The Real News Network has the episode De Zayas: UN Human Rights Council’s Report on Venezuela is ‘Unbalanced’ (1/2).
Former lawyer for the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights, Alfred de Zayas, says that High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet’s report on human rights in Venezuela mostly ignores the severity and responsibility of US sanctions against Venezuela.
Now the U.N.has been corrupted. What a sad commentary.
The Jimmy Dore show has the episode Mueller Repeatedly Contradicts Himself & Undermines Russiagate. This is an interview with Aaron Maté about his article CrowdStrikeOut: Mueller’s Own Report Undercuts Its Core Russia-Meddling Claims.
In that article, Aaron Maté wrote the following:
The report presents this narrative with remarkable specificity: It describes in detail how GRU officers installed malware, leased U.S.-based computers, and used cryptocurrencies to carry out their hacking operation. The intelligence that caught the GRU hackers is portrayed as so invasive and precise that it even captured the keystrokes of individual Russian officers, including their use of search engines.
I had surmised that this would be the way to do it over the internet if over the internet were the way it was done. In my previous post ‘Zero evidence’ for claims Russia hacked DNC – NSA whistleblower. I I added an April 2018 addendum that said:
The VIPS experiments involved transfers of data from this side of the Atlantic to the other side of the Atlantic. There is no telling how many hops it required to make the trip. On the other hand, if the downloaders of the data used a receiving computer that was close to the DNC’s computer, then the number of hops could have been minimized. Thus the transfer speed could have been higher than the transfer speed from a computer on this side of the Atlantic to some place in Europe that the VIPS experimented with.
This is exactly the scenario of a leased, rented, or computer time purchase of a computer local to the DNC.
Need to Know has published the Al Jazeera the article Puerto Rico Imports 85% of Its Food and Owes $123 Billion in Debt, Yet It Gives Monsanto/ Bayer a 90% Tax Exemption.
Puerto Rico’s fertile land is a crop and pesticide poison test site for Monsanto, which was recently sold to Bayer chemical company. Many locals near the company’s seed sites complain of illness. Monsanto/ Bayer has $2 billion in court judgements against it for cancer and injury claims, with 13,000 more US cases pending. Other GMO and chemical companies in the area include Syngenta, BASF, Pioneer and RiceTec. Ricardo Rossello, the Governor of Puerto Rico, blamed the island’s bad economy on “colonial treatment” and said that tax breaks are the only tool for economic development. He said that the transnational companies account for 42% to 46% of the economy, although Monsanto/ Bayer receives a 90% tax exemption and $3 million in wage subsidies.
There is a reason why Puerto Rico has to import 85% of its food. I wonder if the Puerto Rican official who was interviewed really understands this. When the “economic development” is impoverishing your colony and poisoning your people, might you conclude the colony would be better off without it? Most likely only bribery could get local officials to approve borrowing that the colony cannot afford.
Here is the link to my previous post, The IMF and World Bank: Partners In Backwardness, about the economic war that countries like the USA are waging on places like Puerto Rico. Since Puerto Rico is “only” a colony of the USA, our oligarchs feel free to treat it like any other enslaved country.
The factory farms in the continental USA have a different role to play in the scheme of the oligarchs. These farms are part of the oligarchs’ plan to feed the rest of the world in order to control the rest of the world. There is no threat more powerful than withholding food. That is how places like Puerto Rico are encouraged to take on debt to produce exports rather than feed their own people, and stay out of debt.
Guns and Butter has the interview The IMF and World Bank: Partners In Backwardness with Michael Hudson.
Michael Hudson discusses his seminal work of 1972, Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire, a critique of how the US exploits foreign economies through IMF and World bank debt; difference between the IMF and World Bank; World Bank dysfunctional from the outset; loans made in foreign currency only; policy to provide loans for countries to devote their land to export plantation crops; US food and monetary imperialism; U.S. agricultural protectionism built into the postwar global system; promotion of dependency on the US as food supplier; food blackmail; perpetration of world poverty preferred; no encouragement of land reform; privatization of the public domain; America aided, not foreign economies; exploitation of mineral deposits; bribery; foreign nations politically controlled at the top; veto power for US only.
You can also access this interview on Michael Hudson’s web site under the title Food Blackmail, the Washington Consensus and Freedom
I wonder how many of us have any awareness of this. I have been a follower of Michael Hudson for a few years now, but I had never gone back to read his earlier work. This interview was done June 19th, 2019, but it is about what he wrote in 1972. I had no idea of the depths of depravity that the USA and world finance had descended to. He also explains why our Latin American proxies in war targeted the Catholic Church. OMG!!!!
Even following MMT and Hudson, I had had not realized until just now what a sucker I had been in falling for the fiction I had been taught about “Free Trade”.
July 5, 2019
Guns and Butter provides the transcript-The-IMF–and-World-Bank-Partners-In-Backwardness in several forms.
July 7, 2019
Wikipedia has an article on the World Bank. It sounds almost benign. The history of the bank is enlightening.
Naked Capitalism has posted the article Michael Hudson Discusses the IMF and World Bank: Partners In Backwardness. As usual, there is a vigorous discussion about it.
How do we expect the USA Government to prosecute the crooks on Wall Street when the USA government uses the same business model as the crooks on Wall Street? I vaguely knew most of what was in this interview, but the stark details are really shocking. All these years (since the early 1960s) I have been taken in by the academic scam of free trade. It never dawned on me how “free trade” could actually be used as a weapon.
The Real News Network has shared the episode Economic Update: China’s Economic Record and Strategy.
This week on Economic Update, Professor Wolff follows up with part two of his in-depth analyses of the USSR and anti-capitalist governments by providing (1) an overview of China’s economic development mostly over the last 25 years (GDP, real wages, etc.), and (2) its economic strategy: learning but also differing from Soviet strategy along with some relevant, and interesting, historical context.
I have been anxiously waiting for this episode. It was worth waiting for. It is not so much that this episode proves anything one way or another. It is valuable because it gives you something to think about. What he gives you to think about is something that neither side of the political debate in this country seems to understand.
YouTube has the Tim Black episode Bernie Sanders gets Berned again.
Reminiscent of 2015, 2016 Sen. Bernie Sanders receives distorted, unfavorable coverage in the Washington Post. Tim Black explains how Bernie Sanders is getting Berned Again.
This was a great episode. Highlighting Bernie’s closing debate remarks is something we should all do over and over again.
If there was one thing I was waiting for, but never heard was that Tim Black missed one of the biggest biases in the way the poll was reported. The Dreaded Washington Post said over and over again that they were only reporting the people who lean Democratic. What about the people who detest the Democratic Party, but would vote for Bernie Sanders anyway? The problem with the Democratic Party nomination process in 2016, was that too many Democrats only considered what they themselves liked without a care for what independents like. The registered independents who can vote in the general election outnumber Democrats in this country.
Here is a slight variation on the sign you can wear when are out and about with the Bern app from app.bernisanders.com.
In your browser on a computer, view the image below in its own window. Do a print preview before you print the image. You may have to scale it to get it to fit on a letter size piece of paper.
I printed the sign on presentation matte paper, and I laminated it in plastic.
Jacobin Magazine has the article A Cross-Atlantic Plan to Break Capital’s Control.
Bernie Sanders’s plan for worker-owned funds isn’t just notable because it could lead us toward a democratized, sustainable, socialist economy. It’s also the product of a growing collaboration between the Left in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Time to again raise the idea of the Social Security Trust Fund being able to buy corporate stocks. Replace some of those special federal bonds with collective stock ownership – one form of sovereign wealth fund.
On this blog, I have been touting this change to Social Security for a long time. Here are some examples of previous posts.
I have come up with a sign to wear when you are using the Bern app from app.bernisanders.com. Previously, I did not have the “mobile field office” at the top of the sign. I was not getting the response I had expected. I hope this change to the sign will be a big help.
In your browser on a computer, view the image below in its own window. Do a print preview before you print the image. You may have to scale it to get it to fit on a letter size piece of paper.
This is how you can wear the sign. I printed the sign on presentation matte paper, and I laminated it in plastic.
YouTube has the video Chuck Collins in Eugene, April 17, 2019: Solutions to Wealth Inequality.
We are living in a time of extreme inequality, and few places are more unequal than the United States. America’s 20 richest people now own more wealth than the bottom half of the rest of the population combined. Scholar and activist Chuck Collins argues that these inequalities have their roots in forty years of the powerful and wealthy rigging the entire system in their favor. He proposes a wide range of public policies to roll back decades of accelerating inequality, analyzes the barriers to progress, and shows how transformative local campaigns can be made into a national movement for change.
One of the sources he mentions is inequality.org – Your portal into the world of inequality online — and ongoing efforts to leave our planet a more equal place.