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

-30-

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.

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“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.

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“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.

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“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.)

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“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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Hillary Clinton's War of Extinction or Donald Trump's Holocaust: Either Way the United States Is Doomed

NO WRITING SPECIFICALLY for OAN this week – and my apology for the fact I unavoidably missed my self-assigned Thursday 20 October deadline – but it's been one hell of an interlude. First the National Weather Service forecast a “historically significant” hurricane-force storm for 15-16 October that alarmed some house-owning friends of mine enough they asked me to stay with them so that – should the weather have materialized as destructively as forecast – I would not have been subject to the post-Katrina horrors of survival in a low-income housing facility that would no doubt have been deliberately abandoned by our governmental overlords in (yet another) act of opportunistic genocide.

Spawned by Typhoon Songda, the storm veered away from Tacoma but inflicted major damage elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest.

Next there was the dreadful head-and-chest cold – the most debilitating cold I have had in years – I caught from a charmingly loquacious three-year-old, the youngest member of a two-child-plus-mother-and-father family who were also staying with my friends because the roof of the family's rental house had begun severe leakage just at the onset of the storm and the landlord's response, typical for tenants-have-no-rights Washington state, was the usual “fuck you if you don't like it move elsewhere.” Again my apology for the delay, but such is life amongst the lower quartiles of the 99 Percent.

That said, here below are links to eight Internet reports and comment-thread responses that may be of some significance in the final approach to this election in which we the people are asked by our capitalist overlords to make the impossible choice between the national doom of the new Holocaust proposed by the Republican Party's Donald Trump or the planetary doom of the thermonuclear apocalypse threatened by the Democratic (sic) Party's Hillary Clinton.

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Dennis Kucinich, the outspokenly pacifist, Left-leaning Ohio congressman whose seat was maliciously gerrymandered out of existence by Democratic (sic) and Republican collaborators, has penned a scathing denunciation of Hillary  entitled simply “War or Peace.” Originally appearing on the World Without War website,  where it is available in any number of languages including Russian and Chinese, it was surprisingly re-published by Reader Supported News, a nominally bold alternative website that since the Democratic (sic) National Convention has become disappointing for the censorious support it has provided Clinton, but now may finally be – or let us hope – returning to its former courageously open-minded self. Whatever, “War or Peace” is by far the best – that is, the most pointedly revealing and succinct – work of its kind this abysmal presidential campaign has yet generated:

The most consequential statement by Secretary Clinton...was her pronouncement that a no-fly zone over Syria could “save lives and hasten the end of the conflict,” that a no-fly zone would provide “safe zones on the ground,” was in “the best interests of the people on the ground in Syria” and would “help us with our fight against ISIS.”

It would do none of the above. A US attempt to impose a no-fly zone in Syria would, as Secretary Clinton once cautioned a Goldman Sachs audience, “kill a lot of Syrians,” and, according to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Dunford, lead to a war with Russia. If the US has not been invited into a country to establish a “no-fly zone” such an action is, in fact, an invasion, an act of war.

It is abundantly clear from our dark alliance with Saudi Arabia and our conduct in support of jihadists in Syria that our current leaders have learned nothing from Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya as we prepare to plunge head-long into the abyss of a world war.

THE ENSUING DISCUSSION,  inexplicably ignored for several hours by Hillary's disruptive legions of paid trolls, was thus fondly reminiscent of the mutually informative dialogues that characterized the pre-presidential-campaign RSN at its best. I contributed the following:

Frankly I think Hillary is truly mad – insane – with a combination of Goldwater Girl ambition (to be the first ever conqueror of Russia) and a fanatical vision of herself as the angel of death triggering the Christian Apocalypse (“better dead then Red” because this way – so they believe – all their sadistic god's chosen zealots go directly to heaven).

No, I am not exaggerating: read pages 272-277 of Jeff Sharlet's The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Governance (Harper: 2008), which expose Hillary's clandestine collaboration with Sam Brownback (and therefore presumably also with all the other JesuNazi fanatics in the fundamentalist leadership cabal).

Were she not herself a secret believer in the Christian “End Times” dogma, she would never have been accepted by Brownback and his ilk.

Moreover, were the cause of her war-mongering merely her debt to the military-industrial complex, she would want to perpetuate the profits generated by the new Cold War she and Obama have started. But instead – her intent undeniable – she wants thermonuclear Armageddon: that is, the end of all sentient life on this planet.

As I said, her warmongering proves she is insane: a homicidal maniac with her finger moving ever closer to the doomsday button.

And – yes – I am frankly terrified, many times more so than during the Cuban Missile Crisis: not for me, as I am old and chronically ill, but for all the world's children and young adults.

Later, in response to a fellow poster's observation Hillary is “deeply hypnotized by the patriarchal mindset,” I added my “hear, hear” of agreement: 

Were I a believer in alien visitation, which I most assuredly am not, I would have to regard the sudden imposition of patriarchy (via talking snakes, “divinely” inscribed tablets, burning bushes, fiery wheels, etc. ad nauseam) as the intergalactic equivalent of the smallpox-infested blankets with which European Christians began the destruction of the American First Nations. In either case, the result is deadly: in the latter to the indigenous cultures of the American continents, in the former – unless we are saved by some genuine miracle – to all sentient life on this planet.

(If perhaps the UFO-philes are correct in their assumptions, then it follows logically the creatures who infected us with the toxins of patriarchy are some species of super-cockroach, since only roaches can survive in the thermonuclear wasteland the suicidal madness of patriarchy now threatens to make real.)

All of which, whether one rejects or accepts the notion of extraterrestrial intervention, raises the most valid question of this entire election: who – or what – does Hillary Clinton truly serve?

And no, I am not being the least bit facetious.

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Stephen Eric Bronner, a political science professor at Rutgers University, acknowledges in his “Our Hillary” she stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders and represents a dire threat to world peace. But he claims she will “support equal pay for equal work, a woman’s right to choose, civil liberties...an attack on Citizens United...fund Planned Parenthood, restrict gun sales, and inject a degree of civility into a polarized environment. There is also,” Bronner asserted, “symbolic importance in electing a woman to the highest office,” never mind her presidency could in fact mean the end of all life on earth. Hence Bronner insists “any rational person (should) vote for Hillary.”

I RESPONDED ACCORDINGLY:  Hillary's feminism is entirely bogus, a Big Lie to win the votes of identity-politics zealots and (tragically misinformed) women.

The truth is that Hillary clandestinely collaborates with Sam Brownback and others of his JesuNazi ilk for “tunneling beneath...the wall between church and state” (Sharlet, ibid., page 275).

In other words – again the difference between her public and private positions – Hillary is a closet theocrat, a secret fanatic intent on imposing the Christian version of Sharia on the United States, complete with zero-tolerance prohibitions of abortion, extra-marital sex, homosexuality, trans-sexuality and gay marriage (which let us not forget she publicly opposed until she changed her public position in 2013).

As to her private position, since she still regularly attends prayer meetings with the Family, we can assume it is at least as hostile to women and sexual minorities as it was prior to 2013.

Relevant links providing additional data on Hillary's 24-year association with The Family and its unabashed reverence for Adolf Hitler are here,  here,  and here.

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“Plutocratic Forces Crippled Democracy, And Why It’s Up To Us To Fight Back” The following is an excerpt from Ralph Nader's new book, Breaking Through Power (City Lights: 2016). “In the 1920s, near the end of his spectacular career as our country’s most prominent fighter for working people, labor leader, presidential candidate, orator, and all-around progressive Eugene Debs was asked by a reporter: 'Mr. Debs, what do you regret the most in your lifelong struggle for justice?' Debs looked at him and replied: 'What do I regret the most? I regret that the American people can have almost anything they want under our Constitution, but they seem not to want much of anything at all.'”

MR. NADER, I responded, has written the best historical summation I have yet seen of how capitalism triumphed to become the most lethal tyranny in our species' history. Indeed he proves beyond argument the essence of capitalism is both genocide and ecocide. We should all salute him for his courageous text and salute Popular Resistance for the bravery required to publish it.

That said, what is tragically missing here, most assuredly not from Mr. Nader's text but obviously, just as Eugene Debs observed, from the USian majority's will, is any truly effective spirit of resistance. Now, with USian fascism an undeniable reality, only the smallest minorities – most of them non-white – are sufficiently disciplined to believe and act upon the notion “It's Up To Us To Fight Back.”

Meanwhile the vast USian majority is obviously so utterly subjugated they in their craven submissiveness are increasingly indistinguishable from the “Good Germans” whose submission to Adolf Hitler led to our species' deadliest war to date. And now, in the likely outcome of the 2016 presidential election, we the (methodically disempowered) people are being led by an unabashed tyrant into a war from which there will be no survivors save cockroaches..

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“Extremist Militias Recruiting in Fear of Clinton Winning Election, Activists Say: Dwindling services lead to a sense of abandonment. The right can easily step in and provide both a clear political narrative to explain this, and a set of simple-seeming solutions...'The Patriot movement is attracting people who feel disenfranchised...The same dynamic has been driving the election.'”

MY RESPONSE WAS blunt and to the point: There would be no “Extremist Militias” had the Democratic (sic) Party not betrayed the 99 Percent by becoming the party of forcible-disarmament Republicans.

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“Half of US Adults Are Recorded in Police Facial Recognition Databases, Study Says:” Whether they are suspects or not, “about half of all Americans are pictured in a digital 'perpetual line-up,'  composed of databases handled either by the FBI or local police departments, the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law Center finds in a new study published Tuesday.”

MY (PREDICTABLE) RESPONSE: How many times must it be said? The ONLY reason for the uniformed police and the secret police to have this technology is to facilitate mass arrests.

Wake up, people! THINK. What does that technology – particularly in combination with Total Surveillance – tell us about the the intentions of our overlords?

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“Black Children Punished for Anthem Protests: After young 11 and 12-year-boys of the Beaumont Bulls football knelt during the (national) anthem to protest police violence against Black youth, their local executive board canceled their entire football season, suspended the coaching staff, and threatened to arrest their parents if they attended any future games, practices or events.”

I HAD NO comment – what could I possibly add to this report beyond pointing out it is yet another defining moment in the USian Empire – but I post it here because a friend rightfully sent it to me and asked me to disseminate it to as many persons as possible.

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New York Police Sergeant Shoots Dead Mentally-Ill Black Woman: In the latest incident of police killings of Black people in the U.S., a New York officer Tuesday evening shot and killed 66-year-old Deborah Danner, who was mentally ill, because she was waving a baseball bat at him to which he responded with deadly force instead of following protocol and firing his taser gun to neutralize her.

NOT MUCH TO say in response to this atrocity either, save to point out its similarity to a notorious incident that occurred while I still lived and worked in the City:

Sounds like another Eleanor Bumpurs case.  And I would bet it has exactly the same outcome. 

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“Watchdog: EPA Action to Protect Flint Residents From Lead Was Delayed 7 Months: The Environmental Protection Agency had the authority and information to issue an emergency order protecting residents of Flint, Mich., from lead-tainted water a full seven months  before it did so, an EPA internal investigation has concluded. 'It is clear that EPA intervention was delayed,' the report from the EPA's inspector general states.”

SAID I: ANOTHER classic example of how the Obama Regime “protects” cities with African-American majority populations – with exactly the same genocidal opportunism we saw demonstrated in the Bush Regime's post-Katrina “protection” of New Orleans.

Where then – from the perspective of those of us who are black, Hispanic, First Nations or merely chronically impoverished – is there any difference, particularly in the body count, between what the Democratic (sic) Party does to us and what the Republican Party does to us?

Really, what does it matter who wins the White House, the wanna-be Hitler named Trump or the wanna-be Hitler named Hillary? We the (lower-income) People are dead either way.

LB/23 October 2016