Michael K. Smith's Blog, page 46

News From Consciousness Control

_____ James Hill for The New York Times • Washington’s imposition of tough sanctions against several leading oligarchs is in many respects a game changer for Russia, with repercussions that are slowly coming into view. The sanctions may force some of the moguls to choose whether they want to be identified with the Kremlin or face isolation from Western markets. The close relationship between oligarchs and President Vladimir Putin has played out beyond financial ties. A “special highway,” above, between the Kremlin and Mr. Putin’s home is reserved for emergencies by law, but it is mostly used by Russia’s privileged to bypass traffic. It has one other special quality: no safety barriers, resulting in at least seven deaths over the past year. _____OMG!  OMG! seven deaths in the past year? OMG! OMG! we kill more than 100 a day here in Amerrycar! Those evil Russkies are soooo far behind us.




   

Market Farce

farce:  a broad satire or comedy supposed to be serious but that has become ridiculous

The market forces of religious capital have been running the world for hundreds of years during which time they have made advances and benefitted many beyond any system that came before. But so did slavery and feudalism, while also, like capitalism, slaughtering and brutalizing more people than those to whom they brought benefit. Their time passed and they were replaced by newer arrangements, all in keeping with the subjugation of humanity and limiting social choice, if any, to lesser and not seemingly greater evil organizations always ruled by un-chosen minorities. We are now in the time in which the capitalist farce of market forces needs to be radically changed before the comedy moves from farce to a tragedy for all of humanity and not just one or another slave state, feudal fiefdom or capitalist corporation.
Even with mass suppression of public thought the evidence of system failure grows clearer everyday which is why the system’s owners try to cloud reality with dangerous propaganda, mindless trivialization and vicious assaults on critical thinking lest an outraged public pierce the plastic curtain hiding minority rule and rises up in socially transforming revolutionary actions. But the further danger is that they may destroy everything by their increasing practices of passionately supporting the farce of the market owned and controlled by allegedly brilliant idiots with near demonic practices that act on what they believe which makes them richer by reducing more of humanity to poverty and threatening disaster for the entire natural foundation of all life.
The almost trite everyday contradictions of a system based on private profits accrued at a market with goods and services only becoming available to people who can afford them are, under the domain of mind managed consciousness control, shrugged off as inescapable and even “natural” if often perverse reality. How else to explain, with a straight if not bleeding face, fanatic market dogma as rationale for some of the following.
How can gasoline be cheaper than milk? Even industrial farm businesses using machines to mass milk cows still depend on a very simple natural occurrence:  a cow eats grass, transformed by its digestive system to become milk. The cow is then milked, and after eating more grass it is milked again the next day and sometimes even twice a day, and so on. Mr. and Mrs. farmer and their children are able to milk a cow and it’s simple and relatively safe work, unless a cow falls on someone while being milked but that doesn’t happen very often, if ever.
Gsoline, on the other hand, is produced by a far less simple, highly technical, dangerous operation and the petroleum that is dug and sucked out of the earth will not return tomorrow after the process but will take millennia – if ever – to be replaced once a network of industrial and high tech work that does occasionally kill workers and a refining process involving ships, international pipelines and an incredibly complex system to change it into the gasoline that is internally combusted/ exploded to move autos, planes, missiles, and create power to make life much better and easier for many; except for those it maims, pollutes or murders.
So, naturally, our forces of the market make it cheaper than milk. See?
If you have a doctoral degree from the London School of Economics that might make sense, but you might also find the Resurrection, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy as explainable, logical outcomes of those market forces. The tomb was empty, the bunnies are available at the store, and the money turned up under the pillow after the tooth was placed there. Demand for mythology, supply of myths, ca-ching, as cash registers used to sound.
But wait; how about this example of the beneficial forces of a market under minority capital control and dedicated to the creation of private profit.
Birth control, or planned parenthood – the idea not the organization – could be, should be, a serious benefit to humanity, one would think, if it were widely available, cheap, safe, efficient and nearly flawless. What if an organization of scientific and medical workers came up with a method that simply involved a man getting one injection a year – like a flu shot – and having no side affects and working to avoid unwanted pregnancy but also allowing a user to not get a shot when desiring new life creation and being able to do so? Might that be something humans would find useful? Would young men happily go off to “the market” to purchase such a thing? But wait: market forces, you know that stuff that sells hundreds of pills a year to millions of women, which works out to hundreds of millions of pills, or an intrauterine device sold to hundreds of thousands of women, or abortions to millions of women, or therapy to millions of men and women who want, don’t want, fear, love or otherwise ponder the meaning of bringing new life into the world, etc, would not be able to sell all that stuff if men could simply get one birth control injection for a year. So those market forces are seeing to it that the group which has worked for ten years on perfecting this injection for men, tested it so thoroughly they swear to its absolutely fool proof and safe nature, but jeepers creepers kids, they just can’t get it to the market, let alone test its “force” against those other profit making products. Make you wonder?
But wait even more:  those of us Americans able to feed, house and enjoy our pets to the tune of more than 60 billion dollars a year in the pet “gross” national product, find that those market forces we create are far beyond those able to be created by more than 500,000 American humans who live in the street, under bridges, under highways and in tent communities who just can’t seem to find the forces to put a roof over their heads and have a place to sleep and a toilet to use. My dog and cat create more profit at the market than provision of housing for those humans, so I will find plenty of pet food, pet toys, pet washings, pet hotels and maybe even pet vehicles for my beloved animals, while those wretched, dirty, smelly humans can only wish the invisible hand of the market would stop giving them the finger and maybe throw in a bath, a meal and especially a home so they can lavish in a similar degree of comfort, or at least something close to the splendor my beasts enjoy.
The list of anti-human contradictions would be endless if there were enough time to compile it, but the need for change of a radical nature becomes very clear at only confronting some of the most obvious and glaring, even if they don’t seem so under the oppressive brain prisons in which most of us are forced to live. But maybe one or two more will help clear some of the fog that has us speaking of a democracy and equality in a land where three of America’s foremost rich men – Gates, Bezos and Buffet, have a combined income and wealth greater than the combined income and wealth of more than 160 million Americans. And those Americans, in combination with the other half of the population, are in public debt for more than 21 trillion dollars, most of those trillions owed to the minority richest Americans and several foreign countries. That money is supposedly guaranteed to those we borrowed it from – and you possibly remember when we all asked for the loans so that we could spend most of the money on weapons to blow up and murder nations and people in the Middle East? - but we somehow neglected to guarantee the loans of the millions of folks who lost their homes in the last mini-collapse of market forces we were taught to call a “recession”. Yes, and the Grand Canyon is a “depression”, and that is the same as how we feel when we lose a loved one, a job, or an investment in those magical, mystical, market forces that enable my dog to stay at a hotel while some family sleeps in a car, if they have one.
Enough. Let’s close with some synonyms for “farce”:
shambles, travesty, circus, sham, mockery, charade, embarrassment, disgrace

Immigrant Humanism vs. Immigration Capitalism

Language has been a concern ever since humans created it and began using words to replace grunting, howling or shrieking. It’s much easier to be clear in communication when speaking, assuming the language is mutually understood, rather than simply gesturing or making barely intelligible noises. But when indicating difficulty in communicating with someone was once referred to as an experience like “talking to a wall”, present political discourse about immigrants and immigration among people who supposedly speak the same language has become divisive screeching in a “tower of babble”. This is a weapon for minority dominating powers who keep humans in a condition of confusion in order to continue ruling out any notion of a state of democracy, another concept widely confusing and misunderstood. But let’s just stick to the words immigrant and immigration, which are as different as day and night or love and hate, and are a great cause of social division among people who desperately need unity before that division helps push an entire society into oblivion.
Confusion over those words has pushed many good people who passionately support immigrants into dispassionately supporting policies that strengthen the very immigration system they criticize. A majority of Americans still support the political economics they have lived in and under all of their lives, but they are as confused as social critics who in their desire to help other humans often work at cross purposes by strengthening an anti-social, anti-human, anti-environmental system that is helping destroy nature - and we who are a vital part of it  - more quickly than ever before. Things have become so confused that many calling for “revolution” work hard to create a sanctuary for the system they seek to radically change. Or at least they do that based on another confusion of language that convinces some that “revolution” is exclusively personality based, involves identity-tribal-religious-ethnic groups, an alleged two party system in which both parties are owned by the rich, and other contradictions that manifest serious problems getting worse by the minute.
America is believed by many to be a nation of immigrants in that it was founded by people from Europe and grew peopled by new generations that came first from Europe, then Africa – in physical bondage and not just economic chains - then Asia, and more recently, from the southern part of North America, the name given to the continent settled by immigrants from Europe. The fabled tale of our nation’s birth and our seeming worship of immigration usually leaves out the near destruction of the humans who lived here before the invasion of settlers and immigrants who found better lives – mostly after suffering a great deal as most immigrants did and some still do – at the cost of ruining the lives of those they replaced. And all immigration under any circumstances has social costs that are absorbed by some far more than others.
Under the political economics of capitalism, which ruled when our nation was founded though it wasn’t called by that name yet, immigration profited many people greatly but meant a loss for sometimes far more. That reality has continued from its beginning with the replacement of the indigenous people by murder and ethnic cleansing to a more modern form which simply reduces some to lower standards of living while increasing profits for investors in capital’s market for cheap labor, the reason for the overwhelming majority of people who came here in the sixteenth century and continue to do so at the present moment.
 Whenever there was a need for bodies to work the land – the peasants sent from England and later Germany at the nation’s beginnings – or work the mills and factories of the later industrial revolution – when the rest of Europe and China offered their unwanted or extraneous populations – the calls for new shipments went out and soon they were delivered.
While it was supremely difficult for immigrants to enter the country illegally in the past when oceans had to be crossed in becoming a newer, cheaper work force, it became a bit easier for workers from south of the American border who, often at great and even life threatening difficulty had to merely step over an invisible line to leave one nation and enter another. Since that line had been created more recently than mostly older European and Asian borders, there were mixed cultures on both sides and a sometimes-easier community to welcome new immigrants. Immediately arriving migrants from Mexico and Central America could find old communities that spoke the same language and were of related culture – with differences, of course, but none as wide as those between English speakers and Germans or Italians or the Irish of previous immigration waves – and this too made it possible to find quicker entrance and a degree of comfort and familiarity. Where previous groups took some time to settle in and find cultural comfort zones, the Latino influx of 20thand early 21st century was able to adapt more quickly, and with even more homeland pleasure for the profits they created as cheap labor. And with the new class of illegal immigrants, they become even cheaper and thus even more profitable for capital and its professional class servants.
Whether finding work in agriculture, factories, mills, or smaller businesses like restaurants or in domestic work, the Latinos became both a larger group of workers than ever imported in a short time, and a far more profitable one taking jobs at the lower and entry levels of the economy. Thus, the upper-middle and professional classes could also enjoy the replacement of domestic servants with cheaper help for house cleaning, childcare, landscaping and such, at lower cost than previously employed Americans. And again contradicting well intentioned people anxious to end racism and employment discrimination, those replaced Americans were mostly black, as is true of hotel workers who have become almost entirely Latino where once black Americans did the vacuuming, bed making and laundering for both hotel chains and independent smaller motels. This replicated past experience when the English immigrants were replaced by Germans and they were replaced by the Irish and they by central and southern Europeans. Each new group entered the nation poor, took the dirtiest jobs available, and with luck moved up the economic ladder to become more average working class and later and more recently a middle class citizens. This highlights more language confusion when America is supposedly a non-class society, which just happens to have a lower, middle and upper class. Oh well.
Or is it Orwell?
The point being that in almost entirely well intentioned support for immigrants, good people continued bad policy when, by creating alleged sanctuary for individuals suffering systemic problems, they actually create sanctuary for capital’s policies that replace one group of workers with another, thereby strengthening the system’s endless need for cheaper labor for its profits by creating greater loss among the often misguided majority. When those who profit directly from the import of cheap workers are joined by those who bear little or no social cost for that intervention, the policy is strengthened by a focus on humanism, which conveniently keeps capitalism out of the frame. Then, people are reduced to being labeled “racist” if/when they complain about immigration - as though immigrants were members of a different race than human, in keeping with a racist culture’s population subdued into believing such mythology – which completely excludes the personal and social cost of bringing a newer work force in to replace an older work force going out, and a tax paying public frequently receiving no profits at all while absorbing much greater loss.
The more recent wave of immigration meant entry-level employment for new workers, which were thus denied those Americans previously dependent on such work. If that wave of immigrants were professional class and English speaking, say from Canada, and Americans could get a lawyer, doctor or therapist for fifteen bucks and hour, a teacher, social worker or accountant for ten, many Americans might be thrilled and delighted but that would hardly be the case for all those professional class people reduced to near or real hardship if not destitution. Under such duress we might see "extremist" groups of lawyers or doctors with shaved heads and swastika tattoos parading the streets upon losing their homes, investments and facing such hardships. And rest assured that America’s bloated and near bursting penal colony numbers many members of a new "criminal class" who became such as entry level jobs vanished from their version of the American Dream, too often a nightmare upon waking to face reality.
A far better and socially just answer to our massive economic problem of worship of market forces instead of democracy would be to bring in immigrants from foreign countries the way we bring in relatives and neighbors whom we treat as such and not simply profit makers for us and burdens for others. A truly humane welcome would not see to it that they remain illegal as we give them driver’s licenses, educations – which frequently leave them speaking foreign languages and denied equal status to their neighbors and thus remaining at the lower paid end of the economy – but make them legal, as quickly as possible if we truly want them to stay here and become Americans. Anything less, whether directly supported by capital or ignorantly accepted by those who mean well but practice ill, continues a rotten system that abuses far more than one or another sector of the population but all of us who carry the burden of an out of control system that ultimately threatens all and not just some humans, whatever language we speak or culture we are taught to embrace.

You Can't Make This Shit Up Dept.(from the NY Times)

Dan Kitwood/Getty Images •" British officials believe an assassin smeared a Soviet-developed nerve agent on the door handle of Sergei Skripal’s home, above, suggesting a high-level plot hatched by the Kremlin. Since the poison, Novichek, is so potent and dangerous, the British authorities suspect that only a highly trained professional — on orders from the highest levels of the Russian government — could have administered it to the former Russian double agent and his daughter. That theory is raising questions about the role of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, in the attack, which has raised tensions between Russia and the West to their highest point since the Cold War. "

This was not taken from Fox News, MSNBC or the Kardashian Report but from the political garbage section of the New York Times ,and without  inclusion of a disclaimer.
If someone had smeared dog shit on that door handle it would obviously suggest a high-level plot hatched by the highest levels of American government.

Unless the smearing agent was  a highly trained and low paid illegal immigrant, in which case Trump alone would be guilty.

Bulletins Fron The Garlic

Latest report from ATM - American Toilet Media - proves conclusively that Trump is homophobic. Interviews with dozens of hookers, porn stars and other hustlers show he has never had sex with a man!
Meanwhile, euro leaders who have never had sex with anyone “came together” to excommunicate Russian diplomatic corps workers in retaliation for mass murder, well, attempted murder of two people with no evidence offered yet as to why, that must have been influenced by Putin because the alleged attempted murder weapon was an exotic poison allegedly created by Russians so that they could allegedly use it to kill two Russian expatriates for no apparent or offered reason who’d been living in England for many years but whose murder suddenly became critically important because Euro-American leaders who have never had sex united with outraged bisexuals, trisexuals, unisexuals, quadrisexuals, monosexuals and homosexuals who also never had sex to put a stop to Trump’s sex life but especially to stop Russian attempts to meddle, hack, infiltrate, dehydrate, infect ,facebook, instagram, lie, steal, cheat and do other things to cause the global capitalist system to continue decomposing even while Russia and China gain power from its anti-social practices of profiting privates at public loss.
Go that? And if such idiocy wasn’t enough:
The feeding frenzy at the Russiagate food mart seems to get worse by the second, speeding up from the previous minute by minute reports of Russian meddling with our democracy and our fast food businesses to screech about new taco-pizza-burger poisoning that may cause a generation of Americans to become almost as dumb as their political media overlords.
Who can recall the crippling shock of learning (?) that Russian hustlers had spent 100,000 dollars on Facebook ads to reshape our cherished democracy from its near complete ownership by the rich to complete ownership by the rich? Most shocking of all, in an election that saw nearly seven billion dollars spent on convincing Americans – unsuccessfully – to rush to the polls and select either a rich candidate with a penis or an owned by the rich candidate with a vagina. That stunning, shocking, frightening figure spent by the evil Russian internet hustlers amounted to less than two ten thousandths of one percent of the total democracy bankroll !!!!!
And some of the evil russkies spent their funds to probe the unconscious American mindset before the election campaign began !!!!!!!!!
More recently, and with the British clown princess and her footmen taking the lead, Russia was accused of that previously mentioned poisoning the ex-spy-turncoat and his daughter, using a semi-top-secret deadly agent known only to Russians and for nefarious purposes such as, taking the British public’s minds off the sorry state of their nation by blaming its problems on (ominous violin chord) the evil commie empire of the Soviet Union?
Oooops. It’s the evil Russian empire of capitalist agents made to replace the usual knee-jerk title of individual evil responsible for everything that has ever gone wrong in life from Hitler to Putin. And Trump is involved up to his feminist hair-color-from-a-bottle eyeballs, especially once it was shown that the Clinton campaign had paid more than 100K – the same shocking figure paid by the evil russkies! – to find dirt on Trump’s toilet habits or sex life or toilet sex life or habits or whatever such moral teachers explore in their pursuit of sewage to help achieve a more cherished democracy than the pristine one we already have.
But wait.
We have not yet had revealed the toilet and sex habits of the ex-spy and his daughter, nor what their condition is, nor what evidence there is that Russians, Hillary Clinton, Marvel Comics or Oprah Winfrey had to do with the attempt on their lives using fiendish poisons that came from Russia or somewhere near Russia or the British poison factory located a few miles from the site of the alleged crime or something. Confused? Ready to go to the polls? Oops…too late.
On a more important note, this just in from cybercurrency international

New “Buttcoin” To Replace Bitcoin, Revolutionize (Debt) Sharing Economy
Wall Street, the Pentagon, the Israeli Lobby and Nathans of Coney Island were rocked by news of the latest entry into the cyber-money-sharing global marketplace.Italian entrepreneur Italo Manishevitz announced the new “Buttcoin”, a product of a more powerful Internet tool than the previous source behind Bitcoin, called BlockChain.
“Our new “Blankcheck” will transform the financial, political, economic and weapons markets as they have never been transformed before. “ Buttcoin” will be backed by “Blankcheck” in the spirit of the sharing economy. We will no longer be limited to sharing our tired old money with McDonalds, Uber, Comcast, General Motors or Israel but now be able to buy, sell, trade, borrow or extort funds without ever going to a bank or writing out numbers on a check in advance. In fact, new “Blankcheck” will be just that show of solidarity and kinship with fellow humans we desperately need at a time of divisive shopping. Simply make purchases with “Buttcoin” and then send a “Blankcheck” in payment that allows recipients to fill in any amount they wish and take it to an old fashioned money laundering firm to collect as much as honor, integrity and the borrowing capacity of the institution will allow.”
When asked how “Buttcoin” was reacting to the first day of its introduction into the marketplace, with “Blankchecks” filled in totaling more than 257 trillion dollars in the first hour, company vice president Murray Provoloni said “See? It’s working!”
“White Supremacy” new favorite criticism of white lower class by privileged people of all races, creeds, sexual preferences who see less privileged “whites” a threat to their privilege. “These working class, uneducated, powerless people are responsible for the fact that America spends trillions on war, billions on pets, hundreds of millions on junk food and guns, and makes it really difficult for us to invest in the market, hire cheap foreign help to replace the more expensive cheap help once supplied by Americans, and attend demonstrations against all the things we hate but support by voting for politicians who insure economic continuity.”
AI (artificial intelligence) in the employ of OI (organic ignorance) assures free market democracy as genius robot from Ayn Rand School of Economic Constipation calls rape a cost effective form of dating. “No dinner, no movie, get right to the sex, reduces the cost of relations and even with some medical expense possibly necessitated by resistance of the datee, the market comes out ahead since health insurers will profit, too. More power to market forces!”
New reality TV show highlighting trials and tribulations of poor women trying to feed families living under bridges, highways and in tents, and forced to shop at expensive ghetto chain stores with higher prices than upscale food marts.  “Housewives of America’s Shitholes” debuts tonight in massive simulcast on ABC, NBC, CBS, Netscape, Facemat, Twitter Twat Tweet Twaddle and DisneyNews.
Stay Tuned?

Which Fits Us Better- Chump* Nation or Twit* Country?

Our great constitutional democracy - said document written by slave owners and Indian killers whom we are taught to worship as founding fathers - numbers an electorate of more than 230 million. In 2016 less than 125 million chose from the presidential lesser evil slate of the pinhead with a penis or the vixen* with a vagina. 100 million did not vote at all and combined with those who actually chose one of the lesser evils, that means 160 million members of the electorate, some 70%, chose neither one.
Putin was just re-elected in Russia, getting 75% of the vote in a turnout of some 60% of the electorate of 110 million. He got fifty percent of the electorate while our deadly duo barely got 30% each. Clearly, our great democracy is much more democratic and Russia’s is a sham, a hypocritical excuse for a police state of war mongering fiends with genetic needs to lie, cheat and steal. And if we, like much of our liberal and conservative leadership, regularly visit a proctologist to have our brains examined, that makes enough sense to continue paying more for milk than we pay for gasoline, spend more for war than we do for peace, and lavish time, money and love on our pets while many of our humans lack housing, health care and sanity.
 Isn’t it great to be a member of the master race of self-chosen people?






*Chump: a foolish, stupid or gullible person; dupe or fool
*Twit: a foolish, contemptible little person
*Vixen: a spiteful or quarrelsome woman

The Committee to Re-Elect Trump Goes Into High Gear

The U.S. corporate media has been waxing nearly hysterical about the "risk" of having a political neophyte like Trump doing direct diplomacy with the government of North Korea.

One breathless talking head recently exclaimed that Trump doesn't understand that de-nuclearization is only supposed to apply to North Korea, not to U.S. nukes on the Korean peninsula.

USA nukes good!, Commie nukes bad!

This is the "sophisticated" understanding of international affairs that Trump is said to lack.


Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton continues to attack Trump voters for being economically and politically "backward," while she represents the "progressive" values of coastal elites leading us to a bright future over the protests of the dumb masses.

As long as these continue to be the (Pavlovian) responses of the president's "opposition," we can look forward to eight years of Trump in the White House.

The clown running the circus is the best U.S. democracy money can buy.

Regressive Liberals, Reactionary Progressives: The New Left?

“A cabal of anti-Trump fanatics cooked up the Russia collusion story, and don't-rock-the-boat bureaucrats went along with it, so we now have a behemoth investigative monster chasing unicorns.”Ann Coulter 
When an economic Cro-Magnon can make what passes for a left in America look like political Neanderthals, you know we’ve got big problems. The rush to passionately embrace the “Russiagate” story is only one, though a big one, of the moves of what was once called a liberal progressive segment of the american people so far to the right that mad dog conservatives are fighting to maintain their position as least logical pretenders to sanity. What is going on here?
A system so dangerously troubled that its dominating minority is losing control fast enough to warrant radical message changing to its subjects thereby causing irrationality to rule more blatantly than ever before.

Decent people have always known that poverty is an aspect of reality that should be changed but market forces, god and whatever other supernatural powers could be blamed made it impossible so the only thing to do was to be kind to the poor, maybe pray for them and send an occasional check to charity and all would be as well as possible. But the appalling and growing inequality rampant in a capitalist dominated market system has made poverty so frighteningly obvious among a former middle class sinking dangerously close to that status itself that the information flow must reflect excuses that explain away the social conditions.
Sun spots were once used as a potential rationale to explain the economic forces of a stock market and as such were no more or less logical than the religious-scientific belief in the buying and selling that relies on investments made by a tiny segment of a population, all of which would ultimately create the best possible world for almost everyone. Alleged primitive people who danced around a fire to bring rain or wore animal bones to ward off illness were more in touch with the universe and the powers of nature than many civilized types sporting degrees in quantifiable spectroscopic economic scat gathering who pose and are accepted as experts in market analysis. Living in a time which has seen the inequality gap between humans grow wider than ever in fairly reliable history while trillions of dollars of wealth are spent on warfare and hundreds of billions on pet care is likely to provoke more thought than usual about the alleged wisdom of such a system. Thus, reality tv, american politics, marvel comics and other fantasy productions to keep the remaining solvent sector occupied with the status of special identity groups and kept divided from one another enough to protect the wealthiest from any chance that unified democratic action might threaten their dominating role.
A generation ago conservative anti-Russian-communist fanatics made some liberal types smirk at their backward and narrow-minded political stance but that has now been adopted by progressive anti-Russian-capitalist fanatics swept up in the farce called Russiagate. This dementia-based view finds an American oligarchy of billionaires ruling a minority of the electorate into voting for the capitalist party with two slightly differing factions and calling that “our democracy”. At beating our minds into such mush it now claims that Putin and Russia are somehow responsible for the electoral college and alienated just enough Americans in a disintegrating system to be swept up in fervor for things facebooked next to photos of our dogs, cats and lunch that allegedly “meddled” in our sacred electoral process. A handful of bumbling Russian financial hustlers picked up dumb items from anti-social American media and furthered their entry into semi-empty American heads. OMG! To think that any foreign power in our wonderful globalized economy would have an interest in another nation’s political economic life is so far fetched it makes american meddling in foreign politics seem, uh, fictional? The Russian wino who led that nation into near disaster was a creature of American foreign policy and the Putin regime has led that nation from capitalist total disaster to only regular capitalist disaster, which is far more than can be said about the present American gang and its recent predecessors.
It’s as though the sinking Titanic crew and passengers were forced into concentrating on who the captain was and how many gay Latinos, Jewish transsexuals, white supremacists or black female impersonators were working in the kitchen while the water approached their lungs and all lifeboats had already left. We may not have reached that moment yet but at the rate things are moving and the near complete vanishing of a real american anti-capitalist left, it could be here sooner than anyone might wish. Opposition to Trump is important but really no more so than opposition to any CEO of a major corporation could be, but the business is the problem and not it’s chief clerk, bookkeeper or toilet cleaner, no matter how personally pinheaded, egomaniacal or TV famous. And Trump is opposed by the ruling power oligarchs of America and was never supposed to be able to gain his position as powerful figurehead with less power than the figures who own him. But as long as this “new left” takes on the work of the “old right”, the conditions of capitalist America will get worse and bring on material tragedies much bigger than a single oaf, or a single oafish identity group, might be able to fathom. Stop Trump’s worst possibilities, of course, but the worst possibilities of murderous, anti-human and perversely anti-social capitalism are far bigger problems for humanity and must be dealt with by a movement that goes far beyond celebrity leadership personalities and deals with political economic substance by creating radical systemic change. At this sad point, what passes for an American left is a major part of the problem and hardly anywhere near offering a solution.

Eco-Radicalism and Hitler Derangement Syndrome: The Strange Case of Derrick Jensen

"You seemed like such a nice man until you opened your mouth."

-----member of the audience to Derrick Jensen after one of his talks (quoted by Jensen in End Game Vol. 1)

Derrick Jensen is a radical environmentalist and prolific author, who has been called the poet-philosopher of the ecological movement. In 2008 he was named one of Utne Reader's fifty visionaries who are changing the world. Among his many books are A Language Older Than Words, The Culture of Make Believe, Endgame, What We Left Behind, and Resistance against Empire. His central thesis is that "the dominant culture is killing the planet," and we need to build a "culture of resistance" that includes blowing up dams and cell phone towers because "what we're doing isn't working." (Democracy Now, November 26, 2010)

Jensen is to be commended for reminding us that the world is run by force, not by voluntary interaction in a "free market" dedicated to delivering the greatest good for the greatest number. Nevertheless, while believing himself to be a rational dissident advancing a sensible argument, he demonstrates an uncritical acceptance of the establishment view of WWII, repeatedly lapsing into dogmatic assertions about Hitler and the "Final Solution" in order to establish a basis of comparison with the U.S., which he then condemns for Nazi-like behavior on an even larger than Hitlerian scale. The central preoccupation of his book "End Game" (Vol. 1)  is to put forth an argument for "bringing down" civilization by any means necessary, in order to return imperiled humanity to indigenous ways of living that proved themselves sustainable for thousands of years.

Unfortunately, the book is shot through with sloppy thinking, adolescent bravado, and snotty asides, while overlooking the fact that trying to "bring down" civilization today is like dedicating oneself to sinking the Titanic just after it hit the iceberg.

Jensen sees civilization as purely destructive, claiming that it leads inevitably to “assembly-line mass murder” as at Auschwitz. There is, he insists, an inherent logic that leads inevitably to “the electrified fences, the gas chambers, the bullets in the brain.” He evinces no skepticism whatsoever about this extravagant thesis, in spite of its flimsy factual basis, merely blunders ahead to declare, with considerable self-importance, that he has an “intense opposition to genocide,” thus contrasting himself favorably with the vast hordes he presumes are lukewarm or indifferent on the issue. 

Having thus established his moral superiority, he then expands the definition to include the dams on the Columbia River, which he insists are “instruments of genocide, just as surely, explicitly, and intentionally as the gas chambers at Treblinka, Birkenau, and Auschwitz.” The pomposity and self-righteousness are troubling in themselves, of course, but there are also important factual questions that Jensen glosses over:  Did the homicidal gas chambers actually exist? If so, why is there no forensic evidence of them? Why no corroborating archival evidence? Why no photograph? Why so much crazy eyewitness testimony (no different in kind from that claiming that Jesus Christ literally rose from the dead)? 

Jensen doesn’t say, and likely doesn't even know. And if the “extermination” was a result of the collapse of Germany's Eastern Front after the battle of Stalingrad, don’t we need to critique what started the war? Unfortunately, Jensen doesn't see the need for doing this, since he believes in the cartoon-like view of Hitler as a cosmic force that single-handedly mobilized tens of millions of Germans to rush headlong to their doom. Sure.

Digging himself ever deeper, Jensen advocates setting up a “Nuremberg-style tribunal to try politicians, CEOs, generals, and capitalist journalists” for crimes against nature and humanity. He recommends that U.S. generals read Robert Conot's, Justice At Nuremberg, a standard work on the show trial, so that they will know what “justice” awaits them when Jensen's eco-warriors succeed "civilization." 

Justice! Starving, dismembered Germany, its cities bombed into rubble and its territory occupied by four foreign enemies that excluded their own crimes against humanity from the hypocritical indictment they advanced against the defeated "Reich," retroactively applying laws that had not existed at the time the hideous German atrocities were committed. Some of this absurdity comes through even in Conot's book, such as Hermann Goering bringing up Manifest Destiny and the U.S. conquest of the Southwest on explicitly white-supremacist principles, which the prosecutors don't even try to refute. 

In short, while Jensen spews out all the myth-making minnows about "progress" and "civilization," he swallows whole the establishment's ideological whale about unique Nazi racism culminating in mass extermination by gas chambers. He then goes on to paint ordinary Americans today as Nazis by default for failing to stop the capitalist rush to irretrievable environmental catastrophe. It's hard to know which is the more offensive, his establishment version of the facts or his sweeping dismissal of Americans as latter day "Good Germans."

In any event, seeking to rid the world of evil (like George Bush!), Jensen argues that violence in defense of mother earth is justified, just as killing Adolf Hitler would have been justified. Had someone killed Hitler before WWII started, he claims, it would have saved millions of lives, since the war only occurred because of the perverted will of a single individual. Obviously ludicrous, this is like arguing that if Thomas Edison's mother had aborted him the world would never have had electricity. (More relevantly, if the West hadn't reacted hysterically to the Bolshevik revolution, Hitler never would have been Hitler).
Unfortunately, this is hardly the only example of Jensen's amazing simple-mindedness. For example, he debunks the rational claim that removing an especially appalling CEO from the top of a particularly evil corporation just leads to his replacement by a similarly criminal individual by comparing it to arresting or killing an individual rapist, which is hardly pointless just because other rapists continue to rape. But these situations are not at all comparable, because there is no structure of rapists as there is a structure of corporate power. CEOs perch at the apex of profit pyramids that are legally required to maximize profit. No rapist is under a legal obligation to rape. How can Jensen be unaware of this simple and highly relevant fact? 

Worse than this, a deep cynicism pervades Jensen's thought, as he dismisses the vast majority of Americans as morally indifferent, if not depraved: 

“I don’t think most people care, and I don’t think most people will ever care. We can trot out whatever polls we want to try to prove most Americans actually do care about the Environment, Justice, Sustainability – that they care about anything beyond being left alone to numb themselves with alcohol, cheap consumables, and television.  . . . But the truth is that it’s just not that important to most people – it in this case being the survival of tigers, salmon, traditional indigenous peoples, oceans, rivers, the earth; it also being justice, fairness love, honesty, peace. If it were, ‘most people’ would do something about it. . . . why should I care if brown people living on a sea of oil a half a world away get blown to bits?” (End Game, Vol. 1, p. 341)
In short, only Jensen and the small circle of people he approves of are properly moral. This conclusion, offensive in itself, also overlooks considerable counter-evidence within Jensen's own life span (he was born in 1960). When a relative handful of dedicated political activists engaged in anti-war popular education in the 1960s and 1970s, a highly indoctrinated U.S. population went from strongly supporting the Vietnam slaughter to an 80% majority judging the war to be "fundamentally wrong and immoral." In subsequent decades elements of that overwhelming majority grew into a myriad of social change movements raising issues of a depth and scope never even contemplated in the much celebrated protest era of the 1960s. True, ecological destruction has not been stopped, or even slowed down, but given the massive concentration of wealth and power at the top of society this was entirely predictable. If achievable at all, an ecologically sane world of billions of people is not the work of decades but of centuries. The popular rebellions of the 1960s at least put the issue on the map. The collective effort to avoid human extinction will define the next two centuries, if we are lucky enough to have them. But no technique or series of actions could have transformed the U.S. into an ecologically sustainable society in a mere forty years. Nevertheless, Jensen is firm in his sweeping condemnation of ordinary Americans: 

"There will never be a mass awakening such that a majority of Americans or even a significant minority will realize that we are destroying our land base and rise up and stop it. Good Americans are just like Good Germans." (End Game, Vol. 1, p. 343) 

In short, there is not one human nature, but two: the mass of people are evil, albeit passively, while Jensen and a handful of heroic environmental radicals are good.
Given sweepingly contemptuous judgments such as these, it's perhaps not surprising that Jensen sometimes slips into a sniveling juvenile-delinquent tone when anticipating counterarguments. "Don't give me any shit about ______, he admonishes the reader." This from the "poet and philosopher of the environmental movement."
The implications of Jensen's self-righteous dismissal of the majority are left unclear.  For example, Jensen notes, apparently approvingly, that Julius Streicher was hanged at Nuremberg for his role as a propagandist, not for overtly criminal actions. Should we therefore kill leading voices in the U.S. mass media, whose role in unleashing massive bloodshed on civilian populations is well documented? And would such a policy truly strike a blow for justice and freedom, or would it (almost certainly) lead us closer to outright totalitarianism? Or should we have assassinated George W. Bush when he made it clear he intended to invade Iraq? Would that have resulted in world peace, or contributed to our reaching it? Again, Jensen doesn't say, merely relies on the caricature of Hitler and "Good Germans" as evil incarnate, which he claims mirrors U.S. leaders and "Good Americans," so blowing things up is therefore justified.


 

American Violence: Disorganized and Organized

"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do”: Samuel P. Huntington 

The latest American slaughter of innocents  - at home instead of abroad - has led to the usual outpourings from political leaders expressing prayers and sympathy and then switching to attacks on the evil weapons wielders that completely avoid the social system relying on massive weapons production and their wielding by military forces glorified for making wars.
The bloody horror in Florida that took seventeen lives is known to everyone in the USA but that same population is kept relatively ignorant of the bloody horror being perpetrated everyday in Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and Palestine/Israel – to mention only the Middle East – by people using the armaments we sell them, when they’re not being used by our own military which we train to use our weapons to kill people; foreigners, until further notice.
The guilt tripping about guns belonging to individuals from what passes for liberals and the protection of the right of individuals to have guns from what passes for conservatives is the two-sides-of-the-same-coin debate that does nothing to stop the massive profits of the weapons industry and the attempted perpetuation of the empire represented by those profits.
The military styled murder weapon used by the mentally troubled killer of innocents in Florida is the same one used by allegedly normal military personnel to mass murder innocent foreigners who are made to seem enemies and adversaries in the same way the troubled Floridian may have seen his innocent victims. And the nature of a society which has suicides increasing along with mass murders often committed by the suicidal must be distracted by consciousness control which highlights alleged deformities in individual character while protecting a diseased social organism now devouring its own along with outside victims.
It is much easier to feel the shock and pain when we see innocent americans suffering at the hands of a usually mentally ill individual but the mind management that keeps us from seeing the massive horrors that our social weapons problem produces under the control of a mentally deranged political economics are never dealt with in what passes for a debate between people manipulated to disrespect one another instead of the system that manipulates them into an easy to control divided population of identity groups that can’t possibly act as a democracy. This even as that false definition of reality is driven through the skulls of both into thinking what each has is democracy and the other threatens it. Honest well meaning conservatives reduced to geeks confronted by sincere dedicated liberals reduced to twits while the weapons makers continue banking hundreds of billions and leave them clawing at one another with charges and countercharges at a court owned and operated by the capitalist munitions industry. 

The guaranteed outcome of this demlib-repcon hissy fit form of politics is the continued economics of mass murder when what we need is a united confrontation with the minority power that needs to be replaced in order to save all and not just some of the future victims. Until we do that, suicides, mass murders both foreign and domestic, and further economic collapse are not merely threatened but assured.