A Rothschild Plan for World Government

by Dr. K R Bolton from Foreign Policy Journal. 

In the past I have often dismissed assertions about a world government as right-wing fantasies from people who want to maintain US dominance and avoid any arrangement that would promote cooperative, equal relations with other countries.

This author makes a strong, and for me, a convincing case that this project is already underway by the world financial elites. Read it and see if you agree.

Crisis scenarios are the means by which dictators justify control. The most often cited example is Hitler’s “Enabling Act” in the wake of the Reichstag Fire. Another example is the “Patriot Act” in the aftermath of 9/11. Globalist organizations, behind the usual façade of the most idealistic intentions, such as the Club of Rome, have for decades warned of impending planetary doom unless a world control system of inaugurated.

Who Owns North Sea Oil: the fat Cat Oil Companies or the People?

from the Left Banker (Scotland). 

Also, read about Left Banker's interesting background.

The vulnerability wildcard and Kenneth Rogoff

by Jim O’Reilly from his blog, "Comments on Global Political Economy".

Even after a career in banking and finance, this blogger not only doesn't subscribe to the TINA thesis (there is no alternative...to capitalism), he thinks the existing system is absurd. It is designed to enrich a few, and it has succeeded. The system was not created by some god--it was created by people. We don't have to accept it when it is causing so much human suffering and environmental devastation. We can create a new, sustainable system.

It’s the height of absurdity to think society – humanity itself – can be truly vulnerable to a clique of financiers.  US and European society are indeed vulnerable to rising debt:  but only to the extent they choose to acquiesce to the system.  There’s nothing in nature or physics that requires them to rely on a handful of individuals in order to live.  Society is vulnerable only to the extent it so chooses and is therefore not really vulnerable at all; concentrated wealth on the other hand, with its undying lust for power, is absolutely vulnerable.

Capitalism is just like the game of Monopoly. I played this game frequently with a friend when we were adolescents. I remember that after several years of playing it, we at one point decided to keep the game going after one of us went broke. The winner simply loaned the money to the loser and played on. It didn't work. 

The loser just kept getting deeper in debt simply because he had little opportunity to earn money except by passing "Go", while frequently having to pay rents to the winner. This is very similar to a capitalist economy in which much more money can be made off the ownership of property than can be made off labor, even though it is labor, mental or physical, that provides us with food, fuel, shelter, education, medical care, etc.

If we had been even more creative when playing Monopoly, we could have changed the rules of the game so that we earned far more money passing "Go" and not charged each other rent because all the properties would be owned in common. 

The point is not that an economy is very simple to operate, but that its rules are man made, and as such the rules can be changed to promote different outcomes. 

Ocean dumping: Fukushima far from under control

by Jessica Miller from Greenpeace USA. 

In a time when trusted, independent sources about nuclear energy and the ongoing disaster in Japan are hard to find, I think that this site offers reliable information.

The TRUE story of the Tea Party

by Thom Hartmann from RT.  (Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored Award-winning New York Times best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk program on the Air America Radio Network.)

The author discovers the real story of the Boston Tea Party in an old book he found in a London book store. This source appears to be completely authentic. He uses this source to tell the real history of this event which the Koch brothers have used to create the phony Tea Party of today to manipulate unknowing working people to serve the class interests of the rich and powerful.

History is always written by the ruling class to reflect their interests. Thus, the interests of working people are always ignored and we don't know much of our own history. Hartmann, like an archeologist at a dig, finds this lost treasure that reveals the real story of the Boston Tea Party: the first recorded rebellion against probably the first multi-national corporation owned by the new British capitalist class allied with their government. You will find the story so very familiar, so contemporary in its details.

Although the US succeeded in winning independence from the British ruling class, the new American capitalist class merely took over from the Brits and went on to establish their own corporations to rule over working people, to control the resources of the new continent, and to extract huge profits from both working people and the land.

To briefly bring this history lesson up to date, we need to be aware that the capitalist classes mostly in the NATO countries have come together to grab the remaining resources, to diminish any remaining social expenses to support the poor, the elderly, the unemployed, the disabled, medical care, education, libraries, parks, etc. 
 
Can we succeed in throwing off this same tyranny when our forefathers and mothers failed? Stay tuned, better yet, stay informed and active.

Greenspan Returns to De-Regulation

by Michael Hudson from his blog. 

It all seems so long ago! On October 23, 2008, Alan Greenspan choked up a mea culpa for his deregulatory policy as Federal Reserve Chairman. “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief,” he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. “The whole intellectual edifice, however, collapsed in the summer of last year.”

This capitalist clown returns to his religion--the invisible hand of the market.

Libya "Vampire War" is About Oil, Lockerbie and CIA Heroin Op

by Susan Lindauer from OpEd News.

In the past week I have come across, more than ever, so many convincing conspiracy reports like this, and many from the past fifty years. It has literally boggled my mind. When this happens, I have to avoid them in order to preserve my mental health. I can't even bring myself to provide links or any references to these other reports. I'm just dumbfounded as to how they continue to get away with these crimes! It's clear that we are ruled by a class of criminals. There is little difference between them and Mafia types, and the two often collude to commit their crimes. Who are they? You ask.

Is it the one-percent of the wealthiest in our capitalist societies? They do have responsibility, but mostly the rich don't really want to know what is done with their money. So, they work through intermediaries like the Business Roundtable, the Council on Foreign Relations, and all the right-wing NGOs like The American Free Enterprise Institute and AIPAC. If necessary, the latter organizations in turn outsource the dirty work to the CIA who often use the services of the Mafia, drug cartels, and even secret operating groups within the US Armed Forces.

So, in view of the fact that more and more reports of criminal conspiracies are being reported, why don't more of the American people rebel? I think that they, like the rich, don't really want to know about these crimes. They resist them intensely, the reports are too disturbing. They would much rather continue watching "Desperate Housewives" and playing the lottery while believing the lies and the fairy tales about democracy, elections, and the American Way of Life.

Blackwater and RAW trying to stir sectarian riots in Pakistan

by Abdus Sattar Ghazali from OpEd News.

Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) Pakistan, a leading religious political party, has accused the Blackwater and Indian intelligence agency RAW for Sunday's bomb blasts at the shrine of Hazrat Sakhi Sarwar in DG Khan which claimed at least 49 lives and left scores wounded. In a press statement, the JI chief Syed Munawar Hasan, said the enemy agencies were out to spark sectarian riots in the country to harm the national unity and drive the country towards a civil war.

Although the headline refers only to a claim by a religious leader in Pakistan, his theory fits with a long history of false flag and Salvador Option methods used by US and Israeli secret services to create civil wars and chaos in the countries they wish to control.

There was one fairly recent incident that made it into Western media. In 2005 in Iraq some British secret service operatives were caught red-handed dressed as Arabs and loaded with explosives in their vehicle.

Isn't it comforting to know that your tax dollars don't go only for bailing out banksters? 

I've heard Enough, I've had Enough

by David Glenn Cox from OpEd News. 

This piece brings to mind that famous quote from the 1976 film, "Network", in which the protagonist leans out the window and screams, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" 

After listing all the many grievances: the wars, the cutbacks, the bank scams, etc, he writes:

Power backs up only in the face of more power, we need revolutionary change, we must build a new political front based on Jobs, Justice and the Environment. We must make demands on which there will be no equivocation.

...This is not about you and I anymore, any improvement in our situation will take years if not decades. This is about what kind of country your children will live in and what kind of life they will have in it. Either an educated citizenry living in decent homes that they own or a generation of Wal-mart greeters and unemployed masses living in rental slums. Either a free people with the right to join a union or herded masses spied upon and watched by an autocratic corporate fascist regime presided over by a rump Duma and a corporate El Duce demanding more and even greater sacrifices for the sake of  "our interests" in East Asia.

The only problem I see with his thinking is that he seems to envision only the need for political change, not political AND economic. Because it is the latter that is determining the former under the present system.

Crack capitalism or reclaim the state?

from Red Pepper (Britain): John Holloway and Hilary Wainwright debate strategy and tactics for social change

I found the abstract nature of this discussions a bit off-putting. (What can you expect of a couple of academicians?) Maybe I read it too hurriedly. I think what they were arguing about was working within the system to change it or working from without to transform it.  You decide. In any case, I found many of their observations interesting. 

Hillary writes: 

...I’ve come to believe that flows need foundations and conditions of a more enduring kind. The flow of citizens’ movements against privatisation of public goods, for example, needed the ‘backbone’, as one Uruguayan activist in the movement for public water put it, of the trade union confederation born two decades earlier in the struggle against the dictatorship. Similarly, the flow of relationships in the open software movement is conditional on the institutional framework provided by the GNU General Public License. 

John counters:

To fit in to a society of death is to die ourselves. Let us misfit and grow in our misfittings and let our misfittings flow together. That is surely the only way in which we can pose the question of breaking this world and creating another one.

Fukushima Dai-ichi status and prognosis

by Euan Mearns from The Oil Drum.

This article can be a bit difficult for the technology-challenged, but one can get the drift of what is written. Because the site is followed by a lot of highly trained scientists, engineers, and technicians, the comments following the article are always interesting.

‘Silencing WikiLeaks is the aim, smear the method’

by John Pilger from Green Left (Australia).

This distinguished, independent Aussie journalist provides us with a stirring defense of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, and independent journalism that exposes the lies of the global capitalists. Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, and journalists like John Pilger are in the front lines of the struggle to expose their lies. 

Several years ago Warren Buffet admitted what was an open secret among his friends: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Well, working people are finally waking up to this fact because this class war is hardly disguised anymore. 

More and more people all over the world are beginning to fight back against the lies and corruption of the world's capitalist classes and their puppets, stooges, satraps, proxies, etc. They are fighting back in Greece, France, Ireland, Portugal, Egypt, Yemen, Wisconsin, and many other places.

As I see it, we are now at a pivotal point in human history. What we, as working people, do now, or don't do, will have lasting effects on the ultimate destiny of the human race. If we sit passively in front of our boob tubes mesmerized by the cultural junk and lies fed to our minds by corporations, we will bestow to our children and grandchildren a nightmarish world of poverty, ignorance, extreme weather, environmental devastation, resource depletion--all under the control of an Orwellian police state. 

On the other hand, if we can turn our attention away from the boob tube to talk and listen to each other and supporting those in the front-lines of this battle, we might just be able to figure a way out of this growing nightmare. If we can rid ourselves of this oppressive class structure, we might enter a new renaissance, a new era that uses man's greatest intellectual achievement, the scientific method, in combination with a universal yearning for social justice, to create a rich, sustainable life of peace and social justice.

The U.N. Would Never Lie to George Monbiot

by Joe Giambrone from OpEd News.

Because there is a lot of information in this article and more provided by links, the article requires careful study to really appreciate the issues. I recommend that you first listen to the Democracy Now debate between George Monbiot and Helen Caldicott, then read the article and links contained therein.

I see Monbiot as a classic liberal as reflected in his writings in the Guardian, Britain's most notable liberal newspaper. As such he has done much to point out the data and arguments that support the fact of climate change (see this, this, and this), and has done much to criticize the influence that industry lobbyists have in denying climate change. But he has also blamed environmentalists, "the cowardice of governments, the natural human tendency to deny what we don't want to see", and consumers.

It appears to me that he has become so brainwashed with the TINA (there is no alternative) view, that he simply cannot question the capitalist system. (Or else, he dare not go there if he wants to keep his income from the Guardian newspaper.) Hence, he too sees the only alternative as being the adoption of nuclear energy which alone can feed the growth demands of capitalism. Thus he is forced to insist on the sanctity of the information from the UN's IAEA and WHO who seem to be in collaboration with each other. He simply cannot even question that these organizations may also be influenced by the great capitalist powers that largely control these world bodies.

Caldicott, on the other hand, as a physician is solely concerned with the health effects of nuclear energy, and has devoted much of her life to the study of this.

Is Warren Buffett and Bill Gates’s New Philanthropic Initiative Condescending?

by Jamie Johnson from Vanity Fair.

Johnson is an heir to the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical corporation, and filmmaker of "The One Percent". I have posted his articles quite often in this blog because he gives us a rare inside view of life among the class of people who largely rule the world. Also, his film was quite a surprising exposé on the lives of the rich and the hypocritical way they live and justify their wealth and power. I've often wondered if this was just an indication of a youthful rebellious phase he was going through. With this article I think that I am beginning to think so.

After lavishing praise on the American billionaires in this article, he criticizes them for organizing a conference in India (also in China) where it carried...

...a slightly condescending message. It implies somehow that Indian billionaires require the guidance of American billionaires to act responsibly, and in the best interest of their own society. I tend to believe that super-rich Indians—whose fortunes, it’s worth remembering, are already remarkably high and only expected to swell in forthcoming years—have a suitable vision of their own for philanthropy. According to Forbes, the nation currently is home to 55 billionaires—many of whom are internationally renowned entrepreneurs. There isn’t any reason to assume their business savvy and creativity won’t extend to developing effective strategies for donating wealth. Plus, a number of Indian billionaires already rival their American counterparts in the arena of social responsibility. The Tata family, for example, has notably sacrificed personal wealth for generations by placing shares of their industrial conglomerate in charitable trusts to benefit India’s people. 

I think that one can also make a valid argument that American billionaires are condescending if they think they know what is best for people in the US who are poor. They are so insulated from the poor and have such a vested interested in keeping their class in power, that I don't think we should trust their judgement. After all, isn't philanthropy largely motivated by guilt, and a desire to improve the public image of the rich?

It's interesting to me that a scathing critique of Bill Gates and his educational reforms is no longer available on Truthout's website. See my posting.

Beware: Widespread Mission Creep Underway in Libya

by Joshua Holland from AlterNet. 

It's rather startling, even to a cynic like me, at the rapid pace which the ruling class is proceeding in changing this Libyan adventure from a humanitarian mission. 

Consider the bait-and-switch. The U.S. role in the intervention was sold to the American people as a very limited one: we'd help enforce a no-fly zone. In his speech on Monday, Obama said that "broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake."

But now in fact, it is "regime change".  And that, of course, means change to a regime that promotes "our national interest". Which, of course, means the interest of the capitalist ruling classes who rule the Empire.

Socialism In America [satire]

by Michael DeLang from Swans Commentary. 

I think I would have entitled this piece, "Politics in America". To be sure, the right-wing still uses "socialism" as an epitaph, but just as frequently they focus on runaway government spending. And the latter always refers to spending on health care, education, libraries, single mothers, etc--not on war spending measures to promote industries that produce killing machines ("defense spending"). Likewise, the right-wing fail to mention the bailouts of mega-banks and other corporations, and fail to mention that tax revenues have shrunk due to the many tax breaks given to the rich and their corporations over the last 40 years.

Another point in the article was that the town was "trying to lure a factory or two to Pleasantville by offering them a fifty year exemption on all taxes....". This illustrates an important truth about all public entities across the country: they are all competing over jobs which are controlled by corporations who are free to go anywhere in the world that offers them the best deal in terms of wages, taxes, infrastructure, low or unenforced environmental laws, etc. We are all now at the mercy of international corporations. The system of capitalism has created these monstrosities.

Whose miracle?

by Richard Swift from New Internationalist. 

After Deng Xiaoping announced in 1992 that ‘to get rich is glorious’, this writer shows how Chinese capitalists were so easily able to exploit Chinese peasants.

China, despite its embrace of corporate capitalism and private investors at the top, remains for many at the bottom highly autocratic and arbitrary. Nothing is more indicative of this than the Maoist-era hukouzhidu laws on family registration that (despite various reforms) still dictate who has the right to live where. This has left millions of China’s new proletariat in a situation of chronic insecurity, preyed upon by their bosses and often corrupt municipal authorities and police.

But now there are definite signs that workers are organizing and fighting back.

The labor movement after Wisconsin

by Lee Sustar from Socialist Worker.

So far, it looks like union bureaucracies in Wisconsin are winning the battle while leaving the workers behind. But this writer thinks that "...organized labor's showdown with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has set the stage for even sharper conflicts to come." He elaborates:

The gap between union leaders' policy of retreat and workers' willingness to fight has seldom been greater. In Wisconsin, grassroots labor and community activists are attempting to build on the connections made during the protests to forge new coalitions and networks to fight the next round of Walker's budget cuts and maintain their union organizations despite the new restrictions imposed by the new anti-union laws.

The Real Toll of America’s Wars [3:55m video]

 from RT (Russia Today). 

                

Zeitgeist: Moving beyond money [9:36m video]

from RT (Russia Today). 

 ...the world could get rid of major problems by restructuring and removing the class system that exists today, a system where 1 percent of the people have all the money and power and an invested interest in keeping the system in place.