The MoA Week In Review – OT 2019-05

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January 27, 2019

The MoA Week In Review – OT 2019-05

Last week's posts on Moon of Alabama:

January 21 – Disunity Of U.S. Command Lets Afghan Rebels Win The War

January 22 – 'Strategic Threat' To Israel – Progressives Lose Fear Of Speaking Out On Palestine

January 26 – Pelosi Aghast – Stone Indictment Proves That Trump Campaign Deliberately Campaigned For Trump

Bay of Pig 2.0?

January 23 – Venezuela – U.S. Again Tries Regime Change Which Is Again Likely To Fail
January 24 – Venezuela – The U.S. Game Plan For 'Regime Change' And How To Respond To It
January 25 – Venezuela – Trump's Coup Plan Has Big Flaws
January 27 – These Media Claims About Venezuela Are Lies Or Misconceptions

To enlighten others about the situation in Venezuela you can spread the link to this excellent five minute rant (vid) by Rania Khalek. All the important points are in there.

—
Yesterday Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbullah, made some interesting comments. He confirmed the recent reporting of Elijah Magnier that Israel will have to fight Syria and Lebanon should Netanyahoo decide to cross specific red lines. The gist of Nasrallah's interview can be found in this thread.

Recommended read: Jonathan Cook on The Failure of the Liberal System:

In one sense, their diagnosis is correct: Europe and the liberal tradition are coming apart at the seams. But not because, as they strongly imply, European politicians are pandering to the basest instincts of a mindless rabble – the ordinary people they have so little faith in. Rather, it is because a long experiment in liberalism has finally run its course. Liberalism has patently failed – and failed catastrophically. …

Use as open thread …

Posted by b on January 27, 2019 at 18:55 UTC | Permalink

Comments

Posted by: karlof1 | Jan 28, 2019 4:15:41 PM | 100
“Unfortunately, still just the retweet of Ro Kanna to Dick Durbin to get any inkling of her position on Trump’s illegalities toward Venezuela. Which is to call her out given what she said above about not participating. Walk the Walk if you’re going to Talk the Talk!!”
Yes, the Ro Khanna tweet where she echoed Sanders in condemning the alleged evils of the Bolivarian government, thus abetting the imperial propaganda, even though she lamely added that the US shouldn’t be meddling. Well, why shouldn’t it meddle, if it’s as bad as she and Sanders say according to their own American-exceptionalist ideology they share with the neocons.
As for AOC, maybe she’s still as confused as she claims about these things, just she’s confused about the relationship of capitalism and the climate crisis.
https://www.mintpressnews.com/ocasio-cortez-palestine/245950/
Though she had tweeted on May 14 that the Israeli crackdown in Gaza was a “massacre,” and expressed hope that her “peers have the moral courage to call it such,” Ocasio-Cortez distanced herself from that statement during her recent PBS interview, asserting that she had made that statement as an “activist” and not as a congressional candidate for the Democratic Party….
Ocasio-Cortez went on to distance herself from other past statements she had made regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict, including having used the term “occupation” when referring to Israel’s military rule over Palestine’s West Bank. For instance, when asked to expand on what she had meant by “the occupation of Palestine,” Ocasio-Cortez only referred to the fact that “[Israeli] settlements … are increasing in some of these areas.” When prodded further, she stated that she was “not the expert on geo-politics on this issue” and that she may not always “use the right words” when discussing the Israel-Palestine conflict.
These are supposed to be the “insurgents”! For anyone but a pro-imperial psychopath to still have faith in the Democrat Party is evidence of extreme morbid stupidity.

Posted by: Russ | Jan 28 2019 21:37 utc | 101

Interesting discussion here on the words of economic systems. I can see I shall have to study up on definitions.
What I like about the Gilets Jaunes is their lack of words and their shunning of labels. Despite this – or actually of course, because of this – their message roars through the world and perfectly articulates the truth of things, which is that they’ve been screwed and they know why and they know what to do to fix it (which is to bake the right of referendum into the political process, so they can be consulted over measures of economic class warfare).
Alastair Crooke’s latest is a brilliant report of how terrified the rich at Davos now feel as they face the specter of the workers rising up against them, and realizing that their systems of control no longer work to hold the people down:
A Progressive ‘Artifice’ of Democratic Impotence: The ‘World’ Finally ‘Gets It’

Posted by: Grieved | Jan 28 2019 22:05 utc | 102

Grieved@103
Great article. I especially liked this paragraph:
“”The 60% were hit thrice. Firstly, by the initial bail out; secondly by the austerity that followed; and thirdly by the Central Banks resuming their asset inflating, savings-depleting, policies. Against this grim backdrop, the 60% understood and felt their impotence – but also, they saw that they had nothing to lose. They had no stake in this game.””
He includes the gillets and the deplorables in this 60% and I would also suggest adding the followers of AOC.
People say that sovereigns that print their own money can’t go bankrupt which is technically true but they can still ruin their economy. Money can’t just be spent on the top tiers to inflate stocks and real estate. It needs to be spent on rejuvenating and anti-austerity measures such as infrastructure, livable wages, affordable medical care, housing and education, clean water, climate mitigation.
The article also discusses how all these destructive wars are just for the benefit of the top tiers but that a lot of forces are rising up against them such as Hizbullah and Hashd al-Shaabi.

Posted by: financial matters | Jan 28 2019 22:41 utc | 103

Spudski @ 70:
It’s my understanding that the Polish government (no friend of Russia) was the first to discover the connection between Chrystia Freeland’s maternal grandfather and the Nazi collaborator war criminal it had been hunting for ages but could never find – until Freeland was elected to parliament, was made Foreign Minister and then started talking loudly about how her mother had been born in a “refugee camp” in West Germany and her mother’s parents had been “refugees” fleeing Soviet imperialism.
https://vigile.quebec/articles/canada-s-new-foreign-minister-lying-about-family-s-ukrainian-nazi-past
By not mentioning the Polish government’s role in exposing Mykhailo Chomiak’s actual past, Thomas Walkom is perpetuating another lie (that Russia exposed his past for self-serving reasons).

Posted by: Jen | Jan 28 2019 22:56 utc | 104

@Jackrabbit 26
I have not seen any reference threats by Russia that caused Obama to decide not to launch a cruise missile strike on Syria, and in 2013 there were not large amounts of Russian troops in Syria. Another article I read several years ago mentioned that he did not think that the intelligence was clear enough.
This article states the following regarding how we ended up with boots on the ground:
“A senior Mideast adviser to Obama explained the misgivings of the administration’s anti-interventionists:
Many in the administration were in favor of some form of intervention, perhaps targeted strikes. But there was also significant skepticism about the wisdom of direct U.S. military involvement, about the nature of the opposition, the risk of a slippery slope.
The compromise between direct military involvement and staying out was the route taken by many presidents before Obama: a covert operation to raise an insurgent army and train it in nearby countries; provide weapons, sustenance, and communications; and oversee the military campaign. It was high-risk for the locals and casualty-free for the Americans. A senior administration official told me, “Only a few were against arming the opposition. Obama commissioned a report on the history of arming groups.”

Posted by: Schmoe | Jan 28 2019 23:29 utc | 105

Russ @25 nails it:
“That’s not the definition of capitalism. The whole “private owner” thing is misdirection. The essence of capitalism is surplus value extraction and metastatic cancer, aka economic “growth”.”
The “private ownership” canard is second only to the supposition that the only alternative to neoliberal finance capitalism is full-on state socialism USSR style. Those who know their history are aware that state socialism as theorized and practiced by the Soviet Union was no less committed to constant economic “growth”–constant increases in productive and consumptive capacity–than the AngloCapitalist model. The key is to move to an economy wherein production is oriented primarily to local use and not to external markets. See The Great Transformation on this.

Posted by: WJ | Jan 28 2019 23:45 utc | 106

@96 james – “obfuscation” is very polite and insufficiently organic. (:))
@105 Jen – good point re Walkom and thanks for the link.

Posted by: spudski | Jan 29 2019 0:05 utc | 107

@108 spudski.. you could always send him him the link jen gave here – which i am unable to open for some reason… it just opened now!
ah, now i see it refers to john helmer who did a number of posts on this from a few years ago.. i had approached the globe and mail and talked with an editor about this back then, but was essentially told they wouldn’t be doing any article on this.. fact is, this isn’t going away, even if they want to bury the story.. i tell everyone i know about her family connections to nazis… i do believe crystia freeland has an ally in george soros, but that is also not discussed…and of course there is a large uke community in canada that must have mixed feelings about this, if they were to be told..

Posted by: james | Jan 29 2019 0:50 utc | 108

The US military exit from Afghanistan is coming up, also Syria, and then Iraq.
Jan 28, 2019
Iraqi militia leader wants US troops to leave

BAGHDAD — The leader of one of the most powerful Iranian-backed Shiite militias in Iraq said Monday that he expects a vote in the coming months by Iraq’s parliament calling for the withdrawal of U.S. troops, underscoring the jostling for power between Iran and the U.S. in this key Middle Eastern country.
Qais al-Khazali, who rose to prominence as a leader in the Shiite insurgency after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, said there’s no longer a justification for thousands of U.S. troops to remain in Iraq now that the Islamic State group has been defeated. He suggested U.S. troops may eventually be driven out by force if they do not yield to the will of the Iraqi people.
“I think more than half the members of parliament reject the presence of American military forces as a matter of principle,” he said. “If the United States wants to impose its presence by force, and to bypass the Iraqi constitution and parliament, Iraq can treat it the same way and drive it out by force… But the first phase is political,” al-Khazali said. . .here

Posted by: Don Bacon | Jan 29 2019 1:45 utc | 109

Schmoe @106
Obama intended to bomb

“People have interpreted it [going to Congress] as his decision not to when, in fact, he never made a decision not to bomb. He made the decision to bomb. He simply decided he had to go to Congress because Tony Blair – not Tony Blair – because David Cameron lost the vote in the Parliament on a Thursday, and on Friday, President Obama felt, hearing from Congress, ‘Oh, you got to come to us, you got to come to us,’ he would go there and get the decision,” Kerry said.

He decided to bomb over the vociferous objections of the intelligence community, many of whom raised serious questions about the nature of the Ghouta attack because there was good reason to believe it was a false flag.
Obama wasn’t ambivalent. He was determined. So determined that after his bombing was stymied, he made the “willful decision” to allow ISIS to grow (note: it’s likely that ISIS was a creation of the ‘Assad must go! conspirators).
<> <> <> <> <> <> <>
The Russians were adamantly opposed to a US strike against Syria so when Kerry mistakenly* answered a reporter’s question about what Assad could do to avoid being bombed, the Russian’s came back to say that they would guaranty that Assad gave up all his chemical weapons.
* mistakenly? Yes. Kerry tried to play down the prospect of Assad giving up his chemical weapons in his answer (“He could give up his chemical weapons, but he’s not going to do that …”) and Kerry tried to walk back the remarks later, to no avail.

Posted by: Jackrabbit | Jan 29 2019 2:02 utc | 110

Don Bacon: US military exit from Afghanistan is coming up
Link?

Posted by: Jackrabbit | Jan 29 2019 2:03 utc | 111

@104 financial matters
Yes, that paragraph struck me too. I had never considered that calculus, that those excluded from the benefits of a system have no stake in its perpetuation. It was the final straw, and those who delivered it had not once considered that there might be consequences from this, an objection from the victim.
And I agree about the disparate forces rising up in challenge – this is the brilliance of the article, I think, the ground he covers with the one overarching theme of detachment from the ruler, that now has no vision for the future, and is empty.
~~
What I think we might see from this is the governing class allocating a few more crumbs to the working poor over time, as was done after WWII in order to counter the seduction of the communist and socialist global awakening. We will see it as a triumph of the socialist or justice-oriented new politicians and movements, and frankly the gains to the working classes will be beneficial, but underneath it if we look we’ll see the same ownership of capital, and the same usurious rentier system waiting for the time to tighten the screws again, maybe after a generation.
So, over time, the human race, in its propagandized misunderstanding of political economy, will come to accept not only the short business cycle of “boom and bust” but also the far longer social cycle of “privatize and socialize”.
One day, perhaps hundreds of years from now, perhaps merely decades, humans will see the whole scam for what it is, and return the means of production back to the place it comes from – which is to say, not ownership for the private gain but stewardship for the common good. These could then be days that prove there is plenty of motivation within the human passion for the communal good. In fact, it is the root nature of all beings.
It would be a form of growing up for the human culture.

Posted by: Grieved | Jan 29 2019 2:19 utc | 112

@111 – the comments quoted there were different than others I have read which described Obama as starting to wonder what really happened in the alleged gas attack when walking back his initial statements – perhaps those comments from those who were skeptical and felt they prevailed on Obama’s thinking.
On the second one, yes the Russians were adamantly opposed to any attack, but they were not in a decision to militarily do anything about it, although I was not aware of the specific slip by Kerry that gave rise to the surrender of the CW stocks.

Posted by: Schmoe | Jan 29 2019 2:58 utc | 113

JR @112
I’m guessing that Bhadrakumar’s article is the authority here.
James, the Freeland story most certainly isn’t going away. There is a demo at her current Toronto riding office later this week. She is likely to face a real challenge in the Federal Election.
The Ukrainian community in Canada has two parts: the pre 1945 migrants who were almost all farmers and, among other things, helped found the Communist Party. And the descendants and remnant of two Waffen SS Divisions, one of which was the Galicia Division, evacuated, I believe by the British from one of the Adriatic ports.
You probably knew this, someone else will fill in the gaps.
The media establishment have closed ranks around Freeland, one of their own, but her riding is a natural NDP stronghold and, given an NDP candidate worth anything plus the militancy expected from students when the OSAP (student aid) is cut by the Tories, plus the anger over her disgusting foreign policy(not to mention personal treachery in the Dion matter) I see her as a future Senator or reverting to the contract she had before 2015 to write Soros’ official bio.

Posted by: bevin | Jan 29 2019 4:40 utc | 114

@ Jackrabbit | Jan 28, 2019 9:03:12 PM | 112
Don Bacon: US military exit from Afghanistan is coming up – Link?
WaPo, Jan 28

KABUL — U.S. and Taliban officials have moved closer to an agreement that could meet a Taliban demand for withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan, officials here indicated Monday, a potential step toward ending more than 17 years of American involvement in the country’s long conflict. . .here

Business Insider, Jan 28

The US has committed to pulling its forces, as well as NATO forces, out of Afghanistan in a serious bid to stop the 17-year-long war that’s claimed tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of US tax dollars.
Citing “significant progress” in peace talks with the Taliban, the hardline Islamist group that harbored Osama Bin Laden and became the US’s first target after the September 11, 2001 attacks, a US official told Reuters the US was working on a ceasefire and the timing of a pull out.
“Of course we don’t seek a permanent military presence in Afghanistan,” the official told Reuters on the same day Afghan President Ashraf Ghani gave a televised address saying: “No Afghans want foreign forces in their country for the long term.” . .here

Posted by: Don Bacon | Jan 29 2019 5:18 utc | 115

Don Bacon
Jan.29: No Conditions Reached for NATO Pullout From Afghanistan – Stoltenberg

“We will not stay longer than necessary, but we will not leave before we have a situation, which enables to leave or reduce the number of troops without jeopardizing the main goal of our presence“, Stoltenberg said at a meeting with US Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan.

Posted by: Jackrabbit | Jan 29 2019 5:59 utc | 116

@115 bevin.. i am not sure.. i know un-freeland has illusions of being the next leader of the fake liberals.. she wants tru-dopes gig..i have a few friends who live in her riding.. i have spoke with them about her and i think they changed the boundaries of the riding to make it less ndp as memory serves.. but you are right – it is more ndp then liberal provincial vote..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University%E2%80%94Rosedale_(provincial_electoral_district)
i think the federal liberals are toast next federal election.. the even worse conservatives will win and we will get a trump like leader.. canada is one election cycle behind the usa… trudope is our obama – both flakes… next up our trump version… i wish it wasn’t so… canucks for the most part are really stupid people at election time.. they will vote for a pretty face over substance every time..

Posted by: james | Jan 29 2019 6:28 utc | 117

See what Zionism does.:
https://mondoweiss.net/2019/01/israeli-settlers-another-palestinian/

Posted by: Circe | Jan 29 2019 6:35 utc | 118

Not sure these recent developments about the White Helmets were mentioned here
https://www.patreon.com/posts/un-security-on-23470356
https://twitter.com/grigorievms
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/447385-white-helmets-un-panel/
https://www.mintpressnews.com/inside-the-humanitarian-regime-change-network-exploiting-jo-coxs-death/248209/

Posted by: Mina | Jan 29 2019 9:31 utc | 119

@ Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Jan 28, 2019 3:29:16 PM | 95

Today, we agree that a blend of socialism and Capitalism would probably have continued to be good enough if the greedy anti-commie Pigs had been convicted and punished for bribing politicians.

Social-democracy is not feasible anymore. That’s because capitalism is not a closed system, and suffers of “old age” and will suffer an eventual collapse. In capitalism, that translates into a secular fall in the social profit rate (total profit rate), as demonstrated by Marx in his “Capital” (books I, II and III). There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle.
See two examples, one for the USA, another for Europe, from the contemporary profitability economist, Michael Roberts:
Why is the US recovery so weak? – look at profitability
Eurozone corporate profitability
Capitalism can only exist with a positive profit rate. When the profit rate is high and the working classes of some central countries are well organized, the capitalist class can share some crumbles of this unusual bonanza.
The thing with social-democracy is that it depends on superprofits to exist: indeed, that’s what happened during the “Golden Age” of capitalism in 1945-1975: post-war reconstruction allowed some Western European countries, Japan and the USA (and, as a late phenomenon, the Asian Tigers) to have huge trade surpluses with the Third World thanks to very cheap commodities and monopoly of manufacturing. Other two factors that enabled its existence was: 1) the menace of the USSR, and 2) the destruction of old infrastructure and the availability of a new, superior one to substitute it right away (electronics).
The social-democrat experiment in the First World ended with the oil crisis of 1974-1975, when we had the phenomenon of stagflation (high inflation with high unemployment — a combination that should be phisically impossible according to Keynesianism). That resulted in a sharp and sudden fall in profitability around the world and paved the way for the rise of neoliberalism in the US and the UK, and even in those countries where a neoliberal didn’t rise to power, the incumbent social-democrat parties executed the neoliberal reforms anyway (e.g. Swedish Social-Democrat Party, Miterrand coalition). Germany would undoubtedly adopt neoliberalism with the Hartz Reforms, in the early 2000s.
The capitalist classes are not dumb: if they could’ve maintained social-democracy ad eternum, they would’ve. They didn’t for the simple reason it was impossible.

Posted by: vk | Jan 29 2019 10:44 utc | 120

…
The capitalist classes are not dumb: if they could’ve maintained social-democracy ad eternum, they would’ve. They didn’t for the simple reason it was impossible.
Posted by: vk | Jan 29, 2019 5:44:03 AM | 121
I agree that the Capitalist Classes aren’t intellectually challenged but I interpret your conclusion as meaning that they’re overflowing with magnanimous altruism. However, the existence of tax havens and the recent undignified squabbles among governments (!?) over which are ‘legitimate’ and which are not, suggests that the CC have been keeping two sets of books to facilitate the siphoning of undeclared profits into tax havens for no better reason than to prevent poor folk from getting their hands on the money.
If Trump decides to Drain the Tax Havens first, and then go after The Swamp’s ringleaders, he’ll do so with the blessings of a multitude of needlessly stressed people.

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Jan 29 2019 12:56 utc | 121

vk, Hoarsewhisperer
Great points in this important discussion.
I must say that I’m inclined toward Hoarse’s views. It appears to me that a certain kind of dumbness is an emergent property.

Posted by: Jackrabbit | Jan 29 2019 14:39 utc | 122

Few thoughts on the underlying problem or great struggle, imo: that of nefarious mass-exposure information control. If such information were dominated by the intention of honesty and excellence, then society would have access to an abundance of pertinent considerations and a reality-based choice of actions. But if communication is successfully used to manipulate, then whoever has control of the mass manipulation process will strongly tend to serve their self-interest. Dishonesty and censorship empower criminality, and promote dysfunction.
The West now, and not just the West but more obviously and ominously there, has become a political and economic system and network of societies in which dishonesty and censorship and propaganda and the attempt to brainwash the public are fundamental, essential to that System.
All discussion of capitalism, liberalism, liberal democracy, socialism, democratic socialism, corporatism, fascism and so on are taking place within an overarching overwhelmingly toxic intellectual milieu, in which in critical respects the real has been displaced by the false.
For example, the supposed moon landings by American astronauts could not have happened due to many reasons, including the Van Allen radiation belt; 9/11 as now depicted and taught in the history texts is an utter lie; Robert Kennedy was not killed by Sirhan Sirhan; MLK was feared and killed by elements of the US government; Libya and Iraq and Syria etc have been attacked and greatly harmed, mass murder inflicted on them within the context of and enabled by massive continual lies and censorship of honest description.
But more lately, the massive rapid expansion of meme of ‘false news’, the great decline in the public confidence in mass media’s veracity and competence, the growth of citizen journalism, and the exposures of crimes via cell phone cameras, etc, are indications of a potential decline in the capabilities of the system of lies and censorship to maintain its domination of our minds, and a re-assertion of the general human default position preferring honesty over dishonesty.
If we can strengthen, and then achieve the normalization of, the intention of excellence and honesty and openness in communication, then we can have all sorts of ongoing meaningful and even potentially amazingly helpful discussions about how to arrange society, what rules out to prevail, etc. If we can’t achieve such excellence, we’re f****d. Our present behavior writ large is harming and disabling humanity terribly and destroying or harming much of the life on earth.

Posted by: Robert Snefjella | Jan 29 2019 15:33 utc | 123

@ Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Jan 29, 2019 7:56:33 AM | 122
This is not a question of “magnanimous altruism”, but a question of survival of the system: better be a king in hell than a slave in heaven. That’s the motto of every dominant class throughout History. It’s always cheaper to rule by consensus than by brute force.
And, well, of course, that, in the abstract, there’s always some room for improvements in every conjecture of a given historical period. But this is not hard science: it’s not like the working classes meet in a huge international gathering and tell: “well, if Trump clamps down the tax havens, we will call the revolution off”. That’s simply not how History works.
Besides, there’s no possible universe Trump would eliminate tax havens. Tax havens exist for a reason: they are essential for the very survival of the capitalist system.

Posted by: vk | Jan 29 2019 15:44 utc | 124

More Russia/Israel meetings on Syria, Iran.
Netanyahu to meet top Russian diplomats Tuesday, with Syria reportedly on agenda
https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-to-meet-top-russian-diplomats-tuesday-with-syria-reportedly-on-agenda/

Posted by: Zanon | Jan 29 2019 17:12 utc | 125

…
Besides, there’s no possible universe Trump would eliminate tax havens. Tax havens exist for a reason: they are essential for the very survival of the capitalist system.
Posted by: vk | Jan 29, 2019 10:44:38 AM | 125
Well, that’s obviously NQR.
One of the reasons the current iteration of capitalism is buckling at the knees is that the World Economy has been over-looted. Once those multi-trillion dollar hoards have been liberated there’ll be plenty of cash to kick off a new and less avaricious brand of capitalism unencumbered by the people responsible for the over-looting – most of whom will be in jail(s).

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Jan 30 2019 15:24 utc | 126

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