Your Up-To-Date Guide To Avoiding Internet Censorship & Getting Real Watchdog Journalism

Click here to access article by Whitney Webb from Mint Press News. (Note: Thanks to Christopher from northwest Oregon for alerting me to this useful article.)

There are lots of good strategies for beating both corporate and government Internet censors and snoops. These range from alternatives to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter — to direct subscriptions to authors and pubs — to setting up your own VPN. All are worth the effort.

You might also be willing to consider Ecosia which I have recently used, but haven't used enough to know much about it or to thoroughly recommend it.

The Road to Charlottesville: Reflections on 21st Century U.S. Capitalist Racism

Click here to access article by Paul Street from CounterPunch. 

Street offers a valuable dissection of American racism that has become very complicated due to the obfuscation of it by all the indoctrination/propaganda agencies of the ruling capitalist class by transforming its more overt forms into more indirect, but still effective, forms that serve to preserve racism. Now with a more hardcore racist in the White House, many white Americans have been deceived by agents of the ruling class to see themselves as victims, and are now being encouraged to foment racist-based actions .

In my opinion, Street wastes far too much time (and ours) by listing details about what should happen to overcome racism, and far too little time developing his last paragraph in which he suggests that all the "shoulds" (expressed as "we need") will likely not change anything simply because those who rule our nation, under a system their ancestors created, will not permit such reforms to be made.

Unlikely under capitalism….

Can reparations (due also to Native Americans and nations abroad where untold millions/billions of people have been devastated by U.S. imperialism) be properly and meaningfully introduced under the existing U.S. regime of class rule called capitalism?  Almost certainly not – as with the demand for a shift to an ecologically sustainable economy and society.  It must therefore be considered a revolutionary demand and be combined with multi-racial working-class struggle to remove the “One Percent” (a catchy euphemism for the capitalist ruling class) not just from its wealth but also and above all from its command of the structuring and purpose of “our” (their) political economy. It must be interwoven with the struggle for the broad redistribution of wealth and power and for peoples’ socialism. This is very different from the reactionary, “divisive,”  and zero-sum way in which reparations is advanced by its bourgeois champions both white and Black.

Racism along with poverty, powerlessness for the vast majority, never-ending wars, environmental destruction, and all the other evils of capitalism will not change until we, the people, change the system that supports all those evils. We need to study and execute a revolution before our masters with their addiction to profits and power make humans extinct. Time is fast running out.

We'll be in afghanistan forever. Here's a cartoon you can re-use with each new administration!

by editorial cartoonist Matt Bors. 

Matt Bors: I made this cartoon in 2010.

You might also be interested in an article entitled "WATCH: Brave Congressman Explains How US Keeps Afghan Heroin Trade Alive at Your Expense" from Mint Press News.

Racist Organization Receives Bonanza Of “Anti-Racism” Donations

Click here to access article by Alison Weir from Mint Press News. 

For the past 69 years, Israel has oppressed Palestinians in diverse ways, confiscating their land, destroying their homes, killing numerous children, and imprisoning at least one member of 70 percent of all Palestinian families.

In addition, Israel has waged wars of aggression against Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. It has urged wars against Iraq, Iran, and others.

And the ADL has been in the forefront of supporting Israel. It has also used its $57 million budget to smear those who support fairness, justice, and equality for Palestinians.

The sad fact is that donations to the ADL, rather than fighting racism, will be used to enable it.

It is so ironic that an Zionist-American lobby organization (ADL) that promotes the interests of Israel and its apartheid practices is benefiting from the recent expressions of racism against African-Americans in the US. 

In many ways African-Americans can be regarded as the US's Palestinians. They have been a target of discriminatory practices by US police forces and, likewise, the huge US prison system confines a disproportionate number of African-Americans. This only accounts for the obvious racial discrimination practices by the ruling capitalist class that so often promotes racism, a method known as "divide and conquer", as a way to distract the American working class from the real issues of class war. What can we conclude about such irony? 

Israeli apartheid cannot even be legitimately classified as racism because Palestinians are racially classified as Semites like most Israeli Jews. The Zionist oriented ADL are a Jewish nationalist organization that has allied itself with the US-led Empire capitalist class in order to promote the interests of profit and power of Jewish international capitalists. As such their policies mirror the imperialist history of history's leading capitalist powers of the British Empire, the former Nazi Empire, the Japanese Empire, and the current US-led Empire. 

RMG Rhymes Reasons w/Dr. Edward Rhymes: Abby Martin

Click here to access this interview with a leading independent media journalist Abby Martin. (Note: This 40 minute audio interview starts at 1:40m.)

The retired sociology professor asks what America's premier independent journalist Abby Martin has learned primarily about her recent visit to Venezuela and secondarily her observations about an earlier visit to Israel. 

Capitalism puts profits first, but an ecological society will serve humanity-- an Interview with Fred Magdoff (a "best post")

Click here to access this interview from Truthout.

What would a truly just, equal and ecologically sustainable future look like? Why would it require a change in our economic system, namely the end of capitalism? Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams answer(s) these questions in Creating an Ecological Society: Toward a Revolutionary Transformation. Suffused with radical hope, this book can be yours with a donation to Truthout!

Is a world possible based on equitable needs, empathy and sustainable economics? Two authors believe so -- and that it would require the end of capitalism: Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams, who co-wrote Creating an Ecological Society. In this Truthout interview, Magdoff -- a professor emeritus of plant and soil science at the University of Vermont -- shares his vision of how we could move toward such a world.

Magdoff's articles have been frequently published in the Monthly Review, a longtime socialist journal. He is a professor emeritus of plant and soil science at the University of Vermont and co-author of the new Monthly Review Press book Creating an Ecological Society: Toward a Revolutionary Transformation.
 
Fred Magdoff demonstrates in this interview that he is a very wise man as illustrated in this paragraph in a partial answer to the question "In summary, what would an ecological society look like to you?"

It will be critical to operate in ways that maintain an egalitarian and democratic society. Transparency and openness need to be maintained. There are a variety of methods to help make that happen, such as simple processes for recall of unsatisfactory persons in positions of authority and regular rotation of positions within economic units and within social structures, such as community, regional and multi-regional councils. Continuing efforts will take place in schools and society at large to encourage pro-social traits needed in a cooperative society -- cooperation, reciprocity, sharing, empathy, treating all people equally and fairly (no favoritism) -- and to work to minimize the expression of traits emphasized and rewarded by capitalism (especially, greed, selfishness and individualism) and to eliminate the deep scourges of racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination and oppression.

In the last lengthy sentence he poses what I believe to be a major hurdle to overcome by any revolutionary movement that attempts to replace capitalism with what is truly a social-system: individualism that is laced like fabric throughout the culture of capitalism. That is why I believe that any effective revolutionary movement must emphasize a pro-social prefigurative component (see mine here and here in my revolutionary proposal) in order to provide training and experience to create a totally new human being to preserve this new social system.

Is Capitalism Killing Our Climate? A radio interview with Ian Angus [a "best post"]

The hosts of Planet Haliburton, a program from the wilds of Haliburton County in Ontario, Canada, interview Ian Angus, the editor of Climate & Capitalism.

This fascinating interview lasts about 46 minutes minus 6 minutes in the middle (which you can skip) to hear a Bob Dylan song.

Trump's Base Turns On Him Over Afghanistan

Click here if you wish to access the 10:43m podcast via YouTube that originated from the Jimmy Dore show.  

I especially liked the exchange between Dore and one of his guests (Ron?) toward the end of the show.

Ron: Let's look at the system that allowed this snake oil salesman [Trump] to happen in the first place.

Jimmy: No wants to do that, Ron. That's a good idea. I know no one wants to change the system. No one wants to get rid of their money. No one wants to get rid of their corporate cash. Nobody wants to change the system, believe me.

Unfortunately, they didn't name the system, but the system has a name--capitalism. 

Capitalist speech versus people speech

by political cartoonist Matt Wuerker.

This cartoon very well illustrates the truth that a tiny class of capitalists, who rule the US, have overwhelmingly more opportunities to influence decisions than the vast majority of Americans. In addition, it shows the hypocrisy of the propaganda that we are all subject to: "the people have spoken". What is missing from the satire is the power of wealth also enables capitalists to hide a very "inconvenient truth": Their wealth enables them to control both political parties and select their candidates. It's not a perfect system as they discovered in the recent election, but it is sufficient to fool most Americans into believing that they live in a "democracy".

Fighting Neo-Nazis and the Future of Free Expression

Click here to access article by Jeremy Malcolm, Cindy Cohn, and Danny O'Brien from Electronic Frontier Foundation.  

Although these people don't acknowledge the reality of the current class war that is occurring, they, as experts on all technical matters of internet, recognize that there are attacks happening against the norms of free expression of opinions over the internet. There is much to be learned about the internet in this piece to enable us to better fight against censorship that is currently being waged by agents of the capitalist class.

Permit me to digress because I've just had an epiphany and, before I forget, I want to share it with you! Don't ask me how I arrived at it, because I don't remember. It has something to do with the free expression of ideas.

The thought just occurred to me that education in a capitalist controlled society, such as we are in, has so effectively blocked any class-based analysis of issues in those it educates. (If this is difficult for you to grasp, think of it in terms of inoculation against a disease--the disease in this case is critical thinking.) And the more education one receives, the more this blocking process occurs. These insights have been validated by many experiences in my rather long life of 81 years. 

Capitalists need highly trained people to enable them to exploit workers, to design devices (robots, subsystems, weapons, etc) which eliminates the need for workers, to better exploit workers, have better access to resources and markets, to develop weapons that can threaten other countries to comply with our masters' demands, to staff their many institutions to protect and promote their system of capitalism, etc, etc. The more education one receives in a capitalist controlled society the more potentially dangerous one becomes for our capitalist masters. To offset any threats to their rule and their system, which lays so many golden eggs (among which are wealth and power) for them to enjoy at our expense, they especially load their system of higher education with pro-capitalist ideas about the sanctity of private economic property, the mythology/religion of the "invisible hand", the justness of their economic and political system, and the necessity for workers to obey their leaders and work hard for their bosses. 

Of course, such ideas are pure indoctrination and people are discouraged from ever questioning questioning these fundamental beliefs of capitalism. They are like the 10 Commandments of Judaism and Christianity. Capitalism is a faith-based belief system which often resembles a religion.  As mentioned above, my experience has validated a corollary of this indoctrination component of education: the more education one has, the more indoctrinated such a person is likely to be in these fundamental tenets of capitalism. (This holds true even when the factor of rewards/benefits are factored in--although less so.) This explains why I nearly always have found it more difficult to convince educated people of the class nature of our society than I have people who have received much less education.

The truth will not be Googled

Click here to access article by Claire Connelly from Renegade Inc. (Edited for clarity at 5:45 PM Seattle time.)

Even people who I regard as believers in the reform of capitalism (otherwise known as "liberals") are disturbed by the increasing efforts of internet related corporations to censor out material that our masters in the capitalist class find objectionable. 

While web-hosting services have been criticised for cancelling the registration of neo-Nazi website, Daily Stormer, progressive left-leaning sites are losing Google ranking and traffic because of a deliberate move to censor “fake” news by the internet search giant.

I haven't yet seen any significant evidence that my website has been adversely affected by corporate internet censors (other than the usual August slowdown when people go on vacations), but many as reported in this article have been affected. However, I have a rather difficult time sympathizing with people whose websites have been adversely affected. I think it is very naive of them to expect otherwise. They seem to have actually believed in all the propaganda about liberties in a capitalist class ruled society. Actually I am surprised that this has not happened sooner. So, I say, "people, grow up! Get a grip on reality! (This does not mean that we should simply accept their efforts to control the internet--on the contrary, we must throw everything into the battle to preserve it for our use.)

You live in a society that is ruled of, by, and for the interests of a class of owners of the economy, otherwise known as capitalists. The latter see evidence all around them that the internet is used by people to reject their self-serving propaganda, and logically they want to shut it down. Is that so hard to understand?

Yes, I am aware of all the amendments, known as the Bill of Rights, to the Constitution. However our early "founding fathers" were forced to tack on these liberties to their constitution in order for the states to ratify it. They didn't really mean it. So, get over it. Surely you stopped believing in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy. Likewise you should stop believing in all the fairy tale indoctrination about freedom existing in the US. These freedoms largely only exist for this class; and when "push comes to shove" as they are now for the increasingly threatened ruling class, they won't exist at all for ordinary people. 

The implication of all this is clear: we ordinary people must act to secure your own liberties by overthrowing the rule of the capitalist class and insuring that no ruling class ever takes control. But we can't stop there. We will also have to design a new society that insures equality, that the fruits of one's labor is shared by all, and, most importantly, the policies that govern this new society are influenced by all. 

There has never been a more favorable time to do this since the beginning of civilization. Think about it. We have constructed so many labor saving devices that free us from work; and with our control of them, we could all work about a 15 hour week which would free us to educate ourselves, to govern, spend more time with our families, create things, enjoy life, preserve the environment, etc, etc. Unfortunately under the rules of capitalism, these devices are all "owned" by capitalists whose only interest is to accumulate more profit and power at your expense by producing many frivolous and even terribly harmful things (never-ending wars) that we can and must do without if we are to survive as a species.

They Want You to ‘Punch a Nazi’: Enacting Violence Keeps You Distracted From the Real Issue

Click here to access article by Matt Agorist from The Free Thought Project. 

There is absolutely no chance of an outspoken, swastika toting white supremacist, hell bent on a 2nd Holocaust, taking over the country and locking you up. This is why battling white supremacists is futile. There is, however, a very real system of oppression on the rise in this country that does oppress minorities, kidnaps them, cages them, and also kills them on a large scale. It was here far before Trump too.

And later he writes:

America’s real white supremacists don’t identify themselves with flags—they use the seals of government agencies and company logos to officialize their corporatism into policy. They hide behind marble walls, built by slaves, and move armies around the planet like chess pieces on a board. America’s real white supremacists want you paying attention to the serfs fighting over statues so they can continue to rape the planet, extract the fruits of your labor, and spread empire all in their hellish mission to maintain their ‘order.’ 

You may also be interested in Jay Syrmopoulos's similar interpretation of the remarks made recently by Noam Chomsky entitled "Noam Chomsky: ‘Antifa is Wrong in Principle — a Major Gift to the Militant Right’".

As Russia-Gate Story Stalls, Cue Trump Neo-Nazi Scandal

Click here to access article by Finian Cunningham from Strategic Culture Foundation. (Minor editing to add greater clarity to my commentary.)

...the concerted, massive media campaign to nail Trump as some kind of new Fuhrer seems way over the top. The media frenzy smacks of Deep State opponents scouring for a handy new pretext for ousting him from office.

The enthusiasm for whipping up the new anti-Trump campaign seems due in large part because the erstwhile Russia-gate story has patently failed to gain any traction. For nearly seven months since Trump’s inauguration, the relentless claims pushed by Democrats, the media and anonymous intelligence sources that his election last November was enabled by Russian interference have shown little impact in terms of discrediting Trump and ultimately forcing him out of the White House. The Russia-gate theme has failed in its soft coup objective.

The Irish journalist argues that Deep State operatives are now exploiting the increasing revelations that Trump has racist inclinations as demonstrated by corporate media coverage given to the recent incident in Charlottesville, Virginia. Having largely failed with the Russia-gate strategy, the racist card looks more promising. Of course, this overlooks the fact that nearly all Americans (I include myself) in the US have harmful racist feelings ranging from people in the White nationalist groups to the Deep State to African-Americans (who are, in many cases, affected psychologically negatively) simply because one cannot avoid the racist indoctrination that is laced throughout US culture. The Deep State exploited the African-American superficial features of Obama to promote him as president in order to camouflage their own racism and to bolster their propaganda that the US was no longer a racist nation.  

Racism is a ubiquitous fact of life in the US because the capitalist ruling class has always seen it as a useful weapon to weaken labor movements by playing off various groups of workers against each other. Other groups affected at various times in our history were the Chinese, Asians as a whole, brown Latin Americans, southern and eastern Europeans, and even the Irish. The Deep State may now be seeing it (stirring up racial conflicts) as a useful strategy to dump Trump. As I argued yesterday, the evidence suggests that the entire Charlottesville incident was carefully planned by not only White nationalists but local police agencies as well.

“Start Throwing Rocks”: Washington Post Op-Ed Calls For More Violence In The Streets

Click here to access article by Daniel Lang from SHTF Plan. (My thanks goes to Christopher in northwest Oregon who alerted me to this article.)

Although I don't like the wording in the third paragraph, otherwise I totally agree with him. I think the media agents of the ruling class play ordinary Americans like a circus calliope. I have been "entertaining" the idea that this might be the opening salvo of the ruling class's war against dissenters. From what I've learned so far is that the Charlottesville incident looks engineered with the cops' role part of the engineering. The ruling class might have decided to take out their frustrations over Syria on what constitutes the left domestically, especially with a right-wing racist in office who is not of their choosing. Time will tell. Keep in mind that ruling class agents have developed an expertise and a lot of experience with regard to creating social chaos.

It's articles like the one entitled "Chaos in Charlottesville: No One Gave Peace a Chance, Including the Police" that reinforces my theory.

Life under capitalism: Early deaths a ‘silver lining’ for corporations

Click here to access article by Pete Dolack from Systemic Disorder. 

Dolack illustrates how the "disorder" of the inevitable development of the system of capitalism, which results in ever greater concentration of wealth in the hand of a diminishing number of rich, can actually be measured by using certain statistics like longevity. However what is very bad news to us is good news to the tiny ruling class of capitalists as reported to them in an article in one of their news publications (Bloomberg) entitled "Americans Are Dying Younger, Saving Corporations Billions". This is another example of the contradictions of capitalism that our masters like to hide from us, but are completely candid about in their news sources.

So what does this have to do with an article published by Bloomberg? The headline on this particular article says it all: “Americans Are Dying Younger, Saving Corporations Billions,” complete with a subhead declaring “lower pension costs” a “silver lining.” As not only a proud member of the corporate media, but one specializing in delivering news to financiers and industrialists, extolling a benefit to corporate bottom lines and ignoring the, ahem, human cost of said benefit is only to be expected. The article is not at all atypical of the business press, even if this one is a little more obvious than usual.

Thus, you can be dead certain (pun intended) that such news shapes their policy decisions to diminish resources for health care for ordinary people as very well illustrated in their attempts to weaken the already inadequate (for us), pro-insurance company Affordable Care Act that the last Congress passed with Obama's support.

Cornel West & Rev. Traci Blackmon: Clergy in Charlottesville Were Trapped by Torch-Wielding Nazis [Parts 1 and 2]

Click here to access 44:26m video and transcript of the interviews posted on Democracy Now!. (Note: The interviews and Goodman's report (in Part 1) of the Charlottesville incident is interrupted from 9:09m to 15:46m when Amy Goodman reported the regular news.) (Updated at 5:42 PM Seattle time with links to documentation added.)

...violence that erupted in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend as thousands of neo-Nazis, KKK members and other white nationalists began descending on the city to participate in the "Unite the Right" rally. Thousands of counterprotesters met in Charlottesville, including clergy, students, Black Lives Matter activists, and protesters with the antifascist movement known as "antifa." We are joined by two clergy members and a local Black Lives Matter activist who helped organize the demonstration. Rev. Traci Blackmon is executive minister of Justice and Witness Ministries of the United Church of Christ. During a live interview with MSNBC at the march on Saturday, she was forced to flee as counterprotesters were attacked around her. Cornel West was also on site and describes the scene. We also speak with Jalane Schmidt, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia.

Then this coverage continues in Part 2:

Cornel West:

...our concern has to be...to empower those of us who are willing to fight. We need prophetic fightback, progressive fightback. It’s got to be multiracial, but it’s also got to be critical to capitalism and the empire, along with patriarchy and white supremacy. White supremacy certainly is at the center, but it can’t just be a matter of talking about race isolated from these other very ugly realities.

Of course, as usual (see this, this, and this), because this dramatic comment made Amy Goodwin uncomfortable because she knew that such remarks would make her rich funders (for example, this) unhappy which might threaten her several hundred thousand dollar salary she enjoys (see this, this, and this), she did not pick up on it by having West expand on it. She simply ignored it by quickly asking another question of Traci Blackmon.

(Democracy Now! is providing other followup coverage of the incident that you may want to follow.)

Oakland's NFL Star Marshawn Lynch Sits During US Anthem

Click here to access article from TeleSur. 

A former star running back for the Seattle Seahawks joins quarterback Kaepernick in refusing to stand for the national anthem. Last night his friend and former teammate Michael Bennett also refused to stand as a protest against racist injustice in the exhibition game against the San Diego Chargers. In contrast to Lynch he explained his reasons in an interview after the game.

Seahawk defensive lineman Michael Bennett sat during the national anthem prior to the team’s preseason opener against the Chargers in Carson, Calif., Sunday night, a stance he said he will continue throughout the 2017 season in an effort to “continuously push” a message against injustice in society.

Delcy Rodriguez to Lead Constituent Assembly in Venezuela

from TeleSur. 

The rise of such people to leadership as Delcy Rodriguez in the Constituent Assembly, whose task is to propose a new constitution for ratification by the Venezuelan people, holds much promise for the salvation of the Venezuelan people. At 1:50m she confronts President Macri of Argentina at a Mercosur meeting for supporting a known opposition terrorist in Venezuela.

Sloppy reporting "to scare people to death"

by Ron Horn for this website.

This morning while perusing articles, I came across the article posted in Defend Democracy Press entitled "Is America Trying to Start a World War? This Is How It Would Happen" in which I became alarmed at this statement:

North Korea has been on the receiving end of a U.S.-led sanctions regime for years, as well, and the American military is now flying bombers over its airspace, provoking the country to respond in kind.

Immediately I checked the link the author provided. It took me to a report from Reuters in which I found the following statement in the first paragraph: 

The United States flew two supersonic B-1B bombers over the Korean peninsula in a show of force on Sunday and the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations said China, Japan and South Korea needed to do more after Pyongyang's latest missile tests. 

This was repeated further down under a picture of a B-1 bomber. The ambiguous reference to the "Korean peninsula" is what really really disturbed me. Eventually I found a more precise location where the two bombers flew in the Independent:

A pair of US supersonic bombers have flown over the Korean Peninsula, less than 48-hours after North Korea’s successfully tested an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

Flanked by South Korean fighter jets The B-1 bombers carried out a low-pass over the Osan Air Base, near South Korea's capital Seoul. [my link]

However the author did not furnish any link to a source of this information. 

Unfortunately this Anti-Media report was also posted in Global Research as well as the Defend Democracy Press, and I don't know how many others. I wondered why Reuters was so vague about their path over the "Korean peninsula". Then I recalled a statement made by Brian Williams on MSNBC who said that "our job tonight actually is to scare people to death on this subject". Well, it looks like Reuters is also doing their job. It makes me wonder if all the corporate media executives were given this instruction and by whom.

But I also am critical of the reporting by Darius Shahtahmasebi on the staff of Anti-Media. This website is already suffering from being blacklisted by Media Bias/Fact Check, so I would think that they would be especially careful about their reporting.

It's later than you think

by cartoonist Niels Bo Bojesen.

The planet has just a 5% chance of reaching Paris climate goal.