The global struggle of teachers

Click here to access article by Jerry White from World Socialist Web Site. 

I frequently read in more independent websites that teachers are involved in labor strikes not only in many locations across the USA but in other lands across the globe. Such coverage is always omitted by our masters in their media corporations just like they refuse to cover the Gilet Juanes' ongoing protests in France for obvious reasons: the careful management of information that we are allowed to receive to protect the power and profit interests of the ruling transnational capitalist class of the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire. White attempts a summary of these strikes and their significance. 

Teachers have won popular support because they are fighting for fundamental rights and because all workers are facing the same conditions—declining incomes and skyrocketing living costs, precarious employment and endless attacks on social rights, including health care and pensions—which were won over generations of struggle.

The developing movement among teachers is an initial expression of a rebellion that will inevitably extend into broader layers of the working class, particularly industrial workers in key sectors such as auto, steel and other areas of manufacturing. It is a movement that will be compelled to address not only the immediate questions of wages and working conditions, but the great issues that face workers in every country—social inequality, the shredding of democratic rights, the growth of authoritarian forms of rule and the mounting danger of catastrophic war.

Watch My Speech On Assange’s Persecution For “Whistle-blowing, Wikileaks & the Future of Democracy”

Click here if you wish to access the video from its source: Australian Caitlin Johnstone's website.

I gave a speech at the Sydney Politics in the Pub event “Whistle-blowing, Wikileaks & the Future of Democracy”. Here it is if you’d like to watch (video quality isn’t great, but the audio’s fine): 

Mr Bolton’s Long Game Against Iran – Pakistan Becomes Saudi Arabia’s New Client State

Click here to access article by Alastair Crooke from Strategic Culture Foundation. (This article requires a greater degree of knowledge of recent events in the Middle East.)

Despite the history of Crooke's service to the Anglo section of the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire, he continues to shed light on the Empire's covert strategies in the politically important region of Eurasia. This rather mysterious geopolitical analyst has written some solidly argued analyses of recent political events, and this is one of the best, in my opinion. Bolton appears to be continuing the David Rockefeller's protege Zbigniew Brzezinski and his influence outlined in his book The Grand Chessboard together with the current Empire's obsession with Iran. 

US Special Forces, (mostly) withdrawn from Syria, are deploying into this new Iraq military ‘hub’ in order, Trump said, to “watch Iran”. (Trump rather inadvertently ‘let the cat out of the bag’ with that comment).

The detail of the US ‘hub encirclement’ of Iran, however, rather gives the rest of Mr Bolton’s plan away: The ‘hubs’ are positioned precisely adjacent to Sunni, Kurdish, Baluch or other Iranian ethnic minorities (some with a history of insurgency). And why is it that US special forces are being assembled in the Iraqi hub? Well, these are the specialists of ‘train and assist’ programmes. These forces are attached to insurgent groups to ‘train and assist’ them to confront a sitting government. Eventually, such programmes end with safe-zone enclaves that protect American ‘companion forces’ ....

The covert element to the MESA programme, targeting Iran, is ambitious, but it will be supplemented in the next months with new rounds of economic squeeze intended to sever Iran’s oil sales (as waivers expire), and with diplomatic action, aimed at disrupting Iran’s links in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq.

Earlier in the article he explains what the MESA program is:

MESA (Middle East Security Alliance) maybe the new bland vehicle for a seemingly gentler Arab NATO, but its covert sub-layer is, under Mr Bolton’s guidance, as fixated on Iran, as was ‘Arab NATO’ at the outset. How would it be otherwise (given Team Trump’s obsession with Iran)?

And he continues his cogent analysis citing the recent moves and interests of all the other players in this dangerous part of the world.

The Magic Socialist

Click here to access article by C. J. Hopkins from his blog Consent Factory, Inc.

In his latest article America's master-satirist takes aim at Sen. Bernie Sanders (see the latest revelation), his very naive followers, and at the managed elections held by the capitalist ruling class:

... that’s the magic of electoral politics! The global capitalist ruling establishment, despite the fact that they own the banks and the corporations that own the government that owns the military and intelligence services, and despite the fact that they own the media, and all essential industries, and channels of trade, and are relentlessly restructuring the entire planet (which they rule with almost total impunity) to conform to their soulless neoliberal ideology, and are more than happy to unleash their militarized goons on anyone who gets in their way … despite all that, if we elect Bernie president, they will have no choice but to peacefully surrender, and transform America into a socialist wonderland!  

‘The Establishment’s Last Roll of the Dice’: What Will Become of Europe?

Click here to access article by Alastair Crooke from Strategic Culture Foundation. (I missed this essential article because I was distracted by personal medical issues. Thankfully, Pepe Escobar alerted me to this post.)

Clearly he uses "The Establishment" (in the headline) to mean the hidden-from-your-view, transnational capitalist class that controls the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire.

Crooke, who has an extensive history in Britain's CIA (MI-6) and diplomatic corps, reviews the rather dismal scene in today's Europe: the "Gilets Jaunes" mostly in France, the threats to the Italian economy, a downturn in the German economy, Brexit issues, etc, and draws some rather dramatic interpretations.

I think that you’ll find that after ‘08 people understand a lot more about finance than they did before ‘08. They may not realize it, but I think they now understand bailouts, they understand how unfair bailouts are when they’re targeted at Wall Street, as opposed to Main Street. And I think that what you’re going to see, sadly, is the Fed and the government will do what they’ve always tried to do, which is bail out Wall Street to ‘save the system’.

If you have a bad economy and you have people feeling like they’re disenfranchised and you tell them, you know what, we need to do this to save the system, well, suddenly the reaction changes. And the reaction is to hell with it, let’s burn the system to the ground.  

US Executes Planned Venezuela Violence, Pompeo Says Cuba, Nicaragua Next & US Doubles Syria Troops

Click here if you wish to access the one hour video and introductory article by Ryan Cristián directly from The Last American Vagabond.

Cristián contrasts what is happening in Venezuela to what is reported by mostly US Empire media corporations. I can't confirm every last details of actual events as presented by Cristián, but I think his version is light-years better than what the Empire's media corporations report which is propaganda disguised as reporting and ordered by fascist Empire capitalists to deceive you.

The climate emergency with Dahr Jamail

Click here if you wish to directly access a 28:27m video of an interview with Dahr Jamail on Chris Hedges' "On Contact" show that is posted on RT America. (My thanks go to a long-time activist for alerting me to this video.)

The following is an introduction to this video:

The glaciers in Alaska alone are losing an estimated 75 billion tons of ice every year. The oceans, which absorb over 90 percent of the excess heat trapped by greenhouses gases in the atmosphere, are warming and acidifying, melting the polar ice caps and resulting in rising sea-levels and oxygen-starved ocean dead zones. We await a 50-gigaton burp, or "pulse," of methane from thawing Arctic permafrost beneath the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, which will release the equivalent of around two-thirds of the total carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial era. Some 150 to 200 species of plants, insects, birds and mammals are becoming extinct every 24 hours – one thousand times the "natural" or "background" rate. This pace of extinction is greater than anything the world has experienced since the disappearance of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Chris Hedges speaks to journalist and author, Dahr Jamail, about his new book 'The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption,' which looks at the climate emergency.

  

It's clearer now than ever before that climate destabilization has already set in. Chalk another victory to the addicts of power and profits--capitalist ruling classes all over the world (in addition to their collaborators among the highly trained, indoctrinated, and pampered upper-middle classes) who have been the main criminals perpetrating this crime. What does this mean for those who have long witnessed the destruction of our biosphere upon which so many species depend including our own human species? 

I, for one, choose to continue my fight against those who are guilty of this monstrous crime of ecocide: capitalists who have imposed on the rest of us through violence and chicanery the system of capitalism. I don't care if addiction is a disease or not because those who have succumbed to this addiction have used the most criminal means possible to commit this monstrous crime. What about you? What is your choice?

The Crisis of Science

Click here to access article by James Corbett from The Corbett Report.

I have followed Corbetts's political libertarian views (and others like him)--"the government is the cause of all problems"--for some time, and I found these people quite fascinating. Such people have been so thoroughly trained to eliminate the system that is at the root of nearly all things social and economic--capitalism--that they have problems rationalizing their understanding of such problems. Libertarians (in America) are like ostriches with their heads firmly in the sand. They simply cannot recognize the system of capitalism that underlies all things social and political (see this and this). Like gravity, capitalism in their view is simply a fact of nature. 

In this Crisis of Science podcast which he goes into at length, he often cites commercial interests as being the root cause of the corruption of science. He does refer to government agencies that collude with private interest, but stops short there. Corbett doesn't offer solutions, and says that "this isn't simply a problem of money" that is at the root of the crisis. He refers to the crisis as "having social-political and structural roots". (If he only knew!) He promises to examine various proposals to solve this crisis in the next podcast. I can't wait.

(If you are scientist or academic, I recommend this article entitled "The Commercialization of Science and the Struggle Against It" by "Denys Bondar, a young Ukrainian scientist working in one of the famous North American universities" [Princeton] from LeftEast, a website based in Bulgaria.)

Growing power: Mega-Mergers and the fight for our food system

Click here to access article by Katie Sandwell from the Transnational Institute (TNI).

Download this PDF document and learn about how mergers of agricultural corporations are leading to just a handful of corporations that exercise almost total control over what we eat. Yes, it's corporations über alles under capitalism!

Giant corporations have taken control of our food. Today, just a few companies control what we eat and how it is produced. For them, food is money: companies and their shareholders aren’t interested in what food means to the people who grow and eat it, or what farming means for the environment. They are interested in the profits they can make from it.

The situation is not good, and it is getting worse: since 2015 a number of “mega mergers” have been proposed, or taken place. Six companies controlled most of the international trade in seeds and agricultural chemicals in 2015. In the last two years, these companies have begun the process of merging and re-arranging themselves into just four colossal corporations. The larger these companies grow, the less we can control them. And the less control we have, the harder it is for us to build the kind of food system that more and more of us want: one that recognizes the value of people, respects the planet, and provides decent, dignified work.

Profits Are Up!

Click here if you wish to access the cartoon directly by Stephanie McMillan from her website.  (I thank an activist for alerting me to the latest cartoon of hers.)

The Inconvenient Truth of Modern Civilization’s Inevitable Collapse

Click here to access article by "xraymike79" from his blog Collapse of Industrial Civilization.

This author returns from an absence of nearly a year to summarize scientific data which show clearly that we, as a human species, are in a "dire" situation. Because of his his extended absence I thought that he had given up his long effort to warn humans of this threat. However, he seems at one point to hold out some hope for a future of humans if only we can reduce our birth rate.

By far the most effective way to reduce future emissions and resource consumption is to reduce human birth rates, yet the global population is still increasing at about 90 million people per year despite the geographic shift in fertility rates.

This "effective way" is not effective at all which he readily admits. I am not a scientist, but I can read, and have read many scientific articles on the subject. I now think there is very little chance that humans can survive. Our atmosphere has become so loaded with carbon that there is a baked-in effect that will increase global warming for many decades even if we stopped completely all carbon emitting now. But I don't know that, and nobody knows that for sure. 

Hence, in the meantime we must use the most effective means to combat this threat by ending the rule of a tiny segment of humans and their system which has caused so much devastation--and not only wrecking our biosphere. We have seen disastrous global wars in the 20th century followed by endless wars so far in the 21st century. We have also seen entire populations uprooted and migrating to other areas of the globe to escape such disasters. We have also seen the growth of concentrated wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people who use this wealth to increase their power over our lives. The obvious solution is to rid ourselves of their system of capitalism!

Europe pays the price of a US decision: where will European ISIS go?

Click here to access article by Kuwaiti-born independent journalist Elijah Magnier from his blog.

Another independent journalist discloses another dirty and very open secret of the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire. Anyone who refuses to believe the fictional realities as presented by the Empire's corporate media already knows this dirty secret because there have been hundreds of reports from independent sources to confirm it. Yes, the Empire and its allies (Saudi Arabia and its satellites) have emptied their prisons of deviants, trained them to become terrorists, outfitted them with weapons and brand-spanking new Toyota trucks, and launched them into Syria to destabilize the government. Now that ISIS, the Empire's terrorist mercenary army, has been defeated, almost nobody wants them. This poses a quandary for most members of the Empire and their allies. The Empire also used Kurds for this purpose and now they are abandoning them. There are no crimes that our capitalist masters will find unacceptable if it serves their interests of power and profits.

Wall Street’s Banksters Are Clandestinely Trading the “Digital Gangster” Stock of Facebook

Click here to access article by Pam Martens from Wall Street on Parade.

Martens was referring to this report issued by a committee of the British Parliament which referred to Facebook as a "digital gangster" which had little effect of the price of Facebook's stock.

Yesterday, the U.K. Parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee released a 108-page report based on its 18-month investigation into digital disinformation campaigns that provided granular details on Facebook’s thuggish business model, inferring at one point that the U.S. should investigate the company under its Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).

The report minced few words about Facebook or its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, writing that the company and its management were “ ‘digital gangsters’ in the online world, considering themselves to be ahead of and beyond the law.”

And, she goes on to cite other historical examples of corporations that have been legally convicted of law violations, but whose stock has greatly increased. The lesson of this story is that getting rich "by hook or by crook" is perfectly acceptable in today's amoral capitalist world. Hence, all sociopaths are attracted to the world of today's capitalism like never before. They have infiltrated every institution and are in control of every institution. We are now seeing the results all around us in terms of acceptance of extreme inequality, imperialist wars, and the lack of concern about climate destabilization.

Bernie ‘Looked the Other Way’ on Wasserman Schultz, Florida Election Rigging

Click here if you wish to access the video and brief introduction from 21st Century Wire.

The is abundant evidence that election rigging has been rife in South Florida’s notoriously corrupt Broward County. Former Florida congressional candidate Tim Canova exposed the DNC election fiddling through a series of independent investigations, following his challenge to former disgraced Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Talk Show host Jimmy Dore interviews Canova about the controversy, and also explains how Bernie Sanders remained quiet on the matter in order to placate the Democratic Party elite. Watch:

Counterpunch Shadowboxes and Loses

Click here to access article by Edward Curtin from his blog Behind the Curtain. 

Another very astute observer of political power events in today's capitalist class rule has been rejected and disappeared by the editors of CounterPunch, one the oldest online, "alternative", American blogs. I have long held doubts about their dedication to truth when the truth leads one to question the very foundations of the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire: the ruling capitalist classes and their obsession with power and profits.

He attacks the editors of CounterPunch as "gatekeepers" after he describes the way that corporate media's use highly trained people who will follow orders by presenting only news, information, and analysis that serve the interests of the capitalist ruling class:

In the fight for truth in the public arena, similar subterfuges occur.

To battle honestly in the open forum, to argue to and fro squarely, is often prevented in advance by eliminating an opponent’s voice from the debate.  This is the typical method used by the corporate mass media that stack the deck with sycophants and refuse dissidents a place to voice their ideas.

Then there is the masquerade of fighting an opponent who is really a collaborator and benefactor, whose punches one counters in a game of shadow boxing meant to convince the audience that the fight is real and you are on their side.  Some alternative media use this technique because they are gatekeepers for the power elite.

How One of America’s Premier Data Monarchs is Funding a Global Information War and Shaping the Media Landscape

Click here to access article by Alexander Rubinstein and Max Blumenthal from Mint Press News. 

Others have written articles on the insidious influence of billionaire Pierre Omidyar, but this piece provides an in-depth examination of his influence over disinformation about our world that ordinary people of the USA and beyond receive. But even these crimes are excelled by his efforts to organize and fund information and analysis organizations that purport to be progressive. Such organizations tend to attract honest journalists in order to limit and shape independent reporting. Ordinary people of the world are no match for the skills and expertise that billionaires are able to purchase to promote their interests of profit and power and the monster Empire that they have created.

Omidyar’s political empire consists of a web of organizations overseen by its center of administration: the Omidyar Group. Each outfit appears to be an independent entity with its own staff and directors. Taken together, however, these organizations pursue a mission that reflects the vision of the billionaire behind it.   

Johnny Versus The News Man

Click here to access article by Caitlin Johnstone from her blog.

What a beautiful fantasy! Well, if reality is sometimes too distasteful, we can always resort to fantasies.

... one day the News Man announced that Freedomocracy was going to War. All other recourse had failed with the Evil Dictator, he said, and everyone receiving a notice on their pocket Screens was to report to their Enlistment Stations immediately.

But nobody went. Everyone refused to fight this new War, and everyone refused to support the people who were trying to start it. The tangle of lies fell away completely, and everyone saw what was really happening with clear eyes. The people rose up together, and soon even the police joined them, and it wasn’t long before the News Man appeared on the Screen for the last time.

Then the people began creating a country which really works for them instead of keeping them poor and tricked all the time.

Who Rules the Anglosphere?

Click here to access article by Moti Assani from Veterans Today. (Updated on 2/18/2019 at 8:44 AM to add a clip from The Jimmy Dore website.)

The author rounds up a lot of observations about what a number of people know: there is an invisible government that controls the puppets of our official government behind the curtain. This super-secret group goes by various names: deep state, shadow government, oligarchs, etc. (He prefers "Controllers".) Nissani states the obvious, that is, what's obvious to most astute observers:

Humans have always known that water exists, even though they were often ignorant of its constituent parts. The same goes for the Invisible Government: Truth-seekers have excellent reasons to believe it exists, although information about its internal structure and the identity of its members remains as elusive as they are.

Read what he discovers about this very elusive bunch who control so much of our lives. As I learned many years ago from Jim O’Reilly, a retired banker who now lives in Denver, the rich don't merely seek to accumulate more money for itself, but they seek the power that concentrated wealth gives them.

You may be interested in another article of Nissani, the title of which is essentially a corollary of this one entitled "Why voting in the US may be an exercise in self-delusion" from The Greanville Post. He goes on to elaborate on the "Controllers", or the Deep State. Another video that may interest you is from The Jimmy Dore website that illustrates US corrupt elections.

Reshaping the Middle East: why the West should stop its Interventions (Part 2)

Click here to access article by Elijah J Magnier from his blog.

This Kuwaiti-born independent journalist provides a summary of the past decades of US, Israeli, and Saudi interventions in the Middle East, and the consequences are not good for the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire. He reaches several conclusions after he poses the question: So, what has this global intervention brought about?

The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent: “The Inconvenient Truth” Behind Youth Cooptation

Click here to access series of articles by Cory Morningstar with Forrest Palmer reposted on Deep Green Resistance News Service. 

I don't pay much attention to corporate media sources because they are all about deceptions, and instead I focus on news and analysis by reliable independent sources. So, I occasionally miss the scams being committed by our masters in the capitalist ruling class. This post is a result of receiving this morning an article from Climate Code Red (Australian website) which lauded Greta Thunberg and her followers. I knew that Morningstar and Palmer have been running a series of articles on her backers (incidentally, I haven't seen any other exposé of this fake operation other than the series run by Morningstar and Palmer), but I was discouraged by the tome-length articles that they, as usual, write and post. However, this morning's post by Climate Code Red, which has previously run excellent pro-environmental articles, had me concerned. They were obviously taken in by our masters in the capitalist Empire.

As a result of this experience, I admit I didn't read all of the series by Morningstar and Palmer, but I scanned them together with many other articles which supported the astonishing rise of teenager Greta Thunberg as an environmental celebrity. After hours of research I reached a conclusion: there is another sheep-herding operation going on to shepherd those concerned about climate destabilization into the chute that leads--well, maybe not to the slaughterhouse of managed elections as Bernie Sanders did--but to the control and diffusion of the growing worldwide concern about the obvious signs of weather extremes--the first signs of climate destabilization.

At this stage we can only point to the supporters behind this celebrity status of Thunberg and the many other manifestations of this sheep-herding operation. Morningstar and Palmer provide an exhaustive (exhausting?) list of the promoters. The following is only a sample of what the authors found: worldwide coverage from media corporations, and their capitalist backers have managed to have Thunberg appear at the UN Climate Conference; at Ted Talks, at Davos, and they have used her celebrity status to spawn other organizations supposedly concerned about climate destabilization: The Green New Deal (Democratic Party), We Don't Have Time (movement), Sierra Club's Sunrise Movement, and NGO supporters like the World Resources Institute. The articles goes into considerable detail about the capitalist associations of the directors and backers. 

It's patently clear what is going on. The hoi poiloi (ordinary people) are once again being played for fools. In contrast to what we've seen in the past: devastating world wars, but this time it will result in human extinction.