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 Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Saturday, February 13, 2016

Kafraya & Foua: the forgotten terrorist siege

Click here to access article by Vanessa Beeley from her blog The Wall Will Fall.

Recent reports indicate that the Aleppo, Syria's largest city, is under siege by Syrian government forces who appear to be within days of liberating the city from terrorist forces backed by the US, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Britain, etc.--the usual Empire allies. 

This report is of villages southwest of Aleppo and its people who have been suffering the ravages of the Empire's war against Syria for five years. However this period appears to be coming to a close, if the villages haven't already been liberated by the Syrian army.

Beeley's report is in sharp contrast to reports by corporate media (if you need an example, read this from the Empire's number one newspaper) located in countries that make up this imperial NATO Empire and Israel, or in media permitted to function in the medieval Muslim countries of Saudi Arabia and associates. 
The people of Kafarya and Foua maintain their valiant struggle against the forces that bear down upon them and they resist in silence, an externally imposed silence.  Like so many of the Syrian people they know only too well who is the enemy in their midst and it is not the Syrian Arab Army.  Their Army is the Syrian people, as Mother Agnes Mariam de la Croix expressed so eloquently.  They know their enemy are the NATO  US proxy thugs camped among them bringing pestilence and death.  These preying locusts will be driven out of Syria by the peoples Army and their allies and the children of Kafarya and Foua will be liberated from the pall of terror that has been hanging over them for almost 5 years.
Once again, it looks like someone is lying, grossly lying about massive war crimes. So, who are you going to believe?

The Incarceration Industry – 2 graphs

Click here to access article by David Ruccio from Real-World Economics Review Blog

We're number one! Again! We are number one spending our national treasure on military weapons, and we are also number one in the world for locking up our citizens! We are truly an exceptional nation--who can argue against that? I wonder how many other ways that we are exceptional: percent of population that are homeless? percent of population that wants but cannot afford health care? percent of population that wants to go to university but can't afford it?

Ecological Disaster After Disaster: Is Technology Worth the Price Humans Have to Pay?

Click here to access article by Catherine Frompovich from Activist Post
Who pays the price when technology goes wrong, fails, makes a mistake, malfunctions, or is not developed or utilized properly? The answer is ordinary, everyday humans who work to provide food, clothing and shelter for themselves and their families.

The photograph above shows the devastation due to the breach of an iron ore millings dam in Bento Rodrigues, Brazil. That disaster occurred November 5, 2015 when, according to Wikipedia [1], 60 million cubic meters of iron waste flowed into the Doce River. It’s been called the worst environmental disaster in Brazil’s history, and yet the world seems not to care about it.
The "world" doesn't seem to care about it because ubiquitous media owned by corporations don't report this kind of news (or TPP, or TTIP [read this], or TISA, or honest news about Syria, Ukraine, etc) simply because they don't want ordinary people to know about it. If they knew about the ongoing degradation of the planet by corporations, they might want to interfere with corporate activities and plans. It's the same with all other news--they don't want ordinary people interfering with their profit opportunities. Under capitalist corporate rule, the guiding principle is "profits über alles". To hell with the planet. To hell with peace. To hell with any kind of democracy. 

The only problem with her essay is that she appears to blame technology! It seems to me that she has been so well indoctrinated by capitalist ideology that she is very much like fish who swim in the ocean--they don't see the water around them. Technology is knowledge of sophisticated tools that humans have devised to secure their happiness, but have since been appropriated by capitalists to accumulate more profits (and power). 

Capitalism is not a natural fact of life. It, too, has been constructed by humans, or by a tiny class of humans and imposed on the rest of us originally several hundred years ago through violence (they removed this from our history books), and in today's world they maintain and expand their profit and power system through violence.  Guess what? Their system can also be deconstructed, and replaced with a new and improved system which serves all humans and doesn't degrade our planet Earth.

Clear climate conscience

Click here if you wish to access this cartoon by Max Gustafson directly from his website.


Friday, February 12, 2016

Lenin, Putin and Me

Click here to access article by Michael Welton from CounterPunch

Although Welton starts out his very readable essay casually by citing anecdotes from his personal life in relation to the Russia and its revolution, he soon get serious about a central issue that has proved to be a conundrum for Marxist intellectuals and many left revolutionaries. Welton focuses in on this issue by examining the Russian Revolution and the theoretical statements of many Marxist intellectuals and the practice of Russian revolutionary leaders. The issue boils down to "who will educate the educator?" He argues that this conundrum caused the Russian revolutionaries to descend into an authoritarian bureaucracy which was far from the worker's utopia that its "bourgeois intellectual leaders" envisioned. 

I dealt with this issue earlier this year in my commentary in response to an article entitled "Thoughts on Rojava: an interview with Janet Biehl". My answer which I didn't make explicit in this commentary is that a bottom-up structure together with a supportive ideology must be established from the very beginning of any worthwhile revolutionary organization as a bulwark against authoritarian and centralization tendencies.

The US “Plan B” for Syria and the threat of world war

Click here to access article by Bill Van Auken from World Socialist Web Site
Late Friday night, US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced that they had reached a tentative deal that would see a ceasefire “within a week” along with expedited humanitarian aid. Kerry allowed that while the agreement looked good “on paper,” it was yet to be tested. All of the underlying conflicts remain unresolved, and both US and Russian military operations are to continue in the name of the struggle against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

On the eve of the Munich talks, Kerry, in an interview with Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, delivered an unmistakable threat in connection with the US negotiating strategy in Munich: “What we’re doing is testing [Russian and Iranian] seriousness.” he said. “And if they’re not serious, then there has to be consideration of a Plan B… You can’t just sit there.”
The author outlines the various "Plan B" proposals discussed by those trying to topple the Assad government, and it's clear that they pose a threat of a world war among nations armed with nuclear weapons! This may be an idle threat, but such threats can escalate into real actions when so many sociopathic war criminals are involved, and when the latter have long committed themselves to the hegemony of the capitalist rule of the Empire.

Also on topic is this article entitled "On Shaky Ground: Will Washington Give Blessing to Saudi Invasion of Syria?" posted on Sputnik

Also in an article entitled "A Comedy of Terrors" Bernie Sanders, the great liberal hope for those that constitute much of the left in the US, reportedly said in statements broadcast over CNN that he thinks Saudi Arabia should invade Syria.

Decoding the US Empire of Chaos: The Global Reversal of the Social Evolution of Humanity

Click here to access a transcript of an interview recently conducted with Canadian Prof. John McMurtry in Belgrade, Serbia.

McMurtry throughout this interview launches a scathing attack on neoliberalism and its many deceptive manifestations in today's world. He often uses the metaphor of cancer to explain how this advanced stage of capitalism has spread through every Western institution and throughout much of the world. I thoroughly agree with his attacks on neoliberalism, but disagree with his implied espousal of capitalism prior to this advanced transnational stage: a nation-based stage of capitalism. For example, he expressed several statements like this:
In a nutshell, social evolution itself has been reversed by a US-led war on social and ecological life organisation driven by one corrupt master value – to free transnational corporations and their shareholders from social responsibility to multiply private fortunes without limit. It is a counter-revolution against the long development of democratic government and the welfare state that once crossed across the divisions of the Cold War.
And his whole emphasis is on this post-WWII period which saw the evolution of nation-based capitalism into its transnational form of neoliberalism that is being aggressively implemented by the US Empire. This, for him, is when everything went bad. Before this, capitalist rule was engaged in "the long development of democratic government and the welfare state...." 

I regard this view as another middle class rejection of neoliberalism as expressed by a life-long member of capitalism's indispensable middle class. The growing number of such critics does not bode well for neoliberalists, but does not yet offer much in the way of inspiration and support to genuine anti-capitalist revolutionaries who want to construct a system that assures equality and sustainability.

TTIP: A locked room, no internet access, two hours, 300 pages and lots of typos

Click here to access article by Kieren McCarthy from The Register
The whole experience, rather than setting her mind at ease, has just made Kipping [a member of the German parliament] all the more suspicious about what is being negotiated.

"Anyone who was going into these negotiations to enhance environmental protection, consumer protection and labor standards would have nothing to fear from transparency," she notes. "Anyone who's engaged in selling out democracy, on the other hand, is obviously going to want to avoid public scrutiny.
If Sigmar Gabriel [Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy and Vice Chancellor of Germany] and the negotiators are really so convinced of the benefits of TTIP, why don't they just make the text available to everyone online?"

Thursday, February 11, 2016

The bloody legacy of American Exceptionalism

Click here to access article by Vanessa Beeley from American Herald Tribune. (Beeley also has her own blog at The Wall Will Fall.)

Beeley explains the concept of "gaslighting" which is a term used to describe some very sophisticated techniques designed to destroy one's capacity to form their own judgements and opinions about reality. She describes its use in three stages; and after the final stage is reached, she describes the victim this way:
The process is complete and the victim has been reduced to a willing accomplice in the abusers creation of a very distorted reality.

We are currently seeing the transformation of US exceptionalism into an abusive Narcissism.  The gargantuan apparatus of mind bending and controlling is being put into hyper drive by the ruling elite.  We are inundated with propaganda that challenges our sense of reality but only after being “tenderized” by the fear factor.  Fear of “terror”, fear of war, fear of financial insecurity, fear of gun violence, fear of our own shadow.  Once we are suitably quaking in our boots, in comes the rendition of reality that relieves our anxiety.
This reminds me of a recent incident while I was sitting in my dentist's waiting room waiting for my dental work to be done. The room had a flat screen TV mounted on the wall which was impossible to ignore. My attention was immediately drawn to Wolf Blitzer of CNN warning his audience in very sinister tones of the likelihood that terrorist "sleeper cells" were being set up across the US. (Of course our masters manage to make just enough of these "terrorist" incidents happen to make such lies believable.) I spontaneously had to chuckle at this obvious latest attempt to scare the wits out the American public, but then I looked around and noticed that other people in the room looked rather scared.

Washington Again Underestimated the Iranian Mind

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

Engdahl fills us in on the real history of the growing US Empire since the 1973 OPEC oil embargo which was retaliation for the Anglo-American support given to Israel in the 1973 Arab–Israeli War launched by Egypt, Syria, and allies against Israel to recover territories lost in the 1967 war. 

The subsequent agreement that the US made with Saudi Arabia--almost totally ignored by established historians and conventional political analysts--was designed to recover the strength of the US dollar which was threatened by the huge expenditures of the Vietnam War. Another huge benefit is that the deal secured the Empire's domination of the Mid-East by forging a close relationship of interests between the head-chopping, medieval Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its satellites with the US Empire. These new allies plus the heavily armed (by us) state of Israel and the NATO's sinister regime of Erdogan'sTurkey insures Empire dominance of the area for many decades. Iran, Syria, Iraq, and Libya tried to pursue an independent course in their relations to the Empire, and you can see what grief that has caused them and is continuing to cause them. Engdahl tells us some of the most important parts of this history. 

I find articles like this one entitled "It's time for Washington to get out of bed with the al-Saud – Senator calls to lose al-Saud" naive in the extreme. We need war criminals like Turkey's Erdogan and Saudi Arabia's Prince Salman to play along with the Empire's numerous war planners.

Mammon’s Mania

Reproduced below is a brief satirical graphic and commentary from A Culture of Imbeciles:

In a culture of imbeciles — assaulted by advertising, and fed on fantasies – the pursuit of authentic life, liberty and happiness faces the formidable obstacles of complacency and wishful thinking. As this toxic commercial onslaught on our collective psyches becomes pandemic — and pandemonium ensues — the plague of profit prophets threaten to plunge the planet into a state of total chaos. At that point – and events indicate it isn’t far off — no amount of reason can save us, leaving panic and hysteria to reign.

Daniel Ellsberg: Covert Ops ‘Provoke Our Adversaries’ To Create An Excuse For War [Chap. 6]

Click here to access article and access to a 32:13m video interview with Ellsberg from Mint Press News.

This is an opportunity for you to recover more of your country's real history instead of the patriotic pablum you are fed daily by corporate media and schools. You will learn from someone who during the Vietnam War was a military analyst employed by the Empire's military research tank known as the RAND Corporation. During this segment you will learn specifically about how US planners manufactured an incident in order to deceive the American public and declared war against (North) Vietnam. 

After learning of so many lies being told to the public, he became a whistleblower by releasing The Pentagon Papers which revealed the true war policies of our masters. (Should you wish to order the Papers, I strongly advise you to order v. 2 of the Senator Gravel edition published by Beacon Press. As a part of a damage control effort, the NY Times flooded the market with a distorted edition of the Papers.)
MintPress News is proud to host “Lied to Death,” a 13-part audio conversation between famed whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and social justice activist Arn Menconi.

Menconi wrote that these interviews are a “mixture of historical, political science and Dan’s sixty-year scholarly analysis as a former nuclear planner for Rand Corporation.”

For more information on the interview and Ellsberg, see the introduction to this series.

Wednesday, February 10, 2016

What US Congress Researchers Reveal About Washington’s Designs on Syria

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

Gowans has summarized the important findings and implications of a research study published in 2005 by the Congressional Research Service. Unless one reads the report, one has to trust the good judgement of Gowns and his interpretations. I have followed his writings for a number of years, posted many of them, and I have reached the conclusion that he is an absolutely reliable source of information. (For example, last December I posted a "must-read" article by him, a part of which, made an excellent attempt to explain how bourgeois democracy, the capitalist fake version of democracy, works.)
Documents prepared by US Congress researchers as early as 2005 revealed that the US government was actively weighing regime change in Syria long before the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, challenging the view that US support for the Syrian rebels is based on allegiance to a “democratic uprising” and showing that it is simply an extension of a long-standing policy of seeking to topple the government in Damascus. Indeed, the researchers made clear that the US government’s motivation to overthrow the government of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is unrelated to democracy promotion in the Middle East. In point of fact, they noted that Washington’s preference is for secular dictatorships (Egypt) and monarchies (Jordan and Saudi Arabia.) The impetus for pursuing regime change, according to the researchers, was a desire to sweep away an impediment to the achievement of US goals in the Middle East related to strengthening Israel, consolidating US domination of Iraq, and fostering free-market, free enterprise economies. Democracy was never a consideration.

Immigrant Crisis: Facts, Myth or Plot?

Click here to access article by "Brainstorm" from A bird's eye view of the Vineyard

This piece seems overly long and filled with awkward expressions of English (either it was rather poorly translated or it was written by someone whose English was a second language), but it offers many sound reasons to be suspicious about any explanation for the European immigrant crisis which suggests that it simply just happened by itself. The evidence and arguments that this writer presents suggests that it is another deceptive strategy implemented by the Empire directorate and its allies to support the Empire's many hegemonic interests in the Middle East and Europe.
Decades long, war mongering politics of US and NATO satellites, their role in creating and backing various insurgent and terrorist groups from Afghanistan to the Levant and North Africa, brutal neocolonial politics of the Western “corporate governments”, guided from the shadows by the huge corporate business, every present hunger and greed for influence, markets and resources; brutal regime changes by the means of “color revolutions”; breaking all agreed international standards and laws, forcing UN to surrender and capitulate under the enormous pressure of US administration are destroying already fragile balance and security system established after the WW2.

In defense of north Korea

Click here to access article from Workers World.
Since the beginning of their revolution against Japanese colonialism, the Koreans have shown the greatest determination to follow their own path to development, not by following the dictates of a capitalist class dependent on foreign imperialism, as existed during the 35 years of Japanese colonial rule over Korea, but by applying socialist principles to the growth of the economy while guarding their sovereignty and independence.

It’s time for all who are sick and tired of predatory imperialism and capitalism to speak up in defense of the DPRK.
No nation has been so abused by the capitalist west than the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Because Korea's post-WWII history has been buried in the US by an avalanche of lies and distortions, the people of the US remain completely ignorant of the role that the directors of the nascent Empire pursued in the crushing of dissent of the Korean people who had fought for over 30 years against their Japanese colonial masters. US. Empire directors, true to their fascist nature, after WWII immediately allied themselves with the old Japanese colonialists and their Korean landlord collaborators to put down this rebellion. Then in 1950 came the Korean War in which most cities were bombed into obliteration by the US (many among the directorate wanted to use nuclear bombs). As Bruce Cumings describes the aftermath:
In 1953 the Korean peninsula was a smoldering ruin. From Pusan in the south to Sinuiju in the north, Koreans buried their dead, mourned their losses, and sought to draw together the shattered remains of their lives. In the capital at Seoul, hollow buildings stood like skeletons alongside streets pave with weird mixtures of concrete and shrapnel. At American military encampments on the outskirts of the capital, masses of beggars waited to pic through the garbage that foreign soldiers tossed out. In the north, modern edifices scarcely stood anymore; Pyongyang and other cities were heaps of bricks and ashes, factories stood empty, massive dams no longer held their water. People merged from a mole-like existence in caves and tunnels to find a nightmare in the bright of day.
To gain a much more accurate understanding of how this war developed and the early stage of the development of the US Empire, I strongly advise people to read at least volume 1 of The Origins of the Korean War by Bruce Cumings

More unemployment and less security

Click here to access article by Pete Dolack from Systemic Disorder

I frankly wouldn't bother reading the first part where Dolack points to forecasts presented to us by the capitalist-backed International Labour Organization, an agency of the UN. Such agencies will always fudge the numbers to protect the system. The numbers are useful, but only to capitalists who are constantly looking for cheap labor, larger markets, and bigger profits. The system only exists to supply profits to private "owners" of socially produced wealth instead of what a system should be doing: supplying the needs of all the people who democratically control the means of production and decide what those needs are.

However, I highly recommend the second part where Dolack supplies data and analyses by John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney from their book The Endless Crisis where one can learn about the true impacts in the developing advanced stage of capitalism known as neoliberalism. 

Much like the passengers on the Titanic we can resign ourselves that the capitalist captain and officers know what they are doing and can be trusted, or we can look to Foster and McChesney and many others who are telling us that we are headed straight toward the icebergs of widespread poverty, nuclear conflagration, and climate destabilization. We simply must take control of the Earth's ship and steer a safe course to save the ship and all its passengers. Our only salvation is mutiny! 

Tuesday, February 9, 2016

The Pentagon Fights Back

Click here to access article by Philip Giraldi from The American Conservative

I occasionally post articles like this, which represent fairly significant points of view on serious issues that one sometimes finds in mainstream media, in order to clarify such issues. This article is posted in a traditional conservative US publication because it obviously supports their basic ideological position. This older capitalist ideology has now been replaced by neoliberalism and its global capitalist followers.

Back in the 1980s the US ruling class with their Anglo allies began launching a trans-nationalist version of capitalism that has replaced the older version of capitalism that traditional conservative predecessors (some examples: Pat Buchanon, Paul Craig Roberts, Ron Paul) favored, and continue to favor. I have long been convinced that this new version is only a natural segue in the evolution of capitalism, and that any desire to return to the former is futile.

According to the older national capitalist imaginary the US is a democracy that has gone wrong through the rise of the influence of neoconservatives and their global agendas of neoliberalism and Empire building. In this imaginary all the old myths about democratic elections and formal offices represent the reality of American political life. Thus elections were the expression of a "democratic" political process which resulted in formal officers who held real power. This view is still expressed in this article by regarding Obama as a real, not merely a formal, chief executive officer of the US government.

Indeed I see these two capitalist ideological positions, nation-oriented capitalism and neoliberal or global capitalism, influencing writers everywhere on the web. I see influences of the former even appearing among dissident writers, especially multipolar advocates such as F. William Engdahl, Tony Cartalucci, Pepe Escobar, and "The Saker". One finds some tolerance of traditional conservative thought expressed in corporate media, but not the latter dissidents who scathingly reveal the Empire's imperial agenda. Another variant of acceptable capitalist thought is represented by social democrats like Bernie Sanders and Richard Wolff (another pretend "socialist" as illustrated in this interview) who are permitted some coverage by corporate media.

I have always argued, based on 60 years of political activism, that the democratic ideology (aka "bourgeois democracy") of nation-oriented capitalists was always an ideological facade that legitimatized their rule since they took control of Western nations over 300 years ago (and now under trans-national capitalists, aka "neoliberals", dominate the world). This is a naive view which has contained only a modicum of reality and came to a final end with the ruling class's (with the collaboration of organized crime) assassination of President Kennedy. (Read JFK and the Unspeakable by James Douglass.)

This former CIA officer and author continues in this traditional view with this piece which, I believe, represents a kind of wishful thinking on the part of traditional conservatives. The latter often engage in fantasies about returning to power with the aid of militarists in the Pentagon. They are too often seduced by dangerous ideas about a military coup that could restore them to power. I believe that, indeed, this is most dangerous fantasy which justifies my posting of the article.

The military, like all other important sectors of society, have been thoroughly co-opted into the capitalist ruling class and the majority ideologically committed to the new neoliberal stage of capitalism. Surely I don't need to argue this with all the cogent observations that have been written about that reveal how militarists are playing in the revolving door game between the Pentagon and "defense" contractor corporations.

Two degrees of warming closer than you may think

Click here to access article by David Spratt from Climate Code Red (Australia).
It's taken a hundred years of human-caused greenhouse emissions to push the global temperature up almost one degree Celsius (1C°), so another degree is still some time away. Right?  And there seems to have been a "pause" in warming over the last two decades, so getting to 2C° is going to take a good while, and we may have more time that we thought. Yes?

Wrong on both counts.

The world could be 2C° warmer in as little as two decades....
From the evidence that Spratt has gathered and the research of others, I think his thesis is correct. Most scientists have been cowed by their capitalist masters sitting on boards of directors of corporations or boards of regents of universities and have softened their alarms about the disastrous destabilization of the climate that lies much more in the immediate future.

How Washington’s New Rich Live

Click here to access article by Mike Lofgren from ConsortiumNews.

Lofgren lampoons the new Wall Street rich and their taste in housing adjacent to the nation's capital of which they are in firm control.

Democratic Party as lipstick on a pig

by cartoonist B. Rich. 

Monday, February 8, 2016

Risking World War III in Syria

Click here to access article by Joe Lauria from ConsortiumNews

I've seen more and more geopolitical analysts eyeing with concern the showdown at the Syrian corral that appears to be developing. I am referring to comments by Eric Draitser (see this and this), Peter Korzun, and Maxim Egorov in addition to Lauria's in this article. 

Korzun in his article sums up the concern in this paragraph:
The recent news about the US sending troops to Syria, Turkey’s announced intent to launch a ground operation there and Saudi Arabia’s statement on its readiness to join "any" military campaign on Syrian soil serve as indicators of imminent large-scale war. It was not accidental that the opposition supported by Saudi-Arabia and Turkey did its best to stymie the Geneva-3 peace talks. The deployment of ground troops in Syria is not only an outright violation of international law. The action will bring the Russia-Syria-Iran coalition and the US-led collation to the brink of collision. Saudi Arabia, Turkey and other states willing to start this dangerous game rely on the US support. The United States is the key country. It can and must use its influence to avoid the worst from happening. It can direct the process and keep the situation from sliding into an uncontrollable conflict with unpredictable repercussions.
But then, would not the US Empire directors like to see Russia bogged down in a lengthy war, Saudi Arabia over-extending itself and thereby causing conditions for its own destabilization, a splitting up of Syria as well as Saudi Arabia into smaller, more manageable nations? In short, more chaos that the Empire could reap various benefits from? 

Water War Against the Poor: Flint and the Crimes of Capital

Click here to access article by Mumia Abu-Jamal from CounterPunch.
In a capitalist society, only capital matters. It’s all about the Benjamins – bucks over bodies. Profit. Period.

In Michigan’s prisons, there ain’t a single prisoner who committed a more vicious crime than the Governor of that state.

Their crimes, no matter what, were retail. The government, for a few bucks, committed crimes against thousands –wholesale.

But these are crimes of the powerful.

They don’t count.

These are crimes of capitalism.

Ted Cruz PsyOp

Click here to access article by Thierry Meyssan from VoltaireNet (France).

I'm glad that Meyssan posted this article even though I think it grossly distorts how elections are influenced in the US and much of the capitalist world. He is suggesting that with the candidate Ted Cruz, it is some dark conspiracy known as a "psychological operations" (PSYOP) which have been used extensively since WWII as a useful method by the super-secret and unaccountable CIA to protect European government from being infected with a left-wing political virus, to destabilize and overturn governments as illustrated in those operations known as color revolutions, and other applications. 

But to suggest that these techniques have been uniquely applied to Cruz is a gross distortion. All major candidates use campaign managers to organize and manage their political campaigns, and they all use elements of PSYOPs to influence voters. There is an entire industry devoted to campaign management (just enter "political campaign management" into any search engine), and they don't come cheap. There must be big money behind candidates in order to finance campaign management firms. And that is one of many methods that capitalists use to shape the outcome of elections. 

The Super Bowl Promotes War

Click here to access article by David Swanson from The Peoples Voice.
The U.S. military has been dumping millions of our dollars, part of a recruitment and advertising budget that's in the billions, into paying the NFL to publicly display love for soldiers and weaponry.

Sunday, February 7, 2016

Organic Agriculture, Capitalism And The Parallel Reality Of The Pro-GMO Evangelist

Click here to access article by Colin Todhunter from his blog East by Northwest and CounterPunch, RINF, Global Research, Countercurrents.
The case for GM cannot be made in terms of better yields, less chemical inputs, safety, impact on the environment, nutritional value or improved farmers’ incomes, so the tactic is to denigrate alternative solutions.
This Britisher cites a vast majority of scientists whose research overwhelmingly supports organic agriculture as the most productive method of farming. Yet, as in similar cases with Big Tobacco and more recently by energy corporations with the issue of climate destabilization (read Merchants of Doubt by Oreskes and Conway regarding both industries), the voices of scientists our drowned out by well-funded corporate campaigns to discredit scientists.

He concludes with this insightful comment:
...the real issue isn't about whether or not organic can feed the world, it is that global capitalism is preventing us from doing so and will continue to do so if its structures and impacts remain unchallenged.

Oil Industry Group's Own Report Shows Early Knowledge of Climate Impacts

Click here to access article by Neela Banerjee from Inside Climate News.

More evidence uncovered by the authors reveals that Big Oil knew in the early 1980s that the burning of fossil fuels was adversely impacting the stability of our climate. It was shortly thereafter that they began a campaign of disinformation to discredit the growing science evidence that was unfavorable to their industry and the capitalist system which requires growth based on cheap abundant energy.

Sanders and the left feint in capitalist politics

Click here to access article by Patrick Martin from World Socialist Web Site

Martin expresses very adequately the significance and the use of Sen. Bernie Sanders in the primary elections of the Democratic Party. I agree 99% with his views as written in this article. I only disagree with his advocacy for the Socialist Equality Party which this website represents. This latter party is a vanguard type party which has been thoroughly discredited by history as a worthy option to replace capitalist rule. But the 99% includes some very valuable insights. Here is one:
If the American financial aristocracy thought Sanders represented a genuine threat to its interests, it would not be putting him on national television to deliver his jeremiads before a mass audience. The ruling elite has more than a century of experience in the use of such figures to manipulate mass sentiment and safeguard the profit system from challenges from below.
If Sanders were a genuine socialist and a real threat to capitalist rule, he would be assassinated within days. Of course, his death would be made to look like an accident or suicide.

Seventy years of harassing political establishment and people of Europe

Click here to access article by Andrey Fomin from Oriental Review

The material written about in this article is of particular interest to me because I know, based on much past experience, that the right-wing in the Anglo-American ruling circles were very busy in the immediate years after WWII with their nefarious plans to establish what has become known today as the Empire, or US Empire. They were busy both within this country attempting to reverse all the progressive legislation of the FDR administration and smear all progressive people on the left (McCarthy period) that were active in the 1930s, and in foreign affairs using mostly the CIA (Operation Gladio) and propaganda media to suppress very popular left-wing movements everywhere in the world. Most of this history has been completely censored from Western publications. Thus, one must make extraordinary efforts, particularly at this late date, to recover this history. (I have already read the excellent book by Udo Ulfkotte entitled (in English) Purchased Journalists, which Fomin makes reference to, and am making further efforts to recover this history by seeking out other materials related to this subject.)

Thus I am posting this article as another small effort to recover the real history that our capitalist masters have censored from our education and from all other sources of information.

What prompted the author to write this article was a report in the Telegraph, a British newspaper, which carried a warning from a US intelligence director about political parties, both right-wing and left-wing: apparently the former for advocating nationalist agendas incompatible with Empire objectives for Europe, and the latter for directly opposing Empire objectives.
According to a “sensational” article by the Telegraph, the US director of National Intelligence was recently instructed by Congress to “conduct a major review into Russian clandestine funding of European parties over the last decade.” This disclosure – a classic “controlled leak” – is intended to warn disobedient yet popular political entities across Europe to scale back their ambitions to rebalance the roles and weight of their nation states within the European Union.

Avaaz: manufacturing consent for wars since 2011

Click here to access article by Vanessa Beeley from her blog The Wall Will Fall.

Beeley reports on her personal experience with an NGO and provides documentation to illustrate its use of propaganda in support of a "humanitarian" effort to establish "no-fly zones" in Libya to protect its people from atrocities committed by their leader Qaddafi. This led to NATO's "humanitarian" bombing and destabilization of Libya into what is now a country ruled by various terrorist gangs. The NGO, of course, is Avaaz, which is funded by rich advocates (such as George Soros) of the Empire and it has been used in variety of places to promote the imperial interests of the Empire (simply enter "Avaaz" into one of my search boxes to find out more).
Four years ago I received an email from the internet campaign group Avaaz which read:

“Together, we’ve sent 450,000 emails to the UN Security Council, “overwhelming” the Council President and helping to win targeted sanctions and a justice process for the Libyan people. Now, to stop the bloodshed, we need a massive outcry for a no-fly zone.” [Bold as in the original.] 
Now such advocates are calling for "safety zones" in Syria.