Can we talk? In a meaningful way, that is…

Click here to access article by Cecile Andrews from Seattle City Living via Energy Bulletin. 

In the fragmented, alienated societies we now live in, mainstream media owned by the One Percent has played a major role in substituting their communications for person-to-person communications that previously had been a main feature of community life. By describing an ordinary conversation she had with local workers, this author from my Seattle area explains that right-wing media has largely replaced these communal communications with communications crafted by corporations to separate and divide us. This has resulted in something like artificial communities under the control of corporations that has fractured organic communities across the country.

Roundtable on the Language of Revolution in Egypt

Click here to access posting from Jadaliyya featuring discussions about recent Egyptian political events by Paul Sedra, Robert Springborg, and Joshua Stacher. 

This posting provides a very intelligent discussion of what constitutes revolutionary change and the political uses of revolutionary rhetoric in the process of change. Although I think that Sedra fails to realize the dangers of confusing revolutionary rhetoric with real change, he does provide some very interesting insights on the electoral strategies that Egyptian militarists used with guidance from US political figures to contain the revolutionary impetus within the bounds of a coup. 

The Empire and its military collaborators all over the world are becoming expert at using the machinery of elections to contain genuine democratic aspirations for change. Ruling class operatives have inculcated the idea in many ordinary people throughout the world that elections equals "democracy". To the extent that they have succeeded, electioneering has become a fetish--all that the One Percent needs to do is hold elections which they have become expert at controlling and many people will be satisfied that the outcome results in a legitimate democratic process.  Thus, it is critically important to study and thoroughly understand these strategies and expose them in order to prepare ordinary people for real change rather than allowing them to be endlessly fooled into accepting cosmetic change.

£13tn: hoard hidden from taxman by global elite

Click here to access article by Heather Stewart from The Guardian, The Observer section. 

A global super-rich elite has exploited gaps in cross-border tax rules to hide an extraordinary £13 trillion ($21tn) of wealth offshore – as much as the American and Japanese GDPs put together – according to research commissioned by the campaign group Tax Justice Network.

 We are forced into debt because they don't pay us enough to maintain a decent lifestyle. We work mostly to pay off our debts to them, and they don't pay taxes on what they earn off our work and the interest payments they receive from us! If you are a member of the global elite of the One Percent--what's not to love about capitalism?

By the way, for every debt or debtor in the world, there is a credit or creditor(s)--someone who "owns" that debt. To put it into feudalistic words, for every debt peon--that's us--in the world, there are lords and masters--the elite One Percent.

Also, related Guardian coverage of this issue is here, hear, and here.

London prepares for the war games

Click here to access article by Tim Dobson from Green Left (Australia).

Like everything else subject to the rule of the One Percent, an event that was designed to celebrate the athletic prowess of youth has been turned into "the most corporatised, militarised and draconian Olympics of all time." The author provides all the disturbing details that he is presently witnessing in London regarding the subversion of Olympic values by the Empire's imposition of their values of profit and power.

Why WikiLeaks is a gift to history

Click here to access the transcript of a speech given by activist Gail Malone at a July 16 rally in Sydney, from Green Left (Australia). 

WikiLeaks is a gift to history. We now have, for the first time, the ability to write history not only through the eyes of the victors. WikiLeaks has become a leveler between people and government. They have ushered in an age where we, the people, have access to information once deemed for their eyes only.

Her speech concludes with this powerful affirmation:

As history is written by the victors, this is a battle we cannot afford to lose. Let truth be victorious.

Steven Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and the Western Culture of Destruction

Click here to access article by K. Wood from her blog Killing Mother.

Steven Covey died yesterday [7-16-2012]. His best-selling, self-help book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, is a paragon of the Western, goal-oriented culture that conflates “effectiveness” with human value. In Covey’s seminal work, he promotes seven behaviors, which he contends will lead to self-mastery, interdependence and self-renewal. Nobody could argue with these goals. Self-mastery and knowledge, and intimate integration in a meaningful way with one’s natural and human communities, could be viewed as the ultimate goals in a human life.

Covey was a popular motivational author and speaker in the US and was very influential among people looking to get ahead in the capitalist system. Like the system itself "getting ahead" is a capitalist value that is never questioned. It is simply taken for granted. In this system getting ahead is almost always interpreted in materialist terms--wealth, status, possessions, etc. Hence his guides to effectiveness were themselves effective in supporting people within this system to function well without questioning the values underpinning the system, and most certainly to never question the system.

As an environmentalist K. Wood is well aware of the ongoing ecosystem destruction that is occurring, but in this otherwise insightful essay she safely confines the identification of the causes to "macho men [as if there weren't macho women], inept politicians, predatory economies, religious fanatics". No doubt because of the long years in academia and its ideological conditioning, she is unable to accurately identify the organizing system that is destroying the planet and degrading human lives. The closest she can come is Western culture.

Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

Click here to access article by Bill McKibben from Rolling Stone.

The author uses three critical numerical measures to frame his well thought out argument that we are in deep doo-doo. Because he seems very pessimistic about the future, this is not uplifting reading. 

Since I wrote one of the first books for a general audience about global warming way back in 1989, and since I've spent the intervening decades working ineffectively to slow that warming, I can say with some confidence that we're losing the fight, badly and quickly – losing it because, most of all, we remain in denial about the peril that human civilization is in.

All the blame for this seems to be the fossil fuel industry. If only they would behave better! Thus, fundamentally this astute environmentalist and product of capitalist informed education can only see this as a moral issue.

Climate change operates on a geological scale and time frame, but it's not an impersonal force of nature; the more carefully you do the math, the more thoroughly you realize that this is, at bottom, a moral issue; we have met the enemy and they is Shell.

Apocalypse Soon: Has Civilization Passed the Environmental Point of No Return?

Click here to access article by Madhusree Mukerjee from Scientific American.

If Bill McKibben's article didn't bring you down, this one will--unless you are an incorrigible optimist.

Although there is an urban legend that the world will end this year based on a misinterpretation of the Mayan calendar, some researchers think a 40-year-old computer program that predicts a collapse of socioeconomic order and massive drop in human population in this century may be on target.

Financing development or developing finance?

Click here to access article by Nicholas Hildyard from Bretton Woods Project. 

Although I found his presentation a bit oblique, it's clear to me that the author is essentially arguing that bankers and private financial institutions, having now saddled governments with their gambling debts, are now intent upon entering into highly profitable infrastructure investments which bankrupt states can no longer fund.

Governments argue that the sheer size of the 'infrastructure gap', coupled with the lack of government funds due to huge costs of propping up the banks in the wake of the financial crisis, means that they have no choice but to bring the private sector into infrastructure development.

The method of choice they are using are state/private partnership ventures:

...The policy choice is not between the private sector, on the one hand, and the state, on the other. There is a new state-private combo, in which a realigned state is the lynchpin in creating new highly profitable investment opportunities through selling off state-owned enterprises at knock-down prices.

Such state/private ventures are encouraged by international banking institutions (run by the One Percent) to rollback environmental and other regulatory restrictions and provide tax breaks in order to induce private parties to invest. For example, in India:

To attract infrastructure investors, the Indian government (like many other governments) is rolling back hard-won environmental and social regulations, particularly those protecting poorer people against forced evictions. It also set up a high-level committee (including investment bank Goldman Sachs' India director) to identify "regulatory or legal impediments constraining private investment in infrastructure" and to "issue specific recommendations for their removal". Other incentives now being offered by the Indian government include tax breaks and an $11 billion fund to provide debt finance through tax-free infrastructure bonds. Legislation is also being introduced in many countries to encourage public pension funds (which could be a major source of public finance for infrastructure) to invest in privately-funded infrastructure, for the profit of the private sector. Private investors in the North, particularly private equity firms, are leaping onto the bandwagon, increasingly looking to infrastructure investments in the South as a new source of profits.

The fleecing of the 99 Percent never seems to end! Ain't capitalism grand?

The Terrifying Background of the Man Who Ran a CIA Assassination Unit

Click here to access article by Conor Friedersdorf from The Atlantic.

The author uncovers evidence that the CIA and President Bush Jr. secretly set up and authorized private assassination teams to serve their policies in order to shield them from any accountability. 

This reads like an exposé, but in fact it is old news--at least 50 years old. The CIA has a long history of outsourcing assassination to organized crime and criminal elements beginning, as far as we know, with hundreds of assassination attempts on Fidel Castro. This latter target furnished years of training in assassination techniques under the control of the CIA in collaboration with criminal organizations which were ultimately used against President J.F. Kennedy. Following this success secret government agencies went on to use similar methods to dispatch Malcolm X, ML King, Robert Kennedy, and other lessor known people. See this, this, this, and this.) US secret agencies rarely, if ever, use official members of their own agencies to assassinate people. Although one might dispute that given that the president is getting in on this action with his Tuesday morning sessions assigning people to a kill list for drone attacks.

US hawks rally to defend defense

Click here to access article by Jim Lobe from Asia Times Online. 

The author provides a clear written article about the "circling of the wagons" of the military-industrial hawks around the issue of automatic cuts to their welfare programs. They, as usual, are pushing two themes: cuts will threaten US security and jobs.

The only problem I have with the article is his suggestion that there is a big difference between Republican and Democrats on this issue in Congress. 

The Act was designed to spur both parties to compromise, since Republicans have generally been adamantly opposed to cuts in the defense budget, while Democrats have no less vehemently tried to protect favored social, educational, and health programs from the budget axe. 

Democrats try to make a big impression about their support of the latter issues, but these are mostly poses for public consumption. For example, here in Washington state the majority of Comgressmembers are Democrats, but when push comes to shove, you can be sure that most will not go against the interests of Boeing Corporation, a major military contractor. 

Although not justified on a cost effective basis, the wide dispersion of military production facilities across the country was an intentional strategy of these "defense" contractors in order to insure political support. You see, jobs in these industries are some of the highest paying; and most jobs, for obvious reasons, are not outsourced to cheap labor countries.

The Afghan bottomless pit

Click here to access article by Manlio Dinucci from Voltaire Network. 

With the support of military contractors, war hawks, and Zionists, Empire operatives continue to turn Afghanistan into a prime military base for further expansion of the Empire. Meanwhile...

To convince Americans and Europeans, already severely affected by cuts in social spending, that it is necessary to remove from public funds more billions of dollars and euros to spend in Afghanistan, they are told that these amounts serve to improve the lives of the Afghan people, especially their women and children. That is the fairy tale told by Hillary Clinton, accompanied by the sound of birds in Kabul and by the chorus of those who benefit from these funds.  

Millions take to the streets as Spain unites against austerity

Click here to access article by Santiago Carrion from Reflections on a Revolution. 

Struggles converge as miners, firefighters, judges, public employees, the unemployed and even the army step up their resistance against EU-enforced cuts.

Post-Carbon Postcard #2: New York City

Click here to access article by John Wiseman from Climate Code Red.

This Australian climate advocate and professor (U. of Melbourne) is visiting in the US. Here he reports on the views of prominent US climate advocates.

Over the last few months I’ve had the privilege of listening to a range of leading climate change policy advocates in Australia, the US, Canada and Europe reflect on priority actions for reducing the risk of runaway climate change.

This has included interviews with many of the lead authors of the strategies reviewed in the Post Carbon Pathways report. In this Post Carbon Postcard #2, written from New York City, I’d like to highlight a few of their responses to two of the most common questions in the minds of people who have been working on climate change and environmental issues for many years: Is it too late? And...So what should we do now?

Their responses are not at all encouraging to me. First of all, the consensus is that we now cannot escape the deleterious effects of climate change, we can only mitigate them. (By the way, I agree with this.) Second, the responses indicate to me that there are no new practical ideas about how to effect policies that can mitigate the effects. Some examples:

• Be prepared to write letters to your Congressman to lobby, to demonstrate, in front of a coal- fired power plant if necessary or in front of a utilities office. 
• One priority would be eliminating subsidies to fossil fuels and shifting some of those subsidies to renewables, clean energy, technologies.... The only way to get rid of them is through passing a law....

Third, there is no mention of the necessity of system change, that is, changing a system whose dynamic results in ecosystem destruction. These advocates are all well-indoctrinated academics that were brought up through the rigorous indoctrination systems of universities. It appears that real change agents will have to come from the ranks of grass-roots activists and the few renegade academics that exist.

Zombies, vampires and capitalism

Click here to access article by Margaret Kimberley from Intrepid Report.

The author examines Hollywood's mass production of films depicting blood-sucking, devouring creatures and finds that they are providing an escapist substitute for the inability of most Americans to understand the economic crises that are tormenting them. Most do not see their problems as a system problem.

...millions of people resort to frightening themselves on the big or small screen to make sense of their experiences. We can grasp a frightening world where characters must escape from gruesome deaths, because we are living those experiences on a daily basis.

Americans are not only becoming increasingly impoverished but they are also deeply delusional about the true nature of their insecurity. They still have faith in a system which will inevitably fail them, and ignorance of that fact makes for insanity of various kinds. The conscious mind says that if we have a different president, we may escape from a rotten, and completely broken system.

New report foreshadows post-election assault on pensions, social programs in US

Click here to access article by Jack Hood from World Socialist Web Site. 

The author reviews a recently released report from the State Budget Crisis Task Force organized by, and consisting of, some very prominent members of the ruling One Percent. Once again we see clear evidence that elections don't matter, because whichever candidates wins the contests for president and Congressional seats, you lose! People on this task force are solid representatives of the ruling class situated in both parties, some have close relations with the labor aristocracy. 

And...

The report ignores the real causes of the fiscal crisis. In the nearly 100-page document nothing is said about how state, local, and federal government coffers have been emptied by corporate tax giveaways, multi-trillion dollar bank bailouts, and multiple wars and overseas interventions. The economic breakdown that followed the Crash of 2008 hardly merits a mention even though it led to a plunge in tax revenues as millions lost their jobs, home values plummeted and small businesses, starved of loans, went bankrupt.

The lily-pad strategy

Click here to access article by David Vine from Asia Times Online. 

After witnessing a gruesome scene of wounded US soldiers at an airbase in Germany, this professor of anthropology started asking questions about where they were coming from. He learned a lot about the mostly secret expansion of smaller military bases throughout the world. 

Unknown to most Americans, Washington's garrisoning of the planet is on the rise, thanks to a new generation of bases the military calls "lily pads" (as in a frog jumping across a pond toward its prey). These are small, secretive, inaccessible facilities with limited numbers of troops, spartan amenities, and prepositioned weaponry and supplies.

Around the world, from Djibouti to the jungles of Honduras, the deserts of Mauritania to Australia's tiny Cocos Islands, the Pentagon has been pursuing as many lily pads as it can, in as many countries as it can, as fast as it can.

The Brotherhood's one per cent

Click here to access article by Wael Gamal from Ahram Online (Egypt). 

What lies between the president and social justice is the elite of the Brotherhood, the one per cent, who are set to pursue the same neo-liberal policies which led to the revolution.

Another way to characterize the election charades sponsored by Empire elites and collaborators is that "the more things change, the more they stay the same".

Although I have seen scattered reports of people charging fraudulent processes during the election proceedings in Egypt, what I would like to see are detailed studies of how elites engineer elections to produce the outcomes they achieve which is to continue the rule of the One Percents, but with different actors. Thus, their elections are simply a way of re-packaging neo-liberal capitalist rule with different wrappers. Such operations are designed to preserve a patina of legitimacy to the ruling One Percents of various nations.

A revealing exposé of the US assets leading the Syrian opposition

Click here to access article by Chris Marsden from World Socialist Web Site. 

It is laudable whenever a prominent liberal media site offers accurate information to counter the lies of mainstream news reporting. Marsden recognizes the Guardian piece by Charlie Skelton as such an example. Exposés such as Skelton's rarely make it through the filters of editorial rooms of major media; but, occasionally they do. It's interesting to note that a major editor of The Guardian followed this piece the next day with a denunciation.

It is this that accounts for the scathing denunciation of Skelton in the next day’s edition of the Guardian by diplomatic editor Julian Borger

“US manipulation of news from Syria is a red herring,” the headline declares, “The big picture is clear.”

Accusing Skelton of “innuendo,” a heavy use of quotation marks to denote skepticism, “banal prose” and other literary crimes, Borger defends the various intelligence assets identified by Skelton as “people who have devoted a substantial share of their working life studying Syrian society and politics.” 

Hard rain on the parade

Click here to access article by Charlotte Du Cann from her blog (UK). 

Clearly the author has not let her attention be diverted from the developing disaster, the signs of which, are appearing all around us.

History depends on our attention. Where we place our attention confers value and significance. ...Attention can keep the flags flying and the illusion of supremacy going, it can hold people on pedestals up as small gods. Or it can focus on the real facts of the matter and see climate change happening in the backyard. Distracted by entertainments, you can't see what is happening in front of your eyes. You don't notice the weather. You don't see the London allotments torn down to make a hockey stadium, the people displaced in Guatemala for EU biofuels, you don't see the treatment of the cows, or the dairy farmers, when you buy your cheap milk, you don't see the scam of the banks who have created 97% of our money supply out of thin air.