See How They Robbed Us When They Murdered the Kennedys

(So Began Their Boiled-Frog Reduction of Our Lives to Wretchedness)

 

“TV commentator Chris Matthews’ book, Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit, has been a best seller since it was released last October, but there’s a lot of important material that Matthews (deliberately) left out (to cover up Kennedy's progressive politics)...Martin Luther King was relying on Bobby to enter the race, and when he did, was overjoyed, saying he would make an outstanding president. RFK had King, Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta on his side...Why does Matthews continually ignore these points? If one thinks, as his employers at MSNBC do, that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are the liberal ideal, then what Bobby Kennedy represented in 1968 was (genuinely) radical...(and must therefore be suppressed).”

 

The following comment is a revised and expanded version of the thank-you note I posted on the comment-thread of James DiEugenio's above-linked "Distorting the Life of Bobby Kennedy," courageously published by Consortium News to refute Matthews' lies of omission:

We should all be grateful to Mr. DiEugenio for his fine work, which accurately describes the real Robert Francis Kennedy: the U.S. attorney general who repeatedly intervened on behalf the Civil Rights Movement, whose mostly unpublicized interventions I learned of as a civil rights activist in East Tennessee; the refreshingly enlightened senator from my home state of New York, whose unprecedented activism I would have endorsed with my vote had I not, in 1964, still been registered to cast my ballots in Tennessee; the RFK whose policies I sometimes (triumphantly) covered as a confident young reporter and editor in New York City and adjacent urban New Jersey; the "Bobby" whose presidential candidacy reached across racial lines to mobilize a larger and more solidarity-minded majority of the 99 Percent than ever before or since; the martyr whose assassination ended forever any rational hope the United States might someday forcibly reform predatory Capitalism at least enough to enable what was allegedly "our" nation to live up to its claims of egalitarian and humanitarian ideals.
  

That is one of the many reasons I have such scorn and contempt for the Hillaryite Democratic (sic) Party; I have long been outraged by the Democrats' sneaky efforts to hide the  magnitude of their treachery by maliciously portraying Senator Kennedy as far less progressive than he actually was.

 

Indeed this alone is perhaps the most effective tactic employed by the Democrats to disguise their morally imbecilic Neoliberal savagery; they rewrite the past to portray the Kennedys as oppression-tolerant masqueraders, lending credence to breathtaking Big Lies  of "change we can believe in" while obscuring the ever-deepening  wretchedness to which they are actually betraying us. 

But even these examples of oppression by deception do not excuse our appalling ignorance of history: our willfully embraced Moron Nation anti-intellectualism as demonstrated yet again by how even the  U.S. Left -- Pseudo-left and Real Left alike -- accepts these Hillaryite slanders as unquestionable truth, as if our national slogan were "self-deception is self-protection" or some other equally damning variant of 1984's "ignorance is strength."

Though Robert Kennedy was certainly no Marxist, he was nevertheless -- as Mr. DiEugenio so aptly reminds us -- our last hope of retaining the partial Working Class empowerment we had achieved via the (contextually) revolutionary socialism of New Deal economics...

(To read the rest, go here.)

Radically Revised to Include This Weekend's Updates: How the Always Brutal, Often Murderous Past of Capitalist U.S. Governance Enables Its Ever-More-Evil JesuNazi Present

If We Are to Understand How We Became Our Planet's Apocalypse Nation, We Must All Fearlessly Admit Our Blood-Drenched History 

(Editor's Note: Never before have I rewritten a published blog post as thoroughly as I have rewritten this one, a challenging process that reveals by the delays it imposed on publication the extreme, mostly emotional difficulty I had in verbally focusing on my chosen material. I have therefore, in embarrassment so acute it borders on mortification,  deleted the original version,  an act of revisionism unprecedented in all my years of blogging. I have also expanded the text to include this weekend's updates, thereby avoiding back-to-back publication of two separate posts. While this version is unquestionably better than its predecessor -- attentive readers will recognize its improvements as motivated entirely by sharpened focus rather than correction or retraction --  such re-evaluation is probably never truly complete. That's why I have no doubt I will many times more revisit the subject -- how we (and myself in particular) reflexively wrapped our experiences of ever-intensifying USian malevolence in shrouds of complacency -- a sin of which we are all to some extent guilty regardless of how raised any one of us might have imagined our consciousness to be. Meanwhile I offer my heartfelt apology for the original text's premature expostulation./LB)

"Robert Kennedy’s death, like the President's, was mourned as an extension of senseless violence; events moved on, and the profound alterations that these deaths…brought in the equation of power in America was perceived as random…. What is odd is not that some people thought it was all random, but that so many intelligent people refused to believe that it might be anything else. Nothing can measure more graphically how limited was the general understanding of what is possible in America."

Comment: again, as in my two preceding posts, we begin with never-avenged atrocities that define "what is possible" in the homeland of the U.S. Empire; again, as before, I take this approach because I am convinced we cannot truly comprehend the terminal magnitude of the horrors the United States is inflicting on ourselves, our species and our planet without first acknowledging at least some of the preceding outrages that regardless of the vehemence and constancy of our opposition nevertheless define us as citizens of the most wantonly murderous empire in all human history.

But this time I also confess my own guilt in acts of self-censorship that make me a telling example of how for years we the people reflexively adjusted, like the proverbial frog, to the stealthily imposed JesuNazism and fascism in general that is now bursting terribly into boil as demonstrated by our suddenly accelerated reduction to credit-card serfdom and for-profit prison slavery.  
    
Here too is my own belated Memorial Day eulogy for some of our more politically revealing dead and wounded -- belated because (given how the warmongers have perverted Decoration Day's original post-Civil-War "memory and tears" into a grotesque celebration of the Empire's conquer-the-world agenda) -- I had originally planned to ignore the holiday entirely.

(To read the rest, go here.)

Official Protection of Violently Racist, Often Murderous Cops Shows the World the True Magnitude of U.S. Nazi-Mindedness

Federally Militarized Police Add Middle-Class Minorities to Target List

“Another day, another black man violently assaulted by five rogue police officers for the ever-increasing crime of BWB (breathing while black). This time it was NBA player Sterling Brown...It’s hardly news that people of color are continually harassed, but what’s been making the news lately is the frequency with which upwardly mobile, middle-class people of color are being targeted. From the two black men waiting for a friend at a Philadelphia Starbucks, to a black Yale graduate student napping in her dorm’s common room, to three black women facing down seven cop cars and a helicopter as they checked out out of an Airbnb house they were renting...there is an overlooked long-lasting collateral damage to the black community’s faith in the promise of the American dream and the sinister effect on their children that is much worse than that single assault.”

See also: "I am speaking for Dontre Hamilton of Milwaukee, Laquan McDonald of Chicago, Stephon Clark of Sacramento, Eric Garner of New York and the list goes on...The common denominator in all of these (killings) has been racism towards the minority community...The lack of repercussions for the police officers involved in so many of these cases is...a slap in the face to the victims’ families and communities."

And this: "American police shoot and kill far more people than their peers in other countries...(but) are almost never prosecuted and convicted for use of force."

Plus this: "The technology giant Amazon is providing police agencies and private intelligence contractors in the United States with facial recognition and video tracking algorithms to (intensify) mass surveillance on the population."

Comment: I posted the above material as this weekend-update's lead story because, once again, we cannot comprehend the true horror of the Empire's domestic and foreign agendas without first examining the capabilities and intentions demonstrated by its ever-expanding catalogue of atrocities.  

These newest outrages -- clearly another expansion of the Empire's lifelong, 242-year history of hate-motivated, often genocidal persecution of non-whites -- are precisely what prove "American Democracy" to have never been more than a Big Lie. 

 

What further condemns the United States -- what defines it as a nation ever-more-dictatorially ruled by a multi-generation cabal of  Nazi-minded Capitalist overlords -- was first revealed...

(To read the rest, go here.) 

Finally, Mass Media Begins Waking Up to the JesuNazi Threat

 A Mainstream Magazine Warns of "Much Harder" Tyranny Ahead;  New Threats of War Give the Regime an Excuse to Abolish Our Rights 

(Note: much of the following was written before Trump's John-Bolton-inspired Thursday afternoon cancellation of the Korea talks, for which see "Trump Kills Korean Talks; World War III Threat Intensifies," below. I didn't make this dreadfully ominous development tonight's lead story for two reasons: one, because Mainstream Media has already covered it (albeit no doubt omitting the fact Pence threatened Kim Jong-Un with ending "like the Libyan model ended," i.e., with an agonizing death like Gaddafi's, by anal impalement; and two, because it is the ever-more-apparent malevolence of the Empire that reveals the magnitude of this crisis -- which means the sum of the proofs of malevolence are somewhat more telling than its latest exemplary incident./LB) 

  

AGAIN AS LAST WEEKEND I am compelled by circumstance to preface a newly released report with commentary rather than follow my usual practice of posting in the traditional reversed-pyramid form, new material first, old guy's remarks last. 

Even so, today's comment requires scarcely more than a single sentence expressing my profound thanks to The American Prospect  for finally daring to reveal, in mass-circulation form, how terrifyingly close the Trump/Pence Regime has already brought us to complete subjugation by white Christian  tyranny.

 

Though the near-daily manifestations of Trump/Pence Fascism are now regularly exposed even by the Mainstream Media propaganda apparatus, until American Prospect writer Adele M. Stan assembled these phenomena as parts of a jigsaw and discovered the horrific whole evidenced by the result, there was no widely circulated portrait of the breadth and depth of the regime's greater malignancy. Nor was there a widespread sense of these events as the potential birth-cells of something far more malignant -- so malignant most of us who did not personally experience our species' capacity for Pure Evil as in Nazi Germany or Pinochet's Chile cannot imagine what the regime might become or envision the death and suffering it could thereby inflict, whether in grotesque triumph or triumphant defeat.  But those results are now, with the near certainty of world war imposed on us by Trump's cancellation of the Korean talks, our species most probable future -- that is, should Earth somehow survive as anything more than a bug planet. Moreover it is all occurring precisely as Marx reasoned it would, which underscores as never before how Marxism is the only logic that explains our present circumstances, including why ours is the darkest most hopeless epoch in all our species' experience.

But Let Ms. Stan Tell the Story from This Point On...

"In every issue where America has made progress...the Trump administration is rolling back those gains with alarming speed. While it’s tempting to think of this regression as a return to an earlier time—a dirtier, more racist, more sexist, less compassionate America—it’s far worse than that. This is what authoritarianism looks like...In the course of the last two weeks, President Donald J. Trump and members of his administration made a series of announcements that the news media necessarily address individually: the separation of parents seeking asylum from their children in detention centers, the order to cut federal funding from reproductive health clinics that even dare to utter the word 'abortion,' the president’s demand that the Justice Department investigate the FBI for allegedly 'infiltrating' his presidential campaign for ostensibly political reasons...Taken together, however, these assaults and many others—including the apparent end of discrimination protections for LGBTQ people and the virtual abandonment of Justice Department consent decrees on police departments that have records of violating the civil rights of African American people—add up to groundwork laid for the imposition of a much harder form of authoritarianism likely planned for the near future."

 

Comment: No doubt because Prospect is a publication of the Left-leaning bourgeois rather than the True Left, Ms. Stan deftly avoids noting how, even before 22 November 1963, the Democratic (sic) Party was the main clandestine collaborator in the boiled-frog imposition of fascism on the United States. Indeed its very unobtrusiveness is what makes the Democrats' strategy for "rolling back" so much more effective than its far-more-brazen Republican counterpart. No doubt Ms. Stan's omissions  also explain why the editors of Common Dreams chose to reprint her text; CD is, after all,  a key voice of the Bernie Sanders movement, the primary goal of which is restoration of the New Deal -- i.e., once more positioning ourselves so the Capitalists can fuck us again.

It is here on the pseudo-Left, specifically in its undying support for Hillary Clinton, that we also glimpse what is undoubtedly the real reason for the Democratic (sic) Party's anti-Trump frenzy -- especially its new, always-kiss-the-secret-policeman's-ass adoration of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Even so, it may take us a moment to identify the Trump/Pence Regime's one most unforgivable sin. It is surely not Trump's  boorishness; I know of nothing in the cesspool of our modern  political effluent quite so boorish as Hillary's expression of sadistic glee over Gadaffi's agonizing death by anal impalement. 

Might it be, instead, that Trump and his henchmen have prematurely revealed the magnitude of manifest Evil that is Capitalism?  That their revelation is therefore as responsible for the mouth-frothing fury of the frog-boiling Democrats as it is for the ejaculatory joy of the pussy-grabbing Republicans? That in their loud and boastful relentlessness, the Republicans have revealed enough of the One Percent's ultimate agenda to rekindle thoughts of revolution? That they have re-ignited the relevance of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Mao Ze Dong, Ho Chi Minh  and Che Guevara? 

From the perspective of Hillary and her factional cronies, there could be no greater defeat; if my analysis is accurate, the Trump/Pence Regime's revelations flush at least 55 years of archly Machiavellian planning down the historical commode. These disclosures also ensure the transition from Big Lie "democracy" to unabashed tyranny will almost certainly be accompanied by exactly the sort of mass murder Hillary hoped her boiled-frog gradualism would avoid -- not because of any humanitarian impulse, but because death on that scale looks bad on the international Internet and suggests the realm in which occurs might be a "shithole" nation.

Especially after her Gaddafi cackle, I cannot doubt Hillary had also hoped there would be a sufficient number of school shootings and other such atrocities to compel the forcible disarmament of the entire U.S. civilian population. Obviously she knows that mandatory...

(To read the rest, go here.)

Hastily Suppressed Audits Suggest U.S. Government Can't -- or Won't -- Account for $21 Trillion in Unidentified Expenditures

One of the Now-Censored Reports Says the Army Lost Track of $6.5 Trillion in Fiscal 2015, a Sum 54 Times Greater Than the $120 Billion Army Budget Approved by Congress. Is This Inept Accounting? Or Is It Governance as Gangsterism, Complete with Under-the-Table Payoffs? 

DESPITE OUR NATIONAL MATHOPHOBIA -- and if the two remarkably courageous economics professors who authored this mind-blowing scoop-the-world report for the online 8 December 2017 issue of Forbes magazine are not disappeared by government agents -- these disclosures could evolve into the most devastating scandal in U.S. history. 

Yes, math is a big turn-off for many of us, but in this instance the numbers are too important to ignore. Their apparent message is so damning it literally enters the realm of the unthinkable.What the numbers suggest is the federal government is composed of out-of-control bureaucracies granted unlimited ability to print paper money and thereby elevated to veritable omnipotence by whichever cabal of plutocrats is secretly in command. 

To clarify what these numbers might be telling us, our best metaphor is organized crime. Imagine a seemingly legitimate business actually owned by a Cosa Nostra family, invariably in some field characterized by maximum cash flow and minimum documentation. (Who is to say how big that real estate commission truly was?) Typically such an enterprise serves two purposes. It provides its mafiosi with what are known as "income-tax jobs" -- apparently legal sources of income on which they pay the taxes by which they hope to deceive their Internal Revenue Service adversaries. But it also provides a cover for one or more big-money rackets the finances of which are many times larger than those of the legitimate business. Thus the operation necessitates two sets of books. One set records legitimate income and expenses and provides the basis for tax returns and the like. The other set, protected by the deadly code of omerta,  documents the operation's true finances. The difference between the two is often in millions, even billions of dollars.

What the two economists discovered -- initially in a U.S. Army Inspector General's report that was flushed down the Orwell hole almost as soon as one of the economists questioned it -- suggests the U.S. Government is doing the same sort of thing on a trillion-dollar scale. Which prompts two vital questions: 

Where did the Army get 54 times more money than Congress budgeted for it?

On what did the Army spend the money? 

In keeping with the other worst-of-all-possible-worlds disclosures that in this darkest epoch of our species' history continually monkey-wrench our individual and collective consciousness, it is not at all difficult for me to imagine the most icon-smashing, delusion-destroying answers: that the money came from those Capitalist plutocrats who behind the Big Lie of "American Democracy" are in fact our true overlords -- tyrants as omnipotent as Adolf Hitler, as sadistic as Reinhardt Heydrich and as morally imbecilic as Ted Bundy -- and that the money they gave the Pentagon was spent on murderously clandestine operations wherever they chose to advance the Empire's agenda of world conquest. 

Imagine Iran-Contra on an unimaginable scale. Did this indeed mark the reduction of the U.S. Government to the One Percent's global bag-man? Did such a function grow out of the government's alliance with the Mafia during World War II? Or is it far older, perhaps even dating to the revolution fostered in large measure by the fears of southern planters and northern bankers the British would outlaw slavery?  
   
As to the use of Meyer Lansky book-keeping by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, that too is easily explained: note once more the connections between the real estate industry and the mob (see again the links in my third paragraph, above).  For example, in New York City -- something I know from my years in journalism there and across the river in New Jersey -- it was customary to mark up construction budgets by at least 50 percent to cover the requisite payoffs to mobsters, officials and politicians. 

And what then might the breathtaking discoveries by economics professors Laurence Kotlikoff and Mark Skidmore actually mean? 

If my darkest suspicions are correct, these revelations tell us...

(To read the rest, go here.)

Mainstream Media Inadvertently Admits We're a Dictatorship

Newspaper Report Reveals How Secret Police, Military Rule the Nation

(Though the delay was unavoidable, again my apology for the tardy publication of this post.)

Thursday’s edition of The New York Times carries an extraordinary, 4,000-word report on the role of the FBI in the 2016 US presidential election. Whatever the intentions of those who produced, edited and approved this lengthy account, it gives a glimpse of an American political system in which the security services, and particularly the FBI and CIA, play a critical and even decisive role...(in tyrannizing) a deeply class-divided society, in which two political parties of the financial aristocracy do the bidding of a state apparatus of coercion and violence of almost unimaginable dimensions. 

    

Six Dems Show Party's True Colors, Give Torture-Queen Haspel Command of CIA
"'This was never just about Gina Haspel. This is about a nation that claims constantly to be exceptional and morally superior showing the world in clear terms that it supports torture and will never hold its own accountable.'"
See earlier story for more damning details: "In her testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on May 9, Haspel insisted that the CIA's interrogation program during the Bush administration was legal. Haspel, a 33-year CIA veteran, argued that it could not be determined whether torture was effective to gain intelligence. She refused to state categorically that torture is immoral. And she never condemned the torture program in which she participated."
Plus this: "...the Senate Intelligence Committee has restricted (other senators') access to a classified memo that Democratic staff put together, detailing Haspel's role in advocating for torture and later destroying related evidence."
And this: "Senate confirmation of veteran Central Intelligence Agency operative Gina Haspel to head Washington’s main spy agency is a new milestone in the collapse of American democracy."
Comment: combined with the Trump/Pence Regime's outspoken support for police who murder or torture U.S. citizens, this newest outrage means there's no significant difference between the United States and Pinochet's Chile or, for that matter, Hitler's Third Reich. The Eighth Amendment's prohibition against "cruel and unusual punishment" is obviously dead forever -- "forever" because,  thanks to The New York Times (for which see above),  it is again confirmed our alleged "democracy" is indeed nothing more than a scam, the biggest of Big Lies, with our real overlords -- Torture-Queen Haspel amongst them -- rendered forever untouchable by insurmountable barriers of wealth and bureaucracy.  As to Haspel herself, waterboarding obviously gets her wet, and not just from the obscene splatter of the slowly drowning victim's struggles. 

         

The Mass Murder Essential to Capitalism Forces Us into Criminal Compliance

"The cost to human lives in our current cycle of U.S.-initiated 'perpetual wars' throughout the Middle East and Africa is unthinkably high. It runs well into millions of deaths if one counts – as do the Nuremberg principles of international law – victims of spinoff fighting and sectarian violence that erupt after we destroy governance structures. Also to be counted are other forms of human loss, suffering, illness and early mortality that result from national sanctions, destruction of physical, social and medical infrastructure, loss of homeland, refugee flight, ethnic cleansing, and their psychological after-effects. One has to witness these to grasp their extent in trauma, and they all arise from the Nuremberg-defined “supreme crime” of initiating...aggressive war."
Comment: in other words, we have been living in the de facto Fourth Reich long before the Trump/Pence Regime made it undeniably obvious. And in contemplating our futures we would therefore do very well to reflect on how the civilized world avenged the Third Reich's still-inadequately counted millions of victims.  (The preceding link is to 4.33 minutes of historical film, documentary footage bolstered by intensely accurate dramatizations. All-documentary films on the taking of Berlin are here and here; the RT footage was complied in 2010, hence the outdated crawl.)  

Regime to Imprison Immigrant Children in Concentration Camps on Military Bases 

U.S. authorities are surveying American military bases for sites for concentration camps to house thousands of children that the government intends to seize from their parents at the US border under a draconian new policy announced by the Trump administration.
See also: "The Trump administration has zealously altered the US immigration system...

(To read the rest, go here.)

Trump/Pence War on Black Dissidents Claims First Victim

NORMALLY I ORDER the linked reports in Dispatches in accordance with news values that were mine as a daily newspaper news editor or telegraph editor. This is to say international news generally outranks all but the most significant local news, and crisis, scandal or disaster outranks everything else unless it is a positive story about some development (such as an increase in the minimum wage) that benefits us all. But those criteria vanish down the proverbial toilet in the face of the following story, which, though it is about the victimization of one man, nevertheless exemplifies the stark, Gestapo-type  terror with which the JesuNazi Trump/Pence Regime threatens us all. Indeed it is a wake-up call of the most alarming sort -- precisely why I have chosen it to lead this edition of "Weekend Update": 
       

Rakem Balogun, who lost his home and more while incarcerated, is believed to be the first person targeted and prosecuted under a secretive US surveillance effort to track so-called 'black identity extremists.' In a leaked August 2017 report from the FBI’s Domestic Terrorism Analysis Unit, officials claimed that there had been a 'resurgence in ideologically motivated, violent criminal activity' stemming from African Americans’ 'perceptions of police brutality.'"

Comment: obviously Mr. Balogun is but the first victim in the JesuNazi regime's Gestapo-inspired terrorizing of dissenters, in which context we dast not forget the words of Martin Niemöller, "first they came for the socialists..."  
  

Fight to Save Net Neutrality Requires Only One More Affirmative Vote    
"Democrats on Wednesday officially filed a petition to force a vote in the Senate to save net neutrality. With a single Republican supporting the effort, only one vote is needed to advance a resolution that may one day soon reinstate the net neutrality rules overturned by the FCC last year."  Please use this story's clickable form to contact your senators.

  

Democratic (sic) Party's Closet Fascists Urge CIA Torture Queen's Approval
"Sen. Joe Donnelly on Saturday became the second Democrat to announce he will cast his vote in favor of CIA director nominee Gina Haspel -- boosting her prospects...

(To read the rest, go here.)