ZIONCONS

Also on Saturday, Czech police said they were looking for two Russian citizens who were in the area of the military depot at the time of the blast, apparently implying their involvement without directly saying so. The news was met with much ridicule in Russia, as the suspects are the same men who were accused by London of the poisoning of double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in 2018 – an allegation denied by Moscow.

MOA—The G7 are not the ‘global community’. They have altogether some 500 million inhabitants out of 7.9 billion strong global population. Neither China nor India are members of the G7 nor is any South American or African country. Moreover Russia has rejected a Russian return into the G7/8 format:

“Russia is focused on other formats, apart from the G7,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in a brief statement ..

Russia has no interest in a summit which would only be used by the U.S. to further bash Russia. Why should it give Biden that pleasure when there is nothing that Russia would gain from it. Russia does not need a ‘bridge back’. There will be no summit.

ERIC ZUESSE—The Minsk agreements were negotiated between Germany, France, Ukraine, and Russia — the four “Normandy Format” participants. The initial contacts had been discussions between Merkel, Hollande and Putin, all three of whom wanted the Obama-initiated slaughter in Donbas to stop, and Merkel and Hollande forced Ukraine’s Poroshenko to accept the Minsk agreements, or else Germany and France would block further IMF loans, which have been keeping the post-coup Ukrainian Government afloat. (That was leverage which Germany and France had over the U.S. regime — the empire isn’t entirely a one-way street.)

JANICE KORTKAMP— Her summary of the war against Syria is succint, mordant and spot on: “It is: A terrorist-proxy war. An economic siege war. A political war to undermine the sovereignty and legitimacy of the Syrian state. An attrition war. A media propaganda war. A divide and conquer war…”

AJAMU BARAKA—The major contradiction that Marx identified was between the capitalists and the workers. And that’s a continuing contradiction, but at this stage of monopoly global capital and the irrationality of these processes, the major contradiction today, in my opinion, is between capitalism—the capitalist class—and collective humanity. We have to take power from these maniacs if we’re going to survive. So there’s an objective, material need for us to recognize that we have an interest in taking power back from the capitalist class if we want to survive for ourselves and for our children.