Ideology

I Am Not Anti-West

Posted by Lou on January 4, 2023
Posted in: Architecture, Art, Caitlin Johnstone, Civilization, Democracy, Free speech, Freedom, Ideology, Philosophy, Science. 1 Comment

Caitlin Johnstone

Jan 3, 2022

I am so pro-west that I want the west to embody the actual western values it pretends to embody. I am so pro-west that I support the practice of spreading western values to the west. I’m a western cultural imperialist, except I want to do western cultural imperialism to the west. I’m like a conquistador, a western colonialist setting sail to spread the wonders of western civilization to these godless western savages. Except, instead of actually just bringing them murder, slavery, theft and disease I really am trying to bring them western civilization.

I am so pro-west that I want the western values that were sold to me as a child to be actual things that actually exist. And because I support western values much more than the actual west does, I get called “anti-west” and told to move to China. Shit, THEY should move to China.

A guy I follow on Twitter named David Gondek put it very nicely: “There is nothing wrong with western civilization that living up to its own professed principles wouldn’t fix.”

It’s not “anti-west” to want the west to end warmongering, militarism, censorship, propaganda, government secrecy, oligarchy, injustice, oppression and exploitation, it is PRO-west. The “western values” of peace, justice, equality, democracy, freedom and accountability that we were taught in school are very good things. The only problem is that the west doesn’t actually value them. 

Caitlin Johnstone

Jan 3, 2023

The War For Eight Billion Minds

Posted by Lou on December 18, 2022
Posted in: Economic collapse, Economic terrorism, Government, Humanity, Ideology, Mind control, Political science, Social control, Social engineering. Leave a comment

In an age when information has never been more easily accessible, the world is awash in lies.

Political speech was also censored through the collaborative efforts of the FBI and more than 50 intelligence community agents in violation of the First Amendment. In each case, the “narrative” proved to be either misleading propaganda or an outright lie. Yet they were created and sustained by online communication platforms that pushed the lies and excluded the truths.

BY TYLER DURDEN

SATURDAY, DEC 17, 2022

Authored by J.B.Shurk via The Gatestone Institute,

The heavy perils we face today include centralized governments micromanaging society, the growing prospect of global war, the growing prospect of forced surrender, and the replacement of reasoned debate and free speech with state-sanctioned “narratives” and censorship: totalitarian governance seems not far behind. This is a new kind of war against civilians for control of their minds.

The torrents engulfing us appear to be potentially catastrophic. In a few short years, the world has endured the COVID-19 pandemic, forced government lockdowns, extreme economic volatility, commodity shortages, and the World Economic Forum’s attempts to exploit this cascade of crises as an excuse to usher in a structural “Great Reset” in which global food and energy consumption can be strictly regulated according to the “climate change” goals of an unelected cabal. Governments are relying increasingly on controlling public “narratives” and vilifying dissent.

While health bureaucrats and politicians claimed to be “following the science,” mandatory compliance with unilateral rule-making precluded reasoned, good-faith debate. The predictable result: the lethal consequences of the Wuhan Virus were exacerbated by the lethal consequences of misguided public policies imposed to fight the virus. Students whose schools were shuttered now suffer the lifelong effects of learning loss. Patients whose timely diagnoses and preventative care were forestalled now suffer the debilitating outcomes of untreated disease. Small businesses unable to endure prolonged closures are gone for good. Middle class savings once reserved for unexpected “rainy day” funds or children’s future educations have dried up. Credit card debt is on the rise, while more and more people struggle to survive on less. The “safety nets” of government welfare programs have ballooned to leave nation states more indebted than ever but have also proved too perforated with leaky holes (often draining needed resources straight into the bank accounts of corporate campaign donors, interest group lobbyists, and foreign hackers) to keep society’s most vulnerable afloat. Governments’ justifications for reckless fiscal, monetary, and credit policies during short-term emergencies have weakened nations’ prospects for long-term solvency and the likelihood that they will be capable of preserving stable currencies. Still, for all the harms their actions have caused, governments have issued no apologies for enforcing such life-altering policies while silencing critics. It is as if “narrative engineers” have adopted an official position that they are incapable of being wrong.

Geopolitical conflict is wrenching the post-WWII international order apart. While America’s and the European Union’s “climate change” policies have already inflated the costs of energy, food and much else, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has only added to ordinary Europeans’ financial pain and jeopardizes the continent’s security more broadly. China’s territorial ambitions threaten peace in Taiwan, Japan, across Southeast Asia and beyond. The United States’ efforts to enlarge NATO’s European membership, while expanding its mission objectives into the Indo-Pacific, all but ensure that the U.S., China and Russia remain on a collision course.

Policymakers cannot help seeing parallels to the quickly falling geopolitical dominoes that ushered in WWI and WWII over the course of a few fateful weeks. They cannot help looking at the unsustainable accumulation of government debt around the world and the avalanche of investment derivatives balancing unsteadily upon fragile currencies unmoored from any real value in gold or silver and fearing the risks of a severe depression. They cannot help seeing Russian revanchism and Chinese territorial expansion as signs that the Great Powers have set course down a dangerous path. The more nervous about the future policymakers are, the more committed they seem to enforcing a standard “narrative” they can control.

It was the detonation of two nuclear warheads over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of course, that brought combat in the Pacific Theater to a close and ended WWII with an exclamation point.

Now we stand on a new kind of battlefield. Just as with nuclear weapons, civilians have nowhere to hide from this war’s effects. Weapons systems are spread out across the Internet, deployed on mobile phones and active on every computer chip, tracking, sharing, and pushing digital information throughout the world. Instead of explosives and bullets, we have competing “narratives” whizzing past. The breadth of the campaign to control what information we see, how we process that information, and ultimately what we think and say makes even the most effective psychological operations of the past look antiquated and rudimentary. Whereas “mutually assured destruction” has so far succeeded as a deterrent against nuclear war, the tantalizing opportunities for governments to use programs of mass digital surveillance and communication to spread lies, manipulate opinion, and affect human behavior have created a kind of mutually assured dystopia, “where people lead dehumanized, fearful lives.”

In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler spoke with boisterous energy and theatrical gesticulation before tens of thousands of stormtroopers, Hitler Youth, and Nazi Party faithful. Today, the dictator’s raised stage has been replaced with Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and anywhere else a pop-up online audience can be found. The visual stimuli that enthralled Hitler’s crowds are now reproduced with the release of pleasure-causing endorphins rushing to the brain after every “politically correct” online statement is “rewarded” with approval from strangers providing instant fame. Online “influencers” have become the goose-stepping middlemen for campaigns of mass propaganda that touch more humans in a day than a decade of Hitler’s speeches. In an age when information has never been more easily accessible, the world is awash in lies.

Instead of encouraging public debate and rational argument, governments push the constant drumbeat of the “narrative” above all else. A citizen either obediently accepts the government’s vast and intrusive COVID-19 rules, or that person is labelled a “COVID denier.” A citizen either obediently accepts the government’s vast and intrusive “climate change” rules, or that person is labelled a “climate denier.” A citizen either accepts Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” as “Russian disinformation”, or that person is labelled a “Russian sympathizer.” Daring to say otherwise could get one banned from social media, professionally sanctioned, or even fired from a job. Except none of these established “narratives” has proved true.

In hindsight, it is clear that lockdowns unleashed more health, educational and economic problems than they solved. As Europe faces an expanding energy crisis that leaves its populations vulnerable to the cold, it is clear that “climate change” policies can kill those they are purportedly meant to protect. And as Elon Musk’s recent release of internal Twitter communications proves, Hunter Biden’s laptop was not only real news censored from the public during a presidential election. Political speech was also censored through the collaborative efforts of the FBI and more than 50 intelligence community agents in violation of the First Amendment. In each case, the “narrative” proved to be either misleading propaganda or an outright lie. Yet they were created and sustained by online communication platforms that pushed the lies and excluded the truths.

As global events increasingly threaten Western stability, governments have demonstrated no inclination to entertain a diversity of viewpoints or discussions along the way. Instead, the more serious the issue, the more committed to a single, overarching “narrative” they seem to become. Dissent is despised. Reasoned argument is lampooned. A citizen is expected to blithely accept government-approved messaging disseminated online, or risk the wrath of the technocracy.

This war for eight billion minds means that citizens must be more vigilant than ever in processing and evaluating what they see and read. Whether they like it or not, they are under attack at all times from those who seek to manipulate and control them. As in the last century, we are surrounded by totalitarian propaganda routinely disguised as “the truth.” In this century, though, the reach and scale of mass indoctrination seems endlessly expanding.

Euthanizing the poor is just capitalism finally being honest about itself

Posted by Lou on November 17, 2022
Posted in: Capitalism, Euthanasia, Ideology. Leave a comment

Caitlin Johnstone

Euthanizing the poor is just capitalism finally being honest about itself. After all this time of falsely pretending to have real solutions to the problems it creates, it finally presents a solution entirely in alignment with its values that actually works.

The Sarco pod is a euthanasia device or machine consisting of a 3D-printed detachable capsule mounted on a stand that contains a canister of liquid nitrogen to die by suicide through inert gas asphyxiation. “Sarco” is short for “sarcophagus”. Wikipedia

Capitalism Has Failed As Badly As Anything Can Fail

Posted by Lou on November 3, 2022
Posted in: Capitalism, Civilization collapse, Economic collapse, Ideology, Imperialism, USA. Leave a comment

Western punditry is rife with op-eds arguing that the US needs to vastly increase military spending because a world war is about to erupt, and they always frame it as though this would be something that happens to the US like its own actions would have nothing to do with it.

If World War 3 does indeed occur, it will be because the drivers of the US-centralized empire continued accelerating towards that horrific event while refusing every possible diplomatic off-ramp due to their inability to relinquish their goal of unipolar planetary domination.

https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/capitalism-has-failed-as-badly-as

Caitlin Johnstone

Nov. 2, 2022

It’s (capitalism) literally killing us. It’s brought us to the brink of extinction by environmental collapse or nuclear armageddon. That’s literally the worst failure that any system could possibly achieve. When your back is against the wall and your choices are between radical change and extinction, you’ve no other options but to try radical change. That’s the juncture we’re at right now.

Listen to a reading of this article:

https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?auto_play=false&buying=false&liking=false&download=false&sharing=false&show_artwork=true&show_comments=false&show_playcount=false&show_user=true&hide_related=true&visual=false&start_track=0&url=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F1374934258

“No no you don’t understand, this US war is completely different from all the other US wars. See, the US is intervening in Ukraine for humanitarian reasons. We’re fighting a bad guy who is an evil dictator that loves war crimes and genocide. Not like all those other interventions.”

If the US proxy war in Ukraine was meaningfully different from other US wars they would be justifying it using different arguments, not the exact same ones.

The war propaganda is airing reruns.

❖

Western punditry is rife with op-eds arguing that the US needs to vastly increase military spending because a world war is about to erupt, and they always frame it as though this would be something that happens to the US, like its own actions would have nothing to do with it.

If World War 3 does indeed occur, it will be because the drivers of the US-centralized empire continued accelerating towards that horrific event while refusing every possible diplomatic off-ramp due to their inability to relinquish their goal of unipolar planetary domination.

❖

Pointing out the various flaws in historical attempts at communism does not address the problem that if we don’t move from competition-based models to collaboration-based ones we’re going to destroy all life on this planet in short order. We’ve still got to find a way to change.

Have issues with Stalin and Mao? Okay. Cool. Our competition-based models are still destroying our biosphere and shoving us toward nuclear war. Our survival still depends on moving toward collaboration with each other and with our ecosystem toward the thriving of all beings. Babbling about Stalin and Mao doesn’t magically change the fact that we can’t keep doing this thing where human behavior is driven by profit and competition.

Leaving aside that many problems with communism have been wildly exaggerated and others are the direct result of sabotage and economic warfare by the capitalist empire, those criticisms never address the problem that capitalism has no solutions for our current existential crises. So we need systems which can address those existential crises. I see no models with any hope of sustainability that don’t involve a radical transition from competition to collaboration at every level. We will either accomplish that transition or we will go extinct. It really is that simple.

People tell me, “Capitalism isn’t perfect, but it’s the best system we’ve seen.”

It’s literally killing us. It’s brought us to the brink of extinction by environmental collapse or nuclear armageddon. That’s literally the worst failure that any system could possibly achieve. When your back is against the wall and your choices are between radical change and extinction, you’ve no other options but to try radical change. That’s the juncture we’re at right now.

The status quo political establishment has failed as spectacularly as anything could possibly fail. We could have a world of peace, equality, justice, health and harmony, but instead we’re marching toward dystopia and extinction. It is entirely within the reach of human potential to have a collaboration-based civilization where everyone works together toward human thriving. Our rulers have delivered only competition-based systems which do the exact opposite. They failed the test. Time for something new.

It doesn’t get any more fail than “Yeah we’ve competed ourselves into a situation where there might be a nuclear war that ends literally everything any minute now.” That’s the most fail you can have while still being alive enough to acknowledge the failure. The facts are in. They failed.

A system that fails to that extent does not deserve to exist, and should not exist. There are a whole lot more of us than there are of them, and if we can just shake each other awake from the propaganda-induced coma we’re all in we can force the creation of much better systems.

❖

Mass media propagandists work so hard to discredit The Grayzone because they know that tomorrow it could be their own emails getting published revealing corrupt collusion with western officials and intelligence insiders.

❖

Let yourself be happy. If you can’t do it for you then do it for the world. Refusing to let yourself be happy is just keeping that much happiness out of the world. It’s making it a worse place to live. Be happy.

Refusing to let yourself be happy just deprives the world of that much happiness. Refusing to let yourself be loved just deprives the world of that much love. Refusing to let yourself be at peace just deprives the world of that much peace.

Be happy. Not because you “deserve” it or any of that empty narrative fluff, but because the world is a hard place and any spark of happiness is sorely needed.

New Study Finds The Rest Of The World Supports China And Russia

Posted by Lou on October 31, 2022
Posted in: Australia, China, Democracy, Ideology, Perception, Political science, Propaganda, Russia, USA. 4 Comments

“Among the 1.2bn people who inhabit the world’s liberal democracies, three-quarters (75%) now hold a negative view of China, and 87% a negative view of Russia,” the report reads. “However, for the 6.3bn people who live in the rest of the world, the picture is reversed. In these societies, 70% feel positively towards China, and 66% positively towards Russia.”

https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/new-study-finds-the-rest-of-the-world

Caitlin Johnstone

Oct 31, 2022

Listen to a reading of this article:

https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?auto_play=false&buying=false&liking=false&download=false&sharing=false&show_artwork=true&show_comments=false&show_playcount=false&show_user=true&hide_related=true&visual=false&start_track=0&url=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F1373442502

The US is preparing to station multiple nuclear-capable B-52 bombers in northern Australia in what the mass media are calling a “signal to China,” yet another example of Australia’s forced subservience as a US military/intelligence asset.

“Having bombers that could range and potentially attack mainland China could be very important in sending a signal to China that any of its actions over Taiwan could also expand further,” Becca Wasser from the Centre for New American Security think tank told the ABC.

“This is a dangerous escalation. It makes Australia an even bigger part of the global nuclear weapons threat to humanity’s very existence – and by rising military tensions it further destabilises our region,” tweeted Greens Senator David Shoebridge of the incendiary provocation.

A new Australian Financial Review article titled “Australia’s alliances in Asia are a tale of two regions” candidly discusses the Biden administration’s recent sanctions geared toward kneecapping the Chinese tech industry in what the author James Curran correctly says “is unambiguously a new cold war.” Curran describes the impossible task Australia has of straddling the ever-widening divide between its number one trading partner China and its number one “security” partner the US, while Washington continually pressures Canberra and ASEAN states toward greater and greater enmity with Beijing.

“ASEAN countries, as much as Australia, have much at stake in resisting the onset of a bifurcated world,” Curran writes.

But that bifurcation is being shoved through at breakneck pace, using both hard and soft power measures. Australians have been hammered with increasingly aggressive anti-China propaganda, and as a result nearly half of them now say they would be willing to go to war to defend Taiwan from an attack by the mainland, with a third saying they’d support a war against China over the Solomon Islands.

A recent Cambridge study found that this hostility toward China has been on the rise in recent years not just in Australia but throughout the “liberal democracies” of the US-centralized power alliance. But what’s interesting is that public opinion is exactly reversed in the much larger remainder of the Earth’s population, with people outside the US power cluster just as fond of China as those within that power cluster are hostile toward it. This relationship is largely mirrored with Russia as well.

“Among the 1.2bn people who inhabit the world’s liberal democracies, three-quarters (75%) now hold a negative view of China, and 87% a negative view of Russia,” the report reads. “However, for the 6.3bn people who live in the rest of the world, the picture is reversed. In these societies, 70% feel positively towards China, and 66% positively towards Russia.”

Image

Image

Image

12:45 PM ∙ Oct 30, 20224,557Likes1,469Retweets

The report finds that in the “developing” world, approval of China is higher than approval of the US:

“For the first time ever, slightly more people in developing countries (62%) are favourable towards China than towards the United States (61%). This is especially so among the 4.6bn people living in countries supported by the Belt and Road Initiative, among whom almost two-thirds hold a positive view of China, compared to just a quarter (27%) in non-participating countries.”

The report finds that while Russia’s approval has plummeted in the west, it maintains broad support in the east despite the invasion of Ukraine:

However, the real terrain of Russia’s international influence lies outside of the West. 75% of respondents in South Asia, 68% in Francophone Africa, 62% in Southeast Asia continue to view the country positively in spite of the events of this year.

I first became aware of the Cambridge study via a Twitter thread by Arnaud Bertrand (who is a great follow if you happen to use that demonic app). Bertrand highlights data in the study showing that US-aligned nations’ opinion of China began plummeting not after the Covid outbreak in late 2019, but after 2017 when the US began ramping up its propaganda campaign against Beijing.

Apart from the fact that the USA’s immensely sophisticated propaganda machine naturally focuses primarily on where the world’s wealth and military firepower rests while pushing its global agendas, and apart from the fact that those in Belt and Road Initiative countries apparently believe they benefit from their economic relationships with China, the disparity between the “developed” and “developing” worlds in their perceptions of the US and its enemies may also be partly explained by another thought-provoking Arnaud Bertrand thread, which I will quote in its entirety here:

A puzzling observation in today’s world is that almost no Western leader has laid out a positive vision for the future.

Take Biden for instance. His big vision is “democracies vs autocracies”. Meaning his vision for the future of the world is conflict. How positive is that?

Contrast this with China: between “national rejuvenation” and “common prosperity” at home and the “global security initiative” as their vision for improved international relations; everyone is very clear on the journey they’re embarked on.

This is a key, if not the key reason why the “West” has no chance in hell to convince the “rest” to join them.

There’s simply nothing to join! Except conflict, I guess, but you join a conflict to fight for a vision – for a better world – the conflict itself cannot be the vision!

This reminds me of what George Kennan, the architect of the cold war, wrote: to win he said that America had to “create among the peoples of the world generally the impression of a country which knows what it wants, which is coping successfully with the problems of its internal life and with the responsibilities of a World Power, and which has a spiritual vitality capable of holding its own among the major ideological currents of the time”

Does America give this impression today?

Even in my own country, France. Ask any French person what Macron’s vision for the future of France and the world is, what the grand plan is, and you’ll get very puzzled looks. “Reform the pension system so we have to work longer?”

The truth is there’s nothing, nada, rien! 

What we have essentially in the West are political operators. They think their jobs are to get reelected and to attempt to move whatever metrics the electorate cares about: GDP, unemployment, debt levels, CO2 emissions, etc. Actual leaders have gone extinct (or gone East).

It’s actually quite sad, really speaks to the levels of intellectual decrepitude in the West today. The time of the Enlightenment, the big revolutions is well and truly gone. We’re stuck with our mediocre operators.

It’s also why this is such a dangerous time. A positive vision brings confidence, it brings hope, it motivates, it makes people look forward to what’s to come. The West has none of that today.

The future is scary, the dominant feelings are fear and anger.

And when there’s a lot of fear and anger, these feelings need to be directed somewhere. And our operators certainly don’t want it to be them! So it’s China, Iran, all those “foreigners” who “hate our freedom”.

Perfect recipe for a very bad conflict…

Please, don’t get fooled!

Bertrand’s musings echo a recent quote by Professor Jeffrey Sachs at the Athens Democracy Forum: “The single biggest mistake of president Biden was to say ‘the greatest struggle of the world is between democracies and autocracies’. The real struggle of the world is to live together and overcome our common crises of environment and inequality.”

Indeed, we could be striving toward a positive vision for the future, one which seeks “common prosperity” and “improved international relations,” one which works to remedy inequality and address the looming environmental crisis. Instead the world is being bifurcated, split in two, which history tells us is probably an indication that something extremely terrible is on the horizon for our species unless we drastically change course.

It’s worth keeping all this in mind, as nuclear-capable bombers are deployed to Australia; as NATO weighs moving nuclear weapons to Russia’s border in Finland; as the Biden administration goes all in on economic warfare with China regardless of the consequences; as Russia accuses the US of “lowering the nuclear threshold” by modernizing the arsenal in Europe into “battlefield weapons”; as the Council on Foreign Relations president openly admits that the US is now working to halt China’s rise on the world stage; as China declares its willingness to deepen ties with Russia on all levels.

We could have such a wonderful, healthy, collaborative world, and it’s being flushed down the toilet because an empire is using its leverage over the wealthiest populations on our planet to work toward dominating all the other populations. This stupid, insane quest to shore up unipolar planetary domination is costing us everything while gaining us nothing, and it’s going to be the poorest and weakest among us who suffer the most as a result.

The hypocrisy about the western calmness when the US Govt invaded multiple countries 10,000 miles away from its borders as a matter of national security

Posted by Lou on September 7, 2022
Posted in: Hypocrisy, Ideology, Mind control, Propaganda, Russia, Ukraine, USA, War. Leave a comment

BREAKING: Twitter Senior Engineer says “Twitter Does Not Believe in Free Speech”, admits employees are “Commie as F**k” and they tried to “revolt against” Elon Musk’s takeover bid

Posted by Lou on May 17, 2022
Posted in: Ideology, Social media. Leave a comment

These idiotic engineers don’t even comprehend the basic concept of communism.

‘Profound lack of human decency’: Oliver Stone tears into US govt over Iran and Venezuela sanctions amid Covid-19 crisis

Posted by Lou on April 5, 2020
Posted in: Coronavirus, Cuba, Ethics, Evil, Ideology, Idiocracy, Nicaragua, Pandemic, Political science, Ponerology, Sanctions, USA, Venezuela. Leave a comment
5 Apr, 2020
‘Profound lack of human decency’: Oliver Stone tears into US govt over Iran & Venezuela sanctions amid Covid-19 crisis
FILE PHOTO: Oliver Stone ©  REUTERS/Mark Blinch
The United States government has revealed its contempt for human compassion and global solidarity by refusing to lift draconian sanctions on Iran and Venezuela during the Covid-19 crisis, director Oliver Stone has argued.

Iran has suffered immensely from the virus, Stone noted in an op-ed published by the New York Daily News, but due to US sanctions the Islamic Republic is “reportedly the only country in the world that cannot buy medicines needed to fight the pandemic.”

The outspoken Hollywood legend similarly condemned Washington’s decision to maintain – and in some cases, increase – its economic chokeholds on countries such as Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua as coronavirus strains healthcare systems across the globe.

In the case of Venezuela, US “coercion” led to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) denying the South American state’s request for a $5 billion loan to help fight the pandemic, Stone contended. The US has ratcheted up its pressure on Caracas amid the global health crisis, accusing the government of drug trafficking and calling for a “transition government” to replace President Nicolas Maduro.

The award-winning filmmaker and activist said that the health crisis has shown the inhumanity of Washington’s foreign policy.

The current pandemic is exposing not only our government’s utter failures to protect its own citizens, but also its profound lack of human decency in dealing with other nations

Stone called for “serious moral self-reflection” in the US, warning that countless lives were at risk unless there is an “immediate change in course.”

Iran has registered nearly 3,500 Covid-19 deaths, with 19,700 confirmed cases, according to a tally maintained by Johns Hopkins University. President Hassan Rouhani said last week that the crisis is “a great opportunity for Americans to apologize… and to lift the unjust and unfair sanctions on Iran.”

Economics professor blames capitalism for America’s coronavirus crisis

Posted by Lou on April 5, 2020
Posted in: Capitalism, Coronavirus, Ideology, Idiocracy, ljf, Marxism, Political science, Socialism. 1 Comment

There is no hope for America, as most of its population is so dumbed down by ideology that they end up putting the likes of Trump at the helm. Most of these “educated” Americans cannot even spell Marxism without a spell check and yet they have opinions on it?

Source
ERIN MCLAUGHLIN – GROVE CITY COLLEGE 
APRIL 3, 2020
A longtime economics professor argues that capitalism is accountable for the shortages, economic downturn, and vast spread of the novel coronavirus in the United States.In a variety of recent public statements, economist Richard Wolff argues that “the catastrophe we are living through was caused by a capitalist system that could not anticipate, plan for, or cope with the coronavirus.”Wolff has been an economics professor for more than 50 years and has taught at Yale and the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is currently a visiting professor at the New School University in New York City. Often described as a “Marxian economist,” Wolff was named in Jacobin magazine as one of the “greats of contemporary Marxian political economy.”

In a March 31 YouTube video titled “Capitalism is making a mess of the coronavirus crisis,” he argued that “private companies have no incentive to produce test kits and store them in a warehouse for years before there’s a crisis. It’s not profitable.”

Wolff told The College Fix that economic systems have a duty to look after public health, something that would have occurred under socialism.

“A socialist system would much more likely have required production of all the needed supplies (tests, ventilators, beds, etc.) and stockpiling them around the country,” he told The Fix via email.

Asked whether China, a prime example of centralized government, had a role in instigating the pandemic, Wolff said that “whatever the Chinese did or did not do, it is the job of all other societies — their private sectors and their governments — to prepare for and cope with viruses that can come from anywhere anytime.”

Continue:

Source

Brazil’s Ex-President on Venezuela: Maduro is Democratic, Guaidó Should Be in Prison, US Blockade Kills Civilians

Posted by Lou on April 4, 2020
Posted in: Brazil, Ideology, Imperialism, Military Coup, Political science, USA, Venezuela. Leave a comment
consortiumnews.com

Ben Norton reports on comments by Lula da Silva that have been ignored by English-language media. 

Brazil’s Lula da Silva.

The far-right government of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is one of Washington’s closest allies in Latin America. It has played a major supporting role in the Trump administration’s coup attempt against Venezuela, even supporting a terror plot against the government of President Nicolás Maduro.

This March, the Bolsonaro administration signed a historic military agreement, bringing Brazil directly into the U.S. imperial sphere of influence, essentially merging the country’s defense industry with Washington’s military-industrial complex.

Days before the deal was finalized, however, Brazil’s former president, the left-wing labor organizer Lula da Silva, spoke out vociferously against U.S. meddling in Latin America, harshly criticizing Washington’s putsch against Evo Morales in Bolivia and its ongoing coup attempt against Venezuela.

In an interview with Brazilian media that has yet to be covered in the English-language press, Lula condemned U.S.-backed Venezuelan coup leader Juan Guaidó as a warmongering criminal who should be in prison. He went on to emphasize that President Nicolás Maduro is a democratically elected leader who has encouraged peace and diplomacy.

“Europe and the United States can’t recognize a fraud who declares himself to be president,” Lula said, referring to Guaidó. “It is not right. Because if fashion takes over democracy, it is thrown in the garbage, and any scammer can declare themself president. I could declare myself president of Brazil, but where would democracy go?”

Lula was interviewed by Folha de S.Paulo, the most widely circulated Brazilian newspaper, which is owned by an elite family of billionaire media oligarchs.

When the paper pushed back against his comments, calling Maduro a “dictator,” Lula stressed that the Venezuelan president was elected, and has shown the kind of patience and restraint that no other leader would in similar circumstances.

“He [Guaidó] should be in prison,” Lula said. “And Maduro was so democratic and did not arrest him when he went to Colombia to try to instigate an invasion of Venezuela.”

“The one who is taking the initiative to talk is Maduro, not Guaidó,” Lula stated. “Guaidó would like the Americans to invade Venezuela — in fact, he even tried to force it.”

The newspaper pushed back again, saying Maduro has presided over an economic crisis in Venezuela.

“Whether his government is doing well or not, that’s another story. But you aren’t going to attack all of the countries that aren’t doing well,” Lula responded.

“People can’t criticize Maduro and not criticize the blockade. The blockade doesn’t attack soldiers, it doesn’t kill the guilty, the blockade kills innocents,” the former Brazilian president said.

These remarks from Lula received virtually no coverage in the English-language press, although they were widely covered in Portuguese- and Spanish-language media.

Defends Evo Morales

The Brazilian paper also pushed Lula to denounce Bolivian President Evo Morales, who was overthrown in a U.S.-backed far-right military coup in November 2019.

Folha de S.Paulo noted that Morales had run for a fourth term as president, although the paper failed to mention that Bolivia’s Supreme Court permitted him to do so.

In the first round of the October 2019 election, Morales won with more than a 10 percent margin.

The newspaper falsely claimed that there were irregularities in the election — a myth initially spread by the Organization of American States (OAS) that has subsequently been debunked by numerous investigations by top scholars.

Lula defended Morales and his government against the newspaper’s claims that the Bolivian election was marred by supposed “complications.”

“Wasn’t George Bush complicated in his election against Al Gore? It was complicated, Bush took control of the government for eight years,” Lula replied.

“Was Trump not complicated? It was complicated, and he took power,” he said.

“Was Bolsonaro not complicated? Everyone knows the farce of ‘fake news.’”

US Coups Usher Extreme-Right into Power in Brazil

Remarks like these illustrate why Washington has backed coups and meddled in Brazil’s internal politics in order to overthrow Lula and his left-wing Workers’ Party and prevent them from returning to power.

Lula has not only been one of the most popular politicians in Brazil, he represents a regional buffer against U.S. hegemony. When he left office in 2010, after completing his second term as head of state, he had a staggering 87 percent approval rating — one of the highest in the entire world.

Lula’s successor from the Workers’ Party, President Dilma Rousseff, was ousted in 2016 in a parliamentary coup led by Brazil’s right-wing opposition and a collection of oligarchs that was backed behind the scenes by the United States.

Lula has repeatedly stressed that Washington played a decisive role in the coups in Brazil. “Everything that is happening has the hand of the United States on it,” he said in a 2019 interview.

“The U.S. created the Lava Jato investigation,” Lula added, referring to the supposed “anti-corruption” operation that was used to oust the Workers’ Party and install the far-right administration of Jair Bolsonaro, an extremist who has called for restoring the military dictatorship.

In 2018, Lula was campaigning again for the presidential election, and leading the polls by a huge margin. It was only then that he was imprisoned on false charges of corruption, providing an opening for Bolsonaro to take power.

The judge who oversaw Lava Jato and imprisoned Lula, Sergio Moro, was subsequently rewarded by Bolsonaro with a post as minister of justice.

Immediately after taking office, Bolsonaro and Moro paid a special visit to CIA headquarters.

“No Brazilian president had ever paid a visit to the CIA,” commented Celso Amorim, who served as Foreign Minister under Lula. “This is an explicitly submissive position. Nothing compares to this.”

Ben Norton is a journalist and writer. He is a reporter for The Grayzone, and the producer of the “Moderate Rebels” podcast, which he co-hosts with Max Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.com, and he tweets at @BenjaminNorton.

This article is from The Grayzone.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

‘Criminal blockade’: Cuba outraged as delivery of Covid-19 aid from Alibaba chief aborted ‘at the last minute’ due to US sanctions

Posted by Lou on April 3, 2020
Posted in: China, Coronavirus, Cuba, Ideology, Idiocracy, Pandemic, Political science, Sanctions, USA. Leave a comment
Dear US government, you are, simply put, the evil scum of the planet.
2 Apr, 2020
‘Criminal blockade’: Cuba outraged as delivery of Covid-19 aid from Alibaba chief aborted ‘at the last minute’ due to US sanctions
A woman wears a face mask as a preventive measure against the spread of the novel coronavirus in Havana, Cuba. March 28, 2020. © Yamil Lage / AFP
Cuba has slammed the US’ “criminal blockade” of the country after the embargo stood in the way of the delivery of Covid-19 test kits and ventilators donated by Chinese e-commerce tycoon Jack Ma.

“The criminal blockade of the imperial government violates the human rights of the Cuban people,” President Miguel Diaz-Canel tweeted on Wednesday.

Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez

✔@DiazCanelB

The criminal blockade of the imperial government violates the human rights of the Cuban people. https://twitter.com/PresidenciaCuba/status/1245290570140004353 …

Presidencia Cuba@PresidenciaCuba

Cuba denuncia que donación de suministros médicos a #Cuba🇨🇺 para combatir la #COVID19, de la Fundación china🇨🇳 Alibabá, no ha podido llegar por regulaciones del criminal bloqueo del gobierno de #EEUU🇺🇸 contra nuestro pueblo.#EsteVirusLoParamosEntreTodos http://www.granma.cu/cuba-covid-19/2020-04-01/por-que-las-cosas-para-cuba-siempre-son-mas-dificiles …

1,189

Twitter Ads info and privacy
1,131 people are talking about this

Cuba’s envoy to Beijing, Carlos Miguel Pereira, explained that an American firm was hired to deliver medical goods necessary to fight Covid-19, which were donated by a fund run by Jack Ma, Chinese philanthropist and owner of e-commerce giant Alibaba. However, the firm refused to deliver the shipment “at the last minute,” Pereira said.

According to the Xinhua News Agency, the company had specifically worried about the possibility of violating the 1995 US Helms-Burton Act, which strengthened sanctions against Cuba.

Cuba has 212 confirmed Covid-19 cases, with six deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

ALSO ON RT.COMNot letting Covid-19 crisis go to waste? US ramps up war on drugs… focusing on Venezuela’s Maduro

Ma announced last month that his foundation would donate emergency medical supplies to Cuba and 23 other Caribbean and South American nations. The donation was said to include 2 million masks, 400,000 test kits, and 104 ventilators.

The US has maintained a trade embargo against Cuba since 1960.

Quarantine Meditations: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Posted by Lou on March 24, 2020
Posted in: China, Coronavirus, Ideology, Idiocracy, Imperialism, Iran, Military, Political science, Sanctions, USA, War, World. Leave a comment

The world is messed up because powerful people think in terms of narrative control, and ordinary people don’t. Change that and you change the world.

~

Hot tip: Dump all stocks and invest in becoming the kind of decent human being who people will want to help in chaotic times.

~

Let’s go humans! The sooner we can put aside our differences all around the world and unite to beat this virus the sooner we can get back to exploiting each other over an imaginary monetary system and murdering each other with bombs!

~

FYI if your government is pushing the suspension of civil liberties before coming up with a healthcare plan or providing you with financial security in an unprecedented economic crisis, then their desire to suspend civil liberties has nothing to do with fighting the pandemic.

~

Protecting the citizenry in situations like this is the thing governments are supposed to be for. It’s the single most compelling argument for their existence, by a very wide margin. Any government which doesn’t take good care of its people right now does not deserve to exist.

~

If this virus hasn’t yet caused you to seriously re-evaluate your priorities in life, it should. For better or worse we appear to be standing on the brink of some very significant worldwide paradigm shifts. Where you choose to put your mental energy right now should reflect this.

~

Powerful people will work to advance authoritarian agendas which they have no intention of reversing during this pandemic. They are working on it right now. This is not a possibility, this is a certainty.

~

I love that so many people are pleading with the Trump administration to end Iran sanctions during the pandemic because it’s killing civilians, but it won’t work. They know it’s killing civilians, and they know it will kill a lot more. That has always been the objective. Pompeo has openly admitted that Iran is being sanctioned no so that its government will change its behavior, but so that the Iranian people will get so desperate from all the suffering and devastation that they rise up and overthrow their government.

Sanctions are the only form of warfare where it is considered legal and acceptable to deliberately target a civilian population with deadly force. That’s what they’ve been doing this whole time. It’s what they want. The pandemic only helps them.

Every single Iranian who is dying because of these sanctions is on Trump. The MAGA narrative that he’s better on war than Obama has been thoroughly invalidated by every metric.

~

Humanity is uniting against this common crisis. We’re uniting in our desire to beat this virus and protect our more vulnerable populations, and in a shared awareness that this thing could technically kill any of us. If ever there was a catalyst for a shift in consciousness, this is it.

~

We appear to be watching a confluence of factors on a trajectory to push the world toward vast changes which may leave it unrecognizable in some ways within a matter of months. Maybe we don’t need to pour as much mental energy as we used to into sectarian infighting and petty social media spats.

~

Nothing’s the same and it never will be again. Fuck seizing the means of production. Seize this moment. Take back everything they took from us and refuse to give it back.

Also seize the means of production because you can and why not.

~

Every time there’s a major mainstream narrative shift half my mentions are people going “Caitlin I’m so disappointed in you for saying something I disagree with. Normally I agree with you but now here you are not agreeing with me, like you’re an independent person or something.”

~

Imagine being such a bleating, brainwashed NPC cuck that you believe China is your enemy.

~

The nation that is circling the planet with hundreds of military bases and engaging in countless undeclared military operations around the world is the belligerent rogue nation. Everyone else is, at worst, acting in self-defense in response to this belligerence.

Governments using force to dominate the planet put every human being on a trajectory toward extinction via nuclear armageddon, and should be vehemently opposed. One government is the worst offender in this area, by a very, very, very wide margin. And it ain’t China.

~

Every few weeks, depending on who the empire is targeting at a given moment, I swing from arguing with liberals about a nation liberals hate to arguing with conservatives about a nation conservatives hate, or vice versa. And they always think they’re different from the others.

“Caitlin I normally agree with you, but I don’t know what’s gotten into you supporting Evil Nation X like this!” they say, firmly believing that they’re doing something original and unique.

“This Official Bad Guy is different from all the others, Caitlin!” they say. “This one’s real!” It’s like listening to a serial loser-dater explain that her new boyfriend with the neck tattoo is actually a really great guy.

~

I oppose warmongering against Venezuela and China and they say it’s because I love communism.

I oppose warmongering against Iran and they say it’s because I love theocracy.

I oppose warmongering against Russia and Syria and they say it’s because I love autocracy.

Maybe I just oppose warmongering.

~

Rank-and-file Dems unwittingly consented to cold war escalations against Russia out of concern for election interference. Rank-and-file Republicans are now doing the same with China out of concern for a virus outbreak. But both escalations were pre-planned by government agencies.

~

The only reason people don’t worry about cold war escalations against China and Russia like they do about hot wars with non-nuclear powers is because we got lucky in the last cold war. But that’s all it was: sheer, dumb luck. No one was ever in control during that time. Not once.

Nobody likes to think about the fact that we came within a hair’s breadth of total annihilation on multiple occasions during the last cold war due to communication breakdowns and tech malfunctions. That can easily happen again, but without getting lucky. People have a tendency to believe they succeeded because they were in control and lost because they lost control, but nobody was ever in control. We survived by sheer, dumb luck.

With hot wars they take a few lives here, a few lives there. With cold war it’s an all-or-nothing dice roll that nothing goes wrong; no tech glitches, no miscommunications, even when things get very tense. And you roll those dice every single day. And with every escalation you add more dice.

~

All arguments the US government makes against any “regime” it dislikes are completely invalidated by its alliance with Saudi Arabia alone, to say nothing of all the other tyrannical governments it’s allied with.

~

If you find yourself thinking more thoughts about China’s authoritarian government than about the abusive authoritarian governments of US allies like Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, Egypt, the Philippines etc, it’s because you’ve been propagandized to align you with US interests.

~

Establishment narrative managers aim their publications not at their followers but at other establishment narrative managers, seeking their approval. Alternative media should always do the opposite and address the people; too many also engage in upward-looking approval-seeking.

~

Everything’s been in a steadily accelerating pattern of unpatterning for a good while now, since well before the virus. There are people who think they’ll be able to shore up control through this thing, but you have no control in a tornado. Nature, which includes homo sapiens, wins out.

_________________________________

Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics onTwitter, checking out my podcast on either Youtube, soundcloud, Apple podcasts or Spotify, following me on Steemit, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my books Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone and Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

Bernie Sanders may be just what U.S. capitalism needs, says top economist: Don Pittis

Posted by Lou on February 13, 2020
Posted in: Capitalism, Communism, Economics, Ideology, Political science, Socialism, Taxation, USA. 2 Comments

History is filled with examples of healthy social democracies born out of extreme inequality

Source

CBC News
Don Pittis

Vermont senator and Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Bernie Sanders — who has variously referred to himself as a socialist and a democratic socialist — won his party’s New Hampshire primary this week. (Mike Segar/Reuters)

A recent visit to Cuba reminded me that Soviet-style state planning is no way to run a healthy economy.

So it’s safe to say the New Hampshire primary win by Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders — who has variously referred to himself as a socialist and a democratic socialist — is not a request by voters for Cuba’s crumbling buildings and shortages of consumer goods.

Socialism means different things to different people, and for many older North Americans conditioned by years of Cold War rhetoric, it is a trigger word for fears of creeping communism.

While there are plenty of economists who disdain Sanders, others who believe that capitalism is the hands-down winner in making ordinary people rich, healthy and happy are also convinced that right now U.S. capitalism needs someone like him.

Perhaps none have made that clearer than the French bestselling economist Thomas Piketty, currently doing the media rounds in advance of the English version of his newest book, Capital and Ideology.

The Nobel Prize-winning Piketty himself was labelled a Marxist by opponents when he made a splash with his 2013 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century that some say accurately foreshadowed the populist win by U.S. President Donald Trump.

Piketty’s case in that book was that unless capitalism was adjusted in favour of the poor, we should expect a nationalist backlash by those who were losing out and blamed global capitalism for all their problems.

After years of state socialism, many buildings in Cuba are crumbling and the most vibrant parts of the economy are places where the free market has been allowed to operate. (Don Pittis/CBC)

To some critics, the movement in favour of Sanders is just a kind of populism from the other side, a sort of anti-Trumpism, to Make America Great by bringing down the evil rich.

The kind of ideology celebrated in books such as Winners Take All, by former New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas, has become a key part of the U.S. political opposition that supports Sanders.

Sanders ‘not radical’

There are plenty of credible U.S. economists who agree with the need for capitalist reform. But for dry, intellectual analysis of why capitalism needs the kind of metamorphosis that only someone like Sanders can provide, it is hard to find a better source than Piketty.

In advance of the English version of his new book, the economic historian did two fresh interviews this week, one on the business news service Bloomberg, and one by the Financial Times in the tweeted link below.

Financial Times

✔@FT

Thomas Piketty: why we need a radical new wealth tax https://on.ft.com/37iejGS 

Thomas Piketty: why we need a radical new wealth tax

The bestselling French economist talks to the FT’s European economics commentator Martin Sandbu about ideology, capital, and how to make societies fairer with taxes on wealth and inheritance

ft.com

73

Twitter Ads info and privacy
56 people are talking about this

“I think, first, that [Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth] Warren and Sanders are not radicals,” said Piketty in response to one interviewer’s question. “They are moderate social democrats by European standards.”

Looked at in historical terms, said the French economist, even by the standards of the U.S. — a country that in another era was the world leader in progressive taxation — raising taxes on the rich from their current low levels is hardly radical. History is filled with examples of ideological shifts away from inequality far short of revolutions that made countries’ economies stronger.

He offers the example of Sweden, which we now think of as a healthy social democracy. But as recently as the early 1900s the country was controlled by a wealthy elite, where only the richest 20 per cent had voting rights and where richer people got a greater number of votes. And he said the new Swedish ideology propelled the change with minimal economic disruption.

Piketty sees a parallel in the United States, where the poor and lower-middle class don’t vote because they know the government will inevitably only represent the better off. Perhaps a new Sanders-led ideology could change that.

‘Broad participation’ needed

Like many other economists, Piketty insists that, as happened in Sweden, sharing wealth more broadly will make the U.S. economy stronger, not weaker, and richer overall. He says the evidence from the past 30 years shows that the low-tax ideology that made the rich richer as a way of boosting the economy is “not convincing.”

“I think the level of inequality we have today is not only unfair but it is also not efficient for the working of the economy,” he said. “We need broad participation by a very large group.”

There is no question that Piketty is himself a socialist. He is also a believer in capitalist economics and sees no conflict between the two. But the type of socialism matters.

In Cuba, years of economic planning means everyone is now literate. Socialized medicine means life spans are equivalent to those in the United States at a tiny fraction of the cost. But it is increasingly clear that the only vigorous parts of the otherwise tattered economy are in places where market forces have been permitted to develop.

There is a palpable feeling of ideological change in the air. Perhaps, as in China, Cuba’s long period of relative equality will act as a platform for a market-based rebirth.

According to the Piketty model of economic history, a social democratic Sanders is also riding a wave of changing national ideology, one that will keep the capitalism motor running while sharing the wealth to make the entire country richer.

Whether a majority of U.S. voters will be comfortable with the kind of ideological shift that Sanders represents is yet to be seen.

Follow Don on Twitter @don_pittis

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 

Don Pittis

Business columnist

Don Pittis was a forest firefighter, and a ranger in Canada’s High Arctic islands. After moving into journalism, he was principal business reporter for Radio Television Hong Kong before the handover to China. He has produced and reported for the CBC in Saskatchewan and Toronto and the BBC in London. He is currently senior producer at CBC’s business unit.