Posts that I especially recommend for Tuesday, May 4, 2021

• New Report Sheds Light on Vaccine Doomsday Cult by Mike Whitney from The Unz Review. 

• India’s “COVID outbreak” & the need for scientific integrity – not sensationalism by Colin Todhunter, a Brit who lived many years in India, from Off-Guardian.
  

• CDC Violated Law to Inflate COVID Cases and Fatalities featuring nearly a 1:05 hour interview with Dr. Henele (Dr. Henry Ealy) from Dr. Joseph Mercola's website. My commentary follows: 

At first, having done some research on "Henele" who is a naturopathic physician, I decided not to post this interview on my website; but after reading the entire transcript of the interview, I felt that "Henele" was making a sincere effort to investigate the pandemic which others of my posts weren't asking the appropriate questions, were ignoring discrepancies, and having a too narrow of focus. I personally was frustrated last summer after learning from a very sociable person that she knew of no one who was afflicted with Covid-19 in our town of 12,000, but she qualified her position by saying that she knew of hospital statistics in a nearby large city that many people have come down with Covid-19 illness. Then I kept noticing reports of doctors being pressured by health authorities to declare the coronavirus reason for someone dying, and hospitals being offered money incentives to diagnose deaths due to Covid-19 illnesses. 

 

I had in an early career with a state Department of Rehabilitation directly experienced the gross inflation of numbers of "rehabilitations" to justify higher budgets and was pressured to "play along with the game". After a while and learning that this was the same situation in many states, it disturbed me so much that I ended up quitting an entire career that I had trained for.

 

My suspicion is that the ruling capitalist class, for various reasons, intentionally brought about this pandemic. They first created Covid-19 illness and somehow spread it in China, their number one enemy. The concentration of ownership in private enterprise and the concentration of the medical professions (no longer can doctors afford to set up a private practice) under chains of authority (bureaucracy) that physicians can be easily controlled. 

• Corporate News Outlets Again "Confirm" the Same False Story, While Many Refuse to Correct it by Glenn Greenwald from his weblog on Substack. (Note: Greenwald introduces his article with the caption "Journalists with major outlets know they spread a false, retracted story about the FBI and Giuliani but refuse to remove it because their real job is spreading disinformation.")

And he follows this caption with the first paragraph as follows:

 

One of the primary plagues of corporate journalism, which I have documented more times than I can count, just reared its ugly head again to deceive millions of people with fake news. When one large news outlet publishes a false story based on whispers from anonymous security state agents with the CIA or FBI, other news outlets quickly purport that they have “independently confirmed” the false story, in order to bolster its credibility (oh, it must be true since other outlets have also confirmed it). 

• On World Press Freedom Day, US Report Reveals 'Startling Extent of Police Violence Against Journalists' by Jessica Corbett from Common Dreams.
  

• From gunboats to treaties: Who wrote the rules of globalisation? by Ben van der Merwe from Investment Monitor. (Note: I very recently this article received from Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS). But, in conformance with my policy, I re-posted it from the original source at Investment Monitor.)

• Recognizing Lies about Latin America: Seven Tips by Laura Wells from Dissident Voice. My reaction: She immediately starts with a false assumption: "A focus on lies about Latin America is important because we do care about how the US treats other people ...". Unfortunately, that is not true. Being focused on surviving and otherwise distracted, Americans mostly ignore how the government treats other people in foreign lands. They mostly believe what their told by the "talking heads" on major TV stations. But her advice on detecting lies is spot-on.
  

Posts that I especially recommend today: Sunday, January 24, 2021

• The Will to Believe: Americans and their Divine Masters by Edward Curtin from Off-Guardian.
  

• That’s All Folks! by CJ Hopkins, a master satirist who offers his take on the exit of Pres. Trump from the White House and related matters.  

• Mob mentality: Capitol riot exploited to expand the national security state that failed to stop it by Aaron Maté from The Grayzone.
  

• Catherine Austin Fitts on The State of Our Currencies featuring James Corbett and Catherine Austin Fitts discussing solutions at a high level of abstraction via 33:34m video from The Corbett Report. My reaction: I don't normally post such discussions, but this post sounds so promising. Because their discussion is such a high level of abstraction, I can't understand most of what they are talking about. Can you? But I will be patient and wait for further clarification.

• Telegram Passes 500 Million Users As People Seek Facebook & Twitter (Big Tech) Alternatives by Arjun Walia from Collective Evolution.
  

• The Enthronement of False Dimitry, and What Will Happen Next by Stephen Karganovic from Strategic Culture Foundation. 

• The Illusion of Democracy: Government by the Rich for the Even Richer by Rod Driver from his weblog Elephants in the Room. My reaction: He seriously understates our fake democracy.
  

• Confessions of a Deprogrammed Trump Supporter by Canadian Matthew Ehret from Strategic Culture Foundation. My commentary follows: 

In this article Ehret is doing an obvious parody of a "deprogrammed" Trump supporter which is showing signs of becoming the latest fake theme in today's "news" provided by media corporations in America (see also this post). 

Matthew Ehret is developing of following. He is becoming a "political genius" by increasing numbers of acolytes of America and abroad. He joins a list of several other "geniuses" (James Corbett, Derrick Broze, etc.) of American politics who are proposing to lead the way out of the political mess the country is in. Ehret's articles are posted on popular critical websites like Strategic Culture Foundation and Fort Russ News (the latter appears to be posting exclusively his articles). Let me be clear--I don't share this current fawning and fashionable trend. I occasionally post articles authored by these people that shed some light on current problems. Although these "geniuses" function as good critics of American politics, they don't offer any effective solutions to this growing crisis of capitalist rule.

Ehret is another carefully guided well-read person whose mind has been prepared by 75 years of Empire "education" that forbade any reference to Marxist thought or ideas. In 1963 I graduated from a major university with a BA degree in political sociology, but I was never assigned a reading by Marx or Marxist oriented writers! I had to use the university's library to read such literature.

• What Snowden's Exile Says About America by Brian Berletic from his weblog Land Destroyer Report. (Berletic is an American, and former member of the Marine Corps, who lives in Thailand.)
  

• Nationwide Dementiafest: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix by Caitlin Johnstone from her weblog.

• Faces of Lockdowns by Amelia Janaskie, Jenin Younes, and Taleed Brown from American Institute for Economic Research. (Note: This post features three people from New York City who comment (via video) about the effects of the pandemic on the people they serve and on themselves. None of the three videos are longer than 12:04m. If this interested you, you may also be interested in a video on how the lockdown is affecting French students.)
  

• Risks of the Pfizer BioNtech vaccine – Dr. Louise Lagendijk (video) posted by Vanessa Beeley on her weblog The Wall Will Fall.
  

• Can US Workers Be Dismissed for Refusing to Be Vaxxed? by Stephen Lendman from Global Research.
  

• The Vaccine Race: Yet Another US Weapon for World Domination by Valery Kulikov from New Eastern Outlook. 

• Decentralization Urgent as Big Tech Condemns Free Speech by Dr. Joseph Mercola from his weblog Mercola.

• The Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly Is the covid ‘pandemic’ merely economic theatre? by Maribel Tuff from Off-Guardian. (Note: This post offers some relatively different views on the pandemic and related matters.)
  

• Indian Farmers on the Frontline Against Global Capitalism by Colin Todhunter from Off-Guardian.
  

• Deir Ezzor is a Sign of Things to Come by "The Ister" for "The Saker" Blog.
  

• Realizing the Dream of Communal Cities: A Conversation with Jennifer Lemus and José Luis Sifontes by Cira Pascual Marquina from Internationalist 360°. My commentary follows:

Although ordinary people in this article credit Hugo Chávez for their communal structure, I think that such people should be credited for the realization of bottom-up control of their nation of Venezuela come true. They have been severely tested by the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire and have passed the test.

In a two week visit in late 2005 in which we visited various communes and listening to officials, I wasn't impressed by their support. I don't think that the bureaucrats that were appointed by Chavez truly believed that such a project was possible--even Chavez didn't take the communal structure seriously enough. Chavez too often used the communal structure as a political base for his elections, and I found some of the officials in his government unaware of the details of the communal structure. My commentary in 2010 reveals my doubts about the Venezuelan radical experiment.

But thanks to ordinary people like Lemus and Sifontes, the nation is on the way to implementing the dreams of Chavez and the people of Venezuela.

• Twitter Latin America coordinator exposed as right-wing operative, amid anti-AMLO social media purge by Ben Norton from The Grayzone.
  

• Gen Z’s Call to Arms: Climate Crisis, to 9:57m video from RT (via a YouTube channel) in which Holland Cooke interviews Dr. Reese Halter, biologist and author.

Gen Z activists worldwide are answering a call to arms, as climate change continues to be a looming existential threat. Biologist and author of “The Gen Z Emergency” Dr. Reese Halter explains how our click-happy consumer culture has fueled the decline of global ecosystems. The youth of 2021 are taking matters into their own hands, acknowledging the failures of their predecessors to combat ecological extinction events.

• Complex Life Threatened by Robert Hunziker from Dissident Voice.
  

Posts that I especially recommend today: Thursday, December 10, 2020

• New Film SEVEN Available Today on Multiple Streaming Platforms from Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth. My commentary follows: 

I viewed this 45 minute film last night and I highly recommend it. On 9/11/2001 I watched on TV the buildings of the World Trade Center come down, but I was already convinced that the collapse of buildings was a ruse to get Americans prepared for dramatic changes in foreign policy. Sure enough, people everywhere were shocked and prepared to do anything for their country. Gas station attendants in Oregon, where I was living at the time, insisted that their customers put patriotic stickers on their cars. Laws were rushed through Congress like the Patriot Act to grant government agencies to secure all kinds of records on Americans and the suspension of habeus corpus laws for alien Americans. Members of Congress who were concerned about the rush to pass these laws were targets for anthrax attacks. I felt very uncomfortable with this growing police state and relocated to Canada until 2006. About 1 1/2 years after 9/11, the US along with some allies had already invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. 

This film shows clear evidence that many architects and engineers were reluctant to challenge the governments flimsy excuses and reports by government agencies that gave approval to the official story of 9/11. They were intimidated into silence by the Deep State which controls nearly everything in the USA. Only after a decade did these professionals become involved and started to challenge the obvious inconsistencies and unscientific justifications of the official story.

• Révolution écosocialiste: A strategic perspective for uniting ecosocialists in Québec by Richard Fidler from Climate & Capitalism.

• Bolivia: New Gov’t Sets to Work Undoing Damage Left by US-Backed Añez Regime by Alan Macleod from Mint Press News. My reaction: Be sure to appoint sound military loyalists to the Constitution of Bolivia as top generals in the Bolivian army. By "sound", I mean generals that have demonstrated their loyalty to the Bolivian Constitution, but not to foreigners.

• Pentagon to Biden: Latin America a major battlefield in war with China by Bill Van Auken from World Socialist Web Site.
  

Posts that I especially recommend today: Friday, December 6, 2019

While waiting for the ecosystem to collapse, I'm hearing sounds that suggest the destructive iceberg of the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire and its army, NATO, is breaking up. What do you think? Even Canada, the Empire's colony to the north, is part of this noisy background. 

• NATO is “Brain Dead” by Peter Koenig from New Eastern Outlook.

• NATO Splits Reveal Alliance is Redundant, an editorial from the Strategic Culture Foundation.

• Hong Kong — Pure Western Insanity by Peter Koenig from New Eastern Outlook.

• Fake News By Omission :  The Mass Media’s Cowardly Distortion Tool by Caitlin Johnstone from her weblog.

• Bolivia Returned to Being a Country Governed by the U.S., Neo-Nazis and Narcos translated from Misión Verdad and re-posted on Internationalist 360º.

• Latin America: Imperialist Subversion Forges Full Speed Ahead posted on Granma (Cuba) and re-posted on Internationalist 360º (probably safer for you to read).

• Greenland ice melt feeds glacier instability by Tim Radford from Climate News Network.

Articles I especially recommend for today: Thursday, September 19, 2019

• Don’t Smile for the Camera by Andrew P. Napolitano from Antiwar.

• Cutting air pollution would not cause ‘near-term spike’ in global warming by Robert McSweeney from CarbonBrief.  

• No One To Save Us But Ourselves by Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin from Rebel (Ireland).

• Trump’s Re-election? Did the Federal Reserve Already “Decide the 2020 US Election”? by F. William Engdahl from Global Research. 

• Houthi rebels overturned the chessboard by Pepe Escobar from Asia Times.

• China, Russia and Iran: Basis of the New Geopolitical Order by James ONeill from New Eastern Outlook. 

• Latin America and the US: The chains of indebtedness by Marco A. Gandásegui from Cuba-Network in Defense of Humanity.

Articles recommended to deepen your understanding of what is going on in the world as of 4/17/2019

• The Latin American Left’s Setbacks: What Does It All Mean? This is an interview with Prof. Steve Ellner posted on Venezuelanalysis.com.

• Extreme heat is growing threat to harvests by Tim Radford from Climate News Network. 

• Gallup Quietly Admits ‘Israeli vs. Palestinian’ Sympathy Polls Are Misleading by Grant Smith from Antiwar.com.

• 10 Things We Know Thanks to WikiLeaks by "Juventud Rebelde" from Network in Defense of Humanity. 

• Protests organized across Europe, demanding action to prevent climate change by Vyshakh T from Peoples Dispatch. 

• Julian Assange and the Agenda for Global War by Prof. James Petras from Global Research. 

• Yellow Vests Struggle to Reinvent Democracy by Richard Greeman from The Bullet (Canada).

Nations as Foreign Capital Corporations

Click here to access article by Francisco Fernández-Bullón from A bird's eye view of the Vineyard. 

The article is not well written (or translated), but one still gets a realist impression that many of the Latin American countries (the US's "backyard") are ruled by mafia-like corporate gangs who have plundered such countries for many decades. Such insights are helpful in understanding why so many Central Americans are marching to the US border. 

The foreign capital company strips all of the homelands of its excess inhabitants, who then have to migrate on foot looking for other lands. The only nationals that Honduras has at the moment are Orlando Hernandez and his cadre of cocaine traffickers who are the only ones who feel at home in the country (although they would probably prefer to live in Miami and be North Americans) and perhaps the high-ranking US military stationed at the base of Palmerola. .... However scarce the rights enjoyed by the Hondurans that manage to enter the stepmother country of adoption that could be the USA, they’ll always have more than in their own country, where they have none and where their death isn’t news. Now finally they have become “news” after many decades of being anonymous victims, thanks to an epic journey on foot, crossing the hostile lands of Central America and North America: lands hostile to those who don’t have more capital than only their hands or their wit, as long as they do not use it to foment crime and robbery.

Recommended articles to help understand the primary world issues on Tuesday, November 6, 2018

•  The Unraveling of the Netanyahu Project for the Middle East by Alastair Crooke from Strategic Culture Foundation.

• Not on the Agenda – America’s Wars Are a Non-Factor in Today’s Midterm Elections by Maj. Danny Sjursen from Antiwar. 

Of course not. America's wars are a non-factor because our masters don't want their subjects to be preoccupied by them, and their corporate media have intentionally avoided much news about them. When they are mentioned, our troops are only fighting out of humanitarian concerns and engaging in a War on Terrorism!

• The Troika of Tyranny: The Imperialist Project in Latin America & Its Epigones by Roger Harris from Venezuelanalysis.

We’ve seen what Pax Americana has meant for the Middle East. The same imperial playbook is being implemented in Latin America. Solidarity with the progressive social movements and their governments in Latin America is needed, especially when their defeat would mean chaos.

What Big Meat doesn’t want you to know about slaughterhouses

Click here to access article by Martha Rosenberg from Intrepid Report. (Edited for omissions and greater clarity at 10:24 AM CT.

The real issues regarding immigrant labor are always submerged by the flood of lies portraying such people as solely victims whose human rights are being threatened. Indeed, they are! But this portrayal hides the real motivation by corporations to hire the most desperate and most compliant labor force at rock bottom prices. This current coverage of illegal immigrants by corporate media is being cynically used by the Deep State to add to the criticism of, and further undermine, the Trump administration.

The corporations that are owned by the ruling capitalist class have a difficult time exploiting such a vulnerable workforce and keeping the real incentives for this practice out of the consciousness of ordinary Americans. Hence, this practice will continue and the issues of illegal immigration will always be with us as long as corporations can profit from it. Have you noticed that corporations never get prosecuted for hiring such workers?

What is also kept out of the consciousness of ordinary Americans is the widespread and often brutal interference in Central America by the US ruling class to keep those countries open to US investors looking to make easy profits. This, in turn, results in governments throughout Latin America turning against their own people with their ruling classes actively collaborating with our powerful ruling capitalist class because of the inducements of wealth and power. This article explains some of the reasons why corporations like to hire illegal immigrants, and Wayne Madsen in article entitled "Political asylee numbers will soon skyrocket" explains, as an example, how the foreign policies of our ruling masters result in the type of government in Columbia which, in turn, drives people at great risk to themselves to head to the USA.

Russian Revolution at 100

Click here to access a series of brief articles from TeleSur.

The link gives you access to brief videos, photos, and articles which, in turn, provides more links to other related material. The material's emphasis is on the revolution's influence on Latin America. Did you know that "Lenin" is a popular first name in Ecuador? 

To mark the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, teleSUR reflects on the values and achievements of the revolution and what it means to today's revolutionaries. 

Caribbean Reparations Movement Must Put Capitalism on Trial

Click here to access article by Ajamu Nangwaya from TeleSur. 

The author is only referring to slaves used in the British sugar plantations, but the same questions should be asked about US's cotton plantations.

Why is the reparations movement in the Anglophone Caribbean not putting capitalism on trial in its campaign to force British imperialism to provide financial compensation for its industrial and agricultural capitalists’ enslavement of Africans?

To what extent is capitalism such a sacred spirit or god whose name should not be publicly called in order to avoid attracting its vindictive and punishing rebuke?

Are the advocates of reparations truly convinced that British imperialism’s payment of financial compensation for the enslavement of Africans would end the economic marginalization of the labouring classes who are toiling under capitalist regimes throughout the region?

Why are we willing to place racism or white supremacy in the dock but not its creator – capitalism?

Suspects In Murder Of Environmental Activist Trained At Controversial U.S. Facility

Click here to access article by Whitney Webb from Mint Press News.

The Murder of environmental activists has reached unprecedented levels throughout Latin America – and nowhere is this more pronounced than in the Central American nation of Honduras. Since Honduras’ government was overthrown in 2009 in a coup backed by the Clinton-led State Department, the industry-friendly government that came to power is cracking down local activism by any means necessary.

Over 120 Honduran activists have been killed since 2010, making the small nation the world’s deadliest place to protect the environment. Berta Cáceres, one of the slain activists, was the winner of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize. However, her international prestige and recognition did not prevent her from being gunned down in her own home last year.

Once again we receive news about deadly terrorist attacks on activists in "our backyard" of Honduras, this time on a noted environmentalist, and links to the notorious terrorist training school at the School of the Americas in Georgia. Terrorism is a weapon used by agents of the Empire against the people not only in Syria, but wherever the Empire's corporate and political interests can be advanced. This includes within the US.

Though the U.S. military insists that SOA/WHINSEC is dedicated to preserving human rights, the training manuals used at the facility tell a different story. In 1996, bowing to public pressure, the Pentagon reluctantly released training manuals that had been used at SOA. The manuals expressly advocated torture, extortion, blackmail, and the targeting of civilian populations.

The numerous crimes committed by SOA and WHINSEC graduates throughout Latin America are also well-documented. In Colombia alone, U.S. assistance was considered a factor in a total of 5,763 extrajudicial killings that took place in the nation from 2000 to 2010.

Latin America overdoses on Irony as CIA complains Russia rigged US election

Click here to access article from The Rochdale Herald (Britain). (Note: Their "About" section reads: "Daily news, satire and comment from the world's worst local newspaper.)

While you're on the website, I encourage you to peruse other pieces of their work. This is British satire at its best. Enjoy!

US Court Protects 'School of the Assassins' Graduates

Click here to access article from TeleSur.

A U.S. court has sided with the Pentagon that it does not have to publicly release the names of attendees from the training school, formerly known as the School of the Americas, on Friday.

The infamous military school was a training ground for dictators, death squad members, and torturers, fueling human rights abuses and coups across Latin America, earning it the moniker “the School of the Assassins.”

The Empire's court apparently didn't consider the safety of citizens throughout Latin America who are often targeted by those attending their "assassins'" school.

Mush for Brains?

Click here to access article by Moti Nissani from Veterans Today.

Nissani argues that many people, including the US-led Empire's most prominent enemies in Russia and China, underestimate the cleverness that the "controllers", the invisible government consisting of major bankers and top owners of corporations, are using in their mad efforts to extend their control over all the world. They may be crazy by risking a nuclear war (and destroying habitat) but they are not stupid as currently expressed by so many naive political observers. In addition to their plethora of powerful weapons, and Machiavellian strategies and tactics to destabilize and break up countries, they use the stealth weapons of finance and control of central banks which are probably even more effective in extending their control. Nissani's observations about the latter weapon as used on Russia is most revealing.

I firmly believe, and have argued many times, that these empire builders are under the influence of the most powerful drug of all--power. This drug works much like a metastasized cancer that is inherent in the advanced stage of transnational capitalism. (Only working people have opposed its more benign form when it was functioning mostly within nations and the latter's colonies.) By underestimating their drugged state of minds and their insane actions that threaten a nuclear war and havoc everywhere, their main opponents of Russia, China, and revolutionaries are failing to take the goals of these "evil geniuses" seriously, and thus failing to apply effective counter-measures. This essay is a passionate call to sane people everywhere to stand up to this juggernaut of invisible empire builders and evil, sick geniuses.

Puerto Rico 'Rescue' Bill to Reinforce Colonial Relationship with US

Click here if you wish to access a 12:09m interview (and transcript) conducted by Gregory Wilpert with activist Julio Lopez directly from Real News Network.

If you haven't followed this issue very well, I recommend that you read this, this, and this for further background information which you should have to understand the present situation. For a history of Puerto Rico view this 28:43m video interview entitled "Puerto Rico: 500 Years of Colonial Bondage & Resistance" conducted by Abby Martin with two professors of Latin American studies, Luis Barrios and Danny Shaw.

The Right Rises Up as Latin American Left Faces Setbacks

Click here to access article by Benjamin Dangl from Toward Freedom.

Dangl has been one of Latin America's leading leftist intellectuals, so I was looking forward to reading this piece for his assessment on all the recent right-wing gains in South America during the past year. I was profoundly disappointed. I googled his name to find out if he wrote other essays about this disturbing trend. I only found another brief article in Upside Down World of which he is the editor. I noticed that he is a doctoral student at McGill university in Montreal, Canada. I also noticed in my googling survey that his articles have been frequently published on liberal websites like the Nation, the Guardian, AlterNet, TruthOut, etc. So, my searches and perusals of his articles left me wondering if he was now trying to tone down his militant politics in order to protect his doctoral status and a future career. Anyway this brief article and another one posted on his Upside Down World website are both very disappointing. In the latter article he seems too casual in his brief sum up of this right-wing trend:

The new Latin American left, in all its shades of red or pink, has lately been experiencing perhaps its roughest string of months since it came to power. From embattled Venezuela to the possible political death of the Workers' Party in Brazil, from the demise of the Kirchners in Argentina to Bolivia's own turmoil, the situation is grim.

It seems to me that he and others are failing to acknowledge, or in denial of, the unsustainability of left-liberal regimes in which the left governments permit the existence of a major capitalist sectors within their countries. The latter can and do wreck havoc, with their Empire partners, on any such left-liberal government and can rather easily regain control of governments.

Capitalists in most countries in Latin America and elsewhere typically maintain close ties with the US capitalist ruling class and vice versa. These capitalists are keenly aware that their existence depends to a large extent on US support and protection. Any radical revolutionary movement will be opposed not only by the local capitalists, but by the powerful US Empire. 

Given this reality, it seems to me that revolutionaries in Latin America and other countries under the heel of the US Empire must coordinate their activities and collaborate to insure their ultimate victories. Capitalist ruling classes, under the direct or indirect influence of the Empire, do this as a matter of strategic practice to maintain their control over most of the world. As Russian revolutionaries knew even before their successful Soviet revolution, socialism in one large country (or several small countries) cannot survive in a capitalist world.

The real reason Dilma Rousseff’s enemies want her impeached

Click here to access article by David Miranda from The Guardian. 

The country’s elite class and their media organs have failed, over and over, in their efforts to defeat the party at the ballot box. But plutocrats are not known for gently accepting defeat, nor for playing by the rules. What they have been unable to achieve democratically, they are now attempting to achieve anti-democratically: by having a bizarre mix of politicians – evangelical extremists, far-right supporters of a return to military rule, non-ideological backroom operatives – simply remove her from office.

Indeed, those leading the campaign for her impeachment and who are in line to take over – most notably the house speaker Eduardo Cunha – are far more implicated in scandals of personal corruption than she is.

Politics in Latin America have always reflected real class power conflicts without much of the gloss of rights, justice, and due process that is superficially imposed on the conflicts in the leading Euro-American nations. Thus, like any real war, the ethics of these contests for political domination in Latin America tend to be that of real war: to the victor go the spoils. This has been true even under "progressive" regimes of Argentina and Venezuela. Consequently Latin Americans are much less deceived by the absence of morality under class rule, whereas in the leading Western nations the immorality of extreme inequality is glossed over by a huge propaganda apparatus. But another consequence is that these more "progressive" governments are also infested with corruption which doubtlessly is encouraged by the US Empire to bring down those governments.

The solution, of course, is the elimination of the organization of societies around classes. This would require a revolutionary movement whose objective would be elimination of the basis of inequality of power in today's societies--capitalism. This system gives property rights to a tiny minority to "own" the fruits of labor in economies which are almost entirely devoted to the profit interests of this minority at the expense of the benefits to the vast majority. But revolutions would make Latin American nations a definite target for the wrath of the Empire which would find, or create, some excuse to overthrow them.

Operation Condor Never Ended: Assassinations and Coup Plots Continue Across Latin America

Click here to access article by Hugo Turner from Global Research. 

The author reminds us that the battle against the Empire continues throughout Latin America with the right-wing loyalists to the Empire winning some recent battles in Argentina, Venezuela, and looking ominous in Brazil.

Latin America is an often forgotten theater in World War 4 America’s war on the planet that began with the collapse of the Soviet Union. In many ways World War 4 is merely a continuation of World War 3 aka the Cold War and nowhere is this more apparent then in Latin America. Wherever the US maintained it’s control it carried on with the horrific dirty war assassinating anyone who dares to dream and work for a better world. The recent murder of COPINH co-founder Berta Caceres has briefly drawn attention to this never ending wave of murder and assassinations. [my link]

El Salvador vs Pacific Rim: The Price of Saying ‘No’ to a Gold Mine

Click here to access article by Ciara Nugent from The Argentina Independent. 

Gold mining is one of the most polluting mining industries there are, and El Salvadorians through their government refused to allow a mining company to continue to pollute their water supplies and are now facing a $301 million lawsuit.

North American mining corporations have been most notorious for using violent tactics to gain access to various metals throughout Latin America. Pacific Rim, a Canadian gold mining company, is one such corporation. The details are a bit complicated, but what is clear is that they first used terrorist tactics to mine gold in El Salvador, then they gained access to a legal weapon through the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism that has become a part of all "free trade" agreements. Read the article to find out what El Salvadorians, and all smaller countries, are up against with this weapon while fighting for clean water and healthy environments in their respective countries. Once again, it's the people versus powerful international capitalists whose corporations have the sole legally defined purpose as profits.

To challenge El Salvador’s rejection of their project, Pacific Rim activated the ISDS – investor-state dispute settlement provisions. Written into most trade agreements these days, and due to be expanded under the massive Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the ISDS allows companies to challenge the decisions of governments that might be said to affect their investments in the country. The main forum for these cases, including El Salvador’s, is the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). It was established by the World Bank in 1966, and currently has more than 200 ISDS cases pending.

The ISDS is built into a free-trade agreement between the US and the countries of Central America. Pacific Rim initially gained access to this clause by transferring part of its business to the US, via a subsidiary.