ASK YOURSELF WHAT the Charleston atrocity has in common with the Vietnam War, and you've got yourself the intellectual equivalent of a two-base hit.
Ask yourself what Charleston has in common with austerity, with Ferguson and Baltimore or with the ever-escalating savagery of the Gestapo-minded federal police and the murderous brutality of their federally militarized local counterparts, and you're rounding third base.
Ask yourself what Charleston and these other atrocities have in common with the the Trans-Pacific Partnership and its implicitly genocidal war of austerity against the U.S. and global 99 Percent, you've belted an out-of-the-park homer.
How,
your critics will demand, could you possibly reach such an
“unthinkable” conclusion about the “land of the free and the home of the
brave.”
First
you probably noted, as we all did, the murderous bigotry underlying the
statement attributed to suspected Charleston Terrorist Dylann Roof – “I
have to do it. You rape our women and you're taking over our country.
And you have to go” – “go” in this instance being synonymous with “die.”
Next maybe it dawns on you that “you have to go” was precisely the message in the slaying of Medgar Evers, in the church bombing that killed Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Carol Denise McNair, and in the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy three months later. It was repeated ad nauseam in the years of political murders that followed: James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner; Malcolm X; Viola Liuzzo; Martin Luther King Jr.; Sen. Robert Francis Kennedy; Fred Hampton; the white kids gunned down by Ohio National Guard troops at Kent State
(Allison B. Krause, Jeffrey Glenn Miller, William Knox Schroeder and
Sandra Lee Scheuer); the black kids gunned down by white Mississippi
cops at Jackson State (Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green); and let us not forget the labor-movement martyr Karen Silkwood.
Lastly maybe you realize the same übermenschen
bigotry and arrogance and morally imbecilic indifference that killed
all these people also explains why the One Percent is ramming TPP down
our collective throats no matter the devastation it will inflict on
nearly everyone else.
The One Percenters are utterly indifferent to the fact at least 62 percent of us
already opposed TPP and its fast-track coup last year, long before the
associated controversy reached its present magnitude. And they're no
doubt ecstatic over TPP's consequences – particularly that it will kill
tens of thousands of us, possibly millions – in slow-motion executions
inflicted by joblessness, loss of health care, increases in prescription-drug prices and increased doses of (already genocidal) austerity in general.
“We have to do it,” say the One Percenters and their political vassals.
What
they dare not express – at least outside their posh boardrooms and
luxuriant private clubs – is the reasoning their policies make
undeniable.
Remember
that under capitalism, greed is elevated to the ultimate virtue – the
conscious rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever
uttered. Remember too the sole purpose of capitalist governance:
absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total
subjugation for all the rest of us.
Atop that,
the One Percenters and their politicians believe there are too many of
us 99 Percenters. They believe our needs are draining their bank
accounts and diminishing their assets. They want those of us who are
most obviously no longer exploitable for profit – that is, those of us
who are elderly and/or disabled and/or chronically impoverished – to be
exterminated first. That's why they're slashing the services -- food stamps, Medicaid, Medicare, even Social Security-- on which our lives depend.
But since death camps are no longer fashionable, we're to be killed by austerity instead.
See it now? As it is in Charleston, so it is throughout the USian Empire, the de facto Fourth Reich.
*** *** ***
Sanders Calls Charleston What It Is: Racist Terrorism
The
only non-opportunistic and therefore genuinely humanitarian statement
issued by a U.S. politician in the wake of the Charleston atrocity was
from Sen. Bernie Sanders, a declared socialist running as a Democrat for the U.S. presidency.
I
reproduce its full text here because its unpretentiousness and its
laudable absence of inflammatory rhetoric makes it so unlike the
utterances of those politicians who are trying to co-opt the murders to
bolster a favored cause.
Sanders seems to speak directly from his heart:
What transpired in Charleston, South Carolina last night was not just a tragedy, it was an act of terror.
Nine
of our fellow Americans were murdered while praying in a historic
church because of the color of their skin. This senseless violence fills
me with outrage, disgust, and a deep, deep sadness.
This
hateful killing is a horrific reminder that, while we have made
important progress in civil rights for all of our people, we are far
from eradicating racism.
The
Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church is one that has been
attacked, burned, and rebuilt throughout its 200 year history. While
their community mourns now, they will rebuild, and they will emerge
stronger than before.
Our
thoughts and prayers are with the families and their congregation. But
we can add our actions to our prayers. The families and the community
that have been hurt so very badly by this brutality need our help. Let
us stand with them in their time of mourning.
You can help by making a donation to the Emanuel AME Church community today.
*** *** ***
Obama: It's Not Terrorism or Racism, It's Guns
(I began the following in response to a Reuters report republished by Reader Supported News.
The report tells us President Obama is citing the Charleston murders
not to engender a dialogue on USian racism but to bolster his campaign
for forcible disarmament of the U.S. 99 Percent.)
DESPITE
THE ESCALATING campaigns of denial and distraction, let us not forget
white racism is the sole cause of the Charleston atrocity and all other
atrocities like it.
Post-Katrina
polling shows about 75 percent of the nation's whites claimed they
believed there was “no racism” in the government's deliberately
genocidal (non) response – an obvious falsehood or self-deception only a
racist could utter.
But
addressing U.S. racism forthrightly would require public examination of
the nation's (alleged) conscience, which in turn would require
acknowledging the genocide committed against First Nations peoples,
against African slaves and even now against their African-American
descendants.
Because our species has presumably progressed a bit since the days of Nazi
Germany, all but the most racist whites generally closet their bigotry.
In fact it's internationally embarrassing. That's why U.S. racism is
allowed out only when it serves today's (equally genocidal) Ruling Class
austerity agenda, typically as opposition to anything labeled
"welfare," even health care, education, mass transit.
But now – with the Ruling Class so terrified of revolution it is hoarding ammunition –
the refusal to confront racism has become psychological warfare. Note
how the Ruling Class is trying to convince us it was Guns and the Second
Amendment – not racism – that caused the Charleston atrocity.
What a clever Big Lie. How diabolically Machiavellian. Anything to further the total disarmament of the Working Class lest it unify in rebellion.
Not that I'm surprised by Obama's spin-doctoring. The One Percent's skyrocketing fear of economically provoked insurrection is increasingly obvious.
Meanwhile, Reader Supported News
– which does a vital and praiseworthy job of seeing to it we're kept
abreast of what truly obtains – is in dire need of life-sustaining
contributions. Any financially generous OAN readers please take note.
*** *** ***
In Seattle Area, Racism Means Bad Mass Transit
(Smiley-faced prose by Leonard Garfield in Crosscut,
an eclectic, variable-quality Seattle on-line daily, prompted me to pen
yet another diatribe denouncing the bigotry that fuels the Puget Sound
region's self-destructive hostility to adequate mass transit.)
GARFIELD'S PIECE IS PollyAnna propaganda/ lipstick-on-a-pig boosterism at its worst.
Yes, Seattle's long-ago accomplishments in the realm of public transport were very real.
But
they are reduced to meaninglessness by the region's present-day hatred
and contempt for those of us who are genuinely transit-dependent.
Goaded
by a combination of "we-don-wanna-be-like-New-York" xenophobia
intensified by racism and Ayn Rand socioeconomic bigotry, local voters
have ensured the region's mass transit is at least a half-century behind
its counterparts elsewhere in this (notoriously anti-transit) nation.
And now these voters are making it obvious – repeatedly obvious – they intend to keep it backward forever.
Given
the electorate's haughty claim to environmental enlightenment, its
anti-transit-user politics are astonishingly hypocritical – undoubtedly
the most breathtaking example of political hypocrisy to be found
anywhere in today's United States.
Hypocritical
too is the not-unrelated anti-union malice that so frequently lurks
behind the region's deliberately deceptive "progressive" facade. Local
unions embrace mass transit, local voters reject it.
Indeed,
the hypocrisies of Pugetopolis “progressives” remind me of the
hypocrisies of old-time Southern Democrats: speak the New Deal language,
walk the Ku Klux walk.
No doubt that's why some call this realm "Mississippi on Puget Sound."
However
“progressive” its electorate might seem at first glance, its lack of
adequate transit, its regressive tax structure and its
worst-in-the-nation hostility to tenant rights proves it is reflexively
fascist at heart.
Above
all else it is aggressively white/bourgeois and relentlessly
self-identified with the One Percent – with transit (or rather the
maliciously sustained lack thereof) – employed as a gatekeeper to lock
out "undesirables."
Which – obviously – includes anybody who can't afford to own and operate an automobile.
Here
though is where Garfield's core hypothesis is absolutely correct. Puget
Sound's (anti-transit-user) past, which includes widespread
condemnation of mass transit as a form of "welfare,” will undoubtedly
define its (anti-transit-user) future.
*** *** ***
Russia Vows Retaliation if U.S. Aggression Continues
(In keeping with this week's theme – that TPP and Charleston are kindred outrages – here is what I wrote after I recognized the news in the above headline as official U.S. policy toward anyone it regards as a threat to capitalist governance: “You're trying to take over our country...you have to die.”)
AS I HAVE been saying for at least three years now, the U.S. has become – both domestically and abroad – the de facto Fourth Reich.
Its
foreign policy is the 21st Century equivalent of Hitler's: world
conquest, the total subjugation of all peoples in capitalist slavery,
the methodical albeit slow-motion extermination of those of us who for
what ever reason are not exploitable for profit.
And
just as a poster screen-named Dongi said on the news report's comment
thread, the U.S. psyche has been taken over by “some sort of collective
force” demanding wars of global conquest. (Precisely the same thing
happened in Nazi Germany.)
That said, thank you, A_Har, for the video link.
It is not just informative; it also gives us a glimpse of the vast
superiority of Russian intellectuals over the Moron Nation dunderheads
who are bullying the world in an extinction-level conflict,
thermonuclear jocks versus thermonuclear chess masters.
In
fact U.S. foreign policy views the world as a U.S. school yard in
macrocosm. The bullies rule. Boiling over with envious hatred, they
ruthlessly attack and try to subjugate their intellectual superiors. But
the school officials refuse to intervene because such might-makes-right
savagery is the core truth of “the American Way.”
Sometimes though the victims retaliate...and in this instance they have intercontinental ballistic missiles.
*** *** ***
Understanding Media (with apologies to McLuhan)
(A pointed but nevertheless inadequately damning Thom Hartmann column on what's wrong with mainstream media
prompted me to offer my own somewhat more uncensored view. In keeping
with our Charleston/TPP/Global-Conquest theme, I note that
“exceptionalism” is most often a code-word for “white supremacy.”)
U.S.
MASS MEDIA is what it is – a privatized version of Josef Goebbels' Nazi
German Ministry of Propaganda – because it is owned by the same people
who own the two major political parties and the federal, state and local
government.
Whether
labeled Ruling Class or One Percent, this cabal of capitalist
aristocrats has the same absolute power formerly possessed by Adolf
Hitler. They are the tyrants who not only rule us but shape our
consciousness by their ever-more-total control of information.
Nor
is there much hope for improvement. The triumphant imperial trade
coalition – which defies the will of the U.S. electorate in its effort
to further slash wages, send still more jobs abroad and gleefully fling
millions more U.S. workers into inescapable poverty – did everything in
its power to serve the One Percent by blatantly destroying the last
remnants of the American experiment in representative democracy and the
so-called “American Dream.”
The
One Percent's long-term, global goal is replacing the policy-making
functions of local, state and national governments with zero-tolerance
edicts handed down by dictatorially empowered boards of corporate
managers. Under this system, the only purpose of traditional
“government” is to maintain the goon squads of police and soldiers
essential to enforce the corporate decrees.
For a prophetic view of existence beneath the boots of the resultant global imperium,
look at the wretched conditions that prevailed in the coal towns of
Appalachia, where the mine owners also owned everything else – houses,
stores, schools, clinics – and every person as well.
As part of its march toward the global corporate imperium,
the One Percent's more immediate goal is the reduction of the United
States to fascist oligarchy – actually a uniquely USian form of Nazism
in which the corporate cabal has replaced the individual despot, with
the mandatory ideology a combination of (implicitly white)
exceptionalism, Christian intolerance and Ayn Rand socioeconomic
savagery. And – yes – exceptionalism with its implication of
divine-right rule is indeed the 21st Century version of the Nazis'
concept of übermenschen or Master Race.
Despite
the implicit whiteness of exceptionalism, it is no accident the present
U.S. figurehead is Barack the Betrayer, who makes no secret of being
the tyrannical cabal's most cravenly obedient servant thus far. Indeed
it is the Betrayer who personifies the One Percent's strategy and
tactics. He is not just the most malicious liar ever to occupy the
presidency, but in truth a hard-Right Republican who used his membership
in the Democratic Party and his own skin color as false flags to scam
the U.S. electorate into imagining he might provide desperately sought
relief from the succession of One Percent vassals who have lorded it
over us since the coup of 22 November 1963.
The
One Percenters need the U.S. not for its (now-surplus) workforce or its
(irremediably poisoned) agricultural lands, but rather for the
cannon-fodder enlistments compelled by its otherwise-inescapable poverty
and the goon-squad function of its imperial war machine.
Mass
media's role in this era of unprecedented deception is merely to
provide its imprimatur, thereby giving whichever Big Lie whatever
appearance of truth the One Percent demanded.
As
Goebbels repeatedly affirmed to Hitler, taking control of policy is
only half the victory essential to total dictatorship. Full victory is
achieved only when policy and the public mind are each controled with
identical absolutism – precisely what happened in Germany after 1933,
precisely what has happened here in the United States in the aftermath
of 22 November 1963, the subsequent decade of political murders. and the
Reichstag Firer of 9/11 – a slow-motion coup that gathers speed and
momentum as it approaches its terminal events.
Which,
by the way, explains the death-blow to representative democracy dealt
by the anti-worker trade vote of 18 June. The national mobilization against
fast-track and the Trans-Pacific Partnership made it clear a vast
majority of the voters – I have seen figures ranging from 55 percent to
80 percent – oppose so-called "free trade." But, exactly as I predicted
would happen, Congress dropped any and all pretense of representing
anyone but the One Percenters, and even here in Moron Nation, such a
brutal slap-in-the-face cannot be portrayed as anything other than what
it was.
This means the era of charade democracy is over, and the era of unapologetic tyranny is upon us.
But
I wonder how U.S. mass media – the world's first fully privatized
government propaganda machine – will play the story. Will they try to
explain it as yet another manifestation of how 9/11 "changed
everything"? Or will they merely try to flush it down the Orwell hole?
*** *** ***
“Defining Issue" Is Whether Our Species Survives
(Thom Hartmann agrees with the International Monetary Fund's surprise conclusion that “the defining issue of our time” is inequality and argues accordingly. I usually agree with Hartmann, but this time he and the IMF are both dead wrong.)
ACTUALLY THE “DEFINING issue of our time” is whether life as we know it – including our own species – will survive capitalism.
As
evidenced by our capitalist masters' escalating efforts to provoke an
extinction-level war with Russia and their ongoing refusal to act
against terminal climate change, they have already concluded we are a
dead species on a dying planet.
Indeed
it is an Occam's Razor moment of the most terrible sort: no other
hypothesis explains the totality of Ruling Class behaviors, including
the no-tomorrow savagery of their run-amok greed – a global orgy of exploitation, oppression, contractual theft and outright armed robbery with no precedent in human experience.
That
said, such an uncharacteristically humanitarian conclusion from the
International Monetary Fund, which is one of capitalism's chief economic
executioners, indicates the Ruling Class is finally awakening to the
fact the global proletariat – even broken as it is by the One Percent's
imperial omnipotence – is not so subjugated as to plod submissively into
the grave.
And
it makes no difference whether the genocidal intent is obvious (as when
the killing is done by soldiers and police), or whether it is disguised
by rhetoric (as when the mechanism of murder is euphemized as
"austerity").
Obviously the real message of the IMF study is that the Ruling Class is becoming terrified.
Ninety-eight
years ago, faced by the same sort of hopeless inequality and abject
powerlessness that has been inflicted on us all by the One Percent of
today, the Russian people rose up in a revolution that truly changed the
world. Though that revolution was later betrayed and undone, its
triumphs remain part of Russia's collective consciousness, the
wellsprings of a yearning as profoundly heartfelt as Dark Age Britain's
folk- remembrance of Arthur and their desperate longing for the
rescue-from-chaos they symbolized as “the return of the king.”
Foolishly
we regard our overlords as stupid, and in so doing we commit what to
Sun Tzu was the warrior's ultimate and ultimately fatal error: we
underestimate our enemy. We fail to acknowledge the horrid truth the One
Percent is brilliant – diabolically so – and in its Machiavellian
wisdom it no doubt recognizes that as the Russians once rose to fling
off the shackles and hangman's-knots of capitalism, so might they rise
up again.
And
if it is not too late for our species – if it is not the ultimate
absurdity of revolution by a doomed species on a ruined planet – this
time the revolution might go as global as the malevolence of capitalism
has already gone.
If
our species survives – or maybe as the very fulcrum of our survival –
that is surely the legacy of the inequality thrust on us by capitalism.
That is its teachable essence.
And
because the Russians have already learned that lesson so well they were
able, for a time, to teach it to the rest of the world, that is perhaps
why the One Percent in the person of the United States government is
now trying to provoke a war with Russia: anything to maintain
capitalism's imperial power, anything to perpetuate its signature
inequality, anything – even the dying gasp of one triumphant Kochroach
to another,”we had to destroy the planet to save it.”
(With Solstice Greetings to all: may our species live to see the Sun turn North again.)
LB/21 June 2015
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