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
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