Posts that I especially recommend today: Friday, October 30, 2020

• I’m Really Sorry Redux by Edward Curtin from his weblog Behind the Curtain. (Note: Curtin joins CJ Hopkins in writing a parody of media corporations which are filled with reports blaming people for engaging in conspiracy theories. Furthermore, media corporations exist to protect us from fake news by censoring any information that one might pickup in order to create a conspiracy theory that suggests that our government (or ruling class) is engaged in conspiracies! Read this and laugh because it is very much tongue-in-cheek. The article is perfect to prepare you for the next several posts.)

• The Darkest Winter by Derrick Broze from The Last American Vagabond. (In a addition to the essay which reports on the test exercise Event 201, this includes a 12:57m video.)

• After the Virus: The World of 2025 – #PropagandaWatch featuring James Corbett (of The Corbett Report) providing a summary of what our masters have planned for our future (in a 22:10m video).

• Class Consciousness in the Age of COVID by Colin Todhunter from Off-Guardian.
  

• Liability-Free COVID Vaccine Makers Seek Additional ‘Free Pass’ From FDA by Jeremy Loffredo from Children's Health Defense. (Note: If this interests you, you may also be interested in another article from the same source.)
  

• Glenn Greenwald Resigns From The Intercept After They Censor His Content by Joe Martino from Collective Evolution. (Note: If this report interests you, you may also may be interest in Bernhard's detailed report on Greenwald's resignation from his weblog Moon of Alabama. Another report about censorship by Jimmie Moglia for the Saker Blog may interest you.)
  

• Silicon Valley Billionaires CENSORING Speech On-Line! featuring Jimmy Dore (of The Jimmy Dore Show) commenting in an 8:45m video via his channel (on YouTube) on this subject, and he provides very good documentation.

• When You Don’t Know Who To Vote For featuring JP Sears, a comedian, who doesn't know who to vote for, but he is told he must vote--from a 4:21m video posted from his YouTube channel.
  

• Brazilian meat giant trucked cattle from deforested Amazon ranch by Andrew Wasley , Alexandra Heal, André Campos, and Piero Locatelli from The Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

• Ford, GM Knew of Climate Risks Decades Ago by Maxine Joselow from E&E News.
  

No Longer Fiction: Orwell’s 1984 is the Reality of Our Times

Click here to access article by Robert Bridge from 21st Century Wire.

Because Orwell, a British veteran of the Spanish Civil War, finally realized the reason why the "democratic" Western nations did not come to the aid of a democratically elected government in Spain while fascist nations were attacking it, and wrote about his awakening in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the warnings were tragically ignored. We are now living in the world he imagined in the late 1940s. Could it be that the ruling classes of Western "democratic" nations wanted their own empire? Could it be that WWII ended up as a kind of civil war between ruling capitalist classes of the fascist countries of the Axis and the Anglo-American wannabees?

Do you think that Bridge learned the lessons of this prescient book when he asks questions like these?

The book ends with the words, “He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.” Will we too declare, like Winston Smith, our love for ‘Big Brother’ above all else, or will we emerge victorious against the forces of a technological tyranny that appears to be just over the horizon? Or is Orwell’s 1984 just really good fiction and not the instruction manual for tyrants many have come to fear it is? [my emphasis]

Yes, indeed, time is running out for all of us because most people, like Bridge, have consistently asked the wrong questions ever since Orwell wrote the book. What are the "forces of technology"? Technology are essentially sophisticated tools, whereas capitalism is a system that privileges owners of economies over the rest of us, and thus capitalist ruling classes have used technology to secure and protect their system of privileges and power.

Capitalism Collapsing from Inequality... Blame Russia!

Click here to access article by Finian Cunningham from Strategic Culture Foundation.

The Irish journalist sees capitalism, which has brought so much wealth and power to so few in those elites associated with the US-led Empire, in its death throes as illustrated by its official leaders neurotically declaiming about the wickedness of Russia.

Inequality, poverty and the denial of decent existence to the majority of people stands out as the clarion condemnation of capitalism and its organization of society under private profit. The human suffering, hardships, austerity and crippled potential that flow from this condition represent the crisis of our time. Yet instead of an earnest public debate and struggle to overcome this crisis, we are forced by our elites to focus on false, even surreal problems.

American politics has become paralyzed by an endless elite squabble over whether Russia meddled in the presidential elections and claims that Russian news media continue to interfere in American democracy. Of course, the US corporate-controlled news media, who are an integral part of the plutocracy, lend credibility to this circus. Ditto European corporate-controlled media.

All of this hysterical behavior that we are daily witnessing, he sees as a neurotic response psychologically defending them from the frightful reality that the end of a system and their rule is approaching, a system that has served this tiny ruling class so well over the past several hundred years. And he concludes with a warning to us ordinary people that we need to do something before they take us with them in a nuclear war conflagration or, more slowly, in a deteriorating environment that can no longer support human life.

The biggest disconnect is the obscene inequality of wealth and resources that capitalism has engendered in the 21st century. That monstrous dysfunction is also causally related to why the US and its Western allies like Britain are pushing belligerence and wars around the planet. It is all part of their elitist denial of reality. The reality that capitalism is the biggest threat to humanity’s future.

Do we let these mentally deficient, deceptive political elites and their media dictate the nonsense? Or will the mass of people do the right thing and sweep them aside? 

We are increasingly noticing others who think that capitalism has become thoroughly dysfunctional. Read this review of a book entitled How will capitalism end? by Wolfgang Streeck re-posted in Real-World Economics Review Blog.

2 or 3 Things I Know About Capitalism [a "best post"]

Click here to access article by Phil Rockstroh form The Greanville Post.

Reading an article by Rockstroh, a leading American wordsmith, takes a little more time and effort, but I think you will agree that it is often worth it. 

This article of his was prompted by a NY Times piece entitled "“Why Are More American Teenagers Than Ever Suffering From Severe Anxiety?”, and he attempts to answer the question. He concludes his article with this insightful remark:

Due to the reality that capitalism, on both an individual and collective basis, drives individuals into madness, all as the system destroys forest and field, ocean and sea and the soulscape of all who live under its rapacious dominion, our plight comes down to this: We either struggle and strive, by and any and all means, to end the system — or it will end us.

Rockstroh's article instantly recalled my early morning experience listening to NPR's Morning Addition through the fog of awakening to my radio-alarm. It's amazing what one can learn listening to NPR, America's radio station! This morning I learned that not only American teenagers are going crazy but adults as well. But NPR's directors would not leave their listeners to suffer because they assured us that there were apps (def.) to cure this. And if that didn't work for you, they immediately followed with another segment to report that American entrepreneurs had devised other cures such as "floating away your anxiety and stress" for as little as $50 a float! (sarcasm)

A Primer: USAID & US Hegemony

Click here to access article by Tony Cartalucci from New Eastern Outlook.

The author provides an excellent explanation of the role of USAID, in contrast to military invasions, as the most effective strategy of maintaining control of other nations.

By controlling these aspects in any given population, one then controls that population itself. It is the key to not only defeating an “insurgency,” it is also the key to running a successful insurgency oneself. USAID projecting its influence into any given nation is in fact a sort of insurgency – a literal attempt to take control of a government – however incremental and patient the nature of that insurgency might be.

Areas included in US counterinsurgency manuals as essential to control include (but are not limited to):

•     police and fire services,
•     water,
•     electricity
•     education and training,
•     transportation,
•     medical,
•     sanitation,
•     banking,
•     agriculture,
•     labor relations,
•     manufacturing and,
•     construction

What few social critics understand is that this is precisely how any ruling class of people take control of a society whether that class of people are known as monarchist/aristocrats, autocrats, bureaucratic class, military dictatorship, or capitalists. They must take control of all these institutions (ideological institutions are most important in the long term and control over the rest in the short term) if they are going to rule very long--and they know that. It's fairly easy to see how USAID functions in a relatively short time span, but it is much more difficult to see the same process that evolves over hundreds of years as is the case with capitalism. 

This is because the capitalist system has required this length of time to evolve into its ultimate destiny: the concentration of wealth in a few hands. It's obvious that the concentration of wealth translates readily into power/control/domination. That is the end result of capitalist class rule which we see wrecking havoc on societies and the environment nearly everywhere in the world. More dreadfully, we are now faced with the imminent prospect of human extinction via a nuclear conflagration and/or environmental destruction.

Some Fun Facts for a Dystopic Future

Click here to access article by "xraymike79" from his blog Collapse of Industrial Civilization.

The author has taken quite a while to post new material on his blog, and this one portends a future that is the darkest of all of them. If you have a weak stomach for suck bleak facts--the author's "fun facts" are meant to be ironic--you should probably not read this. Instead, I advise you to turn on the boob-tube for escapist entertainment, or turn to your favorite hallucinatory drug of choice. If you have such a weak stomach and still bravely or recklessly decide to read it, I advise you to take some anti-depressant medication before reading it.

We’ve been fooling ourselves for a very long time about what is truly sustainable and will continue to do so as the system falls apart, geoengineering fixes are applied, interstellar space colonization fantasies are dreamed up, and wars are fought for what remains. Humans have constructed a reality incompatible with the well-being of the natural world and the stability of the biosphere, but we won’t be able to escape the rules of physics, chemistry, and biology. We’ve spent generations making the bed we’re going to be lying in, never realizing it’s also our death bed. Time is not on our side.

Most are not listening and our leaders are misleading, so it bears repeating: ‘The Oil Age’ made us all confident idiots with short attention spans.

As for myself, I read it and acknowledge the many truths that it reveals about the future of humans. Still, as long as there is any chance of survival, I will continue to attack the real culprit of our predicament: our relatively recent history of capitalist class rule that has so voraciously consumed fossil fuels to satisfy their addictions to wealth and power. And even if our future is doomed, I still want to attack this class which has so compulsively led us to our extinction.

The way the world will end? Superstorms, soaring temperatures, droughts, fires and the collision of political, economic and environmental disasters

Click here to access article by Will Denayer from Flassbeck-Economics (based in Germany). [A best post.]

This website offers some of the best analysis backed up by solid documentation on various topics related to economics. This article focuses on climate destabilization.

This is what we are seeing. The ‘impeding dislocations’ of climate change intersect with already existing crises of poverty and neoliberal violence all over the world. The militarized response to the threat of terrorism and the militarisation of the Mediterranean with regards of the refugee problem of today leaves no doubt that increasing militarisation will be used in order to respond to the impeding crises that the multiple threats of climate change are creating. Based on what we did so far, what will be the likely answer of the West to a MENA region which becomes increasingly uninhabitable, while European and American cities are running under water, infrastructure is taken apart and global food prices spike?

Humanity at Risk

Click here to access article by Stephen Lendman from The Greanville Post.

Referring to Einstein's warning back in 1946: "The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.", he writes:

Neocons in Washington represent the greatest threat to life on earth. If war against Russia or China is launched with nuclear weapons, Einstein’s dark prediction could become reality.

They’ll be no turning back. Extinction may follow or conditions so devastating for survivors they’ll wish they were dead – anything to end their unbearable suffering.

New Era of Global Collective Psychosis

Click here to access article by Gilbert Mercier from News Junkie Post. 

I think that this was written to those of us who see we humans hurtling unthinkingly to our doom. As such it is a very somber piece that largely expresses the feelings of us who are aware of the current disturbing zeitgeist created by the "Empire of Chaos" that appears to be carrying us, along with the Empire's tiny capitalist class, to the end-time of humans. Their overwhelming command of wealth has given them overwhelming power to control events and thus control our minds. It seems that their daily dose of terror delivered to us via corporate TV networks has left us humans acting much like immobilized deer staring at the headlights of an oncoming vehicle. 

The media brainwasher/propagandists have powerful bullhorns and are always hard at work to keep their vast audience either uninformed, anxious, and feeling powerless or entertained. The news cycle has to spin so fast that critical thinking is never an option.

But wait, there's more! (You see, even people like myself have been infected with the memes of capitalist culture.) I think Mercier is also shouting in our collective ears to wake up, to act, and to save ourselves!

The Human Experiment is Probably Coming to an End

Click here to access article by Moti Nissani from Dissident Voice.

(Note: This week I am radically departing from my usual rule of posting articles that are limited to the past 30 days. I have recently discovered to my deep chagrin that I have been missing many excellent articles by Moti Nissani due in large part to my own failings, some misunderstandings, and because no one drew my attention to them. I am making up for this now by posting what I regard as the best articles of his in chronological order starting in 2010, one for each day everyday of this week, and maybe beyond until I catch up.

By giving Nissani this special consideration, I do not wish to imply that I agree with every single one of his views. Nobody has a monopoly on truth. We are like the blind men and the elephant fable who must collaborate to unravel the many mysteries of our existence. This is in sharp contrast to immature people who always look to leaders or "people in the know" for guidance on what to believe and how to behave. All of us must become our own seekers of truth if there is to be any hope of our continued existence as humans.)


This retired professor of biology with a rich background in the humanities looks at all the possible threats to humans, assesses probabilities, and adds them up to see what the future looks like for humans. It doesn't look good.

But what if we could replace the dominant class-based social-economic system in the world known as capitalism with one that could rationally coexist in harmony with the biosphere? I think this would greatly increase our chances of survival for many centuries. I see this as the major and crucial challenge facing humanity today. 

Some scientists say that it is already too late to save the biosphere and human extinction is imminent (20-30 years); but I argue that even if we as individuals accept this as true, we as a species must strive to do better than what we have done so far. This means in the time remaining we will demonstrate that our human natures simply will not accept an economic system that guarantees the rule of a class of people and their culture whose character is defined by "greed, shortsightedness, and colossal stupidity". We are better than that. 

'Idiocracy' Realized: How Our Current Situation Is Worse Than the Film Predicted

Click here to access article by Paula Young Lee from AlterNet. 

This just may be the article to put you in a sick humor mood for the long holiday weekend. After all this could be the proper mood considering that our capitalist overlords designated Monday as Memorial Day as some sort of remembrance for all those working class soldiers they've sent to their deaths in service to them and their Empire.

The corporate overlords the movie indicted are creating a world where water is inaccessible to the poor and Trump Nation darkly looms. 

If this article doesn't succeed to put you in the mood for sick humor, "Tom Tomorrow's" cartoon might do the trick.

 

Why we need a politics of the far future

Click here to access article by Richard Eckersley from On Line Opinion (Australia). 

This is an academic journal and this piece reports on findings from research done on people's broad views of the future. The study used a sample of over 2,000 people in Australia, US, UK and Canada. Eckersley, commenting on one major implication of the findings, makes this insightful observation:

The findings strip the ground from under the largely 'business as usual' strategies that dominate political thinking. Concerns about the world's future barely register in our politics; our political leaders proclaim constantly that Australia is a great nation with a great future. This tension may contribute more than politicians and political pundits suspect to the current mood of political disillusion and cynicism.

This disconnect between the views of the future of ordinary people and the views of the real leadership can be explained by looking at the realities of a class-based split of society in which the leadership is based on "ownership" and control of all major institutions of society (by definition, a ruling class). The leadership especially in Western societies are capitalists and the agents among the middle class who loyally serve them. 

Because the study did not collect responses by class (this would have been impossible for the ruling One Percent (actually .01%) because of the small sample size), it is unknown how many people of the "leadership class" actually believe their own propaganda ("the dominant thinking") about the future. I suspect that many of them do not. However, they must keep ordinary people believing it so that they, capitalists, who depend on the latter to show up at work, can continue with their business as usual: engaging in the relatively short-term "highs" of power and profit.

Beyond Extinction: Transition to post-capitalism is inevitable

Click here to access article by Nafeez Ahmed posted on Medium Corporation website.

In this piece Ahmed responds to a recent post by Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood entitled "It's not Climate Change--It's Everything Change" which is also worth reading as an urgent call to change our ways or we will face a dystopia and then become extinct. It looks like intellectuals are becoming worried about the approaching crisis given all the signs that it is real--and this is good, although a little late--but they are still keeping the discussion on a very abstract plane--which is not good if we humans are to save ourselves. 

Ahmed does little better by targeting industrial capitalism.

The endless growth model of contemporary global capitalism is not just unsustainable — it is on track to destabilize the Earth System in a way that could make the planet uninhabitable for society as we know it.

It is not humanity, then, that is doomed — it is industrial capitalism.

The choice before us, then, is whether or not we are willing to give-up fossil-fueled endless material growth. 

Then, as is the fashion among intellectuals, he quotes Foucault to indicate that the problem is us and that we need to change things. Unfortunately, Foucault is even more abstract. 

Given that overconsumption is driving many of the world’s most pressing problems, it may be that ethical activity today requires that we critically reflect on our own subjectivities in order to refuse who we are — so far as we are uncritical consumers. This Great Refusal would open up space to create new, post-consumerist forms of subjectivity, which is surely part of the revolution in consciousness needed in order to produce a society based on a ‘simpler way.’

So, the gist of both essays is that "we" are responsible for the many crises "we" are faced with and "we" need to do something about it. It's like "we" are all participating in one grand world democracy and "we" have made wrong decisions. This sort of analysis carefully steers us away from any realities that we have been, and are currently, subject to massive forms of control by a specific socio-economic class who are committed to their system of capitalism because of their addiction to the drugs of profit and power.

I guess such essays as these represent progress because they suggest an awakening consciousness of intellectuals, a small segment of humans, but it is far from being sufficient to save ourselves from the many crises that are in our future if not already here. This tiny, compromised sub-class of intellectuals even control how we think about these crises, and these rather timid, abstract essays are a reflection of that control. They lead us into thinking that the capitalist system can be reformed or that people can be morally influenced to invest in the right things as illustrated in a current article entitled "Fossil fuel industry still winning the investment war".

Because time is fast running out, what we really need to think about is the development of revolutionary movements to counter the powerful control of capitalists over existing societies so that ordinary people can truly shape and determine their own future.  While it is good to write consciousness-raising articles about the threat of climate change and, even more so, about capitalism that drives it, what is urgently needed are articles dealing with specific strategies and tactics to defeat this class and overthrow their odious, crisis-ridden system. Too often we are seeing articles like the above and articles like this entitled "Why Some People Will Always Bow to Tyrants" posted on Uncommon Thought Journal which wallow in pity by arguing that human nature is at fault instead of exploring how class rulers deliberately try to render ordinary people powerless both psychologically and in a real practical sense. 

All of these efforts that lead to the overthrow of capitalism are needed in order to provide the necessary conditions for the creation of new societies that can live in harmony with the ecosystems of our finite planet. Only then can we ordinary people truly participate in decisions about how we live. We don't need any more abstract discussions about how we are responsible for the crises.

‘Epic Fail’: Feminism and Ecological Crises

Click here to access article by Robert Jensen from CounterPunch.

Much nutritious food for thought here in this piece. He sees in the truth about pornography (although there is considerable overlap, I differentiate erotica from pornography) some greater truths about the oncoming failure of humans. It's the playing out of the human drama in very self-centered ways which began some 10,000 years ago and currently reflected in, and supported by, the economic system of capitalism. This way of living is fundamentally in conflict with the social nature of humans that has sustained the species for 95-98% of its existence.

In lectures I used to give on the subject, I would sometimes suggest that "pornography is what the end of the world looks like," not to suggest that pornography was going to lead to the destruction of the world, of course. Rather, I was suggesting that contemporary pornography deadens consumers' capacity for empathy for and solidarity with others--the things that make decent human society possible. When these aspects of our humanity are overwhelmed by a self-centered, emotionally detached pleasure-seeking, social justice is impossible to imagine. Equally impossible to imagine is ecological sustainability; if that same self-centered, emotionally detached pleasure-seeking leads to support for an unsustainable extractivist economy, our collective ability to emphasize with other living things or act in solidarity with life atrophies.

If these capacities are lost, human societies will become increasingly inhuman, and the planet will not indefinitely sustain those societies.

The State Against The Republic

Click here to access article by Thierry Meyssan from VoltaireNet.

At the request of President François Hollande, the French Socialist Party has published a note on the international “conspiracy theorist" movement. His goal: to prepare new legislation prohibiting it to express itself. In the US, the September 11, 2001 coup established a "permanent state of emergency" (Patriot Act), launching a series of imperial wars. Gradually, the European elites have aligned with their counterparts across the Atlantic. Everywhere, people are worried about being abandoned by their States and they question their institutions. Seeking to retain power, the elites are now ready to use force to gag their opposition.

Finding Positive Meaning In End Times

Click here to access article by Roger Boyd from his blog Humanity's Test.

I could really empathize with the thoughts and feelings expressed in this piece. Referring to a "dark friend that sometimes recedes and sometimes bursts wholesale into my consciousness", he writes:

Grief for a world that currently exists, but is being slowly destroyed as I look on, and will not be there for younger generations.

However, it is clear that he does not let himself succumb to apathy and depression. He is still looking for ways to prevent such a dystopia.

Arkhipov Day: Celebrate the Man Who Saved the World

Click here to access article from Telesur.

I well remember those terrifying days in October 1962 when the world was confronted by the very real threat of imminent nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union. I was so worried that I phoned my professor for some kind of reassurance, but he was as worried as I was. It was only many years later that I learned about the story of this submarine officer who refused to approve what his commander and political officer wanted--to launch a nuclear missile.

Three officers on board the submarine had to agree unanimously to authorize the launch: Captain Savitsky; the political officer Ivan Semonovich Maslennikov; and the second-in-command Arkhipov. An argument broke out among the three, in which only Arkhipov was against the launch. [Wikipedia]

I think that as long as nations have these weapons, and especially with such weapons under the control of ruling elites, we will inevitably have a nightmarish nuclear war. The decision by Soviet officer Vasili Arkhipov prevented a nuclear holocaust in 1962 and gave the world more decades of civilized life. Next time, we may not be so lucky. So, let us celebrate Arkhipov Day...while we still can!

Why Did East Germany Really Go Under?

Click here to access article by Victor Grossman from CounterPunch.

With the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall approaching in November, we find some articles written by people on the left questioning how the fall of self-identified socialist regimes happened. They began with so much idealism and promise for better, more fulfilling lives in a peaceful world, but ended up on the scrapheap of history as people under their regimes seem to have easily fallen for the propaganda of Western consumer values. 

Grossman who left the US long ago as a harassed political refugee and fled to East Germany, is one such person who wonders how this could have happened. Here are some of his conclusions:

...the GDR had to compete with one of the world’s most prosperous economies, West Germany. It was never able to match the swift innovation pace of competing corporations whose ups and downs may have cost many tears in lost jobs and ruined plans but meant a constant stream of chic, modern products – above all good cars. Like people elsewhere, GDR citizens thrilled at enticing advertising. .... Envy was widespread. It was worsened by often old-fashioned tastes of the men ruling the roost – and rule it they did, almost to the end.

I think most of those aging anti-fascists retained their original hopes, their ideals based on socialism. But as they grew older, accustomed to central rule and constantly flattered by the careerist Yes-men who always gather where power and perks are found, they increasingly lost touch with much of the population. Many freedoms were indeed curtailed, worst of all for the media which were, when political, dull, rigid, one-sided and self-laudatory.

Other people merely complain of disillusionment as we find in this article entitled "Freest Under Czech Communism! Former Czech Dissident, Now Against the West". But what seems to be missing altogether in these reviews of history is any discussion about what these "socialist" failures imply for future revolutionary attempts to create much better social-economic systems and societies.  

With many nations armed with nuclear weapons, with capitalist regimes pursuing aggressive actions for world domination, and with impending destruction of our human habit caused by the relentless pursuit of more profit and power by capitalist gangs, this search for a better alternative is more urgent than ever before. Have we given up? Are we passively arriving at the end of (human) history, not the phony one promoted by Fujiyama, but the end of the human race?

Weekend Funnies for the Depressed Collapsitarian #9

Click here to access article by XrayMike79 from Collapse of Industrial Civilization.

I love this first one, but there is a lot more. 

Capitalism’s onward march to self-destruction

In the Ashes of Civilization

Click here to access article by xraymike79 from Collapse of Industrial Civilization.

The author is expert at describing where we are headed if we continue down the path of "business as usual". It ain't pretty, but it's real.

From its inception, capitalism paved a one-way path to annihilation, predicated as it was on unmitigated growth, the extraction of finite resources, the exaltation of individualism over communal ties, and the maximization of profit at the expense of the environment and society. .... Capitalist industrial civilization was built on burning the organic remains of ancient organisms, but at the cost of destroying the stable climatic conditions which supported its very construction. The thirst for fossil fuels by our globalized, high-energy economy spurred increased technological development to extract the more difficult-to-reach reserves, but this frantic grasp for what was left only served to hasten the malignant transformation of Earth into an alien world.