Anti-Capitalist Meetup: War Profiteers Ecstatic at Middle East Mess

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Sunday June 22, 2014 · 2:29 PM PDT

2014/06/22 · 14:29

US General Smedley Butler detailed in his "War is a Racket" in 1935 the World War I racket he had served. It is now much, much worse.

Vice-President Richard Cheney and his fellow Neo-Cons originally lite the barn fires with their factually unjustified invasion of Iraq in 2003. Bush-Cheney then torched the secular, but Sunni sect based, ruling Baathist Party and applauded the decapitation of its brutal, but anti-al Qaeda leader, Saddam Hussein. (Saddam himself had originally been put in place by the US CIA in a coup, but thereafter fell out of favor with the US government because he dared to assert exclusive control of Iraq’s oil industry.)

Up to his ouster, Saddam had successfully kept the radical jihadists out of Iraq, which even the US intelligence agencies have admitted:

“There was no al Qaeda-Iraq connection until the war; our invasion made it so. We have known this for nearly a decade, well before the murderous ISIS even appeared. In a September 2006 New York Times article headlined “Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat,” reporter Mark Mazetti informed readers of a classified National Intelligence Estimate representing the consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ the analysis cited the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology: “The Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,’ said one American intelligence official.”

Now jihadist ever more extreme than al-Qaeda, the ISIS, are an hour outside of Baghdad, threatening the capitol city and its Shia sect residents. Its Sunni sect population, a minority in Baghdad, is seemingly terrified of the reaction of the Shiite majority as well as the blatantly brutal, although Sunni ISIS. Likely everyone there is arming. (The NRA must be delighted.) Read More

Venezuela Under Fascist Attack -- with U.S. Help.

Justina for Anti-Capitalist Meetup

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Sunday April 13, 2014 · 2:00 PM PDT

2014/04/13 · 14:00

American progressives must recognize the urgent need to support and preserve the Venezuelan socialist revolution. The peaceful, democratically elected socialist government serves as a model for the kind of programs that our own country desperately needs.

Look at what Venezuelan socialists have already accomplished and why they have consistently been under attack by Venezuela’s wealthy classes and their U.S. government, CIA and USAID funders: (See Eva Golinger’s “Post Cards from the Revolution” archives for details of U.S. funding at http://www.chavezcode.com/)

In 1998, Hugo Chavez was elected president of Venezuela. He was democratically re-elected twice in the following 14 years until his death in March of 2013, even triumphing over a separate right-wing generated national recall referendum in 2004.

During those years, Chavez and his socialist party, the PSUV, set out to reverse the power relations of the pre-1998 years of capitalist rule and giving voice to the millions of Venezuelans who had previously been poor, hungry, uneducated and ill under those capitalist regimes.

Chavez and his government created what they termed "social missions", focused programs to deal with depredations that had previously affected the majority of citizens. Their literacy mIssion sent thousands of high school and university students into the country side to teach reading and writing, virally whipping out illiteracy in the country according to UN statistics. A similar project provided high school level education to those without previous access, while hundreds of new university and technical programs were created where no tuition was charged and students were actually paid a stipend to go to school.

An early mission, called Mission Adentro, brought free neighborhood medical and dental clinics by the thousands into neighborhoods throughout the country which were previously unserved. A mission to provide good nutritional food provides subsidized markets and restaurants.

After the extreme flooding throughout the country in 2010, which destroyed thousands of homes, a new Mission to build 2 million new homes began, homes to be given to families at very low interest rates or even free, depending on family income.

There followed a massive training and employment program for up to two million people, wherein folks received job training and thereafter job placements at government expense.

Since 2003, more than the equivalent of $772 billion has been invested in the social missions programs.These funds came from the profits of Venezuela’s nationalized oil industry.

In 2011, five new “great social missions” were launched to build upon the work of previous programs and achieve specific objectives regarding health, employment, housing, social security, and agriculture. Millions of workers, students, mothers, children and the disabled have received the benefits of these social services while receiving government financial support to utilize these programs.

Justina for Anti-Capitalist Meetup

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Sunday July 28, 2013 · 2:59 PM PDT

2013/07/28 · 14:59

Wired.com, in a July 26, 2013 piece by David Cravats, details that not-very-surprising fact that those congressional representatives who received the largest political donations from defense contractors voted last week, 217 to 205, to oppose cuts to NSA’s phone-spying dragnet budget. Those who opposed the cuts, and thus the “Amash amendment” received 122% more defense contractor funds than those who voted against it, with one Democratic exception of Representative Dennis Moran of Virginia.

An analysis done by the Berkeley non-profit, MapLight for Wired showed that Defense contractor donations averaged $41,635 from the pot, whereas House members who voted to repeal authority averaged $18,765 for the previous two year period.

The only really surprising fact is how very little the defense contractors had to pony-up to buy their contractor-collusive representative over the two year period: $12.97 million.

In contrast to the billions of dollars these big corporations make each year from their defense contracts in the surveillance industry, the going price for representatives is trifling low. (Of course, undoubtedly some representatives with committee assignments critical to surveillance budget issues do undoubtedly get lucrative extra perks in the form of post-term jobs, many as lobbyists, should they leave Congress, but still the cost of doing business with friendly congressional representatives is virtually a rounding error in their corporate budgets.

Justina for Anti-Capitalist Meetup

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Sunday June 16, 2013 · 2:59 PM PDT

2013/06/16 · 14:59

From This in Michigan...

Capitalism's Old Marvels photo detroit_census_AP110322152791_620x350.jpg

To This in Honduras....

In Michigan, Republican Governor Rick Snyder has appointed an “emergency manager” to take over the city of Detroit, with the powers to over-ride the votes of local citizens and the decisions and contracts made by their locally elected mayor and city council. The manager has the power to abrogate previously signed union contracts with city workers and sell city assets to pay off the city's creditors. The new emergency manager has ordered the appraisal of the Detroit Art Institute's world class art collection with a view to its sale.

In Honduras, its post-coup president and legislature has signed a law allowing the government to sell or lease vast tracks of lands in habited by Honduran's indigenous tribes, to private owners to establish "charter cities", feudal-like city states which are to establish their own laws and form of government, free of pre-existing state laws and regulations.

As a part of Honduras's "public-private partnership", law, capitalist business have been invited to create new business cities in the wilderness, profit paradises to be totally controlled by the businesses which own them. Thus the ese corporate vandals are pillaging the world, its land, art and culture by liquidating previously sovereign states in their favor.

Honduras will now allow consortia of private corporations to set up their own city-states, free of virtually all pre-existing law and regulation by the country’s government. The "public" component of this "public-private partnership", the putatively democratically elected Honduran government (post the 2009 Zelaya-coup) have voted to sell (or long term lease) large tracks of their country to private corporations and their agents. Hondurans living in these feudal city-states will have no democratic control of their environment.

The rules will be set by private charters, written by the corporate agents who shall decide who shall live in their states and who shall be excluded and where they will live and work if they allowed in. (Never mind that the likely territories involved long have belonged to indigenous tribes, who have not been consulted in this massive give-away of their land, but actively oppose it.)

It’s really not much different in Michigan.

Justina for Anti-Capitalist Meetup

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Sunday May 12, 2013 · 3:28 PM PDT

2013/05/12 · 15:28

"You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month." - CIA operative discussing with Philip Graham, editor Washington Post, on the availability and prices of journalists willing to peddle CIA propaganda and cover stories. (from "Katherine The Great," by Deborah Davis (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1991)

Thus Davis chronicles the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) official campaign to turn American newspapers, into conduits for its anti-communist ideology which began after World War II. It was called "Operation Mockingbird". Perhaps the operation would have been more accurately named "Operation Cuckoo" as the cuckoo will lay its egg in another bird's nest and steal the original. With this propaganda operation and spying operation, the CIA effectively threw objectivity out of the nest of American journalism and put CIA denominated news in its place.

The CIA was successful in capturing the nests of the biggest newspapers in the U.S., including the the Washington Post, the N.Y. Times, and the Los Angeles Times, among many others. They all still seem to be on team. During the years of the Contra war against the lawful Sandinista government in the 1980's, the CIA employed similar methods here in Nicaragua. Is it still going on here?

Justina for Anti-Capitalist Meetup

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Sunday March 17, 2013 · 3:00 PM PDT

2013/03/17 · 15:00

Following the ideals of his hero, Simon Bolivar, President Hugo Chávez Friás long had a grand vision of a Bolivarian unity among the countries of South America, Central America, and the Caribbean. His long serving foreign minister, Nicolas Maduro, now acting president of Venezuela, was the person who brought that vision to material reality. In so doing, they may have walked off with some prime real estate -- the U.S.’s own backyard.

As a reported two million people lined the streets to accompany the body of Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez Friás, to the Military Academy in Caracas where likely millions more stood in line for hours, if not days, to view his face one last time. Fifty-four international delegations, political leaders and heads of state arrived in Venezuela to attend the official state ceremony for the deceased president, 15 of whose countries had declared official days of mourning for him at home. They were greeted by then vice president and now Acting President Nicolas Maduro.

The South, Central American and Caribbean countries in attendance gave witness to the impact the Chavez Administration has had on forging unity among them.
Representatives of the more than 33 countries belonging to MERCOSUR, UNOSUR, ALBA and CELAC appeared and credited Chavez’s vision and energy with establishing the equivalent of a new regional union, modeled after the European Union, south of the U.S. border, in what the U.S. formerly regarded as virtually its own territory.

Justina for Anti-Capitalist Meetup

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Sunday December 23, 2012 · 11:52 AM PST

2012/12/23 · 11:52

Viva Hugo Chavez Frias! Long Live the Bolivarian Revolution! We are republishing this piece by Justina written in December 2012 in memorial to Hugo Chavez and in solidarity with the Venezuelan people and revolution!

Here in Nicaragua, where this writer is now living, the news on December 8, 2012 that Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez Frias was to undergo yet another operation to fight the cancer which has plagued him since 2011 was reported in one of the country's two major newspapers, âEl Nuevo Diarioâ, under massive and thick black headlines, that in announcing his need for a 4th cancer operation, President Chavez had, for the first time, named his preferred successor to the presidency should he be unable to serve. Chavez asked the country to support his recently appointed vice president, Nicholas Maduro, should a new election be necessary.

Nicaragua, and much of the rest of Central and South America were stunned by the notion that President Chavez might be unable to serve out the new 6 year term to which he was re-elected on October 7, 2012. He conducted a physically vigorous campaign against the much younger opposition candidate, Henrique Capriles Radonski, and had bested Capriles 55 + to 44 % with a more than 80% voter turnout.

The majority of Venezuelans were devastated by the news, and rushed into the streets do demonstrate their support and into the churches to pray for his recovery. Thousands of people, including many heads of states, in other Latin American countries did the same.

Most of the tattered opposition, including Capriles, had the grace to refrain from showing their glee at Chavez's possible demise, some did not. The hierarchy of the Catholic Church which had long and viciously opposed Chavez, piously pointed out to their laity that Chavez was only a frail human being, like any other man. They likely highly resented that they had to open their churches and allow masses to be conducted for the heath of this man who had frequently criticized the hierarchy for its support of the wealthy oppositionists, while at the same time calling on Catholic saints for aid during his illness. Chavez had consistently identified himself as a Christian socialist.

Justina

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Sunday October 28, 2012 · 3:00 PM PDT

2012/10/28 · 15:00

Workers: The Source of All Value, All Surplus Value and All the Resulting Capitalist Looted Wealth.

Recently, Forbes magazine, a major tool of the capitalist class, reported that the "Super Rich" are hiding $21 Trillion dollars in off-shore tax-havens. A single trillion dollars is a looooooooooo….t of money, and that amount pales besides the trillions the super rich are holding quite openly -- in factories, equipment, office buildings, agribusinesses, stocks, bonds, derivatives and ownership of magazines like Forbes and all our media industries.

Where did all that vast wealth come from? Why are so many impoverished under our capitalist economic system, while the few gain such tremendous wealth? Karl Marx (1818 - 1883), Hegelian philosopher, political economist and practical revolutionary, asked that basic question and provided the most definitive answer to this very day in his study, Capital published in 1867.

So why does this old book strike such fear today into the hearts and minds of America's corporate owners that they virtually forbid its teaching in American universities' economics and business schools?

Some members of our Anti-Capitalist Meet-Up group hope to explore that question and the basics of Marx's theories in a series of once monthly posts, of which this is the first, on surplus value.

We will explore other issues such as wages, profits and the falling rate of profit, accumulation of capital and the means of production, use value versus exchange value of a commodity, money as an intermediary between buying and selling commodities, alienated labor, private property, private versus state capitalism, finance capitalism and globalization, the role of cooperatives versus unions, finance capitalism and like issues. We'll break it up into different diaries one a month. Maybe you'll volunteer to write one too? (Please do!).

Economics Professor Richard D. Wolff (University of Massachusetts and the New School for Social Research) provides, in his four part series of lectures on the basics of Marxian economics analysis available on his web site under "online classes". a solid, readily understandable and thoroughly enjoyable introduction to Marx's economic theories which this writer uses as her departure point.

Wolff shows how Marx discovered, by analyzing its inner-most workings in detail, why capitalism is so de-humanizing and exploitative of its workers and produces such poverty and misery for the vast majority of the population. Marx's analysis is set forth in his "theory of Surplus Value", which is the secret to where all the trillions of wealth, both hidden and open, came from.

Justina for Anti-Capitalist Meetup

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Sunday August 12, 2012 · 3:00 PM PDT

2012/08/12 · 15:00

In last week's Anti-Capitalist Meet-Up, northsylvania described a wonderful example of non-alienated labor among a community in Britain whose citizens join together freely into neighborhood clubs to create extensive Guy Fawkes Day celebrations, expending hundreds of hours throughout the year in building parade carts for the festival to raise money for local charities. Democratic decision making rules in these endeavors, and the participants derive great personal satisfaction from their communal creations.

This principal of "freely associated labor" is fundamental to Karl Marx's vision for the truly human, organization of an economic system which liberates all individuals to be able to not only meet their basic survival needs but develop all their talents and skills.

Freely-Associated Labor Made Real.

"Freely associated labor" has been made a reality by the workers at the Grafitos factory in eastern Venezuela. Here's their story.

When, in 2009, the private owners of the Grafitos factory in eastern Venezuela refused to bargain with its workers' union and threatened to remove the machinery from the factory and close it, the union members physically occupied the plant, stopped the removal of the machinery and won official permission from the Venezuelan government to re-open and run it themselves.

Now the plant, which supplies materials to the large nationalized Sidor Steel factory, is being run by its workers, to the economic and social benefit of themselves, their local community and the larger movement in Venezuela towards a human, egalitarian and socialist economic democracy.

Ewan Robertson, writing in "Revolutionary Democracy in the Economy? Venezuela’s Worker Control Movement and the Plan Socialist Guayana" published by www.venezuelanalysis, reports that:

"A workers council was installed, which from September 2010 debated how to organize the workers’ control of the factory. Escalon and the other workers described to me how at first they had been unprepared for self-management. One of the mistakes that had been made was the attempt to make every decision in a factory assembly with all the workers, which is the “sovereign” decision making body at Grafitos. This proved inefficient and “wore out” workers, with Escalon emphasising that “holding an assembly to agree to buy a screw, no, that’s falling into the abyss”. Yet, in the process of debating and trying different models “we learnt as we went along”

Anti-Capitalist Meet-Up: Mitt And His Fellow Vulture Capitalists See Venezuela As a Threat: It Is.

Justina for Anti-Capitalist Meetup

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Sunday July 22, 2012 · 3:00 PM PDT

2012/07/22 · 15:00

The likely Republican presidential candidate and quintessential vulture capitalist, Mitt Romney, chided President Obama for not being sufficiently fearful of Venezuela’s socialist president, Hugo Chávez Friás last week. In the conservative Daily Telegraph Mitt is quoted as saying:

"The idea that this nation, this president, doesn't pose a national security threat is simply naive and an extraordinary admission on the part of this president to be completely out of touch with what is happening in Latin America," Romney said of Chavez in an interview Wednesday with Fox News.

Yes, socialist Venezuela, the country which was recently ranked the 5th happiest in the world, following four social democratic countries, presents a threat to Mitt’s vulture business model and his support base, who largely come from the 92,000 wealthy individuals who sequester their wealth in “tax havens” such as Switzerland the Cayman Islands. (See rt. com for its report on "The Price of Off Shore Revisited".

After President Chavez was elected to office in 1998, Venezuela has had currency controls in place to prevent its national wealth from being looted and sent to extra-territorial banks, a model which defeats the efforts of would-be off shore tax evaders in Venezuela. Other countries have allowed themselves to be systematically raped of their needed tax revenues.

Venezuela also jailed its criminal banksters for speculating with their depositors money. Here, Mitt, you would likely be in jail for creating tax-evading investment vehicles in the Cayman Islands. No, socialist Venezuela, under President Chavez, is definitely not a vulture-capitalist friendly country. That is why it is now thriving.

Justina

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Wednesday May 30, 2012 · 2:49 PM PDT

2012/05/30 · 14:49

The Occupy movement has sent out a Call to Action for a June 20th “Global Festival” to celebrate their global demand for a Universal Living Wage:

The regime of wholesale robbery — what the 1% call “austerity” — is already falling across Europe, and soon will fall across the world. But the inevitable collapse of austerity is not enough. We, the 99%, demand a world beyond Wall Street. We demand a system where everyone can not only survive, but flourish. To reach this world, we are raising our voices to demand a universal living wage.
We call on all occupies, unions, community organizations, immigrants rights groups, bodies, religious organizations, environmental groups, anti-poverty activists, and everyone to join us June 20th, 2012 for a new holiday for the 99%: A Global Festival for the Universal Living Wage.

No, Karl Marx, dead since 1883, is not now able to report on the events of the Occupy Movement, as he did on events of the U.S.’s Civil War for the NY Herald Tribune in the 1860's and the Paris Commune in the 1870’s, but strangely, to this day, the mere mention of his name still strikes terror into the hearts of global capitalists and their media puppets, such as Sean Hannity. [Link to http://thinkprogress.org/...

There must be a reason that the capitalist powers of the 21st century tremble at his name 129 years after his death, his writing must have been very dangerous indeed. How much they must be fear of Tim Poole's live-streaming. No wonder they arrested him this month in Chicago!. Read below to understand why Karl Marx, and especially his writing on the Paris Commune, was such a danger to capitalism.

Justina for Anti-Capitalist Meetup

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Sunday May 27, 2012 · 2:59 PM PDT

2012/05/27 · 14:59

My apologies, but I got very sick in the last two days and was unable to post this evening. The group will publish tonight’s discussion on Wednesday, May 30th, at 6:00 p.m. EDST.

This postponed diary will discuss Karl’s Marx’s analysis of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement of his day – when the people of Paris took over the city, not only the streets of Paris, but the government buildings as well and actually ran the city, its services and its labor laws. They called themselves the Paris Commune. Marx saw in their actions the seeds of a new, human society -- even though the Paris Commune only lasted one month!

Marx described the communards' actions and their significance with great vividness and passion, as you can see from this snippet from his "Civil War in France"

Here is the beginning of Marx’s address on the Paris Commune to the First International Workingmen’s Association in 1870, written two days after the demise of the commune in an counter-revolutionary bloodbath. For the entire article see:
http://www.marxists.org/...

The Third Address
May, 1871
[The Paris Commune]
______________
On the dawn of March 18, Paris arose to the thunder-burst of “Vive la Commune!” What is the Commune, that sphinx so tantalizing to the bourgeois mind?
“The proletarians of Paris,” said the Central Committee in its manifesto of March 18, “amidst the failures and treasons of the ruling classes, have understood that the hour has struck for them to save the situation by taking into their own hands the direction of public affairs.... They have understood that it is their imperious duty, and their absolute right, to render themselves masters of their own destinies, by seizing upon the governmental power.”
But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.

(See the whole article at marxists.org

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Anti-Capitalist Meetup: War Profiteers Ecstatic at Middle East Mess

Venezuela Under Fascist Attack -- with U.S. Help.

Anti-Capitalist MeetUp: Surveillance Corps Capture Congress, Courts, Exec.

Anti-Capitalist Meetup: From Detroit to Honduras and Back: Capitalists Immigrate To Usurp Rights.

Anti-Capitalist Meet-Up: Are CIA Mockingbirds Still Nesting in Nicaragua?

Anti-Capitalist Meetup: Did Chavez and Maduro Evict the U.S. From Its Own Backyard?

Viva Chavez! Venezuela's Chavez, A Revolutionary Empowered By Love and Kindness.

Anti-Capitalist Meetup: Trillions in Capitalist Wealth: Where Does It Come From?

Anti-Capitalist Meet-Up: Venezuelan Workers Run Their Own Factory: Economic Democracy Blooms

Anti-Capitalist Meet-Up: Mitt And His Fellow Vulture Capitalists See Venezuela As a Threat: It Is.

Anti-Capitalist Meet-Up: Karl Marx on the Paris Commune and Occupy Wall Street

Anti-Capitalist Meet-Up Diary Postponed to Wednesday, the 30th, at 6 PM EDST