In February 1920, Winston Churchill wrote an article for the British Illustrated Daily Herald on ‘Zionism versus Bolshevism’ in which he identified Rosa Luxemburg as one of the Jewish revolutionaries involved in a ‘worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation’. Churchill compared ‘international Jews’ like Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Emma Goldman, Bela Kun with ‘national’ and ‘loyal’ Jews who served the nations in which they lived. He wrote that most of the Bolshevik leaders in Russia were Jews and blamed them for Bolshevism.
The extract below covers ‘international Jews’:
” …the schemes of the International Jews. The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race. Most, if not all of them, have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world. This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognisable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.”
Churchill concluded his article by recommending the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, although noting that “[o]f course, Palestine is far too small to accommodate more than a fraction of the Jewish race, nor do the majority of national Jews wish to go there.” He argued that the Jews, persecuted in Russia and eastern and central Europe, should be allowed- and encouraged- to emigrate to Palestine. Zionism, he believed, would weaken Bolshevism, because it was ‘in violent contrast to international communism’.
Source: Rt. Hon. Winston Churchill ‘Bolshevism versus Zionism; a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people’ in Illustrated Daily Herald, 8 February 1920.

Posted by: andy | Nov 19 2018 18:06 utc | 104

Blues 79,
Very insightful post. The problem with a direct approach to economic disparity is the degree the system is adapted to defuse and combat such direct threats. From Sunday comics to the police. That’s why I think the effective rebuttal has go into those deeper social and philosophical issues.
You do understand the reason industry was off shored wasn’t just to undercut wages, but necessary for making the dollar the global currency. It took more than just oil to do that.
When the US can no longer issue enough debt, then disaster capitalism will come home to roost and the remaining public assets, from parks to highways, are sold to those holding the treasuries.

Posted by: John Merryman. | Nov 19 2018 18:09 utc | 106

Noirette @ 102
“”The no. 1 input into the economy, energy in terms of FF and other is simply taken for granted, ignored, or figured sometimes – only partially – in terms of ‘price’ (dollars, vouchers, see Merryman.) So I’m including Marx as deficient as well – Nature as an all giving backdrop —> No.””
Yes indeed. We have not been using water, air, forests etc as the precious resources (public resources) that they are.
Joseph Stiglitz wrote a very good book Freefall in 2010. One of the first books to deal with the financial crisis.
“Economics is a social science. I soon realized that my colleagues were irrationally committed to the assumption of rationality. Robert Putnam has emphasized the importance of our connectedness with others.””
“”It has become a cliche to observe that the Chinese characters for crisis reflect “danger” and “opportunity”. We have seen the danger. The question is, Will we seize the opportunity to restore our sense of balance between the market and the state, between individualism and the community, between man and nature, between means and ends?
We now have the opportunity to create a new financial system that will do what human beings need a financial system to do; to create a new economic system that will create meaningful jobs, decent work for all who want it, one in which the divide between the haves and have-nots is narrowing, rather than widening, and, most importantly of all, to create a new society in which each individual is able to fulfill his aspirations and live up to his potential, in which we have created citizens who live up to shared ideals and values, in which we have created a community that treats our planet with the respect that in the long run it will surely demand. These are the opportunities. The real danger now is that we will not seize them.””

Posted by: financial matters | Nov 19 2018 18:34 utc | 108

Thank you for mentioning Dr Hudson. I always find his analyses to be interesting, especially the idea that a banking crisis is “a break in the chain of payments”. I’d be real interested in his explanation of inflation, especially the big US inflation of the 1970s and 1980s. Supposedly it was cured with massive interest rate hikes imposed by the “Federal” Reserve private banking cartel.
When I am thinking about economics I find it useful to strip away all the abstractions like accounting statements and currency. What remains is the very real life-and-death struggle of who gets access to resources and who controls that access. A person sleeping rough isn’t a mentally ill drug addict or even a person with a low-wage job – they are simply a person who has been denied access to resources such as shelter, food, clothing, and even hot water.
In modern societies this access is mediated by official pieces of paper and plastic, but that is irrelevant. Whether one calls it “money” or “ration coupons” or “debt” or some other label makes no difference – it all boils down to using the threat of state violence (such as arrest) to enforce whatever resource allocation system is imposed on working stiffs, with or without their consent.
Dear Leaders want us to think that there just isn’t enough to go around so that everyone can have a decent life. That might have been true 150 years ago. It certainly isn’t true today. That is a Big Lie used to justify their greed and our suffering. Think about the ongoing Great Recession of 2008. Millions of US residents were forced from their homes while millions of housing units remained empty and deteriorated to the point where they were torn down. There is more food produced each year than all of us around the world can possibly eat – but it serves the interests of Dear Leaders to feed some and starve others, like the Yemenis who won’t obey Saudi Barbarians.
During any economic depression (now called “recessions”) millions are forced from their jobs even though the factories remain standing with functional machinery and connections to utilities like electricity and natural gas. It’s not like we suddenly run out trees, minerals, water, air, etc. All the resources needed to produce goods and services still exist, yet the workers are not allowed to continue producing goods and services. This is clearly a massive failure of Dear Leaders to properly manage the economy – a failure which just happens to create opportunities for even *more* centralized control of resources and more accumulation of personal wealth.
So maybe The Great Recession wasn’t really a failure after all but just another opportunity to enrich Dear Leaders and impoverish the rest. Funny how these banking crises happen so frequently and predictably. It’s almost as if Dear Leaders *want* periodic crises to keep happening…
Once one concludes that the denial of access to resources (known as “poverty”) is not a bug but a feature, the obvious question is, “why?”. The simple answer is, “to enforce the hierarchy” as illustrated by the Pyramid of Capitalism (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_of_Capitalist_System ). There can not be a handful of rich f’ers at the top without a bunch of poor people at the bottom. Each person above the destitution of the bottom layer lives in mortal fear of being shoved out into the street, whether or not they are conscious of that fear and able to articulate it. It’s that fear that keeps working people pliable, obedient, and quiet.
This is where I part ways with Dr Hudson. He wants to stabilize the system by bringing back the jubilee. I want to demolish the hierarchy and replace it with institutions that work for us instead of the Dear Leaders. What would those institutions look like? How can we get there? Given the fickleness of “human nature” is it even possible? I don’t know. One might think that social scientists could give us a few clues, but overall they seem to be more interested in protecting their own position on the Pyramid than in getting rid of it.

Posted by: Trailer Trash | Nov 19 2018 19:34 utc | 110

Imran Khan has responded very forcefully to Trump’s unfounded accusations of Pakistan such that the Outlaw US Empire has lost yet another vassal:
“Pak has suffered enough fighting US’s war. Now we will do what is best for our people & our interests.”
This was the last of four Tweets by Khan on this topic, so see his overall twitter feed to read the other three.

Posted by: karlof1 | Nov 19 2018 19:48 utc | 112

@Jackrabbit
craigsummers is or was a longtime troll over at Glenn Greenwald’s forum at the Intercept. I stopped visiting the Intercept at least two years ago so I have no idea if he still posts there, but he was by far that site’s most prolific, and mind-numbingly tedious, shill for U.S. Empire and the Zionist entity. Never thought I’d see him again, but here he is…

Posted by: Daniel | Nov 19 2018 20:22 utc | 114

love the shlomo sand link. i give haaretz credit for publishing his work (though not too much since he is more or less officially an israeli) since his books are a consistent “go to” for me when anyone brings up the canard of “jews= a race”.
the invention of the jewish people is highly recommended though it has faced the expected whining from materialist members of The Church of the Almighty Gene. apparently centuries of historical and archeological evidence can be invalidated by a “23 and me” level genetic test. i suppose our shared genetics with other “great apes” will lead these scientists to advocate plant-based diets? probably not. unless there are plans in the works for a “chimpanzee holy land”.
(i also like to drop this and ask people to explain how connie chung, zooey deschanel and sammy davis jr “converted” their ethnicity.)

Posted by: the pair | Nov 19 2018 21:00 utc | 116

Circe @103

“…..You say Zionists didn’t displace the natives, the landowners were absent and Zionists just bought their land and Israel is a democracy…🤥🤥🤥🤥 Pinocchios just for what I bothered to read. The rest is just as trash-worthy…….”

Remarkably thorough rebuttal.
Thanks.

Posted by: craigsummers | Nov 19 2018 21:24 utc | 118

@103
“4. Fourth, they didn’t fight or displace the natives like the colonial powers in the various locations around the world. They immigrated peacefully and obtained land mostly by buying from absentee land owners. There were no slaughters of the native population to obtain the land (although there was clearly tension interspersed with some violence). There was no ethnic cleansing prior to the war of Independence.”
They owned something like 7 or 8% of the land when they proclaimed the establishment of the state of Israel and proceeded to force 700,000 people off their land. Further, Israel has gradually continued to lay claim to more land in the decades since. The settlements are literally colonies.
@117
“the expected whining from materialist members of The Church of the Almighty Gene.”
Sand made a claim about genetics. The genetic evidence later contradicted him. The only one in this scenario who is being whiny is Sand himself, who has no actual rebuttal other than evoking Hitler.
Further, no, the historical evidence doesn’t support his views. Sand’s ideas aren’t much thought of by academics.

Posted by: Merasmus | Nov 19 2018 23:04 utc | 120

@121 merasmus.. thanks for the first part where you are trying to talk sense into our local troll cs…good luck with that!
the 2nd part though is more of this attempt by zionists to validate there claim to israel based on genetics and is a pile of rubbish..
i guess you missed @77 pft link here – https://academic.oup.com/gbe/article/5/1/75/730630

Posted by: james | Nov 20 2018 0:17 utc | 122

John Merryman @124–
Thanks so much for your reply!
As is often the case with these short commentaries/discourses, concepts are often left il- or undefined, then expanded on later within a comment/discourse elsewhere, which was the case with the Rule of Law above. Here’s what I wrote a few hours ago:
“There’re two versions of the Rule of Law–one moral: laws written such that no one has an advantage over another–the other immoral: laws written to provide advantage to one faction over all others, particularly in the areas of commerce and finance. As such, Liberal Democracy comes under the heading of Immoral Law, which is why its dysfunctional and skews all benefits to one faction–the rich. The challenge is to author moral law and build democracy from the bottom->up such that all citizens benefit roughly equally–roughly since all humans differ in innate abilities and thus outcomes will never be perfectly equal. IMO, the concept of Moral Law is Just yet will be deemed Radical by the faction served by Immoral Law since they lose all the advantages they’ve built over centuries.
“So, IMO, the mantra isn’t a call for the return to Law & Order; rather, the mantra is a call to establish Moral Law and a New Order based upon its tenets.”
All of this plus additional substance found its way into the basis for my reply to Jen on the current Syria thread regarding Iraq’s future direction.
I’m sure you’ve heard of the Problem Tree approach to attaining solutions: The root of the problem must be discerned correctly for the problem to be solved and the situation ameliorated. This is the approach I’ve used in analyzing our multiplicity of current dilemmas. Most would agree that the social contracts existing in the vast majority of nations must be rewritten as they’re based on an Immoral Rule of Law favoring the few over the many that fosters outrageous levels of corruption and grossly skews cultural value systems–how could Greed is Good ever become accepted within a Just, Moral society? That is was/is shows the level of dysfunctionality within our cultural norms and mores. So, it’s not just a matter of rewriting laws that’s required; reestablishing a functional, moral culture that rejects such dysfunctional notions as Greed is Good must also be done somehow.
IMO, humanity’s faces an Existential Crossroads with one path leading to repair and resurrection and the other disaster, which could be full or partial. And the choice of which path to take approaches rapidly–2025-2030 at latest. Some national leaders see this while others are blinded by trying to fulfill autocratic fantasies. Convincing humanity that it faces such a dire situation brought about by a series of particular problems will be difficult at best in a world currently ruled by BigLie Media and dysfunctional education systems that don’t teach what needs to be learnt or outright falsifies history.

Posted by: karlof1 | Nov 20 2018 1:38 utc | 124

@10 psychohistorian – “Until and unless Michael Hudson calls out private finance as the systemic problem Western society has …”
I think you do Dr. Hudson a grave disservice. You should read the Hudson article linked by Bart Hansen at #44. Here’s a long excerpt from it, with my emphasis added:

Many people who oppose debt cancellation try to pooh-pooh the Babylonian and Sumerian cancellation. Samuel Kramer, the right-wing Sumerologist, said they were all failures because once they canceled the debts, they all grew back again. You have to realize that every society is going to run up debts, every society is going to run up bills, every society is going to polarize. So it has to be a permanent, ongoing revolution. You have to continually keep restoring it. Obviously, today, you’re not going to begin with a debt cancellation.
What has caused this basic shift away from debt cancellation is the privatization of credit. In Sumer and Babylonia the temples and the palace were the source of credit. In medieval Japan it also was the temples that were the creditors. Most people ran up debts, in Japan, to the temples for sake – the temples were also sake-makers. There were revolts against the sake-makers to cancel the debts, and they were successful.
The problem is the privatization of credit. The government today could cancel the student debts that are owed to the government. But they can’t cancel the debts that are owed, say, to David Rockefeller or to other banks – to somebody else.
The banks should be a public option, just like health care should be a public option. Even the University of Chicago right-wingers, in the 1930s, proposed a 100% reserve. The idea is that banks should not be able to create credit, meaning create debt. When you create credit, you’re creating somebody’s debt. That should be a government function, because the government can relieve the debts.
The bankruptcy law was re-written in 2005. It made it almost impossible to declare bankruptcy. It used to be you could declare bankruptcy and have a clean slate, on an individual basis, not a social basis, but now even that has been closed here. And for student loans you can’t have bankruptcy at all.
Obviously this has to be a big fight. Dennis Kucinich tried to fight for it and immediately the Democrats redesigned his district, gerrymandered the voting districts to get him out of Congress so that he wouldn’t talk about it anymore. So it’s obviously going to be a very hard fight.
– The Land Belongs to God

Hudson is in there fighting, with the weapons he possesses. He understands that it’s a fight, and that the fight is made up of many pieces. We can’t just hope or lobby for a change in consciousness without these pieces. The epiphany will not be televised, and it will not even be seen to have occurred until its multitude of little components have been laid in place by ten thousand fighters for the change of mind.
There is no question in my mind that Michael Hudson deserves great honor as a relatively large weapon in this struggle.

Posted by: Grieved | Nov 20 2018 2:55 utc | 126

“Commemoration for Israel”
The land that we live on
Is soaked in the blood
Of those that we stole the land from,
And we eat of “our” food
And drink of “our” drink
And dance of “our” dance
And sing of “our” song….
….And pretend that nothing is wrong!

Posted by: ADKC | Nov 20 2018 4:08 utc | 128

Jen@51
‘One way in which finance becomes public is for the banking system (or whatever replaces it) to become public. Instead of privately owned banks lending to individuals, families or small businesses, community-owned banks or banks controlled by local councils, trade unions, student unions or grassroots organisations would lend money. These banks would draw their funds from savings and day-to-day business accounts operated by the same groups of people they lend to. They could also be funded by national governments.’
Jen…what you explain here is a credit union, greatly popular in Ireland and the more deprived parts of the UK (e.g anywhere outside the M25 London orbital ring road). One of the oldest in Europe is the Garda Soichana (Irish police) Credit Union set up in 1964 I beleive, but they run exactly as you explain. They are largely unreported in the media because they are independent of the big banks and don’t go in for usury. They are run by local boards of suitably trained lay trustees and as far as I know have never had to be bailed out, nor do they pay obscene bonusues out of bail-out money. They’ve been around a long time and work well, but don’t expect to read about them in the MSM as they work in the interests of the people, in their truest sense.

Posted by: Emmanuel Goldstein | Nov 20 2018 6:40 utc | 130

karlof1,
I think that to get to the basis of the current paradigm, we have to go back to the essential premise of Western civilization; The search for the ideal in a reality that is more a function of binaries and polarities. Consider everything from God to materialism; That there is some essential state or ideal, on which everything is based. The problem of god is that a spiritual absolute, the source of our consciousness, would be some element of sentience, which increasing feedback loops have evolved into increasingly complex biological life. Not an ideal of wisdom and judgement from which we have fallen. The raw beingness radiating outward, that explains everything from the most extreme egotism and narcissism, as it emerges as the absolute center of its own view of the universe, to the most complete selflessness, as it senses the same element of sentience radiating out of all life. Wisdom is the hard won knowledge that we learn and earn, not some state of perfect knowledge and judgement.
Meanwhile we have a culture based on the assumption of a singular father figure deity, that conveniently validates top down authority over the rest of society. Divine Right of Kings. If it is, obviously God must have ordained it.
Materialism holds there must be some singular physical element on which everything is based, but as physics has long realized, it is multitudes of dualities, from positive and negative charge, to waves/particles. The ups and downs that keep everything from being a flatline.
Even how we understand anything is to either distill it down to its core element, or place it in its broadest context. Nodes and networks. Nothing can exist in total isolation, as it needs some context of relationships, even if with just the observer, in order to have expression and form. Everything exists in terms of everything else. Even galaxies are energy radiating out, as mass coalesces in, in some cosmic convection cycle.
Yet now we have this world society with no balances, seeking some bottom line validation and falling into a black hole of abstracted value, that destroys the entire network and feedback loops sustaining life. The rich and powerful haven’t so much created this as being those most focused on their goals of infinite wealth, religious purity, or whatever end state they seem to worship.
So a proper and effective system of laws would need to recognize some overall sense of balance, yet also recognize the vital need for fluctuations from the median. The basic expanding energy driving life and reality, along with the forms, structures, patterns, that emerge, as multitudes of such forces interact and/or reach their apex. Realizing as well, that anything with a beginning, will also have an end. The price we pay to feel in the first place, is that some of it will be pain.
As well as recognizing the essential state of existence is this state of presence and while we might desire goals, they only exist as an expression of the journey. What goes round, comes round.

Posted by: John Merryman | Nov 20 2018 6:49 utc | 132

Emmanuel Goldstein @ 131: Thanks for your comment – yes, we used to have credit unions in Australia too before they were subsumed by our “Gang of Four” big banks (Westpac Banking Corporation, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Australia & New Zealand Banking Group and the National Bank of Australia) in one form or another through takeovers and mergers.
Post offices are another institution through which decentralised banking services could operate. Community centres could do the same.

Posted by: Jen | Nov 20 2018 10:05 utc | 134

Jackrabbit @ 93
Thanks for this lesson on how a capitalist pig can use the system to set up shell limited liability companies for each “deal” to protect his personal assets, evade responsibility for the financial ruination caused to others caught up in his schemes as “subcontractors” and “employees”, then when his corporate credit is trashed he turns to Russian mobsters, er I mean “oligarchs” to fund the next round of real estate deals….
Uhm, dude, there is no core “Trump” buiness. Lol. The “Trump Organisation” in fact is an LLC fed by more than 500 other limited liablity companies and partnerships set up for each deal. His business exists as a byzantine series of shell games, Llc, limited partnerships…the very stuff of what most people on the left (but not Jackrabbit apparently) routinely rail against: crony capitalism, income tax evasion, exploitation/stiffing of contract labor through liberal use of bankruptcy court proceedings, financial fraud, intentional marketing misrepresentation and other forms of organised white collar crime.
Oh and did anyone explain to you the main beneficiaries of Trump’s “tax reform” were owners of LLC? Coincidentally of course for Trump is a populist!

This month, two incredible investigative stories have given us an opportunity to lift the hood of the Trump Organization, look inside, and begin to understand what the business of this unusual company actually is. It is not a happy picture. The Times published a remarkable report, on October 2nd, that showed that much of the profit the Trump Organization made came not from successful real-estate investment but from defrauding state and federal governments through tax fraud. This week, ProPublica and WNYC co-published a stunning story and a “Trump, Inc.” podcast that can be seen as the international companion to the Times piece. They show that many of the Trump Organization’s international deals also bore the hallmarks of financial fraud, including money laundering, deceptive borrowing, outright lying to investors, and other potential crimes.

I like to give you the benefit of the doubt, accepting that you are engaging online merely as an innocent, useful idiot… but when your Trump apologia becomes this thick, I have to wonder….LMAO

Posted by: donkeytale | Nov 20 2018 14:22 utc | 136

donkeytale
I’m not defending Trump as much as I’m criticizing dembot attempts to make Trump himself the issue. As Caitlin Johnston writes:

The noxious strain of American liberalism which promotes Russia conspiracy theories, supports the prosecution of government transparency advocates, and only attacks Trump as an idea rather than actually resisting his actual policies was never about any principle of any kind. There were preexisting agendas against Russia, alternative media, WikiLeaks, and government transparency long before Trump took office, and all of those agendas have been systematically advanced by the powerful using the “us vs them” herd mentality of the McResistance.

The time to examine Trump’s finances was three years ago. The establishment and sycophantic media game him a pass. Mueller’s Russian influence investigation has turned up nothing like dembots fantasies have hoped for.
Lastly, Trump is merely a symptom of the Duopoly.

Posted by: Jackrabbit | Nov 20 2018 15:29 utc | 138

I don’t disagree with you that Trump is a symptom of the duopoly or whatever you wish to call the American political condition. His presidency is more specifically a reaction to the symptom of the wealth gap created by globalism (and the corollated movement to kill unions which previously protected at least a significant portion of the white working class in the US).
None of these statements are true: The time to examine Trump’s finances was three years ago. The establishment and sycophantic media game him a pass. Mueller’s Russian influence investigation has turned up nothing like dembots fantasies have hoped for.
More like the GOP House Judiciary Congress abdicated its duty and protected Trump at all cost….that is the cost of their House majority. So, now is the perfect time to examine Trump’s finances….the Amerikkkan people just voted that examination into existence. And if the Demotards wussy out I will be in the forefront of condemning them.
The “Russian Collusion” (or “Influence” in your term) meme is meaningless either way. Who cares? It’s actually Trump’s own attempt at misdirection away from his financial indiscretions which are lifelong going back to Daddy gifting him nearly a half billion dollars (in 1970s valuation) and avoiding state and federal taxes in the process.

Posted by: donkeytale | Nov 20 2018 16:19 utc | 140

US promises to ‘disrupt’ oil shipments to Syria, sanctions Russian & Iranian companies
https://www.rt.com/usa/444472-us-sanctions-russian-iranian-firms-syria/

Posted by: Zanon | Nov 20 2018 17:01 utc | 142

Posted by: donkeytale | Nov 20, 2018 11:19:01 AM | 141
So, now is the perfect time to examine Trump’s finances….the Amerikkkan people just voted that examination into existence. And if the Demotards wussy out I will be in the forefront of condemning them.
That’s exactly the kind of fake, worthless, grandstanding horse-shit the people can expect from your worthless Democrats. Meanwhile anyone who waits for them to do anything that could actually be good for any real people will wait a long, long time.
You sure hit every Dembot point, every time.
The “Russian Collusion” (or “Influence” in your term) meme is meaningless either way. Who cares? It’s actually Trump’s own attempt at misdirection away from his financial indiscretions which are lifelong going back to Daddy gifting him nearly a half billion dollars (in 1970s valuation) and avoiding state and federal taxes in the process.
Um, we’ve been subjected to two years now of your Dembot ape-shit lunacy on Russia, and we haven’t forgotten. You better put that lie back on the shelf. (Of course we expect grandstanding about Russia from the House Democrats. Another worthless circus which helps no one.)
As for Caitlin Johnstone, her quote is 100% dead on (as she usually is when she’s writing about you Dembots). She pegs you perfectly. But call it what you want, whatever gets you vile Dembots through the night. You certainly can’t rebut her – exactly what substantive Trump policy have you opposed?

Posted by: Russ | Nov 20 2018 17:13 utc | 144

Russ – lol. of course you love her empty air overgeneralised invective…..you specialise in it yourself! Lol
exactly what substantive Trump policy have you opposed?
1. Obamacare repeal
2. Tax cuts for the wealthiest individuals, corporations and LLC in the guise of “tax reform”
3. Refugees/immigration/Border Wall
4. Military budget increases
5. Gorsuch, Kavanaugh nominations
6. Iranian foreign Policy, repeal of the nuclear deal
7. Israeli foreign policy, support of Jerusalem embassy and Netanyahoo’s extremist policies wrt Palestinians
8. KSA foreign policy
9. Foreign policy in general

Posted by: donkeytale | Nov 20 2018 17:59 utc | 146

Yet another article trying to raise awareness of the debilitated condition of the Outlaw US Empire’s military; this time, lack of attention to naval shipyards:
“‘Most naval shipyard capital equipment infrastructure is well beyond effective service life, obsolete, unsupported by original equipment manufacturers, and at operational risk,’ a Navy report submitted to Congress this year said. ‘Continued reliance on this aged equipment infrastructure increases submarine and aircraft carrier depot maintenance availability costs and places schedules at risk.'”
The amount of money needed to modernize and protect these installations is greater than the entire Russian and Chinese annual defense budgets, but no allocations are forthcoming as the issue gets kicked down the road. The Navy is already is a state of poor repair dogged by massive boondoggles having cost well more than the amount needed to effect improvements. And Pence is pushing a Naval war with China when his Navy’s air wings report a under 50% rate of combat readiness with their carriers immobilized for lack of spare parts as cited by the previous report I provided. Frankly, I’m not a bit surprised.

Posted by: karlof1 | Nov 20 2018 19:43 utc | 148

Peter AU 1 @148–
At Southfront’s posting of this same item, PavewayIV replied to a comment accusing Trump of being insane and ought to be put in an asylum: “He already is. Washington DC is our open-air asylum for psychopaths.”
Pathetic yet predictable. Some Turk media said the tapes were released, but all I’ve seen provided is a partial transcript. With Trump’s statement, the ball’s in Erdogon’s court. Releasing the tapes ought to finally shut Trump up.

Posted by: karlof1 | Nov 20 2018 20:51 utc | 150

Merasmus@ 67
I haven’t read Sand’s book, only extracts, reviews and critics. However I think you are wrong in saying that genetics are is main evidence. From what I gathered his thesis is based on historical evidence, and if I recall correctly the main criticism from other historians was that he dared to venture on one historical period he had not specialised on.
His main argument, if I recall correctly, was the fact that judaism, in the Greco-Roman world, was an aggressively proselytising religion and therefore it spread not on account of an unrestrained rabbit like reproduction rate by ethnic judeans, but on the difusion of their faith. Such proselytising started coing to an end when a competing, even more agressive religion, catholicism gained state power in the hegemon of the time, the Roman Empire.
Historical evidence of such proselytising can be gathered from the Church Councils of Visigothic Iberia. Nearly all of them took up the jewish question, adopted measures against proselytising, at times the death penalty, in others the prohibition of children being brought up as jews. Yet, despite all such measures, during a timespan of over 200 years there was a steady increase in the jewish population of Iberia to the point that when, starting with the islamic period the situation crystallised in different rules for the three different faiths, there was hardly any significant town without a jewish quarter, and in some towns jews were the majority.
I don’t think anyone needs population genetics (whatever their worth, which I highly doubt) to understand that the tale of the wandering jew is no more than that.
Basically, Sephardic Jews are ethnically Iberians, Misrahim, ethnically levantines and north africans, Ashkhenazi turkic and slavic. Diasporas, there were plenty, probably the first big Diaspora was 1492 and 1497 in Iberia, followed by emigration to the americas when steamers came of age, and to western europe in the interbellum period.
So, even if I doubt some of Sand’s interpretations, namely on the so-called Arab conquest of North Africa, I think is thesis is well grounded in History.
craigsummers @ 103
Go read Herzl letter to Rhodes, educate yourself about the alternative possible homes for the jewish people, Uganda, Angola, Patagonia and then comeback to us with your assertion that the racist and racial discriminating zionist entity is just “charged” and while you are at it, try reading Israel Shahak “Jewish History, Jewish Religion”, it might give you another viewpoint.
It took Cuito Canavale to bring down Apartheid in South Africa, I think one will come soon to the zionist state

Posted by: estouxim | Nov 21 2018 1:45 utc | 152

FOCK ISRAEL! Trump is fellating the Zionist donkey again and is hot on MbS and his bone saw.
He exonerated MbS, because KSA is so important to Israel for getting Iran. Trump was
too chicken to listen to the tape of Khashoggi getting his fingers cut off and a plastic bag
put over his head before he got hacked to pieces and dissolved in acid. But he’s okay with anything
that makes his Zionist masters happy.
Israel is kosher with what psycho MboneSaw did to Khashoggi and his genocidal deprivation of humanitarian aid
in Yemen starving millions of children as long as they can obsess about destroying Iran together.
Israel is the most depraved shithole on the planet. Trump should go rule there. He would
feel right at home with supremacist land grabbers and gutter morality. He could have a threesome
with MboneSaw and Netanyahoo and form the hellbound three headed beast.

Posted by: Circe | Nov 21 2018 5:45 utc | 154

Sorry donkey 147, those won’t do.
1. Obamacare repeal
2. Tax cuts for the wealthiest individuals, corporations and LLC in the guise of “tax reform”
3. Refugees/immigration/Border Wall
4. Military budget increases
5. Gorsuch, Kavanaugh nominations
6. Iranian foreign Policy, repeal of the nuclear deal
7. Israeli foreign policy, support of Jerusalem embassy and Netanyahoo’s extremist policies wrt Palestinians
8. KSA foreign policy
9. Foreign policy in general
Those are all policies Trump shares with your Democrats. 2-4, 6-9 are identical to things you Dembots support when a Democrat is doing them. The nuclear deal was a minor deviation amid the general bipartisan Iran-hating consensus, and would never have been necessary if this consensus didn’t exist.
Obamacare, as Obama often boasted, was a Republican program in the first place (Heritage Foundation, Romneycare), and as I predicted prior to 2016, Republicans would never really repeal it anyway since it’s primarily a bailout for the private insurance racket – again a bipartisan consensus. So the only thing you Dembots “oppose” there is Republican theater, and your “opposition” is theater.
That goes especially for the whole “supreme court” nonsense. I saw zero opposition to Kavanaugh on grounds of his extreme pro-corporate and police statist ideology, because again Democrats and Republicans have consensus on those, and you Dembots support those. The Democrat “opposition” was nothing but grandstanding over “MeToo”-type allegations. A police state corporatist without such allegations against him would’ve sailed through without a peep of “opposition”. Democrats and Republicans have consensus on the “supreme court”. (Which is an extremely anti-democratic institution in principle, before we even reach the evil and destructive corporate ideology of any nominee of any president. Again, any partisan squabbling over nominees is nothing but worthless grandstanding. The factions have consensus on the vile substance.)

Posted by: Russ | Nov 21 2018 6:33 utc | 156

Here’s more on the US biological warfare program based in Georgia laboratories, which we discussed here at MoA a few weeks ago. The piece includes the NYT and WaPo parroting the military’s lies.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/11/21/criminal-behavior-us-may-be-developing-biological-weapons/

Posted by: Russ | Nov 21 2018 11:42 utc | 158

After almost one hundred years of special relationship, the Brits seem to discover the absence of a legal system in the Gulf
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-46288510
On top of that “Matthew does not speak or read Arabic,” the family statement said.
Hard to understand why Durham University decided to sacrifice this poor guy.

Posted by: Mina | Nov 21 2018 13:15 utc | 160

john @158–
My daughter lives at Virginia Beach, next to Norfolk, and knows many carrier-crew sailors. Many haven’t been to sea for 2+ years because of seemingly endless ship repairs. Imagine rattling sabers as the blade separates from the hilt and clangs to the ground; that’s what Pence and Trump are doing, and the Russians and Chinese know that and more.

Posted by: karlof1 | Nov 21 2018 16:33 utc | 162

@144 psychohistorian – “When you write that humans will always be greedy it makes me sad.”
I didn’t explain that well, and I should now. I said that greed will always arise, and that’s a description coming out of my understanding of how humans tick. I would expand that to say that all of the emotions, temptations, impulses, traits, habits, etc, will arise. This doesn’t mean that a human gets carried away with any of them.
Even the Buddha, whom I claim as source for this understanding, was visited by the final vestiges of illusory thought while he was becoming enlightened. He saw forces attacking him and perceived that these were simply traces of his own mind – at which the attackers fell to the ground as flowers and he became the Buddha.
So, to get practical here, it’s useful to think that people aren’t a fixed commodity, or that once they’ve chosen the high or low road, they’re established forever on that path. There is no “forever”. Everything is impermanent and this itself opens up great hope for positive change. People are very much more changeable than we culturally assume. The situation of human conduct is a very plastic one, and many forces can act to influence how any person thinks, perceives, believes and acts.
This to me is all extremely hopeful, because it means that one action over here can have a demonstration effect over there, and that one person moving a chair can change the whole room when the music stops. The leverage of what we do is hard to know. But everything helps, and the universe itself has built the fix in by making the root nature of all sentient beings that of compassion. Everything we are and everything we believe is a clouding over that true nature, to some degree or another. So there is nothing but the future and the possibility of betterment.
And how will this betterment come about if not through the actions of each one doing whatever one can in the direction of the goal?
In this context, I regard Hudson as a great force at play in this shifting global culture. He brings the issue of private finance into an actual historical context, turning it from a concept to a reality that is clouded by his “2,800 year lie”. And we can now suggest that behind this clouding of almost three millennia is a system that is only a temporary aberration. It didn’t used to exist, it’s been established and held by lies, and it has been so wrong that in its short time it has pretty much destroyed what should have been an almost eternal planetary abode for us.
So, personally I find the potential to change entire paradigms and to give rise to new thinking about money simply enormous coming directly from Hudson’s 40 years of work, now finally coming into very sharp relief. I salute him as a comrade in the struggle, as I so salute you.

Posted by: Grieved | Nov 21 2018 18:00 utc | 164

@146 Russ – “I wonder how this new book stacks up against Graeber’s Debt.”
I have read somewhere in recent days that Graeber and Hudson are good friends, and that Graeber relied on some of Hudson’s then-unpublished work to write his book. I can’t find this now, but it may well be in some of the reviews of Hudson’s latest book.
I do note that in the speech that Bart Hansen linked at #44, Hudson cites Graeber and Debt to make a point. That link is here, and it’s a fine piece:
The Land Belongs to God

Posted by: Grieved | Nov 21 2018 18:12 utc | 166

Grieved @165–
I meant to comment about greed earlier, but it’s only a point I’ve made previously relative to cultural dysfunction. Greed is one of many potentially damaging deviant human behaviors that were initially tamed through culture, there being no written laws or police to enforce them. At some point, culture failed to contain greed and other deviant behaviors causing the culture to become dysfunctional and the society on which it was reliant also became dysfunctional and generally ceased to exist as it fell apart and its members joined other functional groups. Indeed, culture–its norms and mores–was THE governor over human behavior and its societies for many millennia–the vast majority of human existence. I’ve been working a long time to put my finger on when and why cultural dysfunction became almost universal–almost because even today there are still a few societies using culture to govern themselves. At this point, I’m leaning to the inability of culture to adapt to technological advances, which our current condition shows easily occurs. A few societies were able to transcend their cultural dysfunction through its evolution which provided a means for solving the dysfunction and returning the society to its normative, productive state. Unfortunately, such societies are/were rarities and existed as outliers, developing in a manner similar to allopatric speciation. Greed as a deviant behavior in those societies was solved by making it the norm to give all excess away thorough ritual celebration. Christmas might have developed as a similar mechanism but was hijacked for other purposes long ago. The several Islamic Pilgrimages and the hospitality involved also serves a similar purpose, although they too have mostly been commercialized. IMO, the idea of Jubilee harkens back to an ancient memory of a similar virtue. The tired adage–It’s better to give than to receive–also relates to another relic. In The Odyssey, we are reminded of the laws given by the Goddess of Hospitality demanding good treatment of travelers and beggars who arrive at your door. Almost everything Dickens wrote was an attack on greed, as are the Spaghetti Westerns.
Yes, greed is present in Asia, but Asian cultures also have their Dickensonian aspects, particularly the act of self-deprecation. Some are finally coming round to see the vast gulf between the ideologies of Win-Win versus Zero-sum: Share the Wealth versus Monopolistic Triumph–the timid, lowly Hobbit versus the all powerful destroyer, wealth hoarding Smaug. I wonder how many would join the Radical, Revolutionary Church of the Actual Jesus, whose aim would be the levelling of society such that a rough equality be established, keeping in mind a similar group of Puritans known as The Levelers was decimated by Cromwell after they’d served their purpose during the English Civil War.
Oh well, enough about greed and dysfunctional cultures and their societies. It’s Thanksgiving, so we should give and be thankful.

Posted by: karlof1 | Nov 21 2018 20:35 utc | 168

@169 karlof1
I think we learn our culture in school and we maintain it through our media. I think culture remains the greatest governor of what we think and how we act. I also think there are actors who have tampered with our cultures for many, many decades, and gradually the control over media and education has become powerfully leveraged from behind the scenes until we have what we see today in the US and elsewhere: people with no coherence in what they believe and think. And I think a lot of this is deliberate, kind of an ongoing dynamic psy-op.
I’m not saying anything new or different from what is discussed here daily.
In my earlier posts I was presenting my view that we all have the capacity to become completely different people, even betraying our deepest instincts, given enough persuasion. Krishna told Arjuna that a person from any height can always slip, and fall, all the way to hell. Anything less than the Buddha’s enlightenment is not safe, for any of us.
The point is that we contain all of these possibilities, and we are whoever we are at this moment, largely from influences and susceptibilities that we agree with. But large positions are made up of small things, and over time, with enough of the small things changing, our positions can alter radically.
And I do think it’s valuable to accept that people are changeable at all times, rather than thinking that we, as people, are ascending or descending a certain upward or downward path. I think we should look to our cultures as ascending or descending certain paths.
We live in an age when people in power have discovered how to change the culture. So we are going to have to hone our discernment to see this. And we’re going to have to change the culture in response. Many of the political memes and themes we discuss here are part of this struggle. I think a lot of the disintegration of character and morality in individuals is brought about deliberately through subverting the culture.
I’ve shared before a few lines that I read once, from a source I don’t know, that seem very true to me:
Be careful with your words.
Words become actions.
Actions become habits.
Habits become character.
I would say, further to your comment, that for the most part it is our culture that gives us our words.

Posted by: Grieved | Nov 21 2018 23:28 utc | 170

@ Grieved and Karlof1 with the arc of culture/greed discussion
Keep flapping your wings fellow butterflies and we will change the world…
The evolution of culture varies from place to place. If we generalize about the West we can refer to paganism, Greek and Roman mythology and then the various monotheistic religions as “managers” of culture from the “spiritual” side. Other contributors to culture are the application of evolving science and lets not forget the cultural implications of everyone belonging to the God of Mammon lifeblood of social management meme.
So I am going to say there are 3 major contributors to culture,
1. spiritual,
2. evolving applied science and
3. social management.
1. The problem I see with the spiritual component is that the social management group consorted with the monotheistic folks back in the Enlightenment period and humanity still does not use reason and logic to govern itself over the ongoing insinuation of faith motivated social actions (birth control, etc.). I am fine with taking the good parts of the monotheistic religions and creating thoughtful myth but rail at the ongoing faith based social control by the believers. I like what I am reading about how China is restricting ALL religions to not influence government organized social order….I think that is a good thing for secular government.
2. Applied science is neutral but the application of it are anything but neutral and applied science will continue to evolve and provide opportunity to move society as needed if there is social will.
3. Social management of the West is based on God of Mammon principles as I have railed about on this forum for years (thanks b). The elite that own global private finance gives us social class levels evolving from ongoing inequality. The same elite and their tools set the incentives by which all governments and cultures must interface commercially and at the same time use the tools to enslave all. So far their application of applied social science has kept them operating below the radar of most folks but the old ways of Might-Makes_Right have reached their limit. So the West goes nuclear or shudders into a multipolar world.
That shudder part is a big unknown and is dependent on how the western empire continues to collapse
…..slowly and then all of a sudden. I think the all of a sudden part, or at least a major step towards it, is now on our event horizon.
Hopefully someday soon society will decide what aspects of our lives should be provided socialistically (water, communication, transportation, education, health care, ???) and which aspects should be provided competitively…..and how to continue to evolve the mix.
To even to be able to discuss that globally would mean that society has cast off the jackboot of social management being controlled by an unrepresentative elite….may I live to see the day.
There are those that want revenge on the elite and I am not one of them in spite of all the ongoing wrong done to humanity. Might-Makes-Right needs to be deprecated as a childish behavior of our evolving species along with the faith based social control….Mammon and the rest.
I believe that humanity is capable of going to the stars someday but we need to heal ourselves and hopefully our planet from centuries of crude direction.
The US Founding Fathers were big culture thinkers in spite of their behaviors which today we find reprehensible. One of their culture thoughts/actions which I admire is the original US motto of E Pluribus Unum or Out of many, One. Historians can argue about dates that represent turning points in American culture and to me the action in the early 1950’s to change the US motto to In God we Trust is a major one……no longer a secular republic.
In closing I will share an old futurist cultural dig….Hey buddy, can you paradigm?
Best of the holidays to b and all MoA barflies !!!!!

Posted by: psychohistorian | Nov 22 2018 2:40 utc | 172

It’s time once again to pop in a blurb for Jane Jacobs, the American urban planner, city explainer, practical activist and culture-exploring goddess. Her self-taught understanding of cities, people and their needs, failures and successes are put forth in dozens of books published in the late 20th and early 21st century. She rocks.
Here’s a blurb from a wikipedia entry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Age_Ahead) about her last book, 2004, Dark Age Ahead. The book itself is available for free from the Open Library at https://openlibrary.org/authors/OL29371A/Jane_Jacobs.
“Jacobs argued that modern political and economic ideologies were in effect no different from those dominant in Western civilization’s past Dark Ages, such as Middle Age Roman Catholicism. In both cases, she claimed, the dominant ideology prevented and discouraged people from finding rational and scientifically verifiable explanations and solutions.
…
Community and Family
People are increasingly choosing consumerism over family welfare, that is: consumption over fertility; debt over family budget discipline; fiscal advantage to oneself at the expense of community welfare.
Higher Education
Universities are more interested in credentials than providing high quality education.
Bad Science
Elevation of economics as the main “science” to consider in making major political decisions.
Bad Government
Governments are more interested in deep-pocket interest groups than the welfare of the population.
Bad Culture
A culture that prevents people from understanding the deterioration of fundamental physical resources on which the entire community depends.”
Another good read is Systems Of Survival. In this book she unravels the two main castes or cultures in human society: Guardians and Merchants. Merchants make deals, guardians enforce laws. It’s excellent for buyers and sellers to bargain and explore options, that is where innovation comes from. On the other hand, it is bad for guardians such as police or politicians to make deals, those would be bribes or cronyism.
The book is written as a Socratic dialog so it’s a different read but the ideas are sound and in fact fundamental to understanding how our society has been perverted by the cross-pollination of guardian and commercial values.
There’s a free PDF download of Jane Jacobs’ Systems Of Survival at AllBookServe.org.

Posted by: jonku | Nov 22 2018 4:30 utc | 174

(((debsisinpurgatory))) @ 176
What you describe sounds like yet another heinous abuse by the White Powder Movement….

Posted by: donkeytale | Nov 22 2018 6:54 utc | 176

Posted by: psychohistorian | Nov 21, 2018 9:40:16 PM | 173
“Applied science is neutral but the application of it are anything but neutral and applied science will continue to evolve and provide opportunity to move society as needed if there is social will.”
No science, and “applied” least of all, ever is neutral. At any time there are effectively infinite paths of scientific inquiry of which only a minuscule fraction can be pursued with society’s limited resources, and social elites choose which of these to fund. Needless to say they make these choices based on their own profit and power goals.
The same is even more true for subsequent technological development (“applied science”) based on this scientific research.*
Of course under the modern corporate science paradigm, science itself is defined as research which helps develop corporate-controlled and military technology. This is how academia and the mainstream scientific establishment, and of course all funding organizations, view science as such.
*In practice, much of the technology is developed not in tandem with any bona fide “science” but through brute force empiricism, often in defiance of the actual science. Genetic engineering might be the best example.

Posted by: Russ | Nov 22 2018 7:14 utc | 178