<![CDATA[Deep Politics Forum - DPF Articles Discussion]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/ Wed, 24 Jun 2026 07:52:23 +0000 MyBB <![CDATA[South Africa's document on Gaza Genocide]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16374 Thu, 04 Jan 2024 01:38:09 +0000 Lauren Johnson]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16374 https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/fi...-00-en.pdf]]> https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/fi...-00-en.pdf]]> <![CDATA[The World To Come - VERY SOON to a Planet Near You!]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16018 Tue, 29 Jan 2019 19:53:54 +0000 Peter Lemkin]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16018 The World to Come - by Chris Hedges




The World to Come

[URL="https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-world-to-come/#"]

[/URL]



[Image: The-World-to-Come-850x654.jpg]Mr. Fish / Truthdig
The ruling elites are painfully aware that the foundations of American power are rotting. The outsourcing of manufacturing in the United States and the plunging of over half the population into poverty will, they know, not be reversed. The self-destructive government shutdown has been only one of numerous assaults on the efficiency of the administrative state. The failing roads, bridges and public transportation are making commerce and communications more difficult. The soaring government deficit, now almost a trillion dollars thanks to the Trump administration's massive corporate tax cuts, cannot be eliminated. The seizure of the financial system by global speculators ensures, sooner rather than later, another financial meltdown. The dysfunction of democratic institutions, which vomit up con artists such as Donald Trump and hold as alternatives inept, corporate-indentured politicians such as Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi, is cementing into place a new authoritarianism. The hollowing out of the pillars of the state, including the diplomatic corps and regulatory agencies, leaves the blunt force of the military as the only response to foreign disputes and fuels endless and futile foreign wars.
Just as ominous as the visible rot is the internal decay. Among all social classes there is a loss of faith in the government, widespread frustration, a sense of stagnation and entrapment, bitterness over unfulfilled expectations and promises, and a merging of fact and fiction so that civil and political discourse is no longer rooted in reality. The nation's isolation by its traditional allies and its inability, especially in the face of environmental catastrophe, to articulate rational and visionary policies have shattered the mystique that is vital to power. "A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial," George Orwell wrote. "That is when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud." Our elites have exhausted fraud. Force is all they have left.
The United States is a wounded beast, bellowing and thrashing in its death throes. It can inflict tremendous damage, but it cannot recover. These are the last, agonizing days of the American Empire. The death blow will come when the dollar is dropped as the world's reserve currency, a process already underway. The value of the dollar will plummet, setting off a severe depression and demanding instant contraction of the military overseas.
Seth A. Klarman, who runs the Baupost Group hedge fund, which manages about $27 billion, just sent a sobering 22-page letter to his investors. He pointed out that the nation's ratio of government debt to gross domestic product from 2008 to 2017 exceeded 100 percent and is close to that in France, Canada, Britain and Spain. The debt crisis, he warned, could be the "seeds" of the next financial crisis. He decried the global unraveling of "social cohesion," adding, "It can't be business as usual amid constant protests, riots, shutdowns and escalating social tensions."
"There is no way to know how much debt is too much, but America will inevitably reach an inflection point whereupon a suddenly more skeptical debt market will refuse to continue to lend to us at rates we can afford," he said in the letter. "By the time such a crisis hits, it will likely be too late to get our house in order."
The ruling elites, worried about impending financial collapse, are scrambling to cement into place harsh legal and physical forms of control to stymie what they fear could be widespread popular unrest, nascent forms of which can be seen in the strikes carried out by American teachers and the protests by the "yellow vests" in France.
The ruling ideology of neoliberalism, the ruling elites recognize, has been discredited across the political spectrum. This is forcing the elites to make unsavory alliances with neofascists, who in the United States are represented by the Christian right. This Christianized fascism is swiftly filling Trump's ideological void. It is embodied in figures such as Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, Brett Kavanaugh and Betsy DeVoss.
In its most virulent form, one that will be expressed once the economy goes into crisis, this Christian fascism will seek to purge the society of those branded as social deviants, including immigrants, Muslims, "secular humanist" artists and intellectuals, feminists, gays and lesbians, Native Americans and criminalslargely poor people of colorbased on a perverted and heretical interpretation of the Bible. Abortion will be illegal. The death penalty will be mandated for a variety of crimes. Education will be dominated by white supremacist views of history, indoctrination and the teaching of creationism or "intelligent design." The pantheon of new America heroes will include Robert E. Lee, Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon. The state will portray the white majority as victims.
This Christian fascism, like all forms of totalitarianism, wraps itself in a cloying piety, promising moral as well as physical renewal. The degradation of mass culture with its celebration of sexual sadism, graphic violence and personal dysfunction, its plagues of opioid addiction, suicide, gambling and alcoholism, along with social chaos and government dysfunction, will lend credibility to the Christian fascists' promise of a return to a "Christian" purity. The cloak of this piety will be used to snuff out all civil liberties.
Central to any totalitarian ideology is a constant inquisition against supposedly clandestine and sinister groups held responsible for the country's demise. Conspiracy theories, which already color Trump's worldview, will proliferate. The ruling rhetoric will whipsaw the population, swinging from championing individualism and personal freedom to calling for abject subservience to those who claim to speak for the nation and God, from the sanctity of life to advocating the death penalty, unrestrained police violence and militarism, from love and compassion to the fear of being branded a heretic or traitor. A grotesque hypermasculinity will be celebrated. Violence will be held up as the mechanism to cleanse the society and the world of evil. Facts will be erased or altered. Lies will become true. Political language will be cognitive dissonance. The more the country declines, the more the paranoia and collective insanity will grow. All of these elements are present in varying forms within the culture and our failed democracy. They will become pronounced as the country unravels and the disease of totalitarianism spreads.
The ruling oligarchs, as in all failed states, will retreat into fortified compounds, many of which they are already preparing, where they will have access to basic services, health care, education, water, electricity and security largely denied to the wider population. The central government will be reduced to its most basic functionsinternal and external security and collecting taxes. Severe poverty will cripple the lives of most citizens. Any essential service once provided by the state, from utilities to basic policing, will be privatized, expensive and inaccessible to those without resources. Trash will pile up in the streets. Crime will explode. The electrical grid and water systemsdecrepit, poorly maintained and run by corporationswill repeatedly turn on and off.
The mass media will become nakedly Orwellian, chatting endlessly about a bright future and pretending America remains a great superpower. It will substitute political gossip for newsa corruption already far advancedwhile insisting that the country is in an economic recovery or about to enter one. It will refuse to address ever-worsening social inequality, political and environmental deterioration and military debacles. Its primary role will be to peddle illusions so that an atomized public, fixated on its electronic screens, will be diverted from the collapse and see its plight as personal rather than collective. Dissent will become more difficult as critics are censored and attacked as responsible for the decline. Hate groups and hate crimes will proliferate and be tacitly empowered and condoned by the state. Mass shootings will be commonplace. The weakespecially children, women, the disabled, the sick and the elderlywill be exploited, abandoned or abused. The strong will be omnipotent.
There will still be money to be made. Corporations will sell anything for a profitsecurity, dwindling food supplies, fossil fuel, water, electricity, education, medical care, transportationforcing citizens into debt peonage that will see their meager assets seized when they can't make payments. The prison population, already the largest in the world, will expand along with the number of citizens forced to wear electronic monitors 24 hours a day. Big corporations will pay no income tax or at best a symbolic tax. They will be above the law, able to abuse and underpay workers and poison the environment without oversight or regulation.
As income inequality becomes more massive, financial titans such as Jeff Bezos, worth some $140 billion, will increasingly function as modern-day slaveholders. They will preside over financial empires where impoverished employees will live in run-down campers and trailer parks while toiling 12 hours a day in vast, poorly ventilated warehouses. These employees, paid subsistence wages, will be constantly recorded, tracked and monitored by digital devices. They will be fired when the punishing work conditions cripple their health. For many Amazon employees the future is now.
Work will be a form of serfdom for all but the upper elites and managers. Jeffrey Pfeffer in his book "Dying for a Paycheck: How Modern Management Harms Employee Health and Company Performanceand What We Can Do About It" quotes a survey in which 61 percent of employees said workplace stress had made them ill and 7 percent said they required hospitalization as a result. The stress of overwork, he writes, may cause 120,000 deaths annually in the United States. In China there are an estimated 1 million deaths a year from overwork.
This is the world the elites are preparing for by setting in place legal mechanisms and internal security forces to strip us of liberty.
We, too, must begin to prepare for this dystopia, not only to ensure our survival but to build mechanisms to blunt and attempt to overthrow the totalitarian power the elites expect to wield. Alexander Herzen, speaking to a group of anarchists a century ago about how to overthrow the Russian czar, reminded his listeners that it was their job not to save a dying system but to replace it: "We think we are the doctors. We are the disease." All efforts to reform the American system is capitulation. No progressive in the Democratic Party is going to rise up, take control of the party and save us. There is one ruling party. The corporate party. It may engage in petty, internecine warfare, as it did in the recent government shutdown. It may squabble over power and the spoils of power. It may come wrapped in more tolerant stances regarding women, LGBT rights and the dignity of people of color, but on the fundamental issues of war, internal security and corporate domination there is no divergence.
We must carry out organized civil disobedience and forms of non-cooperation to weaken corporate power. We must use, as in France, widespread and sustained social unrest to push back against the designs of our corporate masters. We must sever ourselves from reliance on corporations in order to build independent, sustainable communities and alternative forms of power. The less we need corporations the freer we will become. This will be true in every aspect of our lives, including food production, education, journalism, artistic expression and work. Life will have to be communal. No one, unless he or she is part of the ruling elite, will have the resources to survive alone.
The longer we pretend this dystopian world is not imminent, the more unprepared and disempowered we will be. The ruling elite's goal is to keep us entertained, frightened and passive while they build draconian structures of oppression grounded in this dark reality. It is up to us to pit power against power. Ours against theirs. Even if we cannot alter the larger culture, we can at least create self-sustaining enclaves where we can approximate freedom. We can keep alive the burning embers of a world based on mutual aid rather than mutual exploitation. And this, given what lies in front of us, will be a victory.

Chris Hedges

Columnist
Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the college degree program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by Rutgers…

Mr. Fish

Cartoonist
Mr. Fish, also known as Dwayne Booth, is a cartoonist who primarily creates for Truthdig.com and Harpers.com. Mr. Fish's work has also appeared nationally in The Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice, Vanity…
]]> The World to Come - by Chris Hedges




The World to Come

[URL="https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-world-to-come/#"]

[/URL]



[Image: The-World-to-Come-850x654.jpg]Mr. Fish / Truthdig
The ruling elites are painfully aware that the foundations of American power are rotting. The outsourcing of manufacturing in the United States and the plunging of over half the population into poverty will, they know, not be reversed. The self-destructive government shutdown has been only one of numerous assaults on the efficiency of the administrative state. The failing roads, bridges and public transportation are making commerce and communications more difficult. The soaring government deficit, now almost a trillion dollars thanks to the Trump administration's massive corporate tax cuts, cannot be eliminated. The seizure of the financial system by global speculators ensures, sooner rather than later, another financial meltdown. The dysfunction of democratic institutions, which vomit up con artists such as Donald Trump and hold as alternatives inept, corporate-indentured politicians such as Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi, is cementing into place a new authoritarianism. The hollowing out of the pillars of the state, including the diplomatic corps and regulatory agencies, leaves the blunt force of the military as the only response to foreign disputes and fuels endless and futile foreign wars.
Just as ominous as the visible rot is the internal decay. Among all social classes there is a loss of faith in the government, widespread frustration, a sense of stagnation and entrapment, bitterness over unfulfilled expectations and promises, and a merging of fact and fiction so that civil and political discourse is no longer rooted in reality. The nation's isolation by its traditional allies and its inability, especially in the face of environmental catastrophe, to articulate rational and visionary policies have shattered the mystique that is vital to power. "A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial," George Orwell wrote. "That is when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud." Our elites have exhausted fraud. Force is all they have left.
The United States is a wounded beast, bellowing and thrashing in its death throes. It can inflict tremendous damage, but it cannot recover. These are the last, agonizing days of the American Empire. The death blow will come when the dollar is dropped as the world's reserve currency, a process already underway. The value of the dollar will plummet, setting off a severe depression and demanding instant contraction of the military overseas.
Seth A. Klarman, who runs the Baupost Group hedge fund, which manages about $27 billion, just sent a sobering 22-page letter to his investors. He pointed out that the nation's ratio of government debt to gross domestic product from 2008 to 2017 exceeded 100 percent and is close to that in France, Canada, Britain and Spain. The debt crisis, he warned, could be the "seeds" of the next financial crisis. He decried the global unraveling of "social cohesion," adding, "It can't be business as usual amid constant protests, riots, shutdowns and escalating social tensions."
"There is no way to know how much debt is too much, but America will inevitably reach an inflection point whereupon a suddenly more skeptical debt market will refuse to continue to lend to us at rates we can afford," he said in the letter. "By the time such a crisis hits, it will likely be too late to get our house in order."
The ruling elites, worried about impending financial collapse, are scrambling to cement into place harsh legal and physical forms of control to stymie what they fear could be widespread popular unrest, nascent forms of which can be seen in the strikes carried out by American teachers and the protests by the "yellow vests" in France.
The ruling ideology of neoliberalism, the ruling elites recognize, has been discredited across the political spectrum. This is forcing the elites to make unsavory alliances with neofascists, who in the United States are represented by the Christian right. This Christianized fascism is swiftly filling Trump's ideological void. It is embodied in figures such as Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, Brett Kavanaugh and Betsy DeVoss.
In its most virulent form, one that will be expressed once the economy goes into crisis, this Christian fascism will seek to purge the society of those branded as social deviants, including immigrants, Muslims, "secular humanist" artists and intellectuals, feminists, gays and lesbians, Native Americans and criminalslargely poor people of colorbased on a perverted and heretical interpretation of the Bible. Abortion will be illegal. The death penalty will be mandated for a variety of crimes. Education will be dominated by white supremacist views of history, indoctrination and the teaching of creationism or "intelligent design." The pantheon of new America heroes will include Robert E. Lee, Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon. The state will portray the white majority as victims.
This Christian fascism, like all forms of totalitarianism, wraps itself in a cloying piety, promising moral as well as physical renewal. The degradation of mass culture with its celebration of sexual sadism, graphic violence and personal dysfunction, its plagues of opioid addiction, suicide, gambling and alcoholism, along with social chaos and government dysfunction, will lend credibility to the Christian fascists' promise of a return to a "Christian" purity. The cloak of this piety will be used to snuff out all civil liberties.
Central to any totalitarian ideology is a constant inquisition against supposedly clandestine and sinister groups held responsible for the country's demise. Conspiracy theories, which already color Trump's worldview, will proliferate. The ruling rhetoric will whipsaw the population, swinging from championing individualism and personal freedom to calling for abject subservience to those who claim to speak for the nation and God, from the sanctity of life to advocating the death penalty, unrestrained police violence and militarism, from love and compassion to the fear of being branded a heretic or traitor. A grotesque hypermasculinity will be celebrated. Violence will be held up as the mechanism to cleanse the society and the world of evil. Facts will be erased or altered. Lies will become true. Political language will be cognitive dissonance. The more the country declines, the more the paranoia and collective insanity will grow. All of these elements are present in varying forms within the culture and our failed democracy. They will become pronounced as the country unravels and the disease of totalitarianism spreads.
The ruling oligarchs, as in all failed states, will retreat into fortified compounds, many of which they are already preparing, where they will have access to basic services, health care, education, water, electricity and security largely denied to the wider population. The central government will be reduced to its most basic functionsinternal and external security and collecting taxes. Severe poverty will cripple the lives of most citizens. Any essential service once provided by the state, from utilities to basic policing, will be privatized, expensive and inaccessible to those without resources. Trash will pile up in the streets. Crime will explode. The electrical grid and water systemsdecrepit, poorly maintained and run by corporationswill repeatedly turn on and off.
The mass media will become nakedly Orwellian, chatting endlessly about a bright future and pretending America remains a great superpower. It will substitute political gossip for newsa corruption already far advancedwhile insisting that the country is in an economic recovery or about to enter one. It will refuse to address ever-worsening social inequality, political and environmental deterioration and military debacles. Its primary role will be to peddle illusions so that an atomized public, fixated on its electronic screens, will be diverted from the collapse and see its plight as personal rather than collective. Dissent will become more difficult as critics are censored and attacked as responsible for the decline. Hate groups and hate crimes will proliferate and be tacitly empowered and condoned by the state. Mass shootings will be commonplace. The weakespecially children, women, the disabled, the sick and the elderlywill be exploited, abandoned or abused. The strong will be omnipotent.
There will still be money to be made. Corporations will sell anything for a profitsecurity, dwindling food supplies, fossil fuel, water, electricity, education, medical care, transportationforcing citizens into debt peonage that will see their meager assets seized when they can't make payments. The prison population, already the largest in the world, will expand along with the number of citizens forced to wear electronic monitors 24 hours a day. Big corporations will pay no income tax or at best a symbolic tax. They will be above the law, able to abuse and underpay workers and poison the environment without oversight or regulation.
As income inequality becomes more massive, financial titans such as Jeff Bezos, worth some $140 billion, will increasingly function as modern-day slaveholders. They will preside over financial empires where impoverished employees will live in run-down campers and trailer parks while toiling 12 hours a day in vast, poorly ventilated warehouses. These employees, paid subsistence wages, will be constantly recorded, tracked and monitored by digital devices. They will be fired when the punishing work conditions cripple their health. For many Amazon employees the future is now.
Work will be a form of serfdom for all but the upper elites and managers. Jeffrey Pfeffer in his book "Dying for a Paycheck: How Modern Management Harms Employee Health and Company Performanceand What We Can Do About It" quotes a survey in which 61 percent of employees said workplace stress had made them ill and 7 percent said they required hospitalization as a result. The stress of overwork, he writes, may cause 120,000 deaths annually in the United States. In China there are an estimated 1 million deaths a year from overwork.
This is the world the elites are preparing for by setting in place legal mechanisms and internal security forces to strip us of liberty.
We, too, must begin to prepare for this dystopia, not only to ensure our survival but to build mechanisms to blunt and attempt to overthrow the totalitarian power the elites expect to wield. Alexander Herzen, speaking to a group of anarchists a century ago about how to overthrow the Russian czar, reminded his listeners that it was their job not to save a dying system but to replace it: "We think we are the doctors. We are the disease." All efforts to reform the American system is capitulation. No progressive in the Democratic Party is going to rise up, take control of the party and save us. There is one ruling party. The corporate party. It may engage in petty, internecine warfare, as it did in the recent government shutdown. It may squabble over power and the spoils of power. It may come wrapped in more tolerant stances regarding women, LGBT rights and the dignity of people of color, but on the fundamental issues of war, internal security and corporate domination there is no divergence.
We must carry out organized civil disobedience and forms of non-cooperation to weaken corporate power. We must use, as in France, widespread and sustained social unrest to push back against the designs of our corporate masters. We must sever ourselves from reliance on corporations in order to build independent, sustainable communities and alternative forms of power. The less we need corporations the freer we will become. This will be true in every aspect of our lives, including food production, education, journalism, artistic expression and work. Life will have to be communal. No one, unless he or she is part of the ruling elite, will have the resources to survive alone.
The longer we pretend this dystopian world is not imminent, the more unprepared and disempowered we will be. The ruling elite's goal is to keep us entertained, frightened and passive while they build draconian structures of oppression grounded in this dark reality. It is up to us to pit power against power. Ours against theirs. Even if we cannot alter the larger culture, we can at least create self-sustaining enclaves where we can approximate freedom. We can keep alive the burning embers of a world based on mutual aid rather than mutual exploitation. And this, given what lies in front of us, will be a victory.

Chris Hedges

Columnist
Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the college degree program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by Rutgers…

Mr. Fish

Cartoonist
Mr. Fish, also known as Dwayne Booth, is a cartoonist who primarily creates for Truthdig.com and Harpers.com. Mr. Fish's work has also appeared nationally in The Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice, Vanity…
]]> <![CDATA[Campaign to Exterminate Muslims]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15816 Mon, 23 Apr 2018 02:46:21 +0000 Peter Lemkin]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15816

The Campaign to Exterminate Muslims - by Chris Hedges


[Image: Am-I-Not-a-Man-Fish-Hedges-4-8-18-850x661.jpg]Mr. Fish / Truthdi
g
The Israeli army's wanton slaughter of unarmed Palestinians trapped behind the security barriers in Gaza evokes little outrage and condemnation within the United States because we have been indoctrinated into dehumanizing Muslims. Islam is condemned as barbaric and equated with terrorism. The resistance struggle against foreign occupation, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq or Gaza, sees Muslims demonized as the enemy. Muslims are branded as irrational and inclined to violence and terrorism by their religious beliefs. We attack them not for what they do but because we see them as being different from us. We must eradicate them to save ourselves. And thus we perpetuate the very hatred and counterviolence, or terrorism, that we fear.
Muslims in this age of racialized authoritarianism have been stripped of due process in our courts and are subjectas Abid Naseer and Haroon Aswatwere in Britain before being extradited to the United Statesto pretrial incarceration for years. They endure police brutality and secret trials, are convicted on secret evidence they cannot see and suffer long-term detention in solitary confinement, often in clandestine prisons known as black sites. They are kidnapped anywhere in the world and taken, hooded, drugged and shackled, to the secret sites. They are tortured through savage methods such as beatings, "walling," sexual humiliation, close confinement, prolonged isolation, water dousing, electric shocks, waterboarding and so-called rectal rehydration. Their citizenships are revoked. Their communities and mosques are harassed, infiltrated and monitored by law enforcement. Muslim children are viewed as future terrorists. Muslim women as breeders of terrorists. Muslim men as dangerous. We are the maniacal Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," keeping the heads of "savages" on stakes outside our fortress and crying out "Exterminate all the brutes!"
We have declared a worldwide war on Muslims. Muslims, who read us better than we read ourselves, are rising up to resist. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims in the Middle East have been butchered since our invasion of Afghanistan. Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya have been destroyed as viable states. Millions of Muslims have been displaced or are refugees. And when desperate Muslim families attempt to flee to Europe or the United States from the hell we created in the Middle East, they are thrown into displacement camps or turned back and branded as disease carriers, thieves, rapists, barbarians and terrorists. Islamic culture and religion in our Manichean narrative have been shorn of all nuance, humanity, complexity and depth. Islam has been replaced by a xenophobic cartoon version, an image that, to use the words of Frantz Fanon, is the "quintessence of evil." We respond to the crisis we created out of ignorance, self-exaltation and racism.
As the imprisoned poet Syed Talha Ahsan writes:
to kill
is to erase an image
off a mirror:
side-step
no body
just a gaping hole
upon an indifferent world
Israel's slow-motion genocide of the Palestinian people, justified by the racism and Islamophobia that are central to Israeli identity, has entered a new, deadlier phase. No longer constrained by any pretense of respecting human rights or a peace process, Israeli soldiers, although they are not threatened, fire indiscriminately into crowds of unarmed Palestinians, killing or wounding men, women, children, the elderly and journalists. The sheer number of the dead and woundednine or more Palestinians killed by Israeli fire and hundreds injured on Friday alonetestifies to raking the crowd with gunfire. In a civilized world, Israel would be immediately slapped with sanctions, boycotts and divestmentthe only mechanism left to protect the Palestinian people from exterminationbut we do not live in a civilized world. We live in a world where murder and racism are state policy, where the oppressed are dehumanized and unworthy of life and where our mutant demagogues and despots revel in the rivers of blood they create.
This racialized authoritarianism, one that defines Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has ominous consequences for the oppressed. It is fed by a willful refusal to accept our responsibility for the social and political disintegration as well as the violence in the Middle East and, increasingly, at home. Most academics, trapped in the meaningless silo of Islamic writings on apocalyptic terrorism, contribute nothing to the debate. The press, which has turned journalism into nonstop entertainment and the celebration of nonexistent American virtues, is complicit in this perpetuation of anti-knowledge, which Tennessee Williams once called our voluntary matriculation into a school for the blind. It dehistoricizes these movements. It certifies radical jihadists, and by extension Islam, as incomprehensible. Since terrorism is incomprehensible, and since it is an intrinsic part of Islam, Muslims are worthy not of investigation but annihilation. But facts don't speak for themselves, as Edward Said noted. They require context to be understood, and all context is absent.
"You could hardly begin (in the public sphere provided by international discourse) to analyze political conflicts involving Sunnis and Shi'is, Kurds and Iraqis, or Tamils and Sinhalese, or Sikhs and Hindusthe list is longwithout eventually having to resort to the categories and images of terrorism' and fundamentalism,' which derived entirely from the concerns and intellectual factories in metropolitan centers like Washington or London," Said wrote in "Culture and Imperialism." "They are fearful images that lack discriminant contents, or definition, but they signify moral power and approval for whoever uses them, moral defensiveness and criminalization for whomever."
The pattern of persistent decontextualization traps us in an endless cycle of violence for violence. Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou in his book "A Theory of ISIS: Political Violence and the Transformation of the Global Order" writes of the now-standard response following a terrorist attack:
For every time a new radical Islamism-related attack takes place in New York, Washington, London, Paris, Brussels or Berlin, a ritual of denial of the deeper political issues plays out in an increasingly familiar fashion. The sequence is performed thus: shock gives way to fear followed by anger; security experts step up hurriedly in television studios and on social media to denounce the lack of preparation by the authorities; specialists in radical Islamism (or simply Islam) follow, declaring that IS (previously Al Qaeda) has been weakened, is on its way to be defeated and is merely lashing out with desperate attacks; Muslim communities in Western countries are called out and racist and violent attacks against them sometimes take place (hours after the March 2016 attacks in Brussels a #stopislam movement started trending, revealing the depth of bias that had come to overtake sectors of the Western world, readily associating Islam and terrorism); sympathy movements for the victims of city where the attack took place are set up (Je suis Charlie, I am Brussels, etc.); calls for tougher legislation (surveillance mechanisms, detention conditions, nationality measures, immigration procedures, travel regulations, dress codes, access to pools, prayer sites, etc.) are spoken urgently; arrests are made in neighborhoods where Muslim migrants are known to reside and bombing is redoubled in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen or Libya.
The Obama administration under counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, now a national security and intelligence analyst for NBC and MSNBC, set up a database, Disposition Matrix, of terrorism suspects across the globe. It is known informally as the kill list. Those on the list are targeted by clandestine CIA extradition units, special forces, militarized drones and airstrikes. These techniques for racialized control of Muslims are drawn from the blueprint of colonialism, although the state now uses the coded language of ideology to mask its racist assault. As in colonialism, those who defy the "liberal democratic" state have forfeited all rights and deserve to be treated as beasts because they are beasts. This stance of collective criminalization of a group or race will have ominous consequences as the corporate state, beset by the growing unrest from deindustrialization and global warming, begins to view larger and larger segments of the population as hostile.
"In some sense, the figure of the terror suspect forms the testing ground upon which Western versions of democracy' and human rights' are deliberated," writes Nisha Kapoor in "Deport, Deprive, Extradite: 21st Century State Extremism." "It is via the representation of these individuals that cases are made in support of summary killings, bigger bombs, drone strikes, ever more grotesque forms of torture, and clandestine and indefinite detention. It is also through the policing of such individuals that mechanisms have been put in place in Britain [and the United States] for the growing use of secret justice, the retraction of the provisions of citizenship and the move away from human rights protections."
Policies have consequences. The decision to hunt down Muslims around the globe, giving to the so-called war on terror a transnational dimension, means also that those who oppose us are not restricted by national boundaries. The terrorists who carry out these attacks are mirror images of ourselves, consumed by the same narcissism and cult of the self that define celebrity culture. They post self-indulgent videos of rants against the West and of their beheadings of captives clad in orange jumpsuits. They replicate the cultural effort to film "Life the Movie." The images we use to communicate with the world, as well as each other, infect all of their messages to us. They are not from a medieval era. They are creations of modernity. They feed to us their own versions of the pornographic violence that fascinates and deforms our culture. They know this is how you communicate with the West. And we communicate back in the same manner.
The Israeli massacre of Palestinians is a prelude to a dystopian, neocolonial world where global elites, hoarding wealth and controlling the mechanisms of power, increasingly resort to widespread bloodshed to keep the oppressed at bay. What Israel is doing to Palestiniansimpoverished and trapped without adequate food, water and medicine in the open-air prison that is Gaza, a strip of land subject to repeated murderous assaults by the Israeli war machinewill be done to desperate climate refugees and citizens who rise up to protest the pillage by global oligarchs. Those who resist will be as dehumanized as Muslims. They too will be branded as terrorists. The global elites have a plan for the future. It is visible in the killing fields of Gaza.
]]>

The Campaign to Exterminate Muslims - by Chris Hedges


[Image: Am-I-Not-a-Man-Fish-Hedges-4-8-18-850x661.jpg]Mr. Fish / Truthdi
g
The Israeli army's wanton slaughter of unarmed Palestinians trapped behind the security barriers in Gaza evokes little outrage and condemnation within the United States because we have been indoctrinated into dehumanizing Muslims. Islam is condemned as barbaric and equated with terrorism. The resistance struggle against foreign occupation, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq or Gaza, sees Muslims demonized as the enemy. Muslims are branded as irrational and inclined to violence and terrorism by their religious beliefs. We attack them not for what they do but because we see them as being different from us. We must eradicate them to save ourselves. And thus we perpetuate the very hatred and counterviolence, or terrorism, that we fear.
Muslims in this age of racialized authoritarianism have been stripped of due process in our courts and are subjectas Abid Naseer and Haroon Aswatwere in Britain before being extradited to the United Statesto pretrial incarceration for years. They endure police brutality and secret trials, are convicted on secret evidence they cannot see and suffer long-term detention in solitary confinement, often in clandestine prisons known as black sites. They are kidnapped anywhere in the world and taken, hooded, drugged and shackled, to the secret sites. They are tortured through savage methods such as beatings, "walling," sexual humiliation, close confinement, prolonged isolation, water dousing, electric shocks, waterboarding and so-called rectal rehydration. Their citizenships are revoked. Their communities and mosques are harassed, infiltrated and monitored by law enforcement. Muslim children are viewed as future terrorists. Muslim women as breeders of terrorists. Muslim men as dangerous. We are the maniacal Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," keeping the heads of "savages" on stakes outside our fortress and crying out "Exterminate all the brutes!"
We have declared a worldwide war on Muslims. Muslims, who read us better than we read ourselves, are rising up to resist. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims in the Middle East have been butchered since our invasion of Afghanistan. Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya have been destroyed as viable states. Millions of Muslims have been displaced or are refugees. And when desperate Muslim families attempt to flee to Europe or the United States from the hell we created in the Middle East, they are thrown into displacement camps or turned back and branded as disease carriers, thieves, rapists, barbarians and terrorists. Islamic culture and religion in our Manichean narrative have been shorn of all nuance, humanity, complexity and depth. Islam has been replaced by a xenophobic cartoon version, an image that, to use the words of Frantz Fanon, is the "quintessence of evil." We respond to the crisis we created out of ignorance, self-exaltation and racism.
As the imprisoned poet Syed Talha Ahsan writes:
to kill
is to erase an image
off a mirror:
side-step
no body
just a gaping hole
upon an indifferent world
Israel's slow-motion genocide of the Palestinian people, justified by the racism and Islamophobia that are central to Israeli identity, has entered a new, deadlier phase. No longer constrained by any pretense of respecting human rights or a peace process, Israeli soldiers, although they are not threatened, fire indiscriminately into crowds of unarmed Palestinians, killing or wounding men, women, children, the elderly and journalists. The sheer number of the dead and woundednine or more Palestinians killed by Israeli fire and hundreds injured on Friday alonetestifies to raking the crowd with gunfire. In a civilized world, Israel would be immediately slapped with sanctions, boycotts and divestmentthe only mechanism left to protect the Palestinian people from exterminationbut we do not live in a civilized world. We live in a world where murder and racism are state policy, where the oppressed are dehumanized and unworthy of life and where our mutant demagogues and despots revel in the rivers of blood they create.
This racialized authoritarianism, one that defines Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has ominous consequences for the oppressed. It is fed by a willful refusal to accept our responsibility for the social and political disintegration as well as the violence in the Middle East and, increasingly, at home. Most academics, trapped in the meaningless silo of Islamic writings on apocalyptic terrorism, contribute nothing to the debate. The press, which has turned journalism into nonstop entertainment and the celebration of nonexistent American virtues, is complicit in this perpetuation of anti-knowledge, which Tennessee Williams once called our voluntary matriculation into a school for the blind. It dehistoricizes these movements. It certifies radical jihadists, and by extension Islam, as incomprehensible. Since terrorism is incomprehensible, and since it is an intrinsic part of Islam, Muslims are worthy not of investigation but annihilation. But facts don't speak for themselves, as Edward Said noted. They require context to be understood, and all context is absent.
"You could hardly begin (in the public sphere provided by international discourse) to analyze political conflicts involving Sunnis and Shi'is, Kurds and Iraqis, or Tamils and Sinhalese, or Sikhs and Hindusthe list is longwithout eventually having to resort to the categories and images of terrorism' and fundamentalism,' which derived entirely from the concerns and intellectual factories in metropolitan centers like Washington or London," Said wrote in "Culture and Imperialism." "They are fearful images that lack discriminant contents, or definition, but they signify moral power and approval for whoever uses them, moral defensiveness and criminalization for whomever."
The pattern of persistent decontextualization traps us in an endless cycle of violence for violence. Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou in his book "A Theory of ISIS: Political Violence and the Transformation of the Global Order" writes of the now-standard response following a terrorist attack:
For every time a new radical Islamism-related attack takes place in New York, Washington, London, Paris, Brussels or Berlin, a ritual of denial of the deeper political issues plays out in an increasingly familiar fashion. The sequence is performed thus: shock gives way to fear followed by anger; security experts step up hurriedly in television studios and on social media to denounce the lack of preparation by the authorities; specialists in radical Islamism (or simply Islam) follow, declaring that IS (previously Al Qaeda) has been weakened, is on its way to be defeated and is merely lashing out with desperate attacks; Muslim communities in Western countries are called out and racist and violent attacks against them sometimes take place (hours after the March 2016 attacks in Brussels a #stopislam movement started trending, revealing the depth of bias that had come to overtake sectors of the Western world, readily associating Islam and terrorism); sympathy movements for the victims of city where the attack took place are set up (Je suis Charlie, I am Brussels, etc.); calls for tougher legislation (surveillance mechanisms, detention conditions, nationality measures, immigration procedures, travel regulations, dress codes, access to pools, prayer sites, etc.) are spoken urgently; arrests are made in neighborhoods where Muslim migrants are known to reside and bombing is redoubled in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen or Libya.
The Obama administration under counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, now a national security and intelligence analyst for NBC and MSNBC, set up a database, Disposition Matrix, of terrorism suspects across the globe. It is known informally as the kill list. Those on the list are targeted by clandestine CIA extradition units, special forces, militarized drones and airstrikes. These techniques for racialized control of Muslims are drawn from the blueprint of colonialism, although the state now uses the coded language of ideology to mask its racist assault. As in colonialism, those who defy the "liberal democratic" state have forfeited all rights and deserve to be treated as beasts because they are beasts. This stance of collective criminalization of a group or race will have ominous consequences as the corporate state, beset by the growing unrest from deindustrialization and global warming, begins to view larger and larger segments of the population as hostile.
"In some sense, the figure of the terror suspect forms the testing ground upon which Western versions of democracy' and human rights' are deliberated," writes Nisha Kapoor in "Deport, Deprive, Extradite: 21st Century State Extremism." "It is via the representation of these individuals that cases are made in support of summary killings, bigger bombs, drone strikes, ever more grotesque forms of torture, and clandestine and indefinite detention. It is also through the policing of such individuals that mechanisms have been put in place in Britain [and the United States] for the growing use of secret justice, the retraction of the provisions of citizenship and the move away from human rights protections."
Policies have consequences. The decision to hunt down Muslims around the globe, giving to the so-called war on terror a transnational dimension, means also that those who oppose us are not restricted by national boundaries. The terrorists who carry out these attacks are mirror images of ourselves, consumed by the same narcissism and cult of the self that define celebrity culture. They post self-indulgent videos of rants against the West and of their beheadings of captives clad in orange jumpsuits. They replicate the cultural effort to film "Life the Movie." The images we use to communicate with the world, as well as each other, infect all of their messages to us. They are not from a medieval era. They are creations of modernity. They feed to us their own versions of the pornographic violence that fascinates and deforms our culture. They know this is how you communicate with the West. And we communicate back in the same manner.
The Israeli massacre of Palestinians is a prelude to a dystopian, neocolonial world where global elites, hoarding wealth and controlling the mechanisms of power, increasingly resort to widespread bloodshed to keep the oppressed at bay. What Israel is doing to Palestiniansimpoverished and trapped without adequate food, water and medicine in the open-air prison that is Gaza, a strip of land subject to repeated murderous assaults by the Israeli war machinewill be done to desperate climate refugees and citizens who rise up to protest the pillage by global oligarchs. Those who resist will be as dehumanized as Muslims. They too will be branded as terrorists. The global elites have a plan for the future. It is visible in the killing fields of Gaza.
]]> <![CDATA[The Cost Of Political Resistance - Chris Hedges]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15677 Wed, 08 Nov 2017 11:40:42 +0000 Peter Lemkin]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15677 [Image: Protest-Hedges-5-Nov-2017-e1509945595511.jpg]A Minneapolis protest on Jan. 20, the day of Donald Trump's inauguration. (Fibonacci Blue / flickr / CC BY 2.0)
Resistance entails suffering. It requires self-sacrifice. It accepts that we may be destroyed. It is not rational. It is not about the pursuit of happiness. It is about the pursuit of freedom. Resistance accepts that even if we fail, there is an inner freedom that comes with defiance, and perhaps this is the only freedom, and true happiness, we will ever know. To resist evil is the highest achievement of human life. It is the supreme act of love. It is to carry the cross, as the theologian James Cone reminds us, and to be acutely aware that what we are carrying is also what we will die upon.
Most of those who resistSitting Bull, Emma Goldman, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.are defeated, at least in the cold calculation of the powerful. The final, and perhaps most important quality of resistance, as Cone writes, is that it "inverts the world's value system." Hope rises up out of defeat. Those who resist stand, regardless of the cost, with the crucified. This is their magnificence and their power.
The seductive inducements to conformitymoney, fame, prizes, generous grants, huge book contracts, hefty lecture fees, important academic and political positions and a public platformare scorned by those who resist. The rebel does not define success the way the elites define success. Those who resist refuse to kneel before the idols of mass culture and the power elites. They are not trying to get rich. They do not want to be part of the inner circle of the powerful. They accept that when you stand with the oppressed you get treated like the oppressed.
The inversion of the world's value system makes freedom possible. Those who resist are free not because they have attained many things or high positions, but because they have so few needs. They sever the shackles used to keep most people enslaved. And this is why the elites fear them. The elites can crush them physically, but they cannot buy them off.
The power elites attempt to discredit those who resist. They force them to struggle to make an income. They push them to the margins of society. They write them out of the official narrative. They deny them the symbols of status. They use the compliant liberal class to paint them as unreasonable and utopian.
Resistance is not, fundamentally, political. It is cultural. It is about finding meaning and expression in the transcendent and the incongruities of life. Music, poetry, theater and art sustain resistance by giving expression to the nobility of rebellion against the overwhelming forces, what the ancient Greeks called fortuna, which can never ultimately be overcome. Art celebrates the freedom and dignity of those who defy malignant evil. Victory is not inevitable, or at least not victory as defined by the powerful. Yet in every act of rebellion we are free. It was the raw honesty of the blues, spirituals and work chants that made it possible for African-Americans to endure.
Power is a poison. It does not matter who wields it. The rebel, for this reason, is an eternal heretic. He or she will never fit into any system. The rebel stands with the powerless. There will always be powerless people. There will always be injustice. The rebel will always be an outsider.
Resistance requires eternal vigilance. The moment the powerful are no longer frightened, the moment the glare of the people is diverted and movements let down their guard, the moment the ruling elites are able to use propaganda and censorship to hide their aims, the gains made by resisters roll backward. We have been steadily stripped of everything that organized working men and womenwho rose up in defiance and were purged, demonized and killed by the capitalist elitesachieved with the New Deal. The victories of African-Americans, who paid with their bodies and blood in making possible the Great Society and ending legal segregation, also have been reversed.
The corporate state makes no pretense of addressing social inequality or white supremacy. It practices only the politics of vengeance. It uses coercion, fear, violence, police terror and mass incarceration as social control. Our cells of resistance have to be rebuilt from scratch.
The corporate state, however, is in trouble. It has no credibility. All the promises of the "free market," globalization and trickle-down economics have been exposed as a lie, an empty ideology used to satiate greed. The elites have no counterargument to their anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist critics. The attempt to blame the electoral insurgencies in the United States' two ruling political parties on Russian interference, rather than massive social inequalitythe worst in the industrialized worldis a desperate ploy. The courtiers in the corporate press are working feverishly, day and night, to distract us from reality. The moment the elites are forced to acknowledge social inequality as the root of our discontent is the moment they are forced to acknowledge their role in orchestrating this inequality. This terrifies them.
The U.S. government, subservient to corporate power, has become a burlesque. The last vestiges of the rule of law are evaporating. The kleptocrats are pillaging and looting like barbarian hordes. Programs instituted to protect the common goodpublic education, welfare and environmental regulationsare being dismantled. The bloated military, sucking the marrow out of the nation, is unassailable. Poverty is a nightmare for half the population. Poor people of color are gunned down with impunity in the streets. Our prison system, the world's largest, is filled with the destitute. And presiding over the chaos and the dysfunction is a political P.T. Barnum, a president who, while we are being fleeced, offers up one bizarre distraction after another, much like Barnum's Feejee mermaidthe head and torso of a monkey sewed to the back half of a fish.
There is no shortage of artists, intellectuals and writers, from Martin Buberand George Orwell to James Baldwin, who warned us that this dystopian era was fast approaching. But in our Disneyfied world of intoxicating and endless images, cult of the self and willful illiteracy, we did not listen. We will pay for our negligence.
Søren Kierkegaard argued that it was the separation of intellect from emotion, from empathy, that doomed Western civilization. The "soul" has no role in a technocratic society. The communal has been shattered. The concept of the common good has been obliterated. Greed is celebrated. The individual is a god. The celluloid image is reality. The artistic and intellectual forces that make transcendence and the communal possible are belittled or ignored. The basest lusts are celebrated as forms of identity and self-expression. Progress is defined exclusively by technological and material advancement. This creates a collective despair and anxiety that feeds and is fed by glitter, noise and false promises of consumer-culture idols. The despair grows ever-worse, but we never acknowledge our existential dread. As Kierkegaard understood, "the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair."
Those who resist are relentlessly self-critical. They ask the hard questions that mass culture, which promises an unachievable eternal youth, fame and financial success, deflects us from asking. What does it mean to be born? What does it mean to live? What does it mean to die? How do we live a life of meaning? What is justice? What is truth? What is beauty? What does our past say about our present? How do we defy radical evil?
We are in the grip of what Kierkegaard called "sickness unto death"the numbing of the soul by despair that leads to moral and physical debasement. Those who are ruled by rational abstractions and an aloof intellectualism, Kierkegaard argued, are as depraved as those who succumb to hedonism, cravings for power, violence and predatory sexuality. We achieve salvation when we accept the impediments of the body and the soul, the limitations of being human, yet despite these limitations seek to do good. This burning honesty, which means we always exist on the cusp of despair, leaves us, in Kierkegaard's words, in "fear and trembling." We struggle not to be brutes while acknowledging we can never be angels. We must act and then ask for forgiveness. We must be able to see our own face in the face of the oppressor.
The theologian Paul Tillich did not use the word "sin" to mean an act of immorality. He, like Kierkegaard, defined sin as estrangement. For Tillich, it was our deepest existential dilemma. Sin was our separation from the forces that give us ultimate meaning and purpose in life. This separation fosters the alienation, anxiety, meaninglessness and despair that are preyed upon by mass culture. As long as we fold ourselves inward, embrace a perverted hyper-individualism that is defined by selfishness and narcissism, we will never overcome this estrangement. We will be separated from ourselves, from others and from the sacred.
Resistance is not only about battling the forces of darkness. It is about becoming a whole and complete human being. It is about overcoming estrangement. It is about the capacity to love. It is about honoring the sacred. It is about dignity. It is about sacrifice. It is about courage. It is about being free. Resistance is the pinnacle of human existence.
]]> [Image: Protest-Hedges-5-Nov-2017-e1509945595511.jpg]A Minneapolis protest on Jan. 20, the day of Donald Trump's inauguration. (Fibonacci Blue / flickr / CC BY 2.0)
Resistance entails suffering. It requires self-sacrifice. It accepts that we may be destroyed. It is not rational. It is not about the pursuit of happiness. It is about the pursuit of freedom. Resistance accepts that even if we fail, there is an inner freedom that comes with defiance, and perhaps this is the only freedom, and true happiness, we will ever know. To resist evil is the highest achievement of human life. It is the supreme act of love. It is to carry the cross, as the theologian James Cone reminds us, and to be acutely aware that what we are carrying is also what we will die upon.
Most of those who resistSitting Bull, Emma Goldman, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.are defeated, at least in the cold calculation of the powerful. The final, and perhaps most important quality of resistance, as Cone writes, is that it "inverts the world's value system." Hope rises up out of defeat. Those who resist stand, regardless of the cost, with the crucified. This is their magnificence and their power.
The seductive inducements to conformitymoney, fame, prizes, generous grants, huge book contracts, hefty lecture fees, important academic and political positions and a public platformare scorned by those who resist. The rebel does not define success the way the elites define success. Those who resist refuse to kneel before the idols of mass culture and the power elites. They are not trying to get rich. They do not want to be part of the inner circle of the powerful. They accept that when you stand with the oppressed you get treated like the oppressed.
The inversion of the world's value system makes freedom possible. Those who resist are free not because they have attained many things or high positions, but because they have so few needs. They sever the shackles used to keep most people enslaved. And this is why the elites fear them. The elites can crush them physically, but they cannot buy them off.
The power elites attempt to discredit those who resist. They force them to struggle to make an income. They push them to the margins of society. They write them out of the official narrative. They deny them the symbols of status. They use the compliant liberal class to paint them as unreasonable and utopian.
Resistance is not, fundamentally, political. It is cultural. It is about finding meaning and expression in the transcendent and the incongruities of life. Music, poetry, theater and art sustain resistance by giving expression to the nobility of rebellion against the overwhelming forces, what the ancient Greeks called fortuna, which can never ultimately be overcome. Art celebrates the freedom and dignity of those who defy malignant evil. Victory is not inevitable, or at least not victory as defined by the powerful. Yet in every act of rebellion we are free. It was the raw honesty of the blues, spirituals and work chants that made it possible for African-Americans to endure.
Power is a poison. It does not matter who wields it. The rebel, for this reason, is an eternal heretic. He or she will never fit into any system. The rebel stands with the powerless. There will always be powerless people. There will always be injustice. The rebel will always be an outsider.
Resistance requires eternal vigilance. The moment the powerful are no longer frightened, the moment the glare of the people is diverted and movements let down their guard, the moment the ruling elites are able to use propaganda and censorship to hide their aims, the gains made by resisters roll backward. We have been steadily stripped of everything that organized working men and womenwho rose up in defiance and were purged, demonized and killed by the capitalist elitesachieved with the New Deal. The victories of African-Americans, who paid with their bodies and blood in making possible the Great Society and ending legal segregation, also have been reversed.
The corporate state makes no pretense of addressing social inequality or white supremacy. It practices only the politics of vengeance. It uses coercion, fear, violence, police terror and mass incarceration as social control. Our cells of resistance have to be rebuilt from scratch.
The corporate state, however, is in trouble. It has no credibility. All the promises of the "free market," globalization and trickle-down economics have been exposed as a lie, an empty ideology used to satiate greed. The elites have no counterargument to their anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist critics. The attempt to blame the electoral insurgencies in the United States' two ruling political parties on Russian interference, rather than massive social inequalitythe worst in the industrialized worldis a desperate ploy. The courtiers in the corporate press are working feverishly, day and night, to distract us from reality. The moment the elites are forced to acknowledge social inequality as the root of our discontent is the moment they are forced to acknowledge their role in orchestrating this inequality. This terrifies them.
The U.S. government, subservient to corporate power, has become a burlesque. The last vestiges of the rule of law are evaporating. The kleptocrats are pillaging and looting like barbarian hordes. Programs instituted to protect the common goodpublic education, welfare and environmental regulationsare being dismantled. The bloated military, sucking the marrow out of the nation, is unassailable. Poverty is a nightmare for half the population. Poor people of color are gunned down with impunity in the streets. Our prison system, the world's largest, is filled with the destitute. And presiding over the chaos and the dysfunction is a political P.T. Barnum, a president who, while we are being fleeced, offers up one bizarre distraction after another, much like Barnum's Feejee mermaidthe head and torso of a monkey sewed to the back half of a fish.
There is no shortage of artists, intellectuals and writers, from Martin Buberand George Orwell to James Baldwin, who warned us that this dystopian era was fast approaching. But in our Disneyfied world of intoxicating and endless images, cult of the self and willful illiteracy, we did not listen. We will pay for our negligence.
Søren Kierkegaard argued that it was the separation of intellect from emotion, from empathy, that doomed Western civilization. The "soul" has no role in a technocratic society. The communal has been shattered. The concept of the common good has been obliterated. Greed is celebrated. The individual is a god. The celluloid image is reality. The artistic and intellectual forces that make transcendence and the communal possible are belittled or ignored. The basest lusts are celebrated as forms of identity and self-expression. Progress is defined exclusively by technological and material advancement. This creates a collective despair and anxiety that feeds and is fed by glitter, noise and false promises of consumer-culture idols. The despair grows ever-worse, but we never acknowledge our existential dread. As Kierkegaard understood, "the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair."
Those who resist are relentlessly self-critical. They ask the hard questions that mass culture, which promises an unachievable eternal youth, fame and financial success, deflects us from asking. What does it mean to be born? What does it mean to live? What does it mean to die? How do we live a life of meaning? What is justice? What is truth? What is beauty? What does our past say about our present? How do we defy radical evil?
We are in the grip of what Kierkegaard called "sickness unto death"the numbing of the soul by despair that leads to moral and physical debasement. Those who are ruled by rational abstractions and an aloof intellectualism, Kierkegaard argued, are as depraved as those who succumb to hedonism, cravings for power, violence and predatory sexuality. We achieve salvation when we accept the impediments of the body and the soul, the limitations of being human, yet despite these limitations seek to do good. This burning honesty, which means we always exist on the cusp of despair, leaves us, in Kierkegaard's words, in "fear and trembling." We struggle not to be brutes while acknowledging we can never be angels. We must act and then ask for forgiveness. We must be able to see our own face in the face of the oppressor.
The theologian Paul Tillich did not use the word "sin" to mean an act of immorality. He, like Kierkegaard, defined sin as estrangement. For Tillich, it was our deepest existential dilemma. Sin was our separation from the forces that give us ultimate meaning and purpose in life. This separation fosters the alienation, anxiety, meaninglessness and despair that are preyed upon by mass culture. As long as we fold ourselves inward, embrace a perverted hyper-individualism that is defined by selfishness and narcissism, we will never overcome this estrangement. We will be separated from ourselves, from others and from the sacred.
Resistance is not only about battling the forces of darkness. It is about becoming a whole and complete human being. It is about overcoming estrangement. It is about the capacity to love. It is about honoring the sacred. It is about dignity. It is about sacrifice. It is about courage. It is about being free. Resistance is the pinnacle of human existence.
]]> <![CDATA[McCarthyism Revisited in the Age of Trump]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15667 Sun, 29 Oct 2017 09:01:25 +0000 Peter Lemkin]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15667 OCTOBER 27, 2017

Decency Lost: McCarthyism Revisited

by STANLEY L. COHEN[/FONT]
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[Image: Screen-Shot-2017-10-26-at-9.34.27-PM.png]Photo by DonkeyHotey | CC by 2.0

With unsurprising convenience, a growing chant can be heard from a choir of lay scholars who find revisionist console in diluting the aim and reach of what was the very real, dark and damning nativist clutch of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Like its political ancestor, today's cheap sale does great damage to not just truth but, as important, the survivors and memory of the generational victims of a domestic political purge come to be known as simply McCarthyism.
From social media pundits to accomplished bloggers, trendy journal keepers and political gurus, a partisan echo can be heard that reduces any attempt to investigate institutional accountability to little more than a global witch hunt that targets the vulnerable super rich, the powerful and the despots among us… be they the current resident of the White House, the Kremlin or offshore banks.
Quite frankly, I don't give a shit. Let them eat caviar. Better still, a one way ticket to the Bastille, for them all, will not leave me with an overwhelming sense of lament or loss.
McCarthyism, by its very definition, was the storied practice of manipulating facts through accusations of "disloyalty"… especially through pro-Communist activity… based upon little more than speech, association or artistic voice… as if that matters ,at all, given the intended broad reach of the First Amendment.
Had it just stopped there, veterans of the day would have little more to complain of than, perhaps, noxious harassment that sought to mute or compartmentalize a diverse and unorthodox chorus into neat political and social "norms."
After-all, the rush to mandate the political culture of a given era has, in the United States, become very much the routine ritual that provides cover for arbitrary purpose and power whether it be the prevailing winds that blow across our political bow from the East… or the West.
No, McCarthyism was much more than purification of language and view in the broadest sense. It was a calculated, vicious drive to control the tenor of the times as it aimed to vanquish individual thought as so much a compelled, but necessary, sacrifice to "patriotic" group speaks.
During the McCarthy era, thousands of Americans were accused of being communists, or sympathizers, and became the targets of aggressive inquisition before government or private-industry panels, committees and agencies.
Most of those, so marked, paid dearly for their voice or vision with the number imprisoned for their alleged beliefs or associations running into the many hundreds. Often, simply being subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) or one of the other "security" committees of the day… such as the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee or the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations… was sufficient cause to be fired.
Indeed, between 1949 and 1954, it is estimated some ten to twelve thousand people lost their livelihood falling victim to an environment of fear and repression generated by various Congressional Committees that held a total of 109 separate "loyalty" investigations.
Though remembered largely for HUAC, the campaign to cleanse the United States of "seditious" political, cultural or social diversity had its genesis well before McCarthy grabbed his damning 15 minutes of fame.
As very much a cheap stench of what was yet to come, the first legislative salvo against the artificial threat of Communist subversion was empowered through a series of federal laws.
Under the Alien Registration Act or Smith Act of 1940 it was a criminal offense for anyone to "knowingly or willfully advocate, abet, advise or teach the […] desirability or propriety of overthrowing the Government of the United States or of any State by force or violence, or for anyone to organize any association which teaches, advises or encourages such an overthrow, or for anyone to become a member of or to affiliate with any such association".
Between the start of World War II through well after the armistice in Korea, hundreds of communists and alleged supporters were prosecuted under this law.
In 1949, eleven leaders of the Communist Party were convicted under the Smith Act; ten received sentences of five years, the eleventh three years. Several of their defense attorneys were, themselves, imprisoned having been held in contempt of court. Two years later, twenty-three other leaders of the party were indicted… including Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a founder of the ACLU.
In 1952, Albert J. Lima, a Latino community activist, who ran twice, unsuccessfully, in California as a Communist candidate for the House of Representatives and 13 others were convicted of threatening to overthrow the United States government.
By 1957, 140 leaders and members of the Communist Party had been prosecuted under the law, with 93 convicted on the basis of little more than speech and association propped up by government induced false testimony.
In quick succession, other national laws laid the ominous footing of McCarthyism well before the Senator himself had a chance to deceptively proclaim that he had a list of 205 known members of the Communist Party who were "working and shaping policy" in the State Department.
For example, the McCarran Internal Security Act, which became law in 1950, required the registration of Communist organizations with the Attorney General and established the Subversive Activities Control Board to investigate so-called Communist-front organizations so they could be required to register.
In 1952, the Immigration and Nationality, or McCarran-Walter Act, was passed which allowed the government to deport immigrants or naturalized citizens engaged in "subversive" activities and to bar suspected subversives from entering the country.
In 1954, the Communist Control Act was passed as an adjunct to the Internal Security Act of 1950. It sought to outlaw the Communist Party by declaring that the party, as well as other "Communist-Infiltrated Organizations", were "not entitled to any of the rights, privileges, and immunities attendant upon legal bodies."
In 1954, this Act was used to prevent Communist Party members from running for political office in New Jersey. In 1960, it was cited to deny the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) lawful status as an employer under New York State's unemployment compensation system.
Not to be outdone by Congressional pandering to a public looking for a new generation of women to be hanged as witches, Presidents Truman and Eisenhower gladly joined the torch lit parades of the day.
Under Truman's Executive Order 9835 of 1947, all federal civil service employees were required to be screened for "loyalty." In relevant part, the order said that one basis for determining disloyalty would be a finding of "membership in, affiliation with, or sympathetic association" with any organization determined by the Attorney General to be "totalitarian, Fascist, Communist or subversive.
When Eisenhower took office in 1953, he expanded Truman's loyalty review program while limiting appellate rights available to the many government employees dismissed on the basis of mere political belief or unacceptable party affiliation or sympathy.
One such victim of the political purge was J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project that built the first atomic bomb. Then working as a consultant to the Atomic Energy Commission, Oppenheimer was stripped of his security clearance and, essentially, driven from his chosen field following a "fact finding" hearing.
During the same period, various states and municipalities enlisted in the palpable rampage against speech and association by enacting statutes against criminal anarchy and criminal syndicalism.
Although ultimately struck down as unconstitutional, or repealed, local governments banned Communists and other subversives from public employment or receiving public aid, demanded loyalty oaths from employees, or restricted or proscribed the Communist party as a whole.
Some states had their own equivalent to HUAC… including California which established the California Senate Factfinding Subcommittee on Un-American Activities.
Others passed draconian laws that targeted political organizations or activists within their own state lines.
Thus, in 1950, Michigan passed a law which called for a sentence of life imprisonment for subversive propaganda. A year later, Tennessee approved the death penalty for mere advocacy of the violent overthrow of the government. The death penalty for nothing more than membership in the Communist party was widely discussed and supported in Texas.
New York had laws that prohibited state employees from belonging to any organization that advocated the overthrow of the US government or was "treasonous" or "seditious."
The regents of the State University of New York required teachers and employees to sign an oath that they were not members of the Communist Party. Those faculty and staff who refused to sign the oath were fired. In 1952 the New York City Board of Education dismissed a public school teacher because of his previous "connection" to the CPUSA.
Reaching levels of absurdity, those applying for licenses to fish in New York reservoirs had to sign loyalty oaths.
During the same period, in 1950, thirty-one professors, after refusing to sign a loyalty oath, were dismissed from the University of California. Not long thereafter, the Los Angeles City Council enacted anti-Communist ordinances that required local Communists to register with the Police Department and prohibited any Communist or "Muscovite model of police-state dictatorship" from owning a firearm. In Birmingham, Alabama and Jacksonville, Florida, Communists were banned from being within the city limits.
Like blind oaths, proper patriotism knows neither bounds nor modesty, whether in government or out, as private agencies and groups willingly volunteered during this time to ensure the proper decorum of speech and association.
At its height McCarthyism was supported by a variety of private groups, including, predictably, the American Legion and a number of women's organizations such as the American Public Relations Forumand the Minute Women of the U.S.A. Both were fiercely anti-communist with thousands of their membership organized into study groups and letter-writing networks that worked to identify and stamp out perceived subversion.
Private loyalty review boards and anti-communist investigators found bountiful work in industries anxious to ensure their employees had the appropriate beliefs. For a fee, these teams would investigate employees and question them about their political identity and affiliations at informal hearings where their attendance was mandated… but their right to counsel disavowed.
By 1958, it was estimated that roughly one out of every five employees in the United States was required to pass some sort of loyalty review which was often cross referenced against a private nationwide data bank.
This collection of personal information contained detailed referenced lists of leftist organizations, publications, rallies and charities along with a registry of those known or suspected to be Communists. Books and newsletters, such as Red Channels , Counterattack and Confidential Information were published by private organizations to monitor and share the identity of Communist and leftist organizations and individuals.
Not to be outdone by private patriots, in the vanguard of our national defense against the Communist menace stood, of course, the Department of Justice which started maintaining a list of "subversives" as early as 1942. Made public in 1948, when it included 78 groups, the list grew to include some 154 organizations… 110 of them identified as Communist.
FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, was the architect of President Truman's loyalty security program with its background investigations of employees carried out by his agents. As a result of these investigations, thousands of government workers lost their jobs without the benefit of any due process whatsoever. Most targets of loyalty security reviews were not allowed to cross-examine or even know the identities of their accusers. Often, they were fired without learning of what they had been accused.
Although the results of Hoover's loyalty screening program were to be maintained as strictly confidential, "evidence" developed through the investigations (reliable or otherwise) was routinely shared with other government and private entities.
For example, information was provided to Congressional committees such as HUAC. So, too, from 1951-1955 the FBI operated a secret "Responsibilities Program" that distributed anonymous, unreliable documents to state governors and civic leaders pertaining to alleged communist "affiliations" by teachers, lawyers, and other professionals. Many of the accused were promptly fired without any notice of consequence or other fundamental due process.
Never known to be uncomfortable with skirting the very laws they were sworn to uphold, during this frenzied period of subversive hunt the FBI engaged in a wide range of illegal practices as it tried to build so-called loyalty cases against Communists or sympathizers. Indeed, agents routinely undertook warrantless searches, burglaries, illegal wiretaps and opened mail.
The National Lawyers Guild, then at the forefront of the defense of many Communist-related cases, was a favorite target of the FBI with its offices burgled by agents at least fourteen times between 1947 and 1951 as they sought to uncover legal strategies of NLG defense attorneys.
On other occasions, the FBI used illegal undercover operations to disrupt Communist and other dissident political groups, meetings and speak outs. In 1956, this strategy led directly to Hoover formalizing a covert "dirty tricks" program under the name COINTELPRO… short for Counterintelligence Program.
Initially designed to disrupt the activities of the CPUSA in short order, and over the following 15 years, it went on to target all major domestic civil rights organizations… with a particular focus on such groups as the Black Panther Party, the Latino organization, the Young Lords, the American Indian Movement (AIM), Students for a Democratic Society, and the Socialist Workers Party.
In Hoover's own words, a now declassified 1967 document set forth the willful criminal use of COINTELPRO:
. . . to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters
The government goal to disrupt and destroy these movements was accomplished through a wide range of largely lawless activity. It included planting forged documents, smear campaigns and blackmail, leaking information to the press, unleashing IRS audits, physical harassment and intimidation.
COINTELPRO resulted in various show trials designed to tie up activists, their lawyers and resources… usually ending in acquittals and, often, with those charged spending many months in jail awaiting trial.
Numerous targeted activists were sent to prison on the basis of fabricated evidence and testimony from paid government informants. Others were murdered… in particular, members of the Black Panther Party including Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.
Though formally "disbanded" when exposed in 1971, COINTELPRO tactics remained very much the hallmark of the FBI attack on AIM. Virtually every known AIM leader, since the organization's emergence in 1968, was incarcerated… some time and time again.
In 1973, during the 71 day siege at Wounded Knee, the FBI fired over 250,000 rounds of ammunition into the Tribal Reserve… killing two Natives whose deaths were never investigated.
After the standoff ended, the FBI caused 542 separate charges to be filed against those identified as key AIM leaders. This resulted in only 15 convictions, all on petty offenses. As with the persecution of the Black Panther Party, AIM members often languished in jail for months on end unable to raise bail.
HUAC
Of all the high profile Congressional loyalty programs, the one most active was the House Un-American Activities Committee which initiated a televised effort, it professed, to identify and eradicate Communist subversion in the United States.
Although HUAC also targeted educators, union activists and State Department "liberals", it achieved its greatest notoriety through its harassment, indeed purge, of the Hollywood film industry.
In October 1947, the Committee began to subpoena screenwriters, directors, and other film industry members to testify about their known, or suspected, membership, or association, with the Communist Party and/or any support of its beliefs.
It was at these appearances that what came to be known as "the $64,000 question" was routinely asked: "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States?"
Among the first movie industry witnesses who appeared before the Committee were ten who decided not to cooperate with its investigation. Known as the "Hollywood Ten", these men cited the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech and assembly which they believed provided them ample protection from being required to answer the Committee's questions. Falling on deaf ears, this defense proved to be, at the time, but an abstract constitutional shibboleth… as the ten were ultimately sentenced to prison for contempt of Congress. Two of the ten were sentenced to six months, the rest to a year.
The day after the House of Representatives approved citations of contempt for the Hollywood Ten, the President of the Motion Picture Association of America issued a press release on behalf of all of the major studios. Known simply as the Waldorf Statement, with patriotic flare, it announced the Hollywood Ten had been fired and would not work again until they renounced Communism. In relevant part, the release went on to proclaim that "We will not knowingly employ a Communist or a member of any party or group which advocates the overthrow of the government of the United States."
This was to unleash the decade-long artistic purge known simply as the Hollywood Blacklist. Though hundreds would be denied employment, with many forced to find work outside their chosen field or under pseudonyms or abroad, the studios, producers and other employers denied the existence of any such blacklist.
Not satisfied with the damage already done by their televised political inquisition, HUAC continued to subpoena additional witnesses connected to the entertainment industry and government agencies.
Although many of the next generation of witnesses successfully invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination before the Committee, and were thus safely beyond the reach of its questions, it was not without adverse consequence.
Now known as "Fifth Amendment Communists", a soubriquet coined by Senator Joseph McCarthy, this particular constitutional protection proved too little too late, when it came to careers, as its invocation was deemed grounds for dismissal by various government and private industry employers.
Indeed, in the film industry alone it is estimated that more than 300 actors, authors and directors were denied work in the U.S. because of "questionable" political beliefs or associations.
During this period, blacklists were by no means limited to the entertainment industry alone. For example, it is estimated that nearly 3000 seaman and longshoremen lost their jobs, not long after the start of the Korean War, due to a loyalty review program initiated by the Coast Guard.
Under this program, long employed workers were summarily fired on the basis of accusations which, all at once, challenged their patriotism yet kept secret the identity of their accusers and the nature of any accusations lodged against them.
Within the trade union movement, as a whole, the government moved with swift pace to control the political tone of its membership. Thus under the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 all union officials were required to sign an affidavit affirming they didn't belong to, or sympathize with, any communist or subversive organization.
Unions, with officials who refused to sign the affidavit, were denied any government protection through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Unions that failed to sign the affidavits could not participate in NLRB elections or challenge unfair labor practices directly to the NLRB.
Enter Senator McCarthy
Senator Joseph McCarthy spent almost five years trying, without success, to expose alleged Communists and other left-wing "loyalty risks" both in the U.S. government and out. In the hyper-charged atmosphere of the Cold War, McCarthy's witch hunt, fueled by sweeping claims of disloyalty, was enough to convince many Americans that their government was overrun with traitors and spies.
Given the times, and McCarthy's bluster, his accusations, alone, were so menacing, and strangely credible, that few "ordinary" Americans dared to challenge, or to look beyond, his simplistic patriotic screed. Others of political prominence or office feared, as well, to challenge his shrill bombast lest their own loyalty become suspect.
As noted by a Gallop poll in 1954, at the height of his popularity a majority of Americans supported McCarthy even as he blindly railed against long accomplished institutions and individuals on the basis of little more than explosive rhetoric and unsubstantiated accusations. Indeed, at the time, Earl Warren, then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court opined that if the Bill of Rights was put to a vote it likely would have lost. It seems history does, in fact, repeat itself.
From 1953 to 1954, McCarthy headed the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations which he used to its full tyrannical potential for a number of his "Red Scare" investigations that ultimately proved to be a complete waste of time and expense. During these hearings, witnesses were badgered… and lives destroyed … by explosive accusations of Communist subversion that proved to be groundless.
At first, the McCarthy inquisition raised allegations of pervasive Communist influence in the staffing and content of Voice of America. It failed.
Next, he moved on to the overseas library program of the State Department. Demanding its card catalogues, McCarthy vetted them for publications he considered to be subversive. Reciting the list of authors, and their books, which he deemed to be "un-American" before his Committee and the press, the State Department and many libraries in the US were cowered into removing the books from circulation.
It is estimated that some three hundred books were removed from library shelves… with some being burned. They included Robin Hood, Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience and John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. In Providence, Rhode Island, the post office barred Lenin's State and Revolution from being delivered to Brown University.
McCarthy's committee then began an investigation into the United States Army with televised hearings watched by 20 million people. Beginning with the Army Signal Corps laboratory at Fort Monmouth, McCarthy once again made headlines through wild baseless claims of a spy ring among the Army researchers at the base.
One line of examination by McCarthy of Stanley Berinsky, a civilian worker for the Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth, about the political affiliations of his mother speaks volumes about the Red Scare of the day. "Did you ever ask her if she was a communist? …When you went to see her, weren't you curious?"
Needless to say, nothing came of this particular investigation, either.
Next, McCarthy took on an Army dentist who had been promoted to the rank of major despite his refusal to answer questions on a loyalty review form.
During this inquest, McCarthy levied various public insults at a brigadier general which led to the Army-McCarthy hearings… with the two trading charges and counter-charges for more than a month before a national television audience seemingly fixated on the proceedings.
Following this public exposure, McCarthy's popularity dropped precipitously. Not long thereafter he was censured by the Senate and his calling as the country's leading red-baiter ended.
It is difficult to estimate the number of victims of McCarthy, or the era from which he sprang, and which he subsequently came to personify. McCarthy sought to promote himself as the guardian of social morality… as the embodiment of certain rigid values and traditions which he, and others of the day, falsely found to reflect uniformity of belief and purpose.
While America, as a whole, was assaulted by the poisoned pledge that McCarthyism promoted, tens of thousands of its citizens felt the immediate injury of his political cleanse through the loss of jobs, opportunity and hope. Millions were formally investigated. Thousands lost their liberty or reputation. Many fled the United States to find freedom abroad no longer available to them at home. Still, others took their own lives from the desperation fed by the narrow and hateful voice of a man who would stop at nothing to promote his agenda.
We are a people that generally applaud success and recognize accomplishment. In that light, some of the notable persons who were blacklisted or suffered other persecution during McCarthyism, and which follows, provides a dramatic view of just how damning and far its reach existed in the United States:
+ Nelson Algren, writer
+ Lucille Ball, actress, model, and film studio executive.
+ Alvah Bessie, Abraham Lincoln Brigade, writer, journalist, screenwriter, Hollywood Ten
+ Elmer Bernstein, composer and conductor
+ Leonard Bernstein, conductor, pianist, composer
+ David Bohm, physicist and philosopher
+ Bertolt Brecht, poet, playwright, screenwriter
+ Archie Brown, Abraham Lincoln Brigade, WW II vet, union leader, imprisoned. Successfully challenged LandrumGriffin Act provision
+ Esther Brunauer, forced from the U.S. State Department
+ Luis Buñuel, film director, producer
+ Charlie Chaplin, actor and director
+ Aaron Copland, composer
+ Bartley Crum, attorney
+ Howard Da Silva, actor
+ Jules Dassin, director
+ Dolores del Río, actress
+ Edward Dmytryk, director, Hollywood Ten
+ W.E.B. Du Bois, civil rights activist and author
+ George A. Eddy, pre-Keynesian Harvard economist, US Treasury monetary policy specialist
+ Albert Einstein, Nobel Prize-winning physicist, philosopher, mathematician, activist
+ Hanns Eisler, composer
+ Howard Fast, writer
+ Lion Feuchtwanger, novelist and playwright
+ Carl Foreman, writer of High Noon
+ John Garfield, actor
+ Jack Gilford, actor
+ Allen Ginsberg, poet
+ Ruth Gordon, actress
+ Lee Grant, actress
+ Dashiell Hammett, author
+ Elizabeth Hawes, clothing designer, author, equal rights activist
+ Lillian Hellman, playwright
+Dorothy Healey, union organizer, CPUSA official
+ Lena Horne, singer
+ Langston Hughes, writer, poet, playwright
+ Marsha Hunt, actress
+ Sam Jaffe, actor
+ Theodore Kaghan, diplomat
+ Garson Kanin, writer and director
+ Danny Kaye, comedian, singer, actor
+ Benjamin Keen, historian
+ Otto Klemperer, conductor and composer
+ Gypsy Rose Lee, actress and stripper
+ Cornelius Lanczos, mathematician and physicist
+ Ring Lardner Jr., screenwriter, Hollywood Ten
+ Arthur Laurents, playwright
+ Philip Loeb, actor
+ Joseph Losey, director
+ Albert Maltz, screenwriter, Hollywood Ten
+ Heinrich Mann, novelist
+ Klaus Mann, writer
+ Thomas Mann, Nobel Prize winning novelist and essayist
+ Burgess Meredith, actor
+ Arthur Miller, playwright and essayist
+ Jessica Mitford, author, muckraker. Refused to testify to HUAC.
+ Dimitri Mitropoulos, conductor, pianist, composer
+ Zero Mostel, actor
+ Joseph Needham, biochemist, sinologist, historian of science
+ J. Robert Oppenheimer, physicist, scientific director of the Manhattan Project
+ Dorothy Parker, writer, humorist
+ Linus Pauling, chemist, Nobel prizes for Chemistry and Peace
+ Samuel Reber, diplomat
+ Al Richmond, union organizer, editor
+ Martin Ritt, actor and director
+ Paul Robeson, actor, athlete, singer, writer, political activist
+ Edward G. Robinson, actor
+ Waldo Salt, screenwriter
+ Jean Seberg, actress
+ Pete Seeger, folk singer, songwriter
+ Artie Shaw, jazz musician, bandleader, author
+ Irwin Shaw, writer
+ William L. Shirer, journalist, author
+ Lionel Stander, actor
+ Dirk Jan Struik, mathematician, historian of maths
+ Paul Sweezy, economist and founder-editor of Monthly Review
+ Charles W. Thayer, diplomat
+ Dalton Trumbo screenwriter, Hollywood Ten
+ Tsien Hsue-shen, physicist
+ Sam Wanamaker, actor, director, responsible for recreating Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London, England.
+ Orson Welles, actor, author, film director
+ Gene Weltfish, anthropologist fired from Columbia University
The decade plus run of McCarthyism was not simply about red baitingor a drive to demand political purity or obedience whether in the workplace or the world of electoral politics, academia or entertainment.
At its core, McCarthyism demanded rigid uniformity in sexual identity and expression… and unleashed cold war attacks upon race and those who deviated from religious faith. It was also noted for sweeping conspiracy theories.
Not far from the shadow of World War II, social conformity became very much the rallying cry, across the country, in a staged shriek against communism.
No longer needed for the war industry, women were dropped from the work force and told to go home and become obedient housewives. African American soldiers who fought in largely segregated units, and who survived, returned home to the pain and punishment of "separate but unequal". Meanwhile, American religion was fixated on what McCarthy called an "all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity."
While examples of each drive for cultural uniformity abound, several sum up the place and time that was America during its full-time chase for subversives.
Thus, while Jim Crow was at its zenith, African American civil rights organizations and activists were targeted for their alleged connection to communists who had long supported their struggle for equal rights.
Because of little more than his work in the civil rights movement, famed international actor and artist, Paul Robeson's passport was seized by the Government… eliminating his ability to travel and earn a living.
Never one to be slowed or intimidated by government restriction, Robeson would speak to the roar of enormous rallies in Harlem and then move on to the next demonstration… despite ever-present FBI surveillance as it tried to build a subversion case against him.
In 1951, W. E. B. Du Bois, then 83 years of age (and a founder of the NAACP) was tried in federal court as a Soviet agent for little more than exercising his First Amendment rights through circulating a petition protesting nuclear weapons.
Branded "un-American", the government argued Du Bois' long relationship with the CPUSA,during his civil rights work, had led him to protest in order to advance American pacifism at a time when Soviet aggression was on the march.
Acquitted by a federal judge because prosecutors failed to present any evidence, nevertheless, the trial and attendant publicity ruined his career.
The following year, not satisfied with leaving Du Bois penniless, the State Department illegally revoked his passport to prevent his travel to a peace conference in Canada… and to thwart his move to a country where he was not blacklisted.
At the same time that Black activists were being harassed and imprisoned, cold war "warriors" routinely spoke of the core disconnect between "godless communism" and "god-fearing Americanism".
Religious conservatives such as Baptist Minister, Billy Graham, exalted the idea of traditional god-fearing families as a bulwark against atheistic totalitarianism. In 1950, he preached that communism aimed to "destroy the American home and cause… moral deterioration."
At times, the anti-internationalist aspect of red scare rhetoric and literature took on a rabid anti-Jewish tone because of the role that many Jews had played in both the Russian revolution and establishment of the Communist Party.
On the Senate floor, Senator J.W. Fulbright of Arkansas, the long-term Chair of the Foreign Relations Committee who supported multilateralism and opposed McCarthyism and HUAC, read from a letter he had received from the president of the Chemical Attraction Oil Corporation of Texas:
"When you joined the only Jew to vote against 76 Senators that proved you were the henchman of the Jew Deal. H. H. Lehman should be deported out of this nation to Russia, or let Germany take that bird' in and give him the gas, like Hitler did, as per my opinion of his record."
The red scare produced more than a few sweeping conspiracies. For example, some in the McCarthy camp attacked the public health services particularly in the areas of vaccination, mental health and fluoridation as communist plots to poison or brainwash the American people.
The "lavender scare" drove cold war attacks on "homosexuality" with a hunt for "sexual perverts" who were presumed to be subversive by nature and, thus, a threat to state security.
Having heard the State Department was employing gay staff members, and never one to miss an opportunity to manipulate American fears, McCarthy was the prime mover in the establishment of an FBI surveillance program intended to identify gay and lesbian government employees. As a result, thousands lost their employment in the name of protecting "national security."
One tragedy, in particular, sums up the convergence of cold war homophobia and its exploitation by the political thirst of Joe McCarthy… which knew no bounds.
In 1954, a sitting Democratic Senator was found dead inside his Senate office. A year earlier, his son had been arrested and convicted of soliciting sex with a male undercover police officer. Looking to pick up a Senate seat for the Republican Party, McCarthy threatened to expose the event as a scandal, in the Senator's campaign, if he did not withdraw his bid for re-election. Two weeks later, Senator Lester Huntof Wyoming committed suicide.
Fast Forward… 2017
"It's McCarthyism"… Nonsense.
I've known victims of McCarthyism; real life artists, activists, lawyers, educators, writers, union organizers and street corner screamers. Women and men of diverse race, faith, political belief and sexual identity they took seriously their commitment to their own unique voice, vision and skill. These were people of great courage and principle… of loud and soft presence… who sacrificed much as they fought to make a difference in a world they struggled to leave better than that which they had inherited.
It's very difficult to read the history of McCarthyism, even an abbreviated version, without feeling some sense of the direct, immediate pain and punishment an entire nation was subjected to in one of the most politically charged, indeed explosive, periods in US history.
Whether it was the hundreds that went to prison, the tens of thousands that lost their livelihood, the millions investigated, a nation cowered to silence, or those who preferred death to the fear of tomorrow, McCarthyism was not an abstract debate. It was a nightmare… a real, seemingly timeless, repeat that passed victims from inquisition to inquisition with no relief in sight.
The red scare was much more than an intangible political thought about the course of the future. It was not an evening's amusement for those who race to hear stories that cheer on their particular hero of the day or demonize an expedient foe. Nor was it virtual information fodder for activists of the moment to fill their blog page with artisan passage of the next day.
No, the witch hunt that was McCarthy ripped a real, immediate, and deep hole in the liberty and light that dared to entice people to express themselves and to do so in ways that were personal and, at times, provocative.
The women and men who paid the price for their association and expression were much more than interesting passing footnotes to a now silenced historical sideshow.
Yet, today, for some, their sacrifice has been reduced to an opportune shroud to provide cover for what a narrow group did or did not do during this past election and in the years to its run-up.
For months, now, we've heard simple chants of "McCarthy" as partisans have apparently grown fatigued… others, perhaps, fearful of what a search for truth may or may not reveal.
I've spent more than three decades shredding or putting together cases, criminal and civil, in state, federal and international courtrooms…often high profile, complex litigation. More than a few were matters handled in quiet and well beyond the reach of the public eye. The search for truth is not a quick-speak or a head-note to be embraced, or rejected, by simple majority vote or process.
I have no idea what an intensive and widespread investigation will, or will not, ultimately reveal about what a small group of individuals, perhaps entities, did or did not do in their conspicuous chase to obtain more and more personal wealth or political power.
But to hear a necessary search to hold accountable those that may have done so, politicized by passion and silenced by secret, is to craft a double standard of law that sends millions of poor, political and powerless to prison while providing a free passageway to those that have usurped their collective rights.
"It's McCarthyism"… Nonsense.





[/FONT]]]> OCTOBER 27, 2017

Decency Lost: McCarthyism Revisited

by STANLEY L. COHEN[/FONT]
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[Image: Screen-Shot-2017-10-26-at-9.34.27-PM.png]Photo by DonkeyHotey | CC by 2.0

With unsurprising convenience, a growing chant can be heard from a choir of lay scholars who find revisionist console in diluting the aim and reach of what was the very real, dark and damning nativist clutch of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Like its political ancestor, today's cheap sale does great damage to not just truth but, as important, the survivors and memory of the generational victims of a domestic political purge come to be known as simply McCarthyism.
From social media pundits to accomplished bloggers, trendy journal keepers and political gurus, a partisan echo can be heard that reduces any attempt to investigate institutional accountability to little more than a global witch hunt that targets the vulnerable super rich, the powerful and the despots among us… be they the current resident of the White House, the Kremlin or offshore banks.
Quite frankly, I don't give a shit. Let them eat caviar. Better still, a one way ticket to the Bastille, for them all, will not leave me with an overwhelming sense of lament or loss.
McCarthyism, by its very definition, was the storied practice of manipulating facts through accusations of "disloyalty"… especially through pro-Communist activity… based upon little more than speech, association or artistic voice… as if that matters ,at all, given the intended broad reach of the First Amendment.
Had it just stopped there, veterans of the day would have little more to complain of than, perhaps, noxious harassment that sought to mute or compartmentalize a diverse and unorthodox chorus into neat political and social "norms."
After-all, the rush to mandate the political culture of a given era has, in the United States, become very much the routine ritual that provides cover for arbitrary purpose and power whether it be the prevailing winds that blow across our political bow from the East… or the West.
No, McCarthyism was much more than purification of language and view in the broadest sense. It was a calculated, vicious drive to control the tenor of the times as it aimed to vanquish individual thought as so much a compelled, but necessary, sacrifice to "patriotic" group speaks.
During the McCarthy era, thousands of Americans were accused of being communists, or sympathizers, and became the targets of aggressive inquisition before government or private-industry panels, committees and agencies.
Most of those, so marked, paid dearly for their voice or vision with the number imprisoned for their alleged beliefs or associations running into the many hundreds. Often, simply being subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) or one of the other "security" committees of the day… such as the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee or the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations… was sufficient cause to be fired.
Indeed, between 1949 and 1954, it is estimated some ten to twelve thousand people lost their livelihood falling victim to an environment of fear and repression generated by various Congressional Committees that held a total of 109 separate "loyalty" investigations.
Though remembered largely for HUAC, the campaign to cleanse the United States of "seditious" political, cultural or social diversity had its genesis well before McCarthy grabbed his damning 15 minutes of fame.
As very much a cheap stench of what was yet to come, the first legislative salvo against the artificial threat of Communist subversion was empowered through a series of federal laws.
Under the Alien Registration Act or Smith Act of 1940 it was a criminal offense for anyone to "knowingly or willfully advocate, abet, advise or teach the […] desirability or propriety of overthrowing the Government of the United States or of any State by force or violence, or for anyone to organize any association which teaches, advises or encourages such an overthrow, or for anyone to become a member of or to affiliate with any such association".
Between the start of World War II through well after the armistice in Korea, hundreds of communists and alleged supporters were prosecuted under this law.
In 1949, eleven leaders of the Communist Party were convicted under the Smith Act; ten received sentences of five years, the eleventh three years. Several of their defense attorneys were, themselves, imprisoned having been held in contempt of court. Two years later, twenty-three other leaders of the party were indicted… including Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a founder of the ACLU.
In 1952, Albert J. Lima, a Latino community activist, who ran twice, unsuccessfully, in California as a Communist candidate for the House of Representatives and 13 others were convicted of threatening to overthrow the United States government.
By 1957, 140 leaders and members of the Communist Party had been prosecuted under the law, with 93 convicted on the basis of little more than speech and association propped up by government induced false testimony.
In quick succession, other national laws laid the ominous footing of McCarthyism well before the Senator himself had a chance to deceptively proclaim that he had a list of 205 known members of the Communist Party who were "working and shaping policy" in the State Department.
For example, the McCarran Internal Security Act, which became law in 1950, required the registration of Communist organizations with the Attorney General and established the Subversive Activities Control Board to investigate so-called Communist-front organizations so they could be required to register.
In 1952, the Immigration and Nationality, or McCarran-Walter Act, was passed which allowed the government to deport immigrants or naturalized citizens engaged in "subversive" activities and to bar suspected subversives from entering the country.
In 1954, the Communist Control Act was passed as an adjunct to the Internal Security Act of 1950. It sought to outlaw the Communist Party by declaring that the party, as well as other "Communist-Infiltrated Organizations", were "not entitled to any of the rights, privileges, and immunities attendant upon legal bodies."
In 1954, this Act was used to prevent Communist Party members from running for political office in New Jersey. In 1960, it was cited to deny the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) lawful status as an employer under New York State's unemployment compensation system.
Not to be outdone by Congressional pandering to a public looking for a new generation of women to be hanged as witches, Presidents Truman and Eisenhower gladly joined the torch lit parades of the day.
Under Truman's Executive Order 9835 of 1947, all federal civil service employees were required to be screened for "loyalty." In relevant part, the order said that one basis for determining disloyalty would be a finding of "membership in, affiliation with, or sympathetic association" with any organization determined by the Attorney General to be "totalitarian, Fascist, Communist or subversive.
When Eisenhower took office in 1953, he expanded Truman's loyalty review program while limiting appellate rights available to the many government employees dismissed on the basis of mere political belief or unacceptable party affiliation or sympathy.
One such victim of the political purge was J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project that built the first atomic bomb. Then working as a consultant to the Atomic Energy Commission, Oppenheimer was stripped of his security clearance and, essentially, driven from his chosen field following a "fact finding" hearing.
During the same period, various states and municipalities enlisted in the palpable rampage against speech and association by enacting statutes against criminal anarchy and criminal syndicalism.
Although ultimately struck down as unconstitutional, or repealed, local governments banned Communists and other subversives from public employment or receiving public aid, demanded loyalty oaths from employees, or restricted or proscribed the Communist party as a whole.
Some states had their own equivalent to HUAC… including California which established the California Senate Factfinding Subcommittee on Un-American Activities.
Others passed draconian laws that targeted political organizations or activists within their own state lines.
Thus, in 1950, Michigan passed a law which called for a sentence of life imprisonment for subversive propaganda. A year later, Tennessee approved the death penalty for mere advocacy of the violent overthrow of the government. The death penalty for nothing more than membership in the Communist party was widely discussed and supported in Texas.
New York had laws that prohibited state employees from belonging to any organization that advocated the overthrow of the US government or was "treasonous" or "seditious."
The regents of the State University of New York required teachers and employees to sign an oath that they were not members of the Communist Party. Those faculty and staff who refused to sign the oath were fired. In 1952 the New York City Board of Education dismissed a public school teacher because of his previous "connection" to the CPUSA.
Reaching levels of absurdity, those applying for licenses to fish in New York reservoirs had to sign loyalty oaths.
During the same period, in 1950, thirty-one professors, after refusing to sign a loyalty oath, were dismissed from the University of California. Not long thereafter, the Los Angeles City Council enacted anti-Communist ordinances that required local Communists to register with the Police Department and prohibited any Communist or "Muscovite model of police-state dictatorship" from owning a firearm. In Birmingham, Alabama and Jacksonville, Florida, Communists were banned from being within the city limits.
Like blind oaths, proper patriotism knows neither bounds nor modesty, whether in government or out, as private agencies and groups willingly volunteered during this time to ensure the proper decorum of speech and association.
At its height McCarthyism was supported by a variety of private groups, including, predictably, the American Legion and a number of women's organizations such as the American Public Relations Forumand the Minute Women of the U.S.A. Both were fiercely anti-communist with thousands of their membership organized into study groups and letter-writing networks that worked to identify and stamp out perceived subversion.
Private loyalty review boards and anti-communist investigators found bountiful work in industries anxious to ensure their employees had the appropriate beliefs. For a fee, these teams would investigate employees and question them about their political identity and affiliations at informal hearings where their attendance was mandated… but their right to counsel disavowed.
By 1958, it was estimated that roughly one out of every five employees in the United States was required to pass some sort of loyalty review which was often cross referenced against a private nationwide data bank.
This collection of personal information contained detailed referenced lists of leftist organizations, publications, rallies and charities along with a registry of those known or suspected to be Communists. Books and newsletters, such as Red Channels , Counterattack and Confidential Information were published by private organizations to monitor and share the identity of Communist and leftist organizations and individuals.
Not to be outdone by private patriots, in the vanguard of our national defense against the Communist menace stood, of course, the Department of Justice which started maintaining a list of "subversives" as early as 1942. Made public in 1948, when it included 78 groups, the list grew to include some 154 organizations… 110 of them identified as Communist.
FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, was the architect of President Truman's loyalty security program with its background investigations of employees carried out by his agents. As a result of these investigations, thousands of government workers lost their jobs without the benefit of any due process whatsoever. Most targets of loyalty security reviews were not allowed to cross-examine or even know the identities of their accusers. Often, they were fired without learning of what they had been accused.
Although the results of Hoover's loyalty screening program were to be maintained as strictly confidential, "evidence" developed through the investigations (reliable or otherwise) was routinely shared with other government and private entities.
For example, information was provided to Congressional committees such as HUAC. So, too, from 1951-1955 the FBI operated a secret "Responsibilities Program" that distributed anonymous, unreliable documents to state governors and civic leaders pertaining to alleged communist "affiliations" by teachers, lawyers, and other professionals. Many of the accused were promptly fired without any notice of consequence or other fundamental due process.
Never known to be uncomfortable with skirting the very laws they were sworn to uphold, during this frenzied period of subversive hunt the FBI engaged in a wide range of illegal practices as it tried to build so-called loyalty cases against Communists or sympathizers. Indeed, agents routinely undertook warrantless searches, burglaries, illegal wiretaps and opened mail.
The National Lawyers Guild, then at the forefront of the defense of many Communist-related cases, was a favorite target of the FBI with its offices burgled by agents at least fourteen times between 1947 and 1951 as they sought to uncover legal strategies of NLG defense attorneys.
On other occasions, the FBI used illegal undercover operations to disrupt Communist and other dissident political groups, meetings and speak outs. In 1956, this strategy led directly to Hoover formalizing a covert "dirty tricks" program under the name COINTELPRO… short for Counterintelligence Program.
Initially designed to disrupt the activities of the CPUSA in short order, and over the following 15 years, it went on to target all major domestic civil rights organizations… with a particular focus on such groups as the Black Panther Party, the Latino organization, the Young Lords, the American Indian Movement (AIM), Students for a Democratic Society, and the Socialist Workers Party.
In Hoover's own words, a now declassified 1967 document set forth the willful criminal use of COINTELPRO:
. . . to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters
The government goal to disrupt and destroy these movements was accomplished through a wide range of largely lawless activity. It included planting forged documents, smear campaigns and blackmail, leaking information to the press, unleashing IRS audits, physical harassment and intimidation.
COINTELPRO resulted in various show trials designed to tie up activists, their lawyers and resources… usually ending in acquittals and, often, with those charged spending many months in jail awaiting trial.
Numerous targeted activists were sent to prison on the basis of fabricated evidence and testimony from paid government informants. Others were murdered… in particular, members of the Black Panther Party including Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.
Though formally "disbanded" when exposed in 1971, COINTELPRO tactics remained very much the hallmark of the FBI attack on AIM. Virtually every known AIM leader, since the organization's emergence in 1968, was incarcerated… some time and time again.
In 1973, during the 71 day siege at Wounded Knee, the FBI fired over 250,000 rounds of ammunition into the Tribal Reserve… killing two Natives whose deaths were never investigated.
After the standoff ended, the FBI caused 542 separate charges to be filed against those identified as key AIM leaders. This resulted in only 15 convictions, all on petty offenses. As with the persecution of the Black Panther Party, AIM members often languished in jail for months on end unable to raise bail.
HUAC
Of all the high profile Congressional loyalty programs, the one most active was the House Un-American Activities Committee which initiated a televised effort, it professed, to identify and eradicate Communist subversion in the United States.
Although HUAC also targeted educators, union activists and State Department "liberals", it achieved its greatest notoriety through its harassment, indeed purge, of the Hollywood film industry.
In October 1947, the Committee began to subpoena screenwriters, directors, and other film industry members to testify about their known, or suspected, membership, or association, with the Communist Party and/or any support of its beliefs.
It was at these appearances that what came to be known as "the $64,000 question" was routinely asked: "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States?"
Among the first movie industry witnesses who appeared before the Committee were ten who decided not to cooperate with its investigation. Known as the "Hollywood Ten", these men cited the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech and assembly which they believed provided them ample protection from being required to answer the Committee's questions. Falling on deaf ears, this defense proved to be, at the time, but an abstract constitutional shibboleth… as the ten were ultimately sentenced to prison for contempt of Congress. Two of the ten were sentenced to six months, the rest to a year.
The day after the House of Representatives approved citations of contempt for the Hollywood Ten, the President of the Motion Picture Association of America issued a press release on behalf of all of the major studios. Known simply as the Waldorf Statement, with patriotic flare, it announced the Hollywood Ten had been fired and would not work again until they renounced Communism. In relevant part, the release went on to proclaim that "We will not knowingly employ a Communist or a member of any party or group which advocates the overthrow of the government of the United States."
This was to unleash the decade-long artistic purge known simply as the Hollywood Blacklist. Though hundreds would be denied employment, with many forced to find work outside their chosen field or under pseudonyms or abroad, the studios, producers and other employers denied the existence of any such blacklist.
Not satisfied with the damage already done by their televised political inquisition, HUAC continued to subpoena additional witnesses connected to the entertainment industry and government agencies.
Although many of the next generation of witnesses successfully invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination before the Committee, and were thus safely beyond the reach of its questions, it was not without adverse consequence.
Now known as "Fifth Amendment Communists", a soubriquet coined by Senator Joseph McCarthy, this particular constitutional protection proved too little too late, when it came to careers, as its invocation was deemed grounds for dismissal by various government and private industry employers.
Indeed, in the film industry alone it is estimated that more than 300 actors, authors and directors were denied work in the U.S. because of "questionable" political beliefs or associations.
During this period, blacklists were by no means limited to the entertainment industry alone. For example, it is estimated that nearly 3000 seaman and longshoremen lost their jobs, not long after the start of the Korean War, due to a loyalty review program initiated by the Coast Guard.
Under this program, long employed workers were summarily fired on the basis of accusations which, all at once, challenged their patriotism yet kept secret the identity of their accusers and the nature of any accusations lodged against them.
Within the trade union movement, as a whole, the government moved with swift pace to control the political tone of its membership. Thus under the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 all union officials were required to sign an affidavit affirming they didn't belong to, or sympathize with, any communist or subversive organization.
Unions, with officials who refused to sign the affidavit, were denied any government protection through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Unions that failed to sign the affidavits could not participate in NLRB elections or challenge unfair labor practices directly to the NLRB.
Enter Senator McCarthy
Senator Joseph McCarthy spent almost five years trying, without success, to expose alleged Communists and other left-wing "loyalty risks" both in the U.S. government and out. In the hyper-charged atmosphere of the Cold War, McCarthy's witch hunt, fueled by sweeping claims of disloyalty, was enough to convince many Americans that their government was overrun with traitors and spies.
Given the times, and McCarthy's bluster, his accusations, alone, were so menacing, and strangely credible, that few "ordinary" Americans dared to challenge, or to look beyond, his simplistic patriotic screed. Others of political prominence or office feared, as well, to challenge his shrill bombast lest their own loyalty become suspect.
As noted by a Gallop poll in 1954, at the height of his popularity a majority of Americans supported McCarthy even as he blindly railed against long accomplished institutions and individuals on the basis of little more than explosive rhetoric and unsubstantiated accusations. Indeed, at the time, Earl Warren, then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court opined that if the Bill of Rights was put to a vote it likely would have lost. It seems history does, in fact, repeat itself.
From 1953 to 1954, McCarthy headed the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations which he used to its full tyrannical potential for a number of his "Red Scare" investigations that ultimately proved to be a complete waste of time and expense. During these hearings, witnesses were badgered… and lives destroyed … by explosive accusations of Communist subversion that proved to be groundless.
At first, the McCarthy inquisition raised allegations of pervasive Communist influence in the staffing and content of Voice of America. It failed.
Next, he moved on to the overseas library program of the State Department. Demanding its card catalogues, McCarthy vetted them for publications he considered to be subversive. Reciting the list of authors, and their books, which he deemed to be "un-American" before his Committee and the press, the State Department and many libraries in the US were cowered into removing the books from circulation.
It is estimated that some three hundred books were removed from library shelves… with some being burned. They included Robin Hood, Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience and John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. In Providence, Rhode Island, the post office barred Lenin's State and Revolution from being delivered to Brown University.
McCarthy's committee then began an investigation into the United States Army with televised hearings watched by 20 million people. Beginning with the Army Signal Corps laboratory at Fort Monmouth, McCarthy once again made headlines through wild baseless claims of a spy ring among the Army researchers at the base.
One line of examination by McCarthy of Stanley Berinsky, a civilian worker for the Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth, about the political affiliations of his mother speaks volumes about the Red Scare of the day. "Did you ever ask her if she was a communist? …When you went to see her, weren't you curious?"
Needless to say, nothing came of this particular investigation, either.
Next, McCarthy took on an Army dentist who had been promoted to the rank of major despite his refusal to answer questions on a loyalty review form.
During this inquest, McCarthy levied various public insults at a brigadier general which led to the Army-McCarthy hearings… with the two trading charges and counter-charges for more than a month before a national television audience seemingly fixated on the proceedings.
Following this public exposure, McCarthy's popularity dropped precipitously. Not long thereafter he was censured by the Senate and his calling as the country's leading red-baiter ended.
It is difficult to estimate the number of victims of McCarthy, or the era from which he sprang, and which he subsequently came to personify. McCarthy sought to promote himself as the guardian of social morality… as the embodiment of certain rigid values and traditions which he, and others of the day, falsely found to reflect uniformity of belief and purpose.
While America, as a whole, was assaulted by the poisoned pledge that McCarthyism promoted, tens of thousands of its citizens felt the immediate injury of his political cleanse through the loss of jobs, opportunity and hope. Millions were formally investigated. Thousands lost their liberty or reputation. Many fled the United States to find freedom abroad no longer available to them at home. Still, others took their own lives from the desperation fed by the narrow and hateful voice of a man who would stop at nothing to promote his agenda.
We are a people that generally applaud success and recognize accomplishment. In that light, some of the notable persons who were blacklisted or suffered other persecution during McCarthyism, and which follows, provides a dramatic view of just how damning and far its reach existed in the United States:
+ Nelson Algren, writer
+ Lucille Ball, actress, model, and film studio executive.
+ Alvah Bessie, Abraham Lincoln Brigade, writer, journalist, screenwriter, Hollywood Ten
+ Elmer Bernstein, composer and conductor
+ Leonard Bernstein, conductor, pianist, composer
+ David Bohm, physicist and philosopher
+ Bertolt Brecht, poet, playwright, screenwriter
+ Archie Brown, Abraham Lincoln Brigade, WW II vet, union leader, imprisoned. Successfully challenged LandrumGriffin Act provision
+ Esther Brunauer, forced from the U.S. State Department
+ Luis Buñuel, film director, producer
+ Charlie Chaplin, actor and director
+ Aaron Copland, composer
+ Bartley Crum, attorney
+ Howard Da Silva, actor
+ Jules Dassin, director
+ Dolores del Río, actress
+ Edward Dmytryk, director, Hollywood Ten
+ W.E.B. Du Bois, civil rights activist and author
+ George A. Eddy, pre-Keynesian Harvard economist, US Treasury monetary policy specialist
+ Albert Einstein, Nobel Prize-winning physicist, philosopher, mathematician, activist
+ Hanns Eisler, composer
+ Howard Fast, writer
+ Lion Feuchtwanger, novelist and playwright
+ Carl Foreman, writer of High Noon
+ John Garfield, actor
+ Jack Gilford, actor
+ Allen Ginsberg, poet
+ Ruth Gordon, actress
+ Lee Grant, actress
+ Dashiell Hammett, author
+ Elizabeth Hawes, clothing designer, author, equal rights activist
+ Lillian Hellman, playwright
+Dorothy Healey, union organizer, CPUSA official
+ Lena Horne, singer
+ Langston Hughes, writer, poet, playwright
+ Marsha Hunt, actress
+ Sam Jaffe, actor
+ Theodore Kaghan, diplomat
+ Garson Kanin, writer and director
+ Danny Kaye, comedian, singer, actor
+ Benjamin Keen, historian
+ Otto Klemperer, conductor and composer
+ Gypsy Rose Lee, actress and stripper
+ Cornelius Lanczos, mathematician and physicist
+ Ring Lardner Jr., screenwriter, Hollywood Ten
+ Arthur Laurents, playwright
+ Philip Loeb, actor
+ Joseph Losey, director
+ Albert Maltz, screenwriter, Hollywood Ten
+ Heinrich Mann, novelist
+ Klaus Mann, writer
+ Thomas Mann, Nobel Prize winning novelist and essayist
+ Burgess Meredith, actor
+ Arthur Miller, playwright and essayist
+ Jessica Mitford, author, muckraker. Refused to testify to HUAC.
+ Dimitri Mitropoulos, conductor, pianist, composer
+ Zero Mostel, actor
+ Joseph Needham, biochemist, sinologist, historian of science
+ J. Robert Oppenheimer, physicist, scientific director of the Manhattan Project
+ Dorothy Parker, writer, humorist
+ Linus Pauling, chemist, Nobel prizes for Chemistry and Peace
+ Samuel Reber, diplomat
+ Al Richmond, union organizer, editor
+ Martin Ritt, actor and director
+ Paul Robeson, actor, athlete, singer, writer, political activist
+ Edward G. Robinson, actor
+ Waldo Salt, screenwriter
+ Jean Seberg, actress
+ Pete Seeger, folk singer, songwriter
+ Artie Shaw, jazz musician, bandleader, author
+ Irwin Shaw, writer
+ William L. Shirer, journalist, author
+ Lionel Stander, actor
+ Dirk Jan Struik, mathematician, historian of maths
+ Paul Sweezy, economist and founder-editor of Monthly Review
+ Charles W. Thayer, diplomat
+ Dalton Trumbo screenwriter, Hollywood Ten
+ Tsien Hsue-shen, physicist
+ Sam Wanamaker, actor, director, responsible for recreating Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London, England.
+ Orson Welles, actor, author, film director
+ Gene Weltfish, anthropologist fired from Columbia University
The decade plus run of McCarthyism was not simply about red baitingor a drive to demand political purity or obedience whether in the workplace or the world of electoral politics, academia or entertainment.
At its core, McCarthyism demanded rigid uniformity in sexual identity and expression… and unleashed cold war attacks upon race and those who deviated from religious faith. It was also noted for sweeping conspiracy theories.
Not far from the shadow of World War II, social conformity became very much the rallying cry, across the country, in a staged shriek against communism.
No longer needed for the war industry, women were dropped from the work force and told to go home and become obedient housewives. African American soldiers who fought in largely segregated units, and who survived, returned home to the pain and punishment of "separate but unequal". Meanwhile, American religion was fixated on what McCarthy called an "all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity."
While examples of each drive for cultural uniformity abound, several sum up the place and time that was America during its full-time chase for subversives.
Thus, while Jim Crow was at its zenith, African American civil rights organizations and activists were targeted for their alleged connection to communists who had long supported their struggle for equal rights.
Because of little more than his work in the civil rights movement, famed international actor and artist, Paul Robeson's passport was seized by the Government… eliminating his ability to travel and earn a living.
Never one to be slowed or intimidated by government restriction, Robeson would speak to the roar of enormous rallies in Harlem and then move on to the next demonstration… despite ever-present FBI surveillance as it tried to build a subversion case against him.
In 1951, W. E. B. Du Bois, then 83 years of age (and a founder of the NAACP) was tried in federal court as a Soviet agent for little more than exercising his First Amendment rights through circulating a petition protesting nuclear weapons.
Branded "un-American", the government argued Du Bois' long relationship with the CPUSA,during his civil rights work, had led him to protest in order to advance American pacifism at a time when Soviet aggression was on the march.
Acquitted by a federal judge because prosecutors failed to present any evidence, nevertheless, the trial and attendant publicity ruined his career.
The following year, not satisfied with leaving Du Bois penniless, the State Department illegally revoked his passport to prevent his travel to a peace conference in Canada… and to thwart his move to a country where he was not blacklisted.
At the same time that Black activists were being harassed and imprisoned, cold war "warriors" routinely spoke of the core disconnect between "godless communism" and "god-fearing Americanism".
Religious conservatives such as Baptist Minister, Billy Graham, exalted the idea of traditional god-fearing families as a bulwark against atheistic totalitarianism. In 1950, he preached that communism aimed to "destroy the American home and cause… moral deterioration."
At times, the anti-internationalist aspect of red scare rhetoric and literature took on a rabid anti-Jewish tone because of the role that many Jews had played in both the Russian revolution and establishment of the Communist Party.
On the Senate floor, Senator J.W. Fulbright of Arkansas, the long-term Chair of the Foreign Relations Committee who supported multilateralism and opposed McCarthyism and HUAC, read from a letter he had received from the president of the Chemical Attraction Oil Corporation of Texas:
"When you joined the only Jew to vote against 76 Senators that proved you were the henchman of the Jew Deal. H. H. Lehman should be deported out of this nation to Russia, or let Germany take that bird' in and give him the gas, like Hitler did, as per my opinion of his record."
The red scare produced more than a few sweeping conspiracies. For example, some in the McCarthy camp attacked the public health services particularly in the areas of vaccination, mental health and fluoridation as communist plots to poison or brainwash the American people.
The "lavender scare" drove cold war attacks on "homosexuality" with a hunt for "sexual perverts" who were presumed to be subversive by nature and, thus, a threat to state security.
Having heard the State Department was employing gay staff members, and never one to miss an opportunity to manipulate American fears, McCarthy was the prime mover in the establishment of an FBI surveillance program intended to identify gay and lesbian government employees. As a result, thousands lost their employment in the name of protecting "national security."
One tragedy, in particular, sums up the convergence of cold war homophobia and its exploitation by the political thirst of Joe McCarthy… which knew no bounds.
In 1954, a sitting Democratic Senator was found dead inside his Senate office. A year earlier, his son had been arrested and convicted of soliciting sex with a male undercover police officer. Looking to pick up a Senate seat for the Republican Party, McCarthy threatened to expose the event as a scandal, in the Senator's campaign, if he did not withdraw his bid for re-election. Two weeks later, Senator Lester Huntof Wyoming committed suicide.
Fast Forward… 2017
"It's McCarthyism"… Nonsense.
I've known victims of McCarthyism; real life artists, activists, lawyers, educators, writers, union organizers and street corner screamers. Women and men of diverse race, faith, political belief and sexual identity they took seriously their commitment to their own unique voice, vision and skill. These were people of great courage and principle… of loud and soft presence… who sacrificed much as they fought to make a difference in a world they struggled to leave better than that which they had inherited.
It's very difficult to read the history of McCarthyism, even an abbreviated version, without feeling some sense of the direct, immediate pain and punishment an entire nation was subjected to in one of the most politically charged, indeed explosive, periods in US history.
Whether it was the hundreds that went to prison, the tens of thousands that lost their livelihood, the millions investigated, a nation cowered to silence, or those who preferred death to the fear of tomorrow, McCarthyism was not an abstract debate. It was a nightmare… a real, seemingly timeless, repeat that passed victims from inquisition to inquisition with no relief in sight.
The red scare was much more than an intangible political thought about the course of the future. It was not an evening's amusement for those who race to hear stories that cheer on their particular hero of the day or demonize an expedient foe. Nor was it virtual information fodder for activists of the moment to fill their blog page with artisan passage of the next day.
No, the witch hunt that was McCarthy ripped a real, immediate, and deep hole in the liberty and light that dared to entice people to express themselves and to do so in ways that were personal and, at times, provocative.
The women and men who paid the price for their association and expression were much more than interesting passing footnotes to a now silenced historical sideshow.
Yet, today, for some, their sacrifice has been reduced to an opportune shroud to provide cover for what a narrow group did or did not do during this past election and in the years to its run-up.
For months, now, we've heard simple chants of "McCarthy" as partisans have apparently grown fatigued… others, perhaps, fearful of what a search for truth may or may not reveal.
I've spent more than three decades shredding or putting together cases, criminal and civil, in state, federal and international courtrooms…often high profile, complex litigation. More than a few were matters handled in quiet and well beyond the reach of the public eye. The search for truth is not a quick-speak or a head-note to be embraced, or rejected, by simple majority vote or process.
I have no idea what an intensive and widespread investigation will, or will not, ultimately reveal about what a small group of individuals, perhaps entities, did or did not do in their conspicuous chase to obtain more and more personal wealth or political power.
But to hear a necessary search to hold accountable those that may have done so, politicized by passion and silenced by secret, is to craft a double standard of law that sends millions of poor, political and powerless to prison while providing a free passageway to those that have usurped their collective rights.
"It's McCarthyism"… Nonsense.





[/FONT]]]> <![CDATA[Abuse of HIstory - Chris Hedges]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15636 Thu, 28 Sep 2017 09:36:30 +0000 Peter Lemkin]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15636

The Abuses of History


[Image: History-Fish24Sept2017-850x729.jpg]Mr. Fis
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Historians, like journalists, are in the business of manipulating facts. Some use facts to tell truths, however unpleasant. But many more omit, highlight and at times distort them in ways that sustain national myths and buttress dominant narratives. The failure by most of the United States' popular historians and the press to tell stories of oppression and the struggles against it, especially by women, people of color, the working class and the poor, has contributed to the sickening triumphalism and chauvinism that are poisoning our society. The historian James W. Loewen, in his book "Lies Across America: What Our Historic Markers and Monuments Get Wrong," calls the monuments that celebrate our highly selective and distorted history a "landscape of denial."
The historian Carl Becker wrote, "History is what the present chooses to remember about the past." And as a nation founded on the pillars of genocide, slavery, patriarchy, violent repression of popular movements, savage war crimes committed to expand the empire, and capitalist exploitation, we choose to remember very little. This historical amnesia, as James Baldwin never tired of pointing out, is very dangerous. It feeds self-delusion. It severs us from recognition of our propensity for violence. It sees us project on othersalmost always the vulnerablethe unacknowledged evil that lies in our past and our hearts. It shuts down the voices of the oppressed, those who can tell us who we are and enable us through self-reflection and self-criticism to become a better people. "History does not merely refer to the past … history is literally present in all we do," Baldwin wrote.
If we understood our real past we would see as lunacy Donald Trump's bombastic assertions that the removal of Confederate statues is an attack on "our history." Whose history is being attacked? And is it history that is being attacked or the myth disguised as history and perpetuated by white supremacy and capitalism? As the historian Eric Foner points out, "Public monuments are built by those with sufficient power to determine which parts of history are worth commemorating and what vision of history ought to be conveyed."
The clash between historical myth and historical reality is being played out in the president's disparaging of black athletes who protest indiscriminate police violence against people of color. "Maybe he should find a country that works better for him," candidate Trump said of professional quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who knelt during the national anthem at National Football League games to protest police violence. Other NFL players later emulated his protest.

Friday at a political rally in Alabama, Trump bellowed: "Wouldn't you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He's fired. He's fired!' " That comment and a Saturday morning tweet by Trump that criticized professional basketball star Stephen Curry, another athlete of African-American descent, prompted a number of prominent sports figures to respond angrily. One addressed the president as "U bum" on Twitter.
The war of words between the president and black athletes is about competing historical narratives.
Historians are rewarded for buttressing the ruling social structure, producing heavy tomes on the ruling elitesusually powerful white men such as John D. Rockefeller or Theodore Rooseveltand ignoring the underlying social movements and radicals that have been the true engines of cultural and political change in the United States. Or they retreat into arcane and irrelevant subjects of minor significance, becoming self-appointed specialists of the banal or the trivial. They ignore or minimize inconvenient facts and actions that tarnish the myth, including lethal suppression of groups, classes and civilizations and the plethora of lies told by the ruling elites, the mass media and powerful institutions to justify their grip on power. They eschew transcendental and moral issues, including class conflict, in the name of neutrality and objectivity. The mantra of disinterested scholarship and the obsession with data collection add up, as the historian Howard Zinn wrote, "to the fear that using our intelligence to further our moral ends is somehow improper."
"Objectivity is an interesting and often misunderstood word," Foner said. "I tell my students what objectivity means is you have an open mind, not an empty mind. There is no person who doesn't have preconceptions, values, assumptions. And you bring those to the study of history. What it means to be objective is if you begin encountering evidence, research, that questions some of your assumptions, you may have to change your mind. You have to have an open mind in your encounters with the evidence. But that doesn't mean you don't take a stance. You have an obligation. If you've done all this studying, done all this research, if you understand key issues in American history better than most people, just because you've done the research and they haven't, you have an obligation as a citizen to speak up about it. …We should not be bystanders. We should be active citizens. Being a historian and an active citizen is not mutually contradictory."
Historians who apologize for the power elites, who in essence shun complexity and minimize inconvenient truths, are rewarded and promoted. They receive tenure, large book contracts, generous research grants, lucrative speaking engagements and prizes. Truth tellers, such as Zinn, are marginalized. Friedrich Nietzsche calls this process "creative forgetfulness."
"In high school," Foner said, "I got a history textbook that said Story of American History,' which was very one-dimensional. It was all about the rise of freedom and liberty. Slavery was omitted almost entirely. The general plight of African-Americans and other non-whites was pretty much omitted from this story. It was very partial. It was very limited. That's the same thing with all these statues and [the debate about them]. I'm not saying we should tear down every single statue of every Confederate all over the place. But if we step back and look at the public presentation of history, particularly in the South, through these monuments, where are the black people of the South? Where are the monuments to the victims of slavery? To the victims of lynching? The monuments of the black leaders of Reconstruction? The first black senators and members of Congress? My view is, as well as taking down some statues, we need to put up others. If we want to have a public commemoration of history, it ought to be diverse enough to include the whole history, not just the history that those in power want us to remember."
"Civil War monuments glorify soldiers and generals who fought for Southern independence," Foner writes in "Battles for Freedom: The Use and Abuse of American History," "explaining their motivation by reference to the ideals of freedom, states' rights and individual autonomyeverything, that is but slavery, the cornerstone of the Confederacy,' according to its vice president, Alexander Stephens. Fort Mill, South Carolina, has a marker honoring the faithful slaves' of the Confederate states, but one would be hard pressed to find monuments anywhere in the country to slave rebels like Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, to the 200,000 black soldiers and sailors who fought for the Union (or, for that matter, the thousands of white Southerners who remained loyal to the nation)."
The United Daughters of the Confederacy, as Loewen points out, erected most of the South's Confederate monuments between 1890 and 1920. This campaign of commemoration was part of what Foner calls "a conscious effort to glorify and sanitize the Confederate cause and legitimize the newly installed Jim Crow system."
Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who Loewen writes was "one of the most vicious racists in American history," was one of the South's biggest slave traders, commander of the forces that massacred black Union troops after they surrendered at Fort Pillow and the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. Yet, as Foner notes, "there are more statues, markers and busts of Forrest in Tennessee than of any other figure in the state's history, including President Andrew Jackson."
"Only one transgression was sufficiently outrageous to disqualify Confederate leaders from the pantheon of heroes," Foner writes. "No statue of James Longstreet, a far abler commander than Forrest, graces the Southern countryside, and Gen. James Fleming Fagan is omitted from the portrait gallery of famous figures of Arkansas history in Little Rock. Their crime? Both supported black rights during Reconstruction."
The American myth also relies heavily on a distorted history of the westward expansion.
"The mythology of the West is deeply rooted in our culture," Foner said, "whether it's in Western movies or the idea of the lone pioneer, the individual roughing it out in the West, and of course, the main lie is that the West was kind of empty before white settlers and hunters and trappers and farmers came from the East to settle it. In fact, the West has been populated since forever. The real story of the West is the clash of all these different peoples, Native Americans, Asians in California, settlers coming in from the East, Mexicans. The West was a very multicultural place. There are a lot of histories there. Many of those histories are ignored or subordinated in this one story of the westward movement."
"Racism is certainly a part of Western history," Foner said. "But you're not going to get that from a John Wayne movie [or] the paintings by [Frederic] Remington and others. It's a history that doesn't help you understand the present."
Remington's racism, displayed in paintings of noble white settlers and cowboys battling "savages," was pronounced. "JewsingunschinamenItaliansHuns," he wrote, were "the rubbish of the earth I hate." In the same letter he added, "I've got some Winchesters and when the massacreing begins … I can get my share of 'em and whats more I will."
Nietzsche identified three approaches to history: monumental, antiquarian and critical, the last being "the history that judges and condemns."
"The monumental is the history that glorifies the nation-state that is represented in monuments that do not question anything about the society," Foner said. "A lot of history is like that. The rise of history as a discipline coincided with the rise of the nation-state. Every nation needs a set of myths to justify its own existence. Another one of my favorite writers, Ernest Renan, the French historian, wrote, The historian is the enemy of the nation.' It's an interesting thing to say. He doesn't mean they're spies or anything. The historian comes along and takes apart the mythologies that are helping to underpin the legitimacy of the nation. That's why people don't like them very often. They don't want to hear these things. Antiquarian is what a lot of people are. That's fine. They're looking for their personal roots, their family history. They're going on ancestry.com to find out where their DNA came from. That's not really history exactly. They don't have much of a historical context. But it stimulates people to think about the past. Then there's what Nietzsche calls critical historythe history that judges and condemns. It takes a moral stance. It doesn't just relate the facts. It tells you what is good and what is evil. A lot of historians don't like to do that. But to me, it's important. It's important for the historian, having done the research, having presented the history, to say here's where I stand in relation to all these important issues in our history."
"Whether it's Frederick Douglass, Eugene Debs, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Martin Luther King Jr., those are the people who were trying to make America a better place," Foner said. "King, in particular, was a very radical guy."
Yet, as Foner points out, King is effectively "frozen in one speech, one sentence: I want my children to be judged by the content of their character, not just the color of their skin. [But] that's not what the whole civil rights movement was about. People forget, he died leading a poor people's march, leading a strike of sanitation workers. He wasn't just out there talking about civil rights. He had moved to economic equality as a fundamental issue."
Max Weber wrote, "What is possible would never have been achieved if, in this world, people had not repeatedly reached for the impossible."
Foner, like Weber, argues that it is the visionaries and utopian reformers such as Debs and the abolitionists who brought about real social change, not the "practical" politicians. The abolitionists destroyed what Foner calls the "conspiracy of silence by which political parties, churches and other institutions sought to exclude slavery from public debate." He writes:
For much of the 1850s and the first two years of the Civil War, Lincolnwidely considered the model of a pragmatic politicianadvocated a plan to end slavery that involved gradual emancipation, monetary compensation for slaver owners, and setting up colonies of freed blacks outside the United States. The harebrained scheme had no possibility of enactment. It was the abolitionists, still viewed by some historians as irresponsible fanatics, who put forward the programan immediate and uncompensated end to slavery, with black people becoming US citizensthat came to pass (with Lincoln's eventual help, of course).
The political squabbles that dominate public discourse almost never question the sanctity of private property, individualism, capitalism or imperialism. They hold as sacrosanct American "virtues." They insist that Americans are a "good" people steadily overcoming any prejudices and injustices that may have occurred in the past. The debates between the Democrats and the Whigs, or today's Republicans and Democrats, have roots in the same allegiance to the dominant structures of power, myth of American exceptionalism and white supremacy.
"It's all a family quarrel without any genuine, serious disagreements," Foner said.
Those who challenge these structures, who reach for the impossible, who dare to speak the truth, have been, throughout American history, dismissed as "fanatics." But, as Foner points out, it is often the "fanatics" who make history.
]]>

The Abuses of History


[Image: History-Fish24Sept2017-850x729.jpg]Mr. Fis
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Historians, like journalists, are in the business of manipulating facts. Some use facts to tell truths, however unpleasant. But many more omit, highlight and at times distort them in ways that sustain national myths and buttress dominant narratives. The failure by most of the United States' popular historians and the press to tell stories of oppression and the struggles against it, especially by women, people of color, the working class and the poor, has contributed to the sickening triumphalism and chauvinism that are poisoning our society. The historian James W. Loewen, in his book "Lies Across America: What Our Historic Markers and Monuments Get Wrong," calls the monuments that celebrate our highly selective and distorted history a "landscape of denial."
The historian Carl Becker wrote, "History is what the present chooses to remember about the past." And as a nation founded on the pillars of genocide, slavery, patriarchy, violent repression of popular movements, savage war crimes committed to expand the empire, and capitalist exploitation, we choose to remember very little. This historical amnesia, as James Baldwin never tired of pointing out, is very dangerous. It feeds self-delusion. It severs us from recognition of our propensity for violence. It sees us project on othersalmost always the vulnerablethe unacknowledged evil that lies in our past and our hearts. It shuts down the voices of the oppressed, those who can tell us who we are and enable us through self-reflection and self-criticism to become a better people. "History does not merely refer to the past … history is literally present in all we do," Baldwin wrote.
If we understood our real past we would see as lunacy Donald Trump's bombastic assertions that the removal of Confederate statues is an attack on "our history." Whose history is being attacked? And is it history that is being attacked or the myth disguised as history and perpetuated by white supremacy and capitalism? As the historian Eric Foner points out, "Public monuments are built by those with sufficient power to determine which parts of history are worth commemorating and what vision of history ought to be conveyed."
The clash between historical myth and historical reality is being played out in the president's disparaging of black athletes who protest indiscriminate police violence against people of color. "Maybe he should find a country that works better for him," candidate Trump said of professional quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who knelt during the national anthem at National Football League games to protest police violence. Other NFL players later emulated his protest.

Friday at a political rally in Alabama, Trump bellowed: "Wouldn't you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He's fired. He's fired!' " That comment and a Saturday morning tweet by Trump that criticized professional basketball star Stephen Curry, another athlete of African-American descent, prompted a number of prominent sports figures to respond angrily. One addressed the president as "U bum" on Twitter.
The war of words between the president and black athletes is about competing historical narratives.
Historians are rewarded for buttressing the ruling social structure, producing heavy tomes on the ruling elitesusually powerful white men such as John D. Rockefeller or Theodore Rooseveltand ignoring the underlying social movements and radicals that have been the true engines of cultural and political change in the United States. Or they retreat into arcane and irrelevant subjects of minor significance, becoming self-appointed specialists of the banal or the trivial. They ignore or minimize inconvenient facts and actions that tarnish the myth, including lethal suppression of groups, classes and civilizations and the plethora of lies told by the ruling elites, the mass media and powerful institutions to justify their grip on power. They eschew transcendental and moral issues, including class conflict, in the name of neutrality and objectivity. The mantra of disinterested scholarship and the obsession with data collection add up, as the historian Howard Zinn wrote, "to the fear that using our intelligence to further our moral ends is somehow improper."
"Objectivity is an interesting and often misunderstood word," Foner said. "I tell my students what objectivity means is you have an open mind, not an empty mind. There is no person who doesn't have preconceptions, values, assumptions. And you bring those to the study of history. What it means to be objective is if you begin encountering evidence, research, that questions some of your assumptions, you may have to change your mind. You have to have an open mind in your encounters with the evidence. But that doesn't mean you don't take a stance. You have an obligation. If you've done all this studying, done all this research, if you understand key issues in American history better than most people, just because you've done the research and they haven't, you have an obligation as a citizen to speak up about it. …We should not be bystanders. We should be active citizens. Being a historian and an active citizen is not mutually contradictory."
Historians who apologize for the power elites, who in essence shun complexity and minimize inconvenient truths, are rewarded and promoted. They receive tenure, large book contracts, generous research grants, lucrative speaking engagements and prizes. Truth tellers, such as Zinn, are marginalized. Friedrich Nietzsche calls this process "creative forgetfulness."
"In high school," Foner said, "I got a history textbook that said Story of American History,' which was very one-dimensional. It was all about the rise of freedom and liberty. Slavery was omitted almost entirely. The general plight of African-Americans and other non-whites was pretty much omitted from this story. It was very partial. It was very limited. That's the same thing with all these statues and [the debate about them]. I'm not saying we should tear down every single statue of every Confederate all over the place. But if we step back and look at the public presentation of history, particularly in the South, through these monuments, where are the black people of the South? Where are the monuments to the victims of slavery? To the victims of lynching? The monuments of the black leaders of Reconstruction? The first black senators and members of Congress? My view is, as well as taking down some statues, we need to put up others. If we want to have a public commemoration of history, it ought to be diverse enough to include the whole history, not just the history that those in power want us to remember."
"Civil War monuments glorify soldiers and generals who fought for Southern independence," Foner writes in "Battles for Freedom: The Use and Abuse of American History," "explaining their motivation by reference to the ideals of freedom, states' rights and individual autonomyeverything, that is but slavery, the cornerstone of the Confederacy,' according to its vice president, Alexander Stephens. Fort Mill, South Carolina, has a marker honoring the faithful slaves' of the Confederate states, but one would be hard pressed to find monuments anywhere in the country to slave rebels like Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, to the 200,000 black soldiers and sailors who fought for the Union (or, for that matter, the thousands of white Southerners who remained loyal to the nation)."
The United Daughters of the Confederacy, as Loewen points out, erected most of the South's Confederate monuments between 1890 and 1920. This campaign of commemoration was part of what Foner calls "a conscious effort to glorify and sanitize the Confederate cause and legitimize the newly installed Jim Crow system."
Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who Loewen writes was "one of the most vicious racists in American history," was one of the South's biggest slave traders, commander of the forces that massacred black Union troops after they surrendered at Fort Pillow and the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. Yet, as Foner notes, "there are more statues, markers and busts of Forrest in Tennessee than of any other figure in the state's history, including President Andrew Jackson."
"Only one transgression was sufficiently outrageous to disqualify Confederate leaders from the pantheon of heroes," Foner writes. "No statue of James Longstreet, a far abler commander than Forrest, graces the Southern countryside, and Gen. James Fleming Fagan is omitted from the portrait gallery of famous figures of Arkansas history in Little Rock. Their crime? Both supported black rights during Reconstruction."
The American myth also relies heavily on a distorted history of the westward expansion.
"The mythology of the West is deeply rooted in our culture," Foner said, "whether it's in Western movies or the idea of the lone pioneer, the individual roughing it out in the West, and of course, the main lie is that the West was kind of empty before white settlers and hunters and trappers and farmers came from the East to settle it. In fact, the West has been populated since forever. The real story of the West is the clash of all these different peoples, Native Americans, Asians in California, settlers coming in from the East, Mexicans. The West was a very multicultural place. There are a lot of histories there. Many of those histories are ignored or subordinated in this one story of the westward movement."
"Racism is certainly a part of Western history," Foner said. "But you're not going to get that from a John Wayne movie [or] the paintings by [Frederic] Remington and others. It's a history that doesn't help you understand the present."
Remington's racism, displayed in paintings of noble white settlers and cowboys battling "savages," was pronounced. "JewsingunschinamenItaliansHuns," he wrote, were "the rubbish of the earth I hate." In the same letter he added, "I've got some Winchesters and when the massacreing begins … I can get my share of 'em and whats more I will."
Nietzsche identified three approaches to history: monumental, antiquarian and critical, the last being "the history that judges and condemns."
"The monumental is the history that glorifies the nation-state that is represented in monuments that do not question anything about the society," Foner said. "A lot of history is like that. The rise of history as a discipline coincided with the rise of the nation-state. Every nation needs a set of myths to justify its own existence. Another one of my favorite writers, Ernest Renan, the French historian, wrote, The historian is the enemy of the nation.' It's an interesting thing to say. He doesn't mean they're spies or anything. The historian comes along and takes apart the mythologies that are helping to underpin the legitimacy of the nation. That's why people don't like them very often. They don't want to hear these things. Antiquarian is what a lot of people are. That's fine. They're looking for their personal roots, their family history. They're going on ancestry.com to find out where their DNA came from. That's not really history exactly. They don't have much of a historical context. But it stimulates people to think about the past. Then there's what Nietzsche calls critical historythe history that judges and condemns. It takes a moral stance. It doesn't just relate the facts. It tells you what is good and what is evil. A lot of historians don't like to do that. But to me, it's important. It's important for the historian, having done the research, having presented the history, to say here's where I stand in relation to all these important issues in our history."
"Whether it's Frederick Douglass, Eugene Debs, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Martin Luther King Jr., those are the people who were trying to make America a better place," Foner said. "King, in particular, was a very radical guy."
Yet, as Foner points out, King is effectively "frozen in one speech, one sentence: I want my children to be judged by the content of their character, not just the color of their skin. [But] that's not what the whole civil rights movement was about. People forget, he died leading a poor people's march, leading a strike of sanitation workers. He wasn't just out there talking about civil rights. He had moved to economic equality as a fundamental issue."
Max Weber wrote, "What is possible would never have been achieved if, in this world, people had not repeatedly reached for the impossible."
Foner, like Weber, argues that it is the visionaries and utopian reformers such as Debs and the abolitionists who brought about real social change, not the "practical" politicians. The abolitionists destroyed what Foner calls the "conspiracy of silence by which political parties, churches and other institutions sought to exclude slavery from public debate." He writes:
For much of the 1850s and the first two years of the Civil War, Lincolnwidely considered the model of a pragmatic politicianadvocated a plan to end slavery that involved gradual emancipation, monetary compensation for slaver owners, and setting up colonies of freed blacks outside the United States. The harebrained scheme had no possibility of enactment. It was the abolitionists, still viewed by some historians as irresponsible fanatics, who put forward the programan immediate and uncompensated end to slavery, with black people becoming US citizensthat came to pass (with Lincoln's eventual help, of course).
The political squabbles that dominate public discourse almost never question the sanctity of private property, individualism, capitalism or imperialism. They hold as sacrosanct American "virtues." They insist that Americans are a "good" people steadily overcoming any prejudices and injustices that may have occurred in the past. The debates between the Democrats and the Whigs, or today's Republicans and Democrats, have roots in the same allegiance to the dominant structures of power, myth of American exceptionalism and white supremacy.
"It's all a family quarrel without any genuine, serious disagreements," Foner said.
Those who challenge these structures, who reach for the impossible, who dare to speak the truth, have been, throughout American history, dismissed as "fanatics." But, as Foner points out, it is often the "fanatics" who make history.
]]> <![CDATA[Bill Blum has died....]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15606 Sat, 26 Aug 2017 15:50:20 +0000 Peter Lemkin]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15606 Quote:See post #9 about Bill dying today.....
Bill is a good and old friend of mine. If you have not read his books, what the fuck are you waiting for?!?! They have no equals. In his illness for quite some time he has not been posting his blog of many years. Here is the latest. I know some of the other advanced Deep Political thinkers will see that Bill doesn't quite see the possibilities of false-flag or terrorists-R-paid-by-US, but nevertheless his ramblings have value, IMO. Read his books!!!!!


The Anti-Empire Report #150

By William Blum Published August 25th, 2017


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I'm back

It has recently been reported that Senator John McCain has an aggressive brain tumor. Not long ago I would have thought: "Good. It'll be great to be rid of that neanderthal reactionary bastard!"
Not now. My kidneys are gone and I'm on (rather unpleasant) dialysis for the rest of my life. My separated-from German wife is in Germany and can't fly because of the danger of blood clots forming and lodging in her lungs or heart. I'm an avid reader of medical news and almost every day I get choked-up and depressed by the never-ending heart-breaking stories of incurable pain and suffering of the old and the young.
So I wish the senator a good recovery, if that's possible. Probably no more possible than his politics recovering. He just condemned all the neo-Nazi actions in Charlottesville, this man who went out of his way to pose for friendly photos with neo-Nazis in Ukraine and jihadists in Syria.
So far the dialysis does not seem to have helped, at least not with my two main symptoms: deep-seated sleepiness at home, resulting in repeated naps, making my writing difficult; and getting out-of-breath and having to stop and rest after a very short and slow walk outdoors. I'm curious about whether any of my readers knows of anyone with a medical problem that was clearly relieved by dialysis. It may be my advanced age of 84 that blocks any improvement. But, supposedly, the dialysis keeps me alive in the absence of functioning kidneys. Incidentally, nine of my readers and friends have offered me a kidney for transplant, but I can't find a hospital willing to perform it; again it's my age, though I'm very willing.
At least I still have my eyesight and my hearing. My mind is okay. I have all my limbs and am not paralyzed. And I'm not in pain. Much to be thankful for.
It's also very nice to have gone past the hangups my condition thrust upon me and to be back writing my report for the first time in five months. During the recent American presidential campaign I wrote that if I were forced to vote and also forced to choose between Clinton and Trump I'd vote for the Donald. (As it turned out I voted for the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein.) I stated two reasons why I'd choose Trump over Clinton: presumably, a lesser chance of nuclear war with Russia and a lesser chance of the American government closing down the Russian TV station, Russia Today (RT), broadcasting in the US. There was at the time, and now again, growing Congressional pressure to do just that and I'm very reliant on the station. Because of such matters I was willing to overlook Trump's many and obvious character defects, which I summed up with the endearing word of my people back in Brooklyn - "shmuck". But by now the man's shmuckiness has been writ so large that little hope for him can be maintained.
What is keeping Donald Trump from drowning in the very cesspool of his own shmuckiness is a gentleman named Kim Jong-un. Who would have believed that a single historical period could produce two such giant shmucks, men who tower over their pathetic contemporaries? There's only one explanation for this remarkable phenomenon. Of course. It's Russia. Moscow is using the two men to make America look foolish. And Russia, it may soon be revealed, gave North Korea its nuclear weapons. Did you think that such an impoverished, downtrodden society could produce such scientific marvels on its own?
Is there any act too dastardly for Vladimir Putin?
We don't know yet whether Trump's son, daughter or son-in-law made any deals with Kim Jong-un. Stay tuned to Fox News and CNN.
Those stations, amongst others, put out a lot of fake news, but when it comes to news of North Korea nothing compares to the fake news of 1950. Did you know there's no convincing evidence that North Korea did what they're most famous for - the June 25, 1950 invasion of South Korea, which led to the everlasting division of the Korean peninsula into two countries? And there were no United Nations forces that observed this invasion, as we've been taught. In any event, the two sides had been clashing across the dividing line for several years. What happened on that fateful day in June could thus be regarded as no more than the escalation of an ongoing civil war. Read my chapter on Korea in Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II for the full details of these and other myths.
The response to terrorism

I still get emails criticizing me for the stand I took against Islamic terrorists earlier this year. Almost every one feels obliged to remind me that the terrorists are acting in revenge for decades of US/Western bombing of Muslim populations and assorted other atrocities. And I then have to inform each one of them that they've chosen the wrong person for such a lecture. I, it happens, wrote the fucking book on the subject!
In the first edition of my book Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, published in 2001, before September 11, the first chapter was "Why do terrorists keep picking on The United States?" It includes a long list of hostile US military and political actions against the Islamic world during the previous 20 years.
So I can well see why radical Muslims would harbor a deep-seated desire for revenge against The United States and its allies who often contributed to the hostile actions. My problem is that the Islamic terrorist actions are seldom aimed at those responsible for this awful history - the executive and military branches of the Western nations, but are more and more targeted against innocent civilians, which at times includes other Muslims, probably even, on occasion, some who sympathize with the radical Islamic cause. These random terrorist acts are thus not defendable or understandable from any revenge point of view. What did the poor people of Barcelona have to do with Western imperialism?
Civilians are of course much easier to target, but that's clearly no excuse. As I've pointed out in the past, we should consider this: From the 1950s to the 1980s the United States carried out all kinds of very harmful policies against Latin America, including numerous bombings, without the natives ever resorting to the uncivilized, barbaric kind of retaliation as employed by ISIS. Latin American leftists generally took their revenge out upon concrete representatives of the American empire: diplomatic, military and corporate targets not markets, theatres, nightclubs, hospitals, schools, restaurants or churches.
The terrorists' choice of targets is bad enough, but their methods are even worse. Who could have imagined 20 years ago that an organization would exist in this world that would widely publicize detailed instructions on how to choose a truck to drive down a busy thoroughfare and directly into crowds of people? What species of human being is this?
What is needed is a worldwide media campaign to make fun of the very idea that such men, along with suicide bombers, will be rewarded by Allah in an afterlife; even the idea of an afterlife can of course be derided; yes, even the idea of Allah, by that or any other name, can be derided; at least the idea of such a cruel God. Appealing to jihadists on simply moral grounds would be even more useless than appealing to Pentagon officials or Donald Trump on moral grounds. The jihadists have to be deeply ridiculed; the small amount of human empathy and decency still remaining in their heart of hearts has to be reached through embarrassing them before their friends and family. Femmes fatalescan be used against young Islamic men, most of whom, I'd venture to say, have sizable sexual hangups. Bombing them only increases their numbers.
Some thoughts on the question that will not go away: Capitalism vs. socialism

"The whole art of Conservative politics in the 20th century is being deployed to enable wealth to persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power." Aneurin Bevan (1897-1960), Labour Party (UK) minister
The fact that Donald J. Trump is a champion - indeed, a model, or as he might say, a huge model - of capitalism should be enough to make people turn away from the system, but the debate between capitalism and socialism continues without pause in the Trump era as it has since the 19th century. The wealth gap, affordable housing, free education, public transportation, a sustainable environment, and health care are some of the perennial points of argument we're all familiar with.
So many empty houses … so many homeless people - Is this the way a market economy is supposed to work?
Twice in recent times the federal government in Washington has undertaken major studies of many thousands of federal jobs to determine whether they could be done more efficiently by private contractors. On one occasion the federal employees won more than 80% of the time; on the other occasion 91%. Both studies took place under the George W. Bush administration, which was hoping for different results. The American people have to be reminded of what they once knew but seem to have forgotten: that they don't want BIG government, or SMALL government; they don't want MORE government, or LESS government; they want government ON THEIR SIDE.
As to corporations, we have to ask: Do the members of a family relate to each other on the basis of self-interest and greed?
Speaking in very broad terms … slavery gave way to feudalism … feudalism gave way to capitalism … capitalism is not a timelessly valid institution but was created to satisfy certain needs of the time … capitalism has outlived its usefulness and must now give way to socialism … the ultimate incompatibility between capitalist profit motive and human environmental survival demands nothing less.
The system corrupts every important aspect of our lives, including the one which takes up the most of our time - our work, even for corporation executives, who demand huge salaries and benefits to justify their working at jobs that otherwise are not particularly satisfying. Several years ago, the Financial Times of London reported on Wall Street's opposition to salary limits:
Senior bankers were quick to warn the plans would cause a brain drain from the profession as top executives seek more rewarding jobs out of the public eye. Unlike other careers where job satisfaction and other considerations play a part, finance tends to attract people whose main motivation is money. … The cap is a lousy idea,' complained one top Wall Street executive. If there is no monetary upside, who would want to do these jobs?'
As for those below the executive class … When they work, it's too often just any job they can find, rather than one designed to realize innermost spiritual or artistic needs. Their innermost needs are rent, food, clothes, and electricity.
For those concerned about the extent of freedom under socialism the jury is still out because the United States and other capitalist powers have subverted, destabilized, invaded, and/or overthrown every halfway serious attempt at socialism in the world. Not one socialist-oriented government, from Cuba and Vietnam in the 1960s, to Nicaragua and Chile in the 1970s, to Bulgaria and Yugoslavia in the 1990s, to Haiti and Venezuela in the 2000s has been allowed to rise or fall based on its own merits or lack of same, or allowed to relax its guard against the ever-threatening imperialists.
The demise of the Soviet Union (even with all its shortcomings) has turned out to be the greatest setback to the fight against the capitalist behemoth, and we have not yet recovered.
How could the current distribution of property and wealth reasonably be expected to emerge from any sort of truly democratic process? And if this is the way regulated capitalism works, what would life under unregulated capitalism be like? We've long known the answer to that question. Theodore Roosevelt (president of the United States 1901-09) said in a speech in 1912: "The limitation of governmental powers, of governmental action, means the enslavement of the people by the great corporations who can only be held in check through the extension of governmental power."
And what do the corporate elite want? In a word: "everything" … from our schools to our social security, from our health care to outer space, from our media to our sports.
"We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause." William James (1842-1910)

A few years ago, when George W. Bush came out as a painter, he said that he had told his art teacher that "there's a Rembrandt trapped inside this body". Ah, so Georgie is more than just a painter. He's an artiste.
And we all know that artistes are very special people.
They're never to be confused with mass murderers, war criminals, merciless torturers or inveterate liars.
Neither are they ever to be accused of dullness of wit or incoherence of thought or speech.
Artistes are not the only special people.
Devout people are also special: Josef Stalin studied for the priesthood.
Osama bin Laden prayed five times a day.
And animal lovers: Herman Goering, while his Luftwaffe rained death upon Europe, kept a sign in his office that read: "He who tortures animals wounds the feelings of the German people."
Adolf Hitler was also an animal lover and had long periods of being a vegetarian and anti-smoking.
Charles Manson was a staunch anti-vivisectionist.
And cultured people: This fact Elie Wiesel called the greatest discovery of the war: that Adolf Eichmann was cultured, read deeply, played the violin.
Mussolini also played the violin.
Some Nazi concentration camp commanders listened to Mozart to drown out the cries of the inmates.
Former Bosnian Serb politician Radovan Karadzic, convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity, was a psychiatrist, specializing in depression; a practitioner of alternative medicine; published a book of poetry and books for children.
Members of ISIS and Al Qaeda and other suicide bombers are genuinely and sincerely convinced that they are doing the right thing, for which they will be honored and rewarded in an afterlife. That doesn't make them less evil; in fact it makes them more terrifying, since they force us to face the scary reality of a world in which sincerity and morality do not necessarily have anything to do with each other.
Dick Gregory, 1932-2017
"Mayor Daley and other government officials during the riots of the '60s showed their preference for property over humanity by ordering the police to shoot all looters to kill. They never said shoot murderers to kill or shoot dope pushers to kill."
"When the white Christian missionaries went to Africa, the white folks had the bibles and the natives had the land. When the missionaries pulled out, they had the land and the natives had the bibles."
"The way Americans seem to think today, about the only way to end hunger in America would be for Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird to go on national TV and say we are falling behind the Russians in feeding folks."
"What we're doing in Vietnam is using the black man to kill the yellow man so the white man can keep the land he took from the red man."

Notes
  • Washington Post, June 8, 2005 and March 23, 2006
  • Financial Times (London) February 5, 2009
  • Washington Post, November 21, 2013
]]> Quote:See post #9 about Bill dying today.....
Bill is a good and old friend of mine. If you have not read his books, what the fuck are you waiting for?!?! They have no equals. In his illness for quite some time he has not been posting his blog of many years. Here is the latest. I know some of the other advanced Deep Political thinkers will see that Bill doesn't quite see the possibilities of false-flag or terrorists-R-paid-by-US, but nevertheless his ramblings have value, IMO. Read his books!!!!!


The Anti-Empire Report #150

By William Blum Published August 25th, 2017


Share10

I'm back

It has recently been reported that Senator John McCain has an aggressive brain tumor. Not long ago I would have thought: "Good. It'll be great to be rid of that neanderthal reactionary bastard!"
Not now. My kidneys are gone and I'm on (rather unpleasant) dialysis for the rest of my life. My separated-from German wife is in Germany and can't fly because of the danger of blood clots forming and lodging in her lungs or heart. I'm an avid reader of medical news and almost every day I get choked-up and depressed by the never-ending heart-breaking stories of incurable pain and suffering of the old and the young.
So I wish the senator a good recovery, if that's possible. Probably no more possible than his politics recovering. He just condemned all the neo-Nazi actions in Charlottesville, this man who went out of his way to pose for friendly photos with neo-Nazis in Ukraine and jihadists in Syria.
So far the dialysis does not seem to have helped, at least not with my two main symptoms: deep-seated sleepiness at home, resulting in repeated naps, making my writing difficult; and getting out-of-breath and having to stop and rest after a very short and slow walk outdoors. I'm curious about whether any of my readers knows of anyone with a medical problem that was clearly relieved by dialysis. It may be my advanced age of 84 that blocks any improvement. But, supposedly, the dialysis keeps me alive in the absence of functioning kidneys. Incidentally, nine of my readers and friends have offered me a kidney for transplant, but I can't find a hospital willing to perform it; again it's my age, though I'm very willing.
At least I still have my eyesight and my hearing. My mind is okay. I have all my limbs and am not paralyzed. And I'm not in pain. Much to be thankful for.
It's also very nice to have gone past the hangups my condition thrust upon me and to be back writing my report for the first time in five months. During the recent American presidential campaign I wrote that if I were forced to vote and also forced to choose between Clinton and Trump I'd vote for the Donald. (As it turned out I voted for the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein.) I stated two reasons why I'd choose Trump over Clinton: presumably, a lesser chance of nuclear war with Russia and a lesser chance of the American government closing down the Russian TV station, Russia Today (RT), broadcasting in the US. There was at the time, and now again, growing Congressional pressure to do just that and I'm very reliant on the station. Because of such matters I was willing to overlook Trump's many and obvious character defects, which I summed up with the endearing word of my people back in Brooklyn - "shmuck". But by now the man's shmuckiness has been writ so large that little hope for him can be maintained.
What is keeping Donald Trump from drowning in the very cesspool of his own shmuckiness is a gentleman named Kim Jong-un. Who would have believed that a single historical period could produce two such giant shmucks, men who tower over their pathetic contemporaries? There's only one explanation for this remarkable phenomenon. Of course. It's Russia. Moscow is using the two men to make America look foolish. And Russia, it may soon be revealed, gave North Korea its nuclear weapons. Did you think that such an impoverished, downtrodden society could produce such scientific marvels on its own?
Is there any act too dastardly for Vladimir Putin?
We don't know yet whether Trump's son, daughter or son-in-law made any deals with Kim Jong-un. Stay tuned to Fox News and CNN.
Those stations, amongst others, put out a lot of fake news, but when it comes to news of North Korea nothing compares to the fake news of 1950. Did you know there's no convincing evidence that North Korea did what they're most famous for - the June 25, 1950 invasion of South Korea, which led to the everlasting division of the Korean peninsula into two countries? And there were no United Nations forces that observed this invasion, as we've been taught. In any event, the two sides had been clashing across the dividing line for several years. What happened on that fateful day in June could thus be regarded as no more than the escalation of an ongoing civil war. Read my chapter on Korea in Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II for the full details of these and other myths.
The response to terrorism

I still get emails criticizing me for the stand I took against Islamic terrorists earlier this year. Almost every one feels obliged to remind me that the terrorists are acting in revenge for decades of US/Western bombing of Muslim populations and assorted other atrocities. And I then have to inform each one of them that they've chosen the wrong person for such a lecture. I, it happens, wrote the fucking book on the subject!
In the first edition of my book Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, published in 2001, before September 11, the first chapter was "Why do terrorists keep picking on The United States?" It includes a long list of hostile US military and political actions against the Islamic world during the previous 20 years.
So I can well see why radical Muslims would harbor a deep-seated desire for revenge against The United States and its allies who often contributed to the hostile actions. My problem is that the Islamic terrorist actions are seldom aimed at those responsible for this awful history - the executive and military branches of the Western nations, but are more and more targeted against innocent civilians, which at times includes other Muslims, probably even, on occasion, some who sympathize with the radical Islamic cause. These random terrorist acts are thus not defendable or understandable from any revenge point of view. What did the poor people of Barcelona have to do with Western imperialism?
Civilians are of course much easier to target, but that's clearly no excuse. As I've pointed out in the past, we should consider this: From the 1950s to the 1980s the United States carried out all kinds of very harmful policies against Latin America, including numerous bombings, without the natives ever resorting to the uncivilized, barbaric kind of retaliation as employed by ISIS. Latin American leftists generally took their revenge out upon concrete representatives of the American empire: diplomatic, military and corporate targets not markets, theatres, nightclubs, hospitals, schools, restaurants or churches.
The terrorists' choice of targets is bad enough, but their methods are even worse. Who could have imagined 20 years ago that an organization would exist in this world that would widely publicize detailed instructions on how to choose a truck to drive down a busy thoroughfare and directly into crowds of people? What species of human being is this?
What is needed is a worldwide media campaign to make fun of the very idea that such men, along with suicide bombers, will be rewarded by Allah in an afterlife; even the idea of an afterlife can of course be derided; yes, even the idea of Allah, by that or any other name, can be derided; at least the idea of such a cruel God. Appealing to jihadists on simply moral grounds would be even more useless than appealing to Pentagon officials or Donald Trump on moral grounds. The jihadists have to be deeply ridiculed; the small amount of human empathy and decency still remaining in their heart of hearts has to be reached through embarrassing them before their friends and family. Femmes fatalescan be used against young Islamic men, most of whom, I'd venture to say, have sizable sexual hangups. Bombing them only increases their numbers.
Some thoughts on the question that will not go away: Capitalism vs. socialism

"The whole art of Conservative politics in the 20th century is being deployed to enable wealth to persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power." Aneurin Bevan (1897-1960), Labour Party (UK) minister
The fact that Donald J. Trump is a champion - indeed, a model, or as he might say, a huge model - of capitalism should be enough to make people turn away from the system, but the debate between capitalism and socialism continues without pause in the Trump era as it has since the 19th century. The wealth gap, affordable housing, free education, public transportation, a sustainable environment, and health care are some of the perennial points of argument we're all familiar with.
So many empty houses … so many homeless people - Is this the way a market economy is supposed to work?
Twice in recent times the federal government in Washington has undertaken major studies of many thousands of federal jobs to determine whether they could be done more efficiently by private contractors. On one occasion the federal employees won more than 80% of the time; on the other occasion 91%. Both studies took place under the George W. Bush administration, which was hoping for different results. The American people have to be reminded of what they once knew but seem to have forgotten: that they don't want BIG government, or SMALL government; they don't want MORE government, or LESS government; they want government ON THEIR SIDE.
As to corporations, we have to ask: Do the members of a family relate to each other on the basis of self-interest and greed?
Speaking in very broad terms … slavery gave way to feudalism … feudalism gave way to capitalism … capitalism is not a timelessly valid institution but was created to satisfy certain needs of the time … capitalism has outlived its usefulness and must now give way to socialism … the ultimate incompatibility between capitalist profit motive and human environmental survival demands nothing less.
The system corrupts every important aspect of our lives, including the one which takes up the most of our time - our work, even for corporation executives, who demand huge salaries and benefits to justify their working at jobs that otherwise are not particularly satisfying. Several years ago, the Financial Times of London reported on Wall Street's opposition to salary limits:
Senior bankers were quick to warn the plans would cause a brain drain from the profession as top executives seek more rewarding jobs out of the public eye. Unlike other careers where job satisfaction and other considerations play a part, finance tends to attract people whose main motivation is money. … The cap is a lousy idea,' complained one top Wall Street executive. If there is no monetary upside, who would want to do these jobs?'
As for those below the executive class … When they work, it's too often just any job they can find, rather than one designed to realize innermost spiritual or artistic needs. Their innermost needs are rent, food, clothes, and electricity.
For those concerned about the extent of freedom under socialism the jury is still out because the United States and other capitalist powers have subverted, destabilized, invaded, and/or overthrown every halfway serious attempt at socialism in the world. Not one socialist-oriented government, from Cuba and Vietnam in the 1960s, to Nicaragua and Chile in the 1970s, to Bulgaria and Yugoslavia in the 1990s, to Haiti and Venezuela in the 2000s has been allowed to rise or fall based on its own merits or lack of same, or allowed to relax its guard against the ever-threatening imperialists.
The demise of the Soviet Union (even with all its shortcomings) has turned out to be the greatest setback to the fight against the capitalist behemoth, and we have not yet recovered.
How could the current distribution of property and wealth reasonably be expected to emerge from any sort of truly democratic process? And if this is the way regulated capitalism works, what would life under unregulated capitalism be like? We've long known the answer to that question. Theodore Roosevelt (president of the United States 1901-09) said in a speech in 1912: "The limitation of governmental powers, of governmental action, means the enslavement of the people by the great corporations who can only be held in check through the extension of governmental power."
And what do the corporate elite want? In a word: "everything" … from our schools to our social security, from our health care to outer space, from our media to our sports.
"We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause." William James (1842-1910)

A few years ago, when George W. Bush came out as a painter, he said that he had told his art teacher that "there's a Rembrandt trapped inside this body". Ah, so Georgie is more than just a painter. He's an artiste.
And we all know that artistes are very special people.
They're never to be confused with mass murderers, war criminals, merciless torturers or inveterate liars.
Neither are they ever to be accused of dullness of wit or incoherence of thought or speech.
Artistes are not the only special people.
Devout people are also special: Josef Stalin studied for the priesthood.
Osama bin Laden prayed five times a day.
And animal lovers: Herman Goering, while his Luftwaffe rained death upon Europe, kept a sign in his office that read: "He who tortures animals wounds the feelings of the German people."
Adolf Hitler was also an animal lover and had long periods of being a vegetarian and anti-smoking.
Charles Manson was a staunch anti-vivisectionist.
And cultured people: This fact Elie Wiesel called the greatest discovery of the war: that Adolf Eichmann was cultured, read deeply, played the violin.
Mussolini also played the violin.
Some Nazi concentration camp commanders listened to Mozart to drown out the cries of the inmates.
Former Bosnian Serb politician Radovan Karadzic, convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity, was a psychiatrist, specializing in depression; a practitioner of alternative medicine; published a book of poetry and books for children.
Members of ISIS and Al Qaeda and other suicide bombers are genuinely and sincerely convinced that they are doing the right thing, for which they will be honored and rewarded in an afterlife. That doesn't make them less evil; in fact it makes them more terrifying, since they force us to face the scary reality of a world in which sincerity and morality do not necessarily have anything to do with each other.
Dick Gregory, 1932-2017
"Mayor Daley and other government officials during the riots of the '60s showed their preference for property over humanity by ordering the police to shoot all looters to kill. They never said shoot murderers to kill or shoot dope pushers to kill."
"When the white Christian missionaries went to Africa, the white folks had the bibles and the natives had the land. When the missionaries pulled out, they had the land and the natives had the bibles."
"The way Americans seem to think today, about the only way to end hunger in America would be for Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird to go on national TV and say we are falling behind the Russians in feeding folks."
"What we're doing in Vietnam is using the black man to kill the yellow man so the white man can keep the land he took from the red man."

Notes
  • Washington Post, June 8, 2005 and March 23, 2006
  • Financial Times (London) February 5, 2009
  • Washington Post, November 21, 2013
]]> <![CDATA[Voting by Electronic Voting Machine is a JOKE!...on democracy!]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15573 Tue, 01 Aug 2017 11:02:25 +0000 Peter Lemkin]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15573
AUGUST 1, 2017 | SEAN STEINBERG


HACKERS EVISCERATE ELECTION TECH SECURITY…WHO'S SURPRISED?

[Image: image2-700x470.jpg]Photo credit: Cory Doctorow / Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Over the past two days, all major US news outlets breathlessly reported that hackers in Las Vegas needed little time to expose the security flaws of several types of voting machines this weekend. While it is certainly nice to see the mainstream media cover election integrity issues more than once every four years, anybody following the topic, as WhoWhatWhy routinely does, was hardly surprised that the hackers were so successful.
How do we know? Because, in anticipation of what happened at the DEF CON hacking conference, WhoWhatWhy spoke to many of the leading election integrity experts to get their thoughts on the event.
Most of them expressed hope that the hackers would raise much-needed awareness of the vulnerabilities of US voting machines.
Some of the experts we spoke to ahead of the event expressed concerns that, should the hackers fail to breach the machines, it would give people a false sense of security. It turns out that they did not have to worry about that at all.
"…all of the studied systems possess critical security failures that render their technical controls insufficient to guarantee a trustworthy election."
Hackers wasted no time decimating voting-machine security when they were invited to take a swing at more than 30 "real voting machines, used in past elections and to be used in future elections" obtained by the event's organizers for the convention's inaugural "Voting Machine Hacking Village."
Doug Kellner, co-chair of the New York State election board, lauded DEF CON's "commendable" effort.
"We can never be certain that our systems are completely secure," Kellner told WhoWhatWhy. "If hackers expose vulnerabilities, that is a positive development that can motivate election officials to address those issues."
Some election officials went one step further, travelling to DEF CON "to hack the very machines they use in their jurisdictions to run elections," according to Harri Hursti, the Finnish cybersecurity expert who helped spawn the Voting Village.
"This was their first opportunity to take a look themselves into the machines machines they were forced to use and manage, but were prohibited to study and find answers to their own questions and learn the truth about that equipment," Hursti told WhoWhatWhy.
But not every public official shares this curiosity, or advocates total transparency. Some would rather keepquiet about these security failures in order to preserve the American public's faith in the integrity of our democratic system. Nevertheless, computer security experts and election integrity activists generally agree that raising public awareness is the best means of motivating change.
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Password in the #ESS #iVotronic svcsvc - they found it by googling at the #VotingVillage #DEFCON #defcon25 that machine in use in 18 states.
9:49 PM - Jul 30, 2017
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All Sequoia voting machines have a common hard-coded password. yay. #defcon #VotingVillage
11:04 PM - Jul 29, 2017
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Hackers in attendance successfully infiltrated the DRE touch-screen systems and voter poll books almost immediately, according to a DEF CON representative. It took a mere 40 minutes for an attendee "with no prior knowledge" of the system to hack the Express-Pollbook 4000, which is still deployed in Ohio. Within 90 minutes, hackers "gained complete remote control" of the AVS voting terminal, a "glorified laptop running Windows XP"that was decommissioned by the Virginia election board in 2015. The country's "worst voting machine" is host to a slate of vulnerabilities, including "physically unprotected" USB ports, hilariously simple default encryption keys and passwords ("a-b-c-d-e" and "admin," respectively), and wi-fi capabilities that beg hackers to come right in.
Hackers had varying degrees of success circumventing the security of the Sequoia AVC Edge, the iVotronic, and a TSXmachine, which are collectively employed by more than 800 municipalities nationwide, according to Verified Voting. The same machines are rolled out statewide in Nevada and Louisiana (Edge); Washington, DC and South Carolina (iVotronic); and Alaska, Georgia, and Utah (TSX).
Some computer experts, like J. Alex Halderman, entered the weekend with tempered expectations. The prominent University of Michigan computer science professor, well-regarded for his work in the field of election-tech security, said that, while the event was "a nice way to raise awareness of the issues," he "suspect[ed] that it's way too short a time for anybody to demonstrate interesting hacks."
Election security consultant Neal McBurnett, who was also prepared for a lackluster showing, cautioned against jumping to conclusions. "If nothing new comes out of this, it is NOT a sign that all is well," said McBurnett, noting that DEF CON's "very ad-hoc" setting was "no substitute for a proper red-team engagement, with sufficient time, access to system code and documentation, etc., all of which are of course available to a well-supported adversary."
In hindsight, the biggest takeaway here seems to be that meager resources are no barrier to a determined, capable hacker.
"Once you've discovered that the front door is unlocked and that there's no alarm system and no security cameras, how much does it matter whether the windows are unlocked, too?"
Under the industry-friendly Digital Millennium Copyright Act, this sort of "white hat" hacking would have been impossible just a few years ago or at the very least, illegal as the copyright-protection law deemed voting machine software strictly off-limits without official supervision.
And as Hursti explained, the official studies that wereallowed under the DMCA were defanged by "restrictions on what the participating researchers were allowed to try…which obviously would not exist for criminals."
But the DMCA was amended in the wake of the ongoing Volkswagen emissions scandal to allow decreased restrictions on unsupervised hacking of vehicle software, and incidentally, election tech, provided it was done in the name of "good faith security research."
Mike Kiniry of election software provider Free & Fair credits these restrictions for voting companies' unearned public trust.
"The fact that very few [voting systems] have been demonstrated to be hackable is mostly a case of it being literally illegal until fairly recently," said Kiniry.
Computer scientist Daniel Zimmerman said relaxed restrictions, combined with the media frenzy surrounding Russian voter database infiltration during the 2016 presidential election, was "a perfect storm' for setting up a public hacking event like DEF CON put together."
Reflecting on the weekend's accomplishments, Hursti said DEF CON "established that people with no previous knowledge of voting machines, without even being provided proper tools, can still learn to hack the machines within tens of minutes or a few hours."
While DEF CON findings may prompt jaw-dropping among the uninformed, those familiar with this technology's frighteningly inadequate security could only shake their heads in agreement. Ohio's landmark EVEREST study, which examined voting systems from some of the largest players in the election tech market, including ES&S, Premier, and Hart InterCivic, came to the conclusion that "all of the studied systems possess critical security failures that render their technical controls insufficient to guarantee a trustworthy election."
For this very reason, experts have fervently espoused physical paper ballot trails a feature lacking in many DRE systems which can be accessed to verify election results, should there be any cause for doubt.
Philip Stark, an associate dean of mathematical and physical sciences at UC Berkeley, went so far as to pronounce the hype surrounding the event "a little overblown," given the vulnerabilities already brought to light by state-sponsored evaluations like EVEREST, as well as the published findings of academics like Halderman and Hursti. Hursti's successful hack of a Florida county's voter systems, all the way back in 2005 depicted in the documentary Hacking Democracy prompted the state of California to order its own comprehensive security review.
Stark, who also serves as an advisor to the federal Elections Assistance Commission, anticipated that DEF CON hackers would "find new flaws." But he said he was not worried about further shaking the confidence of the American public in the country's voting systems: "Once you've discovered that the front door is unlocked and that there's no alarm system and no security cameras, how much does it matter whether the windows are unlocked, too?"]]>
AUGUST 1, 2017 | SEAN STEINBERG


HACKERS EVISCERATE ELECTION TECH SECURITY…WHO'S SURPRISED?

[Image: image2-700x470.jpg]Photo credit: Cory Doctorow / Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Over the past two days, all major US news outlets breathlessly reported that hackers in Las Vegas needed little time to expose the security flaws of several types of voting machines this weekend. While it is certainly nice to see the mainstream media cover election integrity issues more than once every four years, anybody following the topic, as WhoWhatWhy routinely does, was hardly surprised that the hackers were so successful.
How do we know? Because, in anticipation of what happened at the DEF CON hacking conference, WhoWhatWhy spoke to many of the leading election integrity experts to get their thoughts on the event.
Most of them expressed hope that the hackers would raise much-needed awareness of the vulnerabilities of US voting machines.
Some of the experts we spoke to ahead of the event expressed concerns that, should the hackers fail to breach the machines, it would give people a false sense of security. It turns out that they did not have to worry about that at all.
"…all of the studied systems possess critical security failures that render their technical controls insufficient to guarantee a trustworthy election."
Hackers wasted no time decimating voting-machine security when they were invited to take a swing at more than 30 "real voting machines, used in past elections and to be used in future elections" obtained by the event's organizers for the convention's inaugural "Voting Machine Hacking Village."
Doug Kellner, co-chair of the New York State election board, lauded DEF CON's "commendable" effort.
"We can never be certain that our systems are completely secure," Kellner told WhoWhatWhy. "If hackers expose vulnerabilities, that is a positive development that can motivate election officials to address those issues."
Some election officials went one step further, travelling to DEF CON "to hack the very machines they use in their jurisdictions to run elections," according to Harri Hursti, the Finnish cybersecurity expert who helped spawn the Voting Village.
"This was their first opportunity to take a look themselves into the machines machines they were forced to use and manage, but were prohibited to study and find answers to their own questions and learn the truth about that equipment," Hursti told WhoWhatWhy.
But not every public official shares this curiosity, or advocates total transparency. Some would rather keepquiet about these security failures in order to preserve the American public's faith in the integrity of our democratic system. Nevertheless, computer security experts and election integrity activists generally agree that raising public awareness is the best means of motivating change.
[URL="https://twitter.com/LuluFriesdat"]
Follow[/URL]
[Image: zshR-qrI_bigger.jpg]Lulu Friesdat @LuluFriesdat

Password in the #ESS #iVotronic svcsvc - they found it by googling at the #VotingVillage #DEFCON #defcon25 that machine in use in 18 states.
9:49 PM - Jul 30, 2017
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All Sequoia voting machines have a common hard-coded password. yay. #defcon #VotingVillage
11:04 PM - Jul 29, 2017
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Hackers in attendance successfully infiltrated the DRE touch-screen systems and voter poll books almost immediately, according to a DEF CON representative. It took a mere 40 minutes for an attendee "with no prior knowledge" of the system to hack the Express-Pollbook 4000, which is still deployed in Ohio. Within 90 minutes, hackers "gained complete remote control" of the AVS voting terminal, a "glorified laptop running Windows XP"that was decommissioned by the Virginia election board in 2015. The country's "worst voting machine" is host to a slate of vulnerabilities, including "physically unprotected" USB ports, hilariously simple default encryption keys and passwords ("a-b-c-d-e" and "admin," respectively), and wi-fi capabilities that beg hackers to come right in.
Hackers had varying degrees of success circumventing the security of the Sequoia AVC Edge, the iVotronic, and a TSXmachine, which are collectively employed by more than 800 municipalities nationwide, according to Verified Voting. The same machines are rolled out statewide in Nevada and Louisiana (Edge); Washington, DC and South Carolina (iVotronic); and Alaska, Georgia, and Utah (TSX).
Some computer experts, like J. Alex Halderman, entered the weekend with tempered expectations. The prominent University of Michigan computer science professor, well-regarded for his work in the field of election-tech security, said that, while the event was "a nice way to raise awareness of the issues," he "suspect[ed] that it's way too short a time for anybody to demonstrate interesting hacks."
Election security consultant Neal McBurnett, who was also prepared for a lackluster showing, cautioned against jumping to conclusions. "If nothing new comes out of this, it is NOT a sign that all is well," said McBurnett, noting that DEF CON's "very ad-hoc" setting was "no substitute for a proper red-team engagement, with sufficient time, access to system code and documentation, etc., all of which are of course available to a well-supported adversary."
In hindsight, the biggest takeaway here seems to be that meager resources are no barrier to a determined, capable hacker.
"Once you've discovered that the front door is unlocked and that there's no alarm system and no security cameras, how much does it matter whether the windows are unlocked, too?"
Under the industry-friendly Digital Millennium Copyright Act, this sort of "white hat" hacking would have been impossible just a few years ago or at the very least, illegal as the copyright-protection law deemed voting machine software strictly off-limits without official supervision.
And as Hursti explained, the official studies that wereallowed under the DMCA were defanged by "restrictions on what the participating researchers were allowed to try…which obviously would not exist for criminals."
But the DMCA was amended in the wake of the ongoing Volkswagen emissions scandal to allow decreased restrictions on unsupervised hacking of vehicle software, and incidentally, election tech, provided it was done in the name of "good faith security research."
Mike Kiniry of election software provider Free & Fair credits these restrictions for voting companies' unearned public trust.
"The fact that very few [voting systems] have been demonstrated to be hackable is mostly a case of it being literally illegal until fairly recently," said Kiniry.
Computer scientist Daniel Zimmerman said relaxed restrictions, combined with the media frenzy surrounding Russian voter database infiltration during the 2016 presidential election, was "a perfect storm' for setting up a public hacking event like DEF CON put together."
Reflecting on the weekend's accomplishments, Hursti said DEF CON "established that people with no previous knowledge of voting machines, without even being provided proper tools, can still learn to hack the machines within tens of minutes or a few hours."
While DEF CON findings may prompt jaw-dropping among the uninformed, those familiar with this technology's frighteningly inadequate security could only shake their heads in agreement. Ohio's landmark EVEREST study, which examined voting systems from some of the largest players in the election tech market, including ES&S, Premier, and Hart InterCivic, came to the conclusion that "all of the studied systems possess critical security failures that render their technical controls insufficient to guarantee a trustworthy election."
For this very reason, experts have fervently espoused physical paper ballot trails a feature lacking in many DRE systems which can be accessed to verify election results, should there be any cause for doubt.
Philip Stark, an associate dean of mathematical and physical sciences at UC Berkeley, went so far as to pronounce the hype surrounding the event "a little overblown," given the vulnerabilities already brought to light by state-sponsored evaluations like EVEREST, as well as the published findings of academics like Halderman and Hursti. Hursti's successful hack of a Florida county's voter systems, all the way back in 2005 depicted in the documentary Hacking Democracy prompted the state of California to order its own comprehensive security review.
Stark, who also serves as an advisor to the federal Elections Assistance Commission, anticipated that DEF CON hackers would "find new flaws." But he said he was not worried about further shaking the confidence of the American public in the country's voting systems: "Once you've discovered that the front door is unlocked and that there's no alarm system and no security cameras, how much does it matter whether the windows are unlocked, too?"]]> <![CDATA[Slavery 2017]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15488 Thu, 04 May 2017 04:54:10 +0000 Lauren Johnson]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15488 [/URL]
When in the 18th and 19th Century African slaves did not 'behave', they were cruelly beaten sometimes to death as a deterrent for others. They were deprived of food for their families. Their women were raped. They were traded to even harsher white masters. Their lives were worth only what their labor could produce. They were treated as subjects, devoid of human warmth.

Today we have become all slaves; slaves to the powers of mafia bankster of finance; slaves to the western lie-propaganda; to the lobbies and their giant all dominating corporations to the war-industry, because we happily believe what we are told about ever-increasing terrorism that needs to be fought with eternal wars; slaves to the environment-destructive hydrocarbon industry; to the pharma-industry; to the Monsanto-ized agroindustry; to senseless consumerism and foremost and summing it all up: to greed, endless greed that drives endless growth, nurturing endless competition fomenting adversity, destroying solidarity, instead of amical cooperation for a harmonious human cohabitation.

As people of western nations, we are enslaved to an all-engulfing neoliberal fascism to a predatory economic. Corporate lie propaganda drip-feds our brains. We haven't even noticed it. We are enslaved to so-called leaders', put in office by obscure foreign masters of deceit the ever-stronger corporate controlled propaganda machine the six all controlling Zion-Anglo media, whom we believe whatever lie they vomit because it is more comfortable to believe a lie than to confront the truth that's self-imposed slavehood.

That's how far we have gone. Because we are clearly on an almost irreversible downward track sliding and running towards our own demise into darkness the darkness of chaos and bloody wars, endless wars against self-invented terrorism; wars that keeps our western economy running and our armchair politics alive. Wars that kill and slaughter millions and millions but all in far-away' lands. We are told we are protected. Our police and military watch over us. The new gods money and military.

To prevent this endless terror chaos happening in our western spheres, once proudly' called Europe or United States of America, Canada, Australia, Japan and whatever other country has surmised to the western slaughter machine we call for police and military protection in our own lands, we give them power to enslave us further to the Dark State those Zionist Illuminati Masonic Satanic forces that slyly command a worldwide slave trade, called The Market the all commandeering market. We adore The Market. We want to be integrated into it. The Market lets us live and strive and eat and dream of more. It feeds our greed as if there was no end. Slavehood to Nirvana or Neverland.

Although pride' was never an appropriate term to integrate our soul and minds, as we the western powers have for centuries enslaved, raped, exploited and slaughtered the indigenous people, those who have for millennia, for history of mankind survived and passed on our human genes from one murderous civilization to another, always in the hope that the new one would see the light.
We can only hope that the patience of these native people, the survivors, our saviors will prevail, that before we disappear in darkness, in the void of a manmade blackhole, we will awake, open our eyes and seek the light become finally human, the term we have fraudulently applied to ourselves the western civilization.

Beware anybody who contradicts this truth and course of events, is labeled a conspiracy theorist, defamed and out-laughed, stigmatized. We have to de-metricize. Abandon our western established parameters, they are made to enslave us -so that an ever-smaller elite satanic class that produces and manages the Clintons, Trumps, Obamas, Bushes, Blairs, Merkels, Abes, Hollandes and soon probably Macrons and many more of the same kind may continue their feast.

We are called to vote for these abject people, called politicians, most of them brain-and mindless, who have been preselected by the Masters who control the globe, in the believe we are actually choosing people who represent our society, defend our needs, freedom, justice and equality. Every four or five years we fall for the same rituals and believe things will change. We never dig deep down to find the reasons why all stays the same -and gets worse, despite our unhappiness and despite our democratic' votes. We are blind. Slavehood makes blind. We are more comfortable as blind slaves than as seeing humans. So, we keep falling for illusions.

Our lives are grey-white like a foggy sky, no sun. The sun and its enchanting wonderful brightness has been eviscerated from our enslaved minds. We are living in an oppressive depressive western civilization which we still call democracy' because our twisted, manipulated comfort-loving minds do not want to admit that we are enslaved. That democracy has been a pipedream of some Greek Philosophers 2500 years ago. Nothing more. We stole the term from history as a pretext to wage wars, rape, exploit and to enslave.

Slavehood of 2017 and maybe many more years to come if we do not wake up soon has gone global, very global. It's the epitome of globalization. We are being uniformed into colorless cubicles. Culture is massacred, language is synthesized into Anglo-Saxon slogans we are all supposed to think in globally recognized clichés; clichés repeated and perpetuated at nauseatum by Hollywood, the notorious mass-media; by the western education system, schools from primary to universities private or state-run are indoctrinating our kids with neoliberal dogmas that keep enslaving them.

Independent thinking has become a crime, as it impedes the advancement of slavehood. Education is designed to kill individual thinking and the wide range of inventiveness because it's dangerous for those who enslave and control us. New-speak' education has to make us thinking what the system wants us to think. That's what western education has become in the last 50 years a farce to keep us as non-thinking idiots.

Idiots are easily enslaved and exploited and sent to wars to steal foreign resources to satisfy the greed of a few. We love to be cannon fodder, as we were told enslaved to believe that good patriots love to die for their country. We are blinded and avoid seeing that we are dying fighting to satisfy puppet leaders' greed for power and money whose power is nothing more than that allowed them by the Masters who control the world and who pull the strings on their marionettes.

Wakeup from slavehood 2017! Make 2017 the last slave year!]]> [/URL]
When in the 18th and 19th Century African slaves did not 'behave', they were cruelly beaten sometimes to death as a deterrent for others. They were deprived of food for their families. Their women were raped. They were traded to even harsher white masters. Their lives were worth only what their labor could produce. They were treated as subjects, devoid of human warmth.

Today we have become all slaves; slaves to the powers of mafia bankster of finance; slaves to the western lie-propaganda; to the lobbies and their giant all dominating corporations to the war-industry, because we happily believe what we are told about ever-increasing terrorism that needs to be fought with eternal wars; slaves to the environment-destructive hydrocarbon industry; to the pharma-industry; to the Monsanto-ized agroindustry; to senseless consumerism and foremost and summing it all up: to greed, endless greed that drives endless growth, nurturing endless competition fomenting adversity, destroying solidarity, instead of amical cooperation for a harmonious human cohabitation.

As people of western nations, we are enslaved to an all-engulfing neoliberal fascism to a predatory economic. Corporate lie propaganda drip-feds our brains. We haven't even noticed it. We are enslaved to so-called leaders', put in office by obscure foreign masters of deceit the ever-stronger corporate controlled propaganda machine the six all controlling Zion-Anglo media, whom we believe whatever lie they vomit because it is more comfortable to believe a lie than to confront the truth that's self-imposed slavehood.

That's how far we have gone. Because we are clearly on an almost irreversible downward track sliding and running towards our own demise into darkness the darkness of chaos and bloody wars, endless wars against self-invented terrorism; wars that keeps our western economy running and our armchair politics alive. Wars that kill and slaughter millions and millions but all in far-away' lands. We are told we are protected. Our police and military watch over us. The new gods money and military.

To prevent this endless terror chaos happening in our western spheres, once proudly' called Europe or United States of America, Canada, Australia, Japan and whatever other country has surmised to the western slaughter machine we call for police and military protection in our own lands, we give them power to enslave us further to the Dark State those Zionist Illuminati Masonic Satanic forces that slyly command a worldwide slave trade, called The Market the all commandeering market. We adore The Market. We want to be integrated into it. The Market lets us live and strive and eat and dream of more. It feeds our greed as if there was no end. Slavehood to Nirvana or Neverland.

Although pride' was never an appropriate term to integrate our soul and minds, as we the western powers have for centuries enslaved, raped, exploited and slaughtered the indigenous people, those who have for millennia, for history of mankind survived and passed on our human genes from one murderous civilization to another, always in the hope that the new one would see the light.
We can only hope that the patience of these native people, the survivors, our saviors will prevail, that before we disappear in darkness, in the void of a manmade blackhole, we will awake, open our eyes and seek the light become finally human, the term we have fraudulently applied to ourselves the western civilization.

Beware anybody who contradicts this truth and course of events, is labeled a conspiracy theorist, defamed and out-laughed, stigmatized. We have to de-metricize. Abandon our western established parameters, they are made to enslave us -so that an ever-smaller elite satanic class that produces and manages the Clintons, Trumps, Obamas, Bushes, Blairs, Merkels, Abes, Hollandes and soon probably Macrons and many more of the same kind may continue their feast.

We are called to vote for these abject people, called politicians, most of them brain-and mindless, who have been preselected by the Masters who control the globe, in the believe we are actually choosing people who represent our society, defend our needs, freedom, justice and equality. Every four or five years we fall for the same rituals and believe things will change. We never dig deep down to find the reasons why all stays the same -and gets worse, despite our unhappiness and despite our democratic' votes. We are blind. Slavehood makes blind. We are more comfortable as blind slaves than as seeing humans. So, we keep falling for illusions.

Our lives are grey-white like a foggy sky, no sun. The sun and its enchanting wonderful brightness has been eviscerated from our enslaved minds. We are living in an oppressive depressive western civilization which we still call democracy' because our twisted, manipulated comfort-loving minds do not want to admit that we are enslaved. That democracy has been a pipedream of some Greek Philosophers 2500 years ago. Nothing more. We stole the term from history as a pretext to wage wars, rape, exploit and to enslave.

Slavehood of 2017 and maybe many more years to come if we do not wake up soon has gone global, very global. It's the epitome of globalization. We are being uniformed into colorless cubicles. Culture is massacred, language is synthesized into Anglo-Saxon slogans we are all supposed to think in globally recognized clichés; clichés repeated and perpetuated at nauseatum by Hollywood, the notorious mass-media; by the western education system, schools from primary to universities private or state-run are indoctrinating our kids with neoliberal dogmas that keep enslaving them.

Independent thinking has become a crime, as it impedes the advancement of slavehood. Education is designed to kill individual thinking and the wide range of inventiveness because it's dangerous for those who enslave and control us. New-speak' education has to make us thinking what the system wants us to think. That's what western education has become in the last 50 years a farce to keep us as non-thinking idiots.

Idiots are easily enslaved and exploited and sent to wars to steal foreign resources to satisfy the greed of a few. We love to be cannon fodder, as we were told enslaved to believe that good patriots love to die for their country. We are blinded and avoid seeing that we are dying fighting to satisfy puppet leaders' greed for power and money whose power is nothing more than that allowed them by the Masters who control the world and who pull the strings on their marionettes.

Wakeup from slavehood 2017! Make 2017 the last slave year!]]> <![CDATA[American Irrationalism - Chris Hedges]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15066 Mon, 31 Oct 2016 19:23:36 +0000 Peter Lemkin]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15066 [TR]
[TD="width: 84%"]American Irrationalism

By Chris Hedges[/TD]
[TD="width: 16%"][/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]

From Truthdig
[Image: ---jpg_28678_20161030-953.jpg]
The false values of reality TV have been carried over into the current presidential race. Shown here, Donald Trump on 'The Apprentice.'

There is no shortage of signs of impending environmental catastrophe, including the melting of the polar ice caps and the rise of atmospheric carbon to above 400 parts per million. The earth's sixth mass extinction is underway. It is not taking place because of planetary forces. Homo sapiens are orchestrating it.
Americans are at the same time bankrupting ourselves by waging endless and unwinnable wars. We have allowed our elites to push more than half the U.S. population into poverty through deindustrialization. We do nothing to halt the waves of nihilistic violence by enraged citizens who carry out periodic mass shootings in schools, malls, movie theaters and other public places.
The political and financial elites flaunt their greed and corruption. Donald Trump appears to pay no federal income taxes. Hillary and Bill Clinton use their foundation as a tool for legalized bribery. Our largest corporations have orchestrated a legal tax boycott. The judicial system is a subsidiary of the corporate state. Militarized police conduct public executions of unarmed people of color. Our infrastructure, including our schools, roads and bridges, along with our deindustrialized cities, are in ruins. Decay and rot -- physical and moral -- are pervasive.
We are blinded to our depressing reality by the avalanche of images disseminated by mass media. Political, intellectual and cultural discourse has been replaced with spectacle. Emotionalism and sensationalism are prized over truth. Highly paid pundits who parrot back the official narrative, corporate advertisers, inane talk shows, violent or sexually explicit entertainment and gossip-fueled news have contaminated cultural life. "Reality" television, as contrived as every other form of mass entertainment, has produced a "reality" presidential candidate.
Mass culture, because it speaks to us in easily digestible cliche's and stereotypes, reinforces ignorance, bigotry and racism. It promotes our individual and collective self-glorification. It sanctifies nonexistent national virtues. It takes from us the intellectual and linguistic tools needed to separate illusion from truth. It is all show business all the time.
There are hundreds of millions of Americans who know that something is terribly wrong. A light has gone out. They see this in their own suffering and hopelessness and the suffering and hopelessness of their neighbors. But they lack, because of the contamination of our political, cultural and intellectual discourse, the words and ideas to make sense of what is happening around them. They are bereft of a vision. Austerity, globalization, unfettered capitalism, an expansion of the extraction of fossil fuels, and war are not the prices to be paid for progress and the advance of civilization. They are part of the savage and deadly exploitation by corporate capitalism and imperialism. They serve a neoliberal ideology. The elites dare not speak this truth. It is toxic. They peddle the seductive illusions that saturate the airwaves. We are left to strike out at shadows. We are led to succumb to the racism, allure of white supremacy and bigotry that always accompany a culture in dissolution.
We cannot, for this reason, discount the possibility that Trump will be elected president. The election outcome will be decided by whatever emotion Americans feel when they cast their ballots.
Celebrity narratives, manufactured pseudo-drama, sex scandals, natural disasters, insults and invective, mass shootings and war flash before us in a constant jumble of images on ubiquitous screens. The sensory assault obliterates reality. A former congressman who sends a picture of himself in underwear to a woman is a national news story. Sober examinations of our economic, foreign, judicial and environmental policies are dismissed as too complicated and boring. They do not produce engaging images. The electronic media's sole goal is to attract viewers and advertising dollars. It has conditioned us to demand a nonstop vaudeville act.
Because of this mass indoctrination, we have become infected by what Daniel Boorstin in "The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America" calls "social narcissism." The bottomless narcissism of Trump and the Clintons caters to this social narcissism. They reflect back to us our desperate longing for, as well as celebration of, entertainment, celebrity, wealth, power and self-aggrandizement. It is not only advertising and public relations, as Boorstin pointed out, that carry out the incessant manufacturing of illusions that feed social narcissism.
Journalists, book publishers, politicians, athletes, entertainers, positive psychologists, self-help gurus, the Christian right and talk show hosts all feed the mania for illusion. They all chant the insane mantra that reality is never an impediment to what we desire. We can have anything we want if we work hard, get an education, believe in ourselves, grasp that we are exceptional and see the impossible as always possible. It is magical thinking. And magical thinking is the only real commodity the elites have left offer to us. Make American Great Again. Or American already is great. Take your pick of idiotic cliche's.
"We tyrannize and frustrate ourselves by expecting more than the world can give us or than we can make of the world," Boorstin wrote. "We demand that everyone who talks to us, or writes for us, or takes pictures for us, or makes merchandise for us, should live in our world of extravagant expectations. We expect this even of the peoples of foreign countries. We have become so accustomed to our illusions that we mistake them for reality. We demand them. And we demand that there be always more of them, bigger and better and more vivid."
The incessant search for instant gratification and the most appealing image, including the image of ourselves we manufacture for others on social media, has robbed us of the ability to examine ourselves and our society. It has extinguished the truth. The terminal decline of the American empire, the utter inability of our elites to manage anything important, the climate crisis, widespread poverty and despair do not fit with the illusion. So these realities are blotted from public consciousness. The poor are rendered invisible. The foreign policy debacles will be fixed with more bombs. Only the Soviet and fascist dictatorships, along with the medieval Catholic Church, controlled thought as effectively.
Candidates Trump and Clinton have no plans to halt our slide to oblivion. They are part of the circus. They, like all of the other elites, profit from the system that is destroying us. They lack the incentive and probably the capacity to challenge the structures and assumptions that define corporate capitalism. They function as high priests. They peddle the illusions. They laud our ingenuity and strength. They preach the inevitability of human progress and American exceptionalism. They tell us what we want to hear. They appeal to our emotions, as does all of mass culture. They do not acknowledge reality. That would spoil the show.
We vote for slogans, manufactured personalities, perceived sincerity, personal attractiveness and the crafted personal narratives peddled by candidates. Office seekers create the illusion of intimacy established between celebrities and their audiences. We see ourselves in them; admirers of the "winner" Trump see themselves as becoming him. No politician succeeds without such artifice. Today's politics is just one more product of a diseased culture. Our political leaders are much like the celebrities who, in Boorstin's words, "are receptacles into which we pour our own purposelessness. They are nothing but ourselves seen in a magnifying mirror."

The quest for identity through mass culture is self-defeating. We can never achieve what these illusions tell us we can achieve. We can never be who we want to be. It is a ceaseless chase from one chimera to the next. And this is why at the end we fall into despair and rage. It is why huge parts of the country no longer hold genuine political ideas. It is why people vote according to how they feel. It is why hatred and fear are a potent political platform. It is why we are sleepwalking into oblivion.]]> [TR]
[TD="width: 84%"]American Irrationalism

By Chris Hedges[/TD]
[TD="width: 16%"][/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]

From Truthdig
[Image: ---jpg_28678_20161030-953.jpg]
The false values of reality TV have been carried over into the current presidential race. Shown here, Donald Trump on 'The Apprentice.'

There is no shortage of signs of impending environmental catastrophe, including the melting of the polar ice caps and the rise of atmospheric carbon to above 400 parts per million. The earth's sixth mass extinction is underway. It is not taking place because of planetary forces. Homo sapiens are orchestrating it.
Americans are at the same time bankrupting ourselves by waging endless and unwinnable wars. We have allowed our elites to push more than half the U.S. population into poverty through deindustrialization. We do nothing to halt the waves of nihilistic violence by enraged citizens who carry out periodic mass shootings in schools, malls, movie theaters and other public places.
The political and financial elites flaunt their greed and corruption. Donald Trump appears to pay no federal income taxes. Hillary and Bill Clinton use their foundation as a tool for legalized bribery. Our largest corporations have orchestrated a legal tax boycott. The judicial system is a subsidiary of the corporate state. Militarized police conduct public executions of unarmed people of color. Our infrastructure, including our schools, roads and bridges, along with our deindustrialized cities, are in ruins. Decay and rot -- physical and moral -- are pervasive.
We are blinded to our depressing reality by the avalanche of images disseminated by mass media. Political, intellectual and cultural discourse has been replaced with spectacle. Emotionalism and sensationalism are prized over truth. Highly paid pundits who parrot back the official narrative, corporate advertisers, inane talk shows, violent or sexually explicit entertainment and gossip-fueled news have contaminated cultural life. "Reality" television, as contrived as every other form of mass entertainment, has produced a "reality" presidential candidate.
Mass culture, because it speaks to us in easily digestible cliche's and stereotypes, reinforces ignorance, bigotry and racism. It promotes our individual and collective self-glorification. It sanctifies nonexistent national virtues. It takes from us the intellectual and linguistic tools needed to separate illusion from truth. It is all show business all the time.
There are hundreds of millions of Americans who know that something is terribly wrong. A light has gone out. They see this in their own suffering and hopelessness and the suffering and hopelessness of their neighbors. But they lack, because of the contamination of our political, cultural and intellectual discourse, the words and ideas to make sense of what is happening around them. They are bereft of a vision. Austerity, globalization, unfettered capitalism, an expansion of the extraction of fossil fuels, and war are not the prices to be paid for progress and the advance of civilization. They are part of the savage and deadly exploitation by corporate capitalism and imperialism. They serve a neoliberal ideology. The elites dare not speak this truth. It is toxic. They peddle the seductive illusions that saturate the airwaves. We are left to strike out at shadows. We are led to succumb to the racism, allure of white supremacy and bigotry that always accompany a culture in dissolution.
We cannot, for this reason, discount the possibility that Trump will be elected president. The election outcome will be decided by whatever emotion Americans feel when they cast their ballots.
Celebrity narratives, manufactured pseudo-drama, sex scandals, natural disasters, insults and invective, mass shootings and war flash before us in a constant jumble of images on ubiquitous screens. The sensory assault obliterates reality. A former congressman who sends a picture of himself in underwear to a woman is a national news story. Sober examinations of our economic, foreign, judicial and environmental policies are dismissed as too complicated and boring. They do not produce engaging images. The electronic media's sole goal is to attract viewers and advertising dollars. It has conditioned us to demand a nonstop vaudeville act.
Because of this mass indoctrination, we have become infected by what Daniel Boorstin in "The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America" calls "social narcissism." The bottomless narcissism of Trump and the Clintons caters to this social narcissism. They reflect back to us our desperate longing for, as well as celebration of, entertainment, celebrity, wealth, power and self-aggrandizement. It is not only advertising and public relations, as Boorstin pointed out, that carry out the incessant manufacturing of illusions that feed social narcissism.
Journalists, book publishers, politicians, athletes, entertainers, positive psychologists, self-help gurus, the Christian right and talk show hosts all feed the mania for illusion. They all chant the insane mantra that reality is never an impediment to what we desire. We can have anything we want if we work hard, get an education, believe in ourselves, grasp that we are exceptional and see the impossible as always possible. It is magical thinking. And magical thinking is the only real commodity the elites have left offer to us. Make American Great Again. Or American already is great. Take your pick of idiotic cliche's.
"We tyrannize and frustrate ourselves by expecting more than the world can give us or than we can make of the world," Boorstin wrote. "We demand that everyone who talks to us, or writes for us, or takes pictures for us, or makes merchandise for us, should live in our world of extravagant expectations. We expect this even of the peoples of foreign countries. We have become so accustomed to our illusions that we mistake them for reality. We demand them. And we demand that there be always more of them, bigger and better and more vivid."
The incessant search for instant gratification and the most appealing image, including the image of ourselves we manufacture for others on social media, has robbed us of the ability to examine ourselves and our society. It has extinguished the truth. The terminal decline of the American empire, the utter inability of our elites to manage anything important, the climate crisis, widespread poverty and despair do not fit with the illusion. So these realities are blotted from public consciousness. The poor are rendered invisible. The foreign policy debacles will be fixed with more bombs. Only the Soviet and fascist dictatorships, along with the medieval Catholic Church, controlled thought as effectively.
Candidates Trump and Clinton have no plans to halt our slide to oblivion. They are part of the circus. They, like all of the other elites, profit from the system that is destroying us. They lack the incentive and probably the capacity to challenge the structures and assumptions that define corporate capitalism. They function as high priests. They peddle the illusions. They laud our ingenuity and strength. They preach the inevitability of human progress and American exceptionalism. They tell us what we want to hear. They appeal to our emotions, as does all of mass culture. They do not acknowledge reality. That would spoil the show.
We vote for slogans, manufactured personalities, perceived sincerity, personal attractiveness and the crafted personal narratives peddled by candidates. Office seekers create the illusion of intimacy established between celebrities and their audiences. We see ourselves in them; admirers of the "winner" Trump see themselves as becoming him. No politician succeeds without such artifice. Today's politics is just one more product of a diseased culture. Our political leaders are much like the celebrities who, in Boorstin's words, "are receptacles into which we pour our own purposelessness. They are nothing but ourselves seen in a magnifying mirror."

The quest for identity through mass culture is self-defeating. We can never achieve what these illusions tell us we can achieve. We can never be who we want to be. It is a ceaseless chase from one chimera to the next. And this is why at the end we fall into despair and rage. It is why huge parts of the country no longer hold genuine political ideas. It is why people vote according to how they feel. It is why hatred and fear are a potent political platform. It is why we are sleepwalking into oblivion.]]> <![CDATA[Why Trump opposed by ...]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=14857 Thu, 14 Jul 2016 08:06:13 +0000 Harry Dean]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=14857 that has existed since 22 November 1963 under a ' combination ' of Republican and
Democrat administrations, or will ' cinch ' further anti-U.S. Constitutional intentions!]]> that has existed since 22 November 1963 under a ' combination ' of Republican and
Democrat administrations, or will ' cinch ' further anti-U.S. Constitutional intentions!]]> <![CDATA[USA tries to take over European Military Airspace - but you don't hear about it.]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=14847 Tue, 05 Jul 2016 04:52:38 +0000 Peter Lemkin]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=14847 United States seeking permission to fly surveillance aircraft through Czech airspace

Quote:The U.S. is seeking permission from the Czech government to fly Global Hawk surveillance drones through Czech airspace, the daily Právo reports. The pilotless aircraft is the largest of its kind in the U.S. fleet and isreportedly to help monitor areas along the Russian border. The U.S. Embassy in Prague declined to comment but the news was confirmed by the spokesman for the Transport Ministry, says the daily. Právo adds that teams from the Interior, Defense, and Transport Ministries have met to discuss ways of accommodating the U.S. plans but suggests getting to yes won't be easy,saying Czech and European legislation do not deal with long-distance operation of unmanned aircraft.

I would guess that the Ukraine and Russia are the immediate targets, but of course, there are SO many others..... Here, so far, it has only been reported by the communist-leaning newspaper, Pravo.]]> United States seeking permission to fly surveillance aircraft through Czech airspace

Quote:The U.S. is seeking permission from the Czech government to fly Global Hawk surveillance drones through Czech airspace, the daily Právo reports. The pilotless aircraft is the largest of its kind in the U.S. fleet and isreportedly to help monitor areas along the Russian border. The U.S. Embassy in Prague declined to comment but the news was confirmed by the spokesman for the Transport Ministry, says the daily. Právo adds that teams from the Interior, Defense, and Transport Ministries have met to discuss ways of accommodating the U.S. plans but suggests getting to yes won't be easy,saying Czech and European legislation do not deal with long-distance operation of unmanned aircraft.

I would guess that the Ukraine and Russia are the immediate targets, but of course, there are SO many others..... Here, so far, it has only been reported by the communist-leaning newspaper, Pravo.]]> <![CDATA[We, the Prisoners of the United States - Opinion for 'Independance Day']]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=14837 Thu, 30 Jun 2016 02:37:27 +0000 Peter Lemkin]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=14837 [TR]
[TD="width: 84%"]By John Whitehead
[/TD]
[TD="width: 16%"][/TD]
[/TR]
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It's true that there may be little the average person can do to push back against the police state on a national level, but there remains some hope at the local level as long as we recognize that the only way the police state can truly acquire and retain power is if we relinquish it through our negligence, complacence and ignorance.
Unfortunately, we have been utterly brainwashed into believing the government's propaganda and lies. Americans actually celebrate with perfect sincerity the anniversary of our independence from Great Britain without ever owning up to the fact that we are as oppressed now--more so, perhaps, thanks to advances in technology--than we ever were when Redcoats stormed through doorways and subjected colonists to the vagaries of a police state.
You see, by gradually whittling away at our freedoms--free speech, assembly, due process, privacy, etc.--the government has, in effect, liberated itself from its contractual agreement to respect our constitutional rights while resetting the calendar back to a time when we had no Bill of Rights to protect us from the long arm of the government.
Aided and abetted by the legislatures, the courts and Corporate America, the government has been busily rewriting the contract (a.k.a. the Constitution) that establishes the citizenry as the masters and agents of the government as the servants. We are now only as good as we are useful, and our usefulness is calculated on an economic scale by how much we are worth--in terms of profit and resale value--to our "owners."
Under the new terms of this one-sided agreement, the government and its many operatives have all the privileges and rights and "we the prisoners" have none.

Ignorance of the law is defensible if you work for the government.
Police officers can use lethal force in car chases without fear of lawsuits.
Police can perform a "no-knock" raid as long as they have a reasonable suspicion that knocking and announcing their presence would be dangerous or futile.
Police can carry out warrantless searches on homes, cars, persons and property based on a "reasonable" concern that a suspect (or occupant) might be attempting to flee or destroy evidence.
Police can forcibly take your DNA, whether or not you've been convicted of a crime.
Police can subject Americans to virtual strip searches, no matter the "offense."
Police have free reign to use drug-sniffing dogs as "search warrants on leashes."
Police can conduct sobriety and "information-seeking" checkpoints.
Police officers are free to board a bus, question passengers, and ask for consent to search without notifying them of their right to refuse.
Police can arrest you for minor criminal offenses, such as a misdemeanor seatbelt violation, punishable only by a fine.
Refusing to answer when a policeman asks "What's your name?" can rightfully be considered a crime. No longer do Americans, even those not charged with any crime, have the right to remain altogether silent when stopped and questioned by a police officer.
Police may stop any vehicle as long as they have reasonable cause to believe that a traffic violation occurred. A vehicle can be stopped even if the driver has not committed a traffic offense.
Police officers can stop cars based only on "anonymous" tips. Police can also pull you over if you are driving too carefully, with a rigid posture, taking a scenic route, and have acne.
What many Americans fail to understand is the devastating amount of damage that can be done to one's freedoms long before a case ever makes its way to court by government agents who are violating the Fourth Amendment at every turn. This is how freedoms, long undermined, can give way to tyranny through constant erosion and become part of the fabric of the police state through constant use.
Phone and email surveillance, databases for dissidents, threat assessments, terror watch lists, militarized police, SWAT team raids, security checkpoints, lockdowns, roadside strip searches: there was a time when any one of these encroachments on our Fourth Amendment rights would have roused the public to outrage. Today, such violations are shrugged off matter-of-factly by Americans who have been assiduously groomed to accept the intrusions of the police state into their private lives.
So when you hear about the FBI hacking into Americans' computers without a warrant with the blessing of the courts, or states assembling and making public terror watch lists containing the names of those who are merely deemed suspicious, or the police knocking on the doors of activists in advance of political gatherings to ascertain their plans for future protests, or administrative government agencies (such as the FDA, Small Business Administration, Smithsonian, Social Security, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Mint, and Department of Education) spending millions on guns and ammunition, don't just matter-of-factly file it away in that part of your brain reserved for things you may not like but over which you have no control.

It's true that there may be little the average person can do to push back against the police state on a national level, but there remains some hope at the local level as long as we recognize that the only way the police state can truly acquire and retain power is if we relinquish it through our negligence, complacence and ignorance.
Unfortunately, we have been utterly brainwashed into believing the government's propaganda and lies. Americans actually celebrate with perfect sincerity the anniversary of our independence from Great Britain without ever owning up to the fact that we are as oppressed now--more so, perhaps, thanks to advances in technology--than we ever were when Redcoats stormed through doorways and subjected colonists to the vagaries of a police state.
You see, by gradually whittling away at our freedoms--free speech, assembly, due process, privacy, etc.--the government has, in effect, liberated itself from its contractual agreement to respect our constitutional rights while resetting the calendar back to a time when we had no Bill of Rights to protect us from the long arm of the government.
Aided and abetted by the legislatures, the courts and Corporate America, the government has been busily rewriting the contract (a.k.a. the Constitution) that establishes the citizenry as the masters and agents of the government as the servants. We are now only as good as we are useful, and our usefulness is calculated on an economic scale by how much we are worth--in terms of profit and resale value--to our "owners."
Under the new terms of this one-sided agreement, the government and its many operatives have all the privileges and rights and "we the prisoners" have none.]]> [TR]
[TD="width: 84%"]By John Whitehead
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[/TR]
[/TABLE]

It's true that there may be little the average person can do to push back against the police state on a national level, but there remains some hope at the local level as long as we recognize that the only way the police state can truly acquire and retain power is if we relinquish it through our negligence, complacence and ignorance.
Unfortunately, we have been utterly brainwashed into believing the government's propaganda and lies. Americans actually celebrate with perfect sincerity the anniversary of our independence from Great Britain without ever owning up to the fact that we are as oppressed now--more so, perhaps, thanks to advances in technology--than we ever were when Redcoats stormed through doorways and subjected colonists to the vagaries of a police state.
You see, by gradually whittling away at our freedoms--free speech, assembly, due process, privacy, etc.--the government has, in effect, liberated itself from its contractual agreement to respect our constitutional rights while resetting the calendar back to a time when we had no Bill of Rights to protect us from the long arm of the government.
Aided and abetted by the legislatures, the courts and Corporate America, the government has been busily rewriting the contract (a.k.a. the Constitution) that establishes the citizenry as the masters and agents of the government as the servants. We are now only as good as we are useful, and our usefulness is calculated on an economic scale by how much we are worth--in terms of profit and resale value--to our "owners."
Under the new terms of this one-sided agreement, the government and its many operatives have all the privileges and rights and "we the prisoners" have none.

Ignorance of the law is defensible if you work for the government.
Police officers can use lethal force in car chases without fear of lawsuits.
Police can perform a "no-knock" raid as long as they have a reasonable suspicion that knocking and announcing their presence would be dangerous or futile.
Police can carry out warrantless searches on homes, cars, persons and property based on a "reasonable" concern that a suspect (or occupant) might be attempting to flee or destroy evidence.
Police can forcibly take your DNA, whether or not you've been convicted of a crime.
Police can subject Americans to virtual strip searches, no matter the "offense."
Police have free reign to use drug-sniffing dogs as "search warrants on leashes."
Police can conduct sobriety and "information-seeking" checkpoints.
Police officers are free to board a bus, question passengers, and ask for consent to search without notifying them of their right to refuse.
Police can arrest you for minor criminal offenses, such as a misdemeanor seatbelt violation, punishable only by a fine.
Refusing to answer when a policeman asks "What's your name?" can rightfully be considered a crime. No longer do Americans, even those not charged with any crime, have the right to remain altogether silent when stopped and questioned by a police officer.
Police may stop any vehicle as long as they have reasonable cause to believe that a traffic violation occurred. A vehicle can be stopped even if the driver has not committed a traffic offense.
Police officers can stop cars based only on "anonymous" tips. Police can also pull you over if you are driving too carefully, with a rigid posture, taking a scenic route, and have acne.
What many Americans fail to understand is the devastating amount of damage that can be done to one's freedoms long before a case ever makes its way to court by government agents who are violating the Fourth Amendment at every turn. This is how freedoms, long undermined, can give way to tyranny through constant erosion and become part of the fabric of the police state through constant use.
Phone and email surveillance, databases for dissidents, threat assessments, terror watch lists, militarized police, SWAT team raids, security checkpoints, lockdowns, roadside strip searches: there was a time when any one of these encroachments on our Fourth Amendment rights would have roused the public to outrage. Today, such violations are shrugged off matter-of-factly by Americans who have been assiduously groomed to accept the intrusions of the police state into their private lives.
So when you hear about the FBI hacking into Americans' computers without a warrant with the blessing of the courts, or states assembling and making public terror watch lists containing the names of those who are merely deemed suspicious, or the police knocking on the doors of activists in advance of political gatherings to ascertain their plans for future protests, or administrative government agencies (such as the FDA, Small Business Administration, Smithsonian, Social Security, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Mint, and Department of Education) spending millions on guns and ammunition, don't just matter-of-factly file it away in that part of your brain reserved for things you may not like but over which you have no control.

It's true that there may be little the average person can do to push back against the police state on a national level, but there remains some hope at the local level as long as we recognize that the only way the police state can truly acquire and retain power is if we relinquish it through our negligence, complacence and ignorance.
Unfortunately, we have been utterly brainwashed into believing the government's propaganda and lies. Americans actually celebrate with perfect sincerity the anniversary of our independence from Great Britain without ever owning up to the fact that we are as oppressed now--more so, perhaps, thanks to advances in technology--than we ever were when Redcoats stormed through doorways and subjected colonists to the vagaries of a police state.
You see, by gradually whittling away at our freedoms--free speech, assembly, due process, privacy, etc.--the government has, in effect, liberated itself from its contractual agreement to respect our constitutional rights while resetting the calendar back to a time when we had no Bill of Rights to protect us from the long arm of the government.
Aided and abetted by the legislatures, the courts and Corporate America, the government has been busily rewriting the contract (a.k.a. the Constitution) that establishes the citizenry as the masters and agents of the government as the servants. We are now only as good as we are useful, and our usefulness is calculated on an economic scale by how much we are worth--in terms of profit and resale value--to our "owners."
Under the new terms of this one-sided agreement, the government and its many operatives have all the privileges and rights and "we the prisoners" have none.]]> <![CDATA[Brexit and British Member Of Parliament Murdered]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=14818 Thu, 16 Jun 2016 18:24:27 +0000 Albert Doyle]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=14818 https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/bri...story.html]]> https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/bri...story.html]]> <![CDATA[Anglo-America: Regression and Reversion in the Modern World]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=14784 Fri, 03 Jun 2016 04:26:46 +0000 Lauren Johnson]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=14784 James Petras.

Quote:Introduction: What does it mean when the US and British financial systems launder hundreds of billions of dollars of illicit funds stolen by world leaders while their governments turn a blind eye', and yet the very same Anglo-American officials investigate, prosecute, fine and arrest officials from rival governments, rival banks and political leaders for corruption?
[Image: blank.gif]

What does it mean when the US government expands a world-wide network of nuclear missiles on bases stretching from Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, the Gulf States to Japan, surrounding Russia, Iran and China, while the very same US and NATO officials investigate and condemn rival defense officials from Russia, China and Iran, as military threats to peace and stability?

What does it mean when Anglo-American economic officials devote decades to raising the age of retirement, reducing working and middle class household income, cutting workers compensation, expanding part-time work, setting the stage for mass layoffs slashing unemployment and health benefits and reducing social spending by the hundreds of billions of dollars and then turn around and investigate and threaten rival countries, like China and Argentina with loss of markets, investment and employment for not doing the same thing ?

The meaning of Anglo-America's long-term, large-scale structural regression is clearly evident across the world. From Europe to Latin America and from Asia to Africa, socio-economic and politico-military agendas have been reversed.

Since the end of the Second World War there had been incremental gains in labor rights, stable employment, poverty reduction and working conditions.

Recently, these have all been reversed: Longer working days and weeks with reduced salaries and benefits; unstable temporary work replaces stable employment; employer-funded pensions are eliminated and replaced by multi-billion dollar corporate tax cuts and off-shore tax evasion.

Systematic structural swindles by the leading financial institutions have forced employees to delay retirement for years in order to 'self-finance' their own meager pensions', some expecting to die at the job'.

Capitalist regression has been implemented by arbitrary state dictates and authoritarian decrees, erasing any pretense of democratic procedures and constitutional laws.

The regressive and retrograde leader-states from the imperial centers impose their conditions on follower regimes like Mexico and Russia forcing them to reverse their legacy of social progress while blackmailing these regimes' oligarchs with the loss of lucrative markets, access to tax and money-laundering havens and impunity for their crimes and swindles.

Anglo-America: Historic Reversion
For the past three decades, the US and Great Britain have led the global drive to undermine labor's advances. First, the economic structure sustaining labor organizations were dismantled and fragmented. Then organized labor was decimated, co-opted and corporatized.
Capital proceeded to reverse labor and social welfare legislation and lower wages, in order to impose longer workdays and destabilize employment.

The mass media re-packaged the regression cycle as economic reform', a euphemism, which disguised the re-concentration of power, wealth and income over the last three decades.

The growth of inequality and the concentration of wealth and assets to the 1% became the standard' for the Anglo-American era. However, class organization and the vicissitudes of class struggles continued to constrain efforts to impose unchallenged Anglo-American capitalist rulership throughout the world.

The first decisive blow against social reform resulted from the systematic Anglo-American breakdown of the former USSR and allied nations of the Warsaw Pact in East Europe. This was followed by the endogenous dissolution of Communist Party rule in China, Russia, Eastern Europe, the Baltic and Balkan states and their conversion into capitalist satellites. Social welfare, full employment, public pensions and health systems were shredded; labor lost all its rights except one - the right to emigrate to the West as cheap labor.

From Russia to Latvia and Poland to Bulgaria and Romania, there were massive layoffs, plant closures and the total dissolution of social security networks driven by the Anglo-America neo-liberal onslaught. The Atlantic Alliance brought their new Eastern satellites to social submission.

Until the second decade of the 21st century, Western Europe's centers for the defense of the progressive social agenda were in France, Italy, Spain, Greece and Portugal. The social agenda in Latin America and China faced the Anglo-America offensive even earlier.

France: The Strategic Key to Anglo-American Social Regression
France has been the center where the Anglo-American regressive attack on socio-economic policy and Southern Europe's resistance has been playing out.

By 2015 the regressive alliance had overturned all progressive social policy in the former communist bloc countries. Their alliance with Germany's finance sector give them tight control of the EU and they successfully decimated the progressive social programs and labor legislation in Greece, Spain and Portugal.

France became the centerpiece for Western capitalism's drive to incorporate Italy into the regressive orbit. The conquest of France and Italy would completely reverse 70 years of incremental labor gains after the defeat of fascist capitalism.

The assault on France's progressive social agenda is spearheaded by the retro-Socialist President Francois Holland and his troika of authoritarian hyper-capitalist ministers: Financial Minister Michel Sapin, Prime Minister Manuel Valls and Economy Minister Emmanuel Macron.

The strategy of relying on a nominal socialist' to destroy the social welfare state is a classic Trojan Horse' operation. Hollande's virulent anti-labor policy is implemented by decree under a joint plan developed in association with France's leading industrialists.

The imposition of the regressive policy in France began in stages. It first established the retrograde political leadership with Valls, a notorious authoritarian police-state official willing to over-ride any democratic niceties. The Economy Minister, Emanuel Macron, a millionaire investment banker, is a direct associate of the financial elite, with no qualms in slashing labor programs. The Finance Minister Michel Sapin, a long-time accomplice of the French bureaucratic-capitalist elite, is prepared to slash pensions and public services while reducing job security in order to lower the cost of labor to capital.

Once the Hollande and his troika took control of the centers of political power, (and after militarizing French society in response to the terrorist attacks), the regime launched its anti-labor offensive to shred the progressive social agenda. Its first target was its most formidable - the mass of the French working class.

Declaring anti-ISIS' martial law powers, Hollande adopted an outright authoritarian strategy, bypassing the elected French Parliament in the legislature and imposed rule by decree' with the announcement of a highly regressive labor law against the French people.

The dictatorial labor decree was a first step to weaken organized labor's capacity to protect wages and job security in order to give a powerful impetus to employer control over the French labor force.

Once Hollande's labor decree established capitalist supremacy, his Troika would be in a decisive position to reverse seventy of incremental social advances.

The joint Hollande-Troika-capitalist bloc emasculated the legislature, leaving a weak, bleating chorus of so-called left Socialists' to bemoan their political impotence. Then an entirely new business anti-labor code was rolled out, which included the right of bosses to hire and fire workers at will, extend the workday , lengthen the work week, undermine labor's bargaining power and restrain strikes and job actions. This would open the way for a wave of irregular and contingent jobs for new workers . . . Using the pretext of terrorist attacks, the French capitalist class had begun to rule by decree to further expand and deepen their long planned assault on labor.

Hollande's troika and France's capitalists are lowering corporate taxes and employer contribution to social payments. Regulations that restrained the concentration of elite power were eliminated.

With curfews and anti-terrorist' militarized police in the streets, French business elite could now freely begin to to imitate the Anglo-American capitalist elite and impose an iron-fisted New Order.

Without labor constraints on French capital, the bosses are is free to relocate factories and investments any and everywhere, under the most favorable wage, tax, employment and environmental conditions.

No longer required to invest in French industry, the business elite can transfer capital from industry to financial sectors, allowing hundreds of billions of euros to be laundered in off shore tax havens.

The Hollande troika will now also establish its own version of Security and Exchange investigators' to prosecute and fine its rival Anglo-American financial swindlers, just as the Anglo-Americans pursue their French competitors today.

The Hollande regime's regressive social agenda has opened the door for an even more extreme Presidential prototype to follow and Alain Juppe is waiting.

The rabid Republican Party presidential candidate, Alain Juppe, promises to go whole hog' in utterly destroying the French welfare state, as it has existed since the fall of fascism. If elected president, Juppe promised to slash 100 billion euros from the budget - double the amount that the Hollande regime currently seeks to cut. Juppe has pledged to eliminate 250,000 civil service jobs in all vital social sectors; to delay the retirement age from 62 to 65; eliminate the 35-hour workweek; facilitate worker layoffs and decimate unemployment benefits. Finally, Juppe has promised French capital that he would implement their entire business agenda, cut taxes for business and bankers and eliminate the tax on inheritance implemented nearly four decades ago.

In other words, the Hollande regime's assault on labor and embrace of business has opened the door for the rise of the extreme right. Moreover, Hollande has manipulated the incidents of Islamist terrorism to assume arbitrary decree powers wiping out any pretense of a democratic government. The terrorist incidents are arguably related to Hollande's colonialist embrace of the regime change' assaults against the secular nationalist governments of Libya and Syria and his policy of sending (or tolerating the recruitment of) marginalized French youth of North African ancestry to fight in the ensuing civil wars. This has further strengthened the rise of the extreme right in France.

As the Socialist and Republicans compete for dictatorial powers to serve business' regressive agenda, the nationalist, protectionist and social reformist policies of the National Front are emerging as the populist alternative in the coming presidential race. Anti-fascist rhetoric has worn thin and important sectors of the working class will turn to the National Front in defense of their jobs and social legislation. The anti-immigration rhetoric of the National Front is now part of the political vocabulary of the Republicans as well as Prime Minister Valls.

The only alternative to a power grab by the French hard right is a mass general strike and sustained street battles in order to resist the reaction by decree.

As throughout history, popular struggles in France begin in the streets - among the trade unions and young workers angrily facing low wages, austerity and the grim prospect of permanently' temporary jobs.

The outcome of the intensifying French labor-capital conflict will have a decisive impact on the future of labor throughout Europe, especially among all Left unionists.

Latin America: The Labor-Capital Showdown
Beyond Europe, the Anglo-American onslaught against labor and the working class resonates most directly in Latin America and to a lesser extent in Asia and Africa.

The first country to fall victim to capital's attack was Mexico with the implementation of the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). By the early 1990's NAFTA had demolished the independent Mexican trade unions, crippled social legislation, eliminated subsidies to small corn farmers, forced peasants into debt, reduced minimum wage, doubled poverty levels and turned the majority of the labor force into landless, indebted, casual workers. On the other hand, NAFTA has been a bottomless source of wealth as capitalists accumulate double and triple digit profits and absolute power to hire and fire employees. Mexico's government, under Anglo-American capital, has allowed the illicit transfer of hundreds of billions of dollars of Mexican assets to US, English and other overseas banks, which have become immense money-laundering operations. The proximity of Mexican drug cartels to the US banks has facilitated the extension of their networks into the US market. The horrific expansion of drug cartel death squads, linked to Mexico's political leaders, dates from the 1990's and the signing of NAFTA. This bloody nexus has consolidated neoliberal political power in Mexico and weakened the possibility of a viable mass electoral alternative.

Anglo-American dominance in Latin America in the 1990's led to an entire panoply of regressive policies: privatizing and denationalizing the most lucrative natural and state resources, banks and industries; reducing wages and social spending for labor while increasing the concentration of capital. By 2001 however the Anglo-American edifice collapsed throughout South America with the demise of its neo-liberal political leadership.

From Venezuela in 1999, to Argentina in 2002, Brazil 2003, Bolivia 2006 and Ecuador 2007, left and center-left parties capitalized on their mass support and were elected into power. They took advantage of global economic conditions with the rising commodity prices, booming Chinese markets and new regional alliances to fund a variety of progressive social agendas, including increased social expenditures, guaranteed pensions, family allowances, minimum wages, wage increases for public sector and expanded labor rights.

The Anglo-American power elite was in retreat and isolated, but it was far from defeated. They retrenched and prepared to re-mobilize their strategic business, banking and political allies when the opportunity arose. They counter-attacked when global and regional conditions turned unfavorable to the social regimes.

The assault on Latin America was preceded by the Anglo-American neo-liberal take-over of Northern Europe from the 1990's to the first decade of the 21st century. This was followed by the sweep and grab of the Balkans and Southern Europe. The combined Anglo-American-EU-NATO offensive now seeks to reverse the last social-welfare regimes in Europe: France and Italy with the help of President Hollande and Prime Minister Renzi.

Simultaneously the Anglo-American offensive has been launched throughout Latin America. Their goal is to recover the imperial prerogatives, political power and economic privileges lost during the previous decade. The primary Euro-American target is the golden triangle', Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela. These countries constitute a global center of immense oil and agro-mineral wealth.

The Argentine neo-liberal restoration took off in December 2015 with the election of far-right President Mauricio Macri. His junta wasted no time in stripping the state of its social legislation, dismantling job security through large-scale layoffs and assuming authoritarian rule by decree to devalue Argentina's currency by 40% and to eliminate state subsidies and raising the price for gas, electricity, transport, and water between 300 and 800 %.

The regressive offensive was in full force. Next, Brazil's twice elected President Dilma Rousseff was impeached' and essentially overthrown by a bizarre legislative right-wing coup-d'état, designed to reverse a generation of progressive regulatory, labor and employment legislation. It was also secretly designed to halt corruption investigations against many right-wing politicians.

Venezuela is next. It will be the scene of a full-scale-elite coup-d'état with imperial backing, to overthrow the government of President Maduro and end decades of progressive social advances under the Chavista governments.

While in France and Italy, the great social reversal is being implemented by internal enemies from the progressive' political parties ("Trojan Horses"), in Latin America the reversal is led by openly hostile class enemies who depend on the arbitrary exercise of executive power. The drive to put a definitive end to the welfare state' in Europe and Latin America is marked by the use of dictatorial decrees, (in the style of Mussolini in the 1920's) as exercised by Argentina's elected President Marci in January 2016 and Brazil's Interim (Coup) President' Temer in April 2016. Meanwhile capitalist lockouts, hoarding and sabotage are being used to crush Venezuela's elected government.

This epochal confrontation has spread across Africa and Asia. China's capitalist offensive has seen a four-fold increase in the number of new billionaires in less than a decade, at the expense of hundreds of millions of workers stripped of their rights and social programs.

South Africa, under the ANC government, turned its back on social gains promised by the liberation struggle and has imposed regressive social legislation and repressive anti-labor decrees. A corrupt class of black and white billionaires now rule by guns and clubs over the black working class.

In Africa and the Middle East, the social welfare states of the nationalist regimes in Iraq and Libya have been completely shredded through imperialist military intervention and civil war. Their once advanced societies have been thrown back into ethno-tribal warfare with no remaining modern social institutions in those two blighted, resource-rich nations.

Wither the Class Struggle: Historical Reversal and Class Revolt?
The Anglo-American offensive to reverse decades of social advance has captured most of Europe. They have incorporated or coopted the Social Democratic parties and are moving swiftly toward dismantling the decade-long center-left welfare states in Latin America.

In Africa, the centerpiece of Anglo-Americanization is South Africa, the continent's most advanced bastion of international capitalism.

In Asia, China, the second most important capitalist economy in the world, has been leading the struggle to overturn the social agenda of the revolutionary past.

Large-scale, prolonged class resistance in several decisive centers is emerging to confront this Anglo-American process of reversion. The class confrontation however takes specific characteristics in each country.

In France, the major protagonists of street fighting and marches are young unemployed or casual workers, members of the strategic transport and oil unions and student-workers facing a bleak future of marginal employment and a shredded social safety net.

Trade unions and farmers' association have joined the street struggles on numerous occasions, possibly in preparation for a general strike.

In Latin America, the center of the class struggle is Argentina. Power-mad President Macri immediately imposed regressive policies against all sectors of the working class. His actions managed to unite the four major trade union confederations, multiple retirees associations and small businesspeople bankrupted by exorbitant charges on gas and electrical use and regional neighborhood federations. The widespread growth of job actions among public sector employees points to a general strike.

The regressive assault on long-term social legislation in Brazil immediately followed the thinly disguised capitalist coup. The ousting of President Rousseff has provoked street demonstrations, led by the huge rural landless workers movement (MST), the confederation of industrial and service workers (CUT), social movements of the homeless workers and the recipients of Lula's poverty programs. New revelations, based on taped conversations among the coup plotters reveal their plans to oust the incumbent President Rousseff in order to derail official investigations into their own corruption scandals. This has enraged the general public.

With the initial take-over, the Brazilian political-financial elite has prepared to launch its full-scale reversal of pensions and employment laws and wage guarantees. The pro-business leadership plans to slash corporate and wealth taxes and to appoint business executives to all leading ministries. The deep corruption scandal and the mass demonstrations suggest the rightwing power grab may not survive.

The regressive offensive in Venezuela has severely crippled the national economy and deeply eroded living standards of the vast majority of the working class. The rightist Congress, backed by the US and allied with international mass media, industry and multinational banks, are trying to force the resignation of Socialist President Maduro.

Maduro has declared a state of emergency and mobilized the armed forces. He called on the military and popular militia to defend the constitutional order and has threatened to mobilize the workers to "take control of the means of production". Still, the leftist government vacillates over arming the militias and workers. A wide gap remains before the word and the deed.

In the meantime Venezuela's right wing and left-wing mass mobilizations face each other in the streets seething with class hatred and waiting to engage in a decisive confrontation. The military thus far remains constitutionalist and on the side of the elected president.

In South Africa, the corrupt pro-business ANC led by President Zuma murdered dozens of striking mine workers. It has impoverished millions of shantytown residents, while increasing the wealth and power of the black-white elite. On April 30, 2016, 1.1.million South African activists, including civil society and community organizations and trade unions covering the mining, manufacturing and service sectors have organized to form a new confederation linked with informal, unemployed and poor workers. The South African Workers Summit replaces the moribund and corrupt labor confederation, COSATU, the labor desk' for the neo-liberal ANC regime. The new confederation will co-ordinate mass struggles and reclaim social programs as a central part of the anti-capitalist revolution.

In China, the growth and consolidation of the world's second largest concentration of billionaires has led to the proliferation of large-scale industrial workers' strikes, walkouts and confrontations with factory bosses, company unions and government officials. China is becoming the epicenter of Asia's working class struggles. Chinese workers have forced the government to investigate and jail over 200,000 corrupt officials, high and low, and to concede substantial wage increases and social compensation to factory workers. Fearing more social upheaval, China's billionaires and multi-millionaires have transferred hundreds of billions of dollars of stolen assets abroad in a buying spree of high-end property in the 'safe' Anglo-American "heartland" of world reaction.

The continued advance of working class struggles against the public and private oligarchs has forced the Chinese Prime Minister to reform elite privileges and prosecute large-scale banking swindles and illegal seizure of farmland. Especially important, millions of workers have successfully secured double-digit wage increases and the right to legally live in urban/industrial and construction centers.

As it gains momentum, class struggle in China can become the centerpiece for a wider Asian social transformation and a great leap forward to socialist values.

Conclusion

The Anglo-American drive to establish a global regressive social order has pushed billions of workers on five continents into destitution, insecurity and lifelong exploitation. The capitalist world rules by fiat and violence, declaring that social regression and worker repression are the wave of the future'. For the elite, the proper order of the universe is being restored'!

In response, new working class organizations have emerged and engage directly to defend their historic social advances and economic rights.

In the course of defending their past progressive social legacy, the new working class militants can clearly see the imperative to challenge and overthrow the entire political and economic order. From France to Latin America, from China to South Africa, class struggle is defining the present and future of class relations.
]]> James Petras.

Quote:Introduction: What does it mean when the US and British financial systems launder hundreds of billions of dollars of illicit funds stolen by world leaders while their governments turn a blind eye', and yet the very same Anglo-American officials investigate, prosecute, fine and arrest officials from rival governments, rival banks and political leaders for corruption?
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What does it mean when the US government expands a world-wide network of nuclear missiles on bases stretching from Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, the Gulf States to Japan, surrounding Russia, Iran and China, while the very same US and NATO officials investigate and condemn rival defense officials from Russia, China and Iran, as military threats to peace and stability?

What does it mean when Anglo-American economic officials devote decades to raising the age of retirement, reducing working and middle class household income, cutting workers compensation, expanding part-time work, setting the stage for mass layoffs slashing unemployment and health benefits and reducing social spending by the hundreds of billions of dollars and then turn around and investigate and threaten rival countries, like China and Argentina with loss of markets, investment and employment for not doing the same thing ?

The meaning of Anglo-America's long-term, large-scale structural regression is clearly evident across the world. From Europe to Latin America and from Asia to Africa, socio-economic and politico-military agendas have been reversed.

Since the end of the Second World War there had been incremental gains in labor rights, stable employment, poverty reduction and working conditions.

Recently, these have all been reversed: Longer working days and weeks with reduced salaries and benefits; unstable temporary work replaces stable employment; employer-funded pensions are eliminated and replaced by multi-billion dollar corporate tax cuts and off-shore tax evasion.

Systematic structural swindles by the leading financial institutions have forced employees to delay retirement for years in order to 'self-finance' their own meager pensions', some expecting to die at the job'.

Capitalist regression has been implemented by arbitrary state dictates and authoritarian decrees, erasing any pretense of democratic procedures and constitutional laws.

The regressive and retrograde leader-states from the imperial centers impose their conditions on follower regimes like Mexico and Russia forcing them to reverse their legacy of social progress while blackmailing these regimes' oligarchs with the loss of lucrative markets, access to tax and money-laundering havens and impunity for their crimes and swindles.

Anglo-America: Historic Reversion
For the past three decades, the US and Great Britain have led the global drive to undermine labor's advances. First, the economic structure sustaining labor organizations were dismantled and fragmented. Then organized labor was decimated, co-opted and corporatized.
Capital proceeded to reverse labor and social welfare legislation and lower wages, in order to impose longer workdays and destabilize employment.

The mass media re-packaged the regression cycle as economic reform', a euphemism, which disguised the re-concentration of power, wealth and income over the last three decades.

The growth of inequality and the concentration of wealth and assets to the 1% became the standard' for the Anglo-American era. However, class organization and the vicissitudes of class struggles continued to constrain efforts to impose unchallenged Anglo-American capitalist rulership throughout the world.

The first decisive blow against social reform resulted from the systematic Anglo-American breakdown of the former USSR and allied nations of the Warsaw Pact in East Europe. This was followed by the endogenous dissolution of Communist Party rule in China, Russia, Eastern Europe, the Baltic and Balkan states and their conversion into capitalist satellites. Social welfare, full employment, public pensions and health systems were shredded; labor lost all its rights except one - the right to emigrate to the West as cheap labor.

From Russia to Latvia and Poland to Bulgaria and Romania, there were massive layoffs, plant closures and the total dissolution of social security networks driven by the Anglo-America neo-liberal onslaught. The Atlantic Alliance brought their new Eastern satellites to social submission.

Until the second decade of the 21st century, Western Europe's centers for the defense of the progressive social agenda were in France, Italy, Spain, Greece and Portugal. The social agenda in Latin America and China faced the Anglo-America offensive even earlier.

France: The Strategic Key to Anglo-American Social Regression
France has been the center where the Anglo-American regressive attack on socio-economic policy and Southern Europe's resistance has been playing out.

By 2015 the regressive alliance had overturned all progressive social policy in the former communist bloc countries. Their alliance with Germany's finance sector give them tight control of the EU and they successfully decimated the progressive social programs and labor legislation in Greece, Spain and Portugal.

France became the centerpiece for Western capitalism's drive to incorporate Italy into the regressive orbit. The conquest of France and Italy would completely reverse 70 years of incremental labor gains after the defeat of fascist capitalism.

The assault on France's progressive social agenda is spearheaded by the retro-Socialist President Francois Holland and his troika of authoritarian hyper-capitalist ministers: Financial Minister Michel Sapin, Prime Minister Manuel Valls and Economy Minister Emmanuel Macron.

The strategy of relying on a nominal socialist' to destroy the social welfare state is a classic Trojan Horse' operation. Hollande's virulent anti-labor policy is implemented by decree under a joint plan developed in association with France's leading industrialists.

The imposition of the regressive policy in France began in stages. It first established the retrograde political leadership with Valls, a notorious authoritarian police-state official willing to over-ride any democratic niceties. The Economy Minister, Emanuel Macron, a millionaire investment banker, is a direct associate of the financial elite, with no qualms in slashing labor programs. The Finance Minister Michel Sapin, a long-time accomplice of the French bureaucratic-capitalist elite, is prepared to slash pensions and public services while reducing job security in order to lower the cost of labor to capital.

Once the Hollande and his troika took control of the centers of political power, (and after militarizing French society in response to the terrorist attacks), the regime launched its anti-labor offensive to shred the progressive social agenda. Its first target was its most formidable - the mass of the French working class.

Declaring anti-ISIS' martial law powers, Hollande adopted an outright authoritarian strategy, bypassing the elected French Parliament in the legislature and imposed rule by decree' with the announcement of a highly regressive labor law against the French people.

The dictatorial labor decree was a first step to weaken organized labor's capacity to protect wages and job security in order to give a powerful impetus to employer control over the French labor force.

Once Hollande's labor decree established capitalist supremacy, his Troika would be in a decisive position to reverse seventy of incremental social advances.

The joint Hollande-Troika-capitalist bloc emasculated the legislature, leaving a weak, bleating chorus of so-called left Socialists' to bemoan their political impotence. Then an entirely new business anti-labor code was rolled out, which included the right of bosses to hire and fire workers at will, extend the workday , lengthen the work week, undermine labor's bargaining power and restrain strikes and job actions. This would open the way for a wave of irregular and contingent jobs for new workers . . . Using the pretext of terrorist attacks, the French capitalist class had begun to rule by decree to further expand and deepen their long planned assault on labor.

Hollande's troika and France's capitalists are lowering corporate taxes and employer contribution to social payments. Regulations that restrained the concentration of elite power were eliminated.

With curfews and anti-terrorist' militarized police in the streets, French business elite could now freely begin to to imitate the Anglo-American capitalist elite and impose an iron-fisted New Order.

Without labor constraints on French capital, the bosses are is free to relocate factories and investments any and everywhere, under the most favorable wage, tax, employment and environmental conditions.

No longer required to invest in French industry, the business elite can transfer capital from industry to financial sectors, allowing hundreds of billions of euros to be laundered in off shore tax havens.

The Hollande troika will now also establish its own version of Security and Exchange investigators' to prosecute and fine its rival Anglo-American financial swindlers, just as the Anglo-Americans pursue their French competitors today.

The Hollande regime's regressive social agenda has opened the door for an even more extreme Presidential prototype to follow and Alain Juppe is waiting.

The rabid Republican Party presidential candidate, Alain Juppe, promises to go whole hog' in utterly destroying the French welfare state, as it has existed since the fall of fascism. If elected president, Juppe promised to slash 100 billion euros from the budget - double the amount that the Hollande regime currently seeks to cut. Juppe has pledged to eliminate 250,000 civil service jobs in all vital social sectors; to delay the retirement age from 62 to 65; eliminate the 35-hour workweek; facilitate worker layoffs and decimate unemployment benefits. Finally, Juppe has promised French capital that he would implement their entire business agenda, cut taxes for business and bankers and eliminate the tax on inheritance implemented nearly four decades ago.

In other words, the Hollande regime's assault on labor and embrace of business has opened the door for the rise of the extreme right. Moreover, Hollande has manipulated the incidents of Islamist terrorism to assume arbitrary decree powers wiping out any pretense of a democratic government. The terrorist incidents are arguably related to Hollande's colonialist embrace of the regime change' assaults against the secular nationalist governments of Libya and Syria and his policy of sending (or tolerating the recruitment of) marginalized French youth of North African ancestry to fight in the ensuing civil wars. This has further strengthened the rise of the extreme right in France.

As the Socialist and Republicans compete for dictatorial powers to serve business' regressive agenda, the nationalist, protectionist and social reformist policies of the National Front are emerging as the populist alternative in the coming presidential race. Anti-fascist rhetoric has worn thin and important sectors of the working class will turn to the National Front in defense of their jobs and social legislation. The anti-immigration rhetoric of the National Front is now part of the political vocabulary of the Republicans as well as Prime Minister Valls.

The only alternative to a power grab by the French hard right is a mass general strike and sustained street battles in order to resist the reaction by decree.

As throughout history, popular struggles in France begin in the streets - among the trade unions and young workers angrily facing low wages, austerity and the grim prospect of permanently' temporary jobs.

The outcome of the intensifying French labor-capital conflict will have a decisive impact on the future of labor throughout Europe, especially among all Left unionists.

Latin America: The Labor-Capital Showdown
Beyond Europe, the Anglo-American onslaught against labor and the working class resonates most directly in Latin America and to a lesser extent in Asia and Africa.

The first country to fall victim to capital's attack was Mexico with the implementation of the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). By the early 1990's NAFTA had demolished the independent Mexican trade unions, crippled social legislation, eliminated subsidies to small corn farmers, forced peasants into debt, reduced minimum wage, doubled poverty levels and turned the majority of the labor force into landless, indebted, casual workers. On the other hand, NAFTA has been a bottomless source of wealth as capitalists accumulate double and triple digit profits and absolute power to hire and fire employees. Mexico's government, under Anglo-American capital, has allowed the illicit transfer of hundreds of billions of dollars of Mexican assets to US, English and other overseas banks, which have become immense money-laundering operations. The proximity of Mexican drug cartels to the US banks has facilitated the extension of their networks into the US market. The horrific expansion of drug cartel death squads, linked to Mexico's political leaders, dates from the 1990's and the signing of NAFTA. This bloody nexus has consolidated neoliberal political power in Mexico and weakened the possibility of a viable mass electoral alternative.

Anglo-American dominance in Latin America in the 1990's led to an entire panoply of regressive policies: privatizing and denationalizing the most lucrative natural and state resources, banks and industries; reducing wages and social spending for labor while increasing the concentration of capital. By 2001 however the Anglo-American edifice collapsed throughout South America with the demise of its neo-liberal political leadership.

From Venezuela in 1999, to Argentina in 2002, Brazil 2003, Bolivia 2006 and Ecuador 2007, left and center-left parties capitalized on their mass support and were elected into power. They took advantage of global economic conditions with the rising commodity prices, booming Chinese markets and new regional alliances to fund a variety of progressive social agendas, including increased social expenditures, guaranteed pensions, family allowances, minimum wages, wage increases for public sector and expanded labor rights.

The Anglo-American power elite was in retreat and isolated, but it was far from defeated. They retrenched and prepared to re-mobilize their strategic business, banking and political allies when the opportunity arose. They counter-attacked when global and regional conditions turned unfavorable to the social regimes.

The assault on Latin America was preceded by the Anglo-American neo-liberal take-over of Northern Europe from the 1990's to the first decade of the 21st century. This was followed by the sweep and grab of the Balkans and Southern Europe. The combined Anglo-American-EU-NATO offensive now seeks to reverse the last social-welfare regimes in Europe: France and Italy with the help of President Hollande and Prime Minister Renzi.

Simultaneously the Anglo-American offensive has been launched throughout Latin America. Their goal is to recover the imperial prerogatives, political power and economic privileges lost during the previous decade. The primary Euro-American target is the golden triangle', Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela. These countries constitute a global center of immense oil and agro-mineral wealth.

The Argentine neo-liberal restoration took off in December 2015 with the election of far-right President Mauricio Macri. His junta wasted no time in stripping the state of its social legislation, dismantling job security through large-scale layoffs and assuming authoritarian rule by decree to devalue Argentina's currency by 40% and to eliminate state subsidies and raising the price for gas, electricity, transport, and water between 300 and 800 %.

The regressive offensive was in full force. Next, Brazil's twice elected President Dilma Rousseff was impeached' and essentially overthrown by a bizarre legislative right-wing coup-d'état, designed to reverse a generation of progressive regulatory, labor and employment legislation. It was also secretly designed to halt corruption investigations against many right-wing politicians.

Venezuela is next. It will be the scene of a full-scale-elite coup-d'état with imperial backing, to overthrow the government of President Maduro and end decades of progressive social advances under the Chavista governments.

While in France and Italy, the great social reversal is being implemented by internal enemies from the progressive' political parties ("Trojan Horses"), in Latin America the reversal is led by openly hostile class enemies who depend on the arbitrary exercise of executive power. The drive to put a definitive end to the welfare state' in Europe and Latin America is marked by the use of dictatorial decrees, (in the style of Mussolini in the 1920's) as exercised by Argentina's elected President Marci in January 2016 and Brazil's Interim (Coup) President' Temer in April 2016. Meanwhile capitalist lockouts, hoarding and sabotage are being used to crush Venezuela's elected government.

This epochal confrontation has spread across Africa and Asia. China's capitalist offensive has seen a four-fold increase in the number of new billionaires in less than a decade, at the expense of hundreds of millions of workers stripped of their rights and social programs.

South Africa, under the ANC government, turned its back on social gains promised by the liberation struggle and has imposed regressive social legislation and repressive anti-labor decrees. A corrupt class of black and white billionaires now rule by guns and clubs over the black working class.

In Africa and the Middle East, the social welfare states of the nationalist regimes in Iraq and Libya have been completely shredded through imperialist military intervention and civil war. Their once advanced societies have been thrown back into ethno-tribal warfare with no remaining modern social institutions in those two blighted, resource-rich nations.

Wither the Class Struggle: Historical Reversal and Class Revolt?
The Anglo-American offensive to reverse decades of social advance has captured most of Europe. They have incorporated or coopted the Social Democratic parties and are moving swiftly toward dismantling the decade-long center-left welfare states in Latin America.

In Africa, the centerpiece of Anglo-Americanization is South Africa, the continent's most advanced bastion of international capitalism.

In Asia, China, the second most important capitalist economy in the world, has been leading the struggle to overturn the social agenda of the revolutionary past.

Large-scale, prolonged class resistance in several decisive centers is emerging to confront this Anglo-American process of reversion. The class confrontation however takes specific characteristics in each country.

In France, the major protagonists of street fighting and marches are young unemployed or casual workers, members of the strategic transport and oil unions and student-workers facing a bleak future of marginal employment and a shredded social safety net.

Trade unions and farmers' association have joined the street struggles on numerous occasions, possibly in preparation for a general strike.

In Latin America, the center of the class struggle is Argentina. Power-mad President Macri immediately imposed regressive policies against all sectors of the working class. His actions managed to unite the four major trade union confederations, multiple retirees associations and small businesspeople bankrupted by exorbitant charges on gas and electrical use and regional neighborhood federations. The widespread growth of job actions among public sector employees points to a general strike.

The regressive assault on long-term social legislation in Brazil immediately followed the thinly disguised capitalist coup. The ousting of President Rousseff has provoked street demonstrations, led by the huge rural landless workers movement (MST), the confederation of industrial and service workers (CUT), social movements of the homeless workers and the recipients of Lula's poverty programs. New revelations, based on taped conversations among the coup plotters reveal their plans to oust the incumbent President Rousseff in order to derail official investigations into their own corruption scandals. This has enraged the general public.

With the initial take-over, the Brazilian political-financial elite has prepared to launch its full-scale reversal of pensions and employment laws and wage guarantees. The pro-business leadership plans to slash corporate and wealth taxes and to appoint business executives to all leading ministries. The deep corruption scandal and the mass demonstrations suggest the rightwing power grab may not survive.

The regressive offensive in Venezuela has severely crippled the national economy and deeply eroded living standards of the vast majority of the working class. The rightist Congress, backed by the US and allied with international mass media, industry and multinational banks, are trying to force the resignation of Socialist President Maduro.

Maduro has declared a state of emergency and mobilized the armed forces. He called on the military and popular militia to defend the constitutional order and has threatened to mobilize the workers to "take control of the means of production". Still, the leftist government vacillates over arming the militias and workers. A wide gap remains before the word and the deed.

In the meantime Venezuela's right wing and left-wing mass mobilizations face each other in the streets seething with class hatred and waiting to engage in a decisive confrontation. The military thus far remains constitutionalist and on the side of the elected president.

In South Africa, the corrupt pro-business ANC led by President Zuma murdered dozens of striking mine workers. It has impoverished millions of shantytown residents, while increasing the wealth and power of the black-white elite. On April 30, 2016, 1.1.million South African activists, including civil society and community organizations and trade unions covering the mining, manufacturing and service sectors have organized to form a new confederation linked with informal, unemployed and poor workers. The South African Workers Summit replaces the moribund and corrupt labor confederation, COSATU, the labor desk' for the neo-liberal ANC regime. The new confederation will co-ordinate mass struggles and reclaim social programs as a central part of the anti-capitalist revolution.

In China, the growth and consolidation of the world's second largest concentration of billionaires has led to the proliferation of large-scale industrial workers' strikes, walkouts and confrontations with factory bosses, company unions and government officials. China is becoming the epicenter of Asia's working class struggles. Chinese workers have forced the government to investigate and jail over 200,000 corrupt officials, high and low, and to concede substantial wage increases and social compensation to factory workers. Fearing more social upheaval, China's billionaires and multi-millionaires have transferred hundreds of billions of dollars of stolen assets abroad in a buying spree of high-end property in the 'safe' Anglo-American "heartland" of world reaction.

The continued advance of working class struggles against the public and private oligarchs has forced the Chinese Prime Minister to reform elite privileges and prosecute large-scale banking swindles and illegal seizure of farmland. Especially important, millions of workers have successfully secured double-digit wage increases and the right to legally live in urban/industrial and construction centers.

As it gains momentum, class struggle in China can become the centerpiece for a wider Asian social transformation and a great leap forward to socialist values.

Conclusion

The Anglo-American drive to establish a global regressive social order has pushed billions of workers on five continents into destitution, insecurity and lifelong exploitation. The capitalist world rules by fiat and violence, declaring that social regression and worker repression are the wave of the future'. For the elite, the proper order of the universe is being restored'!

In response, new working class organizations have emerged and engage directly to defend their historic social advances and economic rights.

In the course of defending their past progressive social legacy, the new working class militants can clearly see the imperative to challenge and overthrow the entire political and economic order. From France to Latin America, from China to South Africa, class struggle is defining the present and future of class relations.
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