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By Jani Allan

17 Jul 2021 – Widespread looting and burning has killed over 100, and wrecked factories, shops and homes, with Indian and whites increasingly the target. Is the country I love, where I spent 30 years of my life, spiralling into racial warfare?

Many years ago, I was invited by Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi to attend the Shaka Day celebrations in Natal. I was one of a handful of whites. Thousands of Zulus in their traditional garb, swayed, danced and sang praise songs to the great 19th-century warrior king, Shaka kaSenzangakhona, who made his people one of the formidable and feared powers in southern Africa.

Without the support of Chief Buthelezi, the leader of the Inkatha Freedom Party, Nelson Mandela would not have been released from jail. Gavin Relly, the former chairman of Anglo American, has said the Zulu leader was “the anvil on which apartheid was broken”.

But because he refused to join the African National Congress (ANC), due its Marxist underpinnings and his strong belief in “education before liberation”, Buthelezi and his supporters paid a heavy price, and he was frozen out of the highest echelons of power in post-apartheid South Africa.

This week, I watched in horror as my beloved homeland was transmogrified into an apocalyptic hell. The fruits of liberation before education were on full display, as looters and arsonists rampaged across the country. The tragedy was almost Shakespearean. Who could imagine that a nation would loot in order to express their rage at the jailing of the great Looter-in-Chief himself, former president Jacob Zuma?

Nelson Mandela gave the nation a gift: a non-racial constitutional democracy that enshrined freedom, equality and the rule of law. What we saw was the wilful torching of this gift – criminal behaviour emblazoned across the world’s screens. I was ashamed.

The orgy of looting, the burning of shopping malls, the wanton destruction of cars and trucks, and the brutal killing of livestock – all speaks to a descent into a barbarism that is plainly inexplicable. What is clear is that we have reaped what we have sown: a culture of impunity forged over decades of rampant government corruption, lawlessness and maladministration.

High rates of unemployment (70%-plus in many areas), poverty and ill health only partially explain the widespread manifestations of anger and anomie. But they are an insufficient explanation for this barbaric plunder of the economy. If they were, why would rioters loot a sex shop and a funeral parlor?

Revolutionary movements such as the ANC demand unfettered loyalty from the electorate for having defeated the enemy: apartheid. And that loyalty means turning a blind eye to the excesses of the ruling elite’s entitlement to the state’s resources, with which they buy themselves opulent villas, Ferraris and Bentley convertibles, and large farms while millions of the people they promised to set free live in ramshackle wood-and-corrugated-iron shacks in crime-ridden slums without toilets, jobs or hope.

But within the ANC, the ruling elite is not a monolith. The tribal divisions run deep. Zuma is a Zulu in a party that accords hegemony to the dominant Xhosa ethnic group. And this subterranean faultline has been the fatal flaw that, since Mandela departed frontline politics in 1999, has seen it struggle to remain united.

Under Mandela, a Xhosa, Zuma the Zulu could always be contained because of Mandela’s stature. The current president, Cyril Ramaphosa, however, has a much more difficult task reining in his predecessor and his considerable Zulu following, partly because he’s a member of the Venda ethnic group, a minor tribe from the northern regions of the country.

These tribal distinctions are further bedevilled by the political factions within the ANC, which were writ large with the jailing of Zuma. Contempt of court is a foreign concept to the masses, who are not ignorant of the party’s entrenched culture of corruption across the board. South Africa is bankrupt because of the looting of the state treasury for personal enrichment. In this regard, all ANC leaders are culpable.

Every week, another financial scandal erupts, with one of the latest being billions of rands earmarked for Covid vaccines going missing. This against the backdrop of excess mortality rates that suggest the virus has killed at least 160,000 in South Africa, making it the worst-hit nation on the continent.

That Zuma fleeced South Africa with the help of his businessmen chums, particularly the three Gupta brothers – all of whom protest their innocence, of course, and say the charges are politically motivated – is of no consequence to his minions, although the majority of South Africans were outraged by the scandal. What they demand is equal justice before the law. ANC officials who destroyed every state-owned enterprise have not been held accountable and are still walking free.

But Zuma’s followers have overplayed their hand with the wanton destruction of property and life. The image of a mother hurling her baby from a burning building set on fire by looters is seared into the global consciousness.

Aware that they have lost the sympathy both of the nation and of countries across the globe, Zuma’s ANC resorts to the Marxist playbook of turning on old opponents: white and Indian people. Deflection, after all, is the best form of defence. Propaganda messages abound online, urging comrades that “the revolution has begun” and they must take it “into the white areas and to the next level.”

Others call for “the revolution” to be taken to all parts of the country, demanding: “We need to liberate ourselves from these cronies, who are political puppets and sellouts, who are working as the black face/white skin, who are the political puppets of the white supremacy and white monopoly capital … Our struggle is against white supremacy and black subjugation.”

Death toll in South African unrest jumps above 200 as looting and violence continues in KwaZulu-Natal

In another video clip, filmed by a citizen journalist and shared on the social media app Telegram, an apparent ANC official in a rather sharp-looking suit, urges, “Once you are done with the looting, go to Indian areas. Go there and kill Indians and burn their houses. Once you are done with looting, go to white areas and kill them and burn their houses.”

While the provenance of some of these is uncertain, there’s no doubt that there are plenty of high-profile people inciting the violence, including Zuma’s own children and the notorious Julius Malema, of the anti-white, far-left Economic Freedom Fighters revolutionary group.

This inflammatory rhetoric of a race war, inciting the masses to mobilise against an ethnic minority, to destroy all vestiges of so-called white monopoly capital, has been countered by the spontaneous emergence of ad hoc multiracial militias, who have been patrolling their neighbourhoods armed with an array of weapons to keep would-be looters at bay.

President Ramaphosa deployed 74,000 troops during the Covid lockdown in 2020 to enforce regulations; today, as the country burns, there are about 25,000 soldiers on the streets – or at least that’s what the government claims. They are needed – the inept South African Police Service is not only incapable of protecting lives and properties, but some of its officers have joined in the looting themselves.

The newly installed King of the Zulus, Misuzulu KaZwelithini, has likened the ongoing violent protests in his region to a “suicide mission that will haunt the poor and vulnerable in the near future.”

Meanwhile, Ramaphosa has blamed the rioting and looting on “coordinated criminality.” This reluctance to call the violence what it really is, is emblematic of the president’s pusillanimous leadership since he took office.

My prayers go out to all my relatives and friends – black, white and of Indian origin – who still live in my former homeland. And I thank God that I no longer do.

Jani Allan is a writer and talk show host. She has written for the London Sunday Times, the Spectator, the Daily Mail and various other British publications.

19 July 2021

Source: www.transcend.org

By Mike Gruss

12 Jul 2021 – The coronavirus pandemic is not yet over — despite our most optimistic thinking — and this year’s Defense News Top 100 list offers hints of how the broader international defense market has coped.

The answer appears to be that national security firms have fared well. Very well.

Consider that six of the 10 largest U.S. defense companies had revenues jump by 6 percent or more — a total of about $11 billion — from fiscal 2019. And all seven Chinese firms on the list grew during the last year as well.

See the 2021 Top 100 list here!

The pandemic has shown — or maybe exposed — a workforce in which everyone is always online, always connected and, during the last 16 months, always on the job. That’s also true of the national security community. During this era of gray zone conflict, information warfare and cyberattacks, it’s often felt like there has been no letting up, no pause, no time to catch a breath.

At the same time, this year’s list marks yet another significant shift in how the industry is changing. Last summer, I mentioned that the Top 100 is part art and part science but that every year we push it a bit closer to science. We succeeded in that vision for 2021.

This year’s list includes more than 20 new names. Part of that is due to mergers since last summer. For example, Raytheon Technologies — the result of a combined United Technologies Corporation and Raytheon Company — makes its debut at No. 2.

Some of those new additions are due to a more aggressive approach on our part to seek out information on defense revenues from companies around the world or from firms we either overlooked or for which we couldn’t previously find revenue figures.

As evidence, last year’s 100th company on the list had just less than $300 million in defense revenue. This year, the 100th firm has just less than $600 million.

And some of the change serves as proof of the shifting demands of modern warfare.

Among the companies that are new — or returning — to the Top 100 are the cyber firm ManTech, the space company Parsons Corporation, the satellite imagery company Maxar Technologies, sensor company FLIR Systems, and emerging technologies company Alion Science and Technology. For all the talk of a digital, net-centric battlespace, this year’s list may best reflect how industry is bending and evolving toward that future.

The primary story in the defense industry has been one of relentless growth. A decade ago, 15 companies had $5 billion in defense revenue. Today, we know of at least 24 companies that reach the same threshold.

By next year at this time, we will know if a coronavirus could slow the defense economy down or if even a once-in-a-generation pandemic is a mere hiccup.

19 July 2021

Source: www.transcend.org

By Richard Falk

A modified text of my responses to interview questions of Murat Sofuoglu, a
Turkish journalist associated with TRT World: “On the July 15th Coup Attempt Five Years Later (July 8, 2021).

16 Jul 2021 – Five years ago my Turkish wife and I were strolling in the Karakoy neighborhood of Istanbul amid the crowded cafes on a typical summer night. It was our only day in Istanbul during the entire summer, occasioned by a conference at Koç University scheduled for the next day devoted to refugee policy with special attention to problems of massive human displacement caused by the regional conflicts, particularly Syria and Iraq. We stopped for dinner at a Greek restaurant, encountering unexpectedly Turkish friends who asked to join us. As the meal neared its end, the manager came to our table, speaking in almost a whisper he said that the Bosphorus Bridge, subsequently renamed 15th of July Martyr’s Bridge, was occupied by troops and the scene of violence, and that it seemed a coup was underway. It was a bit eerie as the atmosphere in the restaurant was vibrant and utterly without any sense that a national crisis was in the process of erupting. We paid our bill, and walked slowly back to a nearby hotel where we were staying for the night. Soon jets were flying low over this part of the city fast enough to cause the terrifying explosive sound of sonic booms, obviously with the intention of causing panic on the ground. We cautiously looked out of our hotel window to see police cars blocking the street below. For the rest of the night we were glued to the TV coverage of the rapidly unfolding events climaxed by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s dramatic appearance at the Istanbul Airport, greeted by a supportive crowd that walked the streets to greet the President and reaffirm their loyalty to the elected legitimate government. This reassurance by the people of Turkey and all of the political parties that made clear their rejection of the coup attempt contrasted with the silence of NATO governments, the longtime allies of the Ankara government. An impression was created among close observers of the political scene that leading Western governments would have greeted a successful coup with open arms. This impression was undoubtedly shared by leadership circles in Turkey, and has had profound effects on Turkish foreign policy, and particularly with the United States. These effects were initially associated with the Obama and Trump presidencies, but have continued in the early months of the Biden presidency.

1. How has the July 15 coup attempt affected Turkey’s foreign policy?

I believe the principal impact of the failed coup five years ago on Turkish foreign policy has been to cast lingering doubts on the loyalty of Turkey’s NATO partners. There was not only a display on the fateful night of July 15th of ‘wait and see’ attitudes in the principal capitals of Western Europe and of Washington as the coup unfolded, but there was no show of support for the legitimate elected government of Turkey from its longtime, and supposedly closest, allies. This Western diplomacy sent a message to Ankara that for the sake of its future security the government would be well advised to proceed rapidly to diversify its relations with other countries, and in particular, seek to deepen friendly relations with important other countries, including Russia and China.

These impressions were reinforced by the refusal by Washington to give serious consideration to the extradition request of the Turkish Government after the coup to enable the criminal prosecution of Fetullah Gulen, the presumed leader of FETO, the presumed forces behind the coup. Furthermore, in the period after the coup the various anti-Turkish international actors that were situated in various countries, including FETO, Kurdish groups aligned with the PKK, hard-core Kemalists living in the West, and Israel mounted an anti-Turkish international campaign alleging that Turkey was an unreliable ally, and was guilty of undermining Western policy with regard to Iran and the Kurdish presence in the Syrian civil strife.

A final factor for some was a clear indications that the coup attempt had been given a green light to proceed by Washington even if it not receive active, material support. There were several independent reports of CIA involvement and collaboration with FETO, and although never definitively confirmed, it naturally contributed to Turkish attitudes of wariness and some distrust with respect to ongoing relations with the United States, which had already been strained by a vigorous anti-Turkish international campaign.

2. Did the coup attempt make negative effects on US-Turkey relations? If so, how?

My response to the prior question supplies part of the answer. Turkey acted in a manner that stressed its political independence, especially on matters of national security and in relation to regional issues. It made no secret of its support for the Palestinian struggle for basic rights including the right of self-determination and its consistent opposition to Israeli longtime policies and practices. As well, Turkey purchased a defensive missile system—S-400—from Russia, which angered Washington, and was treated as a threat to NATO coherence and a breach of an unwritten NATO code of conduct. .

To an extent difficult to measure the coup attempt intensified preexisting trends in both Ankara and Washington. It has led to a downward trajectory in relations between the two countries. Ever since the AKP was elected to govern in 2002, its leadership made clear that Turkey was no longer a passive ally within the NATO framework as it had been throughout the Cold War. Already in 2003. the Turkish Parliament turned down the U.S. request to invade Iraq from Turkish territory, and in 2010 Turkey, together with Brazil, made efforts to negotiate an agreement on Iran’s Nuclear Program, which although earlier encouraged by the U.S., created tensions with the U.S. when Iran turned out to be receptive to such an initiative with its promise of reduced regional tensions. The coup attempt in 2016 hardened Turkish perceptions that hostile forces were receiving help from governments supposedly friendly with Turkey. In the background was a steady drum-beat of anti-Turkish propaganda on right-wing Western websites such as the Gatestone Institute and Middle East Watch, which are geopolitical propagandists for post-colonial U.S. imperialism, which include unabashed support for Israeli expansionism and denigration of legitimate Palestinian aspirations for an end to apartheid and the attainment of self-determination in their own country.

3. Will the coup attempt’s effects on the Turkish foreign policy have a lasting legacy?

This is hard to predict. It depends, in part, on whether Turkish/Israel relations remain strained, and possible leadership shifts in both countries. If normal diplomatic relations with Israel are restored, a process now mutually pursued, then I would suspect that leading Western governments will not back away from their anti-Turkish policies without offering an explanation. The American president Biden, together with the UK, France, and Germany, seem eager to focus their foreign policy in relation to meeting the multiple challenges posed by China’s rise, and secondarily by Russian territorial ambitions on its borders, and want as few secondary distractions in other regions as possible.

At the same time Turkey is likely for the foreseeable future to continue to hedge its policies, as well as seize its opportunities, by further developing a wide range of positive contacts within the Middle East and beyond, and this seems prudent even if Washington/Tel Aviv back off. Because Turkey is polarized in relation to the governing AKP, which has now held the reins of power since 2002, the originality of the Turkish reality is rarely comprehended as perceptions oscillate between embittered critics of the government and its leadership and its base of ardent supporters.

Richard Falk is a member of the TRANSCEND Network, an international relations scholar, professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, Distinguished Research Fellow, Orfalea Center of Global Studies, UCSB, author, co-author or editor of 60 books, and a speaker and activist on world affairs.

19 July 2021

Source: www.transcend.org

By Pepe Escobar

The Persian Gulf harbors an array of extremely compromising secrets. Near the top is the Afghan heroin ratline – with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) positioned as the golden node of a transnational, trillion dollar heroin money laundering operation.

27 Aug 2017 – In this 21st century Opium War, crops harvested in Afghanistan are essentially feeding the heroin market not only in Russia and Iran but especially in the US. Up to 93% of the world’s opium comes from Afghanistan.

Contrary to predominant Western perception, this is not an Afghan Taliban operation. The key questions — never asked by Atlanticist circles — are who buys the opium harvests; refines them into heroin; controls the export routes; and then sell them for humongous profit compared to what the Taliban have locally imposed in taxes.

Beyond Opium: US Could Be ‘Smuggling Uranium Out of Afghanistan’

The hegemonic narrative rules that Washington bombed Afghanistan in 2001 in “self-defense” after 9/11; installed a “democratic” government; and after 16 years never de facto left because this is a key node in the Global War on Terror (GWOT), against al-Qaeda and the Taliban alike.

Washington spent over $100 billion in Afghan reconstruction. And, allegedly, $8.4 billion in “counternarcotics programs”. Operation Enduring Freedom — along with the “liberation” of Iraq — have cost an astonishing several trillion dollars. And still the heroin ratline, out of occupied Afghanistan, thrives. Cui bono?

Have a SIGAR

An exhaustive Afghanistan Opium Survey details the steady rise of Afghan opium production as well as the sprawl in production areas; “In 2016, opium production had increased by approximately 25 times in relation to its 2001 levels, from 185 tons in 2001 to 4800 tons in 2016.”

Another exhaustive report issued by the delightful acronym SIGAR (Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction) even hints — discreetly — at the crucial connection; Operation Enduring Freedom feeding America’s heroin epidemic.

Afghanistan is infested by contractors; numbers vary from 10,000 to tens of thousands. Military and ex-military alike can be reasonably pinpointed as players in the heroin ratline — in many cases for personal profit. But the clincher concerns the financing of US intel black ops that should not by any means come under scrutiny by the US Congress.

A Gulf-based intel source with vast experience across the Pentagon-designated “arc of instability” tells the story of his interaction with an Australian intel operative who served in Afghanistan; “This was about 2011. He said he gave US Army Intelligence and the CIA reports on the Afghan heroin trade — that US military convoys from the ports of Pakistan were being used to ship the heroin out of Afghanistan — much of it was raw opium — for distribution as their backhaul.

No one answered.

The Never-Ending War: US Misrepresents Troop Numbers in Afghanistan by Thousands

He then cornered the key army intelligence operations and CIA at a meeting and asked why no action was taken. The answer was that the goal of the US was winning the hearts and minds of the population and giving them the poppies to grow won their hearts. He was then warned that if he brought this issue up again he would be returned to Australia in a body bag.”

The source is adamant, “CIA external operations are financed from these profits. The charge that the Taliban was using the heroin trade to finance their operations was a fabrication and a form of misdirection.”

And that brings us to a key motive behind President Trump‘s going against his instincts and accepting a new Afghan surge; “In the tradition of the opium wars of perfidious Albion in the 19th century, in which opium paid for tea and silk from India, and the taxes on these silk and tea imports financed the construction of the mighty British Navy which ruled the seas, the CIA has built itself up into a most powerful agent based on the trillion dollar heroin trade. It is impossible for Trump to overcome it as he has no allies to tap. The military are working together with the CIA, and therefore the officers that surround Trump are worthless.”

None of this deviates from the CIA’s modus operandi.

Past examples abound. The most notorious concerns the Golden Triangle during the Vietnam war, when the CIA imposed a food-for-opium scheme on Hmong tribesmen from Laos — complete with a heroin refinery at the CIA headquarters in northern Laos and the set up of nefarious Air America to export the opium.

The whole story was exposed on Prof. Alfred McCoy’s seminal The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia — which drove Langley nuts.

A contemporary counterpart would be a recent book by Italian journalist Enrico Piovesana detailing the New Opium War in Afghanistan.

The return of Air America

A Pakistani intel source with vast Pashtun/ tribal area contacts delves into even more incendiary territory; “According to our best information the CIA has brought in their al-Qaeda-Daesh proxies into Afghanistan to justify the additional American troops”. That would neatly tie in with Trump being cornered by his generals.

And then, there’s Moscow. Last week, the Russian Foreign Ministry was adamantly denouncing “foreign fighters” transferred by “unknown helicopters” as the perpetrators of a massacre of Hazara Shi’ites in a northern Afghanistan province; “It seems that the command of the NATO forces controlling the Afghan sky stubbornly refuses to notice these incidents.”

It does not get more serious than that; Moscow denouncing sectors of the US-trained Afghan Armed Forces side by side with NATO engaged in covert ops supporting jihadis. Russian intel has hinted — discreetly — for quite some time that US intel is covertly sponsoring Daesh — a.k.a. “ISIS Khorasan” — in Afghanistan.

WikiLeaks CIA Docs: US Lacked Afghanistan-Pakistan Strategy

Russian intel is very much aware of the Afghan chapter in the New Great Game. Russian citizens are “collateral damage” of the Afghan heroin ratline as much as Americans. The Russian Foreign Ministry is tracking how tons of chemicals are being illegally imported into Afghanistan from, among others, “Italy, France and the Netherlands”, and how the US and NATO are doing absolutely nothing to contain the heroin ratline.

Well, Air America, after all, never died. It just relocated from the jungles of Southeast Asia to the arid crossroads of Central and South Asia.

Pepe Escobar is a Brazilian independent geopolitical analyst. He is a frequent contributor to websites and radio and TV shows ranging from the US to East Asia.

19 July 2021

Source: www.transcend.org

By Hamilton Nolan

We are developing a private class of billionaire kings whose will is omnipotent and untouchable by any democratic force.

12 Jul 2021 – There comes a moment in every good gangster movie when all of the villains come together in a remote hideaway to make nefarious plans. If the good guys are smart, this is the moment they swoop in and arrest everyone. In real life America, though, we consistently squander these opportunities, opting instead to sit back and gawk at the villains like a bunch of dazed paparazzi. It’s never too late to change that.

Did you make it to the Allen & Co conference in Sun Valley, Idaho this past week? If you did, go directly to jail. The investment bank sponsors the annual schmooze-fest and “summer camp for billionaires” for the same reason that companies give away their luxury products in Oscars gift baskets: because if you spoil rich people enough, they may develop sufficiently warm feelings towards you to throw you some business one day. At Sun Valley each year, the billionaires are feted by the mere millionaires; the millionaires drum up enough deals to allow them to buy their third and fourth homes; and somewhere down the line, you can get a job as a housekeeper for one of those homes. This is the wondrous model of American capitalism in action – a tiny handful of wealthy people eat cake, and an entire nation gathers downstream, hoping to snatch up a few falling crumbs.

The Sun Valley conference is primarily known as a place where tech and media moguls gather to do a little fly fishing and strike multibillion-dollar merger deals, while various members of the financial press flit about the periphery of the resort like a bunch of tabloid hacks desperate for a snapshot of Mark Zuckerberg in the season’s latest fleece vest. More fundamentally, the conference is, like Davos, a mechanism for the concentration of wealth, dressed up as something friendlier. Here, America’s wealthiest mega-billionaires gather with the chief executive of America’s most powerful companies, the director of the CIA, and America’s most worthless pseudo-journalists (hello, Anderson Cooper) to develop the social and business connections that allow the top 0.00001% of earners to continue to accumulate a share of our nation’s wealth that already exceeds the famously cartoonish inequality of the Gilded Age of Rockefeller and Carnegie. Everything that happens at Sun Valley will contribute to the ability of attendees like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Mike Bloomberg to increase their society-warping fortunes. They and their fellow billionaires got more than 50% richer during the pandemic year, by doing absolutely nothing but sitting back and watching their capital grow as millions around the world suffered and died. Their power over the course of this country grows ever more unassailable and unaccountable to anything other than their own whims. We are developing a private class of billionaire kings whose will is omnipotent and untouchable by any democratic force. This is the state of affairs that the Sun Valley conference serves to intensify. It is, by any reasonable measure, a threat to the long term stability of our country that far exceeds anything the Taliban could ever dream up.

Yet there is a noticeable lack of Special Forces troops rappelling into the scenic Idaho woods to capture Oprah Winfrey and Tim Cook as they go whitewater rafting. The collective wealth of the small group of people inside that Sun Valley resort is estimated to be a trillion dollars – meaning that confiscating it all could end homelessness in America for the next decade, with a few hundred billion left over. Instead of pursuing this obviously good idea, we opt instead to leave all of that wealth in the hands of the rich, so that Sun Valley attendees Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson can use it to race one another to become the biggest asshole ever to go to space.

Everything that happens at Sun Valley helps attendees like Bezos and Gates to increase their society-warping fortunes.

It is odd that a nation obsessed with identifying threats has developed such a blind spot to the existential threat posed by the rich getting infinitely richer. Americans stockpile guns to fight off imaginary home invaders, flee to gated exurbs to hide from imaginary street crime, and launch doomed forever wars to battle imaginary foreign terrorists. But 40 years of wage stagnation, rising inequality, and the nightmarish gig-ification of all aspects of economic life are not enough to prompt us to cast a wary glance at an annual confab of all the people responsible for creating the conditions that have made it impossible to work one job and retire with dignity. The people who have, in fact, sucked up all of the money that no longer belongs to the mythical American middle class cavort openly in Sun Valley while we fearmonger about antifa breaking the windows of some coffee shop. It is enough to make me think that we are not so skilled at threat assessment, after all.

There is always next year. In 2022, the billionaires will return to Sun Valley. By then, they will almost certainly be richer, and more powerful, and control an even more grotesque share of the fruits of everyone’s labor. They will have continued to bust unions, consolidate control of industries, and wield disproportionate influence over all of our lives, solely for their own benefit. The case for rounding them up and redistributing their wealth will only have grown more convincing. And fortunately, we know exactly where they all will be.

Hamilton Nolan is a New York-based writer.

19 Julai 2021

Source: www.transcend.org

By Carlos L. Garrido & Edward Liger Smith

Yesterday, the Midwestern Marx co-founders got together to discuss the recent imperialist attacks on Cuba. In the podcast below, Carlos and Edward analyze the Cuban protests in their historical context; beginning from the development of colonial monocropping and the subsequent sugar and tobacco dependency created on the Cuban economy thereof, to the revolution, the process of industry nationalization, and the last 60+ years of the US blockade (which includes military, biochemical, and ideological attacks). Situating the condition in Cuba in its proper historical position, the focus is then turned towards the recent build up towards these protests, which include the US’ exploiting of the pandemic to intensify the conditions created by the reinstatement of the blockade via the Trump administration, the US funding of opposition groups in Cuba, and the role Cuban-opposition artist have played in furthering the imperialist narrative. The duo also examines the role and tactics western media has used to manufacture consent for these opportunists, as well as how they have been able to blow the scope of the protests out of proportion while ignoring the substantially larger pro-revolution crowds that hit the streets after Diaz-Canel’s called on them to defend the revolution. Watch our podcast interview below if you want a complete picture of the current situation in Cuba.

Podcast #11 HANDS OFF CUBA – Defend the Revolution!

Carlos L. Garrido is a philosophy graduate student and professor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.

Edward Liger Smith is an American Political Scientist and specialist in anti-imperialist and socialist projects, especially Venezuela and China.

14 July 2021

Source: countercurrents.org

By Gerald A. Perreira

Organization for the Victory of the People (OVP) stands firmly with the revolutionary government of President Diaz-Canel and all the patriotic and anti-imperialist citizens of our Caribbean sister-nation Cuba, as they struggle against this most recent US-backed attempt to provoke counter-revolutionary forces. In the Caribbean and South America, having seen these thinly-veiled US tactics to destabilize progressive and revolutionary governments play out time and time again, most recently in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia, the scenario is familiar and instantly recognizable.

The Empire’s relentless attempts to wreck Cuba’s economy and break the resolve of the Cuban people since the triumph of the revolution in 1959 is nothing short of a crime against humanity. Last month, for the 29th year in a row, a total of 184 countries voted in favour of a resolution to demand the end of the US economic blockade on Cuba, with only the two rogue states, the United States and Israel voting against. UN agencies estimate that this illegal economic blockade, designed to foment unrest, has over six decades, cost Cuba well over 100 billion dollars.

How can the US speak of freedom and democracy while, against the will of the world’s people, it continues to enforce this tortuous and criminal economic blockade against a small nation, simply because it dares to exercise its inalienable right to sovereignty and self-determination?

The immorality, hypocrisy and tyranny of the US Empire has been further exposed during the COVID 19 pandemic. Increased sanctions on Cuba at this time, when, like all nations of the world, it is struggling to overcome the economic and health crisis caused by the pandemic, was correctly described as “obscene” by Argentine president, Alberto Fernandez. Especially obscene in light of the fact that Cuba sent medical brigades to COVID epicenters around the world in their hour of need, and became the only country in the Global South to develop COVID vaccines, intended for their own citizens and for distribution to countries in South America, the Caribbean and Africa that have been denied access to vaccines by the US and Western Europe. The US imperialists, whose wickedness knows no bounds, have even hindered Cuba’s access to syringes and other supplies to assist in the manufacture and distribution of life-saving vaccines. Cuba’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla, rightfully described the sanctions as an “act of genocide” and said that “like the virus, the blockade asphyxiates and kills, it must stop.”

In fact, there are those in our region that predicted that Cuba’s development of vaccines Soberana, Abdala and Mambisa that are different in type and perhaps safer than the vaccines developed in the West, would prompt the Empire to accelerate its attempts to create chaos in Cuba to upset and discredit Cuba’s phenomenal achievements.

It is preposterous and incomprehensible that the US continues to promote itself as a champion of human rights, while being the world’s greatest violator of human rights.

It is equally incomprehensible, after what the entire world has witnessed over the past decade, not only in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan, but also in the very belly of the beast, the US itself, that anyone of us, in Cuba or elsewhere, could still be deceived and fall prey to the false promise that US intervention and capitalism can lead to prosperity, freedom and democracy. It is important at this time to remember the words of the revolutionary and friend of Cuba, Kwame Ture, “Capitalism and Imperialism does not lie sometimes, they lie all the time.”

In unity and struggle,
Gerald A. Perreira
On behalf of the National Directorate,
Organization for the Victory of the People (OVP)
Guyana

12 July 2021

www.ovpguyana.org

By Emanuel Pastreich

Slowly, against their will, and against their natural inclination to watch football and eat pizza, Americans are awaking to the reality of a totalitarian system with its tentacles wrapped around every aspect of their existence. Sadly, the true nature of this tyranny still eludes the understanding of most citizens, in part because the process by which America was transformed utterly has been slow, in part because the commercial media points us away from the true causes of this slippage and pins all blame on easily identifiable bad guys.

Those seeped in the progressive political tradition sensed a radical loss of justice and transparency under the George W. Bush administration, a trend that only accelerated under the Trump administration—with a perceived reprieve under Obama and the possibility of a positive turn under Biden.

Those marinated in the juices of conservative politics observed an end of freedom and the spread of fake “leftist,” ideology that oppresses the citizen under Clinton and Obama.

Both interpretive communities refer to the same social and political trends, to the war on freedom that renders us up as sacrificial lambs to the cruel gods of global capital. The rhetoric employed by the two groups is so radically different, however, and the histories of the United States that they embrace are so divergent, that they are lost in intense ideological conflicts even as they describe the same creeping totalitarianism.

That conflict is no accident. That ideological battle over the insignificant is just what the doctor ordered for the interests of high finance. Or as J. P. Morgan put it,

“By dividing the people, we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance to us except as teachers of the common herd.”

The super-rich already had their consultants come up with detailed studies on how to divide up citizens by religion, by ethnic identity, by cultural signifiers, and by class so that they are incapable of unity even in the face of the complete takeover of the economy, the media, education and the political process.

“Progressives” refer to the supporters of Trump in rural areas as “stupid” and fundamentalist Christians refer to the followers of the Democratic Party as “evil.”

This profound misunderstanding is probably reinforced by numerous classified operations in which individuals promoting divisive left-wing, or right-wing, positions are encouraged, and paid, to do so as render those who should have common cause as foes.

There is another reason why we have such a difficult time understanding the transformation of our society. The nature of this totalitarianism runs against the assumptions we were taught by movies, novels, and news reports. Our minds are cluttered with archetypes for dictatorship and evil that are at odds with the reality.

The greatest crime of Hollywood was convincing us that evil takes the form of a monster with fangs and claws, of an evil leader with a sinister smile. Corrupt journalists extend this fiction to the public sphere, explaining how evil is embodied in foreign leaders like Kim Jong-un, Xi Jinping, or Vladimir Putin, or in domestic ill-doers like Hillary Clinton (for the right) or Donald Trump (for the left).

As a result, we are unable to detect, or to understand, the takeover of our society that has taken place.

That is to say that we are confronted by “inverted totalitarianism,” to borrow the term of the philosopher Sheldon Wolin, a cultural and political state in which all aspects of our daily lives are controlled by multinational corporations without our knowing and we lose all freedom.

As a result, our actions are profoundly limited; we are constantly beaten down by an iron fist covered in the soft glove of interest charges, student loans, and constant surveillance.

The totalitarianism that we face is “inverted” in the sense that we expect some dictator standing on top and playing the bad buy, oppressing us out of personal greed, vanity or cruelty. But the true source of our misery is rather the manner in which multinational corporations use supercomputers to calculate profits and then extract as much money as possible from us by making it impossible for us to grow our own food, to heal our own illnesses, to teach ourselves, or to entertain ourselves. Instead, we must buy products, online, or in supermarkets, in transactions from which multinational corporations and banks will invariably take a major cut. The only learning that is recognized and accredited is expensive and is controlled by corporations.

We are offered only false choices between Pepsi or Coke, between Taco Bell or Wendy’s, between action films or romantic comedies, and between the Democratic or Republican Parties.

The process by which citizens lost their self-reliance, their self-sufficiency in food production and in energy production, and the basic skills of sewing, knitting and carpentry, growing dependent on products supplied by corporations, began 100 years ago. We can trace the current crisis back to the campaigns of John D. Rockefeller to force citizens to be dependent on petroleum through the promotion of automobiles and trade, the slashing of budgets for public transportation and the massive funding for highways, the push for the mechanization of farming and the popularization of plastics.

Rockefeller also paid off experts so as to marginalize homeopathic medicine and traditional treatments and create dependency on overpriced hospitals that are tied to corporations, while rendering universities and research institutes dependent on the benevolence of the rich, thus making systematic critiques of the sources of wealth a taboo topic.

To be more specific, the invisible inverted totalitarianism that has taken control of our daily experiences can be traced back to the launch of Windows as an operating system in 1985. Microsoft Word, under the rule of Bill Gates (an ardent student of John D. Rockefeller), set out to control the means by which citizens utilize their computers and later, to control how they interacted with each other over the internet.

Sure, presidential elections were held every four years, and the public was given a chance express itself. Secret secret police did not cart off those who criticized the government—in fact criticism of government was encouraged as way to distract from the impact of bank deregulation.

Most citizens were hardly aware that having one corporation control the system software for all computers that they supposedly “owed” meant that they had lost their freedom.

Yet the shift was profound. Whereas the individual previously could decide for himself where to place files in his office, how to organize documents and layout his papers around his typewriter, the manner in which information is organized within Windows is extremely limited, determined in advance by unaccountable forces and the format and layout cannot be modified by the user.

Needless to say, this first step down the road to tyranny, this fatal loss of basic autonomy, was carefully covered up in the rhetoric of convenience and efficiency, exciting innovation and technological advancement, so that few recognized the loss.

Myths about the importance of convenience, of connectivity and of globalization were swallowed by the entire population. Critical topics like the scientific method, the control of the means of production and the decision-making process in government, and in other institutions, were forgotten.

The next step in this hidden tyranny over our daily lives came in the form of search engines like Google, social networks like Facebook, and other massive, interconnected, corporations that mediated the interactions of the individual with the community, often taking over critical functions that previously belonged to the community or to non-profit institutions like schools or research centers.

Under the guise of greater convenience for the individual, businessmen with unlimited funding from investment banks were able to buy up rivals, block out alternatives that offered search engines as cooperatives, and thereby created search engines that pose as transparent institutions but derive money through the sophisticated manipulation of human interactions using algorithms.

Because Google and Facebook had such resources that they could lose money for years, the manner in which they whittled away at the autonomy of the citizen was almost undetectable. Equally important was the strategy of using short-term stimulation of the brain by postings, instant messages and gaudy news reports, to remap the connections between synapses so as to render most incapable of complex, three-dimensional, thinking. That service, the creation of a dumbed down, passive, population, was true product that internet giants offer to their real clients.

Google controls what information we access to, in what order we have access to it, and it lays out a hierarchy of significance in search results that has some basis in fact, but is primarily a political act for sale to the highest bidder.

Results of Google searches are altered, on a case-by-case basis, in response to the needs of corporations to promote their views to extremely specific audiences.

Although we are trained to think of Google as a public service, its falsehoods, increasingly given authority by the parallel Wikipedia entries created by public relations firms, are not subject to external review. Google users are never permitted to participate in the process of the formulation of policy, or in the review of content. That is to say, the United States calls itself a democracy, but the primary tool that citizens rely on for information is run as a dictatorship.

Another popular cloak for the slip into tyranny is the framing of “opinion” as content in the news. Scientific fact ceased to be central in reporting from 1990s. In its stead, opinion polls of groups selected by polling companies are held up as a confirmation of what is true.

Public opinion polls are the propaganda equivalent of stock buybacks. The billionaires, having radically deregulated the economy and dumbed down the population, merely force-feed their opinions to the public through the media that they control and then claim that the policies they want are demanded by the public.

Facebook gives the appearance that the citizen can express himself freely, and can make friends with anyone. Yet, since Facebook Inc. controls whom a citizen can easily find through its network, and who sees what, and it does not permit users to use their own software, or design their own page, or own the networks they create on Facebook, or to have any say in how Facebook is administered, the freedom is fiction.

Legal concepts like the contract have been twisted beyond recognition in the totalitarian cyberspace that surrounds us.

A contract is a negotiated agreement between two parties. On-line, however, whether it is the decision to accept cookies, or to comply with the rules for a commercial application, the user has no right to make demands of the corporation. He or she is given the false choice of either agreeing with all conditions offered, or not having access to the service. The contract is an empty ritual.

We are accustomed to permitting Facebook, Twitter, SnapChat or Instagram to determine what becomes of information that we share, and we are unaware of the billions in profits those corporations make by selling off the information, the content, and the creative ideas that we supply without giving us any compensation. In a sense, these social networks are a form of virtual slavery.

COVID19 Totalitarianism

Because the thinking of citizens has been degraded for decades, and citizens rely on corporate-sponsored sources for basic information, it became possible, for the first time, to create a virtual pandemic, planned by the super-rich, promoted by the news sources that they own, authorized by experts at the institutes and universities that they fund, and legitimated by government agencies (and international institutions like the World Health Organization) that have been radically privatized.

Previously, a significant number of citizens were capable of assessing the accuracy of information on their own. Research institutes like Harvard University still had an ethical commitment to the scientific method and to academic integrity.

All that is over now. The façades of the NIH and Harvard remain the same, maybe they are even better maintained, but the intellectual innards have rotted away. Distinguished professors are easily assembled to give testimony to ridiculous theories about COVID19.

The dangers of the COVID19 vaccines are not the primary threat. The danger lies rather in the shift of the decision-making process for policy away from science, and away from a transparent policy debate. COVID19 serves a successful precedent for invisible forces at private equity funds to decide medical policy in secret and then feed it to us through authority figures.

Those invisible forces now feel they are free to require of us, without any accountability to science, that we have any substance that they offer injected into our bodies as a condition for the right to attend school, to find employment or to receive medical treatment.

The process was made possible by the interaction of social networks, search engines, commercial media, and other critical components of daily experience that determine opinions concerning reliable and authoritative voices. That process is run as an invisible dictatorship that controls a distracted, confused and unfocused population, drowning in connectivity.

Nothing will get better until citizens recognize the cause of this nightmare was not the legacy of the Bushes, the Clintons, the Obamas or the Trumps, although they all played their role, but rather the end of the self-reliant and informed citizen with access to the writings of experts with a deep commitment to the scientific method and to ethical principles.

Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi.

11 July 2021

Source: www.globalresearch.ca

By Robert Hunziker

Facing Future.TV founder and executive producer Stuart Scott and co-host Dale Walkonen recently broadcast a wide-ranging interview with Noam Chomsky about the state of human existence in the face of universal decadence.

A Conversation with Noam Chomsky

They started by referencing the Doomsday Clock (Science and Security Board Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists), which has pegged humanity’s risk of annihilation at an all-time high of only 100 seconds to midnight. Chomsky feels we’re actuality closer to midnight than that. For example, his opinion is influenced by information in a leaked draft of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) upcoming report, “which is much more grim than earlier reports,” keeping in mind it is only a draft so far, and he believes the final report may temper the initial draft.

With regard to nuclear weapons, the situation is far more dangerous than the last Doomsday Clock report. New weapons systems under development are much more effectively dangerous. The Biden administration, expanding upon Trump’s confrontational approach, has Chomsky at a loss for words to describe the danger at hand. Only recently, Biden met with NATO leaders and instructed them to plan on two wars, China and Russia. According to Chomsky: “This is beyond insanity.” Not only that, the group is carrying out provocative acts when diplomacy is really needed. This is an extraordinarily dangerous situation.

According to Chomsky, the Doomsday Clock setting at 100 seconds to midnight is based upon: (1) global warming (2) nuclear war and (3) disinformation, or the collapse of any kind of rational discourse. As such, number three makes it impossible to deal with the first two major problems. Along those lines, within the Republican Party there’s virtually a disappearance of any pretense of rational discourse. Twenty-five (25%) percent of Republicans believe the government is run by an elite satanic group of pedophiles. Seventy percent (70%) of Republicans believe that the election was stolen. Only fifteen percent (15%) of Republicans believe that global warming is a serious problem. Therein lies an insurmountable problem to solving the main issues that continually tick the clock ever closer to a disaster scenario that will likely be unprecedented in the annals of warfare and environmental degradation.

As a result, Chomsky says: “We’re living in a world of total illusion and fantasy.” Accordingly, “Unless this is dealt with soon, it’ll be impossible to deal with the two major issues within the time span that we have available, which is not very long.”

In Chomsky’s opinion the Republican Party, especially if it regains control in 2024, will take society down the tubes, down for the final count into the depths of a nether world. In Chomsky’s words: “If they return to power, it is very likely it will be an organized death knell for human society.”

However, on a positive note, boots on the ground political activism is still a political factor that works. A prime example is the Sunrise Movement that has effectively lobbied for a civilian climate corp. Chomsky applauds Sunrise as well as The United Mineworkers agreement to support a transition program of miners to sustainable energy via government-sponsored programs. Additionally, nineteen unions in California have agreed to a similar program.

Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the ledger, OPEC is planning to increase investment and production of fossil fuels because the price of oil is going up. According to Chomsky: “It is totally suicidal.” It’ll be suicidal in due course, but over the short term it’ll produce more wealth for Saudi Arabia. However, there’s little doubt that the country will be uninhabitable within a few years in a self-afflicted pogrom.

Chomsky: “Whatever is going on in the minds of human beings, they’re capable of saying let’s destroy ourselves, let’s destroy life for our children, because I can make a few more dollars tomorrow.” Not only are countries blind to an encroaching hothouse Earth, the wealthy countries are basically monopolizing vaccine for Covid 19 in the face of variants of the virus that will come back more powerful and deadly to haunt the wealthy countries. Indeed, the world is at odds with itself!

Chomsky claims there are opportunities and ways to reach people to resolve issues. But, “we do not have much time.” He warns that if the Republicans come back to office in 2024, it may be too late. “The programs they are pursuing offer no hope for survival.” After all, every year that Trump was in office, the Doomsday Clock minute hand moved closer to midnight. Eventually, the Doomsday Clock analysts gave in by shifting from the minutes-hand to the seconds-hand.

There are opportunities that must be grasped to stop the madness. To be effective, change must come from below from the general population not from above or the politicians. For example, Congress passed a resolution calling for a Green New Deal introduced by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey. He claims: “It’s a very good proposal.” Extensive activism got it to this point. The key to making things happen is “boots on the ground.” The Sunrise Movement occupied Nancy Pelosi’s office and got support from AOC. That’s grass roots activism at work and it has succeeded, so far.

Chomsky: “There are good people like Ocasio-Cortez and Markey but they’re not going to get anywhere unless there’s extensive popular pressure compelling the legislative authorities, the Congress, the White House to pursue these objectives.” For example, when FDR wanted to pass New Deal legislation, he told the public: “You have to make me do it, I cannot do it myself.” It takes human bodies with boots on the ground to effectively influence legislation. Whereas, clicking a mouse gets nowhere and easily ignored.

In retrospect, it is important to emphasize that throughout history political parties that rely upon lies bring society down to its knees in piles of shameless destruction. A prime example of this is the fall of Rome, which resonates today: “By the time of Augustine (354-430 AD), the Roman Empire had become an Empire of lies. It still pretended to uphold the rule of law, to protect the people from the Barbarian invaders, to maintain the social order. But all that had become a bad joke for the citizens of an empire by then reduced to nothing more than a giant military machine dedicated to oppressing the poor in order to maintain the privileges of the rich. The Empire itself had become a lie: that it existed because of the favor of the Gods who rewarded the Romans because of their moral virtues. Nobody could believe in that anymore: it was the breakdown of the very fabric of society; the loss of what the ancient called the auctoritas, the trust that citizens had toward their leaders and the institutions of their state.” (Source: Cassandra’s Legacy, The Empire of Lies, February 8, 2016).

Robert Hunziker is a writer from Los Angeles

12 July 2021

Source: countercurrents.org