in the time remaining, to help us understand how the man-made system of capitalism will lead to the extinction of our human species, and so many others.
We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore LappĂ©, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up
Saturday, February 3, 2018
World is Burning – While Western Left is Quarreling
Vltchek takes his anger out on the limited left in the US after his articles are no longer published by a left publisher that he refuses to name. I am convinced after several hours of sleuthing on the web that this publisher is the left-liberal CounterPunch magazine. (See this listing of Vltchek's CounterPunch articles for evidence. Notice they stop at 12/2017.)
I must confess that I suspected this from the beginning because I remember the website's campaign against questioning the official version of the 9/11 false flag incident that justified all the wars that followed and justify our meddling in the affairs of every nation on earth and the promotion of such myths as we are an "exceptional nation". In other nations, the Empire's ruling capitalist class don't have to justify what their nation does in the world, and they no longer need to follow any international rules of conduct.
This campaign to smear any questioner of the 9/11 event was led by the now deceased chief editor and publisher of CounterPunch, Alexander Cockburn (see this and this). Those that cross this red line incite the wrath of the ruling class, and that often comes with negatives consequences. For those who stay safely on the "comfortable" side of this red line avoid their wrath and sometimes even enjoy comfortable salaries and perks. (See this, this, and this.) Now CounterPunch has decided to play it even safer by excluding those writers, like Vltchek, who write on Russia related websites. Thus, it appears that "Russiagate" has had an impact on the cowardly left political spectrum of the USA!
Under the guidance of the Deep State, the 9/11 event has become a red-line event that has separated American leftists into two camps: 1) those that regard anything that the ruling capitalist class does is open to question and criticism, and 2) those opportunists who for varying reasons don't want to fundamentally threaten the legitimacy of capitalist rule by questioning the official story of 9/11.
Friday, February 2, 2018
How F-Book, Goo ogle, & You Tuube Collude To Crush Dissent
"Finding the real information takes effort. The truth will not be spoon-fed to us." Camp urges us to find and explore alternative media to avoid censorship of real news and information.
The CIA, Wormwood, and Gall: The Facts, the Accusations & the Cover-up
This post provides an introduction to a full length that I watched several weeks ago, and immediately placed in on my Memorable Political Films list. It was a stunner because even corporations like Netflix usually don't go near such topics. But as I had a Netflix membership, I viewed it and was very impressed.
Frank Olson died after being thrown out of a 13th story window in New York City. The government, as usual, made up a series of stories over the years to explain this bizarre event. Frank Olson's son couldn't believe these stories, and started an investigation which led him to the conclusion that his father had been murdered because he opposed the bio-weapons the scientists were researching and developing at Fort Detrick (Maryland) under the control of the CIA.
These bio-weapons were actually used in the Korean War. Many American soldiers captured by the North Koreans and Chinese armed forces, particularly airmen, knew from experience that this was happening and delayed their return to the US after the war. One, who I later encountered at a talk in Hawaii, actually remained in China. The series of six mini-films are a must-view.
Thursday, February 1, 2018
Faking it
Bowles make innumerable attempts to find evidence from various corporate media sources that claim Russian/Putin meddling in elections and their attempts to introduce fake news into the media of the US-led Empire. He reports the details of his experience.
Christopher's article recommendations for 2/1/2018
- Blackouts and Flashpoints in 2018 by James Petras from his website (PDF).
- Betting the Earth on a Game of Wrap-Cut-Smash by Stan Cox posted of The Greanville Post.
Former British Ambassador Weighs in on Assange, Russia Hacking and Israel
Craig Murray is a very well informed and conscientious person and author who reveals much of what he has learned on various issues from his experience with the British government. For example:
It is fair to say that the establishment stick together. In fact, I believe that the government and the judiciary are closer here than they are in the United States to some extent. There is quite a closed circle of the ruling class. They attend all the same schools and they are closely linked in various ways. So once you take on [any part of] the establishment, you are taking on the entire establishment.At the risk of distracting from the substance of this excellent interview, Dennis Bernstein use an expression that always pushes my hostility buttons. He used the cowardly term "the powers that be". Unless one is completely uninformed, the use of this expression shows cowardice. It is self-censorship. It is playing along with the capitalist ruling classes avoidance of any terms that might be used to shed reality about their class's overwhelming power over the billions of people trying to secure some kind of existence in spite of the overwhelming threats to their lives posed by this tiny class. Bernstein is not uninformed! It's like he is saying, "I know who really runs this country, but I won't say it because it might damage my career".
The crisis of legitimacy in international investment agreements and investor-state dispute settlement
The ISDS (investor-state dispute settlement) section is installed in all neoliberal trade agreements, and are the main weapon used against nations wanting to protect their populations from the predatory actions of corporations of the US-led Empire. The legitimacy of this weapon is being increasingly examined and questioned. Kelsy summarizes her report in these paragraphs:
The legitimation crisis facing IIAs [international investment agreements] is entering a new phase. Capital exporting states have regrouped to defend an investment regime that serves their corporate interests. Large developing countries are promoting alternatives that offer a new balance between their offensive and defensive interests. Governments in rich and poor countries continue to face potentially crippling investment disputes that are often designed to intimidate their regulatory decisions. Boutique law firms and third-party funders are intent on defending a lucrative source of income.
As the turbulence in the global economy and backlash against neoliberalism continues, opposition to the international investment regime and ISDS from the left seems destined to grow. A system in which rules that privilege capital are enforced through a biased extra-territorial dispute process cannot be fixed. The South African remedy that brings the disputes back into the domestic jurisdiction may be the best of the current alternatives. For many on the left, however, that would presage a return to the more traditional contest over the authority of the legislative and judicial branches of the state in relation to capital.
Wednesday, January 31, 2018
Recommended articles by Christopher, one of my longtime readers, for 1/31/2018
- STEEM: A Blockchain Media Platform Which Could Finally Make Alt-Media Financially Viable from Russia Insider. The article gives you more information about another social type media that might be a good replacement for Facebook in this information war that is assaulting our sense of reality. I don't think that Christopher is necessarily endorsing it.
- The Economist: Humanity teeters on the brink of world war from World Socialist Web Site. This prominent financial magazine of the capitalist ruling classes projects a world at war in their latest issue.
Tuesday, January 30, 2018
Two Minutes to Doomsday
Not since 1953, when the U.S. and the Soviets exploded thermonuclear bombs, has the world been such a powder keg!
Only recently, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock forward 30 seconds. It now registers two minutes to midnight. Verily, it’s lights out when the clock strikes 12:00 midnight. Ka-boom, it’s over!
Monday, January 29, 2018
Denying the Obvious: Leftists and Crimestop
I do not know the motivations or intentions of many prominent leftist intellectuals and publications, but I do know that many choose to avoid placing certain key historical events at the center of their analyses. In fact, they either avoid them like the plague, dismiss them as inconsequential, or use the CIA’s term of choice and call them “conspiracy theories” and their proponents “conspiracy nuts.” The result is a powerful propaganda victory for the power elites they say they oppose.I'd like to attempt an answer to Curtin's excellent article, specifically to his lack of understanding of "the motivations or intentions of many prominent leftist intellectuals and publications"...who are fall prey to the intellectual disability of "Crimestop". It's capitalist culture, stupid!
Orwell called it “Crimestop: [it] means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short means protective stupidity.”
Culture is like water that fish swim in. Fish, like most people, are not perceptive enough to realize that there are other waters to swim in, waters that are not polluted with extreme individualism like the one we live in. Capitalist culture has ensured that we as humans do not recognize ourselves as being social animals. No, we are mostly self-seeking animals who exist only for ourselves and our material interests. Margaret Thatcher was lying twice when she argued that there was no such thing as society, only families. Have you observed extended families fighting over the distribution of wealth from a rich relative? I have. In reality under capitalism all individuals are competing against all the other individuals for material rewards. Thus, capitalist culture has almost completely eliminated the social from our identity and replaced our sense of selves, through their comprehensive indoctrination system, as merely self-seeking animals.
The ruling capitalist class has done this with their 24/7 indoctrination campaign to lure us into thinking that we don't need each other, even worse, that we should distrust each other, and seek only material rewards in form of money, homes, careers, and the most important of all, the ability to establish a family. Thus, one must not resist the diktats of the ruling capitalist class or else we shall have none of these rewards.
Left intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and left media people like Amy Goodwin have succumbed to these enticements and conditioning. They serve to limit the analysis of news and events by refusing to question the ruling class interpretation of those events. And they are rewarded for their refusal. Chomsky gets invited to many campuses to speak and Goodwin enjoys a very comfortable salary.
People like socialist John Bellamy Foster who is a full professor at the University of Oregon and heir to serious socialists like Paul Sweezy, Leo Huberman, and Paul Baran at the Monthly Review, is known academically as a "Marxian" specialist. This is a label that our ruling class attaches to academic people who are experts on the studies of Karl Marx's writings. Such academics are labeled "Marxian" because they must not stray too far from the merely academic study of Marxism, such as into activist politics--those that do are labeled as "Marxists" and are banished into poverty. Foster has been rewarded with a wife (Carrie Naumoff) and a three-child family, a comfortable salary, and respectable academic standing, and this will continue if he keeps his nose clean and out of activist practice. So what if he writes in obscure journals that nobody reads about capitalism that is in deadly conflict with the health of the biosphere? Of course, he will never be interviewed by any respectable mainstream media corporation for his views on capitalism or the ongoing destabilization of the climate. He is rendered quite harmless to the system of capitalism. He has become thoroughly domesticated.
Capitalist culture denies that there is any such thing as society because capitalists want full license to plunder societies across the world for their riches and to gain more power. That is what neoliberalism, an advanced form of capitalism, is all about. The point is that true revolutionaries--and that is what is so desperately needed right now--do not have families, they have dedicated their lives to the overthrow of capitalism because they know that the system is in the process of killing us all.
Sunday, January 28, 2018
Recommended articles for 1/28/2018 by my website followers who are obviously engaged activists
- The Atlantic Council & Latin American Regime Change The Atlantic Council is one of most powerful organizations that make up the Deep State, the transnational capitalist ruling class that make all major decisions behind the facades of US-led Empire governments.
- Robert Parry's Legacy and the Future of Consortiumnews We have lost one of our great journalists.
- Not Even Orwell or Huxley Could Have Imagined 'Totalitarian' Threat Posed by Facebook and Google, Warns Soros "WTF? Soros defending free speech???" Wonders never cease!
- Octopus Genes In Industrial Pot? Derrick Jensen discovers the inevitable dynamics of capitalism in the growing concentration of the marijuana industry.
Saturday, January 27, 2018
The War on Dissent
Hopkins explains how capitalist online social and information media (Twitter, Facebook, Google) have joined the Deep State, the financial and industrial elites that make major decisions behind the facade of official government, in order to protect their interests of profit and power from people like you who were disobedient in the last election! You will obey, or else!
The corporatocracy is going to change that attitude, or it is going to make it disappear. It is in the process of doing this now, using every ideological weapon in its arsenal. The news media. Publishing. Hollywood. The Internet. Intelligence agencies. Congressional inquiries. Protests. Marches. Twitter’s “advisory emails.” Google’s manipulation of its search results. Facebook’s “counterspeech” initiative. Russiagate. Shitholegate. Pornstargate. The ruling class is sending us a message. The message is, “you’re either with us or against us.” The message is, “we will tolerate no dissent, except for officially sanctioned dissent.” The message is, “try to fuck with us, and we will marginalize you, and demonize you, and demonetize you, and disappear you.”
The message is, “we control reality, so reality is whatever the fuck we say it is....
Facebook Is Throttling My Articles, So It's Time To Diversify Platforms. Hi Steemit!
Steemit appears to be a good alternative to Facebook, which serves the interests of the capitalist ruling class, judging by Johnstone's article. It's about time!
I'm suddenly having a much harder time getting my articles in front of people due to a drastic plummet in the amount of views I'm getting from Facebook. According to my Medium account's statistics, I've gone from receiving many thousands of views from Facebook to just a few hundred over the last week or so, and the reach of my FB page has been slashed to a quarter of what it was in the same amount of time.
This likely has something to do with changes that Facebook has announced it is making in its News Feed algorithm, but it's hard to know exactly to what extent or whether anything else is going on. All I know is far fewer people are seeing me on that site now.
It's impacting everyone in alternative media, though.
A message from Patrice Greanville, chief editor of The Greanville Post.
By now only those who are really NOT paying attention may be s[h]ocked to hear the corporate plutocracy is actively and furtively stifling genuine left/dissenting news and comment on social platforms, media and other venues. What is happening to Caitlin Johnstone is also happening to us. The Greanville Post has lost almost 45% of its circulation since mid-2016 alone, with dramatic losses after the election of Donald Trump, and although many new readers continue to make up for some of the downturn, the impact cannot be denied. Proof that only the real left is affected (and some of the “wild right”) is that the fatuous liberaloid blogosphere—still calling themselves “the left”, a cruel joke— sails on without disruption, and possibly even with some assistance from the powers that be. Since it is clear that Facebook, Twitter, Google and the rest of that uber corporate sneaky tribe are soon likely to become fully hostile territory to true journalists and dissidents in the United States and the rest of the West, it’s time to seek new platforms, and other modes of mass communication and struggle. We may soon contemplate the need to go back to a version of the Russian Zamisdat. 1984 is now, and the liberals, as we warned all along, now openly in cahoots with the CIA, and still idiotically rallying under the banner of the Democrats, are the chief undertakers of free speech. It was bound to happen. Lenin once said that the capitalists would sell revolutionaries the rope to hang them with, but he may have been wrong. Contemporary capitalists with their shitloads of highly-paid prostituted advisors and sentries are not liable to make that tactical mistake. From the beginning of the 20th century, at least, the US ruling class has completely understood the value of controlling the thinking of the masses, and reality has been shaped accordingly. The neutral Internet eventually came to challenge that underhanded stranglehold on people’s ability to grasp the truth, a dangerous thing for a blood-soaked fake democracy, and now the global plutocrats are clamping down. Creative thinking and much courage will be needed to survive and hopefully prevail in this brave mew world being thrust upon us.
New Year, New Turmoil as US Targets Thailand
The Empire's transnational capitalist class, based in the US, Europe, and Japan, continue their efforts to encircle China using both soft and hard power. However, they are experiencing diminishing returns on their efforts. Read this carefully written article to see how Thomas reaches this conclusion regarding Thailand:
Thus, 2018 will not only see a concerted attempt to undermine the current Thai government and force it to hold elections the US will do all in its power to ensure Shinawatra [a Thai convicted criminal] wins, but also will see US-funded organisations in Thailand increasingly attempt to leverage violence in Thailand’s deep south to endanger not only Thailand’s peace and stability, but peace and stability across Southeast Asia.Yes, it is a nasty habit of the Empire's ruling class to interfere in the elections of so many countries of the world. It is also becoming a nasty habit for them to accuse others of doing so in the USA.
Friday, January 26, 2018
Recommended articles for engaged activists on 1/26/2018
- "Op Ed: Washington Post, Legacy Press Betray Assange As His Freedom Hangs In The Balance" by co-founder and editor of Disobedient Media. (Recommended by engaged activist Christopher in northwest Oregon.)
- "Op Ed: Political Division Is A Hysterical Charade Maintained By Corporate Press" by the chief editor of Disobedient Media, Elizabeth Vos. I particularly recommend that you view the video featuring a discussion about American politics as reality TV show between two very smart women, Vos and journalist Suzie Dawson. They don't yet connect "plutocracy" to the system that inevitably produces plutocracy--capitalism--but they are on the way.
- "The Genocide Conspiracy Against North Korea: An Open Letter to the International Criminal Court" by a Canadian international criminal lawyer, Christopher Black.
Thursday, January 25, 2018
The Opioid Epidemic in America - Killing One Million Workers: The Triumph of Capital (Creating a Domestic ‘Shithole’)
After a short introduction regarding the use of addictive drugs to open up the China market to British and other advanced capitalist countries, the article continues on in PDF format to describe how Big Pharma in collusion with the government, which they largely control, has decimated mostly the white working population in the USA with modern highly addictive drugs. The authors see this as another manifestation of class warfare to enrich the ruling capitalist class along with many rewards for their compliant, highly educated upper-middle class scientists, technologists, and medical professionals.
There are historical precedents for the successful elimination of drug lords, both
elite and criminal and for bringing addicts back to productive social life.
Nobody Cares About ‘the News’
In his mordant novel Scoop, Evelyn Waugh has one of his characters explain what "The News" is:
News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. And it's only news until he's read it. After that it's dead.Also, I think that the minds of ordinary people in the USA have been rendered largely ineffective to adequately interpret the propaganda which has been carefully crafted by the ruling capitalist class through their control over all institutions--most especially education, media, and entertainment.
There is a great deal of wisdom in this little remark that I will attempt to unpack. It also, in my opinion, succinctly explains why we, who believe ourselves to be so brilliantly analytical and persuasive on sites like this one, have so little success in changing the opinions of our friends and neighbours (or awakening them as we might prefer to say).
Kafka 2.0: How Youtube’s Political Censorship Is Exercised
The procedure by which Youtube deletes videos and even the entire content of a channel is comparable to this Gothic novel in more ways than one. As I mentioned in a previous article, my channel Sayed Hasan, which, for more than five years, has subtitled in French and English speeches of Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, Secretary General of Hezbollah, as well as Vladimir Putin, Bashar al-Assad and Sayed Ali Khamenei (in addition to interviews with Norman Finkelstein, content about revolutionary Latin America, etc.), was given two strikes by Youtube in less than one month because of two Hassan Nasrallah speeches, on the pretext of a “violation of the rules concerning violent or graphic content on Youtube”. The total suppression of the channel did not take long, since it occurred on December 20th, 2017, after a third and last strike announcing the guillotine, still because of a Hassan Nasrallah speech published in… 2014 – there is no prescription on Youtube, nor half measure. Thus, 400 videos, more than 6 million views and soon 10,000 subscribers have vanished, at the time of the greatest growth in their history. Youtube strives to hide its censorship behind a pseudo-legalistic procedure, but in fact, as we will see, all creators are under the constant threat of its political blade that drastically restricts tolerated contents.
Thought Police for the 21st Century [with two later addenda]
I've watched with growing pleasure the transition of Hedges from the low point of his writing when he was still trying to suck up to the ruling class in articles like "The Cancer of Occupy" to where he is now doing a program on RT and associating with socialist David North. He still annoys me by putting "corporate" in front of capitalism which leaves open the implication that there is a good kind of capitalism. Corporate capitalism is only entrepreneurial capitalism that has matured. It is the ugly monster that has grown up from (for some people) the rather cute baby of entrepreneurial capitalism of earlier times.
As a result of censorship that he writes about in this article, my website has also declined in readership from a year ago when it was rapidly increasing following the disillusionment of "Bernie-the-Sheepherder" followers. Mostly long time followers have remained loyal and kept reading my articles and commentaries. Hopefully with people like Hedges and the growing awareness of censorship, my website and other anti-Big Brother/capitalist websites will continue their growth in readership. There is clearly an information war going on and we, the people, are its victims--if we remain passive.
What I don't understand is why websites like The Greanville Post keep encouraging people to use Facebook. Isn't there some other place for people to virtually meet online?
Addendum provided by Caren from Oregon:
https://www.1and1.com/digitalguide/online-marketing/social-media/the-best-facebook-alternatives/From another engaged activist, Christopher in northwest Oregon, I received the following posts which also tackled alternatives to Facebook which I added to this post at 9:00 AM, 1/26/2018, Seattle time.
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/09/13/secure-alternatives-to-facebook-instagram-and-twitter.html
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/six-alternatives-google-facebook-battle-online-privacy-1472156
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/6-alternatives-facebook
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/10/ello_diaspora_and_the_anti_facebook_why_alternative_social_networks_can.html
http://web.appstorm.net/roundups/communication-roundups/6-alternatives-to-facebook/
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/09/13/secure-alternatives-to-facebook-instagram-and-twitter.html

