Washington’s strategic objective is to isolate Russia from without, undermine its military capability and erode its economy, in order to strengthen NATO’s political and economic collaborators inside Russia – leading to its further fragmentation and return to the semi-vassal status.
"We're screwed. Right now. And it could get much worse."
That was how 350.org co-founder Jamie Henn responded to Tuesday's release of the federal government's National Climate Assessment, the national scientific community's definitive statement on the current and future impacts of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.While there are some indications that officials of our capitalist government are beginning to recognize the devastating impacts of continued fossil fuel usage, their policies cannot solve this problem within the system of capitalism. Thus, their efforts are directed at managing the perceptions of Americans regarding climate destabilization.
Obama on Tuesday has scheduled interviews with a number of meteorologists from major network stations in an effort to promote the report and stem "the strong current of climate skepticism among weather forecasters," the Guardian reports.
According to a 2012 Pew report, 62% of Americans trust television weather reporters on climate change far more than they do climate scientists. And another survey in 2010 by George Mason University's Center for Climate Change Communications found that only 19% of TV weather forecasters accepted that human activity was the main driver of climate change.
Although real GDP growth is currently estimated to have paused in the first quarter of this year, I see that pause as mostly reflecting transitory factors, including the effects of the unusually cold and snowy winter weather. With the harsh winter behind us, many recent indicators suggest that a rebound in spending and production is already under way, putting the overall economy on track for solid growth in the current quarter. [my emphasis]I believe this quote indicates that the ruling class's Federal Reserve, which has so much power over the economy, still has no idea that their economic system is having a major and destructive impact on our biosphere. They continue to have their heads stuck firmly in the sand. This is a typical symptom of an addict: prolonged and irrational denial of reality in order to continue practicing a drug habit.
Reports are already emerging that inside the city there is widespread fear of far-right, anti-Semitic violence breaking out in the coming days. The National Guard began street patrols yesterday, amid mounting popular outrage over the Friday massacre.
.... Everything points to the preparation by the Kiev regime and its US and European backers of another fascist atrocity to try to terrorize the city into submission. Given that forces like Right Sector openly glorify Ukrainian fascists who collaborated with the Nazis during the Holocaust, there is deep concern, in particular in Odessa’s 30,000-strong Jewish community, one of the largest in Ukraine.
[Interviewer]: So, Michael, this week we're going to be talking about the very popular book by French economist Thomas Piketty. It's a 700-page book that takes on the topic of income inequality. Why do you think so many people are talking about this book? What's in it that has people buzzing?
Energy and technology are not substitutable with each other. If you run out of the former, you can’t replace it with the latter (and by “run out” I mean get it at a return of energy investment that makes sense). The techno-narcissist Jeremy Rifkins and Ray Kurzweils among us propound magical something-for-nothing workarounds for our predicament, but they are just blowing smoke up the collective fundament of a credulous ruling plutocracy.
In fact, we’re faced with an unprecedented contraction of wealth, and a shocking loss of ability to produce new wealth. That‘s the real “game-changer,” not the delusions about shale oil and the robotic “industrial renaissance” and all the related fantasies circulating among a leadership that checked its brains at the Microsoft window.However, Kunstler's vision of the future is unimaginative and uninspiring--humanity can do better.
For the first time since ‘modern humans’ originated on planet earth, the atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have reached and stayed at or over 400 ppmv (parts per million by volume), or 0.04% for over a month. The modern humans (Homo Sapien Sapiens) are said to have originated around 60,000 years ago, and in that short span of time – about four seconds, if we take the earth’s age of 457 billion years as one year – we have managed this remarkable (negative) feat.Looking at the graph in the article, the trend appears to increase generally through the month of April.
This begs the question of what this is all about. Why is Washington determined to take on Russia?After his analysis in which he attempts to answer this question, he provides what I regard as very encouraging news about a huge, growing gap, supported by documented evidence, between the propaganda put forth by the European ruling capitalist classes regarding events in Ukraine and the views of the general population, with particular emphasis on ordinary Germans.
...on-the-ground reality of legitimate and understandable concerns among the eastern Ukrainians [that have] been missing from the U.S. propaganda barrage, which has overwhelmed the mainstream press as thoroughly as a similar P.R. campaign did during the run-up to the Iraq War, if not more so. Official Washington’s “group think” now is all about blaming Russian President Vladimir Putin for the Ukraine crisis.
The reversal of longstanding policy preventing the US from using Filipino territory for military bases signifies and escalation in tensions between the United States and China, as well as exposes the true nature of the US “pivot” toward Asia.
Washington, which has invested $5 billion over the past 20 years in implementing regime change in Ukraine, seems to have yanked the strings tighter on its puppets in Kiev, demanding a much stiffer military response to crush the anti-Kiev protests it the east and south. The apparent integration of regular Ukrainian military with CIA-backed neo-Nazi paramilitaries and covert American mercenaries is consistent with this renewed Washington-led regime change effort. The greater covert intervention by Washington in Ukraine is also consistent with the unprecedented build-up of NATO forces in the region. The latter has to be seen as a concerted campaign of state-sponsored intimidation, just as shooting civilians on the street is.
Future historians will note that in April 2014, nearly a quarter-century after the end of the Soviet Union, the White House declared a new Cold War on Russia.And that, in a grave failure of representative democracy, there was scarcely a public word of debate, much less opposition, from the American political or media establishment.
...despite the best efforts of the West's media and politicians to claim the Nazi militants they used to overrun Kiev are creations of Russian propaganda, the truth exists in plain sight. The inability of the West to check Russia's counterstrokes in Crimea and eastern Ukraine is precisely due to the fact that neither the people of the East nor the West believe what Washington, London, or Brussels are saying.
To whom shall we turn and ask for support, if not to you, to the German people ? We ask you not to conceal the appeal of the Ukrainian people, but to publish and distribute, so that this cry will be heard by the whole world.As proof of our peaceful intentions and the very broad support of our movement in the population I have collected video material. We are writing to you with the request to support our efforts for a referendum because we understand that a peaceful solution to the conflict is no longer possible otherwise.The junta is not interested in such a solution and is apparently ready to shed a lot of blood of peaceful people in Ukraine. In view of the fact that our media belong to powerful oligarchs, I am convinced that the world public has been presented false information and invented facts about the conflict in Ukraine and will obviously continue to receive such.
We have a huge ongoing scandal in the US, the non-prosecution of what are referred to as “protected entities”. These are not just the very rich, but those who are very powerful, or who have very powerful friends… political power. A State district attorney or a US attorney is putting his career on the line by going after someone whose conviction could embarrass many of those associated with the person targeted.And it gets worse. If they fear the one prosecution could lead to others, those folks are not above killing a few people to tidy things up, although prosecutors and judges are generally never handled that way. They use other ways to discourage them.
It is clear then that nations like Russia, China, and others are not only responding to growing concern from among their populations regarding the safety and environmental impact of GMO products, but the threat this monopolized technology poses toward each respective nation’s food supply and consequently, their sovereignty.
Poor NATO. Damned Soviets. The benign North Atlantic Treaty Organization has spent two decades "trying to build a partnership" with Russia. But now, "clearly the Russians have declared NATO as an adversary, so we have to begin to view Russia no longer as a partner but as more of an adversary", according to NATO deputy secretary-general Alexander Vershbow, a former US diplomat/ Pentagon employee.
Capitalists and corporations, we argue, are driven not to maximize profit, but to ‘beat the average’ and increase their differential power. In this approach, the redistribution of income and assets is not a ‘societal’ side effect of the economy, but the central conflict that propels modern capitalism. And the main weapon in this struggle, we claim, is not investment and growth, but what the American political economist Thorstein Veblen called ‘strategic sabotage’ – the restrictions, limitations, hazards and pains that capitalists impose on the rest of society in order to sustain and augment their differential power.Capitalists and corporations are motivated by both. Given that capitalist operations are now coming up against the resource limits of a finite planet, they are driven more by the second motivation which essentially constitutes power and control.
And, I thought Americans were stupid! Referring to Europeans as lab rats seems very apt in more than one way.Like a court eunuch, the Parliament was effectively neutered at birth. Put simply, its main mission in life is to give the wildly misleading impression that democracy actually exists in the EU. In reality, the Parliament cannot overrule the EU Commission nor can it even amend its budget on a line by line basis. Indeed, it cannot initiate legislation and it has no say whatsoever in foreign policy.The European Parliament has no power to even hold individual members of the Commission to account. At best, it can overturn the entire executive branch, which it has only done once in its lifetime – back in 1999 when, thanks to leaks by commission-insider Paul Van Boetenin, the Parliament learnt of the irregularities, fraud and mismanagement within the Commission.The real power in Brussels resides in the European Commission, the European Council of national leaders and the Eurogroup of Finance Ministers – three unelected institutions that are subject to virtually no democratic checks or balances.
...why are some allowed to own and control the land, wealth and the means of production? Shouldn't these be the common property of all as the inheritance of all that has been contributed by human history and the complex social processes that interacted to bring us to, and maintain the wealth that we have today? So how can we justify maintaining a system where some benefit more than others from the historically developed and socially maintained wealth? And how can we call only for reform of that system? It'd be like sitting at a family dinner where your brother claims to own the kitchen even though you're cooking dinner with your parents. Your brother then receives all of the food produced and gives you and your parents each 10% of the food while he keeps 70% of it as the owner. A reformist response would be to say that if only each member of the family were able to get a 15% or 20% portion each (leaving your brother with a 55% or 40% share for being the "owner"), everyone would be alright and less hungry.However, the author expresses a classic leftist view of supporting reforms with which I take issue:
We see this revolutionary situation coming about after decades of battles- wins and losses- in which the popular classes steadily increase their power and continue to demand more and more until the demands of the popular classes are too much to concede for the elite classes; and the power of the popular classes is enough to effectively carry-out revolution....The key justification for this argument is as he wrote:
...winning in reform struggles can build confidence, organization, capacity, solidarity, skills, and power; and losing in a reform struggle, can strengthen resolve and sharpen strategy. The point is that although we want reforms because they improve the lives of the oppressed and popular classes of which we are a part; even more fundamental to struggle– whether we win or lose- is developing the strength of the movement, which can come out of both wins and gains in reform struggles.He briefly mentioned, but didn't elaborate on, the fact that "Losing in a reform struggle can demoralize participants around the possibility of struggle achieving gains...." Thus, the key question regarding any proposed reform struggle will be the possibilities of winning, or the achievement of, real gains. This consideration is often viewed in very simplistic terms.
What we have here is something much bigger than any individual or single country. Market forces are at work, which undergirds the “race to the bottom” capitalism has foisted on the world. It is demand that creates jobs and if wages are declining and more are unemployed, demand will naturally decline, leaving less incentive to hire. Eventually, corporate profit margins will be squeezed, with the result that production is moved to locations with ever lower wage, safety and environmental standards.
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…
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?
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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?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.
Van Auken then attempts to provide some answers.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?
...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.”
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.
...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.
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?
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.
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], andthat 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.
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.
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.
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!"
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?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.
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.
...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.
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.
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.