Tag Archives: Plutocracy

Our Political Parties Are Obsolete

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

When the parties do finally implode, the general mood will be: good riddance.

History informs us that once something is obsolete, it can disappear far faster than anyone expected. While we generally think of obsoleted technologies vanishing, social and political systems can become obsolete as well.

Should a poor soul who entered a deep coma a year ago awaken today, we must forgive his/her astonishment at the political wreckage left by the 2016 election. The Democratic Party, a mere year ago an absurdly over-funded machine confident in an easy victory in the presidential race, is now a complete shambles: its leadership in free-fall, its Fat-Cat donors disgusted, and its demented intoxication with pinning collaboration with Russia on the Trump camp eroding whatever feeble legacy legitimacy it still holds. What the party stands for is a mystery, as its Elites are clearly beholden to insiders, special interests and Corporate donors while glorifying the worst excesses of globalism and the National Security State’s endless war on civil liberties.

The newly awakened citizen would also marvel at the chaotic war zone of the Republican Party, in which the Insider Warlords are battling insurgent Outsiders, while the same Elites that fund the Democratic machine are wondering what they’re buying with their millions of dollars in contributions, for it’s unclear what the Republican Party stands for: it’s for Small Government, except when it’s for Bigger Government, which is 95% of the time; it’s for more law enforcement and the militarization of local police, and more intrusion into the lives of the citizenry; it’s for stricter standards for welfare, except for Corporate Welfare; it’s for tax reform, except the thousands of pages of give-aways, loopholes and tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations all remain untouched, and so on: a smelly tangle of special interests masked by a few sprays of PR air freshener to the millions left behind by the globalization that has so enriched Corporate America and the class of financier-owners, bankers, insiders and technocrats–the same group that funds and controls both political parties.

Political parties arose to consolidate centralized control of the central state.We have now reached the perfection of this teleology: the political elites and the financial elites are now one class. In our pay-to-play “democracy,” only the votes of wealth and institutional power count.

As I have often noted here, the returns on centralization are diminishing to less than zero. The initial returns on centralizing capital, production and social-political power were robust, but now the centralized cartel-state is eating its own tail, masking its financial bankruptcy by borrowing from the future, and cloaking its political bankruptcy behind the crumbling facades of the legacy parties.

Now that technology has enabled decentralized currency, markets and governance, the centralized political parties are obsolete. They are the political equivalent of buggy whips, and those holding tight to the fantasy that their current dissolution will magically be transformed into unity by some future leadership will be disappointed.

The fragmentation of the political parties is not temporary–it is permanent. As I discussed yesterday, political and social fragmentation are the consequence of economic fragmentation–these are self-reinforcing dynamics, as fragmentation in one feeds fragmentation in the others.

Those who have gotten rich inside the bloated machinery of the parties will never accept their era has ended. The dreams of private jets and millions of dollars in contributions die hard. But the voters and donors are both waking up to the cold reality that the parties are nothing but wealth distribution machines that sluice millions from financial elites to various political elites.

All the legacy claims of both parties ring false; neither party gives a hoot about the working class, small business or civil liberties. Their entire game plan is to whip up hot-button social issues to distract a fragmented citizenry and arouse last-gasp emotional loyalty to empty slogans.

Is it any wonder that people are abandoning both parties and claiming Independent status? All the core systems of the nation are failing, visibly, painfully, badly, and yet all the parties can dredge up is more of the same and TINA–there is no alternative.

The citizen who just awakened also awakened to the truth: the legacy parties have no solutions; their game plan is to milk the system as long as they can before it collapses in a rotten heap of corruption, fraud, collusion, debt and profiteering that benefits the few at the expense of the many.

When the parties do finally implode, the general mood will be: good riddance. A centralized spoils system is no longer a viable way to govern the nation. Political systems everywhere are facing a choice: Decentralize or die.

Now Just Five Men Own Almost as Much Wealth as Half the World’s Population

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By Paul Buchheit

Source: CommonDreams

Last year it was 8 men, then down to 6, and now almost 5.

While Americans fixate on Trump, the super-rich are absconding with our wealth, and the plague of inequality continues to grow. An analysis of 2016 data found that the poorest five deciles of the world population own about $410 billion in total wealth. As of 06/08/17, the world’s richest five men owned over $400 billion in wealth. Thus, on average, each man owns nearly as much as 750 million people.

Why Do We Let a Few People Shift Great Portions of the World’s Wealth to Themselves? 

Most of the super-super-rich are Americans. We the American people created the Internet, developed and funded Artificial Intelligence, and built a massive transportation infrastructure, yet we let just a few individuals take almost all the credit, along with hundreds of billions of dollars.

Defenders of the out-of-control wealth gap insist that all is OK, because, after all, America is a ‘meritocracy’ in which the super-wealthy have ‘earned’ all they have. They heed the words of Warren Buffett: “The genius of the American economy, our emphasis on a meritocracy and a market system and a rule of law has enabled generation after generation to live better than their parents did.”

But it’s not a meritocracy. Children are no longer living better than their parents did. In the eight years since the recession the Wilshire Total Market valuation has more than TRIPLED, rising from a little over $8 trillion to nearly $25 trillion. The great majority of it has gone to the very richest Americans. In 2016 alone, the richest 1% effectively shifted nearly $4 trillion in wealth away from the rest of the nation to themselves, with nearly half of the wealth transfer ($1.94 trillion) coming from the nation’s poorest 90%—the middle and lower classes. That’s over $17,000 in housing and savings per lower-to-middle-class household lost to the super-rich.

A meritocracy? Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos have done little that wouldn’t have happened anyway. ALL modern U.S. technology started with—and to a great extent continues with—our tax dollars and our research institutes and our subsidies to corporations.

Why Do We Let Unqualified Rich People Tell Us How To Live? Especially Bill Gates! 

In 1975, at the age of 20, Bill Gates founded Microsoft with high school buddy Paul Allen. At the time Gary Kildall’s CP/M operating system was the industry standard. Even Gates’ company used it. But Kildall was an innovator, not a businessman, and when IBM came calling for an OS for the new IBM PC, his delays drove the big mainframe company to Gates. Even though the newly established Microsoft company couldn’t fill IBM’s needs, Gates and Allen saw an opportunity, and so they hurriedly bought the rights to another local company’s OS — which was based on Kildall’s CP/M system. Kildall wanted to sue, but intellectual property law for software had not yet been established. Kildall was a maker who got taken.

So Bill Gates took from others to become the richest man in the world. And now, because of his great wealth and the meritocracy myth, MANY PEOPLE LOOK TO HIM FOR SOLUTIONS IN VITAL AREAS OF HUMAN NEED, such as education and global food production.

—Gates on Education: He has promoted galvanic skin response monitors to measure the biological reactions of students, and the videotaping of teachers to evaluate their performances. About schools he said, “The best results have come in cities where the mayor is in charge of the school system. So you have one executive, and the school board isn’t as powerful.”

—Gates on Africa: With investments in or deals with Monsanto, Cargill, and Merck, Gates has demonstrated his preference for corporate control over poor countries deemed unable to help themselves. But no problem—according to Gates, “By 2035, there will be almost no poor countries left in the world.”

Warren Buffett: Demanding To Be Taxed at a Higher Rate (As Long As His Own Company Doesn’t Have To Pay) 

Warren Buffett has advocated for higher taxes on the rich and a reasonable estate tax. But his company Berkshire Hathaway has used “hypothetical amounts” to ‘pay’ its taxes while actually deferring $77 billion in real taxes.

Jeff Bezos: $50 Billion in Less Than Two Years, and Fighting Taxes All the Way 

Since the end of 2015 Jeff Bezos has accumulated enough wealth to cover the entire $50 billion U.S. housing budget, which serves five million Americans. Bezos, who has profited greatly from the Internet and the infrastructure built up over many years by many people with many of our tax dollars, has used tax havens and high-priced lobbyists to avoid the taxes owed by his company.

Mark Zuckerberg (6th Richest in World, 4th Richest in America) 

While Zuckerberg was developing his version of social networking at Harvard, Columbia University students Adam Goldberg and Wayne Ting built a system called Campus Network, which was much more sophisticated than the early versions of Facebook. But Zuckerberg had the Harvard name and better financial support. It was also alleged that Zuckerberg hacked into competitors’ computers to compromise user data.

Now with his billions he has created a ‘charitable’ foundation, which in reality is a tax-exempt limited liability company, leaving him free to make political donations or sell his holdings, all without paying taxes.

Everything has fallen into place for young Zuckerberg. Nothing left to do but run for president.

The False Promise of Philanthropy 

Many super-rich individuals have pledged the majority of their fortunes to philanthropic causes. That’s very generous, if they keep their promises. But that’s not really the point.

American billionaires all made their money because of the research and innovation and infrastructure that make up the foundation of our modern technologies. They have taken credit, along with their massive fortunes, for successes that derive from society rather than from a few individuals. It should not be any one person’s decision about the proper use of that wealth. Instead a significant portion of annual national wealth gains should be promised to education, housing, health research, and infrastructure. That is what Americans and their parents and grandparents have earned after a half-century of hard work and productivity.

America’s Oligarchs Will Control 70% Of National Wealth By 2021

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By Whitney Webb

Source: AntiMedia

America’s rich just won’t quit getting richer, according to a new study released in mid-June by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), a global management consulting firm. The study, which seeks to analyze the global wealth management industry, as well as the evolution of private wealth, uncovered some startling statistics that suggest that global financial inequality will grow significantly by the year 2021.

The firm found that the already massive gap between the world’s wealthy elite – the approximately 18 million households that hold at least more than $1 million in assets – and everyone else is continuing to widen at a remarkable rate. The estimated 70 million people who make up these households were found to control 45 percent of the world’s $166.5 trillion in wealth. And in just four more years, it is estimated that they will control more than half of the world’s wealth, despite representing less than 1 percent of the world’s current population.

However, while rising inequality is a global phenomenon, it is especially pronounced in the United States. While wealth inequality in the U.S. is by no means an unknown phenomenon, the U.S. is significantly more unequal than most other countries, with the nation’s elite currently holding 63 percent of the private wealth. The U.S. elite’s share of national wealth is also growing much faster than the global average, with millionaires and billionaires expected to control an estimated 70 percent of the nation’s wealth by 2021.

The U.S.’ high wealth inequality largely owes to post-World War II government policies that have seen almost a quarter of all national income go to its wealthiest residents. Meanwhile, wages for the majority of Americans have remained stagnant for decades – in contrast to the richest Americans, their future economic outlook is incredibly bleak by comparison.

The U.S. is also home to more billionaires and millionaires than anywhere else in the world, which partly explains how U.S. policy has come to favor them over the years. According to Bloomberg, two out of five millionaires and billionaires live in the United States – and their ranks are growing.

While the world’s richest citizens may be pleased by the results of BCG’s recent study, there is plenty for them to be worried about if history is any indicator. Indeed, history shows that societies with drastic wealth inequality are much more unstable and more likely to experience drastic economic failure or outright societal collapse.

For instance, a 2014 study conducted by the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center noted that over-consumption and wealth inequality have occurred in the collapse of every civilization over the last 5,000 years. That same study also warned that rising inequality could easily lead to an unsustainable use of resources and the “irreversible collapse” of global industrial civilization.

This warning seems particularly prescient, given that wealth inequality in the U.S. is well above that of past civilizations that eventually collapsed as a result of these factors. For example, at the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire, the top 1 percent of the Roman elite controlled just 16 percent of the society’s wealth, a measly figure compared to the percentage commanded by the 1-percenters of the U.S.

While the BCG study paints a rosy picture for the world’s millionaires and billionaires, particularly in the United States, they should be gravely concerned that their growing accumulation of wealth could have drastic consequences – not just for those poorer than them, but for everyone.

The Crisis of US Imperial Governance and the Struggle for a New World

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By Danny Haiphong

Source: Black Agenda Report

“Economic crisis at home and endless war abroad has placed finance and monopoly capital in political disarray.”

When I was here last year, I spoke a lot about ideology and how the struggle for social transformation in the mainland of imperialism partly depended upon the ideological development of oppressed people trapped within US borders. The 2016 elections were beginning to pick-up momentum, but it was unclear what direction they would go. Fast-forward to the present and, I don’t know about you all, but I am exhausted. The election of Donald Trump has presented both new and old challenges. It has created an almost circus-like political environment with dire consequences for the masses. What precipitated the circus-show is a crisis of governance that has been intentionally misunderstood by US imperialism’s corporately owned media and political elite.

To distort the crisis, a state of anti-Russian madness has been prescribed to medicate political consciousness in rapidly changing times. The rise of China and Russia has exposed the bankruptcy of US imperialism on all fronts. Economic crisis at home and endless war abroad has placed finance and monopoly capital in political disarray. Donald Trump took advantage of the chaos. He spoke about jobs, he spoke about wars, and he spoke to the growing insecurities of white Americans of working and middle class status who no longer can rely on the wages of whiteness for guaranteed prosperity. The duopoly and its capitalist masters had no one to offer, indeed nothing to offer, so Trump rode in on his orange horse to become the head of state of imperialism.

“The rise of China and Russia has exposed the bankruptcy of US imperialism on all fronts.”

The ruling class does not want people in the United States to understand the context of the Trump Presidency. It has reapplied Cold War fears with Russia as the prime target. Russia’s geopolitical moves away from imperialism have been deemed just as criminal as China’s economic supremacy. The US does not depend as much on Russia in the economic sense, but it trembles in fear at the prospect of growing Russian economic activity across Eurasia. Yet, provoking Russia militarily will lead to World War. This is a risk the ruling class appears willing to take as the anti-Russia narrative in the US has only intensified since Hillary Clinton made the erroneous claim of Russian interference in the 2016 elections.

According to the US ruling class and its “intelligence officials,” Russia promotes “fakes news” to assist Donald Trump. Russian President Vladimir Putin lurks in our social media, and is hacking his way through algorithms to smear the US political system. Russia is infecting minds with its Russia Today “propaganda” arm. The Ruskies have no regard for the damage they have caused to so-called US democracy. Putin wants total control of the US and will wield his most talented social media users to get the job done. This is what the corporate media sounds like these days.

“The U.S. trembles in fear at the prospect of growing Russian economic activity across Eurasia.”

Of course, the US ruling class doesn’t want to talk about how US intelligence already collects the numbers, emails, and calls of every single person in the world who uses a cell phone or computer. They don’t want to tell you about how the US has interfered in every election in Russia since the Soviet Union fell, or how it has led bloody proxy wars and coups in over fifty countries in as many years. They don’t want to discuss how Russia has absolutely nothing to do with the millions of incarcerated people in the US or the fact that it is the US monopoly capitalist economy, not the emerging capitalist economy of Russia, which has automated many of the jobs and siphoned much of the wealth that once belonged to a privileged sector of US workers. No, it would rather attention be placed on the Russian boogeyman.

Anti-Russian hysteria doesn’t just distract the broad masses of people from the legitimate causes of the conditions afflicting the working and unemployed. It feeds into an atmosphere of war that strikes the very roots of the US social order. Imperialism is the rule of monopoly and finance capital. This system has run its course. It cannot hold onto political legitimacy any more than it can spur economic development beyond the meager 1 to 2 percent growth calculated year after year. In a sense, war is all the system has left. And war is exactly what the ruling class will get, with or without Trump.

“They don’t want to tell you about how the US has interfered in every election in Russia since the Soviet Union fell, or how it has led bloody proxy wars and coups in over fifty countries in as many years.”

War with Russia is today’s clarion call for “American unity.” In times of crisis, the US imperial state has relied on war to bring political and economic relief from domestic crisis. Every major US-led war has in part been waged for this purpose. What differs now is that war with Russia could bring about the destruction of humanity. Scientists have confirmed that nuclear war could make the planet uninhabitable.

What is also different about this current war drive with Russia is how it marks the historical conclusion of the current stage in the world imperialist order. When the US threatened nuclear war with the atomic bombing of Japan in 1945 and the Cuban missile crisis almost two decades later, the world was in the midst of a transition from Western monopoly capitalism to proletarian socialism. Revolutions in Vietnam, Cuba, and the Soviet Union, to name a few, threatened to undo the very notion of private property. And while US and Western backlash nearly eliminated the socialist bloc by 1991, the imperialist order entered a transition stage of its own that some call “neo-liberalism.”

Neo-liberalism has greatly expanded the reach of capitalism’s tentacles and widened the impact of capitalist crisis since its inception in the late 1970s. Neo-liberalism has unleashed unfettered capitalist production by imposing economic stagnation on participating countries. Meanwhile, China’s socialist model has paved a different path, one marked by unprecedented growth and poverty reduction. China has understandably attracted underdeveloped nations so desperately seeking to escape from the clutches of neo-colonial impoverishment. Russia has grown close to China, providing both countries with much assistance in the way of constructing a multi-polar economic arrangement based on the principles of sovereignty and mutually beneficial cooperation. According to the logic of neo-liberal capital, only war with Russia and China can save the system from itself.

“War with Russia could bring about the destruction of humanity.”

This conclusion stems from the fact that neo-liberal capital is not growing, it is contracting. Eighty-percent of workers are near-poor in the US while six mega billionaires hold ownership of over half of the planet’s wealth. Concentrated profit does not mean that all is well with the ruling class. Internal contradictions are eating the capitalist system alive. Neither finance capital nor its monopoly investors can arrest the resultant decline. The growth of technology to speed up production and profit has left millions stuck in permanent unemployment. A high-tech system of production is an expensive system of production, requiring lower wages and debt to absorb the falling rate of profit. Global overproduction has thus developed alongside mass misery.

Such conditions are at the root of mass incarceration, where millions of mostly Black and poor workers are warehoused in cages because there is nothing on the outside that the system can offer. They are also the root of mass surveillance, as the system must keep tabs on an increasingly restless population and justify infringements on civil liberties as necessary counter-terror measures. The War on Terror and Drugs have been prerequisites toward keeping the population scared and its attention away from the US capitalist overlords who fund and support drug trafficking and terrorism for political gain. And when all else fails, blame Russia.

“The system must keep tabs on an increasingly restless population and justify infringements on civil liberties as necessary counter-terror measures.”

The struggle against neo-liberal capital and anti-Russian hysteria is a struggle to transform and revolutionize society. This struggle requires both practical political organization and ideological development. There will be no revolution without revolutionary thought, and no revolution without revolutionary action. All too often the left is debating which one is the most important for the future success of a revolutionary movement. The answer is both, together.

For most, this explanation is understandably too broad to inform individual political energy. Liberal thought and action thus becomes attractive because it hides behind the cloak of the possible and pragmatic. It is easier to think in terms of electoral politics than in global struggle. It is far more simple to advocate for a cooperative economy or universal basic income without spelling out the broad context that prevents their formation. In order for any material victories to be won on a mass scale, the victors must understand the world in which they fight.

“A movement for social transformation in the US has still yet to be born.”

Conscious struggle has brought about meaningful and deep changes in recent years. Mumia Abu-Jamal is now receiving Hep-C treatment after years of struggle with the State of Pennsylvania. The release of Chelsea Manning and Oscar Rivera Lopez also come to mind. Solidarity with Cuba freed the Cuban 5 and has given the socialist nation more opportunities to develop its economy. But these victories have come in the midst of great cost. A movement for social transformation in the US has still yet to be born, as the presence of dozens of political prisoners and the ongoing US blockade against Cuba reminds us.

Not once did I mention the Democratic or Republican Party. Both parties have done their part to create the crisis before us. A rejection of the two-parties means an embrace of the struggle against imperialism worldwide. It means that the nations with US targets on their backs should be seen as potential allies. Yes, this includes Russia. And Syria. It includes the left movements in Latin America. In the spirit of Malcolm X, the Black liberation movement, and the historic anti-imperialist struggle around the world, the time has come to search for real bonds of solidarity around the world to aid in the struggle against white supremacy, capitalism, and empire in the US and the West. Let no one, not even those who call themselves “the left,” tell you otherwise.

 

Danny Haiphong is an Asian activist and political analyst in the Boston area. He canbereachedatwakeupriseup1990@gmail.com

Deep State, shallow politics, dumb economics

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By Frank Scott

Source: Intrepid Report

In 1965, the USA had 780,000 people in prison, jail, on parole or on probation.

By 2010, that population had grown by more than nine times, to 7 million and the prison business was booming as never before, creating profits, jobs and unparalleled human misery.

In 1954, the integration of public schools was seen as a great victory for civil rights and Americans now designated as “people of color”*. Today more than 50% of the prison population is designated as “people of color” and the disintegration of the entire public school system continues for all Americans designated as people.

In 2015, there were 536 billionaires in the U.S.A. In a nation of more than 325 million people, that represents less than 2 millionths of one percent of the population. For the textually challenged, that looks like this:.000002%

Wow.

How hard those truly brilliant people must have worked to achieve those riches. And one of them was Donald Trump!

Imagine how many cases they had to plead in court, classes to teach in school, buses to drive, meals to prepare, floors to wash, crops to pick, mail to deliver and deals to make? Well, actually, they mostly made deals using their great wisdom and brilliance at investing wisely. You and I could do as well if we worked as hard and were as smart and industrious as they are, including Donald Trump!

And if we were paid a thousand dollars an hour for our hard work, and we worked twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty two weeks a year, maybe if we stashed all that cash and didn’t spend any of it we might have a billion dollars.

Nope.

In fact, if you worked twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty two weeks a year and did that for ten years, at one thousand dollars an hour, never stopped, never took any time off and never spent any of the money and just stashed it, you still wouldn’t have a billion dollars.

Is this a great democracy or what?

In that same year of 2015, America’s GDP for pets, which was $38.5 billion in 2006, had grown to $60.3 billion. Twelve companies insured 1.4 million pets owned by 79.6 million American families (65% of households) with premiums amounting to 660.5 million dollars.

163.8 million dogs and cats are comfortably housed in a political economy that has half a million of its people homeless and more than 20% of its children living in poverty. This is certainly reason enough for us to demand that Russia, North Korea, Syria and other nations adopt our democratically civilized way of living or suffer the consequences of our superior wrath. Right?

As of March1, 2017, our national debt was close to $20 trillion, which is more than our GDP, which is truly a gross domestic product. We the people of this great democracy pay more than $440 billion a year in interest on that debt.

Who do we pay it to?

Where’d they get the money to loan us?

Who prints and backs this money supply?

If you have any money among your plastic, look at one of the bills of any denomination and note that the power behind the cash is not the dead presidents or Rockefeller, Carnegie, Zuckerburg, Soros, Bezos, Visa or MasterCard but something called “The United States of America.”

That is not a private bank or a billionaire. That’s you. That’s us.

Remember, we, the public, print the money, in our name, and somehow it gets to a private source which loans it to us and charges us interest for the privilege. Would you like to buy a bridge?

Our personal debt, incurred to keep the economy going with our consuming and owed to the same market gods, was over $18 trillion. Almost as high as our public debt. Somehow, we owe it to the same people who loaned us our own money for public expenses. Wow.

Are they really smart?

Or are we really stupid?

Many Americans are treated as lower than scum for being working class and “uneducated.” Why are so many Americans so “uneducated”? Could it have anything to do with the fact that at some point they went through grammar and high schools taught by (drum roll) college-educated people**? And winding up with presidents like a truly brilliant rich guy with degrees from Yale and Harvard (wow!) who starts wars in the Middle East that have gone on longer than any in our history, with the consent of 534 out of 535 democratically (?) elected college graduates in congress?

Whether the organized crime lobby (Wall Street, banks, billionaires) supports guns for individuals, Israelis or the Military Industrial Complex, it remains in control of the political economics of American government. NRAIPAC and its ilk own, rent and control the White House, Congress and Corporate media. That was the case before Trump and still is the case now.

We need resistance to that system of minority control itself, and not simply the servants it hires, leases, rents or outright owns. As long as we allow a gallon of milk to cost more than a gallon of gasoline, as long as we tolerate an economics that will sustain a disease as long as profits for its treatment are greater than profits for its cure***, we not only face long range climate disaster but a much shorter range political economic calamity.

Global capitalism threatens immediate and growing poverty, war, human misery and planetary destruction no matter which political pinhead, pimp or ho lives in the subsidized residency we call the white house. As long as we allow the richest and smallest minority in our history to put only their servants up for our votes, calling this a democracy reduces us to the best-dressed peasants on the Titanic. We need to end the fundamentalist religion of private profit marketing that is becoming a greater menace by the minute and begin democratic action in a social revolution that expresses majority public interest, desire and need. Fast.

 

Notes

*All members of the human race are “of color” save for a small group called albinos. Some of us have darker or lighter skin but skin tone is of no more racial significance than brown hair, green eyes or long legs. Innocents, the ignorant and morons who still believe otherwise are science deniers at best, and anti-human at worst, no matter their skin tone.

**Those with a stake in maintaining their incomes & consumption are unlikely to participate in efforts to bring about radical change”—Michael D. Yates

***Check cancer, for starters; a multi-multi billion-dollar industry

Oligarchs Succeed! Only the People Suffer!

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By James Petra

Source: The Fourth Media

On a scale not seen since the ‘great’ world depression of the 1930’s, the US political system is experiencing sharp political attacks, divisions and power grabs. Executive firings, congressional investigations, demands for impeachment, witch hunts, threats of imprisonment for ‘contempt of Congress’ and naked power struggles have shredded the façade of political unity and consensus among competing powerful US oligarchs.

For the first time in US history, the incumbent elected president struggles on a daily basis to wield state power. The opposition-controlled state (National Public Radio) and corporate organs of mass propaganda are pitted against the presidential regime. Factions of the military elite and business oligarchy face off in the domestic and international arena. The oligarchs debate and insult each other. They falsify charges, plot and deceive. Their political acolytes, who witness these momentous conflicts, are mute, dumb and blind to the real interests at stake.

The struggle between the Presidential oligarch and the Opposition oligarchs has profound consequences for their factions and for the American people. Wars and markets, pursued by sections of the Oligarchs, have led opposing sections to seek control over the means of political manipulation (media and threats of judicial action).

Intense political competition and open political debate have nothing to do with ‘democracy’ as it now exists in the United States.

In fact, it is the absence of real democracy, which permits the oligarchs to engage in serious intra-elite warfare. The marginalized, de-politicized electorate are incapable of taking advantage of the conflict to advance their own interests.

What the ‘Conflict’ is Not About

The ‘life and death’ inter-oligarchical fight is not about peace!

None of the factions of the oligarchy, engaged in this struggle, is aligned with democratic or independent governments.

Neither side seeks to democratize the American electoral process or to dismantle the grotesque police state apparatus.

Neither side has any commitment to a ‘new deal’ for American workers and employees.

Neither is interested in policy changes needed to address the steady erosion of living standards or the unprecedented increase in ‘premature’ mortality among the working and rural classes.

Despite these similarities in their main focus of maintaining oligarchical power and policies against the interests of the larger population, there are deep divisions over the content and direction of the presidential regime and the permanent state apparatus.

What the Oligarchical Struggle is About

There are profound differences between the oligarch factions on the question of overseas wars and ‘interventions’.

The ‘opposition’ (Democratic Party and some Republican elite) pursues a continuation of their policy of global wars, especially aimed at confronting Russian and China, as well as regional wars in Asia and the Middle East. There is a stubborn refusal to modify military policies, despite the disastrous consequences domestically (economic decline and increased poverty) and internationally with massive ethnic cleansing, terrorism, forced migrations of war refugees to Europe, and famine and epidemics (such as cholera and starvation in Yemen).

The Trump Presidency appears to favor increased military confrontation with Iran and North Korea and intervention in Syria, Venezuela and Yemen.

The ‘Opposition’ supports multilateral economic and trade agreements, (such as TTP and NAFTA), while Trump favors lucrative ‘bilateral’ economic agreements. Trump relies on trade and investment deals with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates and the formation of an aggressive military ‘axis’ (US-Saudi Arabia-Israel -Gulf Emirates) to eventually overthrow the nationalist regime in Iran and divide the country.

The ‘Opposition’ pursues wars and violent ‘regime change’ to replace disobedient ‘tyrants’ and nationalists and set up ‘client governments’, which will provide bases for the US military empire. Trump’s regime embraces existing dictators, who can invest in his domestic infrastructure agenda.

The ‘opposition’ seeks to maximize the role of Washington’s global military power. President Trump focuses on expanding the US role in the global market.

While both oligarchical factions support US imperialism, they differ in terms of its nature and means.

For the ‘opposition’, every country, large or small, can be a target for military conquest. Trump tends to favor the expansion of lucrative overseas markets, in addition to projecting US military dominance.

Oligarchs: Tactical Similarities

The competition among oligarchs does not preclude similarities in means and tactics. Both factions favor increased military spending, support for the Saudi war on Yemen and intervention in Venezuela. They support trade with China and international sanctions against Russia and Iran. They both display slavish deference to the State of Israel and favor the appointment of openly Zionist agents throughout the political, economic and intelligence apparatus.

These similarities are, however, subject to tactical political propaganda skirmishes. The ‘Opposition’ denounces any deviation in policy toward Russia as ‘treason’, while Trump accuses the ‘Opposition’ of having sacrificed American workers through NAFTA.

Whatever the tactical nuances and similarities, the savage inter-oligarchic struggle is far from a theatrical exercise. Whatever the real and feigned similarities and differences, the oligarchs’ struggle for imperial and domestic power has profound consequence for the political and constitutional order.

Oligarchical Electoral Representation and the Parallel Police State

The ongoing fight between the Trump Administration and the ‘Opposition’ is not the typical skirmish over pieces of legislation or decisions. It is not over control of the nation’s public wealth. The conflict revolves around control of the regime and the exercise of state power.

The opposition has a formidable array of forces, including the national intelligence apparatus (NSA, Homeland Security, FBI, CIA, etc.) and a substantial sector of the Pentagon and defense industry. Moreover, the opposition has created new power centers for ousting President Trump, including the judiciary.

This is best seen in the appointment of former FBI Chief Robert Mueller as ‘Special Investigator’ and key members of the Attorney General’s Office, including Deputy Attorney General Rob Rosenstein. It was Rosenstein who appointed Mueller, after the Attorney General ‘Jeff’ Session (a Trump ally) was ‘forced’ to recluse himself for having ‘met’ with Russian diplomats in the course of fulfilling his former Congressional duties as a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. This ‘recusal’ took significant discretionary power away from Trump’s most important ally within the Judiciary.

The web of opposition power spreads and includes former police state officials including mega-security impresario, Michael Chertoff (an associate of Robert Mueller), who headed Homeland Security under GW Bush, John Brennan (CIA), James Comey (FBI) and others.

The opposition dominates the principal organs of propaganda -the press (Washington Post, Financial Times, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal), television and radio (ABC, NBC, CBS and PBS/ NPR), which breathlessly magnify and prosecute the President and his allies for an ever-expanding web of unsubstantiated ‘crimes and misdemeanors’. Neo-conservative and liberal think tanks and foundations, academic experts and commentators have all joined the ‘hysteria chorus’ and feeding frenzy to oust the President.

The President has an increasingly fragile base of support in his Cabinet, family and closest advisers. He has a minority of supporters in the legislature and possibly in the Supreme Court, despite nominal majorities for the Republican Party.

The President has the passive support of his voters, but they have demonstrated little ability to mobilize in the streets. The electorate has been marginalized.

Outside of politics (the ‘Swamp’ as Trump termed Washington, DC) the President’s trade, investment, taxation and deregulation policies are backed by the majority of investors, who have benefited from the rising stock market. However, ‘money’ does not appear to influence the parallel state.

The divergence between Trumps supporters in the investment community and the political power of the opposition state is one of the most extraordinary changes of our century.

Given the President’s domestic weakness and the imminent threat of a coup d’état, he has turned to securing ‘deals’ with overseas allies, including billion-dollar trade and investment agreements.

The multi-billion arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates will delight the military-industrial complex and its hundreds of thousands of workers.

Political and diplomatic ‘kowtowing’ to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu should please some American Zionists.

But the meetings with the EU in Brussels and with the G7 in Siciliy failed to neutralize Trump’s overseas opposition.

NATO’s European members did not accept Trump’s demands that they increase their contribution to the alliance and they condemned his reluctance to offer unconditional US military support for new NATO members. They showed no sympathy for domestic problems.

In brief, the President’s overseas supporters, meetings and agreements will have little impact on the domestic correlation of forces.

Moreover, there are long-standing ties among the various state apparatuses and spy agencies in the EU and the US, which strengthen the reach of the opposition in their attacks on Trump.

While substantive issues divide the Presidential and Opposition oligarchs, these issues are vertical, not horizontal, cleavages – a question of ‘their’ wars or ‘ours’.

Trump intensified the ideological war with North Korea and Iran; promised to increase ground troops in Afghanistan and Syria; boosted military and advisory support for the Saudi invasion of Yemen; and increased US backing for violent demonstrations and mob attacks in Venezuela.

The opposition demands more provocations against Russia and its allies; and the continuation of former President Obama’s seven wars.

While both sets of oligarchs support the ongoing wars, the major difference is over who is managing the wars and who can be held responsible for the consequences.

Both conflicting oligarchs are divided over who controls the state apparatus since their power depends on which side directs the spies and generates the fake news.

Currently, both sets of oligarchs wash each other’s ‘dirty linen’ in public, while covering up for their collective illicit practices at home and abroad.

The Trump’s oligarchs want to maximize economic deals through ‘uncritical’ support for known tyrants; the opposition ‘critically’ supports tyrants in exchange for access to US military bases and military support for ‘interventions’.

President Trump pushes for major tax cuts to benefit his oligarch allies while making massive cuts in social programs for his hapless supporters. The Opposition supports milder tax cuts and lesser reductions in social programs.

Conclusion

The battle of the oligarchs has yet to reach a decisive climax. President Trump is still the President of the United States. The Opposition forges ahead with its investigations and lurid media exposés.

The propaganda war is continuous. One day the opposition media focuses on a deported student immigrant and the next day the President features new jobs for American military industries.

The emerging left-neo-conservative academic partnership (e.g. Noam Chomsky-William Kristol) has denounced President Trump’s regime as a national ‘catastrophe’ from the beginning. Meanwhile, Wall Street investors and libertarians join to denounce the Opposition’s resistance to major tax ‘reforms’.

Oligarchs of all stripes and colors are grabbing for total state power and wealth while the majority of citizens are labeled ‘losers’ by Trump or ‘deplorables’ by Madame Clinton.

The ‘peace’ movement, immigrant rights groups and ‘black lives matter’ activists have become mindless lackeys pulling the opposition oligarchs’ wagon, while rust-belt workers, rural poor and downwardly mobile middle class employees are powerless serfs hitched to President Trump’s cart.

Epilogue

After the blood-letting, when and if President Trump is overthrown, the State Security functionaries in their tidy dark suits will return to their nice offices to preside over their ‘normal’ tasks of spying on the citizens and launching clandestine operations abroad.

The media will blow out some charming tid-bits and ‘words of truth’ from the new occupant of the ‘Oval Office’.

The academic left will churn out some criticism against the newest ‘oligarch-in-chief’ or crow about how their heroic ‘resistance’ averted a national catastrophe.

Trump, the ex-President and his oligarch son-in-law Jared Kushner will sign new real estate deals. The Saudis will receive the hundreds of billions of dollars of US arms to re-supply ISIS or its successors and to rust in the ‘vast and howling’ wilderness of US-Middle East intervention. Israel will demand even more frequent ‘servicing’ from the new US President.

The triumphant editorialists will claim that ‘our’ unique political system, despite the ‘recent turmoil’, has proven that democracy succeeds … only the people suffer!

Long live the Oligarchs!

 

James Petras is a Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York. http://petras.lahaine.org

 

The Price of Resistance

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Statues at the Museum of Myths and Traditions. (León)

By Chris Hedges

Source: OpEdNews.com

In the conflicts I covered as a reporter in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans, I encountered singular individuals of varying creeds, religions, races and nationalities who majestically rose up to defy the oppressor on behalf of the oppressed. Some of them are dead. Some of them are forgotten. Most of them are unknown.

These individuals, despite their vast cultural differences, had common traits–a profound commitment to the truth, incorruptibility, courage, a distrust of power, a hatred of violence and a deep empathy that was extended to people who were different from them, even to people defined by the dominant culture as the enemy. They are the most remarkable men and women I met in my 20 years as a foreign correspondent. And to this day I set my life by the standards they set.

You have heard of some, such as Vaclav Havel, whom I and other foreign reporters met most evenings, during the 1989 Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, in the Magic Lantern Theatre in Prague. Others, no less great, you probably do not know, such as the Jesuit priest Ignacio Ellacuria, who was assassinated in El Salvador in 1989. And then there are those “ordinary” people, although, as the writer V.S. Pritchett said, no people are ordinary, who risked their lives in wartime to shelter and protect those of an opposing religion or ethnicity being persecuted and hunted. And to some of these “ordinary” people I owe my own life.

To resist radical evil is to endure a life that by the standards of the wider society is a failure. It is to defy injustice at the cost of your career, your reputation, your financial solvency and at times your life. It is to be a lifelong heretic. And, perhaps this is the most important point, it is to accept that the dominant culture, even the liberal elites, will push you to the margins and attempt to discredit not only what you do, but your character. When I returned to the newsroom at The New York Times after being booed off a commencement stage in 2003 for denouncing the invasion of Iraq and being publicly reprimanded by the paper for my stance against the war, reporters and editors I had known and worked with for 15 years lowered their heads or turned away when I was nearby. They did not want to be contaminated by the same career-killing contagion.

Ruling institutions–the state, the press, the church, the courts, academia–mouth the language of morality, but they serve the structures of power, no matter how venal, which provide them with money, status and authority. In times of national distress–one has only to look at Nazi Germany–all of these institutions, including the academy, are complicit through their silence or their active collaboration with radical evil. And our own institutions, which have surrendered to corporate power and the utopian ideology of neoliberalism, are no different. The lonely individuals who defy tyrannical power within these institutions, as we saw with the thousands of academics who were fired from their jobs and blacklisted during the McCarthy era, are purged and turned into pariahs.

All institutions, including the church, Paul Tillich once wrote, are inherently demonic. And a life dedicated to resistance has to accept that a relationship with any institution is often temporary, because sooner or later that institution is going to demand acts of silence or obedience your conscience will not allow you to make. To be a rebel is to reject what it means to succeed in a capitalist, consumer culture, especially the idea that we should always come first.

The theologian James H. Cone in his book “The Cross and the Lynching Tree” writes that for oppressed blacks the cross was a “paradoxical religious symbol because it inverts the world’s value system with the news that hope comes by way of defeat, that suffering and death do not have the last word, that the last shall be first and the first last.”

Cone continues: “That God could ‘make a way out of no way’ in Jesus’ cross was truly absurd to the intellect, yet profoundly real in the souls of black folk. Enslaved blacks who first heard the gospel message seized on the power of the cross. Christ crucified manifested God’s loving and liberating presence in the contradictions of black life–that transcendent presence in the lives of black Christians that empowered them to believe that ultimately, in God’s eschatological future, they would not be defeated by the ‘troubles of this world,’ no matter how great and painful their suffering. Believing this paradox, this absurd claim of faith, was only possible in humility and repentance. There was no place for the proud and the mighty, for people who think that God called them to rule over others. The cross was God’s critique of power–white power–with powerless love, snatching victory out of defeat.”

Reinhold Niebuhr labeled this capacity to defy the forces of repression “a sublime madness in the soul.” Niebuhr wrote that “nothing but madness will do battle with malignant power and ‘spiritual wickedness in high places.’ ” This sublime madness, as Niebuhr understood, is dangerous, but it is vital. Without it, “truth is obscured.” And Niebuhr also knew that traditional liberalism was a useless force in moments of extremity. Liberalism, Niebuhr said, “lacks the spirit of enthusiasm, not to say fanaticism, which is so necessary to move the world out of its beaten tracks. It is too intellectual and too little emotional to be an efficient force in history.”

The prophets in the Hebrew Bible had this sublime madness. The words of the Hebrew prophets, as Abraham Heschel wrote, were “a scream in the night. While the world is at ease and asleep, the prophet feels the blast from heaven.” The prophet, because he saw and faced an unpleasant reality, was, as Heschel wrote, “compelled to proclaim the very opposite of what his heart expected.”

This sublime madness is the essential quality for a life of resistance. It is the acceptance that when you stand with the oppressed you get treated like the oppressed. It is the acceptance that, although empirically all that we struggled to achieve during our lifetime may be worse, our struggle validates itself.

Daniel Berrigan told me that faith is the belief that the good draws to it the good. The Buddhists call this karma. But he said for us as Christians we did not know where it went. We trusted that it went somewhere. But we did not know where. We are called to do the good, or at least the good so far as we can determinate it, and then let it go.

As Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” the only morally reliable people are not those who say “this is wrong” or “this should not be done,” but those who say “I can’t.” They know that as Immanuel Kant wrote: “If justice perishes, human life on earth has lost its meaning.” And this means that, like Socrates, we must come to a place where it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong. We must at once see and act, and given what it means to see, this will require the surmounting of despair, not by reason, but by faith.

I saw in the conflicts I covered the power of this faith, which lies outside any religious or philosophical creed. This faith is what Havel called in his great essay “The Power of the Powerless” living in truth. Living in truth exposes the corruption, lies and deceit of the state. It is a refusal to be a part of the charade.

“You do not become a ‘dissident’ just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career,” Havel wrote. “You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society. … The dissident does not operate in the realm of genuine power at all. He is not seeking power. He has no desire for office and does not gather votes. He does not attempt to charm the public. He offers nothing and promises nothing. He can offer, if anything, only his own skin–and he offers it solely because he has no other way of affirming the truth he stands for. His actions simply articulate his dignity as a citizen, regardless of the cost.”

The long, long road of sacrifice and suffering that led to the collapse of the communist regimes stretched back decades. Those who made change possible were those who had discarded all notions of the practical. They did not try to reform the Communist Party. They did not attempt to work within the system. They did not even know what, if anything, their tiny protests, ignored by the state-controlled media, would accomplish. But through it all they held fast to moral imperatives. They did so because these values were right and just. They expected no reward for their virtue; indeed they got none. They were marginalized and persecuted. And yet these poets, playwrights, actors, singers and writers finally triumphed over state and military power. They drew the good to the good. They triumphed because, however cowed and broken the masses around them appeared, their message of defiance did not go unheard. It did not go unseen. The steady drumbeat of rebellion constantly exposed the dead hand of authority and the rot of the state.

I stood with hundreds of thousands of rebellious Czechoslovakians in 1989 on a cold winter night in Prague’s Wenceslas Square as the singer Marta Kubisova approached the balcony of the Melantrich building. Kubisova had been banished from the airwaves in 1968 after the Soviet invasion for her anthem of defiance “Prayer for Marta.” Her entire catalog, including more than 200 singles, had been confiscated and destroyed by the state. She had disappeared from public view. Her voice that night suddenly flooded the square. Pressing around me were throngs of students, most of whom had not been born when she vanished. They began to sing the words of the anthem. There were tears running down their faces. It was then that I understood the power of rebellion. It was then that I knew that no act of rebellion, however futile it appears in the moment, is wasted. It was then that I knew that the communist regime was finished.

“The people will once again decide their own fate,” the crowd sang in unison with Kubisova. [Editor’s note: To see YouTube photographs of the 1989 revolution and hear Kubisova sing the song in a studio recording, click here.]

The walls of Prague were covered that chilly winter with posters depicting Jan Palach. Palach, a university student, set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square on Jan. 16, 1969, in the middle of the day to protest the crushing of the country’s democracy movement. He died of his burns three days later. The state swiftly attempted to erase his act from national memory. There was no mention of it on state media. A funeral march by university students was broken up by police. Palach’s gravesite, which became a shrine, saw the communist authorities exhume his body, cremate his remains and ship them to his mother with the provision that his ashes could not be placed in a cemetery. But it did not work. His defiance remained a rallying cry. His sacrifice spurred the students in the winter of 1989 to act. Prague’s Red Army Square, shortly after I left for Bucharest to cover the uprising in Romania, was renamed Palach Square. Ten thousand people went to the dedication.

We, like those who opposed the long night of communism, no longer have any mechanisms within the formal structures of power that will protect or advance our rights. We too have undergone a coup d’e’tat carried out not by the stone-faced leaders of a monolithic Communist Party but by the corporate state.

We may feel, in the face of the ruthless corporate destruction of our nation, our culture and our ecosystem, powerless and weak. But we are not. We have a power that terrifies the corporate state. Any act of rebellion, no matter how few people show up or how heavily it is censored, chips away at corporate power. Any act of rebellion keeps alive the embers for larger movements that follow us. It passes on another narrative. It will, as the state consumes itself, attract wider and wider numbers. Perhaps this will not happen in our lifetimes. But if we persist, we will keep this possibility alive. If we do not, it will die.

Dr. Rieux in Albert Camus’ novel “The Plague” is not driven by ideology. He is driven by empathy, the duty to minister to suffering, no matter the cost. Empathy, or what the Russian novelist Vasily Grossman called “simple human kindness,” becomes in all despotisms a subversive act. To act on this empathy–the empathy for human beings locked in cages less than an hour from us [here in Princeton], the empathy for undocumented mothers and fathers being torn from their children on the streets of our cities, the empathy for Muslims who are demonized and banned from our shores, fleeing the wars we created, the empathy for poor people of color gunned down by police in our streets, the empathy for girls and women trafficked into prostitution, the empathy for all those who suffer at the hands of a state intent on militarization and imposing a harsh cruelty on the vulnerable, the empathy for the earth that gives us life and that is being contaminated and pillaged for profit–becomes political and even dangerous.

Evil is real. But so is love. And in war–especially when the heavy shells landed on crowds in Sarajevo, sights so gruesome that to this day I cannot eat a piece of meat–you could feel, as frantic family members desperately sought out loved ones among the wounded and dead, the concentric circles of death and love, death and love, like rings from the blast of a cosmic furnace.

Flannery O’Connor recognized that a life of faith is a life of confrontation: “St. Cyril of Jerusalem, in instructing catechumens, wrote: ‘The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.’ No matter what form the dragon may take, it is of this mysterious passage past him, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell, and this being the case, it requires considerable courage at any time, in any country, not to turn away from the storyteller.”

Accept sorrow–for who cannot be profoundly sorrowful at the state of our nation, the world and our ecosystem–but know that in resistance there is a balm that leads to wisdom and, if not joy, a strange, transcendent happiness. Know that if we resist we keep hope alive.

“My faith has been tempered in Hell,” wrote Vasily Grossman in his masterpiece “Life and Fate.” “My faith has emerged from the flames of the crematoria, from the concrete of the gas chamber. I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious leaders, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning. Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.”

How to get rid the bastards before they murder us all

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march_of_tyranny

By Jack Balkwill

Source: Intrepid Report

If most Americans knew what was happening in our extremely corrupt government, there would be a bloody riot, and most of the Democrats and Republicans would be slaughtered with as little mercy as they’ve shown the American public.

Through their actions, Democrats and Republicans have caused the deaths of millions from unsafe products, unsafe workplaces, lack of minimal health care, unnecessary wars, and other malfeasance resulting from their serving the vile capitalists who finance their elections.

True, a fourth of the electorate vote Democrat, and another fourth Republican, because they see no other hope. Delusions of “lesser evils” lead them to line up, lambs to the slaughter, hoping that the stinking pile of dung for whom they vote will enable less horror than the other stinking pile of dung.

Half of the electorate routinely do not vote, understanding that, in our system, decent candidates are not allowed air time by the corporate-viewpoint media, nor allowed the mountains of cash given to the Democrats and Republicans with which to purchase additional media exposure for deceitful campaign ads.

If a candidate of the people did find a way to be recognized, he or she would not be allowed into the controlled debates. Ballot access is another way the establishment blocks democracy from breaking out in the Land of the Free. The ruling plutocratic oligarchs have pretty much covered all the bases to snuff out any hope for an iota of democracy.

In many of our elections, far more than half of eligible voters do not cast ballots. Propaganda control by mainstream media tell us this is because those who do not cast votes are satisfied, when anybody with an IQ higher than their shoe size knows it’s a lie. “Let’s see now,” these potential voters ponder, should I vote for the guy who’ll stick a knife in my left hand, or the one who will put an ice pick through my right foot?

I’ve watched for decade after decade as young people voted for “lesser evil” scum, saying they will do better next time. Next time they do the same thing. The system is evil itself, if anything is evil, encouraging the hopeless to vote for scumbags with the hope to stop other scumbags from winning.

It is a part of American capitalism, where everything of importance is controlled and nobody is supposed to notice that it only works for the capitalists—those few who control most of the capital. American capitalism is so badly broken that it requires the world’s largest prison system to make it barely chug along. It requires thousands dying for a lack of health care each year, higher numbers than in any industrialized nation. It requires the highest homelessness and hunger among major industrialized nations.

And the corporate media, fawning lap dogs that they are, never notice any of it. If a corporate-paid journalist did, they would soon find themselves to be among the unemployed. Capitalism loves unemployment because it draws down wages, allowing the capitalists to increase their profits, the only thing that works in capitalism. That is why our submissive government lies about unemployment figures constantly, always giving the numbers as half or less than half of the true misery index.

When people begin to minimally get jobs, the Federal Reserve raises interest rates to increase unemployment and maintain the wealth disparity. As the poor are wiped out by the millions, no billionaire is allowed to lose a penny in the rigged system.

The problem in doing something about it is that the doors have just about all been shut by corrupt laws. There are groups of voters who have more right to be upset than others, but they are locked out of the system to prevent an outbreak of democracy.

For example, in most states convicted felons are not allowed to vote, even though they have officially “paid for their crime.” These people are ripe for voting for a people’s party, and the establishment knows it, so bars them. Unemployed, they may have sold some pot to feed their kids, the only real shot there is for many at the bottom of an economy in which more illegal drugs are sold than in any other nation.

And I’ve tried for decades to change the law in Virginia so that homeless people can vote. Long ago I was feeding homeless people on the street, spooning out grits in freezing cold, watching people with ice around their faces crawl out from doorways where they slept and thinking, “What if I could bring registration forms, get them to sign up and encourage them to vote for the Greens?”

I even found a legislator, a Black woman named Mary Christian, to sponsor me to speak before the Constitution Committee of the House of Delegates, the oldest legislature in North America, and ask that they allow homeless people to vote. To make a long story short, I failed in that attempt.

Didn’t know that homeless people can’t vote? Check your state and you will probably find it’s near impossible there as well. In Virginia, if you are caught with a false address on your registration, you are subject to a year in jail and a $10,000 fine. If you are homeless, and you register as living in the building whose doorway you slept in last night, chances are you won’t be there the next night after a cop tells you to move along.

The establishment knows who could be trouble, and has already enacted laws to make democratic participation hell for millions of Americans.

Most Americans live in ignorance of almost anything of importance to them, knowing only the myths given to them by the corporate media. That is what makes it so difficult to organize them—their heads are filled with propaganda. “But if I don’t vote for Hitler, Satan will get in. . . .”

So, in my entire life of trying to find ways to disrupt the system and make it work for the people, I always come back to the one thing that holds promise, and that is to find a way to get information to the masses around the corporate-viewpoint media. It is that mainstream media which keeps the masses ignorant and in thrall.

I hate to agree with Donald Trump, but he’s right that the mainstream media is the enemy of the people. They have been all my 72 years, but it is getting worse.

Once there were big dreamers in our government who came up with National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System, which were a great idea. The idea was to allow opinions around the corporate media, so that the public could get a second opinion.

But good ideas soon hit a meat grinder in our system. The scum who run the country had their bought-and-paid-for politicians cut funding, forcing NPR and PBS to take more and more corporate money, until they became a clone of ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, FOX, etc.

If we had one TV channel of our own, we could destroy the entire house of cards. Years ago I wrote about it and it appears we need a Social Justice Network more than ever today. The thing the establishment fears most is information and democracy, and a Social Justice Network could bring us both, by opening the eyes of the public to the scam that keeps a boot on their backs. Ignorant people are controlled people.

 

Jack Balkwill has been published from the little read Rectangle, magazine of the English Honor Society, to the (then) millions of readers USA Today and many progressive publications/web sites such as Z Magazine, In These Times, Counterpunch, This Can’t Be Happening, Intrepid Report, and Dissident Voice. He is author of “An Attack on the National Security State,” about peace activists in prison.