Video: The on-coming technocratic multi media Bilderberg takeover

In this post from We Are Change we are presented with the following 19:08m video interview with Tony Gosling, a former BBC journalist, conducted by Luke Rudkowski. Gosling seems to be a storehouse of information about the transnational Deep State whose important members will be meeting at the upcoming 2017 Bilderberg meeting. Gosling starts out slowly with unfamiliar references (for most Americans) to British politics, but he soon shares with us some very fascinating information he has gleaned about the people who control much of what goes on in the world, and which corporate media refuses to cover.

The Deep State is the State

Click here to access article by Ron Jacobs from CounterPunch. 

I think that Jacobs offers a useful analysis of the current struggle between the Deep State and Trump. Many bloggers are confusing the Deep State, or the active politicos of the ruling capitalist class, with their secret, unaccountable surveillance and subversion agencies like the CIA, FBI, and all the rest (I believe there are 16 such agencies). Most of the time Jacobs separates the two, but in the following sentence he lapses into confusing the two.

If Trump is able to get the agencies of the deep state to work for the factions he represents—either by replacing those loyal to others not named Trump or by cajoling and coercing them to change their loyalty—he will think the deep state is a great thing.

Trump will never take over the secret agencies of the Deep State because they have been organized to serve the ruling capitalist class which has become a very powerful transnational ruling class that is in control of the US Empire. Although a billionaire real estate mogul, he is small potatoes compared to the ruling transnational operatives. He will of necessity keep bending to the latter's will or he will be ousted one way or another.

Washington Post Caught Blatantly Lying To Their Readers Yet Again

Listen to the following Jimmy Dore's rant about Washington Post and their latest pieces of fake news. 

A revolutionary model - part 2a

by Ron Horn.

Most of the time I see that the ruling capitalist class has overwhelming control over every sector of our society, but recently I see one sector in which they are vulnerable--news media. Because the US-led Empire is increasingly fighting a losing battle in their goal of world hegemony, their media corporations are increasingly issuing fake news, and the US and allied governments are increasingly using subterfuge, secrecy, and false-flag operations to impose their will on the world. The growing gap between reality of what is happening in the world and the awareness of most Americans about this reality is becoming rather wide. There is considerable evidence that many no longer believe the talking heads featured in the TV broadcasts of media corporations, but these megaphones of disinformation are drowning out the tiny voices trying to be heard in more independent sources that exist online.

You say that we already have alternative sources of news and analysis and they are growing? For over nearly the eight years of my website's existence I have been promoting these websites, but now I no longer think that is sufficient to overcome the stranglehold that the capitalist class has over every sector of our society in the limited time we have. Alternative websites, which challenge the lies (see this, this, and this for the latest) of our masters, are all begging for support from us (see this, this, this, and this at 23:25m) and other worthy projects (see this). 

Although there are more and more independent voices going online to tell us what is really happening in our dangerous world, they all with few exceptions are trying to do this with very limited budgets and unpaid volunteers. Given the dangerous times we live in, I think that it is urgent that we promote collaboration, cooperation, and a sharing of resources in order to establish a much more powerful and more effective American independent news service. By remaining in the present state that scattered independent voices are now in, we are no match for the powerful megaphones of media corporations. The words of a famous American are so appropriate for our time: "We must hang together, or we will all hang separately."

We presently see major Western dissident figures and independent journalists having to go on RT, TeleSur, and PressTV to express their analysis and views of what is happening in the world. This is not at all ideal. All of these sources of information are funded by foreign countries which most Americans shy away from. There are also two additional important reasons we Americans must support our own news service to provide independent news, news analysis, and views.

Trump has contributed one positive thing to the plethora of disinformation that we are faced with: he has brought to the attention of Americans that they have been issued "fake news" by these media corporations (even though he has no compunctions about issuing fake reports of his own). By doing so, he has exposed the issue of fake news, and an awareness of this has entered the consciousness of ordinary people across the USA and much of the world. 

Finally, and most importantly, I will argue for a radically different type of organization to sustain this collective effort which I believe has excellent prospects for bringing down the rule of capitalists. 

People on the left may be familiar with references to a "bottom-up" concept of organization, but are hazy as to what it actually means. This is simply because it is so new and so different to what we have been exposed to up to now. What we are most familiar with, and have come to believe as the only possibility, is a top-down organization. This is because since the dawn of civilization we have been controlled by ruling  classes. With the growth of populations has come increasing complexity of societal organization and has resulted in top-down organizational methods of control that are ideal to serve the interests of tiny ruling classes over the vast majority.

It is easy to see how a top-down organizational structure is so well designed to serve the profit interests of a relatively few management personnel who are hired to serve the profit interests of shareholders over a vast majority of workers. 

Tellingly omitted under each of the orange categories are thousands of ordinary wage workers--they simply don't matter. The blue boxes are considered staff functions that serve the CEO, and the orange boxes are considered line functions which serve to control workers and what work they do. All the boxes are filled with well rewarded upper-middle class people who have had many years of exposure to ruling class ideology and have demonstrated loyalty to the capitalist ruling class who own these corporations.

 

Likewise, it is easy, logically speaking, to see that a reverse authority structure, or a bottom-up organizational structure, is designed to serve to the vast majority over a few who are assigned tasks that require regulatory and coordinating functions over societies as a whole. (In the latter imaginary schematic there would be no capitalist shareholders of economic enterprises.) If we truly want to see an information service serve the interests of the vast majority, shouldn't we likewise use an organizational structure that is suited for that purpose? Therefore I think the new news service must appropriate this concept into their organization. With an independent news service organized in such a manner, I firmly believe that it can also serve as a revolutionary catalyst. And, with a concentration of resources in one major independent, grassroots-organized news service, most people who are turned off to the coverage provided by mainstream media might eagerly look to this alternative source.

I can't provide all the details of how to bring this about, but can suggest some ways that this could be accomplished. The important thing is that people associated with this project see that this organized form is not only desirable, but mandatory to accomplish the objectives of bringing accurate news reports to serve the vast majority of people. If this new media can be effective as a source of coverage, the word will spread like wildfire to the rest of the population. If it's true that corporate media has been manipulating coverage, this new media could lead to vast, even revolutionary, changes in the organization of society. We might conceivably be on the threshold of a new human-centered era, with the old era of civilization controlled by ruling classes lasting only 10,000 years--about 2% of human existence.

(Next in part 2b: more details about this independent information service as a revolutionary catalyst.)

Environmental Groups as Climate Deniers

Click here to access article by George Wuerthner from The Greanville Post.

Most environmental/conservation groups are Climate Change deniers. Specifically, I am talking about the numerous organizations that give lip service to the threat posed by climate change, but don’t even mention to their membership the contribution that livestock production has with regards to rising global temperatures. While most organizations are calling, climate change the environmental issue of our time, they avoid discussing the contribution of animal agriculture in climate change.

Saudi Arms Deal Exposes Obama Administration’s Jaw Dropping

From the Jimmy Dore Show in Burbank, California.

Dore gives us an excellent rant about the fake news issued by America's "finest" corporations and exposes the hypocrisy of the Democratic party operatives in their vendetta against Trump.

Trump: dancing with wolves on the Titanic

Click here to access article by "The Saker" from his blog.

This article so well resonated with me that I decided to post it. Although the US Empire and Company are "armed to the teeth", they increasingly look like "paper tigers".  Because they have piled lies upon lies to their constituents about what they do mostly in secret, people residing in the countries of the Empire and Company have increasing doubts about what they report. Such people can never be an effective fighting force for the capitalist ruling classes.

Eurasian Economic Transformation Goes Forward

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

In this article Engdahl looks at the US Empire from a long range perspective and sees the Empire and its transnational capitalist class very much in decline in its quest for world hegemony. At the same time he see the efforts of China, Russia, and Iran very much in ascendancy in their promotion of a multipolar world in general, and specifically in their quest to accelerate the development of the economies across Asia to the Middle East. The imperialists ensconced in the capitalist ruling classes of the Empire seem only capable of responding by using the same-old aggressive policies toward this new development.

At this juncture it’s clear that the attempt of the Trump Administration and related circles in the US military industrial complex have failed in their prime objective, that of driving a permanent wedge between Russia and China, the two great Eurasian powers capable of peacefully ending the Sole Superpower hegemony of the United States. Some recent examples of seemingly small steps with enormous future economic and geopolitical potential between Russia and China underscore this fact. The Project of the Century, as we can now call the China One Belt One Road infrastructure development–the economic integration on a consensual basis by the nations of Eurasia, outside the domination of NATO countries of the USA and EU–is proceeding at an interesting pace in unexpected areas.

Are we ordinary Americans going to sit passively on the sidelines to see how this contest turns out, or are we going to become actors on this stage of human life by writing our own scripts and determining our own fates? That is the question that everyone must ask themselves. The problem is that so many of us believe the lies of our capitalist masters. So, what is to be done?

A revolutionary model: an introduction (part 1 of 4)

by Ron Horn -- edited for clarity at 8 PM on Sunday, May 21, Seattle time. (Edited for clarity again on July 14th.)

In this series of articles I am proposing a potentially revolutionary project: an independent US media organization to serve the needs of North American audiences for the truth about foreign and domestic actions and policies. More and more North Americans are becoming aware of the issue of "fake news" reports issued by media corporation. Thus I think the time is ripe for a more aggressive effort to present news and analysis of critical issues that now threaten the very existence of humans. But first I need to introduce my political and philosophical beliefs for this project to insure that it is rational and offers a reasonably good potential for not only averting the twin threats of a nuclear war conflagration and climate destabilization, but also offers the potential to lead to more peaceful relations and environmentally sustainable progress.

What we have experienced since the dawn of capitalist rule starting about three hundred years ago is the increasing power and wealth of a decreasing proportion of humans. Capitalism is based on the private ownership of an economy, and the inevitable logic of the system is the ever increasing concentration of wealth by fewer and fewer people.  But what I wish to emphasize in this proposal is that the system has a much worse consequence for the vast majority of humans:  concentrated wealth serves a distorted psychological need of domination and control by only a tiny class of owners of economic property which leaves the vast majority of humans feeling powerless. The solution is constructing a revolutionary model that increases the influence of people over their own lives.
 
To be sure, there are a number of other consequences resulting from this type of rule as many critics of the system are well aware: many wars (which now appear never-ending), periodic economic crises, widespread poverty, alienation in the workplace, etc. Probably worst of all is the additional specter that is now haunting humans: the likely destabilization of the Earth's climate because of the contamination of the atmosphere and oceans with accumulating carbon, due to the mad pursuit of profits, that will end in the extinction of humans.

However, to propose a revolutionary model to prevent all these consequences from interfering not only with the potential for human happiness but to preserve us as a humans species, I think we need to go further back in our history to discover what constitutes our essential qualities as humans as a foundation upon which to build a successful revolutionary model that frees us from all ruling classes.

We know from recorded history (roughly starting about 10,000 years ago) that we humans have suffered to live under oppressive class rule since the beginning of civilization. Because this period of class rule, which was brought about initially by violence or the threat of violence, and supplemented thereafter by all sorts of ruses ("divine right", "there is no alternative", etc.) has continued so long, most people now believe that class rule is the natural order of societal arrangements. Most people are completely unaware the extent of the damage this has done not only to their material well-being but to their mental capacities. Most people simply accept the false notion that they must look to leaders in the ruling classes to govern them otherwise chaos and mayhem would reign in which societies would descend into some kind of law of the jungle. This notion, of course, is based on capitalism's concept of humans as essentially self-seeking individuals.
 
Most people have completely forgotten about their natural abilities as creative, social beings capable of ruling themselves. These natural abilities sustained them throughout roughly 98% of human existence (use the label "human nature" to find articles posted on my website that support this concept).  Many anthropologists remind us that originally humans lived in small groups of hunting, fishing, and gathering societies where all adult members participated in decision making. However since the dawn of civilization when people permanently settled in agricultural communities, some people using violence, or the threat of violence, started taking control over others which led to control of entire societies which, in turn, over time deteriorated into masters and subjects, tiny ruling classes and the subjugated vast majority. Since then, the participation of humans in decision-making, otherwise known as real democracy, has been only a dream of ordinary people. (Have you noticed how capitalists love to use the word "democracy" in their propaganda?)

The ability to have influence over one's life is a key feature of human nature, but its perverted form is the power to control others for one's own benefit. This perverted form is expressed with a contemporary meaning by author Peter Robb who wrote in his book Midnight in Sicily:

The colossal wealth brought by the drug trade brought no improvement to the lives of those who risked their necks for it. The furtive enjoyment of a fast car or a gold Rolex or expensive clothes was cold comfort in a life of hiding, sexual misery, mistrust, the constant fear of betrayal and death. The old mafia reward hadn’t been wealth but power. ‘Giving orders is better than fucking,’ was an often-heard mafia saying.

Mafia, or organized crime, is only a crude form of capitalism. All ruling classes ultimately rely on violence, or the threat of violence, most of which is buried and obscured in the recorded history of not only capitalist societies, but since the beginning of ruling classes shortly after civilization was established.
 
This power over people and the self-centered drive to accumulate wealth are both found in exaggerated form in capitalism, however power is a far more addictive drug than wealth accumulation. I've also found this to be true from personal experience I had with a very wealthy family headed by a CEO of a transnational corporation. The CEO had everything he and his family could want, but he only enjoyed the thrill of decision-making, much like the "high" of a powerful drug, rather than the enjoyment of his wealth. (This was also argued by Jim O’Reilly, a retired banker, educated in Britain, and now resides in Colorado, whose blog I followed back in 2011-2013.) 

Wealth is mostly used in today's capitalist societies as a means to exercise power over others. Today we see billionaires who use their wealth in various ways--some even criminal--to influence not only people in government, but throughout society. Wealth used as power can be seen in the very legal framework of corporations (a quintessentially capitalist institution): the owners' formal influence, as stockholders, varies according to the number of corporate shares owned by them. But I argue that they mostly use this wealth in combination with other capitalists to control the rest of us, and in the capitalist countries that make up the US-led Empire, by insuring we are well indoctrinated in the virtues of capitalism through their control of education, media, and entertainment. 

Our ruling masters in this transnational ruling class nowadays reserve the use violence (or the threat) on not only those who resist their rule (whether domestically or on foreign countries), but on nations and people who wish to pursue an independent course of action. Accordingly, we see daily reports of wars: wars by proxy terrorist armies, well hidden ("in the interests of national security") subversive attacks to destabilize nations, and outright invasions and occupations. Domestically we see the armed guardians of capitalist rule killing mostly minorities with no accountability to any system of justice; and those they don't murder, they lock away in a vast prison system.

The damage of roughly 10,000 years of class rule has had a deleterious effects on the vast majority of humans to sustain themselves psychologically as well as materially in a healthy and just manner, however I argue that these capacities still exist, but only need the removal of class rule and time to blossom once again. 

But there is far more at stake than simply the full expression of our humanity. Those alive today, mostly the young adults, are tasked with saving our human species from the twin possibilities (some say probabilities) posed by the imminent threat of a nuclear war and/or the eventual extinction of humans due to ravages imposed on our habitat by the compulsive drive of capitalists to grow on a finite planet.


(This continues in Part 2a)

The Special Council Inquisition - Bad For Trump - And All of Us

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

This is bad and the Trump administration should have pulled all strings to prevent it. Such investigations NEVER stick to their original, limited tasks but extend further and further. The order the Acting Attorney General wrote includes language which allows for nearly unlimited digging in "any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.” It will thereby continue until -inevitably- some dirt will be found that can be blown out of all proportion and lead to prosecutions or impeachment.

And he concludes with this ominous statement:

Trump believes that better relations with Russia are important for the well-being of the United States, Pence would likely pursue an anti-Russian policy.

That, I believe, is the real issue here. There are no unbeseeming relations between Trump and Russia. Russia had little, if any, influence on the 2016 election. There was no "Russian meddling". But Trump's somewhat more friendly behavior towards Russia, which he campaigned for, is disliked by the-powers-that-are.

We can now expect a very long drawn special council investigation with lots of media leaks and reporting. It will drown out all other important issues. It will likely end badly for Trump and badly for peaceful global power relations. 

The Pathologization of Dissent

Click here to access article by C. J. Hopkins from CounterPunch. 

With this post I am departing from my practice of posting (and commenting on) only current articles (less than one month). While perusing the web this morning, I found this piece (which I missed back in October) by one of America's most erudite and politically perceptive writers. It struck me as most illuminating,  and not at all out of date. It's as relevant today as it was last October 27th when it was published. 

The corporate media is sending a message … a message aimed at a much broader audience than undecided American voters (assuming such creatures really exist). The message is, “get with the fucking program, or get stigmatized as an anti-Semite, or a racist, or a Russian spy, or whatever.” The message is, “drop the populist rhetoric, shut the hell up about the Wall Street banks, and the corporations, and the ‘one percent,’ and … actually … forget about politics completely, except for identity politics, of course. Go ahead and knock yourself out with that.” The message is, “you’re either with us or against us … and it doesn’t matter why you’re against us, or what it is you think you’re for. Right, Left … who gives a shit? It’s one big Basket of Deplorables to us.”

This piece is about the accelerated war on truth which I see has having started after 9/11, the most politically pivotable event since WWII. I also see this accelerated, desperate war on truth as an early sign of the disintegration of the US-led Empire, a transnational capitalist empire that is ruled by a network of major capitalists from countries aligned with the US and Britain and formed after WWII. 

However I don't take any consolation in my view that it is a sign of its disintegration. I see that this ruling network is so addicted to wealth and power that they, like many ordinary addicts, will seek self destruction (and ours) in a nuclear conflagration in a final effort to maintain their addiction. I also look around and see the vast majority of us as either too powerless, ignorant, confused, isolated, or too co-opted codependents to stop this final genocidal conflagration. 

Guns and Butter, May 10, 2017, F. William Engdahl and The Gods of Money

Click here to access an interview with F. William Engdahl on Bonnie Faulkner's Guns and Butter program broadcast from KPFA in Berkeley, California. (Note: This interview is used as a fund raising event to raise money for the station and the program. Thus the actual interview is interrupted in the middle for 12 minutes and for 3 minutes starting at about 50:00m, followed in the final 7 minutes with Faulkner reading passages from Engdahl's book. Thus the interview lasts only about 38 minutes.)

Faulkner interviews Engdahl about his book The Gods of Money in which he focuses most of his comments about the historical highlights of the private control of US money through the central bank (The Federal Reserve) and the powerful impacts that this had on US history.

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.

Syria is the dam against more bloody chaos

Click here to access article by Jonathan Cook from his blog.

Today, Israel’s vision of the region is shared by other key actors, including Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, and Turkey. The current arena for destabilisation, as I warned, is Syria. But if successful, the Balkanisation process will undoubtedly move on and intensify against Lebanon and Iran.

All of these actors have their own geopolitical interests in destabilizing and fragmenting Syria, and the US Empire stands behind them urging them on and funding proxy terrorist armies. This effort to destabilize Syria appears likely to be a pivotable event in the Empire's grand design to control the entire world, not merely the Middle East as Cook implies. But not only for that reason, the transnational capitalist classes that control this Empire have thus far invested so much effort in terms of wealth and grossly deceptive propaganda into this project in combination with numerous other aggressive moves by their NATO army in Europe, against North Korea, the South China Sea, etc., that they will not give up without an enormous struggle. Russia, China, and host of other nations also see Syria as a contest that must not be lost without posing an unacceptable threat to their own security. This situation could very easily end up in a nuclear conflagration. We live in very dangerous times.

To aware activists this presents a challenge to engage in activities to undermine the weakest component of this imperial plan--the Empire's grossly deceptive propaganda war on their own populations. So far they have engaged in mostly individual efforts; but because time is rapidly running out, they must organize and consolidate their efforts so that they can be much more effective in the battle against the disinformation and propaganda that agents of the Empire are using to neutralize their home populations while pursuing dangerously aggressive efforts in multiple areas of the world.

Dr. Edward Rhymes interviews Eva Bartlett regarding Syria

Click here to access the audio interview from Rhymes Media Group. Here is all the bio I could find about Edward Rhymes.

Already I'm departing from my decision to post only essential articles, etc. on my website. I confess I'm a hopelessly addicted fan of Canadian journalist Eva Bartlett. This is one of the best interviews of her that I've listened to so far. Listen to this 50:36m interview to see if you agree with me that she is one of most sincere journalists around. If you agree, I urge you to subscribe to her email service so that you won't miss any of her activities.

War and Empire: the American Way of Life

Click here to access article by Paul Atwood from CounterPunch. 

The title of this article is also the title of Atwood's book which is being translated in Farsi for the Iranian audience. As such it is primarily intended for the latter, but it also offers an excellent overview of the imperialist history of the United States as propelled by capitalist interests of wealth and power, and specifically the launching of the US imperial project after WWII with emphasis on the consequences for Iran. The article, and presumably the book, emphasizes the power of US institutions of indoctrination (education, corporate media, and entertainment (especially Hollywood) to deceive ordinary Americans into believing that government policies and actions were always benevolent or "in the interests of national security" if they provided media coverage at all.

I confess I haven't read the book or even heard of it. I believe that is another piece of evidence to illustrate the latter phenomenon: the book simply was ignored by all corporate media and received scant coverage in alternative media. I notice that I did post one article by Atwood back in 2012, and in my commentary I criticized him for his lack of references to capitalism and instead using circumlocutions to refer to capitalism's role in shaping US policies and actions. This is certainly not the case in this article I posted today. Although his book was mentioned in the 2012 article, I had assumed that he used the same style in that book as he did in the article.

I was very happy to see that he is no longer using circumlocutions to hide the fact of capitalism. It has been one of the purposes of my website, which I started in late 2009, to eliminate such practices by authors on the left. In 2009 I was appalled by this practice and other similar practices which tended to obscure political reality particularly in relation to the post war project of global domination that was planned and carried out to a great extent by the capitalist ruling class in the US and their partners-in-crime abroad in the Empire.

The End of the Age of Protest

Click here to access article by Jeffrey St. Clair from CounterPunch. 

I am directing in this post to only the first part down to where he writes "The time for protests is over." In this first part he argues that we are now in the era of action, by which he explains consists of the following:

Action is standing arm-in-arm before water cannons and government snipers on the frozen plains of North Dakota. Action is hanging from a fragile perch 150-feet up in Douglas-fir tree in an ancient forest grove slated for clearcutting, through howling winter storms. Action is chaining yourself to a fracking rig in rural Pennsylvania or camping out in the blast zone at a Mountain Top Removal site in the hills of West Virginia. Action is intervening when police in storm trooper gear are savagely beating a defenseless woman on the streets of Portland. Action is jumping into the Pacific Ocean with a knife in your teeth to cut the vast trawler nets ensnaring white-sided dolphins and humpback whales. Action is stopping bad shit from going down, or trying to.

His (gay?) partner, Alexander Cockburn (deceased in 2012) and St. Clair lived near Arcata, California where he gave a talk which was a version of this article. From this I infer that St. Claire still lives in nearby Petrolia, CA where he shared a residence with his late friend Alex Cockburn. As you may know, Cockburn and later St. Clair joined him as editors of CounterPunch for many years. As co-editors they earned a reputation of being rather radical in their views. Cockburn's nuclear family were well educated and descendants of quite wealthy and highly educated people on the left. 

However I always felt that the two editors were always a bit too liberal for my taste in politics, and wondered if these two iconoclasts were more dilettantes than serious critics on the left. This piece doesn't alter this perception.

It seems to me that it is not only that I sees protests as futile, but also "actions" such as St. Clair writes about. I think it is time (maybe even past time) to think about revolution, and I intend to do just that in the remaining time I still have before returning to nature. Hopefully I might even influence other people to do just that like I have influenced people to write about "capitalism" instead of using euphemisms or circumlocutions as substitutes. (See my commentary here and the comments section for this post.)  

The Horror! The Horror! (parts 1 and 2 of 3?)

Click here to access part 1 and this link to access Part 2 of a series of articles by Jim Quinn of The Burning Platform. 

I’m constantly amazed by the ability of those in power to create a narrative trusted by a gullible non-critical thinking populace. Appealing to emotions, when you have millions of functionally illiterate, normalcy bias ensnared, iGadget distracted, disciples of the status quo, has been the game plan of the Deep State for the last century. Americans don’t want to think, because thinking is hard. They would rather feel. For decades the government controlled public education system has performed a mass lobotomy on their hapless matriculates, removing their ability to think and replacing it with feelings, fabricated dogma, and social indoctrination. Their minds of mush have been molded to acquiesce to the narrative propagandized by their government keepers.

Quinn makes many good points about the gullibility of Americans and the adept skills by what he calls the Deep State to manufacture the consent and dissent of Americans. The Deep State serves the interests of the transnational capitalist class who control the US-led Empire regardless of who occupies the White House or Congress. However, I don't agree with everything he writes.

First. his reference to the "Deep State" is based on Mike Lofgren's views in his book (of the same title). Although I have not read his book, I have read some of Lofgren's articles and find his conception of the "Deep State" much too vague and as only a relatively recent phenomenon in the US. Read my commentary posted in this piece regarding his concept.

Second, his reference in Part 2 to the Fourth Turning as some kind of explanation for our current state of affairs. This book apparently sees history as running in cycles. Thus, we shouldn't worry about the extinction of humans due to the degeneration of capitalist rule into a nightmarish nuclear Armageddon or worry about the destabilization of our climate and the resulting destruction of our habitat. It's just another historical cycle that humans will live through.

Reporter Actually In S-Y-R-I-A Exposes Media Lies About Everything

Click here if you wish to access Jimmy Dore's interview with Canadian journalist Eva Bartlett directly from The Jimmy Dore Show via YouTube.

I'll introduce this interview with a message by Eva Bartlett from her website (actually check this link out because it offers other relevant links. Also at around 2:00m in the interview she refers to an important article by Steve Gowans entitled "The Revolutionary Distemper in Syria That Wasn’t".)

Very pleased to have been on Jimmy Dore's show. I have a lot of respect for Jimmy, unabashedly speaking truth on Syria and many other issues--in fact, he has paid a price with Youtube demonetizing his videos. [On that note, how you can support his work: ▶Become a PATRON▶  https://www.patreon.com/jimmydore]

 

De-escalation Zone Memorandum – Decisive Step Towards Peace in Syria?

Click here to access article by Firas Samuri from Global Research. (Added a link to additional post from RT at 7 PM Seattle time.)

Following the results of the fourth round of Syrian talks in Astana the representatives of guarantor-states (Iran, Russia and Turkey) signed a memorandum on de-escalation zones in Syria.

....

The memorandum, which comes into effect on May 5, envisages the cessation of hostilities between the sides, conditions for returning refugees, the restoration of destroyed urban infrastructure and the access of humanitarian organizations. Moreover, the checkpoints to control the movement of civilians and the ceasefire regime will be created along the de-escalation zone borders.

It is notable, that the agreement doesn’t apply to Islamic State and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham terrorists, it doesn’t depend on whether they are inside a zone or not.

Moreover, the flights of the U.S.-led International Coalition are strictly forbidden in the area. The airspace will be also controlled by the guarantor-states.

The agreement has received endorsement by various important actors involved in the Syrian conflict including UN officials and even luke-warm approval by US officials. 

Although this subject is not directly related to the purpose of my website, it is of interest to many US activists who are interested in the advanced revolutionary ideology of Syrian Kurds as I outlined in a previous post, and also how this latest agreement might dovetail with US officials who would like to see Syria fragmented. The Duran has very recently run a series of articles discussing the implications of this Memorandum worked out by Russia, Turkey, and Iran in Astana, Kazakstan. See this, this, and this. Also, added at 7 PM Seattle time, this post from RT entitled "Are airstrikes possible? Mixed signals from Washington on Syria safe zones".