text:
Ecocidal Genocide and Enslavement of All Surviving Workers: That's the Shock-Doctrine "Final Solution" Ever More Evident in the Neoliberals' Stubborn Refusal to Fight Climate Change
Imagine a Concentration-Camp Planet Ruled by a Hillary or a Trump. Unthinkable, Yes? But What Other Future Could They Be Planning?
WHEN WE ANALYZE the indications as investigative reporters and intelligence analysts are taught to do, there is only one possible explanation for the denial, dithering and maliciously scripted paralysis by which our overlords sabotage every effort to counter the already-apocalyptic and soon-to-be-terminal climate crisis.1
No matter how I evaluate the evidence, I find it impossible to escape the conclusion our Capitalist masters long ago decided their "Final Solution" to all the world's problems is to allow the looming disasters to exterminate as many of us as possible. And then impose a zero-tolerance global tyranny more savage than anything our species has ever known, condemning the few Working Class survivors and their descendants to inescapable slavery.
Thanks to Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism; Metropolitan Books: 2007), the Neoliberal methodology is obvious. Thanks to Chris Hedges (American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America; Free Press: 2006); to Kevin Phillips (American Theocracy: the Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century; Viking: 2006); and most of all to Jeff Sharlet (The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power; Harper: 2008); we already know our oppressors' capabilities and intentions.
We therefore also know our masters are methodically weaponizing the murderously self-righteous patriarchal misogyny, the hateful Christian white-supremacy and the sadistic theocratic malevolence of their increasingly fanatical supporters into a new, terrifyingly global Sturmabteilung to serve as guards, torturers and executioners.
A few of us even recognize the Shock-Doctrine dynamics evident in the epidemic of mass murder2 that fuels the now-probably unstoppable Forcible Civilian Disarmament Movement, which is manipulating our fear, horror and ignorance into the frightened helplessness of mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood.
Given how the ChristoNazis and their fascist collaborators are already embraced as allies by the cops and by the imperial war machine, it is obvious these new Storm Troopers will remain armed -- legally or otherwise -- even after the last firearm has been confiscated from the last non-fascist U.S. household.
Meanwhile the entire murder-minded rabble is officially encouraged to prey upon us at will.
But -- until now -- only one other journalist, the admirably courageous Sarah Kendzior, has dared publicly suggest the Occam's-Razor-obvious answer of why our rulers are behaving as they do. Clearly they intend to profit both from the apocalyptic disasters and from the Shock-Doctrine opportunities for genocidal reconstruction of human society -- think Puerto Rico and New Orleans -- such events provide.
Our masters have been quietly smuggling their traveling holocaust of horrors home, one private jetload at a time, since 22 November 1963.3 But now the triumph of the genuinely Nazified Donald Trump and his burn-all-witches running-mate Michael Pence has blown the One Percenters' cover and revealed -- over an entirely bogus storm of objections -- the hideous truth of what actually obtains in this "one nation under (their sadistic) God."
We can (and typically do) spare ourselves the guilt and horror evoked by these near-daily atrocities if we reduce them to the emotionless abstractions of statistics -- for example the approximately 45,000 USian children, women and men the Neoliberals exterminate each year by deliberate denial of medical care. Such sanitized information does absolutely nothing to alleviate our overwhelming sense of powerlessness or goad us to action. But its near-universal availability most assuredly helps maintain the Exceptionally Big Lie of U.S. press freedom.
Of course if we are mindful enough to see without flinching -- and far too few of us are -- we can look directly at the hopelessly distraught faces of the growing legions of homeless children and adults and acknowledge that what is already sculpted by wretchedness on their faces is also an accurate vision of our own more-than-probable future. Housed or not, we struggle to survive even as we are criminalized for the poverty inflicted on us by our masters. So impoverished, we are endlessly tormented -- indeed not infrequently slain -- whether by the edicts of their insurance executives and welfare bureaucrats or the hollow-point antipersonnel rounds fired by their uniquely murderous federally militarized local police. Survival itself thus becomes a (potentially fatal) assertion of revolutionary defiance.
It is therefore utterly delusional to suppose the Apocalypse -- here deliberately capitalized as a proper noun -- is not already well underway. Never mind the environmental projections; to see the future intended for all of us in the 99 Percent, just visit the nearest homeless encampment. Meanwhile the One Percenters and their trusted henchmen -- the lawyers, politicians and executives who transmogrify their masters' moral imbecility into real-world atrocities -- are fully cognizant of our intensifying anger. That's why they are building strongholds and raising private armies to defend them.
Welcome to the new post-imperial Dark Age, complete with moated castles.
Knowing history as I do -- including military history and the history of weapons -- I have a reasonably accurate notion of what is taking shape. Forget nations and governments; it will instead be a world of corporate manorialism enforced by the de facto tribalism of ultra-high-tech feudalism. Its population will be forever divided into two classes: the all-powerful and the abjectly powerless -- that is, the masters and the slaves.
Also knowing anthropology and mythology and life on rural agricultural communes, I can accurately imagine the post-apocalyptic socialist alternative: a contentious but nevertheless fully functional amalgum of family and community that despite its emotional dysfunction is bound by a diligent solidarity evident in proven skill, whether at subsistance agriculture or self-defense.
Obviously I would choose the latter were I able.
My own sense of what our probable future might look like -- mental imagery based on scholarship and personal experience including not only the tragedies and disasters I covered as a journalist but also the postwar horrors I witnessed in South Korea c. 1961-1962 -- is something I intend to write about in considerable detail during the weeks ahead.
For now though suffice it to say life in a postapocalyptic world -- that is, assuming there is any human survival at all -- would be nothing like most of us seem to imagine. The eventual collapse of the electrical grid would eliminate nearly all post-19th Century technology including the associated industrial capabilities essential to its restoration. Meanwhile the post-Roman history of Britain vividly demonstrates civilization's fragility. Save for its stone-and-concrete structures -- chiefly aqueducts, roads, bridges and buildings -- it was gone in less than a century. By the time these structures began crumbling, there was no one left alive who was knowledgeable or skilled enough to repair them.
What follows then is list of 115 present-day headlines arbitrarily divided into eight categories of evidence. Each head is hyperlinked to its text. I lifted 96 of these from the approximately 760 news stories and analytical commentaries I received in my electronic in-box between 25 February 2019 and 15 March 2019 inclusive. The remaining 19 -- 13 slightly older analytical and historical essays listed under "However Banal, Evil May Also Prove Bottomless" as background reading and six reassuring entries under the concluding section, "Unrecognized Resistance to Extinction" -- are from the bookmarks of my electronic library.
Were we to envision a genuinely accurate metaphor for our circumstances and begin to focus on these 115 examples as accurate microcosms of our real circumstances, we might soon realize it is rather as if we of the 99 Percent are passengers aboard a ship at sea. But the officers -- the One Percenters and their lawyers, politicians and executives -- have knowingly overbooked it to maximize their profit and have thus overloaded it nearly to the point of sinking. As we sail toward heavy weather the officers have realized the danger they are in and have begun to lighten the load by flinging groups of us overboard in circumstances designed to rebrand murders as unavoidable tragedy -- exactly as is done, for example, to hide the murders of the approximately 45,000 of us who are slain every year by deliberate denial of health care.
(I am compelled to ask: when someone is killed by deliberate perpetuation of a policy known to be deadly, how can it not be murder? Note in this context the deliberate embrace of genocide inherent in the U.S. One Percenters' knowingly deadly edicts to perpetuate healthcare as a privilege of wealth rather than the universal human right it is considered by every other government in the developed world.)
The officers who command our metaphorical ship meanwhile tells us they are doing everything they can to save our lives. They continue repeating this lie even after we discover they are actually opening the scuttlecocks; the truth is we passengers are all doomed. By sinking us the officers not only silence our complaints and pocket our fares but also collect on the insurance, profiting obscenely.
Now -- as passengers who have not yet been flung overboard -- let us look both at the unprecedented real-world malevolence of our overlords, at the growing rebelliousness it is evoking and also at a few of the many oft-unrecognized assertions of our own boundless determination to survive. It's that very combination -- the serial-killer moral imbecility of our rulers versus our own humanitarian mindfulness -- that make this hypothesis so obviously true once we have brought the evidence into sharp focus.
Having contemplated our circumstances for nearly a decade -- see for example "Economic Collapse: Capitalist Death-Stroke To Hated Public Services?" (my post of 27 April 2010, for which I was immediately and permanently ousted from Facebook) -- I can no longer doubt the rulers of the world have no intention whatsoever of ameliorating climate change; that instead they are deliberately using the apocalypse -- and quite possibly engineering it -- the ever-more-obvious goal of which is to reorganize all human society into the hierarchical structure of the slave plantation or the concentration-camp.4
Thus the following, a portrait of the deepening gloom in which we dwell, the hues of its darkness softened -- because I'm sure you are as tired as I of reading atrocity reports -- into lists of hyperlinked heads and titles from which you may choose at will. You'll see more of these easy-choice lists as I continue to re-format Dispatches after Facebook terminated my access to the Tacoma Communists page, where until last January links to my work were routinely posted.
(I). Our Mother Earth as an Abused Woman
The Climate Change Paper So Depressing It's Sending People to Therapy
In the Deepest Ocean Trenches, Animals Eat Plastic
Iconic Forests Reaching Climate Tipping Points in American West
Nothing resolved as Flint water crisis nears fifth anniversary
Insecticide Linked to Increased Breast Cancer Risk -- 40 Years After Exposure
Moment of Reckoning: US Cities Burn Recyclables After China Bans Imports
A World Without Clouds. Think About That a Minute: New Study Details Possibility of Devastating Climate Feedback Loop
'Like a nightmare': Amtrak train, trapped by snow for 36 hours, arrives back in Seattle
Flint water crisis claims its youngest Legionnaires' victim to date
Measles outbreak in Ukraine claims eight lives
Popular Brands Of Beer And Wine Found To Contain Glyphosate Weedkiller
RSN: How Fukushima Nukes Kill Our Climate, Our Planet, Ourselves
Game Over? Report Card on Our Planet's Environment
(II). Dithering as Denial
The Environmental Implications Of A Trump Presidency
Dianne Feinstein Says No to the Green New Deal
Legislature, Inslee struggle to fix roads that block salmon, help starve orcas
Top Democrats Are Enabling Climate Catastrophe
The 2020 Democrats of the "Anti-Green New Deal Coalition"
Democrats Wasting Time While Our Climate Burns
(III). The Apocalypse Is Already Upon Us
Survival of the Richest, All Are Equal, Except Those Who Aren't
American Exceptionalism: The Naked Truth
The New York Times Won't Stop Pushing Crank Economics
Amazon federal taxes: how the company's corporate tax bill was $0
The deadly truth about a world built for men – from stab vests to car crashes
Dakota Access Pipeline Company Is Abusing The Judicial System To Silence Dissent
Democrats Not Backing Medicare For All
Trump's 2020 Budget Proposes $1 Trillion Cut to Medicare, Medicaid
FOCUS: Will 2020 Democrats Help Trump by Destroying Each Other?
Right-Wing Extremism Linked to Every 2018 Extremist Murder in the US, ADL Finds
Pack City Hall to Stop Mayor Durkan's attacks on Homeless Services
The Most Harrowing Revelation of the Cohen Hearing
Corporate and "Progressive" Democrats Threaten Medicare Itself
Trump Reportedly Wants to Steal From the Troops to Pay for His Wall
Joe Biden Has a History of Racist Comments
Pharma & Insurance Gave $43M To 130 House Democrats Not Backing Medicare For All
Immigrants endure inhuman conditions at ICE prison in New Jersey
Poverty in the UK: 100 "baby banks" spring up to assist parents with basic supplies
Torture Fans and War Criminals Determine US Foreign Policy
Pelosi dismisses efforts to impeach President Trump
Free dental clinic draws hundreds in Nashville, Tennessee
Closure of Brazil Ford plant to destroy up to 27,000 jobs
The Trump presidency: From the Manhattan underworld to the White House
Latest collision on Long Island Rail Road shows fatal consequences of system-wide neglect
Nearly 200 Immigrants in Texas Detention Facilities Have Mumps
Trump May Want to Be President Forever. Take the Threat Seriously.
Pity the Nation: War Spending Is Bankrupting America
No charges for Sacramento police officers who murdered Stephon Clark
Fascism by Another Name
The Global Assault on Indigenous Peoples
Mitch Nuclear Option McConnell Poised to Turn Steady Stream of Trump's Right-Wing Judges Into a Flood
Cuts to hours for Whole Foods workers exposes fraud of Amazon pay increase
Big Capital, the Working Class, and US Imperialism: a Brief Look at Recent History
Nearly 1.4 Million Puerto Ricans Facing Dangerous Food Stamp Cuts as Trump and Congress Fail to Act
Trump to Divert Up to $385 Million From Crucial Health Programs To Pay for Government-Sanctioned Child Abuse
Big Pharma, Insurers and Hospitals Team Up to Kill Medicare for All
Trump's Legacy: Conservative Judges Who Will Interpret US Law for Decades
Chelsea Manning Defies Secret Grand Jury, Julian Assange Scoops Michael Cohen
Stephon Clark Killed Twice by U.S. imperialism
President's Budget Targets Key Health Care Programs
The VA Is Privatizing Veterans Health Care While Launching A Campaign To Deny It
Union Busting on Campus: Jackson Lewis and Higher Education Anti-Unionism
College admissions scandal: what it reveals about wealth in America - Vox
NY School Holds Mock Slave Auction Selling Black Students to White Kids
FOCUS: Colony of Hell: 911 Calls From Inside Amazon Warehouses
Joint US-South Korean war games amid rising tensions with North Korea
Federal Aviation Administration accused of colluding with Boeing in wake of 737 crashes
Of Course College Admissions Rigged for the Rich. The Whole Economic System Is
Report Card Shows Majority of Senate Democrats Aiding Trump's Right-Wing Court Takeover
Scientist Who Resisted Censorship of Climate Report Lost Her Job
The criminalization of environmental protest in Trump's America
(IV). Their God Demands They Rape Our Mother5
The Supreme Court Is Quietly Changing the Status of Religion in American Life
Giving The Bomb To Saudi Arabia's Dr. Strangelove
What You Need to Know About Trump's Latest Attack on Reproductive Health
United Methodist Church votes to maintain its opposition to same-sex marriage, gay clergy
Southern Baptist Convention Grapples With Sexual Abuse Report
Cuba's Evangelical Alliance Leads Crusade Against Gay Marriage
With Trump, White Protestantism Hits Rock Bottom
United Methodists Fracture: LGBT Plan Rejected - The Atlantic
The Cult of the Good Christian Woman
Anti-Vaxx Mobs: Doctors Face Harassment Campaigns on Facebook
Revealed: AmazonSmile Helps Fund Anti-Vaccine Groups
Abortion Restrictions Sweep Through GOP-Held Legislatures
Saudi Women Activists Stand Trial in Criminal Court
Trump Administration Rolls Out Implementation Plan for Transgender Military Ban
The Kansas Bomb Plot: What Has the Media Missed?
New Zealand mosque shooting: what we know so far about the mass shooting in Christchurch
Trump's Pick of Wealthy Climate Denier for UN Ambassador Decried as Slap in the Face to Planet and Humanity
New Zealand mosque shooting: the shooter's manifesto shows how white nationalist rhetoric spreads
The shadowy network shaping Trump's anti-immigration policies
The EPA and Evangelical (Anti)Environmentalism
Trump: The most anti-science president ever?
(V). A Few Vernal Sprouts of Wishful Thinking
Climate Change Could End Washington's Global Dominion
FOCUS: A Future Without Fossil Fuels?
How long can we keep dodging nuclear war?
The climate crisis and the insidious idea that things must get worse before they get better
(VI). The Earth Mother's Spring Sunshine Grows Flowers of Defiance
The Keys To The Sunrise Movement's Momentum? A Bold Idea, A Visionary Narrative, And Organising Best Practices
The Black Stake in the Green New Deal | Black Agenda Report
Female Leaders Warn Against Global Rise of Autocratic Strongmen and Attack on Womens Rights
Youth Climate Activists Arrested for Sit-In at Mitch McConnell's Office
Rethink Activism in the Face of Catastrophic Biological Collapse
Researchers: Violence, War And Climate Change Are Linked
Vandana Shiva: We Must Fight Back Against the 1 Percent to Stop the Sixth Mass Extinction
It's the Green New Deal or Else
Extinction Rebellion: "Green" capitalism versus world socialism
The Youth Climate Strike and the fight against global warming
Global Climate Strike in Pictures: Millions of Students Walk Out to Demand Planetary Transformation
A Tribal Camp in South Texas Is Vowing to Resist Trump's Wall
(VII). However Banal, Evil May Also Prove Bottomless
Donald Trump Is Anti-Environment, But So Was Barack Obama
How Republicans came to embrace anti-environmentalism
Joining the dots: women, environmentalism and neoliberalism
What is Neoliberalism?
Neoliberalism's Dark Path to Fascism
How Neoliberalism Is Normalising Hostility
A shock to the ecosystem: Neoliberalism and the environment | well sharp
Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as individuals
Neoliberalism is to blame for stalled climate action
The Secret Threat That Makes Corporations More Powerful Than Countries
Average U.S. Citizens Have "Little Or No" Influence On Government Policy
Our Mania For Hope Is A Curse
In Facing Mass Extinction, We Must Allow Ourselves to Grieve
(VIII.) Unrecognized Resistance to Extinction
A much-expanded version6 of the Jung/McLuhan hypothesis all art includes elements of prophecy.
How to Spin Wool (with Pictures)
Enjoying Horseback Archery Adventures of the Year 2017
Ricky Roberts Ferguson Rifle Timed Fire at King's Mountain National Military Park
Finding Freedom in a Frontier Life
Making a Blacksmith Shop with No Power Tools
Western Science Is Finally Catching Up To Traditional Knowledge
1Key passage of the cited essay: "climate-induced societal collapse is now inevitable in the near term." How near? About a decade.
2The U.S. epidemic of mass murder is the byproduct of a culture that decrees humans worthless save as consumers, declares greed the only human motivator and honors hatefulness as the apex of emotion. Thus -- without any need for possibly embarrassing conspiracies -- do our rulers guarantee themselves a constant flow of tragedies by which to rationalize their imposition of Shock-Doctrine tyranny. See for example "School Shootings and Drone Wars: America's Invisible Ways of Violence,"
3As I suspect all truthful historians will do if our species escapes extinction, I take the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy as the death-date of the United States as a pretend-democracy. See James W. Douglass. JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (Orbis Books: 2008), pgs. 375-376. See also: After Kennedy's assassination, new President Lyndon B. Johnson immediately reversed his predecessor's order to withdraw 1,000 military personnel from Vietnam by the end of 1963.
4I built a half-dozen population projections based on the assumption some humans will survive, my reasoning elaborated in Footnote 6, below. One projections was based on reduction of the human population by 95 percent -- approximately the percentage of earthly species taken by the Permian-Triassic Extinction 250 million years ago. Significantly, using the One Percent/99 Percent model, a 95 percent human extinction rate would would result in the same ratio of masters to slaves, 8.75 million to 350 million or 1:40, that is typical of today's U.S. chain gangs. By comparison, the ratio of Nazis to victims in the German concentration camps was 1:18, for which see Bucheim, Broszat, Jacobsen and Krausnick, Anatomy of the SS State (English translation William Collins Sons: 1968); pg. 504. Given the One Percenters' now obvious adoration of Nazi Germany and the white-supremacist South, these are almost certainly the population parameters they are employing as they try to leverage the Apocalypse into their New World Order.
5Patriarchy and its Abrahamic religious offspring, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, are the ideological vectors of the misogynistic war on the environment. As defined by Thomas Sancton and cited by Naomi Klein in "Neoliberalism is to blame for stalled climate action," The ultimate source of Neoliberalism (and Capitalism itself) is ...the misuse of the Judeo-Christian concept of "dominion" over nature and the fact that it supplanted the pre-Christian idea that "the earth was seen as a mother, a fertile giver of life. Nature -- the soil, forest, sea -- was endowed with divinity, and mortals were subordinate to it."
6Carl Jung (All art intuitively apprehends coming changes in the collective unconsciousness) and Marshall McLuhan (Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it) each defined art as prophecy. A paramount example is the series of paintings entitled The Scream, each of which clearly anticipate the apocalyptic horrors of the 20th and 21st centuries. But the definitions of art employed by Jung and McLuhan are elitist, which caused them to exclude entirely the vast body of evidence that is to be found outside of museums, galleries and theaters. Hence this section's focus on recovery of primitive skills such as fire-making, blacksmithing, spinning and weaving or the use of antique tools and weapons. All such activities -- and there are a great many more than are sampled here -- preserve the means to survive the death of the technologies upon which we are now dependent. Popular music likewise: in "Glimpses of a Pale Dancer" -- the photographically illustrated manuscript that was destroyed, probably by government arsonists, just as it was on the brink of major publication -- I presented an enormity of evidence the folk-music renaissance of the 1950s provided the aesthetic momentum of the 1960s Counterculture, especially the revolution against patriarchy implicit in the earliest aspects of Second-Wave Feminism, Environmentalism and the Back-to-the-Land Movement. Indeed the poet/musician Lisa Thiel has since composed what could be construed as an entire post-apocalyptic liturgy in celebration of the resurrected Goddess. Nor do I think it mere coincidence Robert Graves wrote the first draft of his revolutionary recovery of our species' long suppressed pre-patriarchal mythology, The White Goddess, in 1944 -- literally just as the Atomic Age was dawning. The survival instinct apparent in such examples -- as if (often without conscious intent) we are already preparing for a world without today's technology -- convinces me some humans will survive, no matter what madness our masters inflict on Nature and ourselves.
(With thanks to Tigerlille1 for some of the above links.)
LB/25 February-15 March 2019
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Government Lockout: Neoliberal Moral Imbecility Wins Again
Putin Regime Reanimates Tsarist Russia's Theocratic Hatred of Jews;
Anti-Semitic Film Trotsky Encourages New Pogroms Much as T/P
Regime Encourages New Plague of Racist, Sexist Violence (See Below)
TO UNDERSTAND WHY the Neoliberals are murdering us and raping our Mother Earth to death -- and why the present government shut-down could become their deadliest short-term victory yet -- it is necessary to first acknowledge just how bottomlessly evil Neoliberalism truly is.
And to do that it is necessary to actually read a few treatises on Capitalist economics.
However I must confess this is a chore which for me is most often tantamount to suffocating myself in a bottomless miasma of boredom. Economics in the United States -- and probably
Important note: news reports formerly published weekly in Dispatches are now published daily on the Facebook page of the Tacoma (Harry Bridges) Chapter of the Communist Labor Party. Most are stories suppressed or downplayed by the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine (MMPM), the world's first private, for-profit version of Nazi Germany's Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Therefore please check this page at least once per day for vital information. Thank you.
everywhere else in the Capitalist domain -- is taught like old-time parochial school catechism, a no-discussion/no-questions/rote-recitation-of-greed-worshiping-shibboleths. And it was that way decades before the triumph of Neoliberalism.
But because journalistic intuition recognizes the present, seemingly irreversible government shutdown as the newest and potentially most vicious fulfillment of the Neoliberals' determination to "shrink (government) down to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub" -- I spent all of Saturday struggling through the numbing turgidity of economic papers until at last I found five essays on Neoliberalism sufficiently definitive to help us understand just how ruinously our overlords are fucking us and how they intend to profit by our suffering.
The first essay, of British origin, defines Neoliberalism by its consequences:
Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that "the market" delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.
Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions, that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counter-productive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve...
In a world governed by competition, those who fall behind become defined and self-defined as losers.
The second essay rather thought-provokingly tells us what Neoliberalism is not:
What we are confronted by now is not the threat of fascism but the long march of neoliberalism that began in the 1970s with the overthrow of Salvador Allende. Chile became a testing ground for the economic ideas of Milton Friedman, which soon became enshrined in both the USA under Reagan and Great Britain under Margaret Thatcher. After them, they continued to be carried aloft by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. The goal of neoliberal economics is to extirpate all of the gains made in the 20th century under social democratic or liberal governments such as social security or unemployment insurance...It has nothing to do with fascism and until we get that figured out, we will be next to useless careening from one antifa adventure to another.
The third defines Neoliberalism by its ever-more-murderous moral imbecility:
Neoliberalism is a vicious but cunning form of capitalism. And like all varieties of capitalism, it rests on a foundation of white supremacy. Neoliberalism's goals are not merely privatization and the decimation of unions and the social safety net. It also seeks to manage the social order and ensure the continued political dominance of the ruling class by absorbing social threats. Sisters and brothers, your opposition to racist state terror is a major threat to the normal functioning (and thus the hegemony) of the neoliberal regime. To neutralize this threat and destabilize the most rebellious segments of the population, the corporate power structure aggressively propagates certain false assumptions among the public.
The fourth defines Neoliberalism by its methodical destruction of U.S. public education:
(N)eoliberalism... (replaces) the state with the market as a way to coordinate the economy...human relationships are forced to conform to an ideal of economic competition. The individual is transformed from a citizen into an independent economic actor... (by) massive tax cuts for the rich, the destruction of trade unions, a growing inequality of wealth, deregulation, privatization, unemployment and the decline of public services — with the exception of prisons and the military-industrial complex.
One aspect of...neoliberalism was to reshape the population's understanding of the purpose of public institutions, such as schools and universities, to fit the corporate model...
The Powell memo's plan was to: a) defund public higher education; b) then "save" the universities with ideologically focused corporate funding friendly to "free enterprise;" c) turn universities into corporations; and d) turn the students into consumers who became educated labor products. See also the update here.
The fifth and last essay tells us why the Neoliberals moved so swiftly to destroy Occupy:
Beneath the officially stated reasons for the often vicious and over-the-top, military-style municipal assaults on and break ups of Occupy's camps lay a cold reality: city officials and police are beholden to overlapping metropolitan financial, corporate, and real estate elites, that is, to members, allies, and servants of the upper 1 percent that Occupy has with no small reason identified as the primary threat to public health, safety and democracy in the U.S. and the world. The masters and their metropolitan servants do not like...high profile symbols of how much their system has failed the American people (modern day "Obamavilles" that hark back to the ignominious "Hoovervilles" of the early Great Depression) or vibrant gatherings of energized people who seem to threaten to develop a life and culture beyond the wage- and salary- (and debt- and time-) slavery that is expected of the populace under the rule of capital...and...the longstanding corporate neoliberal agenda that serves and protects "the One Percent" -- the top hundredth of disproportionately Caucasian corporate and financial masters who own more than a third of the nation's wealth and a larger share of its elected officials...
Note particularly the second of the above-linked essays. Please study it carefully and thoughtfully. Neoliberalism is not the same as fascism or Nazism; let us not be so blinded by fascist and Nazi atrocities to overlook the fact each dramatically improved their national infrastructures and by so doing provided millions of jobs to formerly unemployed workers.
In stark contrast, Neoliberalism does just the opposite. It unabashedly robs us and otherwise exploits us for no purpose beyond the fulfillment of our masters' unprecedentedly obscene and most likely terminal greed.
Neoliberalism, therefore, is best understood as a universal, government-enforced ethos of moral imbecility: Ayn Rand economics imposed on us with Ted Bundy savagery, obviously with the intent of reducing us all, via the Stockholm Syndrome, to the same serial-killer, snake-eat-crocodile sociopathy that defines our overlords.
(Yes, I am well aware the vast majority of my Marxian comrades regard the atrocities of Neoliberalism as "structural" and thus rebuke me for focusing on moral imbecility as Neoliberalism's ultimate origin. But in this instance I am compelled to reject their assertions as yet another variant of the always absurd chicken-or-egg argument. The fact remains -- proven beyond debate by the apocalyptic state of our world -- that just as one cannot become a Jeffrey Dahmer without first embracing moral imbecility, neither can one become a Neoliberal without first possessing the same anti-humanitarian mindset that defines serial killers.)
For two more recently exposed examples of Neoliberalism's atrocities -- these reported by the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine in its sudden effort to regain a bit of its whored-away credibility and perhaps thereby reinforce the dwindling delusion of "American democracy" -- go here and here.
TECHNICALLY SPEAKING THE government shutdown is actually two Neoliberal coups simultaneously.
It is a lockout -- which is what happens when the boss shuts us out and denies us our paychecks in the hope the resultant devastation will make us more submissive to ever-intensifying tyrannies.
But for those of us who are required to work without pay lest we be punished for withholding our labor, it is unapologetic enslavement.
And our masters' defiantly bipartisan refusal to end the shutdown or even ameliorate its steadily worsening consequences proves they applaud the psychological havoc they are already inflicting. No doubt they believe it will "put us in our places" and shrink our growing rebelliousness into yet another episode of craven submission.
OBVIOUSLY THERE ARE at least three reasons reason the Neoliberals want to drown government in a bathtub.
One is that our overlords recognize the U.S. government -- for all its innumerable failings and deliberately genocidal atrocities -- has sometimes in the past, as in the Supreme Court's decisions on Brown v. Board of Education or Roe v. Wade, managed to be the court of last resort for us, We the People, members of the Empire's ever-more-savagely oppressed 99 Percent.
And that protective function -- defending any of us against Capitalist atrocities -- could not be allowed in a genuinely Neoliberal nation. Hence the present-day Robber Court, which will never again allow the Constitution to obstruct white supremacy or misogyny or unlimited profiteering. Hence too the ongoing, eventually total destruction of the remnants of the socioeconomic safety net -- a long-range project given a huge boost by the lockout and its attendant subjugation and enslavement.
The second reason is that the government's function as the empire's primary denier of necessities for survival engenders precisely the heartfelt intensity of hatred, contempt and distrust of government and its bureaucrats that forever kills any widespread possibility of socialist revolution. Socialism is government -- and Neoliberalism's eternal uglification of government ensures its popular repugnance.
Reason three is the seldom-publicly expressed but nevertheless obvious Capitalist belief that corporate cabals are far more efficient than governments at reducing targeted populations to the modern forms of serfdom and slavery and -- when we are declared surplus -- to exterminating us without the embarrassment of death camps.
The consensus in every Capitalist boardroom on this planet is that government's only "legitimate" function is that of a goon squad, violently crushing resistance whenever it threatens to boil over into outright rebellion.
Let us therefore hope -- and if we are so inclined, fervently pray -- that the fully privatized, corporate-owned, for-profit Neoliberal future foreseen by so many of today's science fiction writers is a product of their loyalty to their corporate benefactors rather than of the prophetic function of art.
I THOUGHT THIS piece was finished until journalistic intuition again reared its oft-oracular head and asked if the known victims of our 11 years of political murder -- President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Senator Robert Francis Kennedy, Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, William Schroeder, Phillip Lafayette Gibbs, James Earl Green and Karen Silkwood -- were each slain to ensure Neoliberalism never again has any effective opposition.
Following this hunch with a 12-hour exploration of the Internet -- thank you, Muse -- I found many hints others were reaching similar conclusions. Here is but one example:
(N)eoliberalism helped foreign bodies gain access to these resources and sell them abroad without reinvesting in the country where they were extracted. Understanding this chain of events that started with the JFK assassination helps us answer an important question about today's world order.
But no one dared say it so bluntly as I say it now: that in the imperial homeland, as later in U.S. Puppet Pinochet's Chile, murder was the primary tool used to to clear the way for the imposition of Neoliberal tyranny.
Actually -- something I know both as a historian and as a former U.S. soldier -- such atrocities are nothing more than standard post-conquest military tactics: kill any potential leaders of resistance who cannot be co-opted or bought off and publicly gun down at least some of their followers to underscore the message that resistance is not only futile but suicidal.
To paraphrase Malcolm X, thus the predators of Operation Paperclip and the Gehlen Organization come home from Lidice to roost -- and feed.
Which at least circumstantially links all these seemingly unconnected deaths -- the victims ranging from a president who was presumably the most powerful and therefore well-protected man in the world to a high-school student slain on his way home from a part-time job or a union member murdered in retaliation for her activism -- by at long last assembling them into a familiar pattern that now in retrospect seems both Occam's-Razor obvious and therefore undeniable.
Such is the utterly conscience-less Evil by which We the People are confronted.
Meanwhile Post-Soviet Russia Re-Embraces Its Own Brand of Violent Bigotry
RUSSIAN TELEVISION MARKED the hundredth anniversary of the October Revolution with the broadcast of an eight-part television serial titled Trotsky. Quoth its most harshy outspoken reviewers:
The series is an exhibition of the political, intellectual and cultural depravity of all those involved...No excuses can be made for anyone...who participated in this mixture of lies, pornography, anti-communism and blatant anti-Semitism.
(T)he Putin regime...openly promoted this film and welcomed its broadcast on Kanal Pervyi (the most prominent TV channel) as an official event...
Joshua Rubenstein, author of the 2011 biography Leon Trotsky, said..."I wonder what their intention is by putting an explicitly Jewish figure like Trotsky at the center of the story...If they're saying that Trotsky was behind the execution of the Tsar [as the film suggests], that's simply not true. Lenin and Sverdlov executed the Tsar… If they're saying it was Trotsky, then I really question their motives because this is a very sensitive point. … Trotsky always wanted to bring the Tsar to trial and serve as a prosecutor...The Tsar is an honored figure by the Russian Orthodox Church—to say that a Jew was behind his execution is a very incendiary accusation." (Emphasis added.)
Comment: A notable U.S. scientist for whom I did a bit of journalistic work during his final years -- he was a PhD biologist whose mother had escaped from Tsarist Russia in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1905 -- told me she had repeatedly frightened him and his brother by describing in detail the pogroms she had witnessed.
The word is Russian; it means "to wreak havoc."
But his mother's most horrifying disclosure, he said, was that the Cossacks' favorite method of killing Jewish infants and toddlers was to anally impale them on picket fences and then bet amongst themselves on how long the tiny victims might remain conscious in writhing, shrieking, convulsing agony.
Significantly, the woman's two sons were each born in the U.S. after she herself had become a naturalized citizen and married an also-naturalized immigrant from Switzerland.
But while the boys were preschoolers, she often dressed them as Cossacks -- I have seen the photographs -- presumably to acquaint them with their Russian heritage.
How Democrats Intend to Suppress the Sanders Campaign
National polling shows that the U.S. public strongly favors bold policy proposals that Sanders has been championing for a long time. On issues ranging from climate change to Medicare for All to tuition-free public college to Wall Street power, the party's base has been moving leftward, largely propelled by an upsurge of engagement from progressive young people. This momentum is a threat to the forces accustomed to dominating the Democratic Party. Additional reportage here.
Comment: I doubt the Democratic (sic) Party and its Neoliberal owners will ever let Sanders be anything more than yet another Barack the Betrayer (and probably never more than a political decoy). But such reports are nevertheless significant for what they tell us about the terminal oppressiveness of the United States and its masters.
Vengeful Republicans Kill Minimum Wage Hikes, Voter-Rights Expansions
Lame duck sessions of Republican-controlled state legislatures in Michigan and Wisconsin have passed dozens of bills overturning voter decisions in the November 6 election. In both states, Republican state administrations were swept out of office—narrowly in Wisconsin, by a wide margin in Michigan—but the state legislatures remain under Republican control.
While the most publicized actions have been politically motivated slaps at incoming Democratic governors in the two states, the most substantive and reactionary actions have been to effectively reverse efforts to raise the minimum wage and expand voting rights in the two states.
NYC Steam Plant Explosion Looks Like Imagined Onset of Alien Invasion
Though it immediately evoked images of "an alien invasion" or the eerie opening scene of a "monster movie," the explosion that briefly turned New York City's skyline bright blue late Thursday night was actually something rather more conventional, but still cause for serious alarm and action: an electrical blast at one of New York's dirtiest power plants. (With scary photograph of the startling light show).
Texas Persecutes Teacher-of-the-Year for Lesbianism
A former Texas teacher of the year, who has been on paid administrative leave since September after parents complained she was pushing a "homosexual agenda," is suing the school district for discrimination.
According to the federal lawsuit, Stacy Bailey believes the Mansfield Independent School District put her on paid administrative leave, then offered to transfer her to a secondary school, because she is gay.
Was Friday's South Sound 911 Outage Part of Much Larger Cyber Attack?
South Sound 911, the emergency service provider for Tacoma, was nonfunctional for a time Friday (28 December) as a result of circumstances that remain undisclosed.
Nevertheless, maximum kudos to the 911 operators, who notified by telephone the literally tens of thousands of us affected by the outage, provided us an alternative phone number to access emergency services and then, a few hours later, phoned us to announce the service was restored and asked us to please confirm receipt of the restoration message by pressing the number "1" on our telephonic keypads.
I can't imagine a larger city being so considerate of its population, so once again I am grateful for where I live and for the social services we Tacomans have thus far managed to save from Neoliberal theft and cancellation.
Other simultaneous computer failures -- including online access to the bank that holds my account -- leave me wondering if the South Sound 911 outage was yet another aspect of the much larger cyber-attack that shut down 11 major U.S. newspapers.
Ralph Nader on Why We Desperately Need Canadian-Style Healthcare
Costly complexity is baked into Obamacare. No health insurance system is without problems but Canadian-style single-payer— full Medicare for all— is simple, affordable, comprehensive and universal...
Below (in the linked report) please find 25 ways the Canadian health care system is better than the chaotic U.S. system.
Replace it with the much more efficient Medicare-for-all: everybody in, nobody out, free choice of doctor and hospital. It will produce far less anxiety, dread, and fear.
Eight LGBTQ Struggles the Mainstream Media Refused to Cover
If anything, 2018 showed that LGBTQ liberation is a long, drawn-out process that's going to take much more than policy change and a narrow focus on one particular identity. The many queer and trans people who organized around LGBTQ issues over the past year also worked to curb capitalism, end deportations and challenge police violence — issues that affect marginalized people everywhere. Here are (the) eight battles...
How New Jersey's Bergen County Ends Chronic Homelessness
In order to receive emergency assistance an applicant must provide proof that no one in their family is declaring them a dependent on their tax forms. Many young homeless are homeless because they are estranged from their families and not on speaking terms. Applicants for emergency housing assistance must also prove that they are not eligible for unemployment benefits. If you are, and even if those benefits don't amount to enough to pay rent and live on, you are nevertheless turned down for emergency assistance.
Social services personnel too often act as though their job is to find obstacles to providing housing rather than trying to make their services readily available...
If you are thinking that perhaps Bergan County can achieve this because of its small size, monotone demographics and remote location you could not be more wrong. Bergan County is located directly across the Hudson River from Manhattan, it is the most populous county in New Jersey (948,406); and its population is as diverse economically and racially as any similar American urban center...
Julia Orlando is willing and eager to assist others in ending homelessness in the communities where they live. She is available for consultations, conference calls and one-on-one meetings. Reach out to her at the Bergen County, Housing, Health and Human Services Center, 120 S. River Street, Hackensack, NJ 07601. 201-336-6476 (w).
And in Closing, a Delightful Story about the Crickets Who Came for Christmas
Besides my wife, Briana, and I, our house is home to 5-year-old twins, a 1-year-old, three large cats, one beagle-basset mix and one lizard. There was only one place where I thought I could put the cricket box without it getting overturned or split open by a child or an animal: the bathroom adjacent to our kitchen. I put the crickets in the cabinet above the toilet and went back to work. For about 20 minutes, everything was quiet.
Just as I was about to file my story, I heard Briana, in the kitchen, utter the following words: "Where do these crickets keep coming from?"
In the name of the Goddess and all benevolent gods whether real or symbolic, a better 2019 to everyone!
LB/30 December 2018
Posted at 01:53 AM in Antifa, Austerity as Genocide , Capitalism: Apocalyptic Threat of, Censorship, ChristoNazism, Nazism, Facism, Current Affairs, Environmental crisis, Feminism, Film, Healthcare as a right not a privilege, History, Humanitarianism, Identity Politics, LGBTQ , Marxism, socialism, Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Moral imbecility, Mother Earth, Photography, Poor People, Religion, Science, Spirituality, Television, Weblogs, White Supremacy | Permalink | Comments (0)
Democratic (sic) Party Kills All Hope of Progressive Recapture
New Hillaryite Rule Locks Out Sanders, Any Others the DNC Won't Ok as Real Democrats, Thus Formalizing the Party's Hatred of Reformers
'"We just came off a devastating presidential loss in 2016. It would seem to me the actual impetus would be to expand the Democratic Party. I just for the life of me don't see any motivation for this beyond personal spite,' Mark Longabaugh, a senior adviser to Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign, told Yahoo News.'I scratch my head and ask why they would want to make the party more narrow and more exclusive.' Other progressives echoed Longabaugh's critique of the new rule on social media, with many noting that such restrictions could demobilize large constituencies that are disaffected with both major political parties...'Democrats don't want Bernie-Most-Popular-Politician-In-America-Sanders running for President, but they're perfectly fine with Mark-Raise-The-Social-Security-Retirement-Age-Warner, because although he commonly votes with Republicans, he IDs as a Democrat...'''
See also: "The Democratic National Committee's rules and bylaws committee adopted a new rule on Friday that would prevent outsiders like Bernie Sanders from seeking the party's nomination in the 2020 presidential race. The move seems to be the latest salvo in the ongoing jockeying over the party's future that emerged following the...bitter primary battle between Hillary Clinton and Sanders in 2016... the move could only have been motivated by lingering animus from the primary race between Clinton and Sanders."
Comment: despite the false pseudo-Left optimism by which these reports attempt to soften the Democratic (sic) National Committee's terminal blow to any rational hope for a progressive takeover of the party, by this new rule the DNC awards itself the absolute power to determine who is and is not a real Democrat. The rule therefore locks in ideological cement overshoes the party's suicidal, already thoroughly documented malice toward Sanders. It also radically expands the party's hateful efforts to exclude all would-be reformers, a brazenly pro-Republican purge exemplified by its maliciously triumphant slandering of Laura Moser. Thus once again we are taught our only possible exit from JesuNazi theocracy is the formation of a genuinely socialist -- and genuinely revolutionary -- party of the Working Class. Indeed the Democrats' fuck-you message to all of us in the 99 Percent was never clearer -- so unmistakable (and such an unmistakable endorsement of Capitalist malevolence) -- even those in the deepest depths of denial can no longer reject it.
And Here is Always Insightful Paul Street to Tell Us Why the Democrats So Ruled
"The reigning corporate Democrats would rather lose to the right, even to a proto-fascistic white nationalist and eco-exterminist right, than lose to the left, even to a mildly progressive social democratic left within their own party."
Comment: Street's essay -- though it is entirely too pseudo-Leftish for my taste -- was written before approval of the DNC's rule to exclude progressive reformers, but it explains perfectly why the rule was enacted and -- most importantly -- why those of us on the Real Left should forever abandon any (1930s/Stalinist) notion of infiltrating the Democratic (sic) Party and attempting to make it the mechanism of our national redemption.
Additional late-night insight: today's Democratic (sic) Party -- in an exceptionally grotesque example of Orwelliano-Machiavellian deception proven by its ever-more-fawning obedience to its Capitalist masters -- is now the Republican Party's most colossally ambitious false-flag operation ever. It positions the Democrats as a Fifth Column to bolster by discouragement the more obvious Republican effort to shrink voter turnout even as the illusion of two parties helps perpetuate the apocalyptic Big Lie of "American democracy." (Please remember where you read this hypothesis first: on Dispatches' weekend update, 9 June 2018.)
T/P Regime Resumes Obama's Anti-First Amendment War on Journalists
"Now we know that the Justice Department secretly seized the phone and email records of Ali Watkins, a New York Times reporter, in a leak investigation involving a former Senate staffer. It is the first time the Trump administration is known to have engaged in such an aggressive tactic against a reporter, and it is exactly the kind of press surveillance at which the Obama administration excelled. For years, conservatives attacked Obama for using such tactics to spy on reporters. Of course, there was no outcry from the right on Friday over Trump's willingness to do the same thing."
Why We Must "Beware the Democrats and Their Good Billionaires"
"(Starbucks) Executive Chairman Howard Schultz...(fashioned) for himself a shining reputation as a moral capitalist... As a result, he's become that favored species of Democratic Party hacks: the Good Billionaire...Schultz has political ambitions, perhaps presidential ones. He almost certainly would have been Hillary Clinton's secretary of labor...And let's be honest:The psychopathic acquisitiveness required to actively hoard $3 billion is a close relative of the titanic self-regard and absolute megalomania that drive most presidential candidates...On CNBC, Schultz worried that the Democratic Party has drifted too far to the left...and identified the national debt as the great crisis of our time...There you have it..(worsening) austerity, but with a few rainbow flags and diversity seminars. America's shining, post-Trumpian future."
G7 Summit Reveals Europe's Intensifying Hostility to U.S. JesuNazi Imperialism
"This weekend's summit of the G7 is the most contentious meeting in the body's 43-year history. It has revealed deep and growing fissures between the United States and its European allies...Looming over the summit is Trump's June 1 decision to impose sweeping tariffs of up to 25 percent on steel and aluminum imports from the EU and other countries...At the same time, Trump has opened the prospect of cooling off the United States' two other major geopolitical conflict areas: with North Korea, including a US-North Korean summit scheduled in Singapore immediately after the conclusion of the G7, and with Russia, to which Trump held out the prospect of regaining membership in the G7 after it was ejected in 2014...However, as with the (Nazi) fractured geopolitics of the 1930s, the 'deals' offered by Trump to one or another country are merely the prelude to military conflict. War is on the horizon, though it is not yet clear between whom."
Poll Shows Seattle Citizenry's Growing Contempt and Hatred of Homeless People
"Seattle residents are not only deeply dissatisfied with how the Seattle City Council has addressed homelessness, but also less willing than they used to be to sign off on new taxes to address the problem, according to a poll of 800 likely voters conducted in March that Crosscut has obtained...Those familiar with the results, who requested anonymity to discuss private polling, were stunned: It's the first time anyone can recall the usually generous Seattle voters being overwhelmingly skeptical of additional taxation...a shift from just 18 months prior, when voters responded more positively to the idea of increasing spending on homelessness..."
See also: "The campaign to repeal the recently approved (housing-for-homeless-people) tax has gathered more than 20,000 valid signatures...more than what the campaign needs to put a referendum on the ballot next fall, leaving it to voters to decide whether to keep or repeal the tax."
Comment: having had the profound misfortune to have resided in Seattle from 1972 through 1976, I know too well the malicious hypocrisy of the majority of its white residents. Thanks to the courageousness of the late Walter Crowley, I also know of the breathtaking racism, bourgeois socioeconomic bigotry and anti-Jewish malice exposed by the still-officially-secret polling that explained the self-destructive defeat of the Forward Thrust subway proposal as precipitated not as much by the so-called Boeing Bust as by the white Seattleites' decision to listen to their Inner Fascists. (Walter told me of the poll and its results during an otherwise-social late-1970s J&M Cafe conversation that for a moment became the deepest of what in journalism is known as "deep background" briefing. Thus I promised him I would never write about it as long as he was alive, but now that he is dead [and sorely missed], there is no remaining reason for me to keep silent about his disclosures.) Hence given how the old, clandestine poll results inadvertently predict the new poll's results, I would judge Seattle's alleged change of heart toward homeless people to be nothing more than a 21st Century version of the "we-don'-wanna-be-another-Jew-York/yeah-we're-closet-Nazis-deal-with-it-fuck-you" exclamation like the ones of 1968 and 1970, albeit without the never-more-than-whispered "Zieg Heil" asserted quite so loudly.
How Elite Colleges Protect Their Young Aristocrats from Police-State Savagery
"American police...(are) militarized...occupying forces for America's poor neighborhoods, not unlike the American military abroad. If one lives in America and is poor, especially black and poor, the police are your oppressor, not your protector...Encountering a police officer, let alone confronting one for their injustice, is a dangerous activity for many in this country. The poor have been abandoned by our government yet they are arrested for petty and necessary crimes done to survive. Once in the system it is even harder to make a legal living and people have no choice but to turn to alternative methods of survival. The police in this country consistently use a call to them as an excuse to hit the victim with a crime of their own. The right to protest is considered a criminal offense, as evidenced by Standing Rock and the protests against President Trump. ICE is becoming an increasingly insidious force that obtains people in extraordinarily inhumane conditions.On the other hand, you have elite college campuses that aim to protect their students of crimes at all costs."
New Evidence in RFK Murder Prompts Demands for Reopening Case
"Robert Kennedy was shot on June 5 and died June 6, 1968, fifty years ago today. A new examination of evidence is forcing human rights organizations -- including the (Organization of American States) -- to consider probing the case."
See also: "We now live in a country that would be unrecognizable to anyone who died prior to 1968."
The Empire Escalates Its Efforts to Drag Assange into a Death Chamber
"One day after Ecuadorian Foreign Minister María Fernanda Espinosa declared that her government would continue blocking WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange from all communications and deny him any personal visitors, she was elected president of the United Nations General Assembly...There is little doubt that the treatment of Assange...is the outcome of pressure and threats by the US and other powers. Washington is demanding Assange's head...to silence him while Washington (seeks) his extradition to stand trial on espionage charges that potentially carry the death penalty."
Millennials Favor Unions Over Corporations
"Pew Research Center has just released its annual survey on public opinion and unions in the United States. As in the last few years, the general public views the decline of organized labor negatively.... Sixty-eight percent of people aged 18-29 said they have positive views of unions, while just 46 percent of young people said the same of corporations."
Last Words (I): Eulogies for Anthony Bourdain
"Anthony Bourdain was the only major American celebrity who succeeded in depicting publicly the Palestinians as rational, caring human beings rather than as irrationally angry 'inciters' to violence. He was the anti-Bernard Lewis. Lewis smeared the world's 1.8 billion Muslims with the charge of 'Islamic Rage' (as though large swathes of humankind are angry for no reason). Bourdain said, 'The world has visited many terrible things on the Palestinians, none more shameful than robbing them of their basic humanity.'"
See also: "Anthony Bourdain, who was found dead Friday in an apparent suicide, opened his viewers' eyes to issues within and beyond the borders of the United States through food. He also championed many of the communities that affected his work in the kitchen and on screen. Whether it was global poverty, systemic racism in the United States or sexual abuse of women in the workplace, Bourdain frequently used the publicity he earned through his celebrity to draw attention to the issues affecting the people behind the food that he brought into Americans' living rooms. Here are some examples..."
With heartfelt thanks to my dear friend and comrade Brie, who in a poignantly teachable moment told me of Bourdain's significance in her own life and then opened my eyes as to his significance for the rest of our species.
And here is Brie's own tribute to him: "Anthony Bourdain taught me from a young age that food is love and a way to connect with others when language-barriers are present. It's a way to respect and honor your elders and your younger comrades too. He taught me that food is what can bring us together when we think that there is no common ground to be found. Food is also love, service, honor and much more. It's what binds us together and fuels our bodies, minds and souls for the fight we all face daily -- and I'll always treasure the ways Tony Bourdain taught me to serve my comrades and community with love, dignity and respect. For that alone I mourn the loss of a man I never had the pleasure of meeting."
Last Words (II): Cossacks Dare Verbalize what All Warriors Secretly Know
"There's something dashing and soulful about Russian folk music, especially when it originates with the Cossacks, Russia's warriors of the steppe. This is perhaps the most famous Cossack song, sung at dinners, concerts and campfires. It's a song about a love that is always just out of reach, a strange mix of longing and recklessness. Listen to it. You won't regret it." (The lyrics translated to English are here.)
LB/9 June 2018
Posted at 02:37 AM in Austerity as Genocide , Censorship, Current Affairs, Disabled People , Environmental crisis, Healthcare, History, Immigration, LGBTQ , Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Music, Poor People, Religion, Science, Seniors , Television, Visual art, Weblogs, White Supremacy | Permalink | Comments (0)
Official Protection of Violently Racist, Often Murderous Cops Shows the World the True Magnitude of U.S. Nazi-Mindedness
Federally Militarized Police Add Middle-Class Minorities to Target List
"Another day, another black man violently assaulted by five rogue police officers for the ever-increasing crime of BWB (breathing while black). This time it was NBA player Sterling Brown...It's hardly news that people of color are continually harassed, but what's been making the news lately is the frequency with which upwardly mobile, middle-class people of color are being targeted. From the two black men waiting for a friend at a Philadelphia Starbucks, to a black Yale graduate student napping in her dorm's common room, to three black women facing down seven cop cars and a helicopter as they checked out out of an Airbnb house they were renting...there is an overlooked long-lasting collateral damage to the black community's faith in the promise of the American dream and the sinister effect on their children that is much worse than that single assault."
See also: "I am speaking for Dontre Hamilton of Milwaukee, Laquan McDonald of Chicago, Stephon Clark of Sacramento, Eric Garner of New York and the list goes on...The common denominator in all of these (killings) has been racism towards the minority community...The lack of repercussions for the police officers involved in so many of these cases is...a slap in the face to the victims' families and communities."
And this: "American police shoot and kill far more people than their peers in other countries...(but) are almost never prosecuted and convicted for use of force."
Plus this: "The technology giant Amazon is providing police agencies and private intelligence contractors in the United States with facial recognition and video tracking algorithms to (intensify) mass surveillance on the population."
Comment: I posted the above material as this weekend-update's lead story because, once again, we cannot comprehend the true horror of the Empire's domestic and foreign agendas without first examining the capabilities and intentions demonstrated by its ever-expanding catalogue of atrocities.
These newest outrages -- clearly another expansion of the Empire's lifelong, 242-year history of hate-motivated, often genocidal persecution of non-whites -- are precisely what prove "American Democracy" to have never been more than a Big Lie.
What further condemns the United States -- what defines it as a nation ever-more-dictatorially ruled by a multi-generation cabal of Nazi-minded Capitalist overlords -- was first revealed in 1934 by exposure of the too-powerful-to-prosecute/too-rich-to-jail One Percenters who formulated the Bankers' Plot.
But now, 85 years later, the cabal's once-thwarted lust for the savagery of Nazi governance is methodically approaching fulfillment in the Trump/Pence Regime.
It should therefore surprise none of us that the regime's sadistic intensification of signature expressions of its hatred of non-whites -- especially the ever-more-commonplace police violence against Blacks, Hispanics and First Nations people -- is now expanding to include even those minority folk who were hitherto granted some protection by bourgeois occupations and appearance.
Significantly, this ongoing expansion of official USian hatefulness ominously parallels Hitler's step-by-step intensification of Germany's official hatred of its own doomed minorities. `
Meanwhile the ever-more-obvious JesuNazism of the Empire's rulers underscores the apocalyptic nature of their schemes for global conquest and environmental destruction, thereby redefining the Big Lie of "American Democracy" into the most potentially terminal Big Lie in all human existence.
But I have to disagree with those comrades whose focus on class warfare unfortunately blinds them to the bottomlessly sociopathic nature of the white-supremacist hatred of Blacks, Hispanics, First Nations people and Asiatics. To minimize how race hatred drives the USian Empire's domestic and foreign policy is tantamount to minimizing how hatred of Jewish, Slavic and Roma people drove the German Nazis' domestic and foreign policy. To reason that such murderous moral imbecility is the byproduct of class struggle alone is like trying to comprehend a mass murder without reference to the murderer's psychological state; it does nothing to address the hideous truth that a seemingly irremediable hatred of non-whites has become -- especially since the advent of the Abrahamic forms of patriarchy -- the defining characteristic of nearly the entire Caucasian race. In this context, the woeful inadequacy of the class-struggle-only analysis is emphatically demonstrated by how racist malice prevails even within groups and nationalities of whites who, theoretically, have long been securely affluent enough to have cleansed themselves of fear and loathing toward people of color.
Which is most assuredly not to reduce the importance of class struggle; it is instead an urgent plea to continue our examination of intersectionality -- how various forms of bigotry and hatred combine and interact synergistically, rather as if its victims are trapped in the middle of intersections and "hit by cars from many sides." As the Combahee River Collective asserted in 1977, "...Although we are in essential agreement with Marx's theory as it applied to the very specific economic relationships he analyzed, we know that his analysis must be extended further..."
This is especially true if one is to understand the unique role of hatred in the formulation of governmental policy, whether in Hitler's Third Reich or the emergent Fourth Reich of the Imperial United States.
Meanwhile Our Species Has Already Destroyed Most Earthly Life
"Humankind is revealed as simultaneously insignificant and utterly dominant in the grand scheme of life on Earth by a groundbreaking new assessment of all life on the planet. The world's 7.6 billion people represent just 0.01% of all living things, according to the study. Yet since the dawn of civilisation, humanity has caused the loss of 83% of all wild mammals and half of plants, while livestock kept by humans abounds."
When the Empire Inflicts "Regime Change," Murderous Chaos Often Results
"When the United States uses its impressive military machine to topple a tyrant...it's impossible to predict the course of the chaos that follows. Fracture a society, it seems, and the most nefarious (and well-armed) actors often rise to the top: militiamen, criminal elements, Islamists and sociopaths of various stripes...Still, Washington never seems to learn. Since October 2001, our military has been ordered to topple at least three sovereign governments—those of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya—and is theoretically seeking to overthrow another regime in Syria. Republican and Democratic presidents alike have ordered these ill-advised operations, demonstrating the striking bipartisanship of American militarism. Let us, then, take a tour of the tragic outcomes unfolding today in each of these victims of U.S.-imposed regime change."
See also: "The question is: has the Trump administration already made a decision to go to war with Iran?...several developments have come together to suggest that the rationale for using sanctions to force a re-negotiation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is cover for an eventual military assault by the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia aimed at regime change in Teheran."
And this: "...national security adviser John Bolton, the formidable chairman of the new 'war cabinet,' was never agreeable to the idea of U.S.-North Korean diplomacy."
Comment: I for one believe the murderous chaos is deliberate -- another of the many forms of genocide by which the Empire seeks to ensure Earth and all its resources remain under forever under Capitalist control.
Democrats Again Show True Colors in Votes to Enable Warmongers, Banksters
"While the world responds with alarm over President Donald Trump's...(cancellation of) diplomatic talks with North Korea scheduled for next month—(talks) which aimed to ease rising nuclear tensions—131 Democrats in the U.S. House joined with the overwhelming majority of Republicans to pass a $717 billion Pentagon spending bill that includes massive expansion of the U.S. nuclear arsenal" (emphasis added). The roll-call vote is here.
And: "Handing President Donald Trump a major legislative victory and delivering a huge gift to Wall Street banks on the very same day (these banks) reported record-shattering profits, 33 House Democrats joined nearly every Republican...in passing a deregulatory measure that independent analysts say will significantly increase the risk of another financial crisis."
Comment: two entirely predictable fuck-off-and-die betrayals of the 99 Percent by the Democratic (sic) faction of the One Capitalist Party of Two Names (OCPOTN) provide yet another illustration of how "American Democracy" is by far the most potentially deadly of all humanity's Big Lies.
Despite the fact Washington state's Puget Sound area with its five major military bases is already the most target-rich environment on this planet, Tacoma-area representatives Adam Smith and Derek Kilmer voted to sate the imperial war machine's thirst for blood money by approving the Trump/Pence Regime's bring-on-the-apocalypse budget. So did Puget Sound Democrats Suzan DelBene, Rick Larsen, and Denny Heck, all five (predictably) joining with their state's four Republican representatives.
The one Washington state Democrat with the courage to vote against the let's-make-Earth-a-bug-planet measure was Pramila Jayapal; obviously she is the only Washington representative who understands that expanding the thermonuclear capabilities of the submarines based at Bangor will not protect her beloved Evergreen State from reduction to a black-and-brown radioactive wasteland. (Disclosure: I salute and applaud Ms. Jayapal for her bravery on this war-machine budget issue, though I nevertheless emphatically oppose her schemes for forcibly disarming all civilian firearms owners. )
While Larsen was the only Washington state Democrat to also vote for unleashing Capitalism's most predatory banksters, the unspoken message of the two bills is nevertheless clear: the One Percent and its Ruling Class Vassals are now -- as a growing number of regime's former opponents forgive its premature disclosures of Capitalism's ultimate Evil -- predictably uniting behind its JesuNazi agenda.
Empire Escalates Its Campaign to Enslave Venezuela and Steal Its Petroleum
"Of particular interest to the United States is Venezuela, who is full of oil. They want the oil and anyone who doesn't give it to them is illegitimate. But there are people in Venezuela too. And they have been wonderfully resilient in response to U.S. power. This was why it was such good news that Nicolás Maduro won reelection in Venezuela."
More Genocide: Bureaucrats OK $7 Billion Cut in Children's Health Program
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) on Tuesday approved President Donald Trump's 'despicable' proposal to slash more than $7 billion from the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), which helps impoverished families provide healthcare to their kids. The approval came by way of a GAO report delivered to Congress early Tuesday. The cuts to CHIP are part of a broader plan by the Trump administration to cancel $15.3 billion in previously approved funding.
Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine Ignores Poor People's Campaign
"The Poor People's Campaign remains invisible to much of America. Corporate media have chosen to dismiss this call for a national moral revival, but the establishment will not be able to ignore the growing community that is calling for it much longer."
See also: "The Art of Resistance."
Activist Blames West Virginia's Wretchedness on "Corporate Domination"
"West Virginia has the highest rate of obesity in the country. The highest rate of smoking. The highest rate of drug overdose deaths. Why? Corporate domination of the state...(says) Stephen Smith...director of the West Virginia Healthy Kids and Family Coalition."
India's Massacre of Environmental Protestors Exemplifies Capitalism in Action
"The barbarity of social life and class relations in contemporary India were laid bare in Tuesday's police massacre of working people demanding the closure of a copper smelter that has long befouled Tuticorin, Tamil Nadu, polluting its groundwater and environs with toxic chemicals. The massacre...left 12 people dead and more than 60 others injured..."
History Shows Invasion of Russia Would Be "Military Nightmare"
"The Swedish daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) recently examined the most difficult countries in the world to invade, which include Russia, Switzerland, and New Zealand. The paper said an invasion of Russia would become a 'military nightmare' for foreign armed forces. While SvD did not define who precisely that enemy would be, our suspicions point to the countries intertwined with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)."
Can Resurrected Indian Country Today Maintain Editorial Independence?
"SCRAPPY AND RESILIENT as the population it covers, a reinvented Indian Country Today recently announced its return after a nine-month hiatus...(but) ICT's comeback brings with it concerns for the publication's editorial independence."
Despite JesuNazi Hate-Mongering, Support for Gay Marriage Rises to 67%
"Sixty-seven percent of Americans support same-sex marriage -- the highest level in Gallup's trend. In each of the past three annual polls, Gallup has recorded three-percentage point increases among Americans who say same-sex marriages should be legally valid. The current figure is up 40 percentage points from the 27 percent who supported gay marriage when Gallup first polled on the question in 1996."
Georgians Pick First-Ever Black Gubernatorial Nominee
"Stacey Abrams...became the first Black nominee for governor in Georgia by either party."
Two Petitions from UltraViolet: (Please Sign Each One)
"The Trump administration is about to literally BAN the word abortion from the doctor's office. Yes, you read that right. For clinics and hospitals that accept dollars from the Title X program--the nation's program for affordable birth control and reproductive health care--doctors, nurses, and other health care providers would be banned from providing, counseling on, or referring any patient for an abortion. Even if it was needed to protect a woman's health or save her life. Even if she asked."
"Did you know that Target, which boasts a family-friendly brand, provides employees who've just given birth just two weeks of paid leave? It's neither enough to recover from childbirth or medically advisable to keep a newborn away from her mother. This year, big companies like Starbucks, CVS Pharmacy, and Walmart caved to organized public pressure and are now allowing their employees meaningful paid time off to take care of their newborns. Combined, that's millions of people finally gaining access to essential parental leave time. If we push Target, the second largest retail employer in the United States, to follow, we can win paid family leave for hundreds of thousands more people..."
Last Words: a Flicker of Optimism in This Darkest of All Human Eras
"Thousands of teachers and students are walking out of schools, marching in the streets, and raising their hands and signs in protest against the war on education. Most recently, South Carolina has joined the wave of teachers' protests and strikes taking place across the nation. In the age of illiberal democracy and the growing fascism of the Trump administration, the unimaginable has once again become imaginable as teachers inspired and energized by a dynamic willingness to fight for their rights and the rights of their students are exercising bold expressions of political power. The power of collective resistance is being mounted in full force against a neoliberal logic that unabashedly insists that the rule of the market is more important than the needs of teachers, students, young people, the poor and those deemed disposable by those with power in our society. Teachers are tired of being relentless victims of a casino capitalism..."
Posted at 01:12 AM in Austerity as Genocide , Censorship, Current Affairs, Environmental crisis, Film, Healthcare, History, Immigration, LGBTQ , Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Music, Photography, Poor People, Religion, Science, Television, Visual art, Web/Tech, Weblogs, White Supremacy | Permalink | Comments (0)
31 Mar-5 Apr 2018: Tyrannies, Teachers, Metaphors of Change
How Soon Will Imperial Warmongering Bring on the Apocalypse?
"The countries of the West are effectively heading for war with Russia but relatively few among the public seem to know or even care...With the reckless neoconservative warmonger John Bolton now part of the Trump administration, it seems we could be hurtling towards major war much faster than previously thought...Most of the public remains blissfully ignorant of the psy-ops being directed at them through the corporate media." See also: "a twenty-first-century version of the Cold War (with dangerous new twists) has begun and hardly anyone has even noticed." And this: "Russia is the only country that has put its military forces in the way of a U.S. program of regime change—indirectly in Ukraine, where Russia would not get out of the way, and directly in Syria..." Comment: the text mentions the offshoring of production facilities -- a perfect way to move manufacturing outside the U.S., so that when the country is rendered uninhabitable by retaliatory Russian and Chinese thermonuclear bombs, the Capitalists' losses will be minimal. And of course We the Surplus People will all be dead or dying. Not to worry, folks; its just Ayn Rand moral imbecility in action, with a big boost from apocalyptic JesuNazism as well.
Is Blaming Russia for Skripal Poisoning a Warmongers' Hoax?
"It is now beyond any reasonable doubt that the claims of the Conservative government of Theresa May charging Russia with responsibility for the poisoning of the Skripals are fabrications." See also: Scientists at the U.K.'s Porton Down military laboratory have not identified Russia as the source of the nerve agent used in the alleged attempted assassination of former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia...(the) admission confirms that the British establishment is guilty of a criminal hoax, surpassing even that of the dodgy "intelligence" dossier manufactured to justify the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003...(Meanwhile) the U.S. and British media have been almost silent on (this development)." And this: "The United Kingdom unknowingly admitted that its government has been lying..."
Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine Hides Israeli Atrocities
"Major American media outlets, led by the New York Times, are treating the Israeli military's mass killing and wounding of unarmed, peaceful Palestinian protesters in Gaza as a non-event." See also: "... you will search in vain for a statement condemning this or the previous Israeli massacres in Gaza from the Congressional Black Caucus or for the most part, its individual members."
Democrats Signal Tacit Approval of Trump's Anti-Immigrant Pogrom
"Without any opposition from the Democratic Party and little attention in the corporate media, President Donald Trump and his fascist advisors are quietly carrying out the most dramatic rightwing shift in US immigration policy in a century. They are laying the basis for mass roundups and the brutalization of hundreds of thousands of immigrants in an expanding network of internment camps nationwide."
Martial Law on the U.S. Borders -- and Maybe in Legal Pot States Too?
"President Donald Trump's announcement...that the government will deploy the military to the US-Mexico border is a threat to the safety of undocumented immigrants and a fundamental attack on the democratic rights of the entire population...the deployment of the military on U.S. soil to arrest or deter immigrants raises the specter of martial law..." Update 5 April: "Should President Donald Trump follow through on his plan to deploy the National Guard to the southern border to deter migration from Mexico and Central America, he won't be able to count on Oregon's 5,800 soldiers." Comment: this Trump/Pence Regime ploy also mobilizes troops that could be used for Nazi-sized mass arrests, the regime's only option if it is to terminate legal marijuana.
Trump's Expanding Propaganda Machine Is Bill Clinton's Brainchild
"...the engine of Donald Trump's propaganda machine was constructed by none other than Bill Clinton. In 1996, Clinton passed the Telecommunications Act...allowing a single entity to own as much as 35 percent of market share...(if) the far-right Sinclair Broadcasting Group...is successful in its acquisition of the Tribune Media Company, that number could climb to 72 percent." See also: "Sinclair has already forced its stations to air commentary...described by more than one observer as 'Orwellian'...(that) makes explicit the corporation's efforts to undermine trust in the press." Comment: Seattle's KOMO, cited in the linked text, is a Sinclair property.
Supreme Court Says It's OK for Cops to Gun Down Innocents
"The US Supreme Court established an interpretation of qualified immunity this week that effectively grants police legal impunity to use lethal force at will." See also: "The Supreme Court...shielded a police officer from being sued for shooting an Arizona woman...four times outside her home because she was seen carrying a large knife...Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in dissent the victim did not threaten the police or a friend who was standing nearby."
The Race Hatred That Killed Stephon Clark Defines the United States
"Stephon Clark died as did black people who died at the hands of Ku Klux Klan raiders during the Reconstruction era, as did thousands of blacks lynched over the course of decades, as did so many killed in dozens of massacres carried out by white people between the Civil War and the 1920s." See also: "on the police murder of Stephon Clark and the reverberations of this barbaric act in the city and around the country." Comment: emphatically recommended reading.
At Least Seven States Intend to Felonize Environmental Activism
"Efforts to prosecute environmental activists with felony or eco-terrorism charges...are coming to a head in Louisiana and Minnesota, where newly introduced bills seek to make it a felony to plan to trespass, damage, or disrupt pipeline operations — even if the individuals didn't physically participate or go through with the action. See also: "in the wake of the massive protest movement at Standing Rock...at least seven states have introduced or passed (such) legislation."
Michigan City Maliciously Multiplies Misery of Its Poison Water Victims
"The 'fix' for Flint (Michigan) promised by politicians never came, instead residents face a final indignity – residents' water supply is being cut off for unpaid bills for water that made them sick." See also: "More than 17,000 Detroit households face having their water turned off as the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) resumes mass water service shutoffs to city homes this month." Comment: two more examples of moral imbecility -- i.e., Capitalism -- in genocidal action.
Lest We Forget: MLK Was Slain for Denouncing War and Capitalism
"April 4 mark(ed) the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had gone to support the struggle of African-American sanitation workers for decent wages and human dignity." See also Cornel West: "In this brief celebratory moment of King's life and death we should be highly suspicious of those who sing his praises yet refuse to pay the cost of embodying King's strong indictment of the US empire, capitalism and racism in their own lives." And this: "Because he took on those...powerful economic forces that dominated politics in this land, they killed him." Plus this corrective history from Black Agenda Report: "All 100 of Columbus (Georgia) Black churches shut their doors on Dr. King, rejecting any outside interference in their long accommodation with white supremacy."
Will the Plutocrats Restore 21-Year-Old Voting Age to Stifle Protests?
"The result (of ongoing student protests) may be sweeping changes to legislation in various states...(not) gun laws...but rather laws that will make it more difficult for young Americans to vote." Comment: I frankly would not be surprised to see an effort to raise the voting age back to 21. Moreover — given the many polls that document younger voters' growing preference for socialism and hostility to capitalism — I suspect the corporate Democrats will be eager collaborators with the Republicans. Nor would I be surprised were the corporate parties to collaborate on presenting younger voters with a genuine devil's bargain: raising the purchase age for all firearms to 21 as a trade-off for restoration of the higher voter-eligibility age.
The "One Nation Under God" Declares War on Sex Workers
"With Congress passing the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, many sex workers are worried they'll be forced to go back on the streets...SESTA has already begun to (criminalize) ways in which sex workers communicate online: shared resources, communal bad date lists, and sex worker-only threads." Comment: Christian theocracy in action. But how many times must that be said before we the people get our heads out of our arses and wake up to the fact we're the ones being nailed to crosses?
Facebook Begrudgingly Admits Near 100% Exposure to Data Thieves
"Buried in Facebook's announcement that Cambridge Analytica had improperly gathered data from up to 87 million users—rather than the previously reported 50 million—was the stunning admission that 'malicious actors' exploited the social networking site's search features to collection information from 'most' of its 2 billion users. Comment: when the hell are we going to wake up to the fact the primary purpose of social media -- indeed of the entire Internet -- is to facilitate total surveillance by the secret police and all the other definitively hostile agencies that serve our Capitalist overlords? Stop and think: given what we know of the moral imbecility and infinite malevolence of Capitalism and Capitalist governance, why else would the Internet and any of its social-media spinoffs ever have been invented, much less opened to public access?
Aggressive Teenage Misogyny Making British Schools Unsafe for Females
"...sexual harassment has been 'normalised' in adolescent culture... (with the result that) schools are no longer safe for girls... 'upskirting' - where photographs are taken up girls' skirts without their knowledge - has led to 'girls wearing shorts under their skirts so that [boys] are not going to find anything.'"
McDonald's Shafts Workers and Taxpayers, Withholds Promised Pay Hike
"McDonald's failure to deliver on wage increase promises...costs taxpayers roughly $1.2 billion because of the employees' dependence on social safety net programs like food stamps and Medicaid to help cover costs that their wages cannot." See also: "...settlement of a landmark case against McDonald's at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) deals a blow to Fight for $15's union ambitions, widening the chasm between the campaign's astonishingly successful wage demand and its faltering union aspirations."
The Genocidal Abandonment of Puerto Rico Claims Another Victim
"Months later, without running power or water, Hector Ramon Ortiz's business remained closed. He struggled to reopen, and failed, every week...Ortiz is one of 236 Puerto Ricans who killed themselves in 2017... His death also belongs to a growing number of suicides on the island that increased by 55 percent in the last four months of 2017 following Hurricane Maria, compared to the same period in 2016."
Hedges Reveals How Guaranteed Annual Income is Capitalist Scam
"A number of the reigning oligarchs...are calling for a guaranteed basic income...But behind this is the stark awareness, especially in Silicon Valley, that the world these oligarchs have helped create is so lopsided that future consumers, plagued by job insecurity, substandard wages, automation and crippling debt peonage, will (otherwise) be unable to pay for the products and services offered by the big corporations."
***** ***** *****
Striking Teachers Hope to End Austerity's War on Public Schools, Students
"The (teachers') rebellion has caused The New York Times to worriedly comment about a 'wildfire' of strikes by teachers who are using social media to 'organize and act outside the usual parameters of traditional unionism.'" See also: "Teachers in the US and internationally are demanding the restoration of (funds cut) over the last decade and an end to the corporate-driven campaign to privatize and dismantle public education." And this: "...striking teachers...are taking a stand not only about their own financial situation, but also about the conditions of their students, their schools, and their communities."
Last word: Metaphors as Mechanisms of Transformation
"Emerging psychological research tells us that something as simple as a single metaphor can have consequences for how we think. They can also be powerful tools in the hands of those looking to shape our opinions." Comment: vital information, especially as a sequel to George Orwell's groundbreaking essay "Politics and the English Language."
LB/5 April 2018
Posted at 10:11 PM in Austerity as Genocide , Censorship, Current Affairs, Healthcare, History, Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Poor People, Religion, Science, Television, Web/Tech, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (0)
Weekend Update 11/3/18: Is a General Strike in Our Future?
Growing 99% Militance Terrifies the 1% and Its Ruling Class Vassals
(Important Notice: given the reawakening of U.S. Working Class consciousness and the increasing violence of the JesuNazi/fascist response, I am once again going to attempt publishing Dispatches on a twice-weekly basis, with projected publication days late Thursday (to accommodate the newest material from Black Agenda Report) and late Saturday (to include material withheld until late Friday in the regime's hope of it being obscured by weekend distractions). I don't know if I will be able to continue this schedule, as when I attempted it last year, it was constantly interrupted by other obligations. However, the most time-consuming of those obligations is no more. This was the editing, writing, photographing and designing of a monthly newsletter for the senior housing complex where I live, but the newsletter has since been killed by lack of printing funds, which in effect gains me all those days to work on Dispatches -- enough time, I hope, to make this twice-weekly schedule permanent.--LB.)
"In the wake of the unions' shutting down of a nine-day strike by 33,000 West Virginia public school employees on 6 March, there are growing calls for strikes and protests by teachers and other sections of the Working Class throughout the United States, which are threatening to break free from the control of the trade unions...placing (workers) in direct conflict with the entire Ruling Class and the Democratic (sic) and Republican parties." Comment: the question -- ultimately the only question in terms of the revolutionary potential of U.S. workers' new-found militance -- is whether the Ruling Class and their political allies (who include the JesuNazis and the fascists in general), will be able to resurrect an identity politics toxic enough to head off the 99 Percenters' evolving solidarity.
"American 'progressives' are divided over the politics of class and identity...(but) can the demands of class warfare and identity politics be reconciled into a common political program that speaks to the vast majority of Americans?" Comment: as I said in the foregoing.
Fukushima Continues to Poison the Oceans and Ultimately the Whole World
The (Fukushima) crisis is ongoing...radioactively contaminated water is still pouring into the Pacific Ocean (permanently contaminating and altering sea life which bio-accumulates and bio-concentrates the radioactivity)...two principle government and corporate lies demonstrate how bad faith brought about the worst reactor accident in history. Comment: Capitalism in (typically apocalyptic) action. And just for starters, why we should never again dare eat seafood.
Meanwhile, the JesuNazi Onslaught Continues Unabated
"(with) the most far-reaching and sinister implications for democratic rights within the United States...Google, Facebook, Twitter and other tech companies, in close coordination with the government, have moved extremely rapidly to censor content online through the manipulation of search results and news feeds." Comment: thus -- in response to our increasing solidarity and militance -- the One Percenters impose on us a regimen of zero-tolerance oppression so savage it will make all previous tyrannies seem mild in comparison. Wake up, people; just as I have argued for decades, the Internet was never the electronic freedom road it was portrayed as being. Indeed it is only now fulfilling its always-intended purpose of sustaining Capitalism by total surveillance and total censorship.
"Trump is giving (the Christian theocracy movement) what it wants, so they are willing to overlook his many moral flaws and reckless behavior." Comment: informative reading, though as always the liberals underestimate the magnitude of the JesuNazi threat.
"God Wills It...The US may be sinking ever deeper into the moral morass of the Trump era, but if you think the (theological) malevolence of this period began with him, think again."
"The (federal) Title X program, which has provided family planning services to low-income Americans since 1970, is under threat from the Trump administration...(which is) funding...unscientific and ineffective family planning programs."
"Reproductive justice activist Alejandra Pablos has been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in what immigrant rights advocates are calling an act of 'retaliation' for protesting in Virginia earlier this year."
"A recently leaked trove of internal communications among white supremacists show that many believed members of the police and military are on their side."
"Hillary Clinton's favorite think tank is still trying to make sure single payer health care never happens...(unveiling) their counterfeit, sound-alike health care plan, dubbed 'Medicare Extra for All,' whose sole purpose is to distract and confuse a public that is demonstrably 'ready' for single payer." Comment: this is the best analysis I've yet seen on the Democratic (sic) Party's newest Big Lie.
"So it stands, in 2018, that instead of a sensible 'go home' option, America's generals and civilian policymakers have handed us the worst of all worlds...Forever war."
And Once Again, "Forever War" Brings Its Deadly Consequences Home
"A hostage situation (at a veterans' home) in Northern California ended Friday evening with the discovery of four people dead...the gunman and (his) three women...hostages."
Some Fascists Leaving Congress; Is It Just More "Change We Can Believe In"?
"Congress will be a very different place in 2018, no matter what the Democrats manage to accomplish, due to the departures of several seemingly eternal conservatives."
Book Review: How Fascists Use Music to Seduce Ignorant White Youth
"Nancy Love's 2016 book Trendy Fascism (State University of New York)...(is) an important work to make sense of how today's fascists have made significant use of song and lyric to attract youth. Comment: as is so often the case with such vital analytical tools, the book is censored by price: $85 for a hard-cover volume, $22.95 for the paperback.
Relevant History: the Inspiring Example of Edward R. Murrow
"'We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty,' said Edward R. Murrow as he denounced Sen. Joseph McCarthy on CBS television. 'We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason.' Today, with unreason having a time of it...we need Murrow more than ever." Comment: the URL includes a total replay of Morrow's breathtakingly courageous, history-making broadcast, a pivotal event I urge us all to witness.
LB/9-10 March 2018.
Posted at 08:23 PM in Books, Current Affairs, Film, Healthcare, History, Memoirs, Misogyny, Music, Poor People, Religion, Science, Television, Web/Tech, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (1)
Slow-Motion Genocide: Trumpcare, Betrayal of Puerto Rico Are Schemes to Exterminate Minorities and Surplus Workers
Black Athletes' Revolt Could Change USian Revolutionary Dynamics
APART FROM THE ONGOING rebellion of African-American athletes, the influence of which is already spreading beyond the realm of sports, probably the most important story in the USian Homeland right now is the One Percent's escalation of its efforts to radically reduce Working Class and non-white populations, whether by abandoning Puerto Rico to the most immediately deadly aspects of terminal climate change or by making healthcare so expensive only the One Percenters and their Ruling Class vassals can afford it.
Both tactics, denial of post-disaster aid and denial of healthcare, are obvious expressions of Capitalism's strategy of exterminating unwanted or surplus populations by boiled-frog methods of slow-motion genocide.
Meanwhile the athletes' rebellion offers the hitherto-unexplored potential of expanding revolutionary leadership to include a group of people who are not only profoundly respected for their physical prowess but are literally adored by a segment of the USian population that spans every race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and caste.
Whether and to what extent that potential might explode into actuality depends on how brutally the authorities suppress the athletes. The team owners' verbal alliance with the dissidents is obviously an attempt at nonviolent suppression, specifically by co-optation, but in such a white supremacist JesuNazi police state as the U.S.has become, literally anything is now possible.
That's why, though the Mainstream Media pundits assure us the athletes' protests are succeeding, also that there will be aid for Puerto Rico and that the latest Trumpcare terror will never become law, we dare not forget these pundits are the same Josef Goebbels types who assured us Trump/Pence JesuNazism would never be headquartered in the White House – the name of which has now been fully restored to its grotesque antebellum appropriateness.
We are thus ruled by an ideological combination of JesuNazi white supremacy and Ayn Rand moral imbecility in which anyone who is neither wealthy nor a Christian Identity fanatic is damned as the same sort of üntermenschen the Trump/Pence Regime's German Nazi predecessors gleefully consigned to the concentration camps. If We the (Real) People are to have the slightest hope of survival, we must therefore do the difficult work of cleaving through a seemingly impenetrable cloak of disinformation and deception to examine the regime's every gesture and initiative in terms of its real-world impact on ourselves, the global 99 Percent.
Not only does retaining health as a privilege of wealth guarantee the premature death of any of us deemed no longer exploitable for profit (whether because we're rebellious, old, disabled, chronically unemployed or all of the foregoing), it's also a helluva lot cheaper than manufacturing Zyklon B and building the facilities essential for its use. Besides which, death camps have fallen out of fashion since the Red Army liberated Berlin.
Moreover – given how our overlords get off on massaging each other with money – premiums from the plutocrats and from the professionals and executives who whore for them will obviously be sufficient to keep the insurance barons and prescription drug lords in business after We the (Surplus) People are all We the (Genocidally) Murdered Corpses, thereby guaranteeing the lords and barons their continued membership in Capitalism's global fraternity of sadists, mass murderers and eco-slayers.
In this dystopian context the most relevant report available is my own analysis, for which scroll down to "Single Payer Situation Report."
But it is confirmed in far greater detail by a CounterPunch report published on 21 September: "Most of those Democrats have signed on because they felt politically forced to, because they knew they could not face their constituents if they didn't. But many of them do not support single-payer... and will, in fact, do their best to undermine and prevent it."
This was of course precipitated by Trumpcare's most brazenly murderous iteration yet.
While I trust most USian readers already know the horrifying details of the latest Ruling Class effort to make "healthcare" the newest euphemism for genocide, I'm nevertheless linking additional aspect-focused reports here, here, here and here. These URLs make the record complete and serve readers outside the imperial homeland who many not understand the infinite viciousness hidden beneath the Big Lie of "our democracy."
As to what will obtain – whether genocidal Trumpcare will become law, whether the genocidal abandonment of Puerto Rico will continue and what will become of the athletes' rebellion – the best I can say is we won't know until it happens. But only a fool would be optimistic.
The Rest of the Week in Review: Obladi, Oblada, Death Goes On
The Broader Significance of the Athletes' Rebellion is what it reveals about life in the USian Homeland as it truly is for those of us who refuse to give the stars-and-stripes banner of white patriarchal Capitalism-under-god the Zieg Heil its politicians demand.
Racist malevolence has become so extreme even cultural heroes – and major-league USian athletes are certainly that – are routinely attacked by the police. Thus it is increasingly undeniable the police have been federalized and militarized specifically to sustain Capitalism and expand white supremacy.
Most of us know this story already. Many of us have experienced it firsthand. But its ultimate significance lies in the fact the transformation of the local police into the equivalent of armored infantry – and thus into a functional counterpart of the German Nazi SS – began long before the advent of the Trump/Pence Regime.
This tells us our overlords knew at least two decades ago, and probably as early as the Nixon years, that the uniquely USian hybrid of Capitalism, racism, misogyny, homophobia and Christian Identity bigotry would eventually become so vicious its defense would require Gestapo-type brutality.
The Central Intelligence Agency's Strategic and Tactical Debt to Nazi Germany – so obvious in its activities both at home and abroad (though not specifically mentioned in the linked text) – should thus surprise no one, particularly those of us who recognize the father-son relationship of Capitalism and Nazism.
Predictably, the CIA under Trump/Pence management is becoming yet another instrument of JesuNazi fulfillment: "more white, more male, more Jesus."
Just as Trump/Pence Normalizes Violent Racism, So Does It Enable Militant Misogyny, a disheartening conclusion strongly suggested by an alarming escalation in assaults on family planning facilities. Obvious question: are representatives of the regime secretly meeting with JesuNazi zealots and giving them permission to maximize their anti-abortion aggressiveness?
Apropos Mysogyny, Note Nikon's Exclusion of Women from Its Newest Camera Ads. Thirty-two photographers, no women. Nikon claims it's an accident but those of us with a more rationally skeptical turn of mind wonder if the company is cozying up to the Trump/Pence New Order.
St. Louis Police Brutality Is an Old Story, but Truthful Coverage of It Is Brand New: a detailed report by People's World provides us the perspective Mainstream Media deliberately suppressed.
Harvard Comes Out of the Closet, Defiantly Aligns Itself with JesuNazi Agenda by honoring Betsy DeVos and endorsing her campaign to destroy what remains of USian public education. Since Harvard is the leading USian Ruling Class university – first amongst the academies of privilege where those who transform Capitalism into JesuNazism are educated in the methodology of Machiavellian malevolence – its fondness for the Trump/Pence Regime should surprise no one, especially after the university's behavior toward Chelsea Manning.
But Apparently Not Every Department Got the Memo. The Harvard business school just released a report condemning what too many of us still think of as "our democracy" as a primary enemy of the people.
JesuNazis and Other Fascists Now Openly Recruiting College Students, another manifestation of the same Trump/Pence dynamic that's targeting minorities and women. Thus fascist Ohio seeks to abolish on-campus dissent.
More on How the Democratic (sic) Party Continues to Fuck Itself – and Us. Yes it's an old story, but in such desperate, any-port-in-the-storm times as these, we (myself included) often need to be reminded the Democrats are merely the more deceptive half of the One Fascist Party of Two Names that tyrannizes us all on behalf the One Percent.
New Vietnam War Documentary Refurbishes Old Vietnam War Lies. not surprising since it's broadcast on PBS – the now hopelessly co-opted Plutocratic Broadcasting System. A properly negative critique, here, with my comment-thread recollections of the class warfare that so often divided veterans and non-veterans and foretold how the latter would purge the Working Class from the Democratic (sic) Party. Plus an antidote to the documentary's lies, here. Relevant to these texts is a soldier's essay on why there is no longer an effective veterans' anti-war movement, its conclusions supplemented by my comment-thread review of the real reason the government ended the military draft: that mandatory military service was training the revolution.
Life and Death Under Capitalism Closer to Home
Washingtion State Has the Nation's Most Regressive Tax Structure, nor will its smirking Bill Gates aristocracy ever allow even the slightest easing of the deliberately impoverishing burden its taxes inflict on lower-income people. Between-the-lines message: apart from the state's deceptively progressive identity politics, it is as socioeconomically viciously as any unapologetic plutocracy in the deep South, the greedy malice of its Ruling Class proven by its perennial war on public education and infrastructure.
A Washington State Lawsuit Could Clarify a Key Issue of States Rights. Attorney General Bob Ferguson's suing GEO Group Inc., the operator of the for-profit gulag in which immigrants are held for deportation. His state Superior Court suit accuses GEO of wage theft and enslavement of prisoners. GEO claims its violations of Washington state labor law are legal under federal law because its prison is a federal facility.
But What Might Ferguson Do If Trump/Pence AG Sessons Invades the State with deputized federal troops (note particularly the fourth paragraph) and/or DeVos Family mercenaries for mass arrests of marijuana users? It is now almost certain Sessons is planning such an action – no doubt intending to confine the thousands of prisoners in concentration camps on federal military bases.
Though There's Also Some Solidly Good News from Washington State. Trump/Pence misogyny has sparked a surprising surge of female activism in a nominally conservative rural county. And a precedent-setting show of female photographers is generating big attendance and rave reviews on an island near Seattle.
The News from Abroad Is a Mixture of Intriguing and Disheartening
How BRICS Is Emerging as the Main Threat to USian Imperial Hegemony: an anthology of informative, thought-provoking reports assembled by Global Research that explain why the imperial plutocracy, in sheer terror of losing its global dominance, is trying to start World War III.
Fascist Resurgence Restructures German Politics. First a report from Der Speigel, then a commentary from Common Dreams, and somewhere deep in the CD comment thread, the restoration of my commenting privileges and my gratitude obliquely expressed by what might accidentally be a poem:
HARK!
Do I hear the sound of snare drums?
Of hobnailed jackboots trodding cadence on the cobblestones?
Is it of Horst Wessel the marching multitude now sings?
Be afraid.
Be very very very afraid.
For this time there is no Red Army to save us
from ourselves.
Stuff to Contemplate
It Ain't Utopia, but There's a Helluva Lot Less Anxiety Under (Real) Socialism: a brief anthology of interviews with residents of the former German Democratic Republic.
Existential Crisis: Do I Punch That Nazi or Just Walk Away? From the text: "...in order for the left to present itself as a true alternative that is supportive of everyday citizens' struggles and opposed to the continued oppression of the state and its right-wing metastases, it must embrace people's rights for justice, equality, defense and dignity by any means necessary."
We Should Continue Reading Chris Hedges Despite His Despicable Slander of anarchists, socialists and Marxists by portraying us as no better than Nazis. Why? Because he is brutally forthright in warning us of what is to come: "This is a war of ideas. The corporate state cannot compete honestly in this contest. It will do what all despotic regimes do—govern through wholesale surveillance, lies, blacklists, false accusations of treason, heavy-handed censorship and, eventually, violence."
Anti-Fascist Heroines Past and Present. A Common Dreams essay honors three women, Sophie Scholl, Anne Frank and Heather Heyer. It concludes with "Let all their stories inspire a new wave of bold resistance." Let us therefor in the name of "bold resistance" also remember heroines such as Lyudmilla Pavlechenko, Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, Zinaida Portnova and all the other Soviet women who battled the fascists, personifying female courage for all time and humanity.
Clicktivism Occasionally Works. But don't for a minute imagine it takes the place of the revolutionary activism that is our only true antidote to Capitalist tyranny. Nevertheless sometimes it's better than nothing. Hence this.
LB/26 September 2017
Posted at 05:45 PM in Austerity as Genocide , Current Affairs, Disabled People , Film, History, Minorities, Misogyny, Poor People, Religion, Science, Seniors , Television, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: anti-fascist heroines, Betsy DeVos, black athletes' rebellion, boiled frog, BRICS, Capitalism, Chelsea Manning, Chris Hedges, clicktivism, coping with fascism, Democratic (sic) Party, fascists recruiting on campus, female activism, freedom from anxiety, German Democratic Republic, German elections, German fascism rises again, government as enemy of the people, Harvard, Harvard Business School, healthcare, Hurricane Irma, Hurricane Maria, JesuNazism, little anxiety in GDR, Mainstream Media, marijuana, militant misogyny, militarization of police, military draft, most regressive state taxes, Puerto Rico, slow-motion genocide, socialism, St. Louis police brutality, surplus populations, Trump/Pence Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessons, Trump/Pence Regime, Trumpcare, veterans, Vietnam War, Washington state, Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson, Washington state versus feds, Washington state versus GEO Group Inc., White House, World War III, Zyklon B
Trumpcare Confirms We Are a Conquered People, Reduced to Serfs and Slaves, but Will It Ignite Long-Overdue Revolution?
DESPITE DELAYS, TRUMPCARE WILL ALMOST CERTAINLY BECOME LAW, with its tyrannies compelled and excused by white USians' religiously fostered genocidal hatreds of African-Americans, Hispanics, Asiatics, First Nations peoples, LGBTQ folks and anti-patriarchal women of all races. Meanwhile the total corruption of the Democratic (sic) Party ensures the USian policy of healthcare as a privilege of wealth will endure as long as the Empire itself endures. Thus USian single-payer universal healthcare is effectively doomed for all eternity, never mind the magnitude of the public's desperate yearning for such healthcare-as-a-human-right protection is again confirmed, this time accidentally by a Republican survey.
FORMER REAGAN OFFICIAL NOW CALLS FOR (SOCIALIST) REVOLUTION: the headline on Paul Craig Roberts' newest essay tells most of the story, "Once Only Blacks Were Enslaved, Now We All Are," and his concluding quote tells the rest of it: "Chris Hedges says that your only alternatives are to overthrow the criminal class in Washington or to accept your slavery." Roberts' publisher Global Research also offers five other provocative essays on the always-relevant topic of USian imperialist savagery.
MAINSTREAM MEDIA ACTS TO SUPPRESS REVOLUTIONARY ANGER: As I have noted way too many times to count, so-called "Mainstream Media" is owned by members of the same class of plutocratic tyrants – i.e., the One Percenters – who own or control USian government at all levels whether federal, state or local. This means Mainstream Media is the privately owned, for-profit clone of Josef Goebbels' deservedly infamous Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. And now, just as if Goebbels had risen from the grave to command his USian Capitalist legacy, Mainstream Media is (predictably) upping the volume and intensity of its ChristoFascist effluent both nationally and locally.
AND THE FEDERAL DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION DOES LIKEWISE: JesuNazi Reichsführer Betsy DeVos and her newly appointed Kochroach metastasize their theocratic toxins throughout public education, thereby ensuring the expansion and perpetuation of Moron Nation as exemplified by the rabid hostility with which USians greeted the Declaration of Independence on its day of celebration, an ironically comical footnote to the disastrous consequences engendered by our national epidemic of deliberately inflicted ignorance.
FEDERAL MILITARIZATION OF COPS LEADS TO BIGGER BODY COUNT: The propensity of federally militarized police for domestic atrocities – entirely predictable given the long and bloody history of war crimes tacitly encouraged by the USian military – is now confirmed even by Mainstream Media in a surprise truth-telling that will most likely cost its researchers, reporters and editors their jobs, or at the very least earn them severe reprimands from the chief censor aka publisher.
YES, VIRGINIA, HIGH TECH IS SYNONYMOUS WITH MAXIMUM SEXISM. As consumers we have all been enraged by the contemptuous, unforgivably obnoxious arrogance of too many male Nurds, who seem to take an obviously special delight in sadistically marginalizing those of us who are female. But that's only a hint of the misogynistic viciousness that obtains inside the high tech firms, where locker-room-minded patriarchs rule an innately fascist realm in which – despite allegedly zero-tolerance anti-sexual-harasment policies – males defiantly remain the strutting übermenschen who damn all females as üntermenschen. Hence new outrages continue to surface with infuriating regularity. (Note: each of the few female Nurds with whom I have been acquainted has told essentially the same story – that her male counterparts are, with few exceptions, the most connivingly malevolent woman-haters she has ever encountered. Hence I must ask: could this extreme form of male supremacy be the karmic legacy of high-tech's Nazi origins?)
MEANWHILE THE REAL LEFT TRIES TO STOP THE JESUNAZI OFFENSIVE, both with education and calls for ideological discipline, neither of which is likely to provide the necessary antidotes to the white supremacist JesuNazi fanaticism the Trump/Pence victory has elevated to the ruling ethos of the USian homeland, where "racism will win yet again," and again, and again, and again.
LEST WE FORGET: ELEANOR ROOSEVELT'S GENUINELY FOND FRIENDSHIP WITH LYUDMILA PAVLICHENKO, as described by Smithsonian's Gilbert King in a recovery of suppressed history from an infinitely more promising era. The ending of King's text, testimony to the intensity of the bond the two women shared, moved me to momentary tears.
TODAY'S SUBVERSIVE LIMERICK applauds Beyoncé for her stunningly choreographed defiance of white-supremacist Christian theocracy's rabid misogyny and fanatical war against human sexuality. However, I must admit I stopped following pop music soon after the blessedly pagan Muse-poet Tim Buckley was silenced. Hence like some Washington state legislators, I just now discovered Beyoncé's breathtaking talent via Wikipedia, YouTube and You Tube with Lyrics. Ergo:
The Christians damn sexy as evil and nasty
But Beyoncé proves it's exquisite and classy
Now all JesuNazis are having a hissy
Ordained by their god to be hateful and pissy.
LB/5 July 2017 (Yes, this is again late. Its posting, which always requires about two hours of odiously meticulous clerical drudgery to live-link all the URLs, was delayed by my desperate need for catch-up sleep after being forced to arise at 5:30 a.m. on the Fourth. This is because Fred Meyer's corporate refusal to separate its monthly Senior Discount Tuesday shoppers from the last-minute holiday shoppers required getting to the store at its 8 a.m. opening – that is, [hopefully] before the Independence Day celebrants stripped it of essential grocery items such as eggs, bread and lean ground beef. That night I was too wired to get more than three hours of bad-dream sleep, which meant all day Wednesday I was nodding off at my keyboard until finally I said fuck it, went to bed and slept nearly 14 hours. Now here I am again, a still-tired age 77 but nevertheless back in action...)
Posted at 09:13 PM in Austerity as Genocide , Books, Current Affairs, Disabled People , Film, History, Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Music, Poor People, Religion, Science, Seniors , Television, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: " Chris Hedges, "Once Only Blacks Were Slaves, African-Americans, Betsy DeVos, Beyoncé, bigger body count, Declaration of Independence, Democratic (sic) Party, Eleanor Roosevelt, federal militarization of cops, First Nations, genocidal hatred, Gilbert King, Global Research, healthcare a human right, healthcare a privilege of wealth, high tech misogyny, Hispanics, IBM-Nazi connection, Josef Goebbels, Koch, LGBTQ, Loren Bliss, Lyudmila Pavlichenko, Mainstream Media, Moron Nation, Now We All Are, Paul Craig Roberts, public education, Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, Republican Party, subversive limerick, Tim Buckley, Trumpcare, U.S. war crimes, white racism unstoppable, women
"Our Democracy": Viciously Misogynistic Christian Theocracy, Jury-Approved Genocide by Cops, Total Surveillance Just as Reichsführer-SS Heydrich Proposed and Obama Made Real
THIS POST IS TARDY FOR TWO REASONS. One, on Tuesday I joyfully seized a depressingly rare opportunity for an afternoon of outdoor recreation which so painfully inflamed my arthritis I spent most of Wednesday in bed (though if I have another such opportunity, I will seize it with equal joyfulness, the afflictions of old age be damned). Two, looking at the defining characteristics of USian (i.e. Biblical Capitalist, i.e. JesuNazi, i.e. murderously white Christian) governance, I was paralyzed with several hours of indecision. I couldn't decide which is worse: the ever more brazen imposition of theocracy; the ever increasing (and ever more obviously genocidal) murders of minority people, especially African-Americans, by federally militarized police; or the newest disclosure of Obama's fuck-us-all vindictiveness, in this instance his malicious evasion of the Constitution to impose total-surveillance precisely as conceived by Adolph Hitler and his henchmen and now applauded by the white Christian theocrats as a means of enforcing their unspeakable malevolence. But since it's this "secret fundamentalism at the heart of American power" that knowingly enables these and all other USian atrocities, that's where we'll start today's Dispatches.
SCOTUS OPENS DOOR FOR FORCIBLE TAXATION TO FUND THEOCRACY. The Capitalist-mandated imposition of USian theocracy went public in 1954 with the still-controversial and often vindictively enforced addition of "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance – the capital "G" making it undeniably obvious the deity so referenced is the Divine Sadist worshiped by white-supremacist Christians. And now the theocracy campaign has been handed its greatest and most decisive leap forward by the USian Supreme Court in a pivotal 7-2 decision that potentially makes every USian taxpayer a slave of national Christendom. Or as Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, the court has ruled, "for the first time...the Constitution requires the government to provide public funds directly to a church." In other words, the Roberts Court has reduced the Establishment Clause to another of the innumerable Big Lies implicit in the biggest Big Lie of all time, "our democracy." Meanwhile, JesuNazi Justice Neil Gorsuch took advantage of another Supreme Court decision to declare total and unending war on LGBTQ people.
THEOCRACY IS LIKE A VENOMOUS SERPENT: WE IGNORE IT AT OUR OWN PERIL Most USians – 63 percent – are already at theocracy's gateway-belief in the Bible as the literally true (and therefore indisputable) word of their infamously sadistic god. They thus countenance – whether by their support or unconcern – the ever-escalating imposition of Christian tyranny. Yet too many of us who oppose it are effectively self-silenced, whether by the smug and arrogant belief religion has become irrelevant or by misguided "political correctness" that demands tolerance of anything labeled "religion" – including the JesuNazism of the theocrats. Moreover, all these theocratically contributory viewpoints are fostered and sustained by the extent to which mainstream media methodically downplays and often censors the terrifying facts about the murderous intentions of the Christian fanatics. (Mainstream media, let us not forget, is owned by some of the same One Percenters who not only own or control USian government at all levels but whose fathers and grandfathers were the theocrats' primary financiers.) Now, with the advent of the Trump/Pence regime, these Capitalist-financed theocrats control all three branches – legislative, executive, judicial – of the federal government, which has thus become history's most vindictively powerful pusher of this particularly paralytic opiate of the masses.
GENOCIDAL RACISM IS A SUBSET OF WHITE CHRISTIAN THEOCRACY, an ugly truth of USian history conveniently suppressed even in doctoral-level studies at most (implicitly white) USian colleges and universities. Thus there's no doubt one of the reasons Trump/Pence Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions intends to fully re-criminalize marijuana is it gives the USian (i.e., white supremacist) criminal injustice system yet another rationale for acquitting – often the judicial equivalent of applauding – the growing number of white cops who murder African-Americans.
TOTAL SURVIELLANCE – OBAMA'S FULFILLMENT OF A NAZI DREAM – IS NOW OUR TOTAL REALITY. Thanks to a hitherto-unreported Obama Regime atrocity – just one of the many atrocities facilitated by our moronic acceptance of Obama the Orator as the messiah of "change we can believe in" and our subsequent victimization by his (utterly predictable) shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer – every one of "those internet-connected gadgets we just have to have...are setting us up for a brave new world where there is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide." Perfected in the post-Syriza rat-lab the global Capitalists have made of Greece, such a world was originally proposed by Reinhard Heydrich, who intended to bring every individual within the Third Reich under "continuous supervision." Nor does USian total surveillance stop with electronic spying. Soon even the books, magazines and other reading material carried by USian air passengers will be subject to physical scrutiny – and therefore to ideological evaluation – by the Transportation Security Administration's goons, an obvious Trump Regime precursor to the sorts of hands-on intrusiveness mandated by JesuNazi theocracy. Again we see the ideological and historical connections between Capitalism, the USian government and its German Nazi prototype. Which, by the way, included a special branch of the Gestapo, the Reich Office for Combating Homosexuality and Abortion, dedicated to the suppression of LGBTQ people and the female sexuality that had flourished during the Weimar Republic's doomed experiment in social democracy.
MORE EXAMPLES OF OUR FORCIBLE CONVERSION FROM CITIZENS TO SERFS AND SLAVES: Firstly, there's the "vast net of stress, fear and insecurity" inflicted on an entire generation by student loan debt which – exactly as intended – is suppressing resistance to USian socioeconomic savagery. Then there's the unprecedented effort to criminalize dissent, especially when the dissent seeks to block fossil-fuel pipelines. Note that even the most egregious of these laws are sure to be upheld by the Roberts Court. Lastly there's New Jersey's mandate to teach k-12 students how to display proper submissiveness and thereby – for sure if you're white, and at least theoretically if you're African-American, Hispanic or First Nations – avoid being murdered or brutalized by the police.
DON'T IMAGINE EVEN FOR A MINUTE TRUMPCARE IS DEAD. While the Democratic (sic) Party's PseudoLeftists foolishly celebrate the delay in the imposition of Trumpcare, those of us who are more politically honest realize our reprieve is only temporary. That's why disabled activists say they'll continue risking arrest – and Trump Regime encouraged brutalization by Washington D.C. cops – to protest the genocidal contents of what should be called the DEATH Act – Denying Every American Tenable Healthcare – another key element in the Christian Theocrat agenda (see "murderous intentions of Christian fanatics," above).
WAS GEORGE WASHINGTON A FRENCH AGENT? Historian Paul LeBlanc rebuts the revisionist notion Lenin was a German agent by noting the exact parallels between Lenin's relationship with Imperial Germany and Washington's relationship with Royalist France.
CONTRARY TO THE BIG LIES TAUGHT AS HISTORY, USIAN CLASS REBELLION WAS COMMONPLACE. That's why the Ruling Class – the true founders of the Deep State – decided they needed a constitution to protect their greed-begotten gold from "Levelers," the Communists of the late 18th Century.
DOOR-TO-DOOR ENCYCLOPEDIA SALES AS THE CURE FOR POVERTY: A cautionary introduction to the newest Capitalist propaganda, a 21st Century version of the (alleged) "power of positive thinking."
BOOKS: AN ESOTERIC ESSAY ON WHY JAMES BALDWIN IS AGAIN RELEVANT. An excerpt from William J. Maxwell's James Baldwin: the FBI Files (Arcade Publishing: 2017).
YET ANOTHER OBITUARY FOR THE DEMOCRATIC (SIC) PARTY: "It's not that the Democratic Party can't 'wake up' to Americans' surging support for a bold challenge to the corporate stranglehold over our economy and politics. It's that it won't." Italics as in original, which underscores our desperate need for a new political party.
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: Anyone who questions the 21st Century relevance of Marxism should be reminded that it's the only proven antidote for Capitalism, especially Capitalism metamorphosed into fascism, witness how the triumph of the Red Army saved us from a world ruled by Hitler and his Wall Street financiers.
LB/28-30 June 2017.
Posted at 03:39 AM in Austerity as Genocide , Books, Current Affairs, Disabled People , History, Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Poor People, Religion, Science, Seniors , Television, Web/Tech, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: " Establishment Clause, " LGBTQ rights, " US-Nazi connections, "continuous supervision, "James Baldwin: the FBI Files, "our democracy, "under God, 63% believe Bible is absolute truth, Adolph Hitler, Biblical capitalism, cops who murder African-Americans, criminalization of dissent, DEATH Act (Denying Every American Tenable Healthcare), Democratic (sic) Party self-destruction, disabled activists, divine sadist, encyclopedia sales as cure for poverty, federally militarized police, from citizens to serfs and slaves, genocidal murders of African-Americans, George Washington as French agent, Gestapo, Greece, James Baldwin, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, JesuNazism, Marxism, Neil Gorsuch, New Jersey K-12 schools teaching proper submissiveness to police, Obama, oppression by student loan debt, Red Army. , Reich Office for Combating Homosexuality and Abortion, Reinhard Heydrich, Shay's Rebellion, Sonia Sotomayor, Syriza, taxation to fund churches, theocracy, theocratic agenda, total surveillance, Trump, Trump/Pence, Trumpcare not dead, TSA to scrutinize reading material, U.S. Supreme Court, USian class rebellions, Washington D.C. cops, Weimar Republic, white-supremacist Christians, William J. Maxwell, women's sexuality

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl