Oklahoma teachers strike as workers’ upsurge spreads in US

Click here to access article by Tom Hall from World Socialist Web Site.

Due to personal issues I have been rather remiss on reporting the wave of strikes across America by teachers. This website has been covering it well.

The mainstream media has portrayed the growing strike wave among teachers as a “red state rebellion” against Republican-led austerity measures. However, the situation in Oklahoma, West Virginia and elsewhere is by no means unique to Southern states with Republican governors and Republican majorities in the state legislature. Last month, teachers in Jersey City, New Jersey went on strike, and teachers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania voted for strike action. In 2015, teachers in Detroit staged sickouts in opposition to atrocious conditions in their schools.

The disastrous situation facing public schools and educators is the result of a national and international ruling-class policy of slashing social spending to pay for surging military budgets and bolster the profits of the banks and corporations.

You may also be interested to listen to a 23:36 minute interview (the first part of Henwood's program) with Jennifer Berkshire, a journalist who has closely reported on the wave of strikes and the strategy of the "right" (her word) to destroy public education. The interview was conducted on March 22nd by Doug Henwood of KPFA, a listener sponsored radio station in Berkeley, California.

Notice particularly that these two people are thoroughly indoctrinated in the conventional view of two political parties that compete for votes in "democratic" elections. The ruling capitalist class control both parties in the style of good cop/bad cop (Democratic Party/Republican Party) to fool most Americans into believing that they live in a democracy. Although they both acknowledge that the Democratic Party is doing nothing to back the teachers, they both seem surprised. Yet, they continue to impose this political construct on the issue throughout the interview. This delusion affects most Americans and is a major barrier to further progress against the ever increasing fascist direction that the ruling class is heading.

Of particular interest to me was the accurate observation by both people that there was an effort to destroy communities across America because they represent the last grass-roots resistance to "the right-wing", as they saw it.

Henwood: This is an interesting point. Schools in a lot of communities are sort of gathering points, a real institution that keeps communities together. The right doesn't really like that, does it.

Berkshire: No, not at all. That's why it's an interesting thing to pay attention to. Because the extent that you have real resistance among the Republicans to these ideas .... These schools are community groups and people understand that blowing them up would mean the end of these communities.

Henwood: And post offices, too. They like to talk about communities, but they want to destroy any institution that keeps them together.

Berkshire: Those are the last two institutions that we feel entitled to as Americans ... and they're hell bent on going after them. That's why I think it's a missed opportunity for Democrats. 

Recommended articles for 4/2/2018

• The Persecution Of Assange Proves Him Right by Caitlin Johnstone from The Greanville Post.

• Mass Deception and the Prelude to World War by Colin Todhunter (a British blogger) from Global Research. 

The owners of these companies, the capitalist class, have off-shored millions of jobs as well as their personal and company tax liabilities to boost their profits and have bankrupted economies. We see the results in terms of austerity, unemployment, powerlessness, privatization, deregulation, banker control of economies, corporate control of food and seeds, the stripping away of civil liberties, increased mass surveillance and wars to grab mineral resources and ensure US dollar hegemony. These are the interests the politicians serve.

It’s the ability to maximise profit by shifting capital around the world that matters to this class, whether on the back of distorted free trade agreements, which open the gates for plunder, or through coercion and militarism, which merely tear them down.

• It’s Not Russia, America’s Unspoken Program of “Political Assassinations” by Eric Sommer from Global Research.

The Geo-Political Poker Game: Where’s the 'Off-Ramp'?

Click here to access article by Alastair Crooke from Sic Semper Tyrannis (thus always to tyrants). 

I regard Crooke as one of the top geopolitical analysts. As a Brit who has worked for the British version of the CIA (MI-6) and various diplomatic posts, he is eminently qualified. In this piece he continues with his description of Trump's political style which he has identified as "Art of the Deal", a very risky high stakes poker strategy that he used in building his real estate empire, to see how it will play out in the upcoming important geopolitical events in the next two months. Referring to this political style, Crooke writes:

... in the sphere of geo-politics this is not so easy. In the next months, but climaxing in May (other things being equal), Trump will put his negotiating theory to the test in a very different ambit to that of New York real estate. The North Korean summit should be held; the verdict on the nuclear agreement with Iran is due to be pronounced then; the US Israeli-Palestinian determination is scheduled to be ‘handed down’ in May; the Sunni states’ Iran containment roles to be set; and any punitive tariffs on China will be decided, and enacted. Although apparently disconnected issues, their clustering together in May will inter-connect them: Success or failure in one, will leach into parallel spheres.

Crooke then asks the following critically important question and speculates about the dangerous dilemma that the possible outcomes pose for the "players" (the factions in the US ruling class and other ruling classes) in this poker style game which puts all of humanity at risk.

... what happens if someone calls the bluff? .... What happens, more importantly, if the bluff is shown for what it is – a bluff, widely and publicly? 

(You might also be interested in the latest development of the Skripal poisoning drama as posted on Moon of Alabama.)

Will America accept its defeat or will it challenge the Russian Bear and the Chinese Dragon?

Click on part 2 and part 3 of a series of three by Elijah J. Magnier from his blog. (Added some content to my commentary at 1:10 PM Seattle time.)

Magnier is a Kuwaiti independent journalist with a very intimate knowledge of the conflicts in the Middle East especially since the beginning of the 21st century. In this series he summarizes the events that led to the defeat of the US Empire in Syria which he regards as pivotal in creating a challenge to the Empire's dominance in the world since WWII. 

Part 1 of the series largely sums up the conflict in Syria, but in parts two and three he develops the above thesis regarding this challenge which directly leads to the question in the title: "Will America accept its defeat or will it challenge the Russian Bear and the Chinese Dragon?". This is the most important question of all, and all political and economic signs suggest to me that the ruling capitalist classes in the USA and across their Empire will not accept defeat simply because the Deep State directors of the ruling class are "still living in the era of 1991". Besides that, the Empire's ruling capitalist class has with its (metaphorical) printing machine ran up a debt of nearly $21 trillion dollars, which is a debt that they largely own and can only recover if they dominate the world. It is a gross understatement to declare that we are living in dangerous times.

The US is still living in the era of 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. Its strong decline continued until the arrival of President Vladimir Putin to power in 2000. Washington realised there is a new person at the Kremlin in the castle of the Tsars with a determined intention to restore the lost glory. Russia had only nuclear weapons at that time and nothing else but the will was strong for the Russian bear to wakeup from its hibernation.

Putin did not declare war on America but extended his hand and tried to build friendship or at least not enmity. But Washington saw in Moscow the potentiality to recover in a couple of decades and worked on slowing down the process or interrupting it if possible. This is why the US started to pull to its side many countries of the ex-Soviet Union which have declared independence and include these in NATO and in the European Union surrounding Russia.

China, which includes cheap labor and can clone any commercial or military technology, like Russia has perceived America’s fear of its rapid economic development and wealth. Thus, the Chinese-Russian rapprochement was mainly created by the aggressive US policy towards the two countries, and this mainly because the American concentrate exclusively on military muscle when dealing with the World.  

Americans Trust ‘Our’ Intelligence Agencies. Should We?

Click here to access article by Eric Zuesse from Strategic Culture Foundation. (Added the last two paragraphs to my commentary at 11:30 AM and 8 PM Seattle time.)

Zuesse, like all well-indoctrinated academics and other upper-middle class people (in general), consider bourgeois (capitalist) "democracy" as the real thing. These people were rather easily seduced by the extra privileges and income given them by the ruling capitalist class in order to keep the capitalist system functioning and give it a superficial appearance of legitimacy and authenticity as a "democracy". Millions of Americans now regard what we formerly had as "democracy" and believe the current lies of the government and corporate media because of their work for the ruling capitalist class. Only recently some of them have discovered a growing police state, evidence of a growing fascist government, and an increasing promotion by the ruling class of foreign wars and subversion of legitimate governments. A few of them, like Zuesse, are coming out of their privileged woodwork to criticize what is happening, and in this piece about the profusion of lies by the government. However, he seems to blame the victims.

Something’s deeply wrong here. Government by deceit, cannot be a democracy. And, yet, the public still don’t get the message, even after it has been delivered to us in history-books. By then, it’s no longer in the news, and so only few people really care about it. The message of history is not learned. The public still accepts the ongoing lies — the new lies, in the new ‘news’, for the new atrocities.

This paragraph reveals the underlying superior attitude of this class toward the classes below them. They wrote the largely fake history in these books and taught capitalist ideology to impressionable young people in public schools and colleges. Such deceit is an integral part of the divisive ideology that the ruling class superimposed on members of the upper middle class (academia and public school administrators are members) to justify their privileges. 

Elsewhere in the economy we see these upper-middle class "professionals" pleasing their capitalist masters (Zuesse always refers to them as an "aristocracy" thus hiding the system which has given them so much power) and bosses in corporate media, Hollywood, corporations, and government in order to live a luxurious lifestyle compared to that of workers "below" them who are steeped in debt and working two or three jobs in order to survive. 

US National Security Advisor John Bolton Backs Terrorists

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

Read this and note how the author carefully documents, although in some cases belatedly, the following conclusion about the Deep State's promotion of terrorist armies. Therefore, John Bolton is not some kind of rogue government figure, but a key figure in carrying out the interests of the Deep State consisting of top financiers and corporate officials, the network of top capitalists and assorted followers who promote imperial interests regardless of administrations.

While exposing John Bolton’s complicity in the material support of egregious terrorists and his efforts to use them as armed proxies against Iran in a war he has attempted to promote and instigate for years is important, it is equally important to expose, confront, isolate, and extinguish the influence of the corporate-financier interests that have underwritten and directed Bolton’s efforts and the efforts of countless others working to drag the United States, its allies, and the rest of the planet into another destructive conflict.Understanding that efforts to remove MEK from the US State Department’s  Foreign Terrorist Organizations list and prepare them for their role as armed proxies against Iran transcended the administrations of George Bush, Barack Obama, and now Donald Trump exposes the continuity of agenda – regardless of who occupies the White House or US Congress – advanced by these unelected corporate-financier interests.

Recommended artilces for 3/30/2018

• Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un: Make Korea United Again! by Federico Pieraccini from Strategic Culture Foundation. As I see it, the world's population mostly consists of pawns as in the game of chess, and our ruling classes, armed with nuclear weapons, play deadly games of chess in which the outcomes threatens our survival as a human species. See how the author elaborates on, and reaches, the following conclusion in the latest chess game played by our masters: 

... while Moscow and Beijing have multiple reasons for seeking an agreement between Pyongyang and Washington, both are aware that the US has no intentions of abandoning its presence in South Korea. The meeting between Kim Jong-un and Trump is a well-designed trap prepared by Moscow, Beijing and Pyongyang, maybe over many months or even years. The most realistic objectives are to further isolate Washington in the region, to bring Beijing and Seoul closer together, and to drive a wedge between Seoul and Washington.

• Disembodied Americans and the Crucifixion of the World by Edward Curtin from his blog.

Why are so many Americans indifferent to the savage slaughter of millions of people around the world carried out by their own government under a long string of presidents?   Why were they stone-cold silent during eight years of Obama’s many wars and drone killings of which he boasted?  Why are they silent in the face of the Trump administration’s continuation and expansion of those wars and its push for a nuclear war with Russia?  Why this incestuous turning in and away from the bloody havoc their government keeps afflicting on the world?

And why all this denial while focusing on the pornographic media spectacles of Stormy Daniels (the porn queen turned “Adult Film Actress”), Monica Lewinsky, and a host of others paraded before the cameras to distract and entertain a population of spectators?

I, like many people, wonder why.  What follows is an attempt at an answer ....  

Recommended articles for 3/29/2018

• Amnesty International: Trumpeting for War… Again by Paul de Rooij from CounterPunch. (Thanks go to an activist reader for recommending this.)

• Ecuador cuts off Julian Assange’s access to the outside world by Mike Head from World Socialist Web Site.

• China taking the long road to solve the petro-yuan puzzle by Pepe Escobar from Asia Times.

• You Know The U.S. is Losing, We’re Willing to Talk by Tom Luongo from his website Gold Goats n Guns.

Cowboys, Class Struggle, and the West

Click here to access this 55 minute interview with historian and author Mark Lause conducted by Sasha Lilley of KPFA radio, a listener sponsored radio station in Berkeley, California. This interview with Lause offers you the real history of cowboys and labor and their often violent conflicts with capitalists and their bosses in the late 1800s.

The cowboy is a mythified character in American society, conjuring up rugged individualism and masculine brawn, values dear to American capitalism. But historian Mark Lause suggests that when we think of the cowboy, we should think of a precarious wage worker.

Activist Christopher (of northwest Oregon) recommends these web posts

• Countries Worldwide Expel Russian Diplomats in Show of Unity from WNYC Radio. This is a program I heard on the OPB [Oregon Public Radio] radio this AM, thick with outrageous anti-Russia lies. The woman interviewed on the program is from the Washington Institute, an Israeli lobby/propaganda machine masquerading as a "think tank". It's a veritable who's who of war-mongering Ziocons.

• Welcome to the Dick Cheney Administration by Stephen M. Walt from Information Clearing House. Nazi Germany 2.0 here we come....

Our Ghost Democracy [a "best post"]

Click here to access article by Mike Small from Bella Caledonia (Scotland).

The author comments on the latest revelations about the collusion of Facebook with a British firm Cambridge Analytica to manage the consent/dissent of populations to support the interests of their clients and, above all, the ruling capitalist classes of the US-led Empire. (Craig Murray on his blog reveals how closely connected Cambridge Analytica is to the ruling class of Britain.) 

Of special interest is the following 19:12m video produced by Channel 4, included in the article, regarding the nefarious activities of Cambridge Analytica:



After reading/viewing the above material, I think that the article would have been better titled as "Our Fake Fake Democracy". It is a double fake because bourgeois or the capitalist version of democracy is mostly fake; but our ruling masters no longer find this version useful to hide their class's sins, so they have created this carefully managed fake version of bourgeois democracy. To better understand this "brave new world" we have entered, I recommend learning a new word: "hypernormalization".

What happened to the West I was born in?!

Click here to access article by "The Saker", a Russian-American from his blog A bird's eye view of the Vineyard.

The author is aghast at the likely direction we are headed in--a nuclear war with Russia, and baffled by the indifference of the people living in the USA.  He argues that the situation is much worse than during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and I remember that--I was terrified!

The truth is that the situation today is infinitely worse than the Cuban missile crisis. First, during the Cuban missile crisis there were rational people on both side.  Today there is NOT ONE SINGLE RATIONAL PERSON LEFT IN A POSITION OF POWER IN THE USA.  Not ONE!  Second, during the Cuban missile crisis all the new was reporting on was the crisis, the entire planet felt like we were standing at the edge of the abyss.

Today nobody seems to be aware that we are about to go to war, possibly a thermonuclear war, where casualties will be counted in the hundreds of millions.

I'm not so terrified today because I have seen this coming for a long time. I have been fortunate to live a full life. I, and many other independent voices, have done everything we could to alert our fellow Americans to this danger and the longer term danger of catastrophic climate destabilization. But capitalist/fascist sociopaths rule the Empire, and it appears that no one or nothing will stop them. The people are like sheep going down the ramp into the nuclear-war slaughterhouse.

Exposing and Stopping the Danger of US “Soft Power”

Click here to access article by Joseph Thomas from New Eastern Outlook. (Edited for much needed clarity around 4:18 PM and 5:08 PM Seattle time.)

While the US does this often under the guise of promoting “democracy,” it is clearly engaged in precisely the opposite. While democracy is generally understood as a process of self-determination, through US soft power, the process is co-opted and abused to allow Wall Street and Washington to determine the policies and direction a targeted nation takes rather than its own people.

Often times victims of US soft power are youths who are indoctrinated in university programmes or targeted by US-funded fronts posing as nongovernmental organisations (NGOs).

Thomas provides a very good analysis of "soft power", with emphasis on Asia, as one of the weapons (in addition to military force and subversive efforts by the CIA) that has been used by the US-led Empire since the end of WWII. With the USA having escaped severe damage in WWII in the Anglo-American war against capitalist rivals of the Axis powers for global dominance, the new Empire's ruling class, which was largely a merger of US and British capitalists, decided that what was needed was the addition of soft power to obtain global dominance in addition to the terrorist methods of Operation Gladio (see part 1 and part 2 of what appears to be an excellent 10 part series). 

This new program of management of consent/dissent, which the US ruling class had so successfully applied to their own population to sell products, used an upgraded version to convert the beliefs of subjugated populations (as well as their own population) to align with their own more global interests of profit and power. Thus, they placed heavy emphasis on propaganda, infiltration of foreign media corporations, the establishment of NGOs to monitor and promote these programs, and "educational" programs which attracted youth from all over the world. 

With the rest of the world lying mostly in ruins, this project did not meet much opposition with the exception of the Soviet Union and Maoists in China that were soon successful (1949) in overthrowing the capitalist ruling class in China led by Chiang Kai-shek. Hence, a vendetta, which became known as the Cold War, was waged against "communism" using every institution of this new Empire.

A truly historical month for the future of our planet

Click here to access article by "The Saker" (Andrei Raevsky) from his blog A bird's eye view of the Vineyard. 

We are fortunate to have our own Russian expert (I'm convinced that he is a descendant of White Russians) living on our shores and interpreting Russia for us.

In this article the author leads us into what looks like a descent into a war between the "Anglo-Zionists" (essentially the US-led Empire) and Russia. However, the meaning of his last clause completely eludes me.

... the fact that today Trump replaced McMaster with a warmongering psychopath like John Bolton is a clear sign that the Neocons are in charge in the USA and that the Axis of Kindness is about to get a heck of a lot “kinder”.

I am mainly posting this article to ask my readers if you can explain what he meant by writing "the Axis of Kindness is about to get a heck of a lot 'kinder'". Sarcasm? I don't remember reading any references to "Axis of Kindness" before. If it's sarcasm, the author seems to join several others into concluding that a war with Russia is inevitable. If so, I think such an attitude is beyond cynicism.

Then They Came for the Globalists

Click here to access article by CJ Hopkins from CounterPunch. 

Hopkins scores a bullseye with this satire on the neoconservative (transnational) section of the ruling capitalist class which have been on a rampage against the neo-nationalist capitalists and people like Hopkins who use words such as "globalist". Such people are "Nazis" and their worst crime of all was duping ordinary Americans to reject their candidate, Hillary Clinton, in 2016. Hopkins explains what this is all about.

Seriously, though, all satire aside, this stigmatization of terms like “globalist,” “globalism,” and “global capitalism” is a key component of The War on Dissent which the global capitalist ruling classes have been waging against a broad assortment of insurgent elements for the last eighteen months. It isn’t just a question of delegitimizing dissidents by smearing them as anti-Semites, Russian agents, and conspiracy theorists. The goal is also to conceal the essential nature of the conflict itself.

The neoconservative solution?

So what the global capitalist ruling classes have to do is … well, they have to lie. They have to disseminate a different narrative, a narrative that has nothing to do with the hegemony of global capitalism, the dissolution of national sovereignty, and the privatization of virtually everything. Because people aren’t total morons, this narrative needs to bear some resemblance to the actual conflict taking place. So, all right, a little rebranding is in order. Global neoliberalism becomes “Western democracy,” neo-nationalism becomes “Nazism,” and Vladimir Putin becomes Adolf Hitler.

Presto! Now things are nice and simple!

Unfortunately, this contest between neo-national capitalists and transnational capitalists (neoliberalism) is distracting attention from the anti-social nature of capitalism itself. Sooner or later capitalists were going to turn into transnational capitalists simply because the latter find national boundaries too restrictive, that is, they are no longer able satisfy their addictions to wealth and power within national boundaries. (Hint: The only real solution is to abolish the addictive system of capitalism so that ordinary people can create systems that guarantee equality, thereby preventing this drug-addicted ruling class from putting an end to all of us.)

Google sets up “news initiative” to censor political opposition and promote mainstream media

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

The campaign for Internet censorship has been spearheaded by the major media outlets, including the Times and the Post, who have seen their subscription base eroded by the growth of oppositional news outlets and “citizen journalism.” By working with the technology giants and intelligence agencies to censor smaller news outlets, the media giants hope to regain the monopoly over the distribution of news they held before the rise of the Internet.

In April of last year, Google announced measures to promote “authoritative content” over “alternative viewpoints,” which led search traffic to left-wing, antiwar, and socialist web sites to plunge by over 50 percent.

I can't put a percentage on this effort against my own website, but the "hits" that I currently receive are substantially down from a year ago when they were accelerating at a rapid pace.

Is the North Korea Deal a Stalking Horse for Trump’s Mid-East Makeover?

Click here to access article by Alastair Crooke from Strategic Culture Foundation. 

I think that Crooke in this article very astutely develops an argument that there is a new version of the Trump administration, which is compatible with the Zionist-laced neoconservative branch of the Deep State, and leading the US down a very dangerous path. 

The main components of his analysis are "the Art of the Deal" and a Zionist paper that ties North Korean's nuclear program with Iran's missile technology that forms a foundation for a very risky strategy that is being pursued by the Trump administration. Crooke thinks that this is a very high risk strategy because these components together with the recent changes in his administration "suggest that we are heading for war with Iran and Russia".

Christopher's recommended articles for 3/20/2018

• Teachers in Jersey City begin strike as demands for walkouts expand across the US from World Socialist Web Site. Good current example of how the unions serve the ruling class.

• Growing Apart: A Political History of American Inequality by Colin Gordon from Inequality.

Evolutionary Dead-Ends

Click here to access article by "xraymike79" from Collapse of Industrial Civilization. (Once again, I thank Christopher, an engaged activist in northwestern Oregon, for alerting me to this article.)

While the Earth is literally burning up, while the oceans increase their acidification, while numbers of wildlife are disappearing, etc, the thoroughly addicted (to profits and power) capitalist ruling classes and their dumbed-down supporters continue to play showing little concern about the future. The author points to these contradictions among a number of others.

Have things improved since I wrote my last essay a year ago for this blog? Have we miraculously transformed our entire energy system into one that does not poison and degrade the natural world? Have we slowed the onslaught of plastic pollution choking the planet’s rivers, lakes, and oceans? Have we done anything meaningful to halt the deterioration of the planet’s biodiversity toward mass extinction? Has this global, hi-tech civilization done anything significant to avert its own demise?

Despite a constant flow of warnings from the scientific community and even a letter signed by more than 20,000 scientists, the simple answer is no.  [my formatting]

Police State Rising: Partisan Politics Wielded to Ensure Our Oppression

Click here if you wish to directly access from YouTube the nearly 3 hour video which features Debbie Lusignan on her Sane Progressive channel discussing many topics related to the title.

I had doubts about listening to this when I have so many important tasks in front of me, but I decided to listen to the video as a background while I do the tasks. However, this plan was put aside after I listened to the first 20 minutes. Then I had to view and listen to her video directly from my desk's computer. I was so impressed about her breadth of knowledge about fake news, PSYOPs, even gatekeeping that seems to be infecting people in alternative media that I have decided that she is one of my well-informed, prime truth-tellers along with Vanessa Beeley, Eva Bartlett, Stephen Gowans, and a few others. I now feel that the long video was well worth my time to view/listen to it. 

She stumbles a bit on the various ideologies and at one point seems to imply that only a regulated capitalism is possible, and I didn't hear her say that any one course was possible to overcome the totally corrupted, criminal system of capitalism that we have today. She does urge us to try to talk to people about what is going on according to her understanding of it (which I think is completely accurate).

A very long discussion that covers my current mindset about the state of the world including psych ops, political division, how the alternative media is in the process of being coopted....I know its lengthy, but it is a discussion with our core community and it is meant as such. Thank you. Please go to my our videos on youtube and Bitchute to see the documentation of what I am talking about in the video descriptions of each of those topic videos. Most of my Florida Vegas stuff is on Bitchute HERE: https://www.bitchute.com/channel/sane...

Triggering War. A Manufactured “Catalytic Event” Which Will Initiate An All Out War? Are We Going to Let this Happen Again?

Click here to access article by Prof. Graeme McQueen from Global Research. 

McQueen has extensively researched the subject of managed and manufactured triggers of past wars, which he shares with us, and reaches the following conclusion:

We would do well to remember that the on-going production of managed and manufactured war triggers takes great resources and cannot forever remain leak-proof. It carries serious risks for war planners. The successful and definitive exposure of even one of these frauds before the people of the world could affect the balance of power overnight.

Our task is clear. We must mobilize both our investigative resources and our communication resources to nullify the efforts of those who specialize in the construction and encouragement of war triggers and who wish to keep the war system robust. We lost over 100 million people to war in the 20th century. Are we really going to let this happen again?

Books—The Doomsday Machine – Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. Daniel Ellsberg [a must read]

Click here to access article by Jim Miles, a Canadian educator, posted on The Greanville Post.

I am close to the generation of Jim Miles and thus share his concerns about a nuclear winter and the future of the "western world" (the US-led Empire). This piece is divided into two parts: 1) the impact the book by Ellsberg had on Miles, and 2) "Final Thoughts" which he writes more generally on the implications of the geopolitical scene we are witnessing today. 

The dominant factor in all this is the U.S. geopolitical view of global domination – hegemony – under the guise of a neoliberal economic outlook and a neoconservative political perspective. It is a society based on consumer consumption promoted through a lifetime of advertising propaganda in the material sense, the pretentious and unrealistic “rugged individualism” of Reagan and Rand, and in the emotive ideas of being the world’s indispensable nation. To support the material side, the corporate world – ranging from the military industries, the financial corporations, through the large media outlets – supports the ongoing wars and subversions around the world in order to harvest the resources and use the cheap labour required to keep the domestic economy going.

This is aided and abetted by their many sycophantic allies [the trans-national capitalists of the US-led Empire].

Trump Wants Her Running CIA, Germany Wants Her Arrested

Click here if you wish to directly access the following 7:05m video by Cenk Uygur, host of The Young Turks from YouTube. (I thank Christopher in northwestern Oregon for alerting me to this post.) (Minor editing was done to clarify my views at 9:46 AM Seattle time on 3/19/2018.)

Uygur points out the contradiction between the "rule of law" and Trump's appointment of Gina Haspel to head the CIA. This is a contradiction that is so widely misunderstood by ordinary Americans because they have been led to believe not only in the "rule of law" which applies to everyone, but in other mythologies spread by the ruling class who control the institutions of education, media, entertainment, etc: that we live in a country ruled by a democratic system, a fair economic system where anyone can achieve anything if they work hard enough, and our their government seeks only humanitarian objectives in their foreign policies. (You may need to wait a few more seconds for the following video to upload on your device.)



Uygur, like others, appears shocked by Trump's CIA appointment because he, like they, has been so thoroughly indoctrinated in these mythologies. What they fail to understand is reality. 

The reality is that our nation is governed by a capitalist ruling class who have constructed a number of fairy tales to secure some form of legitimacy for their tiny class to rule over the larger society. These fairy tales take an enormous and very expensive effort by the capitalist ruling class to ensure that most Americans believe them. During the past decades the contrast between reality of their actions (such as this appointment to the CIA) and these fairy tales have become especially dramatic, and the lies their media have spread have become more and more outrageous. However, most Americans have been so thoroughly conditioned to obey authorities and to seek individual solutions to their problems that it is questionable that they will ever recognize the need to organize a revolution before some catastrophic event occurs.

Uygur entertains the fantasy of her being arrested if she steps foot in Europe. Nonsense! The European governments have been so thoroughly brought under the control of their own ruling capitalist classes who are allied with, and take orders from, their Anglo-American friends that they will quietly dismiss any such notions to arrest Gina Haspel.

CIA/military infiltrating Congress, global arms trade, CEO greed skyrockets

Click here to access the 28:03m video from RT's Redacted Tonight show.

In the first segment Camp is referring to Patrick Martin's series of three reports plus one entitled "The CIA takeover of the Democratic Party" he posted at World Socialist Web Site.

Lee Camp explains the US military/security state’s not-so-secret plan to take over the Democratic Party, and shows how corporate media serve no purpose but a mass distraction and justification for imperialism and exploitation. Naomi Karavani reports on the arms trade while John F. O’Donnell discovers that Google is both helping the state drone foreigners and contributing to mass surveillance.

(Note: I must warn you that you will be watching a Russian sponsored show. To be safe, you must only watch programs and content sponsored by US media corporations. 😉) 

Of a Type Developed by Liars

Click here to access article by Craig Murray from his blog. (Note: I added more content at 8:12 AM and 8:35 AM Seattle time.)

This former member of the British foreign service begins his article with this statement:

I have now received confirmation from a well placed FCO  source that Porton Down scientists are not able to identify the nerve gas as being of Russian manufacture, and have been resentful of the pressure being placed on them to do so. Porton Down would only sign up to the formulation “of a type developed by Russia” after a rather difficult meeting where this was agreed as a compromise formulation. [my link]

And after supplying many facts and arguments, he ends with this statement:

Until this week, the near universal belief among chemical weapons experts, and the official position of the OPCW, was that “Novichoks” were at most a theoretical research programme which the Russians had never succeeded in actually synthesising and manufacturing. That is why they are not on the OPCW list of banned chemical weapons. [my link]

Porton Down is still not certain it is the Russians who have apparently synthesised a “Novichok”. Hence “Of a type developed by Russia”. Note developed, not made, produced or manufactured.

It is very carefully worded propaganda. Of a type developed by liars. [my emphasis]

(The propaganda directors of the Empire have become chronic liars and using others to issue lies to promote their self-serving anti-social agendas: wars, social injustice, inequality, etc. Another example of this allegation is furnished today by Caitlin Johnson in her article entitled "The “Alt-Right” Label: What’s Real, What’s Fake, And Why It Matters".

Read this piece by Edward Curtin who writes about the propaganda specialists who are currently engaging in a war on your mind. He sums up his views with this statement: 

... with a massive and unrelenting war on truth being waged by the Western corporate media, an arm of the CIA, capitalism’s invisible army. It is a twisted game show with deadly consequences. Its method is Janus-faced. From one face, repeat over and over again bold-faced lies always lacking in evidence – e.g. Russiagate, WMD in Iraq, the Syrian government used chemical weapons, Russia is an aggressor planning to invade Eastern Europe, three World Trade Center buildings fell into their own footprints in virtual free fall speed because of fires, etc.; from the other face, play the game of suggesting to the public that they know more than they do because they watch CIA-backed shows like “Homeland,” movies like “Zero Dark Thirty,” and are being informed by all the so-called ex-CIA and intelligence commentators that populate the corporate media and explain what’s really going on. The old adage that “you never leave the CIA” has somehow imperceptibly morphed into “Yes, we can; trust us.”

If you are still not convinced, read the article entitled "Lies Can Lead to War" by conservative Dr. Paul Craig Roberts.)

The Anti-Empire Report #156

Click here to access the report by William Blum. 

Blum highlights the hypocrisy of the US ruling class by citing so many historical examples of their use of manipulation, propaganda, and subversion to control elections in other countries. Finally, he ends by citing a basic ideological conflict: capitalist ruling classes cannot tolerate any government that moves toward social justice, societal ownership and control of the economy, and have, indeed, waged wars of one kind or another on various governments that have tried to do so.

At One Million Views, Richard Gage’s Interview Is the Most-Watched C-SPAN Video — Ever

Click here to access article posted by the Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

Earlier this week, Richard Gage’s 2014 C-SPAN interview surpassed one million views on CSPAN.org, cementing its place as the network’s most-watched video of all time.

.... The interview’s massive reach, both on CSPAN.org and across the Internet, is a testament to the hard work and dedication of hundreds of thousands of activists. It’s also a stark reminder of the disconnect between the public’s continued yearning for the truth about 9/11 and the media’s resolute avoidance of the issue. In the few instances where the media has covered 9/11 Truth seriously, the public has shown tremendous interest.

The CIA takeover of the Democratic Party

Click here to access article by Patrick Martin from the World Socialist Web Site. (I must thank Christopher in northwest Oregon for alerting me to this fine article.) (Some editing done to clarify my views at 4 PM Seattle time, and then added a 9/11 link at 7:20 AM Thursday, 3/15/2018.)

Martin adds a summary to his previous excellent series of three articles (see here and here) examining the takeover of one of the two ruling class parties allowed to participate in "democratic" elections. The Deep State, the network of political activists serving the ruling One Percent, want to preserve the myth of democracy by more closely managing elections with their chosen participants.

Yes, the political climate was much different in the 1970s and '80s when the Church and Pike committee hearings exposed so many of the crimes of the CIA. As Martin describes it: 

The Church and Pike committee exposures, despite their limitations, had a devastating political effect. The CIA and its allied intelligence organizations in the Pentagon and NSA became political lepers, reviled as the enemies of democratic rights. The CIA in particular was widely viewed as “Murder Incorporated.”

Yes, how things have changed since then! The Deep State's solution was for their secret (from us) agencies of the CIA and other "intelligence" agencies to execute the false-flag event of 9/11 that proved so successful in quashing this hostile anti-establishment attitude to where we are today: half of the population believing the lies of the ruling class media and the other half immobilized by bewilderment and fear for their own security.

How times have changed. One of the main functions of the “war on terror,” launched in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, has been to rehabilitate the US spy apparatus and give it a public relations makeover as the supposed protector of the American people against terrorism.

This meant disregarding the well-known connections between Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders and the CIA, which recruited them for the anti-Soviet guerrilla war in Afghanistan, waged from 1979 to 1989, as well as the still unexplained role of the US intelligence agencies in facilitating the 9/11 attacks themselves.

Recently our masters in the Deep State decided to take over the Democratic Party to insure that no populist elements like the Bernie Sanders phenomenon could have much influence in the party and that ruling class policies and actions were implemented. Now we as a society are descending into more overt fascist rule.

The working class is confronted with an extraordinary political situation. On the one hand, the Republican Trump administration has more military generals in top posts than any other previous government. On the other hand, the Democratic Party has opened its doors to a "friendly takeover" by the intelligence agencies.

The incredible power of the military-intelligence agencies over the entire government is an expression of the breakdown of American democracy. The central cause of this breakdown is the extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny elite, whose interests the state apparatus and its “bodies of armed men” serve. Confronted by an angry and hostile working class, the ruling class is resorting to ever more overt forms of authoritarian rule.

... working people must confront the fact that within the framework of the corporate-controlled two-party system, they face two equally reactionary evils.   

Protests by restless workers, students and farmers spring up across Iran

Click here to access article by Hamid Alizadeh from Defense of Marxism (Britain). 

Here is another report from Trotsky-oriented socialists in Britain about the ongoing clashes of poor workers and farmers in Iran to end the corruption favoring capitalist elements in Iran's ruling class. This will challenge the thinking of those who justifiably protest against the US-Empire's rampaging actions in their pursuit of world hegemony and overlook seeing the working class current and historic struggles to obtain social justice in the victim-nations of the US-led Empire's and the British Empire's past policies and actions.

The author concludes his report by writing:

When a regime starts talking about reforms to avoid a revolution, as the French historian, Alex de Toqueville pointed out, it is often already too late. The conservative wing of the regime is aware of this. It is warily watching how each protest is radicalising and embolding other layers. But neither crackdowns nor reforms can restore stability in Iran because the contradictions run much deeper. They reflect the sclerotic and impotent state of Iranian capitalism and its capitalist class, which is tied up in the complex web of its own contradictions. It is is incapable of solving any of the fundamental problems faced by society. In the end, this is what lies behind the present crisis.

Why Super-Rich Rush to Buy Nuclear-Proof Bunkers

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

See other photos of the interiors of these bunkers here and here.

The rush amongst the super-rich started after the key event of 2014; this single stunning event suddenly sparked that rush by the super-rich to buy nuclear-proof bunkers, and the rush has been nonstop since that event. Though many news-media in The West have reported on the existence of this suddenly booming market for luxurious and supposedly nuclear-proof bunkers, none has reported on what actually caused it — the event that had sparked it. In fact, that event is still a secret in The West — not publicly mentioned here; it is, practically speaking, banned from being publicly even mentioned, in The West. ... this report, explaining why the super-rich rush now to buy nuclear-proof bunkers, violates that ban.

Later in the article Zuesse implies that the super-rich are immoral:

Any of these billionaires and centi-millionaires could have chosen instead to establish (either alone or in combination with one-another) the first foundation or other propaganda-operation to publicize the fraudulence of the US-and-allied case for sanctions against Russia, and the fraudulence of NATO’s continuing assertions after 1991 that it’s a ‘defensive’ military alliance (it’s no longer that, at all), and the fact (contrasted against that fraud) of NATO’s being nowadays purely an alliance for aggression against Russia and China, as if the Cold War had never ended (and it never really did end except on the Russian and Chinese side, which now recognize that the US and its allies had lied in 1990); so, all of these billionaires rather buy private nuclear-bomb shelters, than establish a foundation to expose to the public the US side’s apocalyptic lies, which actually cause the danger that’s heading to destroy the entire world.

I would like to argue that the super-rich are most insightfully seen as addicts to the power-high that riches produces for them by the system of capitalism. Power, which is the sense of control over other people's lives, is the most addictive "substance" of all, and power over others is insured by concentrated wealth. We must ban the system of capitalism which inevitably and ultimately delivers this drug, and replace it with a system that insures genuine democratic control of all of society's institutions--including most emphatically the economy--by all of the people.

A Texan in Ukraine to the American People - 'Overthrow Your Kleptocratic Oppressors!'

Click here to access article by Russell 'Texas' Bentley from Russia Insider. (Thanks for this article goes to engaged activist Caren in northern Oregon.)

Much like the international brigades that went to Spain during the late 1930s to fight the fascists, Bentley has gone to breakaway eastern Ukraine to fight the current fascists installed in Ukraine's government with the help of the USA. In this open letter to the people of the USA, he writes:

To My Family and Friends, and All Good People of the USA,

.... America, that time has now come for you. The choice is stark and clear, and you must make it soon.

Either bring your rulers to heel, stop the war they are bent on starting, and reap the benefits of stopping the most egregious and wasteful scam in history, or do nothing, allow your parasites to consume you, and let them lead you and your children and your nation to Armageddon and a fiery death in a war that you now know you can never win. The choice is yours. And so is the responsibility.

Platform power is crushing the web, warns Berners-Lee

Click here to access article by Natasha Lomas from TechCrunch. (Edited for clarity at 5:36 PM Seattle time.)

Internet techies understand the technical aspects of the internet, but they flunk out when it comes to the political aspects of social systems. In this article Berners-Lee shows his social system ignorance by naive statements such as these: 

• ... Berners-Lee argues that letting commercial entities pull levers to try to fix such a wide-ranging problem is a bad idea — arguing that any fixes companies come up with will inexorably be restrained by their profit-maximizing context and also that they amount to another unilateral impact on users. 

•  “Companies are aware of the problems and are making efforts to fix them — with each change they make affecting millions of people,” he writes now. “The responsibility — and sometimes burden — of making these decisions falls on companies that have been built to maximise profit more than to maximise social good. A legal or regulatory framework that accounts for social objectives may help ease those tensions.” 

In another article by Andrew Keen entitled "'Facebook co-founder says its rise reveals the fault lines destroying the 'American Dream'" we find a report about Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook along with Zuckerberg, that reveals Hughes' naive and ignorant beliefs about capitalism.

It's not "platform power" that is killing the web, it is ruling class power using the system of capitalism that is not only crushing the internet, but all institutions of society for the benefit of this tiny class. Apparently Oxford and Harvard, both top capitalist ruling class educational institutions where Berners-Lee and Hughes studied, failed to teach them about how the capitalist system works: how the magic of the "invisible hand" and the sanctity of private (economic) property, the foundations of capitalism, result in concentrated wealth which feeds the addiction to power that humans are so vulnerable to, and which, in turn, results in ruling class exploitation over the other social classes, class war, extreme inequality, destructive wars between capitalist nations, etc.

The (Largely Unrecognized) US Occupation of Syria

Click here to access article by Stephen Gowans from his blog, What's Left. 

I regard Gowans as a top geopolitical analyst and truth-teller. Reading his articles is like taking a powerful antidote to destroy all the lies and propaganda inflicted on us by our masters in the ruling capitalist class.

Atop multiple indignities and affronts to liberty and democracy visited upon the Arab world by the West, including the plunder of Palestine by European settlers and the political oppression of Arabs by a retinue of military dictators, monarchs, emirs and sultans who rule largely at the pleasure of Washington and on its behalf, now arrives the latest US transgression on the ideals of sovereignty, independence, and the equality of nations: marauders in Washington have pilfered part of the territory of one of the last bastions of Arab independence—Syria. Indeed, Washington now controls “about one-third of the country including most of its oil wealth”, [1] has no intention of returning it to its rightful owners, has planned for an indefinite military occupation of eastern Syria, and is creating a new Israel, which is to say, an new imperialist outpost in the middle of the Arab world, to be governed by Kurdish proxies backed by US firepower. [2] The crime has been carried out openly, and yet has hardly been noticed or remarked upon.

 Here are the facts:

A capitalist society

by cartoonist "Mr. Fish", aka Dwayne Booth.

The CIA Democrats -- Parts 2 and 3

by Patrick Martin of the World Socialist Web Site. 

Part 2: 

... the number of candidates who openly proclaim their role in the CIA or military intelligence. In years past, such activities would be considered confidential, if not scandalous for a figure seeking public office. Not only would the candidates want to disguise their connections to the spy apparatus, the CIA itself would insist on it, particularly for those who worked in operations rather than analysis, since exposure, even long after leaving the agency, could be portrayed as compromising “sources and methods.”

Part 3:

There is growing popular hostility to the Trump administration [among the general population], but within the political straitjacket of the two-party system, it is trapped without any genuine outlet. In November 2016, faced with the choice of equally repugnant ruling class figures—Hillary Clinton, the longtime stooge of Wall Street and the Pentagon, and Donald Trump, the corrupt billionaire from the financial underworld of real estate swindling and casino gambling—millions refused to vote. But disappointment and anger over the bankrupt, right-wing policies of the Obama administration led a sufficient number of working people to vote for Trump, particularly in devastated industrial states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, that he could eke out an Electoral College victory despite losing the popular vote. [my clarification]

.... In a sense, the Democratic Party’s promotion of a large number of military-intelligence candidates for competitive districts represents an insurance policy for the US ruling elite. In the event of a major swing to the Democrats, the House of Representatives will receive an influx of new members drawn primarily from the national security apparatus, trusted servants of American imperialism. 

Make-Believe America: Why the US Unemployment Rate Doesn’t Indicate Economic Recovery

Click here to access article by Paul Craig Roberts from Foreign Policy Journal. 

The former Assistant Secretary of Treasury under the Reagan administration points to another lie spread by the current capitalist ruling class.

Today the labor force participation rate is the lowest since February 1978, reversing all the gains of the Reagan years, and the Federal Reserve has used an increase in consumer debt to fill in for the missing growth in consumer income for so long that consumers have no more room to take on more debt. [my emphasis]

Roberts might be forgiven for indulging in a bit of braggadocio. As you can see, the participation rate under the Reagan administration was not much higher than it is now, and it increased under subsequent administrations. In addition, one must not forget that the government under each administration provides little employment for workers except in the military. The Reagan administration brought in the neoconservatives and the neoliberals who promoted an aggressive foreign policy and the elimination of borders that were impediments to their profits. It just took them about 15 years to implement their policies. 

This change was brought about by the ruling capitalist class, not by administrations who are the servants of the ruling class. However, Roberts does reveal another lie of this ruling class to hide their attack on American workers in pursuit of cheap labor elsewhere in the world. And he makes another good point: the fact that ordinary Americans are maxed-out in debt is a growing threat to (the capitalist organization of) the economy.

The latest false-flag attack against Russia?

These two articles point to suspicious clues that, indeed, this incident in Britain was the latest example of a false-flag incident to hoodwink people into hating Russia, supporting the armaments industry, and likely a propaganda campaign to prepare ordinary people for a war against Russia.

• The Skripal Incident-Another Anti-Russian Provocation by Christopher Black, an international criminal lawyer from Canada, posted on New Eastern Outlook.

• Poisioned British-Russian Double-Agent Has Links To Clinton Campaign by Bernhard from Moon of Alabama.

Stop Sessta and Fosta

Click here to access article from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The people at this foundation are good, sincere people who naively believe that the political organs of capitalist rule serve ordinary people. They absolutely do not! However, if you have an extra $10,000 laying around, promise your Congress representatives that you will donate to his/her campaign if he/she will oppose these bills.

The CIA Democrats [Part 1]

Click here to access article by Patrick Martin from World Socialist Web Site.

According to Martin in part one of a series of three, it looks like the ruling capitalist class is packing one of its two political parties, the Democratic Party, with "intelligence" operatives and military personnel as candidates for the next House of Representatives 2018 election to insure that the US government follows their imperial agenda. Isn't (fake) "democracy" wonderful?!

The New Blacklist

Click here to access article by Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone.

Even intelligent and moral liberals like Taibbi are becoming upset over the insanity of the Russiagate events which, as he argues, are designed to "become a way of targeting all dissent".

From Trump to Bernie Sanders to Brexit to Catalonia, voter repudiation of the status quo was the story of the day. The sense of panic among political elites was palpable. The possibility that voters might decide to break up the EU, or put a Trump, Corbyn, or Sanders into power, led to a spate of "Do we have too much democracy?" essays by prominent think tankers and national press figures.

Two years later, the narrative has completely shifted. By an extraordinary coincidence, virtually all the "anti-system" movements and candidates that so terrified the political establishment two years ago have since been identified as covert or overt Russian destabilization initiatives, puppeteered from afar by the diabolical anti-Western dictator, Vladimir von Putin-Evil.

Recommended articles for 3/7/2018

• Tell Me More About How Google Isn’t Part Of The Government And Can Therefore Censor Whoever It Wants? by Caitlin Johnstone from The Greanville Post. The author explains how the ruling class does an end run around the Constitution by outsourcing much of its work to corporations. She explains how some major corporations are so integrated into the government, which constitutes fascism, that they are virtually one and the same. 

• Take a look around. This is what annexation looks like by Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man from +972 Magazine. The author describes how the Israelis are annexing the Palestinian territory one small step at a time.

The Weaponization of Social Media

Click here if you wish to access the 15:57m video (or podcast and transcript), that is provided below, directly from James Corbett's website. This is a best post.

Now openly admitted, governments and militaries around the world employ armies of keyboard warriors to spread propaganda and disrupt their online opposition. Their goal? To shape public discourse around global events in a way favourable to their standing military and geopolitical objectives. Their method? The Weaponization of Social Media. This is The Corbett Report.

In the past capitalist ruling classes initially were largely identified with nations which were under their control. Although national constitutions often used extravagant language about "democracy" and serving the people, in reality these ruling classes created governments to promote their interests and to moderate various capitalist factions that would occasionally come into conflict. These capitalists frequently adopted the corporate form that functioned largely within nations. 

However, beginning in the 1980s largely due to the developments in technology, transnational capitalists and their corporations became a dominate faction in Western nations, particularly in the nations that comprised the US-led Empire. These new capitalists promoted an ideology called neoliberalism ("neo" plus the classic meaning of "liberalism") that sought to eliminate trade barriers such as tariffs that interfered with their profits. They have used this transnational Empire to promote their interests of profits and power, much like their national predecessors did, but with a more aggressive use of subversive organizations such as the CIA and the use (or the threat) of their Empire's military forces.

In this video Corbett brings us up to date by revealing the ruling class of the Empire's use of internet technology to manage the views of the general public to be consistent with their global interests. (You may need to wait a few more seconds for this video to upload on your device.)



(For a very good, although very naive, explanation of only one of the tools, algorithms, that social media corporation use, listen to this 30:38m podcast from Mozilla Corporation.)

Fake History. How The Money Power Controls Our Future By Controlling Our Past

Click here to access article by Jim Macgregor and Gerry Docherty from Information Clearing House. 

These British authors and researchers of real history describe the methods of the capitalist ruling class, who they name as the "Money Power" or "elites", to alter history to support their interests of profit and power, and to discourage any real understanding of history by ordinary people. However, it must be understood that the ruling class insures that all institutions (media, entertainment, education, etc) support their interests. That's precisely why people, who are aware, call them the "ruling class".

To maintain control and stem dissent, the ruling elites maliciously misrepresent and question the integrity of alternative media and non-corporate news sources which broadcast genuine news, and the honest revisionist historians who relate historical truths. George Orwell suggested in his ‘war is peace’, ‘freedom is slavery’, ‘ignorance is strength’ thesis that the masses fall for the ruling power’s lies because their critical thinking has been so repressed they will believe any absurdity in contradiction of the plain facts.

Recommended articles for 3/5/2018

• Write for love, not money? Journalists appalled by Jonathan Cook from his blog.

• US Seeks to Intentionally Prolong Syrian Bloodshed by Tony Cartalucci from New Eastern Outlook

• America is a System Not a Democracy by Chris Kanthan from Signs of the Times (SOTT) More and more people are waking up to the practice of "democracy" in the USA, and the real powers behind the political system which he identifies as the "System". However, the author doesn't name the system. It has a name--capitalism, and those that control it are a capitalist ruling class. Also, he doesn't realize that there never was any kind of meaningful democracy in our country.

Extracts from a new book entitled "How Will Capitalism End?"

posted by Ron Horn

The book, published in 2016, that I will quote from is written by Wolfgang Streeck, a German sociologist who I believe has some important insights about the capitalist system that I would like to share with you and for your consideration. This doesn't mean that I endorse everything he writes in the book. After all, his educational experience has been somewhat contaminated by capitalist authorities that oversee all institutions within the US-led capitalist Empire. (Note: I've taken the liberty to re-format the paragraphs to make them more suitable for online reading.)

The image I have of the end of capitalism--an end that I believe is already under way--is one of a social system in chronic disrepair, for reasons of its own and regardless of the absence of a viable alternative. While we cannot know when and how capitalism will disappear and what will succeed it, what matters is that no force is on hand that could be expected to reverse the ... downward trends in economic growth, social equality,and financial stability and end their mutual reinforcement.

In contrast to the 1930s, there is today no political-economic formula on the horizon, Left or Right, that might provide capitalist societies with a coherent new regime of regulation.... Social integration as well as system integration seem irreversibly damaged and set to deteriorate further. What is most likely to happen as time passes is a continuous accumulation  of small and not-so-small dysfunctions; none necessarily deadly as such, but most beyond repair ....

Conceiving of the end of capitalism as a process rather than an event raises the of how to define capitalism. Societies are complex entities that do not die in the organisms do: with the rare exception of total extinction, discontinuity is always embedded in some continuity. If we say that a society has ended, we mean that certain features of its organization that we consider essential to it have disappeared; others may well have survived.

I propose that to determine if capital is alive, dying or dead, we define it as a modern society that secures its collective reproduction as an unintended side-effect of individually rational, competitive profit maximization in pursuit of capital accumulation, through a 'labour process' combining privately owned capital with commodified labour power, fulfilling the ... promise of private vices turning into public benefits. It is this promise, I maintain, that contemporary capitalism can no long keep--ending its historical existence as a self-reproducing, sustainable, predictable and legitimate social order.

.... One might think that a long-lasting crisis of this sort would open up more than a few windows of opportunity for reformist or revolutionary agency. It seems, however, that disorganized capitalism is disorganizing not only itself but its opposition as well, depriving it of the capacity either to defeat capitalism or to rescue it. For capitalism to end, then, it must provide for its own destruction--which, I would argue, is exactly what we are witnessing today.

But why should capitalism, whatever its deficiencies, be in crisis at all if it no longer has any opposition worthy of the name? When Communism [i.e. the Soviet Union] imploded in 1989, this was widely viewed as capitalism's final triumph, as the 'end of history'. Even today, after  2008, the Old Left remains on the brink of extinction everywhere, while a New Left has, until now, failed to appear. The masses, the poor and powerless as much as the relatively well-to-do, seem firmly in the grip of consumerism, with collective goods, collective action and collective organization thoroughly out of fashion. As the only game in town, why should capitalism not carry on, by default if for no other reason?

At first glance, there is indeed much that speaks against pronouncing capitalism dead, regardless of all the ominous writing on the historical wall. As far as inequality is concerned, people may get used to it, especially with the help of public entertainment and political repression. Furthermore, examples abound of governments being re-elected that cut social spending and privatize public services, in pursuit of sound money for the owners of money. Concerning environmental deterioration, it proceeds so slowly compared to the hum lifespan, so one can deny it while learning to live with it. Technological advances with which to buy time, such as fracking, can never be ruled out, and if there are limits to the pacifying power of consumerism, we clearly are nowhere near them.

Moreover, adapting to more time-consuming and life-consuming work regimes can be taken as a competitive challenge, an opportunity for personal achievement. Cultural definitions of the good life have always been highly malleable and might well be stretched further to match the onward march of commodification, at least as long as racial or religious challenges to pro-capitalist re-education can be suppressed, ridiculed or otherwise marginalized.

Finally, most of today's stagnation theories apply only to the West, or just to the U.S., not to China, Russia, India or Brazil--countries to which the frontier of economic growth may be about to migrate, with vast virgin lands waiting to be made available for capitalist progress. 

My answer is that having no opposition may actually be more of a liability for capitalism than an asset. Social systems thrive on internal heterogeneity, on a pluralism of organizing principles protecting them from dedicating themselves entirely to a single purpose, crowding out other goals that must also be attended to if the system is be sustainable.  Capitalism as we know it has benefited greatly from the rise of counter-movements against the rule of profit and of the market. Socialism and trade unionism, by putting a brake on commodification, prevented capitalism from destroying its non-capitalist foundations--trust, good faith, altruism, solidarity within families and communities, and the like. Under Keynesianism and Fordism, capitalism's more or less loyal opposition secured and helped stabilize aggregate demand, especially in recessions. Where circumstance were favourable, working-class organization even served as a 'productivity whip', by forcing capital to embark on more advanced production concepts.

 ... capitalism can survive only as long as it is not completely capitalist--as it has not yet rid of itself, or the society in which it resides, of 'necessary impurities". Seen this way , capitalism's defeat of its opposition may actually have been a Pyrrhic victory, free it from countervailing powers which, while sometimes inconvenient, had in fact supported it. Could it be that victorious capitalism has become its own worst enemy?

How far can the Americans be pushed?

Click here to access article by Ghassan Kadi from A bird's eye view of the Vineyard. (Added a relevant quote by the author at 9:40 AM Seattle time.)

... after the petro-dollar loses its world dominance, and this doesn’t seem very far away, a time will come when it will become virtually impossible to keep propping up the American economy with quantitative easing (aka printing money). And as America loses its economic stature, its only remaining prowess and might will be in its nuclear arsenal. The question is this. If America is imposing sanctions and bans right left and centre right now, and for no good reason at all, will a much more desperate America use its nuclear power to restore its dominion?

Such questions have been troubling me for some time. With all I know about the desperate, sociopathic ruling class, I can't reach any other conclusion but that they will risk all in their determination to rule the world and to salvage their huge run-up of debts. They are totally addicted to the drugs of power based on concentrated wealth that capitalism has supplied them with. Anyone who has had any experience with addicts knows that they are likely to engage in desperate acts while under the influence of drugs.

We are now witnessing the end games that they are engaging in by converting every ounce of information into self-serving propaganda, subverting nations, activating military operations all over the world, and issuing bellicose threats to nations that stand in the Empire's way. 

Nobody likes to be lied to, but the information that the ruling class's media corporations are spreading are riling all sorts of honest and aware people from right to left on America's political spectrum (which is mostly skewed to the right). We see almost daily articles by Paul Craig Roberts and Pat Buchanan, who are on the right of the spectrum, American libertarians like Ron Paul and James Corbett, and numerous liberals (people who believe that only reforms are needed to the capitalist system) who are all extremely troubled by the lies and other aggressive acts of the Empire's transnational capitalist ruling class.

I think that only the American people can stop them, but I don't hold much hope for this to happen given that so many Americans believe their lies while others who know that they are lying, but due to capitalist indoctrination of individualism, are mostly preoccupied with their who own security concerns.   

Colonizing the Western Mind

Click here to access article by Jason Hirthler posted on The Greanville Post. 

I think this article provides much food for thought about the launching of neoliberalism by the ruling capitalist class that, according to the author, started in the 1970s and reached full bloom in the 1980s under the Reagan administration. 

Still, I experienced annoyance at the wording of numerous statements which I, as a pretend editor, would have re-phrased. Some examples of this (in order of their appearance):

• Instead of "On the left, the ruling ideology might be described as neoliberalism, a particularly vicious form of imperial capitalism that, as would be expected, is camouflaged in the lineaments of humanitarian aid and succor.", I would have re-written as "Leftists began to describe this ruling ideology as neoliberalism, ...."

• Instead of "The ideological assumptions, which serve to justify what you could call neocolonial tactics, are relatively clear: the rights of the individual to be free of overreach from monolithic institutions like the state.", I would have written "... the rights of individual capitalists must be mostly free of interventions by the state."

• Instead of "Together, an unshackled economy and an unfettered populace, newly equipped with individual rights, would produce the same flourishing and nourishing demos of mid-century America that had been the envy of humanity.", I would have written "By unshackling capitalists from government regulations while promoting more freedom for various social identities (such as gay and women's prerogatives), the neoliberalists disguised the former behind the wide publicity for the latter."

• Instead of "The enduring lie is that there is no democracy without economic democracy.", I would write "The enduring lie is that there is no kind of democracy that limits the freedom for capitalists to participate in the economy." 

• Then I would simply replace the last paragraph, which does nothing to advance his argument, with a summary of his thesis that would be something like this: "The ruling capitalist class began in the 1970s to construct a highly organized effort to advance a neoliberal agenda through its overwhelming control of corporate media and other institutions such as the film industry and education. The latter advanced the liberalizing themes of social identity while mostly disguising the steady promotion of government deregulation and lessening the restrictions placed on capitalist enterprise. Meanwhile, military interventions abroad in support of capitalist interests were always framed in corporate media has a promotion of human rights and freedoms. Such highly organized efforts effectively colonized the Western mind to support the ruling class's neoliberal agenda."  

Recommended articles for March 2, 2018

• Trump’s Bosses Pushing for Nuclear War with Russia by Gordon Duff from New Eastern Outlook. Duff writes in the last paragraph:

What we now recognize is that Trump, as with so many other politicians around the “free world,” has “handlers” and serves an agenda. That agenda clearly threatens human survival. Who profits by this?

My answer regarding Trump's handlers is: an executive network of top capitalists from primarily the financial sector but also includes industrial corporations, the military establishment, and academia. They function secretly in "think tanks" such the Council on Foreign Relations, Brookings Institute, Atlantic Council, and many others.

• Putin’s message couldn’t be clearer: The West needs to stop provoking a war we don’t want & which no one can win by "Catte" from Off-Guardian.

• The Shadow of an Israeli/U.S. Attack Grows Larger by the Day by Edward Curtin from his website, What's Left.

• World is Burning – While Western Left is Quarreling by Andre Vltchek from New Eastern Outlook.  (My mistake. I posted this on February 3 of this year. I got mixed up with the different formatting of the date by New East Outlook: I mistook 3/2/2018, NEO's Russian formatting for 2/3/2018, USA's formatting. )

Recommended articles for March 1, 2018

• Escalation In Syria – How Far Can The Russians Be Pushed? by "The Saker" and posted on Southfront. The author uses sound political reasoning to suggest some very realistic future scenarios in the complicated, dangerous, and crucial international political contest currently developing in Syria and adjacent areas.

• Xi Jinping’s power grab: Bonapartism with Chinese characteristics by Peter Symonds from World Socialist Web Site. Although I believe emerging nations of Russia, China, and Iran are posing necessary challenges to the US-led capitalist Empire, I still have mixed feelings about where these nations are headed. I am posting this article because it challenges the views of people who believe that these emerging nations (and their ruling classes) can do nothing wrong.

The [Continuing] War Against Alternative Information

Click here to access article by Rick Sterling, a re-post from January 2017 from ConsortiumNews. (a "best post")

This post updates the legalization of the propaganda war being waged against the American people as revealed in yesterday's post by Debbie Lusignan on her YouTube channel called Sane Progressive. A more recent law was passed at the end of 2016 that established a specific agency to fill the minds of ordinary Americans with propaganda designed to promote the interests of the Empire's trans-nationalist capitalist ruling class.

The U.S. establishment is not content simply to have domination over the media narratives on critical foreign policy issues, such as Syria, Ukraine and Russia. It wants total domination. Thus we now have the “Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act” that President Obama signed into law on Dec. 23 as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2017, setting aside $160 million to combat any “propaganda” that challenges Official Washington’s version of reality.

As Sterling later explains:

The new law is remarkable for a number of reasons, not the least because it merges a new McCarthyism about purported dissemination of Russian “propaganda” on the Internet with a new Orwellianism by creating a kind of Ministry of Truth – or Global Engagement Center – to protect the American people from “foreign propaganda and disinformation."

As part of the effort to detect and defeat these unwanted narratives, the law authorizes the Center to: “Facilitate the use of a wide range of technologies and techniques by sharing expertise among Federal departments and agencies, seeking expertise from external sources, and implementing best practices.” (This section is an apparent reference to proposals that Google, Facebook and other technology companies find ways to block or brand certain Internet sites as purveyors of “Russian propaganda” or “fake news.”)

Thus, this propaganda war against ordinary Americans is now completely legal. We are their new enemy! Of course, we always were enemies of the ruling capitalist class, but these new laws provides a legal basis for their government to wage war against us.