The Right-wing War on Dissent: Ousted “White Genocide” Professor Speaks

                                                Chauncey DeVega Podcast: Episode 170


With the help of the Republican Party, the right-wing news media, and his legions of followers, President Donald Trump has attempted to silence dissent. Part of this campaign involves a coordinated assault on the concept of critical thinking and those individuals who dare to protest against his policies.

The right-wing assault on the American people and their capacity to resist Donald Trump and his movement has many elements: delegitimizing the free press; harassing and imprisoning political protesters and others who dare to exercise their constitutionally-protected rights of free speech and assembly; creating a malignant alternate universe through propaganda; supporting Christian fascism; cultivating ignorance and stupidity; eliminating restraints on corporate power; destroying the social safety net; growing the culture of cruelty and the surveillance and punishment state; and encouraging violence against liberals, progressives, and any other group or individuals whom conservatives view as "un-American."

Donald Trump and the broader right-wing movement have singled out America's educational system as a particular target of interest. Educated and literate citizens are a bulwark against the type of authoritarianism which afflicts sick and weakened democracies. To that end, across the United States, the right-wing movement is engaging in an expansive campaign of harassment, intimidation and other threats of violence against college professors and other educators they view as "radical" and "dangerous." As envisioned by Trump and his right-wing allies, the American school system should produce drone-like workers who are compliant and efficient, lacking the ability to function as democratically engaged citizens who hold their leaders accountable.

What is it like when the full force of Trump's movement comes crashing down on you? How does the right-wing mob target and mobilize against professors and other educators it views as the enemy? How are racism and white supremacy channeled in the war against American higher education? In an effort to answer these questions, I recently spoke with political scientist George Ciccariello-Maher, currently a visiting scholar at New York University. Ciccariello-Maher was targeted for more than a year by Fox News and other parts of the right-wing echo chamber. This followed a series of comments he made online mocking conservatives' obsession with "white genocide" and calling attention to the connections between toxic white masculinity and mass shootings in America. This outpouring of death threats of murder and other forms of abuse eventually forced Ciccariello-Maher out of his previous tenured position at Drexel University. As Ciccariello-Maher, the tweets that got him in trouble "were really straightforward analytic points about white mass shooters in the United States." [These are] conclusions and observations that are well grounded in research, findings that have had seen thousands of pages of academic and other literature dedicated to them. In other words, white male entitlement and how potentially explosive and dangerous it is. This is not controversial. There are disagreements about some of the dynamics surrounding white men and mass shootings. But my conclusions are not that controversial. Yet my comments were enough in this moment to be turned into a call for violence and harassment against me.   The right-wing mob works as follows:

It begins on Twitter. Then the hate mails start. If you’re a college or university faculty member like myself, maybe you’ll get an email from an administrator or your chair saying, “We’re receiving all these messages.” These things begin to grow and in the worst case scenario what happens is that Fox News makes this into a story and runs with it for days. These faux-scandals and witch hunts are not about just reporting the news. It is about creating, inventing and amplifying this fake news. That’s when the real death threats begin because you now have people watching Fox News, getting all riled up and sending off threatening emails or phone calls.

On this podcast, DeVega cautions the public to remain focused on the real issues instead of being mesmerized by Donald Trump's sexual escapades and other antics. He also highlights the connections between "white trash" and Trump's racist slurs against nonwhite countries and immigrants.

Poet's Nook: "My Revolution Lives In This Body" by Eve Ensler

My revolution begins in the body
It isn’t waiting anymore
My revolution does not need approval or permission
It happens because it has to happen in each neighborhood, village, city or town
at gatherings of tribes, fellow students, women at the market, on the bus
It may be gradual and soft
It may be spontaneous and loud
It may be happening already
It may be found in your closet, your drawers, your gut, your legs, your multiplying cells
in the naked mouth of taut nipples and overflowing breasts
My revolution is swelling from the insatiable drumming between my legs
My revolution is willing to die for this
My revolution is ready to live big
My revolution is overthrowing the state
Of mind called patriarchy
My revolution will not be choreographed although it begins with a few familiar steps.
My revolution is not violent but it does not shy away from the dangerous edges where fierce displays of resistance tumble into something new

My revolution is in this body
In these hips atrophied by misogyny
In this jaw wired mute by hunger and atrocity
My revolution is
Connection not consumption
Passion not profit
Orgasm not ownership
My revolution is of the earth and will come from her
For her, because of her
It understands that every time we frack or drill
Or burn or violate the layers of her sacredness
we violate the soul of our future
My revolution is not ashamed to press my body down
On her mud floor in front
Banyan, Cypress, Pine, Kalyaan, Oak, Chestnut, Mulberry
Redwood, Sycamore trees
To bow shamelessly to shocking yellow birds and rose blue setting skies, heart exploding purple bouganvillea and aqua sea
My revolution gladly kisses the feet of mothers and nurses and servers and cleaners and nannies
And healers and all who are life and give life
My revolution is on its knees
On my knees to every holy thing
And to those who carry empire-made burdens in and on their heads and backs and
hearts
My revolution demands abandon
Expects the original
Relies on trouble makers, anarchists, poets, shamans, seers, sexual explorers
Tricksters, mystic travelers, tightrope walkers and those who go too far and feel
too much,
My revolution shows up unexpectedly
Its not naïve but believes in miracles
Cannot be categorized targeted branded
Or even located
Offers prophecy not prescription
Is determined by mystery and ecstatic joy
Requires listening
Is not centralized though we all know where we’re going
It happens in stages and all at once
It happens where you live and everywhere
It understands that divisions are diversions
It requires sitting still and staring deep into my eyes
Go ahead
Love.

The Useful Idiocy of Donald Trump by Chris Hedges

The problem with Donald Trump is not that he is imbecilic and inept—it is that he has surrendered total power to the oligarchic and military elites. They get what they want. They do what they want. Although the president is a one-man wrecking crew aimed at democratic norms and institutions, although he has turned the United States into a laughingstock around the globe, our national crisis is embodied not in Trump but the corporate state’s now unfettered pillage.

Trump, who has no inclination or ability to govern, has handed the machinery of government over to the bankers, corporate executives, right-wing think tanks, intelligence chiefs and generals. They are eradicating the few regulations and laws that inhibited a naked kleptocracy. They are dynamiting the institutions, including the State Department, that served interests other than corporate profit and are stacking the courts with right-wing, corporate-controlled ideologues. Trump provides the daily entertainment; the elites handle the business of looting, exploiting and destroying.

Once democratic institutions are hollowed out, a process begun before the election of Trump, despotism is inevitable. The press is shackled. Corruption and theft take place on a massive scale. The rights and needs of citizens are irrelevant. Dissent is criminalized. Militarized police monitor, seize and detain Americans without probable cause. The rituals of democracy become farce. This is the road we are traveling. It is a road that leads to internal collapse and tyranny, and we are very far down it.

The elites’ moral and intellectual vacuum produced Trump. They too are con artists. They are slicker than he at selling the lies and more adept at disguising their greed through absurd ideologies such as neoliberalism and globalization, but they belong to the same criminal class and share many of the pathologies that characterize Trump. The grotesque visage of Trump is the true face of politicians such as George W. Bush, Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The Clintons and Obama, unlike Bush and Trump, are self-aware and therefore cynical, but all lack a moral compass. As Michael Wolff writes in “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” the president has “no scruples.” He lives “outside the rules” and is “contemptuous of them.” And this makes him identical to those he has replaced, not different. “A close Trump friend who was also a good Bill Clinton friend found them eerily similar—except that Clinton had a respectable front and Trump did not,” Wolff writes.

Trump, backed by the most retrograde elements of corporate capitalism, including Robert and Rebekah Mercer, Sheldon Adelson and Carl Icahn, is the fool who prances at the front of our death march. As natural resources become scarce and the wealth of the empire evaporates, a shackled population will be forced to work harder for less. State revenues will be squandered in grandiose projects and futile wars in an attempt to return the empire to a mythical golden age. The decision to slash corporate tax rates for the rich while increasing an already bloated military budget by $54 billion is typical of decayed civilizations. Empires expand beyond their capacity to sustain themselves and then go bankrupt. The Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Mayan, Khmer, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires all imploded in a similar fashion. The lessons of history are clear. But the illiterate charlatans who seize power in the dying days of empire know nothing of history. They are driven by a primal and inchoate lust for wealth, one that is never satisfied no matter how many billions they possess.

The elites in dying cultures turn everything into a commodity. Human beings are commodities. The natural world is a commodity. Government and democratic institutions are commodities. All are mined and wrecked for profit. Nothing has an intrinsic value. Nothing is sacred. The relentless and suicidal drive to accumulate greater and greater wealth by destroying the systems that sustain life is idolatry. It ignores the biblical injunction that idols always begin by demanding human sacrifice and end by demanding self-sacrifice. The elites are not only building our funeral pyre, they are building their own.

The elites, lacking a vision beyond satiating their own greed, revel in the intoxicating power to destroy. They confuse destruction with creation. They are agents of what Sigmund Freud calls the death instinct. They find in acts of national self-immolation a godlike power. They denigrate empathy, intellectual curiosity, artistic expression and the common good, virtues that sustain life. They celebrate a hyper-individualism embodied in celebrity, wealth, hedonism, manipulation and the ability to dominate others. They know nothing of the past. They do not think about the future. Those around them are temporarily useful to their aims and must be flattered and rewarded but in the end are ruthlessly cast aside. There is no human connection. This emotional numbness lies at the core of Trump’s personality.

“[Stephen] Bannon described Trump as a simple machine,” Wolff writes. “The On switch was full of flattery, the Off switch full of calumny. The flattery was dripping, slavish, cast in ultimate superlatives, and entirely disconnected from reality: so-and-so was the best, the most incredible, the eternal. The calumny was angry, bitter, resentful, ever a casting out and closing of the iron door.”

The elites in a dying culture confuse what the economist Karl Polanyi calls “real” and “fictitious” commodities. A commodity is a product manufactured for sale. The ecosystem, labor and money, therefore, are not commodities. Once these fictitious commodities are treated as real ones for exploitation and manipulation, Polanyi writes, human society devours itself. Workers become dehumanized cogs. Currency and trade are manipulated by speculators, wreaking havoc with the economy and leading to financial collapse. The natural world is turned into a toxic wasteland. The elites, as the society breaks down, retreat into protected enclaves where they have access to security and services denied to the wider population. They last longer than those outside their gates, but the tsunami of destruction they orchestrate does not spare them.

As long as Trump serves the interests of the elites he will remain president. If, for some reason, he is unable to serve these interests he will disappear. Wolff notes in the book that after his election there was “a surprising and sudden business and Wall Street affinity for Trump.” He went on: “An antiregulatory White House and the promise of tax reform outweighed the prospect of disruptive tweeting and other forms of Trump chaos; besides, the market had not stopped climbing since November 9, the day after the election.”

The Russia investigation—launched when Robert Mueller became special counsel in May and which appears to be focused on money laundering, fraud and shady business practices, things that have always characterized Trump’s financial empire—is unlikely to unseat the president. He will not be impeached for mental incompetence, over the emoluments clause or for obstruction of justice, although he is guilty on all these counts. He is useful to those who hold real power in the corporate state, however much they would like to domesticate him.

Trump’s bizarre ramblings and behavior also serve a useful purpose. They are a colorful diversion from the razing of democratic institutions. As cable news networks feed us stories of his trysts with a porn actress and outlandish tweets, the real work of the elites is being carried out largely away from public view. The courts are stacked with Federalist Society judges, the fossil fuel industry is plundering public lands and the coastlines and ripping up regulations that protected us from its poisons, and the Pentagon, given carte blanche, is engaged in an orgy of militarism with a trillion-dollar-a-year budget and about 800 military bases in scores of countries around the world.

Trump, as Wolff describes him in the book, is clueless about what he has unleashed. He is uninterested in and bored by the complexities of governance and policy. The faster Trump finds a member of the oligarchy or the military to take a job off his hands the happier he becomes. This suits his desires. It suits the desires of those who manage the corporate state. For the president there is only one real concern, the tumultuous Trump White House reality show and how it plays out on television. He is a creature solely concerned with image, or more exactly his image. Nothing else matters.

“For each of his enemies—and, actually, for each of his friends—the issue for him came down, in many ways, to their personal press plan,” Wolff writes of the president. “Trump assumed everybody wanted his or her fifteen minutes and that everybody had a press strategy for when they got them. If you couldn’t get press directly for yourself, you became a leaker. There was no happenstance news, in Trump’s view. All news was manipulated and designed, planned and planted. All news was to some extent fake—he understood that very well, because he himself had faked it so many times in his career. This was why he had so naturally cottoned to the ‘fake news’ label. ‘I’ve made stuff up forever, and they always print it,’ he bragged.”

Yes, the elites wish Trump would act more presidential. It would help the brand. But all attempts by the elites to make Trump conform to the outward norms embraced by most public officials have failed. Trump will not be reformed by criticism from the establishment. Republican Sens. Jeff Flake of Arizona and Bob Corker of Tennessee, who denounced Trump, saw their approval ratings plummet and have decided not to run for re-election. Trump may have public approval of only 39 percent overall, but among Republicans the figure is 78 percent. And I don’t think those numbers will decrease.

The inability of the political establishment and the press to moderate or reform Trump’s egregious behavior is rooted in their loss of credibility. The press, along with political and intellectual elites, spent decades championing economic and political policies that solidified corporate power and betrayed and impoverished American workers. The hypocrisy and mendacity of the elites left them despised and distrusted by the victims of deindustrialization and austerity programs. The attempt to restore civility to public discourse and competency to political office is, therefore, fruitless. Liberal and establishment institutions, including the leadership of the two main political parties, academia and the press, squandered their moral authority. And the dogged refusal by the elites to address the engine of discontent—social inequality—ensures that they will remain ineffectual. They lay down the asphalt for the buffoonery of Trump and the coming tyranny.

Human

What is it that makes us human? Is it the ability to love? Is it because we are able to show different emotions and express different feelings? Is it how we join religious groups and how we fight for the ideologies that we believe?

Filmmaker Yann Arthus-Bertrand wanted to understand why humans are different to other living beings, so he spent three years collecting stories from thousands of men and women from 60 different parts of the world. The stories capture the realities of life: sexual identity, anger, poverty, war, love, happiness, and the plethora of emotions that human beings experience.

When it comes to love, every person seems to have his or her own definition and each definition is based on a person’s story. The situations he or she has experienced and endured influences what love means to them. For some, love is sex but for others it goes way beyond that and it means service in the good times and the bad times. Is it possible to be deeply in love with more than one person at the same time? Does the gender of the person we fall in love with matter? And do the rest of us who are called ‘straight’ have the right to judge those who are homosexuals?

What causes wars? Are all the killings and the hatred really inevitable? When one takes a look at the decisions that are made by politicians—decisions that deliberately place the lives of innocent people in danger—one has to wonder whose interests are being protected. The shock of seeing the lifeless bodies of loved ones lying on the floor in pools of blood is hard to forget.

Where does one find happiness? Is it something that only the privileged can enjoy? Is it possible to live in joy and acceptance in spite of difficult circumstances? Is it true that our level of gratitude is directly proportional to our level of happiness?

As you listen to the stories you can’t help but take a look deep inside. Some of the testimonies are funny, some are heartwarming, while others are filled with pain and hurt. A few of them seem far removed from our reality and are hard to identify with. Yet these are their stories— their true stories—and they have the power to move our souls.

What is it that makes us human? It’s more, much more. 

Poet's Nook: "There Will Come Soft Rains" by Sara Teasdale

.

(War Time)

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, 
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone. 

As America becomes a more harsh, divisive & militaristic society, I can't help but be more worried about our collective fate on this planet. Daily we are bombarded by all sorts of distractions while the world rots. This poem & *Ray Bradbury-inspired video highlights our likely fate if we don't make a sudden, life- affirming & long-overdue shift in our consciousness.

*Ray Bradbury was inspired by this poem to write a short story in his highly lauded The Martian Chronicles which you can quickly read here.

How the Republicans Helped Trump Steal the Election by Greg Palast

Believe me, the last damn thing I wanted to do was make an update of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.

But you gave me no choice.

The original film, released in 2016, told you in cold terms: "Trump's going to win and he's going to win by stealing it."

But did you listen?

No, MSNBC reported that "Trump has no path to 270," and they bought their party dresses for Clinton's inaugural.

Well, the 2 million who saw the film got it -- and Truthout readers of my columns got it. But that left 120 million American voters who actually believe Trump won, and marched like sheep to the Trump Casino to be sheered.

So, here's the skinny: Trump lost not just the popular vote, but also the vote in key swing states -- that is, if you counted all the ballots cast and allowed the blocked and purged voters to vote.

How? Well, that's why I made a new edition to the film, to lay it out cold. And why I tramped through the snows of Michigan and Wisconsin and beyond to explain exactly what happened. The result was the updated film, just released, with a new sub-title: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: The Case of the Stolen Election.

Take Michigan. Trump officially won the state by 10,700 voters. But dig this: 75,355 ballots were never counted.   

Like, huh? Not counted? Yes. Michiganders vote on these ridiculous paper ballots that old machines have a hard time reading. And critically, 87 machines simply broke down and didn't count the votes at all.

And where were these uncounted ballots and broken machines? I found them in Detroit and Flint, Michigan -- two majority-Black cities. Do you think those 75,355 ballots in Detroit and Flint were Trump ballots?

So, why broken machines? As I explain in the update, Detroit and Flint went bankrupt -- and so the budgets of those cities were taken over by "managers" appointed by the violently Republican governor. Detroit's manager was told the machines would break in advance of the election. That the machines were old and couldn't read all the ballots if marked with red pens or if folks put an "X" instead of filling in a bubble.

But there's a marvelous machine that can read those uncounted ballots: the human eye. And that is why Jill Stein called for a "recount" -- which was actually a count of the ballots previously "spoiled" and uncounted. Trump's lawyers stopped the recount because he was losing. 

And as I illustrate in the film, almost 3 million ballots were disqualified for cockamamie reasons, like not filling in the bubble.

Whose votes get thrown in the ballot dumpster? According to the US Civil Rights Commission, the chance your vote will be disqualified is 900 percent higher if you're Black than if you're white.

Do the math. Trump would have lost Ohio, North Carolina, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania ... the list goes on ... if not for the "spoilage" game and blocking legit voters from the polls.

The documentary has special extra reports from Michigan and Georgia -- where the trick that was key to Trump's vote heist also swiped the special election in Georgia's Sixth Congressional District for the GOP.

And that new trick? It's called, "Interstate Crosscheck" and it's run by Trump's vote-thief-in-chief Kris Kobach, secretary of state for Kansas. The mainstream media discovered Kobach and Crosscheck only after the election. 

No reporter confronted Kobach with the evidence of his scheme -- except this reporter, working for Rolling Stone. (You will see that confrontation in the film.)

And yet, the mainstream media still don't get it. Crosscheck wiped out the registration of 1.1 million folks.

The updated film also includes Trump's appointment of Kobach to his witch-hunting group called, "The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity" -- now disbanded and reformed within the Department of Homeland Security.And whose money is behind Kobach? Me and my chief investigator Leni Badpenny run the money trail back through half a dozen front groups to the Koch brothers.

So, be afraid. Be very afraid of what Kobach is up to now. Unfortunately, it's not just a movie; this horror show is for real.

Plus, I had to tell you how those billionaires made out who bought the election for Trump. (No, Trump's not a billionaire; he just plays one on TV.) And they did fine, indeed.

So that's why I had no choice but to update The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and give it a new subtitle: The Case of the Stolen Election. 

Some folks ask, How much of an update? Oh, say, 15 percent of the film -- and the extras are all new. No more was needed because, sadly, we figured out the trickery well before the election.

Whiteness and Working Folks by Ron Jacobs

White supremacy is the foundation of the US economic and political system. The slave trade, the use of slave labor and the breeding of humans for sale like livestock created the capital that created the empire. Those who owned slaves did not only own the means of production, they were also the owners of real property, useful in terms of measuring wealth and providing collateral to procure more property. The social and cultural context for what can only be considered a crime against humanity was created and maintained by religion, media, schools and entertainment. The rulers—from the wealthiest folks on Wall Street to the politicians in Washington and down to the managers of businesses large and small—have understood this fact at a level so innate to their social being it is rarely questioned. The assumptions of racial inequality existing even today among an unfortunately large minority of the US population influence the very nature of our society. As recent history seems to prove, this is the case no matter who is in power, Democrat or Republican, Black man or white man.

Given the insidious and complex nature of the relationship between white supremacy and capitalism in the United States, organizing workers has almost always required dealing with white workers’ racism. Indeed, certain labor unions refused membership to non-white workers well into the 1970s. This refusal made it virtually impossible for those workers to find work at a union wage. In turn, it provided a ready-made pool of strikebreakers/scabs. If a strike did occur, the non-white workers would cross the picket lines with very few qualms given the racist practices of the union. That scenario is played out on a grander level today in the conversation that claims non-white immigrants take jobs from US workers. Although most of the politicians and pundits making that claim rarely include the nature of the skin color of those US workers, it is commonly understood that the US workers being discussed are primarily white.

Naturally, there is much written about this subject from across the political spectrum. Unashamed white supremacists make it clear that white men are the ones deserving of the benefits the US capitalism offers. Liberals maintain that US capitalism can insure that all races and genders can be the recipients of those ballyhooed benefits. Those on the left tell their audience that it is only through struggle against capitalism that all working people can benefit. Even on the left however there is debate about the role racism plays in the exploitation of working people. This debate is often framed in terms of race versus class. In other words, should labor organizers organize strictly along class lines and ignore how white supremacist appeals to white workers are used to divide the working class?

It is the opinion of numerous organizers, scholars and activists on the left that this question is based on a false dichotomy. Like the late African American activist and scholar Roderick Bush said to me in a 2006 interview: ““race or class” is or should be a non-issue, …race and class are inextricably intertwined.” He goes on to quote Black socialist Hubert Harrison: ‘”Class-consciousness must be learned, but race consciousness is inborn and cannot be wholly unlearned. . . .”’ Essentially agreeing with Bush is David Roediger, the author of the recently published Class, Race and Marxism, who is best known for his writing on the creation of the concept of “whiteness” and its use by those in power.

Roediger’s latest book is a collection of six essays. These essays discuss the nexus where race, class and capital collide. In discussing this nexus, Roediger argues that there cannot be a successful radical anti-capitalist movement that does not destroy white supremacy, nor can a movement seeking the destruction of white supremacy hope for success unless it is also a class struggle. Indeed, Martin Luther King, Jr. once stated, “We must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as ‘right to work.’ It is a law to rob us of our civil rights and job rights …” In other words, the connection between white supremacy and capitalist exploitation is as clear as the amount of money one sees on their paycheck. In a related manner, Jesse Jackson told audiences during his 1984 presidential campaign that his campaign was not just about jobs, but jobs with good pay and dignity. After all, he would continue, all the Black folks had jobs under slavery.

The writing in this book is in a scholarly vein. Roediger takes the reader through history, inspired greatly by the works of WEB DuBois, CLR James and George Rawick. He quickly diminishes the claim that he should be considered one of the founders of what are called “whiteness studies.” In doing so, he draws the line back to DuBois and James along with other Black writers. Interspersing his personal remembrances with objective history, Roediger guides the reader through various discussions and debates on the subject of Black nationalism, white supremacy, labor organizing, and differences of opinion among leftists regarding all of the above. His incisive language is both analytical and quite readable. In his history lessons, the reader is shown just how completely the doctrine of white supremacy is woven into the American mythology of exceptionalism and fortune.

A recently written book by Jeannine Fletcher titled The Sin of White Supremacy discusses the essential role Christianity played in the development of white supremacy. The text also argues that white supremacy will not be destroyed until the idea of Christian supremacy is also tossed into the dustbin of history. The current political situation in the US where millions of Christians support an openly racist billionaire president provides a graphic example of how this religious, political and economic combination manifests. David Roediger’s writing in Class, Race and Marxism assumes a similar take in his discussion of just how necessary white racism is to the perpetuation of US capitalism. Conversely, it provides some powerful insight into how destroying white supremacy is one of keys to defeating capitalism (and vice versa.)

America’s Painful Self-delusion by Allen Marshall

America is the only nation brought forth by a set of beliefs, and those beliefs, captured so eloquently in our founding documents, are some of the most powerful and inspiring ever conceived. We consider this to be the land of the free, where the individual is supreme and nothing prevents us from going as far as our talents can take us. That image of America – that “brand” – is incredibly strong.

However, there’s a very large gap between that long-held image and the reality of America today. What was once a government built for the people is now a government run for the rich and powerful, one that throws the people under the bus whenever their interests differ from those of the corporate and political leaders who run the show.

And living in one world (the corrupt) while stubbornly believing you live in another (the ideal), despite mounds of evidence, causes a distinct kind of stress, often called cognitive dissonance.

Psychologists suggest that when people are in a state of cognitive dissonance, they’ll search for a way to resolve it, either by rejecting one view or the other as either wrong or unimportant. If you’re a smoker looking at the link between smoking and cancer, for example, you’ll either quit smoking or decide that the research is biased, wrong, or doesn’t apply (in other words, that you’re smart enough to quit before the long-term damage is done).

But what happens if you can’t resolve the two?

For most of us Americans, resolving our cognitive dissonance would mean either accepting that we’re impotent and living futile (and feudal) lives, or rejecting our lifestyles and actively fighting the rot in the system. If we’re not willing to do either of those, the dissonance stays – and eats at us.

People carrying this kind of ongoing, underlying stress find ways of coping with it; in America we’re doing it with self-medication, compulsive behaviors and distractions. Consider the following examples of the way we cope with the ever-present stress in our lives:

• Drugs – Our country is awash in drugs, both legal and illegal, that keep us numb. In 2014, there were 245 million prescriptions filled for opioid pain relievers. The number of deaths from drug overdoses has risen from around 30,000 in 2005 to 64,000 in 2016. And communities across the country are being devastated by the opioid epidemic, as explained in this in-depth reporting by Cincinnati.com.
• Drinking – People don’t only use drugs to self-medicate; drinking does the trick as well, and we’re doing a lot more of it than we used to. According to a new study in JAMA Psychiatry, overall drinking in the US increased by 11% between 2002-13, while high-risk and problem drinking rose even higher: high-risk drinking rose by 29.9%, while problem drinking rose by 50%.
• Mental Illness – In 2015, 17.9% of adults held a diagnosis for a mental disorder, while a 2010 study found that 46.3% of children ages 13-18 had a mental disorder at some point in their young lives, and the majority of those adults and children are given prescriptions. This includes a dramatic increase in ADHD diagnoses for children: According to SharpBrains, “Among children aged 5 to 18, between 1991-92 and 2008-09, rates of ADHD diagnosis increased nearly 4-fold among boys – from 39.5 to 144.6 per 1000 – and nearly 6-fold for girls – from 12.3 and 68.5 per 1000 visits.”
• Obesity – If drinking and drugs aren’t your thing – or even if they are – more of us are coping with stress by overeating, and it’s showing up on our waistlines. From 1990 to 2016, the average percentage of obese adults increased from 11.1% to 29.8%; when you add in the number of people who are overweight but not obese, it rises to more than two in three adults.
• Sleeping problems – Sleep has a significant impact on our physical and mental health, and in America we’re not getting enough of it: The CDC states that 50-70 million American adults have a sleep or wakefulness disorder.
• Media Usage – Is there any better distraction from life’s problems than media? We certainly spend a lot of our time being passively entertained: In 2016, Americans consumed an average of 10 hours of media per day, compared with 7.5 hours per day globally. Nielson reports that lower income adults spend much more time with media than do affluent adults, with adults in households with include under $25,000 watching 211 hours/month of television, versus 113 hours/month for adults in households earning $75,000 or more. (The trend is similar across other media as well.)
• The Disease of Debt – According to the New York Fed, household debt reached a new peak in the third quarter of 2017, at $12.8 trillion. Part of our debt problem comes from the compulsive shopping we do as a distraction; the other results from denying the reality that our wages aren’t keeping up with the increase in the cost of living, meaning that we use debt to plug the gap rather than reducing our living standards to align with our reality.

We’re collectively doing so much damage to ourselves, solely to protect our psyches from the reality that the America that used to be is no longer the America we have. And who does that help? As you can see from the points above, it doesn’t help us: Instead, it helps the rich and powerful who are subverting the system. They’re corrupting everything this country once was, and by willfully refusing to acknowledge that reality, we’re inadvertently helping them to do it.

The best thing we can do – for our mental and physical health, as well as for our country – is to open our eyes to what America has become, not what we wish it still was. It’s time to face reality and take action.

Revolt Against The Shallow Deadliness Of Our Corn Syrup Nation by Rivera Sun

Reject the glossy and sensational for the gritty and educational. Wean your mind from corn syrup and eat your vegetables. We have become a diabetic, cancerous, obese, depressed, anxiety attack ridden culture from the consumption of glitter-sugary corn syrup politics, sound-bite news, vacuous entertainment, and catch-phrase economics. We are commercialized right down to our souls from our mega-churches to our worship of wealth to our brand cults. It is killing us and our world.

Mega-corporations are watching us with horrified fascination as we become the sugar-and-sex addicted lab rats in their button-pushing experiments. Online buying is a quick hit of the primal rush of acquisition hard-wired into humanity from the days of hunting and gathering. Now triggered with a click, we feed this addiction with thousands of clicks per day. We are jittery, strung-out, nervous wrecks. We are as destructive as any addict, recklessly obsessed.

We are zombies of consumption, mindlessly craving the next buzz created by a clever catch-phrase, a sound-bite, an instant download, a one-click buy. This way of life is unsustainable. Worse, it’s soulless.

We are losing our humanity, those qualities that make our species remarkable: intelligence, reflection, compassion, connection, wisdom, creativity, and so much more. The whale surpasses us in altruism. The dolphin rises over our average intelligence. The memory of migratory species surpasses ours – few humans could trek from Canada to Mexico, let alone survive a week in the so-called wilderness. We excel at destructiveness, hoarding, and greed. And, while beavers also alter their environments, no species comes close to causing the types of massive environmental destruction as we do.

Humans possess the capacities to change our world, but we must activate and exercise them for life-enhancing change. We must wean ourselves off the shallowly consumptive corn syrup lives of instant gratification and continuous pleasure. We must restore our health, increase our awareness, apply our intelligence, access our fortitude and determination, and use these strengths to create a way of life that has a future on this planet.

And no one can do this for you. It is the lonely effort of millions, one non-click at a time, one news channel choice at a time, one non-purchase at a time. It is one hour spent in connection instead of consumption. It is one vacuous entertainment replaced with something that contains meaning and depth. It is one moment of mindless pleasure-seeking released in favor of cultivating awareness. This is the path of waking up, of snapping out of sleepwalking before you tumble off a cliff.

Once your eyes are open, look around. The whole culture is stumbling toward catastrophe. Shake the person next to you. Wake up your neighbors. Snatch your children back from disaster.

Take the corn syrup out of your diet of news, media, entertainment, social interactions, purchases, and more. Eat your vegetables of depth and meaning, knowledge, reflection, discourse, presence and awareness. A revolution is inner, outer, and utter, or else it fails to meet its full potential. Do your inner work … the personal is political because the political is getting personal. We need change on every level. Revolt against the shallow deadliness of our corn syrup nation. Take back your soul … and then let’s take back our country.

What is a “Shithole Country” and Why is Trump So Obsessed With Haiti? by Mark Schuller

Unforgivable: Revolt against White Supremacy which Haiti is still paying for

On Thursday, the day before the eighth anniversary of the earthquake in Haiti that killed at least 230,000 people, President Trump called Haiti – as well as a single, undifferentiated “Africa” – “shithole countries.”

Of course, the president’s first impulse was to deny the statement, just as he had denied the statement made public through an anonymous source to the New York Times that “all Haitians have AIDS.”

Triggering the conversation is his administration’s denial of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for 58,000 people from Haiti currently living in the U.S., some for as much as thirty years.

His comments speak to the callous attitude of an individual that feels no accountability, who thinks he can rewrite history as is convenient. Senator Durbin (D-IL) confirmed that indeed 45 had spoken these “hate filled words” many times in a conversation about immigration policy, that Trump has been actively sabotaging despite an apparent deal with Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ) for his “yes” vote on Trump’s tax plan.

It would be unfortunate if the media were to exceptionalize Trump’s comments as the latest gaffe from an individual too accustomed to bullying people on Twitter, recently claiming that his “nuclear button” is bigger than North Korea’s. The comments are also indicative of an unchallenged white supremacy that has unfortunately been allowed to fester in our society. It is more useful to see this as an open expression of often hidden feelings, unresolved cultural aftershocks of the institution of plantation slavery that our nation has to deal with head on and with courage and honesty.

As Haitian literature professor Regine Jean-Charles has written, she was not surprised by the comments, as “evidence of a brand of racism that has always been present in U.S. society, which since the 2016 campaign has been fanned into virulent flame.”

What is behind Trump – and white America’s – obsession with Haiti?

Haiti has been targeted for its decisive role in challenging what Southern planters – including eight U.S. Presidents – called a “peculiar institution.” The Haitian Revolution was the first time slaves were able to permanently end slavery and forge an independent nation. It also was a tipping point in U.S. history, leading to the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, paving the way for U.S. “Manifest Destiny” stretching from sea to shining sea and eventual dominance. Chicago, the country’s third largest city, was founded by a Haitian, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, who Haitian historian Marc Rosier called an “agent” of the Haitian government to pursue a pro-freedom international policy.

Haiti’s contribution to U.S. “greatness” has long been unacknowledged. The pivotal Haitian Revolution was literally “unthinkable,” as Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillotargued. The demonization of Haiti was so strong, its inspiration to slaves so dangerous, that Congress imposed a gag order in 1824, preventing the word Haiti from being uttered in Congress, a year after the imperialist Monroe Doctrine.

White supremacy was not defeated in the Appatomox Court House in 1865, nor the 13^th Amendment that allowed for a back-door legalization of slavery, nor in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling, nor in the 1965 Voting Rights Act following “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, nor in the 2008 election of the first African American President.

Through it all, as Haitian anthropologist Gina Athena Ulysse analyzed, Haiti has served as the “bête noir” in a deliberate smear campaign against the descendants of the people who said no to white supremacy.

These narratives of Haiti continued throughout the initial response to the 2010 earthquake, from the likes of televangelist Pat Robertson and the New York Times’ David Brooks. As New Yorker contributing writer Doreen St. Felix pointed out, this obsession with Haiti has to do with white society’s rejection of black self-determination.

These discourses have definite and powerful material consequences.

France, which in 2001 declared slavery a “crime against humanity,” extorted 150 million francs from Haiti as a condition of recognition of Haitian independence, plunging Haiti into a 120-year debt that consumed up to 80% of Haiti’s tax base. Socialist president Jacques Chirac scoffed at Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s demand for reparations before being the first to call for his resignation in 2004.

Calling Haiti “ungovernable” provided justification for U.S. intervention: The United States invaded Haiti twenty-six times from 1849 to 1915, when U.S. Marines landed and occupied the country for nineteen years. During the U.S. Occupation, the Marines set up the modern army, opened up land for foreign ownership, solidified class and racial inequality, laying the groundwork for the 1957-1971 Duvalier dictatorship.

Incorrectly blaming Haiti for its role in the AIDS epidemic killed the tourist industry, which, along with the deliberate destruction of Haiti’s pig population, sent the economy in a nosedive. Neoliberal capitalist interests seized the opportunity to take advantage of the massive rural exodus to build sweatshops, exploiting people’s misery by offering the lowest wages in the world. With poverty wages, and a crippling foreign debt that according to the IMF’s own recordkeeping went to the paramilitary tonton makout, Port-au-Prince’s shantytowns had no services and no government oversight. These foreign interventions were the main killer in the 2010 earthquake.  

Fearing Haitians as “looters” or the other familiar racist scribes, and calling Haiti a “failed state” led to the invisibility of Haitian people’s heroic first response, and also to the complete exclusion of Haitian state and non-state actors in rebuilding their own country and providing aid. Bill Clinton co-chaired the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission, making decisions about aid, and humanitarian aid was coordinated in a UN Logistics Base, where Haitian people were excluded by foreign soldiers responsible for the cholera epidemic that killed almost 10,000 people or the English language of the meetings. Nongovernmental organizations reproduced a top-down, hierarchical structure that excluded people living in the camps from decisions. These humanitarian aftershocks led to, among other consequences, the breakup of Haitian families and increasing violence against women.

Calling the world’s beacon of freedom a “shithole” sullies not only Haiti’s ten million residents on the island and three million in the U.S., but is an affront to human freedom and equality.

As award-winning Haitian author Edwidge Danticat argued, “today we mourn. Tomorrow we fight.”