STILL WORKING ON updating essays, a project that has morphed into preparation of an anthology for my post-mortem beneficiaries. Nevertheless -- journalist to the end -- I spend the first hour or so of every day reading the (real) news, and when a report, analysis or disclosure moves me to do so, I post a comment on the associated thread. (Sometimes, as did the last three comments below, these get rejected, at which point the uplifted-social-finger portion of my alleged mind insists they too be published here.)
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Major Trump trials delayed until after election
Biden is merely the most "plausibly deniable" of the ruling class options for throwing the election to Trump, thus guaranteeing the perpetuation of capitalism by permanently reducing the U.S. to a zero-tolerance Christonazi theocracy. But how many more times must this be said before the Moronic Majority awakens to its looming subjugation?
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Unfortunately, Mr, Reich, the Christonazis' core belief -- that they have a divine mandate to conquer the world and exterminate all of us who refuse to declare for their demon Jesus -- is bound to overcome the Neoconfederates' isolationism. This will make a second Civil War unavoidable. Which leaves three questions:
(1)-Will the so-called Blue States be able to overcome their anti-gunowner pacifism enough to train and mobilize an effective defense against Waffen-SS-minded Christonazi fanatics?
(2)-Will the Blue States be able to react fast enough to seize and utilize the military assets within their boundaries?
(3)-Given that the destruction of the United States is in the interest of its primary global opponents -- these are Russia and China; probably India; depending on the time-frame, perhaps also a pan-African union -- where will the Blue States (which, thanks to outsourcing by capitalist profiteers, lack the manufacturing capabilities essential to winning even a small war) -- find the allies essential to their victory?
Apropos my use of the "so-called" adjectival prefix in question (1), as someone who's aware of psycho-linguistics, I am infuriated by the Orwellian, silence-dissenters-by-destroying-our-vocabulary methodology obvious in assigning red -- the color (as in the Red Army), of liberation from the Original Nazis, and the color (as in "yeah damn right I'm a Red") of socialism in general -- to the permanently Christonazified regions of the "United" (sic) States.
A more truthful color assignment would be derived from our (first?) Civil War: blue for the states remaining true to the best of our founding principles, gray -- or better yet the feldgrau of Hitler's Wehrmacht -- for the states of the Christonazi Neoconfederacy.
By the way, the same psycho-linguistically malicious subversion of meaning is evident in Trump's theft of socialism's clenched-fist salute.
As to what will actually obtain, I'm sure I'll never get to find out, which admittedly vexes my journalistic curiosity. But there's no escaping the fact I am 84 years old and terminally ill, so I may not even get to find out who wins in November, though I cannot doubt it will be Trump and the final triumph of the permanent nazification that's been underway – mostly by the diabolical cunning of the boiled-frog method – since our plutocratic masters embraced those legions of Original Nazi war criminals as advisors and comrades-at-arms.
Biden? He's merely the plutocrats' most plausibly deniable method of throwing the election to their new Führer.
A near-lifelong student of history -- also part of the working press c. 1956-1959, 1962-1986 and 2004-2009 -- I've always recognized the murder of President Kennedy as a coup. I recognized the murder of his brother as the end, forever, of any possibility of a counter-coup; I saw the 1976 election as a final act of surrender; and I recognized the 1980 election as the beginning of the inevitable post-coup national "cleansing," prefaced as it was by the decade of additional political murders that began in 1964. Thus I have long argued that -- assuming our species has enough future to produce historians (which I gravely doubt) -- 22 November 1963 will by the U.S. Empire's equivalent of 4 September 476, the latter the date the Roman Empire died.
As to which side will win our second Civil War, that will undoubtedly be determined by who gets the nukes. Which will also determine whether the war stays within the boundaries of the original U.S. or morphs into the apocalypse that exterminates our species and reduces our Mother Earth back to the bug planet she was four million years ago.
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Then and Now: 1968 and 2024
(Second paragraph slightly revised here to correct the error I made by too hastily editing the original.)
I must respectfully disagree with the definitive portion of Mr. Albert's attempt to define what killed the revolutionary potential of the 1960s. While his overview is (superficially) correct – what might be loosely termed "poor choices" did indeed help facilitate the Counterculture's extermination -- those (alleged) “choices” were not caused by any absence of self-sustaining "reason and evidence." Nor were they the sole factor in its destruction. As a near-lifelong professional journalist and an activist in the post-Sputnik Education-Reform, Civil Rights, Anti-Vietnam-War, Alternative-Press, Back-to-the-Land, Environmentalist and Occupy movements, I know any (accurate) analysis of such failures must begin with the necessarily painful acknowledgment of how patriarchy combines two distinct types of force to perpetuate its historically proven omnipotence.
One type is, as Mr. Albert implies, self-inflicted. But Marx’s Manifesto and FDR’s Four Freedoms are potentially as compelling now as they were in 1848 or 1941 respectively; once adopted, their principles are never abandoned by “choice” per se. Instead they are nullified by the methodically conditioned caste, racist, sexist and egotistical hatreds that have ever-more-irreparably fragmented human society since patriarchy’s imposition six or seven millennia ago. Today these hatreds are perpetuated by patriarchal religion and its capitalist derivatives, the latter including the Madison-Avenue-induced, morally imbecilic self-obsession that began as USia's media-vectored terminal illness and is now fatally infecting all humanity. As intended, the resultant malaise prohibits the solidarity essential to overthrow or even ameliorate patriarchy’s ultimate function as the planet-poisoning, species-exterminating mechanism of a global Final Solution, its dynamic first evidenced by smallpox-envenomed blankets.
Though in 1970 I kept my ideology semi-closeted in an (ultimately doomed) effort to preserve my journalism career, I have been a Marxian since my teens. Thus in June of that year, exiled from my New-York-City birthplace and home, I was relieved to discover most of the women I met in the Pacific Northwest were as feminist as those I knew in Lower Manhattan. But in startling contrast to the males I knew in the City -- a vivid example of how NYC of that era truly was, as James Baldwin put it, Another Country -- most Pacific Northwest males remained stubbornly misogynistic. And it is only here I've repeatedly seen solidarity slain -- even in alternative-press collectives -- by bourgeois antagonism toward alleged socioeconomic inferiors. Nor are these reactionary attitudes much abated; now they are merely camouflaged by language proven false by behavior.
Patriarchy's other movement-destroying force is the escalating sadism of its military and police, their murderous brutality intensified by technological supremacy and psychological terror. These are mandates of what Jeff Sharlet reveals as the “fundamentalism” that dictates USian domestic and foreign policy. In the '70s, it was locally proclaimed on Christian reader-boards: "Organic Is Satanic"; "Environmental Means Of The Devil"; and the far more ubiquitous "God Hates Hippies." Now its proclamations are international news.
Honed to invincibility by the legions of Nazi war criminals the empire adopted after WWII, the synergistic combination of these internal and external forces perpetuates the reduction of our planet to an ecogenocidal death-camp. As a near-lifelong student of history, I know any notion patriarchy includes a “moral arc...toward justice” is a tyranny-protecting Big Lie. In a sane world, it would be symptomatic of clinical delusion if not outright dementia. Therefore I see no (logical) escape from the looming apocalypse. But I also know the Gaia Theory does not exclude the possibility of last-minute rescue. Apropos that, let us hope an '80s bumper-sticker -- "Goddess Is Coming and She Is Pissed" -- is more than mere fantasy.
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The Supreme Court Might Rescue Trump
(I
wrote of "Trumpler" and his "smear-all-putsch" on a sarcastic whim,
merely because it rhymes with Hitler and his beer-hall putsch.
Nevertheless I believe the comparison is valid, particularly given how
Trump has followed Hitler's example of packing the judiciary with puppet
judges. It's also noteworthy that some psychics now claim Trump is
Hitler's reincarnation, for which go here and here. )
As I have been pointing out since well before Trumpler's 6 January smear-all putsch, the USian Christonazis have followed their German Nazi forebears' strategy of packing the judiciary as the one sure means of permanently abolishing democracy without alarming a submissively complacent citizenry. This nullified all the Weimar Republic's constitutional protections just as it has done likewise to those of the (equally doomed) U.S. republic. Indeed I would argue that anyone who supposes Trumpler's judiciary would not declare him immune to prosecution is clinically deluded.
We are thus left with three questions:
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(1)-Will the "Democratic" (sic) Party continue the failing Biden candidacy, which -- despite his superficial, intentionally deceptive emulations of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt -- ever-more-obviously demonstrates the party's post-JFK function as the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party?
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(2)-Assuming the Democrats continue Biden's plausibly deniable pro-Christonazi candidacy (because that is the only option their Wall Street owners allow), will enough voters recognize the infinite horror of the Trumpite threat to vote Biden a second term despite his many flaws?
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(3)-Assuming Trumpler wins, will the so-called "blue states" have the courage necessary to resist the Christonazis' armed might -- but if they do, where will they find the necessary allies?
Bear in mind too that in reality, it was the Red Army that saved the world from Hitler -- and that in today's world, there is no comparable force to save humanity from Trumpler. (Which is precisely why I'm thankful I'm terminally ill and will therefore most likely be spared Trumpler's concentration camps.)
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The following three comment-thread posts were rejected, the first two by the World Socialist Web Site, the third by The New York Times. Apropos the topmost WSWS-suppressed post, I was initially surprised it did not appear. But on reconsideration, I realized it was probably censored for two reasons: focused as its moderators are on class warfare, and locked as they are into a fundamentalist definition of dialectical materialism (yes, unfortunately there are Marxian fundamentalists too), they seem loathe to recognize the Trumpite onslaught is as much a resumption of religious warfare -- specifically Christianity's two-millennia crusade to impose zero-tolerance global theocracy -- as it is a class war; they likewise refuse to acknowledge it is also resumption of the race warfare that has defined European colonialism in the Americas since its birth in 1492. Plus there is the fact the site's moderators are adamantly opposed to any sort of alliance with less-ideologically "pure" Marxians, New Deal advocates or any other sorts of socialists or social democrats, the potential solidarity of such a united front implicit in the best-seller status accorded the disclosures by Jeff Sharlet. About the suppression of my other attempted WSWS post, I can only guess it was killed because the moderators might have considered it an elaboration on an exposé published earlier this year by Jacobin, which it most assuredly was not; I did not discover that report until tonight, 18 May. But WSWS moderators harbor an especially intense hatred for Jacobin's semi-official parent organization, the Democratic Socialists of America, because they (correctly) condemn DSA as the "Democratic" (sic) Party's weapon to co-opt and thereby nullify the growing demand for a national alternative to the two (pro-nazi) capitalist parties. Apropos the NYT-suppressed post, I can only suppose the editors deemed it too brutally honest to be fit to print.
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Disclosure of how the USian Empire is an ever-more-tyrannical theocracy governed by "secret fundamentalism" -- for which see Jeff Sharlet's The Family (Harper: 2008) and his subsequent works -- shows how all the diverse atrocities of capitalism are expressions of this fundamentalism's ecogenocidal intent.
Sharlet's ongoing investigation reveals how the "Democratic" (sic) Party's national-prayer-breakfast, post-JFK treachery as the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party ideologically enabled the Vietnam War; the destruction of the New Deal; the imposition of economic neoliberalism; the expansion of national and global theocracy; the re-conquest of much of the world by white-supremacist neo-colonialism; the wars for capitalist lebensraum in the Ukraine and Palestine; the Christonazi take-over of the U.S. Supreme Court to guarantee theocratic expansion and permanence; and the militarization of the USian police to suppress any domestic opposition to theocratic subjugation, much as the imperial war machine suppresses such resistance abroad.
Recognition of how these atrocities are theocratically connected brings into sharp focus how this "secret fundamentalism" not only justifies capitalism's ecogenocidal greed as divinely ordained, but mandates USian alliance with -- and military support of -- other fundamentalist theocracies. Ruled as they are by zero-tolerance tyrannies -- Israel by genocidally fundamentalist Judaism and the Western Ukraine by de facto nazis -- the blank-check support given them by the empire is among USian fundamentalism's unapologetic public expressions.
So is the skyrocketing militarized-police violence unleashed against Occupy, Black Lives Matter and now against pro-Palestine demonstrators. The message here is that in the eyes of the ruling class, we of the 99.9 Percent, regardless of race or ethnicity, are all defined by the N-word -- and will be savaged accordingly should we dare protest. But once we Marxians begin making these connections obvious, it may also begin to be obvious that -- as an old labor-movement slogan puts it -- an injury to one of us is truly an (intentional) injury to us all.
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Fed says interest rates to stay higher longer
Given that the pro-Trump USian ruling class, like its pro-Hitler German ruling-class predecessor, has determined nazism is capitalism's only salvation; given also that resurgent inflation is one of several factors -- including the Biden candidacy itself -- that are ever-more-obviously scripted to ensure Trump's victory in November; it is entirely plausible to assume the Federal Reserve and Wall Street are collaborating to continue victimizing us with ruinous prices and prohibitive interest rates. We already know the price-hikes are expressions of run-amok corporate greed rather than problems of supply and demand, which in turn suggests the Fed's role is that of enabler rather than regulator.
Moreover there's the fact Fed Chairman Jerome Powell is living proof of the "Democratic" (sic) Party's post-JFK function as the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party. Powell was appointed to the board by Obama, elevated to its chairmanship by Trump and reappointed to that post by Biden. As we should all know by now, Hitler-disciple Trump's appointees were at least Christonazi sympathizers, else they'd never have received the wanna-be Führer's endorsement. Thus Powell's re-appointment by Biden is a tacit endorsement of the Trumpite agenda -- further proof the unprecedentedly unpopular Biden candidacy is the "plausibly deniable" strategy developed by the thoroughly Christonazified spy-and- secret-police apparatus for throwing the election to Trump.
Where the Gaza War itself fits into this strategy remains to be seen, but there's no doubt the violence Biden has unleashed on pro-Palestine demonstrators is intended to goad the youth vote into boycotting the election, thereby further ensuring Trump's victory and the final, permanent reduction of USia to the modern, technologically omnipotent version of a slave-plantation state the financial aristocracy has sought to impose on us at least since the defeat of the Bankers' Plot in 1934.
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Biden Is Not Winning. His Campaign Should Stop Acting Like It Is.
Those who persist in proclaiming Biden a certain victor have their heads deep enough in the proverbial sand to blind themselves to two absolute realities. One of these is the fanaticism of the Trumpites, who will vote for him even if he is imprisoned, and some of whom have already pledged armed rebellion to free him should he be locked up. The other is the ultimate indifference of the nation's youth, whose core belief is they -- and ultimately the entire human species -- are doomed, regardless of who wins in November, and who will therefore be easily convinced to refrain from voting, thus to avenge the police brutality they believe Biden has unleashed against their pro-Hamas peers.
The one unknown that might reverse this growing probability for disaster -- the one factor that could save us from an increasingly certain Biden defeat -- is the women's vote. This is rightfully mobilized to near-revolutionary fervor by the theocratic misogyny imposed by the Trumpites' state regimes and perpetuated by the Trumpite seizure of the federal judiciary, the latter an application of the strategy pioneered by the German Nazis. But if the women are convinced their ballots will be nullified by Trumpite anti-voter schemes -- perhaps due to the refusal of Biden to rigorously enforce the few remnants of the Voting Rights Act -- they too may refrain from voting, guaranteeing the transformation of the nation into the de facto Fourth Reich.
LB/1-18 May 2024
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