shorty

RAMIN MAZAHERI—If Putin was a socialist – if he cared more about Ukrainians and was willing to risk Russia’s standing more – I believe he would have made more of a stink about the leaks. Unlike the leaders of the USSR, Putin does not really stand on moral-political grounds – he mainly gets vocal about sovereignty. Zuesse echoed this idea when I asked him how Russia can “win” in Ukraine, much as they have helped “win” in Syria: “In my personal opinion, Putin has done everything exactly correct, but with only one possible exception, which — because everything else has been SO correct that he’s probably right about that one too: my preference would have been for Putin publicly to challenge the lies from Obama and the rest of the West,” Zuesse told me. “That recording is a smoking gun on a coup in process, if ever there was one….”

ANDRE VLTCHEK—A few days before this essay went to print, Julian Assange was cynically betrayed by a country which used to be governed by a socialist administration, and which gave him political asylum and citizenship, both. Its current ruler, Lenin Moreno, will be judged extremely harshly by history: he’ll be remembered as a man who began dismantling the socialist structure of Ecuador, and who then literally sold (to the twisted British and US judiciary systems) a man who has already sacrificed more than his life for the truth as well as for survival of our planet.

FRANK SCOTT—It is significant that Assange and Manning, two heroic figures, are imprisoned while an entire population of corporate and media hustlers make a living blaming the empty headed egotist in the white house for everything that is, was, and continues to be appallingly wrong with a system while they all make good livings obliterating any mention of that while jumping on a bandwagon of “resistance” to Trump

RAMIN MAZAHERI—he French government is under fire for continually giving low estimates of turnout for Yellow Vest demonstrations. Multiple groups consistently put the number of Yellow Vests at 3 to 4 times the official figures. Ramin Mazaheri has more on this story from Paris.  This is a PressTV report I did with the Union of Angry Policemen – (Syndicat France Police policiers en colère) it is a real cop union, the 5th largest, despite the goofy name. They are permanently angry, it seems. This  is all about how totally undercounted the Yellow Vests are – this union has pegged the Vesters’ numbers at 3-5 times the ministry’s numbers, which are total bullshit.

GROVER FURR—Soviet leaders, Stalin among them, decided that the only solution was to reorganize agriculture on the basis of large factory-type farms like some in the American Midwest, which were deliberately adopted as models. When sovkhozy or “Soviet farms” appeared to work well the Soviet leadership made the decision to collectivize agriculture. Contrary to anticommunist propaganda, most peasants accepted collectivization. Resistance was modest; acts of outright rebellion rare. By 1932 Soviet agriculture, including in the Ukrainian SSR, was largely collectivized.