Michael K. Smith's Blog, page 39
April 26, 2019
SUPREME AND EXALTED MASTER PRESIDENT ROBERT MUELLER
by Ann CoulterApril 24, 2019
www.anncoulter.com According to Robert Mueller, a president can be guilty of obstruction of justice simply by exercising the powers of the president -- if he does so with "an intent to obtain an improper advantage for himself or someone else, inconsistent with official duty and the rights of others." Wow. That's a new standard for a president's Article II powers! I don't see it in my pocket Constitution.
What Mueller is saying is that he should hold the position of supreme exalted master president to review all decisions made by the man who was elected to the office of president by mere voters. Mueller can't say Trump obstructed justice. The investigation found no Russian "collusion," or related crimes, so there was no justice to obstruct. That's why there's nothing in the report about "perjury," "destroying evidence" or any other recognizable crime, like, say, "accepting a cash bribe."
Instead, Mueller proposes to review the decisions of the person duly elected president on a purity-of-motive standard. "An improper motive," the Mueller report states, "can render an actor's conduct criminal even when the conduct would otherwise be lawful and within the actor's authority."
Except the "actor" here is the president. We're not talking about the authority of a CEO or chief of police. We're talking about the U.S. president, whose "authority" comes directly from the Constitution.
If a special counsel is entitled to sit in judgment on a president's motives for exercising his constitutional powers, there will never be a president who is not under investigation for everything he does. Mueller is claiming that prosecutors and Congress have a right to probe the president's state of mind when he orders the 101st Airborne into action or nominates a new Supreme Court justice.
While we're at it, can the president convene a commission to investigate the motives of a member of Congress for voting a particular way? How about a Supreme Court justice? (I've been dying to get to the bottom of Justice Roberts' vote to uphold Obamacare.)
Have I got "corrupt" for you!
In addition to perjuring himself, suborning the perjury of others and hiding evidence in a private citizen's civil rights lawsuit against him, Bill Clinton issued a number of highly unusual pardons when he was president.
Clinton crony Susan McDougal, the Clintons' partner in the Whitewater Development Corp. scam, was convicted on charges of fraud and conspiracy. She sat in jail for 18 months on contempt of court charges rather than answer questions about whether Bill Clinton had lied in his testimony about Whitewater.
Before leaving office, President Clinton pardoned McDougal.
Is there any possibility that Clinton issued that pardon with "an intent to obtain an improper advantage for himself"? Any at all?
In July 1999, Hillary Clinton indicated that she would be running for the U.S. Senate from New York. Weeks later, President Clinton offered clemency to members of the Puerto Rican terrorist group F.A.L.N, responsible for 130 bombings in the 1970s and '80s that killed five, maimed more than 80 and caused almost $3 million in damage.
Was Clinton's motive for this pardon to help Hillary win the Puerto Rican vote in New York? Time for a purity-of-heart investigation!
(Principled as ever, Hillary initially supported the clemencies, until they turned out to be wildly, shockingly unpopular, whereupon Hillary remembered that she opposed them.)
Over the objections of everyone, President Clinton also granted a full pardon to Marc Rich, an international fugitive wanted on more than 50 counts of wire fraud, racketeering, evading $48 million in income taxes and trading with the enemy -- specifically, conspiring with Iran as that country was holding 52 Americans hostage.
What possible explanation can there be for such a pard-- Oh! Look at this! Rich's ex-wife gave $450,000 to Clinton's presidential library, more than $100,000 to Hillary's Senate campaign and more than $1 million to the Democratic National Committee.
Is it possible that Clinton's pardon of Rich was intended to "obtain an improper advantage for himself or someone else, inconsistent with official duty"?
How about the Clinton pardons for which his brother-in-law, Hugh Rodham, was paid $400,000? I'm not a fancy prosecutor in Robert Mueller's office, but it sure looks to me like selling those pardons constituted "an improper advantage" at least to Hugh.
I haven't even gotten started. This is just the pardons!
To mention a few other curious exercises of Clinton's Article II powers, there was also the sudden decision of his Department of Justice to investigate the NYPD, then presided over by -- I'm sure this is entirely a coincidence -- Hillary's presumed opponent for the Senate, Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
May we ask about the feds' motive for turning with a blind fury on the police department that had slashed New York City's murder rate by 67%?
And what was President Clinton's thinking when he approved the sale of sensitive ballistic-missile guidance technology to China over the objections of his own Pentagon, State Department and Justice Department? Here's something any independent counsel might want to look at: The Chinese had just funneled millions of dollars in illegal campaign donations to the Democrats.
Does that get a purity-of-heart investigation?
How about Obama? When he said if he had a son, he'd look like Trayvon Martin, and then sent three White House officials to Michael Brown's funeral -- more than he sent to Margaret Thatcher's funeral -- did Obama seriously believe Martin and Brown were innocent victims? Or was he just trying to gin up the black vote to help Democrats' electoral prospects -- i.e. trying "to obtain an improper advantage for himself or someone else, inconsistent with official duty and the rights of others."
I'm sure Democratic presidents will be treated EXACTLY like President Trump.
Remember the most egregious of the Clinton pardons, the one granted to tax cheat and friend-of-the-Crazy-Ayatollah Marc Rich? Of course you do -- it was just few paragraphs back.
Guess who investigated that pardon and concluded that Clinton's motives were pure? Yes: That would be James Comey.
COPYRIGHT 2019 ANN COULTER
www.anncoulter.com According to Robert Mueller, a president can be guilty of obstruction of justice simply by exercising the powers of the president -- if he does so with "an intent to obtain an improper advantage for himself or someone else, inconsistent with official duty and the rights of others." Wow. That's a new standard for a president's Article II powers! I don't see it in my pocket Constitution.
What Mueller is saying is that he should hold the position of supreme exalted master president to review all decisions made by the man who was elected to the office of president by mere voters. Mueller can't say Trump obstructed justice. The investigation found no Russian "collusion," or related crimes, so there was no justice to obstruct. That's why there's nothing in the report about "perjury," "destroying evidence" or any other recognizable crime, like, say, "accepting a cash bribe."
Instead, Mueller proposes to review the decisions of the person duly elected president on a purity-of-motive standard. "An improper motive," the Mueller report states, "can render an actor's conduct criminal even when the conduct would otherwise be lawful and within the actor's authority."
Except the "actor" here is the president. We're not talking about the authority of a CEO or chief of police. We're talking about the U.S. president, whose "authority" comes directly from the Constitution.
If a special counsel is entitled to sit in judgment on a president's motives for exercising his constitutional powers, there will never be a president who is not under investigation for everything he does. Mueller is claiming that prosecutors and Congress have a right to probe the president's state of mind when he orders the 101st Airborne into action or nominates a new Supreme Court justice.
While we're at it, can the president convene a commission to investigate the motives of a member of Congress for voting a particular way? How about a Supreme Court justice? (I've been dying to get to the bottom of Justice Roberts' vote to uphold Obamacare.)
Have I got "corrupt" for you!
In addition to perjuring himself, suborning the perjury of others and hiding evidence in a private citizen's civil rights lawsuit against him, Bill Clinton issued a number of highly unusual pardons when he was president.
Clinton crony Susan McDougal, the Clintons' partner in the Whitewater Development Corp. scam, was convicted on charges of fraud and conspiracy. She sat in jail for 18 months on contempt of court charges rather than answer questions about whether Bill Clinton had lied in his testimony about Whitewater.
Before leaving office, President Clinton pardoned McDougal.
Is there any possibility that Clinton issued that pardon with "an intent to obtain an improper advantage for himself"? Any at all?
In July 1999, Hillary Clinton indicated that she would be running for the U.S. Senate from New York. Weeks later, President Clinton offered clemency to members of the Puerto Rican terrorist group F.A.L.N, responsible for 130 bombings in the 1970s and '80s that killed five, maimed more than 80 and caused almost $3 million in damage.
Was Clinton's motive for this pardon to help Hillary win the Puerto Rican vote in New York? Time for a purity-of-heart investigation!
(Principled as ever, Hillary initially supported the clemencies, until they turned out to be wildly, shockingly unpopular, whereupon Hillary remembered that she opposed them.)
Over the objections of everyone, President Clinton also granted a full pardon to Marc Rich, an international fugitive wanted on more than 50 counts of wire fraud, racketeering, evading $48 million in income taxes and trading with the enemy -- specifically, conspiring with Iran as that country was holding 52 Americans hostage.
What possible explanation can there be for such a pard-- Oh! Look at this! Rich's ex-wife gave $450,000 to Clinton's presidential library, more than $100,000 to Hillary's Senate campaign and more than $1 million to the Democratic National Committee.
Is it possible that Clinton's pardon of Rich was intended to "obtain an improper advantage for himself or someone else, inconsistent with official duty"?
How about the Clinton pardons for which his brother-in-law, Hugh Rodham, was paid $400,000? I'm not a fancy prosecutor in Robert Mueller's office, but it sure looks to me like selling those pardons constituted "an improper advantage" at least to Hugh.
I haven't even gotten started. This is just the pardons!
To mention a few other curious exercises of Clinton's Article II powers, there was also the sudden decision of his Department of Justice to investigate the NYPD, then presided over by -- I'm sure this is entirely a coincidence -- Hillary's presumed opponent for the Senate, Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
May we ask about the feds' motive for turning with a blind fury on the police department that had slashed New York City's murder rate by 67%?
And what was President Clinton's thinking when he approved the sale of sensitive ballistic-missile guidance technology to China over the objections of his own Pentagon, State Department and Justice Department? Here's something any independent counsel might want to look at: The Chinese had just funneled millions of dollars in illegal campaign donations to the Democrats.
Does that get a purity-of-heart investigation?
How about Obama? When he said if he had a son, he'd look like Trayvon Martin, and then sent three White House officials to Michael Brown's funeral -- more than he sent to Margaret Thatcher's funeral -- did Obama seriously believe Martin and Brown were innocent victims? Or was he just trying to gin up the black vote to help Democrats' electoral prospects -- i.e. trying "to obtain an improper advantage for himself or someone else, inconsistent with official duty and the rights of others."
I'm sure Democratic presidents will be treated EXACTLY like President Trump.
Remember the most egregious of the Clinton pardons, the one granted to tax cheat and friend-of-the-Crazy-Ayatollah Marc Rich? Of course you do -- it was just few paragraphs back.
Guess who investigated that pardon and concluded that Clinton's motives were pure? Yes: That would be James Comey.
COPYRIGHT 2019 ANN COULTER
April 19, 2019
The "Free Market" and Fake Libertarianism
There are some issues on which libertarian socialists and anarcho-capitalists (right-wing libertarians) can work together - like free speech, the illegitimacy of victimless crimes, and opposing regime change wars. But beyond that, the rationally inclined simply have to face the fact that so-called libertarians are loony tunes when they start talking about the "free market," which has about as much contact with reality as a masturbation fantasy. In the real world we have private monopoly control of essential social resources. Right wing libertarians are fine with that, asking only that "coercion" be cut out of the equation. But if I have enough money to buy the community water supply, I don't have to use coercion to subordinate others to my will. All I need do is build an impenetrable wall around the water, leaving everyone "free" to pay the extortionate prices I demand, or die of thirst. It's perfect liberty without coercion, a regular paradise.
Limitless accumulation of capital is the central enemy, not "coercion." But don't expect "libertarians" to understand this. They can't.
Limitless accumulation of capital is the central enemy, not "coercion." But don't expect "libertarians" to understand this. They can't.
April 16, 2019
Diseased Capitalist Culture Blamed On Subcultures
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society..we are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men..who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses..it is they who pull the wires which control the public mind."
from "Propaganda" 1928 by Edward Bernays
Ignorant but often understandable fearful reactions by individuals to retail murders committed by driven lunatics and manic revenge seekers that have taken the lives of many innocent souls is conveniently labeled “islamophobic”, while the systemic mass murdering destruction of major parts of the middle east and wholesale inhumanity that slaughters hundreds of thousands, reduces millions to refugees while destroying nations and governments and is the root of retaliatory terrorism is, um, enlightened globalized love of Islam?
Poverty and injustice in some foreign countries is seen as dreadful behavior demanding our humanitarian attention while poverty and injustice at home calls for more domestic spending on war, junk food, pets and gossip.
A rich, arrogant, asshole, thus over-qualified for the job of American president, is so hated by the establishment and its class of professional minions that much of public consciousness is focused exclusively on him while a system sinks lower in wealth and morality each day and situations more threatening than modern humanity has ever consciously faced get worse with each moment focused on his alleged fascism while its more destructive than ever qualities remain in what amounts to an unconscious state that the psych business loves as long as it can be individually monetized.
Proposals that are part of the Green New Deal encounter criticism from the ruling powers and their servant class in media and politics with the plaintive wail “where will we get the money” coming from sources deaf, dumb and blind to the trillions spent on warfare, the billions spent on pet care in a nation with millions living in poverty and hundreds of thousands living under bridges, highways, in tent cities, their autos or on the street. A four-year-old child idiot savant might advise that the wailers consider budgeting less for war, poverty, exploitation, profits and pets and more for food, clothing, shelter and health care for the entire population. If such a gender free disabled child of color existed it might be urged to enter the democratic sweepstakes for president but hopefully refuse to sink to their level, from which warfare, poverty and waste result.
Gossip mongers posing as political commentators insist Trump reveal his tax figures so that they might learn the shocking news that he is an extremely wealthy capitalist, thus given, like all members of his class, to hire lawyers and accountants and regularly cheat on his taxes the way they all do, and to an overwhelmingly greater extent than the common people formerly called the middle but more honestly the working class. In fact, a study revealed that .5% of the richest people in America claim 20% of the untaxable wealth in existence, which amounts to some 50 billon dollars a year of what should be our cash that they stash. Trump represents chump change to that mob, which is why they pay to have him play the role of individual rich pig and drum that idea into the heads of people so starved for information they can believe Trump is having a homosexual affair with Putin while missing the fact that he has almost buried his face in Netanyahu’s crotch with hardly a word of criticism about Israel from the same information pimps screeching about Russia and everything but the system that he, they, and we are a part of and which must be radically transformed if we are to have real democracy, peace, social justice and an environment treated as foundation for such a system.
As the mildly sensible recover from the shock of finding that fantasies they were fed by consciousness control’s mind managers that had Trump and Putin sharing secrets of American fictional democracy, the bottom feeder brigade hasn’t let go and still clings to unrevealed secrets yet to be found when the full story of a two year 25 million dollar waste of time and money called the Mueller farce is open to the public. While most of America watches the latest marvel comics film, hears the latest celebrity gossip and then tries to get some rest, the tiny minority that is paying any attention to this disgraceful Russiagate fiasco and actually reads this 400 page glorified political pornography may start wishing Putin would take over what passes for democracy here, having achieved some measure of success with whatever they call it there. After all, a great majority of Russians do support Putin while, we are told every few minutes, an overwhelming majority here is opposed to Putin’s alleged agent, Trump.
Now, for a comparison of the shameful behavior of alleged representatives of the people and their co-conspirators in corporate media, let’s watch what the great heroes of our “free” press do with the arrest of Assange, an international figure of courageous public service who makes most of what passes for a journalist class seem a system worshipping stenography religion by comparison. It is significant that he and Manning, two heroic figures, are imprisoned while an entire population of corporate and media hustlers make a living blaming the empty headed egotist in the white house for everything that is, was, and continues to be appallingly wrong with a system while they all make good livings obliterating any mention of that while jumping on a bandwagon of “resistance” to Trump. And Trump will of course cooperate, calling for their heads and despite his initially expressed feelings about wasteful wars becoming a barking dog in response to his master’s orders to get more belligerent about Venezuela, Cuba, and intellectual concepts beyond his – and far too many Americans’ - frame of reference or understanding, like socialism and communism.
A leadership class whose morality and intellect could give pond scum a bad name will continue searching for evidence to impeach the captain of a ship that is not only in danger of sinking but threatening the entire ocean in which it may be swallowed, while the crew follows orders and the passengers are distracted, confused and not yet angry enough to really mutiny. Let’s not wait until the water is up to our ankles.
April 13, 2019
All Must Rise For The People's Champion Julian Assange
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has been evicted from the Ecuadorian Embassy and arrested by the London Metropolitan Police on orders of the United States, which wants him extradited to face a death penalty charge related to his exposure of U.S. war crimes in Iraq. This shocking contempt for democracy and human rights violates both Ecuadorian and international law.
Assange was granted political asylum by then Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa in 2012, along with Ecuadorian citizenship last year. Those protections were stripped away on orders of current president Lenin Moreno, whom Correa tweeted is "the greatest traitor in Ecuadorian and Latin American history" for "allow[ing] the British police to enter our embassy in London to arrest Assange."
Alone among Democratic leaders so far, Hawaii representative Tulsi Gabbard rose to the defense of Assange. "The purpose of arresting Assange," tweeted the Democratic presidential aspirant, is "to send a message to the people, especially journalists, to be quiet and don't get out of line. If we the people allow the government to control us through fear, we are no longer free, we are no longer America."
The Trump administration wants to try Assange on charges that he conspired with Chelsea Manning in 2010 to steal the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs obtained by Wikileaks, but as with Russiagate, no evidence has emerged with which to substantiate the charge.
What Assange and Manning actually did was to document grotesque crimes of war, the casual slaughter of Iraqi men, women, and children, Reuters journalists, and Red Cross workers trying to help such victims, that were part and parcel of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Manning leaked 500,000 documents from the Pentagon and State Department, along with the 2007 video of U.S. helicopter pilots nonchalantly gunning people down in the streets as though playing a video game. In a nutshell, Assange's "crime" is having revealed the hypocrisy, wholesale massacre, torture, bribery, and intimidation, that are at the heart of U.S. policy in the Middle East.
The establishment press initially published the Wikileaks documents, but then turned on Assange, eagerly joining in a smear campaign to destroy his reputation. The coordinated propaganda operation was confirmed in a leaked Pentagon document prepared by the Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch dated March 8, 2008. The document called on the United States to eradicate the "feeling of trust" that is the "center of gravity" for Wikileaks. In other words, they seek to destroy Assange's reputation for having revealed the truth. Keep this in mind as you prepare to send off your tax return on Monday.
Assange published 70,000 hacked e-mails belonging to the Democratic National Committee and senior Democratic Party officials. The e-mails were copied from the accounts of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman in 2016. The Podesta e-mails exposed that Saudi Arabia and Qatar, two major ISIS funders, had donated millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation. They also revealed a payment of $657,000 from Goldman Sachs to Hillary Clinton for speeches. Naturally, one shouldn't assume such modest recompense influenced her views, although she was caught in the e-mails saying that she favored "open trade and open borders," and believed Wall Street executives were best situated to manage the economy, which directly contradicted what she was telling voters. Other e-mails demonstrated Democratic efforts to insure that Donald Trump emerged as the GOP nominee for president, and that Hillary had advance knowledge of presidential debate questions. They also exposed that she was the main architect of the regime-change war in Libya, which left the ruined country in the hands of terrorist gangs, results she is proud of and which she thought would enhance her presidential stature and image.
Although the evidence couldn't be clearer that HRC's 2016 loss to a reality TV show clown was self-inflicted, corporate Democrats claim to this day that Russia alone caused the defeat, that the Podesta e-mails in particular were pilfered by Putin's hackers. Unfortunately for them, Hillary was already widely detested for her disgraceful record, which renders the Podesta e-mails just another dump in the Clinton cesspool. In any event, ex-FBI director James Comey says that the Podesta e-mails were probably delivered by an intermediary, and Assange insists that "state actors" were not involved.
Further Wikileak-provided e-mails exposed the hacking tools used by U.S. intelligence agencies to interfere in foreign elections - a regular CIA practice - including in the French elections, as well as the internal conspiracy against British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn by Labour members of parliament. It is not difficult to see why Assange is so bitterly hated by the Washington establishment, Democratic and Republican party alike.
Let us recall that it was Wikileaks that intervened to save Edward Snowden, who had revealed how intelligence agencies were engaged in wholesale spying against the U.S. public, as he flew from Hong Kong to Moscow, where he lives in exile to this day. (Snowden faced extradition to the U.S., just as Assange does.) The Snowden leaks also showed that Assange was on a U.S. "manhunt target list."
It shouldn't need stressing, but in our civics-starved culture we can't repeat too often that without the courage and integrity of people like Assange, there can be no First Amendment, no independent journalism, no democracy worthy of the name.
On his way to the White House Trump denounced the media as the "enemy of the people," while simultaneously declaring "I love Wikileaks." But now that he has power, he wants to crucify Julian Assange. Nothing better illustrates what a hypocritical fraud he is.
If we do not now rise to the occasion and defend Assange, fake news and the infantile tweets of moronic leaders will be all we ever get to see.
Sources:
"Dark Day For Journalism As Assange Arrested," Jimmy Dore Show (You Tube), April 13, 2019
"Julian Assange Arrested in London; Faces U.S. Charge Related to Chelsea Manning Leaks," Democracy Now, April 11, 2019
Assange was granted political asylum by then Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa in 2012, along with Ecuadorian citizenship last year. Those protections were stripped away on orders of current president Lenin Moreno, whom Correa tweeted is "the greatest traitor in Ecuadorian and Latin American history" for "allow[ing] the British police to enter our embassy in London to arrest Assange."
Alone among Democratic leaders so far, Hawaii representative Tulsi Gabbard rose to the defense of Assange. "The purpose of arresting Assange," tweeted the Democratic presidential aspirant, is "to send a message to the people, especially journalists, to be quiet and don't get out of line. If we the people allow the government to control us through fear, we are no longer free, we are no longer America."
The Trump administration wants to try Assange on charges that he conspired with Chelsea Manning in 2010 to steal the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs obtained by Wikileaks, but as with Russiagate, no evidence has emerged with which to substantiate the charge.
What Assange and Manning actually did was to document grotesque crimes of war, the casual slaughter of Iraqi men, women, and children, Reuters journalists, and Red Cross workers trying to help such victims, that were part and parcel of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Manning leaked 500,000 documents from the Pentagon and State Department, along with the 2007 video of U.S. helicopter pilots nonchalantly gunning people down in the streets as though playing a video game. In a nutshell, Assange's "crime" is having revealed the hypocrisy, wholesale massacre, torture, bribery, and intimidation, that are at the heart of U.S. policy in the Middle East.
The establishment press initially published the Wikileaks documents, but then turned on Assange, eagerly joining in a smear campaign to destroy his reputation. The coordinated propaganda operation was confirmed in a leaked Pentagon document prepared by the Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch dated March 8, 2008. The document called on the United States to eradicate the "feeling of trust" that is the "center of gravity" for Wikileaks. In other words, they seek to destroy Assange's reputation for having revealed the truth. Keep this in mind as you prepare to send off your tax return on Monday.
Assange published 70,000 hacked e-mails belonging to the Democratic National Committee and senior Democratic Party officials. The e-mails were copied from the accounts of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman in 2016. The Podesta e-mails exposed that Saudi Arabia and Qatar, two major ISIS funders, had donated millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation. They also revealed a payment of $657,000 from Goldman Sachs to Hillary Clinton for speeches. Naturally, one shouldn't assume such modest recompense influenced her views, although she was caught in the e-mails saying that she favored "open trade and open borders," and believed Wall Street executives were best situated to manage the economy, which directly contradicted what she was telling voters. Other e-mails demonstrated Democratic efforts to insure that Donald Trump emerged as the GOP nominee for president, and that Hillary had advance knowledge of presidential debate questions. They also exposed that she was the main architect of the regime-change war in Libya, which left the ruined country in the hands of terrorist gangs, results she is proud of and which she thought would enhance her presidential stature and image.
Although the evidence couldn't be clearer that HRC's 2016 loss to a reality TV show clown was self-inflicted, corporate Democrats claim to this day that Russia alone caused the defeat, that the Podesta e-mails in particular were pilfered by Putin's hackers. Unfortunately for them, Hillary was already widely detested for her disgraceful record, which renders the Podesta e-mails just another dump in the Clinton cesspool. In any event, ex-FBI director James Comey says that the Podesta e-mails were probably delivered by an intermediary, and Assange insists that "state actors" were not involved.
Further Wikileak-provided e-mails exposed the hacking tools used by U.S. intelligence agencies to interfere in foreign elections - a regular CIA practice - including in the French elections, as well as the internal conspiracy against British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn by Labour members of parliament. It is not difficult to see why Assange is so bitterly hated by the Washington establishment, Democratic and Republican party alike.
Let us recall that it was Wikileaks that intervened to save Edward Snowden, who had revealed how intelligence agencies were engaged in wholesale spying against the U.S. public, as he flew from Hong Kong to Moscow, where he lives in exile to this day. (Snowden faced extradition to the U.S., just as Assange does.) The Snowden leaks also showed that Assange was on a U.S. "manhunt target list."
It shouldn't need stressing, but in our civics-starved culture we can't repeat too often that without the courage and integrity of people like Assange, there can be no First Amendment, no independent journalism, no democracy worthy of the name.
On his way to the White House Trump denounced the media as the "enemy of the people," while simultaneously declaring "I love Wikileaks." But now that he has power, he wants to crucify Julian Assange. Nothing better illustrates what a hypocritical fraud he is.
If we do not now rise to the occasion and defend Assange, fake news and the infantile tweets of moronic leaders will be all we ever get to see.
Sources:
"Dark Day For Journalism As Assange Arrested," Jimmy Dore Show (You Tube), April 13, 2019
"Julian Assange Arrested in London; Faces U.S. Charge Related to Chelsea Manning Leaks," Democracy Now, April 11, 2019
April 7, 2019
But At Least They Still Have "White Privilege"
"The rustbelt . . . . is being wiped out . . . . Workers have essentially nothing. They had a compact, they thought. People have done studies of workers in Ohio and Indiana. They feel cheated, rightly. They thought they had a deal with the corporations and the government: they would work hard all their lives and in return they would get pensions, they would get security, their children would get jobs. They served in the army, they did all the right things. Now they're being thrown into the trash can. No pensions, no security, no jobs. The jobs are being shipped somewhere else."
-------Noam Chomsky, Power Systems
-------Noam Chomsky, Power Systems
March 26, 2019
Bulletin! Trump Is Putin's Puppet After All!
Crack Legalienate Team Wins Nobel Prize For Logic
Evidence:
1. Trump Opposes Natural Gas Deal Between Russia and Germany
2. Trump Menaces Russia With U.S. Warships In The Black Sea
3. Trump Has Ongoing Military Build-Up On Russia's Border, Including Nukes
4. Trump Has U.S. Troops In Syria Against Putin's Wishes
5. Trump Is Trying To Overthrow Venezuelan Government Against Putin's Wishes
6. Trump Is Increasing Severity Of Sanctions Against Russia
7. Trump Is Sending Arms To Anti-Russia Rebels In Ukraine
8. Trump Is Withdrawing From Key Nuclear Treaty With Russia (INF)
9. Trump Is Criticized By Putin For Withdrawing From Iran Nuclear Deal
Conclusion:
Trump Is Putin's Puppet
Evidence:
1. Trump Opposes Natural Gas Deal Between Russia and Germany
2. Trump Menaces Russia With U.S. Warships In The Black Sea
3. Trump Has Ongoing Military Build-Up On Russia's Border, Including Nukes
4. Trump Has U.S. Troops In Syria Against Putin's Wishes
5. Trump Is Trying To Overthrow Venezuelan Government Against Putin's Wishes
6. Trump Is Increasing Severity Of Sanctions Against Russia
7. Trump Is Sending Arms To Anti-Russia Rebels In Ukraine
8. Trump Is Withdrawing From Key Nuclear Treaty With Russia (INF)
9. Trump Is Criticized By Putin For Withdrawing From Iran Nuclear Deal
Conclusion:
Trump Is Putin's Puppet
March 25, 2019
Trump Vindicated By Mueller Report!
"This is the saddest media spectacle I've ever seen, since I began practicing journalism in 2005. And what makes it even sadder is to watch all of the people who invested their journalistic credibility into what proved to be a complete and total fraud and scam continue to try and cling to some vestige of credibility by continuing to spin conspiracy theories that are even more reckless and more unhinged than the ones to which we've been subjected for three years. The great journalist and writer Matt Taibbi wrote in an article over the weekend, and I agree with him completely, that as humiliating as the media debacle was leading up to the Iraq War, what they did over the last three years in the Trump-Russia story makes all of that look like a pimple. Even though obviously the Iraq War was much more destructive because it led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, the errors and lies and falsehoods and recklessness and speculation that we've been subjected to, over and over and over, that Robert Mueller just definitively debunked, is far more humiliating journalistically, far more unjustifiable journalistically. And who knows where it will lead to? It's ratcheted up tensions between the two most dangerous nuclear-armed powers in the world, Russia and the United States, that the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists says has brought us to two minutes before midnight on their Doomsday Clock. So it's also been extremely dangerous in ways that we don't yet know.
. . . everybody knows - and I don't care how many people try and rewrite history - that the central question that everybody was obsessed with for three years was: Did Donald Trump, his family members and his aides conspire and collaborate and collude with the Russians to interfere in the election? And contrary to what David (Cay Johnston) just said, it is absolutely false that Robert Mueller simply said there's not enough evidence to convict with a reasonable doubt. He said something much, much, much, much more important than that. He said that after 20 months of investigation, with a huge team of FBI agents and prosecutors, heralded as being the most aggressive and skilled in the world, we found no evidence that his happened. That's what Robert Mueller said. The whole thing was a scam and a fraud from the beginning. And The New York Times headline today says that as clearly as it can: Robert Mueller finds no collusion between Trump and Russia. That was the focal point of the entire narrative, no matter how much people try and change the focus.
"The second point, this idea that, 'Oh, we haven't heard from Robert Mueller, yet, we've only heard Bill Barr's summary of him,' yes, that's true. But Bill Barr has been friends with Robert Mueller for 30 years. They come from the same Republican circles in the Department of Justice. They both worked together at the Bush Justice Department, the Bush 41 Justice Department. All we heard for 20 months is that Robert Mueller is a man of the greatest integrity and patriotism. The idea, the very idea - just think about this - that he would allow Bill Barr to run around making false and misleading distortions about what the Mueller team found, and not one person on the Mueller team, including Bob Mueller himself, would stand up and say, 'Wait a minute, he is distorting what our findings was,' that is laughable. That's exactly the kind of conspiracy theories that led to this entire mess in the first place, and we should no longer tolerate this. Rachel Maddow and MSNBC are the Judy Millers of this story, except unlike Judy Miller, who was scapegoated for doing things that her male colleague did and had her career destroyed, Rachel Maddow will continue to make $10 million a year for NBC because she's their most valuable brand, and there will be no reckoning and consequences for this story that the media got radically, fundamentally and deliberately wrong for almost three years now in a very dangerous way . . .
". . . . prior to Bob Mueller's appointment, I was calling for a full-scale investigation in which all of the facts at the conclusion of the investigation would be publicly revealed, so that we would stop having to rely on media leaks that the CIA and the NSA and the FBI were engineering and manipulating and lying to us, as we now know, so that we could see the full picture. So I continue to believe that we should see the full Mueller report. I support that completely.
"Secondly, let me say, as well, that I believe that Donald Trump is one of the most corrupt people ever to occupy the White House, I am certain that he's guilty of all kinds of crimes - war crimes as president, financial crimes as a business person. One of the reasons why those of us who were so angry about this obsession on Russia and collusion, aside from the fact that it was so dangerous to ratchet up tensions between two nuclear-armed powers this way instead of trying to forge a peace between these two countries, is precisely because it took the oxygen away from all of the things that the Trump administration is doing that is so damaging, in lieu of this idiotic, moronic, Tom Clancy-type espionage thriller, where we were talking about Putin blackmailing Donald Trump with pee-pee tapes and Donald Trump being a Russian agent since 1987, which was a cover story that was on New York Magazine, that Chris Hayes put on MSNBC. Just all kinds of moronic conspiracies, that we love to mock other countries' medias for circulating and disseminating, drowned out our airwaves and our discourse for three years, preventing us from focusing on the real, substantive damage that the Trump administration is doing and that Donald Trump's corruption entails.
"But the reality is, the media chose to focus on this. Everybody knows this. David Cay Johnston was on your show, Amy, a week ago, and he said, 'Donald Trump, I believe, is a Russian agent.' We now have a full-scale, 20-month investigation by somebody that everybody agreed was a man of great integrity who would get to the bottom of all of this, who had full subpoena power. And David keeps trying to imply, which is totally false, that all that Mueller said was, 'Oh, it just doesn't rise to the level of criminality.' That is not what he said. He said, after 20 months of a full-scale investigation - which, by the way, included hours of interrogating Donald Trump Jr. before Congress, all of the transcripts of which were made available to Mueller, which he could have prosecuted Trump Jr. on for perjury and obstruction had Donald Trump Jr. lied about anything, but he chose not to. He said, 'After reviewing all of this evidence, I am concluding that this did not happen,' not that it doesn't rise to the level where I can criminally prosecute. He's saying there was no collusion.
"The game is over, and it's time to be honest about it. And the more we try to cling to this and invent new - you know what it reminds me of? In 2003, when the neocons finally had to face the truth that there were no WMDs, that they had fabricated that, that the media had misled millions of people around the world for years, and they started saying, 'Um, maybe Saddam hid them in Syria. Maybe they're buried in places we just haven't looked yet.' It's time to face the truth. The media got this tory wrong. They obsessed on this for three years, and all this time there was no evidence for it. It was just a conspiracy theory. Rachel Maddow, the most influential liberal TV host in the country, every single night misled millions of liberals into believing something that was totally false, and there will be no media consequences for it. And that is extremely grave and serious, no matter how much is true about how corrupt Donald Trump is in his financial dealings or any of the other stuff that people are now trying to deflect our attention onto.
"Why did millions of people vote for a complete joke of a game show host? And how did Democrats lose the presidency to one of the most embarrassing spectacles of a candidate in U.S. history? What is the prevailing ideology of the ruling class that has turned millions and millions of people, and to this country, into such angry citizens that they either refuse to vote or vote for the person who promises to burn down the entire system? Why are they so angry? What has happened to their economic security? What ideology and what group of people are responsible for that? What has Donald Trump been doing in realigning the United States away from the Western Europe and to Saudi despots, and the collusion that actually happened, which was from the Israeli government during the election in order to undermine Obama's policies? All those kinds of questions could have been asked and should have been asked, but it all got drowned out because we were all much more fascinated by this superficial, kind of very appealing and melodramatic espionage thriller, that has completely destroyed the credibility of the U.S. media and so tragically vindicated Donald Trump in a way that probably is the greatest gift that has been given to him throughout his entire presidency.
". . . .let me just say one thing about this idea that he's a Kremlin asset or that we need to find out what his relationship is with the Russians, We just had a 22-month investigation where the media and Bob Mueller did nothing but look into that exact question. He's saying it like nobody's ever asked this before or nobody's ever - we have the answer. And as for him being a Russian asset, it's so irresponsible to say that, because the reality is that the conflict between the U.S. and the Russians are at a worse and higher level than they've been in many years, probably decades. How can you say Donald Trump is a stooge of the Kremlin when he's right now trying to remove one of Vladimir Putin's client regime states in Venezuela? Or when he's trying to bully Angela Merkel out of being Russian natural gas, probably the thing that's most important to the Russian economy? Or when he sold lethal arms to the Ukrainians, something Obama refused to do on the grounds that it would be provocative to Russia? Or when he bombed Putin's client state in Syria? Over and over, the Trump administration has taken actions far more adverse and aggressive and belligerent to the Russians than the Obama administration did. That's why this whole narrative That Trump all along was being blackmailed by Putin, that he's an asset of Russian intelligence, this is idiocy. It is completely irrational. It is contrary to all facts."
"And Bob Mueller's investigation, who spent 22 months examining that core question - what is the relationship between Trump and the Russians? - concluded that there is no relationship. It's time to stop these dangerous conspiracy theories that are ratcheting up tensions between the two most dangerous countries on the planet. The reality is, the Trump administration has been constantly belligerent to Putin, has constantly acted adverse to the Kremlin's interests, and there's zero basis for thinking or believing or finding evidence to assert that Trump in any way is beholden to Vladimir Putin and to Russia. The whole thing has been a joke and a fairy tale from the start . . . .
" . . . as Noam Chomsky just pointed out and has spent the last 40 years pointing out, the United States has done very little since the end of World War II but going around the world and interfering in every single democracy that they can find, literally, including the country in which I'm currently living, which is Brazil, where they overthrew a democratically elected government in 1964 and then proceeded to impose a military regime for 21 years, and also Russia, where they openly boasted about helping to elect Boris Yeltsin because he would privatize everything and that would be good for U.S. industry, or even agitating anti-Putin resistance in parliamentary elections under Hillary Clinton's reign as secretary of state.
"This doesn't make it right for Russia to do it, but we've never kept in perspective the fact that interfering or meddling in other countries' elections or governance is not some grave, aberrational, never-before-heard drama that the entire world has to stop and lament and put an end to. It's normal business. We're currently, right now, in the process of trying to change the government of Venezuela openly, and have done so over and over around the world. And that's why Noam Chomsky says that all of this moral outrage of Americans at the idea that somebody would interfere or meddle in our democracy has made the U.S. a laughingstock to the hundreds of millions of people - billions, in fact, - who live in countries where the U.S. has done this and far, far worse decade after decade after decade.
". . . .there was a big difference between Obama and Clinton when it came to foreign policy. She was very critical of Obama for not being more confrontational with Putin, for refusing to bomb Syria, for refusing to send lethal arms to Ukrainians, for working with Russia on the Iran deal. I side with President Obama. He was absolutely right that Hillary Clinton would have been extremely dangerous, because she wanted to be way more provocative and belligerent toward Russia. And I'm very glad she didn't get the chance to do that. That would have been very dangerous for the world, although the Trump administration is doing it now.
"As for Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks, the Trump administration has made no secret of the fact that they want to prosecute WikiLeaks for the crime, in their eyes of disclosing confidential documents - one of the gravest threats we can imagine to press freedom Chelsea Manning's torture, being put back into solitary confinement is trying to squeeze her to say things that aren't true, to let them prosecute WikiLeaks. And all of the journalists who have spent three years claiming to be so worried about the threats to press freedom are utterly silent about what the Trump administration's real threat to press freedom is, which is this attempt to prosecute WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, abusing Chelsea Manning to do it, in order to criminalize journalism, which is the publication of top-secret documents that journalists do every day. And I hope that gets way more attention."
----------Glenn Greenwald, Democracy Now, March 25, 2019
. . . everybody knows - and I don't care how many people try and rewrite history - that the central question that everybody was obsessed with for three years was: Did Donald Trump, his family members and his aides conspire and collaborate and collude with the Russians to interfere in the election? And contrary to what David (Cay Johnston) just said, it is absolutely false that Robert Mueller simply said there's not enough evidence to convict with a reasonable doubt. He said something much, much, much, much more important than that. He said that after 20 months of investigation, with a huge team of FBI agents and prosecutors, heralded as being the most aggressive and skilled in the world, we found no evidence that his happened. That's what Robert Mueller said. The whole thing was a scam and a fraud from the beginning. And The New York Times headline today says that as clearly as it can: Robert Mueller finds no collusion between Trump and Russia. That was the focal point of the entire narrative, no matter how much people try and change the focus.
"The second point, this idea that, 'Oh, we haven't heard from Robert Mueller, yet, we've only heard Bill Barr's summary of him,' yes, that's true. But Bill Barr has been friends with Robert Mueller for 30 years. They come from the same Republican circles in the Department of Justice. They both worked together at the Bush Justice Department, the Bush 41 Justice Department. All we heard for 20 months is that Robert Mueller is a man of the greatest integrity and patriotism. The idea, the very idea - just think about this - that he would allow Bill Barr to run around making false and misleading distortions about what the Mueller team found, and not one person on the Mueller team, including Bob Mueller himself, would stand up and say, 'Wait a minute, he is distorting what our findings was,' that is laughable. That's exactly the kind of conspiracy theories that led to this entire mess in the first place, and we should no longer tolerate this. Rachel Maddow and MSNBC are the Judy Millers of this story, except unlike Judy Miller, who was scapegoated for doing things that her male colleague did and had her career destroyed, Rachel Maddow will continue to make $10 million a year for NBC because she's their most valuable brand, and there will be no reckoning and consequences for this story that the media got radically, fundamentally and deliberately wrong for almost three years now in a very dangerous way . . .
". . . . prior to Bob Mueller's appointment, I was calling for a full-scale investigation in which all of the facts at the conclusion of the investigation would be publicly revealed, so that we would stop having to rely on media leaks that the CIA and the NSA and the FBI were engineering and manipulating and lying to us, as we now know, so that we could see the full picture. So I continue to believe that we should see the full Mueller report. I support that completely.
"Secondly, let me say, as well, that I believe that Donald Trump is one of the most corrupt people ever to occupy the White House, I am certain that he's guilty of all kinds of crimes - war crimes as president, financial crimes as a business person. One of the reasons why those of us who were so angry about this obsession on Russia and collusion, aside from the fact that it was so dangerous to ratchet up tensions between two nuclear-armed powers this way instead of trying to forge a peace between these two countries, is precisely because it took the oxygen away from all of the things that the Trump administration is doing that is so damaging, in lieu of this idiotic, moronic, Tom Clancy-type espionage thriller, where we were talking about Putin blackmailing Donald Trump with pee-pee tapes and Donald Trump being a Russian agent since 1987, which was a cover story that was on New York Magazine, that Chris Hayes put on MSNBC. Just all kinds of moronic conspiracies, that we love to mock other countries' medias for circulating and disseminating, drowned out our airwaves and our discourse for three years, preventing us from focusing on the real, substantive damage that the Trump administration is doing and that Donald Trump's corruption entails.
"But the reality is, the media chose to focus on this. Everybody knows this. David Cay Johnston was on your show, Amy, a week ago, and he said, 'Donald Trump, I believe, is a Russian agent.' We now have a full-scale, 20-month investigation by somebody that everybody agreed was a man of great integrity who would get to the bottom of all of this, who had full subpoena power. And David keeps trying to imply, which is totally false, that all that Mueller said was, 'Oh, it just doesn't rise to the level of criminality.' That is not what he said. He said, after 20 months of a full-scale investigation - which, by the way, included hours of interrogating Donald Trump Jr. before Congress, all of the transcripts of which were made available to Mueller, which he could have prosecuted Trump Jr. on for perjury and obstruction had Donald Trump Jr. lied about anything, but he chose not to. He said, 'After reviewing all of this evidence, I am concluding that this did not happen,' not that it doesn't rise to the level where I can criminally prosecute. He's saying there was no collusion.
"The game is over, and it's time to be honest about it. And the more we try to cling to this and invent new - you know what it reminds me of? In 2003, when the neocons finally had to face the truth that there were no WMDs, that they had fabricated that, that the media had misled millions of people around the world for years, and they started saying, 'Um, maybe Saddam hid them in Syria. Maybe they're buried in places we just haven't looked yet.' It's time to face the truth. The media got this tory wrong. They obsessed on this for three years, and all this time there was no evidence for it. It was just a conspiracy theory. Rachel Maddow, the most influential liberal TV host in the country, every single night misled millions of liberals into believing something that was totally false, and there will be no media consequences for it. And that is extremely grave and serious, no matter how much is true about how corrupt Donald Trump is in his financial dealings or any of the other stuff that people are now trying to deflect our attention onto.
"Why did millions of people vote for a complete joke of a game show host? And how did Democrats lose the presidency to one of the most embarrassing spectacles of a candidate in U.S. history? What is the prevailing ideology of the ruling class that has turned millions and millions of people, and to this country, into such angry citizens that they either refuse to vote or vote for the person who promises to burn down the entire system? Why are they so angry? What has happened to their economic security? What ideology and what group of people are responsible for that? What has Donald Trump been doing in realigning the United States away from the Western Europe and to Saudi despots, and the collusion that actually happened, which was from the Israeli government during the election in order to undermine Obama's policies? All those kinds of questions could have been asked and should have been asked, but it all got drowned out because we were all much more fascinated by this superficial, kind of very appealing and melodramatic espionage thriller, that has completely destroyed the credibility of the U.S. media and so tragically vindicated Donald Trump in a way that probably is the greatest gift that has been given to him throughout his entire presidency.
". . . .let me just say one thing about this idea that he's a Kremlin asset or that we need to find out what his relationship is with the Russians, We just had a 22-month investigation where the media and Bob Mueller did nothing but look into that exact question. He's saying it like nobody's ever asked this before or nobody's ever - we have the answer. And as for him being a Russian asset, it's so irresponsible to say that, because the reality is that the conflict between the U.S. and the Russians are at a worse and higher level than they've been in many years, probably decades. How can you say Donald Trump is a stooge of the Kremlin when he's right now trying to remove one of Vladimir Putin's client regime states in Venezuela? Or when he's trying to bully Angela Merkel out of being Russian natural gas, probably the thing that's most important to the Russian economy? Or when he sold lethal arms to the Ukrainians, something Obama refused to do on the grounds that it would be provocative to Russia? Or when he bombed Putin's client state in Syria? Over and over, the Trump administration has taken actions far more adverse and aggressive and belligerent to the Russians than the Obama administration did. That's why this whole narrative That Trump all along was being blackmailed by Putin, that he's an asset of Russian intelligence, this is idiocy. It is completely irrational. It is contrary to all facts."
"And Bob Mueller's investigation, who spent 22 months examining that core question - what is the relationship between Trump and the Russians? - concluded that there is no relationship. It's time to stop these dangerous conspiracy theories that are ratcheting up tensions between the two most dangerous countries on the planet. The reality is, the Trump administration has been constantly belligerent to Putin, has constantly acted adverse to the Kremlin's interests, and there's zero basis for thinking or believing or finding evidence to assert that Trump in any way is beholden to Vladimir Putin and to Russia. The whole thing has been a joke and a fairy tale from the start . . . .
" . . . as Noam Chomsky just pointed out and has spent the last 40 years pointing out, the United States has done very little since the end of World War II but going around the world and interfering in every single democracy that they can find, literally, including the country in which I'm currently living, which is Brazil, where they overthrew a democratically elected government in 1964 and then proceeded to impose a military regime for 21 years, and also Russia, where they openly boasted about helping to elect Boris Yeltsin because he would privatize everything and that would be good for U.S. industry, or even agitating anti-Putin resistance in parliamentary elections under Hillary Clinton's reign as secretary of state.
"This doesn't make it right for Russia to do it, but we've never kept in perspective the fact that interfering or meddling in other countries' elections or governance is not some grave, aberrational, never-before-heard drama that the entire world has to stop and lament and put an end to. It's normal business. We're currently, right now, in the process of trying to change the government of Venezuela openly, and have done so over and over around the world. And that's why Noam Chomsky says that all of this moral outrage of Americans at the idea that somebody would interfere or meddle in our democracy has made the U.S. a laughingstock to the hundreds of millions of people - billions, in fact, - who live in countries where the U.S. has done this and far, far worse decade after decade after decade.
". . . .there was a big difference between Obama and Clinton when it came to foreign policy. She was very critical of Obama for not being more confrontational with Putin, for refusing to bomb Syria, for refusing to send lethal arms to Ukrainians, for working with Russia on the Iran deal. I side with President Obama. He was absolutely right that Hillary Clinton would have been extremely dangerous, because she wanted to be way more provocative and belligerent toward Russia. And I'm very glad she didn't get the chance to do that. That would have been very dangerous for the world, although the Trump administration is doing it now.
"As for Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks, the Trump administration has made no secret of the fact that they want to prosecute WikiLeaks for the crime, in their eyes of disclosing confidential documents - one of the gravest threats we can imagine to press freedom Chelsea Manning's torture, being put back into solitary confinement is trying to squeeze her to say things that aren't true, to let them prosecute WikiLeaks. And all of the journalists who have spent three years claiming to be so worried about the threats to press freedom are utterly silent about what the Trump administration's real threat to press freedom is, which is this attempt to prosecute WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, abusing Chelsea Manning to do it, in order to criminalize journalism, which is the publication of top-secret documents that journalists do every day. And I hope that gets way more attention."
----------Glenn Greenwald, Democracy Now, March 25, 2019
March 22, 2019
Capitalism is Anti-Social: Socialism is Anti-Capital
“Consciousness is…from the very beginning a social product”Karl Marx
Given the degree of consciousness control suffered by people under the domain of privately owned political media and its stress on individual consumption, the very notion of social behavior, let alone socialism, can provoke outbursts of fear and loathing as the current idiocy over the term clearly shows. Fear that wealth will be taken away from people who don’t have any and given to some unworthies who have even less can reduce intellects and morality to a point at which president Trump begins to look like a humanitarian scholar with funny hair.
Social: having to do with human beings living together as a group in which their dealings with one another affect their common welfare.
This definition does not come from the Communist Manifesto but from a left wing tract called the New World Dictionary of the American Language. It defines what most of us are led to believe only in times of war or other threats to our well being which we must face, bravely, proudly as a nation of souls striving to work together to kill whoever the proposed enemy is. Otherwise, it’s the hell with everyone else, what’s in it for me, how can I trust any of these fools and why don’t they all acknowledge me and my identity group or my pets instead of themselves. Welcome to the commodity consuming humanity denying market forces of a malevolent social disease at the root of what should be called our climate catastrophe: private profit obsessed capitalist individuality.
While it is in our nature to be social, it has been forced into our heads to be anything but and our schools, advertisements and government see to it that we remain mostly obsessed with self. We only join with others under great stress, which is then used to keep us in small separate groupings that offer no threat to the minority rule of the rich. There are exceptions, but they are mostly of the cosmetic form, like shopping, which guarantees the system prevails, but with privileges offered and provided for those who serve it, and only rarely, perish the thought, society.
Members of the comfortable class able to see the value of social democratic capitalism as preservation and possibly even improvement of their status while also bringing in some of the less comfortable are often unaware that their status depends on the continued existence of less and under privileged “uncomfortables”. They are hardly reducible to white supremacists but an ever more diverse economically privileged caste certainly akin to the more comfortable house negroes created when classes were introduced to slaves that made life among the future black bourgeois – the house Negros - far superior to life among the field Negros. While some working the fields would occasionally remind them that they were still slaves but only with some material privileges, and some few from the house even led rebellions against their owners, most acted as “upper” classes are educated, taught and trained to act. Eat your better food, wear your better clothes, put something in the poor box at church or write out a tax deductible check during the holidays, and otherwise keep your mind clear of critical thought and above all keep your mouth shut. This division of class background realities among people of all skin tones, religions, ethnicities, genders, political and other market choices - maintains age old minority power by keeping the multitudes-masses divided in every psycho - identity way but the most obvious: the economically disabled results of market place private profit-private property rules not only taking precedence over any public good but dominating such out of the realm of thought let alone action on the part of truly disabled populations reduced to rising up as minorities and mostly taking issue with those below or beside them and showing little regard for those above except near worship, until recently when things have become so blatantly unjust that the previously near comatose are waking to the stench, sight and sound of massive injustice and inequality.
While anti-social media tropes of tripe get attention from major sources, as when reporting crimes among the working class majority rather than the bigger crimes of the leisure class minority, we get a steady diet of indigestible mental fare that makes fast food seem like gourmet dining. As in; which identity group suffers an outrage of hate from which other identity group, while the outrageous hate crime of inflicting war, waste and trillions of dollars in debt on people powerless to stop it while distracted by economic arguments based on a form of market fanaticism to make religious fundamentalists seem thoughtfully critical by comparison.
A degenerate value system based on an alleged democracy owned and controlled by a minority reduces humans to “the homeless” and pets to revered status while slaughtering millions in foreign countries with hundreds of billions spent for alleged defense that leaves millions here defenseless against poverty, crime, traffic and mental illness while inducing impoverished foreigners to come here in search of job security, which profit makers supply them in return for their cheaper-than-American labor. Welcome to the joys of a free market, where nothing is free and if you can’t afford food, clothing and shelter, you can drop fucking dead.
This economy sees to it that hookers get paid to make fake love to profit the pimp, reporters get paid to report fake news to profit corporate media, and politicians get paid to legislate fake democracy to profit the 1% and their professional servants. As long as news (?) is what we get from MSNB-FOX, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New York Post and the Washington Times, the above will remain true. Thus, “hate crimes” become individual acts against individual people and what they really are: poverty, war, invasions, injustice and more are hate crimes of a social nature which are treated, if at all, as due to evil individuals and nasty identity groups, never the acts of a political economy that demands homelessness, bloodshed, drug addiction and dishonesty in personal relations in order to keep profits flowing up to the top minority while the bottom majority is taught to fight one another in order to advance self, or their identity group safely kept a minority by individual acceptance of the social lie.
All too often, the mere mention of socialism is greeted by a frenzy from consciousness control and its mind management staff implying that this means mass murder, poverty, theft and all the other stuff capitalism has been profiting from for generations while a relative handful control its apparatus of propaganda taught as supposed common sense. The time has come for people to look behind the plastic curtain and learn what is fiction and what is reality. The economic class system is composed of a shrinking number of people of more incredible wealth than any tyrant deity of ancient times, when there might have been some excuse for people being taken in by fables, myths and legends. In the present we find our selves facing a dilemma for the human race that can only be met and overcome by ending the system of private profits first and beginning one that puts the public good in its place. In whatever language we speak or culture we are taught, that means something previously non-existent anywhere but among very small groups: democracy. In finally achieving it for the greatest number of people and for the greatest good, thus a salvation for humanity, we need to understand the majority class almost all of us belong to, no matter what minority division our rulers have reduced us to, even teaching us to be proud of un-scientific differences. We are the human race, we are overwhelmingly members of its working class, and we need to unite as ourselves before their imposed separatism destroys us all.
March 18, 2019
Identity Politics Brigades Are the Committee To Re-Elect Trump!
The identity politics dogmatists are just as guilty as Trump in spreading intolerance . . .He eagerly throws gasoline in their fire-breathing faces, spreading an ever-widening sectarian conflagration, and they recoil in mock horror, denouncing him as a "white nationalist." He denies the charge with a fresh barrage of insults, which sets off more firestorms. The PC brigades then get indignant at those insults, which is just what Trump wants, because it fires up his base. (Anyway, he's white, and he's nationalist, but he's not Adolf Hitler, let's get serious.)
March 11, 2019
Thirty Years Gone: Remembering "Cactus Ed"
“Freedom begins between the ears.”
------Edward Abbey
“What do old men who don’t believe in Heaven think about?” queried Abbey rhetorically in his masterpiece Desert Solitaire. “. . . they think about their blood pressure, their bladders, their aortas, their lower intestines, ice on the doorstep, too much sun at noon.” In other words, they think about postponing dying, though many may never have gotten around to actually living.
To die well, one must live fully, Abbey thought, and dedicated himself to the task.
Anarchist, wilderness defender, story-teller, truth-lover, industrial saboteur, sex fiend, river runner, poker lover, beer guzzler, cantankerous social critic, part-time fanatic opponent of unrestrained growth, full-time desert rat, Edward Abbey went at life full throttle, forsaking a long half-lived, half-life for a shorter span of years indulging a hearty appetite for bourbon, bacon, cigars, and countless nights out under the stars. (Abbey died at 62, before his own father did.)
Faced with terminal illness in late middle age, he never bargained with God for more time or experienced any of the alleged “stages” of accepting death that psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross says we all inevitably pass through. The reason? For Abbey it was not death or dying that was tragic, but rather to have “existed without fully participating in life – that is the deepest personal tragedy.” Accepting his own demise without anguish decades ahead of time while communing with the desert, he was philosophical rather than horrified by mortality: “If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture—that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves.”
You owe the earth a body, he believed.
A shy man infuriated by the devastating effect of industrial “progress,” Abbey’s rage was an expression of love for all that it destroyed: wilderness, freedom, free-flowing rivers, the pre-Stone-Age desert that his spirit would not leave even in death. And perhaps it was this passionate bond with the earth that gave Abbey his extraordinary poise, which never abandoned him, even in tragic moments. When he collapsed at a friend’s house in 1982 doctors gave him only a few months to live. Quipped Abbey, then fifty-five: “At least I don’t have to floss anymore.”
In a 1957 journal entry Abbey wrote that we don’t come into the world so much as grow out of it: “Man is not an alien in this world, not at all. He is as much a child of it as the lion and the ant.” But though we emerge from nature, its importance, especially in the desert, is that it bears no reflection of us: “In the desert, a man comes directly upon a world that is not a projection of human consciousness, a world that has not been interpreted by art or science or myth, that bears no trace of humanity on its surface, that has no apparent connection to the indoor human world.” Just this is its essential value. “In the desert one comes in direct confrontation with the bones of existence, the bare incomprehensible absolute is-ness of being. Like a temporary rebirth of childhood, when all was new and wonderful.” The city, for all its treasures, cannot reveal this.
Born in 1927, Abbey’s adult years were lived under the shadow of nuclear annihilation, among other ominous signs of massive destruction, but while others fretted over looming social disaster, Abbey actually looked forward to the end of human misrule, taking solace in the fact that his beloved Grand Canyon had already outlasted thirty failed civilizations.
“Be of good cheer,” he wrote in Down the River (1982), “the military-industrial state will soon collapse.” Although our “military industrial” state is now more of a military financial state, Abbey felt its approaching demise represented “good news,” the actual title of a novel he wrote on the topic, which critics took to be an ironic comment, whereas Abbey intended it as nothing more than the literal truth. Given that human population had vastly overshot its land base, progress required catastrophe, he thought, and he hoped that in the ruins of former cities “a small society of friends in a community of mutual aid and shared ownership of land” might manage to “rebuild the simple farming and pastoral economy that had been destroyed by the triumph of the city.” A Jeffersonian anarchist vision for the 21st century.
Though broadly cultured and obviously possessed of a lively intellect, prolonged visits to the city always produced in Abbey a longing for prompt return to “light on rock, the sun on my bones, the smell of a sweating horse, the bright thirsty air of the high plateaus.” Only a small scale civilization could be compatible with Abbey’s yearning for vast unspoiled wilderness, and then only if it recognized the primacy of nature. “A world without wilderness is a cage,” said environmentalist David Brower, and Abbey fervently concurred.
He flatly rejected the view that his deep urge to preserve what remained of humanity’s ancestral home was a marginal or superfluous concern. Wilderness, he wrote, “is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread.” Only in wilderness could one find an abundance of life’s essentials: clean air, pristine sunlight, pure water, unbounded space and time, grass and woods to play and get lost in, solitude and silence, “alien” life and the risk of death. “A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original,” warned Abbey, “is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.” And the danger part was not to be omitted. Abbey agreed with his friend Doug Peacock that one was not truly in the wilderness unless one was at risk of being eaten.
Abbey felt that liberal taboos against criticism of official minority groups was a form of censorship, and he often ran afoul of language police, who accused him of sexism, racism, “eco-fascism” and xenophobia. In response to a suggestion that he remove the “Archie Bunkerisms” from his then forthcoming novel “The Fool’s Progress,” Abbey ranted: “I’m not going to toady to chickenshit liberalism anymore; fuck it. I’ve already been called fascist, racist, elitist, as well as communist, terrorist, misanthrope, bleeding-heart etc. so often it doesn’t bother me anymore. To hell with all those petty, taboo-ridden dogmatic minds.”
The critics “hate my books,” he went on, because “almost all reviewers, these days, are members of and adherents to some anxious particular sect or faction . . . . As such, any member of any one of those majority minorities is going to find for certaina few remarks in any of my books that will offend/enrage’s/he’ to the marrow.” Thirty years after Abbey’s death Donald Trump is the arsonist in charge of our ideological fire department, eagerly flinging gasoline in the faces of identity politics dogmatists, setting off an ever-widening sectarian conflagration. Maybe we should have paid more attention to Abbey’s comments when he first made them.
Although it is difficult to see Abbey as outright hating anyone (except the rich, whom he loathed), it’s easy to detect double standards in his work and life. While enjoying the benefits of monogamous marriage, he cheated on four out of five wives, using his celebrity to help bed attractive women. Though he was convinced that (1) “girls should be encouraged from infancy on to see the world as a playground of potentiality,” and (2) women’s under-representation in most fields was regrettable, and (3) “no man who is really a man will feel his manhood demeaned or threatened by the act of washing dishes,” he nevertheless disapproved of novelist Barbara Kingsolver’s having left young children at home in order to attend a 1989 writing conference that Abbey also attended (Kingsolver says Abbey was “respectful to the point of deference” in his treatment of her, however).
Abbey’s justification for the double standard was the usual one. Women are morally superior to men, caring for others, while men crave sexual variety out of selfish pleasure. (“I’ve never met a nymphomaniac I didn’t like,” commented the hero of The Fool’s Progress). The vast majority of men are polygamous, bogged down and frustrated with monogamy, which they submit to only out of sloth. So why did Abbey, hardly a slothful type, get married five times? His fifth and final wife (Clarke) said that he was seriously conflicted: “There was always the real complex issue of wanting to be married and have a family and wanting to be totally on his own and doing what he wanted.” One illustration of just how serious the conflict was for Abbey is provided by his fourth wife, Renee, who remembers a time she sent him to the store for groceries and had to wait two days for his return.
On feminism, Abbey had a very mixed response. Three years before Roe v. Wade his unpublished “Some Second Thoughts on Women’s Lib” contained the opinion that “a woman’s womb is not the property of the State . . . She must be mistress of all that’s enclosed within her skin.”On the other hand, he saw feminism as androgyny-promoting and contemptuous of working class men. And though he supported the Equal Rights Amendment and reviewed, counseled, and befriended several women writers, his negative portrayal of feminism in The Fool’s Progress offended his father (a lifelong socialist who appreciated the social gains of the Bolshevik Revolution) to the point that he stopped reading the book, and also his wife Claire, who hated the depiction, saying that Abbey never treated her in the sexist manner he sympathetically portrayed in his books. At a book event in 1987 a number of women who apparently shared this dislike walked out of an Abbey reading of The Fool’s Progress.
On the issue of race, Abbey very clearly did NOT sympathize with the multiplication of victim minorities, which he claimed were “advance men for planetary majorities.” However, it should be kept in mind that Abbey’s misanthropic convictions (in one book he commented that what the world needed to solve the overpopulation problem was a vast, painless plague) made him portray nearly ALL groups in a negative light, white people included. For example, in a 1956 journal entry he wrote: “On the Negro question: I don’t like ‘em. Don’t like Negroes,” which seems to be an openly bigoted statement. But the next sentence is: “As far as I can see, they’re just as stupid & depraved as whites.” Similarly, in one breath Abbey depicted (American) Indians as alcoholic welfare bums, while in the next he had the hero of one of his novels say, “Indians are just as stupid and greedy and cowardly and dull as us white folks” (The Monkey Wrench Gang).
Asians he portrayed as products of authoritarian “anthill societies” mindlessly producing consumer junk for clueless Americans (“Jap crap,” the hero of The Fool’s Progress called it). He rejected the idea that Eastern cultures had anything important to teach the West, and roundly criticized those who thought differently. “I find it pathetic as well as ironic to see the enthusiasm with which hairy little gurus from the sickliest nation on earth are welcomed by the technological idiots of all-electric California,” he said in Abbey’s Road.
However, when Washington unleashed a nearly genocidal assault on tiny Vietnam, Abbey spoke out harshly against the deeply racist slaughter. He considered the Vietnam war the most shameful chapter in U.S. history apart from slavery, and in a 1968 appearance to promote Desert Solitaire, he offended many in his audience by denouncing the war instead. Four years later in a letter to the Arizona Daily Star, he compared it to the worst atrocities of totalitarian states: “Nothing in American history, not even the wars against the Indians, can equal the shame and brutality and cowardice of this war. It makes an obscenity of our Christmas holidays and sinks our own Government and all who passively consent to its atrocities down to the moral level of Stalinist Russia and Hitler’s Germany.”
Abbey called himself a racist in Confessions of a Barbarian, though he defined the term as an aversion to being dominated by a race to which one did not belong, which definition would render nearly all of humanity “racist”: “Am I a racist? I guess I am. I certainly do not wish to live in a society dominated by blacks, or Mexicans, or Orientals. Look at Africa, at Mexico, at Asia.” Abbey was aware of the contributions of Western colonialism and imperialism to the widespread misery found in those regions, but argued it was but “Western guilt neurosis” to assign primacy to them in accounting for Third World conditions in the late twentieth century.
He urged a complete halt to immigration coming north from Mexico, contending that a porous border was allowing in “millions of hungry, ignorant, unskilled, and culturally, morally, generically impoverished people.” Such people brought with them an “alien mode of life which . . . is not appealing to the majority of Americans . . . Because we prefer democratic government . . . hope for an open, spacious, uncrowded, and beautiful - yes, beautiful! – society. The alternative, in the squalor, cruelty, and corruption of Latin America, is plain for all to see.”
Abbey argued that a solution to mass immigration from the south had to be sought in Mexico, not the United States: “Mexico needs not more loans – money that will end up in the Swiss bank accounts of los ricos – but a revolution.” According to his best friend John Du Puy, Abbey considered the Mexican government an appalling betrayal of the Zapatista revolution and he vehemently opposed allowing them to “dump people on us” that they “couldn’t deal with.” In One Life At A Time, Please, he called for the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, but also advocated handing out rifles to those turned back there, so they could return home and settle accounts with their exploiters. Though more rhetoric than serious policy proposal, the implied sympathy for social revolution is hardly racist (racists prefer eugenic solutions). Curiously, Abbey “didn’t think much” of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, which implemented a wide range of popular programs for the poor that made it unnecessary for Nicaraguans to migrate to the United States in large numbers, as campesinos from Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador did (and still do), much to Abbey’s dislike. Perhaps Abbey was the kind of anarchist who favors every revolution except the (imperfect) ones that succeed.
In any event, Abbey had curious associations for a “racist.” Early in his career he spoke at a Navajo rally, and in 1959 he edited the bilingual newspaper El Crepusculo de la Libertad (Twilight of Liberty), which promoted Indian rights. Years later he favorably reviewed Vine Deloria’s “Custer Died For Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto,” one of several favorable articles he wrote on Indian affairs. He lamented that Deloria’s views were not being taught in schools, and noted that “the many parallels between the war in Vietnam and the war against the American Indian has not escaped the American Indian.”
Though, as noted, he opposed mass immigration from Mexico, he bore no grudge against Hispanics per se, and felt that any immigrant who had managed to stay five years or more should be allowed to stay. For many years he wore a cap with the inscription “Viva La Causa,” and his best friend John De Puy reports he was sympathetic to Chicano activists in Taos and throughout northern New Mexico. De Puy says Abbey’s opposition to immigration, both legal and illegal, was not because of contempt for other cultures, but because of the problems inherent in large scale immigration.
Responding to Alfredo Gutierrez in the New York Times in August, 1983, Abbey conceded he preferred his own culture to others: “I will confess to cultural bias. Though an aficionado of tacos, Herradura tequila, and ranchero music (in moderate doses), I have no wish to emigrate to Mexico. Nor does Alfredo Gutierrez . . . At some point soon our Anglo-liberal-guilt neurosis must yield to common sense and enlightened self-interest.” In a 1987 letter to Earth First! Journal, Abbey drew a distinction between chauvinism and racism: “I am guilty of cultural chauvinism – I much prefer life in the USA to that in any Latin American country; and so do most Latin Americans – but chauvinism is not racism. Racism is the belief that all members of one race are innately superior to all members of some other race. I do not subscribe to any such belief. In a 1988 journal entry he wrote that the only “superior” races would be those who have done the least harm to the earth; he suggested the Bushmen of Africa, the Australian aborigines, and perhaps the Arizona Hopi.
If this is white supremacy, it’s a rather novel strain.<!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-alt:"Times New Roman"; mso-font-charset:77; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:auto; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph {margin-top:0in; margin-right:0in; margin-bottom:0in; margin-left:.5in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-add-space:auto; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst {mso-style-type:export-only; margin-top:0in; margin-right:0in; margin-bottom:0in; margin-left:.5in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-add-space:auto; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle {mso-style-type:export-only; margin-top:0in; margin-right:0in; margin-bottom:0in; margin-left:.5in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-add-space:auto; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast {mso-style-type:export-only; margin-top:0in; margin-right:0in; margin-bottom:0in; margin-left:.5in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-add-space:auto; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} /* List Definitions */ @list l0 {mso-list-id:1138498060; mso-list-type:hybrid; mso-list-template-ids:1464248250 -65866404 67698713 67698715 67698703 67698713 67698715 67698703 67698713 67698715;} @list l0:level1 {mso-level-text:"\(%1\)"; mso-level-tab-stop:none; mso-level-number-position:left; margin-left:1.25in; text-indent:-.25in;} @list l0:level2 {mso-level-number-format:alpha-lower; mso-level-tab-stop:none; mso-level-number-position:left; margin-left:1.75in; text-indent:-.25in;} ol {margin-bottom:0in;} ul {margin-bottom:0in;} </style><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> --></span>
Michael K. Smith's Blog
- Michael K. Smith's profile
- 1 follower
Michael K. Smith isn't a Goodreads Author
(yet),
but they
do have a blog,
so here are some recent posts imported from
their feed.
