VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY

COVID Relief Bill is a CRUEL JOKE.
An astonishing abomination. Theft in broad daylight, testament that the ruling class does not fear the wrath of the people, nor exposure. They feel their propaganda and police can shield them from repercussions for their betrayals. But the pandemic is accelerating the moment when the crisis of political representation and system legitimacy will hit the fan, and the problem afflicts most US allied nations. 

VANESSA BEELEY—The BBC has recently produced a 15-part radio documentary ‘probe’ into the Le Mesurier fraud allegation and the White Helmets. The “Mayday” series, produced by Chloe Hadjimatheou, turned out to be nothing more than an attempt to smear and discredit researchers, academics, scientists and journalists whose work has exposed the White Helmets to be an armed-group-auxiliary, an extension of power for the UK/US-led regime-change coalition, whose failed agenda is the removal of the Syrian government and President Bashar Assad.

CALEB MAUPIN—This is easily one of Caleb Maupin’s bravest, most urgent and most lucid chats. Simply indispensable. Every American looking for explanations and solutions to the rapidly advancing national and global crisis should take a listen. The world is pregnant with desperately needed social change, and the choice is clear: It will be either Fascism or Communism. The former represents, as usual, the preferred, default solution endorsed by the global imperialist ruling elites. Fascism entails massive destruction and death, and the triumph of the Big Lie and possibly the end of freedom in much of the planet. On the other hand, true communism can save the US and the world from such a fate, but the obstacles in its path—starting with the capitalists’ control of mass media and the pervasive toxicity of anticommunist exceptionalism, aggravated by the rise of a huge fake left— are simply colossal.

HIROYUKI HAMADA—That’s why so many people buy the idea that Russians are messing with their “democracy”.  It is not that they actually believe that Russians do stuff to them, but they sense the position of Russia in the imperial framework.  “How dare Russians get in the way of the United States of America!”.  How ironic is it that those who are going through the economic shock therapy now at the hands of those who inflicted an economic shock therapy against the Russian people after the destruction of USSR fail to see what is happening to themselves.  Needless to say, imperial gravity is global.  Some western proxy powers, on the other hand, are eager to comply and do extra miles in order to hold better positions in the imperial hierarchy.  Neoliberal restructuring of their economies, compliance with military strategic necessities, and demonization of “enemy countries” and so on can be more prominent in those countries than the US itself.  

AJAMU BARAKA—Trump’s plan from the beginning of his administration was to complete the Obama pivot to Asia, but those efforts were undermined by the domestic political obstacles he faced in just trying to gain full control of the Executive Branch. And while Trump was eventually successful in winning over elements of the U.S. and European ruling classes to a more aggressive stance against China, his short-sighted, erratic “America first” policies and his inability to consolidate effective power over the U.S. state were a destabilizing force for the continued hegemony of the Western colonial/capitalist project.  

The U.S.-EU unity project with its NATO military wing in the service of collective imperialism and under U.S. leadership is the neoliberal corrective strategy to Trump.