Mike Head

In what can only be described as a massacre, 38 anti-government activists were killed Friday after fascist-led forces set fire to Odessa’s Trade Unions House, which had been sheltering opponents of the US- and European-backed regime in Ukraine.

According to eye-witnesses, those who jumped from the burning building and survived were surrounded and beaten by thugs from the neo-Nazi Right Sector. Video footage shows bloodied and wounded survivors being attacked.

The atrocity underscores both the brutal character of the right-wing government installed in Kiev by the Western powers and the encouragement by the US and its allies of a bloody crackdown by the regime to suppress popular opposition, centered in the mainly Russian-speaking south and east of Ukraine.

As the Odessa outrage occurred, US President Barack Obama, at a joint White House press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, explicitly endorsed the military offensive being carried out by the unelected Kiev government against protesters occupying official buildings in eastern Ukraine.

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Stephen Lendman

A right wing thug from Kiev throws a petroleum bomb at
the trade union building in Odessa, Ukraine, on Friday. At
least 31 people were killed in the blaze. (Stringer/Reuters)

Kiev putschists helicoptered them in. They came with orders to cause mayhem. They attacked federalization supporters. They did so violently. Gunfire was heard. Three deaths were reported. So were over a dozen injuries. The House of Trade Unions was set ablaze. Neo-Nazis did so with anti-Maidan activists inside. Reports said 38 people died. Thirty succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning. Eight perished jumping out of windows. Another 50 needed medical treatment. Ten policemen were affected.

An emergency meeting followed. Mayor Vladimir Nemirovsky said: "We are making all possible intensive measures to restore law and order." Violent perpetrators will be prosecuted, he added.

Reports said about 1,500 Kiev supporters gathered in central Odessa's Sobornaya Square. Radicalized Chernomorets football club supporters joined them. Right Sector insignia were prominently displayed. Thugs came armed with chains, bats, shields and other weapons. They came looking for trouble. They shouted "Glory to Ukraine." "Death to enemies." "Knife the Moskals." It's a derogatory Ukrainian term for Russians. Hundreds of anti-Kiev activists confronted them. Clashes followed. Mayhem explains what happened. Both sides used Molotov cocktails, smoke grenades and rocks.

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John W. Whitehead

“[The aim of public education is not] to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. . . . Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim . . . is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States…” — H. Mencken, April 1924

How do you persuade a nation of relatively freedom-loving individuals to march in lock step with a police state? You start by convincing them that they’re in danger, and only the government can protect them. Keep them keyed up with constant danger alerts, and the occasional terrorist incident, whether real or staged. Distract them with wall-to-wall news coverage about sinking ships, disappearing planes and pseudo-celebrities spouting racist diatribes. Use blockbuster movies, reality shows and violent video games to hype them up on military tactics, and then while they’re distracted and numb to all that is taking place around them, indoctrinate their young people to your way of thinking, relying primarily on the public schools and popular culture.

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Paul Craig Roberts

Photo: Ukrainian soldiers arrive to reinforce a checkpoint that troops seized Friday, May 2, in Andreevka, a village near Slavyansk. Two helicopters were downed Friday as Ukrainian "security forces" tried to dislodge pro-Russian separatists from Slavyansk, Ukraine's Defense Ministry said. The operation appears to be the most significant yet by the Ukrainian military against pro-Russian militias that have taken control of swaths of eastern Ukraine.

Washington has no intention of allowing the crisis in Ukraine to be resolved. Having failed to seize the country and evict Russia from its Black Sea naval base, Washington sees new opportunities in the crisis.

One is to restart the Cold War by forcing the Russian government to occupy the Russian-speaking areas of present day Ukraine where protesters are objecting to the stooge anti-Russian government installed in Kiev by the American coup. These areas of Ukraine are former constituent parts of Russia herself. They were attached to Ukraine by Soviet leaders in the 20th century when both Ukraine and Russia were part of the same country, the USSR.

Essentially, the protesters have established independent governments in the cities. The police and military units sent to suppress the protesters, called “terrorists” in the American fashion, for the most part have until now defected to the protesters.

With Obama’s incompetent White House and State Department having botched Washington’s takeover of Ukraine, Washington has been at work shifting the blame to Russia. According to Washington and its presstitute media, the protests are orchestrated by the Russian government and have no sincere basis. If Russia sends in military units to protect the Russian citizens in the former Russian territories, the act will be used by Washington to confirm Washington’s propaganda of a Russian invasion (as in the case of Georgia), and Russia will be further demonized.

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Larisa Shevchenko

Introduction by Paul Craig Roberts: We have heard weeks of bullshit propaganda from the Obama regime and its presstitute media, especially the New York Times, the false reporting of which has finished off whatever remained of the newspaper’s reputation. We have heard the threatening squeals from the Washington-installed stooge government in Kiev. But we haven’t heard from the actual people themselves.

Here is a letter in English sent to a German website and published here. The letter makes it completely clear why so much of Russian-speaking Ukraine, former Russian territories that were attached to Ukraine by Soviet leaders in the 20th century, want nothing to do with the Washington-installed government in Kiev.

Again, ask yourself why “your” government and the presstitute media lie every time they open their mouths or roll the ink. Anyone who relies on the US media, or on the word of the president and secretary of state, is an utter and stupid fool.

Larisa Shevchenko from the eastern Ukrainian city of Lugansk, who has mobilized against the coup activities on the Maidan in Kiev since December last year and so is familiar with the developments in her country firsthand:

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Edward S. Herman

The fool is John Kerry, who has looked bad in his rushing around between Washington and Tel Aviv trying to get in place a “framework” agreement between Israel and the Palestinians that would show progress in the efforts of the honest broker, assailing Nicholas Maduro of Venezuela for his “terror campaign against his own people,” and, of course, denouncing the Russians for their “aggression” against the coup-regime of Ukraine. His statement that “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on a completely trumped-up pretext,” has to be regarded as an Orwellian classic and may be his signifier in future history books, in the unlikely event that he makes it at all. His punchline has been the subject of many jokes and laughs in the dissident media, but the mainstream media have hardly mentioned it and certainly haven’t made it the butt of jokes and a basis for discrediting the man (just as there has been no discrediting of Madeleine Albright based on her statement on national TV that killing 500,000 Iraqi children via the sanctions of mass destruction in the 1990s—which she helped engineer—“was worth it”).

Of course, it is possible that Kerry really believed he was speaking truths, having internalized the assumptions that flow from U.S. “exceptionalism,” which make words like “invasion,” “aggression” and “international law” inapplicable to us as the world’s police; and what might be a “completely trumped up pretext” if offered by the Russians is only a slight and excusable error or misjudgment when we do it. After all, the New York Times quickly used the word “aggression” in editorializing on the Crimea events (“Russia’s Aggression,” March 2, 2014), whereas it never used the word to describe the invasion-occupation of Iraq, nor did it mention the words “UN Charter” or “international law” in its 70 editorials on Iraq from September 11, 2001 to March 21, 2003 (Howard Friel and Richard Falk, The Record of the Paper).

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Paul Craig Roberts

The US economy is a house of cards. Every aspect of it is fraudulent, and the illusion of recovery is created with fraudulent statistics.

American capitalism itself is an illusion. All financial markets are rigged. Massive liquidity poured into financial markets by the Federal Reserve’s Quantitative Easing inflates stock and bond prices and drives interest rates, which are supposed to be a measure of the cost of capital, to zero or negative, with the implication that capital is so abundant that its cost is zero and can be had for free. Large enterprises, such as mega-banks and auto manufacturers, that go bankrupt are not permitted to fail. Instead, public debt and money creation are used to cover private losses and keep corporations “too big to fail” afloat at the expense not of shareholders but of people who do not own the shares of the corporations.

Profits are no longer a measure that social welfare is being served by capitalism’s efficient use of resources when profits are achieved by substituting cheaper foreign labor for domestic labor, with resultant decline in consumer purchasing power and rise in income and wealth inequality. In the 21st century, the era of jobs offshoring, the US has experienced an unprecedented explosion in income and wealth inequality. I have made reference to this hard evidence of the failure of capitalism to provide for the social welfare in the traditional economic sense in my book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism, and Thomas Piketty’s just published book, Capital in the 21st Century, has brought an alarming picture of reality to insouciant economists, such as Paul Krugman. As worrisome as Piketty’s picture is of inequality, I agree with Michael Hudson that the situation is worse than Piketty describes.

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Finian Cunningham

Western countries are now paid so badly that businesses are reportedly finding it profitable to return from China - having relocated to Asia in the first place to exploit cheap labor there.

It is an astounding indictment of how capitalism has created a global race to the bottom of misery for workers - yet the Western corporate news media actively conceal this abomination.

This week a BBC business report sounded almost celebratory about the fact that Britain, the US and other Western countries were now said to be "cost competitive" with China and Brazil. The upshot is that many businesses and companies are now re-setting up in Western countries because of the "competitive" wages of workers, according to the BBC spin. The competitiveness, said the BBC, stemmed from workers' wages in the West being "held steady" and because they have "become more productive".

This is Orwellian language to obscure the conditions of systematic poverty and exploitation that exist for many workers in Western countries - the scale of which is so appalling that companies are finding Western countries more profitable than other destinations that were formerly thought of as providing cheap labor.

Such companies had previously closed down, or as the Orwellian language called it "downsized", operations in the US, Britain and other Western countries to boost their profits by taking advantage of low wages in China.

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