Fwd: [acb-chat] This is simply horrible....

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Carl Jarvis <carjar82@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 9 Feb 2017 07:13:12 -0800
Subject: Re: [acb-chat] This is simply horrible....
To: "General discussion list for ACB members and friends where a wide
range of topics from blindness to politics, issues of the day or
whatever comes to mind are welcome. This is a free form discussion
list." <acb-chat@acblists.org>
Cc: "Demaya, Diego" <Diego.Demaya@memorialhermann.org>

As horrific as this story is, the real tragedy is the indifference we
humans pay to such suffering that is caused by our own careless
treatment of our Planet Earth.
I must receive a dozen emails every day asking for help regarding one
animal or another, nearing extinction.
In addition, I receive as many posts telling of cruel and careless
treatment to both animal life and our environment.
Every year following hunting season, we take large garbage bags and
walk the back roads and trails around our beloved forest, picking up
the beer cans and whiskey jugs and fast food containers and other
trash that has been cast aside.
As a reformed Christian, now a practicing Agnostic, I think back to
those days we would gather on a Sunday morning in our House of Worship
and sing praise to He who had created everything. In those days I
thought of Earth as the Garden of Eden, and we humans were the Adams
and Eves, charged with the care of this beautiful garden. But I never
believed back then that we would take such poor care that we could
find ourselves being cast into Outer Darkness. But here we are.

Carl Jarvis



On 2/8/17, Demaya, Diego via acb-chat <acb-chat@acblists.org> wrote:
>
>
> "It wasn't like it was in just part of the stomach. It filled up the whole
> space."
> Mary Papenfuss Trends reporter, The Huffington Post
> </us/author/mary-s-papenfuss>
> [http://img.huffingtonpost.com/asset/scalefit_630_noupscale/58957cc825000034080b6dec.jpeg?cache=asgm8mwwxv]
>
> University of Bergen
> Scientist reveals the plastic bags pulled from the intestines of a beached
> goose-beaked whale in Norway.
>
> A rare goose-beaked whale that repeatedly beached on a Norwegian shore was
> so ill that it had to be euthanized — and experts soon found out why. The
> 2-ton animal had about 30 plastic bags and other garbage packed in its
> stomach.
>
> There was "no food, only some remnants of a squid's head in addition to a
> thin fat layer," said University of Bergen zoologist Terje
> Lislevand<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.seattlepi.com_news_science_article_In-2DNorway-2Dzoologist-2Dfind-2D30-2Dplastic-2Dbags-2Din-2D10905578.php&d=DwMFaQ&c=cBOA5YEoZuz9KdLvh38YxdrPtfJt83ckXekfBgq5xB0&r=CK8oOj7-JYZnTDmB5orNTVZXar6NrsnGtGHfQ5m79Do&m=pMZpNGUAbTZ9r5c1I8fhxyYP6ynz-R9Hx6NVRtodwzY&s=B2uj-Dizo2Uz6cJtJkG8Zzx2JzC1HjPvqL_GD4NepEk&e=>,
> according to The Associated Press.
>
> The 20-foot adult male whale had appeared several times in shallow waters
> off the island of Sotra, and personnel from both the fire department and the
> Department of Wildlife Conservation repeatedly attempted to herd or tow the
> animal back into the deep.
>
> The plastic — as well as candy wrappers, smaller bread bags and other
> garbage— was discovered during the necropsy, Norwegian public media NRK
> reported<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.tnp.no_norway_panorama_5450-2Dnorwegian-2Dwhale-2Dfound-2Doff-2Dthe-2Dwest-2Dcoast-2Dwith-2D30-2Dplastic-2Dbags-2Din-2Dits-2Dstomach&d=DwMFaQ&c=cBOA5YEoZuz9KdLvh38YxdrPtfJt83ckXekfBgq5xB0&r=CK8oOj7-JYZnTDmB5orNTVZXar6NrsnGtGHfQ5m79Do&m=pMZpNGUAbTZ9r5c1I8fhxyYP6ynz-R9Hx6NVRtodwzY&s=-Rh5qpGwUTB2WYP3JnSElsC9vSJjMOsvkIRMnoH_RWI&e=>.
> Researchers believe the animal may have thought the bags were
> squid<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__news.sky.com_story_sick-2Dwhale-2Dfound-2Dto-2Dhave-2D30-2Dplastic-2Dbags-2Dblocking-2Dits-2Dstomach-2D10754077&d=DwMFaQ&c=cBOA5YEoZuz9KdLvh38YxdrPtfJt83ckXekfBgq5xB0&r=CK8oOj7-JYZnTDmB5orNTVZXar6NrsnGtGHfQ5m79Do&m=pMZpNGUAbTZ9r5c1I8fhxyYP6ynz-R9Hx6NVRtodwzY&s=8-Hk6a7OwJHwsZlx9q8l9d7qXxaZfZ5hzfx59kYp7-Y&e=>
> it could eat, according to Sky News.
>
> "It wasn't like it was in just part of the stomach," Lislevand told Sky
> News. "It filled up the whole space. It's the explanation of why the animal
> acted so strange and stranded."
>
> Lislevand said he believes the animal was in serious pain for a long time.
>
> "I'm afraid to estimate how long it could have taken before his stomach was
> totally
> full<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.tnp.no_norway_panorama_5450-2Dnorwegian-2Dwhale-2Dfound-2Doff-2Dthe-2Dwest-2Dcoast-2Dwith-2D30-2Dplastic-2Dbags-2Din-2Dits-2Dstomach&d=DwMFaQ&c=cBOA5YEoZuz9KdLvh38YxdrPtfJt83ckXekfBgq5xB0&r=CK8oOj7-JYZnTDmB5orNTVZXar6NrsnGtGHfQ5m79Do&m=pMZpNGUAbTZ9r5c1I8fhxyYP6ynz-R9Hx6NVRtodwzY&s=-Rh5qpGwUTB2WYP3JnSElsC9vSJjMOsvkIRMnoH_RWI&e=>,"
> he said. "In this case the plastic particles accumulated and created a
> barrier in the system."
>
> The goose-beaked whale, also known as a Cuvier's beaked whale, is the first
> to ever be found off the coast of Norway. The animal was just the latest of
> a mounting tally of victims claimed by plastic
> pollution<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.huffingtonpost.com_news_ocean-2Dplastic-2Dpollution_&d=DwMFaQ&c=cBOA5YEoZuz9KdLvh38YxdrPtfJt83ckXekfBgq5xB0&r=CK8oOj7-JYZnTDmB5orNTVZXar6NrsnGtGHfQ5m79Do&m=pMZpNGUAbTZ9r5c1I8fhxyYP6ynz-R9Hx6NVRtodwzY&s=43LuhHB9cch6a6MN_3_qZIS22mKCllfJIQPMwUQ_IpM&e=>
> of the ocean.
>
> Lislevand noted to the AP that United Nations estimates indicate that about
> 8 million tons of plastic trash are dumped into the ocean every year. A
> World Economic Forum
> study<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www3.weforum.org_docs_WEF-5FThe-5FNew-5FPlastics-5FEconomy.pdf&d=DwMFaQ&c=cBOA5YEoZuz9KdLvh38YxdrPtfJt83ckXekfBgq5xB0&r=CK8oOj7-JYZnTDmB5orNTVZXar6NrsnGtGHfQ5m79Do&m=pMZpNGUAbTZ9r5c1I8fhxyYP6ynz-R9Hx6NVRtodwzY&s=OKfGpf65sB83bqAD643GvyeZS-JukkB6TjDZzQbzLog&e=>
> also found that there are currently at least 150 million tons of trash in
> the
> ocean<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.weforum.org_reports_the-2Dnew-2Dplastics-2Deconomy-2Drethinking-2Dthe-2Dfuture-2Dof-2Dplastics&d=DwMFaQ&c=cBOA5YEoZuz9KdLvh38YxdrPtfJt83ckXekfBgq5xB0&r=CK8oOj7-JYZnTDmB5orNTVZXar6NrsnGtGHfQ5m79Do&m=pMZpNGUAbTZ9r5c1I8fhxyYP6ynz-R9Hx6NVRtodwzY&s=EbQfXThuMK8JcDCxWBRhbhOWFexlTHECOj8KniWwXfY&e=>,
> Norwegian public media NRK reported.
>
> A 2015 study by researchers at the University of California, Davis and
> Hasanuddin University in Indonesia found that one-quarter of fish sampled in
> fish
> markets<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.ucdavis.edu_news_plastic-2Ddinner-2Dquarter-2Dfish-2Dsold-2Dmarkets-2Dcontain-2Dhuman-2Dmade-2Ddebris&d=DwMFaQ&c=cBOA5YEoZuz9KdLvh38YxdrPtfJt83ckXekfBgq5xB0&r=CK8oOj7-JYZnTDmB5orNTVZXar6NrsnGtGHfQ5m79Do&m=pMZpNGUAbTZ9r5c1I8fhxyYP6ynz-R9Hx6NVRtodwzY&s=oQ69AUCYGPyujyHdEW01bJO-0y6Fcn71-4Z52sAXOmg&e=>
> in California and Indonesia had plastic or some other fibrous garbage in
> their bellies.
> [http://img.huffingtonpost.com/asset/scalefit_630_noupscale/58957d2b25000032080b6ded.jpeg]
>
> University of Bergen
> Norwegian researchers examine the body of a goose-beaked whale that
> scientists believe was driven to beach by the pain and hunger of a belly
> full of plastic.
>
>
> http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_58957a1de4b0c1284f262e91<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__m.huffpost.com_us_entry_us-5F58957a1de4b0c1284f262e91&d=DwMFaQ&c=cBOA5YEoZuz9KdLvh38YxdrPtfJt83ckXekfBgq5xB0&r=CK8oOj7-JYZnTDmB5orNTVZXar6NrsnGtGHfQ5m79Do&m=pMZpNGUAbTZ9r5c1I8fhxyYP6ynz-R9Hx6NVRtodwzY&s=7vsqV-vQzMX7uFy4kIoXa50HTB1nqoj4__tGk46-TgU&e=>
>
>
>
>

Fwd: [blind-democracy] Make America Ungovernable

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Carl Jarvis <carjar82@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 6 Feb 2017 10:12:16 -0800
Subject: Re: [blind-democracy] Make America Ungovernable
To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
Cc: jamesjarvis98 <jamesjarvis98@gmail.com>, Matthew
<mcblack@gmail.com>, footballmania <footballmania@gmail.com>

This is a "must read". There is so much to consider, and such a short
time until the "loyal opposition" is shut down.
In my opinion, Chris Hedges is a modern day prophet.
Here is a short but urgent warning:
"If we speak back to them in the language of violence,
we will fail. We will be transformed into the monsters we seek to defeat."




On 2/6/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> <http://www.truthdig.com/>
>
> Make America Ungovernable
>
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/make_america_ungovernable_20170205/
>
> AddThis Sharing Buttons
>
> Share to FacebookShare to TwitterShare to More50
>
> Posted on Feb 5, 2017
>
> By Chris Hedges
>
>
>
> Mr. Fish / Truthdig
>
> Donald Trump's regime is rapidly reconfiguring the United States into an
> authoritarian state. All forms of dissent will soon be criminalized. Civil
> liberties will no longer exist. Corporate exploitation, through the
> abolition of regulations and laws, will be unimpeded. Global warming will
> accelerate. A repugnant nationalism, amplified by government propaganda,
> will promote bigotry and racism. Hate crimes will explode. New wars will be
> launched or expanded.
>
> And, as this happens, those Americans who remain passive will be complicit.
>
>
> "We don't have much time," Kali Akuno, the co-director of Cooperation
> Jackson <http://www.cooperationjackson.org/> and an organizer with the
> Malcolm X Grassroots Movement <https://mxgm.org/> , told me when I reached
> him by phone in Jackson, Miss. "We are talking two to three months before
> this whole [reactionary] initiative is firmly consolidated. And that's with
> massive resistance."
>
> Flurries of executive orders and memorandums are being issued to demolish
> the anemic remnants of our bankrupt democracy. Those being placed in
> power—such as Betsy DeVos, who if confirmed as secretary of education will
> defund our system of public education and expand schools run by the
> Christian right, and Scott Pruitt, who if confirmed as head of the
> Environmental Protection Agency will dismantle it—are agents of
> destruction.
> In the eyes of the Christian fascists, generals, billionaires and
> conspiracy
> theorists around Trump, the laws, the courts and legislative bodies exist
> only to silence opponents and swell corporate profits. It is impossible to
> know how long this transformation will take—it may be longer than the two
> or
> three months Akuno fears—but unless we mobilize quickly to stop the Trump
> regime the end result is certain.
>
> "The forces around Trump have a plan to roll this [attack on democracy]
> out," said Akuno, who was the coordinator of special projects and external
> funding for the late Mayor Chokwe Lumumba in Jackson. "They have a
> strategy.
> They have a timeline. They know whom they need to divide and whom they need
> to recruit. They are consolidating their base. Those who try and chalk this
> up to Trump's pathology miss the intentionality, the strategic aims and the
> objectives. We will do ourselves a great disservice if we underestimate
> this
> regime and where it is going."
>
> Stephen Bannon, the president's chief counselor, was behind the ban on
> Muslims entering the United States from seven Muslim-majority countries—a
> ban you can expect to see extended if the Trump administration is
> successful
> in removing a stay issued by a district court. He was behind the order to
> the Department of Homeland Security to draw up lists of Muslim
> organizations
> and individuals
> <http://www.npr.org/2017/01/31/512439121/trumps-executive-order-on-immigrati
> on-annotated> in the United States that, in the language of the executive
> action, have been "radicalized" and have "provided material support to
> terrorism-related organizations in countries that pose a threat to the
> United States." Such lists will be used to criminalize Muslim leaders and
> the institutions and organizations they built. Then, once the Muslims are
> dealt with domestically, there will be new Homeland Security lists that
> will
> allow the government to target the press, activists, labor leaders,
> dissident intellectuals and the left. It is the beginning of a fascist
> version of Leon Trotsky
> <http://www.biography.com/people/leon-trotsky-9510793> 's "permanent
> revolution."
>
> "Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that's my goal too," Bannon told
> writer Ronald Radosh
> <http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/22/steve-bannon-trump-s-top-g
> uy-told-me-he-was-a-leninist.html> in 2013. "I want to bring everything
> crashing down, and destroy all of today's establishment."
>
> The Trump regime's demented project of social engineering, which will come
> wrapped in a Christianized fascism, can be implemented only if it quickly
> seizes control of the bureaucratic mechanisms, an action that Max Weber
> <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Max-Weber-German-sociologist>
> pointed
> out is the prerequisite for exercising power in industrial and technocratic
> societies. Once what the historian Guglielmo Ferrero calls the "silken
> threads" of habit, tradition and legality are gone, the "iron chains" of
> dictatorship will impose social cohesion.
>
> "This problem is not going to be solved in the 2018 elections," warned
> Akuno, the author of the organizing handbook "Let Your Motto Be Resistance
> <https://mxgm.org/let-your-motto-be-resistance-a-handbook-on-organizing-new-
> afrikan-and-oppressed-communities-for-self-defense/> " and the former
> executive director of the New Orleans-based People's Hurricane Relief Fund.
> "That hope is an illusion. The democratic apparatus will be completely
> gutted by then. We have to look beyond Trump. We have to look at the
> consolidation on the state level of these reactionary forces. They are near
> the threshold of being able to call for a constitutional convention because
> of the number of governorships and state legislatures where they hold both
> chambers. They can totally reorder the Constitution, if they even continue
> to abide by it, which they may not. We are facing a serious crisis. I don't
> think people grasp the depth of this because they are focused on the
> president and not the broader strategy of these reactionary forces."
>
> "We have to encourage a broad noncompliance strategy of ungovernablity,"
> Akuno said. "Not complying. Not consenting. We have to struggle on every
> front. We have to expect that the courts will not protect us. We are going
> to get less and less protection from the police. The slightest act of civil
> disobedience will mean jail. We have to mentally prepare for that. We have
> to build serious organizations, drawing upon the examples of forces that
> fought authoritarian regimes in Latin America and Europe. Either we submit
> to not having any protection as workers, women, queers, blacks, Latinos or
> indigenous or we fight back. These forces [arrayed against us] are not
> willing to compromise. I hope it does not come to violence, but we know the
> proclivities of the society and the forces that run it."
>
> If nonviolent protest is met with violence, we must never respond with
> violence. The use of violence, including property destruction, and taunting
> the police are gifts to the security and surveillance state. It allows the
> state to demonize and isolate a mass movement. It drives away the bulk of
> the population. Violence against the state is used by the authorities to
> justify greater forms of control and repression. The corporate state
> understands and welcomes the language of force. This is a game the
> government will always win and we will always lose. If we are perceived as
> a
> flag-burning, rock-throwing, angry mob that embraces violence, we will be
> easily crushed.
>
> We can succeed only if we win the hearts and minds of the wider public and
> ultimately many of those within the structures of power, including the
> police. When violence is used against nonviolent protesters demanding basic
> forms of justice it exposes the weakness of the state. It delegitimizes
> those in power. It prompts a passive population to respond with active
> support for the protesters. It creates internal divisions within the
> structures of power that, as I witnessed during the revolutions in Eastern
> Europe, paralyze and defeat those in authority. Martin Luther King Jr. held
> marches in Birmingham, Ala., rather than Albany, Ga., because he knew
> Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner
> <http://www.nytimes.com/1973/03/11/archives/eugene-bull-connor-dies-at-75-po
> lice-head-fought-integration-less.html?_r=0> "Bull" Connor would overreact
> and discredit the city's racist structures.
>
> The Trump regime is populated with blind fanatics. They believe in one
> truth, which is whatever they proclaim at the moment (any such declaration
> may contradict what they said a few hours before). They are possessed with
> one idea—conflict. They venerate a demented hypermasculinity that includes
> a
> sacralization of violence, misogyny, a disdain for empathy, and the
> self-appointed right to engage in bouts of frenzied rage. These
> characteristics, they believe, are a sign of masculinity. The highest
> aesthetic is militarism, violence and war. Without conflict, without
> enemies
> real or imagined, their ideological structures and racism collapse into a
> heap of contradictions and absurdities. They will attempt to thwart
> nonviolent, nationwide resistance with force. And they will attempt to
> stoke
> counterviolence, including through the use of agents provocateurs, as a
> response. If we speak back to them in the language of violence, we will
> fail. We will be transformed into the monsters we seek to defeat.
>
> Bannon and his followers on the
> <https://www.google.com/#q=definition+of+alt-right> "alt-right,"
> self-declared intellectuals, ferret out facts and formulas that buttress
> their peculiar worldview and discard truths that contradict their messianic
> delusions. They mouth a few clichés and quote a few philosophers to justify
> bigotry, chauvinism and governmental repression. It is propaganda
> masquerading as ideology. These pseudo-intellectuals are singularly
> incurious. They are linguistically, culturally and historically illiterate
> about the Muslim world, and about most other foreign cultures, yet blithely
> write off one-fifth of the world's population—Muslims—as irredeemable.
>
> The inability of white supremacists like Trump and Bannon to recognize the
> humanity of others springs from their spiritual impoverishment. They
> mistake
> bigotry for honesty and ignorance for innocence. They cannot separate
> fantasy from reality. Such people are, as author James Baldwin said, "moral
> monsters."
>
> Evil, for them, is embodied in the dehumanized other. Once the human
> personification of evil is eradicated, evil itself is supposed to
> disappear.
> Except, of course, that as soon as one group of human beings is
> annihilated,
> another human embodiment of evil rises to take its place. The Nazis began
> with Jews. Our fanatics are beginning with Muslims. History has shown where
> they will go from here.
>
> "The nationalist is by definition an ignoramus," the Yugoslav writer Danilo
> Kis <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danilo_Ki%C5%A1> said. "Nationalism is
> the line of least resistance, the easy way. The nationalist is untroubled,
> he knows or thinks he knows what his values are, his, that's to say
> national, that's to say the values of the nation he belongs to, ethical and
> political; he is not interested in others, they are no concern of his,
> hell—it's other people (other nations, another tribe). They don't even need
> investigating. The nationalist sees other people in his own images—as
> nationalists."
>
> Like all utopian dreamers they believe their authoritarianism is being
> implemented for our benefit. They are like Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, who
> oversaw the burning of Giordano Bruno
> <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Giordano-Bruno> at the stake and who
> argued that eradicating heretics does them a favor because it saves them
> from their own damnation. It is impossible to have a rational dialogue with
> people who view reality through the binary lens of black and white—us and
> them. They do not recognize the right of dissent. Dissent is at best
> obstruction and probably treason. Fanatics, in power, always become
> inquisitors.
>
> The acts of resistance—including the massive street protests the day after
> the inauguration and later the demonstrations that grew out of the ban on
> Muslims, the Department of Energy's refusal to give the Trump
> administration
> a list of employees that worked on climate change, acting Attorney General
> Sally Yates' refusal to enforce the travel ban and hundreds of State
> Department staff members' signing of a memo opposing the immigration
> restrictions—terrify those around Trump. These reactionaries do not trust
> the old elites and their bureaucrats and courtiers, including the press,
> which Bannon has called "the opposition party."
>
> Akuno, who supports the appeal for nationwide general strikes, cautioned
> that such a call might be premature "because unions don't know if a general
> strike is called how many members would comply, given how many voted for
> Trump." He also noted that because the Trump regime is carrying out
> assaults
> on so many fronts, resistance will tax the resources of the left.
>
> "This shotgun assault effectively divides the left," he said. "Do I defend
> Chicago if, as Trump says, he puts tanks in the streets or do I go to
> Standing Rock if I am black? These are the kinds of choices we will be
> forced to make."
>
> "We are going to have to bring this society to a standstill," he said. "We
> are going to have to disrupt the flow of commerce. We are going to have to
> disrupt the nodal points of distribution. We will not only have to figure
> out how to get on the highways, but disrupt Amazon.com and UPS. We have to
> get workers there, even though they are not unionized, to see these acts as
> in their long-term interests. And we have to build strong, fortified bases
> locally and link them together."
>
> Trump loyalists are counting on enough support from the police, the
> military, private contractors and the organs of internal security such as
> Homeland Security and the FBI, along with newly empowered white vigilante
> groups, to physically crush those who defy them. They will attempt to use
> fear and even terror to paralyze the population into acquiescence.
>
> "It is not accidental that the Trump regime immediately went after the
> water
> protectors at Standing Rock
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakota_Access_Pipeline_protests> ," Akuno
> said. "Standing Rock forced the wider society to look at itself, its
> history
> and its origins. It raised serious questions. Do we want human civilization
> to survive? Are we willing to destroy ourselves for short-term profit?
> Standing Rock exposed the U.S. colonial project and challenged capitalist
> logic. It showed us that we have to make a choice between oil and water. It
> asked us which will take priority for human beings."
>
> We have the power to make the country ungovernable. But we do not have much
> time. The regime will make it harder and harder to organize, get into the
> streets and carry out the nationwide strikes, including within the federal
> bureaucracy. Resistance alone, however, is not enough. It must be
> accompanied by an alternative vision of a socialist and anti-capitalist
> society. It must reject the Democratic Party's attempt to ride anti-Trump
> sentiment back into power. The enemy is, in the end, not Trump or Bannon,
> but the corporate state. If we do not dismantle corporate power we will
> never stop fascism's seduction of the white working class and unemployed.
>
> "The evil which you fear becomes a certainty by what you do," Johann
> Wolfgang von Goethe wrote in his play "Egmont."
>
> Now is the time not to cooperate. Now is the time to shut down the systems
> of power. Now is the time to resist. It is our last chance. The fanatics
> are
> moving with lightning speed. So should we.
>
>
> New on Truthdig
>
>
>
> <http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/on_contact_editorial_cartoonist_mr_fis
> h_on_how_art_must_20170206/>
>
> Dissident Cartoonist Mr. Fish:
> <http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/on_contact_editorial_cartoonist_mr_fis
> h_on_how_art_must_20170206/> 'Saturday Night Live' Is Failing to Deal With
> Trump
>
> Posted on Feb 6, 2017
>
>
> <http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/what_happens_when_all_we_have_left_is_t
> he_pentagon_20170206/>
>
> What Happens When All We Have Left Is the Pentagon?
> <http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/what_happens_when_all_we_have_left_is_t
> he_pentagon_20170206/>
>
> Posted on Feb 6, 2017
>
>
> <http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/oils_methane_emissions_are_higher_than_
> feared_20170206/>
>
> Methane Emissions From Oil Production Are Higher Than Feared
> <http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/oils_methane_emissions_are_higher_than_
> feared_20170206/>
>
> Posted on Feb 6, 2017
>
>
> <http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/how_jeff_sessions_helped_kill_equitable
> _school_funding_in_alabama_20170206/>
>
> How Jeff Sessions Helped Kill Equitable School Funding in Alabama
> <http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/how_jeff_sessions_helped_kill_equitable
> _school_funding_in_alabama_20170206/>
>
> Posted on Feb 6, 2017
>
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> Make America Ungovernable
>
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/make_america_ungovernable_20170205/
>
> AddThis Sharing Buttons
>
> Share to FacebookShare to TwitterShare to More50
>
> Posted on Feb 5, 2017
>
> By Chris Hedges
>
>
>
> Mr. Fish / Truthdig
>
> Donald Trump's regime is rapidly reconfiguring the United States into an
> authoritarian state. All forms of dissent will soon be criminalized. Civil
> liberties will no longer exist. Corporate exploitation, through the
> abolition of regulations and laws, will be unimpeded. Global warming will
> accelerate. A repugnant nationalism, amplified by government propaganda,
> will promote bigotry and racism. Hate crimes will explode. New wars will be
> launched or expanded.
>
> And, as this happens, those Americans who remain passive will be complicit.
>
>
> "We don't have much time," Kali Akuno, the co-director of Cooperation
> Jackson <http://www.cooperationjackson.org/> and an organizer with the
> Malcolm X Grassroots Movement <https://mxgm.org/> , told me when I reached
> him by phone in Jackson, Miss. "We are talking two to three months before
> this whole [reactionary] initiative is firmly consolidated. And that's with
> massive resistance."
>
> Flurries of executive orders and memorandums are being issued to demolish
> the anemic remnants of our bankrupt democracy. Those being placed in
> power—such as Betsy DeVos, who if confirmed as secretary of education will
> defund our system of public education and expand schools run by the
> Christian right, and Scott Pruitt, who if confirmed as head of the
> Environmental Protection Agency will dismantle it—are agents of
> destruction.
> In the eyes of the Christian fascists, generals, billionaires and
> conspiracy
> theorists around Trump, the laws, the courts and legislative bodies exist
> only to silence opponents and swell corporate profits. It is impossible to
> know how long this transformation will take—it may be longer than the two
> or
> three months Akuno fears—but unless we mobilize quickly to stop the Trump
> regime the end result is certain.
>
> "The forces around Trump have a plan to roll this [attack on democracy]
> out," said Akuno, who was the coordinator of special projects and external
> funding for the late Mayor Chokwe Lumumba in Jackson. "They have a
> strategy.
> They have a timeline. They know whom they need to divide and whom they need
> to recruit. They are consolidating their base. Those who try and chalk this
> up to Trump's pathology miss the intentionality, the strategic aims and the
> objectives. We will do ourselves a great disservice if we underestimate
> this
> regime and where it is going."
>
> Stephen Bannon, the president's chief counselor, was behind the ban on
> Muslims entering the United States from seven Muslim-majority countries—a
> ban you can expect to see extended if the Trump administration is
> successful
> in removing a stay issued by a district court. He was behind the order to
> the Department of Homeland Security to draw up lists of Muslim
> organizations
> and individuals
> <http://www.npr.org/2017/01/31/512439121/trumps-executive-order-on-immigrati
> on-annotated> in the United States that, in the language of the executive
> action, have been "radicalized" and have "provided material support to
> terrorism-related organizations in countries that pose a threat to the
> United States." Such lists will be used to criminalize Muslim leaders and
> the institutions and organizations they built. Then, once the Muslims are
> dealt with domestically, there will be new Homeland Security lists that
> will
> allow the government to target the press, activists, labor leaders,
> dissident intellectuals and the left. It is the beginning of a fascist
> version of Leon Trotsky
> <http://www.biography.com/people/leon-trotsky-9510793> 's "permanent
> revolution."
>
> "Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that's my goal too," Bannon told
> writer Ronald Radosh
> <http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/22/steve-bannon-trump-s-top-g
> uy-told-me-he-was-a-leninist.html> in 2013. "I want to bring everything
> crashing down, and destroy all of today's establishment."
>
> The Trump regime's demented project of social engineering, which will come
> wrapped in a Christianized fascism, can be implemented only if it quickly
> seizes control of the bureaucratic mechanisms, an action that Max Weber
> <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Max-Weber-German-sociologist>
> pointed
> out is the prerequisite for exercising power in industrial and technocratic
> societies. Once what the historian Guglielmo Ferrero calls the "silken
> threads" of habit, tradition and legality are gone, the "iron chains" of
> dictatorship will impose social cohesion.
>
> "This problem is not going to be solved in the 2018 elections," warned
> Akuno, the author of the organizing handbook "Let Your Motto Be Resistance
> <https://mxgm.org/let-your-motto-be-resistance-a-handbook-on-organizing-new-
> afrikan-and-oppressed-communities-for-self-defense/> " and the former
> executive director of the New Orleans-based People's Hurricane Relief Fund.
> "That hope is an illusion. The democratic apparatus will be completely
> gutted by then. We have to look beyond Trump. We have to look at the
> consolidation on the state level of these reactionary forces. They are near
> the threshold of being able to call for a constitutional convention because
> of the number of governorships and state legislatures where they hold both
> chambers. They can totally reorder the Constitution, if they even continue
> to abide by it, which they may not. We are facing a serious crisis. I don't
> think people grasp the depth of this because they are focused on the
> president and not the broader strategy of these reactionary forces."
>
> "We have to encourage a broad noncompliance strategy of ungovernablity,"
> Akuno said. "Not complying. Not consenting. We have to struggle on every
> front. We have to expect that the courts will not protect us. We are going
> to get less and less protection from the police. The slightest act of civil
> disobedience will mean jail. We have to mentally prepare for that. We have
> to build serious organizations, drawing upon the examples of forces that
> fought authoritarian regimes in Latin America and Europe. Either we submit
> to not having any protection as workers, women, queers, blacks, Latinos or
> indigenous or we fight back. These forces [arrayed against us] are not
> willing to compromise. I hope it does not come to violence, but we know the
> proclivities of the society and the forces that run it."
>
> If nonviolent protest is met with violence, we must never respond with
> violence. The use of violence, including property destruction, and taunting
> the police are gifts to the security and surveillance state. It allows the
> state to demonize and isolate a mass movement. It drives away the bulk of
> the population. Violence against the state is used by the authorities to
> justify greater forms of control and repression. The corporate state
> understands and welcomes the language of force. This is a game the
> government will always win and we will always lose. If we are perceived as
> a
> flag-burning, rock-throwing, angry mob that embraces violence, we will be
> easily crushed.
>
> We can succeed only if we win the hearts and minds of the wider public and
> ultimately many of those within the structures of power, including the
> police. When violence is used against nonviolent protesters demanding basic
> forms of justice it exposes the weakness of the state. It delegitimizes
> those in power. It prompts a passive population to respond with active
> support for the protesters. It creates internal divisions within the
> structures of power that, as I witnessed during the revolutions in Eastern
> Europe, paralyze and defeat those in authority. Martin Luther King Jr. held
> marches in Birmingham, Ala., rather than Albany, Ga., because he knew
> Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner
> <http://www.nytimes.com/1973/03/11/archives/eugene-bull-connor-dies-at-75-po
> lice-head-fought-integration-less.html?_r=0> "Bull" Connor would overreact
> and discredit the city's racist structures.
>
> The Trump regime is populated with blind fanatics. They believe in one
> truth, which is whatever they proclaim at the moment (any such declaration
> may contradict what they said a few hours before). They are possessed with
> one idea—conflict. They venerate a demented hypermasculinity that includes
> a
> sacralization of violence, misogyny, a disdain for empathy, and the
> self-appointed right to engage in bouts of frenzied rage. These
> characteristics, they believe, are a sign of masculinity. The highest
> aesthetic is militarism, violence and war. Without conflict, without
> enemies
> real or imagined, their ideological structures and racism collapse into a
> heap of contradictions and absurdities. They will attempt to thwart
> nonviolent, nationwide resistance with force. And they will attempt to
> stoke
> counterviolence, including through the use of agents provocateurs, as a
> response. If we speak back to them in the language of violence, we will
> fail. We will be transformed into the monsters we seek to defeat.
>
> Bannon and his followers on the
> <https://www.google.com/#q=definition+of+alt-right> "alt-right,"
> self-declared intellectuals, ferret out facts and formulas that buttress
> their peculiar worldview and discard truths that contradict their messianic
> delusions. They mouth a few clichés and quote a few philosophers to justify
> bigotry, chauvinism and governmental repression. It is propaganda
> masquerading as ideology. These pseudo-intellectuals are singularly
> incurious. They are linguistically, culturally and historically illiterate
> about the Muslim world, and about most other foreign cultures, yet blithely
> write off one-fifth of the world's population—Muslims—as irredeemable.
>
> The inability of white supremacists like Trump and Bannon to recognize the
> humanity of others springs from their spiritual impoverishment. They
> mistake
> bigotry for honesty and ignorance for innocence. They cannot separate
> fantasy from reality. Such people are, as author James Baldwin said, "moral
> monsters."
>
> Evil, for them, is embodied in the dehumanized other. Once the human
> personification of evil is eradicated, evil itself is supposed to
> disappear.
> Except, of course, that as soon as one group of human beings is
> annihilated,
> another human embodiment of evil rises to take its place. The Nazis began
> with Jews. Our fanatics are beginning with Muslims. History has shown where
> they will go from here.
>
> "The nationalist is by definition an ignoramus," the Yugoslav writer Danilo
> Kis <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danilo_Ki%C5%A1> said. "Nationalism is
> the line of least resistance, the easy way. The nationalist is untroubled,
> he knows or thinks he knows what his values are, his, that's to say
> national, that's to say the values of the nation he belongs to, ethical and
> political; he is not interested in others, they are no concern of his,
> hell—it's other people (other nations, another tribe). They don't even need
> investigating. The nationalist sees other people in his own images—as
> nationalists."
>
> Like all utopian dreamers they believe their authoritarianism is being
> implemented for our benefit. They are like Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, who
> oversaw the burning of Giordano Bruno
> <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Giordano-Bruno> at the stake and who
> argued that eradicating heretics does them a favor because it saves them
> from their own damnation. It is impossible to have a rational dialogue with
> people who view reality through the binary lens of black and white—us and
> them. They do not recognize the right of dissent. Dissent is at best
> obstruction and probably treason. Fanatics, in power, always become
> inquisitors.
>
> The acts of resistance—including the massive street protests the day after
> the inauguration and later the demonstrations that grew out of the ban on
> Muslims, the Department of Energy's refusal to give the Trump
> administration
> a list of employees that worked on climate change, acting Attorney General
> Sally Yates' refusal to enforce the travel ban and hundreds of State
> Department staff members' signing of a memo opposing the immigration
> restrictions—terrify those around Trump. These reactionaries do not trust
> the old elites and their bureaucrats and courtiers, including the press,
> which Bannon has called "the opposition party."
>
> Akuno, who supports the appeal for nationwide general strikes, cautioned
> that such a call might be premature "because unions don't know if a general
> strike is called how many members would comply, given how many voted for
> Trump." He also noted that because the Trump regime is carrying out
> assaults
> on so many fronts, resistance will tax the resources of the left.
>
> "This shotgun assault effectively divides the left," he said. "Do I defend
> Chicago if, as Trump says, he puts tanks in the streets or do I go to
> Standing Rock if I am black? These are the kinds of choices we will be
> forced to make."
>
> "We are going to have to bring this society to a standstill," he said. "We
> are going to have to disrupt the flow of commerce. We are going to have to
> disrupt the nodal points of distribution. We will not only have to figure
> out how to get on the highways, but disrupt Amazon.com and UPS. We have to
> get workers there, even though they are not unionized, to see these acts as
> in their long-term interests. And we have to build strong, fortified bases
> locally and link them together."
>
> Trump loyalists are counting on enough support from the police, the
> military, private contractors and the organs of internal security such as
> Homeland Security and the FBI, along with newly empowered white vigilante
> groups, to physically crush those who defy them. They will attempt to use
> fear and even terror to paralyze the population into acquiescence.
>
> "It is not accidental that the Trump regime immediately went after the
> water
> protectors at Standing Rock
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakota_Access_Pipeline_protests> ," Akuno
> said. "Standing Rock forced the wider society to look at itself, its
> history
> and its origins. It raised serious questions. Do we want human civilization
> to survive? Are we willing to destroy ourselves for short-term profit?
> Standing Rock exposed the U.S. colonial project and challenged capitalist
> logic. It showed us that we have to make a choice between oil and water. It
> asked us which will take priority for human beings."
>
> We have the power to make the country ungovernable. But we do not have much
> time. The regime will make it harder and harder to organize, get into the
> streets and carry out the nationwide strikes, including within the federal
> bureaucracy. Resistance alone, however, is not enough. It must be
> accompanied by an alternative vision of a socialist and anti-capitalist
> society. It must reject the Democratic Party's attempt to ride anti-Trump
> sentiment back into power. The enemy is, in the end, not Trump or Bannon,
> but the corporate state. If we do not dismantle corporate power we will
> never stop fascism's seduction of the white working class and unemployed.
>
> "The evil which you fear becomes a certainty by what you do," Johann
> Wolfgang von Goethe wrote in his play "Egmont."
>
> Now is the time not to cooperate. Now is the time to shut down the systems
> of power. Now is the time to resist. It is our last chance. The fanatics
> are
> moving with lightning speed. So should we.
>
>
> http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/on_contact_editorial_cartoonist_mr_fish
> _on_how_art_must_20170206/http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/on_contact_ed
> itorial_cartoonist_mr_fish_on_how_art_must_20170206/
>
> http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/on_contact_editorial_cartoonist_mr_fish
> _on_how_art_must_20170206/
>
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/what_happens_when_all_we_have_left_is_th
> e_pentagon_20170206/http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/what_happens_when_al
> l_we_have_left_is_the_pentagon_20170206/
>
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/what_happens_when_all_we_have_left_is_th
> e_pentagon_20170206/
>
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/oils_methane_emissions_are_higher_than_f
> eared_20170206/http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/oils_methane_emissions_ar
> e_higher_than_feared_20170206/
>
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/oils_methane_emissions_are_higher_than_f
> eared_20170206/
>
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/how_jeff_sessions_helped_kill_equitable_
> school_funding_in_alabama_20170206/http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/how_j
> eff_sessions_helped_kill_equitable_school_funding_in_alabama_20170206/
>
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/how_jeff_sessions_helped_kill_equitable_
> school_funding_in_alabama_20170206/
>
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Re: [blind-democracy] Make America Ungovernable

This is a "must read". There is so much to consider, and such a short
time until the "loyal opposition" is shut down.
In my opinion, Chris Hedges is a modern day prophet.
Here is a short but urgent warning:
"If we speak back to them in the language of violence,
we will fail. We will be transformed into the monsters we seek to defeat."




On 2/6/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> <http://www.truthdig.com/>
>
> Make America Ungovernable
>
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/make_america_ungovernable_20170205/
>
> AddThis Sharing Buttons
>
> Share to FacebookShare to TwitterShare to More50
>
> Posted on Feb 5, 2017
>
> By Chris Hedges
>
>
>
> Mr. Fish / Truthdig
>
> Donald Trump's regime is rapidly reconfiguring the United States into an
> authoritarian state. All forms of dissent will soon be criminalized. Civil
> liberties will no longer exist. Corporate exploitation, through the
> abolition of regulations and laws, will be unimpeded. Global warming will
> accelerate. A repugnant nationalism, amplified by government propaganda,
> will promote bigotry and racism. Hate crimes will explode. New wars will be
> launched or expanded.
>
> And, as this happens, those Americans who remain passive will be complicit.
>
>
> "We don't have much time," Kali Akuno, the co-director of Cooperation
> Jackson <http://www.cooperationjackson.org/> and an organizer with the
> Malcolm X Grassroots Movement <https://mxgm.org/> , told me when I reached
> him by phone in Jackson, Miss. "We are talking two to three months before
> this whole [reactionary] initiative is firmly consolidated. And that's with
> massive resistance."
>
> Flurries of executive orders and memorandums are being issued to demolish
> the anemic remnants of our bankrupt democracy. Those being placed in
> power—such as Betsy DeVos, who if confirmed as secretary of education will
> defund our system of public education and expand schools run by the
> Christian right, and Scott Pruitt, who if confirmed as head of the
> Environmental Protection Agency will dismantle it—are agents of
> destruction.
> In the eyes of the Christian fascists, generals, billionaires and
> conspiracy
> theorists around Trump, the laws, the courts and legislative bodies exist
> only to silence opponents and swell corporate profits. It is impossible to
> know how long this transformation will take—it may be longer than the two
> or
> three months Akuno fears—but unless we mobilize quickly to stop the Trump
> regime the end result is certain.
>
> "The forces around Trump have a plan to roll this [attack on democracy]
> out," said Akuno, who was the coordinator of special projects and external
> funding for the late Mayor Chokwe Lumumba in Jackson. "They have a
> strategy.
> They have a timeline. They know whom they need to divide and whom they need
> to recruit. They are consolidating their base. Those who try and chalk this
> up to Trump's pathology miss the intentionality, the strategic aims and the
> objectives. We will do ourselves a great disservice if we underestimate
> this
> regime and where it is going."
>
> Stephen Bannon, the president's chief counselor, was behind the ban on
> Muslims entering the United States from seven Muslim-majority countries—a
> ban you can expect to see extended if the Trump administration is
> successful
> in removing a stay issued by a district court. He was behind the order to
> the Department of Homeland Security to draw up lists of Muslim
> organizations
> and individuals
> <http://www.npr.org/2017/01/31/512439121/trumps-executive-order-on-immigrati
> on-annotated> in the United States that, in the language of the executive
> action, have been "radicalized" and have "provided material support to
> terrorism-related organizations in countries that pose a threat to the
> United States." Such lists will be used to criminalize Muslim leaders and
> the institutions and organizations they built. Then, once the Muslims are
> dealt with domestically, there will be new Homeland Security lists that
> will
> allow the government to target the press, activists, labor leaders,
> dissident intellectuals and the left. It is the beginning of a fascist
> version of Leon Trotsky
> <http://www.biography.com/people/leon-trotsky-9510793> 's "permanent
> revolution."
>
> "Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that's my goal too," Bannon told
> writer Ronald Radosh
> <http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/22/steve-bannon-trump-s-top-g
> uy-told-me-he-was-a-leninist.html> in 2013. "I want to bring everything
> crashing down, and destroy all of today's establishment."
>
> The Trump regime's demented project of social engineering, which will come
> wrapped in a Christianized fascism, can be implemented only if it quickly
> seizes control of the bureaucratic mechanisms, an action that Max Weber
> <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Max-Weber-German-sociologist>
> pointed
> out is the prerequisite for exercising power in industrial and technocratic
> societies. Once what the historian Guglielmo Ferrero calls the "silken
> threads" of habit, tradition and legality are gone, the "iron chains" of
> dictatorship will impose social cohesion.
>
> "This problem is not going to be solved in the 2018 elections," warned
> Akuno, the author of the organizing handbook "Let Your Motto Be Resistance
> <https://mxgm.org/let-your-motto-be-resistance-a-handbook-on-organizing-new-
> afrikan-and-oppressed-communities-for-self-defense/> " and the former
> executive director of the New Orleans-based People's Hurricane Relief Fund.
> "That hope is an illusion. The democratic apparatus will be completely
> gutted by then. We have to look beyond Trump. We have to look at the
> consolidation on the state level of these reactionary forces. They are near
> the threshold of being able to call for a constitutional convention because
> of the number of governorships and state legislatures where they hold both
> chambers. They can totally reorder the Constitution, if they even continue
> to abide by it, which they may not. We are facing a serious crisis. I don't
> think people grasp the depth of this because they are focused on the
> president and not the broader strategy of these reactionary forces."
>
> "We have to encourage a broad noncompliance strategy of ungovernablity,"
> Akuno said. "Not complying. Not consenting. We have to struggle on every
> front. We have to expect that the courts will not protect us. We are going
> to get less and less protection from the police. The slightest act of civil
> disobedience will mean jail. We have to mentally prepare for that. We have
> to build serious organizations, drawing upon the examples of forces that
> fought authoritarian regimes in Latin America and Europe. Either we submit
> to not having any protection as workers, women, queers, blacks, Latinos or
> indigenous or we fight back. These forces [arrayed against us] are not
> willing to compromise. I hope it does not come to violence, but we know the
> proclivities of the society and the forces that run it."
>
> If nonviolent protest is met with violence, we must never respond with
> violence. The use of violence, including property destruction, and taunting
> the police are gifts to the security and surveillance state. It allows the
> state to demonize and isolate a mass movement. It drives away the bulk of
> the population. Violence against the state is used by the authorities to
> justify greater forms of control and repression. The corporate state
> understands and welcomes the language of force. This is a game the
> government will always win and we will always lose. If we are perceived as
> a
> flag-burning, rock-throwing, angry mob that embraces violence, we will be
> easily crushed.
>
> We can succeed only if we win the hearts and minds of the wider public and
> ultimately many of those within the structures of power, including the
> police. When violence is used against nonviolent protesters demanding basic
> forms of justice it exposes the weakness of the state. It delegitimizes
> those in power. It prompts a passive population to respond with active
> support for the protesters. It creates internal divisions within the
> structures of power that, as I witnessed during the revolutions in Eastern
> Europe, paralyze and defeat those in authority. Martin Luther King Jr. held
> marches in Birmingham, Ala., rather than Albany, Ga., because he knew
> Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner
> <http://www.nytimes.com/1973/03/11/archives/eugene-bull-connor-dies-at-75-po
> lice-head-fought-integration-less.html?_r=0> "Bull" Connor would overreact
> and discredit the city's racist structures.
>
> The Trump regime is populated with blind fanatics. They believe in one
> truth, which is whatever they proclaim at the moment (any such declaration
> may contradict what they said a few hours before). They are possessed with
> one idea—conflict. They venerate a demented hypermasculinity that includes
> a
> sacralization of violence, misogyny, a disdain for empathy, and the
> self-appointed right to engage in bouts of frenzied rage. These
> characteristics, they believe, are a sign of masculinity. The highest
> aesthetic is militarism, violence and war. Without conflict, without
> enemies
> real or imagined, their ideological structures and racism collapse into a
> heap of contradictions and absurdities. They will attempt to thwart
> nonviolent, nationwide resistance with force. And they will attempt to
> stoke
> counterviolence, including through the use of agents provocateurs, as a
> response. If we speak back to them in the language of violence, we will
> fail. We will be transformed into the monsters we seek to defeat.
>
> Bannon and his followers on the
> <https://www.google.com/#q=definition+of+alt-right> "alt-right,"
> self-declared intellectuals, ferret out facts and formulas that buttress
> their peculiar worldview and discard truths that contradict their messianic
> delusions. They mouth a few clichés and quote a few philosophers to justify
> bigotry, chauvinism and governmental repression. It is propaganda
> masquerading as ideology. These pseudo-intellectuals are singularly
> incurious. They are linguistically, culturally and historically illiterate
> about the Muslim world, and about most other foreign cultures, yet blithely
> write off one-fifth of the world's population—Muslims—as irredeemable.
>
> The inability of white supremacists like Trump and Bannon to recognize the
> humanity of others springs from their spiritual impoverishment. They
> mistake
> bigotry for honesty and ignorance for innocence. They cannot separate
> fantasy from reality. Such people are, as author James Baldwin said, "moral
> monsters."
>
> Evil, for them, is embodied in the dehumanized other. Once the human
> personification of evil is eradicated, evil itself is supposed to
> disappear.
> Except, of course, that as soon as one group of human beings is
> annihilated,
> another human embodiment of evil rises to take its place. The Nazis began
> with Jews. Our fanatics are beginning with Muslims. History has shown where
> they will go from here.
>
> "The nationalist is by definition an ignoramus," the Yugoslav writer Danilo
> Kis <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danilo_Ki%C5%A1> said. "Nationalism is
> the line of least resistance, the easy way. The nationalist is untroubled,
> he knows or thinks he knows what his values are, his, that's to say
> national, that's to say the values of the nation he belongs to, ethical and
> political; he is not interested in others, they are no concern of his,
> hell—it's other people (other nations, another tribe). They don't even need
> investigating. The nationalist sees other people in his own images—as
> nationalists."
>
> Like all utopian dreamers they believe their authoritarianism is being
> implemented for our benefit. They are like Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, who
> oversaw the burning of Giordano Bruno
> <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Giordano-Bruno> at the stake and who
> argued that eradicating heretics does them a favor because it saves them
> from their own damnation. It is impossible to have a rational dialogue with
> people who view reality through the binary lens of black and white—us and
> them. They do not recognize the right of dissent. Dissent is at best
> obstruction and probably treason. Fanatics, in power, always become
> inquisitors.
>
> The acts of resistance—including the massive street protests the day after
> the inauguration and later the demonstrations that grew out of the ban on
> Muslims, the Department of Energy's refusal to give the Trump
> administration
> a list of employees that worked on climate change, acting Attorney General
> Sally Yates' refusal to enforce the travel ban and hundreds of State
> Department staff members' signing of a memo opposing the immigration
> restrictions—terrify those around Trump. These reactionaries do not trust
> the old elites and their bureaucrats and courtiers, including the press,
> which Bannon has called "the opposition party."
>
> Akuno, who supports the appeal for nationwide general strikes, cautioned
> that such a call might be premature "because unions don't know if a general
> strike is called how many members would comply, given how many voted for
> Trump." He also noted that because the Trump regime is carrying out
> assaults
> on so many fronts, resistance will tax the resources of the left.
>
> "This shotgun assault effectively divides the left," he said. "Do I defend
> Chicago if, as Trump says, he puts tanks in the streets or do I go to
> Standing Rock if I am black? These are the kinds of choices we will be
> forced to make."
>
> "We are going to have to bring this society to a standstill," he said. "We
> are going to have to disrupt the flow of commerce. We are going to have to
> disrupt the nodal points of distribution. We will not only have to figure
> out how to get on the highways, but disrupt Amazon.com and UPS. We have to
> get workers there, even though they are not unionized, to see these acts as
> in their long-term interests. And we have to build strong, fortified bases
> locally and link them together."
>
> Trump loyalists are counting on enough support from the police, the
> military, private contractors and the organs of internal security such as
> Homeland Security and the FBI, along with newly empowered white vigilante
> groups, to physically crush those who defy them. They will attempt to use
> fear and even terror to paralyze the population into acquiescence.
>
> "It is not accidental that the Trump regime immediately went after the
> water
> protectors at Standing Rock
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakota_Access_Pipeline_protests> ," Akuno
> said. "Standing Rock forced the wider society to look at itself, its
> history
> and its origins. It raised serious questions. Do we want human civilization
> to survive? Are we willing to destroy ourselves for short-term profit?
> Standing Rock exposed the U.S. colonial project and challenged capitalist
> logic. It showed us that we have to make a choice between oil and water. It
> asked us which will take priority for human beings."
>
> We have the power to make the country ungovernable. But we do not have much
> time. The regime will make it harder and harder to organize, get into the
> streets and carry out the nationwide strikes, including within the federal
> bureaucracy. Resistance alone, however, is not enough. It must be
> accompanied by an alternative vision of a socialist and anti-capitalist
> society. It must reject the Democratic Party's attempt to ride anti-Trump
> sentiment back into power. The enemy is, in the end, not Trump or Bannon,
> but the corporate state. If we do not dismantle corporate power we will
> never stop fascism's seduction of the white working class and unemployed.
>
> "The evil which you fear becomes a certainty by what you do," Johann
> Wolfgang von Goethe wrote in his play "Egmont."
>
> Now is the time not to cooperate. Now is the time to shut down the systems
> of power. Now is the time to resist. It is our last chance. The fanatics
> are
> moving with lightning speed. So should we.
>
>
> New on Truthdig
>
>
>
> <http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/on_contact_editorial_cartoonist_mr_fis
> h_on_how_art_must_20170206/>
>
> Dissident Cartoonist Mr. Fish:
> <http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/on_contact_editorial_cartoonist_mr_fis
> h_on_how_art_must_20170206/> 'Saturday Night Live' Is Failing to Deal With
> Trump
>
> Posted on Feb 6, 2017
>
>
> <http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/what_happens_when_all_we_have_left_is_t
> he_pentagon_20170206/>
>
> What Happens When All We Have Left Is the Pentagon?
> <http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/what_happens_when_all_we_have_left_is_t
> he_pentagon_20170206/>
>
> Posted on Feb 6, 2017
>
>
> <http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/oils_methane_emissions_are_higher_than_
> feared_20170206/>
>
> Methane Emissions From Oil Production Are Higher Than Feared
> <http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/oils_methane_emissions_are_higher_than_
> feared_20170206/>
>
> Posted on Feb 6, 2017
>
>
> <http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/how_jeff_sessions_helped_kill_equitable
> _school_funding_in_alabama_20170206/>
>
> How Jeff Sessions Helped Kill Equitable School Funding in Alabama
> <http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/how_jeff_sessions_helped_kill_equitable
> _school_funding_in_alabama_20170206/>
>
> Posted on Feb 6, 2017
>
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>
> Make America Ungovernable
>
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/make_america_ungovernable_20170205/
>
> AddThis Sharing Buttons
>
> Share to FacebookShare to TwitterShare to More50
>
> Posted on Feb 5, 2017
>
> By Chris Hedges
>
>
>
> Mr. Fish / Truthdig
>
> Donald Trump's regime is rapidly reconfiguring the United States into an
> authoritarian state. All forms of dissent will soon be criminalized. Civil
> liberties will no longer exist. Corporate exploitation, through the
> abolition of regulations and laws, will be unimpeded. Global warming will
> accelerate. A repugnant nationalism, amplified by government propaganda,
> will promote bigotry and racism. Hate crimes will explode. New wars will be
> launched or expanded.
>
> And, as this happens, those Americans who remain passive will be complicit.
>
>
> "We don't have much time," Kali Akuno, the co-director of Cooperation
> Jackson <http://www.cooperationjackson.org/> and an organizer with the
> Malcolm X Grassroots Movement <https://mxgm.org/> , told me when I reached
> him by phone in Jackson, Miss. "We are talking two to three months before
> this whole [reactionary] initiative is firmly consolidated. And that's with
> massive resistance."
>
> Flurries of executive orders and memorandums are being issued to demolish
> the anemic remnants of our bankrupt democracy. Those being placed in
> power—such as Betsy DeVos, who if confirmed as secretary of education will
> defund our system of public education and expand schools run by the
> Christian right, and Scott Pruitt, who if confirmed as head of the
> Environmental Protection Agency will dismantle it—are agents of
> destruction.
> In the eyes of the Christian fascists, generals, billionaires and
> conspiracy
> theorists around Trump, the laws, the courts and legislative bodies exist
> only to silence opponents and swell corporate profits. It is impossible to
> know how long this transformation will take—it may be longer than the two
> or
> three months Akuno fears—but unless we mobilize quickly to stop the Trump
> regime the end result is certain.
>
> "The forces around Trump have a plan to roll this [attack on democracy]
> out," said Akuno, who was the coordinator of special projects and external
> funding for the late Mayor Chokwe Lumumba in Jackson. "They have a
> strategy.
> They have a timeline. They know whom they need to divide and whom they need
> to recruit. They are consolidating their base. Those who try and chalk this
> up to Trump's pathology miss the intentionality, the strategic aims and the
> objectives. We will do ourselves a great disservice if we underestimate
> this
> regime and where it is going."
>
> Stephen Bannon, the president's chief counselor, was behind the ban on
> Muslims entering the United States from seven Muslim-majority countries—a
> ban you can expect to see extended if the Trump administration is
> successful
> in removing a stay issued by a district court. He was behind the order to
> the Department of Homeland Security to draw up lists of Muslim
> organizations
> and individuals
> <http://www.npr.org/2017/01/31/512439121/trumps-executive-order-on-immigrati
> on-annotated> in the United States that, in the language of the executive
> action, have been "radicalized" and have "provided material support to
> terrorism-related organizations in countries that pose a threat to the
> United States." Such lists will be used to criminalize Muslim leaders and
> the institutions and organizations they built. Then, once the Muslims are
> dealt with domestically, there will be new Homeland Security lists that
> will
> allow the government to target the press, activists, labor leaders,
> dissident intellectuals and the left. It is the beginning of a fascist
> version of Leon Trotsky
> <http://www.biography.com/people/leon-trotsky-9510793> 's "permanent
> revolution."
>
> "Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that's my goal too," Bannon told
> writer Ronald Radosh
> <http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/22/steve-bannon-trump-s-top-g
> uy-told-me-he-was-a-leninist.html> in 2013. "I want to bring everything
> crashing down, and destroy all of today's establishment."
>
> The Trump regime's demented project of social engineering, which will come
> wrapped in a Christianized fascism, can be implemented only if it quickly
> seizes control of the bureaucratic mechanisms, an action that Max Weber
> <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Max-Weber-German-sociologist>
> pointed
> out is the prerequisite for exercising power in industrial and technocratic
> societies. Once what the historian Guglielmo Ferrero calls the "silken
> threads" of habit, tradition and legality are gone, the "iron chains" of
> dictatorship will impose social cohesion.
>
> "This problem is not going to be solved in the 2018 elections," warned
> Akuno, the author of the organizing handbook "Let Your Motto Be Resistance
> <https://mxgm.org/let-your-motto-be-resistance-a-handbook-on-organizing-new-
> afrikan-and-oppressed-communities-for-self-defense/> " and the former
> executive director of the New Orleans-based People's Hurricane Relief Fund.
> "That hope is an illusion. The democratic apparatus will be completely
> gutted by then. We have to look beyond Trump. We have to look at the
> consolidation on the state level of these reactionary forces. They are near
> the threshold of being able to call for a constitutional convention because
> of the number of governorships and state legislatures where they hold both
> chambers. They can totally reorder the Constitution, if they even continue
> to abide by it, which they may not. We are facing a serious crisis. I don't
> think people grasp the depth of this because they are focused on the
> president and not the broader strategy of these reactionary forces."
>
> "We have to encourage a broad noncompliance strategy of ungovernablity,"
> Akuno said. "Not complying. Not consenting. We have to struggle on every
> front. We have to expect that the courts will not protect us. We are going
> to get less and less protection from the police. The slightest act of civil
> disobedience will mean jail. We have to mentally prepare for that. We have
> to build serious organizations, drawing upon the examples of forces that
> fought authoritarian regimes in Latin America and Europe. Either we submit
> to not having any protection as workers, women, queers, blacks, Latinos or
> indigenous or we fight back. These forces [arrayed against us] are not
> willing to compromise. I hope it does not come to violence, but we know the
> proclivities of the society and the forces that run it."
>
> If nonviolent protest is met with violence, we must never respond with
> violence. The use of violence, including property destruction, and taunting
> the police are gifts to the security and surveillance state. It allows the
> state to demonize and isolate a mass movement. It drives away the bulk of
> the population. Violence against the state is used by the authorities to
> justify greater forms of control and repression. The corporate state
> understands and welcomes the language of force. This is a game the
> government will always win and we will always lose. If we are perceived as
> a
> flag-burning, rock-throwing, angry mob that embraces violence, we will be
> easily crushed.
>
> We can succeed only if we win the hearts and minds of the wider public and
> ultimately many of those within the structures of power, including the
> police. When violence is used against nonviolent protesters demanding basic
> forms of justice it exposes the weakness of the state. It delegitimizes
> those in power. It prompts a passive population to respond with active
> support for the protesters. It creates internal divisions within the
> structures of power that, as I witnessed during the revolutions in Eastern
> Europe, paralyze and defeat those in authority. Martin Luther King Jr. held
> marches in Birmingham, Ala., rather than Albany, Ga., because he knew
> Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner
> <http://www.nytimes.com/1973/03/11/archives/eugene-bull-connor-dies-at-75-po
> lice-head-fought-integration-less.html?_r=0> "Bull" Connor would overreact
> and discredit the city's racist structures.
>
> The Trump regime is populated with blind fanatics. They believe in one
> truth, which is whatever they proclaim at the moment (any such declaration
> may contradict what they said a few hours before). They are possessed with
> one idea—conflict. They venerate a demented hypermasculinity that includes
> a
> sacralization of violence, misogyny, a disdain for empathy, and the
> self-appointed right to engage in bouts of frenzied rage. These
> characteristics, they believe, are a sign of masculinity. The highest
> aesthetic is militarism, violence and war. Without conflict, without
> enemies
> real or imagined, their ideological structures and racism collapse into a
> heap of contradictions and absurdities. They will attempt to thwart
> nonviolent, nationwide resistance with force. And they will attempt to
> stoke
> counterviolence, including through the use of agents provocateurs, as a
> response. If we speak back to them in the language of violence, we will
> fail. We will be transformed into the monsters we seek to defeat.
>
> Bannon and his followers on the
> <https://www.google.com/#q=definition+of+alt-right> "alt-right,"
> self-declared intellectuals, ferret out facts and formulas that buttress
> their peculiar worldview and discard truths that contradict their messianic
> delusions. They mouth a few clichés and quote a few philosophers to justify
> bigotry, chauvinism and governmental repression. It is propaganda
> masquerading as ideology. These pseudo-intellectuals are singularly
> incurious. They are linguistically, culturally and historically illiterate
> about the Muslim world, and about most other foreign cultures, yet blithely
> write off one-fifth of the world's population—Muslims—as irredeemable.
>
> The inability of white supremacists like Trump and Bannon to recognize the
> humanity of others springs from their spiritual impoverishment. They
> mistake
> bigotry for honesty and ignorance for innocence. They cannot separate
> fantasy from reality. Such people are, as author James Baldwin said, "moral
> monsters."
>
> Evil, for them, is embodied in the dehumanized other. Once the human
> personification of evil is eradicated, evil itself is supposed to
> disappear.
> Except, of course, that as soon as one group of human beings is
> annihilated,
> another human embodiment of evil rises to take its place. The Nazis began
> with Jews. Our fanatics are beginning with Muslims. History has shown where
> they will go from here.
>
> "The nationalist is by definition an ignoramus," the Yugoslav writer Danilo
> Kis <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danilo_Ki%C5%A1> said. "Nationalism is
> the line of least resistance, the easy way. The nationalist is untroubled,
> he knows or thinks he knows what his values are, his, that's to say
> national, that's to say the values of the nation he belongs to, ethical and
> political; he is not interested in others, they are no concern of his,
> hell—it's other people (other nations, another tribe). They don't even need
> investigating. The nationalist sees other people in his own images—as
> nationalists."
>
> Like all utopian dreamers they believe their authoritarianism is being
> implemented for our benefit. They are like Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, who
> oversaw the burning of Giordano Bruno
> <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Giordano-Bruno> at the stake and who
> argued that eradicating heretics does them a favor because it saves them
> from their own damnation. It is impossible to have a rational dialogue with
> people who view reality through the binary lens of black and white—us and
> them. They do not recognize the right of dissent. Dissent is at best
> obstruction and probably treason. Fanatics, in power, always become
> inquisitors.
>
> The acts of resistance—including the massive street protests the day after
> the inauguration and later the demonstrations that grew out of the ban on
> Muslims, the Department of Energy's refusal to give the Trump
> administration
> a list of employees that worked on climate change, acting Attorney General
> Sally Yates' refusal to enforce the travel ban and hundreds of State
> Department staff members' signing of a memo opposing the immigration
> restrictions—terrify those around Trump. These reactionaries do not trust
> the old elites and their bureaucrats and courtiers, including the press,
> which Bannon has called "the opposition party."
>
> Akuno, who supports the appeal for nationwide general strikes, cautioned
> that such a call might be premature "because unions don't know if a general
> strike is called how many members would comply, given how many voted for
> Trump." He also noted that because the Trump regime is carrying out
> assaults
> on so many fronts, resistance will tax the resources of the left.
>
> "This shotgun assault effectively divides the left," he said. "Do I defend
> Chicago if, as Trump says, he puts tanks in the streets or do I go to
> Standing Rock if I am black? These are the kinds of choices we will be
> forced to make."
>
> "We are going to have to bring this society to a standstill," he said. "We
> are going to have to disrupt the flow of commerce. We are going to have to
> disrupt the nodal points of distribution. We will not only have to figure
> out how to get on the highways, but disrupt Amazon.com and UPS. We have to
> get workers there, even though they are not unionized, to see these acts as
> in their long-term interests. And we have to build strong, fortified bases
> locally and link them together."
>
> Trump loyalists are counting on enough support from the police, the
> military, private contractors and the organs of internal security such as
> Homeland Security and the FBI, along with newly empowered white vigilante
> groups, to physically crush those who defy them. They will attempt to use
> fear and even terror to paralyze the population into acquiescence.
>
> "It is not accidental that the Trump regime immediately went after the
> water
> protectors at Standing Rock
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakota_Access_Pipeline_protests> ," Akuno
> said. "Standing Rock forced the wider society to look at itself, its
> history
> and its origins. It raised serious questions. Do we want human civilization
> to survive? Are we willing to destroy ourselves for short-term profit?
> Standing Rock exposed the U.S. colonial project and challenged capitalist
> logic. It showed us that we have to make a choice between oil and water. It
> asked us which will take priority for human beings."
>
> We have the power to make the country ungovernable. But we do not have much
> time. The regime will make it harder and harder to organize, get into the
> streets and carry out the nationwide strikes, including within the federal
> bureaucracy. Resistance alone, however, is not enough. It must be
> accompanied by an alternative vision of a socialist and anti-capitalist
> society. It must reject the Democratic Party's attempt to ride anti-Trump
> sentiment back into power. The enemy is, in the end, not Trump or Bannon,
> but the corporate state. If we do not dismantle corporate power we will
> never stop fascism's seduction of the white working class and unemployed.
>
> "The evil which you fear becomes a certainty by what you do," Johann
> Wolfgang von Goethe wrote in his play "Egmont."
>
> Now is the time not to cooperate. Now is the time to shut down the systems
> of power. Now is the time to resist. It is our last chance. The fanatics
> are
> moving with lightning speed. So should we.
>
>
> http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/on_contact_editorial_cartoonist_mr_fish
> _on_how_art_must_20170206/http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/on_contact_ed
> itorial_cartoonist_mr_fish_on_how_art_must_20170206/
>
> http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/on_contact_editorial_cartoonist_mr_fish
> _on_how_art_must_20170206/
>
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/what_happens_when_all_we_have_left_is_th
> e_pentagon_20170206/http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/what_happens_when_al
> l_we_have_left_is_the_pentagon_20170206/
>
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/what_happens_when_all_we_have_left_is_th
> e_pentagon_20170206/
>
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/oils_methane_emissions_are_higher_than_f
> eared_20170206/http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/oils_methane_emissions_ar
> e_higher_than_feared_20170206/
>
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/oils_methane_emissions_are_higher_than_f
> eared_20170206/
>
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/how_jeff_sessions_helped_kill_equitable_
> school_funding_in_alabama_20170206/http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/how_j
> eff_sessions_helped_kill_equitable_school_funding_in_alabama_20170206/
>
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/how_jeff_sessions_helped_kill_equitable_
> school_funding_in_alabama_20170206/
>
>
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Democrats fiddle while USA burns

From Carl Jarvis.

Need more proof that the Democratic Party is a toothless old Tiger?
Here's the latest from Robert Reich:

Dear MoveOn member,

I flipped on CNN the other day, and I almost spit out my coffee.

There, on TV, was a Democratic U.S. senator arguing that we shouldn't
really try to block Trump's stolen Supreme Court pick.1

Then I flipped the channel, and there was another one saying the same thing.2

Never mind that this is a stolen seat that by all rights belongs to
President Obama's nominee, Merrick Garland. Or that this is a judge
who by many counts
is "more conservative than Scalia" and a reliable friend of big
corporations. Or that Trump's entire presidency may be illegitimate
given the unprecedented
interference of Russian agents and FBI Director James Comey.

Senate Democrats should shut down the work of the Senate while the
immoral and unconstitutional Muslim ban stands.

They have the votes to stop this pick. But to do it, they need to show
some spine.