Bulletin N° 827
« Silkwood »
https://putlocker.vip/film/silkwood-11124/watching.html?ep=904364v2
or
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIzamAd_pQ0&feature=youtu.be
Subject
: Boétie
vs.
Machiavelli: Self-Determination vs.
Social Control.
16 December 2018
Grenoble,
France
Dear
Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
A
good friend of mine frequently tells me that for every negative idea I express,
I should come up with three positive ideas. It’s a folkloric idea that probably
has some scientific truth to it, in the realm of neurobiology and biochemistry
[see CEIMSA Bulletins n°369,
n°371, n°447, & n°565] and quite
possibly relates to the theoretical principle known as Maxwell’s
demon in particle physics. My friend came up with this insight
by way of her musical studies.
Upon
reflection, it seems evident that a positive attitude is more than simply Pollyanna
thinking; it is required for undertakings of any project anchored in
self-determination. We could use the mechanical analogy of two kinds of
transportation: a locomotive and an airplane, both of which depart from the one
dimensional pathology of freezing on some stationary point in space and time. The
movement of the locomotive requires that two dimensional linear tracks be laid
down in advance, analogous to a hypothesis or a theory that must be followed closely
if one is to move forward from A to B; the airplane, by contrast, represents
three dimensional mobility with greater flexibility for maneuvers. (Perhaps
there is a fourth dimensional mobility of which I know nothing.)
In
the age of “collective self-determination,” we might expect greater flexibility
and voluntary cooperation in decision-making processes chosen to advance our
collective security and well being, without compromising our self-fulfillment.
To arrive at this state of competence, however, we must unlearn the acquisitive individualism with which we have been carefully
indoctrinated since birth, and we must embrace the conviviality of collective
action, which includes the pleasure of sharing, the comfort of solidarity, and
the satisfaction of collective accomplishment - all in real time, as opposed to virtual investments.
Indispensible
readings to disabuse ourselves of our capitalist miseducation in acquisitive individualism include Nicolai
Machiavelli’s essay, The
Prince (printed posthumously in 1532), and Etienne de La Boétie’s The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude(1552).
For
past CEIMSA references to the political philosophy of Boétie (1530-1563), please see the 7 ceimsa links below:
Bulletin
#712: 'REVOLUTIONARY CAPITALISM' AND ITS
EFFECTS AT HOME AND ABROAD, Sept. 5, 2016.
http://ceimsa.org/archives/bull-712.htm
Bulletin
#713: Conspiracies & “CONSPIRACY
THEORIES,” Sept. 11, 2016.
http://www.ceimsa.org/archives/bull-713.htm
Bulletin
#718 : LIKE GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER . . . ? , Oct. 15, 2016.
http://ceimsa.org/archives/bull-718.htm
Bulletin N° 794 : The economic, political and
ideological debacle of capitalism now underway . . . , April 21, 2018.
http://www.ceimsa.org/archives/bull-794.htm
Bulletin N° 798 : PALESTINE : PRESENTE
! , May
13, 2018.
http://www.ceimsa.org/archives/bull-798.htm
Bulletin N° 800 : Up Against the Wall in the Gaza
Concentration Camp: the freedom to choose how to be murdered by Zionists ! , May
16, 2018.
http://www.ceimsa.org/archives/bull-800.htm
Bulletin N° 801 : Palestinian Freedom Fighters against Imperialist
Hand Puppets, May 19, 2018.
http://ceimsa.org/archives/bull-801.htm
And
for past CEIMSA references to the philosophy of Nicolai Machiavelli (1469-1527),
please see the following 6 ceimsa links:
Bulletin
N° 215 : ON
LESSONS FROM THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF WARS : FROM THE CENTER FOR
THE ADVANCED STUDY OF AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS AND SOCIAL
MOVEMENTS, GRENOBLE, FRANCE, November 26, 2005.
http://ceimsa.org/archives/bull-215.html
Bulletin N° 346 :
ON 21ST CENTURY WARFARE - TACTICS,
STRATEGIES, AND LOGISTICS, March 18, 2008.
http://www.ceimsa.org/archives/bull-346.html
Bulletin N° 371 :
ON MORAL BLINDNESS IN THE LABYRINTH OF PAIN AND PLEASURE, October 11, 2008.
http://ceimsa.org/archives/bull-371.html
Bulletin N°507 :
ON RECOGNIZING PATTERNS OF BEHAVIOR, PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE, Nov.13, 2011.
http://www.ceimsa.org/archives/bull-507.html
Bulletin
N°525 : ON HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS WITHIN A
DEGENERATE POLITICAL ECONOMY, April
6, 2012.
http://www.ceimsa.org/archives/bull-525.html
Bulletin
N° 749 : VIBRATIONS ON THE ‘SOUNDING BOARD’ IN TIME : WHERE TO BEGIN?
WHERE TO END?, April
27, 2017.
http://ceimsa.org/archives/bull-749.htm
The
24 + items below offer readers a look at a veritable collage of
scandals that have surfaced recently across the world. It would be
perilous to ignore the ruling-class ideologies which govern policy at this
moment. This menace is stated implicitly in the articles and essays below,
leaving each of us with one inescapable question: Which side are you on?
Francis Feeley
_______
Professor emeritus of
American Studies
University
Grenoble-Alpes
Director of Research
University of
Paris-Nanterre
Center for the Advanced
Study of American Institutions and Social Movements
The University of
California-San Diego
a.
ZNET
The
antidote to civili$ational collap$e
http://www.iopsociety.org/news/the-antidote-to-civiliational-collape
8th
December 2018
Interview
with the documentary filmmaker Adam
Curtis @
The Economist
https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/12/06/the-antidote-to-civilisational-collapse
"We
live in a world where the powerful deceive us. We know they lie. They know we
know they lie. They don't care." ::
"It's
'fuck off' to everything," says Adam
Curtis, describing
public sentiment today. The British documentarist
sees himself as an optimist amid dystopians, and as a
classical journalist whose medium happens to be film. For 30 years he has
produced a rich body of documentaries on politics and society for the BBC—and
in the process, has emerged as a cult-hero to young
thinkers trying to comprehend a chaotic world.
The films themselves are a collage of archival footage, words on
screen and fast montages that create sprawling, idealistic-yet-dark narratives
on the changing relationships among people, politics, philosophy, psychology,
economics and power. They cut quickly between different tones and topics to
resemble a train of thought or a rich conversation between friends. The mirror
he holds up is disturbing: a reality that is freakish,
demented, deformed.
+
Averting World Conflict With China,
The PRC Should Retaliate by
Targeting Sheldon Adelson's Chinese Casinos
http://www.unz.com/runz/averting-world-conflict-with-china/
by Ron Unz
As most readers know, I’m not a casual
political blogger and I prefer producing lengthy research articles rather than
chasing the headlines of current events. But there are exceptions to every
rule, and the looming danger of a direct worldwide clash with China is one of
them.
Consider the arrest last week of Meng Wanzhou, the CFO of Huawei, the world’s largest telecom equipment manufacturer.
While flying from Hong Kong to Mexico, Ms. Meng was
changing planes in the Vancouver International Airport when she was suddenly
detained by the Canadian government on an August US warrant. Although now
released on $10 million bail, she still faces extradition to a New York City
courtroom, where she could receive up to thirty years in federal prison for
allegedly having conspired in 2010 to violate America’s unilateral economic
trade sanctions against Iran.
Although our mainstream media outlets
have certainly covered this important story, including front page articles in
the New York Times and
the Wall Street Journal, I
doubt most American readers fully recognize the extraordinary gravity of this
international incident and its potential for altering the course of world
history. As one scholar noted, no event since America’s deliberate 1999 bombing of China’s embassy in
Belgrade, which killed several Chinese diplomats, has so outraged
both the Chinese government and its population. Columbia’s Jeffrey Sachs correctly described it
as “almost a US declaration of war on China’s business community.”
+
From: Paul Thom
Sent: Sunday, December 16, 2018
Hello Francis,
After reading ceimsa bulletin n°827, I'm sending you a TED talk on Douglas Rushkoff that has a good and positive visions.
It's nice for the positive ideas and positive thinking.
Paul
https://www.ted.com/talks/douglas_rushkoff_how_to_be_team_human_in_the_digital_future
Humans are no longer valued for our creativity, says media theorist Douglas Rushkoff -- in a world dominated by digital technology, we're now just valued for our data. In a passionate talk, Rushkoff urges us to stop using technology to optimize people for the market and start using it to build a future centered on our pre-digital values of connection, creativity and respect. "Join 'Team Human.' Find the others," he says. "Together let's make the future that we always wanted."
===========
b.
Chers/chères ami.e.s de la paix de l'Isère et des environs,
Le Mouvement de la Paix suit naturellement le mouvement des gilets jaunes avec la plus grande attention. Cette initiative spontanée est l'expression de nombre d'insatisfactions, voire de souffrances, bien réelles, qui se manifestent de façon encore désordonnée. Notre Mouvement a jugé opportun de l'accompagner par une réflexion générale sur l'emploi qui fait de nos impôts et, en particulier, sur les 37 milliards d'euros qui seront prochainement affectés à la modernisation de l'armement nucléaire de la France. Cette dépense énorme et inconsidérée (réfléchissez à tout ce qu'on pourrait faire avec ce montant en matière de politique sociale, sanitaire, éducative; etc...ou allègements d'impôts) nous apparaît non seulement comme un gaspillage inouï des deniers publics, mais aussi comme totalement contraire à la véritable politique de paix et de sécurité dont notre pays a besoin. Ces 37 milliards de dépense insensée doivent être politiquement combattus par tous les amis de la paix, y compris par les gilets jaunes.
37 milliards d'€ sur 6 ans pour les armes nucléaires NON
37 milliards d'€ pour la justice sociale et la justice climatique OUI
signez la pétition https://www.mvtpaix.org/wordpress/petitions/
Ci-joint: la déclaration correspondante du Mouvement de la Paix.
* Nous voulons aussi rappeler que nous tenons un stand aussi souvent que possible, en particulier le samedi après-midi, Place du Dr Martin à Grenoble, sur le Marché de Noël solidaire. Nous y proposons livres et brochures, et notre Agenda de la Paix 2019 (beau et indispensable). C'est surtout l'occasion d'engager le dialogue sur la politique de paix dont notre pays et le monde ont besoin en urgence.
à bientôt,
le bureau du Comité de l'Isère du Mouvement de la Paix,
+
Why Can the CIA Assassinate People?
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50713.htm
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Given that we have all been born and raised under a regime
that has the CIA, hardly anyone questions the power of the CIA to assassinate
people. The CIA’s power of assassination has become a deeply established part
of American life. |
Instead, the delegates came out with an entirely different
proposal, one that would call into existence a federal government that had more
powers, including the power to tax.
Americans were leery. The last thing they wanted was a powerful central
government. They had had enough of that type of government as British citizens
under the British Empire. They believed that the biggest threat to people’s
freedom and well-being lay with their own government. They believed that if
they approved a federal government, it would become tyrannical and oppressive,
like other governments had done throughout history.
They were especially concerned with the power of the government to murder
people, including citizens. They knew that state-sponsored murder was the
ultimate power in any tyrannical regime. When a government can kill anyone it
wants with impunity, all other rights are effectively nullified. And our
ancestors were sufficiently well-versed in history to know that tyrannical
regimes were notorious for killing their own citizens, especially those people
who challenge, criticize, or object to the tyranny.
The proponents of the Constitution told Americans that they had nothing to be
concerned about. The Constitution wasn’t calling into existence a government
with general powers to do anything it wanted. Instead, by the terms of the
document that would be calling the federal government into existence, its
powers would be limited to the few powers that were enumerated within the
document. Thus, if a power wasn’t enumerated, it didn’t exist and, therefore,
couldn’t be exercised. Since the Constitution wasn’t giving the federal
government the power to murder people, it couldn’t exercise that power.
On that basis, our American ancestors approved the deal, but only on the
condition that the Constitution would be immediately amended after approval
with a Bill of Rights. To make sure that federal officials understood that they
didn’t have the power to murder people, the Fifth Amendment was enacted. It
prohibited the federal government from killing people without first according
them due process of law. It’s worth noting that the protections of the Fifth
Amendment are not limited to American citizens. The Amendment prohibits the
federal government from murdering anyone, including people who are not US
citizens.
===========
c.
If There's A Hell Below,
That's Where He'll Go: The BAR Obituary on George H.W. Bush
https://blackagendareport.com/if-theres-hell-below-thats-where-hell-go-bar-obituary-george-hw-bush
by Bruce A. Dixon
+
Don’t Forget George H. W. Bush’s War Crimes,
from Iraq’s ‘Highway of Death’ to Panama
As
US president, George H.W. Bush invaded Panama and waged the barbaric Gulf War,
in which the American military devastated Iraqi civilian infrastructure and
massacred thousands of fleeing soldiers
+
Cancer
as Weapon: Poppy Bush’s Radioactive War on Iraq
by
Jeffrey
St. Clair
At
the close of the first Gulf War, Saddam Hussein was denounced as a ferocious
villain for ordering his retreating troops to destroy Kuwaiti oil fields,
clotting the air with poisonous clouds of black smoke and saturating the ground
with swamps of crude. It was justly called an environmental war crime.
+
George
H. W. Bush: Another Eulogy
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/12/14/george-h-w-bush-another-eulogy/
by
Nick
Alexandrov
The
story was almost over even before it had fully begun. When Keith Jackson, a
black eighteen-year-old from Anacostia,
heard where the men wanted to do the deal, he grew skeptical. “Where the fuck
is the White House?” he asked.
Yet the buyers persisted.
They got
Jackson to Lafayette
Park on September 1, 1989, purchasing
three ounces of the drug off him for $2,400. “This is crack cocaine,” President
Bush told the nation
evenings later, flashing the bag the teen sold, “seized a few days ago by drug
enforcement agents in a park just across the street from the White House.”
Only
the bag was part of a set-up. Presidential aides, vacationing at Bush’s
Kennebunkport compound, dreamed
up the plan. Buying crack near the White House would show how bad
the drug problem was, would justify Bush’s escalating Drug War. But DEA agents
failed to find dealers lurking in Lafayette Park. So they focused on Jackson
some distance from downtown.
Ensnaring
the young man was not easy. “We had to manipulate him to get him down there,”
one agent admitted.
Jackson was soon deemed guilty—hearing the verdict, he wept so violently
“federal marshals subdued
him with a straitjacket”—and serving a ten-year prison term. President Bush was
unmoved. He felt no weight of responsibility for the teen’s fate. And he never
wept, as far as we know. But the story, Bush’s and ours,
would go on by God’s grace.
Through
the following years, President Bush would frequently prove, nearly daily, that
his ruining Jackson was no accident. In a sense, the rest of his presidency was
a perennial effort to prove his callousness, to intensify human suffering.
There were always more armies to fund, more countries to bomb, more lives to
terminate. And what a headlong race he made of it all. He never slowed down.
+
George H.W. Bush’s Bitter Legacy in the Middle East
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/12/12/george-hw-bushs-bitter-legacy-in-the-middle-east/
+
All US Presidents, Living and Dead,
are War Criminals
https://blackagendareport.com/all-us-presidents-living-and-dead-are-war-criminals
by Glen Ford
===========
d.
How
George W. Bush Invented the Global War on Terror
(Just Like the Banks, War Itself Has Become Too Big to
Fail)
by Peter Isackson
In US policy, business almost always
trumps democratic aspirations, human rights and the needs of the environment.
This is the second of a two-part series.
George
W. Bush, the president, solved the problem Bush, the candidate, had
highlighted: his ignorance of the identity of “them.” Instead of an ideology
(communism), he designated a method of political expression: terrorism,
or violence with a political purpose aimed at creating a climate of fear. Bush
boldly declared that the US was engaged in a war not on a nation or a group of
people, but on terror itself. This enabled him to avoid the more accurate
perception that the US was surreptitiously engaged in a war on
the Muslim world, fulfilling the prediction of Samuel Huntington in
his 1993 Clash of Civilizations.
Despite
the inclusive label, the US was not taking arms against any and every
perpetrator of terror — a list that could include many of its allies, and even
America itself — but against specific groups or nations accused of harboring or
abetting those groups that challenge the principles of Western civilization.
The techniques used to combat this terror resembled less and less conventional
warfare, and increasingly terror itself. With the development and massive
employment of drones, the war on terror became a war of terror.
The
military-industrial complex had provided the commanders-in-chief with a new
technology designed less to effectuate the “surgical strikes” the Obama
administration later claimed as its absolution than to spread terror in the
targeted regions. Any honest observer should acknowledge, as does Conor Friedersdorf, writing in The Atlantic that “the spread of this
characterization is a triumph of propaganda.” Some people have pointed to the
terror that would result if drones were to be launched on Western cities. But
that fear doesn’t appear to have convinced them that’s precisely what their own
government is doing, and on a grander scale, in at least seven different
nations.
Making the Most of Terror
+
Empire Files: Abby Martin Exposes
What Hillary Clinton Really Represents
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PV_PLCC6jeI&feature=youtu.be
(April 2016)
Digging deep into Hillary's connections to Wall Street, Abby Martin reveals how the Clinton's multi-million-dollar political machine operates. This episode chronicles the Clinton's rise to power in the 90s on a right-wing agenda, the Clinton Foundation's revolving door with Gulf state monarchies, corporations and the world's biggest financial institutions, and the establishment of the hyper-aggressive "Hillary Doctrine" while Secretary of State. Learn the essential facts about the great danger she poses, and why she's the US Empire's choice for its next CEO. http://multimedia.telesurtv.net/v/the...
+
Roger Waters: Neoliberalism
Is Fueling the Flames of Fascism
https://therealnews.com/stories/roger-waters-neoliberalism-is-fueling-the-flames-of-fascism-pt-2-2
===========
e.
The Donald Undone: Tilting at the Swamp,
Succumbing to the Empire
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50730.htm
by David Stockman
You can’t build the Empire and drain the Swamp at the same
time. That’s because the Swamp is largely the fruit of Empire. And it’s also
the reason that the Donald is being rapidly undone.
Indeed, it is the Empire’s $800 billion national security budget which feeds Washington’s
vast complex of weapons suppliers, intelligence contractors, national security
bureaucrats, NGOs, think tanks, K-street lobbies, so-called "law"
firms and all-purpose racketeers. It’s what accounts for the Imperial City’s
unseemly and ill-gotten prosperity.
It goes without saying that the number one priority of these
denizens of Empire is to keep the gravy train rolling. That is accomplished by
inventing and exaggerating threats to America’s homeland security and by
formulating far-flung and misbegotten missions designed to extend and reinforce
Washington’s global hegemony.
As we demonstrate elsewhere, a true homeland security defense
budget would consist of the strategic nuclear triad and modest conventional
forces to defend the nation’s shoreline and air space; it would cost about $250 billion per year plus a few $10
billion more for a State Department which minded its own business.
So the $500 billion
difference is the fiscal cost of Empire, which is pushing the US toward an
immense generational fiscal crisis. But it’s also a measure of the giant larder
that fills the Swamp with the projects and busywork of Washington’s global
hegemony.
In fact, it is the vasty deep of
that $500 billion larder which gives rise to the forces that not only thwart
the Donald’s desire to drain the Swamp, but actually enlist him the cause of
deepening its brackish waters.
Moreover, these missions encompass far more than direct
military occupations, such as in Afghanistan and Iraq; or indirect aggressions,
such as in Washington’s arming of antigovernment terrorists in Syria and
facilitating and supplying Saudi Arabia’s genocidal bombing campaign in Yemen;
or even the kind of rank provocation implicit in the 29,000 troops Washington
still bivouacs on the Korean peninsula 65 years after the war there ended and
the thousands of US and NATO forces which conduct virtually constant maneuvers
and war games on the very borders of Russia.
===========
f.
Understanding
the Collective Rage of France’s ‘Gilets Jaunes’
by CORA ENGELBRECHT, EMMA COTT, YOUSUR
AL-HLOU and ANNA PRICHARD
Shuttered shops,
burning cars and tear gas. We were
on the ground in Paris with the “Yellow Vests” protesters as they took to the
streets for the fourth week in a row.
+
Bloomberg Opinion
Politics
& Policy
Macron
Just Doesn’t Get It
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-12-12/macron-is-the-wrong-man-for-france-right-now
He
and others on the left are being swept along by world-historical forces they do
not fully understand.
by Tyler Cowen
+
Richard Wolff | Masterfully Explains France's Yellow
Vest Movement
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPPQ5R80SlI&feature=youtu.be
+
Round five: Yellow Vests gather in Paris for ‘Macron resign’ protest
https://www.rt.com/news/446504-france-yellow-vest-macron-protests/
(December
14, 2018)
Paris is bracing for yet another
round of Yellow Vest protests, with demonstrators taking to the streets of the
capital. More than 10,000 are expected to join the march, with the slogan
‘Macron resign’.
Protesters are gathering on the
Champs-Élysées, which has seen four weekends of violent clashes between rioters
and police. The organizers, consisting of some 15 groups, have outlined their
list of demands on Facebook, saying they will
continue their action against Macron until all their demands are met.
“Our
organizations support the demands of tax and social justice brought by the
movement of yellow vests. They call for demonstrations Saturday, December 15,
for social justice and tax, for a real democracy, for equal rights, for a true
ecological transition…” the planners said in a statement,
as quoted by Le Parisien.
Similar demonstrations are also
expected to take place in other cities across the country.
+
THE
DEMANDS OF THE YELLOW VEST MOVEMENT
ARE
GROWING INTO REAL SYSTEMIC CHANGE
December 14, 2018
===========
g.
Billionaires Are the Leading Cause of Climate Change
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50724.htm
by Luke Darby
This week, the United Nations released a damning report. The
short version: We have about 12 years to actually
do something to prevent the worst aspects of climate change. That is, not to prevent climate change—we're well
past that point—but to prevent the worst, most catastrophic elements of it from
wreaking havoc on the world's population. To do that,
the governments of Earth need to look seriously at the forces driving it. And
an honest assessment of how we got here lays the blame squarely at the feet of
the 1 percent.
Contrary to a lot of guilt-tripping pleas for us all to take
the bus more often to save the world, your individual choices are probably
doing very little to the world's climate. The real impact comes on the
industrial level, as more than 70 percent of global emissions come from just 100 companies. So you, a random American consumer, exert
very little pressure here. The people who are actively cranking up the global
thermostat and threatening to drown 20 percent of the global population are the billionaires
in the boardrooms of these companies.
There are probably no individuals who have had a more toxic
impact on public and political attitudes about climate change than the Koch
brothers, and it would take an absurd amount of space to document all the
money and organizations they've scraped together for that purpose.
(Investigative reporter Jane Mayer's groundbreaking Dark Money does basically that.) And they have every reason
to: In her book, Mayer notes that "Koch Industries alone routinely
released some 24 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere a
year." |
But the scope goes far beyond merely sowing dissent and
skepticism. While billionaires and the companies they run have spent years
insisting that climate change either doesn't exist or is overblown, they've
known the reality of the situation for a long time. PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, for example, used to donate to the Seasteading Institute, which aimed to build floating cities in
order to counteract rising sea levels. And Exxon Mobil allegedly knew about climate change in 1977, back when
it was still just Exxon and about 11 years before climate change became widely
talked about. Instead of acting on it, they started a decades-long
misinformation campaign. According to Scientific American, Exxon
helped create the Global Climate Coalition, which questioned the scientific
basis for concern over climate change from the late '80s until 2002, and
successfully worked to keep the U.S. from signing the Kyoto Protocol, a move
that helped cause India and China, two other massive sources of greenhouse gas,
to avoid signing.
Even when Republican lawmakers show flashes of willingness to
get something done, they're swiftly swatted down. There are myriad examples,
but one example comes via Dark Money,
where Mayer describes an incident in April 2010 when Lindsey Graham briefly
tried to support a cap-and-trade bill: A political group called American
Solutions promptly launched a negative PR campaign against him, and Graham
folded after just a few days. American Solutions, it turns out, was backed by
billionaires in fossil fuel and other industries, including Trump-loving casino
magnate Sheldon Adelson.
===========
h.
Black Agenda
Report
News, commentary and analysis from the black left.
Julian
Assange: No Surrender
https://blackagendareport.com/julian-assange-no-surrender
by Ann Garrison, BAR contributor
Supporters of the Wikileaks founder say he won’t leave the Ecuadorian embassy
in London unless the British police drag him away.
“If
you look at his enemies, and you look at who wants to lock him up forever, it's
clear that we have to defend him.”
Wikileaks
founder Julian Assange appears to be one step closer
to forcible removal from Ecuador's London Embassy, most likely to be extradited
to the US to face charges in the Eastern District Court of Virginia, which is
commonly known as “the espionage court.” If UK police have to go in and remove
him by force that will of course demonstrate the brutality of the state in the Gandhian tradition.
The US and UK governments may
nevertheless be in a hurry to get hold of him however they can, with Theresa
May's Tory government so close to collapse and Jeremy Corbyn's
Labor Party so close to power. Given all that Corbyn
has said about protecting journalists who take risks to reveal the truth about
power, it's hard to imagine him extraditing Assange
in response to US demands, even though refusal would no doubt damage the
longstanding Anglo-American alliance.
+
‘Spying & threats’: Assange
complains
of ‘more subtle’ silencing than Khashoggi
https://www.rt.com/news/446323-assange-khashoggi-spying-hearing/
Julian
Assange has accused his Ecuadorean hosts of spying
and feeding information to US authorities, and slammed attempts to block his
journalistic work as a more subtle way of silencing than the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.
Suggesting
there were “facts of espionage”
inside the embassy, the WikiLeaks co-founder
expressed concern during a hearing in Quito on Wednesday that Ecuadorean intelligence
is not only spying on him, but sharing the data it has harvested with the FBI.
Ecuadorean intelligence clearly spent a sizable amount of money equipping the
embassy for surveillance, Assange added.
He
accused Ecuadorean authorities of “comments of a
threatening nature”
relating to his journalistic work and compared attempts to silence him to
the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi,
who was tortured and cut up in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul in October, but “more subtle.” The comparison elicited a
harsh reaction from Ecuadorean Prosecutor General Inigo
Salvador, who accused Assange
of biting the hand that feeds him.
Assange
told the Ecuadorean court that the living conditions in the embassy were so
detrimental to his health that they may put him in the hospital – and suggested
that may be the point, because once he leaves the building, he’s fair game for
UK and US authorities.
US prosecutors accidentally revealed
the existence of a sealed indictment against the whistleblower last month and
have since stonewalled reporters’ inquiries into what the indictment might
contain.
+
Julian
Assange denounces his illegal detention in Ecuadorian
embassy
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/12/14/assa-d14.html
by Oscar Grenfell
+
Integrity Initiative: Spanish Cluster
Misled UK Parliament Over Assange, Russia
https://sputniknews.com/world/201812141070699912-assange-integrity-institute-parliament/
Research
into members of the Integrity Initiative's Spanish 'cluster' has led to some
extremely troubling conclusions.
On
December 19 2017, the House of Commons' Digital, Culture,
Media and Sport Committee convened its ‘fake news' inquiry's first oral
evidence session, hearing testimony from a number of witnesses.
Among
them were David Alandete, Editor of El Pais, Francisco de Borja Lasheras, Director of the European Council
on Foreign Relation's Madrid Office, and Mira Milosevich-Juaristi,
Senior Fellow for Russia and Euroasia at Elcano Institute.They'd been
invited to discuss an alleged Kremlin effort to interfere in the
October 2017 Catalan independence referendum via a dastardly nexus
of social media, bots, trolls, Sputnik News and RT — and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
What
the trio failed to disclose, and are yet to acknowledge publicly
almost a year later, is they are both directly and indirectly connected
to the Integrity
Initiative — an "information
war effort" based in London that has received
millions in UK government funds and is subject to more than one
official investigation into its activities.
Julian Assange's Internet Access Has Been Cut Off
Even
more troublingly however, their testimony — which may have contributed
significantly to Ecuador's March 2018 decision to cut
off Assange's access to the internet, and
bar him from receiving any visitors other than his legal team —
has been condemned as "exceptionally misleading" an independent data
analyst, who also submitted expert
testimony to the Committee.
===========
i.
The real reason Western media & CIA turned against
Saudi MBS
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/446470-saudi-arabia-mbs-cia/
Forces
are aligning against Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince, lead by elements within the
CIA and strong players in the mainstream media. But what is really behind this
deterioration in relationship, and what are its implications?
Following
the brutal murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi,
western media and various entities, including the CIA, appear to have turned
their back on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman
(MBS). In response to the scandal, the Guardian released a video which its celebutante, Owen Jones, captioned“Saudi Arabia is one of the
biggest threats on Earth. Time to stop propping up its
repulsive regime.”
The
Guardian was not alone in its condemnation. “It’s high time to
end Saudi impunity,”
wrote Hana Al-Khamri in Al-Jazeera. “It’s time
for Saudi Arabia to tell the truth on Jamal Khashoggi,” the Washington Post’s Editorial
Board argued. Politico called it “the tragedy
of Jamal Khashoggi.”
Even
shadowy think-tanks like the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Atlantic Council released articles criticising Saudi Arabia in the wake of Khashoggi’s
death. A number of companies began backing away from Saudi money after
the journalist’s death, including the world’s largest media companies such as
the New York Times, the Economist’s editor-in-chief Zanny
Minton Beddoes, Arianna Huffington, CNN, CNBC, the Financial Times, Bloomberg,
Google Cloud CEO, just to name a few.
===========
j.
Sartre,
Said, Chomsky and the Meaning of the Public Intellectual
by
Richard
Falk – Daniel Falcone
===========
k.
From:
Margaret Atwood, PEN America <development@pen.org>
To: Francis Feeley
<Francis.Feeley@u-grenoble3.fr>
Sent: Thu, 13 Dec
2018
Subject: Defending
the sanctity of truth and the role of the press
Join me in
defending the role of the press in the United States and around the world.
View this email in
your browser (https://us1.campaign-archive.com/?u=0809b771ad9123934911c8d9b&id=41e08a1d54&e=28a9e0f4d0)
https://pen.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=0809b771ad9123934911c8d9b&id=8436d1f730&e=28a9e0f4d0
Dear Francis,
When democracy is
in retreat, the first thing authoritarians do is imprison, exile, or kill those
who are telling stories about them that they dislike.
This year, I had
the honor of presenting the PEN/Barbey Freedom to
Write Award to imprisoned Reuters’ journalists Wa
Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, who were recently sentenced to 7 years in prison in
Myanmar for reporting on a massacre of 10 Muslim Rohingya
men in the country’s Rakhine state.
The number of
journalists jailed worldwide has recently hit an all-time high. And many
journalists are not even jailed: They are simply murdered, like Washington Post
columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
https://pen.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=0809b771ad9123934911c8d9b&id=0344534bc1&e=28a9e0f4d0
Wa Lone, Kyaw
Soe Oo, Jamal Khashoggi, and other targeted journalists were just honored
this week with Time Magazine’s 2018 Person of the Year.
We may comfort
ourselves by believing that this kind of persecution happens only in distant
countries, and so far that is fortunately true. But the tactics of the current
U.S. Administration are dangerous in their own right. They include attacking
and discrediting reporters by name, threatening to punish unfavorable coverage,
trying to convince the public that reputable and accountable news outlets
cannot be trusted, and branding certain news organizations as the enemies of
the American people.
That is why PEN
America, this fall, brought a lawsuit against President Trump—to stop him from
using the machinery of government to retaliate against the press for coverage
he doesn’t like.
Please join me in
supporting PEN America in defending the sanctity of truth and the role of the
press right here in the United States and around the world. (https://pen.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=0809b771ad9123934911c8d9b&id=271918b4e9&e=28a9e0f4d0)
The systematic
effort to drive a rift between access to knowledge and the citizens of a
country has a familiar ring to this dystopian novelist. When I wrote The
Handmaid’s Tale, I made sure that nothing went into it that had not come from
somewhere in history. I used journalists, historians, and other nonfiction
writers as my sources. Because when you publish such a novel, you hope your
work will remind people that "It can’t happen here" has simply never
been true.
The U.S.
Administration’s calls of "fake news" have become an international
knee-jerk response by strongmen and dictators seeking to discredit accurate
reporting and valid criticism, and to undermine democracy in the process.
I hope you will
make a year-end contribution to PEN America to defend freedom of the press,
free expression, our right to information, and democracy in the United States
and around the world. (https://pen.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=0809b771ad9123934911c8d9b&id=a9a9ba92a4&e=28a9e0f4d0)
Thank you,
https://pen.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=0809b771ad9123934911c8d9b&id=39591b17df&e=28a9e0f4d0
Margaret Atwood
https://pen.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=0809b771ad9123934911c8d9b&id=2a65e3d9ca&e=28a9e0f4d0
===========
l.
Saudi
crown prince considering 'game-changing'
handshake with Israeli PM: Report
https://www.presstv.com/detail/2018/12/14/582877/saudi-bin-salman-handshake-netanyahu
Saudi Crown
Prince Mohammed bin Salman is seriously considering a
summit meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with US
President Donald Trump playing host, a report says. The meeting between bin Salman, also known as MbS, and
Netanyahu is to be a “game-changing” Camp David-style one, the Middle East
Eye said in a report.
Bin
Salman has asked an emergency task force dealing with
the fallout of the murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi
to study the idea of a meeting with Netanyahu, sources in the kingdom with
close knowledge of the discussions told Middle East Eye.
Israel's Maariv newspaper reported in June that bin Salman and Netanyahu had held secret meetings in Amman
both with and without the presence of Jordan’s King Abdullah.
+
What
the Attack on Marc Lamont Hill Tells Us
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/12/13/what-the-attack-on-marc-lamont-hill-tells-us/
by
Lawrence
Davidson
There
are many things wrong with ideologues. Here I mean those who see the world
through a narrow dogma. It is as if they wear figurative blinders, like those
real ones placed on draft horses, so as to prevent their gaze from wondering
away from a designated path. As a consequence ideologues can sometimes be
embarrassing—making gross general pronouncements based on the narrowest sets of
beliefs and expecting the world to go along. Often they are just boring.
However, give them a modicum of power and they can become downright dangerous.
For
instance, take the recent dustup at Temple University in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania. It
started when Marc Lamont Hill, a tenured professor holding an
endowed chair in the School of Media and Communications, gave a speech at the
United Nations. The occasion was the U.N.’s International Day of Solidarity
with the Palestinian People. Hill, who is a longstanding critic of Israel’s
treatment of Palestinians, summarized
the official discrimination practiced by Israel against the
Palestinians—that is he laid out examples of Zionist Israel’s racist nature and
practice—and then “endorsed a free Palestine from the river to the sea.”
It
was at this point that local supporters of Israel, specifically the ideologues
who see things through the lens of the dogma of Zionism, went on the
attack. Their
claim was that Hill was “calling for the end of Israel.” Morton
Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, claimed Hill’s
endorsement of a “free Palestine” amounted to the “violent genocide of Jews in
Israel.” Leonard Barrack, “a major donor to the university,” accused Hill of
calling for “the destruction of the State of Israel” and said “I think it
[Hill’s speech] was anti-Semitic.” And then Patrick O’Connor, the chairman of
Temple University’s board of trustees, called Hill’s remarks “hate speech” and
“disgusting.” He went on to claim that “no one at Temple is happy with his
comments.” By the way, Temple has a student enrollment of over 30,000, so how
can the chairman be sure? O’Connor has instructed the university’s lawyers to
explore ways to punish Hill. In the meantime CNN, obviously responding to
Zionist pressure, immediately fired Lamont Hill from his position as an on-air
commentator.
Clarifying
Points
Here
are some clarifying, non-dogmatic points relevant to this situation:
—The
phrase “a free Palestine from the river to the sea” has long been understood by
supporters of Palestinian rights to be a call
for democracy. That is, a call for a state that represents and
treats all its people as equals. It is not proposal to
purge all the Israeli Jews. However, it is undeniably anti-Zionist. Why?
Because Zionism ultimately insists on a state with full rights for only one
people (Jews), and this essentially denies full rights to 20 percent of its
population (Palestinians). Both in theory and practice, it is present-day
Israel, and not a proposed “free Palestine,” that is demonstrably racist.
—There
is a clear difference between Israel and the Jewish people. Israel is a
recently created (1948) political state that falsely claims to represent the
entire—that is worldwide—Jewish people. By doing so, the Zionists set up the
false relationship that allows them to equate anti-Zionism
with anti-Semitism. Yet the claim is not sustainable, for there have always
been Jewish opponents of Zionism. Today this tradition of opposition continues, and a
large segment of those, worldwide, opposing Israel and its racist practices,
are Jewish. However, the Zionists, having been indoctrinated with the belief
that Israel and the Jews are one, cannot face this truth. It may be the case
that their fear and dislike for the numerous anti-Zionist Jews (the so-called self-hating
Jews) is as great, or greater than, that for Palestinians.
—Zionist
consciousness requires a denial and distortion of
history. The reality of the Zionist movement’s link to British imperialism;
the subsequent fact that the Zionist intrusion into Palestine constitutes a
history of a European settlement project in a non-European land; the Zionist
complicity with at least some of the forced displacement of Jews from Arab
lands; the reality of the Nakba—all have to be denied
or reinterpreted. As is the case with most dubious moral behavior,
rationalizations and denials become key to the
perpetrators’ own self-image.
===========
m.
Typhoon Haiyan Survivor:
Fossil Fuel Companies Killed My Family by Hastening Climate Change
https://www.democracynow.org/2018/12/12/typhoon_haiyan_survivor_fossil_fuel_companies
“From the biggest of tragedies, hope
can be found. My name is Joanna Sustento. I had a
happy life, a good job, great friends and a wonderful loving family. But in a
matter of minutes, all of that changed.
“For those who experienced Haiyan, the strongest typhoon ever recorded, it was apocalyptic.
I witnessed my mother, my father, brother, sister-in-law and my 3-year-old
nephew being swept away by the storm surge. It left my brother and me to search
for our family’s bodies in the aftermath. We never found our father and our
nephew. It’s difficult to be the one left behind. We have to deal with all the
questions, the grief, the pain and the regrets.
“Typhoon Haiyan
killed more than 10,000 people and left over 14 million people homeless. But
it’s not just statistics and numbers in a news report. This is about us, the
people.”
===========
n.
Current Climate Targets Put Us On
Track For 3.0˚C Of Warming
By 2100
by Joshua S Hill
The
current state of global climate policies has the world on a path
to 3.0˚C of warming by 2100, twice the 1.5˚C limit agreed
upon in Paris three years ago, according to the Climate Action Tracker’s annual
update which was published on Wednesday at the COP24 United Nations climate
change talks currently underway in Katowice, Poland.
According
to the Climate Action Tracker’s latest update, current warming in 2018 has
reached 1˚C and, while current pledges and targets are currently
leading us to a 3˚C warming, current actual policies in place have the
world on track to warming of 3.3˚C by 2100.
“Two
months ago the world received a strong message from the scientific community –
that it’s possible to keep warming to 1.5˚C,” said Bill Hare, CEO of
Climate Analytics, one of three organizations behind the Climate Action
Tracker, along with NewClimate Institute and Ecofys. “But we have yet to see this translate into action
in terms of what governments are prepared to put on the table.”
+
Right to end life on Earth: Can corporations
that spread climate change denialism
be held liable?
If
a corporation’s propaganda destroys the world, doesn’t that conflict with our
right to live?
===========
o.
From: Monty Kroopkin
Sent: Friday, December 14, 2018
Subject: Greta Thunberg calls for Global School Strike for Climate on
Fridays
“Fearless
Girl”
https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000006255372/fearless-girl-moves-stock-exchange.html
Fellow
Workers, Friends,
Greta
Thunberg's speech today to the United Nations climate change conference in
Poland.
She calls
for a Global School Strike for Climate on Fridays.
"You
Are Stealing Our Future: Greta Thunberg, 15, Condemns
the World’s Inaction on Climate Change"
https://www.democracynow.org/2018/12/13/you_are_stealing_our_future_greta
Background
on School Strike for Climate
https://www.democracynow.org/2018/12/11/our_leaders_are_behaving_like_children
https://www.democracynow.org/2018/12/11/meet_the_15_year_old_swedish
Solidarity,
Monty
Kroopkin
+
Our
plan to revive Europe can succeed where Macron and Piketty
failed
by Yanis Varoufakis
===========
p.
Black Agenda Report
News,
commentary and analysis from the black left.
Study Shows US Has Caused the Death of Millions in Iraq,
Afghanistan and Pakistan
https://blackagendareport.com/study-shows-us-has-caused-death-millions-iraq-afghanistan-and-pakistan
by Murtaza Hussain
Study
Shows US Has Caused the Death of Millions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan
By
conservative estimate, the US has directly killed nearly half a million people,
and doomed millions more, in just three of the countries it is attacking.
“If the conflicts in Libya, Yemen,
Somalia, or Syria had been included, the death toll would likely be
significantly higher.”
How
many people have been killed in the post-9/11 war on terror? The question is a
contentious one, as there has been no formal accounting for the deadly cost of
the initial U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the
secondary conflicts that continue to wreak havoc across the Middle East and the
opaque, covert war still expanding across Asia and Africa. But even as the U.S.
government evades responsibility for the human cost of its overseas endeavors,
some researchers are determined to keep count. Brown
University’s Costs of War Project this month released a new estimate of the
total death toll from the U.S. wars in three countries: Iraq, Afghanistan, and
Pakistan. The numbers, while conservatively estimated, are staggering.
Brown’s researchers estimate that at least 480,000 people have been directly
killed by violence over the course of these conflicts, more than 244,000 of
them civilians. In addition to those killed by direct acts violence, the number
of indirect deaths — those resulting from disease, displacement, and the loss
of critical infrastructure — is believed to be several times higher, running
into the millions.
===========
q.
Foreign
Interventions in Revolutionary Russia
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/12/10/foreign-interventions-in-revolutionary-russia/
by
Jacques
R. Pauwels
All over Europe, the First World War
had brought about a potentially revolutionary situation as early as 1917. In
countries where the authorities continued to represent the traditional elite,
exactly as had been the case in 1914, they aimed to prevent the realization of
this potential by means of repression, concessions, or both. But in the case of
Russia, the revolution not only broke out but succeeded, and the Bolsheviks
began work on the construction of the world’s very first socialist society. It
was an experiment for which the elites of the other countries felt no sympathy
whatsoever; to the contrary, they fervently hoped that this project would soon
end in a dismal fiasco. (It was also a revolutionary experiment that would
disappoint numerous sympathizers because the socialist Utopia failed to spring
whole, Athena-like, from the brow of the Russian revolutionary Zeus.)
In elitist circles in London, Paris,
and elsewhere, they were convinced of the ineluctability of the failure of the
Bolsheviks’ bold experiment but, just to be sure, it was decided to send troops
to Russia to support the “white” counterrevolutionaries against the Bolshevik
“reds” in a conflict that was to morph into a great, long, and bloody civil
war. A first wave of allied troops arrived in Russia in April 1918, when British
and Japanese soldiers disembarked in Vladivostok. They established contact with
the “whites,” who were already involved in a full-blown war against the
Bolsheviks. In total, the British alone would send 40,000 men to Russia. In
that same spring of 1918, Churchill, then minister of war, also sent an
expeditionary corps to Murmansk, in the north of Russia, in order to support
the troops of the “white” General Kolchak, in the hope that this might help to
replace the Bolshevik rulers with a government friendly to Britain. Other
countries sent smaller contingents of soldiers, including France, the United
States (15,000 men), Japan, Italy, Romania, Serbia, and Greece. In some cases,
the allied troops became involved in fighting against the Germans and Ottomans
on Russia’s frontiers, but it was clear that they had not come for that
purpose, but rather to overthrow the Bolshevik regime and to “strangle the
Bolshevik baby in its crib,” as Churchill so delicately put it. The British, in
particular, also hoped that their presence might make it possible to pocket
some attractive bits and pieces of territory of a Russian state that seemed to
be falling apart, much like the Ottoman Empire. This explains why a British
unit marched from Mesopotamia to the shores of the Caspian Sea, namely to the
oil-rich regions around Baku, capital of modern Azerbaijan. Like the Great War
itself, the allied intervention in Russia aimed both to fight the revolution
and to achieve imperialist objectives.
In Russia, the war had spawned not
only conditions favourable to a social revolution,
but also — at least in some parts of this gigantic country — to national
revolutions among a number of ethnic minorities. Such national movements had
already reared their heads during the war, and they generally belonged to the
right-wing, conservative, racist, and anti-Semitic variety of nationalism.
Germany’s political and military elite recognized close ideological relatives
in these movements and potential allies in the war against Russia. (Lenin and
the Bolsheviks, on the other hand, were considered useful in the war against
Russia, but ideologically these revolutionary Russians were antipodes of
Germany’s reactionary regime.) The Germans did not support the Finnish, Baltic,
Ukrainian, and other nationalists out of ideological sympathy, but because they
could be used to weaken Russia; they also did it because they hoped to stamp
German satellite states out of the ground in Eastern and Northern Europe,
preferably monarchies with as “sovereign” some scion of a German noble family.
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk proved to be an opportunity to create a number of
states of this type. From July 11 to November 2, 1918, a German aristocrat
named Wilhelm (II) Karl Florestan Gero
Crescentius, Duke of Urach
and Count of Württemberg, could thus enjoy being King of Lithuania under the
name of Mindaugas II.
With the armistice of November 11,
1918, Germany was doomed to disappear from the scene in Eastern and Northern
Europe and that put an end to the dream of German hegemony over there. However,
Article 12 of the armistice authorized German troops to remain in Russia, the
Baltic lands, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe as long as the Allies deemed it
necessary; in other words, as long as they remained useful for the purpose of fighting
the Bolsheviks, which is precisely what the Germans did. In fact, British and
French leaders such as Lloyd George and Foch henceforth considered
revolutionary Russia as a more dangerous enemy than Germany. The national
movements of Balts, Finns, Poles, etc., were now
totally embroiled in the Russian Civil War, and the Allies replaced the Germans
as their supporters, also militarily speaking, as long as they fought the
“reds,” rather than the “whites,” as they also often did, since much Eastern
European real estate, formerly part of the Czarist Empire, was claimed
simultaneously by the Russian “whites” and by Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian,
and other nationalists.
In all the countries emerging from
the clouds of dust rising after the collapse of the czarist empire, there were
basically two kinds of people. First, workers and peasants and other members of
the lower classes, who favoured a social revolution,
supported the Bolsheviks, and were willing to settle for some sort of autonomy
for their own ethnic-linguistic minority within the new multi-ethnic and
multi-lingual state — inevitably dominated by its Russian component — that was
taking the place of the former czarist empire and would be known as the Soviet
Union. Second, the majority, though certainly not all, of the members of the
old aristocratic and bourgeois elites and of the petty bourgeoisie, who were
against a social revolution and therefore detested and fought the Bolsheviks
and wanted nothing less than total independence vis-à-vis the new state being
created by the latter. Their nationalism was a typical nineteenth-century
nationalism, right-wing and conservative, closely associated with an ethnic
group, a language, a religion, and a supposedly glorious past, mostly mythical,
that was expected to be reborn thanks to a national revolution. Civil wars also
erupted between “whites” and “reds” in Finland, Estonia, Ukraine, and
elsewhere.
===========
r.
William
Blum, Renowned U.S. Foreign Policy Critic, Dead at 85
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50735.htm
By Chris
Agee and Louis Wolf
William Blum died in Virginia on December 9,
2018. He was surrounded by friends and family after falling in his Washington
D.C. apartment and sustaining serious wounds 65 days ago. He was 85 years
old. Bill was born March 6, 1933 at Beth Moses Hospital in
Brooklyn, N.Y. and became an American author, historian, and critic
of United States foreign policy. He worked in a computer-related
position at the United States Department of State in the mid-1960s.
Initially an anti-communist with dreams of becoming a foreign
service officer, he became disillusioned by the Vietnam War.
**
William
Blum: Anti-Imperial Advocate
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/12/14/william-blum-anti-imperial-advocate/
by
Binoy Kampmark
In
the incessant self-praise of the US imperial project, kept safe in a state of
permanently enforced amnesia, occasional writings prod and puncture. Mark
Twain expressed an ashamed horror at the treatment of the Philippines; Ulysses
Grant, despite being a victorious general of the Union forces in the Civil War
and US president, could reflect that his country might, someday, face its
comeuppance from those whose lands had been pinched.
In
the garrison state that emerged during the Cold War, the New Left provided
antidotes of varying strength to the illusion of a good, faultless America,
even if much of this was confined to university campuses. Mainstream
newspaper channels remained sovereign and aloof from such debates, even if the
Vietnam War did, eventually, bite.
The
late William Blum, former computer programmer in the US State Department and
initial enthusiast for US moral crusades, gave us various exemplars of this
counter-insurgent scholarship. His compilation of foreign policy ills in Rogue
State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, was written with the US as sole
surveyor of the land, all powerful and dangerously uncontained. To reach
that point, it mobilised such familiar instruments of
influence as the National Endowment for Democracy and the School of the
Americas, a learning ground for the torturers and assassins who would ply their
despoiling trade in Latin America. The imperium
developed an unrivalled military, infatuated with armaments, to deal with its
enemies. Forget the canard, insists Blum, of humanitarian intervention,
as it was espoused to justify NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999.
His Killing
Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions since World War II, remains his best and potently
dispiriting affair, one in which Washington and its Christian warriors sought
to battle the “International Communist Conspiracy” with fanatical, God-fearing
enthusiasm. In this quest, foreign and mostly democratically elected
governments were given the heave-ho with the blessings of US intervention. Food
supplies were poisoned; leaders were subjected to successful and failed
assassinations (not so many were as lucky as Cuba’s Fidel Castro); the
peasantry of countries sprayed with napalm and insecticide; fascist forces and
those of reaction pressed into the service of Freedom’s Land.
***
Oliver Stone Remembers Anti-Imperialist Journalist
William Blum, Chronicler of CIA Crimes
Academy
Award-winning filmmaker Oliver Stone speaks about the life and legacy of
dissident journalist and historian William Blum, who documented US war crimes
and CIA interventions across the planet
===========
s.
The Narrowness of Mainstream Economics
Is About to Unravel
https://truthout.org/articles/the-narrowness-of-mainstream-economics-is-about-to-unravel
by
Richard D. Wolff
Recent
extreme volatility and sharp drops in US stock markets underscore the
instability of capitalism yet again. As many commentators now note, another
economic downturn looms. We know that all the reforms and regulations imposed
in the wake of the Great Depression of the 1930s failed to prevent both smaller
downturns between 1941 and 2008 and then another big crash in 2008.
Capitalism’s instability has, for centuries, resisted all efforts to overcome
it with or without government interventions. Yet mainstream economics mostly
evades an honest confrontation with the social costs of such economic
instability. Worse, it evades a direct debate with the Marxian critique that
links those costs to an argument that system change would be the best and most
“efficient” solution.
In
economics courses these days, most US professors praise the “free market.” They
insist that its outcomes (prices, incomes, interest rates, and so on) flow from
self-interested individuals bargaining freely over their economic interactions
(buying, selling, borrowing, lending, working, and so on). Market outcomes,
they teach, are uniquely stable, efficient and, indeed, optimal in some
overarching social sense (or at least in Vilfredo
Pareto’s sense). The economy works well if we let markets work their
magic, according to this ideology.
Good
teachers explain that many assumptions are required — about social conditions
that need to be in place — for free markets to have these wonderful outcomes.
But the vast majority of students walk away from their economic courses with
little more than free-market ideology. They walk away believing that the market
works badly when governments interfere by influencing prices, incomes, interest
rates and so on.
Free-market
ideology took a big hit in the 1930s. That was because the years before the
1929 crash had seen that ideology in full bloom taking credit for the “Roaring
Twenties.” The horrendous Great Depression that followed for over a decade
after 1929 saw blame replace adulation. Private,
unregulated capitalism was seen as the problem for which government
intervention was the necessary solution. A new economic paradigm pioneered by
John Maynard Keynes displaced the free-market ideology from the 1930s to the
1970s. (My graduate professor of macroeconomics, James Tobin, was an
enthusiastic Keynesian. He peppered his lectures with hard jabs at free-market
“orthodoxy” and its doctrinaire proponent, Milton Friedman.)
===========
t.
From: "Mark
Crispin Miller" <markcrispinmiller@gmail.com>
To: "newsfromunderground"
<newsfromunderground@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, 15 December, 2018 4:43:37 PM
Subject: [MCM] The New York Times slimes William Blum in its obituary
Let's
note that Jim Naureckas—like Bill Blum
himself—doesn't dare extrapolate from
Zbigniew Brzezinski's
shocking boast, in Le Nouvel Observateur,
that the CIA had
actually,
deliberately brought on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, by sending
the
mujaheddin
(led by Osama bin Laden) to provoke it at the border. (You can read
the
interview
at https://dgibbs.faculty.arizona.edu/brzezinski_interview.)
That
it was Bill who "spotted and translated" the Brzezinski interview, as
Jim notes
here,
and yet would never dare infer (at least in public) that the "terrorist
attack" on
9/11
may have been another US provocation,
to bring on a far larger, longer war—
and
that Jim too doesn't dare infer it—tells us just how hard it is to cross that
line,
even
for the best and brightest on the left.
And
yet we have to cross it, if we're ever going to clean the wound that's
all but
killed
American democracy (and that was first inflicted back in 1963, and deepened
many
times thereafter).
MCM
DEC 14, 2018OPINION
The New York Times'
Shameful Obituary of Historian William Blum
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-new-york-times-shameful-obituary-of-william-blum/
by Jim Naureckas
===========
u.
From:
Mark Crispin Miller
News From
Underground
“American Moon”
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1P3VqaPDsTJN5pONFOeFY9SsNZw55aGuy/view
by Massimo Mazzucco
A
new documentary which examines the photographic record of NASA's Apollo
missions.
(I strongly
recommend Mazzucco's previous masterpiece, “September
11—The New Pearl Harbor”.)
This
is a freebie; so you might either buy Mazzucco's new
doc, via Amazon or whatever other vendor sells it, or donate to American Moon's
GoFundMe campaign :
https://www.gofundme.com/americanmoon.
And
after watching it, consider taking part in this quite brief anonymous survey :
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/9Z7ZD6F
===========
v.
Russia to Set Up Military Base in the Caribbean
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50778.htm
by Tass
Moscow is gearing up to establish a
long-term military presence in Latin America and the current mission of the
Tu-160 strategic bombers to Venezuela is part of this plan, Nezavisimaya
Gazeta writes.
According to military envoys, Russian authorities have made a
decision (and Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro did
not object) to deploy strategic aircraft to one of Venezuela’s islands in the
Caribbean Sea, which has a naval base and a military airfield. Ten years ago,
Russian experts and Armed Forces commanders had already visited the island of
La Orchila, located 200 kilometers northeast of
Caracas. Venezuelan laws prohibit the setup of military bases in the country,
but a temporary deployment of warplanes is possible.
"It is the right idea to include Venezuela in long-range
aviation missions," military expert Colonel Shamil
Gareyev told the newspaper, adding that it was also
economically reasonable. "Our strategic bombers will not
only not have to return to Russia every time, but also won't perform
aerial refueling while on a patrol mission in the Americas. Our Tu-160 aircraft
arrive to their base in Venezuela, conduct flights, execute their missions and
are then replaced on a rotating basis. This is how it should be done," he
said.
Colonel Eduard Rodyukov, a
Corresponding Member of the Academy of Military Sciences, in turn, told Nezavisimaya Gazeta that
"the arrival of Russia’s Tu-160 strategic bombers to Central America is
kind of a signal to Trump to make him realize that abandoning nuclear
disarmament treaties will have a boomerang effect."
According to Kommersant’s sources in Russian military
management agencies, the Russian-Venezuelan agreement on the flight of two
Tu-160 strategic bombers is mutually beneficial, since Caracas got a chance to
exhibit its independent military policy and Russian pilots performed not just a
simple training flight but covered a distance of more than 10,000 kilometers
over the Atlantic Ocean, the Barents, the Norwegian and the Caribbean Seas.
We are clearly helping the Venezuelan government stay afloat, Research Fellow
at the Institute of Latin American Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Emil Dabagyan told Kommersant.
"Since Russia benefits from oil exploration, it wants the Venezuelan regime
to stay in place," he added. As for Caracas, joint military drills with
Russia and other activities of this kind are very important for it at the
moment. According to the expert, Venezuelan authorities "seek to show
their determination to protect the country from the potential aggression of the
United States, who has been labeling the Maduro
regime as illegitimate."
===========
w.
From:
Mark Crispin Miller
News From
Underground
The Clinton Foundation operated as a (highly profitable) foreign agent, NOT a
charity. It makes the Trump Foundation
look like a pickpocket ring.
MCM
Financial
Bounty Hunters Testify: Clinton Foundation Operated As Foreign Agent
by Sara Carter
The Clinton Foundation operated as a foreign
agent ‘early in its life’ and ‘throughout it’s
existence’ and did not operate as a 501c3 charitable foundation as required by
its and is not entitled to its status as a nonprofit, alleged two highly
qualified forensic investigators, accompanied by three other investigators,
said in explosive testimony Thursday to the House Oversight and Government
Reform Committee.
John Moynihan
and Lawerence W. Doyle, both graduates of
the Catholic Jesuit College of the Holy Cross and
former expert forensic government investigators, gave their shocking testimony
before congress based on a nearly two-year investigation into the foundation’s
work both nationally and internationally. They were assisted by three other
highly trained experts in taxation law and financial forensic investigations.
The forensic investigators stressed that they obtained all the documentation on
the foundation legally and through Freedom of Information Request Acts from the
IRS and other agencies.
The investigation clearly demonstrates that
the foundation was not a charitable organization per se, but in point of fact
was a closely held family partnership
Former Utah U.S.
Attorney General John Huber, who resigned when he was appointed by former
Department of Justice Attorney General Jeff Sessions to investigate the Clinton
Foundation and the issues surrounding the approval to sell 20 percent of U.S.
Uranium assets to Russia, declined to attend the hearing. Chairman Mark
Meadows, R-NC, who oversaw the hearing stated that it was disappointing that
Huber declined, leaving Congress in the dark regarding the DOJ’s investigation.
Investigations into
the Clinton Foundation have always been plagued by politics but Moynihan
wanted to make clear in his opening statement that this investigation was one
of many his firm has conducted on nonprofits and had nothing to do with
politics.
Doyle and Moynihan
have amassed 6,000 documents in their nearly two-year investigation through
their private firm MDA Analytics LLC. The documents were turned over more than
a year and a half ago to the IRS, according to John Solomon, who first
published the report last week in The Hill.
“The investigation
clearly demonstrates that the foundation was not a charitable organization per
se, but in point of fact was a closely held family partnership,” said Doyle,
who formerly worked on Wall Street and has been involved with finance for
the last ten years conducting investigations. “As such, it was governed in
a fashion in which it sought in large measure to advance the personal interests
of its principles as detailed within the financial analysis of this submission
and further confirmed within the supporting documentation and evidence
section.”
At the onset of the
hearing, Moynihan wanted to make perfectly clear that the intention to look
into the Clinton Foundation was not political but based on their work with the
firm.
“At this point, I’d
like to answer two questions, who are we? We are apolitical,” Moynihan told the
committee. “We have no party affiliation to this whatsoever, No one has
financed us… we are forensic investigators that approached this effort in a
nonpartisan profession, objective, and independent way…we follow
facts, that’s all.”
“We have never been partisan,” he added, speaking on behalf of all five members
of his group testifying to Congress. “We come from law enforcement and wall
street where each of us has dedicated our entire lives and praised the rule of
law doing the right thing pursuing facts. we follow
facts. that’s all.”
“None of this is our opinion,” he went on state: “I emphasize none of this is
our opinion. These are not our facts. They are not your facts. They are the
facts of the Clinton Foundation.”
He disclosed the
reason his firm decided to take on the Clinton Foundation and the fact that
they paid for the investigation out of their “own pockets.”
“Are you doing this
for money,” said Moynihan to the committee. “Yes, this is how we make a
living.”
Moynihan and Doyle
swapped back and forth between there testimony and
opening statement, making it clear they were working as a team. But the most
shocking statements came from Moynihan’s statement as he read the laundry list
of violations by the Clinton Foundation.
Moynihan stated
“Foreign agent,” as he began to read from a long list of violations discovered
during the course of their investigation.
===========
x.
An online vigil for WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange was broadcast live on Consortium News on Friday night. If you missed it, watch the replay here.
Among the featured guests were famed whistleblower Dan Ellsberg, former U.S. Senator Mike Gravel, CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, columnist Caitlin Johnstone, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern and more: