Seymour Hersh: The CIA Is Filled With Criminals

Click here to access a fascinating recent interview with Hersh conducted by Elon Green, Columbia Journalism Review, posted on Reader Supported News. 

This interview was obviously taped and is full of disjointed comments and slang that you would find in any conversation between good, knowledgeable friends, and it presupposes a level of fairly sophisticated understanding of Hersh, his background and history of reporting scandalous events that are rarely covered by other journalists. To those of you who have acquired such an understanding, this is a most fascinating interview ... and Hersh promises more revelations of our thoroughly corrupt, gangster-capitalist government.

Hiding the real number of unemployed

Click here to access article by Pete Dolack from Systemic Disorder. (I started to post this in the morning, but as luck would have it, too many important tasks demanded my attention.)

Your government believes that exhausting your unemployment benefits is a cause for celebration — because you are no longer unemployed!

Huh? Well, there is a slight of hand here. Only working people who are receiving unemployment benefits are counted as “unemployed” in official statistics issued by countries around the world. Thus the actual unemployment rates are much higher than the “official” rates, generally about twice as high. Most governments make it difficult to find the actual rate, and the corporate media does its part by reporting the official rate as if that includes everybody.

Then there is the matter of how much of a given national population is actually engaged in paid employment, another useful number difficult to discover. Finally, we can consider wages, both how fast they might be rising as compared to inflation and whether they are increasing in concert with increases in productivity.

To cut to the chase, things ain’t so hot. But you already knew that, didn’t you?

The dedicated researcher give us the real scoop on what is happening regarding unemployment statistics in the USA and several other countries in the world. Did you suspect that ruling class governments often lie? 

John Pilger and Courage Foundation announce “urgent campaign” to free Assange

Click here to access article from World Socialist Web Site.

Citizens of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your ignorance (how you are ruled by self-serving interests)!

If we cannot protect one of our own who has sacrificed so much to reveal the lies of self-serving sociopaths, then we don't deserve any better than we presently have--never-ending wars and precarity.

Read about another person who has been victimized for telling the truth.

Whoever Controls The Narrative Controls The World

Click here to access article by Caitlin Johnstone from her blog. 

This Aussie journalist illustrates how the capitalist ruling class promotes people who spread their lies about the world, and likewise how people who refuse to do so are fired. 

She uses two examples: in one case MSNBC found a Black women, who has a record of telling lies, to host one of their "news" programs; and the other a self-admitted propagandist, Richard Stengel, from the State Department whose career illustrates how people who serve the interests of the ruling class easily go back a forth through the proverbial revolving door between government and corporations in evermore responsible and well-paid positions--in this example, Time Magazine, a media corporation. The latter is shown on a clip on the Jimmy Dore Show promoting the use of propaganda on a forum sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relation, a prime Deep State actor. These are excellent examples of the control by the US capitalist class over information that ordinary Americans are allowed to hear, read, and view.

Some excellent articles I missed while attending to my personal projects

• Capitalism and Democracy: Where Is The Left? by Christopher Black from New Eastern Outlook. In this article the Canadian humanitarian and international criminal lawyer aptly describes the bourgeois or capitalist version of "democracy" that deceives so many people:

  ... working people have no say whatsoever in the control of the economy and their well-being. They are forced instead to play an insulting game in which various parties of capital offer them candidates to choose from, in what are called “elections,” but which in fact are selections, that is, a system of appointing, through the illusion of the popular will, pre-selected candidates of capital to carry out capital’s agenda while candidates that represent the interests of the majority who have to work for a living are not permitted to be heard or are marginalised and ridiculed.

  And Black goes on to ask some very serious questions related to "where is the left". 

• Will Oil End the American Century? by F. William Engdahl from New Eastern Outlook. He sees sanctions and the reversal of the Iran Nuclear Agreement as a desperate attempt to maintain the power of the US Empire and its debt laden dollar. Also on the same subject read an article entitled "Africa Speculates Joining Russia, China, India and EU – Escalating De-Dollarisation Of Oil Trades" from True Publica. The oil trade in US dollars is a primary lynch-pin of US foreign and economic dominance. 

Because of the huge war debts the US racked up in the Vietnam War, Nixon was forced in the 1970s to remove gold from backing the US dollar. The solution was provided by Nixon and Kissinger and the 1974 agreement with that medieval kingdom of Saudi Arabia whereby the Saudi monarchy agreed to sell their vast supplies of oil only in US dollars in return for protection by the Empire. And this marriage of convenience between the US ruling class and the feudal monarchs of Saudi Arabia has continued to this day.

• USA in a Debt Trap Death Spiral by F. William Engdahl from New Eastern Outlook. The author segues with this piece the threats to US economic power related to the increasing debts by corporations, the government, and the American people. Tyler Durden explains the Moody warning that Engdahl refers to.

• From Bernays to Trump, Hooked on Misery by Colin Todhunter from East by Northwest.

Only ‘collective intelligence’ can help us stave off an uninhabitable planet

Click here to access article by Nafeez Ahmed from Insurge Intelligence.

Human beings organize ourselves in numerous social forms. But in all and each of these forms, a new form of collective intelligence is required for that social form to fully engage with the challenges it faces; to truly understand them in their systemic and holistic contexts; and to thereby adapt to them powerfully and creatively.

This requires a form of collective intelligence that has not yet been fully cultivated and practiced in human history — though it may well have had various past iterations and manifestations. It will be truly ‘new’, in the sense of building on the best of what we have so far achieved as a species, to deal with the unprecedented scale and convergence of contradiction and change we now face, together, on the planet.

The "only" problem with the above statement and the entire article is that it ignores the present reality that very little of collective intelligence exists! It ignores the stark reality that a class structure exists in which the top or ruling class, the capitalist class, has overwhelming control of decisions that affect every institution of most global societies. Their class power and control stem directly from the use of fossil fuels to extract maximum profits which they add to their mountain of wealth in order to control every institution in most nations of our planet home. 

Thus, the intelligence that does exist is under their control and drives decisions to accumulate more profits and power for their tiny class of humans--not for the benefit of the human species. This drive has nowadays essentially transformed into an addiction to power and control. This tiny class are so blinded by this addiction that they can't see the reality that it is leading to the destruction of habitat that supports human life. The only solution is revolution that can restore a "collective intelligence".

Extended absence

by Ron Horn, administrator of this blog.

I will be tied up with personal affairs until sometime after the 25th of May. Thus, there will be no posts until then.

I invite you to read those labeled "best posts" (my rating) which express my rather unique point of view on social-political issues.

Recommended articles for May 9, 2018

• Trump Ends The Nuclear Deal With Iran - What's Next? by Bernhard from Moon of Alabama. Also another good article on this latest event is We Are Being Lied To About Yet Another Middle Eastern Country By Yet Another US President by Caitlin Johnstone from her blog.

• Are Michael Isikoff and David Corn CIA Agents? by Eric Zuesse from The Greanville Post. The author contrasts the lying sociopaths Corn and Isikoff with a German truth-teller journalist who "died" under very mysterious circumstances.

• THE MARCH ON TEHERAN IS ON! Let’s have the campaign of pretexts blanket the public mind [begin] by Michael Schäfer from The Greanville Post. The author focuses on what the directorate (Deep State--for a brief description of this term read this; for an in-depth description by a researcher who has studied the Deep State for many years, listen to this interview with Peter Dale Scott) of the ruling capitalist class have planned all along regarding Iran as revealed in a Brookings Institute (a Deep State organization) document.

• Actors were paid to support Entergy’s power plant at New Orleans City Council meetings by Michael Isaac Stein from The Lens. The article reports on what is an excellent example of how the use of actors and acting in political situations is a common practice by capitalist agents who have a major interest in how governments make decisions as well as to influence the perceptions of ordinary people as in the case of the White Helmets in Syria.

Recommended articles for Monday, May 7, 2018

• China’s Determined March Towards the Ecological Civilization by Andre Vltchek from New Eastern Outlook.

‘Political correctness’ is diluting the sense of urgency, and there is plenty of hypocrisy at work: while, at least in the West and Japan, people are encouraged to recycle, to turn off the lights in empty rooms and not to waste water, in other parts of our Planet, entire islands, nations and continents are being logged out by the Western corporations, or destroyed by unbridled mining. The governments of the West’s ‘client states’ are getting hopelessly corrupt in the process.

Western politicians see absolutely no urgency in all that is taking place around the world, or more precisely – they are paid not to see it.

So, are we now dealing with the thoroughly hopeless scenario? Did the world go mad? Is it ready to get sacrificed for the profit of the very few? Are people simply going to stand passively, watching what is happening around them, and die, as their world goes literally up in flames?

It appeared so, until few months ago.

• Russia’s v. America’s Records on Democracy, and on Whistleblowers’ Safety by Eric Zuesse from Washington's Blog.

• Once China got off drugs: the link between opium and ‘liberal strongman’ Macron by Iranian-American Ramin Mazaheri. I only scanned this article and discovered that I don't agree with everything he argues, but he contributes to a valuable understanding of China's history with the ruling capitalist classes of Europe and North America.

• De-Briefing Academics: Unpaid Intelligence Informants by James Petras from Global Research.  Dr. Petas gives us a good idea of how upper-middle class academic travelers have been co-opted to serve the imperialist interests of the ruling capitalist class. Read the article to understand how he reaches the following conclusion:

What is clear in virtually all know[n] experiences is that academic informers’ ‘de-briefings strengthened the empire-builders and complemented the deadly work of the paid professional operatives of the CIA, DEA and the National Security Agency.

• The Myth of Low US Unemployment. Twisting the Definition, Manipulating the Data by Stephen Lendman from Global Research. Once again we learn that our masters are compulsive liars whenever their interests of profit and power are involved. However, due to the type of socialization that Americans are subject to throughout their lives, most of them have a very naive trust in their capitalist masters who have gotten away with lying so long that it has become essentially an automatic response to any subject where their interests are at stake. 

Recommended articles for Sunday, May 6, 2018

• 'The Biggest Player in the History of the World' by Alistair Crooke from Strategic Culture Foundation.

• Israels Murderous Strike on Syria (Via ‘Pacified’ Lebanon) by Andre Vltchek from New Eastern Outlook.

• The Historic Background of China's Perception of the West by Carl Zha posted on Moon of Alabama. Excellent review of certain aspects of Chinese history during the past 100 years.

• Diagnosing the Capitalist Disease: Our Passive Society by Chris Wright from The Greanville Post. I agree with the author that the social system impacts every institution including technology in the sense that it shapes what technology is used for.

Absence

I will be traveling for the next several days. Do not expect any posts until possibly Sunday, May 6th.

International Workers' Day!

by Ron Horn  (I was inspired by an activist, Caren, to write this post.)

Giant celebrations are occurring all over the world--except in the US--for this day in honor of workers. (Some examples: in Zambia, India, France, Cuba, and Russia.) 

That's a bit strange since it originated in the USA. It is another example of worker history that our ruling masters have almost disappeared from the consciousness of many American workers. But looking at the history of International Workers' Day, we learn that the day is as American as apple pie! 

Our ruling masters have attempted to obliterate its meaning by relabeling the day to various other meanings, by changing it to "Labor Day" and shifting it to the first Monday of September, by removing most of the history of this day from schools and educational materials, and by media corporations portrayal of the day as almost un-American by framing the day as one of potential violence. Isn't it ironic that the most violent ruling class in recorded world history treats American workers with such paranoia?

It started on May 1, 1886 with a workers' rally which led to what it sounds like was a ... false flag event--probably the most favored tactic of our capitalist masters. Historian Yohuru Williams gives us a brief history of the event which led to this day of honor for working people all over the world.

The future of work is now

Click here to access article by Peter Radford from Real-World Economics Review Blog. 

The author focuses our attention on the present and future consequences of artificial intelligence (AI) on the vast majority of humans. Nowhere does the author address that the capitalist system distorts the way this new technology will be used not for the benefit of humans, but for the enrichment of a tiny minority of "owners" who are addicted to not only profits, but power most of all.

There is no doubt that AI will have an enormous impact. There are countless breathless accounts of the number of jobs that will simply disappear as AI sweeps through the economy. These accounts usually appear from those involved in the invention and application of AI. They all end up expressing some form of fatalistic vision where the workplace will inevitably collapse under the impress of technology, wages will similarly collapse for those poor souls unable to keep up with the onslaught of robotics, with the resultant picture being grim for just about everyone except for the few who remain in the so-called “knowledge economy”.

Later he describes the inevitability of consequences under the existing social system, but again he doesn't attribute them to capitalism which we can change to serve all of humanity instead of a tiny minority of capitalists:

By simplifying the purpose of a corporation and focusing it exclusively on shareholder value the way was opened for increasing portions of the national wealth to be allocated to profit, away from wages, and thus satisfy the rising demands of investors.

The consequence was a constant re-writing of the workplace arrangement, with every step designed to reduce worker compensation so as to free up cash for profit.

For more material to learn about how this new technology of AI will be used under the existing system, I recommend another article entitled "As AI advances rapidly, More Human Than Human says, “Stop, let’s think about this” from Ars Technica.

Why the U.S. Regime Hates Vladimir Putin

Click here to access article by Eric Zuesse from Global Research.

Because I am currently having little time to devote to my website, I only scanned this article. What was of special interest to me was the following video.



I believe it illustrates how the Russian government under Putin and the great majority of Russian people have drawn from their long experience under the Soviet Union a hostile attitude against the intrinsic nature of capitalist greed. I don't think that the Russians will ever let the capitalist sector dominate their society, and possibly they will be so disenchanted with capitalism that they will once again turn toward a creation of a new type of socialism.

Fuck You, Actually

Click here to access article by Caitlin Johnstone (Australian) posted on The Greanville Post.

For months leftist analysts have been warning that the increasingly hysterical anti-Russia narratives being aggressively promoted by the western media would eventually be used to target the political left. Those warnings went largely unheeded in the United States where the Russiagate narrative was being ostensibly used to undermine the Trump administration, and the McCarthyite feeding frenzies which have become normalized for American audiences have now metastasized across the pond to the UK.

The author goes off on a well-deserved rant against the the British ruling class (she refers to them as "poms", Australian derogatory slang) for their anti-Russian smearing of Jeremy Corbyn, a prominent British Labour party leader.

This is as fascinating as it is infuriating. By attacking literally anything which poses an obstacle to the loose alliance of western plutocrats and secretive government agencies, the social engineers who are fueling this Russia hysteria are actually closer than ever before to openly admitting that the west is truly ruled by those plutocrats and agencies. They are now this close to saying “Russia is our enemy because it stands in opposition to the corporatist Orwellian oligarchy which is your real government.”

 But she ends on a very hopeful note--at least for the Brits:

This is a really extraordinary time to be alive. The nationless power establishment which looked completely unshakeable a matter of months ago is now flipping out like a meth addict whose stash just got stolen and publicly overextending itself in an amazingly conspicuous way. The mechanics of western imperialism and the deceitful nature of the mass media propaganda machine which holds it all together have never been as exposed as they are today.

Keep pushing against the machine, clear-eyed rebels. Truth is winning. Truth will prevail. The bastards are about to fall. 

An Afghan Year: My Road from Soldier to Socialism

Click here to access article by Adam Denker from The Greanville Post.

I found reading this article to be an emotionally gripping experience. Denker sounds like a very ordinary young American:

I joined the National Guard to pay for college. I didn’t really think of the consequences at the time. After all: I’m an American, I was raised to worship my country and adore the military, and I did. Receiving a college education seemed like fair payment for "service to my country".

 It was a transforming experience for him.

... the worst part was what I was slowly being forced to accept: everything I had believed in my whole life was a lie. I had always been a patriotic American. I believed we weren’t perfect but that we were “the good guys.” I truly believed that the Afghans wanted us there, that we were protecting and helping them. But now, as I saw the war around me, and why it was being fought, as well as the inhuman attitude towards even the Afghan civilians that my fellow soldiers had, I couldn’t keep believing this lie.

There was no greater example of the lie than the contractors who were there.

But the worst was yet to come. Read (if you can) what he experienced and concluded looking at a five or six year old girl who was searching for and collecting old Soviet mines from a field. 

Dr. Gilbert Doctorow: “America Is Absolutely Corrupt”

Click here to access an interview with Doctorow by independent Algerian journalist Mohsen Abdelmoumen posted on American Herald Tribune's website. (I must thank an attentive and dedicated activist for this post.)

This is a most fascinating interview of a Russian scholar with a PhD in history from Columbia University. The interview obviously took place in Belgium, and the journalist asks wide ranging questions about the USA in relation to Russia. Several questions asked about the state of journalism today and the appearance of fake news in the USA which was of considerable interest to me.

[Abdelmoumen:] Do you think that the disappearing of the paper press plays in favor of misinformation?

[Doctorow:] This plays a huge role, but it is not a recent situation. Mr. Noam Chomsky, the great American dissident, wrote as co-author in 1985 the book The Manufacture of Consent. It's a matter of censorship out of censure. Today, when someone graduates as a journalist and hopes to make a living, to have a family, there is only one thing to do: go into public relations for a big company. It requires the same skills for an employer who pays the salary. And finally, the journalists became corrupt. .... Journalists are retiring and it's over, they are not replaced them because there is no money.

[Abdelmoumen:] Is not journalism disappearing and are we not moving towards a press made by the citizens, like the alternative press?

[Doctorow:] The alternative press is a good thing but it is not the same size and it is not the same quality, in principle. If real journalism had continued, it would be much more sophisticated and much more educated than what we have now. We are talking about fake news. There are many fake news because there are no professional intermediaries, and even among the major publishers, I do not speak of the press but of the publishers in general, they sacked the writers. If you are dealing with a big edition, in most cases there are no real writers. All the services of an edition have disappeared, that is to say that the professions are under digital attack.

Globalopoly

I couldn't find the name of this British cartoonist in my limited time. Here is a link to his/her website.

 

World employers report

Click here to access article by David Ruccio from Occasional Links & Commentary.

 Economist Ruccio comments on the latest World's Bank report. This is how he starts out:

The history of capitalism is actually a combination of two histories: it’s a history of employers attempting to hire workers and develop new technologies to make profits and expand the reach of capitalism; it’s also a history of workers banding together to improve wages and working conditions and imagine ways of moving beyond capitalism.

The World Bank’s World Development Report, currently in draft form, comes down firmly on the side of employers and their historical role.

Russia and the War Party

Click here to access article by Carl Boggs from The Greanville Post. 

More examples of well-rewarded liberals promoting the imperial agenda of the US-led Empire.

The steady deterioration of American political discourse seems to have reached its lowest ebb in historical memory, visible in the rightward shift of both Democrats and Republicans. One sign is the frenzied Democratic assault on Republicans from the right, especially in foreign policy. Another is the resounding silence on the most crucial problems facing humanity: threat of catastrophic war, nuclear arms race, ecological crisis, health-care debacle, the worsening miseries of global capitalism. Tabloid-style spectacles have increasingly filled media space. Still another sign is the intensifying anti-Russia hysteria promoted by unhinged liberals in Congress and the corporate media, reminiscent of the worst McCarthyism.

Another example of this descent into absurdity is the book Russian Roulette, by liberals Michael Isikoff and David Corn – Beltway writers whose shrill anti-Russian crusade has received highest accolades by the New York Times and such promoters of the permanent warfare state as Rachel Maddow ....