Category Archives: American

An Open Letter to Bernie Sanders

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An Open Letter to Bernie Sanders

“Writing today to ask you to share your thoughts on what our progressive movement should be doing to address the many crises we face as a country. I would very much appreciate hearing from you, so please, add your comments today.”

— Bernie Sanders, broadcast e-mail, 12 February 2022
(213th birthday of both Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln)

Dear Bernie (and my fellow Americans, and World):

Issues raised in Bernie’s letter (in my words):

  • Pandemic: 900,000 Americans dead, 14-24 million dead worldwide in less than 3 years.
  • Jobs: lost, not found, given up, poorly paid.
  • Education: disrupted and unaffordable at all levels.
  • Seniors isolated by COVID-19, abandoned by neoliberal economics.
  • Desperation, loss of control: mental illness, drug addiction, alcoholism, domestic violence.
  • Democracy fails, media lies, science disbelieved, paranoia rising, factuality vanishing, irrationality.
  • Bigotry enables Authoritarianism: White Supremacy, vote suppression, racism, xenophobia, fascism.
  • Plutocracy: enrichment of the already wealthy few by further impoverishment of the desperate many.
  • Corruption of government by accumulated and incorporated wealth, to enhance plutocracy.
  • Impoverishment of the wage-slave masses to lard the Military Industrial Complex.
  • Fossil-fueled Capitalism and its international military power forever overriding Climate Change.
  • Ukraine: one focal point of competitive imperialist adventurism today, February 2022.

Bernie’s Questions:

— 1. “What is the best way forward?”

— 2. “What should the President be doing?”

— 3. “What should Congress be doing?”

— 4. “What should the progressive community be doing?”

1:

Bring the maximally socialist program advocated by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, Bernie Sanders and their associated Progressive legislators, to the House and Senate for votes (ASAP). Let the chips fall where they may, and let the American people see those facts.

2:

President Biden should:
— give full-throated support to the above and direct the Democratic Party to vigorously enact as much of it (originally Franklin Roosevelt’s 1944 proposed “Second Bill of Rights”) as possible as soon as possible without making any concessions to Republicans and Copperhead Democrats;
— push vigorously to raise taxes on the wealthy to pre-Reaganite (and ideally Eisenhower) levels;
— enact a transaction tax on Wall Street trades;
— cease all provocations of Russia over Ukraine and accept Western European energy commerce with Russia;
— stop nuclear weapons production and deployments immediately;
— end the Cuban Economic Blockade and relinquish its Guantanamo base-and-prison;
— stop CIA destabilization of foreign governments;
— direct the Justice Department to vigorously prosecute January 6 insurrectionists and bar those who were elected or appointed officials from ever holding public office again;
— direct the Justice Department and the Treasury Department to investigate and prosecute perpetrators of the 2008 Financial Crash, and current inside traders and stock market and banking manipulators, and bar all government officials from all such trading and activity;
— stop subsidizing Israel, an apartheid state;
— support the U.N resolutions demanding cessation of Israel’s occupation of Palestine;
— appoint pro-union judges to Federal and Supreme courts,
— cut military spending and close many foreign military bases (as at Okinawa);
— stop all arms sales to Saudi Arabia and Gulf states at war with Yemen;
— release Afghanistan’s foreign bank accounts so it can fund its famine, drought and natural disaster relief;
— reign in, even stop, drone warfare: stop killing foreign civilians!
— vastly expand pandemic preparedness and mass vaccination programs (COVID-19, influenza, measles, polio, etc.);
— inoculate (flu, COVID) all migrants and refugees crossing US borders;
— ban family separations of undocumented migrants, and reunite those separated;
— forgive/cancel ALL student debt;
— direct the National Academy of Sciences to formulate a plan to transform US energy production to 100% green/solar, and US food production to 100% Regenerative Agriculture within 5 years, and all Cabinet Departments to support (not contradict) those efforts;
— ban the use of coal for energy production;
— ban fracking nationally;
— prosecute fossil fuel companies for manslaughter (minimally) because of knowingly adding to climate change, which is known to kill people;
— enact federal legislation banning state restrictions on solar home systems, as a restraint of trade;
— ban all hunting and killing of wolves and other animal predators, nationally;
— ban clear-cutting for timber, nationally;
— end the criminalization of drug addiction, nationally, (replace with M4A treatment);
— direct the Justice Department and the NLRB to prosecute corporate anti-union activities;
— seek out progressive Democrats to primary and displace Copperhead Democrats and Republicans;
— enact strict campaign finance laws, ideally with only public funded elections at all levels;
— declare war on the “democratic deficit” and corruption of government by billionaire capitalism;
— advocate seriously, loudly and often for all the above positions;
— obviously champion the aspirations of the overwhelming majority of Americans — not corporations!

3:

Congress should support all the above, vigorously, immediately and continuously:
— Work for us (the 99%), not them (the 1%) — now and always;
— Work to eliminate White Supremacy, not support it;
— Work to expand Social Security and Medicare for All, not exclusionary private equity;
— enact national Gun Control legislation, and ban retail sales of automatic weapons;
— end prisoner slavery (now a 13th Amendment exception) and the death penalty;
— Work to reform the Judiciary and all Police Forces (largely replaced by expanded Emergency Services) to serve public social needs, not to protect and shield accumulated capital from public social responsibility.

4:

Progressive Democrats should:
— displace the corporate-controlled DNC for leadership of the Democratic Party;
— lead as much of Congress as they can ally to pursue all the above;
— and not stop nor flag their efforts regardless: lead if you want people to follow.

Also:

  • antitrust prosecutions to break up media, internet and other monopolies and cartels;
  • ensure 100% internet neutrality;
  • reestablish the 1949 FTC Fairness Doctrine for broadcast news media;
  • cancel pharmaceutical patents based on any federally funded scientific research;
  • immigration reform with a path toward citizenship (especially for already long-term residents).

And more, as you can imagine in line with the above.

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On Ukraine, today in February 2022:

“For both Hitler and Stalin, Ukraine was more than a source of food. It was the place that would enable them to break the rules of traditional economics, rescue their countries from poverty and isolation, and remake the continent in their own image. Their programs and their power all depended upon their control of Ukraine’s fertile soil and its millions of agricultural laborers. In 1933, Ukrainians would die in the millions, in the greatest artificial famine in the history of the world. This was the beginning of the special history of Ukraine, but not the end. In 1941 Hitler would seize Ukraine from Stalin, and attempt to realize his own colonial vision beginning with the shooting of Jews and the starvation of Soviet prisoners of war. The Stalinists colonized their own country, and the Nazis colonized occupied Soviet Ukraine: and the inhabitants of Ukraine suffered and suffered. During the years that both Stalin and Hitler were in power, more people were killed in Ukraine than anywhere else in the bloodlands, or in Europe, or in the world.”

— Timothy Snyder, ‘Bloodlands, Europe Between Hitler and Stalin’ (2010, Basic Books).

To understand the attitude of Ukrainians today (2022), and the attitudes toward the Ukraine by the successors of Hitler’s Fascism (Neoliberal Anglo-American Capitalism) and Stalin’s Communism (Putin’s Oligarchic Russian Nationalism) — even with the differences between those successor powers from the 1940s powers they replaced, and the differences between the early 21st century “World Order” from that of the mid 20th Century — it is necessary to understand “the special history of Ukraine” as well as that of “the bloodlands” between Berlin and Moscow from 1914 to 1945, and particularly from 1933 to 1945 during which 14 million non-combatant civilians were intentionally murdered by government policies of territorial conquest and control, and the expansion and consolidation of political power.

The ultimate state of human society if the devolution of today’s politics is not checked:

Borowski’s Inferno
28 January 2022
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2022/01/28/borowskis-inferno/

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World War Infinity

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Albert Einstein is often quoted as having said:

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

Stan Goff writes:

“There won’t be a WW4.”

I say:

It’s a continuum of war, not a sequence of episodes of war. It’s a “streaming” of war, not a stasis of “peace” episodically punctuated by temporary eruptions of violence, called “wars.”

Numbering the “wars” simply means the intervals of “peace” are just well disguised wars by the clever perpetrators, and/or the antiwar and historian observers doing the numbering have failed to properly pay attention to what is actually happening during those “peaceful” intervals.

“Full spectrum dominance,” the military doctrine of the United States, means everything — from infant formula to nuclear bombs, and everything else in between — is “weaponized” all * the * time. It is all always WW∞.

The ‘end’ isn’t a point in the future, it is the streaming ‘now’ of thoughts passing through a cloud of amnesia to be transformed into bullets — both real and metaphorical, but all truly deadly — and which streaming presents itself, among other manifestations, as global warming climate change.

It is WW∞. We are WW∞. And Earth is fighting back, and will win.

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On the Rittenhouse Acquittal

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American criminal law trials are decided in favor of whichever of the competing attorneys spins the most compelling story that resonates with the consensus bigotry of the jury. Now that Kyle Rittenhouse has been acquitted of three shootings with two murders of unarmed Black Lives Matter protestors, it is time for the US Attorney General, Merrick Garland, to file a federal civil suit against Rittenhouse, for violating the civil rights of the people Rittenhouse shot and killed. This is how the Ku Klux Klan killers of the four Voting Rights Workers, in Mississippi in 1964, were finally successfully prosecuted, after being acquitted of murder, which is a state charge. It is also how O. J. Simpson was successfully prosecuted to win large damages for the families of his murder victims. The previous criminal trial, even with an acquittal, establishes the fact of the taking of the lives and with them their civil rights. Why should the U.S. Attorney General do this? Because it would signal that the Federal Government is not irredeemably White Supremacist, and that it actually wants to be representative of all Americans. Allegiance is only justified to the extent this is true, and that extent is sorely lacking today.
(19 November 2021)

In a statement released today, President Biden said: “we must acknowledge that the jury has spoken.” This seems a pretty clear signal that no Civil Rights suit will be filed by the US Attorney General.
(19 November 2021)

The purpose of the American Police and Justice/Legal System is to preserve and protect the status quo of a white supremacy racist and patriarchal country. Besides outright oppression, there is much deception and P.R. applied to this purpose. But, it is also important to remember that though “villains” come in every shape, age, color, ethnicity and socio-economic ($) class, there are also “heroes” and “good people” from every one of those categories as well — just not enough of them by a long shot.
(17 November 2021)

Another triumph of American White Supremacy: the 14th Amendment (“equal protection”) is voided by the Color Line. I do not pledge allegiance, and I will remember all of this when next drafted into jury duty.
(19 November 2021)

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My wife and I have been binge watching the ABC series (2014-2020) ‘How To Get Away With Murder’, streaming on Netflix (a new thing for us, in 2020, after no TV of any kind since about 2004).

What I find intriguing about this show is that it is a chained murder soap opera heavily laced with extensive social justice stories and courtroom speeches, all made commercially viable and popular by liberal use of hyperactive sex scenes, fast-paced hyper-dramatic emotionalism, cast inclusivity by all parameters (black, white, Latino/Latina, Asian, Muslim, gay, straight, bi, every possible permutation of those), fast-paced “gritty” violence, glitzy ‘hip’ (sic) modernism/colloquialism/argot, with a crew of millennials front and center, along with an Academy Award winning actress (Viola Davis, the lead) who is also producer/executive producer (which undoubtedly was essential to getting the original ABC approval and funding), and – excellently – a large number of African-American actors/actresses who are: strong, pivotal, quick, sharp, superb with language (from the King’s English all the way to ghetto, downhome and jailhouse argot), eye-appealing when that is necessary for the stories, and both “heroes” and “villains.” Even with the many exaggerations and razzmatazz for commercial appeal, the show has managed to really blast away (mercilessly) at many injustices in American society. I think the show is a good example of the entertainers behind it using their professional skills to really put out strong and timely social justice messages while simultaneously cutting good paychecks for themselves. Of course, one could instead argue that they are somewhat cynically exploiting popular social justice hopes (of the Barack Obama type of “hope and change” longings) to capture “audience share,” but I don’t think that is the case.

Because of our binge watching of this show (6 seasons of 15 episodes each = 90), those social justice issues (as expressed really vividly in the show) have been much on my mind.

Viola Davis is the star and standout performer, the whole series is built around her as an actress, and around her character. She’s phenomenal. Excepting her, my favorite characters are “Frank Delfino” and “Bonnie Winterbottom,” they have enviable fortitude. My favorite hairstyle for “Annalise Keating” (Viola Davis) is her last one.

I’ll be thinking of this show the next time I’m called to jury duty.

https://www.netflix.com/title/80024057

(16 November 2021)

One of the biggest and recurring targets of the ‘Murder’ show was the large over-representation of African-Americans in America’s jails, and as America’s victims of homicide by police (and framing by the Justice system: local, state and federal).
(19 November 2021)

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How to Get Away With Depicting Social Justice in Hollywood
19 November 2021
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/11/19/how-to-get-away-with-depicting-social-justice-in-hollywood/

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BEST U.S. R&R BANDS

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I was asked my opinion on “the best U.S. rock-and-roll bands.” My answer:

‘The Band’ was ‘built’ around Levon Helm, from Arkansas, and the mythology it plumbed was all country-blues, country-folk, Levon’s canon of music. By “best” I mean most connected to the spirit of the people, coupled with absolutely superb musicianship, lyrical insight, and ever captivating ‘listenability,’ all equaling pure songwriting and pure performance.

What I DO NOT mean by ‘best’ is flamboyant sonic showmanship — though I have enjoyed much of this as well, as with Hendrix and the Allman Brothers (with Duane). Sly and Santana were good, mainly for dancing. Dylan and Aretha were superb, each in their own idiom, but they were showcased acts fronting cherry-picked studio bands, though I’ll give Dylan credit for sometimes blending into the bands who backed him (The Band, with the ‘Basement Tapes’, and George Harrison’s ‘Traveling Wilburys’).

For me, ‘best’ is a musical ensemble that is a song-expressing integral unit that has achieved a timeless recorded body of work; and for ‘American’ that has really tapped into the spirit of its people both on its light and dark sides.

My three favorite (‘best’) American Rock and Roll bands are:

— The Doors (especially albums 1,2,4,5),
— The Band
(‘Music From Big Pink’, and ‘The Band’ being to me two halves of one double album), and
— the 1969 band in Memphis, TN, that recorded ‘The Memphis Tapes’ with Elvis Presley, his absolute best work ever.

*If the pure ‘American idiom’ were the #1 criterion, then ’The Memphis Tapes’ band+singer rates #1.

*The most underrated Doors album is #4: ‘Morrison Hotel’, which is their most unified (a favorite).
*The most avant-garde Doors album is #5: ‘L.A. Woman’.

*The ‘best’ (favorite) Band song is ‘King Harvest Has Surely Come.’
(Steinbeckian musical mythology).
*The most ethereal song of any Rock band: ‘Whispering Pines’ by The Band.

*Best stoner album: ‘Blonde on Blonde’ by Bob Dylan
(+ real musicians, one from The Band).
*Best Dylan albums: ‘Highway 61 Revisited,’ ‘Bringing It All Back Home,’ ‘Blood On The Tracks’.

*Best Hendrix song/track: ‘Little Wing’.

*Best Janis Joplin song/track: ‘Me and Bobby McGee’
(Kris Kristofferson song).

*Best Southern Rock band: The Allman Brothers
(with Duane Allman).
*Best Duane Allman + Dicky Betts track: ‘Little Martha’.
*Most popular Duane Allman solo: on ‘Blue Sky’
(Dicky Betts’s non-blues balladic song).

*Best ‘supergroup’ band: The Traveling Wilburys (1988)
(also, best ‘old man’ band).

*Best Dance Band: ‘B-52s’.
(most creative song: ‘Rock Lobster’).

*Best Beer-Drinking Night band: ‘Hoodoo Rhythm Devils’.
(their best ‘American mythology’ song: ‘Red Pacific’).

*Best ‘generation II southern rock band’: ‘The Doobie Brothers’.
(with Tom Johnson, and pre Michael McDonald).

*Best soul singer: Aretha Franklin (obviously).

*Best female rock-pop-country vocalist: Linda Ronstadt.

*Most idiosyncratic: ‘Captain Beefheart’, a Howling Wolf imitator
(considered a genius by his afficionados, an acquired taste, not mine).

*Most Puckish: Ry Cooder
(especially his ‘Paradise and Lunch’ album: his best?)
(a favorite, especially ‘Married Man’s a Fool’, delicious guitaring).

*Best band for wallowing in depression: ’The Velvet Underground’.

*Best frenetic unhung rock band: ‘The New York Dolls’.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

*Best album for spending the night with your girlfriend in the dormroom:
‘Crosby, Stills and Nash’.

*’The Rascals’ (or, ‘The Young Rascals’)
(‘Good Lovin’’ best cover ever).

‘Lovin’ Spoonful’
(‘Do You Believe In Magic?’, ’Summer In the City’)

*’Creedence Clearwater Revival.’
(their groove is all in their pacing).

*’Steppenwolf’ (best white trash stoner band)
(’Easy Rider’ soundtrack).

*Best Country-Pop: ’The Carpenters’
(sorry, Dolly)

*Most soporific on long roadtrips out West: ‘The Eagles’.

*Most ‘70s coke-hip cool: ‘Steely Dan’ (eh, for me).

Most amusing gen-II ‘Dolls’ style (with less chops): ‘The Ramones’.

Best Disco: an oxymoron.

CATEGORIES NOT INCLUDED HERE:
Blues, R&B, Soul, DooWop, ‘Detroit Sound’, JAZZ, Gospel, ‘50s R&R,
(Black music from which White R&R was sourced)

NON U.S. R&R Bands:

*Most appealing rock band ever, and best all-around: ‘The Beatles’
(and from the working class).

*Most pretentious rock ban ever: ‘The Rolling Stones’
(and most Tory-decadent rich hypocrite appropriators of American R&B)
(my favorite RS song: ’No Expectations’, last with Brian Jones).

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From Social Contract To Occupy Wall Street

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The decade of the 1920s was one of industrialization and economic growth, globally. This relatively peaceful and prosperous period ended with the onset of a quarter century of economic hardship and armed conflict.

In 1927, a civil war broke out in China that would finally end with the victory of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949. In 1929, the New York Stock Exchange crashed, and the Great Depression began. Two years later, a period of 23 years of continuous international warfare began.


The period of open warfare, which includes the 1939-1945 interval labeled “World War Two,” began in 1931 with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, and ended in 1953 with the armistice ending the shooting of the Korean War.


The United States of America emerged from the period of economic depression and world war as the supreme global power by 1945, and it would revitalize its non-communist European and Asian allies, and former enemies, during the period of postwar reconstruction from 1945 to 1953.


As the combatant nations of WWII recovered and reconstituted themselves in the immediate postwar years, they were each motivated by revulsion over the recent past, gratitude to the millions of soldiers and workers who brought about the collective liberation, and hope for a brighter future, to develop some form of social contract between the people and their governments, the labor force, and the industries. In the United States, this social contract was a bipartisan support for popular New Deal and progressive collectivities like Social Security, public education, unionized labor, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), as well as the postwar G.I. Bill (educational and housing benefits for veterans). In the non-communist European states it was a social democratic form of government, which managed many nationalized popular benefits. In the communist states, the socialized benefits were offered in exchange for unchallenged political control by Communist Party authority.


The next twenty years (1953-1973) were the golden age of capitalism and Soviet communism, a period of unexcelled economic expansion resulting from vigorous industrialization coupled with distributive social contracts.


Despite increasing population, productivity slackened in the 1970s, and given the unavoidable increase of social costs, the expansion of prosperity stagnated. By the end of the decade, plutocratic political pressure in the West had built up enough to increasingly detach government from stewardship of the social contract, and more closely focus it on corporate interests. In 1978, the People’s Republic of China abandoned central planning and began command capitalism.


Over thirty years of neoliberalism followed in the capitalist world, to the present day (from about 1979 to 2011). Non-communist neoliberalism is “free,” or market-driven (with varying interventions by governments), while a command form of neoliberalism is used in the People’s Republic of China, directed by its exclusive national party.


At the beginning of the 1990s (between 1989 and 1991) the economically and politically stagnant Soviet Union and its satellite empire in Eastern Europe disintegrated, and the many independent states formed out of that former political monolith were absorbed into the capitalist world.


During the 1980s and 1990s, the United States was de-industrializing (“outsourcing”) to increase corporate profits by decreasing its domestic labor costs. Many newly industrializing states (NIEs) in Asia and Latin America were taking advantage of this expatriation of American industrial capacity, by offering to host foreign-owned industrial facilities, and offering their people as a lower-cost substitute labor force.


Japan was a leader in outsourcing production throughout Asia, but it only did so after achieving full employment in Japan, and only to increase its total industrial output to feed its export (mainly U.S.) market. While the portion of Japan’s labor force in industry has dropped since before the 1990s, the affected workers have been shifted to service industry employment, so full employment has been maintained (about 4% unemployment during the 2000s).


As in the major industrialized states during the 1970s, productivity gains in the 2000s in the now more developed NIEs were not always capable of outpacing the growth of population and the increasing costs of social needs and unexpected losses. So, the returns from some outsourced investments were diminished from initial expectations. The perceived lethargy of industrial development anywhere to yield profits quickly enough increased investors’ fever to decouple profitability from productivity. The first decade of the 21st century was one of frenzied speculation in financialized paper (e.g., derivatives, hedge funds), and was facilitated by the deregulation of the US banking industry in 1999.


The financial system collapsed between 2007 (burst housing bubble, banks insolvent) and 2008 (stock market crash, public bail-out of banks), after thirty years of de-industrialization accompanied by a trend of growing income inequality. From a rate of 4.5% in early 2007, the official US unemployment rate shot up past 10% by January 2010, and remains above 9% today. One should double these numbers for a more realistic estimate of unemployment.


The combination of heavy personal debt and lack of jobs (for skilled labor and professionals) has spurred many people across the United States to congregate in public protests, to move themselves beyond fearfulness in isolation to a release of their anger, by channeling it into a joint sense of purpose for social change. These are the people of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement in its many locations.


The sense of purpose for social change has two parts: a change of self image so one interacts in a new and more effective way with the rest of society, and the taking up of some form of political activism so as to help move the larger society to change in desired ways. How these two factors are proportioned within any particular individual is determined by their unique circumstances.


OWS is the human face of debilitating debt and unemployment, and it will disappear when popular debt relief (e.g., for underwater mortgages and student loans) and the widespread availability of skilled employment occur. How long it will take the U.S. to arrange for popular debt relief and the widespread availability of skilled employment is unknown. Equally unknown are how many political and thus economic changes will have to be made in the course of arriving at popular debt relief and a full employment economy, but ultimately that point will be reached because it is the most stable arrangement for US society. Resistance to achieving this stable social state will only delay the inevitable and increase the quantity of blood, sweat, tears, and money needed to achieve it.


Every desire for social change held by every person in the OWS movement can be reflected in one simple phrase: renew the social contract.


OWS is an awakening. People who had thought of themselves as law abiding, hard working, loyal Americans ready and willing to take their places in society as contributors are waking up to the fact that they have been pushed out of American prosperity, and they want in.


OWS is a protest about being personally saddled with debt, primarily for homes and education, sold under promises of a better future, and then government allowing the lending institutions to destroy the economy necessary to support those rosy futures, at a handsome profit, without penalty, and — most galling — without canceling the essentially fraudulently-created debt on the mortgage holders of financially inundated real estate or evaporated professional careers.


The young people of OWS are the cadets of the bourgeoisie who have been excessed by the time of their graduation. A soulless nation is eating its young: for decades by incarcerating rather than employing blacks, and now, because of a tightening of the money situation for plutocrats, even throwing over the white cadets who have been training to man the occupations that will continue America’s bourgeois economics during the next two decades. The graduates of 2006 to 2016 may be a lost generation, as this is an ageist society. When the economy recovers, maybe by 2016 (since neoliberalism is likely to persist), employers will look to fresh graduates to fill the available slots; once five years out of school, you are obsolete.


OWS has social and political impact primarily by being LARGE and PRESENT. It has to be the elephant in the middle of the nation’s view-screen in order to cause a course correction. The longer OWS endures, the more likely it is that the political class will agree to work toward debt-cancellation and job growth, since these will make OWS disappear.


Can enough new jobs be created soon? Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (international business editor at The Telegraph) has the idea that a US economic turnaround (more jobs) will occur within the next few years, brought about by the exploitation of new domestic sources of petroleum (oil shale and tar sands) and a reversal of outsourcing (or, a return to domestic industrialization). This is just one indicator of rational expectations (devoid of environmental concerns) for a resumption of economic growth.


What about reform of the financial industry? Nicholas Kristof, a conservative pundit at The New York Times, is advocating reform of the financial industry because he understands that hubris by the plutocracy could lead to a disastrous popular backlash (the ultimate conservative nightmare is communism). Mainstream voices for financial reform know that wonderful profits can easily be made the old fashioned way, as was the case under Glass-Steagall banking regulations between 1933 and 1999.


And, what about debt relief? Wall Street certainly loves the idea when it applies to banks. Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, recently stared down the European banks and made them accept a 50% writedown of their Greek debts. The stock market zoomed 300 points, because investors are far more concerned with the “stability” and continuity of the eurozone financial markets than they are with a few banks losing a few 10s or even 100s of billions (half made up with public bail-outs), so long as the game and the global banking casino are not shut down by a currency (euro) and credit market (banking industry) collapse.


Obviously, the concept of debt relief will be pushed and expanded further and further, because the debt burden everywhere is like a bone caught in the financial world’s throat. Once it is finally swallowed or coughed out, then the feasting can begin again. When debt is cancelled, people are free to borrow, spend, create, and expand productivity, that is to say generate earnings and profits. The next Steve Jobs may be milling about in an OWS throng, just waiting for student loan relief to set him capitalistically free. So, we can expect that when OWS people begin speaking the language of demands, one of the items included will be relief of students’ loans for education.


The young generation in OWS wants the freedom to advance their bourgeois, capitalist aspirations; they want to be the Steve Jobs and Barack Obama of the 2020s. They do not want to shrink their vision into re-entering a proletarian life, nor to occupy their minds and time with “organization” for proletarian-type unions like the UFW (United Farm Workers), nor consign their aspirations to distant hopes for an elusive millennialist “revolution.”


OWS is a leaderless coincident mass awakening, it is not a popular uprising in the style of the Mexican or Russian (February) Revolutions, and it is not organized in the sense of being hierarchical and regimented. The cadets manning OWS will never adopt Marxism, essentially none have flocked to the red banner.


The people in OWS are shackled by debt and economic fear, and they are gathered to celebrate the freeing of their minds from a number of illusions. Individually, they may go on to be active politically, each in their own way, but all are quite unlikely to relinquish their identification with the American bourgeoisie (“middle class”), or to relinquish their new and painfully-realized mental freedom by submitting themselves to the blinkered thinking of any political ideology that seeks to exploit their massed energy, or to direct their social purpose.


Renew the social contract.
 
Timeline: 1945 Social Contract to 2011 Occupy Wall Street

1945, Europe and Japan ruined by World War II

Civil War in China (1927-1949) interrupted by Japan’s occupation of Manchuria (1931-1945) and Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945)

Postwar rebuilding in Europe, 1945-1956:

U.S. role:

  • 1944, Bretton Woods system of currency relations to US dollar
  • 1945-1948, $12B in U.S. postwar aid to Europe
  • 1948-1952, $13B in Marshall Plan aid to Western Europe
  • (US GDP in 1948 was $258B)

Soviet role:

  • 1945-1954, Soviets extract 23% of East German GNP
  • 1945-1954, slow release of German POWs, forced laborers
  • 1949 Cold War split formalized, West and East Germany created
  • 1949-1956 East and West evolve comprehensive social contracts

Western European states (Atlantic Alliance) 1949-1956:

  • renew politically as social democracies
  • much foreign aid in, rapid growth, more satisfied population
  • have extensive political freedom on account of prosperity
  • 1954, West Germany gains full political and economic autonomy

Eastern European states (Warsaw Pact) 1949-1956:

  • reformed as Soviet communist satellite states
  • reparations or little aid, slow growth, less satisfied population
  • very limited political freedom in exchange for social contract
  • 1953 East German and 1956 Hungarian revolts suppressed

Postwar rebuilding in Japan, 1945-1960:

1945-1952, US aid of $1.9B while Japan under occupation:

  • this equaled 15% of imports and 4% of GNP, in forms of:
  • 59% food, 15% industrial materials, 12% transport equipment

1953, US military spending (Korean War) is 7% of Japan’s GNP

  • by 1960 US military spending in Japan less than 1% of Japan’s GNP

Economic growth 1953-1973:

“Golden Age” in Western Europe, Japan, and Soviet Union
economies achieve “full employment”
labor cooperation exchanged for social contract
productivity and gains due to industrialization, and:

  • government (trade) policies
  • exports
  • technology
  • cooperative labor

Economic stagnation 1971-1979:

1971 collapse of Bretton Woods currency relations to US dollar.

(The Vietnam War had accelerated inflation, and faith had been lost in the US’ ability to cut budget and trade deficits. “On August 15, 1971, the United States unilaterally terminated convertibility of the dollar to gold. As a result, ‘the Bretton Woods system officially ended and the dollar became fully fiat currency, backed by nothing but the promise of the federal government.’ This action, referred to as the Nixon shock, created the situation in which the United States dollar [not gold] became the sole backing of currencies and a reserve currency for the member states.”)

1973, first oil crisis
(Arab boycott over US aid to Israel in 1973 Arab-Israeli War)

1973-1974, stock market crash (20+ years of steady growth ends)

1978, People’s Republic of China abandons central planning

  • a centrally planned economy is replaced by command capitalism

1979, 2nd oil crisis
(U.S. opposes Iranian Revolution)

Thatcherism and Reaganomics

  • Margaret Thatcher, UK Prime Minister, 1979
  • Ronald Reagan, US President, 1981
  • lower productivity after 1960s, higher population and social costs
  • government increasingly oriented to corporate interests
  • retreat from New Deal and post WWII social contracts
  • trend of increasing income inequality begins

30 Years of US Neoliberalism, 1981-2011:

Ronald Reagan Administration (R), 1981-1988:

  • breaks the air traffic controllers union in 1981
  • “supply side” and “trickle down” economics, and tax cuts
  • deep recession of 1982 with 10% unemployment
  • stock market crash of 1987
  • Savings and Loan crisis, a $125B public bail-out
  • deregulation and hostility to regulate
  • no change to the minimum wage
  • raised national debt from $997B to $2.85T
  • the share of US income received during 1980-1988 by the:
    — 5% highest-income households grew from 16.5% to 18.3%
    — 20% highest income households grew from 44.1% to 46.3%
    — 20% lowest income households fell from 4.2% to 3.8%
    — second poorest 20%, fell from 10.2% to 9.6%.

George H. W. Bush Administration (R), 1989-1992:

  • recession in 1992 with 7.8% unemployment
  • developed North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)

Bill Clinton Administration (D), 1993-2000:

  • 1994, enacts North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)
  • 1996, ends Aid to Families with Dependent Children,
    — (fulfills promise to “end welfare as we have come to know it”)
  • 1996, Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996
    — (significant precursor of the Patriot Act of 2001)
  • 1999, signs Gramm-Leach-Blyly Act,
    — (this repeals Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, bank deregulation)
    — (see ENDNOTES for more on Glass-Steagall)
  • 2000, signs Commodity Futures Modernization Act,
    — (legalizes over-the-counter derivatives)
  • federal budget surpluses 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001 (Fiscal Years)
  • War on Drugs swells prison population from 1.4M to 2.0M

George W. Bush Administration (R), 2001-2008:

  • 2001 and 2003, total tax cuts of $1.3T, aimed at the wealthy
  • 2002, No Child Left Behind Act (push to privatize public schools)
  • “War on Terrorism”:
    — 2001, Patriot Act (curtails civil liberties)
    — October 2001, invasion of Afghanistan
    — March 2003, invasion of Iraq
  • 2002, stopped funding the United Nations Population Fund
    — (UNFPA promotes family planning in the developing world)
  • 2005, response (and lack of) to Hurricane Katrina
  • 2008, Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the $700B bail-out

Barack H. Obama Administration (D), 2009-present:

  • failed to use Democratic majorities in congress to pass reforms
  • September 17, 2011, Occupy Wall Street begins; what now?
     
    ENDNOTES

“The People Cry Out Against the New Great Depression”
by Manuel Garcia, Jr.
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/10/05/the-people-cry-out-against-the-new-great-depression/
(Glass-Steagall Act and financial reforms are described)

“Some Central Themes of the Occupy Protesters”
by Associated Press
http://youtu.be/3zXk_2_LCR8
(video on income inequality)

“Graphic of US Income Inequality, 1947-2011”
by Robert Reich and New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/09/04/opinion/04reich-graphic.html?ref=sunday

“United States Income Distribution 1947-2007”
by wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_Income_Distribution_1947-2007.svg

“Where’s My Job?” by ConnectTheDotsUSA.com
http://www.connectthedotsusa.com/pdf/WheresMyJobSlides.pdf

“Owe Dear”
by The Economist
http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/07/world-debt-guide
(global debt map)

“World Power Swings Back to America”
by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/8844646/World-power-swings-back-to-America.html

“Crony Capitalism Comes Home”
by Nicholas Kristof
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/27/opinion/kristof-crony-capitalism-comes-homes.html

“Calling Bankers’ Bluff, Merkel Won Europe a Debt Plan”
by Steven Erlanger and Stephen Castle
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/28/world/europe/europe-in-accord-on-basics-of-plan-to-save-the-euro.html?_r=1

“Another Idea For Student Loan Debt: Make It Go Away”
by Petra Cahill
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45040659/ns/us_news-life/

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From Social Contract To Occupy Wall Street
7 November 2011
http://www.swans.com/library/art17/mgarci32.html

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Confessions of a Secret Controlled Demolitions Special Operative for 911

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Confessions of a Secret Controlled Demolitions Special Operative for 911

An insane person knows they are sane and the rest of the world is crazy, and that is why it should be feared. A truly sane person knows they are crazy and the rest of the world is sane, and that is why it should be feared. I have learned from experience that the best way for me to speak with other people is: not at all. I have learned from experience that everything that people tell me is correct, and I should never let on that I rarely if ever believe them. As far as everybody is concerned: you are right, I am crazy.

But now I’ve had a chilling life-and-death health scare, and it made me realize that before I die I should finally confess to the American People about being a secret controlled demolitions special operative for 911. Everything you have secretly believed, and could never let on about, is true. Here is my story.

In the 1980s I was working on the secret Orbiting Space Laser Weapons Platform (OSLWP) project for the US Government. Believe me, they’re up there now; they’re just not telling you, it is TOP SECRET. The HARP Project was just a low level test run experiment during the development of the OSLWP.

I had gotten a Physics Ph.D. from an Ivy League University, and was recruited into the Nuclear Weapons Program a few years earlier. I designed an electronic sensor that was able to measure the rate of fusion burn in the golfball-sized spark plug at the core of fissioning uranium and plutonium atom bombs. Only the U.S. has this, and I did it. Because of this, I was then double secretly posted into the OSLWP project, and my identity in the outside world was completely erased, until now.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, we were building OSLWP modules in the vast underground MX Missile Railway Complex, the expansion and completion of which with weapons manufacturing and assembly capabilities is another TOP SECRET. Those modules would be loaded into the cargo bays of the USAF robotic mini Space Shuttles (whose existence is no longer a secret) at AREA 51, which is linked by the MX Underground Railroad (MXUR). By the way, the steak restaurant in the MX Underground Weapons Manufacturing Complex (MXUWMC) is top notch, as is the bar (one dollar for top shelf doubles of martinis and 18-year scotch!, and yes I often got hammered on the US taxpayers’s nickel).

The OSLWP fleet was assembled piece by piece robotically in space, the engineers doing the work remotely from MXUWMC, by video link and joysticks. The huge underground supercomputer banks doing all the calculations and command and control generate so much heat that they have to be cooled by an underground river diverted from the Colorado River by a deep rock-cut tunnel.

By 2000, the OSLWP fleet had been up and running for a few years, and work down in the MXUWMC had dropped off very significantly, mainly just legacy maintenance and guarding classified data banks. Layoff after layoff happened, and I thought my high-paying high-tech career would suddenly come to a close, and I’d have to live off my savings from there on out. I would always be a designated security risk under surveillance by the CIA’s secret Homeland Monitoring Department in the FBI (yes, it exist, another secret they’re not telling you about), because of the Government’s fear that I might inadvertently “spill the beans” to coworkers if I was to get an outside job, which they did not want me to do.

So after I got my notice on July 4th, 2000, I just stayed home and drank my own martinis. I wasn’t much fun for the wife and kids, but then I had never been able to tell them anything anyway, while now at least I was home regularly at nights and available to take out the garbage cans once a week for the pickup. Dullsville 24/7, and staying off the telephone.

Then one day I got a visit from an old buddy of mine who was an Army Ranger and had been a guard at MXUWMC. Guards at MXUWMC had to have proven search-and-destroy capabilities, and my drinking buddy ‘Keith’ had lots of secret missions under his belt. He’d parachuted into Vietnam in late 1975 (after the US withdrawal and the official end of the war) to find and lead out a group of 86 people hiding in the jungle from the Communists: rich bankers and their families who were also hauling crates of gold bars. He and his squad (not all surviving) guided this group to an isolated spot on the Vietnamese coast and loaded them onto a waiting US submarine, for evacuation. In 1980 ‘Keith’ was secreted into Poland at night from a German S-100 Class Schnellboot (a WWII war trophy now used by the CIA’s Naval Branch), where he was to reconnoiter the Solidarity Movement and try to recruit in-country anticommunist spy assets, particularly for monitoring Soviet military movements. ‘Keith’ was the “muscle” of the small team which included a CIA political officer who was also a Polish language expert. ‘Keith’s’ souvenir from that trip was the beret of the Soviet Special Forces sentry he killed during the team’s extraction (I’ve seen this beret, it has a beautiful emblem in Cyrillic sown in). ‘Keith’s’ proven performance as a special op gave him lots of credibility with MXUWMC Security, so they recruited him for a Guard job in 1982, and that’s where we met and traded stories many nights at the MXUWMC bar: “Thor’s Cave.”

‘Keith’s’ kind of an ADHD sort of guy and he left MXUWMC after three years, but he didn’t leave the secret world we were both part of (okay, let’s call it the ‘Deep State’). He went out and made tons of money as a CIA approved and vetted assassin in the employ of the apartheid South African Government, from 1985 to 1990. While John Perkins made his splash with his book Confessions Of An Economic Hit Man, dishing about his times as a national foreign economy disruptor secretly employed by the US Government, ‘Keith’ was the ultimate type of person-as-weapon employed by the US Deep State: a jackal, a man with a gun, a Swiss bank account, and any passport of his choosing anytime he wanted it. So I lost contact with ‘Keith’ during the years that he was dispatching African nationalist activists and union organizers in several African countries south of the Equator, for the South African Defence Forces (SADF), and burying his bounties in gold in the cellars of his various foreign retreats, and in Switzerland.

So I was really surprised to see ‘Keith’ on my doorstep in the autumn of 2000, when everybody was all hopped up about the election tussle between George W. Bush’s people and Al Gore’s. That was obviously going to be a no-brainer as the Supreme Court made blindingly clear. Deep State rules. ‘Keith’ had been tasked to bring me a very tasty offer for getting back into the Deep State fast action high tech world I had been so enthralled by. The project was being run by Dick Cheney, and its purpose was to reshape the World Order to secure another century of US control. How could I say no?, plus, the pay was astronomical (and thanks to the US taxpayers!).

And that is how I was recruited into the most complex US false flag operation in history: the secret controlled demolition of the World Trade Center: a cover for launching the Global War On Terror, which is really the War For Complete National Control and World Domination, though of course they never call it that or let any of that phraseology appear in any written memo or in any electronic file. Those of us who already had long histories of working deeply in dark government programs all knew the drill about “security.”

By the way, being drunk really messes up the readings of their polygraph tests on you, which is fun. But then they just keep you in the tank until you sober up, and you have to take it over and over again until they’re satisfied. Dreary. They respect your technical skill and prize that, but not your humanity. You’re just a tool.

Once I again had access to supercomputers, engineers and laboratory technicians, I set about calculating what arrays and minimum doses of charges could collapse tall buildings instantly. My experience as a young physicist working on nuclear bomb detonation tests, years before, came in very handy here. Now at MXUWMC, I had laboratory scale models built and tested in blast-wall confined cells. It was good to be back in MXUWMC, now refurbished for Cheney’s GWOT false flag kick-off project.

None of us had any moral qualms about this work because we all knew GWOT911 (yeah, another of our ’spoken only’ acronyms) was a necessary operation to insure the best for the continuation of the American Way Of Life. That phrase meant a lot to us, and we would refer to it affectionately amongst ourselves as AWOL — really, I’m not kidding. I guess we all believed the operation would be carried out at night on a long holiday weekend when the WTC buildings would be empty. But, hey, you know how it is, people always believe the best about themselves and about what they are doing. We were no different, at least for those of us below the level of the Inner Council of the Directorate, basically Cheney’s roundtable (which George W. Bush was escorted into a few times, or so I heard from ‘Keith’, as Security Guard scuttlebutt).

Anyway, my calculations and experiments worked out really great, and jibbed with the best results of the other controlled demolitions designers in the GWOT911 Physics Department. So from our pooled results, the technological component packages were blueprinted and built in the MXUWMC factory. When it came time to select Emplacement Teams (ETs), I was selected as the “physics lead” for Team 6, and I got Keith’ as the “muscle” leader for my team. My small platoon comprised of 20 people; the other 18 were a mix of demolition emplacement techs, electronics and circuitry interruption specialists, and security troopers like ‘Keith’. This was exciting adrenaline-pumping work.

In less than two weeks, staged as HVAC, plumbing, elevator, and electrical conduit repairmen working through the Labor Day weekend of 2001, all our teams got the WTC Twin Towers and Building 7 wired for demolition. Then we were sent home and scattered, without knowing the date of execution or even if the operation would actually be carried out.

It didn’t take long to find out. On 11 September 2001, the WTC buildings were blown, and those collapses were caught on many cameras for the world to see and be humbled into submission by the awesome yet cloaked power of the Deep State that controls us. I was as surprised as all of you to see this. I call it the American Fatima, because so many people watching the televised visions of 911 got a miraculously instant engineering and physics education that day.

That night, ‘Keith’ came and picked me up for a ride in an unmarked government limo. By then I had come to realize that he was my personal security monitor for GWOT911. Frankly, I thought I might be living out the last scene in The Friends Of Eddie Coyle, because of what ‘Keith’ was capable of. But it turned out to be much sweeter than that. The GWOT911 Directorate realized that they needed to ramp up and maintain a long-term undercover disinformation program to confuse the public and keep a lid on the real purpose of the 911 ‘Spectacle’ (that’s what we GWOT911 insiders call the events known to the public as “September 11”: “the Spectacle”), and ‘Keith’ had been sent to retrieve me for induction into that effort. I got a really nice seafood dinner in San Francisco that night — and of course martinis before dinner, and 18-year scotch after — for listening to that spiel and getting read into the program. Hey, more big chunks of change electronically dumped into my bank account for the next seven years of easy work. My cover was “retired physicist” (for the nuclear bomb work) who wrote amateur essays supporting the “official story” of the 911 events as being solely the work of Osama Bin Laden and his 19 Saudi henchmen (who were all expendables supplied to GWOT911, through Cheney, as part of the ‘Washington-Allied Oil Industry’s’ compliance with the plan).

The problem for the GWOT911 Directorate was that 300 million Americans, and billions of people worldwide, had seen the Twin Towers and Building 7 fall on TV, and they all just knew that these had to be controlled demolitions (I mean, you can see it, right? Who believes you need an engineering degree to think differently?). And besides, no one in America was believing that “Arabs in caves” could conceive of and then execute such a daring and devastating operation on American soil. So I was recruited to become one of many “internet influencers” tasked with thwarting the messaging that had started coming out of what soon became known as the ‘truther community.’ For me this was easy work at first, but it soon became boring. Like gravity, the truthers just never quit. It became clear to me that truther belief would live forever, and it was ultimately a waste of my time to continue opposing it. But the income from doing it was good, so I slogged on without any enthusiasm.

Between 2002 and 2008 many big engineering reports were issued detailing the technicalities of the official story, and a huge number of photographs were published of scattered airliner debris in Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon. I know how much of all that was real, but I’ll leave you to your own guesses about that (this story is already too long, and I’ve got to wrap it up).

However, I will give you one more little tidbit about Spectacle Day. Wiring up the Twin Towers took up 22 of the 24 ETs, so Building 7 was shortchanged on getting more than 2 Emplacement Teams, which then had to rush their work because they each had over twice as many floors to wire up. As a result, they slipped up a bit. Some of WTC7’s charges dudded, others misfired out of synch, and so the building stayed standing while highly damaged internally, and burning from fires ignited by burning WTC1 debris falling into it. The fires in WTC7 could not be extinguished because the water mains under the street had been cut by the collapse of WTC1, and all the fire suppression systems were rendered inoperative. Many hours later on that day, WTC7 finally collapsed.

By 2007, I had grown disillusioned that GWOT911 would really lead to a beneficial transformation of appropriately guided American democracy, and assured prosperity for the American people. You know how it is, we technical propeller-heads are not real good at political insight. And smart as I’d always thought I was, I finally came to fully realize this was so true of me, too. By then truther consciousness had become very subdued in American public discourse, thanks in no small part to people like me, so despite the fact that it would never really disappear altogether the Directorate now considered it innocuous, like the common cold, and deemed it ignorable.

So on 9 October 2008, Keith’ came to pay me one last visit. His message from the Directorate was simple and clear. We were both cut loose to live quietly on our savings from there on out, and never to break the security regulations of our lifetime Official Secrets contracts — we’d be watched. ‘Keith’ and I then went out and had a fabulous filet mignon plus shrimp scampi dinner at Scott’s Seafood at Jack London Square, with lots of Maker’s Mark and Woodford’s bourbon and sodas. ‘Keith’ is a straight bourbon man, I’m bi with either bourbon or vodkatinis, and ‘Keith’ was buying, spending from his saved up lavish SADF per diems. Soon after, ‘Keith’ flew off — I don’t know where — to one of his personal gold-bottomed dark sites situated in a beautiful resort setting where bevies of nubile and compliant pleasure angels were certain to be available for his company. ‘Keith’ is a simple straightforward guy when it comes to “the meaning of life.”

The coup de grâce of the Financial Crash of 2008 hit the next day — “another controlled demolition,” I thought to myself. The ensuing frenzy in the US government over that economic chaos made them forget about outcasts like me, and I never got any messages from the Deep State again. So I just puttered along in my life of birdwatching, and writing my little ‘political word doodles’ that I post occasionally on the internet. This was just a way for me to ward off boredom, by continuing with a writing habit I’d been habituated to from my days as a covert anti-truther influencer.

We physics people, especially in MXUWMC and GWOT911, all knew about global warming from way back, of course. But that was unmentionable on the outside, and the expendables the Oil Industry was tasked with supplying for Spectacle Day were part of the price the Deep State demanded as payment from the Oil Industry to keep global warming off the public radar screen (I’m sure you can guess who the Dark Lord was who mediated that arrangement). Believe me, all those high-end people are pure business, they don’t have friends, they only have “interests.”

I’m a conventional guy, I have kids, I want the best for them and I know where our future is headed, and I now had the freedom to write openly about climate change. Naïvely — and we propeller-heads are always naïve — I thought my warnings on climate change could arouse the public, and that it in turn would influence our government, and all governments, to really take action changing national infrastructure to transform our energy and food systems for a sustainable society and sustainable human civilization. And so I spent more than the last decade happily writing for that. But that revolution never came. I guess I’m just a dreamer, tech-savvy and socio-politically dumb.

Then this year I got a medical diagnosis, and my long view into the future collapsed (another controlled demolition) into a much shorter timeline. I’m not a praying kind of guy, I like to think of myself as a realist who is logical — and moral. So I came to the conviction to “spill the beans.” Why not, what can they do to me now? And who cares anyway? Nobody pays attention, nobody notices anything, nobody listens to anybody, and everyone is their own expert who does their own research: usually on the toilet with a smartphone.

So that’s my story. You can believe it or not as you like, I don’t care. I’m at peace for having told it, in fact I rather enjoyed myself doing so. I’ll just be birdwatching and word doodling all my happy days from here on out. All I can tell you beyond that is this: it’s your world now, folks, take care of it if you want it to last (but I don’t think you will).

Cheerio.

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Louis N. Proyect (1945-2021), Light Saber of Truth

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Michael D. Yates (27 August 2021):

It is with great sadness that I announce my good friend, Louis Proyect, has died. He had a serious illness for some time. He died peacefully in his sleep on August 25. I will miss him greatly, and I assume you will as well. Louis was a voracious reader, and almost every day, he posted links to articles from a wide variety of sources on multiple subjects, from politics and economics to music and philosophy to physics and ecology. I am sure we have all learned a great deal from his posts. He did much in his life, through his efforts in Nicaragua and South Africa, for example, and with his voluminous writing, to push radical transformation forward. He allied himself with leftists around the world. He seemed to know just about everybody. Those who knew him personally know that he was a good human being, always willing to help a friend, no matter where in the world that person happened to be. He and his wife Mine showed me and my partner many kindnesses over the years. Goodbye, Louis. You will live on in our hearts and in our efforts to change the world.

Manuel García, Jr. (in response):

I first became aware of Louis N. Proyect in 2003, when I began writing for Swans (Gilles d’Aymery’s internet magazine), where Louis was an established presence. Over the 18 years since then we have had many exchanges (all over the internet, sadly; and all good, happily), and I learned a great deal from him. I was even able to teach him some things, mainly about science. We were both native New Yorkers, and he was very much the archetypical kind of good-hearted prickly exterior quick witted wise ass Jew that I had grown up surrounded by (and especially with one cherished college professor who hailed from Brooklyn). He had that refreshing “what’s it to ya'” attitude that doesn’t seem to cut it so well west of the Hudson River; but which can be so essential to cut through the crap when you really need to solve a problem (and my secret weapon out here in Californicate). On 10 July 2021, I read the ‘comic book’ style biography of Louis that he had posted (in several parts) on his blog, and wrote to tell him how redolent it was of the times and scenes I had grown up through. By then I had reached a point in my life where I told people outright if I appreciated them, because I didn’t want to accumulate more regrets. And I told Louis that in our exchanges on July 10 and then again in our exchanges on July 17, my last personal e-mail contact/exchange with him. Louis appreciated my gesture and said so. After that I could see from his blog that he was trying to get as much done as he could, as the phenomenon we all knew as Louis Proyect. I’ve lost a brother, older, and often “pesado,” but dearly loved. What I liked most about Louis was that he never let ideology confine his moral sense — his heart; his primal motivation was his deep moral sense of solidarity with all human beings, and his fiery outrage at the injustice of the sufferings of the humble, the weak, the exploited, the “salt of the earth.” He was a mensch.

He was absolutely correct on Syria — and Libya — neither of which the comfy doctrinaire ‘left’ herd have been able to face up to yet. Louis was a Light Saber of Truth.

Louis N. Proyect was the only leftist to publicize my article on chemical warfare in Syria (a commissioned piece, rejected, that went against the grain of herd orthodoxy). We both hate dictators regardless of their stripes.
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2021/07/09/chemical-warfare-in-syria-and-its-corrosiveness-beyond/

Adam Weissman (27 August 2021):

“One of the all-too-few voices on the left who challenged the lies of campists and the brutal dictators they shill for. A fierce and passionate defender of the Syrian people. He will be sorely missed.”

Link to Louis Proyect autobiography
https://louisproyect.org/2021/07/06/the-unrepentant-marxist-comic-book-final-chapter/

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The Idea of America

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52 State Flag (proposed); if add Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C.

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The Idea of America

America is an idea struggling to free itself from slavery and the many degradations that slavery entails: conquest, genocide, racism, classism, sexism, exploitation imposed by fear of starvation, and regimentation into legions of thuggish enforcers and cannon fodder used as pawns for self aggrandizement by the kings, queens, bishops, executioners, and judges of the social order.

There is rebellion trembling in the souls of the people, looking up to the fabled blue sky of their dreams from the dank dark depths of their wells of desperation; and looking out with bleary eyes to the hazy lost horizons for unrealized promises, from the burnt lands and baking deserts of their isolated naked vulnerability.

What do you do when you fall far from help? You sit waiting until you can get up, and then you go on. On!

Those that survive to do this embody the earth tremors of the idea of America struggling to erupt into freedom ruled by justice, fortified by intelligence, ennobled by compassion; an eruption that will inevitably require a crisis that may unleash tragic cruelties because the unyielding resistance against the pressure for social change — by the slaveowners, the speculators, the profiteers — could only be broken by a terrible and searing explosive force.

The idea of America will find its lasting peaceful freedom in solidarity by the resurrection of America in the aftermath of its last death in its last civil war. Who can know if they will live to see this? All that we can know is that the idea is undying.

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House Upon The Sand

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This is my two-part rant of 30 June 2021.

Andrew Bacevich writes:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/06/29/the-passing-of-the-present-and-the-decline-of-america/

This is the kind of commentary, and commentator that pisses me off. Yes, an honorable, intelligent, patriotic former career soldier, and highly respected military-political commentator comes to forthrightly state that the war-crazed dysfunction of the American state now seems fatally terminal, and one might have found glimmers of that realization as far back as 1969, such as in Kurt Vonnegut’s new book that year Slaughterhouse 5, though Bacevich finally acceded to it in mid-Trump Administration.

WOW! I fucking knew this in 1968 as an 18 year old! I read SH5 in 1969, and Catch-22 in ’68, and had read Helen Hunt Jackson somewhere between 1963-1967 (which was before Dee Brown’s “Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee” was published).

Okay, so now the old West-Pointer Bacevich has finally read SH5, and published his erudite books on the stupidity of American militarism, and been forthright about his previous white American exceptionalism careerist wrong illusions, and made sincere and public efforts to advocate for an inclusive, just, “progressive” America, and write as here about the complete toxicity of Trumpianism and the Republicans, and the pathetic flaccidity of the less than B-minus grade Bidenites — great, all welcome and good (and Stan Goff would tell me to be accepting of anyone’s personal redemption — okay), but DAMN! it took long enough!

The whole damn Vietnam War genocidal catastrophe wasn’t enough to wake you up by 1975? by Reagan-time? by Bush II time and the Iraq War? How come so many of us dumber unimportant people can figure this stuff out decades before you super-informed, super-plugged-in brainiacs and lever-pullers?

Well, okay, you’re good now Bacevich, and thanks for the accurate insights about today. I’m guessing that just as (some) serious people like Bacevich have woken up to the evils of American militarism 50 years after the Vietnam War, that equally in 50 years time we’ll see a heartening swelling in the ranks of today’s serious lever-pulling people who have woken up to the Planetary Crisis encompassing global warming climate change, collapsing biodiversity and its attendant social inequities. And then (forgetting about all the bodies buried since then) they’ll want to do something about it. By then palm trees might sprout in Greenland, and we may even have a smaller world population (involuntarily).

Okay, rant, part 1, is over. Now for part 2.

From Wikipedia: The Oklahoma City bombing was a domestic terrorist truck bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States, on Wednesday, April 19, 1995. Perpetrated by anti-government extremists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, the bombing happened at 9:02 am and killed at least 168 people, injured more than 680 others, and destroyed more than one-third of the building, which had to be demolished.

From Wikipedia: On June 24, 2021, at approximately 1:30 a.m. EDT, Champlain Towers South, a 12-story beachfront condominium building in the Miami suburb of Surfside, Florida, experienced a sudden partial collapse. At least 12 people died, and 11 others were injured.[as of 30 June 2021] About 35 people were rescued from the uncollapsed portion of the building, 2 people have been rescued from the rubble, and 149 people remain missing as rescue operations continue… As of June 28, 2021, 12 people are known to have died during the collapse, and 11 more have been injured. 11 of the 12 fatalities have been publicly identified, including two Venezuelan nationals and two Cubans. Up to 149 people remain unaccounted for.

So, it looks like the Champlain Towers South will have snuffed out 162 lives. “Missing” and “unaccounted for” are the terms used to describe people that have been killed but whose bodies have yet to be recovered, and for whom, illogically, their loved ones hope (and who can blame them!) that they will miraculously return alive.

So this building collapse — in all probability — nearly equals the death toll of the Oklahoma City terrorist bombing of 1995, though it did not cause any noticeable number of other injured. But the Oklahoma tragedy was “terrorism” and required a swift and vigorous government response, both to care for the victims and to apprehend and punish the perpetrators. But the Surfside (Miami) building collapse tragedy is not “terrorism” by rising seawater intrusion climate change undermining heedless shoreline real estate development, so: hold your horses!, let’s not rush to judgment!, let’s not act hastily — meaning at all — about that uncertain “climate change” scare tactic. Yeah, sure Gomer.

The mainstream finger of blame is pointing to faulty building construction and maintenance — which is undeniable — but that mainstream public consent-directing ministry (“of Truth”) has a massively pregnant silence about (the unthinkable!, the unmentionable!, don’t “politicize” tragedies!) CLIMATE CHANGE! But, well, “the possible excessive ingress of salt water” MIGHT have also been involved.

The bottom fell out and has been falling out not only of the Champlain Towers South, but of the whole damn Idiocracy clinging to and dangling from their high hopes of exponential prosperity for the ‘serious’ and ‘worthy’ (a.k.a. “exceptionalist”) denizens of the United States of Amnesia. Victims R Us.

“And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand.” — Matthew 7:26, King James Bible.

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