Loren Bliss: Dispatches from Dystopia

Weekend Update 28/4/18: Top Scientist Says We're Doomed

Proposed Korean Peace Treaty Exemplifies Our Remaining Potential

THE HEADLINES ABOVE and the related text immediately below combine two very different reports as if they were separate aspects of the same story -- which in oft-unacknowledged fact they truly are, intertwined like Yin and Yang.

One report -- "a new era of peace has begun" --  applauds the inspiring progress the Koreans are making toward establishing lasting peace on their peninsula. The key to their success seems to be recognition by both Kim Jong-Un and Moon Jae-in of the extent to which the Empire and its plutocratic owners profit by keeping the ancient nation divided. The two Koreas -- culturally one nation --  are thus quietly but fiercely fighting for the independence they need to extricate themselves from the JesuNazi race to apocalypse. Thus too the apparent success-by-negotiation of the two Korean heads of state bids fair to be the most hopeful omen for human survival since the Trump/Pence Regime took office.

The second text --  "(an) influential social scientist...has declared humanity 'doomed' due to its reliance on the burning of fossil fuels and the Capitalist economic system that ensures that dependence will continue" -- describes our fate if we fail to throw off the shackles that bind us to the Capitalist juggernaut. Ultimately, every one of these shackles are traceable to Abrahamic doctrines, especially the belief Earth is no more than a notably sadistic  trial court to which the sons of god are sent to prove their worthiness for heaven. (The misogynistic wording of the preceding sentence, like the biblical tract to which it links, accurately portrays the zero-tolerance male supremacy at the core of all Abrahamic doctrines.)  That's why the Capitalists -- whom the Christians worship as exemplars of their cruel god -- ignore our pleas to stop their depredations. Why bother to prepare for a nonexistent future? Not only do the Capitalists continue their obscene quest to wring profit from ecocidal ruin; the JesuNazis provide the Earth-is-evil rationale (scroll down to the 10th and 11th grafs) that enables the Capitalists to escalate their war on our Mother Earth.  Both groups -- Capitalist eco-rapists and Christian fanatics -- behave as if she -- not they -- were the sole reason the planet is turning hostile to sentient life.  Obviously they have concluded that as a species our only remaining human hope is to die, pampered to senselessness,  amidst an orgy of greedy acquisition.  

But the dramatic breakthrough Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong-un have seemingly accomplished on the Korean Peninsula -- a feat that only a few days ago we were being told was impossible but is nevertheless relentlessly demanded not just by Koreans but by all mindful peoples of the world -- gives  us a little taste of what we might do if we truly put our minds and bodies to it. Yes, it's still too soon to jump and cheer, but most inside sources say the positive signs are undeniable. The question of course is whether the Empire -- which depends on its South Korean presence to perpetuate a big chunk of profit for its military-industrial vassals -- will crush detente as it has so many times in the past.

If the majority of us begin doing as the Koreans began doing long before this (now-prophetic) report was published in 2016   -- that is, joining hearts and hands to save our planet from apocalypse whether thermonuclear or environmental --  we might just yet survive.

Frankly I think what happened at Panmunjom on Friday is the most promising, hope-inspiring omen we've seen here on this tragically afflicted planet since 9/11 gave the Empire its long-sought rationale for flooring the accelerator on its 84-year drive toward global fascism. 

*****

Fukushima Now Officially the World's Worst Nuclear Power Accident

The radiation dispersed into the environment by the three reactor meltdowns at Fukushima-Daiichi in Japan has exceeded that of the April 26, 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe, so...(Fukushima is now the worst)  nuclear power disaster in history."

*****                

General Blasts Judge for Indefinitely Delaying Oil Spill Workers' Medical Claims

"On the eighth anniversary of the BP oil spill, Retired Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré stood in front of the New Orleans Federal Court House and called 'bullshit' on the court's handling of claims made by those who participated in the cleanup efforts. Thousands of workers BP hired to clean up the spill that polluted the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 have claimed exposure to oil and the dispersant has made them sick and still have not had their day in court. 'It's a crying damn shame we've allowed this in America,' Honoré said...We were poised to start World War lll over what the Syrians did to their own people, but here, we still haven't held BP accountable."  Comment: given the malevolence of Capitalism, I doubt these unfortunate workers ever will be granted justice.

*****          

New Study Shows Black Poverty Is Due to Economic Racism 

"(New research from)...William Darity of Duke University, Darrick Hamilton of the New School, and a team of researchers seeks to... establish that the racial wealth gap was not produced by supposed black pathology and cannot be closed by individual effort." 

*****         

British Rejection of Black Immigrants Has Long Racist History

"On June 22, 1948 the ship HMT Empire Windrush arrived in the United Kingdom with 492 people from colonies in the Caribbean. The passengers were British subjects and thus had the right to emigrate. They had in fact been invited to live in the United Kingdom, recruited in the years of the post war labor shortage. They were the first arrivals of those who came to be known as the Windrush generation. They and their children had the right to live and work in Britain. But laws are always malleable when black people depend upon white power structures to protect their human rights..."

*****  

Israel Steps Up Efforts to Provoke War with Iran

With the world media focused on the discussions in Washington between US President Donald Trump and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron concerning the Iranian nuclear agreement, the Israeli government has adopted an increasingly provocative posture toward Iran while carrying out a buildup on its northern border in preparation for a military confrontation.   

*****                  

Empire Intensifies Planning to Overthrow Elected Venezuelan Government

"It was only a matter of time before the U.S. government and its compliant media would once again put Nicaragua in their sights. And, that time has indeed come. Comment: remember, Mouskeeters, when we subvert a foreign government and have its ousted leader tortured to death or put a Nazi regime in power, it's always to spread "democracy." It's only when somebody else tries to do it to us -- we  exceptionals  (i.e., god-anointed white successors to the German Nazi master race) -- that such assaults become  provocations for thermonuclear war.

*****             

Wisconsin Oil Refinery Blast Forces Evacuation of Thousands

"The Husky Energy refinery in the city of Superior (Wisconsin)  was in the process of stopping operations for repairs on Thursday when a tank exploded, leading to a fire and huge plumes of smoke. After the initial blaze was put out, another punctured tank went up in flames. More than a dozen people were injured. A state of emergency and a mandatory evacuation order were lifted Friday morning. Officials are still investigating what led to the explosions."

*****              

Arizona Ruling Class Openly Slinging Political Mud at Striking Teachers 

"The teachers striking in Arizona have been called Democratic operatives. Masterminds of a national socialist revolution. Architects of a plot to legalize marijuana...State politicians, lawmakers, and journalists are making these accusations to discredit teachers who are demanding higher pay and more funding for public schools."  

*****             

Beware the Fascist Facilitators Who Now Claim to Be Anti-Fascists

"The U.S. and its Vichy Republican Party has drifted so far to the fascist right that people such as Albright and Clinton come across as the heroic vanguard of a political and ethical resistance to fascism...While the call to resist fascism is to be welcomed, it has to be interrogated and not aligned with individuals and ideological forces that helped put in place the racist, economic, religious, and educational forces that helped produce it." 

*****

 Europe Approves Strict Ban on Bee-Killing Insecticides

"Faced with mounting scientific evidence that bee-poisoning neonicotinoids, or neonics, could cause an 'ecological armageddon,' European regulators on Friday approved a 'groundbreaking' and 'historic' ban on the widely-used class of pesticides—an announcement met with immediate applause by campaigners."

*****         

Seattle Asks Court to Vacate Decades of Marijuana Convictions

The City of Seattle on Friday filed a motion asking the court to vacate hundreds of marijuana possession convictions going back three decades and adversely impacting people of color.

*****          

Last Words: Fire Cops Who Beat Black Woman for Nixing Beanery Bill  

"Have you heard what happened to Chikesia Clemons last weekend? Violence against Black women often doesn't get the coverage it deserves, so it's especially important that everyone sees this story. Clemons was eating with friends at a restaurant...When told they would be charged extra for disposable silverware to go with their leftovers, they requested to talk to a manager...(but) the restaurant called the police...(who) violently threw Clemons to the ground, exposing her breasts and threatening to break her arm...but one of Clemons' friends got the whole thing on video and it's gone viral." Comment: another racist atrocity by our federally militarized, Israeli-Army-trained local police, and in determinedly courageous response, another relevant, timely and uniquely effective petition from UltraViolet. Please sign.  Remember every such signature also says "thank you for watching our backs and truly paying attention."

LB/28 April 2018

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22-26 April 2018: Is Demo Lawsuit Start of Hillary's 3rd Run?

How This Blog Serves the People; How Its Service Defines Its Content

A COUPLE OF READERS have asked me why I didn't link to last Friday's breaking news of the brazenly deceptive lawsuit the Democratic (sic) Party filed in federal court against Hillary Clinton's long list of selected scapegoats -- WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, WikiLeaks itself, the Russian government and of course the Trump campaign.

Rather than dodge such questions, I welcome them as potentially corrective feedback; they often tell me what I need to do improve Dispatches' usefulness to readers. In this instance the questions tell me I have not adequately explained Dispatches' form, content and purpose -- an oversight for which I apologize and -- hopefully -- will remedy in the next few paragraphs.  

I did not overlook the lawsuit story or -- Goddess forbid -- choose to ignore it. The suit itself is merely the newest reiteration of the Democrats' endlessly repeated Big Lie that a criminal conspiracy by Assange, Russian intelligence operatives and Trump/Pence campaign officials  stole the 2016 election from Hillary. The reeking taint of its Big Lie is half the reason Dispatches' "Weekend Update" of 20-21 April did not link to the original stories. The other half of the reason is the extensive, favorable and typically misleading coverage the lawsuit was granted by the Mainstream Media propaganda machine. Why sully Dispatches by linking to the sort of disinformation it seeks to neutralize or transcend?  The story was already widely reported, and at that point in the news cycle I could add nothing to the coverage save perhaps a cynical sneer.         

Thus -- as I usually do in such circumstances -- I decided I would await further developments. Decades ago the evolution of broadcast media, and more recently the advent of the Internet and social media, relieved print journalism of the scoop-the-world mandate that had ruled during most of my newspaper, wire service and magazine years.  By necessity, print journalists these days focus far less on the rudiments of what happened -- that's now the job of the broadcasters -- and far more on the intricacies of what it means and what it might portend. It is an approach that in the newsrooms of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s was known as a "second-day angle," and it was the reportorial lifeblood of all the better afternoon papers. 

(Note too it is the greed-motivated refusal of the news monopolies to adopt this approach that has put U.S. daily newspapers on the endangered species list. Reliably ferreting  out and communicating second-day angles demands of its writers and editors far more than the sorely limited perspective provided by a journalism degree. It is therefore considerably more expensive to produce than the traditional who-what-when-where-and-why brand of reporting. But why should you buy a paper if it merely rehashes what you already saw on  your TV or cellphone?)

In any case, I knew someone of far greater professional renown than I would soon analyze the implications of the lawsuit, at the very least recognizing it as an obvious effort to further undermine the First Amendment, or as the World Socialist Web Site has since called it, "a frontal assault on democratic rights." Other analyses were similarly forthright.  See also: "The DNC's suit...poses a grave threat to press freedom." Plus this: "The Democratic Party...is seeking to...cripple journalists’ ability to expose corporate and government wrongdoing."  And don't overlook this: "It’s very a risky move. In civil suits 'discovery' runs in both directions. We’re about to learn a lot more about how the Democratic Party really works behind the scenes." 

Meanwhile even the more normally astute analysts somehow missed the suit's most glaring implication -- that Hillary Clinton is planning a third run for the presidency.

The lawsuit's accusations provide precisely the pseudo-factual foundation Hillary needs to support her false narrative of victimization, That's the only way she can redefine her 2016 loss to the Trump/Pence ticket as anything other than what it was -- a colossal blunder fostered by her own astounding arrogance and proven so by her unprecedentedly large victory in the popular vote.

If proven, the lawsuit's assertions would substantiate the portrayal of Hillary as a feminist martyr. But even as formal though unproven allegations, they turn the Trump presidency into to her springboard. They enable her to offer herself as the reanimated savior come back to lift the nation out of its Trumpian convulsions of cruelty, conflict, chaos and corruption "without ever" -- this next whispered in an aside to her owners -- "damaging so much as the one strand of proverbial hair from any One Percenter's head."  

If Hillary makes it onto the 2020 ballot, the notoriously short-memoried gullibility of the U.S. electorate will interact with widespread post-Trumpian loathing of anything Republican to enable her to at last fulfill her all-consuming ambition to be not only the first female president of the United States and ruler of its global empire, but also the first-ever conqueror of Russia.

How else but with a resurrected Hillary candidacy will the Democratic (sic) Party continue to serve its Capitalist masters? How will it (again) suppress the ever-intensifying grassroots effort to leverage it toward another New Deal?

And what of the so-called "CIA Democrats"? Are they not the perfect Praetorian Guard for a Hillary presidency? 

Given the givens, what other strategic explanation for the lawsuit actually makes sense? 

Which brings me to the purpose -- and therefore the form and content -- of Dispatches from Dystopia. 

As its founder and editor, I do my best to avoid regurgitating the rigorously censored Mainstream Media stories by which we are deluged throughout our wakeful hours. In depressing fact, Mainstream Media -- the  cabal of big-money corporations that own and control the U.S. Internet and most of the nation's newspapers, magazines, broadcasting and publishing facilities --  has become the Empire's private, for-profit version of Josef Goebbels' Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Just as we are assailed by privatized, for-profit prisons and dumbed down by privatized, for-profit education, so are we ensnared by the lies and disinformation spewed by privatized, for-profit propagandists. And because the Mainstream Media monopolies are owned by same One Percenters who own and control all U.S. governance,  they have become simultaneously functioning mouthpieces both for our overlords and for their government vassals. The assertions of Mainstream Media and government spokespersons are thus mutually supportive if not identical.

But for now -- until the corporate/government process of censoring the Internet is complete -- we have an antidote. That antidote is a regularly published anthology of links to sources that contain the very information and analyses Mainstream Media denies us -- precisely the service Dispatches from Dystopia provides.

We need such an antidote because most of us today are so overworked and stressed out, we lack the time and focus necessary to perform the extensive web-surfing required for in-depth perusal of alternative media. That's why -- though I have been officially retired since 2005 -- I spend 40 or 50 hours each week scanning alternative news sites, collecting links to the most relevant articles I can find and then sharing these links in twice-weekly Dispatches anthologies. Their purpose -- my purpose -- is to use the skills and perspective of 55-plus years' experience as a professional editor, writer and photographer to Serve the People by providing access to information they might not have time to ferret out for themselves. 

Thus too the Dispatches quickly readable form: a descriptive headline followed by a brief but telling passage lifted from the linked text. And the lifted passage is always less than 200 words, the length-limit imposed on reviewers  by U.S, copyright law. To avoid any question of authorship, the lifted material is indicated both by italic body type and quotation marks. When the lifted material is followed by my own commentary, this too is plainly identified as "Comment."

Bottom line, if a breaking story gets widespread coverage by the Mainstream Media propaganda machine, you normally won't read about it here until more truthful reports are available.      

*****            

Evo Morales Damns U.S. as World's Worst Ever Threat to Freedom

"The biggest threat against freedom, against democracy, against Mother Earth and against multilateralism is the United States. I am not afraid to say this openly,"

*****                                

Horrors Implicit in Oft-Denied U.S. Origins of German Nazism

"The Nazis idolized many aspects of American society: the cult of sport, Hollywood production values, the mythology of the frontier..In our current age of unapologetic racism and resurgent authoritarianism, the mechanics of Hitler’s rise are a particularly pressing matter. For dismantlers of democracy, there is no better exemplar."

*****                     

More on How Trump/Pence JesuNazis Yearn for the Apocalypse 

"A distinct subset of evangelical Christians know that Donald Trump is bad news for the entire world—and they’re really, really excited about...signs in the heavens, the bloodshed of nations at Armageddon, the final destruction of non-believers in the winepress of God’s wrath... The tone is jovial, even smug, as if they’re discussing the plot of a popcorn flick that doesn’t affect them...Because in their world, it doesn’t—they’re going to be raptured...earth is just (their) place of trial and suffering before (their) final destination of heaven."  See also: "One would think that cooler heads might inject a note of sanity before things get completely out of hand. But the opposite seems to be the case." Comment: it cannot be said too often that the JesuNazis' nightmarish yearning for the apocalypse is what makes the Trump/Pence Regime's tantrums of thermonuclear brinksmanship  incalculably more dangerous than any other confrontations in human history. (See again my "Infinitely More Terrifying Than Cuban Missile Crisis.")  Unfortunately too many of us continue to cower beneath blankets of denial in an imaginary realm where the looming JesuNazi tyranny and its probable apocalyptic outcome remain part of the so-called "unthinkable." But if we are to save ourselves from extinction, these terrible truths must be repeated until we the people awaken not just to the horrific magnitude of the threat but to the fact that socialism is literally our only salvation. (With thanks to TigerLille1 for sending me the "raptured" link.)

*****

Trump's Medicaid Work Requirements Are Genocidal Denial of Care

"The Trump administration is supporting a major policy shift on Indian health programs which could result in a loss of millions of dollars to the Indian Health Service while also sabotaging treaty rights. See also: "...attacks on Medicaid are now accelerating at the state level across the country..."  Comment: The Trump/Pence Regime's "aggressive action...to improve the health and well-being for all American Indians and Alaska Natives" is clearly genocide, to be inflicted by massive cuts in heath services. But the precedent for concealing genocidal intent behind such a breathtaking Big Lie was set by Obama in 2014, when he claimed his $4 billion food-stamp cut would "make sure America's children don't go hungry," Precisely as intended, Obama's cuts were devastating; they slashed my own food stamp allocation from a notably helpful $130 per month to an utterly useless $15 per month and similarly victimized all other food stamp recipients. Such is slow-motion, post-deathcamp genocide as inflicted on us by the One Capitalist Party Of Two Names (OCPOTN), whether its targets are First Nations folk or Medicare recipients in general; whether the murders are inflicted overtly, as they are by the faction that calls itself  "Republican," or facilitated clandestinely, as is so often done by the faction that -- with the biggest most Orwellian Big Lie brazenness of all -- calls itself "Democratic."

*****                   

Macron Tells Congress He Applauds U.S. Aggression 

"Emmanuel Macron’s address to a joint session of the US Congress on Wednesday was one of the most belligerent public statements ever made by a French president. Hailing the unprovoked bombing of Syria on April 14 by Washington, London and Paris as a model for a new world order in the 21st century, Macron declared his support for US war threats against Iran, North Korea and beyond."

*****         

Tape Reveals Mechanics of Democrats' Intra-Party  Ideological Enforcement

"The secretly taped audio recording, released here for the first time, reveals how senior Democratic officials have worked to crush competitive primaries and steer political resources, money, and other support to hand-picked candidates in key races across the country, long before the party publicly announces a preference. The invisible assistance boosts the preferred candidate in fundraising and endorsements, and then that fundraising success and those endorsements are used to justify national party support. Meanwhile, opponents of the party’s unspoken pick are driven into paranoia, wondering if they are merely imagining that unseen hands are working against them."

*****                     

Trump's DHS Has Torn More Than 700 Children from Their Families

"The Trump administration’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has separated more than 700 children, including infants, from their families at the US-Mexico border since October, according to a New York Times investigation. The Trump administration had declared previously that it was considering taking children away from parents as a deterrent to immigration."

*****            

Capitalist: Why Cure a Disease When You Can Profit Off Its Perpetuation?

"Yes, a Goldman analyst has said outright that curing people will hurt their cash flow. And he said that in a note designed to steer clients away from investing in cures."

*****               

GOP Measure Would Force Food Stamp Recipients to Work

"If the Republican House bill goes through, anyone between the ages of 18 and 59 will have to work or participate in a work training program for 20 hours a week in order to receive food stamp benefits."

*****  

700 Georgia Cops Muster to Protect JesuNazis

"...hundreds of police descended on the town of Newnan, Georgia to protect a small rally of neo-Nazis from anti-fascist counterprotesters, arresting several protesters under a 1951 law designed to prevent the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan (KKK) from demonstrating in public."

*****            

Accused Killer Cop Is  Convicted Hate Criminal 

"A Barstow, Calif., police officer accused of being involved in the fatal shooting of driver Diante Yarber, a young father of three, was convicted of a hate crime back in 2010 but was somehow allowed to return to the police force, attorneys representing Yarber’s family and his passengers say."

*****        

Feds Likely Won't Prosecute Choke-Hold Cop for Garner Murder

Nearly four years after the murder of Eric Garner, the 43-year-old unarmed African-American man from the New York City borough of Staten Island, it remains unlikely that the cop responsible for his death will face trial.

*****                   

Border Guard Acquitted of Murdering Mexican Teen

"After sixteen days of deliberation, US Border Patrol Agent Lonnie Swartz was acquitted on Monday of second degree murder for the slaying of a 16-year-old Mexican youth through a US-Mexico border fence. The court deadlocked on lesser charges of manslaughter leaving open the possibility of a re-trial."

*****          

Rewire Exposes Another Pence Plot to Impose Theocracy 

"According to reporting by Rewire.News, Catholic hospitals across the country are imposing dangerous and life-threatening mandates on their patients, including requiring fetal burial after a miscarriage and restricting access to contraception, abortion, fertility treatments and gender-affirming care for transgender patients. And now, right-wing politicians like Vice President Mike Pence are pushing to enshrine these dangerous practices into law. For more, we speak with Rewire investigative journalist Amy Littlefield."

*****           

Examples of the Positive and Negative Aspects of U.S. Labor Unionism

"Teachers in Jersey City, New Jersey, voted April 19 to approve a deal by the Jersey City Education Association (JCEA), which was used to shut down the one-day March 16 strike by 4,000 teachers and school employees. The delay of a month was likely necessary to bully teachers and sell the deal, which did not meet their main demand to end soaring out-of-pocket medical costs under New Jersey’s health care plan known as Chapter 78." See also: "Within days of announcing the elimination of an entire shift and 1,500 jobs at the giant Lordstown, Ohio assembly plant, General Motors announced that its subsidiary, known as the Lordstown GM Subsystems Manufacturing LLC, will be hiring low-paid temporary workers under an agreement the United Auto Workers signed behind the backs of rank-and-file workers." And this: "For the first time in decades, union membership is on the rise among young people." Comment: a long-time union member myself  (previously American Newspaper Guild, now National Writers Union), I have seen both the enormous good we do by organizing ourselves into unions and how the purpose of unionism is so often betrayed, far too frequently by entrenched interests within unions. However that betrayal is usually a two-way street, with the betrayers empowered by long periods of rank-and-file indifference and inactivity.   

*****          

Multiple Efforts Increase Focus on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women

"Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women awareness efforts get a boost with a new Wash. state law and a data website, a continuous daily tweet, and the documentary film 1200+."

*****  

Red Wolves Perilously Close to Extinction

"The only wild population of endangered red wolves is unsustainable and could be wiped out within a decade after dwindling to a few dozen, government officials said in a report Tuesday. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service review of the species' status estimates that only about 40 wolves remain in the wild in eastern North Carolina, down from a peak of about 120 a decade ago. 'The population cannot recover from their losses and overcome mortality resulting in a steadily declining population,' the review states, predicting these wild wolves could vanish in as little as a decade."

*****         

Portland, Oregon Activists Protest Naming Navy Warship After Their City

"Activists from roughly 10 different local organizations gathered this morning to protest the naming of the Navy warship that docked in Portland over the weekend. The Portland Democratic Socialists of America planned the demonstration after learning that the ship would be named USS Portland, with April 21 being declared by Mayor Ted Wheeler as 'USS Portland Day.'"

*****         

Democrats Embrace National Marijuana Legalization

"Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has introduced legislation that would decriminalize cannabis at the federal level, a sign that the Democratic leadership is finally ready to align itself with a majority of voters and embrace marijuana reform ahead the 2018 midterm elections." Comment: remember this is an election year. It's what the Democrats do after the election that counts. And never, ever forget the monumental betrayal the Democrats dealt us as "change we can believe in."

*****            

Lab Accident Spawns Plastic-Eating Enzyme 

"Researchers in the UK and the U.S. have inadvertently engineered an enzyme that eats up plastic. The enzyme is able to digest PET (polyethylene terephthalate)—the same material used in the ubiquitous plastic bottle that’s clogging up landfills, coastlines and oceans around the world." Comment: Goddess grant the enzyme does not escape from the lab and begin consuming all plastic everywhere, our computer disks, our picnik supplies, flower pots, shower curtains, even the elastic that holds up our undies.  

*****        

Last Words: Once Again, Dogs Prove Themselves the Superior Species

"A 17-year-old Australian Cattle Dog named Max saved the life of a young girl lost in the mountains of Queensland, Australia last week...(he) found his young human, settled her down, then sought out help despite being partially blind, totally deaf and...(even after human searchers had given up)...a dog (who) refused to stop looking." Comment: I love dogs. Love them dearly. Always have, always will. Indeed they are by far my favorite quadrupeds. And they have repaid my love by twice -- maybe three times -- saving my life. The first time was in 1942, when I was a toddler out for an evening walk with my father in Queens, a borough of New York City, and the lightening-fast reflexes of Lobo, our German Shepherd, rescued me from an eerily aggressive house cat that without provocation had pounced onto my head as we passed the stoop whereon he was crouching; Lobo literally bit the cat in half. The third time was in 1963, when I was a civil rights activist in Knoxville, Tennessee, and Brunhilda, my own German Shepherd, grabbed a murder-minded Ku Klux Klan hitman by the testicles as he was attempting to climb into my kitchen window and dragged him screaming to the ground. (The second time was the Maybe, Its circumstances, which occurred in Roanoke, Virginia on the Summer Solstice Eve of 1945, are less obvious. This was the day and night of madness and familial violence during which my mother's plan to take me to the top of Mill Mountain "to meet god" -- that is, to murder me, apparently in payment for a debt she believed she owed Satan -- was aborted by the unexpectedly early return of my father from a wartime work-related conference. But it was our English Setter Cocoa whose refusal to be confined in the basement had repeatedly delayed our departure until my father's arrival.) Knowing and respecting canine insight and intelligence as I have learned to do both from my own interactions with dogs and from the hundreds of hero-dog stories I have read (and occasionally reported) as a journalist, I strongly suspect Cocoa's behavior was not the coincidence it seemed. Indeed I sometimes wonder if perhaps the translators of the Bible were dyslexics, that in cosmic truth our one truly protective, loving and forgiving deity is Dog, not God. (With thanks to TigerLille1 for the link to the short but wonderful story of how Max saved the life of Aurora.)

LB/26 April 2018

 -30-

 

Weekend Update 21/4/18: Capitalism Makes War Inevitable

"...capital’s capacity to produce constantly outstrips the capacity of consumers to consume, as these very consumers are, in the main, the very workers whose wages are driven down, or who are made redundant altogether, by improved technology. Ultimately, this results in a crisis of overproduction, with markets glutted, and workers thrown out of work in their millions...Increasingly unable to rely on economic coercion alone to keep countries within its ‘sphere of influence...the West have been turning more and more to military force. Indeed, the US, UK and France have been permanently at war since the eve of the new millennium – starting with Yugoslavia, through Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Syria and Yemen (to say nothing of proxy wars such as that in the Congo, or the ‘drone wars’ waged in Pakistan, Somalia and elsewhere). In each case, the aim has been the same – to thwart the possibility of independent development..."

*****             

North Korea Says It's Suspending Nuke Tests, Missile Launches 

"North Korea announced yesterday it had suspended nuclear and long-range missile tests and plans to close its northern nuclear test site. It was the latest in a series of concessions offered by Pyongyang in the lead-up to a summit scheduled next Friday between North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in, and a later summit between Kim and US President Donald Trump." See also:  "The decision of Washington, London and Paris to launch missile strike against Syria on April 9, risking a direct military clash with Russian forces in the country, is reverberating internationally. As the Trump administration prepares for talks with North Korean President Kim Jong Un over his country’s nuclear program, it is inflaming military tensions in East Asia."

*****         

Cuba's New President Pledges to Defend Socialism

"Cuba's new president, Miguel Diaz-Canel, began his term on Thursday with a promise to defend the socialist revolution led by the Castro brothers since 1959, giving a sober speech that also emphasized the need to modernize the island's economy."

*****         

Clinton Case Could Trigger Constitutional Crisis; Media Curiously Silent

"Wednesday’s criminal referral by 11 House Republicans of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as well as several former and serving top FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) officials is a giant step toward a Constitutional crisis...With no attention from corporate media, the referral was sent to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and U.S. Attorney for the District of Utah John Huber."

*****                                 

Democratic (sic) Betrayal I: Heitkamp Ensures Pompeo Confirmation 

"Flouting urgent demands by anti-war groups, environmentalists, and LGBTQ rights organizations to reject Mike Pompeo over his lengthy record of warmongering and bigotry, Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) on Thursday became the first Democrat to declare her support for President Donald Trump's secretary of state pick. The announcement...ensures that Pompeo will become America's top diplomat—as he likely only needs one Democratic vote to make it through the Senate—and immediately drew criticism from progressives who have been pressuring Democrats to block his confirmation."

*****             

Democratic (sic) Betrayal II: Manchin Helps Kill Anti-Racism Protocol

"In a 'precedent-shattering' 51-47 vote on Wednesday that could set the stage for the GOP to kill a slew of longstanding consumer and environmental regulations, Senate Republicans—joined by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.)—approved a measure to repeal a 2013... guidance aimed at protecting minorities from auto lending discrimination...'This may end up being the most vicious hardball escalation and norm-breaking of Trump's first two years.'"

*****          

Trump Regime Says Union Membership Is Evidence of Criminal Intent

"In prosecutions against Inauguration Day protesters, the government contends some of the defendants’ union memberships qualify as evidence of a conspiracy to commit a crime."

*****         

Israelis Kill Four Protestors Including 15-Year-Old Boy

"As the fourth Friday of popular protests in the besieged Gaza Strip came to a close, Israeli forces had killed four Palestinians, including a 15-year-old who was shot in the head." See also: "A coalition of community organisations in the city of Durham in the U.S. state of North Carolina has successfully lobbied the city council to ban training and exchanges between Durham's police department and the Israeli military...the first US city to ever explicitly take such measure...(against) the militarisation of police forces around the country." Comment: knowing how the Israelis routinely slaughter Palestinians, I cannot but wonder to what extent training by Israeli Army war criminals contributes to the skyrocketing incidence of murders committed by U.S. cops. 

*****              

Saudis, Other U.S. Puppets Again Bomb Yemen, Kill At Least 20 

"Twenty people have been killed in an air strike by a Saudi-led military coalition in southwestern Yemen, residents said."

*****       

Top Brazilian Official Says Cop Militias Probably Murdered Marielle Franco 

"Brazil’s government declared Monday that human rights activist Marielle Franco was 'very likely' killed by...Rio de Janeiro’s militias...whose members are former police officers or active and corrupted officers, controlling large parts of the city...Franco was renown for openly denouncing their activities, defending the rights of the poor communities of Rio de Janeiro against police brutality and corruption."

*****           

Black Motorist  Killed by Cops for Awaiting Walmart-Shopping Friends

"Barstow, Calif., police officers fired what sounded like more than 30 bullets into a car in Walmart’s parking lot, killing Diante 'Butchie' Yarber, 26, and shooting two other passengers, including 23-year-old Marian Tafoya who was critically wounded...Yarber, the father of three girls, ages 9, 7, and 1, drove his cousin and friends to a local Walmart. Barstow police claim they were responding to a call about a 'suspicious' vehicle in the parking lot...(and opened fire)  when they spotted Yarber waiting in a black Mustang for his passengers to return to the car."

*****          

Power Outage Shows Magnitude of Racist Regime's Hatred for Puerto Ricans

After struggling for nearly seven months to rebuild Puerto Rico's power grid, which was destroyed by Hurricane Maria, the U.S. territory experienced an island-wide blackout on Wednesday—its first since the storm struck last September. As meteorologist Eric Holthaus put it, "This is still a humanitarian emergency."

*****          

Death-by-Monopoly of Hungarian Press Freedom Bodes Ill for U.S.

"Hungary’s far-right governing party, Fidesz, won  a crushing victory in national elections, further strengthening Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s tight grip on power. Orbán has gradually eroded Hungary’s independent press since he took office in 2010. His latest win is all but a death knell."  Comment: the linked report deftly avoids the issue, but the war on media independence waged by the U.S. One Percent and its vassals employs the same strategy and tactics as Orban is employing in Hungary and is creating the same information vacuum. Coincidence? I rather doubt it.

*****              

Pot Arrests Soar in 21 States; as Usual, Minorities Are Primary Targets

"...in at least 21 states, pot arrests went up from 2014 to 2016, even as weed has been legalized and decriminalized in other states and cities. Complete data were not available for Florida, Illinois, Alabama, and Washington, D.C."

*****         

A Photographer Kills Himself in King County Jail  

"It was clear that Michael Clinard was in a bad way long before that fatal day last July in the King County Jail. It was clear even before a Bothell municipal court judge remanded him into custody for repeatedly violating a domestic violence protection order and he made a grim vow. 'I won’t live that long,' Clinard shouted at the judge, according to a prosecutor’s court filing. 'I don’t intend to live past another two weeks. You just signed my death warrant, bitch!'...Clinard, a photographer who was once a rising star on the local and national magazine scenes, made good on his threat..."

*****           

Mind Control Data Mysteriously Leaked to Investigative Reporter

"The government has all kinds of secrets, but only a true conspiracy theorist might suspect that 'psycho-electric weapons' are one of them. So it's odd that MuckRock, a news organization that specializes in filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with state and federal government bodies, received mysterious documents about mind control, seemingly by accident."

*****            

Are Tacoma's New "Opportunity Zones" Really Gentrification Targets?

"Gov. Jay Inslee today approved six census tracts in Tacoma for Opportunity Zone status, allowing for special federal tax breaks encouraging development and job creation." See also: "...there is a risk that instead of helping residents of poor neighborhoods, the tax break will end up displacing them or simply provide benefits to developers investing in already-gentrifying areas." Comment: previous incarnations of  these "Opportunity Zones" exempted bosses from minimum wage requirements. Hence I checked to see if these new zones contained the same waiver. Apparently they do not  -- but knowing the bottomless treachery of our overlords, I suggest staying tuned, as I promise to investigate further.

*****          

Barbara Bush Obituary: In This Case It's Necessary to Speak Ill of the Dead

"How wicked (was) Barbara Bush?... Refresh your memory with this quote on Good Morning America, dismissing the escalating body count of American soldiers in Iraq. 'Why should we hear about body bags and deaths and how many,' the Presidential Mother snapped. 'It’s not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?'"

*****          

Appalachian Pipeline Resistance Defying Efforts to Starve Out Protestor

"Midstream Partners with local law enforcement have cut off all supplies. Red Terry has had no food or water for three days and continues her tree sit to block destruction of trees for a fracked gas pipeline."

*****           

100,000 Petitions Denounce Cops Who Murdered Stephon Clark

"...100,000 petitions were delivered to the Sacramento police asking for justice for Stephon Clark...concerned community members hung a 75 foot banner from Sacramento’s Tower Bridge reading 'They Want Peaceful Protests- We Want the D.A. To Prosecute.'"

*****          

Last Words: How Capitalism Murders Our Hearts and Minds

"Finally (at the end of the program) this is your brain on capitalism. Dr. Harriet Fraad is a mental health expert as well as a political radical. She sees first hand what capitalism does to our mental health – how the psychology of the system shapes everything from our personal relationships to mass shootings." Quoth Dr. Fraad: "we didn't know Gloria Steinem was a CIA agent."  Comment: an outstanding interview by Eleanor Goldfield.

LB/21 April 2018

  -30-        

 

15-19 April 2018: Sighs of Relief, Expressions of Hopeful Anger

Is the Empire at Long Last Learning It Cannot Conquer All Nations? 

"They had long been in favor of ensuring this country’s 'unchallenged supremacy' by building its already staggering military into a force beyond compare...It was to be a Pax Americana planet for the ages...'a position of unparalleled military strength'...a single, unparalleled military power 'beyond challenge'... a dream of dominion that once would have been left to 'Evil Empires' or madmen (or the truly, truly bad guys in Hollywood movies). But in the world as they imagined it then, the one in which only that 'sole' superpower stood tall, how easy it proved to imagine a Great Game with just a single player and an eternal arms race of one." See also: "The fading empire refuses to accept the humiliation of defeat of its jihadist proxies, the head-cutters Washington and Saudi Arabia have nurtured as a foreign terror legion since deploying them against a leftist government in Afghanistan and its Soviet ally almost 40 years ago."  Comment: ultimately, and unabashedly in the tradition of Hitler and Bonaparte, the "New American Century" is just another genocidal effort by another morally imbecilic conqueror, in this case a cabal of Capitalists and their vassals rather than one Capitalist-anointed tyrant. 

*****             

Attack on Syria Did Not Slake Imperial Warmongers' Blood Lust

"Within hours of the strikes, US and European newspapers began pumping out editorials demanding a further escalation of the war for regime-change in Syria....while tactical considerations led the United States to...(avoid) a full-scale assault that would have led to a shooting war with Iranian and Russian forces, the launching of such an onslaught is only a matter of time. The fact that such a conflict could have cataclysmic consequences for humanity will not deter the imperialist powers from waging it." See also: "Considering the just inflicted U.S. insult to Russia by its attack in Syria, Moscow may well choose to respond by hitting U.S. interests in a very different location, where it enjoys logistical superiority and also where the counter-strike may be less likely to escalate to direct crossing of swords and the unthinkable—possible nuclear war."

*****         

International Study Damns U.S. as World's Most Corrupt Industrial Nation

"No other 'democracy' in the developed world comes close to the United States when it comes to giving big-money donors unregulated power in their national electoral processes...this plutocratic campaign finance free-for-all is why the Electoral Integrity Project (a research undertaking funded by the Australian Research Council with a team of researchers based at the University of Sydney and Harvard University) ranks the democratic election integrity of U.S. elections below that of all 19 North and Western European democracies and also below that of 10 other nations in the Americas (Costa Rica, Uruguay, Canada, Chile, Brazil, Jamaica, Grenada, Argentina, Barbados and Peru), 10 nations in Central and Eastern Europe, nine Asian-Pacific countries, two countries in the Middle East (Israel and Tunisia) and six African nations...dead last among 'Western democracies.'" Comment: now at last we're being recognized for our true exceptionalism. (Longtime suspicions emphatically confirmed.)

*****          

Nearly All Democrats Countenance Trump/Pence Attacks on Syria

"Only a handful of Democrats—Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., Christopher Murphy, D-Conn., Edward Markey, D-Mass., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.—opposed the air strikes on substance. The vast majority, instead, relied on process demands that Trump get congressional approval—without saying if the strikes themselves were good or bad." See also: "The curators of American public opinion at the three most influential broadsheets in the United States decided that dissent...(against) new airstrikes on Syria was not...an opinion worth hearing." Comment: Democrats and Republicans again confirming their assigned roles as serial deceivers in the One Capitalist Party of Two Names (OCPOTN). But how many more times must this bitter truth be pointed out before we recognize the magnitude of our enslavement?

*****     

Vermont Mayor to Anti-F-35 Majority: Go Fuck Yourselves

"On April 11, the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, announced that he was betraying a 55% majority of Burlington voters and a 75% majority of his city council that had opposed basing the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter at the Burlington Airport in South Burlington...The third-term Democratic mayor has now asked the Air Force to impose its deafening fighter-bomber on a neighboring city for no cogently articulated reason, following a process bereft of integrity, rigor, or honor." Comment: note that Vermont's Congressional delegates, including Sanders, are backing the mayor in his defiance of popular will: another telling example of how "American Democracy" is the biggest Big Lie in human history.

*****

More Evidence the Douma Gas Attack Didn't Happen

"...whatever incontrovertible information the US, UK and France claimed to have that Syria carried out a chemical weapons attack last week is clearly no more reliable than their claims about an Iraqi WMD program back in 2002." See also: "It is difficult for Americans to find out what is happening in their country and around the world...(even) the internet, the hoped for level playing field for communication and information gathering, is...part of a well coordinated censorship effort and attack against left wing sites..."

*****        

Trump's National Guard Troops Already Massing on Mexican Border

"Just a week after President Donald Trump announced the deployment of up to 4,000 members of the National Guard to the southern border, hundreds of soldiers have already been deployed in all four states situated along the US border with Mexico."  See also: "A new segment of Trump's 'big, beautiful wall' is already destroying big, beautiful tracts of land and native wildlife -- and potentially human lives -- as construction broke ground last week."

*****                      

Jerry Brown, Justin Trudeau Damned as Climate Hypocrites 

"Two leading political figures from the U.S. and Canada, who have boasted about the need to fight climate change, are now under fire for being climate change hypocrites: saying they care about the climate, but allowing drilling and fossil fuel infrastructure to be built anyway."

*****           

Fueled by Climate Change, the U.S. Western Desert Expands Eastward

"...scientists are looking again at the 100th meridian...They confirm that the divide has turned out to be very real, as reflected by population and agriculture on opposite sides. They say also that the line appears to be slowly moving eastward, due to climate change...Data collected since about 1980 suggests that the statistical divide between humid and arid has now shifted closer to the 98th meridian, some 140 miles east. (In Texas, this would move it roughly from Abilene to Fort Worth.)"  With thanks to TigerLille1 for spotting the story and emailing me the link. 

*****             

Activist Immolates Himself to Protest Capitalism's War on the Environment

"David Buckel, a nationally known advocate for gay rights and the environment died Saturday in self-immolation suicide in a wake-up call to save the planet." Comment: remember the fiery, indescribably courageous protests by the South Vietnamese Buddhist Monks? As for the viciously anti-Buddhist Diem Regime, its atrocities detailed in the "fiery protests" link, what else might one expect from a theocratic Christian tyrant? Note too that Diem was imposed on a 90-per-cent Buddhist population as an deliberate expression of "the secret fundamentalism at the heart of American power."

*****           

52% of Voters Reject Brainwashing, Call Bullshit on Trump's Billionaire Tax Cut

"As right-wing advocacy groups embark on yet another campaign to sell the American public on the GOP's corporate-friendly tax law that President Donald Trump insisted would sell itself, a new Gallup poll published Monday found that the tax cuts remain 'very unpopular,' with just 39 percent approving and 52 percent disapproving."

*****      

JesuNazi Support for Trump Soars Despite Stormy Scandal

"The most recent Pew polls suggest that President Donald Trump...has grown his support (amongst white Evangelicals) since the Stormy Daniels story took hold...With his white evangelical support... (slumping to) 61 percent in December, Trump now enjoys 78 percent support, just a shade beneath the support he won from white evangelicals on Election Day...(but) this should be no surprise at all...(because) the history and sexual politics of evangelicalism in America fit well with Donald Trump and his message." Comment: precisely as the linked text states, "White evangelicals, particularly in the South, long ago lined up their party with 'family values,' which above all else has meant patriarchy." And what is patriarchy? Think for a moment. Is it not human society constructed with fear, hatred and contempt of femaleness as its core principle? Thus patriarchy wages its war of misogyny against any expression of femaleness it can identify, whether a single girl-child or our Mother Earth herself. With thanks to TigerLille1 for sending me the link.

*****                          

The Capitalists Resurrect Debtors' Prison, Especially for Student Loan Victims

"One in three Americans has a debt that has been turned over to a private collection agency. One in five Americans has unpaid medical bills that have gone into collection...A Texas man was arrested by seven or eight U.S. Marshals for failure to appear in court. The original $2,500 federal student loan he obtained in 1983 to pay for trucking school had ballooned to $12,000 with interest and fees. The man was...unable to appear in court: he had just undergone open-heart surgery. Had he been able to appear, it would still have been unable to pay. He was retired and subsisting on Social Security and disability..." See also: "Incarceration is, probably, the starkest form of commodification where simply warehousing flesh brings a return." Comment: read as one, the two linked reports are useful in helping us recognize how the JesuNazism into which U.S. Capitalism is maturing includes resurrected forms of the serfdom that defined the manorial economy of the Middle Ages and the plantation slavery that defined  the antebellum South. Unfortunately Alan Nasser buried the lead of his "Texas man" story,  apparently to force us to read 15 paragraphs of advocacy before we get to the information promised by his story's headline. Fortunately though  the Scroll function gets us quickly to the subtitle "The Criminalization of Private Debt," which is where the promised disclosures begin. As to the report linked via "Warehousing flesh," it is much better organized and written. It's source is a piece by Susan Roberts entitled "Uses of the Poor," which reveals the myriad, typically malicious ways the Capitalists profit from our poverty. Both reports document how our morally imbecilic, Ayn Rand-minded overlords (redundancy employed for emphasis) have added a new, college-level route to the slave pens via the school-to-prison pipeline.  

*****        

Pogrom Update (1): ICE Arrests, Isolates Latina Reproductive Rights Activist 

"...Alejandra Pablo (of) the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health (NLIRH)...(works toward) a world where no woman fears accessing health care at her local clinic because of immigration raids; a world where families aren't torn apart by a broken immigration system; where all people can exercise decisions about family formation and abortion without stigma, shame or coercion...(but) Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) took Alejandra into custody, denied her a bond hearing, and whisked her (far) away from her loved ones... (to imprisonment in)  Eloy Detention Center in Southern Arizona, one of the deadliest detention centers in the US." See also: "Riding high off two recent  widely denounced deportations that ripped apart immigrant families who have called the U.S. home for decades, acting ICE director Thomas Homan boasted at a conference on Wednesday that he has really begun 'enjoying' his role in carrying out President Donald Trump's racist mass deportation agenda." Comment: Though the linked report on Ms. Pablo fails to tell us where she was arrested, the implication is she was seized in Virginia and then transported in chains to Arizona -- which, if that is indeed what happened,  would exemplify the Gestapo-minded ICE practice of inflicting maximum geographical isolation on detainees by sending them to concentration camps as far as possible from their comrades, families, friends and homes. 

*****                 

Pogrom Update (2):  Suit Says Georgia For-Profit Prison Enslaves Immigrants

"Detainees held at a privately-operated immigration detention center in Georgia are forced to work at the facility for pitiful pay and are threatened with serious harm if they refuse to “volunteer” to work, according to a class-action lawsuit filed Tuesday against the private prison operator CoreCivic."

*****            

U.S. Gender Pay Gap Nearly Twice as Large as (Censored) Analyses Reveal

"Using the latest census data, I find that the median woman between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-four earned $25,000 in 2016. For men, it was $41,000. This means that women earn 39 percent less than men, not 20 percent."

*****             

School Privatization Is Latest Battle in Fight against Capitalist Serfdom 

"It’s the latest battle in a contest between two countervailing forces: one bent on reengineering America for the benefit of the wealthy, the other struggling to preserve dignity and security for ordinary people."

*****                

Union Betrayal of Oklahoma Teachers Follows West Virginia Tactical Model 

"The strike by tens of thousands of Oklahoma teachers...did not win their demands for significantly increased wages and the restoration of school funding, which has been cut by nearly 30 percent over the last decade...like the nine-day strike in West Virginia, the walkout of Oklahoma teachers was betrayed by the National Education Association (NEA), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and their state affiliates in Oklahoma."  See also: "...class has always mattered far more in our public and private lives than our (propaganda) would allow." Comment: telling examples of how the  long-ruling cabal of Democratic (sic) Party officials and Democrat-owned union officials join hands with the Republicans to preserve Capitalism and facilitate the continued savaging of the Working Class. In other words, "business as usual."

*****          

Anarchist scott crow Focuses on Armed Self Defense, Forcible Disarmament

"In this interview with Truthout, (scott) crow discusses his experience with armed self-defense, the current gun control debate, the student-led protests on gun control, the militarization of police, the media framing of police killings and the military-industrial complex." Note: the all-lower-case spelling of scott crow's name is not a typographical error; it is the form demanded by crow himself.

*****                   

Especially in Mental Health, Doctors' Greed Shortchanges Appalachian Residents 

"Appalachia’s suicide rate is 17 percent higher than the national average, but (most) mental health providers (refuse to accept Medicaid)...one of the region's most (commonplace) forms of insurance."  

*****                       

New Poor People's Campaign Demands Massive Reforms to Capitalism

"While our nation once fought a war against poverty, now we wage a war on the poor. The richest 1% in our country own more wealth than the bottom 90% combined, tightening their grip on political power to shape labor, tax, healthcare and campaign finance policies that benefit the few at the expense of the many. A full 60% more Americans now live below the official poverty line than in 1968..Now, 50 years after leaders of the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign declared silence was betrayal, we are coming together to break the silence and tell the truth about the interlocking evils of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, the war economy and our distorted moral narrative." Comment: the murder of the New Deal proves Capitalism cannot be reformed. Thus -- the campaign's leadership's implicitly pro-Capitalist bias not withstanding -- it should be obvious the only way the Poor People's Campaign will achieve its humanitarian goals is by revolution.

*****                  

Wealth, Greed and Malice of U.S. Plutocrats Soar to All-Time Highs

"Across the United States, workers are being told by Democrats and Republicans alike that there is 'no money' for decent wages, pensions or health care. Teachers from West Virginia to Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona and other states are rebelling against near-poverty wages and years of school cuts only to be told by the politicians and union leaders that their demands are 'unrealistic' and cannot be met. But a series of reports on CEO pay, bank profits and corporate cash released over the past week reveal that corporate America and the financial oligarchy are wallowing in record levels of wealth."

*****                  

JesuNazi Organizer ID'd as Active Duty U.S. Marine

"Just weeks before a white supremacist rally turned deadly last August after a neo-Nazi allegedly drove his car into a crowd in Charlottesville, Virginia, several of the rally's organisers discussed ways to use cars as weapons...one of those organisers... operating under the alias "Tyrone"...(has been exposed) as Michael Joseph Chesny, a 36-year-old active duty Marine who was stationed at an airbase in Havelock, North Carolina with a speciality in explosives." Comment: once again the blitzkreig-minded collaboration between cops, soldiers and Nazis.

*****              

Starbucks Busts Two Men for Daring to Do Business While Black 

"The arrest of (two) black men for trespassing while they sat inside a Starbucks awaiting their meeting with a white developer to discuss a possible real estate investment deal sparked social media outrage, an apology from the corporate head of Starbucks and a strident assessment from Philadelphia’s Mayor James Kenney (that the) incident 'appears to exemplify what racial discrimination looks like in 2018.'" See also: "That Starbucks manager didn’t call the police in hopes that they’d politely ask two black customers to buy a latte or leave, just as the angry woman in front of my apartment wasn’t threatening to call the cops just to get her boyfriend to listen to her. The intent of these actions is to remind black people that the ultimate consequence of discomforting white people—let alone angering them—could be death" (emphasis as in original). Comment: the Trump/Pence regime got only 15.45 percent of the Philly vote but won Pennsylvania by 48.2 percent. 

*****    

Petition: Oppose AG Session's Personal Pogrom against Immigrant Women

"Trump's attorney general, Jeff Sessions, wants to reverse a longstanding practice of granting asylum to refugees running from domestic and sexual violence...sending thousands of women back to potentially violent deaths. But Sessions does not have the final say...If a huge outcry breaks out in response to this racist, sexist, and plainly violent plan to turn away domestic and sexual violence survivors, we can stop this administration from going through with it. Will you add your name to protect survivors who need asylum?"  Thanks again to Tigerlille1, though I have long been on the UV mailing list.

*****                       

Last Words: Why Today's Tyranny Needs a Better Name Than "Fascism."

While the term "fascism" accurately describes the  tyrannical governance essential to maintain Capitalism, what assails us today is nevertheless a uniquely 21st Century form of fascism.

In the United States, as if to prove the Empire's master-race claims of exceptionalism, fascism has uniquely bonded with Christianity to produce what I have labeled "JesuNazism."   

Meanwhile the most definitive aspect of present-day fascism's uniqueness, JesuNazi or otherwise, is how it rejects the better-living-through-tyranny claims of the older fascisms. Instead it focuses the zero-tolerance brutality of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Batista, Pinochet et al not just on its declared targets (e.g., African-Americans, Hispanics, First Nations Peoples, Jews, Roma, Muslims etc. ad nauseam), but on any and all of us who happen to be its subjects. 

Embracing an economic agenda that duplicates the psychodynamics of serfdom and slavery, today's fascism thus goes further than any modern ideology -- and possibly further than any ideology in our species' history -- toward openly declaring that we the people are naught but clay to be modeled into whatever servile forms our divine-right overlords choose.

While the earlier forms of fascism implicitly rationalized the same magnitude of subjugation, their oppressive natures were typically hidden behind brilliantly conceived propaganda. Moreover the propaganda was confirmed as "truth" by economic measures that -- as in pre-war Nazi Germany's response to the Great Depression -- pacified its Working Class and petite bourgeois citizens with incomes just comfortable enough to bribe them to submission. This is how both Mussolini and Hitler achieved and sustained power until they were ousted by fascism's reversals during World War II. 

But today's fascism offers no such economic attractions. The economic security programs that genuinely improved the lot of fascism's many supporters in Depression Era Germany, Italy or Spain have no equivalent in today's United States. Even when such programs are promised, the bootheel-on-the-mouth betrayal we experienced thanks to Obama's precedent-setting Big Lie of "change we can believe in" has taught us that Capitalism is forever done with any such humanitarian improvements. 

Whether we verbalize it or not, the defining element in the individual and collective consciousness of today's 99 Percent is that we who are not part of the One Percent or its vassalage are now and forever well and truly fucked.

Which leads immediately to the  question of "why the growing popularity of fascism if its failure too is deemed inevitable?" The short answer, I believe, is that even in a realm of economic hopelessness, fascism provides the downtrodden with both a rationale for hatred and a mechanism for its expression. The rationale is provided by the malicious targeting of minorities as undesirables. The mechanism is that of the lynch mob or the pogrom or its modern equivalents. Its murderous momentum is an expression of the species-damning fact -- proven beyond argument by the present state of the world -- that most humans despite the magnitude of their sufferings would rather torture scapegoats than rise in rebellion against the causes of their misery.

And it is this distinction -- the difference between (yesterday's) fascism as a (woefully misconceived) effort at self and societal improvement versus (today's) fascism as implicit confirmation of one's own hopelessness and helplessness  -- that compels me to suggest we need an entirely new term to describe what it is.  

However, if such a new term is to stick, it must be, in equal measures,  emotionally compelling and phenomenologically accurate. Indeed it must be so compelling and so accurate it becomes by its own appropriateness a focal-point around which to mobilize genuine mass resistance, precisely as the terms "Nazi" or "fascist" did during the first half of the 20th Century. But now nearly 70 years later, these labels fail in this regard because they omit the resurrections of serfdom and slavery that are central to fascism's present-day form.

That said, I have no suggestions for so functional a replacement noun. The best I have done so far is "JesuNazi" (which I think is both incisively accurate and emotionally compelling but lacks the essential completeness and completion that would be be provided by references to serfdom and slavery). Hence I am tossing this brief essay out into the electronic cosmos in the hope others more compulsively creative than I might take up the task it defines as essential. 

After all, is not vocabulary the most effective vector of revolution? 

LB/19 April 2018

 -30-

Weekend Update 14/4/18: Trump Appointees' JesuNazi Yearning for Apocalypse Makes Present Confrontation with Russia Infinitely More Terrifying Than Cuban Missile Crisis

TOO MANY OF US have remained comfortably oblivious to the fact all the most fanatical U.S. Christians are ominously applauding the Trump/Pence Regime as "the most evangelical cabinet in history," a belligerently Bible-thumping boastfulness frighteningly confirmed by Tom Waddell of the Freedom from Religion Foundation.

The Mainstream Media propaganda machine -- ever faithful to the Capitalist mandate to conceal "the secret fundamentalism at the heart of American power" -- routinely suppresses any reports that reveal the breathtaking speed and vast dimensions of the regime's conversion of our Big-Lie "democracy" to zero-tolerance Christian theocracy. Likewise suppressed are analyses that declare theocracy prophetically implicit in the 1954 addition to the Pledge of Allegiance, which redefines the flag as emblematic not of "one nation" of allegedly free peoples but of one nation tyrannized to submission "under God."

We are also plagued by an obliviousness that is due to the allegedly "progressive" equivalent of the prideful, self-inflicted ignorance that defines the USian national mentality. In this instance it's the stubborn refusal of some secular-minded folks to recognize the U.S. remains more far more opiated by Christianity -- and therefore far more shackled to all its bigotry and hatefulness -- than any other industrial nation.  

Beyond that, even many of us who recognize the multiple horrors of the Trump/Pence Regime's white Christian agenda nevertheless choose to avoid looking closely at its unprecedented ecocidal, genocidal (and therefore ultimately apocalyptic) implications. Though in this instance I suspect our denial is a last-ditch mechanism of self-protectiveness, one of the very few ways left us to try to preserve whatever aspects of sanity we might manage to retain in this the darkest and most hopeless of all eras in our species' 200,000-year history.

Quoth Waddell:  

"Most of Trump’s Cabinet nominees...believe that God created the Earth 6,000 years ago, that men and dinosaurs co-existed, that everything is part of God’s plan and that Armageddon is just around the corner. Collectively they oppose civil rights, LGBT rights, a woman’s right to choose, and public education, while they deny climate change, all based on their Christian beliefs." 

Armageddon is of course the final battle of the apocalypse. Christian doctrine states that Armageddon is to be welcomed as the prelude to the second coming of Jesus. When that doctrine becomes a core tenet of the Empire's foreign policy -- as it probably is already and undoubtedly will be after the Senate's all-but-certain  approval of Mike Pompeo as secretary of state -- our species and planetary Motherland will be in jeopardy as never before.  

Waddell again:

"Pompeo shows he doesn’t understand that the secretary of state’s job is to promote and maintain world peace when he claims that politics is a 'never-ending struggle until the rapture.'"

Thus the difference between the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and the U.S.-Russian confrontation today. 

During the former I was a married 22-year-old just returned stateside, joyfully reunited with my first wife after nearly two years of soldiering in Korea and newly transferred to the reserves after three years' Regular Army duty. If war broke out, I knew my wife and I would either be killed in the initial nuclear exchange or I'd called back to active duty and -- given the horrors of war -- I'd probably never see her again. But President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had each known those horrors -- Khrushchev's experience included the epic battle of Stalingrad -- and both were men of reason. Otherwise there'd have been no U.S.-Soviet rapprochement and humanity would not have survived.

But today most of the people in the White House know war only in its sanitized Hollywood version. Moreover they are apocalyptic Christian fundamentalists whose we-have-to-destroy-the-planet-to-save-it fanaticism can neither be appeased nor ameliorated no matter the unquestionable depth of Russian President Vladimir Putin's patience and rationality.

That's why the the sheer terror I feel today is many magnitudes greater than the apprehensiveness I experienced for a few days in October 1962. Today's terror is relentless. It has no discernible end.  It is the spectral companion who peers over my shoulder in my every conscious moment, and it is the omnipresent source of  nightmares too horrifically chaotic to describe.  Its origin is my firsthand experience of the bottomlessly self-righteous lynch-mob malevolence of the white Christian mentality; I lived most of my boyhood in the South, where it rules unchecked and from which its venom has metastasized to conquer the entire nation and now attempt conquest of the entire planet.

I am not afraid for myself or my generational peers; at age 78 my life is effectively over, and the increasing pains of rapidly declining health tell me I will soon be at that threshold beyond which death is welcome. But I am wrenchingly fearful for the young adults and children I know personally and for the millions of other humans like them who might yet live long, fulfilling and useful lives.  I am equally fearful for our Mother Earth, whom the Christians despise as the domain of Satan and treat accordingly -- thus the looming environmental apocalypse that will surely kill us even if by some miracle we escape extinction by thermonuclear war.

  ***         

Note: Apart from the following texts -- a brief RT after-action report and two analyses that are undoubtedly more accurate than the material fed us by the Imperial Mainstream Media propaganda machine -- I am not posting links on the aftermath of the Empire's massive missile attack on Syria. Yes I believe the attack is as much the beginning of World War III as Hitler's attack on Poland was the beginning of World War II.  But I also recognize its events may be unfolding with such rapidity they can only be covered by broadcast media.

  ***           

Russians Say U.S., U.K. and France Launched 103 Missiles at Syria

"Syrian air defense units were scrambled to thwart the aerial invasion, intercepting 71 out of 103 of the missiles, the Russian Ministry of Defense said. Now, as Syria deals with the aftermath of the early morning airstrikes, we look at five major things you should know about the American-British-French attack."

  ***              

Neoliberal Capitalists, Neocon Imperialists Collaborating to Enslave Us All 

"World imperialism is undertaking a new re-division of the world...All of the governments participating in this new onslaught are crisis-ridden and lack any electoral legitimacy...The vast gulf between them and their populations is expressed in the fact that none of them has been able to create any broad-based support for war...the launching of a major new military campaign is seen in London, Paris, and Washington as a means of implementing police-state rule, including mass censorship, to prop up their crisis-ridden governments in the face of mounting popular opposition and a growing strike movement by the Working Class."

  ***         

Trump, Conned by False Flag Gas Attack, Damned by Left and Right Alike

"The Russian military has found no trace of chemical weapons use after searching parts of Syria’s Douma allegedly targeted by an 'attack.' Photos of victims posted by the White Helmets are fake, Russia’s Defense Ministry said...It is not just the left that absolves Assad. Despite their overall support for Trump, especially his racism, a number of prominent alt-right figures are disappointed that he has been snookered by jihadi fake news."

*****         

Israelis Again Gun Down Unarmed Palestinian Protestors

"The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) fired live ammunition and tear gas on unarmed Palestinians protesting for the third Friday in a row near Gaza’s border with Israel. At least 528 protesters were injured, 59 by gunshots and many others by tear gas, 107 of whom were hospitalized. At least one is in a critical condition. Ten of the wounded are nurses and paramedics...while two are journalists."

*****           

Oklahoma Teachers Defy Union Demand to End Strike

“Oklahoma teachers have reacted defiantly to the Oklahoma Education Association’s (OEA) call to end their two-week strike. Thousands of teachers and their supporters converged on the state capitol Friday, the day after the union urged them to return to their classrooms...The militant mood of teachers was spelled on the signs they were carrying Friday, including, 'OEA doesn’t speak for me,' 'The movement didn’t start with the OEA and won’t end with the OEA,' and 'We’re not leaving.'” See also: "A right-wing coalition, which has received funding from both the Koch brothers and the billionaire Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, is launching an aggressive attack on the tens of thousands of teachers and education supporters who have been demanding increased school funding and teacher salaries in recent weeks."

*****        

14,000 AT&T Workers Vote to Strike; No Walkout Date Set 

"Contracts covering 14,000 telecommunication workers at AT&T’s Midwest and Legacy T regions expire at midnight Saturday. Workers in both regions have voted overwhelmingly to strike, expressing outrage over the company’s demands for massive concessions in health care and continued job cuts."

*****           

Genocide Nation Report: Black Teen Shot At for Asking Directions 

"A 14-year-old black kid looking for directions to his high school narrowly avoided being shot to death Thursday in (white) suburban Detroit. Brennan Walker missed his bus and didn’t have his cell phone when he decided to knock on the door of a family home to ask directions to the school...'Then she started yelling at me (he said) and she was like why are you trying to break into my house...Then the guy came downstairs (with a) gun. I saw it and started to run. And that's when I heard the gunshot.'"  See also: "A'Donte Washington was 16 years old when an unnamed police officer shot him four times, killing him. A grand jury found the killing 'justified,' and the officer suffered no consequences. But there is someone who will be spending decades in prison for Washington's murder: his friend Lakeith Smith...sentenced to 65 years in prison -- 30 years for a felony murder, 15 for burglary and two 10-year sentences for theft." And this: "Campus police, local police and state police have all repeatedly proven themselves to be collaborators and protectors of white supremacists. As such, cops are often as unwanted on campus as white supremacist infiltrators. At minimum, some leftist student groups want to keep guns out of campus cops' hands and stop the growth of police presence at their schools." Plus the fact cops kill more often than mass shooters: "Some 590 Americans were killed in mass shootings last year...(but) law enforcement officers shot and killed 987 Americans...nearly a quarter (of the slain were)... black."  

*****     

U.S. Capitalists Evict Nearly Four Families Every Minute

"A new project called the Eviction Lab examined more than 80 million eviction records going back to 2000 and found that in 2016 alone there were nearly four evictions filed every minute."  

*****             

Congressional Staffers Again Plea for Protection from Sexual Harassment

"Many current and former staff have spoken publicly about their own experiences, often describing a climate of fear, a burdensome and confusing reporting process, and a system designed to protect congressional office(holders) at the expense of victims." Comment: not surprisingly given the rampant misogyny inherent in the patriarchal white-supremacist Capitalism the senators and representatives so dutifully serve, all previous such pleas have either been ignored or thwarted by senatorial inaction.  

*****        

Radioactive Hanford Labeled a Deadly Danger to Us All

"Once home to the nation’s largest plutonium-making facility, Hanford, Washington, is now one of the most toxic nuclear-waste sites in the world. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is currently spending $2 billion a year to clean up the 586-square-mile reservation...Whistle-blowers are stepping forward, claiming that taxpayer money is being spent recklessly on a project riddled with potentially deadly design defects."

*****                 

Senators Ask Sessions to Unblock Medical Marijuana Research 

"Bipartisan senators are calling on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to cease efforts by...the Justice Department (which) is effectively blocking...more  than two dozen requests to grow marijuana for use in research." Comment: the senators' gesture is clearly no more than symbolic  as surely no one will be surprised when Sessions -- whose JesuNazi ideology damns marijuana as "devil weed" and mandates uncompromising hostility to its use -- denies their request.

*****              

Looming Sinclair TV Cartel Prompts Left-Right Coalition 

"The Donald Trump-backing Sinclair Broadcast Group’s pending $3.9 billion acquisition of Tribune Media, creating a local television station cartel of unprecedented power and reach, has triggered a mind-meld of liberals and conservatives that would otherwise have been unthinkable in the present era of polarized politics."

*****              

Despite Trump's Hostility, Medicaid Effectively Treating Opiate Addictions

"About 1.9 million nonelderly adults in the United States are believed to be living with opioid addiction, and those with Medicaid were twice as likely as those with private insurance or no health insurance to receive treatment for the disease in 2016...(but) the Trump administration, which has declared the opioid crisis a major priority while working simultaneously to undermine Medicaid...has promoted (only) punitive responses, such as putting drug dealers to death...that have nothing to do with public health."

*****

Last Words: New Film Portrays Karl Marx's Early Adulthood

“The Young Karl Marx, a 2017 film co-written with Pascal Bonitzer, director and Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck...shows (Marx's life)...before he explodes onto the social science scene...six years later and stimulates the intellectual developments of communism in the mid-19th century and forever changes political philosophy and economics...Prior to this film, Peck was nominated for an Oscar for his James Baldwin documentary, I Am Not Your Negro. Comment: I strongly suspect this film will be severely censored by extremely limited U.S. showings, probably only in the largest cities. It may not be shown here at all. Stay tuned; if I can find an online schedule of U.S. showings,  I'll link to it in Dispatches. 

LB/14 April 2018

 -30-

 

                   

             

 

 

 

            

 

          

 

8-12 April 2018: Which Will It Be, Apocalypse or Revolution?

 Trump Says He'll Bomb Syria; Russia Pledges Immediate Retaliation

"Donald Trump says the United States is about to bomb Syria, and Russia has vowed to shoot down US aircraft...With John Bolton, the new national security adviser and infamous enemy of the United Nations by Trump's side, diplomacy is not in the cards." Earlier report: "Russian officials warned that any military action by the U.S. and its allies would be met with an aggressive response—targeting any U.S. missiles as well as their launch sites." See also:  "'the Russian forces will confront any US aggression on Syria, by intercepting the missiles and striking their launch pads.'" Plus this: "Civilization itself is being put in peril so that the West can continue supporting sectarian armed groups seeking to overthrow the Assad government, in violation of international law and the UN Charter."  And especially this:  "...the deep state...helped prevent Barack Obama from launching a war in which a dozen nations would have fought and millions might have died, which could easily have escalated into a nuclear conflict between the US, Israel and NATO on the one hand and Russia on the other...We can hope that some of these forces, none of whom are friends of peace or justice, will restrain Donald Trump, as they did Obama. (But) the odds don’t look good."

*****                   

Russian Navy's Syrian Squadron Puts to Sea (w/Aerial Photos)

"...satellite images (show) eleven Russian (warships) have already left the port of Tartus..." Comment: while these vessels may indeed have sailed as part of Russia's announced live-firing missile exercises, it is also world naval SOP (standing operating procedure) to get your ships out of port and scattered to relative safely at sea when you are anticipating enemy attack. Hence this is by far the most ominous indication yet to emerge from this escalating crisis. That said, Goddess save us all from the USian Empire's apocalypse-minded tyrants.

*****                

Also Relevant: Brink-of-War Commentaries by Slane and Greenwald

"Unfortunately American foreign policy was hijacked in the 1990s by fanatical ideologues with a messianic complex who cannot accept anything other than U.S. hegemony over the entire planet" (Slane) and "The exact danger Obama sought to avoid — military confrontation with Russia in Syria — is now upon us, being directly threatened by Trump. And Democrats — who spent years first scorning Obama for not becoming more militarily involved in Syria and then pushing Trump to be more hostile to Moscow — are, just as Clinton last year did, defending Trump’s military aggression" (Greenwald). 

*****                     

U.S. Pseudo-Left Silent on Looming World War

"Four of the most prominent pseudo-left websites—Jacobin magazine, which is closely connected to the Democratic Socialists of America; Socialist Worker, the online newspaper of the International Socialist Organization; the website of Socialist Alternative; and International Viewpoint, the magazine of the Pabloite, ex-Trotskyist United Secretariat, have written next to nothing about the growing danger of a major world war." Comment: a sharp-edged analysis from the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) that exemplifies why Dispatches increasingly links to its reports.

*****

Will U.S. Attack on North Korea (Again) Mean War with China?

"Bolton insists that North Korea’s nuclear weapons pose an existential threat to the U.S. which cannot be tolerated. Bolton claims that within months North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will have ballistic missiles which can reach the continental U.S. Once that happens, will the U.S. be willing to go to war to save South Korea at the price of one or more American cities? The question, however, glosses over the fact that Kim would have to be suicidal to use nuclear weapons against the U.S."

*****          

Japan, Rearming as U.S. Imperial Puppet, Activates a New Marine Brigade

"The Japanese military activated its first marine unit since end of World War II on Saturday at a base near Sasebo on the southwestern island of Kyushu. The 2,100-strong Amphibious Rapid Deployment Brigade (ARDB) has been trained by the US Marines Corp as part of the US-led military build-up in the region against China." See also: "The formation of the Japanese marine brigade is controversial because amphibious units can project military force and could, critics warn, be used to threaten Japan’s neighbours. In its post World War Two constitution Japan renounced the right to wage war."

*****     

Leftist Leads Mexican Presidential Race; What Will U.S. Do?

"Mexican leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) – who has had two unsuccessful presidential runs – is enjoying a near 11-percent lead over his closest rival. The National Regeneration Movement (Morena) leader is ahead according to a newspaper poll." Comment: no doubt if Obrador wins, the Empire -- the new Murder Incorporated -- will either invade, send in its assassins or organize local death squads. (Historical note: the original Murder Incorporated was the enforcement agency of U.S. organized crime.)

*****        

WikiLeaks Publisher Still Gagged by Ecuadorian House Arrest

"Two weeks have passed since the Ecuadorian government cut off WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange from any communication with the outside world, placing a block on his access to the Internet, phone communications and visitors."

*****              

Despite Denial, Systematic Murder of U.S. Blacks Is Domestic Terrorism 

"The proof of white supremacy cannot be denied. Individuals like the Austin bomber are given protection even after they kill. The young white man who murdered nine black people at a Charleston, South Carolina church was treated to lunch by the arresting officers. Obama intervened in that instance too, appearing at a funeral and singing Amazing Grace, quieting the justifiable anger and mollifying the credulous. While hundreds of thousands recently marched to protest gun violence committed by individuals, the state’s victims were forgotten, those at home and around the world. The top down acceptance of terrorism when committed by those in uniform trickles down to the entire society."

*****

Hedges: "Murder and Racism Are State Policy."

"The global elites have a plan for the future. It is visible in the killing fields of Gaza." See also: "Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren...has made comments recently about North Korea and other foreign policy questions that can only be described as rivaling the Trump administration in hawkishness."

*****      

World Bank Calls for Intensified Oppression of Workers

"The (World) Bank...puts forward a policy program of extensive labor market deregulation, including lower minimum wages, flexible dismissal procedures, and UK-style 'zero-hours' contracts, which allow employers to hire staff with no guarantee of work. The resulting decline of workers' incomes would be compensated in part by a 'basic level of social insurance' to be financed largely by regressive consumption taxes."  Comment: our Capitalist overlords have not only spoken but spat in our faces. When will we unify and rise up in response?

*****     

Oklahoma Teacher Strike Update: Unions, Democrats as Betrayers

"The powerful strike by Oklahoma teachers, now in its ninth day, is in danger of being betrayed and shut down by the unions before teachers win their demands for a $10,000 pay increase and the restoration of school funding cuts over the last decade...The strikebreaking role of the teacher unions underscores the need for Oklahoma educators to break completely with the OEA and AFT and reject its political subordination of teachers to the Democratic Party, which is just as much a corporate-controlled enemy of public education as the Republicans." See also: "Organized labor's clout in Europe is declining...(crushed by) neoliberal philosophy that views any sort of restrictions and rules on labor and capital as stifling profit-making, free enterprise." Comment: neoliberalism, the deliberately misleading academic euphemism for Ayn Rand Capitalism, is manifest as fascism running amok in Europen governance and JesuNazism ever more efficiently tyrannizing the United States.

***** 

U.S. Teacher Strikes a Rightful Expression of Women's Anger

“The US is in the grip of a wave of strikes in our public schools...The mainstream US media have been generally supportive of the strikes...(but are suppressing the fact) the strike action is led almost exclusively by women...(that it is) a feminist project, and all feminists need to stand with the teachers.” See also: "Fed-up teachers in right-to-work states like Oklahoma, Kentucky and Arizona are continuing to press demands of their majority-Republican legislators who have slashed corporate tax rates over the years, shortchanging public education and other public services." And this: "The pay gap worsened for American women younger than 40 between 2015 and 2017, despite widespread attention to the issue, according to a study. "

*****          

 

19 States Allow School Officials to Beat K-12 Students

"...19 states...explicitly allow a teacher, principal or other school staffer to penalize students with physical force. These states -- Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wyoming -- say that physical punishment is a tried-and-true technique to maintain order and discipline in the public schools."

*****              

Feds Continue Their Assault on Food Stamp Recipients

"Republicans are preparing to... impose tougher requirements for eligibility for food stamps, officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)...(so that) adults between the ages of 18 and 65, who are able-bodied and without children, would have to be working to be eligible for food stamps..result(ing) in the loss of benefit eligibility for 1 million people..." Comment: lest we forget, the 21st Century assault on food stamp recipients was begun by Democrat Obama, another example of how in bitter truth we are ruled -- tyrannized actually -- by One Capitalist Party Of Two Names (OCPOTN). 

*****      

Trump/Pence Regime May Impose Drug Testing on Food Stamp Recipients

"...a plan that would allow states to require mandatory drug testing for some food stamp recipients...would give a win to conservatives seeking to cut the safety net program." Comment: it might also allow the JesuNazi regime to terminate food stamps to all residents of legal marijuana states. Which, in fact, may be its clandestine purpose -- not the least because so many pot smokers say the resultant change in consciousness lays bare the misogynistic hatefulness and ecocidal absurdity at the core of Abrahamic religious doctrine whether Jewish, Christian or Islamic.  (Note how the Christians damn marijuana as "devil weed.") 

*****                

Michigan Cuts Off Bottled Water Distribution to Flint Residents

"Governor Rick Snyder announced last Friday that the state would cease distributing bottled water by Friday, April 13 or even sooner if remaining supplies run out...From the beginning, Flint’s working-class residents have had to fight for everything in the face of the criminal indifference and cover-up by government officials."

*****                       

Zuckerberg Admits Facebook Is Mass Censorship, Total Surveillance

"Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg...explained how every single statement made by the company’s 2.2 billion users is analyzed and vetted by artificial intelligence systems, then reviewed by an army of some 20,000 censors. If the company finds a statement to be 'sensational' or 'divisive,' the user will be flagged as a 'bad actor,' and either have their posts blocked, be reported to the government, or both." See also: "Over the years, [Google] supplied mapping technology used by the U.S. Army in Iraq, hosted data for the Central Intelligence Agency, indexed the National Security Agency’s vast intelligence databases, built military robots, co-launched a spy satellite with the Pentagon, and leased its cloud computing platform to help police departments predict crime... Google is not alone. From Amazon to eBay to Facebook… Some parts of these companies are so thoroughly intertwined with America’s security services that it is hard to tell where they end and the U.S. government begins."  And this: "The terrifying part of this controversy....is the possibility that Facebook will ultimately engage in a kind of policing/censorship activity that all of these Senators may actually favor – perhaps driving down or eliminating certain kinds of alternative or dissenting speech in return for regulatory relief." Comment: wake the fuck up, people. Facebook -- like the Internet itself -- is, precisely as intended from its very beginning, the most diabolically effective secret police surveillance mechanism in human history. Think that's hysteria or hyperbole? Think again: "Social media is a form of mass surveillance and a tool of elite control."

*****                             

Genocide Nation: Another Unarmed Black Woman Gunned Down by Cops

"Decynthia Clements...fell prey to (police) perceptions of Black women as inherently threatening. According to a recent study, 57.2 percent of killings of Black women occur when they are unarmed, making Black women 'the only race-gender group to have a majority of its members unarmed when killed.'" See also: “...NBC News obtained a video showing Border Patrol agents attempting to dump a mentally challenged man in Mexico without authorization from the Mexican consulate—in an apparent violation of the repatriation agreements between the U.S. and Mexico.”

*****           

New Poll Shows Most Democrats Favor Forcible Disarmament

"Eighty-two percent of Dems favor banning 'semiautomatic weapons.' Only 13 percent oppose. Most surprisingly, twenty-five percent of Republicans 'strongly favor' banning them and 12 percent 'somewhat' favor a ban. Independents are more evenly split." Comment: the poll was conducted by a conservative organization, but that does not does not alter its validity. 

*****          

Militarized French Police Attack Environmentalist Camp Near Nantes

"On Monday morning (9 April) the National Gendarmerie, France’s militarized police, deployed nearly 2,500 heavily armed officers to brutally attack an environmentalist camp in Notre-Dame-des-Landes near the city of Nantes. Scenes resembling civil war unfolded as bulldozers and armored vehicles moved into the camp to destroy a colony of about 100 huts and makeshift homes that protesters and farmers have built since they set up the camp 10 years ago." 

*****        

JesuNazis Triumph Again as Park Service Suppresses Climate Change Data   

"National Park Service officials have deleted every mention of humans’ role in causing climate change in drafts of a long-awaited report on sea level rise and storm surge, contradicting Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s vow to Congress that his department is not censoring science." Comment: Long-ago reader board messages (c. 1970) on Bible-thumping churches -- "Environmental Means Of The Devil" and "Organic Is Satanic" -- are now thanks to Trump/Pence Regime tyranny the law of the land in this ever-more-malevolently theocratic nation. 

*****            

Why JesuNazis Fanatically Support Trump Despite His Scandalous Conduct

"'Christians who voted for Donald Trump knew exactly what (they) were getting… a morally flawed candidate who made promises that largely aligned with our values...This is why (they) cheer when President Trump promises to end tax payer funding for abortion...nominates Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court and advocates for more like him, appoints Cabinet members that affirm Christian values and implements fiscal policy that helps strengthen the family.'"

*****          

The Gospel According to the Prophets (and Profits) of JesuNazi Prosperity

"May the rivers run black with tar if it should serve benefit to oil companies. May the fields overflow with toxic waste from the livestock industry should it lead to greater profits, let the earth frack and crack, let the ice caps melt back to the seas, let innocent people be ruthlessly bombed, let love die in a pit of despair – For if it is in the name of personal gain for profit then it is divine will and it is no man’s right impair the free groping hands of unfettered capitalism. Impeding profiteering is a hindrance to providence. The net capital gains far outstrip whatever negative was caused by acquiring the capital, this is the way of the lord." Comment: the Christian part of JesuNazism, here described with terrifying accuracy.  

*****  

Christian Civilization's Discarded Plastics Murder 6-Ton Sperm Whale

"In the annals of human history, modern day society is already setting records never before dreamed possible, as human-trashed plastic officially kills a six-ton six-year-old sperm whale...An autopsy of the dead whale found on a beach in southern Spain brought to light the cause of death, which according to experts at El Valle Wildlife Rescue Centre concluded the whale was unable to digest or excrete plastic it ingested. The official cause of death is termed peritonitis, which is an infection of the inner lining of the stomach."

*****        

Pakistan's "Lady Health Workers" Face Hostile, Sometimes Fatal Responses

"In 2017, five polio cases were reported in five districts in Pakistan, down from 306 cases across 43 districts in 2014. But for the women largely responsible for bringing the figure dramatically down, their work is anything but safe or lucrative. Two...were shot dead while on polio-vaccination duty...The women work in some of the harshest conditions imaginable. In conservative neighbourhoods, they are often vilified for carrying out tasks deemed un-Islamic by local leaders." Comment: Fearless reporting by Al Jazeera. 

*****                 

Early Abrahamic Version of God May Have Had a Wife and (Gasp!) a Penis

"A 3,000 year old picture from the Sinai Peninsula is back in the news again this week, with some claiming that this ancient Jewish artwork depicts God, God’s penis, and God’s wife. If this interpretation is correct, this picture would call into question much of what we think about Judaism, in particular the idea that there was only one God." (With thanks to TigerLille1 for spotting this story.)

*****        

Washington State First in U.S. to Judicially Target Racial Bias in Jury Selection

"On April 5, the Washington (State) Supreme Court adopted a a rule change that seeks to narrow the racial bias gap in jury selection...(making) it the 'first court in the nation to adopt a court rule aimed at eliminating both implicit and intentional racial bias in jury selection.'"

*****      

New Study Shows Minimum Wage Hikes Benefit Nearly Everyone

"'[R]aising the minimum wage increases earnings growth at the bottom of the distribution, and those effects persist and indeed grow in magnitude over several years,' the authors write. At the same time, there’s little indication that other people will lose their jobs as a result of the minimum wage—the outcome conservatives always warn about."

*****    

Gifts of Food, Daycare Reveal Surprising Solidarity with Strikers

"In West Virginia, striking teachers paid out of pocket to buy food and deliver it to students...in Oklahoma, school administrators have coordinated a large-scale effort, in collaboration with community organizations, to help vulnerable children and their families." Comment: this evidence of emergent and growing Working Class solidarity is maybe the best news yet for the U.S. 99 Percent, particularly if what we are witnessing in Oklahoma spreads throughout the nation. Dispatches thus salutes the World Socialist Web Site, which is using the strike both as a teachable moment to focus on the necessity of overthrowing apocalyptic Capitalism and to build a Working Class solidarity that transcends occupational, racial and gender differences. Unfortunately though there's also a dark, subversive, ultimately self-destructive  element within Oklahoma's emergent solidarity, the fact its "community organizations" include churches, some of which are taking advantage of the strike-provided opportunity to brainwash children five days a week in the self-righteous bigotry, belligerence and implicit support for Capitalism that defines Christianity. (See again "The Gospel," above.)

*****

Ending U.S. Senate's Hostility to Nursing Mothers: a Recommended Petition

"Senator Tammy Duckworth (is being punished)...for giving birth. If she takes any maternity leave, she will be barred from voting or sponsoring any legislation. And...she'll likely be forced to miss voting times because her nursing infant will be barred from the Senate floor." Comment: While Duckworth is no more a friend to the Working Class than any other politician from the OCPOTN (One Capitalist Party of Two Names), the vicious racism and misogyny of Congressional rules should be challenged at every opportunity. Hence please sign.

*****                

Fun Mainstream Media Essay on the Rats Fleeing Trump's Ship of State

"...as the ship continues to list, the traffic down the ratlines is getting awfully heavy." Note to landlubbers: "ratlines" -- pronounced "ratluns" -- are the mooring lines (cables or ropes) by which ships and boats are attached to docks and piers.

*****      

Last Words: in Praise of Judy Dater's Exquisite Photographs

"Bohemia is still alive today and for many of the same reasons that originally gave birth to it. Contemporary nonconformists of all sorts, including Beats, beatniks, hippies, punks and generation Z rebels can see bohemian art at the de Young Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. The exhibit is titled 'Only Human' and it features the photographs of Judy Dater. It opened on April 7 and lasts until September 16, 2018." Comment: Dater, whose work I have followed since the 1960s, is a superb  photographer who has taken social documentary portraiture to an entirely new and psychologically provocative dimension. Hence, as impoverished as I am, I nevertheless hope to scrape together the $49.95 plus postage for the show's companion-book of her pictures, Only Human (Marymount Institute Press and TSEHAI Publishers: 2017).

LB/12 April 2018

   -30-

   

Weekend Update 8/4/18: Vernal Pain and Promise

Economic Warfare -- and Worse --  Looms at Home and Abroad

"The corporate-financial elite is preparing the most ruthless measures—economic and political—to counter the emerging rebellion of U.S. workers against the government, the corporations and the corporatist trade unions that do their bidding." See also: "The U.S. regards the economic growth of China...as an existential threat...(and is) threatening to plunge the world into the kind of economic chaos not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s, as well as world war if that proves necessary."

*****      

36% of U.S. College Students Battle Hunger and Homelessness

"As college students grapple with the rising costs of classes and books, mortgaging their futures with student loans in exchange for a diploma they're gambling will someday pay off, it turns out many of them are in great financial peril in the present...36 percent ...say they are food insecure. Another 36 percent say they are housing insecure, while 9 percent report being homeless."

***** 

Sessions Wants Death Penalty for Marijuana Dealers

"This week, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions  sent a memo to the nation’s federal prosecutors urging them to seek the death penalty in cases involving large-scale drug traffickers...(therefore) Anyone convicted of cultivating more than 60,000 marijuana plants or possessing more than 60,000 kilograms of a substance that contains marijuana could face death as a punishment."

*****

Federal Secret Police to Intensify Surveillance of Journalists

"The Department of Homeland Security wants to...monitor hundreds of thousands of news outlets and journalists around the world...(collecting) data about each source’s 'sentiment,' influence, language, and circulation...The tracking would apply to online, print, broadcast, cable, and radio sources — essentially, any journalist, editor, blogger, or correspondent deemed a possible 'media influencer' could be included. DHS also wants to follow social media activity..."  Comment: I don't doubt our overseers are already collecting this data -- most likely have been at least since the Vietnam War  -- but now they want to make this especially egregious example of USian fascism formal and legal.

*****     

Trump, Obama, Hillary All Guilty in Honduran Refugee Crisis

"Put all that Trumpian (anti-immigrant) madness aside for a moment and reflect on Hillary and the Obama administration’s role in generating the annual ragged and desperate march of deeply impoverished Central Americans through Mexico. Most of the caravan participants that Washington’s Orange Dotard railed against are Hondurans fleeing repression, violence, and extreme poverty imposed by a right-wing regime Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama helped put in place in the spring of 2009 – a government the U.S. has funded and equipped ever since."

*****                    

New Gun Laws: Forcible Disarmament, Confiscation without Compensation

"On Monday, Deerfield, Illinois—a suburb of Chicago—passed an ordinance that makes it illegal to possess, manufacture, or sell assault rifles and large capacity magazines...(and penalizing) anyone refusing to give up their banned firearm...$1,000 a day until the weapon is handed over or removed from the town's limits...In Boulder, Colorado on Thursday night, the city council unanimously passed a first reading of a similar ordinance." Comment: obviously the student anti-mass-murder protest movement, which many of us hoped would focus on the socioeconomic causes of mass shootings, has instead been co-opted by the Democratic (sic) Party with its Ruling Class agenda of forcible disarmament (i.e., mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood). The movement has seemingly abandoned reason and now seeks only the sort of draconian, confiscation-without-compensation measures imposed by Deerfield, Illinois and pending in Bolder, Colorado.  Who knows how many more such laws are pending in other locales -- especially in states that lack the protection of preemption laws. Note too how Common Dreams -- a staunch supporter of forcible disarmament -- buried these reports at the very bottom of a story applauding a federal judge's ruling to uphold the 20-year-old Massachusetts gun ban, which outlaws most semiautomatic weapons.

*****              

FCC Honcho Wants to Cut Poor People Off the Internet

"FCC chairman Ajit Pai is proposing to scale down the Lifeline program (by)...cut(ing) affordable internet access...for 8 million people, about 70 percent of the Lifeline’s recipients. This reduction would be particularly devastating for Puerto Rico, where about 500,000 people, or 17 percent of the population, have relied on the Lifeline program since Hurricane Maria." Comment: another of our Capitalist overlords terrified of what we might be finding out. 

*****           

Seven More Dead as Israeli Atrocities Continue

"Israel’s military forces killed seven Palestinian protestors along Gaza’s border and injured around 200 more, five of them seriously, according to Gaza’s health ministry." See also: "Gaza death toll climbs to 22 as Israeli forces continue violent suppression of protests..." Comment: given the Israeli/U.S. alliance -- especially the way the two countries gleefully share military and police tactics -- I cannot but wonder when U.S. authorities will begin firing live ammo at protestors here in the imperial homeland. 

*****   

Will Teachers' Strikes Trigger a Nationwide General Strike?  

"The strike by teachers in Oklahoma will continue into its second week on Monday, following the passage on Friday of...(deliberately deceptive) measures that will do nothing to meet the demands of the teachers...The attempt by the unions to sell out the strike in Oklahoma is taking place as teachers are winning ever-broader support. This year has already seen strikes and demonstrations by teachers in West Virginia, New Jersey, Arizona, Kentucky and other states. There are growing calls for a nationwide strike that would connect the fight of teachers with the struggles of all sections of the working class for quality jobs, wages, health care and pensions." See also: "Arizona teachers are considering a strike...if they don't receive their requested 20 percent pay raise. An official strike date hasn't been set, but the teachers, following the playbooks from West Virginia, Oklahoma and Kentucky, have staged multiple protests in individual districts and at the state capitol in Phoenix for the last five weeks..." And this: "Transit workers (in New York City) declared their support for striking Oklahoma teachers, expressing the solidarity that workers across America, indeed internationally feel for the growing strike wave of teachers." Plus this: "After Kentucky's GOP-controlled legislature passed a bill last week to slash teachers' retirement benefits—a proposal that has provoked a series of massive protests—lawmakers approved legislation that would cut taxes for the state's wealthiest residents while hiking taxes for the remaining 95 percent." Comment: imagine what could happen if the teachers' strikes went nationwide, then morphed into the imperial homeland's first-ever nationwide general strike. 

*****              

Expanding Community Support Bolsters Resistance to Appalachian Pipeline

"As the (Virginia/West Virginia) tree sits continue, residents in the surrounding area, many of which are in the middle of legal battles with MVP (Mountain Valley Pipeline) to keep their homes, began to rally in support of the resistance and also send up supplies. In response, police...attempt to cut off supplies and support, but have so far been unsuccessful in stopping the tree sit and people from mobilizing in solidarity." Comment: jeer not, bourgeois urbanites. I spent much of my boyhood in this area, mostly in East Tennessee, also in Virginia and West Virginia. Hence I know these people are most assuredly not to be fucked with. I also know that so moved, they could be devastatingly effective as leaders in the evolution of genuinely revolutionary environmentalism.

*****         

Anchorage Votes Down Anti-Transgender Proposal

"Voters in Anchorage, Alaska, have defeated an anti-transgender bathroom measure...(that) would have required everyone in Anchorage public spaces to use the locker room and bathroom that aligns with the gender they were assigned at birth — effectively barring trans people from using the facility that matches their gender identity."

*****       

How Community Mobilization and Protest Saved a Teacher's Job

"...a (Portland, Oregon) middle school teacher...was wrongfully suspended...(but) protest pressured administrators to reverse the (unjust) punishment." Comment: hear, hear! 

*****                             

Last Word: How Millennials Are Revitalizing English

"...millennials have created a new rulebook for a variant of written English unique to social media. A rulebook which states that deliberately misspelled words and misused grammar can convey tone, nuance, humour, and even annoyance."

 

LB/8 April 2018         

   -30-

 

31 Mar-5 Apr 2018: Tyrannies, Teachers, Metaphors of Change

*****   *****   *****   *****  *****          

How Soon Will Imperial Warmongering Bring on the Apocalypse?

"The countries of the West are effectively heading for war with Russia but relatively few among the public seem to know or even care...With the reckless neoconservative warmonger John Bolton now part of the Trump administration, it seems we could be hurtling towards major war much faster than previously thought...Most of the public remains blissfully ignorant of the psy-ops being directed at them through the corporate media." See also: "a twenty-first-century version of the Cold War (with dangerous new twists) has begun and hardly anyone has even noticed." And this: "Russia is the only country that has put its military forces in the way of a U.S. program of regime change—indirectly in Ukraine, where Russia would not get out of the way, and directly in Syria..." Comment: the text mentions the offshoring of production facilities -- a perfect way to move manufacturing outside the U.S., so that when the country is rendered uninhabitable by retaliatory Russian and Chinese thermonuclear bombs, the Capitalists' losses will be minimal. And of course We the Surplus People will all be dead or dying. Not to worry, folks; its just Ayn Rand moral imbecility in action, with a big boost from apocalyptic JesuNazism as well. 

*****           

Is Blaming Russia for Skripal Poisoning a Warmongers' Hoax?

"It is now beyond any reasonable doubt that the claims of the Conservative government of Theresa May charging Russia with responsibility for the poisoning of the Skripals are fabrications." See also: Scientists at the U.K.’s Porton Down military laboratory have not identified Russia as the source of the nerve agent used in the alleged attempted assassination of former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia...(the) admission confirms that the British establishment is guilty of a criminal hoax, surpassing even that of the dodgy “intelligence” dossier manufactured to justify the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003...(Meanwhile) the U.S. and British media have been almost silent on (this development)." And this: "The United Kingdom unknowingly admitted that its government has been lying..."

*****               

Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine Hides Israeli Atrocities

"Major American media outlets, led by the New York Times, are treating the Israeli military’s mass killing and wounding of unarmed, peaceful Palestinian protesters in Gaza as a non-event." See also: "... you will search in vain for a statement condemning this or the previous Israeli massacres in Gaza from the Congressional Black Caucus or for the most part, its individual members."

*****            

Democrats Signal Tacit Approval of Trump's Anti-Immigrant Pogrom

"Without any opposition from the Democratic Party and little attention in the corporate media, President Donald Trump and his fascist advisors are quietly carrying out the most dramatic rightwing shift in US immigration policy in a century. They are laying the basis for mass roundups and the brutalization of hundreds of thousands of immigrants in an expanding network of internment camps nationwide."

*****          

Martial Law on the U.S. Borders -- and Maybe in Legal Pot States Too?

"President Donald Trump’s announcement...that the government will deploy the military to the US-Mexico border is a threat to the safety of undocumented immigrants and a fundamental attack on the democratic rights of the entire population...the deployment of the military on U.S. soil to arrest or deter immigrants raises the specter of martial law..." Update 5 April: "Should President Donald Trump follow through on his plan to deploy the National Guard to the southern border to deter migration from Mexico and Central America, he won't be able to count on Oregon's 5,800 soldiers." Comment: this Trump/Pence Regime ploy also mobilizes troops that could be used for Nazi-sized mass arrests, the regime's only option if it is to terminate legal marijuana.

*****                 

Trump's Expanding Propaganda Machine Is Bill Clinton's Brainchild

"...the engine of Donald Trump's propaganda machine was constructed by none other than Bill Clinton. In 1996, Clinton passed the Telecommunications Act...allowing a single entity to own as much as 35 percent of market share...(if) the far-right Sinclair Broadcasting Group...is successful in its acquisition of the Tribune Media Company, that number could climb to 72 percent." See also: "Sinclair has already forced its stations to air commentary...described by more than one observer as 'Orwellian'...(that) makes explicit the corporation’s efforts to undermine trust in the press." Comment: Seattle's KOMO, cited in the linked text, is a Sinclair property. 

*****             

Supreme Court Says It's OK for Cops to Gun Down Innocents

"The US Supreme Court established an interpretation of qualified immunity this week that effectively grants police legal impunity to use lethal force at will." See also: "The Supreme Court...shielded a police officer from being sued for shooting an Arizona woman...four times outside her home because she was seen carrying a large knife...Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in dissent the victim did not threaten the police or a friend who was standing nearby."

*****          

The Race Hatred That Killed Stephon Clark Defines the United States   

"Stephon Clark died as did black people who died at the hands of Ku Klux Klan raiders during the Reconstruction era, as did thousands of blacks lynched over the course of decades, as did so many killed in dozens of massacres carried out by white people between the Civil War and the 1920s." See also: "on the police murder of Stephon Clark and the reverberations of this barbaric act in the city and around the country."  Comment: emphatically recommended reading.

*****      

At Least Seven States Intend to Felonize Environmental Activism

"Efforts to prosecute environmental activists with felony or eco-terrorism charges...are coming to a head in Louisiana and Minnesota, where newly introduced bills seek to make it a felony to plan to trespass, damage, or disrupt pipeline operations — even if the individuals didn’t physically participate or go through with the action. See also: "in the wake of the massive protest movement at Standing Rock...at least seven states have introduced or passed (such) legislation."

*****          

Michigan City Maliciously Multiplies Misery of Its Poison Water Victims

"The ‘fix’ for Flint (Michigan) promised by politicians never came, instead residents face a final indignity – residents’ water supply is being cut off for unpaid bills for water that made them sick." See also: "More than 17,000 Detroit households face having their water turned off as the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) resumes mass water service shutoffs to city homes this month."  Comment: two more examples of moral imbecility -- i.e., Capitalism -- in genocidal action.

*****             

Lest We Forget: MLK Was Slain for Denouncing War and Capitalism

"April 4 mark(ed) the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had gone to support the struggle of African-American sanitation workers for decent wages and human dignity." See also Cornel West: "In this brief celebratory moment of King’s life and death we should be highly suspicious of those who sing his praises yet refuse to pay the cost of embodying King’s strong indictment of the US empire, capitalism and racism in their own lives." And this: "Because he took on those...powerful economic forces that dominated politics in this land, they killed him." Plus this corrective history from Black Agenda Report:  "All 100 of Columbus (Georgia) Black churches shut their doors on Dr. King, rejecting any outside interference in their long accommodation with white supremacy."  

*****

Will the Plutocrats Restore 21-Year-Old Voting Age to Stifle Protests?

"The result (of ongoing student protests) may be sweeping changes to legislation in various states...(not) gun laws...but rather laws that will make it more difficult for young Americans to vote." Comment: I frankly would not be surprised to see an effort to raise the voting age back to 21. Moreover — given the many polls that document younger voters’ growing preference for socialism and hostility to capitalism — I suspect the corporate Democrats will be eager collaborators with the Republicans. Nor would I be surprised were the corporate parties to collaborate on presenting younger voters with a genuine devil’s bargain: raising the purchase age for all firearms to 21 as a trade-off for restoration of the higher voter-eligibility age.

*****

The "One Nation Under God" Declares War on Sex Workers

"With Congress passing the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, many sex workers are worried they’ll be forced to go back on the streets...SESTA has already begun to (criminalize) ways in which sex workers communicate online: shared resources, communal bad date lists, and sex worker-only threads." Comment: Christian theocracy in action. But how many times must that be said before we the people get our heads out of our arses and wake up to the fact we're the ones being nailed to crosses? 

*****   

Facebook Begrudgingly Admits Near 100% Exposure to Data Thieves

"Buried in Facebook's announcement that Cambridge Analytica had improperly gathered data from up to 87 million users—rather than the previously reported 50 million—was the stunning admission that 'malicious actors' exploited the social networking site's search features to collection information from 'most' of its 2 billion users. Comment: when the hell are we going to wake up to the fact the primary purpose of social media -- indeed of the entire Internet -- is to facilitate total surveillance by the secret police and all the other definitively hostile agencies that serve our Capitalist overlords? Stop and think: given what we know of the moral imbecility and infinite malevolence of Capitalism and Capitalist governance, why else would the Internet and any of its social-media spinoffs ever have been invented, much less opened to public access?

*****                       

Aggressive Teenage Misogyny Making British Schools Unsafe for Females

"...sexual harassment has been 'normalised' in adolescent culture... (with the result that) schools are no longer safe for girls... 'upskirting' - where photographs are taken up girls’ skirts without their knowledge - has led to 'girls wearing shorts under their skirts so that [boys] are not going to find anything.'"

*****       

McDonald's Shafts Workers and Taxpayers, Withholds Promised Pay Hike

"McDonald’s failure to deliver on wage increase promises...costs taxpayers roughly $1.2 billion because of the employees’ dependence on social safety net programs like food stamps and Medicaid to help cover costs that their wages cannot." See also: "...settlement of a landmark case against McDonald’s at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) deals a blow to Fight for $15’s union ambitions, widening the chasm between the campaign’s astonishingly successful wage demand and its faltering union aspirations."

*****     

The Genocidal Abandonment of Puerto Rico Claims Another Victim

"Months later, without running power or water, Hector Ramon Ortiz’s business remained closed. He struggled to reopen, and failed, every week...Ortiz is one of 236 Puerto Ricans who killed themselves in 2017... His death also belongs to a growing number of suicides on the island that increased by 55 percent in the last four months of 2017 following Hurricane Maria, compared to the same period in 2016."

*****      

Hedges Reveals How Guaranteed Annual Income is Capitalist Scam

"A number of the reigning oligarchs...are calling for a guaranteed basic income...But behind this is the stark awareness, especially in Silicon Valley, that the world these oligarchs have helped create is so lopsided that future consumers, plagued by job insecurity, substandard wages, automation and crippling debt peonage, will (otherwise) be unable to pay for the products and services offered by the big corporations."

 

*****   *****   ***** 

Striking Teachers Hope to End Austerity's War on Public Schools, Students

"The (teachers') rebellion has caused The New York Times to worriedly comment about a 'wildfire' of strikes by teachers who are using social media to 'organize and act outside the usual parameters of traditional unionism.'" See also: "Teachers in the US and internationally are demanding the restoration of (funds cut) over the last decade and an end to the corporate-driven campaign to privatize and dismantle public education." And this: "...striking teachers...are taking a stand  not only about their own financial situation, but also about the conditions of their students, their schools, and their communities." 

 

 

*****   *****   *****          

Last word: Metaphors as Mechanisms of Transformation

"Emerging psychological research tells us that something as simple as a single metaphor can have consequences for how we think. They can also be powerful tools in the hands of those looking to shape our opinions." Comment: vital information, especially as a sequel to George Orwell's groundbreaking essay "Politics and the English Language." 

LB/5 April 2018   

  -30-

18-22 March 2018: Could "Russiagate" Be a Red Herring to Distract from a Domestic Scandal That's Infinitely Worse?

  This image feels as relevant now as it did when I made it in 1971. (Photo by Loren Bliss © 1971, 2018)

*****

AN EXPATRIATE NEW YORKER acutely aware (as many New Yorkers are) of the multiple connections that link organized crime (Cosa Nostra, the Irish mob, the Russian mob, etc. ad nauseam) to the construction industry, the political establishment and capitalism in general, I cannot but wonder if the so-called "Russiagate" investigation is perhaps a red herring to distract from an infinitely more disturbing story of homegrown corruption and malfeasance.

Something of this sort is indeed implied by Coleen Rowley's thought-provoking Consortiumnews.com essay "McCabe: a War on (or in) the FBI," especially her reminder that  "both presidential campaigns (were) under under serious criminal investigation in the weeks before the 2016 election."

Certainly both candidates have been linked to organized crime in ways that -- including even the Democratic (sic) Party's Geraldine Ferraro fiasco in 1984* -- have no precedent in my lifetime, which began in 1940 and includes 30 years on daily and weekly newspapers and monthly international trade journals.

For a revealing trip through a genuinely astounding number of under-reported or suppressed stories, merely Google, without the quotation marks here grammatically mandated for clarity, "trump mafia connections"; "clinton mafia connections"; and "clinton dixie mafia connections."

The Trump material contains a BillMoyers.com report by Todd Gitlin that questions why allegations of Trump's criminal connections are so often suppressed or at best downplayed. This Google anthology also includes a wealth of other damning reports.

While the Clinton material is mostly from rightist sources -- which means it should be carefully fact-checked rather than discarded out of hand -- I found three bits of gold amidst the dross. One was published by The Progressive Review on 17 December 2017, "The Clinton stories the media didn't cover" (caps and lower case as in original). The second appeared in The (NY) Daily News of 30 October 2016, "Bill and Hillary Clinton lead diabolical, influence-peddling organized crime syndicate, FBI's former NYC boss says" (caps and lc as in original). The third, a sort of overview of the Empire as a global crime syndicate, is "The Bush-Clinton Mafia," in Counterpunch on 16 March 2015.

Thus my "Russiagate" conjecture: that it is a fake scandal behind which is concealed what is perhaps the most diabolical, most terrifying, most potentially apocalyptic scandal in our species' history -- that of an entire empire become nothing more than the loot-collector (aka "bag man") for organized crime.

Indeed the application of Occam's Razor suggests this is the one most likely explanation of the myriad horrors that have befallen us all.
__________________
*Note also Ferraro's son's involvement in the cocaine trade on a level that probably would not have been possible without mob connections.

*****               

Internet Censorship Partly Driven By Mainstream Media Profiteering

"Google announced Wednesday that it is partnering with The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Financial Times and other major news outlets to reinforce their monopoly over news coverage by blocking independent news organizations...the latest step in a protracted campaign on the part of the major technology companies, working with the Democratic Party and the US intelligence agencies, to censor the Internet."

*****    

Death for Drug Dealing: Sessions Makes It Official

"Attorney General Jeff Sessions directed states in a memo released Wednesday to pursue the death penalty in certain drug-related cases as an answer to the opioid epidemic—a plan President Trump first announced this week in New Hampshire."

*****                 

Supreme Court Will Determine if Christians Can Legally Lie to Women

"As the U.S. Supreme Court begins hearing  NIFLA v. Becerra on Tuesday, we need to remember what is at stake. This is a case that could redefine accountability regarding providing false medical information and misleading women about their reproductive health choices, all in the name of religious freedom."

*****         

Hypocritical Christians Gleefully Forgive Trump's Boasts of Sin

"With the sexual harassment allegations against Trump covered regularly in the news, the question is why 'values voters' are now willing to disregard character when it formerly held center stage in their proclamations and voting decisions...what is (now) more important than Trump's personal life and personality are his...anti-abortion stances, his promotion of a white Christian nation, his rabid anti-immigration position and his anti-Islamic fervor." Comment: once again, in the JesuNazi U.S. as in Nazi Germany, we see that fanatical bigots will follow their Führer no matter how monstrous his behavior.

*****      

Will Wisconsin's Newest Attack on Impoverished People Go Nationwide?

"Critics and supporters of Wisconsin's new policies (targeting low income people) agree that they could have implications outside of the state, especially now that Walker's politics are reflected in the White House."

*****            

Naomi Klein at "Democracy Now" on Puerto Rico's Escalating Class War 

"Six months since Hurricane Maria battered the island of Puerto Rico, the island is the site of a pitched battle between wealthy investors -- particularly from the technology industry -- and everyday Puerto Ricans fighting for a place in their island's future." Comment: Klein dare not say it, lest she be openly persecuted as an enemy of the state, but perhaps -- due to this clash of clearly defined, irremediably hostile ideologies (Ayn Rand moral imbecility versus community-based socialism) -- the Second American Revolution will start in Puerto Rico.

*****                

Fascists Recapturing El Salvador Via Elections

"Already beset by an antagonistic judiciary, a right-wing majority in the legislature, and a hostile corporate media, the FMLN (Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front) enter the 2019 presidential campaign with a discontented base and an invigorated opposition as right-wing elites reclaim power throughout the region...(with all FMLN's gains) imperiled and as-yet-unrealized parts of their program, like the partial decriminalization of abortion...set back by years."

*****           

More on the Murder of Marielle Franco and Why It Is Internationally Significant

"The assassination of Rio de Janeiro city councilwoman Marielle Franco sent huge crowds of outraged mourners into the streets of Brazil, the western hemisphere’s “blackest” nation, where more than half of the 210 million inhabitants describe themselves as preto (black) or pardo (partly African). The 38 year-old member of the Party of Socialism and Liberty (PSOL) and her driver were ambushed by hit men firing police-issued (ammunition). See also: "The fact is that, consistent with its ugly history, Brazil maintains a regime of racial terror that does not differ from the (U.S. and South African) past and present system of racial domination." And this: "By murdering activists who were striving to cross into mainstream politics, the assassins send a message that...landless people should avoid becoming leaders." Comment: I cannot but wonder to what extent these murders are encouraged -- and perhaps even ordered -- by U.S. imperial authorities. 

*****            

Though Europe Seems to March Rightward, It's Not (Yet) Goose-Stepping

"Center-left parties all over Europe bailed out banks and financial speculators, while inflicting ruinous austerity measures on their own populations to pay for it. It became difficult for most people to distinguish between the policies of the center-right and the center-left."

*****

Sanders, in Major Turnabout, Condemns U.S. Imperialism and War-Mongering 

"In a wide-ranging speech viewed by more than 11,000 people from over 30 countries, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on (18 March) commemorated the 15th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq by highlighting its devastating consequences and issuing an urgent call for a global agenda that pursues 'peace, not war' and 'development, not destruction.'" Comment: This appears to be a substantial turn-about for Sanders, who has been repeatedly (and legitimately) criticized by the Real Left for his support of U.S. imperialism and warmongering. If the turn-about is genuine, it could mark the beginning of a new age in U.S. politics. That's why it's reported here. See also: "The Sanders 'hope'...is so fierce because Capitalism has become a hopeless place."

*****          

At Last, the AIPAC Sacred Cow is No Longer Sacred

“...criticisms (of AIPAC, the leading Israel lobby group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) are finally showing up in the mainstream press...Notable among them is a report in The Washington Post...saying that AIPAC was born to rally American Jews to stand shoulder to shoulder behind Israeli “lies” about a massacre of Palestinians, back in 1953. And two angry pieces in the Jewish press decrying AIPAC’s blackout policy on coverage of its gatherings.”

*****          

As Predicted, Democrats Betray, Abandon DACA Immigrants 

"Congressional Democratic leaders have decided that there will be no protection for DACA recipients—the young undocumented immigrants brought to this country as children—in the omnibus budget bill that must pass the House and Senate by midnight Friday night." Comment: Once again the Democratic (sic) Party reveals itself as nothing more than a band of betrayers.

*****   

How the Democrats Betrayed New Jersey's Teachers

"The struggle of Jersey City teachers exposes the role of the Democratic Party, which supports the assault on teachers and public education no less than the Republicans. At issue is a bill, known as Chapter 78, which forces public employees to pay up to 35 percent of their medical insurance premiums and eliminates fully funded pensions for future teachers. It was passed with the backing of the Democratic-controlled state legislature in 2011."

*****               

Trump's EPA Is as Genocidally Racist as the Rest of His Regime

"The case of the Arrowhead Landfill in Uniontown (Alabama) is tragically just one of countless examples of environmental racism: the tendency for Black, Latinx and Native communities to face disproportionate amounts of pollution and hazardous conditions."

*****       

New Details On Our Subjugation by the Big Lie of U.S. "Democracy"

"In what was fated by the Great Recession and by the wealth- and power-serving performance of the centrist, arch-neoliberal Obama administration to be an anti-establishment election, the PPC (Permanent Political Class) Democrats’ strategy was a formula for the installation of a malignant and moronic white-nationalist atop the world’s most powerful nation."

*****                  

Hospital Refuses Dying Man Treatment, Has Him Arrested for Trespassing

"'With a heart rate of 116 and complaining of an excruciating headache, my nephew, Marconia Kessee, was turned away from the hospital and arrested by the Norman Police Department for trespassing,” Michael Washington said. “Two hours later my nephew laid upon the cold concrete floor naked and dead.'" Comment: once more we see how U.S. healthcare as a privilege of wealth, depicted here in genocidal action.  The same thing might have happened to me in 1963 at the hands of the Ayn Rand Christians who run the Oak Ridge (Tenn.) Hospital of the Methodist Church: I was dying of pneumonia -- temperature 105F and delerious -- but the hospital refused to admit me because I did not have written proof of insurance. However my then-girlfriend saved my life by contacting my editor, who forcefully intervened on my behalf and compelled the hospital to admit and treat me.  Point being, what was done to Mr. Kessee is not an anomaly. It is in fact the U.S. norm -- and the Ruling Class will do everything in its power to keep it that way, not the least because it's (another) post-deathcamp method for getting rid of "surplus people."

*****              

Authorities Say Austin Bomber's Motives Remain Unclear

"...without more information about (the Austin package bomber's) motive...it’s impossible to know how (his home-schooled, evangelical white Christian) background influenced his violence, if it was an influence at all." See also: "It is well known by now that 'terrorism' is often used by American officials as a dog whistle to refer to acts of political violence carried out by Muslims or by minorities, and that typically white violence of a terroristic sort is characterized by other adjectives (the poor things often seem to be off their meds or at most involved in 'hate crimes.')   Comment: lack of information on the bomber's motives is thus hardly surprising.

*****          

Tacoma Approves Defense Fund for Undocumented Immigrants 

"In response to growing community concerns about Tacoma residents facing deportation, the Tacoma City Council authorized the creation of a Deportation Defense Fund to assist with their legal defense services...(and) the City of Tacoma made an initial allocation of $50,000...(while) local community efforts (have raised) an additional $2,000." Comment: as sometimes happens, Tacoma, Washington walks the walk as well as talks the talk.

*****         

Social Worker Says Biggest Challenge Is Now Saving Seniors from Homelessness

"(Seattle) social worker Denise Malm’s newest agenda is keeping her elderly clients out of homelessness." Comment: when you're old and poor, gentrification is just another word for genocide.

*****     

An Interesting and Informative Report on Cuban Self-Government

"Voting on March 11 for Cuba’s National Assembly was newsworthy mostly because the body, which convenes on April 19, is charged with selecting a new Cuban President. Current President Raul Castro has served the two five-year terms he is allowed. The new president will be Cuba’s first with no personal participation in struggles leading to the victory of Cuba’s 1959 revolution. Castro’s departure signifies a generational transfer of political leadership." Comment: now, as the Empire escalates its efforts to re-enslave Cuba, is when we will learn whether Cuban socialism  is strong enough to withstand the onslaught.

*****         

Approaching the Apocalypse I: Flirting with Thermonuclear Extinction

"if some extraterrestrial species were compiling a history of Homo sapiens, they might well break their calendar into two eras: BNW (before nuclear weapons) and NWE (the nuclear weapons era). The latter era, of course, opened on August 6, 1945, the first day of the countdown to what may be the inglorious end of this strange species, which attained the intelligence to discover the effective means to destroy itself, but — so the evidence suggests — not the moral and intellectual capacity to control its worst instincts."   Comment: I am no fan of Chomsky, the Empire's token socialist, but in this essay he is right on.

*****            

Approaching the Apocalypse II: The Democrats Won't Save Us

"It is obvious that the Democrats will provide some relief to a disturbed populace. This relief will be largely symbolic, but not wholly...If the world was to run as is with Democrats in place of Republicans we would still become extinct in the near future. If not by nuclear annihilation, then by climate change. Inequality would continue to grow. War, police and prisons would continue to increase. Millions of refugees would still be left to die. Our entire ecosystem and our means to live would still crumble. The other animals within this ecosystem would still be defined by the profit they can create for the human race. We all know this. Every best selling novel these days is about the apocalypse or the post-apocalypse..."

*****                        

Busting the Myths: Early American History We Need to Know

"...in 1763, at the close of the French and Indian War, the vast majority of colonists saw themselves as Englishmen and Englishwomen, invested in and proud of their British Empire. "How did (at least some) North American colonists evolve from a proud celebration of empire into (a) riotous, rebellious mob?...It’s an important question, actually, and it deals with an issue hardly mentioned in standard textbooks."

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White Supremacy Nullified: Some Early Britons Were Probably Dark Skinned

"A new genetic analysis of DNA from the Cheddar Man fossil, excavated in 1903 from Gough’s Cave in Cheddar Gorge, Somerset, England, suggests that at least some of the early modern human inhabitants of the British Isles had a mixture of traits different from later populations...includ(ing) dark skin, curly dark brown hair, and blue or green eyes...(These findings are) is consistent with other recent research which indicates...(skin color) is actually controlled by a multiplicity of genes, leading to a wide range of phenotypic expressions, and that simplistic racial classifications based on skin tone are scientifically invalid.  See also: "...racial conceptions regarding skin color and its supposed marking of distinct groupings of human beings have no scientific foundation." Comment: yet another reason the JesuNazis despise science and hate scientists. 

LB/18-22 March 2018

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Weekend Update 17/3/18: Notes on Our Epidemic of Violence

"The Republicans and Democrats alike ignore the underlying causes of school violence—unprecedented social inequality, unending war, the consequences of the militarization of society and the defunding of education and social programs—because a serious examination of the roots of this social phenomenon would expose their own role in creating the social crisis out of which it has developed." Comment: a vital, thought-provoking socio-ecomomic analysis that (correctly) blames Capitalism for USian savagery whether abroad or at home.

*****           

"I have never spoken with a school shooter, but I’ve talked with many teenage boys and young men who—though behaviorally nonviolent themselves—emotionally connect with the anger, alienation, and hopelessness of school shooters. Regardless of whether they received poor or excellent grades, these teenage boys and young men all tell me that high school was an oppressive experience...Cynical about virtually all societal institutions, these young people... (see) the conservatives’ religion and militarized society and liberals’ schools and shrinks (as) different faces of the same oppressive box...they have no hope that school shootings will decrease because all they hear in the news are authorities’ ideas about how better to control them."  Comment: an essay by a psychologist, vital because it that expands on and thereby authenticates the socio-economic analysis in the preceding essay. 

*****  

"While seldom acknowledged, students have a right to engage in political dissent and, more significantly, the entitlement to an education that nurtures their ability to do so." But more importantly see:  "There is no way anyone could object to something so necessary and relevant. Unless, of course, Black people do it." Comment: as noted before, the racism and class warfare implicit in the wildly varying coverage given school shootings is as revealing as the atrocities themselves.   

*****             

"Farm worker parents of six children die in car crash while fleeing ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents...The future of the children remains uncertain."

*****              

"The (Denver) Post is just the most recent outlet owned by 'vulture' hedge fund Alden Global Capital to face the ax. Alden controls Digital First Media, the country’s second largest newspaper chain, which has a pattern of gutting newsrooms and selling off valuable office space to squeeze profit from the industry." Comment: given the deadliness that defines the U.S. economy, the forthcoming layoffs will send many of its victims to their graves.

*****   

"Teachers in Puerto Rico are planning a one-day strike on Monday, 19 March, to protest school deform legislation that..would open up the island's 1,100 public schools to be turned into charter schools...(and) institute a voucher system, under which families could get public school money to pay tuition at private schools."

*****           

"Marielle died because of her struggle, because she was Black, because she was a woman, because she came from the Rio favela called Maré, because she dared to confront the system that oppresses and kills her people." See also: "A massive outpouring of grief and anger filled the streets of Rio de Janeiro and other cities...as Brazilians reacted to the execution-style murder of a promising young leader in the struggle for the rights of women, LGBT people, and Brazilians of African descent." Plus a revealing update: "The 9mm (ammunition) that killed Marielle Franco (was) part of a lot bought by federal police."

*****         

"...don’t just look at the record body count attached to the slaughter at (My Lai), and imagine you have a true picture of American crimes in that war. Count the day to day toll of Vietnamese civilian deaths..."  See also: "Vietnam veterans tell me that there were scores, maybe hundreds, of (such atrocities)...The only unusual thing about the My Lai Massacre was that it was eventually found out. " Comment: here we witness white bourgeois exceptionalism -- the exact U.S. equivalent of the Nazis' Aryan ubermenschen or divinely ordained 'Master Race' -- in action from Wounded Knee to My Lai and thence to the endless atrocities in the Middle East and in the Imperial Homeland.

*****    

"Now, as we approach the 15th anniversary of Bush's Iraq invasion, two notorious torturers are poised to assume positions of enormous power within the federal government." See also: "Haspel, the CIA’s current deputy director, now stands to become the agency’s first female director, despite the fact that she previously supervised a CIA black site where detainees were tortured...(moreover) her confirmation would also represent the culmination of the Democrats’ failure to categorically oppose torture." 

*****                   

"Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter announced a plan to begin using nitrogen gas as a method of carrying out executions, which would make the state the first in the country to do so."

*****       

"U.S. Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Secretary Alex Azar defended Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) Director Scott Lloyd...for...'violating young immigrant women’s privacy, their right to medical care, and in some cases, their safety, and blocking them from accessing safe and legal abortions.'" Comment: JesuNazi theocracy in action despite the Democratic (sic) Party's belated, enfeebled and therefore doomed efforts to defend us against it. 

*****  

"As the strike by 1,400 Frontier Communications workers in West Virginia and Virginia enters its third week...the company has... hired agents from the notorious Pinkerton “consulting” firm, as well as Securitas USA, to monitor and intimidate the striking workers."

*****    

"Six people, including one student, have been confirmed dead so far in the collapse of a pedestrian bridge under construction at Florida International University (FIU) in the Miami area Thursday afternoon...Meanwhile, as rescue crews continue to dig through the rubble of the 950-ton bridge span that fell on motorists, new information has emerged showing a history of safety violations by the two companies responsible for its construction." Comment: this is precisely the sort of malfeasance and ineptitude I will always believe brought about the collapse of the World Trade Center, particularly given the rumors of bribed inspectors and inferior materials that accompanied its construction. See for example here (scroll down to my comments) and here. Alas, Moron Nation would rather believe in conspiracy theories than acknowledge its accelerating incompetence and omnipresent corruption.

*****         

"In the latest (and woefully unpublicized) attack on internet freedom, the US Senate is expected to pass legislation as early as next week that, in the name of combating online sex trafficking, will further increase the powers of the state to censor the internet."

*****   

"Sadly, today's corporate textbook-producers are no more interested in feeding student curiosity about the poverty and inequality that drove the (potato) famine than were British landlords interested in feeding Irish peasants...(the same sort of genocidal Capitalism and colonialism) that are starving and uprooting people today." Comment: obviously what terrifies our One Percent masters and their vassals is that we the people -- students and adults alike -- will recognize how famine then and famine  now have the same source in the truly bottomless evil of Capitalism.    

*****     

"In a move widely seen as political retaliation that came straight from President Donald Trump, former Deputy Director of the FBI Andrew McCabe was fired by Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Friday night, but the ousted law enforcement official immediately struck back by stating his removal was clear retaliation directly related to last year's firing of FBI director James Comey." Comment: normally I leave this sort of inside-the-Ruling-Class story to the Mainstream Media propaganda machine, but the fact Common Dreams is covering it so thoroughly prompts me to link to its report. Also to wonder if -- or when -- the Trump/Pence Regime's ongoing feud with the federal secret-police-and-intelligence apparatus will trigger a retaliatory coup.   

***** 

"What has pushed the (U.S. Postal Service) into insolvency is an oppressive congressional mandate...in the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 (PAEA), which requires the USPS to prefund health care for its workers 75 years into the future. No other entity, public or private, has the burden of funding multiple generations of employees yet unborn...(a requirement) so blatantly unreasonable as to raise suspicions that the nation’s largest publicly owned industry has been intentionally targeted for (privatization)."

*****     

"...this year’s...session of the Washington (state) Legislature, (was) marked by a few environmental firsts but also some significant losses for the greens on climate change that go beyond their inability to pass a carbon tax." Comment: again we witness the profiteering function of the One Party of Two Names:  how its Democratic (sic) Party faction is as hostile to Mother Nature -- and driven by the same ecocidal greed -- as is its Republican faction.

*****      

"The scapegoating of Russia has taken on an air of bigotry and ugliness, based largely on Cold War-era stereotypes...but Natylie Baldwin counters this intolerance with some of her positive impressions having traveled the country extensively."

*****    

"Buried for millennia in the rear of a rock-shelter in the Lapedo Valley 85 miles north of Lisbon, Portugal, archaeologists uncovered the bones of a four-year-old child...(with the) chin and lower arms of a human, but the jaw and build of a Neanderthal, suggesting that he was a hybrid, the result of interbreeding between the two species." See also: "Given the importance of the find...it was decided, for exhibition purposes, to make a replica of the burial...(including) facial reconstruction (of the dead infant)." Comment: this wonderfully enlightening discovery is a perfect example of how science again proves the truth of evolution and so fights the ignorance mandated by the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam). In response,  the JesuNazis and the other Bible-thumpers ever-more-fanatically reject evolution -- precisely the usually denied, often suppressed reason the study of science in the increasingly theocratic United States dwindles with every passing year. (With thanks to TigerLille1 for the Lapedo link.)

*****

And Now -- to End This Otherwise Dismal Anthology on an Encouraging Note -- a Festival of Poetry and Science: Inspirational Gifts from Our Planetary Motherland

"When power corrupts, poetry cleanses,” John F. Kennedy famously wrote. Half a century later, with art, science and the humanities under assault from the government, this intersection of science and poetry, truth and beauty, is an uncommon kind of protest and a singularly fertile frontier of resistance." Comment: an uplifting film of last year's The Universe in Verse is an evening of poetry celebrating great scientists and scientific discoveries, hosted by Maria Popova, Janna Levin and the Academy of American Poets.

LB/17 March 2018

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