You can fool most of the people most of the time. P. T. Barnum.
Someone said, “If you don’t have something nice to say about someone, don’t say anything.”
Oh, the idiocy of America!!
Shit-dog, this country, now, and going back when I was in my teens (13 when my family moved us from Paris, France, to Arizona – of all places), well, lying, cheating, achy-breaky heart, don’t you know, thieving, scamming, and, well, bombing (military and economic), that’s what it is, but you won’t get that from those lying cheating bullshitting PR-spinning, pass-the-hat, money-loving politicians on both sides of the manure pile.
Literally, most Americans really believe this is, at its core, a great country. Honest. Pretty darned exceptional. God-granted. Great White Hopey Dopey.
The lies, in school, and the lies, in families, and the lies, within the culture – every single flyover of the blue angels (sic) and the parachute drop of the golden knights, more ramification of the emptiness of the country.
I remember learning about Chavez Ravine, in the Los Angeles area, where amazing Mexicans and Mexican-Americans set up a community – homes, churches, schools, and community center. That started in 1910, and the reason Mexicans ended up creating a self-sufficient neighborhood of up to 1,800 families was because of the racism declared by and emanating from those great lords of capital – restrictive housing covenants they called them. In Oregon, where I live now, they just got rid of Sundown Laws, another way to say, “If you are caught being black after sundown, well, anything goes . . . . bring in the nooses (not clowns).” Alas, the planners in LA sold them out, the politicians screwed them and the Dodgers professional sports stinkers, from New York, to LA, ripped them off in a really screwed typical North American manner.
More than 3,000 people living in three communities, in a rural setting, they eventually got tossed and evicted, a la LA County Sheriff Department ghouls, again, evidence of the pigs or coppers or whatever you want to call the thugs of oligarchy.
Stealing Home: Los Angeles, the Dodgers, and the Lives Caught in Between tells the story of how a cluster of longstanding Mexican-American neighborhoods in Los Angeles was destroyed through the exercise of newly expansive state powers. The author, sportswriter Eric Nusbaum, demonstrates the caprice with which municipal leaders used that power, shifting their priorities rapidly from a project aimed at expanding the city’s housing stock to one aimed at assuring its big-league status. Nusbaum employs the well-known story of Dodger Stadium’s origins to craft a compelling social, political, and cultural history of postwar Los Angeles. The result is a cautionary tale about the dangers of eminent domain, and of municipal authorities’ power to reshape communities in the name of grand civic enterprises. Source. More information here.
Now, this was a high school English class, in Tucson. The 15-year-old Paul was already steeled against robber barons, against the military, against the capitalists, against the entire project of death by a thousand pollutants. I was introduced to Silent Spring, too, at age 13. I learned about what happened to Rachel Carson. Hell, even Cousteau gave me a sense of the oceans and humanity’s razing and dazzling exploitation, and more of that.
You know, the winners write the history. Eminent domain for the greater good. All that taxpayer money and all that land and all of the other graft associated with “professional sports,” well, the high school class wasn’t so much divided, as it was me and a couple of other students decrying this system of theft and eviction.
I hated the University of Arizona basketball teams and football teams because the coaches and staff and all the money thrown into that it was a shining example of conservative thievery, and then all those “liberal” college profs loving the NCAA Sweet Sixteen and all of that. Overpaid thugs in the sports business, while part-time faculty live in their minivans, going from campus to campus. Fuck America (and it is the same in all the white countries, Canada, Australia, and in Korea, Mexico, all over) — real teachers not only do not get paid squat, but they get killed.
Oh, that racism! Who was here before the whites ended up in California?
Might makes right. That’s how the progress cookie crumbles. These idiotas have a thousand little homilies to the criminality of USA and Capitalism!
Go Team. Give me a “C.” Give me an “R.” An “I” . . . “M’” . . . “I” . . . “N” … “A” … “L”!!!!!! Oh yeah, -ality . . . CRIMINALITY! C for Capitalism/Criminality!
Even after living in Europe and UK, with a mother from Canada, grandparents from Germany, my namesake, Paul Haeder, a WWI pilot for the Keiser, and the others a Scotsman and Scotswoman forced to live in Canada a la Salvation (starvation) Army … after all the pro-union discussions when my Scots grandfather ended up working in a paper-pulp mill in B.C., a union job … after years of learning the history of my Irish roots, too … the bombing of relatives in Dresden, well, I had a real sense of how capitalism was a whore’s game of extreme exploitation.
One of my relatives showed me the wee book, “War is Racket.”
All it takes is one example to drive a person to understand the systemic criminality of this country tis of thee, and the absurdity of what, calling Turtle Island, “America,” after another thief of time from Florence, Amerigo Vespucci.
“Who was here before the sick boys and girls from Europe came in pillaging, prostituting, pimping and polluting the land with their ministers of money, military and religions?” Deeper questions for a 15 year old.
In that class, in Tucson, in a school, called Canyon del Oro, with our mascot called, The Dorados. This is valuable underpinning for a radically progressive and leftist human’s progenerating. Sure, the mascot looked like a Conquistador, in that weird way of making us on the football team and wrestling squad look like ancient warriors, in a school named for a desert canyon with no gold – on this very land, usurping everything about the very fruit of the races and tribes that were, or course, here, way before the DNA mutants, called Europeans, slogged over to the so-called New World, the New Eden.
That was 1973, decades before the ugly racists fought to ban classes in the school system in Tucson that gave a history of Mexicans and Chicanos in this part of the world.
On Tuesday, May 11, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed into law HB 2281, which “prohibits a school district or charter school from including courses or classes that either promote the overthrow of the United States government or promote resentment toward a race or class of people.”. The classes now banned are the ‘La Raza studies’ courses—also called Chicano studies or Mexican American studies—that have become popular in Arizona public schools.
I interviewed one of the faculty who helped set up this engaging set of courses, Mexican-American Studies, in the Tucson Unified School District. Sure, a federal judge deemed the governor’s and legislature’s HB2281 racist, years later, but what needs to be emphasized – those students who took all the other core courses as well as the Mexican-American Studies classes were motivated to learn more, motivated to break some cycles of poverty, and not drop out before graduation.
We are talking about students defending the Mexican-American studies program who were then attending the University of Arizona.
So, 1973, a punk wrestler/football player/scuba diving freak already got the memo of how racist the entire system is, from the Democrat-voting freaks in high office, to the GOP, Great Oppressors Party. And my own classmates telling the teacher that Chavez Ravine just shows how backwards “those people were, and how smart Walter O’Malley was to get the Dodgers there and to win championships.”
To the victors go the spoils. Foreclosures, illegal evictions, dark clad figures in the night with torches, an army of lawyers out to scrape every cent from the poor working class. Ahh, America, what would that Florentine say, uh?
The white lords of capital, the winners, and, unfortunately these white kids mostly were the losers, for the most part, of that white lords’ game of wealth and power accumulation.
Ironically, when I was a faculty union organizer (part-time college instructors) with SEIU-925 in Seattle, my supervisor’s old man had just written a book on Chavez Ravine.
Michael Laslett was my boss’s name (SEIU-925), and his old man, John, had a book coming out soon, from the U press at my old stomping grounds, University of Arizona (Press) –
Many historians have contributed to our understanding of Chavez Ravine, the forcible evictions that took place there, and the impact that these evictions had on the Mexican American community that once lived there. Some of these historians, like John H.M Laslett, focus their research on how the Red Scare impacted the Los Angeles City Council’s decision to not go through with the public housing that was promised to the residents of Chavez Ravine. In his book, Shameful Victory: The Los Angeles Dodgers, the Red Scare, and the Hidden History of Chavez Ravine, Laslett provides an analysis of what life was like for Chavez Ravine residents before the evictions, and as they were resisting the evictions. One of Laslett’s main arguments is that of the anti-communist sentiment that was sweeping the nation and rearing its head into Los Angeles City Council politics. He describes a correlation between the growth of anti-communist sentiment and the opposition of public housing, ultimately resulting in the 1953 decision to cancel the public housing, and instead use Chavez Ravine land for “public purpose.”
Chavez Ravine: A Story of Mexican American Female Resistance in Mid- 20th Century Los Angeles
Ahh, the same old same old, 2020, and the forced evictions. The Gestapo sheriff deputies playing turnkey for the dirty management companies, the banks, the mortgage holders. And where oh where are those women, those Cesar Chavez types during this lockdown? Please, dear reader, there is good reason why they, the paymasters of this country, call it a lockdown.
That is the process of locking out people, locking up the food, locking away the profits, getting a lock on all the benefits of a war profiteer’s wet dream. Imagine, any company making profits hand over fist, during this time of Covid Reset.
Zero talk about a tax on profits during 2020. No talk of reappropriating the profits made on locked down and locked out and lock and unloaded Americans. Job after million jobs after ten million jobs, ended. Restaurant after store after coffee shop after even biggish chain, closed.
Talk about neutered and spayed Americans. This bye-bye to 2020 will usher in the decade of continuing criminal enterprises, on a huge scale, and usher in more meaningless cult of celebrities, more meaningless business story after business story on this or that next or ex Titan of business.
Zoom and Amazon and a thousand other companies making money hands over fists, while USA citizens en mass are starving, soon to be starving, and, then, the heroic vaccinators, now, with this or that experimental RNA vaccine, and oh how the year 2022 is now on the lips of the profiteers. By 2022 the LMIC’s might get some version of the arm stab. Low and Middle Income Countries, they are acronymized.
The predictions are there – all businesses that are deemed mom and pop, they are on the chopping block. All workers will have the Scarlet Letters, VV, on a passport or little tattoos, but not VV for Valued Victory, not VV for Victorious Vendetta, but VV for Vaccinated Victim.
Victims of criminal profiteers, criminal millionaires in Congress and the Senate, and the destroyers of all safety nets and public services – the unqualified, deceitful, deliriously dumb anointed assholes of all those government agencies.
Yeah, no need for FEMA, no need for OSHA, no need for veterinarians and ag inspectors and fish biologists and climate experts and transportation wonks and housing authorities and the like to be honest, there for, by and because of the people. Hell, how many education secretaries from either side of the political manure pile deemed teachers as commies or ingrates or spoiled? I lived under many of them since 1979 when I began teaching.
We don’t need robust research on the thousands of new chemicals (read, poisons and toxins) coming out of the war profiteer sectors. No need for oceanographers and wetlands experts in the employ of the public. No need for seismologists, hard rock geologists, holistic medicine wonks, and all the other people who should be protecting us as individuals, communities, collectives, states, regions and the country as a whole.
We are all – the 80 Percent of us – future Chavez Raviners. We are now the Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. We all are illegal aliens.
Leading me to think how shallow Americans are now, and how flagrantly philandering the media are. There is no So-Called Liberal Media, and many a conservative has admitted they call NPR and PBS liberal just to get headlines, to get their goat. No one believes NPR and PBS are liberal outlets. Neoliberal, sure, but neoliberal ain’t progressive. Does anyone reading Dissident Voice really need a primer on how bad NPR and MSM have been, way before Si Se Puede Obama?
The omnipresence of the ads hour after hour has irritated many NPR listeners around the country. By way of comparison, a major commercial station in Hartford – WTIC – clocked 18 advertisements in that 8am hourly slot – albeit they were longer than the NPR ones.
They invite guests on air who ideologically oppose public broadcasting—that’s fine, but then they minimize the appearances by leading progressives.
It seems that NPR and PBS, often by their omissions and slants, bend over backward in order not to offend right-wing lobbies and corporations. They invite guests on air who ideologically oppose public broadcasting – that’s fine, but then they minimize the appearances by leading progressives.
Occasionally, I speak with the NPR and PBS Ombudsmen. The purpose of the ombudsman is to maintain proper standards and ethics as well as to consider audience complaints. A while back, an NPR Ombudsman volunteered to me that NPR was giving far more time to representatives of conservative evangelical groups than to representatives of liberal religious organizations.
Charlie Rose on PBS had many more CEOs on his program than civic leaders. — “The Realized Temptations of NPR and PBS” – Ralph Nader
Allow me to circle around to the germ of this screed — Mike “Rooster” McConaughey. He went off on his soap box last week (he has more than $200 million listed, but there is always more and more offshore, as the Fiddler on the Roof might sing). Again, this is America – giving this putz airtime. Big bad McConaughey, working as a 12-year-old in his old man’s oil field ventures in Texas.
He went off on that vapid line of how there are two bad same sides of the same coin – the extreme right and the extreme left. This libertarian Hollywood puke, again, he gets on TV, British TV, too. It’s all nonsense, and yet, he takes himself seriously, and the world listens to this nincompoop.
He said we need “the liberal and conservative side” to be present in our society but that “the extreme left and the extreme right completely illegitimize the other side.” McConaughey explains that “the two extremes illegitimize those two sides or they exaggerate that side’s stance into an irrational state.”
The division in America will not be fixed without “confrontation.” McConaughey said, “you’ve got to have confrontation to have unity.” He said, “I would argue we don’t have true confrontation right now, confrontation that gives some validation and legitimizes that opposing point of view. We don’t give legitimacy or validation to an opposing point of view, we make it persona non grata, and that’s unconstitutional.” — Source.
These are the rich people, speaking for the, well, both sides their mouths? False balancing, manufactured lies, and to say the extreme right is the same extreme as the socialists, and that’s what these multimillionaire entertainers see the left as. Liberal to him is neoliberal, and conservative to him, well, in his cannabis haze, is, who, Dwight Eisenhauer?
Cancel culture is not socialist, communist or anarchist. Yet, the billowing bag of wind, he represents much of Holly-Dirt, much of the vaunted class, the millionaire and investor class. As they produce endless crap, movies, the same old “character actor” who is the same old “dude or gal” in yet another film.
These people hang with each other, and I just saw Mel Gibson and Sean Penn have a new movie Nuts Flicks!. Oh, two sides of the same coin.
These are charlatans, and their lives are meaningless to that working class or underclass human being.
Mister Mike knows nothing of the real cancel culture, knows nothing of the real world, no matter how many days he worked in the oil fields with his old man.
That’s how the idiotic cookie crumbles in the USA – vultures of capital, the same investing gurus, these folk who have money thrown at them, in an industry (sic) that is around to propagandize the exceptionalism of this global terrorist country, and then oh they wax poetic, nostalgic and crocodile tear eyed about this bloody country built on the backs of slaves and over the bones of Original Peoples.
I think just skimming suck goofball Bing News or Yahoo News, something, that’s what got my ire, and there are another million Michael McConaughey’s out there or John Malkovich’s to fill a septic field from Portland to Peoria.
Long live the memory of Robert Fisk, and this is, again, another nutshell of the nutty Americans in Holly-Dirt, or Politics, or Business, or Tech, you name it:
There was always, in the past, a limit to this hatred. Letters would be signed with the writer’s address. Or if not, they would be so-ill-written as to be illegible. Not any more. In 26 years in the Middle East, I have never read so many vile and intimidating messages addressed to me. Many now demand my death. And last week, the Hollywood actor John Malkovich did just that, telling the Cambridge Union that he would like to shoot me.
How, I ask myself, did it come to this? Slowly but surely, the hate has turned to incitement, the incitement into death threats, the walls of propriety and legality gradually pulled down so that a reporter can be abused, his family defamed, his beating at the hands of an angry crowd greeted with laughter and insults in the pages of an American newspaper, his life cheapened and made vulnerable by an actor who – without even saying why – says he wants to kill me. — Robert Fisk
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
