Cuba in the American Imagination by Margaret Kimberley

On December 17, 2014, the Obama administration announced changes in relations with Cuba which broke with over fifty years of foreign policy decisions. The United States will open an embassy in Havana for the first time since 1961. All of the Cuban Five political prisoners are now free. While Congress must approve a complete end of the trade embargo, some trade restrictions have already been loosened. 

Of course, Yankee imperialism gave with one hand, and took with the other. The day after the Cuba announcement, president Obama signed legislation imposing sanctions against the Venezuelan government. Instead of asking why the United States would help Cuba but punish its biggest benefactor, Americans are celebrating what they hope is a return to Cuba’s status as a de facto American colony.

Anyone who depended on the inane exultations from the corporate media and so-called leftists would think that Cuba ceased to exist from January 1, 1959 until now. They speak as if it has remained in a state of suspended animation, not waking up until the United States woke it with a kiss, as if in a fairy tale. While Americans think that Cubans exist as relics like cars from the 1950s, that nation has succeeded in achieving a number of accomplishments which Americans refuse to acknowledge. Of course that is easy to do if revolutionary Cuba isn’t thought of as a real nation, which is as much as the average American mind can fathom.

Cuban soldiers hastened the end of South Africa’s apartheid system. The victory at Cuito Cuanavale in Angola proved that the South African army was not invincible. While the United States sent troops to build only one paltry hospital during the most recent Ebola epidemic, Cuba sent over 400 doctors to treat patients in the affected areas. Cubans have an excellent health care system which compares quite well to the private and astronomically expensive system in the United States. 

Cuba is a nation with its own interests and a history of fighting first against Spanish colonialism and then United States control. Yet in the popular mind Cuba is still a mafia outpost from the 1950s where Americans went to soak up sun and sin. The corporate media helps with ludicrous wishful thinking about expropriated property being returned fifty years after the fact. 

Even supposedly serious thinkers succumbed and revealed more about their own fantasies than any insight about Cuba. Liberal pundit David Corn could only think of his stereotypes in a startling missive posted on twitter. “Cuba's a swell place to visit. Beaches, rum, baseball, music. It'll be great for more USers to visit-& that could counter repression there.” If there were a prize awarded for truly stupid twitter posts, Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin should win with these words, “Obama spoke with Raul Castro yesterday. The ice is melting. Mojitos for all!” 

It is difficult to know where to begin in analyzing such nonsense. It isn’t clear what Corn means by repression, but surely the presence of Americans having fun has never made people safe anywhere in the world. As for Benjamin, anyone whose response to a foreign policy decision includes references to a cocktail should be ignored now and forever.
The foolishly excited liberals are outdone by people who revel in vulgarity but who expose a lot by doing so. Blogger Matt Forney opined, “What Russia was to Generation X, Cuba will be for the Millennials: a land where the white man is God.”

That is the crux of the matter. Cuba’s history and its politics mean nothing to the right or to liberals who may espouse somewhat higher motives. Cuba is a dream for white people who want a place where they can be well, white. They can fantasize about having a good time while their government controls a largely brown skinned and subservient group. 

The lovers of empire may have celebrated too soon however. While even a partial end to the embargo will benefit Cubans, their government made it clear they will not return to subservience. President Raul Castro stated in no uncertain terms that Cuba will remain socialist and will not extradite Assata Shakur or anyone else granted asylum by the government. 

Obama said himself, “The whole point of normalizing relations is that it gives us a greater opportunity to have influence with that government.” None of the cognoscenti dared ask what those words meant. Imperialism is on the march as never before. United States and Saudi Arabian machinations have succeeded in lowering oil prices and crippling Russia, Venezuela and Iran. Sanctions and market manipulations can succeed where sending troops cannot.

No one can argue against the end of a 16 year-long ordeal for the Cuban Five, but there are no benevolent motives behind the Obama administration’s actions. The United States did not suddenly give up its plan for unipolar domination. Indeed we must assume that these latest moves are part of the larger plan to bring every nation to heel. 

Cuba is a nation which has suffered and struggled to be free from domination. It doesn’t matter if it is a psychological after thought for Americans. They may try to pretend that the last fifty years never happened but there is no turning back. People in the United States may have selective amnesia, but surely Cubans do not.

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OneLove

:::MME:::

America's Decay Into a Violent, Cruel Place by David Masciotra

It seems police can get away with anything: choking men who have surrendered; shooting unarmed teens; knocking pregnant women to the ground. While the issues involving race, civil rights and the relationship between law enforcement and communities are essential for examination and correction, few are talking about how all of this fits into the larger pattern of America’s cultural decline and decay. America has become a society addicted to violence and indifferent to the suffering of people without power. Whenever there is a combination of a culture of violence and an ethic of heartlessness, fatal abuse of authority will escalate, and the legal system will fail to address it.

Critics are right to condemn the criminal justice system for its embedded inequities and injustices, but they are hesitant to condemn the actual jurors giving killer cops get-out-of-jail-free cards. These jurors are representational of America: ignorant and cold. They hear testimony from eyewitnesses claiming Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown while he had his hands in the air, and set Wilson free without trial. They listen to reports of three officers choking Robert Saylor, an unarmed man with Down syndrome who wanted to see a movie without a ticket, and they send the police back to work. They watch video footage of police choking Eric Garner in New York, and of two police officers brutally beating Keyarika Diggles, a woman in Texas, and they decline to make them pay for it.

Have they been programmed into cruelty and apathy by American schools, churches, families, politics, and pop culture?

There are practical demands that the sane minority of Americans can make as they march the streets of Ferguson, New York and Chicago. Body cameras on police officers is a technological aid to the people who live under military occupation from the blue army. Tougher requirements for entering the police force, and better training methods for those in the academy are essential, as is a sweeping and radical review, best led by the White House, of a racist and predatory criminal justice system.

Jesse Jackson has offered the excellent proposal that the Department of Justice begin investigating police departments to determine if they are following civil rights laws on hiring, employment issues and law enforcement policy. If they are not, as it appears with Ferguson, they should no longer receive any federal funding. Jackson’s idea to “fight civil rights violations with civil rights law" is a brilliant plan to punish police departments that obstruct justice, prevent further abuses by exerting financial pressure for compliance and strike a blow against the militarization of police. No more armored vehicles or special forces gear for police departments that do not hire minorities, or that systemically target Latinos and African Americans for arrest.

While this all seems unlikely to happen, let us pretend America magically transforms into a decent society and begins policing the police, moves toward fairness in criminal justice and actually prioritizes civil rights. There is still the cancer at the heart of a culture committed to venerating violence, celebrating selfishness and condemning compassion.

Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman wrote the classic Manufacturing Consent, about the manipulative and exploitative relationship corporate media has with the American public. What if the consent is not manufactured? What if, as historian Morris Berman contends, the plutocratic theft of American lives and treasure is not actually a robbery, but a transaction?

William of Ockham famously devised the problem-solving principle, Occam’s razor: Cut away the unnecessary complications and the simplest answer to a question is most likely the correct answer. After all the analysis of the normalized dysfunction of democracy in America, launched with the assumption that the political system fails to represent the will of the people, the question remains: what if it actually does represent the will of the people? That the system is actually succeeding in upholding its representational promise might be the simplest and most probable answer to the mystery of America’s comatose slumber in a nightmare of torment for the oppressed and treasures for the oppressors.

More optimistic liberals will identify the masses of protestors filling the streets with rage and disgust over the state-sanctioned murder of two unarmed black men, but the thousands of people protesting in major cities are only the sane minority. The sane minority fights against the “silent majority” of Richard Nixon’s delight. The disgraced president was right in 1969 when he pointed out that the majority of Americans were not part of anti-war demonstrations or countercultural movements; they were his voters, and their children became Reagan’s voters. From beyond the grave, he is still right.

The police officers who shoot teenagers for the crime of stealing cigarillos, the cops who choke men to death and beat women, along with the police administrators and county prosecutors who protect them, are not from Mars. They are not lizards in disguise, as some of the wildest conspiracy theorists suggest. They are Americans. They are products of American institutions and culture, and they staff and supervise the enforcement of our laws.

In all of the attacks on the “system” for endorsing the behavior of murderous cops, few critics actually condemn those most responsible for the decisions not to press charges: the jurors. No one reasonable can doubt that the county prosecutor, Robet McCulloch, in Ferguson, did his best to corrupt the process, but clearly no one marching in solidarity with Michael Brown’s family would have let Darren Wilson live comfortably with the $1 million his supporters raised to assist him through his financial difficulties. A large part of the problem lies with the jurors who accepted their roles as McCulloch’s toys and Wilson’s collective shield.

There is no imaginable defense of the jury in the Eric Garner case. They had visual evidence of the police murdering a man begging for his life. They, like the police they protect, are average Americans. They are not cyborgs. They are your neighbors.

Twelve more Americans in Texas felt no horror or sympathy when watching two police officers beat Keyarika Diggles in a police station. Perhaps they viewed it with the same amusement we when watching the destruction of lives on reality television. One thing that is for certain is that they did not watch as decent human beings.

There is no question that the criminal justice system is racist, and that the American political system is vicious. Black people have always suffered the worst beating and battering in America, because the mental disease of racism is too viral to quickly heal. African Americans were three-fifths human during slavery, and it seems that in 2014, with a biracial man in the White House, they are four-fifths human. America has made progress, but no one but the blind can believe that black life has equal value as white life.

These “systems,” however, are not giant computers. They are institutions run and powered by people. The people are the face of America. Darren Wilson, Robert McCulloch and the jurors who failed to punish police officers for killing, are part of the silent majority. They are the same silent majority of voters responsible for the election of officials who dismiss poverty as an unimportant issue, who assault public education, and who continually call for the enhancement of killing Muslims in the Middle East. They are the same silent majority, 66 percent according to polls, who support air strikes against Iraq, and they constitute the 40 percent, which will only grow if the propaganda campaign picks up again, that support a ground invasion.

For a particularly horrific glimpse into the creep show of American values of violence, consider that, according to a recent Pew Report, 51 percent of Americans believe that torture, such as rectal feeding, waterboarding and other gruesome methods described in the Senate Intelligence Committee report, is justified. Another 20 percent said that they have no opinion.

It seems the jurors in the Brown, Garner and Diggles cases were easy to deceive, and in the case of Ferguson, likely because they had little knowledge of American history or law. They are likely part of the 71 percent of Americans who never read a newspaper, the 80 percent of American families who bought no books last year, and the 70 percent who cannot name a single part of the Bill of Rights.

They are the natural products of a culture that has steadily mutated into embracing destructive hyper-individualism. The for-profit healthcare system, the prison-industrial complex, and the bitter segregation along race and class lines in the public education system are also natural products, along with deranged and violent police who face no consequences for shedding blood. The victims of this culture, whether they are the children caught in the crosshairs of drone strikes or the women beaten in police stations, are made invisible or insignificant by myths of American exceptionalism and benevolence.

Speaking to me about Michael Brown’s death and the racial divide in America, Jesse Jackson said, “We’ve removed the layer of skin—the epidermis—that separates us. So now we can vote together, work together, date each others’ sisters, but this thing is bone-deep. That’s what people don’t want to acknowledge. We know how to survive apart, but we must learn how to live together.”

The acknowledgment of America’s need to learn to live together has a simplicity that masks its profundity. Robert Putnam, in Bowling Alone, documented the extent of Americans’ isolation from each other. Mass shootings, rates of violent crime higher than the rest of the developed world and outrages like Garner's and Brown’s deaths demonstrate that the inability to peacefully coexist in America goes beyond race. It is a bone-deep dysfunction with social costs, political implications and spiritual disasters. Inequality will continue to grow and injustice will continue to worsen until America is made to actually deal with its levels of selfish indifference to suffering, from ordinary people on grand juries to those who occupy the highest thrones of power.

The sane minority might ostensibly protest the racism of the criminal justice system, but they are actually demanding that America become a civilized society. No civilization would tolerate what America has recently done, but it is that very concept —the idea of civilization—that the silent majority so fiercely seems to hate and reject.

                                                              *********

OneLove

:::MME:::

Fear Artificial Stupidity, Not Artificial Intelligence by Mark Bishop

It is not often that you are obliged to proclaim a much-loved genius wrong, but in his alarming prediction on artificial intelligence and the future of humankind, I believe Stephen Hawking has erred. To be precise, and in keeping with physics – in an echo of Schrödinger's cat – he is simultaneously wrong and right.

Asked how far engineers had come towards creating artificial intelligence, Hawking replied: "Once humans develop artificial intelligence it would take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded."

In my view, he is wrong because there are strong grounds for believing that computers will never replicate all human cognitive faculties. He is right because even such emasculated machines may still pose a threat to humankind's future – as autonomous weapons, for instance.

Such predictions are not new; my former boss at the University of Reading, professor of cybernetics Kevin Warwick, raised this issue in his 1997 book March of the Machines. He observed that robots with the brain power of an insect had already been created. Soon, he predicted, there would be robots with the brain power of a cat, quickly followed by machines as intelligent as humans, which would usurp and subjugate us.

Triple trouble

This is based on the ideology that all aspects of human mentality will eventually be realised by a program running on a suitable computer – a so-called strong AI. Of course, if this is possible, a runaway effect would eventually be triggered by accelerating technological progress – caused by using AI systems to design ever more sophisticated AIs and Moore's law, which states that raw computational power doubles every two years.

I did not agree then, and do not now.

I believe three fundamental problems explain why computational AI has historically failed to replicate human mentality in all its raw and electro-chemical glory, and will continue to fail.

First, computers lack genuine understanding. The Chinese Room Argument is a famous thought experiment by US philosopher John Searle that shows how a computer program can appear to understand Chinese stories (by responding to questions about them appropriately) without genuinely understanding anything of the interaction.

Second, computers lack consciousness. An argument can be made, one I call Dancing with Pixies, that if a robot experiences a conscious sensation as it interacts with the world, then an infinitude of consciousnesses must be everywhere: in the cup of tea I am drinking, in the seat that I am sitting on. If we reject this wider state of affairs – known as panpsychism – we must reject machine consciousness.

Lastly, computers lack mathematical insight. In his book The Emperor's New Mind, Oxford mathematical physicist Roger Penrose argued that the way mathematicians provide many of the "unassailable demonstrations" to verify their mathematical assertions is fundamentally non-algorithmic and non-computational.

Not OK computer

Taken together, these three arguments fatally undermine the notion that the human mind can be completely realised by mere computations. If correct, they imply that some broader aspects of human mentality will always elude future AI systems.

Rather than talking up Hollywood visions of robot overlords, it would be better to focus on the all too real concerns surrounding a growing application of existing AI – autonomous weapons systems.

In my role as an AI expert on the International Committee for Robot Arms Control, I am particularly concerned by the potential deployment of robotic weapons systems that can militarily engage without human intervention. This is precisely because current AI is not akin to human intelligence, and poorly designed autonomous systems have the potential to rapidly escalate dangerous situations to catastrophic conclusions when pitted against each other. Such systems can exhibit genuine artificial stupidity.

It is possible to agree that AI may pose an existential threat to humanity, but without ever having to imagine that it will become more intelligent than us.

Mark Bishop is professor of cognitive computing at Goldsmiths, University of London, and serves on the International Committee for Robot Arms Control

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OneLove

:::MME:::

When Idiots Get Air Time

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,The Daily Show on Facebook,Daily Show Video Archive

Andrea Tantaros has to be one of the dumbest people on television, but then again, most of the folks on Fox News are nitwits so she is amongst like-minded peers. She might as well wipe her ass with her journalism degree as it serves no purpose. A journalist's  - any good one, at least- first obligation is to the truth, closely followed by verification (which separates journalism from other modes of communication, such as propaganda, fiction or entertainment) and independence (being a watchdog over those in power). Corporate news outlets by and large do not adhere to any of journalism's core principles. Fox News in particular is nothing but a psycho's wet dream. Nothing on that network mirrors reality in any way, shape or form. 
It is no surprise that Fox News viewers,  according to a poll from Fairleigh Dickinson University, are less informed than people who don't watch any news. Just wow!

OneLove

:::MME:::

Why is Near Term Human Extinction Inevitable? by Robert J. Burrowes

If you hadn't previously heard the expression 'near term human extinction', you have now. And you will get used to hearing it soon unless you insulate yourself from reality with greater effectiveness than you are doing by reading this article.

The expression 'near term human extinction' is relatively new in the scientific literature but, unlike other truths that have been successfully suppressed by national elites and their corporate media, this one will keep filtering out until you start to hear the expression routinely. Why? Because this truth is simply too big to suppress permanently and the planetary environment delivers its feedback directly to us in the form of catastrophic environmental events, climatic and otherwise, whether or not these are reported by the corporate media.

It is now widely accepted that we are living through the sixth mass extinction in planetary history. The last one occurred 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs vanished. We are now losing biodiversity at a rate similar to that time. But this mass extinction is driven by us. And we will be one of the casualties. The only real debate is when. And this debate is predicated on the unstated and highly problematic assumption that we can continue to avoid nuclear war.

So what does the expression 'near term human extinction' mean? In essence, according to those scientists who use the term, it means that human beings will be extinct by about 2030. For a summary of the evidence of this, with many references, listen to the lecture by Professor Guy McPherson on 'Climate Collapse and Near Term Human Extinction' Why 2030? Because, according to McPherson, the 'perfect storm' of environmental assaults that we are now inflicting on the Earth, including the 28 self-reinforcing climate feedback loops that have already been triggered, is so far beyond the Earth's capacity to absorb, that there will be an ongoing succession of terminal breakdowns of key ecological systems and processes – that is, habitat loss – over the next decade that it will precipitate the demise of homo sapiens. 

Now, it should be pointed out, many scientists disagree with this timeframe. For example, science journalist Scott K. Johnson endeavours to explain 'How Guy McPherson gets it wrong'. And, just recently, Dr Piers J Sellers, acting director of earth science at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, stated that 'It is almost certain that we will see a rise of two degrees Celsius before 2100, and a three-degree rise or higher is a possibility. The impacts over such a short period would be huge. The longer we put off corrective action, the more disruptive the outcome is likely to be.' See 'Wobbling on Climate Change'

But even if Johnson and Sellers are right, and McPherson is wrong about the timeframe, there are still many scientists who are keen to point out that we are ongoingly breaching 'tipping points' that make human survival increasingly problematic. In 2009, for example, Johan Rockström, James Hansen and colleagues explained that three of nine interlinked planetary boundaries – in relation to climate, biodiversity loss and biogeochemical cycles – had already been overstepped. See 'A safe operating space for humanity'

And, in 2012, Prof Kevin Anderson, Deputy Director of the UK's premier climate modelling institution, the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, warned that emissions are now out of control and we are heading for a world that is 6 degrees hotter; he pointed out that even the International Energy Agency, and conservative organisations like it, are warning that we are on track for a 4 degree increase (on the pre-industrial level) by 2040. He also accused too many climate scientists of keeping quiet about the unrealistic assessments put out by governments. See 'What They Won't Tell You About Climate Catastrophe'

And what these assessments do not necessarily take into account is the synergistic impact of our combined assaults on the environment including those unrelated to the climate. These include the devastating assaults on the environment through military violence (often leaving vast areas uninhabitable), rainforest destruction, industrial farming, mining, commercial fishing and the spreading radioactive contamination from Fukushima. We are also systematically destroying the limited supply of fresh water on the planet which means that water scarcity is becoming a frequent reality for many people and the collapse of hydrological systems is now expected by 2020. Human activity drives 200 species of life (birds, animals, fish, insects) to extinction each day and 80% of the world's forests and over 90% of the large fish in the ocean are already gone. Despite this readily available information, governments continue to prioritise spending $US2,000,000,000 each day on military violence, the sole purpose of which is to terrorise and kill fellow human beings.

The point is simply this: you are welcome to analyse the scientific evidence for yourself and make your own assessment of the timeframe and the degree of severity of the threat. Perhaps human extinction will not occur until next century. But whether we define 'near term' as 2030, 2040 or even next century, human extinction is now a distinct possibility. And after 200,000 years of our species, calling this 'near term' seems reasonable.

So is near term human extinction inevitable?

In my view, human extinction is the most likely outcome. But not simply because we are inflicting too many insults on the planetary environment. Extinction is inevitable because of human fear and, specifically, unconscious fear: The fear in ourselves and others that is not experienced consciously but which often drives three capacities that are vitally important in any context: the focus of our attention, our capacity to adequately analyse the evidence (if we get our attention focused on it) and our behaviour in response to this analysis. For example, if you do not know that your fear is making you screen out unpalatable information, then you won't even notice that you have turned your attention elsewhere and have now forgotten what you just read. Or your fear might prevent you adequately analysing the evidence and/or responding intelligently to it. See 'Why Violence?' and 'Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice'

So, if you are one of the people still reading this article, you are probably less frightened than most people. The others gave up before they got to this paragraph. So let me now tell you the primary problem with the fear. It distorts the mental focus, capacity for analysis and the behaviour of national elites, that is, corporate owners and their political, military, media, bureaucratic, academic and judicial lackeys. In essence, corporate profits cannot be maximised in a world where environmental constraints are taken into account, either through sensible consideration or legal requirement, so fear will drive dysfunctional corporate activity irrespective of its environmental cost. And corporate executives will ensure that their political and other lackeys do not get in their way because the fear that drives profit maximizing behaviour is deep-seated and far outweighs any fears in relation to the environment. For a fuller explanation of this point, see 'Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War'

This is why lobbying elites to change their behaviour in the direction of environmental sustainability (or peace and justice, for that matter) is a complete waste of time. It is their fear that locks them into what they focus on, what they are 'thinking' and what they are doing, and arguments, no matter how sensible or evidential, cannot work.

In essence then, it is fear that drives dysfunctional environmental behaviours. And, history tells us, fear will prevent us taking sufficient action in time.

So is there any point doing anything given that we are dead on track for near term human extinction?

Well, if you are like me, you are one of those people who does not intend to go down without a fight. A big fight! So you might consider joining those of us participating in 'The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth': a fifteen year strategy to address all of our environmental challenges systematically in a way that undermines the elite fear that would destroy us all. You might also like to sign the online pledge of 'The People's Charter to Create a Nonviolent World'

The Flame Tree Project was inspired by that great environmentalist, Mohandas K. Gandhi, who identified the environmental crisis nearly one hundred years ago and, having done so, subsequently lived his own life in extraordinary simplicity and self-reliance, symbolised by his daily spinning of khadi: 'Earth provides enough for every person's need but not for every person's greed.'

Extinction might be howling outside our door but, if you have the courage, you can still fight. There is no downside in trying. But we need to fight strategically so that we defeat elite fear. How long do you want to wait before joining the fight?

Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of 'Why Violence?' His website is at http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com

OneLove

:::MME::: 

Musings

                                                           

                                                            Rebuilding the World

"A father was trying to read the newspaper, but his little son kept pestering him. Finally, the father grew tired of this and, tearing a page from the newspaper – one that bore a map of the world – he cut it into several pieces and handed them to his son. ‘Right, now you’ve got something to do. I’ve given you a map of the world and I want to see if you can put it back together correctly.’

He resumed his reading, knowing that the task would keep the child occupied for the rest of the day. However, a quarter of an hour later, the boy returned with the map. ‘Has your mother been teaching you geography?’ asked his father in astonishment. ‘I don’t even know what that is,’ replied the boy. ‘But there was a photo of a man on the other side of the page, so I put the man back together and found I’d put the world back together too.’"

                                                                     ~~Paul Coelho~~ 


OneLove

:::MME:::

Facebook is a Cult by Harmon Leon

We all know Scientology is a cult. But Facebook, everyone’s favorite social network, has plenty of cultish qualities too. After all, the amount of control and personal information we relinquish to Facebook goes way beyond any confidential tidbits John Travolta reveals during the church’s regular “auditing” interviews.   

Think of the cult similarities between Facebook and Scientology: Both have a strong, authoritative leader (Zuckerberg/L. Ron Hubbard) who came to power via questionable means (See The Social Network/The Master for reference). And both Facebook and Scientology have Tom Cruise as a member—coincidence, or something more?

Like all cults, Facebook and Scientology have diabolical means of controlling their members. Facebook updated its Terms of Use this past month, in an attempt to clarify its privacy policies. But the pages of information and infographics just serve as a reminder that the social media company basically owns us, and has access to all our most personal information. Yet we are willing participants in this pillaging of our private lives. Being a member of Scientology is all about surrendering one’s power to self-determination. We voluntarily allow Facebook to have more power over our lives than the science fiction cult from the Planet Xenu—and here’s how.

1. The Contract

Members of Scientology’s elite inner circle, known as the Sea Org, are required to sign a billion-year contract pledging their fidelity to the religion. Meanwhile, Facebook requires you to sign a detailed contract for terms of use—a beast of legalese the Zuckerberg crew really doesn’t want you to read. If you do sift through the Terms of Use, you’ll find that it attempts to absolve Facebook of any and all liability for anything it might do to you. (But chances are you didn’t read it.) You sign away all possible rights, leaving your entire identity exposed for exploitation. Only a fool would sign such a contract.

2. Complete Surveillance of All Activities

Many former members of Scientology claimed they felt brainwashed, like a robot for the church living in an Orwellian nightmare, with all their moves monitored by the higher-ups within the group. Scientology dissidents, such as L. Ron Hubbard’s great grandson, have often been trailed by thugs associated with the church.

Facebook also welcomes you to 1984. Think of Facebook Location Tracking as an NSA Santa Claus; it sees you when you’re sleeping, it knows when you’re awake. More specifically, it knows what bar you’re at, and the name of the restaurant where you just had dinner. You’ve volunteered to have Big Brother—or potential stalkers—watch over you and all your friends, feeding them constant updates about where you are and what you are doing. Better yet, Facebook will bombard you with ads for nearby establishments by tracking your location (which it euphemistically calls “building a history”). Facebook explains that you can turn this tracking off, but “Location History” must be turned on for some location features to work, including Nearby Friends. You can run but you can’t hide!

3. Personal Files

When actress Leah Remini left the Church of Scientology in 2013, her biggest fear was being blackmailed by personal confessions she made during “audit” sessions; she feared her confidential files would go public and ruin her life. Facebook users are much more gullible than Scientologists. They don’t require an “audit” session to disclose intimate personal information; they freely post it on their own, which has sometimes ended up ruining their offline lives.

Take the Idaho schoolteacher who was fired after posting a humorous photo on Facebook of her fiance’s hand on top of her swimsuit. Or the Ohio waitress who was canned after complaining about bad tips. You could also be given the sack if a friend happens to post those drunken party pics from Cabo—and tags you in the post. Or if that photo of you sucking on a bong, which you thought was deleted, happens to surface. Facebook is more effective than a Scientology auditing session; it allows people to wreck their own lives by practicing the First Amendment.

4. Facebook Owns You!

Sure, Scientology has dirt on John Travolta and his various romps with gay porn stars that could be detrimental to his sagging career (or helpful, at this stage), which prevents him from ever leaving the cult. Facebook, on the other hand, owns your ass! Did you bother to read its copyright notice when you signed up? These are the rules you agree to play by so long as you use Facebook. Chances are you didn't bother reading these either, so read along with me:

“For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.
When you delete IP content, it is deleted in a manner similar to emptying the recycle bin on a computer. However, you understand that removed content may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time (but will not be available to others).” 

So if you’re a professional photographer and post your images on Facebook, Facebook now has the right to use those images. Same with your party photos from your cousin’s bat mitzvah. Facebook can use those too, and even put out a book called, Your Cousin’s Bat Mitzvah Photos.

Facebook also has access to all your personal information, and most people willingly provide it. Facebook knows where you went to school, who you’re dating, your birthday, even your phone number. Good thing Facebook, unlike Scientology, is not run by an evil overlord from the Planet Xenu who wants to ruin your life.

5. No One Will Hear Your Complaints

Scientology has a reputation for hostile action toward anyone who criticizes it in a public forum; executives within the organization have proclaimed that Scientology is "not a turn-the-other-cheek” religion. Hubbard Church policy letter states, “Don't ever tamely submit to an investigation of us. Make it rough, rough on attackers all the way.” And that tactic helps keep the Scientology brand intact.

Facebook has a more ingenious method for dealing with criticism: As long as you are a member of the cult of Facebook, – you will have no one to turn to if you want to voice a grievance over, say, an ex-boyfriend or stalker posting incriminating photos of you. Sure there’s a phone number offered (650-543-4800) but good luck with that; if you press the prompt you’ll be told that Facebook doesn’t offer phone support.

Or better yet, send your complaint to the Facebook Help Desk. It might be a long shot, but remember, until Facebook’s policies change, it will also own the full text of your complaint.

6. You Allow People to Stalk You on Facebook

Scientology is a secret sect, closed off from the rest of society. Though this veil of secrecy is troubling in its own right, at least members’ private information is only available to other members of the organization. In fact, if you leave the Church of Scientology, members will practice “disconnection,” which strongly discourages them from associating with "enemies of Scientology," further keeping the lives of members secret from outsiders.

Facebook, on the other hand, is a stalker’s wet dream. Statistics show that 28 percent of Facebook profiles are set as "visible to the public," meaning anyone can access them, becoming privy to information such as a status update about your engagement being broken off or a selfie showing your 30-pound weight gain. Once you “friend” a person, they gain access to a plethora of random information about your life. A recent study suggested that romantic partners (or hopefuls) Facebook stalk because of “relational uncertainty,” noting that checking up on someone’s Facebook activity is a way we monitor and gather information about potential significant others (or victims).
What if your stalker’s drunken messages become increasingly disturbing? You can block him or her. Or delete your Facebook account. Or complain to Facebook…OK, nix that last idea.

7. You Are One Big Market Research Project

Scientology uses an E-meter. It claims that this lie detector device can examine a person’s mental state and “see a thought,” like some sort of mind-reading market research contraption of tomorrow. Using a trained auditor, Scientology believes it can uncover "hidden crimes."

Facebook has something better than the E-meter: the capacity to mine all your personal data and sell it to marketing companies. Come on, did you think this free account was actually “free”? Everything has a price, and Facebook’s is targeted advertising. The scope of this brokering of information is on par with the NSA’s, and yet it is almost entirely unregulated.

8. Impossible To Completely Leave the Organization

Much like Scientology, the cult of Facebook makes it tough for members to leave. Until 2007, Facebook never completely deleted a user's information—even when it deleted an account. The status was more like suspending an account, which meant a user could get her account and all the information back anytime if she decided to rejoin.  

In 2008, the social media giant introduced an option to permanently delete the account, though a Facebook member has to be sure not only to deactivate his or her account but also check other preferences to make sure the account is completely deleted. Still, all those photos that were tagged on other peoples’ pages will live on—and Facebook will retain the right to use them as it pleases. Also, much like Scientology, other members will ostracize you when you quit Facebook; you will be left out of the social loop— which will force you to go out into the real world and make real friends. The horror!

If you do happen to break away from Facebook and feel lost with nowhere to go, there’s one group you can turn to that has a social network based on the Planet Xenu. It's called Scientology, and it wants to be your friend.

Exploring the"Scariest F*cking Place on Earth":Dick Cheney's Mind

The Daily Show
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Sociopath: a person with a psychopathic personality whose behavior is antisocial, often criminal, and who lacks a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience. Dick Cheney fits the definition of a sociopath. Jon Stewart is on point yet again. 

 OneLove

 :::MME:::

The 6-Step Process to Dispose of the Poor Half of America by Paul Buchheit

One of the themes of the writing of Henry Giroux is that more and more Americans are becoming "disposable," recognized as either commodities or criminals by the more fortunate members of society. There seems to be a method to the madness of winner-take-all capitalism. The following steps, whether due to greed, indifference or disdain, are the means by which America's wealth-takers dispose of the people they don't need. 

1. Deplete Their Wealth 

Recent analysis has determined that half of America is in or near poverty. This is confirmed by researchers Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, who point out: "The bottom half of the distribution always owns close to zero wealth on net. Hence, the bottom 90% wealth share is the same as the share of wealth owned by top 50-90 families—what can be described as the middle class."

The United States has one of the highest poverty rates in the developed world. It's much worse since the recession, especially for blacks and Hispanics.

From 2008 to 2013 the stock market, which is largely owned by just 10% of Americans, gained 18% per year. Well-to-do stockholders get capital gains tax breaks, including a carried interest subsidy Robert Reich calls "a pure scam."

The bottom half of America, relying on regular bank accounts, earn about one percent on their savings. 

2. Strip Away Their Income 

Earnings due to workers for their years of productivity have been withheld by people in power. Based on inflation, the minimum wage should be nearly three times its current level. An investor report from J.P. Morgan noted a direct correlation between record profits and cutbacks in wages.

We hear occasional news about job growth, but low-wage jobs ($7.69 to $13.83 per hour), which made up just one fifth of the jobs lost to the recession, accounted for nearly three-fifths of the jobs regained during the recovery. And it's getting worse. Nine out of 10 of the fastest-growing occupations are considered low-wage, generally not requiring a college degree, including food service, healthcare, housekeeping, and retail sales.

Among rich countries, according to OECD data, the U.S. is near the bottom in both union participationand employee protection laws. 

3. Take Away Their Homes 

A study by the National Low Income Housing Coalition concluded that an average American renter would need to earn $18.92 per hour—well over twice the minimum wage—to afford a two-bedroom apartment. "In no state," its report says, "can a full-time minimum wage worker afford a one-bedroom or a two-bedroom rental unit at Fair Market Rent." Over one-eighth of the nation’s supply of low income housing has been permanently lost since 2001.

Little wonder so many people are homeless: over 600,000 on any January night in the U.S., tens of thousands of children, tens of thousands of veterans, and one of every five suffering from mental illness. 

4. Hit Them with Fines, Fees and Fleecings 

The poor half of America is victimized by the banking industry, which takes an average of $2,412 each year from underserved households for interest and fees on alternative financial services; by rental centers that charge effective annual interest rates over 100 percent; by payday lenders that charge effective annual interest rates of over 1,000 percent; and by the burgeoning prison industry, which charges prisoners for food, healthcare, phone calls, and even probation monitoring.

On top of all this, bubbly TV personalities rave about all the lottery money just waiting to be taken home. Poor families account for most of the lottery sales. 

5. Criminalize Them 

Matt Taibbi's recently published book The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap contrasts the targeting of the poor for trivial offenses with a tolerance for the architects of billion-dollar financial crimes.

The U.S. court system is flooded with cases for minor infractions, including loitering charges reminiscent of the infamous Black Codes of post-slavery years. The buildup of arrests has added one out of every three U.S. adults to the FBI's criminal database.

The poor are criminalized for lying down or sleeping in public, for sharing food, for having nowhere to go. 
6. Most Insidious: Let Their Children Suffer 

The U.S. has one of the highest relative child poverty rates in the developed world. Almost half of black children under the age of six are living in poverty. Nearly half of all food stamp participants are children. The number of homeless children has risen by 50 percent in less than 10 years.

Early education is certainly part of the solution, for numerous studies have shown that pre-school helps all children to achieve more and earn more through adulthood, with the most disadvantaged benefiting the most. But even though the U.S. ranks near the bottom of developed countries in the percentage of 4-year-olds in early childhood education, Head Start was recently hit with the worst cutbacks in its history.

Meanwhile, public schools in the inner-city are being closed to satisfy the profit urges of the privatizers, who view our children as commodities. Said community organizer Jitu Brown after 50 schools were shut down in Chicago: "It has ripped black communities apart." 
Americans seek reasons for all the violence in our city streets. With so many "disposable" citizens deprived of living-wage jobs, a meaningful education and equal treatment by our system of justice, rebellion in the form of violence is not hard to understand. The privileged members of society would lash out, too, if they were stripped of everything they own and tossed into the streets.


Paul Buchheit is a college teacher, a writer for progressive publications, and the founder and developer of social justice and educational websites (UsAgainstGreed.org, PayUpNow.org, RappingHistory.org)
                                                          ***********

OneLove

:::MME:::

Musings

OneLove 

 :::MME:::

Criminalizing Nonviolent Protest

The security and surveillance state, after crushing the Occupy Movement and eradicating its encampments, has mounted a relentless and largely clandestine campaign to deny public space to any group or movement that might spawn another popular uprising. The legal system has been grotesquely deformed in most cities to, in essence, shut public space to protesters, eradicating our right to free speech and peaceful assembly. The goal of the corporate state is to criminalize democratic, popular dissent before there is another popular eruption. 

-Chris Hedges 

OneLove

:::MME:::

MME's Jam Of The Day

Marvin Gaye's words still ring true today....we really are in bad shape....the levels of disillusionment run  deep across the land with a culture in decay & a political system that’s dysfunctional...so instead of addressing real problems, what do our "leaders" do in our name? Tear apart other countries to get their stuff letting them know who's in charge...all we have left here in the USA are just voices in the wilderness and certain truth-tellers just trying to keep alive some memories of when we had some serious, serious movements and leaders....and artists who impacted our consciousness..like Marvin... 

OneLove 

:::MME:::

Poet's Nook: "What Jesus Said" by Robert Bly

 

 

 

 

 

The wind blows where it likes: that is what

Everyone is like who is born from the wind.

Oh now it’s getting serious. We are the ones

Born from the wind that blows along the plains

And over the sea where no one has a home.

And that Upsetting Rabbi, didn't he say:

‘Take nothing with you, no blanket, no bread.

When evening comes, sleep wherever you are.

And if the owners say no, shake out the dust

From your sandals; leave the dust on their doorstep.’

Don’t hope for what will never come. Give up hope,

Dear friends, the joists of life are laid on the winds

 

 

*****

 

OneLove

 

:::MME:::

When Words Don’t Mean Anything Anymore: Reflections on the Life and Rhetoric of Barack Obama by Paul Street

Nothing mocks disingenuous, power-serving politicians more than their own past words. President Barack Obama is a remarkable case in point.

On the presidential campaign trail in 2007 and 2008, for example, Barack Obama ran on a promise to oversee “the most transparent administration in history,” specifically vowing to shield whistleblowers, whom he praised as “noble” and “courageous.” The Obama administration has waged what many civil libertarians and journalists across the political spectrum have called an unprecedented war on whistleblowers, prosecuting more government leakers under the draconian 1917 Espionage Act than all previous U.S. presidents combined.

As a presidential candidate in 2007 and 2008, Obama promised “real immigration reform” with a clear “path to citizenship” for millions of undocumented Latinas and Latinos living in the U.S. He denounced the George W. Bush administration’s policy of mass deportations. As president, Obama has deported undocumented immigrants at a record rate—more than 2 million people to date. Further cementing his legacy as what some immigrant rights activists call “The Deporter in Chief,” Obama has recently and not for the first time delayed his promise to provide deportation relief for millions of undocumented immigrants.

The only real difference with Bush has been a matter of style. In the final years of his administration, Bush undertook a harsh immigration crackdown replete with provocative military-style raids on U.S. factories and farms. As Obama prefers a stealthier, more behind-the-scenes approach, one that avoids high-profile armed-force assaults but yields a higher rate of family-shattering arrest and expulsion—this while he claims to favor “humane” reform and to be advancing a safe way for “dreamers” (“illegal” immigrants who came to the U.S. as children) to avoid expulsion.


The Green Deception

In 2007 and 2008, presidential candidate Obama repeatedly posed as an environmentalist who was deeply concerned about anthropogenic climate change and determined to reduce carbon emissions. As president, Obama approved the significantly increased extraction and burning of U.S. fossil fuels through hydraulic fracturing, offshore drilling, and other ecocidal practices, praising the hydrocarbon frenzy in the name of so-called national energy independence. He also acted to undermine efforts at binding global carbon emission limits at international climate summits beginning in Copenhagen in the winter of 2009.

At an AFL-CIO Civil, Human and Women’s Rights Conference in 2003, Illinois state senator and U.S. Senate candidate Obama declared his allegiance to single-payer, Canadian style, government-funded health insurance (basically Medicare for All). “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program,” Obama said. “I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its gross national product on health care, cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody…. A single-payer health care plan…that’s what I’d like to see.”

Once elected president, Obama made it his highest domestic policy priority to pass a corporate version of not-so “universal” health insurance “reform.” He excluded single-payer advocates from the national health care reform discussion orchestrated by the White House. His so-called Affordable Health Care Act left the nation’s leading insurance and drug companies in parasitic and massively profitable control of the nation’s absurdly expensive health care system.

What Occupy Made Obama Do

Both as a candidate and as president, Obama has posed as a friend of ordinary working people and an opponent of the harsh socio-economic disparity. He has inveighed against corruption in the nation’s leading financial institutions. He has called the growth of inequality the “defining challenge of our time,” calling it a “fundamental threat to the American dream, our way of life and what we stand for around the globe.” President Obama, however, has been a good friend of the top 1 percent, which has enjoyed 95 percent of the nation’s income gains during his presidency. His Administration has expanded the monumental bailout of hyper-opulent financial overlords and refused to nationalize or break up the nation’s “too-big-to fail” financial behemoths. It pushed through a corporatist health “reform” bill that only the big insurance and drug companies could love, it has cut an auto bailout deal that raided union pension funds, slashed wages, and rewarded capital flight.

It supported a Detroit bankruptcy process that raids municipal workers’ wages and pensions. Consistent with its staffing of key positions by top corporate and financial operatives, it has advanced neoliberal “free trade” agreements (including the current secret negotiations for the richly corporatist and authoritarian Trans Pacific Partnership, TPP, deal). It has pressed forward with the corporate schools privatization agenda, advocated deficit reduction and austerity over and against job creation and social programs, making repeated offers and attempts to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits (in the name of a “grand deficit-slashing bargain” and “entitlement reform”); and refused to advance serious public works programs (green or otherwise) or to act even minimally on behalf of Obama’s campaign promise to champion the re-legalization of union organization (to advance the rapidly abandoned Employee Free Choice Act). In these, and many other ways, Obama has been a shining monument to the reach and power of what Edward S. Herman and David Peterson call “the [nation’s] unelected dictatorship of money.”

Leftists and others who have dared to criticize Obama’s business-friendly actions have been mocked by the Administration as “purists” who “do not live in the real world,” who make “the perfect the enemy of the good” and who fail to grasp the necessity of “compromise” to “get things done.” When the Occupy Movement arose across the country to denounce the extreme over-concentration of U.S. wealth and power in New Gilded Age America, Obama responded by stealing some of Occupy’s language while his Administration engaged in a coordinated federal campaign to dismantle the movement’s many urban encampments. A curious twist on the hope of many naïve liberals and progressives that a “progressive” Obama was just waiting for popular pressure to “make me do it” (New Deal President Franklin Roosevelt’s advice to labor activists in the early 1930s)—the “it” signifying the passage of social-democratic policy. Occupy “made” the president sign off on stealth police state measures to repress a populist rebellion whose rhetoric he found useful in his fake-populist re-election campaign (against Mitt “Mr. 1%” Romney), consistent with the once leftist Christopher Hitchens’s description of the “essence of American politics” as “the manipulation of populism by elitism.”


Heart of Darkness


Last September, Obama tried to justify his launching of a new U.S. war in Iraq and Syria by telling the United Nations that the cruelty of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) “forces us to look into the heart of darkness.” It was an interesting choice of words. Heart of Darkness is the title of Joseph Conrad’s turn-of-the-20th century novel about a “civilized” white ivory trader’s trek down the Congo River into “barbarian” Central Africa. It’s a novel that many critics and readers have found to be fundamentally racist. That’s how young Barack Obama found Conrad’s novel when he was an undergraduate at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

Look at the following passage in Obama’s autobiographical 1995 memoir Dreams From My Father, from a section in which the future US president remembered hanging out with some of fellow Black students:

“the whole first year [at Occidental College] seemed like one long lie, me spending all my energy running around in circles, trying to cover my tracks…Except with Regina, the way she made me feel like I didn’t have to lie. Even that first time we me, the day she walked into the coffee shop and found Marcus giving me grief about my choice of reading material. Marcus had waved her over to our table, rising slightly to pull out a chair.”

“ ‘ Sister Regina,’ Marcus said, ‘You know Barack, don’t you? I’m trying to tell Brother Barack about this racist tract he’s reading.’ He held up a copy of Heart of Darkness, evidence for the court. I reached over to snatch it out of his hands.”

“ ‘Man, stop waving that thing around.’”

“ ‘See there,’ Marcus said, ‘Makes you embarrassed, don’t it – just being seen with a book like this. I’m telling you, man, this stuff will poison your mind.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Damn, I’m late for class.’ He leaned over and pecked Regina on the cheek. ‘Talk to this brother. I think he can still be saved.’”

Regina smiled and shook her head as we watched Marcus stride out the door. ‘Marcus is in one of his preaching moods, I see.’”

“I tossed the book into my backpack. ‘Actually, he’s right,’ I said. ‘It is a racist book. The way Conrad sees it, Africa is the cesspool of the world, black folks are savages, and any contact with them breeds infection.”

“Regina blew on her coffee. ‘So why are you reading it?’”

“ ‘Because it’s assigned.’ I paused, not sure if I should go on. ‘And because – ’”

“ ‘Because…’”

“ ‘And because the book teaches me things,’ I said. ‘About white people, I mean. See, the book’s not really about Africa. Or black people. It’s about the man who wrote it. The European. The American. A particular way of looking at the world. If you can keep your distance, it’s all there, in what’s said and left unsaid. So I read the book to help me understand just what it is that makes white people so afraid. Their demons. The way ideas get twisted around. It helps me understand how people learn to hate” (emphasis added).

“ ‘And that’s important to you.’”

“My life depends on it, I thought to myself. But I didn’t tell Regina that. I just smiled and said, ‘That’s the only way to cure an illness, right? Diagnose it.’ ”

“No Just God”: Speaking of Demons, Fear, Hate and Things Unsaid….

Obama’s rhetoric on behalf of renewed U.S. War in the Middle East this last summer and fall suggests that he remains interested in the exploitation of demons and fear and the selective presentation of facts—things unsaid in connection with a nationally narcissistic and Euro-American view of the world to encourage the majority white U.S. populace to hate officially Evil non-white Others. Besides tarring ISIS with Conrad’s Eurocentric brush, the president proclaimed last August that “No just God would stand for what [ISIS militants]…do every single day.” ISIS, he said, represented “the collapse of any definition of civilized behavior.”

 What about Israel’s recurrent slaughter (with U.S. weapons and ordnance) of hundreds of Palestinian children in Gaza, one of its regular exercises in “mowing the lawn?”


 What about when (as has regularly occurred under Obama) the U.S. bombs a houseful and/or wedding party full of civilians in pursuit of one presidentially targeted “terrorist,” killing dozens in pursuit of a single official enemy?


How about the public beheadings that are routinely carried out for even petty crimes by Saudi Arabia, Washington’s “partner” in its re-escalated war on/of terror? How about the death of more than 500,000 children thanks to U.S.-led “economic sanctions” during the 1990s?
   

How about the open aerial murder (described by former participants as like “shooting fish in a barrel”) of many thousands of surrendered Iraq troops on the “Highway of Death” in February 1991?


How about the killing and maiming of more than a million Iraqis in the course of the monumentally criminal U.S. invasion and occupation of Mesopotamia beginning in March 2003?

What of U.S. assaults on the Iraqi city of Fallujah in the spring and fall of 2004—attacks that (among other horrific things) targeted hospitals and used radioactive ordnance that left “a toxic legacy…worse than Hiroshima” (UK journalist Patrick Cockburn), plaguing the city with an epidemic of child leukemia and birth defects?

Or Obama’s bombing of the Afghan village of Bola Boluk in May 2009? Ninety-three of the dead villagers torn apart by explosives were children.

The Obama administration refused to issue an apology or to acknowledge responsibility. And the Pentagon’s revealing computer designation of ordinary Iraqis certain to be killed in the 2003 invasion as “bug- splat?”

Does any of that and more in the way of murderous and racist U.S. imperial arrogance and criminality make one look into “the heart of darkness?” What “just God” supports that sort of “civilized behavior?” Who will cure the “illness” of racial and imperial demonization and fear-mongering that fuels such dreadful wrongdoing, ghastly transgressions that provide essential context for the rise of the merciless Islamic State (in much the same way that a massive U.S. bombing campaign created the rise of the vicious Khmer Rouge in Cambodia during the early 1970s)?

“What do you think of Western civilization?” a journalist once asked Mahatma Gandhi. “I think it would be a good idea,” the great Indian independence leader replied.

It is unthinkable, of course, that Obama or anyone else in the U.S. political and media establishment would subject U.S. foreign policy to anything like the same moral scrutiny he aims at ISIS. “We lead the world,” candidate Obama explained seven years ago, “in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good…. America is the last, best hope of Earth….. America’s larger purpose in the world is to promote the spread of freedom.”

Obama elaborated in his first Inaugural Address. “Our security,” the president said, “emanates from the justness of our cause; the force of our example; the tempering qualities of humility and restraint”—a fascinating commentary on Fallujah, Hiroshima, the U.S. crucifixion of Southeast Asia, the “Highway of Death” and more.

In the televised address in which he informed the subject U.S. citizenry of his decision (made without any consultation of the populace) to attack Iraq and Syria last September, Obama gave voice to standard “American exceptionalist” doctrine. “America,” the president intoned, “our endless blessings bestow an enduring burden.  But as Americans, we welcome our responsibility to lead.  From Europe to Asia, from the far reaches of Africa to war-torn capitals of the Middle East, we stand for freedom, for justice, for dignity.  These are values that have guided our nation since its founding.”

Millions across the Middle East and the world can be forgiven for taking such words with more than a grain of salt. A world littered by U.S. crimes like the My Lai massacre (a relatively small transgression compared to the broader U.S. “crucifixion of Southeast Asia” [Noam Chomsky’s term at the time] between 1962 and 1975). The “Battles of Fallujah” and the bombing of Bola Boluk is understandably unimpressed with the extent to which U.S. global policies reflect “the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.” It’s for nothing that the U.S. consistently ranks in global opinion surveys as the leading threat to peace and security on the planet. “The Battles We Need to Fight”

Listening to Obama’s announcement of renewed U.S. war in the Middle East last September, I was moved to find then state senator Obama’s half-eloquent speech against then U.S. President George W. Bush’s clear plans to illegally invade Iraq in fall 2002. Here’s a key passage from that oration: “I am opposed to the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income—to distract us from corporate scandals…I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man…. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him…. But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States…. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaida…”

“You want a fight, President Bush?… Let’s fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people, suppressing dissent and tolerating corruption and inequality, and mismanaging their economies so that their youth grow up without education, without prospects, without hope, the ready recruits of terrorist cells. You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s fight to wean ourselves off Middle East oil, through an energy policy that doesn’t simply serve the interests of Exxon and Mobil.”

“Those are the battles that we need to fight. Those are the battles that we willingly join. The battles against ignorance and intolerance. Corruption and greed. Poverty and despair. The consequences of war are dire, the sacrifices immeasurable.”

Here we are 12 years later in the ever more openly plutocratic U.S., where the top hundredth owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent.  Six Walmart heirs possess as much wealth between them as the bottom 42 percent of U.S. residents while 16 million U.S. children live below the federal government’s notoriously inadequate poverty level.  One in seven U.S. citizens rely on food banks for basic nutrition (half of those people are employed, incidentally).  These terrible facts reflect more than three decades of deliberately engineered upward wealth and income distribution: a ruthless state-capitalist concentration of riches and power that has brought us to a New Gilded Age of militantly bipartisan abject oligarchy and (along the way) to the brink of environmental catastrophe.

These savage disparities are heavily racialized. U.S. racial inequality is so steep in the Age of Obama that the median wealth of white U.S. households is 22 times higher than the median wealth of black U.S. households.  The Black joblessness rate remains more than double that of whites. The Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) reports that an astonishing 40 percent of the nation’s Black children are growing up beneath the federal government’s notoriously inadequate poverty level. Roughly 1 in 5 Black and 1 in 7 Hispanic children live in “extreme poverty”—at less than half the poverty measure—compared to just more than 1 in 18 White, non-Hispanic children.

This radical race disparity both reflects and feeds a four- decades-long campaign of racially disparate hyper-incarceration and criminal marking.  More than 40 percent of the nation’s 2.4 million prisoners are Black. One in three black adult males carries the crippling lifelong stigma (what law Professor Michelle Alexander has famously termed “the New Jim Crow”) of a felony record.

And who does President want to “pick a fight” with? Against whom and what does he wish to “battle?” The vicious and amoral “1%”—the scandal-ridden corporate and financial elite that profits from massive inequality, corruption, and endless war at home and abroad while advancing ecological destruction around the world? The big energy corporations that exploit Middle Eastern oil resources and the poison the climate? Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other despotic Middle Eastern states that supply those corporations, host U.S. military bases, and receive giant U.S. military backing? Poverty, despair, and savage, highly racialized economic inequality at home and abroad? Greed? Wall Street corruption? The distraction of the “homeland” populace away from domestic inequalities by diversionary dog-wagging wars abroad? With persistent underlying societal and institutional “homeland” racism?

No. Obama, instead, has launched a fight with a (yes) brutal Middle Eastern enemy that (as Obama said of Saddam Hussein in 2002) “poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States”—a fight that that (to continue with Obama’s words 12 years ago) will “only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm[s]” of the Islamic State and al Qaeda’s many other offshoots. It’s a fight that will only reinforce inequality and repression at home, a regular outcome and bidden purpose behind imperial adventures. Washington’s “partners” in Obama’s war on ISIS include “the Saudis and the Egyptians,” who (more verbiage from Obama’s “antiwar” past) “oppress…their own people, and suppress… dissent, and tolerat[e]…corruption and inequality…so that their youth grow up without education, without prospects, without hope, the ready recruits of terrorist cells.”  Under Obama as under Bush and previous presidents,  Washington’s Sunni “partners” remain important to U.S. planners primarily because of the access they have given to U.S. and multinational oil corporations seeking to exploit and control the Persian Gulf region’s remarkable stock of fossil fuels—the very material whose capitalist over-extraction and burning are pushing the planet past the tipping points of livability.

Obama’s UN Address last September took place in the immediate aftermath of a giant, indeed historic, New York City march for action to stem catastrophic climate change. During his war speech, the president absurdly claimed that the U.S. leads the world in pressing for such action—a curious boast for the planet’s all-time top carbon emitter and the headquarters of corporate Big Carbon’s climate change denial industry.

Last December, Obama advanced some interesting reflections before some friends atop the U.S. business elite at an event called The Wall Street Journal CEO Council. “When you go to other countries.” Obama told a gathering of top business executives, “the political divisions are so much more stark and wider. Here in America, the difference between Democrats and Republicans…we’re fighting inside the 40-yard lines.… People call me a socialist sometimes. But no, you’ve got to meet real socialists. (Laughter)…. I’m talking about lowering the corporate tax rate. My health care reform is based on the private marketplace. The stock market is looking pretty good last time I checked.”

As Danny Klatch commented at Socialist Worker, “It was a touching ruling class moment…a bunch of CEOs were able to sit down with their president…. Together, they shared a good laugh at the idea held by many ordinary people in both parties—that Obama and Corporate America are somehow on different sides.”

Fight racism? Obama has said less about race and racism than any Democratic U.S. president since Franklin Roosevelt. He has continued his longstanding practice of lecturing Black Americans on their own personal and moral responsibility to take advantage of the “endless blessings” bestowed on what he has called “this magical place” (the U.S.).

Taking in the grand Orwellian absurdity of it all, I am reminded of a passage from young Obama’s Dreams From My Father, where Obama recalls the warning he got from an “old black poet” named Frank (in fact, the former U.S. Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis) as he prepared to leave Honolulu and begin college in California: “What had Frank called college? An advanced degree in compromise. I thought back to the last time I had seen the old poet, a few days before I left Hawaii…he had asked me what it was I expected to get out of college. I told him I didn’t know. He shook his big, hoary head. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s the problem, isn’t it? You don’t know. You’re just like the rest of these young cats out here. All you know is college is that college is the next things you’re supposed to do. And all the people who are old enough to know better, who fought all those years for your right to go to college—they’re just so happy to see you there that they won’t tell you the truth. The real price of admission.’”

“And what’s that?”

“ ‘Leaving your race at the door. Leaving your people behind…. Understand something, boy. You’re not going to college to get educated. You’re going there to get trained. They’ll train to want what you don’t need. They’ll train you to manipulate words so they don’t mean anything anymore…. They’ll train you so good, you’ll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit. They’ll give a corner office and invite you to fancy dinners, and tell you you’re a credit to your race….’.”


A Prophetic Warning


Frank Davis’s warning seems more than a little prophetic three decades later. Obama’s ascendancy to the White House depended fundamentally on his “post-racial” campaign and presidency’s calculated determination to leave “race at the door”—a phenomenon that has been amply documented. Equally evident in the empirical record is candidate and president Obama’s formal allegiance—either sincere or disingenuous (my strong guess is the latter)—to “equal opportunity and the American way and all that…” Given the ultimate “corner office” (the Oval Office) by the white ruling class, he has been hailed as a credit if not to his race then certainly to purported remarkable racial progress—as “proof” that racism no longer poses serious obstacles to Black advancement and equality in the supposedly color-blind U.S.

For the purposes of this essay, however, the key phrase in Frank’s warning is “to manipulate words so they don’t mean anything anymore.” Such manipulation has always been at the heart of the Obama phenomenon and presidency. It’s nothing new, of course. It’s long been at the heart of the reigning U.S. major party political culture where very little ever seems to change.

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OneLove

:::MME:::