In the past, America has witnessed “McCarthyism” from the Right and even complaints from the Right about “McCarthyism of the Left.” But what we are witnessing now amid the Russia-gate frenzy is what might be called “Establishment McCarthyism,” traditional media/political powers demonizing and silencing dissent that questions mainstream narratives....It's about Establishment control of the narrative that establishes consensus reality.
“The general feeling is that they’ll get there before us.”
It doesn’t necessarily mean that their scientists are better,” McClatchy reported Martin Laforest, a physicist at University of Waterloo as saying. “It’s just that when they say, ‘We need a billion dollars to do this,’ bam, the money comes.”Out of thin air.
Despite early reports that there was no use of National Security Agency-developed exploits in this week's crypto-ransomware outbreak, research released by Cisco Talos suggests that the ransomware worm known as "Bad Rabbit" did in fact use a stolen Equation Group exploit revealed by Shadowbrokers to spread across victims' networks. The attackers used EternalRomance, an exploit that bypasses security over Server Message Block (SMB) file-sharing connections, enabling remote execution of instructions on Windows clients and servers. The code closely follows an open source Python implementation of a Windows exploit that used EternalRomance (and another Equation Group tool, EternalSynergy), leveraging the same methods revealed in the Shadowbrokers code release. NotPetya also leveraged this exploit....
What follows is very unorthodox thinking even among the heterodox. It’s well beyond and different from MMT’s utterly convincing takedowns of “loanable funds” notions, for instance.
So take it as the ravings of an internet econocrank, if you will. But here it is FWIW....Asymptosis
It is a slippery slope and we have just entered a fast descent into Deep State censorship.This is a test case. If public pushback in the US in not significant, the process will be gradually ratcheted up until the bipartisan establishment regains control of the narrative. TPTB have realized that there is no alternative.
The move by social media company Twitter to ban two Russian news outlets from placing advertisements on the site is a "blatant violation" of international norms, a Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said, adding that retaliation measures are unavoidable.RT
Michael Sussmann, a lawyer from the same firm that hired Fusion GPS on order of Democrats, hired the Crowdstrike cyber-outlet to investigate the leak of DNC emails. Crowdstrike and the DNC denied the FBI access to the relevant servers but asserted that "Russian hacking" was the source of the leak....
The fake dossier, paid for by the Democrats, was used by the FBI under Obama to get FISA warrants to spy on Republican party operatives.
We noted in January that the dossier was additionally used by the British and American deep state to sabotage Trump's plans for better relations with Russia (see original for source quotes):Anyone see a pattern here?
The last Steele report was not paid for by the DNC. It was delivered to British government and to John McCain. The purpose of this last report was to plant false evidence that Trump paid for "Russian hacking". There is a strong cooperation between U.S. and British intelligence.
Why were the highest levels of the British government involved in the "private investigation" that resulted in the Steele dossier. Did the Brits act on their own initiative or were they cut-outs for U.S. intelligence circles, especially for Obama's consigliere and CIA director John Brennan?
It his time for Congress to dig deeper into the undue British influence in this whole affair.The Republicans are on the case.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova reaffirmed her country's position on the issue of the intervention of the Washington-led international “anti-ISIS” coalition in Syria, pointing out that its presence under the pretext of fighting terrorism is illegal due to not being approved by the legitimate Syrian government.
During the weekly session on Thursday, Zakharova pointed out that there are certain parties who always try to exploit the humanitarian issue in Syria for political purposes in order to put pressure on the Syrian government and its allies in the fight against terrorism....
Before finishing her speech, Zakharova noted that those who sponsor the terrorists in Syria, are doing it deliberately in order to harm the political process in the country and prevent the delivering of humanitarian aid, while also noting how they're maintaining the hotbeds of chaos and instability by the help of their assests, such as the notorious “White Helmets” who are spreading fake rumors and deceiving the public in order to undermine efforts of those who truly fight against terrorism.Fort Russ
It is necessary to improve the security of the Russian Internet (known colloquially as Runet). This was stated by President Vladimir Putin at a meeting of the Russian Security Council . For this he proposed to adopt additional normative acts. At the same time, the head of state stressed that it is not about limiting access to the internet and not about "total barriers and filters" for citizens.Fort Russ
"We must fight against those and those who use the information space to propagate radical ideas, justify terrorism, extremism, resolutely stop attempts to post materials that threaten the security of our state, society and individual citizens," Putin said at the meeting.
According to RBC, members of the Association of European Businesses (AEB) are concerned by the impact of the new law that may complicate or even ban the use of Virtual Private Networks (VPN) by international companies operating in Russia. As we have reported, according to this law any VPN services or anonymizers will have to restrict users’ access to the websites officially prohibited in Russia (which are currently accessible via these VPNs). As for VPNs and proxies that do not comply with the rules, Russian authorities plan to block their domains and remove their apps from App Store and Google Play....Awara
[Andrew Watt] thinks our position is “indistinguishable from the extreme right” and thus demands a response.
Inasmuch as the ‘extreme right’ has grasped the reality that globalisation does not mean the nation state should surrender its legislative remit and currency sovereignty to advance the interests of capital over those of the rest of us, it is not surprising that we share that understanding.
But this is where the Left gets itself in a funk. Its kneejerk response to anyone who advocates an empowerment of the nation state and a dis-empowerment of surpranational organisations is that it is a descent into nationalism – and then – a few breaths later – xenophobia – isolationism – Fascism.This is a confusion of ethnic nationalism, which is a sociological and anthropological issue, with national sovereignty as an institutional paradigm. Both ethnic nationalism and national sovereignty have political implications, but very differently.
The New York Times, which once postured as the champion of a free press, now is seeking crackdowns on news that the public gets from the Internet under the guise of combatting “Russian propaganda,” explains Daniel Lazare....It's about who controls the narrative. The Establishment is bent on making sure it does.
Hannah Arendt was a literary intellectual, defined by Thomas Pynchon as, “people who read and think.” Like Socrates, Hannah Arendt thought and went where thought took her. Arendt’s thinking led her many places, but one of the more interesting topics she thought about was the source of human values. Arendt shared Nietzsche’s and Marx’s belief that moral values are made by humans and not, as the Enlightenment believed, independently existing principles of right and wrong. As Nietzsche and Marx are both earlier in history and more forceful in their language then Arendt (and also, notably, men), Arendt’s own thinking on how values are made gets less attention than it merits.
Arendt devotes much of her most important book, The Human Condition, to elaborating three different categorical distinctions important for how she thinks our experience of existence shapes how we make human values. She calls the first distinction the social/private/political distinction, the second the labor/work/action distinction and the third the earth/world distinction. To understand these three distinctions correctly is to follow Arendt’s thinking on human values, and they are best taken in reverse order....
The key idea, according to British political scientists such as Julian Le Grand and David Miller, is that market socialism retains the market mechanism while socializing the ownership of capital. The thrust of this social-democratic approach is that markets not only promote efficiency but also freedom and democracy thus giving wide political appeal.
And American imperialism is scared. U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has described the plan as an “attack” on “American genius.” In an excellent new book, The US vs China: Asia’s new cold war?, Jude Woodward, a regular visitor and lecturer in China, shows the desperate measures that the US is taking to try to isolate China, block its economic progress and surround it militarily. But she also shows this policy is failing. China is not accepting control by foreign multi-nationals; it is continually developing trade and investment links with the rest of Asia; and, with the exception of Abe’s Japan, it is succeeding in keeping the Asian capitalist states ambivalent between China’s ‘butter’ and America’s ‘arms’.’ As a result, China has been able to maintain its independence from US imperialism and global capitalism like no other state.
This brings us to the question of whether China is a capitalist state or not? I think the majority of Marxist political economists agree with mainstream economics in assuming or accepting that China is. However, I am not one of them. China is not capitalist. Commodity production for profit, based on spontaneous market relations, governs capitalism. The rate of profit determines its investment cycles and generates periodic economic crises. This does not apply in China. In China, public ownership of the means of production and state planning remain dominant and the Communist party’s power base is rooted in public ownership. So China’s economic rise has been achieved without the capitalist mode of production being dominant....
And here I can provide some new evidence that, as far as I know, has not been noticed by any other commentators. Recently the IMF published a full data series on the size of public sector investment and its growth going back 50 years for every country in the world. This data delivers some startling results.
It shows that China has a stock of public sector assets worth 150% of annual GDP; only Japan has anything like that amount at 130%. Every other major capitalist economy has less than 50% of GDP in public assets. Every year, China’s public investment to GDP is around 16% compared to 3-4% in the US and the UK. And here is the killer figure. There are nearly three times as much stock of public productive assets to private capitalist sector assets in China. In the US and the UK, public assets are less than 50% of private assets. Even in ‘mixed economy’ India or Japan, the ratio of public to private assets is no more than 75%. This shows that in China public ownership in the means of production is dominant – unlike any other major economy....The battle is on.
As the paper puts it: “The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), by controlling the career advancement of all senior personnel in all regulatory agencies, all state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and virtually all major financial institutions state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and senior Party positions in all but the smallest non-SOE enterprises, retains sole possession of Lenin’s Commanding Heights.”
The reality is that almost all Chinese companies employing more than 100 people have an internal party cell-based control system. This is no relic of the Maoist era. It is the current structure set up specifically to maintain party control of the economy.This is, of course, the opposite of capitalism, where private ownership ("capital") controls the commanding heights of the economy and representative democracy" is tends toward plutocracy under bourgeois liberalism.
Similarly, the great expansion of infrastructure investment after 2008 to counteract the impact of collapsing world trade from the global financial crisis and Great Recession hitting the major capitalist economies was no Keynesian-style government spending/borrowing, as mainstream and (some) Marxist economists argue. It was a state-directed and planned programme of investments by state corporation and funded by state-owned banks. This was proper ‘socialised investment’ as mooted by Keynes, but never implemented in capitalist economies during the Great Depression, because to do so would be to replace capitalism.Where are workers better off policy-wise? Obviously, this cannot be approached on an absolute basis economically, since the West is developed and China is still emerging. Bur relatively, Chinese workers are doing very well and increasing their positions for the most part with the government even targeting the poorest, while Western workers are not for the most part and the ranks of the poor and precarious are growing.
A recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that 77% of those asked believe that their way of life in China needs to be protected from “foreign influence”. Political scientist Bruce Dickson collaborated with Chinese scholars to survey public perceptions of China’s ruling Communist Party. Researchers conducted face-to-face interviews with some 4,000 people in 50 cities across the country. Dickson concluded: “No matter how you measure it, no matter what questions you ask, the results always indicate that the vast majority of people are truly satisfied with the status quo.”This is not to say that China is utopia. But it is far from the hell-hole that Western propaganda would have the naive believe. Even self-styled "Marxist economist" Michael Roberts is critical.
