Beyond the Newest Squabbles of the Two Evils, a Faint Possibility Sanders Might Be the Perfect Compromise

JILL STEIN'S EFFORT TO nullify the 2016 presidential election by last-minute recounts reeks of Green Party naivety, typically dishonest Democratic (sic) Party sleight-of-hand and the sinister guile for which Hillary Clinton is rightfully infamous. In all probability, Stein is Hillary's figurehead, positioned to be the perfect scapegoat for the debacle that will inevitably follow if this newest campaign to monkeywrench Donald Trump's victory is even half as effective as Hillary's felonious suppression of Sen. Bernie Sanders' candidacy.

Properly cynical analysis of the Stein campaign – Stein's relative innocence and limited finances as opposed to Hillary's bottomless corruption and obscenely unlimited wealth – indicates it can hardly be anything but another Clinton operation. In any case it has turned a long-cliched Madison Avenue hyperbole into new reality. Advertisers often boast their product “changes everything,” but this is precisely the outcome the breathtakingly Machiavellian recount-ploy will have if it triumphs, which several sources say is highly probable. For this “everything” truly is everything – not just the hitherto-certain, now unnervingly dubious outcome of the election, but the now equally dubious longevity of our nation, our species and our planet.

As I have said for months, the actual choice allowed us by our capitalist overlords – minor parties, write-ins, incomplete ballots and hell-no-I-won't-vote abstentions aside – was between two latter-day Hitlers and the horrific agenda each represents: the new Holocaust as promised by Donald Trump; the attack on Russia and the resultant thermonuclear apocalypse as sought by Hillary Clinton. In other words, we were forced to choose between possibly survivable horrors versus absolutely certain extinction.

Obviously exploiting Stein as her puppet – and obviously both as Stein's financier and puppet-master (diabolical, yes, especially in its multiple betrayals, but nevertheless the only conclusion allowed by logic) – Hillary is timing the recount to invalidate enough electoral votes to deny Trump the presidency and possibly – depending on whether the Democratic (sic) election-fixing apparatus can alter recount results as efficiently as it killed Sen. Sanders' primary victory – give it to herself.

Here's how it might work:

As The Hill reports, failure to complete an official recount by the federal 13 December deadline probably nullifies the state's electoral votes. Rightist websites – in this instance to be believed – are already saying Stein's belated filing of the recount demands is intended to ensure the three states' miss the 13 December deadline, thereby subtracting their electoral votes from Trump's total and throwing the presidential election into the House of Representatives.  (Apologetic note: this link to Inquisitr.com,, which summarizes the associated arithmetic, is obnoxiously clogged by advertisement monitoring and takes at least five minutes to stabilize to readability.)

What would happen were the presidency to be decided by the Republican-ruled House remains to be seen. There are at least three possibilities: that it confirms Trump's election; that it finds another Republican whose domestic Nazism is perhaps more closeted than Trump's but who will obey with absolute reliability the One Percent's global-conquest mandates Trump seems to opposes; or that it will find a compromise candidate acceptable to both parties – a possibility no less remote than Alpha Centauri, but one that nevertheless could put the hugely popular Sen. Sanders in the White House. (You read it first here.)

But let us not forget the recounts could also reverse enough votes to give Hillary the presidency. Thus she would seize the White House after having positioned Stein and the Green Party as the immediate scapegoat for the civil war that is certain to result. Meanwhile who can doubt the recount is yet another product of Hillary's limitless vindictiveness? As I said before, Stein not only lacks the requisite malice, but – without Hillary's clandestine intervention – it's gravely doubtful she'd have been able to access the requisite wealth. Cynicism – which sometimes is the most revealing Muse of all – suggests only two possibilities: that Hillary has blackmailed Stein into becoming her figurehead, or that Stein's ambitions have reduced her to Hillary's sacrificial lamb and turned her into another of Clintons' useful idiots. (Wikileaks: please tell all!)

As to the danger of civil war, the KuKlux/Christian/Nazi militias have already threatened to rise in armed rebellion if Trump is denied the presidency. They would be even more enraged were Trump's ouster – seemingly accomplished by the same typical Democratic (sic) deviousness that invariably spares the Clintons from prosecution despite their brazen criminality – to succeed in putting Hillary in the White House.

Unfortunately, and just as I have written elsewhere,  the violence of a second civil war would kill forever the nonviolent revolution now brewing at Standing Rock, which is fast evolving the potential of mobilizing sufficient overseas support  to succeed much as Gandhi's revolution did against the British Empire in India. But with the nonviolent revolution aborted by unrelated violence, the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals could rest in absolute certainty the nonviolent threat to capitalist governance was permanently terminated even as the government's technological superiority was ensuring the defeat of the Rightist militias.

Moreover, a second civil war (perhaps labeled by future historians “the War of Presidential Succession”), would – under the unlimited powers Obama has bequeathed the presidency – allow declaration of a permanent state of emergency, thereby nullifying what little remains of the Constitution and ensuring the eternal omnipotence of capitalist tyranny.

Were Hillary the president, it would also facilitate her most cherished domestic ambition: zero-tolerance forcible disarmament – confiscation without compensation of every civilian-owned firearm in the United States.

Hillary would ultimately blame Russia for the millions of deaths and millions of dollars of damage so inflicted, whether by civil war, forcible disarmament or both. She would no doubt claim it was all the result of some alleged Kremlin conspiracy involving Trump, Stein, the Greens and Vladimir Putin – thereby giving herself a “nothing-to-lose” rationale for nuking Moscow and triggering thermonuclear apocalypse.

As to why Hillary would do anything so obviously suicidal, there are only two possible answers.

One is that her decades  of fanatical Christian brainwashing  by The Family  have driven her beyond what should be labeled JesuNazism to clinical insanity, perhaps even turning her into a believer in biblical End Times and the Apocalypse  as the only sure route for the Christian god's devotees  to depart this world of sin and get to Heaven.

(I apologize for the above paragraph's link-heavy text. But now with the growing likelihood  Hillary Clinton will be the next USian president – remember how she stole the primary  from Sen. Sanders – I think it vital for us to recognize what a JesuNazi she truly is, and that once she is in the White House, she is likely to attack the remnants of the First Amendment at least as vindictively as we know she will attack the Second Amendment.)

The other possible explanation for Hillary's obvious intent to start World War III – an explanation that does not negate the first possibility (and could in fact be the expression of its Noah's Ark intent) – is that the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals have secretly built and stocked a vast subterranean network of bunkers to allow themselves and a few carefully chosen and meticulously bred slaves to survive a 25-year nuclear winter. Rumors of such refuges have persisted for years, and knowing our overlords' genocidal contempt for all the rest of us, we the people of the 99 Percent, I cannot doubt the rumors are founded on truth. Thus the plutocrats, their children and their slaves – the slaves no doubt dark-pigmented for easy identification – would emerge from these latter-day Noah's Arks as unchallenged rulers of a planet “cleansed” of all “sinful” humans and, not coincidentally, also healed of global warming.

In this context, let us further examine what might be the hidden agenda of the recount.

As I said above, on 8 November 2016 we were forced to choose between two Hitlers: Donald Hitler of the Renewed Holocaust versus Hillary Hitler of the Thermonuclear Apocalypse. But ultimately our choice was between (possibly survivable) horror or (certain) extinction. And our decisions revealed to the One Percent's psychological warfare experts the magnitude of our national courage.

The courageous – those of us who dared vote against Hillary (whether by voting for Trump or one of the lesser alternative-party candidates – voted to gamble on the likelihood of survival and thus to fight on.

But those who voted for Hillary chose thermonuclear suicide. Some chose suicide because their fanatical Christianity convinced them they were better dead than Red – “Red” in this instance encompassing not only the uncertainties of socialist revolution (as by the nonviolence of Standing Rock), or at the very least the long-overdue rejection of Prosperity Gospel Christianity,  the consequence implicit in Senator Sanders's efforts to resurrect the New Deal. Others chose suicide because they are terrified by the prospect of life on a planet undergoing terminal climate change or in a nation in which people – especially Working Class people – are allowed to own firearms. Still others – perhaps the moronic majority of Hillary's voters – chose suicide out of Moron Nation ignorance – ignoring all the damning evidence of Hillary's closet fascism and attachment to theocracy, and remaining in clinical denial of Hillary's ever-escalating threats, whether against any remnants of USian civil liberties or against Russia and ultimately against human survival.

In any case, the fact Hillary is winning the popular vote – overwhelmingly so, if the latest figures are to be believed – also tells the psychological warfare experts Moron Nation is already significantly subjugated, too cowardly to alter the status quo save by imposing forcible disarmament – that is, mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood – on all civilian firearms owners.

Even so, what might the One Percent and its Ruling Class hope to accomplish by forcing a recount and at the very least nullifying the election? Is the One Percent perhaps still indecisive about which Hitler will serve it best as Führer? Or is something else afoot – say deliberate provocation of a Rightist uprising, with civil war its inevitable result.

To reiterate: civil war would kill forever the potentially successful nonviolent revolution taking shape at Standing Rock. And – again reiterating – the resultant “state of emergency” would enable the One Percenters and their Ruling Class vassals to terminate – also forever – any rational hope of ever restoring USian liberty. Plus – last reiteration – a civil war's destruction, its magnitude akin to that of Germany in 1945, would give the Hillary the perfect “nothing-to-lose” rationale for starting World War III.

Think, people. We are tyrannized by Evil, our species' most diabolical plotters ever.

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THE FOLLOWING ARE the titles and links that were part of the blog post I had written for OAN before the news of the recount literally changed everything. The material – most of it about the transition to overt Nazism that would have occurred under Trump – is still relevant. But it is way too lengthy to add to the above, so I am reducing it to a recommended reading list, with the briefest possible notes about content and whether I commented on the associated discussion thread.

Fascism in Donald Trump's United States (Henry A. Giroux):  Trump's comments form a discourse of hate, bigotry and exclusion...resonating deeply in a landscape of U.S. culture and politics crafted by 40 years of conservative counterrevolution...We heard this same hatred in the words of Hitler, Mussolini, Pinochet and other demagogic orators who have ranted against Jews, communists and other alleged “infidels.” (No comment by LB.)

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Honor Roll Student Shares Fruit With Classmate, Gets Suspended for Violating Weapons Policy: An honor roll student...shared part of her lunch with a classmate. The school suspended her for six days...after she cut a peach in half with a child’s butter knife...The Pembroke Pines Police Department said it has turned over their investigation to the State Attorney’s Office. (No comment by LB.)

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His horror show hides Clinton's rotten agenda (Elizabeth Schulte and Alan Maass):  Donald Trump is so despicable that no one is paying attention to what Hillary Clinton actually stands for.  (No comment by LB.)

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Goodbye, American Neoliberalism. A New Neo-Fascist Era Is Here (Cornel West):  (T)he abysmal failure of the Democratic party to speak to the arrested mobility and escalating poverty of working people unleashed a hate-filled populism and protectionism that threaten to tear apart the fragile fiber of what is left of US democracy. And since the most explosive fault lines in present-day America are first and foremost racial, then gender, homophobic, ethnic and religious, we gird ourselves for a frightening future. (Extensive comments by LB.)

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President Obama's Last Stand (Matt Taibbi):  As Taibbi often does, he buried his lead, probably in embarrassment: ...There are a lot of people these days wondering if the election of the race-baiting Donald Trump will end up staining or outright repudiating the legacy of Barack Obama. I think it will be the other way around. Trump's presidency is almost sure to throw the best qualities of this unique and powerful historical figure into relief. (Brief comment by LB.)

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Obama Refuses to Pardon Edward Snowden. Trump's New CIA Pick Wants Him Dead (Alex Emmons and Naomi LaChance):  President Obama indicated on Friday that he won’t pardon NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, even as President-elect Donald Trump announced his pick to run the CIA: Kansas congressman Mike Pompeo, who has called for “the traitor Edward Snowden” to be executed. (Extensive comments by LB.)

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7 Big Areas Where Jeff Sessions Could Change Policy at DOJ (Danny Vinik):  Sen. Jeff Sessions was an instantly divisive figure when President-elect Donald Trump named him as his next attorney general: conservatives and immigration hardliners welcomed the choice, while civil-rights groups and Democrats spent the day attacking the pick...the critics’ focus was on controversial past comments by Sessions, such as accusations that he said the NAACP and American Civil Liberties Union were “un-American,” and joked that he thought the Ku Klux Klan was “OK, until I learned they smoked pot.” But much of the concern is what he’d actually do as AG: that he’d undermine civil rights protections, prosecute more undocumented immigrants and allow companies to go wild with mergers...Here are seven areas where Sessions could most dramatically change public policy. (Extensive comments by LB.)

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Life Under Trump (Rebecca Gordon): Can we hold back the rising seas that are already closing over island nations on a planet where Donald Trump promises to abandon the fight against climate change and walk away from the historic Paris climate accord? And...(j)ust how vulnerable are we, two middle class white lesbians in our sixties, during a Trump presidency? (Brief comment by LB.)

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Here's What We Do Now - a Personal Note (Greg Palast):  Decades of progress created with sweat and determination face destruction.  Within the next six months, we may see the Voting Rights Act repealed—and civil rights set back 50 years; the entirety of our environmental protection laws burnt in a coal pit; police cruelty made our urban policy; the Education Department closed to give billionaires a tax holiday; and a howling anti-Semite as White House Senior Counselor. But the horror we face is countered by this one hard and hopeful fact: Donald Trump did NOT win this election. (Brief comment by LB.)

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Medics Describe How Police Sprayed Standing Rock Demonstrators With Tear Gas and Water Cannons (Alleen Brown):  (T)he Standing Rock Medic and Healer Council...estimated that 300 people were treated for injuries, including 26 who were taken to area hospitals. (Brief comment by LB.)

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War Has Broken Out in North Dakota (Marc Ash):  The situation in North Dakota at the site of the Dakota Access Pipeline has degenerated into what can now only fairly be described as a war zone. (Extensive comments by LB.)

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IN SUCH TERRIBLE times as these I am occasionally asked what weird insight or sickness of imagination enables me to (accurately) portray our capitalist overlords as they truly are – that is, as boundlessly more cunning (and therefore infinitely more Evil) – than any diabolical creature ever conceived by the authors of the Torah, the Bible, the Qur'an or even the far more ancient and dreadful Chaldean catalogue of demons.

Usually I merely shrug my shoulders – a nonverbal “I dunno” – and leave the question unanswered.

But if I am asked this same how-do-you-do-it question by someone with whom I am already psychologically comfortable, I might, if there is time, explain it as the hidden blessing of my childhood, which was all the more miserable for the absence of physical evidence that hid its unhealable gashes of psychological trauma. So wounded was I that even now on adult word-association tests I equate “family” with “betrayal” and “deception” and “scapegoating” and “rejection” and “despair.” Thus the microcosm of family brutality prepared me – quite thoroughly in fact – to cope with our species-wide macrocosm of bottomless Evil.

Evil is in fact humanity's default reality. (I capitalize it not for theological reasons – I am an ever-more-devoutly skeptical agnostic – but to provide the proper literary emphasis due what is undeniably our sole defining quality, intellect and soul alike, if indeed the latter is more than hallucination.) Nor will I debate my admittedly misanthropic conclusion; it has been confirmed more times than I can count, proven far more conclusively by what I've witnessed done to others than by what was ever done to me, whether during my first 18 years, or my award-winning but grievously underpaid and overworked decades as a journalist and social-documentary photographer, or now finally in my final seasons as a crippled old man with a failing heart, no longer exploitable for capitalist profit and thus like everyone else in such circumstances knowingly, deliberately, maliciously sentenced to death by the slow but methodically certain genocide of ever-deeper cuts to Medicare and food-stamps and Social Security and any other programs on which we depend for survival. Such is the quintessential Evil of Homo sapiens sapiens: Evil as it was in the beginning, Evil as it is now and Evil as it ever shall be, Evil without end amen.

Thus the one truly vital lesson to be gleaned from life is to learn to beware our species' penchant for perverting our most hypothetically exalted principles into real-time rationales for mass murder as at Wounded Knee and Mai Lai, mayhem as in Birmingham or at Standing Rock, and the sort of sadism the invading Germans sometimes inflicted on Russian children: bloating their bowels with gasoline enemas, lighting matches to their petrol-leaking anuses, then – much as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton cackled at Qaddafi's execution by anal impalement – chortling with glee at the children's shrieking, running, sometimes exploding and always indescribably agonized deaths. Thus do the ubermenschen – our “brightest and best” – behave toward those of us they damn as untermenschen. Such is the Evil that defines our species.

Merry Christmas, Happy Easter, and here's a thermonuclear egg to brighten your basket. Our Evil demonstrably exceeded our ability at self-control when we nuked Japan to terrify our then-ally Josef Stalin and serve him notice that henceforth we'd be his deadliest enemy, far deadlier than the Germans his Red Army had just defeated.  Now – thanks to this election and its aftermath – no matter its outcome our Evil will almost certainly overwhelm any possibility we might have escaped it.

LB/28 November 2016

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The Postmortem Continues: Some Genuine Leftists Awaken; the Identity-Politics Pseudo-Left Remains as Arrogant and Vindictively Counter-Revolutionary as Ever

WE THE PEOPLE can no longer doubt Donald Trump is the new Hitler. Last week – particularly given the conciliatory tone of his victory speech,  I said we should wait and see what sort of a president Trump would be – but his appointment of the notorious white supremacist Steve Bannon as his chief advisor tells us all we need to know.

Thus before the last few remnants of our Bill of Rights  are forever abolished, we who survived the Johnson-Nixon-Ford-Carter-Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama prelude to Trump's Fourth Reich and now find ourselves among this not-so-New Order's publicly declared targets should at least try to understand the psychological cunning by which the capitalists manipulated Moron Nation into crowning their Donald as Führer of our species' deadliest and most relentlessly tyrannical empire.

For only by studying what has been done to us – and indeed what we have thus done to ourselves – might we begin to comprehend the unbearable truth that capitalism is naught but pure Evil, the most relentlessly powerful Evil in our maliciously abused Mother Earth's history, Evil so infinitely huge and overwhelming it has burst the doctrinal bounds of theological conceptualization and become instead the now-probably irreversible mechanism of ecocidal apocalypse, whether by thermonuclear war (as was intended by fascist Hillary), or by patriarchal hatred of Woman and her macrocosm Nature soon to be enshrined as federal policy by Trump and his JesuNazi Vice-President Mike Pence.

Nor should we overlook the increasing probability the election of Trump was the product of the ultimate, climactic (and almost certainly terminal) charade of USian “democracy” – the breathtakingly Evil consequence of an utterly Evil deception in which the One Percenters, the maliciously Evil capitalist overlords of both the Democratic (sic) and Republican parties, suppressed the Sanders candidacy to inflame our disgust with the Hillary candidacy, which they had already mandated to ensure the election of Trump and Pence – the shortest most direct route to the Nazi tyranny the capitalists have been seeking for the past 85 years.

Acknowledging these unbearably bitter truths and probabilities, armed with such excruciatingly painful recognitions, we might then fulfill Sun Tzu's prerequisite, “Know the enemy and know yourself, and in one hundred battles you will never be in peril.” In other words – if our species somehow survives the forthcoming debacle and we the people of the USian Homeland somehow at last banish our obstructive optimism – we might thus begin the long process of helping our species evolve a global path to humanitarian victory.

Such is the reasoning that underlies my belief in Marxism. Despite Marxism's obvious failures – the drowning of the Soviet Union in the dark undertow of Russian history  and the more notorious collapse of the People's Republic of China into zero-tolerance state capitalism – it remains the only ideology on earth with sufficient discipline to successfully resist (and perhaps even topple and permanently eliminate) the bottomless horror of Nazism – the terminal form of capitalism – that once again openly assaults us. But now, thanks to Trump's White House predecessors, it possesses incalculably more powers of subjugation than its Third Reich forefathers might ever have imagined. And there is no longer a Red Army nor anything like it to ensure our victory.

(Note: I have added a few links – indicated as “added link” – to the following reports to exemplify the points they make.)

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It Was the Rise of the Davos Class That Sealed America's Fate (Naomi Klein, Guardian UK): They will blame James Comey and the FBI. They will blame voter suppression and racism. They will blame Bernie or bust and misogyny. They will blame third parties and independent candidates (added link). They will blame the corporate media for giving him the platform, social media for being a bullhorn, and WikiLeaks for airing the laundry. But this leaves out the force most responsible for creating the nightmare in which we now find ourselves wide awake: neoliberalism. That worldview – fully embodied by Hillary Clinton and her machine – is no match for Trump-style extremism. The decision to run one against the other is what sealed our fate...Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards have declined precipitously. They have lost jobs. They have lost pensions. They have lost much of the safety net that used to make these losses less frightening. They see a future for their kids even worse than their precarious present...For the people who saw security and status as their birthright – and that means white men most of all – these losses are unbearable.

The only point on which I would quibble with Ms. Klein is her either/or assertion about the Democratic (sic) Party.

Given its long history of betraying the 99 Percent – which started the instant a Missouri political hack named Harry S. Truman became president (but which dates to the era in which it was the party of slavery and slave-owners) – it should be obvious to anyone of Ms. Klein's foresighted intelligence the only fate suitable for the Democratic (sic) Party is not just abandonment but methodical destruction.

Otherwise the Democrats' history of wanton betrayals will merely repeat itself again.

But where to start? Moron Nation, proven so by its election of Trump, most assuredly lacks the ability, the will and most importantly the courage to provide the requisite revolutionary leadership.

Asked without a scintilla of facetiousness: where is Vladimir Lenin now that we so desperately need him? Where is the old ComIntern? Where, finally, is the Soviet Union? (Never forget it was the USSR that during the 1930s provided us with a leadership built from our own people so effectively we nearly overthrew capitalism here in its global headquarters.)

Alas, there is nothing like that – no source of the requisite training and discipline -- in the world today. Which means Moron Nation is truly on its own – and when in history did a despotism of dunces ever give birth to anything save chaos, destruction and death?

Truly, only a miracle can save us now.

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My (very strong) suspicion is – apart from an even greater escalation of Democratic (sic) and Republican “austerity” – i.e., genocidal war on elderly, disabled and otherwise chronically impoverished people – there will be very little change in the status quo. (But given the 180-degree difference between Hillary's “public” and “private” policies, no doubt we'd have gotten that anyway, assuredly in a far more euphemistic form.) To make real change, we need a genuine revolution, and that will never happen here in Moron Nation, at least not in the lifetimes of anyone now living, because too much of the citizenry has been moronated into maliciously selfish submission.

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Never forget “the party of evil” is in fact one capitalist party of two deceptive names, Democratic (sic) and Republican.

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Trouble is, identity politics – the capitalist antidote to class consciousness – will abort (anti-capitalist) solidarity before it is even in the embryonic stage. The clitoris-envy misogyny of the anti-abortion Christian jihadist right; the forcible disarmament fanaticism of the pseudo-Left – people who truly believe every firearms owner is “a Nazi” and the mere ownership of a firearm is “an act of violence”; the Ku-Klux minded racists and Nazi-minded ableists of the Right; the tree-spiking environmentalists of the bourgeois Left, whose hatred of corporate depredations is exceed only by their demonstrably murderous hatred of Working Class people who have no other livelihood than logging – these differences and their corollaries, envenomed ad nauseam by hatreds of the same bottomless magnitude that tore apart the Weimar Republic and thus enabled Hitler, make any such (solidarity) hopeless under present circumstances.

The question then is how do we educate people on both sides of the political spectrum – people whose closed-minded zealotry proves them to be utterly ineducable.

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You (addressed to a hostile fellow RSN comment-thread poster) err grievously in equating Stalin with the Koch brothers. Read some history: Stalin was building an industrial nation from the ruins of a feudal nation. The Koch cabal is building a feudal nation from the ruins of an industrial nation.

But the implication of your “expect to learn Russian soon” – unintentionally to be sure (though maybe your subconscious is telling you something you should heed) – is that given present-day politics, Russia could well emerge from the global miasma as the savior of human liberty.

That savior most assuredly won't be Moron Nation, i.e., the United States of America.

Вы говорите по-русски?

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Before we damn Stalin as “a monster,” let us acknowledge the monstrous behavior of the United States, which for the most part went unchallenged by its citizenry until capitalism brought USian sadism home and the white population began to suffer the same depredations as indigenous populations abroad and minority or First Nations populations in the imperial homeland.

Then of course the white population, methodically moronated to self-destructive stupidity, did precisely as it was conditioned to do: note for example the required high school reading of Ayn Rand, a fictionalizer of Hitler's Mein Kampf whose work should never have been published, much less given, like gasoline thrown on a fire, to people capitalism had already raised from birth to be moral imbeciles. Thus in its ignorance-aborted quest for relief, Moron Nation voted in fascism. (Paragraph revised slightly to comply with format differences.)

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Think of the Electoral College as the national equivalent of the Democratic (sic) National Committee's “superdelegates.” Both serve the same class-war function – that is, making sure the will of the One Percent and the Ruling Class prevail over the will of the 99 Percent.

Just as the Democratic (sic) superdelegates parlayed an enormity of election fraud into ousting Sanders and nominating Hillary, so did the Electoral College parlay the candidacy of Hillary into the presidency of Donald Trump.

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Health Care in the Age of Trump (Adam Gaffney): The implications of the election  are widespread and multifaceted, ranging from the catastrophic impact a Trump presidency will have on climate change — and the attendant global health consequences — to the squeeze on reproductive health care access that will likely follow the rise of the Right. At the state level, important health care–related ballot initiatives went down in defeat, including a universal health care referendum in Colorado and an initiative in California...to mildly loosen Big Pharma’s tentacle-like grip on the state’s finances...Big Pharma and the insurance industry (spent) huge sums...Republicans now...(can) remold the nation’s health care system into something both uglier and more lucrative...Pharma stocks soared the day after the election).

Mr. Gaffney – still in denial of Tuesday's results – asks, “And how can we keep the dream for single-payer alive?”

The answer, of course, is that any hope of single-payer is dead, as dead as the so-called “American Dream,” in other words, dead forever with no hope of resurrection.

Apropos the Ayn Rand influence cited by (a fellow-comment-thread contributor), the significant fact about Rand is that she is the fictionalizer of Hitler's Mein Kampf: just as der Führer did, she demands extermination of all untermenschen, which by USian definition – now made policy by the Trumpite electorate – includes racial, ethnic and sexual minorities; those of us who are chronically impoverished, elderly and/or disabled; and most of all anyone who is chronically ill.

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Trump Voters Will Not Like What Happens Next (Garrison Keillor, The Washington Post): ...Raw ego and proud illiteracy have won out,  and a severely learning-disabled man with a real character problem will be president...The Trumpers had a whale of a good time, waving their signs, jeering at the media, beating up protesters, chanting “Lock her up”...The Trumpers never expected their guy to actually win the thing, and that’s their problem now. They wanted only to whoop and yell, boo at the H-word, wear profane T-shirts, maybe grab a crotch or two, jump in the RV with a couple of six-packs and go out and shoot some spotted owls...(but)...The uneducated white males who elected him, they will not like what happens next.

I should thank Keillor for his malevolent arrogance, firstly because it demonstrates exactly why Trump won; secondly because it proves the truth that earned me my all-time RSN down-thumb high, 62 at last count.

What I wrote is that “Prairie Home Companion...was a malicious satire...on those flyover folk...'Wobegon' was pronounced 'Woe-begone,' as in woe-begone peasants...The program was also a devastating parody...on 1950s rural-U.S. midday radio...For that reason, I never cared much for... Keillor nor for his perpetuation of USian class snobbery... I thought it wrong to make a mockery of people who could no more help being what they were than a polio victim in an iron lung could help being deathly ill.”

Obviously – note again the 62 red thumbs – revealing the now Keillor-proven truth about his vindictive elitism was the Hillaryite equivalent of owning a firearm, which the forcible disarmament cult damns as an “act of violence” that irrevocably defines one as “a Nazi.”

Indeed my only criticism of (another of Keillor's comment-thread critics) is the writerly observation that “hissy fit” is redundant. In the South, from whence the term originates, it was merely “hissy”: the ultimate hold-your-breath-until-purple, fall-to-the-floor, kick-shriek-and-shit-your-pants tantrum of a raging two-year-old boy, precisely as demonstrated above by Keillor's hateful invective.

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(To another RSN poster): I up-thumbed both your remarks, but must differ with you on one point. You wrote, “Bernie's revolution needs to find new legs – it'll be a winner in four years time.”

Sorry to disillusion you, but with Trump about to bring back the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (added link), Bernie's so-called “Revolution” and any other public expressions of Left-leaning thought, including this and any kindred websites, are living on borrowed time and will be dead in the foreseeable future.

What happened during the 1960s was our 1905; it is merely that the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals took much longer to crush us than the Tsar's Okhrana, police, Cossacks and soldiers took to crush the brave revolutionaries of '05.

Our 1917 – if it ever comes – will most assuredly not be led by Bernie Sanders, who betrayed the entire USian Left by his surrender to Hillary.

Indeed, I suspect this (Fourth) Reich, which pre-dates Trump by 53 years, will prove to be the Thousand-Year Reich Hitler imagined and with dreams of which his legions of Nazi war criminals further toxified the already-fascist USian Ruling Class when they were welcomed here after Germany's defeat. There is no power on earth that can beat it – not without destroying the planet – nor will the greedy submissiveness of Moron Nation ever dwindle, not until Mother Earth herself rises in apocalyptic rebellion against capitalist depredation. And by the time that happens, all of us alive today will be well and truly dead. Only a miracle can save us. 

By the one red thumb I've already gotten for this comment, it's clear some of you – probably in fact most of you – have no idea of the terrorism inflicted on this nation by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee.

It literally destroyed, literally forever, the lives of millions of USians – not only those it summoned to public degradation and financial lynching, but the millions more whose careers were destroyed and who were thus forever damned to inescapable poverty by the ripple effect of its indescribably vicious accusations. My father was one of this latter group; as in fact was I, my journalism career forever limited by the lynch-mob-like frenzy into which HUAC's accusations goaded the USian public. Ultimately, it is because of HUAC I will die in ever-more-wretched poverty, in all probability murdered by the poverty itself.

The primary legacy of HUAC's accusations was, firstly, the death, forever, of any ideologically disciplined (and therefore effective) opposition to capitalism, and, secondly, the fascist taint, “austerity” included, that poisons USian politics, culminating in the election of Trump and HUAC's vindictive return – its unprecedented tyranny now made truly omnipotent by all-seeing surveillance technology from which there is no possible escape.

Wake up, idiots. Unless you're my age (76) or older, you cannot begin to imagine the ruinous magnitude of the horrors soon to be unleashed on us.

Such is the ultimate malevolence (added link) of Moron Nation.

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Trans People Are Terrified of What Lies Ahead. We Must Look Out for One Another (Hannah Simpson, Guardian UK): The announcement that Donald Trump won the election was devastating for many people, but transgender people like me were especially frightened...The election of Donald Trump and Mike Pence to our nation’s highest office gives the social conservatives who championed them free reign to overturn decades of progress...A right-shifted supreme court could void all same-sex unions, and perhaps even challenge the fitness of transgender persons to be parents...any chance of the climate improving vanished this week.

I'd say Ms. Simpson is being optimistic: “could void” should be replaced with “will void” and “may well continue” be replaced with “will escalate.”

Here, of course, in the persecution of sexual nonconformists – which, mark my word – will be expanded to include heterosexual couples living together without marriage and communal households in which polyandry and/or bisexuality is common – is the ultimate and absolute proof of the infinitely murderous, infinitely sadistic viciousness of the Abrahamic god and therefore the defining core not just of Christianity, but of Judaism and Islam as well.

(With 60-something percent of the USian population believing the Bible as the literal word of god and therefore definitively fundamentalist whether they admit it or not, no wonder Trump won. And Pence is a theocratic, prosperity-gospel ogre [link added].)

The real winner, of course, is Moron Nation – a constituency now enabled to be as fanatically savage as their Jewish and Muslim counterparts in the Middle East.

Everyone in the targeted communities should waste no time in contacting Pink Pistols and learning the rudiments of effective self-defense.

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Does Trump Have a Mandate? (Marc Ash, Reader Supported News): For the second time in the fledgling 21st century, we are set upon by a right wing radical assuming the power of the US presidency without having won the popular vote.

Sorry, but (the) “50 years of progressive gains” (cited by a fellow comment-thread-contributor) is a Big Lie, an effective weapon in the One Percent's paralysis of USian political consciousness.

The era of “progressive gains” ended when President Roosevelt died on 12 April 1945. The era of revenge fascism now culminating in Trump, Pence and the resurrection of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee began immediately thereafter. The maliciously anti-worker Taft-Hartley Act became law on 23 June 1947. Any hope the U.S. might achieve economic democracy thus died forever, leading to the despair that, as in Weimar Germany, prompted the hopelessly oppressed 99 Percent to embrace fascism.

President Kennedy tried to revive the New Deal but was murdered on 22 November 1963 – the day future historians (if indeed there is a future) will cite as the date USian liberty died forever.

“Peace President” Johnson's so-called Great Society was ultimately nothing more than massive bribery to suppress resistance to his murderous Vietnam War. President Nixon, a fascist felon, began his second term by dropping all pretense of support for the 99 Percent's well-being, and our standard of living has declined steadily ever since.

True, there have been a few identity-politics gains since then, but these are mere Ruling Class giveaways. They have no impact on the increasing savagery of capitalism and capitalist governance, do nothing to alleviate our ever-worsening economic suffering and are therefore not “progressive” at all.

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It's Time for Progressives to Seize Control of the Democratic Party (Scott Galindez, Reader Supported News):  Donald Trump’s victory has left the Democratic Party open to redefining itself.

As I look back, defying Mr. Galindez's repetition of the Obama-ism by which the Betrayer justified his de facto pardon of the Bush Regime war criminals, what I see bolsters the suspicion I voiced on this site several weeks ago – that the One Percenters had concluded Trump was the more direct path to the Nazi Nation they've sought since the Bankers' Plot of 1934 (link added).

Indeed the mysterious failure of the Democratic (sic) Party's election-fraud apparatus seems to eliminate any other conclusion.

Moreover, Trump's appointees, apart from obvious Teabagger consolation prizes like Sarah Palin, are ideological twins of the neo-libs and neo-cons Hillary would have appointed to ensure our neo-subjugation.

Alas, the RSN posts in which I suggested the One Percent was secretly abandoning Hillary have seemingly been disappeared, though (the contributor screen-named) Radscal cited my suspicion:

“But Loren Bliss has gotten me thinking that the One Percent...may actually hope they could install Drumpf...for a more conventional fascist regime.”

Meanwhile let us not forget the support given Hillary by Messrs. Galindez, Ashe, Reich and Krugman fails the “which-side-are-you-on”  (link added) test so vital in times of intensified class-struggle and identifies them all as willing members of the One Percent's Ruling Class vassalage – a fact we dare not forget, particularly now that with the impending resurrection of HUAC we have to be McCarthy-era careful what we say or write in public.

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I frankly don't believe the Democratic (sic) Party CAN be reformed. Not now, not ever. Like the Republican Party, the Democratic (sic) Party is in fact the party of capitalism and capitalist governance, i.e., fascism.

Nor, given the realities of late-stage capitalism, can either party EVER be anything but a betrayer of the 99 Percent. Indeed, if we have not learned that lesson from the 2016 presidential campaign, we are clearly incapable of learning anything at all.

What we need is a genuine Democratic Socialist Labor Party, sworn from the moment of its formation to fight the class war on behalf the entire 99 Percent.

Won't happen, of course – the Moron Nation pseudo-Left is too invested in its self-destructive identity politics, too moronated-stupid to ever give them up, too bourgeois-hateful of blue-collar workers and too damn cowardly to ever embrace the hard and sometimes deadly work of revolution.

But it is nice to think about...

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Think logically. What are we told by the fact the Democratic (sic) Party is submissively silent on the Republicans' genocidal plans to destroy Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security?

What we are told by their silence is that the Democrats' private position is the same as the Republicans' public position.

In other words, had Hillary been elected, the same thing would now be happening.

Which vividly illustrates why the Democratic (sic) Party is infinitely worse than the Republican Party. Both are parties of capitalist governance – i.e., fascism. The Republicans admit it – even boast about it. By contrast, the Democrats hide their fascism behind a smokescreen of Big Lies – again Hillary's “public” versus “private” positions.

Moreover, these deliberately malicious lies totally nullify the principle of free elections. How can the voters make a knowledgeable choice if one of the parties always lies about what it is?

All of which has two points: one is the overwhelming probability that with Trump we are neither worse off nor better off than with Hillary; two is that our ONLY hope is the creation of an independent, truthfully informed, ideologically disciplined Democratic Socialist Labor Party.

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Don't Call Clinton a Weak Candidate: It Took Decades of Scheming to Beat Her (Rebecca Solnit, Guardian UK): Sometimes I think I have never seen anything as strong as Hillary Clinton.  That doesn’t mean that I like and admire everything about her. I’m not here to argue about who she is, just to note what she did. I watched her plow through opposition and attacks the like of which no other candidate has ever faced and still win the popular vote...Or, as my brilliant friend Aruna d’Souza put it Wednesday: “At some point soon we need to discuss whether Sanders would have been able to win, but helpful hint: today, it just sounds like you’re saying: ‘The Democrats should have cut into Trump’s lead in the misogynist vote and the whitelash vote by running a white man.’ Let’s come to terms with the racism and the misogyny first, before analyzing the what-ifs – because otherwise we’re just going to replicate it forever. And if you think that the angry anti-establishment vote won (hence Sanders would have fared better), let me remind you that patriarchy and white supremacy are the cornerstones of the Establishment.”

Rebecca Solnit, a writer for whom I had enormous respect, is correct about Hillary's strength.

Hillary's strength is so great she handed the One Percent the Nazi victory they have sought since 1934, when Russian (Soviet) intelligence operatives helped Gen. Smedley Butler, USMC ret., save President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal from the Bankers' Plot, whereby the One Percenters' great-grandfathers sought to make the United States the economically dominant partner in the Third Reich and its later Rome/Berlin/Tokyo Axis.

What Hillary has accomplished is the most powerful act of political subversion in the past several centuries – maybe in our species' entire history. Indeed, she deserves a hearty Zieg Heil for putting our neo-Führer in the White House, thereby fulfilling the Aryan promise of the imperial domicile's name. USA! USA! USA!

As to Ms. Solnit, the spiteful gender-identity invective with which she has gifted us tonight permanently reduces her from significant essayist to to maudlin propagandist. The implicit hatred of and contempt for the viciously downtrodden USian 99 Percent evidenced in Ms. Solnit's newest text also casts profound doubt on the (alleged) humanitarianism from which she wrote. It thus reduces all her previous works to “schtick” – merely another extended program of histrionics, a chic and lucrative Big Lie wrapped in pseudo-empathy, one more dismal manifestation of the ultimately deadly charade of USian “democracy.”

Considering the role of the Soviet Union aka Russia in saving us from the pro-Hitler, pro-Mussolini capitalists in 1934, when these banksters plotted to make the U.S. a Nazi nation and turn the American Legion into an USian SS – I cannot but wonder if that's the real reason Goldwater Girl Hillary so despises Russia and all Russians including their unborn children.

Or maybe she just envies the Russians their oh-so-beautiful, oh-so-nuanced language, capable of so much more than the malignantly leering cackle that is Hillary at the apex of her expressiveness, as when she was celebrating the hideously agonizing death of Qaddafi by anal impalement.

How ironic too how Hillary – even as she was enthroning the real neo-Hitler (neo-Duce too) – was damning Vladimir Putin as the new Hitler. It was the most effective sleight-of-hand political action I've ever witnessed – obviously (Ms. Solnit take note), another proof of Hillary's great strength.

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Learning to Walk (Michelle Alexander, Michelle Alexander's Facebook Page):  (W)hat happened  can't be explained simply as a failure of the political establishment...Nor is it simply a problem of racism or sexism — though both are alive and well and flourishing in this moment. Nor is this election simply a matter of economics, though global capitalism and neoliberalism have created a world in which people of all colors are suffering greatly as factories close, work disappears, wages stagnate, and human beings are treated as disposable — like plastic bottles tossed in a landfill — as political and media elites (not just Trump) spew propaganda that encourages us to view “the others” as the enemy...What many of us have been attempting to do...(is) build a thriving multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-faith, egalitarian democracy out of the rubble of slavery and genocide...

It is truly astounding – but simultaneously no surprise – to witness the lengths to which the One Percent and their Ruling Class vassalage will go to preserve Identity Politics, the inherent divisiveness our capitalist overlords chose long ago as their primary antidote to class consciousness and the Marxian epiphany it inevitably evokes.

Now of course in the USian election of a genuinely Nazi regime, we see the ultimate fruition of Identity Politics, now proven even more effective at building a malevolently militant Aryan Right than at ensuring the hopeless division of the Left.

In other words, by its vindictive embrace of Identity Politics, the USian Left first reduced itself to a pseudo-Left and now has slain itself entirely, witness the USian replay of how the Germans discarded their own Weimar-guaranteed liberty in 1933.

But – Identity-Politics propagandists like Garrison Keillor, Rebecca Solnit and the far more subtle Michelle Alexander not withstanding – from beyond the pseudo-Left's remains another Left is arising. It is potentially a Red Banner Left,  acutely aware of the capitalists' seductive cunning and the bottomless evil it maliciously fosters. Thus it freely acknowledges the need for the ideological discipline inherent in Marxism.

The question then is not whether the One Percent will respond to the failure of its Identity Politics deceptions, but rather just how violent it will be in its effort to suppress our awakening.

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No, Everything Is Not Going to Be Alright (Ted Rall):  Given that I’ve been saying The Donald had an excellent chance of winning for many months, maybe you should be scared when I tell you what I think there’s really a 15% chance of: another presidential election in four years...forget impeachment...the chances of Republicans impeaching a Republican president are pretty much zero...forget constitutional checks and balances. Weimar Germany had a lovely constitution, in many ways better than ours, but constitutions are mere paper unless they’re enforced...Guantánamo, immigration prisons, drone assassinations and secret black site CIA prisons are all brazenly unconstitutional. If Trump and his henchmen want to trash legal and political precedent, nothing institutional will stop them...Trumpism is here to stay, for at least four years.

The “right wing smear machine” of which you speak – “you” was not Mr. Rall but a comment-thread-contributor to whom I was replying – was in fact Hillary Clinton's Democratic (sic) Party, and its malevolent effectiveness is proven by the fact that while we were previously oppressed by closet fascists, we are now tyrannized by ever-more-brazenly outspoken Nazis. Thus after 82 years of clandestine efforts the great grandsons of the original 1934 Bankers' Plot conspirators have at last achieved their goal: conversion of the USian Empire into the Fourth Reich.

If I were to be in any way critical of Mr. Rall – which I most assuredly will not – it would only be to suggest he is still extricating himself from the cult of self-deluded optimism that is the opiate that anesthetizes the present-day, identity-politics USian Left to stupefied ineffectiveness.

But at least Mr. Rall – unlike the vast Moronic Majority of his peers – is beginning to awaken to the infinite horror we are facing, which includes not only another Holocaust, but a Holocaust facilitated by technologies of surveillance and genocide the original Nazis could only imagine – literally, all the murderous sadism of the Abrahamic god, the morally imbecilic deity of Judaism, Christianity and Islam – now fully materialized in the tools of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent and their ever-more-openly Nazi vassalage; total subjugation for all the rest of us.

Indeed that – total subjugation – is precisely what we are facing. But until we acknowledge how utterly alone and powerless we are – until we start reading Marx and Sun Tzu and Che Guevara rather than identity-politics invective, triumphalist jock biographies and Ayn Randish self-help manuals – the only question is not whether we are destined for concentration camps, but how soon we will end up there. In fact I think Mr. Rall's notion there is a 15 percent chance 2016 will not be the last USian election ever is dangerously optimistic.

Nor would Hillary have been any better: the the only difference between the Democratic (sic) Party and the Republican Party is the former lies about the magnitude of their Nazification while the latter boasts about it.

Moreover, now that we are being rationally pessimistic, note the choice our overlords offered us: between two Hitlers, Hillary Hitler (who wanted to be the first-ever conqueror of Russia and was willing to impose biblical Apocalypse – the extinction of our species and the death of our planet – to achieve her goal); versus Donald Hitler, neo-Führer of the neo-Holocaust, who won election by promising white USia to ensure its bigoted hegemony forever. Indeed it was the classic rat-experiment, performed in the rat lab of capitalism with us, we the rat-people of the rat-race, as subjects.

No Virginia, there is no Santa Claus. There is only the Slavic myth of Saint Nicholas, a good-hearted priest – originally pagan, later Russian Orthodox – who ministered to those flung down by misfortune. It was a fine midwinter bedtime story, a parable for the instruction of children in the necessities of sharing and generosity, an excellent prelude to the most profound slogan of our age: “from us according to our ability, to us according to our need.” But it was stolen by the capitalists and twisted into an orgy of obscene profiteering and we of Moron Nation laughed and applauded and let ourselves be Trumped. Hence our Christmas stockings will now and forever contain naught but thorns and cinders.

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I have no doubt the (basic strategic and tactical doctrine that enabled Trump's triumph) was planned long ago, probably during the first meetings between the legion of high-ranking Nazi war criminals to whom the Empire gave sanctuary and their sponsors the grandfathers and great-grandfathers of today's One Percent, i.e the Bankers' Plot perpetraitors (note spelling) who wanted to make the U.S. part of Hitler's Greater Reich. Interesting too the skillful sleight-of-hand by which Hillary distracted us by damning Putin as the “new Hitler” even as she was helping put the real neo-Hitler in the White House.

LB/17 November 2016

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