A Tacoma Clinic Defense volunteer, left, confronts a JesuNazi who was harassing a Planned Parenthood patient. The JesuNazis shriek biblical invective at any woman entering the clinic, whether for an abortion or any other gynocologoical care. (Photograph by Loren Bliss © 2017)
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Is Celebrity-Backed Rebellion of Athletic Heroes a Glimmer of Revolutionary Light?
BEYOND THE DISTRACTION of the Las Vegas massacre, the four major stories in the USian Homeland this week are apocalyptic climate change, murderously inadequate healthcare, killer cops and expanding protests against the rising tide of death, brutality and oppression that now afflicts us much as it afflicts the population in any other colony or Third World nation.
The Las Vegas atrocity most assuredly diverts our attention from the more gradual but far more deadly atrocities perpetrated by the Trump/Pence Regime and the Capitalists in general. Hence it should be viewed with extreme suspicion. But – horrific as it is – it does not change the fact the “four major stories” I cited above are each separate aspects of one much larger story – the genocidal malevolence spawned by Capitalism's inevitable metamorphosis into fascism. Whether Las Vegas is a fifth aspect remains to be seen.
In any case, “genocide” is not a term to be taken lightly. Merriam-Webster defines it as “the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group.” What it means in real life are corpses piled in mounds so grotesque we can scarcely visualize them, much less imagine the smell of the decaying flesh or the incessant buzzing of carrion-hungry flies. And thanks to Capitalism our present-day circumstances have worsened to the extent we must now add two more categories to genocide's list of victims, so its definition reads “the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, sexual, socioeconomic, political or cultural group.”
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San Juan Mayor Says Trump's Abandonment of Puerto Rico Is “Close to a Genocide”
ADD CARMEN YULÍN CRUZ to the list of courageous women thrust by circumstances toward revolutionary awakening. She is – at least thus far – the only public figure in the entire USian Empire courageous enough to dare use “genocide” to describe what the Trump/Pence Regime is doing to Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands and to all other populations everywhere on our beleaguered planet.
What Cruz said was Trump's abandonment of Puerto Rico threatens so much death it might become “close to a genocide.”
Truthful as her assessment is – bravely truthful in fact – Donald Trump is nothing more than Capitalism's latest and most blatant malefactor. Plus there's the high probability The Donald is merely the twittering finger of a regime the commanding brains of which are in the relentlessly theocratic, demonically Machiavellian skull of Vice President Mike Pence, much as the real power in the regime of George Bush the Second was almost certainly Vice President Richard Cheney.
What we should be asking ourselves is not what the Tyrant of Tweet is doing, but what the Mike the Misogynist is doing behind the tweet screen.
Nevertheless – regardless of whose thumb is on the kill switch (and were I a gambler I'd damn sure wager it is Pence's) – the genocidal intent in US governance became undeniable with the Clinton Regime's unabashedly murderous “welfare reform,” and I have been calling it that in print since Dispatches was born as Outside Agitator's Notebook in 2009. A couple of characteristic examples are here – yeah, I used to be a helluva lot more (stupidly) hopeful than I am now – and here. But my readership, albeit global, remains quite small, never more than a thousand persons at most, which means my commentaries have approximately the same impact as the proverbial fart in a windstorm.
By contrast, Carmen Yulin Cruz, the embattled mayor of San Juan – the capitol city of the mixed-race island the Trump/Pence Regime has abandoned to die in the aftermath of two climate-change-intensified hurricanes – has an audience limited only by the censorship imposed on behalf the Empire and its Capitalist overlords by Google and Mainstream Media. But thanks to social media, she may well have the eyes and the ears of the entire world anyway. So perhaps the Capitalism-is-genocide meme will at last begin to acquire the requisite momentum.
At the very least, abandonment of Puerto Rico Cruz so vehemently protested has already become an international outrage, widely recognized as a racist atrocity. Were there any doubts about its identity, they were banished by Trump's belittling of all Puerto Ricans with the dog-whistle slander of laziness, claiming “they want everything done for them” – the same malicious accusation by which white supremacists routinely defame African Americans, Hispanics and First Nations people, the traditional USian targets of genocide.
The Trump/Pence Regime therefore seems to be targeting not only the 24.2 percent of the Puerto Rican population that is of African, First Nations or racially mixed descent. It is also apparently aiming at nearly all the 75.8 percent of the island's population that, though officially “white,” is nevertheless of Hispanic descent and therefore does not meet the white supremacist standard for“whiteness.” (The latter link is to a notorious fascist website, for which I apologize. But Mainstream Media – no doubt in obedience to orders from its Capitalist owners – has done such a thorough job of concealing the JesuNazi threat, there was no other source by which to vividly demonstrate how white supremacists typically dismiss Hispanics as “mongrels.”) In fact, only .009 percent of the Puerto Rican population, a mere 2,490 women, children and men, seem to fulfill the white-supremacist definition of “white” – a group so small the maliciously white-supremacist Trump/Pence Regime is evidently willing to write it off as collateral damage.
Even without the demographic evidence, genocide remains the obvious intent – indeed the only plausible intent – motivating the regime's abandonment of hurricane victims in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. (Note the linked report, from The New York Times, describes the hurricane damage but deftly avoids describing how the islands were already drained of their economic lifeblood by Capitalist vampires. Again my apology. Because The NYT's fawning service to the Capitalists has made this formerly [usually] reliable journal an upscale equivalent of Volkischer Beobachter, I link to it only when I can find no other source.)
Meanwhile at least one Ruling Class politician has publicly noted the telling contrast between the Trump/Pence Regime's murderously miserly response to the people of the Empire's Caribbean colonies and the regime's largess toward the mostly white hurricane victims in Florida and Texas: “New York Congressmember Nydia Velázquez, who was born in Puerto Rico, said the White House showed far more urgency responding to Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, which devastated parts of Texas and Florida – two states that voted for Trump.”
The regime's genocidal purpose is further underscored by its refusal to allow Puerrto Ricans to accept aid from other nations: “Cuba has offered help in the form of doctors and a brigade of electrical workers to help shore up and rebuild the island’s ravaged infrastructure...Yet cruelly, but predictably, the American government denied them entry on political grounds...Puerto Rico is dying, yes. It is a victim of the stupidity of its political class and the racist vindictiveness of its colonial masters.”
“Racist vindictiveness” indeed: note how the Trump/Pence henchmen obediently parrot the Tyrannical Tweeter's truculence in slandering Cruz. (Picture a flock of white parrots perched on a magnolia branch, each bird wearing a Koo Klucks Klamor cape and shrieking calumny in perfectly synchronized cadence.) But note too how many USian celebrities were hastening to her defense. Perhaps at long last the times truly are a-changin.
Puerto Rico is also an object lesson in Capitalist savagery, all the more so since Trump himself fucked Puerto Rican taxpayers out of $32.7 million. Now the vulture-Capitalists are circling the Puerto Rican ruins. That Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens “is not a privilege, but the branding of a slave.”
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JesuNazis Say Natural Disasters Prove God Hates Orgasmic Women, LGBTQ Folks
HALF OF ALL USIANS – including the anti-sexuality fanatics I've confronted while helping Tacoma Clinic Defense protect Planned Parenthood (see above photo) – believe the disasters inflicted by terminal climate change are the beginning of the Biblical Apocalypse: that is, the Divine Sadist's extermination of all of us “who don't love Jesus.” In other words, biblical genocide as at Sodom and Gomorrah.
Never mind Pew Research data identifies Puerto Rico is “overwhelmingly Christian,” 56 percent Catholic and 33 percent Protestant. Never mind half these Protestants declaring themselves born-agains or evangelicals. No matter. From the prudishly prurient perspective of the Bible-brandishing bigots, hurricanes are punishment for anyone who dares relish anti-biblical sex, LGBTQ or otherwise.
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Denial of Healthcare Is Least Controversial Way to Exterminate Surplus Workers
GENOCIDAL INTENT IS ALSO overwhelmingly apparent in the Trump/Pence Regime's ongoing effort to make healthcare ever-more-unaffordable and therefore ever-more-definitively a privilege of wealth. Our lack of healthcare is transformed into a killing machine. It exterminates any of us who are chronically impoverished, thereby proven unexploitable for profit and thus deemed unfit to remain alive. Money becomes the only recognized permit to live – the permit without which we'll be murdered by neglect.
That is clearly the rationale behind the various iterations of the so-called Trumpcare program. Thus Graham-Cassidy would have slain at least 41,600 people per year. Though Trumpcare once more appears to be dead, it will no doubt be reanimated again – and again and again – until by some combination of stealth, misdirection and legislative sleight-of-hand it is imposed with all its deliberately fatal results.
(In a related atrocity, Republicans and Democrats joined hands in sentencing 9 million children to death by terminating the Children's Health Insurance Program [CHIP] on 29 September. Will CHIP eventually be restored, perhaps after a secretly agreed-upon number of [mostly minority] children are slain by untreated conditions? Your guess is as good as mine.)
Because we are entering an era in which the malicious denial of healthcare is once again openly unsheathed as a weapon of genocide, it's worth reflecting on the fact such medical manipulation has always been “the American Way,” especially notable for its inspiration to Adolf Hitler.
And don't for a minute imagine the Graham-Cassidy measure died because of public opposition. As we should all know by now, we the people are of no significance whatsoever in imperial decision-making. “Our democracy” is truly the biggest of Big Lies. What killed Graham-Cassidy was the adamant opposition of the insurance barons, who feared it might clear the way for some states to develop their own single-payer programs.
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Killer Cops Refurbish European Imperialism's Oldest Terror Tactic
THE WHOLESALE SLAUGHTER of non-white humans is probably the Empire's oldest defining characteristic. In fact it was USia's hitherto-unequaled efficiency at genocidal extermination of First Nations peoples that provided Hitler the prototype for the Holocaust. This particular expression of USian white supremacy got its biggest modern boost from Bill Clinton's welfare “reform” and Hillary Clinton's denunciation of African-American youth as “super-predators.”
But that does not minimize the present regime's culpability for encouraging its escalation, with predictable results.
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Sports Stars Spite Sports Tsars; Scribes Salivate; Censorship Shrouds Citizen Struggle
YES I AM PAYING most unusual attention to the athletes' rebellion. Given the extent to which USia is a nation of oft-frenzied sports fans, I believe the rebellion's revolutionary potential is far greater than many of us imagine. Admittedly this is no more than a hunch, but it is fostered by logic based primarily on Mainstream Media's lavish, celebrity-driven coverage of the entire affair. Its lavishness becomes obvious when it is compared to MM's near-total suppression of reportage about the ongoing protests in St. Louis, for which see the next paragraph.
(If my hunch is wrong, I will apologize for the wasted space, take the 15-yard penalty and punt.)
That said, let us never forget it is the definitively USian modality of methodical murder of minority persons by federally militarized police that is provoking both the athletes' rebellion and the St. Louis demonstrations. As Black Agenda's Margaret Kimberley says of Colin Kaepernick, he “made police brutality his target. No one should claim to join with him unless they are completely onboard with that sentiment. Stand or kneel with Kaepernick against the police state or don’t bother at all.”
In other words, beware not only Kaepernick's overt opponents, but also those who would co-opt or undermine his protest by pretending to join it.
Kimberley thus urges us to always remember what Kaepernick said: “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”
To which a (white) member of the Evangelicals for Trump Facebook Page replied with characteristic JesuNazi hatefulness: “Go back where you came from. You are ungrateful demanding and intimidating. And America doesn't need or want your type of control. Why did you leave your native land in the first place?”
Kaepernick, of course, is a native-born U.S. citizen.
But that means nothing to the JesuNazis. Their white-supremacist core dogmas – brutally exemplified by the Facebook poster – include the Ku Klux Koncept that even the most distant African ancestry forever excludes one from the ranks of “True Americans.”
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As support for the rebellion Kaepernick sparked spreads throughout the sports world, so do its enemies multiply and wax fruitfully putrescent.
National Association for Stock Car Racing (NASCAR) owners, all whites and most from the old Confederacy, say they'll fire any driver who joins the protest. Given the organization's deep-South roots and Klannish history, the owners' declarations are hardly surprising. NASCAR is also the defendant in at least two racism lawsuits, one for $500 million, the other for $200 million.
Probably the most devastating blow to the rebellion thus far was dealt by the National Basketball Association (NBA), which has forbidden its players to participate. “The NBA has a rule that players, coaches and trainers stand respectfully for the anthem. The league office will determine how to deal with any possible instance in which a player, coach or trainer does not stand for the anthem. (Teams do not have the discretion to waive this rule).”
Parkway High School, in Bossier, Louisiana, has issued a similar edict: students who refuse to “stand in a respectful manner” during the national anthem will be punished.
Predictably, most of the opposition festers amongst the Trump/Pence Regime's JesuNazi supporters. Robert Jeffress, who is one of the regime's most biblical dogmatists, says Kaepernick and his supporters are lucky “they're not shot in the head.”
And two students at the Victory and Praise Christian Academy in San Antonio, Texas, were permanently ousted from its football team after they joined the protest.
But some students, like the cheerleaders at who knelt during the national anthem at a football game in Houston, Texas, remain defiant. The game was between McCallum and Lyndon B. Johnson high schools, but inept reporting by The Houston Chronicle failed to state which school the protesters were from or whether they were from both.
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Among the more articulate defenders of the athletes' rebellion were San Antonio Spurs Coach Gregg Popovich and former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director Gen. Michael Hayden.
Popovich said Trump's normalization of white-supremacist hatefulness has reduced the United States to “an embarrassment,” adding that white racism is “the elephant in the room” of our national politics.
Hayden, a four-star Air Force general, denounced Trump for fostering divisiveness “by wrapping humself in the national banner,” adding were he forced to choose sides, “put me down with Kaepernick.”
Because these two men are members of the Ruling Class, their statements immediately bring to mind Margaret Kimberley's warning, above.
Popovich though was probably speaking from the heart. His remarks declare him an opponent of the NBA's newly issued protest ban, which could prove extremely troublesome if the rebellion continues. Also, he and his wife Erin each have long histories of supporting causes the Trump/Pence faction condemns as “un-American.”
Hayden on the other hand was most likely trying to do nothing more than wipe some of the racist feces off the nation's dung-bespattered face.
But now even the stereotype of the red-necked race-car driver is breaking down. On Monday 2 October, NASCAR legend Dale Earnhardt Jr. defied his colleagues by Tweeting his support for nonviolent protest. At the same time he Tweeted a memorably relevant quote from the murdered President John Kennedy: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible...make violent revolution inevitable.”
Nevertheless the USian public remains starkly divided in its response to the protests – and perhaps a bit confused – as shown by poll results here and here.
As I wrote last week, “the athletes' rebellion offers the hitherto-unexplored potential of expanding revolutionary leadership to include a group of people who are not only profoundly respected for their physical prowess but are literally adored by a segment of the USian population that spans every race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and caste.”
“Whether and to what extent that potential might explode into actuality depends on how brutally the authorities suppress the athletes. The team owners' verbal alliance with the dissidents is obviously an attempt at nonviolent suppression, specifically by co-optation, but in such a white supremacist JesuNazi police state as the U.S.has become, literally anything is now possible.”
Since then, Ron Jacobs of CounterPunch and Kareem Abdul Jabbar have each spelled out a remarkably similar analysis of the rebellion's revolutionary potential.
“The good news,” says Jacobs, “is that the protest is spreading. Part of this is due to Donald Trump's racist attacks on the players involved in the protest, but it is also related to the growing awareness Trump is using the racist attitudes of many U.S. residents to maintain his hold on power...Furthermore, the protests have sharpened the contradiction between the nation our children are told we are and the nation that we truly are. It is up to us to carry this struggle to its fruition.”
And as Jabbar says, “We can’t hide from these harsh realities by escaping in talk show antics or the diversion of sports when – to their credit – athletes and entertainers are reminding us of the seriousness of our national crisis.”
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Dystopian Miscellany
Trump/Pence Regime Seeks to Criminalize Its Opponents
In an unprecedented action that is being ignored (if not deliberately covered up) by the Mainstream Media propaganda machine, the Trump/Pence Justice (sic) Department is seeking the names of its online opponents. The implication, unthinkable until now, is the regime is scheming a Pinochet-type coup in which all of us will be arrested. (Yes, we must indeed begin thinking as if we were the subjects of a conquered nation.)
Reagan Treasury Official Says the Entire 99 Percent Is Being Enslaved
Paul Craig Roberts, former assistant secretary of the treasury under Ronnie the Repugnant, was a traditional (Eisenhower-type) conservative who sounds more like a socialist every day, no doubt why his latest essay is published by CounterPunch. “Without jobs, dependent on their masters for trickle-down benefits that are always subject to being cut, and without voice or representation, Americans, except for the One Percent, are becoming the most enslaved people in history.”
Chinese Report Notes USian Economic Deterioration, Human Rights Hypocracy
The People's Republic of China prepares an annual report on socioeconomic and political conditions in the USian Homeland. This year's edition is particularly damning. “Wielding 'the baton of human rights,' (the U.S.) pointed fingers and cast blame on the human rights situation in many countries while paying no attention to its own terrible human rights problems...In 2016, the U.S. social polarization became more serious, with the proportion of adults who had full-time jobs hitting a new low since 1983, income gaps continuing to widen, the size of middle class reaching a turning point and beginning to shrink, and living conditions of the lower class deteriorating.” Though most of us already know this by embittering first-hand experience, it's always good when a government with the stature of the People's Republic confirms it. (Perhaps, in time, we can once again proclaim triumphantly “The East Is Red.”)
Is a New Civil War Looming in Spain?
Mass protests engulfed Catalonia as its population attempted to vote despite a brutal crackdown by Spanish national police dispatched to block the Catalan referendum on secession from Spain. Lest we forget, there is this, with its lyrics translated in the comment thread here, and then of course this, this, this and this. The last, as relevant today as it was in 1936, is translated here.
Fascist Media Executive Promises Concentration Camps, Hitler's Face on Money
Claiming connections to Trump, AltRight.com honcho promises all Europe will be under the jackboots of a new reich by 2050.
Community Solidarity, Government Atrocities Follow Mexican Quakes
Linked is the most comprehensive, non-sensationalized (i.e., non-pornofied) report I could find on the aftermath of the Mexican disasters. “The difference in behavior between Mexico's classes has been very noticeable after the disaster. Unlike workers who rushed to rescue others in their community, politicians and entrepreneurs have been looking to take advantage of the situation for their own gain.”
(With special thanks to TigerLille for spotting the Concentration Camps/Hitler-on-the-Money story and contributing several URLs to the Puerto Rico and athletes' rebellion stories.)
LB/25 September-3 October 2017
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