We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore LappĂ©, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Saturday, March 8, 2014

Ukraine

by William Blum from his latest Empire Report.
When it gets complicated and confusing, when you’re overwhelmed with too much information, changing daily; too many explanations, some contradictory … try putting it into some kind of context by stepping back and looking at the larger, long-term picture.

The United States strives for world domination, hegemony wherever possible, their main occupation for over a century, it’s what they do for a living. The United States, NATO and the European Union form The Holy Triumvirate. The Holy Triumvirate has subsidiaries, chiefly The International Monetary Fund, World Bank, World Trade Organization, International Criminal Court … all help to keep in line those governments lacking the Holy Triumvirate Seal Of Approval: the IMF, WB, and WTO impose market fundamentalism, while foreign leaders who act too independent are threatened with being handed over to the ICC for heavy punishment, as the United States imposes sanctions on governments and their leaders as only the King of Sanctions can, lacking any sense of hypocrisy or irony.

And who threatens United States domination? Who can challenge The Holy Triumvirate’s hegemony? Only Russia and China, if they were as imperialistic as the Western powers. (No, the Soviet Union wasn’t imperialistic; that was self-defense; Eastern Europe was a highway twice used by the West to invade; tens of millions of Russians killed or wounded.)

Since the end of the Cold War the United States has been surrounding Russia, building one base after another, ceaselessly looking for new ones, including in Ukraine; one missile site after another, with Moscow in range; NATO has grabbed one former Soviet Republic after another. The White House, and the unquestioning American mainstream media, have assured us that such operations have nothing to do with Russia. And Russia has been told the same, much to Moscow’s continuous skepticism. “Look,” said Russian president Vladimir Putin about NATO some years ago, “is this is a military organization? Yes, it’s military. … Is it moving towards our border? It’s moving towards our border. Why?”

The Holy Triumvirate would love to rip Ukraine from the Moscow bosom, evict the Russian Black Sea Fleet, and establish a US military and/or NATO presence on Russia’s border. (In case you were wondering what prompted the Russian military action.) Kiev’s membership in the EU would then not be far off; after which the country could embrace the joys of neo-conservatism, receiving the benefits of the standard privatization-deregulation-austerity package and join Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain as an impoverished orphan of the family; but no price is too great to pay to for being part of glorious Europe and the West!

The Ukrainian insurgents and their Western-power supporters didn’t care who their Ukrainian allies were in carrying out their coup against President Viktor Yanukovych last month … thugs who set policemen on fire head to toe … all manner of extreme right-wingers, including Chechnyan Islamic militants … a deputy of the ultra-right Svoboda Party, part of the new government, who threatens to rebuild Ukraine’s nukes in three to six months. … the snipers firing on the protestors who apparently were not what they appeared to be – A bugged phone conversation between Urmas Paet, the Estonian foreign minister, and EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, reveals Paet saying: “There is now stronger and stronger understanding that behind the snipers it was not Yanukovych, but it was somebody from the new coalition.” … neo-Nazi protestors in Kiev who have openly denounced Jews, hoisting a banner honoring Stepan Bandera, the infamous Ukrainian nationalist who collaborated with the German Nazis during World War II and whose militias participated in atrocities against Jews and Poles.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on February 24 that Ukrainian Rabbi Moshe Reuven Azman advised “Kiev’s Jews to leave the city and even the country.” Edward Dolinsky, head of an umbrella organization of Ukrainian Jews, described the situation for Ukrainian Jews as “dire” and requested Israel’s help.

All in all a questionable gang of allies for a dubious cause; reminiscent of the Kosovo Liberation Army thugs Washington put into power for an earlier regime change, and has kept in power since 1999.

The now-famous recorded phone conversation between top US State Department official Victoria Nuland and the US ambassador to the Ukraine, wherein they discuss which Ukrainians would be to Washington’s liking in a new government, and which not, is an example of this regime-change mentality. Nuland’s choice, Arseniy Yatseniuk, emerged as interim prime minister.

The National Endowment for Democracy, an agency created by the Reagan administration in 1983 to promote political action and psychological warfare against states not in love with US foreign policy, is Washington’s foremost non-military tool for effecting regime change. The NED website lists 65 projects that it has supported financially in recent years in Ukraine. The descriptions NED gives to the projects don’t reveal the fact that generally their programs impart the basic philosophy that working people and other citizens are best served under a system of free enterprise, class cooperation, collective bargaining, minimal government intervention in the economy, and opposition to socialism in any shape or form. A free-market economy is equated with democracy, reform, and growth; and the merits of foreign investment in their economy are emphasized.

The idea was that the NED would do somewhat overtly what the CIA had been doing covertly for decades, and thus, hopefully, eliminate the stigma associated with CIA covert activities. Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, declared in 1991: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

NED, receives virtually all its financing from the US government ($5 billion in total since 1991), but it likes to refer to itself as an NGO (Non-governmental organization) because this helps to maintain a certain credibility abroad that an official US government agency might not have. But NGO is the wrong category. NED is a GO. Its long-time intervention in Ukraine is as supra-legal as the Russian military deployment there. Journalist Robert Parry has observed:

    For NED and American neocons, Yanukovych’s electoral legitimacy lasted only as long as he accepted European demands for new “trade agreements” and stern economic “reforms” required by the International Monetary Fund. When Yanukovych was negotiating those pacts, he won praise, but when he judged the price too high for Ukraine and opted for a more generous deal from Russia, he immediately became a target for “regime change.”

Thus, we have to ask, as Mr. Putin asked – “Why?” Why has NED been funding 65 projects in one foreign country? Why were Washington officials grooming a replacement for President Yanukovych, legally and democratically elected in 2010, who, in the face of protests, moved elections up so he could have been voted out of office – not thrown out by a mob? Yanukovych made repeated important concessions, including amnesty for those arrested and offering, on January 25, to make two of his adversaries prime minister and deputy prime minister; all to no avail; key elements of the protestors, and those behind them, wanted their putsch.

Carl Gershman, president of NED, wrote last September that “Ukraine is the biggest prize”. The man knows whereof he speaks. He has presided over NED since its beginning, overseeing the Rose Revolution in Georgia (2003), the Orange Revolution in Ukraine (2004), the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon (2005), the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan (2005), the Green Revolution in Iran (2009), and now Ukraine once again. It’s as if the Cold War never ended.

The current unbridled animosity of the American media toward Putin also reflects an old practice. The United States is so accustomed to world leaders holding their tongue and not voicing criticism of Washington’s policies appropriate to the criminality of those policies, that when a Vladimir Putin comes along and expresses even a relatively mild condemnation he is labeled Public Enemy Number One and his words are accordingly ridiculed or ignored.

On March 2 US Secretary of State John Kerry condemned Russia’s “incredible act of aggression” in Ukraine (Crimea) and threatened economic sanctions. “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pre-text.”

Iraq was in the 21st century. Senator John Kerry voted for it. Hypocrisy of this magnitude has to be respected.

POSTSCRIPT: Ukraine’s interim prime minister announced March 7 that he has invited the NATO Council to hold a meeting in Kiev over the recent developments in the country. “I invited the North Atlantic Council to visit Kiev and hold a meeting there,” Arseny Yatsenyuk said during a visit to Brussels, where he met with NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and EU officials. “We believe that it will strengthen our cooperation.”
Notes
  1.     Guardian Weekly (London), June 27, 2001
  2.     RT television (RT.com, Moscow/Washington, DC), March 1, 2014
  3.     Deputy Mikhail Golovko, RT, March 1, 2014
  4.     RT, March 5, 2014, “The EU’s Ukraine policy and moral bankruptcy”; the      phone conversation is believed to have taken place February 26.
  5.     NED 2012 Annual Report
  6.     Washington Post, September 22, 1991
  7.     Victoria Nuland, speaking at the National Press Club, Washington, DC, December 13, 2013
  8.     Washington Post, September 26, 2013
  9.     “Face the Nation”, CBS, March 2, 2014 

Bring on the oligarchs! Ukraine drafts in its super-rich tycoons to help curb unrest in Russian-speaking east

Click here to access article from the Daily Mail Online (Britain).

The Empire's new regime in Ukraine is recruiting the rich and super-rich to take over their top government offices. Obviously, this is an ancient practice--it's called "to the victor belongs the spoils". Of course, having been guided in their quest for power and wealth by their Western counterparts who appreciate the value of good public relations, they offer a nicer sounding justification:
It is hoped that their influence and self-interest in preventing further conflict could help curb separatist tensions among pro-Russian activists in the region.

Brainwashed: The Indoctrinated West

Click here to access article by Andre Vltchek from CounterPunch.

Is this merely another rant? Or, is it an impassioned plea to wake up from the stupor induced by the megaphones of Western corporate propaganda? You decide. 

Fracking is the death spasm of a defunct economic order

Click here to access article by Paul Mobbs from Ecologist. 

This environmental consultant is growing in his awareness about the contradictions imposed by finite limits in our planet in relation to the economic system of capitalism. (Although, he doesn't name the system.) Also, in discussing his new awareness, he seems to be having difficulties keeping conventional thinking audiences with him.
The real problem is economic growth and consumption within a finite environment. It's only by changing the economic process [system?] itself, to adapt to the ecological limits acting upon the human system, that we can tackle the inter-related issues of resource depletion, climate change and ecological degradation.

Friday, March 7, 2014

Manifesto 2014

Click here to access article by the Greek collective writing for their website Eagainst.

Writing from a nation that is feeling the boot of neoliberalism stomping on their lives, people in this Greek collective have awakened from this nightmare to create a radically different vision for their future. Although the piece suffers a bit in its translation into English and from a format that does not favor reading via computer, it offers much inspiration in these dark days of capitalist rule. Here are a few samples:
...we reject the contemporary global political infrastructure, the concentration of power in the hands of the few which reproduces and perpetuates poverty, inequality and injustice in all areas, leading inevitably to violence and dissolving any bond of social solidarity. The existing political system of liberal oligarchies deprives humanity as it measures every human value in profit (the only dominant value) destroying every spirit of friendship.

...we propose to replace all of
[capitalist] institutions...[with] political bodies that will allow all citizens to participate in the making (and taking) of decisions concerning public life, popular assemblies in squares, municipalities, workplaces (schools, factories, universities). Equality, friendship, solidarity and human creation for us should be a key objective of these new institutions.
One sentence that is especially impaired by translation into English is this:
The entire bureaucratization for our lives is characterized by the sheer totality of capitalist (and every heteronomous) imaginary that embraces every aspect of human activity and condition.
 I think that a better way to express this is: 
Our lives are shaped by the ruling class's ideological control that is pervasive throughout all institutions.

US, China ready to each assert power in Pacific

Click here to access article by Naoya Yoshino and Gakku Shimada from Nikkei Asian Review. 

You may have forgotten about "Obama's pivot" to China in all the turmoil going on in Ukraine, but the Empire's directors have not.
Updating its global strategy, the U.S. Defense Department announced the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) on Tuesday, which calls for deploying more naval vessels to the Pacific.
On Wednesday, the Chinese government unveiled a record defense budget for 2014. The country is steadily building up its military strength to counter the U.S. military's "pivot" to Asia and to forge a relationship of equals with the U.S.
Oh boy, ain't life grand? Now we can look forward to more tension--as if we didn't have enough already to worry about. Well, as long as you have capitalist ruling classes vying for control over markets, resources, and cheap labor to support their addictions to wealth and power, what else could you expect?

Banks speculate on raw materials and food

Click here to access article by Eric Toussaint from the Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt. 

I hesitated in posting this article because of it requires considerable knowledge about investing that ordinary people do not have. Also, many of its references are in French. Nevertheless, one with some knowledge of investments can glean a lot of information on how large financial institutions can and do cause considerable social pain while serving the interests of the capitalist class in general. You will learn that...
...the commodities market is a narrow market. Institutional investors such as pension funds, need only allocate 2% of their assets to overwhelm the system.
And:  
The price of commodities on the futures market has immediate repercussions on the current prices of these goods.
And Toussanit follows this with numerous examples.

By the way, for people who are less knowledgeable about the investment world, I highly recommend that you follow Pete Dolack's blog entitled Systemic Disorder. He is a journalist by training; but understands a lot of the more obscure investment concepts and market operations, and can explain them in language ordinary people can understand.

Thursday, March 6, 2014

Snipers Are Commonly Used as “False Flag” Terrorists

Click here to access article from Washington's Blog.

Although he doesn't name the source behind such nefarious projects, this blogger has noticed the same phenomenon, snipers, being used in past regime-change projects. He examines their use as a part of a broader category of false flag actors who engage in violent actions in order to discredit, disrupt, and destroy anti-ruling class movements as well as regimes. If you examine closely the examples he provides, you will find that the Empire, the Empire's allies and agents, and/or its neoliberal agenda are supported in each case.

There is also a lot of evidence which suggests that in relation to governments the Empire's regime-change agents look for opportunities to extend their neoliberal empire that meet all these requirements: 1) significant popular dissent with a government as evident in protests, 2) the present targeted government functions either independent of the Empire's neoliberal agenda, doesn't adequately support such policies, or actively opposes them, and 3) the existence of Empire agents in the targeted country: CIA agents, NGO networks functioning in support of neoliberal policies, right-wing organizations and figures that can be recruited to serve Empire actions.

Then in an advanced stage of the regime-change process, the use of snipers to create panic, terror, and backlash against the targeted government becomes an effective weapon.

The current protests in Venezuela meet all the above criteria and if Empire agents can achieve more success in escalating the crisis, be on the lookout for the use of snipers to accelerate regime-change in that country.

Aid for the Ukraine “Will Be Stolen” – Former Ukrainian Minister of Economy

Click here to access article by Wolf Richter from his blog Testosterone Pit. 
Secretary of State John Kerry jaunted to Kiev on Tuesday and offered the newly installed Ukrainian government $1 billion in aid. EU Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger announced the same day that the EU would help the Ukraine pay its gas bill of about $2 billion, owed Russian state-controlled Gazprom. On Wednesday, the rest of the EU aid package was announced: €11 billion, contingent on the Ukraine’s inking a deal with the IMF and implementing tough reforms. The IMF is still working on its own aid package.
As always, it’s about preventing a default during which bondholders and lenders, including numerous Western banks, hedge funds, and other speculators.... ...taxpayers in other countries will be shanghaied into bailing out these bondholders and lenders, but indirectly, under the guise of bailing out the Ukrainian people.

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Kiev snipers hired by new coalition, not Yanukovych - Estonian FM to Ashton

Click here to access leaked phone call between Estonian Foreign Minister and EU foreign affairs officer posted on Voice of Russia.

I'm not sure the leaked phone call proves that the Western backed coalition used snipers against protestors and policemen, but it certainly raises a lot of suspicions and questions that I'm sure will not be investigated. It also supports the information that William Engdahl recently received from his source. The following is part of what the Estonian official reported in the leaked conversation about his visit to Kiev as revealed in the 10:50m video.
"And second, what was quite disturbing, this same Olga [Bogomolets] told as well that all the evidence shows that the people who were killed by snipers from both sides, among policemen and then people from the streets, that they were the same snipers killing people from both sides," the Estonian FM stressed.

Ashton reacted to the information by saying: "Well, yeah…that’s, that’s terrible."

"So that she then also showed me some photos she said that as a medical doctor she can say that it is the same handwriting, the same type of bullets, and it’s really disturbing that now the new coalition, that they don’t want to investigate what exactly happened," Paet said.
About all she could respond with was a feeble "that's terrible" and "I think we do want to investigate, ...that's interesting."

Snipers have appeared in all the recent protests in Libya, Egypt, Syria, and Ukraine which I think is used to create panic, a climate of terrorism, and a backlash against authorities who are blamed.

The Libyan Bedlam: General Hifter, the CIA and the Unfinished Coup

Click here to access article by Ramzy Baroud from Uncommon Thought Journal.

Baroud evaluates another Empire engineered regime-change "success" story--Libya.
Libya is in a state of chaos, not because of some intrinsic tendency to shun order. Libyans, like people all over the world, seek security and stability in their lives. However, other parties, Arab and western, are desperate to ensure that the 'new Libya' is consistent with their own interests, even if such interests are obtained at the expense of millions of people.
See also Chris Nineham's discussion of  Horace Campbell's recently published book entitled Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya.
...by the end of the decade the Gaddafi regime was developing a foreign and economic policy that was more and more independent of the west as a response to the US’s problems and the growing strength of rivals. Libya’s links with China, Russia and Brazil were developing fast. At the same time, conscious that six of the ten fastest developing countries were in Africa, Gaddafi was also orientating politically and economically more and more towards the African continent. He was using the rhetoric of Pan Africanism and forging close trading ties particularly with other states that had recently discovered new mineral resources.

Faced with this evidence of stubborn autonomy, the US began to develop a second track to its Libyan policy by encouraging alternative leadership figures.

Mexican Protest Site Censored by GoDaddy — with the U.S. Embassy's Help

Click here to access article by Danny O'Brien from Electronic Frontier Foundation. 

After an extensive protest against GoDaddy in late 2011 the corporation appeared to back off from its support of SOPA, a bill introduced in Congress in October of 2011 which would have allowed the U.S. attorney general to seek a court order against a targeted offshore Web site that would, in turn, be served on Internet providers such as GoDaddy to disappear the website. There was such a storm of opposition against the bill that it was shelved. (See this, this, and this.)

But it appears that they will cooperate anyway with US authorities who, it turn, are cooperating with Mexican authorities by blocking a Mexican protest site.
The Mexican website 1dmx.org,,,was set up in the wake of a set of controversial December 1st 2012 protests against the inauguration of the new President of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto. For a year, the site served as a source of information, news, discussion and commentary from the point of view of the protestors. As the anniversary of the protests approached, the site grew to include organized campaign against proposed laws to criminalize protest in the country, as well as preparations to document the results of a memorial protest, planned for December 1, 2013.

On December 2nd, 2013, the site disappeared offline. The United States host, GoDaddy, suspended the domain with no prior notice. GoDaddy told its owners that the site was taken down "as part of an ongoing law enforcement investigation."

How a Libertarian Capitalist Became a Libertarian Socialist

Click here to access article by Chris Wilson posted on Films for Action.

This article provides a memoir of an interesting political journey on which the author traveled as described by the title. In the process he learns how the system of capitalism essentially forces people into acting certain ways, ways that he rejected and the system from which they sprung. 

Tuesday, March 4, 2014

An anti-pension billionaire shows the five rules of deceptive native advertising

Click here to access article by David Sirota from PandoDaily.

In order to fully understand this article, I had to go on a 30 minute pursuit of what "native advertising" meant. The article uses the term throughout, but hardly defines what it means other than to suggest it is deceptive advertising. After much searching, I gather that it means using another, more legitimate media content to hide an advertisement. Googling the term led me to advertising industry sites and other media sites that used a variety of jargon to explain what they were doing. Although not totally satisfactory, Wikipedia offered the best explanation that I could find.

Surely you must be aware that advertising technology which has long ago infiltrated all capitalist media, is no longer used merely to sell products. Such technology is also widely used to sell political ideas to serve the class that owns the media--the capitalist class. In this article Sirota lists five strategies that one billionaire has used to promote the slashing of public worker's pensions via public television (PBS).

Target: Ukraine – How Foreign Intervention is Tearing the Country Apart

Click here to access article by James Corbett and others from Global Research. 

The posting as a whole provides a good review and summing up of the Empire's destabilization project in Ukraine featuring the views of James Corbett, Prof Michel Chossudovsky, F. William Engdahl, and Dr. Paul Craig Roberts in a 12:34m video. Corbett's script is provided in the rest of the article. 

In the video Roberts' strongly criticizes the dangerousness of such a project and cannot understand why Empire directors have carried it out. Regarding the latter subject, it seems clear to me that the project was only a continuation of Empire policies to exert dominance over the entire world on behalf of their capitalist gang. Roberts himself acknowledges all the other actions against Russia that the Empire has pursued. And, of course, we are only beginning to see the same actions against China. So, this is only Empire business as usual in the competitive larger game of capitalist domination. It wouldn't matter in the long run whether this current dominant gang were to disappear--another gang would soon take its place threatening the world with global wars, many local wars, poverty for the 99 Percent and wealth for their One Percent. "It's the [capitalist] system, stupid!" to paraphrase one of our great presidents (sarcasm).

Regarding the project's threat of a major war, I don't share Roberts' views. However, this is only because of the current composition of the Empire directorate which consists of more prudent members. If this directorate were to be taken over by more right-wing sections, then we would be in deep shit. Also, if the existing directorate sees their Empire seriously threatened, we could see more aggressive and dangerous adventures. The odds of this happening are, in my opinion, quite high over the foreseeable future--unless, of course, if we, the people, can muster enough political awareness and guts to stop them.

What the 2008 Federal Reserve transcripts reveal

Click here to access article by Andre Damon from World Socialist Web Site.

The author has reviewed the recently released transcript of the 2008 meetings of the Fed’s policymaking Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) which reflect the deliberations of Fed officials concerning the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. 

The article provides an excellent review of how the ruling class, which is strongly represented in the Fed, saw what was happening and how they managed the crisis. From this review Damon reached this conclusion:
In all of the 1,500 pages of Fed transcripts from the fatal year 2008, there is not the slightest suggestion that the banks should be seized, broken up or taken over, and that those responsible for the financial disaster should be held accountable and made to pay for their crimes. The Federal Reserve, far from being an impartial arbiter, above the fray of social interests, is delegated by the capitalist state with particular responsibility for securing the interests of the banks and financial interests, covering up their illegal activities, providing them with the most favorable conditions to speculate, and bailing them out with public funds when their bets go bad.

Climate forecast for Australia: hot days, higher fire risk, more severe droughts

Click here to access article by Paul Farrell from The Guardian.

Extreme weather events seem to be occurring over all the world, but it seems that nowhere are they as frequent and extreme as in Australia.
“The duration, frequency and intensity of heatwaves have increased across many parts of Australia, based on daily temperature records since 1950, when coverage is sufficient for heatwave analysis. Days where extreme heat is widespread across the continent have become more common in the past twenty years,”....

Monday, March 3, 2014

Who's afraid of ruins?

Click here to access article by Out of the Woods's blog (a collective) posted on libcom. (Be sure to read another article by the same people immediately following this post on my website.)
Capitalism is locking-in climate change for centuries, but in the process, making radical social change more realistic than tinkering around the edges.

Goodbye to the future

Click here to access article by Out of the Woods's blog (a collective) posted on libcom.

The authors first construct a convincing argument that humanity, whose actions are mostly shaped by immediate rewards, is doomed because it is caught between a capitalist system that promises, and sometime can deliver (to some), immediate rewards while facing a far-off future of climate destabilization that requires immediate action but no prospect of immediate rewards. Having led us down the path to doom and gloom, the authors immediately launch into an argument (which logically follows) that we must support a utopian vision which can be constructed in the near future. 
To survive we must couple bleak reality with the utopian impulse. No Future, Utopia Now. Let us jettison the notion of gradual change. There is no time for a transition. Let us pledge ourselves unflinchingly to a utopia. Not a distant one, not an imaginary thrown out into the future, but one we can build right now. One in which work is all but abandoned, in which the liberation of every minority is a priority, in which collective well-being is the only ideology. In which the machines which previously worked against Earth and its inhabitants are turned into the mechanisms of their preservation and emancipation. 
Because capitalist ruling classes control all ideological institutions of society, I think it will take a "game-changing event" (or several) even more dramatic than 9/11 to get people to consider other alternative ways of living. I have little doubt that this will happen; but I fear that by the time it happens, it will be too late.

Ukraine: Secretive Neo-Nazi Military Organization Involved in Euromaidan Sniper Shootings

Click here to access article by F. William Engdahl from nsnbc. 

I don't normally post articles which provides political analyses based on private sources, but I make an exception with Engdahl. I have followed his writings over many years and found his views to be solidly based in reality. (Of course, no one is infallible.) Lending credibility to the views expressed in this piece is the fact that the US has a long historical record of such Gladio-type subversive actions. We have seen the Empire's use of snipers to create panic and terror in various countries in Latin America since the 1970s, and more recently in Libya, Egypt, Syria, and now Ukraine. It makes me wonder when we will start reading about unknown snipers firing on civilians in the currents protests in Venezuela.

Of special interest to me was his report and documentation of a news event that I previously saw referred to, but couldn't find any source for, last week: the fact of a negotiated deal between European leaders and Ukraine in the latter part of February following Asst. Secretary Nuland's infamous leaked remarks in early February.

Sunday, March 2, 2014

Jeff Bezos and the Imperial Paper

Click here to access article by Keane Bhatt from Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)

Following the purchase of the Washington Post by Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon Corp, Bhatt focuses on the role of the Washington Post to support the most secretive and imperial departments of the US government such as the CIA (with which Amazon has a contract for services), NSA, the Pentagon and all the imperial policies pursued by the government. But, hasn't the Washington Post along with other major media long worked in close collaboration with the CIA? (See this and this.)

He makes clear that the newspaper often goes against the views of its readers in support of imperial policies. This is hardly news to most politically aware people. It is old news. Way back in 1919 Upton Sinclair (Brass Check) exposed the role of newspapers and their rich owners in support of imperial and anti-union policies pursued by the government, their government.  

And, why only focus on the Washington Post? The latter along with the NY Times are the leading shapers of public opinion in support of ruling class interests. They lead in this endeavor and other mainstream media are expected to follow, and do follow to a lessor or greater extent. The myopic view as expressed in this article is typical of liberal outlets like FAIR in their critiques of ruling class policies and pursuits. 

Rich people like Bezos and corporations do not buy media to get rich--they are rich already. They want power, the power to influence people to serve their interests as a class which is probably the greatest power after a gun-to-the-head to get people to do your bidding. This ruling class has largely concentrated media in six corporations, and this will soon change to five with Comcast's intention of buying the Time-Warner media empire. This, of course, is true throughout the Empire.
This is precise why it is so urgent that we, the people, have our own media which can tell our stories for our benefit.

On the importance of keeping investors out of the newsroom, and not treating your readers like fools

Click here to access article by Paul Carr from PandoDaily.

This piece offers some very interesting tidbits about connections between a billionaire co-sponsor of Ukrainian regime change, Greenwald, and billionaire sponsored journalism in general.
Mr. Greenwald is a very popular guy on Twitter, with about 320,000 followers. And he has earned a reputation for bullying people who don’t share his views, frequently using his megaphone to launch unfair and frequently dishonest personal attacks. It will be interesting to see if he keeps this up at the $50 million news venture he’s starting that’s being bankrolled by eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar. – Christian Science Monitor