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

Tuesday, November 16, 2021

Posts that I especially recommend for Tuesday, November 16, 2021

As an NHS hospital doctor, I have had a front-row seat as the drama of the coronavirus pandemic has unfolded. It has been a year and a half of confusion, frustration and anger for me as I’ve watched our profession drawn into complicity with what I anticipate will be regarded as one of the most egregious public health disasters in history.

I have watched as ‘the science’ has been presented on the national stage flanked by Union Jack flags as an unassailable truth.
While the bill is being touted as $1 trillion devoted to rebuilding roads, bridges, airports and seaports, as well as expanding rural broadband and providing other necessary repairs to crumbling physical infrastructure, only $550 billion is new money. The rest was already appropriated last year under the Trump administration and is being redirected.

In terms of the actual infrastructure needs of a modern, 21st century society, the bill provides only a drop in the bucket. The $1 trillion is spread out over ten years, for an average of only $100 billion a year, far less than the typical infrastructure legislation for roads and bridges alone in previous decades.
Darkness descends over civilization and freedom. It flows not from any external threat but from within the human heart. We are beings capable of happiness and flourishing, but sometimes we push our fears and anxieties into the shadows. There they fester. And from those deep psychological bowers, fear and anxiety reemerge transformed.
 
To live right now, then, is to live in paradox. Despite conditions of relative peace and abundance, a psychosocial pathology has taken hold. It manifests itself as something like a replacement religion. Where people once turned to their temples and communities for reassurance, more turn now to political authority.
One has to wonder who exactly selected someone as toxic as Victoria Nuland to go to Russia, but worse was to come after her return to America. Any Putin-Biden summit meeting is now less likely than it was several weeks ago as right after Nuland’s departure for the United States, the bilateral relationship worsened. The NATO headquarters in Brussels declared several Russian diplomats ‘personae non gratae’, and the Russian Foreign Ministry responded to the provocation by sending home all NATO representatives present at diplomatic missions in Russia. In response back in the United States, the media and some Congressmen and Biden Administration officials immediately began to press forward with their plans to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, a vital or even existential issue for Russia that guarantees to scuttle any attempts to actually improve relations. And the White House continues to make a bad situation worse by suggesting that it has an obligation to “defend Ukraine.”

So why was CIA Director William Burns in Moscow and what did he accomplish? God only knows! 
  • Hate speech and misinformation in Ethiopia’s war from Al Jazeera (to 11:25). My reaction: In their efforts to balance the reporting, Al Jazeera tries to express both sides. However, notice that the reported fake news is funded by US-based corporations like CNN, Facebook, and Twitter. Even the Ethiopian journalist Nima Elbagir is employed by CNN. (Let me remind you that Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the UN's WHO, is from the northern Tigray province of Ethiopia. Coincidence? I think not. Here is one commentary on the WHO chief.)                                  
                                                                     Map of Ethiopia
https://www.worldatlas.com/r/w960-q80/upload/60/6f/d7/regional-states-of-ethiopia-map.png
If you to understand this article, you must know about the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine, an important doctrine of the Pentagon and a major driving force shaping US foreign policies. Fortunately, Meyssan has explained that topic also. In May of this year, he posted an article (The Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine) exploring this topic in which he wrote the following:
 
The final word on the project was in the "Office of Force Transformation," created by Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon in the days following the 9/11 attacks. It was occupied by Admiral Arthur Cebrowski. This famous strategist had been the designer of the computerization of the armed forces [5]. One could believe that this Office was a way to finish his work. But no one disputed this reorganization anymore. No, he was there to transform the mission of the U.S. armed forces, as the few recordings of his lectures in military academies attest.

Arthur Cebrowski spent three years lecturing to all senior U.S. officers, thus to all current general officers. The target determined by Admiral Cebrowski is not only the "wider Middle East", but all regions not integrated into the globalized economy.

What he was teaching was quite simple. The world economy was becoming globalized. To remain the world’s leading power, the United States had to adapt to financial capitalism. The best way to do this was to ensure that developed countries could exploit the natural resources of poor countries without political obstacles.
 
Ordinary Americans must understand the objective of the original cabal in 1940 which I have elaborated on in this article. But if you don't trust my judgment, you surely must trust Prof. Stephen Wertheim, a historian at Columbia University, who recently wrote a book entitled Tomorrow, the World that provided details of a 1940 conspiracy. They were right-wing ruling class figures, ensconced in the Council on Foreign Relations and the State Department, and swearing to secrecy their launch of a project destined to make the USA the dominate force in the world. Because today they are so confident about their powers of control, they have now released a book openly announcing and celebrating this achievement.
 
I argue that ordinary thinking Americans must understand this decades-long project of the ruling capitalist class in order to understand many of the issues of today, including especially the Covid pandemic, the decimation of workers and a large sector of the middle class, and their mad continuation of aggressive policies which may lead to a nuclear war conflagration. 
 
With this book, the capitalist class has declared victory over their sleepy and sleeping subjects--ordinary Americans. They have so manipulated and distracted public opinion with their ownership/control of major media and entertainment corporations that they have neutralized ordinary Americans while they pursued the goal of global supremacy. Only the ecological forces of this planet can oppose and defeat them, and they will soon with the destabilization of the Earth's climate.
Amid the deepening climate crisis, it has become increasingly clear that capitalism is not only the root of the problem, but it also offers no viable solutions. Police cracked down on those that bore the clarion call “socialism or extinction”.
The United Nations COP26 Glasgow Climate Pact signed on November 14 is another confirmation of what we learned in Durban in 2011, at the 17th UN climate summit. As expressed by Indigenous activist Ta’Kaiya Blaney (from the Tla A’min Nation in western Canada): ‘COP26 is a performance. It is an illusion constructed to save the capitalist economy rooted in resource extraction and colonialism.’ 
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