Steve's Politics Blog

The Real News Network has the interview Is Another World Possible? – Leo Panitch on RAI (4/4).

On Reality Asserts Itself, Prof. Leo Panitch says it’s a dilemma that the gradualism of European social-democracy and attempts at a more radical transformation have so far both failed; Panitch says a first step towards democratizing the economy is to make finance a public utility – with host Paul Jay

This is a great interview, not because it provides all the answers. It is great because it asks some very intriguing questions. Making finance a public utility is a suggestion that is a rather puny part of what makes this interview so good. This is the first discussion that I have heard in a long time that doesn’t just rehash the standard arguments about socialism and capitalism.

Craig Murray has posted the article The Novichok Story Is Indeed Another Iraqi WMD Scam.

As recently as 2016 Dr Robin Black, Head of the Detection Laboratory at the UK’s only chemical weapons facility at Porton Down, a former colleague of Dr David Kelly, published in an extremely prestigious scientific journal that the evidence for the existence of Novichoks was scant and their composition unknown.

In recent years, there has been much speculation that a fourth generation of nerve agents, ‘Novichoks’ (newcomer), was developed in Russia, beginning in the 1970s as part of the ‘Foliant’ programme, with the aim of finding agents that would compromise defensive countermeasures. Information on these compounds has been sparse in the public domain, mostly originating from a dissident Russian military chemist, Vil Mirzayanov. No independent confirmation of the structures or the properties of such compounds has been published. (Black, 2016)

To further attest to Craig Murray’s bona fides, he wrote the following:

And finally – Mirzayanov is an Uzbek name and the novichok programme, assuming it existed, was in the Soviet Union but far away from modern Russia, at Nukus in modern Uzbekistan. I have visited the Nukus chemical weapons site myself. It was dismantled and made safe and all the stocks destroyed and the equipment removed by the American government, as I recall finishing while I was Ambassador there. There has in fact never been any evidence that any “novichok” ever existed in Russia itself.

Read the Wikipedia article on Craig Murray for verification.

Evonomics has the article How to Construct a New Invisible Hand: A Conversation with Peter Barnes.

A middle path between laissez faire and centralized planning.

When I say I believe in ‘what worksism”, another way to say it is a middle path. Don’t interpret middle path too literally. If it works and it is not an amalgam of two existing paths, I’d take that, too.

PB: Yes. I don’t think markets, at least as currently constituted, can self-regulate for the common good, nor do I think governments can plan, much less administer, a vast dyna­mic economy. So we need something in the middle.

Russia Insider has the article Kremlin Publishes Full Megan Kelly Putin Interview – NBC Cut the Best Parts (Video + Transcript).

Putin is very confident in this interview. He knows that what he is saying makes Russia look very smart, and America look ridiculous.

I have no idea who or what Russia Insider is. I have no independent knowledge of the faithfulness of the translation. If NBC wants to contest this transcript, they are free to publish their own transcript. I do wonder why they did not publish their version of the complete interview. In this day and age of the internet, you would think that NBC wolud publish a transcript of the whole interview even though they couldn’t fit it all in in the air time they decided to give this interview. Large parts of the USA and world audience demand more of our news media these days.

Democracy Now has the story Overthrow: 100 Years of U.S. Meddling & Regime Change, from Iran to Nicaragua to Hawaii to Cuba

As special counsel Robert Mueller continues his probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, we take a look back at Washington’s record of meddling in elections across the globe. By one count, the United States has interfered in more than 80 foreign elections between 1946 and 2000. And that doesn’t count U.S.-backed coups and invasions. We speak to former New York Times reporter Stephen Kinzer, author of “Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq.”

The tail end of this interview is in the article As Ex-CIA Head Admits to U.S. Meddling in Elections, Is Outrage over Russian Interference Overblown? This second part has a startling revelation about an organization called the National Endowment for Democracy. As you might guess, this organization promotes the opposite of democracy,

Kinzer’s latest book is The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire.

Politico has the story The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook.

An ambitious US task force targeting Hezbollah’s billion-dollar criminal enterprise ran headlong into the White House’s desire for a nuclear deal with Iran.

I am not sure what to make of this story. There is enough in the story to back up the headline, but their are also tidbits that undermine it. Some day, I might put aside enough time to read the whole story.

Here is another excerpt from the story.

The campaign, dubbed Project Cassandra, was launched in 2008 after the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed evidence that Hezbollah had transformed itself from a Middle East-focused military and political organization into an international crime syndicate that some investigators believed was collecting $1 billion a year from drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities.

While reading this, I was thinking of another post I had yesterday – “Rise and Kill First” Explores the Corrupting Effects of Israel’s Assassination Program. In that post, I had an excerpt that said the following:

Bombing and invading Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s, with assassination an essential element of the campaign, produced out of the hitherto pacific Lebanese Shiite community an organization called Hezbollah that became the most effective guerrilla force Israel had ever faced.

These words are not a direct refutation of the excerpt from the first story, but it has me wondering if there is some conflict between the two understandings of Hezbollah.

The Intercept has the book review “Rise and Kill First” Explores the Corrupting Effects of Israel’s Assassination Program.

Bergman, an Israeli former lawyer and investigative journalist, charts not only the details of assassinations over the past century, but also the corrupting effect of relying on the black to the exclusion of diplomacy and compromise. Why negotiate with your enemies when it’s so easy to kill them?

As a member of a minority group that often suffers seemingly undeserved hate against it, I take particular exception to this possible collateral damage from Israeli government actions.

Because the book concentrates on Israeli actions and their corrupting effects within the Israeli polity, it sometimes misses their consequences in the countries where they took place. Employing Jewish citizens of Syria, Egypt, and Iraq as spies, for example, created the misimpression that their communities were fifth columns. Bombing and invading Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s, with assassination an essential element of the campaign, produced out of the hitherto pacific Lebanese Shiite community an organization called Hezbollah that became the most effective guerrilla force Israel had ever faced.

If you are a member of my tribe, and want to give unquestioned support to the government of Israel, you might consider the above consequence.

If you are a citizen of the USA, you might want to consider the consequence of supporting our own govenment’s actions along these lines. Maybe this is the true answer to George W. Bush’s question about “Why do they hate us, so?”

Bernie Sanders has posted the video The Bank Lobbyist Act.

Why is Congress busy worrying about the needs of huge financial institutions, but ignores the concerns of ordinary Americans? The answer is simple. Follow the money.

The next bank to fail ought to be nationalized, the executives fired, and some be put in jail. I bet that is not in the bill that Congress is looking to enact.

The Rabit Hole has the story What’s really going on in East Ghouta? VIDEO. (It is also on Facebook.)

This video was created by an amazing team of people that won’t let the voices of innocent civilians who are being killed in Damascus, be silenced by western mainstream media!

Created by Carla Ortiz, Jason Clarke, Soraya Tebbani and narrated by Sarah Abed.

Helicia Forest-Ussach has posted some items like this one. The Rabbit Hole web site has a “What Is The Rabbit Hole?” page to give you some background on the author of these stories.

It is hard to figure out who, if anyone, is telling you the truth about Syria. I get skeptical when a well financed news medium tells you only one side of a story. That is why I post the “other” side of the story. I could post both sides, but I figure you get enough of one side from the corporate press, so I only have to supply the missing part.

Twitter has some videos and screen shots about the situation in Syria.

Save #Ghouta’s children from #Assad’s bombing, but mostly from #terrorists that stick children in holes so that they can “rescue” them for #propaganda. (See magic hand at 00:02 brought to you by your friend at #Save_Ghouta )

If the story the corporate media is trying to sell us is legit, why don’t you see stuff like this?

I hope you can follow the link to the above posting to see the video, images, and comments. At the very least, I have included above one of the images.