Weapons and Walls

“The Kids Are Alright”

The Who

The kids are doing a fine job of re-alerting everyone to the problem of the weapons business when it comes to private citizen ownership of a gun and the thousands we kill with them. But we need those kids and especially their parents and grand parents to wake up and face up to the very public social problem of the weapons and hundreds of thousands of murders we all pay for under the misnomer of defense.

The Pentagon, the weapons industry and our military kill far more people than the NRA and we all pay for it, not as individuals shopping for a personal weapon but as taxpayers in an alleged democracy who foot the trillion dollar bills for warfare and mass murders that have finally come home to us through retaliatory acts of terrorism. While lauding our kids for doing what our alleged democratic government should be doing, we adults might give a moment to stopping the mass murders and destruction of nations conducted by a military allegedly defending us in other nations thousands of miles from home, while it, and we, remain helpless to stop private and public murders in our own country. Make you wonder? It should.

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall. That wants it down.”

Robert Frost

Seems to depend on where the wall is, who builds it and who is being kept out or in by it. Many Americans are upset by the proposal to build a wall on the U.S. - Mexican border to keep Mexican people from coming into the country without legal processing. And some Americans are very upset about the wall in Israel that keeps Palestinians locked both in and out of their own homeland to protect Israelis the way early Americans had to be protected from Indians whose homes and land they had taken. The Americans concerned about both walls are equally upset and some group members may even overlap and their concern is justifiably based on moral grounds. But both need to strongly consider the enormous political economic impact of our dollars connected to building and maintaining both walls.

The proposed structure between the USA and Mexico would hamper the supply of illegal immigrant cheap labor for American businesses and professional class domestic servant seekers while offering much needed jobs to those Mexicans under-served by their nation’s political economic system. It would attempt to help regulate traffic between the nations and see to it that none were allowed in who could do harm to American taxpayers and workers.

The existing wall in Israel is used to control the cheap labor of Palestinians who work for businesses in Israel but cannot do so without passing through checkpoints and authorities regulating them in their own country and making sure they aren’t people who would do harm to Israelis.

Guess which wall and which group of opponents to the wall gets more attention from media and the elected officials of our precious democracy?

Also guess which lobby has more power over congress and the white house and is responsible for more death both in America and especially the Middle East - The NRA or the Israeli Lobby?

First correct answer gets to spend one week with the Trump family.

Second correct answer gets two weeks with the Clintons.

Near Deadly Political Gas Attack On Americans

“Historically, reactionary forces on the verge of extinction invariably conduct a last desperate struggle against the revolutionary forces, and some revolutionaries are deluded for a time by this phenomenon of outward strength but inner weakness, failing to grasp the essential fact that the enemy is nearing extinction while they themselves are approaching victory.”

In the face of steadily deteriorating imperial power, the reactionary forces of global capital have pressed the panic button and are performing far worse than rats on a sinking ship, unless those rats were armed with nuclear weapons and were as deluded as the politburo of western capitalism. Unfortunately some who were previously considered advocates of change are now among the deluded mentioned in the quote and have become foremost protectors of the reactionary political economics of global capital controlled by the market forces of Artificial Intelligence. As the world lurches closer to what could become a nuclear confrontation and the western toadies of empire raise wimpy voices in an atonal chorus of support for accusations against logic and reality, it would be nice to think the quote had it right and that this is just a sign of their and not our extinction. But while we need to keep the faith and work for a better future it must be noted that things get worse and more worrisome in the present.

The most recent nerve gas charges in Syria coming from the mental bowels of western reactionaries were as believable as the last ones, which means hysterically funny when not tragically frightening. The only truthfulness comes from America’s Pinhead-In-Chief who actually believes that Assad is as dumb as American policy pundits and would use poison gas to kill for no reason other than sadistic pleasure, or at least to conveniently cause photo-ops of suffering babies being protected by performers in uniform. Only slack-jawed oafs could believe that at a time of near total victory over the American sponsored and trained anti-civil warriors Assad would be so venal, stupid and morally corrupt as to order such a thing and most American leadership jackals would know it was political bullshit and simply lie about how terrible and dreadful and monstrous all of this was. Trump, in his incredibly ignorant honesty, actually believes it, which makes him the most sincere potential mass murderer we’ve ever had in the now diverse formerly “white” house. That’s not really a comfort but more a terrible statement about the murderous political pimps we deify as great leaders of the past, both historic and very recent.

Following the equally unbelievable charges against Russia and Putin which had them-him putting nerve-gas-poison on a doorknob to kill an ex-spy who had been exiled-swapped to and living anonymously in England for years, and leaving out the numbskull idiocy of any alleged super-agent doing so and jeopardizing any visitor, salesperson, neighbor or delivery person who might have touched the door before the intended victims whose conditions of recovery remained buried on back pages while headlines screamed  “murder most foul”. This fetid gas emanating from England’s governmental toilet was quickly taken up by America’s own reality TV government, thus raising the intellectual stench to that of an international moral sewer. If only the UK and USA had to pay the price of this foulness that might be another point for the quote’s analysis, but when the western toilet overflows, the world becomes inundated with the mental excrement and polluting waste of a more dangerous kind than the usual outcome of minority private profit at majority public loss. This could have blundered into a confrontation between nuclear powers far more threatening than the slow destruction of our environment under western control directed by the master race of self chosen rulers in the USA and Israel. Some reactionary pessimists might welcome the possible destruction of humanity but the rest of us far outnumber them and need to begin acting as a democratic majority of our race.

Luckily, sensibility in Russia, Syria, Iran and other parts of the global majority became more powerful at a time of extremely serious crisis. The reaction, especially by Russia, to the publicity stunt bombing of Syria’s alleged poison gas supply, a product said to no longer be in existence by another member of the presidential pimp parade several years ago, was as should have been expected by knowledgeable observers, at an intellectual and moral level unperceivable by the class of murderous intellectual clowns running our  circus. While it may seem too much to ask of our own population, much of it kept obsessed with scandals about Trump’s alleged sex life with rich and soon to be even richer “me too” porn queens, Russian meddling in our pet food purchases or world history according to Marvel Comics, it might be a good idea for all those truly seeking change in our system - not just its diverse front men and women - to keep the faith and take the actions necessary to end the crisis of the moment so that we might avoid an even worse crisis in the immediate future, transforming it to truly come closer to “approaching victory”, as the political philosopher quoted at the beginning mentioned. His name is Mao Tse Tung, and in the Marxist tradition, he didn’t only analyze reality but worked very hard to lead a revolution that radically changed it. Only private wealth worshippers and political cynics believe he failed but the hundreds of millions of Chinese previously consigned to peasant and working class poverty whose lives were totally transformed might inform them, and us, otherwise. 

We need to learn more about the actual conditions in the lives of people in other places but we first need to fully understand our own homeland and what our rulers do to the rest of the world in our name, while keeping us in the dark about reality. As in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Palestine and Ukraine, to mention only a few places where we murder, maim and prevent social justice and democracy while piously extolling their virtues. They can only continue to do that if we continue to let them, and inspiration can come from actually learning what people in other nations have achieved, against seemingly impossible odds, to enable us to not only believe in creation of a better world, but actually bring it from theoretical dream to practical reality. That means clearing the poisoned political gas filling our heads and analyzing reactionary rule in order to replace it with revolutionary democracy. Soon. Like now.

Nothing New Here.

“We are experiencing a dangerous time in our country,” Comey writes, “with a political environment where basic facts are disputed, fundamental truth is questioned, lying is normalized and unethical behavior is ignored, excused or rewarded.”


Just another day in the USA.

News From Consciousness Control

_____

James Hill for The New York Times

• Washington’s imposition of tough sanctions against several leading oligarchs is in many respects a game changer for Russia, with repercussions that are slowly coming into view. The sanctions may force some of the moguls to choose whether they want to be identified with the Kremlin or face isolation from Western markets.

The close relationship between oligarchs and President Vladimir Putin has played out beyond financial ties. A “special highway,” above, between the Kremlin and Mr. Putin’s home is reserved for emergencies by law, but it is mostly used by Russia’s privileged to bypass traffic. It has one other special quality: no safety barriers, resulting in at least seven deaths over the past year.

_____OMG!  OMG! seven deaths in the past year? OMG! OMG!

we kill more than 100 a day here in Amerrycar! Those evil Russkies are soooo far behind us.

Market Farce

farce:  a broad satire or comedy supposed to be serious but that has become ridiculous

The market forces of religious capital have been running the world for hundreds of years during which time they have made advances and benefitted many beyond any system that came before. But so did slavery and feudalism, while also, like capitalism, slaughtering and brutalizing more people than those to whom they brought benefit. Their time passed and they were replaced by newer arrangements, all in keeping with the subjugation of humanity and limiting social choice, if any, to lesser and not seemingly greater evil organizations always ruled by un-chosen minorities. We are now in the time in which the capitalist farce of market forces needs to be radically changed before the comedy moves from farce to a tragedy for all of humanity and not just one or another slave state, feudal fiefdom or capitalist corporation.

Even with mass suppression of public thought the evidence of system failure grows clearer everyday which is why the system’s owners try to cloud reality with dangerous propaganda, mindless trivialization and vicious assaults on critical thinking lest an outraged public pierce the plastic curtain hiding minority rule and rises up in socially transforming revolutionary actions. But the further danger is that they may destroy everything by their increasing practices of passionately supporting the farce of the market owned and controlled by allegedly brilliant idiots with near demonic practices that act on what they believe which makes them richer by reducing more of humanity to poverty and threatening disaster for the entire natural foundation of all life.

The almost trite everyday contradictions of a system based on private profits accrued at a market with goods and services only becoming available to people who can afford them are, under the domain of mind managed consciousness control, shrugged off as inescapable and even “natural” if often perverse reality. How else to explain, with a straight if not bleeding face, fanatic market dogma as rationale for some of the following.

How can gasoline be cheaper than milk?

Even industrial farm businesses using machines to mass milk cows still depend on a very simple natural occurrence:  a cow eats grass, transformed by its digestive system to become milk. The cow is then milked, and after eating more grass it is milked again the next day and sometimes even twice a day, and so on. Mr. and Mrs. farmer and their children are able to milk a cow and it’s simple and relatively safe work, unless a cow falls on someone while being milked but that doesn’t happen very often, if ever.

Gsoline, on the other hand, is produced by a far less simple, highly technical, dangerous operation and the petroleum that is dug and sucked out of the earth will not return tomorrow after the process but will take millennia – if ever – to be replaced once a network of industrial and high tech work that does occasionally kill workers and a refining process involving ships, international pipelines and an incredibly complex system to change it into the gasoline that is internally combusted/ exploded to move autos, planes, missiles, and create power to make life much better and easier for many; except for those it maims, pollutes or murders.

So, naturally, our forces of the market make it cheaper than milk. See?

If you have a doctoral degree from the London School of Economics that might make sense, but you might also find the Resurrection, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy as explainable, logical outcomes of those market forces. The tomb was empty, the bunnies are available at the store, and the money turned up under the pillow after the tooth was placed there. Demand for mythology, supply of myths, ca-ching, as cash registers used to sound.

But wait; how about this example of the beneficial forces of a market under minority capital control and dedicated to the creation of private profit.

Birth control, or planned parenthood – the idea not the organization – could be, should be, a serious benefit to humanity, one would think, if it were widely available, cheap, safe, efficient and nearly flawless. What if an organization of scientific and medical workers came up with a method that simply involved a man getting one injection a year – like a flu shot – and having no side affects and working to avoid unwanted pregnancy but also allowing a user to not get a shot when desiring new life creation and being able to do so? Might that be something humans would find useful? Would young men happily go off to “the market” to purchase such a thing? But wait: market forces, you know that stuff that sells hundreds of pills a year to millions of women, which works out to hundreds of millions of pills, or an intrauterine device sold to hundreds of thousands of women, or abortions to millions of women, or therapy to millions of men and women who want, don’t want, fear, love or otherwise ponder the meaning of bringing new life into the world, etc, would not be able to sell all that stuff if men could simply get one birth control injection for a year. So those market forces are seeing to it that the group which has worked for ten years on perfecting this injection for men, tested it so thoroughly they swear to its absolutely fool proof and safe nature, but jeepers creepers kids, they just can’t get it to the market, let alone test its “force” against those other profit making products. Make you wonder?

But wait even more:  those of us Americans able to feed, house and enjoy our pets to the tune of more than 60 billion dollars a year in the pet “gross” national product, find that those market forces we create are far beyond those able to be created by more than 500,000 American humans who live in the street, under bridges, under highways and in tent communities who just can’t seem to find the forces to put a roof over their heads and have a place to sleep and a toilet to use. My dog and cat create more profit at the market than provision of housing for those humans, so I will find plenty of pet food, pet toys, pet washings, pet hotels and maybe even pet vehicles for my beloved animals, while those wretched, dirty, smelly humans can only wish the invisible hand of the market would stop giving them the finger and maybe throw in a bath, a meal and especially a home so they can lavish in a similar degree of comfort, or at least something close to the splendor my beasts enjoy.

The list of anti-human contradictions would be endless if there were enough time to compile it, but the need for change of a radical nature becomes very clear at only confronting some of the most obvious and glaring, even if they don’t seem so under the oppressive brain prisons in which most of us are forced to live. But maybe one or two more will help clear some of the fog that has us speaking of a democracy and equality in a land where three of America’s foremost rich men – Gates, Bezos and Buffet, have a combined income and wealth greater than the combined income and wealth of more than 160 million Americans. And those Americans, in combination with the other half of the population, are in public debt for more than 21 trillion dollars, most of those trillions owed to the minority richest Americans and several foreign countries. That money is supposedly guaranteed to those we borrowed it from – and you possibly remember when we all asked for the loans so that we could spend most of the money on weapons to blow up and murder nations and people in the Middle East? - but we somehow neglected to guarantee the loans of the millions of folks who lost their homes in the last mini-collapse of market forces we were taught to call a “recession”. Yes, and the Grand Canyon is a “depression”, and that is the same as how we feel when we lose a loved one, a job, or an investment in those magical, mystical, market forces that enable my dog to stay at a hotel while some family sleeps in a car, if they have one.

Enough. Let’s close with some synonyms for “farce”:

shambles, travesty, circus, sham, mockery, charade, embarrassment, disgrace

Immigrant Humanism vs. Immigration Capitalism

Language has been a concern ever since humans created it and began using words to replace grunting, howling or shrieking. It’s much easier to be clear in communication when speaking, assuming the language is mutually understood, rather than simply gesturing or making barely intelligible noises. But when indicating difficulty in communicating with someone was once referred to as an experience like “talking to a wall”, present political discourse about immigrants and immigration among people who supposedly speak the same language has become divisive screeching in a “tower of babble”. This is a weapon for minority dominating powers who keep humans in a condition of confusion in order to continue ruling out any notion of a state of democracy, another concept widely confusing and misunderstood. But let’s just stick to the words immigrant and immigration, which are as different as day and night or love and hate, and are a great cause of social division among people who desperately need unity before that division helps push an entire society into oblivion.

Confusion over those words has pushed many good people who passionately support immigrants into dispassionately supporting policies that strengthen the very immigration system they criticize. A majority of Americans still support the political economics they have lived in and under all of their lives, but they are as confused as social critics who in their desire to help other humans often work at cross purposes by strengthening an anti-social, anti-human, anti-environmental system that is helping destroy nature - and we who are a vital part of it  - more quickly than ever before. Things have become so confused that many calling for “revolution” work hard to create a sanctuary for the system they seek to radically change. Or at least they do that based on another confusion of language that convinces some that “revolution” is exclusively personality based, involves identity-tribal-religious-ethnic groups, an alleged two party system in which both parties are owned by the rich, and other contradictions that manifest serious problems getting worse by the minute.

America is believed by many to be a nation of immigrants in that it was founded by people from Europe and grew peopled by new generations that came first from Europe, then Africa – in physical bondage and not just economic chains - then Asia, and more recently, from the southern part of North America, the name given to the continent settled by immigrants from Europe. The fabled tale of our nation’s birth and our seeming worship of immigration usually leaves out the near destruction of the humans who lived here before the invasion of settlers and immigrants who found better lives – mostly after suffering a great deal as most immigrants did and some still do – at the cost of ruining the lives of those they replaced. And all immigration under any circumstances has social costs that are absorbed by some far more than others.

Under the political economics of capitalism, which ruled when our nation was founded though it wasn’t called by that name yet, immigration profited many people greatly but meant a loss for sometimes far more. That reality has continued from its beginning with the replacement of the indigenous people by murder and ethnic cleansing to a more modern form which simply reduces some to lower standards of living while increasing profits for investors in capital’s market for cheap labor, the reason for the overwhelming majority of people who came here in the sixteenth century and continue to do so at the present moment.

 Whenever there was a need for bodies to work the land – the peasants sent from England and later Germany at the nation’s beginnings – or work the mills and factories of the later industrial revolution – when the rest of Europe and China offered their unwanted or extraneous populations – the calls for new shipments went out and soon they were delivered.

While it was supremely difficult for immigrants to enter the country illegally in the past when oceans had to be crossed in becoming a newer, cheaper work force, it became a bit easier for workers from south of the American border who, often at great and even life threatening difficulty had to merely step over an invisible line to leave one nation and enter another. Since that line had been created more recently than mostly older European and Asian borders, there were mixed cultures on both sides and a sometimes-easier community to welcome new immigrants. Immediately arriving migrants from Mexico and Central America could find old communities that spoke the same language and were of related culture – with differences, of course, but none as wide as those between English speakers and Germans or Italians or the Irish of previous immigration waves – and this too made it possible to find quicker entrance and a degree of comfort and familiarity. Where previous groups took some time to settle in and find cultural comfort zones, the Latino influx of 20^th and early 21^st century was able to adapt more quickly, and with even more homeland pleasure for the profits they created as cheap labor. And with the new class of illegal immigrants, they become even cheaper and thus even more profitable for capital and its professional class servants.

Whether finding work in agriculture, factories, mills, or smaller businesses like restaurants or in domestic work, the Latinos became both a larger group of workers than ever imported in a short time, and a far more profitable one taking jobs at the lower and entry levels of the economy. Thus, the upper-middle and professional classes could also enjoy the replacement of domestic servants with cheaper help for house cleaning, childcare, landscaping and such, at lower cost than previously employed Americans. And again contradicting well intentioned people anxious to end racism and employment discrimination, those replaced Americans were mostly black, as is true of hotel workers who have become almost entirely Latino where once black Americans did the vacuuming, bed making and laundering for both hotel chains and independent smaller motels. This replicated past experience when the English immigrants were replaced by Germans and they were replaced by the Irish and they by central and southern Europeans. Each new group entered the nation poor, took the dirtiest jobs available, and with luck moved up the economic ladder to become more average working class and later and more recently a middle class citizens. This highlights more language confusion when America is supposedly a non-class society, which just happens to have a lower, middle and upper class. Oh well.

Or is it Orwell?

The point being that in almost entirely well intentioned support for immigrants, good people continued bad policy when, by creating alleged sanctuary for individuals suffering systemic problems, they actually create sanctuary for capital’s policies that replace one group of workers with another, thereby strengthening the system’s endless need for cheaper labor for its profits by creating greater loss among the often misguided majority. When those who profit directly from the import of cheap workers are joined by those who bear little or no social cost for that intervention, the policy is strengthened by a focus on humanism, which conveniently keeps capitalism out of the frame. Then, people are reduced to being labeled “racist” if/when they complain about immigration - as though immigrants were members of a different race than human, in keeping with a racist culture’s population subdued into believing such mythology – which completely excludes the personal and social cost of bringing a newer work force in to replace an older work force going out, and a tax paying public frequently receiving no profits at all while absorbing much greater loss.

The more recent wave of immigration meant entry-level employment for new workers, which were thus denied those Americans previously dependent on such work. If that wave of immigrants were professional class and English speaking, say from Canada, and Americans could get a lawyer, doctor or therapist for fifteen bucks and hour, a teacher, social worker or accountant for ten, many Americans might be thrilled and delighted but that would hardly be the case for all those professional class people reduced to near or real hardship if not destitution. Under such duress we might see "extremist" groups of lawyers or doctors with shaved heads and swastika tattoos parading the streets upon losing their homes, investments and facing such hardships. And rest assured that America’s bloated and near bursting penal colony numbers many members of a new "criminal class" who became such as entry level jobs vanished from their version of the American Dream, too often a nightmare upon waking to face reality.

A far better and socially just answer to our massive economic problem of worship of market forces instead of democracy would be to bring in immigrants from foreign countries the way we bring in relatives and neighbors whom we treat as such and not simply profit makers for us and burdens for others. A truly humane welcome would not see to it that they remain illegal as we give them driver’s licenses, educations – which frequently leave them speaking foreign languages and denied equal status to their neighbors and thus remaining at the lower paid end of the economy – but make them legal, as quickly as possible if we truly want them to stay here and become Americans. Anything less, whether directly supported by capital or ignorantly accepted by those who mean well but practice ill, continues a rotten system that abuses far more than one or another sector of the population but all of us who carry the burden of an out of control system that ultimately threatens all and not just some humans, whatever language we speak or culture we are taught to embrace.

You Can't Make This Shit Up Dept.(from the NY Times)

Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
•" British officials believe an assassin smeared a Soviet-developed nerve agent on the door handle of Sergei Skripal’s home, above, suggesting a high-level plot hatched by the Kremlin.
Since the poison, Novichek, is so potent and dangerous, the British authorities suspect that only a highly trained professional — on orders from the highest levels of the Russian government — could have administered it to the former Russian double agent and his daughter.
That theory is raising questions about the role of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, in the attack, which has raised tensions between Russia and the West to their highest point since the Cold War. " This was not taken from Fox News, MSNBC or the Kardashian Report but from the political garbage section of the New York Times ,and without  inclusion of a disclaimer. If someone had smeared dog shit on that door handle it would obviously suggest a high-level plot hatched by the highest levels of American government. Unless the smearing agent was  a highly trained and low paid illegal immigrant, in which case Trump alone would be guilty.