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

Monday, April 18, 2022

Posts that I especially recommend for Monday, April 18, 2022

  • Dawn of a New Global Financial System by Pepe Escobar from Covert Geopolitics. (Note: This post includes an introduction and interview with Sergey Glazyev from Covert Geopolitics. (Note: "Special Operation Z" is Russia's name for their current invasion of Ukraine.)
For the past three years he has helmed Moscow’s uber strategic portfolio as minister in charge of integration and macroeconomics of the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU).  
 
Glazyev’s recent intellectual production has been nothing short of transformative, epitomized by his essay “Sanctions and Sovereignty” and an extensive discussion of the new, emerging geo-economic paradigm in an interview with a Russian business magazine. 
  • The Parapolitical Hypothesis from "Apparatchik's" weblog on Medium. My reaction: I don't get that this post is about any "parapolitical hypothesis" unless it is the last paragraph, but the history-summary since WWII the anonymous author presents is far more accurate than ordinary Americans have received since that global war in their education, Hollywood films, and mainstream media. Lacking any real education, ordinary Americans cannot understand the current real issues. This is deliberate on the part of the US ruling capitalist class because they have wanted ordinary Americans ignorant of their real objectives: to rule the entire world. They combined what was left of the British Empire with their intact military-industrial complex to establish a transnational capitalist class to rule much of the world, and they have expanded since by incorporating all European capitalists in their plan. In 1967 the directors of their Empire added right-wing, wealthy Jews by admitting Israel in their conspiracy to rule the world. (Read my articles here and here, and this has been recently confirmed (confessed to) by a Columbia U. professor in his recent book Tomorrow the World.) Russia and China (and allies) are challenging the de-facto US/British/Zionist Empire and their attempt to rule the world in order to establish a multipolar world.
One factor that Johnstone has missed is that our American society is fractured into socioeconomic classes with the self-serving ruling class determining what news to deliver to ordinary people. I put emphasis on "self-serving" because it's a fact demonstrated throughout history and because a ruling class always serve themselves first.

Because the subject of socioeconomic classes has been banished from our consciousness by the ruling capitalist class, we are ignorant of how it determines the rest of our understanding of so many societal issues. I first met this in the university in my early adult years, but I went around it by using the university library to determine what was false and what was true information. It was quite a struggle, and it is growing worse because of censorship. They not only banished from our consciousness the fact that all societies are fractured in classes, but they have fed us information about other issues that they wanted us to believe for their own benefit--wealth and power.
 
However, I've found throughout my long life that information supplied to us by the ruling capitalist class is severely distorted with the result that only a few people can realistically understand and communicate their own opinions about what is going on. 
 
Johnstone and her American husband miss what is the striking feature of American society and nation, and the result is that they mistake what is really going on. They describe the censorship that the ruling class issues as becoming worse by such statements as this:
 
One severely under-discussed aspect of the latest round of escalations in Silicon Valley censorship which began at the start of the Ukraine war is the fact that it’s an entirely unprecedented order of censorship protocol. While it might look similar to all the other waves of social media purges and new categories of banned content that we’ve been experiencing since it became mainstream doctrine after the 2016 US election that tech platforms need to strictly regulate online speech, the justifications for it have taken a drastic deviation from established patterns.
 
What they are unaware of is the fact that the ruling class has always influenced the information that they allow us to receive. But what they are missing is this: it is getting worse because the ruling capitalist class have consolidated the ownership which gives them control of our mainstream media and most of the economy. Ownership gives them control over media corporations as well as other features of their (not ours) economy. It is their economy because they have exploited us as workers to attain ownership over the entire economy. Johnstone and her husband substitute "Silicon Valley" for a class that has caused the growing censorship, but failed to point-out that a ruling capitalist class owns Silicon Valley. This is precisely why Klaus Schwab said "you will own nothing and be happy!" He is acting like a used-car salesman selling you a car that was junk because he feels that you are gullible enough to swallow his sales pitch.
 
The capitalist system works for capitalists and their desire to eliminate competition, and the result is monopolies: a relative handful of owners own nearly all of the economy. Is this so hard to understand?!
Professor John Mearsheimer is the man who predicted the Ukraine crisis. In a new, must-watch video discussion with the American Committee for U.S.-Russia Accord, he explains why the West’s current strategy is so dangerous.
  • Elon Musk Buying Twitter: Why It's a Bigger Battle Than You Think features Brain Berletic, an independent geopolitical expert and ex-Marine who for a lengthy time has lived in Thailand with his family, from his channel on Rumble (14:54). My reaction: Berletic shows how important social media like Twitter is to our ruling billionaire masters.
Jacques Baud joined Aaron Maté, host of Pushback, to analyse the Russia-Ukraine conflict.  He argued that the US and its allies are exploiting Ukraine in a longstanding campaign to bleed its Russian neighbour.
  • The War in Ukraine and the Collapsing World Order, a discussion by a number of top experts including Alastair Crooke, Scott Ritter, Max Blumenthal, and Seyed Mohammad Marandi from The Alt World. (Note: If you have time to hear the comments of this nearly 2 hour video of a group of distinguished guests, I promise it will be at least interesting. I will listen to it after I post today's collection of posts.)
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