How Long Can The Federal Reserve Stave Off the Inevitable?

Click here to access article by Paul Craig Roberts from his blog. (Edited for greater clarity at 6:48 AM CT on 6/28/2018.)

Roberts, like so many unrepentant capitalists, insists that regulated capitalism can work, but, as he often argues, the fight must be against unregulated capitalism which has been infected and corrupted by, neoliberalism, the new form of capitalism of the 21st century. According to Roberts and others, the new version of capitalism has replaced the good old-fashioned nationalist, regulated capitalism which he presided over in his career. 

I wish he could tell that to all the workers throughout the 20th century of "regulated" capitalism (regulated by and for capitalists) like the workers that Upton Sinclair described in his books like The Jungle, The Brass Check, and King Coal (1917) or the workers that John Steinbeck wrote about in the 1930s such as Grapes of Wrath, Cannery Row, East of Eden, etc. No, Roberts must be referring to the immediate post WWII years when American corporations shared more of the loot with their workers because American industries were unscathed by the war and were able, with the backing of a powerful military, to thoroughly dominate the post WWII scene. Funny how things turned out.

However, he does have a good understanding, although rather superficial, as to what happened to his very weak "regulated" capitalism. It's just that his recollection of regulated capitalism is largely a myth. The capitalist system has always been used by a self-serving capitalist class at the expense and suffering of workers. Its just that over the succeeding decades the system inevitably, via the concentration of wealth and power, morphed into a monster that threatens not only the well-being of the overwhelming majority of workers but our planet's habitat that supports human life as well.

If the Chinese don’t believe in democracy, do they believe in meritocracy?

Click here to access article by Robin Daverman posted on The Greanville Post. (This post was originally a long answer to a deceptive question posed on Quora which was repeated in this post.)

My life experience and education, both formal and informal, has shaped my belief that all cultures are shaped by the interests of ruling classes, or at least this is true since the history of ruling classes began roughly when humans began settling in permanent communities. Because the culture in China is much older than those in the Western capitalist countries, much has been lost to explain why Chinese culture is different from the West. Perhaps this can be partially explained by China's self-imposed isolation from the West. I believe that Daverman's insights about contemporary Chinese culture are valid based on what I do know about contemporary China from reading articles and books and viewing Chinese films.

Somehow social ethics became deeply rooted in Chinese culture and present a formidable bulwark against sociopathic tendencies among their people. Hopefully, this bulwark will endure. Therefore, the question in the title of this article comes from a fake Western ideological perspective which holds that elections automatically equal democracy.

Empire Files: Peter Joseph & Abby Martin on Abolishing Capitalism [updated with corrected links]

Click here to access access a 45 minute interview with Peter Joseph that is conducted by Abby Martin.

I initially accessed a re-posted excerpt of the interview with Joseph today, but then I discovered that the entire interview was posted in August of last year that was originally posted on TeleSur.

Martin introduces Joseph by citing his earlier career in advertising and equity trading, but doesn't mention anything about his subsequent founding of the Zeitgeist movement. (I hadn't yet read the introduction posted on YouTube.) I began to think that she was interviewing someone totally different, but after some research I concluded that the two different persona were one and the same.

In this extended interview you will learn many things about how capitalism functions such as Wall Street gimmicks to cheat ordinary investors,  creating demand for products through advertising, how debt is used by our masters in the capitalist ruling class to further enrich themselves at our expense, how the system is wrecking our habitat and threatening our demise, among other topics. When he gets to his vision for change in the latter part of the interview, he becomes more abstract and moralistic. 

Joseph is another perfect illustration of how a well-trained and skilled person was hired by corporations to serve in critical functions that make capitalism work. However, Joseph, unlike many others, apparently did not succumb to his conditioning in sociopathy through the inducements he received from high salaries and perks that corporations give to such talented people. In time he began to learn about the disastrous effects that the system of capitalism created for the overwhelming majority of people and our habitat on planet Earth. He apparently took his insights, dropped out of the corporate rat-race, and founded a movement to attack the capitalist system. 

In a more recent interview he appeared on the Jimmy Dore Show to explain some of his views that he wrote in his book entitled The New Human Rights Movement. In this interview he focuses on the structure of capitalism that has many secondary consequences that adversely impact the lives of ordinary people.

Is Washington the Most Corrupt Government in History?

Click here to access article by Paul Craig Roberts from his website. (I thank Christopher in northwest Oregon for sending me this article.)

I think such a question (in the headline) is the wrong one. It leads one down the wrong path that will lead to nowhere. I doubt that Roberts does this deliberately. He has been so well indoctrinated in capitalist ethics that he simply can't see that once you espouse a system that puts rich individuals at the center of it, that puts individuals who "own" substantial parts of the economy at the center of a social system, that totally organizes all parts of the social system that is usually called patriotically the "American Way of Life" or more benignly, "Western Civilization", then you will have what he now sees as widespread "corruption". I will argue that once you have such a system, you will almost automatically and eventually have widespread "corruption".

At this point we need to define what "corruption" really is. I think we can agree that it reveals itself when behavior, particularly despicable behavior, is at wide variance with the theory of how the system is supposed to function, that is, behavior does not conform to the rules that supposedly govern a society. 

You can find these rules nearly everywhere: most prominently in history textbooks, in the way corporate media frame news events, in the way politicians expound about the glorious "American Way of Life", in some laws passed by governments, particularly in the official founding documents of a nation, etc. All of these rules are described as representing "democracy": the rule of the people by representation, that is, people choose others to represent them in congresses or parliaments and executive branches of government. 

However, laced throughout these rules are another set of rules that sanctify the private ownership of property. Here, I'm not talking about personal property, but property of economic value that has been created by people as a result of their work and their imagination. This property is in essence social property because it is property that has been the result of efforts by more than one person: by the efforts of present living members of society and previous generations of humans throughout the roughly 200,000 years of human existence. 

I'm referring to the set of rules of a social-economic system called capitalism which is a system that has turned nearly everything into a commodity to be bought and sold. You won't find the word "capitalism" often used because the supporters of capitalism prefer other more nice sounding or obscure words such as "free markets", "Wall Street", and even more imaginatively, "democracy". This set of rules which virtually sanctified the "ownership" of social property by individuals resulted over time in a class of people, called capitalists, who were able to accumulate considerable social property which they could essentially use and dispose of as one would personal property. And they as a class soon discovered many other advantages.

Another class of people simultaneously arose under the operation of this system called workers. These people were essentially rented by capitalists to produce value for them. Within this very large group of workers there evolved sub-classes that are nowadays roughly referred  to as professionals, highly skilled, and unskilled workers. Probably a more meaningful way to divide these rented workers is between two categories: salaried and hourly workers. Salaried workers function much more independently than hourly workers who tend to be carefully supervised and must function according to well-defined rules. Among other advantages capitalists have found that dividing up workers this way serves to divide workers which are natural antagonists of capitalists. Also, by giving salaried workers more perks serves to identify these workers with their capitalist masters, their values, and their behaviors.

Actually a third class of worker arose in the history of capitalism, and they were called "slaves". They were also treated as private property to be used as the "owners" saw fit to accumulate wealth. However, this practice was largely abandoned (though it still exists) primarily because owners regarded the renting of workers much more practical and efficient to accumulate wealth. (Think of renting tools when you need them versus owning a large inventory of tools that you have to store and maintain.) 

Capitalists noticed over time as they accumulated economic property and employed large numbers of workers that they had much more influence over decisions of government, over the selection of governors, and over every institution of societies including most especially education and media. Naturally they installed people in every institution that promoted their interests in relation to the accumulation of social property. It almost naturally followed that they began to see the ownership of property brought them not only fabulous wealth, but even more importantly, POWER. (Power is, of course, the ability to have others behave the way you want them to.)  

Thus, the accumulation of wealth was no longer an object by itself, instead the accumulation of power became the prime driving force behind all of capitalist endeavors. The history of capitalism became the history of wars because different national capitalists would compete for power until one faction ruled over the whole world. This is essentially where we are today with the existence of the US-led (capitalist) Empire trying to eliminate every last competing power such as posed by Russia and China. 

There are many directions one could go with this analysis of capitalism, but I will only take one road which many are bothered by--the current media issue of today: sexual harassment. Have you noticed that largely only one class of people have been affected by this: high profile salaried workers? You won't find any major capitalists like Donald Trump being fired from his job over accusations of sexual harassment. Many salaried workers, who often identify with their capitalist bosses, have learned the lessons about sexual behavior from their bosses who routinely take advantage of their powerful positions vis-à-vis their subordinate workers (of either sex). 

I strongly suspect that the capitalist ruling class's current media focus on sexual predations of high profile salaried workers, like their focus on Russiagate and in the recent past on gender-neutral bathrooms, serves to distract people from any coverage about the Empire's war crimes that they are committing in many places of the world and other embarrassing issues such as the decline of living conditions of American workers.

The social pathology of the Las Vegas Massacre

Click here to access article by Patrick Martin from World Socialist Web Site.

The Las Vegas massacre is a peculiarly American crime, arising out of the social pathology of a deeply troubled society.

What is the social context of this latest episode of domestic mass killing? The United States has been at war more or less continuously for the past 27 years. The US government has treated tens of millions of people in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Africa as targets for extermination through bombs, bullets, and drone-fired missiles. These wars have penetrated deeply into American culture, celebrated endlessly in film, television, music and even sport.

Social relations within the United States, characterized by the growth of economic inequality on a scale that exceeds any previous era in American history, fuel a culture of indifference, and even outright contempt for human life.

“Start Throwing Rocks”: Washington Post Op-Ed Calls For More Violence In The Streets

Click here to access article by Daniel Lang from SHTF Plan. (My thanks goes to Christopher in northwest Oregon who alerted me to this article.)

Although I don't like the wording in the third paragraph, otherwise I totally agree with him. I think the media agents of the ruling class play ordinary Americans like a circus calliope. I have been "entertaining" the idea that this might be the opening salvo of the ruling class's war against dissenters. From what I've learned so far is that the Charlottesville incident looks engineered with the cops' role part of the engineering. The ruling class might have decided to take out their frustrations over Syria on what constitutes the left domestically, especially with a right-wing racist in office who is not of their choosing. Time will tell. Keep in mind that ruling class agents have developed an expertise and a lot of experience with regard to creating social chaos.

It's articles like the one entitled "Chaos in Charlottesville: No One Gave Peace a Chance, Including the Police" that reinforces my theory.

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.

The New U.S. Way Of War

Click here to access article by Bernhard from his blog Moon of Alabama.

Bernhard is a master at dissecting news from major and more obscure, but accurate media sources to find what is really going on especially in the Middle East where US Empire forces are so active. In this piece he takes some information from a NY Times article to construct a fairly new model that the Empire uses (for example in Somalia), and has used, to destabilize countries and spread chaos.

Somalia is an example of the "failed states" the U.S. now creates wherever it goes. A "failed state" then justifies further involvement. The "model" applies around the world:

The Somalia campaign is a blueprint for warfare that President Obama has embraced and will pass along to his successor. It is a model the United States now employs across the Middle East and North Africa — from Syria to Libya — despite the president’s stated aversion to American “boots on the ground” in the world’s war zones. This year alone, the United States has carried out airstrikes in seven countries and conducted Special Operations missions in many more. [from the NY Times]

Such wars are mostly "off the book". Congressional oversight does not happen for them as the impact within the U.S. is too small. The media are practically excluded. The money comes out of secret CIA and special forces accounts or is shaken out of some friendly U.S. client state like Saudi Arabia. No one will find out what methods of force or "interrogation" are used and as those prisoners vanish in some local warlord's dungeon, no one is likely to ever find out....

ISIS Moves To Syria Where Erdogan Still Aims For Aleppo

Click here to access article by Bernhard from his blog Moon of Alabama.

Bernhard often micro-analyzes conflicts down to obscure details which I am not interested. But my main takeaway from this article is the convincing evidence he provides to explain the Empire's very active promotion and participation in the attack on Mosul in northern Iraq.

The attack on Mosul proceeds on three axes. From the north Kurdish Peshmerga under U.S. special force advisors lead the fighting. Iraqi forces attack from the east and south. The way to the west, towards Syria, is open. The intend of the U.S. is to let ISIS fighters, several thousand of them, flee to Deir Ezzor and Raqqa in Syria. They are needed there to further destroy the Syrian state.

Jobs Go Off The Cliff As Suicides and Violence Piles Up

Click here to access article by James Corbett from The International Forecaster. 

Corbett sees in employment numbers, election violence, and other signs that we can look forward to an even more disturbing summer and future.

...there are a number of economic, social and political factors that have brought us here, toward a cycle of violence that seems unlikely to stop no matter what way America votes in November. And they are coming to a head. America's second civil war is coming, and the chances of it remaining civil are declining almost as quickly as the economy.

The Neoliberal Self: Some Observtions on the Psychology of Contemporary Neoliberalism

Click here to access article by Mihaly Koltai re-posted on LeftEast from Eszmelet.hu (Hungary).

[Talk delivered at the conference “Человек vs. отчуждение” in Moscow (supported by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation Moscow) by our editor Mihály Koltai.]

In my talk I would like to provide some observations and intuitions on what one might call the psychological basis of contemporary neoliberalism. These are attitudes and engrained habits that one is essentially forced to adopt, contributing to the day-to-day reproduction of the current form of highly unequal and – as I would argue – more and more sadistic form of capitalism, that we can call neoliberalism. 

Facing Turkey, Europe chooses suicide

Click here to access article by Thierry Meyssan from Voltaire Network. 

By signing an agreement with Turkey to slow the influx of refugees – which happens to be illegal in international law – the leaders of the European Union have taken a step further in their pact with the devil. A large part of the 3 billion Euros annually allotted to Ankara will serve to finance support for the jihadists, and as a result will increase the number of migrants who are fleeing the war.

This French intellectual covers a lot of ground to support his thesis as expressed in the headline. Although I have posted some of his articles on my website, others have not been posted because of what I considered to be inadequate translations and thus would not be well understood by Americans. I am posting this piece because Meyssan draws on his extensive body of work and other solid sources to portray the irrationality from a European perspective of not only the recent agreement regarding refugees but most of the policies of Europe's ruling class. 

However, must we conclude that European leaders are stupid as Meyssan seems to suggest in the headline? This pattern of rule which he documents suggests to me that European leaders, and the European ruling class that they represent, have been so thoroughly integrated into the US-led Empire that they are really serving the Empire and identify with its global hegemonic orientation. 

We see another excellent example of portraying European leaders as stupid in a briefer article entitled "Is Putin Weaponising Stupidity?" by Rob Slane from his blog TheBlogMire.

America’s Fake War on ISIS Grinds On

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

Unfortunately the link on which his essay is based regarding the hearing at the Senate Committee on Armed Services is no longer valid, however the author has demonstrated over a number of years that he is a very reliable source of information. He expresses his general observation of the hearings as follows:

What the hearing illustrated once again was that it is the US plowing the fields – turning nations into failed-states – and then sowing the seeds of perpetual chaos with heavily armed, well-funded, and well backed mercenary forces to transform entire regions of the world into divided, weak, and perpetually fighting, perpetually shifting conflict zones from which the West’s enemies can be removed, and regimes more to their liking can be installed.

In the one hour plus hearing, nothing resembling a tangible strategy for confronting and defeating ISIS was discussed.

Syria before the War

Click here to access article by Tobias Nase from Global Independent Analytics. 

Nase describes in detail what Syrian society was like before the "Empire of Chaos", as Brazilian journalist often refers to the US, engineered along with their pals in the Mid-East (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey) the Empire's latest project of destabilization of countries they don't like. Much like Libya, Syria was a stable non-sectarian country that enjoyed a moderately high standard of living.

The Humiliated Masses

Click here to access article by "td0s" from Pray for Calamity. 

The author describes a very disturbing and provocative visit to Chicago and seeing Star Wars, the latest Hollywood flick. He describes this visit in the language of a poet.

We have a lot of masters. We are made pitiful by clerks as well as clocks. We are degraded not just [by] politicians and police but by abstractions and imaginary lines. We so badly need to forge time and space to be quiet, to meditate, to speak softly about just who we think we are. Technology interrupts. The buzzing of other people’s demands seeps in through the cracks to find us, to distract us, to constantly hurry us up, to tire us out, to intoxicate us, to leave us slumped over and worn.

So we go to the movies and watch civilization collapse. We envy those who get to rebuild, if only on the screen. If we keep buying such stories, they will keep selling them. And we will surely never live them.

How a Nation Self-destructs

Click here to access article by Harvey Lothian from Dissident Voice.

I believe that this brief article contains a profound insight of which few people are aware: how the withering away of the social fabric can destroy a nation. And this is currently, in my opinion, a deliberate policy by our capitalist masters who are now moving step by fascist step to make the world safe for corporate rule.

I am particularly struck by an awareness of how most people get their interpretations of major issues through CIA-infiltrated media corporations, and repeat their views endlessly and unquestioningly to each other as if they were based on fact. The way corporate media reports on crimes and terrorist incidents accelerates a fear of not only Muslims but all other people in society that ordinary Americans regard as strangers. 

As a result Americans are encouraged to support more oppressive police measures and/or to buy guns to protect themselves from these threats. If Lothian's observations are correct and my observation is correct about a massively misinformed American public, then American society may be well on its way to self-destructing. In spite of this conclusion, I remain optimistic that there will be sufficient number of people who will opt for sanity, follow reliable alternative media, and join together to rid society of capitalist rule.

Intimacy Against Alienation

Click here to access a 55 minute interview with Mitch Mansour provided by KPFA, a listener sponsored radio station in Berkeley, California. Mansour is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the U. of Oregon. His doctoral dissertation focused on this topic.

Is a romantic partner a replacement for the community that people used to rely on to meet their material and emotional needs? Mitch Monsour thinks so; he points to the competitive and individualistic nature of our society, the way economic rationality gets enacted in the romantic arena, and the structural obstacles to real intimacy.

Human beings are quintessentially social animals, and historically humans have received physical and emotional supports from a wide variety of sources within a community. Mansour argues, and provides evidence for, a phenomenon seen in US society of increasing isolation, both physical and psychological, with the result that romantic love is seen as the solution to isolation. This imposes an impossible burden on one's partner to provide the social supports that characterized earlier social relations. 

Capitalist influences has also shaped this relationship by encouraging consumption by these partnerships and individualistic competition in general. The commodification of everything under capitalism interferes with supportive values even within the partnership. This influences how people enter the partnership "marketplace" with pronounced focus on how much a prospective partner person can provide a person in terms of wealth and status. People tend to be interested in what they can get out of a relationship which interferes with real intimacy. Thus, most relationships fail.

The Age of Imperial Wars

Click here to access article by James Petras from Information Clearing House. 

Like the wildfires appearing everywhere in eastern Washington state and Oregon, this retired professor provides a survey of mini-wars and chaos spreading throughout the globe. Meanwhile, the politicos in the US ruling class directorate and their cronies are threatening more in the future.

War is everywhere and expanding:  No continent or region, big or small, is free from the contagion of war.

Imperial wars have spawn local wars . . . igniting mass flights in a never-ending cycle.  There are no real diplomatic success stories!  There are no enduring, viable peace accords!

U.S. is Destroying Europe

Click here to access article by Eric Zuesse from Strategic Culture Foundation.

Zuesse makes a much stronger argument that the US-led Empire has pursuing strategies against Russia because of its refusal to submit to the diktats of the Empire rather than that these strategies are destroying Europe. 

Obama’s top goal in international relations, and throughout his military policies, has been to defeat Russia, to force a regime-change there that will make Russia part of the American empire, no longer the major nation that resists control from Washington.

Obviously, the economic boycott is hurting European economies and the chaos of the Empire's destruction of entire nations in north Africa and the Middle East is forcing people to flee to Europe causing European countries numerous social and economic problem, but to argue that these actions are actually destroying Europe is not tenable. What they are clearly doing is maintaining Europe's dependence on the US while enlisting European efforts in the anti-Russian project. 

Libya has become Europe’s big problem. Millions of Libyans are fleeing the chaos there. Some of them are fleeing across the Mediterranean and ending up in refugee camps in southern Italy; and some are escaping to elsewhere in Europe.

And Syria is now yet another nation that’s being destroyed in order to conquer Russia.

The Coup and Its Aftermath: Honduras Bleeding

Click here to access article by Eric Draitser and Ramiro S. Funez from CounterPunch. 

June 28 marked the six year anniversary of the military coup in Honduras – the day that a democratically elected left wing government was ousted by a US-backed, US-trained cabal of generals and right wing politicians and landowners. It could correctly be called a “Quiet Coup” primarily because it took place with very little fanfare from the corporate media which, to the extent that it covered it at all, did so mostly from a distorted perspective which spread more misinformation than truth. Today, six years (and many innocent lives, and billions of dollars) later, this shameful moment in recent history still remains largely forgotten.

Also, I recommend this piece from Al Jazeera entitled "The Honduran meltdown: Made in USA" which reports that Honduras is another disintegrating society and failed state "made in the USA" and created to serve US corporations.