Posts that I especially recommend for Tuesday, June 8, 2021

• Uttar Pradesh COVID-19 Case Decline Continues as Authorities Lift Restrictions in 72 or 75 State Districts: What Was in those Medicine Kits? by TrialSite Staff from TrialSite News. (Note: Thanks go to an activist for sending me this post.) My reaction: This blows the censorship that the ruling class used to suppress findings from front-line physicians.

• How Top British Scientists Covered Up COVID-19 Bioweapons Research To Peddle Natural Origin Theory from GreatGameIndia.
  

• Fauci's Dishonesty and Co-Conspirators Revealed! by Chris Martenson of Peak Prosperity (via their channel on YouTube), which is following the origins of Covid-19 closely. Posted by Brad Fredricks, an associate of Surviving Capitalism (Not). (Note: You can access Martenson's script via the settings.)

• Tom Cotton Explains Why Warmongers Love The Wuhan Lab Leak Theory by Australian Caitlin Johnstone with her American husband reading the script, which is provided from her article. My reaction: Johnstone is referring to any official investigation, but we, the people, have our own collective efforts to uncover the truth. However, the latter will not make it onto corporate media. Thus, efforts will depend upon the people who will want to seek the truth so that they will not have to suffer through a pandemic, or some other manufactured catastrophe, again. This, in turn, will depend on our efforts to get people to stop watching/listening to billionaire-owned and/or controlled media corporations (which includes PBS and NPR) which provide coverage of "news" and "analysis". Billionaire-owned/controlled media are supplying you with pure, self-serving propaganda.

• WEF Warns of Cyber Attack Leading to Systemic Collapse of the Global Financial System by Whitney Webb from The Last American Vagabond. 

• From London to Los Angeles, News Outlets Go Dark Around the World this Morning; Fastly Takes Blamel by Pam & Russ Martens from their weblog Wall Street on Parade. My reaction: Could be that our masters in the ruling class are testing their ability to shut down our access to the internet in preparation for another real catastrophic project? Just wondering. 
  

• Crackdown on Academic Freedom: Prof Under Attack for Asking Students to Think Independently by Dr. Joseph Mercola from Children's Health Defense. 

• The False Idea of Who You Are by Alan Watts from the After Skool channel of YouTube. My reaction: I would only substitute "Planet Earth" for "universe" to arrive at the reality of humans as a part of the web of life on our unique planet Earth. It was common in Watts' day to label the universe as our unique planet Earth.

• Means of Extinction: Broiling Earth featuring Prof. (retired) Guy McPherson, an independent scientist (via his YouTube channel--04:36m), who has focused on the climate crisis, fearlessly listing scientific articles that indicate the growing probability of extinction of humans and most other species that have evolved on planet Earth.
  

Posts that I especially recommend for Monday, May 24, 2021

• 10 Covid-Skeptic Memes to Get You Through the Day – Part 3 by Kim Usbourne from Off-Guardian.
  

• America’s Public Health System Is Utterly Corrupt by Paul Craig Roberts from his weblog.
  

• Imagining Year 2020 Without Fauci, Redfield, USIAID, and the CDC by John Tamny from American Institute for Economic Research. My reaction: From my personal experience, I find "cancel culture" highly effective in limiting the views of ordinary Americans, particularly in relation to Americans believing whatever CDC and Dr. Fauci say despite abundant evidence to the contrary. "Cancel culture" is a ruling class sub-ideology that justifies censorship of those who have dissenting views, a characteristic of historical fascist-style capitalism. Worse yet, "cancel culture" is encouraging, and largely succeeding, in getting ordinary Americans to ignore dissident views related to the pandemic no matter how qualified they are on the subject.
  

• Slavoj Žižek, Emergency Capitalism, and the Capitulation of the Left by Fabio Vighi from The Philosophical Salon.

• How Billionaire Foundations Fund NGOs to Advance US Foreign Policy Goals by Rick Sterling from Dissident Voice.
  

• A People’s Guide to the War Industry by Christian Sorensen from Consortium News.

• The Disintegrated States of America by Pepe Escobar from "The Saker Blog". (Note: This post is essentially a book review of Disintegration: Indicators of the Coming American Collapse, a recent book authored by Andrei Martyanov that has had a marked influence on Escobar's thinking.)
  

• Manufacturing Consent for War: 70 Years of CIA Coups, Assassinations, False Flag Operations and Mass Murder by Jeremy Kuzmarov from Internationalist 360°. (Note: This post is a book review of Vijay Prashad's book entitled "Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations".) 

• America’s ‘Deal of the Century’ in Flames After Israel Pounds Gaza by Finian Cunningham from Strategic Culture Foundation.
  

• The US Isn’t An Israel Puppet, Israel Isn’t A US Puppet: It’s One Empire by Caitlin Johnstone, an independent Australian blogger, with her American husband's narration of her post. (Note: This is consistent with my longtime designation of the empire: US/Anglo/Zionist Empire which I argue reflects reality.)

• Israeli Soldiers Murder Palestinian Child And Kidnap Young Men In The Village Of Bil’in by Robert Inlakesh from The Last American Vagabond.
  

• U.S. hypocrisy on human rights shines bright on Palestine by Danny Haiphong from CGTN, China's major online news publication. My reaction: Ordinary Americans are too absorbed with surviving, subject to brainwashing propaganda, and other distracting nonsense, that they will ignore reports like this.

• 'She was too vocal': Outrage grows over AP journalist fired for pro-Palestine views by MEE staff from Middle East Eye (based in London).
  

• We’re wired to care for others featuring an interview conducted by Sophie Shevardnadze of Tbilisi, Georgia (Sophie&Co.) with Patricia Churchland, a retired neuroscientist from San Diego, California, from Shevardnadze's RT channel on YouTube. My reaction: Although Churchland's theory of human nature as social animals makes sense, she admits that her field of neuroscience are unable to fully explain the phenomenon of sociopaths ("psychopaths"). Could it be that the man-made system of capitalism rewards "psychopaths" with wealth and power? 

Posts that I especially recommend for Friday, May 14, 2021

• The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan? by Nicholas Wade from Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Science is supposedly a self-correcting community of experts who constantly check each other’s work. So why didn’t other virologists point out that the Andersen group’s argument was full of absurdly large holes? Perhaps because in today’s universities speech can be very costly. Careers can be destroyed for stepping out of line. Any virologist who challenges the community’s declared view risks having his next grant application turned down by the panel of fellow virologists that advises the government grant distribution agency.

The Daszak and Andersen letters were really political, not scientific, statements, yet were amazingly effective.

• How the CIA cultivates a fake left: From the cultural cold war to intersectional imperialism by Ben Norton posted on this article from Moderate Rebels.
  

• 💥The Markets Are Rigged by James Corbett from The Corbett Report with audio, video (47:11m) & transcript. This is a best post. My reaction: Corbett keeps on investigating the capitalist Wall Street markets and discovers in this post that the "markets are rigged", with government collusion, by top capitalists who are in control of central banks throughout the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire. This discovery might lead him to adopt a Marxist perspective, which will replace his anarchist (agorist--a specific type) ideology, with a self-serving ruling class. But that is verboten in a capitalist society, especially in the heart of a capitalist Empire. So, we will continue on with descriptions of "oligarchic billionaires" who control the stock market for self-serving ends. Corbett will likely not conclude that a ruling capitalist class controls every institution in a capitalist society, that is, that they control media corporations, education, opinion shapers (thesaurus) like Hollywood films, etc.
  

• 💥Denying the Demonic by Edward Curtin from his weblog Behind the Curtain. This is a best post. My commentary follows: 

This is a "best post" because Curtin exposes the insight that demons are a part of what it is to be human: "For they are part of ourselves, not alien beings, as the tragedy of human history has shown us time and again." And Curtin ends with a death-bed confession by James Jesus Angleton, who many believe was a sinister "devil" along with his boss Alan Dulles of the CIA. It seems that we are all susceptible to the classic conditioning of Ivan Pavlov, and it appears that power is the irresistible drug that we all occasionally aspire to have. People who designate others as being "evil people" are the latter who find this drug to be irresistible. It may be, and probably is, our "Achilles heel" that now threatens us with extinction as a species, in addition to so many others, on planet Earth--or elsewhere should a few of us manage to migrate to other planets.

 

But, what if a ruling class consists of these people that are sometimes designated as "evil people"? What if these people infest all ruling classes? What if the nature of ruling classes infect all advanced societies? These questions suggest a Marxist perspective which is heavily censored throughout all advanced capitalist societies. What about mixed societies (mixed between privately owned and controlled enterprises and those which the government owns)? I do not know, so I will confine my comments to capitalist societies represented by the leading nations under the control of the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire (US, Britain, and Israel)  

• Latest Bizarre Chapter of “War on Drugs”: U.S. Special Forces Train Drug Cartel Enforcers Linked to Rape, Torture and Decapitation of Victims by Zach El Parece from CovertAction Magazine.

• We Should All Be Worried About The United Nations Food Systems Summit. From A Growing Culture.
  

• Palestine: It is Not a Conflict, It is Colonialism by Carolina Bracco from Internationalist 360°. (Also I especially recommend Vanessa Beeley's elaborate take on the ongoing strife in a 1:05 hr interview conducted by Gordon Dimmack, a Brit who has a channel on YouTube. Beeley currently lives in Syria.)
  

Israel sought not only to sustain its military supremacy in the region but also, like any colonial project, to present itself as a superior and more civilized population. The identification of the Palestinians as a primitive and violent rabble in contrast to the sophisticated, cultured and European Israeli society supports this feeling of superiority, while reinforcing the unequivocal link with its European origin and American endorsement. After all, it is these states that finance Israeli military policy. Hence the immanence of the security discourse, which in turn enables the practices of oppression, discrimination and murder by transforming them into practices of defense and revenge.

• Fifteen Thoughts On Palestine by Caitlin Johnstone, an Australian independent blogger, from her weblog.

• Silencing Supporters Of B.D.S. featuring Max Blumenthal (of The Grayzone) on Jimmy Dore's YouTube channel expressing his views on the subject. (Note: You will need to know what B.D.S. means.)

• Escalation In Palestine - Hizbullah Is Ready To Join The Fight by Bernhard, an independent German blogger, from his weblog Moon of Alabama.

• Turning The Clock Back To 2001 - CIA, Others Prepare A New Resistance Against The Taliban by Bernhard from his weblog Moon of Alabama.
  

• Explained: Strona and Bradshaw 2018 features Prof. (retired) Guy McPherson, an independent scientist who has focused on the climate crisis, starting a series on his YouTube channel discussing reports from peer-reviewed websites (this one is from Scientific Reports) published in 2018).
  

Posts that I especially recommend for Thursday, April 22, 2021

• 💥Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi Interview – COVID Vaccine Blood Clot Risk Was Known, Ignored & Buried in a video interview (52:21m)from The Last American Vagabond. This is a best post. Also, if this interests you, you might also find an interest in this article. Unfortunately the retired doctor does not understand that our American capitalist masters have chosen to work through corporations to enforce their demand to take Covid-19 vaccinations.

• U.S. May Soon Reach Tipping Point on COVID Vaccine Demand + More by Children's Health Defense Team from Children's Health Defense.

• The Covidian Cult (Part II) by political satirist CJ Hopkins from his weblog Consent Factory, Inc. (Note: He occasionally detours from his usual ridicule and becomes serious in exposing what he calls the "covidian cult".)
  

• Forging Vaccine Passports featuring James Corbett from his weblog offering his insights that forging vaccine passports is not the answer even though reporting on this solution is accompanied by propaganda to encourage fake passports. My reaction: What is the solution to this? Unfortunately, this anarchist doesn't have an answer because "the powers that shouldn't be" (read our "ruling capitalist class") are coming with their solution because "it is for your own good". Listen to what their solution is!

• Masters of Puppets and Men of System: Review of Mario Rizzo and Glen Whitman, Escaping Paternalism by Art Carden from American Institute for Economic Research.
  

• The Catastrophes of the Pandemic are the Catastrophes of Capitalism by Stephen Gowans, an independent Canadian blogger from his weblog What's Left. 

• Free Speech Has Legal And Ethical Confines, Propaganda Does Not by Patrick Wood from Technocracy. My reaction: Unfortunately, our ruling class masters have other ideas.
  

• US Postal Service Running 'Covert Operations Program' To Spy On Americans' Social Media Posts, Share With Agencies by Tyler Durden from his weblog ZeroHedge.
  

• We’re All Weird Naked Murder Monkeys by Australian Caitlin Johnstone from her weblog. 

• US Order Against Russia: Italy at Attention by Manlio Dinucci, translated from Italian on Il Manifesto, and reproduced on Global Research. (Note: This report reveals how the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire is currently imposing "such costs as to cause a strategic impact on Russia”.)
  

• Vladimir Putin On Petty Tabaquis And International Issues by Bernhard, an independent German blogger, from his weblog Moon of Alabama. (Note: "Tabaquis" refer to a novel by Rudyard Kipling. Also, this article references the attempted assassination of the government leader of Belarus which is explained in this article from The Saker weblog.)

• Resistance Axis on war alert, to ‘openly’ target Israel if Iran attacks continue: Hezbollah insider from Middle East Observer. 
  

• [Big] Agriculture’s Greatest Myth by Jonathan Latham, PhD from Independent Science News. (Note: My insertion in the title.)
  

• The Impact of Population, Productivity, and Consumption on the Planet featuring Jaia Syvitski, professor at the University of Colorado and Stuart H. Scott, educator and environmentalist discussing the climate crisis. My reaction: I notice that Prof. Syvitski emphasizes population; and whenever Scott introduces that capitalism is a central problem, she always brings back the subject of population as the problem. She is in tune with our transnational ruling class of capitalists as expressed by Karl Schwab and the Great Reset as the solution to our climate crisis--the very thing that capitalism promoted along with its alliance with Christianity and similar religions.
  

Posts that I especially recommend for Wednesday, March 31, 2021 (I ran out of time)

• Fear of Fairy Tales by John Steppling from his weblog. (Note: Steppling is currently living with his family in Norway. He has a strong background as an American playwright, director of plays, etc., and he apparently is highly educated. I find his posts rather challenging because I don't know how his frequent quotes and images relate to the substance of his articles. He is obviously very disturbed particularly with the current pandemic particularly its impact on children.)
  

💥Thus, I especially recommend Steppling's rather lengthy (1:23:54) conversation (via some technology) with Cory Morningstar, Hiroyuki Hamada, and Johan Eddebo found  at Aesthetic Resistance (Post #35) (also in the link at the end of the above article). I encourage you to listen to this profound conversation among these highly educated people regarding the significance of the pandemic and its impact on people.) This is a best post.

• Vandana Shiva on the Taking Down of Bill Gates' Empires features Dr. Joseph Mercola in conversation (57:47) with Dr. Vandana Shiva from Marcola's weblog. (Note: This is the first video on the page.)

• What The 2007 Financial Crisis Taught Us About Corrupt Bankers by Rod Driver from his weblog Elephants in the Room on Medium.com.
  

• Washington’s Hegemonic Ambitions Defy Multipolar Reality, Risking Catastrophic Conflict by Finian Cunningham from Strategic Culture Foundation. (Note: Cunningham's introduction precedes an interview with Glenn Diesen who is a professor at the University of South-Eastern Norway and author of several books.)
  

• The Problem Isn’t Human Nature, The Problem Is A Few Manipulative Sociopaths by Caitlin Johnstone, an independent Australian blogger, from her weblog. My commentary follows: 

Johnstone writes in the article "Someone who says it’s human nature to be selfish, competitive, predatory, exploitative, tyrannical, vicious, brutish and violent isn’t telling you about human nature, they’re telling you about their own nature." Maybe so, but she apparently doesn't yet realize that the capitalist system is based on this view of human nature. Capitalists, and those unwitting people that support them, likely wouldn't dare admit to the negative characteristics but would swear that people are basically selfish. Thus, they would go on to support the capitalist system either completely oblivious to the more negative consequent behaviors listed above and would offer absurd rationalizations for them.

We are fed propaganda to cover-up the heinous crimes the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire commits directly or indirectly. Read a current post entitled The True Story of the Rwandan Genocide from Current Affairs for an example of a major crime (a massacre of at least 500,000 people). This is about who really was responsible for what has been "universally acknowledged as one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century".

• Faced with ICC Investigation, Apartheid Israel Asserts Moral Superiority Over The Victims of Its Terror by Miko Peled from Mint Press News.
  

• Opposing All Governments Equally Is Supporting The Most Powerful Government by Caitlin Johnstone, an independent Australian blogger, from her weblog. My reaction: This is only one fundamental reason why I think shallow-thinking anarchists are nuts.

• Tanzania’s Late President Magufuli: ‘Science Denier’ or Threat to Empire? by Jeremy Loffredo and Whitney Webb from Unlimited Hangout.
  

• Open-Source Versus Patent Monopoly Financing of Drug Development by Dean Baker from CounterPunch. My reaction: The trouble with Baker is that he takes an eighth-grade-civics- class view of how the government of the ruling class works. Thus, he doesn't see that capitalists run the puppet show that the government performs. Patents are one major way they (the capitalist ruling class) have of stealing profits from ordinary workers. Look at Bill Gates and how he accumulated his vast wealth. 

• Twisting the Law by Steve Martinot from CounterPunch. (Note: The following note was published within the article following the article: "[This article contains excerpts from a work in progress called “Brutality: a Study of Police Culture in the US,” which is also looking for a publisher.]". You might also be interested in this post from CGTM, a major Chinese news corporation, via Reuters.
  

• If the Minimum Wage Had Increased as Much as Wall Street Bonuses Since 1985, It Would Be Worth $44 Today by Sarah Anderson from CounterPunch.

• Ecuador’s poisoned loans from the World Bank and the IMF by Eric Toussaint from CADTM (Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt) [Part 1 of the Series].
  

A "best posts" post that I especially recommend today: Friday, June 19, 2020

• Climate Crisis, Pandemics and Bad Governance: Humanity’s Existential Threats by Gilbert Mercier from his weblog News Junkie Post. (Note: No one could express this existential crisis--climate crisis, pandemic, and bad governance--better than Mercier.)

The Coverup of President John F. Kennedy’s Assassination Is Wearing Thin

Click here to access article by Paul Craig Roberts from his weblog. (Note: I have decided (9/29/2019 at 1:20 PM CT) that my commentary is a major project for another time, but I did not find another time because dramatic events took over. Thus, I've edited out most of the original post.)

I place this event and the Deep State's portrayal of it along with the 9/11 tragedy and other major false-flag events contrived by them. Their portrayal of these events are thoroughly ridiculous, and thus I like the address Michael Parenti gave to a Berkeley (California) audience in 1993 (here and here) in which he ridiculed and entertained them with the stories that the authorities gave on the assassination of JFK.

A Marriage of Conscience: Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning

Click here to access article by Edward Curtin posted on Titanic Lifeboat Academy, a website administered by dear friends who have dedicated so much of their lives to alerting others that what we are doing is causing the destruction of our very own habitat.

The way I see it, no reference must be made to some obscure painting by a 16th century painter and to ancient mythology that are only known by a few highly educated people in the 21st century.

No, I think because there is so much evidence all around us in the 21st century that suggests that we, the people, have been so ground down, so inured to the suffering of others and the destruction of nature by the ruling capitalist class. Our masters in this class live by the principle that "there is not such thing as society, there are only families" (with some consideration for our neighbors so as not to offend them), and that we should no longer be moved by the suffering of others and the destruction of our habitat.

Unfortunately, our masters have insured that we were taught to believe only in our happiness and comfort and that of "our" patriarchal families (an extension of ourselves), that we, like they, don't care about the plight of others. It is because of such indoctrination that we in the 21st century have become uncaring about the suffering of others because of what we, our neighbors, and our masters do. We look away so as not to be disturbed by these ugly sights.

Like Icarus of ancient lore, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange refused to follow what they had been taught. They were so stricken with the awareness that what we do causes the suffering of others that they had to report these facts.

Still, the Icarus in each of us cannot be completely disappeared and forever--there is much risk for our masters in such behavior.

The Fascinating Spell Cast by Weasels

Click here to access article by Edward Curtin from his blog Behind the Curtain.

Curtin expresses his thoughts about one of three human weaknesses that looks increasingly likely to cause the extinction of humans--the fascination of humans for weasel-like others who exude authority and power:

It’s still the same old story, a gory story of the fight to dominate and control that is coterminous with human history or longer. It is an ancient myth that we still live by.  As in days of old, the siren song is often sexual in nature, not sexual in the passionately loving sense, not an encounter between two unknowns seeking to discover each other, but an instrumental sexual enticement wrapped in power, prestige, money, false charm and fake bravado whose purpose is domination.

The other two are: the seduction of power that often leads to the corruption of people (related to the latter weakness), and the lure of immediate gratification in place of an ability to assess developments in the future that might pose threats .  

How Come the World is Suffering from Stockholm Syndrome

Click here to access article by Andre Vltchek from New Eastern Outlook.

His argument that most of the world's suffering, exploited, oppressed, poverty-stricken people love the images of the West is a very sad insight on humans. It seems that there is nothing like "success" and "winning" that attracts the admiration of others even when this success comes about using the cruelest and the most criminal of means. Of course, the "Stockholm syndrome" doesn't infect everyone, but it is little consolation to discover that it infects many, if not most, people. Perhaps this is another reason not to grieve over the coming extinction of humans.

It may sound incredible, but it is true: in countries that have been damaged, even totally robbed and destroyed by the West, many people are still enamored with Europe and North America.

For years, I have been observing this ‘phenomena’, even in the most plundered, devastated war zones and slums. Often I was shocked, other times thoroughly desperate. I did not know how to respond, how to react, how to describe what I have been observing.

Democracy Or Extinction

Click here to access article by an editor of Media Lens (Britain).

The article opens with some very important questions: 

What will it take for governments to take real action on climate? When will they declare an emergency and do what needs to be done? How much concerted, peaceful public action will be required to disrupt the current economic and political system that is driving humanity to the brink of extinction?

And it ends with this paragraph:

We have now had three decades of increasingly alarming reports from climate scientists since the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was set up in 1988. Last October, the IPCC warned that we only had 12 years left to turn things around, taking radical action now. But alarm bells from scientists have not, and will not, stop governments in their tracks. Only peaceful and massive concerted action from citizens around the world stands a chance of doing that at this desperately late stage. 

Notice that the author places much emphasis on "peaceful" efforts to stop this chain of events to will result in human extinction. Why is it that we must be peaceful in the face of our own extinction? I am not prone to violence, but I will engage in it if my life is seriously threatened. Show me a species that doesn't fight for survival! I don't mean that we should engage in reckless violence, but I do think that we must not exclude any means for survival, especially if it is organized: because we are facing a powerful, well-armed enemy of the people.

Take a look at my revolutionary proposal as one illustration of how we might save ourselves.

However, I do like his overall arguments and facts, and especially this one:

To any reader unsettled by the scare word 'socialism', simply replace it with 'democracy': a genuinely inclusive system where the general population has proper input and control, and does not simply have its wishes overridden by a tiny elite that enriches itself at our, and the planet's, expense.

The Real Red Pill

Click here to access article by Cailin Johnstone from her blog.

This piece portrays a scene in an American bar where six guys and a bartender try to sort out what is real and what isn't about the world today. Only if it were real! I may be too cynical, but I think it is only wishful thinking, more blue pill stuff for people pretending to take the red pill. God (or Allah), I hope I'm wrong!

It seems to me that such a conversation can only be found in fiction. The vast majority of people like their illusions. They depend on them to cope with their very challenging lives. When supposedly ordinary people such as Steve, Greg, Ed, and old Pete try to argue that such illusions are fake and present some real truths about our existence, people such as Ian and Bill get upset and try to shut them up. This is the real truth (red pill) about humans that explains why most of them ignore the plight of people like Julian Assange who has revealed that their capitalist masters are nothing but war criminals who constantly lie to them. That's "The Real Red Pill" version of reality.

Our capitalist masters know this secret about human weakness. Thus, they keep feeding us lies to maintain their self-serving domination over us.

The Root Problem 10,000 BC (leaflet [& a link to a video])

Click here to access article by Eric Schechter from his blog Eric's Rants and Videos. 

I couldn't agree with his perspective more, and he express it so well--much better than I can. 

Be sure to click on, and view, his video.

Capitalism puts profits first, but an ecological society will serve humanity-- an Interview with Fred Magdoff (a "best post")

Click here to access this interview from Truthout.

What would a truly just, equal and ecologically sustainable future look like? Why would it require a change in our economic system, namely the end of capitalism? Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams answer(s) these questions in Creating an Ecological Society: Toward a Revolutionary Transformation. Suffused with radical hope, this book can be yours with a donation to Truthout!

Is a world possible based on equitable needs, empathy and sustainable economics? Two authors believe so -- and that it would require the end of capitalism: Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams, who co-wrote Creating an Ecological Society. In this Truthout interview, Magdoff -- a professor emeritus of plant and soil science at the University of Vermont -- shares his vision of how we could move toward such a world.

Magdoff's articles have been frequently published in the Monthly Review, a longtime socialist journal. He is a professor emeritus of plant and soil science at the University of Vermont and co-author of the new Monthly Review Press book Creating an Ecological Society: Toward a Revolutionary Transformation.
 
Fred Magdoff demonstrates in this interview that he is a very wise man as illustrated in this paragraph in a partial answer to the question "In summary, what would an ecological society look like to you?"

It will be critical to operate in ways that maintain an egalitarian and democratic society. Transparency and openness need to be maintained. There are a variety of methods to help make that happen, such as simple processes for recall of unsatisfactory persons in positions of authority and regular rotation of positions within economic units and within social structures, such as community, regional and multi-regional councils. Continuing efforts will take place in schools and society at large to encourage pro-social traits needed in a cooperative society -- cooperation, reciprocity, sharing, empathy, treating all people equally and fairly (no favoritism) -- and to work to minimize the expression of traits emphasized and rewarded by capitalism (especially, greed, selfishness and individualism) and to eliminate the deep scourges of racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination and oppression.

In the last lengthy sentence he poses what I believe to be a major hurdle to overcome by any revolutionary movement that attempts to replace capitalism with what is truly a social-system: individualism that is laced like fabric throughout the culture of capitalism. That is why I believe that any effective revolutionary movement must emphasize a pro-social prefigurative component (see mine here and here in my revolutionary proposal) in order to provide training and experience to create a totally new human being to preserve this new social system.

Necessity: The Mother of Invention Or The Mother of Strife? [a "best post"]

Click here to access article by Bernard Marszalek from Ztangi Press. (Amended for clarity at 10:18 AM and at 5:35 PM Seattle time.)

The author takes us on a mind-expanding tour from current research through history and archeology to uncover evidence that humans need security and peace in order to realize our collective powers (as social creatures) of creativity. (Is not "creativity" the ability or power to influence an outcome in a new way?) It is clear that our Western civilization that is anchored on the dynamic engine of capitalism is becoming increasingly dysfunctional regarding these needs. This is the inevitable end result of the overwhelming power of a tiny class of capitalists who are increasingly hoarding not only wealth but power to satisfy their addiction to the latter. The power to create must belong to all the people because it is embedded in their human nature, but for this class it has become an end in itself. Sadly they have brainwashed us into being their willing accomplices or (to stick with the addiction theme) their co-dependents.

Our jobs prevent us from being creators. Or to put this another way, the false scarcity that compels us to obediently perform our daily sacrifices to maintain our miserable survival veils the real, but unacknowledged scarcity of creation. ...our condition of enslavement frustrates our species-work – the creation of culture. It is as if we are the compliant, if not the eager, agents of our own demise as evolutionary beings.

Collective intelligence manifests on a material basis as everything from jewelry to gigantic public works like the reservoirs of the Indus cities.

His tour brings us to this apt conclusion: 

Given the reality of economic trends however, no matter how important it is to retrieve from the bosses every ounce of the value of labor that they are stealing, we need to confront the fact that jobs are not only increasingly precarious and stupid, they are disappearing. No effort to ignore this fact by focusing on immediate demands will make it disappear. There can be no effective political movement that does not meet changing reality with radicalism.

I have difficulty with the last sentence. To me, it should read something like this. "There can be no effective political movement that does not insure security and peace for its inhabitants, and to accomplish this we must radically change the way societies currently function."  

Economic Update: Human Nature and Capitalism

On the last half of a recent program presented below, economics Prof. Wolff interviews Dr. Harriet Fraad who talks about human nature.



Because I'm not entirely sure if she is arguing that human nature is infinitely malleable, I would like to clarify my own position. 

Human nature is very adaptable, but within limits. Our nature is to be free, but within limits of human society. Because ruling classes have emerged during the last 2% of human existence corresponding to civilization, there has also occurred far more stringent limits that have been imposed on large numbers of people by ruling classes in order to secure their advantages. 

Originally they accomplished this through violence, but since then mostly by indoctrinating the oppressed with various justifying messages: such arrangements have been ordained by some god, there is no alternative, or it is simply conforming to human nature. The desire for freedom within social limits, which humans had to maintain for 98% of human existence in order to survive, has never been destroyed, but only repressed by ruling classes during the last 2% of human existence.

Hence there never ceases to be vigorous opposition to these arbitrary limits imposed on oppressed people by ruling classes. This conflict between rulers and the oppressed is often referred to as "class struggle". It also represents what oppressed humans frequently refer to as "fairness" or "social justice". If human nature were infinitely adaptable, this conflict would not occur.

A revolutionary model: an introduction (part 1 of 4)

by Ron Horn -- edited for clarity at 8 PM on Sunday, May 21, Seattle time. (Edited for clarity again on July 14th.)

In this series of articles I am proposing a potentially revolutionary project: an independent US media organization to serve the needs of North American audiences for the truth about foreign and domestic actions and policies. More and more North Americans are becoming aware of the issue of "fake news" reports issued by media corporation. Thus I think the time is ripe for a more aggressive effort to present news and analysis of critical issues that now threaten the very existence of humans. But first I need to introduce my political and philosophical beliefs for this project to insure that it is rational and offers a reasonably good potential for not only averting the twin threats of a nuclear war conflagration and climate destabilization, but also offers the potential to lead to more peaceful relations and environmentally sustainable progress.

What we have experienced since the dawn of capitalist rule starting about three hundred years ago is the increasing power and wealth of a decreasing proportion of humans. Capitalism is based on the private ownership of an economy, and the inevitable logic of the system is the ever increasing concentration of wealth by fewer and fewer people.  But what I wish to emphasize in this proposal is that the system has a much worse consequence for the vast majority of humans:  concentrated wealth serves a distorted psychological need of domination and control by only a tiny class of owners of economic property which leaves the vast majority of humans feeling powerless. The solution is constructing a revolutionary model that increases the influence of people over their own lives.
 
To be sure, there are a number of other consequences resulting from this type of rule as many critics of the system are well aware: many wars (which now appear never-ending), periodic economic crises, widespread poverty, alienation in the workplace, etc. Probably worst of all is the additional specter that is now haunting humans: the likely destabilization of the Earth's climate because of the contamination of the atmosphere and oceans with accumulating carbon, due to the mad pursuit of profits, that will end in the extinction of humans.

However, to propose a revolutionary model to prevent all these consequences from interfering not only with the potential for human happiness but to preserve us as a humans species, I think we need to go further back in our history to discover what constitutes our essential qualities as humans as a foundation upon which to build a successful revolutionary model that frees us from all ruling classes.

We know from recorded history (roughly starting about 10,000 years ago) that we humans have suffered to live under oppressive class rule since the beginning of civilization. Because this period of class rule, which was brought about initially by violence or the threat of violence, and supplemented thereafter by all sorts of ruses ("divine right", "there is no alternative", etc.) has continued so long, most people now believe that class rule is the natural order of societal arrangements. Most people are completely unaware the extent of the damage this has done not only to their material well-being but to their mental capacities. Most people simply accept the false notion that they must look to leaders in the ruling classes to govern them otherwise chaos and mayhem would reign in which societies would descend into some kind of law of the jungle. This notion, of course, is based on capitalism's concept of humans as essentially self-seeking individuals.
 
Most people have completely forgotten about their natural abilities as creative, social beings capable of ruling themselves. These natural abilities sustained them throughout roughly 98% of human existence (use the label "human nature" to find articles posted on my website that support this concept).  Many anthropologists remind us that originally humans lived in small groups of hunting, fishing, and gathering societies where all adult members participated in decision making. However since the dawn of civilization when people permanently settled in agricultural communities, some people using violence, or the threat of violence, started taking control over others which led to control of entire societies which, in turn, over time deteriorated into masters and subjects, tiny ruling classes and the subjugated vast majority. Since then, the participation of humans in decision-making, otherwise known as real democracy, has been only a dream of ordinary people. (Have you noticed how capitalists love to use the word "democracy" in their propaganda?)

The ability to have influence over one's life is a key feature of human nature, but its perverted form is the power to control others for one's own benefit. This perverted form is expressed with a contemporary meaning by author Peter Robb who wrote in his book Midnight in Sicily:

The colossal wealth brought by the drug trade brought no improvement to the lives of those who risked their necks for it. The furtive enjoyment of a fast car or a gold Rolex or expensive clothes was cold comfort in a life of hiding, sexual misery, mistrust, the constant fear of betrayal and death. The old mafia reward hadn’t been wealth but power. ‘Giving orders is better than fucking,’ was an often-heard mafia saying.

Mafia, or organized crime, is only a crude form of capitalism. All ruling classes ultimately rely on violence, or the threat of violence, most of which is buried and obscured in the recorded history of not only capitalist societies, but since the beginning of ruling classes shortly after civilization was established.
 
This power over people and the self-centered drive to accumulate wealth are both found in exaggerated form in capitalism, however power is a far more addictive drug than wealth accumulation. I've also found this to be true from personal experience I had with a very wealthy family headed by a CEO of a transnational corporation. The CEO had everything he and his family could want, but he only enjoyed the thrill of decision-making, much like the "high" of a powerful drug, rather than the enjoyment of his wealth. (This was also argued by Jim O’Reilly, a retired banker, educated in Britain, and now resides in Colorado, whose blog I followed back in 2011-2013.) 

Wealth is mostly used in today's capitalist societies as a means to exercise power over others. Today we see billionaires who use their wealth in various ways--some even criminal--to influence not only people in government, but throughout society. Wealth used as power can be seen in the very legal framework of corporations (a quintessentially capitalist institution): the owners' formal influence, as stockholders, varies according to the number of corporate shares owned by them. But I argue that they mostly use this wealth in combination with other capitalists to control the rest of us, and in the capitalist countries that make up the US-led Empire, by insuring we are well indoctrinated in the virtues of capitalism through their control of education, media, and entertainment. 

Our ruling masters in this transnational ruling class nowadays reserve the use violence (or the threat) on not only those who resist their rule (whether domestically or on foreign countries), but on nations and people who wish to pursue an independent course of action. Accordingly, we see daily reports of wars: wars by proxy terrorist armies, well hidden ("in the interests of national security") subversive attacks to destabilize nations, and outright invasions and occupations. Domestically we see the armed guardians of capitalist rule killing mostly minorities with no accountability to any system of justice; and those they don't murder, they lock away in a vast prison system.

The damage of roughly 10,000 years of class rule has had a deleterious effects on the vast majority of humans to sustain themselves psychologically as well as materially in a healthy and just manner, however I argue that these capacities still exist, but only need the removal of class rule and time to blossom once again. 

But there is far more at stake than simply the full expression of our humanity. Those alive today, mostly the young adults, are tasked with saving our human species from the twin possibilities (some say probabilities) posed by the imminent threat of a nuclear war and/or the eventual extinction of humans due to ravages imposed on our habitat by the compulsive drive of capitalists to grow on a finite planet.


(This continues in Part 2a)

Marx on Life After Capitalism

Click here to access a 55 minute interview with Peter Hudis conducted by Sasha Lilley on the program Against the Grain broadcast by KPFA, a listener sponsored radio station in Berkeley, California. 

Rather than reproducing the rather confusing introduction to this interview with Hudis provided by KPFA, I will provide a more revealing introduction given by Jason Schulman in his review of Hudis's recent book Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism from Logos.

Hudis makes plain from the beginning of Marx’s Concept that he will not be visualizing the technical details of socialist society, nor does he pretend that Marx ever offered a comprehensive blueprint for such. His aim is modest: “to see what implicit or explicit indications [Marx’s work] contains about a future, non-alienating society.” Hudis makes it clear that—contrary to those who would enlist Marx’s support for an imagined “market socialism”—that value, or the computation of wealth in monetary terms, is seen by Marx as specific to capitalism and as incompatible with a classless society. The retention of value-production would render “socialist” society unable to overcome capitalism’s “inversion of subject and predicate, in which the products as well as the actions of people take on the form of an autonomous power that determine and constrain the will of the subjects that engender them.” ....

Marx famously criticized other anti-capitalists of his day, most notably anarchist forefather Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, for their failure to acknowledge the centrality of alienated labor to capitalism, and Hudis stresses the importance of alienated labor in explaining the oppressive and defective nature of the official Communisms of the 20th century, which he claims merely changed wage- and property-relations in order to produce a “state capitalism” wherein a ruling class imposed forced labor on workers.

Man as a product of capitalism

by British illustrator and animator Steve Cutts from his website.

Are humans like horses?

by Ron Horn. I thank "Don Quijones" (pseudonym) for this video which he posted on his new blog Rigged Game. He previously posted articles on Raging Bull-Shit, then posted articles on Wolf Street, and now has returned to his own blog.



The narrator alerts us to some very real issues facing humans regarding the ever advancing improvements in technology. In this 15 minute video he compares humans to horses to illustrate how the latter became obsolete with the appearance of autos, trucks, etc. There are now relatively few horses around especially in the technologically advanced nations. Like most metaphors, this one is also limited in its aptness--far more than what its creator intended. I think that it reveals the ideological blindness of the creator (and narrator). 

The creator/narrator of this video along with the vast majority of Americans like fish in the sea don't see the system or the water in which we all swim--capitalism. This system is an artifact created by humans, but it was made by only a certain class of human who saw the potential benefits of profit and power that such a system could give them. They simply and deceptively extrapolated the system of feudalism in which aristocrats and monarchs owned all the land (which their ancestors had conquered) and claimed ownership of most everything that peasants produced in their new system of capitalism. The new class of capitalists now claimed "ownership" over the products and creations of workers who became essentially wage slaves. 

The new system of capitalism was widely known and discussed in most of the West until the last half of the 20th century. In an effort to prevent people from examining the inequities of capitalism, our masters, the ruling capitalist classes, since then have disappeared the word from most of their writings, their history, etc. As a result, most people, like the narrator, simply take for granted that the system is an immutable reality; thus it has almost disappeared as a topic of discussion. 

Now let us return to the metaphor the narrator uses--humans as horses. The metaphor seeks to expose the problems for workers given the advances of technology where most of them are no longer needed. This is accurate and poses a dilemma for humans. However the metaphor fails to provide an understanding of the class-based exploitation that the system of capitalism imposes on the vast majority of humans. Did horses invent cars, trucks, etc? Of course not. But human-workers did invent them along with all of technology. The problem is that the benefits of their activity did not go to the workers, but to a tiny class of capitalists who claim "ownership" over everything the workers produce and create--and this includes technology. The metaphor hides this glaring fact.

Instead of a blessing that could free workers from not only mindless tasks but more complex tasks, under the existing system technology is now threatening their very existence. With a new system that distributed the benefits of technology to everyone, humans could be free of the necessity of spending so much time in activities to meet their material needs of existence. This could free them to engage in the tasks of making decisions about production, about what they want to produce, about issues of relations to each others, about questions in our relations with nature, about refinements to the new system that they created,  etc, etc. 

As you can see, this is in marked contrast to today's world where only a tiny minority decide everything--and for their exclusive benefit. In such a new system humans would need to spend a lot of time in education about the world in which they live. Thus technology could free all humans to develop their fullest potentialities. It's hard to imagine what humans could be become under a system that was designed to serve all of them.