when the Afghan airspace was under NATO control!
- Venezuela’s Gangs Have Been Turned into Armed Capitalist Enterprises by Adriana Gregson & Andrés Antillano from Internationalist 360°. My commentary follows:
This post is about how criminal enterprises grow inside of a societal institution resembling "legitimate" capitalist enterprises. As a social system capitalism differentiated people into two basic
classes: those who owned property and those that did not. Later capitalist
societies developed into various classes depending on the extended families'
relationship to the ownership of property, and created gross inequality among the various classes in terms of material well-being and societal influence. This inevitably poses questions about the capitalist system itself: are capitalist enterprises legitimate in the broadest sense (def. #2).
This article is by two criminologists in crime-ridden Venezuela. The two authors describe the development of criminal organization as roughly following four steps:
1) Being a bad, daring, reckless, brave, or evil kid was the way of
“being someone” for a person who has no other chance of a decent job or
access to schooling that may allow them to improve their living
conditions. These characteristics are valued in these excluded
territories.
2) ... gangs are turned into criminal enterprises
that function just as a company would, with a logic of capitalist
accumulation, surplus investment, recruiting more workers to lower
costs, reinvest and expand. We observe a change in the nature of gangs
that have become instrumental enterprises, mainly concentrated in
illicit markets with managerial rationality. They are armed capitalist
enterprises.
3) As a result of police violence and mass
imprisonment, many gangs shifted from being gangs that were pitted
against other gangs to organizations that began to effectively control
the drug market and territory. Predatory crimes came down and the gang
in the area dedicated itself to selling drugs or other more complicated
activities such as extortion, extortion in informal mines, the issue of
the border, etc.
4) ... the gang began to develop armed
resistance capabilities, yielding the ability to negotiate with the
state. This is another transformation that was alien to criminals
before. Traditional criminals did not negotiate because it was a matter
of reputation: “I don’t care if they kill me.” Now, gang leaders are
able to sit down with so-and-so to pay him or to negotiate politically:
“we guarantee that there will be peace here, there will be no violence,
but you will not enter.” This demonstrates an effective, successful
capacity to establish negotiations that had been alien to the
traditional criminal logic.
But as we see in the USA, numerous criminal organizations have taken another step by merging into ruling capitalist classes and become "legitimate" (def. #1). This US phenomenon was dealt with at length by Oreskes and Conway in their book Merchants of Doubt. This latter phenomenon lends greater emphasis to the profound question of whether capitalist societies are legitimate.
- The Importance of Arctic Sea Ice featuring the views of Prof. (retired) Guy McPherson, an independent
scientist (via his YouTube channel--09:29m), who has fearlessly focused
his attention throughout his career on the climate crisis.
