What Big Meat doesn’t want you to know about slaughterhouses

Click here to access article by Martha Rosenberg from Intrepid Report. (Edited for omissions and greater clarity at 10:24 AM CT.

The real issues regarding immigrant labor are always submerged by the flood of lies portraying such people as solely victims whose human rights are being threatened. Indeed, they are! But this portrayal hides the real motivation by corporations to hire the most desperate and most compliant labor force at rock bottom prices. This current coverage of illegal immigrants by corporate media is being cynically used by the Deep State to add to the criticism of, and further undermine, the Trump administration.

The corporations that are owned by the ruling capitalist class have a difficult time exploiting such a vulnerable workforce and keeping the real incentives for this practice out of the consciousness of ordinary Americans. Hence, this practice will continue and the issues of illegal immigration will always be with us as long as corporations can profit from it. Have you noticed that corporations never get prosecuted for hiring such workers?

What is also kept out of the consciousness of ordinary Americans is the widespread and often brutal interference in Central America by the US ruling class to keep those countries open to US investors looking to make easy profits. This, in turn, results in governments throughout Latin America turning against their own people with their ruling classes actively collaborating with our powerful ruling capitalist class because of the inducements of wealth and power. This article explains some of the reasons why corporations like to hire illegal immigrants, and Wayne Madsen in article entitled "Political asylee numbers will soon skyrocket" explains, as an example, how the foreign policies of our ruling masters result in the type of government in Columbia which, in turn, drives people at great risk to themselves to head to the USA.

Steve Cutts wins a Webby award for best animated video

Click here to access is award winning video created by Steve Cutts whose illustrations and cartoons I've often posted on this website. (If you have AdBlocker extension on your Firefox browser like I do, it can take as much as 40 seconds to upload. Then you will need to click on the image of his video to play it. Even if you have this extension on your computer, it's well worth the wait. You can also upload it on Cutts' website much easier and you will get the full version.)

This video illustrates and satirizes the pursuit of happiness in capitalist societies.

Black Agenda Report Book Forum: Patriots, Traitors and Empires: The Story of Korea’s Struggle for Freedom

Click here to access an interview with Canadian Stephen Gowans conducted by Roberto Sirvent and posted on Black Agenda Report.

I regard Gowans as one of the top political intellectuals in today's world. The fact that he refers to Domenico Losurdo as a source of his influence, resulted in my ordering (from Abebooks) his latest book entitled Liberalism: A Counter-History.

In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Stephen Gowans . Gowans is an independent political analyst whose principal interest is in who influences formulation of foreign policy in the United States. His book is Patriots, Traitors and Empires: The Story of Korea's Struggle for Freedom.

Hong Kong’s Paradoxical “Independence” Movement

Click here to access article by Tony Cartalucci from New Eastern Outlook. [Edited for greater clarity throughout the day.]

Using the example of Hong Kong, the author illustrates how well-funded US sponsored NGOs lure educated young people in foreign countries to join in US's subversive activities on behalf of the Empire. These young people are enticed by the many rewards that their wealthy sponsors can provide them and the promise of lucrative future careers serving the Empire. Such rewards in these sociopathic individuals often offset their moral responsibility to others in their own countries. 

There will always be sociopaths among us regardless of any one society. It is the responsibility of well socialized people to see that their influence is minimal. This also means that well socialized adults must strive to provide opportunities for young people to contribute to their societies in a productive way. In addition, they must insure that values of social justice, equality, truth, beauty, forgiveness, empathy, responsibility, cooperation, courage, patience, etc (perhaps you can think of others) are inculcated as an essential part of the socialization process and thereby thoroughly reject the crass, self-serving aggressive, materialist values of the US-led Empire. Could it be that the Chinese Communist Party that controls nearly all policies in China are not sufficiently promoting this kind of socialization? 

A Gateway for Truth

I would like to share with you an email I received from an activist in the Boston area announcing a new website where one can find the hidden-from-us, real history of the USA and other topics not covered well in conventional history books.

                                                      This One's For John

Today is the June Solstice, where the Sun, appearing to travel along the ecliptic, reaches the point where it is farthest north of the celestial equator. In the northern hemisphere days are longest and nights shortest while the opposite is happening in the southern hemisphere.

Four years ago the concept was hatched of what today begins at https://hiddenhistorycenter.org/. A compelling and provocative scaffolding is now in place through which to relay information, raise questions, and generate discussion. The driving imperative has been to craft something akin to what John Judge would have envisioned were he alive to establish a brick-and-mortar Museum of Hidden History in D.C. to serve as its complement on the internet.

                                                           Beyond 1984 

The yearning has been constant over the past four years to ask John what he thought, what he wanted, what to do, to seek his advice and counsel. This internet aspect of the Hidden History Center project of the Museum of Hidden History is our endeavor to manifest what John explored and expressed throughout his days here. I want to express my gratitude and appreciation for Amie Tracey, nonpareil web wizard. This redesign/upgrade would not have been possible without her good-natured help, support, savvy, and counsel.

The framework is not yet at full power; of the intended 49 subtopics—see the linked list of 31 Second Tier Subjects in Table of Contents—19 remain to be implemented including Alternative Economic Systems, Climate Catastrophe, Drones and Targeted Assassinations, Electromagnetic Radiation (EMR) & Wireless Tech, Food Security, GI Resistance/Counter-Recruitment, and Nanotechnology.

                                                 Military Intelligence Dominance

On September 1st 2001, John wrote:

    Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said there are three pillars that hold up the current system of domestic oppression: poverty, racism and militarism. In order to have real democracy, economic justice, peace and a unified society, we have to both envision our own liberation in our time and take back our history, power and moral integrity.

    The reason Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. King were both loved and hated, both followed and murdered had to do with their use of “satygraha” or truth force and “ahimsa” or nonviolent harmlessness. These powerful tools moved them outside the control game that has secured privilege for a few over millenia. These systems of privilege, which are the real, deep violence of society, cannot be challenged or defeated using their own violent methods. Nor can they be changed by substituting a new elite in the seat of power, or by reforming them.

 As I see it, the crucial steps that must be taken now to stop the current trend to global corporatization, fascism and genocide/ecocide/ethnocide include the following, here in the belly of the beast....

 There are many brilliant people and communities thinking about, practicing and expanding these ideas and actions that are the answer to the current global dilemma. If you are inspired, if you wish to share your vision of them, if you want to learn more, please contact us.

                                      
                               We Are Children Of Earth & Sky

This is an invitation to rededicate ourselves to both envision our own liberation and take back our history, power, and moral integrity. Please communicate with us, sharing your own endeavors and pursuits on behalf of the Seventh Generation yet unborn and your ideas of what to build into the Hidden History Center internet archive.

Encoded in our individual DNA is the experience of our lineage from the very beginning. Whose whole perceptional reality was what I was just saying: all things have being, we’re made up of the Earth—all my relations, pray to spirits. See, and they didn’t pray to man or human form. The closest they came to it was they prayed to spirits that were called ancestors. And because they were praying to those ancestors for help and guidance, they understood that we were borrowing today from the past and the future. We’re borrowing it from both places. So they had this understanding of reality. They knew that to keep the balance was the purpose.... The reason for being was to keep the balance.... So this was what I will call a spiritual perception of reality. Because of the spiritual perception of reality they understood that life was about responsibility. It wasn’t about the abstraction of freedom—it was about responsibility.
    —John Trudell, What It Means To Be A Human Being (2001)

May we all continually awaken to and be renewed by recognition of our participation in and partaking of life at this unique time of Koyaanisqatsi.

For the Earth, the children, and all that follow us here,
I remain, sincerely yours,

Dave


Hidden History Center is a project of the Museum of Hidden History, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation and presentation of little-known history. We depend on your tax-deductible contributions to continue our work.

Dave Ratcliffe
editor and publisher
rat haus reality press
Roslindale, MA 02131
https://ratical.org/rhrPress.html
Assistant Director Museum of Hidden History
https://hiddenhistorycenter.org/MoHH
Archivist, Board member Committee for Nuclear Responsibility
https://ratical.org/radiation/CNR/
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Clueless or Just Plain Stupid?

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

The title of this article refers to the relatively new chairman, Jerome Powell, of the Federal Reserve who expressed surprise at the failure for wages to rise in this period of supposedly low unemployment and corporate tax cuts. Likewise, this mystery affects a lot of Radford's friend in the economics profession. 

He writes that there is no mystery. Those, in the upper-middle class, who work in high places serve their capitalist masters. To do this, they frequently encounter contradictions between capitalist theory and reality. To psychologically handle these contradictions, they must, in order to serve their masters and earn high salaries and numerous perks,  engage in self-deceptions consciously or unconsciously.

... reality has become inconvenient. It contradicts what our elite prefers to believe.

So rather than waste time tearing their hair out over Trump’s manifest ignorance and disregard for democracy, perhaps my friends all ought to be pondering their own role in transferring power to the unelected elite that is currently enriching itself and starving the masses of a prosperous and secure future.

As Social Security and Medicare Go Bankrupt, US Gives $10.5 Million a DAY to Israel

Click here to access article by Rachel Blevins from Activist Post. 

The article includes other immoral and criminal spending on nefarious activities beyond support for Israel such as the never-ending wars in the Middle East. But such reckless spending at the expense of taking care of our elderly citizens omits our contribution to NATO and military support for many countries near Russia in order to intimidate the Russian government, the numerous US military bases strewn all over the world, the CIA which has a history of overthrowing governments on behalf of the Empire's corporations, the numerous "aid" programs designed to corrupt foreign governments and their officials and to support fake non-political NGOs which prepare the groundwork among foreign citizens to undermine their governments. This list doesn't include the domestic uses to surveil its citizens, subsidies and tax breaks to corporations, and on and on. 

These sad facts provide proof that the Empire's trans-national capitalist class is really concerned about the precarious nature of its control over the world and not the welfare of its citizens. That is precisely why they must deceive their citizens into believing that they are concerned about humanitarian issues.

A current example of the latter is the ubiquitous coverage they give in their corporate media of the separation of children from their parents under the government's immigration policies. This is not new, but it has been increasing under the Trump administration. Meanwhile they give military support to the feudal regime in Saudi Arabia which results in the starvation of the people, especially the children, of Yemen--but you won't see this covered in corporate media. 

The Deep State (the informal, behind the official scenes capitalist board of directors of the US-led Empire), which is smarting from their defeat in the last presidential election of their candidate Hillary Clinton, are using their news and information media to discredit Trump in every way they can to prepare citizens for his removal from office. The Deep State is not accustomed to losing, but in recent years they have been losing everywhere. Sooner or later the American people--not only the elderly--will suffer catastrophic consequences from these policies and their failure to overthrow this capitalist regime and establish a social system that is truly their own.

A Call to Bring Julian Assange Home

Click here to access article by John Pilger from ConsortiumNews.

The Australian government has an obligation to free Julian Assange, John Pilger told a rally in Sydney on June 16 [their time, but our time on Sunday, the 17th], marking Assange’s six years’ confinement in the Ecuadorean embassy in London.

 Also, for a description of this event, read this piece from World Socialist Web Site.

They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

Click here to access article by Dr. Gary G. Kohls from Global Research.

Journalist Milton Mayer traveled to Germany in the wake of World War II to find out how ordinary, normally decent, educated German people got caught up, co-opted or neutralized in the horrible devolution of the country that ended in the atrocities with which we are all so familiar — and a World War that cost countless lives.

The book he wrote should be better known: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 was published in 1955 by the University of Chicago Press.

The retired physician from northern Minnesota provides potentially insightful excerpts from a book about "educated" Germans shortly after WWII in an attempt to explain how they followed Hitler and the fascists into compliance with their horrendous actions. However, he doesn't provide the insight. I think he leaves that for each of us to experience. I lived through WWII, and like many others, I wondered how "educated" and decent people could follow their leaders into such a miasma of evil. Let me tell you about my experience while reading the article.

It didn't take me much time to flash on the thought that I was looking into a virtual mirror that portrayed the zeitgeist of current times, and here in the good ol' USA. The details are different, but the process of inducing compliance with evil among  "educated" people is much the same. It also occurred to me that this process was being accelerated with the advanced methods of "public relations", that is, the advanced methods developed since WWII to influence people not only to consume, but to accept the overwhelming deceptions about what the ruling transnational capitalist classes under the US-led Empire (the Fourth Reich?) are doing in the world. 

Here I am thinking of the ever-present means of inducing a false consciousness about world events through the various means of electronic communication: TV most of all, movies, Facebook, and other electronic means of herding the "sheeple" into thought-pens. Even the technology of 24/7 surveillance of citizens is used to measure how well their brainwashing is doing, and is used to modify and perfect their techniques.  All these methods have been accelerated by the concentrated ownership of media and guidance by the CIA and other secret agencies, and now the attack on the internet and the World Wide Web which favors corporate use of this wonderful technology, a technology that was originally designed to be used democratically.

Added to this array of technological advancements is the mountain of debts that our ruling masters have induced most of us to take on amidst a developing reality of precarity. Debts act as an inhibiting influence over any resistance to the general brainwashing process described above.

The corporate media’s world of illusions

Click here to access article by Jonathan Cook of Nazareth from is blog. 

Cook uses the metaphor that was so well illustrated in the film Matrix to explain why we in the West are so brainwashed about the issues between Israelis and Palestinians.

The conclusion from this is that the way to change our societies fundamentally for the better depends on a change in our consciousness, on liberating ourselves from false perspective, on stepping through the door.

If we remain in a world of illusions, of false hierarchies of virtue, oblivious to the role of power, we will continue to be Neo living in his dream world. 

Of course, the "Great Western Narrative" applies to not only the issues in occupied Palestine, but to a number of other issues that the Empire's ruling capitalist class are so concerned with. Having walked through the door of the illusions created by the Great Western Narrative, Cook knows so well what is really happening in this corner of the world.

State of the Climate – It’s Alarming!

Click here to access article by Robert Hunziker from CounterPunch. (This post is another activist contribution.)

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (“NOAA”) concern about CO2 is decisive: “Today’s rate of increase is more than 100 times faster than the increase that occurred when the last ice age ended.” One hundred times anything is big.

That is an unprecedented rate of growth with profound and nasty negative consequences for temperature, climate, ecosystems, and species on land and in the oceans, nothing good.

Utopia and technology

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

I've recently experienced the new digital technology while re-settling in another area of the country, and had considerable difficulties with it. Although it offers conveniences, I think that American companies are overdoing its introduction in an effort to reduce payroll expenses and to enhance profits. Digital technology is used by owners to reduce the normal complex interactions between their workers and customers into very narrow digital categories without workers. This is another illustration of how benefits from advances made in any field in a capitalist society always go to the rich ruling class and often at the detriment to workers and the general public.

Anyway, in an effort to keep up with latest technological developments, I thought this explanation about blockchains might clarify the subject for you and me.

Recommended articles for Friday, 6/15/2018

• Europe Faces Crossroads as Atlantic System Crumbles by F. William Engdahl from New Eastern Outlook.

The world events of the past days are significant far beyond the apparent divide within the G7 industrial nations. If we imagine the planet as a giant electric force field, the lines of flux are in dramatic reordering as the post-1945 global dollar-based system comes to its disordered end phase. Europe’s political elites are currently split between rationality and irrationality. The developments to the East however are drawing more and more force and we are seeing the early phases of what might be called a geopolitical polarity reversal within the EU from West to East. The latest developments across Eurasia including the Middle East, Iran and above all between Russia and China are gaining in importance as Washington offers only war, whether trade war, sanctions war, terror war or kinetic war.

• The Real Results Of The Trump-Kim Summit - Freeze For Freeze (And Some Amusement) by Bernhard from Moon of Alabama.

• Antarctic melt holds coastal cities hostage. Here’s the way out. by Eric Holthaus from Grist.

Antarctica’s glaciers are massive enough to flood every coastal city on Earth. So it’s no exaggeration to say that what happens in Antarctica over the next few decades will determine the fate of not just Miami and Mumbai, but also the course of human history. If we’re lucky and quickly start cutting emissions, Antarctica’s glaciers might mostly remain in place. The alternative is unthinkable.

There’s still so much we don’t know about Antarctica. But a series of major breakthroughs in recent years have raised the urgency and scale of scientists’ efforts. This week’s papers put that information into context. The clear takeaway: There is no sign of a slowdown in Antarctica’s melt rate.

Brzezinski's Ghost: The Geopolitics of the Trump Administration

Click here to listen to a one hour interview with geopolitical analyst F. William Engdahl conducted by Bonnie Faulkner on her radio show called "Guns and Butter" carried on many listener sponsored stations on the Pacifica Network.

Engdahl elaborates on many subjects the late Zbigniew Brzezinski who had so much influence over anti-Russian policies and strategies because of his almost obsessive hatred of all things Russia. Brzezinski, whose family had a history in the Polish aristocracy, was brought into prominent political influence by the Rockefeller clan who were, and probably still are, key members of the Deep State. These policies, which Engdahl reviews, have continued under the neocons ziocons like Wolfowitz, the Bush clan, Rumsfeld, and in recent years, Victoria Nuland. Brzezinski's influence is seen by Engdahl to be continuing in the Trump administration.

America’s Public Are Foie-Gras Ducks

Click here to access article by Eric Zuesse from Strategic Culture Foundation. 

Zuesse uses a brilliant analogy to illuminate the insight that the American public is "fattened" on lies and various other deceptions in order for the ruling class (he erroneously refers to them by using a feudal term "aristocracy" instead of ruling capitalist class) to harvest and consume them at various times. He, step by political step in the election process, refers to the reality analogs that mirrors the fattening of geese to suit the interests of the rich and powerful in order to reveal the obscene nature of American "democracy". Of course, his use of the analogy is much too narrow because one can apply this analogy to the entire ideological spectrum that includes all institutions: media, education, entertainment, etc.--but I refuse to criticize him for that.

America’s voters are foie gras birds, but some of these birds (the Republicans and especially independents) are more resisting than some others (Democrats) are.

The way that America’s billionaires farm this public is by feeding to the voters the politicians, without even considering the needs — much less the wants — of that public.

Empire Files: Peter Joseph & Abby Martin on Abolishing Capitalism [updated with corrected links]

Click here to access access a 45 minute interview with Peter Joseph that is conducted by Abby Martin.

I initially accessed a re-posted excerpt of the interview with Joseph today, but then I discovered that the entire interview was posted in August of last year that was originally posted on TeleSur.

Martin introduces Joseph by citing his earlier career in advertising and equity trading, but doesn't mention anything about his subsequent founding of the Zeitgeist movement. (I hadn't yet read the introduction posted on YouTube.) I began to think that she was interviewing someone totally different, but after some research I concluded that the two different persona were one and the same.

In this extended interview you will learn many things about how capitalism functions such as Wall Street gimmicks to cheat ordinary investors,  creating demand for products through advertising, how debt is used by our masters in the capitalist ruling class to further enrich themselves at our expense, how the system is wrecking our habitat and threatening our demise, among other topics. When he gets to his vision for change in the latter part of the interview, he becomes more abstract and moralistic. 

Joseph is another perfect illustration of how a well-trained and skilled person was hired by corporations to serve in critical functions that make capitalism work. However, Joseph, unlike many others, apparently did not succumb to his conditioning in sociopathy through the inducements he received from high salaries and perks that corporations give to such talented people. In time he began to learn about the disastrous effects that the system of capitalism created for the overwhelming majority of people and our habitat on planet Earth. He apparently took his insights, dropped out of the corporate rat-race, and founded a movement to attack the capitalist system. 

In a more recent interview he appeared on the Jimmy Dore Show to explain some of his views that he wrote in his book entitled The New Human Rights Movement. In this interview he focuses on the structure of capitalism that has many secondary consequences that adversely impact the lives of ordinary people.

Court sanction of AT&T-Time Warner merger strengthens corporate grip on news and entertainment

Click here to access article by Barry Grey from World Socialist Web Site.

Read this article to learn about the increasing tendency of capitalists to concentrate ownership in ever fewer hands, a tendency that affects every profit-making enterprise. However, the effects of this merger will further undermine, along with the termination of internet neutrality, any efforts by independent journalists to bring accurate information to ordinary people. Instead, the merger will result in more propaganda that justifies ruling class policies that create precarity among ordinary people at home and never-ending wars abroad. 

Coming just one day after the termination of net neutrality, the legal requirement that Internet service providers treat all communications as equal and not discriminate against websites, the federal court ruling sets the stage for the further consolidation of monopoly control over the Internet, social media, television, films and news outlets, and the suppression of oppositional points of view.

Recommended articles for Tuesday, June 12, 2018

• As Net Neutrality Officially Ends, Internet Defenders Gear up for a Fight by Jessica Corbett from Mint Press News. 

Now that the repeal is in effect, ISPs “have the green light to begin degrading our access to the internet,” said former FCC commissioner and Common Cause special adviser Michael Copps. “Monopoly phone and cable companies will undoubtedly seek to maximize profits by favoring their own content over their competitors and creating fast lanes and slow lanes ultimately at the expense of consumers.”

And later in the article:

... it has sparked an unprecedented backlash from across the political spectrum, and internet users are coming out of the woodwork to fight tooth and nail in Congress, in the courts, and at the local and state level,” she continued. “This summer we’ll channel our anger productively and harness the power of the internet to mount an unprecedented district-by-district campaign to get Congress to do their job.”

• The end of net neutrality: The US ruling elite escalates campaign of internet censorship by Andre Damon from World Socialist Web Site.

The control over the internet by a handful of social media monopolies and internet service providers, which conspire against the democratic rights of the population, makes clear that the defense of democratic rights is inseparable from the ending of private ownership of the internet infrastructure. Internet access is a basic social right, which must be freely available to all without the interference of corporations or the state.

I'm sure the author would agree that private ownership over any significant segment of our capitalist economy results in private interests taking both wealth and power away from the people. 

• Twelve Tips For Making Sense Of The World by Caitlin Johnstone from her blog.

• There Are No War Heroes. There Are Only War Victims by Caitlin Johnstone from her blog. I especially liked the title. She attacked another lie that our official leaders always say at gatherings related to veterans: our hero-soldiers died serving their country, the USA. 

• What Sy Hersh Knows by Christian Lorentzen from Vulture (a website produced by the New York Magazine). Lorentzen interviews one of America's top independent journalists, Seymour Hersh, about his latest book entitled Reporter: A Memoir.

Churchill and WW Two: The Man and the Myth

Click here to access article by British historian Mike Faulkner posted on The Greanville Post. (Some editing was done as late as 6/14/2018 to strengthen my views.)

Faulkner knows history very well, but it is sad that his writings will be read by a small fraction of the people in the West. They will get their understanding of history from movies like this current one, Darkest Hour, and all the other "historical" films that capitalist movie studios produce.

Some topics that Faulkner didn't emphasize enough was the split in the ruling classes of the Western capitalist nations between support or opposition to the fascists. Mostly these ruling classes supported the fascists. This was only a little more than a decade after Russian revolutionaries established the Soviet Union. When fascist powers reared their ugly head in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, the other capitalist (pre-fascist) nations stayed "neutral" in contrast to the fascist nations of Germany and Italy which provided massive military support for the reactionary Spanish conservatives against the elected government of Spain.

I have read widely sources that described what went on in the 1930s and I am convinced (see this and this) that there was a conspiracy by capitalist ruling class to promote and prepare Hitler and the Nazis to move to the east to attack and destroy their arch nemesis, the Soviet Union. This was during a time when Western capitalist nations were plagued by an economic collapse and when Western workers increasingly were aware that there was full employment in the Soviet Union which was industrializing at a rapid pace.

My doubts about the standard history I received in US schools occurred when I learned that suddenly in 1929 Hitler turned against his Brown Shirts (SA) and supported the SS who wore black uniforms. I couldn't understand why he would turn against his own supporters. But I now think that ruling capitalist classes of the other countries began to see that the Nazis could be used to attack and destroy the Soviet Union. The SA consisted largely of working class people; so the capitalist agents bargained with Hitler, promised abundant financial backing by major industrialists like Fritz Thyssen, and created the SS which consisted of more upper class Nazis.  

(Incidentally, I think the Nazi's and others hatred for Jews stemmed from the fact that the leaders of Bolshevik revolution in Russia were mostly Jewish.)

Hitler's megalomania can be explained by the fact that he was conscious of his powerful backing, and only became a threat to the Western capitalist countries when he attacked Britain. Britain and the other capitalist allies were forced into collaboration with their arch enemy, the Soviet Union, to prevent Nazi Germany and the Axis Powers from taking over the domination of the world from the British Empire and its capitalist allies. That is when arch-imperialist, racist Churchill re-entered the stage of history and became the hero of capitalist history. (Earlier he backed aggressively the efforts of the British to crush the Soviets immediately after their revolution, but failed because Britain's armed forces were too exhausted to do so.) True to his obsessive anti-Soviet views, he always sought to delay FDR's efforts to launch a second front in continental Europe to take the pressure off the Russians (read Roosevelt and Hopkins by Robert E. Sherwood).

I recently read a book by Terry Parssinen entitled The Oster Conspiracy of 1938. Although he takes the same standard view that the Nazis were totally home grown, he was curious enough to uncover the much neglected, and in my opinion deliberately neglected, history of this first revolt against Hitler and the Nazis. The standard view holds that it was all the fault of Neville Chamberlain and his "appeasement" policies.  But what he uncovers could also support the argument that the Western capitalist ruling classes refused for political reasons to support a vigorous anti-Nazi movement which consisted mostly of German generals and some diplomats in Germany. I see this as further evidence that the British capitalist ruling class and others saw the German fascists as useful for their plans to destroy the Soviet Union. I think the facts that he uncovers furnish more support for this alternative explanation than the conventional version of these historical events.

American Pravda: Breaching the Media Barrier [updated]

Click here to access article by Ron Unz from his website The Unz Review. (Thanks go to an activist who alerted me to this article.) I added a link to Phil Butler's article on 6/13/2018.

Taking Unz's argument at face value, I think the article serves more to illustrate that members especially of the upper-middle class are disturbed by the gross lies that corporate media are spreading than it serves to argue for an effective strategy to counter their lies. 

The capitalist system is based on private ownership of any productive enterprises in societies. Thus the owners inevitably evolve into a class with considerable power over the rest of society and over time, because of the dynamics of capitalism, ownership becomes concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. The security of the vast majority of people are faced with increasing wars and precarity, and they naturally engage in all sorts of resistance. To counter such resistance, the owner class must counter this resistance by using their media to spread ever greater deceptions about what they are doing in the world. This is precisely what is happening today.

The class that has contributed heavily to this end-development of capitalism is the well-rewarded upper-middle class of technologists, scientists, and highly educated trained and indoctrinated professionals in every field of endeavor. (Phil Butler is an excellent example of this phenomenon.) Currently even they, in spite of receiving many rewards and perks, are having a difficult time believing the lies that are constantly spewed by their counterparts in corporate media. As a consequence many, such as Ron Unz, Patrick Buchanan, Paul Craig Roberts, Ron Paul, Andrei Raevsky (The Saker), Bernhard (blogger for Moon of Alabama) are now defecting--some such as Chris Hedges more than others. As a consequence Unz has not posted any of Hedges' writings on his website since 2016, and he was published frequently on his website previously. 

I noticed on the right side of this posting that he posted an interview with David Harvey, a noted American Marxist, conducted by Chris Hedges. Because David Harvey has not appeared on this website before, it seems to me that Harvey's post was juxtaposed with this article in order to establish his neutrality and credibility regarding capitalism. Considering the evidence of his postings as a whole, I think Unz, as a member of the upper-middle class and a conservative, is worried about the fascist direction that his masters in capitalist ruling class are going. Thus, he and his fellow-rebels are waking up and smelling the foul odors emanating from the increasing fascist actions taken by their masters in the capitalist class and they are defecting--but only so far. Not far enough to challenge the system from which they have benefited so much, but are only desperately striving to return to an earlier stage of capitalism like in the 20th century when they, as an upper-middle class, flourished. 

However, there is another argument that one could make--I won't because I prefer to believe that Unz is honest--that he and agents of the ruling class are cleverly trying to co-opt alternative media to tame it and capture its audience as much as possible so that the threats posed by this opposition media are diminished.