Animal liberators face a dilemma. Livestock deserve to be freed, every last piglet and lamb. But animals bred for captivity won’t survive without it. Emptying a CAFO will precipitate an equally calamitous tragedy outside its door. The remedy of course is to stop breeding sentient beings for human consumption. The same probably holds for people. Social justice advocates can aim to liberate the “sheeple” but into whose hands?
By all means shout down the fascists. Shout down white supremicists. Bash the alt-right. Do it in black bloc, if you must (and yes we must). March on, against, and over, capitalism. Declare yourself anti-fascist. Express solidarity with ANTIFA protests and counterprotests across the country. I would rethink, however, opening an Antifa franchise without knowing who elsewhere can now act IN YOUR NAME.
No one owns the ANTIFA brand. Like “black bloc”, it’s a tactic, not a movement. Except as this moment’s zeitgeist, the brand has indeed become a movement. The imperative to repudiate emboldened Nazis lacks for neither urgency nor legitimacy.
Antifa is horizontal like Occupy, no leaders. Its membership is fully self-nominated. Except where Occupy Wall Street offshoots offered local casts of characters, Antifa participants remain undercover. The problem becomes whose undercovers.
I fully support confronting fascists. I might quibble about picking fights with inarticulate Nazi cosplayers. Our corporations, the media, and the police who protect both are the full grown, authoritarian fascists.
I likewise support black bloc as an essential strategy for effective protest actions. I encourage picking fights with dogmatic nonviolence passivists who continuously thwart the potential of public demonstrations.
I support Antifa as I do Earth First, as I do ELF, or ALF the Animal Liberation Front, or Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Intifada if you’re begining to catch my drift. I stand with them without wearing a mask because my expression of support is my political right. I do not act as them, wearing a mask.
Antifa may be serving the establishment just fine by diverting youthful rebellion from directing its energy at STATE fascism. It may be suiting populist urges just fine too by allowing discontents to vent our disgust against punchable twits instead of the impregnable powers that be. Ideally those inclined to resist fascism will catch on to who really needs the pounding.
When that begins to happen however, some Antifa chapter (the media will call it a “cell”) in Reseda or Des Moines or Stuyvesant is going to commit an outrage of domestic terrorism and the Antifa brand will be blown. It may be government black ops conducting a false flag, or three percenters shy of a full load hoping to ignite a race war, or misguided revolutionaries jumping the gun. It won’t matter. “Antifa” will be declared a terrorist organization. Pardon the pun, that will be trump.
And while we know Antifa is not an organization, intelligence records will have mapped out who were the ringleaders and daredevils of concern to national security. Authorities may or may not round up suspected co-conspirators and charge them with racketeering. That’s not even my worry. Once discredited and forced underground, Antifa enthousiasts will recede into the woodwork. All the organizing, educating and networking will have come to naught.
I anticipate that my thoughts here are not going to find favor with my many friends currently marching behind the Antifa banner. But I know a number of idiots among them too, and worse, suspected moles bent on disrupting productive insurgencies.
Though Antifa in its character employs security culture stratagems, by design it’s one big back door. I know some comrades see that as essential to escalating a revolutionary force. I see the absence of a binding ideology to be its undoing.
How about we think outside the box too calculatedly provided to us by our anti-fa social engineers? That box is pre-addresed and postage due.
If you are anti-fascism or anti-capitalism, WHAT ARE YOU FOR?
BE THAT.
You can fly the Antifa banner but do it as an allied organization you are meanwhile building.
You can punch the same Nazis and blockade the same racists, and you can sell the establishment killer app for which you control the code.
DENVER, COLORADO- Yes, Denver’s FIGHT FOR FIFTEEN march kept to the sidewalks. When ISO members (organizing the local “15 NOW” group) pushed the boundaries, SEIU marshals criticized them not just for agitating, but for pushing their socialist agenda. Occupy Denver activists held a prominent banner which referenced reigning minimum wage champion Socialist Alternative. Most of the attendees were union members whose representatives have obviously failed to credit the SA party or Seattle Councilwoman Kshama Sawant for the nation’s first $15 minimum wage victory. We fielded questions all evening from marchers eager to know if an SA chapter was brewing in Colorado.
TO BE FAIR, Denver’s march did take an adventurous turn, by Denver standards, but the rally began as might be expected from an event dominated by the SEIU and other corporate unions and their immobile nonprofit cohorts. Denver’s 4-15 rally started in the middle of CU-Denver’s Auraria campus, invisible from any street and unseeable to even partipants arriving, until they turned the corner to find it, behind the Tivoli Center.
Then organizers had a lineup of speakers which stretched well past expectations, trimming the crowd by over a third as supporters opted to slip away due to the unexpected cold front. Next participants were admonished to stick to the sidewalk, even on campus grounds, and applaud the police who’d agreed to permit the march. We were heading to a neighboring McDonalds, at least we were taking the scenic route.
Throughout the rally and march, a brass band played, and members of the local band Flobots led chants and songs. This lent a fun energy but it did preclude ordinary marchers speaking out or centering the vocal messaging on anything more than the generic themes of financial discontent. Even as crowds lingered in front of McDonalds, the band played on, when poignant denunciations might have provided a suitable climax.
Fortunately, a “Silver Brigade” had been deployed to patronize the fast food monster beforehand, to prevent managers from being able to lock the doors when the marchers arrived. McDs managers did lock the doors and they discussed a number of interesting defensive tactics under the noses of our operatives, but the managers were ultimately unable to refuse senior citizens demanding they be allowed to exit. This exit was timed to allow the Fight-for-Fifteen procession to march straight up to the counter, demanding a living wage, etc. Their objections heard, the marchers left and eventually crossed the street and dissolved into shortcuts through the Auraria campus.
(Note: My account of our inside job may appear indiscrete, but I include it purposefully. One, because even with advance knowledge it’s a difficult tactic to prevent, and two, because organizers of successive protests of establishments such as McDs need to include this tactic if they don’t want to remain locked out.)
The highlight for me was infusing the event theme with the S-word. Desperate as they were today to fight for a living wage, vowing “we’ll be back” or else to “shut it down”, these union adherants will shortly become the usual Democrats, waving the Hillary banners, as if there was no alternative.
Whose fault is it that America’s minimum wage has been allowed to lapse below the poverty level? Is the responsibility not in part that of the unions’? The SEIU is driving the official “Fight for Fifteen” campaign, but only after socialists have led the way, as they did whenever the labor movement made its gains.
They’re reporting the mine collapse in China as being a failure of the Communist economic system, and just not pointing out that it’s CAPITALIST deregulation that caused it, just like the mine collapses in New Zealand, Chile, Peru, West Virginia…. and the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf Oil spill Massive Petroleum Hemorrhage were caused by the POP principle. Profits Over People. The difference is that in China the Death Penalty applies to murder by Corporation.
The CEO of the Chinese mine is likely to become an unwilling organ donor. Don L Blankenship, the Retired CEO of Massey Energy, who created 29 job openings with one (predictable AND predicted) reaction to defiance of existing regulations, will continue to be a multi-millionaire and will continue to donate to Right Wing Causes like, loosening regulations even further… so he can KILL more miners, Oil workers, factory workers, construction workers, farm workers, unlike himself REAL workers, and feast on the proceeds of their life and death.
Those who like myself are merely crippled by their policies will be discarded, jailed, treated as psychotics and criminals and, if the plans of Blankenship and his allies, and their political appointees, to buy the entire governance of the world for their own profit, if those plans come to fruit then I and ever other like me will also die of our injuries.
It’s a big issue in the Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Main Street movement. The Chinese had an epiphany more than a century ago when the Emperor Pu Yi demonstrated his willingness to sell China to the same Corporate Interests who are running Wall Street and Washington DC and Denver and Colorado Springs today.
And FOX News celebrates and promotes Corporate Fascism and promotes Blankenship as a Hero.
Recap: Don Blankenship, Political Donor, Chinese Mine Owner following his Political “leadership”: Organ Donor.
That Blankenship, Massey Energy, British Petroleum etc are directly subsidized in every aspect of their attainment of riches, from acquiring the “rights” to mine or drill in any land mass or ocean of their choice through TAXPAYER funded Military Action, and the police and courts shielding the Rich from the consequences of their MURDERS and thefts, is nothing short of Fascism in every classic definition of the term. Their use of the Tea Party and Minutemen as Brownshirt (Germany) or Blackshirt (Spain, Portugal, Italy, France) Stormtrooper Militia seals the definition tightly onto their foreheads. The Security Chief at Upper Big Branch was recently “sacrificed” by Great Big Hero Blankenship and his pals, even though he, like Hermann Goehring and Josef Goebels and Heinrich Himmler, was “only following orders”.
Yeah, I DID compare Corporate Amerika to the Nazis. Bite me.
That and I pointed out the TeaParty, Fox News, and the Minutemen as being Nazi oriented if not directly affiliated.
An interesting exhibit about Genghis Khan’s “enduring legacy” hit the Denver Museum of Nature and Science two years ago and continues its US tour, so you can still learn about “the ruthless warlord who conquered half the known world,” but who “is also revered as an innovative leader and statesman who brought unity, stability, and much more to his people.”
When it comes to curatorial decisions at a museum, I always wonder: why now? Indeed it’s hard to deny, when you look a little deeper, that Genghis Khan was a renaissance man for the Bilderberg set.
No seriously. Genghis Khan used to vie with Attila the Hun for most cruel overlord. Their reputations for inhumanity defied the western imagination. Now apparently it’s thought that both leaders of barbarian hordes have been undervalued, and dare it be suggested, unfairly maligned? I’ll tell you what’s happened. It’s becoming transparent that the techniques of Western war making, invasion, mass killing and ruthless administration of foreign occupation look a lot like the work of Khan. So it’s small wonder elements in our culture want to pay him tribute.
A key to what drove the Mongols to exterminate all the peoples in their path was that they had no need for them, their cities and hungry mouths. The Mongols and the Huns needed only grasslands for their herds and yurts. Expanding agricultural societies were cancerous tumors against their interests. Except for craftsmen who offered goods which the growing nouveaux riche Mongols could appreciate, they had no use for non-Mongols.
I’m thinking about the jet-set now, surrounded by the hoi poloi who are no longer needed in factories and fields now fully mechanized. Except for the outward most reaches of exploitable third world labor, they have no use for common man. If they were Khan they could just queue us up to kill us. When it came to thinking about sustainable populations on limited environmental resources, he had an unappreciated wisdom that Khan.
Yes, our old friends who took a billion dollar gift from America, paid no taxes…
Got us again. Seems they’re going to make the consumers pay for regulations which prevented them from unannounced and hidden fees.
The smug perfectly manicured bastard interviewed by NBC news said: “People should complain to their congressmen” because Congress told them they’re not allowed to steal (sometimes not allowed) from us and thus they “lost” MONEY THE THIEVING BASTARDS DIDN’T ALREADY HAVE, IT WAS STILL OUR MONEY AND THEY WERE PROHIBITED FROM STEALING IT.
Yes, by those calculations, anybody who buys a watchdog or installs a burglar alarm Owes The Burglars Compensation.
The Smiling Smug with the hands that never touched a shovel said “Well, somebody’s got to make up the cash, it’s just going to have to be the Consumers” .. Like he ever gave two shits about the well being of consumers. Watch as they give out another billion in year end bonus payments, and sneer at us Mere Peasants who dare to believe we shouldn’t be ripped off.
And they wonder why people throw airplanes at their buildings.
I put “Ron Paul 2012” in the tags just because so many Tea Bag Morons are looking for it and it’ll show up in their google search.
Which is a smack to the back of the head to all those who told us in 1984 that the Police State setup from the BOOK of the same name couldn’t possibly happen in America because it was all about Socialist Dystopia and nobody, no not ever, could set up a CAPITALIST dictatorship. God, they’re stupid.
But here’s what the post 9/11 “patriotism” has gotten us. Eight years of a moron for president, an evil moron but a moron. His crew of more intelligent evil people used the occasion to make it unpatriotic to question their plans to deregulate American industries. We’ve seen a 9/11 worth of dead Americans every single month due to denial of Health Care. We’ve seen pollution that al Qa’eda could only hope to inflict on any one small town, done daily and across the nation. We’ve seen our national surplus turned upside down, and many multiples of the amount of that surplus in debt, due to the Wars started by the aforementioned Moron in response to 9/11. The badly misnamed USA PATRIOT Act is being invoked against Julian Assange and Wikileaks in response to their telling the TRUTH about 9/11 and the aforementioned wars, the moron who started them and the morons who still follow his leadership even though it’s destroyed what used to be America. Those Morons have banded together into Right Wing Terrorist Groups such as the TeaParty, Minutemen and other “patriotic” front-ends for the Ku Klux Klan. 
They’ll be flying plenty of the Hate Flag. By Tea-Klan MORONS such as this couple who made their Wedding into a Hate-fest. Yep, that’s right, they’re celebrating their wedding with symbols of Starting A Racist War which killed half a million Americans in order to keep according to the 1860 census 3,950,528 Americans in perpetual bondage based on the color of their skin.
To deny AMERICANS the rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness spoken of, ever so nobly, in a revered document written by a Slaveowner. So much for the “original intent”, Jefferson spoke of Liberty in one paper then wrote whole books demonizing Black Americans and condemning them to slavery.
You find that a lot in the “original intent” doctrine espoused by those who want to return America to an official slave nation.
Emboldened by the level of pure ignorant and racist Hatred engendered by 9/11.
So, De-Celebrate it by burning the Racist Flag.
And, not just those of us who are of Darker Skin, or mixed “race”.
Every WHITE person in the world has a stake in this as well, a huge stake because it will only be by the WHITES rejecting the label the Racist PurkMeisters like the Tea-Klan want to place on All White People.
They would have me and thee and she and he and we and everybody in the whole world believe that all white people are as stupid, ignorant and hate filled as they are.
So I’m calling on the so-called “white race” to step up and redeem and reclaim the dignity of what their and my white relatives have done FOR the world. Of course, a lot of it is mixed in with some very stupid and often Evil crap.
The world wars saw many millions of mostly “christian” whites killed by other “christian” whites. Literally marched into belt-fed water-cooled machine gun fire.
And those wars, like the ones leading up to it, some of them so long and vicious they’re called by the number of years they took between declaring war and declaring peace, just for the sake of simplicity.
Which were also direct pre-cursors to the American Civil War and, yes, planted the seeds of Hatred which blossomed so brightly on 9/11 and afterward.
The Colorado Springs city and county governments are giving away red-white-blue ribbons pledging never to forget, with the suggestion that we put them on our trees, mailboxes, fences.. fuck that.
I’ll probably be picking up hundreds of them off the roads and out of the ditches the same way I STILL pick up those stupid damned antenna flags that “patriots” lose off their cars and don’t go back to retrieve them.
In fact I’m going to go around with a camera taking pictures of the ribbons and flags, the store-bought fake-ass “patriotism”, laying in the weeds and ditches and mud-gutters as I’m picking them up and it will be a reminder of the SHAME those ignorant Socially Retarded Animated Sphincters (walking assholes) bring to their own definitions of “patriotism”.
Blind racism and fear of Arabs, whether or not the Arabs are Christian, Jewish or Muslim, (yes, people, your stupid stereotypes are WRONG, take THAT, byotches!) and in fact there was a “Mosque” AT THE TWIN TOWERS which was being used for prayers at the moment the attack began. There were Muslims on the planes who were merely Passengers. In fact for all anybody knows, the ones credited with the kill might have just been passengers who happened to be Arabic.
None of the alleged hijackers were from Iraq or Afghanistan.
Indeed, among the many victims of 9/11 were several dozen innocent Muslims, ranging in age from their late 60s to a couple’s unborn child. Six of these victims were Muslim women, including one who was 7 months pregnant. Many were stockbrokers or restaurant workers, earning a living to care for their families. There were converts and immigrants, hailing from over a dozen different countries and the U.S. There were heroes: a NYPD cadet and a Marriott hotel worker, who sacrificed their lives attempting to rescue others. The Muslim victims were parents to over 30 children, who were left orphaned
Also many of the victims were “illegal” Immigrants who were working at or near the Towers, another group of people the Hate-Freak Confederate Tea-Klan like to demonize.
Again, take THAT, byotches! Fold your bigotry and prejudice and racism until it’s all sharp corners and shove it up your collective Arse, sideways so it hurts more.
Thinking about the Tea Party Poor:
“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” — John Steinbeck
Think our judicial system is broke? It is, but not because it gave young Bad Mom Casey Anthony a chasmic benefit of the doubt. It’s broken because of Walmart, Citizens United, and all the corporatist, anti-democratic rulings that guarantee that ordinary Americans no longer have recourse in the courts.
Banned Books, p.2–
I put a lot of faith in an internet resilient enough to remain an unrestricted archive of crowd-sourced human knowledge, even more I hope public data will eventually permeate the proprietary, but continued access to subversive literature I have little doubt will meet the full brunt of digital book burners. If there’s any text not to download unto your Kindle, as an easily vaporized or expurgate-able file, it’s one of these classic oft-censored, perpetually-offense-giving titles. These are the dystopian novels and science fictions which paint a bleak picture of the society we are engineering.
As pictured, here are some notoriously subversive dystopian novels, (as differentiated from commercial drivel which reinforces mainstream dogma, such as Lord of the Flies, or Hunger Games)
Atwood, Margaret, THE HANDMAID’S TALE
Bierce, Ambrose, CAN SUCH THINGS BE?
Bradbury, Ray, FAHRENHEIT 451
Burgess, Anthony, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
Ellison, Harlan, THE GLASS TEAT
Huxley, Aldous, BRAVE NEW WORLD
Karp, David, ONE
Lewis, Sinclair, IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE
London, Jack, THE IRON HEEL
Orwell, George, NINETEEN EIGHTY FOUR
Pohl, Frederick, & C.M. Kornbluth, THE SPACE MERCHANTS
Rand, Ayn, ANTHEM
Vonnegut, Kurt, PLAYER PIANO
Wiener, Norbert, THE HUMAN USE OF OTHER BEINGS
Zamiatin, Eugene, WE
Haven’t heard of many of these? Curious, don’t you think?
There’s a Psych101 example that just about everybody who experiences college in America would find familiar, the Lifeboat Question. Setup for it is, you’re on a lifeboat, with absolutely no hope of rescue, You have passengers on board whose needs exceed the supply of fresh water and food. You have a baby, an elderly professor, a laborer, … that kind of thing.
Then you’re told to group up and discuss who you would kill. Drown, Toss from the lifeboat.
The discussions get long and involved but somehow a few basic facts never get mentioned.
Like:
The one person who NOBODY tosses off the boat is himself.
If there’s no hope of rescue or landfall with the extra person on board, there’s not really any chance without him either.
If you’re in a lifeboat then you’re in a shipping lane, unless every vessel on the sea suddenly vanished, you’re very likely to have one come near.
If every ship on the ocean has vanished, then so, apparently, has civilization.
You and the fellow lifeboaters would be, as far as you know, the only living humans left.
It would be up to you to restore any semblance of civilized behavior.
Yet to do it, according to the TRICK question, you would first have to make a human sacrifice.
What kind of a sick society can you build on that foundation?
Hint: it’s all around us.
Right now the debate in Budget Committees, especially those in the House and thus, top heavy with so-called “conservatives”, is centered on who to toss out of the lifeboat first.
I say “first” because that sort of thing is damnably hard to stop once it gets started.
Their figures and calculations all pointedly leave in THEIR source of income, the Military Industrial complex which is the only driving force left for Capitalism. They’re not tossing themselves out of the lifeboat.
It’s more like get in the canoes and take grandma out, put her on an ice-floe and smear her all over with seal meat to draw the polar bears.
Then row away with all the villagers chanting traditional Leave-grandma-to-die songs.
Paradigm is a “consciousness” term. One of the best known ways to demonstrate it is visually, not verbally, there’s a really famous illustration of three forms, if looked at one way, the form in the middle would be the first thing you see, a lamp with a fancy shade. Looking at it from the two side forms it’s two human faces close to each other.
I think but could be wrong, it’s part of the Rorschach series. Much like when we look at clouds, and see faces in them, or animals, flowers, sometimes extremely profound abstract concepts. But whatever we see is a projection of what we were looking to find anyway. Fear or hope, love or hate, friend or foe, food or poison, human faces or lamp. In European Celtic lore the moon has the face of a man, in Japan it’s a rabbit.
Abstract the paradigm a little, with the faces in the original, are they arguing, speaking words of wisdom, about to kiss?
Advertising companies need the psychological data from mass sources, years ago it would take, well, years… to form a basic paradigm from data collected around the world. And then modify it as needed. Which would also take considerably longer than it does now, each modification taking between a week or a year.
Now, with Twitter especially, web logs and Facebook, which could be described in advertising terms as “Weblog Lite”, we (or more importantly “they” whoever “they” are on any particular day) can analyze with a fair amount of accuracy what the people across the world are thinking on any subject, simply by counting the occurrences of any given word or short phrase.
Key Words. If the keywords show up steadily over the course of a normal work day, 8 hours would be a good arbitrary starting point, they become “Trending” keywords.
Using those trending keywords in the short term could make huge differences in Capitalist Stock Exchanges because you can literally buy or sell an entire nation’s production within those 8 hours. Knowing what words are most interesting to most people, at least from the representative sample of words used on the internet, can show you which products, services or concepts people are most willing to buy within those 8 hours. From the point of view or “base paradigm” of an independent grocery store owner, who purchases a week or month in advance, the keywords have to trend for whatever his spending cycle is, a week, two weeks, a month..
People in marketing literally sell their own lives because in order to succeed they have to buy other peoples thoughts and then resell them. They HAVE to live on what other people are saying.
In 1925, Aldous Huxley wrote a short novel, “Brave New World”, where he didn’t mention things that were on the verge of becoming technical reality, like the Television, Nuclear Explosives, antibiotics, reliable chemical birth control, or advances in what was then a 250 year old invention of a French mathematician named Blaise Pascal, “the Pascaline”, a mechanical calculator using binary logic. Instead he focused on technologies, some of them apparent dead-ends, like eugenics, Pavlovian conditioning (not a dead end) and Marketing.
Or “Social Engineering” or “Emotional Engineering” and one of his characters actually references Shakespeare as being a “Brilliant emotional engineer”.
Huxley noted the degradation of language through simplification of keywords.
Nearly two decades, several revolutions and another world war later, Eric Blair (Orwell) wrote a book mirroring the Capitalist Dystopia of Brave New World… “1984” where, again, deliberate perversion of language in a totalitarian government which used a socialist economy as a control mechanism (Orwell was a Socialist himself) presented another path to totalitarianism.
It wasn’t the economic models themselves which made the Dystopia, it was the (uncomfortably true) nature of “Type A” personalities to desire dominance over other people and systematically taking it, using the one tool at the core of each such system, persuasion. Getting the other people to “buy into” being controlled.
So now we have in OfficeSpeak (NewSpeak from 1984) the “buzzword”.
Why that becomes important to blue collar people such as I used to be until the day I stepped off that roof, is the white collar office workers are all, in one way or another, selling. And using buzzwords, keywords, paradigms, catch-phrases.
If people ever wonder what an English Major or Creative Writing in college has to do with the “real world”. that’s it.
Aldous Huxley wrote a sequel to Brave New World, tacked the word “Revisited” on the end, taking into account data processing with word usage as the original data. Still before the internet.
The Right Wing are so frightened of that concept that they held massive rallies last September because the President of the United States dared to have a televised address to schoolchildren telling them that education is important. And they have attempted steadily to cut off Public Education since its introduction.
The “leaders” apparently don’t want Blue Collar children to even have the capacity to express or understand anybody else expressing the concept of them gaining social or economic equality with our Masters in the Parasite Class. They’d prefer that the children are indoctrinated by perversions of Religion which teach that the King/President/Policeman/General is always right and that God commands us to Obey our leaders. Thus making it not only treason, a capital offense for which the King can kill you, to dare to think yourself his Equal and not his servant… it becomes Blasphemy, a capital offense where you suffer the pains of Eternal Hell Fire for daring to suggest that we, the Working Class, are equal to the “management” Parasites.
That and they condemn Brave New World as “pornography”.
If, as a Corporate Lawyer and somewhat friend suggests, Capital were the be-all and end-all for progress, economically, politically, technologically, and even spiritually, why then is Participation Made Mandatory? The Capitalist PIGS go after not only nations who opt for a more socialist economy, but communes within the Capitalist CONTROLLED countries.
Communal economies such as Anarcho-Syndicalism are brutally repressed, Unions are Brutally Repressed, by taxpayer funded State Manifestations of Power, like the Ludlow Massacre. The PIGS who murdered the 4 students at Kent State had loaded submachine guns, (M16A1) simply because earlier that day they were “negotiating” with a Teamster strike. At gunpoint. Since the guns weren’t pointed at the Corporate Faction in any of this, it’s patently obvious who exactly the Ohio National Guard were representing.
Their Rich-Bitch Owners.
If, as the Capitalists assert, it’s their own initiative, their own industry and entrepreneurship which gained them their riches, and anybody who takes government handouts is a Welfare State Junkie…
Why then don’t they “just say no” to the Welfare State subsidizing THEIR INDUSTRIES far above and beyond what pittances are accorded the Public at Large.
Instead huge amounts of Public Money is spent to ensure that the Public never rises in power. The People are kept down, especially the Working Class, by Police and Military and Court so-called “authority”, Union activity and other organized and coordinated collective action groups which benefit the individual workers above the Corporate Masters, criminalized and punished, yet so-called “revolutionaries” organized by the Corporations to protect the status-quo of Corporate Hegemony, both at home and abroad, like the so-called Tea Party so-called “patriots” not merely protected by the police and military but actually encouraged?
If the Capitalists had such hegemony, not only the right but the Duty to bring every nation and every person on earth under their dominion, if it were really patently obvious, as they insist it is, why would they spend more than half the Government Budgets of the United States, the states themselves and local “authorities” to FORCE compliance at gunpoint?
Why would it be necessary to send soldiers to other countries, to force those countries to obey the Capitalist Ideal, and why would it be necessary to lie and call such forced compliance “freedom”?
Faith based politics where you have to believe fervently the dogma handed down by the High Priests of Capital… But according to their gospels of greed, there has never actually been any revolution where wealth has been redistributed to the poor from the wealthy. In other words, the wealth has been transferred from one group of heavily armed rich thieves to another. Lateral instead of Vertical economic mobility. Thus, no real Socialist state or more importantly, Socialist Economy has ever existed, at least according to the Ayn Rand Theology. Yet somehow, it’s the Communists and Socialists, the ones who never had their hands on the missing bread in the first place, who crashed the economy repeatedly over the past 500 years of straight-on Capitalism. For instance the Mortgage Crisis that immediately preceded the crash of the War-expense Bloated Debt Economy.
Not the approximately ten trillion dollar difference in Budget surplus projected v the budget deficit Actual. Part of that went to Enron in a pyramid scheme. To end all pyramid schemes? Nay verily. Kenny Lay died, basically in jail, ready to make the trip to Club Fed where Rich Thieves spend a few months of “hard” time. Without the money and, importantly, without ever telling anybody who exactly was holding the cash. Bush and Cheney, Suspects Prime and Secondary, generously brushed aside any suspicion of their guilt in the matter and since they controlled the Justice department, so did the DoJ. But that’s not the straw that broke the camels back. Nor was the massive War Budget, unfunded save for credit, issued against Future Taxes. By putting Future in front of the word Taxes GW and his merry band of thieves managed to say that they hadn’t raised Taxes. The correct and true way to put it would be that they hadn’t raised CURRENT taxes. Making War Profits basically untaxable granted the richest pigs in America virtually tax free existence. Massive tax cuts to the people who make all their money on the spending of Tax Generated money. A double gift of Corporate Welfare and Corporate Warfare.
But it’s the Socialists who never had their hands on the bread who are to blame.
With the Mortgage Crisis, one of many investment scams that went wrong all at once, people who control less than a percent of the income in America are alleged to have brought the entire house of cards down.
People, I’m capable of a LITTLE bit of math, m’kay? Which would you think, logically speaking, mathematically speaking, to be more likely, that people with full control of 95% of the wealth crashing the economy or the less than a percent “controllers”?
According to the Right Wing Theology, it’s obviously the < 1%. Up is black, east is sideways and Oceania has ALWAYS been at war with Eastasia.
Oh, and the Weathermen who are alleged to have killed 4 people, including 3 weathermen.. Are the supremely violent ones, not the Big Pigs who kick open the gates of Hell and start scooping in thousands at a time. Wonderful how placing the decimal a few digits to the Right can skew the equation so elegantly.
And carpet bombing nations who don’t do as our Freedom Loving Dictators tell them is somehow less murderous and violent than a few very ineffective bombs in America. How many hundreds of thousands of USAF, Navy and Army bombs were dropped on South VietNam, (more than on North VietNam and neither one of which were at war with America), how many Millions dropped on North Korea? Yet the Weathermen are the Terrorists.
I say this with the full authority of my own personal experience: nonviolence is for cowards. When push has come to shove, I stepped to the sidewalk but I am so full of admiration for those who stayed in the line of fire. Today much of the world commemorates Bastille Day, France’s unique independence day, because it launched the French Revolution. Not just a revolution for the masses of humanity, but their Enlightenment. Storming the Bastilles was no small transformative event, and the sans-culottes were not led by urgings to keep it nonviolent. The monarchy took heed, as it had for every historic concession, because the citizenry had it scared to death.
Have you changed social inequity by voting in the polls? Have you found justice via protest? Sought, beseeched, was as far as you got. Violent uprising has not lately looking too effective either. But it’s got the track record.
I’m not saying I’m up to the task, but I assure you I have the courage to be nonviolent in spades.
It is a most self-aggrandizing dishonesty that holds nonviolence to be brave. There is nothing easier than to take the path of least resistance. I don’t mean to downplay the audacity to protest, as opposed to conforming, although isn’t sticking to your principles squarly self-indulgent? I claim no credit for failing to bend on matters of principle. In fact, sometimes I feel positively anti-social.
But taken the next step, what’s easier than subjecting yourself to the authority of the sword? Again it’s the principle of not becoming like your abuser, another no-brainer, but no-bravery required.
Standing up for what you believe? Easy-peasy. To the death? Positively cowardly lion.
This is you inner dialog, be honest: I defy your authority, but only so far. I reject your physical oppression, but just kidding. I call for the total destruction of your hierarchy, but only in words, I’m entitled, and you can’t lay a finger on me because I’m playing by the rules.
Hope of getting anywhere: dismal. Modern social movements have only Gandhi and Mandela as purported success stories. But I’ll not insult the elders. The Gandhi and Mandela of our textbooks bear no resemblance to the reality, they are false role-models put forth by fascists who want to blunt every effort to rise against power.
Oh, nonviolence is the higher ideal, sure. Lovely. Browny points for the afterlife. Trickle-up transcendence has as much potential for success as awaiting extraterrestrials or building playing fields for disgraced baseball reincarnates.
Unless power wants to transcend the human experience, and lift all of us with it, mankind is not going anywhere. The only way you’re going to levitate powerful heads is with a guillotine. Dreadfully eighteenth century, but check out the horrific bygone days from which they’re reconstituting torture and feudalism.
You can probably contrive a litany of rationalizations for why it would be beneath you, but imagine picking up a gun and having a go against the overwhelming power of the state. Now that’s terrifying.
Man is kidnapped in front of his wife, taken to a secret prison and tortured for 7 months… government stonewalling, …CIA?
According to the Propaganda, Narco Gangs in Mexico. The way the story is slanted, the Mexican Federal Government is a “failed state” and the country is run by Terrorists.
Like, yeah… Ford Motors, Coca-Cola, Baxter Pharmaceuticals.. oh, not THOSE Terrorists.
So are “we” going to mount Operation Mexican Freedom? Go in and occupy their country, set up a(nother) Puppet government backed by Run By U.S. troops? Maybe set up arbitrary checkpoints to limit the travel of the native population…
We already did. 165 years ago, to a third of the land area of their country, set up arbitrary boundary lines which they can only cross with the Royal Permission of the U.S. Government. Knocked the Mexican Republic, the parts “our” Corporate Government didn’t outright Conquer errr.. “Liberate”, down to a shadow state run by the French, aka Holy Roman Empire.
Then sent American troops whenever the Mexican people rebelled against this setup. When the “Outlaw Regime” of Pancho Villa finally threw off Foreign Ownership and Natoinalized eerrrr “Stole” the Lawfully Conquered holdings of the Foreign Overlords, first he was assassinated (but not by an American or a paid agent of American corporate interests, no, everyone KNOWS that Americans don’t commit crimes like that) and the U.S. Government waged Economic Warfare against the Parti Revolucionaria Institucional.
Finally restored Corporate Dictatorship with the American financed and run Parti Action Nacional, under the Puppet Dictators Vicente Fox and now Calderon.
So now what? Will they blame PRI and it’s partisans for the unrest, instead of the Corporate Thieves who have now taken away everything that the PEOPLE of Mexico officially owned?
Certainly it can’t possibly be blamed on the almost 8 decades of unrelenting American Corporate attacks on the economy and by proxy the People of Mexico.
Because that would be an admission that the Almighty Capitalism has failed.
Can’t have that, now, can we?
It’s getting so you can’t fly a plane into a federal office building and hope somebody will finally find your website. Though engineer Joseph Stack left an online statement to explain his last act of desperation against the IRS, it was deleted “in compliance with a request from the FBI.” I guess his web hosts think the 1st Amendment has an FBI exemption. Even Google’s cache was expunged. This has freed Reporters to characterize Stack’s missive as a crazed rant. Nothing threatens the establishment like this conclusion: “Sadly, though I spent my entire life trying to believe it wasn’t so, … violence … is the only answer. The cruel joke is that [those] at the top have known this all along and have been laughing, at … fools like me all along.” I don’t know about you, but when I hear that a self-made engineer-businessman who has his own plane, commits suicide on principles he has articulated in a manifesto, I’m curious to hear him out.
I’m reminded of the sad story of the desperate antiwar activist who set himself on fire as a final protest of the escalating wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He knew accomplices would only dissuade him, so he chose an isolated spot where he could proceed unmolested and set up a video camera to record the act. Naturally, policemen were the first to encounter his body and thus the footage of dramatic statement are consigned to the obscurity of their files.
Fortunately the internet is still too porous for redaction on the grounds of national security, or whatever reason the FBI contrived to censor Stack’s suicide note/screed/diatribe. The Smoking Gun has the usual non-text scans of what Joseph Stack wrote before he piloted his single-engine Piper PA-28 into the Austin TX IRS office. Here’s the full text of Stack’s manifesto.
If you’re reading this, you’re no doubt asking yourself, “Why did this have to happen?” The simple truth is that it is complicated and has been coming for a long time. The writing process, started many months ago, was intended to be therapy in the face of the looming realization that there isn’t enough therapy in the world that can fix what is really broken. Needless to say, this rant could fill volumes with example after example if I would let it. I find the process of writing it frustrating, tedious, and probably pointless… especially given my gross inability to gracefully articulate my thoughts in light of the storm raging in my head. Exactly what is therapeutic about that I’m not sure, but desperate times call for desperate measures.
We are all taught as children that without laws there would be no society, only anarchy. Sadly, starting at early ages we in this country have been brainwashed to believe that, in return for our dedication and service, our government stands for justice for all. We are further brainwashed to believe that there is freedom in this place, and that we should be ready to lay our lives down for the noble principles represented by its founding fathers. Remember? One of these was “no taxation without representation”. I have spent the total years of my adulthood unlearning that crap from only a few years of my childhood. These days anyone who really stands up for that principle is promptly labeled a “crackpot”, traitor and worse.
While very few working people would say they haven’t had their fair share of taxes (as can I), in my lifetime I can say with a great degree of certainty that there has never been a politician cast a vote on any matter with the likes of me or my interests in mind. Nor, for that matter, are they the least bit interested in me or anything I have to say.
Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours? Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country’s leaders don’t see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies. Yet, the political “representatives” (thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags is far more accurate) have endless time to sit around for year after year and debate the state of the “terrible health care problem”. It’s clear they see no crisis as long as the dead people don’t get in the way of their corporate profits rolling in.
And justice? You’ve got to be kidding!
How can any rational individual explain that white elephant conundrum in the middle of our tax system and, indeed, our entire legal system? Here we have a system that is, by far, too complicated for the brightest of the master scholars to understand. Yet, it mercilessly “holds accountable” its victims, claiming that they’re responsible for fully complying with laws not even the experts understand. The law “requires” a signature on the bottom of a tax filing; yet no one can say truthfully that they understand what they are signing; if that’s not “duress” than what is. If this is not the measure of a totalitarian regime, nothing is.
How did I get here?
My introduction to the real American nightmare starts back in the early ‘80s. Unfortunately after more than 16 years of school, somewhere along the line I picked up the absurd, pompous notion that I could read and understand plain English. Some friends introduced me to a group of people who were having ‘tax code’ readings and discussions. In particular, zeroed in on a section relating to the wonderful “exemptions” that make institutions like the vulgar, corrupt Catholic Church so incredibly wealthy. We carefully studied the law (with the help of some of the “best”, high-paid, experienced tax lawyers in the business), and then began to do exactly what the “big boys” were doing (except that we weren’t stealing from our congregation or lying to the government about our massive profits in the name of God). We took a great deal of care to make it all visible, following all of the rules, exactly the way the law said it was to be done.
The intent of this exercise and our efforts was to bring about a much-needed re-evaluation of the laws that allow the monsters of organized religion to make such a mockery of people who earn an honest living. However, this is where I learned that there are two “interpretations” for every law; one for the very rich, and one for the rest of us… Oh, and the monsters are the very ones making and enforcing the laws; the inquisition is still alive and well today in this country.
That little lesson in patriotism cost me $40,000+, 10 years of my life, and set my retirement plans back to 0. It made me realize for the first time that I live in a country with an ideology that is based on a total and complete lie. It also made me realize, not only how naive I had been, but also the incredible stupidity of the American public; that they buy, hook, line, and sinker, the crap about their “freedom”… and that they continue to do so with eyes closed in the face of overwhelming evidence and all that keeps happening in front of them.
Before even having to make a shaky recovery from the sting of the first lesson on what justice really means in this country (around 1984 after making my way through engineering school and still another five years of “paying my dues”), I felt I finally had to take a chance of launching my dream of becoming an independent engineer.
On the subjects of engineers and dreams of independence, I should digress somewhat to say that I’m sure that I inherited the fascination for creative problem solving from my father. I realized this at a very young age.
The significance of independence, however, came much later during my early years of college; at the age of 18 or 19 when I was living on my own as student in an apartment in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. My neighbor was an elderly retired woman (80+ seemed ancient to me at that age) who was the widowed wife of a retired steel worker. Her husband had worked all his life in the steel mills of central Pennsylvania with promises from big business and the union that, for his 30 years of service, he would have a pension and medical care to look forward to in his retirement. Instead he was one of the thousands who got nothing because the incompetent mill management and corrupt union (not to mention the government) raided their pension funds and stole their retirement. All she had was social security to live on.
In retrospect, the situation was laughable because here I was living on peanut butter and bread (or Ritz crackers when I could afford to splurge) for months at a time. When I got to know this poor figure and heard her story I felt worse for her plight than for my own (I, after all, I thought I had everything to in front of me). I was genuinely appalled at one point, as we exchanged stories and commiserated with each other over our situations, when she in her grandmotherly fashion tried to convince me that I would be “healthier” eating cat food (like her) rather than trying to get all my substance from peanut butter and bread. I couldn’t quite go there, but the impression was made. I decided that I didn’t trust big business to take care of me, and that I would take responsibility for my own future and myself.
Return to the early ‘80s, and here I was off to a terrifying start as a ‘wet-behind-the-ears’ contract software engineer… and two years later, thanks to the fine backroom, midnight effort by the sleazy executives of Arthur Andersen (the very same folks who later brought us Enron and other such calamities) and an equally sleazy New York Senator (Patrick Moynihan), we saw the passage of 1986 tax reform act with its section 1706.
For you who are unfamiliar, here is the core text of the IRS Section 1706, defining the treatment of workers (such as contract engineers) for tax purposes. Visit this link for a conference committee report (http://www.synergistech.com/1706.shtml#ConferenceCommitteeReport) regarding the intended interpretation of Section 1706 and the relevant parts of Section 530, as amended. For information on how these laws affect technical services workers and their clients, read our discussion here (http://www.synergistech.com/ic-taxlaw.shtml).
SEC. 1706. TREATMENT OF CERTAIN TECHNICAL PERSONNEL.
(a) IN GENERAL – Section 530 of the Revenue Act of 1978 is amended by adding at the end thereof the following new subsection:
(d) EXCEPTION. – This section shall not apply in the case of an individual who pursuant to an arrangement between the taxpayer and another person, provides services for such other person as an engineer, designer, drafter, computer programmer, systems analyst, or other similarly skilled worker engaged in a similar line of work.
(b) EFFECTIVE DATE. – The amendment made by this section shall apply to remuneration paid and services rendered after December 31, 1986.
Note:
· “another person” is the client in the traditional job-shop relationship.
· “taxpayer” is the recruiter, broker, agency, or job shop.
· “individual”, “employee”, or “worker” is you.
Admittedly, you need to read the treatment to understand what it is saying but it’s not very complicated. The bottom line is that they may as well have put my name right in the text of section (d). Moreover, they could only have been more blunt if they would have came out and directly declared me a criminal and non-citizen slave. Twenty years later, I still can’t believe my eyes.
During 1987, I spent close to $5000 of my ‘pocket change’, and at least 1000 hours of my time writing, printing, and mailing to any senator, congressman, governor, or slug that might listen; none did, and they universally treated me as if I was wasting their time. I spent countless hours on the L.A. freeways driving to meetings and any and all of the disorganized professional groups who were attempting to mount a campaign against this atrocity. This, only to discover that our efforts were being easily derailed by a few moles from the brokers who were just beginning to enjoy the windfall from the new declaration of their “freedom”. Oh, and don’t forget, for all of the time I was spending on this, I was loosing income that I couldn’t bill clients.
After months of struggling it had clearly gotten to be a futile exercise. The best we could get for all of our trouble is a pronouncement from an IRS mouthpiece that they weren’t going to enforce that provision (read harass engineers and scientists). This immediately proved to be a lie, and the mere existence of the regulation began to have its impact on my bottom line; this, of course, was the intended effect.
Again, rewind my retirement plans back to 0 and shift them into idle. If I had any sense, I clearly should have left abandoned engineering and never looked back.
Instead I got busy working 100-hour workweeks. Then came the L.A. depression of the early 1990s. Our leaders decided that they didn’t need the all of those extra Air Force bases they had in Southern California, so they were closed; just like that. The result was economic devastation in the region that rivaled the widely publicized Texas S&L fiasco. However, because the government caused it, no one gave a shit about all of the young families who lost their homes or street after street of boarded up houses abandoned to the wealthy loan companies who received government funds to “shore up” their windfall. Again, I lost my retirement.
Years later, after weathering a divorce and the constant struggle trying to build some momentum with my business, I find myself once again beginning to finally pick up some speed. Then came the .COM bust and the 911 nightmare. Our leaders decided that all aircraft were grounded for what seemed like an eternity; and long after that, ‘special’ facilities like San Francisco were on security alert for months. This made access to my customers prohibitively expensive. Ironically, after what they had done the Government came to the aid of the airlines with billions of our tax dollars … as usual they left me to rot and die while they bailed out their rich, incompetent cronies WITH MY MONEY! After these events, there went my business but not quite yet all of my retirement and savings.
By this time, I’m thinking that it might be good for a change. Bye to California, I’ll try Austin for a while. So I moved, only to find out that this is a place with a highly inflated sense of self-importance and where damn little real engineering work is done. I’ve never experienced such a hard time finding work. The rates are 1/3 of what I was earning before the crash, because pay rates here are fixed by the three or four large companies in the area who are in collusion to drive down prices and wages… and this happens because the justice department is all on the take and doesn’t give a fuck about serving anyone or anything but themselves and their rich buddies.
To survive, I was forced to cannibalize my savings and retirement, the last of which was a small IRA. This came in a year with mammoth expenses and not a single dollar of income. I filed no return that year thinking that because I didn’t have any income there was no need. The sleazy government decided that they disagreed. But they didn’t notify me in time for me to launch a legal objection so when I attempted to get a protest filed with the court I was told I was no longer entitled to due process because the time to file ran out. Bend over for another $10,000 helping of justice.
So now we come to the present. After my experience with the CPA world, following the business crash I swore that I’d never enter another accountant’s office again. But here I am with a new marriage and a boatload of undocumented income, not to mention an expensive new business asset, a piano, which I had no idea how to handle. After considerable thought I decided that it would be irresponsible NOT to get professional help; a very big mistake.
When we received the forms back I was very optimistic that they were in order. I had taken all of the years information to Bill Ross, and he came back with results very similar to what I was expecting. Except that he had neglected to include the contents of Sheryl’s unreported income; $12,700 worth of it. To make matters worse, Ross knew all along this was missing and I didn’t have a clue until he pointed it out in the middle of the audit. By that time it had become brutally evident that he was representing himself and not me.
This left me stuck in the middle of this disaster trying to defend transactions that have no relationship to anything tax-related (at least the tax-related transactions were poorly documented). Things I never knew anything about and things my wife had no clue would ever matter to anyone. The end result is… well, just look around.
I remember reading about the stock market crash before the “great” depression and how there were wealthy bankers and businessmen jumping out of windows when they realized they screwed up and lost everything. Isn’t it ironic how far we’ve come in 60 years in this country that they now know how to fix that little economic problem; they just steal from the middle class (who doesn’t have any say in it, elections are a joke) to cover their asses and it’s “business-as-usual”. Now when the wealthy fuck up, the poor get to die for the mistakes… isn’t that a clever, tidy solution.
As government agencies go, the FAA is often justifiably referred to as a tombstone agency, though they are hardly alone. The recent presidential puppet GW Bush and his cronies in their eight years certainly reinforced for all of us that this criticism rings equally true for all of the government. Nothing changes unless there is a body count (unless it is in the interest of the wealthy sows at the government trough). In a government full of hypocrites from top to bottom, life is as cheap as their lies and their self-serving laws.
I know I’m hardly the first one to decide I have had all I can stand. It has always been a myth that people have stopped dying for their freedom in this country, and it isn’t limited to the blacks, and poor immigrants. I know there have been countless before me and there are sure to be as many after. But I also know that by not adding my body to the count, I ensure nothing will change. I choose to not keep looking over my shoulder at “big brother” while he strips my carcass, I choose not to ignore what is going on all around me, I choose not to pretend that business as usual won’t continue; I have just had enough.
I can only hope that the numbers quickly get too big to be white-washed and ignored that the American zombies wake up and revolt; it will take nothing less. I would only hope that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are. Sadly, though I spent my entire life trying to believe it wasn’t so, but violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer. The cruel joke is that the really big chunks of shit at the top have known this all along and have been laughing, at and using this awareness against, fools like me all along.
I saw it written once that the definition of insanity is repeating the same process over and over and expecting the outcome to suddenly be different. I am finally ready to stop this insanity. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well.
The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.
Joe Stack (1956-2010)02/18/2010
The future of socialism and LGBT rights in Cuba, an interview with Mariela Castro. I thought this interview might be of some interest to Colorado’s LGBT community, as it shows not quite the monster leadership of Cuba as is usually portrayed by the Right Wing here in NORADlandia when they talk about Human Rights. Ted Haggard might even ought to ask for political asylum in Cuba? Take your whole family, Ted, and at least have a vacation there! Break the law! Psst… I hear you’re changing your views as a Christian… right?
It could be confused for being contrarian or reactionary, but how else do you build upon what you learn? Instead of letting life buffet you while you strap yourself to a mast to drift to a predestined shore, why not sail a bit? You’ve got a rudder and centerboard to limit your drift. Let those who live back in the age of the square sail think that weather can only lead downwind.
In public protest, as in arguments, I can tell I’m on the right tack when authorities object to what I’m saying. I’ve learned this much, if they don’t like where you’re standing, you’re closing in on the sweet spot.
The 2008 presidential campaign offered some great insight on political positioning. I’d like to consider the attempts to slander Barack Obama as a point of reference. A good place to start for what most scares authority.
Middle name Hussein?
Sounds like a fine middle name to me. Adopted by any of us, “Hussein” commemorates cultural tolerance, specifically, irreverence for ethnocentric bigotry and false fear-mongering.
Paling around with Bill Ayers?
We should all be so lucky to know a real 60s Weatherman. Where were you on the Vietnam War? Any less radical ideology would probably be indefensible now. Maybe “Bill Ayers” makes an even better middle name to adopt, if you want to pay tribute to youthful idealism and audacity.
(BTW- The Weather Underground Organization (WUO), was a militant antiwar group known originally as The Weathermen, named from a Dylan lyric referencing Kerouac. Splintered from the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM), a subgroup of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Weatherman formed a “white fighting force” in solidarity with the Black Liberation Movement after the murder of Blank Panther leader Fred Hampton.
BTW2- Neither Bill Ayers nor the WUO were terrorists. The bombs they planted were not to terrorize people but to symbolize the need to destroy the mechanisms of US imperialism. Warnings were always issued beforehand to prevent casualties.)
Agree with Reverend Jeremiah Wright?
Wow. Who could but hope to have the moral courage of Reverend Wright? Especially his temerity, eloquence and perseverance. “God Damn America?” If any Nationalist Hypocracy ever deserved a wrathful kick in the ass, we do. God Damn America most certainly. Americans joke about Hell in a Handbasket, but where are those who dare leap out and try to lead their companions to deserving a more honorable fate? The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The Stars and Stripes fly over monumental crimes for which Americans have never atoned. We worship false Gods if they do not damn our immoral economic enslavement of everyone in our grasp.
As a politician, Barack Obama would not have had the latitude to express agreement with Reverend Wright. Or admiration for Bill Ayers. It’s nothing to do with conviction and everything to do with the compromises of an elected office in the face of a slanderous press. But while Obama makes his pragmatic choices to get neared the seat of power, we needn’t delude ourselves about right and wrong, wisdom and ignorance. We don’t need to win popularity contests, so why not be our true, moral selves?
Socialist?
That old anti-capitalism Red Scare bugaboo? Too bad for the would-be critics, “socialist” doesn’t mean totalitarian commie, or puritanical dictator. Socialism means putting social concerns first. Socialized medicine. Socialized education. Socialized economy. Protecting ourselves and fellow beings from the baser human natures of predation and greed. I find a person who is opposed to socialism is, and it’s an instructive pun, anti-social.
One of America’s great socialist leaders, Studs Terkel died last week during the pre- election hoopla. What made Studs Terkel stand out from all the other Americans of lesser stature was his respect for the average working person as a human being. He proselytized on behalf of the common people, even as American society increasingly began to devalue those who actually do the work of society, as opposed to holding up high those that are profiting from the work of others.
Studs was best known for his book,WORKING, which was not a novel, but rather a book of interviews where working people told of their lives. In today’s America, the reading of this book would be a revelation for many, who grew up and learned only the warped values of the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Cheney Era.
See Democracy Now for interviews and programs about Studs Terkel, a Great American leader of the First Class, the American working class.
Stephen Colbert and Brian Moore discuss the question of whether Barack Obama is actually the Socialist candidate for President of the United States. The conclusion between them was that Obama actually was not, but he seems a bit brighter than the real Socialist Party candidate for President actually appears to be.
That’s one more reason I do not plan to vote Socialist Party myself. My party’s candidate certainly is no later day Eugene Debs, and we have a long way to go to get back to that. However, I would vote for Moore becoming the Mayor of Colorado Springs against Lionel Rivera.
True, Lionel is for ‘socialism’, too, but for the benefit of Lockheed and the Pentagon. He’s for big government spending, PLUS he’s a dishonest lying creep. Mayor Moore, unlike Mayor Rivera, would have pushed for a municipal proposal condemning US government torture of POWs. Rivera blocked that proposal and instead talked about what a great job the troops were doing. Moore is not for using torture against other people, while Rivera is. In short, Rivera kind of has a way of turning people’s stomachs. He’s another Republican creep.
I think it’s time to colorize The Grapes of Wrath. And I don’t mean the Turner Classics process exactly. It may help to dumb down the artistic contrast of the black & white for a contemporary audience palate of splashy Disneycolor, but how about trying to make Steinbeck’s theme more accessible to today’s spoon-fed viewers? Let’s colorize the skin of the poor migrant workers to reflect the inhumanly-treated populations of today’s displaced im-migrants of color.
I can’t remember where I come down on colorizing the old movies. No one’s insisted on infusing CMYK into Ansel Adams or Picasso’s sketchbook, why are masterpieces filmed in black and white supposed to be pigment deficient? We don’t presume to dub dialog over the silent movies made before the age of the talkies. As yet. Of course, Ted Turner was concerned for reviving interest in old intellectual properties, many of which were already in-artful. And perhaps his salesmanship maneuver has been proven effective. When my family sat down to watch Grapes of Wrath, the grey image tuned a number of youthful eyes away.
Like Dorothea Lange’s famous photographs, John Ford’s film depicted disadvantaged Okies with whom the American audience could identify. We may not know what it feels like to be forced off our homes, but how the families cope with the hardship, we all can recognize. I’m curious how the film was received by Californians in 1940, coming less than ten years after the original plague of destitute Oklahoma refugees. How would the characters have faired with our sympathies if they had been played as coarse hillbilly Crackers with guns and a poor person’s chip-on-the-shoulder desperation?
The poor protagonists of The Grapes of Wrath were weakened skinny po-folk, who staked their relief on the strength of a single hopeful job listing flyer, who protested their oppression without resorting to violence, and who accepted hardship as their lot. Seeing into their daily lives, viewers were shown a dignified, earnest people who treated others with respect and compassion. Antagonist characters in the film were less charitable, taking advantage of the hard-luck migrants with guile, violence and authority. People into which the Oklahoma refugees traveled, New Mexico, Arizona and California, treated the migrants like vermin. Even as onlookers might express admiration for the Okies’ determination to cross Death Valley, the better fed Californians held them in disdain for not knowing enough to be in such a predicament. The Okies were blamed for their own poverty. They threatened to burden everyone’s already depleting resources. Only the viewers understood the unfair actions which had landed the otherwise self-sufficient sharecroppers to have to leave their livelihoods.
The circumstances of the Dust Bowl cum great depression era forced removal of the small Oklahoma farmers is eerily familiar to today’s economy and its foreclosures. Homesteaders find themselves made homeless, as a consequence of business decisions between corporations, banks and regulators. The Oklahoma farmers wanted to point their shotguns to warn the financial disruptors from their land, but found the conduits of the dirty work were their own neighbors and relatives. Everyone was merely following orders from someone higher up. That the system could be at fault, left the victims with no clear recourse.
Here’s the classic eviction exchange.
THE MAN
I can’t help that. All I know is I got my orders.
They told me to tell you you got to get off,
and that’s what I’m telling you.MULEY
You mean get off my own land?THE MAN
Now don’t go blaming me. It ain’t *my* fault.SON
Whose fault is it?THE MAN
You know who owns the land–the Shawnee Land and Cattle Company.MULEY
Who’s the Shawnee Land and Cattle Comp’ny?THE MAN
It ain’t nobody. It’s a company.SON
They got a pres’dent, ain’t they?
They got somebody that knows what a shotgun’s for, ain’t they?THE MAN
But it ain’t *his* fault, because the *bank* tells him what to do.SON
All right. Where’s the bank?THE MAN
Tulsa. But what’s the use of picking on him?
He ain’t anything but the manager, and half crazy hisself,
trying to keep up with his orders from the east!MULEY
Then who *do* we shoot?THE MAN
Brother, I don’t know. If I did I’d tell you.
But I just don’t know *who’s* to blame!
There was a lot more in The Grapes of Wrath which could inform a modern world view. The dreaded “Cats” for example. These were the Caterpillar tractors which were shown ravaging the land like locusts, arriving to demolish the houses of the reluctant dispossessed. Bulldozers are still used for that function today. In fact, Caterpillar manufactures armored versions to deploy in war zones for the destruction of houses. Palestinians have shown to be less reluctant than the poor Okies about trying to shoot the bulldozer drivers who are taking aim at their homes. Israel is expanding its settlements in Palestine with the aid of Caterpillar tractors which clear the land of its recalcitrant invadees.
Likewise, the union busting strategies portrayed in Grapes of Wrath are the same used today. Police officers are called in when work supervisors encounter workers who show too much skepticism for the employer’s scam. Troublemakers are arrested lest the workforce succeed in organizing itself. Instigators are paid to infiltrate a social event and start a fight, to give law enforcement the excuse to break in and make its calculated arrests. Casual viewers may think the famous 1939 film depicts a bygone age. Not at all.
Director John Ford made sure that the Okie migrants were deathly skinny, while everyone else, from gas station attendants to deputized union-busters, was immaculately dressed and well fed. But the audience could identify with both sides, because both were white. Imagine if the displaced peoples were not the same color.
Today’s migrant workers are hispanic. They are illegal immigrants, just like Okies passing through the Arizona checkpoint in Steinbeck’s novel.
GUARD
Where you going?TOM
California.GUARD
How long you plan to be in Arizona?TOM
No longer’n we can get acrost her.GUARD
Got any plants?TOM
No plants.GUARD
Okay. Go ahead, but you better keep movin’.
Could a modern audience appreciate the travails of a Mexican family in an exact same predicament? Mexican farmers have been forced from their land in an even less polite manner today. They have similar claim to their homesteads, some of them even have indigenous claims. But American and Mexican corporate interests have been forcing the Mexicans to flee. The migration north is not about seeking fortune; picking lettuce it most certainly is not. The work our illegal immigrants are willing to do is out of desperation and subsistence. Corporate America reserves our agricultural work for migrants because it’s cheaper. Otherwise American citizens have devised unions to ensure that workers are paid an honorable wage. Exploitation of the illegal immigrant is simply a bypass of decent labor practices meant to protect everyone.
In selfish, protectionist terms, hiring illegal immigrants undermines the strength of unionized labor. Ultimately the exploitation of others dehumanizes us all.
I wish Americans could see The Grapes of Wrath as a projection of the ongoing injustices suffered by all exploited migrants. As well-fed American citizens leading prosperous lives, wouldn’t it be our responsibility to help the victims of our system? Instead, we are those cold-hearted leather-jacketed Californians herding them into lives of slow death by hard labor and starvation.
The Grapes of Wrath offered a strong Socialist message, disguised in a protagonist who did not yet have all the answers. Before setting out to light the way, Henry Fonda’s character says this to his mom:
TOM
…maybe I can do sump’n. Maybe I can jus’ fin’ out sump’n.
Jus’ scrounge aroun’ an’ try to fin’ out what it is that’s wrong,
an then see if they ain’t sump’n could be done about it.
But I ain’t thought it out clear, Ma. I can’t.
I don’t know enough.MA
How’m I gonna know ’bout you?
They might kill you an’ I wouldn’t know.
They might hurt you. How’m I gonna know?TOM
Well, maybe it’s like Casy says, a fella ain’t got a soul
of his own, but on’y a piece of a big soul–the one big soul
that belongs to ever’body–an’ then…
Then it don’t matter. Then I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark.
I’ll be ever’where–wherever you look. Wherever there’s
a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there.
Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there.
I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad
–an’ I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re
hungry an’ they know supper’s ready.
An’ when our people eat the stuff they raise,
an’ live in the houses they build, why, I’ll be there too.
I had to see The Grapes of Wrath in high school. It was required. Are schools today trying to infuse students with social wisdom? How about a Grapes Redux starring people of color? Imagine this closing line, spoken by a dark skinned mother, about the hardship that is her people’s fate:
MA
…Maybe that makes us tough. Rich fellas come up an’ they die, an’ their kids ain’t no good, an’ they die out. But we keep a-comin’. We’re the people that live. Can’t nobody wipe us out. Can’t nobody lick us. We’ll go on forever, Pa. We’re the people.
The Domino Theory at work! Next to fall- Washington Mutual. Nothing related to Vietnamese Communism at all, but to American capitalism itself.
And what does Wall Street and Washington, D.C. advocate now? Why socialism! They advocate socialism for themselves,The Rich, where profits are privatized for the super elites and losses are socialized for the poor to pay the costs of bad business dealings done by private owners. They call that ‘bailout’.
So if we are to have this form of socialism in place in the US one begins to wonder about having a much different form of Socialist Movement return to the scene, where benefits are privatized and the super rich must pay their fair costs to a society that they have been looting from? Well why not? Why should government always be benefiting only the rich, where corporate corruption allows Big Business to seize control of the government to use only for themselves?
Also, we need to ask ourselves whether Big Business will ever care for Nature? The answer seems obvious that NO it will not, since looting nature is part of the essential business ethic of making profit for owners at the expense of others (workers and Nature).
Yes, Socialism is back and we need to see that it is not the National Socialism of the rich for the rich that shall predominate, but rather Socialism of those who do the work for those who do the work, that is put into effect. Because one way or the other, it is what’s now on the agenda. After WaMu, which next? The corporate-run government is bankrupting itself to stop bankruptcy! The FDIC will have to spend another $20 billion if this bank blows bringing itself almost to the point of insolvency. The money for bailouts and bankruptcies is not endless.
Sticks to play the fiddle? Absurd!
Here’s another sign our cultural literacy level can’t handle satire: “bootstraps.” It’s become a keyword for the conservative/libertarian dismissal of society’s need for a safety net. Apparently lazy welfare recipients won’t “pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.” As if it takes but the effort, even as we can only interpret what was the procedure, since few of us come close enough to wearing riding boots to recognize a bootstrap. But I’ve heard social advocates offer this meek argument for their disadvantaged/minority/ailing charges: “but what if you don’t have bootstraps?”
Well give that person a bootstrap if they think they can levitate with it. Bootstraps may be colloquial to us now, but they only ever could assist you to pull up your boots. Perhaps we could suggest new idioms for the poor like: lose weight by tightening your shoelaces. Or if that’s going to be dated soon: hang on to your earnings with Velcro.
When did hard nose conservatives assume command of the expression that used to ridicule the inhumanity of their tough-love logic? “Bootstraps” now asserts that taking care of oneself is so self-evident it doesn’t merit thinking about.
Does “let them eat cake” register as elite class disconnect anymore? I wonder because the affluence brought by modern capitalism has proved Marie Antoinette cynically prophetic. The disadvantaged have their cake these days. Little Debbie’s. It’s pseudo-food rat poison. We won’t give them bread.
Notice how all the big guys look out after themselves. They got themselves a ‘bailout’ of several tens of billions of dollars over at Fannie Mae’s and Freddie’s houses, and it will be paid to them from much of the work of all those who, today, will get a big boost up to $6.55 an hour! More than that would be socialism they say. Federal Minimum Wage to Increase to $6.55 on July 24
What cons these business men are, because people believe them with their idiotic nonsense justifying their own largess at others expense, too. Their looting of the National Treasury is never called socialism at all. And it’s not. It’s just pure thievery and real socialism is not thievery at all, like what the American business community practices daily. Real socialism is nothing more than helping out the less fortunate in society, instead of helping out the more fortunate in their robberies of the rest of us.
“The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil… I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.”
Socialism is not inherently totalitarian. To advocate for an equitable distribution of wealth, to look after the poor and feeble, to provide health, education, and opportunity for all, is to be a socialist. Not by coincidence, these are the very reasons socialism is feared by capitalists and slandered by their educational system. The Red Scare was not about Commie infiltrators but a creeping social consciousness. “Democrats” are the lip service which corporate power has to pay to keep human beings from wising up and demanding their due.
Is there a single humanitarian whom you admire for his/her brilliance and grace, who advocates capitalism? Albert Einstein was a socialist.