Israel is an Apartheid State

Click here to access article by Siham Nuseibeh from Muftah.

Kerry was wrong to say that Israel would become an Apartheid State if a two-state solution was not implemented. He was wrong to say this because Israel is an Apartheid State as it stands today. Here is a small excerpt from a factsheet by the Institute for Middle East Understanding about how Israel does in fact classify as an Apartheid state…

Why is Putin in Washington’s Crosshairs?

Click here to access article by Mike Whitney from CounterPunch.

US provocations in Ukraine cannot be understood apart from Washington’s “Pivot to Asia”, which is the broader strategic plan to shift attention from the Middle East to Asia. ....

So what does controlling China have to do with the dust up in Ukraine?

Obama's 'strategy' against 'pariah' Russia

Click here to access article by Pepe Escobar from Asia Times Online.

Many geopolitical analysts are joining in the discussion of what's up with the Empire's aggressive actions. Escobar gives us his perspective in the amusing metaphor laden piece. 

For all of US Think Tankland talking and theorizing, breathlessly, about "containment" of a "rogue state" - which in itself is laughable, as if Russia was Somalia - the Obama administration's overarching "strategy" is really in a class by itself. This masterpiece of juvenile delinquent diplomacy boils down to "ignore Putin".

Also, William Engdahl in his article "Obama: World’s loneliest leader" offers his assessment in which I think he attributes far too much agency to Obama. Otherwise, I have great respect for his views which in this article look quite alarming. For example, this statement: "A US State Department reliant on an uncontrolled group of psychopaths is hardly reassuring for world peace."

Syrian rebels who received first U.S. missiles of war see shipment as ‘an important first step’

Click here to access article by Liz Sly from The Washington Post.

Several items in today's news have me wondering if our masters have lost their grip on reality. Hopefully today's news is some kind of aberration; but if it isn't, then we will soon be wading in deep doo-doo.

I started my day by reading this disturbing article. It looks like our masters intend to keep stirring the cauldron of terrorism, death, and destruction in Syria. Then I read about more arm sales to the Philippines. Well, that means jobs for Americans, doesn't it? (sarcasm)

Then in Al-Monitor I read...

US Secretary of State John Kerry told Fahmy prior to his visit to Washington that he is "certifying to Congress that Egypt is sustaining the strategic relationship with the United States," although Kerry is "not yet able to certify that Egypt is taking steps to support a democratic transition."

The first part of his justification is certainly true, but the last part is the understatement of the year (see this). Ruling class media is justifying it as competition with Russian suppliers.

Finally, I read a piece entitled "War: What Is It Good For?", published in the Post and several other prominent Empire media outlets such as the Chicago Tribune and the The Telegraph, which essentially argues that war is good for us!  

Then, of course, there is all the war-mongering associated with the Ukrainian coup that was financed by Empire operatives (listen especially at 7:26m).

Yes, indeed, I think that the stench of doo-doo coming from the offices of the Empire is overwhelming, and I worry that we will all soon be wading in it.

Captured Soldiers Not OSCE Observers as Claimed: Germany and Russia Held Talks

Click here to access article by Christof Lehmann from nsnbc international.

This reports on another lie put out by Empire propagandists. 

The Ukraine crisis and the political lies of the media

Click here to access article by Alex Lantier from World Socialist Web Site.

What I really connected with in this piece by Lantier is his argument about the degeneration of US media into a monolithic Orwellian loudspeaker for the ruling class. I have expressed this feeling several times in my articles. I cannot recall in my lifetime that mainstream media was so full of disinformation, and so pervasive. I'm absolutely amazed at this development, and wondering what it might portend.

If the emphasis is put on "warmongers", then I agree with Lantier's statement that "A vast gulf separates the working class from the warmongers in the American ruling class and their lackeys in the media."  I think there is a gulf to the extent that ordinary Americans are not on board with any more aggressive actions over Ukraine; and, I think that Empire directors are aware of this and only going so far as to punish Putin and his friends with economic measures. 

Still, these directors and their European counterparts are playing a dangerous geopolitical game as argued by Paul Craig Roberts in his article "The World Moving Closer to War". The fact that they are willing to play such a game is very worrying. Do they really think they can intimidate Russia and their ruling class? Or is the strident rhetoric necessary to pacify the right-wing in the US? 

Democratic Elections in Syria

Click here to access article by Thierry Meyssan from VoltaireNet.

When is an election a legitimate exercise in something like "democracy"? Well, opinions vary widely depending on the viewers' interests, and the viewers usually have some kind of big stake in the outcomes of elections. The universal cry of humanity for social justice has produced this process of elections to select and legitimize leaders, but it is a thoroughly corrupted system used by ruling classes to fool their subjects. You simply cannot have ruling classes and fair elections--this is, or should be, a self-evident contradiction. One might argue, as Meyssan does with the planned Syria election, that some elections are more legitimate than others. (See also Viktor Titov's views on the Syrian elections.)

For me, the best part of this article are the observations Meyssan makes about the gross hypocrisy which the planned Syrian elections are viewed by Empire directors and their associates.

War, Economic Catastrophe and Environmental Degradation. Under the Guise of Progress and Development

Click here to access article by Colin Todhunter from his website East by Northwest.

Todhunter, a British born writer, has lived in India for a number of years. In this fine article we learn how neoliberalism is destroying that society, and native neoliberal collaborators are making more plans to continue the destruction on behalf of the world's ruling capitalists. This is a global story because it is happening all over the world (the US included) to a greater or lessor extent.

The Earth is 4.6 billion years old and if you scale this to 46 years then humans have been here for just four hours. The Industrial Revolution began just one minute ago, and in that time, 50% of the Earth’s forests have been destroyed. Forests are just part of the problem. We are using up oil, water and other resources much faster than they can ever be regenerated. We have also poisoned the rivers, destroyed natural habitats, driven some wildlife species to extinction and altered the chemical composition of the atmosphere – among many other things.

Levels of consumption were unsustainable, long before India and other countries began striving to emulate Western levels and high energy use. The current model of development is based on a totally misguided dream; or, to put it another way, a deceitful ideology that attempts to justify and sell a system that is designed to fail the majority of the global population and benefit the relative few.

Capitalism has for a long time succeeded in making most people blind to the chains that bind and which make them immune to the falsehoods that underpin the system. This wasteful, high-energy system is tied to what ultimately constitutes the plundering of peoples and the planet by powerful transnational corporations. And, as we see all around us, the outcome is endless conflicts over fewer and fewer resources.

The Dull Static

Click here to access article by td0s from his/her blog Pray for Calamity. (Thanks to the blogger at Collapse of Industrial Civilization for posting this and thereby alerting me to this article.)

The writer beautifully expresses the many dilemmas facing humanity today. The only problem I have with the views expressed here is that he/she too often seems to reference "civilization" when I think he/she should be specifying capitalism (especially later in the essay). They are not equivalent. However, capitalism isn't the only ideology that has had deleterious effects for humans. The problem has been class rule, that is, the rule by a few over the vast majority of people. The fact that this began with the beginning of civilization must not lead us to throw out the baby of civilization with the bathwater of human creativity just because it also has the parasite of class rule in it.

But lay this rather minor criticism aside, and enjoy the many great insights that he/she expresses so well.

I named this blog, “Pray for Calamity,” because there are several major crises converging which threaten human civilization, and there are no existing structures capable of mitigating them. Democracy, capitalism, neo-liberal globalization; they are all incapable of undertaking the work necessary to avert cataclysm. The paradigms of thought and approach which are almost hardwired into the modern mind at this point, need to be scrubbed. Of the remaining, solvable ecological crises, which may not include climate change, there is no tool available to attend to them that comes from the conventional tool box of legal, lawful pursuit.

Eight Energy Myths Explained

Click here to access article by Gail Tverberg from her blog Our Finite World.

I have followed Tverberg's articles for a number of years. She has demonstrated to me and many others that she knows of what she writes. She is widely respected for her research and knowledge about energy by her peers in the energy field. (Take a look at the quality and quantity of the responses she got from this article.) However, she has one serious limitation. She has been so well indoctrinated in the TINA view ("there is no alternative") that she cannot even consider any alternative to capitalism. To her it is an absolute given, an unalterable reality. 

Nevertheless, I have found her insights about energy extremely useful in understanding the huge conflict that the system of capitalism has for our survival. Whereas other energy specialists writing for capitalist media often engage in fanciful ideas such as fusion energy to deal with the doomed future of capitalism on a finite planet, she looks clearly and steadily at the evidence and can only reach one conclusion--we are facing a herculean task, if not an insoluble, dilemma. In this article she demolishes many such myths by people who refuse to face reality.

Republicans, Democrats, and environmentalists all have favorite energy myths. Even Peak Oil believers have favorite energy myths. The following are a few common mis-beliefs,  coming from a variety of energy perspectives. I will start with a recent myth, and then discuss some longer-standing ones.

Why We Shouldn't Vote for Elizabeth Warren (or Bernie Sanders)

Click here to access article by John Spritzler from New Democracy World.

Spritzler explains how the plutocratic ruling class and their system of capitalism needs to have people like Elizabeth Warren to maintain their indoctrination about "democracy", especially the myth that elections equal democracy. This cradle to the grave indoctrination is having difficulty fending off the reality of today's world which is becoming ever more polarized between tiny islands of the rich and powerful among the oceans of the poor. Thus, our masters keep presenting us with liberals like Warren and Sanders who with their promises of crumbs from the plutocratic table desperately try to reinforce such rapidly diminishing myths.

...all the plutocracy needs to retain its power is to make sure that the principle of class inequality is not challenged by a large number of people. It matters not to the plutocracy that a politician defends the principle of class inequality while adopting vote-getting rhetoric about limiting various excesses of class inequality. The plutocracy couldn't care less, for example, that Warren talks about reducing the interest students pay on student loans or that she calls for more regulation of banks. These are crumbs compared to the fundamental injustice of our class society in which, to take just one example, people who work (or study in order to work later) are told they owe money to bankers who don't work. In fact, the plutocracy wants politicians like Warren to use such rhetoric if this is what it takes to persuade people to rely on voting instead of revolution.

Let's keep our eye on the prize--an egalitarian society with no class inequality.  

Poverty and war condemn capitalism

Click here to access article by Finian Cunningham from PressTV (Iran).

The article explains how the neoliberal stage of capitalism has worked its magic to enrich the global capitalist class at the expense of the wealth-creators, the workers.

Workers in Western countries are now paid so badly that businesses are reportedly finding it profitable to return from China - having relocated to Asia in the first place to exploit cheap labor there.

It is an astounding indictment of how capitalism has created a global race to the bottom of misery for workers - yet the Western corporate news media actively conceal this abomination.

This week a BBC business report sounded almost celebratory about the fact that Britain, the US and other Western countries were now said to be "cost competitive" with China and Brazil. 

NATO’s Incremental Absorption of Ukraine

Click here to access article by Rick Rozoff from VoltaireNet.

Rozoff provides an excellent history of NATO's strategy to absorb all the states adjacent to Russia to maintain the old Cold War as a neo-Cold War, and creating a "cordon sanitaire severing Russia from Europe". This history refutes the notion that the Empire is merely punishing Russia for their support of the Syrian government and their opposition to other Empire policies in the Middle East. This encroachment appears to be continuing the strategies of the Cold War when the latter was framed as a battle between social-economic systems. The Soviet Union collapsed, state industries were sold off for pennies on the dollar to a new capitalist class. But, as you can see, nothing really changed for our directors of the Empire. 

Therefore, Rozoff's history indicates that the history of the conflict-ridden 20th century is still continuing, and the prior contest had little to do with a conflict between social systems. It is a continuing conflict for world domination by capitalist gangs. The US imperial gang simply won't tolerate any interference in their plans for world domination, and Russia's historical independence requires that they must be contained and subdued. And, of course, China can look forward to the same treatment.

The great challenge facing all conscious activists is to throw off this monstrous system which is pillaging and ravaging country after country, destroying human habitat, destroying the biosphere, creating widespread poverty, and amassing fortunes and power for a tiny few. There IS no alternative worth considering. Humanity's very existence is now at stake.

Including the Young and the Rich

Click here to access article by Jamie Johnson from the NY Times.

For those of you who are not familiar with Jamie Johnson, he is a wealthy descendant of the Johnson & Johnson corporate entity founded by his ancestors. As such he should be considered as a part of the old wealth section of the ruling class. Such people often turn out to be considered as renegades by their contemporaries, and Jamie certainly fits that description. You see, he made two films that gave inside information on the rich: the film "Born Rich", a wonderful exposé, and followed it up with the sensational "The One Percent" which I think became the namesake of the target of the Occupy movement in 2011. (Coincidentally--or maybe not--he frequently wrote a column for Vanity Fair magazine, a magazine directed to the ruling rich; but ceased writing for them in the Fall of 2011.)

In this article we see the special access given to the rich by the official CEO of the government (in reality, he and most presidents serve as public relations officers for the ruling class) which, of course, the rich essentially own. According to Matthew Continetti of The Washington Free Beacon,

Here I learn that last month the White House held a secret meeting with “an elite group of 100 young philanthropists and heirs to billionaire family fortunes.” This “discreet, invitation-only summit” was intended, the author says, “to find common ground between the public sector and the so-called next generation philanthropists, many of whom stand to inherit billions in private wealth.” Media were not allowed, the author says in a parenthetical, but he was “invited to report on the conference as a member of the family that started the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical company.”  

What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream?

Click here to access article by Noam Chomsky from Z Magazine. 

Chomsky, as a kind of elder statesman of radical academic circles, writes about his favorite subject: the way our capitalist masters use their institutions to manage our minds (those of the "outsiders"). This is a well-developed technology which he has examined and written about extensively over many years. Now, more the ever before, it serves so effectively the narrowing ruling class of owners of our economy, and increasingly under neoliberalism, the world's economy. Those privileged technicians who practice this highly specialized technology, and their bosses, are restricted to a very few trusted people within the ruling capitalist class. By implication, they must be the "insiders". 

A few renegade intellectuals like Chomsky have long been aware of their game, and occasionally he likes to remind his fellow intellectuals of this by writing articles which tend to make vague references to things that only intellectuals have knowledge of. (For example, he makes reference to "what happened at San Jose Mercury News" to illustrate a point, which must be about their 1996 series of articles regarding government collusion in the illicit drug trade authored by Gary Webb.) 

I think Chomsky's own celebrity status as a left critic and his academic career also has meaning in relation to his favorite subject. It certainly raises the question of his role as a radical critic in a system which, as he has shown, is very well managed to exclude real criticism and inspection. From an examination of his career, I think he has had to make certain compromises with the "insiders" by carefully limiting his remarks to very select academic audiences and by not treading over any red lines of the ruling class. 

This article with its glib academic jargon and obscure references illustrates his first compromise. The second, which is much less known and acknowledged, is that he, like many others, refuses to cross the red lines of the ruling class. Here I am referring to his acquiescence to the official versions of the many assassinations such as John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, etc, and of the many suspicious "terrorist" events such as 9/11 and the Boston Bombing. By making these compromises with the agents of power, he has been allowed to continue with an academic career, be invited to many conferences, and write many articles such as this in obscure media outlets.

I certainly don't want anyone to interpret this commentary as a cynical criticism of Chomsky. He has contributed so much to the understanding of the function of mainstream media; and if he hadn't made such compromises, his insights would not be as well known and influential. We've all had to make compromises with power, some merely to survive, others in order to function in some kind of constructive fashion, and others who surrendered easily to the temptations of comfort and wealth. But, doesn't this offer us another reason to destroy capitalism and all such hierarchical, class structured systems so that we can freely associate with each other and contribute each of our talents toward building a healthy society that can coexist with nature?

Escobar on RT: US fears opposing views are gaining strength

RT in this 6:47m video interviews internationally renowned independent journalist about Sec. of State Kerry's attack on RT as a Russian "propaganda bullhorn". It seems that this US ruling class agent and others do not like the fact that they no longer are in possession of the only bullhorn. These alternative bullhorns are threatening the monopoly that the Empire's Ministry of Truth has enjoyed since WWII. We are already seeing attempts to censor them as we've seen with Iranian PressTV, limiting access in general to websites, and giving priority internet access to corporations.

The revolving door between Google and the Department of Defense

Click here to access article by Yasha Levine from PandoDaily.

Levine provides examples of several people who have gone through this revolving door to reveal a pattern that is working to integrate corporate information technologies with the needs of the ruling class's surveillance agencies located in NSA and CIA. Corresponding with these activities, the author sees a tendency for many such people to become identified and integrated with powerful figures in the ruling class.

Weslander Quaid told Entrepreneur Mag that a big part of her job at Google entails meeting with intelligence agency directors to discuss technology they want and/or need. She also spends quite a bit of time teaching rank-and-file Google employees on how to hard-sell government clients. “I act as a bridge between the two cultures.”

...Google has aggressively intensified its campaign to carve out a bigger slice of the lucrative military-intelligence contracting market. It’s been targeting big federal agencies, and pushing its intel technology onto local and state government structures as well.

Goodbye, Net Neutrality; Hello, Net Discrimination

Click here to access article by Tim Wu from The New Yorker.

Referring to a promise that Obama made in 2007 about internet neutrality, Wu writes:

If reports in the Wall Street Journal are correct, Obama’s chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Thomas Wheeler, has proposed a new rule that is an explicit and blatant violation of this promise. In fact, it permits and encourages exactly what Obama warned against: broadband carriers acting as gatekeepers and charging Web sites a payola payment to reach customers through a “fast lane.”

The Politics of Pachamama

Click here to access article by Benjamin Dangl from CounterPunch.

Pachamama, which is translated into English as "Mother Earth", is rooted in Inca religious beliefs as a goddess of fertility. Dangl reviews this affirmation of nature which has informed the rhetoric of many new Latin American governments to find that the concept has not been reflected much in their policies. 

I spoke with CONAMAQ indigenous leader Mama Nilda Rojas of her view of the Mining Law. “The Morales government has told us that it ‘will govern by listening to the bases, and that the laws will come from the bottom-up.’” But this is not what happened with the Mining Law, Rojas said, which was created without sufficient input from representatives of communities impacted the most by mining. “This is a law which criminalizes the right to protest. With this law we won’t be able to build road blockades, we won’t be able to march [against mining operations],” she explained. “We’re well aware that it was the same Evo Morales who would participate in marches and road blockades [years ago]. And so how is it that he is taking away this right to protest?” 

“This government has given a false discourse on an international level, defending Pachamama, defending Mother Earth,” Rojas explained, while the reality in Bolivia is quite a different story. 

Meanwhile, outside of Latin America, governments, activists, and social movements are looking to places like Bolivia and Ecuador as examples for overcoming capitalism and tackling climate change.

This is not really news, but his information gives us much food for thought as to why this scenario is happening in so many places. Is it simply a matter of these leaders becoming co-opted by the old ruling classes? 

My immediate answer is that what Dangle describes is happening in Latin America is inevitable as long as the world is menaced by ruling classes armed with superior military and other technologies that can easily overwhelm lessor developed countries. To survive, the latter must rapidly develop their own countries in order to acquire what is needed to fend off their foreign acquisitive enemies. 

Still, I'm not satisfied with this. Hopefully, you and others can supply better answers.

De-escalation in Ukraine as seen by Joe Biden

Click here to access article by Nikolaï Bobkin from Strategic Culture Foundation.

Administration officials and spokespeople like Biden continue talking peace while fomenting more conflict in Ukraine and against Russia. It appears to me that the American audience is only hearing what they say, but due to corporate media coverage have very little idea of what Empire agents are actually doing in Ukraine. 

At the very least, I think that the ultimate events in the Empire's project for Ukraine are risking a dangerous confrontation with Russia, but at the very least will provide a turning point which will result in the Empire's loss of power in the world. The latter may be desirable; but given the fact that there are power-addicted figures in their directorate, this trend could also ratchet up more very destructive wars. 

Meanwhile, back at the American ranch, very few people seem to be paying attention.

Does Washington want war with Russia?

Click here to access article by Bill Van Auken from World Socialist Web Site.

Presumably, those in the White House and the Pentagon believe that such a conflict would stop short of a nuclear war, but who knows?

The threat of a US war on Russia is also apparent in the flood of war propaganda being unleashed upon the public. Vladimir Putin is being subjected to the same kind of demonization previously reserved for Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, while the State Department and its faithful scribes at the New York Times serve up “photographic evidence” of Russian troops in Ukraine that has all the authenticity of similar “proofs” of Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction.”

What underlies the US war drive?

Van Auken then attempts to provide some answers.

Many others are speculating on the super-aggressive actions which are accompanied by the most outrageous hypocritical propaganda supported by altered photos much as we saw in the run-up to the Iraq War. For example, the anonymous blogger "The Saker" compares the lies of Empire agents to those of the nomenclatura of the late Soviet Union which led to the downfall of that regime; and he predicts the same will happen to the US Empire.

Confronting Injustice: A must-read book for today’s activists

Click here to access a review of the book Confronting Injustice: Social Activism in the Age of Individualism by Umair Muhammad posted on Climate and Capitalism.

...it’s a true delight to receive a book written by an activist for activists, a practical contribution to building real struggles for a better world. Confronting Injustice is a powerful call for collective action against the social causes of poverty and climate change. It’s a compact and well-written book that deserves to be widely read.

Here is one excerpt from the book:

“There can be no such thing as a democratic, socially just, and environmentally sustainable capitalism. … it unavoidably produces a world full of injustice and inequality in order to secure a global division of labour suitable to profit-making; and it unavoidably produces the kind of ecological destruction which makes its own longevity, and that of human civilization, impossible.”

So long, net neutrality? FCC to propose new pay-for-preferential treatment rules

Click here to access article by Grant Gross from PC World.

Some digital rights groups called the pay-for-priority proposal, reported earlier in a Wall Street Journal article, the death of net neutrality at the FCC.

Trade legerdemain on both sides of the Atlantic

Click here to access article by Pete Dolack from his blog Systemic Disorder.

I had to run to the dictionary to find out what "legerdemain" means and found that the term is very apt for this article. 

Dolack reports on the various tricks now being deployed to pass major neoliberal trade deals through Congress and the European Union, deals which are being negotiated in secret by ruling class officials and their counterparts in corporations. Of course, I am referring to the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. (Actually, the word "partnership" in these two agreements is also appropriate because they really represent an attempt to further the partnership between capitalist-owned multi-national corporations and capitalist-ruled governments.)

Kiev regime orders crackdown as US steps up threats against Moscow

Click here to access article by Bill Van Auken from World Socialist Web Site.

Van Auken reports on the latest moves by the Empire's coup-installed regime in Ukraine to continue pursuing their aggressive designs despite any agreements.

...the Ukrainian regime’s foreign minister joined his counterparts from the US, Russia and the European Union in drafting an agreement in Geneva to halt all violence and de-escalate tensions by disarming illegal groups, ending occupations of public buildings and spaces, freeing political prisoners and initiating a dialogue between the regions.

Shortly afterwards, the regime in Kiev added that it was observing an “Easter truce.” It was during this supposed truce that a column of four cars carrying Right Sector gunmen attacked a roadblock on the outskirts of Slovyansk on Easter Sunday, killing three local men.

Then Alex Lantier from the same website reports on the discovery of deliberate photo tricks used by the NY Times to promote the Empire's project in Ukraine. 

Dollar dying; multi-polar world in offing

Click here to access article by William Engdahl from PressTV (Iran).

Engdahl is a brilliant geopolitical analyst, but fails to understand the nature of capitalism. He, like many other Empire critics, is placing his hopes on the rise of a multi-polar capitalist world. In this essay he examines what he regards as stupid strategies of Empire agents to preserve their dominant position in the world. 

Washington’s decision to go for the military coup in Ukraine...opened the door for a genuine multi-polar world where peaceful cooperation replaced military threats and sole Superpower domination.

I think his analysis is likely correct. But to see a multi-polar capitalist world as a desirable alternative is also stupid. The system of capitalism creates societies where social injustice is a natural consequence, and people who do well in it are logically sociopaths--people without any social justice scruples or who are reluctant to engage in wars to acquire wealth and power. We've had multi-polar capitalist worlds before now--in fact, the world has always been a multi-polar capitalist world from the advent of capitalism until the conclusion of WWII when the US led Empire has attained almost total dominance. So, was there peace before 1945?

Pieces of Madrid

Click here if you wish to access the original posting on Global Uprisings. 

The first half of the video portrays typical street battles by the people against the security forces of the ruling class. But what I think is a much more important part of the video starts at 9:00m. Although not as photogenic as the street battles, they show people engaged in self-organizing efforts to not only protect themselves and their communities, but to begin the critically important revolutionary task of constructing bottom-up infrastructures of a genuine democracy. They are busy constructing the foundation of a new society that serves the needs of everyone to replace the capitalist organization of society which delivers so much wealth and power to a few. The Spanish people are starting to realize that there is no alternative: they must construct a genuine democracy or our masters will continue to lead us down the road to a nightmarish fascism and the destruction of the biosphere for human habitation. 

This short documentary explores ongoing resistance and self-organization in the midst of the economic and social crisis in Madrid, Spain.

As social conditions continue to deteriorate across the country, people have been turning to the streets and to each other to find for solutions to the crisis. This film tells a story of the massive mobilization that saw millions of people converge on Madrid on March 22nd 2014, the story of the proliferation of social centers, community gardens, self-organized food banks, and the story of large-scale housing occupations by and for families that have been evicted. The film pieces together many of the creative ways that people have been coping with crisis and asks what the future may hold for Spain.

Filmed and edited in March/April 2014, it is part of the Global Uprisings documentary series.

‘Kiev desperately pushing for greater conflict with Russia’

Click here to access a 4:37m interview (with transcript) with German investigative journalist Manuel Ochsenreiter posted on RT.

Ochsenreiter argues that the right sector in Ukraine is trying desperately to bring on a wider war in Ukraine by violating any agreements reached by international parties. He poses the worrying argument that this is a deliberate ploy by Western agents so that they can have deniability for their aggressive agenda to bring all of Ukraine under NATO control. 

This argument is very bewildering to me because I do not see that the present US regime or their counterparts in Europe are prepared for the dangerous potential such actions have to bring about a wider war. To be sure there are right-wing elements in the the West who have a very arrogant attitude toward Russia and believe they can intimidate Russia, but there have been official statements coming from the Obama administration that suggest a desire to dissipate the crisis in Ukraine. So, what are the real policies informing US Empire actions? If the German journalist's argument is correct, then Western agents are playing a very dangerous game in Europe. He writes in reference to the new regime brought to power by the violent overthrow of the government: 

 It’s a failed state, so the government in Kiev is nothing else as satellite government. It’s a mix of oligarchs and organized crime, and of course terrorists – the Right Sector. We should see it as a terrorist organization, activists of the Right Sector fought in Chechen wars against Russia alongside Islamism terrorists. So we should see that Kiev doesn’t have a will as well as the power to crack down on those people [in Eastern Ukrainian], and that long since [for several] weeks other people telling [them] what to be done, what not, we have to see that American advisors already active there, that there are NATO advisors, we have to see this in a context that Poland is asking for 10,000 US troops on their soil. Something big is going on and the Right Sector’s aggression against the Eastern Ukrainian is just a little pretext of what we will maybe expect within the next weeks.

Taking On the Fashion Industry

Click here to access a book review of Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion by Tansy E. Hoskins posted on MRZine. 

The fashion industry's operations provide an excellent example of how capitalism works from one end, the exploitation of working people, to the other end of consumption driven by advertising, the engine of consumption. This book appears to provide an excellent exploration of this key industry of capitalism. 

The exploitation of consumers in New York or London is clearly less horrifying than the treatment of workers in Bangladesh, but it remains exploitation.  Frequently using and reinforcing racist and sexist stereotypes, fashion pressures working people here to consume, and to consume more than they can afford.  Women especially are subjected to "constant messages that [they] must diet, must get cosmetic surgery, buy clothes and feel bad about themselves," Hoskins writes.  And those of us who can resist the omnipresent pressure to buy are still compelled to "dress for success" if we hope to get and hold most types of job.  

Towards the End of U.S. Propaganda

Click here to access article by Thierry Meyssan from VoltaireNet.

Meyssan proposes a very interesting, hopeful argument that the world of ruling class propaganda has changed, and changed for the better. He reviews the early, successful history of war propaganda starting in 1915 when the British issued the infamous Bryce Report on German war crimes to enlist their population in a war against Germany, and continues with such efforts during WWII. He argues that the present proliferation of alternative sources of information has radially changed things. I think he is referring to the internet and the access it gives to people all over the world, to TV media networks like RT, and such journalists as Pepe Escobar, that are independent of Empire control and accessible in the US.

Barack Obama and Benjamin Rhodes , John Kerry and Richard Stengel act only in the short term. Their propaganda convinces the masses for only a few weeks and then helps create revulsion when the people understand they are being manipulated. Unwittingly, they undermine the credibility of the state institutions of NATO who consciously relay them. They forget that the propaganda of the twentieth century could only succeed because the world was divided into blocks that did not communicate with one another, and this monolithic principle is incompatible with the new means of communication.

Ukraine: The Bloody Eastern Escalation

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

For the very latest news on the Empire's latest victim, follow this blog. 

This is very bad news. The OSCE had reported that Pravyi Sektor paramilitaries were moving to the eastern Donbass region. It looks like they have arrived.

It seems the U.S. neocons found out that they can not have the Ukraine and are responding like they always do. "Can't have it? Will destroy it!"

Film of the Week: Quants — The Alchemists of Wall Street

Click here to access 47:48m video posted by Don Quijones from Raging Bull-Shit (Spain).

With the banks ruling the world, and the machines as good as ruling the banks, just how close are we to another major financial crash?

In this brilliant VPRO documentary, some of the world’s leading “quants” — that is, people who specialize in the application of mathematical and statistical methods to financial and risk management problems – voice their fears about the financial industry’s almost complete dependence on mathematical models, many of them deeply flawed.

What I got from the film is that the new financial products that capitalists gamble with are based on assumptions about the future which have their roots in the most basic of all capitalist assumptions--economic growth. Capitalism requires growth to exist, hence people who work for capitalists such as mathematicians create models and mathematics with growth built into them. Inevitably these assumptions are wrong because reality based on people is constantly changing. Investments, or the bets, based on these assumptions are huge, the payoffs huge, but also the consequences for economic destruction are huge most of which are born by ordinary people. 

The bust part of these cycles are happening at an increasing rate. Capitalists, who incidentally are a ruling class, use their control of the state and central banks to provide stimulus in the form of low interest rates to create more money (debts to nations) and another cycle of big payoffs is created for them. (For an interesting commentary on the role of the Fed, read this piece by James Kunstler.)

I would also argue that because their assumptions, on which their logarithms are based, are motivated by the basic capitalist requirement of growth, they are disastrously wrong given the fact that growth can no longer be sustained given the finite limits of the planet. So, we must choose between two options: change the system or experience a nightmarish dystopia and probably extinction.

View the fascinating video and see what you think.

Seed Wars: Latin America Strikes Back Against Monsanto

Click here to access article by Don Quijones from Raging Bull-Shit.

The author reports on a global backlash against corporate owned, engineered seeds in the form of protests and political actions particularly in Latin America.

...despite its tireless lobbying efforts in Brussels, Monsanto and its main rivals continue to hit a brick wall of resistance in many of Europe’s biggest markets, including Germany and France. And now, with popular resistance on the rise in Latin America, the U.S. agribusiness giant faces the prospect, albeit slim, of losing its grip on one of its most important strategic markets.

A new wave of environmental protest rocks China

Click here to access article by James Smart from Reflections on a Revolution.

Ahkok Wong is an activist and school lecturer from down the road in Hong Kong, potentially enjoying his last two days of freedom.

“Environmental problems are one of the main outcomes of a one party-ruled, corrupted, non-humane government,” he starts. “The citizens started discovering what harm the PX [paraxylene]  plant can bring, so there are [a lot] of protests, and then the police arrest and kill protesters, forcing people to sign agreements that they support PX plants,” he continues. “They control the media and the internet so the news cannot get across the country.”

Protesters like Ahkok are sentenced by a judiciary with links to the government, which in turn has links to big business — for example, the Maoming PX joint venture between Sinopec and the state.

Climate Change Meets High Tech: An Eco-Future is Possible

Click here to access article by Robert Hunziker from The Greanville Post. 

This article assures us that it is okay to continue practicing our addiction to consuming all kinds of frivolous products. I'm referring to the drugs delivered by the global system of capitalism. Some people think that capitalism is a racket run by drug lords to supply us with all kinds of stuff to fill up our empty lives such as electronic gadgets, car-cars, the latest fashions, cosmetics to make us look younger, etc. That's nonsense! Forget about climate destabilization and environmental destruction. We humans can go on producing and consuming forever on our little planet. Yes, folks, the solution to all these crises is at hand! Fusion energy!

It seems that whenever we are sufficiently aroused out of our drug-induced slumber we become too concerned about some of the effects of our habit--such as, it will kill us--that our capitalist drug lords trot out their favorite fantasies such as climate engineering and carbon capture so that we keep practicing our habit of consuming frivolous stuff. When these fantasies don't work, they bring out their ultimate fantasy--excuse me, "fact"--this time from the United States Navy!

Looking ahead into the future, the Navy predicts seawater fuel will cost $3-6 per gallon, and it could be available on a commercial scale within 10 years.

Now, please excuse me, I must leave to go shopping for the very cool Nike Fingertrap Max sneakers.

Let them eat cake! IMF the equality champion?

Click here to access article from Bretton Woods Project.

Talk of inequality seems to be all the rage in Western media, and this has been spearheaded by such notable figures as Obama, and here in this article it is reported that no less than the IMF director Christine Lagarde has raised the issue. Being a rather cynical doubter of all things printed in mainstream media, I ask: are they serious?

I think the answer is partly "yes" and mostly "no". This article supports my opinion by revealing that IMF actions indicate that such concerns about inequality are for public relations purposes only. Let me explain.

In the past, like in the Great Depression of the 1930s, the ruling capitalist class was seriously concerned about the dramatic gaps between the rich and the poor. Also, there was a very militant labor movement that was concerned about social justice which was inspired by the mostly theoretical ideas coming from the Soviet Union and the actual fact that the workers of the latter country experienced no unemployment. I do not think that they have that concern today. 

In today's Western societies they have in place very effective means of controlling dissent: the concentration of media provides for control of information, highly advanced technology and police state methods to surveil potential revolutionaries, and militarized police forces. 

However, the ruling class also has a more serious concern about the phenomenon of a diminishing middle class. A happy middle class is a critical requirement to the stability of a capitalist ruling system simply because they actually run the system while capitalists, who reward them with the vaunted middle class lifestyles, skim off most of the benefits from a system that exploits both workers and the environment. Besides, it is widely recognized that revolutions in recent centuries have all been led by middle class people. 

While the second concern exists, I think that most of the publicized concern is rhetorical and informed by a desire to divert political opposition into paths which will require an enormous expenditure of energies, but will end up in the scrapheap of failed efforts. I'm referring here to the growing phenomenon of publicity about dramatic raises in the minimum raise, such as $15 per hour in Seattle and the advocacy of a guaranteed annual wage. 

Labor advocates such as Shamus Cooke have devoted many articles (see this and this) to promote dramatic increases in minimum wage laws, and now we see the appearance of David Graeber on PBS TV extolling the benefits of a guaranteed income. I have commented on the minimum wage campaign previously here, so let me address my observations about the latter.

Anarchists are usually smeared by ruling class mainstream media as hooligans, often compared to terrorists, and never given access to their media. So, it is remarkable that PBS gave coverage to anarchist Graeber's views promoting a guaranteed income. I understand why a ruling class TV network would want to promote such a dead-end proposal, but it makes me wonder a lot about Graeber. Such access to mainstream media is often a method used by media directors as bait to lure left-wing critics to advocate safe reforms to the system and eventually to thoroughly co-opt them. I hope this isn't the case with Graeber.

Perfection Anxiety

Click here to access article by A. A. Gill from Vanity Fair.

This is another contribution to my practice on Saturdays to run articles about our fellow citizens of the One Percent (actually .01 of the 1%, or one out of every 10,000 of us) hoping that by doing this that we don't lose touch with their world and their concerns--you know, to promote understanding. It is important that we become better acquainted so that we can serve them better and make it easier for them to carry out the daily burden of making important decisions, decisions which affect whether we go off to war in foreign lands to kill their enemies, if we have jobs, if we live in a home or under a bridge, if we can afford their health care services, education, etc.

Unfortunately, for some reason they tend to hide their lives from the rest of us behind walls of secrecy, literal walls of guarded gated communities, private clubs, esoteric publications, by traveling with private jets, etc. We should not let that deter us.
 
Today we have to thank Vanity Fair for making us aware in this article of a widespread disease plaguing the rich. I think it reasonable to believe that many of the rich were not even aware of it, and probably not conscious that they, too, might be suffering from it. Thankfully, you and I don't have to worry about it.

When you have 15 houses, yachts in three oceans, planes, cellars, mistresses, surgery, a library, and a personal charity, new purchases become just a matter of upgrading. And this is where the Perfection Anxiety kicks in. What you need is to have not just the most but the very, very best. The super-rich watch each other like envious owls, to see who’s got a slightly better loafer, a pullover made from some even more absurdly endangered fur. They will go to any lengths to find the best tailors. I know of a man who gets his suit pants made in Italy and the jackets on Savile Row.

Gill reports on some other symptoms of this disease plaguing the rich: 

And when you’ve got the best of everything, when you have your tea flown in from a micro-garden in Darjeeling and it still tastes rather like tea, when you’ve designed your own scent made from the squeezed glands of civets and the petals of rare orchids and that fails to give you the high—“When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer”—then you’re reduced to collecting art.

Ukraine and the grand chessboard

Click here to access article by Pepe Escobar from Asia Times Online.

I love the way Escobar ridicules Western propagandists who with their preposterous statements give him so many opportunities. Ridicule and laughter offer a healthy way to neutralize so much of the absurdity of US media coverage.

The US State Department, via spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki, said that reports of CIA Director John Brennan telling regime changers in Kiev to "conduct tactical operations" - or an "anti-terrorist" offensive - in eastern Ukraine are "completely false". This means Brennan did issue his marching orders. And by now the "anti-terrorist" campaign - with its nice little Dubya rhetorical touch - has degenerated into farce.

Now couple that with NATO secretary general, Danish retriever Anders Fogh Rasmussen, yapping about the strengthening of military footprint along NATO's eastern border: "We will have more planes in the air, mores ships on the water and more readiness on the land."

Welcome to the Two Stooges doctrine of post-modern warfare.

Unfortunately, many Americans take such statements from the Ministry of Truth as straight information. This is largely because the so-called "free press" is very well managed by the ruling class and consistently gives out stories that are unchallenged by any alternative views. And, many Americans consider it un-American to get their news and analysis from sources other than corporate media.   

Generally, Escobar's analysis suggests that the Empire with its latest actions is only digging its grave deeper.

Interview: Big Men Director Rachel Boynton on Oil, Ghana and "Responsible Capitalism"

Click here to access article by Steve Horn from DeSmogBlog.

This piece interested me because I think it is a good illustration of limited thinking on the parts of the participants, the interviewer Horn and the interviewee Boynton, a film director, who answered questions about her film "Big Men". 

The limits of the discussion were wider than most because of the recognition that the drama in her film involved the system of capitalism and the many conflicts and undesirable consequences that often follow their operations. However, the questions and comments in the interview clearly indicated that both considered the system as a given or constant, whereas questions about human nature as well as the possibilities of capitalist outcomes were left open for the viewer to question. 

Neither Horn nor Boynton thought about questioning the system itself. Although they named the system, their questions and comments clearly reinforced the idea that "there is no alternative". Thus, Brad Pitt, the producer, leads readers to speculate over whether there is such a thing as responsible capitalism; whereas Boynton leads readers to speculate about the (capitalist) nature of humans.

Such limited thinking is a major hurdle for all ordinary people to overcome if humanity is ever going to find its salvation. Websites like this encourage people to stay safely inside limits that capitalist ideological enforcers can tolerate.

The West Marches East, Part 1: The U.S.-NATO Strategy to Isolate Russia

Click here to access article by Andrew Gavin Marshall from The Hampton Institute.

As an antidote to the poison of the Empire's anti-Russian propaganda, Marshall provides us with some inconvenient current and historical facts. Ultimately, the Empire's actions boil down to this:

...the United States is the global 'Godfather' of the Mafia crime family of Western industrial nations (the NATO powers). Countries like Russia and China are reasonably-sized crime families in their own right, but largely dependent upon the Godfather, with whom they both cooperate and compete for influence.

When the Mafia - and the Godfather - are disobeyed, whether by small nations (such as Iraq, Syria, Libya, et. al.), or by larger gangster states like China or Russia, the Godfather will seek to punish them. Disobedience cannot be tolerated. If a small country can defy the Godfather, then any country can. If a larger gangster state like Russia can defy the Godfather and get away with it, they might continue to challenge the authority of the Godfather.

Of course, this is the nature of capitalism as it is for every system that privileges one segment of society over another. Such gangs end up competing with gangs from other nations for dominance, and we have inter-gang wars which ordinary people fight and die in. This will last as long as we tolerate gangs, as long as we tolerate privileges like private ownership of an economy over the needs of whole societies. We must stop believing all the lies of the gangsters that there is no alternative to the existing societal arrangements; and then, we must be prepared to sacrifice immediate comforts to fight against such gangster organizations.  

We have a choice: continue to accept these societal arrangements that make such gangs possible, their inter-gang wars, and all the other forms of suffering we endure, or we destroy these arrangements and construct egalitarian societies.

One of the most powerful documentaries on 9/11—ever.

I thank the people at The Greanville Post for posting this 1:44:55 video and bringing it to my attention. I watched it last night and I was profoundly impressed. I have read a lot about this 9/11 project which prepared ordinary Americans for a much more aggressive foreign policy abroad and the installation of the infrastructure of a police state at home. But this profession quality Italian film captured this project better than any other single film production, and made it so any ordinary person could easily follow it. 

It had to be made abroad because there are too many pressures on companies associated with film production here in the US to prevent any serious examination of the event. I urge everyone to view it over this long holiday weekend.

I am posting this YouTube film instead of the same one in the article because it identifies the correct title of the film--"ZERO: An Investigation Into 9/11".

America's Thin-Skinned Billionaires

Click here to access article by Paul Krugman from TruthOut.

Never mind freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, freedom from fear. What America's embattled billionaires are demanding, as their birthright (and I mean that pretty much literally), is something much more important: freedom from criticism.

Making a desperate stand in The Wall Street Journal, heroic, oppressed men like Tom Perkins [see this] and now Charles Koch have been telling it like it is: anyone who says anything negative about them is just like the Nazis, or maybe Stalin. 

Is India on a Totalitarian Path? Arundhati Roy on Corporatism, Nationalism and World’s Largest Vote

Click here to access a one hour video interview (with transcript) with activist and writer Arundhati Roy from Democracy Now!.

In the interview Roy attempts to explain how India is going down the neoliberal path by touching on the subjects of foreign investments, IMF policies, deeply indebted farmers, use of paramilitaries and regular armed forces to clear the land of populations resisting such policies, and the control of Indian politics by major corporations.

 ARUNDHATI ROY: So, I’m talking about how, when you have this kind of control over all business, over the media, over its essential infrastructure, electricity generation, information, everything, then you just field your, you know, pet politicians. ...reasons that is being attributed to the slowdown of the economy is the fact that there is a tremendous resistance to all of this from the people on the ground, from the people who are being displaced, from the—and in the forests, it’s the Maoist guerrillas; in the villages, it’s all kinds of people’s movements—all of whom are of course being called Maoist. And now...these new economic policies cannot be implemented unless—except with state—with coercive state violence. So you have a situation where the forests are full of paramilitary just burning villages, you know, pushing people out of their homes, trying to clear the land for mining companies to whom the government has signed.... So there is a kind of war which, of course, always existed in India. There hasn’t been a year when the Indian army hasn’t been deployed against its own people. ....

AMY GOODMAN: Since when?

 ARUNDHATI ROY: Since independence, since 1947, you know? But now the plan is to deploy them. Now it’s the paramilitary. But this new election is going to be who is the person that the corporates choose, who is not going to blink about putting the Indian—about deploying the Indian army against the poorest people in this country, you know, and pushing them out to give over those lands, those rivers, those mountains, to the major mining corporations. So this is what we are being prepared for now—the air force, the army, going in into the heart of India now.

I used the phrase "attempts to explain" deliberately. I was not pleased by the way the interviewers handled the interview. Both interviewers seemed more interested in drawing out her views regarding the upcoming national elections in India, but that really wasn't what Roy was interested in because she quickly explained that the whole government apparatus was controlled by large corporations. She began to launch into what really interested her: an explanation of the role of NGOs in influencing media and the people.

“Having worked out how to manage governments, political parties, elections, courts, the media and liberal opinion, the neoliberal establishment faced one more challenge: how to deal with the growing unrest, the threat of ’people’s power.’ How do you domesticate it? How do you turn protesters into pets? How do you vacuum up people’s fury and redirect it into a blind alley?

She then started to discuss the origins of NGOs in the US and their role here in shaping political activity so that they would not interfere with capitalist agendas. However, before she could get into their role in India, a co-interviewer diverted the discussion in another, less controversial direction: what Roy intended to write about in the future.

This diversion and the framing of the whole interview around elections really peaked my interest. I couldn't help but wonder if the management of the interview itself didn't actually illustrate what Roy was getting into: the influence of NGOs or of non-profit funding agencies to act as limiting agents or gatekeepers to contain dissent. 

"Democracy Now!" has been cited as one media outlet among many that have received ruling class foundation money as reported by Edward Ulrich in his article "Media Outlets Such as 'Democracy Now!' are Establishment Controlled News Sources". Stuart Bramhall and others have reported on the history of the CIA and other government agencies infiltrating news organizations to disseminate false information up until Church Committee investigations in 1975, after which foundations became more active in funding and influencing media that might pose too critical a threat to the policies of the ruling One Percent. 

Such funding mainly functions to limit what left media outlets cover and how they cover controversial topics. Perhaps that explains the reason why the popular left-wing media program Democracy Now! has always refused to interview knowledgeable people about evidence that puts in doubt the official reports about 9/11, the Boston Bombing, and other terrorist incidents. 

Inequality and the drive to war

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

Damon reminds us of the old historical strategy used by ruling classes to head of opposition to their rule by quoting James Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights: “Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war whenever a revolt was apprehended.” He goes on in the rest of the article to show how this relationship is playing out in the US today. 

It seems that one military crisis after another occurs where our masters in the US ruling class are involved, and who frequently threaten greater US involvement. Their policies in such crises are always supported by massive propaganda campaigns to justify their actions. 

Then with the one-year anniversary of the Boston Bombing yesterday, we are reminded of the use of domestic terrorist incidents which seem to serve the same purpose: there are "evil doers" out there who are threatening us, and we must be prepared to use military force against them while curtailing our own civil liberties. So, forget about growing inequality and social injustice--we've got to fight those "evil-doers"! This favorite strategy of all ruling classes has worked for millennia. Are we of the 99 Percent still stupid enough to continue falling for it? If so, then maybe we deserve our subjugation.

Years Of Living Dangerously: Is This The New Trend?

Click here to access article by Denise Robbins from Media Matters. 

Both specials treat manmade global warming as a given and feature established experts on climate science, a welcome change from the contrarian "skeptics" that have been infiltrating the media with doubt and misinformation. "Years of Living Dangerously" begins with Harrison Ford inspecting carbon dioxide measurements -- the primary cause of manmade global warming -- with the help of NASA scientists. ....

Although the premiere episode of "Years Of Living Dangerously" doesn't touch on any solutions to climate change, the series promises to address solutions in later episodes, including segments on renewable energy, global warming as a political priority, and the "greening" of the corporate sector.

Robbins points out the significance of two TV programs which recognize the fact of climate destabilization (media managers use the more benign term "global warming")--NBC's "Our Year Of Extremes" broadcast on April 6th and Showtime's broadcast of the first of a series of nine programs entitled ""Years of Living Dangerously". I think Robbins exaggerates the promise of these programs by repeating the claims of spokespeople of the latter series to offer solutions, the real significance is that our ruling class can no longer ignore the scientific evidence which has been buttressed by recent extreme weather events. 

What these programs have revealed now for the first time are the facts that have been known and reported in alternative media for many years. I think we can safely assume that their solutions will be compatible with business as usual by mainly promoting nuclear power, carbon capture, and climate engineering.

South Africa Today: Apartheid by Another Name

Click here to access article by John Pilger from The Greanville Post. (This article originally appeared in the Sunday Times, Johannesburg, but it lies behind a paywall at that website.)

Pilger does an excellent job of deconstructing the myths about Mandela that have been constructed by compliant Western historians and media propaganists who find it rewarding to serve the needs of Western capitalist propaganda. 

The New Great Game Round-Up: April 13, 2014

Click here to access article by Christoph Germann from Boiling Frogs.

Germann essentially gives us a play-by-play description of the inter-capitalist gang rivalries which will cause untold suffering for ordinary people. It appears that the recent bellicose moves by the Empire to punish Russia for interfering with the Empire's activities in Syria is pushing Russia closer to China which is also being threatened by the Empire. Another result is that China is rapidly building up its military.

Such is the nature of the capitalist games to control access to resources (especially energy), markets, and cheap labor. In addition to these contests, we are now witnessing the Empire's regime-change strategy to augment its control of governments in order to impose more sovereign debts on people under the control of neoliberal technocrats such as we've seen in Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Italy. 

As long as we the people of the world allow this system and its various self-serving gangs to rule over us, we will be plagued by never-ending mini-wars and other crises. (The most immediate crisis is in Ukraine.)

Mobilizing for the common: some lessons from Italy

Click here to access article by Jerome Roos from Reflections on a Revolution.

Bravo! Roos and this website continue to impress me as being on the cutting edge of revolutionary thought. This article, which contains a wealth of excellent links to other resources, is an outstanding example of such revolutionary thinking. I have been surveying websites intensively for the past five years and I have found no single website that is as advanced in revolutionary thinking as this one is. 

As with many of the articles posted at the site, this one needs to be studied rather than merely read casually. Some linked resources are better than others, but that is for each person to decide depending on their experience and orientation. I found the best link to be to the article entitled "Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power" by Max Haiven that was posted in January (which I missed for some reason!).

I have tried to argue previously that capitalism is not merely a system which is preoccupied with the accumulation of material wealth and power. It is a comprehensive system that affects all of our existence, that distorts our relationships, our interpretations of realty, and our imaginations. In other words, it has colonized our very minds. This is the secret of its success; it is the secret of its exploitation of us; it is why we continue with our daily grind of serving the interests of those few who preside over the system regardless of all the profound devastating consequences on our lives and on the planet. As Haiven observes, capitalism is not only about the...

...dynamics of class struggle and capitalist accumulation of a century ago, the system is more invested than ever in preoccupying and enclosing our sense of self and of the future; our hopes, dreams and aspirations; and our capacity to imagine. As such, the possibilities of meaningful solidarity and class struggle depend on the politics of the imagination. The imagination is a material process: it emerges from and informs our capacity to cooperate and labor together, and as such is at the core of the reproduction of value. If we can understand capitalism as a system based on the reproduction of value, the role of the imagination cannot be gainsaid.

As capitalist crises deepen under today’s new regimes of austerity, the desire to reinforce our ignorance, apathy and fatalism becomes stronger.  

Three presentations by David Harvey on his new book entitled "Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism"

There are three video and audio presentations on two websites featuring Harvey explaining some of his views of capitalism that he writes about in his new book. Because I've only had time to sample them, I will not offer any comments. Harvey is a leading exponent of anti-capitalist thought.

Here is a one hour radio interview with Harvey from SoundCloud.

From Harvey's own website we can access a 1hr8min video presentation he gave at the Royal Society of the Arts during which he focuses on three contradictions in the first 27 minute period followed by a question and answer period.

Another from video presentation by Harvey from his website was of his lecture at The London School of Economics and Political Science. This lasts about 1 1/2 hour. 

Venezuela shows that protest can be a defence of privilege

Click here to access article by Seumas Milne from The Guardian.

The Empire's agents that have brought us false-flag terrorism are now producing false-flag protests as another means of manipulating the 99 Percent into serving the Empire's regime-change projects.

If we didn't know it before, the upsurge in global protest in the past couple of years has driven home the lesson that mass demonstrations can have entirely different social and political meanings. Just because they wear bandannas and build barricades – and have genuine grievances – doesn't automatically mean protesters are fighting for democracy or social justice.

From Ukraine to Thailand and Egypt to Venezuela, large-scale protests have aimed at, or succeeded in, ousting elected governments in the past year. In some countries, mass protests have been led by working class organisations, targeting austerity and corporate power. In others, predominantly middle class unrest has been the lever to restore ousted elites.

Libertaria: A Libertarian Paradise

Click here to access article by John Spritzler from New Democracy World.  

Spritzler constructs a pure economic libertarian nation to introduce an egalitarian vision of a nation. This piece is helpful in clarifying the difference between an organization of society ruled by those who want the owners of economic property to be free of all restrictions; and a society organized around strictly egalitarian principles where people have, as much as possible, equal access to the decision making process and to the benefits of the entire economy in which property ownership is limited to personal property. 

The key difference here, of course, hinges on the notion of property ownership: personal property versus social property. The concept of social property essentially recognizes the social nature of economic property when property is used by more than one person, or a family, to obtain material value. 

The history of capitalism has been essentially a struggle between advocates of these two concepts. Capitalists as a class have dominated most societies over the past 400 years. And, now we are seeing the results in a dramatic bifurcation of societies: a tiny class of "owners" of economic property that have accrued enormous amounts of wealth and, its concomitant, power, and an underclass, who are the vast majority, who live in precarious economic conditions with little political influence. These extreme in-egalitarian conditions have devolved into a dystopia, so well described and analyzed by critics such as Henry Giroux, and now exists throughout the world dominated by capitalist elites. 

However, this type of organization of societies goes against what is a basic component of human nature: social justice or fairness. Thus, people are raising questions, protesting, and rebelling. Hence, the need by this capitalist class to obscure the nature of their rule as much as possible through their control of all the ideological institutions of society while greatly augmenting all its authoritarian methods of control.

The McCutcheon ruling and zombie democracy in the U.S.

Click here to access article by Ajamu Baraka from CounterPunch and his blog A Voice from the Margins.

...the McCutcheon decision, which makes it easier for the corporate and financial elite to buy elections and candidates, is a serious ruling that conveys a devastatingly simple message: that the furtherance of the neoliberal project and the maintenance of the U.S. Empire require the evisceration of democracy. 

That message has always been clear to those of us on the margins who have never had the luxury of embracing illusion as a way of life. For us, democracy in the U.S. has always been a “zombie democracy”—a rotten facsimile that looked a little like democracy, sounded like democracy and even had some democratic forms, but was never the real thing, never really alive.

His very accurate description of the founding of the US government and its constitution makes clear that from the very beginning the nascent capitalist class who at that time consisted of land speculators like George Washington, slave owners like Thomas Jefferson, bankers like Alexander Hamilton, and merchants like Robert Morris (traded with both sides during the Revolutionary War) successfully established a nation based on capitalism and its sacred component of private ownership of the economy. They looked at the continent, on which they occupied a small part, and saw the huge potential for exploitation of its riches. Only "savages" and the British government stood in their way.  

Capitalist historians like to refer reverently to "the Founding Fathers", but this brief article sets the record straight. The democratic themes they wrote in the Declaration of Independence before the revolution were quickly forgotten once the Founding Fathers succeeded in separating the colonies from Britain. They merely used these themes to induce many ordinary Americans to support their project of establishing a nation under their control. Once this was accomplished, they then secretly conspired to secure their control by writing a new constitution to replace the Articles of Confederation.

The possibility of democracy was aborted by Thomas Jefferson and the white, male, property-owning, settler “revolutionaries” who declared their independence in 1776. It was aborted by the first American coup in Philadelphia in 1787, when men of property ignored the mandate from their state legislatures to strengthen the Articles of Confederation and instead met in secret to produce a document that would solidify their power.  The resulting Constitution consolidated a white, male, property-owning republic that reduced black people to 3/5th of a person, marked the indigenous for genocide and did not mention democracy anywhere in its text. 

Likewise, the European capitalist classes first supported these democratic themes in their battle against the land-owning aristocracy. The success of the US revolutionary movement inspired the French bourgeoisie to use the same strategy in the 1789 French revolution.

The rising capitalist classes of both countries used people like Thomas Paine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau to spread ideas of equality; but after their revolutions were accomplished, their ideas were continued only in their propaganda and indoctrination programs. They held elections to choose leaders, but only property owners were allowed to participate. Since then they have gradually expanded the voting franchise as they perfected their control of the political machinery of elections, instituted indoctrination into education, and spread their propaganda throughout their media. 

Sheldon Adelson's Menagerie

Click here to access 2:02m video by Mark Fiore from his website. (satire)

Sheldon Adelson

In case you missed it, a number of potential Republican presidential candidates went down to Las Vegas to bow at the feet of Sheldon Adelson, democracy-meddling billionaire extraordinaire.  It was a pretty sorry sight as each of the potential candidates tried to out-Israel and out-tough the other as they vied for Adelson's attention.  (And mustn't forget Sheldon bestowing actual awards for being a "great Zionist" in the past.)
 
Even though ol' Sheldon didn't have a very good track record on his bets last go-round, he has a huge impact on the primaries, even if his horses don't win in the end.  We are witnessing the selling out of democracy to cheesy casino-owners.  (Because, y'know, some people have more free speech than others if they have a few billion to throw around.)

Besides the presidential candidates, Sheldon's casino cash is buying some favorable legislation that would knock out some online gaming competitors.  Thanks, Lindsey Graham, glad to see you're representing your good ol' Southern Baptist constituents!  Enjoy the cartoon, and hold onto your hats now that the Supreme Court just threw more cash into the mix.

How the Media Whitewash the Face of Capitalism

Click here to access article by Patrice Greanville from The Greanville Post.

What is a bit discouraging about this excellent post is that it was written and published in their print edition back in 1982, almost 32 years ago! It's clear that such views didn't make a dent in the American psyche. Even today, many people who are upset about things only want wars to go away. 

Such is the case with Rick Staggenborg, MD who writes today in opposition to wars by explaining that they have something to do with our history since WWII, and something to do with corporate war profiteers and their propaganda. What he writes is all true, but why can't he then take the next step and tie it to the system of capitalism? It seems that he is another victim of not only the propaganda that he writes about, but the whole system of capitalist indoctrination. He has bought into one of the basic myths of this indoctrination that Greanville exposed 32 years ago--that capitalism is based on human nature:

This propaganda equation [myth] is one of the oldest and most effective ideological weapons utilized in defense of capitalism. It pays off handsomely in a number of important ways. ...if capitalism is congruent with “human nature,” then the capitalist system must be the most “natural” and “logical” form of social organization, as people will have a built-in tendency to observe its basic rules.

Of course, these capitalist myths which they have poured into the minds of citizens since birth are not just the result of journalistic media. They are proliferated everywhere: in all education, in entertainment, in our workplaces, etc., repeated endlessly by our peers and families, and it may be in the very air we breath. The fact is, this 24/7 brainwashing is absolutely necessary if the ruling One Percent class is to continue with their system, the goose which lays them so many golden eggs. It is necessary in order to get us to serve them, to stop what we're doing and go off to kill people who are their enemies in foreign lands, to get us to work for paltry wages, to determine what work we do and when, to endure unemployment, poverty, ill health, etc.

We don't have wars merely because of corporate propaganda, but because corporate propaganda is an integral and inevitable part of capitalism.

So, the big question for today is: are we going to continue to be brainwashed by their indoctrination and propaganda, and thereby insure that we continue to be plagued by wars, unemployment, austerity, poverty, etc? There is now much more at stake--think about it: if capitalism continues, we face climate destabilization and the end of the human race along with other species!