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, January 11, 2022

Posts that I especially recommend for Tuesday, January 11, 2022

  • The Dark Secret History of Capitalism featuring Lee Camp, a comedian, that concentrates the history of capitalism in 9 minutes and 48 minutes while occasionally injecting humor from RT America's channel on YouTube. My reaction: Camp gets away with his expose because YouTube has already impugned RT as sponsored by Russia, the ruling class's enemy number one, while impugning Jimmy Dore as a comedian. Both examples illustrate how YouTube "cancels" any of their influence on you, but both are astute individuals who see what is false about the indoctrination that you receive in educational institutions, Hollywood films, etc. and propaganda shows of the daily "news reporting" by media corporations.
NATO officials have thumbed their noses at Putin’s concern with Russia’s security. Trump’s National Security Advisor and neocon warmonger John Bolton encourages more provocation of Russia, which as Putin has made clear will result in war.

Clearly as 2021 comes to an end, there is no intelligence to be found anywhere in the Western World as all vie to show how tough they are with Russia.

When Putin says Russia has nowhere left to which to retreat, he is telling the idiot West that Russia has reached the extent of its ability to avoid war. “We simply have no room to retreat” means Russia has done all she can do to avoid war and now the Americans must get off Russia’s doorstep.
 
Putin is relying on Biden to show awareness and responsibility and to work for peace by acknowledging Russia’s legitimate security concern. But what if Biden is just a figurehead, and the shots are called by the military/security complex who will go for profits despite the risk that Putin will not back down?
 
What if Washington’s concern is limited to destabilizing Russia in the interest of US hegemony and Russia’s security is precisely what Washington intends to undermine, not secure.
 
My reaction: Roberts knows the Deep State well (see this, this, and this).
The US and organizations including NATO will hold a series of emergency meetings with Russia this week, beginning with Monday's US-Russia meeting in Geneva. Then it moves on to the Russian-NATO Council in Brussels on Wednesday and ends on Thursday's meeting in Vienna at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
 
My reaction: If the Global Times reflects the thinking of the Chinese Communist Party, as some major writers have argued, the Chinese government, in the world's most populous nation, sympathizes with Russia. This is the second most popular article from this source--behind a news item that an earthquake destroyed a section of the Great Wall. For they (China) have experienced similar threats, and they, too, have been painted as an "enemy" by the aggressive growing encroachment of the US/British/Zionist Empire. 
 
The Chinese Communist Party recognizes that the right-wing aggressive capitalist cabal, which took control of the USA after WWII using mostly the highly secretive CIA, has matured into a Nazi-like hegemon, which is in its last desperate stages, with their long sought after goal of ruling the world. As such, the Empire has recently unleashed multiple fronts in this undeclared war: a pandemic led by their corruption of the UN's World Health Organization (WHO) in the hope of damaging the Chinese economy (and some other purposes), the ever-expanding NATO bases adjacent to Russia, a barrage of economic sanctions against anyone who refuses to submit to their Empire diktats, and a variety of subversive acts designed to topple governments of the latter and replace them with more compliant governments as they did in Ukraine. We are, indeed, living in dangerous times! 
  • A Little Bit Of My Talking Head. By Andrei Martyanov, a emigrant from Russia, who is a reputed expert on weapons systems and recommended by Pepe Escobar, from his weblog Reminiscence of the Future.... (Note: I used the "CC" button of this post to access a machine translation of what he said via his channel on YouTube--I understood most of it. The video lasts until about 17:50 followed by a pitch for more support.)
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the U.S.-led Western powers became deluded with arrogant entitlement. As Krainer points out, the Western empire-builders presumed to have the right to wage wars and flout international law. For much of the past three-decade period, Russia was too weak economically and politically to challenge this reckless aggression. But now it has grown strong enough to “check-mate the empire’s global ambitions”. This is why war or regime change in Russia has become an obsessive goal for the U.S. and Western partners. It accounts for the relentless sanctions, Russophobia and surge in tensions over Ukraine and more recently Kazakhstan.

Russia is perceived as an obstacle to Western control over the strategically vital Eurasian continent. The prize of Eurasia has long been coveted by Western imperialists, from the British Empire’s Sir Halford Mackinder to the U.S. strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski.
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