Rhymes With Hypocrisy

"The greatest objective of mankind in this century should be to eradicate imperialism and capitalism as models for society." Evo Morales

As we approach the end of our most recent contamination of the ideal of national democracy with possibly its worst example we would do well to consider the words of a democratically elected leader of a nation that could teach us about the word’s meaning.

A representative of the real majority of his people, a former farm worker who rose to the presidency on the shoulders of ordinary Bolivians and not the bank books of his nation’s rich, Evo Morales and his supporters understand more about the state of the world than many of us understand about the state of our nation. Whichever of the ruling parties unpopular wretches is elected on November 8, they will contradict Morales’s words, possibly with more savagery than ever before, and the need for a political economic transformation of America and the world will become greater than ever before.

Our ruling oligarchs have reacted with a vengeance in suppressing two dangerously democratic threats to their dominance. First, Bernie Sanders leading a popular movement motivated by social desire, and second a more ego centered individualist struggle led by an economic millionaire and intellectual pauper, usually a winning combination in the empire of capital but not this time. In fact, the populace has received daily bulletins about Donald Trump’s outrageous practice of capitalism and its profitable by-products of division by dollar, race and sex. Who knew?

If we are to believe polls which measure how much we absorb the message of our consciousness controllers, the assault on our collective mentality has never been as blatant, corrupt, single minded and seemingly successful; we will soon coronate a historic first for the empire as the glass ceiling above the CEO presiding over the slaughters perpetrated by our warfare state will be broken and a woman will lead the foreign policy that creates many people of color: blood red.

The further destruction of the Muslim world and the creation of more terrorists who murder us because we murder them will continue. Heart breaking photos of a Palestinian, Yemeni, Iraqi or Syrian parent carrying what used to be a son or daughter, reduced to a bloody pulp form of unidentifiable gender fluidity by an Israeli, French, British or German aimed, American created bomb, will not go viral. Only those dramatic and sometimes staged photos of alleged victims of America’s adversaries are assured such coverage, while we beseech one and all to take in refugees created by our destruction of their nations.

Frighteningly worse for all of us than terrorist attacks would be a nuclear war that could happen if Russia reacts with as much arrogance and stupidity as the USA and responds to menacing provocation on its borders to enter such a confrontation that could spell the end of everything.

Hopefully, there will be enough americans who identify with humanity’s wholeness and refuse forced acceptance of membership in a fictitious minority with warped identity sense that makes it somehow less or more politically correct by having different genitals, skin tones or belief systems and remaining oblivious to being members of the one and only race: human.

Historic problems dating back to the nation’s origins in being brutally stolen from the original inhabitants, built on slave and indentured servant labor abused in order to create wealth enough to trickle down on what many of the descendants found a middle class status in a dream society that offered material hope to many but depended on continued exploitation of many more to maintain a lie. We are a nation built at the expense of the semi-voluntary poor thrown out of europe, Asia and Africa to become supporters of a national dream nearing a nightmare for too many and needing a wakeup call from the world, in the words of Morales.  

Government of the people, by the people, for the people, our supposed ideal, obviously has nothing to do with the present owned and operated by great wealth entity that can be defined as democracy the way that rape can be defined as love. But as long as great wealth maintains dominance and keeps democratic power from the rest of us in part by controlling what we think we know, genuine concern about government can be played as a skirmish between the supporters of a market without any control and supporters of a market with minimal control, both assuring that wealth will be defended, only differing in how much of it will accrue to the minority rulers, how quickly it will occur and how acceptable that will be found by the poorly informed.

Neither government nor banking nor finance will work for the majority of the people until the people create democracy in deed as opposed to the sham we have. As long as minorities, growing smaller in number as their private wealth grows larger, are allowed to dominate there is no difference between modern capitalism and ancient feudalism. We now tolerate billionaires whose material wealth and power would stagger some phony royal/god/pharaoh of the ancient past and our innumeracy in failing to understand that - how the hell does anyone have a billion dollars while more than a billion humans survive (?) on not much more than a couple of dollars a day? - while we are fed a steady diet of consumerist garbage by these rulers can only change when we grow angry enough at what is happening to the planet we live on and most of its people by having it and us treated as products in a free market where nothing is free, all to benefit them while we carry the ever more staggering cost. For openers, we ought not to vote for the lesser evil deadly duo but the greater good of Jill Stein and the Greens and then join any group opting for change that is systemic and not simply individual.

The Trump and Sanders expressions of disgust with things as they are and the great followings that resulted, despite the twisted treatment by established power, are signs that the end of this system is near even if the people who want it over aren’t yet sure what it is they want it replaced by. Democracy does seem to be an agreement they can focus on in building a future coalition. Morales, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela and many more leaders and nations are right. Capitalism must end or humanity will.

Bulletin: Why The Religious Economy Isn't Working The Way Parishioners Wish

 Yellen: Recovery surprisingly slow ( Duh?)

Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen said Friday that the slow recovery from the recession has surprised economists, confounding long-held beliefs about growth and inflation...

The aftermath of the 2007-09 crisis has “revealed limits in economists’ understanding of the economy,” the Fed chair suggested.

Hereafter, witch doctors who use the size of goat brains, the look of calf livers, the stench of cat excrement , the brightness of moon phases and the heat of sun spots to forecast the working of our world famous market system will be relied on in the hopes of achieving more accuracy of just what market forces under minority control seeking nothing more or less than private profit can come up with for the successful future of, um, witch doctors and, um, economists.

Latest Shocking Trump Bulletins from The Garlic

Trump In Clown Garb Registers Illegal Immigrants

An anonymous source claims to have seen Donald Trump dressed as a very scary clown and herding frightened illegal immigrants to the polls after forcing them to register as his voters. He was laughing hideously all the while.

Details later.

Trump Accused of Lurid Sex Comments Watching Bill Cosby

Another anonymous source claims to have seen and heard Trump comment on wanting to have sex with various members of the Cosby TV family while watching reruns of the show.He was looking lustily and drooling all the while.

Details later.

Trump and Cosby Abuse Victims Unite for Class Action

Still another anonymous source – a legal and religious expert – prophesizes that the united victims will sue for billions and go to the Supreme Court if necessary. Trump looked terrified, ugly and unhinged all the time.

Details much later.

Trump Asks Putin & Assad How Hot Their Wives Are

Still another anonymous source –not the same as the other three, this one speaks Russian and Arabic – alleges that Trump asked both global mass murdering villains about their sex lives. He wanted explicit details and looked very horny and sexist and racist all the while.

More details much later.

Much much later.

The Garlic prides itself on using international morals-free paparazzi media sources, all of them college graduates and sworn to secrecy lest their alma maters suffer vicious definancialization after donors are incentivized to tell them to fuck off with that garbage, looking embarrassed all the while.  

The Trump Phenomenon, as Seen From Europe

by Jean Bricmont

Brussels, Belgium.

The first thing to say about the U.S. presidential elections is that they are extremely anti-democratic. And here I’m not even talking about the manipulations that may have enabled Clinton to beat Sanders or about the fact that mainstream media spend their time deriding one candidate and covering up for the other. The most fundamentally anti-democratic aspect of the American elections is that a small fragment of humanity gets to elect someone who has an enormous influence over the rest of the world, someone who takes decisions that can drag us all into a generalized war, or at very least can aggravate tensions with Russia, Iran, and China, not to mention Syria, which are contrary to European interests.

From that point of view, Trump has an advantage over Clinton. That is, he says he wants to be President of the United States and not of the whole world, whereas she insists that the United States must exert world leadership.

Trump is berated as the latest incarnation of Evil (after Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad, the Brexiters): racist, sexist, Islamophobe, a friend of dictators, etc., in short the embodiment of all that arouses the righteous indignation of the human rights defenders.

I would like to suggest a different way of seeing Trump.  He is above all a capitalist, almost a caricature of the sort of man capitalism produces, encourages and celebrates. He makes money and is proud of it. For him, the bottom line is cost-benefit. Everything comes down to that ratio.  Defend the Baltic States?  What does it cost, what do we gain? Defend Japan?  What does it cost, what do we gain?

In his way, he is also patriotic.  Of course, not enough to pay taxes, or to pay his subcontractors if he can get out of it.  But he is no doubt seriously worried about the de-industrialization of the United States (a rational worry for a capitalist). He fancies he can solve the problem, in a capitalist way – making deals with the Chinese or with companies that take their jobs abroad.

As a capitalist, Trump succeeded. Of course, he didn’t start from nothing, but he considerably enlarged the fortune he inherited.  He did so by all sort of morally and legally doubtful methods. So what?  Are there many capitalists who get that rich otherwise?

It is almost laughable to see the horrified reaction of the respectable left (human rights defenders, feminists, anti-racists) to the sight of this phenomenon. After all, the respectable left is itself totally pro-capitalist, but it uses its own vocabulary to designate the system: free market, open society, liberalism.  But it accepts capitalism as essentially the end of history.  It directs its criticism solely against “exclusion”, whether due to supposed prejudice or rejection of immigrants, or against unfair competition.   But perfect competition would be a capitalist dream come true.

When the respectable left is faced with such a pure product of the system it defends (in its own way), that is, someone who is very calculating, vulgar, who says what comes to mind without concern for what is politically correct, all of which is fairly typical of a successful capitalist pleased with himself, we hear cries of dismay.

For that well-mannered left, the pro-capitalist discourse must be wrapped in sweet words, such as freedom, human rights, equality of opportunity, whereas the system as it is produces something quite different. Trump, for example.

The point at which the conflict between Trump and the pro-Clinton left, including the lesser-evilists, becomes interesting is the issue of war and peace.

Here too, Trump calculates: almost six trillion dollars spent on wars in the Middle East. And what do we have to show for it?  Practically nothing! Chinese companies among others exploit Iraqi oil without having spent a penny on those wars. The chaos in Libya or Syria is not profitable to anyone, notably not to oil companies (which profit from stability), while all reasonable capitalists are itching to do business with Iran and Russia.

Incidentally, even the anti-war left tends to get things wrong by attributing those wars to rational economic calculation.  In reality, those wars are motivated by a mixture of human rights ideology, determination to destroy Israel’s enemies and American ambition to exert world hegemony.

However, that ambition is not rational in economic terms.  It is expensive.  If you neglect the costs, it can seem rational. But Trump, as a genuine capitalist, doesn’t neglect them, and figures the whole enterprise is not worth it.  And there, he is absolutely right.  By the same token, he doesn’t see any good reason to launch a jihad against Russia, which is what is being done by the same ideologues who support the Middle East wars.  Russia is a capitalist country and someone like Trump can perfectly well make deals with the Russians.

What is fascinating about the Trump phenomenon is that those who denounce him as vulgar, dishonest, racist, and so on, have nevertheless to admit that his support comes from ordinary folks, inasmuch as all the media are against him, along with Wall Street, the Pentagon, and the left from Sanders to Chomsky. But the more violent that denunciation is, the more obvious becomes the total failure of the “third way”, or the “second left” (the Clintons, Blair, Zapatero, Schroeder, Jospin, Hollande, Renzi) which has totally lost popular support, and can now only rely on the support of the elites.

That “second left” has lost out because it is unable to solve economic problems due to its blind obedience to economic liberalism and because its international policy of endless interventions has only resulted in gigantic chaos, both in the Middle East and increasingly in Europe, by causing the refugee crisis.  Intensifying tension with Russia or insisting on overthrowing the Syrian government, no matter what the price, can only make matters worse.

Finally, that “third way” finds nothing better to do than to insult the people as being a mass of “deplorables”, as Hillary Clinton put it, thus digging itself deeper into a hole.

However “deplorable” he may be, the Trump phenomenon is a current form of “the revolt of the masses” faced with the failure of Western elites, supported by the “third way” left.

As for those of us in Europe, the issue is not to support either Trump or Clinton, since there is absolutely nothing we can do about it.  We need to wake up to our submission to the United States and try to free ourselves, which requires a long term effort at cultural, psychological and political liberation. From that angle, an eventual election of Trump could have a positive effect, at least in the short run, by the shock it would provoke among our America-idolizing media and political elites. But it’s up to ourselves to recapture our own independence.  That never comes from outside.

Translated by Diana Johnstone.

Where’s Our Alt-Left? Serving Our Center-Right

With daily bulletins from consciousness control informing us of the dangers of electing a textbook capitalist as president while daily news of textbook capitalism’s increasing dangers to humanity go unreported, it is long past time for an “alt-left” to balance the “alt-right” which seems to represent the only organized critical voice in american politics.

An electorate is being forced to choose between a lesser evil representative of the rich with excrement clogging his brains and a lesser evil representative of the rich with pus clogging her veins, while a real alternative for the 90% is not allowed to debate them for fear she would attract millions of citizens desperate for change even if some are vague about what it should represent. But almost as bad is the fact that one of capitalism’s own, a multi-millionaire tv personality, is seen as a threat to the established order far beyond that represented by Bernie Sanders, a supposed socialist not remotely anti-capitalist and at best only a reviver of the FDR 20^th century new deal that saved capitalism the last time it neared global collapse.

What’s going on here? Alleged progressives, even ( ssshhh) many leftists, are united with the american minority establishment in spreading fear that if Trump were elected a cherished american warfare state of neo-lib-con identity groups would be threatened with racism, sexism, poverty, war and other things never before experienced in the mental Disneyland where some progressive-regressives seem privileged to live.

How has a super wealthy individual member of a tiny minority, an example of all that is wrong with America, become a threat to a far more super wealthy tiny minority – 400+ billionaires - who are the greater example of all that is wrong with America? And how is it that only the Democratic Party establishment saw an alleged socialist as a threat, while both parties and the establishment they are employed by are up in arms about a true-blue died in the wool capitalist? Worse, supposed system critics and advocates of change – mostly psychological - are assigned the job of helping create a supposed anti-american monster whose arrogant, egoistic, individualist behavior all but scream the national anthem, the pledge of allegiance, the constitution, the lord’s prayer and hatikvah?

While polls are taken every fifteen minutes measuring everything from citizen’s hatred of Trump, devotion to pets and support of war against the world, we’ve yet to see a poll of the seven billion global inhabitants that asked which nation they found the most powerful, dangerous, obnoxious, egotistical and ignorant, to which the overwhelming response might be a unified chant of USA! USA! USA! so powerful earth might suffer a massive tsunami.

It would be difficult to conduct such a poll but easy to come to that conclusion if the plastic curtain enshrouding american consciousness were broken through enough to enable understanding of what we truly represent to the world, are doing to much of it, and why that is a threat to all of us and not just foreigners.

As paid critics and their amateur students excitedly inform us that Trump is hopefully becoming unhinged at shocking revelations of how he and other capitalists make money – who knew? - our alleged democratic government is becoming truly unhinged with reckless behavior that could provoke not only even bloodier war against an adversary we cannot dominate but worse, a nuclear confrontation. Russia is not a powerless little country we can bomb at will while pretending, as the Clintonistas, that “we kill because we care” and are only stopping genocide. The overused g-word comes in handy when others kill people. When we do it, it’s beneficial, democracy inspired loving murder. Kind of like Syria’s Assad, constantly charged with blowing up hospitals with “barrel bombs”, as opposed to the teeny-weeny itsy bitsy things we use to reduce thousands of humans to bloody pulp while destroying their nations. In the interest of free trade. In the free market. Where nothing is free.

The U.S. and its NATO puppets have been ringing Russia with military bases since the end of the Soviet Union and are increasing border threats to that nation, all the while calling it defensive postures against a supposed world dominating lust on the part of Putin, depicted as a menace in the way that comic book villains are depicted as threats to comic book heroes. Bulletin for the American innocent and unconscious: U.S. military bases border Russia, not the reverse.

Arrogance? The master race of self chosen people existed long before Trump came into the picture but the hit job on him says he’s an accomplice of Putin, and this is one of the cases in which the egomaniacal rich guy who talks military toughness represents an almost peace politics by comparison to the blood thirsty warheads of the other finance company. He speaks of friendship with, rather than wars against, Russia and China.

Rest assured, whatever negative superiority either one of the deadly duo may represent in some cases, neither offers anything but evil and whichever of them might win, Corporate Capital, Israel and the 1% will maintain power.

In the face of this dreadful choice offered voters, there is still the contradictory fact that one of the lesser evils is seen as a threat by the ruling evils. What? Has this brought the growth of a movement to vote for Jill Stein and the Green Party, a real alterative to the political economics of boom for some and doom for most? A vote for the greater good was never more necessary and that’s what a truly alternative left would and should be working for, but not yet. Why? Because believers in crackpot realism and the useful idiots who demand its practice, under which we would still have slavery, remain innocently swept up in fear or cynically in the employ of our rulers.

There is still some time for a slumbering left that truly stands for social transformation and not rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic, to become an alternative voice. A minority of Americans are already doing it, working hard to put the alternative offered by Jill Stein and the Green Party into the public debate. If and when the rest join them, this could be a truly historic election, and not for negative reasons.