A Culture Falling Apart As Fast As An Economy

Each day another culturally reduced group is stricken with abuse, panic, anger and driven to what seem fresh new demands for justice.

Black youths killed by police or vigilante bullets? Check. Women raped or physically abused? Check. Workers left jobless with no hope for the future? Check. Students wondering how to pay for an education that produced low paying work? Check. Immigrants supplying the economy with profitable cheap labor and treated as sub-humans? Check. Another crazed person imitating an army and killing many people? Check.

The latest murders committed by a tortured and demented person and media labeled a “rampage” or a “massacre” has once again brought forth calls for gun control – though three of his six victims were stabbed – attention to rampant sexism and abuse of women – though three of his victims were men – and more suffering and tears for parents, friends, relatives and citizens with new fears about where to walk, shop or just try to act like a normal person without worrying about being attacked by a stranger driven mad by demons of the mind, body and marketplace.

The Isla Vista slaughter seemed provoked by a young man’s deadly frustration at not getting any of the sexual commodities that we reduce women to, young and old, in the packaging and cosmeticising of them that we call the fashion business. The job we do on reducing women to painted objects squeezed into clothing that either makes them look foolish or is so revealing it provokes idiocy from men is enough to make Islamic fundamentalists who insist women be covered in robes before going out in public seem more concerned about their safety than western feminists.

 Some years ago a very young child was murdered and many were shocked at photos of a sweet little girl tarted up to look like a desirable-to-perverts woman and entered into things called “beauty contests” for children no more than eight or nine years of age. The terrible crime and the attendant publicity may have led to a slight decline in this horrendous early packaging syndrome – not before at least one Hollywood production - but the trend was there much earlier and continues to this day.

We smile with favor on an economic commodity culture that strives to make women look like the most desirable sexual products available and then grieve when men taught to see them as glorified “hoes” act like crazed animals when dealing with them. That most of us – men or women - do not conduct ourselves as craven beasts or sexual sluts is no more indication of our individual purity than that we do not all bomb, stab, shoot and burn foreigners is an indication of our complete irresponsibility for the fact that our culture and political economy are profiting from such things.

Simply blaming everything on individuals, even the most demented – excluding, of course the truly powerful and most responsible - does absolutely nothing to bring about social change.

The same arguments being made about sexism and violence against women now were being made generations ago. The same outrage about racist murders is even older. Economic pain, debt, wars and environmental assaults on nature are hardly anything new, though their occurrence may seem more noticeable than ever before.

There are social roots at the base of all these things no matter how we are manipulated into simply identifying individuals as being the guilty parties, however profitable that may be to individuals on the other side of the moral ledger. The loss is something we all absorb whether we are taught to identify as male, female, persons of color, persons of no color, gays, straights, liberals, conservatives and whatever other special minority category or box we allow ourselves to be kept inside.

Our culture doesn’t just create sickness: it creates profit from sickness. Drugs, therapy and more drugs won’t help cure the loneliness, alienation, despair, frustration and vicious animosity that are byproducts of a system based on benefits for some only at severe cost for others.

We need to acknowledge social problems that hurt all of us in order to break the artificial barriers reducing us to minorities in order to become a majority that creates the democracy we need to benefit the same group. All of us.

Supreme Court rules in favor of death-row inmates with low IQ

All encouraged to run for high political office.

Memo to Pope Francis: You Can't Be Apolitical In A Political World

The Pope has arrived in the Holy Land to bless sacred sites while remaining mum about the ongoing racial conflict imposed by maintaining Jewish sovereignty over Palestinian Arab land.

So racist Jewish "settlers" who make sport of robbing and killing Palestinian Arabs (ten percent of whom are Christian), as they have done now for decades, will continue to ply their vicious trade unobserved by the vast majority of the world's Christians. The false frame of "Muslim extremists vs. fearful Jews" will be imposed yet again on a historical reality of racist dispossession of indigenous Arabs from their ancestral lands by a fanatical Jewish state bent on conquest and destruction. This is not neutrality.  It is delusion.

The greatest threat of "terrorism" comes from Jewish colonizers.  Last month they issued a death threat to the Catholic Bishop of Nazareth and his followers, which was but a prelude to more recent attacks on clergy, the defacing of churches and monasteries with offensive graffiti, and the desecration of cemeteries.  A church in Beersheva was recently sprayed with the message, "Jesus is a son of a bitch," while the building where Pope Francis was to meet Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was tagged with "Death to Arabs and Christians."

To say nothing about this even as the Pope along with Christian institutions are under round-the-clock protection by some 9000 police, and the holy sites to be blessed are turned into a military base, is as ludicrous as anything yet seen from the land of "democratic" apartheid.

The threat has moved beyond Jewish "settlers."  Last week, hundreds of angry Israeli Jews demonstrated against the Pope in Jerusalem, while police banned posters celebrating the Papal visit, apparently out of fear of widening the protests.   Meanwhile, the local Palestinian Christian population is feeling more under attack than ever.  On Sunday, the Pope stopped at the hideous concrete wall that has turned the birthplace of Jesus into a giant outdoor prison for its modern inhabitants.  At a nearby refugee camp the Pope was reminded that Israel bars Palestinians from ever returning to homes inside territory conquered by Israel.  Meanwhile, the Vatican steadfastly insists that the Pope's trip is "absolutely not political."  The official purpose of his visit is to commemorate the 50th anniversary of a meeting in Jerusalem  between Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras that ended a 1000-year split between Rome and the Orthodox Church.  But his itinerary does not include a stop in the Galilee, where most Palestinian Christians live.

While media mouthpieces for USrael denounce Islamic indoctrination in "madrassas," no attention at all is given to Jewish religious schools that reject a modern curriculum in favor of a literalist interpretation of the Bible which awards the land of Palestine to the Jews forever. At the same time, Israel's Holocaust indoctrination teaches boundless Jewish entitlement based on the theory that Jews are eternal victims of universal anti-Semitism.  This is the ideological arm of "settler" fanaticism, and cannot be divorced from the overt acts of violence that constantly menace Palestinian Arabs, Christians and Muslims alike.

Another pious declamation from the Pope about the need for a "stable peace" while Israel continues breeding longstanding ethnic and religious intolerance based on master race doctrines the vast majority of the rest of the world has long since discarded as Hitlerian lunacy is simply base and hypocritical idiocy.  We do not need more rhetorical posturing while Palestinians continue to be robbed, swindled, tortured and murdered.  We need blunt criticism of Jewish racism and prompt dismantlement of the elaborate structure of oppression and misery it has constructed, not just in the occupied territories, but throughout historical Palestine.

Source:

Jonathan Cook, "The Pope in the Holy Land," 5/26/14, www.counterpunch.org

Israel will 'speak to the Vatican' about Pope's unscheduled stop near an Israeli-built barricade

After severe admonishment by Israeli authorities, pope agrees to atone by submitting to a public circumcision in Tel Aviv to be televised all over the world.

U.S. Charges Chinese Army Personnel With Cyberspying

The U.S. has also charged the pot with having a darker colored ass than the stove.

U.S. Officials Question Ability of Nigeria to Rescue Hostages

Nigerian Officials Question Ability Of U.S. to Rescue Rape Victims On College Campuses and in U.S. Military

Obama says Assad has no place in Syria’s future

Assad says Obama's brains may be even smaller than his balls.

Why Are They So Disagreeable?

Qaeda Affiliate Steps Up Video Propaganda Push

By SAEED AL BATATI and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

Militants are seeking to capitalize on growing anger over the killings of civilians in drone strikes.

Economic Hate Crime

 

“Any government with both the power and the will to remedy the major defects of the capitalist system would have the power and the will to abolish it altogether”

Economist Joan Robinson was analyzing the situation a generation ago but her words are a call to create such a government now. Our global problem is not only a perpetually war making empire but also the economic basis of its imperial system. The evidence seemed clear to only some scholars in the past, but it is becoming more obvious to anyone who notes the signs of breakdown in the present. They are political, social and environmental, all due to the economics of private profit at public loss. This lethal combination threatens not just a crumbling empire, but all of humanity.

The market system under private control in which all goods and services are produced for purchase that profits some at the expense of many has gone as far as civilization can tolerate.

However rooted it might be in fiction or delusion, Capital has been able to maintain a trickle down program to keep a middle class comfortable enough to perpetuate its dream of a material equality which would prevail and grow. Workers in the western world could see the potential for a progressively better life since so many of them seemed to be living it under capitalist social democracy. But that era ended late in the 20^th century and the sinking sensation many now feel is not merely personal or even national; it is profoundly social and global.

A generation in the west saw working people rise to a status dubbed middle class, representing gains for them at unnoticed loss for people in the rest of the world. Minority profits always come at serious loss to the majority, a reality that can no longer be hidden. Worse, the cultural environmental assault that reduces the foundations of life - earth, water and air - to no more than profit making commodities is causing changes that spell more general doom if the process is allowed to continue.

Even if consciousness controllers could keep us in a mental state accepting this system, a diminishing material reality is forcing us to note massive and growing problems that cannot be solved by belief systems. However we may be reduced to think ourselves personally or psychologically isolated, all of us are threatened by what was once air and water pollution and has now become rising sea levels, shrinking land masses and radical climate changes.

The problems created by capitalism have become so obvious that many of its true believer economists are forced to notice failings that are not aberrations but endemic to the system. They propose changes, but they call for a return to policies that helped the last near collapse of the previous century. At that time, enlightened capital – not a total oxymoron – saw the possibility of revolution if the contradictions of free market fundamentalism prevailed. So they created a more liberal economic structure that called for government investment in life support systems from which private enterprise could not turn a profit.

Working people could not afford to create profits for the private sector by purchasing housing, electricity and other necessities, so government would provide financing, job creation and services to take care of these things, at taxpayers’ expense. The rich paid a slightly higher tax rate, easily affordable to them, but the bulk of the financial burden for social services, as in diminished form today, was, and is born by the greatest mass of the population.

This primitive social democratic phase in the USA – more highly developed in Europe - has been under assault and led to austerity programs cutting social services and the entire public sector and leading to greater inequality than ever before. It is easy to depict the ruling wealthy as greedy or evil – though some of them are – but they are only doing what the system dictates:

Increasing private profits by lowering wages and benefits for workers while lowering taxes for themselves. This creates greater profits for them, which they, according to legend, use to create more jobs. The way the tooth fairy creates more teeth.

The illusion of a better future was possible for some workers in the developed world because billions of people in the less developed world assumed the horrendous burden of having greater profit accumulated on their continued poverty. That could not last.

We must not mistake this as simply an end to arrogant western power or specifically the domination of the USA over the world. Capitalism is moving at different speeds in the newer environs of Russia, China and other entries into private profit making assaults on the public and the natural environment humanity depends on for survival. But cultural differences in war making still mean mass murder and cultural differences in capitalism only use different languages to do the same thing:

Extract private profit from humans and nature that lead to the loss and detriment of much larger segments of humanity and the planet that is our home.

This can be called a free market, for some, an entry to riches previously inconceivable, for a few, and a host of other terms and buzz words that cloud a collective future of doom under a cover of psycho-economic-religious babble.

Whether life was created in six days, six millennia or six trillion years, whether by an explosion of nothing or an invention of something with a penis, it will come to an end if we continue using it to briefly benefit only some at ultimate cost to the many. That is the essence of anti-democratic capitalism and it must be radically transformed by a truly democratic government as called for in the opening quote. And it must happen everywhere, or humanity will wind up nowhere.