Posts that I especially recommend today: Friday, January 29, 2021

• Lessons From Portland’s Protest Movement by Sunnivie Brydum from Yes! (This article features a 3:45m video explain how the movement succeeded over four months.) 

• Gamestop–And the Game That Never Stops by Jack Rasmus from his weblog. My reaction: Rasmus describe how the capitalist system works to make the some of the rich richer and the poor poorer.

• Contradictions of Finance Capitalism by Richard Peet from Monthly Review. My reaction: You will learn about the evolution of industrial capitalism into finance capitalism that began around 1950 and accelerated in the 1980s and beyond. They added finance to their wealth and thereby increased their power over the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire. They sought cheap labor all over the world, invested in, and loaned money to, companies that exploited this cheap labor. The also bought many homes in foreign lands which added to their neoliberal outlook (trans-nationalism). The de-industrialization of the USA was the result.  The author reveal that he had an education in North America by ending his article with an affirmation of democratic socialism and a rightward move for the Monthly Review. Democratic socialism in the USA commonly means a welfare-state type of a capitalist economy. In other words, a fake representation of socialism.
  

• What Carbon Budget? from Arctic News. 

• Is the NHS overwhelmed by incoming COVID-19 patients? by Ludovic Noble from Off-Guardian (based in Britain). 

• Conflicts of Interest Taint Investigations Into COVID Origins by Dr. Joseph Mercola from Children's Health Defense. 

• Under Federal Law, Can Your Employer Makte You Get the COVID Vaccine? by Greg Glaser and Mary Holland from Children's Health Defense. (Note: Those who do not choose the vaccine may want to read this article entitled "Forced to Get the COVID Vaccine? ICAN May Be Able to Help."
  

• 329 Deaths + 9,516 Other Injuries Reported Following COVID Vaccine, Latest CDC Data Show from Children's Health Defense. (Note: These stats are never reported by corporate TV stations.) 

• January 6th: Cops, Vigilantes, and the Ruling Class by Richard Moser from Be Freedom. 

• Reuters vs. Thailand: Why Does the Western Media Always Lie? by Brian Berletic from his weblog Land Destroyer Report. My commentary follows: 

I have followed this ex-Marine for the last 10 years, and I've always found his reports about political issues, whether they were about Thailand or some other country, to be absolutely spot-on (to use a British expression). Thus I trust his presentation and analyses of issues.

As Caitlin Johnstone frequently and convincingly writes, "Whoever controls the narrative controls the world." This is never more true than in today's world because the communication of ideas has become under such tight control by a relatively few capitalists than ever before. This point is driven into our consciousness no better than this article by Berletic. The solution is obvious: take away their ownership/control of communication properties. But that would be the ultimate evil of communism, you declare in an angry voice! The thorough indoctrination of your mind by capitalist ruling classes who control all institutions is the problem preventing any future progress and ensuring our ultimate doom.

• Biden Attacks Farms – Comprehensive War on Global Food Supply – Engineered Famine by the "Ice Age Farmer" from his weblog. (Note: This post features his 27:35m report on his YouTube channel.) My reaction: I don't know much about farming, the production of crops, the world's food supply, etc. I would like to learn of your responses to this report by writing to me at goatmeal36@yahoo.com.)

• 2020 Annual Wrap Up: The Going Direct Reset — The Central Bankers Make Their Move with John Titus in 4 minute video report posted by Catherine Austin Fitts from her weblog Solari Report. 

• Solutions: Survival Currency featuring James Corbett of The Corbett Report giving his introduction and recommendations for a survival currency. (Note: Although I have only listened to 25 minutes of his one hour talk, I think it is worth your time.) 
  

Posts that I especially recommend today: Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2020

• The Establishment’s Plan to Divide Part 2: COVID-19, Election 2020, and The Great Reset by Derrick Broze from The Last American Vagabond. My reaction: I think Broze spends too much time on how Trump functions to divide Americans, and not enough time devoted to exposing the carefully designed ruling class agenda of fomenting fear and chaos among ordinary Americans. Trump is a natural-born American capitalist of a nationalist variety, but the transnational ("neoliberal") ruling class intentionally creates chaos among ordinary Americans as a method to install more authoritarian measures. They want to do this as a part of their global domination project that I have exposed numerous times. Transnational capitalists see Trump, who unconsciously stirs up conflict, as an upstart who is detracting from their finely honed control methods, and as such, they are greatly irritated by him. They only included the clownish Trump on the 2016 ballot to ensure the victory of their chosen candidate Hillary Clinton; but they were surprised, as I was, that many voters simply withheld their votes with disgust from Clinton, and as a result, Trump was elected (by the electoral college but not by popular vote).

• Media Gunning For Scott Atlas Because He Keeps Exposing Coronavirus Lies from Political Patrol.
  

• Big donors fund state parties at record levels by Reid Wilson from The Hill. (Note: This article gives only one part of the ruling class's control over elections which is an integral part of American capitalists' fake democracy. See also this evidence.)
  

• Brave New Money, part 1 and part 2 of a 2-part series. By Norbert Häring, a German blogger and economist, from his weblog Money and more. (Note: I think that this is a summary of his book by the same title.) My reaction: I think that digital money is a part of the The Great Reset project that the Empire wishes to accomplish with the pandemic. I assume that if they are successful, this will give them ever greater control (domination) over their populations. Control and domination is what the Empire and capitalism are all about.
  

• Like a Rowboat in a Typhoon: Why 2020 Center-Right Yankee Election Outcomes are Dead in the Water by Bruce Lerro from Planning Beyond Capitalism. 

• LIVE UPDATES: ASSANGE HEARING DAY SEVENTEEN—US Intel Spying on Assange Detailed in Court, Including Plans to Kidnap or Poison Him by Joe Lauria from Consortium News. My reaction: I am not posting articles on the trial of Assange because I see the court in Britain as a "kangaroo court", I assume that Assange will be either killed in the British prison or he will be extradited to USA where he will await a similar fate.

• Carolyn L. Karcher: “Zionism Was Always A Settler Colonial Ideology” by Mohsen Abdelmoumen from American Herald Tribune. (Note: The author interviews Karcher who is a long time activist, retired professor, and author.)
  

• Western government-funded intelligence cutouts trained Syrian opposition leaders, planted stories in media outlets from BBC to Al Jazeera, and ran a cadre of journalists. A trove of leaked documents exposes the propaganda network. By Ben Norton from The Grayzone.

• Thai Protests are Anti-Chinese, Not "Pro-Democracy" by Tony Cartalucci from his weblog Land Destroyer Report. (Note: Cartalucci is an American living in Thailand.)

• For an egalitarian, cooperative road to an ecosocialist future from Green Left (based in Australia).
  

Posts that I especially recommend today: Sunday, Sept. 20, 2020

This morning I only got through to 1/3 of the 50 websites that I normally peruse to select articles for your greater understanding of the world we live in. I've simply run out time. I was so fascinated by the many articles I found--there are several "best posts" among them. I will start you off with something light: a satirical comedian's take on censorship.

• What It’s Like Getting Censored on YouTube featuring comedian JP Sears. 

• How an “Act of God” Pandemic is Destroying the West by Michael Hudson from his weblog. (I neglected to credit an activist for alerting me to this article.)
  

• Julian Assange trial: the mask of Empire has fallen by Pepe Escobar posted on A bird's eye view of the Vineyard. 

• NATO’s Slow-Motion Blitzkrieg Eastward by Ulson Gunnar from New Eastern Outlook.

• Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Statement About the Situation in Belarus issued via this Russian press office and authored by S.N. Ivanov and posted on "The Saker".  

• BLM's War on the Deplorables by Mike Whitney from The Unz Review. A best post.
  

• Hyperinflation, Fascism and War: How the New World Order May Be Defeated Once More by Matthew Ehret from "The Saker". (Note: I didn't read all of this rather lengthy article, but I will. I was so impressed by his knowledge of history during this period about which I have read widely. I need to followup with subjects and books he suggested. A best post.)

• New Technologies, TikTok, Competition, and “Free” and Human Labor: An Interview with Economist Paula Bach. This article was posted on Left Voice. (Note: The article was translated from a transcript in Spanish and found on a Spanish website. She has an exceptional knowledge about this important subject. I found at times that I didn't understand all of her references and arguments, but I learned a lot. Maybe you can do better. You will need to know about "unicorn companies" This is another best post.)
  

Posts that I especially recommend today:Sunday, July 12, 2020

• How Democrats Are Deceived by Eric Zuesse from Strategic Culture Foundation. My summary follows:

In this article Zuesse refers to ordinary citizens who register as "Democrats" in the fake elections that are held in the USA while examining the CIA engineered coup in Ukraine in 2014. Zuesse uses his well-trained skills as an historian to uncover the key true story of what happened in contrast to the fake stories published by media corporations to deceive US citizens. He also cites an obviously CIA written entry for the "Ukrainian Revolution"  in Wikipedia to manipulate public opinion in addition to mainstream media coverage in support of the ruling class's version of events. He accomplishes all of this in a rather short article. Amazing!

• Propaganda Brainwashing, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix by Australian Caitlin Johnstone from her weblog.

• Corporatism is a Feature of Capitalism, not a Bug by Signý A. from Left Voice.

• Iran-China pact turbocharges the New Silk Roads by Pepe Escobar from A bird's eye view of the Vineyard. (Note: Because Asia Times, the original source of the article, is now behind a paywall, I am posting other sources for Escobar's articles appearing on their website.)

• You Have the Right to Keep Silent If You Want to Remain Employed by Terry Everton from Dissident Voice.

• Race, Class & Protest in the United States Today by Ajamu Baraka from LookLeft.

• Looks Like Sweden Was Right After All by Mike Whitney from The Unz Review. 

• As warming approaches 1.5°C, talk of a carbon budget for the Paris targets is delusional by David Spratt from Climate Code Red. 

Posts that I especially recommend today: Wednesday, June 3, 2020

• The Capitalists of the 21st Century by Norbert Häring (Germany) from his weblog Money and more. (Note: I've assigned this as a "best posts" category.) My commentary follows:

I notice this morning that there is a slew (def. #3) of posts alleging that the protest movement is being manipulated (see this, this, and this--btw, I've since removed The Duran from my recommended list of websites.) There is certainly manipulation going, but what type, to what extent, and who benefits is too soon to tell.) What is certain is that the Empire's transnational capitalist ruling class does not want a "crisis to go to waste". It's immediately apparent that the Deep State wants to get rid of Trump, but what else, to my mind, is yet to be determined. It's clear to me that police forces all across American represent the mailed fist of fascist capitalism, and as such they won't disappear or become transformed into protecting the people as their official mission. So, it appears to me that the protest movement is moving toward a clash with the ruling class.

Häring has read a book by this title (The Capitalists of the 21st Century by Werner Rügemer) which apparently the article is a summary of the book according to Häring. This article contains a considerable amount to learn about the latest phase of capitalism. For example from the following section:

This, our capitalism – or death for all

The wealth of the BlackRock milieu is increasing, but the national economies and the infrastructure important for the majority of the population – schools, apartments, hospitals, water pipes, sewage treatment plants – are decaying or being privatized and made more expensive by the capital organizers. Climate warming is being accelerated. Armament profits boom with the invention of new enemies. While the new capital masters have created diverse collective forms for themselves, they are destroying the remnants of previous collective forms of dependent employees and maneuvering them into professionally staged, ultimately joyless, sick loneliness.

With the inward war of the new, even more US-led capitalists against democracy, against the rule of law and the welfare state, they also became more outwardly aggressive. They wage declared and undeclared wars through their governments and military and intelligence services, expand their global military presence, secretly and openly arm their representatives. Even nuclear war on European soil becomes a calculated, incalculable possibility. Motto: This, our capitalism or death for all.

I think this is an important article and book that activists can learn much from. It looks to me like the current protest movement, if it is to evolve into something more that that, is confronting a powerful force. And I think that the above motto means that the ruling capitalist class are like an alcoholic, in the final stage of addiction, who will risk everything--even death--to obtain their drugs of domination, control, and wealth that the capitalist system provides them with in such abundance. (Btw, the nerve center and the real capital of this highly invisable capitalist ruling class appears to be East Wenatchee, Washington and behind the Sabey Data Center (also see this.) This way they can take advantage of taxpayer-funded cheap energy to power their data centers. The hydroelectric power plants, built by workers in the Great Depression of the 1930s, on the Columbia River produce the cheapest electricity in the USA. It is also the home of the soccer-field-sized data centers run by Yahoo, Microsoft and Dell. Do you think 21st century capitalists are dumb? I admit that they may be, but they have all the money to hire people with brains to run their data centers, the government, and everything else.

But, I fear that today's youth are ill-equipped by so many years of indoctrination, propaganda, and entertaining distractions that they are hardly a match for such a goliath of a capitalist ruling class.

• Why America’s revolution won’t be televised by Pepe Escobar from Asia Times.

• If you can't beat'em ... by cartoonist Terry Everton from Dissident Voice. 

• Rebellion and Repression: Capitalism’s Long Hot Summer Begins by Ben Becker from Internationalist 360°.

• It’s a Class War Now Too by Joshua Frank from Defend Democracy Press.

• Are we about to see a Colour Revolution in the United States? by Kit Knightly from Off-Guardian. 

• VIDEO – Here are the Horrifying things I learned at a Contact Tracing Class from FRN (based in Serbia). 

• Facts Vs. Fake by Peter Koenig from Dissident Voice.

THIS IS ALL I HAVE TIME AND ENERGY FOR.

Two posts that I especially recommend today: Friday, November 22, 2019

• Bolivia, Lithium and Hijacking the Environmental Movement by Guy Crittenden from Solarian (based in Canada). 

• Obama Tells Dems Don't Be "Too Far Left" by Jimmy Dore and his show in Philadelphia (via YouTube).

Posts I especially recommend for today: Wednesday, November 20, 2019

Bolivia:

• Coups easy in Latin America when US controls military – professor by Jeb Sprague from RT America.

• Bolivia: Chaos hits Cochabamba as police and pro-Morales protesters clash from Ruptly via YouTube. 

• Evo and the Movements: A Long Process of Degradation by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui from Capitalism Nature Socialism. (Note: This contain some apparently legitimate criticism of Evo Morales and the MAS party.)

• Bolivia: A Color Revolution or a New Surge for Latin American Independence? by Peter Koenig from Dissident Voice. 

Other posts:

• Reclaiming Your Inner Fascist by C. J. Hopkins from his weblog Consent Factory, Inc.

• General Shows Trump Maps of Oil Fields To Keep US Troops in Syria by Josiah Thayer from Antiwar.

• Now That Assange Is Safely Locked Up, Sweden Drops Its “Investigation” by Caitlin Johnstone from her weblog.

• Assange rape case dropped: Sweden abandons probe that led to WikiLeaks co-founder’s asylum in UK’s Ecuadorian embassy from Defend Democracy Press. 

• NYT’s “Leaked” Chinese Files Story Covers For Terrorism by Tony Cartalucci from New Eastern Outlook. (Note; I couldn't access the article directly from their website (censorship?), but I found a way to access it indirectly from Startpage.com, a search engine I sometimes use.

• Chemical watchdog manipulated Douma attack report - whistleblower from RT. 

• New report finds costs of climate change impacts often underestimated by Dana Nuccitelli from Yale Climate Connections.

The Great Transition [a proposal]

from The E. F. Schumacher Society. You may want to skip the introduction and go straight to the title, "The Great Transition".

New Economics Foundation policy director Andrew Simms put it like this.
"For years we have been told that there is no alternative to an economy that
wrecks the environment and worsens inequality. We've been told that we live
in a time of prosperity, when really we're no happier than we were thirty
years ago. We've been told that crashes, bubbles and recessions are all
part of the 'natural cycle' of economies. But faced with potentially
irreversible climate change and corrosive inequality, these are dangerous
fairy tales. The Great Transition shows we have a chance of a better
reality."

Some Reflections on ‘The Big Society’….

by Rob Hopkins from Transition Culture. 

I remain very skeptical of the Transition Movement whose guru is Rob Hopkins. I try to remain open to new information that will convince me that his ideas are constructive. However, there continue to be pieces like this that reinforce my skepticism. He seems to be quite the politician by acknowledging different points of view and thus appearing to be broadminded on any given subject. However, he clearly steers people in the direction of his movement and its collaboration with the policies of the ruling class.

For example, in this article he acknowledges a critical view:

Of course the cynic might point out that the reason for the Big Society is the sweeping cuts in public spending that are only just beginning.  If you replace the word ‘localism’ with ‘privatisation’, it is not that different in some ways from the Thatcher government’s agenda.  There is a challenge within it around what people are actually capable of doing in their spare time.  Working full time, and also running a school?  Working, managing a family, looking after an ailing relative, and running a Community Land Trust?  Of course there are incredible people out there who do that, but it will have its limits unless people are supported in other ways too.

But, as you can see, he dismisses it as cynical and continues on with the great opportunities the "Big Society" presents for the Transition Movement.

Having said that though, I welcome the potential that the Big Society represents.  It offers a context within which Transition can really step up to the plate.  It explicitly states that it wants to see communities stepping up and taking control, and that can only be to the good.  It has lots of hooks onto which Transition groups can hang their projects, and it also raises lots of questions which Transition initiatives have hard-won experience they can feed into.

Tipping Point

from The Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability. I have only read the summary (the first four pages), but it looks to me like a very important document that attempts to shed more light on what we may expect to happen with declining fossil energy supplies and climate change. The emphasis appears to be on peak energy. The complete report is a 45 page pdf type document.

We are at the cusp of rapid and severely disruptive changes. From now on the risk of entering a collapse must be considered significant and rising. The challenge is not about how we introduce energy infrastructure to maintain the viability of the systems we depend upon, rather it is how we deal with the consequences of not having the energy and other resources to maintain those same systems. Appeals towards localism, transition initiatives, organic food and renewable energy production, however laudable and necessary, are totally out of scale to what is approaching.

The Local Food and Farming Revolution

by Michael Brownlee from Transition Times. This is quite a lengthy article (about 7,000 words), but contains a lot of useful information and references to resources regarding permaculture, transitioning, localization, etc.

Tim Kasser on Consumerism, Psychology, Transition and Resilience. Part Two

from Transition Culture. 

So, I think what we really need to be doing now from my perspective is developing and fleshing out and thinking through the multitude of options, not because we think we’re ultimately going to chose one of those things from the menu, but because we recognise that we’re actually going to have to chose the whole buffet, and implement them now, as soon as possible. Once we get one implemented people will be more open to the next one and the next one and then you can affect that kind of change reasonably quickly. And that’s what gives me hope.

The Transition Towns Movement: Its Huge Significance and a Friendly Criticism

by Ted Trainer from (We) Can Do Better. This is a must read article--probably the most important one I've posted thus far.  For myself, I printed out a hard copy on Word to study it more thoroughly.

The case for scarcity and a critique of the Transition Towns movement

from P2P.  Excerpts from a longer article. I think that this is very important because many transition people think that they and society can be saved by their methods, and totally ignore the pernicious effects on everyone caused by the larger capitalist system. For one egregious example of a reformist approach, see this.

In my view few green people or transitioners recognise the huge distinction here between trying to reform consumer-capitalist society and trying to replace its major structures and systems. The Simpler Way contradicts the core systems of the present society and cannot be built unless we replace them. Consumer-capitalist society cannot be fixed; it cannot be reformed to not create the alarming global problems we face while still being about the pursuit of affluence and growth etc.

Rob Hopkins: Getting over oil, one town at a time

from New Scientist. "The founder of the Transition Towns movement explains why he is optimistic that we can survive peak oil and minimise climate change."