The election of Donald Trump has polarised the American society on many levels, including in its attitudes to intellect and science. Trump’s supporters see him as a shrewd and smart deal breaker, the salt of the earth, while his critics describe him as the ultimate ignoramus worthy of nothing but contempt. Is there any middle ground between the two? To discuss this, Oksana is joined by Lawrence Krauss, Theoretical Physicist and Cosmologist.
He who has the youth has the future, said Leon Trotsky. For the Conservative Party, which counts on the support of older voters, the future doesn’t look bright. The gray vote isn’t turning red for Labour – it’s dying off.
Source: Conservative voters dying off at rate of 2% per year, warns Tory lord — RT UK
The result of the June 8 election looks completely different when the older demographic is excluded. With Conservative Party voters dying at the rate of 2 percent per year, according to one observer, future elections could see Tory support crumble unless it appeals to the youth.
The shocking statistic came from none other than Tory grandee Lord Heseltine, who warned his party must act in order to stay relevant and “restore its electoral fortunes.”
The snap election saw the Conservatives lose 13 of their parliamentary seats and with them their majority in the House of Commons.
“One thing which is just worth having in mind, and you can’t do anything about it, 2 percent of the older part of the electorate die every year – they are 70 percent Conservative,” the one-time deputy to John Major told Sky News.
“Another 2 percent come in at the young end of the electorate – they are about 70 percent Labour. That’s about 2 percent change each year. There isn’t that much time.”
Recently published YouGov figures show that voters over the age of 70 opted predominantly for Theresa May’s party. A further half of those aged between 60 and 69 were also Tory supporters. But the trend started changing for those aged 50 to 59, who still voted predominantly blue, but only at a rate of 47 percent.
According to YouGov, “for every 10 years older a voter is, their chance of voting Tory increases by around nine points and the chance of them voting Labour decreases by nine points.”
In comparison, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party gained the support of 66 percent of 18 and 19-year-olds, and more than 60 percent of those aged 20 to 29.
“I find it incredible but I think Mr Corbyn is now a credible candidate for Number 10. The danger is that the Conservatives don’t find a way to argue him out of that position,” Lord Heseltine added.
“I am as interested in what the Conservatives are going to say as I am in who is going to say it. Theresa May could do the party a service by holding on a little whilst the party comes to a conclusion not just about who, but what.
“Given my rather bleak but I think realistic assessment about the time in which this government can survive before the opposition parties have a self-interest in bringing it down, it must be a matter of months before we have a new leader and a redefined policy in order to give us the chance to persuade an electorate that they want to support us.”
An unprecedented number of young voters turned out at polling stations on June 8, with 58 percent of 18 to 24-year-olds having their say. At the last general election in 2015, only 44 percent of those in the same age group voted.
Source: Above International Law: US Sends Global Message in Syria
sputniknews.com
June 19, 2017
According to the military expert, currently the US is invading Syria’s southern borders at al-Tanf.
“The Americans have installed missile systems in areas where there is no need to fight the terrorists. Moreover, these actions were not coordinated with the Syrian government. This all is happening in the framework of aggression against Syrian sovereignty,” Hasan said.He further said that with their actions, the US is sending a message to the whole world, first of all to Russia, that international law does not apply to the Americans, that they themselves dictate laws.
“The US is trying to prevent the Syrian army from taking control of the Syrian-Iraqi border in order to break the ties between the opposing sides,” Hasan told Sputnik, clarifying that by opposing sides, he meant Iran, Iraq, Syria, Israel and Yemen.
According to the expert, the advancements of the Syrian army towards the Iraqi border and the People’s Mobilization Forces are destroying the US’ strategic plans aimed at isolating Syria from the rest of the world.
Hasan said that in such circumstances, control over the al-Waleed (al-Tanf) checkpoint is very important, as it was taken back from the terrorists over the weekend.
The al-Waleed checkpoint is strategically vital because it opens the road to Syria, Iraq and Jordan. However, it was until recently serving as a terrorist base.
On June 8, the US-led coalition bombed pro-Damascus forces near al-Tanf within a de-confliction zone following an alleged attack by a combat drone resulting in no coalition force casualties. This was the third attack by the coalition on Damascus’ allies in the area. The coalition targeted a drone and trucks with weapons.
Earlier, Syrian media reported that at least 43 civilians were killed as a result of the US-led coalition airstrike in the region. Just a few days later, the Lebanese media reported that the coalition’s airstrikes killed more than 30 additional civilians near Raqqa.Moreover, US-led coalition forces have repeatedly attacked the Syrian Army and its allies in other parts of Syria.
On June 18, the Syrian Defense Ministry said that the US-led coalition shot down its aircraft in the countryside near Raqqa when it was on a combat mission against Daesh.
The ministry noted that the coalition’s “actions are aimed at halting the Syrian army and its allies in the fight against terrorism, whereas our army and allies make great progress.”
Later, the US Central Command confirmed the incident saying that it shot down the Syrian government forces’ Su-22 aircraft, as it was allegedly bombing an area where US-backed rebel forces, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), were stationed, south of Tabqa in Raqqa province.
The Russian ministry condemned the attack saying, “The destruction of the Syrian Air Force aircraft by US aviation in Syrian airspace is a cynical violation of the sovereignty of the Syrian Arab Republic.”
“The repeated hostilities of US aviation against the legitimate armed forces of a UN member state under the guise of ‘combating terrorism’ are a gross violation of international law and de facto a military aggression against the Syrian Arab Republic.”
The ministry added that the Syrian jet was supporting the Syrian army’s units which were conducting an offensive against Daesh terrorists near a populated area located some 40 kilometers southwest of the city of Raqqa.
“As a result of the strike, the Syrian jet was destroyed. The pilot of the Syrian Air Force’s Su-22 ejected over an area controlled by Daesh terrorists. His fate is unknown,” the ministry said.
A bunch of white middle age men arguing over the legality of a plant that is now proven to be one of the world’s best medicines ever. Yup, this is the Barbaric States of Dumbmerica. This is the era of IDIOCRACY for sure. Eejits.
Source: Republicans & Democrats Join Together in Senate to Legalize Pot on Federal Level
thefreethoughtproject.com
In an epic push back against the tyranny of Jeff Sessions and his war on an amazing plant, lawmakers crossed party lines to legalize cannabis — federally.
In a bipartisan push back against the tyrannical Jeff Sessions and his relentless war on cannabis, U.S. Sens. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York) have introduced a bill that will end federal prohibition of marijuana.
“The fact is our marijuana laws in America are broken,” Democratic Sen. Cory Booker said at the bill’s unveiling at the Capitol. “They are savagely broken, and the jagged pieces are hurting American people.”
The Compassionate Access, Research Expansion and Respect States, or CARERS, Act would go directly after the DEA’s absurd and immoral classification of marijuana under the Controlled Substances Act. It would allow for the states to act on their own in regards to possession, production, and distribution of medical marijuana.
While this bill was originally introduced in 2015 — as the first ever medical marijuana bill in the US Senate — it now boasts even more support, adding Democratic Sen. Al Franken and Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Mike Lee.
This bill mirrors bipartisan legislation that was introduced in Congress by Representatives Tom Garrett (R-VA) and Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) to exclude cannabis from the federal Controlled Substances Act (CSA) in February, and illustrates how preventing the government from caging and killing people over a plant has transcended party lines.
The CARERS Act also specifically addresses veterans and the ability to obtain this most beneficial plant. SB-683 directs the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to authorize VA health care providers to provide veterans with recommendations and opinions regarding participation in state marijuana programs.
“The reintroduction of the CARERS Act is the first of many steps we hope this Congress will take to end the federal prohibition of medical marijuana,” Don Murphy, director of conservative outreach for the Marijuana Policy Project, said in a statement. “Polls show overwhelmingly strong support for medical marijuana, and it spans the political spectrum.
“The federal government should not be meddling in state laws that allow it or obstructing research into its many medical benefits.”
This bill comes at a dire time in the history of cannabis prohibition in America. Just after tyrant Jeff Sessions was exposed for privately sending a letter to congressional leaders asking them to turn legal medical marijuana patients into criminals, Republicans and Democrats put their party differences aside and joined forces to stave off the inevitable persecution of innocence that would follow such assinine policy.
“I believe it would be unwise for Congress to restrict the discretion of the Department to fund particular prosecutions, particularly in the midst of an historic drug epidemic and potentially long-term uptick in violent crime,” Sessions penned. “The Department must be in a position to use all laws available to combat the transnational drug organizations and dangerous drug traffickers who threaten American lives.”
Notably, the senators are even calling Sessions out for his misguided rage against cannabis, pointing out how it has already — in spite of prohibition — saved the lives of countless children who suffer from seizures.
“I dare him to sit down with families and listen to their stories and then pursue a policy like he’s advocating for now,” Booker says of Sessions’ letter.
However, judging from Sessions’ ignorance and obstinance on the issue of marijuana, he would most likely arrest the parents and their child for possessing a controlled substance.
As Rolling Stone reports, While the bill’s proponents know their proposal faces an uphill battle, they also say they believe the effort is quickly picking up steam, especially because many red states have now passed some form of legal weed. “I believe things are changing and they’re changing fast,” Sen. Gillibrand tells Rolling Stone. “I think we will get the support we need.”
Gillibrand is right, the times are changing. People are no longer accepting the status quo of government kidnapping and caging people for possessing a plant. People are also waking up to the fact that cannabis is a medicine and can fight our current opioid problem in this country.
Those who continue to persecute their fellow American for possessing this plant would do well to get on the right side of history and refuse to enforce such tyranny. After all, without the state’s enforcers willing to ruin people’s lives by extorting, kidnapping, caging, and killing people over pot, prohibition is nothing more a piece of paper, scribbled on by a bunch of corrupt lowlifes who couldn’t care less about their fellow human.
Everybody knows by now that conservatives are not too bright, they are ugly, they smell, and their mothers dress them funny.
“That this movement is a threat to Western values is transparent.”
Source: Stop Legitimizing ‘Conservatism’: It’s Not an Ideology – It’s a Goddamn Death Machine
anonymous-news.com
(Common Dreams) There’s no end to the maladies that ail American politics these days. It would, indeed, be far easier and quicker to identify what’s working than to itemize the travails that bedevil our pathetic polity in 2017. Altogether, if this country was a piece of art it would have to combine the orderliness of Pollock with the perceptual logic of Dali, all rooted in the joyful well-being of Hieronymous Bosch, in order to do justice to our times.
For those of you who for some reason always wanted to know what it looks like when an empire cracks apart, I’ve got some lovely news for you: A certain North American specimen, not generally known for its generosity, is nevertheless happy to oblige you today. Truly, the full catalog of America’s political woes could crash Amazon’s entire array of server farms, and most of us are struggling enough with chronic nausea these days such that revisiting all these horror stories again is way too depressing to contemplate. So I won’t. But there is one thing that inflames my tortured mind more than any of these items – perhaps because it is the one thing that explains them all.
Here it is: I am sickened to live in a society that treats a malignant illness as just another legitimate point of view, when in fact it’s the very disease that is killing us. We don’t treat a heroin epidemic as an innocuous choice that some may opt for and some may reject. We don’t treat cholera as just another flavor of ice cream that some prefer while others go for strawberry. And we don’t welcome Nazism as a legitimate belief system that deserves the same consideration as any other old model of race relations a society might adopt. So why do we treat ‘conservatism’ like some harmless cup of tea that some choose over Earl Grey or Jasmine?
“That this movement is a threat to Western values is transparent.”
I’m dead serious. And I mean like, literally, dead serious, because if we’re honest about it, that which goes by the name of conservatism today is not an ideology – it’s a death machine.
Maybe there was once a responsible, legitimate (if misguided and merely moderately deceitful) ideology by the name of conservatism – I don’t know. Regardless, we’re not talking about Dwight Eisenhower or Gerry Ford here. We’re talking about societal hemlock. And it’s been that way for a generation or two, but of course now the threat from this monstrosity is no longer just a moral disaster, it’s a full-blown existential crisis, wrapped inside a suicide vest.
Death machine, huh? Maybe you’re thinking, “Sure, those Trump idiots are completely bonkers, but calling them a willful agent of the apocalypse is little extreme. I mean, artistic license is a good thing, but c’mon man…” Sorry. I’m not kidding. I’m being quite literal. This is a belief system which is bringing death to thousands-year-old traditions of Western values, to democracy, to the country, to people’s lives, to the truth, and to the planet. Because of the threat this represents, we need to stop treating ‘conservatism’ as just another legitimate ideological choice. It’s not. It’s a murder weapon metastasized to global proportions.
That this movement is a threat to Western values is transparent. Today’s so-called ‘conservatives’ are the enemy of equality, human rights and liberty (despite their protestations to the exact contrary). They instead embody elitism, bigotry and repression. They don’t stand for gay rights any more than they ever did for civil rights back in the day, or equal pay for equal work. They worship power and its use to colonize others abroad while repressing dissent at home. Five minutes at any given Trump rally last year would have made that clear enough. But in case the message was somehow lost, one look at our fearless leader and his fawning relations with the likes of Putin, Erdogan and Duterte, combined with the shattering of the Western alliance with leaders like Angela Merkel and those of other (once-)allied democracies tells you all you need to know.
And no, it’s not just one buffoon we’re talking about here. While a number of right-wing pundits have – to their partial credit – repudiated Trumpism, there are loads of problems with that alibi for their movement. First, a whole lot of other folks have not disowned the walking crime scene that is the Trump White House. Second, these are pundits – hardly a single Republican officeholder in Washington has found it ethically necessary to distance him or herself from the moral abyss DBA an orange-haired gorilla in a Brioni suit. Most importantly, however, Trump is far less the historical aberration from the tendencies of the last four decades than he is the expression of its logical outcome. The right has been trucking in racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, military aggression, environmental destruction and armed robbery of the 99 percent going back at least as far as William F. Buckley and Ronald (Jesus’ Kid Brother) Reagan. Methinks the ladies of the conservative intelligentsia (pardon the oxymoron) doth protest too much when they seek to distance themselves from an administration whose only difference from its Republican predecessors is the grotesque overtness of its toxicity. (Especially when it doesn’t take a Svengali to see that this administration is going to jail, and that its place in history will make Nixon look like Abraham Lincoln by comparison. It ain’t too brave to want to make sure your name isn’t associated with that particular catastrophe.)
Speaking of the rest of the GOP, they are even more liable for the destruction of American democracy than is McDonalds Stump himself. Democracies, of course, are built on such requisite features as constitutions, elections, fixed institutions with defined powers, and so on. But underlying all of that is something of even greater importance, a political culture that forms the fabric and the foundation upon which any democracy must be built. This foundation silently and implicitly stipulates the rules of the game and the boundaries of permissible behavior, and without it, there can be no functioning democracy. It is defined by elements such as a shared national identity that supersedes partisanship, an understanding that certain principles must be protected – even at the cost of one’s own political fortunes – in order for the system to survive, and a basic level of trust such that one can hand over the keys of government to the other side without fearing that that new government will become a weapon used against the losers of an election, while at the same time believing that the next election will provide a genuine opportunity to return to power. These are the least tangible aspects of what sustains a functioning democracy, but they are also the most crucial. After all, you can have a formal written constitution or not, you can have a president or a prime minister, you can have two parties or many, you can have powerful states within a national government or not. In all these profound ways the British system differs from the American one, but nobody would claim that the UK is therefore not a democracy. What matters at the end of the day is the political culture of mutual respect and trust, the norms and the self-imposed restraints that form the fabric and foundation of a functioning democratic political culture.
And this is precisely what ‘conservatives’ have not been conserving for forty years now, but rather instead destroying. The necessity of preserving this crucial political culture is why impeaching a president for lying about a personal sexual relationship matters. It is why five conservative members of the Supreme Court breaking all their own internal rules and supposed principles in order to install their guy in the White House matters. It’s why using the country’s racial divide to win elections matters. It’s why relentlessly employing the filibuster to block every item on the agenda of a president from the other party – even those items that you supported yourself only yesterday – matters. And why it matters when you then alter filibuster rule when it’s used in the same way against you. This is why radical gerrymandering matters. This is why targeted voter suppression of the other party’s base in order to prevail in elections you couldn’t otherwise win matters. This is why refusing to act on a Supreme Court nomination for a year in order to get the nominee you want instead matters. And its why falsely claiming elections are rigged matters.
I have nothing particularly nice to say about the feeble and ineffectual (on a good day) Democratic Party, and especially its last two presidents. But all of the above examples of the undermining of American democracy in our time come from the Republican Party and the supposedly conservative folks who inhabit it. For all the many failings of the Democrats, there is no equivalent to any one of these items on their side of the aisle, let alone an equivalent to all of them. The upshot is that rather than conserving the Founders’ democratic system that conservatives are forever cynically clothing themselves in, they are in fact destroying it. This is not death by a thousand cuts, but rather death by relentless saber slashes.
Conservatism is also death in a quite literal sense, as well. Just ask the million or so Iraqis who perished because of the right’s war of choice justified by lies. Er, oops, wait a second… Turns out you can’t ask them, because they’re dead, killed by conservatives. But you could ask the tens of thousands Americans who are alive today because of Obamacare – which conservatives have fought relentlessly – and who may be dead tomorrow if the GOP manages to kill what skimpy health care protections Americans now enjoy. Or you can ask the workers who will be dying because the conservative movement is so determined to remove any sort of workplace safety regulations from providing them even modest protection. Or those who whose lives will be sacrificed in order to destroy the (woefully) basic environmental standards that have been built up over the last half-century. If you want to know what conservatism means for our environment and health, look no further than Flint, Michigan. The story that nobody in the media bothers to tell about that insane catastrophe is why it happened. The reason that ‘Flint’ has now become shorthand for environmental meltdown and lethal governmental buffoonery is that conservatives in Michigan’s government – who fervently ‘believe’ in local control, mind you – passed legislation allowing the state to simply take over control of municipalities whenever it saw fit, despite the electoral choices of voters in those communities. That’s what the conservative Snyder administration then proceeded to do in Flint, and the rest is history. By the way, their justification for doing so was that Flint was being mismanaged, so they – wait for it, now – had to come in and get it right. You can’t make this shit up. And if you did, you could never find anyone in Hollywood willing to make a movie out of it, on account of its absurdly ridiculous improbability.
“By treating conservatism and conservatives as reasonable and acceptable we not only legitimize the unspeakable, we massively enhance its likelihood of successfully killing us.”
But we’re not done yet. Conservatism also means death to the truth. Of course, when it comes to Herr Bloated Pumpkinhead and the current administration, the scale of dishonesty is absolutely epic. It is literally no exaggeration to say that a consumer of any generic statement by this White House would be more likely to know the truth by simply assuming its opposite is the case, than he or she would by accepting any given tweet or Spicerism as fact. No wonder Orwell is selling like hotcakes these days. This is a true “2+2=5″ moment, Winston.
It’s hardly surprising that a career New York City real estate developer who has spent a lifetime doing little but shameless self-promotion and fabricating scams running the gamut from bottled water to bottled diplomas would be unable to speak truthfully about nearly anything. And of course, when we say ‘anything’ here, we mean… anything. What’s somewhat astonishing and most definitely disturbing, however, is the reaction that his compulsive tendency to lie produces among the roughly forty percent of Americans who form his political base. What has gone so wrong in the lives of these ‘conservatives’ that they not only tolerate being lied to incessantly, but actually crave it? This is not the place for an extended discussion of that question, but suffice it to say that conservatism’s appeal among the public – including many whom it harms the most – cannot be understood outside the realm of political psychology. One might view these ‘comfortably numb-nuts’ as the rightful inheritors of America’s storied Know Nothing tradition, but in fact that’s too generous a label, since it turns out that it is actually possible in this world to know less than nothing if you’re willing to work hard enough at it. When you believe that Iraq really had WMD, or that cutting taxes on billionaires will get you a sweet job, or that Donald Trump has your back, well then, graduating to the status of being a full-blown Know Nothing truly is something for which you are well-positioned to aspire.
This is where, alas, the Founders got it wrong, with their Enlightenment model of rationally calculating citizens. A good hundred million plus Americans have literally lost their minds in our time and, in order to soothe the resentments torturing their savage souls, they are taking down the country around their heads as they descend into an emotionally satisfying madness.
Or, at least it used to be the country they are taking down. Now it’s the world. With the president’s destruction of the Paris climate change accord, American conservatism is now bringing it on a planetary scale. Could this possibly be more jaw-dropping in its sheer stupidity? We are talking here about a phenomenon that literally threatens life on this planet, and conservatives – who are otherwise so consumed with fear so much of the time – insist on rejecting slam-dunk scientific evidence and making sure that we perish instead. Again, the pathological psychology of these folks is the only way to understand such a suicide mission, such an act of terrorism on a global scale. The president’s speech was entirely laced with the rhetoric of bogus grievance – about how the United States is the laughing stock of the world because we’re being duped and cheated by smarter, tougher, more cynical countries, and blah, blah, freaking blah… Apart from the sheer absurdity of this trope on the basis of any sort of actual logic or fact, there remains this outstanding question: Even if it was all true, who the hell cares? If the planet winds up being destroyed, does it really matter whether in the preceding years one country’s GDP grew a half-percent slower than that of some other countries? What’s that old line about deck chairs…? Could there be any other accurate term for a belief system that so jeopardizes an entire planet than ‘death machine’?
We need to stop fooling around with this shit. Smallpox is not just another disease. Totalitarianism is not just another political system. Nuclear war is not just another form of conflict. And what calls itself ‘conservatism’ today is not just another form of legitimate, maybe-they’re-right-maybe-they’re-wrong, ideology.
All of these are life-threatening pathologies of epic proportion. It’s bad enough that we have to expend so much energy to keep them at bay. But, by treating conservatism and conservatives as reasonable and acceptable we not only legitimize the unspeakable, we massively enhance its likelihood of successfully killing us.
Today’s ‘conservatism’ is not an ideology – it’s a goddam death machine. And we should welcome it into our homes and communities every bit as much as we would the Black Plague.
Source: Twelve Blasphemous Thoughts: Some Summer Sacrilege
With permission from
counterpunch.org
June 13, 2017
Photo by Thomas sauzedde | CC BY 2.0
Summer’s here and the time is right for sacrilege in the streets. Here are twelve blasphemous thoughts for the current Russo-phobic season, likely to be a real carbon- and (see below) capital-cooked scorcher.
Wouldn’t That Have Been Russia’s Job?
Forget for now the question of whether the Kremlin intervened to any significant degree against Hillary Clinton in “our great democratic process and elections” last year. I’ve been consistently skeptical about the claim, which continues to be made in the absence of any smoking gun. At the same time, I’ve always harbored the following question in the back of my mind: if the Russian did do what they are accused of, wouldn’t that have been the Russian foreign policy intelligence apparatus doing its very basic job of patriotic national self-defense? Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and the broader Russo-phobic U.S.-imperial foreign policy establishment she represented seemed Hellbent on provoking a potentially deadly conflict with Russia over Ukraine, Crimea, and/or Syria. Hello?
What Democratic Process and Elections?
The Big Money-run United States is a damn near openly plutocratic oligarchy where the wealthy Few get what they want again and again regardless of majority working class sentiment. There’s a strong body of solid academic research demonstrating what Joe and Jane Six Pack already know about U.S. politics and policy: “money talks, bullshit walks.” You can’t have meaningful “democracy” in a nation where the top tenth of the upper 1 Percent owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent.
Eighty-six years ago, the great American philosopher John Dewey observed that “politics is the shadow cast on society by big business.” Dewey rightly prophesized that U.S. politics would stay that way for as long as power resided in “business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents, and other means of publicity and propaganda.” Ten years later, the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis made the very basic and elementary observation that Americans “must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” Why all this nonsensical talk about “American democracy”? It’s a childish fantasy.
Uncle Sam Interferes Abroad Like Crazy
Who on Earth is the United States to get enraged about Russia or anyone else’s real or possible interference in other nation’s political processes and elections? Uncle Sam has long and regularly undertaken such interference across the planet. It still does. Just for starters, ask the people of Latin America about U.S. political interference past and present. “We” interfered like crazy in Russian politics during the 1990s and certainly continue to conduct covert political operations there as in countless other sovereign nations. “We” have acted to topple and overthrow dozens of foreign governments since World War Two.
Why shouldn’t other nations try to impact U.S. politics by any means possible? Washington and Wall Street exercise powerful influence on life and politics in other nations whose people never have a say in U.S. policy. The United States’ outsized and deadly Superpower role (responsible for many millions of deaths around the world since 1945) means that other nations (Russia is certainly no exception) have a vested interest in the U.S. political process.
Hello Mike Pence?
But let’s ask another unpleasant question. If it were ever shown that the Orange-Tinted Beast treasonously colluded with Russia, do we really want Mike Pence in the White House? Impeachment and removal would put a vicious right-wing Christian white-nationalist zealot (Pence) in the Oval Office and probably speed the passage of the full right wing Republican agenda through Washington. That’s what the Constitution says. It lets Trump use Pence as a kind of deadly insurance policy against removal.
What’s so Great About the Holy Constitution?
This suggests another and truly sacrilegious question: what’s so damn great about the widely fetishized and damn-near deified U.S. Constitution? I won’t elaborate on this as I have recently published a Truthdig report on why we should hold a Constituent Assembly to go beyond that absurdly glorified and hideously anti-democratic charter, which was crafted with expressly classist intent and consequences by the early republic’s propertied masters near the end of the 18th century. Read that essay, titled “Impeach the Constitution,” here. Certainly, it’s absurd to think that a document crafted by wealthy slave-owners, opulent merchants, and other vast property-holders with the explicit purpose of keeping the “wicked” popular majority and its “secret sigh for a more equal distribution” of wealth (James Madison’s lovely phrase) at bay (see my essay if you think I’m lying) can function in meaningful service to popular self-rule in the 21st (or any other) century.
Questions Not Posed to Comey
Speaking of class rule, notice how none of James Comey’s examiners during the nationally televised hearings of the Senate Intelligence Committee last Thursday asked the former FBI Director any of the following questions suggested by Amy Goodman and Dennis Moynihan:
“How far-reaching is the FBI’s surveillance of journalists?…Why did the FBI label nonviolent water protectors at Standing Rock, North Dakota, possible domestic terrorists? What about the FBI’s similar infiltration of Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter?…Regarding the FBI’s illegal COINTELPRO suppression of dissent in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, how many of those targeted who are still incarcerated, such as American Indian Movement activist Leonard Peltier, and the many imprisoned former Black Panthers, were imprisoned based on FBI misconduct?….Finally, where do you think we would be, as a country, if the FBI hadn’t targeted Martin Luther King Jr., with its unrelenting campaign of surveillance, intimidation and harassment, which very likely contributed to the climate of hate that led to his assassination?”
Of course these queries were not posed. Russiagate is following in the footsteps of the Watergate hearings, which focused on Richard Nixon’s cover-up of an amateurish break-in of the headquarters of one of the nation’s leading capitalist parties but ignored the Nixon White House and FBI’s egregious violation of basic civil liberties in the domestic police state war on the New Left and the Black Freedom struggle. The small potatoes Watergate investigation also steered clear of Nixon’s arch-criminal invasion and bombing of Cambodia. See Noam Chomsky
Weapons of Mass Distraction: The Biggest Issue of Our or Any Time is Not a News Story
Here’s a scandalous observation: the news is a constant maddening distraction from the issues and problems that matter most, especially the deepening environmental crisis generated by the profits system. Nothing that Anderson Cooper and the rest of his Trump- and Comey- and Russia-obsessed panels have been jabbering about on CNN these days is remotely significant compared to the chilling (no irony originally intended) fact that atmospheric carbon parts per million (ppm) is now at a shocking 409.21, nearly full 10 points above just four years ago. We are now heading to 500 ppm by 2050. As Steven Newton wrote on Huffington Post almost one year ago:
“That’s only 35 years away. A child born today will barely have moved out of Mom’s basement (at least, judging by some millennials) by the time CO2 reaches 500 ppm. The hundred-point rise between 300 to 400 ppm took about a century; the rise between 400 to 500 ppm will take only about 35 years, and with accelerating rates, the rise to 600 ppm will happen even faster.”
Newton left something out: that is not survivable for the species. As the Australian Earth and paleoclimate scientist, Andrew Gliskon explained seven years ago:
“The consequences of open ended rise in atmospheric CO2 are manifest in the geological record (Frontispiece). The world is in a lag period, when increasing atmospheric energy is expressed by intense hurricanes, increased pressure at mid-latitude high pressure zones and shift of climate zones toward the poles. With ensuing desertification of temperate zones, i.e. southern Europe , southern Australia , southern Africa , the desiccated forests become prey to firestorms….There is nowhere the 6.5 billion of contemporary humans can go, not even the barren planets into the study of which space agencies have been pouring more funding than governments allocate for environmental mitigation to date. At 460 ppm CO2-equivalent, the climate is tracking close to the upper stability limit of the Antarctic ice sheet, defined at approximately 500 ppm [5,7]. Once transcended, mitigation measures would hardly be able to re-form the cryosphere. According to Joachim Schellnhuber, Director of the Potsdam Climate Impacts Institute and advisor to the German government: ‘We’re simply talking about the very life support system of this planet.’”
“Humans can not argue with the physics and chemistry of the atmosphere. What is needed are urgent measures including: Deep cuts in carbon emissions; Parallel Fast track transformation to non-polluting energy utilities – solar, solar-thermal, wind, tide, geothermal, hot rocks; Global reforestation and re-vegetation campaigns, including application of biochar. The alternative does not bear contemplation.”
As the left philosopher John Sanbonmatsu told me years ago, global warming “is the biggest issue of our or any time.” (Though correspondent Richard Matthews recently reminded me to worry about “the 400 nuke power plants that will melt down as industrial civilization collapses if nuke war doesn’t come first.”).
Please note the deafening silence in the reigning media and politics culture on “the biggest issue of our or any time.” Of all the maddening and insane things about the malignant narcissist Donald Trump, the most dangerous of all and is his climate change-denialist promise to “deregulate energy” – a pledge that amounts to what Noam Chomsky considers a potential “death-knell for the species.”
The corporate media-politics system is deadening the citizenry to the most significant existential threats the species has ever faced. It’s insane.
BDS the USA?
Now that Trump has pulled the world’s top cumulative carbon contributor (USA, USA! being far in the historical lead) out of even the painfully modest and inadequate Paris Climate Accord, I am moved to ask another sacrilegious and not-entirely tongue-in-cheek question: Given U.S. leadership of geocidal climate destruction, the unparalleled and racist U.S. incarceration rate, the mass-murderous U.S. military Empire (which accounts for more than 40 percent of world military spending, eats up more than half of U.S. federal discretionary spending, maintains more than 1000 military installation across more than 100 “sovereign” nations, and has the largest carbon footprint of any institution on Earth), and the extreme inequality and plutocracy prevalent in the U.S….given all these and other problems (including rampant hedonistic idiocy and indifference), should we now issue a call to the international community for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) targeting the United States and its institutions engaged in the destruction of the common good?
Think Capitalogenic, not Anthropogenic Climate Change
Now for some sacrilege on our holy “free market” profits system. We should follow the lead of the brilliant Marxist environmental historian and sociologist Jason Moore and replace the term “anthropogenic global warming” with “capitalogenic global warming.” The currently popular scientific concept of “the Anthropocene” – an era in which Earth systems are now for the first time decisively influenced by human activity – has rich geological validity and holds welcome political relevance in countering the carbon-industrial complex’s denial of humanity’s responsibility for contemporary climate change. Still, we must guard against lapsing into the historically unspecific and class-blind uses of “anthros,” projecting the currently and historically recent age of capital onto the broad 100,000-year swath of human activity on and in nature. As Moore told the left interviewer Sasha Lilley two years ago, “It was not humanity as whole that created …large-scale industry and the massive textile factories of Manchester in the 19th century or Detroit in the last century or Shenzen today. It was capital.” Read those two sentences again and commit them to memory. It is only during a relatively small slice of human history – roughly the last half-millennium giveor take a century or so – that humanity has been socially and institutionally wired from the top down to wreck livable ecology. Moore and other left analysts argue with good reason that it is more appropriate to understand humanity’s Earth-altering assault on livable ecology as “Capitalocene.” After all, it is only during the relatively brief period of history when capitalism has existed and ruled the world system (since 1600 or thereabouts by some academic calculations, earlier and later by others) that human social organization has developed the capacity and inner accumulation- and commodification – and “productivity” – and growth-mad compulsion to transform Earth systems – with profitability and “productivity” dependent upon on the relentless appropriation of “cheap nature” (cheap food, cheap energy, cheap raw materials and cheap human labor power or cheap human nature). Moore maintains that human destruction of livable ecology is best explained by changes that capitalism’s addictive and interrelated pursuits of profit and empire imposed on humanity’s relationships with “the web of life” since “the long sixteenth century” starting in 1450.
One of the great and tragic consequences of contemporary class (capitalist) rule and mass consent manufacture is that most U.S. Americans can now more readily imagine the end of life itself than they can envision the end of the relatively recent and very specific historical phenomenon known as capitalism.
No More Children Until We Fix This
Now for some real blasphemy. I really cannot recommend anyone having children at this juncture. I know that’s a terrible thing to say but we are currently on track for 500 ppm, by 2050 (that’s 33 years away) and 500 ppm is the dissolution of the cryosphere. Antarctica is gone at that level. That’s game over. The “very life support of the system of this planet” is now in epic crisis and the most powerful nation on earth and in history (the U.S.) is also the leading cumulative carbon emission contributor by far and is ruled by a soulless, socio-pathological capitalist class that is shockingly ready to lead the world over the cliff. Talk about “The End of History.” Fukuyama may have been right but not in quite the way he thought. The only thing that can save chances for a decent future worthy of new life is a massive popular upheaval leading to a full conversion from fossil fuels to renewable energy along with giant programs of global re-forestation and re-vegetation.
I see young adults with 1-2-year old babies and toddlers in strollers and car seats and I have three blasphemous thoughts these days: (1) are they aware that those strollers and car seats (posture nightmares) are destroying the structure and development of their child’s backs and necks? (2) did they look at the Earth science before they brought new life into this world? (3) They’d better figure out how to focus their lives on bringing about an eco-socialist revolution if they want their kids to have any shot at a decent life.
Bernie is Who We Said He Was
Let me re-state some especially irritating sacrilege to my “progressive” friends: we “perfectionist” radicals told you so and not just about Obama, but also about Bernie F-35 Sanders. It’s considered rude to gloat about having gotten things right while others didn’t. But I don’t really mean to gloat. I wish instead to instead to suggest that the progressive and liberal left (think The Nation, AlterNet, In These Times and the like) might want to pay more attention to its more serious “hard radical” voices (think Black Agenda Report, Counterpunch, John Pilger) when we issue serious and deeply considered warnings about Democratic Party politicos posing as populist champions of peace, equality, and the common good. I won’t belabor the point about Obama, who Dr. Adolph Reed, Jr. all too easily and accurately identified as a “vacuous to repressive neoliberal” as early as January of 1996. That’s old news though now with the added proof of the Dollar Obomber’s great and highly distasteful post-presidential cash-in (since nothing says “show me the money” like POTUS on your resume).
With Bernie of late, we have gotten yet more evidence that he is in fact the imperialist and sheep-dogging fake-socialist Democratic Party company man that some of us the “hard radical” Left said he was. “Bomber Bernie” (as he was quite properly nicknamed by Vermont peace activists when he jumped on board Bill Clinton’s criminal attack on Serbia in 1999) let his imperialist colors fly regarding Donald Trump’s ridiculous, dog-wagging missile-launch into Syria this last spring. Behold this reflection from Young Turk Michael Tracy last April 11th:
“Sanders’ initial statement on the strikes contained nothing that could be reasonably construed as a declaration of opposition…misleadingly, the statement was then excerpted into individual tweets, which falsely gave the impression that Sanders opposed the strikes, when all he had done was signal his “deep concern” as to the potential ramifications of the strikes. That’s a crucial distinction….’Raising concerns’ is not tantamount to an expression of clear, articulable opposition. One can support the Syria strikes, and yet be ‘concerned’ about the second-order effect of them, and the escalated conflict that might result. (See Schumer, Chuck, who rushed to endorse Trump’s attack within hours, only to then follow-up later with expressions of “worry” as to the long-term consequences).”
“Similarly, Sanders expressed ‘concern’ about the potential consequences of Trump’s attack, but not opposition to the act itself. Unlike Schatz, Paul, and Gabbard, he has not rejected on principle the utility of American military force in this circumstance. He merely wants Trump to ‘explain to the American people’ what is to be achieved by the strikes, and to put forward a plan for a ‘political solution.’ Neither of these demands constitutes first-order opposition to the strikes: They are second-order worries. Even Sanders’ procedural complaints don’t signify opposition — unlike [even] Kaine, he doesn’t declare the strikes ‘unlawful,’ he merely says that ‘Congress has a responsibility to weigh in,’ which virtually no one in that body would disagree with.”
“Then, on Meet the Press this past Sunday, Sanders went further: ‘We eventually have got to get rid of Assad,’ he told Chuck Todd, thereby endorsing the underlying logic of regime change. His only apparent recommendation is that this particular regime change be effectuated multi-laterally, i.e, the US should enlist some Middle Eastern autocrats to help out.” (emphasis added).
How’s was that for Left Resistance, Bernie-style? That’s war socialism for you, as in Kautsky, Karl (who was, however, actually a Marxist and socialist, unlike the New Deal liberal Sanders). One is not a “perfectionist” just because they can’t get behind a politician who claims to a social democrat – even a democratic socialist – but who can’t seem to grasp the elementary moral and practical (fiscal and programmatic) contradiction between (a) calling for progressive policy and (b) backing the giant Pentagon System and the historically unmatched global empire it equips and staffs. If one is a left “perfectionist” because they expect post-Vietnam era progressives to honor the basic anti-imperial wisdom of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s April 4th 1967 “A Time to Break the Silence” speech, then I plead guilty.
It’s true that Bernie recently gave a rousing Chicago speech in which he properly bellowed that “Trump didn’t win the election, the [neoliberal Clinton-Obama – P.S.] Democratic Party lost the election” and that “the current model and the current strategy of the Democratic Party is an absolute failure.” Sanders’ criticism of the Democratic party as out-of-touch and elitist resonated with activists at the People’s Summit. Audience members roared their approval when Sanders said that “the Democratic Party needs fundamental change [and to] understand what side it is on. And that cannot be the side of Wall Street, or the fossil fuel industry, or the drug companies.”
I won’t bother to criticize the notion that significant revolutionary change will or even can take place within and through the Democratic Party (it can’t and won’t). That’s an ancient, never-ending progressive fantasy. The main things that struck me were (a) that Sanders’ oration indicated no movement left (Dr. King-ward) on U.S. foreign policy (imperialism) and (b) that he repeated the establishment claim that Vladimir Putin has been trying to “destabilize democracy” (listen the speech hyperlinked above from 38:45 to 39:10) in the U.S. What democracy, Bernie?
(There was also this strange and repellent line in Sanders speech: “Even a very conservative Republican president like George W. Bush understood that one of the important functions of a leader in a democratic society is to bring people together, not separate them.” That statement, which must be some kind of reference to Dubya rallying the nation [in nationalistic hatred] after the 9/11 jetliner attacks [the hatred was then exploited for the arch-criminal U.S. invasion of Iraq], is so stupid and reactionary it almost defies belief.)
Something Rotten in the State of Independent Left Media
My final blasphemy: there’s something wrong with what passes for independent “left” media in the U.S. today. In an interview concerning David J. Garrow’s recent epic biography of Barack Obama on Dr. Jared Ball’s show imixwhatilike last week, I told the host the story of my last-minute cancellation at Democracy Now! (DN) in December of 2008. I had been scheduled to discuss my all-too sadly predictive book Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Paradigm, June 2008). I was in New York, flown out there with assistance from my publisher to try to warn folks about the fake-progressive and arch-corporatist, Goldman Sachs-staffed, and imperialist Obama presidency to come. The then the call came to my cell phone on the morning of my scheduled interview as I walked out of midtown Manhattan’s Port Authority and started heading down to DN’s headquarters. The spot was off, cancelled. I had trekked out to the Big Apple for…nothing. Amy and Juan had other matters to which to attend. There was no hint of rescheduling or revisiting prior to the Inauguration. A very basic calculation took hold: nice middle-class DN viewers and contributors would have been put off by my all-too subsequently validated evidence- and history-based projections on the Obamanistic betrayals to come.
Ball then related how having “perfectionist” me on to speak candidly and seriously about the limits of candidate Sanders from a left perspective was a factor in his recent dismissal from another leading left media outlet.
DN’s Goodman has given some credence to the dismal dollar-drenched Dems’ cynical and distracting Russiagate narrative. So now has The Intercept, founded by the E-Bay and Pay Pal billionaire Pierre Omidyar, who pays the journal’s top and brilliant civil-libertarian writer Glenn Greenwald between $250K and $1 million per year. To his credit, the Rolling Stone’s also brilliant and left-liberal, Trump presidency-predicting writer Matt Taibbi ran away from Omidyar’s “independent journalism” scheme after a brief fling three years ago. But now comes depressing news from the left Canadian writer Joe Emersberger:
“In an op-ed for Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi called Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro ‘the infamous left-wing dictator of Venezuela.’ To back up his case, Taibbi cited Julio Borges, president of the National Assembly and a leading opposition figure and Henrique Capriles, the opposition governor of the state of Miranda. Didn’t Taibbi notice a huge contradiction in his piece right there? How does the opposition win major elections in a dictatorship?…It gets worse. Julio Borges, as Taibbi also alludes to in his piece, has been using his position as head to the National Assembly to try to get economic sanctions implemented against Maduro’s government. Borges’ predecessor as president of the National Assembly, another opposition leader (Henry Ramos), boasted about having a lot of success scaring away investors – again by using his position as head of the National Assembly which the opposition won control over in December of 2015.”
Good grief. I like Matt Taibbi and have learned a lot about Goldman Sachs and Wall Street’s perversion of America from him, but now even he has lined up with the vicious U.S.-sponsored right-wing assault on Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela.
Is nothing sacred?
Last year it was eight men, then down to six, and now almost five.
Source: Now Five Men Own Almost as Much Wealth as Half the World’s Population | Alternet
DEAUVILLE, FRANCE – MAY 26, 2011 : Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Press conference at the summit G8/G20 about new technologies – Deauville, France on May 26 2011
Photo Credit: Frederic Legrand – COMEO / Shutterstock.com
Last year it was eight men, then down to six, and now almost five.
While Americans fixate on Trump, the super-rich are absconding with our wealth, and the plague of inequality continues to grow. An analysis of 2016 data found that the poorest five deciles of the world population own about $410 billion in total wealth. As of June 8, 2017, the world’s richest five men owned over $400 billion in wealth. Thus, on average, each man owns nearly as much as 750 million people.
Why Do We Let a Few People Shift Great Portions of the World’s Wealth to Themselves?
Most of the super-super-rich are Americans. We the American people created the internet, developed and funded artificial intelligence, and built a massive transportation infrastructure, yet we let just a few individuals take almost all the credit, along with hundreds of billions of dollars.
Defenders of the out-of-control wealth gap insist that all is OK, because after all, America is a meritocracy in which the super-wealthy have earned all they have. They heed the words of Warren Buffett: “The genius of the American economy, our emphasis on a meritocracy and a market system and a rule of law has enabled generation after generation to live better than their parents did.”
But it’s not a meritocracy. Children are no longer living better than their parents did. In the eight years since the recession the Wilshire Total Market valuation has more than tripled, rising from a little over $8 trillion to nearly $25 trillion. The great majority of it has gone to the very richest Americans. In 2016 alone, the richest 1% effectively shifted nearly $4 trillion in wealth away from the rest of the nation to themselves, with nearly half of the wealth transfer ($1.94 trillion) coming from the nation’s poorest 90% — the middle and lower classes. That’s over $17,000 in housing and savings per lower-to-middle-class household lost to the super-rich.
A meritocracy? Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos have done little that wouldn’t have happened anyway. All modern U.S. technology started with, and to a great extent continues with, our tax dollars and our research institutes and our subsidies to corporations.
Why Do We Let Unqualified Rich People Tell Us How To Live?
In 1975, at the age of 20, Bill Gates founded Microsoft with high school buddy Paul Allen. At the time, Gary Kildall’s CP/M operating system was the industry standard. Even Gates’ company used it. But Kildall was an innovator, not a businessman, and when IBM came calling for an OS for the new IBM PC, his delays drove the big mainframe company to Gates. Even though the newly established Microsoft company couldn’t fill IBM’s needs, Gates and Allen saw an opportunity, and so they hurriedly bought the rights to another local company’s OS — which was based on Kildall’s CP/M system. Kildall wanted to sue, but intellectual property law for software had not yet been established. Kildall was a maker who got taken.
So Bill Gates took from others to become the richest man in the world. And now, because of his great wealth and the meritocracy myth, many people look to him for solutions in vital areas of human need, such as education and global food production.
Gates on Education: He has promoted galvanic skin response monitors to measure the biological reactions of students, and the videotaping of teachers to evaluate their performances. About schools he said, “The best results have come in cities where the mayor is in charge of the school system. So you have one executive, and the school board isn’t as powerful.”
Gates on Africa: With investments in or deals with Monsanto, Cargill and Merck, Gates has demonstrated his preference for corporate control over poor countries deemed unable to help themselves. But no problem: according to Gates, “By 2035, there will be almost no poor countries left in the world.”
Warren Buffett: Demanding To Be Taxed at a Higher Rate (As Long As His Own Company Doesn’t Have To Pay)
Warren Buffett has advocated for higher taxes on the rich and a reasonable estate tax. But his company Berkshire Hathaway has used “hypothetical amounts” to pay its taxes while actually deferring $77 billion in real taxes.
Jeff Bezos: $50 Billion in Less Than Two Years, and Fighting Taxes All the Way
Since the end of 2015 Jeff Bezos has accumulated enough wealth to cover the entire $50 billion U.S. housing budget, which serves five million Americans. Bezos, who has profited greatly from the internet and the infrastructure built up over many years by many people with many of our tax dollars, has used tax havens and high-priced lobbyists to avoid the taxes owed by his company.
Mark Zuckerberg (6th Richest in World, 4th Richest in America)
While Zuckerberg was developing his version of social networking at Harvard, Columbia University students Adam Goldberg and Wayne Ting built a system called Campus Network, which was much more sophisticated than the early versions of Facebook. But Zuckerberg had the Harvard name and better financial support.
Now with his billions he has created a charitable foundation, which in reality is a tax-exempt limited liability company, leaving him free to make political donations or sell his holdings, all without paying taxes.
The False Promise of Philanthropy
Many super-rich individuals have pledged the majority of their fortunes to philanthropic causes. That’s very generous, if they keep their promises. But that’s not really the point.
American billionaires all made their money because of the research and innovation and infrastructure that make up the foundation of our modern technologies. They have taken credit, along with their massive fortunes, for successes that derive from society rather than from a few individuals. It should not be any one person’s decision about the proper use of that wealth. Instead a significant portion of annual national wealth gains should be promised to education, housing, health research, and infrastructure. That is what Americans and their parents and grandparents have earned after a half-century of hard work and productivity.
