Happy New Year! Resolutions For 2017

The air shall be cleansed of all poisons except those born of human fears and human passions;

in the streets cars shall be run over by dogs;

people shall not be driven by cars, or programmed by computers, or bought by supermarkets, or watched by televisions;

the TV set shall no longer be the most important member of the family and shall be treated like an iron or a washing machine;

people shall work for a living instead of living for work;

written into law shall be the crime of stupidity, committed by those who live to have or to win, instead of living just to live like the bird that sings without knowing it and the child that plays unaware that he or she is playing;

in no country shall young men who refuse to go to war go to jail, rather only those who want to make war;

economists shall not measure living standards by consumption levels or the quality of life by the quantity of things;

cooks shall not believe that lobsters love to be boiled alive;

historians shall not believe that countries love to be invaded;

politicians shall not believe that the poor love to eat promises;

earnestness shall no longer be a virtue, and no one shall be taken seriously who can't make fun of himself;

death and money shall lose their magical powers, and neither demise nor fortune shall make a virtuous gentleman of a rat;

no one shall be considered a hero or a fool for doing what he believes is right instead of what serves him best;

the world shall wage war not on the poor but rather on poverty, and the arms industry shall have no alternative but to declare bankruptcy;

food shall not be a commodity, nor shall communications be a business, because food and communication are human rights;

no one shall die of hunger, because no one shall die of overeating;

street children shall not be treated like garbage, because there shall be no street children;

rich kids shall not be treated like gold, because there shall be no rich kids;

education shall not be the privilege of those who can pay;

the police shall not be the curse of those who cannot pay;

justice and liberty, Siamese twins condemned to live apart, shall meet again and be united back to back;

a woman, a black woman, shall be president of Brazil, and another black woman shall be president of the United States; an Indian woman shall govern Guatemala and another Peru;

in Argentina, the crazy women of the Plaza de Mayo shall be held up as examples of mental health because they refused to forget in a time of obligatory amnesia;

the Church, holy mother, shall correct the typos on the tablets of Moses and the Sixth Commandment shall dictate the celebration of the body;

the Church shall also proclaim another commandment, the one God forgot:  You shall love nature, to which you belong;

clothed with forests shall be the deserts of the world and of the soul;

the despairing shall be paired and the lost shall be found for they are the ones who despaired and lost their way from so much lonely seeking;

we shall be compatriots and contemporaries of all who have a yearning for justice and beauty, no matter where they were born or when they lived, because the borders of geography and time shall cease to exist;

perfection shall remain the boring privilege of the gods, while in our bungling messy world every night shall be lived as if it were the last and every day as if it were the first.

------Eduardo Galeano, upside down - A Primer For The Looking-Glass World

Stop Listening To Them and Start Acting Like Us

“Western modernity enmeshed people in spiritually numbing networks of discipline and control…no one is more distant than the Americans from spirituality and piety.

Sayyid Gutb*

After blaming the FBI, Russia, Duck Dynasty, Honey Boo Boo, Housewives of Atlanta and everyone but the Tooth Fairy for Clinton’s loss to Trump perhaps now that the historic disgrace of democracy called an electoral college has legitimized his victory, some self criticism from the political clods responsible for our national condition should be on the agenda. But don’t hang by your lip waiting for that to happen, as everyone at least slightly left of the American Nazi party is being mobilized in the alleged crusade for freedom being organized by freedom’s worst enemy: the American ruling class.

Once it became clear that the owned-by-billionaires candidate had been defeated by the billionaire candidate who was as yet undisciplined as to the rules of the owners of the nation, the campaign that vilified him before the vote became one to house break him or destroy him after. So far, the tv personality who has come to stand for all that is wonderful, inspiring, ugly and frightening about America - depending on which channel or social media tool is being used to exercise control over the viewer/user - seems to be acting like he’s not about to poop on the ruling class rug. But he is unpredictable and so the crusade to diminish him by creating a near civil war goes on with no letup as creatures from the democratic party to the republican party and even some who call themselves “the left” are united in further reducing the american people’s minds to a collective pulp of mis and dis information to make fake news and conspiracy plots sound thoughtfully critical by comparison.

A story alleging that Putin has the secret hots for Hillary or that Trump gay-ly lusts for Bill might be accepted by some of the post-senile and pre-adolescent diners at the fabulous american taco-chicken-pizza-burger mall of media cuisine being force fed to people being prepared for fascism, world war five or emergency brain surgery. Not just the dimmest bulbs in a rapidly darkening nation, those whose knowledge (?) comes from watching the History Channel or a Spielberg movie, accept the hysterical charges of fascism at our doors, but alleged experts from the academic and political elder community. These equivalents of the old powdered wig and gown wearing elite of the colonialists who brought the USA into being are not bright enough to be drag queens or trannies but are sold as authority and expound on how Trump threatens the land grabbing racist war making ugliness that has made us the great nation many just recently came to regard ourselves as when what used to be liberals became like neo-nazis and real neo-nazis became too embarrassed to show up in public so are reliant on the Southern Poverty Law Center and the FBI to act as their membership. What can the less educated idiots do when the college educated imbeciles have stolen their game?  

This rich, egotistical, arrogant presidential putz has been cast as the inventor of historic institutional ugliness inherited by all americans but always blamed on individuals, in keeping with the political economic system of social unconsciousness i-me-mine-and-up-yours-if-you-get-in-my-way-ism we call american free market capitalism.

The un-regulated markets of obsessive profit seeking are like un-protected sex. Even at their best they can produce unwanted results but at their worst they may produce terminal disease, which is what present global market forces have created. The current awakening to an all too often new profit motivating business called “climate change” may yet lead to a truly global movement that will work to transform political economics before they transform us into a former race. Until that democratic movement develops strength we will suffer the continued treatment of humanity, earth, air, water and atmosphere as no more or less than commodities capable of producing private profits and the public be damned. Do we need radical change? Does a snake have wings?

Of course, if change is simply a matter of identity politics, the USA is the most radical nation in the world. Its ruling parties and corporations are composed of women, people of color, people of no color, gays, lesbians, every hyphenated American sub-group known to the market and practitioners and prosecutors of hate speech, dumb speech, and moronic and suppressed speech. The 1% has hired an affirmative action governmental team to simultaneously screw the majority of Americans, itself, and even larger sectors of the global community, in order to wear the shiniest economic chains in the history of political economic slavery. We call it “our” Democracy, showing our lack of much more than our accuser cites in the opening quote.

 What passes for liberalism has provoked balkanized divisiveness which has conservative fakers appealing to groups and ideals it has neglected: American workers, social values, political economics and more. Thus, we have survival-of-the-fittest individualism stronger than ever because political forces work to divide the nation into controllable minorities and in the process keep them from becoming the democratic majority. Our elections involve agents of the 1% calling themselves representatives of Americans against agents of the 1% calling themselves representatives of hyphenated Americans and whichever agents win, America loses.

And so does the world when we continue the system that is destroying it; what sense does it make to have a handful of humans living on millions of dollars a week while billions of humans live on less than five dollars a day? That’s Trumpism for the mind controlled and slack jawed but it’s deadly capitalism for the rest of us. We need to get beyond idiocy about who captains the Titanic and create a democratic mutiny to save the ship or get the hell off before it’s too late.

* After living in the USA for a few years he founded the Muslim Brotherhood…are we inspiring or what?

Liberals Still Wetting Their Pants Over Trump

Videos from clueless Hollywood liberals are making the rounds again. Martin Sheen, Mike Farrell, and many others are on display at sites like Occupy Democrats and Move-On pleading with the electoral college to vote against president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, even though he clearly won the election. This is not an effort to get Hillary Clinton in the back door, they insist, but a non-partisan effort to prevent an "unqualified" president-elect who has no knowledge or respect for the U.S. Constitution from taking office, allegedly the purpose of the electoral college in the first place.

Please liberals - take your medications. Where has your (alleged) concern for our glorious Constitution been these past eight years? Obama, the constitutional lawyer, has usurped the right to assassinate even U.S. citizens - wherever they happen to be in the world - with no due process of law. Every Tuesday morning he flips through his "baseball cards" of official enemies to determine who will subsequently die by drone attack, now the largest terrorist campaign in the world. If you want to know what sorts of actions increase the risk of the American people suffering further terrorist attacks, including, ultimately, a WMD-attack, this should be at the top of your list.

In any event, the electoral college is not a tool of expedience for liberals to over-turn election results that don't turn out the way their preferred style of corruption has told them they should. It's one of many undemocratic features of American politics put in place to make sure the super-rich never lose political control of the country. Liberals apparently haven't noticed, but the Lords of Capitalism regard Trump as a threat, which is why they're now acting to make sure his populist demagoguery stays within proper bounds. That, not the electoral college, is what determines our political parameters in the USA. It would be nice if liberals would take time out from their anti-Trump hysteria to notice it.

President Obama defended his restrained response to hacking ... but says he warned Russia, "We can do stuff to you"

Conversation opened. 1 unread message.

December 16, 2016 President Obama warned Putin that we could send all our identity groups to Russia and then they would have to create  gender fluid toilets, trigger alert rooms for sensitive therapy patients, multi-lingual phone messages and ballot statements for bilingual billionaires and housing for 400 thousand homeless americans and 150 million american pets.			Related Google+ Page

Conspiracy vs Conspiracy: 911 Truthers Sue Government

Calling government charges of a Russian conspiracy to elect an American president " a clear and dangerous policy designed to  strip our movement of its supporters" , 911 Truther Inc. , a subsidiary of Galaxy Conspiracies Corporation , introduced a libel suit against the "far out fanatics of the CIA and major media fake news who think their story of Russian infiltration of our electoral system is on a par with our story of unspeakable, unknowable, unexplainable and unintelligently brilliant plotters who magically took down the twin towers and convinced several billion morons to believe it was done by terrorist  "Arabs from caves" can stand up to logic, reason and other stuff we learned at community college and used to prove beyond any semi-reasoning creature with brains larger than a spider's genitals doubt."

The unidentified spokesperson, wearing a propeller beanie, spats, chartreuse pants, a green sweat shirt with the words "it's all out there, or in here, which is neither here nor there" in bold faced lie type, paused to take a breath after such a long sentence, as did our garlic reporter who was recording the historic and hysterical moment for posterity, or past therapy, or something really meaningful  that very few may understand but just come back in a few thousand tears when future experts will be able to explain all this stuff. For now, your guess is as good as that of 911Inc, Galaxy Corp,, or those zany fruitcakes  from the USA-CIA-Zion-Putinkilledyomama department of psycho-social marketing at the Pentagram.

Rest assured,  or  lie awake in tension , when the next bulletin from the White House, Nut House or Frat House details more of the intricate policies and plots by which otherwise decent intelligent beings are kept in a state of slack jawed moronic imbecility, The Garlic will be there covering every slapstick dipshit moment of  the new reality show, "America on the verge of massive socially demented  brilliance".

Or something.

Racism, Capitalism and Denialism

Given the founding of the nation in vicious ethnic cleansing of the original inhabitants and the forced immigration of kidnapped Africans in chains, racism, the false notion that humans are members of different races with some superior or inferior by virtue of skin tone, has taken hold of the minds of most americans. Given the taught and learned rationalization of that material ugliness of national origins as being natural divisions among humans, this is understandable. But when racism becomes a fetish used to keep divisions among people that insure minority wealth’s continued dominance of what is supposed to be a democracy, its hateful supporters and sincere opponents become equal participants in the perpetuation of an ugly lie.

We have just finished a presidential election which, despite the horribly comedic idea that either of the major party candidates represented anything but continuity of ownership of the nation by that wealthy minority, was reduced to charges about racism and its companion national isms that serve the same purpose: to keep americans from looking at the source of most if not all our social problems in the political economic system and instead focus on alleged good and bad individuals in places like police departments, schools, or the two parties with one ownership class.

Thus, we have a president elected by the system created to sustain slavery, the Electoral College, and wildly criticized now because the candidate of the rich won the popular vote while the richer of the candidates won the Electoral College vote. Were their substantial differences between the two? Only in genitalia. Both were of what is called the “white” race, which could lead to charges of a political hate crime leveled at both if the nation continues on its path toward total social dementia.

While charges of racism, sexism, xenophobia and appalling ignorance are hurled at the new president, only the last is real and hardly an impediment to carrying out the job of chief executive of this nation. Trump’s tendency to over speak, under think and rarely edit his remarks, the very thing found endearing by those who didn’t vote for him just because they hated her, has led to counter quotes sometimes even dumber than his, as in the case of his slur of some immigrants. His remark that Mexico wasn’t sending us its best but often some of its worst, criminals, like rapists, led to scathing charges of racism from people who don’t seem to know that Mexico is a nation and not a race. Nor did Trump, who even in his crudeness included a demurring “some of them are nice people”, ever say anything as stupid as charging 68 million Mexicans with being rapists, but the atonal orchestra lead by hearing impaired mind management and echoed by the thought controlled chorus simply sang the ridiculous charge that “he called Mexicans rapists”.

This usually sincere and humanitarian support for maligned immigrants also showed an incredible ignorance of our history, which has found enormous waves of foreigners, first from Europe, later from Asia, swept out of their homelands and into America to both rid those nations of extraneous people and reward american capital with cheap labor. All these past waves of immigrants encountered not only severe hardship but often violent discrimination, often far beyond the experience of present generations who though made to suffer greatly mostly do not have to cross an ocean but only a border and have an entire network of support service organizations to represent and protect them from the dreadful abuse that befalls all foreigners who are not here as tourists or escapees from countries experiencing revolutions against tyrants supported by the USA.

Perhaps the most persistent and bigoted notion driven into the minds of far too many was the idea that “uneducated white working class” people voting for Trump were all racist, sexist and afraid of losing their privileged status to other more deserving identity groups, these usually composed of a by comparison pampered class that experiences professional work after college, if ever, but is made to feel superior to a class often forced by economics to experience work during or even before high school. It should not take Harvard and Yale degrees – both earned by the incredibly brilliant George Bush - to learn that as disgracefully expensive a college education has become in america, the minority who gain such enjoy a very privileged status by comparison to those with simply a high school education.

 In fact, going along for the moment with the horrendous racist divisions of Americans forced into identity groups, only Asian Americans show a majority of their number to be college graduates. All others find minorities of their minorities with such degrees, including what are called “white” people. In very real fact, while some immigrants can dream of a higher education, under current economic market rules most Americans do not have a prayer at getting one. Especially if they are members of the working class, and of any skin tone, religion, ethnicity, sexual preference or other artificially forced separation, in keeping with the national standard of equal opportunity economic bigotry.

While a few corporate pundits have begun to notice that the nation is being driven wild by the truly stupid notion that people who have less are actually dominating those who have more, a concept only possible among supposedly educated people barely familiar with Groucho let alone Karl Marx, the post election atmosphere continues to force more americans further apart, after a campaign that nearly started a civil war. Trump rallies were picketed and attendees threatened and even attacked by neo-libs while neo-cons have been guilty of their own ugly attacks and threats to both self and falsely identified minorities. Even allowing for exaggeration of all such stories, where and how does this end?

Very difficult days lie ahead, for sure, but the demand for change represented by both Sanders and Trump and their tremendous support even in confusion about what the change should be, are a healthy sign for the future if we can get beyond the intellectually senile analysis which provokes the mentally infantile behaviors now creating exactly what our rulers want: a more divided, easier to control public set against its own interests that allow a minority of fabulously wealthy people to rule a supposed democracy with a tyrannical power ancient feudal lords would envy.

When global capitalism is working that means millions of Americans are not. That is the most important reason for Trump’s election, which will bring a more nationalist orientation of capitalism for a brief while and make no essential difference except to reward some at the expense of others. And that’s what has been going on forever under the domination of private capital over an anything but free market, even during the heyday – for some – of the New Deal, which Bernie Sanders suggested as answer to our problems though it would only do the same thing: Reward some at the expense of others, for a while.

The system of anti-democratic capitalism is the core reason for destruction of the environment that sustains all life, and currently going under the 21^st century brand name “climate change”, though it was anticipated in the 19^th century and not only by Marx. It’s local hold over consciousness has to do with the identitarian and politically correct politics that focus on micro changes that carry on the policy of benefits for only some at costs for many, while doing absolutely nothing to macro change the economics which are the problem of humanity and not just one or another group of humans. And the acceptance of evil, even fanatic nonsense like the existence of different races plays a very large role in keeping us occupied with science denial as great as what is called climate change denial. In fact, believing in different races is even dumber since there is absolutely no scientific evidence for such ignorance, while some small case can be made that climate always changes and bla bla bla so let’s not mess with the profit margin for private capital or we’ll all die in a market collapse brought on by god, the big bang, market forces, or the “college educated” who teach us to believe such nonsense.

Those socialized to blithely speak of “Trump America” or “Black America” or “Latino America” or any other reduction of humans to a sub-strata are responsible for people reacting as hyphenated rather than whole citizens, falsely divisible by birth when our only real division is of class. A transgender Latino-Serbo-Croation-American-Jew with money matters more than a straight, Black-Greek-Chinese-American-Seventh Day Adventist without money. What truly matters has nothing to do with the fiction of racial difference and everything to do with the reality of money and class.

In truth, we are all “people of color” except for a few who suffer a genetic defect called albinism, but whatever our skin tone or lack of it, we are in danger of far more than our nation collapsing if we continue living lies like the one about race. And more, the one that says treating humans, earth, air and everything else as simple commodities to be used in creating profits for some and enormous loss for most is the best way of reproducing our race, along with democracy, equality, social justice and other good stuff we need but will never get until we stop acting as slaves of capitalism and begin acting as what we are: a human race.

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.

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.

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

15 de noviembre a las 20:26 ·

Occupy Democrats

13 de septiembre de 2015 ·

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!

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.

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.

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 19^th century capital operating in a 21^st 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.

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..

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)

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 21^st 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.