Michael K. Smith's Blog, page 63

Tax Havens: Minority Heaven, Majority Hell

 “To be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing.” Raymond Williams

An old story well known to a few has been brought a new life for many with revelations of the rich stashing their wealth in tax havens that cost the rest of us trillions in their unpaid denial of social bills and national responsibilities. A whistle blower-leaked tale about a Panamanian firm handling accounts for some of the global rich cheats and scammers is being carefully screened by mind managers and consciousness controllers before revealing names, but ultimately the public will be better informed about still another way that the rich rule by their profit and the rest pay for it through our loss.
Initial names dropped in the western, especially american, media repeat Putin and Assad as often as possible, in keeping with propaganda campaigns  of demonization that will not stop until the balance of global power has changed for the good of humanity and ended for the very rich these revelations may help finally defeat. It seems that Putin’s daughter had a wedding in a hotel owned by someone whose name appears among those so far revealed, not surprising given that Russia is a capitalist country and numbers a minority of extremely rich people among its population. And wonder of wonders, Putin may even know and deal with some of them. Imagine. Nothing like that could be true in the USA. If we keep our heads stuffed in a part of our anatomy that never sees the sun.
Actually, many American politicians are rich even before elected, and many who aren’t become so shortly after. And ex presidents, and their wives, often become multi millionaires upon leaving office. This should not be a late breaking bulletin to our citizenry but given the status of our education and information dispensing institutions it may be. Nevertheless, with selected releases and even attempted censorship this enormous cache of elitist cash swindling info may ultimately drop some American names. Maybe.
It is important to know that our richest thieves and legal book jugglers really don’t need offshore tax havens since there are many right here in the USA, with Delaware and Nevada long offering comfortable places to incorporate firms without giving any names as to who actually owns them and thus protect identities and avoid responsibility. The issue of money remaining free from tax collection and being laundered so as to clean it from the criminal ways it is often procured by organized crime, corporadoes or politicians, are really very old stories which may not have originated here but have a long history of practice in the good old marketplace culture of the USA.
Still, and despite this silly Putin-Assad stress that not only leaves Americans unmentioned but also seems not to notice quite a few Israeli firms and stockholders among the wealthy welfare chiselers – imagine that! - there is much that may be revealed to people for the first time, teaching them more about how they are robbed by the oligarchs in their societies. This, at a time when Americans and Europeans are under great stress having had government services and public spending viciously slashed in favor of private profits for that class of global royalty, may even help produce a bigger vote among the already great outpouring of disgust for established power through new parties in europe and for Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump here in the almost endless American primary race. Sanders and Trump hardly speak the same language but attract some of the same people totally disgusted with the establishment parties they belong to but whose politics they hardly represent.
While the mass of information collected by what seems a major financed media funded source has led to healthy speculation, it has also caused much of the suspicion fueled by establishment lies that finds anything and everything that happens that seems to be even slightly anti-establishment to be a plot, conspiracy or twisted scheme organized by that very establishment. Or nearly mystical manifestations of power attached to often biblical codes, racial theories born of those codes, or simple beliefs that only a chosen few can possibly understand anything and the other billions of us are too dumb to fathom anything beyond the Super Bowl, the World Cup or Downton Abbey.
Just as many if not most american voters are brain bludgeoned into the crack pot realism ordering them to vote for lesser evils since nothing good can ever come from voting, the despair of ugliness at the core of so much of perceived reality can reduce once hopeful people to give up and accept less than half a loaf or no loaf at all.
But the growing reaction of anger at things as they are and desire to transform reality to something much better may ultimately bring even some of the most despairing to see a light at the end of humanity’s tunnel. We should expect that every step forward, including this small one towards revelation of another way in which the rich minority takes advantage of the majority, will be seen as just another ploy by “them” to further induce ignorance and despair such as the wise ones are all too aware of, and continue us on the path to failure. Truly, some of this could almost make the Pope succumb to cynicism, but his inherent hope and faith based on spiritual yearning balanced with material intelligence is very much like what is going on in the world among growing numbers of human beings of different nations and cultures.
Facing a near total breakdown of political economics and the environment that sustains us all, many are saying: enough, we can’t go on this way and must have radical change or the human race, let alone our various nations, will face disaster. Whoever the original revealers were and whatever provoked them, ultimately it is humanity which will be served by what is revealed, however established authority will try to suppress that information, and its gullible handmaidens in communities of perpetual doubt will innocently help by spreading their message of hopelessness and despair.
We live in a time of no secrets, anytime, anywhere. While it can seem that only means gossip, trivia and propaganda, at least to some, the rest of us are learning that there will be no place to hide for anyone on earth if we allow our world to succumb to the ravages of it and its inhabitants being treated like nothing more than a “branded” commodity for sale at a market. We also know that those most responsible for bringing us to this point have to be removed from power and replaced by democracy. Echoing the opening quote, it is time for the truly radical to so convince those remaining in despair.That is our only hope, and it should be no secret anymore.

Fake Protest vs. Real Change

"The brutal way in which America's hardest-working folks were historically forced to internalize the values of a gangster capitalist class continues to elude the left, which, with few exceptions, understands not a thing about how this political and economic system has hammered the humanity of ordinary working people."


                    -----Joe Bageant, Deer Hunting With Jesus

The voters are speaking, and the urge-to-change is more evident on the political right than the so-called left. The Democrats are divided between the DLC and the Sandernistas over the issue of whether or not to revive and expand the New Deal, aka the "nanny state." The right is increasingly unified behind a USA-First agenda, which has no necessary conflict with a social democratic form of governance, though one wouldn't know this from the deep hostility that divides the Sanders and Trump campaigns.

The Democratic primaries are a contest between "socialist" Sanders and Wall Street's Clinton, while on the Republican side voters are united in contempt for all establishment candidates. In short, the GOP base has escaped the control of party elites - hallelujah! whereas the Democrats continued to be a house divided against itself.  So what do these independent-minded Republicans want? If we count the Cruz and Trump voters together based on their similar stances on immigration, it is clear that a large majority of them wants (1) a border wall, (2) deportation for those here illegally, and (3) less immigration in the future.

This is a message the Republican establishment, the Clintonistas, and those feeling the Bern can't bear to even hear, much less intelligently do something about. In their minds, the immigration-phobes can only be motivated by racism, an ignorant and hateful unwillingness to welcome the great unwashed to America's shores, which is supposedly what our "nation of immigrants" should always be prepared to do. Never mind that real wages have been in stagnation or decline for a large majority of American workers for decades, and that white working class males are dying younger than their parents did due to the accumulated effects of outsourcing and mass immigration:  "Diversity" is self-evidently wonderful, and the more poor uneducated people there are here, the better.

It is deeply unfortunate that immigration is discussed as a racial rather than a class issue. For the plain fact is that the growth imperative behind capitalism is uprooting hundreds of millions of people all over the world and depositing them in alien surroundings, occasioning fear and resentment in communities that experience their presence as a loss of local control. As the world heads for a human population of ten or twelve billion, even a low growth rate - two or three percent - promises to deliver a forced diversification of human communities in the next few decades that will be simply unendurable, no matter what people's personal attitudes about ethnicity and race may be. In short, the owners of the system need perpetual mass immigration on an ever expanding scale, but the workers who sustain the system cannot indefinitely endure falling wages, rising underemployment, and endemic ethnic conflict stemming from capitalism's permanently rootless existence. Something has to give.

At the moment Donald Trump is the prime beneficiary of voter anger at Washington's acquiescence in the cheap labor economy, as his criticism of job-destroying free trade treaties is hitting home with laid-off blue collar workers. Apparently lost on anti-Trump protesters is the fact that Bernie Sanders and Trump have a very similar message for these workers: Washington elites don't care about you and have let you down. Unfortunately, however, there is no chance at all of the two candidates' constituencies finding common ground, as identity politics trumps class consciousness at every turn.  At the moment the most militant Trump opponents have somehow convinced themselves that insulting Trump supporters and invading their rallies is the best way to get political traction for their cause. The predictable consequence is that they get their lights punched out, while Trump the shameless remains unshamed. How this is supposed to expand the ranks for progressive reform is anybody's guess.

Meanwhile, the ideology of victimhood becomes ever more absurd. A New Jersey Board of Education punished a child for criticizing vegetarianism to a vegetarian classmate because overtly disapproving of vegetarianism is bullying! Beware of microaggressions, which lead directly to genocide.

Or how about the brave social justice warriors at UC Davis, who accused the campus student government of "fat shaming" and "culturally appropriating the traditions of the Japanese people" for renting out two sumo suits for an annual campus block party.

“My overall impression is that this conversation is in itself an expression of white-supremacist anti-Asian structural racism,” student Scott Tsuchitani told The California Aggie. “Asian Americans are treated as mute, hapless victims, devoid of agency, a.k.a. the ‘model minority’ stereotype. That is what is being re-inscribed by this conversation.”

Student Phil Jones, shocked at the student government's insensitivity towards overweight students on campus, demanded financial reimbursement for the emotional distress.

Such is "protest" in our degraded era. At the moment, Trump, the demagogic master of reality TV, is more than up to the challenge posed by the perpetually aggrieved.

Market Forces - Class Conflicts = Democracy’s Defeat

Market Forces - Class Conflicts = Democracy’s Defeat

America’s history of subjugation, slaughter and enslavement of  “red skin” Indians and “black skin” Africans by more economically powerful and better armed “white skin” Europeans may be the root of a most malevolent superstition that still has believers in the mythology of racially superior and inferior peoples. It may be in the tradition of older biblical tales of special people favored over all others, these brought about by suffering which could only be rationalized by myths about a god offering reward in the hereafter to whoever suffered most in the here and now. But such gross reductionism in the American tradition brought up to date would have a hateful slack jawed moron with a gun being racially superior to a loving brilliant person without one, or a brutal, drooling sex fiend rapist racially superior to a kind and innocent victim.
Simple gradations in human skin tones have everything to do with our different geographic and genetic origins but absolutely nothing to do with the social, political and economic construct we’ve been taught to believe makes us different races.
The most profound and meaningful difference among members of the human race is that of sex, without which there would be no human race. But African, European or Asian men are not only the same sex but also the same race, as are Nigerian, Italian or Vietnamese women. Still, you’d have a tough time convincing most of us, especially in the U.S.A., since we’ve been divided & and conquered by our rulers for so long that we all but have to identify as one or another minority in order to band together to achieve some alleged equality, often only in our minds. But we have reached a point at which continued belief in racial and other socio-ethnic division only plays into the hands of the most powerful economic minority of all, which becomes more falsely multi-racial, multi-ethnic and multi –cultural in its employment policies as wealth skews up to it more unequally than ever.
While identity politics play greater roles in the divisions that prevent democracy, some members of supposed minorities become stock holders in corporate capital’s upper professional and leadership classes while those lower on the economic spectrum continue suffering the slings, arrows, bullets and bombs that come from the same power sources always rewarding some at the expense of others. Our system of private profit for some only at public loss for the many has maintained for generations, most recently with the added fiction that there is strength in accepting the role of a minority within the minority, accepting affirmative success by acting as such, and thereby making a better living and sometimes idealistically thinking others will be helped by such individually allowed affirmation once it is wrapped in the social packaging of equality-for-all rhetoric.
Unequal wages paid to men and women is one of the glaring economic injustices that draws attention and should, but without forgetting that women who are unemployed or not professional bear burdens worse than making less money than men. The skin tone racial wage disparities in the marketplace are even more unjust, but again, increasing-equalizing the paycheck size of a female or “person-of-color” in the professional class does little or nothing for those reduced to working class lives with no hopes of achieving professionalism and worse, those who suffer the injustice and deprivation of poverty, an absolute necessity in an economy of profit for only some, with increasing loss for most.
 A higher minimum wage for all workers is far more socially beneficial than improved rewards for a minority of better paid people in some cases already somewhat privileged if only in lesser evil terms. Affirming some supposed minority members of society with college educations while continuing to negate, deny and treat with bigotry all those with no chance of such professional achievement is, unfortunately, not only the rule but accepted and passionately protected as a socially liberal concept. This anti-social political economic arrangement is strengthened by recruiting a leadership class from relatively privileged sectors of the out-groups who then convince their less privileged members to maintain the system since someday they too may rise to a higher economic level simply by mastering minority market forces and forgetting about majority rule democracy.
This helps maintain the glaring inequities of a system which threatens all of humanity, in a truly global sense, while most of that humanity is controlled and manipulated into accepting social organization which works against the best interests of the human race, and not just one or another supposed minority of it, however blatantly discriminatory things may be or seem in a selective, personal way. From that standpoint, people are manipulated into believing privilege is enjoyed only by those slightly above their own economic level, while blatant inequality allows incredible wealth to pile up for a real and tiny minority while great majorities are kept in needless, often violent competition among themselves.
For example:
400 U.S. billionaires have more wealth than 197 million Americans combined. Twenty of them - 20! - have more than 150 million people. Rest assured that there is ample “minority” representation among the 197 and 150 million but they – we – represent a majority if we ever demand and exercise democracy, which is why we are mind managed and consciousness controlled into acting like minorities.
In a nation in which so few have amassed such fantastic wealth – and most innumerate citizens cannot fathom a billion, let alone billions – at the latest count there are 46 million of us who are poor. What might a judgmental, righteous and vengeful god, favored by many biblical believers, do to such a people and society?
We Americans owe more than $940 million in credit card debt, $1.3 billion in student loans and $13.8 billion in mortgages. Who do we owe it to? Mostly to those 400 billionaires and their professional servant class. If that is democracy, then cancer is good health. And according to the rules of capital and private profit, much about cancer is a sign of financial health; it is a multi billion-dollar industry.
Last year cancer pharmaceuticals crossed the billion-dollar mark in sales and in economic truth, a cure for cancer would represent staggering loss for the industry. Not only oncologists but also thousands of workers in the drug, therapy, medical, therapeutic, home care, wheel chair, and countless other businesses related to such severe illness would be unemployed. That crippling diseases exist and need to be fought and controlled is one thing, but that they are profit creators in a market place without morals, where weapons, housing, pet food, clothing, autos, bombs, cosmetics and everything and anything else are sent to the market to create profit by being sold only to those who can afford them is great for the minority that profits, but deadly for the majority that carries the financial, political and moral burden of loss.


The social disease of capitalism has created a financial, environmental, moral, intellectual and philosophic form of cancer that can only be cured by democratic restructuring of the political economic system. That cannot come about in a divided population, which is why rulers work to keep it that way. We are forced into fictional combat over allegedly shrinking resources while a small group consumes incredible amounts of the earth’s wealth as that consumption pattern brings about a dangerous ecological condition that threatens all and not just some of humanity.
And humanity, we need to learn or remember before it’s too late, is neither hyphenated, color-coded nor a marketplace product available for sale. At least it shouldn’t be. Our class needs to come to attention, focus on our problem and work to solve it before the divisions we have been physically and mentally forced into help to destroy not just the school or the educational system but the entire society in which they function. The majority democratic forces of the people must control the market before minority control brings the global mall of weapons, war and needless consumer waste provoked by psycho-neurotic controlled needs crashing down on all our heads.

U.S. Elections May End All Life on Earth; Details Below

Rubio, Cruz, denounce Trump as "racist, misogynist, genocidal xenophobe" who is leading the GOP to  "total disaster;" pledge to "support him 100%" if he's nominated.

Sanders slams "my friend" Hillary Clinton for "drowning the Middle East in ocean of blood" and "empowering Wall Street financiers to destroy U.S.;" promises "unconditional support" if she succeeds in buying the Democratic nomination.

All mental hospitals in Israel to close; Jewish Institute of Mental Health claims concept is "meaningless"  in nation that talks only of "who to incinerate next."

Hillary Clinton proposes Medicare For All who invade Russia to topple Putin regime. Trump sticks by his "something terrific" plan to replace Obama Care.

GOP presidential candidates found to be infected by Zika; virus shrunk Republican brains while leaving normal-sized skulls intact. Trump insists there is "no problem" with size of his thinking organ.

President of International Congress of War Refugees calls for Hillary Clinton to win U.S. presidency. "The destruction of all we know and love" would be handled more humanely by a woman, Ima Dunce tells the New York Times.

Brave, Bold, Courageous, Angry American Speaks Out

What is happening to this great and wonderful and exceptional nation? How can the greatest country in the history of map making allow this fiendish monster to not only dominate our Tv screens and newspaper headlines but threaten to become president of this greatest country ever in history not counting ancient Rome, Greece, Egypt or other empires too old to really matter compared to this one?
This rhetorical nazi, racist, sexist language spouting rich ego maniac may be the darling of nazi, racist, sexist language spouting working class and poorly educated unwashed stupid dopey moronic people who actually run this country and secretly own it, but we americans who stand for truth, justice, common decency and loving our pets while thousands live in the streets will not stand for this madness! And I for one declare here and now that if is this vile filthy pig is elected I will take my family and move to Russia or China or Mexico, where the free market will afford us the opportunities that were our heritage in the old America. The one we cherish and love and honor and get tears in our eyes when we think about it, or something.
You know, the one before this beastly monster and his rhetoric made us all ashamed. The one that drove the Indians off their homelands, slaughtered them if they resisted, and put them in concentration camps called reservations so it sounded like they were going to dinner. That great originator of freedom and justice that brought Africans over in chains so that their labor could be used to build a mighty fortress of agricultural capital in the south that we had to destroy in a civil war to relocate as industrial capital up north. That great nation that saved the world from evil fascism or communism or some other really bad thing by blowing up much of europe and Asia, especially Germany, Japan, Korea and Viet Nam, and did it unselfishly, with little or no concern for the young men and women who had to die in order to perform the slaughter of millions. How can we let this filthy demonic Trump creature destroy that with his nasty rhetoric? Even as we continue doing it in the Middle East, as always, saving the lives of thousands by murdering millions?
I’m asking all Americans of good conscience, all decent people who employ cheap immigrant labor to pick our crops, bus our tables, clean our houses, take care of our kids, do our gardening, and work cheaper than ungrateful americans who used to do that stuff, to come together and buy tickets to other countries if this monster somehow gets the slack-jawed dumbo majority – you know, the ones that elected Reagan, Clinton, Bush, Obama and them  - to make an even dumber choice.
We can create a newer, greater America in some foreign country that will be like the old one, only better. It will be much easier for us to get rid of lower forms of humans than it was in the past, and if we’re careful we can rid ourselves of all stupidity, venality, immorality and other stuff that will help us rise to an even higher form of the master race of self chosen people we were, before this vicious creator of filth, hate, racism and sexism came along.
It’s not too late. Check out our fundraising site online, send all the money you’ve got, and join this effort to save our nation from the deepest, darkest threat ever in the history of consciousness controlled creation of demonic individuals to take people’s minds off the need to change corrupt and murderous social systems. Join the real conspiracy for humanity, give us your money, stick a false flag up your ass and join the parade for freedom!

Sanders, Social Democracy, and Socialism

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In this year of the outsider, voters are flocking to Trump and Sanders, and, though there is a long way to go, it's not impossible that both corporate parties will see their voting bases in full revolt. Let us hope so.</span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Extreme imperialist Hillary Clinton is particularly unappealing in her identity politics quest to be the first woman president of the U.S. While Donald Trump calls Vladimir Putin a genuine leader and trusts in his negotiator skills to deal with him, Clinton regards him as the personification of evil and eagerly courts WWIII to put him in his place. On Sanders, her sound bite of the moment is that she agrees with his "democratic socialist" analysis, but as an experienced politician "knows how to do it" (i.e., reign in Wall Street), better than the (allegedly) utopian dreamer Sanders. Given her $200,000 lecture fees on the Wall Street circuit, and the avalanche of corporate money inundating her campaign coffers, it's not a very convincing claim.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Meanwhile, the corporate media seem to have lost themselves in the Bermuda Triangle of spin vis-a-vis Sanders, eager to find some means of discrediting his surging campaign, then simply lapsing into silence at their inability to do so. This is the common fate of New Deal holdovers like Jerry Brown (1992) Dennis Kucinich (2004) and Jesse Jackson (1988). They are either slandered or rendered invisible by non-coverage. Such contemptuous treatment extends to populists of the right as well. When libertarian Ron Paul finished second in the 2008 Nevada primary, the corporate media reported the first place finisher and the third place finisher, but ignored Paul.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Although Sanders supporters may not know it, their candidate didn't necessarily win the New Hampshire primary in terms of delegate count. There are hundreds of "super-delegates" in the party that do not even have to consider the primary results in deciding whom to support, and the vast majority are in Hillary Clinton's pocket at the moment. These are Democratic Party elites, not average Joes, and very subject to the crackpot realist philosophy alleging that liberal populists like Sanders "can't win" a general election. After the tie in Iowa and the 22-point Sanders rout in New Hampshire, Clinton has nearly four hundred delegates and Sanders around forty. It's actually possible for her to lose every primary from now on and still take the nomination via her control of the super-delegates. But according to what Jeffrey St. Clair calls "the Sandernistas," the super-delegates will shift their allegiance to Sanders once they see how popular and inspiring he is. Sure. This ignores the fact that the super-delegates were invented precisely to ward off liberal populists like Sanders. Do we really think it's an accident that the Democratic Party has collaborated extensively in the erosion of the New Deal for the last forty years?  </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist, but there is really nothing socialist about him, which is not to say he is undeserving of support. Sanders stands for a deepened and expanded New Deal, which was slandered by FDR's enemies as "socialism," though it never was that. FDR claimed his achievement was to have restored the capitalist system after the 1929 collapse, and he accused the rich of ingratitude for his efforts. This is quite correct.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 10.0pt;">As for socialism, if it means anything, it means the workers are in charge of the economy, primarily by deciding what to to with the economic surpluses their labor generates. This would entail a fundamental restructuring of society, with corporate boards replaced by worker committees, which would be free to create a radically different society. Sanders is clearly not calling for this. Tellingly, Sanders backer Robert Reich (Labor Secretary under Bill Clinton) has a new book out entitled "Saving Capitalism." That is precisely what the Sanders campaign seeks to do.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 10.0pt;">The social democracy advocated by Sanders and Reich has been proven to work elsewhere (Scandinavia), though it does not do away with the divide between wealth-makers and wealth-takers, i.e. social classes. To his credit, Sanders wants to reduce inequality, though apparently without realizing that "inequality" is the wrong term to describe the relationship between a parasite and its host. A fungus and a blighted potato do not have an unequal relationship, they have a parasitic relationship, and there's no way to end up with a healthy potato without eliminating the fungus. The big banks and insurance companies are the "fungus." They produce nothing of any value to society, merely reproduce diseased social relations. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Yes, we can reduce the extent of the fungus, and should, which is what Sanders wants to do. But we should be clear that social and economic health require that the body politic be fungus-free. Would you trust a doctor that said the best treatment for cancer is to keep a "balance" between healthy cells and cancer cells, in order to take advantage of the "dynamism" of cancer? This is the liberal line on capitalism. It's a crock. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><br /><br /><br />

The Donald Trumps Political Correctness Again

The dissing of Donald Trump was dealt another blow on Tuesday as the maverick billionaire registered 35% support in an eight-candidate race in the New Hampshire Republican primary, this after winning 42% support in a CNN national poll just prior to the Iowa caucus the week before. His continued popularity is said to be reflective of racist, sexist, and even Nazi ideas finding favor with stupid voters, in contrast to his establishment rivals, whose lesser support derives from their principled promotion of (try not to gag) a sensible consensus. 

Although we can't support his candidacy, we at Legalienate do not accept that Trump's popularity lacks all logical basis or is somehow unreflective of democracy. It's perfectly logical and also democratic in that it is going AGAINST what the establishment media and candidates are saying is right and true and so, and has had Trump at or near the top of state and national polls for over seven months, in spite of continuously negative media attention. The logic of his support may be superficial, but it is hardly senseless.  Everyone knows that the American people have been told forever that the U.S. "is the greatest country in the world," while at the same time it can no longer be denied that the American middle class is in substantial decline, which means to most people that the U.S. is no longer the greatest country in the world. So Trump the billionaire comes along and says he can restore the U.S. to "greatness." He doesn't need a lot of specifics right now because his rivals are the ones who have been instrumental in assaulting the middle class, which Trump has not been. So the initial logic for his support is that at least he's not a conventional politician reciting sound bites someone else has crafted in order to manipulate the electorate. As for democratic support, on immigration there is strong democratic sentiment against continuing to let in millions of largely poor, uneducated people without legal documents, and letting in millions more with documents, but with all of the hassles and problems that mass immigration entails in a time of middle class decline, and with no end in sight. Again, Trump doesn't need specifics, since he is the only candidate independent enough to even raise the issue of there being social costs to mass immigration. (Who knew?)

 The establishment's inability to do anything other than cry "racist" or "misogynist" or some other politically correct pejorative at this tells everyone else that power has no answers to popular concerns, and is in fact contemptuous of them in this and many other cases. That neither deserves nor is it likely to win majority support in a time of rising political discontent.

Vote As The Class You Are, Not The Race You Aren’t

As the incumbent occupier of subsidized housing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue works on his legacy by fending off mad dogs of the neo-zio-con right and still bringing us closer to provoking war with Russia, a seemingly eternal presidential race for the next tenant continues while the nation passes through a critical period of confusion, disinformation and social-economic disorder. All this is part of the divide and rule politics to reinforce the weakening foundation of a political economic structure that threatens a global as well as national population if it ever collapses.
Bernie Sanders’ candidacy offers some hope for reform that will make things as humane as social democratically controlled capitalism was back in the days of FDR and the New Deal. This means better for some but only at the expense of most, with the groups showing profit and loss undergoing some degrees of change. Exercising more control of banks and corporations while offering a higher minimum wage and lower cost education and health care can almost seem nirvana in the face of damnation, but a victory for Sanders may actually help the nation survive long enough to initiate a second phase of truly revolutionary change in the system and not just some of its aspects. But many divisive old myths and newer fables about capitalism and democracy will have to be confronted and dealt with if that is to happen. Among them:
That “people of color” are all members of the 1%, or at least seem so to those who think raising the minimum wage and lowering the cost of education and health care only offer help to “people of no color”. Those who subscribe to this belief often entertain the nearly demented notion that great power in America somehow accrues to working “people of no color” who do not have college degrees, whose jobs have vanished, whose income has declined, who’ve seen taxes, crime and immigration increase, social costs rise, public budgets cut, and income inequality assume epic proportions. Particularly guilty in this group, according to many with incomes, college degrees and enough financial security to afford being judgmental of others, are religious Christians, with evangelicals being the worst and most disrespected of all.
This segment of the population is often stigmatized as enjoying “white privilege”- shared along with other “whites” like Warren Buffet, Donald Trump, Bill Gates and some homeless woman sleeping under a bridge - or worse, mounting in racist opposition to social change as a result of losing this alleged privilege to working “people of color”, with college degrees.
Such notions are especially popular among beneficiaries of marketplace trickle down success through commercial gentrification, cheap labor immigration and all other profits-for-some-at-loss-for-most policies. Many upper middle-professional class members of society who truly wish for a more just nation are either helpless to, totally incapable of, or have little desire to confront real power or create social transformation beyond electing one or another member of their class to represent their interests on the board, the council, the congress or at the White House. And that class includes more multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-racial and gender fluid people than ever before. Hooray?
Scapegoating those who have less but are not quite poor only makes sense to the innocently thoughtless or those most consciously responsible for maintaining a system that demands a social underclass in order to tolerate and rationalize a wealthy overclass.
An accompanying fable has it that privilege in America is awarded or denied almost exclusively by identity group membership, with special separatist labels assigned, as in designations of “gay” or “ Latino” or “white” or “black” or more up to date separatist euphemisms like people of color, some color, or no color. Of course we are treated by authority according to these separatist designations and need to initially respond as members of them, but if we continue living by those imposed restrictions we might as well become an opaque race of species fluid creatures who accept further reductionisms that maintain social divisions so the one minority with real power, the rich, can continue controlling an oligarchy and convincing its subjects they have a democracy by remaining in their proper roles as minorities.
Existing evils inflicted upon people negatively treated as minorities must be opposed and overcome, most obviously when they take innocent lives as when unarmed “black” men are shot down by police. But it must be understood that even before the movement called “Black Lives Matter”, some black lives mattered a hell of a lot more than others. Rest assured that few if any among the “Black Bourgeoisie” that has grown far beyond its number when Frazier wrote about it back in 1957, are likely to be shot in the back while fleeing a traffic stop for not having proper headlights or no license plates. If Lebron James or Bill Cosby or Beyonce or Denzel Washington were stopped by a cop it would more likely be for an autograph, but if there was any legal complication, lawyers and media would be on the scene very quickly to make sure justice would be served on their behalf.
Those who suffer the worst outrages of injustice, whether part of an alleged racial minority or not, are almost always among the lower, not higher, economic class.
In fact, when a past incident took place in which an upper class and famous African-American Academic was insulted at being mistaken for a burglar by a police officer – after a caller to the police advised he might be one – it became a national incident and ended up with the president inviting everyone over to the half-white house for a friendly chat over beer or coffee or whatever beverage was served. No such invitation has been extended to the next of kin of any of the black men recently murdered – not simply insulted, but murdered - by the police. This is class speaking more loudly than race, and that’s the way our rulers want it. And far too many of their servants accept it as long as the checks keep coming in and there is a group or cause to identify with that talks the proper talk, and then walks the proper walk. To the bank.
Under our political economic rules there is a very thin line between dedicated service to the people suffering injustice, and almost as dedicated service to perpetuating the system which creates the need for such service. Back in the 1960s, rising consciousness and anger at racism led to radical and even revolutionary demands for change. The most militant activists were often hired to administer government and private non-profit programs that maintained things as they were by helping out only some and not all, and soon they were derided as “poverty pimps” by many necessarily left out of programs that would only serve a relative few, in the interest of profits for even fewer. Many of those militants, just as now, were sincere about helping others, but they helped themselves first with paychecks offering entry to the middle class, and the system far more by rationalizing its limitations.
Even now, entertaining theatrics at the Super Bowl reduced some to being all a-twitter about the alleged political impact of a halftime performance in which dancers wore black berets, like the Black Panthers did in the 60s, forgetting that some of those Panthers died for being truly revolutionary, while their memory was to become a fashion-pop culture moment at a commercial orgy watched by millions who wouldn’t know a black panther from a blue dahlia. The sincerity and talents of the artist-performers was nice, and they got paid big money for dancing and singing at a national circus but nobody in the projects or the penitentiary will see a check for that performance, nor will the kin of dead black panthers likely be invited to the White House for a sympathetic chat over beer, or sangria.
According to some of the reductionist identity games played with the consciousness of Americans, we, or at least “Latinos” should be proud because not one but two wealthy “Latinos” are running for president in the republican primaries. Yippee. Better yet, an even more wealthy woman is in the democratic primaries and has already been coronated as first CEO of the empire to use the lady’s room and not the men’s room before giving orders to destroy one or another nation. Wowee, is this an exceptional nation, or what?
War, colonialism, racism, sexism and all the other categories of inhumanity still practiced and profitable to minorities must end if we are to have a future as a truly human race. Some parts of Islam have it that “there is no god but god” and that needs no science to be accepted by the faithful. But we need to learn the scientific, material fact that “there is no race but human” if we are to rise above the material horror of abuse of people and the environment in order to achieve benefit for a relatively tiny group at cost to the entire race. That is the root of our present dilemma, and we won’t solve our problem by continuing to go along with the program.
 Living in observance of hyphenated divisions among ourselves does not make us any different in the eyes of those who hate us for what our country does to them. “Terrorists” who attack us do not observe identity politics beyond the identity we share, whether we understand it, like it, accept it, or not. We are Americans who pay the price for what a minority exercises in policy while we argue among ourselves over which of us should be affirmed this cycle, and which should be forgotten. Democracy means majority rule with respect for the minority, not what we have under capital, which is minority rule with contempt for the majority. Vote for what may make us a materially better, stronger and democratic human race. You owe it to your racial brothers and sisters, and our future depends on it.

Room for Debate: Which States Should Vote First in the Primaries?

No contest.

Israel.

Putin 'Probably Approved' Litvinenko Poisoning, British Inquiry Says

The British Inquiry also mentioned the probability of Jesus Christ being an irish catholic trans-sexual, world war two starting over a gambling debt incurred by Hitler, and capitalism as having originated when two cave men made a deal swapping their wives for dogs, with one gaining an extra set of breasts.