Official Protection of Violently Racist, Often Murderous Cops Shows the World the True Magnitude of U.S. Nazi-Mindedness

Federally Militarized Police Add Middle-Class Minorities to Target List

“Another day, another black man violently assaulted by five rogue police officers for the ever-increasing crime of BWB (breathing while black). This time it was NBA player Sterling Brown...It’s hardly news that people of color are continually harassed, but what’s been making the news lately is the frequency with which upwardly mobile, middle-class people of color are being targeted. From the two black men waiting for a friend at a Philadelphia Starbucks, to a black Yale graduate student napping in her dorm’s common room, to three black women facing down seven cop cars and a helicopter as they checked out out of an Airbnb house they were renting...there is an overlooked long-lasting collateral damage to the black community’s faith in the promise of the American dream and the sinister effect on their children that is much worse than that single assault.”

See also: "I am speaking for Dontre Hamilton of Milwaukee, Laquan McDonald of Chicago, Stephon Clark of Sacramento, Eric Garner of New York and the list goes on...The common denominator in all of these (killings) has been racism towards the minority community...The lack of repercussions for the police officers involved in so many of these cases is...a slap in the face to the victims’ families and communities."

And this: "American police shoot and kill far more people than their peers in other countries...(but) are almost never prosecuted and convicted for use of force."

Plus this: "The technology giant Amazon is providing police agencies and private intelligence contractors in the United States with facial recognition and video tracking algorithms to (intensify) mass surveillance on the population."

Comment: I posted the above material as this weekend-update's lead story because, once again, we cannot comprehend the true horror of the Empire's domestic and foreign agendas without first examining the capabilities and intentions demonstrated by its ever-expanding catalogue of atrocities.  

These newest outrages -- clearly another expansion of the Empire's lifelong, 242-year history of hate-motivated, often genocidal persecution of non-whites -- are precisely what prove "American Democracy" to have never been more than a Big Lie. 

 

What further condemns the United States -- what defines it as a nation ever-more-dictatorially ruled by a multi-generation cabal of  Nazi-minded Capitalist overlords -- was first revealed...

(To read the rest, go here.) 

Finally, Mass Media Begins Waking Up to the JesuNazi Threat

 A Mainstream Magazine Warns of "Much Harder" Tyranny Ahead;  New Threats of War Give the Regime an Excuse to Abolish Our Rights 

(Note: much of the following was written before Trump's John-Bolton-inspired Thursday afternoon cancellation of the Korea talks, for which see "Trump Kills Korean Talks; World War III Threat Intensifies," below. I didn't make this dreadfully ominous development tonight's lead story for two reasons: one, because Mainstream Media has already covered it (albeit no doubt omitting the fact Pence threatened Kim Jong-Un with ending "like the Libyan model ended," i.e., with an agonizing death like Gaddafi's, by anal impalement; and two, because it is the ever-more-apparent malevolence of the Empire that reveals the magnitude of this crisis -- which means the sum of the proofs of malevolence are somewhat more telling than its latest exemplary incident./LB) 

  

AGAIN AS LAST WEEKEND I am compelled by circumstance to preface a newly released report with commentary rather than follow my usual practice of posting in the traditional reversed-pyramid form, new material first, old guy's remarks last. 

Even so, today's comment requires scarcely more than a single sentence expressing my profound thanks to The American Prospect  for finally daring to reveal, in mass-circulation form, how terrifyingly close the Trump/Pence Regime has already brought us to complete subjugation by white Christian  tyranny.

 

Though the near-daily manifestations of Trump/Pence Fascism are now regularly exposed even by the Mainstream Media propaganda apparatus, until American Prospect writer Adele M. Stan assembled these phenomena as parts of a jigsaw and discovered the horrific whole evidenced by the result, there was no widely circulated portrait of the breadth and depth of the regime's greater malignancy. Nor was there a widespread sense of these events as the potential birth-cells of something far more malignant -- so malignant most of us who did not personally experience our species' capacity for Pure Evil as in Nazi Germany or Pinochet's Chile cannot imagine what the regime might become or envision the death and suffering it could thereby inflict, whether in grotesque triumph or triumphant defeat.  But those results are now, with the near certainty of world war imposed on us by Trump's cancellation of the Korean talks, our species most probable future -- that is, should Earth somehow survive as anything more than a bug planet. Moreover it is all occurring precisely as Marx reasoned it would, which underscores as never before how Marxism is the only logic that explains our present circumstances, including why ours is the darkest most hopeless epoch in all our species' experience.

But Let Ms. Stan Tell the Story from This Point On...

"In every issue where America has made progress...the Trump administration is rolling back those gains with alarming speed. While it’s tempting to think of this regression as a return to an earlier time—a dirtier, more racist, more sexist, less compassionate America—it’s far worse than that. This is what authoritarianism looks like...In the course of the last two weeks, President Donald J. Trump and members of his administration made a series of announcements that the news media necessarily address individually: the separation of parents seeking asylum from their children in detention centers, the order to cut federal funding from reproductive health clinics that even dare to utter the word 'abortion,' the president’s demand that the Justice Department investigate the FBI for allegedly 'infiltrating' his presidential campaign for ostensibly political reasons...Taken together, however, these assaults and many others—including the apparent end of discrimination protections for LGBTQ people and the virtual abandonment of Justice Department consent decrees on police departments that have records of violating the civil rights of African American people—add up to groundwork laid for the imposition of a much harder form of authoritarianism likely planned for the near future."

 

Comment: No doubt because Prospect is a publication of the Left-leaning bourgeois rather than the True Left, Ms. Stan deftly avoids noting how, even before 22 November 1963, the Democratic (sic) Party was the main clandestine collaborator in the boiled-frog imposition of fascism on the United States. Indeed its very unobtrusiveness is what makes the Democrats' strategy for "rolling back" so much more effective than its far-more-brazen Republican counterpart. No doubt Ms. Stan's omissions  also explain why the editors of Common Dreams chose to reprint her text; CD is, after all,  a key voice of the Bernie Sanders movement, the primary goal of which is restoration of the New Deal -- i.e., once more positioning ourselves so the Capitalists can fuck us again.

It is here on the pseudo-Left, specifically in its undying support for Hillary Clinton, that we also glimpse what is undoubtedly the real reason for the Democratic (sic) Party's anti-Trump frenzy -- especially its new, always-kiss-the-secret-policeman's-ass adoration of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Even so, it may take us a moment to identify the Trump/Pence Regime's one most unforgivable sin. It is surely not Trump's  boorishness; I know of nothing in the cesspool of our modern  political effluent quite so boorish as Hillary's expression of sadistic glee over Gadaffi's agonizing death by anal impalement. 

Might it be, instead, that Trump and his henchmen have prematurely revealed the magnitude of manifest Evil that is Capitalism?  That their revelation is therefore as responsible for the mouth-frothing fury of the frog-boiling Democrats as it is for the ejaculatory joy of the pussy-grabbing Republicans? That in their loud and boastful relentlessness, the Republicans have revealed enough of the One Percent's ultimate agenda to rekindle thoughts of revolution? That they have re-ignited the relevance of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Mao Ze Dong, Ho Chi Minh  and Che Guevara? 

From the perspective of Hillary and her factional cronies, there could be no greater defeat; if my analysis is accurate, the Trump/Pence Regime's revelations flush at least 55 years of archly Machiavellian planning down the historical commode. These disclosures also ensure the transition from Big Lie "democracy" to unabashed tyranny will almost certainly be accompanied by exactly the sort of mass murder Hillary hoped her boiled-frog gradualism would avoid -- not because of any humanitarian impulse, but because death on that scale looks bad on the international Internet and suggests the realm in which occurs might be a "shithole" nation.

Especially after her Gaddafi cackle, I cannot doubt Hillary had also hoped there would be a sufficient number of school shootings and other such atrocities to compel the forcible disarmament of the entire U.S. civilian population. Obviously she knows that mandatory...

(To read the rest, go here.)

Hastily Suppressed Audits Suggest U.S. Government Can't -- or Won't -- Account for $21 Trillion in Unidentified Expenditures

One of the Now-Censored Reports Says the Army Lost Track of $6.5 Trillion in Fiscal 2015, a Sum 54 Times Greater Than the $120 Billion Army Budget Approved by Congress. Is This Inept Accounting? Or Is It Governance as Gangsterism, Complete with Under-the-Table Payoffs? 

DESPITE OUR NATIONAL MATHOPHOBIA -- and if the two remarkably courageous economics professors who authored this mind-blowing scoop-the-world report for the online 8 December 2017 issue of Forbes magazine are not disappeared by government agents -- these disclosures could evolve into the most devastating scandal in U.S. history. 

Yes, math is a big turn-off for many of us, but in this instance the numbers are too important to ignore. Their apparent message is so damning it literally enters the realm of the unthinkable.What the numbers suggest is the federal government is composed of out-of-control bureaucracies granted unlimited ability to print paper money and thereby elevated to veritable omnipotence by whichever cabal of plutocrats is secretly in command. 

To clarify what these numbers might be telling us, our best metaphor is organized crime. Imagine a seemingly legitimate business actually owned by a Cosa Nostra family, invariably in some field characterized by maximum cash flow and minimum documentation. (Who is to say how big that real estate commission truly was?) Typically such an enterprise serves two purposes. It provides its mafiosi with what are known as "income-tax jobs" -- apparently legal sources of income on which they pay the taxes by which they hope to deceive their Internal Revenue Service adversaries. But it also provides a cover for one or more big-money rackets the finances of which are many times larger than those of the legitimate business. Thus the operation necessitates two sets of books. One set records legitimate income and expenses and provides the basis for tax returns and the like. The other set, protected by the deadly code of omerta,  documents the operation's true finances. The difference between the two is often in millions, even billions of dollars.

What the two economists discovered -- initially in a U.S. Army Inspector General's report that was flushed down the Orwell hole almost as soon as one of the economists questioned it -- suggests the U.S. Government is doing the same sort of thing on a trillion-dollar scale. Which prompts two vital questions: 

Where did the Army get 54 times more money than Congress budgeted for it?

On what did the Army spend the money? 

In keeping with the other worst-of-all-possible-worlds disclosures that in this darkest epoch of our species' history continually monkey-wrench our individual and collective consciousness, it is not at all difficult for me to imagine the most icon-smashing, delusion-destroying answers: that the money came from those Capitalist plutocrats who behind the Big Lie of "American Democracy" are in fact our true overlords -- tyrants as omnipotent as Adolf Hitler, as sadistic as Reinhardt Heydrich and as morally imbecilic as Ted Bundy -- and that the money they gave the Pentagon was spent on murderously clandestine operations wherever they chose to advance the Empire's agenda of world conquest. 

Imagine Iran-Contra on an unimaginable scale. Did this indeed mark the reduction of the U.S. Government to the One Percent's global bag-man? Did such a function grow out of the government's alliance with the Mafia during World War II? Or is it far older, perhaps even dating to the revolution fostered in large measure by the fears of southern planters and northern bankers the British would outlaw slavery?  
   
As to the use of Meyer Lansky book-keeping by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, that too is easily explained: note once more the connections between the real estate industry and the mob (see again the links in my third paragraph, above).  For example, in New York City -- something I know from my years in journalism there and across the river in New Jersey -- it was customary to mark up construction budgets by at least 50 percent to cover the requisite payoffs to mobsters, officials and politicians. 

And what then might the breathtaking discoveries by economics professors Laurence Kotlikoff and Mark Skidmore actually mean? 

If my darkest suspicions are correct, these revelations tell us...

(To read the rest, go here.)

Mainstream Media Inadvertently Admits We're a Dictatorship

Newspaper Report Reveals How Secret Police, Military Rule the Nation

(Though the delay was unavoidable, again my apology for the tardy publication of this post.)

Thursday’s edition of The New York Times carries an extraordinary, 4,000-word report on the role of the FBI in the 2016 US presidential election. Whatever the intentions of those who produced, edited and approved this lengthy account, it gives a glimpse of an American political system in which the security services, and particularly the FBI and CIA, play a critical and even decisive role...(in tyrannizing) a deeply class-divided society, in which two political parties of the financial aristocracy do the bidding of a state apparatus of coercion and violence of almost unimaginable dimensions. 

    

Six Dems Show Party's True Colors, Give Torture-Queen Haspel Command of CIA
"'This was never just about Gina Haspel. This is about a nation that claims constantly to be exceptional and morally superior showing the world in clear terms that it supports torture and will never hold its own accountable.'"
See earlier story for more damning details: "In her testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on May 9, Haspel insisted that the CIA's interrogation program during the Bush administration was legal. Haspel, a 33-year CIA veteran, argued that it could not be determined whether torture was effective to gain intelligence. She refused to state categorically that torture is immoral. And she never condemned the torture program in which she participated."
Plus this: "...the Senate Intelligence Committee has restricted (other senators') access to a classified memo that Democratic staff put together, detailing Haspel's role in advocating for torture and later destroying related evidence."
And this: "Senate confirmation of veteran Central Intelligence Agency operative Gina Haspel to head Washington’s main spy agency is a new milestone in the collapse of American democracy."
Comment: combined with the Trump/Pence Regime's outspoken support for police who murder or torture U.S. citizens, this newest outrage means there's no significant difference between the United States and Pinochet's Chile or, for that matter, Hitler's Third Reich. The Eighth Amendment's prohibition against "cruel and unusual punishment" is obviously dead forever -- "forever" because,  thanks to The New York Times (for which see above),  it is again confirmed our alleged "democracy" is indeed nothing more than a scam, the biggest of Big Lies, with our real overlords -- Torture-Queen Haspel amongst them -- rendered forever untouchable by insurmountable barriers of wealth and bureaucracy.  As to Haspel herself, waterboarding obviously gets her wet, and not just from the obscene splatter of the slowly drowning victim's struggles. 

         

The Mass Murder Essential to Capitalism Forces Us into Criminal Compliance

"The cost to human lives in our current cycle of U.S.-initiated 'perpetual wars' throughout the Middle East and Africa is unthinkably high. It runs well into millions of deaths if one counts – as do the Nuremberg principles of international law – victims of spinoff fighting and sectarian violence that erupt after we destroy governance structures. Also to be counted are other forms of human loss, suffering, illness and early mortality that result from national sanctions, destruction of physical, social and medical infrastructure, loss of homeland, refugee flight, ethnic cleansing, and their psychological after-effects. One has to witness these to grasp their extent in trauma, and they all arise from the Nuremberg-defined “supreme crime” of initiating...aggressive war."
Comment: in other words, we have been living in the de facto Fourth Reich long before the Trump/Pence Regime made it undeniably obvious. And in contemplating our futures we would therefore do very well to reflect on how the civilized world avenged the Third Reich's still-inadequately counted millions of victims.  (The preceding link is to 4.33 minutes of historical film, documentary footage bolstered by intensely accurate dramatizations. All-documentary films on the taking of Berlin are here and here; the RT footage was complied in 2010, hence the outdated crawl.)  

Regime to Imprison Immigrant Children in Concentration Camps on Military Bases 

U.S. authorities are surveying American military bases for sites for concentration camps to house thousands of children that the government intends to seize from their parents at the US border under a draconian new policy announced by the Trump administration.
See also: "The Trump administration has zealously altered the US immigration system...

(To read the rest, go here.)

Trump/Pence War on Black Dissidents Claims First Victim

NORMALLY I ORDER the linked reports in Dispatches in accordance with news values that were mine as a daily newspaper news editor or telegraph editor. This is to say international news generally outranks all but the most significant local news, and crisis, scandal or disaster outranks everything else unless it is a positive story about some development (such as an increase in the minimum wage) that benefits us all. But those criteria vanish down the proverbial toilet in the face of the following story, which, though it is about the victimization of one man, nevertheless exemplifies the stark, Gestapo-type  terror with which the JesuNazi Trump/Pence Regime threatens us all. Indeed it is a wake-up call of the most alarming sort -- precisely why I have chosen it to lead this edition of "Weekend Update": 
       

Rakem Balogun, who lost his home and more while incarcerated, is believed to be the first person targeted and prosecuted under a secretive US surveillance effort to track so-called 'black identity extremists.' In a leaked August 2017 report from the FBI’s Domestic Terrorism Analysis Unit, officials claimed that there had been a 'resurgence in ideologically motivated, violent criminal activity' stemming from African Americans’ 'perceptions of police brutality.'"

Comment: obviously Mr. Balogun is but the first victim in the JesuNazi regime's Gestapo-inspired terrorizing of dissenters, in which context we dast not forget the words of Martin Niemöller, "first they came for the socialists..."  
  

Fight to Save Net Neutrality Requires Only One More Affirmative Vote    
"Democrats on Wednesday officially filed a petition to force a vote in the Senate to save net neutrality. With a single Republican supporting the effort, only one vote is needed to advance a resolution that may one day soon reinstate the net neutrality rules overturned by the FCC last year."  Please use this story's clickable form to contact your senators.

  

Democratic (sic) Party's Closet Fascists Urge CIA Torture Queen's Approval
"Sen. Joe Donnelly on Saturday became the second Democrat to announce he will cast his vote in favor of CIA director nominee Gina Haspel -- boosting her prospects...

(To read the rest, go here.)

War Clouds Darken: Who Will the USian Empire Attack Next?

While the mass media focuses on the latest daily scandals emanating from the White House, a leader of the secular left in Iran says President Trump is stepping up plans for an attack on that country which could trigger a devastating regional war with horrific implications for world peace...The Tudeh Party leader warned that the Trump administration poses a graver threat to peace than any prior U.S. administration..."
See also: "The war on Iran, in other words, has begun. It has been brewing for some time."
And this: "In the immediate wake of U.S. President Donald Trump's announcement that America is withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, Israel reportedly carried out airstrikes in Syria and began mobilizing its defense forces over what it claimed were 'abnormal movements of Iranian forces.'”
Plus this: "...there are striking and instructive parallels between imperialist diplomacy in the 1930s and today. In the run-up to World War II, all sorts of diplomatic agreements were signed, only to be shredded soon after, with the Nazi regime leading the wolf pack.
As well as this: "President Trump floated the idea that former Secretary of State John Kerry could face criminal charges for lobbying to salvage the Iranian nuclear deal." 
Also this: "a new CNN poll (showed) support for the (Iran nuclear) agreement (was) continuing to rise, with an all-time high 63 percent of Americans saying Trump should uphold the accord.
Comment: the poll results are irrelevant to the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassalage and thus would be ignored even if support for the Iran accord were 100 percent. But when O when will we finally awaken to the fact our alleged "democracy" is but a Big Lie?

  

Empire Ignores World War II History -- Especially the Battle of Sevastopol
"Western leaders and Ukraine’s current pro-Western government...entertained ideas of a NATO base in Sevastopol, right on the border with Russia, offering NATO ships almost unlimited control over the region and also an opportunity to neutralize the Russian Black Sea Fleet...a similar dream once held by Nazi Germany."
See also: "The US Navy announced on Friday that it is relaunching its Second Fleet..."

(scroll way down)

Seattle's War on Homeless Culminates in Bitter Tax Fight   
"In (retaliatory) response to Seattle’s proposed head tax, Amazon is pausing construction of a new tower and may sublease to tenants a new skyscraper in downtown Seattle."
See the tax proposal's details here: "...the city expects only three percent of Seattle’s businesses to be subject to the tax. Amazon, of course, is the big one..."
Plus this: "One day after an open letter from more than 100 Seattle area business leaders to the Seattle City Council in opposition...a group of several local unions has sent a letter in support..." 
And this: "Looking just at the percent of (homeless) people...King County ranked 5th while east coast cities like ...D.C., Boston and New York disappear from the top 10 entirely...all places with some form of a legal right to shelter. Seattle, like most West Coast cities, doesn’t guarantee access to shelter.
Also this: "At the town hall, neighborhood residents sneered at him, telling O’Brien to invite the homelessness into his house."
Comment: because I had the misfortune of being stuck in Seattle for four miserable years -- it was unquestionably the most venomously unfriendly place I have ever lived --  I recognize the malice expressed by the Ballard residents as an unusually public expression of the same reflexively fascist hatred of Blacks and impoverished people in general that has long obstructed mass transit development throughout the state. Indeed, despite the state's documented secularism, it exemplifies the white-supremacist malevolence that brought us the Trump/Pence Regime and its ever-accelerating thrust toward zero-tolerance JesuNazi theocracy.  

(To read the rest, go here.) 

 

"Headaches, Confusion, and an Inability to Think Straight"

Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Reaches All-Time Human-Era High

"Carbon dioxide measurements at Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii averaged 410.31 parts per million (ppm) in April. That bests last May’s record of 409.65 ppm, is well above the pre-industrial value of 280 ppm, and means the atmosphere of April 2018 was unparalleled in human history. Its reign will be short-lived, as May will almost surely set another record."

See Also: "At it's most tame state, hypercapnia will cause headaches, confusion, and an inability to think straight." 

Comment: could it be the carbon dioxide poisoning that's turning so many of our alleged leaders into apocalypse-courting economic cannibals? (See diagnostic data above, indicative stories below.)

Iowa Governor Gleefully Inks Law to Forever End All U.S. Abortion Rights

“Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) signed the country’s most restrictive abortion bill into law Friday, outlawing the procedure once a 'heartbeat' is detected, which is usually at about six weeks — a time when many people do not yet know they are pregnant...Reynolds, who has in the past referred to abortion as 'murder,' echoed that sentiment in a statement Friday. 'I understand and anticipate that this will likely be challenged in court, and that courts may even put a hold on the law until it reaches the Supreme Court,' (she said). This is bigger than just a law. This is about life.'”

Comment: we all know the intent of the Trump/Pence Regime is to pack the Supreme Court with misogynistic, homophobic, racist JesuNazis; we likewise know that only a deity-class miracle will prevent judicial aging from giving Trump at least one more vacancy to full -- all he needs to turn the court into precisely the rubber-stamp for theocracy he and his collaborators intend it to be. But maybe after the Trumped Court upholds this murderously misogynistic law,  as we know with near 100-percent-certainity it will do,  the nation's women finally will throw away their pussy hats -- which sugar-coat dead serious issues with pink polyester silliness (and in tactical truth  do nothing more than give the cops and secret police aiming points for their cameras and guns) -- and at long last recognize the only way to defeat the JesuNazis is to get Petrograd-serious about the hard and deadly dangerous work of revolution. The only question -- should that blessed event obtain -- is whether we men of the USian Empire will have the brass balls demonstrated by the men of the Putilov Machine Works and, just as they did when they joined the women of the Lesnoy Textile Works on International Women's Day of 1917, follow our breathtakingly courageous sisters into battle.

    

2018 Farm Bill Threatens Genocidal Food Stamp Cuts

"There is a lot at stake in the 2018 Farm Bill negotiations. The largest proposed cuts would be to the SNAP program, formerly known as 'food stamps.' Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, argues that these cuts would 'increase hunger, foster poorer nutrition, and further increase health inequity in our nation,' while Nancy Brown, CEO of the American Heart Association, calls them 'deeply concerning because they potentially cut millions of Americans out of these benefits, putting their health in jeopardy. The staff of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, cautions that the bill’s proposed 'sweeping, aggressive new work requirements' for SNAP recipients 'would likely prove unworkable and do substantially more harm than good, fueling increases in hunger and poverty.'"

Comment: this is conflict in which the Democrats lose the 2018 election by revealing their true Neoliberal (aka Republican aka JesuNazi) colors and supporting the Trump/Pence Regime's savagery.

Trump/Pence Regime Continues Iran Warmongering...

(to read the rest, go here.)