Americans Trust ‘Our’ Intelligence Agencies. Should We?

Click here to access article by Eric Zuesse from Strategic Culture Foundation. (Added the last two paragraphs to my commentary at 11:30 AM and 8 PM Seattle time.)

Zuesse, like all well-indoctrinated academics and other upper-middle class people (in general), consider bourgeois (capitalist) "democracy" as the real thing. These people were rather easily seduced by the extra privileges and income given them by the ruling capitalist class in order to keep the capitalist system functioning and give it a superficial appearance of legitimacy and authenticity as a "democracy". Millions of Americans now regard what we formerly had as "democracy" and believe the current lies of the government and corporate media because of their work for the ruling capitalist class. Only recently some of them have discovered a growing police state, evidence of a growing fascist government, and an increasing promotion by the ruling class of foreign wars and subversion of legitimate governments. A few of them, like Zuesse, are coming out of their privileged woodwork to criticize what is happening, and in this piece about the profusion of lies by the government. However, he seems to blame the victims.

Something’s deeply wrong here. Government by deceit, cannot be a democracy. And, yet, the public still don’t get the message, even after it has been delivered to us in history-books. By then, it’s no longer in the news, and so only few people really care about it. The message of history is not learned. The public still accepts the ongoing lies — the new lies, in the new ‘news’, for the new atrocities.

This paragraph reveals the underlying superior attitude of this class toward the classes below them. They wrote the largely fake history in these books and taught capitalist ideology to impressionable young people in public schools and colleges. Such deceit is an integral part of the divisive ideology that the ruling class superimposed on members of the upper middle class (academia and public school administrators are members) to justify their privileges. 

Elsewhere in the economy we see these upper-middle class "professionals" pleasing their capitalist masters (Zuesse always refers to them as an "aristocracy" thus hiding the system which has given them so much power) and bosses in corporate media, Hollywood, corporations, and government in order to live a luxurious lifestyle compared to that of workers "below" them who are steeped in debt and working two or three jobs in order to survive. 

US National Security Advisor John Bolton Backs Terrorists

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

Read this and note how the author carefully documents, although in some cases belatedly, the following conclusion about the Deep State's promotion of terrorist armies. Therefore, John Bolton is not some kind of rogue government figure, but a key figure in carrying out the interests of the Deep State consisting of top financiers and corporate officials, the network of top capitalists and assorted followers who promote imperial interests regardless of administrations.

While exposing John Bolton’s complicity in the material support of egregious terrorists and his efforts to use them as armed proxies against Iran in a war he has attempted to promote and instigate for years is important, it is equally important to expose, confront, isolate, and extinguish the influence of the corporate-financier interests that have underwritten and directed Bolton’s efforts and the efforts of countless others working to drag the United States, its allies, and the rest of the planet into another destructive conflict.Understanding that efforts to remove MEK from the US State Department’s  Foreign Terrorist Organizations list and prepare them for their role as armed proxies against Iran transcended the administrations of George Bush, Barack Obama, and now Donald Trump exposes the continuity of agenda – regardless of who occupies the White House or US Congress – advanced by these unelected corporate-financier interests.

Recommended artilces for 3/30/2018

• Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un: Make Korea United Again! by Federico Pieraccini from Strategic Culture Foundation. As I see it, the world's population mostly consists of pawns as in the game of chess, and our ruling classes, armed with nuclear weapons, play deadly games of chess in which the outcomes threatens our survival as a human species. See how the author elaborates on, and reaches, the following conclusion in the latest chess game played by our masters: 

... while Moscow and Beijing have multiple reasons for seeking an agreement between Pyongyang and Washington, both are aware that the US has no intentions of abandoning its presence in South Korea. The meeting between Kim Jong-un and Trump is a well-designed trap prepared by Moscow, Beijing and Pyongyang, maybe over many months or even years. The most realistic objectives are to further isolate Washington in the region, to bring Beijing and Seoul closer together, and to drive a wedge between Seoul and Washington.

• Disembodied Americans and the Crucifixion of the World by Edward Curtin from his blog.

Why are so many Americans indifferent to the savage slaughter of millions of people around the world carried out by their own government under a long string of presidents?   Why were they stone-cold silent during eight years of Obama’s many wars and drone killings of which he boasted?  Why are they silent in the face of the Trump administration’s continuation and expansion of those wars and its push for a nuclear war with Russia?  Why this incestuous turning in and away from the bloody havoc their government keeps afflicting on the world?

And why all this denial while focusing on the pornographic media spectacles of Stormy Daniels (the porn queen turned “Adult Film Actress”), Monica Lewinsky, and a host of others paraded before the cameras to distract and entertain a population of spectators?

I, like many people, wonder why.  What follows is an attempt at an answer ....  

Recommended articles for 3/29/2018

• Amnesty International: Trumpeting for War… Again by Paul de Rooij from CounterPunch. (Thanks go to an activist reader for recommending this.)

• Ecuador cuts off Julian Assange’s access to the outside world by Mike Head from World Socialist Web Site.

• China taking the long road to solve the petro-yuan puzzle by Pepe Escobar from Asia Times.

• You Know The U.S. is Losing, We’re Willing to Talk by Tom Luongo from his website Gold Goats n Guns.

Cowboys, Class Struggle, and the West

Click here to access this 55 minute interview with historian and author Mark Lause conducted by Sasha Lilley of KPFA radio, a listener sponsored radio station in Berkeley, California. This interview with Lause offers you the real history of cowboys and labor and their often violent conflicts with capitalists and their bosses in the late 1800s.

The cowboy is a mythified character in American society, conjuring up rugged individualism and masculine brawn, values dear to American capitalism. But historian Mark Lause suggests that when we think of the cowboy, we should think of a precarious wage worker.

Activist Christopher (of northwest Oregon) recommends these web posts

• Countries Worldwide Expel Russian Diplomats in Show of Unity from WNYC Radio. This is a program I heard on the OPB [Oregon Public Radio] radio this AM, thick with outrageous anti-Russia lies. The woman interviewed on the program is from the Washington Institute, an Israeli lobby/propaganda machine masquerading as a "think tank". It's a veritable who's who of war-mongering Ziocons.

• Welcome to the Dick Cheney Administration by Stephen M. Walt from Information Clearing House. Nazi Germany 2.0 here we come....

Our Ghost Democracy [a "best post"]

Click here to access article by Mike Small from Bella Caledonia (Scotland).

The author comments on the latest revelations about the collusion of Facebook with a British firm Cambridge Analytica to manage the consent/dissent of populations to support the interests of their clients and, above all, the ruling capitalist classes of the US-led Empire. (Craig Murray on his blog reveals how closely connected Cambridge Analytica is to the ruling class of Britain.) 

Of special interest is the following 19:12m video produced by Channel 4, included in the article, regarding the nefarious activities of Cambridge Analytica:



After reading/viewing the above material, I think that the article would have been better titled as "Our Fake Fake Democracy". It is a double fake because bourgeois or the capitalist version of democracy is mostly fake; but our ruling masters no longer find this version useful to hide their class's sins, so they have created this carefully managed fake version of bourgeois democracy. To better understand this "brave new world" we have entered, I recommend learning a new word: "hypernormalization".

What happened to the West I was born in?!

Click here to access article by "The Saker", a Russian-American from his blog A bird's eye view of the Vineyard.

The author is aghast at the likely direction we are headed in--a nuclear war with Russia, and baffled by the indifference of the people living in the USA.  He argues that the situation is much worse than during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and I remember that--I was terrified!

The truth is that the situation today is infinitely worse than the Cuban missile crisis. First, during the Cuban missile crisis there were rational people on both side.  Today there is NOT ONE SINGLE RATIONAL PERSON LEFT IN A POSITION OF POWER IN THE USA.  Not ONE!  Second, during the Cuban missile crisis all the new was reporting on was the crisis, the entire planet felt like we were standing at the edge of the abyss.

Today nobody seems to be aware that we are about to go to war, possibly a thermonuclear war, where casualties will be counted in the hundreds of millions.

I'm not so terrified today because I have seen this coming for a long time. I have been fortunate to live a full life. I, and many other independent voices, have done everything we could to alert our fellow Americans to this danger and the longer term danger of catastrophic climate destabilization. But capitalist/fascist sociopaths rule the Empire, and it appears that no one or nothing will stop them. The people are like sheep going down the ramp into the nuclear-war slaughterhouse.

Exposing and Stopping the Danger of US “Soft Power”

Click here to access article by Joseph Thomas from New Eastern Outlook. (Edited for much needed clarity around 4:18 PM and 5:08 PM Seattle time.)

While the US does this often under the guise of promoting “democracy,” it is clearly engaged in precisely the opposite. While democracy is generally understood as a process of self-determination, through US soft power, the process is co-opted and abused to allow Wall Street and Washington to determine the policies and direction a targeted nation takes rather than its own people.

Often times victims of US soft power are youths who are indoctrinated in university programmes or targeted by US-funded fronts posing as nongovernmental organisations (NGOs).

Thomas provides a very good analysis of "soft power", with emphasis on Asia, as one of the weapons (in addition to military force and subversive efforts by the CIA) that has been used by the US-led Empire since the end of WWII. With the USA having escaped severe damage in WWII in the Anglo-American war against capitalist rivals of the Axis powers for global dominance, the new Empire's ruling class, which was largely a merger of US and British capitalists, decided that what was needed was the addition of soft power to obtain global dominance in addition to the terrorist methods of Operation Gladio (see part 1 and part 2 of what appears to be an excellent 10 part series). 

This new program of management of consent/dissent, which the US ruling class had so successfully applied to their own population to sell products, used an upgraded version to convert the beliefs of subjugated populations (as well as their own population) to align with their own more global interests of profit and power. Thus, they placed heavy emphasis on propaganda, infiltration of foreign media corporations, the establishment of NGOs to monitor and promote these programs, and "educational" programs which attracted youth from all over the world. 

With the rest of the world lying mostly in ruins, this project did not meet much opposition with the exception of the Soviet Union and Maoists in China that were soon successful (1949) in overthrowing the capitalist ruling class in China led by Chiang Kai-shek. Hence, a vendetta, which became known as the Cold War, was waged against "communism" using every institution of this new Empire.

A truly historical month for the future of our planet

Click here to access article by "The Saker" (Andrei Raevsky) from his blog A bird's eye view of the Vineyard. 

We are fortunate to have our own Russian expert (I'm convinced that he is a descendant of White Russians) living on our shores and interpreting Russia for us.

In this article the author leads us into what looks like a descent into a war between the "Anglo-Zionists" (essentially the US-led Empire) and Russia. However, the meaning of his last clause completely eludes me.

... the fact that today Trump replaced McMaster with a warmongering psychopath like John Bolton is a clear sign that the Neocons are in charge in the USA and that the Axis of Kindness is about to get a heck of a lot “kinder”.

I am mainly posting this article to ask my readers if you can explain what he meant by writing "the Axis of Kindness is about to get a heck of a lot 'kinder'". Sarcasm? I don't remember reading any references to "Axis of Kindness" before. If it's sarcasm, the author seems to join several others into concluding that a war with Russia is inevitable. If so, I think such an attitude is beyond cynicism.

Then They Came for the Globalists

Click here to access article by CJ Hopkins from CounterPunch. 

Hopkins scores a bullseye with this satire on the neoconservative (transnational) section of the ruling capitalist class which have been on a rampage against the neo-nationalist capitalists and people like Hopkins who use words such as "globalist". Such people are "Nazis" and their worst crime of all was duping ordinary Americans to reject their candidate, Hillary Clinton, in 2016. Hopkins explains what this is all about.

Seriously, though, all satire aside, this stigmatization of terms like “globalist,” “globalism,” and “global capitalism” is a key component of The War on Dissent which the global capitalist ruling classes have been waging against a broad assortment of insurgent elements for the last eighteen months. It isn’t just a question of delegitimizing dissidents by smearing them as anti-Semites, Russian agents, and conspiracy theorists. The goal is also to conceal the essential nature of the conflict itself.

The neoconservative solution?

So what the global capitalist ruling classes have to do is … well, they have to lie. They have to disseminate a different narrative, a narrative that has nothing to do with the hegemony of global capitalism, the dissolution of national sovereignty, and the privatization of virtually everything. Because people aren’t total morons, this narrative needs to bear some resemblance to the actual conflict taking place. So, all right, a little rebranding is in order. Global neoliberalism becomes “Western democracy,” neo-nationalism becomes “Nazism,” and Vladimir Putin becomes Adolf Hitler.

Presto! Now things are nice and simple!

Unfortunately, this contest between neo-national capitalists and transnational capitalists (neoliberalism) is distracting attention from the anti-social nature of capitalism itself. Sooner or later capitalists were going to turn into transnational capitalists simply because the latter find national boundaries too restrictive, that is, they are no longer able satisfy their addictions to wealth and power within national boundaries. (Hint: The only real solution is to abolish the addictive system of capitalism so that ordinary people can create systems that guarantee equality, thereby preventing this drug-addicted ruling class from putting an end to all of us.)

Google sets up “news initiative” to censor political opposition and promote mainstream media

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

The campaign for Internet censorship has been spearheaded by the major media outlets, including the Times and the Post, who have seen their subscription base eroded by the growth of oppositional news outlets and “citizen journalism.” By working with the technology giants and intelligence agencies to censor smaller news outlets, the media giants hope to regain the monopoly over the distribution of news they held before the rise of the Internet.

In April of last year, Google announced measures to promote “authoritative content” over “alternative viewpoints,” which led search traffic to left-wing, antiwar, and socialist web sites to plunge by over 50 percent.

I can't put a percentage on this effort against my own website, but the "hits" that I currently receive are substantially down from a year ago when they were accelerating at a rapid pace.

Is the North Korea Deal a Stalking Horse for Trump’s Mid-East Makeover?

Click here to access article by Alastair Crooke from Strategic Culture Foundation. 

I think that Crooke in this article very astutely develops an argument that there is a new version of the Trump administration, which is compatible with the Zionist-laced neoconservative branch of the Deep State, and leading the US down a very dangerous path. 

The main components of his analysis are "the Art of the Deal" and a Zionist paper that ties North Korean's nuclear program with Iran's missile technology that forms a foundation for a very risky strategy that is being pursued by the Trump administration. Crooke thinks that this is a very high risk strategy because these components together with the recent changes in his administration "suggest that we are heading for war with Iran and Russia".

Christopher's recommended articles for 3/20/2018

• Teachers in Jersey City begin strike as demands for walkouts expand across the US from World Socialist Web Site. Good current example of how the unions serve the ruling class.

• Growing Apart: A Political History of American Inequality by Colin Gordon from Inequality.

Evolutionary Dead-Ends

Click here to access article by "xraymike79" from Collapse of Industrial Civilization. (Once again, I thank Christopher, an engaged activist in northwestern Oregon, for alerting me to this article.)

While the Earth is literally burning up, while the oceans increase their acidification, while numbers of wildlife are disappearing, etc, the thoroughly addicted (to profits and power) capitalist ruling classes and their dumbed-down supporters continue to play showing little concern about the future. The author points to these contradictions among a number of others.

Have things improved since I wrote my last essay a year ago for this blog? Have we miraculously transformed our entire energy system into one that does not poison and degrade the natural world? Have we slowed the onslaught of plastic pollution choking the planet’s rivers, lakes, and oceans? Have we done anything meaningful to halt the deterioration of the planet’s biodiversity toward mass extinction? Has this global, hi-tech civilization done anything significant to avert its own demise?

Despite a constant flow of warnings from the scientific community and even a letter signed by more than 20,000 scientists, the simple answer is no.  [my formatting]

Police State Rising: Partisan Politics Wielded to Ensure Our Oppression

Click here if you wish to directly access from YouTube the nearly 3 hour video which features Debbie Lusignan on her Sane Progressive channel discussing many topics related to the title.

I had doubts about listening to this when I have so many important tasks in front of me, but I decided to listen to the video as a background while I do the tasks. However, this plan was put aside after I listened to the first 20 minutes. Then I had to view and listen to her video directly from my desk's computer. I was so impressed about her breadth of knowledge about fake news, PSYOPs, even gatekeeping that seems to be infecting people in alternative media that I have decided that she is one of my well-informed, prime truth-tellers along with Vanessa Beeley, Eva Bartlett, Stephen Gowans, and a few others. I now feel that the long video was well worth my time to view/listen to it. 

She stumbles a bit on the various ideologies and at one point seems to imply that only a regulated capitalism is possible, and I didn't hear her say that any one course was possible to overcome the totally corrupted, criminal system of capitalism that we have today. She does urge us to try to talk to people about what is going on according to her understanding of it (which I think is completely accurate).

A very long discussion that covers my current mindset about the state of the world including psych ops, political division, how the alternative media is in the process of being coopted....I know its lengthy, but it is a discussion with our core community and it is meant as such. Thank you. Please go to my our videos on youtube and Bitchute to see the documentation of what I am talking about in the video descriptions of each of those topic videos. Most of my Florida Vegas stuff is on Bitchute HERE: https://www.bitchute.com/channel/sane...

Triggering War. A Manufactured “Catalytic Event” Which Will Initiate An All Out War? Are We Going to Let this Happen Again?

Click here to access article by Prof. Graeme McQueen from Global Research. 

McQueen has extensively researched the subject of managed and manufactured triggers of past wars, which he shares with us, and reaches the following conclusion:

We would do well to remember that the on-going production of managed and manufactured war triggers takes great resources and cannot forever remain leak-proof. It carries serious risks for war planners. The successful and definitive exposure of even one of these frauds before the people of the world could affect the balance of power overnight.

Our task is clear. We must mobilize both our investigative resources and our communication resources to nullify the efforts of those who specialize in the construction and encouragement of war triggers and who wish to keep the war system robust. We lost over 100 million people to war in the 20th century. Are we really going to let this happen again?

Books—The Doomsday Machine – Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. Daniel Ellsberg [a must read]

Click here to access article by Jim Miles, a Canadian educator, posted on The Greanville Post.

I am close to the generation of Jim Miles and thus share his concerns about a nuclear winter and the future of the "western world" (the US-led Empire). This piece is divided into two parts: 1) the impact the book by Ellsberg had on Miles, and 2) "Final Thoughts" which he writes more generally on the implications of the geopolitical scene we are witnessing today. 

The dominant factor in all this is the U.S. geopolitical view of global domination – hegemony – under the guise of a neoliberal economic outlook and a neoconservative political perspective. It is a society based on consumer consumption promoted through a lifetime of advertising propaganda in the material sense, the pretentious and unrealistic “rugged individualism” of Reagan and Rand, and in the emotive ideas of being the world’s indispensable nation. To support the material side, the corporate world – ranging from the military industries, the financial corporations, through the large media outlets – supports the ongoing wars and subversions around the world in order to harvest the resources and use the cheap labour required to keep the domestic economy going.

This is aided and abetted by their many sycophantic allies [the trans-national capitalists of the US-led Empire].

Trump Wants Her Running CIA, Germany Wants Her Arrested

Click here if you wish to directly access the following 7:05m video by Cenk Uygur, host of The Young Turks from YouTube. (I thank Christopher in northwestern Oregon for alerting me to this post.) (Minor editing was done to clarify my views at 9:46 AM Seattle time on 3/19/2018.)

Uygur points out the contradiction between the "rule of law" and Trump's appointment of Gina Haspel to head the CIA. This is a contradiction that is so widely misunderstood by ordinary Americans because they have been led to believe not only in the "rule of law" which applies to everyone, but in other mythologies spread by the ruling class who control the institutions of education, media, entertainment, etc: that we live in a country ruled by a democratic system, a fair economic system where anyone can achieve anything if they work hard enough, and our their government seeks only humanitarian objectives in their foreign policies. (You may need to wait a few more seconds for the following video to upload on your device.)



Uygur, like others, appears shocked by Trump's CIA appointment because he, like they, has been so thoroughly indoctrinated in these mythologies. What they fail to understand is reality. 

The reality is that our nation is governed by a capitalist ruling class who have constructed a number of fairy tales to secure some form of legitimacy for their tiny class to rule over the larger society. These fairy tales take an enormous and very expensive effort by the capitalist ruling class to ensure that most Americans believe them. During the past decades the contrast between reality of their actions (such as this appointment to the CIA) and these fairy tales have become especially dramatic, and the lies their media have spread have become more and more outrageous. However, most Americans have been so thoroughly conditioned to obey authorities and to seek individual solutions to their problems that it is questionable that they will ever recognize the need to organize a revolution before some catastrophic event occurs.

Uygur entertains the fantasy of her being arrested if she steps foot in Europe. Nonsense! The European governments have been so thoroughly brought under the control of their own ruling capitalist classes who are allied with, and take orders from, their Anglo-American friends that they will quietly dismiss any such notions to arrest Gina Haspel.

CIA/military infiltrating Congress, global arms trade, CEO greed skyrockets

Click here to access the 28:03m video from RT's Redacted Tonight show.

In the first segment Camp is referring to Patrick Martin's series of three reports plus one entitled "The CIA takeover of the Democratic Party" he posted at World Socialist Web Site.

Lee Camp explains the US military/security state’s not-so-secret plan to take over the Democratic Party, and shows how corporate media serve no purpose but a mass distraction and justification for imperialism and exploitation. Naomi Karavani reports on the arms trade while John F. O’Donnell discovers that Google is both helping the state drone foreigners and contributing to mass surveillance.

(Note: I must warn you that you will be watching a Russian sponsored show. To be safe, you must only watch programs and content sponsored by US media corporations. 😉)