in the time remaining, to help us understand how the man-made system of capitalism will lead to the extinction of our human species, and so many others.
We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up
Saturday, July 6, 2019
A New Volkisch Mythos
This essay contains so many observations about today's fascism that I'm surprised I missed it in May when it was originally posted in CounterPunch. This upgraded fascism is reflected in many forms from the use of Greta Thunberg to the promotion of depopulation of Africa and other places that people of color live. Meanwhile, capitalists see in global warming as having exciting growth opportunities.
Yellow Vest Realities and Reactions [updated]
I was most interested in the observations and analysis of Rockhill about French intellectual's lack of support, and even criticism of, the Yellow Vest Movement. This suggests support for my observations that the rich capitalist ruling class in the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire has co-opted the highly trained and indoctrinated upper-middle class in their class warfare against other working classes. Unfortunately, he doesn't explain how this was done. But it seems obvious to me: material rewards and the threat of unemployment. Because of technological advancements and the awareness of intellectuals as "opinion leaders" who play a crucial role in capitalist society, the capitalist ruling class must support them in order for today's capitalism to sustain itself.
Friday, July 5, 2019
Yellow Vests protest for the 33rd straight week in Paris
You won't hear much, if any, about the ongoing Yellow Vests protest in the realities created by media corporations in the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire. But you will hear about the suspicious one-day protests in China, and elsewhere where the well paid agents of the Empire are functioning. And, you won't hear about the teachers striking all over North America for better wages and working conditions. They are not interested in those realities.
Thursday, July 4, 2019
‘The coup turned Honduras into hell’: Interview with President Manuel Zelaya on 10th anniversary of overthrow by US
Learn from a leader of Honduras who refused to be a puppet of the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire as he reports on what he learned about the Empire and capitalism:
MANUEL ZELAYA: That is how capitalism works. In the US, France, anywhere. Capitalism is based on just one principle: accumulation of wealth. That is how it functions here and in the rest of the world.
A small elite of transnational [corporations] associated with people in countries who clean up for them. They do business, and that business creates the need to set up security [power] for themselves.
No Longer Fiction: Orwell’s 1984 is the Reality of Our Times
Because Orwell, a British veteran of the Spanish Civil War, finally realized the reason why the "democratic" Western nations did not come to the aid of a democratically elected government in Spain while fascist nations were attacking it, and wrote about his awakening in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the warnings were tragically ignored. We are now living in the world he imagined in the late 1940s. Could it be that the ruling classes of Western "democratic" nations wanted their own empire? Could it be that WWII ended up as a kind of civil war between ruling capitalist classes of the fascist countries of the Axis and the Anglo-American wannabees?
Do you think that Bridge learned the lessons of this prescient book when he asks questions like these?
The book ends with the words, “He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.” Will we too declare, like Winston Smith, our love for ‘Big Brother’ above all else, or will we emerge victorious against the forces of a technological tyranny that appears to be just over the horizon? Or is Orwell’s 1984 just really good fiction and not the instruction manual for tyrants many have come to fear it is? [my emphasis]Yes, indeed, time is running out for all of us because most people, like Bridge, have consistently asked the wrong questions ever since Orwell wrote the book. What are the "forces of technology"? Technology are essentially sophisticated tools, whereas capitalism is a system that privileges owners of economies over the rest of us, and thus capitalist ruling classes have used technology to secure and protect their system of privileges and power.
The plot to keep Jeremy Corbyn out of power
Cook keeps mentioning a "system" that is fundamentally behind the plot to destroy Corbyn as a candidate for Prime Minister of Britain, but never identifies it. What system do you think he is referring to? And, why do you think he never identifies it?
For example, he writes in the final paragraph:
As long as we colluded in the manufactured consensus of western societies, the system operated without challenge or meaningful dissent. A deeply ideological system destroying the planet was treated as if it was natural, immutable, the summit of human progress, the end of history. Those times are over. Accidents like Corbyn will happen more frequently, as will extreme climate events and economic crises. The power structures in place to prevent such accidents will by necessity grow more ham-fisted, more belligerent, less concealed to get their way. And we might finally understand that a system designed to pacify us while a few grow rich at the expense of our children’s future and our own does not have to continue. That we can raise our voices and loudly say: “No!”
Wednesday, July 3, 2019
Posts recommended for Wednesday, July 3, 2019
- Countdown to “Full Spectrum Dominance” by T.J. Coles from CounterPunch.
- The Only Thing Worse Than The World Dying Would Be If It Died Unseen And Unappreciated by Caitlin Johnstone (Australian) from her weblog.
- Former British Parliamentarian George Galloway Speaks out on the Violent Criminalization of Julian Assange in an interview conducted by Dennis J. Bernstein and Randy Credico. This is a transcript of their broadcast from KPFA, a listener funded radio station in Berkeley, California via Covert Action Magazine. You can also listen to the interview directly from the station (nearly one hour).
- Corporations have 'hijacked justice' by Sam Cossar from Ecologist.
- The global war on refugees by Will Morrow from World Socialist Web Site.
- Sea Ice Nitty-Gritty, Profoundly Disturbing European Heatwaves from the weblog of Paul Beckwith, Climate Scientist. (four 15:00m videos with his introductions related to the subject.)
Mutu: rethinking our radical media
Although I am not an anarchist, who I think are too limited in their thinking, I am delighted by this post which reports on a rising network of grassroots independent media in France. The establishment of such networks is exactly what I think is vitally needed to counter the crushing oppression of ruling class corporate media. Media corporations serve only as propaganda and psychological warfare operations of the ruling capitalist class to create confusion and a false consciousness among ordinary people.
In May 2018, we attended a conference of the Mutu network in France, a network of local radical media websites which operate much like Indymedia did, but with a completely transparent editorial process.
We were blown away to discover how each of these sites, many we hadn’t even heard of, were acting as hubs for the various social movements taking place in cities and regions across France, focusing on local struggles and issues. With this focus, they became places where people went to find out about social conflicts when they broke out. But as we listened to descriptions of these sites connecting with groups of striking workers or occupying students, we also realised they function to draw together the various struggles within a given locality into a multi-faceted working-class movement.
Penguin, Rothschild and Zionist Pressure [updated]
This post is for those of you who have been targets of false accusations of being anti-Semitic, have been profoundly disturbed by the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire's use of Israel use as a "Beachhead in the Middle East" (Gowans), and equally disturbed by the equivalence of Jews with Zionists.
Penguin announced this week that in response to claims of ‘antisemitism’ it has stopped printing Col. Pedro Baños’ best selling book, “How They Rule the World.”And George Galloway, a British member of parliament, agrees:
The scandal erupted when it was revealed that passages in the original Spanish edition of the book related to the Rothschild dynasty were omitted from the Penguin Random House English translation. The meaning of this deletion is in itself devastating. It suggests that Penguin attempted to kosherize a book by editing and deleting sections so it would not offend Jewish sensitivities.
Sunday, June 30, 2019
The IMF and World Bank: Partners In Backwardness
In this interview Faulkner revisits Hudson's 1974 book Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire, and Hudson explains how the budding US Empire engineered at the close of WWII the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank to always favor the capitalist wealthy at the expense of working classes all over the world to enlist the support of the world's capitalists for the leadership of the US Empire. This was at a time when most of the world was in ruins, except for the USA, from WWII .
These institutions have shaped most of world as we know it today: a neoliberal economic order in the world which facilitated Empire corporations at the expense of Third World nations. Thus, agents of the Empire essentially bribed local elites, small cliques of capitalists, to support this arrangement.
Friday, June 28, 2019
Articles recommended for Friday, June 28, 2019
- ‘National security’ isn’t journalists’ job – Ben Swann, 6:54m video interview via YouTube from RT. Also, read this report entitled "NY Times admits it sends stories to US government for approval before publication" from The Grayzone by Ben Norton.
- Survey: Americans Have Remarkably Ignorant Attitude Toward Nukes And North Korea by Caitlin Johnstone (Australian) from her blog.
- Iran holds 'last chance' talks with EU to save nuclear deal from PressTV (Iran).
- Revolving Door: Conflicts, corruption in media, a 7:30m video featuring a report by Mechele Greenstein on "The News with Rick Sanchez" posted on RT via YouTube.
Wednesday, June 26, 2019
Are You Complicit? by The Anti-Social Socialist
This post reveals the naive political consciousness of many activists in today's USA. The post contains two major errors: 1) it puts the burden on individuals to not comply and cooperate with the capitalist system and their fake rulers; and 2) it ignores how the American version of fascism is highly deceptive and manipulative.
The ruling class controls nearly all our "realities" using very sophisticated techniques that were first developed by the Creel Commission in WWI as psychological warfare to stunning success. Yes, our masters in the capitalist ruling class used not only psychological warfare techniques on their enemies of that time, but worst of all, on ordinary people in the USA not only to get them to interrupt their lives and go across the ocean to kill other ordinary people who had been similarly brainwashed, but to get ordinary Americans to support the war effort.
Capitalist ruling authorities since the 1930s realized the vast potential of this new discipline and went on to earnestly study and develop this technology to not only sell products but to create "realities" about the political and economic world that has neutralized a working class consciousness. They have created a full-spectrum propaganda technology that serves the interests of profit and power of ruling capitalist classes in the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire.
In the 1930s, Walter Lippmann, building on his extensive work in psychological warfare in WWI, and Harold Lasswell, a political scientist, led the efforts to develop techniques of "persuasion". Christopher Simpson in his excellent book Science of Coercion described their perspectives this way:
Persuasive communication aimed at largely disenfranchised masses [meaning that they have no political party serving their interests] became central to Lippmann's strategy for domestic government and international relations. He saw mass communication as a major source of the modern crisis and as a necessary instrument for any managing elite. The social sciences offered tools that could make administration of what would otherwise be highly unstable social structure relatively rational and effective, he contented. In an era when methods of social supervision in industrial societies still mainly consisted of guns and policemen's clubs, many academics and intellectuals hailed Lippmann's insights as enlightened and humane. [my insertion]
Lasswell extended the idea, giving it a Machiavellian twist. He emphasized employing persuasive media and selectively using assassinations, violence, and other coercion as means of " communicating" with and managing disenfranchised people. He advocated what he regarded as "scientific" application of persuasion and precise violence, in contrast to bludgeon tactics.The Reich Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945 was also fascinated by how people could be manipulated to commit acts which they would otherwise not do through the use of propaganda that served the interests of the German ruling capitalist class in Germany. Remember this famous quote of his?
If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.After WWII, Simpson wrote (with extensive supporting documentation) that US networks fostered by lucrative government contracts arose among propaganda warfare veterans, and soon they were put to work perfecting their techniques through a series of legislation that produced the CIA (and other secret services) and signed off by the naive President Harry Truman. Truman in his earlier political career was carefully groomed for a political offices and influenced by the Pendergast mob of Kansas City, Missouri. He was the "lipstick on the pig" of nefarious influences which proved useful for fascists to use him to pursue their post-war anti-Soviet agendas and grow their Empire.
The CIA has continued to infiltrate all corporate media and Hollywood to insure that they all tell the same lies (see this). Not only in the USA, but in major media corporations in the Empire (see this--it should be noted that Ulfkotte "conveniently" died of a "heart attack" in 2017.). Now media corporations can broadcast their "realities" everywhere at the same time, and Hollywood can repeat these lies in their films. The Deep State through its secretive spy agencies have in realty accomplished what Goebbels said what was needed. This might be referred to as "full-spectrum psychological warfare dominance" over the working classes.
Thus, today Americans believe all kinds of nonsense about their society and those abroad. Americans can only oppose this powerful class of capitalists by collectively organizing against them, but that takes a collective, dramatic rise of consciousness about the reality of class rule. This consciousness has been substantially erased by the intentional corruption of media and all ideological institutions.
Tuesday, June 25, 2019
Articles recommended for Tuesday, June 25, 2019
- Briefing: The Effects of the Economic Blockade of Venezuela by Venezuela Solidarity Campaign (British) from Venezuelanalysis.
- The Ongoing Restructuring of the Greater Middle East by master satirist C. J. Hopkins from his weblog Consent Factory, Inc.
- Trump Finally Confirms: John Bolton is a Menace from 21st Century Wire.
Monday, June 24, 2019
Articles recommended for Monday, June 24, 2019
- Accelerating Imperial Decline by Patrick Lawrence from Consortium News.
- How Iran decided to down a US drone and narrowly averted War by sparing another US plane by Elijah J Magnier from his weblog.
- The US got Itself Caught in the Gulf by Salman Rafi Sheikh from New Eastern Outlook.
- Europe lacks sovereignty even inside its borders: Iran from PressTV (Iran).
- Minutes to disaster: Lessons to be learned from the confrontation with Iran by Andre Damon from World Socialist Web Site.
- A Film about GMOs and the Corruption of the Food Supply for Profit by Colin Todhunter (Brit) posted on Dissident Voice.
- Trump Threatening the World’s Most Eco-Sensitive Habitats by Wayne Madsen from Strategic Culture Foundation.
Sunday, June 23, 2019
Articles recommended for Sunday, June 23, 2019 -- updated at 4:50 PM CT
- As We Face Armageddon the Western World Is Leaderless by Paul Craig Roberts posted on The Unz Review.
- Iran and Trump on the edge of the abyss by Elijah J Magnier from his blog.
- Training in the Tactical Method of Revolutionary Resistance by Esther Yáñez Illescas from Internationalist 360°.
- Malaysian PM Mahathir says Russia being made a scapegoat for downing of flight MH17 from CNA (based in Singapore).
- The Exceptionally American Historical Amnesia Behind Pompeo’s Claim of ’40 Years of Unprovoked Iranian Aggression’ by Brett Wilkins from AntiWar.
- The West’s Losing Battle for Hong Kong by Joseph Thomas from New Eastern Outlook.
- Brazilgate is Turning into Russiagate 2.0 by Pepe Escobar from Consortium News.
- The Balkans and Their Consequences by Aleksandar Pavic from Strategic Culture Foundation.
- Bolton Is In Israel Conferring With Netanyahu How To Provoke US Attack On Iran by Paul Craig Roberts from his blog.
Germany vs. Iran – Has Germany Sold Out to the Devil?
I'm wondering if Koenig and others are right about the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire being in retreat.
Instead of jumping off the sinking ship of Washington and its faithful entourage of the willing, as rats would do, and as the vast majority of the German people would prefer, let alone German and European business, Madame Merkel and apparently all her circles, including Berlin’s Parliament, follow the US flagrant lie propaganda. Why? – Well, this is the deal: There are many ways to “buy” top politicians, with threats or with money or by outright inflicting fear through ‘proxy-assassinations’.They, in spite of their belligerent foreign policies, seem to be losing everywhere. Just when the Empire declared victory over the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, and they subsequently went on a rampage of "color revolutions" and invasions. They seemed to rule supreme. But now their actions have the appearance of a desperate attempt to maintain dominance over the world. One thing appears more certain: Iran, Venezuela, Russia, China, Iran, Syria and their allies now appear determined to push back against this domination. And Europeans and Turkey seem on the edge of defecting from the Empire and its army NATO. If the latter happens, the old cold warriors in the Deep State will have to decide to risk everything with a nuclear war or abandon their dreams of a New World Order.
Once Germany is on board – the rest of Europe will follow suit.
It's not just a "conspiracy theory" to these people in the Empire's Deep State. For this dream they have the USA and a number of other countries mired in debts in the hope that one day they, like all imperialist-fascists, could rule supreme and make the rest of the world pay for these debts. Up to now, under the alliance with Saudi Arabia, Empire has simply printed dollars and used Petrodollars to force other countries to pay for their oil and gas in order to prop up the US dollar.
Friday, June 21, 2019
Articles recommended for Friday, June 21, 2019
- The 5G Dragnet by James Corbett of The Corbett Report.
- The Ruling Class Will Not Tolerate the Sanders-Led Assault on Austerity by Glenn Ford from the Black Agenda Report.
- Iran goes for “maximum counter-pressure” by Pepe Escobar from Strategic Culture Foundation.
- Do Drones Dream Of Electric War Crimes? by Caitlin Johnstone from her blog.
Thursday, June 20, 2019
Articles recommended for Thursday, June 20, 2019
- Himalayan melt rate doubles in 40 years by Alex Kirby from Climate News Network.
- New Thai Government and America’s Asia “Pivot” by Joseph Thomas from New Eastern Outlook.
- UN Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer Becomes One of Assange’s Most Vocal Advocates by "jimmysllama" from MintPress News.
Israel’s Secretive Nuclear Facility Leaking as Watchdog Finds Israel Has Nearly 100 Nukes
As Stephen Gowans in his new book Israel: A Beachhead in the Middle East explains that the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire needs Israel, a largely European settler colony, to police the interests of capitalists to control the rich energy resources in this vital region. Thus, the directors of this Empire permitted them to acquire nuclear weapons as well as showering them with abundant conventional weapons in order to insure their control over the region. Notice the striking difference of attitudes expressed by these imperialists between Israel and Iran acquiring nuclear weapons.
In addition, the Israelis have also expressed the same racist attitudes that are similar to their US and Anglo capitalist partners-in-crime. Gowans writes:
Abroad, Israel's support for colonial movements has been second to none. The Jewish colonial settler state was an energetic supporter of white supremacist Rhodesia, as well as apartheid South Africa, a state also founded by a self-designated 'chosen people' of European origin, the Afrikaners, similarly imbued with a vision based in religious mythology of a divine right to occupy the land of a 'lesser people'.He goes on to provide documented details of this support.
Wednesday, June 19, 2019
Articles recommended for Wednesday, June 19, 2019
- Arctic Permafrost Melting 70 Years Sooner Than Expected, Study Finds by Jan Wesner Childs from The Weather Channel.
- Greenland Was 40 Degrees Hotter Than Normal This Week, And Things Are Getting Intense from the Washington Post via Science Alert.
- Very heavy rain bouts are on the way by Tim Radford from Climate News Network.
- Corporate News Pushes Iran War For Trump from The Jimmy Dore Show via YouTube.
- Teachers’ Strikes: A New Class Politics Emerging by Eric Blanc from The Bullet (Canada).
- Report: US Planning “Massive” Airstrike On An Iranian Facility by Caitlin Johnstone from her weblog.