Category Archives: rant

House Upon The Sand

Posted on by

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.

<><><><><><><>

Bernie’s Triumph, and All The Failed Red Moses

Posted on by

Over the last five years, Bernie Sanders has awakened every single mind in the United States of America to the following 12 ideas, which in the American political orthodoxy of 2015 were ‘known’ to be so ultra-radical that they were deemed politically impossible forever, and thus dismissed without further consideration:

— healthcare as a human right, implemented by Medicare-For-All;

— raising the minimum wage to $15 and hour;

— free education at publicly funded colleges and universities;

— cancellation of all student loan debt;

— a transaction tax on Wall Street trading, and prosecution for economy-crashing Wall Street fraud;

— revoking tax breaks to corporations and the extremely wealthy, and inverting both the tax code and the political campaign contribution system to the benefit of wage earners;

— transitioning from fossil fuels, and investing in infrastructure revitalization in a trillion dollar jobs-rich program;

— accepting the 11 million undocumented residents into a citizenship program, abolishing the ICE concentration camps, and reforming the immigration and political asylum system by humanizing it;

— reforming the criminal justice system to eliminate its evident racial bias and persecution of poverty;

— assuring women’s rights to equal pay for equal work and to abortion: keeping women in control of decisions regarding their own bodies;

— the abrogation of job and manufacturing outsourcing “free trade agreements”; and

— the regulation of drug pricing by pharmaceutical corporations.

Sanders has been able to appeal to people of every racial and sexual distinction, from every Abrahamic and non-Abrahamic religion as well as atheists, and to develop a grassroots political movement, which is both democratic and socialist, from that appeal. No other American, with the exception of Martin Luther King, Jr., has come close to this achievement since the days of Franklin Roosevelt.

People opposed to these 12 ideas, in part or in whole, are possessed by combinations of greed, bigotry and sexism. While such attitudes are repulsive to any decent mind, they are nevertheless common in several wealthy and corporatized constituencies that are inordinately politically powerful by dint of financially patronizing — purchasing — political legislators, policymakers, officeholders, and judges: straightforward political corruption.

The betrayal of public trust by timorous and hypocritical “public servants” who lack authentic moral character and are entirely cultish zealots of lucre is, tragically, all too common in American governance. That the richest and most powerful country in human history can consign so many of its people to abject misery, fear, neglect, financial ruin and death, is an abhorrent testament to the destructiveness of these narcissistic parasites on the American Body Politic.

One sad observation for me about the suspension — the ending — of Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign is the pathetically bitter envy, expressed by isolated politically inconsequential failed leftist ideologues, of the historically major successes at politically bold mass consciousness-raising and organizing achieved by the progressive pragmatic politician Bernie Sanders.

The biting sarcastic glee of numerous self-styled advanced leftist commentators at the suspension of the Sanders presidential campaign are their outbursts of joy at the arrival of this “failure,” which they have been pining for for months, even years, so that now they can finally crow in triumph that they had always been right, that Sanders was merely a sheepdog, a stealth Judas goat and Pied Piper meant to lead the naïve masses into the electoral corral of the Democratic National Committee wolfpack, and away from the true lines of political thought these ideological pastors had stirringly and stridently preached at the inattentive and disinterested masses urging them to cuff their minds in alignment onto the iron rails of ‘correct’ revolutionary tenets inscribed on the Tablets of all these Red Moses, so as to amass the socialist tsunami these commissars-in-waiting wished so delusionally to crown with their leadership.

What pathetic failures of intellectual honesty to admit to their lifelong “revolutionary” ineffectiveness, and what pathetic failures of human decency to acknowledge with grace and gratitude the really incredible societally beneficial achievements of one near-octogenarian Jew from Brooklyn, New York, transplanted to Vermont. It is a fact that Bernie Sanders has permanently altered popular American political consciousness — which had been dominated since 1979 by the neoliberal paradigm — toward the favoring of the wage-earning masses, and that some of his ideas have already been implemented regionally and in several industrial operations.

Can you imagine that the new purely socialist COVID-19 economic relief legislation — however flawed it clearly is as it comes out of the Trump Administration, the Republican dominated Senate and the DNC Democrat dominated House — would be as comprehensive and as reluctantly ‘generous’ as it is at the moment, without the prior popular consciousness of Bernie’s 12 ideas, and without his continuing advocacy? Bernie Sanders has lit a fire in American minds under the age of 50 that will not be extinguished soon. Scores of young people with that fire in their hearts inspired by Bernie Sanders, and which so terrorizes the ensconced political elites, have now gained political office with a drive to change American society.

So to you my friends I say: be grateful for all of that and celebrate the triumphs of a man of integrity who struggles against a corrupted and degenerate establishment, instead of being childishly resentful that your imagined brilliance has perennially and once again been overshadowed.

‘Okay, so I’m a little bit asshole, but friends tell friends the truth’ (https://youtu.be/L8QYgpqbXQQ).

Don’t Trust Anyone Over 30 (40?) Says This 70 Year Old

Posted on by

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

Don’t Trust Anyone Over 30 (40?) Says This 70 Year Old

The Sanders movement, the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America), the BLM (Black Lives Matter) and BAR (Black Agenda Report) types, the post Occupy Wall Street activated (over-indebted under-employed college educated), the anti-ICE pro-immigrant Latinos (mostly) and Muslims, the anti-pipeline and American Indian and sacred land environmentalists, the anti-gig-slavery pro-upping-the-minimum-wage all-hours ‘flexible’ contingent laborers, and the downwardly mobile climate change and school massacre enraged children of Boomers, are all by and large YOUNG PEOPLE.

For these young people the current political struggle is one of US: socio-politically and economically disinherited YOUTH — the FUTURE, against THEM: economically entrenched, corporately huddled, materialistically ($$$) clinging, responsibility avoiding and mentally ossified OLD PEOPLE — the PAST.

That past includes the hoary relics of antique and esoteric “revolutionary” political ‘analysis paralysis’ and arcane argumentative ideological number-of-angels-on-a-pinhead wise-ass sophistry oratorical gratification.

Youth wants action NOW, and those who are seen to be working EFFECTUALLY to produce such action now — and who are known as always having been active on the right side of history, and most effective over time in comparison to all other claimants to the mantles of “progressive,” “socialist,” and “revolutionary” — are who youth are listening to and contributing their energies to join in movement with (a.k.a. Bernie Sanders in 2020).

Youth will NEVER follow old political theorists, into becoming the old ideologues’ perennially hope-for revivifying force of the old dreams of the old dreamers, because the actually inconsequential presence and extreme isolation of the always-on-the-fringe follower-less vanguard — both in matters of mind as well as living experience in today’s world — simply shows what complete failures those lonesome ever-forsaken ‘leaders’ have been as agents of political change and revolution in American life.

These are just the facts, most easily verified by having children who are among the youth of today, and listening to them.

The youth-swarm today is buzzing around Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, and the political campaigns and careers of Sanders’ vibrant youthful associates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Kshama Sawant and numerous others. Why? Because these people have gotten elected (i.e., gained some political power), pushed on the political system legislatively and from their bully pulpits, and actually gotten some useful results in the here and now (e.g., many minimum wage increases and college tuition waivers).

And what of the 2020 future? The intellectually grey-bearded volunteer left-wing ‘professortariat’ fustigates in its self-assured sagacity that Bernie Sanders will be robbed of the Democratic Party presidential nomination by the intrinsically allied with Trump-Republicans — the capitalist parasites — intransigently corrupt mammon-clinging (i.e., Clinton-Obama-Biden-Schumer-Pelosi-DNC) Democratic Party establishment, and with sarcasm dripping with the oily venom of envy disparage Sanders as a sheepdog-in-waiting to mislead naively hopeful youth into voting “Blue no matter who” for Biden, to defeat Trump while still also against their own interests, and thus extending the life of the detested-by-‘all’ (including me) DNC-possessed Democratic Party. You are stupid if you imagine that today’s youth are unaware of this potentiality, and of its framing by the people of THE PAST.

What will youth (THE FUTURE) do if the fossilized Democratic Party politburo (or, “Inner Party”?) is underwhelmed by the 2020 socialist-democratic swarm, and Sanders’ candidacy is sidetracked to ensure a Trump — and raw capitalism’s — reelection as Joe Biden has urged?

Some will vote for Biden or whatever Blue Animatronic Bowsprit Figurehead the DP politburo proposes to hang off the prow of the ship of state, in an effort to defeat Trump and the Republicans and to eke out whatever marginal improvements can be gained by that — for now.

Some will storm off in a huff into the third party doldrums of political frustration, perhaps in chimerical hopes of fracturing the Democratic Party once and for all and birthing a new “revolutionary” and/or “socialist” party, or rebirthing a magically amplified Green Party — for now.

Most will focus on their more-local pro-youth pro-socialist economic justice activism, as well as on their own very personal survival needs — for now because it’s always now — and they will be keenly focused on those politicians and political coalitions that retain the most legitimacy for pushing their dreams and interests forward against the capitalist measly-wage-slavery death spiral. Sanders has done too much for them for too long to ever be discredited in all their eyes whatever course he takes in the coming months. The opposition and disdain Sanders has received from all sides only reinforces his credibility as the leading champion of the dreams of the people of THE FUTURE.

Everybody knows that any frustration of the Sanders’ candidacy by the DP politburo will be blamed on Sanders by the DNC Dems and their allied corporate media, as well as by the envious leading-edge leftist ‘inconsequentials’; and any reelection of Trump and Republicans will be blamed on Sanders for “splitting” the DP whether it is actually split or not. It really doesn’t matter whether Sanders “sheepdogs” for the Blue Corporatists after being bypassed (if such; and why write him off from the get-go you old has-beens?), or rages off TR-and-Nader-like into his own Bull Moose (“spoiler”) independent ‘third’ party. Sanders is very obviously the pre-ordained favorite scapegoat of all of the PAST people for their anticipated (and, sadly, longed-for) political failures of 2020. (I voted for Nader, multiply, with no regrets.)

Criticisms of Sanders for his pragmatism and his supposed inadequacies in comparison to any political ideologue’s theoretical idealizations are completely immaterial in the as-lived here and now. All his admirers know that he is just an ordinary finite and thus fallible man, not a super-being nor the Second Coming, but an honest man doing his utmost best for others, for longer and better than anyone else has demonstrated in American political life in a generation. His greatest achievement has been to fully and memorably articulate the societal dreams and political visions of today’s youth, making those visions vivid common knowledge in 2020, and which dreams and visions today’s youth will put their energies into actualizing in the soonest possible now, and independent of whatever personalities temporarily get their names tacked onto that movement in the future. In the eyes of YOUTH: those who CAN, get elected and change things; those who CAN’T, squawk about everything and no one cares.

If any of my old friends in the internet volunteer commentariat (do I actually have any?) are offended by my intemperate expostulations on 2020 electoral politics, don’t take it to heart it’s not personal. It’s just simply that our day is done, long gone, and I’m rooting for the kids and getting behind them, without getting in their way by pretending to be in front of them. You could do the same if you really wanted to pass the torch.

NOTE to the READER: My use of CAPITALIZED letters and words in the middle of sentences is a device I have copied from Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) — as used by him in “Tale of a Tub,” “A Modest Proposal,” “Gulliver’s Travels,” and his own epitaph — (as well as my use of dashes as done by F. Scott Fitzgerald [1896-1940]) because I find these devices helpful in firing my ranting political broadsides (which Americans definitely need). I have done this without any fear of appearing literarily old and ridiculous: because I am and I don’t care. My aim is to sink the self-serving pomposity of the still lingering animated cadavers of THE PAST, and to blast cannon-holes through the masonry erected by those powdery blinkered fossils to prevent the passage of YOUTH into their deserved radiant FUTURE.

<><><><><><><>

Mutually Assured Madness: Immunity to the 25th Amendment

Posted on by

When Ronald Reagan first arrived at the White House after his big electoral victory over President Jimmy Carter in November 1980, and was now cleared to see and know all the secrets and issue commands, he was asked what he wanted to do first. He asked to see the War Room. The aides, handlers, military and security people were puzzled, what War Room? Reagan described the one with the big circular table and circular-arc overhead light, and the big screen-map of the world that would show the progressive trajectories of B-52 bombers making a nuclear attack on Russia, in the event of such an attack. Reagan was told there was no such War Room. “But I saw it in a movie!” he protested. Indeed, we all saw it in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 phenomenal cinema satire of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) nuclear war (Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb; https://youtu.be/vuP6KbIsNK4).

And so was displayed the lack of boundary between reality and fantasy, between fact and belief, in the mind of Ronald Reagan at the outset of his presidency in 1981, the new man with his finger on THE BUTTON. (The story about Reagan and the War Room was told by James B. Harris, a collaborator of Kubrick’s at the time, in later years for a documentary.)

Reagan would go on to bulldoze though American public affairs — to our detriment to this day — with the plow of his prejudices leading his way while the fog of his fantasies insulated him from accurate sensory feedback from reality. One of his cold-hearted policy directives was to have the Department of Agriculture classify ketchup as a “vegetable” as regards meeting the nutritional needs of children who were eligible for publicly funded school lunches (a.k.a., poor hungry kids). In the late 1990s poetry and spoken word events I attended in Berkeley, California, I would often hear poet Mark States regale us with his line: “Ronald Reagan told us ketchup was a vegetable, and now he is a vegetable.” Reagan’s mind had been lost to Alzheimer’s Disease, he had been diagnosed in 1994, five years after leaving office, and died in 2004. How much could creeping dementia have impaired (or improved?!) his performance as U.S. President during 1981 to 1988 is a matter of partisan argument.

How can we tell if a U.S. President is mentally incompetent, what would be unmistakeable signs of compromised rationality, and who is empowered to make such a determination and act on it?

Article II, Section 1, Clause 6 of the Constitution deals somewhat ambiguously with the the question of presidential succession in the cases of a sitting president’s removal from office (after conviction by the Senate in an impeachment trial), or of his/her death, or resignation (as with Richard M. Nixon), or “inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office.” The 25th Amendment was adopted in 1967 in an effort to clarify the ambiguities in Article II regarding presidential “inability” and succession.

Section 4 of the 25th Amendment reads as follows:

“Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

“Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.

“Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.”

So in effect, the removal of a president from office for “inability” would require a sustained mutiny by the Vice President and a majority of the 15 cabinet officers, who are the secretaries of: State, Treasury, Defense, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Energy, Education, Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security, and the Attorney General. Congressional approval would undoubtedly also be required. Clearly, a president would have to bust out as a really scary looney for that many of the executive officers to sustain a mutiny, and for Congress to condone it.

People generally achieve high executive posts by having displayed years of obedient service (coupled with deft back-stabbing), so it is extremely unlikely that any Cabinet would rebel against their chief executive regardless of how disconcerting the President’s behavior had gotten. And, it is quite likely that Cabinet officers could be just as nutty as the President who appointed them, so why mutiny?

This theme of officers relieving their captain of his/her command was explored in Herman Wouk’s 1951 novel, The Caine Mutiny, which was made into a memorable 1954 movie with Humphrey Bogart cast as Captain Queeg, the paranoid, petty, ineffective and unpopular captain of a U.S. Navy mine-sweeper who has a mental breakdown during a typhoon that threatens to sink the ship, and so his first officer relieves him of command, without opposition from the other officers. In the subsequent court martial of the first officer, Captain Queeg on the witness stand descends into an incoherent rant under the pressure of the defense attorney’s questioning (https://youtu.be/KekChFdIe00).

The court turns against the captain, and the first officer is cleared (as are his pals, by association); but their post-trial celebration is quashed by their getting a tongue lashing from the defense attorney, who tells them their first duty was to support their captain, and make up for his deficiencies to ensure the success of assigned missions, rather than conspiring to undermine his command (https://youtu.be/Jw6gwGawbXA).

So: yes he’s nuts but your duty was to shield the rest of the world from any ill consequences of that while getting the ship’s job done without upsetting and disrupting the established chain of command. I have no doubt that every U.S. Cabinet officer since 1954 has seen and remembers this movie, and quakes at the thought of deviating from that injunction to loyalty, even to a crackpot president.

Now we come to Donald Trump. Some people have become very concerned that President Donald Trump has really become unhinged, and should be legally ineligible to stand trial in the Senate (after his impeachment in the House of Representatives) on the grounds of mental incompetence: insanity. They point to his televised interview on January 22 in which he seems to speak of Thomas Edison (1847-1931) and Elon Musk (1971-) as living contemporaries (https://youtu.be/gxEwTFJG1DQ). Is this really Trump’s “Queeg moment,” or is the twisted thread of his atrociously ungrammatical babble just offering sufficient ambiguity so as to allow for such an interpretation despite his potentially having a sound mind?

The non compos mentis interpretation was voiced by Maya Wiley, a former attorney for the ACLU and NAACP, and seconded by others as noted in an article in Salon about Trump’s maybe Queeg moment (https://www.salon.com/2020/01/24/trumps-fitness-to-stand-trial-questioned-by-professionals-serious-signs-of-deterioration/). That article notes that Yale psychiatry professor Bandy X. Lee had previously been joined by hundreds of psychiatrists from around the country in calling on Congress to convene a panel of mental health professionals to evaluate Trump’s mental state. Lee wrote a joint op-ed with former White House ethics chief Richard Painter warning that Trump should not be tried by the Senate, because he “may not be mentally competent,” and the law requires that only those who are mentally competent can be made to stand trial.

Perhaps Donald Trump is certifiably nuts but his Republican party mates are loyally shielding the country from his worst tendencies while conscientiously attending to the nation’s business; or perhaps they are just cynically keeping Trump — whether really unhinged or merely rabidly befuddled while yet legally sane — manageably distracted in his presidential and Mar-o-Lago playpens while they busy themselves with looting the country with their class war by the plutocrats against everybody else; or maybe Trump is completely sane and fully in command, but his critics cannot bring themselves to believe that a sane mind, as U.S. President, could pursue such a horrid, bigoted and self-aggrandizing agenda, with the faithful support of so many federal officials.

I suppose if we view the last three scenarios as possible quantum states of the Trump Administration, that the “real” situation could be a continuing and unpredictable evanescent flickering between these three states, as well as various superpositions of them. In any case, the invocation of Section 4 of the 25th Amendment seems well beyond the bounds of probability. Given the Republican majority in the Senate — and their loyalty to their own self-interests (clinging to power, getting rich, legalizing their bigotries), as well as peripherally to their own Captain Queeg — Trump’s acquittal in his Senate impeachment trial is a forgone conclusion. Removing Trump from office (before 2025) will require an electoral victory in November 2020 by an opposing presidential candidate.

I think we can conclude that the materialistic careerist power-hungry back-stabbing sycophants and ass-kissers, who scum up to the uppermost tiers of corrupted political bureaucracies, are allergic to enacting administrative procedures for the removal of high officials on the basis of incompetence and mental dysfunction however justified such individual cases might be, because the acceptability of using such removal procedures would threaten them all. In Trumpistan (at the very least): It’s not what you can do to the country, it’s what your country can do for you.

<><><><><><><>

Mutually Assured Madness: Immunity to the 25th Amendment
29 January 2019
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/29/mutually-assured-madness-immunity-to-the-25th-amendment/

<><><><><><><>

Through My Lens, Clearly

Posted on by

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

Through My Lens, Clearly

For me, the 1950s ended in 1962 with the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the 1960s began in 1959 with the Cuban Revolution. I remember the elation in my family, in New York City’s Upper West Side (136th Street, and Broadway), when the Batista Regime in Cuba collapsed in January 1959; and I remember our dumbstruck terror in October 1962, listening to President John Kennedy speaking on our black-and-white TV, wondering if my grandparents would be radioactively incinerated in Havana before we were similarly dematerialized in New York City, or vice versa.

That is how my political consciousness was born; its coming-of-age and definitive molding was done later by the Vietnam War, and the many insistent demands by my government that I sacrifice myself to it. I escaped by dumb luck, for which I am eternally grateful. With the particular curvature and polish of my own idiosyncratic lens for political consciousness, I have come to resolve images of our collective reality that I sometimes feel a need to project, as here today.

People can’t be changed, they either evolve on their own, or they persist as they are to the death. The best you can do, for the rare few, is tell them the truth if they ask.

We live in a world rich in its diversity of intolerance of independent thought and self-directed living. Expressions of personal independence and creativity are threats to the slavish conformity of the mass of fearful repressed people hiding in their submissiveness to traditional ideologies that give them status in social hierarchies that limit the full human potential of the individual. This maintains, without merit, the elevation of patriarchs and power-hungry mediocrities who clip the wings of the human spirit and direct the enforcement of their systems of mental and physical imprisonment of the masses serving them.

Bigotry is popular because it makes stupid people feel intelligent, and weak people feel strong. President (sic!) Donald Trump’s popularity rests on people’s desire to be bigoted and respected for it. Bigotry will exist as long as there are ignorant people who are fearful. Such bigoted people love fascism because under it they can stay bigoted and be proud of it. Fascist bigots, like Trump, don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want to be made to feel ashamed. That is why publicly recognized fascist power-seekers always try to silence their critics: first by ignoring them, then by ridiculing them, then by judicial attacks against them, or by veiled calls to their followers to sprout proxies who will make illegal attacks on their critics, and ultimately if they gain dictatorial power they have their critics killed.

Evangelical Christianity is a cult of fear, and for its men also a cult of patriarchy. Politically, it is irrational Republicanism; socially, it is white supremacy and the subjugation of women. Why do such Republican women remain Republican? Because their bigotry, which is fear, is so embedded that it overpowers their self-respect, which is courage. Evangelical Christianity sees Islam as its reflection and its rival, which is why it hates Islam. In practice, their religion is a hate crime. Heraclitus was so perceptive to write, in about 500 BC, that “bigotry is the disease of the religious.”

The problem of race bigotry in America is like the problem of climate change. It is of our making, and we know how to fix it, but we never will. People are too invested in their ignorance for that to ever happen, and afraid if they let it go they will be weak in a changed world.

Arresting climate change would require the universal application of human intelligence, indiscriminate compassion, worldwide solidarity instead of personal selfishness, and thoughtful discipline instead of thoughtless waste. We are doomed. Climate Change is only a problem for the young, bequeathed to them by the old, who won’t notice it anyway because they’re comfortably done, and will be gone soon (geologically speaking).

I probably should not bother writing about the Climate Change Crisis anymore. Everyone everywhere now knows that it is real, and most have felt its first unpleasant effects. So, some Green Energy actions will now happen in response, probably too few, too weak and too late, but at least a start now that the Global Mind has opened to the truth.

Also, I really don’t need to write any more Jeremiads against Republican Party partisans (there are plenty of others to do that nicely), because it is now obvious to everyone everywhere — even the U.S. corporate media (though it puckers their sphincters to mouth it) — that the Republican Party is just a fascist conspiracy to eliminate democracy in the United States of America, and replace it with an authoritarian corporatized xenophobic bigoted Fundamentalist Christian White Supremacy theocratic oligarchy, to drive us all expeditiously to extinction under their self-satisfied obsessively avaricious command. Thieves lie, and liars steal. For them, it is better for humanity to die out badly than for the stupid, bigoted and greedy to be bypassed. Capitalism is fossil-fueled greed with a total lack of imagination, and a bodacious military. Capitalism is the ideology of parasites.

Who built the United States of America into the richest country in world history?: enslaved and exterminated Native Americans, enslaved Africans, dispossessed Mexicans, and exploited European and Asian immigrant laborers. Who produces American wealth today?: the wage-slave descendants of all of these, who only gain a pittance from their harvested labors. What salve are these squeezed working people given for the bruising sacrifices they make of their humanity into the endlessly grinding engines of obsessive greed?: a patriotism deficient in human solidarity but voracious for taxes. But, don’t think of it as taxes, think of it as tithing to the War Religion.

So in my lens’s focus today I find the following: For the world: Capitalism must die for the World to live. For my country: Tribalism is America’s fatal flaw. Resentment, envy and a fanatical sense of entitlement are its corrosive agents. A generational overturning led by socialist youth is its only hope. For myself and every other person: It’s not what happens to you that determines whether you are a success or failure at life, but how you deal with it. As Thucydides quoted Pericles: “Honor is the only thing that does not grow old.”

And now, back to the bread and circuses.

<><><><><><><>

Soulless Wealth, Fearful Apartheid, Violent Ignorance

Posted on by

The United States of America is not a nation, it is a colony. America is a host ruled by its parasites.

Trumpism is power exercised by the dominant wealth and bigotry classes, to remain exactly as they are. The basis of Republican Party thinking is greed and bigotry. What Republicans call “conservatism” is a religion based on the worship of money and the fear of people.

The challenge for most American politicians today is to use the mechanics of a democratic republic, and the appearance of populist political activism, to maintain a plutocratic corporatist oligarchy while convincing the disempowered populace that they are the masters instead of the servants of the imposed system of upward wealth transfer.

Capitalism is a mass psychosis whose devotees are obsessed to keep, even at the cost of near-term human extinction. The extreme inequality possible under capitalism is its most appealing feature to its fully programmed cultists. The Free Market operates off enslaved people. The U.S. produces wealth by stealing labor, and by printing currency backed by military power.

The repressed oppress. Violence is carried out by ignorant people who feel powerless and want “respect.” Bigots craving respect hypocritically claim a morality compelled by religion. One of the most powerful arguments for being atheist is the hypocrisy of most believers. I detest bigots and bigotry regardless of the gender, language, race, color, creed and sexual orientation of the bigot.

It feels good to be kind. Why can’t everyone realize this?

Your children are like unguided missiles, you can launch them, but you have no idea where they will land. The frustration of the old is the unnecessary stupidification of the young. The frustration of the young is the intransigent resistance by the old to the modern conditioning youth has adapted to. The purpose of education in the U.S. is to indoctrinate status quo-supporting robot consumers, who patriotically sacrifice their individual lives to militarized operations for imperialism abroad and colonialism domestically: submission to capitalist authoritarianism.

People have their mental ruts and their mental boxes, which they can’t allow themselves to wander from. And it is the incompatible diversity of such inability that is the implacable dynamic of human doom.

<><><><><><><>

Political Memes, Opus #2

Posted on by

Why do what’s right when you can make money?
Why be courteous when you can get ahead?
Why be truthful when you can lie to get your way?
Why share when you can have it all?

<><><>

Telling the truth is not hard,
guaranteeing you’ll like it
is impossible.

<><><>

The Socialist overthrow of Capitalism
would be a greater victory
than the capture of the Roman Empire
by Christianity.

<><><>

It must be a terrible heartbreak to have lived through the 1960s, and clearly remember the Civil Rights struggles and your protests against the Vietnam War, and then have had Reaganite Republican children and Bush and Trump Republican grandchildren. What a waste of all your child-rearing sacrifices, after having dreamt of an approaching just and democratic world, to bitterly realize that your turn at genetic transmission had been hijacked by fascism. Because of Hillary Clinton’s connivance in thwarting the Bernie Sanders campaign of 2016, and her being singularly responsible for bringing Donald Trump to power, there will never come a time in which I won’t detest the women (and men) who voted for Hillary Clinton in the primary elections, and still insist she should have been US president. I pity Trump voters, despite them being at least disappointing and at worst horrible people, because they are infected with a self-defeating and obdurate stupidity. Hillary Clinton-loving people are supposedly more intelligent and moral, but are in fact absolute failures who are irredeemably vain and selfish, and thus unworthy of concern.

<><><>

West God In Rut
Wine God Strut
We Trusting Do
Go Turd In West
Wet Gin Or Dust
Go Trust I Wend
I Trod New Gust
Wet Gin Do Rust
West Rust In Dog
Wet God In Rust
In Dog We Trust
I Got Us Newt’rd
In God We Trust.

<><><>

It is so sad to see intelligent, fundamentally decent people
in the prime of their lives
lost in bitterness,
unreachable to friendship
by those outside their exclusive club of resentment.
It is a sadness like grief for a loss in the family
of one still living
but forever beyond contact.

<><><><><><><>

American society is ignorant, self-absorbed,
fearful and thus cruel, surrendering to enslaving greed,
and soulless by lacking a compassionate unifying vision.

Its best hope lies in the individual development
of strong moral character, and thus socialist vision,
by enough people to revolutionize the entire culture.

Manuel García, Jr. — 23 March 2018

<><><><><><><>

Zionist manifest destiny
in Palestine and beyond
is a war crime, which
Americans should not
subsidize nor sacrifice for.

<><><>

VW is Germany’s Ford, Audi is VW’s Lincoln.
US VW’ers pretend having MB & BMW status
they’re too poor and chintzy to pay for,
by being pushy obnoxious drivers.

<><><>

Inflation is money’s shelf-life.

<><><>

Extinction sooner is better than profits delayed.
(It’s all about the money.)

<><><>

Genocide is the original sin of the real estate industry.

<><><>

“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just;
that his justice will not sleep forever…”
– Thomas Jefferson,
(Commerce Between Master and Slave, 1782)

“Freedom is the right to tell people
what they do not want to hear.”
– George Orwell
(The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937)

“If a nation values anything more than freedom,
it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is
that if it is comfort or money that it values more,
it will lose that too.”
– William Somerset Maugham
(Strictly Personal, 1941)

“It is the responsibility of intellectuals
to speak the truth and to expose lies.”
– Noam Chomsky, (1966)
(The Responsibility of Intellectuals)

“It’s typical for educated classes to be more effectively controlled
by the indoctrination system to which they are directly exposed,
and in which they play a social role as purveyors,
hence coming to internalize it.”
– Noam Chomsky, (1985)
(Intervention in Vietnam & Central America: Parallels & Differences)

“Nothing is easier
than to convince oneself of the merits
of actions and policies that serve self-interest.”
– Noam Chomsky
(Year 501, The Conquest Continues, 1993)

<><><>

The Victim Queen controls the World by projecting an infinite spectrum of dislikes.

<><><>

“I don’t want to have to think!”
Why humanity will extinct itself as soon as possible,
and pat itself on the back for doing so.

<><><>

God is a self-righteous excuse
for inflicting unconscionable cruelty.

<><><>

Will there be Love in 200 years?

<><><>

My biggest mistake:
having unrealistic expectations
of people I don’t know.
(Mainly everybody.)

<><><>

An old type of “joke” applied by racists/bigots who happen to be People-Of-Whiteness, against Black People (also known as People-Of-Color, and/or include: African-Americans, Afro-Caribbean, Africans) compares them disparagingly to apes: monkeys, chimpanzees and gorillas. Genetically, there is only one race: the human race. And, we are all a species of primate: apes. Genetically, humans and chimpanzees are 98.8% identical. There is a greater difference between chimp and gorilla DNA (94.8% same) than there is between chimp and human DNA (98.8% same). White skin only developed in humans after 12,000 years ago (after the Ice Ages) and most likely after 6000 years ago. Very well preserved human DNA from recently uncovered human remains in Britain, from 6000 years ago, was analyzed to determine that such early Britons had black skin (very deeply dark brown, or “negro” skin color), straight black hair, and blue eyes! Racial jokes are the lame humor of ignorant people.

<><><>

U.S. Political Parties:

Libertarian:
the sociopathic anti-war pro-greed party.

Republican:
the sociopathic pro-bigotry classist party
run by careerist touts for capitalism.

Democratic:
the anti-bigotry classist party
run by careerist touts for capitalism,
and now fighting off an insurgency
by democratic socialists.

<><><>

The only 2 excuses for voting Trump:
1. You’re a bigot too,
and he lets you feel good about it.
2. Dementia.

<><><>

The Gates of Heaven are locked shut
to bar the dark children
of the despoiled colonies
from climbing into the Olympus
of their White Gods
who luxuriate in the effulgence
of their self-satisfying beneficence
that is the envy of the sacrificed
whose blood and sweat
are fermented and distilled
into the intoxicating ambrosia
swilled
at the never-ending
Harvest Feast of the Gods.

<><><><><><><>

I could whisper words of milk and honey in your ear,
and tell you sweetly what you want to hear.
I could entertain and lull you like the smoothest joint
But, really folks, what would be the point?

<><><><><><><>

Superheroes Require Mega-Victims

Posted on by

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

Superheroes Require Mega-Victims

During the Roman Empire
crowds flocked to the Colosseum to see
their favorite gladiators kill many disposable victims,
so these fervent fans could experience
an ecstasy of entertainment
and fantasize about being would-be heroes
of glorious combat followed by popular acclaim.

In the American Empire
crowds flock to the big-screen Colosseums to see
their comic-book superheroes kill mega-evil super-villains
who kill many disposable victims,
so these fervent fans can experience
an ecstasy of entertainment
and fantasize about being would-be heroes
of glorious combat followed by popular acclaim.

Our bipolar dualities of superheroes and super-villains
require the mega-deaths of innocent mega-victims
– both real and imagined –
so our patriotic gunmen,
whether in police, the NRA, militias, or just lone sociopaths
– all in their closeted secret fears –
can fantasize about being would-be heroes
who will one day kill a bad guy and blaze to glory
to the ecstatic popular acclaim
of the telescreen-mesmerized masses
jammed into our handheld and big-screen Colosseums.

The reason we have so many guns in America
is because we have so many frustrated ignorant people.

21 February 2018

<><><><><><><>

Real Patriotism In America

Posted on by

Real Patriotism In America
27 September 2017

The essence of PATRIOTISM is doing your fair share to help support the public welfare of the nation you call your own.

That “fair share” can be in the form of:

(1) equitable taxation (not the case in the U.S. today, corporations are robbing the nation; that is what the Republican Party and most of the Democratic Party are paid to do); and/or

(2) accepting the hazards of military service, as well as national emergency services (like the Coast Guard with rescues at sea during storms); and/or

(3) working in the many occupations and agencies that maintain the well-being of the public (e.g., pubic health, family services, fire fighting, persevering as under-paid educators, some of the nation’s cops, etc.), and

(4) maintaining vital infrastructure (e.g., roads, bridges, airline safety).

While you are “free” to devote your life in the U.S.A. entirely to making money for yourself, it is definitely unpatriotic to:

(5) use your intelligence (i.e., college education, especially if from a publicly funded school, and all colleges get some public money),

(6) use your money-wealth (like Trump, the Koch brothers, and the “1%”), and

(7) use your corporate and political connections

to try to take money and opportunities away from the public by cornering markets, getting special subsidies, monopolizing essential markets (as the banking and insurance industry does today with “health care”), destroying middle- and lower- class occupations to your gain (“offshoring,” corporate buy-outs with pension fund raiding), and generally just being a selfish gouging son-of-a-bitch/daughter-of-a-bitch.

It is all obvious.

The truly patriotic attitude is “all for one and one for all” (the “all” meaning “all people,” the “for” meaning “pitching in to help” not “getting used and suckered,” and the “one” meaning YOU!).

The truly unpatriotic attitude is: I, me, mine, and to hell with you unless I can use you.

In brief, socialism (in democratic form) is patriotism.

People who “can’t” understand this are simply trying to dissemble to defend their intrinsic selfishness without appearing in public as what they really are: parasites.

<><><><><><><>

The Real Inside Job

The Wall Street capitalism imposed by the banking and finance industries (FIRE: finance, insurance, real estate) is a gambling, loan sharking, shakedown and money laundering racket, with the US military as its international goon squad enforcement arm, which puts the muscle on the marks. Smedley Butler spelled it all out long ago.

While the US military is 60% to 90% parasitic economic bloat passing itself off as “patriotic service,” a minority of it is of substantial benefit to the public good. The US military and spying complex is the largest segment of American society that is 100% socialist, but in the Stalinist mold. There are lots of freeloaders in it, but there are also many unknown active duty military people and veterans who are national treasures of self-sacrifice and service for the public good.

Donald Trump, our parasite-in-chief, is a paragon of the character (lack of), culture (lack of) and moral squalor of the FIRE type of racketeers, high and low. These banksters, grifters, grafters and one-percenters divide people into two categories: the deserving (themselves) and the undeserving, which is everybody else. The undeserving are of two types: useful idiots (voluntary victims) and expendable slaves (involuntary victims).

The biggest “inside job” going on in the U.S.A. is that the FIRE racketeers have taken over the US government and are working to deepen their skim from the US Treasury and the public, under the feeble cover of Trump Bubble demagoguery.

<><><><><><><>