Is Trump the Back Door Man for Henry A. Kissinger & Co?

Click here to access article by F. William Engdahl from New Eastern Outlook.

With Kissinger now in a unique relationship with President-elect Trump as shadow foreign policy adviser, with Kissinger allies Tillerson as Secretary of State and Mattis as Secretary of Defense, it is beginning to appear that the heavy hand of Kissinger and his version of British Balance of Power political manipulations is about to target China, as well as Iran, and to try to use Putin and Russia to destroy the genuine possibility of a counterweight to Western One World delusions, by fostering mistrust and bad blood between China and Russia and Iran.

Engdahl expands on his thesis that he argued in a November post entitled "The Dangerous Deception Called The Trump Presidency" by focusing on Kissinger's role to serve the powerful Rockefeller clan's interest in building what George Bush Sr. referred to as a "new world order" which is essentially the dominance of the US-led Empire. With his excellent understanding of history Engdahl reminds us of the extensive use of the "balance of power" strategy so often employed by the British ruling class to build the British Empire and to neutralize all opponents, and he argues the Kissinger and the current Rockefeller faction are influenced by exactly the same strategy to divide Russia and China.

My main problem with this argument is the continuing news coverage provided by corporate media that continues to engage in virulent attacks on Trump. It's as if corporate news producers get together everyday and see how they can gather together every scrap of information with which to defame Trump and delegitimize his presidency. I've never seen anything like it. Perhaps Engdahl, an American who resides in Germany, is not exposed to so much negative coverage of Trump and it does not figure in his calculations. None of his recent articles arguing this view seem to pose an alternate faction that I believe is led by those in control of the CIA and other "intelligence" agencies.

Engdahl's position is not that Trump was elected by some chicanery, but that the Rockefeller faction saw in him an excellent vehicle that they could use to appeal to wide sections of the American populace and promote their new world order policies. Thus they chose to back Trump. Referring to Trump's style of political campaign, Engdahl wrote his November's article an excellent parody of the performer Trump:

‘Ladies and gentlemen, It’s Showtime!’ Today we give you Donald Trump. He will tell you just what many of you want to hear. Trump the showman will tell you he will make America great again; Trump will say he will ship at least 3 million illegals back across the Rio Grande; Trump will introduce a bill to declare the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization; Trump will bring jobs back to America from China and other low wage countries; Trump will sit down with Putin and work out some kind of a deal to calm things down; Trump will scrap the Iran nuclear deal of Obama…

Often during this election campaign, which was more a Hollywood “D” grade movie than any honest debate of policies and ideas candidate Trump made statements that resonated with the “silent majority” of not only so-called blue collar workers, but also the disenfranchised middle class whose earnings have been declining in real terms since the 1970’s. Trump, like an earlier actor-President named Ronald Reagan, has a talent to make himself sound sincere.

There are three key events that come to mind that I think support Engdahl's thesis.

1) Zbigniew Brzezinski's startling essay entitled "Toward a Global Realignment" (because this can no longer be accessed at The American Interest website--access it here) which subtly argued that some sort of accommodation should be reached with at least one of the two nations. Brzezinski has always exhibited a fanatic anti-Russian attitude.

While no state is likely in the near future to match America’s economic-financial superiority, new weapons systems could suddenly endow some countries with the means to commit suicide in a joint tit-for-tat embrace with the United States, or even to prevail. Without going into speculative detail, the sudden acquisition by some state of the capacity to render America militarily inferior would spell the end of America’s global role. The result would most probably be global chaos. And that is why it behooves the United States to fashion a policy in which at least one of the two potentially threatening states becomes a partner in the quest for regional and then wider global stability, and thus in containing the least predictable but potentially the most likely rival to overreach. Currently, the more likely to overreach is Russia, but in the longer run it could be China.

2) The FBI's re-opening of their investigation about Clinton's alleged misuse of emails only eleven days before the election, and at that time the FBI was denying that Russian influence had any effect on the election. I think that this event was crucial in Trump's victory. Likely the Rockefeller faction influenced Director Comey of the FBI to do this.

3) Kissinger's trip to Russia to meet Putin and other officials in February 2016, and various statements made by Kissinger regarding Trump as reported in this article by Engdahl.

However, I am still concerned about the significance of corporate media's continuing vendetta against Trump and what this represents. This is a phenomenon that Engdahl ignores.

Like Brexit and Trump, Azaria verdict exposes a moment of transition in Israel

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

Settlerism is an ideology, one that believes Jews are a “chosen people” whose Biblical rights to the Promised Land trump those of non-Jews such as Palestinans. Polls show 70 per cent of Israeli Jews think they are chosen by God.

The settlers have taken over the army, both demographically and ideologically. They now dominate its officer corps and they direct policy on the ground.

WATCH: Salmon Confidential [or capitalists versus the environment]

Click here to access this very revealing 1:09.04 film entitled "Salmon Confidential" posted on Wrong Kind of Green. (Note: editing done at 8:15 PM Seattle time.)

(On a personal note, I was particularly interested in this film because of one experience I had in 2005 while riding my bike with a cycling club across northern British Columbia from Prince Rupert to Prince George. At one place where we stopped to rest I noticed some people who were taking samples in a nearby stream and recording data. While talking to them, I learned, based on their data, that almost all of the salmon where pink salmon and very little consisted of Chinook, socket, and coho salmon. I was shocked. I never learned why there were such an abundance of pink salmon.)

The film reports on the struggle of scientists to warn the Canadian government about the disastrous impacts of corporate salmon farms on wild salmon. This struggle illustrates so much about the attack on truth when truth affects the profits of the ruling capitalist class far beyond merely fish wildlife. 

The scientific method of obtaining truth was a gift from many persecuted individuals in search of truth during what became known as the Age of Enlightenment. Science as a disciplined method of obtaining truth used evidence and reason. Ruling classes hate truth whenever it clashes with their interests, and science indeed challenged the authority of the Catholic church which was a major ideological support for the rule of feudal authorities consisting of monarchs, aristocracies, as well as the Catholic church.

The early capitalist classes used their discoveries about the world of nature to increase their profits in enterprises. They then challenged the feudal authorities and eventually took control from them to establish new political forms of states and top-down bureaucratic governments. These new capitalist controlled governments gave capitalists exclusive control over productive enterprises in the form of "ownership" rights which included such rights as exclusive control over management, ownership of all inventions and patentable ideas created by workers on the premises of their enterprises, control of all profits, and exclusive rights to sell such properties and benefit from the sales. This inevitably evolved into what we have today: transnational corporations who command more resources and political power than most states of the world, and have taken control of nearly all governments including Canada and the US.

Nowadays we are again witnessing the clash of scientific and other truths reported by scientists, journalists, and other keen observers who are being suppressed (and again being persecuted, but in modern ways such as taking away their employment opportunities) by ruling capitalist authorities whose operations are increasingly being threatened by the truth. Thus we see almost daily reports of government authorities trying to avoid the truth from reports by independent scientists that indicate that the relatively cheap fossil fuels that capitalist use in their profitable enterprises are creating many disastrous effects on the Earth's ecosystem. We see daily reports in major media that lie and cover up reports by independent journalists and other honest observers about how major capitalist governments are promoting wars to capture resources and markets from other countries to benefit their corporations.

This film, which is about the disease-spreading factory fish farms that capitalists find so profitable, provides a perfect illustration of how governments and other capitalist authorities, in general, go to such great lengths to suppress truthful information. (If you don't have time to watch the entire film, I recommend watching the segment from 27:12m to about 35:00m.)

The CIA’s Cult of Death: a Review of Douglas Valentine’s The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World

Click here to access the book review by Kim Petersen from Dissident Voice.

The CIA is known as a surveillance and information gathering apparatus of the USA that engages in various international intrigues. That view of the CIA is superficial. The CIA as Organized Crime presents the CIA as much more and in decidedly more sinister shades. Among these shades, the CIA is a war criminal, torturer, assassin, arms smuggler, drug smuggling kingpin, media network, business empire, and more. The CIA is steeped in capitalism, girded in racism, masterminds and carries out “regime change,” has hands on the control of information and its communication, is creepily immersed in law enforcement and justice, and has a deeply corruptive influence on foreign governments, the DEA, NSA, military, and Justice Department, as well as on US members of Congress.

Trump Picks Fan of Illegal Surveillance as Intelligence Czar

Click here to access article from TeleSur.

Although Trump has expressed opposition to CIA and other intelligence agency reports about Russian hacking of US elections, it doesn't seem likely that the Deep State that governs our nation will have any difficulty with Trump's nomination of former Sen. Coats as head of all the spy agencies. Coats' career is so typical of most "revolving door" government officials: between serving the government in official posts, he served as a lobbyist for major corporations. 

As director of national intelligence, Coats – who served as an Indiana senator for a total of 17 years, with stints as U.S. Ambassador to Germany and corporate lobbyist for Google and General Electric in between terms – would head the umbrella agency in charge of all 16 U.S. intelligence organizations, including the CIA and the National Security Agency.

While a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Coats was an outspoken supporter of the NSA’s illegal domestic spying programs revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, writing in an op-ed that the programs were “legal, constitutional and used only under strict oversight,” claims which were all proven false by multiple federal judges. After the programs were declared illegal by several federal courts, he voted against legislation to rein in domestic surveillance operations.

In any case from my observations of the CIA since 1960, the CIA and NSA are prime agencies of the Deep State and nothing that Coats could possibly do would be permitted in any way to interfere with their operations. Even when the former director James Clapper lied to a Senate committee, which theoretically has oversight responsibilities for the spy agencies, no discipline was imposed on Clapper. 

You might also be interested in how the Deep State's newspaper, The Washington Post (legally owned by Amazon's Jeff Bezos), report on Coats' nomination in an article entitled "Trump is expected to nominate ex-senator Dan Coats for director of national intelligence".

The Russians Did Not “Hack” the US Election – a Few Facts from a Former CIA Spy

Click here to access article by Robert David Steele from Defence and intelligence Norway.

Although I regard Steele as politically unsophisticated, as a former spy officer with the CIA and connections with other spy officers he does provide some of the best facts that relate directly from those with technical spy skills. I think that the following section of his article is particularly valuable:

Here are the facts as I understand them, augmented by public statements from Julian Assange, Craig Murray, William Binney, James Bamford, Ray McGovern, Philip Giraldi, and John McAfee – and others who do not wish to be named.

Purge the CIA

Click here to access article by Justin Raimondo from AntiWar.com.

I am posting this article to give an illustration of a reformist view (or liberal view) of a contemporary problem as opposed to a radical view. I have long held the latter position and have encountered problems in clarifying this view for my fellow Americans. Most regard our system of capitalism as a given much like fish which regard water as simply reality. Obviously most Americans have been thoroughly indoctrinated by all the ideological institutions of our capitalist ruling class, and no longer see the system as a construct but simply accept it as reality.

Raimondo expresses his outrage regarding the CIA as an agency of the government which has committed the sins of lying to Congress and is currently trying to undermine the legitimacy of Trump's election. That's it. He doesn't even include all sixteen of the so-called intelligence agencies. So his fix is to purge it, and he hopes Trump will do this.

In contrast to this extremely narrow view of an undesirable agency, a radical view holds that the CIA along with all the unaccountable secret agencies are used by the capitalist ruling class's Deep State to control the government and all the institutions of our nation much like a puppeteer controls his/her puppets. They do this to hide their fascist operations within the US and its imperialist activities throughout the world while preserving the ideological narrative that we live in a democracy. 

The solution is not to abolish the agency or revamp it, which is merely one symptom of control by a ruling class of major capitalists, but to use a radical solution by removing the source of the problem--the rule by a tiny capitalist ruling class. Thus a radical solution of revolution is required--whether we like it or not--to rid ourselves of capitalism, a class based system based on private ownership of the economy, and to construct a new egalitarian social system in which there is bottom-up public control of the economy and the entire society. I don't like it, but I see no alternative.

Pushing for a Lucrative New Cold War

Click here to access article by Gareth Porter from ConsortiumNews. 

The New Cold War promises untold riches for the Military-Industrial Complex, causing hawks inside the Obama administration to push for more hostilities with Russia, as in a Syrian case study dissected by Gareth Porter....

The case study was:

Airstrikes by the United States and its allies against two Syrian army positions Sept. 17 killed at least 62 Syrian troops and wounded dozens more. The attack was quickly treated as a non-story by the U.S. news media; U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) claimed the strikes were carried out in the mistaken belief that Islamic State forces were being targeted, and the story disappeared.

Referring to the military-industrial faction in the capitalist ruling class, Porter's conclusion was that "those people had the power and the audacity to frustrate the will of the President of the United States."

Well, of course they had the power and thus there was no audacity involved in their decision. Porter, like most Americans, refuses to believe that anything other than the official government is in charge of what the government actually does.

I think what the case study indicates is that the ruling class directors are frustrated and disorganized due to the failure of their strategies--the support of their terrorist army (ISIS) and other proxy armies (Syrian Kurds)--to bring down the Syrian government because of Russia's support of the Syrian government. That is why their corporate media continue to issue so many outrageously unbelievable lies. Trump's election (and the failure of their candidate Hillary Clinton) and their media's continuing overt opposition to his administration is another indication of their disorganized state--something which we have not seen since they were thwarted in their attempts to bring down the Cuban government in 1961.

Making Sense of Donald Trump. Creating a Divide between Russia and China

Click here to access article by Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich from Global Research. 

Unfortunately, last month I missed this article which makes a rather convincing argument that Trump represents a faction that wants to pursue a slightly different strategy against opponents of the Empire's new world order. Yes, it looks like the old divide and conquer strategy. Thus, the author joins F. William Engdahl who believes the same.

While Trump has made his position vis-à-vis China, Iran, and “radical Islam” abundantly clear, the media has led us on a different path where Russia is concerned.   As such, one could be forgiven for thinking that Trump will reset the button with Russia.  In fact, in the scheme of things, Trump is attempting to wean Russia away from China, Iran, and Syria  in order to continue and accomplish US goals:  Total domination, prevent Russia from re-emerging, contain China, contain Iran, Israel expansion. 

When You Thought Trade Deals Could Not Get Any Worse -- Enter Wall Street.

Click here to access article by Paul Keenlyside from the Sierra Club.

Because only corporations, not governments, can launch ISDS [my link] cases, governments have no equivalent funding sources [compared to wealthy hedge funds which are backing corporate law suits against governments].

Big Pharma prices, profits soar

Click here to access article by Betsey Piette from Workers World.

Affecting all population sectors in the U.S., the costs of prescription medicines are skyrocketing, fueled by the pharmaceutical industry’s greed and monopoly control of the market.

The capitalist ruling class will only allow passage of legislation that helps working people if it will benefit their corporation's profits. Although Social Security was forced on them by activists during the dark days of the Great Depression, our ruling masters soon learned how to "borrow" money from this fund to support their many wars and tax cuts for their rich members. As this article reports, the programs of Medicare, Medicaid, along with the Affordable Care Act have been used to enrich the owners of pharmaceutical corporations.

“Anti-Trump” New Left Continues Crypto-Identity Politics

Click here to access article by Bruce Lerro from Planning Beyond Capitalism.

I was alerted to this website by Pete Dolack who wrote a critique of an article entitled "Economic issues are not separate from 'identity' issues" posted on the Planning Beyond Capitalism website because (in his opinion) it failed to promote both identity politics as well as class politics. Because I, too, have been critical of identity politics which has thoroughly dominated the American left since the Vietnam War, I have some criticisms of Dolack's critique.

First of all, the author was arguing that identity politics within capitalism can never be a successful strategy to overturn the system. I totally agree. And, he never said in the article that he was against the issues promoted by identity politics--it's just that they are not revolutionary. I totally agree. 

In criticizing identity politics I am not proposing that race and gender issues should not be discussed or that they don’t matter.

Capitalism is the issue for our times; and if we don't overturn its existence, we humans along with many other species will stop existing. It is quite literally a matter of life or death for humans.

Political agents of the capitalist ruling class certainly recognized this flaw in identity politics. They encouraged it simply because it was not revolutionary, and it offered an excellent way of diverting left political energies away from class politics that so threatened their rule during the 1930s. (They even fund websites that pretend to be "activists" such as Democracy Now! and The Nation, but actually function as political gatekeepers for the ruling class.)

It is part of a long-standing liberal ideology that spans over a century to promise that under capitalism all ethnicities and genders will be able to compete for a piece of the capitalist pie. Gradually we are told that with education and an expanding economy capitalism will welcome all. After the 1960’s liberals gave up on supporting their color blind ideology, and have been sliding to the right ever since. The New Left, never having taken their own working class very seriously, happily took over race and gender inequalities that should have been the domain of liberals. For 45 years leftists, instead of developing and expanding a socialist program, simply took over the New Deal program that the old liberals abandoned. 

This is precisely why they promoted the Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for president. And mostly middle class left activists were suckered into promoting exclusively identity politics because it was more "respectable", and that is because the middle class in general are always concerned about being respectable in the eyes of the capitalist class.

The extent to which identity politics still governs the liberal and social democratic left, the answer is because Obama, after all, is an African-American president. From the point of view of identity politics, what more can we ask for? He is the first African-American president. For identity politics advocates, the fact that Obama is a Harvard lawyer is no reason to be cynical of his true class interests. Rather, we should be impressed with his credentials.

But as soon as a rich white male is elected, these crypto New Leftists at last gladly see a familiar target. People pour into the streets.

As activists, either we are serious about the overthrow of capitalism because it is the root of most of the evils we experience today, or we think the system is basically fine (it can be tinkered with and fixed), and that we should concentrate on other issues. But the latter should not pretend otherwise as they often do.

How The CIA vs. Donald Trump War Is Just Getting Started

Click here if you wish to access this 6:45m video and rough transcript directly from We Are Change. 

Luke Rudkowski, the founder of this website, exposes the role of the CIA, one of weapons used by the capitalist ruling class's Deep State, along with 15 other secret unaccountable subversive agencies, to keep the US and their Empire from straying from their agendas of power and profits.



Like many other political observers on the left, I have been trying to understand what happened with the surprising election of Trump in spite of corporate media's campaign against him. Knowing that the CIA agendas have thoroughly been embedded in corporate media (beginning with Operation Mockingbird), this was a major puzzle to me along with many other left observers. 

Previously I hypothesized that Trump's election was a symptom of a split in the ruling class over strategies to pursue with regard to foreign policy, specifically in relations to Russia and China. The Trump faction represented Wall Street interests which either simply wanted to do more business with Russia or wanted to split Russia from China or both.This post has caused me to modify my hypothesis.

It looks to me like Trump's election was somewhat of a fluke in a very controlled, well-managed election system that actually represented a true vote count (there was no hacking by anybody, least of all the Russians). This result represented a revolt by wide segments of the population against ruling class authoritative sources in corporate media and a widespread opposition to the deterioration of the American economy and solid job opportunities that have occurred since the 1970s. With Trump's election many Wall Street people jumped on his bandwagon to promote their own corporate businesses, but his election greatly disturbed Deep State operatives of the capitalist ruling class that have been in charge of Empire policies since WWII.

In contrast to Rudkowski last comment (at 5:45m), I have seen a similar phenomenon with the election of John Kennedy in 1960. His policies generally wanted less aggressive actions to overthrow independent or unfriendly governments and to avoid confrontations with the Soviet Union that the CIA had been engaging in. Although this split was mostly concealed from public view, we subsequently learned that to oppose the CIA, a major weapon of the Deep State, was ultimately risking assassination. 

However, I don't think that Trump will be assassinated. He is too much of a businessman who likes to make deals with powerful actors. He will make deals with the Deep State to satisfy their interests in exchange for making money for himself and his Wall Street friends. He has already got on board the Empire's "pivot to China" program.

The Nasty Truth About Yemen

Click here to access article by Gordon Duff from New Eastern Outlook.

Yemen is another of the Empire's war crimes that hasn't been adequately covered in alternative media simply because the Empire is engaged in so many crimes worldwide. By looking at a lot of the evidence which I've been posting over the past seven years, it is easily to conclude that the ruling class's Deep State is really an organized crime syndicate. This article furnishes more evidence to support this conclusion. However, most people don't know this because the directors of the US-led transnational capitalist class's Empire constantly issue fake news reports via their corporate media to hide their crimes.

Were one to analyze “fake news” or “controlled news” or even “false historical narrative,” one would find a single overriding issue and that is a need to damn those who identify a single financial cabal as behind all war and social strife in the world. Thus, any who look at terrorism and extremism and, after peeling away the veneer, find other forces at work, tend to find themselves targeted.

Although Duff doesn't identify those forces adequately, I will. They are all the forces that are driven by the dynamics of concentrated wealth and power that capitalism creates.

The Entire World is “Fake News”

Click here to access article by Andre Vltchek from New Eastern Outlook.

Vltchek offers a comprehensive view of fake news that consists of the whole spectrum of Empire indoctrination from corporate media news reports to indoctrination in higher education. 

My only criticism is that his headline exaggerates by including the "entire world". This is primarily true of the world controlled by the US Empire, and to a lessor extent by countries whose ruling classes are insecure. But there are other countries that do permit and even promote a free exchange of ideas. Many US dissidents, particularly those who expose corporate and government lies or who attack capitalism, must now find outlets abroad or go underground to express their views: Julian Assange and Wikileaks, various commentators from Empire countries that are featured on RT, Abby Martin who frequently is featured on teleSUR, and Seymour Hersh who was dropped by the New Yorker and now writes for the London Review of Books.

Bullshit

by British illustrator and animator Steve Cutts from his website.

Democracy for the people, not for the money-bags

Click here to access article by Sally Campbell from Socialist Review (Britain). 

Campbell uses the upcoming centenary of the Russian Revolution to review the real significance of that event which shaped profoundly most subsequent events of the 20th century and of many events into this century. She focuses on the ideological significance of Lenin's thoughts about real democracy which is in sharp contrast what most of us have been taught through capitalist ideological institutions--schools, corporate media, and corporate entertainment. 

The Russian Revolution exposed common people to ideas that exposed the exploitative nature of class rule and affirmed ideas about a classless, truly democratic rule of, by, and for the people over every institution of society. Of course, in this new ideology no significant private ownership/control of the economy was permitted. The people would decide all important issues. Such ideas were a profound shock to Western capitalists, and there developed among these ruling classes a visceral hatred for these ideas which fundamentally challenged their rule, their wealth, and their privileges. 

They immediately tried to crush the revolution: 13 capitalist nations invaded Russia immediately following their revolution and many of these nations also funded the White armies opposing the Bolsheviks. Since then Western countries have launched wide ranging campaigns in every ideological sector to censor, distort, fabricate, and counter such ideas in order to prevent these ideas from taking hold in their own countries and influencing working people to make their own revolution. During the 1930s Western capitalists started funding the Nazi Party (see this, this, this, and this) when they determined that they could use it as a vehicle to expand eastward and destroy the Soviet Union. Also, the fascist parties across Europe were very useful in countering the influence of socialist type parties in existing capitalist countries.

Meanwhile under such severe pressure from the West and widespread disease and famine following the revolution, Soviet rule deteriorated into an authoritarian, top-down, bureaucratic class rule which eventually proved unable to counter the growth of the US-led Empire.

Immediately following WWII with all rivals in a weakened state the US ruling capitalist class saw a great opportunity to impose their rule on the world, and immediately embarked on imperial adventures starting with the Korean War to counter the socialist forces in that country which had been struggling for nearly 20 years against Japanese colonial-capitalist rule. Then the fascist section of the ruling class joined with the entire ruling class and attempted and largely succeeded in reversing some of the labor rights legislation of the FDR administration and purge progressive people on the left (McCarthy period) from Hollywood, education, and media who had been active in left wing movements of the 1930s; in foreign affairs they used mostly the CIA (Operation Gladio) and propaganda media to suppress very popular left-wing movements most especially in Europe and to a lessor, but significant extent in other areas of the world under US control or influence. At the same time the Cold War began in earnest.

Since then, the US Empire, using the CIA, toppled one government after another which were too independent; funded armies to overthrow other governments the Empire didn't like; directly engaged in the Vietnam War and the first Gulf War; in smaller countries they used military operations against nations like Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Haiti; and now in the 21st century we are witnessing never-ending wars.

Lenin's embryonic ideas about real democracy are still alive today in the imagination of all revolutionary-minded people, and ruling capitalist classes are still trying to crush such ideas. You can see this in the current attempt to suppress alternative media that frequently present reports that counter their many lies. This battle will be fought until either a tiny fascist-capitalist class rules the world or the people rule. In the meantime while these battles are being fought, capitalist addiction to relatively cheap fossil fuels and their obsessive drive for more profits are destroying the habitat that can support the lives of humans and many other species on our planet Earth.

Hopelessly devoted to fossil fuels [a "best post"]

Click here to access article by Amy Leather from Socialist Review (Britain). 

So why won’t our rulers act? We need to look beyond the individual politicians. There are, of course, the climate change deniers, who must be challenged and stopped, but much of the ruling class does accept that climate change is a reality. The problem is they are guardians of a system with fossil fuels at its heart. Tackling the climate crisis would mean tackling the vested interests of the fossil fuel corporations — some of the most profitable companies in the world. To understand why capitalism and fossil fuels are so intertwined we need to go back to the time of the industrial revolution in Britain. 

Bitter banter about pollution turns into anger, frustration

Click here to access article by Bai Tiantian from Global Times (China).

There are definite drawbacks to serving as a workshop for the capitalist world, and this is one of the most obvious. Of course, this was Deng Xiaoping's "win-win" strategy which began in 1978 (profits for Western corporations by using China's cheap labor in exchange for technology) to accelerate the building of China's economy. And it worked fabulously well. But there are downsides and extreme pollution is one of them. Others? Consumerist values and potential capitalist influence in China's ruling class.

Public opinion in China was choked with depression, fear and anger, as large swaths of the country remained shrouded in dangerously high levels of smog and the Beijing government prolonged its yellow alert till Saturday.

Wednesday was the fifth day since the environmental department issued an orange alert for smog in Beijing. Highways have been shut down, flights canceled, and construction work and some vehicles are restricted in order to ease pollution.

However, economic losses are meager compared with torrential waves of complaints by disgruntled city dwellers.

You might also be interested in reading this editorial entitled "Massive social reform needed to cure smog" from the same source.

Germany’s Only Independent Newspaper Says Germany's Gov’t. Is Controlled by US Gov’t

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

Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten (DWN), or German Economic News — an online daily news service for Germans, which has vigorously fought against the U.S. CIA’s longstanding (and now intensifying control over Germany’s ‘news’ media, and which has also helped to promote a book by an editor for the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung who publicly exposed and denounced his previous subordination to the CIA, and who is now being blackballed by Germany’s ’news’media for reporting such things — is finally going behind a pay-wall to sustain its independence, and alleges that the reason for doing this is that financial pressures from the Establishment’s ’news’ media require that this be done, or else DWN will be forced to shut down service altogether.

 Germany, as an outpost of the U.S. Empire, has its ‘news’media seeking to crush ‘fake news’, just as is the case inside the Empire’s center — the U.S.

And Zuesse offers a translated statement by the newspaper that explains why their news website must now charge their patrons for their online news coverage.

Zuesse also provides you with a link to the video and transcript of the brave confession of Udo Ulfkotte, the former editor of the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung (the NY Times of Germany), about his and other German journalists being forced, as a condition of employment, to promote US propaganda. (I fear for his life.) If you haven't seen the video, I urge you to do so. Now the website of Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten is facing similar economic pressures to conform to the diktats of the Empire's controllers.

US Concerns Over “Election Interference” May Backfire

Click here to access article by Joseph Thomas from New Eastern Outlook.

While the US has little evidence regarding Russia’s role in leaking what were genuine e-mails revealing very real impropriety among American political circles, nations like China, Malaysia and Thailand have verified evidence that opposition fronts are funded, backed and even directed by US organisations like NED. What has been perhaps preventing these nations from dismantling these foreign-backed networks, has been the illusion of America’s pro-democracy stance. However, with the US now cracking down on whistle-blowers, opposition media and shifting tides amid American politics all based on allegations of “Russian” involvement, what is preventing other states from cracking down on verified US interference in their own internal politics?

Thomas only barely scratches the surface of US interference in other countries' political processes by focusing only on recent interference--and this omits a lot. If he were to elaborate on US interference since the end of WWII, it would require hours of reading. Ever since the fascist element of the US ruling capitalist class came out of the woodwork after WWII (previously they hid in the woodwork of "isolationism") to promote their own empire after the Nazis, who they helped fund (see this, this, this, and this) failed, they interfered in the political affairs of nations wherever they could; and when such interference using unaccountable secret services and NGO fronts that didn't work, they brought in the jackals of armed forces to secure the governments they wanted.

A well-kept open secret: Washington is behind India’s brutal experiment of abolishing most cash

Click here to access article by Norbert Haering from Real-World Economic Review Blog.

Could it be that our ruling capitalist class operatives are using India as an experiment to see how a cashless electronic system would work as a test for its application here in the US and their satellite countries of the Empire? And why would they want to install such a system? Read the article to see what economist Haering thinks.

Also you might be interested in two other articles which provide some details on how this system is working in India: one entitled "India Cash Ban Could Get Worse: 'We Don’t Even Have Enough Money to Buy Food'", and a lengthy second article posted on Naked Capitalism entitled "The Global War on Cash – India’s Demonetization Debacle".

India’s World: Amazing Debate on Syria Exposes Criminal Western, Israeli and Gulf State Intervention

Click here if you wish to access a 28:21m forum, which was broadcast from a program on Lok Sabha TV station funded by the government of India and posted by independent British journalist Vanessa Beeley, directly from her website The Wall Will Fall. (It didn't seem like a "debate" to me.)

Although my old ears could not understand all of the comments by the two well-informed government officials from India, I believe their views lend more support to other independent sources on the conflict in Syria.

Niraj Srivastava -Former Ambassador,  Pinak Ranjan Chakravarty – Former Ambassador, Waiel Awwad – South Asia Bureau Chief, SANA

Amazing debate on the dirty war being waged against Syria by the US, UK, EU, Turkey, Gulf States, Israel, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Jordan

 

Turkey’s Officials Say American TOWs are Hurting Them Big Time

Click here to access article by Martin Berger from New Eastern Outlook. 

Berger writes that there are ...

...more than enough reasons for Ankara’s resentment of the Obama administration, since it is directly responsible for every single Turkish soldiers murdered by radical militants.

From about 2012 till sometime during 2016 Turkey has been actively supporting ISIS terrorists; but now that the Empire is continuing to supply even more sophisticated weapons to ISIS that are being used against Turkey's armed forces, they are complaining. This, of course, seems so ironic. But I think this is another indication of Turkey's defection from the Empire's goal of dismembering Syria, and another indication of Turkey's growing cooperation with Russia by joining them in the fight against ISIS.

It remains a mystery to me why the Syrian Kurds allow themselves to be used by the US Empire, but it is no mystery to me why US agents have used them. 

The War Against Alternative Information

Click here to access article by independent journalist Rick Sterling from ConsortiumNews.

This article looks like a revision of an article I posted on January 1st entitled "The Information War on Syria and Beyond".

The enactment of HR5181, “Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation,” suggests that the ruling powers seek to escalate suppression of news and analyses that run counter to the official narrative. Backed by a new infusion of $160 million, the plan is to further squelch skeptical voices with operation for “countering” and “refuting” what the U.S. government deems to be propaganda and disinformation.

As part of the $160 million package, funds can be used to hire or reward “civil society groups, media content providers, nongovernmental organizations, federally funded research and development centers, private companies, or academic institutions.”

For a European perspective on the Empire's transnational capitalist ruling class's campaign to control information, read an article posted on the British True Publica's website entitled "Obama Quietly Signs Propaganda Act to Counter ‘Fake News’ – EU to follow suit".

Washington Post latest blunder proves fake news is fine... if it involves Russia

from RT via Youtube.

'Fake news' is making a comeback to the headlines, and hashtags - after the Washington Post retracts its big story on Russian hackers penetrating the US power grid. Apparently, they didn't. The paper has now added an editorial correction, but for some it was too little, too late. Many are already accusing the outlet of spreading fake news supposedly used to influence various aspects of the political process.

You might also be interested in this piece from The Duran entitled "Two false stories about Russia in 3 days: the Moscow school and the Vermont grid".

Though complaining of Russian disinformation and propaganda, the US media spread completely false stories about Russia being about to close the Anglo-American school in Moscow and having hacked into the Vermont electricity grid in just three days, though the first story originated with a US not a Russian source, and the second story would not have survived basic fact checking with the electricity utility involved.

And likewise the ruling class's other newspaper of record, the NY Times. It seems that they, too, feed us misinformation whenever their support for the ruling capitalist class is needed. To find out the latest illustration of this, read an article from The Daily Sheeple entitled "Liar, Liar: NYT Forced to Issue Embarrassing Correction, Lied About Not Supporting the Electoral College in a Bid to Banish It".

Syria’s War Was Only Ever the Beginning

Click here to access article by Tony Cartalucci from New Eastern Outlook.

The author reminds us of the long term strategy on the US-led Empire to rule over the entire world by eliminating the threats posed by the independent, powerful states of Russia and China, and other smaller independent threats posed by Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah in Lebanon. This has been the trajectory of the Empire for the past 25 years, and Cartalucci argues convincingly that this will continue in the future regardless of which puppet lives in the White House. However, I think in this piece he fails to adequately explain the Trump phenomenon. Hopefully he will in the future. 

He concludes with a statement which argues that independent, alternative media and activists can play a constructive role in defeating the hegemonic plans of the Empire's ruling capitalist class.

The illusion that a presidential election could derail this singular, decades-long agenda is a dangerous one. In reality, the only obstacle between US special interests and achieving global hegemony are competing centers of power. These include nation-states like Russia and China, or grassroots movements like the alternative media, alternative and disruptive economic models, and political movements built on the power and influence such movements achieve. Such alternatives can undermine the unwarranted power and influence currently enjoyed by the US and the corporate-financier monopolies that dominate its political landscape.

Multinationals launch 50 lawsuits worth $31b against Asian nations

Click here to access article by Thuy Ong from ABC News (Australia). 

A new report has found that corporations have launched 50 lawsuits, worth at least $US31 billion, using secret international arbitration tribunals against 11 countries in the Asian region.

The Coup against Trump and His Military - Wall Street Defense

Click here to access article by retired Professor James Petras from his blog.

Petras is another perceptive writer who offers his views on the apparent ruling class split between what I will refer to as the Obama faction and the Trump faction. He also expresses his views in a PDF document that he posted the following day on Friday entitled "The Anti-Trump Institutional Coup and the Visible Operatives". I will tease out his position based on these two articles.

Petras sees the Obama faction as a more established one that has been guiding his policies, and whose backers have a visceral opposition to Russia, China, and Iran as has been evident all along during his administration. The Trump faction, on the other hand, want to expand markets to serve the commercial interests of major capitalists. Also with the sole exception of corporate media who support the Obama faction, he sees the split over these issues as cutting across every powerful interest group in the capitalist ruling class such as Wall Street, the military establishment, what I refer to as government puppets in Congress who are funded by both factions and serve both factions, and even several of his Cabinet appointees who support "bellicose policies" presumably toward Russia, China, and Iran.

Petras makes the following claim about the Trump faction:

Trump seeks to implement his foreign policy of ‘market deals’, renegotiation of trade agreements with China, oil and aerospace trade-offs with Iran, and the termination of sanctions with Russia. President Trump will declare ‘let the oil deals flow’!

I have not seen much evidence that the Trump camp wants to make deals with China and Iran--quite to the contrary. Thus, my suspicion is that Trump will be used to make deals with Russia in an effort to split them off from China as I explained on the 15th of December in an article entitled "My ('conspiracy') theory about the emergence of the Trump faction of the ruling capitalist class". In fact, the whole contentious contest between these two factions may be used as a ruse to hide this new strategy.

What is certain is that Trump's domestic policies will favor more austerity policies and likely further cuts to, privatization and/or abolition of, social supports such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act.

The Information War on Syria and Beyond

Click here to access article by Rick Sterling from Dissident Voice. 

Sterling provides an excellent summary of recent efforts to control the information Americans receive about the conflict in Syria, and with the recent passage of Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act it looks like our masters in the ruling class are tightening this control. Apparently they have been disturbed by too many independent journalists who have been reporting on the realities of this conflict which is in sharp contrast to what their corporate media report.

U.S. propaganda and disinformation on Syria has been overall effective in misleading much of the population. Most Americans are unaware how many billion tax payer dollars have been spent on yet another “regime change” attempt. Many liberal and progressive news outlets have failed to challenge the propaganda and disinformation on Syria. It has been left to RT and a host of smaller media outlets to challenge the government and mainstream media.

The passage of HR5181 “Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation”, suggests that the ruling powers seek to escalate suppression of news and analysis which runs counter to their narrative.  Despite their current dominance in the media and information arena, that is not enough. They seek to further squelch opposing voices. The bill calls for “countering” and “refuting” what they deem to be propaganda and disinformation. A slush fund of $20M is provided to hire or reward “civil society groups, NGOs, journalists and private companies “ who participate in the campaign.

Progressives need to prepare for the escalation of the information war.  

$600 Million in CIA Funds at Work? WaPo Runs Another Fake Story on Russia Hacking US Power Grid

Click here to access article by Claire Bernish from The Free Thought Project. 

The fake news issued by corporate media keeps getting weirder and weirder,

Anti-Russia and disinformation hysteria has reached new heights, and — after the Obama administration announced the expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats from the U.S., among other retributions for an ostensibly hacked election — the Washington Post continued its foray into Fake News with an article suggesting Kremlin actors hacked the electrical grid in Vermont.

Perhaps because the outlet got away with citing unnamed officials twice before during this reinvigorated Red Scare, the Post again blared its Russia Did It alarm with an article titled, “Russian operation hacked a Vermont utility, showing risk to U.S. electrical grid security, officials say.”

...especially from the Washington Post which has such an obvious bias with its huge deal with the CIA.

The same year Bezos purchased the Post, Amazon landed a $600 million deal with the CIA to develop a coordinated computing cloud for all 17 agencies of the U.S. intelligence community.

Perhaps superficially innocuous on its own, that sizable deal appears somewhat darker in consideration of this year’s quasi-official continuance of the U.S. government’s most notorious propaganda program, Operation Mockingbird — during which intelligence agents posed as the media to imbue pro-American propaganda and censor certain information. 

Your brain being worked on?

by British illustrator and animator Steve Cutts from his website.

The Guardian’s Summary of Julian Assange’s Interview Went Viral and Was Completely False

Click here to access article by Glenn Greenwald from The Intercept.

Greenwald provides the latest example of corporate media issuing fake news.

Julian Assange is a deeply polarizing figure. Many admire him and many despise him....

But one’s views of Assange are completely irrelevant to this article, which is not about Assange. This article, instead, is about a report published this week by The Guardian that recklessly attributed to Assange comments that he did not make. This article is about how those false claims — fabrications, really — were spread all over the internet by journalists, causing hundreds of thousands of people (if not millions) to consume false news. The purpose of this article is to underscore, yet again, that those who most flamboyantly denounce Fake News, and want Facebook and other tech giants to suppress content in the name of combating it, are often the most aggressive and self-serving perpetrators of it.

Get Ready for an All-Out Assault on Social Security by Washington in 2017

Click here to access article by David Lindorff from his blog This Can't Be Happening. 

As a recipient of Social Security and Medicare I can report my experience with these two programs. There has been an ongoing surreptitious assault on both programs for at least the last seven years, and it boggles my mind as to the lack of public outcry over this issue. As long as our ruling masters in the capitalist class can get away with their assault on retired people, many of whom are very vulnerable, they will continue to do so. But then that seems to be true of all poor people. The latter are the primary victims on our ruling class's imperial adventures within the USA.

Lindorff writes about how the Social Security should operate according to its rules, but not how it actually functions. For this information I have found one source that I believe is by far the most credible: 

Dr. Allen W. Smith is a Professor of Economics, Emeritus, at Eastern Illinois University. He is the author of seven books and has been researching and writing about Social Security financing for the past ten years. His latest book is Raiding the Trust Fund: Using Social Security Money to Fund Tax Cuts for the Rich. Read other articles by Allen, or visit Allen's website.

In his latest article Smith writes:

The $2.7 trillion in Social Security surplus revenue, generated by the 1983 payroll tax hike is gone. It is not sitting in the trust fund or anywhere else. The money was embezzled as it came in and used to help finance wars. tax cuts, and other programs. As the money was spent, government IOUs were issued to keep track of the money. The IOUs, themselves, have no market value and cannot be sold. They serve as certificates of debt. 

Back in August I calculated my basic living expenses compared to Social Securities "cost-of-living adjustments" each year. My cost of just my living quarters in a one bedroom apartment has increased over the past 10 years by 75.2% while my Social Security benefits have only increased 18.2% for the same period. Now the 2017 property maintenance fees alone on my condo are due to go up by 2.4% while my Social Security adjustment will increase only .3%! Apparently our masters are hoping that with this slow attrition of benefits, nobody will notice; and in the future nobody will be able to retire.

Being forced to give up supplementary health insurance and with only Medicare insurance coverage, I can no longer get a reasonably good physician as my primary provider of medical services. The only option I and others have who don't have supplementary private insurance is a clinic that is run like a charity organization staffed by poorly qualified doctors. This clinic appears to cut corners on their expenses by having nursing personnel make decisions on patient care that a doctor should make. 

Berlin – Another False Flag?

Click here to access article by Peter Koenig from Information Clearing House.

Berlin, like Paris, Brussels, Munich, Orlando… is just a cog in the wheel of the monster’s drive towards full world hegemony.

Unexpected, haphazard carnage and terror acts are spreading misery, poverty and fear.

People who are afraid will call for more police and military protection.

They will voluntarily give up their human and civil rights for what they hope will be more ‘protection’, being totally oblivious to the fact that the very governments from whom they are seeking more protection are those that commit these acts of treason and terror, those who are behind the killings. The Anglo-american controlled presstitute mainstream media is in permanent brainwashing mode. Unless you search the news and information for yourself on alternative media, they will never tell you the truth, but their lies, after lies, after more of the same lies will fabricate the public truth.

Escalating the Risky Fight with Russia

Click here to access article by Robert Parry from ConstortiumNews.com. 

The neocons and their liberal-interventionist chums never seem to think through one of their “regime change” schemes. It’s enough that they wrote the plan down in some op-ed article or reached a consensus at a think-tank conference. After that, all there is to do is to generate the requisite propaganda, often accompanied by intelligence “leaks” and maybe some heartbreaking photos of children, to rile up the American people so they can be easily herded into the next slaughterhouse.

We’ve seen this pattern play out over and over again, from Iraq to Libya to Syria to Ukraine. You could even go back to the 1980s and the project for arming Afghanistan’s mujahedeen and a collection of international jihadists led by Osama bin Laden, a project enthusiastically supported by both Republicans and Democrats.

I keep wondering how much longer my fellow Americans will allow themselves to be so "easily herded into the next slaughterhouse" by our masters in the capitalist ruling class.

Meanwhile, I am trying to figure out if our masters are split into two camps: one under the incoming Trump administration that wants to cozy up to Russia in a strategy to split Russia from China (as argued by F. William Engdahl); or two, (more of the same) the continuation of past policies of aggressively waging a new cold war against both Russia and China. Either way, we are in for more austerity and fake news and views at home, wars abroad, and increasing destabilization of our climate. 

Obama's recent signing of the Pentagon budget bill promises more of the same as reported in this article by Bill Van Auken from World Socialist Web Site. It also includes funding for more sophisticated weaponry for the Empire's proxy forces that are trying to bring down the Syrian government, and our ruling class's effort to crack down on alternative websites that present views and analysis that our masters don't like.

[The bill] includes a provision known as the “Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act,” which represents a plan to build up the propaganda arm of the US government. In the name of creating a new government agency to “counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining United States national security interests,” it establishes the framework for directing propaganda against the American people and cracking down on anyone who challenges or exposes the crimes of the US government.  

Obama Quietly Signs Propaganda Act to Counter ‘Fake News’ – EU to follow suit

Click here to access article by Graham Vanbergen from TruePublica (Britain).

Fake news and propaganda driven by government’s and corporations is of course, nothing new. Brexit and the American election have brought the subject into sharp focus more recently as the political class have been unexpectedly losing important desired outcomes. Consequently, as TruePublica reported a week ago, in Britain, controversial laws have been introduced to stem free speech, which, over the passage of time will be used to halt any individual, website or news outlet from reporting against the government narrative with so-called fake news eventually being outlawed.  Think this is conspiratorial theorising? Think again.

While reading this article, I had a thought that I wish to share with you. Isn't it amazing how the issue of "fake news" suddenly appeared and took hold in media throughout the US-led Empire? I only saw its first appearance after the election of Trump. 

To me, it is another illustration of the monolithic shaping of ideas that the Empire imposes on all the NATO countries which are members of the Empire. From all appearances none of these states have a significant amount of independence. The evidence furnished by the "fake news" issue; the anti-Russian economic, political, and military policies; the unanimity regarding the sacredness of banking interests; the occurrence of terrorist incidents; and other issues combine to favor a view that Empire countries are controlled by a super ruling class. The only difference that I've found among these 28 countries is over the acceptance of political refugees fleeing from the war plagued Middle East and the fairly recent independent policies of Turkey. Yet these states are all advertised as being "democracies"!

Even as Global Trade Dropped, US Arms Sales Boomed in 2015

Click here to access article by Nadia Prupis from Common Dreams.

War is so good from business, especially for the military-industrial section of the US capitalist economy whose interests of profit and power drives US Empire policies.

Trump's Cabinet, the Church of Neoliberal Evangelicals

Click here if you wish to access the transcript of the following 11:36m video interview with Prof. Henry Giroux directly from The Real News Network. (Minor editing for clarity at 4:30 PM Seattle time.)



I'm posting this as a prime illustration of liberal thinking (in the modern sense) which had its heyday in the 1930s under the Franklin Roosevelt administration to counter the threat of revolutionary ideas that were fueled by the successful Russian Revolution of 1917. Its roots were in President Wilson's administration, and its slow demise came after WWII when its philosophy was vigorously attacked by right-wing capitalists (fascists) during the McCarthy period as a reaction to liberalism as practiced by members of FDR's administration. This modern sense of liberalism had a brief resurrection under the Kennedy administration, but was soon extinguished with his (and his brother's) assassination by the ruling class's CIA.

This concept is to be distinguished from classical liberalism which included the core concept of private ownership of the new economy that was arising in Europe in the 17th & 18th century characterized by the harnessing of various forms of power (water, coal, petroleum) with machines operated by workers. A new class that came to be known as capitalists wanted the same exclusive control over these new productive units that feudal authorities had over agriculturally based landed economies.

Originally the words relating to liberalism were influenced by the need of the new class of capitalists to attract peasants and other workers in their struggle to take power away from feudal authorities consisting of monarchs, aristocracies, and the Catholic church which was the ideological ally of the feudal authorities. Hence the new capitalist ruling classes always publicly presented classic liberalism, which included private ownership of the economy, as promoting various freedoms such as speech, association, vague notions of equality, and promoted notions of a social contract (under capitalist governing structures called states) which promised peasants and workers that the new capitalist class rule would insure their welfare. Their ideas appealed to many because they promised that one could achieve prosperity based on one's merits and hard work, and not on connections or social rank as had been the case under feudalism. As you can see, these deceptions worked to bring this tiny class of "owners" to the overwhelming power and wealth that they enjoy today.

Since the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few people during the latter half of the 19th century known as the Gilded Age (in the US), capitalist ideological authorities started dropping notions of private economic property from public discourse in order to prevent any notions among the hoi polloi that other systems existed, most especially systems without their class rule which was based on ownership of economic property. 

Hence the success of the Russian Revolution profoundly threatened the capitalist classes, and they mobilized every weapon they could to crush the Soviet Union. This viscerally hostile reaction by leading capitalist classes to the Soviet revolution colored so much of the history of the 20th century. Early on around 13 capitalist nations invaded Russia immediately following the revolution and many of these nations also funded the White armies that were in opposition to the new Soviet government. During the 1930s capitalist ruling classes in Europe and North America heavily backed the rise of the Nazi party in Germany (see this, this, this, and this) with the idea in mind of Germany attacking the Soviet government (Hitler had written this in Mein Kampf). These ruling classes insured that their countries remained "neutral" while the fascist governments of Germany and Italy destroyed the republican government of Spain. Here in the US the FDR administration pursued liberal policies (in the modern sense) in order to counter radical ideas that began taking hold in the US during the Great Depression when 25% of Americans were unemployed amidst full employment in the Soviet Union.

Neoliberalism is an ideology whose exponents want to do away with the rest of the propaganda baggage of the original classic liberalism by eliminating the costly programs of the "social contract" in addition to weakening constitutional protections of civil liberties (as they have already done under the Patriot Act), and strictly promote the narrow interests of major economic property owners (capitalists) throughout the globe by eliminating border restrictions on commerce.

This introduction was necessary to explain Giroux's liberal views regarding political forces today. Notice that he makes no reference to capitalism. Such liberal views represent the last gasp of contemporary liberals who still cling to notions of a kinder, gentler form of capitalism which he, along with other liberals, refers to as "democracy". This is because he as been so completely indoctrinated in capitalist ideology by having spent many years in academia to the extent that the subject of capitalism can no longer even be questioned. The sooner this view dies, and the ascendance of revolutionary ideas of bottom-up authority structures and public ownership/control of the economy, the better for the survival of humans.

A new push toward extinction

by cartoonist Anders Nienstaedt.

Spooked: How the CIA Manipulates the Media, Parts 1 and 2 [a "best post"]

Click here to access a copy of the Introduction ("Part 1") to a recently published book by Nicholas Schou entitled Spooked: How the CIA Manipulates the Media and Hoodwinks Hollywood posted on WhoWhatWhy. 

Click here to access a copy of Chapter 1 ("Part 2") to a recently published book by Nicholas Schou entitled Spooked: How the CIA Manipulates the Media and Hoodwinks Hollywood posted on WhoWhatWhy.

You may also be interested in a 33:07m interview with Schau (I posted this back in August) of Schou discussing his book with Kevin Gosztola of Shadowproof. 

How I Came to Understand the CIA

Click here to access article by Douglas Valentine from The Greanville Post. 

The author explains a bit about his background followed more in detail about his contacts with the CIA in preparation for his book The Phoenix Program that was first published in 1990. What he learned from is contacts with the CIA is probably more applicable today than ever before.

I said that in the book specifically about The New York Times. I said, “When it comes to the CIA and the press, one hand washes the other. To have access to informed officials, reporters frequently suppress or distort stories. In return, CIA officials leak stories to reporters to whom they owe favors.” I told how, at its most incestuous, reporters and government officials are related. I cited the example of Charles LeMoyne, a Navy officer who ran the CIA’s counter-terror teams for a year in the Delta, and his New York Times correspondent brother James. I said that if Ed Lansdale hadn’t had Joseph Alsop to print his black propaganda in the US, there probably would have been no Vietnam War.

So I not only got the CIA mad at me, I also got the Vietnam press corps angry at me too. 

Forbidden Videos, White Helmet Executioners and More

Click here to access the forbidden videos posted by Gordan Duff from Veterans Today.

I haven't had time to view all of these videos, but I believe they show what you are not allowed to see in corporate media, and illustrate very well the fake news that corporate media keep inflicting on the American people to cover for the capitalist Empire's war crimes.

KFCF interview with Jeff Brown

Dan Yaseen of KFCF, a listener sponsored radio station in Fresno, California interviews Jeff Brown in the following 29:19m audio interview via YouTube.

Peace activist and Radio Host Dan Yaseen and author/analyst Jeff J. Brown discuss China, Western Empire, the future of Planet Earth and the roots and inspirations of Jeff's political awakening, as told in his latest book, China Rising: Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations. This is a very personal, revealing interview you will not want to miss. 

Yaseen asks four main questions after his introduction and before general questions about his book at 25:35m. If you don't know about Jeff Brown and his unusual itinerary which eventually took him to China where he now resides and works, be sure to listen to the introduction.

1. 2:10m He asks Brown about his views of the Deep State. 
2. 8:50m He asks about the three leaders since China's independence in 1949.
3. 16:50m He asks about the "pivot to China" policy and China's installation of military bases on islands off China's coast.
4. 21:55m Brown's views of Trump's election and what changes we might expect from his administration. 

 

US middle class completely doomed: another plutocrat hired by the 'anti-establishment' Trump!

Click here to access article posted on the unbalanced evolution of homo sapiens.

Ain't capitalist elections wonderful?! After nearly two years of the electoral stage show, US citizens have chosen a president who does essentially the same thing as the preceding presidents. 

Just when we thought it couldn't get worse with the recruitment of the Wall Street mafia by Donald Trump, he does everything he can to make sure that the US plutocracy will secure its interests at the expense of the US middle class. With such a cabinet, it's a matter of time to see the US middle class completely vanished.

The recruitment of another plutocrat and fanatic supporter of deregulation proves now, beyond doubt, that Trump is here to continue the neoliberal pro-establishment agenda for the benefit of his billionaire class. 

But this concern for the middle class poses a question in my mind: why should societies be divided by classes competing over influence and rewards? Answer: only people who are in the top class enjoy this kind of class warfare. Unfortunately, the top class nowadays only constitutes about .01% of the population.

Guardian newspaper fails to support colleague facing deportation threat from Israeli government

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

An Australia journalist dared to ask a forbidden question of a former Israeli government official:

Loewenstein has been under fire since he attended the event in Jerusalem, hosted by the Foreign Press Association (FPA), on December 12. According to the Israeli media, he asked former government minister Yair Lapid: “Is there not a deluded idea here that many Israeli politicians, including yourself, continue to believe that one can talk to the world about democracy, freedom and human rights while denying that to millions of Palestinians, and will there not come a time soon, in a year, five years, 10 years, when you and other politicians will be treated like South African politicians during Apartheid?”

You might be also interested in this piece entitled "Trump appoints ex-Israeli settler to oversee peace process".

Trump swamp now hiring

by political cartoonist Mike Konopacki.

The Incredible Trump Deception

Click here to access a 58 minute interview with F. William Engdahl from Bonnie Faulkner's Guns and Butter program. 

We examine some of the early political appointments of the new Trump administration and the geopolitical shift in American foreign policy that it represents. The powers behind the Trump presidency - the Netanyahu Likud connected think-tank, The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, including General Mike Flynn, Walid Phares; James Woolsey, and Michael Ledeen, among others; an attack on the nuclear deal with Iran; the failed strategy of using radical political Islam to destabilize and destroy countries; a strengthened alliance between Russia, China and Iran; the failed CIA coup in Turkey of July 2016; a strong dollar policy and a weakened European Union; rising interest rates and concomitant flight capital to a Wall Street safe-haven; making America great again by re-building Americas defense industry infrastructure.

The Top Censored Stories of 2015–2016

Click here to access article from Project Censored.

The presentation of the Top 25 stories of 2015-2016 extends the tradition originated by Professor Carl Jensen and his Sonoma State University students in 1976, while reflecting how the expansion of the Project to include affiliate faculty and students from campuses across North America has made the Project even more diverse and robust. During this year’s cycle, Project Censored reviewed 235 Validated Independent News stories (VINs) representing the collective efforts of 221 college students and 33 professors from 18 college and university campuses that participate in our affiliate program.

Human ‘technosphere’ weighs 30 trillion tonnes

Click here to access article by Tim Radford from Climate News Network.

Scientists have calculated the mass of that unnatural achievement called the “technosphere”, demonstrating the scale of human activity that drives climate change. The bleak conclusion is that cities, factories, cars, railways, cameras, computers, ballpoint pens, swords, machine guns and all other manmade things now weigh about 30 trillion tonnes.

What is excluded from this otherwise excellent account of "human activity that drives climate change" is the system of capitalism created by a particular socioeconomic class that seized power in the 17 and 18 centuries from feudal authorities. Authors writing for capitalist funded websites (see section "About our funders" on their "About Us" page), publishers, and other media resort to abstractions, as Radford does here, in order to avoid any "controversial" references to a system and class that are really responsible for any significant problems: particularly alarming problems like global warming, widespread pollution, and related health problems. Writers know from their indoctrination and/or experience that such references are verboten if one wants any kind of lucrative career in media (or any line of work).

Under this system the production of 30 trillion tons of stuff created the extremely concentrated wealth and power for capitalists who are only a tiny portion of the Earth's population and left many in dire poverty and powerlessness. The 30 trillion tons was also facilitated by the capitalist sector of advertising in order to create desires for many unnecessary products that make up this huge amount. This concentration of wealth and power has been also facilitated by wars that capitalists love to create because wars not only supercharge their profits, but it destroys things which need to be produced again. 

Trump’s Disappearing ‘Neutral Guy’

Click here to access article by Paul R. Pillar from ConsortiumNews.com. 

The real Trump is starting to emerge from the fog of political campaign theatrics. Here we see evidence that he will pursue a pro-Zionist policy in support of apartheid Israel. Like I wrote "many moons ago", you will likely not see any significant difference under the new administration. That is simply because our ruling capitalist class politicos do not depend on the functions of the official government to decide their policies. They use the official government as a facade or puppet show behind which they pull the real strings of power. This arrangement is called the "Deep State". 

This is not to deny that there might be competing factions within the ruling class, but their differences are only marginal in terms of the interests of ordinary people. Hence the seemingly never ending political campaigns and the official organs of government are for show only. Our capitalist masters don't even use the official organs of government to settle differences of strategy to attain their profits and power as they did in the distant past. They do this in their "think tanks" such as the Council on Foreign Relations, Brookings Institution, American Enterprise Institute, etc.

U.S. Energy Department balks at Trump request for names on climate change

Click here to access article by David Shepardson from Reuters. 

Josh Earnest, a White House spokesman, said in a news briefing on Tuesday that the queries "could have been an attempt to target civil servants," including "scientists and lawyers and other experts who are critical to the success of the federal government's ability to make policy."

By design, their work transcends the term of any one president, Earnest said.

Trump, a Republican, said during his election campaign that climate change was a hoax perpetrated by China to damage U.S. manufacturing.

Antarctica’s Southern Ocean May No Longer Help Delay Global Warming

Click here to access article by Jeff Tollefson posted on The Real News Network from an article originally from Scientific American (behind a paywall).

Indirect evidence suggests that the Southern Ocean is a net carbon sink and has absorbed as much as 15% of the carbon emissions emitted by humanity since the industrial revolution. But at some times of year and in specific places in this region, carbon-rich surface waters release CO2 into the atmosphere.

Now, researchers are getting some of their first glimpses in near-real time of what happens in the Southern Ocean, particularly in winter. “Right off the bat, we are seeing CO2 fluxes into the atmosphere that are much greater than we had estimated before,” Sarmiento says. “It’s just revolutionary.”

Trump administration begins preparations for war on existing feeble climate restrictions

by political cartoonist Matt Wuerkler. 

Foxes Guard Facebook Henhouse

Click here to access article by F. William Engdahl from New Eastern Outlook. 

Without commenting on whether the Pizzagate stories are true or not, Engdahl alerts us to the suspicious timing of the widespread reaction by major media and government officials to these events and their plans to crack down on "fake news". He also reveals many of the disreputable people involved in supposedly combating "fake news". Given all this information it seems likely to me that the Pizzagate stories were planted by agents of our capitalist masters as a part of a PSYOP project to effectively censor websites that reveal too much about the widespread lies spun over their corporate media. He concludes his article by writing:

It’s not even the foxes who are guarding the Internet Henhouse. It’s the werewolves of CIA and US Government censorship. Whether the explosive Pizzagate Podesta revelations merely triggered a dramatic acceleration in the timetable for the CIA’s planned “Fake News” operation as the successor to their 1980’s “Conspiracy Theory” linguistic discrediting operation, it’s clear this is no unbiased, objective, transparent public service to protect the Internet public from harmful content.

And, besides, who are they to tell me or you what you are allowed to read, digest and form your independent ideas about? This is a 21st Century reincarnation of the Spanish Inquisition, one by the real fake newsmakers–Washington Post, AP, ABCNews, Snopes.com, FactCheck.org, the CIA and friends. I would say it’s an alarming development of cyber warfare, not by Russia, but by those CIA-run networks that are fomenting Fake News to demonize any and everyone who opposes Washington intelligence propaganda.

The Fake Russian Threat

Click here to access article by Stephen Lendman from his blog.

Big Lies and other type fake news are repeated enough get most people to believe them. Americans are the most over-entertained, under-informed people anywhere - carpet-bombed by state-sponsored and supportive scoundrel media propaganda, aided by constant bread and circuses distractions.

According to neocons infesting Washington and top Pentagon officials, Russia is America’s main threat - even though it poses none to any country.

The Bullets Of An Assassin: Nothing Is Beyond the Pale

Click here to access article by Christopher Black from New Eastern Outlook.

Several astute political observers cite reasons and evidence that secret agencies of the US Empire were likely behind the assassination of the Russian ambassador in Turkey. Empire secret agencies are famous for their use of false-flag incidents to further their imperial aims, and this incident was likely aimed at the warming Russia-Turkey relations.

The bullets of an assassin shook the world on Monday. Shot from behind by a former Turkish police officer, at an art gallery in Ankara, right across the street from the US embassy, the Russian ambassador to Turkey, Andrey Karlov, a man with a long and distinguished career in the Soviet and Russian Foreign Service, died on the spot.

Those who are behind this assassination, for no one can believe that this man acted alone, are exposed by the slogan he shouted after the murder, “Don’t forget Aleppo.” They are exposed by the words and photos which were quickly splashed across the front pages of the western media and set in an editorial context that implicitly condoned the act.

Others such as F. William Engdahl and especially Sibel Edmonds, a Turkish-American who worked as a Turkish translator for the FBI and knows a lot of the dirt behind CIA operations in Turkey are among those who have their suspicions. Kurt Nimmo assembles their rationales and evidence that informs their suspicions in an excellent article entitled "Did CIA Assassinate Russian Diplomat Karlov?".

Berlin Truck Terror Suspect and the Curious Matter of ID Papers Left Behind

Click here to access article from WhoWhatWhy.

Today, WhoWhatWhy has seen heavy traffic coming from Google searches that point to a story we ran almost two years ago. Why the sudden interest? It took us only a moment to discover the connection: We had written about the odd phenomenon of terrorists repeatedly leaving ID papers behind at the scene. And now, with the Berlin truck attack, we see yet another such example.

We also see that, in a pattern we have previously reported on with other terror incidents, the suspect was already known to authorities — had even been in custody, but was released.