"The empire will collapse and the nation will consume itself
within our lifetimes if we do not wrest power from those who rule the
corporate state."
So writes Chris Hedges. But, as with many of us who see the writing
on the wall, the dire warning carries with it no solutions.
The bleak fact is that no Empire has turned itself around and rebuilt
its infra structure, created employment and promoted world peace.
It's just not in the nature of the Beast.
Carl Jarvis
On 10/5/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> The End Of Empire
>
> For-Money-Fish-1stOct2017-850x720
> By Chris Hedges, www.truthdig.com
> October 3rd, 2017
>
> Above Photo: Mr. Fish
>
> The American empire is coming to an end. The U.S. economy is being drained
> by wars in the Middle East and vast military expansion around the globe. It
> is burdened by growing deficits, along with the devastating effects of
> deindustrialization and global trade agreements. Our democracy has been
> captured and destroyed by corporations that steadily demand more tax cuts,
> more deregulation and impunity from prosecution for massive acts of
> financial fraud, all the while looting trillions from the U.S. treasury in
> the form of bailouts. The nation has lost the power and respect needed to
> induce allies in Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa to do its bidding.
> Add to this the mounting destruction caused by climate change and you have
> a
> recipe for an emerging dystopia. Overseeing this descent at the highest
> levels of the federal and state governments is a motley collection of
> imbeciles, con artists, thieves, opportunists and warmongering generals.
> And
> to be clear, I am speaking about Democrats, too.
>
> The empire will limp along, steadily losing influence until the dollar is
> dropped as the world's reserve currency, plunging the United States into a
> crippling depression and instantly forcing a massive contraction of its
> military machine.
>
> Short of a sudden and widespread popular revolt, which does not seem
> likely,
> the death spiral appears unstoppable, meaning the United States as we know
> it will no longer exist within a decade or, at most, two. The global vacuum
> we leave behind will be filled by China, already establishing itself as an
> economic and military juggernaut, or perhaps there will be a multipolar
> world carved up among Russia, China, India, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa
> and
> a few other states. Or maybe the void will be filled, as the historian
> Alfred W. McCoy writes in his book "In the Shadows of the American Century:
> The Rise and Decline of US Global Power," by "a coalition of transnational
> corporations, multilateral military forces like NATO, and an international
> financial leadership self-selected at Davos and Bilderberg" that will
> "forge
> a supranational nexus to supersede any nation or empire."
>
> Under every measurement, from financial growth and infrastructure
> investment
> to advanced technology, including supercomputers, space weaponry and
> cyberwarfare, we are being rapidly overtaken by the Chinese. "In April 2015
> the U.S. Department of Agriculture suggested that the American economy
> would
> grow by nearly 50 percent over the next 15 years, while China's would
> triple
> and come close to surpassing America's in 2030," McCoy noted. China became
> the world's second largest economy in 2010, the same year it became the
> world's leading manufacturing nation, pushing aside a United States that
> had
> dominated the world's manufacturing for a century. The Department of
> Defense
> issued a sober report titled "At Our Own Peril: DoD Risk Assessment in a
> Post-Primacy World." It found that the U.S. military "no longer enjoys an
> unassailable position versus state competitors," and "it no longer can …
> automatically generate consistent and sustained local military superiority
> at range." McCoy predicts the collapse will come by 2030.
>
> Empires in decay embrace an almost willful suicide. Blinded by their hubris
> and unable to face the reality of their diminishing power, they retreat
> into
> a fantasy world where hard and unpleasant facts no longer intrude. They
> replace diplomacy, multilateralism and politics with unilateral threats and
> the blunt instrument of war.
>
> This collective self-delusion saw the United States make the greatest
> strategic blunder in its history, one that sounded the death knell of the
> empire—the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. The architects of the war in
> the George W. Bush White House, and the array of useful idiots in the press
> and academia who were cheerleaders for it, knew very little about the
> countries being invaded, were stunningly naive about the effects of
> industrial warfare and were blindsided by the ferocious blowback. They
> stated, and probably believed, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass
> destruction, although they had no valid evidence to support this claim.
> They
> insisted that democracy would be implanted in Baghdad and spread across the
> Middle East. They assured the public that U.S. troops would be greeted by
> grateful Iraqis and Afghans as liberators. They promised that oil revenues
> would cover the cost of reconstruction. They insisted that the bold and
> quick military strike—"shock and awe"—would restore American hegemony in
> the
> region and dominance in the world. It did the opposite. As Zbigniew
> Brzezinski noted, this "unilateral war of choice against Iraq precipitated
> a
> widespread delegitimation of U.S. foreign policy."
>
> Historians of empire call these military fiascos, a feature of all late
> empires, examples of "micro-militarism." The Athenians engaged in
> micro-militarism when during the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.) they
> invaded Sicily, suffering the loss of 200 ships and thousands of soldiers
> and triggering revolts throughout the empire. Britain did so in 1956 when
> it
> attacked Egypt in a dispute over the nationalization of the Suez Canal and
> then quickly had to withdraw in humiliation, empowering a string of Arab
> nationalist leaders such as Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser and dooming British
> rule over the nation's few remaining colonies. Neither of these empires
> recovered.
>
> "While rising empires are often judicious, even rational in their
> application of armed force for conquest and control of overseas dominions,
> fading empires are inclined to ill-considered displays of power, dreaming
> of
> bold military masterstrokes that would somehow recoup lost prestige and
> power," McCoy writes. "Often irrational even from an imperial point of
> view,
> these micromilitary operations can yield hemorrhaging expenditures or
> humiliating defeats that only accelerate the process already under way."
>
> Empires need more than force to dominate other nations. They need a
> mystique. This mystique—a mask for imperial plunder, repression and
> exploitation—seduces some native elites, who become willing to do the
> bidding of the imperial power or at least remain passive. And it provides a
> patina of civility and even nobility to justify to those at home the costs
> in blood and money needed to maintain empire. The parliamentary system of
> government that Britain replicated in appearance in the colonies, and the
> introduction of British sports such as polo, cricket and horse racing,
> along
> with elaborately uniformed viceroys and the pageantry of royalty, were
> buttressed by what the colonialists said was the invincibility of their
> navy
> and army. England was able to hold its empire together from 1815 to 1914
> before being forced into a steady retreat. America's high-blown rhetoric
> about democracy, liberty and equality, along with basketball, baseball and
> Hollywood, as well as our own deification of the military, entranced and
> cowed much of the globe in the wake of World War II. Behind the scenes, of
> course, the CIA used its bag of dirty tricks to orchestrate coups, fix
> elections and carry out assassinations, black propaganda campaigns,
> bribery,
> blackmail, intimidation and torture. But none of this works anymore.
>
> The loss of the mystique is crippling. It makes it hard to find pliant
> surrogates to administer the empire, as we have seen in Iraq and
> Afghanistan. The photographs of physical abuse and sexual humiliation
> imposed on Arab prisoners at Abu Ghraib inflamed the Muslim world and fed
> al-Qaida and later Islamic State with new recruits. The assassination of
> Osama bin Laden and a host of other jihadist leaders, including the U.S.
> citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, openly mocked the concept of the rule of law. The
> hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of refugees fleeing our debacles
> in the Middle East, along with the near-constant threat from militarized
> aerial drones, exposed us as state terrorists. We have exercised in the
> Middle East the U.S. military's penchant for widespread atrocities,
> indiscriminate violence, lies and blundering miscalculations, actions that
> led to our defeat in Vietnam.
>
> The brutality abroad is matched by a growing brutality at home. Militarized
> police gun down mostly unarmed, poor people of color and fill a system of
> penitentiaries and jails that hold a staggering 25 percent of the world's
> prisoners although Americans represent only 5 percent of global population.
> Many of our cities are in ruins. Our public transportation system is a
> shambles. Our educational system is in steep decline and being privatized.
> Opioid addiction, suicide, mass shootings, depression and morbid obesity
> plague a population that has fallen into profound despair. The deep
> disillusionment and anger that led to Donald Trump's election—a reaction to
> the corporate coup d'état and the poverty afflicting at least half of the
> country—have destroyed the myth of a functioning democracy. Presidential
> tweets and rhetoric celebrate hate, racism and bigotry and taunt the weak
> and the vulnerable. The president in an address before the United Nations
> threatened to obliterate another nation in an act of genocide. We are
> worldwide objects of ridicule and hatred. The foreboding for the future is
> expressed in the rash of dystopian films, motion pictures that no longer
> perpetuate American virtue and exceptionalism or the myth of human
> progress.
>
> "The demise of the United States as the preeminent global power could come
> far more quickly than anyone imagines," McCoy writes. "Despite the aura of
> omnipotence empires often project, most are surprisingly fragile, lacking
> the inherent strength of even a modest nation-state. Indeed, a glance at
> their history should remind us that the greatest of them are susceptible to
> collapse from diverse causes, with fiscal pressures usually a prime factor.
> For the better part of two centuries, the security and prosperity of the
> homeland has been the main objective for most stable states, making foreign
> or imperial adventures an expendable option, usually allocated no more than
> 5 percent of the domestic budget. Without the financing that arises almost
> organically inside a sovereign nation, empires are famously predatory in
> their relentless hunt for plunder or profit—witness the Atlantic slave
> trade, Belgium's rubber lust in the Congo, British India's opium commerce,
> the Third Reich's rape of Europe, or the Soviet exploitation of Eastern
> Europe."
>
> When revenues shrink or collapse, McCoy points out, "empires become
> brittle."
>
> "So delicate is their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly
> wrong, empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for
> Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, eleven
> years for the Ottomans, seventeen for Great Britain, and, in all
> likelihood,
> just twenty-seven years for the United States, counting from the crucial
> year 2003 [when the U.S. invaded Iraq]," he writes.
>
> Many of the estimated 69 empires that have existed throughout history
> lacked
> competent leadership in their decline, having ceded power to monstrosities
> such as the Roman emperors Caligula and Nero. In the United States, the
> reins of authority may be in the grasp of the first in a line of depraved
> demagogues.
>
> "For the majority of Americans, the 2020s will likely be remembered as a
> demoralizing decade of rising prices, stagnant wages, and fading
> international competitiveness," McCoy writes. The loss of the dollar as the
> global reserve currency will see the U.S. unable to pay for its huge
> deficits by selling Treasury bonds, which will be drastically devalued at
> that point. There will be a massive rise in the cost of imports.
> Unemployment will explode. Domestic clashes over what McCoy calls
> "insubstantial issues" will fuel a dangerous hypernationalism that could
> morph into an American fascism.
>
> A discredited elite, suspicious and even paranoid in an age of decline,
> will
> see enemies everywhere. The array of instruments created for global
> dominance—wholesale surveillance, the evisceration of civil liberties,
> sophisticated torture techniques, militarized police, the massive prison
> system, the thousands of militarized drones and satellites—will be employed
> in the homeland. The empire will collapse and the nation will consume
> itself
> within our lifetimes if we do not wrest power from those who rule the
> corporate state.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
Friday, October 6, 2017
Wednesday, October 4, 2017
Re: [blind-democracy] Re: Flag Idolatry Is a Pathology That Crushes Real American Values
To All Users of Paper Towels!
Yes, we certainly did find ourselves on a downward trend during the
Clinton administration. It should have served as a warning that the
Working Class no longer had a political party to defend their
interests. But it certainly did not begin with Clinton. Remember the
words, "I'm from the government, and I've come to help"? Ronald
Reagan laid much of the groundwork that, over the next 37 years saw
the erosion of Collective Bargaining. The attack on Labor Unions,
which had never let up since the 1920's, was intensified. Remember
the Air Traffic Controllers? The Establishment's attack on this union
was no accident. Here was an organization that had fought for decent
wages, good benefits and retirement, along with other benefits not
enjoyed by other hard working Americans.
I remember clearly the Reagan strategy. The Air Traffic Controllers
were painted in the Establishment's Media as greedy Anti Americans.
They were demonized to the point that other labor unions turned their
backs when called upon for support. Yes, Reagan's administration got
the ball rolling, but the destruction of that proud organization came
at the hands of Labor, itself.
But Ronald Reagan was certainly not the beginning of Labor's downward
slide. Following the end of World War II, America's corporations
began to flex their muscles. The victory by the Allied Forces opened
the world markets to American Capitalists. Not only did they have
reduced competition for the sale of their products, but they saw a new
cheap labor force of eager, starving workers. In addition, women
began entering the job market here at home. And of course, without
seeming to be aware, it began taking two wages in order for average
American families to stay even with the economy.
But until Clinton, Americans believed that we had a Political Party
that fought for the working class. By the time Barack Obama eased
into the Oval Office, the new Corporate Democratic Party was well
entrenched. The proof was made clear when the "People's Choice"
Bernie Sanders was kicked to the curb by the DNC.
The Empire's Ruling Class is moving forward toward tyranny. Anyone
speaking their concerns, or demonstrating them by public actions, are
quickly branded as Anti American. If they happen to be of a color
other than White, they are hinted to be Terrorists. The Mass media is
fairly well under the control of the Empire, even NPR has been forced
to knuckle under. And now the push is on to take over the Internet.
Once that happens there will be no public access to the diversity of
opinions that are an integral part of democracy. But most Americans
will not notice the changes for years. Life for them will go forward
about the same. Maybe times will call for tightening the belt a bit
in order to get by, but that's what Americans have to do in order to
stay "free". Well, that's what Americans are told they must do. Such
belt tightening does not apply to the Ruling Class.
Did anyone notice the arrogance demonstrated by Donald Trump, as he
tossed out rolls of paper towels to desperate Puerto Recons?
""Qu'ils mangent de la brioche", "Let them eat cake."!!!
Carl Jarvis
On 10/4/17, Bob Hachey <bhachey@verizon.net> wrote:
> Hi Miriam,
> Yes, in a way, that is a make believe world. More precisely, it is in many
> ways, the world that existed in the mid-1990's before the real impact of
> Clinton's crime and welfare reform bills took hold. IT was a time of less
> income inequality than we have today.
> No doubt, we have regressed considerably since that time.
> Bob
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org
> [mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org] On Behalf Of Miriam Vieni
> Sent: Tuesday, October 03, 2017 6:52 PM
> To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
> Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Flag Idolatry Is a Pathology That Crushes
> Real American Values
>
> Well, I listened and it sounded like a make believe world, certainly not the
> one we inhabit. We're living in a doomed country.
>
> Miriam
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org
> [mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org] On Behalf Of Bob Hachey
> Sent: Tuesday, October 03, 2017 5:50 PM
> To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
> Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Flag Idolatry Is a Pathology That Crushes
> Real American Values
>
> Hi miriam, Carl and all,
> Great article by Mr. bordman heer. Seems to me that some white folks are
> using their offense at others taking a knee as an excuse to sweep the real
> issues here under the rug. IMHO, anyone who is truly offended by those who
> decide to take a knee and do not recognize their right to do so do not have
> a good understanding of free speech and our bill of rights. I am offended by
> the blood and soil marchers of sharlottesville, but I do reluctantly
> recognize their right to march.
> Seems like Trump is trying his best to fan the flames of angry patriotism as
> expressed by the far right and I am concerned that he could succeed.
> Here are two views of patriotism.Thomas Jefferson once said that "from time
> to time, the tree of liberty must be nourished by the blood of patriots."
> Oscar wilde once said that "Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious."
> In my younger days, I might have chosen to side with Jefferson. Today, I
> proudly side with Wilde.
> Pasted below my name is a link to a speech given by Michael douglas's
> character in a movie entitled The American President which brilliantly
> describes free speech and the right to protest. . This was an impromptu
> speech given in the East Room of the White House. President Andrew Shepard
> was asked by a member of the press to explain his membership in the ACLU.
> This question was first posed by Republican opponent Bob Rumson. In reply,
> Shepard gave a speech that I long to hear from a real American president.
> For those who haven't heard the speech before, you're in for a reall treat.
>
> Bob Hachey
> .
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zemrWBIc_hE
>
>
>
>
>
Yes, we certainly did find ourselves on a downward trend during the
Clinton administration. It should have served as a warning that the
Working Class no longer had a political party to defend their
interests. But it certainly did not begin with Clinton. Remember the
words, "I'm from the government, and I've come to help"? Ronald
Reagan laid much of the groundwork that, over the next 37 years saw
the erosion of Collective Bargaining. The attack on Labor Unions,
which had never let up since the 1920's, was intensified. Remember
the Air Traffic Controllers? The Establishment's attack on this union
was no accident. Here was an organization that had fought for decent
wages, good benefits and retirement, along with other benefits not
enjoyed by other hard working Americans.
I remember clearly the Reagan strategy. The Air Traffic Controllers
were painted in the Establishment's Media as greedy Anti Americans.
They were demonized to the point that other labor unions turned their
backs when called upon for support. Yes, Reagan's administration got
the ball rolling, but the destruction of that proud organization came
at the hands of Labor, itself.
But Ronald Reagan was certainly not the beginning of Labor's downward
slide. Following the end of World War II, America's corporations
began to flex their muscles. The victory by the Allied Forces opened
the world markets to American Capitalists. Not only did they have
reduced competition for the sale of their products, but they saw a new
cheap labor force of eager, starving workers. In addition, women
began entering the job market here at home. And of course, without
seeming to be aware, it began taking two wages in order for average
American families to stay even with the economy.
But until Clinton, Americans believed that we had a Political Party
that fought for the working class. By the time Barack Obama eased
into the Oval Office, the new Corporate Democratic Party was well
entrenched. The proof was made clear when the "People's Choice"
Bernie Sanders was kicked to the curb by the DNC.
The Empire's Ruling Class is moving forward toward tyranny. Anyone
speaking their concerns, or demonstrating them by public actions, are
quickly branded as Anti American. If they happen to be of a color
other than White, they are hinted to be Terrorists. The Mass media is
fairly well under the control of the Empire, even NPR has been forced
to knuckle under. And now the push is on to take over the Internet.
Once that happens there will be no public access to the diversity of
opinions that are an integral part of democracy. But most Americans
will not notice the changes for years. Life for them will go forward
about the same. Maybe times will call for tightening the belt a bit
in order to get by, but that's what Americans have to do in order to
stay "free". Well, that's what Americans are told they must do. Such
belt tightening does not apply to the Ruling Class.
Did anyone notice the arrogance demonstrated by Donald Trump, as he
tossed out rolls of paper towels to desperate Puerto Recons?
""Qu'ils mangent de la brioche", "Let them eat cake."!!!
Carl Jarvis
On 10/4/17, Bob Hachey <bhachey@verizon.net> wrote:
> Hi Miriam,
> Yes, in a way, that is a make believe world. More precisely, it is in many
> ways, the world that existed in the mid-1990's before the real impact of
> Clinton's crime and welfare reform bills took hold. IT was a time of less
> income inequality than we have today.
> No doubt, we have regressed considerably since that time.
> Bob
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org
> [mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org] On Behalf Of Miriam Vieni
> Sent: Tuesday, October 03, 2017 6:52 PM
> To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
> Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Flag Idolatry Is a Pathology That Crushes
> Real American Values
>
> Well, I listened and it sounded like a make believe world, certainly not the
> one we inhabit. We're living in a doomed country.
>
> Miriam
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org
> [mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org] On Behalf Of Bob Hachey
> Sent: Tuesday, October 03, 2017 5:50 PM
> To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
> Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Flag Idolatry Is a Pathology That Crushes
> Real American Values
>
> Hi miriam, Carl and all,
> Great article by Mr. bordman heer. Seems to me that some white folks are
> using their offense at others taking a knee as an excuse to sweep the real
> issues here under the rug. IMHO, anyone who is truly offended by those who
> decide to take a knee and do not recognize their right to do so do not have
> a good understanding of free speech and our bill of rights. I am offended by
> the blood and soil marchers of sharlottesville, but I do reluctantly
> recognize their right to march.
> Seems like Trump is trying his best to fan the flames of angry patriotism as
> expressed by the far right and I am concerned that he could succeed.
> Here are two views of patriotism.Thomas Jefferson once said that "from time
> to time, the tree of liberty must be nourished by the blood of patriots."
> Oscar wilde once said that "Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious."
> In my younger days, I might have chosen to side with Jefferson. Today, I
> proudly side with Wilde.
> Pasted below my name is a link to a speech given by Michael douglas's
> character in a movie entitled The American President which brilliantly
> describes free speech and the right to protest. . This was an impromptu
> speech given in the East Room of the White House. President Andrew Shepard
> was asked by a member of the press to explain his membership in the ACLU.
> This question was first posed by Republican opponent Bob Rumson. In reply,
> Shepard gave a speech that I long to hear from a real American president.
> For those who haven't heard the speech before, you're in for a reall treat.
>
> Bob Hachey
> .
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zemrWBIc_hE
>
>
>
>
>
Tuesday, October 3, 2017
Fwd: [blind-democracy] Not again, it is the deadliest mass shooting in America's modern history until now
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Carl Jarvis <carjar82@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2017 11:37:25 -0700
Subject: Re: [blind-democracy] Not again, it is the deadliest mass
shooting in America's modern history until now
To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
Cc: "Undisclosed-Recipient:,"@freelists.org
Bob and All,
A very good observation, Bob. Why does the government not call this
horrific crime an act of Terror, instead of calling it Evil? My
personal opinion is that the government is careful as to when to call
murder or acts of destruction Terrorists acts. If a Muslim or a
recent Immigrant commits a violent crime, it can be used to turn White
Americans against Persons of Color, or of different Faiths. But the
government does not want to have its White People to think of White
violence as Terror. That might turn the majority of working class
Americans against those White Extremists that the government counts on
to help direct the thinking of the nation.
How violence is presented makes the difference between it being "good
violence" or, "bad violence". So the uprising by the American
Colonists against England was presented as "good resistance". The
young United States set out to expand from Sea to Shining Sea. But
some people occupied the land. And they acted as if they believed
they owned "Our Promised Land". So we had to exercise "good violence"
to move them off our land and onto reservations. We labeled these
people as Red Devils, and Savages. When White men bedded native
women, they called the off-spring, Half Breeds, as if the White men
had bred with horses or cows.
As with the Revolutionary War, the Civil War pitted White men against
White men. This ugly war pitted two economic systems against one
another. When it was done and done, and the North had won, notice the
different treatment of the White losers as opposed to the fate of the
Indians? The North allowed the South to save face by continuing to
pretend that the South would "rise again". General Lee and Stonewall
Jackson, and even old Jefferson Davis were idolized. Streets and
schools and parks were named after them. And in time, statues were
erected to honor them and to prove that the "Spirit of the South" was
still alive. And rather than punishing the people who supported
secession and the establishment of a new nation, we all(Whites) took
it out on the newly freed Blacks.
The government, the ruling White Oligarchy, protects the violence of
White people, when it serves their purposes. So when a White man
begins murdering people at random, he cannot be labeled as a
Terrorist. But in order to protect "Good White Violence" he must be
labeled as Insane, Evil and a demented demons.
In this way, the Ruling Class is able to continue selling us its Fairy
Story, the one where we all find a pot of gold at the end of a
rainbow, kiss an ugly frog and watch her turn into a beautiful
princess, and return her to her powerful father, the King of All the
People, and marry her and live happily ever after. And the Ruling
Class always leaves just a little sliver of hope. Hope that next
election we will have a "People's Champion" ride in on a White
Stallion and make all our dreams come true.
Carl Jarvis
On 10/2/17, Bob <ebob824@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Hello. This is certainly hideous, that is genuinely saddening and
> injurious.
>
> Last Sunday night, a demented torpedo opened fire at a consert in Las Vegas
>
> where he brutally murdered at least fifty nine and atrociously wounded 5
> hundred and twenty seven. At its inception, I wholeheartedly offer my
> condolences to the grave loss of these innocent souls that have been taken
> ruthlessly. My heart mourns and grieves with victim's families. I
> unfeignedly implore to Allah glory be to Him, Allah, bless those who have
> been grieved with patience and persistence.
>
> Shooter's identification
>
>
> Shooter was identified as Stephen Paddock, sixty four. Whether he was
> abnormal, lunatic, serial murderer, misanthropist or psychopathic, your
> dissonance of rectifying gun crisis won't ever be resolved. Because a Muslim
>
> wasn't affiliated with this mass shooting, Las Vegas massacre hasn't been
> treated as an act of terror. However, when a Muslim committed a lesser mass
>
> shooting at a nightclub in Orlando last year, the incident has been treated
>
> as an act of terror. This is how disingenuous and hypocritical many
> Americans are. Donald Trump called what happened last Sunday night in Las
> Vegas an act of pure evil. He hasn't mentioned the term terrorism.
> Nevertheless, if the shooter happened to be Muslim, it would have been
> listed as an act of terror. Why are Americans so infatuated with guns? The
> National Rifle Association is a powerful lobby that advocates the right to
> own and bear arms and rejects any gun regulation by the government. I
> sternly remonstrate them for these innocent lives that have been taken
> carelessly. They truly are hardhearted and pitiless. My question though,
> what does really work for the United States? Law enforcement or lobbyism?
> Hasn't your nation been dominated with greed and corporal establishment?
> When Obama proposed gun control initiative, he was assaulted by
> congressional lobbyists. However, when Trump proposed what seems to be a
> discriminative ban act against Muslims, it was approved. Both sought fending
>
> for national security. As time passes on, the true face of Americanism
> unfolds. Many Americans became numb to exercising precautionary
> dissimulation. It is a sign of disgrace for any Muslim to be a greencard
> bearer. It is incredibly shameful to these people as to how their practice
> of double standard is really obvious. Each and every incident of such
> callous crimes reveals to us how counterfeit these people are. I couldn't
> wish for this to be the last incident. Unfortunately, as long as greed
> dominates law enforcement, the probability of hearing again and again about
>
> similar incidents is assuredly procurable. I still wonder though, how just
> one man was able to shoot these people without being instantly detected?
> According to multiple news reports, he killed fifty nine and wounded five
> hundred and twenty seven. That's a staggering number. I don't have specific
>
> stats but, that still is unbelievable. What type of deadly rifle he shot
> with? Was this a machine arm? Was this in the context of expressing warfare?
>
> I am seriously taken aback of what I heard. I am lost for words. I am not
> vindictive of what happened, I am just appalled. How could such incidents be
>
> prevented in the future? First off, honourable congressional members must
> hasten to sue the National Rifle Association for implicitly aiding such
> unfortunate incidents to broaden. Second, congress must critically seek
> unbroken consensus on decisive terms of stiff gun regulation. This will be
> attained only if they truly care about guarding national security. What
> happened last Sunday night in Las Vegas was a denotative act of heinous
> terror. What happened in Orlando last year was absolutely an act of
> flagitious terror as well. Despite whoever committed this and what were his
>
> motives, it was still an act of vicious terror in either case. I am really
> disturbed hearing about these terrible incidents deplorably recurring. I
> just told my fiance, this has got to stop or they will just end up shooting
>
> each other in the street one day. Whether you are at a consert, a grocery
> store, a movie theatre, an elementary school, a college campus or even a
> house of worship, you are threatened with being targeted by some insane
> shooter. Therefore, people of intellect must firmly stand for this. Law
> enforcement is the definite solution for this longly and discreditably
> remaining crisis. I do not intend to interfere. I just have good friends in
>
> this country and I am concerned about them. I certainly grieve and mourn
> what happened. This has been really unfortunate.
>
> Thank you for carefully reading, Bob
>
>
> ---
> This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
> https://www.avast.com/antivirus
>
>
>
From: Carl Jarvis <carjar82@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2017 11:37:25 -0700
Subject: Re: [blind-democracy] Not again, it is the deadliest mass
shooting in America's modern history until now
To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
Cc: "Undisclosed-Recipient:,"@freelists.org
Bob and All,
A very good observation, Bob. Why does the government not call this
horrific crime an act of Terror, instead of calling it Evil? My
personal opinion is that the government is careful as to when to call
murder or acts of destruction Terrorists acts. If a Muslim or a
recent Immigrant commits a violent crime, it can be used to turn White
Americans against Persons of Color, or of different Faiths. But the
government does not want to have its White People to think of White
violence as Terror. That might turn the majority of working class
Americans against those White Extremists that the government counts on
to help direct the thinking of the nation.
How violence is presented makes the difference between it being "good
violence" or, "bad violence". So the uprising by the American
Colonists against England was presented as "good resistance". The
young United States set out to expand from Sea to Shining Sea. But
some people occupied the land. And they acted as if they believed
they owned "Our Promised Land". So we had to exercise "good violence"
to move them off our land and onto reservations. We labeled these
people as Red Devils, and Savages. When White men bedded native
women, they called the off-spring, Half Breeds, as if the White men
had bred with horses or cows.
As with the Revolutionary War, the Civil War pitted White men against
White men. This ugly war pitted two economic systems against one
another. When it was done and done, and the North had won, notice the
different treatment of the White losers as opposed to the fate of the
Indians? The North allowed the South to save face by continuing to
pretend that the South would "rise again". General Lee and Stonewall
Jackson, and even old Jefferson Davis were idolized. Streets and
schools and parks were named after them. And in time, statues were
erected to honor them and to prove that the "Spirit of the South" was
still alive. And rather than punishing the people who supported
secession and the establishment of a new nation, we all(Whites) took
it out on the newly freed Blacks.
The government, the ruling White Oligarchy, protects the violence of
White people, when it serves their purposes. So when a White man
begins murdering people at random, he cannot be labeled as a
Terrorist. But in order to protect "Good White Violence" he must be
labeled as Insane, Evil and a demented demons.
In this way, the Ruling Class is able to continue selling us its Fairy
Story, the one where we all find a pot of gold at the end of a
rainbow, kiss an ugly frog and watch her turn into a beautiful
princess, and return her to her powerful father, the King of All the
People, and marry her and live happily ever after. And the Ruling
Class always leaves just a little sliver of hope. Hope that next
election we will have a "People's Champion" ride in on a White
Stallion and make all our dreams come true.
Carl Jarvis
On 10/2/17, Bob <ebob824@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Hello. This is certainly hideous, that is genuinely saddening and
> injurious.
>
> Last Sunday night, a demented torpedo opened fire at a consert in Las Vegas
>
> where he brutally murdered at least fifty nine and atrociously wounded 5
> hundred and twenty seven. At its inception, I wholeheartedly offer my
> condolences to the grave loss of these innocent souls that have been taken
> ruthlessly. My heart mourns and grieves with victim's families. I
> unfeignedly implore to Allah glory be to Him, Allah, bless those who have
> been grieved with patience and persistence.
>
> Shooter's identification
>
>
> Shooter was identified as Stephen Paddock, sixty four. Whether he was
> abnormal, lunatic, serial murderer, misanthropist or psychopathic, your
> dissonance of rectifying gun crisis won't ever be resolved. Because a Muslim
>
> wasn't affiliated with this mass shooting, Las Vegas massacre hasn't been
> treated as an act of terror. However, when a Muslim committed a lesser mass
>
> shooting at a nightclub in Orlando last year, the incident has been treated
>
> as an act of terror. This is how disingenuous and hypocritical many
> Americans are. Donald Trump called what happened last Sunday night in Las
> Vegas an act of pure evil. He hasn't mentioned the term terrorism.
> Nevertheless, if the shooter happened to be Muslim, it would have been
> listed as an act of terror. Why are Americans so infatuated with guns? The
> National Rifle Association is a powerful lobby that advocates the right to
> own and bear arms and rejects any gun regulation by the government. I
> sternly remonstrate them for these innocent lives that have been taken
> carelessly. They truly are hardhearted and pitiless. My question though,
> what does really work for the United States? Law enforcement or lobbyism?
> Hasn't your nation been dominated with greed and corporal establishment?
> When Obama proposed gun control initiative, he was assaulted by
> congressional lobbyists. However, when Trump proposed what seems to be a
> discriminative ban act against Muslims, it was approved. Both sought fending
>
> for national security. As time passes on, the true face of Americanism
> unfolds. Many Americans became numb to exercising precautionary
> dissimulation. It is a sign of disgrace for any Muslim to be a greencard
> bearer. It is incredibly shameful to these people as to how their practice
> of double standard is really obvious. Each and every incident of such
> callous crimes reveals to us how counterfeit these people are. I couldn't
> wish for this to be the last incident. Unfortunately, as long as greed
> dominates law enforcement, the probability of hearing again and again about
>
> similar incidents is assuredly procurable. I still wonder though, how just
> one man was able to shoot these people without being instantly detected?
> According to multiple news reports, he killed fifty nine and wounded five
> hundred and twenty seven. That's a staggering number. I don't have specific
>
> stats but, that still is unbelievable. What type of deadly rifle he shot
> with? Was this a machine arm? Was this in the context of expressing warfare?
>
> I am seriously taken aback of what I heard. I am lost for words. I am not
> vindictive of what happened, I am just appalled. How could such incidents be
>
> prevented in the future? First off, honourable congressional members must
> hasten to sue the National Rifle Association for implicitly aiding such
> unfortunate incidents to broaden. Second, congress must critically seek
> unbroken consensus on decisive terms of stiff gun regulation. This will be
> attained only if they truly care about guarding national security. What
> happened last Sunday night in Las Vegas was a denotative act of heinous
> terror. What happened in Orlando last year was absolutely an act of
> flagitious terror as well. Despite whoever committed this and what were his
>
> motives, it was still an act of vicious terror in either case. I am really
> disturbed hearing about these terrible incidents deplorably recurring. I
> just told my fiance, this has got to stop or they will just end up shooting
>
> each other in the street one day. Whether you are at a consert, a grocery
> store, a movie theatre, an elementary school, a college campus or even a
> house of worship, you are threatened with being targeted by some insane
> shooter. Therefore, people of intellect must firmly stand for this. Law
> enforcement is the definite solution for this longly and discreditably
> remaining crisis. I do not intend to interfere. I just have good friends in
>
> this country and I am concerned about them. I certainly grieve and mourn
> what happened. This has been really unfortunate.
>
> Thank you for carefully reading, Bob
>
>
> ---
> This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
> https://www.avast.com/antivirus
>
>
>
Thursday, September 28, 2017
Fwd: [blind-democracy] The Abuses Of History
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Carl Jarvis <carjar82@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2017 07:58:02 -0700
Subject: Re: [blind-democracy] The Abuses Of History
To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
Cc: Matthew <mcblack@gmail.com>, Jennifer Ford <dandjford88@live.com>,
delores selset <dselset@aol.com>, footballmania
<footballmania@gmail.com>, Sam Severo <5severos@sbcglobal.net>,
jamesjarvis98 <jamesjarvis98@gmail.com>
Chris Hedges is, in my opinion, the American Conscience.
We will never make America "Great again", as President Donald Trump
believes, because that "Great America" only exists in our bland,
sanitized history books. As my dad was fond of saying, "History is
written by the Victors".
But America has the potential of becoming "Truly Great", to parrot
Trump. But only if we make the time and effort to study *ALL of our
history, the good and the bad. The following article by Chris Hedges
is a keeper.
Carl Jarvis
*****
The Abuses Of History
History-Fish24Sept2017-850x729
> By Chris Hedges, www.truthdig.com
> September 26th, 2017
>
> Above Photo: Mr. Fish
>
> Historians, like journalists, are in the business of manipulating facts.
> Some use facts to tell truths, however unpleasant. But many more omit,
> highlight and at times distort them in ways that sustain national myths and
> buttress dominant narratives. The failure by most of the United States'
> popular historians and the press to tell stories of oppression and the
> struggles against it, especially by women, people of color, the working
> class and the poor, has contributed to the sickening triumphalism and
> chauvinism that are poisoning our society. The historian James W. Loewen,
> in
> his book "Lies Across America: What Our Historic Markers and Monuments Get
> Wrong," calls the monuments that celebrate our highly selective and
> distorted history a "landscape of denial."
>
> The historian Carl Becker wrote, "History is what the present chooses to
> remember about the past." And as a nation founded on the pillars of
> genocide, slavery, patriarchy, violent repression of popular movements,
> savage war crimes committed to expand the empire, and capitalist
> exploitation, we choose to remember very little. This historical amnesia,
> as
> James Baldwin never tired of pointing out, is very dangerous. It feeds
> self-delusion. It severs us from recognition of our propensity for
> violence.
> It sees us project on others-almost always the vulnerable-the
> unacknowledged
> evil that lies in our past and our hearts. It shuts down the voices of the
> oppressed, those who can tell us who we are and enable us through
> self-reflection and self-criticism to become a better people. "History does
> not merely refer to the past . history is literally present in all we do,"
> Baldwin wrote.
>
> If we understood our real past we would see as lunacy Donald Trump's
> bombastic assertions that the removal of Confederate statues is an attack
> on
> "our history." Whose history is being attacked? And is it history that is
> being attacked or the myth disguised as history and perpetuated by white
> supremacy and capitalism? As the historian Eric Foner points out, "Public
> monuments are built by those with sufficient power to determine which parts
> of history are worth commemorating and what vision of history ought to be
> conveyed."
>
> The clash between historical myth and historical reality is being played
> out
> in the president's disparaging of black athletes who protest indiscriminate
> police violence against people of color. "Maybe he should find a country
> that works better for him," candidate Trump said of professional
> quarterback
> Colin Kaepernick, who knelt during the national anthem at National Football
> League games to protest police violence. Other NFL players later emulated
> his protest.
>
> Friday at a political rally in Alabama, Trump bellowed: "Wouldn't you love
> to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say,
> 'Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He's fired. He's
> fired!' " That comment and a Saturday morning tweet by Trump that
> criticized
> professional basketball star Stephen Curry, another athlete of
> African-American descent, prompted a number of prominent sports figures to
> respond angrily. One addressed the president as "U bum" on Twitter.
>
> The war of words between the president and black athletes is about
> competing
> historical narratives.
>
> Historians are rewarded for buttressing the ruling social structure,
> producing heavy tomes on the ruling elites-usually powerful white men such
> as John D. Rockefeller or Theodore Roosevelt-and ignoring the underlying
> social movements and radicals that have been the true engines of cultural
> and political change in the United States. Or they retreat into arcane and
> irrelevant subjects of minor significance, becoming self-appointed
> specialists of the banal or the trivial. They ignore or minimize
> inconvenient facts and actions that tarnish the myth, including lethal
> suppression of groups, classes and civilizations and the plethora of lies
> told by the ruling elites, the mass media and powerful institutions to
> justify their grip on power. They eschew transcendental and moral issues,
> including class conflict, in the name of neutrality and objectivity. The
> mantra of disinterested scholarship and the obsession with data collection
> add up, as the historian Howard Zinn wrote, "to the fear that using our
> intelligence to further our moral ends is somehow improper."
>
> "Objectivity is an interesting and often misunderstood word," Foner said.
> "I
> tell my students what objectivity means is you have an open mind, not an
> empty mind. There is no person who doesn't have preconceptions, values,
> assumptions. And you bring those to the study of history. What it means to
> be objective is if you begin encountering evidence, research, that
> questions
> some of your assumptions, you may have to change your mind. You have to
> have
> an open mind in your encounters with the evidence. But that doesn't mean
> you
> don't take a stance. You have an obligation. If you've done all this
> studying, done all this research, if you understand key issues in American
> history better than most people, just because you've done the research and
> they haven't, you have an obligation as a citizen to speak up about it. .We
> should not be bystanders. We should be active citizens. Being a historian
> and an active citizen is not mutually contradictory."
>
> Historians who apologize for the power elites, who in essence shun
> complexity and minimize inconvenient truths, are rewarded and promoted.
> They
> receive tenure, large book contracts, generous research grants, lucrative
> speaking engagements and prizes. Truth tellers, such as Zinn, are
> marginalized. Friedrich Nietzsche calls this process "creative
> forgetfulness."
>
> "In high school," Foner said, "I got a history textbook that said 'Story of
> American History,' which was very one-dimensional. It was all about the
> rise
> of freedom and liberty. Slavery was omitted almost entirely. The general
> plight of African-Americans and other non-whites was pretty much omitted
> from this story. It was very partial. It was very limited. That's the same
> thing with all these statues and [the debate about them]. I'm not saying we
> should tear down every single statue of every Confederate all over the
> place. But if we step back and look at the public presentation of history,
> particularly in the South, through these monuments, where are the black
> people of the South? Where are the monuments to the victims of slavery? To
> the victims of lynching? The monuments of the black leaders of
> Reconstruction? The first black senators and members of Congress? My view
> is, as well as taking down some statues, we need to put up others. If we
> want to have a public commemoration of history, it ought to be diverse
> enough to include the whole history, not just the history that those in
> power want us to remember."
>
> "Civil War monuments glorify soldiers and generals who fought for Southern
> independence," Foner writes in "Battles for Freedom: The Use and Abuse of
> American History," "explaining their motivation by reference to the ideals
> of freedom, states' rights and individual autonomy-everything, that is but
> slavery, the 'cornerstone of the Confederacy,' according to its vice
> president, Alexander Stephens. Fort Mill, South Carolina, has a marker
> honoring the 'faithful slaves' of the Confederate states, but one would be
> hard pressed to find monuments anywhere in the country to slave rebels like
> Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, to the 200,000 black soldiers and sailors who
> fought for the Union (or, for that matter, the thousands of white
> Southerners who remained loyal to the nation)."
>
> The United Daughters of the Confederacy, as Loewen points out, erected most
> of the South's Confederate monuments between 1890 and 1920. This campaign
> of
> commemoration was part of what Foner calls "a conscious effort to glorify
> and sanitize the Confederate cause and legitimize the newly installed Jim
> Crow system."
>
> Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who Loewen writes was "one of the most vicious
> racists in American history," was one of the South's biggest slave traders,
> commander of the forces that massacred black Union troops after they
> surrendered at Fort Pillow and the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. Yet, as
> Foner notes, "there are more statues, markers and busts of Forrest in
> Tennessee than of any other figure in the state's history, including
> President Andrew Jackson."
>
> "Only one transgression was sufficiently outrageous to disqualify
> Confederate leaders from the pantheon of heroes," Foner writes. "No statue
> of James Longstreet, a far abler commander than Forrest, graces the
> Southern
> countryside, and Gen. James Fleming Fagan is omitted from the portrait
> gallery of famous figures of Arkansas history in Little Rock. Their crime?
> Both supported black rights during Reconstruction."
>
> The American myth also relies heavily on a distorted history of the
> westward
> expansion.
>
> "The mythology of the West is deeply rooted in our culture," Foner said,
> "whether it's in Western movies or the idea of the lone pioneer, the
> individual roughing it out in the West, and of course, the main lie is that
> the West was kind of empty before white settlers and hunters and trappers
> and farmers came from the East to settle it. In fact, the West has been
> populated since forever. The real story of the West is the clash of all
> these different peoples, Native Americans, Asians in California, settlers
> coming in from the East, Mexicans. The West was a very multicultural place.
> There are a lot of histories there. Many of those histories are ignored or
> subordinated in this one story of the westward movement."
>
> "Racism is certainly a part of Western history," Foner said. "But you're
> not
> going to get that from a John Wayne movie [or] the paintings by [Frederic]
> Remington and others. It's a history that doesn't help you understand the
> present."
>
> Remington's racism, displayed in paintings of noble white settlers and
> cowboys battling "savages," was pronounced.
> "Jews-inguns-chinamen-Italians-Huns," he wrote, were "the rubbish of the
> earth I hate." In the same letter he added, "I've got some Winchesters and
> when the massacreing begins . I can get my share of 'em and whats more I
> will."
>
> Nietzsche identified three approaches to history: monumental, antiquarian
> and critical, the last being "the history that judges and condemns."
>
> "The monumental is the history that glorifies the nation-state that is
> represented in monuments that do not question anything about the society,"
> Foner said. "A lot of history is like that. The rise of history as a
> discipline coincided with the rise of the nation-state. Every nation needs
> a
> set of myths to justify its own existence. Another one of my favorite
> writers, Ernest Renan, the French historian, wrote, 'The historian is the
> enemy of the nation.' It's an interesting thing to say. He doesn't mean
> they're spies or anything. The historian comes along and takes apart the
> mythologies that are helping to underpin the legitimacy of the nation.
> That's why people don't like them very often. They don't want to hear these
> things. Antiquarian is what a lot of people are. That's fine. They're
> looking for their personal roots, their family history. They're going on
> ancestry.com to find out where their DNA came from. That's not really
> history exactly. They don't have much of a historical context. But it
> stimulates people to think about the past. Then there's what Nietzsche
> calls
> critical history-the history that judges and condemns. It takes a moral
> stance. It doesn't just relate the facts. It tells you what is good and
> what
> is evil. A lot of historians don't like to do that. But to me, it's
> important. It's important for the historian, having done the research,
> having presented the history, to say here's where I stand in relation to
> all
> these important issues in our history."
>
> "Whether it's Frederick Douglass, Eugene Debs, Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
> Martin Luther King Jr., those are the people who were trying to make
> America
> a better place," Foner said. "King, in particular, was a very radical guy."
>
> Yet, as Foner points out, King is effectively "frozen in one speech, one
> sentence: I want my children to be judged by the content of their
> character,
> not just the color of their skin. [But] that's not what the whole civil
> rights movement was about. People forget, he died leading a poor people's
> march, leading a strike of sanitation workers. He wasn't just out there
> talking about civil rights. He had moved to economic equality as a
> fundamental issue."
>
> Max Weber wrote, "What is possible would never have been achieved if, in
> this world, people had not repeatedly reached for the impossible."
>
> Foner, like Weber, argues that it is the visionaries and utopian reformers
> such as Debs and the abolitionists who brought about real social change,
> not
> the "practical" politicians. The abolitionists destroyed what Foner calls
> the "conspiracy of silence by which political parties, churches and other
> institutions sought to exclude slavery from public debate." He writes:
>
>
> For much of the 1850s and the first two years of the Civil War,
> Lincoln-widely considered the model of a pragmatic politician-advocated a
> plan to end slavery that involved gradual emancipation, monetary
> compensation for slaver owners, and setting up colonies of freed blacks
> outside the United States. The harebrained scheme had no possibility of
> enactment. It was the abolitionists, still viewed by some historians as
> irresponsible fanatics, who put forward the program-an immediate and
> uncompensated end to slavery, with black people becoming US citizens-that
> came to pass (with Lincoln's eventual help, of course).
>
> The political squabbles that dominate public discourse almost never
> question
> the sanctity of private property, individualism, capitalism or imperialism.
> They hold as sacrosanct American "virtues." They insist that Americans are
> a
> "good" people steadily overcoming any prejudices and injustices that may
> have occurred in the past. The debates between the Democrats and the Whigs,
> or today's Republicans and Democrats, have roots in the same allegiance to
> the dominant structures of power, myth of American exceptionalism and white
> supremacy.
>
> "It's all a family quarrel without any genuine, serious disagreements,"
> Foner said.
>
> Those who challenge these structures, who reach for the impossible, who
> dare
> to speak the truth, have been, throughout American history, dismissed as
> "fanatics." But, as Foner points out, it is often the "fanatics" who make
> history.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
From: Carl Jarvis <carjar82@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2017 07:58:02 -0700
Subject: Re: [blind-democracy] The Abuses Of History
To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
Cc: Matthew <mcblack@gmail.com>, Jennifer Ford <dandjford88@live.com>,
delores selset <dselset@aol.com>, footballmania
<footballmania@gmail.com>, Sam Severo <5severos@sbcglobal.net>,
jamesjarvis98 <jamesjarvis98@gmail.com>
Chris Hedges is, in my opinion, the American Conscience.
We will never make America "Great again", as President Donald Trump
believes, because that "Great America" only exists in our bland,
sanitized history books. As my dad was fond of saying, "History is
written by the Victors".
But America has the potential of becoming "Truly Great", to parrot
Trump. But only if we make the time and effort to study *ALL of our
history, the good and the bad. The following article by Chris Hedges
is a keeper.
Carl Jarvis
*****
The Abuses Of History
History-Fish24Sept2017-850x729
> By Chris Hedges, www.truthdig.com
> September 26th, 2017
>
> Above Photo: Mr. Fish
>
> Historians, like journalists, are in the business of manipulating facts.
> Some use facts to tell truths, however unpleasant. But many more omit,
> highlight and at times distort them in ways that sustain national myths and
> buttress dominant narratives. The failure by most of the United States'
> popular historians and the press to tell stories of oppression and the
> struggles against it, especially by women, people of color, the working
> class and the poor, has contributed to the sickening triumphalism and
> chauvinism that are poisoning our society. The historian James W. Loewen,
> in
> his book "Lies Across America: What Our Historic Markers and Monuments Get
> Wrong," calls the monuments that celebrate our highly selective and
> distorted history a "landscape of denial."
>
> The historian Carl Becker wrote, "History is what the present chooses to
> remember about the past." And as a nation founded on the pillars of
> genocide, slavery, patriarchy, violent repression of popular movements,
> savage war crimes committed to expand the empire, and capitalist
> exploitation, we choose to remember very little. This historical amnesia,
> as
> James Baldwin never tired of pointing out, is very dangerous. It feeds
> self-delusion. It severs us from recognition of our propensity for
> violence.
> It sees us project on others-almost always the vulnerable-the
> unacknowledged
> evil that lies in our past and our hearts. It shuts down the voices of the
> oppressed, those who can tell us who we are and enable us through
> self-reflection and self-criticism to become a better people. "History does
> not merely refer to the past . history is literally present in all we do,"
> Baldwin wrote.
>
> If we understood our real past we would see as lunacy Donald Trump's
> bombastic assertions that the removal of Confederate statues is an attack
> on
> "our history." Whose history is being attacked? And is it history that is
> being attacked or the myth disguised as history and perpetuated by white
> supremacy and capitalism? As the historian Eric Foner points out, "Public
> monuments are built by those with sufficient power to determine which parts
> of history are worth commemorating and what vision of history ought to be
> conveyed."
>
> The clash between historical myth and historical reality is being played
> out
> in the president's disparaging of black athletes who protest indiscriminate
> police violence against people of color. "Maybe he should find a country
> that works better for him," candidate Trump said of professional
> quarterback
> Colin Kaepernick, who knelt during the national anthem at National Football
> League games to protest police violence. Other NFL players later emulated
> his protest.
>
> Friday at a political rally in Alabama, Trump bellowed: "Wouldn't you love
> to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say,
> 'Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He's fired. He's
> fired!' " That comment and a Saturday morning tweet by Trump that
> criticized
> professional basketball star Stephen Curry, another athlete of
> African-American descent, prompted a number of prominent sports figures to
> respond angrily. One addressed the president as "U bum" on Twitter.
>
> The war of words between the president and black athletes is about
> competing
> historical narratives.
>
> Historians are rewarded for buttressing the ruling social structure,
> producing heavy tomes on the ruling elites-usually powerful white men such
> as John D. Rockefeller or Theodore Roosevelt-and ignoring the underlying
> social movements and radicals that have been the true engines of cultural
> and political change in the United States. Or they retreat into arcane and
> irrelevant subjects of minor significance, becoming self-appointed
> specialists of the banal or the trivial. They ignore or minimize
> inconvenient facts and actions that tarnish the myth, including lethal
> suppression of groups, classes and civilizations and the plethora of lies
> told by the ruling elites, the mass media and powerful institutions to
> justify their grip on power. They eschew transcendental and moral issues,
> including class conflict, in the name of neutrality and objectivity. The
> mantra of disinterested scholarship and the obsession with data collection
> add up, as the historian Howard Zinn wrote, "to the fear that using our
> intelligence to further our moral ends is somehow improper."
>
> "Objectivity is an interesting and often misunderstood word," Foner said.
> "I
> tell my students what objectivity means is you have an open mind, not an
> empty mind. There is no person who doesn't have preconceptions, values,
> assumptions. And you bring those to the study of history. What it means to
> be objective is if you begin encountering evidence, research, that
> questions
> some of your assumptions, you may have to change your mind. You have to
> have
> an open mind in your encounters with the evidence. But that doesn't mean
> you
> don't take a stance. You have an obligation. If you've done all this
> studying, done all this research, if you understand key issues in American
> history better than most people, just because you've done the research and
> they haven't, you have an obligation as a citizen to speak up about it. .We
> should not be bystanders. We should be active citizens. Being a historian
> and an active citizen is not mutually contradictory."
>
> Historians who apologize for the power elites, who in essence shun
> complexity and minimize inconvenient truths, are rewarded and promoted.
> They
> receive tenure, large book contracts, generous research grants, lucrative
> speaking engagements and prizes. Truth tellers, such as Zinn, are
> marginalized. Friedrich Nietzsche calls this process "creative
> forgetfulness."
>
> "In high school," Foner said, "I got a history textbook that said 'Story of
> American History,' which was very one-dimensional. It was all about the
> rise
> of freedom and liberty. Slavery was omitted almost entirely. The general
> plight of African-Americans and other non-whites was pretty much omitted
> from this story. It was very partial. It was very limited. That's the same
> thing with all these statues and [the debate about them]. I'm not saying we
> should tear down every single statue of every Confederate all over the
> place. But if we step back and look at the public presentation of history,
> particularly in the South, through these monuments, where are the black
> people of the South? Where are the monuments to the victims of slavery? To
> the victims of lynching? The monuments of the black leaders of
> Reconstruction? The first black senators and members of Congress? My view
> is, as well as taking down some statues, we need to put up others. If we
> want to have a public commemoration of history, it ought to be diverse
> enough to include the whole history, not just the history that those in
> power want us to remember."
>
> "Civil War monuments glorify soldiers and generals who fought for Southern
> independence," Foner writes in "Battles for Freedom: The Use and Abuse of
> American History," "explaining their motivation by reference to the ideals
> of freedom, states' rights and individual autonomy-everything, that is but
> slavery, the 'cornerstone of the Confederacy,' according to its vice
> president, Alexander Stephens. Fort Mill, South Carolina, has a marker
> honoring the 'faithful slaves' of the Confederate states, but one would be
> hard pressed to find monuments anywhere in the country to slave rebels like
> Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, to the 200,000 black soldiers and sailors who
> fought for the Union (or, for that matter, the thousands of white
> Southerners who remained loyal to the nation)."
>
> The United Daughters of the Confederacy, as Loewen points out, erected most
> of the South's Confederate monuments between 1890 and 1920. This campaign
> of
> commemoration was part of what Foner calls "a conscious effort to glorify
> and sanitize the Confederate cause and legitimize the newly installed Jim
> Crow system."
>
> Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who Loewen writes was "one of the most vicious
> racists in American history," was one of the South's biggest slave traders,
> commander of the forces that massacred black Union troops after they
> surrendered at Fort Pillow and the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. Yet, as
> Foner notes, "there are more statues, markers and busts of Forrest in
> Tennessee than of any other figure in the state's history, including
> President Andrew Jackson."
>
> "Only one transgression was sufficiently outrageous to disqualify
> Confederate leaders from the pantheon of heroes," Foner writes. "No statue
> of James Longstreet, a far abler commander than Forrest, graces the
> Southern
> countryside, and Gen. James Fleming Fagan is omitted from the portrait
> gallery of famous figures of Arkansas history in Little Rock. Their crime?
> Both supported black rights during Reconstruction."
>
> The American myth also relies heavily on a distorted history of the
> westward
> expansion.
>
> "The mythology of the West is deeply rooted in our culture," Foner said,
> "whether it's in Western movies or the idea of the lone pioneer, the
> individual roughing it out in the West, and of course, the main lie is that
> the West was kind of empty before white settlers and hunters and trappers
> and farmers came from the East to settle it. In fact, the West has been
> populated since forever. The real story of the West is the clash of all
> these different peoples, Native Americans, Asians in California, settlers
> coming in from the East, Mexicans. The West was a very multicultural place.
> There are a lot of histories there. Many of those histories are ignored or
> subordinated in this one story of the westward movement."
>
> "Racism is certainly a part of Western history," Foner said. "But you're
> not
> going to get that from a John Wayne movie [or] the paintings by [Frederic]
> Remington and others. It's a history that doesn't help you understand the
> present."
>
> Remington's racism, displayed in paintings of noble white settlers and
> cowboys battling "savages," was pronounced.
> "Jews-inguns-chinamen-Italians-Huns," he wrote, were "the rubbish of the
> earth I hate." In the same letter he added, "I've got some Winchesters and
> when the massacreing begins . I can get my share of 'em and whats more I
> will."
>
> Nietzsche identified three approaches to history: monumental, antiquarian
> and critical, the last being "the history that judges and condemns."
>
> "The monumental is the history that glorifies the nation-state that is
> represented in monuments that do not question anything about the society,"
> Foner said. "A lot of history is like that. The rise of history as a
> discipline coincided with the rise of the nation-state. Every nation needs
> a
> set of myths to justify its own existence. Another one of my favorite
> writers, Ernest Renan, the French historian, wrote, 'The historian is the
> enemy of the nation.' It's an interesting thing to say. He doesn't mean
> they're spies or anything. The historian comes along and takes apart the
> mythologies that are helping to underpin the legitimacy of the nation.
> That's why people don't like them very often. They don't want to hear these
> things. Antiquarian is what a lot of people are. That's fine. They're
> looking for their personal roots, their family history. They're going on
> ancestry.com to find out where their DNA came from. That's not really
> history exactly. They don't have much of a historical context. But it
> stimulates people to think about the past. Then there's what Nietzsche
> calls
> critical history-the history that judges and condemns. It takes a moral
> stance. It doesn't just relate the facts. It tells you what is good and
> what
> is evil. A lot of historians don't like to do that. But to me, it's
> important. It's important for the historian, having done the research,
> having presented the history, to say here's where I stand in relation to
> all
> these important issues in our history."
>
> "Whether it's Frederick Douglass, Eugene Debs, Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
> Martin Luther King Jr., those are the people who were trying to make
> America
> a better place," Foner said. "King, in particular, was a very radical guy."
>
> Yet, as Foner points out, King is effectively "frozen in one speech, one
> sentence: I want my children to be judged by the content of their
> character,
> not just the color of their skin. [But] that's not what the whole civil
> rights movement was about. People forget, he died leading a poor people's
> march, leading a strike of sanitation workers. He wasn't just out there
> talking about civil rights. He had moved to economic equality as a
> fundamental issue."
>
> Max Weber wrote, "What is possible would never have been achieved if, in
> this world, people had not repeatedly reached for the impossible."
>
> Foner, like Weber, argues that it is the visionaries and utopian reformers
> such as Debs and the abolitionists who brought about real social change,
> not
> the "practical" politicians. The abolitionists destroyed what Foner calls
> the "conspiracy of silence by which political parties, churches and other
> institutions sought to exclude slavery from public debate." He writes:
>
>
> For much of the 1850s and the first two years of the Civil War,
> Lincoln-widely considered the model of a pragmatic politician-advocated a
> plan to end slavery that involved gradual emancipation, monetary
> compensation for slaver owners, and setting up colonies of freed blacks
> outside the United States. The harebrained scheme had no possibility of
> enactment. It was the abolitionists, still viewed by some historians as
> irresponsible fanatics, who put forward the program-an immediate and
> uncompensated end to slavery, with black people becoming US citizens-that
> came to pass (with Lincoln's eventual help, of course).
>
> The political squabbles that dominate public discourse almost never
> question
> the sanctity of private property, individualism, capitalism or imperialism.
> They hold as sacrosanct American "virtues." They insist that Americans are
> a
> "good" people steadily overcoming any prejudices and injustices that may
> have occurred in the past. The debates between the Democrats and the Whigs,
> or today's Republicans and Democrats, have roots in the same allegiance to
> the dominant structures of power, myth of American exceptionalism and white
> supremacy.
>
> "It's all a family quarrel without any genuine, serious disagreements,"
> Foner said.
>
> Those who challenge these structures, who reach for the impossible, who
> dare
> to speak the truth, have been, throughout American history, dismissed as
> "fanatics." But, as Foner points out, it is often the "fanatics" who make
> history.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
Tuesday, September 26, 2017
Re: [blind-democracy] The Silencing Of Dissent
The American Working Class has always been under attack by the Ruling
Class. But in the days since Ronald Reagan, it has become a lopsided
war. And the reason is that the Working Class still trusts their
wealthy bosses far more than is good for them.
Chris Hedges article is a "must read and reread".
Carl Jarvis
On 9/24/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> Please do read this piece very carefully. It is relevant to our access to
> the kinds of journalism and opinion pieces that Sylvie used to post and
> that
> I currently post. All of the journalists and thinkers whom I value are
> slowly being silenced. All of what Hedges describes, I've seen reported in
> pieces in other articles, aside from the statistics which show that Google
> and Face Book have made it impossible for people to search for information
> on certain subjects and individuals.
> Miriam
>
> The Silencing Of Dissent
> Fish-Tree-of-Knowledge-17Sep2017-850x765
> By Chris Hedges, www.truthdig.com
> September 19th, 2017
>
> Above Photo: Mr. Fish
>
> The ruling elites, who grasp that the reigning ideology of global corporate
> capitalism and imperial expansion no longer has moral or intellectual
> credibility, have mounted a campaign to shut down the platforms given to
> their critics. The attacks within this campaign include blacklisting,
> censorship and slandering dissidents as foreign agents for Russia and
> purveyors of "fake news."
>
> No dominant class can long retain control when the credibility of the ideas
> that justify its existence evaporates. It is forced, at that point, to
> resort to crude forms of coercion, intimidation and censorship. This
> ideological collapse in the United States has transformed those of us who
> attack the corporate state into a potent threat, not because we reach large
> numbers of people, and certainly not because we spread Russian propaganda,
> but because the elites no longer have a plausible counterargument.
>
> The elites face an unpleasant choice. They could impose harsh controls to
> protect the status quo or veer leftward toward socialism to ameliorate the
> mounting economic and political injustices endured by most of the
> population. But a move leftward, essentially reinstating and expanding the
> New Deal programs they have destroyed, would impede corporate power and
> corporate profits. So instead the elites, including the Democratic Party
> leadership, have decided to quash public debate. The tactic they are using
> is as old as the nation-state—smearing critics as traitors who are in the
> service of a hostile foreign power. Tens of thousands of people of
> conscience were blacklisted in this way during the Red Scares of the 1920s
> and 1950s. The current hyperbolic and relentless focus on Russia, embraced
> with gusto by "liberal" media outlets such as The New York Times and MSNBC,
> has unleashed what some have called a virulent "New McCarthyism."
>
> The corporate elites do not fear Russia. There is no publicly disclosed
> evidence that Russia swung the election to Donald Trump. Nor does Russia
> appear to be intent on a military confrontation with the United States. I
> am
> certain Russia tries to meddle in U.S. affairs to its advantage, as we do
> and did in Russia—including our clandestine bankrolling of Boris Yeltsin,
> whose successful 1996 campaign for re-election as president is estimated to
> have cost up to $2.5 billion, much of that money coming indirectly from the
> American government. In today's media environment Russia is the foil. The
> corporate state is unnerved by the media outlets that give a voice to
> critics of corporate capitalism, the security and surveillance state and
> imperialism, including the network RT America.
>
> My show on RT America, "On Contact," like my columns at Truthdig, amplifies
> the voices of these dissidents—Tariq Ali, Kshama Sawant, Mumia Abu-Jamal,
> Medea Benjamin, Ajamu Baraka, Noam Chomsky, Dr. Margaret Flowers, Rania
> Khalek, Amira Hass, Miko Peled, Abby Martin, Glen Ford, Max Blumenthal, Pam
> Africa, Linh Dinh, Ben Norton, Eugene Puryear, Allan Nairn, Jill Stein,
> Kevin Zeese and others. These dissidents, if we had a functioning public
> broadcasting system or a commercial press free of corporate control, would
> be included in the mainstream discourse. They are not bought and paid for.
> They have integrity, courage and often brilliance. They are honest. For
> these reasons, in the eyes of the corporate state, they are very dangerous.
>
> The first and deadliest salvo in the war on dissent came in 1971 when Lewis
> Powell, a corporate attorney and later a Supreme Court justice, wrote and
> circulated a memo among business leaders called "Attack on American Free
> Enterprise System." It became the blueprint for the corporate coup d'état.
> Corporations, as Powell recommended in the document, poured hundreds of
> millions of dollars into the assault, financing pro-business political
> candidates, mounting campaigns against the liberal wing of the Democratic
> Party and the press and creating institutions such as the Business
> Roundtable, The Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Cato
> Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy, the Federalist Society and
> Accuracy
> in Academia. The memo argued that corporations had to fund sustained
> campaigns to marginalize or silence those who in "the college campus, the
> pulpit, the media, and the intellectual and literary journals" were hostile
> to corporate interests.
>
> Powell attacked Ralph Nader by name. Lobbyists flooded Washington and state
> capitals. Regulatory controls were abolished. Massive tax cuts for
> corporations and the wealthy were implemented, culminating in a de facto
> tax
> boycott. Trade barriers were lifted and the country's manufacturing base
> was
> destroyed. Social programs were slashed and funds for infrastructure, from
> roads and bridges to public libraries and schools, were cut. Protections
> for
> workers were gutted. Wages declined or stagnated. The military budget,
> along
> with the organs of internal security, became ever more bloated. A de facto
> blacklist, especially in universities and the press, was used to discredit
> intellectuals, radicals and activists who decried the idea of the nation
> prostrating itself before the dictates of the marketplace and condemned the
> crimes of imperialism, some of the best known being Howard Zinn, Noam
> Chomsky, Sheldon Wolin, Ward Churchill, Nader, Angela Davis and Edward
> Said.
> These critics were permitted to exist only on the margins of society, often
> outside of institutions, and many had trouble making a living.
>
> The financial meltdown of 2008 not only devastated the global economy, it
> exposed the lies propagated by those advocating globalization. Among these
> lies: that salaries of workers would rise, democracy would spread across
> the
> globe, the tech industry would replace manufacturing as a source of worker
> income, the middle class would flourish, and global communities would
> prosper. After 2008 it became clear that the "free market" is a scam, a
> zombie ideology by which workers and communities are ravaged by predatory
> capitalists and assets are funneled upward into the hands of the global 1
> percent. The endless wars, fought largely to enrich the arms industry and
> swell the power of the military, are futile and counterproductive to
> national interests. Deindustrialization and austerity programs have
> impoverished the working class and fatally damaged the economy.
>
> The establishment politicians in the two leading parties, each in service
> to
> corporate power and responsible for the assault on civil liberties and
> impoverishment of the country, are no longer able to use identity politics
> and the culture wars to whip up support. This led in the last presidential
> campaign to an insurgency by Bernie Sanders, which the Democratic Party
> crushed, and the election of Donald Trump.
>
> Barack Obama rode a wave of bipartisan resentment into office in 2008, then
> spent eight years betraying the public. Obama's assault on civil liberties,
> including his use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers, was
> worse than those carried out by George W. Bush. He accelerated the war on
> public education by privatizing schools, expanded the wars in the Middle
> East, including the use of militarized drone attacks, provided little
> meaningful environmental reform, ignored the plight of the working class,
> deported more undocumented people than any other president, imposed a
> corporate-sponsored health care program that was the brainchild of the
> right-wing Heritage Foundation, and prohibited the Justice Department from
> prosecuting the bankers and financial firms that carried out derivatives
> scams and inflated the housing and real estate market, a condition that led
> to the 2008 financial meltdown. He epitomized, like Bill Clinton, the
> bankruptcy of the Democratic Party. Clinton, outdoing Obama's later
> actions,
> gave us the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the dismantling of
> the welfare system, the deregulation of the financial services industry and
> the huge expansion of mass incarceration. Clinton also oversaw deregulation
> of the Federal Communications Commission, a change that allowed a handful
> of
> corporations to buy up the airwaves.
>
> The corporate state was in crisis at the end of the Obama presidency. It
> was
> widely hated. It became vulnerable to attacks by the critics it had pushed
> to the fringes. Most vulnerable was the Democratic Party establishment,
> which claims to defend the rights of working men and women and protect
> civil
> liberties. This is why the Democratic Party is so zealous in its efforts to
> discredit its critics as stooges for Moscow and to charge that Russian
> interference caused its election defeat.
>
> In January there was a report on Russia by the Office of the Director of
> National Intelligence. The report devoted seven of its 25 pages to RT
> America and its influence on the presidential election. It claimed "Russian
> media made increasingly favorable comments about President-elect Trump as
> the 2016 US general and primary election campaigns progressed while
> consistently offering negative coverage of Secretary [Hillary] Clinton."
> This might seem true if you did not watch my RT broadcasts, which
> relentlessly attacked Trump as well as Clinton, or watch Ed Schultz, who
> now
> has a program on RT after having been the host of an MSNBC commentary
> program. The report also attempted to present RT America as having a vast
> media footprint and influence it does not possess.
>
> "In an effort to highlight the alleged 'lack of democracy' in the United
> States, RT broadcast, hosted, and advertised third party candidate debates
> and ran reporting supportive of the political agenda of these candidates,"
> the report read, correctly summing up themes on my show. "The RT hosts
> asserted that the US two-party system does not represent the views of at
> least one-third of the population and is a 'sham.' "
>
> It went on:
>
>
> RT's reports often characterize the United States as a 'surveillance state'
> and allege widespread infringements of civil liberties, police brutality,
> and drone use.
>
> RT has also focused on criticism of the US economic system, US currency
> policy, alleged Wall Street greed, and the US national debt. Some of RT's
> hosts have compared the United States to Imperial Rome and have predicted
> that government corruption and "corporate greed" will lead to US financial
> collapse.
>
> Is the corporate state so obtuse it thinks the American public has not, on
> its own, reached these conclusions about the condition of the nation? Is
> this what it defines as "fake news"? But most important, isn't this the
> truth that the courtiers in the mainstream press and public broadcasting,
> dependent on their funding from sources such as the Koch brothers, refuse
> to
> present? And isn't it, in the end, the truth that frightens them the most?
> Abby Martin and Ben Norton ripped apart the mendacity of the report and the
> complicity of the corporate media in my "On Contact" show titled "Real
> purpose of intel report on Russian hacking with Abby Martin & Ben Norton."
>
> In November 2016, The Washington Post reported on a blacklist published by
> the shadowy and anonymous site PropOrNot. The blacklist was composed of 199
> sites PropOrNot alleged, with no evidence, "reliably echo Russian
> propaganda." More than half of those sites were far-right,
> conspiracy-driven
> ones. But about 20 of the sites were major left-wing outlets including
> AlterNet, Black Agenda Report, Democracy Now!, Naked Capitalism, Truthdig,
> Truthout, CounterPunch and the World Socialist Web Site. The blacklist and
> the spurious accusations that these sites disseminated "fake news" on
> behalf
> of Russia were given prominent play in the Post in a story headlined
> "Russian propaganda effort helped spread 'fake news' during the election,
> experts say." The reporter, Craig Timberg, wrote that the goal of the
> Russian propaganda effort, according to "independent researchers who have
> tracked the operation," was "punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping
> Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy." Last
> December, Truthdig columnist Bill Boyarsky wrote a good piece about
> PropOrNot, which to this day remains essentially a secret organization.
>
> The owner of The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, also the founder and CEO of
> Amazon, has a $600 million contract with the CIA. Google, likewise, is
> deeply embedded within the security and surveillance state and aligned with
> the ruling elites. Amazon recently purged over 1,000 negative reviews of
> Hillary Clinton's new book, "What Happened." The effect was that the book's
> Amazon rating jumped from 2 1/2 stars to five stars. Do corporations such
> as
> Google and Amazon carry out such censorship on behalf of the U.S.
> government? Or is this censorship their independent contribution to protect
> the corporate state?
>
> In the name of combating Russia-inspired "fake news," Google, Facebook,
> Twitter, The New York Times, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed News, Agence
> France-Presse and CNN in April imposed algorithms or filters, overseen by
> "evaluators," that hunt for key words such as "U.S. military," "inequality"
> and "socialism," along with personal names such as Julian Assange and Laura
> Poitras, the filmmaker. Ben Gomes, Google's vice president for search
> engineering, says Google has amassed some 10,000 "evaluators" to determine
> the "quality" and veracity of websites. Internet users doing searches on
> Google, since the algorithms were put in place, are diverted from sites
> such
> as Truthdig and directed to mainstream publications such as The New York
> Times. The news organizations and corporations that are imposing this
> censorship have strong links to the Democratic Party. They are cheerleaders
> for American imperial projects and global capitalism. Because they are
> struggling in the new media environment for profitability, they have an
> economic incentive to be part of the witch hunt.
>
> The World Socialist Web Site reported in July that its aggregate volume, or
> "impressions"—links displayed by Google in response to search requests—fell
> dramatically over a short period after the new algorithms were imposed. It
> also wrote that a number of sites "declared to be 'fake news' by the
> Washington Post's discredited [PropOrNot] blacklist … had their global
> ranking fall. The average decline of the global reach of all of these sites
> is 25 percent. …"
>
> Another article, "Google rigs searches to block access to World Socialist
> Web Site," by the same website that month said:
>
>
> During the month of May, Google searches including the word "war" produced
> 61,795 WSWS impressions. In July, WSWS impressions fell by approximately 90
> percent, to 6,613.
>
> Searches for the term "Korean war" produced 20,392 impressions in May. In
> July, searches using the same words produced zero WSWS impressions.
> Searches
> for "North Korea war" produced 4,626 impressions in May. In July, the
> result
> of the same search produced zero WSWS impressions. "India Pakistan war"
> produced 4,394 impressions in May. In July, the result, again, was zero.
> And
> "Nuclear war 2017" produced 2,319 impressions in May, and zero in July.
>
> To cite some other searches: "WikiLeaks," fell from 6,576 impressions to
> zero, "Julian Assange" fell from 3,701 impressions to zero, and "Laura
> Poitras" fell from 4,499 impressions to zero. A search for "Michael
> Hastings"—the reporter who died in 2013 under suspicious
> circumstances—produced 33,464 impressions in May, but only 5,227
> impressions
> in July.
>
> In addition to geopolitics, the WSWS regularly covers a broad range of
> social issues, many of which have seen precipitous drops in search results.
> Searches for "food stamps," "Ford layoffs," "Amazon warehouse," and
> "secretary of education" all went down from more than 5,000 impressions in
> May to zero impressions in July.
>
> The accusation that left-wing sites collude with Russia has made them
> theoretically subject, along with those who write for them, to the
> Espionage
> Act and the Foreign Agent Registration Act, which requires Americans who
> work on behalf of a foreign party to register as foreign agents.
>
> The latest salvo came last week. It is the most ominous. The Department of
> Justice called on RT America and its "associates"—which may mean people
> like
> me—to register under the Foreign Agent Registration Act. No doubt, the
> corporate state knows that most of us will not register as foreign agents,
> meaning we will be banished from the airwaves. This, I expect, is the
> intent. The government will not stop with RT. The FBI has been handed the
> authority to determine who is a "legitimate" journalist and who is not. It
> will use this authority to decimate the left.
>
> This is a war of ideas. The corporate state cannot compete honestly in this
> contest. It will do what all despotic regimes do—govern through wholesale
> surveillance, lies, blacklists, false accusations of treason, heavy-handed
> censorship and, eventually, violence.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
Class. But in the days since Ronald Reagan, it has become a lopsided
war. And the reason is that the Working Class still trusts their
wealthy bosses far more than is good for them.
Chris Hedges article is a "must read and reread".
Carl Jarvis
On 9/24/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> Please do read this piece very carefully. It is relevant to our access to
> the kinds of journalism and opinion pieces that Sylvie used to post and
> that
> I currently post. All of the journalists and thinkers whom I value are
> slowly being silenced. All of what Hedges describes, I've seen reported in
> pieces in other articles, aside from the statistics which show that Google
> and Face Book have made it impossible for people to search for information
> on certain subjects and individuals.
> Miriam
>
> The Silencing Of Dissent
> Fish-Tree-of-Knowledge-17Sep2017-850x765
> By Chris Hedges, www.truthdig.com
> September 19th, 2017
>
> Above Photo: Mr. Fish
>
> The ruling elites, who grasp that the reigning ideology of global corporate
> capitalism and imperial expansion no longer has moral or intellectual
> credibility, have mounted a campaign to shut down the platforms given to
> their critics. The attacks within this campaign include blacklisting,
> censorship and slandering dissidents as foreign agents for Russia and
> purveyors of "fake news."
>
> No dominant class can long retain control when the credibility of the ideas
> that justify its existence evaporates. It is forced, at that point, to
> resort to crude forms of coercion, intimidation and censorship. This
> ideological collapse in the United States has transformed those of us who
> attack the corporate state into a potent threat, not because we reach large
> numbers of people, and certainly not because we spread Russian propaganda,
> but because the elites no longer have a plausible counterargument.
>
> The elites face an unpleasant choice. They could impose harsh controls to
> protect the status quo or veer leftward toward socialism to ameliorate the
> mounting economic and political injustices endured by most of the
> population. But a move leftward, essentially reinstating and expanding the
> New Deal programs they have destroyed, would impede corporate power and
> corporate profits. So instead the elites, including the Democratic Party
> leadership, have decided to quash public debate. The tactic they are using
> is as old as the nation-state—smearing critics as traitors who are in the
> service of a hostile foreign power. Tens of thousands of people of
> conscience were blacklisted in this way during the Red Scares of the 1920s
> and 1950s. The current hyperbolic and relentless focus on Russia, embraced
> with gusto by "liberal" media outlets such as The New York Times and MSNBC,
> has unleashed what some have called a virulent "New McCarthyism."
>
> The corporate elites do not fear Russia. There is no publicly disclosed
> evidence that Russia swung the election to Donald Trump. Nor does Russia
> appear to be intent on a military confrontation with the United States. I
> am
> certain Russia tries to meddle in U.S. affairs to its advantage, as we do
> and did in Russia—including our clandestine bankrolling of Boris Yeltsin,
> whose successful 1996 campaign for re-election as president is estimated to
> have cost up to $2.5 billion, much of that money coming indirectly from the
> American government. In today's media environment Russia is the foil. The
> corporate state is unnerved by the media outlets that give a voice to
> critics of corporate capitalism, the security and surveillance state and
> imperialism, including the network RT America.
>
> My show on RT America, "On Contact," like my columns at Truthdig, amplifies
> the voices of these dissidents—Tariq Ali, Kshama Sawant, Mumia Abu-Jamal,
> Medea Benjamin, Ajamu Baraka, Noam Chomsky, Dr. Margaret Flowers, Rania
> Khalek, Amira Hass, Miko Peled, Abby Martin, Glen Ford, Max Blumenthal, Pam
> Africa, Linh Dinh, Ben Norton, Eugene Puryear, Allan Nairn, Jill Stein,
> Kevin Zeese and others. These dissidents, if we had a functioning public
> broadcasting system or a commercial press free of corporate control, would
> be included in the mainstream discourse. They are not bought and paid for.
> They have integrity, courage and often brilliance. They are honest. For
> these reasons, in the eyes of the corporate state, they are very dangerous.
>
> The first and deadliest salvo in the war on dissent came in 1971 when Lewis
> Powell, a corporate attorney and later a Supreme Court justice, wrote and
> circulated a memo among business leaders called "Attack on American Free
> Enterprise System." It became the blueprint for the corporate coup d'état.
> Corporations, as Powell recommended in the document, poured hundreds of
> millions of dollars into the assault, financing pro-business political
> candidates, mounting campaigns against the liberal wing of the Democratic
> Party and the press and creating institutions such as the Business
> Roundtable, The Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Cato
> Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy, the Federalist Society and
> Accuracy
> in Academia. The memo argued that corporations had to fund sustained
> campaigns to marginalize or silence those who in "the college campus, the
> pulpit, the media, and the intellectual and literary journals" were hostile
> to corporate interests.
>
> Powell attacked Ralph Nader by name. Lobbyists flooded Washington and state
> capitals. Regulatory controls were abolished. Massive tax cuts for
> corporations and the wealthy were implemented, culminating in a de facto
> tax
> boycott. Trade barriers were lifted and the country's manufacturing base
> was
> destroyed. Social programs were slashed and funds for infrastructure, from
> roads and bridges to public libraries and schools, were cut. Protections
> for
> workers were gutted. Wages declined or stagnated. The military budget,
> along
> with the organs of internal security, became ever more bloated. A de facto
> blacklist, especially in universities and the press, was used to discredit
> intellectuals, radicals and activists who decried the idea of the nation
> prostrating itself before the dictates of the marketplace and condemned the
> crimes of imperialism, some of the best known being Howard Zinn, Noam
> Chomsky, Sheldon Wolin, Ward Churchill, Nader, Angela Davis and Edward
> Said.
> These critics were permitted to exist only on the margins of society, often
> outside of institutions, and many had trouble making a living.
>
> The financial meltdown of 2008 not only devastated the global economy, it
> exposed the lies propagated by those advocating globalization. Among these
> lies: that salaries of workers would rise, democracy would spread across
> the
> globe, the tech industry would replace manufacturing as a source of worker
> income, the middle class would flourish, and global communities would
> prosper. After 2008 it became clear that the "free market" is a scam, a
> zombie ideology by which workers and communities are ravaged by predatory
> capitalists and assets are funneled upward into the hands of the global 1
> percent. The endless wars, fought largely to enrich the arms industry and
> swell the power of the military, are futile and counterproductive to
> national interests. Deindustrialization and austerity programs have
> impoverished the working class and fatally damaged the economy.
>
> The establishment politicians in the two leading parties, each in service
> to
> corporate power and responsible for the assault on civil liberties and
> impoverishment of the country, are no longer able to use identity politics
> and the culture wars to whip up support. This led in the last presidential
> campaign to an insurgency by Bernie Sanders, which the Democratic Party
> crushed, and the election of Donald Trump.
>
> Barack Obama rode a wave of bipartisan resentment into office in 2008, then
> spent eight years betraying the public. Obama's assault on civil liberties,
> including his use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers, was
> worse than those carried out by George W. Bush. He accelerated the war on
> public education by privatizing schools, expanded the wars in the Middle
> East, including the use of militarized drone attacks, provided little
> meaningful environmental reform, ignored the plight of the working class,
> deported more undocumented people than any other president, imposed a
> corporate-sponsored health care program that was the brainchild of the
> right-wing Heritage Foundation, and prohibited the Justice Department from
> prosecuting the bankers and financial firms that carried out derivatives
> scams and inflated the housing and real estate market, a condition that led
> to the 2008 financial meltdown. He epitomized, like Bill Clinton, the
> bankruptcy of the Democratic Party. Clinton, outdoing Obama's later
> actions,
> gave us the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the dismantling of
> the welfare system, the deregulation of the financial services industry and
> the huge expansion of mass incarceration. Clinton also oversaw deregulation
> of the Federal Communications Commission, a change that allowed a handful
> of
> corporations to buy up the airwaves.
>
> The corporate state was in crisis at the end of the Obama presidency. It
> was
> widely hated. It became vulnerable to attacks by the critics it had pushed
> to the fringes. Most vulnerable was the Democratic Party establishment,
> which claims to defend the rights of working men and women and protect
> civil
> liberties. This is why the Democratic Party is so zealous in its efforts to
> discredit its critics as stooges for Moscow and to charge that Russian
> interference caused its election defeat.
>
> In January there was a report on Russia by the Office of the Director of
> National Intelligence. The report devoted seven of its 25 pages to RT
> America and its influence on the presidential election. It claimed "Russian
> media made increasingly favorable comments about President-elect Trump as
> the 2016 US general and primary election campaigns progressed while
> consistently offering negative coverage of Secretary [Hillary] Clinton."
> This might seem true if you did not watch my RT broadcasts, which
> relentlessly attacked Trump as well as Clinton, or watch Ed Schultz, who
> now
> has a program on RT after having been the host of an MSNBC commentary
> program. The report also attempted to present RT America as having a vast
> media footprint and influence it does not possess.
>
> "In an effort to highlight the alleged 'lack of democracy' in the United
> States, RT broadcast, hosted, and advertised third party candidate debates
> and ran reporting supportive of the political agenda of these candidates,"
> the report read, correctly summing up themes on my show. "The RT hosts
> asserted that the US two-party system does not represent the views of at
> least one-third of the population and is a 'sham.' "
>
> It went on:
>
>
> RT's reports often characterize the United States as a 'surveillance state'
> and allege widespread infringements of civil liberties, police brutality,
> and drone use.
>
> RT has also focused on criticism of the US economic system, US currency
> policy, alleged Wall Street greed, and the US national debt. Some of RT's
> hosts have compared the United States to Imperial Rome and have predicted
> that government corruption and "corporate greed" will lead to US financial
> collapse.
>
> Is the corporate state so obtuse it thinks the American public has not, on
> its own, reached these conclusions about the condition of the nation? Is
> this what it defines as "fake news"? But most important, isn't this the
> truth that the courtiers in the mainstream press and public broadcasting,
> dependent on their funding from sources such as the Koch brothers, refuse
> to
> present? And isn't it, in the end, the truth that frightens them the most?
> Abby Martin and Ben Norton ripped apart the mendacity of the report and the
> complicity of the corporate media in my "On Contact" show titled "Real
> purpose of intel report on Russian hacking with Abby Martin & Ben Norton."
>
> In November 2016, The Washington Post reported on a blacklist published by
> the shadowy and anonymous site PropOrNot. The blacklist was composed of 199
> sites PropOrNot alleged, with no evidence, "reliably echo Russian
> propaganda." More than half of those sites were far-right,
> conspiracy-driven
> ones. But about 20 of the sites were major left-wing outlets including
> AlterNet, Black Agenda Report, Democracy Now!, Naked Capitalism, Truthdig,
> Truthout, CounterPunch and the World Socialist Web Site. The blacklist and
> the spurious accusations that these sites disseminated "fake news" on
> behalf
> of Russia were given prominent play in the Post in a story headlined
> "Russian propaganda effort helped spread 'fake news' during the election,
> experts say." The reporter, Craig Timberg, wrote that the goal of the
> Russian propaganda effort, according to "independent researchers who have
> tracked the operation," was "punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping
> Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy." Last
> December, Truthdig columnist Bill Boyarsky wrote a good piece about
> PropOrNot, which to this day remains essentially a secret organization.
>
> The owner of The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, also the founder and CEO of
> Amazon, has a $600 million contract with the CIA. Google, likewise, is
> deeply embedded within the security and surveillance state and aligned with
> the ruling elites. Amazon recently purged over 1,000 negative reviews of
> Hillary Clinton's new book, "What Happened." The effect was that the book's
> Amazon rating jumped from 2 1/2 stars to five stars. Do corporations such
> as
> Google and Amazon carry out such censorship on behalf of the U.S.
> government? Or is this censorship their independent contribution to protect
> the corporate state?
>
> In the name of combating Russia-inspired "fake news," Google, Facebook,
> Twitter, The New York Times, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed News, Agence
> France-Presse and CNN in April imposed algorithms or filters, overseen by
> "evaluators," that hunt for key words such as "U.S. military," "inequality"
> and "socialism," along with personal names such as Julian Assange and Laura
> Poitras, the filmmaker. Ben Gomes, Google's vice president for search
> engineering, says Google has amassed some 10,000 "evaluators" to determine
> the "quality" and veracity of websites. Internet users doing searches on
> Google, since the algorithms were put in place, are diverted from sites
> such
> as Truthdig and directed to mainstream publications such as The New York
> Times. The news organizations and corporations that are imposing this
> censorship have strong links to the Democratic Party. They are cheerleaders
> for American imperial projects and global capitalism. Because they are
> struggling in the new media environment for profitability, they have an
> economic incentive to be part of the witch hunt.
>
> The World Socialist Web Site reported in July that its aggregate volume, or
> "impressions"—links displayed by Google in response to search requests—fell
> dramatically over a short period after the new algorithms were imposed. It
> also wrote that a number of sites "declared to be 'fake news' by the
> Washington Post's discredited [PropOrNot] blacklist … had their global
> ranking fall. The average decline of the global reach of all of these sites
> is 25 percent. …"
>
> Another article, "Google rigs searches to block access to World Socialist
> Web Site," by the same website that month said:
>
>
> During the month of May, Google searches including the word "war" produced
> 61,795 WSWS impressions. In July, WSWS impressions fell by approximately 90
> percent, to 6,613.
>
> Searches for the term "Korean war" produced 20,392 impressions in May. In
> July, searches using the same words produced zero WSWS impressions.
> Searches
> for "North Korea war" produced 4,626 impressions in May. In July, the
> result
> of the same search produced zero WSWS impressions. "India Pakistan war"
> produced 4,394 impressions in May. In July, the result, again, was zero.
> And
> "Nuclear war 2017" produced 2,319 impressions in May, and zero in July.
>
> To cite some other searches: "WikiLeaks," fell from 6,576 impressions to
> zero, "Julian Assange" fell from 3,701 impressions to zero, and "Laura
> Poitras" fell from 4,499 impressions to zero. A search for "Michael
> Hastings"—the reporter who died in 2013 under suspicious
> circumstances—produced 33,464 impressions in May, but only 5,227
> impressions
> in July.
>
> In addition to geopolitics, the WSWS regularly covers a broad range of
> social issues, many of which have seen precipitous drops in search results.
> Searches for "food stamps," "Ford layoffs," "Amazon warehouse," and
> "secretary of education" all went down from more than 5,000 impressions in
> May to zero impressions in July.
>
> The accusation that left-wing sites collude with Russia has made them
> theoretically subject, along with those who write for them, to the
> Espionage
> Act and the Foreign Agent Registration Act, which requires Americans who
> work on behalf of a foreign party to register as foreign agents.
>
> The latest salvo came last week. It is the most ominous. The Department of
> Justice called on RT America and its "associates"—which may mean people
> like
> me—to register under the Foreign Agent Registration Act. No doubt, the
> corporate state knows that most of us will not register as foreign agents,
> meaning we will be banished from the airwaves. This, I expect, is the
> intent. The government will not stop with RT. The FBI has been handed the
> authority to determine who is a "legitimate" journalist and who is not. It
> will use this authority to decimate the left.
>
> This is a war of ideas. The corporate state cannot compete honestly in this
> contest. It will do what all despotic regimes do—govern through wholesale
> surveillance, lies, blacklists, false accusations of treason, heavy-handed
> censorship and, eventually, violence.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
Re: [blind-democracy] An American Oligarch‘s Dirty Tale Of Corruption
It's long been my contention that the American Working Class would
have a clearer view of why the government behaves the way it does, if
we could agree, at least in a broad stroke, that this nation was an
Oligarchy from its inception, regardless of what we were taught in
school. The Oligarchy established a Republic, but remember, it served
a very narrow part of the total Colonial Population. Even as the
Constitution was ammended to include other people as First Class
Citizens, the Ruling Class...the Oligarchy, began to devise methods of
restricting the number of registered voters.
Carl Jarvis
Here's part of an article written back in 2014:
By
Cheryl K. Chumley
- The Washington Times - Monday, April 21, 2014
America is no longer a democracy — never mind the democratic republic
envisioned by Founding Fathers.
Rather, it has taken a turn down elitist lane and become a country led
by a small dominant class comprised of powerful members who exert
total control
over the general population — an oligarchy, said
a new study
jointly conducted by Princeton and Northwestern universities.
One finding in the study: The U.S. government now represents the rich
and powerful, not the average citizen, United Press International
reported.
In the study, "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest
Groups and Average Citizens," researchers compared 1,800 different
U.S. policies
that were put in place by politicians between 1981 and 2002 to the
type of policies preferred by the average and wealthy American, or
special interest
groups.
Researchers then concluded that U.S. policies are formed more by
special interest groups than by politicians properly representing the
will of the general
people, including the lower-income class.
"The central point that emerges from our research is that economic
elites and organized groups representing business interests have
substantial independent
impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups
and average citizens have little or no independent influence," the
study found.
The study also found: "When a majority of citizens disagrees with
economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose."
On 9/25/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> An American Oligarch's Dirty Tale Of Corruption
> Flickr/ Charles Hutchins
> F. William Engdahl, www.journal-neo.org
> September 21st, 2017
> Above Photo: Charles Hutchins/ Flickr
>
> Rarely does the world get a true look inside the corrupt world of Western
> oligarchs and the brazen manipulations they use to enhance their fortunes at
> the expense of the public good. The following comes from correspondence of
> the Hungarian-born billionaire, now naturalized American speculator, George
> Soros. The hacker group CyberBerkut has published online letters allegedly
> written by Soros that reveal him not only as puppet master of the US-backed
> Ukraine regime. They also reveal his machinations with the US Government and
> the officials of the European Union in a scheme where, if he succeeds, he
> could win billions in the plunder of Ukraine assets. All, of course, would
> be at the expense of Ukrainian citizens and of EU taxpayers.
>
> What the three hacked documents reveal is a degree of behind-the-scene
> manipulation of the most minute details of the Kiev regime by the New York
> billionaire.
>
> In the longest memo, dated March 15, 2015 and marked "Confidential" Soros
> outlines a detailed map of actions for the Ukraine regime. Titled, "A short
> and medium term comprehensive strategy for the new Ukraine," the memo from
> Soros calls for steps to "restore the fighting capacity of Ukraine without
> violating the Minsk agreement." To do the restoring, Soros blithely notes
> that "General Wesley Clark, Polish General Skrzypczak and a few specialists
> under the auspices of the Atlantic Council[emphasis added—f.w.e.] will
> advise President Poroshenko how to restore the fighting capacity of Ukraine
> without violating the Minsk agreement."
>
> Soros also calls for supplying lethal arms to Ukraine and secretly training
> Ukrainian army personnel in Romania to avoid direct NATO presence in
> Ukraine. The Atlantic Council is a leading Washington pro-NATO think tank.
>
> Notably, Wesley Clark is also a business associate of Soros in BNK Petroleum
> which does business in Poland.
>
> Clark, some might recall, was the mentally-unstable NATO General in charge
> of the 1999 bombing of Serbia who ordered NATO soldiers to fire on Russian
> soldiers guarding the Pristina International Airport. The Russians were
> there as a part of an agreed joint NATO–Russia peacekeeping operation
> supposed to police Kosovo. The British Commander, General Mike Jackson
> refused Clark, retorting, "I'm not going to start the Third World War for
> you." Now Clark apparently decided to come out of retirement for the chance
> to go at Russia directly.
>
> Naked asset grab
>
> In his March 2015 memo Soros further writes that Ukrainian President
> Poroshenko's "first priority must be to regain control of financial
> markets," which he assures Poroshenko that Soros would be ready to assist
> in: "I am ready to call Jack Lew of the US Treasury to sound him out about
> the swap agreement."
>
> He also calls on the EU to give Ukraine an annual aid sum of €11 billion via
> a special EU borrowing facility. Soros proposes in effect using the EU's
> "AAA" top credit rating to provide a risk insurance for investment into
> Ukraine.
>
> Whose risk would the EU insure?
>
> Soros details, "I am prepared to invest up to €1 billion in Ukrainian
> businesses. This is likely to attract the interest of the investment
> community. As stated above, Ukraine must become an attractive investment
> destination." Not to leave any doubt, Soros continues, "The investments will
> be for-profit but I will pledge to contribute the profits to my foundations.
> This should allay suspicions that I am advocating policies in search of
> personal gain. "
>
> For anyone familiar with the history of the Soros Open Society Foundations
> in Eastern Europe and around the world since the late 1980's, will know that
> his supposedly philanthropic "democracy-building" projects in Poland,
> Russia, or Ukraine in the 1990's allowed Soros the businessman to literally
> plunder the former communist countries using Harvard University's "shock
> therapy" messiah, and Soros associate, Jeffrey Sachs, to convince the
> post-Soviet governments to privatize and open to a "free market" at once,
> rather than gradually.
>
> The example of Soros in Liberia is instructive for understanding the
> seemingly seamless interplay between Soros the shrewd businessman and Soros
> the philanthropist. In West Africa George Soros backed a former Open Society
> employee of his, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, giving her
> international publicity and through his influence, even arranging a Nobel
> Peace Prize for her in 2011, insuring her election as president. Before her
> presidency she had been well-indoctrinated into the Western free market
> game, studying economics at Harvard and working for the US-controlled World
> Bank in Washington and the Rockefeller Citibank in Nairobi. Before becoming
> Liberia's President, she worked for Soros directly as chair of his Open
> Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA).
>
> Once in office, President Sirleaf opened the doors for Soros to take over
> major Liberian gold and base metals assets along with his partner, Nathaniel
> Rothschild. One of her first acts as President was to also invite the
> Pentagon's new Africa Command, AFRICOM, into Liberia whose purpose as a
> Liberian investigation revealed, was to "protect George Soros and Rothschild
> mining operations in West Africa rather than champion stability and human
> rights."
>
> Naftogaz the target
>
> The Soros memo makes clear he has his eyes on the Ukrainian state gas and
> energy monopoly, Naftogaz. He writes, "The centerpiece of economic reforms
> will be the reorganization of Naftogaz and the introduction of market
> pricing for all forms of energy, replacing hidden subsidies…"
>
> In an earlier letter Soros wrote in December 2014 to both President
> Poroshenko and Prime Minister Yatsenyuk, Soros openly called for his Shock
> Therapy: "I want to appeal to you to unite behind the reformers in your
> government and give your wholehearted support to a radical, 'big bang' type
> of approach. That is to say, administrative controls would be removed and
> the economy would move to market prices rapidly rather than
> gradually…Naftogaz needs to be reorganized with a big bang replacing the
> hidden subsidies…"
>
> Splitting Naftogaz into separate companies could allow Soros to take control
> of one of the new branches and essentially privatize its profits. He already
> suggested that he indirectly brought in US consulting company, McKinsey, to
> advise Naftogaz on the privatization "big bang."
>
> The Puppet-Master?
>
> The totality of what is revealed in the three hacked documents show that
> Soros is effectively the puppet-master pulling most of the strings in Kiev.
> Soros Foundation's Ukraine branch, International Renaissance Foundation
> (IRF) has been involved in Ukraine since 1989. His IRF doled out more than
> $100 million to Ukrainian NGOs two years before the fall of the Soviet
> Union, creating the preconditions for Ukraine's independence from Russia in
> 1991. Soros also admitted to financing the 2013-2014 Maidan Square protests
> that brought the current government into power.
>
> Soros' foundations were also deeply involved in the 2004 Orange Revolution
> that brought the corrupt but pro-NATO Viktor Yushchenko into power with his
> American wife who had been in the US State Department. In 2004 just weeks
> after Soros' International Renaissance Foundation had succeeded in getting
> Viktor Yushchenko as President of Ukraine, Michael McFaul wrote an OpEd for
> the Washington Post. McFaul, a specialist in organizing color revolutions,
> who later became US Ambassador to Russia, revealed:
>
> Did Americans meddle in the internal affairs of Ukraine? Yes. The American
> agents of influence would prefer different language to describe their
> activities — democratic assistance, democracy promotion, civil society
> support, etc. — but their work, however labeled, seeks to influence
> political change in Ukraine. The U.S. Agency for International Development,
> the National Endowment for Democracy and a few other foundations sponsored
> certain U.S. organizations, including Freedom House, the International
> Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, the Solidarity
> Center, the Eurasia Foundation, Internews and several others to provide
> small grants and technical assistance to Ukrainian civil society. The
> European Union, individual European countries and the Soros-funded
> International Renaissance Foundation did the same.
>
> Soros shapes 'New Ukraine'
>
> Today the CyberBerkut hacked papers show that Soros' IRF money is behind
> creation of a National Reform Council, a body organized by presidential
> decree from Poroshenko which allows the Ukrainian president to push bills
> through Ukraine's legislature. Soros writes, "The framework for bringing the
> various branches of government together has also emerged. The National
> Reform Council (NRC) brings together the presidential administration, the
> cabinet of ministers, the Rada and its committees and civil society. The
> International Renaissance Foundation which is the Ukrainian branch of the
> Soros Foundations was the sole financial supporter of the NRC until now…"
>
> Soros' NRC in effect is the vehicle to allow the President to override
> parliamentary debate to push through "reforms," with the declared first
> priority being privatization of Naftogaz and raising gas prices drastically
> to Ukrainian industry and households, something the bankrupt country can
> hardly afford.
>
> In his letter to Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk, Soros hints that he played a key
> role in selection of three key non-Ukrainian ministers—Natalia Jaresko, an
> American ex- State Department official as Finance Minister; Aivras
> Abromavicius of Lithuania as Economics Minister, and a health minister from
> Georgia. Soros in his December 2014 letter, referring to his proposal for a
> "big bank" privatization of Naftogaz and price rise, states, "You are
> fortunate to have appointed three 'new Ukrainian' ministers and several
> natives (sic) who are committed to this approach."
>
> Elsewhere Soros speaks about de facto creating the impression within the EU
> that the current government of Yatsenyuk is finally cleaning out the
> notorious corruption that has dominated every Kiev regime since 1991.
> Creating that temporary reform illusion, he remarks, will convince the EU to
> cough up the €11 billion annual investment insurance fund. His March 2015
> paper says that, "It is essential for the government to produce a visible
> demonstration (sic) during the next three months in order to change the
> widely prevailing image of Ukraine as an utterly corrupt country." That he
> states will open the EU to make the €11 billion insurance guarantee
> investment fund.
>
> While saying that it is important to show Ukraine as a country that is not
> corrupt, Soros reveals he has little concern when transparency and proper
> procedures block his agenda. Talking about his proposals to reform Ukraine's
> constitution to enable privatizations and other Soros-friendly moves, he
> complains, "The process has been slowed down by the insistence of the newly
> elected Rada on proper procedures and total transparency."
>
> Soros suggests that he intends to create this "visible demonstration"
> through his initiatives, such as using the Soros-funded National Reform
> Council, a body organized by presidential decree which allows the Ukrainian
> president to push bills through Ukraine's legislature.
>
> George Soros is also using his new European Council on Foreign Relations
> think-tank to lobby his Ukraine strategy, with his council members such as
> Alexander Graf Lambsdorff or Joschka Fischer or Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg,
> not to mention former ECB head, Jean-Claude Trichet no doubt laying a subtle
> role.
>
> George Soros, now 84, was born in Hungary as a Jew, George Sorosz. Soros
> once boasted in a TV interview that he posed during the war as a gentile
> with forged papers, assisting the Horthy government to seize property of
> other Hungarian Jews who were being shipped to the Nazi death camps. Soros
> told the TV moderator, "There was no sense that I shouldn't be there,
> because that was–well, actually, in a funny way, it's just like in
> markets–that if I weren't there–of course, I wasn't doing it, but somebody
> else would."
>
> This is the same morality apparently behind Soros' activities in Ukraine
> today. It seems again to matter not to him that the Ukrainian government he
> helped bring to power in February 2014 US coup d'etat is riddled with
> explicit anti-semites and self-proclaimed neo-Nazis from the Svoboda Party
> and Pravy Sektor. George Soros is clearly a devotee of
> "public-private-partnership." Only here the public gets fleeced to enrich
> private investors like Mr. Soros and friends. Cynically, Soros signs his
> Ukraine strategy memo, "George Soros–A self-appointed advocate of the new
> Ukraine, March 12, 2015."
> https://journal-neo.org/2015/06/12/an-american-oligarch-s-dirty-tale-of-corruption/
>
>
>
>
>
have a clearer view of why the government behaves the way it does, if
we could agree, at least in a broad stroke, that this nation was an
Oligarchy from its inception, regardless of what we were taught in
school. The Oligarchy established a Republic, but remember, it served
a very narrow part of the total Colonial Population. Even as the
Constitution was ammended to include other people as First Class
Citizens, the Ruling Class...the Oligarchy, began to devise methods of
restricting the number of registered voters.
Carl Jarvis
Here's part of an article written back in 2014:
By
Cheryl K. Chumley
- The Washington Times - Monday, April 21, 2014
America is no longer a democracy — never mind the democratic republic
envisioned by Founding Fathers.
Rather, it has taken a turn down elitist lane and become a country led
by a small dominant class comprised of powerful members who exert
total control
over the general population — an oligarchy, said
a new study
jointly conducted by Princeton and Northwestern universities.
One finding in the study: The U.S. government now represents the rich
and powerful, not the average citizen, United Press International
reported.
In the study, "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest
Groups and Average Citizens," researchers compared 1,800 different
U.S. policies
that were put in place by politicians between 1981 and 2002 to the
type of policies preferred by the average and wealthy American, or
special interest
groups.
Researchers then concluded that U.S. policies are formed more by
special interest groups than by politicians properly representing the
will of the general
people, including the lower-income class.
"The central point that emerges from our research is that economic
elites and organized groups representing business interests have
substantial independent
impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups
and average citizens have little or no independent influence," the
study found.
The study also found: "When a majority of citizens disagrees with
economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose."
On 9/25/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> An American Oligarch's Dirty Tale Of Corruption
> Flickr/ Charles Hutchins
> F. William Engdahl, www.journal-neo.org
> September 21st, 2017
> Above Photo: Charles Hutchins/ Flickr
>
> Rarely does the world get a true look inside the corrupt world of Western
> oligarchs and the brazen manipulations they use to enhance their fortunes at
> the expense of the public good. The following comes from correspondence of
> the Hungarian-born billionaire, now naturalized American speculator, George
> Soros. The hacker group CyberBerkut has published online letters allegedly
> written by Soros that reveal him not only as puppet master of the US-backed
> Ukraine regime. They also reveal his machinations with the US Government and
> the officials of the European Union in a scheme where, if he succeeds, he
> could win billions in the plunder of Ukraine assets. All, of course, would
> be at the expense of Ukrainian citizens and of EU taxpayers.
>
> What the three hacked documents reveal is a degree of behind-the-scene
> manipulation of the most minute details of the Kiev regime by the New York
> billionaire.
>
> In the longest memo, dated March 15, 2015 and marked "Confidential" Soros
> outlines a detailed map of actions for the Ukraine regime. Titled, "A short
> and medium term comprehensive strategy for the new Ukraine," the memo from
> Soros calls for steps to "restore the fighting capacity of Ukraine without
> violating the Minsk agreement." To do the restoring, Soros blithely notes
> that "General Wesley Clark, Polish General Skrzypczak and a few specialists
> under the auspices of the Atlantic Council[emphasis added—f.w.e.] will
> advise President Poroshenko how to restore the fighting capacity of Ukraine
> without violating the Minsk agreement."
>
> Soros also calls for supplying lethal arms to Ukraine and secretly training
> Ukrainian army personnel in Romania to avoid direct NATO presence in
> Ukraine. The Atlantic Council is a leading Washington pro-NATO think tank.
>
> Notably, Wesley Clark is also a business associate of Soros in BNK Petroleum
> which does business in Poland.
>
> Clark, some might recall, was the mentally-unstable NATO General in charge
> of the 1999 bombing of Serbia who ordered NATO soldiers to fire on Russian
> soldiers guarding the Pristina International Airport. The Russians were
> there as a part of an agreed joint NATO–Russia peacekeeping operation
> supposed to police Kosovo. The British Commander, General Mike Jackson
> refused Clark, retorting, "I'm not going to start the Third World War for
> you." Now Clark apparently decided to come out of retirement for the chance
> to go at Russia directly.
>
> Naked asset grab
>
> In his March 2015 memo Soros further writes that Ukrainian President
> Poroshenko's "first priority must be to regain control of financial
> markets," which he assures Poroshenko that Soros would be ready to assist
> in: "I am ready to call Jack Lew of the US Treasury to sound him out about
> the swap agreement."
>
> He also calls on the EU to give Ukraine an annual aid sum of €11 billion via
> a special EU borrowing facility. Soros proposes in effect using the EU's
> "AAA" top credit rating to provide a risk insurance for investment into
> Ukraine.
>
> Whose risk would the EU insure?
>
> Soros details, "I am prepared to invest up to €1 billion in Ukrainian
> businesses. This is likely to attract the interest of the investment
> community. As stated above, Ukraine must become an attractive investment
> destination." Not to leave any doubt, Soros continues, "The investments will
> be for-profit but I will pledge to contribute the profits to my foundations.
> This should allay suspicions that I am advocating policies in search of
> personal gain. "
>
> For anyone familiar with the history of the Soros Open Society Foundations
> in Eastern Europe and around the world since the late 1980's, will know that
> his supposedly philanthropic "democracy-building" projects in Poland,
> Russia, or Ukraine in the 1990's allowed Soros the businessman to literally
> plunder the former communist countries using Harvard University's "shock
> therapy" messiah, and Soros associate, Jeffrey Sachs, to convince the
> post-Soviet governments to privatize and open to a "free market" at once,
> rather than gradually.
>
> The example of Soros in Liberia is instructive for understanding the
> seemingly seamless interplay between Soros the shrewd businessman and Soros
> the philanthropist. In West Africa George Soros backed a former Open Society
> employee of his, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, giving her
> international publicity and through his influence, even arranging a Nobel
> Peace Prize for her in 2011, insuring her election as president. Before her
> presidency she had been well-indoctrinated into the Western free market
> game, studying economics at Harvard and working for the US-controlled World
> Bank in Washington and the Rockefeller Citibank in Nairobi. Before becoming
> Liberia's President, she worked for Soros directly as chair of his Open
> Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA).
>
> Once in office, President Sirleaf opened the doors for Soros to take over
> major Liberian gold and base metals assets along with his partner, Nathaniel
> Rothschild. One of her first acts as President was to also invite the
> Pentagon's new Africa Command, AFRICOM, into Liberia whose purpose as a
> Liberian investigation revealed, was to "protect George Soros and Rothschild
> mining operations in West Africa rather than champion stability and human
> rights."
>
> Naftogaz the target
>
> The Soros memo makes clear he has his eyes on the Ukrainian state gas and
> energy monopoly, Naftogaz. He writes, "The centerpiece of economic reforms
> will be the reorganization of Naftogaz and the introduction of market
> pricing for all forms of energy, replacing hidden subsidies…"
>
> In an earlier letter Soros wrote in December 2014 to both President
> Poroshenko and Prime Minister Yatsenyuk, Soros openly called for his Shock
> Therapy: "I want to appeal to you to unite behind the reformers in your
> government and give your wholehearted support to a radical, 'big bang' type
> of approach. That is to say, administrative controls would be removed and
> the economy would move to market prices rapidly rather than
> gradually…Naftogaz needs to be reorganized with a big bang replacing the
> hidden subsidies…"
>
> Splitting Naftogaz into separate companies could allow Soros to take control
> of one of the new branches and essentially privatize its profits. He already
> suggested that he indirectly brought in US consulting company, McKinsey, to
> advise Naftogaz on the privatization "big bang."
>
> The Puppet-Master?
>
> The totality of what is revealed in the three hacked documents show that
> Soros is effectively the puppet-master pulling most of the strings in Kiev.
> Soros Foundation's Ukraine branch, International Renaissance Foundation
> (IRF) has been involved in Ukraine since 1989. His IRF doled out more than
> $100 million to Ukrainian NGOs two years before the fall of the Soviet
> Union, creating the preconditions for Ukraine's independence from Russia in
> 1991. Soros also admitted to financing the 2013-2014 Maidan Square protests
> that brought the current government into power.
>
> Soros' foundations were also deeply involved in the 2004 Orange Revolution
> that brought the corrupt but pro-NATO Viktor Yushchenko into power with his
> American wife who had been in the US State Department. In 2004 just weeks
> after Soros' International Renaissance Foundation had succeeded in getting
> Viktor Yushchenko as President of Ukraine, Michael McFaul wrote an OpEd for
> the Washington Post. McFaul, a specialist in organizing color revolutions,
> who later became US Ambassador to Russia, revealed:
>
> Did Americans meddle in the internal affairs of Ukraine? Yes. The American
> agents of influence would prefer different language to describe their
> activities — democratic assistance, democracy promotion, civil society
> support, etc. — but their work, however labeled, seeks to influence
> political change in Ukraine. The U.S. Agency for International Development,
> the National Endowment for Democracy and a few other foundations sponsored
> certain U.S. organizations, including Freedom House, the International
> Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, the Solidarity
> Center, the Eurasia Foundation, Internews and several others to provide
> small grants and technical assistance to Ukrainian civil society. The
> European Union, individual European countries and the Soros-funded
> International Renaissance Foundation did the same.
>
> Soros shapes 'New Ukraine'
>
> Today the CyberBerkut hacked papers show that Soros' IRF money is behind
> creation of a National Reform Council, a body organized by presidential
> decree from Poroshenko which allows the Ukrainian president to push bills
> through Ukraine's legislature. Soros writes, "The framework for bringing the
> various branches of government together has also emerged. The National
> Reform Council (NRC) brings together the presidential administration, the
> cabinet of ministers, the Rada and its committees and civil society. The
> International Renaissance Foundation which is the Ukrainian branch of the
> Soros Foundations was the sole financial supporter of the NRC until now…"
>
> Soros' NRC in effect is the vehicle to allow the President to override
> parliamentary debate to push through "reforms," with the declared first
> priority being privatization of Naftogaz and raising gas prices drastically
> to Ukrainian industry and households, something the bankrupt country can
> hardly afford.
>
> In his letter to Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk, Soros hints that he played a key
> role in selection of three key non-Ukrainian ministers—Natalia Jaresko, an
> American ex- State Department official as Finance Minister; Aivras
> Abromavicius of Lithuania as Economics Minister, and a health minister from
> Georgia. Soros in his December 2014 letter, referring to his proposal for a
> "big bank" privatization of Naftogaz and price rise, states, "You are
> fortunate to have appointed three 'new Ukrainian' ministers and several
> natives (sic) who are committed to this approach."
>
> Elsewhere Soros speaks about de facto creating the impression within the EU
> that the current government of Yatsenyuk is finally cleaning out the
> notorious corruption that has dominated every Kiev regime since 1991.
> Creating that temporary reform illusion, he remarks, will convince the EU to
> cough up the €11 billion annual investment insurance fund. His March 2015
> paper says that, "It is essential for the government to produce a visible
> demonstration (sic) during the next three months in order to change the
> widely prevailing image of Ukraine as an utterly corrupt country." That he
> states will open the EU to make the €11 billion insurance guarantee
> investment fund.
>
> While saying that it is important to show Ukraine as a country that is not
> corrupt, Soros reveals he has little concern when transparency and proper
> procedures block his agenda. Talking about his proposals to reform Ukraine's
> constitution to enable privatizations and other Soros-friendly moves, he
> complains, "The process has been slowed down by the insistence of the newly
> elected Rada on proper procedures and total transparency."
>
> Soros suggests that he intends to create this "visible demonstration"
> through his initiatives, such as using the Soros-funded National Reform
> Council, a body organized by presidential decree which allows the Ukrainian
> president to push bills through Ukraine's legislature.
>
> George Soros is also using his new European Council on Foreign Relations
> think-tank to lobby his Ukraine strategy, with his council members such as
> Alexander Graf Lambsdorff or Joschka Fischer or Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg,
> not to mention former ECB head, Jean-Claude Trichet no doubt laying a subtle
> role.
>
> George Soros, now 84, was born in Hungary as a Jew, George Sorosz. Soros
> once boasted in a TV interview that he posed during the war as a gentile
> with forged papers, assisting the Horthy government to seize property of
> other Hungarian Jews who were being shipped to the Nazi death camps. Soros
> told the TV moderator, "There was no sense that I shouldn't be there,
> because that was–well, actually, in a funny way, it's just like in
> markets–that if I weren't there–of course, I wasn't doing it, but somebody
> else would."
>
> This is the same morality apparently behind Soros' activities in Ukraine
> today. It seems again to matter not to him that the Ukrainian government he
> helped bring to power in February 2014 US coup d'etat is riddled with
> explicit anti-semites and self-proclaimed neo-Nazis from the Svoboda Party
> and Pravy Sektor. George Soros is clearly a devotee of
> "public-private-partnership." Only here the public gets fleeced to enrich
> private investors like Mr. Soros and friends. Cynically, Soros signs his
> Ukraine strategy memo, "George Soros–A self-appointed advocate of the new
> Ukraine, March 12, 2015."
> https://journal-neo.org/2015/06/12/an-american-oligarch-s-dirty-tale-of-corruption/
>
>
>
>
>
Donald Trump, Poster Boy for American racism
Forwarded message ----------
From: Carl Jarvis <carjar82@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2017 08:23:10 -0700
Subject: Re: [blind-democracy] Re: American racism
To: Roger Loran Bailey <rogerbailey81@aol.com>
Cc: blind-democracy@freelists.org
One of my Directors, when I was an employee of the Commission for the
Blind, was a man who was hired by the Commission Board because he
belonged to none of the Blind Organizations, and claimed to represent
"All Blind People".(beware of such claims!)
The year was 1980, and the agency was in total chaos, being under
attack by the president of the NFB, as well as locally by the Seattle
PI paper and King TV. Agency employees were divided into small camps,
some never speaking to others. Client services were in danger of
being compromised. So this new "Leader" went to his office and began
writing memos as fast as his secretary could write...he was totally
blind and had no computer skills. After he sent a ton of memos out,
he sat back and waited for results. He had no "Vision", no "Big
Picture Plan", and so his memos sat on employee's desks. Since most
of them needed cooperative interaction, and since most workers were
"minding their own business" and not talking to anyone
else...including me, with my nose firmly in my classroom, the Agency
began to flounder. Commission meetings became screaming sessions.
Finally, after only one short year at the helm, the Director was
fired.
I tell this story because it reminds me that it is much easier to get
rid of an incompetent Director, than to fire an elected President.
Donald Trump should stand as a living reminder of what the White
Oligarchy pays big bucks to elect as a "leader". Trump has done
nothing to bring the nation together. Indeed, he is actually doing
the bidding of the Oligarchy, by dividing and turning one group upon
another. Now he's taken on the National Football Players. The man is
so blinded by his own privileged white skin that he claims that he is
not a racist!!!
He has no concept of Black and White football players joining together
to protest the divisive, racism being allowed to grow under the
careful nurturing of our President and His carefully selected Cabinet.
And just as scary is the fact that this "Leader" has no vision for a
World Peace. His vision is looking backward toward returning America
to her "former Greatness". Which, sad to say, never was.
Like my former Director, Trump sends out his little memos in the form
of Tweets, upsetting any efforts by others to bring folks together,
and then pointing to the disruption he has created, as proof that we
need to be spied upon and controlled by a military-like police force.
This has been the pattern of every nation that had its roots in some
form of popular rule.
When our "leaders" tell us that "We are under threat", just who are
they referring to? Working Class Americans have less and less to
lose, so it must be the Corporate Capitalists who stand to lose. And
we have the duty to protect their world-wide interest. For Free!
I say, let the Capitalists fight their own battles, while we go back
to our shops and fields.
Carl Jarvis
On 9/25/17, Roger Loran Bailey <rogerbailey81@aol.com> wrote:
>
> Considering all the hurricanes, health care reform in the congress and
> certain countries setting off nuclear bombs I'm not sure that a true
> leader would spend the weekend tweeting twenty tweets bashing football
> players.
> On 9/25/2017 9:03 PM, Carl Jarvis wrote:
>> To Bob Evans, And All.
>> You wrote: " The United States is no longer the place of equal
>> opportunities.
>> It used to be but, now it plainly isn't."
>> Actually Bob, The United States of America is not now, nor has it ever
>> been a Land of Opportunity for All.
>> From the day this nation was formed from the 13 colonies, it was an
>> Oligarchy. True, the 13 colonies fought England and gained their
>> freedom. And true, the 13 colonies formed States and joined together
>> to form the United States of America, but most of those who fought in
>> the ranks of the Colonial Army, were never citizens of that new
>> nation. Only White Men, 21 years of age and older, Landholders or Men
>> of great wealth were allowed to participate in the new government.
>> Women were denied participation. Negros had no voice and in fact,
>> they were counted as only three fifths of a person, Native
>> Americans(Indians) could not participate in the new government, nor
>> could Mexican Americans and Chinese Americans. In short, most people
>> living in the Land that became the United States of America, had no
>> voice in the government that ruled their lives.
>> Although many of those mentioned, came to secure the right to vote and
>> to hold office, and to own land in their own name, the original
>> Oligarchy began to set in place road blocks to prevent many Americans
>> the rights afforded the original Citizens.
>> Today's struggle, although certainly a struggle over racial
>> discrimination, is really a struggle between those who proclaim that
>> all citizens have a right, and a duty to vote in the elections held in
>> their Land, and those who would turn back the hands of time to a time
>> when only the Elite White Men handled the nation's affairs.
>> Of course some of us also believe that even if we all did have the
>> right to vote, the Two Party System in America is so corrupt that it
>> must be replaced. But first things first. And that is to fight for
>> the right for all Americans to vote.
>> And so far as Donald Trump being a Leader, that is impossible. Donald
>> Trump is a shallow minded fool. He grew up scamming people, showing
>> disdain and contempt for those who looked to him for employment.
>> True Leaders watch out over all their people. They are leaders
>> because they are visionaries. Donald Trump is a showman, believing,
>> as did P. T. Barnum, that there is a sucker born every minute. That
>> is what separates a Leader from a Huckster.
>>
>> Carl Jarvis
>>
>> On 9/25/17, Carl Jarvis <carjar82@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On 9/25/17, Bob <ebob824@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Racism is the prejudice that members of one race are intrinsically
>>>> superior
>>>>
>>>> to members of other races.
>>>>
>>>> white supremacists along with Donald Trump made their nation racially
>>>> nonreversible.
>>>> As he ignominiously disparaged soccer players, what a terribly
>>>> petulant
>>>> and infantile character.
>>>>
>>>> Their pride is wholly spurned.
>>>>
>>>> Their America first agenda brought them fractionation, tumultuousness,
>>>> racial disparity, detestable rhetoric and interminably factional
>>>> conflict.
>>>>
>>>> I urge my fellow Muslims to utterly ostracise American enterprises.
>>>>
>>>> I keep my sentiment stiff, these people are worthy of being relegated.
>>>> Their counterfeit mottoes of democracy are no longer believed.
>>>>
>>>> I urge immigration applicants from our Muslim world to seek settlement
>>>> in
>>>> Canada.
>>>>
>>>> At least, therein, they do not advocate for expatriating licit
>>>> occupants.
>>>>
>>>> I myself have the desire to submit an immigration form to Canada.
>>>>
>>>> I just await until I match their requirements.
>>>>
>>>> I do not exaggerate, Americanism certainly became a major threat to
>>>> cultural
>>>>
>>>> diversity.
>>>>
>>>> In Britain, they honour royalty and succession.
>>>>
>>>> Nevertheless, they do not embrace xenophobic temperament, even with the
>>>> rise
>>>>
>>>> of controversial Brexit talks.
>>>>
>>>> I talk to people there and they never denigrated outlanders.
>>>>
>>>> So, what is the trouble in the States then?
>>>>
>>>> Basically, it is racism.
>>>>
>>>> They base their primal tenets on racial discrimination.
>>>>
>>>> Despite nullifying this statement, they explicitly are convicted of
>>>> doing
>>>> so.
>>>>
>>>> The United States is no longer the place of equal
>>>> opportunities.
>>>>
>>>> It used to be but, now it plainly isn't.
>>>>
>>>> Bob
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> ---
>>>> This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
>>>> https://www.avast.com/antivirus
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>
>
From: Carl Jarvis <carjar82@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2017 08:23:10 -0700
Subject: Re: [blind-democracy] Re: American racism
To: Roger Loran Bailey <rogerbailey81@aol.com>
Cc: blind-democracy@freelists.org
One of my Directors, when I was an employee of the Commission for the
Blind, was a man who was hired by the Commission Board because he
belonged to none of the Blind Organizations, and claimed to represent
"All Blind People".(beware of such claims!)
The year was 1980, and the agency was in total chaos, being under
attack by the president of the NFB, as well as locally by the Seattle
PI paper and King TV. Agency employees were divided into small camps,
some never speaking to others. Client services were in danger of
being compromised. So this new "Leader" went to his office and began
writing memos as fast as his secretary could write...he was totally
blind and had no computer skills. After he sent a ton of memos out,
he sat back and waited for results. He had no "Vision", no "Big
Picture Plan", and so his memos sat on employee's desks. Since most
of them needed cooperative interaction, and since most workers were
"minding their own business" and not talking to anyone
else...including me, with my nose firmly in my classroom, the Agency
began to flounder. Commission meetings became screaming sessions.
Finally, after only one short year at the helm, the Director was
fired.
I tell this story because it reminds me that it is much easier to get
rid of an incompetent Director, than to fire an elected President.
Donald Trump should stand as a living reminder of what the White
Oligarchy pays big bucks to elect as a "leader". Trump has done
nothing to bring the nation together. Indeed, he is actually doing
the bidding of the Oligarchy, by dividing and turning one group upon
another. Now he's taken on the National Football Players. The man is
so blinded by his own privileged white skin that he claims that he is
not a racist!!!
He has no concept of Black and White football players joining together
to protest the divisive, racism being allowed to grow under the
careful nurturing of our President and His carefully selected Cabinet.
And just as scary is the fact that this "Leader" has no vision for a
World Peace. His vision is looking backward toward returning America
to her "former Greatness". Which, sad to say, never was.
Like my former Director, Trump sends out his little memos in the form
of Tweets, upsetting any efforts by others to bring folks together,
and then pointing to the disruption he has created, as proof that we
need to be spied upon and controlled by a military-like police force.
This has been the pattern of every nation that had its roots in some
form of popular rule.
When our "leaders" tell us that "We are under threat", just who are
they referring to? Working Class Americans have less and less to
lose, so it must be the Corporate Capitalists who stand to lose. And
we have the duty to protect their world-wide interest. For Free!
I say, let the Capitalists fight their own battles, while we go back
to our shops and fields.
Carl Jarvis
On 9/25/17, Roger Loran Bailey <rogerbailey81@aol.com> wrote:
>
> Considering all the hurricanes, health care reform in the congress and
> certain countries setting off nuclear bombs I'm not sure that a true
> leader would spend the weekend tweeting twenty tweets bashing football
> players.
> On 9/25/2017 9:03 PM, Carl Jarvis wrote:
>> To Bob Evans, And All.
>> You wrote: " The United States is no longer the place of equal
>> opportunities.
>> It used to be but, now it plainly isn't."
>> Actually Bob, The United States of America is not now, nor has it ever
>> been a Land of Opportunity for All.
>> From the day this nation was formed from the 13 colonies, it was an
>> Oligarchy. True, the 13 colonies fought England and gained their
>> freedom. And true, the 13 colonies formed States and joined together
>> to form the United States of America, but most of those who fought in
>> the ranks of the Colonial Army, were never citizens of that new
>> nation. Only White Men, 21 years of age and older, Landholders or Men
>> of great wealth were allowed to participate in the new government.
>> Women were denied participation. Negros had no voice and in fact,
>> they were counted as only three fifths of a person, Native
>> Americans(Indians) could not participate in the new government, nor
>> could Mexican Americans and Chinese Americans. In short, most people
>> living in the Land that became the United States of America, had no
>> voice in the government that ruled their lives.
>> Although many of those mentioned, came to secure the right to vote and
>> to hold office, and to own land in their own name, the original
>> Oligarchy began to set in place road blocks to prevent many Americans
>> the rights afforded the original Citizens.
>> Today's struggle, although certainly a struggle over racial
>> discrimination, is really a struggle between those who proclaim that
>> all citizens have a right, and a duty to vote in the elections held in
>> their Land, and those who would turn back the hands of time to a time
>> when only the Elite White Men handled the nation's affairs.
>> Of course some of us also believe that even if we all did have the
>> right to vote, the Two Party System in America is so corrupt that it
>> must be replaced. But first things first. And that is to fight for
>> the right for all Americans to vote.
>> And so far as Donald Trump being a Leader, that is impossible. Donald
>> Trump is a shallow minded fool. He grew up scamming people, showing
>> disdain and contempt for those who looked to him for employment.
>> True Leaders watch out over all their people. They are leaders
>> because they are visionaries. Donald Trump is a showman, believing,
>> as did P. T. Barnum, that there is a sucker born every minute. That
>> is what separates a Leader from a Huckster.
>>
>> Carl Jarvis
>>
>> On 9/25/17, Carl Jarvis <carjar82@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On 9/25/17, Bob <ebob824@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Racism is the prejudice that members of one race are intrinsically
>>>> superior
>>>>
>>>> to members of other races.
>>>>
>>>> white supremacists along with Donald Trump made their nation racially
>>>> nonreversible.
>>>> As he ignominiously disparaged soccer players, what a terribly
>>>> petulant
>>>> and infantile character.
>>>>
>>>> Their pride is wholly spurned.
>>>>
>>>> Their America first agenda brought them fractionation, tumultuousness,
>>>> racial disparity, detestable rhetoric and interminably factional
>>>> conflict.
>>>>
>>>> I urge my fellow Muslims to utterly ostracise American enterprises.
>>>>
>>>> I keep my sentiment stiff, these people are worthy of being relegated.
>>>> Their counterfeit mottoes of democracy are no longer believed.
>>>>
>>>> I urge immigration applicants from our Muslim world to seek settlement
>>>> in
>>>> Canada.
>>>>
>>>> At least, therein, they do not advocate for expatriating licit
>>>> occupants.
>>>>
>>>> I myself have the desire to submit an immigration form to Canada.
>>>>
>>>> I just await until I match their requirements.
>>>>
>>>> I do not exaggerate, Americanism certainly became a major threat to
>>>> cultural
>>>>
>>>> diversity.
>>>>
>>>> In Britain, they honour royalty and succession.
>>>>
>>>> Nevertheless, they do not embrace xenophobic temperament, even with the
>>>> rise
>>>>
>>>> of controversial Brexit talks.
>>>>
>>>> I talk to people there and they never denigrated outlanders.
>>>>
>>>> So, what is the trouble in the States then?
>>>>
>>>> Basically, it is racism.
>>>>
>>>> They base their primal tenets on racial discrimination.
>>>>
>>>> Despite nullifying this statement, they explicitly are convicted of
>>>> doing
>>>> so.
>>>>
>>>> The United States is no longer the place of equal
>>>> opportunities.
>>>>
>>>> It used to be but, now it plainly isn't.
>>>>
>>>> Bob
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> ---
>>>> This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
>>>> https://www.avast.com/antivirus
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>
>
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