For better or worse, we live in interesting times. That phrase conjures up images of Chinese sages and Oriental inscrutability here in America, but there is no evidence that the expression May you live in interesting times has any historical connection to China or Chinese philosophy or religion. So says the great sage Google.
This apocryphal phrase does have a clear connection to the turbulent, conflicted, scary period of cultural revolution and potential World War Americans experienced in the Nineteen Sixties.
Two years before his assassination, on June 6, 1966, U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy gave a historically important speech at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, on the University's Day of Reaffirmation of Academic and Human Freedom. Kennedy spoke eloquently about the evils of apartheid and about the growing civil rights movement in America and about the need for individual courage and collective action to address the growing cries for justice in racist, unjust and unequal societies around the world.
Kennedy's speech at that crucial time in world history speaks directly to the needs, the concerns, the ideals, the goals and the fears of all people in the 21st Century, and sounds the keynote for the Aquarian Spiritual Festival during this month of February, 2019, and for the initiation of the Piscean Spiritual Festival February 18, 2019.
"It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice," Kennedy proclaimed. "He sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest wall of oppression and resistance."
Kennedy said there were four main dangers we each must confront on the road to a more equitable global society. The first, a sense of individual futility, the second a belief that idealistic goals must take a back seat to immediate necessity, the third timidity on the part of those seeking to change existing systems, and finally a desire for comfort on the part of each and every one of us.
"[Comfort] is not the road history has marked out for us," Kennedy proclaimed. "There is a Chinese curse which says May he live in interesting times. Like it or not, we live in interesting times. They are times of danger and uncertainty; but they are also the most creative of any time in the history of mankind. And everyone here will ultimately be judged - will ultimately judge himself - on the effort he has contributed to building a new world society and the extent to which his ideals and goals have shaped that effort."
Lightworkers, spiritual seekers and meditators have always had an ambivalent attitude toward involvement in politics, and even toward journalism and staying informed about pressing environmental, social justice, economic and cultural issues.
This of course is in stark contrast to the billions of religious fundamentalists around the world who embrace a toxic fusion of bellicose, reactionary, right wing, often racist and sexist politics and rigid hierarchical Piscean Age religious practices.
It is hard to concentrate on subtle energies, maintain a precarious mental, emotional and physical equilibrium, and elevate your spiritual practice while engaging in the time consuming, emotionally draining and energy sapping discipline of becoming well informed citizens.
We are required to sift through the barrage of propaganda, social media marketing, fake news and outright lies we encounter on TV, radio, and the Internet, and in our favorite newspapers and magazines as well, separating the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. Becoming well informed is really hard work. We have to hold our noses and dive deep into the details of complex issues that the powerful politicians and media barons would prefer we ignore, so they can pursue their self serving agendas without interference from the "little people".
But unfortunately, we live in interesting times, and extraordinary efforts are required if we are to fulfill our dharma as global citizens in a time of planetary environmental emergency, simmering regional and civil, religious, resource and economic wars of choice, runaway technophilia and soulless rational materialism.
Our goal in these newsletters is to be your human news filter, providing links and key quotes to important news stories about topics of global interest from this former journalist who has extensive training in academic research methods in the humanities, and extensive experience as a financial, political, cultural and lifestyle publisher, editor and writer.
Jane and I hope that this service will be empowering for those who would like to stay well informed about the burning issues of the day, and help the spiritual community to engage more directly in political issues on behalf of social justice, financial democracy, and environmental resilience. We consider this work to be part of our spiritual practice and we hope to reach a virtual community of like minded spiritual people who will participate in the creation of a new post-carbon post-capitalist global society for the Aquarian Age.
Our work is just to light a single candle in the night. We prefer to light one candle than to curse the darkness. Our hope is that the flame of this candle can serve to light more candles and thus the light will spread in an ever expanding spiral of love and light.
If you know people who might enjoy these newsletters please forward them freely. We do this work as a service, and we are always delighted to share with a larger audience!
Global News Roundup
Last month, we sounded the alarm about potential new European Union copyright laws that might make it illegal to link to news stories from blogs like this one. Now there is good news about this power play designed to turn the Internet into a global censorship machine. There's still a long fight to come to prevent implementations of new iterations of this draconian law, so if you want to stay informed and join in that fight bookmark the website of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and visit frequently for guidance on how to become more involved.
EU Cancels ‘Final’ Negotiations On EU Copyright Directive As It Becomes Clear There Isn’t Enough Support , TechDirt, January 18, 2019
So, this is certainly unexpected. Just hours after we pointed out that even all of the lobbyists who had written/pushed for Article 13 in the EU Copyright Directive were now abandoning their support for it (basically because the EU was considering making it just slightly less awful), it appears that Monday's negotiations have been called off entirely:
. . .this does not mean that the Copyright Directive or Article 13 are dead. They could certainly be revived with new negotiations (and that could happen soon).
Google Warns News Sites May Lose 45% of Traffic if EU Passes Its Copyright Reform, NextWeb, by Mar Masson Maack, February 8, 2019
The EU is still plowing ahead with its highly contested Copyright Reform. Trilogue negotiations between the union’s pillars have started again to reach an agreement on the finalized version, and pass the law in March or April this year.
A myriad of EU politicians and companies are troubled by parts of the reform, including big players like Google. Kent Walker, Google‘s SVP of Global Affairs, laid out Google’s opposition and called for a fix before it’s too late. Google warns Article 11 and Article 13 could have catastrophic effects on the creative economy in Europe by hampering user uploads and news sharing.
Article 11 in its current form will limit news aggregators’ abilities to show snippets of articles. According to Google‘s own experiments, the impact of it only showing URLs, very short fragments of headlines, and no preview images would be a “substantial traffic loss to news publishers.”
“Even a moderate version of the experiment (where we showed the publication title, URL, and video thumbnails) led to a 45 percent reduction in traffic to news publishers,” Walker explained. “Our experiment demonstrated that many users turned instead to non-news sites, social media platforms, and online video sites — another unintended consequence of legislation that aims to support high-quality journalism.”
Opponents of the current proposal argue that Article 11 (a.k.a. link tax) would force anyone using snippets of journalistic online content to get a license from the publisher first — essentially outlawing current business models of most aggregators and news apps.
Article 13 is the other huge concern opponents have about the proposal. It’s argued Article 13 will lead to ‘censorship machines’ as platforms will be made responsible for monitoring user behavior to stop copyright infringements before they happen — possibly preventing content like Miley Cyrus wishing her husband a happy birthday.
This basically means only huge platforms will have the resources to let users comment or share content. Despite that, Google opposes Article 13’s implementation as it could have dire unintended consequences — although the company says it supports the “goals” of the article.
There’s a real worry that Article 13 could lead to broader censorship, leaving free speech vehicles — like parody, satire, or even protest videos — potentially untenable under this system. Similar legislation was trialed in Spain and Germanyin 2014 and failed — but opposing sides argue over what exactly led to the failure.
World Affairs
Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump meet at the 2017 G-20 Hamburg Summit, Kremlin.ru [CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)]
Gallup Poll: Animosity Toward Trump, Putin ‘Must Worry All of Us', Die Welt
[Editor's Note: This month we take a look at the end of year 2018 Gallup poll, showing that the popularity of world leaders is plummeting. This is unprecedented. Ruling elites throughout the world are proving incapable of addressing the pressing issues of our time and their efforts to unite their countries through fear, scapegoating and warmongering have so far failed. Only an Aquarian swelling of popular movements can bring about the change we need in the world today. However, growing animosity between the general populations of America, Russia and China, fed by ceaseless propaganda in all three countries, constitutes a major threat to world peace.]
The Gallup International Association publishes an annual global survey on the popularity of world leaders.
The 2018 End of Year Survey was conducted across 45 countries between October 2018 and January 2019 and included almost 47,000 respondents.
Die Welt: Mr. Stoychev, which takeaway of this year's End of Year Survey surprised you the most?
Kancho Stoychev: It's surprising that for the first time we are registering a downtrend in the ratings for all major political leaders in the world. This has never happened before. Normally some leaders go up and some go down for various reasons, but all of them going down together compared to last year and previous years — this is really without precedent. Something is happening in the world. It's not only about the famous gap between elites and masses, between leaders and voters, it appears that there are deeper reasons, that the world we are living in is in a period of transition.
It's not only political leaders that are losing support. Even Pope Francis is becoming less popular. Is this trend a result of the challenges some of the individual leaders such as French President Emmanuel Macron or Russia's President Vladimir Putin face at home, or does it indicate a growing mistrust in political leadership in general?
I think it is the latter. Yes, the national problems reflect the image of the respective leader, but we are talking about global data. Obviously we know that the rating of President Macron is going down in France, but it is also declining around the world. The same goes for many other leaders, including [Angela] Merkel, who is still the most trusted and positively evaluated leader not only in Europe but around the world, and who is also losing a serious amount of support. It is not only about domestic issues, it's about the global atmosphere. We saw during the last year a growing confrontation on an international level, which reflects the ratings of the global leaders.
In my opinion, the biggest part of the problem is their inability to deal with the problems facing the world today. The world order which was established after the Second World War seems to be unstable. We neither live in a Cold War situation with two big camps or configurations of countries, nor are we really in a situation like the one we had for 10 or 15 years when we had only one big superpower, the US. We live in a multipolar world, the whole picture is becoming more complicated. And it's especially complicated in Europe due to the problems we as are facing here.
Die Welt - US President Donald Trump remains unchallenged at the bottom of the ranking. Have you observed any changes in his popularity in certain regions?
What is interesting is that his acceptance in Russia is continually declining, which was not the case one year ago when public opinion of him was much higher in Russia. Now, about 70 percent of Russians have a negative opinion of him. The same is happening with respect to the opinions of Americans about the Russian President, Putin: Exactly 70 percent of Americans have a negative opinion of him, which is a big problem. It means that the confrontation between the US, Russia and China is reflecting on a level of mass opinion.
This is bad for the stability of the world, because the populations of these superpowers are getting a negative opinion of the adversary. To me, this is very dangerous because it is not only about politicians speaking back to one another or being in conflict. Now, this conflict is spread among people from both sides of the ocean. The US and Russia are great nations and that attitude towards the leader of the other nation is something that must worry all of us.
Trump, Nixon and The SUPER BLOOD WOLF Moon Eclipse, Ed Tamplin, January 2019[Ed. Note: Astrologer Ed Tamplin sees eerie similarities between the present moment and the period just prior to the fall of Richard Nixon. Will Donald Trump also be forced to abdicate the Presidency?]
The Lunar Eclipse is culminating exactly over Washington DC, a destination that is already about as polarising as it gets. And it gets far more interesting. There is a clear connection of this eclipse with presidential inaugurations. They take place on January 20. The eclipse reaches its totality barely a quarter hour into the 21st.
The relevance being that the Sun position of this lunar eclipse is conjunct the Sun position of the last inauguration of Donald Trump. So close in fact that there is only one minute of arc separating the two. The Moon in opposing the Sun, identifies with the public mood and in particular females.
Is this celestial symbolism mirroring the stand-off between the male President, Donald Trump and the female Leader of the House, Nancy Pelosi? Is it timing the President's dwindling public support? Polls have drifted to a 15% negative margin since the President orchestrated the partial government shutdown. Just who might be baying for blood under this Wolf Moon? There's much more to this eclipse.
This Lunar Eclipse of January 21, opposes the leader's inauguration, or the moment that the individual is legally sworn in as President. Without getting too far ahead here, the next Solar Eclipse will occur July 2 2019, effectively eclipsing the USA's birth Sun. So the general idea is of the leadership is being eclipsed – at least from the astrological perspective.
The next move is to look at a bigger picture. Eclipses tie in with larger time cycles. The first three eclipses of 2019 match closely those of 1973. It's not only the eclipses doing that, but so does the planet Mercury. Headlining Mercury will appear in the same signs on virtually the same days, plus turn retrograde and direct in a duplicate pattern to 1973. This year's news cycle will be very similar to 1973.
That's where things get extremely interesting in Washington. Four days following the January 4 1973 Solar Eclipse, five men pleaded guilty to the burglary of the Democrat headquarters at Watergate. Then Richard Nixon was sworn in for a second term two days after the January 18 1973 Lunar Eclipse, but with public opinion gradually turning against him.
On February 8 1973, a special Senate Committee was formed to investigate the President's re-election team. Note that coincidentally on February 7 this year, Donald Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen is due to appear before a congressional panel, as part of the investigations into the legitimacy of the current President.
1973 wasn't the best year for Trump either. It's when the Department of Justice decided to bring charges against the Trump Management Corporation, for racial discrimination re their rental accommodations. But back to this Lunar Eclipse. It has much more to offer the theory of history repeating – albeit with different actors playing lead roles.
The Moon position of this Lunar Eclipse is 00LEO51. It matches the Sun position of July 23 1973, the day when President Richard Nixon refused to hand over White House tapes containing clear evidence of his obstruction of justice. And that's despite eighteen and a half minutes of conversation between Nixon and his Chief of Staff, Harry Haldeman, being conveniently erased.
Will that history repeating theme equate to Trump not releasing requested information or refusing the invitation for a Mueller interview? No doubt Mueller's questions would be far removed from the sycophantic Sean Hannity or Jean Pirro of Fox News. Nixon's tapes were eventually subpoenaed, when he refused to co-operate. They became the smoking gun that took him out.
KENNEDY, KING FAMILIES TO CONGRESS: REOPEN PROBES, WhoWhatWhy, January 19, 2019
. . .The joint statement calls for Congress to establish firm oversight on the release of all government documents related to the Kennedy presidency and assassination, as mandated by the JFK Records Collection Act of 1992. This public transparency law has been routinely defied by the CIA and other federal agencies. The Trump White House has allowed the CIA to continue its defiance of the law, even though the JFK Records Act called for the full release of relevant documents in 2017.
The group statement also calls for a public inquest into “the four major assassinations of the 1960s that together had a disastrous impact on the course of American history.” This tribunal — which would hear testimony from living witnesses, legal experts, investigative journalists, historians and family members of the victims — would be modeled on the Truth and Reconciliation hearings held in South Africa after the fall of apartheid. This American Truth and Reconciliation process is intended to encourage Congress or the Justice Department to reopen investigations into all four organized acts of political violence.
Signers of the joint statement, who call themselves the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, are also seeking to reopen the Robert F. Kennedy assassination case, stating that Sirhan Sirhan’s conviction was based on “a mockery of a trial.” The forensic evidence alone, observes the statement, demonstrates that Sirhan did not fire the fatal shot that killed Senator Kennedy — a conclusion reached by, among others, Dr. Thomas Noguchi, the Los Angeles County Coroner who performed the official autopsy on RFK.
The joint statement — which was co-written by Adam Walinsky, a speechwriter and top aide of Senator Kennedy — declares that these “four major political murders traumatized American life in the 1960s and cast a shadow over the country for decades thereafter. John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were each in his own unique way attempting to turn the United States away from war toward disarmament and peace, away from domestic violence and division toward civil amity and justice. Their killings were together a savage, concerted assault on American democracy and the tragic consequences of these assassinations still haunt our nation.”
The Truth and Reconciliation Committee views its joint statement as the opening of a long campaign aimed at shining a light on dark national secrets. As the public transparency campaign proceeds, citizens across the country will be encouraged to add their names to the petition. The national effort seeks to confront the forces behind America’s democratic decline, a reign of secretive power that long precedes the recent rise of authoritarianism. “The organized killing of JFK, Malcolm, Martin, and RFK was a mortal attack on our democracy,” said historian James Douglass, author of JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. “We’ve been walking in the valley of the dead ever since. Our campaign is all about recovering the truth embodied in the movement they led. Yes, the transforming, reconciling power of truth will indeed set us free.”
President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela, at his inauguration, Presidencia El Salvador [CC0],
via Wikimedia Commons
In Venezuela, US Forgets What Century It Is, Consortium News, Patrick Lawrence, February 5, 2019
[Ed. Note: The Neocons in the Trump administration have gone public with a plan to pursue regime change in three countries constituting a new "Axis of Evil" in Latin America. Trump pulls troops from Afghanistan, says he wants to keep them in Iraq "to watch Iran", and now is ready to foment wars across Latin America as well as in the Middle East and Africa. This is not what Trump promised the people who voted for him. He was against all this Imperial warfare. But that was then, and Geminis do often change their minds.]
The Venezuela crisis worsens by the day. Early last week the U.S. sanctioned PdVSA, the state-owned oil company, by sequestering income from U.S. sales in a blocked bank account. On Sunday President Donald Trump confirmed in a television interview that deploying American troops is “an option.”
Little of what Washington has done in the weeks since it recognized an opposition legislator, Juan Guaidó, as Venezuela’s “interim president” has any basis in international law. But there is much worse to come and much more at risk if the U.S. follows through with its recently disclosed plans to reshape Latin American politics to its neoliberal liking.
Administration officials now advertise the effort to depose the government of Nicolás Maduro as merely the first step in a plan to reassert American influence among our southerly neighbors. The next two targets, Cuba and Nicaragua, are what John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser, calls the continent’s “troika of tyranny.”
“The United States looks forward to watching each corner of the triangle fall—in Havana, in Caracas, in Managua,” Bolton said in a not-much-noted speech in Miami late last year. “The troika will crumble.” There is cold comfort to derive from knowing this forecast reflects the single most deranged worldview of anyone now active in the Trump White House.
US Regime Change Laboratory Created Venezuela’s Coup Leader, Gray Zone, Dan Cohen and Max Blumenthal, January 29, 2019.
Before the fateful day of January 22, fewer than one in five Venezuelans had heard of Juan Guaidó. Only a few months ago, the 35-year-old was an obscure character in a politically marginal far-right group closely associated with gruesome acts of street violence. Even in his own party, Guaidó had been a mid-level figure in the opposition-dominated National Assembly, which is now held under contempt according to Venezuela’s constitution. But after a single phone call from from US Vice President Mike Pence, Guaidó proclaimed himself president of Venezuela. Anointed as the leader of his country by Washington, a previously unknown political bottom-dweller was vaulted onto the international stage as the US-selected leader of the nation with the world’s largest oil reserves.
Echoing the Washington consensus, the New York Times editorial board hailed Guaidó as a “credible rival” to Maduro with a “refreshing style and vision of taking the country forward.” The Bloomberg News editorial board applauded him for seeking “restoration of democracy” and the Wall Street Journal declared him “a new democratic leader.” Meanwhile, Canada, numerous European nations, Israel, and the bloc of right-wing Latin American governments known as the Lima Group recognized Guaidó as the legitimate leader of Venezuela. While Guaidó seemed to have materialized out of nowhere, he was, in fact, the product of more than a decade of assiduous grooming by the US government’s elite regime change factories.
Alongside a cadre of right-wing student activists, Guaidó was cultivated to undermine Venezuela’s socialist-oriented government, destabilize the country, and one day seize power. Though he has been a minor figure in Venezuelan politics, he had spent years quietly demonstrating his worthiness in Washington’s halls of power.
Read more …
US Sanctions On Venezuela Are Killing Citizens – Former UN Rapporteur, UK Independent, by Michael Selby-Green, January 26, 2019
The first UN rapporteur to visit Venezuela for 21 years has told The Independent the US sanctions on the country are illegal and could amount to “crimes against humanity” under international law. Former special rapporteur Alfred de Zayas, who finished his term at the UN in March, has criticized the US for engaging in “economic warfare” against Venezuela which he said is hurting the economy and killing Venezuelans. The comments come amid worsening tensions in the country after the US and UK have backed Juan Guaido, who appointed himself “interim president” of Venezuela as hundreds of thousands marched to support him. European leaders are calling for “free and fair” elections. Russia and Turkey remain Nicolas Maduro’s key supporters.
[Ed. Note: Editors at Naked Capitalism Picked up the following numbers last week on Twitter. Chavez announced cancer in late 2012, died early 2013. Oil prices only explain a small part of it. Economic warfare does the rest.]Mr De Zayas, a former secretary of the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) and an expert in international law, spoke to The Independent following the presentation of his Venezuela report to the HRC in September. He said that since its presentation the report has been ignored by the UN and has not sparked the public debate he believes it deserves. “Sanctions kill,” he told The Independent, adding that they fall most heavily on the poorest people in society, demonstrably cause death through food and medicine shortages, lead to violations of human rights and are aimed at coercing economic change in a “sister democracy”. On his fact-finding mission to the country in late 2017, he found internal overdependence on oil, poor governance and corruption had hit the Venezuelan economy hard, but said “economic warfare” practised by the US, EU and Canada are significant factors in the economic crisis.
In the report, Mr de Zayas recommended, among other actions, that the International Criminal Court investigate economic sanctions against Venezuela as possible crimes against humanity under Article 7 of the Rome Statute. The US sanctions are illegal under international law because they were not endorsed by the UN Security Council, Mr de Zayas, an expert on international law and a former senior lawyer with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said. “Modern-day economic sanctions and blockades are comparable with medieval sieges of towns. “Twenty-first century sanctions attempt to bring not just a town, but sovereign countries to their knees,” Mr de Zayas said in his report.
@spectatorindex – Venezuela GDP growth.
2012: 5.6%
2013: 1.3%
2014: -3.9%
2015: -6.2%
2016: -17%
2017: -15%
2018: -16%
Venezuela: The US’s 68th Regime Change Disaster (AntiWar), by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies, February 6, 2019
In his masterpiece, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II, William Blum, who died in December 2018, wrote chapter-length accounts of 55 US regime change operations against countries around the world, from China (1945-1960s) to Haiti (1986-1994). Noam Chomsky’s blurb on the back of the latest edition says simply, “Far and away the best book on the topic.” We agree. If you have not read it, please do. It will give you a clearer context for what is happening in Venezuela today, and a better understanding of the world you are living in. Since Killing Hope was published in 1995, the US has conducted at least 13 more regime change operations, several of which are still active: Yugoslavia; Afghanistan; Iraq; the 3rd US invasion of Haiti since WWII; Somalia; Honduras; Libya; Syria; Ukraine; Yemen; Iran; Nicaragua; and now Venezuela.
William Blum noted that the US generally prefers what its planners call “low intensity conflict” over full-scale wars. Only in periods of supreme overconfidence has it launched its most devastating and disastrous wars, from Korea and Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq. After its war of mass destruction in Iraq, the US reverted to “low intensity conflict” under Obama’s doctrine of covert and proxy war. Obama conducted even heavier bombing than Bush II, and deployed US special operations forces to 150 countries all over the world, but he made sure that nearly all the bleeding and dying was done by Afghans, Syrians, Iraqis, Somalis, Libyans, Ukrainians, Yemenis and others, not by Americans. What US planners mean by “low intensity conflict” is that it is less intense for Americans.
[..] While Venezuelans face poverty, preventable diseases, malnutrition and open threats of war by US officials, those same US officials and their corporate sponsors are looking at an almost irresistible gold mine if they can bring Venezuela to its knees: a fire sale of its oil industry to foreign oil companies and the privatization of many other sectors of its economy, from hydroelectric power plants to iron, aluminum and, yes, actual gold mines. This is not speculation. It is what the US’s new puppet, Juan Guaido, has reportedly promised his American backers if they can overthrow Venezuela’s elected government and install him in the presidential palace.
Trump’s Brilliant Strategy to End U.S. Dollar Hegemony, Michael Hudson, Naked Capitalism, 2/1/2019
[Ed. Note: Economist Michael Hudson explains that Trump's isolationist, unilateralist, bellicose foreign policies are driving away American allies, and incentivizing America's rivals to create alternatives to the dollar denominated global economy. If, over time, the dollar's role as the de facto single world currency is seriously eroded, America's empire will crumble, its ability to finance its global network of military bases will collapse, and America could risk becoming a pariah state in a multi-polar world.]
The end of America’s unchallenged global economic dominance has arrived sooner than expected, thanks to the very same Neocons who gave the world the Iraq, Syria and the dirty wars in Latin America. Just as the Vietnam War drove the United States off gold by 1971, its sponsorship and funding of violent regime change wars against Venezuela and Syria – and threatening other countries with sanctions if they do not join this crusade – is now driving European and other nations to create their alternative financial institutions.
This break has been building for quite some time, and was bound to occur. But who would have thought that Donald Trump would become the catalytic agent? No left-wing party, no socialist, anarchist or foreign nationalist leader anywhere in the world could have achieved what he is doing to break up the American Empire. The Deep State is reacting with shock at how this right-wing real estate grifter has been able to drive other countries to defend themselves by dismantling the U.S.-centered world order. To rub it in, he is using Bush and Reagan-era Neocon arsonists, John Bolton and now Elliott Abrams, to fan the flames in Venezuela. It is almost like a black political comedy. The world of international diplomacy is being turned inside-out. A world where there is no longer even a pretense that we might adhere to international norms, let alone laws or treaties.
The Neocons who Trump has appointed are accomplishing what seemed unthinkable not long ago: Driving China and Russia together – the great nightmare of Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski. They also are driving Germany and other European countries into the Eurasian orbit, the “Heartland” nightmare of Halford Mackinder a century ago.
The root cause is clear: After the crescendo of pretenses and deceptions over Iraq, Libya and Syria, along with our absolution of the lawless regime of Saudi Arabia, foreign political leaders are coming to recognize what world-wide public opinion polls reported even before the Iraq/Iran-Contra boys turned their attention to the world’s largest oil reserves in Venezuela: The United States is now the greatest threat to peace on the planet.
. . .Perhaps the problem had to erupt as a result of the inner dynamics of U.S.-sponsored globalism becoming impossible to impose when the result is financial austerity, waves of population flight from U.S.-sponsored wars, and most of all, U.S. refusal to adhere to the rules and international laws that it itself sponsored seventy years ago in the wake of World War II.
. . .the major cyber connections [in the post World War II American global order] are financial money-transfer ones, headed by SWIFT, the acronym for the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, which is centered in Belgium.Russia and China have already moved to create a shadow bank-transfer system in case the United States unplugs them from SWIFT. But now, European countries have come to realize that threats by Bolton and Pompeo may lead to heavy fines and asset grabs if they seek to continue trading with Iran as called for in the treaties they have negotiated.
On January 31 the dam broke with the announcement that Europe had created its own bypass payments system for use with Iran and other countries targeted by U.S. diplomats. Germany, France and even the U.S. poodle Britain joined to create INSTEX — Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges. The promise is that this will be used only for “humanitarian” aid to save Iran from a U.S.-sponsored Venezuela-type devastation. But in view of increasingly passionate U.S. opposition to the Nord Stream pipeline to carry Russian gas, this alternative bank clearing system will be ready and able to become operative if the United States tries to direct a sanctions attack on Europe.
I have just returned from Germany and seen a remarkable split between that nation’s industrialists and their political leadership. For years, major companies have seen Russia as a natural market, a complementary economy needing to modernize its manufacturing and able to supply Europe with natural gas and other raw materials. America’s New Cold War stance is trying to block this commercial complementarity. Warning Europe against “dependence” on low-price Russian gas, it has offered to sell high-priced Liquid Natural Gas from the United States (via port facilities that do not yet exist in anywhere near the volume required). President Trump also is insisting that NATO members spend a full 2 percent of their GDP on arms – preferably bought from the United States, not from German or French merchants of death.
The U.S. overplaying its position is leading to the Mackinder-Kissinger-Brzezinski Eurasian nightmare that I mentioned above. In addition to driving Russia and China together, U.S. diplomacy is adding Europe to the heartland, independent of U.S. ability to bully into the state of dependency toward which American diplomacy has aimed to achieve since 1945.
The Price of Empire: Why America and Britain Are Self-Destructing (And What the World Can Learn From it) Medium, by Umair Haque, January 11, 2019
It’s a striking fact of today’s world that the two rich societies in shocking, swift, sharp decline are America and Britain. Nowhere else in the world, for example, are real income, life expectancy, happiness, and trust all plummeting, apart from maybe Venezuela (No, “but at least we’re not Venezuela!” is not the bar to aim for, my friends.) Their downfall is, of course, a self-inflicted catastrophe. But the interesting question is: why? And what does it tell us about what it takes to prosper and thrive in the 21st century, which is something that America and Britain clearly aren’t doing, and maybe aren’t capable of doing?
Here’s an equally curious observation. America and Britain aren’t just any countries. They are the former hegemons of the world’s most powerful empires. Britain, until the first half of the 20th century, and America, picking up where Britain left off. Is this just a strange cosmic coincidence — that it is the two greatest empires of the most recent past who are the ones seemingly most incapable of meeting the challenges of the 21st century? There aren’t coincidences that great, my friends. Such tides of history always whisper lessons to be learned. What is this one trying to urgently teach us?
That there is a price to empire. A grave and ruinous one. And that price has grown over the centuries — so high that now, it is not worth paying anymore.Let me explain what I mean — because it is not just about spending too much money and grasping too high. Not at all. It is about the kind of a place and people such a country ends up limited to being — and perhaps can then never really easily outgrow.
To be a great empire, you must also be a certain kind of culture, society, place— a people with a certain set of values, a certain kind of attitudes. You must cherish control and prize possession over humanity and empathy and wisdom. You must value brutal competition above all else — and train your children to be little warriors, basically, whether tossing them into seas, like Spartans, or making them do “active shooter drills.” You must be domineering and controlling and vengeful, feared, not loved — you must come to prize anger and rage as the only true or worthy emotions in life, not, say, intelligence gentleness, kindness, or happiness. The primary objective of your institutions, the aspiration of your best and brightest, must be subjugating others, instead of lifting them up — after all, empires are made of subjects, not equals. You must instill in people an admiration for violence — since empires are run with bullets, whether fired from drones or armies. Your science and art and so forth must be dedicated, fundamentally, to the proposition that somehow, you are the natural masters of the world which is your dominion — no matter how they claim to admire freedom and equality and truth. You cannot plan for any kind of long term good — your primary motive is simply to acquire, colonize, plunder, take the next possession.
In other words, to be an empire, you must cultivate the qualities of cruelty, of selfishness, of greed, of tribalism, socially. Of materialism and acquisitiveness and conformity to greed and selfishness, mentally. You must encourage the rise of supremacy and triumphalism and bigotry and misogyny, culturally. You must attach to all human life just one purpose: not happiness, or belonging, or the growth of meaning and purpose, but material gain, whether it’s measured in colonies, protectorates, slaves, bodies, or GDP. Thus, the overarching organizing principle of your entire empire must be just this: the strong survive, and the weak perish. Everyone — even the weak — must come to buy into this principle, treasure it, cheer it, applaud it — even when they themselves are the ones being destroyed. Just think of how Donald Trump embodies all those values to a comical, disgusting degree.
. . .Now, the problem with a colonial mentality, attitude, society, way of life is this. What happens when you run out of stuff to colonize? After all, sooner or later, you’re going to run out of tempting frontiers, helpless savages, Manhattans to trade for beads, fish in the ocean, and so on, right? That day might seem a long way away — but it has to come, after all. Well, then, my friends, you are screwed — if you can’t give up the colonial mindset, then you will have to colonize yourself. What do I mean by this curious phrase, “colonize yourself”? I mean that you will have to exploit your own people the very same way that you exploited others before. You will have to teach them to exploit each other, just the same way that they once exploited poorer people of different “colors” and creeds, when there are no more of those strangers in new frontiers left to conquer, no more fresh mountains left to plunder.
And that is exactly what happened in America and Britain. It’s most obvious in America. When there was no one else left to exploit — first it was slaves, then it was subhuman blacks kept segregated, then it was various countries who were “liberated” by war for their oil and cheap labour — bang! Americans were told to turn on themselves. They obeyed. What else did they know? That is what they’d been told all their lives — that this mindset of exploitation and violence is good. So off the American went to work as a manager at an HMO, where his job was to deny people healthcare, or as a minor-league corporate droid, where his job was to find cleverer ways to jack up profits he never even saw a larger share of.
Hieronymus Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights, [Public domain]
Dreams Die Hard, Clusterfuck Nation Blog, James Howard Kunstler, February 8, 2019
America has been blowing green smoke up its own ass for years, promoting oxymorons such as “green skyscrapers” and “clean energy,” but the truth is we’re not going to run WalMart, Suburbia, DisneyWorld, and the interstate highway system on any combination of wind, solar, geothermal, recycled Fry-Max, and dark matter. We’re just running too much stuff at too great a scale for too many people. We’ve blown through the capital already and replaced it with IOUs that will never be honored, and we’re caught in an entropy trap of diminishing returns from all the work-arounds we’re desperately trying. For all that, there are actually some sound proposals in the mostly delusional matrix of the Green New Deal promoted by foxy front-person AOC.
• Revoke corporate personhood by amending our Constitution to make clear that corporations are not persons and money is not speech. Right on, I say, though they have not quite articulated the argument which is that corporations, unlike persons, have no vested allegiance to the public interest, but rather a legal obligation solely to shareholders and their boards-of-directors.
• Replace partisan oversight of elections with non-partisan election commissions. A no-brainer.
• Replace big money control of election campaigns with full public financing and free and equal access to the airwaves. Quite cheap and worth every penny.
• Break up the oversized banks that are “too big to fail.” And while you’re at it, resume enforcement of the anti-trust laws.
• Restore the Glass-Steagall separation of depository commercial banks from speculative investment banks. Duh….There are two kinds of deadly narcissism at work in American culture these days: techno-narcissism — the belief that magical rescue remedies can save the status quo of comforts and conveniences — and organizational narcissism — the belief that any number of committees can lead a march of humanity into a future of rainbows and unicorns. Both of these ideas are artifacts of a fossil fuel turbo-charged economy that is coming to an end. Societies and economies are fundamentally emergent, non-linear, and self-organizing as they respond to the mandates of reality — which are not necessarily consistent with human wishes. Circumstances in the world change and sometimes, when the changes are profound enough, they provoke episodes of flux and disorder. A better index for our journey into the unknown frontier beyond modernity will not be what is “green” and “smart” but perhaps what is “sane” and “insane.”
HAVE WE ALL LOST TOUCH WITH REALITY?, Who. What. Why., January 18,2019
[Ed. Note: Yes, we all create our own reality. And in the 21st Century our minds are overloaded, impairing our ability to successfully synthesize sensory input into a comprehensible picture of our world. The result is that people look to advertising agencies, politicians, billionaires, celebrities, demagogues, and sports stars to construct a consensus reality that becomes the basic common denominator for popular culture, and the primary reality for a majority of the world's citizens, who have given up their precious freedom to create a personal reality, and become slaves to a new class of predators who seek to colonize mass consciousness in pursuit of personal power and profit.]
In many ways, politics has always been about marketing, about deception and in a broader sense, I mean you can go back to the ’50s and Vance Packard writing about the hidden persuaders and Fletcher Knebel in a novel talking about the 480 slicing and dicing America up into its component parts. What’s different today?
Well, what’s different, there are two things that are different. One, the technology we have to do those things you just described is infinitely more powerful, infinitely more available, so the instruments that we have to reach right inside the mind and create visceral experiences, which are the experiences that determine what we really do. It’s not so much our thinking, it’s the way we feel in our body, these bodily states, that are going to shape it.
So with television, as we saw for the first time I think in the Nixon- Kennedy debates in 1960, you could reach right inside a person and give them the experience of calm, cool, handsome John Kennedy and you could contrast that with the experience viscerally of a sweaty, jowly Richard Nixon and the question for the electorate was which experience do you prefer? Lo and behold, they preferred Kennedy for those reasons.
The TV was the first instrument where people could work that kind of mischief directly and move right inside the mind. The technology we’ve got has been greatly expanded. At the same time, the object of that technology, the human mind, or the American mind in this case, has been under a withering assault. That’s what I talk about in State of Confusion, that the amount of pressure on the mind… the mind’s first and most important job is to create our sense of reality.
Now we all think of reality as just something out there that we perceive. But it’s not like that. The mind has to take all of the myriad things that are coming into it and it has to organize it and synthesize it and create a sense of what we prioritize as our reality.When the mind can’t do that, when it’s overloaded with material or when for some other reason it starts to malfunction and we can’t create a reality sense that we trust in, we get very, very anxious. At that point we don’t function as well. We tend to look to some powerful other figure, a demagogue if you will, who will tell us what’s real and what’s not real.
So the mind, as I document in the book, the pace of change that we’ve had to integrate with the amount of dislocation, disruption, and economic fear, the mind has been assaulted. The incidents of trauma in this country, it’s so ubiquitous that we overlook it and say, “Well, it’s just life.”
But 80% of the American public has experienced some form of significant traumatic experience which we can reasonably anticipate will disrupt our effective psychological functioning.
So what’s changed then is you’ve got the mechanisms to work the mischief and the object on which they’re working it, the human mind is, sadly, in much more disarray as the world becomes more complex and as we lose those things that support the mind.
The sanctity of the family, the extended family, communities, neighborhoods, schools, even professionalism. All the things that once supported the mind’s ability to construct its reality have been under assault and the price we’re paying is terrible. People are becoming unable. They’re so shaky in their trust in their own reality that when we see someone with a different reality it’s too threatening to us and so we hate them. That’s the real danger in the country.
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Jane and I will be back with you in a little over a week with our regularly scheduled Cosmic Weather Forecast! Until then we send you love and light!