Michael K. Smith's Blog, page 55

Double Standards R Us

One in a Series
After being vilified as a Satan by neo-liberals for allegedly costing their anointed one the election – this was before Putin was appointed Greater Satan – the former FBI Director is sanctified by neo-liberals as martyr to the cause of justice and democracy. This continues an American tradition born the day European immigrants began making this country great by taking it from its original inhabitants who were foolishly trying to live with nature instead of dominating it for profits.
Immediate comparisons were made to the past Nixon era when a government official said to be getting too close to the truth was dumped and the event was dubbed a “Saturday Night Massacre” by political/media thought and language abusers. This past verbal rape may have helped not having this event called the “Tuesday Night Holocaust”, though potential lawsuits concerning copyright infringement may have also played a role. 
Still, a political event almost to be expected from a new regime which doesn’t seem to care or possibly understand how its every act, no matter how stupid, well intentioned, thoughtless or sincere will be treated as potential for doom among our military-prison-industrial complex of employees socialized to care for identity groups, foreigners and pets more thoughtfully than many of their fellow citizens. This, while the political economics of private profit capitalism bring all the world closer to a debacle that could make what was called the Great Depression seem a minor event.
Good people are programmed to accept absolute fictional nonsense as material reality and rise up in arms against things labeled “hard” left – in other places, since even a soft left is still in formation in the USA – and a much larger movement in the rest of the world called a “hard” right. The somewhat “soft” center, advertised as what people of reason and good grooming should support, and maintained by practice of massive military and murderous weaponry to make the bloodiest tyrant of the past weep at the power available to alleged democracies of the present, continues sinking while many it threatens to drown cheer its every victory.
Thus, in France an agent of global capital’s board of governors who supports a continued austerity regime extending the hours and years workers must toil in order to survive is applauded by professional class innocents lead to believe his “hard” right opposition, part and parcel of the same system though representing groups even more powerless than the cheering section, was a threat to their temporary affluence.
Here, in the once ruling but presently fading headquarters of global capital, a seeming “hard” right billionaire was able to win the vote in a corrupt electoral system originated and kept that way for generations to maintain the power and domination of wealth while decent people are taught to believe their ability to rent and incur debt is somehow ownership and democracy.
Since the rich clown assumed the CEO position at Circus Central, contrary to all the dictates of the circus owners, the plan to impeach him began almost immediately. And his continued holding of the office does promise to do the company quicker harm than might have been previously the case, though for the good of the planet the quicker the American disease takes its toll on the least number among our people, the better for the greatest number. But that’s still looking at humanity instead of private profit, and neither Trump nor his enemies see, hear, think or believe anything but that dollar religion, with its priests, rabbis, shamans, gurus, imams, shrinks and other mental workers to keep minds occupied with things egoist or ephemeral in order to stay away from the social and substantial.
So, get ready for more gibberish about Russia in revival of past mental abuse over Communism – are you now or have you ever spoken to a Russian? - and a spectacle to make Trump’s dumb reality TV show fame seem possibly brilliant by comparison to a nation  sinking in petroleum, chemical and dog waste while complaining about the stench in Syria, Iran, North Korea and other places which are none of our business.Especially considering that our business should involve the hundreds of thousands of homeless Americans and millions of American children living in poverty.
In fact, among the polls taken every few seconds to check what Americans are buying, how often they buy it, how many immigrants they employ and how much they hate president Trump, homeless people were asked how they felt about Comey being fired.

The overwhelming response was: who?

Is The Era of U.S. Coups in Latin America Over?

Pundits love to declare that it is. The "end of history" thesis is a perennial favorite of those who seek to divert attention from their historical criminality. Consider the following coups, all sponsored or indirectly supported by Washington:

2002 - Venezuela. Unsuccessful U.S. coup against Hugo Chavez, a harsh critic of U.S. imperial interventions.

2004 - Haiti. Successful U.S. coup against President Jean Bertrand Aristide, who was hustled out of the country in his pajamas by U.S. Marines. Aristide's constituency was the poor, whose need for democratic representation conflicted with the desires of U.S. investors. The main architect of the reign of terror that followed (Emmanuel Constant) was allowed to live unmolested in New York.

2008 - Bolivia. Unsuccessful U.S. coup against President Evo Morales, another strong critic of U.S. imperialism.

2009 - Honduras. Successful coup against Manuel Zelaya. Coup plotters were trained by the U.S. at Fort Benning, which is known in Latin America as "the school of coups" thanks to the achievements of its graduating classes all over the hemisphere.

2010 - Ecuador. Unsuccessful U.S. coup against socialist President Rafael Correa, an immensely popular (in Ecuador) critic of Washington.

2012 - Paraguay. Successful U.S. coup against Fernando Lugo, whose fondness for liberation theology's "preferential option for the poor" was an affront to U.S. investors.

Deep State, Shallow Politics, Dumb Economics:

Evidence That This Home of the Master Race of Self Chosen People was the World’s Greatest Democracy Even Before Trump
In 1965, the USA had 780,000 people in prison, jail, on parole or on probation.
By 2010, that population had grown by more than nine times, to 7 million and the prison business was booming as never before, creating profits, jobs and unparalled human misery.
 In 1954 the integration of public schools was seen as a great victory for civil rights and Americans now designated as “people of color”*. Today more than 50% of the prison population is designated as “people of color” and the disintegration of the entire public school system continues for all Americans designated as people.
In 2015 there were 536 billionaires in the U.S.A.In a nation of more than 325 million people, that represents less than 2 millionths of one percent of the population.For the textually challenged, that looks like this:
.000002%
Wow.
How hard those truly brilliant people must have worked to achieve those riches. And one of them was Donald Trump! Imagine how many cases they had to plead in court, classes to teach in school, busses to drive, meals to prepare, floors to wash, crops to pick, mail to deliver and deals to make? Well, actually, they mostly made deals using their great wisdom and brilliance at investing wisely. You and I could do as well if we worked as hard and were as smart and industrious as they are, including Donald Trump!
And if we were paid a thousand dollars an hour for our hard work, and we worked twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty two weeks a year, maybe, if we stashed all that cash and didn’t spend any of it we might have a billion dollars.
Nope.
In fact, if you worked twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty two weeks a year and did that for ten years, at one thousand dollars an hour, never stopped, never took any time off and never spent any of the money and just stashed it, you still wouldn’t have a billion dollars.
Is this a great democracy or what?
In that same year of 2015 America’s GDP for pets, which was $38.5 billion in 2006, had grown to $60.3 billion.12 companies insured 1.4 million pets owned by 79.6 million American families (65% of households) with premiums amounting to 660.5 million dollars.
163.8 million dogs and cats are comfortably housed in a political economy that has half a million of its people homeless and more than 20% of its children living in poverty. This is certainly reason enough for us to demand that Russia, North Korea, Syria and other nations adopt our democratically civilized way of living or suffer the consequences of our superior wrath. Right?
As of March1, 2017 our national debt was close to $20 trillion, which is more than our GDP, which is truly a gross domestic product. We the people of this great democracy pay more than $440 billion a year in interest on that debt.
Who do we pay it to? Where’d they get the money to loan us?Who prints and backs this money supply?If you have any money among your plastic, look at one of the bills of any denomination and note that the power behind the cash is not the dead presidents or Rockefeller, Carnegie, Zuckerburg, Soros, Bezos, Visa or MasterCard but something called “The United States of America”. That is not a private bank or a billionaire. That’s you. That’s us.
Remember, we, the public, print the money, in our name, and somehow it gets to a private source which loans it to us and charges us interest for the privilege. Would you like to buy a bridge?
Our personal debt, incurred to keep the economy going with our consuming and owed to the same market gods, was over $18 trillion.Almost as high as our public debt. Somehow, we owe it to the same people who loaned us our own money for public expenses. Wow. Are they really smart? Or are we really stupid?
Many Americans are treated as lower than scum for being working class and "un-educated". Why are so many Americans so "un-educated"? Could it have anything to do with the fact that at some point they went through grammar and high schools taught by (drum roll) college-educated people**? And winding up with presidents like a truly brilliant rich guy with degrees from Yale and Harvard (wow!) who starts wars in the Middle East that have gone on longer than any in our history, with the consent of 534 out of 535 democratically (?) elected college graduates in congress?

Whether the organized crime lobby (Wall Street, Banks, Billionaires) supports guns for individuals, Israelis or the Military Industrial Complex, it remains in control of the political economics of American government. NRAIPAC and its ilk own, rent and control the White House, Congress and Corporate media. That was the case before Trump and still is the case now.
We need resistance to that system of minority control itself, and not simply the servants it hires, leases, rents or outright owns. As long as we allow a gallon of milk to cost more than a gallon of gasoline, as long as we tolerate an economics that will sustain a disease as long as profits for its treatment are greater than profits for its cure***, we not only face long range climate disaster but a much shorter range political economic calamity.
Global capitalism threatens immediate and growing poverty, war, human misery and planetary destruction no matter which political pinhead, pimp or ho lives in the subsidized residency we call the white house. As long as we allow the richest and smallest minority in our history to put only their servants up for our votes, calling this a democracy reduces us to the best-dressed peasants on the Titanic. We need to end the fundamentalist religion of private profit marketing that is becoming a greater menace by the minute and begin democratic action in a social revolution that expresses majority public interest, desire and need. Fast.



*All members of the human race are “of color” save for a small group called albinos. Some of us have darker or lighter skin but skin tone is of no more racial significance than brown hair, green eyes or long legs. Innocents, the ignorant and morons who still believe otherwise are science deniers at best, and anti-human at worst, no matter their skin tone.
 **“Those with a stake in maintaining their incomes & consumption are unlikely to participate in efforts to bring about radical change”         Michael D. Yates
***Check cancer, for starters; a multi-multi billion-dollar industry

How Did They Know? Before Earth Day?

“One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. The two sides are, however, inseparable; the history of nature and the history of men are dependent on each other …Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature…like someone standing outside of it-but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.”
Marx Engels 1847 German ideology


This quote from 170 years ago clearly indicates that some people fully understood humanity’s relationship to nature as being familial rather than a visiting tourist exploiter long before “climate change” became a brand name at the market. Their political economic criticism of industrial capitalism was also years ahead of its time and made the connections between the anti-nature and anti-democratic tendencies of that system clear enough to still cause some to wonder at how they were able to analyze what some of us still haven’t learned to even acknowledge.
But far more important than who might have lead in pointing out that fire burns and water is wet is how much longer humanity can afford to accept the fanatic opposite notion, that fire is really cold and water is how we get dry. Which would approximate the idiocy of teaching that cancer, war and pets are privately profitable investments and that a healthy population, living in peace and not needing but simply enjoying animals would not represent private failure but public success.

France: Boo! America: Yay?

Marine Le Pen Denies French Guilt for Rounding Up Jews


The remark was made on Sunday during an interview in which she referred to the most notorious roundup of Jews in France during World War II, when nearly 13,000 were arrested in Paris by the French police on July 16 and 17, 1942, in what is known as the “Vel d’Hiv roundup.”“France wasn’t responsible for the Vel d’Hiv,” she said. “If there was responsibility, it is with those who were in power at the time, it is not with France. France has been mistreated, in people’s minds, for years.”
ALSO, NEVER FORGET THAT
Americans are all responsible for rounding up more than 100,000 Japanese-American citizens and putting them in prison camps during the same war. FDR, Earl Warren and other authorities who were in power at the time had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Most Shocking Bulletin Since Last Most Shocking Bulletin! Assad Wants To Help Us!!

Legalienate, through its connections to international hackers, interplanetary slackers and more underworld overlords than it can reveal, has come into possession of a secret recording of a conversation between Bashir al Assad and his most loyal hench people. It reveals, shockingly and for the first time, that he is actually intent on helping rather than hindering our great nation. This translation comes to us through a former Israeli agent who once worked for Fox news, Msnbc and Sesame Street and whose work is highly regarded by gender fluid double agents and single minded pursuers of honesty, integrity and democracy among child molesters of all races, creeds and consumer tastes.
Prepare to be shocked.
recorded excerpt follows.

Sniveling Underling: So, brilliant leader, now that with the help of Russia, Iran and Hezbollah we’ve gained the upper hand in the battle against the terrorists and their toadies and even the USA has defied Israel and dropped its claim that you must go, what have you planned for the immediate future to insure that we continue on the path to ultimate victory?
Assad: I have a wonderful idea. We make a chemical attack on our people, especially children and babies, and have film crews, videographers and others of our enemies on hand to record, broadcast and spread the information to the entire world that we have poisoned innocent babies, but especially to the most impressionable, sincere assholes on the planet, the pinhead americans and their semi-imbecile leader.
Groveling Servant: But..but…respectfully, dear loving murderous tyrant, how can that possibly help your image?
Assad: Schmuck, where do you live? don’t you understand? the pinheads will be torn apart by the images and immediately attack us, causing far more deaths and refugees than they have already created, and given their past stupidity in fighting amongst themselves over accepting poor suffering orphans after they have murdered their parents, I will be able to sneak into the nation under an assumed identity, say, a kardashian or rockefeller or rapper – hmm, I could be “mc low i.q” - and eventually run for president as a democratic candidate once I have proved myself even dumber and certainly more dishonest than the republican.
Former western agent now working for evil enemy:
But gracious host and best employer I’ve ever had and whose sap I suck with reverence, how can that help the cause of global evil and murder which you represent with such talent and force?
Assad: Listen asshole, and learn about globalization. Once I take power I can appoint good buddy Putin as secretary of state and loyal comrade whatsisname from north Korea as secretary of defense and others of our cabal of evil and soon we will control the world, just as the americans have learned from their comic books, tv shows and grad schools, only now they will have been taken over by proven assholes from without, instead of continuing under the idiotic rule of home grown assholes from within who shame the nation and are leading to its downfall. In liberating it from these intellectual misfits and moral degenerates:
We will make America great again!

Bulletin From Fake News, Fake Democracy , Fake Sanity and Real Surreality

Evidence of Assad’s responsibility for chemical attack overwhelmingly as foolproof and convincing as:
Evidence of Virgin Birth of Son of God
Evidence of Specially Chosen People of God
Evidence of Sani-Flush as Satanic CreationandEvidence of Easter Bunny as Main Source of Global Cholesterol.
President Pinhead so emotionally moved by loss of innocent life he promises to suspend activities to get even with Democratic imbeciles and morons to concentrate on saving more innocent lives by killing more innocent people and possibly starting a nuclear war.
Democratic imbeciles and morons relieved, since that’s been their policy since long before president pinhead had his hit show on tv, let alone backed his limo into the white house.
Americans advised to continue watching cable, nutflix, huha and nosebook while feverishly shopping for stuff they don’t need and leave foreign policy to experts.
In other words:
Stay Tuned Out.

At everyone’s risk.

Wealth and Poverty, Guilt and Rationalization

"I remember one young woman whom I knew in college years. She had inherited ten million dollars at the age of twenty-one. Now, at twenty-two, she worked in Roxbury with some of the most badly battered children in the city. It struck her often as remarkably unfair that she, her brothers and two sisters, through the accident of birth, should have, each one, ten million dollars to protect their lives and to assure the safety of their children, and their children's children, too. It seemed unfair because she saw before her, every day, so many kids who were in every way the equals of her brothers and her sisters and herself; yet she knew very well these kids would, only by infrequent miracle, be able to break out of the entrapment of slum schools, parent despair, poor health, poor nutrition, crumbling plaster and the rest. The only way she might in later years know any of these kids would be if they were to become her servants, butlers, elevator boys or other kinds of menial laborers. The year in Roxbury hit her so hard that it grew into an ideal for her to go back home to her own family "place," almost a private village really, with two hundred acres of uninterrupted forest, fields and pastures for the horses, even cottages for "help." At home, as would not be unusual in cases of that kind, the servants all were black.

"Each time, then, that she went home, - for instance, at Thanksgiving, Christmas or some other holiday - she found it agonizing to sit at the dinner table and digest her food. She began to vomit secretly upstairs, or spit out food into her handkerchief or napkin, hoping in this manner that her father would not see. Her father did see, of course, and spoke about it with his wife, then with his daughter too. Being concerned about the danger to her health, he made arrangements for her to begin to see a psychoanalyst in Boston. She did so, and in fact spent several years in therapy. Out of this treatment, which had been provoked directly by her devastation at the sight of so much poverty and pain, she gained at length a more relaxed and reasoned skill to reconcile the differences between her own life and the lives of those poor children whom she had begun to know. Simultaneously she learned, as well, to reconcile the differences between her own intense convictions and that style of life which, as she knew, lay waiting for her. Her hesitation and her gnawing sense of guilt at last abated somewhat: never entirely, but enough so that she could go home from time to time, accept the luxury of horses, servants and the rest, and summon up a kind of 'realistic' will to smooth away the inconsistencies. At length she married an appropriate young man and traveled, little by little, out of the orbit of her ethical upheaval. She settled down at last into a normal, quiet and unturbulent routine, learned how to keep that residue of guilt within control, and did not need to vomit after supper.

"It would not make sense, from any 'normal' point of view, to say that she had just been cheated out of something decent and profound when she learned how to live in luxury without a sense of nausea, and to eat well and accept the services of family servants without guilt. I would not try to say that she was 'better off' when she was throwing up her food. Yet I would wonder if there was not something wrong, in toto, looking back, in all that had just taken place. Expensive medical treatment, denied to all but very few, enabled her at last to share without a sense of guilt in use of just such wealth as made that treatment possible. Ironically, it also helped ease her back into a style of life in which she would be less and less exposed to the conditions that inspired her original upheaval. A vulnerable conscience, having been explained and 'understood' at last into a kind of quiet and serene capitulation, no longer trouble her now at twenty-eight as it had done at twenty-two. She became, in terms of the society, a 'better adjusted person,' able to leave at peace with the idea of an imbalance of advantage that once, in an earlier time, had seemed to her to be intolerable. . . . psychiatric exculpation on this scale would have been of great assistance to large numbers of those troubled and uneasy bureaucrats who were so necessary to the German leaders in the Second World War. . . ."

-----Jonathan Kozol, The Night Is Dark And I Am Far From Home, pps. 132-4

Trumpophobia: A Problem, Not A Solution

America’s ruling powers are practicing the trees vs. forest mind game as never before, with constant reminders given information consumers about how important a particular capitalist tree menace is, thereby avoiding awareness of how critical the capitalist forest menace has become. Now that the corporate circus of political lesser evilism has produced a genuine clown as its CEO the danger that his bumbling arrogance will reveal the sham and hypocrisy of the entire show is driving the owners of the big top to mass manipulations that drive their captive audience to desired distraction. But that could lead to a near - if not real - civil war if they succeed in destroying the clown while the circus continues on its death cycle, and that won’t be a laughing matter.
Since Trump took office the move to restrain him if possible and destroy him if not has become more frantic as systemic breakdowns become more numerous. Blaming Putin, Russia, Trump, Lady GaGa, the tooth fairy or any outside source for what ails America is a ploy that has worked before, but the current hysterical performance reflects the stressed state of the nation’s political economic structure, which is collapsing from its rotted foundation while attention is focused on the tenant in its penthouse. This search for individual villains on which to heap responsibility for things much larger than personal egos is also business as usual, but the commercial endeavor nears a frantic pace of irrationality as things show danger of getting completely out of control.
The Trump-ophobia promoted by a ruling class  - which is now referred to as a “deep state” even by anti-conspiracy types - has reduced a privileged sector of the population which needs a therapy session before ordering lunch into a near hysterical mob fearing personal demise as it desperately shops at a mental health mall and incurs ever more crippling physical debt in the process. A political paparazzi from what passes for a left helps induce mental coma while materially goading the lynch motivation that presents the latest capitalist monster in supposed bold light while still keeping capitalism in shadows. That political economic system is responsible for most of what drives an affluent minority to debt, drugs, drink and therapy, and a fast growing majority of strugglers to unemployment, poverty, environmental degradation and war.
Trump claimed his rule would create jobs and boost the economy and make America great again, while his allegedly liberal opponents claimed it was already great. This two party battle of the master race of self chosen people vs. the self chosen people of the master race was bound to lead to nothing more than continuity, however different it might seem to those programmed to think pimps are selling love and lies represent honesty. But a cottage industry of new fund raising for the political left-of-fascism has indeed created jobs and dollars, while popular entertainment feasts on both Trump’s idiocy and the mindless reaction to it that often makes him seem almost thoughtful by comparison. His war belching bravado about how our military is doing a much better job murdering people in Iraq brings reptilian tears to the eyes of the brunch brigades previously silent or barely conscious of the hundreds of thousands murdered by the other branch of the war cabal that – allegedly - ruled before Trump. Even greater military spending than indulged in by the Obama killers does mean more profits and more jobs, along with more death and more destruction. Which, in turn creates jobs for rebuilding the wreckage and repopulating the devastated nations. Isn’t free market capitalism wonderful? Yes, if the blissed-out-by-propaganda sector is kept from seeing the results of job creation and job loss by its own job and financial security that enables belief in material depictions of reality that only highlight the benign and give short shrift to the ugliness of private profit creation that reduces most of the public to market rabble frantically consuming at a fire sale of garbage, waste and murder.
Contrary to major media analysts, Trump is not responsible for the fact that an economy in which treatment of a disease is more profitable than curing the disease means the disease will prosper and remain uncured. Cancer is not a growth industry because of evil oncologists or mean delivery drivers or even a hateful CEO here and there, though all such are possible. But despite the billions spent on cancer, the number of people stricken by the disease increases, as do the profits of the cancer industry. In 2015, cancer pharmaceuticals crossed the one billion dollar mark, and while that means profit and jobs and investments for that disease, it also means that more than a million “new” cases of cancer will occur this year. Hooray? Yes, if you’re invested in the fight against cancer, which means, in this economic system, its continued profit potential. And again, that has nothing to do with an evil individual or abusive personality or wretched behavior pattern of someone who couldn’t afford therapy. It is systemic, not personal, and the most wonderful people, humanitarians, lovers of families, friends and neighbors, who wouldn’t hurt a soul, are buying homes, paying rents, eating, shopping, feeding their pets and living good lives based on that industry.
Looking for evil individuals and remaining unaware of a morally debased system is even worse than the identity politics that looks for blonde hair, brown skin, tall agnostics or short religionists as the source of the evils causing such pain and suffering to so many. The incredible wealth of a relative handful of people in the face of so much of humanity suffering poverty is well worth our attention, but not if we just settle for taxing them at a higher rate, which is the usual social democratic solution that helps maintain rather than transform our political economics. Nobody should have that much wealth – ever! – when there is so much that needs to be done to make life better for everybody. But simply raising the tax rate on the filthy rich and still leaving them with hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars for private profit making that must create injustice for a public no matter how clouded mass consciousness can be kept isn’t nearly enough.
Ultimately, someone driven over the edge by that inequality that is absolutely necessary to sustain the system will bring about an act of madness, terror and murder that can only be avoided by an economy that does not create inequality but promotes the well being of all, and not just some. Trump merely promotes the system more blatantly, and honestly, than the apologists who call him a liar every time he truthfully speaks to the horror of what makes him rich and keeps them in professional class comfort. That failure of anti-democratic capitalism becomes clearer as a result of this egotistical pinhead, but it isn’t very smart to villainize him while the wretched excess of the crime against nature political economic system of capitalism remains invisible. Those who keep it that way are the problem and as things stand, his blatant, open, egotistic honesty may be part of the solution in revealing that fact. But not if good people continue to be herded into the political identity of individualist grad school that makes most high school dropouts wiser about the economy, since they suffer it materially and not just while visiting therapists. Trump is indeed a boob, but he is the logical culmination of a system that is falling apart while its unmindful supporters feverishly work to chop down a tree while the forest is in more danger than ever of becoming an inferno that consumes not just some, but all of us.

American Gourmet Politics Haiku+

pan seared dog shit
sun dried cat shit
identity horse shit
mass consumed bull shit