Just as Donald Trump regularly dehumanizes dark-skinned people, incurring the requisite (and much-desired) outrage from all who claim to be decent, so too is he uncannily proficient at then turning the tables upon the decently outraged.
In typical gaslighting fashion, Trump is calling the outraged media and citizens to account for their coverage of and reaction to his latest "animals" remark aimed at undocumented immigrants. He lambasted the outraged, saying that if they'd been paying close enough attention to his well-known nuanced verbal skills, they would have noticed he was again only talking about the notorious MS-13 gang.
He's technically right about that to a minor degree, but very wrong about it to a truly major degree.. His incendiary comment was, in fact, a response to a complaint by the Fresno County (California) sheriff that state law precludes her from reporting to federal immigration authorities information about undocumented migrants, including MS-13 gang members, being held in her county jail.
"We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in — and we’re stopping a lot of them — but we’re taking people out of the country,” Trump responded without referring to MS-13. “You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals. And we’re taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that’s never happened before.”
He was perfectly OK to let the conventional interpretation of his remarks about "these people" stand for more than 24 hours - more than enough time to rebroadcast his bullhorn of a message that all Latino migrants are animals and criminals - before complaining that he'd been deliberately misunderstood... again.
This has caused a minor corporate media and political frenzy, with some hastily cobbled-together retractions and corrections about the "misunderstanding." So score a win for Trump among his base and his enablers from the Duopoly, and a loss for the coastal elites who pay lip service to the rights of migrants and refugees when it suits their political agendas and party prospects to do so.
And most of all, score more terror and angst for Latinos and other immigrants, who are being torn from their families by the abusive Trump administration.
For the most part, the corporate media are acting like a bunch of wimps in the face of Trump's critique. They should neither have retracted their stories and tweets, like the A.P. did, nor issued even the flimsiest of apologies to the Trump administration for appearing to "coddle" the MS-13 gang the way that they did, nor even "declined to comment" on the issue, as the New York Times safely did.
The media were certainly co-opted by Trump in getting the xenophobic message out to the base, loud and clear, before many outlets took the easy way out and decided that yes, they had indeed misinterpreted Trump's "true" message. The lone exception, strange as it may seem, was the Washington Post, which stands by its factual headline "Trump Refers To Some Undocumented Immigrants As Animals."
CNN, long the profitable subject of Trump's "fake news" wrath, took the low road and sided with Trump, accusing and naming the major outlets which took his "animals" comments out of context. The cable network posted its screed, aptly enough, on its "Money Blog."
Heaven forbid that CNN personalities lose their credentials or "access" to the presidential seat of malevolent power as their bosses and corporate sponsors rake in record revenues by selectively #resisting Trump.
Meanwhile,Trump is having his cake and eating it too, gleefully tweeting today:
"Fake News Media had me calling Immigrants, or Illegal Immigrants, ‘Animals.’ Wrong! They were begrudgingly forced to withdraw their stories.. I referred to MS 13 Gang Members as “Animals,” a big difference — and so true. Fake News got it purposely wrong, as usual!”
Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders went even further. At Thursday's daily White House briefing, she read from a prepared statement: “The president was very clearly referring to MS-13 gang members who enter the country illegally and whose deportations are hamstrung by our laws. If the media and liberals want to defend MS-13, they’re more than welcome to. Frankly, I don’t think the term that the president used was strong enough.”
She then went on to gleefully and graphically imagine the press corps getting their jollies over the gang cutting off heads and ripping out hearts.
There were no follow-up questions from the cowed assembled court stenographers.
Showing posts with label racism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label racism. Show all posts
Friday, May 18, 2018
Thursday, May 17, 2018
The Great White Rant
Not for the first time has Donald Trump dehumanized people by calling them "animals" during one of his habitual rants. Last month, it was alleged gang members. On Wednesday, it was the immigrants entering the country from Mexico, all for the lack of a magical wall to keep Whiteness safe.
But this time he revved up his violent rhetoric to maximum overdrive:
And if outright deportation wasn't feasible, especially for those migrants claiming refugee status because of violence in their home countries, Obama's immigration bureaucrats did the proper public relations thing and locked them up in immigration jails, often euphemised as "family detention centers."
Trump, of course, is far from the first American official to dehumanize dark-skinned people. The US was founded upon slavery and the expulsion and extermination of the continent's native populations, the xenophobic language of which survives to this very day in military jargon and the naming of sports teams.
Along with tens of millions of other modern-day citizens, Trump became a true believer during the post-civil rights victory decades which featured the reactionary law-and-order regimes of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Hillary Clinton herself was a true believer, touting the harsh sentencing reforms of her husband's administration by infamously calling young black men "super-predators who must be brought to heel," as though they were vicious dogs. That remark came back to haunt her during her latest ill-fated presidential bid.
But the autocratic Trump brings the institutional racism, long a part of the American fabric, to a whole new level. His diatribes act as much as a rebuke to "politically correct" liberals on behalf of his army of proud Deplorables as they are a reflection of his own bigotry.
From the New York Times:
Trump might be nothing but an ignorant con man riling up the base for the benefit of his own business empire. But Kushner, whose own relatives were killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust, should know better. Violent language aimed at rendering people less than human is historically the prelude to actual physical violence, ethnic cleansing and genocide. If nothing else, this language serves to terrorize entire populations for the crime of simply existing.
But this time he revved up his violent rhetoric to maximum overdrive:
"We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in — we’re stopping a lot of them,” Mr. Trump said in the Cabinet Room during an hourlong meeting that reporters were allowed to document. “You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people, these are animals, and we’re taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that’s never happened before.”Well, not quite. Trump still hasn't deported as many people as his predecessor, who set the real record. That probably explains at least part of his spittle-inflected rage. He gets away with it, though, because Barack Obama was not one to brag about his own inhumanity. On the contrary, he herded them out of the country very quietly, to little outrage from his own party, no credit from the Republican Party, and nearly nonexistent coverage by the corporate media. When his administration was rarely confronted over his mass deportations, officials soothed it was only in order "to send a message" to future border crossers.
And if outright deportation wasn't feasible, especially for those migrants claiming refugee status because of violence in their home countries, Obama's immigration bureaucrats did the proper public relations thing and locked them up in immigration jails, often euphemised as "family detention centers."
Trump, of course, is far from the first American official to dehumanize dark-skinned people. The US was founded upon slavery and the expulsion and extermination of the continent's native populations, the xenophobic language of which survives to this very day in military jargon and the naming of sports teams.
Along with tens of millions of other modern-day citizens, Trump became a true believer during the post-civil rights victory decades which featured the reactionary law-and-order regimes of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Hillary Clinton herself was a true believer, touting the harsh sentencing reforms of her husband's administration by infamously calling young black men "super-predators who must be brought to heel," as though they were vicious dogs. That remark came back to haunt her during her latest ill-fated presidential bid.
But the autocratic Trump brings the institutional racism, long a part of the American fabric, to a whole new level. His diatribes act as much as a rebuke to "politically correct" liberals on behalf of his army of proud Deplorables as they are a reflection of his own bigotry.
From the New York Times:
My published comment on the article:His harsh criticism came as American and Mexican officials were at a critical stage in their efforts to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement.Mr. Trump’s heated remarks on immigration, both private and public, appear to have resonated with his advisers, who have been moving to put in place ever-stricter policies in line with the president’s vision. Mr. Sessions said the Department of Justice would be adding immigration judges and prosecuting twice as many immigration cases this year.“The president has made clear to all of us that we have to do better,” he said. “We are going to do better.”
With every hateful rant, Trump gives tacit permission to his base and all manner of disturbed individuals to act out their most violent fantasies. When you consider that, according to polls, at least a third of this country's citizens heartily approve of him, I think it's fair to conclude that this potential for violence is increasing exponentially with every passing day.And not just in America, of course. Witness SLOTUS (son-in-law of the United States) Jared Kushner's dehumanization of the Gaza Palestinians shot to death by Israeli snipers this week as mere propaganda tools who deserved to die by daring to venture too close to the barbed-wire fence of the world's largest open air prison.
This applies both to state-sanctioned violence, as in the average of three people now getting killed daily by law enforcement, and the non-state sanctioned violence of people taking matters into their own hands, specifically their own hands gripping guns.
Not that our politicians seem to care. They're actually complicit. Trump doesn't seem like such an anomaly when the Senate has all but confirmed a known torturer and war criminal to head the CIA.
Trump refuses to feed any other belly besides the bloated one of the de facto oligarchy. The only thing he's interested in feeding to ordinary people is resentment.
Too many of us have become numbed to Trump's relentless bursts of projectile verbal vomitus. I don't know what's more noxious: calling immigrants "animals," his cruel demand to break up immigrant families, or his call for the prosecution of a democratically elected official acting to protect these same families.
This isn't a dog whistle to his fans: it's a bullhorn giving them permission to be brown-shirted vigilantes.
It's a very scary time to be alive.
Trump might be nothing but an ignorant con man riling up the base for the benefit of his own business empire. But Kushner, whose own relatives were killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust, should know better. Violent language aimed at rendering people less than human is historically the prelude to actual physical violence, ethnic cleansing and genocide. If nothing else, this language serves to terrorize entire populations for the crime of simply existing.
Tuesday, January 16, 2018
Gray Lady Wants You To Cool the "Race-talk"
How can you tell when the ruling elites have sunk into a moral cesspit? When the Paper of Record, acting on behalf of the Democratic Party, warns liberal politicians and pundits not to talk about Donald Trump's or anybody else's racism past a certain, self-serving point.
You see, it's not about doing or saying what's right. It's about doing or saying whatever it takes for your political party to win. Calling out the evil of racism apparently has a sell-by date, especially in a campaign year.
Of course, the New York Times posits it a bit more delicately than that, as it coyly headlines David Leonhardt's column Is All This Talk of Racism Bad for Democrats?
The short answer is "Yes, You Idiot!", but since this is liberalism talking, there are the usual "pragmatic" excuses for ignoring both the historical and contemporary racism in this country. It's all about clawing back power by any means necessary. You see, although the Democrats thought they they could win in 2016 by harping about the Trumpian sexism targeting Hillary Clinton, similar talk of Trumpian racism should be off-limits as we approach the 2018 midterms. Identity politics is largely a matter of the class and status of the identity symbol they're talking about and elevating on any given day.
(As just one recent example of this basic truth, the recently-announced Senate candidacy of transgender whistleblower Chelsea Manning has elicited howls of outrage from corporate Democrats. She is simply not the "right" kind of identity politics symbol for them, because she exposed their war crimes and otherwise embarrassed the ruling elites when she furnished their self-serving correspondence to Wikileaks.)
For his own pragmatic part, meanwhile, Donald Trump certainly wants 2018 to be all about race, the better to whip up the estimated third of the electorate which still supports him. He needs them to continue believing that even the lowest white man is superior to the highest black man, That was, and is, a winning strategy for him. He wants Democrats to continue accusing him of racism.
Therefore, it follows that the Democrats should fight this strategy by ignoring racism itself. After all, this is the reality-based community, in which facts have a well-known liberal bias.
Of course, racism really sucks, "but" as David Leonhardt worries:
You might agree with Leonhardt - after all, he sounds reasonable and caring and even class-conscious - but read the subtext. He is not suggesting that the Democratic Party actually push policies that will make people's lives better. He is simply suggesting that the candidates talk a good game and get the voters to just "think about" about their economic interests - by making the mid-term campaigns All About Trump. His tax plan and other assaults on everyday Americans are so horrible, who needs an actual plan of one's own? All that Democrats need are better bullshitting skills as they carefully ignore the "shit hole" rhetoric they are currently in a frenzy of co-opting to death.
In other words, rather than open up the whole can of worms about the American imperialistic origins of "shit hole countries," the Democrats want to dial it back to the same old "We Suck Less" strategy. As Leonhardt enthuses, ignoring Trump's race-baiting in favor of his economic assaults "turns off no substantial group of voters. It can win over swing voters and motivate reliably progressive ones."
In other words, those wily Democrats think they can seduce white people into the voting booth by making them worry more about money than they worry about black people, who shall not be mentioned in certain polite bourgeois company. Pander, rinse, repeat, ignore, pander some more. And besides ignoring racism, Dems must studiously avoid all mention of the class war and the politically-manufactured wealth inequality, now at its most extreme level since the last Gilded Age.
Another inside-baseball piece by The Hill's Amie Parnes puts it even more bluntly. The Democrats once again plan to follow the winning 2006 Rahm Emanuel strategy by going after the white suburban voters who propelled Trump to his slim victory one year ago. They will also continue harping on their own witch-hunting, xenophobic agenda of Russia, Russia, Russia:
The upshot of the Democrats' argument is this: let poor people continue to be victimized under our more beneficent watch while we continue to court our wealthy donors and co-opt the support of the people who must continue to believe they "have nowhere else to go."
Remember, this is not about you and your hard lives. This is all about a preferred slate of oligarchic lackeys gaining back power by pretending to care about you for one magical moment every two, four, or six years.
If they think telling people to shut up about uncomfortable topics is a winning strategy for them as they attempt to control the "narrative," maybe they should rethink their entire careers.
You see, it's not about doing or saying what's right. It's about doing or saying whatever it takes for your political party to win. Calling out the evil of racism apparently has a sell-by date, especially in a campaign year.
Of course, the New York Times posits it a bit more delicately than that, as it coyly headlines David Leonhardt's column Is All This Talk of Racism Bad for Democrats?
The short answer is "Yes, You Idiot!", but since this is liberalism talking, there are the usual "pragmatic" excuses for ignoring both the historical and contemporary racism in this country. It's all about clawing back power by any means necessary. You see, although the Democrats thought they they could win in 2016 by harping about the Trumpian sexism targeting Hillary Clinton, similar talk of Trumpian racism should be off-limits as we approach the 2018 midterms. Identity politics is largely a matter of the class and status of the identity symbol they're talking about and elevating on any given day.
(As just one recent example of this basic truth, the recently-announced Senate candidacy of transgender whistleblower Chelsea Manning has elicited howls of outrage from corporate Democrats. She is simply not the "right" kind of identity politics symbol for them, because she exposed their war crimes and otherwise embarrassed the ruling elites when she furnished their self-serving correspondence to Wikileaks.)
For his own pragmatic part, meanwhile, Donald Trump certainly wants 2018 to be all about race, the better to whip up the estimated third of the electorate which still supports him. He needs them to continue believing that even the lowest white man is superior to the highest black man, That was, and is, a winning strategy for him. He wants Democrats to continue accusing him of racism.
Therefore, it follows that the Democrats should fight this strategy by ignoring racism itself. After all, this is the reality-based community, in which facts have a well-known liberal bias.
Of course, racism really sucks, "but" as David Leonhardt worries:
It's also important to distinguish between the current moment and the remainder of 2018. Calling out Trump as a racist is the right thing to do in the days immediately following comments like his vulgar denigration of Haitians and others last week. It should not become the centerpiece of the Democrats’ 2018 strategy.Well, at least he had the decency to wait till after the Martin Luther King holiday to publish his cautionary screed.
That centerpiece needs to be a principled populism that causes voters — white, black, Latino and Asian — to think about their economic interests. Trump certainly can be a huge part of the strategy. The president is almost always the central issue in a midterm election. The key is how Democrats talk about him.Emphasizing the ways he’s hurting the middle class and working class has almost no downside. It turns off no substantial group of voters. It can win over swing voters and motivate reliably progressive ones.
You might agree with Leonhardt - after all, he sounds reasonable and caring and even class-conscious - but read the subtext. He is not suggesting that the Democratic Party actually push policies that will make people's lives better. He is simply suggesting that the candidates talk a good game and get the voters to just "think about" about their economic interests - by making the mid-term campaigns All About Trump. His tax plan and other assaults on everyday Americans are so horrible, who needs an actual plan of one's own? All that Democrats need are better bullshitting skills as they carefully ignore the "shit hole" rhetoric they are currently in a frenzy of co-opting to death.
In other words, rather than open up the whole can of worms about the American imperialistic origins of "shit hole countries," the Democrats want to dial it back to the same old "We Suck Less" strategy. As Leonhardt enthuses, ignoring Trump's race-baiting in favor of his economic assaults "turns off no substantial group of voters. It can win over swing voters and motivate reliably progressive ones."
In other words, those wily Democrats think they can seduce white people into the voting booth by making them worry more about money than they worry about black people, who shall not be mentioned in certain polite bourgeois company. Pander, rinse, repeat, ignore, pander some more. And besides ignoring racism, Dems must studiously avoid all mention of the class war and the politically-manufactured wealth inequality, now at its most extreme level since the last Gilded Age.
Another inside-baseball piece by The Hill's Amie Parnes puts it even more bluntly. The Democrats once again plan to follow the winning 2006 Rahm Emanuel strategy by going after the white suburban voters who propelled Trump to his slim victory one year ago. They will also continue harping on their own witch-hunting, xenophobic agenda of Russia, Russia, Russia:
Emanuel benefited from the political climate of 2006.
The election was driven by opposition to an unpopular President George W. Bush, who was drowning in headlines about the Iraq war and his handling of Hurricane Katrina. Congressional Republicans—including former House Majority Leader Tom Delay (D-Texas) and Rep. Mark Foley (D-Fla.), were also rocked by scandal in the months leading up to the election.Squelching talk of race and racism under the centrist Democratic bromide "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" also lets them ignore their own right-wing policies of endless war, bombings of dark-skinned people in foreign lands under Obama, deportations of record numbers of dark-skinned people under Obama, the warrantless surveillance of American citizens approved by Obama, the bailouts of Wall Street and corporations at the expense of Main Street under Obama, the privatization of public education and the closings of schools in minority neighborhoods under Obama, as well as the militarized police brutality against black and brown people in these same poor neighborhoods.
Democrats say the political climate is even more poisonous for Republicans now. For one thing, Trump’s White House is shrouded in the Russia investigation. And Republican incumbents “are dropping like flies,” in the words of one Democratic strategist helping to win back the House.
“They’re imploding,” the Democrat said. “All we need to do is let them unravel while holding firm to our issues.”
The upshot of the Democrats' argument is this: let poor people continue to be victimized under our more beneficent watch while we continue to court our wealthy donors and co-opt the support of the people who must continue to believe they "have nowhere else to go."
Remember, this is not about you and your hard lives. This is all about a preferred slate of oligarchic lackeys gaining back power by pretending to care about you for one magical moment every two, four, or six years.
If they think telling people to shut up about uncomfortable topics is a winning strategy for them as they attempt to control the "narrative," maybe they should rethink their entire careers.
Monday, October 9, 2017
Observing Indigenous Peoples Day
The push to scrub Columbus Day once and for all from the secular religious calendar of the United States is gaining momentum, thanks to three things that happened in the past year.
First came the widely-publicized protests of the water protectors of North Dakota's Standing Rock Sioux Nation. Even military veterans joined in solidarity to protest the construction of a polluting oil pipeline on sacred land. Despite some setbacks, resistance is on the ascendant.
Second is the popular demand, from all over the country, for the removal of statues and flags which celebrate white supremacy.
And third has been the refusal of professional athletes and others to stand for the jingoistic rituals of the Pledge of Allegiance and the Star-Spangled Banner. This is a direct rebuke to the militarism and racism which are the founding principles of the United States, not to mention the integral ethos of professional football.
All of this public "wokeness" in such a relatively short span of time is a giant leap in the direction of some long-overdue historical truth and reconciliation. And this reckoning isn't coming a moment too soon. Not only are we condemned to repeat the past if we won't remember it (Santayana), the past isn't dead because it's not even past. (Faulkner)
There is an absolute straight line from the plunder of the Americas by the Spanish in 1492 to the present-day terroristic war on a global battlefield. Donald Trump is the end-product of late capitalism and American imperialism, a mass psychosis on a crack cocaine high.
"Our nation was born in genocide," wrote Martin Luther King Jr. "We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode."
It wasn't until nearly a quarter century after King's murder that Indigenous People's Day in the US got its official start. In 1992, the 500th anniversary of Columbus's landing in the Caribbean islands, the city of Berkeley, California officially voted to mark the second Monday in October as a day of solidarity with aboriginal communities and as a protest against colonialism.
The late historian Howard Zinn wrote that the glorification of Columbus, a mass murderer for the ages, as a hero in the American creation myth is just the start of the continuous propaganda fed to us both in textbooks and by our political leaders:
Although many school districts and municipalities are also increasingly refusing to honor Columbus on his very specious day, only four state legislatures have taken the plunge so far: Hawaii (whose native populations were robbed and slaughtered by sugar and pineapple barons under cover of militant Christianity); South Dakota (home of many a US cavalry land grab and massacre of indigenous peoples); Oregon (end-point of Lewis and Clark's manifest march to exceptionally bloody American destiny); and Alaska (Seward's Folly, and oil and gold-despoiled home to many a plundered aboriginal resident.)
People are finally beginning to challenge the archaic but stubborn legal concept of Terra nullius, or the Discovery Doctrine.
It all started with the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas. By papal writ, Spain and Portugal agreed that all non-Christian territory was as good as unpopulated and fair game for plunder and enslavement. Other European countries then followed this same legalistic theory for their own settler initiatives. Thomas Jefferson himself declared the Doctrine of Discovery to be international law, a declaration which was later upheld by the Supreme Court.
The Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony had actually been the first settlers on the mainland to act upon the Discovery Doctrine, using Calvinist Christianity as justification for their plunder just as the Spaniards had used Catholicism. The pilgrims built the foundation for the enduring belief in American Exceptionalism and the prosperity gospel. Certain individuals and groups are just so special that they obviously were chosen by God to be The Elect. Salvation is guaranteed to the materially successful chosen ones, while the poor and unlucky (and dark-skinned) probably deserve damnation.
Scotch-Irish immigrants scrabbling for a piece of land in the aboriginal territory of the South were the ideological forebears of Donald Trump's base of aggrieved white people. It's no surprise that the supposedly ignorant Trump is a huge fan of populist land speculator, slave owner, and Indian killer Andrew Jackson, who finally ordered the mass expulsion of the Cherokee Nation in the infamous and lethal Trail of Tears.
And Trump is by no means the first or the only president to champion the white supremacy which is at the very core of the Discovery Doctrine rationale for the creation of the American settler state both here and abroad. In his 2009 inaugural address, our first cosmetically black president preached the settler creation myth gospel - unforgiving toil and torture and death as the price of "progress" - with all the regressive eloquence he could muster:
Nowhere in his address did Obama mention that in order for this "journey" to prosperity to have succeeded, it was necessary for the elites to enlist those hard-working pioneer folk for the mass genocide of indigenous communities all along the way. Aboriginals weren't whipped; they were scalped (this is the original meaning of the term "redskin," by the way.) And of course, the majority of the poor white settlers who pursued their own American dream were doomed to disappointment once the grasping Trumpian precursors of real estate and railroad empires seized up most of the homestead properties for their own speculative purposes. These were the 19th century progenitors of the modern private equity and hedge fund guys.
And as further evidence of what Zinn calls the deliberate creation of false historical memories, Obama actually tacked on the bloodiest battle of the whole bloody Vietnam War - Khe Sanh - to his litany of militant heroism, ranking right up there with the iconic battles of the Revolution, the Civil War and World War II. Vietnam might have been lost, but that record body count ratio of Vietcong to Americans certainly gave the generals something to brag about (or lie about) - so much so that the legend even made it into Obama's first inaugural speech.
As Roxane Dunbar Ortiz writes in An Indigenous People's History of the United States, the modern US Army had been created specifically to aid the white settler-squatters and militias who, in service to the elites, had already been robbing and exterminating people in the so-called "Indian Wars" since the early colonial days. As a matter of fact, the Second Amendment was written specifically to allow for both the continued killing of indigenous peoples and for the rounding-up of escaped slaves. "The militias were tasked with rubbing out one group of people, and capturing another," Ortiz writes.
The military's modern tactics of "irregular warfare" got their start in the ethnic cleansing of the North American continent. If you watched the recent PBS series on the Vietnam War, you'll have noticed that enemy territory was commonly called "Indian Country" - ripe for pillaging, burning of crops and homes, rape, torture, slaughter of innocent civilians of all ages, and the collection of body parts as trophies. Roxane Dunbar Ortiz noticed striking similarities in the diary entries of soldiers conducting the aboriginal genocide and those who fought in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
And, she continued, black and brown men have always been used disproportionately in American wars, both as a way for them to receive the economic benefits which might otherwise elude them, and to allow the white ruling class and military elites to pit one set of disposable people against another. "The Indian Wars were not fought by the blindingly white American cavalry of John Ford westerns but by African Americans and Irish and German immigrants," she writes.
The US military, in honor of the original ethnic cleansing even gave its relentless bombing campaign in Vietnam the name of a famous medicine man: Operation Rolling Thunder.
And Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge once quipped at a press conference that "we have to get the Indians away from the fort so the settlers can plant their corn."
As Michael Herr wrote about the debacle of Vietnam, "we might as well say that Vietnam was where the Trail of Tears was headed all along, the turnaround point where it would touch and come back to form a containing perimeter."
The American military has such a toxic addiction to slurring Indians as aggressive savages that they even co-opt their tribal names as cover for their own savagery. They launch Tomahawk missiles, and they bomb their human targets with Apache attack helicopters. There are Chinook, Lakota, Kiowa and Ute helicopters, along with C-12 Huron airplanes. And who can forget the secret code-name the Obama administration gave to the soon-to-be-assassinated Osama Bin Laden: Geronimo.
Whenever it's convenient, the American government does not hesitate to rely on historical racist animosity to justify every new atrocity. When Bush lawyer John Yoo wrote his infamous memo "legalizing" torture, he used as precedent an 1873 Supreme Court decision in a case involving the military slaughter of imprisoned Madoc Indians. Since these indigenous people had once been deemed to be subhuman and stateless "enemy combatants," Yoo invoked the principle of homo sacer, which means that anyone defined as a terror suspect may not only be tortured, but killed with impunity.
There is so much more to the atrocities perpetuated in 300 years of white supremacist rule in North America than there is space to write about in one mere blog-post.
But the very fact that school districts throughout the country, including in my own home town, are beginning to teach American history from the perspective of indigenous communities, is cause for hope. We still live in a settler society, and the vestiges of colonialism are everywhere you look. Besides the untold lives lost, the trillions of dollars spent on our constant wars of aggression are dollars not being spent on universal health care and public education and jobs.
We're incessantly told that the road to happiness lies in consumerism and dog-eat-dog competition. The "faint-hearted" individuals who lose the corporate-sponsored game of life all too often resort to drugs, alcohol, guns and violence. Homelessness, joblessness and hopelessness are leading more people to commit suicide. The death rates in general for Americans, from what should be preventable diseases, are increasing as well. What we are witnessing, as Case and Deaton have demonstrated, are deaths from despair.
So our immediate task, bitter though it may be, is acknowledging that America is never going to be a paradise, a Terra Nullis of possibilities there for the taking, if only we're willing to work hard and play by the rules and wave the flag and support the troops.
The Horatio Alger myth is hazardous to our health. The road to national greatness has been paved with very malign intentions. The American dream was a fairy tale then, and it's a fairy tale now.
Facing reality by educating ourselves about unpleasant truths is the first step toward setting ourselves and our fellow citizens free.
First came the widely-publicized protests of the water protectors of North Dakota's Standing Rock Sioux Nation. Even military veterans joined in solidarity to protest the construction of a polluting oil pipeline on sacred land. Despite some setbacks, resistance is on the ascendant.
Second is the popular demand, from all over the country, for the removal of statues and flags which celebrate white supremacy.
And third has been the refusal of professional athletes and others to stand for the jingoistic rituals of the Pledge of Allegiance and the Star-Spangled Banner. This is a direct rebuke to the militarism and racism which are the founding principles of the United States, not to mention the integral ethos of professional football.
All of this public "wokeness" in such a relatively short span of time is a giant leap in the direction of some long-overdue historical truth and reconciliation. And this reckoning isn't coming a moment too soon. Not only are we condemned to repeat the past if we won't remember it (Santayana), the past isn't dead because it's not even past. (Faulkner)
There is an absolute straight line from the plunder of the Americas by the Spanish in 1492 to the present-day terroristic war on a global battlefield. Donald Trump is the end-product of late capitalism and American imperialism, a mass psychosis on a crack cocaine high.
"Our nation was born in genocide," wrote Martin Luther King Jr. "We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode."
It wasn't until nearly a quarter century after King's murder that Indigenous People's Day in the US got its official start. In 1992, the 500th anniversary of Columbus's landing in the Caribbean islands, the city of Berkeley, California officially voted to mark the second Monday in October as a day of solidarity with aboriginal communities and as a protest against colonialism.
The late historian Howard Zinn wrote that the glorification of Columbus, a mass murderer for the ages, as a hero in the American creation myth is just the start of the continuous propaganda fed to us both in textbooks and by our political leaders:
To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to de-emphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves- unwittingly-to justify what was done. My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)-that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth. We have learned to give them exactly the same proportion of attention that teachers and writers often give them in the most respectable of classrooms and textbooks. This learned sense of moral proportion, coming from the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than when it comes from politicians at press conferences. It is therefore more deadly.
The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks)-the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress-is only one aspect of a certain approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders. It is as if they, like Columbus, deserve universal acceptance, as if they-the Founding Fathers, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, the leading members of Congress, the famous Justices of the Supreme Court-represent the nation as a whole. The pretense is that there really is such a thing as "the United States," subject to occasional conflicts and quarrels, but fundamentally a community of people with common interests. It is as if there really is a "national interest" represented in the Constitution, in territorial expansion, in the laws passed by Congress, the decisions of the courts, the development of capitalism, the culture of education and the mass media.
 |
| Slaughter of the Arawaks |
Although many school districts and municipalities are also increasingly refusing to honor Columbus on his very specious day, only four state legislatures have taken the plunge so far: Hawaii (whose native populations were robbed and slaughtered by sugar and pineapple barons under cover of militant Christianity); South Dakota (home of many a US cavalry land grab and massacre of indigenous peoples); Oregon (end-point of Lewis and Clark's manifest march to exceptionally bloody American destiny); and Alaska (Seward's Folly, and oil and gold-despoiled home to many a plundered aboriginal resident.)
People are finally beginning to challenge the archaic but stubborn legal concept of Terra nullius, or the Discovery Doctrine.
It all started with the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas. By papal writ, Spain and Portugal agreed that all non-Christian territory was as good as unpopulated and fair game for plunder and enslavement. Other European countries then followed this same legalistic theory for their own settler initiatives. Thomas Jefferson himself declared the Doctrine of Discovery to be international law, a declaration which was later upheld by the Supreme Court.
The Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony had actually been the first settlers on the mainland to act upon the Discovery Doctrine, using Calvinist Christianity as justification for their plunder just as the Spaniards had used Catholicism. The pilgrims built the foundation for the enduring belief in American Exceptionalism and the prosperity gospel. Certain individuals and groups are just so special that they obviously were chosen by God to be The Elect. Salvation is guaranteed to the materially successful chosen ones, while the poor and unlucky (and dark-skinned) probably deserve damnation.
Scotch-Irish immigrants scrabbling for a piece of land in the aboriginal territory of the South were the ideological forebears of Donald Trump's base of aggrieved white people. It's no surprise that the supposedly ignorant Trump is a huge fan of populist land speculator, slave owner, and Indian killer Andrew Jackson, who finally ordered the mass expulsion of the Cherokee Nation in the infamous and lethal Trail of Tears.
And Trump is by no means the first or the only president to champion the white supremacy which is at the very core of the Discovery Doctrine rationale for the creation of the American settler state both here and abroad. In his 2009 inaugural address, our first cosmetically black president preached the settler creation myth gospel - unforgiving toil and torture and death as the price of "progress" - with all the regressive eloquence he could muster:
"In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted, for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasure of riches or fame.He might as well have titled his speech "Greed Is Good." In just those few paragraphs, Barack Obama echoed the bootstrapping Puritan ethos of condemning of the lazy poor, or the "fainthearted." Whether the pioneers worked for slave wages till they died of exhaustion, or whether they were initially slaves "lashed by the whip," it was all so, so worth it. They did it all for Exceptional Us, the Chosen Ones, the Elect. As Obama revises history in a none-too-subtle appeal to the ultra right wing, even African slaves apparently "chose" to sacrifice for the greater good once they'd adjusted to their kidnappings. And oppressed people all over this great land of ours will gladly continue to serve, at great public cost and for great private profit for the very few.
Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things - some celebrated, but more often men and women obscure in their labor - who have carried us up the long, rugged path toward prosperity and freedom. For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life. For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West, endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth. For us, they fought and died in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sanh.
Time and time again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction. This is the journey we continue today."
Nowhere in his address did Obama mention that in order for this "journey" to prosperity to have succeeded, it was necessary for the elites to enlist those hard-working pioneer folk for the mass genocide of indigenous communities all along the way. Aboriginals weren't whipped; they were scalped (this is the original meaning of the term "redskin," by the way.) And of course, the majority of the poor white settlers who pursued their own American dream were doomed to disappointment once the grasping Trumpian precursors of real estate and railroad empires seized up most of the homestead properties for their own speculative purposes. These were the 19th century progenitors of the modern private equity and hedge fund guys.
And as further evidence of what Zinn calls the deliberate creation of false historical memories, Obama actually tacked on the bloodiest battle of the whole bloody Vietnam War - Khe Sanh - to his litany of militant heroism, ranking right up there with the iconic battles of the Revolution, the Civil War and World War II. Vietnam might have been lost, but that record body count ratio of Vietcong to Americans certainly gave the generals something to brag about (or lie about) - so much so that the legend even made it into Obama's first inaugural speech.
As Roxane Dunbar Ortiz writes in An Indigenous People's History of the United States, the modern US Army had been created specifically to aid the white settler-squatters and militias who, in service to the elites, had already been robbing and exterminating people in the so-called "Indian Wars" since the early colonial days. As a matter of fact, the Second Amendment was written specifically to allow for both the continued killing of indigenous peoples and for the rounding-up of escaped slaves. "The militias were tasked with rubbing out one group of people, and capturing another," Ortiz writes.
The military's modern tactics of "irregular warfare" got their start in the ethnic cleansing of the North American continent. If you watched the recent PBS series on the Vietnam War, you'll have noticed that enemy territory was commonly called "Indian Country" - ripe for pillaging, burning of crops and homes, rape, torture, slaughter of innocent civilians of all ages, and the collection of body parts as trophies. Roxane Dunbar Ortiz noticed striking similarities in the diary entries of soldiers conducting the aboriginal genocide and those who fought in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
And, she continued, black and brown men have always been used disproportionately in American wars, both as a way for them to receive the economic benefits which might otherwise elude them, and to allow the white ruling class and military elites to pit one set of disposable people against another. "The Indian Wars were not fought by the blindingly white American cavalry of John Ford westerns but by African Americans and Irish and German immigrants," she writes.
The US military, in honor of the original ethnic cleansing even gave its relentless bombing campaign in Vietnam the name of a famous medicine man: Operation Rolling Thunder.
And Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge once quipped at a press conference that "we have to get the Indians away from the fort so the settlers can plant their corn."
As Michael Herr wrote about the debacle of Vietnam, "we might as well say that Vietnam was where the Trail of Tears was headed all along, the turnaround point where it would touch and come back to form a containing perimeter."
The American military has such a toxic addiction to slurring Indians as aggressive savages that they even co-opt their tribal names as cover for their own savagery. They launch Tomahawk missiles, and they bomb their human targets with Apache attack helicopters. There are Chinook, Lakota, Kiowa and Ute helicopters, along with C-12 Huron airplanes. And who can forget the secret code-name the Obama administration gave to the soon-to-be-assassinated Osama Bin Laden: Geronimo.
 |
| Praise the Ammunition & Pass the Popcorn: Armchair Warriors Watch the Geronimo Show |
Whenever it's convenient, the American government does not hesitate to rely on historical racist animosity to justify every new atrocity. When Bush lawyer John Yoo wrote his infamous memo "legalizing" torture, he used as precedent an 1873 Supreme Court decision in a case involving the military slaughter of imprisoned Madoc Indians. Since these indigenous people had once been deemed to be subhuman and stateless "enemy combatants," Yoo invoked the principle of homo sacer, which means that anyone defined as a terror suspect may not only be tortured, but killed with impunity.
There is so much more to the atrocities perpetuated in 300 years of white supremacist rule in North America than there is space to write about in one mere blog-post.
But the very fact that school districts throughout the country, including in my own home town, are beginning to teach American history from the perspective of indigenous communities, is cause for hope. We still live in a settler society, and the vestiges of colonialism are everywhere you look. Besides the untold lives lost, the trillions of dollars spent on our constant wars of aggression are dollars not being spent on universal health care and public education and jobs.
We're incessantly told that the road to happiness lies in consumerism and dog-eat-dog competition. The "faint-hearted" individuals who lose the corporate-sponsored game of life all too often resort to drugs, alcohol, guns and violence. Homelessness, joblessness and hopelessness are leading more people to commit suicide. The death rates in general for Americans, from what should be preventable diseases, are increasing as well. What we are witnessing, as Case and Deaton have demonstrated, are deaths from despair.
So our immediate task, bitter though it may be, is acknowledging that America is never going to be a paradise, a Terra Nullis of possibilities there for the taking, if only we're willing to work hard and play by the rules and wave the flag and support the troops.
The Horatio Alger myth is hazardous to our health. The road to national greatness has been paved with very malign intentions. The American dream was a fairy tale then, and it's a fairy tale now.
Facing reality by educating ourselves about unpleasant truths is the first step toward setting ourselves and our fellow citizens free.
Thursday, July 14, 2016
Joyeux Quatorze Juillet
That's French for Happy Bastille Day.
July 14th marks the day in 1789 when angry crowds stormed the Bastille prison in Paris, sparking the French Revolution.
Wall Street obviously does not celebrate Bastille Day. However, if you're in the vicinity, the New York Times suggests that rather than storming The Tombs or Rikers Island, you ponder the statue of Joan of Arc in Riverside Park and then float by the Statue of Liberty, which was donated by the French people. As much as Donald Trump would love to replace it with a Wall, and as much as Barack Obama continues to deport Latin American migrants and refugees in record numbers, it remains a potent symbol of the time when we accepted -- actually, when our forebears were -- the tired, the poor, the huddled masses.
The contemporary masses are also urged to eat out during French Restaurant Week. The Times helpfully links you to some of the participating eateries -- where, for this one week only, you can score lunch at the amazing prix fixe of $17.89. Since this price represents approximately one half of the weekly food stamp allowance for the average struggling peasant or Walmart worker, don't forget to ask for a doggie bag on the way out. And as ever, the city's homeless are advised to use caution when dumpster-diving for any of the culinary leftovers.
But marchons, citoyens, because it turns out that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are now in a dead heat in the plutocratic presidential sweepstakes. More than two-thirds of respondents in a new Times/CBS News poll say that in the wake of her email scandal, Clinton is simply not to be trusted. Nonetheless, the mistrusters think that she is still very qualified to be president. In other words, we prefer our corrupt politicians to be competently careless rather than just carelessly careless.
Trump is mistrusted only very slightly less than Clinton. This is partly because loathing of him has been holding fairly steady, while the Hillary hatred might simply be a temporary crater in the killing fields of competence.
I rather suspect that we won't be hearing any Happy Bastille Day Tweets from either member of this Dynastic Duo.
***
I never thought I'd hear myself write this, but President Obama actually nailed it the other day with this statement about police violence:
“As a society, we choose to underinvest in decent schools. We allow poverty to fester so that entire neighborhoods offer no prospect for gainful employment. We refuse to fund drug treatment and mental health programs. We flood communities with so many guns that it is easier for a teenager to buy a Glock than get his hands on a computer or even a book. And then we tell the police, ‘You’re a social worker; you’re the parent; you’re the teacher; you’re the drug counselor.’ We tell them to keep those neighborhoods in check at all costs and do so without causing any political blowback or inconvenience; don’t make a mistake that might disturb our own peace of mind. And then we feign surprise when periodically the tensions boil over.”
If only he espoused policies to counteract those true words -- if only he fought for policies and took executive actions that would tamp down the awful reality -- what a halfway decent country and world this might be.
Times columnist Charles Blow also finally addresses the class war aspect of aggressive policing policies in today's op-ed:
July 14th marks the day in 1789 when angry crowds stormed the Bastille prison in Paris, sparking the French Revolution.
Wall Street obviously does not celebrate Bastille Day. However, if you're in the vicinity, the New York Times suggests that rather than storming The Tombs or Rikers Island, you ponder the statue of Joan of Arc in Riverside Park and then float by the Statue of Liberty, which was donated by the French people. As much as Donald Trump would love to replace it with a Wall, and as much as Barack Obama continues to deport Latin American migrants and refugees in record numbers, it remains a potent symbol of the time when we accepted -- actually, when our forebears were -- the tired, the poor, the huddled masses.
The contemporary masses are also urged to eat out during French Restaurant Week. The Times helpfully links you to some of the participating eateries -- where, for this one week only, you can score lunch at the amazing prix fixe of $17.89. Since this price represents approximately one half of the weekly food stamp allowance for the average struggling peasant or Walmart worker, don't forget to ask for a doggie bag on the way out. And as ever, the city's homeless are advised to use caution when dumpster-diving for any of the culinary leftovers.
But marchons, citoyens, because it turns out that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are now in a dead heat in the plutocratic presidential sweepstakes. More than two-thirds of respondents in a new Times/CBS News poll say that in the wake of her email scandal, Clinton is simply not to be trusted. Nonetheless, the mistrusters think that she is still very qualified to be president. In other words, we prefer our corrupt politicians to be competently careless rather than just carelessly careless.
Trump is mistrusted only very slightly less than Clinton. This is partly because loathing of him has been holding fairly steady, while the Hillary hatred might simply be a temporary crater in the killing fields of competence.
I rather suspect that we won't be hearing any Happy Bastille Day Tweets from either member of this Dynastic Duo.
***
I never thought I'd hear myself write this, but President Obama actually nailed it the other day with this statement about police violence:
“As a society, we choose to underinvest in decent schools. We allow poverty to fester so that entire neighborhoods offer no prospect for gainful employment. We refuse to fund drug treatment and mental health programs. We flood communities with so many guns that it is easier for a teenager to buy a Glock than get his hands on a computer or even a book. And then we tell the police, ‘You’re a social worker; you’re the parent; you’re the teacher; you’re the drug counselor.’ We tell them to keep those neighborhoods in check at all costs and do so without causing any political blowback or inconvenience; don’t make a mistake that might disturb our own peace of mind. And then we feign surprise when periodically the tensions boil over.”
If only he espoused policies to counteract those true words -- if only he fought for policies and took executive actions that would tamp down the awful reality -- what a halfway decent country and world this might be.
Times columnist Charles Blow also finally addresses the class war aspect of aggressive policing policies in today's op-ed:
We choose to be blind to the policy choices our politicians have made — and that many have benefited from, while others suffered — while simultaneously holding firmly to the belief that all of our own successes and comforts are simply the result of our and our families’ drive, ambition and resourcefulness. Other people lack physical comforts because they lack our character strength.My published comment:
It is from this bed of lies that our policing policies spring. When the president says, “We tell them to keep those neighborhoods in check at all costs,” who is the “we”?It’s not the blue-collar civil servants in law enforcement or the working-class and poor communities, which are aggressively patrolled. No. The “we” is the middle and moneyed classes.
The president's statement about the impossible roles we expect of police officers in this increasingly dystopian country of ours was one of the truest things he's ever said.
This is about classism as well as racism. Very much the product of capitalism, racism only got worse after the abolishment of slavery, since the subhuman wages paid to freed blacks also served to drive down the pay of whites. Dividing and conquering working people has always been the battle cry of plutocratic freedom.
The rich are still too big to jail, and there are now more black people in prison than there were slaves during the mid-19th century. Prisons for profit are just one of the many ways that the rich exploit the poor.
And cops are stuck in the buffer zone. They ARE the buffer zone.
Wall Street is looting their pension funds, too. Their pay stinks, too. Working in swing shifts, they're sleep-deprived. When they get subpoenaed to testify in court during the day, they still have to go to work at night. When they arrest somebody on illegal weapons charges, too many politically appointed or elected right-wing judges promptly let the culprit go on low or no bail.
Cops are human too. Every time one of them overreacts, they endanger their co-workers.
Besides protesting police violence, we should direct our wrath at the sadistic (mainly GOP) policy-makers who created the Gestapo security state in the first place. Confront them right where they work. And fire them on Election Day.
Friday, February 26, 2016
Hillary Clinton's Racism
The forcible removal of a female Black Lives Matter protester from a Hillary Clinton fundraiser this week, and the shocking, forcible removal of a female black student from a classroom last October, differ only in the level of state-sanctioned physical power employed.
Each incident occurred in South Carolina. Each incident was an example of white supremacy at its most blatant. Each incident was designed to belittle the alleged culprit and to put her in her place. Each incident was a power play with the express objective of emotionally scarring the target and protecting the designated authority figure.
While the expulsion of Ashley Williams from Hillary's high-end fundraiser was accomplished relatively gently, due to the venue and a sensitive audience of the rich, powerful and white, the other incident was effected violently in a high school classroom peopled mainly by poor students of color. The fundraiser ejection occurred in a milieu whose inhabitants are used to being coddled and given an outsize voice. No expensive furniture was overturned or otherwise damaged. The school ejection occurred in a milieu which is authoritarian and oppressive by its very nature, where docility and silence are expected from the audience, where both the plastic furniture and the bodies are expendable.
When Ashley Williams interrupted Clinton, demanding that she apologize for having once called black youths "superpredators," all it took for the security detail to spring into action was Hillary's own reaction to the protester. When Hillary made it abundantly clear to her armed guards that she was miffed and uncomfortable, her questioner was escorted out (despite having paid the $500 price of access to the candidate). The audience immediately sided not with the evictee, but with the most powerful woman in the room. They all breathed a sigh of relief, showing class and racial solidarity with the powerful woman who was there to listen to their express concerns. "Okay, back to the issues," barked Clinton. Or should I say, "dog-whistled Clinton?"
When the South Carolina student refused to stop talking on her cell phone last October, the school cop upended her desk and body-slammed her to the floor before dragging her out of the room. That audience did not cheer or sigh in relief. Not at all. They were in shocked disbelief. One of them later would later share cell phone video of the incident with the whole world.
Racism in schools and the existence of the school-to-prison pipeline has long been a reality accepted by most people with eyes, ears and brains. Racism at a Hillary Clinton fundraiser, however, was more than a little eyebrow-raising, given that the candidate is running as a champion of black people, and is even said to possess a magical Firewall in states and counties with majority black populations.
The whole impetus of the fundraiser protest was an old speech that the then-First Lady gave while lobbying for the infamous crime bill which has sent record numbers of black people to prison over the last two decades. The video of the confrontation is now going as"viral" as the previous South Carolina incident, and right on the eve of the South Carolina primary. Hillary Clinton is still expected to win it handily. This is due to the special bond that she and Bill have always enjoyed with black voters (or more accurately, the special bond they have elicited from the black political establishment.) It will be interesting to see whether the final tally reveals any breakdown between older and younger black voters. It will be interesting to see whether voters declare their emancipation from the Clinton Protection Racket and the younger generation goes for Bernie Sanders's inclusive platform of social, economic and racial justice.
Hillary and Bill have always been dog-whistling, if not outright, racists. Before Bill, as primary presidential candidate and Arkansas governor, executed a brain-damaged black man named Ricky Ray Rector in order to give himself an electoral boost with the law-and-order crowd of Reagan Democrats, before he played golf at a segregated country club and then claimed it wasn't really segregated because it employed black people as waiters and caddies, before his rebuke of Sistah Souljah over rap lyrics, Bill used convict slave labor at the governor's mansion. He allowed the Confederate flag to fly high above the state capitol.
And Hillary was just fine with that, despite her current boasts of "fighting for" the rights of black children under her erstwhile mentor, Marion Wright Edelman. (As has been widely reported, the Edelmans broke with the Clintons 20 years ago, when the First Couple championed passage of welfare "reform," and sent millions of mothers and children into outright poverty at the stroke of a triangulating pen.)
I wrote about Hillary's adventures with her black slave convicts in a previous post, quoting directly from her own book, "It Takes a Village". She wrote her neoliberal polemic on the care and treatment of children at about the same time that she made her "super-predator" speech. It dog-whistles its racism right on the front cover, which shows three white children standing nearly at a level with the great lady herself. The much shorter, token black child in the picture has the entire bottom part of his or her face cut off. It's impossible to tell the race or ethnicity of the fifth child.
Clinton's opinions on child-rearing and behavior are based partly upon her personal experience directing the unpaid labor of her black prisoners. Although she was careful to repudiate "The Bell Curve" eugenics theory of race and intelligence then in vogue, she didn't entirely rule out biology-as-destiny as a factor in black crime, either. She did what the Clintons have always done best. She triangulated. She professed surface sympathy for black youths at the same time that she blamed them and their parents for their own behavior. Never did she blame wealth inequality or white racism. "It Takes a Village" was, in fact, a not very subtle dog-whistle to liberal white racists.
A 1995 pop psychology book by Daniel Goleman called "Emotional Intelligence" provided the intellectual basis for her theories on young black offenders who "need to be brought to heel." Their problem, she theorized, is that they are unable to integrate their rational brains with their emotional brains.
She then liberally allows that early experience also plays a role in the neurobiological basis for black youth crime.
I'll say it again. Once a Goldwater Girl, always a Goldwater Girl. It's ironic that a woman professing to be such an expert on "emotional intelligence" resides in a plutocratic bubble so largely devoid of it that she sees no problem in accepting millions of dollars from the same banks that have evicted thousands of black and poor subprime mortgagors from their homes while also engaging in a long-standing policy of racist real estate red-lining.
In any event, the emotional intelligence theory also has its own dark side. The teaching of it can actually enable some bad people to hide their own natures more effectively. One of the main talents of psychopaths is to project a glib, slick set of of emotions that they don't inherently possess. If emotional intelligence can be acquired, it can also be used to fool people. I suppose we should be grateful that Hillary has not yet mastered this "I feel your pain" art as well as her husband. Most people do not trust her, and with very good reason.
If the pundits are right, the next presidential contest will be between two unabashed racists. That one of them has a flimsy, damaged filter, and the other (Trump) has no filter at all, is moot. If either one of them is elected, unabashed fascism will remain a feature, not a bug, in the Feudal States of America.
Hillary Clinton is again trying to do damage control, issuing a written apology for her super-predator comments. "I shouldn't have used those words, and I wouldn't use them today," she told The Washington Post. She didn't say anything about retracting claims made in her first memoir, however. Maybe somebody will read it, and confront her on her characterization of black youths as "emotional illiterates."
Ms. Williams is still awaiting an apology from Clinton, both for her racist remarks "pathologizing black youth as these criminal, animal people" and for having her evicted from a function which she had paid to attend.
Each incident occurred in South Carolina. Each incident was an example of white supremacy at its most blatant. Each incident was designed to belittle the alleged culprit and to put her in her place. Each incident was a power play with the express objective of emotionally scarring the target and protecting the designated authority figure.
While the expulsion of Ashley Williams from Hillary's high-end fundraiser was accomplished relatively gently, due to the venue and a sensitive audience of the rich, powerful and white, the other incident was effected violently in a high school classroom peopled mainly by poor students of color. The fundraiser ejection occurred in a milieu whose inhabitants are used to being coddled and given an outsize voice. No expensive furniture was overturned or otherwise damaged. The school ejection occurred in a milieu which is authoritarian and oppressive by its very nature, where docility and silence are expected from the audience, where both the plastic furniture and the bodies are expendable.
When Ashley Williams interrupted Clinton, demanding that she apologize for having once called black youths "superpredators," all it took for the security detail to spring into action was Hillary's own reaction to the protester. When Hillary made it abundantly clear to her armed guards that she was miffed and uncomfortable, her questioner was escorted out (despite having paid the $500 price of access to the candidate). The audience immediately sided not with the evictee, but with the most powerful woman in the room. They all breathed a sigh of relief, showing class and racial solidarity with the powerful woman who was there to listen to their express concerns. "Okay, back to the issues," barked Clinton. Or should I say, "dog-whistled Clinton?"
When the South Carolina student refused to stop talking on her cell phone last October, the school cop upended her desk and body-slammed her to the floor before dragging her out of the room. That audience did not cheer or sigh in relief. Not at all. They were in shocked disbelief. One of them later would later share cell phone video of the incident with the whole world.
Racism in schools and the existence of the school-to-prison pipeline has long been a reality accepted by most people with eyes, ears and brains. Racism at a Hillary Clinton fundraiser, however, was more than a little eyebrow-raising, given that the candidate is running as a champion of black people, and is even said to possess a magical Firewall in states and counties with majority black populations.
The whole impetus of the fundraiser protest was an old speech that the then-First Lady gave while lobbying for the infamous crime bill which has sent record numbers of black people to prison over the last two decades. The video of the confrontation is now going as"viral" as the previous South Carolina incident, and right on the eve of the South Carolina primary. Hillary Clinton is still expected to win it handily. This is due to the special bond that she and Bill have always enjoyed with black voters (or more accurately, the special bond they have elicited from the black political establishment.) It will be interesting to see whether the final tally reveals any breakdown between older and younger black voters. It will be interesting to see whether voters declare their emancipation from the Clinton Protection Racket and the younger generation goes for Bernie Sanders's inclusive platform of social, economic and racial justice.
Hillary and Bill have always been dog-whistling, if not outright, racists. Before Bill, as primary presidential candidate and Arkansas governor, executed a brain-damaged black man named Ricky Ray Rector in order to give himself an electoral boost with the law-and-order crowd of Reagan Democrats, before he played golf at a segregated country club and then claimed it wasn't really segregated because it employed black people as waiters and caddies, before his rebuke of Sistah Souljah over rap lyrics, Bill used convict slave labor at the governor's mansion. He allowed the Confederate flag to fly high above the state capitol.
And Hillary was just fine with that, despite her current boasts of "fighting for" the rights of black children under her erstwhile mentor, Marion Wright Edelman. (As has been widely reported, the Edelmans broke with the Clintons 20 years ago, when the First Couple championed passage of welfare "reform," and sent millions of mothers and children into outright poverty at the stroke of a triangulating pen.)
I wrote about Hillary's adventures with her black slave convicts in a previous post, quoting directly from her own book, "It Takes a Village". She wrote her neoliberal polemic on the care and treatment of children at about the same time that she made her "super-predator" speech. It dog-whistles its racism right on the front cover, which shows three white children standing nearly at a level with the great lady herself. The much shorter, token black child in the picture has the entire bottom part of his or her face cut off. It's impossible to tell the race or ethnicity of the fifth child.
Clinton's opinions on child-rearing and behavior are based partly upon her personal experience directing the unpaid labor of her black prisoners. Although she was careful to repudiate "The Bell Curve" eugenics theory of race and intelligence then in vogue, she didn't entirely rule out biology-as-destiny as a factor in black crime, either. She did what the Clintons have always done best. She triangulated. She professed surface sympathy for black youths at the same time that she blamed them and their parents for their own behavior. Never did she blame wealth inequality or white racism. "It Takes a Village" was, in fact, a not very subtle dog-whistle to liberal white racists.
A 1995 pop psychology book by Daniel Goleman called "Emotional Intelligence" provided the intellectual basis for her theories on young black offenders who "need to be brought to heel." Their problem, she theorized, is that they are unable to integrate their rational brains with their emotional brains.
The power of emotion is equally dangerous if it is not harnessed to reason. People who cannot control their emotions are often prone to impulsive overreaction. They may be quick to perceive threats and slights even when none are intended, and to respond with violence. They are in Goleman's phrase, "emotional illiterates." Many of the gang members interviewed as part of a recent study released by Attorney General Janet Reno to investigate the illegal use of firearms fit this profile. More than one in three said they believe it is acceptable to shoot someone who "disses" them -- shows them disrespect.So many dog-whistles in just one little paragraph. Leave aside that Clinton quotes the uber-racist Janet Reno's alleged study -- Clinton absolutely does equate gang members with vicious dogs which must be brought to heel. I imagine that one out of every three pit bulls also tends to overreact when its personal space is violated. What Hillary is essentially claiming is that black youths are biologically violent, due both to their untrained emotional brains, and their underdeveloped rational brains.
She then liberally allows that early experience also plays a role in the neurobiological basis for black youth crime.
Some experts speculate that the brains of emotional illiterates are hard-wired early on by stressful experiences that inhibit these mechanisms and leave people prey to "emotional hijacking" ever after. Most of us don't habitually react with impulsive violence, but most of us "blow our tops" from time to time.This paragraph is another dog-whistle: blame the epidemic of black youth crime on Reagan's welfare queens. The Clintons' solution? Reduce the welfare rolls by 60 percent by the time they leave office and force poor mothers to virtually abandon their infants. This abandonment will supposedly save the children from all that bad mothering and mental abuse and brain pathology. Hillary lectures on:
Most people learn how to avoid emotional hijackings from the time they are infants. If they have supportive and caring adults around them, they pick up the social cues that enable them to develop self-discipline and empathy.Hillary's glib solution to the alleged epidemic of bad black mothering and her goal to "bring civility our streets" is to teach children empathy in the classroom. Even when black people become adults, she boasted, it's never too late for white people to teach them how to behave, whether it be in the workplace or in the prison. She should know. She was a virtual schoolmarm to her own Arkansan black slave convicts back in the day:
The structure imposed by the responsibilities of work and the enlightened assistance of concerned people in the prison system and at the governor's mansion helped those onetime murderers I knew in Arkansas to achieve a greater understanding and control over their feelings and behavior.Hillary Clinton makes right-wing New York Times columnist and "black culture" concern-trolling expert Ross Douthat seem like a raging progressive.
I'll say it again. Once a Goldwater Girl, always a Goldwater Girl. It's ironic that a woman professing to be such an expert on "emotional intelligence" resides in a plutocratic bubble so largely devoid of it that she sees no problem in accepting millions of dollars from the same banks that have evicted thousands of black and poor subprime mortgagors from their homes while also engaging in a long-standing policy of racist real estate red-lining.
In any event, the emotional intelligence theory also has its own dark side. The teaching of it can actually enable some bad people to hide their own natures more effectively. One of the main talents of psychopaths is to project a glib, slick set of of emotions that they don't inherently possess. If emotional intelligence can be acquired, it can also be used to fool people. I suppose we should be grateful that Hillary has not yet mastered this "I feel your pain" art as well as her husband. Most people do not trust her, and with very good reason.
If the pundits are right, the next presidential contest will be between two unabashed racists. That one of them has a flimsy, damaged filter, and the other (Trump) has no filter at all, is moot. If either one of them is elected, unabashed fascism will remain a feature, not a bug, in the Feudal States of America.
Hillary Clinton is again trying to do damage control, issuing a written apology for her super-predator comments. "I shouldn't have used those words, and I wouldn't use them today," she told The Washington Post. She didn't say anything about retracting claims made in her first memoir, however. Maybe somebody will read it, and confront her on her characterization of black youths as "emotional illiterates."
Ms. Williams is still awaiting an apology from Clinton, both for her racist remarks "pathologizing black youth as these criminal, animal people" and for having her evicted from a function which she had paid to attend.
Saturday, August 15, 2015
Obama to America: Support Your National Police State
Barack Obama today praised the bravery of armed police officers while glibly commiserating with victims of police state violence and terror about how "frustrated" they must be feeling these days. To beat a cliche even further into the ground, he vowed that morale will improve while the beatings continue.
In his weekly taped address (a.k.a. his weekly dog whistle to the Oligarchy), the president announced the allocation of more government money for police department public relations programs, and zero money for the actual victims of police state brutality. Never once did he utter the phrase "Black Lives Matter."
So without further ado, here is another edition of Let's Play Parse-a-Prez. (Obama's actual words are in italics and my analyses are in parentheses):
Rather than question the horrific practice of placing police in schools, the president changes the issue into how the police state might insert itself into the classroom in a more "engaging" fashion. Maybe they can use pink guns with Disney logos to make standardized test-taking under armed guard fun and scary at the same time?
I'm not being entirely facetious. One of Obama's cosmetic solutions to the public's perception problem is to outfit domestic occupying forces with "softer" uniforms. However, the police are having none of it, rightly noting that a cop dressed up as Mister Rogers is not likely to elicit as much respect from the huddled masses as somebody looking like this:
To be seen as even more fair and righteous, Obama has used the tried and true procedure of co-opting "activists" by placing them, at staged White House events, into close physical proximity with concerned police state officials and a smattering of wise, detached professors. As Glen Ford and other critics have pointed out, officials allowing protesters a seat at their table is S.O.P. for the attempted watering down of protest movements.)
Remember, Obama has always boasted about being the Most Transparent President Evah, so the Drone President is urging his terroristic minions to be just as open and honest (wink, nod) as he is about admitting that they kill people, and regretting that mistakes are sometimes made in the name of Keeping Us Safe. Additionally, saying one thing and doing another is a talent that must be constantly honed in order for it to be effective. Fooling some of the people all of the time takes a lot of practice. Obama should know. His hair is getting grayer by the minute.
And about that data. Police are gathering tons of it spying on the BlackLivesMatter movement, both online and in person.)
The president has one thing right, though: In the end, the American Dream is nothing but a public relations promise. The reality is a nightmare. We are, indeed, in the end-times of democracy.
In his weekly taped address (a.k.a. his weekly dog whistle to the Oligarchy), the president announced the allocation of more government money for police department public relations programs, and zero money for the actual victims of police state brutality. Never once did he utter the phrase "Black Lives Matter."
So without further ado, here is another edition of Let's Play Parse-a-Prez. (Obama's actual words are in italics and my analyses are in parentheses):
Hi everybody. It’s now been a year since the tragic death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. His death—along with the events in Cleveland, Staten Island, Baltimore, Cincinnati, and other communities—sparked protests and soul searching all across our country. Over the past year, we’ve come to see, more clearly than ever, the frustration in many communities of color and the feeling that our laws can be applied unevenly.(Obama reduces the homicide-by-cop of Michael Brown to a "tragic death." He euphemises the homicides in Baltimore, Staten Island and elsewhere as "events." The police state assassination of a twelve-year-old boy in Cleveland, for example, just sort of happened without any direct racist cop action. And these passive happenings make people understandably upset and frustrated! But instead of admitting that government agents are executing black people at the rate of about one a day, for no other reason than they exist, Obama dismisses this brutal reality as a "feeling" in communities that the "laws" (actually, it is total lawlessness) are being applied unevenly. In other words, if cops killed white people at the same rate that they kill black people, he wouldn't even be needing to have this Doctor Phil-type conversation.)
After Ferguson, I said that we had to face these issues squarely. I convened a task force on community policing to find commonsense steps that can help us drive down crime and build up trust and cooperation between communities and police, who put their lives on the line every single day to help keep us safe. And I’ve met personally with rank and file officers to hear their ideas.(Again, he does not address the government's de facto policy of brutality. He immediately pathologizes poverty by pointing to the need to "drive down crime" in poor neighborhoods. He defends police against poor communities and black drivers without mentioning the predations of the police state. He convened yet another study group. He softens the negative image of police by enfolding them into a cozy "community," in which cops and the people they terrorize are all members of the same family. He's even met personally with lower-level, callow young officers to show what a friendly, paternalistic guy he is. He doesn't mention that a small but significant number of these officers are certifiable psychopaths who not only put citizens' lives at risk, they also endanger their fellow cops, both directly on the streets and indirectly in the court of public opinion.)
In May, this task force made up of police officers, activists and academics proposed 59 recommendations – everything from how we can make better use of data and technology, to how we train police officers, to how law enforcement engages with our schools. And we’ve been working with communities across America to put these ideas into action.(True free market neoliberal that he is, Obama prioritizes data and technology. Somebody, somewhere, is going to make big bucks crunching numbers and analyzing algorithms and marketing body cameras at huge mark-ups.
Rather than question the horrific practice of placing police in schools, the president changes the issue into how the police state might insert itself into the classroom in a more "engaging" fashion. Maybe they can use pink guns with Disney logos to make standardized test-taking under armed guard fun and scary at the same time?
I'm not being entirely facetious. One of Obama's cosmetic solutions to the public's perception problem is to outfit domestic occupying forces with "softer" uniforms. However, the police are having none of it, rightly noting that a cop dressed up as Mister Rogers is not likely to elicit as much respect from the huddled masses as somebody looking like this:
To be seen as even more fair and righteous, Obama has used the tried and true procedure of co-opting "activists" by placing them, at staged White House events, into close physical proximity with concerned police state officials and a smattering of wise, detached professors. As Glen Ford and other critics have pointed out, officials allowing protesters a seat at their table is S.O.P. for the attempted watering down of protest movements.)
Dozens of police departments are now sharing more data with the public, including on citations, stops and searches, and shootings involving law enforcement. We’ve brought together leaders from across the country to explore alternatives to incarceration. The Justice Department has begun pilot programs to help police use body cameras and collect data on the use of force.(As long as they are honest about whom they arrest, maim and kill for the crime of existing while black, then it's all good. This is actually the most breathtakingly shocking, Orwellian part of his weekly dog-whistle. As far as Obama is concerned, the collation and sharing of data trumps the evil of state-sponsored violence and murder.
Remember, Obama has always boasted about being the Most Transparent President Evah, so the Drone President is urging his terroristic minions to be just as open and honest (wink, nod) as he is about admitting that they kill people, and regretting that mistakes are sometimes made in the name of Keeping Us Safe. Additionally, saying one thing and doing another is a talent that must be constantly honed in order for it to be effective. Fooling some of the people all of the time takes a lot of practice. Obama should know. His hair is getting grayer by the minute.
And about that data. Police are gathering tons of it spying on the BlackLivesMatter movement, both online and in person.)
This fall, the department will award more than $160 million in grants to support law enforcement and community organizations that are working to improve policing. And all across the country – from states like Illinois and Ohio, to cities like Philadelphia, Boston, and Nashville – local leaders are working to implement the task force recommendations in a way that works for their communities.(No money will be awarded to hire teachers, create jobs, or improve housing and infrastructure in these communities. But because they create the buffer zone between the rich and the poor, police agencies will get all the money they need.)
So we’ve made progress. And we’ll keep at it. But let’s be clear: the issues raised over the past year aren’t new, and they won’t be solved by policing alone. We simply can’t ask our police to contain and control issues that the rest of us aren’t willing to address—as a society. That starts with reforming a criminal justice system that too often is a pipeline from inadequate schools to overcrowded jails, wreaking havoc on communities and families all across the country. So we need Congress to reform our federal sentencing laws for non-violent drug offenders. We need to keep working to help more prisoners take steps to turn their lives around so they can contribute to their communities after they’ve served their time.(Obama kindly admits that police violence will not be solved by police violence alone. Nevertheless, he gives credence to the right-wing dogma that the police state is an important weapon against poor and minority people. Oligarchic man cannot live by bread alone, after all. Although the president recently commuted the sentences of a handful of drug offenders, he dog-whistles in this speech his intent that there will be no more pardons or commutations for the tens of thousands still languishing in for-profit prisons. He is punting it over to the selectively moribund Congress. Meanwhile, he will constantly trumpet all the propagandist baby steps he is taking to help those lucky symbolic few "turn their lives around." Meanwhile, he stands by while public schools in poor neighborhoods are closed, unionized teachers are fired and their pension funds robbed, and hedge fund billionaires reap the education profits via charter schools.)
More broadly, we need to truly invest in our children and our communities so that more young people see a better path for their lives. That means investing in early childhood education, job training, pathways to college. It means dealing honestly with issues of race, poverty, and class that leave too many communities feeling isolated and segregated from greater opportunity. It means expanding that opportunity to every American willing to work for it, no matter what zip code they were born into. Because, in the end, that’s always been the promise of America."Investing in our children" is code for the aforementioned billionaire charter school movement and other privatization schemes. Obama, like other centrist extremists, always uses the language of the market to refer to people and their needs. The commodification of human beings is the very essence of neoliberalism. So, if you "feel" isolated and segregated, the only way you can escape your crumbling existence is to develop your skill-sets through hard work and college debt peonage.
The president has one thing right, though: In the end, the American Dream is nothing but a public relations promise. The reality is a nightmare. We are, indeed, in the end-times of democracy.
And that’s what I’ll keep working for every single day that I’m President. Thanks everybody, and have a great weekend.
Monday, June 22, 2015
Fast Track Zero Hour
(*updated below.)
Never having met an idea or a lower House vote for the public good that it couldn't crush through sheer inertia, corruption, stealth, or just a flick of its contemptuous middle finger at the body politic, the United States Senate will once again try to give President Obama authority to fast-track democracy into permanent oblivion.
Zero Hour begins on Tuesday, June 23, at approximately 11 a.m. President Obama probably won't need to make a personal desperate appearance this time. Neither will the mass media. The pundits are too busy analyzing and marveling at how casually and boldly he was able to say "nigger" while they make their squeamish PC excuses about why they can't allow us to actually hear him say "nigger" on TV. "Nigger" might be a trigger.... it might remind viewers that the secretive TPP is actually a deal for a resurgence of the slave trade -- among its many other abominations.
A typical deflection/distraction, broadcast by The Terror Channel, (aka CNN) whose programming is sponsored by the same voracious multinationals dictating the secret terms of the corporate coup trade packages:
While it's grand that they're talking about finally retiring the Confederate flag in Dixie, the rest of the globe's population will watch in horror and disbelief as the plutocrats turn the planet into one great big toxic plantation.... if Obama and his plutopals get their way. For some reason, the president thinks "Obamatrade" is a legacy to be proud of. The realization that he is a right-wing free market ideologue, and always has been, is slowly beginning to dawn even on some of his biggest fans.
So he chose last week to schmooze with a comedian about race. It's the politics of mass distraction. The post-racial president comes out of his closet and boldly suggests that racism is still in our DNA -- a statement which, by the way, sickeningly dog-whistles the racist right wing ideology (biology is destiny) of Charles Murray, whether Obama meant it that way or not.
But the centrist punditocracy celebrates his refreshing honesty and bravery even as he displays the most egregious dishonesty and subterfuge about the TPP. His administration has even threatened to prosecute any member of Congress who divulges its details to the public.
Sorry, but you don't get to call yourself anti-racist or liberal, and then not speak out against the TPP. It's just as white-supremacist as the hate group that inspired the Charleston massacre. It supports the Malaysian human trafficking cartel and perpetuates labor abuses against Asian people making 40 cents an hour in sweatshops, and family farmers eking out a bare bones existence both here and abroad. The TPP will off-shore more American jobs and further depress American wages and have an adverse economic affect on already oppressed Black and Latino Americans. It's a de facto acceleration of global slavery -- which has its roots not in bigotry, but in greed and unfettered capitalism.
So as reader Valerie urges, call your Dinosaurs one more time and tell them so. Remind them that as the populist climate heats up, those electoral extinctions sure have a strange way of occurring without warning. A list of their phone numbers is here.
Video accompaniment is here.
*Update, 6/23: The Senate advanced Trade Promotion Authority (fast-track), 60-37. The same Democratic quislings who'd voted for it previously -- Michael Bennet (D-Colo), Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.), Chris Coons (D-Del.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) -- were not swayed by the wishes and demands of their putative constituents, aka The Little People, to change their minds. With any luck, they will go down in electoral history as The Unlucky Thirteen.
"It's a great day for the big money interests, not a great day for working families." -- Bernie Sanders, democratic socialist of Vermont.
"Occasionally, even President Obama gets things right." -- John Cornyn, Republican of Texas.
Now the Democrats, Obama included, can pretend to fight for the regular folk by throwing a few extra crumbs to a couple displaced workers. (Trade Adjustment Assistance) The Republicans will pretend to balk, but in the end each side will embrace slavery and plutocracy.
The silver lining is that once Obama completes his deal, we will have an actual opportunity to see it. Hell will hopefully break loose. So we should keep up the pressure. Another silver lining is that 11 other countries also have to approve this travesty. A lot of their citizens (notably in Australia, Canada and Japan) are less than enchanted with it, too. The battle against neoliberalism is global, because neoliberalism itself is global. Individual nation-states are rapidly becoming superfluous to the interests of capital.
Never having met an idea or a lower House vote for the public good that it couldn't crush through sheer inertia, corruption, stealth, or just a flick of its contemptuous middle finger at the body politic, the United States Senate will once again try to give President Obama authority to fast-track democracy into permanent oblivion.
Zero Hour begins on Tuesday, June 23, at approximately 11 a.m. President Obama probably won't need to make a personal desperate appearance this time. Neither will the mass media. The pundits are too busy analyzing and marveling at how casually and boldly he was able to say "nigger" while they make their squeamish PC excuses about why they can't allow us to actually hear him say "nigger" on TV. "Nigger" might be a trigger.... it might remind viewers that the secretive TPP is actually a deal for a resurgence of the slave trade -- among its many other abominations.
A typical deflection/distraction, broadcast by The Terror Channel, (aka CNN) whose programming is sponsored by the same voracious multinationals dictating the secret terms of the corporate coup trade packages:
While it's grand that they're talking about finally retiring the Confederate flag in Dixie, the rest of the globe's population will watch in horror and disbelief as the plutocrats turn the planet into one great big toxic plantation.... if Obama and his plutopals get their way. For some reason, the president thinks "Obamatrade" is a legacy to be proud of. The realization that he is a right-wing free market ideologue, and always has been, is slowly beginning to dawn even on some of his biggest fans.
So he chose last week to schmooze with a comedian about race. It's the politics of mass distraction. The post-racial president comes out of his closet and boldly suggests that racism is still in our DNA -- a statement which, by the way, sickeningly dog-whistles the racist right wing ideology (biology is destiny) of Charles Murray, whether Obama meant it that way or not.
But the centrist punditocracy celebrates his refreshing honesty and bravery even as he displays the most egregious dishonesty and subterfuge about the TPP. His administration has even threatened to prosecute any member of Congress who divulges its details to the public.
Sorry, but you don't get to call yourself anti-racist or liberal, and then not speak out against the TPP. It's just as white-supremacist as the hate group that inspired the Charleston massacre. It supports the Malaysian human trafficking cartel and perpetuates labor abuses against Asian people making 40 cents an hour in sweatshops, and family farmers eking out a bare bones existence both here and abroad. The TPP will off-shore more American jobs and further depress American wages and have an adverse economic affect on already oppressed Black and Latino Americans. It's a de facto acceleration of global slavery -- which has its roots not in bigotry, but in greed and unfettered capitalism.
So as reader Valerie urges, call your Dinosaurs one more time and tell them so. Remind them that as the populist climate heats up, those electoral extinctions sure have a strange way of occurring without warning. A list of their phone numbers is here.
Video accompaniment is here.
*Update, 6/23: The Senate advanced Trade Promotion Authority (fast-track), 60-37. The same Democratic quislings who'd voted for it previously -- Michael Bennet (D-Colo), Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.), Chris Coons (D-Del.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) -- were not swayed by the wishes and demands of their putative constituents, aka The Little People, to change their minds. With any luck, they will go down in electoral history as The Unlucky Thirteen.
"It's a great day for the big money interests, not a great day for working families." -- Bernie Sanders, democratic socialist of Vermont.
"Occasionally, even President Obama gets things right." -- John Cornyn, Republican of Texas.
Now the Democrats, Obama included, can pretend to fight for the regular folk by throwing a few extra crumbs to a couple displaced workers. (Trade Adjustment Assistance) The Republicans will pretend to balk, but in the end each side will embrace slavery and plutocracy.
The silver lining is that once Obama completes his deal, we will have an actual opportunity to see it. Hell will hopefully break loose. So we should keep up the pressure. Another silver lining is that 11 other countries also have to approve this travesty. A lot of their citizens (notably in Australia, Canada and Japan) are less than enchanted with it, too. The battle against neoliberalism is global, because neoliberalism itself is global. Individual nation-states are rapidly becoming superfluous to the interests of capital.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)