New and Improved Bill of Rights Adopted by Corporate Diversity Unlimited

1. Congress Shall Make No Law Abridging Freedom of Speech, Unless Said Speech is Offensive.

2. Freedom of Assembly is Guaranteed To All, Unless You Are Carrying A Tiki Torch, In Which Case You Shall Be Freely Assaulted By Justice Loving Mobs

3. All Citizens Shall Have the Right to Petition the Government for a Redress of Grievances, Unless They're The Wrong Grievances . . .

America’s Liberal & Conservative Nazis

When the National Socialists of Germany took power under the leadership of Hitler they had been inspired by American teachings of master race-ism and the suppression of a political opposition; Communists and Jews in Germany, later only communists in the USA. What was called America’s Great Depression was much worse in Germany where capital’s minority profiteers had reduced the working class to a status even lower than what was experienced here. That German triumph of a state capitalist form called fascism brought benefits to a majority who had suffered earlier, while inflicting enormous costs on some of those who had done well before, but inflicting little if any harm on the rich no matter what their politics or alleged racial differences.

While many rich Germans had to escape to safer havens because they were Jewish, great wealth in Germany did not suffer any loss of power and control since the economics on which they had been acquired did not change one bit. Only the administration over that market changed in a more fiercely controlled way in which munitions and war preparedness dominated as private profit creator of trickle-down-to-the-public survival wages.

Even then, there were many supporters of Hitler and fascism in the USA, among the wealthy, their hired professionals, and many suffering unemployment and poverty who were led to see a way out by supporting the strong control of a government allegedly representing them and not just the rich. This was only a joke to upper classes not subject to an uncontrolled marketplace reducing more humans to lower life with each passing day.

The New Deal in the USA that brought salvation to great numbers of people came about through a far more social democratic adjustment than was made in Germany, but the capitalist economics and rich minorities that ruled did not change in either country. Only the factions were different in practice of how best to exercise control of others, but the private profit motive as source of the beginning and end of all human endeavor remained supreme. Minor market controls initiated here brought living standards up for a great number of Americans but were not radically different from those exercised in more heavy-handed fashion which made life better for a near majority there. So-called minorities paid a heavy price, as always, under profit and loss rules which always come at great cost to many so that some few might benefit.

Germany practiced what America had not only preached, but done in its treatment of the original inhabitants of its “new” world, its imported slaves from Africa, and its generations of poor immigrants from Europe and Asia. The only thing unique about the Nazis in Germany was that they performed national brutality on other Europeans in ways previously not practiced, especially in denigrating them as members of other races and deserving of ethnic cleansing, expulsions and if necessary, death. During the war, America re-introduced its own form of such practice from its past by throwing Americans of Japanese descent into concentration camps, exactly as the Germans did with Jews. We can only imagine what might have happened to those Americans had the country been bombed or invaded, by Japan or Germany.

A struggle between liberal and conservative factions of capital’s subjects continues as the system’s very nature creates conditions that call for almost radical readjustments in political maneuvering so as to save the priorities of an ever more wealthy and smaller ruling group over an increasingly struggling population of the ruled. America is at a serious crossroads, perhaps the most serious yet, in dealing with the contradictions of capital that call for transforming it into a humane and democratic system, or in its continuity face total breakdown of the political, economic, social and environmental foundation of life. The event in Charlottesville, while played as something unique by mind managers, is just another sign of this breakdown and how little real difference there is between supporters and opponents of the status quo, with both being played as puppets by the forces of division which only maintain control by manipulating people into separate identity groups which make a needed democratic majority that much more difficult to achieve.

Since Trump’s election, established power has been conducting a full-scale assault on the public very much like what Nazis did in Germany upon assuming power. In Germany it became nearly impossible for an opposing view to be seen or heard as state suppression, under the tortured language and thought of fascist mind control, became the public choice supported by ever growing numbers reduced by mental bombardments of propaganda under the guise of news reporting and analysis. While these are different times and information sources among people have grown enormously with the electronic internet, these same sources also invite distortion and propaganda to reach more people more quickly than was possible in 1930s and 40s Germany. In fact, German Nazis might have wet themselves to have had so many outlets of gossip, trivia, insignificance and outright lies at their disposal to convince Germans that their neighbors were evil, corrupt, debased villains who deserved none of the rights that came with being a good German. Or a good American?

Welcome to Charlottesville, U.S.A.

A demonstration of what could be called extremist conservative supporters of capitalism was countered by a demonstration of what could be called extremist liberal supporters of capitalism and a citizen was killed, allegedly  assaulted by one of the conservatives. But this only after more liberal extremist types made it clear that the conservative extremist “others” exhibiting alleged nazi-like behavior were not as American as the liberals exhibiting worse behavior; suppressing publicly expressed opposition. The conservatives, some openly nazi but in the majority hardly so, were expressing their supposed rights in a supposedly democratic society of supposed freedom of expression, while the liberals, espousing freedom to suppress other viewpoints seen as dangerous, and thus practicing Nazism under another name, saw their birthright as being to attack the dangerous unbelievers or whatever the various propaganda schools might use as worst of names by which to reduce other humans.

This pattern is as old as american history but most recently has had an establishment supported re-birth in the time of Trump’s administration, a new low in american experience of brutal capitalist behavior unmasked from its usual leadership’s phony rhetorical flourishes about peace, justice and democracy while conducting wars on humanity under a dictatorship of the rich. Trump, a rich, egotistical, arrogant asshole who is thus overqualified to be president, is also a threat to that system because he is so openly representative of what America is, in reality, as opposed to the various fictional depictions force fed to decent and well meaning people of the extreme, central or moderate liberal-conservative persuasion. In other words, the mainstream that can be mobilized to demand toilets for transsexuals while thousands of its people live in the street, call for more bloody attacks on more nations for their daring to disobey their master race betters, or demand justice for refugees and immigrants whose status comes about because america destroys their nations and economies. Both sides of this capitalist coin can easily see themselves as defenders of all that is good and decent, while they play equal roles in supporting quite the opposite.

In the immediate aftermath of the tragic loss of one life as a car rammed into a crowd, and until a court decides that this case was intentional and not a matter of accident based on panic or mental illness or drugs – the court of manipulated public opinion immediately joined in programmed uproars because Trump spoke of violence on both sides being a provocation. Despite overwhelming physical evidence to back this observation, Trump was accused, in the usual fashion, of being an exceptional liar, racist, xenophobe, misogynist, and other regularly used epithets to describe this example of all that is good and great in our democracy; incredible personal wealth, egomania, self centeredness, pampered, privileged behavior and other manifestations of belonging to earth’s foremost master race of self chosen people who support warfare, pet care, anti-racism, imperial bloodshed, equality and toilets for transsexuals, all with equal fervor.

The provocations that are bringing people closer to an open civil war, instead of the below the surface one that has been in process since the last one ended, are more dangerous than ever. The simplistic good vs. evil reductionism that identifies individuals or “identity” groups as the source of problems while we are treated as mushrooms, kept in the dark and fed a lot of shit so as to keep us from noticing the systemic root of most of those problems, can no longer be tolerated. As things get worse for a majority which can only save its “self” by unifying with others our rulers work more frantically to keep us divided. The situation of a vastly over-extended military empire in social debt for trillions of dollars, financed by tax payers whose personal debt is nearly as high, all based on fanatic fundamentalist faith in a market regulated by a deity called finance capital is nearing and may even be long past a disaster point.

Meanwhile, the fascist elements on both sides of the issue will be reduced to warring with each other, righteously convinced they represent the market deity, while the bankers issue more loans with imaginary funds and wonder where and how they can escape if and when people get wise. Religious people moved by faith in humanity need to join agnostics who feel the same way, before the righteous fanatics practicing Nazism under the guise of democracy destroy things for all of us while calling it political economic science. We need to stop the descent into fascism that is being helped by what passes for liberalism and conservatism, as long as those factions serve the cause of preserving the deadly global system of capitalism.

Alt Right, Alt-Left, Backward March!

In a touching display of concern for fair play for anarchists, liberals in the wake of the Charlottesville tragedy are declaring their unanimous opinion that violent Antifa activists who clubbed participants in the Unite The Right rally there cannot be morally compared to neo-Nazis and KKK members.

To the extent that this is a response to President Trump's remarks at last night's press conference, one can only remark on the irrelevance of the claim. Trump in no way suggested such "moral equivalence." He reminded the rabid press corps that he had already explicitly condemned right-wing extremist violence, then went on to make the point that that did not excuse left-wing violence at Charlottesville, as it surely does not. Furthermore, Trump is also correct in saying that important factual matters are still being sorted out about that tragic night, so shrieking demands for categorical condemnation of only one side in the confrontation are premature and likely to perpetuate erroneous claims.

We've come to a pretty pass when a political baboon makes more sense than professional journalists paid to make rational judgments based on objective criteria. But - ho hum - this has been true for over two years now.

Here are some things rational people should want to know about Charlottesville with complete certainty: Who initiated the violence? What was the state of mind of the man who killed Heather Heyer? Was he in fear for his life? Was he on medications? What precipitated his lethal action? And why were the police unable or unwilling to keep the two violently opposed political groups physically separated? It's noteworthy that not one journalist asked President Trump even one of these questions last night. They were more interested in condemning "Nazism." How courageous.

At the moment, liberals want to hold "white supremacy" responsible for everything, as though that could possibly be a sufficient explanation of the horrifying tragedy.  But white supremacist groups have been around for a long time, and, as President Trump correctly pointed out, they include revered figures such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. And, he might have added, Teddy Roosevelt, whose white supremacist beliefs read like the worst of the Nazi archives. He's on Mt. Rushmore.

Trump did NOT equate the so-called alt-left and alt-right ideologically. He talked about how to apportion responsibility for the violence that erupted when the two opposed groups clashed. This is precisely what any president should be focused on in the wake of a tragedy that resulted in the death of a young woman.  And it should be the focus of the press corps, too, but unfortunately is not.

It is the job of the press to discover the relevant facts and rationally account for them, not engage in moral grandstanding about how "there is no room for extremism in American life," a dubious claim if there ever was one. Tell it to the remnants of dozens of Indian nations whose cultures and peoples were enthusiastically annihilated by white supremacy. When's the last article from the press on this ongoing genocidal tradition, enforced by every single U.S. president from Washington to Trump?

 The First Amendment does not say it's OK to club and mace demonstrators whose ideological convictions mirror the Founding Fathers,' but clash with the reigning establishment ideology of corporate multiculturalism. It says EVERYONE has the right to believe what they like and to lawfully petition the government for a redress of grievances. And nowhere in the Constitution does it say that people can be fired from their jobs and evicted from their apartments based on their political beliefs, as has already happened to participants in the Unite The Right demonstration in Charlottesville.

We do not need a ringing endorsement of phony multiculturalism from President Trump. We need a social revolution against a thoroughly corrupt establishment that has trashed the Constitution, eliminated any possibility of popular rule, and openly holds the American people in contempt. If we don't want that revolution led by neo-Nazis and Klansmen, let's stop promoting the toxic ideology of identity politics, which seeks to establish a "democratic" majority of victim groups ruling over a resentful white minority.

The Day After Charlottesville: Listen Up Liberals!

Stop the identity politics parade, stop false charges of racism, stop the demeaning caricatures of blue collar workers, stop the meaningless blather about "hate," and START listening . . . We're not seeing a rebirth of the Confederacy; we're seeing frightened, insecure people who feel themselves pushed into a corner clinging to a reactionary self-image because in an era of corporate multiculturalism that by definition EXCLUDES THEM, there is no other identity available to them. After years of "diversity" propaganda giddily predicting the coming of a white minority governed by a victim majority, you now affect indignation at hearing loud chants of "You Will Not Replace Us!" by white nationalists.

Me thinks you doth protest too much.

Blue Collar Heresies and the Election of Donald Trump

“ . . . I had a keen interest in how life feels to people on the right – that is, in the emotion that underlies politics. To understand their emotions, I had to imagine myself into their shoes. Trying this, I came upon their ‘deep story,’ a narrative as felt. (ix)

------Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers In Their Own Land – Anger and Mourning on the American Right

Arlie Russell Hochschild is a Berkeley sociologist who traveled to Louisiana to befriend Donald Trump supporters and learn directly why they felt and thought the way they did. She discovered that "empathy walls" prevented her (and us) from understanding people whose politics and world view differ from ours. As soon as we sense fundamental contradiction, we become indifferent or hostile to the other, in order not to feel human sympathy for someone whose ideas we find repugnant. Caricature and dismissal quickly follow, and insure that we never have to think. Hochschild sought to move beyond this trap and understand Trump supporters, without changing her beliefs. 

She quickly found the Trumpistas likeable. She appreciated their warm acceptance of a stranger from Berkeley (a Berkeley liberal is practically a communist in their view), and discovered that cooperation could extend beyond the personal: reducing the prison population was a common concern, as was cleaning up environmental contamination, a menace to us all. Nevertheless, a big gap persisted between advocates of New Deal ameliorative measures (like Hochschild) and Trump supporters who bristled at the very notion of a government "safety net." Only the military seemed to have a legitimate claim on taxpayer support.

Many of those whom Hochschild met prided themselves on having overcome serious obstacles without ever having depended on government aid, and they yearned for a self-reliant culture in which no one else would either. This led them to oppose government measures to protect the environment, avert global warming, and end homelessness, not necessarily because the ends weren't important, but because government - distant, stifling, and bureaucratic -  is the wrong instrument. Socialists take note: the Trumpistas felt that community is the right instrument.

In the contest between government and corporations, the populist right takes the side of corporations because they provide jobs. Without jobs one cannot survive, so preaching environmental safety via government regulation, without mentioning how workers will support themselves in a "green" economy, forfeits the support of right-wing populists who depend on corporate jobs. Since liberals and conservatives both condemn "production for use" rather than profit, it's difficult to see how they can be faulted on this score (no socialist opinion is allowed to reach mass audiences).  Furthermore, companies make money on behalf of stockholders, not the general public, so Trump supporters find it understandable that they try to "cover their ass" to avoid losses, whereas government is obligated to protect ordinary people, which it often fails to do, so it is held in contempt. 

Hochschild also found that Trump supporters believe that working to get what one wants is morally superior to qualifying for government aid based on competitive victimhood.  They feel that tax money is being "given away" to non-working, undeserving people, so that the "takers" are winning out over the "makers." The loss of "honor" in not having to earn one's keep offends them even more than the "waste" of spending taxpayer money on people who don't work. Being compensated for making a productive contribution to society is indispensable to them, so income without a chance to earn it strikes them as insulting.

Their lack of support for environmental values turns out to be more apparent than real. The real objection is not environmentalism per se, but the fact that government punishes the little guy rather than the source of the problem (the profit system itself). If your motorboat leaks a little gas in the river, you get fined; but when big business turns the whole ocean into an industrial toilet, government doesn't care. Liberals rarely note the double standard, preferring to make smug put-downs of "uneducated" workers for their "pro-pollution" stance.  (This kind of snobbery is far more important to them than keeping someone like Donald Trump out of the White House.) In any event, the Trumpistas told Hochschild that environmentalism has fallen into the hands of left-leaning government expansionists and do-nothing local officials, which, apart from the "left-leaning" qualification, has the ring of truth.

According to Trump supporters, Barack Obama committed treason to tradition by helping “line cutters” waiting to realize the American Dream. Black people, women, and immigrants were given a free pass ahead of more deserving working class whites politely waiting in line. These people are offended and angry about it, and hate the endless parade of complainers encouraged by a 1960s culture of merit-free “diversity.” On TV, working class whites are routinely portrayed as morons, aggravating the perceived injustices.

Working class whites want recognition for their accomplishments, not rewards meted out for victimhood. Their dilemma is how to get their fair share via the identity politics parade without perpetuating a victim culture they find offensive and counterproductive.  Worthy identities are “survivors” of cancer, rape, childhood sexual abuse, addiction to alcohol, drugs, sex workers, and so on. But there is little or no sympathy for working class whites:  “fairness” never takes up their cause. If you describe yourself as proudly “white,” you risk being seen as a neo-Nazi or worse. If you believe in God and the Bible it only confirms your poor education. If you admire those who make it to the top, you're considered a moron, though it remains unexplained why competitive striving for personal gain isn't better than mass parasitism on the government dole.  And however one chooses to present oneself, blue collar jobs and the way of life that goes with it continue to go extinct - literally. For the first time in American history a generation is dying younger than its parents, particularly working class whites. And as they struggle and die prematurely they are condemned for not sympathizing with blacks or Syrian refugees or immigrants. But who sympathizes with them? Trump was happy to benefit from saying that only he did.

Not surprisingly, Hochschild found that many southerners feel unfairly judged as “racist” by the North. Their understanding of that term pertains to people who refer to blacks as “niggers,” or who “hate blacks.”  Southern working class whites do not usually fit that description. But liberals tend to define the term as one who believes in a racial hierarchy, at the bottom of which are black people. White people are judged as worthy to the extent that they are far from that bottom. In other words, blacks are defined as victims, and those whites who are positioned slightly above them on the wealth pyramid are judged as failures since their white skin should have allowed them to do better. Furthermore, for holding a less inclusive and "sophisticated" definition of racism, one that does not include racially oppressive social structures, blue collar whites are condemned for being "stupid."

But the stupid ones are those who find it inexplicable that Donald Trump got elected president.

Philosophers: Just How Smart Are They?

"One major argument against objectivism in ethics is that people disagree deeply about right and wrong, and this disagreement extends to philosophers who cannot be accused of being ignorant or confused."

Huh?  Philosophers are rather typically ignorant and confused.  With access to, and free time to examine, all the treasures of life and thought, they come forth with little more than the trivially true, the obviously false, and the totally incomprehensible, and dress the stinking pile of garbage up as profound wisdom emanating from great thinkers.

What Threat?

Every twittish utterance from our *AIC is likely to get a full panic response from Imperial Control and its lapdogs in government and media and his latest blurtings about fire and damnation if North Korea were to attack is no different in essence, but worse in substance. While his dimness is to be expected, reactions from alleged liberals, progressives and much of what passes for an american left speaks for historically underprivileged mentalities that make Trump’s own formed-by-popular-media consciousness seem almost sophisticated.

All the blather about an alleged menace from North Korea, going so far as to make light weight tv comics even giddier than in their normal low level humor about the AIC, is blessed with all-american ignorance and master race-self chosen people arrogance when it leaves out the dreadful and murderous American attack on that nation back in the 1950s.

In what was called a “police action” to stop the potential menace of communism – a dread phenomena that, among other things, would have people fed even if they couldn’t afford to pay for the food – the U.S.A., along with a token force called the United Nations, slaughtered hundreds of thousands of North Koreans, destroyed cities, towns, villages, farmlands, water supplies, manufacturing facilities and generally reduced the nation to near under-developed poverty, all the while preaching democracy, humanitarian values and peace for all the world.

Like a pimp lecturing on love, this party line never met and still does not meet the test of material reality, but minority control of almost all information flow and possibly the most under-developed consciousness level among any people in the history of consciousness has brought us to a current predicament in which people depicted as monstrously evil rape victims are seen as a deadly menace by their rapists who glorify in their crimes by convincing innocent people it was all about love.

After suffering massive slaughter and near destruction of their nation, North Korea has experienced a generation of something the infantile and brain dead refer to as “war games” being conducted off their shores, foreign armies patrolling their borders, and an endless american propaganda barrage about evil rulers, despotic regimes and malevolent threats to our benevolent society that operates for the good of all humanity, while leaving more than half a million of its people living in the street as it lavishes trillions of dollars on war,  billions of dollars on its richest minority and its millions of pets, and righteously screams about injustice , menace and a threatening smell coming from everywhere else while paying no attention to the moral sewage and diseased stench emanating from its financial market place, its military industrial complex and its degenerate diet of fossil fuel .

Is this a great democracy or what?

North Korea represents a threat to Americans the way any would-be, might-be or wanna-be murderer, rapist, burglar or thief would represent a threat to Americans. Get the hell out of Korean waters and away from Korean borders with our military and such a threat will not only vanish from the propaganda encrusted minds into which it has been drilled, but from the material world as well. All the rest is political, economic, racist filth that could lead to not only even worse destruction of that nation than we performed on it in the past, but the reduction of america to a pile of ashes and human misery also worse than we once inflicted on an innocent people who never did anything harmful to any of us.

It is not only time to bring the AIC under control, but far more important, the political economic forces that created the atrocity we live by, and that he has assumed some responsibility to lead.

*Asshole In Chief