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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Postmortem; DAPL Escalation; Gratitude for a Pivotal Gift

DESPITE ALL THE intensified and now obviously never-to-be-diminished nastiness spewing from the Hillaryites, the one certainty about President Elect Donald Trump is that we cannot yet be certain what sort of president he will be.

As I emailed a profoundly distraught friend early this morning, Trump's acceptance speech was a model of reconciliation – and no I am not being sarcastic. He said, in essence, that he intends be president "for all Americans," and that he wants to befriend  any nation who will befriend us.

Shortly after the president-elect had spoken, RT (which had provided what was by far the most professional election-night coverage), reported that – as Western European leaders were still dithering about in shock  and horror  – Russian Premier Vladimir Putin had sent Trump a message of congratulations,  the first national leader to do so.

Putin's reaction means I can sleep much better tonight. Take it from me – because I was part of the last Civil Rights Movement – it is a helluva lot easier to fight domestic racism than it is to stop global war-mongering: in which context note the (temporary) successes of the Civil Rights Movement versus the permanent debacles of Vietnam, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan etc. ad nauseam.

It is something of an aside, but in defense of the individual USian soldier, Marine, sailor and air-person, – and bearing in mind I was once a U.S. Regular Army soldier myself (active duty 1959-1962; reserves 1963-1965) – it should be noted a major part of the blame for our now-obviously permanent inability at conventional warfare is the fact that under capitalism, military equipment is designed for maximum profit rather than maximum battlefield efficiency. The classic example is the current U.S. service-rifle, the M-16 and its newest variant the M-4 carbine, each so notorious for fatal malfunctions it is often “lost” on the battlefield and replaced by AK-47s taken from enemy dead. The AK-47 and its successor the AK-74 – like all Sino-Soviet equipment – is designed to kill the enemy rather than to fatten the bank accounts of obscenely wealthy military-industrial profiteers and their bureaucratic collaborators.

Thus, despite the USian Empire's permanent-war mentality and militarily aggressive war-dependent capitalism, U.S. troops have not won a conventional war since 1950, when they conquered North Korea. But they were then battled into headlong retreat when the Chinese, employing Sun Tzu's principle of “when near, make it appear you are far away,” infiltrated 300,000 combat-seasoned soldiers across the Yalu River into North Korea, launched a surprise offensive along the entire front and sent United States and United Nations troops fleeing for their lives. The result, after the Chinese took back North Korea and returned it to Kim Il Sung, was the (oft-violated) armistice of 1953, which remains in effect. Clearly as embittered by the Empire's endless failures at conventional warfare as Sen. (“Nuke Hanoi”) Barry Goldwater was, Goldwater Girl Hillary unquestionably intended to use nukes to compensate for the now-notorious U.S. inability to win at conventional warfare – never mind the result would exterminate our species and kill the planet as well. That's why so many people, I among them, were legitimately terrified by Hillary's ever-more-obvious intent to start World War III, quite possibly with an unprovoked thermonuclear attack on the Russian Motherland.

But neither could I bear the thought of a Trump presidency and its threatened Holocaust against African-American, Hispanic, First Nations, Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transsexual-Queer, Communist, socialist, anarchist and libertarian peoples – not to mention the Christian jihad against female sexual freedom promised by its opposition to abortion and birth control. Hence I voted for Jill Stein, literally – as I said in a comment-thread post repeated below – so I could die with a clear conscience in another manifestation of Christian doctrine, Hillary's intended “better-dead-than-Red” enactment of the biblical End-Times Apocalypse.

Prior to Hillary's malicious and undoubtedly criminal theft of the Democratic (sic) Party's nomination from Sen. Bernie Sanders, I was of course a Sanders supporter. But Sanders betrayed us, becoming in the end a dedicated Hillaryite, thereby – or so I suspect – reducing his future political significance to absolute zero. The Democratic (sic) Party has in all probability similarly doomed itself. 

As Robert Parry of Consortium News wrote earlier this morning, (i)n the end, Hillary Clinton became the face of a corrupt, arrogant and out-of-touch Establishment, while Donald Trump emerged as an almost perfectly imperfect vessel for a populist fury that had bubbled beneath the surface of America...voters chose him in part because they felt they needed a blunt instrument to smash the Establishment that has ruled and mis-ruled America for at least the past several decades. It is an Establishment that not only has grabbed for itself almost all the new wealth that the country has produced but has casually sent the U.S. military into wars of choice, as if the lives of working-class soldiers are of little value.

By his use of the euphemism “Establishment,” Parry seemingly hoped to give British respectability to what in the post-Occupy USian homeland are more correctly known as the One Percent and their Ruling Class vassals – the malevolently greedy politicians, bureaucrats, generals, police chiefs, academics, religious leaders and mainstream-media propagandists who, as the Oberführers of capitalist governance, oversee its efficiency in assuring maximum power and unlimited profit for our overlords, total subjugation for everyone else.

Interestingly, though Consortium News has often joined in the protests  against Barack Obama 's self-proclaimed presidential power to order the murder of anyone  – U.S. citizens included, Parry makes no mention of this policy as a possible post-election factor. Let us hope it is not; the USian reputation for banana-republic politics, which dates to 22 November 1963 but is underscored by Obama's nullification of the U.S. Constitution,  is already damning enough.

Were I Parry's editor, I would have insisted he add three additional elements to his analysis.

One is the irrefutable statistical proof that non-Ruling Class USians are in truth as politically powerless  as medieval serfs or antebellum slaves. While the Moronic Majority are far too ignorant and reflexively anti-intellectual to understand the statistical proof of their ever-worsening plight or the ever-more-obvious fact its only lasting remedy is the permanent overthrow of capitalism, they most assuredly understand – as Parry correctly reported – its day-to-day financial realities, the suffering and death of which Trump promises to ameliorate. But Parry's report was most assuredly weakened by the absence of the statistical corroboration.

On another element of the same topic of the 99 Percent's powerlessness, the report was also weakened by omission of the fact many people my own age – including most of my 90 neighbors in the low-income senior housing complex in which I dwell – are painfully aware that in the notoriously dishonest difference between Hillary's “public” and “private” policies (the latter including the austerity promises she secretly makes to her One Percent masters), lurks her intent to continue the slow-motion genocide of the devastating but mostly unpublicized cuts Obama and the Democratic (sic) Party in general have made in Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps.

Two is the equally irrefutable proof the white segment of the Moronic Majority is reflexively, even malevolently racist – albeit often unconsciously so. This evidence is in post-Hurricane-Katrina studies by the Pew Foundation, perhaps the most credible of the USian polling organizations. Quoth a 2005 Pew report:

(B)lacks and whites draw very different lessons from the tragedy. Seven-in-ten blacks (71%) say the disaster shows that racial inequality remains a major problem in the country; a majority of whites (56%) say this was not a particularly important lesson of the disaster. More striking, there is widespread agreement among blacks that the government’s response to the crisis would have been faster if most of the storm’s victims had been white; fully two-thirds of African Americans express that view. Whites, by an even wider margin (77%-17%), feel this would not have made a difference in the government’s response.

Given that the victims of racism should be the sole source of any definition of what racism is, given also how 77 percent of the whites arrogantly dismissed the blacks' post-Katrina grievances, it seems to me the implicit racism is undeniable.

(Disclosure: my own hostile encounters with racism include a plethora of nasty white reactions to the fact that, over the years, I had two black girlfriends, and of course the vindictive fury of Guy L. Smith, editor and publisher of The Knoxville Journal, that after my arrest in a 1963 civil-rights incident severely crippled my journalistic career-prospects; the same arrest prompted a venomous outpouring of hostility from professional colleagues, alleged friends, other fellow students, one of my four half-sisters and several maternal relatives. And let us not forget the Ku Klux Klan's subsequent efforts to murder me in retaliation for my resistance to the racist agendas of The Journal, The Knoxville News-Sentinel and most especially the University of Tennessee.)

Thus it seems to me the white USian population is no less racist than, say, the 1930s Germans were anti-Semitic. Thus too, when Trump began spouting racist invective, I concluded he was verbalizing the hitherto closeted and/or officially denied racism of Moron Nation whites, and on that basis predicted he would win the election. As a friend e-mailed me last night, “Fuck. You were right.”

The third element in Trump's victory is the methodically conditioned and thus truly limitless USian fear of material loss, a bone-deep cowardice that is easily mustered by our overlords to eternally prohibit even the mildest amelioration of capitalist depredation. As I emailed to another friend last night, “the problem – as common in the countryside as in the towns and cities – is that we are all taught from birth that our only real identity is in our material possessions. Hence we are terrified to lose them; hence too anytime that loss is threatened, we as a nation react with infinite savagery. Though I understood this dynamic from a very early age, I also scorned it, not recognizing the universality and literal bottomlessness of the associated fear until my own material possessions – i.e., the 'Dancer' manuscript and all the rest of my writing and photography – were taken from me by the 1983 fire. As a result I was utterly destroyed – destroyed forever and beyond repair – by their loss. This is, I believe, an extremely important lesson in how the psychic-vampire function of capitalism – especially aided as it is in so many USians by the sadistic opiate of Abrahamic religion – keeps us enshackled.”

Trump, therefore – in exactly the same way Hitler was unquestionably the ultimate expression of post-Versailles Germanism – is unquestionably the ultimate expression of post-New-Deal “Americanism,” whatever that may bode.

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I WROTE FOUR comments on the Reader Supported News website since my last post here on OAN, on 29 October. (Yes last week I entirely missed my self-imposed mid-week deadline; I had momentarily forgotten the horrendous amount of time consumed by running – hobbling, actually – first-of-month errands without an automobile; even with a ride to the supermarket provided by a friend, what used to take me one day by car now takes at least five days – often more – by bus.) In any case three of my RSN comments focus on pre-election issues; one is reprinted in full below; the others are merely titled, described by a few sentences and linked for the sake of the record. The fourth is a denunciation of the escalating war against the Dakota Access Pipeline protesters, also reprinted. And there was one other post I'm printing in totality, a short essay that began as a comment on a Chris Hedges piece published by Popular Resistance but – as if by visitation of the Muse – unexpectedly, even involuntarily turned into an expression of gratitude for a long-long-ago, far-far-away and profoundly influential gift from a young woman named Thias Smedley, who was as lovely as her given name, which is pronounced Tie-yeese, accent on the last syllable.

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The Real Clinton Email Scandal Is That a Bullshit Story Has Dominated the Campaign: Some time ago, Hillary Clinton and her advisers decided that the best course of action was to apologize for having used a personal email address to conduct government business while serving as secretary of state. Clinton herself was, clearly, not really all that remorseful about this...Eventually aides prevailed upon her to express a greater degree of regret, which they hoped would lay the issue to rest. It did not. Instead, email-related talk has...influenced public perceptions of her in an overwhelmingly negative way. July polling showed 56 percent of Americans believed Clinton broke the law by relying on a personal email address with another 36 percent piling on to say the episode showed “bad judgments” albeit not criminality.

My response was to repeat something I have already said many times, and will say once more for those who have not voted:

“The choice our overlords offer us is very simple: either Hillary Hitler (who believes she can top Adolf Hitler, Bonaparte, Charles XII of Sweden, the Teutonic Knights, the Mongols and the Persians in being the first-ever conqueror of Russia), or Donald Hitler, who promises to persecute African American, Hispanic, First Nations, LGBTQ and Leftist peoples.”

“Put even more simply...a vote for Hillary Hitler is a vote for World War III, thermonuclear apocalypse and the extermination of our species, while a vote for Donald Hitler is a vote for a new Holocaust.

“Which is precisely why I voted for Jill Stein. That way, in that final millisecond of consciousness as I am turned into radioactive vapor, I won't be blaming myself for having voted to turn our Mother Earth into a radioactive cinder.

“Yes, it truly is that simple.”

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Obama Is Pathetic on Human Rights in North Dakota (By William Boardman) – The President gave lip service to “the traditions of the first Americans.” He didn’t mention treaties between sovereign nations, of course, because he’s not about to break with the traditions of the second Americans: that such treaties are only a means to a genocidal end and aren’t to be taken seriously by the United States of exceptional, manifestly destined Americans whenever such treaties interfere with what the US wants. That’s what “properly attentive” means historically. Freely translated, “properly attentive” means “make a show of peace talk, then roll over them with whatever force necessary after it’s too late to affect the election.” The legal mind is nothing if not properly attentive to elegant turns of phrase in its unyielding hypocrisy.

“I think Mr. Boardman should have used much stronger language. 'Pathetic' is a bird with a broken wing, a child burned by USian napalm, and most assuredly not the exemplar of lies, corruption and genocide (whether by drone or austerity) who – thanks in tiny measure to my own two unforgivably optimistic votes – now inhabits the White House. But because I myself am a professional writer and editor, I understand Mr. Boardman's problem. The only truly accurate description of Obama is 'evil,' but – due mostly to the atrocities committed by Abrahamic religion – that noun is no longer fashionable.”

“You (on RSN) are all too kind in your denunciations of this most malevolent of presidents. Here we see the true legacy of 'change we can believe in,' the most maliciously premeditated Big Lie ever told by a presidential candidate, the prelude to his years-in-the-planning shape-shift from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer.

“His intent – now in North Dakota proven to be what the far Right has claimed from the beginning – is obviously the reduction of the entire USian 99 Percent to the inescapable powerlessness and degradation that is the eternal lot of the (White Exceptionalist) Empire's African-American and Hispanic subjects, and even harsher subjugation for First Nations peoples – this so he can gleefully point to the Standing Rock Sioux and say 'see how I made their lives even worse, so don't you others dare complain.'

“It is indeed 'change we can believe in': change from less brutal charade of representative democracy to the overt savagery of unabashed fascism. And because there is no force on this planet capable of stopping the USian neo-Reich, the casualties are only beginning. Mark my word, the cops and soldiers and private-security stormtroopers – every one a wanna-be serial killer (and most of them already kill-hardened in the Middle East) – will soon be firing for lethal effect, just as occurred at Kent State University and Jackson State College. The propaganda preparation is already underway. And the orders are no doubt coming from the Betrayer himself.”

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Spiritual Blackout in America: Election 2016 (By Cornel West) – (T)he neofascist catastrophe called Donald Trump and the neoliberal disaster named Hillary Clinton are predictable symbols of our spiritual blackout.

Quoth I: “While the leaders are certainly as much to blame as the masses, don't forget that (precisely as happened in Nazi Germany), it is the USian masses' obscenely capitalist, lockstep conformist selfishness – each USian's psychopathically craven terror of suddenly having even one penny less than the proverbial Joneses – that has fueled the transition from limited democracy to zero-tolerance plutocratic tyranny. And – again like the Nazi Germans – as they have sown, so shall they be reaped.

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Animosity Towards Clinton Runs Deep at the FBI (Guardian UK) – Deep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI, multiple bureau sources have told the Guardian, spurring a rapid series of leaks damaging to her campaign just days before the election.

“Has it occurred to anyone else we are perhaps witnessing the opening moves of a soft coup by factions of the Ruling Class who are rightfully terrified by Hillary's (Goldwater Girl/Christian fundamentalist) intent to bring about the Apocalypse?”

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American Irrationalism (By Chris Hedges) – There is no shortage of signs of impending environmental catastrophe, including the melting of the polar ice caps and the rise of atmospheric carbon to above 400 parts per million... We are led to succumb to the racism, allure of white supremacy and bigotry that always accompany a culture in dissolution.

“Chris Hedges' 'American Irrationalism' is a protest so powerful it is strongly reminiscent of Allen Ginsberg's epic Howl, to which I was introduced by a keenly perceptive fellow University of Tennessee student named Thais Smedley whom I met, seemingly by random chance, as we were walking from opposite directions on a campus sidewalk.”

“It was 1959, when possession of the Howl text anywhere in the South was a felony.

“Thais was a senior bound for graduate school, I a 19-year-old freshman soon to run out of college money and enlist in the Regular Army to fulfill the six-year military obligation the Empire imposed on all save the most financially privileged of the draft-era's males. But on that hot May early afternoon I encountered Thais – whose raven hair fell below her shoulders in what was then a gesture of bohemian defiance, who was clad in the more subtle rebelliousness of a white linen blouse with matching white shorts and bare-legged black leather t-strap sandals and whose appearance thus drew from me the spontaneous salute of a memorably face-stretching grin – my poverty-imposed denouement was yet five months away in the unknown future. Thais grinned back, and now suddenly I was wealthy with the unanticipated gift of her presence, enchanted by her soft-voiced eloquence, smitten by the uniqueness of her beauty and flattered by the attention of a woman three years older than I.

“But I was also lost, lost in the dark miasma of contradictions between the undefined but nevertheless implicitly Marxian values with which I had been raised – my father had been a Communist during the 1930s – and the quagmire of incipient fascism in which the anti-intellectualism and lockstep conformity of the Joe McCarthy realm seemed intent on drowning me.

“Thais somehow sensed my existential quandary, invited me to her dwelling – with its painted stone walls and potted plants it was a study in green and white, the brightest, most airy, most welcoming basement apartment I have ever entered – and there we talked for perhaps two hours, during which she fed me a bowl of Campbell's beef noodle soup, gave me her copy of Howl – 'I think this will speak to you,' she said; 'and I don't need it anymore' – then oh-so-gently sent me on my way so she could continue packing for her move elsewhere to another university.

“She was right, of course; even at 19, I somehow knew better than to ignore the perceptions of a woman who, like some personification of the Muse, had momentarily appeared as if by magic in my life. Ginsberg did indeed speak to me, and Howl was for me the doorway to a new consciousness, an eventual synthesis of my father's Marxism and my own outrage at the casually brutal ignorance of the nyekulturniy state I have since come to damn as 'Moron Nation.' The key that unlocked it – the mechanism of epiphany for which I am forever grateful to Thais – is Howl's opening line: 'I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness...'

“Let us therefore hope Hedges' opening line, 'There is no shortage of signs of impending catastrophe...' awakens as many in the millennial generation as Ginsberg's words awakened in mine; let us also hope Doctor Margaret Flowers' gift of 'American Irrationalism' here via Popular Resistance is as pivotally influential on the multitudes as Thais Smedley's gift of Howl was to me 57 years ago.”

Later, in a dialogue with another reader, I added a defense of Hedges:

“(He) is one of the very few who dare tell us how dire our circumstances truly are. Yes this can cause despair, but if that's what it takes to awaken Moron Nation to what it has done to itself and is now doing not just to our entire species but to our entire planet, so be it. With its total surveillance technology, its domestic policy of slow-motion genocide (to exterminate all of us who are no longer exploitable for profit), and its doomsday foreign policy, the USian Empire is in hideous truth the most malevolently oppressive regime in our species' history. I know this sounds pessimistic, but it is in fact the opposite. As Sun Tzu so clearly understood, if we are to evolve an effective response, we must grasp the totality of our enemy's (oppressive) capabilities and (genuinely evil) intentions. And because I do believe we are capable of evolving such a response, beneath my apparent pessimism lies a profound optimism.”

LB/9 November 2016

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Dispatches from Tyranosauric Petroleum's Global Empire

AGAIN I DID no writing specifically for OAN this week, and again – this time due to voluntary albeit unavoidable interruptions – I missed my self-assigned deadline. But the comments I posted elsewhere on the Internet are nevertheless perhaps worth reading.

***

“DAPL Mississippi Stand Update: Protesters Arrested on False Pretenses and Illegally Searched”: The head, like the organization's name, is written with the customary millennial contempt for precise language and is confusing enough it fooled a Reader Supported News editor into captioning the accompanying photograph as having been made in Mississippi when in fact it was taken far to the north in Illinois. The “Mississippi” in question is the river, not the state. Nor is the acronym DAPL – Dakota Access Pipeline – defined anywhere in the text, an omission corrected in the picture caption by the same RSN editor who got the locale wrong. But the story itself  and the accompanying video are much clearer – and far more troubling than sloppy syntax and geographical confusion:

“...Two of our comrades, Cameron Kennedy and James McBride, were arrested on false pretenses on the East bank of the Mississippi River yesterday afternoon near the drill pad in Illinois that bores underneath the river...DAPL private security spotted (Cameron Kennedy) and James (McBriide) on a public road near the linchpin drilling operation and within three minutes they were surrounded and blocked by multiple Hancock county squad cars as well multiple DAPL security cars...Cameron denied consent to a vehicular search by Police, but... Private DAPL security guards began conducting the search (as)...Hancock Sheriff Scott Bentzinger...said, "They are going to do what they want." These are the first known DAPL related arrests in Illinois...The money of big oil has seeped into small towns and counties across the United States and has effectively hired the police as enforcers of the Dakota Access agenda.”

HERE, I NOTED, THE EMPIRE IS OMINOUSLY HONEST: More than any confrontation in my lifetime (1940-201?), the Dakota Pipeline struggle reveals the true, unabashedly racist/fascist (actually neo-Nazi) nature of today's United States.

Thus we learn the valiant efforts of our kinfolk who died or were wounded or otherwise suffered to save humanity from the original Nazi threat were all in vain.

It also demonstrates the utter futility of peaceful protest – as if, as in Harry Turtledove's alternative-history short story, the German Nazis won World War II, conquered the world, and when Gandhi attempted peaceful protest against their brutality, they killed him and all his followers – just as in the real world the Nazis exterminated all of the German pacifist White Rose Society.

All we can do now is recall the words of another man murdered by USian fascists, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who in a comment increasingly applicable to the USian Empire and its own unique brand of Nazism, warned that “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.”

It will not happen in my lifetime, and probably not in the lifetime of any person now living. The plutocracy – made genuinely omnipotent by its technology – is infinitely more powerful than the feudal order that tyrannized Europe for 1,441 years, from the fall of Rome until the Russian Revolution.

But eventually – if our species survives capitalism – we may evolve a revolutionary ideology with enough discipline to triumph.

WHAT I DID NOT SAY, because I was approaching the 1500-character limit that governs RSN posts, is the DAPL authorities' use of so-called “private security” as goon-squads parallels the often-deadly practice of 19th and 20th century capitalists and thus presages the same sorts of capitalism-in-action vigilante violence exemplified by the lynching of Frank Little,  by the Ludlow Massacre  and by the Battle of Blair Mountain,  known locally as the Logan County War.

A partial listing of the men and women murdered in the USian Empire for daring to challenge our capitalist overlords is here.  And let us not forget to add the name of Karen Silkwood to this roll-call of the heroic proletarian dead.

There is also the fact, relevant to any such discussion as this, that history shows successful revolutions whether peaceful (Gandhi) or violent (Marx, Lenin et al) have four prerequisites (scroll down),  none of which are present in today's USian Empire.

OTHER SIGNIFICANT ELEMENTS I did not have the space to include (1)-that Hillary's silence on the DAPL struggle is yet another indication of her typically-capitalist contempt and hatred for all of us in the 99 Percent; (2)-that Obama's refusal to halt the obvious violations of First Nations' treaty rights and protesters' constitutional rights is yet another confirmation of the tyrannical capitalist agenda evident in his federalization and militarization of local police into a de facto national police force; (3)-that the apparent equipping of the pipeline goons with automatic weapons, toxic gas and other military equipment prohibited civilians is – if indeed it is occurring as alleged – a flagrant violation of federal gun laws that exemplifies the Nazi-like realities of capitalist governance (absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent and its vassals; total subjugation for all the rest of us); (4)- that governmental use of private security forces as goon squads parallels Germany's use of the freikorps and later the Nazi SA   to enforce its tyrannies; and (5)-that an identical maximizing of the 99 Percent's defenselessness – indeed our reduction to mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood – is, like Hitler's forcible disarmament of Germany's Jews, socialists and Communists, the sole purpose behind Hillary's promised campaign of forcible civilian disarmament.

*********

“Bernie Sanders: I'm Going to Make Sure Hillary Clinton Implements Progressive Policies: Sen. Bernie Sanders, a loyal soldier for Hillary Clinton  since he conceded the Democratic presidential nomination in July, plans to push liberal legislation with like-minded senators with or without Clinton’s support if she is elected — and to aggressively oppose appointments that do not pass muster with the party’s left wing.”

NOT SO, SAID I: Sanders' belief he can wrest “progressive” concessions from the war-mongering Goldwater Girl Hillary – whose fanatically fundamentalist Christian “Angel of Death” persona is revealed via her intent to start World War III – is the pre-doomsday equivalent of the rich German Jews' fatally deluded belief their wealth would reduce Hitler's antisemitism to mere posturing...

Hillary with her Goldwater Girl arrogance has the same morally imbecilic “USA uber alles” mentality as the generals (President) Kennedy defied.

Remember it was Goldwater, an Air Force reserve major general and thus one of Curtis LeMay's proteges, who wanted to nuke North Vietnam, which would have triggered instant war with the Soviet Union.

Clearly, Hillary has some twisted sense of loyalty to her original ideological role model and is bent on fulfilling his apocalyptic fantasies of global conquest, never mind the USSR is long gone and there is no alleged provocation by today's Russia that even remotely approaches that of the Soviet thermonuclear missiles in Cuba. (Which, by the way, were emplaced in retaliation for US emplacement of anti-Soviet thermonuclear missiles in Turkey.)

Apropos LeMay, without whose patronage Goldwater would never have been made a general, he “argued that the United States should launch 5,000 missiles on the Soviet Union...During the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, LeMay wanted to bomb Cuba.” 

Obviously, like LeMay and Goldwater, Hillary believes the US can conquer not only Russia but China as well, never mind the millions who would die as a result. Another belief undoubtedly driving Hillary is that most of humanity is 'surplus' – i.e., not exploitable for profit – and should thus be exterminated.

Such are the genocidal inputs that form the core of Hillary's apocalyptic ideology.

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“Letter From El Salvador: 'I Was Jailed for a Miscarriage': nside the women’s prison in El Salvador, set on the outskirts of the capital in a dangerous neighborhood called Ilopango, at least 21 women are serving sentences for abortions they say they never had. All of these women claim they are jailed for miscarrying their babies. 

ALAS I WOULD EXPECT NO BETTER: Abrahamic religion – in this instance Christianity – and its misogynistic, sadistic god in action: not just the opiate of the masses, but the electric cattle prod that subjugates the masses as well.

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“JILL STEIN: Many of our readers are strongly advocating the candidacy of Jill Stein. The problem is that, polling at 2% nationally, she has no chance whatsoever of being elected. In fact, former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson, running under the Libertarian banner, has triple the supporters Stein has, and he doesn’t even appear to be totally coherent. So it isn’t really a candidacy  at all that Stein’s supporters are promoting, it’s more of an ideal or a lecture on political responsibility. The candidacy provides the platform for the ideology.”

MY RESPONSE: Quoth Mr. Ashe: “Painting the Democratic candidate as the devil to achieve those ends is ludicrous.”

Alas, based on her oft-declared intent to start World War III (and thereby not only exterminate our species but reduce the entire planet to a radioactive death-sphere inhabitable only by cockroaches), Hillary truly IS “the devil.”

Worse, actually, because in the Abrahamic theologies (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), it's not the devil who inflicts the Apocalypse; its their sadistic god. With whom we know Hillary identifies because of her long association with the Family.

(Again the damning relevance of Jeff Sharlet's work, The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power [Harper: 2008]. Read it, acknowledge the endless nightmare Hillary and her fanatical fundamentalist co-conspirators intend to inflict on us all and be very, very, very afraid.)

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“As Election Day Nears, Military Hawks Circle To Promote New Wave Of War: Though the hawkish stance of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has been too often ignored  this election season, new reporting on Thursday highlights how her presumed win in November will likely usher in a more aggressive, bipartisan foreign policy in the Middle East and beyond.”

HAD I SPOKEN ALOUD, IT WOULD HAVE BEEN A SNARL: how many times must it be said before Moron Nation awakens to the apocalyptic truth? A vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for World War III, the thermonuclear extinction of our species and the reduction of Planet Earth to a radioactive death-sphere habitable only by cockroaches.

*********

“How Power Works: Heather Ann Thompson’s book Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy is a detailed study of the inner workings of America. The blueprint for social control employed before and after the crushing of the Attica revolt is the same blueprint used today to keep tens of millions of poor people, especially poor people of color, caged or living in miniature police states. Thompson meticulously documents the innumerable ways the state oppresses the poor by discrediting their voices, turning the press into a megaphone for government propaganda and lies, stoking the negative stereotypes of black people, exalting white supremacy, ruining the lives of people who speak the truth, manipulating the courts and law enforcement, and pressuring state witnesses to lie to obstruct justice. Her book elucidates not only the past but also the present, which, she concedes, is worse...Poor people of color have been robbed of the most elemental forms of justice and basic constitutional rights. But the state, in the age of deindustrialization, has no intention of stopping there. These forms of social control, so familiar to poor people of color, will bear upon all of us.”

TO MY APPLAUSE: Thus Mr. Hedges and Heather Ann Thompson confirm what has hitherto been denounced by ignorant or deluded pseudo-Leftists as a 'racist' notion: that the purpose of the Obama Administration's federalization and militarization of the local police and his mostly unreported but nevertheless devastating cuts in food stamps, Medicare. Medicaid and other elements of the socioeconomic safety net is the methodical reduction of impoverished or rebellious whites to the statutory wretchedness already imposed on the African-American, Hispanic and First Nations communities.

Meanwhile – now under obvious (and obviously clandestine) kill-orders – the federalized local police continue their campaign of murder against those minority communities – again blacks, Hispanics and First Nations – whose histories show they are most likely to rise up against the Empire's ever-intensifying savagery.

Such is capitalist governance in action: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals, total subjugation for all the rest of us – and death to any of us who dare resist.

(Thank you, Mr. Hedges and Ms. Thompson for daring to expose these hideous truths about what the United States has become, and thank you Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese for having the 24-karat chutzpah to publish their work. A clenched-fist salute to each of you.)

*********

“US Soldiers Told to Repay Thousands in Signing Bonuses From Height of War Effort: In most cases, when an employer pays a signing bonus to attract new workers, that payment is understood to be essentially unrecoverable. But the Pentagon has a different understanding — and it's ordering the California National Guard to claw back thousands of dollars  paid to soldiers who re-enlisted to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

HENCE MY SUGGESTION: The One Percenters and their Pentagon vassals who are behind this outrage need to remember what happened when Tsar Nicholas II pissed off most of the soldiers in the Russian Army and most of the sailors in the Russian Navy as well...

Veterans are NOT people to screw over.

Indeed the primary reason the military draft was ended was the huge fear by the One Percent and its Ruling Class the draft was training the revolution.

And now the pompous plutocrats are alienating the very soldiers they hired to keep themselves and their obscene wealth secure?

Astounding!

Maybe the Empire truly is teetering on the brink of collapse.

LB/27 October 2016


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