Non-Alignment and Dissent to Challenge US-Russia-China’s New World Order

Posted on May 26, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Gilbert Mercier

In groups of people there are always bullies who feel entitled, for no particular reason, to want more than the rest and to dominate the others in complete disregard of the common good. Fortunately for convivial people, bullies tend to have the psychological subtlety of dominant male gorillas who beat loudly on their chests and fight over food and females. Therefore bullies often annihilate each other. The more serious social problems occur when they collaborate to gang up on others. A primal impulse to dominate is the motivation for the insatiable quest for wealth and power, and it is a curse of the human condition. Altruism and the common global good are not why big world powers like the United States, Russia and China try to impose their rule on smaller countries; raw geopolitical dominance is the reason, and this is similar to the British, French and Spanish imperial-colonial era when countries were arbitrarily determined on maps drawn in London, Paris or Madrid. Our challenge is to break away, as countries and individuals, from the cynical and degrading notion, “to the victor belongs the spoils,” which seems to govern most behaviors. Our esteemed colleague Dady Chery initiated this important discussion in her essay, “Other People’s Countries.” To extract ourselves from the despair of corporate neocolonialism, courtesy of what looks like a new grand-bargaining era between the US, Russia and China, where other nations’ resources are assigned to spheres of influences, a two-fold solution should be considered: first, revamp the nonaligned movement (NAM); second, mount a concerted and systematic dissent, and ultimately a worldwide rebellion, against the global ruling elite apparatus.

Nonaligned movement redux

The nonaligned movement has to be understood in the context of the cold war. Even though most leaders of its founding nations were Marxists or neo-Marxists, the movement was clearly an effort to curtail the influence of the Soviet Union. The NAM officially started in Belgrade in 1961. It was founded by Tito, Nasser, Nehru, Sukarno, and Nkrumah, then the respective leaders of Yugoslavia, Egypt, India, Indonesia, and Ghana. The intention was for those countries, in joining forces with each other, to distance themselves from the spheres of influence of both the US and USSR. The nonaligned doctrine was probably best defined by a champion of the movement, Fidel Castro, who said that the organization’s goal was to guarantee “the national independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity, and security of non-aligned countries in their struggle against imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, racism and all forms of foreign aggression, occupation, domination, interference or hegemony as well as against great powers.”

The NAM still exists and includes 120 members, but it has largely lost its impact and forgotten its core ideology of presenting a united front against the dominant economic powers or permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). One can easily argue that the creation of BRICS, which includes the superpowers Russia and China, in addition to Brazil, India and South Africa, has helped to undermine the NAM. The reality that all NAM nations should consider from the recent events in Syria and North Korea, is that a triumvirate deal was apparently reached despite some unconvincing rhetoric of outrage, and that Russia and China, respectively, can throw their allies unceremoniously under the proverbial bus. One can easily speculate that Iran and Venezuela, both targets for regime-change by Washington, have learned their lesson and seriously doubt that Moscow and Beijing would valiantly rescue them from US attack.

US-Russia-China: corporate imperialism’s new world order

The Alternative Right in the West fancies itself as being nationalist and therefore anti-globalist. Its discourse is so sketchy and inarticulate, however, that it fails to acknowledge that one cannot be anti-globalist without also being anti-capitalist. Capitalism, and especially supra-national capitalism, is a problem that the AltRight movement seems unable to identify. In the ideological fog of the nationalist right, globalism is wrongly identified as being a leftist notion. After a succession of meaningless palace intrigues, the incidental tenant of the White House has become an empty suit tailored from the flag of corporate imperialism. Gone are the vague populist promises of less US interventionism. A father-figure to represent the common man, a mad-dog general, and an oil-man diplomat have been given carte blanche by the military-industrial complex.

What deals were made with Russia to greenlight the April 7, 2017 US missile strike in Syria? Could it have been: if you promise to lift the economic sanctions, we’ll let you bomb Bashar al-Assad to boost Trump in the polls and, to sweeten the deal, Exxon will get favored treatment in Russian oil-extraction ventures. The US no longer philosophically clashes with China and Russia. Despite their communist heritage, the latter have more or less scrapped any remotely Marxist principle from their governing ideology. Just like in the West, Russia and China have their class of oligarchs. As long as all the world’s elite agree on how to carve the global pie, there’s no reason to fight. In recent weeks, the number of inquiries about World War III have skyrocketed on search engines worldwide. Is the fear justified or is this a psychological operation to force people into despair and submission? Would China retaliate against the US, Japan and South Korea if the US would break the taboo of using a nuclear bomb against China’s ally North Korea, or would Russia risk World War III in case of a joint attack against Iran by the US and Israel? Probably not.

The virtue of dissent and rebellion

Superpowers tend to call independent nations “rogue.” This is the spirit of nonalignment. Once in a while, a small nation like Cuba or Vietnam dares to give an imperialist geopolitical bully like Spain, the US, Japan, or France a bloody nose. Bullies fear even the slightest resistance. The little guy does have a chance, against all odds. Oppression can be overcome. The fear of war, and continuously fabricated threat of terrorism in everybody’s daily life, is a good way for government to get a society to accept policing and militarization, and continue to feed the voracious beast that is the global military-industrial complex. The state and corporate controlled media’s various flavors of propaganda serve only to induce passivity and the acceptance of a brutal world order. These can only be overcome with dissent, global rebellion and the refusal to become shadows of what we once were; the refusal to become humans without basic decency, self respect and love for our neighbors; the refusal to become humans without quality; the refusal to settle for survival in a cannibalistic world order.

Gilbert Mercier is the author of The Orwellian Empire. Photograph one by Thomas Ricker; photograph two from the archive of Zeinab Mohamed; composites three and five by Mark Rain; photograph four by David Shankbone; composite six by New 1lluminati; and photograph seven by Joe Brusky.

The Continuing Decline of McDonald’s

Posted on April 26, 2017 by Reid Mukai

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By James Corbett

Source: The Corbett Report

Long-time Corbett Reporteers might recall my 2015 video, “Celebrate! McDonald’s is Dying!” where I detailed the many, many woes the fast “food” giant was dealing with at the time, including:

The first quarterly loss in the firm’s 38 years as a publicly traded company ($343.8 million).
Its first full-year loss ($186 million) in Japan in 11 years.
A 58 cent per share drop on the back of a global comparable sales drop of 3.3%.

Since then, McCancer’s has been undergoing a sweeping “restructuring” that has seen many layers of lipstick slapped on their factory-farmed pig. This restructuring includes not only cosmetic changes (“All-day breakfasts and new value menus for everyone!”) but behind-the-scenes efforts to trim $500 million from the company’s operating expenses, including buyouts and layoffs at company headquarters and the re-franchising of 4,000 corporate “restaurants.”

The global giant’s influential PR machine has used sleight-of-hand and other tricks to make this restructuring look like a smash success. They used their cheerleaders at the Wall Street Journal to hype “stronger-than-expected” profit and sales figures and their boosters at US News & World Report to hype some highly-selective earnings comparisons suggesting that this “turnaround” is, to use the WSJ’s phrase, “sustainable.”

But one doesn’t have to scratch too hard to reveal the rusty reality beneath this PR paint job.

McPinkslime’s might have “beat expectations” for sales and profits, but beating diminished expectations is hardly a sign of booming business. Just look at the nuts and bolts of the Q3 2016 earnings report: Year-on-year revenue is down 2.9% and net income is down 2.6%. And keep in mind, those numbers are in comparison to the already-terrible 2015 figures.

And that “re-franchising” operation? It cost $130 million in pre-tax charges.

But don’t worry, everyone, they “beat expectations!” Pay no attention to the hemorrhaging corporation behind the curtain!

And now the latest sign of McDonteat’s global retreat (via Corbett Report member “BuddhaForce”): “McDonald’s gives up control of its China business in $2 billion deal.”

The story is fascinating enough in its own right, what with McDonteats throwing in the corporate towel on the largest and fastest-growing consumer market in the world. But the devil is, as always, in the details. Who is purchasing the majority stake in the company’s mainland operations? None other than The Carlyle Group and CITIC Group.

The Carlyle Group’s name will likely ring a bell as one of the largest ~~swamp pits~~ “private equity firms” in the world, and one with its fingers in many a pie, including, of course, 9/11.

CITIC Group, meanwhile, will be familiar to The Corbett Report faithful as a key player in “China and the New World Order,” a Chinese state-owned investment company that helped serve as the Rockefeller-Kissinger nexus between the Deng Xiaoping-era “capitalist roaders” and their western finance oligarch recolonizers.

That these two cesspools are converging on the giant turd of American fast food is fitting enough. The McDonaldization of China is proceeding apace, and the usual crew are there to profit from it.

But as to what this story says about the continuing decline of the once-mighty golden arches, there are two main takeaways to the story, one depressing and one positive.

On the depressing front, there is a simple reason for the across-the-board slowdown in fast food sales in recent years (despite the predictable attempts to overcomplicate the problem in clickbait-y listicle format). For once, the Wall Street Journal gets it right: It’s the economy, stupid. What greater rebuke to the easily-disprovable economic “recovery” nonsense of the Obama years could be possible than pointing out the simple fact that people are too worried about their economic future to splurge on a $5 value meal?

But on a positive note, we can take McFatfood’s woes as a sign that, try as they might with their considerable propaganda resources, the corporate chieftains can’t put their egg McMuffin back together again. People are fed up with fast food. And although some, concerned with cost, are turning to eating at home as the cheaper option, others are more concerned with what’s in their food, where it’s sourced from, how it’s being prepared and who is being paid for it. Who wants instant, nutritionless, food-like substitute rolled up in plastic and slapped down on a tray by surly, overworked servers (or, increasingly, robots) anyway?

For those interested in how they can take part in the real food revolution that will render the McFastfood economy obsolete, may I humbly offer this podcast on guerrilla gardening? Bon appétit!

Fake News: The Unravelling of US Empire From Within

Posted on April 5, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Prof. John McMurtry

Source: Global Research

Setting the Stage of the Press-President War

US ruling ideology and Washington power have become unstuck as never before. A war of opposing certitudes and denunciations is waged day to day between the long-ruling US corporate media and the White House. Both continuously proclaim ringing recriminations of the other’s ‘fake news’. Over months they both portray each other as malevolent liars.

US bully pulpits are now beyond show disagreements and successful media inquisitions of the past. Slanderous accusations long confined to vilifying the designated Enemy have crept into accusations of the President himself. ‘The Russians are coming’ is returning as the final recourse of smear to stop deviations from the global program of hugely profitable enemy hate and perpetual preparations for foreign war.

The ruling big lies of the US money party and corporate globalization have divided into opposing camps. The Press and the President denounce each other non-stop on the public stage, while US dark state agents take sides behind the scenes.

Fake news is the medium of battle.

Tracking the Real Fake News Built into Corporate Globalization

Beneath the civil war of official narratives, cognitive space opens for truth long suffocated by ‘the Washington Consensus’. Even the US-led G-20 has recently agreed not to automatically condemn ‘protectionism’ as an economic evil. The battle slogan of transnational corporate rule over 30 years has been quietly withdrawn on the global stage.

Is the big lie of ‘free trade’ finally coming to ground? It has long led the hollowing out of societies and life support systems across the world in a false mass promotion as “freedom and prosperity for all”. In fact beneath the pervasive fake news, a closed-door transnational corporate command system forces all enterprises across borders into a carbon-multiplying trade regime with thousands of rules to protect the transnational corporate looting and ruin of home economies and environments as the only rights enforced.

Propagandist names and fake freedoms are proclaimed everywhere to conceal the reality. The corporate-investor regime has stripped out almost all evolved protections of workers, ecologies and social infrastructures. Non-stop liquidations and roboticizations of local jobs and enterprises are reversed in meaning to ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’ and ‘higher living standards’, the very opposite of the facts. Destabilization and bombing wars attack resource-rich and air-defenceless societies outside the circle of treaty subjugation.

False news allows every step. Even the happy-face Trudeau regime is taken aback by the tidal shift to national priorities. Its ministers scuttle around the US in near panic to find common cause for restoring the unaccountable regime. Multiplying carbon, disemployment and ecological plunder are ignored throughout in the longest standing fake news of all –‘economic growth”.

In fact, there is no real economic growth in universal life necessities or reduction of waste. The only growth is of volumes and velocities of transnational money exchanges, foreign commodities, and private profits to the top.

‘More prosperity for nations and the world’ means, decoded, more transnational corporate-state treaties to deprive nations of their rights to organization and production for citizens’ real needs as well as organically regulated protection of environments and ecosystems.

The consequences covered over by pervasively false cover stories are speeded-up ecocidal extractions, permanent disemployments, and wastes hemorrhaging into cumulatively more polluted oceans, air, atmosphere and life habitats. Corporate-state solutions of carbon markets for pollution rights have nowhere reduced any of these life-and-death crises, but only further and selectively enriched transnational corporations.

As for the Obama solution, “we need more Canadas”, fake news again conceals the reality. Beneath the global celebrity hype covering empty and broken promises, Canada’s Trudeau regime is essentially a brand change of PM rhetoric to advance transnational corporate dictates as ‘free trade’ and to ensure oil pipelines out of the most polluting oil basin in the world, Alberta’s tar-sands, are built through water basins and indigenous lands across Canada and the US. One cannot help but observe this is Trump’s plan too, and overrides Trudeau’s promises to protect Canada’s first peoples.

I recently sent a letter to my local MP requesting evidence for what PM Trudeau promises over months of repetition that “more free trade” means “a better life for those in the middle class and those wanting to join the middle class”. As always, there is no evidence to support the non-stop false news from the PMO. Revealingly, the “middle class” turns out to be people making $180,000 a year slated to get significant tax cuts.

Trump’s rogue elephant charge on Washington-led lies, war, and dispossession of the working class is no solution to life-blind corporate globalization. Trump in office is a US nationalist oligarch commanding policies even more blindly rapacious in despoliation of the environment and transferring far more public wealth to the rich.

The common ground of all our lives, collective life capital, does not exist for any government in ‘the free world’ or any policy of ‘globalization’. The lies that must be promulgated to advance the private corporate agenda are built into its transnational command system from the beginning.

Out of the Ruling Memory Hole with the Internet Commons

Joining the dots shows that every step of US money-party ‘globalization’ has, in fact, been driven by fake news.

No corporate media tolerance has been given in a quarter of a century to any voice demanding accountability to the common life-ground of citizens. A new game of numbers has proceeded instead. At most, a euphemistic ‘climate change’ has been endlessly debated while the totalizing destabilization of human and planetary life cycles remains without a name or collective response. Only more profitable market panaceas which do not reduce any pollution continue to divert from the deepest degenerate trends destroying the planetary life host.

On the upside, the big lies of ‘free trade’ and ‘humanitarian wars’ have been called into official question for the first time by the Trump presidential campaign, and he has been elected against the official line. Yet opposing camps are still at each other’s throats. So the perpetual fallback on accusing the long-designated foreign enemy is triggered by the fallen establishment. The fake news chorus of Russia’s aggressions now includes collusion of the Trump administration with its officials to win the US election. This mainspring diversion from reality is called back from the dead witch-hunts of the past. As then tool, facts do not count, only accusations do. The official media line is almost predictable: Russia is behind Trump’s election victory. As always, reverse projection is the mass-psyche operation to blame an official Enemy to divert attention from the life-and-death facts. The Enemy is once again accused of doing what the US has always done worse as the reason for attacking It. Russia is the usual placeholder in this reverse-blame operation. The 2016 US election of Trump is the latest variation.

Meanwhile throughout the election and its aftermath, the new transnational internet commons including Wiki-leaks over a decade has increasingly laid bare the greatest propaganda machine in history now in many-leveled crisis. The long normalized half-truths, one-sided slanting of the facts, and non-stop fallacies of inference are coming out into the open as never before. The pretexts and lies for US imperial bullying and war are exposed beyond any corporate-media gate.

This time the accusation is “interference and attack on the US presidential election” with no evidence of wrongdoing or vote manipulation whatsoever. Yet as in the long past, the method is smear with no evidence for the accusations. Ever more media repetition and shadowy insinuation does the job. It has always worked before, why not again since all the other media buttons pushed on taking down the Trump peace initiatives with Russia and opposition to globalization of US jobs have failed.

Having wondered during the election campaign whether we could be “friends with Russia” and promoted diplomatic relations into his administration, Trump can be named as the enemy in hiding to be rooted out. The real problem the fake news never mentions is that he threatens the cornerstone of the US war state over 70 years.

So when Trump won the election with his heresy still intact, the ever-ready accusation of evil-Russia connection moves into high gear although the target is the opposite of communist and an epitome of capitalist riches and connections. We see here the historical mind-lock compulsion to blame the Enemy Russia and smear whoever dissents from it, even if it is a bully-capitalist president. There are very big stakes in keeping the game going.

Yet the no-profit and unpaid analyses from the internet commons have no such ulterior motive and interest in false accusations. With more objectively informed analysts than the commercial press and unimpeachable facts like WikiLeaks going to tens of millions of readers across the world, the genie is out of the bottle. The official grand narrative and its normalized big lies are coming apart at the seams.

So blame as usual is diverted onto the accepted Enemy, now conniving with Trump to attack the 2016 US presidential election. Beneath the fake news, the fact is that positive diplomatic relations with Russia not only threaten to stop the highly profitable permanent war against it, but spike the longest pretext for US war and military domination now moving through Ukraine.

The free internet commons cannot be gagged for telling the truth. Freedom of speech in the US cannot be openly stopped without fatal loss of legitimacy of rule.

So the rest follows. All the non-corporate and non-profit messages from the critical sites on the internet commons which are speaking against the US war state inside are now vilified as ‘fake news’. A third, unofficial protagonist has entered the battle with no private profit or career motive or corporate boss to serve and a wealth of proven professional knowledge and talent at work. It has to be denounced to sustain the big lies of the ruling money-war game which is in deepening crises and conflicts all the way to the unprecedented US President-Press civil war.

The Harvard Proclamation of a New Memory Hole

The innermost fount of US ideology and war, Harvard University, has now stepped in. It is officially naming and denouncing US-critical internet sites for ‘fake news’.

Not even the medieval Church went so far in its Index Librorum Prohibitorum of prohibited writings. It was at least innocent of scientific method and openly declared its dogmas. Not Harvard.

Underneath notice, all the sites it attacks are internet commons, and none are financed by private corporate donors and captive institutions while Harvard and the corporate media are. This is the real battle agenda underneath, the long war to privatize the news for profit as everything else with anti-establishment internet criticism now the target.

In the background, Harvard University has long propagated an unexamined academic method. It normally cuts off any faculty or learned source of opposition to the private corporate rule of America and the wars of aggression to impose it on the world. Accordingly, the underling grand narrative equations of the US is Good and the designated Enemy is Evil is not questioned. It is presupposed. Malevolent motives are always assumed of the designated Enemy, down to Harvard-produced geostrategic economic and war models. So when a host of internet commons sites challenge the grand narrative framework, Harvard and satellites denounce them to stop people reading them. A long list of critical sites is accused without criteria, proof or evidence as all spreaders of ‘fake news’.

What is not recognised here is that only on the internet commons can the process of truth be free from ruling pressures to control message for external sponsors.

Here there is no commercial-profit condition to speak and write, and no livelihood dependence on private profit. There is no inducement to avoid life-and-death issues in academic obfuscation or ad-vehicle style. Internet authors not on the payroll can be free of the game of all games behind the scenes – enriching the rich further with no life-coherent criterion of truth.

These underlying conditions of the internet commons and free speech itself cannot be recognised by the academy or the corporate press without undercutting their proclaimed status as the only legitimate founts of truth. The internet commons is a new world of competitive capacities to research, understand and disseminate not bound by private money patronage (as over centuries in Harvard University).

When challenged in this way, Harvard (and the official press) are set back on their heels. They cannot think the facts through because their instituted presumptions have long been what they must presuppose and not question to acquire their credentials and pay for public speech. They must attack what calls all this into question if it effectively speaks truth to power to expose or de-legitimate the ruling system narrative as false. Harvard and the US press thus follow the reigning method of reverse projection. They accuse the effective opposition of ‘fake news’.

The most revealing fact here is that Harvard authority as other academic administrations proceed in name-calling without any valid argument or demonstration – the very basis of reasonable conclusion. Yet this is such a long tradition of presumptive accusation allowed against anyone designated as the Enemy, and anyone else exposing the falsehood of the ruling US story of moral superiority over all others and God’s blessing to lead the world by force or money.

This is why only dissenting sites from the official storyline of US freedom and rightness in all things are accused as ‘fake news’. Accusation of opposing positions is so well-worn into conditioned brains that endless repetition locks it in as self-evident. This is why attributions of vile motive are automatic from Harvard or the New York Times for any outside leader opposing US interference in their countries including elections. US hypocrisy here is staggering, but unreported. In fact, Harvard’s life-blind elite of war criminal geo-strategists, economic modellers and so on are fawned upon within the wider corporate rule they serve.

None can engage critical facts and thought challenging the US moral superiority assumptions because they have never been required to consider them. So they denounce them as once the Church denounced apostasy. In the end, US system worship is a war-state religion. It eliminates all enemies to its right to rule. Its globalizing system institutes the market laws of God. War crimes are God-blessed justice.

Freedom of Speech, the Process of Truth, and the US Constitution

Led by senior academics, journalists and technical expertise, the internet commons provide for the first time impartial witness and free speech open to public examination and circulation across borders. They are free from corporate-rank dictate and private copy-right control.

In consequence, the internet commons are liberated from private corporate profit as controlling goal. Those who know what they are talking about can speak truth to dogma and power without words to appease editors, business boards and ad revenues. Truth itself is not defined, but its principle of process is a more inclusively consistent taking into account towards life-coherent conclusion

Despite Google black-holing of radical legal facts, CIA penetration of Wikipedia, and so on, the internet commons’ freedom of speech is far beyond anything guaranteed in the US constitution. In fact, the ‘sacred US Constitution’ that all presidents give oath to “preserve, protect and defend” guarantees in the end only freedom of public speech to private money demand.

Long before the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision reverse-titled as “Citizens United”, the US constitution was structured to one overriding end – to remove prior limits to private-money right over all else, including to begin, the rule of British law and the lands of the first nations West of the Appalachians.

This is why no common life interest exists in the US Constitution from the start. People’s universal human life necessities of water, food, protection and liveable environment are ruled out a-priori. This is why civil rights themselves were first federally enforced by the ‘commerce clause’ protecting freedom of commercial bus passengers including blacks to cross borders.

It is also why the Fourteenth Amendment to protect the equal rights of freed slaves ended up being the legal basis for private-profit corporations and wealthy funds to acquire the constitutional rights of living persons (e.g., to freedom of speech for big money to buy elections and to avoid government access to financial records).

Even the iconic rights of “life, liberty and happiness” turn out to be in fact only private market rights which allow corporate ‘fictive persons’ to unlimited money wealth, protection against public redistribution, and the freedom of private wealth alone to speak to America by buying corporate self promotions and election attack ads.

The US Constitution fix goes all the way back to 1787. As professor of constitutional law at Chicago’s iconic Kent College of Law, Matthew Stanton, explains in personal correspondence:

“[The fix] goes all the way back to the 1787 coup where the 39 signatories to the Constitution sequestered themselves in a Philadelphia meeting house, with locked doors and shuttered windows, to ostensibly make adjustments to the Articles of Confederation, but instead delivered an entirely new document that enabled creating a federal system centralizing control of the economy by propertied wealth”.

Russia the Enemy: the Deus ex Machina of Fake News

We may recall that the corporate-press and Wall-Street-enriched candidate for the presidency, Hillary Clinton, started the accusation of ‘fake news’ to explain her defeat. As establishment mask of the politically correct masses with the money-war party as her paymaster, Clinton blamed her fall in the 2016 US election on the new enemy she saw arising against the official story and herself. When the ‘glass mirror’ story line did not take, she joined forces with the corporate media on another plane. ‘Fake news’ misled Americans. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the TV Networks, and other establishment tale tellers saw pay-dirt far beyond Clinton’s failed bid for president.

In fact, the corporate mass media were losing marketability by the escalating appeal of free social media. The once all-powerful press propaganda system has been increasingly deserted. The ‘fake news’ story provided a media base to condemn free internet news and commentary as immoral. The 2016 election became the leverage for a big market grab back.

Very soon it was not just ‘fake news’ to spike news cycles and subscriptions. War as peace and corporate globalization as freedom found its long place of rule – the enemy of Russia to blame. Now the news can be that Russia hacked and attacked the lost 2016 election. Russia may be a hollowed-out shell by global corporate and oligarch dispossession. But it can still continue as pretext for US-NATO war crimes and aggression reverse-blamed on it. As the European breadbasket and newly discovered fossil-fuel rich nation, Ukraine is a very big prize. Now in Ukraine’s US-led coup aftermath and ethnic civil war, evil Russia can be an ace card again to accuse for attacking the US election.

Since Russia led by Putin is drawing the line as in Crimea to support the Russia-speaking region against US-led war crimes under international law (documented in previous articles), all roads connect. “Russia’s uncontrolled aggression” is reverse-projected onto the victim again in a glorious new use. Reverse blame it for interference in the US election of Trump and kill Russia-US peace initiatives at the same time. No fact is required to verify the accusation, and no law broken is needed to insinuate treason of whoever relates with Russia’s officials in peace initiative. It can work even against an elected US president.

At the same time, the US’s own record attacking other nations’ elections and societies is thereby erased as well – continually orchestrating mass-murder and dictatorship to sabotage the electoral process from Vietnam and Chile to Ukraine in 2010 and Latin America social democracies since.

If it were a story of reverse projection by a mass-murderous psychopath, it would be too much to believe. Yet it now runs the US news cycle as the big story unfolding with no evidence of US illegality, force, or non-compliance with international law. The accusations run by themselves in US media culture and across the empire. So as 2017 Spring breaks, endless media insinuations of treason seep into the populace from corporate media sites across borders with backrooms and Congress setting up for another presidential inquisition.

It is interesting to observe two precedents. Past inquisitions were unfolded soon after Bill Clinton said in India, “it’s time to level up rather than down in global trade” and Richard Nixon founded the Environmental Protections Agency, stopped corporations from outsourcing US jobs, and made peace with China as Trump sought with Russia.

The ludicrous hypocrisy, factual vacuum, and war-drums of blame-the-enemy go into high-volume operation again, led by an attack-dog media against the elected US president whose only action has been to have business-like relations with Russia. Few observe the immense stakes of the US media and war establishments in this process. Cui bono? – who benefits? – is the question never asked.

What’s new? The perpetual red herring of ‘Russia aggression’ takes everyone’s eyes off the ball – including the continuing US-drone mass murder and ecological wars built into the Trump agenda. Canada’s oil and mining corps and big banks sneak behind the pervasive fake news with a smiling Trudeau front. NATO demands more money behind Trump now fulsomely praising what he earlier campaigned on as “obsolete”, as he has done with the CIA he also condemned. Those hoping for a new departure under Trump from the big lies and war crimes as normalized operations watch in a combination of horror and hilarity.

Who connects the dots? Beneath official notice, the ruling goal of US empire is blind to its consequences of human and planetary life ruin. It has to cover itself in false news to carry on. This is why fake news is not a temporary phenomenon of the Trump era. It is the necessary veil of illusion of an eco-genocidal system. The symptoms and trends are everywhere. But a US-led prism of false inversions of reality regulates consciousness, perception and reaction to ‘steer the course’.

This is true of both sides of the Trump divide, and also in corporate Canada as the US’s largest trading partner, branch-plant and resource cornucopia. What is new is that the ruling illusions are divided against themselves at the top of the US political and ideological system. The Trump phenomenon reflects the rupture. The US empire is in deep crisis from its cumulative destruction of social and natural life support systems. Its carcinomic multiplication of private money demand with no tie to the production of means of life is the reality beneath all the false news.

Nothing is life secure. The ‘global security system’ protects only money values and sequences through life hosts. Peoples everywhere compete to make it go faster to survive. The ruling concept of ‘economy ‘inverts the systematic depletion, degradation and despoliation of the life capital of organic, social and ecological life. Universal necessities of human and fellow life are stripped, polluted and wasted as ‘efficiencies’.

President Trump has gone into the political ring to fight it out with the political establishment on a nationalist capitalist level. He is losing money in the short term. But his program in office is completely eco-blind, and the opposing mass media follow suit. All they can focus on is demonizing normal relations with the official Enemy Russia. Meanwhile Trump has all but abolished the EPA and cut off all federal funding for restoration of the Great Lakes, the most important source of fresh water heritage on the planet.

These supreme crimes under international law are recognised by none on stage. In Canada, a Nazi progeny and neo-Nazi supporter of the violent coup and civil war in Ukraine is made Foreign Affairs Minister and hustles her connections throughout the US to keep the attack-Russia juggernaut going as in the past under a continuous barrage of ethnic prejudices and fake news.

The pattern is clear but unspoken. The Enemy Russia is the auto-pilot of fake news to divert from US and client leadership failure on almost every level. Relations of mutual respect with Russia’s ambassador are ‘collusion’ and taboo.

The Reality Beneath the Questions not Asked

How does disclosure of Hillary’s Clinton’s apparatus theft of the Democratic nomination from Bernie Sanders get blamed on Russia? The question is not asked. The Washington mass media and visible Congress focus instead on accused “collusion with Russia” with very big stakes in the new inquisition show. Suspicions without substance run free in the mass media once the designated Enemy is smeared onto the target, even if elected president.

Who knows that the US joined the armed forces of Britain, colonial Canada and Japan to crush the 1917 Russian Revolution on behalf of the Czarist autocracy and Western capitalism? More deeply, who names the governing objective behind all the shows of force and accusation over a century since? To be managed successfully, attention must be diverted from the facts of US-led war crimes and public looting within and without US empire proclaimed as ‘world freedom’.

The new President and his Exxon Secretary of State seek business-like relations with Russia. Very big powers are coming into conflict over business and war within the US empire. Big oil in both leviathan countries are pitted against the US Enemy-and-smear establishment which has long run the show with big oil formerly leading it. Now transnational big oil in the US and Russia are leading out of the blind alley of war against each other which has so totally failed to bring benefits to either side in the long term, and has almost reversed civilization.

The dots again are not joined. The completely counter-productive war against Russia to keep the US money-war state going is deepened by Wall Street. The falling price of oil is driven beneath notice by Wall Street which has successfully short-future-traded oil down to establish its money-printing powers by debt as supreme over its rival substitute, while diverting everybody’s attention from the greatest fraud in history still going. Observe that Wall Street remains untouched even from its multi-trillion dollar heist from public and pension coffers from 2007 on.

Blame Russia is the normal chorus which Wall Street benefits from as the ultimate leader of the ruinously anti-productive money-war system. It pays off so well to the money party in more public dollars appropriated by its control and issue of money debt for everything that exists; the pervasive military-industrial complex which never gets reversed even in the peace after the planned destruction of the ‘Evil Empire’; and the corporate mass media in front turning the fake news system over continuously to promote, idealize and divert from the global empire’s war and occupation powers. The neo-con and neo-liberal war strategists alike are built into the dark state as managers uniquely dependent on Russia as the Enemy.

So it is in all their self-maximizing interests to sustain perpetual accusations of some enemy’s evil as the great cover-up story of US empire and it inherited war-crime system. Joined to despotic local oligarchies, this axis dismantles ever more societies for corporate, bank and military plunder and jackal payoffs everywhere (including the academy). There is no limit or borders to the established system invasion, and all is at the expense of public treasuries and of life support systems across domains.

President Trump does not break the fatal ruling cycle. He demands that vassal states should pay for their US military protection, a new global extortion supporting new NATO oligarchies against change which accompanies his stripping of environmental protections to pay for more war powers. Trump behind his populist bluster is a paradigm example of instituted US capitalist greed and aggression. Yet the fact that hate of the Enemy is smeared even onto him for not hating Russia too reveals the ultimate pretext of the US-NATO war machine. Behind the US-led perpetual arms build-up, border threats and bombings of mostly innocents across the globe while blaming the terrorists for the horrors now built into the global ‘growth’ system is fake news as continuous cover story. The war-criminal drone mass murders continue on unnoticed. The bank looting of public wealth is instituted more broadly. The universities, health systems and public infrastructures are privatized for profit with no life criteria of outcomes.

Trump is dispossessing the American common wealth for big US money in line with the Reagan public-looting machine before him. It drained public revenues into a black hole of US debt, blamed acid rain on trees, and portrayed orchestrated mass murderers of socialists in Afghanistan and Nicaragua as ‘freedom fighters’. What has changed in the corporate media’s fake-news today?

Trump in office is the opposite of the anti-establishment candidate he promised to be. He wars on the US Environmental Protection Agency (its only collective life protective organization). He fractions corporate taxes in a giveway to the rich beyond Reagan’s $500-billion tax cut. He privatizes the public’s falling infrastructure for speculators and developers’ long-term private tolls, profits and control for private profit at taxpayers’ expense.

Who in the corporate media or Congress questions any of it?

The Trudeau regime to the north imitates the new massive scheme of privatizing public infrastructure. But it disguises it in terms of public investment in public goods. The big banks and speculators on both sides of the border are the winners whatever the corporate media and state cover story. The common wealth is sold off under pervasive fake news masquerading as responsible and for the public good. But the drive-wheel policy mechanisms for ever more dismantling of the living earth and redistribution of more public wealth upwards to the rich march on beneath conscious comprehension.

Trump does not hide the privatization for profit of America’s public infrastructure and stripping of public health and environmental protection policies once he has rising stockholder support in office. The Trudeau Liberal party masqueraded as the social democrat NDP in promising whopping public investment to win the election, but when in office lets the giant privatization boondoggle trickle out in sunny avoidance of the facts.

The monumental schemes of robbing the commonwealth at every level are led by slanted and selective reports through every step across ever more domains. But a constant across US empire is Russia the Enemy to justify it all. In the deepening life support crises of this ruling axis, Russia’s projected ‘attacks’ still lead the show.

The Life-Blind Moral DNA of US Rule

With no common ground but belief in God’s blessing over all nations and the greatest killing machine in history to enforce it, US ideology may seem to be a psychopathic rationalization writ large.

Yet the US national morality tale governs perception so that the a-priori life-blindness is not recognised even by philosophers. The US continues to be ruled at home and abroad without life-value ground or compass. So as the US-led global market system multiplies its demands on organic, social and ecological life systems, it moves inexorably towards a few multibillionaires with more wealth than 99% of the population, steering planetary depredation to ruin as freedom and growth.

How else would a global cancer system behave? Yet almost none recognise that this system overrides life requirements at every level. The reformer Trump selects for even more wealth and power to the home rich. He attacks evolved environmental research and regulations with no better alternative. He seeks to repeal Obamacare with no public option considered. His nationalist and cost-cutting program is essentially life-blind.

The baseline of crisis goes all down to the moral DNA of the US project and its evolved economic, political and ideological system. The innermost value driver is long presupposed without question by even US moral philosophers and social scientists as the first principle of their models. Atomic self-maximization towards more private money-value without limit is the meta-program.

In consequence, the ‘global free market’ the US leads and imposes has no feedback loops to protect human or planetary life against hollowing them out for transient commodities, private profit and wastes on every level. The ruling system is structured only to ensure more money demand and commodities to those who have money to pay. Any accountability to universal life necessities is ruled out a-priori from the US Constitution, ruling market doctrine, and received theories.

As I have commented in articles prior to his presidency, “Trump is America come to meet itself”. But the US cover story has not yet been decoded in its master functions of legitimation and idealization. What makes the eco-genocidal system acceptable to human consciousness is an ultimate story line and moral syntax that transforms it into heroic liberty, individualism and moral supremacy.

This moral syntax has been imprinted into US empire since its original revolution against Britain to invade the America West to the Pacific Ocean to appropriate and destroy all the life and life support systems of the developed first peoples there as ‘freedom’, ‘development’ and ‘self-defense’. What is required for the grand narrative’s success is to hide the reality of continuous eco-genocide by continuous false representations as the virtue and truth others fail to understand.

This first principle the justifying morality tale entails the second – that an alien Enemy must always be blamed for the system’s destructive attacks on barriers and resistance to it. Conversion of all life and life support systems to limitless self-maximization of the US system and its richest citizens then proceeds under cover of fake news with wars of acquisition and control represented as courageous and beneficent for all.

For-profit private corporations are the ever more empowered legal vehicles of this transnational system which is set to select for systematic self-maximization of the rich by all market, state and war means that can be constructed to enable it, starting with the US Constitution (as explained above). This set-point is built into the legislative, judicial and executive branches so that today the system outcome is a constitutionally ordered money-party control of all three branches of government as well as the funding systems of social sciences and philosophy.

Fake news in the widest sense provides a continuous cover story to mask and justify the underlying program which is not seen – the money-war party’s limitless take from life within and without the US that depends on a designated Enemy as perennial pretext to strip the US and global commonwealth against effective opposition or change.

Prof. John McMurtry FRSC is the author of The Cancer Stage of Capitalism: From Crisis to Solution and the three-volume study, Philosophy and World Problems, UNESCO Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), Paris-Oxford.

The Future of Crime

Posted on March 29, 2017 by Reid Mukai

(Editor’s note: This essay was originally published in G-Spot 14 Winter 1994 and later included in the anthology book Mind Invaders: A Reader in Psychic Warfare, Cultural Sabotage and Semiotic Terrorism [Home, 1997]. Though intended as speculative satire, aspects of it now seem eerily prophetic.)

By Stewart Home

Source: Stewart Home Society

In the nineteen-sixties a group of French radicals called the Situationists suggested that ‘freedom is the crime that contains all other crimes’. Things have changed a lot since then, although those at the top of the social heap still believe that the vast mass of humanity are simply cattle to be fattened and slaughtered. It sounds like a cliche, but it’s now ten years since 1984 and the hardware for our total electronic control not only exists, it is also completely obsolete.

The industrial economy based around railways, electricity and the car is a historical curiosity. Until recently, the technological innovations revolutionising society were centred on the generation, storage, processing and transmission of information. Today, we are witnessing the rise of a new technological revolution, a bioeconomy dependent upon genetic engineering, nanotechnology and neurocomputers. Obviously, the level of scientific, technological and cultural development within any given society dictates the types of crime that may be committed within it. Among nomadic tribes, the chief crimes are rape and murder. With the establishment of agriculture and the development of a class system, theft became the major concern of those who controlled the fast expanding, and increasingly bureaucratic, legal system.

A lot of would-be trendy magazines and tv programmes like to pretend they’re covering the cutting edge of crime by running features on computer hacking. Basically, what these people present as the future of crime is hi-tech theft, with cybernauts ripping off money from bank accounts and credit card facilities. When you think about it, this scenario isn’t so different from some farmer of three thousand years ago stealing his neighbour’s cow. A theft, is a theft, is a theft, despite the fact that the methodology of larceny is transformed by technological developments.

What isn’t being reported by the mainstream media is the way in which biotechnology, based on genetic engineering, is being used to boost the profits of multinational corporations as it simultaneously destroys the health of ordinary people. At its most simple, this consists of drugs like Thalidomide being prescribed to pregnant women in Brazil, despite the fact that Thalidomide is banned in Europe because it causes children to be born without limbs. Biotechnology gets even sicker when it’s combined with pre-existing forms of mind control based on psychiatric and electro-shock treatments.

While RoboCop and Terminator were presented to the public as futuristic scenarios, they portray a situation that already exists. The technology required to remake a man or woman, either psychologically or physically, has existed for years. This is where the future of crime really lies, because the police and intelligence services require criminal activity to keep them in a job. While biotechnology is being used to transform the bulk of the population into obedient slaves, the psychological aspect of such mass brainwashing works much more effectively when a minority of individuals are programmed to act as violent psychopaths. The passive majority already accept that the constant surveillance of both public places and cyberspace is fully justified to protect them from those maniacs who threaten the smooth functioning of a well ordered society.

A huge body of publicly available literature exists on CIA experiments such as MK-Ultra, which used LSD as a means of turning ordinary men and women into mind controlled zombies. A number of MK-Ultra test subjects were programmed to slaughter their fellow citizens. Everyone from Luc Jouret and Charles Manson, to Jim Jones and Mark Chapman, the bloke who murdered former Beatle John Lennon, is a victim of coercive psychiatry which transformed them from a regular guy into a murder maniac. During LSD sessions, these future killers were subjected to ‘psychic driving’, a torture technique which consists of revelations extracted under psychoanalysis being played back over and over again, via a helmet the victim can’t remove. In the future, virtually every piece of mayhem to gain widespread publicity will be the involuntary act of some helpless sap whose murderous antics were pre-programmed in a government institution.

Alongside increasingly sophisticated mass murder programmes sponsored by the security services and multinational corporations, there will be resistance from those groups who have already been criminalised for wanting the freedom to party. The Criminal Justice Act, now in force, makes raves illegal and worse is to follow. Fortunately there are still plenty of people about who want to defend themselves from this crackdown. In England, the resistance will be led by the London Psychogeographical Association, who will use games of three-sided football to free people from the shackles of dualistic thinking. Already, the state is preparing to outlaw football played on triangular pitches, with three goals, where a tally of the goals conceded reveals who has won. The shifting allegiances this game brings into play teaches people to break out of the dualistic system of thought that tricks them into becoming victims of the mind control techniques employed by the ruling class.

When three-side football is banned, which will certainly happen in the next two or three years, the London Psychogeographical Association will organise games in abandoned multi-storey car parks and the basements of deserted office blocks. Some games will be played for a full ninety minutes, while others will be broken up by the cops. Anyone arrested will have been told in advance to claim that they are Luther Blissett, a name which has been appearing mysteriously on buildings all over Bologna, Italy, in recent weeks. Some of those who are nicked during games of three-sided football will later reappear among their friends, and with great sadness they will be killed, to free them from the programming that’s destroyed their personality and will compulsively drive them to murder anyone who resists the state. This is the future of crime and it demonstrates that the Situationists were right. FREEDOM IS THE CRIME THAT CONTAINS ALL OTHER CRIMES.

Former World Bank Staffer Explains How Neoliberalism Is Destroying The World

Posted on March 28, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Dylan Charles

Source: Waking Times

More destructive than bombs, money has become the weapon of choice for the global elite, for the hidden hand of finance can plunder and conquer entire nations, assimilate whole cultures, exploit resources and rape the earth while forcing billions into poverty, all with the surprising stealth of pen-strokes and business contracts.

Neoliberalism is the economic and political philosophic driving force in the world today. It suggests that human progress is the result of competition, best expressed by an extremist version of unfettered capitalism, where privatization of profits and socialization of losses are acceptable ethics, regardless of human and environmental costs incurred along the way.

Neoliberalism is the killer plague of the 21st century. Neoliberalism is economic fascism. It is a criminal doctrine. Globalized neoliberalism privatizes public goods for private profit. Neoliberalism led by Washington with the shameful complicity of Europe has in the last fifteen years killed between 12 and 15 million people by wars, famine, deprived health services… forced refugees. Today a small world elite of corporate and Wall Street CEOs and selected politicians call the shots. ~Peter Koenig

First defined in 1938, its global implementation today is the product of the Washington Consensus of 1989 which describes a set of economic prescriptions for developing and crisis-wracked nations created by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the U.S. Treasury Department. It is a policy which relies on the creation of social and financial crises to distract and soften target nations and peoples, creating problems while providing the ‘solutions.’

At present, Mexico is on the brink of revolution, a direct result of the fallout of three decades of neoliberal policy.

It [Neoliberalism] finds that representative democracy has been perverted through fear, putting central political decisions in the hands of power groups with special interests.The social impact of this process has been devastating, with a polarized income distribution, falling wages, increased precarious jobs, rising inequality, and extreme violence. Health conditions have also deteriorated and disorders associated with violence, chronic stress, and a changing nutritional culture have become dominating. [Source]

Journalist George Monbiot describes neoliberalism as follows:

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.

Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve. ~[Source]

Economic hitman turned whistleblower, John Perkins, wrote in detail of his ‘boots-on-the-ground’ experiences in conquering third-world nations through economic aid and infrastructure financing in his seminal classic, Confessions of an Economic Hitman. He’s since been on a world crusade to expose the madness of neoliberalism, seeking redemption by connecting with many of the indigenous cultures he previously had worked to enslave and oppress.

In recent years, Greece has become a more visible victim of this policy as the IMF and the European Union have forced the people of this ancient culture into austerity and starvation as part of a plan of economic restructuring to force repayment of illegitimate debts to international bankers.

Speaking at The Delphi Initiative in 2015, economist, geopolitical analyst, and former World Bank staffer, Peter Koenig, explained the scourge of this political and economic philosophy and how it is destroying our world today.

What we are confronted with today is the globalization, and the globalization basically that we are living is like a fetish of the neoliberals. The neoliberals who want to reduce the world to one culture, to one set of values, all based on greed consumption and maximizing profits. ~Peter Koenig

Koenig also speaks of neoliberalism as the root of the type of endless global conflict we see today, including wars of occupation and their resulting terrorism, noting that the U.S. economy is now so dependent on military spending that if peace were to break out, our economy would collapse.

Although from 2015, Koenig’s message is critically important today as the world continues to wake up to the reality that our lives are in the hands of a small exploitative group of inhumane corporations and governments who will stop at nothing to control the resources which make life possible, including water, destroying any civilization that stands in its way.

Something Is Happening

Posted on March 4, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By William Hawes

Source: Gods & Radicals

SOMETHING IS HAPPENING HERE, but you don’t know what it is: Do you? No one knows, really, as this something is still evolving. As we look back to 2016, though, it is abundantly clear that history has awoken from its slumber. We’ve had a couple events in the West last year: Brexit and Trump.

Politically-charged, dynamic events (as Alain Badiou might define them) have been rare in the West since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the USSR. Capitalism made it seem as if neoliberalism was winning in the 1990s, even as the US wantonly murdered in Iraq and took perverse pleasure in helping to dismember Yugoslavia, among other things.

In fact, one could argue there have only been four notable Western political events in the post-Cold War era: the 9/11 attacks, the 2003 protests against the Iraq War, the 2008 banking crisis and following protest movements of 2011 (Occupy and 15-M Movement), and the populist, anger-driven aforementioned events of 2016.

You see, authentic, spontaneous political events (in the form of uprisings or popular revolts against the elite) are a no-no in the West. History is supposed to have ended, remember? Max Weber called this the Iron Cage, and for good reason.

Now, though, the meaninglessness and rootlessness of our lives trapped inside the cage have become too obvious to ignore, for most of us. As each day passes, our political discourse glosses over how lazy, ignorant, mean-spirited, and numb our society has become. We import luxuries from all over the globe, but can’t be bothered to cook or grow our own food, assemble our own electronics, expand renewable energy projects, provide clean water to inner cities, organize high-speed transport, or educate our youth without drowning them in debt, etc.

So, many have lashed out against the system, and our more vulnerable members of society, in anger, defiance, out of sheer ignorance. Could it be because, deep down, we know how helpless, sheltered, and out-of-touch our society is, compared to the rest of the world? What are the root causes of this disintegration of public discourse?

One cause is our utter dependency on the capitalist system to clothe, feed, and shelter us. What we used to inherit from our mothers and fathers, important agricultural knowledge, artisanal and cultural wisdom, a sense of place and belonging, have all been traded in for money, the privilege to be exploited by capitalism, toiling in jobs that alienate us from ourselves, families, the Earth. Paper bills and electronic bank accounts are a pitiful substitute for self-reliance. This loss, this grief, isn’t allowed to be expressed in public. Logical positivism tells us that progress will prevail, the future will be better than the past, and anyone who thinks otherwise must be some sort of Luddite.

Since real income has fallen and social services have been slashed in the last 40-plus years, many have seen their loved ones’ lives cut short (lack of access to health care and quality food and produce, air and water pollution), their dreams defiled (steady jobs gone, factories shuttered), their entertainment homogenized and dangerous (sports mania has become normalized, “Go Team!”, alcohol, painkiller, and opiate addiction is rampant), their hopes for the future shattered (community and public space swallowed by corporations).

There are those, as well, still too plugged into the system (both Trump and Clinton voters), too attached to their gadgets, to the hum of their slave-labor appliances, to the glow emanating from their screens. They will cry incessantly about the turning away of Muslims from flights, but there is only silence for the millions killed abroad by the US war machine. Mainstream liberals are just as likely as the meanest, most selfish conservatives to fall prey to emotional pleas, demagoguery, and pathetic attempts to see themselves as victims in this Age of Anger.

The urge to resort to the myth of a righteous, homogenous, “pure” social group, to denigrate the other, is strong in such dire, despondent situations. In America, though, material poverty cannot be said to be the only, or even the main causal factor, behind this return of nativism and tribalism. Rather, it is undoubtedly a spiritual malaise that has swept over the West. Ever since the rise of the Industrial Revolution, it has been technology which has provided the underlying weltanschauung for our culture. Sprouting from this, an inhuman and Earth-destroying morality has formed. Jacques Ellul explains:

“A principal characteristic of technique … is its refusal to tolerate moral judgments. It is absolutely independent of them and eliminates them from its domain. Technique never observes the distinction between moral and immoral use. It tends on the contrary, to create a completely independent technical morality.” (1)

Thus, Western society, through the use of mass-produced electronics and disseminated in what some call our “Information Age”, has now seemingly accelerated the pace of change and ecological destruction beyond the scope of any group or nation which could possibly control it. We are then confronted with the thought that only an economic collapse or series of natural disasters could possibly provide the impetus for revolutionary change to occur. This only leaves us feeling helpless, depressed, and passive in the face of government oppression and capitalist exploitation.

Not only that, but capitalism has quite literally dulled our senses and disconnected us from our source of being, planet Earth. Don’t believe me? Read this amazing paper on how Polynesian wayfinders discovered islands thousands of miles apart without any modern technology. This is part of what Morris Berman means by Coming to our Senses. To re-establish our unity with nature, the Western notion of an ego-driven, domineering and reductionist search for truth, meaning, and creativity must be thrown out. Here, Berman invokes Simone Weil:

“‘decreate’ yourself in order to create the work, as God (Weil says) diminished Himself in order to create the world. It would be more accurate to say that you don’t create the work, but rather you step out of the way and let it happen.” (2)

This isn’t really discussed among wide swaths of leftists, the social-justice crowd, or with mainstream liberals. It’s anathema to a materialistic, dead world where freedom has been traded for comforting lies, money has been substituted for the ability to provide for ourselves and our communities, and the abundance and resiliency (truly a miracle!) of the Earth is taken for granted as we chase our next fix for consumer goods, our next chance for drugs or gadgets to dim our perception.

What you’re not supposed to say in public, of course, is that our world is falling apart, and we are doing nothing to stop it. The reactions are too raw, the reality too grim, even as we know, for example, that 10% or more of the total species on Earth will be gone by 2050.

Yet we can do something: there is an opening now in political discourse which has been previously denied to us. The Republican and Democratic parties have thoroughly delegitimized themselves by offering up Trump and Clinton as their figureheads: these were widely considered the most widely disliked candidates in recent memory, if not the history of our republic. There is room for Libertarians, Greens, and Socialists to gain power: yet only if they avoid their own regrettable sectarianism, organize, and promote an inclusive, broad-based platform.

To do so, citizens will have to gain some perspective on their lives. A slow pace of life needs to be seen as a virtue, not a sin: many on the right and left are quick to denounce the hedonism of the jet-setting, parasitic globalists, the Davos men; yet refuse to see their own lifestyles and actions as smaller examples of such outlandish consumption.

If we are open to life and our environment as part of a greater whole, an unfathomable mystery, we can refuse our culture’s siren songs of death, misery, and destruction. While modern technology can be useful if reined in by an Earth-conscious, responsible morality, some things are better left unknown, undiscovered, if it risks destroying the Earth in order to find the answer. Rather than running a cost/benefit analysis to determine the land’s worth, some aspects of the planet and the universe are better Left Sacred.

Also, acknowledging our mortality, and accepting the basic fact that death could come for you at any moment, can liberate our souls and propel them to unimaginable heights. Joe Crookston explains this quite well:

“And then when I turn dry and brown
I’ll lay me down to rest
I’ll turn myself around again
As part of an eagle’s nest
And when that eagle learns to fly
I’ll flutter from that tree
I’ll turn myself around again
As part of the mystery”

Notes:
1.) Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society. Vintage Books, 1964. p. 97.
2.) Berman, Morris. Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West. Simon & Schuster, 1989. p. 337

William Hawes is a writer specializing in politics and environmental issues. His articles have appeared online at Global Research, Countercurrents, Dissident Voice, The World Financial Review, Gods & Radicals, and Counterpunch. He is author of the ebook Planetary Vision: Essays on Freedom and Empire. You can reach him at wilhawes@gmail.com

Why Today’s Neoliberal Global Order Is Incompatible With Democracy

Posted on February 13, 2017 by Reid Mukai

A new book by Jerry Harris explores the transformation of global capitalism and its implications.

By Bill Fletcher Jr.

Source: In These Times

In the years since the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR, the U.S. Left has sensed that something was morphing within global capitalism. This “something” was described more by its symptoms than by its essence, e.g., deindustrialization. In much of the rest of the world there was a growing awareness, however, that a particular form of capitalism was becoming dominant on a world scale, a form that came to be known as neoliberal capitalism or neoliberal globalization.

Jerry Harris offers his book, Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Democracy, as an instrument to better understand this transformation of global capitalism and its implications. Most of the book is devoted to helping the reader better grasp what Harris argues is the historical transition—underway—from capitalism centered around the nation-state to global capitalism. This work is successful, enlightening and engrossing. In the final two chapters, however, Harris shifts gears, laying the basis for a problem that I’ll discuss below.

The thrust of Harris’s argument is that since World War II, but especially since the late 1960s/1970s, capitalism, which as a system is always in need of expansion, has been evolving in such a manner that it transcends national borders. Contrary to theorists, such as the late Ellen Meiksins Wood, this is not a return to the era of high-level trade that marked the pre-1914 capitalist world (what some theorists have described as an earlier globalization). Rather, it is the emergence of an unprecedented interpenetration of capital on a global stage.

And with this interpenetration we start to see, over the last several decades, the rise of what has come to be termed as a “transnational capitalist class.” This class, as the name implies, is not rooted in one country but has assumed an identity that goes beyond specific nation-states. As Harris make clear, this does not mean that the nation-state no longer holds any importance—which is the thrust of the argument offered by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their famous work, Empire—but that the role has shifted significantly, to a great extent servicing and serving the needs of the transnational capitalist class.

This analysis clashes with more traditional arguments on the Left but it speaks to matters that the traditional analyses have been unable to explain fully. A case in point was the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. At the time of the 2003 invasion, much of the Left and the progressive anti-war movement argued that this was an effort, in effect, to recolonize Iraq under U.S. domination and seize its oil. In the aftermath of the invasion, however, something odd happened. Occupation forces opened Iraq up for business to global capitalism rather than reserve it for the United States alone.

The transnational capitalist class thesis has been caricaturized by some critics as suggesting that contradictions between nation-states have disappeared into a global class-against-class scenario. Harris takes on this idea directly and with a level of detail that, on those grounds alone, makes his work a must-read book.

Harris lays out his case in describing the development of global capitalism and the transnational capitalist class in the first three chapters. In chapters 4 and 5, he offers a marvelous examination of two concrete situations: Ukraine and China. With regard to Ukraine, Harris digs behind the headlines and looks at the class forces on both sides, the relationship that they have with capitalist class forces in other parts of the world, historic nation-state tensions and the wild card of right-wing populism and neo-fascism that is infecting both Russia and Ukraine. He examines the interrelationship of these forces in a situation—and world—that is undergoing a transition. And therein lies the key to understanding the transnational capitalist class thesis: It speaks to a phenomenon that is emerging and transitioning, rather than a phenomenon that is fully and totally developed.

Harris’ examination of contemporary China is just as illuminating and satisfying. Again, he examines the connections that the Chinese capitalists have developed with others in the transnational capitalist class, including the role of the Chinese State—ironically led by a party that calls itself “Communist”—in the integration of the Chinese economy into the larger global capitalist economy. Harris, along with other theoreticians of this school, argues that many—though not all—of the contradictions we are witnessing between China and the United States are a reflection of the efforts by Chinese capitalists, and their allies, to alter the terms under which global capitalism operates. In other words, the conflict is not a competition between traditional empires but, analogically, disputes within a gang.

Harris offers his book as both an analysis of the growth of neoliberal globalization and a cautionary note on the dangerous road that it has placed before humanity. Perhaps it is for that reason that his final two chapters examine alternatives to neoliberal globalization, including both failed alternatives as well as sources of hope. The problem is that this comes across as two different books. While it was clear that Harris was trying to get the readers to consider how to struggle against global capitalism and its tendency towards authoritarianism and barbarism, there was a missing transition.

Harris might also have been more successful had he integrated into his discussion a deeper analysis of the rise of right-wing populism (including but not limited to neo-fascism) in the context of neoliberal globalization. After all, right-wing populism posits itself as THE alternative strategy of neoliberal globalization. While Harris acknowledges right-wing populism at various points in the book, he tends to merge it a bit too quickly with other segments of the Right, including into what the theoretician Nicos Poulantzas referenced as “authoritarian statism” and what I have described as “neoliberal authoritarianism.” Drawing from Poulantzas, I would distinguish the movement towards authoritarianism by the so-called democratic capitalist state as not identical with the rise of right-wing populism, though the two tendencies can and do overlap.

Despite the abrupt transition, Harris’s discussion of alternatives is useful, though a bit of a distraction. In fact, I would argue that he should further develop his thinking on alternatives in a separate volume. And I would further argue that a deeper examination of right-wing populism in the context of neoliberal globalization deserves to be addressed by adherents to the so-called global capitalism school in order to flesh out their analysis.

Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Democracy is an exceptionally thorough and thought-provoking work. Very rarely, these days, do I use a highlighter when reading a book in order to remind myself of facts, points of interest or points of difference. In this case, the highlighter was with me till the end, with my knowing that I will return to this book as a resource for better understanding, as well as explaining, the development of global capitalism and its implications for the billions of people on this planet ravaged by it.

Bill Fletcher, Jr. is the author of “They’re Bankrupting Us!”: And 20 Other Myths about Unions and co-author of Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice. He is a talk show host, writer and activist. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook and at http://www.billfletcherjr.com.

Fuck Work

Posted on February 9, 2017 by Reid Mukai

Economists believe in full employment. Americans think that work builds character. But what if jobs aren’t working anymore?

By James Livingston

Source: aeon

Work means everything to us Americans. For centuries – since, say, 1650 – we’ve believed that it builds character (punctuality, initiative, honesty, self-discipline, and so forth). We’ve also believed that the market in labour, where we go to find work, has been relatively efficient in allocating opportunities and incomes. And we’ve believed that, even if it sucks, a job gives meaning, purpose and structure to our everyday lives – at any rate, we’re pretty sure that it gets us out of bed, pays the bills, makes us feel responsible, and keeps us away from daytime TV.

These beliefs are no longer plausible. In fact, they’ve become ridiculous, because there’s not enough work to go around, and what there is of it won’t pay the bills – unless of course you’ve landed a job as a drug dealer or a Wall Street banker, becoming a gangster either way.

These days, everybody from Left to Right – from the economist Dean Baker to the social scientist Arthur C Brooks, from Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump – addresses this breakdown of the labour market by advocating ‘full employment’, as if having a job is self-evidently a good thing, no matter how dangerous, demanding or demeaning it is. But ‘full employment’ is not the way to restore our faith in hard work, or in playing by the rules, or in whatever else sounds good. The official unemployment rate in the United States is already below 6 per cent, which is pretty close to what economists used to call ‘full employment’, but income inequality hasn’t changed a bit. Shitty jobs for everyone won’t solve any social problems we now face.

Don’t take my word for it, look at the numbers. Already a fourth of the adults actually employed in the US are paid wages lower than would lift them above the official poverty line – and so a fifth of American children live in poverty. Almost half of employed adults in this country are eligible for food stamps (most of those who are eligible don’t apply). The market in labour has broken down, along with most others.

Those jobs that disappeared in the Great Recession just aren’t coming back, regardless of what the unemployment rate tells you – the net gain in jobs since 2000 still stands at zero – and if they do return from the dead, they’ll be zombies, those contingent, part-time or minimum-wage jobs where the bosses shuffle your shift from week to week: welcome to Wal-Mart, where food stamps are a benefit.

And don’t tell me that raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour solves the problem. No one can doubt the moral significance of the movement. But at this rate of pay, you pass the official poverty line only after working 29 hours a week. The current federal minimum wage is $7.25. Working a 40-hour week, you would have to make $10 an hour to reach the official poverty line. What, exactly, is the point of earning a paycheck that isn’t a living wage, except to prove that you have a work ethic?

But, wait, isn’t our present dilemma just a passing phase of the business cycle? What about the job market of the future? Haven’t the doomsayers, those damn Malthusians, always been proved wrong by rising productivity, new fields of enterprise, new economic opportunities? Well, yeah – until now, these times. The measurable trends of the past half-century, and the plausible projections for the next half-century, are just too empirically grounded to dismiss as dismal science or ideological hokum. They look like the data on climate change – you can deny them if you like, but you’ll sound like a moron when you do.

For example, the Oxford economists who study employment trends tell us that almost half of existing jobs, including those involving ‘non-routine cognitive tasks’ – you know, like thinking – are at risk of death by computerisation within 20 years. They’re elaborating on conclusions reached by two MIT economists in the book Race Against the Machine (2011). Meanwhile, the Silicon Valley types who give TED talks have started speaking of ‘surplus humans’ as a result of the same process – cybernated production. Rise of the Robots, a new book that cites these very sources, is social science, not science fiction.

So this Great Recession of ours – don’t kid yourself, it ain’t over – is a moral crisis as well as an economic catastrophe. You might even say it’s a spiritual impasse, because it makes us ask what social scaffolding other than work will permit the construction of character – or whether character itself is something we must aspire to. But that is why it’s also an intellectual opportunity: it forces us to imagine a world in which the job no longer builds our character, determines our incomes or dominates our daily lives.

In short, it lets us say: enough already. Fuck work.

Certainly this crisis makes us ask: what comes after work? What would you do without your job as the external discipline that organises your waking life – as the social imperative that gets you up and on your way to the factory, the office, the store, the warehouse, the restaurant, wherever you work and, no matter how much you hate it, keeps you coming back? What would you do if you didn’t have to work to receive an income?

And what would society and civilisation be like if we didn’t have to ‘earn’ a living – if leisure was not our choice but our lot? Would we hang out at the local Starbucks, laptops open? Or volunteer to teach children in less-developed places, such as Mississippi? Or smoke weed and watch reality TV all day?

I’m not proposing a fancy thought experiment here. By now these are practical questions because there aren’t enough jobs. So it’s time we asked even more practical questions. How do you make a living without a job – can you receive income without working for it? Is it possible, to begin with and then, the hard part, is it ethical? If you were raised to believe that work is the index of your value to society – as most of us were – would it feel like cheating to get something for nothing?

We already have some provisional answers because we’re all on the dole, more or less. The fastest growing component of household income since 1959 has been ‘transfer payments’ from government. By the turn of the 21st century, 20 per cent of all household income came from this source – from what is otherwise known as welfare or ‘entitlements’. Without this income supplement, half of the adults with full-time jobs would live below the poverty line, and most working Americans would be eligible for food stamps.

But are these transfer payments and ‘entitlements’ affordable, in either economic or moral terms? By continuing and enlarging them, do we subsidise sloth, or do we enrich a debate on the rudiments of the good life?

Transfer payments or ‘entitlements’, not to mention Wall Street bonuses (talk about getting something for nothing) have taught us how to detach the receipt of income from the production of goods, but now, in plain view of the end of work, the lesson needs rethinking. No matter how you calculate the federal budget, we can afford to be our brother’s keeper. The real question is not whether but how we choose to be.

I know what you’re thinking – we can’t afford this! But yeah, we can, very easily. We raise the arbitrary lid on the Social Security contribution, which now stands at $127,200, and we raise taxes on corporate income, reversing the Reagan Revolution. These two steps solve a fake fiscal problem and create an economic surplus where we now can measure a moral deficit.

Of course, you will say – along with every economist from Dean Baker to Greg Mankiw, Left to Right – that raising taxes on corporate income is a disincentive to investment and thus job creation. Or that it will drive corporations overseas, where taxes are lower.

But in fact raising taxes on corporate income can’t have these effects.

Let’s work backward. Corporations have been ‘multinational’ for quite some time. In the 1970s and ’80s, before Ronald Reagan’s signature tax cuts took effect, approximately 60 per cent of manufactured imported goods were produced offshore, overseas, by US companies. That percentage has risen since then, but not by much.

Chinese workers aren’t the problem – the homeless, aimless idiocy of corporate accounting is. That is why the Citizens United decision of 2010 applying freedom of speech regulations to campaign spending is hilarious. Money isn’t speech, any more than noise is. The Supreme Court has conjured a living being, a new person, from the remains of the common law, creating a real world more frightening than its cinematic equivalent: say, Frankenstein, Blade Runner or, more recently, Transformers.

But the bottom line is this. Most jobs aren’t created by private, corporate investment, so raising taxes on corporate income won’t affect employment. You heard me right. Since the 1920s, economic growth has happened even though net private investment has atrophied. What does that mean? It means that profits are pointless except as a way of announcing to your stockholders (and hostile takeover specialists) that your company is a going concern, a thriving business. You don’t need profits to ‘reinvest’, to finance the expansion of your company’s workforce or output, as the recent history of Apple and most other corporations has amply demonstrated.

So investment decisions by CEOs have only a marginal effect on employment. Taxing the profits of corporations to finance a welfare state that permits us to love our neighbours and to be our brothers’ keeper is not an economic problem. It’s something else – it’s an intellectual issue, a moral conundrum.

When we place our faith in hard work, we’re wishing for the creation of character; but we’re also hoping, or expecting, that the labour market will allocate incomes fairly and rationally. And there’s the rub, they do go together. Character can be created on the job only when we can see that there’s an intelligible, justifiable relation between past effort, learned skills and present reward. When I see that your income is completely out of proportion to your production of real value, of durable goods the rest of us can use and appreciate (and by ‘durable’ I don’t mean just material things), I begin to doubt that character is a consequence of hard work.

When I see, for example, that you’re making millions by laundering drug-cartel money (HSBC), or pushing bad paper on mutual fund managers (AIG, Bear Stearns, Morgan Stanley, Citibank), or preying on low-income borrowers (Bank of America), or buying votes in Congress (all of the above) – just business as usual on Wall Street – while I’m barely making ends meet from the earnings of my full-time job, I realise that my participation in the labour market is irrational. I know that building my character through work is stupid because crime pays. I might as well become a gangster like you.

That’s why an economic crisis such as the Great Recession is also a moral problem, a spiritual impasse – and an intellectual opportunity. We’ve placed so many bets on the social, cultural and ethical import of work that when the labour market fails, as it so spectacularly has, we’re at a loss to explain what happened, or to orient ourselves to a different set of meanings for work and for markets.

And by ‘we’ I mean pretty much all of us, Left to Right, because everybody wants to put Americans back to work, one way or another – ‘full employment’ is the goal of Right-wing politicians no less than Left-wing economists. The differences between them are over means, not ends, and those ends include intangibles such as the acquisition of character.

Which is to say that everybody has doubled down on the benefits of work just as it reaches a vanishing point. Securing ‘full employment’ has become a bipartisan goal at the very moment it has become both impossible and unnecessary. Sort of like securing slavery in the 1850s or segregation in the 1950s.

Why?

Because work means everything to us inhabitants of modern market societies – regardless of whether it still produces solid character and allocates incomes rationally, and quite apart from the need to make a living. It’s been the medium of most of our thinking about the good life since Plato correlated craftsmanship and the possibility of ideas as such. It’s been our way of defying death, by making and repairing the durable things, the significant things we know will last beyond our allotted time on earth because they teach us, as we make or repair them, that the world beyond us – the world before and after us – has its own reality principles.

Think about the scope of this idea. Work has been a way of demonstrating differences between males and females, for example by merging the meanings of fatherhood and ‘breadwinner’, and then, more recently, prying them apart. Since the 17th century, masculinity and femininity have been defined – not necessarily achieved – by their places in a moral economy, as working men who got paid wages for their production of value on the job, or as working women who got paid nothing for their production and maintenance of families. Of course, these definitions are now changing, as the meaning of ‘family’ changes, along with profound and parallel changes in the labour market – the entry of women is just one of those – and in attitudes toward sexuality.

When work disappears, the genders produced by the labour market are blurred. When socially necessary labour declines, what we once called women’s work – education, healthcare, service – becomes our basic industry, not a ‘tertiary’ dimension of the measurable economy. The labour of love, caring for one another and learning how to be our brother’s keeper – socially beneficial labour – becomes not merely possible but eminently necessary, and not just within families, where affection is routinely available. No, I mean out there, in the wide, wide world.

Work has also been the American way of producing ‘racial capitalism’, as the historians now call it, by means of slave labour, convict labour, sharecropping, then segregated labour markets – in other words, a ‘free enterprise system’ built on the ruins of black bodies, an economic edifice animated, saturated and determined by racism. There never was a free market in labour in these united states. Like every other market, it was always hedged by lawful, systematic discrimination against black folk. You might even say that this hedged market produced the still-deployed stereotypes of African-American laziness, by excluding black workers from remunerative employment, confining them to the ghettos of the eight-hour day.

And yet, and yet. Though work has often entailed subjugation, obedience and hierarchy (see above), it’s also where many of us, probably most of us, have consistently expressed our deepest human desire, to be free of externally imposed authority or obligation, to be self-sufficient. We have defined ourselves for centuries by what we do, by what we produce.

But by now we must know that this definition of ourselves entails the principle of productivity – from each according to his abilities, to each according to his creation of real value through work – and commits us to the inane idea that we’re worth only as much as the labour market can register, as a price. By now we must also know that this principle plots a certain course to endless growth and its faithful attendant, environmental degradation.

Until now, the principle of productivity has functioned as the reality principle that made the American Dream seem plausible. ‘Work hard, play by the rules, get ahead’, or, ‘You get what you pay for, you make your own way, you rightly receive what you’ve honestly earned’ – such homilies and exhortations used to make sense of the world. At any rate they didn’t sound delusional. By now they do.

Adherence to the principle of productivity therefore threatens public health as well as the planet (actually, these are the same thing). By committing us to what is impossible, it makes for madness. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton said something like this when he explained anomalous mortality rates among white people in the Bible Belt by claiming that they’ve ‘lost the narrative of their lives’ – by suggesting that they’ve lost faith in the American Dream. For them, the work ethic is a death sentence because they can’t live by it.

So the impending end of work raises the most fundamental questions about what it means to be human. To begin with, what purposes could we choose if the job – economic necessity – didn’t consume most of our waking hours and creative energies? What evident yet unknown possibilities would then appear? How would human nature itself change as the ancient, aristocratic privilege of leisure becomes the birthright of human beings as such?

Sigmund Freud insisted that love and work were the essential ingredients of healthy human being. Of course he was right. But can love survive the end of work as the willing partner of the good life? Can we let people get something for nothing and still treat them as our brothers and sisters – as members of a beloved community? Can you imagine the moment when you’ve just met an attractive stranger at a party, or you’re online looking for someone, anyone, but you don’t ask: ‘So, what do you do?’

We won’t have any answers until we acknowledge that work now means everything to us – and that hereafter it can’t.

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