Understanding America’s Many Wars

Click here to access article by Murray Polner from Uncommon Thought Journal. (Edited for much needed clarity at 8:15 PM Seattle time.)

I've spent too much time this morning trying to access information about the author to the detriment of this commentary/essay. Polner is the book editor of History News Network and has written several books and articles featured in many center-liberal publications. The best I could find on his bio is from Book Depository:

Murray Polner has had a rich and varied career as a teacher, college professor, writer and editor. He is the author of When Can I Come Home. His writings have also appeared in the New York Times, Newsday, the Washington Post, Commonweal, The Nation, Village Voice and the Boston Globe. He lives in Great Neck, New York. Murray Polner is an editor and the author of No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran and has written for The New York Times,The Nation, Commonweal, The Washington Monthly, and many other publications.

I want to use this article/book review which Polner writes about so favorably as an illustration of how a mainstream American intellectual writes about political subjects such as US wars thereby serves as a useful propagandist for the US-led Empire. Now that the Japanese government is a useful ally/puppet of the Empire, we Americans must forgive and forget that we were once adversaries.

In his favorable review of a book by James Bradley’s entitled The China Mirage he uses circumlocutions and abstractions to hide the nature of the rivalries the capitalist nations engaged in during WWII, and as a result he obscures and distorts the realities of these wars. He ends up arguing that our war with Japan was a mistake because "we" (at that time) simply didn't understand Japan's economic needs. In other words, the war was all about national interests and "we" didn't understand Japan's national interests and instead mistakenly aligned our policies with China. Balderdash!

It is Bradley’s contention that Americans have misunderstood and misjudged China, wedded as they were to the fantasy that China was yearning to be Christianized, Westernized and Americanized while ignoring that it had and has its own national interests. This was never more obvious than after 1931, when the Japanese –eager to control China as part of its sphere of interest– invaded Manchuria, which the U.S. promptly denounced as an act of aggression. For both nations the great prize was China. After that, Japan and U.S. were on the road to war.

By referring to the competing capitalist national gang rivalries behind the abstractions of nations (China, Japan, US), he, like many ruling class propagandists, hides the real nature of the devastating wars in the 20th century.

Let me present a concise alternative view of history that focuses more specifically on competition among capitalist ruling classes to control access to markets and resources all over the world to satisfy their interests of profits and power.

In spite of the external military operations of other capitalist countries and internal threats posed by poverty, hunger, chaos, and epidemic diseases, the success of the Soviet revolution in 1917 posed an ongoing threat of a system that directly challenged private ownership of the economy that existed in all the other technologically advanced countries. Should the Soviet experiment succeed, all capitalist ruling classes were threatened by the alternative example of public ownership. Thus capitalist ruling classes, having failed to re-install a capitalist regime in the Soviet Union, waited to see if the new Soviet government simply collapsed under the weight of so many initial threats.

During the 1930s when Western nations were severely plagued by the Great Depression, the Soviet Union was making rapid economic strides and enjoying full employment. Obviously this was of great concern to Western capitalist ruling classes and they began a project to support right-wing fascist parties in Europe which ultimately brought the Nazi Party to power in Germany and the fascists in Italy. Because the "democratic" (the US, Britain, France, etc) nations stood by in neutrality, they allowed Germany and Italy to attach the left elected Spanish government during the Spanish Civil War. Only the Soviet Union and volunteers from the non-fascist Western countries came to the aid of the Spanish government, and the Soviet leaders lost interest in doing so because they themselves felt threatened.

During this period American and other European ruling capitalist classes were split in their attitudes and policies toward the fascist countries. On the one hand, they saw the latter as a bulwark against organized labor unions and leftists, but on the other, especially as the latter grew in power, they feared that they might present a threat to the economic interests of capitalists in what became known as the core allied nations (which initially excluded the Soviet Union). Also the more fascist oriented capitalists in the allied nations saw the splendid potential of the German Nazi government to expand eastward (Hitler had described this plan in Mein Kampf as Lebensraum). 

Similarly Japan's ruling capitalist class had their own imperialist concept of Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. What most Americans are unaware of is that the US ruling class had their own concept, the Grand Area (this area was extended after WWII and became known as the "free world"). The Allies patiently let Germany expand and grow their empire on the European continent and move east toward the Soviet Union. However Germany unexpectedly invaded Poland, with which Britain had a defense treaty, instead of going from Czechoslovakia on to the Soviet Union. Thus began a phony war after which the Nazi government attacked Britain and continued to move east and invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Because the Netherlands, Belgium, and France had been easily overrun by German forces, the Allied ruling classes expected that Germany would easily defeat the Soviet forces. But whereas the defeat of the Allied countries was mainly due to their ruling classes being split in their orientation to the fascist nations, the Soviet government was united in their opposition to fascism. As a result the German forces encountered great difficulty after only a month into their invasion. 

Although I cannot yet prove it, I am convinced by much circumstantial evidence that leading US ruling class figures at this time saw that Germany was not going to succeed in conquering the USSR and therefore Germany was now a threat to the British Empire and the US. They and their British associates began formulating plans in the late summer of 1941 to prepare for war with the Axis powers. They saw the necessity of securing what they referred to as the Grand Area, which included the Western Hemisphere plus southeast Asia, in order to win the war against the Axis powers. Of course, this put them on a collision course with Japan's ruling class who vitally needed the resources in that area and oil from the US. The US government soon embargoed oil exports to Japan in order to force Japan along together their ally Germany into a war with the Anglo-American combination.

Capitalist ruling classes are very much like street gangs in that they compete over territories which provide them with opportunities of profit and power. Thus the Anglo-American capitalist combination were not going to permit the capitalist ruling classes in Germany and/or Japan to dominate the world and threaten their access to raw materials and markets. The British capitalists persuaded US capitalists to join them in opposition to the German Reich, and this combination went on to win WWII with the result that they have dominated the world ever since. (Israel was added in 1967 after the nation and the international Zionist Jewry became obvious as a useful addition to the existing Empire.) However, the governments of Russia, China, Iran and other countries are now starting to challenge their dominance, and we can expect more major wars to follow--unless we organize an effective opposition against the profit and power addicted ruling class!

Are humans like horses?

by Ron Horn. I thank "Don Quijones" (pseudonym) for this video which he posted on his new blog Rigged Game. He previously posted articles on Raging Bull-Shit, then posted articles on Wolf Street, and now has returned to his own blog.



The narrator alerts us to some very real issues facing humans regarding the ever advancing improvements in technology. In this 15 minute video he compares humans to horses to illustrate how the latter became obsolete with the appearance of autos, trucks, etc. There are now relatively few horses around especially in the technologically advanced nations. Like most metaphors, this one is also limited in its aptness--far more than what its creator intended. I think that it reveals the ideological blindness of the creator (and narrator). 

The creator/narrator of this video along with the vast majority of Americans like fish in the sea don't see the system or the water in which we all swim--capitalism. This system is an artifact created by humans, but it was made by only a certain class of human who saw the potential benefits of profit and power that such a system could give them. They simply and deceptively extrapolated the system of feudalism in which aristocrats and monarchs owned all the land (which their ancestors had conquered) and claimed ownership of most everything that peasants produced in their new system of capitalism. The new class of capitalists now claimed "ownership" over the products and creations of workers who became essentially wage slaves. 

The new system of capitalism was widely known and discussed in most of the West until the last half of the 20th century. In an effort to prevent people from examining the inequities of capitalism, our masters, the ruling capitalist classes, since then have disappeared the word from most of their writings, their history, etc. As a result, most people, like the narrator, simply take for granted that the system is an immutable reality; thus it has almost disappeared as a topic of discussion. 

Now let us return to the metaphor the narrator uses--humans as horses. The metaphor seeks to expose the problems for workers given the advances of technology where most of them are no longer needed. This is accurate and poses a dilemma for humans. However the metaphor fails to provide an understanding of the class-based exploitation that the system of capitalism imposes on the vast majority of humans. Did horses invent cars, trucks, etc? Of course not. But human-workers did invent them along with all of technology. The problem is that the benefits of their activity did not go to the workers, but to a tiny class of capitalists who claim "ownership" over everything the workers produce and create--and this includes technology. The metaphor hides this glaring fact.

Instead of a blessing that could free workers from not only mindless tasks but more complex tasks, under the existing system technology is now threatening their very existence. With a new system that distributed the benefits of technology to everyone, humans could be free of the necessity of spending so much time in activities to meet their material needs of existence. This could free them to engage in the tasks of making decisions about production, about what they want to produce, about issues of relations to each others, about questions in our relations with nature, about refinements to the new system that they created,  etc, etc. 

As you can see, this is in marked contrast to today's world where only a tiny minority decide everything--and for their exclusive benefit. In such a new system humans would need to spend a lot of time in education about the world in which they live. Thus technology could free all humans to develop their fullest potentialities. It's hard to imagine what humans could be become under a system that was designed to serve all of them.

Will Superweeds Choke GMO to a Timely Death in USA?

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

Engdahl cites recent studies, including this one and explained by this article, which report data that suggests that pesticide resistant "superweeds" are increasing on US farm lands. Engdahl writes:

When we human beings become too self-destructive for our own well-bring and that of our Earth, sometimes nature takes control and does what we in our greed and stupidity refuse to do. The refusal of Governments around the world–with notable exceptions such as the GMO-free Russian Federation–to order an immediate global ban on planting of Genetically Manipulated Organisms, GMO, including for corn, for soybeans, for cotton to name just a few, along with an immediate ban on paired weed-killers such as Monsanto’s Roundup, is stupidity pure. The response of nature, however, may sound the death knell for American farmers’ use of GMO seeds more effectively than any labelling or WHO carcinogen warning. Superweeds are literally choking GMO plants to death across the US Midwest farm belt and that should send a very real signal that nature abhors GMOs and their toxic weed-killing chemicals.

I must take issue with his first sentence. I think I can safely assume that people reading this article are human beings. So, are you responsible for developing and promoting Roundup? Of course not! People who developed, promoted, and sold this product were instructed and paid by capitalists to do it, and were likely fired if they refused.

Wake Up Call

by British illustrator and animator Steve Cutts from his website.

Some observations and solutions about the contemporary class war being waged (on us) by our capitalist ruling class

by Ron Horn for this website.

I ended up with this essay this morning by reading and recalling a number of articles of how the capitalist ruling class through various NGOs or non-profit organizations (NGOs are usually used to refer to non-governmental organizations abroad, but within the US they are usually referred to as non-profit organizations) are so often used by them to shepherd Americans into fairly safe activist organizations, marches, demonstrations, protests, etc. Then I began to think how this is only one part of a complex of controlling mechanisms to insure that Americans support the existing rule of American capitalism and all its contemporary features of imperialism. Let me provide some details about this train of thought and where it led me.

I read and/or scanned articles entitled Amnesty International Stokes Syrian War and Standing Rock: Profusion, Collusion & Big Money Profits, and recalled other posts of a similar nature to realize more fully the complex nature of the forces of control used by the ruling class to secure our compliance and to divert our opposition energies toward fairly harmless pursuits that don't interfere with their interests of profits and power.

This complex of forces runs all the way from ideological indoctrination and information that we experience in education, to media, to entertainment, to the control of jobs especially in higher education and in non-profits which are usually funded by the rich, and to infiltration of their well-paid agents in activist organizations. Sometimes these forces that the rich ruling class commands seem overwhelming and invincible, and they very well may be. If so, I think that this is going to lead to a series of catastrophes such as nuclear war or major climate disasters or both that will likely end the existence of humans, or at least major loss of life. However, it seems that my human nature resists hopelessness and looks forever toward solutions.

I keep thinking that if only ordinary people knew about, and understood, the realities of their condition of indoctrinated wage slaves or well-paid and indoctrinated agents of an exploitative ruling class that they might engage in revolutionary activities to change the system that supports this ruling class. They would do this because they would understand that the underlying reason why we experience so much extreme inequality, never-ending wars, and environmental devastation is the existence of the capitalist system. So this suggests some action to start the process of this understanding. My individual solution was to start this website. But social problems, especially of this magnitude, require collective solutions.

The only activity that I can see would generate a collective revolutionary movement would be focused on organizing alternative news, information, and opinion sources that are strictly funded by non-ruling class sources. I see signs such as more and more websites that are devoted to presenting such content and are funded by ordinary people. But many need to rid themselves of advertising because their sponsors inevitably end up influencing content. They also need to combine resources such as journalists, administrators, and funding in ever large media collectives to effectively counter the influence of corporate media.

To attract the right kind of activists they need to build in new alternative organizational structures, and not simply borrow hierarchical structures typical of class-structured organizations and societies. Thus some kind of bottom-up control structures are necessary to assure authentic democratic control which serves the people. Thus much experimentation must be done to produce a workable, practical model that can be adopted by other organizations in a growing revolutionary movement. 

Once such alternative collective media organizations become a significant influence, we can expect attacks from the ruling class in the forms of infiltrators who would try to create dissension in these organizations, attempts to bribe people to serve the ruling class, smears in corporate media in an attempt to discredit the alternative media, and even threats to people engaged in work for the new media. All such attacks could escalate as the new media became more effective, but this would only serve to attract more attention and people to the new media organizations. The new media could serve as a revolutionary catalyst that could grow a viable movement to overthrow the reign of capitalists and their entire support system, and then to replace it with a genuine democratic system that affirms life and harmony with nature.

American Media Hacking “Fake News” About North Korea [a best post]

Click here to access article by American political analyst Caleb Maupin from New Eastern Outlook.

Because the American capitalist class has, in my opinion, issued so much fake news and information about the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea), I am so proud to re-post this article by Maupin who has dug up some relatively unbiased reports (see this, this, and this) about our ruling class's favorite whipping boy (idiom). Considering he only sets the record straight about North Korea's nuclear weapons program, one can go further back to gain more objective information about the US role in the Korean War. 

I especially recommend a book by Bruce Cumings entitled The Origins of the Korean War (v.1 of 2). You will learn that as in Vietnam, Korea was to be divided (under Soviet and US control) only temporarily until elections could be held to unify the country. But because our ruling masters feared a communist victory in the elections, they separated the country permanently and installed a friendly, right-wing regime in South Korea.You will learn how the US immediately allied themselves with Koreans who had long collaborated with their Japanese colonizers over the previous 35 years of Japanese brutal control.

Another book I recommend is by Dave Chaddock entitled This Must Be the Place published in recently in 2013. The US air force not only leveled the country, but also participated in biological warfare (BW). Chaddock after studying massive amounts of information on the subject concluded that our government did engage in BW in Korea and nearby China. Of course the use of BW is a major war crime, and no doubt it has been dubbed the "forgotten war" because of this war crime not to mention all the other nefarious reasons for the US  interference in another country's civil war. (Officially the UN fought this war, but at that time the UN was under the complete control of the US.) 

Our ruling masters made a massive effort to cover up their war crime by utilizing every medium of indoctrination at their disposal--corporate media, books and movies about "brainwashing", authority figures such as professors, threats to returning veterans who knew that we used BW, etc. Yes, there really is brainwashing (see definition #1 here), but not the fictional kind that our masters alleged was used by the Chinese and North Koreans to explain away what our masters claimed were false testimonies of veterans who confessed about the US use of biological warfare (BW) against the North Koreans and Chinese during the Korean War.

Are We Moving Away From Fossil Fuels? Separating Facts from Fantasies

Click here to access a first part of an article with a PDF link to the entire article by Sean Sweeney of Trade Unions for Energy Democracy. Here are some concluding remarks:

The  challenge  facing  human  civilization  is  sobering.  But  the  challenge  appears  more  manageable when it is connected to a narrative that is  prepared  to  confront  existing  ownership  relations.  The  struggle  for  democratic  control of  energy  (and  other  key  sectors)  is  today  crucial  for  many  reasons. Achieving  such  control  over  energy  production,  distribution,  and use is a means (but not the only means) to confront the expansionist dynamics of the political economy while at the same time reconfiguring our approach to defining and meeting human needs on the basis of a more equitable distribution of wealth and a qualitative extension of democratic control over major economic decisions.

Energy  systems  controlled by ordinary people in partnership with well-run and accountable public  agencies have the potential to manage and reduce energy demand for certain economic activities while providing electrical power to everyone for basic needs  and truly sustainable forms and levels of human and social development.

I recommend that you view the following 5:26m video by them (via YouTube) entitled "This Is What Energy Democracy Looks Like":

Climate Change, Science, NOAA Falsely Maligned by Tabloid Spin

Click here to access article from Climate Nexus.

Apparently climate deniers feel with the election of Trump that they can come out of the dark closet and be believed. Right-wing websites such as Breitbart have given major coverage to a recent piece in the British Daily Mail that tries to discredit NOAA's scientists.

As a result of human activities, primarily the burning of fossil fuels, the planet is warming. Those who deny this fact have pointed to a supposed “pause” in warming to justify opposition to climate action. In 2015, a study led by NOAA’s Tom Karl was published in Science that flatly refuted the idea of a “pause.” It is one of many. But its high profile made it a target for attack.

On Saturday, a feature in the UK’s Mail on Sunday by David Rose makes outrageous claims that were already disproven as the paper version hit stands....

Jimmy Dore on Pentagon Failed To Report THOUSANDS Of Airstrikes and other deceptions

by Jimmy Dore on the Jimmy Dore Show. 

I like to listen to Dore as therapy to keep my sanity that is assaulted daily by corporate media. In this video Dore ridicules many of the lies and propaganda fed to us by corporate media which is the mouthpiece of the capitalist ruling class.

A new sheepherding operation?

by Ron Horn for this website.

This question arose while scanning materials in an email I received from the founder of ratical.org, Dave Ratcliffe, which was titled "What To Do? Organize, Collaborate, Engage". In it he recommended articles from the Boston Globe and The Nation, and "Some sources to explore" that included the Pussyhat Project that was featured so prominently by corporate media in the recent Women's March in Washington DC. 

After perusing a number of articles related to his organizing drive and my awareness that corporate media coverage is engaged in an ongoing attack on Trump's administration, I began to wonder if a major section of our ruling capitalist class (which I have identified as the "CIA faction") was not behind a drive to intimidate Trump so that he would go along with their neoliberal and imperialist agendas or else remove him from office and replace him with someone more suited to their interests. It appears to me that he has already succumbed to most of their imperialist agendas.

I recalled how Democratic operatives once again used a liberal candidate, Bernie Sanders, to sheep-herd the too-liberal younger generation back into the fold of the Democratic Party and thus to support the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. However she lost the election because she was so distasteful to Americans due to her pro-war views and activities, and many registered Democrats refused to vote for her. Ever since then corporate media has been on an aggressive campaign to discredit Trump's policies--many justifiably so--but I will argue that they are merely using these issues and liberal organizations to intimate Trump or get rid of him.

Trump's great weakness with a sizeable segment of the American population is his backwardness on social identity and multicultural issues, and the ruling class faction that is after Trump is targeting many of the people oriented strictly to these quintessentially liberal issues. Corporate media coverage of the Women's March, which heavily relied on Facebook to organize the march, was so dominated by coverage of the vacuous Pussyhat Project (see this and this) that I thought they were the same thing.

Look at the article in The Nation which he sent entitled "Your Guide to the Sprawling New Anti-Trump Resistance Movement". In it the authors cite the Pussyhat Project, MoveOn.org, Upworthy, and other suspicious liberal organizations. Upworthy's founder, Eli Pariser, has made a career of being associated with Soros-funded organizations, and of course MoveOn.org is well known to be funded by Soros and other major corporate donors.

Once the "CIA faction" of the ruling capitalist class accomplishes their goal of aligning Trump's policies with theirs or removing him from office, you can well expect that their use of these corporate funded liberal projects and organizations will largely end as well as the attacks on Trump through corporate media. Meanwhile all the efforts by ordinary Americans provoked by these corporate front organization will be wasted. They may well get rid of Trump to their enormous satisfaction, but the neoliberal and imperialist agendas will continue as before.

Survival Is the Question

Click here to access an article by Michael Löwy posted in Solidarity that includes reviews of two recent books: 1) Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System by Ian Angus; and 2) Green Capitalism: The god that failed by Richard Smith. 

This reviewer like many of the academic upper-middle class seems to have a tendency to avoid what they regard as an unthinkable solution for our survival: revolution. So in the review of Angus's book he constantly refers to "fossil capitalism", by which he means fossil fueled capitalism. This type of framing, which is typical of other members of this comfortable class like Naomi Klein, and not wanting to offend their capitalist masters from whom they have received so many benefits, suggests that there is another kind of capitalism that is sustainable. Ergo, revolution is off the table, instead we must look to a reform of the system.   

Löwy clearly prefers Angus's book to Smith's which simply lays out a very convincing argument that nature and the human-made capitalist system are incompatible. Thus something has to give, and that something is clearly capitalism. But Löwy seems unsatisfied apparently because he expects Smith to provide a recipe for the elimination of capitalism.

Richard Smith’s point is perfectly coherent. The only remark I would make is the absence of mediation. How can we move from the suicidal train of capitalist civilization to an ecosocialist society? This question merits further examination. 

We need to talk about the Anthropocene

Click here to access article by Gabriel Levy from People and Nature. 

It is surely axiomatic for all socialists that the impacts of human activity on nature need to be understood as products not of undifferentiated humanity, but of hierarchical, exploitative social systems – and, mostly, of capitalism, that has dominated the world economy since the industrial revolution.

But I get the sense that some socialists, in their rush to reject the ideologised, neo-Malthusian Anthropocene narrative that environmental impacts are the fault of all humans....

Along the same lines, you might be interested in a review of a book entitled Anthropocene or Capitalocene by Ian Angus in which he joins the debate and criticizes the author's point of view:

We live in a time when decaying capitalism is destroying our planet’s life-support systems. To prevent political changes that would end their destructive rule, powerful corporations and politicians are actively promoting misinformation about Earth System science. Ignorance and obscurantism are on the march around the world.

But we are also seeing huge advances in scientific understanding of the Earth System and growing awareness that change is urgently needed. Realization that we have entered an unprecedented and dangerous epoch has triggered international discussions in which almost all participants agree that business as usual is a road to planetary disaster. Ideas once held by only a few radical environmentalists are increasingly accepted by scientists worldwide and are creating the possibility of a powerful science-based challenge to the present social order.

In this situation it would be a tragedy if straw-person arguments and fears of ideological contamination were to prevent the Left from engaging with scientists and joining the global discussion.

Beware of Trump’s Double-game in the Middle East

Click here to access article by Salman Rafi Sheikh from New Eastern Outlook.

As the Trump administration's policies are taking shape, I've been wondering how the belligerent remarks made by Trump and his officials square with past indications that he wanted to improve relations with Russia. Sheikh looks squarely at this contradiction. This foreign policy appears to be another illustration of the quixotic nature of Trump's reign as he aggressively and recklessly tilts at so many windmills.

The policy towards Iran is, therefore, fundamentally different from the policy the Trump administration is probably designing towards Russia (read: Trump administration’s resolve to defeat the IS through joint action). Therefore, the key question here is: is the Trump administration looking for dividing the Russia-Iran relations—and if yes, can it do so? 

Some urgent posts regarding DAPL from Dave Ratcliffe of Ratical.org

I received some very informative and urgent articles on the Dakota Access Pipeline crisis which his organization rat haus reality, based in Boston, is supporting, and I thought I would share them with the readers of this website.

U.S. veterans vow to block construction of Dakota Access Pipeline
by Jasmin Malik Chua, inhabitat
February 3, 2017
http://inhabitat.com/u-s-veterans-vow-to-block-construction-of-dakota-access-pipeline/?

Energy Transfer Partners may complete the Dakota Access Pipeline yet: they just have to get past thousands of U.S. military veterans first. Returning to the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota days after President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order reinstating the contentious $3.8 billion project, Veterans Stand has vowed to stonewall the pipeline’s completion. “We are committed to the people of Standing Rock, we are committed to nonviolence, and we will do everything within our power to ensure that the environment and human life are respected,” Anthony Diggs, a spokesman for the group, told CNBC. “That pipeline will not get completed. Not on our watch.”

The group, which served as “human shields” for protestors at Oceti Sakowin camp, just south of Bismarck, in December, have raised over $75,000 since launching a GoFundMe campaign last week. Veterans Stand is looking to raise $500,000 to purchase supplies such as food, firewood, propane, and first-aid kits, as well as arrange car rides for volunteers to and from the camp.

We Need You Now: Final Easement for DAPL Appears Imminent
Camp of the Sacred Stones
International Indigenous Youth Council
Indigenous Environmental Network
January 31, 2017
http://sacredstonecamp.org/blog/2017/1/31/we-need-you-now-final-easement-for-dapl-appears-imminent

The Standing Rock Sioux will soon march on Washington.
by Sabrina Imbler, grist
February 3, 2017
http://grist.org/briefly/the-standing-rock-sioux-will-soon-march-on-washington/?
On Wednesday, the tribe announced that the Rise With Standing Rock Native Nations March will happen in D.C. on March 10. That’s more than a month before the March for Science and the People’s Climate March.

#NODAPL 2017 ACTION HUB
Help us fill every single day of this calendar with a #NoDAPL action! Wherever you are, take action to kill the black snake.
http://tinyurl.com/jg35nky

No Pink Wooly Caps for Me

Click here to access article by Barbara MacLean from Planning Beyond Capitalism.

Whether its the neo-nationalist new-money faction of Trump-Bannon or it’s the old-money Clinton, Bush, Koch Brothers, Kissinger faction, we know that the capitalists give all of them their marching orders. The primary goal of both parties is to protect capitalism and undermine any attempts to regulate, let alone change, the economic system that is driving the majority of us into the ground.

Making demands is for those who accept their subservience

.... The problem with all these “demands” is that they are demands. There is no promise to take power. The implication of demands is that there is someone in power that is in a position of granting or refusing the demands. It accepts the capitalist rulers and complains they are not fair and just rulers. Demands are the plea to make ones in power be better leaders.

I’ll march for a socialist transition program

Fake News Alert: NPR, Amnesty International, and all the others funded by the rich ruling class

by Ron Horn for this website.

I wake up in the morning with the aid of a radio alarm set for Seattle's jazz station which carries many NPR programs--likely because of economic reasons. This morning through the fog of sleepiness I began to hear an NPR news program in which some person from Amnesty International was reporting about torture under the Syrian government. Because I had posted an article recently about Amnesty and their collaboration with the White Helmets, my ears immediately perked up. Then I heard the NPR narrator making the point that Syria was supported by Iran and Russia. I had been hit with another piece of fake news reporting!

I swear to god--it's everywhere! That's because the rich capitalist class owns nearly every medium of communication and they are constantly working to insure that we are on board with their imperialist aims and interests.

NPR began in 1967 under Lyndon Johnson's administration. It was like Medicare, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and various welfare programs set up under what became known as the Great Society program of his presidency. I think all these programs were promoted to distract the shocked and grieving American public away from the Kennedy assassination in which Johnson had likely participated.

Over the years government funding of NPR has been greatly reduced to what it is now only a trickle. NPR is now mainly funded by the rich ruling class through foundations such as Soros's Open Society Institute, and of course NPR's content tends to reflect this class's interests of profit, power, and the promotion under their control of a new world order.

So You Want to Start a Resistance

Click here to access article by Tony Cartalucci from his blog Land Destroyer Report. 

I am posting this because its author is a well-respected critic of the existing power structure and all of its manifestations, but I find his arguments about resisting this status quo lacking in convincing political substance. I've often wondered what the ideology of his politics were, and this piece really lays them out. To me, it sounds like libertarianism, although I think they might qualify that as libertarian anarchism. I also learned that his thinking is very similar to James Corbett who has been a proponent of technology has furnishing a means of confronting "the powers that be" (I hate that expression!) in an alternative way. 

I use "the powers that be" expression deliberately because I think both of them, along with many other activists, regard the capitalist ruling class as invincible if opposed head on, or maybe they don't see any alternative. And they consider the latter as consisting of only protests and militant demonstrations against "the powers that be". This I think reveals a lack of imagination and a lack of understanding of what humans are really up against and ways to carry on a revolutionary struggle. It may also reveal a desire to keep things quite the same because they personally are very comfortable, and they don't want to rock the boat too much for fear that it might affect their comfort.

I don't have time, or maybe the ability, to really take apart their activist ideology, but I can't let their politics go as a promising form of resistance pass unchallenged. I have been an activist for over 60 years in which I grew from a petition-signing person trying to convince our immediate masters in the government to behave better, to a protestor and militant demonstrator, all the way to a convinced revolutionary. 

The capitalist system can tolerate many forms of alternative economic practices as long as they don't disturb the system. They also welcome these alternative practices because they see them as sort of experiments of doing business; and whenever they succeed, they will be integrated into corporate practices. This is precisely what has happened to much of the organic food movement. I've watched it from the sidelines since the 1960's when it began, and it hasn't interfered with business as usual one iota for the capitalist governing class.

The same goes for technology. I remember reading articles by James Corbett extolling the virtues of what he calls a new "peer to peer economy" illustrated by entrepreneurs using the internet in creative ways to rent out extra rooms in their houses or to use their vehicles to earn money transporting people. And sure enough Uber company has taken control of this latter service and earning huge salaries for their officers. There is growing criticism about this company. I think the same is likely true of Airbnb and maybe Bitcoin.

Trump’s New World Order

Click here if you wish to access the 21:34m video directly from The Analyst Report. 

I listened to this yesterday shortly after my posting deadline; and although I've posted similar material, I think it is so well done that I am posting it today. The unnamed excellent narrator begins by citing the manipulation of social identity issues.

The Hijacking of Feminism

Click here if you wish to access this 17:27m lecture by John Pilger, which he delivered in Melbourne in 2012, directly from a recent post on The Wrong Kind of Green. (Thanks go to Christopher of Oregon who alerted me to this post.)

In this 2012 lecture Pilger tried hard to present a critical analysis of the distorted feminism that the ruling class has used to subvert and transform genuine feminism into serving the US-led Empire. By doing this, he provided another illustration of how our capitalist masters have misused and transformed social identity issues to divert our attention away from the class issues of capitalism that is the basis of everything tormenting us today--extreme inequality, mountains of debt owed to our masters, never-ending wars, etc.



But, as you can see, his voice in Melbourne had little effect. That is because our masters own every significant means of communication and they don't permit ideas like this to be distributed widely. It is obvious that we must save ourselves and our planet from the ravages inflicted both on our societies and the planet from the rule of these self-serving, crazed people. But will we??? They and their system of capitalism have ended up owning everything we have created and are obsessively waging one war after another in order to rule the world.

Nancy Pelosi Repels Young People On CNN Town Hall

From the Jimmy Dore show in Burbank, California via YouTube.

Even though people still cling to the fiction that Congresspeople represent us in a democratic society, it is clear from this 15:52m video that many people, especially young people, are viewing this fiction more cynically and are asking questions that are embarrassing to those people in the government who are serving the capitalist system, and not us. In addition, I thought this segment of the show so hilarious that I am posting it also for your entertainment. In these troubling times we all need a little humor.

Karl Rove’s Prophecy: “We’re an Empire Now, and When We Act, We Create our Own Reality” [a must-read]

Click here to access article by Karel van Wolferen from Global Research. 

Those with much power got away with excessive extralegal use of it since the beginning of this century because systems of holding the powerful to account have crumbled on both sides of the Atlantic. ....

The best way, I think, to make sense of how this works is to study it as a type of intimidation. Sticking to the official story because you have to may not be quite as bad as forced religious conversion with a gun pointed at your head, but it belongs to the same category. It begins with the triggering of odd feelings of guilt. At least that is how I remember it. Living in Tokyo, I had just read Mark Lane’s Rush To Judgment, the first major demolishing in book form of the Warren Report on the murder of John F. Kennedy, when I became aware that I had begun to belong to an undesirable category of people who were taking the existence of conspiracies seriously. We all owe thanks to writers of Internet-based samizdat literature who’ve recently reminded us that the pejorative use of the conspiracy label stems from one of the greatest misinformation successes of the CIA begun in 1967. [my link]

So the campaign to make journalists feel guilty for their embarrassing questions dates from before Dick Cheney and Rove and Bush. But it has only reached a heavy duty phase after the moment that I see as having triggered the triumph of political untruth.

We have experienced massive systemic intimidation since 9/11.

This quoted passage confirms my own perceptions about the astonishing campaign of fake news and commentaries found on corporate media. When the ruling capitalist class got away with 9/11 with such dramatic success, they knew then that they could tell any lies to Americans and it would be believed. Such lies are the threads that make up the entire fabric of ruling class ongoing propaganda that has become for most of us our "reality".

But notice that he stops short of any mention of the system that drives our masters to engage in such massive lying. Perhaps for him that dragon poses a too severe threat to his career.

(You will have noticed a fairly common response when the 9/11 massacre enters a discussion. Smart people will say that they “will not go there”, which brings to mind the “here be dragons” warning on uncharted bits of medieval maps.) 

'Spectacular Betrayal' as Trump Hands Economy 'Back Over to Wall Street'

Click here to access article by Deirdre Fulton of Common Dreams. 

It appears that the same-old, same-old ruling class hangout of Wall Street is taking the reigns of government once again from the ego-driven real estate magnate, Donald Trump, and is turning him into their puppet. Surprise, surprise! This report furnishes another illustration of the capitalist version of "democracy": "The more things change, the more they remain the same."

President Donald Trump is handing the U.S. economy "back over to Wall Street" on Friday, with a regulatory rollback that critics say could put consumers and the financial system at risk.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump signed executive orders Friday "establish[ing] a framework for scaling back the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial-overhaul law" and rolling back an Obama-era regulation requiring advisers on retirement accounts to work in the best interests of their clients. That rule was set to go into effect in April.

Trump signed the orders after meeting with bank CEOs.

But don't be misled into thinking that the Dodd-Frank law was anything to celebrate. It was very weak and filled with all sort of holes for clever capitalists to gamble with their wealth (and the economy) similar to what occurred before the 2008 collapse. Trump with the advice of Wall Street bankers just makes it easier for them.

And Daniel Lazare of ConsortiumNews, in an article entitled "Steering Trump Back to Endless War", sees many indications of a similar phenomenon in Trump's foreign policies.

Under capitalist "democracy", the choices in ruling class elections, which they insist constitute "democracy", always represent the same winner--the capitalist ruling class. If only Americans could see that through the dense fog of their ideological brainwashing! If they could see that, they might not be so fooled and played with every election cycle. Then they might see that ownership of significant economic property, which working people like themselves created or developed, must belong to all the people in order to serve the needs of all of the people. Then they might see that invading other lands and killing people are nothing more than a war crimes, and hold people who did, or advocate, such things as criminals and treat them accordingly.

Radiation at Fukushima Spikes to Highest Levels Since 2011

Click here to access article by Whitney Webb from True Activist. 

Nearly six years after the initial explosion caused a catastrophic meltdown at the Daiichi nuclear power plant in the Fukushima prefecture of Japan, the situation has suddenly taken a drastic turn for the worst. Last Thursday, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the company which owns and operates the now defunct power plant, announced that radiation inside the containment vessel of one of the plant’s failed reactors has now reached levels undetected since the disaster first occurred in 2011. Radiation inside the reactor has reached 530 sieverts per hour, a drastic increase from the previously recorded 73 sieverts per hour recorded in the aftermath of the meltdown. The level of radiation is so high that an official of the National Institute of Radiological Sciences told the Japan Times that medical professionals have never considered dealing with this level of radiation in their work.

I remember viewing last month a sixty minute PBS TV program called "The Nuclear Option", funded by billionaire David Koch, which pretended to deal with nuclear power from an objective point of view. The more I watched the program the more I was convinced the it was clearly designed to allay fears about Fukushima and to promote the safety of nuclear power which capitalist enterprises will clearly need to ward off the threat of climate destabilization and increasing costs of drilling for hydrocarbons. 

The broadcast of this program was not produced by neutral scientists. It happened because a billionaire capitalist wanted it to be broadcast in order to fill our minds with disinformation about nuclear energy to conform to that of his and his class friends' interest to develop this source of energy in order to keep their engines of profit and power running. What needs to be understood is that this propaganda program is, as always, broadcast because of huge contributions by capitalists. It's just that usually it's not nearly so obvious because they often prefer to hire upper-middle class intellectuals to do it in their name or their organizations' name. The same principle applies to history books, print and electronic media, educational institutions in general, and even in entertainment provided by Hollywood, etc.

Refugees and American foreign policies

by editorial cartoonist Eric J Garcia. 

Trump browbeats Australian “ally”

Click here to access article from World Socialist Web Site.

Just two weeks in office, Trump’s aggressive “America First” economic nationalism and militarism are sending political shockwaves around the world. Not only has the new president launched provocations and threats against Europe, Mexico, Iran and China, he has deliberately placed a question mark over a number of Washington’s key partnerships—with NATO and the European Union, and with Japan, South Korea and now Australia in the Asia-Pacific region.

Trumps actions reflect his background as an aggressive capitalist who is accustomed to control everything in his firm. Now he thinks he is in charge of America, Inc. and is acting accordingly. Given the dominant international role that the US-led Empire plays, this reckless style can have very serious consequences for the ruling capitalist class which appears to me to be divided currently into two factions (see this and this).

Assuming my theory is correct, if Trump's aggressive style of management may be too much for the Rockefeller faction and if he becomes too much of a loose cannon, or is influenced too much by ziocons, the Rockefeller faction may have second thoughts about supporting him. Meanwhile the CIA faction may be merely waiting for him to commit more diplomatic blunders before removing him from office. Once Trump is removed, most Americans will express a collective sigh of relief and gratitude, and quietly acquiesce to the same old policies pursued by the CIA and the neoliberal ruling class.

C. J. Hopkins has a somewhat different view that I have much respect for. He sees a unitary capitalist faction represented by the usual neoliberal capitalists who are merely using Trump and his "fly-over" followers by pretending to pursue neo-nationalist policies. Thus he sees only a political faction versus a solidly entrenched neoliberal ruling class.

People, unhappy with how Capitalism has been restructuring their lives since the end of the Cold War, and aware that power has been gradually shifting from sovereign nations to supranational entities, multinational corporations, international institutions, and so on, are reaching for the only alternative on offer, Neo-nationalism, in one form or another. Which is what the Trumpians and the Brexit gang are promising, a halt of the spread of global Capitalism and the restoration of national sovereignty.

The neoliberal ruling classes, naturally, would like to prevent this from happening. Which, make no mistake, they are going to do (although they may let Trump, Bannon, et al. go ahead and have their War on Islam to finish destabilizing the Middle East first). What is being marketed to us as the “resistance to Trump,” technically, is a counter-insurgency operation … the global neoliberal establishment quashing the neo-nationalist uprising. But that kind of thing doesn’t sell very well. What sells much better is Hitler hysteria, neo-McCarthyite propaganda, and emotionally loaded trigger words that short circuit any kind of critical thinking, words like “love,” “hate,” “racism,” “fascism,” “normal,” and of course “resistance.” 

How such a contradictory nature plays out is to me mind-boggling. Hopkins sees the neo-nationalist views of the Trump camp being easily subverted by the powerful neoliberalists with the result that a war on Muslims will be needed to distract Trump followers from this takeover:

...Bannon (who will continue to run things while Trump obsesses over the size of his whatever) will be relentlessly pushing his agenda forward. The scary thing is, he is obviously smart enough to know that his insurrection is doomed if the fight remains merely on the economic level (i.e, trade deals, bringing back jobs, et cetera). He understands the global economy, as do the rest of Trump’s Goldman Sachs team. Which means it probably won’t be all that long until the War on Islam gets officially launched, as there’s nothing like a war to unite a country … and manufacturing military ordnance at home won’t screw with the price of people’s smartphones.

How the factions are constituted or whichever faction "wins", we will definitely lose unless we organize ourselves into a powerful opposing independent force capable of challenging and overturning capitalist rule. But I fear, much like Hopkins, that most of us are ill prepared to pursue independent actions based on real knowledge about class rule, and consequently our actions will mostly be manipulated by one faction or the other. 

Hopkins' view does not obviate a view advanced by F. William Engdahl who predicts that US policies will try to seduce Russia away from China in a divide and conquer strategy.  

Labor Leaders Stump For Trump As White House Prepares Attack On Workers

Click here to access article by Eric Draitser from Mind Press News.

The sight of leaders of a number of major trade unions praising President Donald Trump after their meeting with him on Jan. 23 is perhaps the perfect illustration of everything wrong with the labor movement. More importantly, it demonstrates just how hollow President Trump’s rhetoric about defending workers and putting people “back to work” truly is.

For while Trump talks about investing in infrastructure and rebuilding America, ostensibly with the goal of improving the lives of workers, his administration is planning a full-scale offensive on workers and their standards of living. Fluent in doublespeak, Trump is able to posture as a friend of workers while in fact being a ruthless predator bent on the further evisceration of the working class. In that sense he’s not much different than other politicians. 

Washington state jury refuses to convict first “valve-turner” in four state tar sands pipeline action

Click here to access article by Martha Baskin from Free Speech Radio News.

In a surprise victory, a Washington state jury has refused to convict Ken Ward, the first of five “valve turners” who shut off tar sands pipelines [at Anacortes, WA] from Canada to Washington in October of last year. Ken Ward, who turned off an emergency block valve on Kinder Morgan’s Trans-Mountain Pipeline, was charged with two felony counts. After more than five hours of deliberation, Ward’s three day trial ended in a hung jury, with at least one juror refusing to convict.

Following this introduction is a transcript of the audio recording of Baskin's report.

Once again I find activists using expressions like the vacuous "powers that be" which tends to obscure the tiny class that benefits from so many problems that we face, and hides the reality that we are really engaged in a class war. Our ultimate goal must be to rid ourselves of class structured societies and replace them with true egalitarian societies. Capitalism as a system has inevitably created a tiny class of powerful people called capitalists who have over several hundred years accumulated ownership and control over nearly everything that ordinary people have created with their hard work and their creativity. If activists can't recognize reality, then all their activism will be futile.

Ward and O’Hara are among the founders of the Climate Disobedience Center, an organization committed to act publicly and with determination to, in O’Hara’s words, “undermine the fossil fuel basis of industrial civilization.”

To do that, O’Hara says, “You have to build a powerful enough movement. You have to build a power base that’s capable of shifting that policy and capable of pushing back against the powers that be.”  [my emphasis]  

Record-busting heat in eastern Australia as climate warming goes extreme

Click here to access article from Climate Code Red (Australia).

2016 was by far the hottest year in the observation record, with the global average surface temperature 1.24 degrees Celsius (°C) warmer that the late nineteenth century, according to NASA data. This broke the record set just the previous year of 1.12°C, which in turn broke the previous mark set in 2014 of 1.01°C.

 ....

And now Ben Domensino of Weatherzone reports that the month of February is about to put eastern Australia's record-breaking hot January to shame....

Trump’s appointees are stickin’ it to the elites!

by Jen Sorensen.

America’s Looming War with Iran: What You’re Not Being Told

Click here to access article by Darius Shahtahmasebi from AntiMedia. 

This is an excellent, must-read article that covers so much of the background of the current threats posed by our strained relations with Iran and its history over the past sixty years.

The mainstream media has attempted to frame Donald J. Trump’s election victory as a sort of collusion between Russia and Trump — a scheme allegedly intended to promote an American president who would do Vladimir Putin’s bidding. But the truth is that there is one other country that stands to be the prime beneficiary of Trump’s reign as president: Israel.

General Buck Turgidson imitating a low-flying B-52 "frying chickens in a barnyard"

The thought occurred to me while reading the article that we might be living in the world portrayed by the classic film of the 1960s, Dr. Strangelove. Donald Trump might be playing the role of General Buck Turgidson as the mad general who loved combat and war. It appears that he has already threatened Mexico. But then I woke up from this nightmare and thought that the ruling class must be seeing to it that he doesn't do anything crazy.

When will this madness end? In the words of Noam Chomsky, the United States has been “torturing” Iran for 60 years. The intention to take out Iran is still on the table, even with the so-called “anti-establishment” candidate in office.

Clearly, the world cannot continue down this path towards nuclear annihilation. The current industrial war machine must be dismantled. 


I only disagree with the latter statement in the article. "The current industrial war machine" is a product of the capitalist system that controls and sustains it. Thus it follows that the capitalist system must be dismantled!

Iran Just Officially Ditched the Dollar in Major Blow to US: Here’s Why It Matters

Click here to access article by Alice Salles from AntiMedia. (Added a clarify link regarding Saddam Hussein's plan to sell Iraqi oil in Euros at 9:30 PM Seattle time.)

Following President Donald Trump’s ban on travelers from seven predominantly Muslim countries, the Iranian government announced it would stop using the U.S. dollar “as its currency of choice in its financial and foreign exchange reports,” the local Financial Tribune reported.

This is likely the reason why the Trump administration officials are currently engaging in vitriolic verbal attacks on Iran (see this and this). This was likely the reason why we first invaded and toppled Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq, the first of seven too independent Muslim countries that became a target for the Empire in the Middle East and Africa according to (retired) Gen. Wesley Clark in a speech delivered in 2007. (Notice these are most of the same countries that were reportedly included in Trump's ban.)



The securing of the US dollar as a primary world reserve currency is critically important to the dominant position of the US Empire in the world, and it is also necessary to prevent rampant inflation within the US. This has enabled the privately owned Federal Reserve Bank to issue huge volumes of dollars and lend them at near zero interest to banks which, in turn, has lent them to us at much higher interest to help bail them out.

Because of the huge war debts the US racked up in the Vietnam War, Nixon was forced in the 1970s to remove gold from backing the US dollar. The solution was provided by Nixon and Kissinger and the 1974 agreement with that medieval kingdom of Saudi Arabia whereby the Saudi monarchy agreed to sell their vast supplies of oil only in US dollars in return for protection by the Empire. If this appears like a Mafia style arrangement, it appears so because it is.

So this move on the part of Iran is another reason why the directors of the Empire, lodged in various "think tanks" like the Council on Foreign Relations, and their "employees" in Congress are so upset with Iran. 

It’s Time We Talked About Our Owners

Click here to access article by "Don Quijones" (he resides in Spain & Mexico) posted on Wolf Street.

Sometimes it takes a people centuries to wake up. This English expat woke up when Black Rock, a private equity firm, purchased a large minority stock in Spain's telecom giant Telefónica. 

The author gives one an idea of the concentration of wealth (and power) in monster financial corporations that is inevitable in the system of capitalism, and how a tiny class of people called capitalists have managed to work around laws prohibiting monopolies by purchasing sufficient stocks to give them controlling ownership in companies that are in direct competition with each other. 

Yet he holds onto his delusion about the legitimacy of the system with the hope that Donald Trump can do something about a new "gilded age"--as if we weren't already in one.

Whether Trump’s team – filled with billionaires, Goldman Sachs alumni, and financiers – or other national governments will be inclined (or even able) to take such action is debatable. If they don’t, the concentration of ownership within national and global industries is set to grow, setting the stage for a new gilded age that promises to be even more insidious than the last one, since it will be global in scope and will almost certainly be facilitated by the international network of central banks.

Yes, all we need to do is sign a petition telling our government to do something about this, or elect people to Congress or the presidency like Trump who will reform the system. If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you.

Blundering Into a War With China

Click here to access article by Conn Hallinan from CounterPunch. 

Hallinan does a reasonably good job of presenting a balanced view of China's build up of its defense forces on artificial islands near their coast.

When President Trump says he wants to make America great again, what he really means is that he wants to go back to that post-World War II period when the U.S. dominated much of the globe with a combination of economic strength and military power. But that era is gone, and dreams of a unipolar world run by Washington are a hallucination.

Climate destabilization and Trump

by Drew Sheneman. 

Trump up the volume

Click here to access article by Dave Randall from CounterPunch.

There is one good thing about Donald Trump. He doesn't have the public relations skills of  Obama and he doesn't have black skin to divert attention away from what he does. He is a rather crude caricature of a wealthy tycoon with the temperament of a mobster. Now that he is in office he doesn't try to fool anybody other than those gullible and desperate people who watch TV sitcoms. Because of this different style, many liberal people are easily led into believing that the policies he pursues are substantially different than those of other administrations. 

Because their candidate, Hillary Clinton, of the CIA faction of the capitalist ruling class lost the election, they are using corporate media to whip up opposition to Trump, and people are responding with protests. It's good in a way that people are engaging politically, but they urgently need to insure that their actions serve their interests rather that some faction of the ruling class.

I'm posting this interesting piece, not only because it directly connects activists of the present with those of the past, but because music has a way of bringing people together in places where they can raise their political awareness about the difficulties they face. I learned this insight during the Vietnam War by attending many political gatherings that included music. Instead of merely relating in isolation to the world as portrayed on the boob-tube (TV), people at such gatherings are not only entertained but share stories and insights. Such social experiences can raise awareness about what is really going on and why.

Trump’s “Migrant Policy” Exposes Continuity of Agenda

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

Cartalucci reminds that Trump's latest banning of refugee from seven countries has long antecedents in the ruling class's strategy to overturn independent governments in the Middle East which they described as "Soviet client regimes". The list, of course, does not include countries who have been, or were, in fact promoting terrorist armies to overthrow what were independent countries at the time of the formulation of this strategy. He argues that this action is likely motivated by the same strategy that occurred under Obama's administration: to create "safe zones" in Syria that would both serve to protect terrorist armies and fragment the Syrian nation.

Meanwhile the policy is being played up in corporate media by what I identify as the CIA faction to discredit the Trump administration and whip up more popular opposition to his administration.

Bloomberg and other allegedly “liberal” media platforms have attempted to link President Trump’s policies to his own business interests, deflecting public attention away from the fact that the seven nations targeted by the new executive order are precisely the same nations targeted since the 1990’s by Wall Street and Washington special interests.

US and European media are also leveraging their own manufactured “migrant crisis” to sell the concept of “safe zones” in Syria, a policy laid out and pursued under President Obama when initial US-backed regime change in Syria failed to materialize. The policy is now being continued without interruption under President Trump.

What is really needed is an independent popular revolutionary movement that is fully aware of this split in the ruling class and devises independent strategies to take advantage of their rivalry in the interests of the people and social justice, instead of being used by either sick capitalist faction for their own interests of controlling the Empire, ever more profit and power, and imposing their rule on the entire world.

President Trump: Nationalist Capitalism, An Alternative to Globalization?

Click here to access article by James Petras from Global Research. 

I am running out of time this morning and have little time to really study this article, but I am simply amazed by his portrayal of Trump's views. This article could easily be seen as a strong defense of his policies. The only problem is that Petras seems to be totally guided by what Trump said about his policies during his political campaign, and not about his actions. His concluding remarks about what he has actually done--his cabinet appointments--are not consistent with his lengthy description of Trump's views, but Petras doesn't deal with this glaring contradiction.

His cabinet appointments and his Republican colleagues in Congress are motivated by a militarist ideology closer to the Obama-Clinton doctrine than to Trumps new ‘America First’ agenda.  He has surrounded his Cabinet with military imperialists, territorial expansionists and delusional fanatics.

The Reign of Mad Donald King

by "Tom Tomorrow".

Deranged And Deluded: The Media’s Complicity In The Climate Crisis

Click here to access article by David Cromwell, editor of Media Lens (Britain).

Cromwell's article is based on a book published last year by Indian writer Amitav Ghosh entitled The Great Derangement. 

Last Thursday, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved their symbolic Doomsday Clock forward thirty seconds, towards apocalypse. It is now two and a half minutes to midnight, the closest since 1953. Historically, the Doomsday Clock represented the threat of nuclear annihilation. But global climate change is now also recognised as an 'extreme danger'.

Future generations, warns Ghosh, may well look back on this time and wonder whether humanity was deranged to continue on a course of business-as-usual. 

Cromwell finally gets around later in the rather lengthy article to casually mention that Ghosh points to the obvious truth that "capitalism and imperialism" are responsible. But he doesn't seem to understand that major media is an integral part of capitalist rule. The best he can do is  morally condemn them.

As Ghosh also observes, capitalism and imperialism are intertwined as primary drivers of the climate crisis. But when did a BBC environment, economics or business correspondent ever report this truth? Their silence is shameful.... 

Instead of pointing to the necessity of supporting an independent media and the overthrow of capitalism, this moral condemnation seems to be the point of the entire article. This is liberal critical thinking at its best! (sarcasm)

The Resistance and Its Double

Click here to access article by C J Hopkins from CounterPunch. (My commentary edited for clarity at 4:22 PM Seattle time.)

Since WWII the US backed by a NATO army has reigned mostly supreme. In 1990 the Empire's arch-nemesis, the Soviet Union, collapsed largely because of its own self-serving bureaucratic weight. The imperial masters of this new Empire were ecstatic: Bush Sr. declared that this was a beginning of a New World Order, Empire ideologists like Francis Fukuyama argued that capitalist America had demonstrated the attainment of the highest form of civilization, while Samuel Huntington saw only the Muslim nations standing in the way of the US-led capitalist Empire to rule supreme over the world. To understand this astonishing result and our present confusing situation today, we must review briefly our history since WWII.

Immediately after the war the ruling capitalist class went on the attack against organized labor (see this and this) and engaged in a purge of radicals during the McCarthy period. Along with the rollback of labor reforms and the purge of leftists, the ruling class's ideological engines completely saturated the minds of the American people with dumbed-down messages of a benevolent country trying to save the world from the evil empire of the Soviet Union and the splendid virtues of capitalism. Given the US's dominant economic position for nearly three decades following the war, the US capitalist ruling class was able to provide fairly generous material inducements to the middle and lower classes in order to head off resistance to these attacks on labor and the left.

As a result of this history, in recent decades the American public has simply reacted viscerally to the manufactured War on Drugs and War on Terror and encouraged to devote their time and energies to social identity causes and multiculturalism. The end result is what we see today: the class struggle, which became dramatic during the Great Depression of the 1930s, has completely disappeared along with any revolutionary understanding of the class war that is intrinsically embedded in capitalism.

C. J. Hopkins explains how the apparent split between the ideological engines of neoliberalists and neo-nationalists are effectively managing the minds of most Americans today in the absence of any revolutionary politics. 

...the quandary folks on the [existing] Left are currently facing is twofold: (1) how to oppose the Trumpians, and other neo-nationalist insurgencies, without serving the interests of Neoliberalism; and (2) how to oppose Neoliberalism without serving the interests of the Neo-nationalists. Which is more or less a classic Zen koan designed to make one’s head explode.

Both the neoliberals and the neo-nationalists know this, and will be using it to pressure us into joining their camps.

And he doesn't see the conflict ending well. 

And, it won't until there is an independent revolutionary left that stops simply reacting to either of these capitalist factions and promote their own organizations, strategies and tactics to eliminate the rule of this tiny class that is hell-bent on war and environmental destruction.

Trump Skips Saudis in "Anti-Terror" Sweep

Click here to access article by Tony Cartalucci from Land Destroyer Report. 

The deceptive games being played by the two factions ("CIA faction" or the "Obama faction" versus the "Rockefeller faction" or "Trump faction" -- see this, this, and this) as represented by efforts of Kissinger and Brzezinski) of the US ruling class are getting ever more complicated, and I am having a very difficult time trying to keep up with their deceptive activities. It seems that everything is fake with our government and major media, and ordinary Americans are being played with as suckers (def. 5a).

It appears to me--correct me if I'm wrong--that corporate media (largely controlled by the CIA faction) is on the one hand trying to smear Trump with his efforts at rapprochement with the Russians (the Rockefeller faction) while playing along with the old deceptive game of fighting terrorism in the Middle East. In the following commentary Cartalucci is referring to Trump's continuation of CIA faction policies while trying to appear to be different.

Like all politicians and every US president before Donald Trump, talk is cheap - used to target and manipulate the weakest minds among any nation's population. Action, however, is more difficult to manifest among deficient and/or dishonest politicians and political parties.

That President Trump is continuing America's partnership in terror with Saudi Arabia should be of no surprise to the public. Trump - even during his presidential campaign last year - surrounded himself with Bush-era Neo-Conservatives and policymakers, corporate-financier elitists, and the right-wing counterparts of the corporate media, including those elements cleverly disguised as "alternative media" such as Breitbart News.

Objective adults weigh words against actions. Across the West, however, both President Trump's opponents and supporters appear mesmerized by his words, and entirely oblivious to both his actions and their implications.

Beyond Trump and free trade

Click here to access article by economist David Ruccio from Real-World Economics Review Blog.

It seems to me that Ruccio ignores a part of the data regarding the effects of NAFTA that he presents in this article, and I would like to point out its significance. I believe that it is consistent with an analysis from another report entitled "Wealth distribution in the United States and the politics of the pseudo-left" which I posted on my website about a week ago.  

If the following graph of Mexican salaried workers (which he supplied) also applies to American salaried workers (which I believe it does), then American middle class workers have also benefited from NAFTA.

[Note: the graph compares Average real salaried workers (the green line) with Average wage workers (the dark line).] This is another illustration of the fact that the rich ruling capitalist classes must reward their middle classes whenever they promote legislation to serve their interests. It's called "co-optation".

However, an increasing problem for the rich ruling capitalists is their increasing introduction of more sophisticated information technology and especially automation. These technical advances is already reducing the number of middle class salaried workers; and as this development accelerates, it will present numerous problems for the stability of capitalist rule. 

Obama’s administration made the “Muslim ban” possible and the media won’t tell you

Click here to access article by Seth Frantzman from his blog Terra Incognita.

It appears from this well documented article that Trump's executive order merely copied a previous order from the Obama administration.

The Department of Homeland Security targeted these seven countries over the last years as countries of concern. In February 2016 “The Department of Homeland Security today announced that it is continuing its implementation of the Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act of 2015 with the addition of Libya, Somalia, and Yemen as three countries of concern, limiting Visa Waiver Program travel for certain individuals who have traveled to these countries.” It noted “the three additional countries designated today join Iran, Iraq, Sudan and Syria as countries subject to restrictions for Visa Waiver Program travel for certain individuals.”

This leaves me with some questions: why is this exposé coming from an American-Israeli living in Israel and not from someone concerned with immigration issues here in the US? And, why did Trump do this? (To prove to ordinary American that he is protecting them?), and why is there supposed chaos at the airports? Corporate media are taking full advantage of his executive order to mobilize liberal Americans against him.

For a satirical take on this issue, Jimmy Dore provides this hysterical commentary based on Frantzman's article.

 

Rex Tillerson and His Friends: The End Game of America

Click here to access article by Seth Ferris from New Eastern Outlook.

If this article doesn't depress you, nothing will. Ferris writes about Tillerson as being the biggest monster in the swamp of capitalism, and capitalists now rule the swamp of government which Ferris refers to as "the System Behind the System".

Tillerson is himself an integral part part of the System Behind the System. Appointing him gives a blank cheque for that system to do openly what it has done under cover of legality until now.

Is Trump unaware that it is the System Behind the System, acting independently, which has created the failed foreign policy adventures of the past two and a half decades? If he is going to drain the swamp, as he promised, why does he want to appoint another member of it to run the show? If you ever wondered what Chicago would have been like if Al Capone was the actual Mayor instead of merely controlling the elected officials, you may be about to find out.

George Galloway on Why He Still Backs Brexit

Click here to access article by Joe Emersberger from TeleSur.

The EU has nothing to do with internationalism nor with anti-racism as those suffering the lash of racism and islamophobia in mainland Europe know. And those sinking in the Mediterranean trying and failing to enter Fortress Europe know.

It is nothing to do with peace either, as the people of Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Iraq, Libya Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Mali and others know. The EU is the political wing of NATO.

How We Were Misled About Syria: Amnesty International

Click here to access article by Tim Hayward from his blog.

It seems nowadays that nobody can be trusted, that deception is practiced by everybody. Hayward had long believed in the morality of Amnesty...until one day he read about the White Helmets.

Most of us living outside Syria know very little of the country or its recent history. What we think we know comes via the media. Information that comes with the endorsement of an organisation like Amnesty International we may tend to assume is reliable. Certainly, I always trusted Amnesty International implicitly, believing I understood and shared its moral commitments.

As a decades-long supporter, I never thought to check the reliability of its reporting. Only on seeing the organisation last year relaying messages from the infamous White Helmets did questions arise for me.

You’ll Never View Addiction The Same After Watching This Brilliant Video

Click here to access article by Amanda Froelich from True Activist. (Commentary edited for clarity at 5PM Seattle time.)

Although I haven't thoroughly studied the issue, this take on drug addiction makes a lot of sense to me. If Johann Hari is correct, and I think he is, then this would explain why drug addiction is viewed as it is presently is by ruling class authorities: they don't want Hari's research to undermine all their propaganda about the benefits of American capitalist society. History teaches us that whenever evidence of a sick society contradicts ruling class ideology, the latter will always be purveyed by their ideological institutions until they are forced by revolution to relinquish power.

Everything we thought we knew about addiction is wrong.

The Trump-Media Circus and Continuity of Agenda

Click here to access article by Ulson Gunnar from New Eastern Outlook.

This geopolitical analyst from New York argues essentially that "the more things [appear to] change, the more they stay the same." This was my position before the election, but others like Pepe Escobar, F. William Engdahl, and Michael Hudson take the view that there is a strategic divide among the directors of the ruling capitalist class: the Trump faction (aka "Rockefeller" faction) wants to pursue policies that want to seduce Russia away from China (the old divide and conquer strategy). Gunnar argues for his position by writing:

Imagine the United States is a corporation. It thus has a board of directors (Wall Street). It has a CEO (the US President). The candidates for CEO and the CEO are all chosen by the board of directors merely under the guise of “democratic elections.” The CEO then implements the desires of the unelected board of directors, serving also as a spokesperson for the board and a representative of the board’s overarching agenda.

This explains how, over the past 16 years from US President George Bush Jr. to now President-elect Donald Trump, singular agendas, including unending war in Iraq and Afghanistan, still rage and expanding confrontations with Russia, China, and Iran continue unabated regardless of who is president, and regardless of the alleged principles, political ideals, and campaign promises they respectively represented.

Rhetorically and ideologically, Presidents Bush Jr. and Obama could not have been any more diametrically opposed, yet the continuity of agenda from one 8-year administration to the other was almost seamless.

We will have to wait to see what Trump's administration actually does with regard to foreign policy. Regarding domestic policy I don't see any substantial gains made by any sector of ordinary Americans, and most will lose. One thing is certain: the capitalist rape of the environment will accelerate.

2 ½ Minutes to Midnight – Our World in Peril

Click here to access article by Robert Dodge from Common Dreams.

Nuclear weapons and climate change represent a clear and present danger. Retired Marine Corps General Anthony C. Zinni,  former commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East has stated, "We will pay for climate change one way or another. We will pay to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today, and we'll have to take an economic hit of some kind. Or, we will pay the  price later in military terms. And that will involve human lives. There will be a human toll."

We know what needs to be done and how to do it yet no one in a leadership role has shown the political courage to take the necessary steps.

This piece from the liberal website Common Dreams looks at two dire issues confronting humans, but their narrow ideological belief in, and support for, the status quo (the reign of capitalism) forces an uncritical reader into accepting their conclusion: appealing to the government of the capitalist ruling classes to behave themselves. This is an utter delusion. This is engaging in childish fantasy-thinking that no politically aware adult should be doing. 

The underlying problem that insures that both fates await us is a system that requires growth on a finite planet in order to exist and, at the same time, offers abundant rewards to a tiny class of people who rule over humanity and whose rule is sustained by that system. Because there is only one major problem, there is only one major solution! It's only the means to accomplish this solution that needs to be solved by humans. We must spend our time on that urgent task instead of being lead by those loyal to capitalism down dead-end roads that only lead to hell and our extinction.