US Media Keeping Americans Blissfully Ignorant over Syria As Washington ‘Weighs Options’

Click here to access article by Robert Bridge from Strategic Culture Foundation.

It’s not that the American people are inherently stupid to believe such absurd claims; it’s that they are woefully misinformed by a media machine that is marching in lockstep – sometimes even owned – by the military industrial complex. Mark Twain summed up the Catch-22 situation confronting Americans: “If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.”

And it is not just the run-of-the-mill news sources that are serving as cheerleaders for imperialistic regime change operations. The purportedly intelligent ‘thinking man’ publications are also peddling a shameless pro-war stance, which takes the government line for granted.

Bridge arrives at this final conclusion:

This only serves to prove that the United States, and its people, learned absolutely nothing from the Iraq War, which saw the same brazen disregard for legal precedent by launching an attack against Saddam Hussein in 2003, the consequences of which we are experiencing to this day. As the UN weapon inspectors were on the ground, practically screaming that they could not locate weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration shrugged off these uncomfortable truths and carried out its diabolical designs anyways.

In reality, the US did learn one valuable lesson from the Iraq War. It learned it can manipulate the opinions of the people to an astonishing degree. By using the entire media leviathan to coordinate a hate campaign against one state leader, in this case Bashar Assad, it can make the people forget legal precedent, not to mention common sense.

I would go much further back to the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and many activists. Then there was the fairy tale about the biggest false-flag event of them all: 9/11.

World War III: What It Is And What It Threatens To Become

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

... The United States, and its major media, which connive in the likely chemical weapons deception and elevate a planned illegal act of war into a moral crusade, are playing a very dangerous game. They’re willing to bring the world to the brink of a general conflagration to fulfil their vision of a hierarchy of states subordinate to the US administration’s rule—an undisputed global US empire.

Zuckerberg's mistake

by cartoonist Max Gustafson.

 

Recommended articles for Wednesday 4/11/2018

• Nonsense about Syria gas attacks reveals US ideology of tyranny by Stephen Gowans from What's Left. 

In the ideology of US despotism, the compass of civilization includes states that submit to “US leadership”, a euphemized version of “US tyranny,” while states which favor an international order based on the UN Charter’s ideal of the sovereignty and equality of states (Syria, North Korea, Cuba, Iran and Venezuela are among the supporters of this alternative, democratic, order) are relegated to the category of barbarism. Once a state has been located outside of civilization, Western legal traditions—testing accusations against evidence and the assumption of innocence until culpability is credibly demonstrated— no longer apply. The “barbaric” state becomes guilty of all acts of which it is accused, regardless of whether there exists credible evidence to corroborate the accusation.

• Syria Chemical Weapons Attack: The Facts by Stephen Gowans from What's Left.

• Truth, Peace, Justice and the War on Syria: Lies, Fake Humanitarians, Fake Covers for War Crimes by Mark Taliano from Global Research.

• Bob Dylan: It’s All Over Now Baby Red, White and Blue. The Two Party Political Scam and the U.S. Military Industrial Complex by Philip A Farruggio from Global Research. 

• No trace of chemical weapons at alleged attack site in Douma – Russian military from RT. 

The Russian military has found no trace of chemical weapons use after searching parts of Syria’s Douma allegedly targeted by an “attack.” Photos of victims posted by the White Helmets are fake, Russia’s Defense Ministry said. 

• Facebook CEO presents plans for mass censorship at Senate hearing by Andre Damon from World Socialist Web Site.

• “Evil Putin:” The Choirboys of U.S. Think-Tanks Sing Same Old Song posted on Planning Beyond Capitalism with an excellent introduction by Barbara MacLean of this website as follows:

If we lived in the pluralistic society that liberals imagine we live in, then you might think there is some disagreement among the major think tanks in the U.S. But both left and right, including the Brookings Institute, the Institute for National Leadership, the Heritage Foundation, The National Endowment for Democracy and the Jewish Institute for National Security all sing the same song. Isn’t it a serendipitous occurrence they all sing in such beautiful harmonies? We think it has something to do with Russia going off the dollar and creation of an Eurasian independent world-order. 

This introduction to Butler's article struck me personally because in my senior year at a major university I wrote a paper in which I made the same argument: attacking the belief that we live in a "pluralistic society", a doctrine dogma declared by one of the American gods of sociology, Talcott Parsons, at the time (1963). I receive a grade of "D" for that effort, and I knew that the same fate would await me in nearly all universities if I pursued an advanced degree in sociology. I was disciplined for not accepting the conventional ideology--another illustration of what Jeff Schmidt argued in his book Disciplined Minds.

Fact Checking Newsbud's "Syria Under Siege" Video

Click here if you wish to access the 1:39:22 video made by James Corbett directly from YouTube.

Corbett is obviously very upset about this vendetta against independent journalists Vanessa Beeley and Eva Bartlett by Sibel Edmonds on whose website (when she had Boiling Frogs Post) he first posted material that has led to his widespread popularity as an independent investigative researcher and critical thinker. 

He starts off with this extended exposé of the vendetta by issuing a disclaimer: "that this video will not make you a better person in any way, shape, or form. I loathe this type of video." Despite this introduction he races through a critical investigation of the vendetta against Beeley and Bartlett in Edmond's video entitled "Syria Under Siege" and thoroughly debunks it. 

Although Corbett doesn't say it, after he gets through debunking Edmond's tirade against the two independent journalists, I think one must arrive at the conclusion that her tirade is an obviously well-crafted piece of disinformation which tries to discredit Beeley and Bartlett, not unlike all the other lies and false-flags stories we've been fed by media corporations. In fact, I think that this attack on the two independent journalists was because they have been exposing so many lies disseminated by media corporations. And I will further allege that Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI employee, has been used as a fake blogger to attract and control leftists and others critical of US foreign policies. 

To launch her career as a fake dissident blogger, I think that her handlers promoted her as a whistle-blower victim of the FBI. I, myself, contributed to her website when it was "Boiling Frogs Post" after it ran a series on the Gladio operations following WWII. The series accurately revealed all the efforts by the CIA to crush unions and leftists in general and promote right-wing governments in Europe. This effort was designed to attract leftists and dissidents to the website while others, especially young people, didn't especially care much about what they considered as ancient history.  

I also think that the timing of this attack was not accidental. I think that it was in preparation for the launching of another false-flag event (and who knows what else?) that we have just witnessed and spread by the Empire's media corporations as a chemical attack on Syrians by their own President Assad. Hence, I think that Edmond's handlers ordered her to engage in this attack on the two journalists (and probably helped her produce the video) as a way to influence all her followers to go along with this theme. I have little doubt in my mind that both Boiling Frogs Post and Newsbud are fake websites that were set up by the secret services to lure in leftists and dissidents and to gradually steer them away from opposition to the Empire's policies and actions. Watch the following video and decide if you agree with me.

Degeneracy and Fundamentalism of Western Media Control

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

Vltchek who has wandered the world sees millions of people finally waking up from the hypnotic spell of corporate media which serves the Anglo-American Empire, and they are outraged.

The Western regime knows how to lie, shamelessly but professionally, and above all, perpetually. There are thousands of lies piling up on top of each other, delivered with perfect upper-class ‘educated’ accents: lies about Salisbury, about Communism, Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, Syria, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, South Africa, Libya, refugees. There are lies about the past, present and even about the future.

Nobody is laughing, seeing such imperialist thugs like the U.K. and France preaching, all over the world and with straight face, about both freedom and human rights. Not laughing, yet. But many are slowly getting outraged.

People in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin America are beginning to realize that they have been fooled, cheated, lied to; that the so called ‘education’ and ‘information’ coming from the West have been nothing else other than shameless indoctrination campaigns.

Read about the latest false-flag attack here which will be repeated endlessly as a real event by the Empire's media corporations.

Recommended articles for Sunday 4/8/2018

• The Occupation of the American Mind, a one hour and 25 minute film produced by The Media Education Foundation and delivered to you by Vimeo and posted by The Real News. "A documentary film narrated by legendary musician and activist Roger Waters of Pink Floyd fame trains a harsh light on Israel's [and Zionists'] decades-long propaganda war in the U.S."

• Marches, Voting and Social Change by Gary Olson from The Greanville Post. 

The recent March for Our Lives, started by remarkable high school students but taken over by the Democratic Party and financed by wealthy corporate and Hollywood patrons, drew effusive praise from mainstream political pundits. But anyone who’s followed gun control knows the Democrats have never stood up to the NRA. In truth, national level Democrats seized on an opportunity to coopt young people and channel them into electoral gains for themselves. 

Our economic and political rulers are vexed that students of color were standing in solidarity with Parkland while simultaneously linking that shooting with systemic violence in Chicago, Philadelphia and Baltimore. They worry that  young people are becoming concerned with a wide range of issues far beyond gun control and will seek solutions outside the two-party status quo.

• The Doomsday Machine: 00:00:10 Seconds to Midnight. Nuclear Weapons, Climate Change, Geopolitics and the Dollar from Global Research. Although the author describes the tenuous position of human existence in today's world, he doesn't realize that sooner or later capitalists' addiction to the drugs of profit and power would inevitably and ultimately threaten our existence. He exhibits his ignorance--or possibly cowardice--by using the abstract term "the powers that be". And this ignorance and sometimes cowardice has infected millions, especially in the co-opted upper-middle class, that capitalists depend on so much to keep their system that delivers their drugs functioning.

I have lived my whole life under the notifications of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and their Doomsday Clock. It is currently set a two minutes to midnight after many years of variance, some as far away as seventeen minutes. After reading Daniel Ellsberg’s The Doomsday Machine, it would probably be more appropriate to move it forward to ten seconds before midnight. A combination of two main factors – global climate change and nuclear weapons launch on warning risks – puts not only humanity but virtually all species under threat of extinction. 

• State Dept Accuses Russia And Syria Of Gassing Civilians Before Any Investigation by Caitlin Johnstone (Australian) from her website. This false-flag event has been widely predicted by informed and honest people who know that the Empire's ruling class has become desperate and degenerate. After all, it must be acknowledged that they've gotten away with so many other crimes: the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, the 9/11 false-flag event, etc., and most of the people believed their fairy tales which were widely disseminated by their media corporations.

Trump China Trade War Has Deeper Agenda

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

The author poses a deeper conflict of strategies between that of China's economic strategy to attain what is called "industry 4.0", as elaborated in an official Chinese government document called "China 2025", with the US Empire's strategy of putting China's economic back into the fold of a subordinate economic engine to supply US corporations with cheap labor, high profits, and a market for US high tech products.

Engdahl explains the Chinese history behind this and Trump's rather crude response which is likely to backfire. 

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this will not end in any victory for Trump or the US economy. The reaction of the bloated US stock markets to recent escalations suggest he risks popping the greatest speculative bubble in US stock market history, something that would trigger a financial crisis far worse than 2008. All of which suggests the old saying, people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

Trump has decided to launch not a trade war but a confrontation between Washington’s version of a US-run globalized economy versus China’s vision of national sovereign economic development. Today we see an increasing divide opening between nations such as China, Russia, Iran and several European countries such as Hungary or Austria who realize that the agenda of US-riven globalization spells disaster for their future. This divergence is the most significant tectonic fault line in world geopolitics and will define whether the world descends into a new depression or develops a model for growth and expansion centered around the infrastructure of China and Russia Eurasian cooperation.

The US economy is in no shape to win such a confrontation, nor will Xi Jinping back down. This could get very nasty. China is responding very carefully and in measured moves.

The US ruling class directorate doesn't like this Chinese strategy anymore than Trump, but it also doesn't like the crude way that Trump goes about fighting the Chinese with the blunt weapon of a trade war. This is revealed in an article published in a Council of Foreign Relations website, a major ruling class organ, entitled "Why Does Everyone Hate Made in China 2025?" in which they explain why they hate "China 2025".

Technology transfer agreements and restrictive market practices in China present a ... problem. Foreign companies often enter agreements to transfer valuable intellectual property to Chinese partner in exchange for market access. These agreements can be exploitative and highlight the asymmetries in market access between China and the rest of the world. Speaking about Chinese takeovers of German firms, Germany's Economic Minister Sigmar Gabriel said Germany should not sacrifice “its companies on the altar of free markets” while China denies German firms equal access to invest in the Chinese market.

Of course, the US ruling class is not only worried about German firms but other firms throughout the world, and with particular concerns with US high tech corporations which are often seduced by agreements that provide them with immense short term profits in exchange for Chinese access to advanced technology.

Recommended articles for Saturday 4/7/2018

• Orwell and the struggle for socialism by John Newsinger from Socialist Review (Britain).

John Newsinger, author of a new book on George Orwell’s politics, looks at how his stance as an independent socialist led him to great radicalism and terrible betrayal. (Note the Brits' rather eccentric use of the words "public schools".

• YouTube Censors Abby Martin Interview Explaining Israeli Fascism in 28 Countries by Whitney Webb from Mint Press News.

Amid efforts aimed at censoring independent media, internet giants like YouTube are now moving to censor information at the behest of local governments. Though the phenomenon is not new, it appears to be expanding, as shown by YouTube’s recent decision to block a video from the Empire Files, the teleSUR program hosted by journalist Abby Martin, in 28 countries for allegedly violating “local laws” after a legal complaint was filed.

The video itself, titled “Jewish-American on Israel’s Fascism: No Hope For Change From Within,” examines the militaristic attitude increasingly shown by Israelis towards Palestinians and includes an interview with journalist Max Blumenthal. Of the 28 countries where the video is blocked, most are in Europe. The video itself is also blocked in Israel. 

Recommended articles for Thursday 4/5/2018

• "It's The Cover-Up" - UK Foreign Office Deletes Tweet, Posts False Transcript, Issues New Lies from Moon of Alabama. Also, on the same subject: Theresa May – Wannabe Con Artist of the Year? from New Eastern Outlook. But the damage has been done. Diplomats have been expelled from the Empire's nations and the gullible public has been lied to. Now, how much do you think that the denial issued by Porton Down laboratory in Britain will be publicized in the Empire's media? 

• Google workers demand end to company’s involvement in drone murder by Andre Damon from World Socialist Web Site. 

• Donald and the Easter Bunny by Mike Small from Bella Caledonia (Scotland)

Easter is a confusing time. The dates change and the interface between chocolate, the Judeo-Christian faith and bunnies is vague at best.

What has become clearer this holiday however is that the United States of America is governed by an imbecile.

• The Secret Way the NRA Controls Congress in a 5:53m video features James D'Angelo explaining to Abbie Martin how the NRA works Congress to influence their votes. (Hint: it's not all bribery.)

1.5°C of warming is closer than we imagine, just a decade away

Click here to access article by David Spratt from Climate Code Red.

Global warming of 1.5°C is imminent, likely in just a decade from now. That’s the stunning conclusion to be drawn from a number of recent studies, surveyed below.

So how does hitting warming of 1.5°C a decade from now square with the 2015 Paris Agreement’s goal of “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C”? In two words, it doesn’t.

The Paris text was a political fix in which grand words masked inadequate deeds.

Indeed, it was a political fix--or an excuse--to allow time for capitalists to continue to practice their addiction to ever more profits and power at the expense of our Mother Earth who gave birth to us and all living things. Aiding in the addiction is the arrogant delusion derived from the old myth that humans can conquer nature, that humans can control the natural system and continue to extract resources from the planet for their endless benefit. 

And God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.  Genesis 1:26 

The Government, that Honors Dr. Martin Luther King with a National Holiday, Killed Him

Click here to access article by Edward Curtin from The Greanville Post. (Added to commentary at 11 AM Seattle time.)

On the 50th anniversary of the assassination of another great American leader who posed serious difficulties for the Empire's ruling class, Curtin provides a review of a new book, The Plot to Kill King, by William Pepper. Pepper is an attorney who has thoroughly researched the assassination during the past several decades,and was hired by the King family to expose the truth. Curtin writes:

Pepper shows how the mainstream media and government flacks have spent years covering up the truth of MLK’s murder through lies and disinformation, just as they have done with the Kennedy and Malcom X assassinations that are of a piece with this one.

But since this is a book review and not a book, I will stop listing Pepper’s very detailed and convincing findings. While he may not have answered every aspects of the case, and may be mistaken in some small details, he has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt the basic fact that James Earl Ray did not kill Martin Luther King, but that this great and dangerous leader was killed by a conspiracy organized at the highest levels of government.

The Plot to Kill King will mesmerize any reader seeking the truth about MLK’s assassination.

However, I wish to emphasize that the order to kill King was not that of the government, but the invisible ruling capitalist class directorate, or the Deep State (top financiers, industrial corporate executives, and their dedicated ideologues) that controls the government and every other institution. The Deep State directed the government agencies, specifically the FBI, local Memphis police, and assorted government officials to carry out the order and ordered their corporate media to collaborate with the necessary coverup and "explanation" of the event.

As a side note, I wish to qualify what William Pepper wrote in his book:

To understand his death, it is essential to realize that although he is popularly depicted and perceived as a civil rights leader, he was much more than that. A non-violent revolutionary, he personified the most powerful force for the long-overdue social, political, and economic reconstruction of the nation.

He was a civil rights leader up until he realized in 1967 that civil rights was tied to the issue of the Vietnam War. This was best expressed in his speech entitled "Beyond Vietnam" delivered exactly one year before his assassination on April 4, 1967. There was already a massive anti-war movement occurring and the ruling class feared that the civil rights movement would add substantially to the existing opposition to the war. I believe that this is when the Deep State considered King to be dangerous and had to be assassinated. 

(Regarding the assassination, you may also be interested in reading an article entitled "The ‘Crucifixion’ of the Black Messiah" by Greg Maybury also from The Greanville Post.) 

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.