Author: Paul Haeder

June 27, 2021

The Symbol of Our Age: Slime of the Sea
As a possibilist, I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful. — Hans Rosling¹

There are a thousands images each hour, if one were to scour the world wide net, and the news services, wires, that would put a pit in the stomach of any humane human.

You have one 9 minute video of hog-tied, tasered, knee-on-back, then flip over to a story on how Idaho is murdering wolves the US and taxpayers set out as “protected” to the tune of millions of dollars. No water for Southern/Northern California farms and ranches, then flip to a mass shooting in San Jose.

Forget about the click-bait of celebrity-millionaire-billionaire-perverse politician/athlete/ actor/musician blurbs/features/stories on all the major and minor mush head “news” outlets, actually, news organs, as in the alimentary canal.

Blinded by the images, brought you/us via Yahoo, Bing, Google, you name it.

For months, Turkish fishermen in the Sea of Marmara have been running into a problem: They can’t catch fish.

Concerns that the unappealing mucus could discourage tourism abound, and some have called for the government to do more. Ismet Cigit, a columnist for the newspaper Ses Kocaeli, lamented that humans had “betrayed this world’s most beautiful sea” by allowing chemical storage facilities, fuel tanks, factories and other industrial sites to be built along the coast.

“Clearly, there are no deterrent penalties for those who pollute the sea,” he wrote in Turkish, adding, “Marmara is dying.” (Source)

That, of course, in a nutshell, is the crux of the world — “no deterrence for those who pollute . . . the sea . . . soil . . . fetuses . . . air . . . food . . . the airwaves . . . humanity’s brain (collectively).”

“Polluted” as a term goes a long way in retail capitalism. Homo retailopithecus and Homo consumo erectus are the vessels for every known and soon-to-be-developed pollutant.

Given the images one might see to illustrate the rapacious, inhumane, murderous ways of big and little man business, and of the corporations, and of the law makers (thugs in a protection racket for the corporations), compared to the murders of Palestinians over a 10-day bombing campaign seem small in comparison.

That’s the point, then, for those images after bloody images to mean, well, nothing in the end. We are in a constant chaotic and self-dellusional mindset, collectively, and those that resist, well, you know the story of Man/Woman against Nature; against God; against Culture; against Self; against Man/Woman; against Artificial Intelligence/Robotics/Internet of Things. Stirring a few wet tears, gulps, and then onto the next thing. Because capitalism is about stealth distraction, stealth and mostly overt ways to pull the wool over the eyes of everyone. Even those who doubt governments and corporations and so-called experts, yet, well, yet — Covid-19 Jab; Covid-19 Booster Jab; No Jab, No Job; Covid-19/SARS-CoV2 a Novel Man/Woman made (engineered) SUPER virus; Lockdown; Masks; Social 3, 6, 10, 20 feet Distancing.

Sometimes the wool is easily pulled over one’s eyes when that person wants no conscience. When the media and the mob/bandwagon pushes whichever narrative to force compliance, well, that is Capitalism. Things Go Better with Pfizer Jabs, err, better with CocaCola.

Tobacco kills, no? USA “aid” to Israel kills, no? Even those double cheeseburgers kill, no?

You think there’d be people on the streets protesting against and vying to stop the fast-food killers, no? It is so clear, however, if we put the brakes on bad stuff, which is all of capitalism, then there will be blood to pay. Even a small pumping of the brake pedal means war:

A chilling documentary released a few years ago, Fed Up, narrated by Katie Couric, highlighted how the U.S. government capitulates to Big Food lobbies such as the sugar industry and followed the money involved in keeping people fat. Moreover, labs across the country ensure that such junk food is addictive. Finally, Big Food has launched aggressive campaigns, sanctioned by governments, to cast obesity as “lack of exercise” and not something they cause. (Source)

Think about this — if there were campaigns to cut the eating of bad food, fast food, by, oh, say, one-third, or even one-fifth, well, again, there would be blood. Capitalism is all about the business of making money any way possible, and once that money stream is steady — fats, sugars, salts, high calorie foods, nicotine, opioids — no amount of action and citizen uprising could do shit. Kids born into one to six generations drive-thru, fast-food, Uber Eats normality (baseline), well, the eating and the wrongs of capitalism are baked into DNA. How many times were penny or three penny taxation bills against soda companies (so-called sugar taxes) fought and shot down? We are talking a few pennies tax.

And, let it be known, that High Fructose Corn Syrup has many wonderful things cooked into it to create an addiction cycle, and creates the “I am never full even after four Big Gulp Mountain Dews” biophysical reality. There are studies on the RNA of papa’s sperm baking in obesity for offspring. Oh, the epigenetics of bad food, chemical food, and high density calories, the like, well, I would have to say after decades of reading and being on the front lines, that obesity is actually cooked into the gene code, the epigenetics of it all.

Don’t be fooled by the lie after lie coming from industry lobbies and those sons of bitches who would file lawsuit after lawsuit against any citizens’ group or government group tying fast-food to faster death and plethora of chronic illnesses on the way to that death.

Svelte Biden and Svelte lawmaker x or y are all part of the show. The disease is the dollar, and each pinch of the profit margin precipitated by real sanctions and laws and regulations is a poke into the hornets nest that is rapacious capitalism.to

Oh, those Ivy Leaguers, all those beautiful people, running the show, they must get a kick out of the overweight, limping, ragged masses. It is a tale of two worlds. They get stem cell cocktails, plasma and blood doping, IV’s full of herbs and vitamins and, well, the rest of us, we get, hmm, disease maintenance by USA Big Med/Big Pharma/ Big Insurance.

There is no “choice” for this child. I have been in the schools, people, for more than 48 years. This is it for choice (habituation). It is criminal what we do to their minds, but absolutely sadistic what we do to their bodies:

But the images are rarely tied to deep stories, deeper analyses, and deeper regard that the system is sick — that “system” is industrial food, education, media, social media, advertising, the entire system of “capitalism makes right” any form of “offering” or “choice” these Mengele Types continue to bark anytime groups of people decide to question their narrative, the entire wasted system of exploitation.

The exploitation is at the cellular level, at the nanoparticle level, even the electromagnetic waves exploit us, to the tune of profits galore, gushing in every which way possible under the mantel of dirty capitalism.

So we just continue to cruise the insanity of the wasteland, and here, in my neck of the woods, successionists: The proposed new border would encompass 18 full and three partial Oregon counties and account for about 860,000 people in Oregon, which is 21% of the state’s population; however, that chunk would represent 70% of its land.

The land of the original people’s — imagine if those Yanquis/Stars’n’Bars dudes and dudettes really looked at the land, the original benefactors and stewards of the land. Again, redneck, mean as cuss, and, yes, Portland is mean as cuss, sure, and this is what we have looking forward to. This is 2021, major snowpack deficits, major government subsidies to these big old tough independent farmers wanting to create a bigger Aryan Brotherhood Idaho. It ain’t your land, boys and girls.

This is the reality of the White Settler/Colonial/Racist/Slave Embodied people. It may seem hickster out in Idaho, but you can find the same DNA and big mouthed whites in the Fatherlands — Germany, Nordic countries, France, Belgium, UK. The amount of hate for anyone other than white, well, this is a disease throughout the land throughout the EU Zone.

Real issues of crop failures, cancer rates out the roof (all those poisons for all that farmland), extreme weather, and, well, just whose land and whose farms and ranches and goods and services are those?

The sham is the American system of bowing to two corrupt parties, allowing the elites and the riff-raff corrupt ones to run the society, through electoral politics, which is just a giant bribery scheme. All those sniveling Rachel Maddow freaks, with the Trump Derangement Syndrome, well, they do not give a shit:

“Biden says his hands are tied.”

The absence of a strong and well organized movement means that harm reduction is always a fantasy. The Democratic Party establishment chose Biden to be the nominee and didn’t get the pushback that was needed against their backroom deal making. Unscrupulous Black operatives derided anything other than obedience to their bosses. We were told to go along and be quiet and that any other response meant the return of Trump. The lack of demands set us up for failure, propaganda about cutting poverty, and phony progressives taking a dive instead of standing up for the people. Black people have nothing to show for a Biden presidency despite turning out in droves to put him in office.

The moment is ripe to acknowledge that this system is a complete sham and exists only to help the 1% do as much as they can to oppress the 99%. We will live with a cycle of Republicans and Democrats who use different methods but always end up working against our needs. (Black Agenda Report)

The capitalists paint us all into their corners, while they reap the benefits of billions in bribery. We are children, unorganized, malcontents, wasted lives in their eyes. It’s how they see ‘us versus them.’ They as a collective go to the same schools, believe in the same propaganda, and tout the stupidity of patriotism and exceptionalism. Arrogant and dumb, this is the America we all have been sucked into. By birth, for fuck sake, some of us.

The scam is the scam, really, all those spinning bullshit and good cheer amongst themselves at their Aspen Institute conferences, or what have you. They have no plan, except for shoveling with front end loader, the cash they make in the big scam. There is no Green Deal for the Environment when it goes through the jagged teeth of the rich and superrich capitalists.

To the scientists’ warnings, there have been rumblings of concern from some financial investors, businesspeople (in non-oil-producing industries), and local politicians. But overall, the response of conventional politicians has been business-as-usual. The main proposals for limiting climate change has been to place some sort of taxes on carbon emissions. From liberals to conservatives, this has been lauded as a ”pro-market” reform. But, as Richard Smith (2018) has explained, these are inadequate, and even fraudulent, proposals. “If the tax is too light, it fails to suppress fossil fuels enough to help the climate. But…no government will set a price high enough to spur truly deep reductions in carbon emissions because they all understand that this would force companies out of business, throw workers out of work, and possibly precipitate recession or worse.” (Source)

Richard Wolff: The reason the U.S. government takes in less than it spends is because it chooses not to tax corporations and the rich at the rates applied to them in the 1950s and 1960s. Then the government turns around and borrows money. It borrows from foreign governments, but also from banks, insurance companies, large corporations, and rich individuals who purchase Treasury bills, notes, bonds, and securities. In effect corporations and the rich can not only keep more tax dollars; they can then turn around and loan the money they kept to the government and earn interest on it. The interest that must be paid to them comes either from taxes levied upon the mass of Americans or from the savings the government achieves by cutting its payrolls and programs. So the rising deficits are a result of an unjust tax system. Eventually, as the financial burdens grow and the public grasps why, social tensions will rise. The U.S. tomorrow could look like Greece today. [9 years ago, interview by David Barsamian]

Oh boy, recall the Suez canal container ship logjam?

Now, this Singapore-flagged ship carrying 1,486 containers, including 25 tons of nitric acid and other chemicals that were loaded at the port of Hazira, India, on May 15, is burning, baby, with a 25-member crew includes Philippine, Chinese, Indian and Russian nationals.

Globalization! Daily scene. How many oil spills, how many chemical spills, how many barrels of DDT or radioactive sludge are leaking? Christ, do the math.

[You’ll notice “Evergreen” is written across the Ever Given’s body, but confusingly, that’s branding for the Taiwanese company that operates the ship. (Julianne Cona/Instagram)]

All of this is unsustainable, way beyond insane, and, until we do more localized work big time, and until we stop cruise ships, container ships like these on a second to second basis; until we stop cutting down North American forests, to send logs (full trees, delimbed) to overseas markets, and then have that come back in another container ship as cardboard, fiberboard and wood products; until we stop California orange juice tankers meeting up with Florida orange juice tankers in Houston on their east-west crisscrossing journeys; until we go way beyond any new or old green deal; until we actually work with the poor, the subsistence farmers and fishers, and work on real harvest, real sustainable ecologies, with restorative conservation AND anti-poverty programs and peasant worker cooperatives; until, until and until.

I contacted this film maker/scientist/professor, and complained about how white, how “great white burden” like his short piece on net carbon zero, zero dark 2030, or what have is you coming off. No response, yet, however, we need to pushback on these people who always work within the frame of Capitalism. They will never see that, Capitalism, for how polluted, globally heating, water scarce, amazingly diseased the world and our food and sisters and brothers in flora/fauna land.

James Dyke, Senior Lecturer in Global Systems, University of Exeter — I doubt he will respond.
1. Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, 2018.
The post The Symbol of Our Age: Slime of the Sea first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
May 30, 2021

Once a US Soldier, Always Wounded, Always Losing!
What do nations care about the cost of war, if by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand millions in diamonds and cocoa?
― W.E.B. DuBois

He died. In an assisted (sic) care (oxymoron) home (nope) facility/prison (yes). Homeless for a few years; he was a photographer; and his life went to shit in four years. He overspent on photo equipment, a studio, gave away shoots, and alas, he ended up living in his car, putting the entire inventory in an expensive storage unit, and then he tried surviving.

I met him when I was a social worker helping him as a short-term veteran (Army, 12 months, no combat) in a housing program, 24/7, where my job was to get him on his feet, get his VA benefits together, get him back on some financial track, and getting him inspired to live.

He was curious, could run in mixed company, and he was fragile. That is the way of families — estranged, bizarre old men (father) moving on with second and third wives, and just giving shit about offspring.

I worked for the Starvation Army, one bloody year, and you can read about that hell hole of a fake (maybe not) religious wacko institution (poverty pimps): Here, Here and Here, over at Dissident Voice.

The preachers and lecturers deal with men of straw, as they are men of straw themselves. Why, a free-spoken man, of sound lungs, cannot draw a long breath without causing your rotten institutions to come toppling down by the vacuum he makes. Your church is a baby-house made of blocks, and so of the state.

…The church, the state, the school, the magazine, think they are liberal and free! It is the freedom of a prison-yard.

― Henry David Thoreau, I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau

He lost one leg to diabetes, and it was typical – small black dot on his foot, and then, living the rough life, cold weather chills in a vehicle, long walks in the cold when the car broke down. Bad diet, and stress.

They chopped it (the leg) off at the knee. He was having eye/vision issues. He was a smart guy, even did a trivia night for his fellow homeless vets and their families. His memory, though, was flagging. He never wanted to learn how to deal with a prosthetic leg. He was getting more and more confused, obsessed with CNBC-type shit, and anti-trump disease to the max.

He had to be reminded of everything, daily, and we worked on getting him housing vouchers, and, alas, he was finally getting Social Security, and then, the VA took care of some of his stuff.

He went to a couple of my fiction readings in Portland, and he was always there for my movie nights to watch some documentary that pushed to push against the military mindset, and he was there to listen to me rail and rail.

He found out his estranged father left some money to him when he died. It was a windfall, and my vet could not handle all the information and financial asides. It took two years to get that money, and he gave one leech a $10,000 loan for some scheme for a new dog food patent (right!), and alas, that leech never paid him back. The vet’s dead, and this deadbeat who pried money from him has no reason to pay back.

Before death, and after the Starvation Army, my vet got into an apartment (with my help), and they screwed him over. The one ground floor apartment with a large step and stoop, impossible for him to navigate his wheelchair, that wasn’t in the bargain. He already signed the lease and wanted out of the Starvation Army. He and I worked on getting the apartment to build a stone or cement pathway from the back slider, to the parking lot, so he could get his Uber or handicap buses trips.

It was another eye opener – largest (now #3) property management company in the USA for apartments, out of Texas, and not one of them responded to my emails or calls. Terrible, since that has never happened to me ever in my life. I have always gotten responses, even harsh ones back. From cops, senators, CEOs, IRS, more. These people are human leeches.

Pinnacle comes in at number three in the rankings for the largest property managers in the country, with 172,000 units under management. The company manages a diverse array of assets, including mixed-use properties, commercial properties, affordable developments, senior properties, and student housing. It also specializes in the turnaround of distressed assets and assisting in the management of HOAs and condo associations. Pinnacle is headquartered in Dallas, Texas, and is currently headed by President and CEO Rick L. Graf.

So think about that. He had to pay for this walkway, and it was an improvement for that unit, to say the least, so why should he have to pay? He had volunteers with a construction company and from the Rotary Club, and that Pinnacle nixed it. They had to have their vetted company. We are talking about $500 for the job using volunteers and a bonded contractor, versus the $2500 through Pinnacle’s outfit.

That apartment life did not last long. He was having major choking issues, and cognitive ones. He wasn’t eating right. No phone calls taken, or texts.

We are talking about a man, 68, no family. He had no one but a friend he met at the Rotary Club and acquaintances. And me, his former social worker. Who happened to move on the Coast, so I was 3 hours from him one way, via car.

He had to leave the apartment, to a care center (sic). That apartment would not give him a break, since he had to break the lease because of medical reasons. No big deal he was a veteran.

These are parasites.

Then, he ends up in one of the larger senior living places, and that was a living hell for him as he slipped more and more, had no decent meals, and never had a case manager for months. Then, lockdown, March 2020.

Here it is, Wikipedia –

Brookdale Senior Living owns and operates over 700 senior living communities and retirement communities in the United States. Brookdale was established in 1978 and is based in Brentwood, Tennessee. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Fortress Investments became the majority owner of Brookdale, holding approximately 51% of its share. Currently, Glenview Capital Management (a hedge fund) holds the largest number of shares. Brookdale has approximately 70,000 staff members and 100,000 residents. As of 2018, it was the largest operator of senior housing in the United States. In 2021, a New York Times investigation revealed that Brookdale submitted wrong and manipulated data to the government, thus inflating ratings of the quality of care in Brookdale facilities. Shortly thereafter, the state of California filed a lawsuit against Brookdale, alleging that the company manipulated the federal government’s nursing-home ratings system.

He was paying out of his social security and this money he got from his father: $4100 a month plus another $2000 for “special services.” There were no “Special services.” This happens every minute in the USA. Imagine, a society with how many aging people? How many with chronic illness? Who the fuck has $6100 a month to pay for these scabies outfits?

Again, we can either prepare for the ultimate disaster that disaster capitalism gives us, or, put our heads back in that sand:

In 10 years, more than half of middle-income Americans age 75 or older will not be able to afford to pay for yearly assisted living rent or medical expenses, according to a study published Wednesday in Health Affairs.

The researchers used demographic and income data to project estimates of a portion of the senior population, those who will be 75 or older in 2029, with a focus on those in the middle-income range — currently $25,001 to $74,298 per year for those ages 75 to 84.

And it doesn’t look good for that group because of the rising costs of housing and health care. The researchers estimated that the number of middle-income elders in the U.S. will nearly double, growing from 7.9 million to 14.4 million by 2029. They will make up the biggest share of seniors, at 43%. — Source

This three paragraphs cited above are from a two-year-old article. You think the plandemic has assisted with this? Socialism is about planning for and building out facilities and holistic ways to help the aging, the poor, the sick. Capitalism is about planning for and setting out a million ways to fleece and fleece people. Maybe blood and plasma and bone marrow transplants are the only way to get through. Or, just donating body and soul to Big Pharma for their Mengele stuff. A 10 by 10 room, with a roommate, and mac’n’cheese six days a week, fasting on Thursdays.

This is how America runs, as a continuing criminal enterprise, an elaborate multi-layered system of bilking and outright theft, casino capitalism on steroids, and zero concern by the majority of the people with investments, banks (owners) and the elected officials to make safety nets. Who the hell can afford $6100 a month for a studio apartment? Crappy food? Surly workers (underpaid, over worked)? This is prison on a whole other level.

He had to go to the VA, via ambulance, and with taxis, a few times with this female friend.

She got him to get a will prepared, and to get some things in order, but he was failing, vacant, not there, and alas, he died August 2020 age 70, and that should never have happened. If I had a community, 100 acres, gardens, small (tiny) homes, pets, chickens, and community conversations, he would NOT have died. Life expectancy dropped because he ended up in an apartment, isolated, alone, scared, and with deeper cognitive issues. A supportive community getting him off his duff, getting him involved, would have saved him. Could save millions of Americans. Hundreds of millions of global citizens.

So who owns the land, the farms, the concepts of living and aging in place, intergenerational, cooperatives, decent air and water? Dog-eat-dog. And who thinks that a coronavirus lives and breathes in the summer? Oh, that flu season, now 365 days a year, some rain or shine.

You know, I didn’t get a chance to talk to this vet too much about his concerns around lockdown, the SARS-CoV2, and, well, like many things once a person ages, sometimes talking real stuff about real things is too much for a mind that is going south.

Not all pandemics are caused by the obvious suspects. Though the media have us whipped up into a frenzy over a select cast of superstar pathogens, the villain in the next global drama may be lurking in the unlikeliest of places; perhaps it hasn’t even been discovered yet.

“I think the chances that the next pandemic will be caused by a novel virus are quite good,” says Kevin Olival, a disease ecologist from the EcoHealth Alliance, a US-based organisation that studies the links between human and environmental health. “If you look at Sars, which was the first pandemic of the 21st Century, that was a previously unknown virus before it jumped into people and spread round the world. So there’s a precedent there – there are many, many viruses out there in the families that we’re concerned with.”

Out of millions of viruses on the planet, very few have ever caused a major outbreak
Olival is not alone. Earlier this year, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates warned that the next pandemic could be something we’ve never seen before. He suggested that we prepare for its emergence as we would for a war.

Meanwhile, the WHO is so firmly convinced that they have updated their list of pathogens most likely to cause a massive, deadly outbreak to include “Disease X” – a mystery microorganism which hasn’t yet entered our radar. By Zaria Gorvett, 13th November 2018

The irony of ironies, I was talking about things like this way before that BBC (bad bad organization) put out these pabulum pieces as quoted about NOV. 2018, a year before the official Wuhan and Italian flu hit (sic).

The death of the vet, of course, create a nightmare for his friend, designated as the executor of his “estate.”

Comcast screwed the estate by keeping service going (charging $90 a month) even though he was dead. He had a storage unit that was charging $215 a month. That Brookdale ended up hitting the estate with more bills in the thousands. The apartment complex, Pinnacle, was looking for several thousand for fees and penalties. The bills came in, and the collection agencies rose to the occasion.

And this vet’s friend (sic) who had borrowed the money paid nothing back.

It is May, 2021, and those proceeds to his small estate have not yet been disbursed. Pandemic lockdown has hurt the process. Two of the beneficiaries are a free clinic that attended to this vet’s needs during his hours of need. And a food pantry out of a church who also helped him with food and electricity money.

He probably had $340,000 total, most of it in a Morgan Stanley account. Mind you, this is all from his dead old man, and the vet had not expected that. There are tax filing fees, moving expenses for his stuff to a furniture nonprofit, fees for the storage unit. Some prescription bills and other outstanding bills that should have just vanished. The creditors came out of the woodwork, and because I was not a family member, brother, say, of nephew, all those bills got paid. If I had been that family member, I would/could have wrangled many of the bills into either zeroed out bills, or some with a dime on the dollar. It takes letter writing, advocating, and pounding down these leeches.

As of May 18, 2021, the five beneficiaries – two nonprofits in need – have not seen a cent. Because the executor has had to do so much, and the fact the vet had no family, my vet’s estate is getting whittled down by that great American tick – middle men, fees, penalties, taxes, this and that amount extracted as part of the ugly middle and middle man/woman mentality of the USA.

Some people came up to the plate and did pro bono work, but because I was close to this whole thing, and talked with the executor a lot, I see how the total amount that could have been distributed five ways — $70,000 each – might now be even close to $60,000 each. What the beneficiaries don’t know won’t hurt them, right? All those leeches sucking the dead, well, they just don’t know it. It was money they were not expecting, so what’s the big deal.

That’s not the point. This is a minute-to-minute situation in USA. Millions of people and their families get screwed in the tens of billions each year by the ticks and leeches. I have had to deal with PayDay loan companies, repo men, collection agencies, courts, companies, telecoms and hospitals and others who have their hands out for more and more cuts of many of my clients who were making $730 a month in Social Security, and some way less. I contacted hospitals and businesses and others to get fees and bills reduced or zeroed out.

Young or old, many of the homeless people I worked with could NEVER work in a competitive work environment. Their health and minds are shot to shit. Much of that (PTSD and complex PTSD) was caused by the Armed Forces, and by the systems of punishment that hit these guys and gals after departing that shit hole.

Not everything in their lives is someone else’s fault and responsibility. They made bad choices. Booze and drugs, you betcha, took them down. Bad food, bad thinking smoking, and more, deteriorated them at a young age. Trying to pay rent, evictions, etc., all that adds up to the weathering.

Living in a truck or car or tent or in a garage, that also weathers these people. In the end, pre-Covid and now during it, these people are throwaways. The Stock Market is busting at the seams. Zoom school, and Zoom work for the middle class, the new normal abnormal. The rest of the workforce or citizen? Screwed blued and tattooed.

The irony is that my vet friend “made” more money in that investment account dead than when he was alive. And we know the great history of Morgan Stanley.

I’m writing this because I am delaying something bigger, and poetry, tied to the absolute hell hole that is American Zionism a la Israeli Zionism. War crimes that are ten thousand George Floyd’s “I Can’t Breathe” murder.

And I can’t wrap my head around this in a rural community. No marching here, no groups, and hell, in France and Germany and England, it is illegal to peacefully march for Palestine.

I’m thinking about Canada and USA, supporting murderous arms and murderous policies of that racist “country.” I am thinking about my vet’s account at Morgan Stanley:

The broker got him stocks in Walmart, Northrop Grumman, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Blackstone, BlackRock. This guy was a friend, and asked about investing, and I had a guy in mind, but my buddy went with a friend of the Rotary who said this broker with Morgan Stanley would take care of him. My buddy wanted social responsible investing, and that, alas, is yet another bullshit marketing tool of the masters of the casino capitalist Walled Street.

Northrop Grumman’s medium-caliber cannons boast unrivaled reliability and effectiveness. When paired with our exceptional training, services, certified accessories and warranties, the result is exceptional value and performance over the entire gun system lifecycle. The company has produced solid propulsion systems for the Ground-based Midcourse Defense interceptor, as well as for the Trident II D-5 and Minuteman III strategic missiles. Northrop Grumman has 100 percent propulsion success on strategic production motors. For nearly half a century, Northrop Grumman and its heritage companies have been designing and developing bomb fuses that have stayed on pace with the technological advancements of the time.

How many parts in a missile or Bushmaster automatic cannon? Parts equal jobs. Parts designed equal academic jobs. Think of all those people in all those companies, in factories and warehouses, and manufacturing plants, and marketing plants, paint plants, PR plants, all of them down to the web master and the photographer making money on dead Palestinian children. It comes down to that.

I have relatives whose kids (grown adults) are blonde beauties in the sense of USA beauty, and they are tall, and lean, and they are pulling down $120,000 a year as 28 year old’s, working for one of those California based military death companies.

Here, five — to include Raytheon, Northrup Lockheed Martin, Aerojet Rocketdyne, Flir Systems

More listed here —

Here are California Dreaming Death Machine (139) openings for just one hiring site —

In 2019, here are the top states, but remember, those figures are not the true amount of money made on death since so much more tied to offensive weapons and space should be factored in. Sort of the multiplier effect of all the businesses service and hard industries making bank because of those contractors and their employees and their subcontractors and their employees living and eating the California dream, or whichever state listed is the dream. Forget about the billions in Hollywood and their enormous entanglement of people making money off those Tom Clancy, et al crap movies. Death, death, death, even in the form of liberal actors spewing off on this or that thing, but in the end, they love the DoD.
- California: $66.2 billion
- Virginia: $60.3 billion
- Texas: $54.8 billion
- Florida: $29.8 billion
- Maryland: $26.1 billion
- Connecticut: $19.7 billion
- Pennsylvania: $18.1 billion
- Washington: $17.8 billion
- Alabama: $16.0 billion
- Massachusetts: $15.8 billion
So, I am having a difficult time focusing, with this Industrial Complex tied to killing Palestinians, and so many other people’s of the world, through the training, outfitting, arming, and educating of the despots of the world. This is a telling interview. Malak Mattar, Dan Cohen and Miko Peled join MintCast to discuss the ongoing Israeli violence in the Gaza Strip. See interview here.

I am still processing all of this, trying to listen to Zoom continuing education credited things like trauma and social service workers in a time of lockdown and Covid-19. Things like that, which are bullshit, really. Just amazing bullshit now on Zoom, most of it. But I am just cruising through these people who believe they are thinking and saying something new.

© 2021. Raymond Nat Turner, The Town Crier. All Rights Reserved.

BAR’s poet in residence Raymond Nat Turner is an accomplished performing artist. You can find much more of his work at https://www.youtube.com/user/zigilow

BAR’s poet in residence Raymond Nat Turner is an accomplished performing artist. You can find much more of his work at YouTube.

+–+

The acrobats are back…(gimme a bleepin’ break!)

The acrobats are back—riding bareback and backwards on Donkeys! They’re back juggling hocus-pocus focus groups; Back, spinning Wall Street straw into fools’ gold for the war- mongering mouth of a punch drunk politician. Back hallucinating on FDR Fairytales. Back somersaulting over scarlet streets, strikes and factory seizures; back vaulting over violence/militant eviction resistance

The acrobats are back—Lilliputian left-Munchkin Marxists—juggling Classless analysis; doing back-flips erasing millions; Tumbling above herds of handcuffed communists, socialists, anarchists, trade unionists who waged pitched battles with Pinkerton-police-national guard-gun thugs. The acrobats are back turning cartwheels; Flipping history on its head— Landing squarely in the laps of generals and statesmen…

The acrobats are back—flipping LBJ minus 34 dead and smoke-filled skies over Watts/43 dead in Detroit/27 dead, 1400 arrests in Newark; LBJ minus millions marching NO to Jim Crow, war/women’s oppression; Minus martyrs—whose M’s include Mickey, Medgar, Malcolm, Martin… The acrobats are back, dancing in donkey dung down the Yellow Brick Road for the Emerald City Intersectional Empire—strangely resembling the Pentagon…

The acrobats are back—daredevils who dangled dangerously for 8 yrs. from the Drone Ranger’s dick. They’re back—Capitalist Hill cartwheels and flips—sticking stealth socialist landings as Comrade Schmo plays them like The Great Oz—ominously warning: “Pay no attention to Wall Street-War-Profiteer- Big Pharma/Fossil Fuel-Credit Card Companies behind my thin blue curtain of Promises!” Then he quietly pulls his pistol and mumbles, ”What’s in your wallet?”

And the reality is that Wall Street and those Mutual Funds and Exchange Tradeable Funds (ETF’s), all are tied to bombing, booze, tobacco, big pharma, the entire shooting match. Just can’t go to sleep at night, or can’t look myself in the mirror, when thinking about all that time and energy and research and writing, and educating, and the reality is we are what we are — war criminals. Or, read, “Try as You May to Deny, but Evil is in Our DNA“!

Israeli Forces spokesman Zilberman announced the start of the bombing of Gaza, specifying that “80 fighters are taking part in the operation, including the advanced F-35s” (The Times of Israel, May 11, 2021). It is officially the baptism of fire for the US Lockheed Martin’s fifth-generation fighter, whose production Italy also participates in as a second-level partner.

Israel has already received twenty-seven F-35s from the US, and last February decided to buy no longer fifty F-35s but seventy-five. To this end the government has decreed a further allocation of 9 billion dollars: 7 were granted by a US to Israel free military “aid” of 28 billion, 2 were granted as a loan by the US Citibank.

While Israeli F-35 pilots were being trained by the U.S. Air Force in Arizona and Israel, the US Army Engineers built in Israel special hardened hangars for the F-35s, suitable for both fighters’ maximum protection on the ground, and their rapid take-off on attack. At the same time, the Israeli military industries (Israel Aerospace and Elbit Systems) in close coordination with Lockheed Martin enhance the fighter renamed “Adir” (Powerful): above all its ability to penetrate enemy defenses and its range of action which was nearly doubled.

These capabilities are certainly not necessary to attack Gaza. Why then are the most advanced fifth-generation fighters used against Palestinians? Because it serves to test F-35s fighters and their pilots in real war action using Gaza homes as targets on a firing range. It does not matter if in the target houses there are entire families.

The F-35s, added to the hundreds of fighter-bombers already supplied by the US to Israel. are designed for nuclear attack particularly with the new B61-12 bomb. The United States will shortly deploy these nuclear bombs in Italy and other European countries, and will also provide them to Israel, the only nuclear power in the Middle East with an arsenal estimated at 100-400 nuclear weapons. If Israel doubles the range of F-35 fighters and is about to receive eight Boeing Pegasus tankers from the US for refueling the F-35s in flight, it is because it is preparing to launch an attack, even nuclear, against Iran.

— “F-35s Bombing Gaza

Wolff and I have corresponded.

https://youtu.be/ynbgMKclWWc

The coronavirus pandemic, the deepening economic crash, dangerously divisive political responses, and exploding social tensions have thrown an already declining American capitalist system into a tailspin. The consequences of these mounting and intertwined crises will shape our future. In this unique collection of over 50 essays, “The Sickness is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or Itself,” Richard D. Wolff argues clearly that “returning to normal” no longer responds adequately to the accumulated problems of US capitalism. What is necessary, instead, is transition toward a new economic system that works for all of us.

“A blueprint for how we got here, and a plan for how we will rescue ourselves” – Chris Hedges

“A magnificent source of hope and insight.” – Yanis Varoufakis

“In this compelling set of essays, and with his signature clarity, intensity, accessibility and deference to historical and present perspective, Wolff has issued not just a stark warning, but concrete reasoning, as to why this time really should be different.” – Nomi Prins

“One of the most powerful and incisive voices in America. As an economist he transcends that “dismal science”, he is a tribune of Main St, a voice of the people.” – George Galloway

“Wolff clearly explains the ways that capitalism exacerbates unemployment, inequality, racism, and patriarchy; and threatens the health and safety of workers and communities – i.e., most of us.” – Jessica Gordon-Nembhard, Ph.D.

“If you care about deeper measures of social health as Americans suffer the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, you will find here a wealth of insight, statistics, and other ammunition that we all need in the fight for a more just society.” – Adam Hochschild

“The current failed system has a noose around all of our necks. Richard Wolff offers an economic vision that gets our society off the gallows.” – Jimmy Dore

Source.
Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world. — Henry Kissinger, interview with the Observer, 1983, on his book, Years of Upheaval

The post Once a US Soldier, Always Wounded, Always Losing! first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

May 23, 2021

Try as You May to Deny, but Evil is in Our DNA

What’s gotten in the way of education in the United States is a theory of social engineering that says there is ONE RIGHT WAY to proceed with growing up.
― John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

Exploring Coffee's Past To Rescue Its Future : The Salt : NPR

We used to research the cup of coffee. School. Mostly community colleges, but at two universities — UT-El Paso and Gonzaga. A lot of evening classes I taught. Even on military compounds, and in prisons, and in the bowels of twin plants in Juarez.

In the old days, sleeves rolled up, adults and young people in classrooms, computers, paper and white boards at our ready, would get comfortable and uncomfortable. It was not an easy class, those Composition 101 and 102 mandatory (sometimes ONLY) writing classes for college students (I am so for mandatory 12 classes on writing, thinking, media, rhetoric, propaganda, etc.). Food and drinks, music during essay writing, and face to face consternation and confrontation. Cooperation.

That cup of coffee from the earliest look at where that bean came from originally intrigued the students. Who would have known (we talked about the Colombian exchange, the Doctrine of Discovery, food, animals, other things that came to the Imperialists). Think of the spice islands on steroids:

The original domesticated coffee plant is said to have been from Harar, and the native population is thought to be derived from Ethiopia with distinct nearby populations in Sudan and Kenya. Coffee was primarily consumed in the Islamic world where it originated and was directly related to religious practices.

Fun stuff, this sort of research and writing, and deep dive. We turned these assignments into poetry, poster illustrations, research papers on the diseases of coffee, on the power of coffee like so many thousands of other foods and products, crossing oceans. Many a product of empire and racism, and the coffee paper also turned into “Is There Slavery in Your Chocolate?” essays.

In recent years, a handful of organizations and journalists have exposed the widespread use of child labor, and in some cases slavery, on cocoa farms in Western Africa. Since then, the industry has become increasingly secretive, making it difficult for reporters to not only access farms where human rights violations still occur, but to then disseminate this information to the public. In 2004, the Ivorian First Lady’s entourage allegedly kidnapped and killed a journalist reporting on government corruption in its profitable cocoa industry. In 2010, Ivorian government authorities detained three newspaper journalists after they published an article exposing government corruption in the cocoa sector. The farms of Western Africa supply cocoa to international giants such as Hershey’s, Mars, and Nestlé—revealing the industry’s direct connection to the worst forms of child labor, human trafficking, and slavery. (Source)

Hear no Evil, See no Evil, Speak no Evil by Gavin Mayhew

Your Chocolate Pleasure Supports Child Slavery - YouTube

So much has happened since I first hit the streets as a newspaper journalist in 1977, and so much has changed since I started teaching college classes in research writing and writing and journalism (1983). The “see, speak, hear no evil” paradigm is the destiny of capitalists. It is the way of who we are every waking nanosecond of our lives. Boycott Divest Sanction my ass. This is where I also pretzel myself into contradiction after contradiction. I should be on an island, or just on 20 acres I have near Mount Adams. Eating mushrooms and stitching moss and bark clothing.

Do ostriches really bury their head in the sand? - BBC Science Focus Magazine

Capitalism is the cancer, virus, prion, the tapeworm, the carrot and the stick. It is the blood sucker of all concepts. Slavery is Capitalism. We talked about this, in so many ways, not always me railing overtly with my anti-Capitalist thesis. I would bring to class small business owners, restaurant owners, ex-military, nonprofit directors, friends who were homeless, living in garages, artists, and dissidents of many kinds. Another thing that is DEAD in the water.

Now, you have to get people vetted and approved to come to a classroom. This is the sickness of our lefty culture. The rightwing has already played this card, too. “Why the hell are you bringing a person from Planned Parenthood to your class? Illegal. Stop. I’m calling the president.”

U.S. Coffee Facts Infographic by Kellen Lester, via Behance This infographic touches coffee consumption stat… | Coffee facts, Coffee facts infographic, Coffee uses

That coffee, now, looking at a cup, the ecological footprint, the energy used to get a cup of coffee to say, my Spokane students. Because Spokane loves its coffee. The amount of water used to grow a cup of coffee. We’d look at the coffee in Central America, or Colombia. Where that plant is grown. What was bulldozed to bring that plantation there. Who works the finca? Which indigenous group of non-Spanish speakers in Guatemala work these plantation, tends the bushes, picks and dries the cherries. Species lost, pesticides used. Water diverted. And, food crops denied.

Again, young and older adults, blown away in my classes, since I was teaching them to look deeper at any number of topics, and develop critical thinking and discourse skills, in whatever watered down version I’d get with many students who were coming to college ill-prepared to really write “essays.” Variations on a theme. Just the cup of liquid, first grown and processed in poor countries, takes about 38 gallons of water to grow.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is It-takes-37-gallons-of-water-to-produce-one-cup-of-coffee.jpg

We’d try and research more and more on the life-cycle of a ceramic cup or Starbucks thermos, and the life cycle and life span of a coffee maker. Embedded energy, waste, mining, slave warehouses, metals, all that fossil fuel to move those metals, cook them, mill them, ship them around the world. Sure, we could look at at sack of dried but not roasted coffee cherries coming from the Guatemala Highlands, and then where it gets shipped by boat, and then moved by truck, and then the actual cleaning and roasting of the coffee. Packaging, and then, that journey is crossing back and forth, over land, in the air, over seas.

The assignment blows many students’ minds, as it should. In the classroom, and I’d bring in a coffee person, with coffee and snacks, and she’d talk about farms in Mexico and Africa she’s visited. Talk about the flavor, the various types of coffees.

We’d look at Fair Trade, Beyond Fair Trade, Shade Grown and the like. Socially responsible coffee. I’d talk about how Vietnam — where I had gone and worked — was cutting more and more forests down to grow coffee. Coffee pests and diseases, and soil enhancements with fertilizers. The entire life cycle analysis of as many things we could extract from the coffee history and production, well, it blows students’ minds, and it only works in person. Don’t fool yourself with the fucking mouse, keyboard and Zoom camera/mic.

We need to talk about the environmental and human and ecological costs of plantation, mountain-razing coffee:

2.2 A Bitter Brew- Coffee Production, Deforestation, Soil Erosion and Water Contamination | Environmental Biology

This pathetic Zoom and remote learning (sic) formula is the deadening of the brain. Recall, Americans already have three quarters of their brains (or more) colonized by lies, propaganda, hate, myth, plain stupidity, largely from terrible K12 (prison with smiling teachers) and all the marketing, and a government whose job is to fleece the masses for the company men, and fleecing includes culling thinking and deep analysis.

All this work, for coffee? Nope, because the students then do some of their own research on any manner of things. Cause and effect, solutions, pro-con, classification, expository, digital rhetoric, and deeper position papers. Research, and while we share sources and do all sorts of things at home, in groups, the big thing is getting the classroom energized, talking, arguing. Debate every minute. We even meet out of class in a, well, coffee shop, and coffee roaster.

Thinking about origins and perspectives. This is a full-time job as an instructor, in the class with all sorts of human beings there taking in and reacting to the work, the talks, the learning and the discourse. This Zoom shit is the death of humanity as I knew it. Radical Pedagogy, 2003 article!

Why Online Education Can Never Replace the Real Thing 1

Always with food, something in the class, mostly evening classes.

In 1960, the University of Missouri published a short “Guide for Television Teachers.” Across the country, over 100 different colleges offered nearly 500 televised courses to a half a million students. So professors needed pointers about the best way to teach in this burgeoning new medium.

“Relax,” the Missouri guide underlined. “Try to be yourself.” Male professors should wear “conservative” ties, the guide added, while women should avoid necklines or hemlines that might “cause discomfort or embarrassment” if they leaned over a counter or sat in a low chair. Once they were properly attired, they could loosen up and let their real character shine through. “Remember that the TV camera projects your natural personality best,” the guide urged, “and the more relaxed and natural that you are, the better you will reach your viewers.”

Slavery: The Original Bitter In Your Chocolate | Chocolate Class

Who are these children forced to work the cocoa plantations of the Ivory Coast?

Shit, those were the days. And here I am, suffering at age 64. I am feeling the burn, the beat-down burn, of more and more people around me stupid, mean, see-speak-hear not evil when it comes to this fucked up Empire, This War Machine. Those were the good old days? Is that my new mindset and refrain?

See no evil, Hear no evil, Speak no evil by Simulacrumble on DeviantArt

It is the contradiction to be an American totally — North American, Canadian or citizen of the USA. Every waking and sleeping minute we are covering the world in blood, exploitation, penury, death. Pain and misery is the way of the land. The hollow media, the celebrities in music and film, oh even more viral than the politicians. They are the elite, or the elite’s house boys or house girls.

“So what can we do but go with the flow? Just let it go. They have all the power, so just live your life as best you can. It’s not that bad. If we don’t bomb the world, steal the minerals, colonize space with weapons, then someone else will. What about China, Russia? I want a family, a job, and just a chance to live on weekends and kayak and smell the moose dung.”

I am down — really depressed — because of what that cup of coffee assignment represents: I am old. I am no good as a teacher because it is a digital and PC and cancel culture study body. I am down because most of the people I would have worked with years ago on political issues, as artists, well, they are either dead, or brains deadened by the struggle and the losing. I am depressed because that cup of coffee assignment is not lauded. The entire Western Civilization or Western Culture is in various forms of mental illness. That illness grouping includes a million wrong ways to medicate or mediate the illnesses of the minds.

Mental health: 'Spike in self-harm, suicide ideation amid Covid-19 pandemic' - Times of India

I am not that, but I am alone, it seems. Now, the coffee, and where it comes from. Do I invest in Folgers Coffee (a division of J.M Smucker Company)? This is what’s depressing me now — my spouse and I are moving some money saved into some investments. Now I have to decide how to put some of it away, or as they say, to invest it. Because there are no interest rates, the average person can’t go to a state bank or any institution and put money into a municipal bond to do some good for society and make a few percentage points above zero. What’s wrong with 4 percent or 5 percent interest? That is the crime, zero or negative interest rates. Criminal. Imagine, there is not one thing on planet Earth, planet Wall Street, planet Retirement Fund which is not heavily tainted with DDDD: death, disease, destruction and destitution. We have been relooking at Socially Responsible Mutual Funds, or ESG’s, and the picture was never pretty:

ESG Ratings: How can a business' environmental and social impact be measured?

Oh, you can say, “Broker, find me a fund that isn’t into war, weapons, mining, prisons, guns, germs, exploitation, banks, insurance companies.” It is virtually impossible. You might not want Walmart stock in the mutual fund, but then Amazon and Facebook and Kraft Foods might be in it. Microsoft, Boeing. Any amount of honor or commitment to NOT engaging in investing that gives money to the murderers, the exploiters, the ocean-soil-jungle-forest-wetland-river killers, it is all lost because they all are wrapped up into one big fat thievery corporation — BlackRock and Blackstone and the top 100 banks, hedge funds, and so many other “if-you-can-make-6-or-12-percent-on-yearly-return” investment products are so embedded in the master slavers in Fortune 1000 circles, and even within the 10,000 largest corporations.

Housing Is A Human Right Stephen Schwarzman Proposition 21 Blackstone

[Modern-Day Robber Baron: The Sins of Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman]

The system is rigged for brokers to use brokerage houses, big ones, and those fees — buy, sell, trade, manage — more money and profits made for NOT producing one potato or bicycle. Yet, MBAs and the others in this crew believe that they don’t want their precious children to work the slave fields of Ivory Coast, or to be soccer ball stitchers, or to be at the wrong end of a toxic waste discharge hose. But invest in Hershey’s, or Nike, or Smithfield, well, out of sight, out of mind. Yep, they would not want their precious families bombed with the amazing number of components tied to an amazing number of businesses wrapped up in one missile. Screws, wires, capacitors, metal shrouding, telemetry, paint, seals, nuts and bolts, precision metal parts, tubes and coils and electronic guidance systems and batteries and, well, you get the picture. But goddamn, you can make bank on investing in defense (sic) companies because there is an endless demand by governments to have that shit in stock. We the taxpayer pay for those Hellfire’s:

Lockheed Martin, Boeing (previous second source), and Northrop Grumman (seeker only for AGM-114L Longbow Hellfire) Unit cost US$150,000 (FY 2021)!

The Military-Industrial Complex | Hoover Institution

It’s much more than just those three companies making bank for these missiles. There is an entire contingent (armies) of companies and service economies tied to this murder weapon:

AGM-114 Hellfire II Missile, United States of America

Pretty simple looking murder weapon: those companies making tons of money, and the death makes more money for them, in resupplying.

In the past, I have studied mutual funds I have invested in, to squirrel away some savings, and the picture is pretty ugly. There are no SRI’s that are nothing more than just market washing. Socially Responsible Investing, NOT:

21 Best Mutual Funds for Investment in 2021-22

Top Holdings — Axis Bluechip

Company	Sector	P/E	3Y High	3Y Low	% Assets
Infosys	Technology	29.50	10.06	1.48	9.36
Bajaj Finance	Financial	76.34	10.38	4.36	8.98
HDFC Bank	Financial	24.82	10.94	6.06	8.97
Tata Consultancy Services	Technology	34.90	9.05	2.30	7.32
Kotak Mahindra Bank	Financial	33.90	9.46	4.74	7.12
ICICI Bank	Financial	23.28	8.05	0.00	7.07
Avenue Supermarts	Services	178.26	7.41	2.45	5.55
HDFC	Financial	23.54	6.82	1.28	5.01
Reliance Industries	Energy	27.33	8.33	0.89	4.30
Divi’s Laboratories	Healthcare	57.37	3.15	0.00	3.15
Hindustan Unilever	FMCG	68.89	5.27	1.49	2.58
Ultratech Cement	Construction	34.72	2.36	0.00	2.24
Asian Paints	Chemicals	85.41	4.24	1.32	2.17
Nestle India	FMCG	77.15	4.59	0.00	2.14
Motherson Sumi Systems	Automobile	147.57	2.08	0.00	2.08
Maruti Suzuki India	Automobile	46.37	5.83	0.00	1.89
Pidilite Industries	Chemicals	86.93	2.55	0.60	1.82
Bharti Airtel	Communication	—	5.50	0.00	1.79
Cipla	Healthcare	31.01	2.36	0.00	1.62
Wipro	Technology	25.80	1.83	0.00	1.55
Shree Cement	Construction	49.08	1.59	0.00	1.32
Tata Steel	Metals	17.76	1.21	0.00	1.21
Titan Company	Cons Durable	139.72	3.45	0.78	0.98
Dr. Reddy’s Lab	Healthcare	44.62	3.21	0.00	0.94
HDFC Life Insurance	Financial	99.18	1.82	0.00	0.89

This is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Fund holdings, in general:

The Gates Foundation's Hypocritical Investments – Mother Jones

Top Warren Buffett Stocks By Size

Here are the top 10 Warren Buffett stocks by number of shares, as of March 31:

Bank of America (BAC), 1.01 billion
Apple (AAPL), 887.1 million
Coca-Cola (KO), 400 million
Kraft Heinz (KHC), 325.6 million
Verizon (VZ), 158.8 million
American Express (AXP), 151.6 million
U.S. Bancorp (USB), 129.7 million
Bank of New York Mellon (BK), 72.4 million
General Motors (GM), 67 million
Kroger (KR), 51.1 million

Look at what Warren Buffett owns as part of Berkshire Hathaway. Products — Diversified investments, property and casualty insurance, Utilities, Restaurants, Food processing, Aerospace, Media, Toys, Automotive, Sporting goods, Consumer products, Internet, Real estate, Railroad

How Does the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Invest Its Money?

So the average Joe and Jane, if they get a mutual fund or two for some long-term investment, this is the reality — you might be a social justice warrior, an anti-racist campaigner, an anti-war proponent, an environmentalist, community crusader, a socialist, an anti-capitalist, but if you stick your toe just a bit into the pond for minimal investments, just to protect a few thousand dollars here and there, this is what you get — money into the pockets of madmen: school to prison pipeline experts, war lords, surveillance capitalists, drug pushers, bad loan chieftains, medical fraudsters, real estate thugs, polluters, mountaintop removers, river toxifiers, land thieves, propaganda priests.

I am so serious about this now — where does the money go, and which company is being supported by stockholders shoveling money into their companies? Look at the union busters, at the price gougers, at the political lobbying arms, all these giant corporations and their networks of bunkos!

You can turn blue in the face decrying Monsanto (Bayer) for its pesticide poisons or Exxon for climate change propaganda or Sackler/Purdue Pharmacy for opioid addictions, but if you have a mutual fund, there is a chance that somehow those companies are entwined somewhere in the formula of a “strong mutual fund.”

The corporate giants are also demanding that Congress allow the repatriation of about $2.5 trillion stashed abroad without paying more than 5% tax. They say the money would be used to grow the economy and create jobs. Last time CEOs promised this result in 2004, Congress approved, and then was double-crossed. The companies spent the bulk on stock buybacks, their own pay raises and some dividend increases.

There are more shenanigans. With low interest rates that are deductible, companies actually borrow money to finance their stock buybacks. If the stock market tanks, these companies will have a self-created debt load to handle. A former Citigroup executive, Richard Parsons, has expressed worry about a “massively manipulated” stock market which “scares the crap” out of him.

Banks that pay you near zero interest on your savings announced on June 28, 2017 the biggest single buyback in history – a $92.8 billion extraction. Drug companies who say their sky-high drug prices are needed to fund R&D. But between 2006 and 2017, 18 drug company CEOs spent a combined staggering $516 billion on buybacks and dividends – more than their inflated claims of spending for R&D. — Ralph Nader

We all are sinners in capitalism — just paying our tax bill: death and destruction raining down on Palestinians, for example:

Seven deadly sins: Wealth without work, Pleasure without conscience, Science without humanity, Knowledge without character, Politics without principle, Commerce without morality, Worship without sacrifice.
– Mahatma Gandhi

Oh, we all think we have found the formula for living in this insane and murderous country. Oh, we have to put nose to the grindstone. Follow the leaders. Get the jab. Do as you are told. You home is not your castle. There are no 40 acres and a mule. No handouts. Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. Pinch your nose, cover your eyes, plug your ears, muffle your mouth!

What is capitalism for dummies, currency rate of exchange in mexico

So, you end up throwing in the towel — no purity test, no selective boycotting of this or that product or service. No true anti-Imperialist leaning, when tax filing time comes. Nothing free in this un-Democratic land of thieves, murderers and thugs. Almost every step you take in America is full of landmines, cow pies, toxic puddles and electrified fences. The horizon is one theater of the absurd after another. The amount of nonsense and self-congratulatory verbiage from all manner of people who think they are enlightened or vaunted or above the dirty, scab-sucking, ripoff fray of capitalism, well, that is the self-delusion, the big lie.

You have a military industrial complex : LateStageCapitalism

So, the role of k12, and of higher education? One of the key foundations for a society — good education, robust, and deep learning, deep thinking, and systems thinking growing. Under capitalism and consumerism and conformist ideology that is US of Amnesia, there are so many broken things about face to face education, and I have written tons on this. Taking it to Zoom, to televised classes, remote learning, well, all the bad gets funneled into this new normal-abnormal.

In addition to education, colleges and universities provide indoctrination in the values and shared beliefs that our society deems important. These commonly shared values and tenets must be instilled, importantly beginning in grade school and before (the Jesuit boast, variously stated, is “Give me the first seven years and you can have all the rest”), and continued and reinforced through high school and college.

It is at the university where young men and women of indoctrinated conviction are most typically apt and able to respond to what is going on in the world around them, perhaps even take to the streets. Indoctrination can be overt or subtle.
— George Heitmann

The post Try as You May to Deny, but Evil is in Our DNA first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

April 28, 2021

W’s Chickens Coming Home to Roost, yet the Media Cocks Aren’t Crowing
Censorship comes in many forms. One of [them] is a colossal moral indifference to official crimes at the highest levels of our government.

— Ralph Nader, April 17, 2021, Ralph Nader Radio Hour

Disclaimer: This is not a traditional mainstream or even left-stream book review. However, Steven C. Markoff’s book does play as the impetus and linchpin to my essay, more of an analysis/reaction to his book. I give The Case Against George W. Bush, high marks. Read Steve’s book. Press your respective legislators to push for an investigation of W.’s crimes. Markoff sets out in the book about how those crimes were committed. I reference those. He completes his case: The evidence is there to prosecute and find guilty the 43rd President of the USA, George W. Bush.

Nader’s Raiders of the Lost Warriors

I was hitting the old Ralph Nader podcast a week ago when I stumbled upon Steven C. Markoff’s book, The Case Against George W. Bush. Nader had Markoff on his podcast, and both talked about the crimes of W Bush, and even more pertinently, the lack of a criminal case against George W. Bush, as well as the crickets in the so-called liberal media (SCLM) as well in the left press concerning Steve’s book.

I quickly emailed Steve for a copy of his book to review, and he came back at me with a PDF of this book which, as I have stated, has been iced out of mainstream media: no interviews, no reviews let alone getting Steve into a room one-on-one, or onto a Zoom call with other guests to parse his well-researched, well-quoted book on the crimes of George W. Bush.

Of course, those crimes are more than crimes of omission, or crimes of secret rendition and torture sites, or the crimes of Abu Ghraib “prison” and Guantanamo. The crime was more than just all the lies about WMD’s and Saddam murdering babies. The big crime was Bush and his Regime of psychotic sociopaths of the neocon variety completely derailing valid, active and clear intelligence that Osama bin Laden was about to make a huge fiery asymmetrical splash on the world stage.

Markoff lays out the daily briefs, the back and forth communiqués, the speeches Bush and others on his team made which all provides evidence of what “we” know about Osama bin Laden. The entire gambit goes back to the Soviet Union’s role in Afghanistan, then with Carter, Reagan, Bush Senior, Clinton and leading up to the ex-governor of Texas, W Bush.

Carter Doctrine 25 years before 9/11

Unfortunately, Jimmy Carter’s man got the Soviet Union and then USA, all tangled up in Afghanistan.

The best way for us to understand Afghanistan is to look at the record of American involvement going back four decades and to look at the record requires a reexamination of President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. From the start, U.S. policy formation surrounding Afghanistan has lived in a realm of magical thinking that has produced nothing but a catastrophe of nightmarish proportions. Brzezinski impacted the future of American foreign policy by monopolizing the Carter administration in ways that few outside the White House understand. In his role as national security advisor he put himself in a position to control information into and out of the White House and when it came to Afghanistan – to use it for whatever purposes he saw fit.

“Brzezinski was an obsessive Russia-hater to the end. That led to the monumental failures of Carter’s term in office; the hatreds Brzezinski released had an impact which continues to be catastrophic for the rest of the world.” Helmer wrote in 2017, “To Brzezinski goes the credit for starting most of the ills – the organization, financing, and armament of the mujahedeen the Islamic fundamentalists who have metastasized – with US money and arms still – into Islamic terrorist armies operating far from Afghanistan and Pakistan, where Brzezinski started them off.”

— ‘Magical Thinking’ has Always Guided the US Role in Afghanistan by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

The Clinton “team” briefed the incoming George W. Bush “team” before his January 2001 inauguration about al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. For the younger Bush, he repudiated the evidence trail from so many intelligence sources. His eyes were on Operation Iraqi Freedom, but first called, O.I.L, which was propagated by Jay Leno incessantly after it was blurted out from the source:

On the afternoon of March 24, 2003 days after the U.S launched missiles at Baghdad to start the illegal war, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer held a press briefing. After a few minutes, a couple of sentences into the briefing, he verbally stumbled on the name of Bush’s war, stating, “Operation Iraqi, uh, Liberation.”

Calling it “Operation Iraqi Freedom” officially is just more War is Peace, Lies are Truth bullshit. And that 2001 invasion of Afghanistan ― “Operation Enduring Freedom” – is yet more of the PT Barnum spin, all catalogued in the annals of United States Central Command and U.S. Army War College.

Trail of Tears, Trails of Evidence

Markoff’s book is a straightforward record of myriad published records – taped speeches, newspaper articles/Op-Eds, sections from books, redacted memos and top secret records. As a buttress to the asymmetrical history of what happened leading up to and during the September 11, 2001 attacks and subsequently all that went wrong in the Middle East, this upcoming 20th anniversary of 9/11, Markoff’s book should be required reading.

But reading isn’t enough for just consuming Markoff’s book, and reading it is not enough for those of us who have been fighting the wars, those in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as all the others. What we need is a truth and reconciliation hearing for all those murdered in the September 11 attacks (around 3,000) as well as the countless hundreds of thousands (several million some estimates determine up to today) killed when the USA bombed and razed Iraq.

Remember that famous photo of Bush reading about a goat to kids in Florida:

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Bush was at Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota County, Florida, reading “My Pet Goat.”

Oh, his dedication to inner-city first graders and listening to them recite the goat story is golden. Earlier, Bush had been on the way from his hotel to the school in his motorcade when it was reported to him a passenger jet had crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. Old commander in Chief Bush believed the crash was an accident caused, perhaps, by pilot error.

That old goat, man, what a story, so much so that when Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff, entered the classroom at 9:06 to tell this president a second airplane had struck the South Tower and that the nation was under attack, Bush stayed on his duff for seven more minutes, following along as the children finished reading the book.

“Class Goat”

Goat may be an old West Point term for the man/woman graduating last in his/her class, but one infamous George the Goat from the Army Academy is none other than George Armstrong Custer.

Unfortunately, the proverbial goat in America’s eyes is the million people murdered and millions more suffering because of the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq. Steve’s book lays out the three legal frameworks or cases for prosecuting Bush (and solely Bush, not Bush and Company LLC) for crimes against humanity (in Iraq and Afghanistan) and Bush’s own responsibility for those several thousand who died on that fateful day, September 11, 2001.

Here’s part of a blurb on the book’s web site, Rare Bird Lit:

Steven C. Markoff presents sourced evidence of three crimes committed by George W. Bush during his presidency: his failure to take warnings of coming terror attacks on our country seriously; taking the United States, by deception, into an unnecessary and disastrous 2003 war with Iraq; costing the lives of more than 4,000 Americans and 500,000 others; and breaking domestic and international laws by approving the torture as means to extract information. While Markoff lays out his case of the crimes, he leaves it up to the reader to decide the probable guilt of George W. Bush and his actions regarding the alleged crimes.

Casualties of War — Truth, Honor, Duty to Protect

I had cut my teeth as a reporter in El Paso and elsewhere covering and following that other container ship of lies – Reagan’s crew of felons and thugs who philandered the American public with their special form of Murder Incorporated in Central America, and notably, Nicaragua. Or the illegal invasion of Panama under George H. W. Bush. Oh, those invasions, coups, clandestine bombings, proxy wars, incursions, secret operations, PsyOps.

I even ended up “down south,” in Costa Rica, Guatemala and Nicaragua running into all sorts of odd fellows in the “drugs for guns” continuing criminal enterprise involving some of this country’s more nefarious “diplomats” and “generals” and CIA/NSA scum. Oh, those yellow belly Contras, murdering civilians and bombing schools and clinics for Reagan and Company. Those freedom fighters, AKA, the biggest lying cheats in recent times in Central America, Los Contras.

And the dead horse isn’t dead, and another author, like Markoff, just couldn’t buy the bs on those Contras:

Thus, in his 2012 book, The Manufacturing of a President, Wayne Madsen claims, based upon his numerous intelligence sources, that the CIA and Mossad have both been funding these rearmed Contras, and that they have been shipping these Contras arms over both the Honduran and Costa Rican borders. He claims also that the Honduran government which came to power through the 2009 coup – a coup which the Obama Administration actively aided and abetted to unseat a leftist government which, by the way, happened to be friendly to Daniel Ortega – has been key to helping both support the Contras as well as to provide a staging ground for the covert operations to bring down the Sandinista government. In other words, Honduras is playing the very same role it did in the 1980s, and the US-backed coup in 2009 – a mere 2 years after Ortega was elected – was crucial to this role.

— Dan Kovalik

Of course, the Bush Family Legacy was also all written over that fiasco, and again, it was easy for me to continue my penchant for understanding how rotten the United States is as I am the son of a Vietnam War regular army veteran, who put in 31 years in uniform.

Lords of War, the Racket that is General Smedley Butler’s war warnings. Or Gary Webb, killing the messenger, the same CIA-infused Washington Post, New York Times and LA Times, to just name a few of the publications that corrupted the real work of Webb uncovering that entire drugs for guns Mafiosi.

Robert Parry, deceased now, but a journalist who started Consortium News in 1994, with Webb as one of his big stories on how bad the US government is, and how bad the mainstream media has become.

Here, Parry:

So what I was seeking by the mid-1990s was some solid ground in which to plant a flag for honest journalism, rather than constantly being forced into retreat, pulled by nervous editors and producers looking over their shoulders out of fear of right-wing retaliation. From solid ground, I thought, we could produce journalism that simply assessed the facts and made independent judgments regardless of who might be offended.

In 1995, it was my oldest son, Sam, who suggested the then-novel idea of “a Web site.” I didn’t fully understand what a Web site was and Sam was no techie but he demonstrated extraordinary patience in building our original Internet presence. (Back then, there were no templates; you had to start from scratch.) We married old-fashioned investigative reporting with the new technology of the Internet and began publishing groundbreaking investigative articles.

We followed evidence where it went, even when it flew in the face of the conventional wisdom, such as our work on the 1980 October Surprise issue of whether Reagan and Bush went behind President Jimmy Carter’s back during his Iran-hostage negotiations, much the way Nixon had in sabotaging Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks in 1968.

Not only did we present our own original work but we buttressed investigations by other serious journalists, such as Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News when, in 1996, he revived Ronald Reagan’s Contra-cocaine scandal. When the major newspapers set out to destroy Webb and discredit his revelations, Consortiumnews was one outlet that took on the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times.

Yes, we were outgunned. Despite showing that Webb was not only right but actually understated the problem of Contra-cocaine trafficking, we still could not save Webb from having his career destroyed and then watching the big newspapers essentially high-five each other for having helped cover up a serious crime of state.

The Three Crimes of the POTUS #43 (Secret Service called him Trailblazer)

I am not going astray here, kind reader. What Steven talked a lot about on the Ralph Nader podcast was how that same media, the So-called Liberal Press, has virtually gone silent on his book, a type of passive censorship that can eat at the soul of any author.

In reality, the “case against Bush” is the case against mainstream media/press and their close ties to not just the chambers of power, but within their “embeddedness,” inside the ranks, as well as their allegiance to, and participation in, the national security state’s various bureaus of hit men and hit women.

When I finished the book, I offered the book to everybody that I had quoted, which was… around ninety authors. I offered it to Condoleezza Rice, I offered it to Dick Cheney, I offered it to the [George W.] Bush [Presidential] Library. I haven’t heard from one person about the book.

— Steven Markoff stated on Nader’s show.

Interestingly, Markoff incorporates Richard Clarke’s words as a preface to this book. Clarke actually strips culpability from Rumsfeld, Cheney, and others laying the blame on Bush personally. Here, early in Markoff’s book, Clarke puts it clearly in his mind.

While I may be considered by some to be prejudiced in my judgment, there are facts that any objective observer must accept.

• First, Bush ignored warnings about the serious threat from Al Qaeda prior to 9/11.
• Second, Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in violation of international law, when Iraq had been uninvolved in 9/11 and offered no imminent threat to the United States.
• Third, Bush authorized the use of torture and denied prisoners due process, both acts in violation of international law.

Note that in each case I say that Bush did these things, not the Bush administration. There is a revisionist school that seeks to place the blame on Bush’s vice president, Richard B. Cheney. While there can be little doubt that Cheney encouraged Bush to take many of these actions, it is not true that the president was merely a tool of a mendacious and scheming subordinate.

The evidence is now clear that Bush agreed with his vice president and knew full well what he was doing. He was an enthusiastic participant, a believer in the war on terror and the war on Iraq. It is true, however, that he did not master or manage the details of either war until the last few years of his eight-year presidency.

— Richard A. Clarke, in the Forward of Markoff’s book.

[In 1992, President George H. W. Bush appointed Richard A. Clarke to chair the Counterterrorism Security Group and to a seat on the United States National Security Council. President Bill Clinton retained Clarke and in 1998 promoted him to the National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counterterrorism. Under President George W. Bush, Clarke initially continued in the same position and later became the special advisor to the president on cyber security. He left his government position prior to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.]

Markoff uses Clarke’s book, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, as a touchstone of sorts. That was in 2007.

Importantly, Clarke had the necessary government background, involvement, and position to know about what he wrote. When I finished Clarke’s book, I was shocked. Could Bush have really disregarded threats of bin Laden and Al-Qaeda prior to 9/11? If so, was there a compelling reason that Bush spent his political capital and energy going after Hussein? Could it be that George W. Bush’s Iraq War was about oil?

It occurred to me that while Clarke seemed knowledgeable about terrorists, 9/11, and the run up to our 2003 invasion of Iraq, he was just one person, and his knowledge was limited to what he had personally seen and learned.

I thought that if I combined details from Clarke’s book with related information from other diverse sources with inside or special knowledge of those times and places, that combined information could produce new and clearer insights about 9/11 and the Iraq War. I then set out to find what additional facts and information were available on those and related topics.

— Steven Markoff, The Case Against George W. Bush

Torture, Rendition, Yellow Cake, WMD’s

I remember protesting U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales June 27, 2007, in Spokane, when he showed up to talk about his department under Bush. Many of us were there to protest publicly Gonzales and the Bush administration, for many things, including that 2002 memo written by Gonzales that said Bush had the right to waive anti-torture laws and treaties that protect prisoners of war.

Oh, the long arm of the “law” that Wednesday afternoon took a good friend down to the ground, arborist Dan Treecraft. He did nothing wrong, but Dan along with another person, was arrested for public disturbance.

I was there with students of mine from two community colleges where I taught, and alas, even those two respective presidents and chairs of the department where I taught thought they had the right to tell a faculty member what he could and couldn’t do as part of a class assignment on “what it’s like to come out and protest a representative of your/our government who states torture is okay.”

Ironically, he was in Spokane to talk about “gang enforcement,” and Gonzales wasn’t alluding to the biggest continuing criminal enterprise Gang called the United States of America.

Steve’s book is a guide, a probable pathway for lawmakers, voters, and others, including the Press, to ratchet up the attention on George W. Bush the War Criminal, and to put to rest the fawning and ameliorating reputation of Bush as The Painter (sic) Friend of Michelle Obama and Ellen.

The kicker in Markoff’s book, says it all, quite damningly, but the reality is that the War is a Racket machine is a very fine tuned complex – Big Business Complex: Burger King, et al; Home Depot, et al; Mercenaries ‘R Us, et al; paint, air conditioning, roads, drywall, vehicles, depleted uranium, fuel, water, food suppliers, et al; all those financial products, that medical complex et al; Big Ag, Big Oil, Big Chemical, Big Prison et al, all in the manner of the for-profit system that is subsidized – welfare-ized – by the US taxpayer. Insanity we have already seen in other wars, and that War on Vietnam, not enough lessons learned there? I’ve been up close and personal with that war, in Vietnam as a civilian, and as a son of a wounded regular Army officer, social worker for wounded veterans, homeless vets and their families, instructor of college writing for Vietnam veterans.

There is no urban legend attributed to those $200 hammers and $600 toilet seats and $2000 each bolts holding the shrouding of Patriot missiles. War is graft central, and how many millionaires and billionaires were created after World War I? Read General Butler’s, War is a Racket.

Evidence of Crimes as Eight Bullet Points

This shit is personal to me, as well, since I have had friends and students coming back from Bush’s wars, full of trauma, fucked up beyond repair, walking PTSD warriors with all that resentment, anger and physical outbursts, and nowhere to go. Here is Steve’s book, again, near the end:
Could the following quote from Payback, a book by David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton, in part on the strategy of redirected aggression, explain Bush’s taking our country to war on his misleading and false premises?

“George W. Bush and his Administration were not stooges at all, but quite brilliant. They read the need of most Americans at the time: to hit someone, hard, so as to redirect their suffering and anger [from 9/11]. The evidence is overwhelming that for the Bush Administration’s ‘neocons,’ the September 11 attacks were not the reason for the Iraq War; rather, it was a convenient excuse for doing something upon which they had already decided. Their accomplishment—if such is the correct word—was identifying the post-9/11 mood of the American people, and manipulating this mood, brilliantly, toward war.”

It’s difficult to fathom the extent of the death and destruction caused by George W. Bush’s three crimes, but his legacy of death and destruction are of Olympic proportions.
- An estimated 2,977 people killed by the attacks on 9/11, and thousands more injured or incapacitated that day. In addition, hundreds if not thousands have died and will die early from the toxic air from the collapse of the Twin Towers and its aftermath.
- By one count, there were 4,400 United States personnel killed and 30,000 wounded in the Iraq War as of August 31, 2010; tens of thousands more wounded physically and emotionally crippled by participating in that war; millions of Americans and their families destroyed, devastated, and/or traumatized by 9/11 and Bush’s 2003 Iraq War.
- As many as 650,000 deaths or more from Bush’s Iraq War, deaths that wouldn’t have occurred but for that war.
- Many of our civil rights, and the civil rights of others around the world, were curtailed due to the fear created by 9/11, a fear used by some as an opportunity to weaken our liberties.
- Three to seven trillion dollars in costs to our country from 9/11 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Those unnecessary trillions were and will be added to our national debt, a sum burdening our future, the future of our children, and perhaps of generations to come.
- Bush’s torture of prisoners puts American soldiers captured in future wars at greater risk of being tortured.
- The loss of America’s prestige and moral authority from Bush’s unnecessary Iraq War and torturing prisoners will hurt our country in the years ahead.
- Sixteen different US spy agencies on September 24, 2006, concluded that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq since March 2003 has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicals— effectively increasing the terror threat in the years after 9/11—and that the Bush administration tortured detainees and that torture wasn’t effective in securing intel otherwise unavailable.
Because America invaded a sovereign country without credible reason and tortured prisoners, how can we say without hypocrisy that other countries shouldn’t do the same to other nations or to us? What moral authority do we have to tell others it is wrong to torture?

— Steven Markoff, The Case Against George W. Bush
Pretty damning, and as I file this review/analysis/rant, that W is at it again, and his stupidity is the stunt, no, smart as a fox, or pet-painting war criminal?

In a People interview, the former president said he told his former secretary of state he had written for her. “She knows it,” said Bush, 74, “But she told me she would refuse to accept the office.”

Bush has been doing press to support the release of his book, Out of Many, One, which features his painted portraits of American immigrants and the stories of their lives.

He called current-day Republicans “isolationist, protectionist, and, to a certain extent, nativist.”

“Really what I should have said — there’s loud voices who are isolationists, protectionists and nativists, something, by the way, I talked about when I was president,” Bush said. “My concerns [are] about those -isms, but I painted with too broad a brush … because by saying what I said, it excluded a lot of Republicans who believe we can fix the problem.”

Shadow of War — Ghosts of the Dead

We’ll see if People magazine interviews Markoff, and gets a bit under the skin of his fine book, all 360 pages, with a decent bibliography and works cited section.

His conclusion:

Regardless of how I or others see what I submit are Bush’s criminal acts, some will continue to argue that while he wasn’t a perfect president, at least he rid the world of the tyrant, Hussein. Yes, he did, but for what reason, by what method, and at what cost?

In addition to the unnecessary deaths and wounding of thousands of brave Americans, hundreds of thousands of others died and were injured from Bush’s unnecessary Iraq invasion. The trillions of dollars Bush’s war has cost has and will continue to be added to our national debt. A debt saddling our future.

In conclusion, I believe the evidence in this book shows Bush’s three crimes were reckless, dishonest, and tragically unnecessary.

I rest my case.

— Steven Markoff, The Case Against George W. Bush

Of course, there are gross inaccuracies when it comes to US-induced casualties, and the first casualty of war is truth, for sure:

Of the countries where the U.S. and its allies have been waging war since 2001, Iraq is the only one where epidemiologists have actually conducted comprehensive mortality studies based on the best practices that they have developed in war zones such as Angola, Bosnia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guatemala, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan and Uganda. In all these countries, as in Iraq, the results of comprehensive epidemiological studies revealed 5 to 20 times more deaths than previously published figures based on “passive” reporting by journalists, NGOs or governments.

Taking ORB’s estimate of 1.033 million killed by June 2007, then applying a variation of Just Foreign Policy’s methodology from July 2007 to the present using revised figures from Iraq Body Count, we estimate that 2.4 million Iraqis have been killed since 2003 as a result of our country’s illegal invasion, with a minimum of 1.5 million and a maximum of 3.4 million.

— Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies, March 19, 2018

[Civil protection rescue teams work on the debris of a destroyed house to recover the body of people killed in an airstrike during fighting between Iraqi security forces and Islamic State militants on the western side of Mosul, Iraq. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana, File)]

For Markoff, it’s the lives that were destroyed by Bush. That is the echo in his words, and the ghosts of those murdered are the shadows between the lines in The Case Against George W. Bush.

Roots of Zionism and U.S. Liberty to Iraq and Now Iran

Alas, I am ending this analysis/response to Markoff’s book, The Case Against George W. Bush, by slogging through another quagmire, and then some reference to books on just who was lobbying to attack Iraq. We have Markoff trying to open up a case against W. Bush, and his book is clear, focused, not one we’d expect in the pantheon of history books or investigative research/journalistic screeds.

Some writers, thinkers, educators and journalists (such as myself), however, were already looking into the scope of this terror campaign, the implications of US Patriot Act, the entire mess that is Israel’s murderous mucking about in the Middle East with Israel-Firster American corporate heads, administration wonks, politicians and more clandestine and nefarious actors behind the scenes, supreme puppet masters and Svengali types.

All those Israeli wars led to the destruction of Lebanon, Syria and the biggest obstacle at the time, Iraq.

And, here I go again, tangentially putting more fuel into the fires that immolated Iraq and which have blazed through the Middle East before and during and since W. Bush and his Klan invaded the Middle East.

Here, I reference a recent piece by Timothy Alexander Guzman who briefly alludes to the AIPAC/Israel/Israel-firster connection to the invasion(s) of Iraq in his piece, “The Prospect of a Major False-Flag Operation in the Middle-East Grows by the Day: Remembering June 8th, 1967 the Day Israel Attacked the USS Liberty: “It’s was all part of the long-term plan and Iraq was part of that plan, in fact, the most powerful lobby in Washington is AIPAC and the Bush neoconservatives including Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Bill Kristol, Elliot Abrams and others who pushed Washington into a war with Iraq. According to John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, authors of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) was a major supporter for the War on Iraq”:

AIPAC usually supports what Israel wants, and Israel certainly wanted the United States to invade Iraq. Nathan Guttman made this very connection in his reporting [in Haaretz, April 2003] on AIPAC’s annual conference in the spring of 2003, shortly after the war started: “AIPAC is wont to support whatever is good for Israel, and so long as Israel supports the war, so too do the thousands of the AIPAC lobbyists who convened in the American capital.” AIPAC executive director Howard Kohr’s statement to the New York Sun in January 2003 is even more revealing, as he acknowledged “‘quietly’ lobbying Congress to approve the use of force in Iraq” was one of “AIPAC’s successes over the past year.” And in a lengthy New Yorker profile of Steven J. Rosen, who was AIPAC’s policy director during the run-up to the Iraq war, Jeffrey Goldberg reported that “AIPAC lobbied Congress in favor of the Iraq war.”

— John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, authors of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy

[Oh, that anniversary, of the attack by Israel on the Liberty, June 8th (1967)]

I suppose this entire mess that Markoff catalogues in his book, as a triumvirate of crimes by George W. Bush, could for me, personally, be summed up, in my mind, with President George W. Bush, speaking at the annual AIPAC conference in May of 2004:

You’ve always understood and warned against the evil ambition of terrorism and their networks. In a dangerous new century, your work is more vital than ever.

Steven Markoff doesn’t go there, for sure, and that is what makes Markoff’s book unique, too: a clean record of the mess and blunder and murderous trail George W. Bush left in his wake as leader of the so-called “free world.”
The post W’s Chickens Coming Home to Roost, yet the Media Cocks Aren’t Crowing first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
April 19, 2021

Caught in a Propaganda Mad House

The fully developed bureaucratic apparatus compares with other organizations exactly as does the machine with the non-mechanical modes of production.

The organization of offices follows the principle of hierarchy … each lower office is under the control and supervision of a higher one.

— Max Weber, Economy and Society, 1922

This doesn’t infer private companies, organizations, trade groups, corporations, lobbies are any better than the bureaucracies of government. In fact, the bureaucratic hell we all have been put through — those of us who do not go quietly into the night or roll over to show some yellow belly — consumes millions of lifetime lives, working us over through a very disgusting labyrinth of penury, penalties, prosecutions, persecutions and penal phalanx designed to wear down the innocent.

If you do not have a stable of lawyers (imagine: $2000 an hour; imagine, at least 33.33 percent plus expenses for supposed civil cases of a class action variety), or a stable of lobbyists (imagine: entire companies set up to lie, steal, block, and hide for the rich, the corporations), or a brothel of politicians (imagine: how much does it cost to run for a Senate seat) — here, October 2020:

The North Carolina Senate race is already the most expensive congressional race of all time, with $265 million spent between candidates and outside groups. The Iowa Senate race has already claimed the No. 2 spot with $218 million. — Open Secrets

Those small potatoes people like you and I, those underclass, those lower classes, those less than medium wage/middle class, and all those developing world classes, and all those displaced classes, and all the farmer and laborer classes, we are set up for failure, and when we do fight, we have to empty the savings accounts just to get to the courthouse.

I won’t go into deep-deep detail, but my own family has a recent living example of this fleecing, here in good old Oregon. That person set up an LLC — limited liability corporation — when he got a job with a hospitality staffing agency back east. This agency is run by a multimillionaire, who Zooms his gig workers (all workers have to pay the money in respective states for setting up LLC’s) from his 5,000 square foot “dream home” in Vermont, the second or third one in his portfolio. Imagine, a schmuck like me assisting my family member in Oregon to set up his LLC. It cost him $100. Some of my family member’s teammates ended up getting lawyers and CPA’s to help at a tune of not less than $450.

The entire gig and DIY and precarious and atomized world of work, including recruiting and staffing, is full of money at the top, and worker bees at the bottom. These worker bees are usually women. Covid-19 stupidity hit, and, well, the hospitality and restaurant business caved. This company then went after the N95 mask makers, and other industries still operating during the planned-economic-demic.

So, you have I Can’t Breathe George Floyd unfolding, yet this multimillionaire white man did not talk about the national movement to stop the police murders of black people (Duh, restaurant workers are BIPOC). Nothing even on his company’s web site decrying pig-cop violence against blacks.

This commission-based job went south for my family member. Fast. He did not make money, and got one commission check, $3,000 for hundreds of hours of work. Do the math. Think of the money lost, time lost, percentage of the soul eaten out.

Now, he looked for work, paid work, and landed a job. The problem is the Oregon Department of Revenue sent a mountain-high set of letters, warnings, bills, and then penalties. You know, some people have to try and make a living. This family member also had in his past bad nightmares from the IRS coming to his family home and taking the house over, kicking the family into the streets. He was an 11-year-old. Try another incident with a repo of a car, and other such IRS crap, and this family member just could not handle all the chaos of the bureaucracies of hate, failure to file, not knowing the codes inside and out. He expected it all to be washed out at the end of the year when he filed his taxes.

Wrong, sucker.

I helped him out, sending in thoughtful and rhetorically-magnificent letters to stop this idiocy. No go. Still, more and more late penalties.

I went to the Tax Court (logged on), and the only way to get a hearing in Oregon is to pay the charged (but incorrect) taxes and the added-on penalties. At more than $10,000 to pay the government, my family member had to dump two IRA Roth’s. So much for the savings.

Now, just to get an administrative judge to hear this, another $280 check had to be written to the state of Oregon. Think of all the work we had to do to try and figure out what the hell was going on. Over $10,000 shelled out, and here it is, waiting for forms to be filled out.

Then, on top of this, ending the LLC cost my family member, $110. That’s $100 to create a sole proprietor LLC, and another $110 to dissolve it.

My family member did not have the bandwidth to handle this. Of course, over the years the toll of medical bills, mortgage company thieves, PayDay loan thugs, school loan sharks, real estate appraisers, auto creeps, and on and on, I have had to come to the assistance of many many people. In reality, this capitalist society — call it parasitic, diseased, disruptive, poisonous — is a wasteland of fraud, scams, and downright theft. In a real society, there would be navigators for people of all ages and ilk — free legal advice, free clinics, free social workers and services workers helping cut through the avalanche of red-tape and bureaucrats who should be — along with at least the first million lawyers on earth, and first 10 million lords of war, and the first 100 million financial real estate insurance scammers — at the bottom of the sea.

This is it for a broken society. Broken big time. And how do all those notices and penalty scare letters and authentication letters from courts and the revenue service and unemployment service and department of labor come to us in a small rural town?

Yep, through the post office … the dying USPS. That that bumbling mean as a white old man Biden can hardly muster a trickle of phlegm in his words. No groundswell of legislators (sic) and policy makers (sic) and law makers (sic) putting a stop to this evisceration after evisceration.

My family member gets the hearing, appointing me as a secondary or primary family member allowed to present “evidence.” In the first three minutes of my family member presenting evidence, it is clear the Revenue guy is a buttoned down bureaucrat on Prozac. We are talking legalese, and mentioning form x and form y to be filed, with Zeros in all the boxes, to trigger the next step of a refund for the taxes my family member didn’t owe, and then, with the waiving of penalties. My family member literally left, vomiting, and yelling.

Did the judge hear this? Yep. Did the Revenuer hear it? Yep. This wasn’t a Zoom Doom call, but I could hear some dry voices, and then, I took over and navigated the Revenuer’s promise to the judge that all fines and penalties and interests and the initial taxes would be refunded.

Luckily, the Revenuer had some humanity, and emailed me immediately, and we talked, too, on his personal phone, and he attempted to navigate me on some forms, sent them to me, and, alas, the forms did not work. He saw that, and he tried to get some workarounds, and this is where we are at:

Trauma. PTSD. Past bad-bad interaction with IRS, state code men, tax folk, cops, pigs, the entire buffet of bumbling and overpaid and inhumane people. Think of the ticket guy on the street, and the pig-cop. Try and have conversations with these “public” officials about how they live with themselves. I have, in bars. They will throw down, pull a gun, call more pigs-cops. I’ve had many a yelling match. This is the cancel culture.

Courts, Cops, DA’s, HR, Customer Service, Code Enforcers, Penalty Purveyors.

We await the refund checks, and I will have to let the court know it was resolved once a check comes in, but not without more headaches after the administrative hearing. I will petition the court to charge back the $281 court fee to the state of Oregon, demanding a refund.

More letters.

And that’s where we are at — letters encoded in Digital Blockchains, on those electronic strips on the DMV license, passport, medical card, on the license plate. And that leads us to the vaccination passport, and soon, the vaccination electronic tattoo.

All app driven, all approved by the Google-Palantir-Facebook-AI masters of the universe. With those sleazy millionaire governors and sleazier senators and congressmen.

Those of us knew this was beyond 1984 and a Brave New World and Minority Report and The Jungle, more than a modern Grapes of Wrath, we knew all of this three decades ago, way before Plans for the Pandemic, shortened to Plan-demic.

The horror is looking at Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, Thiel, Musk, Fauci, and a million other toadies and Eichmann’s in their lizard eyes. The Agenda 2030 and Great Reset proverbial bulldozer of humanity? Already in second gear!

Here we are, now Rutgers, looking for every person on campus to have been hit with the drug-thing in the hypodermic. Prove your worth, prove your jab (s). And anyone really looking at this bio-nano technology knows that the mRNA poison, and the entire suite of bad-bad brews, well, we can expect constant jabs.

Rutgers Campus about to go 100 percent forced vaccinations!

The federal government’s assurance of vaccine supply for all Americans prompted Rutgers to make the decision, the university said in a statement.

Brian Strom, chancellor of Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences and executive vice president for health affairs, said the vaccine is the key “to the return of campus instruction and activities closer to what we were accustomed to before the pandemic.”

“The COVID-19 vaccines have proven to be safe and effective in preventing serious illness, hospitalization and death,” Storm said in the statement.

— Source: Market Watch

“The Vaccine Passport Propaganda Template” by Adam Dick

And my shitty job with shitty pay and shitty respect, oh, the managers I work with are actually breaking confidentiality rules by announcing which people have gotten the jab vis-à-vis the nonprofit, and those (me) who have not. Can you believe that shit? I have to tell them if, or if not, where and how and which one?

Asking same said boss what the hell is his BMI? How’s that red face blood pressure going? What the hell is going on with the heavy asthmatic breathing? Those fat-laden lunches? You sure about those? Imagine, a world where they ask, or demand, or press — “You’ve gotten the vaccine, right?”

Sure, this is the new normal, and it is their immoral code, their anti-ethics, their Scarlet Alphabet — A through Z, and many symbols stitched into the digital passport signifying the Wrong Kind of American.

My friend does recruiting for California businesses, and that fine fucked up state is requiring vaccine passports, to get to and from work. Pigs-Cops tackling you and folding you into a squad car. That’s step one. Many more steps here to this Plan-Demic takeover.

And this physics and chemistry high school teacher is so right, so vulnerable in this shit show called United Snakes of America:

Today, I would describe myself as a Marxist who thinks the Russian Revolution of 1917 was the most recent example of a working class revolution but would describe its counter-revolutionary collapse as ending in state-run capitalism. I still believe the experience of the Bolshevik party in Russia is vital to look at as an example of what needs to be built today, and there are writings of Lenin and Luxemburg that I use as a political touchstone today. However, I no longer adhere to the idea that “socialism in one country” came only with Stalin, but that you can see its beginnings under Lenin in the policies of the NEP and other changes in policies of the Soviet state under Lenin. The revolution’s fate was sealed when it did not spread to Germany shortly after the socialist revolution in Russia.

Still, I believe the only way out of the mess we are in today is another working class revolution for the establishment of socialism. But that will not take place through the ballot box. It will require mass strikes and an armed insurrection to establish it. Also, it cannot be called socialism unless working class democracy is at its center and is preserved and expanded through the course of the revolution and beyond. Overall, while I firmly believe capitalism must be dismantled, I have more questions than answers about the state of our political tradition and the process by which this mass socialist uprising will take place. Part of the reason I started “What’s Left?”, a podcast/channel I host with two friends, was to give myself an open space to investigate political questions that I am still working through.

The last year has made the prospects for revolutionary change (which were exceedingly dim before the mania around COVID started) seem even more unlikely. I have witnessed the revolutionary Left collapse behind the capitalist state and institutions through the course of the pandemic. I am exceedingly grateful for the existence of Left Lockdown Sceptics and their attempt to fashion a Left response and oppositions to the authoritarian maneuvers of the capitalist classes across the globe. This blog has been a glimmer of hope for me in what has felt like an ocean of despair.

— Andy Libson

Just how long does Andy have left in the rotting K12 school system? DV readers know the real way to beating down the masters, and beating back their toadies and Eichmann’s. You’ve read my stuff until you’ve hacked up the offal of capitalism and the rotting meat percolating from the core systems of oppression and subjugation. You know my stance on K12 and higher education.

Solutions to homelessness, obesity, paranoia, fear, sickness, illiteracy, poverty, hunger? Shit, the entire community-based land-formed people-centered, ecosystem-dominating holism and complete person, from cradle to cradle. Every system checked against a true precautionary principle. Every move for 10 generations out. Every decision made for the good of the community.

Art over science. Environment over economics. Ecology over commerce. All tied into a localized economy, regionalized planning, fair use, retrenchment, and ending capitalism, here, there, everywhere.

Naïve? Shit thinking? Is believing in this warring, poisoning, thieving and murdering system of money and top owning the world better? Is that where we are — giving Musk the green light to dump satellites and space junk into orbit after orbit? Who has the right to the Moon and Mars? Just what price is that sickness, that megalomania?

Embarrassing — sick:

Read Andy’s piece. Follow his links to Alison McDowell and Cory Morningstar and Jake Klyceck!

That is the horror story after horror story — Daily, more and more sad sack humans are opting for Zoom Teaching-Medicine-Social Work-Counseling-Engagement with the lighting on the best side of the face, while every Tom, Dick, Harriet and Jane are Zooming in their Underpants.

Andy, again:

I think we need to get back to our source of power – our workplace and centers where we congregate to do work – immediately and begin figuring out how we can stop what is coming. The remote learning experience we are going through right now is not a momentary mirage of a world trying to escape COVID. What we are witnessing and participating in (as either educator or student) is the future of education that is preparing future workers for what work will be like in the coming years: remote, on a screen, mediated through data flow and transmission, overseen, monitored and directed by AI. Students are experiencing education (separated, individualized, isolated, controlled and obscure) as they will experience their future work.

Participating in remote learning today isn’t ‘safer’, it’s actually far more dangerous to all our futures. It means our lives will be more separated, more surveilled, more scrutinized and more controlled than ever before. Physical schools will be replaced with laptops and drop-in centers. Teachers will be replaced with screens and AI. Education itself will be a lifelong chase, not of learning, but of job skills so each worker can compete in a global labor market where ever-centralized capitalist centers get their pick of the litter to screen for and exploit workers not as a class but as an isolated worker connected via a screen.

And it seems apropos to end with John Steppling, now in Norway, and an intellect on the wane, as is anyone who looks critically at the demise, whether it is art or culture.

There is a deep anti-human agenda in Capitalism. There always has been, but today, as capitalism reaches its most dire crises (one expected, perhaps even planned) the class struggle has taken on its most profound form. And fear is the currency in play. And the most coercive aspect of this struggle is the war on children. And it is found in many forms- from the known and ignored toxicity of plastics and the poisoning of the earth and oceans, to the revanchist sex negativity of social distancing and masks, and to the addictions of screens. And the habituation to screens is, of course, also intentional.

He cites much of Robert Bly’s work and his thinking around fantasy, art, the poet’s duty:

As I mentioned, Bly is in his 90s now. I met him once. And he was like a shining light in the room. My old mentor Terry Ork knew him well. I learned more from Bly than probably anyone. So I feel I want to return to him a bit more right now. I found his opening remarks at the 1968 National Book Awards Ceremony…

“I know I am speaking for many, many American poets when I ask this question: since we are murdering a culture in Vietnam at least as fine as our own, have we the right to congratulate ourselves on our cultural magnificence ? Isn’t that out of place ?

I met Bly a couple of times, drank with him a few times — Spokane, El Paso and Tucson.

Here, a short piece on him coming to Spokane, oh, 14 years ago. I’ve written and published a few essays on my remembrances of him, my work as a journeyman with him, and with others like William Stafford.

Enwrapped in solitude, Bly spins ruminations shaped by other cultures, other poets — as in “Meeting the Man Who Warns Me”:

I dream that I cannot see half of my life. “I look back, it is like the blind spot in a car.

So much just beyond the reach of our eyes, what tramples the grasses while the horses are asleep, the hoof marks all around the cave mouth…

what slips in under the door at night, and lies exhausted on the floor in the morning.

— from Haeder’s article, “Bly’s Call to Duty“

There is that, really, seeing less than that life, blind spots, this teetering age of digital fascism, and worse. That light, barely there, now.
The post Caught in a Propaganda Mad House first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
April 6, 2021

Methanol for the CoV2 Hypodermic Chemical Experiment

“There you have it — At-will, AKA at the beckon call, beckon abuse, beckon exploitation, beckon denigration, beckon injurious behavior and workplace environment. These employers are thugs, and from the top down, with their lawyers and MBAs and institutional misleadership yahoos at the executive level, the worker is doomed by this sick system. Forced vaccinations for schools, colleges, workplaces. The systems need to burn!”

Of course, I am asked not to identify the person who wrote this to me. We all are being surveilled by these Stasi folk, whether we work for a governmental agency, school systems, private college, for-profit business, mom and pop lowbrow joint, nonprofit, you name it.

They (bosses, agencies, pre-employment interviewers) sign up for Google search notifications — any time their company is named in the media or on digital platforms, they get notifications. They track what’s said about their business, corporation, nonprofit, agency, school. That is also for anyone they want to put into the Google-Palantir search engine, for a price, monthly rate, be it a person’s name. Like mine, hmm.

This is what these Stasi Americans want in their lives — complete control. Damage control against the truth-sayers speaking truth to power. Damage the messenger, or kill him or her with constant threats of litigation, fines, subpoenas, more. Imagine one writer, me, getting hooked into the Google Gulag, but then, what about anyone with my name? Hmm, children, siblings, spouses? This is how they play their mole game.

Below, an example of the blithe and dangerous bullshit fake journalism of the mainstream imbeciles. That the State of Oregon can force vaccinations onto people really is the issue: the state just pushes that onto the overlords running businesses or nonprofits. That’s it, no argument, hands down the policy of the land, man.

The news (sic) story below will not contain push back, and it will be vacant of civil rights thinkers/libertarians cited, will allude to no one pushing back on these Draconian measures. In fact, the story will not frame these measures as Draconian. The journalist from the Oregon paper of record (Oregonian) is already colonized and co-opted. Then you get some “law” professor (sic) from a for-profit private university pulled into the article, to come on board to yammer on. This is the new normal that’s been pretty old normal — mainstream media faking it, looking like it’s in the hunt for balance, when it’s all false balance, false and manufactured consent. The goal is to question the prevailing party-bureaucratic-company line, and question all governments’ actions. Read here:

“I think ultimately most employers would be able to require it,” said Henry Drummonds, a Lewis & Clark Law School professor specializing in labor and employment law. “But I think most employers probably wouldn’t want to require it. I think employers could first encourage and educate employees about the safety of the vaccine and the desirability of it in terms of protecting yourself and your coworkers.”

Drummonds said that at-will employment standards allow private businesses to dictate and change the terms of employment at any time and fire employees for any reason, as long as they don’t discriminate on the basis of race, gender, age or any other protected category.

In practice, this means that employers probably could require employees to receive the vaccine to remain employed or return to the office. Both the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Oregon Bureau of Labor & Industries have released guidance stating that employers can mandate that employees get vaccinated.

Already, idiocy prevails: just recently, I witnessed a manager of a nonprofit ask her employee in front of another employee in a public place within lots of people’s earshot: “Well, Rick, got his vaccination. So did I. Most everyone in the company has. But John hasn’t.”

I knew this was a nonprofit this manager was a member of because I was within earshot. I offered an unsolicited response, trying to equate calling someone out in public for not having this experimental and not FDA-approved chemical shot. “How’s your BMI? You looking overweight? How’s your hypertension? You looking pink in the face? How’s your probable lung cancer? You just finished off a cigarette. Come on, shaming people for not agreeing to an untested chemical compound with that jab in the arm is unethical, and in public so I can hear your conversation?” She just clammed up and scooted her two employees away.

Imagine, fewer and fewer tough guys and gals can actually make it in USA (elsewhere too) with the power of what they can and cannot decide upon, that is, what they either want to and do not want to be injected into their bodies. Mind you, the jury is far from out on these chemical shots —

On February 27, 2021, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced it had “issued an emergency use authorization (EUA) for the third vaccine for the prevention of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19),” the Janssen (Johnson&Johnson) Covid-19 vaccine.

This announcement is virtually identical to the EUAs previously issued for Covid-19 vaccines produced by Pfizer-Biontech and Moderna.

In each of the EUAs, the FDA has been careful to avoid any claim that the vaccines provide protection against infection or transmission of the virus. Similarly, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have each publicly stated that the vaccines have NOT been shown to prevent infection or transmission.

All of their regulatory documents and commentary addressing the issue state clearly that there is no evidence that the vaccines affect either infection with or transmission of the virus, nor do they prevent symptoms of Covid-19 from appearing.

— Source: “Covid Vaccine Nonsense” [US-based human rights lawyer breaks down the contradictory claims of “effectiveness”, the incomplete studies and legal minefield of forced use of experimental vaccines] JP Jerome

Let’s shift to some compare and contrast between vaccine makers and cigarette makers. I just read a short but cogent article on the menthol marketing, how 45,000 black Americans die each year from tobacco related illnesses (mostly throat, tongue, and lung cancer). Talk about cool — mentholated cigarettes’ make the poisons go down easier. Everything goes down smoother with a little bit of throat deadening. And this is legal stuff. No massive “take all the cigarettes’ and Juul’s and pipes and cigars and chew cans away.” “Menthol Marketing Exposes Institutional Racism” by Michael Schwalbe, Counterpunch.

But forced vaccinations, and then this pact with the devil — at-will, zero protection: screw up and you get the pink slip bullshit about American capitalism. Sort of buyer beware, user beware, consumer beware, worker beware.

In the long run, the solution to the ongoing global pandemic of tobacco-related disease is to abolish tobacco companies. Short of that, we now have an opportunity to significantly curtail the industry’s ability to profit from the destruction of Black lives. If Black lives matter, we must not let the opportunity pass.

— Michael Schwalbe, professor of sociology at North Carolina State University Source.

Low income, lots of working class people, workers in the developing world. Slick multimillion dollar a year ad campaigns: Slick, and Scientific (sic). Data driven. Imagine, tobacco kills more than 8 million people each year. Of these deaths, 1.2 million are caused by secondhand smoke exposure. Talk about an epidemic, pandemic. You know that every rotting Southern pol and every single tobacco lobbyist and every grower and CEO, they pooh-pooh these stats. “Prove it. If it’s that deadly, then why’s it legal?”

The internet seems great at scrubbing information, but the reality is that when Ray-Gun left his criminal enterprise throne, he did some hucksterism stuff for the tobacco industry. He and Edwin Meese did a talking tour overseas to push cancer sticks.

Talk about killing people from his cold-ass grave, Reagan and the long arm of his contra mentality, still with us:

But the industry did not launch its campaign for new overseas markets alone. The Reagan and Bush administrations used their economic and political clout to pry open markets in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and China for American cigarettes. At a time when one arm of the government was warning Americans about the dangers of smoking, another was helping the industry recruit a new generation of smokers abroad.

Asia is where tobacco’s search for new horizons began and where the industry came to rely most on Washington’s help. U.S. officials in effect became the industry’s lawyers, agents and collaborators. Prominent politicians such as Robert J. Dole, Jesse Helms, Dan Quayle and Al Gore played a role. “No matter how this process spins itself out,” George Griffin, commercial counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Seoul, told Matthew N. Winokur, public affairs manager of Philip Morris Asia, in a “Dear Matt” letter in January 1986, “I want to emphasize that the embassy and the various U.S. government agencies in Washington will keep the interests of Philip Morris and the other American cigarette manufacturers in the forefront of our daily concerns.” Source.

Why the harangue by yours truly against tobacco in a piece about how rotting the at-will mentality of big, small and loser companies run by bigger losers than anyone following the Peter Principle 2.0 [well, Peter Principle update: the worse you are as a human, with no ethics, no character, well, you go up the ladder, food chain, corporate manure pile!] can imagine forcing vaccines onto workers?

Think hard about an experimental mRNA chemical put into a syringe and then forcefully delivered to the global population. Hmm, would this have been acceptable in 2019? 2001? 1990? The year I was born, 1957?

Of course not, and yet, this is it, with people being shamed or called out for reluctance on an experimental, emergency authorized, untested chemical and DNA morphing drug being forcefully put into one’s body. Not once, but with a booster, and then, now, as the world burns, yearly or bi-yearly boosters for the “new” variants of a corona cold virus.

Here, this is science and capitalism, science/capitalism/politics, like leprosery and it’s host —

One way the tobacco industry has manipulated cigarettes to increase addictiveness is by loading cigarettes with chemical compounds. Bronchodilators were added so that tobacco smoke can more easily enter the lungs. Sugars, flavors and menthol were increased to dull the harshness of smoke and make it easier to inhale. Ammonia was added so that nicotine travels to the brain faster.

Specifically, increasing the amount of nicotine was of paramount importance to tobacco company executives. Experts found that Big Tobacco companies genetically engineered their tobacco crops to contain two times the amount of nicotine and adjusted their cigarette design so that the nicotine delivered to smokers increased by 14.5 percent. As Phillip Morris Principal Scientist W.L. Dunn said in 1972, “No one has ever become a cigarette smoker by smoking cigarettes without nicotine.” — Source

Bronchodilators and ammonia added? Come on, my students at UTEP were finding more dirt on big tobacco and the collusion with the FDA, keeping secret under governmental lock and key all the ingredients they sprayed on tobacco before becoming the stuff of rolled cigs, cigars, pipe filler and chew. Think of secret doses of anti-convulsant drugs, since the higher nicotine content and the other burning chemicals cause many people to get ticks, minor tremors; i.e., seizures. Best keep the seizures down and the sales up.

Shoot, this is just the minor list of smoke by-products — Nicotine (the addictive drug that produces the effects in the brain that people are looking for), Hydrogen cyanide, Formaldehyde, Lead, Arsenic, Ammonia, Radioactive elements, such as polonium-210, Benzene, Carbon monoxide, Tobacco-specific nitrosamines (TSNAs), Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).

These Satan’s, these big and little Eichmann types, these Mad Men, these PR spinners, these profiteers and cancer mercenaries, come on, the story is bigger — 600 ingredients can be used in cigarettes, but the actual combustion of the cig produces over 4,000 chemical compounds. And, when burned, these cigarette ingredients mix together and create deadly substances, 69 of which are carcinogenic.

Yeah, how’s that pandemic and pandemic and pandemic on the horizon. SARS-CoV2, 3, 5? Remember, there is no outright statement that declares cigarette smoking causes cancers or any number of other co-occurring diseases or terminal cancers.

So, if Big Tobacco and Gore and Reagan and Clinton and Trump, et al can stump just for this singular felonious Mafia outfit, what do you think might be happening behind closed doors and inside labs and at the top of the heap tied to exactly what this experimental vaccine’s (sic) side effects might do today, next month, a year from now, etc.?

For the good of the world? The economies? For life saving ethos? You got the memo yet? You want life saving? Shit, one product, tobacco, done with, hmm, what’s that life saving factor? Banned from planet earth, more or less. And how much for all the lost labor of huffing and puffing cig smokers . . . all the flagging physiologies, all the damage, slow and fast, caused by cigs, et al? Ya think there will be a ban tomorrow?

Hmm, NEVER. Now, multiply that a million fold with all the deadly chemicals and toxins and fumigants and fungicides and off-gassing crap in all manner of clothes, combustible materials, food, drinks, drugs. Then multiple one times two, and then factor up. How do these work, hmm, twelve together, the impossibility of really studying the synergistic effects of one chemical interacting with another, or a dozen or 4,000? Hmm, those 4,000 chemicals in one good Marlboro man drag, what’s the toll?

You think there are governmental and private financed studies on that? Think.

According to comments from vaccine scientists in September 2020 (prior to the Covid-19 EUA issuances), no vaccine had ever before been distributed on an EUA basis.

“We don’t do EUAs for vaccines,” [Dr. Peter] Hotez said, “It’s a lesser review, it’s a lower-quality review, and when you’re talking about vaccinating a large chunk of the American population, that’s not acceptable.”

Three months later, the FDA issued EUAs for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, but with explicit guidance that the vaccine “has not undergone the same type of review as an FDA- approved or cleared product.”

The idea is that if there are injuries and deaths because of the experimental and untested drugs-chemicals in these shots, well, who foots the bill? Who is responsible? Hmm, in the USA, it’s the US taxpayer.

I have a friend whose niece would not take “death by any other means” as the last answer. She is pushing for an investigation into her father’s death after the vaccine was given to him. He was 74, healthy, but he did have aging issues, like we all do. Blood clots occurred rapidly, hmm, and, then he checked out in a stroke like manner. This is after, right after, vaccination. The county coroner will not do an autopsy, and alas, there are no watchdog agencies in our corner. A simple autopsy would be $6,000. This is a suspicious vaccine-related death, and she has now gone on-line and gotten more people to email her about similar deaths after vaccination. She can’t put it on Facebook, too long or too detailed like, so she is getting contacted through GoFundMe. She’s doing this surreptitiously. There will be no Ralph Nader’s or RFK, Jr.’s coming to her family’s aid.

Just like you can’t sue successfully the big tobacco and their technicians and chemists and MD’s and lawyers and CEO’s and the politicians and marketers for selling a dangerous product to a billion people, let alone the second and third hand smoke of these cancer sticks.
The post Methanol for the CoV2 Hypodermic Chemical Experiment first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
March 21, 2021

Milquetoast for all Three Meals: All’s Dumb in the United States of A
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.
— aphorism

There is dumb-downing, cancel culture (I’ve been cancelled since beginning in 1972 in high school, way before the trendy terminology), forced consent, manufactured bifurcation, false balance, triangulation, perception as reality, equivocation, a host of propaganda techniques unleashed by Edward Bernays and Goebbels, and the ugly quartet of Infantilization-McDonaldization–Walmartization-Disneyfication:

George Ritzer introduced the concept of McDonaldization with his 1993 book, The McDonaldization of Society. Since that time the concept has become central within the field of sociology and especially within the sociology of globalization.

According to Ritzer, the McDonaldization of society is a phenomenon that occurs when society, its institutions, and its organizations are adapted to have the same characteristics that are found in fast-food chains. These include efficiency, calculability, predictability and standardization, and control.

Ritzer’s theory of McDonaldization is an update on classical sociologist Max Weber’s theory of how scientific rationality produced bureaucracy, which became the central organizing force of modern societies through much of the twentieth century. According to Weber, the modern bureaucracy was defined by hierarchical roles, compartmentalized knowledge and roles, a perceived merit-based system of employment and advancement, and the legal-rationality authority of the rule of law. These characteristics could be observed (and still can be) throughout many aspects of societies around the world. — Source

Now, we know infantilization was once applied just to young people, teenagers and such, giving them the one-two punch of treating them as if they have the mental capacity of a four-year or six-year old (now, the nanny-state, and the SARS-CoV2 paranoia and ignorance, making youth think a virus leaps from the ground outside while running in track by themselves will give them the DARPA virus — even DARPA isn’t that good, hail to virologist bomb makers at Fort Detrick and Plum Island). Underestimating the potential of 16-year-olds to understand “our” adult world, or the complexities of society. You know, give a 16-year-old the right to vote since it is that group most affected by the bad bad brew of politics and electioneering that will effect them the most and longest. Nope. That concept of infant-making of the American mind, of course, has been scaled up to an entire society fed on pabulum, cultivated through mass media that are geared to childish concepts of consumerism, fear, patriotism, and celebrity culture and bowing to the rich and famous.

Patronizing might be just one aspect of infantilization, but believe you me, I have been in many arenas — social work, education (higher and K12), environmentalism, union organizing, politics, journalism, the arts (literary, photography), urban planning … and then in so many workplaces as an organizer and social services specialist. I’ve seen some dumbdowning and infatalizing and agnotology from supposed brightest and best coming out of elite Ivy Leadure schools. What has happened in the USA is one broad infantilization and massive Collective Stockholm Syndrome. It took 50 years, or 60.

Walmartization is pretty simple and deadly — Large chain stores moving (bulldozing) into a region (neighborhoods) which then not only devastate local businesses driving and then displacing those workers into low paying chain store jobs, but the money made by these national and multinational chains leaves the community. It could be a bank chain, or hardware chain. That Home Depot is moving profits to shareholders, to the huge monster at the head of the huge serpent that kills local enterprise, local community support. Community of place is replaced by the transnational community of purpose — that purpose being profits anyway possible, and cutting labor costs, benefits, health and safety. Hell, get those workers on state Obama Care, food stamps, and the leftover public assistance. If you work at Amazon, what’s so wrong with three workers living in a beat up RV? That Walmartization is about economies of scale, eating the soul of small manufacturers, small retail businesses, mom and pop’s, and, alas, the money leaves the community and goes to the highly paid family owners or company roughriders — the Cabal of millionaires, multimillionaires, hedge funds, and billionaires that are to put it kindly, bloodsuckers, and viruses.

Disneyfication is a sophisticated intended and unintended set of processes that basically strips a real place (built environment, nature, etc.) or thing of its original character. That is the strip-mall which has boom and busted, and the great 200 acre malls, or the same 7-11 in a million places, as well as those Starbucks shit stores placed everywhere including the bathrooms. It is both a sanitization of real life, of real character, of real communities. Again, anything negative — like telling the real history of this Indian-killing, slave-owning/killing, union-busting/killing, global terror cop propagating country (sic) — is removed, hidden, and then, here we are, with facts that are dumbed down with the psychological and marketing intention of rendering any negative, truthful, hurtful subject more pleasant and easily grasped. Replacing the real bar, the real bookstore, the real coffee shop, the real bodega, the real restaurant, the real park, the real playground, the real forest, the real wetlands, the real swamp, the real everglades, the real farm, with something either idealized … or giving something tourist-friendly veneer. There is a fake “Main Street, U.S.A.” everywhere, and then the ugly side of what makes Milquetoast (but globally deadly) United States of Amerigo Vespucci a dying, wasteful, broken, rotting country.

Now, below will be a short Opinion piece I penned quickly to help my county to realize we have yet another deficit — lack of a literacy initiative, literacy center, literacy professionals and volunteers to help people learn how to read, learn how to decipher children’s schools’ labyrinthine rules and guidelines. To participate in this 21st century, or the Century before this one and the one before that one: learning how to read, and to critically evaluate all the snake oil labels, all the scams, all the hidden fees-tolls-poles-fines-add-ons, to call spade a spade when PayDay comes to town, or when red-lining rules the roost, or when complete and total neighborhoods are fleeced financially, culturally and environmentally.

Literacy — And I have been at that game since, well, since my first year of college, University of Arizona. I’ve taught in prisons where lack of literacy is one big reason for many being locked away. I ran a communications program at a large military base (Fort Bliss, El Paso) where privates all the way to five or six striper NCOs had reading grade levels of 4 or 5 or 6. That’s fourth, fifth and sixth grade (if they were lucky).

I’ve written about this before — cartoon instructional manuals (usually with a buxom blonde white woman as the instructor in series after series cartoon strips) bending over to show how to arm a Stinger missile or how to use a Vulcan machine missile gun.

If reading isn’t important, than, I suppose every single law drawn up by ALEC and every single omnibus bill, every war lord’s thousand-page contract for this or that bound-to-be-triple-cost overrun killing systems, whether in the air, on the water, underwater, on land, in space, over the web, inside telephones and computers, or inside a bacteria or virus just is not that important.

To the point where 9 or 11 trillion dollars is missing from DoD, and how many trillions have been shelled out to war lords, bankers, virus mercenaries, poverty profiteers?

That I have to work on getting one person into a volunteer-run literacy program as if I am writing the new laws or formulating something unique is troubling (read my Op-Ed piece below).

Functional or complete illiteracy. Remember Jonathan Kozol:

Kozol believes that liberal education in our inner-city schools has been increasingly replaced by “culturally barren and robotic methods of instruction that would be rejected out of hand by schools that serve the mainstream of society.”

Oh baby, did I have Kozol on speed dial in the college classes I taught —
- Kozol, Jonathan. Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools. Houghton, 1967, revised edition, New American Library, 1985.
- Kozol, Jonathan. Illiterate America. Anchor/Doubleday, 1985.
- Kozol, Jonathan. On Being a Teacher. Continuum, 1981.
- Kozol, Jonathan. Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope. Crown, 2000.
- Kozol, Jonathan. Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools. Crown, 1991.
- Kozol, Jonathan. Shame of the Nation: The restoration of apartheid schooling in America. Crown, 2005.
This is what Studs Terkel said about Kozol’s Illiterate America — “Stunning… with passion and eloquence Kozol reveals a devastating truth… and offers a challenge and remedy.” Source

If it is any comfort to this man, he should know that he is not alone. Twenty-five million American adults cannot read the poison warnings on a can of pesticide, a letter from their child’s teacher, or the front page of a daily paper. An additional 35 million read only at a level which is less than equal to the full survival needs of our society.

Together, these 60 million people represent more than one third of the entire adult population.

The largest numbers of illiterate adults are white, native-born Americans. In proportion to population, however, the figures are higher for blacks and Hispanics than for whites. Sixteen percent of white adults, 44 percent of blacks, and 56% of Hispanic citizens are functional or marginal illiterates. Figures for the younger generation of black adults are increasing. Forty-seven percent of all black seventeen-year-olds are functionally illiterate. That figure is expected to climb to 50 percent by 1990. — Kozol, Illiterate America

Now, that was from a book Kozol wrote 36 years ago. THIRTY-SIX. Those numbers above pale in comparison to this year’s averages. Since we have 335 million in this country, and alas, functional illiteracy is at an all-time high, a larger percentage of people are duped, fooled, cheated, imprisoned, bankrupted, scammed, and structurally murdered because they can’t read or can’t understand what they are reading. Make that 80 percent of people reading the car-seat instructions for their loved one’s safety, in fact, install the car seat INCORRECTLY after reading a 7th grade level set of simple instructions.

Image below: Jonathan Kozol a long time ago teaching reading

Why do I use milquetoast in the title? Here, Kozol, telling it like it is about Dumb Downed USA, with Sleepy Joe — “Joe Biden’s shameful record on school segregation”

Advocates for children and civil rights who have not yet given up entirely on the struggle to break down the walls of racial isolation in our public schools may want to take a good hard look at Joe Biden’s shameful record on school segregation. Despite his recent effort to allay concerns about that record, it cannot be expunged or easily forgiven.

In an education-policy proposal released by his campaign on May 28, Biden briefly spoke of encouraging diversity by giving grants and guidance to districts that are willing to pursue it. But he said nothing to disown his long history as a fierce opponent of school busing and a scathing critic of the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

Milquetoast to all the idiots who fight me tooth and nail when I explicitly state I never have or never will vote for a democrat or republican for president. That a two-minute scribble exercise called voting does absolutely ZERO for me, and for the causes I fight for, including a literacy center in every rural, suburban, urban community.

Illiteracy is bad all around, but oh is it sweet to the bankers, real estate folk, the doctors, lawyers, accountants, IRS, military, marketers, flimflam folk that rule this country … as you will read in the short piece I did for the small twice a week rag, Newport News Times. But what makes this country a house of horrors and run by corporate and war lord whores, is how all of those elites and monsters conspire to make people dumb downed, and that is the McDonaldization-Walmartization-Infantalization-Disneyfication of everything.

Literacy is a matter of life and death, happiness or penury

I used to get my elbows up into many literacy projects as an English and writing faculty member at community colleges, universities, prison school programs and writing/journalism workshops for people who are exploited because of their status as low income or as former felons, and those homeless citizens as well as adults living with developmental and intellectual disabilities.

Events like “Banned Books Month” (October) or National Poetry Month (April) I worked hard to promote/support. Big journalism organizations like Project Censored and groups like Reporters without Borders are still in my blood.

I am now working again in a small rural community dotted with small towns. I am not only supporting folks with job development and on-the-job training and coaching, but I am helping two Lincoln County citizens with reading literacy.

In my situation with Shangri-La, these two are adult men in their 30s who are seeking reading literacy programs.

It may come as a surprise to citizens, lawmakers and politicians alike, but Lincoln County does not have a literacy center. There is no one-stop place for people who need literacy tutoring, whether they are functionally illiterate in their English skills as a U.S.-born citizen, or those who are English as a second/third language learners.

I’m working with a Salem group, Mid-Valley Literacy Center (founded in 2009). Vivian Ang is my contact who is helping train Newport and Toledo-based citizens to help tutor my two clients. This is not an easy task, and Vivian, with more than 20 years of tutoring including at Chemeketa Community College, says it’s hit or miss.

“I do not have any experience with assisting an adult with a learning disability (developmental disability) to learn how to read,” she has repeated to me several times.

An adult who drives a car, works at a factory, runs a large piece of construction equipment, lives on his own and presents as a “regular sort of guy” can be in one of the most dire of circumstances — functional and complete illiteracy.

Wanting to learn how to read when you are in your 30s takes guts. There are stigmas for someone who can’t read an insurance form or simple job application.

The need is high in Lincoln County for adults like this client of mine — born in Newport and educated in Newport’s K-12 system, including special education classes — to learn how to read. But we have many from Mexico, Guatemala and other countries in our communities where learning how to read and speak English is more than just a step toward better pay.

Vivian tells me a story about an Oregon woman, from Mexico, illiterate in English, who had a sick daughter who needed medication to improve. The prescription stated, “Take this medication once a day.” In Spanish, once is the word for the number 11, so, tragically, the mother followed the prescription contextualized in her Spanish reading abilities. At 11 times a day, after a few days, the medication killed her two-year-old daughter.

Navigating housing, employment, the legal system, utility companies, landlords, cultural activities, and representative politics are basically off limits to a person who can’t read or write. The amount of exploitation, fines, fees, garnishments, late payments and other penalties is a regular occurrence for people who can’t read and write.

According to the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy (founded 1991), low literacy in the USA costs us as a society $2.2 trillion a year. According to U.S. Department of Education, more than half of U.S. adults aged 16 to 74 years old (54 percent or 130 million people) lack proficiency in literacy, reading below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level.

For my many clients across the board, lack of reading, low reading levels and functional illiteracy can be linked to poorer health, low levels of civic engagement and low earnings in the labor market. On average, more than 70 percent of people following the seventh grade reading level for instructions on how to install an infant car seat fail to follow the proper steps.

I am enlisting tutors for my two clients. I have a librarian and a library technician on board. Three retired women living in Toledo and Newport, too. One of my client’s workplaces is stepping up and paying the nonprofit Vivian runs for the materials and training. That general manager is also providing a private space with internet access to his worker (I’ll call him Samuel) who is illiterate.

He tells me, “I wish I had 22 Samuel’s working for me. He’s an incredible worker, reliable, goes the extra mile.” Source

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March 16, 2021

Shifty Shifters: Movers and Shapers like a Trillion Locusts
The final report on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) concludes that the project has been ‘the most successful anti-poverty movement in history’. Two key claims underpin this narrative: that global poverty has been cut in half, and global hunger nearly in half, since 1990. This good-news narrative has been touted by the United Nations and has been widely repeated by the media. But closer inspection reveals that the UN’s claims about poverty and hunger are misleading, and even intentionally inaccurate. The MDGs have used targeted statistical manipulation to make it seem as though the poverty and hunger trends have been improving when in fact they have worsened. In addition, the MDGs use definitions of poverty and hunger that dramatically underestimate the scale likely of these problems. In reality, around four billion people remain in poverty today, and around two billion remain hungry – more than ever before in history, and between two and four times what the UN would have us believe. The implications of this reality are profound. Worsening poverty and hunger trends indicate that our present model of development is not working and needs to be fundamentally rethought.

— Jason Hickel, Third World Quarterly , Volume 37, 2016 – Issue 5

*–*

How could these two cohorts, the 85 richest and 3.5 billion poorest, have the same amount of wealth? The great majority of the 3.5 billion have no net wealth at all. Hundreds of millions of them have jobs that hardly pay enough to feed their families. Millions of them rely on supplements from private charity and public assistance when they can. Hundreds of millions are undernourished, suffer food insecurity, or go hungry each month, including many among the very poorest in the United States.

Most of the 3.5 billion earn an average of $2.50 a day. The poorest 40 percent of the world population accounts for just 5 percent of all global income. About 80 percent of all humanity live on less than $10 a day. And the poorest 50 percent maintain only 7.2 percent of the world’s private consumption. How exactly could they have accumulated an amount of surplus wealth comparable to the 85 filthy richest?

— Michael Parenti

Staggering, no, the memory hole shoveling going on and perpetrated by elites in commerce, weapons, media, education, a la industrial complexes in the second decade of the 21st Century? Like plagues of locusts. Leeches two hundred worth per hominid, and the tapeworm eats the last, next and current generation like a desiccating alien of our nightmares.

The more light shining on the criminals, spotlights onto the military war lords, floodlights on the entire punishment cabal in governments, in corporations, in policing and uniformed military agencies, the more that bearing witness just peters out. It flags the average Yankee, and the doodle dandy is football, flicks and frolicking with furious caloric intent.

Welcome to the West. Then, the mind-numbing retorts to the initiation of discourse, of legitimate discussion about the ails of the world, largely set loose by the captains of industries — the military-media-legal-medical-penal-computing-financial-education-energy-AI-real estate-poison-agriculture COMPLEX. And, boy, is it never really “complex” — it’s about the art of the steal, the art of the scam, the art of the grift, the art of the toll-fine-fee-garnishment-penalty-tax-attachment set forth by the lobbies of the lords of death with the Eichmann’s of Bureaucracy greasing the skids and oiling the wheels. Keep those hedge funds going, the trains running, the profits heaping.
- “We can only take so much trauma.”
- “The human brain can’t take so much truth.”
- “Trigger Warning; The Following Stories About Wealth for the Rich and Poverty for the rest of Us Might Cause Spasms of Collective Amnesia, Anxiety, Animosity.”
- “There is no meek shall inherit the earth. We are talking about the meek and the poor inheriting the toxins, pollutants, the penury, the profound suffering inflicted upon them generation after generation by the rich and their enablers, the ultimate evil — those turning a blind eye to suffering, raping, razing, murdering.”
I’m getting it from all angles, really, the tired, the over-educated (in terms of college but not in terms of smarts). The tired middle class. Retired and one-trick phony environmentalist ponies. All those huffing and puffing and blowing down the Trump Towers, folk who are self-blinding themselves, as if bearing the truth of Biden et al, as well as bearing the weight of protecting Everything/Anything Empire, while the chorus of War Mongering Democrats a la LGBTQA-+ sing ‘Hallelujah, No More Trump’ puts them right smack where Oedipus was, exposed to the truth and overcome with shame, grief, and remorse. Poking eyes out is the least the people who follow the perverse leaders should do.

Except, their blinding is symbolic, life-long, from womb to cradle to grave, as in turning a blind eye to the roots, the very radical cause of all the suffering, the police no-knocks, the cesium floating in lungs and bellies, and a dozen other micro-particles from this or that nuclear fallout incident. Symbolic and demonstrative of the kill-for-profits Capitalism.

It is too too much for the masses — The Truth — so we all have to gather round the Zoom screen, tune into Amazon Prime, and sing, Give Peace a Chance while the world is fleeced by the billionaires, but also those millionaires (we tend to give millionaires, multi-millionaires a get-out-of-jail pass, when they too are the culprits helping spread that poisonous fallout).

Professor Bernd Grambow (co-author from IMT Atlantique) added “the present work, using cutting-edge analytical tools, gives only a very small insight in the very large diversity of particles released during the [Fukushima] nuclear accident, much more work is necessary to get a realistic picture of the highly heterogeneous environmental and health impact.”

Lockdowns for a flu virus, lockdowns for free thought, lockups for free speech, lock and loaded for the Empire, shackled to bills-mortgages-policies-ballooning debt…. BUT for fuck’s sake, we can’t lock-down the fossil fuel monsters, lock-up the Fukushima shills, shutdown the Olympics, punish and quell the military saber rattlers (read: purveyors of nuclear- chemical-bacterial-viral-digital-intergalactic weaponry).

Business as usual is a trillion easy dollars in Pandemic Profits, and a cool several trillion more with mandatory masking, Zooming, SARS-CoV2,3,4,5,6 annual vaccinations and semi-annual boosters.

Passports to their hell. Yet, when you talk to a Kamala Harris floozy, well, they get teary eyed, sing the All Spangled Banner of Buffoonery, and then tell you to hit the road, no more Haeder in their House.

Literally, people want nothing of politics, or the reveal — showing how their own colonized and kettled thinking under the guise of “liberal” looting under the Democrat Vote has always been part of the problem, not any solution to the world thievery or a pathway to world peace.

So What is The Answer?

It is not a $64,000 question, for sure, since the answer is collectively simple, easily repeated, easily understood, Yet, that is the jig, always looking for the messiah, or having their cake (capitalism) and eating it (profits-profits-profits) too. They are limited and limiting, and they gladly take the Kool-Aide and mix in a shot of Jack Daniels and a jigger of high fructose fizz.

Resisting for them is not an option. If they can’t converse, frame, contextualize, harmonize, recount, go back in history, recall the scene of the crime(s), then how the hell can these same folk who ask, Well, you sure know how to criticize and go on and on about the ills of Capitalism, but show me any other system that works. Humanity is humanity, whether in the center of Wall Street or out on the Rez?

This is their thinking, their great retort, and so, how do we get to that point where we just get to the basics, the Cornel West basics– Watch his rumble in the jungle: At Harvard, the worst kind of man-eating institution, along with a few hundred elite schools on this side and that side of the pond:

Listen to him, watch him, feel his presence of soul, Dr. West. Not a perfect man, thank god!

So, what is the answer? Justice. Social-spiritual-ecological-cultural-gender-age-racial-ethnic-ecnonmic-educational-food-energy JUSTICE? Using the inverse, the answer is the whole human-whole earth, toward holism, embedded in systems thinking, what it means to have the commons, what it is to be a society among other societies that is ecologically-based, agrarian-centered, humanistic-thriving, environmentally-aware, is, well, the opposite formulation of these Gandhian sins:

Wealth Without Work
Pleasure Without Conscience
Knowledge Without Character
Commerce (Business) Without Morality (Ethics)
Science Without Humanity
Religion Without Sacrifice
Politics Without Principle

It doesn’t take much K12 education and applied learning to understand that reversing these sins and following the antithesis would illuminate the bearable weight of being a human in the world, triggering change at a global and galactical level. Prometheus steals the fire from the gods and gives it to people. Bound to the mountain. Prometheus grows weary. The future, oh, the future, swallowed up by that lack of hope. Let us all be Prometheus, and help each other take from the thieves, the rich, and give warmth and fire to the world. Unbound us together. Break the chains of the illicit gods and their devils.

Really, though, one person’s hope is another person’s oppression. In capitalism, there is the king of the dung heap, the winner being the one who dies with the most toys. Dog-eat-dog, and survival of the most unfit (using the Seven Sins of Humanity above as illustrative of what makes capitalism really zip along).

In Western culture, it all might seem like a Greek Tragedy of Trailer Park or Mar-a-lago proportions. It might all seem like a hardscrabble blues tribute to American stick-to-it-ness. That hardened soul, as DH Lawrence ascribed —

The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.

We know that Western soul is a killer from the womb — those royals and despicable ones from the Old World, those Belgium in the Congo, those Romans, those hard, soldiering, religious zealots, hand in hand with silver chalice and golden rosary, those kings and queens, launching the deplorable ones, the rabble into crusades of raping-ravaging-razing. There is no “American soul” without the British slave traders-merchants-purchasers; no American soul without the French and Spanish interlopers. The American soul is part and parcel those former Nazis and the money-changers, the globalists looking for a micro-penny for every human corpuscle exploited in their gaming humanity. This is Turtle Island, not some chunk of land named for an Italian map maker for the king.

Now that’s a dark dark killer that never melts — Capitalism. It is now cleaned up, a la Madison Avenue and slick green-blue-pink-white washing, no longer presented as cold, stoic, but happy, illustrious, coopting, brainwashing, gleeful, the ice cream truck coming to serve all the children with gooey goodies. Shifty, slick, liberal, slippery, hip. It is now a virus inside a thousand viruses —

A democratic society shapes itself – by means of the participation of its citizens in discussing and deciding how things should be organised and to what ends.

But, as even their name reveals, the Global Shapers want to “shape” society from above and in their own interests.
- Shapers of slavery: the awakening January 13, 2021
- Shapers of slavery: the virus January 12, 2021
- Shapers of slavery: the empire January 11, 2021
- Shapers of slavery: the leadership January 10, 2021
- Shapers of slavery: the plan January 9, 2021
This is not the solution to global problems, and, the rockets and payloads of Bezos and Musk and DoD and the rest of the capitalists looking for lucre and gold on Mars and the Moon. Reset is not rebounding. Reset is not reconvening the true holistic way of life. Reset is not returning to a point in time in our civilizations where we come together in mutual aid, live a biodynamic present and future, hold onto sacred tribal principles, understand the soil-air-water. The reset is not a return to sanity, actualization for woman, man, child, ecosystem. This reset is the rich’s bargain basement theft of our agency, our independence, our collective will to strike at them as the felons of our time. Their reset is tracking our every movement, each blink of the eye, each snore and defecation. This reset is about pulling strings, forcing the Faustian Bargain each moment. They will fine-garnish-withhold-penalize-criminalize our unborn, and our dying parents. You get a universal income, but not to be spent on what they do not want you/us to spend it on.

The foregone conclusion is what the teachers teach the children. It is what the media paint around us. Each narrative directed and shot for Netflix or Amazon or Hulu or Vudu, they are set to propagandize for the rich, the resetters, the titans who want mars colonized, who want the moon for their private resort. Orbiting Club Meds in the ionosphere.

Yet, the Lesson is Dead Wolves, Manatees and Turtles

The very place of Trump and Spring Break, Florida, is emblematic of the fall, the disgusting imbalance of the world, of sanity, of thinking. Manatees dying off in unfathomable numbers. Turtles washing up sick and dead. The expansion of the ocean, wiping out much of Florida by 2100. The bastion of Spring Break and lust and speedboats and dream hoarding.

Something not to be proud of, and to lend pause for humanity, but not more than once, and give it to me once in that 24-hour news cycle, please. At least 432 Florida manatees have already died in 2021, well over double the state’s 5-year average for the same time period.

Hundreds of sea turtles washing up on Southwest Florida beaches this year in a mass mortality event that researchers say will impact the recovery of the protected species is not a good sign of HUMAN health. The Great Reset has nothing to say about the reality of our own commons.

Then you have Wisconsin, gun-toting AR15-loving murderers taking on a record 216 wolves killed in 60 hours. What does this say about this society, this blood sport society of high powered weapons, radar trackers, dually pick-ups, $340,000 campers, TV, booze, and a quick trip in the woods to murder wolves?

Or, the hard cold soul of the European, Italians, putting 20-year sentences on people working with charities to help stranded and sinking and drowning refugees from African countries. Imagine that world of the cold Great Resetters. Save the Children and MSF among dozens facing sentences of up to 20 years over humanitarian work

Humanitarian organizations are rejecting what they say is an attempt to criminalize lifesaving aid to migrants and refugees at sea after Italian prosecutors charged three groups with aiding and abetting illegal immigration through their rescue operations in the Mediterranean.

Over 20 people are facing up to 20 years in prison. — Source.

Each story of injustice is the tip of the proverbial iceberg, demonstrating the insanity of systems — legal systems of punishment-abandonment-unruly laws against the suffering, laws meant to pay the rich, pay off the rotting bureaucrats, the Eichmann’s, big and small, who keep the wheels and the gears of death grinding, whether those wheels are those of the Empire, or the Capitalists, or the Economic Hitmen-Frontmen-Debasers, or all the pigs who make money off the penury and punishment unleashed by Capitalism.

Not me. Not I. Over my dead body.

The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall. We cannot be sure of having something to live for unless we are willing to die for it.

— Ernesto Che Guevera

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February 23, 2021

American Exceptionalism: Private Wealth and Public Squalor

A December 2017 statement from the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights notes that, while the US manages to spend “more [money] on national defence than China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, United Kingdom, India, France, and Japan combined”, US infant mortality rates were, as of 2013, “the highest in the developed world”.

The Special Rapporteur provides a barrage of other details from his own visit to the US, during which he was able to observe the country’s “bid to become the most unequal society in the world” – with some 40 million people living in poverty – as well as assess “soaring death rates and family and community destruction wrought by prescription and other drug addiction”.

Capitalism, it seems, is a deadly business indeed.

— Belen Fernandez

A demonstrator from the Occupy Wall Street campaign seen with a dollar taped over his mouth as he stands near the financial district of New York September 30, 2011. (Lucas Jackson/Reuters)

How the Cookie Crumbles

She’s 80, comes from Ayr, Scotland, lives in a sea town along the Oregon Coast. She is caretaker for her 55-year-old nephew. Her heart-failed husband, liver shot through, dialysis weekly, is another of her charges.

Imagine, she and her family ran a small chain of shops — clocks, another locksmith, another fish and chips. That was in Bonnie Scotland.

Her sister married a bloke in the US Air Force, and she shipped out with him. Pregnant. Child Drew, early on, in Tucson at Davis Monthan Air Force Base, he was diagnosed with Downs Syndrome. Life for her changed, and then her sister promised if anything happened to this sister, Aunt Regina would take care of Drew. That was a long long time ago.

Regina’s sister and her sister’s husband immolated in a crash coming back from El Paso. Boy Drew left with a younger sister — the boy age 20, sis 16.

For 35 years, our Regina and her Bob raised the boy. Drew is now 55, and part of my job is to support him in his job at a grocery store. He’s been there more than 15 years, and he makes $12.01 an hour.

Forget that economic injustice for a moment. Listen to how the crumbling cookie goes in predatory capitalism — Regina has not been back to the old country in 20 years. She has two knees that are shot. She needs two replacements, but she is the caretaker for the chronically-sick husband. Drew lives with them, getting his two-times a week work at the grocery store as a bagger.

He’s got the infectious personality, and he also has some “issues” glomming onto female staff. Regina was not told that adults with Downs Syndrome many times have lost the synoptic connections tied to urgency for urination and defecation.

Sweet drinks he gulps down, like a lost man in the Sahara. He scarfs down or wolfs down his food.

Like anyone, Drew wants to be in a relationship, married, on some piece of property with a horse, dogs and big garden. He works eight hours a week, and receives under $800 in social security payments.

The state pays Aunt Regina for his care. Her biggest worry is Drew losing his job because of the bathroom accidents or the sexual harassment.

Regina is kind but firm, and her bedside manner isn’t from the latest holistic and enlightened training around people who live with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

“I tell Drew, that if he messes up one more time, the grocery store will fire him. The job is more than pocket change for him. He gets out, has responsibilities, is growing some from the integrated employment, and, mind you this is a big AND, I get him out of the house for a few hours a week so I can gain some sense of sanity. I don’t know if he has to be put into a state institution.”

Luck of the draw, luck of the gene expression, luck of the accidental car mortalities, luck luck luck.

That’s the way the cookie crumbles, and in capitalism, we are not judged by how we treat our aged, infirm, vulnerable, youth, sick, disabled, poor. The worse we treat “them,” the more “they” have to struggle, the more daily fear “they” have of failing, faltering, flipping out mentally, the more successful those Capitalists and those Investors and those Finance Wizards and those Upper Economic Class are!

Redistribution of wealth for “them” is taking every last penny from “them,” us. Working people at $12.01 an hour after 15 years in a national/international chain.

A mentality that posits that “they” meant to do that, defecate in their pants, or, oh, “they” know better, and, oh, “they” are gaming the system and pulling the wool over your bleeding heart social services worker heads.

Heartless in a Time of Plague

Our Scottish Regina is worried about what will happen to Drew once she kicks the bucket, or when she is no longer physically capable of carrying on and running a household with a very demanding Drew and a very failing Bob, her 86-year-old husband.

We talk about the old country’s National Health Service. We talk about the failures of a society that has been ripped open time and time again by the purulent investors — another word for making money anyway they can.

Gutting medical care, gutting entitlement programs, gutting progressive taxation, gutting the measures for health and safety for and by the public. Where oh where will Drew go once his aunt and uncle pass on?

Think of every dollar and penny pinched, and then think of how much we the taxpayer shell out for every nanosecond of the crimes of corporations eating at the belly of communities, and every penny taken in light speed for everything run by the imposters, the misanthropes.

Every million$ here, every billion$ there. Grifters and grabbers. How much did the first Billionaire’s “impeachment” cost us? How much does an Alex Jones or Tom Brady or Michelle Obama get paid for their insipid bolstering of their self-referential mythology? Each speech? Each rot gut book penned?

Every rivet sunk into a Hellfire missile, every pound of fuel used in US Military Terrorism Toys, every nanosecond million made through illegal and unethical investing through algorithm?

That Moon shot by India, or that Mars rover by Japan, or Israel gunning for more surveillance. How much is every human lifetime worth, if we are lumped together in that big pile of “other” and “non-human”?

That heartless cookie crumbling capitalism is rotten to the core. The joke is, though, by the filthy rich, the Art of War Friedman’s and Bezos and all the Google middling’s and upper crust, that if all the billions were taken from the filthy rich, and dumped into the majority on planet earth — the poor, the uneducated, the misbegotten, the terminal, the dysfunctional, the Jerry Springer protagonists and antagonists, in five years all that and more would be back in the hands of the Star Chamber 1,000 or 2,000 Multi-Billionaires.

“We’d just get it all back, because the masses are inherently stupid, know nothing about the value of a dollar, would buy all the junk and shit and whoring dreams we create to sell. We’d have all that so-called ‘redistributed’ wealth back in our hands.”

That myth is coupled with another one, where the rich and the rest of us, having collectively, as much as the 1,000 or millionth richest? Christian Parenti lays it out simply and clearly here:

The 85 richest in the world probably include the four members of the Walton family (owners of Wal-Mart, among the top ten superrich in the USA) who together are worth over $100 billion. Rich families like the DuPonts have controlling interests in giant corporations like General Motors, Coca-Cola, and United Brands. They own about forty manorial estates and private museums in Delaware alone and have set up 31 tax-exempt foundations. The superrich in America and in many other countries find ways, legal and illegal, to shelter much of their wealth in secret accounts. We don’t really know how very rich the very rich really are.

Regarding the poorest portion of the world population—whom I would call the valiant, struggling “better half”—what mass configuration of wealth could we possibly be talking about? The aggregate wealth possessed by the 85 super-richest individuals, and the aggregate wealth owned by the world’s 3.5 billion poorest, are of different dimensions and different natures. Can we really compare private jets, mansions, landed estates, super luxury vacation retreats, luxury apartments, luxury condos, and luxury cars, not to mention hundreds of billions of dollars in equities, bonds, commercial properties, art works, antiques, etc.—can we really compare all that enormous wealth against some millions of used cars, used furniture, and used television sets, many of which are ready to break down? Of what resale value if any, are such minor durable-use commodities? especially in communities of high unemployment, dismal health and housing conditions, no running water, no decent sanitation facilities, etc. We don’t really know how poor the very poor really are.

— 85 Billionaires and the Better Half by Michael Parenti

Image by Judite B

The books and discourse and deep discussions and analyses have already been posited and published, and yet, we are in 2021, and the school system, the media system, the propaganda machines of government-military-resource extraction-big ag/med/pharma/AI/finance continue to cobble truth, censor the reality of the penury system that is consumer-corporate-criminal-corrupt Capitalism.

Here, a hodgepodge of readings ramifying the thesis in this essay of mine —

Chris Hedges and Richard Wolff: Capitalism Does Not Work for the Majority of the People

Make No Mistake: The Rule Of The Rich Has Been A Deadly Epoch For Humanity

Michael Parenti: Does Capitalism Work? (2002)

The 1% Pathology and the Myth of Capitalism

Capitalism: The Systematic Poverty and Exploitation of Human Beings by Finian Cunningham

Michael Parenti: These Countries Are Not Underdeveloped, They Are Overexploited (1986)

Luxury Eco-Communism: A Wonderful World is Possible

The Growing Disparity In Living Conditions and Its Consequences by Rainer Shea

Covid-19 and the Health Crisis in Latin America by Yanis Iqbal

The Start Of The Great Meltdown For Industrial Civilization by Rainer Shea

MFTN: Poverty Will Kill More Of Us Than Terrorism

The Rich Are Only Rich If We Let Them Be by Dariel Garner

Mystery: How Wealth Creates Poverty in the World by Michael Parenti

The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger + How Economic Inequality Harms Societies

Wealth Belongs To All Of Us – Not Just To The Rich by Dariel Garner

We Are So Poor Because They Are So Rich by Dariel Garner

Here are the source links — X and Y

Railroaded into this Mess

It all comes back to the rackets — war, banking, big ag, law, prisons, military, computing, finance, insuring, retail, lending, investing, for-profit medicine, education, utilities.

The rackets of putting garnishments on all of our wages. The punishment rackets of fines, foreclosures, levies, taxes, fees, surcharges, add-ons, user fees, disposal fees, tolls, late fees, interest fees, penalties, wage attachments, wage theft, any-government-revenue/policing/judicial entity having the legal right to crack into any savings or checking or real estate holding they want to….And steal!

Imagine that freedom, uh? My Drew or my Don, they work for pittances, and they have their measly wages garnished if they make too much above the allowable social security benefit level. Imagine all of the flimflam, all those middle and peripheral and shadowy and underhanded people and agencies each taking a gram of flesh until that human life has been pecked away.

Stuck in a closet somewhere. Huddled around a TV, surrounded by the deadly products of a food industry responsible for billions dead. Food (sic) more deadly than cancer sticks, AKA cigarettes.

Think hard how those children-who-come-to-me-as-adults as their social services manager, wanting me to help them find jobs in a dog-eat-dog culture, where the cookie isn’t just crumbling, but rather smashed into smithereens by the capitalists. All those poisons in food, all the polluting, toxin-laced, dam-building, river-tainting, air-staining processes that bring us better living with plastics-fastfood-shelf lives of a decade. Better living through chemistry, pharmaceutics, chronic illness, disease management, pain regulating.

Then, we cannot discuss the possibilities of a society with more and more allergies, more and more chronic illnesses, more and more learning disabilities, more and more developmental disabilities, more and more intellectual disabilities, more and more trauma and PTSD and generalized anxiety and physiological premature weathering.

And poverty does more than just kills. Poverty eats at the soul, drives people to unsafe harbors like consumerism, disposability, obsessions, addictions, inattentiveness, collective Stockholm Syndrome, perversions, empty calories-entertainment-thinking.

There are numbers just for one aspect of our consumer-retail-exploitative societies competing in a trans-national gallery of dirty capitalism — 4.2 million premature deaths annually? Five million? More? Exposure to air pollution caused over 7.0 million deaths and 103.1 million disability-adjusted life years lost in one year.

Attributed to dirty (polluted) air. Not dirty water. Not dirty food. Not dirty drugs. Not smoking. Not boozing. Not war.

The study uses existing data from IHME on global burden of diseases (Mortality and Disability Adjusted Life Years) related to air pollution such as Trachea, Bronchus and Lung cancer, COPD, Ischemic heart disease and Stroke. This study shows that air pollution is one of the major environmental risk factors for the global burden of disease in 1990-2015 and has remained relatively stable for the past 25 years. By region, the largest burden of disease related to air pollution is found in Western Pacific and South-East Asia, reflecting the heavy industry and air pollution hotspots within the developing nations of these regions. Moreover, the rates of Disability Adjusted Life Years increased because of increase in pollution, especially in South-East Asia region, African region, and Eastern Mediterranean region where populations are both growing and ageing.

— Source —

I’ve written about this for years — how there is so much disconnect in Criminal Capitalism, where the marketing ploys and psychological tricks force babies and then toddlers and then kindergarteners and then grade schoolers and then more and more millions of growing minds to adapt to counterintuitive thinking, to accept death, slow or otherwise, as part of the social contract. Dog-eat-dog, predation, big fish/small pond, and the roots of America after decimating Turtle Island, one smoke and mirror show after another snake oil sales pitch.

Which sane or humane person would accept a PayDay loan scam? Which humane person would accept forced arbitration clauses? Which caring human would not endorse clean, well-run, full coverage public transportation? Which caring mother would not demand prenatal care, and medicine and clinics on demand? Where is the logic of old men and old women (look at the senate, the congress, the administration) running the lives of the unborn, newborn and youth into the ground.

Even the thirty-somethings in Brooks Brothers suits look, sound, smell, and espouse OLD. I don’t mean old and wise, or elder thinkers, or experienced and well traveled. I mean old in decayed.

If the world is saved, it will be saved by people with changed minds, people with a new vision. It will not be saved by people with old minds and new programs. It will not be saved by people with the old vision but a new program.

The Takers accumulate knowledge about what works well for things. The Leavers accumulate knowledge about what works well for people.

— Daniel Quinn, Ishmael

These flimflam artists, these liars and cheaters and pontificators and media monsters, they are antithetical to a good governance, good society, good people.

They not only do not know the stories of Drew and his Aunt Regina and Uncle Bob, but they have no forward-thinking solutions to the aging old foster parents and the still healthy middle-aged Drew. With all his beauty. With all his kindness. With all his adept knowledge of how to get on, get along, get his day going. Drew, born in the cookie crumbles crap shoot. Regina, who was on her way back to the UK, Scotland, when she answered the call to take care of Drew and his sister.

This story is repeated a million times a month, worldwide. The penalty for living, for being human, for being not one of them (rich, powerful, greed-wielding) and for stopping their lives to do the right thing.

You wake up one day and believe you have a worthy life. You wake up and take account of what good you have done. You wake up and look in the mirror and wonder what it is you actually dreamt, thought, spoke, cared for, read, built, protected, grew, sheltered, did, held sacred, envisioned, husbanded, parented, fostered, ate, drank, created.

Did any of that living have purpose, or some connection to the humanity that is the real culture of Homo Sapiens, mother culture?

Daily, I have a million intersections with culture and cultures — Big D for deaf or small d for disabled? Brain-injured at birth, or hit by a truck at age 11. Traumatic Brain Injury from an early childhood beating, or massive psychological trauma from a rape at age 20. Born with any number of diagnosed maladies, or any expression of “being born on the autism spectrum.” Fragile X or fetal alcohol affective disorder. Or Downs Syndrome.

The luck of the draw is one enormous field of chance, and the outcomes are not just tied to the abilities — emotional, spiritual, economic, personal — of those you call family, but how the society at large and each community gauge the value of life, the value placed on those whose luck of the draw came up short in some areas.

But the world is fragile, and those on some neuro typical scale and those atypically neuro, can we build our culture together, and heal and protect and shelter and engender and facilitate and teach and learn from?

There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world. Given a story to enact in which they are the lords of the world, they will ACT like lords of the world. And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now.

— Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

The post American Exceptionalism: Private Wealth and Public Squalor first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
February 6, 2021

Dreams Outside the Hopes of the Neuronormal

The legacy of a society is, well, how it treats its young, old, frail, infirm, sick, poor and those hobbled by structural and environmental injustice.

Some in urban planning circles also allude to how safe a community is based on the popsicle test – can a child or two walking from home to a store, get a popsicle without having to cross high speed roads or highways, without having to walk along long stretches of ugly dangerous buildings, and who can find a multitude of stores that sell good food and desserts like Popsicles. How easy it is for the child to walk there? Are the homes-apartments-duplexes-offices looking out toward the sidewalks? Are there porches out front where people linger and lounge? Are there trees for shade? Are there mail boxes? Are there stores and eateries on the ground floor of a stretch of businesses with apartments and housing one and two floors above? Are there people bicycling? Are the stores and businesses set toward the streets and their parking lots pushed to the back of the establishments? Are there scalable hardware stores with windows and many doorways? Are there neighborhood groups that patrol the neighborhoods? Are there mixed neighborhoods with lower economic mixed in with middle class? What are the officers of the peace doing? Are they walking and bicycling their beats, where they live? Are they battened down in huge bulletproof SUV’s with three computers, five assault weapons, and the A/C blaring?

The children, walk or bicycle from their home, and within a few minutes, they get to a place of business, without running through or dodging a gauntlet of racing trucks and autos. Are there elderly and families and business owners and customers there, doing their thing, on a scalable level?

We know that in capitalism, in this free (sic) market society, with the bottom dollar and the bottom line of more and more profits without work or building something as the drivers, we the people – those two children walking to get a fudge bar or organic apple – are not the drivers of the society, the communities, the neighborhoods.

Life in Capitalism is designed for speed, rot, decay, throwaway buildings and throwaway humanity. We have those massive systems of oppression run by real estate, insurance, finance, banks, building and paving, all those entities guarded by the US Chamber of Commerce whose job is to maximize the profits (gouging’s) of the large and medium-sized businesses that have run rough shod over us, the “regular people.”

Now, those old industries are being retrofitted for the next level of exploitation and enslavement vis-à-vis the economies of scale vaunted by the monopolies, the investor class and billionaires. And that scaling up is facilitated by the masters of logarithms and Artificial Intelligence and digital dictators.

Mom and pops – that is, the small family-owned businesses and the mini-chains of this or that service or consumer item – they are now on the cutting block in an amped up destruction of people’s lives, on a scale that would make a steroid using wrestler look like Mother Teresa on bread and water. Any chance of having a small business community have a say in how their communities and neighborhoods and census tracks are developed alongside with how their neighboring communities connect to this urban and rural planning, all of that inclusive and participatory democracy and governance are dwindling ten-fold yearly.

Who makes the decisions? Who puts the brakes on suburban sprawl and rampant car-centric cities? Ahh, the masters of money and masters of stocks and the AI and Digital Dictators will have more and more say in the design (or miss-design) of both the built environment as well as the financial environments. Add to that educational environments, the healthcare environments, the food system environments, the housing environments. We the people do not have control!

Examples by Design

I’m putting in this opening above to help segue into the reality of my work now – one of many hats, but now, it’s social work and case management for adults living with developmental and intellectual disabilities. And some who have had traumatic brain injuries.

If the reader doesn’t have a bead on what the ID/DD community is, well, look it up. In a Western culture with more and more pre-newborns gestating into a slurry of forever chemicals, cortisol loads, heavy metals, stress hormones from mother, and a combination of all of this as a synergetic roulette wheel, coupled with DNA markers from mother and father, well, you can image that young boys and girls with disabilities like Autism Spectrum Disorder or mental retardation or any number of other aspects of life dealt from a genetic and poison deck of cards will be a huge burden on families, medical services, schools, society in general.

Go back to the Popsicle analogy, but this time look at how our cultures deal with the less fortunate – a child born is innocent, no matter what sort of spirituality or religiosity you hold or do not hold. Cases in point for me after more than two decades working with poisoned souls – the children of the storms: fetal alcohol-affected or drug-addicted or hugely malnourished inside the womb – we are barbaric in terms of how we “deal” with the afflicted or the people born into a life of one or multiple deficits.

Here, a composite – Drew was born to a mother who “experienced” drug and alcohol addiction. He was 5 pounds and four ounces at birth. He tested positive for cocaine and opiates at birth. He was in a nursery until moved to foster care in 10 days. His birth mother had several children “taken away or removed from her” because of her addictions.

He was adopted by an old woman, who loved him but died of cancer when Drew was 7. Neighbors reported to the child protective agencies in California that Drew was being neglected and the dying mother was not caring for him properly.

This is a common story in my line of work – multiple foster home placements per individual, lots of behavior issues arising by first year of school, from aggression, to defiance, to tantrums. Quickly he was put under a special education label – independent education plan. His ADHD, Tourette’s Syndrome, and anxiety, depression, aggression, isolating behavior, and poor stick-to-it-ness, all of that and more channeled him into special classes and into the special education network. Hearing voices and magical thinking and fantastical thoughts and paranoia, well, Drew is sort of a ward of the state. His foster/adoptive parents are his financial guardians, and he has county case workers and state ones lined up, along with nonprofit case workers.

I work with a nonprofit, again, as a case worker-employment specialist. My job is to get people like Drew jobs, but that process is holistic, systematic and definitely tied to the whole suite of getting young and not so old people ready to face competitive employment, integrated, no longer stuck in some sheltered workshop.

Those “sheltered workshops” included Goodwill clothing tagging rooms where all workers were those living with developmental disabilities; or even roaming crews of cleaners of office buildings who are all labeled ID-DD. That is a type of cloistering, sheltering from mainstream society.

My nonprofit, of course, is a middleman of sorts, replacing the services states, counties and cities should be providing by taking over the contracts to do the work of providing developmental disabilities safety nets.

Nutshells are the Only Teachable Moments

So, getting someone a job at a hotel to do towel folding or room cleaning, or helping someone land a job as a custodian at a school, and for those with more skills and with more confidence, a place in retail sales, that’s part of my work. Sure, in Portland I worked with lawyers who have cerebral palsy, and true, that type of person deserves an equal shot at being a lawyer or working at the level somewhere. These advocates have their hearts in the right place, to be sure, and no Five F’s for them – filth, factory, food, foliage, fur – because they have graduate degrees.

The reality is, though, someone with a lack of reading skills, with Autism Spectrum Disorder, and all the attending issues tied to the autism in that individual, well, working a cash register is tough (impossible for most), and doing public customer service at any level is tough. Behind the scenes jobs are the norm, and, unfortunately, the filth, food, foliage, fur and factory are the only choices sometimes. Life on the Central Oregon Coast where people retire or vacation, and where a fishing industry thrives, well, those job opportunities dwindle big time.

Aspirational: all people deserve home, health, education, food, work, public transportation choices. Aspirational: sure, we need communities designed for that Popsicle test. Most of my clients, of course, do not drive, or can’t. Most clients have issues with navigating the absurd on-line employment applications. Many clients need me there in the actual job interview.

Many clients need a coach on the job, sometimes for life. Many clients work minimum wage for 20 hours a week to keep a bit of the SSI (social security insurance coming in). We are such a penury and usury society that my clients, even at minimum wage, get a dollar taken away from every two dollars made. This is how the system kills hope, advancement — the state gobbles up shekels after their first $85 is earned.

All the studies and anecdotal evidence show that a job for a person with a developmental disability or a physical disability, or even a psychological disability like schizophrenia, THRIVE with employment for obvious reasons: a sense of belonging, team work, doing something as a member of society, extra money, socialization, using the brain. But here we are again, failing the other Popsicle test – we penalize and penalize and penalize until people are stripped bare.

A few clients have to take urine tests for many jobs, and if they come back positive for cannabis, well, some outfits disqualify the person automatically from a minimum wage job. Even if that person has a medical marijuana card, in a state where pot is legal (it is in OR). Imagine that, all those politicians, those weak-spine things in DC and around state Capitols, and this is what they have legislated and this is how weak they are when it comes to day to day, people to people life-and-death decisions.

Study after study, and again, a million anectodical stories show THC and CBD actually pull patients off prescriptions and actually keep anxiety at bay and amp up focus.

The law enforcers and the bureaucracies and the policymakers are Neanderthals, really (no attack on those people, Neanderthals, but it’s a term of describing how behind the times and backward they are).

My job is to do workarounds, to do magic, and while mom and pop’s along the coast are shuttering daily, the small hotels are now owned by investment groups, and managed by the big daddies of hotel and motel management corporations. Having workarounds with national organizations, sometimes multinationals, well, those conversations never happen, let alone an email gets returned. They are not of, for and by the community. They are in business for the investors and profits.

The chances of having an offspring with one or a number of chronic illnesses or who might end up on the spectrum or might have brain anomalies because of gestational issues, or who are genetically programmed to come out a “certain way,” well, those odds increase monthly.

Yet the systems of oppression and the cops and the legal systems, they still incarcerate, batter and murder people with autism. People in mental health crises are tased and murdered by pigs. The systems of oppression are buttressed by the prejudices of Holly-dirt and the bullies of the world. It can be an overt Trump making fun of a disabled reporter at a press conference when he was first running in 2016, or it could be a Biden who pushed the crime bill, putting untold numbers of people with mental, emotional and situational abuse in chambers of hell – prison.

The spectrum of people who still do not understand why I work in “that field,” under all the pressures of emotionally traumatized and psychologically depleted people and their families, well, they might think of themselves as the beautiful people, the anti-Trumpistas, the LGBTQ folk, the African-American-in-the-VP-office loving folk, but again, they fail the Popsicle test.

Dream hoarders and Not in My Backyard vacillators, and all sorts of other liberal/neoliberal types, they are no friends of the Popsicle Test of a Sustainable, Fair, Resilient Community. They love their first and second homes. They covet a Stock Market hovering around 31,000 points. They love the Netflix mental diabetes junk they consume, and they have no idea why Biden is as bad as Bush or Trump.

And then I have to convince people to shed their prejudices against people that are not appearing “like themselves.” We do not use terms like “neuronormal” to contrast my clients with the mainstream, but in the end, what is normal in a society that shifts baselines almost weekly?

With the new normal full of paranoia, unapproved vaccines, and misleading diseased minds like Fauci and Gates leading the charge for a global forced vaccination program, one can image how paranoid my clients are who live in group homes or in small one-room apartments. TV and few friends ramify their fears. Lockdown is a locking up of the mind!

Some clients do not even want to meet me face to face on a beach with masks on. They are paranoid because of the mass polluting media. One disability on top of another and another. Welcome to America.

What is a disability? I suppose Helen Keller might figure in here:

When she was sixteen, in 1896, she was catapulted to national fame, writes Keith Rosenthal for the International Socialist Review. By 1904, when she graduated from Radcliffe College, she was internationally famous. She joined the Socialist Party of America a few years later and began advocating for revolutionary change. “She noticed the close relationship between disability and poverty, and blamed capitalism and poor industrial conditions for both,” writes Sascha Cohen for Time.

But even though she had strong politics and a national voice, nobody took her opinions seriously. “Newspaper editors would use her disability as a means to dismiss her politics and to dissuade people from taking her seriously,” writes Rosenthal. “Her radicalism, conservative writers would aver, was a product of the political ‘mistakes [which] spring out of the manifest limitations of her development.’”

Despite this, she was a leading light of the American socialist movement, Rosenthal writes. Among many other causes, she championed pacifism and the U.S. staying out of World War I. Source: Smithsonian Magazine

Eventually, in dog-eat-dog, kill your competition capitalism, we all become each other’s competitor, enemy. A few billion dollars here and there for hundreds of millions of struggling people is birdseed, yet the systems of oppression and suppression, along with the mass murdering media, cull agency, gumption, and the ability of people to stand up to the oppressors and the authorities and multiple graduate degree certificate holders.

What do the people I serve and the so-called “normal majority” have in common? There are variations on a Dystopian theme, whether it’s Blade Runner or Minority Report or Brave New World or 1984. Almost everyone in this country is confused, shattered, see-hear-speak no evil tied to their specific coalitions and ways of thinking. My amazing clients are enmeshed in fear and the outside world, thanks to the conflation of SARS-CoV2 to a body-eating zombie virus, eating them alive and culling them all eventually. No more hide and seek — it’s all duck and cover and mask and hide and isolate.

What that gives me as a worker are many people who deserve integrated employment but who are hobbled and shackled to the gestalt of a warped society. Do they have other ways of thinking and seeing and hearing? Of course. Do they have their own methods of surviving paranoia, depression, anxiety, hypervigilance, magical thinking, shattered executive functions, functional or complete illiteracy?

Of course. Of course. But again, the Popsicle test fails each time. Imagine, a job, 4 pm to 8 pm, in a town 15 miles from where they live. Can you see the public transportation system beautiful and timely and regular? Nope. Can you see all these taxi and shuttle services for free getting people to work and from work who can’t-won’t-never will drive? Where is that dreamland in Capitalism?

Yet every minute and every second of a 24-hour news cycle or 24 hours of a million channels broadcasting thousands of novellas, soap operas or series and movies, all are occupied with the stories and travails of the rich and famous, the idiotic heroes or pig crime dramas or Marvel Comic Book drivel. Rarely do Americans see what they live out personally, or view what they struggle with daily, or get to watch people like themselves in this battle to get the oppressors and Eichmann’s to bend to their/our will and begin to apply the tenants of the Popsicle Theory.

Otto Zehm

I can end with story after story of humanity hog-tied or knee-butted to death by the cops. Add to that demographic people living with psychological-intellectual-developmental disabilities.

You do not have to surf the internet long to find a few cases of autistic men and women or boys and girls getting pepper sprayed and handcuffed and body slammed by the pigs.

There is that case of Otto Zehm, and then Alien Boy which I wrote about here at DV. “Watching Brian Lindstrom’s Alien Boy: The Life and Death of James Chasse, I am reminded of my forty plus years in and around cops, with mentally distressed clients, as a social worker with homeless and re-entry and veteran clients, and as a teacher in many alternative high school programs, community college, prisons, with military students, and with adults living with developmental disabilities.”

I think that most of us instinctively avoid people with mental illness.

I think in many ways what my films are about is that search for my grandpa’s dentures: for that humanizing narrative that bridges the gap between “us” and “them” to arrive at a “we.”
—Brian Lindstrom, documentarian

Zehm was 32 years old when the Spokane cops killed him by putting him on the ground and forcing a cop’s weight onto his back while Otto’s diaphragm collapsed. He was a custodian, and back in 2006, the Spokesman Review deemed him as a mentally disabled custodian.

He went into a mini-mart for soda. It took almost a decade to find the pig guilty of murder. And this is how the DA and cops think of “mentally disabled custodians” —

Zehm either “attacked” the officers or at least refused to comply with their commands. Police Chief Jim Nicks said Tuesday that Zehm “immediately engaged” the first officer.

“Whether he lunged or turned quickly on him, whatever the case may be, the officer clearly felt there was a risk there,” Nicks said. “The suspect had a large two-liter bottle of pop. The officer had to take all those things into consideration as far as what level of threat this might be.

“But the bottom line is they had a duty and an obligation to detain and control him.” — Spokesman Review

I’ve been down this road many times over the years. My first police encounter as a newspaper reporter was in Ajo, Arizona. A very long time ago. Pima County Sheriff responds to a mother’s call about her Vietnam War veteran son having a mental crisis out front in the desert front yard. Fenced in. He needed some meds. The cops show up. And, while the veteran was on his mother’s property, which essentially was being paid for through the vet’s job and benefits, the deputy pulled his gun on the other side of the property line. He tells the 38 year old to drop the small knife.

A knife brandished by a shirtless and barefoot fellow in his OWN front yard.

Justified-six-shots-to-the-torso homicide. I was 19, and back then, I had this gig as a newspaper reporter, the so-called “sexy” cop beat, and, while I pushed my editors to allow some of my secondary interviews into the piece (interviews I did from a USC criminal justice reforming professor, another from a police chief in Akron) well, those were cut from the published article. Those two sources discussed how police are ripe for this sort of homicide, and how the system is rigged to defend civilian killing cops. That was 43 years ago.

I spent time with the vet’s mother and his ex-wife, and in reality, this guy was pretty cool, a great rock hound, three years at the university in hard rock geology, but his PTSD was way too much. PTSD wasn’t even the terminology back then in 1976.

I think of Otto Zehm all the time now. I knew of him and said hello to him a few times while I lived and taught in Spokane. He cleaned at the Community Building where I did a lot of gigs as a poet and teacher. I had my radio show in that building, and I ran into Otto a lot.

There is no way in hell Otto could have done harm to a cop.

The irony is that in 2006 I wasn’t working yet directly in the field of developmental disabilities. Sure, I had students who had psychological disabilities, and some students with accommodations. Many students who came back from the killing mountains of the Middle East.

I ended up working with adults with developmental disabilities in Portland and the three-county area 8 years later.

Now I am back at it, and, I think about some of my very verbal and far-thinking men and women with autism disorders. I think of their defiance and their questioning and their inability “to get” that cops or pigs or sheriff deputies just are itching for a bruising. They expect instant compliance. That is compliance from a disabled person, or from a three star black general or a Mexican American female attorney.

You can read about the extrajudicial killings this country’s allows. And that, again, is the Popsicle Test failure Number 999,999.

All those promises for reform. With the Portland Police Bureau. Seattle PD. Spokane PD. A thousand other PD’s blemished overtly with police brutality, police coverups, police maleficence.

No Popsicles for the People. Including the Developmentally Disabled.

The post Dreams Outside the Hopes of the Neuronormal first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
January 10, 2021

USA: Unsafe at any Speed

The number of gun sales in Oregon by Christmas Day, 2020, was a whopping 4,000,000. The year before, an anemic 300,000.

It is the law of the gun. Guns in jets, guns in bombers, guns in schools, guns here on the streets, in Salem, at the Capital, guns in Grand Theft Auto V, guns in purses, guns in boudoirs, guns in locker-rooms, guns in nurseries, guns in churches, guns in cars, guns in drones, guns guns guns.

Dalton Trumbo, quote from Johnny Got His Gun :

An equation: 40,000 dead young men = 3,000 tons of bone and flesh, 124,000 pounds of brain matter, 50,000 gallons of blood, 1,840,000 years of life that will never be lived, 100,000 children that will never be born (the last we can afford: there are too many starving children in the world already)….

Did anybody ever come back from the dead any single one of the millions who got killed did any one of them ever come back and say by god I’m glad I’m dead because death is always better than dishonor? Did they say I’m glad I died to make the world safe for democracy? Did they say I like death better than losing liberty? Did any of them ever say it’s good to think I got my guts blown out for the honor of my country? Did any of them ever say look at me I’m dead but I died for decency and that’s better than being alive? Did any of them ever say here I am I’ve been rotting for two years in a foreign grave but it’s wonderful to die for your native land? Did any of them say hurray I died for womanhood and I’m happy see how I sing even though my mouth is choked with worms?

Of course, the sideshow bantering about the attack on the Capitol, the five dead in DC (“Four Dead in Ohio”), who did what, is it a coup, are the halls of Congress sacred and hallowed, and something never seen before in the history of the United Snakes of America.

Of course, hysterical bantering on both sides of the political manure pile. Then all those “defund the police” woke people now wanting to throw the book at anyone and everyone at the “event,” even those milling around, or those who just came in for a selfie and had nothing to do with the ramming.

This is an inside job, of course — white nationalists in the police department, and a bunch of others flashing badges to get inside the Rotunda.

Impeach again, do a 25th amendment thing, call out the Guard, more laws, more fences, more surveillance tools, more eye, face, skin recognition AI. The trillions being made, passed back and forth, and the people with MAGA hats, and the people with Biden Buttons, the moldy media, the entire shit show really doesn’t give us a look at the new normal. This is old hand, the Cool Hand Luke world of Indian Slaughtering and Slave Torturing.

Oh, the upside world of right-side thinking — Many people arrested during the J20 protests of Trump’s inauguration, as you will recall, faced decades in prison for breaking storefront windows. Then, those two Black Lives Matter protesters who are lawyers, Colin Mattis and Urooj Rahman, went to town on an empty NYPD police car (vandalizing it) and are now facing federal charges with a sentence of 45 years to life.

The slippery slope that is the United Snakes of America. Lock her up. Abu Ghraib them all. Throw the key away.

Look, I have been thrown down and handcuffed several times over the years for, get this, peaceful protests. Protests where we had a fucking license (parade permit) to do our little First Amendment show.

In Arizona, in Texas, in Washington, in Oregon. I have been thrown down and cuffed as a teacher. As a frigging journalist. Try and protest the timber tyrants, or push for dam removal, or how about protesting Sea World or a zoo or circus for their elephant imprisonments.

I guarantee, those Proud Boys, those MAGA women we see at events, at the Capitol, all those bearded bikers, those blue-collar millionaires, come on, liberals, there is no dialogue. They never has been. You think there is dialogue here?

So, that was a whopping 64 years ago, the year I was born. We can go back farther:

Notice the smiles:

Sure, remarkable what the old deplorables did at the Capitol?

Well, let’s go back to 1919, when a white mob rioted through the streets of Washington, DC, while cops passively stood by and President Woodrow Wilson remained silent. A Black community in what’s now the Shaw neighborhood (Utah Avenue and Logan Circle) drove back the rampagers. Forty people were killed over a three day period. Who incited it? It took more than a 100 years for the esteemed Washington Post to admit to inciting and abetting it. The NAACP wrote a scorching letter to Wilson, the most racist president of the 20th century:

the shame put upon the country by the mobs, including United States soldiers, sailors, and marines, which have assaulted innocent and unoffending negroes in the national capital. Men in uniform have attacked negroes on the streets and pulled them from streetcars to beat them. Crowds are reported …to have directed attacks against any passing negro.

I don’t know. I hate to pull rank, but I am surrounded by people who to put it lightly have been so insulated, so cloistered, so self-isolating, that the things I have done on the streets, and the people I ran with and those I worked with and those I still work with, and the ground-truthing, and, well, I can’t say so much more here because I have a job that requires me to have a spotless record, of sorts. I won’t even get into what expungement means to me.

But I am hearing these bizarre things about the entire Capitol Siege, and alas, more censorship, more incarceration, more DA’s, more scrutiny, and, sure, we have a messed up country, but it has ALWAYS been that. The elites and the so-called liberal class have not been warriors of true egalitarianism and Marxist economy and organization. This here country is all about opportunities, and hoarders, and many of those “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” la-la land folk, well, they are dream hoarders. I guarantee many of those caught in the scandals involving paying bribes to get their vaunted children in the best schools are/were/will be Obama-Hillary-Biden backers.

The country was set up for a gilded age, followed by another and another gilded age. Now it’s Bitcoin Age, with the Digital Technologists and the Millions Working on Apps and AI and Robotics, well, they are right smack at the top of that next Fourth Industrial Revolution Gilded Few.

There is no housing guaranteed. There is no medical care guarantee. Teeth rotting? Good luck, Charlie. Bosses strip away any semblance of our rights, and we can organize into collective bargaining units without $2000 an hour legal outfits swooping in with their Leer Jets to denigrate and dissolve solidarity through every trick of the book.

The son-in-law Jared Kushner’s old man, pardoned. For what? Here we have it, no, the chosen elite:

Jared’s father was actually prosecuted back in the early 2000s by Chris Christie, then the US Attorney for New Jersey.

While under investigation, Charles hatched a revenge plot against his brother-in-law, William Schulder, for cooperating with prosecutors in a tax evasion case against him. Charles hired a hooker to have sex with Schulder in a Jersey motel room, where a hidden camera was rolling. The elder Kushner then sent the footage to Schulder’s wife, Ester, who is Charles’ sister.

The revenge plot backfired … the Schulders gave the footage to prosecutors, who tracked down the prostitute. She eventually snitched on Charles.

Christie recalled Charles’ plot last year, calling it “one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes” he ever prosecuted.

Look, there are people even on sites like DV who really believe there is a dialogue to be had with those Trumpies. This is the first sign of weakness and sickness. I live in a rural local. I have lived in big cities but spent much time in flyover country, much time with ranchers, blue collars types, farmers, construction folk, pipe fitters, cement workers, and more. I guarantee, I have had hundreds of conversations with people who truly believe they are the great white race, that the great USA is a land of KKK milk and Slaver honey.

Flags that appeared at the MAGA-Rage: Trump flag, Gadsden Flag, American flag, Blue Lives Matter Flag, monarchist Iranian flag, Confederate flag, Israeli flag. But, sorry Robert Reich, didn’t see one flag for the Russian Federation.

Old Mitch, in his youth:

Then there is the quintessential white hope, Trump, pushing off the Medal of Freedom to South African golfer Gary Player, who believed that South African blacks were not as evolved as his white ass: Here, endorsing apartheid in his 1966 book Grand Slam Golf:

I must say now, and clearly, that I am of the South Africa of Verwoerd and apartheid … a nation which … is the product of its instinct and ability to maintain civilised values and standards amongst the alien barbarians.

Barbarians, one and all. Think of all the people working 80 or 90 hours a week, for staffing agencies. Mostly women, pounded and pounding the keyboard, the spreadsheet, the phone, to get people jobs in the warehouse, manufacturing, trucking, logistics et al business.

In a Time of Covid-19. Think of all the people trying to survive, waiting for the revenuers and the repo men and women and the eviction notices from those Black Live Do Not Matter Blue Lives Matter deputies. Knocking on the trailer door at 10 pm. Serving papers after millions of papers served.

The cops, lording over the forced evictions, the cars and furniture and appliances hauled off. Their, in their SWAT Team gear, fancy squad SUV, amazing, stoic and mean, while the babies and children and old people in wheelchairs are carted off.

Scenes from the Nazi’s coming into France and overtaking homes, belongings.

Thuggery.

My aged friend, Barbara, 71, writes this to me today:

Meanwhile, Wall Street is booming, Bitcoin is soaring, and Big Tech is consolidating to fend against anti-trust actions.
Co-ordinated efforts? Seems to be the PUSH for the privatization of EVERYTHING as good soldiers for “democracy.. (little d)
All the world is a STAGE, Paul. All this nonsense of defending anything is a ruse….
The media PLATFORMS have never made so much money all over the world…this is a gold rush…they won’t be stopping this anytime soon.

And then I just have to go back a few centuries, and remember the number 1.5 billion. 1,500,000,00 acres. Stolen. From Native Americans:

Their tenuous grasp of the subject is regrettable if unsurprising, given that the conquest of the continent is both essential to understanding the rise of the US and deplorable. Acre by acre, the dispossession of native peoples made the US a transcontinental power. To visualize this story, I created ‘The Invasion of America’, an interactive time-lapse map of the nearly 500 cessions that the US carved out of native lands on its westward march to the shores of the Pacific.

I guarantee those MAGA’s and Deplorables and their Backers are not shedding any tears for the First Nations? No tears for slaves or the legacy of generational trauma. Is it a brain wiring problem? Is it education? Family influences? Look at that map above.

I also guarantee those writers and prognosticators are not having real dialogue with redneck lumber guys and gals, redneck fishers, redneck construction gals and guys. Ex-military. Current cops.

Europe’s 20th century atrocities are easier for most people to envision than the dispossession of Native Americans. Stalin’s gulags destroyed millions of people in the 1930s and ’40s; Germany systematically murdered two-thirds of the continent’s Jews during the Second World War; Yugoslavia devolved into a bloodbath of so-called ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the early 1990s. Accounts of those episodes describe the victims as men, women and children. By contrast, the language used to chronicle the dispossession of native peoples – ‘Indian’, ‘chief’, ‘warrior’, ‘tribe’, ‘squaw’ (as native women used to be called) – conjures up crude stereotypes and clouds the mind, making it difficult to see the wars of extermination, forced marches and expulsions for what they were. The story, which used to be celebratory, is now more often tragic and sentimental, rooted in the belief that the dispossession of native peoples was unjust but inevitable.
— Claudio Saunt, Richard B Russell Professor in American History, co-director of the Center for Virtual History, and associate director of the Institute of Native American Studies, all at the University of Georgia. His latest book is Unworthy Republic (2020). He lives in Athens, Georgia.

The post USA: Unsafe at any Speed first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.
December 26, 2020

Mask Up/Sink or Swim: Feedback Loops, Lag Times, Albedo Effects
I remember a long time ago, finding a Life (or Look) magazine at a swap meet in Arizona, on the outskirts of Tucson. Man, those were the days – 1977. Every sort of snow bird and desert rat out there swapping any number of a million things: from shrunken and powdered dog testicles (for the prostate issues of old men) to silver dollar certificates, from six shooters to bleached out badger bones; dream catchers and gold panning equipment; everything you could imagine, it was out there somewhere in the hundreds of stalls.

The Life story was about this crusty guy, who sailed by himself, maybe circumvented the globe. In any case, I don’t have that old issue within reach, but I do recall this fellow who faced gales, isolation, dead calms, no radio contact, hunger, talking about the hernia he had to deal with onboard. Everyday, he did a headstand on the mainsail mast, to let all the guts go back down so the innards wouldn’t be protruding as much. He took a selfie of himself, upside down, with his feet and ankles held in by some loose rope he rigged.

You/We/They Are What They/You/We Eat

I’m not proselytizing some macho moment here, but rather pointing out the mettle, man, of people then, and, well, now, but also how rotting the USA celebrity cult is. From all the pardons the Orange Accused Rapist has filed through, to all the murders he personally is overseeing at the federal level.

All those celebrities and politicos and the like, either the Proud Boys and their Co-Morbidities of obesity, depression, diabetes, hypertension, or the Gestapo police and their shoot-first-cover-up-later mental retardation. I’m in social services again, as a failed novelist, Working with mostly young adults trying to prep them for jobs in the community. All those skills and insider things. People living with I/DD – intellectual and developmental disabilities. Many with co-occurring challenges – one client has fetal alcohol syndrome (was in the womb with mother drinking and drugging). The outcome is autism spectrum, anxiety disorder, oppositional defiance, paranoia, executive function control issues, and so many more DSM-V labeled “things” happening with her – including physical ailments (thanks to mommy) and a truckload of learning disabilities. Try having a job with one of those “disabilities.” I’ve thrown in as a social worker, helping just-released prisoners navigate a place like Portland, Oregon. Ten or 20 years in solitary, and, bam, out into the community, and then, bam, three months to get their proverbial shit together: housing, job, a thousand classes forced down their throats as part of the conditions of release.

Black Men Have the Shortest Lifespans of Any Americans. This Theory Helps Explain Why.

Black people have much higher rates of hypertension, obesity, diabetes and strokes than white people do, and they develop those chronic conditions up to 10 years earlier. Studies link these health problems to stress. The unique, unrelenting strain caused by racism can alter a body’s normal functioning until it starts to wear down. John Henrys, who battle with an unequal system as they try to get ahead in life, bear the consequences in their bodies. “The stress,” James said, “is going to be far more overwhelming than it has a human right to be.”

There is no way that the thousands of people I have met over the years – as teacher, journalist, radio host, activist – could survive those prisoner blues or that sailor’s physical predicament or the life and times of a person with fetal alcohol syndrome disorder.

And I am thinking about the elites, the stem-cell sucking Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or Trump and Company, the lot of them, all in the houses of congress and the senate and those east coast graduates of those Ivy League Schools of the Americas. They may know the legal and political and economic tools for killing and maiming and destroying, but not one of those titans could last a day in the joint. Not one of them. Or homeless on the coast, with daily gales and tourists who call the cops for just one evil glare.

No Safety Nets for the Eighty Percenters; I’ve Fallen and I Can’t Get Up

And here I am, almost 64, in between health insurance coverage (this is the American way – new job, 90- day vetting period before coverage, and alas, what the fuck happens if something happens in the interim?). Imagine, you work your ass off, and it takes the evil system of capitalism to get a guy covered for health insurance!

This is why America and any other capitalist shit hole that demands slave wages and slavery and dead-end and shit jobs while the 10 Percent and then the other 10 Percent go their merry ways down to the investment houses, it is, definitely, a killer society. The language, the bridging, the lexicon and grammar, all of that, they are coming from complete two different places when one considers a precarious worker – college educated too, multiple times – and a retired couple in a nice big house all to themselves. The couple is worried about maximizing at least 12 percent profits on their investments, while the precarious couple is just working to, what, save money, beat the body and mind down, until what?
- no state bank or credit union
- no national health service
- no progressive taxation system
- no community free drop-in clinics
- no community farms/gardens
- no public transportation
- no public amenities
- no intergenerational gatherings
- no leadership and governance
- plenty of pollution, predation, precarity
You’ve heard all of this before. Here, another aside tying into this screed: So, just a few days ago, I braved the gales along the Oregon Coast. King tides. Days of rain. The beaches were full of logs, and the rivers coming from Highway 101 were a few feet deep and 20 feet across.

All my outdoor and military training went out the window – instead of getting my hiking boots wet, I opted to climb a log jam in lashing rain. Climb and climb, until, yep, not a senior moment, but a slip on a huge log jammed cedar. Bam. I did a backward fall, like a swan dive in reverse, and, yep, a perfectly large limb, pointing straight up, ready for my right side.

Ten feet down this log jam/ gnarled collection of cool trees and logs and limbs and snags got me.

The problem was I went down, 10 feet, and, bam. I took the three second rule, then got up, looked for blood on my head, and proceeded to climb out of the crisscrossing logs, as I ended up wet from the crotch down anyways in rapids of tannin-rich fresh water going to sea.

I did a mile down the beach, and, reversed course, and then things started throbbing. As is the case, a day or two later, and the pain is hard.

I live in Lincoln County, a very rural locale on the coast of Oregon. The hospital system is Samaritan, and, I have zero idea if my insurance has lapsed (since I get all these fucking notices that the deadline to enroll in health insurance is coming up).

No pissing blood. Good. No bruising. Bad or good. Pain when I laugh (lots to laugh about with Biden-Bumbler and Butt-Lick Trump in the news) or move sideways.

Everyone, from my spouse to my daughter are admonishing me to go to the ER, to the doctor, get an x-ray.

Do readers really have that memo yet at how the for-profit hospital-medical system is the reason Covid-19 has taken that toll, what, 19 percent higher rate of deaths in USA for 2020 than in the year 2019, not all attributed to the DARPA-Fort Detrick mutated bat virus concocted in several labs. Attributed to the failure of private for gouging medical care (sic) and the number of people who were told – “Wait on that heart ailment, no CAT scans today, etc., etc.”

Death By a Thousand Bills-Fines-Surcharges-Taxes-Levies-Loans

Suicide by delayed health care. Suicide by lockdowns. Suicide by the news news news.

This is North America – my choice is to go into a hospital and then have this or that test, this or that specialist yammer on, and, then, what, $8000 bill later, some diagnosis?

My own background in knowing a thing or two about medical needs, well, I did the old UCSF orthopedic surgeon lecture I found on the worldwide almost-not-free web, and alas, the verdict is my ilium is possibly fractured, maybe a few tendons ripped out of place, and, two ribs cracked?

My spouse checked on me this morning, since it was sort of a day off from my social services job and I slept in, as I also don’t sleep worth shit anymore, for the past 20 years. She thought, “Man, what if Paul is dead.”

I am here writing this, and the point of this screed is that every way I turn, and that means everyway any decent and compassionate person turns, the screws get tighter and tighter. Capitalism is the evil, and the evil doers are the elite, the one percent, then their two percenter lawyers and CEOs and thieves of every ilk. Then the two-income families with a doctor here and a defense contractor there. You get the picture – until we are the 80 Percent, while the 20 Percent not only hoards dreams and hoards community futures, but that slice of the American pie is gorged by the very people who should be, well, sent in capsules into outer space to see exactly what happens to the rich and the very rich and the somewhat rich in an oxygen-free environment at zero gravity.

There is no manner of discussion with the GOP or Libertarians or the Biden Boosters or Trumpies that can come at this fucked up capitalist penury system any other way than to say it is totally not working for the 80 percent. Story after story of the inequities, the inequalities, the ineptitudes, the inertia, the incongruence, the insipidness, and the insanity capitalism has gifted the world. From Blacks and Latinx dying in much higher proportions form the Fort Detrick Bat Virus Militarized Pathogen, to the private hell of privatized prisons, hospitals, education, and just banking.

The system of participatory socialism I describe at the end of Capital and Ideology some people would prefer to call social democracy for the 21st century. I have no problem with this but I prefer to talk about participatory socialism. In effect, this is the continuation of what has been done in the 20th century and what was successful. This includes equal access to education, to health, to a system of basic income, which to some extent is already in place but needs to be made more automatic; educational justice needs to be more real and less theoretical, as it is too often the case.

Regarding the system of property, which has always been the core discussion about socialism and capitalism, the proposal I am making relies on two main pillars: one is co-determination, through change in the legal system and the system of governance of companies, and the other part is progressive taxation and the permanent circulation of property. — Thomas Piketty

BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, which is an eight-trillion-dollar enterprise, and the largest shareholder in almost every company that matters to the future of the Earth.

Better Dead Than Red!

You know, I was just with a client of mine – major Autism Spectrum Disorder. He has a job at a fish processing plant. I mean, like sometimes 70 hours in a week. He’s almost 30, and his mother is his paid personal support worker. That’s cool, for sure. Something like 80 hours a month she is paid above minimum wage to get things done for her son. Things like banking, personal hygiene other things.

Obviously, I work with him and her, and with a non-profit which gets paid through the county and state for our services. This mother is also a military veteran. In any case, the person I work with is amazing, knows a thousand species of sharks and fish and other by-catch that comes in with the nets during certain harvest seasons, and, well, this man needs more men in his life.

They live in cramped quarters, and for the most part, they seem happy.

The problem is, this mother, with sort of hippie like ideology, still, she can’t even imagine socialism. “I don’t even want to hear that word, socialism.” Imagine, military (purely socialistic) veteran (socialism a la health care) and the feeding troughs from the Joints Chief of Staff on down the Raytheon line, and then add to that, everything she gets now is based on a form of socialism – socialized health care for her (VA) and him (ACA); the money she gets paid is from the government, and all those special education schools and programs over the years? Well, again, government-financed, as in public schooling and public commons.

This is why I believe Americans are really more than stupid and perverse, but they are the enemy of earth on so many levels. “It’s easier for an American to imagine a world depopulated, dead and dying from calamities, climate change, war, resource shortages, than a world without capitalism.”

This is a continual conversation I have, daily. Sometimes in the community, other times personal. Just the other night, at a solstice gathering with another couple, well, more of the ugly side of Americans who Have, and those who Do Not Have (And why don’t they have? Easy answers to be gathered).

Paranoia on Steroids (or on MSNBC)

We had already fought about what solstice means, and I like fires outside, breaking shared bread, candles, talking about some crazy pagan and even farther back rituals and thinking. But because of Covid-19 Paranoia, and all the mask fever, all the complete lunacy of our times, well, no fire outside, no swapping of recipes.

We were told not to bring food, and the idea is that food from anywhere outside this couple’s house might have the militarized bat virus lurking on it. Forget about the fact that this fellow served condiments and some other food items prepared outside of the house, packaged and sent to his local Fred Meyers.

The bone of contention was that the husband started talking about how troubled he was about his next investment fandango, and that is the crypto-investment, the post-bit coin realm. Blockchain madness. He pleads Marxist in his belief system, but like so many broken people, he is out for himself and his wife. Life is all about fear and loathing, and listening to Rachel Maddow and the other titans of stupidity on mainstream Democratic Party TV. One day you can love listening to Richard Wolff, but the next day it’s all about the Motely Fool.

My discourse was around the fact that a) I am not well off and therefore I am not in any investor class, and b) that a majority of the world should be paid in cash, in the coin of their realms, not enslaved by some digitized scam called cryptocurrency. That the USA greenback/dollar may collapse (his prediction); therefore, blockchain bit coins are the way to hedge those bets, again, more than 80 percent of Americans have no ready cash to invest in Crypto Bullshit Currency.

We have tens of millions who are food insecure NOW, and unable to feed their families. We have hundreds of millions of Americans with huge debts – from school, to mortgages, to just paying for the daily living, on credit. Of course, medical debt is a trillion dollar albatross around the necks of millions. Once you get taken into a hospital with “Fort Detrick/DARPA virus,” you might come out alive owing several hundred thousand dollars.

No jobs, bad jobs, failing jobs, and alas, the language of investors infected the Solstice. The lexicon of crypto-mancers, well, I was not in the mood, so I was snarky and, well, showed my communistic colors. Sure, it gets frustrating!

All of which leads to the same soft shoe song of “I can’t see how we can stop this technology, this digital currency … I don’t know how we can stop Russia and China from exploiting fossil fuels and resources, while we are supposed to be green, so, therefore, we should be the first at the takings …”

Cynical, Skeptical, Jaded: Part of the Problem, not the Solution

Mainstream media and the mush that is what Americans consume in TV and in la-la land movie-ville, well, that has colonized and co-opted the minds of people who were once friends with a shared and dynamic lexicon and language.

It is now, them against us. More and more, this is the relationship between friends, sometimes good friends.

Giving up, throwing hands in the air, just saying, “you do good work … you should be compensated for that” is just not enough to move a conversation forward.

We ended up talking about movies, and I said that Steve McQueen’s five movie brilliance, Small Ax, was worth the time. The fellow recommended, The Art Dealer, and alas, I reminded him that my glass was more than filled up with World War Two themed movies, Holocaust-themed flicks, flicks about grandkids looking for stolen loot or artifacts. I said, “Hey, try some different stuff than just the chosen people’s produced, or directed, or financed, or scripted shit on cable TV.”

The language of friendships are daily getting more and more cross-wired.

Here is another doozie – so, a fellow I helped over the years, a veteran, homeless, well, he put me into his will. I did not want that, and the funny thing is he came into some money from a father, and, well, nothing to shake a Trump or Clinton stick at, but the money would have been enough to make his amputated leg/ diabetic/ depressed life into something more than sheer homelessness, when I first met him.

I got him set up into an apartment, and they put him in the only ground floor unit that made it impossible for him to navigate his wheelchair safely. They were saying they’d hire someone to put in a special walkway/path to the tune of $5,500 charged to the veteran.

I tried my damnedest to get the largest apartment rental property management service (sic) in the USA to respond to empathy, logos, pathos, ethos, and, not one of my dozen emails got even a response. Pinnacle Property/Real Estate Management, look them up.

Property management investment corporations, and Pinnacle charged him for a sidewalk feature we had the local boy scouts, Rotary and a construction company all ready to put in for, well, supplies, at the tune of $500, which would have been paid by some charities (this was before he came into a few thousand dollars inheritance).

He then went from apartment to assisted living, quickly — and that nightmare, again, in a local facility that is part of national chain, and alas, $4,000 a month for a single room, and then another $2,000 a month they charged for special services? Weekly, when he was still cognizant, my friend complained about the lack of food, the small portions. He did not have a caseworker for more than two months. Then he started to fail. This is America, and, alas, this veteran died due to isolation, Covid-19 insanity, and the threads of assisted living where the workers treat the inmates like scum.

He had outstanding ambulance bills, Comcast would not shut down his phone, the banks froze his assets, the apartment complex previous to this assisted living joint had a bill for breaking his lease, the assisted living outfit had $250 late charges here and there, and alas, this is how America and capitalism runs – middle man, person x and y, corporation a and b, sticking it to you.

He had a newish friend as his executor, and she had to pay the state of Oregon $350 to take a four hour online mandatory class on being an executors (this is the society of nickel and dimes, fines and taxes, fees and surcharges, add-ons, late fees, service charges, hidden fees, surtaxes, forced certifications, levies, and more).

She had him cremated, and again, the deal is, lucky for her, she has some disposable income, so she had the finances to pay for the death certificates, the filing charges, the body burning, the moving fees, the late fees, all of that. Eventually she got the death certificates, and still she had to fight months to stop Comcast. Imagine, the hundreds of millions of dollars companies like Comcast get for phone and cable services and wifi services for the dead.

The lawyer working with the executor, for the few shekels in my friend’s investment account, needed an my W-9, for tax purposes, and I let out my disgruntled ire to him, “that, alas, capitalism and the rules written by the banks and the lawyers, demand my social security number and my name and address be given to the IRS for a paltry sum, an inheritance?” Obviously, it was a point of contention, not an attack on him personally, but surely it must have been an attack in his profession (lawyers, hands down, YUK).

What are 20,000 Lawyers at the Bottom of the Sea? Answer: a start!

These conversations go nowhere, because, a, lawyers do believe their lies and the game they play because they set the rules of the game minute to minute. I ended up saying something positive about the USPS, and he called me on his cell phone. All things looked like he was an agreeable liberal, though he said in his field, investment law, he was a rare democrat.

Again, the dreaded “socialism” came out of my mouth, since I am not and never have been a dedicated Democratic Party proponent, and alas, this country tis of thee needs the new MAGA hat – Make America Go Away.

That crossed the line for this quasi-liberal lawyer. He texted me saying – “I think I need to ask you not to overshare your politics w/ me, I don’t agree on all accounts, but support your right to believe what you want. I try to minimize my cell phone usage for work purposes, and certainly don’t want to have it be a medium for political or religious debate.”

This is how the dimwit smart lawyer types who love democrats think. Just the fear factor, too, of his ultra-conservative partners finding out his liberal leaning ways. On his cell phone. One he used to contact me with, including many texts.

This is how these $300,000 a year gutless wonders work, man. “I have mine, I get mine anyway I can, I will follow the rules, toe the line/tow the line, and alas, I make my money money money while I give a few shekels to the WWF, United Way and some democratic candidate for president. But SOCIALISM? You are worse than Trumpies! Do not contact me again!”

Oh, the level of discourse is so bastardized, so broken with mainstream and idiotic-stem media, all the barking and wailing, the pure shit coming out of the internet, the blogs, the podcasts, and more and more. There are no rational conversations with a broad mix of perspectives, that’s for sure.

Until we live in a world where any narrative, any science, any doubts, any humanity pointing against fascism, digital platforms for crypto-currency, for universal butthole/basic income, any discussion about how bad Zoom doom is for the K12 and post K12 crowd, but now, for the people who embrace working from home, never having to step foot in the office again.

Join, Believe, Comply, Be Coerced, Obey, Lock-step or DIE!

Any level of pushback against Facebook or Musk or self-driving cars or forced vaccinations, forced closures, forced kettling during protest, forced shut downs, forced evictions, foreclosures. Any level of going against the bullshit libertarian-Ayn Randian-Neoliberal-Lords of War narrative, and we are dead meat, literally or figuratively. Forget about having a smart discussion about sea level rise, anthropomorphic causes of global heating, global resource collapse, global pandemics, global pollution, global cancer rates, global hell!

I have so-called lefties denying the whole thing, even making up some shit about Covid-19 isn’t real when the evidence is that it IS real, really manufactured REAL, really perfectly Phase One of a Many Phased/Headed Hydra of Hell.

As if all those bioweapons by USA and Israel and the like are not historically Real. As if the poisons meant for humanity, as in Agent Orange, isn’t really REAL. Phosphorus bombs, Napalm bombs, Smart bombs, the mother of all bombs, nope, not real. Stealth drones and mini-poison delivery systems by CIA-Mossad. Nope, not really REAL at all.

These are subhuman, the murderers of MLK, Kennedys, Malcom, and on and on. So, no, these pieces of human scum would never ever really create REAL biotoxins. Nope. No PR-spinners saying a pack of cigarettes a day pushes the blues away. Nope, not those people, those Salvador Allende plotters. Not those Henry Kissinger types, and Dulles Brothers, and COINTELPRO, and the entire profit system that would have Tyson Foods rule the lives of not just the workers, but the fetuses of workers, the land, the very ecology where the Eerie Lake worth of Blood and Offal and Guts and Shit drain off.

No, the virus is not really a REAL invention of these murderers and experimenters. NOPE.

Imagine, here in Oregon, there is a mink industry (sick sic), where the purveyors of Auschwitz for Animals pack in minks, and they have outbreaks of not just SARS-CoV2, but other pathogens. Imagine that this is an industry? And it isn’t locked down, closed for good.

Imagine that, the democratic Governor Brown, and the lunacy of a country led by leeches and piranha and the almighty power of the imperial president and all the president’s Military-IT-AI-Banking-Medicine-Pharma-Big Ag-Prison-Chemical-Real Estate-Surveillance Complex Men/Women, messing with lockdowns, ICU’s 110 filled up, no PPE, no nothing, and this is what we have. No screaming at the top of their lungs from the NPR pundits. All those worthless millionaires and multimillionaires that are part of the medium is the message pukes.

The character Howard Beale gave the following speech in Network that still resonates today.

I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth. Banks are going bust. Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

Oh well, the lying lefties who think it is all a Greta Spin or Bill McKibben muse, they too are right about green as the new black, how the greenie weenies want capitalism to save the planet, but these same lefties are wrong wrong wrong about the reality of how messed up the world really is, and will be due to a WORLD without ICE:

John Englander is a co-author of the paper and author of the books “High Tide on Main Street” and the soon-to-be-released “Moving to Higher Ground: Rising Sea Level and the Path Forward.” He says this paper is a reaction to a “chorus of concern in the scientific community that the projections for rising sea level were understated.”

He said the research team hopes their work can inform the next major IPCC report, since that’s the most widely cited document on climate change. “With the next report now being prepared for release in 2021-22, our intent was to make the case to the IPCC leadership to explain the reality of Antarctic potential melting better, as it might significantly add to sea level rise this century.”

Since the last Ice Age, which reached its maximum extent about 20,000 years ago, global temperatures have warmed about 18 degrees Fahrenheit and sea levels have risen 425 feet; that’s greater than the length of the football field.

Historically speaking, simple math reveals that for every degree Fahrenheit the Earth warms, sea-level eventually rises by an astonishing 24 feet. There is, however, a sizable lag time between warming, melting and consequent sea-level rise.

Considering that Earth has already warmed 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the late 1800s, we know that substantial sea-level rise is already baked in, regardless of whether we stop global warming. Scientists just don’t know exactly how long it will take to see the rise or how fast it will occur. But using proxy records, glaciologists can see that as we emerged from the last Ice Age, sea level rose at remarkable rates — as fast as 15 feet per century at times.¹
1. Excerpts from Jeff Barardelli, “Sea-level rise from climate change could exceed the high-end projections, scientists warn,” CBS, 23 December 2020.
The post Mask Up/Sink or Swim: Feedback Loops, Lag Times, Albedo Effects first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.
December 12, 2020

Chilean Embraces Environmental Ethos on Oregon Coast

Before heading over to interview this subject, I was thinking of a possible epigraph for the piece. One from a Chilean:

Discovery is not seeing what there is (that is impossible at any level), but rather allowing oneself to converge towards a continually freshly-created reality.
― Chilean economist, Manfred Max-Neef, From the Outside Looking In: Experiences in Barefoot Economics

Then I thought –Why not a female Chilean poet?

Speech is our second possession, after the soul-and perhaps we have no other possession in this world.
— Gabriela Mistral

Maria — In Newport

I meet Maria Sause at her upstairs one-bedroom apartment along a gravel road east of Newport. She’s been renting it for four years from the couple who owns the property who also occupies the residence below her.

Sause tells me her education now at age 78 continues unabated and full-throttle without all the encumbrances tied to trying to raise a child (she has one son), working to survive, and returning to Chile to take care of a dying mother and ailing father, and living with a dynamic Chilean poet leftist in a rural area of that country. “I am belatedly educating myself.”

Gabriela Mistral

As we talk on a warm fall day, Maria explains her current interest is attempting to define “fascism.”

She’s reading Michael Parenti, and asks me, “Is he a reliable source?” I laugh, telling her I’ve been reading him since I was a young college student in Arizona, interviewed him once for one of my newspaper gigs 20 years ago.

The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into dead gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many. The glittering mansion overlooks a vast sprawl of shanty towns, wherein a desperate, demoralized humanity is kept in line with drugs, television, and armed force. ― Michael Parenti, Against Empire

I’ve run into Maria several times over the past two years of my time in Lincoln County. She is a member of the group, Lincoln County Community Rights, which has lobbied for a ban on aerial spraying of clear-cuts (and any other land) with pesticides that are linked to ill effects on humans and animal life.

She believes in the right of a community to determine what practices are safe and which companies should be allowed to do business within the community. The basic gist of her belief system is that companies and governments must be held accountable to the people to ensure public health, safety and security are maintained.

This may sound like Che Guevara and Fidel Castro espoused, but in reality, many communities in the USA before the turn of the 19th Century had restrictions on which company could or could not be allowed in a town to do business.

Her own narrative and her zest for knowing the lay of the political landscape make her a real find on the Oregon Coast. She also is a painter.

Four Days after the Nazi Invasion

As fate would have it, her life and this interview might not have come to fruition. Maria’s father, Franta (Francisco), left Czechoslovakia a scant 96 hours after Nazi Germany took over her parents’ homeland (March 15, 1939).

The Czech family line, originally Kraus, goes way back: “I just got in touch with a second cousin three years ago who has completed the family tree. The Kraus family goes back to the late 1700s in Czechoslovakia.”

Maria is an avowed anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist. Her early days in Santiago, Chile, with her industrialist father (he was a licensed medical doctor from Czechoslovakia whose credentials were not recognized in Chile) was one of personal challenge since he was a highly intelligent but dictatorial man.

Given his tough demeanor, her father was prescient enough to have sent his wife, Lisbet Erica Hirsch (maiden name), to England in 1938 before things got ugly in Europe.

Maria and I talk about history, about the saga of her Jewish heritage and roots. Her Kraus family line was virtually extinguished — 54 members on her father’s side (and an unknown number on her mother’s side) were exterminated in places like Auschwitz. Nazis processed professional Jews through the town of Theresienstadt, a hybrid concentration camp and ghetto established by the SS during World War II.

My father in his youth belonged to several left movements. Maybe it was the shock and trauma of losing parents and the entire family that turned him into a rightwing conservative.

Maria and her sister were sent to private schools outside of Santiago in the 1940s and 50s. Her parents split when she was one and a half years old and the legal battle for the children put them into a children’s home. After Maria turned six, her father took the girls to live with him, and eventually remarried when Maria was 12.

Her own diaspora as a secular, non-practicing Jew is what she herself initiated once she hit age 19 and her father approved of Maria leaving Chile to study at the San Francisco State College. She stayed with an aunt and uncle. That residence lasted six months before Maria was out on her own, working, going to school and eventually marrying.

Pablo Neruda

Summer of Love

Maria talks about her vibrant circle of friends and compatriots now in Lincoln County. At 78, she has good friends and the Lincoln County Community Rights organization is a lifeforce. She has three grandchildren from a single offspring, Christopher (55), who is in Portland but has lived in Tempe, San Francisco and Chile.

As a writer, I measure lives through their formative years and their young adulthood as stepping stones into aging.

Maria’s sister died young, age 47, of ovarian cancer. Maria went to Israel to assist her sister through the dying process. She has two nephews in Israel, aged 56 and 54. They’ve kept in touch, she says, but going to Israel is out of the question for her: “I can’t stand what Israel does to the Palestinians.”

Maria has gone to school to learn English literature as an avocation to becoming a public-school teacher, which she tried her hand at as a single mother raising Christopher, who graduated from Newport High a long time ago.

That lesson, after having gained a master’s in education in a one-year intensive program at Portland’s Reed College, was tough: the challenges of behavioral issues with K12 students and the way things are run in public education were enough to turn her off substituting.

She says working as an English-Art-Journalism teacher at Siletz High School was a hard lesson. “The kids just ate me up, I wasn’t prepared for all the behavioral issues. I gave the principal my resignation after two years.”

We then turn the pages of her life back, to when she was growing up in Chile and her closest friend was an active member of the communist party – Ursula Sternsdorrf. All of Maria’s intellectual curiosity was kept from her conservative father, who was forced to leave the Nazi advance and the imminent death camps to became an industrialist in Chile.

We jump to her first emancipation – coming to California. Three weeks after arriving in San Francisco to go to school, “I met that anarchist poet, Edward Sause.”

When Maria returned to Chile to attend a wedding, her father was about to let her return, even going as far as contacting the American Consulate to put pressure the government to keep her in Chile.

The three groups of people who could not get a visa to leave Chile, she shares, were: adulterers; communists and mentally retarded people.

She was three months pregnant when she married Edward. “My husband was a wonderful person, that is, when he was sober.” Just a few years in, they ended up divorced, and Maria was raising a young boy while getting work in offices.

“I was incredibly influenced by my father. He had a strong personality. I wanted to be on good terms with him.” But the way she lived her life was contrary to her father’s belief system and worldview.

Her pathway to Newport is circuitous – meeting her San Francisco State College Shakespeare teacher who was fired for his support of the 1968 student strike. He was Edward van Aelstyn, who ended up in Northern California and lived in his family’s house which burned down. In 1977, he ended up in Newport with his family where he helped set up Red Octopus Theater and Teatro Mundo.

Chile

“You don’t push other people under in order to get yourself afloat.” – Maria’s credo

She ended up sharing a house, in 2007, with her former Shakespeare teacher, van Aelstyn.

But even that journey is both circuitous and interesting:

She was back in Chile taking care of her father (who died in 1997) when Maria fell in love with Cesar Retamal. He had lived in many places, including studying in East Germany as a machine builder. He had been imprisoned in Chile by the Pinochet junta. He was an activist, a communist and blacklisted in Chile. The country’s American-backed dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, plays a central role in Chile’s history.

Cesar, like thousands of students, professionals, and union activists, was “disappeared” and tortured in one of the hundreds of “torture houses” Pinochet’s secret police had set up throughout Chile.

Cesar escaped because he knew one of the guards, Maria recounts.

“This is a period of time when I had an enormous education,” she said.

After her father’s death (her mother had died years earlier), they ended up with inheritances (both Maria and Cesar got separate amounts). Shortly thereafter, they ended up looking for land in the South of Chile: near Temuco, about 675 kilometers from Santiago. The couple eventually built their dream home at the foot of the Andes.

“We built a house which I designed and made a scaled-down exact model of it.” Four months later, the cabin-like home was built by locals. Great gatherings of friends and acquaintances were common there. Politics were central to the parties.

Cesar ran a construction business, and she ended up doing translation work – technical, engineering reports, environmental impact reports, and process papers. These included multinational companies, such as Rio Tinto and Anglo American.

She says she learned a lot doing that type of work. She recalls working on a report enlisted by the Bolivian government focusing on privatization of water for the city of Cochabamba through a consortium to include the British private company, International Waters.

It was a dialogue between the British company and Bolivian government.

Interestingly, Cesar’s construction outfit was involved in building small plain homes that the Chilean government had guaranteed every citizen could have access to.

Cesar and Maria split amicably in 2006. The house and land they both still own, and Maria said she also has six apartments in Chile that are rentals which have not seen any income since the Covid-19 lockdowns.

Oregon — Tillamook State Park

Rolling Up Her Sleeves to Preserve Forests

“I have a love-hate relationship with Oregon,” she tells me. “It’s got a reputation for having an environmentally minded government. Yet it’s clear industry runs the state.”

She recalls John Kitzhaber, when he was governor, saying he couldn’t do anything about the clearcutting and aerial spraying in Oregon because “my arms are tied by the timber industry.”

“Pre-emption laws are made whenever government and industry see the people are rising up against their projects,” she said. “A government that protects industry at a higher level than it protects the safety of the people is unconstitutional.”

This concept of having a fundamental right enshrined by the Constitution that allows people to decide locally on issue of health, safety and the environment, is held dearly by Maria Sause.

She has witnessed the devastation caused by total forest removal in her own neck of the woods where she lives in small above-garage apartment on acreage along Fruitvale Road. The stumps are emblematic of her own fight and LCCR’s fight against clearcutting.

The Lincoln County aerial ban was reversed September 2019, which means timber companies began spraying glyphosate, Atrazine and 2,4-D (an ingredient in Agent Orange made infamous in Vietnam) near where she lives.

Oregon forest

“Right where I live, they clear cut an enormous parcel of the forest.” Interestingly, her life-long avocation of painting reflects thick forest, open sky and clear-cut landscape.

Both Maria and I talk about our socialist leanings and beliefs.

Maria laughs when she tells me of the construction business she and Cesar embarked upon. “We made sure everyone got the same wages. Cesar and I were working without pay. We did not have any business background.”

The administrators/owners were leftists and the laborers rightwing. She laughs hard at that dichotomy.

She tells me that the fight for a community bill of rights, reversing these state pre-emption laws and having communities determine their health, safety and sustainability takes time.

Maria Sause is no fly on the wall, no Pollyanna, and certainly has certain gravitas in the community. She’s up on the issues why the Liquid Natural Gas proposed port in Coos Bay, Jordan Cove, is wrong for that community and the state.

She alludes to the youth around the world, and especially in Newport, protesting for climate action. She applauds them.

In the end, her goal with LCCR is “to provoke structural change in government. In that sense, education is key to “give people the opportunity to see government is not really there to protect their safety.”

Santiago, Chile

This is why I am here in Newport. I have good friends. I can do my painting. Work on community rights. People have to rise up for their most fundamental rights.

I pose the question bout if she were to die and have a tombstone, what would be inscribed on it: — “We don’t know why we pass through. Let no step we take while here be wasted.”

The country is still collectively traumatized by the ugly years of Pinochet – 1973 to 1990.

Any reader should be able to piece together this grandmother’s “philosophy. Interestingly, she is clear that her concept of work involves having fun. “I can have as much fun working as doing something conventionally called entertainment. Work can be, and should be, entertaining and entertainment, for me, can be something that requires effort and is difficult to do.”

As an environmentalist, Maria has a clear and simple message about how we are more than just stewards of the planet, and more than just the managers of the earth’s beauty, which so many call man’s “resources.”

There are a lot of things we, as a species, shouldn’t do. We unfortunately learn about them as we witness ourselves doing them and causing harm to other species and our own. So, what I think we as a species have to do on Earth today is retrace our steps in many ways, and start living in a way that allows other species to live and flourish, even if that means relinquishing many comforts, we take for granted today.

Penguins in Chile!

The post Chilean Embraces Environmental Ethos on Oregon Coast first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.
December 6, 2020

The Collector, Non-profit, Painter and Teacher

There’s a tremendous power in this place, in this land, and I think that power really changes people’s lives.

— Frank Boyden, Sitka Center for Art and Ecology.

A large number of the most creative, skilled, and savvy people in the country are out of jobs simultaneously. How can we harness that resource and develop collaborative projects and programs for them that might foster interdisciplinary work, enhance skills, and result in innovation in process and product? Perhaps this is the time to incubate a ‘Creative Economy 2.0’ across the United States that is inclusive, interdisciplinary, and intersectoral.

— Michael Seman, an assistant professor of arts management at Colorado State University’s LEAP Institute for the Arts

[New Earth 15, Daniela Molnar]

Here’s a foundational question roiling inside creative people’s brains — What does the artworld look like now, during the economic bust and lockdown, and for the future?

For me, I go back to the concept of duende — Goethe, who in speaking of Paganini, hit on a definition of the duende: “A mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained.”

After posing this and other framing questions (with that idea of a spirit/muse/ force, duende, as my talisman), I luckily have been gifted artists’ feedback and interviews, after initially receiving a few crickets and a couple of snarky diatribes about why journalists suck (yes, we are artful artists, too).

Unfortunately, many artists who have some cash savings to fall back on, or housing, and that old time religion of being a trust fund baby, or even parents and uncles and aunts with some semblance of family connectivity, a spare office and bedroom, and the like, they are so mired in the “anyone but Trump” disease, and they sound so-so much like those elite NPR types who believe they are so tied to the fabric of the country, that these conversations about the death of art are a bit problematic.

Many believe that the tough will get going, and that a little disruption never hurt anyone, and of course, they are absolutely wrong-wrong-wrong.

Places like the UK and other places within the EU have study after study looking at the upheaval see death, the end of the road, depression, and just throwing in both the artist towel and other towels.

Part Two to this is with David Rovics, an artist in Portland, who writes for Dissident Voice about his music career and his fight for rent control. Here, some of his writings at DV.

My intent is not to having a pissing contest between those who have (white privilege, male or female) and those who do not have, but this discussion about who controls the narrative, the media, the press, the arts, well, i courses through the art world big time now, during, and soon, after, Covid-Hysteria/Covid Reset, and it certainly had been coursing through this society for decades.

Yes, we expect artists to starve, and we expect that the master of the universe and sometimes the most insipid ones, to determine the value of something, and the investment of both intellectual space and time and economic space and time in the arts.

This is not about the value of, say, a piece titled, “Piss Christ,” or Robert Mapplethorpe’s work or Laurie Anderson’s performance. This is about the value of life, which is in so many ways for a socialist revolutionary what you do that is good and deeply redeeming as a person connecting ideas to society. Art is just that, and sure, the internal demons and muses of individual artists sometimes prevail, and the art many times seems self-indulgent and narrowly personal.

But if we had a choice between Elon Musk types, Google “creative” types, all the Military Industrial Complex types, either slugs and leeches directly tied to munitions and death planes, or those very loosely tied to the killing mercenary machine of the US on so many levels, well, I’d take a bi-polar, oddly self-absorbed artist over any of the other thieves of hope and dreams and lives in Capitalism.

Here, a cast of people I interviewed. Not surprisingly, this piece was to be a paid gig piece, but alas, the publication caved, even though we had agreed upon the general idea of the piece. No kill fee, nothing, just a “we can’t and won’t use this piece since it deviates too much from our vision and mission of . . . . . .” You can fill in that blank. The media and publishing and newspaper and magazine landscape is, for all intents and purposes, dead and dying, while we have to listen to the putrid multi-million dollar contracts for the Obama’s of the world, or the Trumpies, or all the others who are not writers or artists.

You might tell I am mad, and this is the disenfranchisement of writers in our society, and the sting of rejection is nothing compared to the spinelessness of the entire field.

Thanks to the pantheist originator in the heavens for Dissident Voice.

Cast of players*

The Collector: Duane Snider, with more than 40 years collecting (totalling 247) individual art pieces from PNW creators, who says his life is a living on-going work of art (Waldport, OR, 2 years)

The Non-profit Impresario – Alison Dennis, executive director of the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, whose roots are East Coast, Bennington College, with writing and art coursework (Cascade Head, OR, 2 years)

The Painter: Chuck Bloom, with a truckload of surrealistic and Tim Burton-esque wonderful (Portland, 19 years), who is self-described as the only LGBTQ board member on the Regional Arts & Culture Council (Portland, OR, 14 years)

Educator-Activist Artist: Daniela Molnar, self-described as visual artist/poet/wilderness guide/educator/essayist/activist/eternal student (13 years teaching at Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, OR)

Photo credit: Genaro Molina for the LA Times

*Note: Each cast member deserves his or her own New Yorker-like feature!

Art Not in a Political Vacuum (no matter how hard artists try and not be political)

I easily extrapolate from the cast of players this fact: 2020 represents a “new normal,” or a new “abnormal” for the world of arts.

Daniela sees these times as magnification of feedback loops and more/greater shifts in how we confront colliding breakdowns in politics, the environment, the economy and the arts. She concedes there were hard, dangerous times 13 years ago when she first started teaching in Portland. “What’s changed for me is my age and awareness, I suppose. These crises shifts challenge us more and more. Thirteen years ago, there weren’t Nazi rallies like we see under Trump. I don’t feel safe going out in public as a Jewish woman.”

As both artist and educator, Molnar tells me she has soured on higher education, lamenting how students and faculty are constantly being exploited. She reiterates what a lot of writers and visual artists have said time immemorial – you don’t need a college degree to be a writer or artist.

For New York-raised Molnar, she is “super grateful” her education took place in a time and manner where she incurred no debt. “I wasn’t treated as a consumer.”

In a Closet in a Small Town

Bloom’s roots go back to Bloomdale, a super small hamlet an hour south of Toledo, Ohio. He ended up in a private college, Mt. Union. His college loan debt is $80,000.

“Artists are struggling like they haven’t before. The energy to be creative has been drained by politics, Covid19, and now the fires. There’s a real sense of hopelessness. I go into the studio and say to myself – ‘This is pointless.’”

He ended up with his partner, Patrick (they met at Kent State), in Maui, working in an at-risk youth art program, as well as Borders Books.

His husband Patrick had just left the world of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell US Navy when they met after answering newspaper ads. When they first came to Portland, artists could live downtown and afford a junky studio, Chuck says. “I really noticed the changes in 2007. A lot of people left the Pearl.”

Bloom’s seen less diversity in the Portland arts scene than he first anticipated, emphasizing how he used to hold high the concept of an art community being progressive. “The people I have come to know are not really liberal. I am one of the artists discovering the truth that the liberalness in Portland is kind of fake.”

How this illiberalness plays out is those controlling the art scene are holding back artists who want to not only question capitalism, but the art business. Now, with lockdown and loss of supplemental jobs, “I know a lot of people who want to give up their art dreams.”

He brings up an artist he’s known for 20 years who has had to sell off her tools of the trade, abandon her studio and move into her parents’ house. “I am pretty well off compared to other artists,” he says, since his husband Patrick has a decent job with medical benefits.

The student loan is an albatross around Bloom’s neck, however. That was money spent for a double major at a Methodist college, where he was “outed by an on-campus Christian group. I was living in a dorm with these prayer groups around me finding bible passages taped to my door.”

Community within Community

[Sitka Center for Art and Ecology at Cascade Head, Oregon Coast]

The 50th anniversary of Sitka’s founding is 2020, and Alison Dennis laments those events were cancelled because of Covid-19 and the restrictions on gatherings. For Sitka, shifts have taken place in how arts are delivered and framed. Alison and the board applied for CARE and PPP projection. She was able to keep five full-time and 2 part-time workers on staff. “The programs did not allow me to pass money onto the artist. We would have if we could have.”

Artists depend on paid workshops and events where their work is displayed, considered, and sold directly to the public, collectors. She’s quick to emphasize it would be a mistake to create this dichotomy of organizations over artists, or vice versa.

Thanks in part to relief funding, and in part to foundations and private donors, we’re fortunate in that we’ve been able to keep our full staff employed at full pay. Staff capacity is essential to not only respond to this year’s crisis but also to plan for a resilient return. One example is working with instructors to design workshops for next year, such as outdoor painting and sketch booking workshops, with physical distancing in mind, Alison says.

The celebration goes on, since Sitka had its first cabins up and running in 1972, so 2022 seems like an interesting time to promote, celebrate and reposition Sitka for the changing times. Resilience is great, but artists are most of the times soloists, on their own, lone wolves. They can build community, but most of the time that is a cash-poor cooperative group.

I asked Sitka’s Dennis a key question on all our minds: One major shift in this pandemic is the inability to gather, hold openings, do group training, and such? What effects do you see this new normal have had on artists and the relationship to both the general public and students of art?

Sitka’s annual Art Invitational is one example of this dilemma. Each fall we host a regional 3-day art show showcasing over 300 works by over 100 PNW artists, and raising over $40K in direct art sale dollars that go directly into artists’ pockets, she says. This fall’s show was cancelled due to Covid-19. While we’re working to find ways to connect buyers with artists online, neither the experience nor the economic impact is close to the same.

Collecting Dust? He Wants More Lower Economic Folks to Enjoy Original Art!

[Installation of Chuck E. Bloom originals in Snider’s home]

The magic power of a poem [of art, of music] consists in it always being filled with duende, in its baptizing all who gaze at it with dark water, since with duende it is easier to love, to understand, and be certain of being loved, and being understood, and this struggle for expression and the communication of that expression in poetry sometimes acquires a fatal character.

— Federico García Lorca, Theory and Play of the Duende, 1933

For 68-year-old Duane Snider, his 39 years as a 9-to-5 blue-collar optical lens grinder left a deep emotional toll on him. He kept from jumping off a bridge (for five years he imagined that act daily where he saw the Ross Island bridge) by galvanizing himself into the world of Portland’s art scene.

We are talking about, he estimates, 3,000 to 4,000 art gallery openings, museum soirées and museum talks and MFA shows.

He says he’s always been the backer of the artist, reluctant about the capitalist bent of art galleries taking sixty percent of the sales of art for their own benefit.

Snider and his wife Linda want to disperse of their large collection (247 pieces and counting) through a model of gifting one piece of art to one deserving, underfunded person at a time.

His collection is chalk-full of Chuck Bloom’s work – over 30 pieces.

I’ve always thought artists are the most brutalized in a capitalist system, Snider tells me. The very richest people are obsessed with controlling artistic culture.

He and I have talked for hours walking the beaches around Waldport. While he is the pied piper for creative people in need, Snider also sees artists as problem solvers. He believes artists need to take control of their work, of their own promotion, and of their sales. “. . . and an increased emphasis on the work as a product.”

The white box model of a gallery exhibit is passe, and many galleries are dropping like flies in this pandemic. Snider harkens back to Portland’s 1960s and ‘70s art scene, citing the Image Gallery, a sort of venue for the people started by Jack McLarty and his wife Barbara.

I believe art is for everyone. And I have always been afraid for artists and believe there will be tremendous casualties for great artists and creative people now with this economic crisis.

Snider recalls the twice-a-week art classes at Portland’s St. Francis church where artists would work with homeless citizens in their artistic expression. Are those days numbered? Maybe.

Bloom, Snider and Molnar believe artists can be that radical thinker and doer, but capitalism takes its own toll on the arts – careerism and milquetoast expression.

But I find today in the U.S., two … or make that three … overriding aspects to public discourse. One is aggression. It is a snarky and sarcastic and hostile populace. Two is white privilege. And you see already that they overlap. Third is a distrust of art and the non-instrumental. This is American masculinity, but it seems to have leaked into much feminist thought as well. In any event the professionalizing of art and cultural production began a long gradual process of excluding radical voices and then even working-class voices. Since theatre is what I know best, and what I do, still, the rise of MFA programs coincided with the removal of disruptive voices. And soon a strange disfigured bureaucratization of culture had taken hold.

– American John Steppling is a playwright, author and commentator: a collection of plays, Sea of Cortez & Other Plays and his book, Aesthetic Resistance and Dis-Interest by Mimesis International. He lives in Norway.

Truth Tellers, Fully Awake, Resistance Fighters

[Daniela Molnar interviewed in LA Times and on local TV]

Daniela Molnar sees a tsunami of shake-ups of smaller art schools since Covid-19 lockdowns exposed more of the inequities of neoliberalism and capitalism. She no longer works for PNCA, which just recently merged with Willamette University.

Her pedigree, at the relatively young age of 41, is impressive: founder of the Art + Ecology program at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, founding co-editor of Leaf Litter, Signal Fire’s art and literary journal, and art editor at Bear Deluxe Magazine.

Interestingly enough, right before the Covid-19 pandemic declaration, Molnar was featured in a February 2020 LA Times article aptly titled – “An Artist Set Out to Paint Climate Change. She Ended Up on a Journey Through Grief.”

She was contemplating the shape produced with missing chunks of the Eliot Glacier on Mount Hood. She was zoning out one day while listening to a lecture by a hydrologist. Then she thought — “I haven’t seen that shape before. Maybe I can use that.”

That process of using crushed rocks mixed with gum arabic, a binder, and water from the rain barrel in her yard, for her, is a process of shaping an “abstract” set of scientific theories like climate change into art. Provoking feelings was her intent, but as she says in the LA Times piece, her own feelings of grief took over.

Given that generalized concept of “grief,” after talking with Daniela, I realize she doesn’t know what the future looks like, yet she still is a proponent of dancing to the beat of her/our own drummer when embodying the life of an artist: “Being an artist is one way to craft an honest life. It’s not going to be an easy life, but artists need to see clearly . . . clarity over ease. Art doesn’t look like any one thing.”

It is necessary for my own sanity to insert a stream of positivity in an article framing this new normal as a time of upheaval, struggles, loss and clouds of unknowing.

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happened better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

– Poet Mary Oliver, Don’t Hesitate, November 4, 2020

Full disclosure: I have never made a living as a poet, novelist, essayist and photographer. For more than 46 years I have cobbled together a living teaching part-time gigs, editing, working in social services case management, undertaking newspaper reporting and more to feed me and my need to write and photograph. This March 2020 my latest book, a short story collection, was derailed as all bookstore readings, conferences, literature confabs, libraries were cancelled.

I critique this new (i.e. old) normal which is illustrated in every group within the political red v. blue spectrum: not questioning authority and their masters, whether it’s Bezos, Trump or Kate Brown; not questioning draconian lockdown rules; accepting Zoom schools; failing to see heads on pikes after the massive graft in the trillions of dollars for US corporations; and no collective action for the hundreds of millions losing livelihoods. That’s bad enough; however, while leftist artists are both validated by the enormity of the neoliberal course of US predatory and parasitic capitalism displayed ever-more clearly in 2020, we are more ostracized economically and pushed way outside the margins of the “other” than any other time in history.

I’ll end with Hiroyuki Hamada, a New York artist and writer:

I am sure that with all sorts of manmade substances tossed into the environment, we probably do have physical components that can’t be attributed to our psychological needs alone, but still, I have a serious doubt about how our society deems creative behaviors as sickness because they don’t coincide with the system requiring obedient people for efficiency, productivity and profits. The unquantifiable creative potential smashed by such a tendency can be enormous.

And speaking of the urgent need for radical imagination and keeping one’s hate pure, I think the lack of those is not only stifling our capability to come up with the solutions, but it is blinding many of us from simply seeing the mechanism itself.

“Shelter Within The Storm: A Dialog On Politics And Culture” with Phil Rockstroh.

For more on Daniela’s work, her web site.

For more on Chuck’s work, his web site.

For more on the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, their web site.

The post The Collector, Non-profit, Painter and Teacher first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.