CITIZENS COUNTER-PROPAGANDA

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Like many other forms of bigotry, this one has been engineered and promulgated by powerful people who benefit from it. If the mainstream news media were what it purports to be, namely an institution dedicated to creating an informed populace about what’s truthfully going on in the world, we would see the bombings in foreign nations given the same type of coverage that a bombing in Paris or London receives.

This would immediately bring consciousness to the unconscious bigotry that those in the US-centralized empire hold against people in low and middle income countries, which is exactly why the plutocrat-owned media do not report on it in this way. The US-centralized empire is held together by endless violence, and the plutocrats who run it have built their kingdoms upon the status quo of that empire.

TOM DISPATCH—As TomDispatch regular Dilip Hiro, author of After Empire: The Birth of a Multipolar World, suggests today, behind the growing belligerence of the Trump administration, which should be considered dangerous indeed at this moment — think new Cold War — lies the anger of a president whose world seems to be slipping out of control. Back in 2016, I suggested that Donald Trump was running as this country’s first declinist presidential candidate (the clue lay in that hardly noticed “again” at the end of his election slogan Make America Great Again, or MAGA). And, as Hiro suggests today, looking at the high-tech business world, he’s delivered big time.

Whether negotiating with China, North Korea, or any other country, the art-of-the-dealer-in-chief has proven to be either a stealer-in-chief or an unreeler-in-chief. So say goodbye to the American Century but, given the state of this planet, don’t count on a Chinese Century either. 

CALEB MAUPIN—Kamala Harris being peddled for VP slot; Bob Aviakian, head of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), a small but loud Maoist group, relic of the 1970s, urges everyone to vote for Biden; irrelevance of the synthetic left, their broken anti-imperialist compass; inability of “woke” people to act as genuine revolutionary vectors; why we must go to the masses; there has been a massive shift in consciousness: the old “Cold War” paradigm is dead, a new order is possible. What was the “Hungarian revolution” and its most unusual features? This and much more. 

GODFREE ROBERTS—CNBC reports that China is testing electronic warfare assets at fortified outposts in the South China Sea. The move allows Beijing to further project its power in the hotly disputed waters. [MORE]. China News reports that several US Growler electronic warplanes went out of control for a few second over the South China Sea then withdrew. According to the pilots, their instruments  became chaotic and the planes could not communicate with the outside world. The United States demanded that China dismantle the electronic equipment immediately, but was ignored

ROB URIE—The first Cold War was an imperial business enterprise to keep the Generals, bureaucrats, and war materiel suppliers in power and their bank accounts flush after WWII. Likewise, the American side of the nuclear arms race left former Gestapo and SS officers employed by the CIA to put their paranoid fantasies forward as assessments of Russian military capabilities. Why, of all people, would former Nazi officers be put in charge military intelligence if accurate assessments were the goal? The Nazis hated the Soviets more than the Americans did.