T. P. WILKINSON—Mere mortals are fortunate to plan in days or months, a year at the most. However “the privileged few” know that they are part of an immortal institution for which time is just another resource. It is a serious mistake to measure institutional time and individual time with the same watch. What was presented as an almost accidental or fortuitous event was in fact the result of careful planning and coordination—of organisational intelligence. Organisational intelligence means that the institution created is capable of controlling the behaviour of all involved in a process even without conscious or deliberate commands.
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No, Bernie’s not anti-war
KOLLIBRI TERRE SONNENBLUME—The Cold War between the US and the USSR ended thirty years ago, but was revived against the Russian Federation by Hillary and the Democrats during the 2016 presidential race. This dangerous development has pushed the world closer to nuclear conflict, an unimaginably terrifying prospect. It has also resulted in a new McCarthyism that, with the enthusiastic help of big tech giants like Facebook, Google and Twitter, has led to the marginalization of leftist alternative media and activism online.Sanders has been totally on board. He has consistently supported sanctions against Russia (notwithstanding one particular vote against them, which he cast because of the bill’s stance on Iran). He voted for the 2014 $1 billion package to support the anti-Russian, neo-Nazi forces in Ukraine, another provocative move. He has also professed confidence in the Russia/Trump/collusion conspiracy theories, the pursuit of which has only ratcheted up tensions more, and served to distract the populace from reasons to oppose Trump that are not at all difficult to prove.
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The Assange arrest is a warning from history
JOHN PILGER—The shocking arrest of Assange carries a warning for all who, as Oscar Wilde wrote, “sew the seeds of discontent [without which] there would be no advance towards civilisation”. The warning is explicit towards journalists. What happened to the founder and editor of WikiLeaks can happen to you on a newspaper, you in a TV studio, you on radio, you running a podcast. Assange’s principal media tormentor, the Guardian, a collaborator with the secret state, displayed its nervousness this week with an editorial that scaled new weasel heights. The Guardian has exploited the work of Assange and WikiLeaks in what its previous editor called “the greatest scoop of the last 30 years”. The paper creamed off WikiLeaks’ revelations and claimed the accolades and riches that came with them.
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Drug companies price gouging: An utterly corrupt system can’t (and won’t) fix itself
PATRICE GREANVILLE—The United States has had congressional hearings about price gouging in key industries—including pharmaceuticals— for many decades, and nothing has ever come of it for reasons well known to the politically awake. These periodical exercises in pseudo democracy are meant to provide a cover for the sordid truth: that politicians—from presidents on down— have long been in the pocket of the monopolists’ lobbyists, or, to put it in a different way, they are agents of the billionaires who own all of the major industries and financial institutions dominating the economic life of the nation, including, perhaps, the most crucial social resource of all, the media, which define reality for the ordinary citizen. The upshot of this pervasive corruption—normal under capitalism—is pre-ordained. As Irish socialist icon James Connolly once put it, “Governments in capitalist society are committees of the rich to manage the affairs of the capitalist class.”
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Freedom Rider: The “Resistance” is Silent on Julian Assange
MARGARET KIMBERLEY—This resistance is little more than a collective hissy fit from dead ender Democrats who insist on following a party that can’t even reliably stay in office. They have spent the last three years railing against Trump but bite their tongues when he commits an act that reeks of fascist ideology.The kindest thing that can be said is that they have been hypnotized by a combination of Democratic Party and corporate media lies. It is very difficult to determine the truth in a culture saturated with all the deformities of an imperial state in panic mode.
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On the ( Empire’s ) Waterfront
PHILIP A. FARRUGGIO—Under the rules of capitalism, where everything is “commoditised” (turned into something to be bought and sold as merchandise), these people are heavily promoted and self-promoting “brands”. (Note the table above shows significant disparities in compensation. This can be explained because the facts about the actual salary of a particular celebrity in America are usually carefully hidden, and some compensation packages may not be included, by both the employer and the celebrity, and this goes double for “journalists”.)
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Ecuadorian police repress mass march demanding Julian Assange’s freedom
BILL VAN AUKEN—The frame-up of Bini is bound up with the Moreno government’s retaliation against the exposure of the president’s and his family’s involvement in a massive corruption scandal involving the funneling of millions of dollars in bribe money from a Chinese construction contractor into an offshore shell company named after the president’s three daughters.The publication of the so-called INA papers exposing this corruption was widely reported and prompted the initiation of a congressional investigation in Ecuador before WikiLeaks called attention to the scandal on its Twitter account last month. The Moreno government seized on the tweet to accuse WikiLeaks and Julian Assange personally—despite the intense surveillance and conditions approaching that of solitary confinement in the London embassy—of having hacked the phones and social media accounts of Moreno and his family to secure the evidence of corruption.
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The Assange Poop Smear Was Concocted to Cover Ecuador’s $4.2 B IMF Loan
ALEXANDER RUBINSTEIN—After former Ecuadorian President Rafel Correa, who originally granted Assange his asylum, tweeted a picture of a document showing that Moreno’s government was “auditing” Assange’s asylum and his naturalization in Ecuador — which prevents him from being extradited — WikiLeaks (which has never gotten a story wrong) asserted that a bailout for the country from the International Monetary Fund was conditioned on its “handing over Assange and dropping environmental claims against Chevron” for its pollution of the Amazon.
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