Delegates to the Havana Congress on the New International Economic Order—a gathering organized by the Progressive International and attended by more than 50 scholars and policymakers from 26 countries across all six inhabited continents—agreed over the weekend on a declaration that outlines a “common vision” for building an egalitarian and sustainable society out of the wreckage of five decades of neoliberal capitalism.
“The crisis of the existing world system can either entrench inequalities,” the declaration asserts, or it can “embolden” popular movements throughout the Global South to “reclaim” their role as protagonists “in the construction of a new world order based on justice, equity, and peace.”
Delegates resolved to focus their initial efforts on strengthening the development and dissemination of lifesaving technologies in low-income nations.
“Delegates agreed that a key priority must be to secure science and technology sovereignty.”
This decision comes one year after Cuban officials announced, at a press conference convened by the Progressive International (PI), their plan to deliver 200 million homegrown Covid-19 vaccine doses to impoverished countries abandoned by their wealthy counterparts and Big Pharma—along with tools to enable domestic production and expert support to improve distribution.
It also comes as Cuba assumes the presidency of the Group of 77 (G77), a bloc of 134 developing countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America where “the combined crises of food, energy, and environment” are escalating, PI
noted.
“What is the common vision to guide the Global South out of this crisis?” the coalition asked. “What is the plan to win it? What is the New International Economic Order for the 21st century?”
“After two days of detailed discussions about how to transform our shared world, delegates agreed that a key priority must be to secure science and technology sovereignty,” PI general coordinator David Adler said Sunday at the conclusion of the Havana Congress. “From pharmaceuticals to green tech, from digital currencies to microchips, too much of humanity is locked out of both benefiting from scientific advances and contributing to new ones. We will, as today’s declaration calls for, work to build ‘a planetary bloc led by the South and reinforced by the solidarities of the North’ to liberate knowledge and peoples.”
Speaking at the January 12 ceremony during which Cuba ascended to the G77 presidency, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla emphasized the need for coordinated action across the Global South on science and tech, arguing that “scientific-technical development is today monopolized by a club of countries that monopolize most of the patents, technologies, research centers, and promote the drain of talent from our countries.”
The G77 Summit on Science, Technology, and Innovation, scheduled for September in Havana, seeks to “unite, complement each other, integrate our national capacities so as not to be relegated to future pandemics,” said Parrilla.
During his speech on the first day of the Havana Congress, meanwhile, former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis called for a new non-aligned movement to “end the legalized robbery of people and Earth fueling climate catastrophe.”
\u201cAt the Havana Congress on the New International Economic Order, @yanisvaroufakis calls for a New Non-Aligned Movement to “end the legalised robbery of people and Earth fuelling climate catastrophe.”\n\nRead his full speech here: https://t.co/P8zdht8FD9\u201d
— Progressive International (@Progressive International)
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Read the full Havana Declaration on the New International Economic Order:
The Havana Congress,
Recalling the role of the Cuban Revolution in the struggle to unite the Southern nations of the world, and the spirit of the 1966 Havana Tricontinental Conference that convened peoples from Asia, Africa, and Latin America to chart a path to collective liberation in the face of severe global crises and sustained imperial subjugation;
Hearing the echoes of that history today, as crises of hunger, disease, and war once again overwhelm the world, compounded by a rapidly changing climate and the droughts, floods, and hurricanes that not only threaten to inflame conflicts between peoples, but also risk the extinction of humanity at large;
Celebrating the legacy of the anti-colonial struggle, and the victories won by combining a program of sovereign development at home, solidarity for national liberation abroad, and a strong Southern bloc to force concessions to its interests, culminating in the adoption of the U.N. Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order (NIEO);
Acknowledging that the project of decolonization remains incomplete, disrupted by concerted attacks on the unity of the South in the form of wars, coups, sanctions, structural adjustment, and the false promise that sovereign development might be won through integration into a hierarchical world system;
Emphasizing that the result has been the sustained divergence between North and South, characterized by the same dynamics that defined the international economic order five decades prior: the extraction of natural resources, the enclosure of ‘intellectual property,’ the plunder of structural adjustment, and the exclusion of the multilateral system;
Recognizing that despite these setbacks, the flame of Southern resistance did not die; that the pursuit of sovereign development has yielded unprecedented achievements—from mass literacy and universal healthcare to poverty alleviation and medical innovation—that enable a renewed campaign of Southern cooperation today;
Stressing that this potential for Southern unity is perceived as a threat to Northern powers, which seek once again to preserve their position in the hierarchy of the world system through mechanisms of economic exclusion, political coercion, and military aggression;
Seizing the opportunity of the present historical juncture, when the crisis of the existing world system can either entrench inequalities or embolden the call to reclaim Southern protagonism in the construction of a new world order based on justice, equity, and peace;
The Havana Congress calls to:
Renew the Non-Aligned Movement: In the face of increasing geopolitical tensions born from a decisive shift in the global balance of power, the Congress calls to resist the siren song of the new Cold War and to renew the project of non-alignment, grounded in the principles of sovereignty, peace, and cooperation articulated at the 1955 Bandung Conference, 1961 Non-Aligned Conference, 1966 Tricontinental Conference, and beyond.
Renovate the NIEO: To accompany the renewed non-aligned movement, the Congress calls to renovate the vision for a New International Economic Order fit for the 21st century; a vision that must draw inspiration from the original Declaration, but also account for the key issues—from digital technology to environmental breakdown—that define the present conditions for sovereign development; and to enshrine this vision in a new U.N. Declaration on the occasion of its 50th anniversary.
Assert Southern Power: The Congress recognizes that economic liberation will not be granted, but must be seized. As the original call for a New International Economic Order was won through the exercise of collective power in the coordinated production of petroleum, so our vision today can only be realized through the collective action of the South and the formation of new and alternative institutions to share critical technology, tackle sovereign debt, drive development finance, face future pandemics together, as well as coordinate positions on international climate action and the protection of national sovereignty over the extraction of natural resources.
Accompany Cuba in the G77: The Congress recognizes the critical opportunity afforded by Cuba’s presidency of the Group of 77 plus China to lead the South out of the present crisis and channel the lessons of its Revolution toward concrete proposals and ambitious initiatives to transform the broader international system.
Build a Planetary Bloc: The Congress calls on all peoples and nations of the world to join in this struggle to definitively achieve the New International Economic Order; to build a planetary bloc led by the South and reinforced by the solidarities of the North, whose peoples recognize their obligation to resist the crimes committed in their names; and to bring the spirit of this Havana Congress into the communities that we call home.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
The function of government itself once it’s privatized is to make money for the donor class, which is basically the financial class and the monopoly class that finance creates.
While the vast majority of people were struggling to stay alive and weather economic instability during the first two years of the pandemic, the world’s richest 1 percent were thriving as the proportion of new global wealth they were capturing soared to new heights, a report reveals. Over the past decade, the global top 1 percent has taken about half of all new wealth — an already extremely high…
Romanian authorities have seized several luxury cars from influencer Andrew Tate’s villa as part of a criminal inquiry into alleged human trafficking that led to his arrest. The cars, which included a Rolls-Royce and a BMW, were taken from Tate’s villa in Voluntari on the outskirts of Bucharest and transported by police to a secret warehouse. The self-proclaimed misogynist was arrested in the capital on 29 December, on charges of being part of an organised crime group, human trafficking and rape. His brother Tristan and two Romanian women were also arrested. They have denied wrongdoing.
As Daly notes in his latest video, it’s clear that Andrew Tate’s target audience is young straight men. This demographic, coincidentally, is also the most likely to fall down the far-right rabbit hole. In an age where the idea of gender – of femininity and masculinity – is becoming more fluid, the counter culture which has been pushed by the right is extreme, toxic masculinity. The vulgar misogyny that’s on display finds itself split between Andrew Tate fans who think that it’s a way of picking up women, and those who use the hatred of women as a front for being unsuccessful with them – also known as ‘incels’.
In a world of misinformation – a combination of ultra masculinity, a rejection of modern identity, and being promised that this behavior somehow attracts women – it’s plausible that some young men find this appealing.
Andrew Tate: a neoliberalist biproduct?
So, in his latest video Daly argues that Andrew Tate is a biproduct of neoliberalism – not someone helping young men. As he notes, Andrew Tate is exploiting the false idea that being a man is somehow being erased. However, he also has an economic incentive to push this kind of narrative:
Young men with low self-esteem are actually great for him. He manipulates them and sells them an idea – making a profit off people’s misery. Andrew Tate’s biggest business venture is ‘Hustlers University’ – which users can sign up for, which in turn will miraculously make them rich.
It’s just one big scam – the business is essentially his personality. His persona of leaning into ‘anti-wokeness’ and his extreme misogyny appeal to made-up fears surrounding sex, gender, alpha males and beta males, coupled with a get-rich-quick scheme that promotes selfishness and extreme individualism.
Sounds familiar in any way? Andrew Tate is quite literally a model by-product of neoliberalism.
Watch Curtis Daly’s full video via YouTube below – and don’t forget to hit the subscribe button while you’re there.
I have a newly-discovered health problem, where during the day, my blood pressure readings are quite normal, or we might even say somewhat on the low side, 105-65. During the night, when I am sleeping, however, the very same indicators are just too high, 168-92.
My doctor, a very dedicated physician and caring human being has no idea why. She has asked around, but the responses have been few, and certainly not very encouraging. To be honest, most doctors don’t know the answer, and as far as the patients, how many of them do you know, that measure and record their blood pressure readings while they are asleep? We have tried different types of blood pressure medication, and I have rejected some for their harsh side-effects (skin bruises or cancer). The results have not been any different. Both myself and my doctor are aware that, unless we achieve some success, the final result could be a heart attack or a stroke for me, which neither one of us wants.
What should we do to find the answer? Quite obvious, further research, consultation, and testing.
The problem is our physicians are often overworked and have no more time than 15 minutes (or 20 per patient), for the really good ones. In order to satisfy the neo-liberal system’s appetite for more profits, they are every day given a bigger list of patients assigned to them. To the blood-thirsty CEOs of insurance companies and healthcare outfits, their earnings are never sufficient. In my case, I volunteered to do some further research on my own, but my physician has already indicated to me that she will not be able to satisfy her quota, if we continue down the same path, and I don’t blame her. It’s her job that’s on the line.
What I described to you is just one of the destructive aspects and outcomes of this neo-liberal system of “profits before the people”. Each aspect is alone capable of bringing the system down to its knees. There are many more components that define the characteristics of the broken system. From the greed and desires of the drug companies for a bigger bottom-line, to the victimization of the public every year in order to sign them up, often for no reason at all, with a different insurance network — we are all set up for the big fall. Yes, the invisible hand of the neo-liberal capitalism might eventually adjust itself, but when and at what price? Just look at the healthcare industry’s statistics on COVID-19: number of people lost, the private sector’s profits.
Last month The Daily Blog offered its New Year infamous news media gongs — and blasts — for 2022. In this extract, editor and publisher Martyn Bradbury names the mainstream media “blind spots”.
Graham Adams over at The Platform made the argument this year that the failure of mainstream media to engage with the debates occurring online is a threat to democracy.
Here is my list of 17 topics over 30 years in New Zealand media:
Palestine: You cannot talk about the brutal occupation of Palestine by Israel in NZ media. It’s just not allowed, any discussion has to be framed as “Poor Israelis being terrorised by evil angry Muslims”. There is never focus on the brutal occupation and when it ever does emerge in the media it’s always insinuated that any criticism is anti-Semitism.
Child Poverty NEVER adult poverty: We only talk about child poverty because they deserve our pity. Adults in poverty can go screw themselves. Despite numbering around 800,000, adults in poverty are there because they “choose” to be there. The most important myth of neoliberalism is that your success is all your own, as is your failure. If an adult is in poverty, neoliberal cultural mythology states that is all on them and we have no obligation to help. That’s why we only ever talk endlessly about children in poverty because the vast majority of hard-hearted New Zealanders want to blame adults in poverty on them so we can pretend to be egalitarian without actually having to implement any policy.
The Neoliberal NZ experiment: You are never allowed to question the de-unionised work force that amputated wages, you can never question selling off our assets, you can never criticise the growth über alles mentality, you are never allowed to attack the free market outcomes and you can’t step back and evaluate the 35-year neoliberal experiment in New Zealand because you remind the wage slaves of the horror of it all.
Class: You cannot point out that the demarcation line in a capitalist democracy like New Zealand is the 1 percent richest plus their 9 percent enablers vs the 90 percent rest of us. Oh, you can wank on and on about your identity and your feelings about your identity in a never ending intersectionist diversity pronoun word salad, but you can’t point out that it’s really the 90 percent us vs the 10 percent them class break down because that would be effective and we can’t have effective on mainstream media when feelings are the currency to audience solidarity in an ever diminishing pie of attention.
Immigration: It must always be framed as positive. It can never be argued that it is a cheap and lazy growth model that pushes down wages and places domestic poor in competition with International student language school scams and exploited migrant workers. Any criticism of Immigration makes you a xenophobe and because the Middle Classes like travelling and have global skills for sale, they see any criticism of migrants as an attack on their economic privileges.
Hypertourism: We are never allowed to ask “how many is too many, you greedies”. The tourism industry that doesn’t give a shit about us locals, live for the 4 million tourists who visit annually. We are not allowed to ask why that amount of air travel is sustainable, we are not allowed to ask why selling Red Bull and V at tourist stops is somehow an economic miracle and we are certainly not allowed to question why these tourists aren’t directly being taxed meaningfully for the infrastructure they clog.
Dairy as a Sunset Industry: We are never allowed to point out that the millisecond the manufactured food industry can make synthetic milk powder, they will dump us as a base ingredient and the entire dairy industry overnight will collapse. With synthetic milks and meats here within a decade, it is time to radically cull herds, focus on only organic and free range sustainable herds and move away from mass production dairy forever. No one is allowed to mention the iceberg that is looming up in front of the Fonteera Titanic.
B-E-L-I-E-V-E victims: It’s like How to Kill a MockingBird was never written. People making serious allegations should be taken seriously, not B-E-L-I-E-V-E-D. That’s a tad fanatical Christian for me. It’s led to a change in our sexual assault laws where the Greens and Labour removed the only defence to rape so as to get more convictions, which when you think about it, is cult like and terrifying. Gerrymandering the law to ensure conviction isn’t justice, but in the current B-E-L-I-E-V-E victims culture it sure is and anyone saying otherwise is probably a rape apologist who should be put in prison immediately.
The Trans debate: This debate is so toxic and anyone asking any question gets immediately decried as transphobic. I’ve seen nuclear reactor meltdowns that are less radioactive than this debate. I’m so terrified I’m not going to say anything other than “please don’t hurt my family” for even mentioning it.
It’s never climate change for this catastrophic weather event: Catastrophic weather event after catastrophic weather event but it’s never connected to global warming! It’s like the weather is changing cataclysmically around us but because it’s not 100 percent sure that that cigarette you are smoking right now is the one that causes that lump inside you to become cancer, so we can’t connect this catastrophic weather event with a climate warming model that states clearly that we will see more and more catastrophic weather events.
Scoops: No New Zealand media will never acknowledge another media’s scoop in spite of a united front being able to generate more exposure and better journalism.
Te Reo fanaticism: You are not allowed to point out that barely 5 percent of the population speak Te Reo and that everyone who militantly fires up about it being an “official language” never seem that antagonistic about the lack of sign language use. Look, my daughter goes to a Māori immersion class and when she speaks Te Reo it makes me cry joyfully and I feel more connected to NZ than any other single moment. But endlessly ramming it down people’s throats seems woke language policing rather than a shared cultural treasure. You can still be an OK human being and not speak Te Reo.
Māori land confiscation: Māori suffered losing 95 percent of their land in less than a century, they were almost decimated by disease and technology brought via colonisation, they endured the 1863 Settlements Act, they survived blatant lies and falsehoods devised to create the pretext for confiscation, and saw violence in the Waikato. Māori have lived throughout that entire experience and still get told to be grateful because Pākehā brought blankets, tobacco and “technology”.
The Disabled: Almost 25 percent of New Zealand is disabled, yet for such a staggeringly huge number of people, their interests get little mention in the mainstream media.
Corporate Iwi: You can’t bring up that that the corporate model used for Iwi to negotiate settlements is outrageous and has created a Māori capitalist elite who are as venal as Pākehā capitalists.
Police worship: One of the most embarrassing parts about living in New Zealand is the disgusting manner in which so many acquiesce to the police. It’s never the cop’s fault when they shoot someone, it’s never the cop’s fault when they chase people to their death, it’s never the cop’s fault for planting evidence, it’s never the cops fault for using interrogation methods that bully false confessions out of vulnerable people. I think there is a settler cultural chip on our shoulders that always asks the mounted constabulary to bash those scary Māori at the edge of town because we are frightened of what goes bump in the night. We willingly give police total desecration to kill and maim and frame as long as long as they keep us safe. It’s sickening.
House prices will increase FOREVER! Too many middle class folk are now property speculators and they must see their values climb to afford the extra credit cards the bank sends them. We can never talk about house prices coming down. They must never fall. Screw the homeless, scre the generations locked out of home ownership and screw the working poor. Buying a house is only for the children of the middle classes now. Screw everyone else. Boomer cradle to the grave subsidisations that didn’t extend to any other generation. Free Ben and Jerry Ice Cream for every Boomer forever! ME! ME! ME!
You’ll also note that because so many media are dependent on real estate advertising, there’s never been a better time to buy!
Martyn “Bomber” Bradbury is a New Zealand media commentator, former radio and TV host, and former executive producer of Alt TV — a now-defunct alternative music and culture channel. He is publisher of The Daily Blog and writes blogs at Tumeke! and TDB. Republished with permission.
The first post-cold war assault on Russia by the West began in the early 1990s well before the expansion of NATO. It took the form of a U.S.-induced economic depression in Russia that was deeper and more disastrous than the Great Depression that devastated the U.S. in the 1930s. And it came at a time when Russians were naively talking of a “Common European Home” and a common European security structure that would include Russia.
The Disastrous Russian Depression Resulting from Western supervised “Shock Therapy.”
The magnitude of this economic catastrophe was spelled out tersely in a recent essay by Paul Krugman who wondered whether many Americans are aware of the enormous disaster it was for Russia. Krugman is quite accurate in describing it – but not in identifying its cause.
The graph below shows what happened to Russia beginning in the early 1990s as a result of the economic policies that were put in place under the guidance of U.S. advisors, the economist Jeffrey Sachs, perhaps the foremost among them. Sachs describes his contribution here. These policies drive an economy abruptly from a centrally planned economy with price controls to an economy where prices are determined by the market. This process is often described as “shock therapy.”
The plot shows that, upon the onset of “shock therapy” in 1991, the economy of Russia crumbled to 57% of its level in 1989, a decline of 43%! By comparison the U.S. economy in the Great Depression of the 1930s fell to 70% of its pre-Depression level, a decline of 30%. The life expectancy dropped by roughly 4 years in Russia during that period. Poverty and hopelessness became the norm. From my experience, few Americans know of this, and fewer still understand its magnitude.
“Shock Therapy” Applied to Poland Did Not Result in Prolonged Depression. Why?
The data for Poland are also shown for comparison in the chart above. Why? Because “shock therapy” was also carried out in Poland beginning two years earlier than Russia, in 1989. A glance at the graph above shows the striking difference between the two and the graph below reinforces that view. Below the real GDP’s for both Russia and Poland normalized to a value of 100 for the first year of their transitions to a market economy are shown in a 2001 IMF staff paper by Gerard Roland, “Ten Years After…Transition and Economics.” (China is also included by Roland. One lesson is that China moved to a market economy without “shock therapy,” did so with astonishing success and without putting itself at the mercy of the largesse of the U.S.)
Roland, Gérard. “Ten Years after … Transition and Economics.” IMF Staff Papers 48 (2001): 29–52. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4621689. Figure 1. Cited by Krugman here.
It is immediately clear that Poland went through a brief downturn lasting two years but recovered quickly, unlike Russia which continued in a slump for 16 years. Why the difference between the two? A big part of the answer is provided by economist Jeffrey Sachs who was in the forefront of advisors for the transitions in both countries and hence is a man who knows whereof he speaks. As Sachs put it in an interview here on DemocracyNow!, he was present during a “controlled experiment” where he could observe what led to such different outcomes. He says:
I had a controlled experiment, because I was economic adviser both to Poland and to the Soviet Union in the last year of President Gorbachev and to President Yeltsin in the first two years of Russian independence, 1992, ’93. My job was finance, to actually help Russia find a way to address, as you (the interviewer, Juan Gonzalez) described it, a massive financial crisis. And my basic recommendation in Poland, and then in Soviet Union and in Russia, was: To avoid a societal crisis and a geopolitical crisis, the rich Western world should help to tamp down this extraordinary financial crisis that was taking place with the breakdown of the former Soviet Union.
Well, interestingly, in the case of Poland, I made a series of very specific recommendations, and they were all accepted by the U.S. government — creating a stabilization fund, canceling part of Poland’s debts, allowing many financial maneuvers to get Poland out of the difficulty. And, you know, I patted myself on the back. ‘Oh, look at this!’
I make a recommendation, and one of them, for a billion dollars, stabilization fund, was accepted within eight hours by the White House. So, I thought, ‘Pretty good.’
Then came the analogous appeal on behalf of, first, Gorbachev, in the final days, and then President Yeltsin. Everything I recommended, which was on the same basis of economic dynamics, was rejected flat out by the White House. I didn’t understand it, I have to tell you, at the time. I said, ‘But it worked in Poland.’ And they’d stare at me blankly. In fact, an acting secretary of state in 1992 said, ‘Professor Sachs, it doesn’t even matter whether I agree with you or not. It’s not going to happen.’
And it took me, actually, quite a while to understand the underlying geopolitics. Those were exactly the days of Cheney and Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld and what became the Project for the New American Century, meaning for the continuation of American hegemony. I didn’t see it at the moment, because I was thinking as an economist, how to help overcome a financial crisis. But the unipolar politics was taking shape, and it was devastating. Of course, it left Russia in a massive financial crisis that led to a lot of instability that had its own implications for years to come.
But even more than that, what these people were planning, early on, despite explicit promises to Gorbachev and Yeltsin, was the expansion of NATO. And Clinton started the expansion of NATO with the three countries of Central Europe — Poland, Hungary and Czech Republic — and then George W. Bush Jr. added seven countries — Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and the three Baltic states — but right up against Russia…
The Neocons at Work, Carrying Out “The Wolfowitz Doctrine,” the Latest Expression of the Post-WWII U.S. Drive for Total Global Domination.
It is quite clear that the goal of the United States was not to help Russia but to bring it down, and Sachs correctly links that to the US quest for global hegemony first set forth in the months before Pearl Harbor and reiterated by the neocons who are now its champions. Among them Sachs mentions Paul Wolfowitz whose “doctrine” sums up the goals of the post-Soviet era with the words:
Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.
We must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.
What better way to achieve this goal than to reduce the economy of Russia to a basket case? Sachs draws a direct line from the Great Russian Depression of the 1990’s and early 2000’s to the expansion of NATO, the U.S. backed coup of a duly elected President in Ukraine in 2014 and on to the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine, also designed to “weaken” Russia. The hand of the US was at work every step of the way.
NYT’s Krugman Fails to Discuss the Hand of the US in the Great Russian Depression – not part of the Narrative That’s Fit to Print.
In his article Krugman describes the difference in outcomes between Poland and Russia but he does not describe different factors that distinguish the two countries and might serve as causes of the different outcomes. Sachs points out one such cause which he witnessed firsthand.
Krugman makes no mention of Sachs’s experience which Sachs himself has discussed repeatedly in interviews (like the one quoted for example, here) and in various written accounts going back to 1993 and a lengthy account in 2012 wherein he describes the lack of aid from the West as his “greatest frustration.” Sachs’s account is no secret and certainly a competent economist would know of it.
Certainly there were other factors contributing to this tragedy which Sachs himself discusses here. But there is no doubt that the actions of the US and the West were critical factors in the Great Russian Depression. An understanding of this goes a long way in making sense of events leading up to the present moment of U.S. proxy war in Ukraine and the brutal sanctions imposed on Russia. This understanding, however, does not fit the narrative to which the NYT confines itself – and its readers.
When the president of thepoorest,most corrupt nation in Europe is feted with multiple standing ovations by the combined Houses of Congress, and his name invokedin the same breath as Winston Churchill, you know we’ve reached Peak Zelensky.
It’s a farcical, almost psychotic over-promotion, probably surpassed only by the media’s shameful, hyperbolic railroading of the country into war with Iraq, in 2003. Paraphrasing Gertrude from Hamlet, “Methinks the media doth hype too much.”
Finally, the neo-cons who have led the U.S. into the serial debacles of Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Ukraine, costing the country tens of trillions of dollars and even greater amounts of destroyed reputational capital, will claim their customary immunity from any accountability for their savage failures and cheerily move on to their next calamity.
Let’s remember that before ascending to his country’s presidency, Volodymyr Zelensky’s greatest claim to fame was that he could play the piano with his penis. I’m not joking. And he ran on a platform to unite his country for peace, and for making amends with Russia. Again, I’m not joking.
Now, he’s Europe’s George Washington, FDR, and Douglas MacArthur all rolled into one and before whom the mighty and powerful genuflect.
Please. The only place to go from here is down. And, that is surely coming. Soon.
Consider some inconvenient facts that the fawning media, which is essentially the public relations arm of the weapons industry, doesn’t want you to know.
The European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen,recently let slip that the Ukrainian army has lost more than 100,000 troops in the eight months since the beginning of the war. Over the nine-year span of the Vietnam War, the U.S. with a population six times that of Ukraine, lost a total of 58,220 men.
In other words, on a per day, per capita basis, Ukraine is losing soldiers at a rate 141 TIMES that of U.S. losses in Vietnam. The U.S. lost the public on Vietnam when middle class white boys began coming home in body bags. Does anybody with half a brain believe such losses in Ukraine are sustainable? Does anybody have another plan to avert such slaughter?
Von der Leyen is among the shrewdest public figures in the world. What she is doing is laying the predicate for Western withdrawal from Ukraine and ending the War. If you look at the facts on the ground, not the boosterish propaganda ladled out by the media, you can understand why.
In a matter of weeks, Russia, with its hypersonic missiles, destroyed half of Ukraine’s electrical power infrastructure. This, as winter is coming on. It can just as easily take out the other half, effectively bombing Ukraine back into the Stone Age. Is that what anybody wants?
The startling, indeed, terrifying part of this is that neither Ukraine nor the West have any defense against these hypersonic missiles. They travel so fast, and on variable trajectories, they cannot be shot down, even by the most advanced Western systems. They represent one of the greatest asymmetries in deliverable destructive power in the history of warfare, probably dwarfed only by the U.S.’s possession of atomic bombs at the end of World War II.
Again, there is no effective defense against them. The Russians have them. The Ukrainians don’t. Game over. Can you understand why leaders in the West are beginning to wake up?
On the conventional front, the Ukrainians are having trouble securing even conventional weapons to defend themselves. U.S. arms suppliers are working around the clock to replace their own stocks and the stocks that European countries have given to Ukraine. But the backlog is running into years. A recent headline from The Wall Street Journal stated, “Europe is Rushing Arms to Ukraine but Running Out of Ammo.”
Finally, the U.S. has committed $112 billion to Ukraine. That includes $45 billion just slipped into the omnibus funding bill against the likelihood that a Republican-controlled House will cut such funding, almost certainly substantially.
That’s more than $10 billion per month since the war started in February. And that doesn’t even count the subsidies, both material and financial, from the EU which amount to billions of dollars more per month.
Without such subsidies, Zelensky would not have lasted a month in the war. How many hours do you think he is going last once that flow dries up? And it surely is.
The Europeans are coming to realize that their continent is being de-industrialized, literally moved backwards an entire epoch in economic terms, because of their willingness to serve as the doormat for the U.S.’ imperial war against Russia. Not even they, with their supine fealty to U.S. domination, are willing to commit collective economic suicide on behalf of the U.S.
France’s Macron and Germany’s Scholz are suggesting that accommodations to Russian interests must be devised in order to bring about a peaceful settlement of the war.
Macron suggestedin a television address to his nation that an antagonized Russia is not in the security interests of Europe. “We need to prepare what we are ready to do…to give guarantees to Russia the day it returns to the negotiating table.”
Scholz was even more specific. In anarticle in Foreign Affairs he declared, “We have to go back to the agreements which we had in the last decades and which were the basis for peace and security order in Europe.”
This is a direct repudiation of the U.S.’s maximalist position before the start of the War, that Russia’s security needs were of no interest to a marauding NATO.
Even U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is now mooting the idea that territorial concessions must be on the table. In aWall Street Journal article, Blinken stated that, “Our focus is…to take back territory that’s been seized from [Ukraine] since February 24th.”
Notice, that this is a significant climb down from the U.S.’ earlier position that all Russian gains since 2014, including Crimea, must be reversed before negotiations could begin. And this is just Blinken’s opening hand. More concessions are sure to follow as Russian gains become greater and their likelihood of being reversed, lesser.
Put these four things together: staggering, unsustainable losses of soldiers; terrifying, indefensible asymmetries of destructive power; inability to supply oneself with even conventional defensive weapons; and categorically reduced support from your most important backers.
Does that sound like the formula for winning a war? It is not. It’s the formula for losing the war, which is why von der Leyen, Macron, Scholz, and Blinken are now laying pipe for getting out. The tide is going out under Zelensky. He will soon be remembered as a Trivial Pursuits question, or an answer on Jeopardy: “The only modern head of state known to be able to play the piano with his penis.” Ding. “Contestant #3?” “Who is Volodymyr Zelensky?”
A peace will soon be declared. Russia will keep the Donbas and Crimea in recognition of the facts on the ground. Both sides will be better off for this. The Donbas is ethnically, linguistically, religiously, and culturally Russian, which is why it voted overwhelmingly for assimilation into Russia. Besides, if Kiev loved them so much, it wouldn’t have murdered 14,000 of them over the past eight years and resumed massive shelling in early February of this year, before the Russian invasion.
Ukraine will foreswear any future affiliation with NATO. This is Putin’s highest priority and what he asked for–and was denied–in his request to the U.S. and NATO last December, before the invasion was launched. If Russia begins its much-feared winter offensive, as many expect, Ukrainian generals will dispatch Zelensky in a coup rather than send their few remaining soldiers to certain annihilation.
U.S. grain and pharma conglomerates will buy up Ukrainian farmland—some of the best in the world—for pennies on the dollar. This is the standard MO of U.S. multinational vultures coming in after the kill to pick apart the carcasses. U.S. weapons makers will look for and help provoke the next feeding frenzy, much as they materialized Ukraine barely a year after the humiliating U.S. defeat in Afghanistan derailed their last gravy train.
Russia and China, driven together by U.S. bullying, will continue to constellate the nations of the Global South into an anti-Western bloc committed to collaborative, mutually profitable, peaceful development. The U.S. and its closest allies will cower behind the walls they’ve constructed of the ever-shrinking share of the global economy that they can manage to hold as their own.
Ukraine will prove a turning point in the dismantling of U.S. hegemony over global affairs that it has enjoyed—and, let’s be honest, often abused–since 1945. The U.S. public is not psychically prepared for such a come down. But that is the cost of living in the fantasy world that the media lavishes up to keep that self-same public ignorant, fearful, confused, entertained, and distracted.
Finally, the neo-cons who have led the U.S. into the serial debacles of Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Ukraine, costing the country tens of trillions of dollars and even greater amounts of destroyed reputational capital, will claim their customary immunity from any accountability for their savage failures and cheerily move on to their next calamity. We need to be on the lookout for their next gambit to pillage the treasury and advance their own private interests above those of the nation. It will surely come.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Imagine being confined to a space the size of a car’s interior in the pitch blackness of outer space for three days. Your spacecraft is the Apollo 14 Command Module “Kitty Hawk,” returning from the moon. In order to maintain thermal balance, the module will rotate 360° every two minutes, as the sun, the moon and stars, 10xs brighter and 10xs more prevalent, come into view repeatedly every 120 seconds. For Edgar Mitchell, NASA Lunar Module Pilot of the Apollo 14 moon mission in 1971 it was mesmerizing, inspiring universal connectiveness, a transcendental shift.
Other astronauts have experienced the Overview Effect, a cognitive shift when viewing the planet from outer space, an awe-inspiring transcendental state, overwhelming, often overpowering emotions sometimes accompanied by an ingenious realization of a surging connectiveness of people, the planet, the universe, all pulled together at its origin, a molecule.
This essay discusses Mitchell’s State of the Planet message as well as his tireless efforts to understand universal connectiveness and including special mention of the reality, or not, of UFOs, as described in his book: From Outer Space to Inner Space (New Page Books, 2022).
Dr. Edgar Mitchell (1930-2016) MIT ’64, US Naval officer, test pilot, aeronautical engineer delivered A Letter Message about the State of the Planet to his colleagues of the Board of Advisors of Visionary Alternatives, insisting on the importance of educating people about the true state of the planet, to wit:
It is imperative that adults and children are made acutely aware of this situation. Only a global grassroots effort can hope to grab the attention of our political, economic and institutional leaders. We, as a planetary society, need to generate the appropriate attention to these critical problems now through our individual economic and political choices before it is too late. Unfortunately, many people are not yet convinced of the need for economic restructuring.
Hmm.
Many of my colleagues and I believe that our global civilization is on an economic path that is environmentally unsustainable, one that is leading us toward economic decline and eventual collapse… Our global situation is incredibly challenging today because of the adoption of the western economic model (e.g., materialism, consumerism, and throw-away mentality) throughout much of the developed and developing economies of the world.
Mitchell listed critical planetary boundaries under siege: (1) rapid population growth beyond sustainability: 1 billion in 1804, 2 billion in 1927, 3 billion in 1960, 8 billion in 2022; (2) degradation of life-sourcing ecosystems; (3) excessive resource depletion such as shrinking forests; (4) eroding soils; (5) failing freshwater resources; (6) more frequent crop-withering heat waves; (7) collapsing fisheries; (8) expanding desertification; (9) frequency of extraordinary powerful storms; (10) shrinking natural resources; (11) melting glaciers.
Six years following the passing of Edgar Mitchell, the onset of the 2020s has witnessed considerable, in many cases unprecedented, outbreaks of every item on his list, exceeding planetary boundaries but much worse and much sooner than he thought possible. He was convinced that the only solution to collapse of planetary ecosystems would be a “massive global grass roots educational effort” to inform people how to move “our planetary society onto a sustainable path.”
Hopefully, his personal mission to inform the public and offer suggestions for how to move forward will continue by way of his foundation to expose the most threatening situation of the 21st century, which is a nearly out of control climate system that is broadly ignored for its true reality and impact.
Moreover, he called for “the need for economic restructuring.” Mitchell likely recognized the multitude problems with neoliberal capitalism. He implies that neoliberalism should be tossed in favor of a better system, for example, Herman Daly’s Steady-State Economy that recognizes a dependence upon the biosphere for all materials and energy and disposal of waste in harmony within planetary boundaries. Neoliberalism does the opposite by overusing, abusing, ignoring boundaries as if they do not exist. Thus, the planet becomes nothing more than a vehicle for private wealth creation, but for whom?
Elizabeth G. Boulton, PhD, Australian National University and MA/Climate Policy, University of Melbourne is a former army major in the Australian Defence Force, having served in East Timor (1999) and Iraq (2004) and logistics work in Ghana, Nigeria, and Sudan. She was a lead research officer at army headquarters.
Kitty Hawk’s Fiery Return from Outer Space, 1971
In a flashback from a long time ago, 51 years ago on February 5, 1971, Kitty Hawk was hurtling at 17,500 mph, burning through Earth’s atmosphere at up to 2700°F, bringing home astronauts Edgar Mitchell and Alan Shepard from a 9-day roundtrip to the moon. Mitchell had experienced a lifetime-changing event, an epiphany, an inner connection to “the nature of consciousness.” He’d never be the same person.
With a background in astronomy from Harvard and MIT and educational depth in science, he came to the profound realization that molecules in his body and the molecules of his spacecraft and the molecules of his spacecraft partner, Commander Alan Shepard, were prototypes and perhaps manufactured in some ancient generation of stars. This was a visceral experience brought on by overwhelmingly powerful feelings of “bliss” and “ecstasy” like he’d never previously experienced.
“The sensation was altogether foreign. Somehow, I felt tuned into something much larger than myself, something much larger than the planet in the window. Something incomprehensively big.” (From Outer Space To Inner Space, p. 69)
“I saw how my very existence was irrevocably connected with the movement and formation of planets, stars, and galaxies — the ineluctable result of the explosion of an immensely hot and dense dot at the center of the universe billions of years ago. Or, if quasi-steady state theorists are correct, as it now appears they may be — the ineluctable result of continuous matter creation in super clusters of galaxies,” Ibid, p. 81.
Today, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) launched Christmas Day, December 25, 2021, which orbits the Sun at one million miles away from Earth, dramatically and powerfully expands upon the same continuous matter creation that Mitchell discussed in his book. JWST cruises throughout L2, the second sun-Earth Lagrange point, which allows it to always stay in line with Earth while it orbits the Sun.
In time, Edgar Mitchell came to understand that the “stories” told to us by science of who we are were perhaps wrong, and “stories” told to us by religion about who we are were also perhaps wrong. This led to an awareness of the nature of consciousness as an answer to who we are in our universe, a much broader canvas than taught in science and religion.
As a prologue to recognition of the nature of consciousness, his studies taught that 500 years ago an early adherent was Rene Descartes, who claimed we have body and mind of the physical, but the spiritual belongs to a different realm of reality that doesn’t interact. Thereafter, it wasn’t until the 19th century when Max Planck’s theory established pillars of quantum mechanics that something was found missing from equations of existence in a broad sense.
According to Mitchell’s book, consciousness is what the quantum world is all about. A practical example: Mother and father go out for dinner and leave little Johnny-junior home with the babysitter. Halfway thru dinner, mom jumps up, something’s wrong with Johnny at home. She calls home and is told Johnny fell out of this highchair and bumped his head, screaming bloody murder. Mom knew that because of quantum entanglement. We call this behavior intuition or a sixth sense. It is a fundamental property of nature.
According to Mitchell, 40 years of study taught him that consciousness exists throughout all of nature and matter, and it begins with a quantum property of particles together that subsequently separate from each other but maintain a correlation regardless of where they go. or nonlocality, meaning that it happens faster than the speed of light. Therefore, the speed of light is not a fundamental aspect of consciousness and propagation of consciousness.
According to Mitchell, when describing our universe, rather that mention of matter and energy, which come from Newtonian physics, we must describe the universe as matter, energy, and awareness, adding this fundamental to nature that we did not know and appreciate until the 20th century.
Dr. Mitchell founded Noetics Foundation to investigate consciousness, ongoing for 38 years, eventually coming up with a quantum hologram. “The universe is self-organizing, intelligent, creative, trial and error interactive learning participatory informationally nonlocally interconnected evolving quantum system.” (Source: Edgar D. Mitchells’ Consciousness Presentation, University of Advancing Technologies induction into the Leonardo DaVinci Society for The Society of Thinking, 2011)
We are part of the living intelligent universe and cannot be separated from it. It’s all interconnected with the entire system. We are all matter that comes from the basic energy source we refer to as “zero-point energy field.”
The Quantum World is the most basic information system that we know of, and we live in it. It was here before our solar system developed.
“Energy, we know is the foundation of all matter; information is the foundation of knowing. Both were present at the moment of creation, whether in a big bang, or in a continuous process of creation in galaxies. It is likely that just as energy produced the physical structure that we recognize as waves and particles, in our macro-world, the seeds of consciousness were also present to produce awareness and intentionality,” Ibid, p. 196.
The Afterword of From Outer Space to Inner Space recognizes the Institute of Noetic Sciences, founded by Mitchell, as approaching its fiftieth anniversary, acknowledging Edgar Mitchell’s contribution to “a better understanding of consciousness and its capabilities.” As a result, concepts like the mind-body relationship, the role of spirituality in healing, and the mental and physical benefits of meditation, once considered laughable, have gone mainstream.
Of more than casual interest, the postscript to the book is entitled — It’s Time to End the UFO Coverup. As a boy, Edgar’s family lived in Roswell, NM, the site of the July 1947 UFO incident: “That incident involved the alleged crash of a UFO, possibly two, and their retrieval by the Army Air Force, along with their occupants,” p. 263.
Some years after his Apollo flight, Mitchell went back to Roswell and met old-timers who had been involved in Roswell events in 1947. One person was with the sheriff’s department and went to the crash site to supervise traffic in the area. Another person was an officer at Roswell Air Force Base where the crash debris and dead aliens were taken. For many years, the locals had been silenced by military authorities, but now they told their stories.
Interestingly, one of the locals was Jesse Marcel, Jr. the son of Major Jesse Marcel, an intelligence officer who was one of the first military personnel to the scene. He brought home pieces of the crashed UFO to show family members the remarkable structure of indestructible material, which he claimed, “was not of this Earth.” One item fascinated young Jesse. It was a small beam with purple-hued hieroglyphics inscribed on it. (Source: “Roswell Author Who Said He Handled UFO Crash Debris Dies at 76,” Guardian, August 28, 2013)
Another local that Mitchell talked to was a family member of the local funeral home that provided coffins for the dead at the crash site.
“I have had additional confirmation from very high-ranking members of several governments that UFOs are real, and that ETs have made contact with Earth. I am not at liberty to disclose the names of my informants, but they are from European nations, including the UK. Their sources of knowledge: Their own militaries’ studies of the subject… So, why does the coverup continue?” p. 265
Meanwhile, according to a recent LiveScience article — “US Military Reports ‘several hundred’ UFO Sightings in 2022, Pentagon Officials Claim” — “UFO reports from U.S. military personnel are flooding the government’s new All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). The U.S government’s brand-new UFO-tracking office has been open for half a year, but business is already booming.”
Of special interest is an article entitled “Wild New Paper Suggests We Could Detect Gravitational Waves From Alien Megacraft.” ScienceAlert highlights a public benefit research institute named Applied Physics that announced a potential breakthrough in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) via the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory’s ability to detect gravitational waves from accelerating astrophysical sources, possibly detecting an “extra-terrestrial mega-technology” such as a “Rapid And/or Massive Accelerating spacecraft.”
“I am persuaded, utterly, and completely, that we are being visited by extraterrestrials.” (Edgar Mitchell)
Reference photograph: Sandinistas at the Walls of the National Guard Headquarters: ‘Molotov Man’, Estelí, Nicaragua, July 16th, 1979, by Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos
The International Labour Organisation’s Global Wage Report 2022–23 tracks the horrendous collapse of real wages for billions of people around the planet. The gaping distance between the incomes and wealth of 99% of the world’s population from the incomes and wealth of the billionaires and near-trillionaires who make up the richest 1% is appalling. During the pandemic, when most of the world has experienced a dramatic loss in their livelihoods, the ten richest men in the world have doubled their fortunes. This extreme wealth inequality, now entirely normal in our world, has produced immense and dangerous social consequences.
If you take a walk in any city on the planet, not just in the poorer nations, you will find larger and larger clusters of housing that are congested with destitution. They go by many names: bastis, bidonville, daldongneh, favelas, gecekondu, kampung kumuh, slums, and Sodom and Gomorrah. Here, billions of people struggle to survive in conditions that are unnecessary in our age of massive social wealth and innovative technology. But the near-trillionaires seize this social wealth and prolong their half-century tax strike against governments, which paralyses public finances and enforces permanent austerity on the working class. The constricting squeeze of austerity defines the world of the bastis and the favelas as people constantly struggle to overcome the obstinate realities of hunger and poverty, a near absence of drinking water and sewage systems, and a shameful lack of education and medical care. In these bidonvilles and slums, people are forced to create new forms of everyday survival and new forms of belief in a future for themselves on this planet.
Reference photograph: Neighbourhood residents and other guests participate in a popular bible study in Petrolina, in the state of Pernambuco, 2019. Sourced from the Popular Communication Centre (Brazil).
These forms of everyday survival can be seen in the self-help organisations – almost always run by women – that exist in the harshest environments, such as inside Africa’s largest slum, Kibera (Nairobi, Kenya), or in environments supported by governments with few resources, such as in Altos de Lídice Commune (Caracas, Venezuela). The Austerity State in the capitalist world has abandoned its elementary duty of relief, with non-governmental organisations and charities providing necessary but insufficient band-aids for societies under immense stress.
Not far from the charities and self-help organisations sit a persistent fixture in the planet of slums: gangs, the employment agencies of distress. These gangs assemble the most distressed elements of society – mostly men – to manage a range of illegal activities (drugs, sex trafficking, protection rackets, gambling). From Ciudad Nezahualcoyotl (Mexico City, Mexico) to Khayelitsha (Cape Town, South Africa) to Orangi Town (Karachi, Pakistan), the presence of impoverished thugs, from petty thieves or malandros to members of large-scale gangs, is ubiquitous. In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the favelados (‘slum dwellers’) of Antares call the entrance of their neighbourhood bocas (‘mouths’), the mouths from which drugs can be bought and the mouths that are fed by the drug trade.
Reference photograph: Bishop Sérgio Arthur Braschi of the Diocese of Ponta Grossa (in the state of Paraná) blesses food that Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) donated to 500 families in need, 2021, by Jade Azevedo.
In this context of immense poverty and social fragmentation, people turn to different kinds of popular religions for relief. There are practical reasons for this turn, of course, since churches, mosques, and temples provide food and education as well as places for community gatherings and activities for children. Where the state mostly appears in the form of the police, the urban poor prefer to take refuge in charity organisations that are often connected in some way or another to religious orders. But these institutions do not draw people in only with hot meals or evening songs; there is a spiritual allure that should not be minimised.
Our researchers in Brazil have been studying the Pentecostal movement for the past few years, conducting ethnographic research across the country to understand the appeal of this rapidly growing denomination. Pentecostalism, a form of evangelical Christianity, emerged as a site of concern because it has begun to shape the consciousness of the urban poor and the working class in many countries with traditionalist ideas and has been key in efforts to transform these populations into the mass base of the New Right. Dossier no. 59, Religious Fundamentalism and Imperialism in Latin America: Action and Resistance (December 2022), researched and written by Delana Cristina Corazza and Angelica Tostes, synthesises the research of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research (Brazil) working group on evangelism, politics, and grassroots organising. The text charts the rise of the Pentecostal movement in the context of Latin America’s turn to neoliberalism and offers a granular analysis of why these new faith traditions have emerged and why they dovetail so elegantly with the sections of the New Right (including, in the Brazilian context, with the political fortunes of Jair Bolsonaro and the Bolsonaristas).
Reference photograph: Participants of a march and vigil organised by the Love Conquers Hate Christian Collective light candles during a prayer with believers of various faiths in Rio de Janeiro, 2018, by Gabriel Castilho.
In the 19th century, a very young Karl Marx captured the essence of religious desire amongst the downtrodden: ‘Religious suffering’, he wrote, ‘is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people’. It is erroneous to assume that the turn to forms of religion is merely about the desperate need for goods that the Austerity State has not been willing to provide. There is more at stake here, far more indeed than Pentecostalism, which has earned our attention, but which is not alone in its work in the slums of the urban poor. Trends similar to Pentecostalism are visible in societies that are dominated by other religious traditions. For instance, the da’wa (‘preachers’) of the Arab world, such as the Egyptian televangelist Amr Khaled, provide a similar kind of balm, while in India, the Art of Living Foundation and a range of small-time sadhus (‘holy men’) along with the Tablighi Jamaat (‘Society for Spreading Faith’) movement provide their own solace.
What unites these social forces is that they do not focus on eschatology, the concern with death and judgment that governs older religious traditions. These new religious forms are focused on life and on living (‘I am the resurrection and the life’, from John 11:25, is a favourite of Pentecostals). To live is to live in this world, to seek fortune and fame, to adopt all the ambitions of a neoliberal society into religion, to pray not to save one’s soul but for a high rate of return. This attitude is called the Life Gospel or the Prosperity Gospel, whose essence is captured in Amr Khaled’s questions: ‘How can we change the whole twenty-four hours into profit and energy? How can we invest the twenty-four hours in the best way?’. The answer is through productive work and prayer, a combination that the geographer Mona Atia calls ‘pious neoliberalism’.
Reference photograph: Doing the Ring Shout in Georgia, ca. 1930s, photographer unknown. Sourced from the Lorenzo Dow Turner Papers, Anacostia Community Museum Archives, Smithsonian Institution.
Amidst the despair of great poverty in the Austerity State, these new religious traditions provide a form of hope, a prosperity gospel that suggests that God wants those who struggle to gain wealth in this world and that measures salvation not in terms of divine grace in the afterlife but in the present balance of one’s bank account. Through the affective seizure of hope, these religious institutions, by and large, promote social ideals that are deeply conservative and hateful towards progress (particularly towards LGBTQ+ and women’s rights and sexual freedom).
Our dossier, an opening salvo into understanding the emergence of this range of religious institutions in the world of the urban poor, holds fast to this seizure of the hope of billions of people:
In order to build progressive dreams and visions of the future, we must foster hope among the people that can be lived in their daily reality. We must also recover and translate our history and the struggle for social rights into popular organisation by creating spaces for education, culture, and community in which people can gain better understandings of reality and engage in daily experiences of collective solidarity, leisure, and celebration. In these endeavours, it is important not to neglect or dismiss new or different ways of interpreting the world, such as through religion, but, rather, to foster open-minded and respectful dialogue between them to build unity around shared progressive values.
This is an invitation to a conversation and to praxis around working-class hope that is rooted in the struggles to transcend the Austerity State rather than surrender to it, as ‘pious neoliberalism’ does.
Reference photograph: The March of Daisies (Marcha das Margaridas), a public action in Brasilia in 2019 involving more than 100,000 women, by Natália Blanco (KOINONIA Ecunumical Presence and Service). Sourced from the ACT Brazil Ecumenical Forum (FEACT).
In February 2013, Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, went to the town of Maarat al-Nu’man and beheaded a seventy-year-old statue of the 11th century poet Abu al-Alaa al-Ma’arri. The old poet angered them because he is often thought of as an atheist, although, in truth, he was mainly anti-clerical. In his book Luzum ma la yalzam, al-Ma’arri wrote of the ‘crumbling ruins of the creeds’ in which a scout rode and sang, ‘The pasture here is full of noxious weeds’. ‘Among us falsehood is proclaimed aloud’, he wrote, ‘but truth is whispered… Right and Reason are denied a shroud’. No wonder that the young terrorists – inspired by their own gospel of certainty – decapitated the statue made by the Syrian sculptor Fathi Mohammed. They could not bear the thought of humanity resplendent.
Charter schools close every week, leaving many parents, students, and teachers out in the cold. Even worse, these “free market” schools governed by unelected private persons often close with no warning to anyone, leaving everyone blindsided.
Charter schools typically close for poor academic performance, corruption, or mismanagement, and it is common for all three to occur simultaneously.
The average person often wonders how such a thing is possible and allowed to happen in the first place. How can there be so many outsourced schools that open and close regularly? Why is such chaos and anarchy permitted? Who thinks this is positive and healthy?
The latest charter school to close abruptly and leave everyone stunned is Placer Academy Charter School in Rocklin, California. No one saw the closure coming. The disturbing announcement from the school came out of nowhere. “The abrupt closure plans leave the families of more than 200 students wondering where to turn on such short notice,” reports KCRA Channel 3. Echoing the sentiments of other parents who were stunned by the surprise announcement, one parent, Wendy Jenkins, said, “I could not believe it was real and I started to cry. We just kept reading it [the sudden closure notice] and reading it over – hoping we weren’t reading what we were seeing … the school was closing, and we were only going to have four days to find another fit.”
In the coming weeks and months, more charter schools will fail and close across the country, leaving even more parents, students, and teachers feeling violated. This pattern has not changed in over 30 years.
Nationally, a lengthy 2020 report from the Network for Public Education (NPE), “Broken Promises: An Analysis of Charter School Closures From 1999 – 2017,” showed that a staggering number of charter schools closed just a few years after they opened, displacing more than a million students. The real numbers are higher. Indeed, 5,000 charter schools have closed since their inception 31 years ago. That is an astounding number given that there are only 7,500 charter schools in existence today. And according to the National Center for Education Statistics, 235 charter schools closed just in the 2019-20 academic year. On average that is more than four charter school closures per week. A textbook example of “free market carnage.”
Most of the students cast off by these segregated schools will return to their public schools, which accepts all students at all times and usually has more nurses, more experienced teachers, better employee retirement plans, stronger programs, and more resources than deregulated charter schools. Even in their chronically-underfunded condition, heavily-vilified public schools generally offer more than charter schools.
So far, the neoliberal narrative that “public-schools-are-failing-and-evil-and-you-need-to-get-your-kid-into-a-privately-run-charter-school-immediately” has resulted mainly in greater profits for charter school owners, while lowering the level of education and culture in society. By funneling public wealth into the hands of narrow private interests, charter schools have also harmed the economy and undermined a modern nation-building project.
People reject the idea that the only choices available to them are public schools methodically set up to fail by neoliberals, or privately-run deregulated charter schools created by the same neoliberals in order to get richer under the banner of high ideals. The public rejects this false dichotomy and condemns neoliberals for their destructive actions.
All should unite to oppose the commodification of education and to defend the right to education so that every child has free and easy access to world-class, publicly-governed public schools.
Global warming is taking a big bite out of the planet. Unprecedented severe droughts dry up major commercial waterways and extreme conditions have either diminished or partially decimated many crops in the US, Europe, China, Australia, the Indian subcontinent and throughout regions of Africa.
This article explores the impact of “multiple breadbasket failures” as defined by UN research. As well as a discussion of angry radicals that stop private jets, thus challenging in direct fashion a source at the pinnacle of climate issues, discussed in the final 7 paragraphs.
But first: (1) What will stop global warming? (2) Will global warming get worse even as countries go to net zero by 2050, which will continue adding CO2 every year for the next 27 years? (3) Therefore, does net zero by 2050 imply loss of commercial waterways like the Danube and loss of major water reservoirs like Lake Mead, both of which nearly failed in 2022? (4) Is net zero by 2050 a ruse?
The UN-sponsored Conference of the Parties COP annual get-togethers have punted on any kind of serious diminishment of fossil fuel emissions, as the fossil fuel industry itself is cranking up big time by planning to spend well over $1T to develop more oil and gas, which, in turn, ultimately brings on severe droughts that destroys crops and bleeds commercial waterways of navigability as reservoirs hit dead pool status.
It’s an endless circuitous spectacle of insanity in pursuit of elusive infinite economic growth bumping up against planetary limitations, as we currently use 1.5 more biocapacity than the planet can regenerate (Global Footprint Network).
It’s also a guaranteed losing proposition, but who really cares is the problem. If it were otherwise, meaning if world leaders really cared, then there’d be all kinds of worldwide coordinated Marshall Plans funding renewables, climate restoration, refreezing the Arctic, etc. but that’s not the case, not even close.
More than 80% of the world’s population lives in countries that are currently running ecological deficits, using more resources than the ecosystems can regenerate. Meanwhile, global warming is hammering that deficit hard and harder via soaring drought conditions around the world.
According to the World Economic Forum’s coverage of drought conditions, a new UN study claims drought frequency and duration has increased by nearly a third since 2000. A 33% increase on a biomass as large as the planet in only 20+ years is almost impossible to phantom. How is it even possible in such a short timeframe? (Source: “Droughts are Getting Worse Around the World,” World Economic Forum, August 2022)
The Drought in Numbers 2022 Report concludes: “Sustainable and efficient agricultural management techniques are needed to grow more food on less land and with less water, and humans must change their relationships with food, fodder and fibre – moving toward plant-based diets and stemming the consumption of animals,” Ibid.
Stop Eating Animals helps resolve many ecosystem issues.
UN researchers refer to global warming’s damage to major growing regions as “Multiple Breadbasket Failures.” They know, as we all know, unless global warming lessens soon, meaning real soon, multiple breadbasket failures will get worse. “A study of global hotspots of heat stress due to climate change showed areas of Central Asia, East Asia, South Asia and North America (40–60 degrees N.), which include the major grain producing areas of the world, as being particularly vulnerable.” (Source: Anthony Janetos, et al, “The Risks of Multiple Breadbasket Failures in the 21st Century: A Science Research Agenda,” Boston University, March 2017)
The risks are well defined: Only 23% of total cropland in the world accounts for most of total global cereal production of three major crops, i.e., maize (70%) wheat (69%) and rice (85%) according to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, Statistics Division. The Rub: Those producing areas are the most exposed or most “particularly vulnerable.”
The impact of devastating drought and food vulnerability is nowhere more prevalent than the Horn of Africa where tens of millions of people are up against the wall with 9,000,000 animals already dead, a result of 60 months of terrifying brutal drought. It is an example of global warming-enhanced drought conditions gone bonkers, at its worse. According to Dr. Deepmala Mahia of CARE International, 50,000,000 people are “one step away from starvation.” (Source: “Hunger Crisis in Horn of Africa Grows as Drought Persists,” Voice of America News, VOA, September 23, 2022)
Imagine being one of fifty million one step away from starvation. This represents a gruesome global warming-enhancement story that unfortunately the world choses to ignore as thousands of furrowed brows of global leaders and high-ranking bureaucrats and climate scientists gather annually at UN-sponsored COPs to discuss how bad climate change was in previous years… but do nothing meaningful enough to resolve it.
Meanwhile, global warming has turned ferocious and mean-spirited like never before. The trend is ominously right around the proverbial corner until and unless a massive worldwide coordinated campaign stops fossil fuel dead in its tracks. It’s impossible to sugar coat the devastating impact of fossil fuel emissions.
Scientists are now discussing a new Era of Climate Change-Driven Simultaneous Food Supply Failures: The UN World Food Programme has warned that climate change is now the driving force behind global hunger. For example, extreme temperatures starting in March of 2022, and lasting for weeks, badly damaged India’s rice crop, which is 40% of the world rice trade. Vegetable yields in parts of India were down by 50%. Meanwhile, Pakistan’s floods reduced the rice harvest by 30%. Pakistan is the world’s fourth largest exporter of grain.
Gernot Laganda, Director of Climate at the United Nations World Food Programme: “Climate change is an important driver in the current increase in global hunger. Right now, 345 million people are facing acute food insecurity – which is an increase from 135 million since 2019.” (Source: “Scientists Warn of Breadbasket Failure Because of Climate Change,” Deccan Herald, Sept. 5, 2022)
In only three years’ time the number of people facing “acute food insecurity” has ballooned by 200,000,000, up 150%. At 345 million it’s the size of the United States. It’s little wonder that mass migrations have become brazen constant features of the Northern Hemisphere. People turn desperate, move to new territory, encounter pushback by sadistic white supremacists, especially in the former colonial empires of Europe and America and all hell breaks loose in local communities that heretofore were stable and quiet, peaceful no longer.
Acute food insecurity has not hit the US, yet. Americans generally ignore the issue, but as a precursor to a tough challenging future, global warming hit US crops hard: (1) corn at its lowest yield in 10 years (2) hard red wheat the smallest since 1963 (3) Texas cotton farmers walked away from 70% of their crop because of paltry harvest (4) California’s rice harvest down 50%. The problem is more widespread that it appears on the surface, as drought has hit 40% of the US for the past 100+ weeks, according to USDA’s Brad Rippey: “Precisely where that 40 percent shifted over time, meaning different swaths of the country’s agricultural land have been affected at different times, spreading pain and difficult choices geographically and by crop.” (Source: “The Summer Drought’s Hefty Toll on American Crops,” Washington Post, Sept. 5, 2022)
It is only too obvious that climate change madness must be reigned-in, or the future will turn very dark. As things stand, according to a McKinsey study, 2023 could witness a grain deficit of 60 million tons. (Source: “The Grain Shortage Caused by Global Food Crisis Could Correspond to the Annual Nutritional Intake of up to 250 Million People: McKinsey,” Helsinki Times, August 25, 2022)
According to McKinsey, the pandemic of 2020 increased the price of grain, and “since then, drought-induced harvests have increased prices even more. With the ongoing war in Ukraine, there is a risk of a food crisis, which may become the most serious so far in the 21st century,” Ibid.
According to the International Panel on Climate Change, IPCC: “Future projections in global yield trends of both maize and wheat indicate a significant decline; these declines can be attributed to the negative impacts of climate change arising from increasing greenhouse gas emissions.” (Source: The World’s Food Supply is Made Insecure by Climate Change, United Nations – Academic Impact)
Declining crop yields effectively reverse the impact of the storied Green Revolution, aka: The Third Agricultural Revolution of some 50-70 years ago which saw dramatic increases in crop yields and production. Whereas a couple of generations later we’re going backwards, but the global population of 3 billion in 1960 has exploded to 8 billion today. Astonishingly, we’ve added 5 billion people during one lifetime! Whew! Meanwhile, global warming’s impact of less crop yield in the face of nearly triple population numbers has grave implications.
The IPCC effectively researches and informs world leaders of the risks of climate change, as UN Secretary-General Guterres exclaims: “We are losing the fight of our lives.” In fact, they do a decent job of exposing risks. So, where’s the disconnect and failure to do something about the well-known death trap of fossil fuel emissions?
The origin of the death trap is the economic system of neoliberal capitalism that focuses on profits and growth above all other considerations, oblivious to the health of crucial life-supporting ecosystems and certainly unruffled about global warming. Notably, and obvious for all to see, it generates a tiny flock of fabulously rich people that have nearly gained control over much of the world order. Therefore, maybe the answer to the current upside/down climate system is to upend the upside/down socio-economic system that in fact perpetuates fossil fuels at any costs towards an elusive infinity of growth. After all, that tiny flock basically controls the media, as well as holding major influence over the direction of UN-sponsored COPs. Thus, they have a certain level of control over the ultimate direction of fossil fuel usage or renewable energy sources as a replacement. Therefore, the ultimate question for the future direction of the planet’s climate system, and by extension, its food supply is whether neoliberal capitalism is so impregnable as to be immovable. If its iron-fisted grip over the socio-economic system cannot be broken, then the climate system is destined to break apart worse and ever worse and even worse under neoliberalism’s relentlessness push for elusive infinite growth. Significantly, it’s getting to be very expensive.
What can be done beyond than tens of thousands of people meeting at world forums like the UN-sponsored COPs for climate change and biodiversity but without appreciable results? Meanwhile, the tiny flock of super wealthy are convinced “the market will bail us out.” After all, this is all they know. Ergo, in its infinite wisdom, the unfettered forces of neoliberal capitalism will solve the problem of global warming via human ingenuity. But unfettered neoliberal capitalism is what got us into this mess in the first place, and frankly it seems to like it.
Moreover,they proclaim, grinning from ear to ear, we’ve got all-powerful clean fusion, which sparked for the first time ever only recently, creating more energy output than energy input for a mere fraction of a second. Yeah, maybe, but that’s likely off in the future by a few decades. Stop grinning!
There is something else at work, something that goes well beyond 40,000 well-intentioned climate delegates at COP27 and all the other COP flops of the past 30 years, and its chutzpah is just starting to show enough influence over the masses to incite profound change in the direction of the infamous world order.
Recently “700 self-described climate rebels breached the chain-link fence surrounding Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, the world’s third-busiest hub for international passenger traffic, on November 5.” (Source: Christopher Ketcham & Charles Komanoff, “The Shutdown of ‘Luxury Emissions’ Should Be at the Center of Climate Revolt,” The Intercept, December 13, 2022)
As it happened, bolt cutters pried open metal fences and ladders propped up against the 9-foot fence, as 700 rebels poured onto the tarmac to surround and effectively ground private jets for 6.5 hours, until police laboriously peeled the throng away.
As reported from the scene, “The superrich have got used to polluting as they please with a total disregard for people and planet, and private jets are the pinnacle of these luxury emissions that we simply cannot afford,’ Jonathan Leggett, one of the activists, told us,” Ibid.
“For reasons both symbolic and practical, the climate movement must strike not just at pipelines and mines, but also at obscene wealth,” Ibid.
“At the nexus of consumption and wealth sits luxury carbon. Which is why the Schiphol action was so strategic… The justification is unarguable. Large personal fortunes feed carbon consumption and make a mockery of programs to curb it. As well, the surplus wealth of the superrich is probably the lone source of capital that can finance the worldwide uptake of greener energy and also pay for adaptation where it’s most critical,” Ibid.
“A few days after the Schiphol revolt, climate activists under the banner of Scientists Rebellion disrupted operations at private airports in four U.S. states and a dozen other countries,” Ibid.
The world is stirring towards outright demands for radical change for the betterment of everybody. Stay tuned.
Yes, it’s difficult for people to think it’s dry in Oregon, along the coast, along the Central Coast range. But it is, and it’s wet in the winter, too. Breweries, shrimp industries, hotels, they use a lot of fresh water.
But the reality is clear — America is so dysfunctional, that those trillions thrown at billionaires and military et al., well, not for the people, by the people, because of the people. Remember, this story about Newport, around 10,000 folk, with a swelling of 20,000 or more visitors during any fun given weekend of summer beach activity, is also your story in San Francisco or Boise or Hope, Arkansas. The very debilitating aspect of predatory capitalism is tremendous — so your flagging infrastructure should be our flagging infrastructure, and it all should be taken care of by taxing billionaires, millionaires and ending war economies and the Complex.
The earthen dam is failing, and will fail completely, with some earthquakes that will hit our coast. This is the reality anywhere in the USA — wildfires, tornadoes, dust storms, droughts, blizzards, deluges, heat waves. We have money for trillionaires, for the mercenaries of Military-Pharma-Chem-Mining-Ag-Oil-Energy-Media-Education-Medical-Legal-Prison-Education-AI-Surveillance-Mining-Finance-Banking Complex, but not $$ for a few million-dollar water tank, or a $20/$80 million dam for Newport, which will also give water security to other places around Newport for which we call this area “home.”
We are a third world, banana republic —
On a recent visit to the upper dam, Newport city manager Spencer Nebel pointed to a large pipe sticking out of the facility. He explained how crews just fixed one leak there and said it will need more work next year.
“(I) hate to make this kind of investment here for a facility that we’re planning to replace,” he said. “But it is a legitimate safety concern. And the security of the system is critical for the community and for the folks that live downstream.”
Now the city plans to build another, concrete dam halfway between the two older ones.
“So if we can build a higher dam and build a bigger basin, that’s going to reduce our reliance on the Siletz River, which is a really important environmental consideration here,” Nebel said. “And we’ve been working closely with the Siletz Tribe.”
Historically, Pacific Northwest tribes have often not been supportive of government-built dams, because of their propensity to block fish runs. But Robert Kentta with the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians said pumping water out of the Siletz River every summer is really bad for salmon, lampreys, crayfish and river mussels.
“We had the lowest flows that I can remember and I’ve lived here for nearly 60 years,” Kentta said. “It was scary low and scary warm. It was like bathwater, and we’re just not used to those kinds of temperatures in our river.”
Kentta said a new, larger dam and reservoir on Big Creek would mean more water could stay in the Siletz River and more fish would likely survive. (Source)
In this broken land, where the coroporations have huge lobbying outfits, huge industry coalitions, have huge organized protection rackets, we the people are up shit creek since living in the USA is all about paying for it, paying for water, air, all of it, through regressive and quadruple taxation. Through taxes, fines, code violations, penalties, late fees, pre-fees, tolls, service charges, disposal charges, recycle fees, surcharges, add-ons, restrictions, eminent domain, externalities, we are left to the devices of elected officials and state agencies and this hyper-competition looking for grants, lobbying bucks, pork barrel.
Oh, America, the Banana Republic: Nearly 40% of Americans Live in Constant Risk of Catastrophic Explosion or Poison Gas Exposure – People of Color, the Poor, Schools, and Medical Facilities at Even Greater Risk!
So we are here, with the most broken society ever, as we have smug lockdown forced vaccine (sic) pro-incarceration people advocating all manner of illegal, unconstitutional and inhumane measures, and yet, and yet — never holding the billionaires who are war-pandemic-planned-demic profiteers accountable. It is ugly, that Biden thing, all his Neoliberal War Hawk Handlers, all the same old same old. Embarassing to see the Republicans in their racist zeal hold onto their KKK robes, and singing Dixie in their million-dollar bathrooms.
Here’s that coronavirus map, well, the one that should be part and parcel in this bullshit manic narrative:
Those drug overdoses, man —
It’s the war profiteering, man, and the trillions shipped to war lords, mining lords, Zionist lords, ag lords, chemical lords, all those lords of punishment-theft-disease-pollution-societal collapses
Neoliberalism has reigned supreme as an economic philosophy for nearly half a century. But neoliberal policies have wreaked havoc around the world, reversing most gains made under managed capitalism after the end of the Second World War. Neoliberalism works only for the rich and the huge corporations. But the failures of neoliberalism extend beyond economics. They spread into politics as the…
The US seems to have chosen the worst possible strategy, which is to do everything that’s in its power to maintain its dominant position in the world, even though that’s clearly an impossibility.
an animal (such as a horse) that is wild and unmanageable
Over the years much has been written about the chronic absence of accountability, oversight, transparency, rules, and regulations for charter schools. The record shows that these deunionized, deregulated, outsourced, oversold schools run by unelected private persons on the basis of “free market” ideology routinely operate with impunity. The failure rate of these segregated schools is staggering.
Many have wondered for decades why, in practice, charter schools do not uphold even weak rules and laws here and there. Why do they evade or superficially uphold many federal laws that are supposed to apply to them? Why are accountability and transparency so hard to come by in the crisis-prone charter school sector? After 31 years, how are charter school operators frequently able to dodge many basic standards and requirements of modern life, institutions, and organizations? How can charter schools be so anarchic and unmanageable decades after they first appeared?
Given this long-standing chaos, it is no surprise that charter schools, which barely make up seven percent of all schools in the country, are constantly mired in scandal, corruption, and fraud. Indeed, an arrest of a charter school employee is made nearly every week in the charter school sector. The news is regularly filled with sensational announcements of different crimes committed by charter school owners, operators, and employees.
Charter schools also regularly exclude different types of students and have fewer nurses than public schools. Many do not even require teachers to be certified or licensed to teach. In addition, teachers in public schools are generally paid more and tend to have better retirement plans than charter school teachers. Not surprisingly, the teacher turnover rate in charter schools is very high. So is the student and principal turnover rate. None of this helps continuity, stability, and collegiality.
On top of this, extensive information about widespread poor academic performance in cyber charter schools and brick-and-mortar charter schools is now available in many places. Poor academic performance is one of several reasons charter schools close every week, leaving many minority families feeling violated. Financial malfeasance and mismanagement are the two other most common reasons charter schools close regularly.
The main reason why charter schools are such anarchic and unmanageable schools is that they are set up under the law to be that way. The nation’s 7,500 charter schools are deregulated schools by design. They are purposely exempt from most public laws, rules, regulations, and standards upheld by public schools.
Charter schools are “free market” schools and do not operate like public schools. This is why they differ from public schools in legal, philosophical, and organizational ways. It is why, unlike public schools, charter schools treat parents and students as customers and consumers, not citizens and humans with definite rights. This “autonomy” and entire set-up are deliberate and intentional. This rules-free arrangement is not a fluke, some annoying oversight, or a silly mistake. This “autonomy” is the “independence” that these “innovative” schools run by unelected private persons need in order to “do as they please” under the banner of high ideals.
To be clear, the absence of meaningful supervision, regulation, and accountability is a built-in feature of charter schools, a salient feature of charter schools, not a bug or mishap. It is intrinsic to the charter school model and not the result of shaky thinking, poor implementation, or “unintentional outcomes.” Contrary to what charter school advocates like to claim, accountability and transparency are not at the core of charter schools. Clarity and conviction on this issue are critical.
Charter schools are not set up to be regulated, accountable, transparent, and stable in the sense of what people normally understand these terms to mean.
“Free market” accountability is not really accountability. Chaos, anarchy, and violence are the main features of the “free market.” The fact is that there can be no justice in a fend-for-yourself dog-eat-dog world. Survival-of-the-fittest is brutal and guarantees winners and losers. Equilibrium, stability, and security are rare in an economic set-up based on competition and profit maximization. Every day, we hear financial pundits use terms like “uncertainty,” “volatility,” and “instability” to correctly describe the “free market.” Conditions are so chaotic and anarchic in the “free market” that one of the most common refrains made by such pundits is, “well, of course, at the end of the day you can’t really predict what the markets will do; anything can happen.” This is true, but is it any way for modern humans to live today? Why should anyone live in a state of constant insecurity, instability, chaos, and anxiety centuries after the scientific and technical revolution made it possible to easily meet the needs of all several times over? This includes providing a free world-class public education under public control—free of narrow private interests—to everyone.
Trying to regulate or oversee something that is by design not really meant to have meaningful supervision and regulation would mean radically changing the laws and practices surrounding charter schools. It would mean doing the opposite of what we have today. It would entail making charter schools something they are not.
But can a charter school not be a charter school?
Can a charter school suddenly stop being privatized and become public like a public school? Can it become its opposite? Can it stop being a performance-based contract school? Can a charter school even be called a charter school if it acquires all the features of a public school? Can it become a state actor like a regular public school? Can it be governed by elected officials and have the power to levy taxes like public schools? Can charter schools be audited as normally, frequently, and effortlessly as public schools? Can charter schools allow teachers in their schools to be unionized even though about 90% are currently not unionized? Can charter schools stop treating teachers as “at-will” employees? Can a charter school become an entity that affirms the civil rights and other rights of students in practice? Can neoliberal governments eradicate the powerful private interests that own, operate, and promote charter schools? Can capital-centered governments end the commodification of education? Do the rich have any incentive to terminate unaccountable and unmanageable schools run by unelected private persons? Can the rich abandon the profit motive?
Charter schools differ profoundly from public schools by design, and these differences appear at many levels and in many forms.1 One of the original neoliberal justifications given for charter schools is that they could come into existence once public school districts, which have been around for more than 150 years, are deprived of what charter school advocate Ted Kolderie called their “exclusive franchise to own and operate public schools.” Once this historic pre-condition for privatization happened, Kolderie reasoned, a new and different “system” of schools—outsourced schools—owned and operated by unelected private persons and large corporations could come into being.
It is no accident that charter schools emerged firmly in the context of the neoliberal era that was launched at home and abroad in the late 1970s. Neoliberalism is at its core a major assault on the public interest and human rights. It further marginalizes the polity and ensures that the rich get richer even faster, thereby intensifying political and economic inequality.
The fact that the number of charter schools continues to steadily increase nationwide does not mean that there is any justification for their existence, it just means that neoliberals and their entourage are able to impose their narrow private will on the public will. It means that the public has not yet developed sufficient resistance to stop school privatization. Nonetheless, the justification for charter schools remains as weak today as it did when the charter school idea was first hatched by neoliberal forces more than 35 years ago. Charter schools did not originate with grass-roots forces, which is why they violate the public interest, undermine public education, and harm the economy and national interest.
Just as all the campaign finance reform laws in the world have not changed the corrupting influence of (massive amounts of) money in elections and just as inequality is guaranteed under capitalism, it is impossible for a charter school to not be a charter school. The rich are not going to eliminate arrangements that they have intentionally and methodically established for their benefit. They will always seek new sources of profit, and for the past 40 years the public sector has been a main target of major owners of capital.
It is wishful thinking to believe that a charter school can be something other than a charter school. Such an orientation blocks deeper thinking and deeper changes that are needed. The fact is that small or piecemeal changes to charter schools in different states have not slowed the expansion of charter schools and the myriad problems that accompany them. Problems continue to multiply in the charter school sector. The news is filled every day with reports of illegal and unethical activities in privately-operated charter schools. In this way, charter schools express the replacement of a government of laws with a government of police powers, which is a coercive non-democratic form of governance which rejects modern public standards, principles, laws, and rules. Police powers permeate U.S. political institutions and operate arbitrarily and with impunity.
As they have for the last 31 years, charter schools will continue to undermine public schools by siphoning billions of dollars a year from them. They will also continue to perform poorly, engage in outlaw activities, and close every week, leaving thousands of black and brown families feeling abandoned and angry. So much for a superior alternative to “dreadful” public schools—the same “dreadful” public schools that have been methodically set up to fail by neoliberals and privatizers for years. The general neoliberal playbook strategy here goes like this: starve public schools of funds year after year. Then impose tons of high-stakes standardized tests on them to “show” that they are “failing.” Then humiliate and degrade them repeatedly in order to generate antisocial public opinion against them. And finally, punish and privatize them, only to replace them with many failing charter schools that enrich a handful of people at the expense of low-income minority students.
What is needed today is a robust movement based on the principle that education is a right, not a commodity, not a business, not a consumer good, and not something that should be left to chance and the “free market” in a modern society. To treat parents and students as consumers and to make them fend-for-themselves in order to get a good education is inconsistent with modern demands, requirements, and possibilities.
If charter schools wish to exist, that is fine so long as they receive zero public funds, services, facilities, and resources because these belong legitimately and entirely to public schools. A school does not become public just because it is called public 50 times a day. Nor does it become public just because it receives public funds. Being public requires and means more. Private interests have no valid claim to public funds, services, facilities, and resources. The producers of wealth in society do not want their wealth handed over to non-public entities, especially unaccountable and lawless non-public entities plagued by corruption, fraud, and scandal. Public funds, services, facilities, and resources—and public authority—must remain in public hands at all times.
For extensive background facts and analysis about dozens of different aspects of the charter school sector, search for “Shawgi Tell” here.
Skidrow in Los Angeles, California (Photo: Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
The agenda was set with the Lewis Powell Memorandum in 1971. Written at the request of the United States Chamber of Commerce, probably the most influential structure of capitalist rule at the time, the concern for the Chamber was the need to find a more coherent counter-offensive to the attacks against the system over the previous years. At the center of the anti-system attacks during the 1960s was, of course, the Black Liberation Movement and the Anti-War movement.
Powell made the argument that the capitalist class had to recognize that their very survival was at stake and that meant capitalists had to understand that as a class their interests transcended their individual enterprises.
And while the tone of Powell’s memo was “professional” and lacked rhetorical excesses, the need for a more intentional and strategic class war was the call that leaped out from the Powell memo.
The day is long past when the chief executive officer of a major corporation discharges his responsibility by maintaining a satisfactory growth of profits, with due regard to the corporation’s public and social responsibilities. If our system is to survive, top management must be equally concerned with protecting and preserving the system itself.
The policy implications were obvious. The U.S. ruling class concluded that it could no longer afford the “excesses” of the liberal welfare state and reform liberalism that as far as it was concerned had produced a failed war strategy, cultural decadence, rampant inflation, urban riots and demands for rights from groups representing every sector of U.S. society.
This was the beginning of the right-wing neoliberal turn. A societal-wide counterrevolutionary policy that also required a domestic counterinsurgency strategy that would have a military, but more importantly, an ideological/cultural component. Domestically the main target of the counterinsurgency would be the revolutionary nationalist and socialist forces of the Black liberation movement and “new communist” formations.
Internationally, the turn to neoliberalism translated into a brutal intensification of colonial/capitalist (imperialist) value extraction from nations in the global South buttressed by weak, corrupt, repressive neocolonial states politically and militarily propped-up by the U.S.
The neoliberal counterrevolution produced irreconcilable contradictions that we are living through today. The gap between rich and poor nations and between workers and capitalists had never been more pronounced and immiseration so cruel.
For the Black working class, the neoliberal turn was a catastrophe. The off-shoring of the U.S. industrial base with its relatively high paying jobs along with the reorganization of the economy to a service economy and the privatization wave that devastated social services and public employment where black workers were disproportionately located created structural precarity that only needed one incident to push tens of thousands into desperation. In the 2000s there were two. Hurricane Katrina and the economic collapse of 2008 that saw the greatest loss of Black wealth and income since the end of the reconstruction period between 1877 and 1896.
Compounding this devastation, the crimes against humanity represented by the 2020 covid pandemic in which literally tens of thousands of Black people, mainly poor, unnecessarily died because the state failed to protect their fundamental human rights to health and social security.
While Katrina exposed the fragility of Black life in the Gulf Coast, the economic crisis of 2008 just a few years later plugged millions of African workers into a desperate, depression era scramble for survival in conditions where Black labor was superfluous, and the very existence of Black life was seen as a social problem. The mass slaughter of the covid pandemic closed out the first two decades of a century that was supposed to exemplify “American” greatness with a demoralized and confused electorate turning to a washed-up hack politician named Joe Biden.
Midterm Elections: If Stopping Fascism is on the Ballot, what was it the Africans Experienced all These Years?
Neoliberalism was a rightist capitalist reform project. Today it informs the context for the midterms elections for African/Black workers. The objective material needs of Black workers and our desire for self-determination, independent development and peace were not on the ballot.
And while the duopoly represents the primary political contradiction obscuring the reality of the dictatorship of capital, the most aggressive neoliberal actors now operate in and through the democratic party. Consequently, the unspoken character of the competition between the two parties is that elections have now shaped up since 2016 as a contest between the far-right elements represented today by Trump forces and the neoliberal right represented by corporate democrats tied to finance capital and transnational corporations.
This is the undemocratic choice. The republicans represent the disaffected white nationalist petit-bourgeoisie settlers who think they are indigenous to this land. The ruling corporate capitalist elements of that party are for the most part nationalist oriented, dependent for their profits on the domestic economy. Some elements produce for the global markets, but they are in constant struggle with big capital as the capitalist economy “naturally” concentrates into its monopoly stage.
Democrats who historically had been associated with labor and the common man even during the period when it was the party of racist segregation under the apartheid system in the South, is today the party controlled by U.S. based monopoly capital. For workers, this form of bourgeois democracy has no space or structure representing the interests of workers, the poor and structurally oppressed. The working class and poor are slowly beginning to understand that.
That is why early evidence suggests that African/Black workers did not participate in numbers that were necessary for the democrats to have prevailed in some of those key races. The democrats have nothing to offer, no policies, no hope, and no vision.
Some of the cowardice phony “progressives” in that party suggest that the national democrats did not push an economic message even though it was clear that the economic crisis was their most pressing concern.
But what economic message? The democrats long ago abandoned their base and they continue to desperately find ways to dilute the influence of their most loyal base – African Americans – by seeking out that elusive white, primarily women, suburban vote.
What the midterms reaffirmed is that the class war that Powell advocated for in the 70s as a primary strategic objective of the ruling class continues and is intensifying, even as the ruling class is in crisis and cannot rule in the same way. This means that the people must disabuse themselves of all illusions and sentimental ideas around common national interests with this reckless and increasingly irrational bourgeoisie.
We cannot allow ourselves to fall prey to the slick propaganda that diverts attention away from the failures of the capitalist system. January 6th and Trump, evil Putin, the calculating Chinese, the exaggerated crime issue, and immigration issue, are all meant to divert us away from the fact that our lives are empty, that we have no time for friends and family, mindless soul crushing work characterizes our existence, if we have it, and the fear and anxiety that comes from a precarious existence saps our spirits and turns our confusion and anger inward.
Ideological clarity that stems from a liberated consciousness directs us to the conclusion that it is the system that is the enemy. Not our neighbor, or the undocumented gardener or food delivery person, not the peoples of Nicaragua, Haiti, Venezuela and Cuba who just want to live in their own way and in peace.
The democrat party is a morally bankrupt shell, hollowed out by years of lies and corruption. Many do not want to accept the bitter reality that we (Africans and colonized peoples) must objectively acknowledge that nothing will substantially change by this election or any other bourgeois election. We can and must contest in those spaces but we are clear – as long as power is retained by the Pan European colonial/capitalist dictatorship Black people will continue to suffer and collective humanity will face an existential threat.
A group of Democratic lawmakers led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) is pressuring the Federal Reserve to explain why it’s continuing to raise interest rates at such a rapid pace when economists across the political spectrum say that rate hikes will only hurt the working class with little upside for the economy at large.
In a letter sent to Fed Chair Jerome Powell on Monday, 11 members of Congress lay out a wide swath of evidence from both Powell himself and from economists that American families will be in for “pain” in the coming months, as Powell has said, as the Fed plans to raise interest rates by 75 basis points, or 0.75 percent, for the third consecutive time this year.
The letter, signed by progressive lawmakers like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Representatives Jamaal Bowman (D-New York) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan), expresses “concern” about the Fed’s “alarming” plans and “disturbing warning” to American families about what to expect in coming months.
As the lawmakers point out, the Fed has predicted that as it continues raising rates through next year, unemployment will rise from its current rate of about 3.5 percent to 4.4 percent in 2023 and 2024. This means that about 2 million people will lose their jobs as economic growth slows and the labor market grows weaker, Powell has said.
Other experts’ estimates of the impact on the economy are more dire. Bank of America estimates that unemployment could jump as high as 5.6 percent, which could mean the loss of over 3 million jobs. Meanwhile, according to a survey released last month by The Wall Street Journal, economists predict that there is a 63 percent chance that the U.S. will enter a recession in the next 12 months, in large part due to the Fed’s relentless rate hikes.
Economists, who have been raising warnings about the damage that the rate hikes could cause for months, have been puzzled about Powell’s decisions, the letter points out. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development has said that whether or not there will be a global recession comes down to “policy choices and political will,” economists are unclear on what the Fed’s goals are.
“The Fed clearly wants the labor market to weaken quite sharply. What’s not clear to us is why,” one economist wrote in a report earlier this year, as the letter writers pointed out. Economists have also questioned whether or not the rate hikes could have as much impact on inflation as they’re supposedly meant to have, saying that the impacts on the working class could outweigh any supposed benefits.
Memo to the Fed: Your rate hikes aren’t slowing inflation because inflation is coming from big corporations using the cover of inflation to increase their prices more than their costs.
Even the Fed itself admits that the rate hikes may have little impact on inflation, considering the vast amount of other factors at play, like corporate price gouging and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the letter reads. The lawmakers list a variety of times that Powell has admitted that the Fed’s power over commodity prices is limited.
“As one economist noted, the Fed can’t ‘click its heels three times, raise rates and have inflation drop. There’s a myriad of factors going on now, and it’s a mistake to think the Fed controls any more than a handful of those,’” the letter says. “Nevertheless, you continue to double down on your commitment to ‘act aggressively’ with interest rate hikes and ‘keep at it until it’s done,’ even if ‘[n]o one knows whether this process will lead to a recession or if so, how significant that recession would be.’”
“These statements reflect an apparent disregard for the livelihoods of millions of working Americans,” the lawmakers wrote, “and we are deeply concerned that your interest rate hikes risk slowing the economy to a crawl while failing to slow rising prices that continue to harm families.”
While progressives warn that the Fed’s rate hikes would be at best a band aid on the problem, they say that raising interest rates to suppress demand is a neoliberal policy that passes economic pain onto the consumer at any cost — even a recession. Progressive advocates say, instead, that providing relief to the public while targeting corporations who are using inflation to raise prices would be a good start.
President Joe Biden appears to agree that corporate price gouging is an important underlying cause for inflation, at least in part. On Monday, he warned oil and gas companies that, if they don’t take action to lower gas prices at the pump, they could face a corporate windfall tax that would capture excess profits. Indeed, the oil and gas industry — and corporations as a whole — have been enjoying huge profits as inflation has soared, while Americans are increasingly having to take out predatory loans for basic expenses.
Education and other public services and social programs have been under attack by major owners of capital and “free market” ideologues for several decades. To be sure, the privatization of all spheres and sectors continues at a brisk rate at home and abroad. Public-private “partnerships” and other pay-the-rich schemes carried out under the veneer of high ideals are multiplying rapidly and intensifying problems everywhere. Few countries are unaffected.
Charter schools and vouchers are the two main forms of privatization in the sphere of American education. Both have wreaked havoc on public education and the public interest for decades. Together they have lowered the level of culture and education, misled parents and the public, greatly enriched a handful of people along the way, and damaged the economy. These privatized education arrangements have not served the national interest in any way.
Extensive information and analysis of school privatization in its various forms can be found in many places, including at the Network for Public Education, Tultican, In The Public Interest, Common Dreams, and Truthout. Hundreds of scholarly peer-reviewed articles and books also expose many serious problems with school privatization.
The main theory behind the privatization and deregulation of public education is “free-market” theory, which maintains that treating education as a commodity, as a business, as an exchange phenomenon in a dog-eat-dog world where everyone fends-for-themselves, is the best of all worlds and the most effective, civilized, and fair way to save children, the economy, society, and the nation.
“Free-market” theory openly promotes a survival-of-the-fittest ethos for schools, families, and individuals, which ends up consolidating inequality and reinforcing a system of winners and losers. In practice, “school choice” leaves many children and families behind. In this connection, it is important to appreciate the segregationist origins of “school choice”.
Such a dog-eat-dog system is anachronistic and negates arrangements based on the affirmation of basic human rights that belong to all by virtue of being human. In the “free market” you may end up in a great school or you may not, which is often the case. It is on you alone to find a school that serves the needs of your children, and to do so in an environment that is increasingly complex and confusing. And “buyer beware” because when your school closes, often without warning, there is no way to secure redress. You have to live and die by the “free market.” Nothing is guaranteed.
Such upheavals and chaos are common in the crisis-prone charter school sector. They are a salient feature, not just a bug, of charter school arrangements. In some cases parents receive only a short cold email from charter school operators informing them that their charter school is closing abruptly—and at the worst possible time. It is an irresponsible approach to education in a modern society. And with no sense of irony, “free market” ideologues present such “churn” and disorder as a good and normal thing, as the way things are supposed to be.
Charter schools now have a 31-year record of failure, corruption, fraud, controversy, scandal, and closure. So do vouchers. Poor accountability and low transparency are hallmarks of the crisis-prone charter school sector. However, none of this has stopped charter school promoters from working tirelessly to oversell and prettify charter schools. Charter schools have become notorious for over-promising and under-delivering. Intense advertising and marketing are central to this business-centric drive. The nation’s 100,000 public schools, on the other hand, spend nothing on advertising and marketing because they are not businesses or promoters of consumerism, competition, and the “law of the jungle.” They do not view students and parents as customers shopping for a school. Education is not seen as a commodity or as something provided to society by private interests obsessed with maximizing profit as fast as possible.
“Free-market” theory does not recognize education as a modern human social responsibility. It does not view education as a collective responsibility in the 21st century. It does not consider education to be a basic human right that government must guarantee in practice. It does not accept that public schools in a society based on mass industrial production need to be universal, well-organized, world-class, fully-funded, integrated, locally-controlled by elected individuals accountable to the public, and available for free in every neighborhood.
Education in a complex society such as ours cannot be left to chance and a fend-for-yourself outlook. Such an orientation is at odds with contemporary conditions and requirements. The “law of the jungle” is not fit for human beings. For centuries, humans have needed and wanted a society fit for all, not a society for “the fittest.”
If private schools wish to exist—and thousands do in America—that is perfectly fine. They simply should not have access to any public funds, assets, facilities, services, or resources because these belong legitimately and wholly to the public alone and no one else. Only schools that are public in the proper sense of the word should receive public funds. Calling charter schools “public” 50 times a day does not automatically make charter schools public. Over the years courts in many jurisdictions have even ruled that charter schools are not public schools. Unlike public schools, charter schools are not state agencies. There is ultimately no justification for funneling public wealth to deregulated charter schools run by unelected private persons. The private sector has no valid or legitimate claim to public funds and resources produced by working people.
Public and private are antonyms and should not be mixed up. They are different categories with distinct characteristics. The public sphere and the private domain have different features and embrace different aims, roles, and agendas, which is why they cannot be reconciled. They are also governed by different laws. The rich and their representatives continually blur the critical distinction between these different realms for self-serving reasons. For example, if they can get away with calling privately-operated deregulated charter schools “public schools,” then they can lay false claim to public funds and resources, which is really nothing more than private parasitic expropriation of public property under the banner of high ideals. Such self-serving claims make the rich richer while wrecking public education and the public interest.
According to “free market” theory, anything other than “free-market” arrangements leads to “special interests,” “politics,” “inefficiency,” “economic distortions,” “government tyranny,” and more. Government is typically the bogeyman in “free market” theory. Government is automatically and permanently evil in “free market” theory, which is ironic because government today actively imposes the neoliberal outlook and agenda of the rich on everyone and everything, leading to greater inequalities and tragedies at all levels. Like the welfare state, the neoliberal state ensures that the rich keep getting much richer. This is all consistent with the theory of private property expounded by political philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, and Adam Smith. They argued that government’s main role is to protect private property rights, which means, among other things, prioritizing individualism over the general interests of society. To be sure, states and governments intervene regularly in the “free market” to privilege big business. The rich seem to have no issues or concerns when government guarantees them even more benefits denied to others. The rich, in reality, do not like to live and die by the “free market.” They want the state and government to guarantee them profit at all times, regardless of how damaging this is to the natural and social environment.
Private property, it should be recalled, means that only one individual can use said property. All others are excluded from use of said property; the legal individual owner has the exclusive right to use it as he or she sees fit and no one else is allowed to benefit from this property. Private property is about exclusion.1
Further, any notion of consciously planning an economy to secure stability, sustainability, and growth for all is rashly rejected as irrational by “free market” ideologues. They maintain that it is absurd and impossible to plan for the needs of all humans in a deliberate and conscious way that ensures that all parts of the economy operate in a harmonious pro-social manner. “Things are too complex or too big to be controlled or planned” say “free market” ideologues. In this way, uncertainty, chaos, instability, individualism, consumerism, and a fend-for-yourself lifestyle are normalized.
According to “free market” ideologues, if everything were just left to the “free market” we would supposedly have the best of all worlds where “the best and brightest,” “the winners,” and “the most meritorious” would rise to the top, lead, and make everything better for everyone. Talent, ability, and initiative would be properly rewarded, according to “free market” theory. All the chips would land fairly and correctly in their proper place if everyone just played by the rules of “free market” theory. “Free market” ideologues claim that everything would be high quality if we just upheld “free market” ideas.
This ahistorical and apolitical approach ignores 50 things, including the unequal distribution and control of economic and political power in a class-divided society, that is, who is already-advantaged and who is already-disadvantaged. It ignores inherited wealth, unequal access to information, differing levels of literacy, uneven cultural capital, the exploitation of workers by owners of capital, and much more. The game, as they say, is already rigged, which is why “might makes right” and “winner takes all” prevail in the “free market.” After all, since “not everyone can be excellent” in the “free market,” then not everyone can be “a winner.” Only the “fittest survive” in this obsolete set-up. Many have to fail. Put differently, competition in the “free market” is already heavily pre-conditioned by economic and other considerations.
Mountain States Policy Center
The newest entity to enter the “free market education” foray is a “nonprofit” group called the Mountain States Policy Center. According to Idaho Ed News, the Mountain States Policy Center:
advertises itself as a nonpartisan research group. Its goal is to promote the free market, individual liberty and limited government in Washington, Montana, Wyoming and Idaho.
We are also told that, “Education is one of the group’s top concerns.” Indeed, “school choice” is the group’s “top education priority,” which means more school privatization (e.g., charter schools and vouchers).
The group is led by committed long-standing “free market” ideologues and claims to be “above” politics and rhetoric, even though it is heavily involved in both. Chris Cargill is the co-founder, President, and CEO of Mountain States Policy Center. He “spent the last 13 years with the Washington Policy Center, a similar free-market think tank headquartered in Seattle.”
In an ideological sleight of hand, the Mountain States Policy Center explicitly equates the “free market’ with “the people.” This is a particularly dark form of disinformation because the “free market” and “the people” are not the same. They are different categories with different qualities. The “free market” is the way commodities are exchanged in a society based on individualism, commodity production, exchange relations, and private property. It is a set-up based on profit-maximization, not one based on meeting social needs. This is why there are six vacant homes for every homeless person in the U.S. The people, on the other hand, refers to the modern polity made up of citizens with equal rights and duties. There is no necessary or automatic connection between the “free market” and “the people.”
People have lived and worked in many periods that did not have a “free market.” Entrepreneurialism, for instance, did not exist in most economic formations; it is specific to capitalism and serves as a euphemism for “rugged individualism,” fend-for-yourself, and survival-of-the-fittest. Promoters of entrepreneurialism also try to equate it with “innovation.” It should also be noted that the concept of “the people” did not exist in periods prior to the rise of capitalism. Under slavery and feudalism many humans were not even part of “the people.”
The “free market,” it should be stressed, rests on instability, uncertainty, chaos, anarchy, competition, consumerism, possessive individualism, and private property. It fosters turmoil (“creative destruction”) and blocks the rise of a self-reliant, diverse, and balanced economy whose parts work together in harmony to meet the needs of all. Humans, however, do not need or want instability, uncertainty, and insecurity in the 21st century. People in a modern society based on mass industrial production need and want a society that ensures stability, peace, security, and prosperity for all on a planned, conscious, sustainable basis. Constantly lurching from one economic crisis to another is inhumane and avoidable.
The aim of conflating the “free market” with “the people” is designed to make it seem like the “free market” is somehow pro-social and human-centered when, in fact, it stresses possessive individualism and denies the existence of society and the social relationship between individuals. “Free market” theory does not see individuals as social beings but rather as self-interested, disconnected, isolated (“independent”) beings that just want to be left alone while they “make their way” in this dog-eat-dog world that perpetuates many inequalities and tragedies. The “free market” essentially ignores social responsibility and lionizes individualism and individual responsibility. It has no dialectical conception of the relationship between individuals and society.
The Mountain States Policy Center also creates a false dichotomy between government and “the people.” This is done in an attempt to de-link “the people” from the government, even though no civilized society can exist without government. Such disinformation is meant to foster the idea that government is not and cannot be an arrangement that actually represents and serves people. Indeed, government is seen as a big nuisance. “People” for “free market” ideologues really means capitalists, entrepreneurs, business people, stakeholders, and consumers. It does not mean humans and citizens with rights that belong to them by virtue of their being and which must be upheld by a modern government. “Free market” ideologues never distinguish between a human-centered government versus a capital-centered government. They do not recognize that a government that upholds a public authority worthy of the name differs from a government that puts the narrow interests of big business in first place all the time.
The neoliberal character of the Mountain States Policy Center comes out again in this statement: “We believe that parents should have the right to use the dollars that they put into the public school system to educate their children as best as they see fit.” This is one of many versions of the worn-out neoliberal disinformation to funnel public money into private hands. The statement combines “parents” and “choice” in a way that makes it seem like the Mountain States Policy Center is simply defending some sort of benign choice and rights, when they are really promoting consumerism, individualism, a fend-for-yourself mentality, and the commodification of education. It also ignores the fact that public school funds do not belong to parents or students, per se. Public school funds are not “portable” and free for any individual to use as they wish whenever and wherever they want. This is not the premise, purpose, and function of public school money in the U.S.
It is worth recalling that charter means contract, that contracts are part of private law, and that charter schools are contract schools. Contracts are the quintessential market category; they make markets ‘work’. Contracts are the expression of exchange relations in a society based on commodity production and the social division of labor and private property underlying such an economy. Individualism, competition, utilitarianism, and consumerism are the companion ideologies of such an outdated set-up. The link between private property and charter schools cannot be overlooked, especially because such a connection negates the oft-repeated irrational claim that charter schools are public schools. In practice, the concept and practice of charter schools forsakes public control and benefit. This is why charter schools are not, in fact, open to all students and do cherry-pick their students using many different methods.
Further, like private businesses, charter schools treat teachers as “at-will” employees, which means that they can be hired and fired at any time for any reason. In addition, many states allow charter school teachers to teach without a license or certificate. This is on top of the fact that charter school teachers, on average, are paid less, are less experienced, and work longer days and years than their public school counterparts.
Moreover, widespread fraud and corruption are perhaps the most striking features of cyber charter schools and brick-and-mortar charter schools. Not a day goes by where there is not some sort of scandal, crime, or controversy in the charter school sector. Arrests, indictments, and incarceration of charter school employees are commonplace.
Charter school owners and operators are also known for manipulating student waiting list numbers to create the illusion that most, or all, charter schools have long student waiting lists, which is supposed to “prove” and signal to the public that charter schools are popular and a superior alternative to the public schools that educate 90% of America’s youth. Apparently, parents and students are clamoring to escape “dreadful” public schools as fast as possible, just to get into a privately-operated, deregulated, segregated charter school governed by unelected private persons focused on the bottom line. In reality, countless charter schools manipulate their waiting lists and many cannot meet their own enrollment targets. This is besides the never-ending problem of high student (and teacher and principal) turnover rates in charter schools. Every week, many students are pushed out of charter schools in one way or another and dumped back into the “dreadful” public schools that accept all students at all times. But, as researcher Jeff Bryant notes, No Matter What the Charter School Movement Says, Parents Like Their Public Schools (October 5, 2022).
The list of problems plaguing the charter school sector, along with the damage that this sector is doing to education, society, the economy, and the national interest is lengthy, damning, and indicting.
Today, a robust and growing body of unassailable evidence documents many serious problems in the crisis-prone charter school sector. This has had the effect of steadily and methodically strengthening the ideological, theoretical, educational, and political battle against neoliberal educational ideas, policies, and arrangements.
After two generations of failure and scandal, privatizers and neoliberals continue to push aggressively for more school privatization in order to transfer as much public wealth away from the public and into the hands of narrow private interests seeking new sources of profit in an economy that is tapped out and steadily collapsing.
Working people, students, parents, educators, public education advocates, and others have an objective interest in ending privatization in all its forms and defending the public interest. Neoliberals, privatizers, and “free market” ideologues determined to further wreck public education, society, the economy, and the national interest under the banner of high ideals can and must be stopped.
Private property and personal property are not the same.
thank god for eels, marine science, the probing minds of people who want the world to be better
Yeah, I met this guy, Mork X Twain, at an auto parts shop. He was in his planetary orbit, and his home-van was disabled in Newport, at a Burger King parking lot. I told him I’d drive him to his van, try a jump and then from there, who knows? So, there you have it — a van he lives in, going from Newport to the Bay Area, and he said he’s 82, and estranged from his children but has contact with grandkids. The starter was kaput, so I took him to a starter-battery place, and they were reluctant to work on a vehicle that is also a home (their policy) but I talked them into it. Could have been $300, and the tow, that was $85 plus $6 a mile. He lives on Social Security. He wanted to pay me $20 for the help, but I declined.
Mork says he’s writing a collection of essays, tied to the next planetary synergy. China, Russia, Trump and other issues, and he wants a grand socialism, of sorts (he kept bringing up Michael Moore and his movie where he plants a flag in Finland and France cuz of their supposed social programs). He’s pretty smart, and who knows what that life was before 82, before he adopted Mork from Mork and Mindy, X from Malcolm X, and Twain, from Samuel Clemens. He has no phone, and he gave me a PO Box at a copy-postal center in Lincoln City.
I collect stories, and whew, I get embroiled in some interesting narratives of people who are traveling through the slipstream that is life. Mork is one of ten thousand!
I’m also thinking about my sister, Roberta, who hit the pavement near Kamloops, when she was 23, on her way on her new Harley to Tucson. Two other people were on their bikes, and some asshole fell asleep at the wheel, and crossed the line and ended Robbie’s life.
What could have been, and my mom and I went to Hyder, Alaska to be with her boyfriend and friends and spread her ashes in the ocean. I was 20 years old. My younger sister was 10. My old man was on his way to Saudi Arabia. US military.
I’m on this beach (below) a lot, following the tide charts, looking for agates, jasper and plenty of birds. Time to think, time to get caught up in my own slipstream, this aging out of this American Life, and, alas, thinking about just how damaged the world is around me, and then, de facto, how damaged I am now from absorbing plenty of wins and losses, ups and downs.
Then thinking of those eels. Amazing, really: “First direct evidence of adult European eels migrating to their breeding place in the Sargasso Sea,” (source, Scientists Track Eels to Their Ocean Breeding Grounds in World-First).
All the way to the Sargasso sea, these reverse anadromous fish ( which migrate from the sea up — Greek: ἀνά aná, “up” and δρόμος drómos, “course” — into fresh water to spawn, such as salmon, striped bass, and the sea lamprey), are actually, catadromous fish who migrate from fresh water down — Greek: κατά kata, “down” and δρόμος dromos, “course”) into the sea to spawn, such as eels.
The point of pointing out these incredible animals, eels, is to point to that human compassion and passion, where people study earth, the amazing life histories of the very animals we take for granted, and those we eat, too. And, I was a kid with my family in the Azores where European eels ended up on their way from UK, say, or Germany, to the Sargasso Sea to breed.
A sharp decline in European eel (Anguilla anguilla) numbers since the 1980s has only made the task all that much harder, and more urgent.
But don’t underestimate these enigmatic creatures. European eels migrate between 5,000 and 10,000 kilometers (3,100 to 6,210 miles) to spawn at sea, after which their larvae drift back towards land and the relative safety of rivers.
Using satellite tags, the researchers behind this latest discovery obtained tracking data from 21 female European eels as they navigated the last leg of their epic journey, southwest from the Azores, a volcanic archipelago in the North Atlantic Ocean, far west of Portugal.
Contrast these amazing biologists and such, with the Takers, and the absolute amount of trauma they — Homo Sapiens, Homo Consumopithecus, Homo Retailerectus — inflict on our own species. This war here, this famine there, this corporation poisoning this land there, these murderers and thieves doing what they can to be at the top of their manure piles here and there and everywhere.
It’s simple calculus, but Homo Anglo-Saxon-Bellum will do what it has to, with the puppet masters of folks like Nuland, Kagan, Blinken and Super Goy Zionists goading and propping up this actual subhuman, ZioLensky.
So it’s difficult to absorb the news of these neocons, these billionaires, these propagandists, these lockdown impresarios, these AI-VR-AR surveillance panopticons, and then take some respite in the woods or on a beach, but it is a must, to detoxify, like an spiritual elimination diet, finding which inflammatory ingredient in capitalism and Western culture culls joints or flurries brain fog. Imagine, this propaganda-violence, with that comic above in fake military drab, joking, and positing dirty bombs, and the Bucha lies, and bombing markets while helping with a Vogue Magazine layout.
The fog/miasma is great, in what is the 21st Century’s Sadistic, Broken, Chaotic, Propagandistic, Orwellian New Normal, ranging from SARS-CoV2 gain of function hell — that DARPA darling — to the lockdowns and forced vaccinations (sic), ghosting, confiscation of PayPal accounts and money, to stealing billions from Russia, Venezuela, Iran, and now, even, this nuclear saber rattling by the USA and the Dirty Bomb Boy ZioLensky, and the almost complete empty-headed bending over for their masters in Europe.
Here, that Neocon-Neoliberal cloning:
The latest edition of the aforementioned articles was recently released and titled “Renewing America’s Advantages: Interim National Security Strategic Guidance.” Perhaps, the president, who will sign it, is a devout Catholic because the document starts with a confession, which in Judeo-Christian tradition is a necessary step to obtain forgiveness: The U.S. will no longer resort to military coups when it wants to replace a regime in a foreign country.
Biden – or the authors Blinken, his Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who is Robert Kagan’s wife, and Kathleen Hicks, deputy secretary of defense, also an Obama alumnus but not a neocon because she is a true conservative from the Henry Kissinger contingent – promises to chart a new route for the U.S. in international politics in the first three pages of the document. But the document then continues describing how the new U.S. administration will follow the beaten path devised by the Bush-Obama-Trump teams.
“I confessed all the sins committed before on behalf of my country, my Lord,” it reads, like a psalm, leaving the U.S. free to commit the same sins for future presidents to repent for. The Biden administration admits that previous administrations failed to use democracy to impact the policies of foreign countries they opposed, falling back on military coups and interventions, often soliciting them.
The U.S. is known for its controversial stance on Latin American coups and we, in Turkey, understand the Latin American people. Biden personally begged the White House not to issue a statement of support for the civilian government on the fateful night of July 15, 2016, hoping that “our boys could still prevail.”
Let bootlickers like CNN’s Fareed Zakaria and the New York Times’ David Brooks cheer the “changes the Biden team started implementing already” as we witness the administration attempt to implement the same military policy in the Middle East.
The document says that “we do not believe that military force is the answer to the region’s challenges,” but Biden’s National Security Coordinator for the Middle East, Bret McGurk, had already begun fortifying the military garrisons he was building in Syria until he was stopped by Trump.
No wonder the 7,000-word new national security bible features the term “diplomacy” 10 times but the tally for “military” is double!
This man, both, in foreground and then Biden Always Seeking the Background, are 21st Century monsters:
Here is one reaction from American Jewry: “We are proud of the fact that this slate of nominees includes multiple Jewish Americans and others whose family history represents the rich tapestry of American society,” the Jewish Democratic Council of America (JDCA) said in a statement. “Their understanding of our past will help build a stronger future.”
That response reflects pride that Jews have risen high in the government ranks, and that the new appointees’ understanding of Jewish values will infuse policy.
Contrast that with a tweet from Makor Rishon editor-in-chief Hagai Segal: “There is no need to attribute too much importance to the appointment of Jews in Biden’s administration. There are also a lot of Jews in J Street,” Segal wrote, in reference to the left-wing lobby that has played a leading role in legitimizing and mainstreaming harsh criticism of Israeli policies by both elected and nonelected US officials.(source)
Again, the fog of Western Civilization and the degrading lack of diplomacy and the hard liners in USA running the world aground, and the militaristic attitude, and the racism against Russia/Russians, all of this is important, for sure, and who knows what demographic percentages really mean, what diversity loading can achieve, and what we as thinkers and radicals can do with Anti-Russia people in our midst, the Anti-Chinese attitudes in this society, the amazing Anti-African American racism, and, well, Anti-Semitism, too, which is not even close to being smart about and against Israel’s apartheid state, and their Zionism gone amok. Below, overtly skewed, but then, we do not have open discussions amongst radicals and socialists on what the Biden Cabinet is and what it means to USA and the world.
Very interesting, the power of that occupied land to set the torches ablaze in the world, but these folk never get the mic:
In keeping with Israel’s policy of maintaining WMD ambiguity, Israel “has never made a public policy statement on biological weapons (BW)” and is reluctant to participate in regional and international fora on WMD disarmament. Preferring to address disarmament and arms control in a regional context, Israel has not signed the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Conventions (BTWC), and believes that progress in advancing the treaty’s goals in the region would require significantly improved political stability, discourse, and confidence building in the region. However, Israel has taken steps to strengthen its export control regulations on dual-use biotechnologies and is also examining ways to improve security at sensitive Israeli laboratories. In terms of BW research, development, and deployment, Israel maintains reticence and ambiguity about its activities and capabilities. However, Israeli defensive BW research regularly appears in open publications. The U.S. government offers conflicting assessments of Israel’s BW activities. Given the overall scarcity and ambiguity of official assessments and policy statements, reconstructions of Israel’s BW history, status, and capabilities can provide only partial and interpretive depictions.
Cohen focuses on a two-decade period from about 1950 until 1970, during which David Ben-Gurion’s vision of making Israel a nuclear-weapon state was realized. He weaves together the story of the formative years of Israel’s nuclear program, from the founding of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission in 1952, to the alliance with France that gave Israel the sophisticated technology it needed, to the failure of American intelligence to identify the Dimona Project for what it was, to the negotiations between President Nixon and Prime Minister Meir that led to the current policy of secrecy. Cohen also analyzes the complex reasons Israel concealed its nuclear program—from concerns over Arab reaction and the negative effect of the debate at home to consideration of America’s commitment to nonproliferation. Israel and Chemical/Biological Weapons: History, Deterrence, and Arms Control by Avner Cohen. Israel and the Bomb, exactly!
Again, priorities, and amazing how rotting we Homo Sapiens have become, from our decent tribal roots, our hunter and gatherer roots, to this, really, trillions for Blackrock, for Oil, for War, and so much time and lifetime lives expended on the Takers in the Complex — military-medical-pharma-mining-chemical-media-entertainment-legal-ag-prison-surveillance-finance-banking COMPLEX. Crazy days, man, at this point of drinking our own sewer water: “America’s western water crisis is so bad that Colorado is going to start drinking recycled sewage: Colorado’s water quality agency unanimously approved regulating direct potable reuse. It’s pending a final vote in November.” (source)
[Eric Seufert, owner and manager of 105 West Brewing Co., poses for a photo at his brewery room Tuesday, October 18, 2022, in Castle Rock, Colo. He brewed a test batch of beer in 2017 with water from recycled sewage. AP Photo/Brittany Peterson]
Oh, that incredible lightness of being. Ismael, the book, the ape (gorilla):
Why “Mother” Culture?
Culture is a mother everywhere and at every time, because culture is inherently a nurturer—the nurturer of human societies and lifestyles. Among Leaver peoples, Mother Culture explains and preserves a lifestyle that is healthy and self-sustaining. Among Taker peoples she explains and preserves a lifestyle that has proven to be unhealthy and self-destructive.
If culture is a mother among the Alawa of Australia and the Bushmen of Africa and the Kayapo of Brazil, then why wouldn’t she be a mother among the Takers? (To confirm the notion that “culture is a mother everywhere,” check foreign language dictionaries for the word CULTURE. In languages that recognize “masculine” and “feminine” nouns—French, Italian, Latin, and so on—the noun CULTURE is invariably feminine.) [source]
Working tribally, as a community, small scale, cooperative, that is, being LEAVERS, versus totalitarian everything, the TAKERS. Below, November 1998 Daniel Quinn and biologist Alan D. Thornhill met in dialogue with a small group in Houston, Texas, to forge a new tool designed to unseat the unexamined conventional wisdom that typically shapes all discourse on the subject of population. This program, Food Production and Population Growth, is that tool.
What is that end game. Pretending we have hope doesn’t work. Derrick Jensen a long time ago: End Game. If we do not go through a voluntary transformation, what do we do? Imagine all the minerals, metals, plastics, time and energy put into those weapons, and then the dead, the dying, the witnesses bearing the pain. Can civilization be sustainable?
This toxic culture, and trauma, and Gabor Mate does it well explaining how this Taker Culture takes us all down, in his books, and here on The Real News Network, Chris Hedges:
No matter where you stand on Donbass, on Ukraine, on the Nazis, on Minsk II, it’s the trauma trauma trauma that will continue with each generation, young and old and unborn. Deadly.
The linear political spectrum is bankrupt! How does it explain why socialist China is making alliances with capitalist Russia and even with fundamentalist Saudi Arabia? Why is it that so-called socialist Social Democrats support imperialist United States rather than socialist China? Why is it that right-wing fundamentalist states like India and Brazil are supporting Russia and socialist China instead of being rabid anti-communists? The linear political spectrum is not just simplistic. It serves the interests of neoliberals and New Deal liberals as we shall see.
All over the world, centrist parties are losing elections. People are either not voting at all or they are voting for fascists. In some countries, people are voting for Social Democrats. The traditional choices between liberals and conservatives do not speak to world problems today. Additionally, just as centrist parties are collapsing (as depicted in the image above) so is the linear political spectrum model that serves as its visual description. The purpose of this article is to show how the linear political spectrum model fails to conform to actual world politics as they are practiced today. We need a whole new spectrum model to do justice to the political and economic realities of today.
Linear Version of the Political Spectrum
In his textbook on Political Ideologies Andrew Heywood presents a linear perspective that looks like this:
There are many problems with this model. Let’s start with the more quantitative ones and then we will move to qualitative problems. Then I will provide lots of examples of how the linear political spectrum fails when applied to real-world politics of today. Lastly, I will show how this linear political spectrum really serves two points on the political spectrum: neoliberal libertarians and new deal liberals.
Quantitation problems
For one thing, to the left of communism should be anarchism. Anarchism has been a serious ideological movement for at least 200 years, beginning with William Godwin, and millions of people have fought and died for it. Secondly, within communism there should be delineated the different kinds of Leninism, including Trotskyism, Stalinism and Maoism. Third, it is unfathomable to have only one kind of liberalism on this spectrum. There is FDR liberalism but there is also centrist liberalism. But more importantly there is libertarianism that has no representation at all on the spectrum. Yet libertarianism has been predominant for over 40 years as an economic doctrine over most of the world. As we shall see later, it benefits libertarians to present themselves as more or less the same as New Deal liberals. Lastly, conservatism should also be divided into old paleoconservatives and new right-wing conservatives.
Qualitative problems
In contemporary Mordor politics, even this five-fold division of the spectrum is too much. The political spectrum consists of only liberals (Democratic Party) and the conservatives (Republican Party). Both socialism and communism is conveniently ignored even though thousands of people in Yankeedom claim to be socialists. The last time I checked, the Democratic Socialists of America had 90,000 people. Fascism was mostly ignored until the presence of Trump supporters brought fascism out of the closet of political scientists.
But are liberals (Democrats) and conservatives (Republicans) truly opposite from each other? Political sociologist William Domhoff says that in practice there are differences between the two when it comes to culture and politics (gun control) religion, race and gender politics.
But where the two parties are the same is far more significant. These similarities have at least to do with:
Support of capitalism as an economic system domestically;
Agreeing never to discuss socioeconomic class in the way sociologists would;
Unwillingness to engage third parties in political debate;
Support of imperialism around the world;
Support of the installation of right-wing dictators;
Support of Israel elites despite 50 years of Zionist fundamentalism; and,
Opposition against socialism around the world whether it be Leninism or social democracy.
Furthermore, are the differences between political tendencies just matters of quantitative gradation (as in the linear model) or are there qualitative leaps which are not represented? Under the linear political spectrum, the difference between Social Democrats and New Deal liberals is presented as being quantitative or even identical when it is not. For example, Bernie Sanders whose policies are clearly New Deal liberal, could get away with saying he was a social democrat. A real social democrat historically is Eugene Debs. Debs clearly talked about class warfare and abolishing capitalism. This is not something New Deal liberals, including Bernie Sanders, ever talk about.
The part of the political spectrum that is socialist is a qualitatively different form of economic system.There is a qualitative leap. Social Democrats, the different kinds of Leninists and anarchists are bitterly divided among themselves over the place of state, market relations and the role of workers. Yet they agree that basic resources, tools and means of harnessing energy should be collectively owned and that capitalism cannot be reformed. All socialists believe that whether in the short-run or the long run, workers are capable of running society without bureaucrats, or managers.
Once the separation is made between those advocating socialism and those hoping to preserve capitalism, a chasm exists that is not represented on the political linear political spectrum.
What this means is that:
There are far more commonalties between liberals and conservatives than there are between liberals and socialists because capitalism divides them; and,
There are far more commonalities between liberals and fascists than between liberals and socialists because both liberals and fascists support capitalism.
The Linear Political Spectrum is too Simple for Today’s Complex Politics
China forming alliances with non-socialist countries
These days there are some very complex political configurations that defy the linear political spectrum. For example, China, which claims to be socialist, is forming alliances with countries that are clearly not socialist such as Russia, and a theocracy such as Saudi Arabia. According to the linear political spectrum model, China should only form alliances with other socialist countries like Venezuela and North Korea.
Social Democrats (socialists) forming alliances with imperialists
Secondly, the supposedly left-wing German Social Democrats and Greens and the Swedish Social Democrats have not lined up with China. If the linear political spectrum was accurate, Social Democrats would support Communist countries because they were fellow socialists. Instead, these Social Democrats have aligned themselves with right-wing Democrats of imperialist Yankeedom.
Right-wing governments support a socialist country
Thirdly, the countries that have supported Russia, and indirectly China, (moving towards a multipolar world against the imperialists) have been right-wing rulers such as Modi in India, Bolsonaro in Brazil and to a lesser extent, Viktor Orban in Hungary. The linear political spectrum would predict that right-wing states with fundamentalist fascists in power would be rabid anti-communists, but they are not – at least internationally. My claim is that the linear way of framing political life cannot do justice to the complexity of current political life
The Linear Political Spectrum Serves as an Ideological Tool to Support Two Points on the Spectrum – Either Neoliberals or New Deal liberals
The Recent elections in France
As many of you know, there was a recent election in France that was very close between Macron, Le Pen and the left wing candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Macron got 27% of the vote. Le Pen got 23% and the Mélenchon got about 21 ½%. The left-wing candidate failed by one point short of qualifying for the second round. So the French had to decide between the neoliberal Macron and the more conservative (or supposed fascist) Le Pen. Suddenly the neoliberal Macron discovers the linear political spectrum and presents himself, not as the center right candidate that he is, but closer to the Enlightenment values of New Deal liberalism. This is a prime minister who has presided over cuts to the French welfare system, tried to raise the retirement age and brutalized the Yellow Vests protesters for two years. Now he sings liberty, equality, fraternity. “Behold” this choir boy of Brussels, says “we have to watch out for the fascists.” It is true that Le Pen’s father was a fascist, but that doesn’t make her one. Is Le Pen’s stance against immigrants and refugees? Yes. But how does that compare with Macron in practice. Has he treated immigrants and refuges well? Hardly! Further, a comrade of mine who has lived in France for many years said that Le Pen’s program was considerably to the left of Macron. In addition, Le Pen was more likely to be pro-Russian. Sadly, the French people were tricked by Macron’s claim to define what fascism is and re-elected him. This is one case of letting a neoliberal define for socialists what a fascist is.
The Democratic Party defining what is and isn’t fascism
The Democratic Party has nothing to do with New Deal liberalism
In the 2016 election, the Democratic Party had a candidate who claimed to be a socialist. Every real socialist knew that Bernie Sanders was not a socialist and at best was a New Deal liberal. Since Lyndon Johnson the Democratic Party has slid from moderate left to center-right neoliberals. In 1985 Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council moved consciously away from anything like the FDR program (see Century of the Self Part IV by Adam Curtis) and that includes the eight years of Chicago boy, Baraka Obama. In 2016, the party gave a resounding “no” to New Deal liberal Bernie Sanders as they have done for 50 years. However, the public was 50 years behind the times. When most people voted for a Democrat, they thought they were getting a New Deal liberal. For sixteen years (Clinton and Obama) the party kept disappointing them. The Democratic Party has used the public’s out of date picture of the linear political spectrum to shove austerity programs down the throats of people in the name of liberalism. The public still does not know the difference between a New Deal liberal and a neoliberal, but it knows that the Democratic Party gives them nothing and I predict they will vote them out next month and in 2024.
Not such strange bedfellows: neoliberalism is right next to fascism on the political spectrum
Many people do not understand how fascism occurs. It’s as if suddenly a charismatic leader arises politically without rhyme or reason and this provokes a mass hysteria with people temporarily losing their minds and swooning over the dictator. The truth of the matter is that fascism is a product of a crisis of capitalism. There has been no fascism before the 20th century. Fascism began in the 1920s in response to a crisis in capitalism after World War I and throughout the twenties and into the 1930s. During such a crisis both liberal and conservative centrist parties lost credibility and withered, and the choices were either socialism or fascism. In fact, in the early thirties both the Democrats and Republicans wrote about how much they admired Hitler.
If the ruling party is a right-wing party, it is possible that a new deal liberal party might be a substitute for fascism, at least for a time. In Yankeedom, both Clinton and Obama provided nothing but wars and finance capital accumulation austerity for 16 years. Yet the public did not turn to fascism. But by 2016 the lower middle class and some working-class people had had enough and elected a fascist. Why? Because Trump promised to bring back American jobs and appealed to working class people who were pushed to the margins. Small businesses were even more difficult to start up and those that existed were struggling against the large corporations. Trump’s appeal was to economic issues. Meanwhile Democratic neoliberal Hillary Clinton haughtily called these lower middle class and working-class people “deplorables”. The party embraced identity politics and lost.
But fascism would not have won if the Democratic Party did not propose a New Deal liberal like Bernie Sanders. I’m convinced that had the Democratic Party gave Sanders their candidacy, he could have easily beaten Trump. What am I saying? The Democratic Party co-creates fascism by not running New Deal liberal candidates. My prediction is that with Uncle Mortimer as president almost two years in, by 2024 if Mordor is still standing, we will have a fascist president, whether it is Trump or someone else and the Democratic Party will be to blame. This is an example of a neoliberal party (Democrats) taking advantage of the public’s association of liberals with FDR to use that association to get themselves elected by carrying out a right wing-libertarian program.
Neoliberals support right-wing dictators and fascists internationally
Neoliberals in Mordor have supported right-wing dictators all over the world for 70 years. See William Blum’s book Killing Hope. In fact, the CIA is considered a liberal part of the Deep State. This doesn’t change whether Mordor’s regime is liberal or conservative. The most recent example is the Democratic administration’s support of Ukrainian fascists on and off for the past 70 years.
If the linear political spectrum were accurate neoliberalism would be right next to fascism on the political spectrum. So, I am saying that the linear political spectrum supports the ideology of Neoliberalism by:
Denying its existence in the political spectrum by not including it as a category;
Implementing right-wing neoliberal policies while pretending its legacy is New Deal liberalism.
Centrism is Bankrupt in Extreme Capitalist Crises
The linear political spectrum also makes it appear that the middle of the political spectrum is politically superior because it is not extremist. It is moderate, not hysterical like the fascism or communism. What this ignores is that when there are extreme economic, political or ecological conditions, the centrist political solutions don’t work. The center doesn’t hold, it caves in. In certain periods of history to be a moderate is unrealistic. Gradualist trial and error won’t cut the mustard because a storm is brewing. In the conditions of our time, extremes are the only answer because capitalism has brought us to this point and neither liberal nor conservative solutions have worked. The linear political spectrum arose during naïve political times when economics was thought to be separate from politics and political scientists papered over these extreme conditions which they couldn’t or wouldn’t explain. We need a new non-linear political spectrum which:
Is inclusive of many more political ideologies than the five at the front of this article;
Is economic as well as political;
Accounts for qualitative leaps – which is the difference between socialism and capitalism;
Decenters the spectrum so that both moderate and extreme solutions would seem reasonable. This means that all political tendencies would have be seen as having pros and cons. The way it stands now, liberals and conservatives are seen as virtuous and communism and fascism are seen as having vices.
Flexible enough to make room for alliances between the extremes on the political spectrum such as China and Saudi Arabia, or between India (fundamentalist) and China. The spectrum should not be limited to ideologies that are next to each other on the political spectrum.
Much like individual change, societal developments happen gradually, often painfully; even when sudden shifts take place, seemingly ‘out of the blue’, they are the result of an accumulation of incremental steps – the last straw on the camel’s back as it were. Small developments may slip by unnoticed, major events scream out and demand our attention. Take man-made global warming – going on for 70 years or so, ignored for most of that time, until one July, when, in 40°C heat people collapse, crops are wiped out, water is rationed and drought blights the land.
Whilst it’s true that change is, paradoxically, constant, dramatic shifts, life-changing developments, by their very nature, occur only rarely, at key moments. Globally, we are living through such a time of major change; a transitional time akin to that step from one age group to another, adolescence into early adulthood, for example. A moment when everything is, potentially, set to shift and evolve, when old habits and ways of living, recognized as inadequate, either fall away naturally or are rejected.
Signs that we are living through such a time have been evident for a while – decades, longer probably, and have year on year become more and more widespread and diverse. The momentum for change, and with it resistance (which is intense) from those wedded to the status quo, appears to be reaching a point of crisis. Battle lines are exposed, delineating the choices before humanity, alternative values and modes of living that are becoming more defined, and more opposed all the time.
The political-economic arena has been the primary field of conflict and resistance, and also opportunity. This all-pervasive space encompasses most, if not all, areas of contemporary life, including education and health care, the environment, international relations, immigration, defense, etc; it shapes values and determines the direction of collective travel. Differing viewpoints have become increasingly polarized, opinions hardened. And, growing out of the vacuum created by government’s inability to meet the challenges of the time, and the uncertainty caused by clinging to systems and modes of living that are day by day being drained of life, extremism has exploded; populism, on the left and most fiercely, on the right of politics. Intolerance, prejudice and hate have accompanied this political polarization, dividing societies around the world.
Cynical politicians hungry for power have fueled and exploited these splits, inflamed divisions with the politics of tribal nationalism and intolerance. Truth has been perverted, facts questioned or disregarded; democracy, limited to begin with, has been undermined and autocratic leaders/demagogues have surfaced, or intensified their stifling grip on power.
When and how?
As points of crisis draw near in diverse, yet interconnected areas – climate/ecosystems, economic uncertainty and mass migration/displacement of persons, energy supplies and war, food security and global health threats, demands for solutions intensify.
Current socio-economic-political methodologies hold no answers, and are increasingly seen to be inadequate. Rooted in the Ideologies of Division Exploitation and Greed (Imperialism and Neo-liberalism), they are an integral part of the problem and cannot therefore respond adequately to the current challenges, which are immense. Creative solutions consistent with the emerging times are called for; compassionate alternatives rooted in social justice and freedom.
Systemic change in the economic sphere is desperately needed. Neo-Liberalism, which dominates the global economy, is a poisonous unjust ideology that relies on unlimited, irresponsible consumption and promotes greed, exploitation and inequality. Once change in this area takes place, and a more humane unifying and just model is introduced, then development in a range of other related areas becomes possible – health care and education, the eradication of food insecurity and large scale action on the environment.
It is values that need to change first though, and among many people they are changing; systems, policies and structures will naturally follow. Central to shifting values is the idea of unity, a recognition that humanity is one, varied, diverse but whole. This is not some incense-coated pseudo-religious fluff, but a fact (spelled out many times by visionary figures throughout the ages) in nature that is sensed by people everywhere; a fact that the existing socio-economic ideology, with its emphasis on competition and selfishness, actively works against.
Unity is a primary quality of the time, as is cooperation and tolerance. From these primary Principles of Goodness a series of positive consequences, or secondary colors flows: social and environmental responsibility, the eradication of prejudice; sharing as an economic social principle; social justice and equality, brotherhood — talked about for at least two thousand years, known in the heart but expressed fleetingly — and understanding of self and others. Unity shatters tribalism and strengthens collaboration; working together encourages relationship and erodes fear of ‘the other’, which in turn dissolves tensions and creates a space in which conflict is less likely. These are the values and ideals of the time, not radical, not new, perennial values that have been long buried and are now re-surfacing, influencing thinking in all areas of society. Coloring social and environmental initiatives, empowering popular action and driving change.
Momentum is building and, despite entrenched resistance from fearful forces determined to maintain control and ensure the perpetuation of systems and attitudes that breed division and suffering, the question is no longer will there be fundamental change and the inauguration of new modes of living, but when and how.
The ‘when’ is not a fixed moment in time but a dynamic flow expanding throughout the now; the ‘how’ is a creative explosion of collective action, examples of which are all around us, in every country of the world.
Wherever voices are raised in praise of social justice there is the how and the now; when people, young and old, stand together, despite the risks, demanding freedom from suppression, that is the how and the now; it’s individuals forming groups, acting in unison, crying out for substantive environmental action; it’s the rise of Trades Unions; it’s thousands of community initiatives, large and small, throughout the world; it’s Citizens Assemblies and the fall of demagogues – some, not all; it’s the growing influence of so-called Green Politics and demands for equality in all areas.
These are the signs of the times; diverse worldwide manifestations of ‘the how’, occurring within ‘the now’. Daily they multiply and strengthen, and the forces of resistance falter; they are the seeds of evolving socio-economic-political forms; they are the promise of things to come, the forerunners of The New time, which, no matter how the forces of resistance kick and scream, cannot, and will not, be held at bay.
The onslaught of five decades of relentless neoliberal reforms directed at public universities has aligned those institutions with the profiteering agendas of global capital while simultaneously shrinking dramatically the space for academics to fulfill their public roles as intellectuals. Paradoxically, as the global zeitgeist of neoliberal knowledge production has orchestrated the transformation of universities as propagandists for the free market, rife with entrepreneurship hubs and incubators for settler colonial/neo-capitalist experiments, the global right has organized systematic campaigns targeting academics engaged in public conversations on the raced, classed and gendered roots of neocolonial/capitalist knowledge.
The rise of the far right, mainstreamed through the hegemony of populist authoritarianisms globally, draws upon and in turn, unleashes, coordinated attacks on academics carrying out justice-based scholarship. Orchestrated digitally and mainstreamed through media platforms, these attacks are materialized through brick-and-mortar political-economic infrastructures that bring the disinformation/hate campaign to the university.
One tweet interrogating the hegemonic flows of colonial/capitalist power can turn you into the target of a digital disinformation campaign, as right-wing networks of anonymous internet users, funded by powerful political and economic groups, attack your life and livelihood. A white paper or policy brief in the public domain can turn your life upside down, making you the target of viral disinformation campaigns coordinated by far right hate groups, political parties and commercial funders overnight. You wake up to fake websites attacking you, digital attacks releasing your private information, and your mailbox full of threats of physical and sexual violence, including death threats. These digital infrastructures of disinformation and hate targeting academics are often run anonymously and are globally networked.
Within this climate of growing disinformation campaigns targeting academics, the power and control over the university held by risk managers and media professionals has turned public scholarship into the site of surveillance and management, replete with authoritarian techniques of control and erasure. Risk and reputation form the two key ingredients that fuel the corporate university, continually calibrating its managerial strategies while responding to the populist climate that is built on the premise of undermining knowledge.
An academic under attack from the far right can quickly find themselves alone, needing to respond to multiple requests for information from university technocrats, and struggling to just keep up with the disinformation. In many instances, the support from the university turns into facile prescriptions of self-help. In other instances, the university washes its hands of its duty to care for the academic under attack. In yet other instances, the university gives in to the demands of the far right, launching investigations, issuing disciplinary actions and even firing the academic being targeted.
How then can spaces for justice-based scholarship be secured, sustained and propagated across the neoliberal corporate university? How can universities be transformed into fulfilling their public roles as spaces for raising critical and inconvenient questions that interrogate power?
To articulate claims for justice and to raise questions that challenge the status quo, academics must turn within to find courage. However, this courage is rooted in the wider collective, necessitating that academics go public in securing support for justice-based public scholarship.
Friendships Beyond the Walls
Seeing academic work as collective work is at the heart of building and sustaining spaces for carrying out justice-based scholarship within the context of ongoing neoliberal transformations of university life. Building infrastructures of care that offer embodied support and nourishment as collective resources is vital to securing the lives and livelihoods of academics that become the targets of attacks by the far right. This infrastructure offers joy, kindness and security that are vital to offering comfort amid the targeted attacks by the various streams of the far right, nourishing us with strength and courage.
The enclosure of neoliberal universities by the individualizing logics of competition has disconnected academic life from public spaces of resistance. Corporate universities have increasingly become walled off, rife with ever-expanding building projects that separate them from the wider communities in which they are located. The managerial turn works precisely to detach the academic from the community.
To safeguard justice-based public scholarship therefore is to reject these enclosures, turning to friendships beyond the parochial confines of the university.
Solidarity emerges from the many friendships with activists who embody courage in their everyday practices of questioning structures, offering insights into strategies for sustenance, and offering guidance on ways to raise uncomfortable questions in spite of the threats mobilized by powerful forces. The everyday struggles of survival that activists negotiate offer immensely valuable pedagogies for survival within the toxic climates of corporate universities that have been re-organized to serve the power of the free market. Moreover, these activist networks come together amidst crises to plan strategies of resistance that challenge the campaigns mobilized by the far right, building frameworks for sustaining the strategies of resistance.
In my own public scholarship, I have drawn on friendships with activists in learning strategies of resistance and sustenance. From late-night conversations to strategic planning over weekends, infrastructures of activist organizing are vital in offering ongoing resources for challenging the forces that seek to silence us. When I have been targeted with a wide array of threats, including organized campaigns by powerful political and economic forces, my capacity to speak has been sustained by strategies of resisting repression such as petitions organized by academics and activist networks, letter writing campaigns, researching the attack strategies and writing about them in white papers and policy briefs, tracking the disinformation and reporting it, raising complaints about the harassing organizations and media, and engaging in media advocacy. When I have been targeted by disinformation campaigns, working alongside activists has been vital to building strategies for resistance, rendering these strategies public, sharing the strategies with academic and activist collectives, resisting the disinformation and hate on the platforms both individually and as collectives, and holding universities to account.
Community Struggles
Justice-based scholarship is sustained in the dignity, struggles and organizing of communities at the global margins.
That we must look beyond the university and into the generative capacities of community life in order to return our universities to our public roles is one of the most salient learnings for justice-based scholarship. Turning to the theories of decolonization — such as Kaupapa Māori theory, for instance — teaches us the power of theory emergent from within struggles and collective organizing. The rhythms of community life offer anchors for organizing knowledge, situated amid practices of occupying land, growing food and sharing resources. Justice emerges from the struggles of those who have been marginalized, laying claims to knowledge amid the violence of erasures.
Repression of voices at the margins is one of the most insidious strategies for sustaining and perpetuating inequalities. For those at the margins who have been systematically denied access to resources and erased from spaces of participation, turning to courage is an everyday act that challenges the silencing strategies catalyzed by those with economic and political power. Voicing out how the repression works and identifying the sources of the repression dismantles the silences that are circulated by colonial/capitalist power.
From Indigenous struggles against ongoing expansion of neoliberal extractivism, to feminist struggles among landless women farmers against the neoliberal attacks on food systems, to the various intersecting anti-racist struggles, to the struggles against exploitation among low-wage migrant workers, those who are speaking from the margins are manifesting enormous courage. It is this collective courage held in communities at the margins that forms the bedrock of justice-based scholarship. It works as a reminder that for structural transformations to take place, radical imaginations must be voiced.
Academics with the freedom, privilege and resources to raise these questions must intervene into the structures of power and control that constitute the corporate university. Critical interventions into the public sphere are fundamentally necessary when we place ourselves in academia as seeking to address social justice in our scholarship.
Struggles to Transform Our Universities
Most importantly, unless the neoliberal university is transformed, there is little hope for securing the spaces for carrying out justice-based scholarship.
Our everyday organizing therefore should turn to methods of collectivization that challenge the individualizing logic of the market-driven university.
The attack on academic freedom internally by professional-managerial technocrats who have no understanding of the academic mission of the university must be challenged and dismantled through collectivization.
The anti-intellectualism of shallow cost-effectiveness calculations must be thoroughly challenged. When technocrats seek to impose constraints on academic freedom and limit it, processes should be built for holding them to account, including measuring their performances on their understanding of (and advocacy for) academic freedom, and demanding their roles be circumscribed. Technocrats must be held accountable to elected academic bodies such as senates and academic boards, having to create annual academic freedom reports and be measured on the basis of these reports.
We should be asking questions that interrogate the staffing of managerial positions in areas such as risk management, audit, governance, media, reputation management and data management. We should interrogate the ways in which data are gathered and decisions are made. The power held by technocrats must be the site of our agitations within universities, with our unions organized to question technocracy in decision-making processes that directly impede academic freedom. In a neoliberal climate where senseless managerialism has shaped the broader approach to risk management in universities, sustaining justice-based scholarship calls for disrupting the power of technocracy through collectivization.
Academics doing justice-based scholarship should join unions in spaces where unions exist, and should organize to build unions in spaces where they don’t exist. Moreover, unions should be continually educated and engaged in the conversations on academic freedom.
Dismantling the technocracy that inundates the neoliberal university forms the basis of reorganizing university leadership in the affective registers of care. I have personally witnessed the ways in which the wider affective network of support offered by academic leaders at my university has sustained my public interventions. When academic leaders embody care, they create the infrastructures for raising claims to justice. This translates into steadfast assurances of support and sustenance even as the university negotiates threats that are directed at it because of the public scholarship of academics.
In sum, collectives and communities are the essential ingredients of scholarship seeking to make an impact on the unequal terrains of power and control that constitute injustices globally, nationally and locally. This recognition is vital in de-centering the individualized model of scholarship that prevails in the academe, and in turning toward the role of academia in working alongside struggles in seeking justice, working collectively and collaboratively to transform neocolonial neoliberal structures.
If we hope to build an America that works in the interests of the working class, then we must transcend the partisan culture war and come together around working class issues.
After 12 bleak years of various Conservative governments, led by inadequate Prime Ministers, the UK is on its knees. Democracy is under attack like never before; the disaster of Brexit, which has resulted in a catalogue of negatives including social polarization, isolationism and rabid tribalism.
Years of grinding austerity, underinvestment in public services, frozen wages and staggering levels of incompetence have culminated in the unmitigated mess we see before us: A country in terminal decline, poverty growing, inequality entrenched, and to cap it all The Wicked Witch of the raving Right, Liz Truss, has now been elected leader of the Conservatives, and, as they are in office, the new Prime Minister. A totally undemocratic electoral process, but hey, ‘that’s the way it’s always been’.
She was voted in, in a country of around 69 million people, by 81,326 (57.4% of the total gaggle) Conservative members. A tiny group, overwhelmingly old, posh, white, male, anti-Europe, anti-immigrant, anti-environment – pro-fossil fuels, backward-looking nationalists. A crazy bunch operating within a dysfunctional system that, like much of the UK parliamentary structure and the primordial electoral model, desperately needs reforming.
The revolting campaign rhetoric spouted by Truss, was we hoped, just that, ranting rhetoric aimed solely at the conservative golf club nobs. Alas, in her first pronouncements as PM, surrounded by baying Tory sycophants, it was clear that Truss lives not in the real world at all, but in a crumbling castle for one, built on a foundation of Neo-Liberal doctrine, situated further to the right than any UK Prime-Minister in recent years.
Despite decades of disappointment, whenever a new PM/government takes office, naivety gives rise to a prickle of optimism: surely now things will improve, surely social justice will be prioritized, peace and environmental action imperatives. Well, PM Truss swiftly crushed any such childish hopes with her first speech in parliament and her wooden responses during Prime Minister’s Questions. Arrogance masquerading as certainty imbued every cruel statement of policy intent, and, as opposition parties shook their heads in disbelief, people around the country, millions of whom are struggling to pay rising energy bills and increased food prices, were again crushed.
Truss, her cabinet, and thanks to a purge of moderate voices undertaken by Boris Johnson to quieten dissent, most, if not all of the parliamentary party, is now firmly wedded to an extreme version of Neo-Liberalism and the failed doctrine of Trickle Down economics. After forty years of most boats being sunk by the rising tide, the Ideology of Injustice has been shown to deepen inequality, intensify poverty and further concentrate wealth in the pockets of The Already Wealthy.
In addition to economic plans designed to benefit corporations and, by her own admission, intensify inequality (‘I’m not interested in re-distribution’ she told the BBC), she plans to increase military spending, allow global energy companies to restart gas extraction in the North Sea, end the moratorium on fracking and abolish green levies, which are used to fund energy efficiency and renewable electricity. She despises labor rights and the Trades Union movement, peaceful public protest and immigrants, all of which she is threatening to criminalize or clutter with so much bureaucracy as to make such human rights unenforceable.
Her policies, dogmatism and the doctrine that underpin them are, in many ways, terrifying. And with the suspension of parliament and consequently, any form of scrutiny, resulting from the death of The Queen, there is a danger, or for her, an opportunity, that she attempts to introduce legislation under cover of national mourning. If Truss and her gang get their way, the limited form of democracy that exists in the UK will become a distant memory, rather as ethics and honesty in public office, compassion and honoring international commitments have in recent years.
Rising misery
The list of national crises that the Truss government inherits, most if not all of which she had a grubby hand in causing, is long, and growing. As is public anger. It is a list resulting from ideological obsession, gross incompetence and absenteeism.
The National Health Service (NHS) is in crisis – years of underfunding, lack of training and Brexit, which saw thousands of NHS workers from Europe leave the UK, have led to around 135,000 vacancies, including 40,000 nurses and over 8,000 doctors in England alone. The service has the longest waiting lists for routine treatments on record; if you dial 999 for an ambulance, it could be hours, or in extreme cases, days before it arrives. Social care is dysfunctional; there is a housing crisis, property prices are sky high, rents are unaffordable, tenancies offer no security, homelessness is increasing – according to Government figures, “between January to March 2022, 74,230 households were assessed as homeless or threatened with homelessness,”up 5.4% in the same period in 2021, a further 38,000 were regarded as at “risk of homelessness”.
Inflation is at 10.1% and rising, recession predicted, poverty booming. Thousands of people/families (many of whom are in full-time employment) rely on food banks for basic supplies – over two million people visited a food bank last year, and this doesn’t include independent providers – local charities, churches etc. Ten years ago food banks barely existed in the UK, now there are estimated to be 2,572, and constitute a growth area.
The privatization of utility companies including water in 1989 under Thatcher, has led to energy and water companies making huge profits for shareholders (£72bn in dividends), but neglecting consumers and failing to invest. Since water was privatized no new reservoirs have been commissioned (in 33 years), and, The Guardianreports,“2.4bn liters [of water] a day on current estimates have been allowed to leak away.” Airports including Heathrow, have had to limit the number of flights due to lack of staff; the airport authorities and airlines use the ‘It’s not us, it’s Covid’ excuse, so loved by companies and government agencies who laid off too many employees during the pandemic and either haven’t re-hired enough, or employees refused to return unless wages and conditions improved.
The judiciary is in crisis, as is the prison system and the police, particularly in London; childcare and nursery education is shambolic, unaffordable for most, hard to find, limited places, particularly for those on average incomes; again due in part to lack of properly trained staff. It is, it seems, an endless list, shameful and intensely depressing, There may, however, be a glimmer of light within the storm; a positive effect of this cacophony of chaos is a growing movement of resistance to economic injustice, and Trades Union industrial action.
Enough is Enough
Wages for most people in the UK have been effectively frozen for years; and now, with rising inflation income is reducing in value, economic hardship intensifying, fury rising. Unions, which have been greatly weakened in the last thirty years through restrictive legislation, have rediscovered their courage and purpose, and in response to members’ demands have organised strikes in a number of areas. Most notably, railway and Transport for London workers have withdrawn their labor on a number of occasions in disputes over pay and conditions; refuse workers in Scotland have been on strike over pay; postal workers have also been striking; junior barristers are on indefinite strike over pay; workers at the UK’s largest container port, Felixstowe, recently withdrew their labour for eight days in another dispute about pay. Nurses and doctors working in the NHS are threatening industrial action, as are teachers.
The leader of the RMT union, Mick Lynch, who has emerged as a leading voice for the people, has suggested that, “unions are on the brink of calling for ‘synchronized’ strikes over widespread anger at how much soaring inflation is outpacing wages.” If such a positive step were taken, it would be a powerful act of resistance against years of exploitation and injustice, and may further empower working people, who for years have been silenced.
In parallel with the workers revolt is a social movement of defiance. Initially triggered by high energy bills, rising costs and low wages, the scope of disquiet is expanding to include outrage at huge profits for energy companies and other corporations, increasing payments to shareholders whilst the majority struggle to feed themselves and their families; i.e., it’s about social injustice, exploitation and greed. Two movements of resistance and change have emerged from the widespread disquiet – ‘Don’t Pay’, which aims to empower people to not pay increased energy bills, and ‘Enough is Enough’, which is a broader social movement founded by union leaders and MPs.
The appearance of these groups is deeply encouraging and could prove to be a pivotal moment. Many people, the majority perhaps, are worn down, ashamed of where the country finds itself, and have had enough. Enough of being ignored and manipulated; of being told to ‘tighten their belts’ and ‘carry on’, whilst corporations, public/private companies including energy firms, pay out huge dividends and government ministers, spineless, unprincipled puppets, who live in the silk-lined pockets of big business, including most notably the media barons, lie and lie and lie again.
In the face of increasing levels of social injustice, government duplicity and economic hardship, eventually the people must unite and revolt. If, after the endless pantomime of the Queen’s funeral, people do come together, refuse to pay rising energy costs; refuse to work, refuse to be exploited and marginalized; refuse to stand by while the natural world is vandalised; if the unions do take coordinated action, and many of us would support such a progressive act, there is a chance, slim, but real, that years of frustration and anger, can be turned into empowerment and hope.
Amazing, really, all the money, all the human lifetimes wasted on the Morty ZioLensky’s most corrupt regime, all the oligarchs making money there, and, of course, the endless gravy train for the most despicable of souls, those offensive murdering weapons manufacturers and the tens of thousands of other companies with big and little inside tracks to the culling and killing machine that is the USA.
Authorities have traced the cause of a sewage spill that closed RAT Beach in Torrance Wednesday to a residential street in the Palos Verdes Estates, health officials announced. (source)
Of course, it gets bigger, here in LaLa Land, where Morty ZioLensky rings the bell for the New York Criminal Stock Mafia Exchange. Much bigger, and alas, this is coming to a township or city near you. Forget about decades of environmental warriors talking about non-point pollution in our thousands of rivers and waterways.
About 17 million gallons of sewage were dumped into Santa Monica Bay following the failure at the Playa del Rey plant. The resulting odors were later blamed by residents who said they developed rashes, nausea, burning eyes and other symptoms in the aftermath.
The L.A. city attorney’s office did not respond to a request for comment. (source)
Wonderful beachfront view (above) of the shit about to hit the fan. The hydrogen sulfide is just one issue from the fumes. Raw sewage is the thing of great potentials — heavy metals and SSRIs in the ecosystem, washed up viruses, e coli, and thousands of ever-expanding brain and flesh eating microbes.
Yet, the news is about Ukraine and EuroTrashLandia and the U$A and Klanada — how it is all Ukraine, cold winters, energy bills 8 times last year’s, food shortages, and, well, no more protests, or else. Full-fledged support of war, proxies, economic bombardment, and fake inflation. Here, Richard Wolff does the 101 Econ explanation of what inflation really is: the owners of the businesses and factories deciding it’s time to raise prices to, well, off-set the half-greed to proportionately throw down the full-throttle greed that is capitalism.
It’s only an hour long, and it is definitely basics of capitalism, and, yes, it is NOT the Putin Inflation . . . never was, never will be:
More cognitive dissonance in Chile, where they can’t pass an amazing constitution, but they can start squirting more untested crap into pregnant women, et al:
On Friday, Chile’s Ministry of Health (Minsal) announced that the country would start the vaccination of priority groups amid limitations of monkeypox vaccines in the international context.
RELATED: US: Concerns Are Mounting Due to Escalating Monkeypox Outbreak
Through his official Twitter account, Undersecretary for Public Health Cristóbal Cuadrado said, “We expect to begin the first stage of the inoculation process during October.”
The vaccine to be used for the immunization process in the country will be the Jynneos vaccine from the Bavarian Nordic laboratory. It was obtained through the Pan American Health Organization’s Revolving Fund.
The first stage will include those “close contacts of confirmed cases of monkeypox who are at risk of severe disease, i.e., immunosuppressed people, HIV patients, and pregnant women,” Cuadrado said. (source)
Here, not my favorite source, but two Chileans discussing it, the lost chance for this amazing constitution to get passed by the people:
Ariel Dorfman: This was an extraordinary Magna Carta, both because of its origins, in a popular protest, because it was drafted by people who looked like Chile itself, not sort of elite experts who behind closed walls were constantly deciding what others would be ruled by. And it was, as you mentioned, you know, incredibly ecological, the most advanced in the world. It extended democracy in participatory forms in all levels. It legalized — not only legalized abortion but — you know, when I read the constitution, and I’ve read it several times, the one that has just been rejected, what calls attention to myself is the extraordinary tenderness with which it’s been composed and written. It speaks about the glaciers. It speaks about the air. It speaks about the children, over and over again the children. It speaks about the caretakers at home. It speaks about the animals. It speaks about the dogs. It speaks about everything vulnerable that needs to be taken care of. And, of course, it includes there, for the first time, those who have been invisible and exspoliated constantly by the major powers in Chile: the Indigenous populations. It is also an extraordinarily feminist constitution. And I just could go on and on and on. It had 388 articles, perhaps too many.
Well, well, so the beat goes on, in the endless prattling of media, 24/7, beamed up directly into our brains. Here, another story, tied to my local view, at the OSU Hatfield Marine Sciences Center: “HMSC Science on Tap: Ocean Iron Fertilization: Knowns and unknowns.”
Several decades ago, oceanographers first recognized that the addition of iron to surface waters stimulates algal growth in over a third of the ocean. This realization sparked international efforts to understand the role that iron plays in regulating ocean ecosystems and global carbon cycling. How do feedbacks between climate, iron-rich dust deposition, and ocean productivity work? Can humans leverage iron fertilization to offset greenhouse gas emissions or boost fisheries? (source)
In the “old days,” well, there was a precautionary principle at the top of the agenda; there was a big skiepticism in the sciences and in anything around geo-engineering and climate and oceans. There were even activists against Genetically Engineered mosquitoes in the tens of millions being released into our ecosystems. There used to be folks concerned about nanoparticles in our foods, and there used to be concern about neurotoxins in pesticides and hormone distrupters in baby’s milk bottle.
David Emerson, a geomicrobiologist at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Maine, told Mongabay in an email that when it comes to iron fertilization there are still “critical questions worthy of research,” such as whether alternative forms of iron would interact differently with phytoplankton and ocean currents. However, he also emphasized the “unknown cost” of ecosystem impacts from large-scale fertilization.
“We shouldn’t do it, unless there are concomitant major reductions in emissions,” he said. “We shouldn’t do it until we know significantly more about how effective it will be. We should only do it if the alternative is major ecosystem/human civilization collapse.” (source)
[Satellite image shows a phytoplankton bloom off Newfoundland, Canada, on September 19, 2019. The bloom occurred unusually late for the region, possibly because of higher temperatures and more sunlight than is typical for that time of year. Image courtesy of NASA.]
But there are still warriors going up against Monsanto, Bill Gates, the 10 controlling corporations of food systems, seeds and GMOs.
As effective action on the climate crisis could threaten corporate profits, Big Food and agribusiness conglomerates are counting on greenwashing to save them: the marketing strategy where they use misleading information to make it appear as if they and the products they sell are providing solutions to climate change. This confusing and unrealistic set of greenwashing tactics has even made its way inside international fora, especially at UN climate summits.
Building on the claims made by organisations and social movements around the world, GRAIN has prepared a short glossary to demystify these corporate proposals and expose them as false solutions. In a concise way, we aim to reveal who is behind these greenwashing concepts and why they actually deepen the climate crisis and social inequality.
This glossary focuses on corporations’ 10 favourite terms, ranging from “climate smart agriculture”, to “nature-based solutions” and “bioeconomy”. We have accompanied some of those concepts by infographics to help illustrate with irony the main problems generated by this corporate greenwashing. (source)
Here are the offending terms, the propaganda, the amazing work of millions of human lifetimes to lie, deceive, steal, and cobble the world.
Infinitesimal, grand, pervasive, from cradle to grave, the bombardment of propaganda and forced and concerted unlearning-unknowing (agnotology), each nanosecond, the world wide web and the dirty perversions of MSM and Holly-Dirt, and those millions and millions of Eichammans working for governments, the average kid or adult, well, he or she just isn’t getting the big or small of it. Logic and ethics are thrown out the window. Precautionary thinking, actions, commitments, well, those things are outside the common person’s way of going about his or her daily living.
Again, up is down, fat is thin, small is big, lies are truth, money is for nothing. Imagine, Switzerland, now a land of young women with masks and pro-pro war signs . . . That is the new propaganda frame — getting young people so messed up on their own roots, screwing with their own cultural DNA, their own history, that they would fall for this insanity:
Ahh, diplomacy is dead, and while Switzerland is a weapons producer, and a haven for criminal activity (hidden treasuries of dictators, drug kingpins, government leaders of the “free-for-all” world, for banks, for, well, you know what Switzerland is), here, the take on how to bring Switzerland back to the table as a neutral actor in maybe helping end the proxy war in Ukraine:
It is imperative that president Cassis take note and change his direction. Here is my prescription for Swiss change:
1. Abandon the NATO-leaning partisanship immediately.
2. Withdraw support of war inspired sanctions. Cassis has chosen to support the EU issued sanctions, but not those of Russia. Neutrality demands honoring the sanctions of neither side.
3. Recoil from any Swiss role that might involve facilitating the provision of weapons for use in the war.
4. Recognize that the ultimate decision makers in the conflict are Russia and the United States. It is readily apparent that NATO, the EU, and Ukraine are largely marching to the beat of an American drummer. Switzerland should seek to open negotiations with the principals, Russia and the United States, preferably hosted on Swiss territory.
5. Host the renegotiation of the basic precepts of the Minsk Accords, but this time with Russia and the United States as principals. That would mean achieving a cease fire and finding a mutually acceptable way of somehow incorporating the Donbass republics into Ukraine.
6. Work toward addressing Russia’s publically proclaimed security concerns vis-à-vis Ukraine, including the exclusion from Ukrainian leadership individuals who identify themselves, either by words or actions, with neo-Nazi ideology.
7. Seek agreement from Russia for the conduct of a Swiss-monitored referendum to affirm the current status of Crimea. (source)
And, then, the queen is dead (not really):
Anyone in the UK who imagined they lived in a representative democracy – one in which leaders are elected and accountable to the people – will be in for a rude awakening over the next days and weeks.
TV schedules have been swept aside. Presenters must wear black and talk in hushed tones. Front pages are uniformly somber. Britain’s media speak with a single, respectful voice about the Queen and her unimpeachable legacy.
Westminster, meanwhile, has been stripped of left and right. The Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Labour parties have set aside politics to grieve as one. Even the Scottish nationalists – supposedly trying to rid themselves of the yoke of centuries of English rule presided over by the monarch – appear to be in effusive mourning.
The world’s urgent problems – from the war in Europe to a looming climate catastrophe – are no longer of interest or relevance. They can wait till Britons emerge from a more pressing national trauma. (Jonathan Cook)
And alas, the Democratic Party is sooo different than the Republican Party (har-har). Imagine this, a hit squad list coming out of Brussels run by Ukraine (probably not Ukraine per se, more like CIA and Mossad and MI6, etal):
The co-founder of “Pink Floyd” is known for his support of imprisoned Wikileaks’ creator Julian Assange, and for his opposition to imperialism and war, as well as for his awesome music, loved by millions around the world.
Waters recently referred to Joe Biden as a “war criminal” on CNN, and said that Biden is “fueling the fire in Ukraine.”
“This war,” the musician stated, “is basically about the action and reaction of NATO pushing right up to the Russian border, which they promised they wouldn’t do when [Mikhail] Gorbachev negotiated the withdrawal of the USSR from the whole of Eastern Europe.”
Waters also said that Crimea belongs to Russia, because the majority of people living on the peninsula are Russian.
The rock star’s views have outraged the pro-NATO crowd and their Nazi friends, as well as the social justice warriors who froth at the mouth in support of whatever the mainstream media declares to be “the current thing.” Waters, who has always been something of a dissident and anti-war, the way all rock stars used to be when rock and roll was still real, is attacked mercilessly by the “woke” crowd, who are intolerant of all who are not in lockstep with their views. (source)
All is fine on the Western Front, and that shit has already hit the proverbial fan. ‘When the shit hits the fan’ alludes to the messy and hectic consequences brought about by a previously secret situation becoming public.
The true origins of the expression “shit hits the fan” are largely undetermined, though some sources suggest that Canada is to blame—it might have come from particularly picturesque Canadian military language of the early twentieth century. Another suggestion is that the idiom is descended from “an old joke”:
A man in a crowded bar needed to defecate but couldn’t find a bathroom, so he went upstairs and used a hole in the floor. Returning, he found everyone had gone except the bartender, who was cowering behind the bar. When the man asked what had happened, the bartender replied, “Where were you when the shit hit the fan?” (source)
Great piece by Eva Bartlet, on the hit list Ukraine supports, and who funds this Mafiosa thing?
“Western Media Continues to Ignore Ukraine’s Public ‘Kill List’ Aimed at Those Who Question the Kiev Regime”!
Bartlet: “Christelle Néant, a French war correspondent reporting from Donbass for the past six and a half years, mentioned to me before the panel began that some of the information on the site is not disclosed to the general public, and is password-locked.”
Néant, who said she’s been receiving death threats for years, spoke of how it impacts her:“Every time I use my car, I check underneath it for any unpleasant surprise,” referring to a potential car bomb. “
I don’t publish any photos with people I live with or love. I have to be vigilant at all times.”
“I’m not a terrorist, not a criminal, I’m just a correspondent. This list must be closed and all of those involved must be held accountable.”
And so it goes, as the people in Jackson, Mississippi still can’t drink the water. The optics here of this white governor, man, the reason for this environmental racism, just can’t be the only bitter taste in my “shit hit the fan” infused mouth:
Ahh, money in shitty water. Privatize, man. Every single time there is a disaster of the making of anti-government, anti-social safety net monsters, they come up with Privatize:
Jackson’s persistent water problems make daily life hard for residents and business owners alike. That includes boil water notices that can last weeks or more. Before the most recent failure, John Tierre, who owns Johnny T’s Bistro & Blues in downtown Jackson, said his business was already losing thousands of dollars due to spending weeks under a boil water notice.
“First, you’re gonna have to start a couple hours early. That’s already labor in itself, whatever you’re paying per hour,” he told the Mississippi Free Press in late August. “You gotta get in and start boiling water for everything that you’re gonna be using in service. Not only do we have to boil water just to wash dishes, for the bar, for glasses, but there’s the $200 or $300 a day in ice purchases, canned sodas, bottled water, things of that nature.”
State officials are discussing a number of possible solutions for a permanent fix, including privatising Jackson’s water system. “Privatisation is on the table,” Governor Reeves said earlier this week. The city’s Democratic mayor, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, has also discussed hiring private contractors to operate and maintain the water system. (source)
Yeah, baby, billions more for Ukraine to run their corrupt system, from USA taxpayers.
Zelensky?
In a significant assault on worker rights in Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky last week signed into law legislation that deprives around 73 percent of workers of their right to union protection and collective bargaining.
“For more than 15 months, the Federation of Trade Unions of Ukraine, in solidarity with other trade unions, with support of the international community, actively opposed promotion of the anti-labor draft law,” the Federation (FPU) said in a statement.
The Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine (KVPU) stated, “KVPU will not tolerate a blatant violation of the rights of workers, their constitutional guarantees and international norms and standards. We will continue the fight for workers’ rights.” (source)
There will be photo shoots, and there will be cannon fodder, and there will be blood, and there will be Zelensky rents to be paid:
That’s $51,000 a month Morty ZioLensky gets for this villa he owns in Italy:
Here we go, quoted just below, from the WSWS, world socialist web site, and these references already got me labeled a commie under a Bush or Trump, and alas, today? All Democrats hate social safety programs, err, nets, err, socialism programs. Commie, go home to Russia, China, Venzuela: (Source)
Małgorzata Kulbaczewska-Figat notes that even under the existing labor code, the conditions of workers in Ukraine were atrocious.
“Before the Russian invasion, millions of Ukrainian workers migrated to EU countries (and not only), knowing well that even the poorest of them—Bulgaria and Romania—offered significantly better earnings to an average worker than their homeland.
“Low wages are virtually strangling our economy,” she continued. “In addition, some 20-30 percent of Ukrainian workers are employed ‘unofficially.’
“Even working in a state-owned enterprise, in a critical economy sector, does not guarantee a stable salary, allowing for a decent living.”
Miners, for example, faced delays in payment of wages. “The miners were regularly organizing spontaneous protest actions, including the most desperate move—an underground protest. Another huge underground protest action took place in 2020 in Kryvy Rih, the center of iron mining of transnational importance. A group of workers of KZRK, a formerly state-owned plant consisting of four iron mines and more associated factories, spent more than a month inside mines, demanding a pay rise.”
She cited an expert on labor law who warned that big companies may “artificially split into smaller 250-people entities so that maximum flexibility can be used even by the biggest and strongest employers.”
The fact that the war in Ukraine is being used to impose a brutal increase in exploitation on the already impoverished working class in the country is a further indication of the reactionary character of the conflict. Workers in Ukraine, as well as their brother workers in Russia and the NATO countries, have nothing to gain from this war, which contains the seeds of a world conflagration. Workers in all lands must unite in opposition to the war in Ukraine, which was instigated by US imperialism and its allies as part their drive for world hegemony. (source)
Selfies for Morty (ZioLensky): (source: “Ukraine Counterattacks!”)
Citizens in Chile are voting on whether to approve a truly world-leading constitution on 4 September. Ahead of the big day, people and communities around the world expressed their support for the principles it would enshrine.
As the New York Times highlighted, the result is a sweeping constitution that promises changes in multiple areas, such as universal health care, and rights to clean air, water, and much more. Its approval would mean Chile has “more rights enshrined in its constitution than any other nation” on Earth.
On Sunday the Chilean people can vote for a new constitution, replacing the old anti-democratic one written by the dictator Pinochet with a new one guaranteeing rights to health, housing, education, and a habitable planet. I am proud to support this effort.
Progressive International pointed out in mid-August that the Chile constitution has attracted the support of over 200 political and trade union leaders from around the world:
More recently, western media outlets have highlighted that polls suggest voters may reject the constitution amid widespread misinformation. The Guardian has reported on numerous bogus claims that have circulated about what the constitution will bring, such as the confiscation of private property. Outlets have also pointed to disquiet among industries like mining that benefit from the neoliberal status quo.
Nonetheless, significant support has been evident in Chile at rallies ahead of the vote:
There’s a huge feminist rally in Santiago today in favour of Chile’s proposed new constitution a week before the plebiscite. The constitution enshrines gender equality and the right to a life free from gender violence (@isidoradonosok) #Caupolicanazopic.twitter.com/lw6MUaONZ2
The draft Chile constitution significantly empowers indigenous communities, including in relation to sovereignty over their lands.
Chile is on the verge of making history for Indigenous Rights. If the new constitution passes, over 2 million Indigenous Chileans “would be able to govern their own territories.” A huge act of reparations paid. #Apruebo4deSeptiembre#AprobarEsHumanohttps://t.co/oEoSWiCpEC
On 3 September, 17 indigenous groups from Turtle Island – otherwise known as North America – backed the constitution. Jade Begay, climate justice director at the indigenous-led organisation NDN Collective, said:
Chile’s newly proposed constitution sets a precedent for the U.S. and other governments to not only recognize it is beyond time to update our draconian constitutions, but also that integrating Indigenous rights into our core laws will move us towards truly achieving equity and justice.
As an article in the Conversation also noted, the constitution offers “astoundingly progressive” reforms in relation to protections for the natural world. It contains no less than 50 provisions related to the environment, including granting nature constitutional rights. Ecuador granted such constitutional rights to nature in 2008. Its experience shows that they can safeguard precious ecosystems against extractive practices like mining. The University of Melbourne academics who wrote the Conversation article asserted that:
Chile has crafted one of the most progressive and environmentally conscious legal texts on the planet.
Unsurprisingly then, the new Chilean constitution has attracted attention and support among environment-focused groups:
We stand with the people of #Chile, as they head to the polls to vote whether or not to approve a visionary new constitution. The proposed constitution is one of the most progressive in the world, an achievement of decades of social movement organizing. #ChileVotaApruebopic.twitter.com/Ygu0GRKH2W
In short, a lot is at stake for Chileans in the referendum vote, not least for the country’s president Gabriel Boric. Moreover, the groundbreaking protections the constitution lays out for people, other animals, and the planet overall provides a stunning example to citizens around the world of what a just future for all could look like.
Chris Butters warns: “A specter is haunting America, the specter of middle-class leftists turning to the right.” Writing on the official website of the Communist Party USA, he attacks certain social media personalities for not being sufficiently fearful of the “Trumpist Republican power grab” and by implication for their failure to embrace the succor of the Democratic Party.
My intention is not to defend the people that Butters regards as “disembodied spirits” or to criticize the CPUSA. Rather, Butters is used to illustrate a broader phenomenon in the left-of-center blogosphere. Specifically, his narrow focus on the binary choice (“lesser evilism”) of Republican versus Democrat obscures the larger functioning of the two-party system beyond the merits of the individual parties.
Further, while I agree that a reactionary nationalist tendency with fascistic undertones is haunting not only the “land of the free” but is also threatening contemporary Brazil, some former Soviet republics, India, South Africa, and elsewhere, I differ on both the causes and potential remedies.
The failure of neoliberalism
Butters is scandalized that a “fringe” of the Bernie Sanders movement failed to vote for Biden; some even choosing Trump. While Bernie’s “Our Revolution” ended up herding the hopeful into the Democratic Party by giving that party a false patina of progressivism, the initial movement led by Sanders was broader than just liberal Democrats.
The Sanders movement reflected a mass disenchantment with the neoliberal model. Indeed, Trump’s parallel insurgency cynically seized on that same failure of neoliberalism to meet people’s basic needs via a dishonest faux-populist campaign that portrayed Trump as some kind of man of the people. That failure of neoliberalism partly explains why “make America great again” resonated with some 70 million US voters.
While the super-rich take recreational flights into outer space, neoliberalism – the contemporary form of capitalism – is not meeting working people’s needs. And the two parties of capital collude to shovel tax-payers’ dollars into endless foreign wars…enough, it should be noted, to alleviate hunger and homelessness at home.
Granted, the Trump phenomena is symptomatic of a mounting right-wing faux populism, but it wouldn’t be popular without the disease of a declining standard of living for the working class.
“The struggle against racism, sexism, and gender equality” is equated by Butters with “the broader fight for democracy.” Omitted in his article are class-based economic issues.
While flailing at the symptoms, the Democrats feed the disease. They enthusiastically join their supposed sworn enemies on the other side of the aisle engorging the military and security apparatus of the state with more funds than the White House even requests. In practice, both parties agree that anything like Medicare for All is to be deferred.
It is indicative that, despite Butters’ criticism of the “middle-class leftists,” only twice does the term “working class” appear in his article. That is as often as the litany of “multiculturalism, gender equality, LGBTQ+ rights, environmentalism, anti-colonialism, anti-racism” is cited.
Although I believe that these cultural, identity, and life-style issues are important, they cannot be substituted for providing an adequate material basis for daily life for the working class.
The Democrats’ abandonment of the material interests of their traditional constituency makes them complicitous in the rise of a popular rightist blowback. Resentment by the dispossessed of the use of identify politics as a cover for the neoliberal agenda fuels – but in no way justifies – a white supremist, anti-immigrant, and sexist reaction, delivering them into the open arms of Trump.
With little else to offer, Trump is the Democrat’s greatest asset
WikiLeaks revealed that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC were leading promoters of the dark-horse Trump candidacy in the crowded 17-contender Republican 2016 presidential primary race. The Democrats got what they wished for…and more, as it turned out.
The Democrats no longer pretend to have a social welfare agenda. Forget about Joe Biden being the new incarnation of FDR. The former party of the New Deal and now of neoliberalism only offers its faithful the cold comfort that Trump is not their standard bearer.
After the debacle of January 6, 2021, the disgraced 45th president of the US retreated to a golf course in Florida. He was vilified by the preponderance of corporate media – itself overwhelmingly neoliberal and imperialist – and abandoned by major figures in his own party.
Rather than allowing Trump to fade into the shadows, the Democrats have continued to fan the flames of fear of fascism for their partisan advantage with their liberal constituency. By the same token, though, their publicity helps to mobilize the very right populism that they oppose.
Hence, over a year and a half since the original incident on 1/6/21, the House select investigative committee continued to keep the media spotlight on the former chief executive. And with a professional TV producer for the primetime extravaganza.
Defending “our democracy”
What has happened since that infamous day? The angry Republican mob took some selfies in the Capitol and went home. They never returned.
Meanwhile the Democrats had hundreds of the perpetrators pursued, causing some to be imprisoned. Under Democratic leadership, the US Army – not the civilian police – occupied the streets of the national capital. And new legislation was passed extending police powers to limit protests.
In the name of preserving “our democracy” and fighting fascism, measures that are in fact fascistic were enacted. What ensued under Democratic aegis is not what democracy looks like.
Butters, in another article, calls for a “mass anti-fascist front” against the Republican Party’s assault on voting rights in New York State. He fails to mention the Democrat’s own record of restricting voter choice through their initiative to greatly increase the votes needed for third parties to stay on the ballot in that state. The measure, in effect, denies ballot status to the Green Party.
The main danger
The Democrats’ championing of de-platforming dissenting voices from social media is for Butters counterposed by the cancel culture of the right. Butters argues that the “main danger” is “the increasingly fascistic power grab by Trump and the Republican Party” in contrast to what he characterizes as the concern with the “deep state.”
Butters dismisses the love affair of Democrats with the FBI and CIA. However, the “deep state” is the coercive apparatus of fascism.
With its uncomely embrace of foreign policy neo-conservatives (e.g., Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Under Secretary Victoria Nuland, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines), the Democrats have eclipsed the Republicans as the leading party of war. Now even accused war criminal Henry Kissinger stands to the left of the Democrats.
While 57 Republicans demurred, the Democrats – including the Squad – unanimously voted to appropriate tens of billions of dollars for the Ukraine War. Such hyper-aggressive nationalist partisans make untrustworthy bulwarks against fascism.
Prospects for fascism
A right populist insurgency could provide the shock troops for a future fascism. But it would be the ruling class or major elements of it that would opt to no longer maintain their class rule by liberal bourgeois democratic means.
If ruling elements imposed fascist rule, they would have to forego the convenient façade of legitimacy afforded by the current electoral regime, one where corporations are considered persons and buying politicians is an exercise of free speech. As long as popular discontent can be contained within the Republican-Democrat duopoly, the ruling powers are mollified to have fascistic measures already on the books, such as the Patriot and Espionage acts, used sparingly.
For now, then, the cabal of the two parties of capital is content with their theatre of bitter contention on cultural issues and fundamental collusion on matters of state. All the while, the system is lurching in an ever more authoritarian direction. Regardless of which party prevails electorally, the same class is in power.
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