Steve's Politics Blog

Michael Hudson has posted the article Were the Biblical Prophets Anti-Semitic?

If the prophets of ancient Israel such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Malachi and Amos were alive today, Benjamin Netanyahu would accuse them of anti-Semitism for daring to describe his government as a travesty of what the Mosaic covenant was all about.

This article is very daning of the current state of Israel, Not being an expert in, nor wanting to be an expert in the bible, I have no way of knowing if Michael Hudson is making a fair assessment.

Rokfin has the video Restructuring of the Global Economy – Michael Hudson, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen.

This is a free education handed to you on a silver platter. Most people will not understand what they are passing up when they don’t bother to watch this video. I have followed Michael Hudson for years and The Duran for a shorter time, but I learned a lot from this video. Even to the very end of the video there are things to learn. I thought I came up with the idea of being a “what worksist”, but they endorse that idea at several points in the discussion by coming close to using my very term

YouTube has the video Why does the US support Israel? A geopolitical analysis with economist Michael Hudson

A geopolitical analysis of why the United States so strongly supports Israel: Economist Michael Hudson discusses with journalist Ben Norton.

Facebook thinks this has some misonformation in it, so it tried to block the URL. Facebook’s fact checkers are very narrow minded. This video is actually more wide minded than I ever thought.

Films For action has the article Israel Has Broken My Heart: I’m a Rabbi in Mourning for a Judaism Being Murdered by Israel. By Rabbi Michael Lerner / salon.com

It is this love, compassion, justice and peace-oriented Judaism that the State of Israel is murdering. The worshipers of Israel have fallen into a deep cynicism about the possibility of the world that the prophets called for in which nations shall not lift up the sword against each other and they will no longer learn war, and everyone will live in peace. True, that world is not already here, but the Jewish people’s task was to teach people that this world could be brought into being, and that each step we take is either a step toward that world or a step away from it. The Israel worshipers are running away from the world, making it far less possible, and then call their behavior Judaism and Israel “the Jewish state.”

This article was published in Aug 10, 2014. It is shocking how much the situation has worsened in the almost 10 years since this was published.

Since Facebook won’t let me post a link to this article, I thought I would post it here so I wouldn’t lose the link. Escalations Cannot Be Stopped – The White House Is Rattled; Escalations Might All Fuse Into ‘One’.

This article was written by Alastair Crooke, Former British diplomat, founder and director of the Beirut-based Conflicts Forum.

Should Israel enter Gaza (and Israel may decide it has no choice but to launch a ground operation, given the domestic political dynamics and public sentiment), it is likely that Hizbullah will incrementally be drawn further in, leaving the U.S. with the binary option of seeing Israel defeated, or launching a major war in which all the hotspots become fused ‘as one’.

In a sense, the Israeli-Islamic conflict now may only be resolved in this kinetic way. All efforts since 1947 have seen the divide only deepen. The reality of the necessity of war is permeating widely the consciousness of the Arabic and Islamic world.

Alastair Rooke has this eye-opening article ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’: The surprise is that some are surprised.

The cry for Al-Aqsa resonated across the entire Islamic sphere. Why did the West not get it?

This is the article discussed in the video in the previously posted article Extremist Politics in Israel and Ukraine – Alastair Crooke, Alexander Mercouris and Glenn Diesen

Rokfin has the video Extremist Politics in Israel and Ukraine – Alastair Crooke, Alexander Mercouris and Glenn Diesen.

An amazing, and thought provoking exchange of ideas. I have been waiting for this to be posted ever since Alexander Mercouris hinted at it.

Early in the conversation the class of people they referred to was “Ashkenazi Liberal Left”. I suppose that’s what I am. I thought my whole extended family was that, too. I think we were all propagandized during our youth, to forget what that means. Somehow we were taken in by the idea of Zionism, and many are still suffering from that upbringing.

Michael has posted the article A BRICS+ Bank: How would it really function?

At Thursday’s Valdai Club meeting in Sochi, Russia’s President Putin explained how he viewed the needed restructuring. Contrary to much discussion in the West, what is planned is not a “BRICS currency,” but something much more limited: a means of settling payments imbalances along quite different lines from those that have led to today’s crisis.

This is from someone who I believe has the credentials to opine on this topic. The credentials are not from his degrees, which he has, but from the logic of his claims, and the history that he understands.

Open Culture has Robert Reich’s UC Berkeley Course on Wealth & Poverty Is Free Online.

Once the Secretary of Labor under the Clinton Administration, Robert Reich spent 17 years teaching at UC Berkeley. This past spring, he taught his final course there, and it’s now available online. Above, you can stream 14 lectures from “Wealth and Poverty,” a course “designed to provide students with a deeper understanding of both the organization of the political economy in the United States and of other advanced economies, and why the distribution of earnings, wealth, and opportunity have been diverging in the United States and in other nations.” Usually attended by 750 Berkeley undergraduates, the course is also “intended to provide insights into the political and public-policy debates that have arisen in light of this divergence, as well as possible means of reversing it.”

Here is the first class with links to the other 13 classes.

YouTube has the video The Selfish Ledger.

This internal video from 2016 (leaked to the Verge) by Nick Foster shows a Google concept for how total data collection could reshape society.