Armed with a Pen

06/04/2024

Post-NAFTA, how are US or Canadian nationalisms even imaginable? It’s migrants who put food on the table and are policed and prodded by white slave patrols. Bo***ge remains the economic base and means of reproduction of society; the difference is once individual bondsmen were expensive enough to constitute equity—fixed capital—whereas today they are acquired cheaply like so many foreign inputs. Bo***ge once necessitated holding human beings static, it now requires constant circulation: in either case by state violence. Superprofits go toward maintenance of a white nucleus to work the state machine.

This is to say the settler state has not only a class character but a racial character as well, not only a ruling class but a ruling caste.

05/04/2024

Zionists begging for a direct Iranian response, as they have no legitimate casus belli—this affirmed several times now at the UN and UN Court—and know they can count on Washington for only as long as it’s politically tenable. Zionism exists because it was expedient to Empire at one point, that point has passed. Zionism on a losing track with no hope but to expand the conflict and draw in other parties.

Iran and the Resistance however are masters of asymmetrical warfare. With Zionist and US forces and proxies scattered across the region there are still plenty valuable targets. Banderites and NATO tried goading Russia into reckless attacks, look at them now. Zionists have no reason to believe they’ll fare better. Their own people grow tired of fighting, the world refuses war.

23/03/2024

ISIS is in Russia because they were already in Ukraine: imported from Syria through Turkey, where they‘ve moved freely since Ankara’s entrance to the Syrian conflict. If there is such thing as “globalism,”it is the global underground, criminality breaking into sovereign nations; strategy as old as o***m. There is no Ukraine, nor an Islamic State. There are markets for force, contraband, human traffic and dollars. The main actors—vehicles of self perpetuation—are trans-national cartels like the old India Companies.

Ukraine is ISIS is NATO. Cartels the US Foreign Legion. Everywhere the frontier has receded, against whoever stands in the way of Western schemes ISIS is sicced: in Afghanistan after the US retreat; in Iraq where they experience a convenient resurgence as Baghdad and armed factions seek to expel occupiers; now in Russia that Moscow draws red lines at the invasion of Yemen. Impotent terror—wasted effort against non-military targets—is the last resort of US-NATO when all other avenues are exhausted, their hand played.

18/03/2024

Imperial hegemon inherited from Britain an impossible position in Palestine.

Sykes-Picot 1916 called for an “international regime” over the Holy Land via the League of Nations to safeguard the Suez and traffic to the Indian Ocean. London unilaterally reneged in Balfour 1917, hoping Zionists would establish a sort of Rhodesia to steal advantage over the French and others. By 1947, India had won independence and so less than a year later Brits returned Palestine to the UN, a powder keg at the gateway of Europe and the world.

US made the same mistake for the same reasons relative to the Cold War. Camp David 1978 sidelined the Palestinian Question and served to carve West Asian spheres; but in doing so failed to stabilize the region and removed the possibility of US mediation in a new security framework—Washington’s simply too partisan to take seriously, hence expanded and renewed Russian and Chinese clout.

Once again, we arrive at the global security imperative of a stable Palestine and neutrality of crucial geography. Unable and unwilling to prevent or slow atrocities, US like its forebear finds its mandate to the region and world challenged in Palestine, the Suez and beyond. Defense Secretary Austin summed it aptly while describing Zionist massacres in Gaza: “[replacing] tactical victory with a strategic defeat.”

15/03/2024

Washington goes after TikTok because US tech has lost its edge and is consciously tailing a Chinese competitor (reels anybody?) Now, Washington doesn’t want to admit this or appear anti-free trade, so they can’t just come out and call this protectionism.

They could raise legitimate data sovereignty concerns, except this might inspire other countries—particularly in the EU—to consider their data sovereignty and draft regulation like China’s ‘Great Fire Wall.’ This of course would potentially devastate US tech whose rent seeking model relies on selling countries back their own data.

To save face, the security state accuses TikTok of spying. It’s absurd, provocative, and will not spur innovation but in fact shield US companies from the scrutiny of competition. It’s enough however to sell this policy in an economy accustomed to state intervention and military-industry; to consumer-citizens conditioned to jump at shadows.

12/03/2024

, a Big Five military contractor, absolutely Epstein’d this guy.

Prior to his death, whistleblower John Barnett was testifying against Boeing over concerns about standards.

11/03/2024

Consider the social reproduction of Zionism: perpetuation of ghettoization. Jews who had been driven from their homes in Europe—forced to take up arms and fend for themselves against fascism and again against indifference, whether in ghettos or displaced persons camps—were again driven from their homes and again made to take up arms. Underground capitalists who had eeked out a living amid deprivation under either the Axis or Allies—dealing in scarce consumer goods and contraband in wartime Europe’s black and gray markets—repurposed these networks to traffic human beings illegally into Palestine.

For the camp dweller smuggled out of Europe, conditions are unchanged yet transformed. Ghettos where Jews were confined become gated communities for Jews only; displaced persons camps become armed, sovereign kibbutzim. Palestinians were made by Zionist terror to live as the Jews had under fascism: driven from their homes into ghettos, suffering naked genocidal violence, deprivation and degradation. The same kind of suffering inflicted upon a new people; and so the number of unhoused and displaced can never be lessened. Surplus remains surplus, except that one segment now enjoyed primacy over the other.

The Zionist program is as the N**i program: banditry given uniform, a ruined people realizing power on the ruination of another. The displaced Jew found settlement on the razed Palestinian village just as the impoverished German found subsistence in the job, the business, the home which had first belonged to a Jew. An aristocracy among surplus: the base of racial settlerism. Unheeding the lessons of the Holocaust, humanity had moved from ‘Shoah’ to ‘Nakba’—catastrophe to catastrophe.

08/03/2024

Very interesting conversation with Carlos Garrido. I will respond to one point:

Labor aristocracy theory is not to say that one segment of labor is “paid off.” Rather, superexploited labor in the colonies exists a priori to the industrial working class of the metropole: ie raw resources extracted in the global south are brought north for processing. The question is the national question: Mao’s town-country dialectic, uneven development and accumulation on a global scale. As Ambedkar put it, caste as “not just a division of labor, but the division of laborers.”

We look at the United States—even before the fall of the Soviet Union and unipolar moment—yanking young men from out the workforce to throw at Vietnam. The tendency is towards lumpenization: soldiering and prostituting respectively, ‘Planet of Slums.’ Imperialism has little use of free labor, needs overseers to place on top of slaves. The economist’s labor-capital dialectic fails to explain this bifurcation of the masses. Theorizing uneven development as aristocracy is not reducible to “radicalizing the impossibility,” it is towards New Democracy.

Democracy is at the center of Dominic Losurdo’s newly released ‘Democracy or Bonapartism.’ To touch briefly on this, we can say that Napoleon does not take the throne for the bourgeoisie generally but for one strata in particular: the capitalist rentier and planter class which had earlier supported 1776 Counterrevolution and would later clash with British abolition in the Indian Ocean. Bonapartism is counterrevolution to Haiti’s national liberation, the fault line within so-called ‘global labor’ and ‘global capital.’ Garrido, for all his insight, seems stuck on this imagined swindling of a fully realized working class and struggles to imagine the base which supports that superstructural ideology he identifies.

We welcome philosopher Carlos Garrido for a conversation on the theoretical and practical challenges facing the left in America. Garrido is the author of The...

28/02/2024

“Aaron Bushnell, speaking clearly and in uniform via livestream, is a moral whistleblower. America’s abetting genocide is no secret; however, Bushnell has revealed and embodied US policy and inhumanity to the fullest and most vital extent. Bushnell shows us exactly what Washington has done to more than 70,000 mostly women and children maimed or murdered by indiscriminate aerial bombardment. … We are left with his final words, the demands he died for, a physical and soul imperative: free Palestine.”

On June 11, 1963, Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc, contemplating an upturned moral order, self-immolated at a crowded intersection in then-occupied Saigon. He is seated in the lotus position, remaining still as fire engulfs and overtakes him. Brother monks surround the area and throw themselves under....

26/02/2024

It’s over

21/02/2024

Back by popular demand!

“To justify the unjustifiable, leaders in Washington tout the economic advantage of endless war—they admit to imperialism … The Emperor is naked, he has stripped right in front of us.

“America’s mandate has adapted and evolved through defeat in Vietnam, deep financialization, and entanglement in Eurasia post-9/11. To make sense of Nero’s fiddling, it’s worth tracing American imperial politics since the end of the Cold War, particularly as relates to the War on Terror.”

To justify the unjustifiable, leaders in Washington tout the economic advantage of endless war—they admit to imperialism—and do so because they’ve no domestic or international mandate for spiraling war on multiple continents. Washington does this while its proxies stand guilty of genocide befo...

18/12/2022

PPP measures the REAL economy. Nominal GDP measures the economy in TPD (toilet-paper dollar) terms.

To talk about the real world, PPP should be used. Mainstream usage of nominal GDP simply reflects the increasingly fantastical USA-dominated world.

Even the CIA, in its World Factbook, uses PPP yardsticks, as do the IMF and World Bank.

One significant consequence of PPP usage is that China is the world's largest economy, not the US. China overtook the US in 2014. And the gap keeps getting bigger.

Western journos love using nominal GDP because having the US as No. 1 makes them feel good. China prefers to avoid PPP because it doesn't want the additional pressures that come with being No. 1. So the world’s perceptions of reality are distorted.

According to the IMF, the latest real-economy sizes are China GDP $30 trillion and US GDP $25 trillion.

India follows at $11.7 trillion, then Japan at $6.1 tn, Germany at $5.3 tn and Russia at $4.7 tn.

30/09/2022

On September 26 Alabama prison officials made a rare admission: prisoners had initiated work stoppages at every single major correctional facility in the state.

11/07/2022

"July 6 the LGM-35A Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program suffered a significant setback when its Mk 21A ICBM reentry vehicle being tested at Vandenberg Space Force base in California failed just seconds after launch.

"The LGM-35A is expected to be deployed from 2029 ... Issues with the program and questions regarding its feasibility have come amid broader concerns with the capabilities of America’s strategic arsenal. ... While the future of the LGM-35A, the B-21 and the Next Generation Interceptor all remain uncertain, issues with all three pertaining to cost, performance and schedule have left a considerable possibility that the United States could be left with an underwhelming strategic capability as those of its adversaries modernise quickly."

In the late hours of July 6 the LGM-35A Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program suffered a significant setback when its Mk 21A ICBM reentry vehicle at Vandenberg Space Force base in California failed just seconds after launch. The LGM-35A program has faced widespread criticisms

26/06/2022

Wherever men are made soldiers, women are made prostitutes. It should be no surprise then in a conflict as widely publicized as Ukraine’s to see pimp platform OnlyFans step in to exploit the most vulnerable. More pillaging of the Ukraine by western financial capital and another loathsome chapter in the war on women.

Nastassia Nasko, the founder of "TerOnlyFans," told Insider she feels proud of having found a unique way to help Ukraine in its fight against Russia.

25/05/2022

The settler psyche and economy

When gun control is put back on the political agenda, Americans tend to stock up on weapons and ammo, boosting the finances of manufacturers.

24/05/2022

More piracy by the US Empire!

US Forces Have Smuggled Hundreds Of Oil Tankers Out Of Syria Over The Past Few Months. US occupation forces continue to loot Syrian oil from the northern Al-Jazeera region of Syria’s Hasakah govern…

19/05/2022

Trials soon to begin for the fascists and their NATO handlers. Another victory of the anti-fascists

The Ukrainian military personnel and militants in Azov nationalist units that entrenched themselves in the underground bunkers of the Azovstal plant, began to surrender in Mariupol this week.

1,730 Ukrainian nationalists have laid down their arms since May 16. Wounded Ukrainians receive medical aid at the Novoazovsk hospital in the Donetsk People’s Republic, and the rest were sent to a pretrial detention centre in Yelenovka in the suburbs of Donetsk.

Russian leadership had repeatedly stated that resistance was senseless and announced the opening of humanitarian corridors for militants and Ukrainian military personnel to leave the Azovstal plant after laying down their arms. It was Russia – not Ukraine or its Western masters – that urged the UN to look into this situation and persuade the Kiev regime to let people walk out.

In the meantime, the Kiev regime was doing all it could to prevent civilians, military personnel and militants from leaving the plant. Ukrainian captives tell, the military leadership of Ukraine forbids the troops to retreat or surrender. Why? They need to continue brainwashing the public.

Photo by Dmitry Steshin / Komsomolskaya pravda

* * *

На этой неделе в Мариуполе начали сдаваться в плен украинские военнослужащие и боевики националистического подразделения "Азов", засевшие в подземных бункерах завода "Азовсталь".

1730 украинских националистов сложили оружие с 16 мая. Раненым оказывается медицинская помощь в больнице Новоазовска в ДНР, остальных разместили в следственном изоляторе Еленовки в пригороде Донецка.

Российское руководство неоднократно заявляло о бессмысленности сопротивления, об открытии гуманитарных коридоров, по которым боевики и представители ВСУ могли бы выйти из "Азовстали", сложив оружие. Именно Россия - не Украина и не ее западные хозяева - призывала ООН подключиться к этой "истории", повлиять на киевский режим, чтобы люди смогли выйти.

При этом киевский режим делал всё, чтобы гражданские лица, военнослужащие и боевики находились на заводе и не выходили оттуда. Украинские пленные говорят, что военное руководство Украины запрещает войскам отступать и сдаваться в плен. Почему? Чтобы продолжать обработку общественного мнения.

Фото Дмитрий Стешин /. Комсомольская правда

**i **ism

08/05/2022

Chris Smalls is a hero and desperately needed voice reclaiming the working class as the subject of history

29/04/2022

Russia’s handling these sanctions better than the EU. Good to see the Germans aren’t completely committed to destroying their economy.

"For us, the account number doesn't matter, or the question of whether one or two accounts are opened in one place," Germany's economy ministry said.

26/04/2022

SOEs have long been criticized as unprofitable and inefficient because they spend so much on labor. Turns out the only source of value is a good investment.

The combined profits of China's state-owned enterprises (SOEs) rose 7% year on year to nearly 1.02 trillion yuan (about $155.5 billion) in the first quarter of the year, according to data from the Ministry of Finance.

26/04/2022

A must read from Matt Stoller on the biggest regulatory battle you haven’t heard of, corporate apologism enshrined in law!

Antitrust Division chief Jonathan Kanter told a roomful of fancy lawyers and economists that their day of controlling the law through tricky language is over.

17/04/2022

Invaluable reporting from teleSUR

A memorial to the heroes of the Great Soviet Revolution stands and is part of the symbols on which the Donbas struggle against fascism is based. teleSUR