Impressions of Rojava: a report from the revolution

Click here to access article by Janet Biehl from Reflections on a Revolution. 

Every once in while in history we find examples of revolutionary societies that inspire real progressive people, people looking for social solutions to deal with the myriad problems facing societies in today's capitalist ruled world. We are now seeing reports (see this and this) of such developments in the tiny autonomous area of Rojava which is formally a part of Syria.

Normally in such conflicted areas, radical experiments are compromised by the needs of security from outside threats as happened in the Soviet Union following the 1917 revolution, and to a lesser extent in Cuba following their revolution in 1959. Such compromises do not seem to be happening in Rojava. Although Biehl makes references to problems, she doesn't list any--I wish she had.

In nine days we could not possibly have scoured Rojava for all problems, and our interlocutors candidly admitted that Rojava is hardly above criticism....

This excellent report--there are hints of more to come--reminded me of some speculations I had after reading about the Soviet revolution in the excellent book entitled The Prophet Armed (v.1) by Isaac Deutscher. In the chaos of the aftermath the Bolsheviks were faced with invasions by Western capitalist armies, counter-revolutionary insurrections from within, widespread hunger, epidemics, a devastated country ravaged by WWI, etc. I have speculated that the very understandable mistake that Trotsky made as commander of the new Soviet army was to fall back on what he regarded as the only form of organization that an army could have to secure the revolution while facing foreign armies: the traditional rigid hierarchical structure. Deutscher wrote on page 416:

The task...to be accomplished was to centralize the Red Army and to establish single command. Trotsky went on to disband the Red Guards and the partisan detachments. The incorporation of the partisan units proved unsatisfactory, because it infected the regular detachments with the 'guerrilla spirit'. .... He insisted on the organization of the entire army into uniformly constituted divisions and regiments.

This I think was a fatal mistake that had many future adverse consequences for the success of the revolution. Although it did secure the revolution for the immediate future, it was in a distorted bureaucratic form which led to its corruption and ultimate deterioration into bureaucratic ruling class government.   

An alternative would have been to supply local sympathetic revolutionary populations with arms, training, and political education. Whether this alternative could have been successful under such chaotic conditions in 1917 is debatable, but I think it was necessary to keep the revolution alive and sustainable.

This alternative appears to be operational in Rojava's revolution. Should this alternative survive and thrive, I will not only have a confirmation of my speculation; but of far more importance, there is promise of a successful revolutionary model that the rest of the world's majority can follow.

The Shocking Data Behind Shale Oil

Click here to access article posted on Post Carbon Institute in which Chris Martenson introduces a 47:23m interview (with transcript) with David Hughes who has thoroughly studied the shale oil industry. 

To help us understand all of this we could not have a better guess today than David Hughes, a geo-scientist who has studied the energy resources of Canada for nearly four decades including 32 years with The Geological Survey of Canada as a scientist and research manager. Now it is his work with The Post Carbon Institute that has really caught my eye. That includes "Drill Baby Drill," a 2013 report. Probably the most comprehensive, publicly available analysis to date of the prospects for shale gas and tight oil, as shale oil is usually called in the United States.

I ran out of time this morning to listen to all of this interview, but it looks very promising in terms of understanding the many ramifications that this industry holds for our future.

The Sad Future of Our Planet

Click here to access article by Roberto Savio from Inter Press Service.

The agreement is based on the idea that every country will publicly commit itself to adopting its own plan for reducing emissions, based on criteria established by national governments on the basis of their domestic politics – not on what scientists have been indicating as absolutely necessary.

"National governments" in the above paragraph hides the overwhelming fact of private control of governments and economies governed by capitalist principles to serve those tiny few who rule most of the world. Such people must promote growth of their economies to obtain the wealth and power that are the drugs that feed their addictions to wealth and power. 

However, like any addicted alcoholic, they like to make the appearance that everything is under control. Hence, we see these meetings where nothing of substance ever happens. Only if the vast majority of humans wake up and rid themselves of this human-habitat-destroying system will there be any hope for any agreements to prevent catastrophic climate destabilization.

Of course, the planet will continue on without humans just as it as has when numerous other species appeared for a while and then disappeared because they could not adapt to the planet's conditions. What will be really sad is if the vast majority of humans permit this tiny group of addicted people to destroy their adaptation. A sentient being looking back after the disappearance of humans will be thoroughly perplexed by this puzzle.

Now, contrast this article entitled "Lima Climate COP Fails (of course)" from a liberal source with this brief article from a real alternative media source, Climate Connections. The author, Anne Petermann, has a much better understanding of what is needed to really change things.

Fortunately, more and more people (except for the big green NGOs) recognize that these climate COPs will never get it done and are organizing peoples’ summits where grassroots climate activists, Indigenous Peoples and impacted community members can gather to discuss what to do about climate change from the bottom up....

America Sets Six Record Lows This Year

Click here to access article by Pam and Russ Martens from Wall Street on Parade.

Just as a business succeeds or fails on the basis of trust by its customers, it can also be said that a nation succeeds, over the long term, through the trust and confidence of its citizens. There are now ample warning signs that America is dangerously heading in the wrong direction.

U.S. Congress Now Virtually 100% All-In on Ukraine’s War Against Russia; Americans Are at Least 67% Opposed

Click here to access article by Eric Zuesse from RINF. (Note: Somehow I missed this coverage in mainstream media [sarcasm].)

This is another illustration of the reality that Congress serves the ruling class's shadow government rather than the American people.

Last night, December 11th, the U.S. Senate voted unanimously as the U.S. House had previously voted 98%: to join Ukraine’s war against Russia and against Ukraine’s own ethnic Russians in Ukraine’s southeastern districts, in order to eliminate those resistant Ukrainians and their families.

The U.S. is now throwing down the gauntlet to Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, and daring him to defend openly the ethnic Russians that the U.S.-installed Ukrainian Government is now trying to exterminate in the eastern districts, the places where the present Ukrainian Government is rejected by almost all of the residents.

Russia Pivots to Eurasia for Trade and Military Alliances

Click here if you wish to access the transcript of an interview with Michael Hudson as well as the 12:32m video from The Real News.

I've seen widespread daily coverage in mainstream media (gloatingly) reports that the sanctions are hurting the Russian economy. The reports usually refer to the declining rate of exchange between the US dollar and Euros with the Russian ruble. Hudson explains why these exchange rates are irrelevant to the new Russian economic realities, and suggests that the effort to isolate Russia from Europe will backfire on the Empire's neoconservative directors.

...the result of these changes is the opposite of what American strategy was based on for the last half-century, the idea of dividing and conquering Eurasia by setting Russia against China, by isolating Iran, by preventing India, the Near East, and other Asian countries from joining together to create some kind of alternative to the dollar area. In fact, the American sanctions and the new Cold War policy of the neocons are driving these Asian countries together, in association with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, as an alternative to NATO, and the BRICS are trying to make an alternative to dealing with the dollar area and with the IMF and the World Bank that represent U.S. policy.

So, regarding Europe, America's insistence that it join this new Cold War policy by imposing sanctions on Russia, and especially by blocking Russian oil and gas imports, is--aggravated the Eurozone's austerity, and it's just turning it into a dead zone.

The Congressional report on torture confirms that Al Qaeda was not involved in the attacks of September 11

Click here to access article by Thierry Meyssan from VoltaireNet.

I'm not sure that he proves his argument, but he makes a very convincing argument that the CIA's involvement was largely to obtain false confessions that linked Al Qaeda to 9/11.

Let’s be clear: the Senate Committee [report]...states that the CIA did not question the detainees, but it conditioned them to confess to acts of which they knew nothing. The Commission states that the CIA agents did not even look to see what the detainees had confessed during previous interrogations with the authorities who arrested them. In other words not only has the CIA not investigated whether al Qaeda was involved in the attacks or not, but its action had no other purpose than to generate false evidence attesting to the involvement of al-Qaeda in the attacks of September 11. 

Considering that 9/11 critics have assembled considerable evidence implicating the CIA in the 9/11 attacks to justify the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and the whole "war on terror" to justify the construction of many elements of a police state domestically, such CIA actions in relation to these prisoners as argued by Meyssan make perfect sense. The link between 9/11 and Al Qaeda, which was alleged by government officials immediately after 9/11, had to be firmly established by these pseudo confessions to complete the false flag scenario concocted by the CIA.

Power, Profit And The GMO Issue

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

...[genetic engineering] technology is first and foremost an instrument of corporate power, a tool to ensure profit. Beyond that, it is intended to serve US global geopolitical interests. Indeed, agriculture has for a long time been central to US foreign policy.

Ten Reasons Why a Severe Drop in Oil Prices is a Problem

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

This highly respected analyst of fossil fuels lends her insights about the likely impacts that low oil prices will have to reach this overall conclusion:

In my view, a rapid drop in oil prices is likely a symptom that we are approaching a debt-related collapse.... Underlying this debt-related collapse is the fact that we seem to be reaching the limits of a finite world. There is a growing mismatch between what workers in oil importing countries can afford, and the rising real costs of extraction, including associated governmental costs. This has been covered up to date by rising debt, but at some point, it will not be possible to keep increasing the debt sufficiently.

Because the collapse in oil prices was caused by the Medieval rulers of Saudi Arabian in collaboration with the directors of the Empire mainly to undermine the economies of Russia (as they did in the 1980s) and Iran, I think that the numerous negative impacts that she outlines in her report will not be as negative as she argues--at least, not this time around. Thus, what the Empire directors and their Saudi collaborators decided will be reversed as soon as the impacts become too negative for Empire interests. Meanwhile, many major oil companies will simply take advantage of the situation by buying up smaller companies at bargain prices. 

I have followed her writing for at least five years and I know that she previously argued that peak oil/financial collapse would come in cycles, with each one more damaging than the preceding one. But this time, the drop in prices was decided not by the market, but by political considerations. Thus, I think she is getting ahead of herself in this article.

School of the Americas Morphs Into US Training Industrial Complex

Click here to access article by JP Sottile from TruthOut. 

I've just discovered this valuable study on the history of the infamous School of the Americas (SOA) and its evolution into its current globalized form. Because of the sordid history that included terrorism, assassinations, subversion, paramilitaries, torture, and drug-trafficking, our ruling class directorate decided to change its name to The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC). Sottile then suggests that other manifestations of this school have turned up in other parts of the world, but only cites Africa as an example. 

Just as the Cold War often provided ideological cover for repression of reformers, activists and inconvenient obstacles to "development," so too have the wars on Drugs and Terror allowed the America's infrastructure of cooperation and training to pivot forces around the world - and particularly to the new frontier in Africa. 

 However the "school" in Africa appears to be administered by AFRICOM. It's rather difficult to unravel the chain of command, but it appears to me that the original SOA has been duplicated with schools in most other command areas. Thus, it is difficult to claim that those in other command areas are "satellite campuses". In any case, it's obvious that the directors of the US-led Empire have truly global aspirations as reflected in the Dept. of Defense command structure.


As a summary of the "school" programs in Africa, he makes a general observation about all such "schools":

The common thread through all of these initiatives is the use of training to establish "cooperative" or client relationships that place key military personnel in crucial positions in nations around the globe. To wit, Foreign Policy reported in 2012 that "the United States delivered bilateral security assistance to 134 countries - meaning that every country on Earth had about a 75 percent chance of receiving US military aid."

This "satellite campus" system of the "New" School of the America is expanding at the same time the traditional model is drawing tens of thousands of soldiers and police to "275 known military school and installations." Amnesty International estimates that the United States "trains at least 100,000 foreign soldiers and police from more than 150 countries each year at a cost of tens of millions of dollars" and thereby seems to have created a Training-Industrial Complex. 

The Koch Brothers’ Governors: Butlers Selling the Public’s Silver

Click here to access article by Jeffrey Sommers and Michael Hudson from CounterPunch.

 The Koch Brothers are the closest thing the United States has to Russia’s oligarchs. They fuse ownership of the economy and state, using the latter to enrich themselves while making private gains through the public’s losses. Their idea of a “market economy” is to buy government officials and the assets they privatize at giveaway prices.

The authors ridicule the Koch brothers who hire state governors much like they do butlers. Why pick on the Koch brothers? They are only doing what their fellow class members of the One Percent are doing all the time--just doing it more honestly. After all their ancestors designed our political institutions and succeeding generations of the One Percent have only added improvements to better serve them. And, what is wrong with "selling the public's silver" for any capitalist ruling class? They are only practicing the capitalist religion and its fundamental tenet so well expressed by Margaret Thatcher:

...there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first.

It appears that liberals like these two well-educated authors suffer from brainwashing by having spent so much time in educational institutions. Indoctrination is an essential function of the One Percent's educational institutions to secure their class rule. If you, like them, have been taught to worship at the church of capitalism, you must accept its consequences--or find another faith. Personally, I disavowed this religion long ago after coming to the realization that we as humans depend so much on societies for our health and happiness, and that we depend on our planet's limited environment to supply us with our material needs. We must carefully nurture our societies and respect the finite limitations of our planet if we are to survive, and hopefully even flourish.

The new conquistadors making their presence felt at COP20 in Peru

Click here to access article from Corporate Europe Observatory.

A UN conference is expected to wrap up today in Lima, Peru, and its task is to come up with a first draft of a climate treaty to be negotiated in Paris in 2015. From National Geographic we learn:

Negotiations are expected to conclude by Saturday, and the draft agreement will continue to evolve until it's offered up as an international treaty in December 2015, when world leaders are expected to gather in Paris in an attempt at a global climate deal.

This brief article serves as an introduction to, and summary of, a 28 page paper entitled "Corporate Conquistadors: the many ways multinationals both drive and profit from climate destruction".

A new report released at COP20 by CEO, the Democracy Center and Transnational Institute shows how corporations causing social and environmental destruction in the Andes and Amazon are driving climate change, whilst enjoying influential seats at the climate-negotiating table.  

Finding Positive Meaning In End Times

Click here to access article by Roger Boyd from his blog Humanity's Test.

I could really empathize with the thoughts and feelings expressed in this piece. Referring to a "dark friend that sometimes recedes and sometimes bursts wholesale into my consciousness", he writes:

Grief for a world that currently exists, but is being slowly destroyed as I look on, and will not be there for younger generations.

However, it is clear that he does not let himself succumb to apathy and depression. He is still looking for ways to prevent such a dystopia.

Citigroup to Move Headquarters to U.S. Capitol Building

Click here to access article by Andy Borowitz from The New Yorker. (satire)

Explaining the rationale behind the move, Klugian [Citigroup spokesperson] told reporters, “Instead of constantly flying out from New York to give members of Congress their marching orders, Citigroup executives can be right on the floor with them, handing them legislation and telling them how to vote. This is going to result in tremendous cost savings going forward.”

Native American Council Offers Amnesty to 220 Million Undocumented Whites

Click here to access article from The Daily Current. (parody) 

A council of Native American leaders has offered partial amnesty to the estimated 220 million illegal white immigrants living in the United States.

Torture, police killings and the militarization of America

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

Auken sees that the 9/11 event has been used to reveal the iron fist of capitalism's worst manifestation--fascist rule.

It was Cofer Black, the former director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, who told an approving congressional committee in 2002 that “there was ‘before 9/11 and after 9/11.’ After 9/11 the gloves came off.”

The phrase, conjuring up the image of a bare-knuckled brawl, became a favorite cliché within both the Bush White House and the US military command. It was translated into far more gruesome forms of violence, ranging from waterboarding to hanging people from manacles and “rectal hydration.”

But the “gloves” that were taken off had more far-reaching implications. They involved dispensing with any adherence to the US Constitution, the Geneva Conventions or other bodies of domestic and international law.

See also an article entitled "Brazilian Commission Report Details Murder and Torture by US-backed Dictatorship" from Libya 360°

The Establishment: And how they get away with it

Click here to access article by Sean Ledwith from CounterFire (Britain). 

In this critical review of a new book by Owen Jones, Ledwith reminds us that it's the economic system not individuals that is the problem. Although the book is about the British establishment, essentially the same dynamics of capitalist power apply in the US. After WWII they and vengeful Zionist agents combined to form a rampaging empire.

Owen Jones’ The Establishment is a valuable dissection of the networks of power and ideology, but the concept of the ruling [capitalist] class adds a needed dimension, argues Sean Ledwith.

Is Kaliningrad NATO’s Real Target?

Click here to access article by Diana Johnstone from CounterPunch.

Could we be seeing a preparation for a new "Pearl Harbor" event like 9/11 that served our ruling class so well to justify the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq along with the Patriot Acts and all the rest of the police state apparatus we are now faced with? Johnstone looks at the evidence and warns us that we could see another false-flag event to justify the invasion of a Russian enclave. Remember how the Nazi capitalists used the Gleiwitz incident to invade Poland which started WWII?

...examine a map of the Baltic. There, very discretely, lies Kaliningrad. A small enclave of half a million people belonging to Russia.  It used to be Königsburg, a part of Germany, lost in the Second World War. Wedged between Poland and Lithuania, it is already hit by damage to its trade with the E.U. resulting from U.S.-imposed sanctions. The prospect of recuperating Kaliningrad/Königsberg through some manipulated incident could be a factor in the present official German anti-Russian position, which goes against German economic interests and about half of German public opinion.

A war to conquer Kaliningrad would be started by some contrived “international crisis” to “respond” to.

FRACKING AMERICA: Visualizing the Virus (Is it Worth It?)

Click here if you wish to access the original post from the Post Carbon Institute. 

If you have any doubts about the extravagant claims emanating from corporate media about the oil bonanza from shale fracking, then regard this 1:44m video as only an introduction to a wealth of information from shalebubble.org. These wild claims are another manifestation of the delusional thinking of ruling capitalist elites whose system requires constant growth to exist. 

Those who are so thoroughly addicted to the power and wealth supplied by their suicidal system of capitalism will not hesitate to secure their fixes regardless of the catastrophic effects these operations will have on our climate, the environment, and us. Those of us in the Ninety-Nine Percent and others in the One Percent who are not yet hopelessly addicted must become informed on this issue simply because the future of succeeding generations of our species is at stake--which happen to be your children, grandchildren, etc.

They Knew It Was Illegal

Click here to access article by John Sifton from Just Security.

...the most important revelation in the report [Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture] is not about the torture itself but rather about the legal culpability of the CIA. The report contains a key passage on page 33 revealing that senior lawyers at the CIA in mid 2002, at the very beginning of the CIA’s program, drafted a letter to the Attorney General in which it is expressly acknowledged that the interrogation tactics that came to be known as “enhanced interrogation techniques” violated the US torture statute. The draft letter requested that the Attorney General provide the CIA with “a formal declination of prosecution, in advance”—basically, a promise not to prosecute, or immunity. The document was shared even with CIA interrogators involved in the nascent program. From the beginning, in other words, key CIA officials were well aware that these techniques were clearly unlawful.

People need to understand that in any class-structured society, the ruling class is essentially above the law, unless a member (such as Bernie Madoff) does harm to other members of the ruling class. Of course, for public consumption they use any method they can to cover their law-breaking with some patina of legality such as a "formal declination of prosecution". In the end the prosecution of law-breakers only applies to us who lie below the ruling class; and the more below we lie, the more prosecution we experience. In other words, the "rule of law" only applies to us, the Ninety-Nine Percent, to insure that we behave according the laws of the ruling class.

A Speech For Our Time

Click here if you wish to access this 3:37m video from the original posting by Don Quijones of Raging Bull-Shit.

The video is an excerpt from "The Great Dictator" film by Charles Chaplin. Quijones writes as an introduction:

In this topsy-turvy world where leadership is treated and studied as a science but good leaders are thinner on the ground than ever before, perhaps it’s only fitting that one of the great speeches for our time was written long before our time. Seventy-two years ago, to be precise, during one of humanity’s darkest moments – the Second World War – and, what’s more, by one of history’s greatest comic geniuses.

Remember this was during a time before WWII when Anglo-American ruling classes had such mixed feelings about their support of Nazis (for more details, read my commentary here). After all, the Nazis were vigorously moving against organized labor and had plans to convert that heretical nation, the Soviet Union, into Nazi "lebensraum". Despite the enormous popularity of Chaplin's performances, ruling class media and enforcement agencies immediately started attacking him with smear campaigns and legal charges. As a result, he fled to Switzerland. This is how a rather conservative entry in Wikipedia describes it:

The Great Dictator spent a year in production, and was released in October 1940. There was a vast amount of publicity around the film, with a critic for the New York Times calling it "the most eagerly awaited picture of the year", and it was one of the biggest money-makers of the era. The ending was unpopular, however, and generated controversy. Chaplin concluded the film with a six-minute speech in which he looked into the camera and professed his personal beliefs. Charles J. Maland has identified this overt preaching as triggering a decline in Chaplin's popularity, and writes, "Henceforth, no movie fan would ever be able to separate the dimension of politics from [his] star image". The Great Dictator received five Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay and Best Actor.

In the mid-1940s, Chaplin was involved in a series of trials that occupied most of his time and significantly affected his public image. The troubles stemmed from his affair with an aspirant actress named Joan Barry, with whom he was involved intermittently between June 1941 and the autumn of 1942. Barry, who displayed obsessive behaviour and was twice arrested after they separated, reappeared the following year and announced that she was pregnant with Chaplin's child. As Chaplin denied the claim, Barry filed a paternity suit against him.

The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), J. Edgar Hoover, who had long been suspicious of Chaplin's political leanings, used the opportunity to generate negative publicity around him. As part of a smear campaign to damage Chaplin's image, the FBI named him in four indictments related to the Barry case. Most serious of these was an alleged violation of the Mann Act, which prohibits the transportation of women across state boundaries for sexual purposes. The historian Otto Friedrich has called this an "absurd prosecution" of an "ancient statute", yet if Chaplin was found guilty, he faced 23 years in jail. Three charges lacked sufficient evidence to proceed to court, but the Mann Act trial began in March 1944. Chaplin was acquitted two weeks later. The case was frequently headline news, with Newsweek calling it the "biggest public relations scandal since the Fatty Arbuckle murder trial in 1921."

This stirring video excerpt inspired me to think how life could be in a post-capitalist society. One benefit is clear to me. With all the labor saving devices we have created and without being forced to produce all kinds of junk we don't need, we would have so much time to devote to our families and others, to our education, and to restore to health the damage their capitalist system has done to the environment. 

Production for our capitalist masters has been used to accumulate wealth and, most especially,  power over us for the benefit of these tiny ruling classes. Naturally, what has followed in the wake of their rule has been endless wars, widespread poverty, periodic collapses of our economies, all sorts of social problems, and extensive damage to our ecosystem. If we could replace their obsessive production with our production for actual human needs, we would enjoy so much real abundance in our daily lives.

Is Russell Brand right, do we need a revolution?

Click here to access article by Dan Poulton from CounterFire (Britain).

I was pleasantly surprised to find this in a British website which I've always regarded as politically soft left-wing. Maybe its an encouraging sign that "the times they are a changin'".

If we want to end a system based on violence, the capitalist system, we need to organise the struggle on a mass basis and never surrender our self-activity in the name of 'peace', 'law and order' and all the other false friends of progress. To throw away the gains of a revolution because of a moral injunction against violence would be in itself immoral.

Russell Brand is unique in that here is a celebrity who openly proselytizes for system change.

Poulton notes that views like this "...explains the otherwise baffling fury and derision with which Brand is met, even from the liberal media like the Guardian and the Independent."

Censhorship and Detention in Egypt, a personal account

Click here to access the introduction to an article from Jadaliyya.

I was impressed by the enormous difficulties faced by an activist in Egypt, one of the favorite dictatorships of the Empire in the Middle East. If you think activists in the US face difficulties, read this introduction. (I didn't listen to the interview or read the transcript of the interview with the Egyptian activist, Alaa Abd El Fattah.)

Alaa Abd El Fattah is a writer, programmer, community organizer and activist who constantly generates new meanings to the notion of activism. 

Subjugating Arab World: Top NATO Body In Jordan

Click here to access NATO article posted by Rick Rozoff from Stop NATO.

As an introduction to the NATO article, Rozoff writes:

NATO has already identified Libya as a future member of the Mediterranean Dialogue with, if the West and its Persian Gulf allies succeed in their designs to overthrow the government of Syria, that country and Lebanon to follow, thereby making the entire Mediterranean Sea Basin NATO’s uncontested territory.

Are we ready for the twilight of neoliberalism?

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

Dolack introduces and reviews a new book entitled We Make Our Own History: Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism by professors Laurence Cox and Alf Gunvald Nilsen. Although the professors use academic language, which is to be expected, they demonstrate an accurate knowledge of what is needed by the Ninety-Nine Percent to deliver them from the evil of capitalist assaults on the world's working people and the environment. It appears to me that they have much to contribute to the advance of a people's movement grounded thoroughly in the grassroots, and one capable of overthrowing the disastrous rule of a tiny, advantaged segment of people known as capitalists. For example, Dolack writes:

Learning from one another, not blindly following

How then will this logjam be broken? As no movement, organization or leader has a monopoly of ideas, Professors Cox and Nilsen envision a “movement of movements”: The coming together of independent movements without the intention of submitting to the leadership of any single party or of privileging narrow definitions of working class interests. This necessitates not only learning from one another to increase the body of knowledge that can be drawn upon but also learning from the past. It also stresses the full incorporation of struggles against racism, sexism and all other forms of oppression.

Some Torture Facts: Revelations from the Recent SSCI Report on the CIA Detention and Interrogation Program

Click here to access article by Marcy Wheeler via Jadaliyya. (Note: I am making an exception to my rule that posting of articles must be from their primary websites. In this case Wheeler's posting appears to assume an audience who are well-informed of her previous work. Jadaliyya's editors fill in a lot of the background information and Wheeler's use of abbreviations to make the article much clearer.)

Wheeler and Jadaliyya should be congratulated for posting this article which exposes so many lies, both past and present, to understand how real "evil-doers" in our ruling class were allowed to use torture in our "land of the free, and the home of the brave." 

The post also provides more evidence that our official government institutions are controlled by a hidden government which, as I have frequently argued, is controlled by the highest levels of the ruling capitalist class. The Senate committee's report on torture only came about because more sensitive collaborating liberal members in the official government (like other liberals who find torture and war crimes repugnant) found the use of torture too much for them to tolerate. Nevertheless, it's clear that they went out of their way to assure members of the hidden government that they will fully cooperate to see that no legal actions are taken against anyone for these criminal actions. However, it must be admitted that this "cooperation" was not only from their common class interests, but out of fear of the people who, after all, murdered President John Kennedy, his brother Robert, and Martin Luther King among others.

Self Defense for Radicals

Click here to access article by Mickey Z. from World News Trust.

I love this short video because it cuts through all the crap we activists in the US have been indoctrinated to believe: non-violence is the highest virtue that activists should strive for (of course, this doesn't apply to other Americans, most especially to ruling class enforcers),  voting for a candidate supplied by the ruling class can really change things, and such actions as holding a candle-light vigil are most appropriate when confronted with threats to our lives. 

It's obvious why we have been indoctrinated to believe these things: the ruling class fears violence, which they continually use against others, being used against them. This is definitely not to argue that violence is the first or best choice in all situations, but we must recognize that there are circumstances which make it a necessary response. We must be prepared to use it when circumstances justify its use. The right to use violence to defend oneself, or our family, friends, and neighbors, or any human being that is incapable of defending themselves from violence is an absolute human right.

The CIA torture report and the crisis of legitimacy in the United States

Click here to access article by Tom Carter from The Greanville Post.

(This posting actually contains two articles, one by Carter who usually writes for World Socialist Web Site and the other by Ackerman who writes for The Guardian. I much prefer Carter's because it deals with much wider political implications, while Ackerman's writing for The Guardian is understandably much narrower.)

The long delayed "torture report" by the Senate Intelligence committee chaired by Feinstein was released today. To be clear, it is not the entire report of 6200 pages, but a 500 page heavily redacted summary of it. Although it was completed in December 2012, it was delayed obviously because of the threat it poses for the legitimacy of the ruling class government. While the rough details have leaked out long ago and are widely known about CIA torture, this is an official recognition that is likely to have even more of an impact on those who like to believe in fairy tale governments and believe everything they read or see in mainstream media. Of course, this is the main concern of our ruling masters. They still depend on the gullible to support their fake democracy; however if they lose this support, they will not hesitate to bring their well developed police state apparatus into operation--or at least, they will attempt to do so.

Enough of my comments--please read Carter's outstanding essay.

The implications for American imperialist foreign policy are obvious. The government of the United States asserts the power to invade, bomb and carry out “humanitarian intervention” and “regime-change” anywhere in the world in the name of protecting “human rights.” Meanwhile, top military, civilian and intelligence officials of that same country are implicated in the gravest violations of human rights, as well as in conspiracies to cover up those crimes—and nobody has been held accountable. 

 

And, I must add, nobody will be held accountable. No enforcers of class rule is ever held accountable as we have recently seen domestically with the murder and assaults on African-Americans.

Treasury Warns Congress (and Investors): This Financial Creature Could Sink the System

Click here to access article by Wolf Richter from Wolf Street.

I'm a bit out of my league when it comes to the endless gambling methods that capitalists have created to accumulate ever more wealth and power. And, I have lingering doubts about Richter's judgement after gleaning from his articles that he seems to be a "goldbug", and I regard gold as an archaic fetish. But, assuming his data are correct, this article made sense to me. Then I checked with "Yves Smith's" blog and found that she had posted this same article at the top of her list today. Because I have a lot of respect for her analysis of financial issues and for her integrity, I decided to post this article.

According to Richter's data and analysis, the banks are once again gambling on loans which they package together and refer to them with the fancy name "Collateralized Loan Obligations" and sell them apparently to gullible investors. This time the loans consist of what he describes as "leveraged loans...issued by junk-rated corporations already burdened by a large load of debt." He has come up with data that suggests the banks have blown an even bigger bubble than what they did with the mortgage scam and thereby threatening another collapse of their capitalist economy.

The Corporate Lobby Tour

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

Thanks, once again, to "Don Quijones" for posting this 10:24m video explaining basically how the centralized government of the European Union actually works. What a marvelous coincidence--it looks like it functions just like our government here in the US! (sarcasm) Of course, it is no coincidence. 

The European Union was constructed by US capitalists with their British counterparts and a few other European capitalists after what was left of Europe following WWII. These people made certain that no one interfered with their plans (Operation Gladio) to build what has now become an Empire complete with its own army called NATO. And now the capitalist army is on the march to the east much like Nazi Germany before and during WWII. (I'm sure this is just another coincidence.) If you have any doubts about their intentions, see this, this, and this.

Anyway, back to the video. I have only one criticism of it. Towards the end the narrator implies that the simple solution is for ordinary Europeans to speak up. I'm afraid this is very naive. This advice is at least 25 years too late. It will take a lot more to change things...something like a revolution.

 

Israel’s Secret Plan for a "Second Israel" in Ukraine

Click here to access article by Wayne Madsen from Strategic Culture Foundation.

By following Israeli media, Madsen has come upon a rather surprising discovery pertaining to Zionist machinations involving Ukraine. To me, it reflects the deep racist thinking of at least some Zionists and reminds me so much of the Nazi proclivity to see German identity in racist terms--remember the Aryans?

...some Zionists see in Ukraine a possible second Israel. 

Slain MassMutual Executive Held Wall Street “Trade Secrets”

Click here to access article by Pam Martens and Russ Martens from Wall Street on Parade.

It seems absolutely amazing to me that capitalists have created so many betting opportunities in their capitalist casino. The Martens in this piece have just come up with another one that appears so bizarre that it is hard to imagine being tolerated in a civilized society. I'm referring to Bank-Owned Life Insurance policies that they take out on their workers. It seems that with the number of deaths of bank employees that banks are making a "killing" (excuse the pun) from this tax exempt income. While trying to get information about this scam through the Freedom of Information Act, the Martens were told that it's a secret!

Deception and Democracy: Convincing the Masses to Help the Rich

Click here to access article by Asad Zaman from World Economics Association.

By reviewing the history of government bailouts of the banks, Zaman examines the use of deceptive propaganda to manage the consent of the Ninety-Nine Percent. Although his point is well taken, I think he overstates the use of only one weapon that our ruling masters use against us while pursuing their interests. They have many weapons.

There is widespread agreement on the proposition that people act according to their self-interest. Marx went further to suggest that people subscribe to ideologies conforming to their class interests. For example, agricultural laborers would believe in land reforms, while big landlords would believe that small farms are inefficient. Gradually the weight of strong empirical evidence has led me to understanding that this proposition is false. Large segments of the population can be brought to believe in, and act according to, ideologies extremely harmful to their self interest.

Hunger Games: Western Terror Warriors Spurn Their Innocent Victims

Click here to access article by Chris Floyd from Empire Burlesque. 

This is a bit of a rant, but a well justified one for those of us who take the time and effort required to find out what is really happening in the world. It's hard not to howl with rage against the profiteers in Wall Street who are running amok throughout the world creating chaos, murders, and mayhem on an unprecedented scale while disguising their crimes with "humanitarian" rhetoric.

Talking Turkey: Putin Gobsmacks Obama and Euro-Leaders with Surprise Gas Deal

Click here to access article by Mike Whitney from CounterPunch. 

On Monday [Dec. 1], Russian President Vladimir Putin clinched a groundbreaking deal with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan that will strengthen economic ties between the two nations and make Turkey the major hub for Russian gas in the region. Under the terms of the agreement, Russia will pump additional natural gas to locations in central Turkey and to a “hub at the Turkish-Greek border” which will eventually provide Putin with backdoor access to the lucrative EU market, although Turkey will serve as the critical intermediary. The move creates a de facto Russo-Turkey alliance that could shift the regional balance of power decisively in Moscow’s favor, thus creating another formidable hurtle for Washington’s “pivot to Asia” strategy.

Whitney explains the background that unexpectedly turned Erdoğan against Empire strategies to separate Europe from Russia. This background pertains to another CIA project to support subversion and their use of terrorism referred to by the FBI as Gladio B in Central Asia, and it appears that one important component of this project is the well-funded Gulen Movement created by the CIA. (He only makes superficial reference to the tons of information regarding the Gulen Movement that the courageous Turkish specialist and FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds has made available to us.) It seems that Erdoğan and many others throughout Eurasia do not like what the CIA operations are doing. (Edmond's sleuthing efforts also turned up CIA fingerprints in the Boston Bombing incident.) Hence, Erdoğan has increasingly found himself at odds with the CIA which is a key component of our "deep state" that really determines what happens in our "democracy", throughout the Empire, and the world.

Did Israel's 'Democracy' become just Jewish?

Click here to access article by Ludwig Watzal from Media with Conscience.

66 years after the establishment of the State of Israel, even the most ubiquitous term employed to describe the political nature of Israel as a "Jewish democratic state" is no longer valid. The Netanyahu government and its right-wing coalition partners are preparing a law, which will exclusively define Israel as a "Jewish State" for the "Jewish people". For independent observers, who do not wear rose-colored Zionist propaganda glasses, Israel was never a democracy in the classical Western sense of the term, but always a Jewish democracy or a democracy sui generis, i. e. full democratic rights for Jews only.

I hope it passes so that they can no longer pretend to be a "democracy".

The Federal Reserve Is At The Heart Of The Debt Enslavement System That Dominates Our Lives

Click here to access article by Michael Snyder from The Economic Collapse.

Today, some forms of slavery have been outlawed, but one of the most insidious forms is more pervasive than ever.  It is called debt, and virtually every major decision of our lives involves more of it.

Snyder goes over some basic facts about how the current ruling class cleverly keeps us all in bondage, the modern era's disguised form of slavery.

I would like to add just two points which are left unstated in this article about ruling class control of our money. First, Snyder accurately states that the Federal Reserve is owned by private banks. So, what we have is an operation by the elite of the One Percent to disguise their control of our money behind the facade of what appears to be a government institution, the "Federal Reserve"; and then they add another layer of deception by having private banks "own" the Federal Reserve. This arrangement, in turn, hides the fact that these private banks are owned by the One Percent. Thus, we have this ruling class which really constitutes .01 of the 1% of the US population creating money "out of thin air", loaning it to our government, which is essentially the taxpayers of the US, and charging interest on this money. (Surely, you must know by now that the rich pay very little taxes.) Incidentally, since the recent collapse of the economy caused by banks packaging and selling home mortgages, which were obtained through fraudulent practices, the Fed has been giving a lot of this money away to the banks, which they own, interest-free to rescue them from bankruptcy.

Second, I'd like to make clear how this system, the formal origins of which go back to the 17th century in Holland and Britain, has worked its magic on behalf of the ruling capitalist classes. It is basically because this corresponded with the acceleration of productivity made possible by the era of Enlightenment when science and the scientific method created an understanding of the physical forces that shape our world. This, in turn, produced many kinds of machines which were powered first by water, then by coal, and then productivity really took off when humanity learned how to use fossil fuels to supply energy to the evermore sophisticated machinery.

This era witnessed a huge and accelerating transformation of nature's resources into goods under a system of profit for those who owned the machines. Such people are known as capitalists. This system produced vast amounts of wealth and most of this was accumulated by this tiny class of people. Wealth is readily transformed into political power which is one of the most addictive substances known to humans. 

One glaring fact of human life, which capitalists must deny because such a fact undermines their faith in the system, which is the goose that lays so many eggs for them, is that we live on a finite planet. Up till this point in the story of humans this tiny class could count on the growth of economies to feed their addiction to wealth/power. Do you see where this is going? Now that they are approaching the limits of Earth's resource limits, the capitalist ruling class with their empire of client states and their NATO army are now engaging in land and resource grabbing more than ever before. This is why we are seeing so many wars and subversion of states like Ukraine. This is why we have seen so many cutbacks in services that affect the public. To make their wars and austerity policies acceptable to people in the US where their home base is largely located, they must constantly deceive the American people as to what they are doing. They do this through their control of media, education, and even entertainment. 

Added to the threat of never-ending wars and police states is the looming threat of climate destabilization due to the use of fossil fuels. They've lied about this also until the evidence recently became so overwhelming that they can no longer deny it. Now they engage in such fantasies as migration to other planets and fueling their engines of production with some new exotic fuel such a fusion power.

When People Are Property

Click here to access article by Raven Rakia from Medium. 

I think that this article contributes much to the understanding of the now widespread awareness of racialized police practices that have resulted in many recent killings of African-Americans by police whom the "justice" system refuses to prosecute.

The title of the article refers to a theory on deteriorating property that is not tended to: “one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows cost nothing.” The idea is that a broken window should therefore be replaced or fixed. Wilson and Kelling then apply this theory about damaged property to living and breathing human beings: “the unchecked panhandler is, in effect, the first broken window.”

Here is a condensation of the longer article:

In 1982, George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson introduced the Broken Windows Theory to a national audience with an article published in The Atlantic Monthly. Theorizing about policing in low-income, inner-city, and predominantly black neighborhoods, Kelling and Wilson put forth an argument that cracking down on public disturbances and petty crimes with foot patrol officers would stop larger, more violent crimes from occurring. The essay [was]...funded by the Police Foundation — created by the Ford Foundation in 1970.

.... Over the years, police departments have given it different names: quality of life policing, community policing, hot spot policing, stop and frisk, neighborhood policing, and zero tolerance policing, to name a few. In the comfort of criminal justice classes and textbooks, these descriptions each have a specific definition. However, in practice over the past 30 years, these tactics mirror one another in their reliance on racial profiling and cracking down on petty crimes and ‘disorder’ to yield the same result: criminalizing the poor, black and brown.

If you really want to understand one version of a racialized police practice--"stop and frisk", I suggest you read this brief article entitled "NYPD Stop And Frisks: 15 Shocking Facts About A Controversial Program" before proceeding.  

.... Conveniently, both stop and frisk and the broken windows theory call for the policing of young, black people. For stop and frisk, they claim they’re looking for guns; for broken windows, they claim they’re keeping the order. After Mayor De Blasio was elected on his anti-stop and frisk stance, he appointed William Bratton as police commissioner at the beginning of the year and Bratton returned to his old job.

.... Thirty years later, the power of broken windows policing to sustain mass incarceration and preserve the system of control and ownership indefinitely is harrowing. Michelle Alexander conceived the term “the invisible cage” to describe the life that a person convicted of a felony lives once out of prison:

“the unique set of criminal sanctions that are imposed on individuals after they step outside of the prison gates…These laws operate collectively to ensure the vast majority of convicted offenders will never integrate into mainstream, white society. They will be discriminated against, legally, for the rest of their lives — denied employment, housing, education and public benefits. Unable to surmount these obstacles most will eventually return to prison and then be released again, caught in a closed circuit of perpetual marginality.”

furthermore, those on probation and parole,

“are at increased risk of arrest because their lives are governed by additional rules that do not apply to everyone else. Myriad restrictions on their travel and behavior (such as prohibition on associating with other felons), as well as various requirements of probation and parole (such as paying fines and meeting with probation officers), create opportunities for arrest. Violation of these special rules [can result in a warrant issued for one’s arrest and] can land someone right back in prison.”

The super-rich are feeding off the U.S. and killing it

Click here to access article by Paul A. Alter from Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. 

Germany had the financial backing of the Krupp family [and the Bush family, the Dulles brothers, etc]; we’ve got the Koch family. Germany had Goebbels to spew out the propaganda; we’ve got Rupert Murdoch. Germany had Hitler; we’re waiting. But the last election, putting the nation even more firmly into the hands of the political party owned and operated by the super-rich parasites, is a virtual guarantee that the man on the white horse will appear.

Worse yet in American history of the 1930s was a coup attempt by the right-wing of the US ruling class to take over the US government. However, thanks to a loyal American general the coup was stopped. Also, it appears that the US ruling financial and industrial class of the 1930s were not sufficiently ready for capitalism's pure political form of class rule--fascism. They still preferred working their influence through the filters of their bourgeois democratic institutions: their version of "democracy" and "the rule of (their) law". Because the liberal wing of the capitalist ruling class was very sympathetic to the coup plans, they went to extreme lengths to cover it up and protect those members of their class who supported it.

However, what Prescott Bush and associated ilk failed to do in the 1930s, his son and grandson and associated ilk did accomplish in the following 80 years. We now have what these early plotters wanted: a hidden government (aka deep state or shadow government) that is directing the affairs of our nation using the official government as an elaborate facade much like you see in Hollywood westerns to keep the gullible public believing that they have democracy and a legitimate rule of law. However, we still haven't arrived at overt fascism. 

For example, I couldn't be maintaining this blog if we did have overt fascism. Still, maybe this blog and other similar ones are irrelevant as long as ruling class media can keep people in ignorance. I think that all the machinery of fascist rule are now in place just in case their fake democratic institutions and management of information fail to safeguard their interests in which case our ruling masters won't hesitate to use them.


(For more information, I suggest to start by reading The Plot to Seize the White House by Jules Archer and War Is a Racket by Gen. Smedley Butler. Or if you don't have time to read books, view this 29:12m video which captures much of this history in summary form. For an excellent discussion of bourgeois democracy in today's world, I recommend reading an article entitled "Corporate Oligarchy or People’s Democracy: Countering the Elite Agenda" by Ajamu Baraka.)

Capitalism: The Inner Battle

Click here to access article by Georgie Wingfield-Hayes posted in Occupy Wall Street. 

Capitalism is a ... constructed story, a collection of social perceptions that create a dominant world view. But that’s all it is—a world view.

 It’s easy to see capitalism as a system external to ourselves, but it’s much harder to acknowledge the stories we carry inside of ourselves that create and reinforce the values that sustain it.

Transforming capitalism requires that we step outside of ourselves and examine our own roles objectively. That’s never easy, but it can help to look through someone else’s eyes.

In the rest of the article he attempts to do precisely that, and I think he is quite successful.

Dirt: the Movie -- a film review

Click here to access article by Dr Stuart Jeanne Bramhall from her blog The Most Revolutionary Act.

(This former Seattle psychiatrist and civil rights activist is now a political refugee (from FBI harassment) who is now living and working in New Zealand.)  

New Proposal Would Provide Grand Juries with Eyes

Click here to access article by Andy Borowitz from The New Yorker. (satire)

On the heels of an initiative to provide police departments with body cameras, there is growing support for a plan to supply grand-jury members with eyes, advocates for the plan said on Wednesday.

Defending Dollar Imperialism

Click here to access article by Mike Whitney from CounterPunch.

I think that this blogger, also from Washington state (same as myself), has the best current grasp of the underlying Empire strategies behind Saudi Arabia's oil-price war. To accomplish this, he draws on the investigations of other important geopolitical analysts and adds his own contribution to the giant puzzle--support of the US dollar as the backbone that is propping up the US Empire. 

...gas [from the GCC) will also be denominated in dollars which will shore up demand for USDs thus perpetuating the petrodollar recycling system which creates a vast market for US debt and which helps to keep US stocks and bonds in the nosebleed section. And that’s what this is all about, preserving dollar supremacy by forcing nations to hold excessive amounts of USDs to use in their energy transactions and to service their dollar-denominated debts.

As long as Washington can control the world’s energy supplies and force the world to trade in dollars, it can spend well in excess of what it produces and not be held to account. It’s like having a credit card you never have to pay off.

Meanwhile, here in the US the media is providing cover for this strategy with stories about a price war against US shale oil producers to protect Saudi market share. As usual, this is nonsense to hide the real objectives: destroy Russia's economy, damage Iran's and others such as Venezuela, and secure the US dollar. While the price war will hurt smaller US oil companies, it must be kept in mind that there are many figures in the ruling class who are tied to major oil companies that see this as an opportunity to buy out the failing smaller oil companies at bargain prices.

Why the Guardian axed Nafeez Ahmed’s blog

Click here to access article by Jonathan Cook from his blog.

I've regarded Ahmed's Guardian articles as some of the most insightful in relation to Middle Eastern issues found in the blogosphere. Thus, I was not surprised to read this piece of news. Taking into consideration that Israel plays a key role in maintaining the Empire's interests in the Middle East, Cook explains why an Empire publication cannot allow too much insight to interfere with the interests of the Empire:

The problem with Israel is that its place in the global order – alongside the US – depends on it being a very sophisticated gun for hire. It keeps order and disorder in the Middle East at Washington’s behest and in return it gets to plunder the Palestinian territories and ethnically cleanse the native population. It’s a simple story but not one you can state anywhere in the mainstream because it questions not just a policy (the occupation) but Israel’s very nature and role as a colonial settler state. 

Although The Guardian allows more critical coverage of Israeli affairs than most mainstream media corporation, Ahmed strayed a bit too far from their protective bias toward Israel.

Given that Israel’s character, as a colonial settler state, is the story, the Guardian effectively never presents more than a fraction of the truth about the conflict. Because it never helps us understand what drives Israeli policy, it – along with the rest of the media – never offers us any idea how the conflict might be resolved.

And this is where Ahmed tripped up. Because his piece [arguing Israel's true motivation behind the recent Gaza invasion], as the Guardian’s editors doubtless quickly realised, implicated Israel’s character rather than just its policies. It violated a Guardian taboo.

Cook continues on by describing his own experiences with censorship at The Guardian.

(I signed up as a crowdfunder at $1/month to support his continued investigative journalism.) 

America’s dark imperial legacy: It goes much deeper than George W. Bush

Click here to access article by Robert W. McChesney from Salon.

It seems that after the publication of the book entitled Capital in the Twenty-First Century by the French sociologist, Thomas Piketty, all of a sudden it has become fashionable among North America's academics and leftists to make references to capitalism in a more critical fashion but without really examining the deadly dynamics that drives the system. 

One such person is McChesney who has recently authored the book Blowing the Roof off the Twenty-First Century: Media, Politics, and the Struggle for Post-Capitalist Democracy. Others on my list include such people as the economic historian Richard Smith (from New York, not to be confused with Richard A. Smith of the Institute for Policy Research & Development, London), Naomi Klein, and "Cassiodorus" (a pen-name).  I think that their critiques of capitalist society are muted because of their long experience in academia and their more immediate interests of protecting their careers from the threats of their capitalist overseers. They tend to hang-out online in websites such as the following: Climate&Capitalism, Daily Kos, TruthOut, MR Online, FireDogLake, and Salon.

Although I haven't read McChesney's new book, I offer this piece as a sample of this sort of critical thinking, and which might suggest a preview of what he offers in his book. Such a "radical" view, I argue, examines closely the trees while ignoring most of the dynamics of the forest. 

My critique of these critics is not intended to put them down, rather my intention is to see the weaknesses of their views and to strive for something better. I offer this criticism as a plea to especially young Americans that we must get serious about changing the system, if we are to survive. Either we get serious about overthrowing the system and establishing a socially just and sustainable system, or else we should prepare ourselves to descend into a living nightmare of fascism, wars, and catastrophic climate destabilization. Time is rapidly running out on humanity.

In this piece McChesney looks at our "dark imperial legacy" as originating with Charles E. (General Electric) Wilson who later became Sec. of Defense under Eisenhower. He throws in concepts like "military Keynesianism" to dress up his essay in academic jargon, references some radical authors, offers two quotes from other observers making reference to a ruling class to give his essay some radical cachet, but otherwise ignores an overview of the inherent and compulsive drive to power that the system of capitalism inculcates in those who practice capitalism. Thus, the reader is left to imagine that individuals such as Charles Wilson and George Bush are to blame for aberrations in a system that is basically sound. Hence, it only needs to be reformed to make it function right.

Auditioning for Wall Street

Click here to access article by Pam Martens and Russ Martens from Wall Street on Parade. 

Yesterday, Wall Street on Parade reported on how the corrupt tentacles of Wall Street have engulfed the mindset of our newly minted law school graduates.

Getting one’s resume noticed from those of a stack of competitors previously meant using a good grade ivory linen stock instead of cheap white copy paper. Today, the word is apparently out that getting one’s resume noticed at a major Wall Street bank requires advertising one’s special knack, inside track, or secret sauce for ripping off society for the profit advantage of the big dogs on Wall Street.

Israel's Secret

Click here to access article by David Swanson from War Is a Crime.

Swanson provides an excellent introduction to a new film entitled "On the Side of the Road" to depict Israeli holocaust of Palestinians by drawing on our own history of extermination of native Americans. This history is kept secret from Israeli youth as is our own history regarding native Americans.

Israel is that imagined United States, just formed in our grandparents' day, two-thirds of the people driven out or killed, one-third remaining but treated as sub-human. Israel is that place that must tell forceful lies to erase a past that is never really past. Kids grow up in Israel not knowing. We in the United States, whose government gives Israel billions of dollars worth of free weapons every year with which to continue the killing (weapons with names like Apache and Black Hawk), grow up not knowing. We all look at the "peace process," this endless charade of decades, and deem it inscrutable, because we've been educated to be incapable of knowing what the Palestinians want even as they shout it and sing it and chant it: they want to return to their homes.

The Biggest Scandal in America Is Its Controlled Press

Click here to access article by Eric Zuesse from RINF Alternative News.

I have remarked on this issue for years and also argued the necessity of an organized alternative media controlled by the grassroots. So, I welcome others who are now becoming aware of the controlled nature of mainstream media. I have a perspective of 60 years as an adult activist who started noticing blatantly skewed monolithic mainstream media coverage when the latter were covering issues related to the Cuban government after their revolution in 1959. Of course, I was keenly aware that the media under ownership and sponsorship of major corporations have always to a more limited extent provided biased coverage, however this trend of propaganda skewed coverage increased during the Vietnam War, and accelerated most dramatically since 9/11. What I now see today are symptoms which suggest that major media are under tightly organized and centralized control, something like what Orwell described as the "Ministry of Truth" in Nineteen Eighty-Four. 

So, the question remains as to how major media is so well managed and coordinated to produce such monolithic propaganda. I read in Sibel Edmond's recently published outstanding book of political fiction, The Lone Gladio, in which she has CIA personnel located in every major media outlet. This makes complete sense to me because there have been many reports in the past of journalists paid by the CIA in such books as The Mighty Wurlitzer by Hugh Wilford. On pages 226-227 he writes:

Estimates of the number f U.S. reporters who carried out secret assignments for the CIA vary: in 1973, the Agency itself conceded,in the face of questioning from newspaper publishers, a figure of "some three dozen"; a congressional inquiry conducted in 1976 concluded that the total was more like fifty; a year later, Carl Bernstein calculated that as many as four hundred American journalist had worked for the CIA sin 1952.

Now, I think it is likely that CIA personnel sit at the highest levels of management in media corporations to insure that the organizations report the news "correctly".

Police in Utah kill more people than gang members do

Click here to access article by German Lopez from Vox.

There's not much reliable data on how often police kill civilians nationwide. As my colleague Dara Lind explained, the data collected by the FBI on police shootings should be treated as a minimum count, since it's voluntary and therefore incomplete. But the data does give a good idea of who is targeted by police — and there are some clear racial disparities.

I also recommend this article accurately entitled "Corporate-Fascist America: Former Philadelphia Police Captain Says Cops Are Mercenaries for Corporations".

Arms or Diplomacy: U.S. Foreign Policy Planners Divided over Ukraine Strategy

Click here to access article by Steven MacMillan from New Eastern Outlook.

I think that MacMillan overstates his argument. Aside from the two influential people he mentioned, Kissinger and Mearsheimer, I haven't seen any other evidence of division. To be sure, I was surprised to read their dissenting opinions in ruling class oriented publications, but I think they constitute a minority of two.

With no end in sight for a lasting resolution to the crisis in Ukraine following the Western coup in Kiev, U.S. strategists are increasingly becoming polarised over future policy in the region. The belligerent and antagonistic policies of the war-hungry neoconservative movement are pushing the world closer to war with Russia, while other major geopolitical figures in Washington are advocating a de-escalation of the situation and an inclusion of Russia in serious dialogue.

The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy

Click here to access article by Prof. Edward Curtin from Global Research. 

With The 2001 Anthrax Deception, Professor Graeme MacQueen, founding Director of the Center for Peace Studies at McMaster University, calls us back to a careful reconsideration of the anthrax attacks. It is an eloquent and pellucid lesson in inductive reasoning and deserves to stand with David Ray Griffin’s brilliant multi-volume dissection of the truth of that tragic September 11th. MacQueen makes a powerful case for the linkage of both events, a tie that binds both to insider elements deep within the U.S. government, perhaps in coordination with foreign elements.

Inequality and Liberal Democracy: A Disturbing Association

Click here to access article by Walden Bello from TeleSur. 

I think that this is a very important essay by a scholar whose focus as a sociologist has been on the social-economic arrangements of capitalist society. He has also the experience of serving in a "liberal democratic" institution, the Philippine Congress. 

Notice that I put "liberal democratic" in quotes. I absolutely hate the terms used by capitalist authorities to describe their system. This is because all of their so-called "democratic" forms have been used only to hide the actual realities of capitalist class rule, and one important reality is the inequality that the system creates as recently exposed by another sociologist, Piketty. They must of necessity hide these realities behind a huge facade which consists of such verbiage, false ideas, and capitalist values. These are inculcated in all of us by comprehensive indoctrination in their educational institutions and reinforced daily by their corporate media coverage of information, and even experienced in a more subtle form in our entertainment. 

For example, let us consider only one important component of this brainwashing--consumerism. This emphasis is because capitalism's main focus is about the accumulation of wealth and its concomitant power through the compulsive production of goods for consumption. The production of goods to meet material needs has becomes irrelevant. Hence, the institution of advertising to drive consumption. Have you noticed the ubiquitous messages urging you to shop? Shopping has become a requirement of being a good citizen especially during this time of year. 

Of course, another way to create demand for goods is to destroy those already produced through war. We have seen, and are now seeing plenty of that in this age of never-ending wars.

In this essay Bello has clearly demonstrated that he has transcended this brainwashing experience. The rest of us must also, if we are to prevent the coming holocaust of humanity.

...liberal democratic systems are ideal for the economic elites, for they are programmed with periodic electoral exercises that promote the illusion of equality, thus granting the system an aura of legitimacy, while subverting equality in practice, through money politics, the law, and the workings of the market.  The old Marxist term “bourgeois democracy” is still the best description for this democratic regime. [my emphasis]

To reverse the process requires not just an alternative economic program based on justice, equity, and ecological stability but a new democratic regime to replace the liberal democratic regime that has become so vulnerable to elite and foreign capture.

So, I don't understand why he, and others like him, continue to use capitalist terms which hide the realities which he now recognizes. Part of the process of overcoming our brainwashing is to use terms that reveal these realities rather than hide them.

Oil Price Crashes, Who Really Wins?

Click here to access article by Bill Holter from Global Research. 

To be clear, this is another piece of speculation on the dramatic oil game that Saudi Arabia is playing. Given that their crashing of oil prices will have major and unpredictable effects in various countries (see this, for example) throughout the world, it is imperative that we try to understand this phenomenon. I think that this could very well be a world changing event.

I’d like to address the outright crash of the oil market this past week.  The hope was the Saudis would cut back on production to stabilize prices somewhere in the $80+ range.  This was not to be as Saudi Arabia announced no cutback whatsoever …oil then fell over 10% in one day on Friday and actually traded to a $65 handle.  First and most importantly, oil is THE biggest and most widely used commodity on the planet.  For a market of this importance to outright crash or rise over 10% in one day, unintended consequences not seen or anticipated can be expected at some point.  

U.S. shootings by police, prison conditions trouble U.N.

Click here to access article by John Zarocostas from McClatchy news service.

This piece represents a sign of the times that we are now in. Isn't ironic that the US invades, or it sponsors others to invade, other "evil-doer" states for "humanitarian" reasons? Well, if you hadn't noticed, we are now living in Orwellian times. 

Such a report would have been unheard of in my youth. It is just one more indication of the police state that the United States of America has evolved into. Like the proverbial boiling frog who while in a pot of warm water hasn't noticed the gradual heating of the water to its near boiling temperature, so have we, the American people, reached this extreme state of affairs. 

A U.N. anti-torture panel that’s investigating the United States said Friday that it was deeply concerned by what it described as the high incidence of police brutality and shootings--especially against African-Americans--in the U.S., was troubled by what it called harsh conditions in many prisons and was worried about the interrogation methods used on detainees.

Forget Zombies. The Real Threat to Humanity Is Robots

Click here to access article by Gar Smith from Global Research.

Smith alerts us to a rapidly growing threat to working people in this excellent and timely article.

Diligent observers of new technology predict the Advent of the Automaton will have an impact as great—or greater—than the rise of Industrial Agriculture or the invention of the Internet.  

Under capitalism what could be a blessing for all people is turned into a major threat for all people...except for those who own the machines. Unfortunately, Smith's shortsightedness sheds no light on the real solution to this contradiction: a revolutionary rearrangement of the economy to serve people instead of merely a tiny segment known as investors or capitalists.

And worse still, the Pentagon is getting into the act by imagining and planning robot wars.

Will Russia, Germany save Europe from war?

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

To look on the world as a global chess game played by various ruling classes always seems insane to me. After further reflection, I declare that such a view is a form of insanity. 

But after even more reflection, I have to admit that we are living in an insane world in which the Ninety-Nine Percent passively accept rule by elites who control nuclear weapons and have their own interests apart from the rest of us. This is the fundamental insanity driving all the others. Hence, the only ultimate solution is radical democracy in which ordinary people have control of their communities and societies that includes the control of their economies. 

However, until that times comes--if ever--we must consider the logic of an insane world. Escobar is doing exactly that in this article. Yet, as Escobar argues that there is a kind of balance of terror which will save the world of humanity a few more years, I know that inevitably there will be a time when the balance of terror (or, at least the perception) will favor one set of elites over others. Then we will be in deep doo-doo.

Are the United States, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Russia on a mad spiral leading to yet another war in Europe? Is it inevitable? Far from it.

The Broader Implications Of The Events In Ferguson, Mo.

Click here if you wish to access the cartoon by Gregory Crawford directly from World News Trust. 

Of course, the real "death figure" is the rule by a tiny elite whose arrangement of society includes their private ownership of the economy which, in turn, gives them power over all institutions including the police and courts. It is in their interest to promote racism, to instill fear in some people from the threat of others, as a strategy to divide and control the American people. 

After all, it worked very well in the Middle East where Sunnis and Shias have been killing each other since the US invasion. The British found this useful in Ireland by pitting Catholics against Protestants, and in India by pitting Muslims against Hindus. It's an old strategy used by ruling classes down the ages.