Michael K. Smith's Blog, page 7

Jay Bhattacharya To Head Up NIH? Think Again.

President-elect Donald Trump is said to be considering Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to head up the National Institute for Health. Bhattacharya was one of the three sponsors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated achieving herd immunity by letting the non-elderly continually re-infect each other at a time when there were still no Covid vaccines.

The Declaration was made public on October 4, 2020. It called for "focused protection" for "the vulnerable" and for everyone else (who the authors falsely claimed were not vulnerable) to "live their lives normally," until herd immunity was reached, which they anticipated would be in "three to six months." In other words, immunity would be built up by surviving infection (except for those who died) while the elderly population would be segregated and granted "focused protection."

In a rare reference to specifics, Bhattacharya claimed that hotel rooms were a possible site where the elderly could safely wait out the pandemic. At the time he made the suggestion, there were fifty-five million Americans over sixty-five and 5.3 million hotel rooms in the United States. #1 In other words, if focused protection had been implemented it would have required housing more than ten elderly people in each hotel room. But it was never a serious plan, and those under 65 did not rush to resume normal lives upon hearing the Declaration. #2

Although the Great Barrington Declaration was original - stopping a pandemic by allowing mass infection had never been tried before - it was profoundly counter-intuitive. #3 Nevertheless, Bhattacharya doubled down on its claim that COVID was only dangerous for the elderly throughout the remainder of the pandemic, while predicting that the virus would disappear. #4 Almost five years later, it still hasn't.

Bhattacharya said early on about Covid that "it's probably about as deadly as the flu," and estimated that fewer than 40,000 Americans would die of it. #5

But, apart from the 1918 flu pandemic, flu has never come close to killing the 1.2 million people in two years that Covid ended up killing in the U.S. in 2020-21. #6

Bhattacharya said that the elderly could use Insta-Cart to get food without risking infection, but this was hardly a serious proposal. Instantly delivering food to tens of millions of elderly people would have been a colossal undertaking, and Bhattacharya treated it as though it were a minor errand. The Great Barrington Declaration offered no plan on how the over 65 population could be segregated and fed for months on end. It was just a talking point, reflecting hope that someone else might be able to figure out how to accomplish it. No one did.

Bhattacharya pronounced it unethical to make children wear masks for the benefit of adults, but found deliberately infecting tens of millions of children with Covid for the benefit of those same adults fine and dandy. #6 While the pandemic raged, he repeatedly announced that Covid had been "defanged."#7

Two weeks after the Delta variant became the dominant Covid strain, Bhattacharya announced on Facebook (on July 26, 2021) that "we have protected the vulnerable by vaccinating the older population." But in short order people were dropping like flies and Florida hospitals had to order mobile morgues to deal with Covid-19 death overflow. #8

At the time of Bhattacharya's announcement, fewer than half of Floridians were vaccinated and the state had the highest COVID death rate among the country's six most populated states. Three weeks later AARP reported that "Florida led the nation in nursing home resident and staff deaths in the four weeks ending August 22." And the non-elderly were hardly safe, either, as Bhattacharya repeatedly claimed. A Kaiser Family Foundation analysis reported that during the Delta and Omicron waves (August 2021 - February 2022), COVID was the second leading cause of death in the age cohort 35-54. #9

On September 9, 2021 a POLITICO headline read, "Child COVID Deaths More Than Doubled in Florida as Kids Returned to the Classroom." #10 Countries that let the virus run rampant had higher all-cause mortality than New Zealand, an island country that had a zero COVID policy from the beginning. Even Bhattacharya had to concede this: "New Zealand's strategy delayed the inevitable spread of COVID throughout the population to a time after the development, testing and deployment of a vaccine capable of reducing the burden of severe COVID disease . . ..New Zealand has a tiny proportion of the U.S.'s COVID-attributable deaths per capita."

If the United States had followed New Zealand's COVID strategy, hundreds of thousands fewer Americans would have died of the disease. #11 Nevertheless, Bhattacharya felt that New Zealand had no right to protect its people with "lockdown" when so many other countries just let people die unnecessarily. In fact, he thought that New Zealand was "immoral" for not letting more people get infected before vaccines were available to protect them.

Bhattacharya and his fellow authors of the Great Barrington Declaration (Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta) presented no scientific evidence and made no real effort to argue their case. They simply started from the premise that abandoning public health measures was good for everyone because it was good for business, and made a series of assertions consistent with that outcome. They made no mention of any public health measures to contain the disease. Again, this was because they assumed against evidence and common sense that mass infection was a benefit to be pursued, not a negative outcome to be avoided until vaccines arrived.

The Great Barrington Declaration policy was to deliberately sacrifice human life for the sake of "the economy." This herd immunity strategy drew scathing criticism from the world's premier public health organizations. On October 15, 2020 the British medical journal The Lancet condemned the policy as "a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence." #13 An earlier denunciation was issued by seventeen leading public health organizations, including the Big Cities Health Coalition and the American Public Health Association: "If followed, the recommendations in the Great Barrington Declaration would haphazardly and unnecessarily sacrifice lives. The declaration is not a strategy, it is a political statement. It ignores sound public health expertise." #14

Bhattacharya likes to complain about the "laptop class" shutting everything down during Covid. But he is a tenured professor at Stanford, a laptop class member if there ever was one, and he advocated a do-nothing approach that would have killed far more than the horrifying 1.2 million deaths the U.S. endured in 2020-21.

Just say "no" to a big role for Jay Bhattacharya in public health.

Notes:

#1 Howard, p. 124, 130

#2 Howard, 121

#3 Howard, 112

#4 Howard, p. 118

#5 Uncommon Knowledge, April 21, 2020, Howard, p. 127, 187

#6 Howard, p. 127, 187

#7 Howard, p. 131

#8 Howard, p. 198

#9 Howard, p. 446n.

#10 Howard, p. 113-14, 119

#11 800,000 fewer according to Dr. Johnathan Howard. (Howard, p. 165)

#12 Howard, p. 165

#13 Blake, ed. CCCW, 310

#14 Blake, ed. (CCCW, 311)

Sources:

“The Fight Against Covid-19: An Update FromDr. Jay Bhattacharya,” Uncommon Knowledge, April 21, 2020

Jonathan Howard MD, "We Want Them Infected, - How The Failed Quest For Herd Immunity Led Doctors To Embrace The Anti-Vaccine Movement and Blinded Americans to the Threat of COVID," (Redhawk, 2023)

Evan Blake, ed., "Covid, Capitalism and Class War - A Social and Political Chronology of the Pandemic," (Mehring Books, 2020)

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Published on November 19, 2024 15:31

Capitalism and Mass Migration

The immigration wars are surging again, with mutual accusations of "soft on crime" and "racist" (and worse) being hurled by uncomprehending elites in conflict because of a shared commitment to fondling our economic private parts, which is the source of our immigration problems in the first place.

Democrats want our southern border to resemble a state-of-the-art day care center with a welcome mat out front. Republicans prefer it to look like a concentration camp. Immigrants don't care what it looks like, as long as it leads them to a life without the violence and poverty they are desperately fleeing.

The Wall Street Journal has disclosed that president-elect Donald Trump is elaborating plans to carry out mass deportations once he assumes office on January 20, 2025. Trump advisers are debating what executive actions need to be taken as well as how to finance the operation, which is anticipated to cost around $88 billion a year.

It is likely that Trump will revoke an order given by the Biden administration that ICE not pursue undocumented immigrants who have not committed other offenses, in order to concentrate first on those who have been issued final deportation orders by the courts, as well as those who have criminal charges or convictions against them.

Trump has promised to end the practice of letting foreigners who want to live and work in the United States arrange an appointment over the internet, without having to present themselves at the U.S. border, while also reviving immigration protocols from his first term like Stay In Mexico, which obliged asylum applicants to wait in Mexico for an official response to their application, a dangerous option due to high crime rates there.

Trump maintains that there is no alternative to mass deportation because wave after wave of murderers and drug traffickers are allegedly destroying the U.S. and other countries, too. Whatever it costs, he says, it must be done.

According to Trump adviser Jason Miller, the president-elect doesn't even need an act of Congress to go back to building his border wall and making the asylum process more difficult than it is right now.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the incoming Trump administration intends to eliminate the humanitarian protection against deporting millions of immigrants on TPS - "temporary provisional status" - which currently covers hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Venezuelans living in the country.

Representative Chip Roy, D-Texas, believes that Trump should ignore TPS protection because it was granted in an illegal way.

Trump argues that an aggressive deportation effort is needed in order to get the U.S. back on track after the arrival of what he claims are eight million illegal immigrants during the Biden years.

According to experts, restricting further the already limited ways of entering the U.S. legally will only make immigrants change their plans and rely even more on human-traffickers to get them into the U.S. Millions of real and potential migrants from desperately poor regions of the world will be those most affected, many of them already on the way to the U.S., having sold everything they owned to finance their voyage to fulfilling "the American Dream."

One fundamental contradiction plaguing the immigration situation is that migrants fleeing horrendous economic conditions are hoping to prove they qualify for asylum status in the U.S., which is generally reserved for those whose lives are in danger due to ethnic, racial, or religious persecution. In most cases, they are unable to do this, but the U.S. "catch and release" system allows them to remain in the country while U.S. immigration courts work their way through an immense backlog of similar cases in order to get to theirs. In fact, knowing that they are likely to lose in court, most do not even show up for their court dates, having already gotten what they came for - access to working in the U.S. economy.

Democrats tend to see immigration policy as a vast humanitarian relief program that just incidentally provides them with a wide range of cheap services (jobs Americans "just won't do" because they are vastly under-compensated), while Republicans regard it as a national security challenge - to repel a tsunami of human garbage from "shit-hole countries."

As the late economist Edward Herman pointed out years ago, Washington pursues what he called a "favorable investment climate" throughout what used to be known as the Third World in order to maintain high-repression governments presiding over low-wage economies, yielding an impressive flow of profits back to the U.S.. It is no coincidence that people flee this kind of exploitation by migrating to where the money is.

This is a problem that cannot be solved by police, soldiers, or turning the government into a welfare agency.

Source:

"Trump Opens The Way For Mass Deportation," La Jornada (Spanish), November 18, 2024

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Published on November 18, 2024 20:26

DNC: "Nothing Will Fundamentally Change"; Voters: "Wanna Bet?"

Only a quarter of the U.S. population thinks the country is on the right track, and a big part of the reason is the steady erosion of the middle class. The bottom forty percent of income earners now account for twenty percent of all spending while the richest twenty percent account for forty percent. This is the widest gap on record and is likely to widen further according to Oxford Economics, a consultancy firm. Sixty percent of Americans live from paycheck to paycheck, spending so much on essentials that they can't spend on travel or meals out. Joyless survival appears to be the new "American Dream."

Source: "It's Trump," Novara Live, You Tube, November 6, 2024

According to exit polls 35% of voters felt democracy is threatened in the United States. Those voters favored Trump 53%-46%.

Source: Jeffrey St. Clair, "Chronicle of a Defeat Foretold" Counterpunch, November 6, 2024

Concern about the high cost of food, housing, gasoline, and medical care, and an effective anti-immigrant message carried Trump to victory.

He won increased support in almost every segment of the population. He won forty-five percent of the Latino vote, the highest portion in fifty years for a Republican. Among Latino men, he won fifty-three percent, a ten point gain compared to 2020. Twenty percent of black men voted for Trump, double the corresponding figure from 2020.

Source: "Trump Fascist Threat Materializes" La Jornada (Spanish), November 7, 2024

Turnout was 64.5%, so more than a third of the country, the poorest part of the electorate, still sees no advantage in going to the polls. And they are correct. Poverty can't even be discussed in American politics, much less eliminated by intelligent social policy.

Source: "Congress and the Supreme Court Under Republican Control," La Jornada (Spanish), November 6, 2024

When all of Biden's pandemic relief efforts were still in place, the president's approval rating hit 57%, the highest of his presidency. After he abruptly terminated such efforts and post-pandemic inflation kicked in, his approval rating dropped twenty points. Biden tried to cure inflation with austerity, which didn't work. Child poverty doubled. These are the programs that Biden took away: eviction and foreclosure bans, expanded and prolonged unemployment benefits, expanded child tax credit, expanded Earned Income Tax Credit for low income earners, free school meals, extra SNAP benefits, Medicaid expansion, a pause in student loan collections, child care provider grants, and WIC increase (nutrition support for women and young children). Meanwhile, the Pentagon budget reached nearly a trillion dollars ($953 billion).

Food insecurity has increased 40% since 2021, with over 42 million Americans now food insecure.

As American purchasing power ebbed away, Democrats lost whatever chance they had had to win the elections.

Sources: David Doel, "Charts Clearly Explain Why Trump Won," The Rational National, November 11, 2024. Left Reckoning (podcast), "Two Charts That Explain Kamala Harris' Loss To Trump," You Tube November 9, 2024

Donald Trump gained electoral ground in forty-eight out of the fifty states, all except for Utah and Washington. Almost every demographic group supported him, including white suburban women, with notable gains coming from Generation X men and racial minorities, plus overwhelming support from rural areas. As inventive as they are in excuse-making, it will be difficult for Democratic elites to blame James Comey or Vladimir Putin this time around.

Trump out-performed every other Republican candidate and is effectively the King of American politics. The neo-liberal era is dead, killed by Trump, not Bernie Sanders, whose attempt to revive the New Deal roots of the Democratic Party was crushed by the party's own leaders. Sanders's constituency - the working poor - has fled the Democrats. But when both Trump's and Sanders' "populism" were in play, that demographic favored Sanders more than Trump.

Hillary Clinton painted Sanders as racist and sexist, a one-issue candidate, that issue being economics, which just happens to be the heart of politics. Breaking up the big banks won't end racism and sexism, HRC lectured us. This is the kind of idiocy we regularly get from "the most qualified candidate" in history.

While Kamala Harris told the world she couldn't think of a single change she would make to Joe Biden's policies, Trump provided an explanation of all that needs to be done to "make America great again": deport illegal immigrants, raise tariffs, and bring back industry to the United States. Something beats nothing every time, and there's no point in blaming voters.

Source: "Krystal and Saagar REACT: Trump LANDSLIDE Victory," Breaking Points, November 6, 2024

Harris out-fundraised Trump by nearly 5-to-1 in the final months of the campaign, collecting nearly a billion dollars in record time.

Source: Alison Durkee, "Trump vs. Harris Fundraising," Forbes, November 4, 2024

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Published on November 12, 2024 21:59

Trump Is The Wrecking Ball Come To Destroy Fake Democracy - If We Survive, Real Democracy May Emerge From The Ruins

For the third election in a row Donald Trump's electoral support continues to rise, most notably from white women and ethnic minorities, who the High Priestesses of Identity Politics tell us hate his guts. Given his growing success with these very groups and the American population in general, his presence at the center of American politics cannot be explained away as an aberration; in fact, Trump is the default setting for all those voters effectively expelled by the two-party duopoly, a large and growing number.

While they are loathe to admit it, the Pussy Hat brigades bear major responsibility for sustaining the Trump phenomenon for nine long years now, with now at least four more to come. When Bernie Sanders asked Elizabeth Warren to run for president in 2015, she told him she couldn't because she was beholden to Hillary Clinton. So Sanders ran instead, holding the social democrat banner high and proudly while mobilizing millions to the cause of reviving the New Deal as the center of Democratic Party politics. For his trouble he was tarred as a misogynist and his followers as despicable "Bernie Bros" who detest women. "Sisterhood" prevailed.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton worked assiduously to insure that Donald Trump would win the GOP nomination, as he would supposedly be the easiest Republican to beat. When Trump won the nomination and then defeated Hillary in the fall election, Hillary Inc. said it was an illegitimate and aberrant result and declared itself "the resistance" against Trumpian Evil.

In 2019, Hawaii Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard revealed that the Democratic National Committee had rigged the nomination against Sanders in 2016 and were turning the presidential debates into "commercialized reality television" in an effort to do it again in 2020. When Sanders threatened to surge to the Democratic Party nomination anyway, the DNC pulled out all the stops in favor of the doddering Joe Biden, a career Reagan Democrat in cognitive decline whose popularity with voters tended to plummet the more they got to know him. Warren's role was to ambush Sanders in a televised debate with the false accusation that the Vermont Senator had once told her that a woman could not be president of the United States. She remained in the race even after she had no path to the nomination, but just long enough to split the social-democratic vote with Sanders, so that Biden could gain momentum with a win in South Carolina.

The strategy worked. The DNC candidates united behind Biden, Sanders's momentum stalled, after which Covid surged even faster than his initial campaign had. Biden's handlers knew just what to do. They hid Biden in his basement, limited his public announcements to the absolute minimum, and let the pandemic steadily erode support for the Orange Menace. With no vaccines available until after the elections and Trump reduced to repeatedly announcing that the virus would miraculously disappear, the president went down to defeat while hundreds of thousands of Americans died.

In 2024, Biden refused to allow a party primary precisely so that voters would not be able to canvas the field of potential candidates and select the strongest one for a return match-up with Trump. He was the man for the job, no matter what anyone else might think, though his senile decline often left him with little idea as to his own whereabouts or what day of the week it might be.

After Biden's handlers had shielded Biden from public contact for years, they affected surprise at the first presidential debate when he was seen to be a vegetable before an audience of 51 million, gaping more in senility than indignation at Trump's toxic rants, which remained largely unrebutted by the obviously incapacitated Biden, who everyone could see was destined to lose the election.

Mama Bear Pelosi told Biden he would have to step aside in favor of his vice-president, Kamala Harris. Harris had zero democratic legitimacy, having soared to single digit support in the Democratic Primaries in 2020 and then withdrawn. All she had to offer was female genitalia and brown skin, but that was enough for the DNC. With deep economic pain etched into the political landscape throughout the country, Harris couldn't talk about jobs or production or really anything convincingly except abortion, which became the central policy theme. Though she obviously needed to distance herself from Biden's horrendous extermination policy in Palestine, she couldn't because that would require out-debating party hawks on the issue. (Try to imagine her out-arguing Hillary or Dick Cheney.)

The most obnoxious wing of the party reigned supreme (the DNC), and anyone concerned about anything other than abortion and waxing hysterical about Donald Trump were told they were helping "deplorables" (HRC) or "garbage" (Biden) and pushed out of the party.

Running solely on abortion-on-demand backfired. The electorate preferred Trump. Even fifty-two percent of white women, supposedly the natural constituency for the Democrats on abortion, voted against them. So did an increasing number of young people, Latinos, and blacks, for whom Trump is supposedly anathema.

Trump is the wrecking ball who destroyed the RINO's (Republicans In Name Only) in 2016 and now has defeated Identity Politics Inc. i.e., the Democratic Party, for the second time.

The job of the American people is to see that out of the wreckage of these two demolition jobs arises a real democracy, not just another angry toppling of sacred idols that leaves our political problems unaddressed and unresolved.

Sources:

"Tulsi Gabbard Threatens To Boycott Next Debate," Newsweek, October 10, 2019

Irami Osei-Frimpong, "White Women Delivered Trump 2024", The Funky Academic, November 7, 2024

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Published on November 07, 2024 16:36

Elections 2024 - Day of Civic Pride or National Horror Show?

At last the awful day is here. What to make of it?

The full-scale regional war in the Middle East has not broken out, rather a carefully choreographed exchange of attacks and reprisals continues to threaten that result while mass death has been limited to Gaza and Lebanon, all of it caused by Washington and Tel Aviv. Completely wedded to Jewish supremacy, neither Trump nor Harris will put a stop to it.

On war as a general issue, Trump at least articulates how awful it is, while Democrats distance themselves from the carnage and blindly embrace permanent war as the natural companion to a presumed eternally good USA. Trump is not averse to negotiating an end to the Ukraine war; in fact, he holds himself uniquely qualified to do so, whereas the Democrats will push more pointless death and destruction until Putin wins the war outright.

But Trump is hardly anti-war - he assassinated Iranian General Suleimani, vastly increased drone strikes, and fully backed the Saudi "genocide" on Yemen; nevertheless, he is also far from being compulsively pro-war as the Democrats are. On the other hand, he is thin-skinned, erratic, and impulsive, hardly the best qualities for the head of a nuclear state. He nearly touched off a nuclear war with North Korea before putting North-South peace negotiations on a positive footing. It would be nice to be able to get the second result without risking the first, but the (Dick Cheney) Democrats have blocked the possibility by re-classifying North Korea as part of the "axis of Evil."

The Democrats are said to be far preferable to Trump-Vance on domestic policy, but their decades-long support for offshoring production has made a mockery of any alleged commitment they have to workers and their families, who simply must have full-time jobs with good pay and benefits if American families, let alone communities, are to have any chance of flourishing. In practice, the Democrats are anti-family, as they direct ameliorative measures at children only after targeting the economic viability of their parents and communities for destruction. J. D. Vance has some idea about family, and has at least diagnosed the job problem correctly, whereas the Democrats are exclusively committed to professional success, remaining deaf to the appeals of labor, especially hard-hat labor, which is gravitating to the GOP. Vance has proposed $5000 a year per child in government support; Harris has proposed a one-time payment of $6000 per baby.

The decline of unions to a now puny six percent of the private sector workforce is a far more significant indicator of Democratic labor policy than composition of the National Labor Relations board. Harris is loathe to even discuss the issue of jobs, and the DNC only cares about professionals, not the vast majority of workers. Power and freedom are pre-requisites to the good life, but Democrats only dangle trivial bribes to mislead workers into embracing the "goods life," which leaves them permanently in debt, so without the ability to author autonomous lives. Meanwhile, Vance at least talks about wage subsidies, work, and production, essential topics in any full discussion of labor issues, which Democrats ignore in favor of their preferred policy of pricing the vast majority of the population out of housing, child care, medical care, university, and retirement. Their constituency is well-pensioned and enjoys ample private inheritance; it doesn't need to care about labor and it doesn't.

If the Democrats win, anti-war culture will disappear and the future will be war, war, war until the next election season, and then it will be abortion, abortion, abortion, but always as an electoral and fund-raising issue, never as a reasonable policy solution. Michelle Obama lectures men that they "owe more" to the women in their lives than voting for a third party or sitting the election out, because the right to an abortion is foundational. With all due respect for a woman's right to choose, Michelle Obama is the last person with moral standing to lecture on this issue. She did nothing to make sure her husband fulfilled his campaign promise to codify Roe V. Wade in law when he was elected president with a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress in 2008. Her clueless liberal earnestness is nauseating.

In any event, it is a sure bet that anyone with concerns about anti-family economics wedded to abortion on demand being a sinister fetal killing syndrome will be dismissed as a "misogynist," just as anyone with concerns about loss of community control when unauthorized immigrants flood particular areas is dismissed as a "racist." So expect more hysterical conflicts between "Christian nationalist racists" and satanic "globalists" while the private owners of the economy rake off more profits than they could spend in dozens of lifetimes.

On climate break-down, Trump is the absolute worst, blowing off the concern as a "hoax," whereas the Democrats acknowledge reality while leaving policy in aspirational mode, as opposed to realistically treating it as an issue of unprecedented emergency.

Vote your conscience, if you still have one, and can figure out which candidate stands the best chance of leading us in a direction that deserves the name "forward."

Source:

Irami Osei-Frimpong, "Harris/Wals Dems vs. Trump/Nance GOP (Election Eve Special)" The Funky Academic, November 4, 2024

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Published on November 04, 2024 16:13

What Is Fascism?

by Frank Scott

"Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." Giovanni Gentile* "Encyclopedia Italiana" This definition from one of the exponents of the program has far more clarity than the over-used one coming from present day people of mostly liberal persuasion who define fascism as anything they don't like about present reality, without understanding that without capitalist reality there would be no possibility of what can become what is called fascism. When capitalism is in its most critical state, pretense of democracy vanishes and big money power that always ruled from behind the scenes comes forward to publicly bring order to what seems to threaten chaos; democratic power accruing to the great mass of the people, which translates to chaos for the minority rulers who get away with being out numbered not only by employing imperial military forces but keeping majorities under control by use of consciousness controlling mind management techniques creating commercial distractions among them and hiding class behind false human differences like ethnicity, religion and race. Far more important in the suppression of democracy than, say, pain management or anger management for individuals is the social ignorance management practiced by major political media, at the present moment in attempting to destroy a social democratic and even socialist consciousness rising among Americans by doing everything to suppress, misinform, disinform and otherwise bury that threat to fundamentalist, fanatic obsession with our economic private parts. This amounts to a form of masturbatory politics that finds us forced into identity groups reduced to primarily playing with, for, and against ourselves while remaining mostly unconscious of our human connections. The present crisis in the capitalist political economic system, heightened by a tragic and potentially socially devastating if sometimes hysterically over-hyped pandemic, highlights the fact of a system at a severe stage of breakdown and the need for radical transformation that leads to democratic control and ends the bloody farce of a private profit marketplace assuring poverty, unemployment, illness and death to a population innocently financing the economic war killing people here and currently slaughtering thousands across the world. The danger is so great that recent austerity fanatics and fundamentalist public sector destroyers are proposing salvation of the system through methods that would have labeled them socialist-revolutionaries a short while ago. Their hated "big government" has created trillions of previously unavailable dollars, mainly to save corporate business but also to bail out ordinary workers suffering the inability to buy what the businesses sell. This usually social democratic salvation for capital when it nears moving to fascism is coming from sources previously labeled fascist by the comfortable class which is becoming more uncomfortable each day. While label exchanges and ignorance combine to have unfortunates cursing alleged socialism for robbing ordinary workers and other unfortunates cursing alleged fascism for the same thing but from a slightly different perspective, the labeling and identity businesses profit for their minority owners by blaming the as yet unorganized majority suffering in maintenance of minority rule. But every downside creates an up, or at least offers the opportunity to do so, and the present approaching near if not total collapse of the capitalist market of private profit is helping bring about what could be a massive change for humanity. While the American façade for democracy in November will produce the usual billionaire financed struggle in which a minority of the electorate supports a winner to proceed in maintenance of the system with different sectors of the population showing benefit while the majority pays, larger parts of that majority are seeing, feeling and gradually understanding that the system does not serve their interest, by design, and only a social revolution, whatever language it may be covered in by their supposed leaders, can bring about a reality that serves them and not just the nation's incredibly rich owners and their well-to-do professional servant class. The threats to our social and natural environments grow more deadly, with the viral pandemic added on to the profits for those loaning imaginary money to private wealth and charging real debt service to the paying public. But calls for universal health care, public banking and even public ownership and control of the federal reserve system are growing at the same time, and while control remains in the hands of a tiny if most powerful sector of humanity, the opposition to them is not only a budding national movement but even more important a move towards global democracy. All over the world there are rising voices, organizations and demands for radical change in the political economics that bring incredible wealth to some but only by forcing more and more into unpayable debt and poverty, both physical and mental. Strikes among newly organizing workers are hardly featured in major media which is more busy telling people we'll all be killed by the virus if we don't follow often conflicting orders from leaders who follow one another around a circle of ignorance, but they are numerous and further signs that the conditions capital has created are teaching lessons people do not have to attend colleges to learn. And the overwhelming majority of Americans are workers fast becoming educated beyond the teachings of a minority able to expand horizons in higher education but too often having those horizons shrunk by being taught just how to maintain a system that offers them a possibility of some creature comfort only by falling into debt while making misery and deprivation absolutely essential for the great majority. While many fear the intrusions in and control of individual lives by electronic authority created by the pandemic reaction, others see the possibility of a truly democratic system of life enhancing controls when power is removed from minorities and truly performs on behalf of the public good and not simply for private profit. An electronic watchdog to protect and enhance life itself and not simply some life for some people can be the outcome of control falling to majorities instead of the present situation which if allowed to continue will lead to an outcome even worse than the fears expressed by some who see "them" having too much control while "we" are kept from control, mainly by seeing individuals and not systemic forces as our major problem. Capitalist political economics are why the market is near crashing, the pandemic struck, and wars continue in the Middle East and are threatened further in Latin America. And the creation of global socialist democracy is the only counter measure to global capitalist fascism. That creation is a job for an international majority of humanity but it begins in the national cultures we all inhabit and will extend long past any November election. We all need to learn, if not remember, that Trump, Republicans and Democrats are a problem, but capitalism, the system they serve, is the problem that must be solved if humanity is to have a future. Note: This article was first published on April 10, 2020 at Legalienate.

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Published on October 27, 2024 22:43

Nine Years On Democrats Still Triggered by "Fascist" Trump

In a CNN forum Wednesday, Kamala Harris called Trump a "fascist," the first time her campaign has used this term in public, though the accusation has been widely employed by Trump opponents and even some staff members for years. In the latter camp is Trump's former chief of staff John Kelly, who recently told the New York Times that the former president once said that he wanted "the type of Generals Hitler had," who, ironically, thought the Nazi leader was a moron and tried to assassinate him on multiple occasions. Of course, that's not what Trump meant, and he in fact stated that he wanted generals who reflexively obey their commander in chief, no surprise there.

In any case, it's worth a look at exactly what those still capable of being triggered by Trump say they object to in his "fascist" behavior. One concerning episode is Trump's having claimed that undocumented immigrants are "poisoning the blood" of the United States; another is his saying he would be a dictator from day one; a third is the fact that the Supreme Court he appointed three judges to has given him immunity and nearly unlimited executive power in his actions as president; a fourth is that he wants to use the U.S. military against "the internal enemy," including the "radical left," by which he means President Biden, vice-president Harris and their supporters; a fifth is that he intends to purge the federal government of disloyal members and fire the special prosecutor Jack Smith, who is in charge of two federal criminal cases against Trump. Also deeply concerning is Trump's having inspired the January 6, 2021 coup attempt against certifying the 2020 election results, as well as his current threats to not respect the 2024 election results if he isn't declared the winner.

Admittedly, these are serious concerns, even for the untriggered. No sane person wants a return to the days when "civilized blood" was taken seriously as the justification for white supremacy, though we should note that many U.S. presidents we are still taught to admire not only accepted such ideas as a matter of course, but acted on them with supreme viciousness, until the U.S. was literally torn in half and nearly collapsed. Nor do we want Trump or any other U.S. president working to establish a personal dictatorship, though we should recognize that the reason Kamala Harris and her backers are worried is not because of any damage he may do the American people, but because he threatens what the late Edward S. Herman called the "dictatorship of money." That dictatorship rules with a savage disregard for democracy that makes Trump look like the merest juvenile delinquent. So we can dismiss the remaining charges against Trump with the restrained observation that purges and loyalty crusades and coup attempts are staple items in Washington's arsenal whether nominally headed up by the Democratic or Republican Parties.

But to return to the "fascist" point - the most glaring omission from the indictment against Trump as an unprecedented evil is the signature feature of fascist rule - the mass murder of a despised minority group. Is the Orange Menace guilty of such? He is not, though it must be conceded that his constant inflaming of sectarian passions could culminate in such a horror in the future. But as of now, he is not guilty.

As we know, however, the current Biden-Harris administration is actively engaged in mass extermination via complete military and economic support for Israel's wholesale murder of Palestinian Arabs, including shooting children in the head, gunning down surgeons at the operating table, hunting down and assassinating journalists, blockading and starving the entire Gazan population while leveling hospitals, schools, and sewage treatment plants, promising its victims a rainy winter of being awash in raw human waste and unretrieved corpses, with no capacity to stop the inevitable epidemics of disease that will ensue, and on and on and on.

If "fascism" is taken to be among the ugliest forms of political rule that can exist, current Democratic Party policy in the Middle East would appear to qualify for that designation. Which means that voting against it precludes voting for Harris. On the other hand, a vote for Trump is also out of bounds as he considers Democratic policy in Gaza to not be "fascist" enough.

We either need to redefine the term or vote for a candidate that actually calls for peace - Jill Stein, Cornel West, Claudia De La Cruz, or Chase Oliver.

Source: David Brooks and Jim Cason, "Trump Is A Fascist, Ex Staff and Democrats Say," La Jornada, October 25, 2024 (Spanish)

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Published on October 25, 2024 16:10

Trump Crazy Enough To Start Nuclear War? Yes, But ALL U.S. Presidents Are, And It May Not Even Be Up To Them

David Doel of The Rational National podcast has sounded the alarm that Donald Trump poses a unique danger if he returns to the U.S. presidency, citing a story in The Intercept claiming that he ordered his generals to draw up plans envisioning a U.S. first-use of nuclear weapons against North Korea when the two countries were nearly drawn into direct conflict in 2017. Doel quotes The Intercept article on the allegedly unique danger:

"He didn't merely threaten to attack North Korea if it possessed the ability to strike the United States. He ordered the Pentagon to develop new plans over the resistance of then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis, to do so. As Slate columnist Fred Kaplan reports in his book, "The Bomb," the Joint Chiefs of Staff created new war plans 'that assumed the United States would strike the first blow.'"

Furthermore, the article states, "Mattis had the authority to order the bombing of North Korean launch sites - that is, to start an escalation that could lead to nuclear war, without the approval of Congress or even Trump."

This is all certainly alarming enough, but what makes Doel think the U.S. contemplating a first-strike nuclear attack (or delegating the decision to launch such an attack) is anything new? Forty-two years ago the U.S. Nuclear Freeze movement attracted over a million people to a New York City protest against the U.S. mass production of first-strike nuclear weapons and their deployment minutes from their targets in the then Soviet Union. Similar mass protests rocked Europe. Why does Doel, who follows politics closely and generally intelligently, appear to be completely ignorant of this recent history?

The plain fact of the matter is that the U.S. initiating nuclear war is longstanding U.S. policy supported by both parties and all U.S. presidents going back to and including JFK. The policy is to initiate a nuclear strike to knock out an opponent's nuclear retaliatory capacity, then threaten with an overwhelming second nuclear strike if said opponent refuses to capitulate to U.S. demands. Furthermore, in order to prevent a nuclear adversary from doing the same to us first, the U.S. has delegated the decision to launch nukes well down the chain of command, so that if Washington is taken out and the Commander in Chief with it, U.S. nuclear weapons can still be fired.

When he worked for the Pentagon Daniel Ellsberg tried to find out just how far down the chain of command a nuclear launch decision had been authorized, and he was unable to get a clear answer. So Trump is far from our only problem here. The prime risk factor for nuclear war is not who the Commander in Chief is, though that is certainly an important consideration, but a world wired up to explode in atomic fury at a moment's notice, whether by accident or design. Trump's thin skin and erratic temperament are hardly what we need at the top, but the idea that we're necessarily safer with Harris in the presidency is dogma, not fact. The decision to launch a nuclear war needn't include the president at all, and that has been true for a long time.

Trump's lunacy is an upstart political brand threatening to displace the bi-partisan monopoly on crazy that long preceded his appearance on the scene. Neither is worthy of any support.

Sources:

Jon Schwarz, "By Far The Worst Thing Trump Did Was Flirt With Nuclear War With North Korea," The Intercept, January 20, 2021

Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine - Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner," (Bloomsbury, 2017)

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Published on October 23, 2024 20:35

The Quadrennial Farce Is Almost Over; Israel's Barbarity Isn't and Won't Be Anytime Soon

The interminable lead-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential elections is finally almost over, with the establishment approved candidates in a virtual statistical tie. Once again a horrendous choice is offered to American voters in order to distract them from their problems, which cannot be faced by either the Democratic or Republican parties, much less solved by them.

In the final weeks the empty rhetoric of Kamala Harris and unending insults of Donald Trump seem unable to budge the electorate, which appears to have decided long ago for whom it intends to vote. Neither the crude personal attacks by Trump against Harris nor the efforts of Harris to present herself as the candidate of good sense and the future appear to have convinced anyone of anything.

Trump has been unable to make clear any plans he may have for governing the country he promises to "make great again," and offers nothing convincing on why he will be better in a second term than he was in his first, when 400,000 Americans died of Covid while Trump repeatedly claimed it was on the verge of magically disappearing.

It never did.

Meanwhile, Harris has warned that "democracy" will be suspended if Trump wins, even as her Democratic Party provides an avalanche of lethal arms to Israel, which it uses to pitilessly exterminate a defenseless civilian population in Palestine while unilaterally igniting a regional war in the Middle East, both policies in flagrant violation of human rights law, supposedly an indispensable working part of said democracy. Back at home, Harris's party works aggressively to deny ballot access to independent parties calling for peace via an arms embargo on Israel, an explicitly anti-democratic stance that is beneath contempt.

This is at the heart of what Harris's vice-presidential candidate Tim Wals claims is a "politics of joy" now uniting Bernie Sanders and Dick Cheney and everyone in between, a broad coalition of "truly optimistic people," says Wals.

Ah, yes, optimistic people, just what we've been lacking.

Isn't it comforting to know that neo-cons who butchered hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani civilians a generation ago are now optimistically united in joyful lethality with liberals and neo-liberals, all dedicated to ending Trump's "existential" threat to "democracy," so that they, not he, will get sole credit for enabling Israel's longest-lasting slaughter in the Middle East?

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Published on October 21, 2024 20:49

Vance Wins Vice-Presidential Debate, American People Lose, As Both Candidates Love Bloodthirsty Israel More Than Them

J. D. Vance won the vice presidential debate against Governor Wals, while the American people lost, and right from the start.

After a year of watching Israel exterminate Palestinians in Gaza on our live feeds while also attacking Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and the West Bank, the first question asked at this "thoughtful and civil" vice-presidential debate (moderator Margaret Brennan) was, "Does Israel have a right to pre-emptively strike Iran?"

Of course, Israel has already attacked Iran by bombing its Embassy in Damascus, followed by further bombing raids inside Iran itself, while also massively expanding its zone of attack to include by now virtually the entire Middle East, which is increasingly united against the openly rabid Jewish state. Given all of this, one could certainly wonder whether "pre-emption" at such a late date is even a meaningful term.

Nevertheless, Wals said - incredibly - that a further Israeli attack on Iran is justified in "self-defense," while Vance declared abject moral surrender and left the matter entirely "up to Israel." Who says the two official parties are too polarized to come to agreement?

Naturally, the American people come out losers in this bargain, as all they get is to keep paying Israel's hefty bills while risking another 911.

Vance won the debate based on his discussion of the economy, always an important factor in determining electoral contests. No matter how much Democrats offer in the form of child tax credits, paid pregnancy leave, and free school lunches, it's not going to mean much if more and more key production is off-shored and an abundant supply of crap jobs and "gigs" is all they offer to replace the industrial era's full-time job with good wages and benefits. That leaves them completely open to a Make America Great Again sales pitch, since many people can remember - or at least know other people who can remember, a time not long past when ordinary people could buy homes and go to the doctor and take a paid vacation every year, which they now no longer can. Vance is hampered by the fact that Trump did not deliver on reversing outsourcing when he was president, but at least Vance's diagnosis is right, whereas Wals's very definitely is not.

Also, championing abortion looks more sinister when the Democrats continue to support economic policies that keep average real wages stagnating or declining for a large majority of the population, which induces more and more women to abort rather than start families. Unplanned pregnancies don't have to be an economic disaster, as they are typically described by abortion defenders, but many of them unnecessarily and inevitably will be if we continue to march under the job-exporting banner enthusiastically favored by Democrats.

Let's have a real "pro-life" culture, with dignified jobs at good wages for all who want them and access to abortion for all who need them.

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Published on October 16, 2024 16:35