FOREST COMMENT

  Godfrey Roberts submits this tribute to Mao Tse Tung. It misses out the bad bits....

  This is a very good analysis of the current precarious state of the dollar and the US economy.....

  This is mass surveillance: it starts in Gaza as a 'pilot study' and then be extended.

 

 

Canadian PM Mark Carney has stood up to the USA. Canada has made a trillion dollar deal with China. At the annual capitalist junket at Davos he exposes the myth of democracy and the rules based order. This article is the best I've seen on the issue - by People's World, and the Communist Party of the USA......TRUMP WILL NOW TURN HIS GUNS ON HIM. 'The capitalist class and its partisan political representatives inside the United States have been  divided for years  over how to respond to the system’s prolonged crisis of profitability and the rise of challengers like China. One faction favored a continuation of U.S.-led neoliberal globalization, anchored in free trade agreements like NAFTA, multilateral institutions such as the WTO and IMF, and the projection of U.S. power alongside partners through alliances like NATO. The faction of the capitalist class grouped around Trump has discarded any pretense of universal rules. Here, Trump addresses the Conservative Political Action ...

 

 

  This is a brilliant and prescient article by Canadian Academic Roger Boyd. The first sentence nails the great question of our time ....... 'The greatest question for China is not how to defeat the US and the West, that is a foregone outcome short of nuclear war, but how to manage the decline of the West in such a way that a world war is not the result. With such an aim, the Chinese Party-State must make the kind of very hard pragmatic decisions that are the anathema of the utopian socialists who inhabit much of the Western “left” academia and “left” commentariat. '

  This is brilliant about Kier Starmer... 'His  approval ratings , which began to go into freefall from pretty much the moment he moved into Downing Street, have dropped below 20%. A YouGov poll last week found that he was more disliked by Britons than  Benjamin Netanyahu or Hamas . At the weekend a far-right march against Starmer’s government in Bristol was met with a leftwing counter-protest bearing the slogan “ We hate Keir Starmer more than you ”.'

It seems to me that this diagnosis is absolutely correct...  'An empire divided against itself cannot sustain coherent external power. Its adversaries need not defeat it militarily. They can simply wait........ Empires do not decline only through material exhaustion or military failure. They also decay symbolically. Prestige - what earlier generations called  gravitas  - is not ornamental. It is a form of power. When it erodes, coercion increasingly substitutes for authority, and vulgarity replaces legitimacy.  The conduct and language of senior American political figures in recent years are symptomatic of this deeper erosion of US prestige. The casual use of expletives, threats and street vernacular by White House officials and political elites is not merely a stylistic departure from earlier norms. It reflects the loss of confidence in the moral authority of office itself........Empires at their height are careful with words. Empires in decline are careless, becaus...

 Hikel gets it in a nutshell... 'Israel has been  instrumental  in assassinating liberation leaders in the Arab region, and interfering in the political processes of the Arab countries to prevent nationalist and socialist parties from coming to power. It has a long history of attacking regional states - Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Yemen, etc - destabilizing them and forcing them to divert resources toward defensive spending  instead of industrial development . This is in full alignment with US strategy. Not only in the Middle East: Israel has a long history of providing military and intelligence support to right-wing regimes around the world. For  example , Israel armed and supported Argentina’s US-backed military junta, which murdered 30,000 socialists and political dissidents. And Israel armed and assisted the US-backed genocide in Guatemala, training military cadres in techniques of torture and ethnic cleansing. The US supports Israel for the exact s...

 Good article - but fails to point to China, as the example of how to progress. '....for capital, the  purpose  of production is  not  to meet human needs or improve society, much less to achieve any ecological goals. The purpose is to maximize and accumulate profit. That is the overriding objective. This is known as the “ capitalist law of value ”: capital  only  invests in producing what is profitable to capital. This poses very severe problems for the energy transition. We know we must reduce fossil fuels and ramp up renewable energy. For ages, economists told us that once renewables became cheaper than fossil fuels, the transition would occur automatically. But it’s not happening. Why? Because while renewables are  cheaper  than fossil fuels, fossil fuels are around 3 times  more  profitable .  This is because renewables have a low barrier to entry and are highly competitive (which is great for low prices!), while fossil fu...

Control of the western financial system through the dollar and SWIFT is a stranglehold on those countries wanting to disentangle themselves from 'the west'.  'Hunger and deprivation are not an accidental by-product of Western sanctions; they are a key objective. This is clear from a State Department  memo  written in April 1960, which explains the purpose of US sanctions against Cuba. The memo noted that Fidel Castro – and the revolution more broadly – enjoyed widespread popularity in Cuba. It argued that “every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba,” by “denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government”. The power of Western sanctions hinges on their control over the world’s reserve currencies (the US dollar and the Euro), their control over international payment systems (SWIFT), and their monopoly over essential technologies (eg satellites, c...

Warwick Powell on how the USA's image of itself became its downfall...   'The American hyperreal has become self-conscious. It now knows that it is a performance - and fights desperately to sustain belief through ever-greater displays of spectacle, outrage, and emotion. The political arena has become an extension of the entertainment industry; the news cycle, a genre of serialised fiction. The society that once lived in the exuberance of simulation now lives in the paranoia of competing simulations. What was once a collective dream of freedom and abundance has fractured into polarised narratives, each claiming to represent “the real.” In this sense, the hyperreal has turned cannibalistic. It no longer generates meaning; it consumes it. The utopia realised has become a semiotic wasteland. It has collapsed into an empire of signs devouring its own legitimacy. The tragedy - or perhaps the irony - is that America’s collapse into simulacral decay has been globalised. Through technol...