Bulletin N° 819
Subject : Following
like lambs to slaughter, while neo-fascist tropes point toward an epiphany of capitalist
exploitation sans class struggle.
18 October 2018
Grenoble,
France
Dear
Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
The political theory of corporate capitalism (a.k.a. Fascism) was first applied in Italy following the First World War, when Benito Mussolini (1883-1845) came to power in 1922. A decade later the German rendition of more or less the same political economy replaced the failing liberal Weimar Republic. The rest is history. The history of social, economic and political evolution from liberal capitalism to Fascism should be compulsory study for all citizens needing to know where we now stand and how we got here. Just as seeds of the future are found sprouting in the present, so past habits of thought influence the present climate. (At the time of the anti-Vietnam War movement, one slogan that circulated widely in the streets was: "Scratch a Liberal and discover a Fascist!"
Historian
Peter Linebaugh’s book The
Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day
(2016) is a welcome antidote today for the dark and diseased times lying ahead for us all.
Professor Linebaugh, a former student of E.P.
Thompson’s, has continued in the tradition of writing social history that
informs contemporary political action. This book is a poetic account of class
struggle as it has occurred (and is occurring) in the United States of America:
The bad news is that capitalism has left many victims in its wake – the dead,
the walking wounded . . . ;
the good news is that, by all accounts, its days are numbered.
The survivors must prepare for the new day, and there is no better preparation
than to look at the past struggle and learn from the efforts of others. There
is no need to reinvent the wheel!
An
essential question to keep in mind as we study the past is :
How have class-conscious workers and their allies been derailed
by deceptive ‘friends’ again and again? Like “the old syphilitic rag that just keeps begging to be useful,” not all offers of assistance are beneficial. The story of
William Morris’s life warns us that we must exercise discretion and not make
compromises which we can ill afford.
Linebaugh’s
history of May Day is a cautionary tale that can only make us more aware of
the potential power contained in democratic social movements when class-conscious
activities are awakened and solidarity is born.
In 1886, the ironworkers of the Molder’s
Union struck at the McCormick Works in Chicago, setting in motion the events
that led to the infamous Haymarket bombing, the hanging of four workers, and
our modern May Day. Let’s pick it apart. First, these workers stuck for an
eight-hour day. This had been at the center of the post-Civil War movement of
industrial workers:
We want to feel the sunshine,
We want to smell the flowers;
We’re sure Gad has willed it,
And we mean to have eight hours.We’re summoning our forces from
Shipyard, shop and mill;
Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest,
Eight hours for what we will.
Third, in Chicago the workers were making
a machine to reap the grasses, the grains of the North American prairies. The
machine presupposed the robbery of lands from the indigenous people – the
Lakota, the Comanche, the Apache, the Metis in Canada
– this is the fourth point of analysis. Its so-called productivity would result
in a) the globalization of food as both grain and meat passed through Chicago
and the Great Lakes into the hungry bellies of Europe, and b) the shortsighted
agriculture which would result in the disastrous Dust Bowl two generations
hence. Chicago was a hub of world food organization as well as a forward base
in the conquest of the common lands on the prairies.
The strike was suppressed by soldiers and a
worker was killed. The class-conscious workers of Chicago protested. Irish and Poles,
socialists and anarchists, Catholics and communards, former Blues (Yankees) and
former Grays (Confederates) joined in a howl of outrage. Albert Parsons, the
former Confederate soldier whose consciousness was awakened by the Civil War to
join forces with the former slaves and present wage slaves (marrying Lucy
Parsons, part African American, part Native American), summarized the Haymarket
gathering: “We assembled as representatives of the disinherited.”
Truly, in one way or another
the immigrants had been dispossessed, not only from their present means
of production (capital), but from their past subsistence (commons) in the lands
of their origins. Furthermore, the soldiers attacking the Chicago workers had
learned how to kill in the Indian wars and to expropriate the indigenous
peoples from their communal systems. This was the era when the critique of
capitalism was elaborated by many hands. Few at the time swung the pick with
grater point than Karl Marx who, unlike pure theorists, asked the workers what
they thought in an inquiry of more than a hundred questions. This was to become
the essence of subsequent student movements.
At Haymarket in Chicago, a stick of
dynamite was thrown into the crowd (did the police do it? was it the deed of an
anarchist or socialist activist?) and all hell broke loose. A spectacular and
terrible trail was held, unfair in every respect, and Sam Fielden,
August Spies, Albert Parsons, Oscar Neebe, Michael
Schwab, Adolph Fischer, George Engel, and Louis Lingg
were found guilty. On November 11, 1887, despite an international campaign,
four of them were hanged, preparing the way for the Gilded Age of American
capitalism.
Chicago has never been the same, nor has
the world labor movement: on the one hand, Chicago became the center of brutish
capitalism, led by gangsters such as Al Capone, on the other hand a multiethnic
working class arose from Mississippi, Mexico, Poland, or Ireland and writers
such as Carl Sandburg, Nelson Algren, or Richard Wright told us about it. The
‘Chicago Idea,’ the notion that revolutionary unionism can combine militant
union with mass action, is not quite dead. In remembrance of los mártires May Day became the worldwide day of the
workers and the eight-hour day.
The pick (the workers) and the bowl (the
commons) must take us to the jubilee of SDS and SNCC. But the path is not
direct. . . .(pp.86-88)
If
Linebaugh’s message is that the cloud has a silver lining, the subtext of this book is surely one of
caution: The System is malignant, proceed at your own risk . . . .
The 30 + items below reflect the present period of undisguised barbarism into which we are rapidly descending, as Neo-Fascist tropes serve to fix capitalist delusions into familiar authoritarian structures of command-and-obey, we become accustomed to uncertainty and to our own alienation. Can it be that the cure is in the disease? I don't think so!
Francis Feeley
Professor emeritus of
American Studies
University
Grenoble-Alpes
Director of Research
University of
Paris-Nanterre
Center for the Advanced
Study of American Institutions and Social Movements
The University of
California-San Diego
a.
From: mkroopkin
Sent: Friday, 12 October, 2018 5:10:02 AM
Subject: An open letter by Odile Hugonot Haber and Alan Haber to Friends in the Peace movements...
Dear Friends,
...adapted from “Greetings”
circulated at the 2018 Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom International
Congress, Accra, Ghana.
“2020 vision, change the
world leaflet, full spectrum cooperation”
http://newindicator.org/?p=1021
Please share this with peace
organizations you know.
For the New Indicator Collective,
Monty Kroopkin
==========
b.
Why the left must go beyond electoral politics:
in conversation Chris Hedges and David Talbot
==========
c.
The Post-US Midterm Elections Bombshell
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/10/11/the-post-us-midterm-elections-bombshell/
by
Jack
Rasmus
Liberals and the left were shocked by
the Kavanaugh confirmation this past weekend. They
may experience an even greater shock to their political consciousness should
the Democrats fail to take the House in the upcoming midterm elections.
The traditional media has been
promoting the message that a ‘blue wave’ will occur on November 9. Polls as
evidence are being published. The Democratic Party is pushing the same theme,
to turn out the vote. But these are the same sources that in 2016, on the eve
of that election, predicted Trump would get only 15% of the popular vote and
experience the worse defeat ever in a presidential election! Should we believe
their forecasting ability has somehow radically improved this time around?
Anecdotal examples, in New York City
and elsewhere in deep Democrat constituencies, are not sufficient evidence of
such a ‘wave’. Especially given the apparent successes
underway of Republic-Right Wing efforts to suppress voter turnout elsewhere,
where House seats must be ‘turned’ for Democrats to achieve a majority in the
House once again. (See, for example, Greg Palast’s
most recent revelation of voting roll purging going on in Georgia, which is no
doubt replicated in many other locales).
Should the Democrats clearly win
enough seats to take over control of the US House of Representatives on
November 9, liberals and progressives may be further disappointed. Democrat
party leaders will most likely talk about impeachment, make some safe committee
moves toward it, but do little to actually bring it
about in the coming year. What they want is to keep that pot boiling and
leverage it for 2020 elections. Such prevarication and timidity, so typical of
Democrat leadership in recent decades, will almost certainly have the opposite
intended effect on liberal-left voter consciousness. Voters will likely retreat
from voting Democrat even more in 2020 should Democrat Party leaders merely
‘talk the talk’ but not walk.
Conversely, should the Dems fail to take the House a month from now, an even
deeper awareness will settle in that the Democratic Party is incapable of
winning again in 2020. Even fewer still may therefore
turn out to vote next time, assisted by an even more aggressive
Republican-Trump effort to deny the right to vote than already underway.
In short, a Democrat party failure
to recover the US House of Representatives next month will have a debilitating
effect on consciousness for the Democrat base that will no doubt reverberate
down the road again. So too will a timid, token effort to proceed toward
impeachment should the Democrats win next month.
But a takeover of the House by
Democrats will result in an even greater, parallel consciousness bombshell—only
this time on the right. Bannon, Breitbart,
and their billionaire money bags (Mercers et. al.) are already preparing to
organize massive grass roots demonstrations and protests to scare the Democrats
into inaction so far as impeachment proceedings are concerned. And it won’t
take much to achieve that retreat by Democrat party leaders.
The recent Kavanaugh
affair is right now being leveraged by Trump and the far right to launch a
further attack on civil liberties and 1st amendment rights of assembly and
protest. Trump tweets are providing the verbal ‘green light’ to go ahead. Kavanaugh has become an organizational ‘cause celebre’ to mobilize the right to turn out their vote. The
plans are then to take that mobilization one step further, however, after the
midterm elections.
==========
d.
Historian Howard Zinn Warned Us About
the Supreme Court
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/howard-zinn-warned-us-about-the-supreme-court/
==========
e.
Trump, Kavanaugh and the
Path to Neoliberal Fascism
https://truthout.org/articles/trump-kavanaugh-and-the-path-to-neoliberal-fascism/
by Henry A. Giroux
Even in the darkest of times we have the
right to some illumination.
—Hannah Arendt
The
threads of a general political and ideological crisis run deep in American
history, and with each tweet and policy decision Donald Trump pushes the United
States closer to a full-fledged fascist state. His words sting, but his
policies can kill people. Trump’s endless racist taunts, dehumanizing
expressions of misogyny, relentless attacks on all provisions of the social
state and ongoing contempt for the rule of law serve to normalize a creeping
fascist politics. Moreover, his criminogenic disdain
for any viable sense of civic and moral responsibility gives new meaning to an
ethos of selfishness and a culture of cruelty, if not terror, that has run
amok. Yet it is becoming more difficult for the mainstream media and pundits to
talk about fascism as a looming threat in the United States in spite of the
fact that, as Michelle Goldberg observes,
for some groups, such as “undocumented immigrants, it’s already here.”
The
smell of death is everywhere under this administration. The erosion of public
values and the rule of law is now accompanied by a
developing state of emergency with regards to a looming global environmental
catastrophe. An ecological disaster due to
human-caused climate change has accelerated under the Trump
administration and appears imminent. Trump’s ongoing attempt to pollute the
planet through his rollback of environmental protections will result in the
deaths of thousands of children who suffer from asthma and other lung problems.
Moreover, his privatized and punitive approach to health care will shorten the
lives of millions of poor people, uninsured youth, undocumented immigrants, the
unemployed and the elderly. His get-tough “law and order” policies will result
in more police violence against blacks while his support for the arms industry,
military budget and gun laws will accelerate the death of the marginalized both
at home and abroad. Under the Trump regime all bets are off regarding the
sustainability of democracy.
==========
f.
We Can't Let Kavanaugh's
Confirmation Go
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/ralph-nader-we-cant-let-kavanaughs-confirmation-go/
by Ralph Nader
Brett
Kavanaugh, the new Injustice of the Supreme Court of
the United States, must be pleased by the leading news stories on Monday and
Tuesday regarding his swift swearing-in Saturday. The multiple perjurer,
corporate supremacist, presidential power-monger, and a past fugitive from
justice (regarding credible claims of sexual assault), Kavanaugh
saw critical media coverage become yesterday’s story. The mass media has moved
on to other calamities, tragedies, superstorms, and
celebrity outrages. Opponents of his nomination must persevere anew.
The
future of the Supreme Court looks grim considering Kavanaugh’s
judicial decisions and involvement in war crimes and torture as Staff Secretary
to President George W. Bush. It is likely that Kavanaugh
will be the cruelest and most insensitive justice on the high Court. His
support of corporate power will have few limits. That’s saying something, given
the rulings of Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch.
Kavanaugh’s decisions and political statements
are so off the wall, I’ve called him a corporation
masquerading as a human being.
Kavanaugh’s decisions and political statements
are so off the wall, I’ve called him a corporation
masquerading as a human being. Corporations’ uber alles is his pre-eminent core
philosophy. Public Citizen’s analysis of his judicial record (apart from his
extremist political ideology) showed that in split-decision cases (which are
the most ideologically revealing cases), Kavanaugh ruled 15 times against worker rights and two
times for worker rights. On environmental protection, he ruled 11 times for business
interests and two times for the public’s interest. On consumer protection, he
ruled 18 times for businesses and only four times for consumers. As for
monopoly cases, he ruled two times for the corporation and zero times for
market competition.
==========
g.
Time To
Rise Up Against Washington's Insanity
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50412.htm
by Philip Giraldi
On October 21st there will be a Women’s March on the Pentagon hosted
by the Global Women’s Peace Action. My wife and many of our friends will be
going and even I will tag along in support in spite of my gender. We
participate with some reservations as we have only demonstrated publicly twice
since 9/11, once opposing the then about to start Iraq War and once against the
annual meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). All too
often demonstrations morph into progressive exercises in flagellation of what
are now referred to as “deplorable” values with little being accomplished
either before, during or afterwards, apart from the piles of debris left behind
to be cleaned up by the Park Service. And such events are rarely even covered
by the media in Washington, where the Post generally
adheres closely to a neocon foreign policy tactic,
which means that if you ignore something distasteful it will eventually go
away.
==========
h.
Rothschild worried about new world economic order
https://www.rt.com/business/435490-rothschild-new-world-order-stability/
==========
i.
Uneven
Burden-Sharing Isn’t NATO’s Biggest Problem
by Jyri Raitasalo
The
real problem is lack of collective military purpose within an Alliance that has
become transactional during the post–Cold War era.
Lately,
a lot of ink has been spilled on the issues of uneven burden-sharing within the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the fact that European member-states of
the Alliance are underperforming in military capability development. Although
these topics have been at the top of the Donald Trump’s NATO policy ever since
he assumed the presidency, they have a much longer pedigree—dating back to the
Barack Obama and George W. Bush administrations, and even to the early days of
the Cold War.
That
fact of the matter is that the United States has guaranteed European security
through its massive military power ever since the inception of the Cold War.
For decades, many European states have had the luxury of free-riding at the
expense of Uncle Sam. During much of the post–Cold War era—between 1989 and
2013— this dire situation had few security-related consequences. Prior to the
Russian annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014, NATO-Europe witnessed
twenty-five years of an extremely benign security environment with zero
existential threats to be countered or even imagined.
During
this period, the loss of European military capability had little effect—it was
sufficient for Europeans to send token troop contributions to different
military operations the United States was leading whether in Bosnia, Kosovo,
Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya. In the last case, the United States tried to lead
from behind, but was forced to prop up the attacking coalition against Muammar
el-Qaddafi as European ability to conduct a prolonged operation was in doubt
and European armories were depleted of precision-guided munitions soon after
the beginning of the air campaign.
==========
j.
Michael Mann: We Are Even Closer To Climate Disaster
Than IPCC Predicts
+
Noam Chomsky - Climate Change Debates
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd6cvqZlmj4
==========
k.
We want to
hear what you think about this article.
Submit a letter to the
editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.
How to Understand the UN’s Dire New Climate Report
(It tries to find hope against a backdrop of
failure.)
by Robinson Meyer
Men perform a ceremony on the drought-stricken bed
of Poopo, a lake in Bolivia.
+
Noam
Chomsky talks about the major threats to the human race
and other important issues of today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwTQsvhq3ew
==========
l.
USDA Uses Algorithm to Target Small-Business Owners
in Its Crusade Against SNAP (federally subsidized food
stamps)
by Ilana Novick
Since
the 2008 recession, the cost of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
(SNAP) benefits has nearly doubled, to $70
billion. The rise has made the federal nutrition program a
frequent target of conservative politicians, including President Trump, who are
convinced there is an epidemic of SNAP fraud. Never mind that the rise was
“largely because the economic upheaval caused more Americans to need the help
of food stamps to feed their families,” as Emelyn
Rude wrote in Time
in 2017.
In
February, Trump suggested that most recipients should receive half of those
benefits not in money they can spend as they see fit but in the form of a box
of shelf-stable packaged foods, which the administration said would reduce the
overall cost of the program by $129 billion over the next 10 years.
While
neither the budget for SNAP nor the future of Trump’s “box proposal” has yet to
be determined, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has found other ways to
punish both SNAP users and the stores at which they shop.
+
Theory
101: Patriarchy as a Structure of White supremacist Class Rule
under Imperialism
by Danny Haiphong
==========
m.
US
trying to create ‘quasi-state’ in Eastern Euphrates: Russia
https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2018/10/12/576834/Russia-Lavrov-US-quasi-state-Syria-Kurds
Russian
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says the US is seeking
to use its allies in Syria, especially the Kurds, in order to establish a
quasi-state east of the Euphrates River and create illegal structures there.
October
12, 2018 - “On Syrian territory there are vast lands east of the Euphrates
where absolutely unacceptable things are taking place,” Lavrov
said in a Friday interview with the French website of Russia's state-run RT
channel, along with France's Paris
Match and Le Figaro.
“The
US is trying to use these lands through their Syrian allies – above all,
through the Kurds – in order to establish a quasi-state there,” he went on to
say.
“But
the US is by all means illegally seeking to establish a quasi-state on this
territory, trying to do everything there to create conditions for a normal way
of living for their subordinates, creating a structure of authority which is an
alternative to those legitimate [structures] of the Syrian Arabic Republic,”
the top Russian diplomat noted.
Lavrov stressed that the US is
encouraging the resettlement of refugees in the territories
under their control, undermining the peace process in the country.
“The
question is why they, on the eastern bank of the Euphrates River
which is controlled by the US and their local allies, do not have
to wait until the beginning of a credible political process,” he
asked.
He
said the US "planned to establish a territory that would be a kind of a
prototype of a new state or it will be another round of the most dangerous game
with Iraqi Kurdistan, the idea of the so-called unified Kurdistan."
Lavrov regretted that the US is trying to
“catch the fish they want” in such “muddy waters”, adding that such kind of
strategies "never ended up well".
The
Russian minister’s remarks echoed concerns earlier raised by Turkey
over US massing of heavy weapons in support of Kurdish militants on
the eastern side of the Euphrates.
==========
n.
Saudi
Arabia is taunting Trump
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2018/10/12/saudi-arabia-is-taunting-trump/
by Shadi Hamid
Editor's
Note: Bad allies, particularly in the
Middle East where they abound, have been a recurring problem for successive
U.S. administrations.
In
the wake of Jamal Khashoggi's disappearance, it is
time to call Saudi Arabia’s bluff, argues Shadi Hamid. This piece originally appeared in The Atlantic.
Donald
Trump’s Middle East policy is many things, but it is not incoherent. At the
core of the president’s approach has been a stark redrawing of the friend-enemy
distinction: doubling down on support, often unquestioning, for allies like
Saudi Arabia and Israel, while refocusing the near-entirety of American ire on
Iran.
That
Trump has bet big on the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia, Mohamed bin Salman, makes the Saudis’ disappearing and likely assassination of
dissident Jamal Khashoggi in their Istanbul
consulate—“monstrous” on its own terms—a
different sort of escalation. For Trump, this has been personal. His son-in-law
and adviser Jared Kushner has worked to develop a close relationship with bin Salman, colloquially known as MbS,
seeing the young crown prince as a strong partner in isolating Iran and
softening Arab enmity toward Israel.
In
Trump’s world, friends—particularly friends that are both Arab and
authoritarian—are to be criticized as little as possible, especially on low
priorities for the administration like human rights. This hands-off approach
has emboldened and empowered MbS to increasingly
destructive effect over the past year and a half, offering a reminder that the
prospect of U.S. pressure—if not actual U.S. pressure—serves as a constraint on
allies that tend towards overreach.
What
is both striking and telling is how half-hearted and generally uninterested the
Saudis have been in countering evidence they assassinated Khashoggi.
(Take for example the Saudi ambassador’s suggestion to Senator Bob
Corker that their consulate surveillance video only “live-streams.”) But this
is precisely what makes Saudi Arabia’s behavior in this episode even more
reckless than the ongoing crackdown on even its milder critics or
its increasingly callous disregard for
human life in the Yemen war. Trump has invested political capital and extended
unprecedented goodwill to MbS, drawing considerable
criticism in the process. In a sense, this has been Trump’s “big bet,” perhaps
his biggest one in the Middle East. As Axios’s Jonathan Swan put it, “The Trump administration,
led by Jared Kushner, made about as big a bet on MbS
the visionary-reformer and the Saudis as it’s possible for a US admin to make.”
The goodwill has not been reciprocated. Rather, MbS
is in effect taunting Trump, gloating in his ability to get away with anything.
+
All US presidents kowtow to Saudi Arabia – Trump is
just honest about it
X
https://www.rt.com/news/441173-trump-saudi-arabia-journalist/
(VIDEO)
+
Jamal Elshayyal: Response to
Khashoggi’s Death Will Determine
Future of Saudi Arabia & Middle East
https://www.democracynow.org/2018/10/17/jamal_elshayyal_response_to_khashoggis_death
==========
o.
Marketing
War: the Incessant Drumbeat of Mortal Danger
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50400.htm
by Paul Atwood
The
claim that the national security of the United States requires that more than
half the nation’s discretionary budget must be devoted to the maintenance of
armies, global strategic bases and massive armaments is false. Until we can
convince the majority of the public of this fiction, and surmount the wall of
disinformation, nothing will change and we will continue down the road to a
hellish future.
This
statement of course contradicts the incessant indoctrination emanating from
Washington and the corporate media that U.S. foreign policy is devoted to the
maintenance of global peace and a “liberal” and just world order in the face of
enemies who wish to destroy that order. The facts controvert such declarations
yet to emphasize them is to be accused of disloyalty, a lack of patriotism, and
conspiracy mongering.
The
U.S. propaganda system relentlessly broadcasts the malevolent machinations of
Russia, Iran or North Korea or Syria and China as well as of armed gangs like
ISIS, al Qaeda and the Taliban. The drumbeat that mortal danger is on our
doorstep is so ceaseless and all-encompassing that the public either accepts
the claims as true or remains blind to very real dangers posed by our
government’s own militarized policies that call forth various forms of
opposition to those policies.
+
Syrian
Army Digs Up US-Made Guns in Terrorist Arms Cache
Near
Damascus
https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/201810131068863894-damascus-region-terrorist-weapons-cache-found/
During
operations to clear terrorist-controlled areas across the country in recent
months, Syrian forces discovered countless caches of Western and Israeli-made
weapons, munitions and supplies.
Authorities
in the town of Yalda, about 10
kilometers south of the Syrian capital, have discovered a large stock
of weapons and ammunition carefully hidden inside a plastic water
tank at a local farm abandoned by militants, the Syrian Arab News
Agency reports.
The
discovery included NATO-standard sniper rifles, a LAW portable anti-tank
weapon, thermal and night vision equipment, grenades and improvised explosive
devices, as well as multiple RPG launchers, Kalashnikovs and Dragunov rifles.
==========
p.
The
Long Night Has Fallen on the Supreme Court –
Thanks
Largely to Democrats
https://blackagendareport.com/long-night-has-fallen-supreme-court-thanks-largely-democrats
by Glen Ford
If
the Democrats were serious they would have treated each reactionary GOP nominee
over the decades as a bullet to the heart of their constituents. They did not.
“The Democrats have
always been unwilling to create a political crisis in order to prevent a human
rights meltdown for Black and poor people.”
Brett
Kavanaugh took his seat on the far right of the U.S.
Supreme Court on Tuesday, but before the Court’s newest racist, pro-torture,
corporate, patriarchal pig could don his new robes the Democratic National
Committee was filling email boxes with appeals for funds to turn Republican
victory into defeat in November. “The only way we'll be able to protect our
rights is by regaining a Democratic majority in Congress,” writes Seema Nanda, the DNC’s chief executive officer. “If we
don't, women's reproductive justice, affordable health care, and the future of
our democracy will all be at risk.”
The
Democrats have been singing that same song for decades -- indeed, generations
-- even as they passively allowed reactionary justices to become dominant on
the High Court, their hard right rulings only slightly tempered by the “swing”
votes of, first, Sandra Day O’Connor -- who is credited with rescuing
“diversity,” the pale
replacement for affirmative action, as a public policy option
– and, later, Justice
Anthony Kennedy , whose seat Kavanaugh now
fills. Whenever the Democrats’ GOP-lite policies
became indefensible, the party’s apologists would caution exasperated Black
voters: “But what about the Supreme Court? You can’t allow the Republicans to
decide the law of the land for the next 20 years!”
“The Democrats have
passively allowed reactionary justices to become dominant on the High Court.”
But
their assurances that the Democratic Party would hold back the corporate legal
juggernaut were always a sham. Yes, an ultra-right judiciary portends disaster
for Black, working and poor people, but not for the oligarchs that fund and
control both mass parties in this country. No Supreme Court produced by
the two corporate parties could possibly pose the slightest threat to the core
interests of the ruling class or the capitalist system.Indeed,
the judiciary becomes more reactionary in synch with the consolidation of
wealth at the top of the economic pyramid, which is reflected in the rightward
lunge of both corporate parties. If the Democrats were sincere in their vows to
block the troglodytes’ steady march to judicial hegemony -- if they were
serious about preventing a human rights apocalypse -- they would have treated
each reactionary High Court nominee put forward by the GOP over the decades as
a bullet to the heart of their constituents, and shut down the Congress to
force the nomination to be withdrawn. But the Democrats have always been
unwilling to create a political crisis in order to prevent a human rights
meltdown for Black and poor people.
+
Homeless
America
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50404.htm
by Chris Hedges
October
09, 2018 : PORTLAND, Ore.—It is 8 a.m. I am in the
small offices of Street
Roots, a weekly newspaper that prints 10,000 copies per edition.
Those who sell the newspaper on the streets—all of them victims of extreme
poverty and half of them homeless—have gathered before heading out with their
bundles to spend hours in the cold and rain.
“There
is foot care on Mondays starting at 8 a.m. with the nurses,” Cole Merkel, the
director of the vendor program, shouts above the chatter. “If you need to get
your feet taken care of, come in for the nurses’ foot care. Just
a really quick shout-out and thank you to Leo and Nettie Johnson, who called up
to City Hall this week to testify about the criminalization of homelessness to
City Council and the mayor. Super awesome.”
The
men and women, most middle-aged or elderly, sit on folding chairs that hug the
walls. They are wrapped in layers of worn and tattered clothing. Some cradle
small dogs. Others cup their hands around disposable coffee cups and take small
sips. The weekly newspaper was founded in 1998. It focuses on issues
surrounding social and environmental justice as well as homelessness. It also
reprints poems and artwork by the 180 vendors, who buy the paper for 25 cents a
copy and sell it for a dollar.
On
the walls there are poignant reminders of the lives these people lead,
including posters of missing men and women, notices about where to find free
food or clothing, and scattered one-page obituaries of those who died recently,
many discovered in parks or on sidewalks. The average age at death for a man is
51 and for a woman 43. Nearly half succumb to alcohol or drugs, 28 percent are
hit by vehicles and 9 percent commit suicide. Life expectancy plummets once you
become homeless. From 50 to 80 homeless people die on the streets of Portland
every year, and many more in its hospitals.
==========
q.
Uneven
Burden-Sharing Isn’t NATO’s Biggest Problem
by Jyri Raitasalo
The
real problem is lack of collective military purpose within an Alliance that has
become transactional during the post–Cold War era.
Lately,
a lot of ink has been spilled on the issues of uneven burden-sharing within the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the fact that European member-states of
the Alliance are underperforming in military capability development. Although
these topics have been at the top of the Donald Trump’s NATO policy ever since
he assumed the presidency, they have a much longer pedigree—dating back to the
Barack Obama and George W. Bush administrations, and even to the early days of
the Cold War.
That
fact of the matter is that the United States has guaranteed European security
through its massive military power ever since the inception of the Cold War.
For decades, many European states have had the luxury of free-riding at the
expense of Uncle Sam. During much of the post–Cold War era—between 1989 and
2013— this dire situation had few security-related consequences. Prior to the
Russian annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014, NATO-Europe witnessed
twenty-five years of an extremely benign security environment with zero
existential threats to be countered or even imagined.
During
this period, the loss of European military capability had little effect—it was
sufficient for Europeans to send token troop contributions to different
military operations the United States was leading whether in Bosnia, Kosovo,
Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya. In the last case, the United States tried to lead
from behind, but was forced to prop up the attacking coalition against Muammar
el-Qaddafi as European ability to conduct a prolonged operation was in doubt
and European armories were depleted of
precision-guided munitions soon after the beginning of the air campaign.
==========
r.
WATCH: Russia tests its NUKES in large-scale drills
https://www.rt.com/news/441029-nuclear-forces-exercise-russia/
The
Russian military has tested components of its nuclear deterrence, including
land-launched nuclear missiles, nuclear-armed submarines and strategic aircraft
with nuclear bombs, intended for retaliation against enemy attack
: all three components of the Russian nuclear triad were involved in the
exercise on Thursday.
+
Moscow ‘ready for larger-scale provocations’ by the
West, says Lavrov
https://www.rt.com/news/441577-lavrov-rt-france-interview/
==========
s.
Trump: Chinese lived too well for too long
https://www.rt.com/usa/440980-trump-chinese-lived-too-well/
US
President Donald Trump has said that his tariff policies have hurt the Chinese
economy and that he has “a lot more to do” to the country.
In
a phone-in interview with Fox News, Trump said US tariffs on Chinese goods are
having a “big impact”
and that the Chinese have lived too well for too long.
Trump
began imposing tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars worth of Chinese
imports in January 2018, with Beijing retaliating by slapping tariffs on US
goods in response.
Top
US officials have been using aggressive rhetoric against China in recent weeks,
painting it as a grave threat to US interests.
On
Wednesday, FBI director Christopher Wray said that China represents the “broadest,
most complicated, most long-term”
threat to the US and that it is waging a massive influence campaign over
American voters ahead of the November midterm elections.
Wray
said that China was trying “to get secret
information about our trade, our ideas, and innovations” using “an expanding
set of unconventional methods each time to achieve their goals” and warned that economic espionage
from China would affect companies in all sectors of the US economy.
The
US has also slapped sanctions on the Chinese military industry over its
cooperation with Russia. Beijing has shown less interest in pursuing a adversarial relations with the US, but has warned that
there will be “consequences”
if it did not remedy the “mistake”.
==========
t.
Israel
Thanks the US for allowing them to attack pro-Iranian forces in Syria
Israeli
Foreign Ministry’s Director General Yuval Rotem has
thanked US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for his
public recognition of the partner nation’s “right” to attack pro-Iranian forces
in Syria. “Israel will never allow #Iran and its terrorist proxies in #Syria
& Lebanon to endanger Israel’s sovereignty and people,” Rotem tweeted. Addressing the Washington, D.C.-based Jewish
Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) on October
10, Pompeo reiterated the US administration’s
“unwavering support” for Israel. In particular, Pompeo
claimed that Israel had the sovereign right to “target Iranian-backed militias”
in Syria, and pledged that the United States would continue to stand
up for this right.
Over
the last two years, Israel has struck Syria on multiple occasions,
claiming that it targets Iran-backed forces, including Hezbollah. The nation
has vowed to continue its air raids, despite the crash of the
Russian Il-20 off the Syrian coast, which Moscow blamed on Tel Aviv
and subsequent deliveries of Russia’s S-300 air defenses to the Arab
Republic.
+
Benjamin Netanyahu Is No Friend to
America
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50402.htm
by
Scott Ritter
Benjamin
Netanyahu is no stranger to the American spotlight. A career Israeli politician
who attended school in the United States, he specializes in the kind of
rhetoric that his American counterparts revel in—a kind of narcissism that’s
more used car salesman than educator.
Netanyahu
specializes in selling danger to the American people. This is an art he has
practiced on numerous occasions, whether it be at the gatherings of the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), his many appearances before
the U.S. Congress, at televised events or during the general debate in the
United Nations General Assembly, an annual gathering of global leaders and
diplomats where each nation’s representative is provided the opportunity to
address counterparts and the world on issues he or she deems
to be of particular import.
Bibi (as he is known, affectionately or
otherwise) delivered
his latest address to the General Assembly on Sept. 27. Like others
he had delivered previously, this one was a tour de force of angst, fear and
anger with a nearly singular focus on the issue that has seized Netanyahu for
more than two decades—Iran and its alleged nuclear weapons program.
In
his 1995 campaign autobiography, “Fighting Terrorism,” Netanyahu, preparing to
run for the office of prime minister of Israel, asserted that Iran was “three
to five years” away from having a nuclear bomb. Bibi
repeated this claim several times over the next 20-plus years, apparently
unconcerned by the fact that his self-appointed timetable kept coming and going
without the Iranian nuclear threat manifesting itself.
==========
u.
Pentagon Report Points To US Preparations For Total War
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50418.htm
by Andre Damon
Over
the past two weeks, with next to no media coverage, the United States has moved
substantially closer toward open military confrontation with both Russia and
China, the second- and third-ranked nuclear powers in the world.
On
October 3, the United States threatened, for the first time since the Cold War,
to directly attack the Russian homeland. UN Ambassador to NATO Kay Bailey
Hutchison accused the country of violating the Intermediate Range Nuclear
Forces (INF) treaty by developing a nuclear cruise missile and said that
Washington was preparing to “take out” the weapon with a US strike.
This
statement came just three days after a Chinese warship set a collision course
with a US destroyer carrying out a so-called “freedom of navigation” operation
in the South China Sea, forcing the American ship to maneuver to avoid a
collision and the potentially deadliest military clash in the Pacific in
decades.
Behind
such hair-raising incidents, the United States is undertaking serious,
long-term preparations to restructure the American economy to fight a major war
with a “peer” adversary, entailing radical changes to American economic, social
and political life.
This
is the essential content of a 146-page document released by the Pentagon last
Friday, titled “Assessing and Strengthening the Manufacturing and Defense
Industrial Base and Supply Chain Resiliency of the United States.” It makes it
clear that Washington is preparing not just for isolated regional clashes, but
rather for a massive, long-term war effort against Russia and China under
conditions of potential national autarchy.
==========
v.
From: Mark Crispin Miller
To: "newsfromunderground" <newsfromunderground@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, 13 October, 2018
Subject: [MCM] NYTimes' big piece on Russia's
pre-election Facebook op is "grossly
misleading"
The Shaky Case That Russia Manipulated Social Media to Tip the
2016 Election
by Gareth Porter
October 10, 2018
The idea promoted by the NYT’s Shane & Mazzetti
that the Russian government seriously threatened to determine the 2016 election
does not hold up when the larger social media context is examined more closely,
reports Gareth Porter.
By Gareth Porter
Special to Consortium
News
In their long recapitulation of the case that Russia subverted the
2016 election, Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti of The
New York Times painted a picture of
highly effective Russian government exploitation of social media for that
purpose. Shane and Mazzetti asserted that
“anti-Clinton, pro-Trump messages shared with millions of voters by Russia
could have made the difference” in the election.
“What we now
know with certainty: The Russians carried out a landmark intervention
that will be examined for decades to come,” they write elsewhere in the
10,000-word article.
But an investigation of the data they cite to show that the
Russian campaigns on Facebook and Twitter were highly
effective reveals a gross betrayal of journalistic responsibility. Shane and Mazzetti have constructed a case that is fundamentally
false and misleading with statistics that exaggerate the real effectiveness of
social media efforts by orders of magnitude.
‘Reaching’ 129 Million Americans
The Internet Research Agency (IRA), is a
privately-owned company run by entrepreneur Vevgeny
V. Prigozhin, who has ties with President Vladimir
Putin. Its employees poured out large numbers of social media postings
apparently aimed at stoking racial and cultural tensions in the United States
and trying to influence U.S. voters in regard to the presidential election, as
Shane and Mazzetti suggest. They even adopted false U.S. personas online to
get people to attend rallies and conduct other political activities. (An
alternative explanation is
that IRA is a purely commercial, and not political, operation.)
Whether those efforts even came close to swaying U.S. voters in
the 2016 presidential election, as Shane and Mazzetti
claimed, is another matter.
Shane and Mazzetti might argue that they
are merely citing figures published by the social media giants Facebook and Twitter, but they systematically failed to
report the detailed explanations behind the gross figures used in each case,
which falsified their significance.
Their most dramatic assertions came in reporting the alleged
results of the IRA’s efforts on Facebook. “Even by
the vertiginous standards of social media,” they wrote, “the reach of their
effort was impressive: 2,700 fake Facebook accounts,
80,000 posts, many of them elaborate images with catchy slogans, and an
eventual audience of 126 million Americans on Facebook
alone.”
Shane and Mazzetti: Playing loose with
the facts.
Then, to dramatize that “eventual audience” figure, they observed,
“That was not far short of the 137 million people who would vote in the 2016
presidential elections.”
But as impressive as these figures may appear at first glance,
they don’t really indicate an effective attack on the U.S. election process at
all. In fact, without deeper inquiry into their meaning, those figures were
grossly misleading. . . .
+
‘Bodies lying
everywhere’: Shooting at Crimea college
has echoes of Columbine massacre
https://www.rt.com/news/441520-crimea-college-shotting-columbine/
==========
w.
Future of Western Democracy Being Played Out in Brazil
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50409.htm
by Pepe
Escobar
“Stripped
to its essence, the Brazilian presidential elections represent a direct clash
between democracy and an early 21st Century neofascism,
indeed between civilization and barbarism.”
Nothing
less than the future of politics across the West – and across the Global South
– is being played out in Brazil.
Stripped
to its essence, the Brazilian presidential elections represent a direct clash
between democracy and an early 21st Century, neofascism,
indeed between civilization and barbarism.
Geopolitical
and global economic reverberations will be immense. The Brazilian dilemma
illuminates all the contradictions surrounding the Right populist offensive
across the West, juxtaposed to the inexorable collapse of the Left. The stakes
could not be higher.
Jair Bolsonaro,
an outright supporter of Brazilian military dictatorships of last century, who
has been normalized as the “extreme-right candidate,” won the first round of
the presidential elections on Sunday with more than 49 million votes. That was
46 percent of the total, just shy of a majority needed for an outright win.
This in itself is a jaw-dropping development.
His
opponent, Fernando Haddad of the Workers’ Party (PT), got only 31 million
votes, or 29 percent of the total. He will now face Bolsonaro
in a runoff on October 28. A Sisyphean task awaits Haddad: just to reach parity
with Bolsonaro, he needs every single vote from those
who supported the third and fourth-placed candidates, plus a substantial share
of the almost 20 percent of votes considered null and void.
+
Digital Monitoring Of The
Poor
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxT_phIu7xo&feature=youtu.be
with Chris Hedges
Author,
Virginia Eubanks, explains to Chris Hedges how the goals of Victorian-era
poorhouses have evolved with 21st Century high-tech to exert control and
surveillance of needy, poor and homeless people. Eubanks is
an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University Albany, SUNY.
She is the author of Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police
and Punish the Poor.
==========
x.
The
CIA Finger in Brasil’s Elections
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50395.htm
by Marcelo Zero
The
growth of Bolsonarian fascism in the final stretch of
the election campaign, turbo charged by an avalanche of fake news disseminated
on the internet, is not surprising. It is an old tactic developed by American
and British intelligence agencies, with the goal of manipulating public opinion
and influencing political processes and elections. It was used in the Ukraine,
in the Arab Spring and in Brazil during 2013.
There
is science behind this manipulation.
Some
people think that elections are won or lost only in rigorously rational debates
about policies and proposals. But things don’t really work that way. In
reality, as Emory University Psychology Professor Drew Weston says in his book
“The Political Brain:
The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation”, feelings are commonly
more decisive in defining the vote.
Weston
says that, based on recent studies in neuroscience on the theme, contrary to
what is commonly understood, the human brain makes
decisions mainly based on emotions. The voters strongly base their choices on
emotional perceptions about parties and candidates. Rational analysis and
empirical data normally plays a secondary role in this process.
+
How the FBI Silences Whistleblowers
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/10/16/how-the-fbi-silences-whistleblowers/
by John Kiriakou
The idea of “whistleblowing” has been in
the news a great deal. Is the anonymous author of a recent New York Times op-ed eviscerating the
president a whistleblower? Is the victim of an alleged sexual
assault by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh
a whistleblower? I’m fortunate to have access to the
media to talk about torture after blowing the
whistle on the CIA’s program.
I think Ed Snowden, Tom Drake and others would say the same thing about the
aftermath of their own whistleblowing.
Cost of Doing the Right Thing
The problem is that we are the exception to the rule. Most
whistleblowers either suffer in anonymity or are personally, professionally,
socially and financially ruined for speaking truth to power. Darin Jones is one
of those people. He’s one of the people silenced in Barack Obama’s war on
whistleblowers. And he continues to suffer under Donald Trump. Jones was an FBI
supervisory contract specialist who in 2012 reported evidence of serious
procurement improprieties to his superior. Jones maintained that
Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) had been awarded a $40
million contract improperly because a former FBI official with
responsibility for granting the contract then was hired as a consultant at CSC.
Jones said, rightly, that this was a violation of the Procurement
Integrity Act. He made seven other disclosures alleging financial
improprieties in the FBI, and he was promptly fired for his troubles.
==========
y.
Israeli
settlers, soldiers injure dozens of Palestinian students
in northern West Bank
Dozens
of Palestinian students have been injured after armed Israeli settlers and
soldiers raided a high school in the occupied West Bank, a report says.
The
Palestinian Ma'an news agency, citing Ghassan Daghlas, an official who
monitors settlement activities in the region, reported that around 18 heavily
armed Israeli settlers from the Yitzhar settlement
broke into the high school in Urif village, located
in southern Nablus, on Wednesday.
Upon
storming the school, the invading settlers began hurling rocks at horrified
students inside their classrooms, inflicting injuries to dozens of students, he
further said, adding that the invasion also led to disruption of classes and
material damages.
Minutes
after the incident, Israeli forces also entered the high school and provided
protection for the settlers while escorting them out of the area. The troopers
also fired rubber-coated steel bullets and tear-gas canisters at students,
causing a number of them to suffer from tear-gas inhalation.
Daghlas also confirmed that
authorities dismissed the classes and hundreds of students evacuated
the school’s premises.
In
its annual report for 2017, the Palestinian Ministry of Education revealed that
80,279 Palestinian children and 4,929 teachers and staff were “attacked” by
either Israeli settlers or soldiers.
==========
z.
“Too
Big” Is Too Little
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/10/too-big-to-fail-sanders-bill-financial-crisis
by Nicole M. Aschoff
Bernie
Sanders is right: we need to rein in the big banks. But we shouldn't just break
them up — we should socialize them.
==========
zz.
Warning shot? China sells US Treasury bonds amid trade
war
https://www.rt.com/business/441146-us-treasury-bonds-china-sale/
by Thomas White
China
has sold $3 billion of sovereign dollar bonds. This is only the third such move
by Beijing in the last 14 years, and the first involving bonds with a 30-year
maturity.
China
sold $1.5 billion of five-year bonds at 3.25 percent, $1 billion of 10-year
bonds at 3.5 percent, and $500 million of 30-year bonds at four percent, the
Finance Ministry said on Friday, as quoted by Reuters.
Read
more . . .
Printing machine: US Treasury issuing more bonds to feed soaring
debt but there are no takers
Beijing
is the largest holder of US debt. As of July, China had $1.17 trillion invested
in debt minted by the US Treasury.
China
has made the sale at a time when yuan has depreciated
10 percent against the dollar amid an escalating trade war with the US. “For any other normal corporate borrower the
decision might have been to stand on the sidelines and wait for the market to
stabilize a bit, but China is a little bit of a different animal,” a banker who worked on the deal
told Reuters.
“I
don’t think people had concerns about China specifically, but it’s just a
broader macro noise,”
the person said.
In
the recent tat-for-tat trade punches, China stopped buying oil from the US.
China’s crude oil imports from America reached an average of 334,880 barrels
per day through August, making Beijing the second-largest buyer of US oil after
Canada.
So
far, Washington has imposed tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese goods and
Beijing retaliated with tariffs on $60 billion of US imports.
==========
zzz.
Khashoggi Picked the Wrong Prince
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRG8lA3v0sg&feature=youtu.be
+
Jamal Elshayyal: Response to
Khashoggi’s Death
Will Determine Future of Saudi Arabia & Middle
East
https://www.democracynow.org/2018/10/17/jamal_elshayyal_response_to_khashoggis_death
==========
zzzz.
Saudi Crown Prince to Pompeo: “We Are ‘Allies’.”
https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/100000006163900/saudi-crown-prince-to-pompeo-we-are-allies.html
+
The
Khashoggi Extortion Fiasco:
by Ghassan and Itbah Kadi
http://thesaker.is/the-khashoggi-extortion-fiasco/
+
Jamal Elshayyal: Response to
Khashoggi’s Death
Will Determine Future of Saudi Arabia & Middle
East
https://www.democracynow.org/2018/10/17/jamal_elshayyal_response_to_khashoggis_death
+
In
the Wake of Khashoggi’s Disappearance, Saudi Arabia’s
Crown Prince Is Pushed to the Brink
by Dexter Filkins
+
Pompeo Meets with Saudi Official Amid
Missing Journalist Questions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Uvnm3BZFJA&feature=youtu.be
==========
zzzzz.
Michael Moore: Trump Will Win In 2020