The Media, The Establishment, and the Public

In the October 13 Democratic Party debate wrap-up, CNN commentators did a fact check of candidate claims, one of which was Bernie Sanders' assertion that the unemployment rate among white teenagers was 33%, among Latino teenagers was 36%, and among black teenagers was 51%. It was implied that Sanders was either deluded or lying since these figures allegedly refer to the UNDEREMPLOYMENT RATE, not the unemployment rate.

Just how serious a distortion is this, if in fact it is one? Well, not much of one at all, really, because Sanders' wider point, that in the allegedly greatest economy in world history millions of young people have lousy prospects of being properly employed, remains valid. Psychologists report that Millenials are the most stressed-out generation ever, expected to fulfill a success ethic incongruously juxtaposed to increasingly ephemeral "jobs" that offer little in terms of pay, benefits, or prestige. Forty-five percent of the unemployed are young people, and the average Millenial only lasts 2.6 years at a company these days. Some thirty percent of the workforce is contingent labor, that is, disposable workers without security. By some estimates 40 to 50% of income producing jobs will be short-term contract work by 2020. Career lifespans are now reaching 50 and more years, so half of Millenials can expect to freelance for their entire working lives.

Nit-picking about whether the proper term for this social catastrophe is "unemployment" or "underemployment" is a media "gotcha" game of little interest to the general public, and is one crucial reason why Americans - right, left, and center - despise the establishment media. The pundits can't see the forest for the trees, and engage in selective attacks rather than across-the-board rational analysis. No fact check was done on Hillary Clinton's schoolgirl-like gush that there was a "mass genocide" happening in Libya in 2011, a rather serious omission given that the country with the highest standard of living in Africa was plunged into bloody chaos, its popular government replaced by al Qaeda in de facto alliance with the United States.

This is also why we should take with a very large grain of salt the idea that media scrutiny of Donald Trump's statements must inevitably lead to a decline in his popularity. A media campaign to bring him down (in league with the GOP establishment) stands a good chance of backfiring, since the American public is sick of pundits and politicians both, and may very well continue to prefer Trump over the quadrennial trash hyped by the corporate media as "presidential" material. Seeing him under attack by forces the public strongly dislikes may make him more popular than ever. A better approach for the media to take would be to investigate Trump's popularity, which appears to be largely based on his stance vis-a-vis immigration.

And no, "hate" is not an explanation of anything.

Source:

Nicole Aschoff, "The New Prophets of Capital,"(Verso, 2015)

Israel And Our Discontents:Anti-Philo-Pseudo Semitism

Once again, an explosion of violence in Israel, which always means far more Palestinians than Israelis winding up dead, while U.S. politicians and media act as though tragedy only strikes the Israelis. The entire Middle East is being torn apart by warfare and all of it is related, directly or not, to the colonial establishment of the Jewish European state in the middle of a predominantly Arab and Muslim area. Most of the world knows this but in the USA it is treated as top secret, not acknowledged at all or claimed a giant lie dedicated to destroying an entire people.

Whether one believes Jews are Semites from the Middle East and god’s original nuclear family from thousands of years ago, or that they are Europeans who converted to Judaism more recently and moved to New York, Germany, Miami Beach and Los Angeles to open delis, banks, galleries and become comics, or are a particularly cursed people in constant danger of being exterminated, annihilated, wiped out by hateful jealous others, or simply ethnically identifiable like everyone else by cultural habits of speech, food, dress and manners, or members of a secularly devout or devoutly secular religion given to narratives of factually based fiction or fictionally based fact, there are two extremist groups that present real problems concerning real and imagined anti-jewish bigotry.

The first is composed of nutcases who think four Jews are sitting in a room in Tel Aviv - or New York - planning, plotting, conspiring and organizing anything and everything that happens on earth and in the rest of the universe. New planets discovered, World Series participants, global trade deals, famine, crop circles, droughts, disease, the Super Bowl winner, 911, war anywhere on earth, all these are seen as manifestations of the power of "the jews”. These nuts are a problem and unfortunately play into the  “see, they all hate us” narrative, but in the present tense they are a relatively minor menace.

The second group is composed of jews, their fans and those in their employ, who truly believe there is a category of human different from all other humans, but at the same time, the same as all other humans, and also at the same time, superior in having been graced with special status by the creator (a patriarch, possibly circumcised), while contradictorily experiencing more suffering, deprivation, death and horror than any other humans in the history of history – go figure - and this is all final-solution proof that Israel is the absolutely necessary “self proclaimed” state of the Jewish people, the way ISIS is the “self proclaimed” state of the Islamic people. But in Israel’s case, because they are mostly European despite the Semitic stuff about Middle Eastern origins and because of the incredible suffering and near extermination they have suffered for thousands of years – leading one to wonder how come there are any of them left? – have much more right to self proclaim than a gang of actual Semites like ISIS. Or something.

This second group is a far greater threat to humanity and its future than the sometime ravings of the first, and given the reality of the second group’s power over too many governments, especially the USA’s, it may be that it will cause the first group to grow in numbers. That is, until and unless all people, regardless of their belief systems of specialness and, most ignorantly of racial difference, overcome irrational reliance on ancient myth and modern tragedies often provoked by adherence to principles inherited from those myths, and grow into a human family that acknowledges cultural and ethnic difference but denies ridiculous notions of racial difference and stratified superiorities according to supernatural belief systems.

Experience, contradiction and denial of objectively defined history, and legend-myth-fables in which many peoples have actually been totally obliterated, and not simply in alleged attempts at national, ethnic or racist destruction are common. The assault on european jews by the nazis and their allies during the second world war has become the most known case and while it was a dreadful experience involving ethnic cleansing, great suffering and murders, it has also become the only such story acknowledged internationally, often called the worst experience ever suffered by any people and just as often exaggerated to exclude the sufferings of many people treated so much worse they don’t even exist anymore and have no one teaching about their unique subjection to the inhumanity of conquerors who not only saw them as less than human but wiped them out, totally.

The entire population in what Europeans “discovered” as a new world back in the 15^th century is an obvious case in point, but the American part of that experience is clear enough a far more serious assault on a people, and rarely even touched upon as such outside of minority group consideration with little if any impact on the majority of American’s consciousness.

The indigenous people of the continent that became North America have not been totally wiped out but suffered millions of deaths, complete loss of their homelands, and came very close to being destroyed as a culture and a people –which is supposed to define the overused-to-the-point-of having-no-meaning word, genocide - with present status as “indians” only coming to their descendants, many of whom are still confined to concentration camps we called reservations - making it sound as though they were going to dinner - where they live at the lowest material standards of any americans. This outrageous treatment which began centuries ago and continues to the present microsecond is given little if any attention by the major consciousness controllers and mind managers of american society, while the european treatment of jews is never far from attention in media, popular culture, education, politics and just about any aspect of american life.

Further, there are nearly as many Jews in Europe, after the dreadful persecution that has come to be known as the holocaust, as there are Indians here. And while there was a great decline in the European Jewish population after the war, there was an increase in the number of Jews in other places to which they had escaped, and to Israel both before and after 1948. Indians had no place to which they could escape.

The establishment of that jewish state, believed by some to be a haven and the only safe place for jews on planet earth despite the fact that millions of jews live elsewhere and do quite well thank you, has led to more extremism in the two groups mentioned at the top. Worst of all, the murderous disregard for the Palestinian people, for centuries dwellers in and on the land that came to be colonized as israel and since its establishment treated as a sub strata of the race, has fading numbers still buying into the mythology that they were never really there, while a growing global community becomes more outraged at the treatment of Palestinians as creatures of a lower order by an invading colonial power supposedly chosen by god to rule the area.

Those who see a jewish menace everywhere are driven to say “see, we told you” while those who see the eternal threat brought about by whatever it is they possess and everyone else wants to kill them for are equally driven in the “see, we were right” direction. It is not over simplification to point out that only the second group is armed with nuclear weapons and convinced it is surrounded by anti-Semites intent on time honored genocide-annihilation-extermination and the rest.

For the world, it’s like confronting one nut case with a gun and another mob of maniacs with nukes. They both need to be dealt with but you don’t need a degree in weapons politics or economic religion to clearly see which one is the greater immediate threat to the greatest number of people.

As for clearly european descended people labeling themselves Semites, that makes as much sense as all of us calling ourselves Africans, or the pc accepted "people of color", since we are all members of the same race, regardless of the fact that some "people of no color" think themselves part of a master race or self chosen upper echelon people as they have been led to believe by their cultural rulers. After all, we originated in Africa some two hundred thousand years ago, and that was millennia before any of us evolved into sub-groups that later became called things like Semites.

Whatever national, ethnic, identitarian or other minority labels we are given or forced to wear, we need to get past the marketing process that labels us and become a majority that learns to cooperate and share rather than dominate and own. It isn’t only Israel and anti, philo or pseudo Semites that need to learn this lesson. Americans who finance, arm and conduct the wars raging in the Middle East, all related in some warped way to allegedly defending a minority while actually trying to destroy a majority, play a bigger role. When we stop, it will stop, and the chance for not only a truly democratic middle east but a better world will greatly increase.

The Trump, Clinton, and Sanders Show: Prelude to an "American Berlusconi"?

The Democratic Party debate (October 13) and its aftermath crystallized the political crisis the United States currently faces. Hillary Clinton was quickly declared the "winner," not because she made a convincing case for her politics, but because "no one laid a glove on her." Actually, that is not really true, as Bernie Sanders delivered a convincing rebuttal to Clinton's lame attempt to justify capitalism on the basis that it is the source of many successful small businesses. Aside from the fact that Clinton's stance is the standard GOP defense of capitalism, Sanders correctly pointed out that it doesn't matter how many small businesses there are if income gains accrue nearly exclusively to a microscopic minority of investors at the top, as has been the case for some time now in the USA.

In any event, it's certainly true that an honest picture of Clinton's ugly politics and the appropriate damage to her public image it should do, did not emerge from this debate. But given that the mass media function to conceal major state crimes, some of which Clinton has participated in, this was only to be expected. U.S. voters remain in the dark about everything they most need to know, even AFTER the debate allegedly designed to enlighten them. This is good reason to dismiss criticisms of the American electorate as "apathetic," since watching U.S. political debates is akin to taking a sleeping pill before studying for the final exam.

One gigantic opportunity was completely missed. Clinton's gushing reference to European leaders' fears of an imminent "mass genocide" (as opposed to those genocides in which only a handful of people are killed) in Libya during her tenure as Secretary of State presented a perfect opportunity to not only "lay a glove on her," but in fact to deliver a knockout punch. Unfortunately, the media "personalities" conducting the debate (Anderson Cooper, Dana Bash, et al) were solely concerned with the soap opera of Hillary's e-mails, which Bernie Sanders dismissed with appropriate irritation as a distracting charade. Meanwhile Sanders, Clinton's only significant rival for the Democratic nomination at the moment, failed to follow up with a critique of Clinton's role in deposing and murdering a popular head of state (Moammar Qaddafi) while plunging Libya into murderous chaos at the hands of Washington's de facto al Qaeda allies, chaos from which it has still not emerged four years later, nor will it anytime soon. Hillary called this "smart power at its best."

Let us here note that the charge of "genocide" has become a joke in U.S. political parlance, invoked only to justify Washington's constant military interventions abroad. In the Libya case, it refers to Qaddafi's insistence that rioters in Benghazi lay down their arms, a demand that any head of state would make in similar circumstances.

Sanders' silence on the all-important matter of Libya may be owing to his own support for going to war to stop fake genocide, namely in Yugoslavia in 1999, when the "socialist" Sanders repeatedly and enthusiastically supported Washington's 78-day bombing campaign that ultimately deposed a democratically elected president (Slobodan Milosevic) and reduced socialist Yugoslavia to a Third World colony of NATO. This alone completely discredits Sanders' alleged socialist credentials, a fact lost on the billionaire-blowhard Donald Trump, who immediately dismissed Sanders as a "socialist-communist" and a "maniac" (the three labels are considered synonymous by all "serious" commentators and politicians).

All of which leaves the way wide open for a Trump presidency. Aside from Ben Carson, all of Trump's GOP rivals are mired in single digits in the polls, nearly crippled by conventional political rhetoric and analyses that promise to further entrench a status quo the electorate desperately wants to see changed. Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, Clinton's claim to be an "outsider" because she's a woman is not likely to convince more than a handful of political eunuchs of the Pussy Riot variety, while Sanders has shot himself in the foot on foreign policy and adopted a handicapping socialist label to describe his economic policy, when in fact he is simply a social democrat with modest (but nevertheless helpful) ambitions to revive the New Deal. (In the U.S.A. the New Deal remains popular whereas socialism is heresy.)

Will Trump prove to be the "American Berlusconi"? If he succeeds in convincing an electoral majority that government programs like Social Security and Medicare are akin to "giving everything away" to the undeserving (i.e., to the American people who pay for them), as he recently claimed, while his own plans to hand out budget-busting tax breaks like Halloween candy are somehow not, he may well be.

Stay tuned.

What Emma Lazarus Missed

"Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

she left out cheap labor

Not For Twits

Bernie calls for a political revolution but leaves out the economics, which are inseparable from the politics. His “socialism” is social democratic capitalism and as such a giant step beyond his compatriots. He moves the debate closer to populist economics but the movement needs to put the problem smack dab on the spot. It is capitalist economics, not just corporations, the rich, Wall Street, Israel or minority rule of the political economic process, none of which are anything new but have all become more blatant in the return to pre-great depression free market fundamentalism which has even Clinton calling for control of capitalism which gets out of control from time to time, she says.

Always, we say, for those on the loss side of the ledger.

And they are growing in number as the profits increase for a shrinking group at the top.

Master Race-Self Appointed Chosen People Logic

Thursday October 08 2015

Breaking news   US warships to challenge Chinese claims in South China Sea   The US is poised to sail warships close to China’s artificial islands in the South China Sea, in a move aimed at sending a strong signal to Beijing that Washington does not recognise Chinese territorial claims over the area. A senior US official told the Financial Times that the ships would sail inside the 12-nautical mile zones that China claims as territory around some of the islands it has constructed in the Spratly chain. The ships are expected to start their manoeuvres over the next two weeks.

Campuses Debate Rising Demands for ‘Comfort Animals’

A student suffering extreme depression, anxiety, arrested development and near terminal infantile disorder has claimed the right to bring his comfort pet to his campus quarters at a leading university. His pet is a former hooker, now called an undocumented sex therapist, who provides him  with sexual gratification at moments of intense stress in his life.

"Paying attention in class is very difficult for me, as is taking notes, remembering facts  and trying to look interested during extremely boring lectures" said the student who has been in therapy since his condition was discovered by his parents while he was still a fetus. "Some have jokingly called us internal helicopter parents because we learned about our sensitive, brilliant and very depressed over his great sensitivity and depression son's condition so early, but we wanted to know everything we could as quickly as possible so we could make life easier for him" said the student's father, a licensed psychiatrist and former alcoholic once convicted of pet molesting.

Controversy was introduced when the school was told it's policy of allowing dogs, cats, bats, snakes and other animals as comfort pets would be judged discriminatory if humans could not be included in the category of aids to highly strung , sensitive and progressively spoiled children of professional class parents. When the student in question - nameless because of his age, mental state and looming historic legal case- began having sex with his comfort agent during a sociology of irrelevance class, there was great resentment among other suffering students who demanded the right to  have sex with their comfort animals during class.

The supreme court is expected to act on this case in its next session, after it deals with the issue of pet-human marriage and whether trans-sexual republicans can enter the presidential primary race.