Posts that I especially recommend for Sunday, June 13, 2021

• The Difference Between Totalitarian Regimes And Free Democracies by Australian Caitlin Johnstone with her American husband reading the script, which is also provided in the article from her weblog. My reaction: The only criticism I have is that quotation marks should be around "free democracy". As it is (without quotation marks) there is a tendency to cynicism. "Free democracy" implies a propaganda construct, whereas a free democracy can be very real.

• A Few Thoughts on White Identity by Gary Engler from Dissident Voice. (Note: Engler reviews a book entitled White Fragility: Why White People Have Such a Hard Time Talking About Racism.)

In my opinion, this book starkly epitomizes the dangerous consequences when discussions of white identity are divorced from class analysis. 

• The 2021 Corporate Bamboozle On World Food Systems from GPEnewsdocs featuring a long interview and discussion between Lynn Fries, "producer of Global Political Economy or GPEnewsdocs, and Pat Mooney, who is "leading [the] IPES-Food’s ‘Long Food Movement’ project. My commentary follows: 

Fries and Mooney both represent small farmers in their quest to retain control over the world's food production in contrast to Big Ag's corporate dominance that is emerging under the propaganda construct of "multistakeholderism". The latter term is defined by the Transnational Institute as:

 

Multistakeholderism is a slippery term as most of the definitions are too vague and general and because it is applied to many different forms of governance. It is also an evolving form of governance. ....

 

In multistakeholderism, ‘stakeholders’ become the central actors without any clear procedure to designate ‘stakeholders’.

 

This is in contrast to the previous governing ideology of multilateralism based on interactions and agreements between nation-states. Big Ag is pushing the concept of multistakeholderism to give transnational corporations more relevance in global discussions and in legal bodies such as the UN. In my opinion, "multistakeholderism" is a sneaky construct to give global corporations (and their capitalist backers) as financial "stakeholders" more legitimacy in upcoming legal decisions by the UN. Financial stakeholders have always primarily meant those who have a financial or economic stake in outcomes.

 

Neoliberals (or transnationals) of the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire have already proved their power in the recent pandemic by co-opting the World Health Organization (WHO) of the UN. Co-opting of the UN's agency was accomplished after Trump's decision to withdraw US support for the WHO and the billionaire Bill Gates and his foundation stepped in to provide the greatest single monetary support of WHO among nations. This new construct is used to effect a stealthy move around the poorer nations of the world and to enhance the power of the Empire's transnational agricultural corporations.

I think Pat Mooney is a rather naive "do-gooder" who will have little influence on international legal bodies.

• 💥Propaganda and the Media — Let’s Tell Some Lies — Part 5 by Larry Romanoff from "The Saker" weblog. This is a best post. My reaction: Romanoff illustrates how your views of events in the world are distorted by billionaire-owned media corporations to make you ignorant of the Empire's actual crimes.

I have nearly 1,000 such stories in my files, enough to fill a thick book, and all reprehensibly dishonest in their presentation. When Westerners have only a diet of daily articles like this presented to them by their most trusted media, how is it possible for anyone to accurately understand anything about China?

• How US govt-funded media fueled a violent coup in Nicaragua by Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton from The Grayzone. My reaction: This is an important report because it illustrates how the directors of the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire are going about subverting entire nations (think Ukraine as another example) to the dominance of the Empire. In Nicaragua they were not successful because the people under successive Sandinista governments had encouraged the people to become politically aware.

• Toxic Chemicals Engulf the Planet by Robert Hunziker from Dissident Voice.
  

• Could temperatures keep rising? from Arctic News. 

A recent post suggests that the 1.5°C threshold was already crossed in 2012, i.e. well before the Paris Agreement was adopted by the U.N. (in 2015), while there could be a temperature rise of more than 3°C [ by 2026.

Posts that I especially recommend for Friday, March 19, 2021

• The Chicken Little act isn't working – COVID Mania is wearing off by Jordan Schachtel from his weblog The Dossier.
  

• Biohazards News Tracker: Best articles on SARS-CoV-2 origins, biolabs and gain of function research by Sainath Suryanarayanan from U.S. Right to Know.
  

• World Wide Rally For Freedom featuring James Corbett and James Evan Pilato in a 28:34m video first commenting on media corporation's reporting on the upcoming worldwide protests of the pandemic restrictions. After about 18 minutes they talk about censorship issues.
  

• Columbia University Caught Lying For Biden Over Stimulus Bill featuring Jimmy Dore using his channel at Rokfin in a 12:26m video to expose a current example of Columbia University's participation in the ruling class's management of consent/dissent. 

• 💥VIDEO: With Katie Herzog on the Expansion of LGBTQ Identity and How it is Wielded in Political Discourse featuring Glenn Greenwald and Herzog, from Greenwald's weblog on Substack. This is a best post. (Note: I received this post from Greenwald shortly before I finished work on yesterday's post, and wanted to thoroughly read and understand it--which I subsequently did.) My commentary follows:
  

The ruling capitalist class has used the social identity trick for many years to elect first Barack Obama and then in their attempt to elect Hillary Clinton. Now they have expanded their scope of operations to other social identity groups and smear anyone who challenges them (in addition to anyone who questions their pandemic policies). They do this in order to divide us into hating each other, to distract us from forming other ideas that might be influenced by class politics, and to divert our attention away from real issues of inequality under a capitalist system. 

 

I think they expanded their psychology operation to extend to other identity groups after they failed to elect Hillary Clinton to the presidency. But they saw it as useful because it greatly influenced the upper-middle-class of college-educated professionals which is their core constituency. They drew on their highly trained advertising and public relations experts to study how to "sell" ruling class policies to the rest of the American society. I think Eric London was right when he wrote the following:

 

Identity politics has become a key mechanism through which the next 9 percent situated below the top 1 percent advances its grievances within the political establishment, fighting for “space” in the universities, trade unions, political parties, state apparatus, and corporate media. This layer, which forms a principal social base for the Democratic Party, is generally pro-war and supportive of the right-wing policies that have produced a soaring stock market. 

 

Comics like Jimmy Dore exposed their feminist trick, and radical film reviewers like Michael Walsh did likewise in his review of Hollywood film. Satirists like CJ Hopkins cited in 2018 the advantages that this project of social identity had for our masters in the ruling class. He argued that its appeal extended to other groups and all classes of society. But our masters didn't quit--they had finally found the magic key to the manipulation of the general population. 

 

Over the years the public opinion shapers improved on his project by using it against major dissidents to control and limit their influence on the general population. They discovered last year the benefits of declaring a pandemic: it enabled them to add censorship to their project by using "fact- checkers" to prohibit the use of privately owned social platforms by disobedient dissidents in order to limit their influence. Now they have turned their new weapon on the likes of Glenn Greenwald and Katie Herzog whose writings challenged their newfound weapon. This could not be tolerated. The two in this post, besides commiserating with each other, explain the victimization as a phenomenon of recent converts to prior forbidden social identities as the source of the attacks on them. However, unlike Walsh and Hopkins, the two do not explicitly link this recent persecution to a ruling class that doesn't like their brand of independent journalism.

• New Cold War is Built on Humanitarian Interventionist Lies and Dismissal of Actual War Crimes by Danny Haiphong from Black Agenda Report.
  

• The Puppet Masters: Is There Really a Deep State? by Philip Geraldi from Strategic Culture Foundation (based in Russia, but independent and international). My reaction: For a long time I have suspected Geraldi to be an agent of one of the Empire's many secret services, and now I am sure. You see, they have heavily infiltrated many news agencies located in the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire in order to shape public opinion according to the orders of the Deep State. For the past several years Geraldi has posed as a supporter of Palestinian rights and in opposition to Israeli policies to the extent that one could label him with an anti-Semitic bias. However, now that he is firmly established in various publications and has collected an audience of mostly left-wingers, his bosses in the Deep State ordered him to obscure the CIA, the foremost US secret service, and gaslight the Deep State, the hidden, real government of the USA. In this article he poo-poos the concept of a Deep State, reverses the role they play in relation to their secret services, and he conflates the term "Deep State" with "establishment". Contrary to his assertion, the concept of "deep state" was not coined by a Turkish author, but by Peter Dale Scott. You see, for more than 50 years, I have observed and read about the subversive actions of the CIA, the hidden government represented by the Deep State, and I've developed an advanced "nose" for detecting such fake opinion-shapers. In this case, the stench is overwhelming.

• Vanessa Beeley Interview – Inside The West’s Illegal Yemen Occupation & CIA Caught Rescuing al-Qaeda featuring a 1:08:11 video posted on The Last American Vagabond in which Ryan Cristián interviewing Beeley regarding her meeting with the Yemeni's ambassador to Syria where she presently lives.
  

• The Anti-Semitic Birth of the Zionist State: A History of Israel’s Self-Hating Founders by Miko Peled from Mint Press News.
  

• Myanmar: Hidden Opposition Violence by Brian Berletic from his weblog Land Destroyer Report. My reaction: I have covered Berletic's reports, when he was known as "Tony Cartalucci", for many years, and I've always found them to be reliable. In this post he takes a report from a Western news agency and shows by reading line by line how it is scripting reports from other "color revolutions", whose activists are funded via Western NGOs, to hide what is really going on--starting a revolution in Myanmar.

• Overshoot or Omnicide? by Sam Carana from his weblog Arctic News. 

Posts that I especially recommend for Wednesday, March 17, 2021

• 20+ Countries Suspend AstraZeneca Vaccine While EU & WHO Keep Pushing It As “Safe & Effective” featuring Ryan Cristián Whitney Webb (brief appearance of Whitney Webb) using a variety of online platforms in the first 55 minutes of the 1:04:25 audio/video post addressing issues related to the title of this post.

• 💥Intersectional Imperialism: A Wholesome Menace by Alex Rubinstein from his weblog on Substack. This is a best post. My reaction: This post is a most revealing exposé of identity politics ("wokeism") and how it is used to legitimize the most heinous acts and policies of the capitalist ruling class both within and without the USA. This strategy has its roots in the advanced technology of advertising so necessary to sell all the shoddy and unnecessary products of late-stage capitalism--the selling of anything.
  

• How Do Big Media Outlets So Often "Independently Confirm" Each Other's Falsehoods? by Glenn Greenwald from his weblog at Substack. 

• Do U.S. and UK Have the World’s Most-Censored Press? by Eric Zuesse from Strategic Culture Foundation. My reaction: Although Zuesse avoids Marxist terms like ruling class, and instead prefers feudal words like "aristocracy" because a Marxist lexicon is verboten in the advanced capitalist societies, his description of the ruling class and their fake version of democracy is "spot-on".

• Joe Biden Unlawful Agression [sic] in Syria Signals the Endgame in the Region by Vanessa Beeley from UK Column.
  

• Trump admin insider reveals how US military sabotaged peace agreement to prolong Afghanistan war by Gareth Porter from The Grayzone.
  

• America's National Humiliation by Eurasia by Max Parry from The Unz Review.
  

• The Arab Spring: A social media revolution? from Middle East Eye. (Note: This post is an 8:13m video.)

• Wet Bulb Temperature. Life or death? featuring Dave Borlace from his channel, Just Have a Think, in a 10:25m YouTube video explaining a threat to human-related to global warming.

Wet bulb temperature sounds almost comical, but the implications of it's [sic] extremes could not be more serious. And as our planet's atmosphere continues to warm, our tropical regions move ever closer to posing that existential threat to billions of people.

• Science Update: Amazon Rainforest Warms Earth featuring Prof. (retired) Guy McPherson summarizing in his YouTube channel (7:17m) what scientists have reported about the Amazon rainforest.
  

Posts that I especially recommend today: Thursday, December 31, 2020

• There Will Be No Questioning [of] the Corona Vaccine featuring Tucker Carlson of Fox News commenting on the widespread promotion of corona vaccines and censorship of news-items that cast doubts on official pronouncements in a 14:50m video.

• Tribes: A short comedy film mocks identity politics by Ed Hightower from World Socialist Web Site. (Don't worry--a link to the movie is provided at the end of the article.) 

There are various things the filmmakers haven’t figured out, including, of course, the fact that there are powerful social and economic interests invested in identity politics. But that will come.

• Who Is Bill Gates? (part 1 of 4 parts) by James Corbett from his website. Corbett is a Canadian who lives in Japan. (Note: This is first part podcast lasts about two hours and focuses on a billionaire, top funder of the UN's health agency (the World Health Organization), and one of our successful capitalist masters. I've only will listened to 20 minutes of this video, and already I am impressed.) This series promises to be best posts--Part Two / Part Three / Part Four.

• 2020: the year the elites failed upwards by Jacob Siegel from Unherd (British based).

Perhaps some reputational damage has been inflicted on the experts who warned that the real threat of the coronavirus was overreacting, or worse, racism, and on the elite activists who advanced a deeply unpopular police abolition agenda ahead of national elections, and on the scientific establishment that declared “white supremacy” to be “a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19”. 

But those costs are marginal compared to the material and political gains. If you are one of the people or organisations which repeatedly got the coronavirus wrong, abetted wanton political violence and destruction, or once again misread the American electorate, odds are very good that your funding streams, political influence, institutional power and leverage over your fellow Americans are going increase over the next four years of the Biden administration.

• TOP 5: Most Censored News of 2020 (A Review) by "Felix Rex" from his channel on Bitchute. 
  

• The American Money Tree: The Untold Story of US Aid to Israel by Ramzy Baroud from Mint Press News. My reaction: Israel plays an important part in securing the Middle East for the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire. They deserve the annual billion dollar reward for their services, that is, in the eyes of the directors of the Empire. Spending this money on useless eaters like ordinary Americans such as universal health care, forgiveness of student debt, and to sustain them through this official pandemic is always a wasted effort, that is, in the eyes of our masters in the transnational ruling capitalist class of the Empire.

Posts I especially recommend to you today: Thursday, October 24, 2019

• Twitter Editor Exposed As Military PsyOps Officer from The Jimmy Dore Show. (Note: This post and the following post are to lend some humor to today's awful news.)

• Women Are CEO’s Of Top Weapons Manufactures from The Jimmy Dore Show. (Note: We learn contrary to the propaganda in support of the social identity theme in order to distract angry dissenters that women are CEOs of America's top weapons corporations. I presume this is equal opportunity to cash in on war crimes.)

• Assange’s Extradition Is a Case About the Crimes of Empire by Nozomi Hayase from Antiwar. 

• Global Warming Is Not Part of Natural Climate Variability by Mark Fischetti from Scientific American.

• Video: Dorian’s Deadly Stall – How Climate Change is Weaponizing Hurricanes by "greenman3610" from Skeptical Science. 

• What’s Really Happening in Lebanon? by Laith Marouf from BS News (Britain).

• Chile: “This is Not About 30 Pesos but 30 Years of Abuses” by Sergio Pintado from Internationalist 360°. 

• THE ANGRY ARAB: Trump & the Turkish Invasion of Northern Syria by As`ad AbuKhalil from Consortium News.

The Missing Howls of Denunciation Over Major Sex Trafficking

Click here to access article by Michael Brenner from Consortium News.

Brenner is confused by the differential treatment in the Epstein affair, and has no answer for his own questions: 

Why have the howls of outrage not echoed through the media? Why has the trumpet’s call to action been silent?  Why haven’t the halls of Congress resounded with denunciation and the demands for justice.[?]

Well, let me offer a answer. Those of you who have been following my blog already know the answer, so my answer will be for all the others. 

My answer will provide a key answer to most of the world's problems, and the Epstein story, and the way it is being handled, will provide an excellent illustration of the primacy of social-economic class.

The factor of social-economic class determines so much of our existence, and accounts for so many problems we are faced with. That is precisely why ordinary people, after grasping the real nature of their problems, have gone on to organize revolutions against their ruling classes. And, this is the fundamental reason why academics, promoted by the ruling class, have frequently aided in the suppression of this factor.

The French Revolution and the Russian Revolution are prime examples. Both were ultimately contaminated within and destroyed from without. In the former case, the revolution was directed against the aristocracy and monarchy. The French Revolution contained the embryonic capitalist class of people who, with their superior education and skills, eventually dominated the revolution and took control of it. This class were also aided by Germany, who invaded France during the Revolution. In the case of the Russian Revolution, the new socialist revolutionaries were hampered by the necessity of relying upon educated/trained people, who had largely aristocratic and bourgeois class affiliations, in government positions. But a major factor in the ultimate deterioration of their Revolution was the constant opposition by the existing capitalist nations, including military invasions. This resulted in a deformed ruling class of bureaucrats, and eventually led to the collapse of the socialist experiment in the Soviet Union. To sum up, history during the past roughly 10,000 years has been overwhelmingly determined by class struggles. This view is the contribution of Marxists whose teachings have been thoroughly suppressed contemporary capitalist societies for obvious reasons.  

This Epstein event furnishes us with a prime example of this phenomenon. Benner's exposes the startling inconsistency of treatment in this crime which involved members of the ruling class. The legitimate issue of inequality regarding certain segments (women, gender identity, etc.) of contemporary societies have been used by the ruling capitalist class primarily as distractions from the recent gross crimes committed by the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire. Because Epstein served the ruling class by furnishing them with overt and virtual sex slaves, such crimes have been ignored in past; and if they succeed with the Epstein event, they will quash any substantive punishment for those members of the ruling class who participated in these crimes. 

Captain Marvel: Money, feminism, militarism and previously “independent” filmmakers

Click here to access a review of the latest corporate-produced film by David Walsh, one of the best film reviewers in the world, posted on World Socialist Web Site.

Walsh exposes the latest film offering by a major corporation with US Air Force support for what it is: a widely promoted film to keep you distracted, entertained, and dumbed-down about the real, dire issues facing humans. The film is loaded with the latest identity politics strategy of  our masters in the capitalist ruling class:

Captain Marvel is truly “corporate entertainment”—i.e., the very process by which it came into being prevents it from being entertaining or enlightening in any meaningful fashion.

This type of large-scale, officially sponsored filmmaking, whose success is avidly promoted and tracked by the media and business publications in particular, inevitably intersects and overlaps with other aspects of American establishment culture. In the case of Captain Marvel, this means militarism and feminism specifically.

The US Air Force was involved in the production of Captain Marvel. 

Recommended articles for Monday, January 7, 2019

• The fossil fuel era is coming to an end, but the lawsuits are just beginning from ISDS.

ISDS is hugely controversial. Concerns have been raised by a wide range of actors about both the process of ISDS, and the way the system can infringe on the sovereign right of states to regulate to protect public health, human rights and the environment.

• Reasons To Believe In Trump’s Syria Withdrawal Are Vanishing by Caitlin Johnstone from her blog.

Watching the actions and ignoring the words is a personal policy I’ve found very useful in dealing with top government figures who understand that power has nothing to do with truth and everything to do with narrative control, and in that particular case the president’s claims were quickly memory holed after a highly suspicious chemical weapons allegation in Douma a few days later. The president’s words said the troops were leaving, and what actually happened was the US bombing the Syrian government for a second time in a year while troops remained where they were.

Everyone completely lost their shit last month when the president once again made the claim that US troops will be brought home from Syria.

• Soil and water carbon stores puzzle science by Tim Radford from Climate News Network.

Recent research indicates that a major ruling class solution to the carbon buildup from the burning of fossil fuels--capturing carbon dioxide and burying it underground--is based on very little science. In other words, this capitalist solution is mostly based on wishful thinking as a desperate measure to save their system which delivers to this tiny social-economic class so much power and wealth, and delivers to the rest of us extreme inequality, wars, environmental destruction, etc. 

• Use Hollywood films to counter China & Russia: Integrity Initiative psyop plan exposed in new leaks from RT.

“We need to refocus and reenergize ‘Western’ entertainment to combat increasing authoritarianism and illiberal tendencies worldwide, how to go about doing so BUT without it being ‘propaganda’,” states an undated “Memorandum” uploaded online last week, in the fourth tranche of leaks from the international Foreign Office-funded Integrity Initiative.

• Ecuador unveils “special examination” of Julian Assange’s asylum by Mike Head from The Greanville Post.

• This Is Everything That Is Wrong With Mainstream Feminism by Caitlin Johnstone from her blog.

Who Doesn’t Love Identity Politics?

Click here to access article by master satirist CJ Hopkins from his blog Consent Factory, Inc.

After so many years of the Deep State's use of identity politics to create a distraction from their war on US workers and their adventures abroad, I still welcome this belated satire. Their current social identity of choice are women. They are trying to use women's (often justifiable) grievances to promote their interests. Perhaps this was the tactic used by the Deep State as part of their ongoing vendetta against Trump and his nominee (Kavanaugh) for the Supreme Court. The Deep State's other party, the Democratic Party, has lined up a number of women candidates for government offices in the next election (Heads we lose, and tails we lose.).

The ruling classes love identity politics because they keep the working classes focused on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and so on, and not on the fact that they (i.e., the working classes) are, essentially, glorified indentured servants, who will spend the majority of their sentient existences laboring to benefit a ruling elite that would gladly butcher their entire families and sell their livers to hepatitic Saudi princes if they could get away with it. Dividing the working classes up into sub-groups according to race, ethnicity, and so on, and then pitting these sub-groups against each other, is extremely important to the ruling classes, who are, let’s remember, a tiny minority of intelligent but physically vulnerable parasites controlling the lives of the vast majority of human beings on the planet Earth, primarily by keeping them ignorant and confused.

I have mixed feelings about this exploitation of the use of social identity politics, I still like latter because it eliminates the isolation that many of these groups felt in the past, and they can no longer be used as scapegoats or pitted against each other as they have in the past. Even attempts at targeting Muslims by the ruling class has fizzled out. 

I have other criticisms. Hopkins overdoes the satire by writing that racists and fascists love it. To be sure, the Deep State has given them permission, even encouraged them, to hold rallies and ostentatious displays of racism to better distract us. But, this too is waning. He seems to suggest that truth is entirely relative depending upon which lens we use. Yes, that is an unfortunate fact of the nature of humans, but that isn't entirely true. We can succeed in discerning truth if we are determined to eliminate most biases and develop critical thinking skills. I disagree with his statement that "... this system (i.e., capitalism, not the U.S.A), being globally hegemonic, has no external enemies ....". Capitalism is not entirely hegemonic, and to the extent that it isn't, it leaves room for other systems to be developed. The antagonists of the US-led Empire have mostly mixed economies even though many have a rather pronounced capitalist sector.

Identity Politics: Diversion from the Growing Economic Crisis?

Click here to access article by Ghada Chehade, originally from occupied Palestine and now a citizen of Canada, from The Political Anthropologist (based in Canada). (You will need to register (free) in order to access the full article and all other articles on the website.)

A politics that addresses identity and minority issues without examining the larger socioeconomic system and class relations cannot adequately address the disproportional disenfranchisement and economic despair experienced by minority groups. At the same time, a focus on identity and individual issues prevents us from seeing what we have in common, pitting different groups against one another and distracting them from – and from uniting over – their common economic plight.

I don't think that this phenomenon of identity politics just sort of happened. I am convinced that it has been promoted by the ruling capitalist class who must obscure the class structure they have imposed on society and all understanding of their overwhelming influence to shape institutions and ideology to promote their interests of evermore profits and power. 

By promoting identity politics they distract attention away from the class structure that their class has created: powerless and insecure wage workers (working class) who are essentially "wage slaves" and live from paycheck to paycheck; a middle class who have attained a measure of security (home ownership, and respectable status and extra privileges), but who are often in extreme debt to maintain this lifestyle; the upper-middle class who are highly trained (and indoctrinated) scientists, researchers, managers, technicians, and professionals who make the capitalist system function, enjoy high salaries, and serve their masters of the capitalist class; and finally the ruling capitalist class who own most of the assets of our country, live off of their ownership of property, only work if they want to, and exercise control over every institution of society.

Will the Mainstream Media EVER Talk About Economic Issues?

Click here to access article by Ghada Chehade from Ghada's Soapbox (Canada). (I'm sorry for this belated post, but I only discovered it this morning.)

Everywhere I looked, people of different races and ethnicities were getting along, and gasp, even helping one another out. While I am aware that there is racial tension in the US, it was not overwhelmingly apparent, at least not on the surface (and I say this as a brown person).

This Canadian visitor of Palestinian descent writes of her recent visit to New York City. She noticed how little coverage in mainstream media compared to the reality she experienced during her visit. She uses this experience to illustrate how she has been deceived by mainstream media to distract attention from the real issues facing most Americans.

What was undeniably palpable, however, is something the MSM never talks about: the massive economic disparity in cities like NYC. If there is a glaring and unavoidable tension, it is between the classes not the races. Yes, “class,” that five letter word that no one in the west is willing to address. Everywhere I went in NYC, class was painfully apparent. The gap between the haves and have-nots was wide and oppressive.

Although she didn't make an explicit inference or argument that mainstream media is a major function of the capitalist ruling class to hide their crimes and to distract people from the issues and problems that they are really facing day-to-day, her experience clearly illustrates this insight. Therefore, the answer to the question she posed in the headline is "never", or never as long as capitalism exists ... because mainstream media is "owned" by the ruling class, and its function is to distract and hide the ruling class's self-serving power to commit their crimes of extreme inequality (tiny islands of extreme wealth among oceans of extreme poverty) as well as the many wars the US Empire has been engaged in. Our ruling masters depend on people being ignorant of reality, and the function of mainstream media and all their institutions, including entertainment and education, are designed to maintain this ignorance.

While visiting this post, I discovered an excellent explanation of another topic of our ignorance that our masters have so successfully hidden form our view--it's about money. This I will deal with in a separate post that one conscientious person listed in a comment to this article. This, too, is an illustration of how we can, if we collaborate, pierce the many veils of secrecy, deception, and distraction that our masters create to keep us ignorant.

Identity politics and the growth of inequality within racial minorities

Click here to access article by Eric London from World Socialist Web Site.

The most useful aspect of promoting identity politics that London does not make clear is its ability to distract subjects of the capitalist ruling class away from any class analysis or class identification. And a further (to our masters') benefit, which he alludes to, is that it fosters competition between groups over opportunities to serve the ruling capitalist class.

Identity politics has become a key mechanism through which the next 9 percent situated below the top 1 percent advances its grievances within the political establishment, fighting for “space” in the universities, trade unions, political parties, state apparatus, and corporate media. This layer, which forms a principal social base for the Democratic Party, is generally pro-war and supportive of the right-wing policies that have produced a soaring stock market.

Feminist Organising and the Women’s Strike: An Interview with Cinzia Arruzza

Click here to access an interview with a leading European feminist, an edited version posted on Political Critique. 

The Sicilian born Marxist-feminist talks about the new, global wave of women-led mobilisations and the continuing importance of class politics.

Although this is more suited to those people who have studied high level theory (def.) related to feminism and radical politics, I believe that it has much to offer regarding the debate between identity politics and class politics, and the contrast between liberal or capitalist feminism as represented by Hillary Clinton and radical feminism. She also uses the term "social reproduction" (def.) which I believe is a very useful concept which views capitalism as not merely an economic system, but a comprehensive social system shaping every institution of society, and is designed to reproduce the exploitative social system from one generation to another.

An inside look at Bernie Sanders’s role in the Democratic Party primaries (parts 1 and 2)

Click here to access this book review by Eric London from World Socialist Web Site.

London reviews a book entitled Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes. The book reveals how the capitalist ruling class's fake version of democracy actually worked during the primaries when confronted with a candidate that feigned a social democratic (not a "socialist) political platform.

Shattered conveys the sense of genuine concern in the Clinton campaign following each major Sanders victory, especially the New Hampshire primary in February and the Michigan primary in March. After each defeat, the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party were confronted by their own unpopularity and by a groundswell of opposition from working class voters and youth.

“We should have figured out a way to deal with Bernie earlier,” Clinton told her staff after losing the New Hampshire primary. A debate emerged within the campaign, with one side, led by Bill Clinton, arguing that the campaign was ignoring questions of social inequality and would drive working class voters away.

The overwhelming majority of Clinton strategists and Democratic Party operatives ignored Bill Clinton’s proposals. ....

The decision to focus more intently on identity politics was taken to allow Clinton to build a voting base centered among wealthier voters, so as to ensure that she would not be obligated to issue any proposals for social reform that might turn off her backers in the financial aristocracy and the wealthiest 10 percent of the population.

In the second part of this two part series entitled "The Democratic Convention, anti-Russian hysteria, and Clinton’s concession" the book reveals the juicy details of how the Democratic party operatives and the Sanders camp colluded to keep a lid on a potential explosive reaction by Sanders' supporters at the Democratic convention. 

After the convention Democratic operatives focused on a script to defeat Trump which they have continued ever since Clinton's defeat. 

... they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.” In the days that followed, “her team coalesced around the idea that Russian hacking was the major unreported story of the campaign, overshadowed by the contents of stolen e-mails and Hillary’s own private server imbroglio.”

The anti-Russia narrative did not emerge out of Clinton’s head simply as a defensive cover for her own electoral catastrophe. Working with her allies from the State Department and the military-intelligence apparatus, a powerful section of the American ruling class elevated Russia’s alleged role as a mechanism to tamper social opposition, taint broad anti-Trump sentiment with the poison of American nationalism, and advance the anti-Russian agenda of US imperialism.

This narrative has been become the Democratic Party’s sole method for opposing Trump in his first months of office.

White Trash-A Book Review of Our Family (Part 2)

Click here to access article by Ramin Mazaheri from The Greanville Post. (I'm only posting part 2).

Instead of discussing race politics, I argue that this book proves we absolutely must reject the anti-Trumper’s contention that the current schism in the US is a cultural divide and not a class war.

The White Trash Revolution (WTR), a theme of mine which gained a foothold with Brexit, has always been about class and not race. How else could someone named “Ramin Mazaheri” be one of its leading propagandists?

But elevating race in order to deny class is what Americans always do, and that’s why the author decried this systematic class unconsciousness on the book’s very first page:

“It is as though in separating from Great Britain, the United States somehow magically escaped the bonds of class and derived a higher consciousness of enriched possibility….The very act of migration claims to equalize the people involved….”

It does not, so give up your racial, gender and sexual politics. Let’s get to the down-and-dirty of it all – class.

Identity Politics and Class Struggle

Click here to access article by Robin D. G. Kelley originally published in New Politics, winter of 1997, and now posted in libcom.org.

For some time I have attacked the limitations of identity politics (see this, and this) as a strategy encouraged by the capitalist ruling class to divert political resistance to their rule onto fairly harmless activities. Although in one article I tried to argue that I wasn't opposed to identity politics--indeed, I wrote that we all benefited from it--but it simply wasn't revolutionary. This post by Kelley gives a much more vigorous defense of identity politics that has modified my views on the subject.

Historically the capitalists have frequently used identity politics as a method to divide workers. For example, when I lived in Hawaii for five years in the 1970s, I learned the history of the big plantation owners that were engaged in sugar cane farming and sugar refining and how they learned to effectively pit one nationality of workers against others by playing them off against each other. They imported workers from numerous countries: Japan, China, Portugal, the Philippines, etc., and encouraged them to fight each other for favorable treatment by the owners. That still occurs, but nowadays more frequently capitalists prefer to keep politically active people engaged in identity politics. 

However engagement in identity politics can be very revolutionary if it serves to eliminate competition or adversarial relations between social identities so that the ruling class can no longer use it as a tool to divide us. I remember with some embarrassment in my past political activities that men thoroughly dominated anti-Vietnam War organizations. And for similar reasons, no African-Americans or Latinos participated. The activism was largely an all white, male dominated affair. There is still work to be done on social identity issues and I support such activities, but we also need to work together on class-based politics because that is the only way we will overcome the class-based theft of our creativity and hard work and the destruction of our planet.

While consciously pursuing revolutionary class politics we also need to be aware of the marked tendency of upper-middle class professionals to identify with the ruling capitalist class. Such people are very active on the web to suppress revolutionary thinking. They do this consciously to serve their masters in the ruling class or unconsciously because their political views are compromised due to the fear of losing their comfortable lifestyle. I've specifically targeted the issue in this post, to some extent in this post, and this is illustrated in the following post for today.

We Need to Talk About Women: The Problem With Western Liberal ‘Feminists’ [a must read]

Click here to access article by Ghada Chehade from Ghada's SoapBox.

I am so thrilled to post this excellent article! I've never seen such a devastating attack on America's liberal version of feminism and identity politics. This article contains a treasure chest of political insights. Here is only one:

While the personal may be political, it will never be more political than actual politics and political consciousness. In reality, identity politics is the opposite of politics, in that, traditionally, politics or public engagement dealt with common issues, whereas identity politics further fragments consensus and is extremely divisive. Identity politics–women competing with men or racial groups pitted against one another–reflects the divide and conquer desires and strategy of the elite, since the masses are always weaker when they are divided. It forces a false polemic that stands in the way of consensus building, collective identity, and unity. As the old activist saying goes, “the people united will never be defeated.” Identity politics flies in the face of this and does the exact opposite; it divides people at a historical juncture when unity is most urgently needed.

Western liberal feminism has succumbed to the divisive and diversionary agenda of identity politics.

No Pink Wooly Caps for Me

Click here to access article by Barbara MacLean from Planning Beyond Capitalism.

Whether its the neo-nationalist new-money faction of Trump-Bannon or it’s the old-money Clinton, Bush, Koch Brothers, Kissinger faction, we know that the capitalists give all of them their marching orders. The primary goal of both parties is to protect capitalism and undermine any attempts to regulate, let alone change, the economic system that is driving the majority of us into the ground.

Making demands is for those who accept their subservience

.... The problem with all these “demands” is that they are demands. There is no promise to take power. The implication of demands is that there is someone in power that is in a position of granting or refusing the demands. It accepts the capitalist rulers and complains they are not fair and just rulers. Demands are the plea to make ones in power be better leaders.

I’ll march for a socialist transition program

Trump’s New World Order

Click here if you wish to access the 21:34m video directly from The Analyst Report. 

I listened to this yesterday shortly after my posting deadline; and although I've posted similar material, I think it is so well done that I am posting it today. The unnamed excellent narrator begins by citing the manipulation of social identity issues.

The Hijacking of Feminism

Click here if you wish to access this 17:27m lecture by John Pilger, which he delivered in Melbourne in 2012, directly from a recent post on The Wrong Kind of Green. (Thanks go to Christopher of Oregon who alerted me to this post.)

In this 2012 lecture Pilger tried hard to present a critical analysis of the distorted feminism that the ruling class has used to subvert and transform genuine feminism into serving the US-led Empire. By doing this, he provided another illustration of how our capitalist masters have misused and transformed social identity issues to divert our attention away from the class issues of capitalism that is the basis of everything tormenting us today--extreme inequality, mountains of debt owed to our masters, never-ending wars, etc.



But, as you can see, his voice in Melbourne had little effect. That is because our masters own every significant means of communication and they don't permit ideas like this to be distributed widely. It is obvious that we must save ourselves and our planet from the ravages inflicted both on our societies and the planet from the rule of these self-serving, crazed people. But will we??? They and their system of capitalism have ended up owning everything we have created and are obsessively waging one war after another in order to rule the world.