Poet's Nook: "poems about police violence" by June Jordan

/

Tell me something
what you think would happen if
everytime they kill a black boy
then we kill a cop
everytime they kill a black man
then we kill a cop
you think the accident rate would lower subsequently?

. . . I lose consciousness of ugly bestial rapid
and repetitive affront as when they tell me
18 cops in order to subdue one man
18 strangled him to death in the ensuing scuffle
(don’t you idolize the diction of the powerful: subdue
and scuffle my oh my) and that the murder
that the killing of Arthur Miller on a Brooklyn
street was just a “justifiable accident” again
(Again)

People been having accidents all over the globe
so long like that I reckon that the only
suitable insurance is a gun
I’m saying war is not to understand or rerun
war is to be fought and won

sometimes the feeling like amaze me baby
blots it out/the bestial but
not too often

tell me something
what you think would happen if
everytime they kill a black boy
then we kill a cop
everytime they kill a black man
then we kill a cop
you think the accident rate would lower subsequently

Theory of Everything: God, Devils, Dimensions, Dragons, Illusion & Reality

 

The Theory of Everything covers sensitive topics such as Evolution, Time, Space, Dimensions, Quantum Physics, Measurement Problem, Synthetic Universe, Digital Universe, Holographic Universe, Big Bang theory, Multi-universe / Multiverse theory, Darwin theory, and even ancient texts / Prophecy that line up eerily with modern scientific knowledge. This is a journey through the blurry lines between science and spiritual - buckle up & be dazzled!

Tobe Nwigwe :The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

 

Adrienne Maree Brown: Octavia Butler’s Visions of the Future Have Transformed Generation of Readers

 

 

The visionary Black science-fiction writer Octavia Butler died 15 years ago on February 24, 2006, but her influence and readership has only continued to grow since then. In September, Butler’s novel “Parable of the Sower” became her first to reach the New York Times best-seller list. In this short but riveting interview, Amy Goodman talks to Adrienne Maree Brown, a writer and Octavia Butler scholar, who says Butler had a remarkable talent for universalizing Black stories. “She wrote about Black women and about Black feminism, about Black futures, but she wrote in a way that appealed to all human beings,” says brown.

Social Media Is Traumatizing Us More Than We Realize by Stephanie Barne

 

 

Disturbing headlines aren’t new ― but thanks to social media, we’re more exposed to them than ever.

From uninterrupted streaming of the Capitol riot in Washington, D.C., to videos of police mistreating Black and brown people to updates about the rising COVID-19 death toll, we’re constantly bombarded with doom. Social media provides the perfect space for any and everyone to share the latest information (and misinformation), as well as analysis. There’s no break.

On balance, we think we can handle it because we’re not breaking down every time we spot another tragedy in our news feed. But is this actually a sign we’re OK or is it really an indication that we’re hurting more than we realize?

According to experts, consuming this constant stream of negative information can be traumatic.

Katie Day Good, an assistant professor of strategic communication at Miami University and the author of “Bring the World to the Child: Technologies of Global Citizenship in American Education,” said social media can be a double-edged sword when it comes to understanding tragedy or humanitarian crises. While these platforms can help us to better understand issues plaguing others and “prompt us to adopt behaviors and advocate for policy solutions that bring positive change,” there is also the issue of becoming impervious to tragedy because we see so much of it, she explained.

“Social media can desensitize us to tragedies by presenting us with too much information, information taken out of context, misinformation or disinformation (information designed to deceive),” she said.

And since we don’t always have enough time to digest one story before another breaks, we can sometimes end up feeling emotionally numb, helpless and immobile. This typically happens when our survival mechanisms are triggered. Grace Dowd, an Austin, Texas-based psychotherapist, compares this phenomenon to the “boiling frog” fable.

“If you want to boil a frog, you do not put it straight into a boiling pot of water because it will jump out. But if you put the frog in a pot of water and slowly raise the temperature, the frog will stay in the pot because it fails to notice the gradual change over time,” she said.

“We have become desensitized to situations that in other times would seem outrageous or unimaginable,” she continued. “Our constant access to social media and the news plays into this by continuing to provide access to information to the point where it no longer becomes shocking, and also by taking our attention away with the next crisis.”

More insidious ways our current social media climate affects us

It’s not just desensitization that’s cause for concern. There are a handful of other ways this particular moment in social media can impact us. Here’s how:

Constant doomscrolling can rewire our nervous system.

According to Mary Joye, a licensed mental health counselor and certified trauma professional in Florida, our fight, flight or freeze stress response gets activated when we look at bad news, whether we’re aware of it or not. Then, our system “releases stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol,” Joye said.

And the more we engage in this cycle, the more it hurts us ― sometimes even to the point where our bodies and brains immediately have a reaction as soon as we log on.

“Repetition of [bad news and images] does damage to us through vicarious trauma,” Joye said. “Much like a trauma survivor who has become hypervigilant and scans the world for danger, the doomscroller is also looking for negative events.”

When we’re doomscrolling, our brains begin processing the world as “an unsafe place, which is one of many symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder,” Joye explained. “It can cause us to be irritable, territorial, shut down or shut others out ― and all of these are also trauma responses.”

It may lead to less empathy for others.

Joye said that social media can contribute to making humans less empathetic toward each other thanks to desensitization and anonymity.

“People make comments online they would never say in front of someone. If they do this continually, they will begin to become less empathetic and compassionate in real life,” Joye said.

Excessive doomscrolling can lead to mood swings, loss of appetite and even cardiovascular issues.

 According to Sam Nabil, CEO and lead therapist for Naya Clinics, too much exposure to gloomy, hateful and bleak content can lead to the elevation of cortisol levels in the body, which will result in a downward shift in your mood.

This also “contributes to mental health conditions, loss of appetite, sleep issues, and increases your risk of hypertension and developing other cardiovascular disease.”

How to reduce your doom consumption while still staying informed

If you’re looking to curb your social media usage, there are a few things you can do. But first, you need to acknowledge there’s an issue.

“Awareness is always the first step to changing a behavior,” said Lin Sternlicht, a therapist and co-founder of Family Addiction Specialist based in New York City. “An individual must become aware of the negative impact that doomscrolling is having on their life, and then have a desire to want to change their habit.”

Here’s how to make that change without missing out on crucial current events:

Create limits for yourself.

“We need to monitor our online time and set clear boundaries as to when and how long we are accessing news,” said Steven Crawford, the medical director at Pathlight Mood and Anxiety Center in Baltimore. “Historically, there were traditional news broadcasts that were time-limited. Now there is an endless barrage of news available anytime, anywhere. It is left to us to establish these boundaries on our own, which can be particularly difficult during a pandemic and quarantine when it often seems there is not much else to do but sit at home and scroll.”

 Scroll for good news.

Crawford suggested filling your social media feed with good news or stories that will give your brain a break from the doom and gloom.

“If it doesn’t make you feel good, ask yourself why you want to continue to be exposed to it,” Sternlicht said. “If staying informed is your main concern, find a news source outside of social media that tends to inform you of the news you want to be updated on that is not overtly toxic.”

 Be intentional about checking social media.

“Pay attention to when you are checking for updates out of boredom, impulse, stress or to relieve some negative emotion,” Sternlicht said. “Find healthier ways to fill up idle time and cope with negative thoughts and feelings such as by engaging in self-care through exercise, eating well, meditating, practicing gratitude, journaling and other such methods of wellness.”

 Ignore the FOMO.

FOMO, or fear of missing out, is often used to justify doing things we probably shouldn’t be doing, explained Julie L. Futrell, a psychologist in California. People often use this as a reason to stay plugged in.

You might be afraid of missing something, “but you can almost guarantee that if something major is happening, we all find out about one way or another,” Futrell said. “We are living in an information society.”

The Day Dostoyevsky Discovered the Meaning of Life in a Dream by Maria Popova

 

Source: Brain Pickings

One November night in the 1870s, legendary Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky (November 11, 1821–February 9, 1881) discovered the meaning of life in a dream — or, at least, the protagonist in his final short story did. The piece, which first appeared in the altogether revelatory A Writer’s Diary (public library) under the title “The Dream of a Queer Fellow” and was later published separately as The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, explores themes similar to those in Dostoyevsky’s 1864 novel Notes from the Underground, considered the first true existential novel. True to Stephen King’s assertion that “good fiction is the truth inside the lie,” the story sheds light on Dostoyevsky’s personal spiritual and philosophical bents with extraordinary clarity — perhaps more so than any of his other published works. The contemplation at its heart falls somewhere between Tolstoy’s tussle with the meaning of life and Philip K. Dick’s hallucinatory exegesis.

The story begins with the narrator wandering the streets of St. Petersburg on “a gloomy night, the gloomiest night you can conceive,” dwelling on how others have ridiculed him all his life and slipping into nihilism with the “terrible anguish” of believing that nothing matters. He peers into the glum sky, gazes at a lone little star, and contemplates suicide; two months earlier, despite his destitution, he had bought an “excellent revolver” with the same intention, but the gun had remained in his drawer since. Suddenly, as he is staring at the star, a little girl of about eight, wearing ragged clothes and clearly in distress, grabs him by the arm and inarticulately begs his help. But the protagonist, disenchanted with life, shoos her away and returns to the squalid room he shares with a drunken old captain, furnished with “a sofa covered in American cloth, a table with some books, two chairs and an easy-chair, old, incredibly old, but still an easy-chair.”

As he sinks into the easy-chair to think about ending his life, he finds himself haunted by the image of the little girl, leading him to question his nihilistic disposition. Dostoyevsky writes:

I knew for certain that I would shoot myself that night, but how long I would sit by the table — that I did not know. I should certainly have shot myself, but for that little girl.

You see: though it was all the same to me, I felt pain, for instance. If any one were to strike me, I should feel pain. Exactly the same in the moral sense: if anything very pitiful happened, I would feel pity, just as I did before everything in life became all the same to me. I had felt pity just before: surely, I would have helped a child without fail. Why did I not help the little girl, then? It was because of an idea that came into my mind then. When she was pulling at me and calling to me, suddenly a question arose before me, which I could not answer. The question was an idle one; but it made me angry. I was angry because of my conclusion, that if I had already made up my mind that I would put an end to myself to-night, then now more than ever before everything in the world should be all the same to me. Why was it that I felt it was not all the same to me, and pitied the little girl? I remember I pitied her very much: so much that I felt a pain that was even strange and incredible in my situation…

It seemed clear that if I was a man and not a cipher yet, and until I was changed into a cipher, then I was alive and therefore could suffer, be angry and feel shame for my actions. Very well. But if I were to kill myself, for instance, in two hours from now, what is the girl to me, and what have I to do with shame or with anything on earth? I am going to be a cipher, an absolute zero. Could my consciousness that I would soon absolutely cease to exist, and that therefore nothing would exist, have not the least influence on my feeling of pity for the girl or on my sense of shame for the vileness I had committed?

From the moral, he veers into the existential:

It became clear to me that life and the world, as it were, depended upon me. I might even say that the world had existed for me alone. I should shoot myself, and then there would be no world at all, for me at least. Not to mention that perhaps there will really be nothing for any one after me, and the whole world, as soon as my consciousness is extinguished, will also be extinguished like a phantom, as part of my consciousness only, and be utterly abolished, since perhaps all this world and all these men are myself alone.

Beholding “these new, thronging questions,” he plunges into a contemplation of what free will really means. In a passage that calls to mind John Cage’s famous aphorism on the meaning of life — “No why. Just here.” — and George Lucas’s assertion that “life is beyond reason,” Dostoyevsky suggests through his protagonist that what gives meaning to life is life itself:

One strange consideration suddenly presented itself to me. If I had previously lived on the moon or in Mars, and I had there been dishonored and disgraced so utterly that one can only imagine it sometimes in a dream or a nightmare, and if I afterwards found myself on earth and still preserved a consciousness of what I had done on the other planet, and if I knew besides that I would never by any chance return, then, if I were to look at the moon from the earth — would it be all the same to me or not? Would I feel any shame for my action or not? The questions were idle and useless, for the revolver was already lying before me, and I knew with all my being that this thing would happen for certain: but the questions excited me to rage. I could not die now, without having solved this first. In a word, that little girl saved me, for my questions made me postpone pulling the trigger.

Just as he ponders this, the protagonist slips into sleep in the easy-chair, but it’s a sleep that has the quality of wakeful dreaming. In one of many wonderful semi-asides, Dostoyevsky peers at the eternal question of why we have dreams:

Dreams are extraordinarily strange. One thing appears with terrifying clarity, with the details finely set like jewels, while you leap over another, as though you did not notice it at all — space and time, for instance. It seems that dreams are the work not of mind but of desire, not of the head but of the heart… In a dream things quite incomprehensible come to pass. For instance, my brother died five years ago. Sometimes I see him in a dream: he takes part in my affairs, and we are very excited, while I, all the time my dream goes on, know and remember perfectly that my brother is dead and buried. Why am I not surprised that he, though dead, is still near me and busied about me? Why does my mind allow all that?

In this strange state, the protagonist dreams that he takes his revolver and points it at his heart — not his head, where he had originally intended to shoot himself. After waiting a second or two, his dream-self pulls the trigger quickly. Then something remarkable happens:

I felt no pain, but it seemed to me that with the report, everything in me was convulsed, and everything suddenly extinguished. It was terribly black all about me. I became as though blind and numb, and I lay on my back on something hard. I could see nothing, neither could I make any sound. People were walking and making a noise about me: the captain’s bass voice, the landlady’s screams… Suddenly there was a break. I am being carried in a closed coffin. I feel the coffin swinging and I think about that, and suddenly for the first time the idea strikes me that I am dead, quite dead. I know it and do not doubt it; I cannot see nor move, yet at the same time I feel and think. But I am soon reconciled to that, and as usual in a dream I accept the reality without a question.

Now I am being buried in the earth. Every one leaves me and I am alone, quite alone. I do not stir… I lay there and — strange to say — I expected nothing, accepting without question that a dead man has nothing to expect. But it was damp. I do not know how long passed — an hour, a few days, or many days. Suddenly, on my left eye which was closed, a drop of water fell, which had leaked through the top of the grave. In a minute fell another, then a third, and so on, every minute. Suddenly, deep indignation kindled in my heart and suddenly in my heart I felt physical pain. ‘It’s my wound,’ I thought. ‘It’s where I shot myself. The bullet is there.’ And all the while the water dripped straight on to my closed eye. Suddenly, I cried out, not with a voice, for I was motionless, but with all my being, to the arbiter of all that was being done to me.

“Whosoever thou art, if thou art, and if there exists a purpose more intelligent than the things which are now taking place, let it be present here also. But if thou dost take vengeance upon me for my foolish suicide, then know, by the indecency and absurdity of further existence, that no torture whatever that may befall me, can ever be compared to the contempt which I will silently feel, even through millions of years of martyrdom.”

I cried out and was silent. Deep silence lasted a whole minute. One more drop even fell. But I knew and believed, infinitely and steadfastly, that in a moment everything would infallibly change. Suddenly, my grave opened. I do not know whether it had been uncovered and opened, but I was taken by some dark being unknown to me, and we found ourselves in space. Suddenly, I saw. It was deep night; never, never had such darkness been! We were borne through space and were already far from the earth. I asked nothing of him who led me. I was proud and waited. I assured myself that I was not afraid, and my heart melted with rapture at the thought that I was not afraid. I do not remember how long we rushed through space, and I cannot imagine it. It happened as always in a dream when you leap over space and time and the laws of life and mind, and you stop only there where your heart delights.

Through the thick darkness, he sees a star — the same little star he had seen before shooing the girl away. As the dream continues, the protagonist describes a sort of transcendence akin to what is experienced during psychedelic drug trips or in deep meditation states:

Suddenly a familiar yet most overwhelming emotion shook me through. I saw our sun. I knew that it could not be our sun, which had begotten our earth, and that we were an infinite distance away, but somehow all through me I recognized that it was exactly the same sun as ours, its copy and double. A sweet and moving delight echoed rapturously through my soul. The dear power of light, of that same light which had given me birth, touched my heart and revived it, and I felt life, the old life, for the first time since my death.

He finds himself in another world, Earthlike in every respect, except “everything seemed to be bright with holiday, with a great and sacred triumph, finally achieved” — a world populated by “children of the sun,” happy people whose eyes “shone with a bright radiance” and whose faces “gleamed with wisdom, and with a certain consciousness, consummated in tranquility.” The protagonist exclaims:

Oh, instantly, at the first glimpse of their faces I understood everything, everything!

Conceding that “it was only a dream,” he nonetheless asserts that “the sensation of the love of those beautiful and innocent people” was very much real and something he carried into wakeful life on Earth. Awaking in his easy-chair at dawn, he exclaims anew with rekindled gratitude for life:

Oh, now — life, life! I lifted my hands and called upon the eternal truth, not called, but wept. Rapture, ineffable rapture exalted all my being. Yes, to live…

Dostoyevsky concludes with his protagonist’s reflection on the shared essence of life, our common conquest of happiness and kindness:

All are tending to one and the same goal, at least all aspire to the same goal, from the wise man to the lowest murderer, but only by different ways. It is an old truth, but there is this new in it: I cannot go far astray. I saw the truth. I saw and know that men could be beautiful and happy, without losing the capacity to live upon the earth. I will not, I cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of men… I saw the truth, I did not invent it with my mind. I saw, saw, and her living image filled my soul for ever. I saw her in such consummate perfection that I cannot possibly believe that she was not among men. How can I then go astray? … The living image of what I saw will be with me always, and will correct and guide me always. Oh, I am strong and fresh, I can go on, go on, even for a thousand years.

[…]

And it is so simple… The one thing is — love thy neighbor as thyself — that is the one thing. That is all, nothing else is needed. You will instantly find how to live.

A century later, Jack Kerouac would echo this in his own magnificent meditation on kindness and the “Golden Eternity.”

A Writer’s Diary is a beautiful read in its entirety. Complement it with Tolstoy on finding meaning in a meaningless world and Margaret Mead’s dreamed epiphany about why life is like blue jelly.

The United States Is Visibly In An Early Stage of Disintegration by Tom Engelhardt

 

Source: TomDispatch

Like Gregor Samsa, the never-to-be-forgotten character in Franz Kafka's story "The Metamorphosis," we awoke on January 7th to discover that we, too, were "a giant insect" with "a domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments" and numerous "pitifully thin" legs that "waved helplessly" before our eyes. If you prefer, though, you can just say it: we opened our eyes and found that, somehow, we had become a giant roach of a country.

Yes, I know, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are now in charge and waving their own little limbs wildly, trying to do some of what needs to be done for this sad land of the disturbed, over-armed, sick, and dying. But anyone who watched the scenes of Floridians celebrating a Super Bowl victory, largely unmasked and cheering, shoulder to shoulder in the streets of Tampa, can't help but realize that we are now indeed a roach nation, the still-wealthiest, most pandemically unmasked one on Planet Earth.

But don't just blame Donald Trump. Admittedly, we've just passed through the Senate trial and acquittal of the largest political cockroach around. I'm talking about the president who, upon discovering that his vice president was in danger of being "executed" ("Hang Mike Pence!") and was being rushed out of the Senate as a mob bore down on him, promptly tweeted: "Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution."

Just imagine. The veep who had — if you don't mind my mixing my creature metaphors here — toadied up to the president for four endless years was then given a functional death sentence by that same man. You can't fall much deeper into personal roachdom than that. My point here, though, is that our all-American version of roacherie was a long time in coming.

Or put another way: unimaginable as The Donald might have seemed when he descended that Trump Tower escalator in June 2015 to hail his future "great, great wall," denounce Mexican "rapists," and bid to make a whole country into his apprentices, he didn't end up in the Oval Office for no reason. He was the symptom, not the disease, though what a symptom he would prove to be — and when it came to diseases, what a nightmare beyond all imagining.

Let's face it, whether we fully grasp the fact or not, we now live in a system, as well as a country, that's visibly in an early stage of disintegration. And there lies a remarkable tale of history happening at warp speed, of how, in not quite three decades, the USS Enterprise of imperial powers was transformed into the USS Roach.

Once Upon a Time on Earth…

Return for a moment to 1991, almost two years after the Berlin Wall fell, when the Soviet Union finally imploded and the Cold War officially ended. Imagine that you had been able to show Americans then — especially the political class in Washington — that 13-minute video of Trump statements and tweets interlarded with mob actions in the Capitol that the Democratic House impeachment managers used in their opening salvo against the former president. Americans — just about any of us — would have thought we were watching the most absurd science fiction or perhaps the single least reality-based bit of black comedy imaginable.

In the thoroughly self-satisfied (if somewhat surprised) Washington of 1991, the triumphalist capital of "the last superpower," that video would have portrayed a president, an insurrectionary mob, and an endangered Congress no one could have imagined possible — not in another nearly 30 years, not in a century, not in any American future. Then again, if in 1991 you had tried to convince anyone in this country that a walking Ponzi scheme(r) like Donald Trump could become president, no less be impeached twice, you would have been laughed out of the room.

After all, this country had just become the ultimate superpower in history, the last one ever. Left alone on this planet, it had a military beyond compare and an economy that was the heartland of a globalized system and the envy of the world. The Earth was — or at least to the political class of that moment seemed to be — ours for the taking, but certainly not for the losing, not in any imaginable future. The question then wasn't keeping them out but keeping us in. No "big, fat, beautiful walls" were needed. After all, Russia was a wreck. China was still emerging economically from the hell of the Maoist years. Europe was dependent on the U.S. and, when it came to the rest of world, what else need be said?

This was an American planet, pure and simple.

In retrospect, consider the irony. There had been talk then about a post-Cold War "peace dividend." Who would have guessed, though, that dividends of any sort would increasingly go to the top 1% and that almost 30 years later this country would functionally be a plutocracy overseen until a month ago by a self-professed multibillionaire? Who would have imagined that the American version of a peace dividend would have been siphoned off by more billionaires than anyplace else on earth and that, in those same years, inequality would reach historic heights, while poverty and hunger only grew? Who woulda guessed that whatever peace dividend didn't go to the ultra-wealthy would go to an ever-larger national security state and the industrial complex of weapons makers that surrounded it? Who woulda guessed that, in official post-Cold War Washington, peace would turn out to be the last thing on anyone's mind, even though this country seemed almost disarmingly enemy-less? (Remember when the worst imaginable combination of enemies, a dreaded "axis of evil," would prove to be Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, all embattled, distinctly tertiary powers?)Who woulda guessed that a military considered beyond compare (and funded to this day like no other) would proceed to fight war after war, literally decades of conflict, and yet — except for the quasi-triumph of the first Gulf War against Saddam Hussein's Iraq — achieve victory in none of them? Staggering trillions of taxpayer dollars would be spent on them, while those billionaires were given untold tax breaks. Honestly, who would have guessed then that, on a planet lacking significant enemies, Washington, even six presidents later, would prove incapable of stopping fighting?

Who woulda guessed that, in September 2001, not Russia or Communist China, but a tiny group of Islamic militants led by a rich Saudi extremist the U.S. had once backed would send 19 (mostly Saudi) hijackers to directly attack the United States? They would, of course, cause death and mayhem, allowing President George W. Bush to launch an almost 20-year "global war on terror," which still shows no sign of ending. Who woulda guessed that, in the wake of those 9/11 terror attacks, the son of the man who had presided over the first Gulf War (but stopped short of felling Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein) and the top officials of his administration would come to believe that the world was his oyster and that the U.S. should dominate the Greater Middle East and possibly the planet in a way previously unimaginable? Who would have imagined that he would invade Iraq (having done the same in Afghanistan a year and a half earlier), effectively helping to spread Islamic extremism far and wide, while creating a never-ending disaster for this country?

Who woulda guessed that, in 2009, in the wake of a Great Recession at home, the next president, Barack Obama, would order a massive "surge" of forces into Afghanistan, a war already eight years old? Tens of thousands of new troops, not to speak of contractors, CIA operatives, and others would be sent there without faintly settling things.

By November 2016, when an antiquated electoral system gave the popular vote to Hillary Clinton but put Donald Trump, a man who promised to end this country's "endless wars" (he didn't) in the Oval Office, it should have been obvious that something was awry on the yellow brick road to imperial glory. By then, in fact, for a surprising number of Americans, this had become a land of grotesque inequality and lack of opportunity. And many of them would prove ready indeed to use their votes to send a message to the country about their desire to Trump that very reality.

From there, of course, with no Wizard of Oz in sight, it would be anything but a yellow brick road to January 6, 2021, when, the president having rejected the results of the 2020 election, a mob would storm the Capitol. All of it and the impeachment fiasco to follow would reveal the functional definition of a failing democracy, one in which the old rules no longer held.

Exiting the Superpower Stage of History

And, of course, I have yet to even mention the obvious — the still-unending nightmare that engulfed the country early in 2020 and that, I suspect, will someday be seen as the true ending point for a strikingly foreshortened American century. I'm thinking, of course, of Covid-19, the pandemic disease that swept the country, infecting tens of millions of Americans and killing hundreds of thousands in a fashion unmatched anywhere else on the planet. It would even for a time fell a president, while creating mayhem and ever more fierce division in unmasked parts of the country filled with civilians armed to the teeth, swept up in conspiracy theories, and at the edge of who knew what.

Call it a sign from the gods or anything you want, but call it startling. Imagine a disease that the last superpower handled so much more poorly than countries with remarkably fewer resources. Think of it as a kind of judgment, if not epitaph, on that very superpower.

Or put another way: not quite 30 years after the Soviet Union exited the stage of history, we're living in a land that was itself strangely intent on heading for that same exit — a crippled country led by a 78-year-old president, its system under startling pressure and evidently beginning to come apart at the seams. One of its political parties is unrecognizable; its presidency has been stripped of a fully functioning Congress and is increasingly imperial in nature; its economic system plutocratic; its military still struggling across significant parts of the planet, while a possible new cold war with a rising China is evidently on the horizon; and all of this on a planet that itself, even putting aside that global pandemic, is visibly in the deepest of trouble.

At the end of Franz Kafka's classic tale, Gregor Samsa, now a giant insect with a rotting apple embedded in its back, dies in roach hell, even if also in his very own room with his parents and sisters nearby. Is the same fate in store, after a fashion, for the American superpower?

In some sense, in the Trump and Covid-19 years, the United States has indeed been unmasked as a roach superpower on a planet going to — again, excuse the mixed animal metaphors — the dogs. The expected all-American age of power and glory hasn't been faintly what was imagined in 1991, not in a country that has shown remarkably few signs of coming to grips with what these years have truly meant.

Centuries after the modern imperial age began, it's evidently coming to an end in a hell that Joe Biden and crew won't be able to stop, even if, unlike the previous president, they're anything but intent on thoroughly despoiling this land. Still, Trump or Biden, at this point it couldn't be clearer that we need some new way of thinking about and being on this increasingly roach-infested planet of ours

Myths Are Written By The Victors, History By The Scholars

 

This podcast talks about the competing histories fighting for dominance in the minds of Americans; the mythologized and romanticized history as represented by the "patriotic" framing of history from the 1776 Commission report and the much more fact-based approach that doesn't skirt the issue of race from the 1619 Project.

Howard Thurman's "Fascist Masquerade" by Peter Eisenstadt

 

On Jan. 6, a violent mob invaded the U.S. Capitol, injuring more than 140 police officers and bludgeoning one officer to death. Their goal was to prevent a joint session of Congress from certifying Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 presidential election and to find, and possibly kidnap or murder, elected officials they held responsible for what they considered the theft of the election. Some have called the assault an attempted coup, others an act of insurrection. The attack has raised a question that has been repeatedly asked in the five years since Donald Trump began his ascent to the presidency: Are Trump and his followers fascist, and is Trumpism perhaps the most successful example of American fascism in the nation's history?

The problem with calling anyone or any movement fascist is that "fascism" is likely the slipperiest term in our political vocabulary. And there is the further problem that there has never been a large avowedly fascist movement in the United States. But if we look at the perpetrators of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol — with their Confederate flags, their claims to be religious warriors for Jesus, their beliefs that those opposing them were traitors — we see elements that have been common in descriptions of  American fascism for a century. In the words of one commentator on the subject: 

These organizations exploit the active and latent prejudices that the average American has against the non-white races on the one hand and against the Jewish people on the other. They make it possible for a creative rationalization to provide a cloak for group hatreds which can be objectified as true Christianity or true Americanism. In other words, they provide for a legitimizing of sadistic and demonical impulses of which, under normal circumstances they might be ashamed. To appeal to anti-Negro sentiment in many sections, communities and among many groups is a "natural" for the would-be demagogue. It is sure fire.  

The word "Negro" is a likely giveaway, but this is not a reflection on recent events. It was written by the African American religious thinker, Howard Thurman (1899–1981), a pioneering advocate of radical nonviolence, an inspiration to the Black Freedom Struggle, a mentor to such civil rights pioneers as James Farmer, Pauli Murray and Martin Luther King Jr., and published in a 1946 essay titled "The Fascist Masquerade." The essay is one of Thurman's most urgent yet enduring political works. Its inspiration was Thurman's sense that the United States, shortly after the end of World War II, was at a crossroads. Either the post-war period would see the furthering of the tentative wartime gains by Black Americans for full citizenship, or it would see those aspirations crushed, as had happened so many times before, by a ferocious pushback by the maintainers and abetters of what Thurman called "the will to segregation."  

Thurman, to be sure, was an optimist. In 1944 he left a comfortable position as dean of chapel at Howard University to co-found a small, fledgling congregation in San Francisco, the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, one of the first churches in the U.S. intentionally organized on an interracial and interdenominational basis. At the same time, he was a realist. He wrote in 1943 that the war against Japan "has given excellent justification for the expression of the prejudices against non-white peoples just under the surface of the American consciousness." In his wartime travels he found "the picture is the same everywhere — sporadic outbursts of violence, meanness, murder, and bloodshed." Black Americans were angry, and many whites were furious that they were no longer hiding their anger. The United States had to choose between democracy and fascism, and for Thurman the outcome was uncertain. But he was sure that American fascism would hide behind a homegrown vocabulary drawn from a toxic and intolerant Christianity and ultra-Americanism, disguising their real beliefs and intents. This was the fascist masquerade. 

By 1946 Thurman was very concerned by the growing strength of anti-union sentiment in post-war America. Among the fascist organizations he considered in detail in his essay was the now quite obscure Christian American Association. Based in Houston, it was a racist, anti-labor and anti-Semitic organization whose one lasting contribution to American history was to popularize the term "right to work" while working to help enact the nation's first such laws, banning the "closed" or union shop, in Arkansas and Florida, in 1944. (One reason for such laws, the organization stated, was so "white men and women" would not be forced to work with "black African apes.") Thurman thought the Christian American Association had the perfect name for an American fascist organization. 

Another, much better-known group Thurman wrote about was the Ku Klux Klan, which some observers had labeled fascist even before Benito Mussolini seized power in Italy in 1922. The Klan, in its various incarnations, had an exceptional longevity whereas, as Thurman wrote, most "hate organizations spring up, flourish for a season, disappear, and reappear in another form." The organizational form of such groups was less important than their continuing appeal, he added, noting that "an important part of the menace of fascism is its property as a catalyst," how its appeal "crystallizes moods, attitudes, and fears already in solution."  

Thurman's enduring insight was that was a mistake to see hate organizations like the Klan as somehow outside the political mainstream. They were merely the far edge of a society that tolerated inequalities of all kinds as part of its civic and political life. To counter hate organizations it was "no answer to say" that hate organizations represent "a false interpretation of Christianity" or America. They represented the church and the state only too well. Traditional Protestant Christianity, he thought, with its ironclad division between the saved and the damned, provided the template for all the invidious distinctions that underlined American racism and fascism. As for American democracy, in the gap between the soaring promises of the Declaration of Independence and the uglier realities was a space in which economic and social inequalities could fester and become accepted as natural or even essential parts of American society and religion. This allowed, Thurman wrote, "the various hate-inspired groups to establish squatter's rights" in our basic institutions.Advertisement:

What would Thurman have to say about Donald Trump and the Capitol insurrection? Such retrospective ventriloquizing is always dangerous, but it is fair to say that he would have been appalled, and would have been dismayed that for all the changes in the United States since 1946, the descendants of the Christian American Association are still engaged in a version of the same old Christian American fascist masquerade.   

For Thurman, the most pressing danger of the fascist masquerade was its protean quality, its myriad guises and disguises. It was all too easy to become inured to its prevalence. It is not enough to oppose the KKK or their latter-day descendants such as the Proud Boys. We must look to the ways inequalities between persons are tolerated in our society as a whole. We must look to ourselves, and examine the ways we tolerate inequalities of all kinds in our own lives and politics. Thurman argued that we must "rely upon the guarantee of God in whom all life and all of the great potentials of mind and spirit are grounded. Such a position establishes the infinite worth of all individuals and denies that for which fascism stands." 

We may see this struggle in more secular terms than Thurman, and we may believe that implementing a society based on the "infinite worth of all individuals," where no one is a means to another person's ends, is a utopian dream. At the same time, we need to confront the reality that almost 75 years after Thurman wrote his essay, the fascist masquerade, with its facades, its lies, its true believers and silent supporters, and its chilling willingness to resort to violence, is still very much with us, and seems to be growing stronger, not weaker. And as Thurman wrote in 1946, in 2021 we still stand at a crossroads, and still face the same stark choice: Democracy or fascism. 

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Peter Eisenstadt is the author of "Against the Hounds of Hell: A Life of Howard Thurman," published this month by the University of Virginia Press.

Robert Reich:The Sedition That Nobody's Talking About

VEGAN 2020 - The Film

 

 

The film covers the ever growing vegan movement and how it's best for the animals, human health, and the planet.

Poet's Nook: "I Love America" by Alfred Howard

 

(See Alfred Howard site  & 14 Days of the Universe in Incandescent Bloom )

 

I love America
Let me repeat this I love America
I love hair in the breeze, 70 degrees, palm trees in SD
I love Pokez and OB
I love the freedom that I breathe
This life that I lead
I love thrift stores and vinyl archeology
Diggin’ in crates for ‘70’s gems
The wind through my window, a pen in my afro
I love getting drenched by sound showers
The power of Jimi Hendrix ripping “Purple Haze” 75 miles per hour down the twisting highway
When the sun greets the day
Until it sinks into waves
I love the people all shades Of skin
The true beauty’s within
I love this world like my kin
I’ll turn enemies to friends
I love the music that breathes with its kick drum heartbeat
When it speaks in the evening weaving the fabric that holds us together through all kinds of weather
I love the scenery evolving on into the ever
Crimson canyons layered with mystery and history
The red rocks reminding me of ancient mystic entities
The clear blue waters of a mountain stream running underneath massive, aged sequoia trees
The bayou soaked humidity of the Southeast
Ninety degrees and sticky like molasses
I’ve spent years on this road with rose tinted sunglasses
Mapping the vastness which exist in my heart
I love the full moon above which illuminates the dark
I love Central Park in its rusted fall bloom
Blooming flowers in June and extensive sand dunes
I love being in tune
Surrendering to the flow of surroundings
Astounding
Pounding visuals in the peripheral
I love the miracles which cooperate to make this exist
Its bliss when I’m kissed by the waves of sensation
Inhaling the chaos to exhale liberation
I love underground hip-hop exploring equations
Like listening to Black Star in my burgundy car or 
Aceyalone in my Mission Hills home
I love the Quannum truth speakers, youth teachers, young urban preachers with abstract features
Like Aesop Rock’s unorthodox style
Reminded of miles of instrumentation
Miles of Davis blowing oasis
Blowing out Desolation
Just blowing out pavement
I love Abbey Hoffman and his Woodstock nation
I love America
Elegant like Ellington
Abstract as Ayler
It’s laughing hysterically at old Richard Pryor
America is Coltrane It is pleasure and pain It’s a high school memory of Prince Purple Rain
America is Mingus, Guthrie and Langston Hues
America is a barbecue
America is Blues
America is City Lights
America is Monk
America is rock and roll, rhythm and funk
Saxophone solos soul full of soul Like Sly Stone’s family with so many tones
It’s Gil Scott-Heron on a roof reading poems
It is knowing the side streets and the quickest route home
It’s Sam Cooke with the gospel giving me chills
It’s a young Aretha Franklin making time stand still
It’s afrocentrism, black culture with wisdom
It’s late sixties hippies, no belief in a system
It’s Berkeley students and panthers hand and hand on a mission
It’s the moment when Maya told me why the caged birds sings
It is the time Jane’s Addiction said “All Now With Wings”
It’s Henry David Thoreau and Civil Disobedience

It’s your grandmother’s cooking with her secret ingredients

It’s an Amanda Ziller action thriller
It’s a silent killer with a violent filter
It’s being blazed on the PCH
Winding road on a summer day
It’s me adjusting the levels and raising the treble on a Murder City Devils CD going 60 on a meandering road as a cold wind blows through my windows around Lake Tahoe on the way to the show
Arriving in the nick of time
It’s a nick or a dime in Washington Square Park
It’s a freestyle rhyme in the back parking lot
It’s a drum circle’s echo just before the dark
It’s the brush and the paper, the mother and father of art
It’s the rhythm that’s pounding within all our hearts that are steadily beating and changing like seasons
I pledge allegiance to reason and allegiance to equals
Not allegiance to these demons deceiving our people

As we live through this golden age of misinformation
State run media is on the local station
Pandemic hits home
President takes a vacation
To make Twitter rants about his victimization
To work on his golf swing while a nation can’t breathe
To talk about ratings while a nation can’t grieve
To push a fake cures until a nation drinks bleach
Alternative facts fill an abrasive blank speech
Spin the wheel of misfortune brought to you by climate change
Did you get California flames or New Orleans hurricanes
And the economy is broken unless your occupation is
Digging graves for the greatest generation
And today we have managed to mock education
As if knowledge were flaw
And I’m still in awe
Of a criminal giving me lectures on law And order
When chaos and disorder is all this man knows
Caging children at the border is how low we will go
But that was just the dawn of this social limbo 
There’s good folks on both sides
A young woman dies
Nazis taking joy rides and marching with fire

Rest in Peace Heather Heyer

So you don’t want us to take to streets
Suggest we find ways to protest peacefully
But you didn’t take kindly when we took to one knee
In fact you took to one knee
And placed it on our necks
And held it there, 8 minutes and 46 seconds
Try holding your breath
See how far you can get
With freedom the one goal at the end of all this
See freedom and diversity make America great
Not ranting and raving division and hate
Not turning our streets into a police state
And blaming your successor on what you created
And blaming your predecessor for a disease devastating
Wielding fear as a weapon to mobilize a base
Fear of the unknown things they’ll never face
Fear of a woman’s rights, fear of a race
Fear of the future
The changes we’ll make
Fear of moving forward
Fear of evolution
Fearful of science
Fear this revolution
Cause revolution’s coming
And it will be televised
You’ll have to watch it on fox with your eyes opened wide
Because the future moves forward 
That’s the trajectory of time
And your campaign slogan’s about looking behind
Your pandemic response was to turn a blind eye
To turn a deaf ear when they speak of the dying
“It is what it is”, your relief to those crying
You managed to politicize a disease
As if covid 19 cared what you believed in
As we clutched to our chest saying we couldn’t breathe 

George Floyd Rest In Peace

This is the year of short breath
And my 2020 vision sees nothing ahead
America is wounded and inching toward death
But this is our land so we stand up for it
If you think patriotism stops at waving the red white and blue
When the red white and blue lights flash behind you 
If you’re black then you’re scared cause there’s a black and blue bruise 
On your mind from the phantom batons that they’ve used 
To beat down your soul since you set foot in new sand
From slavery’s shackles to the cuffs on your hand 
And you vote and you hope and you plot and you plan 
And you work and you sweat and you live for this land
And you do what it takes to make it good as you can 
You’ll bend til you break for the sake of your family 
You speak out against the atrocities you see
And you’re willing to die in the streets for beliefs

That’s patriotism!

Not waving a flag for some misaligned vision
Rooted division
America is fading past my recognition
And I love America 
Just not your rendition
Where the emperor sits naked on his golden throne
And we film a mass shooting with a cellular phone
And we don’t even blink cause we’re numb to our bones
And the cyclone of news is the way the wind blows 
We still don’t need a weatherman to know 
And we may be isolated but we’re never alone 
We’ll braid our voices in the streets into a beautiful poem
And I look at every face and see a rainbow of tones
I love America
Won’t let it sink like a stone
And you may yell at me to leave
But this is always my home

Depths of Despair: The Long Shadow of COVID Under Capitalism

LISTEN

 

Cultural theorist Lynn Parramore on the deep social effects of economic precarity before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, the urgent call for large-scale transformation of our poltical and economic system, and her article "Epidemic of Despair Could Haunt America Long After COVID" at the Institute for New Economic Thinking.

Chris Hedges: The Oligarchy Knows Class Warfare Is the Real Fight

Source: ScheerPost

The death spiral of the American Empire will not be halted with civility. It will not be halted with the 42 executive orders signed by Joe Biden, however welcome many are, especially since they can, with a new chief executive, be immediately revoked. It will not be halted by removing Donald Trump, and the crackpot conspiracy theorists, Christian fascists and racists who support him, from social media. It will not be halted by locking up the Proud Boys and the clueless protestors who stormed the Congress on January 6 and took selfies in Mike Pence’s Senate chair. It will not be halted by restoring the frayed alliances with our European allies or rejoining the World Health Organization or the Paris Climate Agreement. All of these measures are window dressing, masking the root cause of the demise of America — unchecked oligarchic power and greed. The longer wealth is funneled upwards into the hands of a tiny, oligarchic cabal, who put Biden into office and whose interests he assiduously serves, we are doomed.  

Once an oligarchy seizes power, deforming governing institutions to exclusively serve their narrow interests and turning the citizenry into serfs, there are only two options, as Aristotle pointed out — tyranny or revolution. The staggering concentration of wealth and obscene avarice of the very rich now dwarfs the hedonism and excesses of the world’s most heinous despots and wealthiest capitalists of the past. In 2015, shortly before he died, Forbes estimated David Rockefeller’s net worth was $3 billion. The Shah of Iran looted an estimated $1 billion from his country. Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos amassed between $5 and $10 billion. And the former Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe was worth about a billion. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are each at $180 billion.  

"The longer wealth is funneled upwards into the hands of a tiny, oligarchic cabal, who put Biden into office and whose interests he assiduously serves, we are doomed."

The new wealth comes from a cartel capitalism far more concentrated and far more criminal than any of the cartels built by the old robber barons of the 19th century. It was made possible by Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton who, in exchange for corporate money to fund their campaigns and later Clinton’s foundation and post-presidency opulent lifestyle, abolished the regulations that once protected the citizenry from the worst forms of monopoly exploitation. The demolishing of regulations made possible the largest upwards transference of wealth in American history. Whatever you say about Trump, he at least initiated moves to break up Facebook, Google, Amazon and the other Silicon Valley monopolists, none of which will happen under Biden, whose campaign these corporations bankrolled. And that has to be one of the reasons these digital platforms disappeared Trump from social media. 

The new robber barons peddle the classless identity politics of the Democratic Party to deflect attention from their stranglehold on wealth and power, as well as their exploitation of workers, especially those that make their products overseas. Corporations such as Walmart have 80 percent of their suppliers in China. These corporations are full partners in China’s state-controlled capitalism and suppression of basic labor rights and wages, where most Chinese workers make less than $350 a month and toil in Dickensian conditions. 

There is no political will among the ruling elites to defend the rights of Amazon workers who are aggressively blocked by the company, the country’s second largest employer, from forming unions, work all night in drafty, COVID-19-infested warehouses or deliver packages for $15 an hour, which leaves thousands of Amazon workers dependent on food stamps. Likewise, this is no political will among the elites to defend the rights of workers in China, often forced to work 100 hours of overtime a month in sweatshops for as little as $2 or $3 an hour. 

History has repeatedly illustrated the dire consequences of extreme social inequality. It foments revolutionary ferment, which can come from the left or the right. Either a leftwing populism that smashes oligarchic power takes control or its counterfeit, a rightwing populism, built on the poisoned solidarity of hate, racism, vengeance and violence — and bankrolled by the hated oligarchs that use it as a front to solidify tyranny. We are barreling towards the latter. 

The soaring levels of social inequality are laid out in stark statistics that are reflected back to us in the pain, despair and suffering afflicting perhaps 70 percent of the US public. The wealth of US billionaires has increased to over $1.1 trillion since mid-March 2020, when the pandemic began to ravage the country, a nearly 40 percent leap during the past 10 months. The total wealth of America’s 660 billionaires, $4.1 trillion, is two-thirds higher than the $2.4 trillion in total wealth held by the bottom half of the population, 165 million Americans. An additional eight million Americans were recently classified as “newly poor” as the poverty rate increased 2.4 percentage points from June to December 2020. It is now at 11.8 percent, although many economists argue that the official poverty rate of $26,500 for a family of four masks the fact that perhaps half the country lives in real poverty. 

"Class war is the real fight, which corporate-owned media platforms and bankrupt liberals refuse to discuss."

The official poverty rate for Blacks has climbed 5.4 percent to 23.6 percent just between June and December, but again is probably at least twice that number. Blacks, along with Hispanic and Native American people, are also dying from COVID-19 at almost three times the rate of white people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But, despite the fact that many Blacks work in the health care industry they are being inoculated at percentages far below those of whites. In Maryland, for example, Black people make up 30 percent of the population and 40 percent of the health care industry yet account for just 16 percent of those who have been vaccinated. Since the beginning of the pandemic, landlords have filed more than 227,000 evictions in just the 27 cities in five states that the Princeton Eviction Lab tracks — and that is with a national eviction moratorium. Twelve million renters, who owe an average of $5,600 in back rent and utilities, now face being thrown out of their homes. By the end of 2020 there were an estimated 50 million food-insecure Americans, up from 35 million in 2019. One in four households with children, according to a report from Feeding America, experienced food insecurity in 2020.

The response by the ruling oligarchs is the equivalent of tossing coins from their gilded carriages to the despised masses. The Democrats have proposed raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15, but not until 2025. Biden has actually called for reducing the proposed third stimulus check — a $1,200 check for eligible adults was issued last spring and a $600 per person check was issued earlier this month — from $2,000 to $1,400. The oligarchs have bristled at even these meager responses. Larry Summers, Clinton’s treasury secretary who orchestrated the Wall Street bailout in 2008, called the $2,000 checks — crumbs compared to the trillions handed to Wall Street speculators —- a “serious mistake.” Elon Musk, now one of the two richest humans, said that a second “government stimulus package is not in the best interests of the people.” 

The response by a morally bankrupt ruling class are symbolic, given that we are enduring the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and an estimated one-third of all Americans are struggling to pay their bills. It illustrates how woefully disconnected the elites are from the lives of those they dominate. 

Unless families receive regular monthly payments of at least $2,000 until the pandemic ends; unless the country has access to universal health care, especially during a national health crisis; unless the nation radically pivots from fossil fuels to halt the looming ecocide; unless the crippling debts that are draining the bank accounts of American families are reduced or forgiven; unless there is an unassailable moratorium on evictions and foreclosures; and unless manufacturers at home and overseas are forced through stringent trade agreements and labor laws to pay decent wages, abide by strict labor regulations and permit independent unions, the oligarchs will only accelerate their pillage. 

The class warfare is global. Not until workers in sweatshops in China, Mexico, Cambodia, Vietnam, India and Bangladesh are lifted out of poverty will the American working class be lifted out of poverty. This class war is the real fight, which corporate-owned media platforms and bankrupt liberals refuse to discuss. 

“In a real sense all life is inter-related,” Martin Luther King wrote in his Letter from Birmingham Jail. “All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.” 

Liberalism, which Rosa Luxemburg called by its more appropriate name—“opportunism”—is an integral component of capitalism. When the citizens grow restive, or when capitalism goes into crisis as it did in the 1930s, liberals ameliorate capitalism’s cruel excesses. Franklin Delano Roosevelt correctly said his greatest achievement was that he saved capitalism. 

But capitalism, Luxemburg argued, is an enemy that can never be appeased. Liberal reforms, such as the New Deal legislation, are used to temporarily stymie organized resistance and then later, when things grow quiet, dismantled to reinstitute capitalist slavery. The history of capitalism illustrates this constant seesaw between liberal reforms and unregulated, capitalist exploitation. The last century of labor struggles in the United States, which has seen unions largely obliterated, and the advent of neoliberalism, austerity, rampant militarism and deindustrialization amply prove Luxemburg’s thesis.

Fascism is the result of a failed liberalism. With liberalism corrupted, as it has been in the hands of the Democratic Party since Bill Clinton, all self-identified liberals have left to peddle is cloying appeals for tolerance and civility, shorn of economic justice. This politesse, which epitomizes the Biden White House, fuels an animus towards the ruling elites, along with the feckless liberals and the liberal values they purport to defend. 

The elevation of women, people of color and those with different sexual orientations to managerial positions in the oligarchic state is not an advance. It is a species of corporate colonialism. It is branding. It is the substitution of cultural politics for real politics.  

When the Belgian colonizers could no longer openly exploit the Congo, they installed the corrupt and compliant puppet Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, after, of course, assassinating the courageous independence leader and first prime minister Patrice Lumumba. Mobuto, who embezzled between $4 and $15 billion during his bloody dictatorial reign, served his colonial masters until the end. Expect the same prostrations before corporate power from the diverse appointments in Biden’s cabinet and, should it be required, the same state repression. 

The political, cultural and judicial systems in any capitalist state are centered around the sanctity of private property. Laws and legislation are instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or, as Luxemburg writes, “those who have some property against those who have none at all.” This inherent bias in capitalist societies, however, becomes criminal once monopolies, from Wall Street Banks to Silicon Valley, seize the organs of power. These monopolists create, by abolishing regulation and oversight, as political economist Karl Polanyi writes, first a mafia economy and then, inevitably, a mafia state. 

The Democrats and Republicans have legalized a level of greed and fraud that even heirs of the robber barons thought unsustainable. David Rockefeller’s “enlightened capitalism,” however self-serving, along with his call for a nation of stakeholders and his formation of the Trilateral Commission, have been pushed aside to license unchecked corporate pillage. 

Bill Clinton and his two treasury secretary enablers, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, instituted a system of unregulated capitalism that has resulted in financial anarchy. This anarchic form of capitalism, where everything, including human beings and the natural world, is a commodity to exploit until exhaustion or collapse, is justified by identity politics. It is sold as “enlightened liberalism” as opposed to the old pro-union class politics that saw the Democrats heed the voices of the working class. Financial anarchy and short-term plunder have destroyed long-term financial and political stability. It has also pushed the human species, along with most other species, closer and closer towards extinction. 

The more workers are dehumanized, as Polanyi notes, the more the ruling elites are morally degraded. Unheard-of wealth creates unheard-of poverty. “Scholars proclaimed in unison that a science had been discovered which put the laws governing man’s world beyond any doubt,” Polanyi writes of laissez-faire capitalists. “It was at the behest of these laws that compassion was removed from the hearts, and a stoic determination to renounce human solidarity in the name of the greatest happiness of the greatest number gained the dignity of a secular religion.” Workers, abandoned by the state, reach a point where they resemble more “spectators that might haunt a nightmare than human beings.”

The shipping of jobs overseas, where workers toil in conditions that replicate the worst abuses of the early industrial revolution, leaves those in the industrialized world unable to compete. A living wage, job security and benefits are replaced by the insecurity of the “gig” economy. This global market forces workers, whether in the Rust Belt or in China, to surrender before the dictates of their corporate masters. The bondage of the working class, at home and abroad, cannot be corrected by legal or legislative reform when the political system is hostage to corporate money and political office is defined by legalized bribery. 

Global capitalism relentlessly searches the globe to exploit cheap, unorganized labor and plunder natural resources. This is its nature, as Karl Marx understood. It buys off or overthrows local elites. It blocks the ability of the developing world to become self-sufficient. At the same time, it strips workers in the industrialized world of good paying jobs, benefits and legal protections, pushing them into crippling debt peonage, which further swells the bank accounts of these global speculators. Its two unrelenting goals are the maximization of profit and the reduction of the cost of production, which demands that workers be disempowered and treated like prisoners. This global assault on the working class is fueling a global rage. And its visage, as we see among the white, dispossessed working class in America, can often be very ugly.

Apple, one of the most profitable companies in the world, is the epitome of “enlightened” global capitalism. WIRED reported that “employees at Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Oracle have contributed nearly 20 times as much money to Biden as to Trump since the beginning of 2019. According to data released by the Federal Election Commission, which requires individuals who contribute $200 or more to a presidential campaign to report their employer, employees at these six companies have contributed $4,787,752 to Biden and just $239,527 to Trump.”

"Societal breakdown, which is looming, brings with it grotesque political distortions. Trump was a symptom of this breakdown. He was not the disease."

Employees at Alphabet, Google’s parent company, WIRED reported, are Biden’s biggest financial backers in Silicon Valley. They donated nearly $1.8 million, more than one-third of the money raised from employees of the six companies. Open Secrets, a campaign finance watchdog, found that contributions from Alphabet’s employees and political action committee to the Biden campaign collectively exceed those from any other company. Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple, Open Secrets found, account for five of the seven largest donors to the Biden campaign on that basis.

Apple in China, however, treats its workers little better than 19th-century serfs. Jenny Chan, Mark Selden and Pun Ngai in Dying for an iPhone, chronicle the endemic labor abuses, including substandard wages and wage theft, long hours, union busting, a refusal to pay sick leave, unsafe labor conditions, a harsh work environment and pressure to meet quotas, that contribute to a high rate of worker suicides in factories that make Apple products. Workers are crammed into overcrowded dormitories next to factories “to facilitate high-speed, round-the-clock production” and are forced to put in as much as 130 overtime hours a month.

The disenfranchised white working class embraced Trump because he taunted and belittled the globalists and monopoly capitalists who destroyed their communities and their lives. For  them, Trump’s vulgarity was a welcome respite from the cloying language of inclusivity and political correctness used by the oligarchs to mask the crimes of monopoly capitalism. The connecting tissue, in the United States, between these disparate, disenfranchised groups of white workers is Christian fascism.

Biden, a tool of global oligarchy, who naively intends to resurrect the ancien régime, is paving the way for a frightening despotism, one where voices of dissent, from the left and the right, are censored and all who refuse to accept the new global order are labeled as domestic terrorists and pounded into submission. Societal breakdown, which is looming, brings with it grotesque political distortions. Trump was a symptom of this breakdown.  He was not the disease.  This dystopian future, one that will probably end in the United States in a form of Christian fascism, has been bequeathed to us by the ruling global elites, who in another era would have been found promenading through the halls of Versailles or the Forbidden City.

 

Poet's Nook: "Dear White America" by " Danez Smith

 

dear white america

i’ve left Earth in search of darker planets, a solar system revolving too near a black hole. i’ve left in search of a new God. i do not trust the God you have given us. my grandmother’s hallelujah is only outdone by the fear she nurses every time the blood-fat summer swallows another child who used to sing in the choir. take your God back. though his songs are beautiful, his miracles are inconsistent. i want the fate of Lazarus for Renisha, want Chucky, Bo, Meech, Trayvon, Sean & Jonylah risen three days after their entombing, their ghost re-gifted flesh & blood, their flesh & blood re-gifted their children. i’ve left Earth, i am equal parts sick of your go back to Africa & i just don’t see race. neither did the poplar tree. we did not build your boats (though we did leave a trail of kin to guide us home). we did not build your prisons (though we did & we fill them too). we did not ask to be part of your America (though are we not America? her joints brittle & dragging a ripped gown through Oakland?). i can’t stand your ground. i’m sick of calling your recklessness the law. each night, i count my brothers. & in the morning, when some do not survive to be counted, i count the holes they leave. i reach for black folks & touch only air. your master magic trick, America. now he’s breathing, now he don’t. abra-cadaver. white bread voodoo. sorcery you claim not to practice, hand my cousin a pistol to do your work. i tried, white people. i tried to love you, but you spent my brother’s funeral making plans for brunch, talking too loud next to his bones. you took one look at the river, plump with the body of boy after girl after sweet boi & ask why does it always have to be about race? because you made it that way! because you put an asterisk on my sister’s gorgeous face! call her pretty (for a black girl)! because black girls go missing without so much as a whisper of where?! because there are no amber alerts for amber-skinned girls! because Jordan boomed. because Emmett whistled. because Huey P. spoke. because Martin preached. because black boys can always be too loud to live. because it’s taken my papa’s & my grandma’s time, my father’s time, my mother’s time, my aunt’s time, my uncle’s time, my brother’s & my sister’s time . . . how much time do you want for your progress? i’ve left Earth to find a place where my kin can be safe, where black people ain’t but people the same color as the good, wet earth, until that means something, until then i bid you well, i bid you war, i bid you our lives to gamble with no more. i’ve left Earth & i am touching everything you beg your telescopes to show you. i’m giving the stars their right names. & this life, this new story & history you cannot steal or sell or cast overboard or hang or beat or drown or own or redline or shackle or silence or cheat or choke or cover up or jail or shoot or jail or shoot or jail or shoot or ruin

this, if only this one, is ours

Pandemic Super Bowl 2021: Billionaires Win, We Lose

 

Report: Pandemic Super Bowl 2021

Musings

 

 

 

John Henryism - a strategy for coping with prolonged exposure to stresses such as social discrimination by expending high levels of effort which results in accumulating physiological costs.

Charles Blow - The Devil You Know

 

Acclaimed journalist and op-ed columnist for the New York Times, Charles M. Blow, walks “The Tight Rope” with Dr. Cornel West and professor Tricia Rose. He shares with us a grand geopolitical vision for Black America in his new book, “The Devil You Know.” The new text is an unsettling manifesto, proposing nothing short of what some may see as the most audacious power play by Black people in the history of this country.