Tuesday, November 29, 2016

Why Shouldn't A Clown Run the Circus?

The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States has shocked many and sent others sobbing to their therapists. It is, admittedly, unprecedented to have a real estate tycoon/reality TV star running the country, but given the rapidly deteriorating state of the USA's phony multiculturalism (Diversity Inc.) the clown was practically forced to take over the circus. 

The American electoral extravaganzas that select presidents have long since descended to the level of the circus, but what fan of Barnum and Bailey ever took the circus so seriously that he refused to share Christmas dinner with a relative who preferred Ringling Brothers? This would be to entirely miss the point. In the circus elephants stand on their heads, bears ride bicycles, and lions and tigers jump through hoops at a signal from their trainers. Everyone laughs and has a good time. It would be pointless and absurd for the audience to angrily insist that the bears aren't acting bear-like nor the lions lion-like. That is just the point of the circus:  to witness fantastic tricks that transport us out of reality into the world of make-believe.

True, this is no way to run a country, but there is simply no alternative to it unless the American people intend to establish a real democracy that expresses the popular will constantly and at every level of society. Absent this highly desirable state of affairs, the circus show is all that there is, and the show must go on. There's little use throwing temper-tantrums about it.

For sheer entertainment any fair-minded person would have to admit that Donald Trump has more than earned his newfound authority to run our circus. After all, over the past year-and-a-half, who has not been captivated by his wild insults, politically incorrect effrontery, and sheer nerve? In that short time he has taken over the Republican Party, won the White House, and exposed the pundit class as a band of clueless idiots, leaving much of the world astounded and trembling at what to expect next. (And all this armed with little more than a Twitter account!) No other circus act has ever commanded greater attention.

The circus exists to distract and thrill, to divert us from troubling dilemmas that admit of no easy solution, while delivering fun and excitement to everyone.

Enjoy the show.





Monday, November 28, 2016

Fidel

globally speaking, and not just for cuba, he was a political, philosophic and moral giant  among political, philosophic and moral dwarfs and his leadership inspired tens, perhaps hundreds of millions across the world…

he will be admired and revered long after all his detractors are gone.

and most of them are and will be forgotten the moment they leave.

Saturday, November 26, 2016

Tension and Stress Affecting Pets..OMG!

In response to emergency calls and visits to veterinary clinics, hospitals, sanitariums and mental health centers, the American Pet Industry has rushed into production some new anti-depressant products to help alleviate the crisis in mental health initiated by the recent election of a deplorable president.

"Our animal family members are feeling as badly as all americans in our wage and earnings bracket", said Ms Jocelyn Cashworthy of cosmopolitan suburban shopping center america. "They need help as much as we do. I haven't slept since November 8 and my pomeranian poodle collie chihuahua mix has been up with me every night."

Owners of cats, spiders, fleas and exotic tropical cockroaches have also been complaining of ill tempered, bad mannered pets since the terrible election of an anti-semitic, misogynistic, racist and pet hating new president.

"We'll just have to keep smoking pot and sharing it with our pets until Big Pharma can market its new drugs at a profit. We all need to unite as a people to save our  pets and our wonderful  capitalist system from this capitalist who somehow won an election in our carefully arranged democracy to maintain capitalism."

Fidel Castro, 1926-2016

His enemies say he was an uncrowned king who confused unity with unanimity. 

And in that his enemies are right.

His enemies say that if Napoleon had a newspaper like Granma, No Frenchman would have learned of the disaster at Waterloo.

And in that his enemies are right.

His enemies say that he exercised power by talking a lot and listening little, because he was more used to hearing echoes than voices.

And in that his enemies are right.

But some things his enemies do not say: it was not to pose for the history books that he bared his breast to the invaders' bullets,

he faced hurricanes as an equal, hurricane to hurricane,

he survived six hundred and thirty-seven attempts on his life, 

his contagious energy was decisive in making a country out of a colony,

and it was not by Lucifer's curse or God's miracle that the new country managed to outlive ten U.S. presidents, their napkins spread in their laps, ready to eat it with knife and fork.

And his enemies never mention that Cuba is one rare country that does not compete for the World Doormat Cup. 

And they do not say that the revolution, punished for the crime of dignity, is what it managed to be and not what it wished to become.

Nor do they say that the wall separating desire from reality grew ever higher and wider thanks to the imperial blockade, which suffocated a Cuban-style democracy, militarized society, and gave the bureaucracy, always ready with a problem for every solution, the alibis it needed to justify and perpetuate itself.

And they do not say that in spite of all the sorrow, in spite of the external aggression and the internal high-handedness, this distressed and obstinate island has spawned the least unjust society in Latin America.

And his enemies do not say that this feat was the outcome of the sacrifice of its people, and also of the stubborn will and old-fashioned sense of honor of the knight who always fought on the side of the losers, like his famous colleague in the fields of Castile.

-----Eduardo Galeano, Mirrors, 2009

Thursday, November 17, 2016


Yes, it's wonderful that low-wage jobs are increasing by leaps and bounds, heralding the brave new world of poverty WITH employment. Becoming a nation of waitresses and bartenders is a fitting tribute to the world's only superpower.  A strong dollar is equally inspiring, especially in the vast regions of the Third World where battered currencies can't purchase enough of the stronger dollars to give the people even the beginnings of a recognizably human existence. But it sure looks good on paper! Gas heading to $2 a gallon - yes! - thanks to fracking, which is so good for the environment. The "Bush" deficit cut by two-thirds - another yes! - owing to the austerity economics that just put Donald Trump in the White House.

Thanks Obama!

Monday, November 14, 2016

Trump 1, Multiculturalists 0

In just a year-and-a-half a reality T.V. star has won the Republican nomination for president, captured the White House, left the Bush and Clinton family "dynasties" in ruins, and exposed corporate pundits as complete fools who haven't the vaguest notion what they are talking about. And the prevailing thesis favored by the losers is that they are shrewd and insightful, while Trump is a complete idiot.

Sunday, November 13, 2016

Quotes By and About The U.S. President-Elect

"I'm excited, man. I'm not going to lie. We've seen, especially the last eight years, talk but not drastic change that benefits the citizens. The idea that a citizen would be taking the presidency as opposed to a politician, I think that's got people excited."

-----Jacob Stout, small business owner, Danville Kentucky

"I spend a lot of time around union guys. And the union leadership has been saying all along to me:  their members just don't trust Democrats anymore."

-------Rep. John Yarmuth, Democrat, Louisville

"As a gay, liberal, health-loving Canadian, most of my friends thought I was crazy to be supporting Trump. But I suggested he had to win to offer a chance for world peace by preventing WWIII with Russia and for his stance on radical Islam."

-----Ashley MacIsaac

"We are all now rooting for his success."

------Barack Obama

"Torture works."

-----Donald Trump

Thank You For Not Blowing Up The Planet

"Russia is killing ISIS. Assad is killing ISIS. I think it would be a good idea to get along with Russia."                            
                                              -----Donald Trump

"I do not believe that Russia and China are paying any price at all - nothing at all - for standing up on behalf of the Assad regime. The only way that will change is if every nation represented here directly and urgently makes it clear that Russia and China will pay a price."

             ----Hillary Clinton to "Friends of Syria"

"We once again thank Americans for keeping this warmonger [Hillary Clinton] from the reins of power."
                                -------The Herald, Zimbabwe

The Hillary Clinton Campaign: An Autopsy

Hillary lost the white vote, 58% to 27%. She lost white women, 53% to 43%, an amazing result given that Trump was widely perceived to be a sexual predator. She won the overall women's vote, 54% to 42%, but that was one percent less than Obama got in 2012. Trump did 2% better with blacks than Romney did four years ago, while Hillary lost 5% of that group compared to what Obama got, making for a seven point differential. The Hispanic vote revealed the same pattern. Trump got 29% compared to Romney's 27%. Hillary got 65%, where Obama had received 71%, an eight percent overall difference unfavorable to Hillary. There was no Great White Surge: Trump received 1.5 million fewer votes than did Romney. But the decline for Hillary was far worse - she got 5.4 million fewer votes than Obama had in 2012, many of them black and Hispanic, and lost six states that Obama won twice: Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Iowa. That's fairly conclusive evidence that Hillary Clinton lost because she's on the wrong side of the class war, not because Donald Trump is the KKK.

Voter support for both major parties is in steady decline. Presidential votes cast for the GOP were 62 million in 2004, 59.9 million in 2008, 60.9 million in 2012, and 59.6 million this year. That's a four percent decline in twelve years, despite eleven percent population growth in that time. Meanwhile, Democratic presidential votes were 69.5 million in 2008, 65.9 million in 2012, and 59.8 million this year. That's a fourteen percent drop in just eight years.

Spending on election advertising was $96.4 million for Hillary Clinton and $17.3 million for Donald Trump.

In just a year-and-a-half a reality TV star has ridden an anti-establishment wave into the Oval Office, leaving the political elites of both the Democratic and Republican parties thoroughly discredited. The Bush and Clinton family "dynasties" are in ruins.



Thursday, November 10, 2016

American Brexit Now, Capitalist Exit Later


 
“Something is happening but you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Jones”  Bob Dylan

That line from a 1960s lyric spoke to a society in the midst of social change totally misunderstood by opinion makers and their employers. The situation now is more serious, the changes needed more radical, and the degree of confused ignorance of the people and criminal immorality of the leadership greater than before. Thus, an election in which the ruling establishment demanded defeat of one of its own, a rich and unruly capitalist, in favor of one of its employees, a more reliable worker in the fields of empire, and they failed.

The people wouldn’t have it, despite the biggest job of mind management ever attempted. While many are mourning this result, which is a part of the management protocol, more should take heart that disgust with things as they are and cannot go on has at least achieved a small victory. Much bigger ones are needed and hopefully will come and if they don’t we will face suffering much worse than the psycho-neurotic personal kind we’re programmed to experience as supposedly social and political.

While Trump offers a mixed bag of egoistic reactionary individualism almost balanced by nationalist concern for the well being of millions beyond consideration by his fellow billionaires, his inability to edit himself before revealing the shallowness of some of his thinking is problematic for the rulers who never wanted him in the first place, and the voters who chose his lesser evil in the second. But after the great surge for Bernie Sanders was crushed by the Democratic Party leadership, and shamefully accepted by its rank and file, Trump was all that was left for millions who have become convinced that present reality will bring further hardship and ruin to them and their world. This tide that finally began to sweep America was already flowing in Europe, mainly to the right, and had created governments in South America, mainly on the left. But while its expression of fed up populism and growing contempt for the imposed reality of globalization, which is just 19th century capital operating in a 21st century world, is confused and sometimes frightening, it is also a hopeful sign that the system threatening the planet and all its people is closer to being confronted, and transformed.

During the campaign to defeat Trump, socially fostered acceptance of individualist gossip worked to depict him in all the identitarian, divide and conquer frames within which democratic majorities are prevented. His crude and often vulgar reactions to criticism, exactly what millions of people admired about him, fed into the culture of division that make it easier to label someone a sexist or racist than a member of a tinier than all minority of billionaires. Though people could not help to know he was rich – he announces it at every opportunity as his prime skill –they were advised that he hated blacks, Mexicans, women and possibly pets, with scandalous background checks revealing alleged evidence of these transgressions. While some privileged and protected populations never knew that men were often sexist, and rich men were able to have sex more often than ordinary people, Trump was seen as a new menace, having been accused by many of being groped and generally treated the way women have been treated by market culture for generations.

 Those who’ve never seen movies, tv, magazines and other popular culture vehicles filled with near naked women paraded around like cattle for the pleasure of millions of admiring men – and quite a few women – or checked into the market sub-culture of sexual workers and their CEO pimps and the millions of dollars transacted in that business, and the billions more in the pornography business, are either consciously escapist, sensually disabled, or dead. What role did Trump play in the creation and profit making of this massive market, its treatment of women, and where were the people recently awakened to this reality during its history?

Also lost, if it was ever found in their consciousness, is the role of all the women in his life reduced to seeming trash by the hordes claiming he was a bitter sexist fiend. His wife and daughters? Stupid. His female workers? Dumbos. His critics? All brilliant feminists, truly far more aware of his flawed character than the women he was most intimate with. And some wonder why working class people without college degrees consider the professional class elitist?

After Trump’s destruction of an entire sex, his stupid outspoken comment about immigration was transformed into a negation of an entire people, all of them falsely identified by Trump’s critics as a race. And there may be ignorance bordering on stupidity that thinks Mexico is not a nation but a race. Who knew? The way that ignorance still accepts, despite science, that there are different races. Like, people with blue eyes or dark hair or very tall people or heavy people, all are different races. Anyone dumb enough to believe that can swallow that skin tone differences somehow make us members of different races and are not just human signs of our geographic and genetic evolution.

Trump’s simplistic remark that Mexico wasn’t sending us its best but some if its worst, criminals, rapists and such, added that “some of them are nice people” to clean up his mouth created mess, but it didn’t matter. This was played as though he had claimed 68 million Mexicans were all rapists, and repeated again and again, causing nightmares for some people with more than enough problems without being told this man wanted all of them deported because they were all rapists. The only thing dumber than Trump has been the reaction by our ruling owners and their employees, feeding us incredible amounts of gossip and innuendo, all strengthened by his big-mouth tendencies, to cause fears with no more substance in reality than those of a boogie man or perverted tooth fairy. Some may be seeing therapists in fear that there will be an epidemic of raping and immigrant bashing now that this monster is president, oblivious to the fact that rape and immigrant mistreatment are as old as humanity, but especially strong cultural currents in the USA.

Every wave of immigrants in this nation’s history has encountered warm welcome by those who profited from their cheap labor, and hostility, fear, animosity and sometimes hate from those whose labor they replaced. This was true for all except the Africans who were purchased and brought over in chains and would have rejoiced rather than protested if they’d been “threatened” with deportation. Every influx of Europeans and Asians of the past was overwhelmingly to work at the bottom of the economy, and it’s true for most of today’s immigrants from all over the world, an aspect of present capitalism answering to the name globalization. This treatment of humans as products is nothing new; only the techniques of transport have changed depending on distance. Upon arrival, they meet the same economy of the past, but do have some immigrant services and representation unknown to past cheap labor.

The economic system that previously brought in Europeans and Asians more recently brought in Mexicans and Central Americans. It is that system that must be dealt with, not simply the personalities of one or another of its executive or ruling class leaders. In order to keep us from seeing and working on that very serious problem, which is threatening the planet and not just one of its identity groups, we are fed a diet of gossip, innuendo, personal case histories as opposed to class analysis, and distraction from shared objective material reality by focus on isolated, subjective, immaterial fiction. Our personal histories are important but when they take on greater importance than our commonalities of class and humanity, we are in trouble.

Some of us are moving in the direction of working together and even when the work takes seemingly backward steps, we should remember that we started out as a race of humans who could not possibly survive without cooperation and only moved toward competition and violence when threatened by a lack of food and shelter during a time when there was not enough to share. Those days ended long ago and the sooner we acknowledge our commonality and need for working together to solve our political economic problems, the sooner we increase the hopes for survival and success of humanity.

Brexit was a rejection of modern capitalism that enriched many while impoverishing more and destroying earth at a faster pace then ever. Those enriched treated it the way the same group here is treating Trump’s victory, reducing it to divisive minority focus, always of some truth in america, and in complete denial of a system that profits a shrinking minority of the rich and their servants, at costly and ever greater loss to most of humanity, whether in England, the USA, South America or anywhere else. We need to organize to change the system, fast, and only worry about individuals when they are collectively in support of that system. Trump? He’s one of them, but the Democratic, and Republican parties and the billionaire class which owns them are the bigger problem we need to solve. After we see our therapists to work on ourselves, we need to join a political group working for social, and not just personal change.



Wednesday, November 9, 2016

if the campaign wasn’t despicable enough, the aftermath is seeming worse.



jill stein, white racists, blacks who didn’t vote enough, right wing latinos who voted too much, working class stupid people, all and more are responsible for this dreadful day in american history that will be a boon to therapists, dope peddlers and legions of self important socially imbecilic people who’ll probably realize, after therapy, that they’ve been repeatedly raped, exploited and robbed by trump sometime in the past..

Saturday, November 5, 2016

Hillary Clinton: Not Lesser Evil, Just Evil

" . . . the potential first female president represent[s] a purely cosmetic form of diversity that works against the structural changes that need to be made at every level of culture and politics to expose and depose a political class that has acted with impunity to promote policies that benefit wealthy donors and powerful multinational corporations."
                                      -----Professor Catherine Liu

"Hillary Clinton is not responsible for the terrible policies of the Bush Administration, but she is responsible for following in lock-step with those policies during her tenure as Secretary of State under the Obama Administration."

                                   -----Robin D., Tits and Sass

"That's a wicked woman."
                                   -----Minister Louis Farrakhan 

It is a staple observation of modern feminism that a woman has to be twice as capable as a man to go half as far in her career, which should mean that in the negative profession of U.S. politics a woman has to be four times as evil as a man in order to capture the presidency. With this in mind we can certainly agree that Hillary Clinton is "far more qualified" than Donald Trump to be president. The only question is how many more years the human race can be expected to survive such "qualified" leaders.

Apparently suffering from a permanent case of what used to be called "the vapors," liberals aghast at Donald Trump's "racism" continually overlook the fact that Hillary backed Bill Clinton's 1994 crime bill, which railroaded an entire generation of young blacks into prison on the pretext that they were "super-predators," (Hillary's term), a reformulation of the Jim Crow era's "bestial black brutes," always supposedly in need of a good lynching or (nowadays) a long prison term. No surprise that Hillary has close ties to the private prison industry, which grows fat on the crushed lives of the desperately poor, all too many of them black.

Recall that Bill Clinton campaigned for the presidency lecturing blacks about "personal responsibility," playing on racist stereotypes that they were hyper-actively and irresponsibly sexual, an amazing display of chutzpah given his own predilections. Furthermore, his deliberate distortion of Sister Souljah's remarks about black lives not mattering (*Clinton claimed Souljah was calling for the murder of white people when in fact her point was that IF black gang members killed whites instead of each other a racist media would at least cover the story, which it does not do when blacks are doing all the dying) was a transparent attempt to put blacks at the back of the Clinton victory bus, which he clearly thought was their "place." Such is the thinking of "New Democrats," and Hillary is one of them.

Hillary also strongly supported president Clinton's 1996 "welfare reform," which plunged another million American children into poverty (a disproportionate number of them black children) at a time when the U.S already had the highest rate of child poverty in the developed world. The Children's Defense Fund (which Hillary worked for fresh out of law school) condemned the Clintons publicly for this, with founder Marian Wright Edelman opining that Bill Clinton's "signature on this pernicious bill makes a mockery of his pledge not to hurt children." By 2002 Hillary was so proud of welfare reform that she bragged, "These people are no longer deadbeats, they're actually out there being productive" (italics added). Note her language - deadbeat - which is a synonym for sponger, and virtually identical to Adolf Hitler's "useless eaters." Note as well that the majority of welfare beneficiaries have always been children, prevented by child labor laws from being "productive."

In other words, her feminism is a fraud. She staunchly opposes welfare, a $15 an hour minimum wage, and Medicare for all, establishment stances that keep millions of women mired in dismal poverty. And she loves war, which always increases rape, and champions military interventions that strengthen ISIS, famous for practicing femicide and sex slavery as masculine ideals.

During her husband's terms in the presidency, Hillary crafted his "triangulation" strategy and helped advance Republican orthodoxy across the board: "social" spending for police, prisons, and war; NAFTA, which off-shored 682,000 American jobs; a racist drug war (penalties for crack cocaine favored by black users were far harsher than those for powder cocaine used by whites); an expansion of capital punishment; a massive assault on the First Amendment via the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, budget austerity; Star Wars; runaway prison construction; the dismissal of unions and unemployment as policy concerns; the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which exempted credit default swaps from regulation and helped usher in economic collapse.

As Secretary of State she focused laser-like on the needs of corporate capital, which she confused with the national interest. According to the Wall Street Journal, she "redefined the job in ways that promoted the interests of U.S. business." Among recent secretaries the Journal found her "one of the most aggressive global cheerleaders for American companies," lobbying foreign governments to "sign deals and change policies to the advantage of corporate giants" like General Electric, Exxon Mobil, Boeing, and Microsoft." According to an analysis by the paper, at least sixty companies that lobbied the State Department during Hillary's tenure as Secretary of State also donated over $26 million to the Clinton Foundation "charity."

How did Hillary do as Secretary of State? A Stanford-NYU study soon after she left office concluded that from June 2004 through mid-September 2012 U.S. drone strikes killed thousands of people in Pakistan alone. Meanwhile, U.S.-brokered arms sales rose to an all-time high on her watch, to $66.3 billion in 2011, more than 75% of the global arms market, driven by major deals with autocratic Persian Gulf states. President Obama said that the arms deals would be good for jobs and the State Department said that in such an insecure region it would be good for security. But what kind of security? A 2009 cable published by WikiLeaks offers a hint. The document has Hillary admitting that Saudi Arabia, a major U.S. arms recipient, is "the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide." In short, "security" means sending more fuel to the arsonists who want to burn our house down.

 All of which makes it difficult to take seriously Hillary's advocacy of "smart power," which  simply means using every conceivable means to advance Washington's world hegemony. "Human rights" is a favorite theme, even as Washington continually tramples on international law and the sovereignty of nations to achieve it. Most alarming is Clinton's continual portrayal of Vladimir Putin as "Hitler," thus dismissing any role for genuine diplomacy. When Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur crashed in Southeastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, killing all 298 people on board, Hillary immediately blamed Putin and urged European countries to attack Russia, though there was no evidence to back up her claim. "There should be outrage in European capitals," she said, adding the brain-dead Cold War adage that "the only language [Putin] understands" is toughness. She declared that Putin was "pushing the envelope as far as he thinks he can," suggesting that the Russian president had deliberately shot down the plane in order to test Western resolve. To this day she maintains that Putin "must be punished," a policy that obviously runs a high risk of nuclear war. By comparison, Donald Trump's call for the U.S. and Russia to "get along" and solve problems through negotiation seems stunningly brilliant.

In spite of her dismal record, Hillary shamelessly affects great concern for the fate of "women and girls" around the world, but as with all her other high-minded rhetoric, it rings hollow. Not quite a year before her "good friend" Madeleine Albright declared to Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes that killing 500,000 Iraqi children via economic blockade was "worth it" because of the perceived political gains involved, Hillary intoned that, "It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are girls." Note that the motive, not the killing, is what she finds reprehensible. If you kill girls not because they are girls, but simply for being Iraqi, that's OK. And you can kill hundreds of thousands of them.

No surprise, then, that Hillary believes the solution to the humanitarian crisis of Syrian refugees is to obliterate their country with bombs.

The 2011 destruction of Libya was at Hillary's initiative, as she convinced a reluctant Secretary Gates and President Obama to intervene, reducing a country that had had the highest standard of living in Africa to a chaotic ruin presided over by ISIS gangs, who now roam the beaches beheading people. At the same time as Hillary was arguing that U.S. military intervention was justified because the Libyan government was using violence against its political opponents, Washington's head-chopping allies in Saudi Arabia were sending thousands of troops into Bahrain in support of a monarchy doing the same thing. Hillary told the Bahranian crown prince, "Violence is not and cannot be the answer. A political process is." But not in Libya, which U.S. bombs devastated perhaps beyond repair.

Former U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens, one of the four U.S. diplomats killed in Benghazi, revealed what all the talk of Qaddafi being a "dictator" was really about. He said Qaddafi was getting tough with U.S. oil companies because he wanted to use more oil for Libyan purposes, like funding regional development to prevent terrorism, and to establish an independent African alternative to the United States African Command. In other words, Qaddafi wanted Libyan national resources to support Libyan purposes, which conflicted with the needs of foreign investors and the U.S. military, so he had to be overthrown and killed. Cables from the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli confirm that the U.S. objected to the Libyan government's belief that the United States African Command was a "vehicle for latter day colonialism."

The world is plastered with U.S. military bases and awash in U.S. sponsored bloodbaths, but we're not colonialists, and we'll kill anyone who says we are, unless they let us govern their country for them.

By all accounts, Hillary is up to the job.

Sources:

Michael K. Smith, Portraits of Empire - Unmasking Imperial Illusions From The "American Century" to The "War on Terror," (Common Courage, 2001)

Diana Johnstone, Queen of Chaos - The Misadventures of Hillary Clinton, (Counterpunch, 2015)

Liza Featherstone, ed. False Choices - The Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton, (Verso, 2016)



















Thursday, November 3, 2016

After November 8, America May Need Legalized Pot



“If we cast a vote for establishment politicians we are legitimizing establishment control of politics. It's that simple.”

 Michael K. Smith 


As millions prepare to do just what Smith warns against, including hundreds of thousands who think themselves dedicated to ending such control, it’s time we understand american mind management’s great success at reducing voters to herds of human cattle whether from a conservative right, a liberal left, or trapped in the middle of the political desert called the two party system under one class control.

Reducing otherwise thoughtful americans to sinking intellectually lower than those they are taught to disrespect as uneducated and worse, we find an allegedly liberal population that might make germans during the nazi era seem civil libertarians by comparison. The all consuming state of the mind managed and consciousness controlled– the greater the conflict, the tighter the control – finds supposedly educated groups reacting with all the critical thoughtfulness of a dog leaving its droppings on the pavement. And a likeness to excrement might be raising the level of debate, given the atrocities of persuasion used to reduce America’s political arena to a giant national toilet. Consider only a few of the glaring contradictions hardly given a thought by innocents who exercise more choice while shopping for clothes, pet food, weapons or drugs than in the political marketplace where they, instead of the products, are branded. And let’s remember the origin of this ugly overused term which originally meant burning into the flesh of an animal or human slave the “brand” of its owner. Whose “brand” are you?

People taught that freedom of speech and thought are cherished ideals are programmed into vilifying those who dare to speak or think differently than they. While the all too easy examples of religious fundamentalists suppressing the freedom of one or another minority or the right to openly speak about beliefs that contradict the accepted code are cited by a purportedly secular liberal sector as narrow minded bigotry, it is as guilty, often proudly so, of the same behavior.

For example, when a rich, silicon valley techmeister dared to contradict the hypothetically free thinking libertarian mindset of the market fundamentalist community who make up the majority of the rich IT class, the reaction was swift and as tolerant as any nazi embargo on thought. Previously lauded by a gay liberal publication for being rich and homosexual as well, he became a villain and un-gay for being a supporter of Donald Trump. And liberals too young to remember or too ignorant to know about the anti-soviet frenzy of the cold war are aroused to react to Putin and Russia the way the people they treat with utter contempt might react to an abortion being performed at the altar during their church service. A supposed community of gay rights advocates doesn’t accept gays who don’t toe the party line of such supporters, while alleged anti-war oriented people operate in a controlled mental state lusting for war as the country moves closer to a military confrontation with Russia, provoked by sources of propaganda they formerly opposed moving them to think – if at all - from their lower anatomy, in the fashion of the candidate they are programmed to hate.

A rapidly diminishing economic system that still rewards a substantial minority with comfort and privilege while giving the class above them that brands their professions measures of wealth beyond belief, is made to feel superior to the majority who carry the burden of social costs to finance their personal benefits. This results in great numbers of people looking down on those below them in the economic stratification of 21st century capitalism, approaching that of its centuries old origins in comfort for some and squalor for most. Thus, those able to afford education, a shrinking minority and ”diverse” in the divide and conquer modes of identitarian affirmation, are taught to disrespect those with less ability to pay the educational premiums or qualify for the massive debt required. The majority of americans, without college degrees and forced to accept even more limited work than those who make it through the paper mills and become lawyers, teachers or as often, baristas, are seen as less able to think or perform in the capitalist marketplace and become subjects of blame for all the worst aspects of the game.

Inequality, racism, sexism, problems of immigration, gentrification and many other aspects of what passes for normal political economics are seen as the fault or responsibility of “others”. And the majority group, carefully splintered into as many ethnic, religious and ugliest and most ignorant of all, racial minorities - thus with less chance to perform as the majority we truly are – are driven to reactionary minority political organization which seems the only answer to other reactionary minority opposition given that action of a majority is treated as a work of fiction or desire of folly. Meanwhile, imperial warfare, Wall Street, corporate america, the richest 1%, its well paid servants and Israeli interests continue to take up the lion’s share of the nation’s wealth as alleged market competition becomes the anti-social reality of the most while a perverted form of wealthy socialism exists with benefits for only the least.

With established billionaires, through their banks and lobbies like NRAIPAC, maintaining control whichever of the deadly duo is elected by well meaning lesser evilites, the need for a radical politics of truly revolutionary and not simply social democratic change will become more pressing. The identity group of those with enough money to matter no matter what their skin tone, religion or ethnicity, needs to join with masses whose lives matter much less because they haven’t enough money to matter, no matter what their skin tone, ethnicity or religion. The most democratic, humane and efficient system will not happen until it’s created by people who understand that with all the horrid treatment of people of different caste and color, the primary division and barrier among all of humanity is that of economic class. With all the nonsense about an alleged problem of growing population, no one goes without food, shelter, education or healthcare because there isn’t enough of those things, but only because they haven’t enough money to pay for them and return a profit to the marketeers who sell them.

We now have capital’s representatives from all supposed minorities in congress, on Wall street, in the military, as CEOs of major corporations and just about everything else. Whether the private profits accrue to heterosexuals, homosexuals, people of light skin tone, dark skin tone, or with accents that identify them as from Mexico, Brooklyn or Serbo-Croatia, they come at public expense. Instead of seeking other mind management created minorities to blame or see as enemies, we need to direct our focus at the rigged system of human inequality which allows some to thrive only at other's failure. The only minority to deal with on a confrontational basis is the billionaire gang formerly confronted by some dedicated followers of the Bernie Sanders campaign, before they became sheep led to a voting booth to make sure that billionaire minority retains its domination. If only 5% of them vote for Jill Stein, the Greens will receive millions of public dollars to continue building a real alternative of hope for the future. When slavish obedience to mind managed lesser evil ends, we will begin building a better nation and world, but not until then. On the eighth, vote, inhale deeply and try to relax, if you can. And on the ninth, begin working for that change, if you haven’t already.





Wednesday, November 2, 2016

Most Shocking Trump Revelation Yet! Must GO Viral !!

OMG!

OMG!

OMG!

Hidden in vaults for many decades taped interviews with the family's wet nurse hired after the tragedy reveal that..

brace yourself...

hold your breath...

Trump abused his mother by biting off her nipples while being breast fed!

OMG!

OMG!

etc.