Michael K. Smith's Blog, page 4

The Method In the Madness: Trump Tariff Meltdown Is An Echo of the Nixon Shock (pulling the world off the gold standard)

"What they [the Trump administration] want is they want to have their cake and eat it [too] . . . .They want to devalue the dollar without jeopardizing the exorbitant privilege of the dollar, the reserve currency status of the dollar . . . . Is this far-fetched? No, it's not far-fetched. They may succeed in doing [so] . . . .I'm not saying they will succeed in doing it, but, what I'm saying is that they have a rational plan, a fiendish plan, as they would say in cartoons, but it is not unprecedented. 

 

"You know, this is why I mentioned the 1970s, 1971, [when] Richard Nixon did exactly the same thing. I mean, in one of his autobiographies, I think he's written more than one, Henry Kissinger, in one of the chapters, just from memory, I read it many years ago. He asks a question in one of the chapters, the chapter title is a question: "Who caused the oil crisis?" And the first sentence is, "We did." And he was very clear on this. 

 

"That myth that it was the Arabs and the OPEC Third World countries that imposed the high prices on America, that's all rubbish. Let's not forget who was in OPEC back then. It was the Shah of Iran, who was on the payroll of the CIA, the Suharto regime in Indonesia, utterly driven by the State Department and the CIA, and Saudi Arabia, which can't move one inch without the OK of Washington DC. 

 

"So why did they create this huge oil crisis then, if Kissinger is right? Remember Richard Nixon sent his Treasury Secretary to the Europeans with a message that 'the dollar, mates, is our currency, and from now on it is going to be your problem.'

 

"Nothing more aggressive has ever been sent to the Europeans. I don't think J. D. Vance said anything worse than that. Indeed, Paul Volcker, who, much, much later became the president of the Federal Reserve, he was a member of that team and he reports that it was Connally, the Treasury Secretary, who convinced Nixon on the fifteenth of August of 1971, to blow up the Bretton Woods system with the following expression, and this is verbatim because it is etched in my memory when I read it. He said, 'Mr. President the foreigners are out there to screw us, and we must screw them before they screw us.' And two days later he blew up the Bretton Woods system.  

 

"He did it for a very simple reason. Once you have deficits, either you go German, in other words, you tighten your belt, you go austerity, big time, like the Germans would do, or they made us (the Greeks) do, or, Nixon was not prepared to do that to his own people and to his own ruling class, to his own country, or, you boost your deficits, if you are the dominant, hegemonic power, which is exactly what Nixon did, and you make other people pay for it. Essentially the American deficit becomes the magnet that magnetizes into the United States both the net exports of the Germans, the Japanese, and the Chinese, and their money, which goes between New York through Wall Street to get recycled in the form of government debt, shares, and real estate. 

 

"So everything . . .  the major shock, the plan to devalue the dollar, the plan to enhance the dollar's hegemony, the plan to damage seriously its most important allies, back then it was Europe and Japan, well, it's more or less the same now, that happened, it included to introduce enormous uncertainty, lots of businesses in the United States suffered, including the markets, the working class was damaged beyond redemption in 1971, '72, '73. 

 

"Remember, American hourly real wages have not recovered to the level that they had in 1973 - to this day - they are lower than they were in 1973. So, you talk about uncertainty, damage, carnage, and all that. Well, Nixon did it. That was the whole point of the Nixon shock. But you know what? It was utterly successful from his perspective. 

 

"Why? Because he managed to create, I'm talking about Nixon now, through his shock, something that has never happened before in human history. Every hegemon, every empire, every large force until 1971, the British Empire, the Dutch Empire, the Spanish Empire, the Portuguese Empire, before that the Roman Empire, every such power that went from being a surplus producer to a deficit producer, lost its power. The United States is the only hegemon whose power has been enhanced by its deficits. And that's due to the Nixon shock. 

 

"So when Trump's men, and a small aside here, when people say that Trump is a very poor excuse for human nature, that he's inarticulate, that he's half-crazy, all that applied to Nixon, right? I mean, was there a man more despicable than Richard Nixon? And yet, the Nixon shock worked. You know, what I find astonishingly ironic, is that all these centrists around the world, in Europe, in Britain, in the United States, who are lamenting the great world that was destroyed by Donald Trump. What world are they lamenting really? The one that was created by madman Richard Nixon's shock. Because everything we have been experiencing recently, taking for granted, globalization, neo-liberalism, financialization, those were the results of a very deliberate plan by Richard Nixon."

-----Yanis Varoufakis, Politics Joe podcast, April 8, 2025

Anonymous American Thoughts on Survival

 

 

 

 

Anonymous American ProposesSHAME celebration

 

(Unpublished letter sent tomajor media)

 

I have nothing but shame about the group we all belong to:Americans. Hundreds of thousands of us have no place to live, millions have nohealth insurance and all of our tax dollars- whether we have testicles vaginasboth or neither, are financing slaughters in Israel and Ukraine and we arethreatened with nuclear war. Let me know when there is a shame flag andparade. 

 

We understand how they (present plural form when not certain ofsex-gender-political party etc.) feel.

 If the society has real democracy insteadof the ugly joke we give that name to, all of our individual and identity group"selfs" can exercise their best motivations, as opposed to theugliness of so much of present reality with various "selfs" blamingall other "selfs" operating in the same dictatorship of the rich andcalling it "our democracy"”

 

 

868 billion for defense…fromwhat? Most Americans are in terror at what other Americans can do to them.

Russia’s “brutal” attack onUkraine, America’s “gentle loving” slaughters in Korea, Viet name, Cambodia,Laos, Libya, Palestine, Yugoslavia. U S military in nations all over the worldbut China and Russia are a global threat. Yes, and rapists prevent sexualfrustration among their victims.

 

Market capitalist religiousservice is an economic rite of moral wrong.

 

 We need public banks, public ownership of utilities,employee owned and controlled business which will mean higher wages for majorityworkers and lower prices for majority consumers by removing the minority anti-democraticanti-social private profit investor class.

 

That means the end ofanti-democratic capitalism and the beginning of the democratic communism wepracticed in order to survive our earliest experiences of life

 

 

 

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Anonymous American ProposesSHAME celebration

 

(Unpublished letter sent tomajor media)

 

I have nothing but shame about the group we all belong to:Americans. Hundreds of thousands of us have no place to live, millions have nohealth insurance and all of our tax dollars- whether we have testicles vaginasboth or neither, are financing slaughters in Israel and Ukraine and we arethreatened with nuclear war. Let me know when there is a shame flag andparade. 

 

We understand how they (present plural form when not certain ofsex-gender-political party etc.) feel.

 If the society has real democracy insteadof the ugly joke we give that name to, all of our individual and identity group"selfs" can exercise their best motivations, as opposed to theugliness of so much of present reality with various "selfs" blamingall other "selfs" operating in the same dictatorship of the rich andcalling it "our democracy"”

 

 

868 billion for defense…fromwhat? Most Americans are in terror at what other Americans can do to them

Russia’s “brutal” attack onUkraine, America’s “gentle loving” slaughters in Korea, Viet name, Cambodia,Laos, Libya, Palestine, Yugoslavia. U S military in nations all over the worldbut China and Russia are a global threat. Yes, and rapists prevent sexualfrustration among their victims.

 

Market capitalist religiousservice is an economic rite of moral wrong.

 

 We need public banks, public ownership of utilities,employee owned and controlled business which will mean higher wages for majorityworkers and lower prices for majority consumers by removing the minority anti-democraticanti-social private profit investor class.

 

That means the end ofanti-democratic capitalism and the beginning of the democratic communism wepracticed in order to survive our earliest experiences of life

 

 

 

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Ripley's Believe It Or Not Says U.S. SignalGate Scandal Defies Belief

Ripley Entertainment's publishing and broadcasting divisions have rejected news of Washington's recent "SignalGate" scandal as a "wildly implausible" Trumpian scam.

 

A spokesperson for the company reacted to news of the scandal with open incredulity: "You want us to believe that Jeffrey Goldberg, former Israeli "Defense" Forces prison guard/Zionist fanatic/paid propagandist, otherwise known as a reporter, was included in an unsecured U.S. national security state GroupChat discussing U.S. war plans with Yemen, specifically a plot to massacre civilians by blowing up an apartment building, which was subsequently carried out, this in revenge for the only effective solidarity with Palestinians visible anywhere on the world scene during what the highest international legal authorities consider an ongoing genocide, and the scandal is that AMERICAN LIVES WERE PUT AT RISK, a great outrage, since Washington's heroic mass murderers are obviously entitled to carry out their civilian massacres in perfect comfort and safety. 

 

"We specialize in the weird and bizarre," said the Ripley spokesperson, but there's got to be a limit.

How a Jewish State Planted In The Heart of the Arab World Came To Be Seen as a Solution To European anti-Semitism

 

"An atmosphere was created in which it was only natural for the American, with his reverence for the underdog, to accept Zionist propaganda as gospel." 

 -----Alfred Lilienthal, The Other Side of the Coin, p. 93 

"About this little Mediterranean country (Israel) more fables have been written than are contained in Scheherazade and Mother Goose together."

 

 -----Alfred Lilienthal, ibid. 

 

 

Trump 2.0 Fears Real Democracy

The Second Coming of Trump has arrived with full force and never a dull moment is the word. Jewish supremacy has re-opened the floodgates of Hell massacring Palestinians and pushing for war with Teheran; the triumphant U.S. president has finally expressed some empathy - for Elon Musk - ("He's being treated unfairly!"); and rising waves of popular revulsion at the billionaire duo's contempt for everybody and everything that doesn't directly enrich them have seized the moment and surged into the political foreground.

 

Meanwhile, DOGE's "efficiency experts" are using nutcase Javier Milei's "chainsaw for bureaucracy" to remove the fraud, frills and extras from the federal budget - like pediatric cancer research, aviation safety, and medical care for Veterans - all three perverse funding priorities posing obvious obstacles to "making America Great Again." 

 

Sadly for Trump, his hoped-for record breaking mass deportations have fallen woefully short, not even equaling Joe Biden's pace, a shameful outcome for MAGA given the president's campaign promises, or at least it would be if he were capable of feeling shame. Unwilling or unable to spend the money required for the mass round-ups he promised, Trump has taken to grabbing the low-hanging fruit - unwary legal immigrants passing through airports, including in one case a woman married to a U.S. citizen who once overstayed a legal visa because flights were canceled and the border shut down due to Covid, making it impossible for her to leave on time. Fortunately, this glaring national security threat has been seized and dispatched to immigration jail, an immense relief to us all.

 

Speaking of national security threats, legal immigrant Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian raised in a refugee camp in Syria, has been smeared as a terrorist and thrown into jail for condemning wholesale U.S.-Israeli extermination in Gaza. The bloody nerve of people driven off their land and tortured and murdered for nearly a century raising a voice of protest against the perpetrators! Have they no shame?

 

There is no relief coming for any of this from the collaborationist Democratic Party, which has spent years claiming that government can't be used to deliver universal health care or a federal jobs guarantee, and certainly not to negotiate our differences with those who object to having their leaders assassinated and their governments overthrown by Washington, standard methods for dealing with popular movements that take majority rule too literally. Democracy does not mean majority rule; it means minority rule with popular ratification, hence the Trump "mandate" to attack and destroy the interests of the majority. 

 

Democratic Party leaders' denial of any constructive role for government in meeting the needs of the majority has left them with nothing to say to the DOGE brigade's meat-axing of government on the grounds that it's all useless bureaucracy. If everything legitimate (apart from the Pentagon) is delivered by the "free market" why shouldn't we gut government? 

 

Interestingly, though the Trump administration is in firm control of all three branches of government, it has chosen not to advance its agenda through the at least formally democratic institutions it controls, but rather, by extra-constitutional gambits like DOGE, which is accountable only to Trump, if even him.

 

There couldn't be clearer evidence that the MAGA masterminds do not trust the people they say have given them a mandate to construct a government of the billionaires, by the billionaires, and for the billionaires.

 

We're overdue for showing them just how deserved their distrust of us is.

 

All hands on deck.

 

 

 

 

Trump Truth Bombs Unleash New Wave of Trump Derangement Syndrome

A tsunami of Trump Derangement Syndrome is washing over us again in the wake of the White House meeting between Volodmyr Zelensky, President Trump, and Vice-President Vance. Trump and Vance took Zelensky to task for opposing a cease fire, forcing Ukrainian conscripts into an already lost war, spending good money after bad, and demonizing Vladimir Putin to the point of making peace negotiations impossible. The remarkable confrontation played out like a reality TV episode, one in which Trump did everything but shout in Zelensky's face: "You're fired!", a fate the seriously unfunny comedian more than deserves.

As usual, simplistic characterizations rather than insight dominates the headlines. Zelensky is a "democratic leader" and  Putin is a "dictator," although Trump has - gasp! - called Zelensky himself a dictator. This judgment, our mind managers tell us, is just more evidence of how stupid Trump and his MAGA supporters are. How could Zelensky, champion of the Free World, possibly be a dictator?  Just because he jails his political opponents, bans independent media, and shuts down religious organizations doesn't mean he isn't a democracy-loving freedom-fighter. How could it? 

 

MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell is incensed that Trump is "not educable," thus incapable of understanding that U.S. media hacks are infallible in their "value-free" judgments about political reality. Trump "knowingly lies" about key statistics like how much aid the U.S. has sent to Ukraine. Horrors! This he takes to be far more significant than the fact that Trump correctly states that (1) Ukraine cannot defeat Russia on the battlefield (2) that it is therefore pointlessly sacrificing huge numbers of its own people, and (3) that it is "risking WWIII," (especially when it shoots U.S. ATACM missiles deep into Russian territory as it has all too recently done). O'Donnell and his fellow media hacks don't enlighten their audience about any of this, which is the heart of the story vis-a-vis the Ukraine war. Lies of omission, as the late Aldous Huxley noted, are the essence of propaganda.

 

Putin has long objected to NATO expansion, as any Russian head of state necessarily would, and questioned why it still exists after the parallel Warsaw Pact disbanded at the conclusion of the Cold War. The West continually stated that it didn't want any more Berlin Walls, even as it kept expanding the Russia-hating military alliance to the East. NATO liked to claim that it was transforming itself into more of a political organization than a military one, to which Putin sensibly replied, "but if it's a political organization, why did it bomb Yugoslavia?" (in 1999).

 

Putin has long objected to the U.S.-dominated, "democratic" world order, which is built around Washington using force in international affairs without a thought to the consequences, as in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Putin especially disliked the U.S. overthrow of Qaddafi in Libya. The UN resolution authorizing a no-fly zone over that country was "defective and flawed," he said, because, "It allow[ed] them to do what they like, to undertake any manner of actions against a sovereign state." It reminded him, he said of "a medieval crusade." 

 

In a speech to the United Nations General Assembly at the end of September in 2015, Putin blamed the refugee crisis (roughly five million people displaced) stemming from the Syrian civil war squarely on the West, which had induced hundreds of thousands of desperate families to rely on rickety boats to flee to Greece, the nearest European Union state. The U.S., which supported ISIS, was behaving as though there were "good terrorists and bad terrorists," Putin thought, without noticing that there was no easy way to distinguish the two groups. "Is it," asked Putin, "that the so-called moderates behead people more delicately or in more limited numbers?" Touche.

 

For Washington's neo-con crusaders, the "good" terrorists are whichever ones we're cynically using at the moment, which is why no one should be surprised that the head-choppers displaced Bashar al-Assad with U.S. air support last fall. 

Sources:

Lawrence O'Donnell, "The Last Word," MSNBC, February 28, 2025

 

"Putin" by Philip Short (Henry Holt, 2022) p. 369, 522, 588-9

Malcolm X: Man of Peace

 "Malcolmwas our manhood, our living black manhood."

------Ossie Davis 

 

"Treatme like a man, or kill me."

-------Malcolm X

 

 

February 21, 2025 marks sixty yearssince Malcolm X was gunned down in a hail of bullets at the Audobon Ballroom inNew York City as he was starting to give a speech. The previous week his househad been firebombed, and days before that the French government had refused toallow him into the country to fulfill a speaking engagement, apparently fearingthe assassination might take place on French soil. 

 

Malcolm fully expected these attemptson his life, which grew out of circumstances surrounding his break with theNation of Islam the previous year. U.S. intelligence had infiltrated hissecurity team, and at the time of his death Malcolm recognized that though theassassination plot originated with the corrupt advisers around Elijah Muhammadin the Nation of Islam, by the end the circle of intrigue had broadenedconsiderably and the U.S. government was certainly involved.

 

Malcolm was undergoing rapidtransformation in the final year of his life. He renounced the aberrant strandof Islam favored by Elijah Muhammad, shed his view that white people could donothing to end racism, and apologized for having repeatedly called civil rightsleaders "Toms" and other degrading nicknames. He lectured andtraveled widely, met and talked with important leaders of national liberationmovements abroad, and embraced a broad, internationalist vision focused ondelivering freedom and justice to all peoples regardless of race. But he stuckto his view that black organizational unity in the United States was apre-requisite to any constructive change in American race relations.

 

Though often portrayed as a violentextremist (he insisted on self-defense against racist attacks), he was actuallyquite conservative in his habits (he didn't drink, smoke, gamble, or swear),and was never known to have laid a hand on anyone. James Baldwin considered himone of the gentlest men he ever met, and when Baldwin was once called on toreferee a debate between Malcolm and a young civil rights activist - on theassumption that Malcolm would overpower the youth - Baldwin discovered that hewas not at all needed. Like an oldest son protecting a younger brother, Malcolmtreated the youngster with tender solicitude, smiling indulgently and gentlycorrecting his view that being born in the U.S. was all it took to be a fullU.S. citizen: "Now, brother, if acat has kittens in the oven, does that make them biscuits?"

 

The same gentleness was evident inMalcolm's home life. In a 1992 interview his daughter Attalah remembered him asa firm father, a mushily romantic husband, and a gentle and funny presencesparking frequent laughter throughout the house. Though work required he beaway for long periods, he managed to be present even when he was absent byhiding little surprises around the house for his daughters. Then when he was onthe road, he would send letters home telling them to go into a certain room andlook in a special place to find a treat he had left for them. 

 

How did such a man gain a reputationfor uncontrolled rage and violence? Easy. He was born in a deeply racistcountry.

 

He grew up broke and hungry in a familyof eight. "We were so hungry we were dizzy," he recalled years later.His father Earl died when Malcolm was six, run over by a rail car, and hismother was slowly driven insane trying to raise eight children alone after herhusband's life insurance company refused to honor the $10,000 policy it hadissued him.

 

Disciples of Marcus Garvey, Malcolm'sparents were proud and rebellious, living isolated from whites but refusing toreside in officially segregated housing. Malcolm's father took his son along ontrips to secret, private homes to hear the "Back To Africa" gospel.This early public exposure with its heavy emphasis on black racial prideprepared Malcolm for the speaker's platform and the barricades years later,but he took a very circuitous route before re-connecting with Garvey's ideasand fashioning them into his life's work and legacy after years of evasivewandering.

 

Born in Omaha, raised in Lansing, theflash of Michigan street life claimed Malcolm by age twelve. Strutting intotown with a fistful of reefers, he quickly became a rising star on the streets.Bold to the point of recklessness, he openly challenged authority, once tellinga notoriously abusive police officer who put a gun to his head to, "Go ahead! Pull the trigger,Whitey." Kids who knewMalcolm at the time foresaw a future of jail and an early grave for him.

 

Malcolm’s fascination for the streetsdeepened at fifteen, when he spent a summer in Boston, where he was exhilaratedby the neon lights, fancy cars, and late-night partying.Though he briefly returned to Michigan, he couldn’t help but be impressed bythe fact that blacks from New York and Boston always had a hustle going thatgave them money or kept them in clothes, a far better fate than being aditch-digger or a janitor, which was the limit of realistic black aspirationsin the Mid-West. Boston soon proved to be his most natural habitat, a placewhere he could live out his desire to survive by his wits.

 

Living with his half-sister Ella on"Sugar Hill," Malcolm loathed the status-conscious blacks heencountered there, preferring to hang out with "his people" in the"valley" below - pool sharks, pimps, hustlers, and hard-workingblacks pursuing snatches of weekend escapism. They, and the surroundingpawnshops, bars, pool halls, cheap restaurants, walk-up flats, barbershops,beauty salons, and scattered storefront churches they patronized, were Malcolm'sentire world.

 

Blessed with a steely self-confidencetaught him by his Garveyite parents, Malcolm thrived in this world and quicklybecame a commanding presence on the streets. But he rejected his parents' proudwork ethic, and cared not a whit about morality or religion. A fast-talking conartist who excelled at finessing himself out of dangerous situations, easymoney was all he lived for.

 

Employed as a shoeshine "boy"at a Boston dance hall, Malcolm was thrilled to see the great bands of the day- Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Gene Krupa, Ella Fitzgerald, Glenn Miller, TommyDorsey, and the Andrews sisters.No small part of his excitement was making piles of cash as the middleman forsexual hookups of white men wanting black women and white women wanting blackmen, proclivities that were not at all in line with racial pronouncements inthe land of the supposedly free.Malcolm’s knowledge of this reality would prove to be a source of greatuneasiness in his future debate opponents.

 

After eight years of drug-dealing,burglary, numbers-running, and occasionally armed robbery, Malcolm landed in aMassachusetts federal prison at the age of twenty.There he underwent a religious conversion, gave up drugs, dedicatedhimself to Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, and became a voracious readerand skilled debater. Paroled in 1952, within a year he was named assistantminister of Temple No. 1 in Detroit, and the year after that minister ofTemple No. 7 in Harlem.

 

He soon proved himself anextraordinarily adept disciple, gaining a reputation as the most ascetic youngzealot for Allah imaginable.Asuperb organizer and proselytizer, he was adored by Harlem blacks for his courageand wit, and they called out to him to "make it plain" with his bluntand uncompromising declarations and exquisite sense of drama. He was farand away the Nation’s most effective recruiter, provoking envy and resentmentamong his peers, which would ultimately form the basis for his assassination.In just a few years, he expanded the flock of the faithful from a few thousandmembers to many tens of thousands, easily surpassing the efforts even of ElijahMuhammad himself. He was especially good at making converts on streets heformerly prowled as a hoodlum.

 

In short, he found his calling as aminister, though it was not his first choice. In his final year in school hiseighth grade English teacher had urged him to “be realistic about being anigger” and abandon his goal of becoming a lawyer. In a way, though, Malcolmended up achieving his goal, becoming the most electrifying “lawyer” in U.S.history by relentlessly advancing the most powerful case ever made againstAmerican racism.

 

Possessed of a fierce, nationalistcritique and a broad international outlook, no one could take Malcolm indebate. A spell-binding speaker with a bitter wit, he spoke in an emotionallycharged tone of angry eloquence that blacks considered "goodpreaching," always bristlingwith unimpeachable facts leading directly to heretical conclusions. Whenunwary adversaries detected what they naively took to be loopholes in hisarguments, James Baldwin once observed, they quickly found out they were reallyhangman's knots that left their cherished rebuttals dangling lifeless inmid-air. 

 

Taught to be humble and dismissive, his eyes burned defiance. Told to moderate his politics, he preached revolution "by any means necessary." Advised to imitate "responsible" civil rights leaders, he brought huge, black audiences roaring to their feet by detailing the racist brutality of which they were the constant victims.

 

Drugdealer, convict, hustler, thief, Malcolm rose to become the greatest blackrevolutionary of the 20th century, a prophet telling truths few couldcomprehend and nobody wanted to hear.Deeply religious, he identified the fight for justice as the central act offaith, which made him that rarest of men who practice what they preach.

 

Flatly refusing to abide thehypocritical pieties of racist Christianity, he angrily denounced the nerve ofits God and his preachers for plaguing American blacks in the name of love. Hefound temporary solace and self-respect under the paternal guidance of ElijahMuhammad, but ultimately could not accept a theology claiming that whites werea genetically impoverished, degenerate race of “blue-eyed Devils,” howevercompelling the thesis might appear in a white supremacist society dedicated toslavery, lynching, and segregation.

 

Nevertheless, it has to be concededthat the Nation of Islam was a considerable draw in the North, being areligion created by and for blacks, especially those trapped in ghettos andprison, and highly effective at teaching discipline and self-respect as a curefor drug addiction, crime, unemployment, gambling, prostitution, and juveniledelinquency, among other problems routinely found in such environments.

 

Seeing clearly the connection betweenlow self-esteem and such vices, Malcolm indignantly rejected civil rightschampions claiming that blacks should lovewhites, insisting instead that they love themselves,at least enough to rise in self-defense when violently attacked, as they alltoo frequently were. He recommended that advocates of the “love your enemies”approach teach it to the Klan before expecting it of blacks, and insisted in the meantime on "an eye foran eye" as the only language a racist oppressor could reasonably beexpected to understand.

 

Appealing to the conscience of theoppressor was simply a fool's errand, Malcolm thought, as the whole point ofracism was to allow whites to subjugate blacks on the pretext that they weresub-human and therefore by definition without rights. There was no point inappealing to a conscience that either didn't exist or wasn't allowed to exist,which amounted to the same thing.

 

As sit-ins swept the south in the earlysixties Malcolm denounced the hypocrisy of nonviolence at an appearance inAlabama. "If the Negro clergy didn't discourage us from participating inviolent action in Germany, Japan, and Korea to defend white America from herenemies,” he announced, “why do these same Negro clergymen become so vocal whenour oppressed people want to take the same militant stand against these whitebrute beasts here in America who are now endangering the lives and welfare ofour women and children?"

 

Though a committed Muslim, the mostinfluential holy book Malcolm had to appeal to was the Christian Bible, as hehad no path to large black audiences until and unless he successfully engagedwith the religious tradition they were most familiar with. Elijah Muhammadtaught that whites were simply evil, preaching Christianity to blacks to makethem hate themselves, with devastating consequences.With more political sophistication than Muhammad, Malcolm developed the mostformidable race critique of Euro-American Christianity of anyone in the modernworld, condemning the faith as a "perfect slave religion" thatpreached salvation in the next life to enslaved, colonized, and segregatedblacks while white hypocrites had their heaven in this world.

 

Malcolm blamed the plight of blackssquarely on their acceptance of this white racist Christianity."Christianity is the white man's religion," he emphasized. "TheHoly Bible in the white man's hands and his interpretations of it have been thegreatest single ideological weapon for enslaving millions of non-white humanbeings. Every country that the white man has conquered with his guns, he hasalways paved the way, and salved his conscience, by carrying the Bible andinterpreting it to call people 'heathens' and 'pagans'; then he sends in hisguns, then his missionaries behind the guns to mop up."

 

Rejecting focus on the hereafter,Malcolm told his black audiences that their hell was obviously right here onearth. "Hell is when you're dumb. Hell is when you're a slave. Hell iswhen you don't have freedom and when you don't have justice. And when you don'thave equality, that's Hell."

 

One of Malcolm’s greatest strengths washis courage in adopting unpopular stances when conscience and the facts  demanded it. Unlike Christian ministers,for example, who reflexively sided with Israel’s Jewish-supremacy in the MiddleEast, Malcolm's support for the Arab world was so fervent that he wasfrequently labeled anti-Semitic.He would not have been at all surprised at Israel’s current wholesale massacreand expulsion campaign in Gaza.

 

Malcolm also rejected theself-defeating idea that blacks in the United States were a small minority,internationalizing the focus to state that they were in fact part of aworld-wide Islamic community of "725 million Muslim brothers and sistersin Africa, Asia and in the brotherhood of Islam," also pointing out thatpeople of color with more than passing familiarity with white racism formed thevast majority of the world's population.

 

Finally, Malcolm’s critical dissectionof the March on Washington demonstration in Washington D.C. in August 1963 showedremarkable insight into the direction black rage was beginning to take due tothe persistence of white terrorism after nearly a decade of “non-violentresistance” that was supposedly the cure for it. Acidly dismissing the protestas "the farce on Washington," Malcolm deftly pointed out thisappropriate and necessary anger had been deliberately excluded from the day’sagenda:

"The Negroes were out there in thestreets . . . .They were talking about how they were going to march onWashington . . .That they were going to march on Washington, march on theSenate, march on the White House, march on the Congress, and tie it up, bringit to a halt, not let the government proceed. They even said they were goingout to the airport and lay down on the runway and not let any airplanes land.I'm telling you what they said. That was revolution. That was revolution. Thatwas the black revolution."

No leader had any chance of stopping it: 

 

"It was the grassroots out there in the street. It scared the white man to death, scared thewhite power structure in Washington D.C. to death; I was there. When they foundout that this black steamroller was going to come down on the capital, theycalled in . . . . these national Negro leaders that you respect and told them,'Call it off.' Kennedy said, 'Look, you all are letting this thing go too far.'And Old Tom said, 'Boss, I can't stop it because I didn't start it.' I'mtelling you what they said. They said, 'I'm not even in it, much less at thehead of it.' They said, 'These Negroes are doing things on their own. They'rerunning ahead of us.' And that old shrewd fox, he said, 'If you all aren't init, I'll put you in it. I'll put you at the head of it. I'll endorse it. I'llwelcome it. I'll help it. I'll join it.'"

And this co-optation worked: 

 

"Thisis what they did with the march on Washington. They joined it . . . became partof it, took it over. And as they took it over it lost its militancy. It ceasedto be angry, it ceased to be hot, it ceased to be uncompromising. Why it evenceased to be a march. It became a picnic, a circus. Nothing but a circus, withclowns and all. . . ."

No dictator could have achieved more thorough control: 

 

"No,it was a sellout, a takeover. They controlled it so tight, they told thoseNegroes what time to hit town, where to stop, what signs to carry, what tosing, what speech they could make, and what speech they couldn't make, and thentold them to get out of town by sundown." 

 

So James Baldwin flew all the way fromParis, but was not allowed to speak. John Lewis’s speech wondering why thegovernment could indict civil rights activists for civil disobedience butcouldn’t bring white terrorists to justice or even stop appointing racist judgesto the bench was censored by John and Robert Kennedy, a decision with which Dr.King went along. Lewis read a watered-down speech absent his pointed inquiry –“I want to know – which side is the federal government on?” - while two JFKaides stood by ready to pull the plug on his microphone should he fail to followthe script.

 

Cancel culture wasn’t born yesterday.

 

Though Malcolm spent the last thirteenyears of his life  trying toprevent America’s racial powder keg from exploding into irreparable disaster,the capitalist media never ceased to portray him as a violent madman. After hisbrutal assassination the New York Timesheaped scorn on what the editors took to be Malcolm’s “pitifully wasted” lifemarked by “ruthless and fanatical belief in violence.” The Washington Post bid good riddance to him as “the spokesman ofbitter racism.” Newsweek mockedMalcolm for “blazing racist attacks on the ‘white devils’ and his calls for anAmerican Mau Mau.” Walter Winchell dismissed him as a “petty punk,” and the Nation magazine back-handedlycomplimented him for being the “courageous leader of one segment of the Negrolunatic fringe.”

 

One of Martin Luther King's associates,Alfred Duckett, provided a far more accurate view, calling Malcolm "oursage and our saint," a prophet who inspired his black brothers and sistersto fight back against racism and persecution. Even Dr. King had to concede thatMalcolm's portrayal of the plight of American blacks was accurate and his rageauthentic, once reportedly telling a friend that "I just saw Malcolm ontelevision. I can't deny it. When he starts talking about all that's been doneto us, I get a twinge of hate, of identification with him."

 

But it may have been Malcolm himself whowas the most reliable source on what his work was about, saying in hisautobiography that, “sometimes I have dared to dream . . . that one day,history may even say that my voice – which disturbed the white man’s smugness,and his arrogance, and his complacency – that my voice helped to save Americafrom a grave, possibly even fatal catastrophe.”

 

 

Notes. (sources listed below)

Cone, p. 251

Smith, p.110

Payne, p. 94

Payne, p.89. Malcolm thought his father had been murdered by the Klan, but this appearsnot to have been the case.

Payne, p. 86

Payne, p. 75

Payne, p.122

Payne, p.145

Payne, p.141

Payne, p.146

Payne, p.152

Payne, p.115

Payne, p.152-3

Payne, p.155-6

Cone, p.154

Payne, p.272, 274

Payne, p.278

Payne, p.285

Cone, p.172

Cone, p.152

Cone, p.164

Cone, p.170. The worst effects and limitations of Elijah Muhammad’s views were alteredor eliminated in Malcolm by his frequent interactions with white universitystudents.

Cone, p.162

Cone, p.160

Cone, p.166

Cone, p.176

Cone, p.162

Cone, p.166

Cone, p.166, 170

Cone, p.174

Cone, p.163

Cone, p.164

Zinn, p.457-8

Quoted inCone, p. 181

Branch, p.11, 373

Cone, p.251, 256

Cone, p.181

 

Sources:

 

James H. Cone, "Martin &Malcolm & America - A Dream or a Nightmare," (Orbis, 1991)

 

Les and Tamara Payne, "The DeadAre Arising - The Life of Malcolm X" - (Norton, 2020)

 

Alex Haley ed., "The Autobiographyof Malcolm X," (Grove, 1964)

 

Howard Zinn, “A People’s History of theUnited States,” (Vintage, 2003)

 

Taylor Branch, “At Caanan’s Edge –America in the King Years, 1965-68," (Simon & Schuster, 2006)

 

Barbara Rogers interview with AttalahShabazz, "Bay Sunday," November 15, 1992

 

Michael K. Smith, "Portraits of Empire," (Common Courage, 2003)

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Malcolm X: Sixty Years Gone

 "Treat me like a man, or kill me."

-------Malcolm X (Cone, 251)

No one could take him in debate. A spell-binding speaker with a bitter wit, he spoke in an emotionally charged tone of angry eloquence that blacks considered "good preaching," (Cone, p. 172) always bristling with unimpeachable facts leading directly to heretical conclusions. When unwary adversaries detected what they thought were loopholes in his arguments, James Baldwin observed, they quickly found their counter-arguments dangling lifeless in mid-air when they turned out to be hangman's knots. 

Drug dealer, convict, hustler, thief, Malcolm rose to become the greatest black revolutionary of the 20th century, a prophet telling truths few could comprehend and nobody wanted to hear. (Cone, p. 152) Religious to his core, he identified the fight for justice as the central act of faith, of far deeper significance than any merely personal moral striving. (Cone, p. 164) 

Socially, he regarded himself first and foremost as a minister acting in loyal service to his people. Deprived of formal education by a racist school system (in middle school a teacher told him his aspiration to become a lawyer was "no realistic goal for a nigger"), he honed his expertise at being black in a white, racist society, ultimately becoming the most electrifying speaker in U.S. history. Possessed of a fierce, nationalist critique and a broad international outlook, his insightful analysis of U.S. race relations is to this day indispensable to all who struggle for American justice, whatever their ideological hue.

A life dedicated to hustling and burglary landed him in a Massachusets federal prison at twenty, though Malcolm himself was convinced his sentence was aimed at punishing his consorting with white women. (Cone, 154, Autobiography) In 1940s America no offense was more gravely regarded than violating the taboo against miscegenation.

Deeply affected by a lifetime of racist degradation, he could not abide the hypocritical pieties of racist Christianity, angrily hurling obscenities at its God and his preachers for plaguing American blacks in the name of love. He found temporary peace and self-respect in the religion of Elijah Muhammad, who taught that blacks were descendants of the "tribe of Shabazz," and that the Original Man was black and from Africa, where the human race emerged. According to Muhammad, history was progressively whitened and weakened by the race of "blue-eyed devils" that had risen to dominate the world. (Cone, p. 154) [Note: The worst effects and limitations of Elijah Muhammad's views were altered or eliminated in Malcolm by his frequent interactions with white university students.] (Cone, p. 170) In any event, the Nation of Islam was a considerable draw in the North, being a religion created by and for blacks, especially those trapped in ghettos and prison, and uniquely effective at treating black drug addiction and self-loathing. (Cone, p. 154, 156)

An extraordinarily adept disciple, Malcolm's theology stressed strict justice and stern punishment, wedded to undying hopes that God would destroy the entire white race so that peace and justice could prevail. (Cone, p. 159) He flatly rejected the notion that blacks should love whites, insisting instead that they love themselves, at least enough to rise in self-defense when attacked. He frankly loathed Martin Luther King's "turn-the-other-cheek" philosophy, recommending that it be taught to the Klan before expected of blacks, and insisting in the meantime on "an eye for an eye" as the only language a racist oppressor could reasonably be expected to understand. (Cone, p. 160)

 When sit-ins were sweeping the south Malcolm spoke out against nonviolence at an appearance in Alabama. "If the Negro clergy didn't discourage us from participating in violent action in Germany, Japan, and Korea to defend white America from her enemies, why do these same Negro clergymen become so vocal when our oppressed people want to take the same militant stand against these white brute beasts here in America who are now endangering the lives and welfare of our women and children?" (Cone, p. 176)

Though a committed Muslim, the most influential holy book Malcolm appealed to was the Christian Bible, as he had no path to prominence with black audiences until and unless he successfully engaged with the religious tradition they were most familiar with. The Nation of Islam was superbly effective in dealing with the "personal" problems of the black poor (Cone, p. 161) - drugs, crime, unemployment, gambling, prostitution and juvenile delinquency, among other vices plaguing that population. The causes of these maladies were understood to be white racism and low black self-esteem; Elijah Muhammad taught that whites were in fact evil, preaching Christianity to blacks to make them hate themselves. (Cone, p. 162)

Unlike Christian ministers, who reflexively sided with Israel in the Middle East, Malcolm's support for the Arab world was so fervent that he was frequently labeled anti-Semitic. (Cone p. 163) Nation of Islam Muslims were especially critical of Ralphe Bunche, then Under Secretary of the United Nations deriding him as an "international Uncle Tom" and "the George Washington of Israel."

Malcolm rejected the idea that blacks in the United States were a minority, stating repeatedly that they were in fact part of a world-wide Islamic community of "725 million Muslim brothers and sisters in Africa, Asia and in the brotherhood of Islam. Colored peoples were, in fact, the vast majority of the world's population. (Cone, p. 164)

Appealing to the conscience of the oppressor was a fool's errand, Malcolm thought, as the whole point of racism was to allow whites to subjugate blacks on the pretext that they were sub-human and by definition without rights. There was no point in appealing to a conscience that wasn't allowed to exist. (Cone, p. 166)

Malcolm made the most formidable race critique of Euro-American Christianity of anyone in the modern world.  He condemned the religion as a "slave-making lie," and a "perfect slave religion" preaching salvation in the next life to enslaved, colonized, and segregated blacks while white hypocrites had their heaven in this world. (Cone, p. 166)

Malcolm blamed the plight of blacks on their acceptance of racist Christianity. "Christianity is the white man's religion," he emphasized. "The Holy Bible in the white man's hands and his interpretations of it have been the greatest single ideological weapon for enslaving millions of non-white human beings. Every country that the white man has conquered with his guns, he has always paved the way, and salved his conscience, by carrying the Bible and interpreting it to call people "heathens" and "pagans"; then he sends in his guns, then his missionaries behind the guns to mop up." (Quoted in Cone, p. 166, 170)

Rejecting focus on the hereafter, Malcolm told his black audiences that, "Hell is when you're dumb. Hell is when you're a slave. Hell is when you don't have freedom and when you don't have justice. And when you don't have equality, that's Hell. And the devil is the one who deprives you of justice . . . equality . . . civil rights. The devil is the one who robs you of your right to be a human being. I don't have to tell you who the devil is. You know who the devil is." (Cone p. 174)

 

 

 

The Problem With Mass Deportation To "Shithole" Capitalist Extraction Zones

 "Before talking about cracking down on undocumented people here, why can't there be a discussion about the United States' role in fueling migration abroad. There's something really unfair to me about the United States having policies that destabilize countries, crippling sanctions that force people to leave . . . If you look at all the countries that are the source of migration you can trace their history and see a huge role of U.S, meddling. For example, take Central America. The United States has been propping up dictators there, supporting death squads, for large parts of the twentieth century. Haiti, since its foundation, the U.S. has been meddling with it, because Haiti was the first free country of this hemisphere, a country of freed slaves who revolted against their French colonizers. And France and the United States have been punishing Haiti for that ever since. Any discussion to me about dealing with people fleeing these counties needs to deal with the U.S. role in destabilizing them to begin with. And some sort of efforts to address that. It's not fair to help destroy foreign countries and then when people flee to basically punish the people that are trying to build better lives for themselves."

-----Aaron Mate, Useful Idiots, January 27, 2025

 

Recent U.S. sponsored coups:

2002 - present - Venezuela.

Unsuccessful U.S. coup against an indigenous revolution opposed to U.S. imperialism. 

2004 - Haiti. 

Successful U.S. coup against champion of the poor Jean Bertrand Aristide, who was hustled out of the presidential palace in his pajamas and deported to Africa. Hideous reign of terror persists down to the present.

2008 - Bolivia. 

Unsuccessful U.S. coup against President Evo Morales, a strong critic of U.S. imperialism.

2009 - Honduras. 

Successful U.S. coup against Manuel Zelaya. Coup plotters were trained by Washington at Fort Benning, Georgia, which is known in Latin America as "the school of coups" thanks to the bloody achievements of its graduating classes.

2010 - Ecuador.

Unsuccessful U.S. coup against socialist President Rafael Correa, a principled critic of U.S. imperialism.

2012 - Paraguay.

Successful U.S. coup against Fernando Lugo, whose fondness for liberation theology's "preferential option for the poor" (i.e. decent treatment) was an affront to wealthy investors and national security state fanatics.

2018 - Nicaragua.

1959 - present - Cuba.

U.S. invasion of the island at the Bay of Pigs failed in 1961. Sore losers, U.S. imperialists have tried everything to destroy the Cuban revolution ever since.

 

New Year? We Need A Whole New World

 

 

 

 

Late in 2024 a board memberof an American health insurance company was murdered by an American privilegedclass member who instantly became a semi-folk hero for taking direct actionagainst one of many despised aspects of a private profit political economywhich in the case of health insurance kills, maims and consigns to misery manywho cannot afford to pay their rates. On the very first day of 2025 an Americanof less privilege murdered 14 innocent people just out celebrating andinnocently becoming victims of the same system that got the health insuranceexecutive killed though there was much less sympathy for the military veteranguilty of the crime because his murder of innocents was the result at least inpart of hatred for America’s long assault in defense of Israel but directedagainst not only Palestinians, in the most murderous sense, but all the peopleof the middle east who are reduced to “terrorists” because unlike the U.S,Israel and other western powers, their retaliatory violence is taken by peopleusually not wearing uniforms and working for a murderous group acting asarmies, navies and other titled members of  western, usually American murder brigades.

 

Whatever the class backgroundof the American assailants they were both taking personal actions againstindividuals for the actions of a political economic system taking more livesand destroying more of nature every second of every minute of every day. Withmassive profits accumulating faster than ever for a smaller and smaller groupof humanity and in ever greater amounts so that while these enormous profitssustained by attacks on humanity and other parts of nature innocent people aremanipulated by anti-social media thought control into believing individualvillains are responsible, whether fantastically wealthy people like the healthinsurance board member or ordinary folks just out celebrating a new yearbeginning and innocently losing their lives in the process.

 

This as a new regime wasabout to be sworn in with many thinking the new corporate CEO, or president, isdifferent from others because this time a human practing artificialintelligence will be taking office. Just as in the case of previouspresidential murderers credited with being very bright people or murderous nuts,depending on which anti-social media channel is being watched, while thepresident has far more responsibility in allegedly running the collapsing messof American and global capitalism he she or it is no more responsible for the systemthan the December or January murderers. It started, long before any of us wereborn and if we don’t stop it soon we may all go the way of those victims.

 

As for our alleged democracy,in the just completed as in mostly every election in history the non-votesoutnumbered either those for winner Trump or loser Harris.  This quote from someone alleged to be amongthe brightest people in history sums it up:

 

‘”…What we see at work is notan expression of the sentiments of the American people; rather it reflects thewill of a powerful minority which uses its economic power to control the organsof political life

 

Albert Einstein

Einstein on peace pg. 343

 

And perhaps most clearly thispart of a song lyric by the Rolling Stones from back in the 60s:

“spare a thought for the stayat home voter

whose eyes perceive such astrange beauty show

a parade of grey suitedgrafters

a choice of cancer or polio”

 

The British songwriters clearlysaw the spectacle from a different class perspective but were clearly commentingon the same murderous farce.

 

 

Calling the multi billiondollar marketing exercise in voting that supposedly runs the country “our”democracywould be like the domestic slaves of our bigoted history citing their forcedservitude as clear evidence of their ownership of the plantation. After all,they lived at a much higher material standard than the field slaves who pickedthe cotton and suffered the worst physical abuse. The domestics were stillslaves but suffered mentally far more than physically and like tens of millionsof middle class Americans now who buy into the psych market to find personalpeace, they could be assured that their own shortcomings, not a bestial systemof slavery, was responsible for their problems. That, while fully knowing thatmost of them were the sons and daughters of the slave master and mistress whoowned them for sexual favors as well as market profits from the cotton theypicked, meals they served and countless other favors they performed for theirowners.

 

Now we have mass murdering demublicanscalling for republicrat Trump to be imprisoned for business swindles and othercommon market crimes which are the foundation of most financial wealth accruingto a tiny minority while a vast majority pays for destroying life and othernature while being lied to by news and lulled by market forces.  The veteran killer of new years day was anexample of the most extreme outcomes of training people to kill, against mosthuman impulse or wishes, leading to far more crimes less horrible than his butequally the outcome of degenerate teaching of anti-humanity to human beingstaught to believe it is supposed to be normal if not heroic to murder people. Thesituation grows more dangerous for humanity and not just the imperial westcurrently falling apart under the fading control of America due to the imperialmilitary power of a mass murder machine more dangerous than ever before. Infact, many who claim expertise in knowledge of nuclear capabilities claim thedanger of a nuclear holocaust is greater than ever before.

 

Meanwhile, innocent millionsblame other innocent millions for the horror threatened by a tiny percent ofhumanity: the ruling class powers of international capitalism, head quarteredmostly in The U.S.A.

 

The world is changing rapidlyand a new global order is being born among the majority of humans on the planetwho are learning to work together to bring about a truly new world no longerunder the murderous domination of any imperial power, As citizen consumers whosustain that power we have the greatest responsibility to join the human race –the one and only race despite fictionally created alleged “racial” differencesamong us – and join the majority in creating a democratic global populationbefore our tiny minority destroys all of us. Capitalist private profits forsome need to come after, long after the assurance of public good for all. Happy2025?

 

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