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Here’s an automated email that I received on January 9th from the neoconservative Foreign Policymagazine’s publicity department, pumping the magazine’s five top stories of that day, all of which suggest that the same U.S. Establishment which had deceived Americans into supporting their country’s invading Iraq, Libya, and other countries that hadn’t ever threatened U.S. national security — that this same Establishment should be restored to power in America now, so as to finish the jobs that Barack Obama and George W. Bush began — to help the poor people who live in the benighted lands whose governments this generous U.S. Government wants to improve, like was done to Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine and all other countries that the kindly U.S. Government has done so much to help (destroy):

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Frpm: ————————

Subject: Foreign Policy’s Top 5 Reads Today

Date: January 9, 2018 at 9:41:21 AM GMT-5

To: —————————

Reply-To: —————————

Foreign Policy’s Top Reads

01/09/18

If You Thought 2017 Was Bad, Just Wait for 2018

Last year, Trump corroded U.S. foreign policy, but avoided disaster. This year, there are powerful reasons to think that matters will worsen.

BY HAL BRANDS | JANUARY 8, 2018, 2:10 PM

Dancing to Russia’s Tune in Syria

As the United States stands back, the Saudis and even the U.N. special envoy are now open to a greater Russian diplomatic role in shaping the future of Syria.

BY COLUM LYNCH | JANUARY 8, 2018, 10:28 AM

It’s Time to Bomb North Korea

Destroying Pyongyang’s nuclear arsenal is still in America’s national interest.

BY EDWARD LUTTWAK | JANUARY 8, 2018, 12:48 PM

How to Break Up Europe’s Axis of Illiberalism

If the EU really wants to punish Poland, it should turn up the pressure on Hungary.

BY SLAWOMIR SIERAKOWSKI | JANUARY 8, 2018, 1:27 PM

China’s War on Poverty Could Hurt the Poor Most

The government is pushing people out of rural squalor — and into urban dependence.

BY EUGENE K. CHOW | JANUARY 8, 2018, 11:45 AM

BOOKERS & PRODUCERS

Contact ————— with requests relating to today’s top reads.

How Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post Became the US Military-Industrial Complex’s Chief Propagandist

January 7, 2018

How Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post Became the US Military-Industrial Complex’s Chief Propagandist

It used to be that the New York Times and the Washington Post competed against each other to be the chief propagandist for the hundred or so top firms who sell to the US federal government — the 100 top “federal contractors,” almost all of which are Pentagon contractors — mainly these are weapons-manufacturing firms, such as the biggest, Lockheed Martin. The federal government is a large part of these firms’ essential market; so, invasions by the US against other countries require lots of their goods and services; and, also, America’s foreign allies additionally buy these weapons; and, right now, US President Trump is demanding that they increase their ‘defense’ budgets to buy more of them. Wars produce corporate profits if (like in the United States) the military suppliers are private corporations instead of government-owned (socialized). Selling wars is crucial to such firms’ bottom lines. And, since there is no law against owning a ‘defense’ contractor and owning or donating to newsmedia (especially newsmedia such as the Times and Post, which publish lots of international news and so can encourage lots of invasions), a sensible business strategy for investors in ‘defense’ stocks is to also own or donate to some international-‘news’ media, in order to generate additional business for the arms-maker or other ‘defense’ firm. Not only does this business-plan relate to such newspapers as the NYT and WP, but they’ll be the focus here, because they are the most important of America’s international-news media.

Serious periodicals, such as The New Republic, The Atlantic, and Mother Jones, have also been steady propagandists for ‘defense’ companies, but magazines don’t reverberate through the rest of the mass-media to the extent that the serious national (NYC & DC) newspapers do.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Is the Buildup to World War I Being Repeated for WWIII?

December 28, 2017

Is the Buildup to World War I Being Repeated for WWIII?

The great scholar of Turkish history, Taner Akçam, has described today’s geopolitics — the alliances and hostilities toward possibly another World War — as being not ideologically based like WWII, but instead greed-based (empire-grabbing) like WWI:

These are wars of power, influence, and control over the use of Middle Eastern energy resources and the “security issues” related to it. It is quite obvious that the sides in this war are not “those who want democracy and human rights” versus “those in favor of evil dictatorships.”

The axes that are now starting to take shape are proof of this: Saudi Arabia and Israel – openly supported by the United States (and likely Egypt over time) – are forming one alliance; Russia, Iran, and Turkey are establishing another.

A tableau reminiscent of 1918 power blocs.

Today’s alliances are modernized versions of WWI.

World War I was a mess of alliances on each of its two sides, the Central Powers, versus the Entente Powers. The aristocracies that were on the side of the Central Powers included (among others) the following: Jabal Shammar (Saudi Arabia allied with Turkey); Germany; Austria (including Croatia & Bosnia); Ukraine; Poland; Lithuania; Georgia; Turkey; Italy.

The aristocracies that were on the side of the Entente Powers included: China; Japan; Czechoslovakia; Russia; Serbia; UK; Canada; US.

Today, we instead have the West: US; UK; Saudi Arabia (UK-allied ‘Arab Revolt’ that ended in 1925 with Ibn Saud’s victory); Israel; EU led by Germany; Ukraine; Japan; South Korea; versus the East: Russia; Iran; Turkey; China.

An odd-man-out is North Korea, which will be supported by China if it stops developing its nuclear program beyond what’s needed for its self-protection (protection against repeating what had happened to Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi), but which will be opposed by China if it develops an aggressive, conquest-oriented, imperialistic, nuclear capability (which would reduce security not only for Japan and South Korea, but also for China).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Americans Are Only Now Beginning to Learn that We Live in a Dictatorship

December 22, 2017

Americans Are Only Now Beginning to Learn that We Live in a Dictatorship

The first time when it became clear to me that I live in a dictatorship was in 2014 when reading, prior to its publication, the landmark (and still the only) scientific empirical study to address the question as to whether or not the United States federal Government is, authentically, a democracy — or, whether, alternatively, it’s instead more of a dictatorship, than a democracy. This study documented conclusively that America’s Government is the latter.

So, on 14 April 2014, I headlined “US Is an Oligarchy, Not a Democracy, Says Scientific Study”. Subsequently, my editor linked it to the published article at the Journal where the study was published, Perspectives on Politics, from the American Political Science Association, and the full study can be read there.

On 30 April 2014, was posted at youtube the video that remains, to this day, the best and clearest ordinary-language summary of what that badly-written academic study proved. See its explanation here:

That summary’s title is also better than the title of my article was; this excellent video headlines “Corruption is Legal in America”, which is another accurate conclusion from that study. Every American citizen should know what this 6-minute video says and shows from the academic study, because it explains how the super-rich, as a class, steal from everyone else (everyone who isn’t super-rich): They do it through corruption.

Then, that same person who created the video did another presentation of it, but this time with text accompanying the video, and this article was titled “One graph shows how the rich control American politics”, and it indeed showed how.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

‘Russiagate’ Is Actually Israelgate — Trump as Agent of Israel, Not of Russia

December 21, 2017

‘Russiagate’ Is Actually Israelgate — Trump as Agent of Israel, Not of Russia

The Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s main evidence thus far in his “Russiagate” probe is not actually about possible Russian collusion with Trump to win the Presidency, but instead about definite Israeli collusion with Trump after Trump had already won the Presidency but before he became inaugurated. As a lawyer explained on the day when Trump’s former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn was indicted in a plea-deal: “Mr. Flynn has just become the prosecution’s star witness.” What Flynn had pled to was his trying to obtain Russia’s support for Israel’s Government, against the Palestinians. Russia said no; Putin said no to Flynn’s request, which had been made on behalf of Israel.

The way that Mueller’s investigation, to find reasons for Trump’s impeachment, achieved on December 1st the indictment and plea-deal with Flynn, was to get Flynn to admit (after his first having lied to deny) that he had been asked by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who had been asked by Israel’s head-of-state Benjamin Netanyahu, to communicate to Russia’s head-of-state Vladimir Putin through Russia’s U.S. Ambassador, a request on behalf of the incoming U.S. Administration of Donald Trump, for Russia to get Israel out of a jam at the U.N. Security Council. Netanyahu didn’t want to be alone in trying to pressure Putin to turn against the Palestinians; he wanted the incoming Trump Administration also to be pressuring Putin to do that — for Russia to veto, this time, a resolution (#2334 in 2016), which, every year in the past, had been supported by Russia; or, failing to achieve that, to get Russia’s support for Israel’s effort to delay the Security Council’s vote, until after Trump would become installed as the U.S. President on January 20th. That’s what Putin was saying no to.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How the US Swindled Russia in the Early 1990s

December 20, 2017

How the US Swindled Russia in the Early 1990s

Due to a historic data-dump on December 10th, the biggest swindle that occurred in the 20th Century (or perhaps ever) is now proven as a historical fact; and this swindle was done by the US Government, against the Government and people of Russia, and it continues today and keeps getting worse under every US President. It was secretly started by US President George Herbert Walker Bush on the night of 24 February 1990; and, unless it becomes publicly recognized and repudiated so that it can stop, a nuclear war between the US and all of NATO on one side, versus Russia on the other, is inevitable unless Russia capitulates before then, which would be vastly less likely than such a world-ending nuclear war now is.

This swindle has finally been displayed beyond question, by this, the first-ever complete release of the evidence. It demonstrates beyond any reasonable doubt (as you’ll verify yourself from the evidence here), that US President G.H.W. Bush (and his team) lied through their teeth to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev (and his team) to end the Cold War on Russia’s side, when the US team were secretly determined never to end it on the US-and-NATO side until Russia itself is conquered. And this swindle continues today, and keeps getting worse and worse for Russians.

Until now, apologists for the US-Government side have been able to get away with various lies about these lies, such as that there weren’t any, and that Gorbachev didn’t really think that the NATO issue was terribly important for Russia’s future national security anyway, and that the only limitation upon NATO’s future expansion that was discussed during the negotiations to end the Cold War concerned NATO not expanding itself eastward (i.e., closer to Russia) within Germany, not going beyond the then-existing dividing-line between West and East Germany — that no restriction against other east-bloc (Soviet-allied) nations ever being admitted into NATO was discussed, at all.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Trump Continues Obama’s Wars Against Democracy

December 10, 2017

Trump Continues Obama’s Wars Against Democracy

US President Trump’s bold support for the apartheid dictatorship of Israel against that theocratic-racist nation’s non-Jews, fits into a larger picture of the supremacist nation that America itself has increasingly become. His immediate predecessor, Barack Obama, had repeatedly referred to the United States as being the only indispensable nation — that all others are “dispensable” — such as when President Obama addressed America’s future military leaders, at West Point, on 28 May 2014, by telling them:

The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come. … Russia’s aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us, and governments seek a greater say in global forums. … It will be your generation’s task to respond to this new world.

He was telling the military that America’s economic competition, against the BRICS nations, is a key matter for America’s military, and not only for America’s private corporations; that US taxpayers fund America’s military at least partially in order to impose the wills and extend the wealth of the stockholders in America’s corporations abroad; and that the countries against which America is in economic competition are “dispensable” but America “is and remains the one indispensable nation.” This, supposedly, also authorizes America’s weapons and troops to fight against countries whose “governments seek a greater say in global forums.” In other words: Stop the growing economies from growing faster than America’s. There is another name for the American Government’s supremacist ideology. This term is “fascism.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How the U.S. Dictatorship Works

December 3, 2017

How the U.S. Dictatorship Works

A recent article in the Washington Post described how the current US tax-‘reform’ bill is being shaped; and it describes, basically (at least as far as tax-law changes are concerned), the operation of a US dictatorship by the super-rich.

First of all, however: there is no longer any realistic question as regards whether the US in recent decades has been a dictatorship, or instead a democracy. According to the only scientific analysis of the relevant data, that has been done in order to determine whether the US is a dictatorship or a democracy, the US is definitely a dictatorship that’s perpetrated by the extremely richest, against the public-at-large; in other words: the US Government functions as an aristocracy, otherwise referred-to as an oligarchy, or a plutocracy, or a kleptocracy; but, in any case, and by whatever name, it’s ruled by a tiny number of the extremely wealthiest and their agents, on behalf of those few super-rich, against the concerns and interests and needs of the public (everyone else). So: instead of being rule by the public (the “demos” is the Greek term for it), it’s rule on behalf of a tiny dictatorial class, of extreme wealth — by whatever name we might happen to label this ruling class.

That study, by professors Gilens and Page, explained that it examined “1,779 instances between 1981 and 2002 in which a national survey of the general public asked a favor/oppose question about a proposed policy change,” and it compared those public-policy preferences, by the public, versus the public-policy preferences regarding those same issues, by the super-wealthiest; and, it found that only the public-policy preferences by the super-wealthiest and their paid agents, made any discernible difference, at all, in the likelihood that a given public policy ultimately became enacted into law, in the United States.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Google ‘Ministry of Truth’ intensifies suppressing ‘fake news’ (such as this)

December 2, 2017

Google ‘Ministry of Truth’ intensifies suppressing ‘fake news’ (such as this)

On November 18th, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt spoke about how Google will help to defeat Russia. He said that Google helps in this effort not by “censoring” Russian newsmedia, but by “de-ranking” them in Google web-searches, so that web-pages from these sites, which he calls “propaganda,” will show so far down in the rankings in any Google-search, so that users of Google will not encounter (or will be vastly less likely to encounter) Russian sites — or any other non-mainstream sites (such as this one), which refuse unquestioningly to trumpet government lies.

Schmidt was speaking to the NATO-sponsored Halifax International Security Forum, which is headquartered actually in Washington DC, though “The Forum is best known for its annual security summit in Halifax, Nova Scotia” in order to strengthen Canada’s bond to America’s anti-Russia military alliance, NATO.

Schmidt’s full speech, and the Q-and-A’s after Schmidt’s presentation, are shown complete in the video here:

https://www.facebook.com/Halifaxtheforum/videos/1642381182492613/

Since no transcript was provided, extensive excerpts from the video will be quoted here.

At the video’s start, it’s marked as 1:51:38, and at its end, it is marked as 0:00:00, but only the end-marking shows in the video while it’s running, and that end-marking indicates the number of minutes-till the video’s end. I therefore provide both markings [with the minutes-from-the end being shown in brackets like here], because the video’s producers had made unusually difficult the finding and location of anything that’s said in Schmidt’s war-speech presentation. The presentation wasn’t addressed to the publics of NATO-member countries, but instead to scholarly and financial elites in those countries, people whose own careers are in service to these nations’ aristocracies (people who themselves are highly invested in their nation’s military-industrial complex). It thus reveals some things that Schmidt might prefer that the public not know.

1:08:00-[-43:00]

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Public Are All Alone: Understanding How the Enemy of Your Enemy Is Not Your Friend

November 24, 2017

The Public Are All Alone: Understanding How the Enemy of Your Enemy Is Not Your Friend

In political matters, the public are taught to believe that some political Party is ‘good’, and that the others are “bad”; but the reality in recent times, at least in the United States, has instead been that both Parties are rotten to the core (as will be clear from the linked documentation provided here).

Belief in this myth (that the opposition between Parties is between ‘good’ ‘friend’ versus ‘bad’ ‘enemy’) is based upon the common adage that “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” One side is believed, and ones that contradict it are disbelieved — considered to be lying, distorting: bad. But, maybe, both (or all) Parties are deceiving; maybe all of them are enemies of the public, but just in different ways; maybe each of them is trying to control the country in the interests of (and so to obtain the most financial support from) the aristocracy, while all of them are actually against the public.

Can it really be false that “The enemy of my enemy is my friend?” Not only can be, but often is. And no one is able to vote intelligently without recognizing this fundamental political fact.

It’s true between entire nations, too — not only within nations.

For example: Hitler and Stalin were enemies of each other, but neither of them was a friend of America (except that Stalin did more than anyone else to defeat Hitler, and thereby saved the world, though the U.S. — far less a factor than the U.S.S.R. was in defeating Hitler — still refuses to acknowledge the fact that Stalin did more than anyone else did to prevent the entire world’s becoming dictatorships; so, whatever democracy exists today, is a result of that dictator, Stalin, even more than it’s a result of either FDR or Churchill).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Runaway Inequality Creates Runaway Global Warming

November 14, 2017

How Runaway Inequality Creates Runaway Global Warming

The bottom half of humans own next to nothing, but they own as much as the world’s richest 80 individuals do, because though the bottom half are poor, there are 3.79 billion of them.

The average person among the richest 80 owns 45,750,000 times as much as does the average person among the lower half. In other words: in terms of wealth, the typical one of those hyper-rich equals nearly 46 million of those poor people.

The richest person among the poor half of humanity owns approximately $5,000, but billions of people in the lower half own less than nothing — they’re negative net worth: owing more than they own. However, whatever they own is visible, and easily seizable, either by creditors, or by thieves.

By contrast, the wealth of all billionaires, including of the top 80, is largely secret, lots of it being in shell companies, many offshore, untraceable. Consequently, estimates of the wealth of the richest 80 individuals are probably unrealistically low. This secretiveness is a major reason why the public tolerates being ruled by an aristocracy: they don’t even recognize that they are — they think they live in a democracy, even if they don’t.

The roughly two thousand known billionaires do lots of business with others in the billionaire class, and with politicians whose careers they fund. And they tend to get what they want in the resulting governmental policies.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How the US Aristocracy Deceive the US Public

October 31, 2017

How the US Aristocracy Deceive the US Public

The progressive former Democratic US Senator Ted Kaufman wrote at Forbes, on 22 July 2014:

Another year has passed with no one from a Wall Street bank going to jail for the criminal behavior everyone knows helped cause the financial crisis. Fines against Wall Street banks are reaching $100 billion, but all will be paid by stockholders. Bank CEOs and managers pay no fines and face no prison.

There has been no reform — zilch, nada — of the credit-rating agencies. They are right back rating securities from issuers who pay them for their ratings.

If you still can’t trust the credit-rating on a bond, and if Wall Street’s bigs still stand immune from the law even after the 2008 crash they had played a huge role to cause, then in what way can the US Government itself be called a ‘democracy’?

Kaufman tries to get the American public interested in overcoming the US Government’s profound top-level corruption, but few US politicians join with him on that, because only few American voters understand that a corrupt government (especially one that’s corrupt at the very top) cannot even possibly be a democratic government.

However, America’s aristocracy are even more corrupt than Wall Street itself is, and they control Wall Street, behind the scenes. And their ‘news’media are under strict control to portray America as being still a democratic country that somehow lives up to its anti-aristocratic and anti-imperialistic Founders’ intentions and Constitution. Maybe all that remains of those Founders’ intentions today is that Britain’s aristocracy no longer rules America — but America’s aristocracy now does, instead. And, this isn’t much, if any, of an improvement.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Does Russia Produce ‘Fake News’? Or Does America? Or Both?

October 30, 2017

Does Russia Produce ‘Fake News’? Or Does America? Or Both?

The biggest difference between American and Russian news-reporting has been a simple factual issue between the two sides, on what incident started the ‘New Cold War’ between the U.S. and Russia. (The original Cold War was between the U.S. and the Soviet Union and had an ideological, capitalist-versus-communist, alleged basis, but this one doesn’t — so, it’s not really a ‘New Cold War’; it is quite different, but it might be even more deadly.)

The U.S. and its allies say that what started it was in March 2014 when “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine” and “the invasion of Crimea” and Russia’s “conquest of land” by means of that “invasion,” sparked America’s sanctions against Russia and NATO’s military buildup along Russia’s borders; but Russia says that what started it was in February 2014 when Ukraine was victimized, as Russian Television reported it, on 13 March 2014, by:

an armed coup. The Maidan do not appoint these people; rather, it’s the US that does it. It’s enough to look at the newly appointed officials: Parubiy, Gvozd, Nalyvaichenko are all people who followed somebody else’s orders, the orders of the US, not even Europe. They are directly linked to the American intelligence.

In the American account, Ukrainian democracy started when the democratically elected President of Ukraine was overthrown in February 2014; in the Russian account, Ukrainian democracy ended when the democratically elected President of Ukraine was overthrown in February 2014, and only after (and in response to) that, did two regions (Crimea and Donbass, both of which had voted more than 75% for that man) break away from, and refuse to be governed by, the newly installed Ukrainian Government, which was now being imposed upon them.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Trump’s Hate-Iran Campaign

October 26, 2017

Trump’s Hate-Iran Campaign

On October 19th, the far-right Foundation for Defense of Democracy (FDD) held a “National Security Summit” which featured as speakers both Donald Trump’s CIA chief Mike Pompeo and Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, both of them (as will be shown here by extensive excerpts from their speeches) whipping up hatred against Shia Iran and against Shia Muslims generally.

They presented Shia Iran — not Sunni Saudi Arabia — as being the most dangerous source of radical Islamic terrorism. Donald Trump during his Presidential campaign had spoken frequently against ‘radical Islamic terrorism’, but everybody thought it pertained to the people who had perpetrated the 9/11 attacks, and those individuals were all fundamentalist Sunnis, not any Shias, and no one from Iran. But now, nine months into his Presidency, it’s clear that he was referring instead to Shia Muslims (and to Iran most of all), which Muslim category the Saud family who own Saudi Arabia hate, and call an “existential threat” to themselves, and so they even bomb Shia parts of their own country. Actually, the royal family who own Saudi Arabia — the fundamentalist Saud family — were said by Osama bin Laden’s financial bagman to have been the main donors to Al Qaeda; and, furthermore, Al Qaeda itself is also fundamentalist Sunni, and doesn’t even allow Shiite members.

15 of the 19 jihadists who did 9/11 were fundamentalist Sunnis from Saudi Arabia. The other four were likewise fundamentalist Sunnis. None of them were from Shia Iran, nor were there any Shia from anywhere. Al Qaeda was, and is, exclusively a fundamentalist-Sunni operation — no Christians, no Jews, no Shia, no atheists, but only fundamentalist Sunnis, such as are the royal families of the Arabic countries, all of whom are Sunnis, and most of whom are fundamentalist Sunnis, like Al Qaeda itself is.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why GDP Is Fake

October 26, 2017

Why GDP Is Fake

Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, is the most commonly used measure and ranking of a nation’s economy. According to the OECD and Wikipedia, its definition is: “an aggregate measure of production equal to the sum of the gross values added of all resident and institutional units engaged in production (plus any taxes, and minus any subsidies, on products not included in the value of their outputs).” No subtractions are included in it for debts that were undertaken in order to generate the given “gross values added.” A trillion dollars of increased assets (additional “gross values” of “production”) adds a trillion dollars to GDP, even if all of it was produced by increasing the debts by a trillion dollars: only the assets-side of the balance-sheet is relevant to GDP.

However, wealth is assets minus liabilities; it is assets minus debts; it is not assets alone. Therefore, a nation’s wealth has no necessary relationship at all to a nation’s GDP, because the nation’s wealth is its assets minus its liabilities, not its assets regardless of its liabilities (such as GDP is).

Britannica provides this definition of “GDP”: “Gross domestic product (GDP), total market value of the goods and services produced by a country’s economy during a specified period of time. It includes all final goods and services — that is, those that are produced by the economic agents located in that country regardless of their ownership and that are not resold in any form. It is used throughout the world as the main measure of output and economic activity.” In this definition, too, no subtractions are included in it for the debts. Britannica then goes on to state:

GDP = Consumption + Investment + Government Spending + Net Exports

or more succinctly

GDP = C + I + G + NX

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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