Category Archives: conditioning

The Utility of the RussiaGate Conspiracy

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New McCarthyism allows corporate media to tighten grip, Democrats to ignore their own failings

By Alan MacLeod

Source: FAIR

To the shock of many, Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential elections, becoming the 45th president of the United States. Not least shocked were corporate media, and the political establishment more generally; the Princeton Election Consortium confidently predicted an over 99 percent chance of a Clinton victory, while MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow (10/17/16) said it could be a “Goldwater-style landslide.”

Indeed, Hillary Clinton and her team actively attempted to secure a Trump primary victory, assured that he would be the easiest candidate to beat. The Podesta emails show that her team considered even before the primaries that associating Trump with Vladimir Putin and Russia would be a winning strategy and employed the tactic throughout 2016 and beyond.

With Clinton claiming, “Putin would rather have a puppet as president,” Russia was by far the most discussed topic during the presidential debates (FAIR.org, 10/13/16), easily eclipsing healthcare, terrorism, poverty and inequality. Media seized upon the theme, with Paul Krugman (New York Times, 7/22/16) asserting Trump would be a “Siberian candidate,” while ex-CIA Director Michael Hayden (Washington Post, 5/16/16) claimed Trump would be Russia’s “useful fool.”

The day after the election, Jonathan Allen’s book Shattered detailed, Clinton’s team decided that the proliferation of Russian-sponsored “fake news” online was the primary reason for their loss.

Within weeks, the Washington Post (11/24/16) was publicizing the website PropOrNot.com, which purports to help users differentiate sources as fake or genuine, as an invaluable tool in the battle against fake news (FAIR.org, 12/1/16, 12/8/16). The website soberly informs its readers that you see news sources critiquing the “mainstream media,” the EU, NATO, Obama, Clinton, Angela Merkel or other centrists are a telltale sign of Russian propaganda. It also claims that when news sources argue against foreign intervention and war with Russia, that’s evidence that you are reading Kremlin-penned fake news.

PropOrNot claims it has identified over 200 popular websites that “routinely peddle…Russian propaganda.” Included in the list were Wikileaks, Trump-supporting right-wing websites like InfoWars and the Drudge Report, libertarian outlets like the Ron Paul Institute and Antiwar.com, and award-winning anti-Trump (but also Clinton-critical) left-wing sites like TruthDig and Naked Capitalism. Thus it was uniquely news sources that did not lie in the fairway between Clinton Democrats and moderate Republicans that were tarred as propaganda.

PropOrNot calls for an FBI investigation into the news sources listed. Even its creators see the resemblance to a new McCarthyism, as it appears as a frequently asked question on their website. (They say it is not McCarthyism, because “we are not accusing anyone of lawbreaking, treason, or ‘being a member of the Communist Party.’”) However, this new McCarthyism does not stem from the conservative right like before, but from the establishment center.

That the list is so evidently flawed and its creators refuse to reveal their identities or funding did not stop the issue becoming one of the most discussed in mainstream circles. Media talk of fake news sparked organizations like Google, Facebook, Bing and YouTube to change their algorithms, ostensibly to combat it.

However, one major effect of the change has been to hammer progressive outlets that challenge the status quo. The Intercept reported a 19 percent reduction in Google search traffic, AlterNet 63 percent and Democracy Now! 36 percent. Reddit and Twitter deleted thousands of accounts, while in what came to be called the “AdPocalypse,” YouTube began demonetizing videos from independent creators like Majority Report and the Jimmy Dore Show on controversial political topics like environmental protests, war and mass shootings. (In contrast, corporate outlets like CNN did not have their content on those subjects demonetized.) Journalists that questioned aspects of the Russia narrative, like Glenn Greenwald and Aaron Maté, were accused of being agents of the Kremlin (Shadowproof, 7/9/18).

The effect has been to pull away the financial underpinnings of alternative media that question the corporate state and capitalism in general, and to reassert corporate control over communication, something that had been loosened during the election in particular. It also impels liberal journalists to prove their loyalty by employing sufficiently bellicose and anti-Russian rhetoric, lest they also be tarred as Kremlin agents.

When it was reported in February that 13 Russian trolls had been indicted by a US grand jury for sharing and promoting pro-Trump and anti-Clinton memes on Facebook, the response was a general uproar. Multiple senior political figures declared it an “act of war.” Clinton herself described Russian interference as a “cyber 9/11,” while Thomas Friedman said that it was a “Pearl Harbor–scale event.” Morgan Freeman’s viral video, produced by Rob Reiner’s Committee to Investigate Russia, summed up the outrage:  “We have been attacked,” the actor declared; “We are at war with Russia.” Liberals declared Trump’s refusal to react in a sufficiently aggressive manner further proof he was Putin’s puppet.

The McCarthyist wave swept over other politicians that challenged the liberal center. Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein refused to endorse the Russia narrative, leading mainstream figures like Rachel Maddow to insinuate she was a Kremlin stooge as well. After news broke that Stein’s connection to Russia was being officially investigated, top Clinton staffer Zac Petkanas announced:

Jill Stein is a Russian agent.

Jill Stein is a Russian agent.

Jill Stein is a Russian agent.

Jill Stein is a Russian agent.

Jill Stein is a Russian agent.

Jill Stein is a Russian agent.

Jill Stein is a Russian agent.

Jill Stein is a Russian agent.

“Commentary” that succinctly summed up the political atmosphere.

In contrast, Bernie Sanders has consistently and explicitly endorsed the RussiaGate theory, claiming it is “clear to everyone (except Donald Trump) that Russia was deeply involved in the 2016 election and intends to be involved in 2018.” Despite his stance, Sanders has also been constantly presented as another Russian agent, with the Washington Post (11/12/17) asking its readers, “When Russia interferes with the 2020 election on behalf of Democratic nominee Bernie Sanders, how will liberals respond?” The message is clear: The progressive wave rising across America is and will be a consequence of Russia, not of the failures of the system, nor of the Democrats.

It is not just politicians who have been smeared as Russian agents, witting or unwitting; virtually every major progressive movement challenging the system is increasingly dismissed in the same way. Multiple media outlets, including CNN (6/29/18), Slate (5/11/18), Vox (4/11/18) and the New York Times (2/16/18), have produced articles linking Black Lives Matter to the Kremlin, insinuating the outrage over racist police brutality is another Russian psyop. Others claimed Russia funded the riots in Ferguson and that Russian trolls promoted the Standing Rock environmental protests.

Meanwhile, Democratic insider Neera Tanden retweeted a description of Chelsea Manning as a “Russian stooge,” writing off her campaign for the Senate as “the Kremlin paying the extreme left to swing elections. Remember that.” Thus corporate media are promoting the idea that any challenge to the establishment is likely a Kremlin-funded astroturf effort.

The tactic has spread to Europe as well. After the poisoning of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal, the UK government immediately blamed Russia and imposed sanctions (without publicly presenting evidence). Jeremy Corbyn, the pacifist, leftist leader of the Labour Party, was uncharacteristically bellicose, asserting, “The Russian authorities must be held to account on the basis of the evidence and our response must be both decisive and proportionate.”

The British press was outraged—at Corbyn’s insufficient jingoism. The Sun‘s front page (3/15/18) attacked him as “Putin’s Puppet,” while the Daily Mail (3/15/18) went with “Corbyn the Kremlin Stooge.” As with Sanders, the fact that Corbyn endorsed the official narrative didn’t keep him from being attacked, showing that the conspiratorial mindset seeing Russia behind everything has little to do with evidence-based reality, and is increasingly a tool to demonize the establishment’s political enemies.

The Atlantic Council published a report claiming Greek political parties Syriza and Golden Dawn were not expressions of popular frustration and disillusionment, but “the Kremlin’s Trojan horses,” undermining democracy in its birthplace. Providing scant evidence, the report went on to link virtually every major European political party challenging the center, from right or left, to Putin. From Britian’s UKIP to Spain’s Podemos to Italy’s Five Star Movement, all are charged with being under one man’s control. It is this council that Facebook announced it was partnering with to help promote “trustworthy” news and weed out “untrustworthy” sources (FAIR.org, 5/21/18), as its CEO Mark Zuckerberg met with representatives from some of the largest corporate outlets, like the New York Times, CNN and News Corp, to help develop a system to control what content we see on the website.

The utility of this wave of suspicion is captured in Freeman’s aforementioned video. After asserting that “for 241 years, our democracy has been a shining example to the world of what we can all aspire to”—a tally that would count nearly a century of chattel slavery and almost another hundred years of de jure racial disenfranchisement—the actor explains that “Putin uses social media to spread propaganda and false information, he convinces people in democratic societies to distrust their media, their political process.”

The obvious implication is that the political process and media ought to be trusted, and would be trusted were it not for Putin’s propaganda. It was not the failures of capitalism and the deep inequalities it created that led to widespread popular resentment and movements on both left and right pressing for radical change across Europe and America, but Vladimir Putin himself. In other words, “America is already great.”

For the Democrats, Russiagate allows them to ignore calls for change and not scrutinize why they lost to the most unpopular presidential candidate in history. Since Russia hacked the election, there is no need for introspection, and certainly no need to accommodate the Sanders wing or to engage with progressive challenges from activists on the left, who are Putin’s puppets anyway. The party can continue on the same course, painting over the deep cracks in American society. Similarly, for centrists in Europe, under threat from both left and right, the Russia narrative allows them to sow distrust among the public for any movement challenging the dominant order.

For the state, Russiagate has encouraged liberals to forego their faculties and develop a state-worshiping, conspiratorial mindset in the face of a common, manufactured enemy. Liberal trust in institutions like the FBI has markedly increased since 2016, while liberals also now espouse a neocon foreign policy in Syria, Ukraine and other regions, with many supporting the vast increases in the US military budget and attacking Trump from the right.

For corporate media, too, the disciplining effect of the Russia narrative is highly useful, allowing them to reassert control over the means of communication under the guise of preventing a Russian “fake news” infiltration. News sources that challenge the establishment are censored, defunded or deranked, as corporate sources stoke mistrust of them. Meanwhile, it allows them to portray themselves as arbiters of truth. This strategy has had some success, with Democrats’ trust in media increasing since the election.

None of this is to say that Russia does not strive to influence other countries’ elections, a tactic that the United States has employed even more frequently (NPR, 12/22/16). Yet the extent to which the story has dominated the US media to the detriment of other issues is a remarkable testament to its utility for those in power.

In A Corporatist System Of Government, Corporate Censorship Is State Censorship

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

Last year, representatives of Facebook, Twitter, and Google were instructed on the US Senate floor that it is their responsibility to “quell information rebellions” and adopt a “mission statement” expressing their commitment to “prevent the fomenting of discord.”

“Civil wars don’t start with gunshots, they start with words,” the representatives were told. “America’s war with itself has already begun. We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America.”

Yes, this really happened.

Today [8/7] Twitter has silenced three important anti-war voices on its platform: it has suspended Daniel McAdams, the executive director of the Ron Paul Institute, suspended Scott Horton of the Scott Horton Show, and completely removed the account of prominent Antiwar.com writer Peter Van Buren.

I’m about to talk about the censorship of Alex Jones and Infowars now, so let me get the “blah blah I don’t like Alex Jones” thing out of the way so that my social media notifications aren’t inundated with people saying “Caitlin didn’t say the ‘blah blah I don’t like Alex Jones’ thing!” I shouldn’t have to, because this isn’t actually about Alex Jones, but here it is:

I don’t like Alex Jones. He’s made millions saying the things disgruntled right-wingers want to hear instead of telling the truth; he throws in disinfo with his info, which is the same as lying all the time. He’s made countless false predictions and his sudden sycophantic support for a US president has helped lull the populist right into complacency when they should be holding Trump to his non-interventionist campaign pledges, making him even more worthless than he was prior to 2016.

But this isn’t about defending Alex Jones. He just happens to be the thinnest edge of the wedge.

As of this writing, Infowars has been censored from Facebook, Youtube (which is part of Google), Apple, Spotify, and now even Pinterest, all within hours of each other. This happens to have occurred at the same time Infowars was circulating a petition with tens of thousands of signatures calling on President Trump to pardon WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange, who poses a much greater threat to establishment narratives than Alex Jones ever has. Assange’s mother also reports that this mass removal of Infowars’ audience occurred less than 48 hours after she was approached to do an interview by an Infowars producer.

In a corporatist system of government, wherein there is no meaningful separation between corporate power and state power, corporate censorship is state censorship. Because legalized bribery in the form of corporate lobbying and campaign donations has given wealthy Americans the ability to control the US government’s policy and behavior while ordinary Americans have no effective influence whatsoever, the US unquestionably has a corporatist system of government. Large, influential corporations are inseparable from the state, so their use of censorship is inseparable from state censorship.

This is especially true of the vast megacorporations of Silicon Valley, whose extensive ties to US intelligence agencies are well-documented. Once you’re assisting with the construction of the US military’s drone program, receiving grants from the CIA and NSA for mass surveillance, or having your site’s content regulated by NATO’s propaganda arm, you don’t get to pretend you’re a private, independent corporation that is separate from government power. It is possible in the current system to have a normal business worth a few million dollars, but if you want to get to billions of dollars in wealth control in a system where money translates directly to political power, you need to work with existing power structures like the CIA and the Pentagon, or else they’ll work with your competitors instead of you.

And yet every time I point to the dangers of a few Silicon Valley plutocrats controlling all new media political discourse with an iron fist, Democratic Party loyalists all turn into a bunch of hardline free market Ayn Rands. “It’s not censorship!” they exclaim. “It’s a private company and can do whatever it wants with its property!”

They do this because they know their mainstream, plutocrat-friendly “centrist” views will never be censored. Everyone else is on the chopping block, however. Leftist sites have already had their views slashed by a manipulation of Google’s algorithms, and it won’t be long before movements like BDS and Antifa and skeptics of the establishment Syria and Russia narratives can be made to face mass de-platforming on the same exact pretext as Infowars.

This is a setup. Hit the soft target so your oligarch-friendly censorship doesn’t look like what it is, then once you’ve manufactured consent, go on to shut down the rest of dissenting media bit by bit.

Don’t believe that’s the plan? Let’s ask sitting US Senator Chris Murphy:

“Infowars is the tip of a giant iceberg of hate and lies that uses sites like Facebook and YouTube to tear our nation apart,” Murphy tweeted in response to the news. “These companies must do more than take down one website. The survival of our democracy depends on it.”

That sure sounds an awful lot like the warnings issued to the Silicon Valley representatives on the Senate floor at the beginning of this article, no? This is headed somewhere dark.

We’re going to have to find a way to keep the oligarchs from having their cake and eating it too. Either (A) corporations are indeed private organizations separate from the government, in which case the people need to get money out of politics and government agencies out of Silicon Valley so they can start acting like it, and insist that their owners can’t be dragged out on to the Senate floor and instructed on what they can and can’t do with their business, or (B) these new media platforms get treated like the government agencies they function as, and the people get all the First Amendment protection that comes with it. Right now the social engineers are double-dipping in a way that will eventually give the alliance of corporate plutocrats and secretive government agencies the ability to fully control the public’s access to ideas and information.

If they accomplish that, it’s game over for humanity. Any hope of the public empowering itself over the will of a few sociopathic, ecocidal, omnicidal oligarchs will have been successfully quashed. We are playing for all the chips right now. We have to fight this. We have no choice.

Western Elites Decrying ‘Populism’ Betrays Fear of Democracy

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By Finian Cunningham

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

A new dreaded word has entered into official Western media speak: “Populism”. Political parties and governments which are deemed to be illegitimate are invariably labeled with the prefix “populist”. There is a vague implication that “populist” parties are imbued with disreputable politics of xenophobia, racism, nationalism and even fascism.

But who is doing the “deeming” here? It is establishment political parties and politicians who have the advantage of establishment news media organizations conveying their words and terminology.

Take French President Emmanuel Macron. He may have coined a new political party, En Marche, but he is nevertheless a politician very much of the prevailing Western establishment. He is pro-European Union as it currently operates, albeit with reforming tweaks; he is pro-NATO, pro-Atlanticist; and pro-neoliberal economic policies.

Recently, Macron decried the rise of “populist” parties across Europe. He compared them to the spread of “leprosy” and claimed they were posing a morbid threat to the conventional order of politics. Macron was referring in particular to the new coalition government in Italy, comprising the anti-establishment Five Star Movement and the League.

The French leader could also have been referring to any number of governments as seen in Austria, Hungary and other Central European states which, like the new Italian government, have challenged the EU’s official stance overEU irregular migration into the bloc.

In this context, the word “populist” as used by Macron and other establishment politicians has the connotation of “racist” or “inhumane” owing to the opposition towards the uncontrolled influx of people from outside Europe.

The “populist” prefix is often used alongside the term “far-right”. Again, the implication is that somehow the largely newcomer parties are something that should be abhorred because they are tarnished with alleged proclivities towards fascism and authoritarianism.

To reinforce that implied demonization, it is often cited by Western establishment politicians and media that the “populist” parties in Europe are aligned with Russian President Vladimir Putin, if not stealthily bankrolled by the Kremlin.

American President Donald Trump also qualifies as “populist” according to the US political and media establishment. Again, the word is loaded to infer a uniquely noxious quality in the Trump presidency and his supporters, in the same way that Democrat presidential rival Hillary Clinton once haughtily denigrated Trump and his voter base as “deplorable”. It’s a way of sanitizing the establishment from any past, and far greater, sins.

The P-word does not always mean “rightwing nationalism”. The recent elected Mexican President, Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, has been described in Western media as a “leftwing populist”.

In Italy, the main ruling coalition party, the Five Star Movement, headed by Luigi Di Maio, is associated with leftwing social policy.

Parties and politicians deemed to be “populist” are eclectic and defy an easy categorization, as their detractors would perhaps like to assign them. Certainly, there is a strong common stance of being opposed to uncontrolled immigration. But it is too simplistic to explain such a stance as merely xenophobic or racist.

There are legitimate and reasonable concerns that the issue of large-scale immigration has been exploited by ruling establishments and their ideological backers as a way to undermine national sovereignty and workers’ rights, from the consequent lowering of wages and employment conditions.

There is also the legitimate concern in Europe that the migration phenomenon has been largely created by illegal wars pursued by the US and its European NATO allies. Why should European member states and ordinary taxpayers have to incur financial and cultural integration problems that have been largely manufactured by ruling elites who have never been held to account for their criminal wars?

So-called populist parties are also opposed to the seemingly slavish adherence by the European political establishment to neoliberal capitalism. There is a legitimate popular backlash to economic policies which are oppressive and destructive, and whose sole priority seems to be satisfying the profits of Big Business and transnational capital. Why should European governments be held in hock to fiscal rules and debt limitations set arbitrarily by institutions seemingly under the diktat of private banks?

There are several fundamental issues that form a groundswell of popular opposition towards the conventional ways of governance, both in Europe and the US. The failings of neoliberal capitalism and its rich-get-richer racket is surely top of the grievance list. So too is relentless, irrational militarism by Western governments, unleashing illegal wars and massive refugee problems, as well as stoking unnecessary hostility towards other powers like Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.

The conventional politics, that is, the ruling establishments and their dutiful news media, are increasingly seen as incompetent, if not bankrupt. The establishment across Western countries has lost legitimacy and “moral authority” in the eyes of masses of people. That dwindling authority of the ruling class in Western states is the real, morbid concern.

One factor for this is the growth of global communications and “alternative” media sources, which Western publics are availing of to inform themselves independently from the old information monopolies that served the established order. That is why the “problem” of alleged “Russian influence” has been invented. In a desperate gambit to distract the masses from noticing the real problem, which is the crumbling of legitimacy for the Western establishment and its obedient political parties.

The looming fear among the ruling order is the ever-growing dissent among the populace. It is a fear of their own inherent failing and impending doom in the face of democratic challenge to power.

It is not so much that Trump or the new Italian government or Hungarian leader Viktor Orban, and so on, represent a vanguard for renewed democracy. These changes are merely symptoms of a deeper popular opposition to the established way of conducting politics – the order that has prevailed for most of the seven-decade period following the Second World War.

There has always been a wariness among ruling elites on both sides of the Atlantic towards a genuine democratic order breaking out, as Noam Chomsky discusses in his book ‘Deterring Democracy’. Western elites have typically viewed the masses as “rabble rousers” who are deemed to be “incapable” of governing society in the “proper way” that benefits the elites, protects their profits and property, and safeguards their imperial war-making overseas.

This underlying tension about the control of political power in Western societies encapsulates the present historical juncture where the word “populist” is being increasingly deployed. It is a term of disparagement by a failing Western establishment. What the failed order is trying to do is divert genuine popular challenge by painting it as something uncouth, vulgar, noxious, or manipulated by foreign enemies like Russia.

As American political analyst Randy Martin notes: “Populism is a convenient term for those in power who seek to isolate those who would want to share, or worse, take that power.”

When you think of the original meaning of the word – “the people” – it is starkly revealing what is really at stake for those elites who wield the “populist” term as a disparagement.

This Viral ‘Feel-Good’ Story Is Actually an Indictment of American Labor Hell

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By Luke O’Neil

Source: Observer

In what’s quickly become the feel-good story of the week, a young Alabama man named Walter Carr is being lauded across the country for his perseverance and indomitable spirit. It’s the type of story that can instill hope in a divided nation when it’s sorely needed and serve as inspiration for the rest of us that if you work hard enough and keep a positive attitude, good things will come to you. It also happens to be disgusting horse shit and an utter indictment of the brutal, indifferent hell of the nightmare capitalist wasteland we all suffer in. So, a bit of a mixed bag here. 

Carr, a 20-year-old college student, as nearly every news outlet has pointed out in sepia-tinted coverage—from CBS News and USA Today to the BBC—was set to start a new job on Saturday morning with the moving company Bellhops. At the last minute, his car broke down, and he was unable to find a ride from friends to get there. Instead, he decided to walk. He began the trek, which was roughly 20 miles from his home, at midnight, hoping to get there by 8 a.m. the next day to meet the rest of the movers. 

“I didn’t want to defeat myself,” Carr later told ABC News.

Along the way, around 4 a.m. in the morning, Carr, a young person of color, was stopped by local police officers, who, out of the kindness of their hearts, no doubt, asked him where he was headed. When he explained the situation—and after his story checked out—they decided to give him a ride the rest of the way, even going so far as to take him to breakfast.

“He was very polite. It was ‘yes sir’ and ‘no sir,”’ one of the officers later said. I bet he was!

When he arrived at the moving job a few hours later, complete with police escort, they explained the situation to Jenny Lamey, the woman who had hired the movers. Inspired by Carr’s work ethic and apparent decency, she shared the story on Facebook, where it soon went viral. 

The story eventually came to the attention of Bellhops CEO Luke Marklin, who arranged to meet Carr a few days later for a big surprise. 

“This is how you pay it forward… treat your employees with respect and incentivize them and bet you’ll get a much better worker for it,” wrote one commenter on Twitter. “It is awesome to see a young man not make an excuse like it’s too far to go to work, and then see him rewarded for it. Wish the young man and the company all the best in the future,” added another. 

It’s enough to drive you to tears. What kind of tears those are will probably depend on how susceptible you are to the lie at the heart of American capitalism and Horatio Alger nonsense.

Carr who set out the night before with a kitchen knife to protect against stray dogs on the walk, as he explained to The Washington Post, nonetheless floored everyone he encountered along the way. 

“He’s such a humble, kindhearted person,” Lamey said. “He’s really incredible. He said it was the way he was raised.”

“We set a really high bar for heart and grit and… you just blew it away,” Marklin told him, after gifting Carr his 2014 Ford Escape (barely-driven! as alabama.com reported). 

A GoFundMe set up by Lamey to help Carr with his car troubles has since raised almost $40,000. 

“Nothing is impossible unless you say it’s impossible,” she told the Post. 

Nothing except for paying workers an actual salary with benefits, which, you may not be surprised to hear, Bellhops does not do. Essentially Uber for movers, (Marklin came to the company from Uber), Bellhops relies on the labor of young college students, like Carr, who take jobs on a gig-by-gig basis. The company, which operates in dozens of cities around the country, and has raised tens of millions of dollars in rounds of funding since it was founded in 2011, pays movers between $13-16 an hour. 

“It’s a transitional job,” CEO Cameron Doody told BuzzFeed News in a story from 2015. “It’s not a career.”

Alabama, incidentally, is also only one of five states that has traditionally never spent any state money on public transportation. 

Naturally, Bellhops are very proud of themselves, and have been reveling in the attention. You probably didn’t know the company existed before yesterday, and may be thinking about contracting their services in the future now. Win win. 

“I want people to know this—no matter what the challenge is, you can break through the challenge,” Carr, who also wants to become a Marine some day, said of his story. 

“Nothing is impossible unless you make it impossible,” he added. “You can do anything you set your mind to. I’ve got God by my side. I’m really emotional right now trying to hold back the tears.”

It’s a heartwarming reminder that, much like with getting sick or injured in America, which needs to be done in a tragic but endearing enough way to go viral so people will pay your medical bills, all you have to do to make it in this beautiful country is have your life fall apart in such a way that the news wants to write about it, then hope the benign feudal lords will see fit to offer you as an aspirational example to the rest of us so we remain compliant.

Russiagate is a Ruling Class Diversion

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By Glen Ford

Source: Black Agenda Report

“Trump supporters see themselves as a distinct and independent force in the nation — the saviors of America, in their diseased minds — and they now hate the Democratic Party in a far deeper way than before.”

So this is what we can look forward to in the long twilight of a shrinking U.S. empire: the shrieks of a delirious ruling class, concocting endless diversions from the central reality of late-stage capitalism’s inability to offer the people anything but widening wars and deepening austerity. The Lords of Capital have led us to a dark yet insanely cacophonous realm, a throbbing madhouse din. “Traitor!” scream the minions of corporate communications, calling for the blood of the corporate government’s orange-branded CEO — a no longer exceptional spectacle for the self-proclaimed exceptional nation.

Donald Trump is, indeed, a kind of traitor to the Washington Consensus, a hyper-militarized capitalist utopia of corporate dominated global supply chains that doubled the international wage-slave workforce in the last two decades of the 20th century and herded these desperate billions into a race to the bottom. The leadership of both corporate parties conspired to force U.S. workers into the global meat-grinder. Democrat Bill Clinton inflicted NAFTA on his party’s wage-earning base and, two decades later, Democrat Barack Obama tried, but failed, to pass the even more devastating Trans Pacific Partnership corporate trade and governance bill. Donald Trump captured the Republican Party by feeding its base the overt racist rhetoric they crave, rather than the more polite “dog whistle” menu cultivated by White Man’s Party politicians since Richard Nixon. With the indispensable assistance of Democrat-oriented corporate media and the Democratic National Committee — both of which saw Trump as the most easily beatable Republican — Trump trounced the entire GOP presidential wanna-be menagerie to seize the reins of half the electoral duopoly, and carried a majority of white voters – including white women — in the general election.

“Global supply chains doubled the international wage-slave workforce in the last two decades of the 20thcentury and herded these desperate billions into a race to the bottom.”

It was not Trump’s flaming racism that made him a traitor to his class and to the empire. One of the U.S. duopoly parties has always played the role of White Man’s Party, with white supremacy as its organizing principle. Were it not for endemic, fervent, nationwide white racism, the most reactionary wing of the U.S. ruling class would have no effective electoral base. Trump simply serves up a stronger brew of white supremacist elixir for the good ole boys and girls. His heresy – precipitating the crisis in ruling class politics — was to rhetorically oppose “free trade” and U.S. “regime change” policies, and to call for normalizing relations with Russia. “Free trade” — a euphemism for the unfettered ability of the ruling class to move money and jobs wherever it chooses on the planet – and the “exceptional” right of U.S. imperialism to remove and replace sovereign governments at will, are the pillars of the Washington Consensus. Donald Trump became anathema to the Lords of Capital and their servants in the national security “deep state,” who crowded into Hillary Clinton’s Democratic tent, where Russiagate was invented out of whole cloth.

Again, racism was not Trump’s unpardonable sin, although it plays into the strategies of the (financial and high tech) ruling class sectors at the helm of the Democratic Party, whose own electoral organizing principle is an anemic anti-racism, a phony politics of “inclusion” that welcomes representatives of minority populations to help enforce the race-to-the-bottom and to join in the general capitalist plunder. Trump’s howling racism was what made Democrats believe he was the ideal candidate for a trouncing by Hillary Clinton, who could be counted on to escalate Barack Obama’s general military offensive and to aggressively pursue TPP and other corporate governance arrangements. (Only fools believed Clinton’s late switch, opposing TPP.) When Clinton lost, the ruling class panicked and resolved to bring down the Orange Menace no matter the cost to U.S. institutions and to the appearance of stability in the very bosom of the empire. The rolling coup was begun.

“Trump’s heresy – precipitating the crisis in ruling class politics — was to rhetorically oppose ‘free trade’ and U.S. ‘regime change’ policies, and to call for normalizing relations with Russia.”

Black folks think the crisis is about race. It is – and it isn’t. If the ruling class, including those that fund and run the Democratic Party, were really concerned about Black people’s rights, they would have challenged Trump’s election victory based on blatant Black voter suppression in key Midwest states. As Greg Palast pointed out, the Republican “Crosscheck” scheme fraudulently and illegally purged 449,000 disproportionately Black voters from the rolls in Michigan, alone — about 40 times larger than Trump’s 10,700-vote margin of victory. Yet, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats only reluctantly joined in Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s recount action, and the first words out of Black Congressman John Lewis’s mouth when the polls closed in November were “Russia…Russia…Russia.” Republicans have been stealing elections through Black voter suppression in broad daylight since 2000, but only one Democratic senator and one congresswoman — California’s Barbara Boxer and Ohio Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, in 2004 – have in this century challenged the thefts . Black voter suppression has been part of the gentlemen’s agreement between the two corporate parties. Rich white people do not plunge the system into crisis for the sake of Black voting rights, or any Black rights at all, including the right to life. But the Lords of Capital will roll the dice on the fate of all humanity to preserve and expand their global dominion and the military machine that is their only remaining advantage. Their survival as a class is at stake. Trump must go because he cannot be depended on to preserve the Washington Consensus — the imperial project.

“Republicans have been stealing elections through Black voter suppression in broad daylight since 2000.”

Trump’s racism did factor into the ruling class decision to oust him from the White House, but not in the way that most people believe. Donald Trump proved that his white base is more enthusiastic to support a candidate that affirms white supremacist “values” (yes, that’s what they value most) than they are about maintaining an aggressive military posture everywhere in the world. They did not blink or budge when Trump denigrated NATO, opposed regime change and U.S. efforts at “nation-building” (a euphemism for prolonged military occupation of other peoples), and called for better relations with Russia. These same voters were presumed to be the most militaristic cohort in the nation, dependable fodder to elect fire-breathing war hawks. But clearly, Trump’s base — composed of a majority of whites – cares more about white supremacy in the U.S. than waging endless wars abroad. And, they either hate “free trade,” or don’t care enough about it either way to abandon their White Man’s President.

The national security state, the military industrial complex and the oligarchs whose interests the empire defends were forced to confront the reality, that their presumed prime constituency was not nearly as gung-ho for war as previously assumed. How, then, to continue the “generational” War on Terror (war of imperial conquest)? Answer: Make Russia a clear and present danger, aided and abetted by “useful idiots” (like BAR), domestically.

Trump still retains the support of his white majority. Most importantly, these white supremacists feel affirmed, as “a people,” by his presence, and what they perceive as Trump’s loyalty to them. They are feeling “Great Again.” And they are reveling in their national strength, as a bloc. That’s why they seem unmovable. This re-energized, aggressively white supremacist, intensely self-aware White Man’s Party will assert its permanent, militant and very large presence in the U.S. political spectrum, no matter what happens to Donald Trump. Other politicians, with billions to spend, will appeal to this majority bloc of whites, after Trump leaves the scene. They see themselves as a distinct and independent force in the nation — the saviors of America, in their diseased minds — and they now hate the Democratic Party in a far deeper way than before, when it was perceived as too concerned with Blacks and other “minorities.” Hillary Clinton turned a new chapter when she called Trump voters “deplorables” — a kind of white trash, but connoting moral degeneracy, transcending financial condition. The “witch-hunt” against Trump is perceived as an elite mob out to lynch the “deplorables” — or, at the least, to decertify them as decent Americans.

“This re-energized, aggressively white supremacist, intensely self-aware White Man’s Party will assert its permanent, militant and very large presence in the U.S. political spectrum, no matter what happens to Donald Trump.”

The Democrats can forget about ever getting back most of these self-aware white supremacist voters, but the establishment corporate Republicans that Trump crushed in winning the GOP nomination will not win back his followers’ allegiance unless they become more like Trump, i.e. more blatantly white supremacist. Which is decidedly not the corporate way, in the 21st century. Thus, corporate America, wedded as it is to a “diversity” doctrine that means little to the masses of Black people but is a red flag to the White Man’s Party “deplorables,” will be forced to identify more publicly with the Democrats, or pretend to be apolitical.

The Trump phenomena — and the resultant ruling class hysteria — has stolen the corporations’ option to pose as “non-partisan” actors in U.S. politics. They are forced deeper into the Democratic camp, creating further contradictions for the “inclusive” party, which must ultimately answer to a more clearly defined — and also more self-aware – constituency of the “left,” most broadly speaking, if it is to preserve the duopoly. This other half of the country, slightly bigger than Trump’s white majority base, is composed of a minority of whites, virtually all Blacks, and large majorities of Latinos and other minorities. It is way to the left of the Democratic Party and roiling with economic demands that the Lords of Capital will not, and cannot, fulfill while keeping on the path of a global race-to-the-bottom and deepening austerity, enforced by endless wars.

“Corporate America, wedded as it is to a ‘diversity’ doctrine that means little to the masses of Black people but is a red flag to the White Man’s Party ‘deplorables,’ will be forced to identify more publicly with the Democrats.”

Therefore, there must be Russiagate hysteria — or some other fictitious obsession — primarily to divert the attentions of the “left” half of the electorate, most of which is broadly social democratic (the Black component is the most left-leaning, and peace-oriented). If the duopoly were to collapse, and the various cohorts of the U.S. political spectrum were reorganized along ideological lines, the two biggest parties would be the Trumpist White Man’s party and a social democratic party with a platform to the left of 2016 Bernie Sanders, with the (rightwing) Democrats and establishment Republicans coming together in an avowedly “centrist” party, the smallest of the three. Space would also be created for more radical and libertarian politics.

The ruling class is determined to prevent such a scenario from occurring, and thus needs a permanent, all-consuming diversion. But the Russiagate hysteria — or something else like it — cannot be maintained indefinitely; U.S. political structures cannot withstand such an institutional assault by the ruling class, itself.

The Lords of Capital are caught in the contradiction. To save the corporate state, they are besieging the corporate state, with no vision or timetable for the outcome.

 

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com

Email Hacking Was ‘Pearl Harbor,’ Helsinki Presidency’s ‘New Low’: Welcome to the United States of Amnesia

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By Jim Naureckas and Janine Jackson

Source: FAIR 

The media maelstrom around the Helsinki meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin obscures at least one point of view: that it’s possible to believe that Russia intervened in the 2016 election on behalf of Trump without thinking that this is remotely comparable to Pearl Harbor, as Politico (7/16/18) declared, or “the worst attack on America since 9/11,” as a Washington Postheadline (2/18/18) claimed earlier this year.

Not saying it doesn’t make it less true that both Russia and the United States frequently interfere in other countries’ elections—the US somewhat more frequently, according to a database of electoral interventions maintained by a political scientist at Carnegie Mellon. That’s a lot of Pearl Harbors.

In 1996, Time magazine published a cover story (7/15/96) headlined “Yanks to the Rescue: The Secret Story of How American Advisers Helped Yeltsin Win.” Russian President Boris Yeltsin, you may recall, embraced the idea pushed by Western advisors that what the Russian economy needed was “shock therapy,” a policy that resulted in the country losing about a third of its GDP. Yeltsin also created the model for the authoritarian post-Soviet Russia we have today, notably when he called out the military to shell the Russian parliament—just one of many examples that make clear that the difference between US and Russian electoral interference is not that “we” intervene on the side of democracy.

What justified concern there could be is undermined rather than served by airily ahistorical claims like that of a Washington Post op-ed by Garry Kasparov (7/17/18): “The Helsinki Summit Marks a New Low in the History of the US Presidency.” Suffice to say there are millions who disagree that Trump failing to acknowledge that he had Russian help in getting elected is worse than Bush Jr. invading Iraq, Reagan arming death squads in Central America, worse than Nixon bombing Cambodia, or Truman dropping atomic bombs on civilians, or FDR rounding up Japanese-Americans or, well,  worse than the deliberate separation of children from their families at the southern border. A conversation without that perspective is hardly worth having. Should we talk about electoral interference? Sure. But we don’t have to be led by media who are outraged at Moscow doing things that never bothered them when they were done by Washington—“It’s different cuz it’s us” is not really a moral principle—or whose concern about “foreign” interference in US elections is orders of magnitude greater than that around the interference represented by anti-black and anti-poor voter suppression, inaccessible polling places or partisan gerrymandering.

Unsouling From the Wilderness

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By Kingsley L. Dennis

Source: Waking Times

“Crazy Horse dreamed and went into the world where there is nothing but the spirits of all things. That is the real world that is behind this one, and everything we see here is something like a shadow from that one.” ~Black Elk, Black Elk Speaks

“Modern man, I dutifully noted, is in search of a soul, and the age is an age of longing.” ~Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends

Perhaps the reason some of us are feeling a sense of loss and longing is that we are, as Black Elk informs us, living in the shadow world. Our reality on this side may only be the fleeting ghosts of a place that is more real somewhere else. On this side we have broken our commitment to the earth and have unsouled ourselves from the wilderness. By the first century CE, the essayist Plutarch was asking, “Why is it that the gods are no longer speaking to us?”

For a long time now, we have been trying to create a new and different image of ourselves. It is an image where modern humanity is placed at the center of its own universe. We learn by observing, probing, experimenting, and finally dissecting and destroying the dynamic world we live within. From this, the modern mind started to develop a new reality for itself.

The collective reality in which we now reside does not take kindly to opposing perspectives. We have inherited an alienated consciousness that views the world as an outside entity – a world of objects that move in mechanical motion. This alienated consciousness has substituted the enchantment and mystery of living within a dynamic and animated world with a dream of the artificial, and ultimately the unreal. The modern landscape is now more scattered with administration than adventure. The central image of our modern age has been that of consumerism: the ability of the average person to buy the material goods they require in order to have a decent standard of living. A standard of living albeit promoted to us through our mainstream media and glamorous propaganda.

Only recently have some of us come to realize that consumerism has now become a contemporary form of crash therapy for unsatisfied people wanting to buy their way into happiness to escape from the very system they are simultaneously supporting. The easy acquisition of things has become more about trying to cover up anxiety as a substitute for contentment. Modern life, especially in the highly-developed West, is now rife with people parading their false selves in place of authenticity.

The modern history of the West has been about the removal of mystery, mind, and magic from the world around us. In the past there were realms of wilderness that existed outside of the social order, and each culture had these ‘wild zones’ where people danced with the little folk in the woods, undertook initiations in caves, circles, and hard-to-find corners. There were pagan rituals, crazy ecstasies, and unknown zones where primal energies were released. These were the places of wilderness, where dreamtime reigned, and clock-time was banned. And now these wild places are fewer and fewer as a new ‘reality order’ becomes the manifesto of the day. Now it is many of us who are feeling haunted. We have lost the presence of the ‘transcendent’ within our modern societies.

We must now recognize that something has happened – a break, a mutation, has occurred that has placed us in an ‘intermediate’ stage between eras. Modern life is being not so much rewritten as reconfigured. We are seeing odd things occurring in relation to time, speed, and distance. It’s as if right now the clock, and our sense of timing, is malfunctioning. This ahistorical period is out of time, until it resets itself. And here, the possibility of transcendence lingers like a phantasma.

We are in a time of carnivalesque distortion where ‘fast food’ is a parody of our normal food preparation and consumption; mediatized sport is a spectacle of its original form; and the music industry is one huge commercial carnival that mocks genuine creativity. In the pop music industry, the spectacle, the live show – the ‘carnival performance’ – is often more important than the actual merit of the song (even when the performer mimes, as they often do). We are in a different world right now – or at least a seemingly different reality.

In this new world of different relations, symbols, and meanings we have become unmoored from our harbors. We are talking about the fractal, the quantum, the molecular, the nano, the bots, artificial intelligence, and the singularity – yet we find we have no soulful connection with any of these terms or their significances. Perhaps we have entered a void-time.

The Sense of the Void

With human life having lost its reference to transcendence and the notion of the sacred, there is the ever-present danger that we may descend to a form of human morality that lacks any real meaning or higher principles. It is not hard to believe that a degree of inertia has crept into our modern societies. The result is that many of us may now be finding ourselves with a hollow space inside. This space becomes the perfect seedbed for the consuming desires, distractions, and attractions of modernity’s excesses. Within such an environment we wonder whether we may find ourselves waking up to a world where the dream is still dreaming itself and we can no longer distinguish what is real.

An age of the quantifiable has been ushered in and everyone, and everything, gets given a mark or a measurement. Ever since the industrial age brought in the points system – the marking scores – into mass education we’ve been carrying numbers around with us. Before then, students were known as apprentices and they spent time embedded in their discipline learning its skills. They either learnt great skills or they didn’t; now they get an 85, a 78, a 66, or a 45. Now all modern institutions think in numbers and our social status is quantified by such numbers, or grades, that allow us into other specialized zones – such as the members clubs, the elite institutions, or even into the ‘good credit’ rating books. The organic nature and capacity of a person has been stripped down to the quantifiable, and this measures the worth of an individual according to such grades. These associated numbers then follow the person around for the rest of their lives, influencing their careers, associations, and social freedoms. Society is now painting-by-numbers.

The mesmerizing void that is modern life tries to appease us with simulated pleasures. Through our unsouling from the greater transcendent wilderness we have become all too easily appeased by seeking inadequate answers to life’s meaning. By not seeking for the essential, we cannot hope to be anything other than temporary. Within the past century millions of people in developed parts of the world have distanced and divorced themselves from nature. We are negotiating how to adapt to a world structured within an increasingly artificial environment. The mutational shift is well underway, and new arrangements will need to be sought.

A potential lack of understanding can disconnect us from a world that is at the same time becoming increasingly connected. For thousands of years our ancestors lived alongside natural forces, learning from environmental cycles, and reading the world around them. This uncoupling from the wilderness is not only in favor of urban settings but eventually artificially constructed settings that will soon be made ‘smart.’ The profusion of what are called ‘mega-cities’ are set to implement ‘smart’ technologies which will be a combination of connected information and communication infrastructures.

A Moment of Reflection

We are, it is said, the most highly-developed and articulate species on planet Earth, and yet we live in a world of reflections. We are doomed never to be able to see directly our own faces. Our face, as well as our ‘true face’ as they say, is non-visible to us; and so we are guided by reflections and their appearances.

There is a short-story from Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges entitled ‘Fauna of Mirrors’ that tells of a time during the reign of the Yellow Emperor when the world of mirrors and the world of men were not, like today, cut off from one another.[i] Both kingdoms lived in harmony and each could come and go through the mirrors. Yet one night the mirror people invaded the earth and a mighty battle ensued until finally the magic arts of the Yellow Emperor prevailed. The mirror people were pushed back and imprisoned into their mirrors, and punished by being forced to repeat, as if in a dream, all the actions of the world of men. They were stripped of their power and their forms and reduced to mere reflections. A day will come, however, when the magic spell will be broken and little by little these reflections will awaken and will slowly differ from us. Then they will stop imitating the world of humans and eventually they will break through the glass once again to enter the earth.

They say that life imitates art far more than art imitates life. Upon reflection, every culture and society claim a portion of our private psyche as its own. With the narrowing of our sensibilities comes not only a much-diminished reality but also a contracted perspective whereby this condensed form of perception and visibility becomes as hyperreality to us. If it’s true that modern life has muffled the call of transcendental mystery, then it is equally true that it has made transcendence both a more needed and yet more difficult promise. The cry for the ‘death of the soul’ and the unsouling from the wilderness has helped to pave the slippery path toward a simplified hyperreality that is now stealing the show. Fasten seatbelts…

A Bardo Chat with: Aranyani, Hindu Goddess of the Forests 

Author (A): Hello Aranyani. Are you there?

Aranyani (Ai): (short pause) Hello…hello!

A: Hello Aranyani. How are you today?

Ai: Today? Why today? I don’t have days like you do.

A: Ah yes, sorry. I was thinking in my own terms of time. It’s a frequent trap!

Ai: That’s okay, we understand. Traps are there to break out of. I am good, thank you. I am well.

A: That is good to hear. I am glad to know you are well amidst all this disconnection going on right now.

Ai: Disconnection? I am gently strolling through my forests. There is no disconnection (another short pause). All is well here.

A: Sorry, I should have been more specific. I meant disconnection between us, humans, and the natural world. It seems that we’ve done a terrible job of respecting Nature and our environment.

Ai: Mmm, yes, that is so. I am not fond of strolling too near to your civilizations. But why do you call it a job? You see, already you show a wrong way to look at things. Your way of words shows how your mind thinks. Looking after the natural world, as you put it, is not a ‘job.’ It is a recognition of respect, or mutual interdependence, and of compassion and love.

A: Sorry again. I know that I use my words too loosely. It is the way we use phrases here.

Ai: Yes, I know how your species is. For one thing, you don’t listen at all very well. You consider yourselves as a separate species. My dear, nothing is separate. You see space between bodies and you label this as separation. You think and behave like children, and Nature is your forgiving mother.

A: I know, we’ve got a lot of things back-to-front. Would you care to explain more on this relationship?

Ai: (a soft sigh) Maybe a little. Everything communicates here, it always has. You don’t necessarily need a mouth or words or letters to communicate. It all communicates energetically, and you humans are also attuned to this. Every part was supposed to work together. You are strange in that you forgot how to properly listen. And now you build devices outside of yourselves to wrap around the earth – but you don’t need them. And there will be a time when you shall know this, and learn to communicate correctly, as you were always meant to – and not with your machine things. All of nature is alive, don’t you know that?

A: Yes, some of us do; but not enough, unfortunately.

Ai: You knew better before, a long time ago.

A: Yes, I have a feeling we did. Yet we now need to learn how to know in a different way.

Ai: Well….. (long pause)

A: Hello, are you there Aranyani?

Ai: Oh yes, sorry, I was dancing. I have a tune in my head. It’s been given to me from the trees.

A: Wonderful! I was saying that we need to learn how to know in a different way.

Ai: That’s not really how it is. Learning, knowing, and all these things – it’s all head stuff. You live too much in your heads. You always think you need to grab onto something – to know better, and the like. I would say you have to open up more, and to remember everything that was placed inside you. You are coming to a different place now…

A: Yes, thank you. And what do you mean by ‘coming to a different place’?

Ai: I mean you are not in your little tribal units anymore. You are now all over the earth. You grew and connected as you should, and now you are coming to a time when you can really be of help to the earth.

A: You mean as a global species?

Ai: (laughs) You and your fancy words. Yes, you are connecting more strongly with the body of Gaia now. Soon you will find your minds being changed for you. That should be fun!

A: Ah, and what do you mean by that?

Ai: (hums to herself) I don’t feel I should reveal too much just now. Not too many of you have realized that your minds are attuned to Gaia, your planet consciousness. Consciousness is not only those thoughts in your head, silly! (laughs). This is the true language, the natural language, and it is everywhere. This language flows through the trees, the plants, the animals, and through all of Gaia. There is a language that connects, and the humans are disconnected from this. Yes, that is the true disconnection. You talk about disconnect from Nature, but really it is disconnection from your shared language. You speak in tongues but only babble silly words.

A: Yes, true – we do babble a lot.

Ai: Babble, babble, yes you do! Like that story you tell yourselves. You call it the Tower of Babel, right?

A: Yes, that’s true. And it’s a perfect analogy. We tried to build a tower to our Creator and we ended up being divided in languages through our ignorance.

Ai: Yes, that’s it right there. You were disconnected through your ignorance.

A: Mm…yes (sighs)

Ai: Don’t worry, dear. You still have it all inside of you. Your connection to Origin and the universal language is still there. And you are not disconnected from us either. You are always with us, and you always have been.

A: Okay, sure. And thanks. But by being with you always are we not making the balance of Nature worse?

Ai: Oh, dear ones – it’s always about you, isn’t it!? Let me tell you that Nature is far more capable of taking care of herself than you are. Things change, yes. And you are making a mess and not clearing up your mess, like children. This is true too. Yet so many more things come to pass that are not in your hands – that is Nature. She is so far beyond your comprehension of her. You think of these separate things within Nature, like the trees and the forests, and the rivers. But you cannot yet see them as being all together as a wondrous Being. She is a Being far beyond your little minds. And she cares for you. Little children, wake up!

A: Yes, yes.

Ai: Be more joyful and love the things you have, and which surround you. The disconnection you speak of is less from Nature and more from yourselves (starts to sing)

A: That is so true – thank you.

Ai: I have to go now…byeee (voice fades into distance)

A: Yes, thank you Aranyani – bye!

 

About the Author

Kingsley L. Dennis is the author of The Phoenix Generation: A New Era of Connection, Compassion, and Consciousness, and The Sacred Revival: Magic, Mind & Meaning in a Technological Age, available at Amazon. Visit him on the web at http://www.kingsleydennis.com/.

References:

[i] See his short-story collection The Book of Imaginary Beings.

Nicaragua Defeats The Not-So-Soft Coup

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Statue of national hero Augusto Sandino at the central park of his hometown, Niquinohomo.

By Stephen Sefton

Source: Popular Resistance

The author, Stephen Sefton, is a writer from the Tortilla Con Sal Collective in Nicaragua. Sefton was the guest on Clearing The FOG Radio this week where we discussed What’s Really Happening In Nicaragua. The show examined the groups behind the violent coup that is occurring, and according to the report below, failing in Nicaragua. It also examines some of the many false stories about what is going on in Nicaragua, e.g. that the coup is nonviolent, that it is student-led, that Ortega is in league with the capitalist class, that the US is not behind the coup attempt. Sefton describes how reality has been turned on its head and reports in the US corporate media and the Nicaraguan media which is controlled by oligarchs and funded by the US National Endowment for Democracy. We hope Sefton is right that the coup is being defeated in time for the July 19th celebration of the 39th anniversary of their historic 1979 defeat of the Somoza dictatorship. KZ and MF

July 19 will be a massive celebration of the coup’s defeat and a categorical vindication of President Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista government’s efforts for peace in Nicaragua.

On July 19, hundreds of thousands of people from across Nicaragua will converge on the capital Managua to celebrate the 39th anniversary of their historic 1979 defeat of the Somoza dictatorship. The event takes place as the authorities continue to liberate communities blockaded by roadblocks operated by armed opposition activists whose not-so-soft coup attempt against the Sandinista government, begun on April 18, has failed. Ever since April 21, when President Daniel Ortega called for a process of National Dialogue to peacefully resolve opposition demands, Nicaragua’s political opposition and their allies have worked to sabotage talks for a negotiated solution. They have regularly staged extremely violent provocations falsely seeking to portray the government as being wholly responsible for the crisis and demanding President Ortega’s resignation.

Early in July, the opposition reneged on an agreement to dismantle the roadblocks their armed supporters have used since late April to try to destroy the country’s economy and intimidate the general population. On July 9, the government declared it would no longer permit the opposition to abuse the population’s basic rights to peace and security, stating: “Faced with the daily suffering imposed on Nicaragua’s families, who since April 18 have suffered violence from terrorists who have murdered, tortured and kidnapped hundreds of citizens, the same terrorists that have burned and destroyed hundreds of families’ homes, public buildings, small- and medium-sized businesses, such that the state is bound to act in accordance with the law to guarantee the right of its citizens to live in peace, with security and respect for the human rights enshrined in our political constitution, in the charters of international organizations and in human rights conventions.”

Opposition Violence

Subsequently, Nicaragua’s national police have worked with local communities around the country to clear the opposition roadblocks. In Jinotepe, they set free hundreds of trucks and their drivers held hostage by opposition gangs for over a month. In many places, it has been possible to negotiate agreements to remove the roadblocks peacefully. Elsewhere, the process has involved violence and casualties provoked by very well-armed activists and associated paid criminals resisting the authorities’ efforts to restore freedom of movement. On July 13 in Managua, two opposition activists were killed during the clearance of blockades in and around the National Autonomous University.

Elsewhere, on July 12, opposition activists from roadblocks operated by Francisca Ramirez and Medardo Mairena’s anti-Canal movement infiltrated an opposition peace march in the town of Morrito, on the eastern shore of Lake Nicaragua, on the highway to the Rio San Juan. They attacked a police post and the local municipal office, murdering four police officers and a primary school teacher, wounding four municipal workers and kidnapping nine police officers. Subsequently, that evening the police officers were set free, six of them with injuries.

Tortured & Murdered

In Masaya, opposition activists tortured, murdered and burned police officer Gabriel Vado Ruiz and would have done the same to another police officer, Rodrigo Barrios Flores, had he not escaped from his captors after enduring two days of torture and abuse. Although the extreme violence of the armed opposition activists has been responsible directly and indirectly for almost all the loss of life and injuries during the crisis, international news media and human rights organizations continue to falsely blame the government for virtually all the deaths and people injured. Amnesty International and fellow coup apologists such as Bianca Jagger and SOS Nicaragua, along with their allies in corporate media such as the Guardian, Telegraph, Washington Post, New York Times, Al Jazeera, CNN,  BBC, all cover up very serious human rights violations by the opposition activists during the failed attempted coup against Nicaragua’s legitimate government.

However, abundant audiovisual and photographic material exists providing irrefutable evidence of systematic human rights violations practiced by Nicaragua’s political opposition. From the the start, on April 18, the armed opposition offensive has manipulated legitimate peaceful protest so as to give cover to a very deliberate campaign of violence and deceit, promoting a climate of fear and casting blame on the government so as to create a psychosis of hatred, polarizing Nicaraguan society. The campaign’s objective is to make impossible a negotiated solution to the crisis provoked by the political opposition. Over the weekend of July 13-15, events in Nicaragua showed how refined the techniques of psychological warfare have become.

Misrepresenting & Exaggerating

The political opposition have used social media to misrepresent and exaggerate events, create incidents that never happened and obliterate their own criminal terrorist attacks. For example, the crisis in Nicaragua began with a fake ‘student massacre’ that never took place. Now Nicaragua’s opposition have faked attacks on a church in Managua, exaggerated casualties during the clearance of opposition thugs from the national university and covered up their own deliberate murders of police in Morrito and Masaya, as well as their gratuitous attacks on peaceful Sandinista demonstrators. In the national university, the opposition gangs also set fire to a classroom module and destroyed a preschool facility on the university campus.

Right from the start of the crisis, the opposition have expertly staged phony scenes of students taking cover from gunfire and used those images to justify their own savage attacks, like those in which they burned down pro-government Nuevo Radio Ya and CARUNA, the rural cooperatives’ savings and loan institution. Photographs show opposition journalists and photographers filming opposition activists pretending to be attacked, but despite the obvious fakery, those false stories get published uncritically in international corporate and alternative media. Nicaragua provides a textbook case study bearing out the work of analysts such as Cuba’s Randy Falcon, who has emphasized how new technologies exponentially multiply the digital reproduction of longstanding conventional propaganda motifs.

Propaganda Ploys

In Nicaragua, the government has in several cases negotiated agreements to clear armed opposition roadblocks, only to find that the opposition refuse to honor the agreements. The extremist political opposition are desperate to keep up their violence so as to sabotage efforts at National Dialogue and project the false image of a repressive government without popular support. Large demonstrations across the country supporting the government’s efforts for peace show exactly the reverse is true. Majority national opinion in Nicaragua is well aware of the opposition’s propaganda ploys and false claims.

Within Nicaragua, the opposition hardly bother to conceal their invention and artifice because their false political theater is staged almost entirely to impress overseas opinion. Their sinister cynical theater aims to set the scene for the Organization of American States to change its previously moderate position on Nicaragua and give the U.S. government an institutional pretext on which to intensify sanctions against Nicaragua’s government and its people. Even so, despite probable opposition attempts to sabotage it, July 19 will be a massive celebration of the coup’s defeat and a categorical vindication of President Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista government’s efforts for peace in Nicaragua.