Posts that I especially recommend today: Tuesday, July 14, 2020

• COVID HELL: Record Temperatures and Shortages Will Test The Patience Of Americans This Summer by Michael Snyder from FRN (based in Serbia).

• Psychologically Locked Down by Rob Slane from The Blogmire.

• On the Political Implications of the Pandemic-Induced Capitalist Crisis by Danny Haiphong from American Herald Tribune.

And it will take a mass movement of the working class, with Black people and oppressed people in the lead, to chart a new course for the United States that is driven by the ideological and material demand for socialism rather than the reactionary scapegoating and political repression inherent in the capitalist system.

What are the chances of that happening?

• ‘Cancel Culture’ hypocrites cancel open debate and foreign countries by Max Blumenthal from The Grayzone. (My reaction:  Academic careerists try to "cancel" real critics of the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire.)

• Miserable Bankruptcy of Neoliberal “Takeover” Reports by Shawgi Tell from Dissident Voice. 

• Classism by Terry Everton (political cartoonist) from Dissident Voice.

• Protecting the American Opium Trade from Tales of the American Empire, a YouTube channel. (Note: A little history of how early American and British capitalists (including an ancestor of FDR) aggressively gained their wealth from the opium trade with China.)

Official history makes frequent references to the British tea trade as a vital part of the British empire in the 1800s. It’s hard to understand how trading tea could be so profitable, until one learns that opium was a major component of the tea trade. Opium is a powerful and addictive pain killer that is often refined into heroin. It was banned by governments a century ago, but the opium trade continues to this day with secret approval by government officials. The American government has used the US military to protect the opium trade for two centuries and evidence shows this continues. The extent of this protection is open for debate, but if one connects the dots the image is ugly.

• RFK, Jr. talks with Dr. Andy Wakefield about his new movie, 1986: The Act. This post is from Children's Health Defense. (Note: This is about a movie made by Wakefield regarding Big Pharma's control over the government which resulted in the latter protecting the exorbitant profits of pharmaceutical corporations while permitting Big Pharma to severely impact the health of some young people. The film costs $12.99 to view. I have seen it and recommend it to those who have a special interest in this subject.)

Yellow vests and government disinformation —list of demands

Click here to access article from "THE BLOG OF GABAS / MEDIAPART. FR" and translated by Patrice Greanville from his website. 

In this latest news of the "yellow vests" they are now making demands on the French government. We now see our capitalist masters imposing austerity on working people in the various countries of the US-led Empire. They like to engage in economic warfare against other countries they don't like, but this is economic warfare directed against their own working people, and the people, particularly the French working people, have had enough.

There are some indications that the protest is spreading to other countries as reported by RT and George Galloway, a British member of parliament, in the following video:

Trump's budget

by Pat Bagley, cartoonist for the Salt Lake City Tribune.

The Crumbling American Superpower

Click here to access article by F. William Engdahl from New Eastern Outlook. 

I'm sorry to provide so many bad news articles today, but it can't be avoided unless you want to live in fairy tale land of corporate entertainment. In this piece Engdahl provides solid data to indicate that America's infrastructure is in very bad shape; and because American industry has escaped to other countries in search of cheap labor and to escape taxes, we don't have the money to fix it.

A Wall Street-driven agenda of globalization of US manufacturing and out-sourcing of production has left America a hollowed-out, crumbling Superpower. Since the 1980’s the United States has significantly under-invested in both new infrastructure and in renewing old. As US multinational corporations moved their factories overseas to cheap labor production in Mexico, then in Asia, especially China, and elsewhere, they found tax loopholes that allowed them to walk away from supporting the country that as recently as the 1960’s was the world industrial economic leading nation. Today US corporations hold $2.4 trillion in overseas profits that they keep abroad to avoid US taxes.

Teaching Homeland Security

Click here to access a 53 minute interview with Professor Nicole Nguyen broadcast over KPFA, a listener sponsored radio station in Berkeley, California.

According to Nicole Nguyen, national security-related agencies and companies are drawing young people into a mindset of militarism and war via their involvement in homeland security programs, which have been established in dozens of public schools in the U.S. Nguyen did ethnographic work at one such high school; she reveals what the students are taught and what values and beliefs they are encouraged to adopt.

I found this interview quite disturbing. Nguyen describes what many poorer school districts are faced with: inadequate funding for education and increasing pressure to focus on jobs to keep their students in school until they graduate. To make up for the lack of funding, many school districts are seduced by grants that are available from the Dept. of Homeland Security to fund curricula that promotes strong militaristic values, distorted ideas about terrorism, stereotypes about the Middle East, racist hyper-masculine conditioning, and the necessity of imperialist wars. Teachers at these schools are also assigned surveillance responsibilities to identify students who might be inclined toward terrorism.

3 Realities You Aren’t Being Told About Afghanistan

Click here to access article by Ulson Gunnar from New Eastern Outlook.

Based on a recent report by General John Nicholson, US commander of US armed forces in Afghanistan, Gunnar found mostly disinformation. But the disinformation actually helped him to deduce three truths or realities about our presence in that country. 

         1. "Stronger Afghan Military" Still Requires Years More of US Hand-Holding

         2. US Taxpayers Will Pay Twice for Afghanistan’s Ineffectual Military

         3. The US is not Fighting Terrorism in Afghanistan

Gunnar ends his analysis with this conclusion:

[Corporate media] Coverage of America's ongoing presence in Afghanistan has dwindled within the US and European media specifically because the alleged narrative underpinning the occupation has diverged so drastically from reality. Over the next year, for those who carefully follow the conflict, the US will continue manufacturing excuses to remain in the country while it focuses on both negotiating with the Taliban and attempting to diminish them politically and militarily.

And to pay for this never-ending occupation of Afghanistan (as well as other imperialist adventures), we ordinary people in the US will experience more cutbacks to social, medical services, educational services, and infrastructure spending.

The Coup against Trump and His Military - Wall Street Defense

Click here to access article by retired Professor James Petras from his blog.

Petras is another perceptive writer who offers his views on the apparent ruling class split between what I will refer to as the Obama faction and the Trump faction. He also expresses his views in a PDF document that he posted the following day on Friday entitled "The Anti-Trump Institutional Coup and the Visible Operatives". I will tease out his position based on these two articles.

Petras sees the Obama faction as a more established one that has been guiding his policies, and whose backers have a visceral opposition to Russia, China, and Iran as has been evident all along during his administration. The Trump faction, on the other hand, want to expand markets to serve the commercial interests of major capitalists. Also with the sole exception of corporate media who support the Obama faction, he sees the split over these issues as cutting across every powerful interest group in the capitalist ruling class such as Wall Street, the military establishment, what I refer to as government puppets in Congress who are funded by both factions and serve both factions, and even several of his Cabinet appointees who support "bellicose policies" presumably toward Russia, China, and Iran.

Petras makes the following claim about the Trump faction:

Trump seeks to implement his foreign policy of ‘market deals’, renegotiation of trade agreements with China, oil and aerospace trade-offs with Iran, and the termination of sanctions with Russia. President Trump will declare ‘let the oil deals flow’!

I have not seen much evidence that the Trump camp wants to make deals with China and Iran--quite to the contrary. Thus, my suspicion is that Trump will be used to make deals with Russia in an effort to split them off from China as I explained on the 15th of December in an article entitled "My ('conspiracy') theory about the emergence of the Trump faction of the ruling capitalist class". In fact, the whole contentious contest between these two factions may be used as a ruse to hide this new strategy.

What is certain is that Trump's domestic policies will favor more austerity policies and likely further cuts to, privatization and/or abolition of, social supports such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act.

#Brexit confirms: the neoliberal center cannot hold

Click here to access article by Jerome Roos from ROAR. 

While Brexit clearly hands victory to the bigots of UKIP and the Tory right, a victory for remain would simply have perpetuated the anti-democratic neoliberal masochism that produced the motivation for people to align themselves with these bigots in the first place. In this light, we have to stop seeing the rabid nationalism of the far-right and the neoliberal cosmopolitanism of the pro-EU camp as polar opposites — in reality, the former is the logical outgrowth of the latter; its deformed Siamese twin in flesh and blood. The only thing the pro-EU camp was able to offer British voters was a continuation of the structural conditions that led to Brexit, combined with fanatical fear-mongering over the consequences of that outcome.

Ultimately, the British vote to leave the EU, whether it eventually materializes or not (and there is no guarantee that it will), is symptomatic of a much deeper and much more debilitating crisis....

I agree with his analysis of the consequences of this British vote to leave the European Union (if it actually does), but I disagree that a positive outcome rests of one man's shoulder: Jeremy Corbin. I don't like individualism and I never will. We are all in this together, and together is the only possibility for our salvation: even if salvation in the end only means a modicum of self-respect as fully politically conscious humans.

An even more extreme illustration of political immaturity is shown by Dave Lindorff's take on Bernie Sander's prospects in his article "What is Bernie Up To?". He naively believes that winning a capitalist election would solve the many faceted dilemmas that we find ourselves in.

A display of political ignorance is one recently illustrated by Noam Chomsky. Jeffrey St. Clair amply criticizes this in an article entitled "Noam Chomsky, John Halle and a Confederacy of Lampreys: a Note on Lesser Evil Voting". 

Review of a Film by Michael Moore: “Where to Invade Next” (2016)

Click here to access article by Maximilian C. Forte from Zero Anthropology (Canada).

Michael Moore links US imperial adventurism, the state of permanent war and unending military occupations, with the devastating impacts these have generated at home. Moore is thus advancing the kind of deeper and more comprehensive concept of “blowback” which I have been advocating. He directly ties war, inflated military spending, and the dominance of corporate “defense” contractors, with not just cutbacks to social services and expenditures on health, education, and infrastructure, but also tying permanent war to the entrenchment of militarization in everyday social relations.

It’s Difficult to Say Exactly What, But Something is Happening A Social Movement Awakens in France

Click here to access article by Anouk Colombani from The Brooklyn Rail. 

I've been aware of these protests known as "Nuit debout" (translated as "Up All Night", "Standing Night", and "Rise up at night") for some time, but I've recently become aware that it is spreading all over France, reaching nearby countries, and has even turned up in Montreal. 

What sparked it was apparently a law proposed to attack labor laws protecting workers, morphed into protests against the whole austerity fabric of capitalist rule under the latest phase of neoliberalism, and incorporated issues and methods of the more recent protest movements such as the Indignados and Occupy movements. As North American activists we need to know what is going on with these spreading protests. This article is the best I have seen to capture the origins and evolution of the movement. (I also recommend reading the recent Wikipedia entry about Nuit debout.)

Scattered, messy, refusing leaders and celebrities, the movement is sustained by the masses of people who make it. The diverse and often new forms it takes are signs that people are searching for new kinds of political organization. In the space of a month and a half, we have participated in the birth of new kinds of struggle but also in raising hundreds of issues for the broader public to consider, such as the vegan issue, the return of radical feminism, radical ecology, and horizontal democracy. This protest movement didn’t come from nowhere. If it refuses to take on a partisan label, it is clearly the product of protest movements and marginal practices that have been going on for the last twenty years. It also signals a political rebirth in many working-class neighborhoods. ....

Large crowds provoke fear [among the ruling class]; as a result repression shows its face when people come together. Since the week of March 16, the police have not hesitated to intervene with tear gas, beatings, and arrests.

Austerity for the people American style

Click here if you wish to access this cartoon by Brian McFadden from the NY Times or here to access it and others from his website. Also read this justified rant from American NewsX.

Meanwhile the corporate dominated government has no problem funding military bases in over a hundred countries, and bombing and invasions in places like Iraq, Libya, and Syria. It's clear that our masters are sacrificing our health and well-being in order to prioritize the corporate interests of profit and power throughout the world. 

No longer is it "guns and butter" as we experienced under Lyndon Johnson administration (guns to kill Vietnamese and butter for us)--our nation is now too poor to afford both. And, it's only going to get worse as we go deeper in debt...if we continue to maintain a state of passivity while watching their dumbing-down TV and entertainment.

Québec fights back against austerity

Click here to access article by Pete Dolack from Systemic Disorder.

We are supposed to accept austerity as being as natural as ocean tides. Or be demoralized by the power of the forces that continually press down on working people around the world. But there is an ongoing, organized fightback going on — in Québec.

A series of rolling strikes by public-sector employees and students throughout 2015 appear to be headed toward a provincial general strike in December. Haven’t heard of this? That is not because it is francophone workers and students are who are driving these actions but because there has been a near total blackout of this news in the North American corporate media.

Turning national parks into corporate profit centers

Click here to access article by Pete Dolack from Systemic Disorder.

Dolack provides disturbing evidence that this process is already underway. Under corporation control the public parks will be relaxing restrictions on mining, drilling, timber harvesting, and cattle grazing. As government, which is essentially owned and controlled by the capitalist class, imposes more austerity cuts on park services, this trend is likely to accelerate.

Given the corporatization of ever more commons, we may yet be visiting Golden Arches National Park or Disneyland Dinosaur National Monument. Even if the most extreme right-wing plans to auction off public lands don’t ever come to fruition, ongoing neglect can only promise creeping corporate colonization of the United States National Park system.

Commercialization is still relatively minimal in national parks, but worrying signs are there.

Added to this corporate threat, global warming is also damaging public parks.  

Central banks step in to prop up global financial bubble

Click here to access article by Andre Damon from World Socialist Web Site. 

...the wealth of the financial elite cannot come from nowhere. Ultimately, the continual infusion of asset bubbles is the form taken by a massive transfer of wealth, from the working class to the banks, investors and super-rich. The corollary to the rise of the stock market is the endless demands, all over the world, for austerity, cuts in wages, attacks on health care and pensions.

Nowhere are these processes more clear than in the US. 

Who Gets the Money? The Secret Bank Bailout

I credit "Don Quijones" of Raging Bull-Shit for this post and the German company, wocomoDOCS for producing this video. I haven't had time to listen to all of it, but I think that the film-makers have made a diligent and honest attempt to uncover the mysteries behind the bailouts of banks and the resulting severe austerity policies imposed by ruling class financial institutions. In the video the investigator makes a determined effort to find out who the real creditors are--something that is always hidden from the public. I also like the introduction of the video from Raging Bull-Shit which is reproduced below.

Where has all the money gone? That is the question that desperately needs asking (and answering) now that the European Union has morphed into one humongous orgy of national bailouts.

In his 2013 documentary “The Secret Bank Bailout,” German investigative journalist Harald Schumann documents how the peoples of Ireland, Cyprus and Spain were not bailed out. The biggest recipients of the Irish bailout that saved Anglo-Irish Bank were British, French and German banks, including Union Investment Privatfonds, Rothschild et Compagnie Gestion, and Deutsche Bank.

German and French banks accounted for 50 out of the 80 bondholders. Without the clandestine bailouts these banks received, they would have almost certainly gone under.

I think that these problems are basically caused by the dense concentration of power by capitalists over our societies through the private ownership of key sectors of the economy. They control money issuance, they control what money gets spent on, they control large segments of the economy, they control governments, and they control every important institution of society including media, education, and entertainment. 

I also recommend from the same filmmakers a more recent video entitled "The Trail of the Troika (HD 720p) | A must-see to understand the situation in Greece" that can be accessed here. 

Greek Asset Stripping Similarities

Click here if you wish to access this video presentation of a talk given by Michael Hudson at the recent conference in Greece posted on his website and delivered via YouTube. 

What I think is most interesting is the first three minutes of this video in which Hudson compares financial imperialism as being essentially another way of conquering a nation and stealing its resources. In the rest of his talk he argues that this approach is completely irrational simply because it will destroy the Greek economy so that they cannot pay back the country's debt. 

I believe that he misses the point of what financial global capitalists located in the the US Empire are faced with. Hudson essentially argues that they are stupid in pursuing these austerity policies. I think that because European bankers, who play a top role in the European division of the Empire, have relied so much on lending their accumulated wealth to others in order to keep their system going, they really have no alternative but to steal Greek assets, slash social safety nets, and impose cheap labor rates on Greek workers. European bankers are clearly aware that Greece can't pay back the loans, so they intend to steal from Greece what they believe is theirs. If they make concessions to Greece, then many other countries will expect the same.

In this era of neoliberalism, the advanced stage of capitalism, capitalists have developed the machinery or weapons of financial capitalism to do what armies did in the first half of the 20th century. And in the first three minutes Hudson offers a very good summary description of this kind of financial warfare.

Greek workers should say No to Euro austerity - and so should we

Click here to access article by Lindsey German from CounterFire. 

The Troika's intransigence has led to Tsipras calling a referendum, to be held next Sunday, on the proposals. In reality a No will mean an exit from the Euro and from the EU. It is the right thing to do. The government has spent too long negotiating with the enemy, smiling in public while being humiliated behind closed doors. Now Greek working people have a choice: carry on with the anti austerity policies on which the government was elected, or capitulate to the bullying neoliberals who want to force poverty and misery on European workers as a whole.

We ordinary working people under the heel of the Empire are all suffering from austerity policies, but people in Greece, Spain, and Portugal are feeling it the worst. To understand this, we must understand the natural trajectory of capitalism. 

The rich elites that direct this capitalist Empire have gradually over the past several centuries consolidated their control over a large part of the global economy. Along with this consolidation has come the extreme concentration of wealth and power by a tiny powerful minority which is precisely the natural outcome of the system of capitalism. This is because capitalism is not really a social system, but a class serving system in the sense that the system is not designed to serve society, but only one part of society--those who "own" and control the economy.

What we are now observing in various parts of the world--especially in countries like Greece--to keep such a dysfunctional system going, they must lend their wealth either to us directly or indirectly by loaning it to our governments (which we in the end will have to pay back because the rich don't pay taxes) in order to keep the economy functioning. Hence, the current need for them to radically cut back all social safety nets. Such safety nets together with never-ending wars have kept the capitalist social systems fairly stable since the Great Depression, but now it appears that our masters have decided to count on military expenditures and imperial adventures to keep their boom and bust economy going.

People all over the Western world have been experiencing the effects of the 2007/2008 economic collapse: losing their homes, unemployment, massive debt among students and others, and widespread cutbacks in social safety nets. In addition to these direct impacts on many of our lives, the US government has been incurring debts at an accelerated pace. The last time I checked, government debt was at $18 trillion. What we are seeing in Greece may be the beginning stage of the unraveling of the US capitalist Empire.

Most terrifying of all the responses of the Empire directors to the instability of their system is now appearing as hyper-aggressive military actions: the use of military force or its threat in Europe and increasingly in the South China Sea, all backed by a huge propaganda effort which closely resembles its infamous predecessor--Nazi Germany. This, of course, risks a nuclear war with Russia and China. So, if climate destabilization doesn't rid the planet of humans, surely a nuclear conflagration will. The only solution to maintain our survival is revolution, and then to construct a peaceful, egalitarian, and sustainable social system.

Syriza: Plunder, Pillage, and Prostration

Click here to access article by James Petras from Dissident Voice.

Petras continues his cynical outlook on Greece's left governing party with this essay (see a previous article). Given his experience with past Greek governments, one needs to take his views seriously. He functioned as a consultant to former Greek prime minister, Andreas Papandreou, who was a Harvard-trained academic.

Early on, the Syriza leadership, headed by Alexis Tsipras, adopted several strategic positions with fatal consequences – in terms of implementing their electoral promises to raise living standards, end vassalage to the ‘Troika’ and pursue an independent foreign policy.

We will proceed by outlining the initial systemic failures of Syriza and the subsequent concessions further eroding Greek living standards and deepening Greece’s role as an active collaborator of US and Israeli imperialism.

Germany is bluffing on Greece

Click here to access article by Mark Weisbrot from Al Jazeera.

Weisbrot agrees with one Greek official in the latter's understanding of what the Empire's European vassals are doing to Greece.

One senior Greek official involved in the negotiations referred to it as a “slow-motion coup d’état.” And those who were paying attention could see this from the beginning. Just 10 days after Syriza was elected, as I noted previously, the European Central Bank cut off its main line of credit to Greece and then capped the amount that Greek banks could lend to the government. All the hype and brinkmanship destabilize the economy, and some of this is an intentional effect of European authorities’ statements and threats. But the direct sabotage of the Greek economy is most important, and it is remarkable that it has gotten so little attention.

The unannounced objective is to undermine political support for the Syriza government until it falls and get a new regime that is preferable to the European partners and the U.S. This is the only strategy that makes sense, from their point of view. They will try to give Greece enough oxygen to avoid default and exit, which they really don’t want, but not enough for an economic recovery, which they also don’t want.

UK Election Aftermath: Cameron To Continue Waging War On Working People

Click here to access article by Colin Todhunter from East by Northwest.

Britisher Todhunter offers his views on what lies ahead for British workers after the Tory victory.

What we can now expect to see is the attempted completion of a project that had begun under Thatcher in the eighties: the complete subservience of ordinary working people to the needs of powerful corporations, the tax-evading corporate dole-scrounging super rich and the neoliberal agenda they have imposed on people. And key to securing this is the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

The European Commission tries to sell TTIP by claiming that the agreement will increase GDP by one percent and will entail massive job creation.