The Revenge of the Lower Classes and the Rise of American Fascism by Chris Hedges

College-educated elites, on behalf of corporations, carried out the savage neoliberal assault on the working poor. Now they are being made to pay. Their duplicity—embodied in politicians such as Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama—succeeded for decades. These elites, many from East Coast Ivy League schools, spoke the language of values—civility, inclusivity, a condemnation of overt racism and bigotry, a concern for the middle class—while thrusting a knife into the back of the underclass for their corporate masters. This game has ended.

There are tens of millions of Americans, especially lower-class whites, rightfully enraged at what has been done to them, their families and their communities. They have risen up to reject the neoliberal policies and political correctness imposed on them by college-educated elites from both political parties: Lower-class whites are embracing an American fascism.

These Americans want a kind of freedom—a freedom to hate. They want the freedom to use words like “nigger,” “kike,” “spic,” “chink,” “raghead” and “fag.” They want the freedom to idealize violence and the gun culture. They want the freedom to have enemies, to physically assault Muslims, undocumented workers, African-Americans, homosexuals and anyone who dares criticize their cryptofascism. They want the freedom to celebrate historical movements and figures that the college-educated elites condemn, including the Ku Klux Klan and the Confederacy. They want the freedom to ridicule and dismiss intellectuals, ideas, science and culture. They want the freedom to silence those who have been telling them how to behave. And they want the freedom to revel in hypermasculinity, racism, sexism and white patriarchy. These are the core sentiments of fascism. These sentiments are engendered by the collapse of the liberal state.

The Democrats are playing a very dangerous game by anointing Hillary Clinton as their presidential candidate. She epitomizes the double-dealing of the college-educated elites, those who speak the feel-your-pain language of ordinary men and women, who hold up the bible of political correctness, while selling out the poor and the working class to corporate power.

The Republicans, energized by America’s reality-star version of Il Duce, Donald Trump, have been pulling in voters, especially new voters, while the Democrats are well below the voter turnouts for 2008. In the voting Tuesday, 5.6 million votes were cast for the Democrats while 8.3 million went to the Republicans. Those numbers were virtually reversed in 2008—8.2 million for the Democrats and about 5 million for the Republicans.

Richard Rorty in his last book, “Achieving Our Country,” written in 1998, presciently saw where our postindustrial nation was headed.

Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments. Edward Luttwak, for example, has suggested that fascism may be the American future. The point of his book The Endangered American Dream is that members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here may then be played out. For once a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic.

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words “nigger” and “kike” will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

Fascist movements build their base not from the politically active but the politically inactive, the “losers” who feel, often correctly, they have no voice or role to play in the political establishment. The sociologist Émile Durkheim warned that the disenfranchisement of a class of people from the structures of society produced a state of “anomie”—a “condition in which society provides little moral guidance to individuals.” Those trapped in this “anomie,” he wrote, are easy prey to propaganda and emotionally driven mass movements. Hannah Arendt, echoing Durkheim, noted that “the chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships.”

In fascism the politically disempowered and disengaged, ignored and reviled by the establishment, discover a voice and a sense of empowerment.

As Arendt noted, the fascist and communist movements in Europe in the 1930s “… recruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention. The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people who had never before appeared on the political scene. This permitted the introduction of entirely new methods into political propaganda, and indifference to the arguments of political opponents; these movements not only placed themselves outside and against the party system as a whole, they found a membership that had never been reached, never been ‘spoiled’ by the party system. Therefore they did not need to refute opposing arguments and consistently preferred methods which ended in death rather than persuasion, which spelled terror rather than conviction. They presented disagreements as invariably originating in deep natural, social, or psychological sources beyond the control of the individual and therefore beyond the control of reason. This would have been a shortcoming only if they had sincerely entered into competition with either parties; it was not if they were sure of dealing with people who had reason to be equally hostile to all parties.”

Fascism is aided and advanced by the apathy of those who are tired of being conned and lied to by a bankrupt liberal establishment, whose only reason to vote for a politician or support a political party is to elect the least worst. This, for many voters, is the best Clinton can offer.

Fascism expresses itself in familiar and comforting national and religious symbols, which is why it comes in various varieties and forms. Italian fascism, which looked back to the glory of the Roman Empire, for example, never shared the Nazis’ love of Teutonic and Nordic myths. American fascism too will reach back to traditional patriotic symbols, narratives and beliefs.

Robert Paxton wrote in “The Anatomy of Fascism”:

The language and symbols of an authentic American fascism would, of course, have little to do with the original European models. They would have to be as familiar and reassuring to loyal Americans as the language and symbols of the original fascisms were familiar and reassuring to many Italians and Germans, as [George] Orwell suggested. Hitler and Mussolini, after all, had not tried to seem exotic to their fellow citizens. No swastikas in an American fascism, but Stars and Stripes (or Stars and Bars) and Christian crosses. No fascist salute, but mass recitations of the pledge of allegiance. These symbols contain no whiff of fascism in themselves, of course, but an American fascism would transform them into obligatory litmus tests for detecting the internal enemy.

Fascism is about an inspired and seemingly strong leader who promises moral renewal, new glory and revenge. It is about the replacement of rational debate with sensual experience. This is why the lies, half-truths and fabrications by Trump have no impact on his followers. Fascists transform politics, as philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin pointed out, into aesthetics. And the ultimate aesthetic for the fascist, Benjamin said, is war.

Paxton singles out the amorphous ideology characteristic of all fascist movements.

Fascism rested not upon the truth of its doctrine but upon the leader’s mystical union with the historic destiny of his people, a notion related to romanticist ideas of national historic flowering and of individual artistic or spiritual genius, though fascism otherwise denied romanticism’s exaltation of unfettered personal creativity. The fascist leader wanted to bring his people into a higher realm of politics that they would experience sensually: the warmth of belonging to a race now fully aware of its identity, historic destiny, and power; the excitement of participating in a wave of shared feelings, and of sacrificing one’s petty concerns for the group’s good; and the thrill of domination.

There is only one way left to blunt the yearning for fascism coalescing around Trump. It is to build, as fast as possible, movements or parties that declare war on corporate power, engage in sustained acts of civil disobedience and seek to reintegrate the disenfranchised—the “losers”—back into the economy and political life of the country. This movement will never come out of the Democratic Party. If Clinton prevails in the general election Trump may disappear, but the fascist sentiments will expand. Another Trump, perhaps more vile, will be vomited up from the bowels of the decayed political system. We are fighting for our political life. Tremendous damage has been done by corporate power and the college-educated elites to our capitalist democracy. The longer the elites, who oversaw this disemboweling of the country on behalf of corporations—who believe, as does CBS Chief Executive Officer Leslie Moonves, that however bad Trump would be for America he would at least be good for corporate profit—remain in charge, the worse it is going to get.

The Elites and the Rise of Donald Trump by Dean Baker

It's not that Trump himself is a fascist, but he's a sign that we are more vulnerable to it than we ever imagined

he rise of Donald Trump as a presidential contender has been accompanied with dire warnings of a coming fascist tide. In both his style and substance—belligerence toward opponents, policy proposals aimed at specific religious and ethnic groups, constant appeals to making the nation great again—Trump makes it easy for pundits to draw analogies to historical fascists.

A Trump presidency would undoubtedly mean difficulty for certain minorities, Muslims and Mexicans being obvious examples, but few observers honestly believe that it would bring about a fascist nightmare, with a complete loss of civil liberties, for most of the general public. Experts point out that the conditions for the rise of real fascism—most notably a devastating economic collapse and political upheaval—are absent in America today, making warnings of a lurch to fascism somewhat exaggerated.

That said, Trump is a new phenomenon in American politics, one that arguably creeps closer to the fringes of fascism than anything preceding it. What should concern Americans is not the possibility that Trump is an American Hitler or Mussolini, but that he is a continuation of a rightward trajectory that the country has been following for decades. His election would be strong evidence that America is vulnerable to demagogic and fascistic tendencies, and that given the right conditions—a catastrophic economic breakdown, for example, perhaps combined with a military humiliation at the hands of China or Russia—a real fascist turn would be conceivable.

This raises the question of what keeps American society on this precarious trajectory, making it susceptible to fascist appeals. There have been numerous causal factors at work in setting this dangerous course, but for those who wish to defuse a potential fascist time bomb there is one element that stands out as most significant: America’s embrace and glorification of militarism.

The United States is by far the most powerful military force the world has ever seen, with land, air and sea forces extending around the globe. At about $600 billion, the nation’s military budget is almost 40 percent of the entire globe’s military spending, an outrageous amount that, even more stunningly, is rarely questioned by the public, the media, or any politician on either side of the aisle. This militarism permeates the culture in countless ways and ultimately leaves the nation at risk of a slide toward fascism, should the right conditions arise.

Fascism needs militarism, not just for its brute force (though that’s part of it) but for its emphasis on sacrificing individualism for the sake of the state. It’s hard to imagine the Nazi rise in Germany, for example, without that country’s deep-rooted martial tradition, particularly Prussian militarism, as a foundational element. Even in Italy, which had no similar tradition of militarism, Mussolini’s power was secured by force and accompanied by militaristic policies and actions that were uncharacteristic of Italy historically.

By its nature, militarism encourages other tendencies that create a fertile environment for fascism. Militarism and nationalism invigorate one another, for example, so it’s no surprise that American culture incessantly affirms notions of patriotism and national greatness. These themes are reflected throughout the culture, in advertising, sporting events, and virtually any public function, where patriotic references and the associated military pageantry are rarely missing. Such actions are usually assumed to be benign—what could be wrong with love of country, right?—but they invariably solidify the importance of militarism as a cultural value.

Even more insidious is the way that nationalism is instilled into young psyches via the daily school ritual of pledging allegiance. The fact that Americans take the pledge exercise for granted is only proof of the effectiveness of the psychological conditioning underlying it, for no other developed country expects daily pledges of national loyalty from its youth. Again, Americans tend to see it as a harmless expression of values—liberty and justice for all—when in reality such persistent patriotic exercises are encouraging an obedient, nationalistic population.

Magnifying the problem is the fact that America defines patriotism by using theistic elements, creating a sense that the nation is doing God’s work. Thus, children pledge that we are “one nation under God,” and the national motto is now “In God We Trust.” These divine patriotic references, both adopted in the early years of the Cold War, would please anyone seeking to create conditions ripe for fascism. The best defense against fascism is an intelligent, educated, and critically thinking populace that is engaged in participatory democracy. This is not what we get when we have a hyper-patriotic nation that believes God is on its side.

In considering how American militarism pushes the nation in a dangerously fascistic direction, we need not debate whether the country’s militarism serves benevolent or malevolent ends. It is the militarism itself, regardless of the country’s historical righteousness or current good intentions, that provides a foundation for the eventual support of fascism. From there, all that is needed are the right conditions—severe economic strife, ethnic groups to vilify, perceived enemies to fear, and political chaos—and a perfect fascist storm could arise. The final entrance of a demagogic character, whether Trump or someone else, is an incidental detail.

As such, we shouldn’t be swayed when the Pentagon goes to great lengths to portray our military as synonymous with all that is good. It’s rare for a television news cycle to pass, for example, without a story of a returning soldier surprising his or her child by showing up unexpectedly at school or at a sports event. The television cameras are rolling as the parent, usually in military fatigues, embraces the surprised child in a joyous reunion, a carefully choreographed moment brought to us by Defense Department publicity experts who realized long ago the propaganda value of such heartwarming moments.

As this suggests, the corporate media, like the corporate sector in general, are complicit in the sale of militarism to the American people. Some corporations glorify the military because they directly benefit from the country’s outlandish military spending, whereas others do so simply because expressions of patriotism are good for business. Giving veterans and military personnel special discounts, or perhaps letting them board airliners first, are gestures that cost little but portray companies as good corporate citizens. However, as I pointed out in my book Fighting Back the Right, corporations have no national loyalty and consistently put their own interests above any nation’s, as their executives readily admit, but they will always play the patriotism card when it is to their advantage.

With military might perceived as innately American and thus exalted within the culture, we are quick to see war as a solution rather than a problem, as was the case in 2003 when the nation rushed to a senseless and indefensible war in Iraq, and as we see now with Barack Obama becoming the first president ever to be at war for two complete terms in office. Militarism has made the United States a nation of permanent war.

We have gone in this direction because there are many powerful interests that desire it. That enormous military budget is a corporate trough, funneling billions of dollars to the institutions that really own and control the country. These military contractors—Lockheed, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and countless others—don’t necessarily want fascism, but they want militarism and they do all they can to ensure that it continues. Even the Pentagon’s enormous budget isn’t enough for them, as they also profit greatly from America’s massive foreign military aid, much of which is appropriated outside of the Defense Department budget, that makes countries around the world their customers.

With the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, one might have thought that the United States would embark on an agenda that emphasized butter over guns, but that’s not what happened. Instead, we expanded NATO up to the Russian doorstep and did little to tone down our culture of militarism. If there was any hope that we might eventually demilitarize somewhat, the events of September 11 left no doubt that fighting enemies would be a defining characteristic of American society for many years to come.

Knowing all this, the accurate view of Trump is not that he is fascism incarnate, but that he is the latest step on a troubling rightward path that America has been following for decades. That path has been cut with values—nationalism, acceptance of authority, anti-intellectualism, chauvinism, conformity—that are encouraged by a culture that glorifies militarism. If you’re worried about a fascist turn in America—and you should be—look beyond Trump to the expansive and unquestioned militarism that nurtures fascistic tendencies.

Dean Baker is a macroeconomist and codirector of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. He previously worked as a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute and an assistant professor at Bucknell University.

The Historical Roots of Contemporary Violence Against Pregnant Black Women byTasasha Henderson

Brenda Hardaway was five months pregnant when police were called to her home in Rochester, New York, because of a family dispute. While intervening in the arrest of her 16-year-old brother, Hardaway was pinned facedown on the hood of a car by police officer Lucas Krull. He also punched her on the back of the head and tossed her to the ground. Forty-five seconds of Krull's attack of Hardaway was caught on video, where she is shown telling the officers she is pregnant.

A year later, in 2014, Hardaway pleaded guilty to second-degree assault for injuring Krull during his attack on her, and was sentenced to six months in jail, and five years of probation. She had already spent two and a half months in jail after her arrest; the remainder of her sentence was two additional months. According to Supreme Court Justice Francis Affronti, Hardaway showed a "total and complete disrespect for authority." Krull, of course, showed complete and total disrespect for this Black woman's life, and the life of her child, as documented by the Democrat & Chronicle. No action on Hardaway's part justified the atrocious level of violence she experienced at the hands of police.

Pregnancy is often thought of as a special, sensitive and sacred time. In general, our society treats pregnant people with extra care because of the impending new life they are bringing into the world. However, there are many who are routinely denied this care and compassion, including Black, Brown and Indigenous people, undocumented immigrants, incarcerated people, non-English speakers, people with disabilities and others.

A closer look at the long history of violence faced specifically by Black pregnant women reveals one piece of this broader picture.

Brenda Hardaway is not the only pregnant Black woman who has been a victim of police violence. Charlena Michelle Cooks was eight months pregnant when she dropped her second grader off at school and became involved in a dispute with another parent, a white woman. This woman called the police, and after arriving, a police officer began talking to Cooks, requesting that she identify herself. She gave the officer her middle name, Michelle, but the encounter quickly escalated as the police officer and another officer grabbed Cooks, pinning her against a chain-link fence, and she landed on her stomach.

This attack was also captured on video, in which she is shown screaming, "I'm pregnant." Cooks was charged with resisting arrest, but the charge was dropped. Of course, the city of Barstow, California, defended the officers' use of force against her.

Police brutality is just one of many forms of state violence that pregnant Black women have experienced throughout their history in the United States -- from antebellum slavery, through Jim Crow, and the continuing era of mass incarceration and criminalization.

Slavery and Jim Crow

Black women's motherhood has never been respected by the forces of power. During chattel slavery, pregnant Black women worked in the fields on plantations up until their labor began. Afterward, they were seldom given a chance to rest, heal and bond with their babies. Soon after birth, women were required to go back to the field, with their baby strapped on their backs or lying nearby, if they hadn't been sold right out of their arms.

Enslaved women and their newborns were often traumatically separated at the will of the plantation owner. Pregnancy also did not exempt enslaved women from the physical violence of overseers and plantation owners. In Dorothy Roberts' book Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty, she explains a method of whipping pregnant slaves: "Slaveholders forced women to lie face down in a depression in the ground while they were whipped."

Mary Turner, whose story was displayed in the "Blood at the Root: Unearthing Stories of State Violence Against Black Girls and Women" exhibit in Chicago, was eight months pregnant when she was lynched in 1918 for daring to speak out against the injustice of the extrajudicial killing of her husband. A lynch mob hung Turner from a tree, doused her in gasoline and set her on fire. Not content with their torture, the mob cut open Turner's abdomen, forced her unborn baby out and stomped it to death.

As the 20th century continued, violent control of Black women's reproduction took new forms. Now, instead of forcing enslaved Black women to reproduce in order to increase slave owners' wealth, the state decided that Black women, and other women deemed "unfit" (often including Indigenous women, and women who were disabled or poor), should not sully the human gene pool by having children. Enter, the Mississippi appendectomy, the forced sterilization of over 700,000 African-American women in Mississippi and across the South during the 1970s and 1980s. The name refers to the fact that doctors often told women that they were getting their appendix taken out, but in fact, they had been sterilized.

Forced sterilization of African-American women, in addition to forced sterilization of Indigenous women, immigrants, poor people and people with disabilities, was a part of the eugenics movement from the early 20th century through the 1970s and 1980s. Beginning with Indiana's 1907 forced sterilization law, advocates of eugenics believed that certain types of people should not reproduce because they were defective and negatively impacted the human race. In North Carolina, in particular, 40 percent of the 7,600 people forcibly sterilized were women of color, and it wasn't until 2014 that the North Carolina Legislature budgeted $10 million to provide some restitution for the surviving victims.

Beginning in the 1970s, we see the intersection of eugenics and punitive welfare policies. After African-American women fought to receive maternity-related welfare benefits (which were initially mostly made available to white women), state eugenics boards began targeting African-American women on welfare for forced sterilizations. These women were told that in order to continue receiving assistance, they had to get sterilized. This continued into the 1980s and even the 1990s, when many states considered legislation that would make taking Norplant, a long-acting birth control, a requirement in order to receive welfare benefits.

Punitive Welfare Reform

In 1996, President Bill Clinton passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, commonly referred to as welfare reform. Based on racist stereotypes of unfit Black mothers, welfare reform replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which provided guaranteed cash benefits to poor mothers, with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which provided time-limited assistance that came with various restrictions, including work requirements and family caps. It was believed among many people that poor mothers were having children in order to receive more welfare benefits, and as Jamelle Bouie wrote in Slate, "caps would arrest the spiral of moral decline and pathology in poor black communities, and end the crime and poverty that presumably flows from black single motherhood."

Family caps regulate the reproduction of poor mothers by denying them additional benefits if they have a child while receiving TANF, thereby punishing poor mothers for daring to have more children by denying them assistance they need to adequately take care of their families. Designed to discourage poor mothers from having more children (emphasizing "personal responsibility"), family caps plunged families deeper into poverty.

Incarceration of Black Mothers

One of the most insidious forms of state violence against pregnant Black women is incarceration. In 2010, Black women were incarcerated at almost three times the rate of white women. One in 25 women in state prisons and one in 33 in federal prisons are pregnant at the time of incarceration. A third of women are incarcerated for drug offenses. Some women are even incarcerated for drug use while pregnant, as documented by The Sentencing Project, with the majority of women incarcerated for this offense being women of color, according to National Advocates for Pregnant Women.

While incarceration itself is a horribly violent trauma for women's bodies, minds and spirits, additional forms of violence and indignities are heaped upon women during their imprisonment. Many incarcerated pregnant women have high-risk pregnancies, complicated by problems of poverty and violence before imprisonment, and inadequate nutrition and poor prenatal care while in prison. In fact, the quality of prenatal care in jails and prions varies between and within states, with most providing poor care, according to Prison Legal News.

One of the cruelest indignities is the shackling of pregnant women during labor and delivery, which is legal in 28 states. Fusion has reported that even in the 22 states where shackling of incarcerated pregnant women is regulated, there are loopholes in at least nine of the states, where women may still be shackled during pregnancy, while being transported to the hospital or postpartum.

And of course, pregnant women who give birth in prison must usually be separated from their babies soon after birth -- a longstanding thread in many Black women's lives, tracing back to slavery.

Maternal Mortality

Even when there isn't direct physical violence such as police brutality, or economic violence such as welfare family caps, pregnant Black women face the everyday violence of living with structural racism in the United States, which negatively impacts their pregnancies. Maternal mortality rates are higher in the US than in 16 other high-income countries, but for Black women, it is much worse. For the last 40 years, Black women have been dying during childbirth at a rate three to four times that of white women. This racial disparity cuts across class lines; college-educated Black women have a higher maternal mortality rate than white women without a college education.

Many doctors, including Dr. Michael Lu, an OB-GYN at UCLA, and Dr. James Collins and Dr. Richard David at Northwestern University, study the links between experiencing the stress of racism, and Black women's health, specifically their maternal health. Lu suggests that stress due to daily exposures to racism negatively impacts the health of pregnant Black women.

From slavery, to forced sterilization, to mass incarceration, to maternal mortality, pregnant Black women have endured many forms of state-sanctioned and state-perpetuated violence -- and it has always been met with resistance. From the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse in the 1970s, to the National Black Women's Health Project (now known as the Black Women's Health Imperative), the first women of color reproductive justice organization, which formed in 1983, to today with organizations such as SisterSong, Trust Black Women and SisterReach, Black women have led, and continue to lead, the fight against various forms of violence enacted against us and our families.

Tasasha Henderson is currently a research and grants coordinator at Heartland Alliance for Human Needs and Human Rights. She also organizes with Love & Protect, and is on the board of directors of Project Fierce Chicago. She has been published in Salon, Ravishly, The Feminist Wire and For Harriet. Follow her on Twitter @T_S_Henderson.

American Drug War: The Last White Hope

OneLove

We're Living in a Racial Caste System Designed to Divide Us, Benefiting No One But the 1%

I like this dude. He takes the complex web of America's caste system and makes it easier to understand. Pulling together disparate stands to create the story of how the ruling class divides people in order to keep them enslaved, he situates us in this present moment with the only option available to counter this madness: resistance. 

Absorb and take action.

OneLove

What College Graduates Can Expect as They Enter the New World of Work

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This post originally ran on Robert Reich’s website.

Good luck kids!

OneLove

A Hauntingly Beautiful Short Film About Life and Death

The Life of Death is a touching handdrawn animation about the day Death fell in love with Life.

We Have Entered The Looting Stage Of Capitalism by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

Having successfully used the EU to conquer the Greek people by turning the Greek “leftwing” government into a pawn of Germany’s banks, Germany now finds the IMF in the way of its plan to loot Greece into oblivion .

The IMF’s rules prevent the organization from lending to countries that cannot repay the loan. The IMF has concluded on the basis of facts and analysis that Greece cannot repay. Therefore, the IMF is unwilling to lend Greece the money with which to repay the private banks.

The IMF says that Greece’s creditors, many of whom are not creditors but simply bought up Greek debt at a cheap price in hopes of profiting, must write off some of the Greek debt in order to lower the debt to an amount that the Greek economy can service.

The banks don’t want Greece to be able to service its debt, because the banks intend to use Greece’s inability to service the debt in order to loot Greece of its assets and resources and in order to roll back the social safety net put in place during the 20th century. Neoliberalism intends to reestablish feudalism—a few robber barons and many serfs: the One Percent and the 99 percent.

The way Germany sees it, the IMF is supposed to lend Greece the money with which to repay the private German banks. Then the IMF is to be repaid by forcing Greece to reduce or abolish old age pensions, reduce public services and employment, and use the revenues saved to repay the IMF.

As these amounts will be insufficient, additional austerity measures are imposed that require Greece to sell its national assets, such as public water companies and ports and protected Greek islands to foreign investors, principallly the banks themselves or their major clients.

So far the so-called “creditors” have only pledged to some form of debt relief, not yet decided, beginning in 2 years. By then the younger part of the Greek population will have emigrated and will have been replaced by immigrants fleeing Washington’s Middle Eastern and African wars who will have loaded up Greece’s unfunded welfare system.

In other words, Greece is being destroyed by the EU that it so foolishly joined and trusted. The same thing is happening to Portugal and is also underway in Spain and Italy. The looting has already devoured Ireland and Latvia (and a number of Latin American countries) and is underway in Ukraine.

The current newspaper headlines reporting an agreement being reached between the IMF and Germany about writing down the Greek debt to a level that could be serviced are false. No “creditor” has yet agreed to write off one cent of the debt. All that the IMF has been given by so-called “creditors” is unspecific “pledges” of an unspecified amount of debt writedown two years from now.

The newspaper headlines are nothing but fluff that provide cover for the IMF to succumb to presssure and violate its own rules. The cover lets the IMF say that a (future unspecified) debt writedown will enable Greece to service the remainder of its debt and, therefore, the IMF can lend Greece the money to pay the private banks.

In other words, the IMF is now another lawless Western institution whose charter means no more than the US Constitution or the word of the US government in Washington.

The media persists in calling the looting of Greece a “bailout.”

To call the looting of a country and its people a “bailout” is Orwellian. The brainwashing is so successful that even the media and politicians of looted Greece call the financial imperialism that Greece is suffering a “bailout.”

Everywhere in the Western world a variety of measures, both corporate and governmental, have resulted in the stagnation of income growth. In order to continue to report profits, mega-banks and global corporations have turned to looting. Social Security systems and public services–and in the US even the TSA airline security screening–are targeted for privatization, and indebtedness so accurately described by John Perkins in his book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, is used to set up entire countries to be looted.

We have entered the looting stage of capitalism. Desolation will be the result.

How The Tremendous Changes In Our Society Mirrors The Evolution of the Butterfly

Renowned cellular biologist and author, Bruce Lipton, says the tremendous changes happening in the world today are like a late stage caterpillar. The creature has eaten its full and is now ready for its old self to die and be born anew. 

The crumbling of capitalism we are seeing is like a caterpillar that is starting to fall apart. But, out of the broken skin of the dying caterpillar, a new civilisation is being birthed. A community of what Bruce Lipton calls “imaginal cells,” which bring fresh ideas to the rest of the cells and create a new organism. You and I are all cells in this wonderful global evolutionary advance into a butterfly.

Fantastic story of this metamorphosis set to interesting imagery and footage from the Occupy Wall Street Movement.

OneLove

Donald Trump, President of the Confederacy: The Southern Strategy Created the GOP Civil War by Chauncey DeVega

There are two consistent themes about the American right-wing in the Age of Obama. First, racism and conservatism is now one and the same thing. Second, the Republican Party is the United States’ largest white identity organization. I am not the only person to have made such observations.

Of course, Republicans and conservatives find these twin facts offensive and unbelievable. They hold onto their founding myth of Lincoln and “Great Emancipator” while simultaneously being dependent on voters from the former Confederacy for power—states that still fly and honor the American swastika, a rebel flag of treason and anti-black hatred.

Despite their protests, the evidence is overwhelming.

The ascendance of Donald Trump and his coronation as the presumed 2016 Republican presidential candidate is the logical outcome of a several decades-long pattern of racism, nativism, and bigotry by the American right-wing and its news entertainment disinformation machine.

For example, in response to the triumphs of the black freedom struggle and the civil rights movement, the Republican Party has relied on the much discussed “Southern Strategy.” Lee Atwater, master Republican strategist and mentor to Karl Rove explained this approach as:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “N****r, n****r, n****r.” By 1968 you can’t say “n****r”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N****r, n****r.”

Ronald Reagan and other Republican elites would leverage Atwater’s approach to winning white voters and elections. To point, Reagan began his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the locale where American civil rights freedom fighters Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney were killed by white racial terrorists. In that speech, Reagan signaled to the ghosts of Jim and Jane Crow and the neo-Confederacy by stating his support for “states’ rights.”

Reagan would continue to use overt and coded racial appeals to gin up white support through his references to a “lazy,” “violent” and “parasitic” class of black Americans who he described as “welfare queens” and “strapping bucks.” George Bush would continue with the Southern Strategy when he summoned up white racist stereotypes and fears of “the black beast rapist” in the form of Willie Horton during the 1988 presidential election.

The Age of Obama witnessed an explosion of anti-black racism by the Republican Party and conservatives en masse. Birtherism, the rise of the Tea Party, the use of antebellum language (which was used to defend the Southern slaveocracy) such as “secession” and “nullification”, both overt and coded racist invective by Republican officials and news media, and a pattern of disrespect towards both the idea and literal personhood of Barack Obama as the United States’ first black president has been the norm. This deluge of anti-black animus towards Barack Obama does not exist in a separate universe outside of American society: it has real impact on the values and behavior of citizens.

To wit: in discussing his recent work on racial attitudes and political polarization, Professor Michael Tesler has noted how:

After at least two full decades of being unrelated to party identification, both old fashioned racism and anti-black affect have once again become significantly linked to white partisanship in the age of Obama…After at least two full decades of being unrelated to party identification, both old fashioned racism and anti-black affect have once again become significantly linked to white partisanship in the age of Obama.

In all, Barack Obama’s presidency has been so disruptive to the white right-wing political imagination that it has resurrected a type of overt racism which was thought to be largely vanquished from American public life.

The intersection of white racism (“modern” and “old-fashioned”), nativism, a sense of white victimhood, and grievance mongering in the form of conspiracy theories and other unfounded beliefs is evident in other ways as well.

Fifty-four percent of Republicans believe that Barack Obama is a “secret Muslim.” Forty-four percent also believe that Obama was not born in the United States. Forty-two percent of Republicans believe that Muslims should be banned from the United States. Sixty-four percent of Republicans believe that “racism” against white people is as big a problem as discrimination against black Americans.

In a recent survey by the Pew Research Center, 66 percent of Republican and Republican-inclined respondents want to return to the “good old days.. This number is higher for Trump backers. It is important to note that this era was one of Jim and Jane Crow anti-black racism, legal sexism, and unapologetic discrimination against gays and lesbians. This yearning for a return to a fictive golden age of white male Christian domination over American social and political life is reflected in other work that shows how white people are much more pessimistic about their futures than Hispanics and African-Americans.

Donald Trump is not a political genius. He understands what the Republican base yearns for and has been trained to believe–like a sociopolitical version of Pavlov’s dog–by its leaders.

Trump says that Muslims should be banned from the United States because Republican voters respond to such hatred and intolerance.

Trump lies that undocumented Hispanic and Latino immigrants are rapists and killers who want to attack white women because Republican voters find such rhetoric compelling.

Trump uses social media to circulate white supremacist talking points about “black crime” because modern conservatives nurtured on “law and order” politics believe that African-Americans are out of control “thugs” possessed of “bad culture” who live to prey on innocent and vulnerable white people.

Trump talks about China “raping” the United States because this arouses anger and fear of a new “yellow peril” where the manhood and honor of (white) America is sacrificed to a “sneaky” and “scheming” “Oriental” horde who twist their Fu Manchu mustaches and seduce white women in opium dens while simultaneously negotiating multibillion dollar trade deals.

And perhaps most damning, Donald Trump has been endorsed by neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and the Ku Klux Klan: he has been reluctant to publicly reject and denounce their support.

The corporate news media has aided and abetted “Trumpmania” by normalizing his racist, nativist and bigoted behavior. In response to Trump’s crucial win in last week’s Indiana primary, Slate’s Isaac Chotiner skewered this failure of journalistic integrity and responsibility among the TV news chattering class as:

On TV Tuesday night, there was hardly a whimper. CNN, MSNBC, and Fox contented themselves with bright chatter about Ted Cruz’s hurt feelings, about Donald Trump’s political skill, about the feckless, pathetic Republican establishment. None of the commentators I saw mentioned the import of what was happening. Large chunks of the media have spent so long domesticating Trump that his victory no longer appeared momentous. He is the new normal….There was little talk of ideology, or racism, or bigotry, or fascist appeals. Instead, the conversation was about process; Trump had been fit into the usual rhythms of an election season. The closest thing I heard to open-mouthed shock came from Rachel Maddow, who wondered, correctly, why out of 330 million people the Republican Party had chosen this particular reality-television star.

Elizabeth Bathory was a 16th century Hungarian countess who killed hundreds of young virgin girls and then bathed in their blood with the hope that it would maintain her beauty. Since at least the end of the civil rights movement, the Republican Party and movement conservatives have followed a similar “beauty” regimen. Instead of the blood of female virgins, they have washed themselves in racism and bigotry in order to buoy their political vitality.

Donald Trump decided to move this political ritual out of the shadows and into the light of prime time television and the 24/7 news cycle. Trump, with his background in professional wrestling and reality TV simply took what has always been implied by the American Right-wing and made it obvious.

This move vanquished Trump’s Republican rivals.

The question now becomes, will Trump’s version of Elizabeth Bathory be enough to defeat Hillary Clinton and win the White House in November 2016?

Musings

The Great Leap Backward: America’s Illegal Wars on the World by Luciana Bohne

Can we face it in this election season? America is a weapons factory, the White House a war room, and the president the manager of the neoliberal conspiracy to recolonize the planet. It exports war and mass poverty. On the economic front, usurious neoliberalism; on the military front, illegal wars. These are the trenches of America’s battle for world domination in the 21st century.

If not stopped, it will be a short century.

Since 1945, America’s Manifest Destiny, posing as the Free World’s Crusade against the Red Menace, has claimed 20 to 30 million lives worldwide and bombed one-third of the earth’s people. In the 19th century, America exterminated another kind of “red menace,” writing and shredding treaties, stealing lands, massacring, and herding Native populations into concentration camps (“Indian reservations”), in the name of civilizing the “savages.” By 1890, with the massacre of Lakota at Wounded Knee, the frontier land grab—internal imperialism– was over. There was a world to conquer, and America trained its exceptionally covetous eye on Cuba and the Philippines.

American external imperialism was born.

Then, something utterly dreadful happened in 1917—a successful social revolution in Russia, the second major after the French in 1789, to try to redistribute the wealth of the few to the advantage of the many. The rulers of the world—US, Britain, France and sundry acolytes—put aside their differences and united to stem the awful threat of popular democracy rising and spreading. They invaded Russia, fomented a civil war, funding and arming the counter-revolutionary forces, failed, and tried again in 1939. But Hitler’s war of extermination on the USSR ended in a spectacular victory for Moscow.

For a while, after 1945, the US had to behave as a civilized country, formally. It claimed that the USSR had a barbarian, all-conquering ideology, rooted in terror, disappearances, murder, and torture. By contrast, the US was the shining city on the hill, the beacon of hope for a “the free world.” Its shrine was the United Nations; its holy writ was international law; its first principle was the inviolability of the sovereignty of nations.

All this was rubbish, of course. It was an apartheid society. It nuked Japan not once but twice, deliberately selecting civilian targets. It shielded from justice top Nazi criminals to absorb them as partners in intelligence structures. It conducted virtual “show trials” against dissidents during the hysteria of the McCarthy congressional hearings, seeding the country with a harvest of fear. It waged a genocidal war on Vietnam to prevent independence and unification. It assassinated African independence leaders and bestowed fascist dictators on Latin America. It softly occupied Western Europe, tied it to itself through military “cooperation” in NATO, and it waged psy-op war on its opposition parties. Behind the civilized façade was a ruthless effort to take out the Soviet Union and crush self-determination in the colonial world.

By hook and by crook, the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, and America went berserk with triumphalism. Now, at last, the conquest of the world, interrupted in 1917, could resume. The global frontier reopened and America’s identity would be regenerated through violence, which had delivered the American West to the European invaders in the 19th century. The benign mask dropped. Behind it came a rider on a pale horse. According to the ideologically exulted, history had ended, ideologies had died, and the messianic mission of the US to become the steward of God’s property on earth could be fulfilled.

The “civilizing mission” was afoot.

A cabal of neo-conservative policy wonks first sketched what I call the Great Leap Backward into lawlessness as a revival of the myth of the frontier in the 1990s. “The Plan for a New American Century” (PNAC) envisaged the 21st century as a unilateralist drive to entrench American values globally—what the PNAC ideologues call “freedom and democracy”—through preemptive wars and regime change. This frenzied delirium of US military domination turned into official foreign policy with the Bush Doctrine after 9/11, but it was the Clinton administration’s Doctrine of Humanitarian Warfare before 9/11, that shut the door on the prohibition of aggressive wars by the UN Charter, remaking the map of the world into a borderless American hunting reserve by removing the principle of sovereignty and replacing it with “right to protect” (R2P)—or humanitarian pretext for use of force.

Clinton’s doctrine was an act of supreme, even witty, exploitation of liberal principles and commitment to policies of human rights. It was how the liberal left was induced to embrace war and imperialism as the means of defending human rights. The Carnegie Endowment cooked up the doctrine in 1992. Its report, “Changing Our Ways: America’s Role in the New World,” urged “a new principle of international relations: the destruction or displacement of groups of people within states can justify international intervention.” The report recommended that the US use NATO as the enforcer. It must be noted, too, that the principle of “humanitarian war” has no authority in international law. The Charter of the United Nations sought to outlaw war by making it impossible for unilateral interventions in the business of sovereign states by self-appointed guardians of human rights. The reason behind the proscription was not heartlessness but the consciousness that WW II had been the result of serial violations of sovereignty by Germany, Italy, and Japan—by militarist imperialism, in other words.

The bell tolled for the UN and the old order in the 1999 Kosovo War. The bi-partisan effort to dismantle the architecture of the post war’s legal order played out there. With the Kosovo War, the Clinton administration launched the first humanitarian war and set the precedent for waging war without Security Council clearance of many to follow by both Republican and Democrat administrations. The Clintonites who used NATO to bomb Serbia to protect ethnic Albanians in Kosovo from non-existing Serbian genocide may or may not have appreciated the fact that Hitler had used the pretext of R2P—humanitarian intervention—to launch WW II by claiming to protect German minorities in Poland, but they certainly knew that the monopoly on use of force rested with the UN’s Security Council. This monopoly was secured after WW II precisely to prevent unilateral attacks on sovereign states through bogus claims of altruistic interventions, such as Hitler had championed and pursued. Ironically for critics of the Soviet leader, it was Stalin who insisted at the Yalta Conference that if the USSR were to join the United Nations a veto in the Security Council was a must to insure that any war would be a multilateral consensus and a multilateral action.

As the Clintonites understood, the postwar legal authority for peacekeeping and the prevention of war entrusted to the UN Security Council posed a colossal obstacle to the pursuit of American world domination. For the vision of PNAC and the Carnegie Endowment to become reality, the United Nations, the guarantor of sovereignty, had to go. In the run-up to the Kosovo War, the Clintonites fatally and deliberately destabilized the United Nations, substituting the uncooperative UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali with the subservient NATO shill, Kofi Annan. Annan obligingly opined that in the matter of war and peace, UN Security Council resolutions were not the only way to skin a country– especially one chosen by the US for remaking, partitioning, or regime changing, a cynic might add.

So now we live in a dangerous world. Once again, since the 1930s, the world is being stalked by an expansionist power answering to no law but its own unilateral, humanitarian vigilantism. The Kosovo precedent has spun out of control. Libya smolders in the ashes of NATO bombs, dropped to prevent “genocide”; Syria fights for survival under attack by genocidal terrorist groups, armed, trained and funded by genocide preventers grouped in the NATO alliance and the Gulf partners; Afghanistan languishes in a permanent state of war, present ten thousand American troops which bomb hospitals to promote human rights; in Iraq, the humanitarians are back, after twenty-five years of humanitarian failure. And in Ukraine, Nazi patriots are promoting American democratic and humanitarian values by shelling Donbass daily. I hesitate to mention Africa, where humanitarian Special Forces are watering the fields where terrorists sprout like mushrooms after rain—in Mali, Nigeria, Somalia, Kenya.

Then there is Yemen, perhaps the most callous, vicious, and careless humanitarian crime of a litany of crimes against humanity in the Middle East. The US government has recently admitted deploying troops to Yemen. The Pentagon claims that the deployment will assist Saudi Arabia (“the Arab coalition”) to fight al-Qaeda in Arabian Peninsula. Can a sentient being meet such a grotesque claim with anything but infernal laughter? Help Saudi Arabia to fight its own creature? Are we stupid yet?

$4 trillion dollars later, spent on the War-on-Terror/Humanitarian-R2P, the pattern of military destabilization of sovereign states proceeds apace, one recalcitrant, independent country at a time in the Middle East and North Africa. For the rest of the world, the surrender of sovereignty is sought by means of economic globalization through trade pacts—TTP, TTIP, etc.—that virtually abolish the constitution of states, including our own. Spearheading the economic effort to control the periphery and the entire world is the so-called “Washington Consensus.”

It hugs the market-fundamentalist idea that global neoliberalism and core finance capital’s economic control of the planet by means of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) is the option to poverty and social chaos.

Neither military nor economic war on the sovereignty of nations has yielded anything close to a stable, prosperous, and peaceful world. It had delivered death, destruction, debt, market crises, tidal waves of refugees and displaced persons, and concentrated masses of wealth in a few but powerful hands. What the poet W.H. Auden called “the international wrong,” which he named “imperialism” in his poem “September 1939,” is the crisis that stares out of the mirror of the past into our faces, and it bodes war, war, and more war, for that is where imperialism drives.

In this scenario, no potential presidential candidate—even establishment-party dissenter—who does not call for both the end of the bi-partisan “Washington Consensus” and the end of bipartisan militarist aggression can reverse the totality of the “international wrong” or stem the domestic descent into social brutalization. If none calls this foreign policy debacle “imperialism,” elections will be a sleepwalker’s exercise. Nothing will change. Except, almost certainly, for the worse.

Luciana Bohne is co-founder of Film Criticism, a journal of cinema studies, and teaches at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania. She can be reached at: lbohne@edinboro.edu

Jon Stewart bashes ‘corrupt, blinded’ media and TV execs opting for conflict over clarity

One of the most truthful media personalities on the scene. I really miss his show. Hopefully, he'll get another show and shake the dust off the dumb-as-bricks citizens out here. Some brilliant stuff in this interview. OneLove

Consciousness : The Final Frontier

The exploration of inner space, our own consciousness, is ultimately connected to our discovery of outer space. Just as the world becomes a smaller place with increase in communication and transport technology, so the universe becomes a smaller place with the increase in meditation technology.

Dada Gunamuktananda has trained in meditation, yoga and natural health sciences in Australia, the Philippines and India. He has been a meditation teacher of Ananda Marga since 1995 and has taught and lectured on meditation in New Zealand, Australia, Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East.

See www.anandamarga.org

Biologist Targeted for Exposing the Gender Bending Pesticide Poisoning America

                                                        (Dr. Tyrone Hayes at TED Talks)

(Source) Biologist, Tyrone Hayes is a soft-spoken professor at the University of California with a big message. One of the most commonly used pesticides in agriculture, atrazine, is responsible for feminizing amphibians, according to his research. More importantly, the chemical is effectively eliminating male chromosomes at an alarming rate, ate levels which are three times lower than what are currently appearing in our drinking water. It isn’t just lead and fluoride we need to be concerned about, but a known endocrine disruptor, created by Syngenta, that is utterly changing our gene pool.

Hayes has been fighting Syngenta, to report the harmful effects of Atrazine for decades now. His scientific papers describe how Atrazine demasculinizes male gonads producing testicular lesions associated with reduced germ cell numbers in teleost fish, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals, and induces partial and/or complete feminization in fish, amphibians, and reptiles. These effects are strong (statistically significant),consistent across vertebrate classes, and specific. Reductions in androgen levels and the induction of estrogen synthesis – demonstrated in fish, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals – represent plausible and coherent mechanisms that explain these effects.

Big Ag Targets a Truth Teller

Other scientists have since come forward to corroborate Hayes’ claims, but not until after Syngenta dumped a 102-page document trying to discredit the scientist.

Atrazine is used on everything from corn fields (75 percent of them are sprayed with Atrazine in the US) to Christmas tree farms, and it is one of the most pervasive chemicals in agriculture. Syngenta actually asked Hayes to research the chemical, but after he found results which the manufacturer of atrazine didn’t expect, he was targeted in ways that, sadly, have become familiar to whistleblowers.

Lead, Fluoride, and Now Atrazine

In typical biowarfare-fashion, this chemical is being used everywhere, and while we fret about fluoride and lead, rightfully so, in our drinking water, an even more sinister chemical is being forced into our ground water, eventually seeping into municipal water supplies.

Atrazine affects men adversely, by literally shrinking their gonads, or causing them to effectively become women, but it also affects women, causing low estrogen levels and irregular menstruation. All in all, this chemical acts exactly as many other UN Agenda poisons do – from chemtrails to vaccines, BPAs which are known xenoestrogens, to pharmaceuticals, including birth control pills that pass unharmed through sewage systems into in our drinking water – it makes fertility a genetic Russian roulette.

Are we to believe that a chemical that causes complete chemical castration in male African clawed frogs, isn’t eventually going to have similar effects on us? More than 80 million pounds of this stuff is used annually, but with all the false-flag attempts, and Flint, Michigan water crises, who can keep up with the numerous ways they are trying to cull the masses?

The population of the US is supposed to DROP 78.2% from 316+ million now to ONLY 69 million people in 2025 according to a government website, and many notorious —– have made statements admitting they want to lessen the earth’s population numbers.

Even the CDC in December 2014, offered the shocking comparison in population totals from 2007 to 2013, where they state “There were 3.93 million births in the United States in 2013, down less than 1% from 2012 and 9% from the 2007 high. The U.S. general fertility rate was at an all-time low in 2013.”

Is this the real reason Tyrone Hayes is being targeted?

He says we’re making ‘toxic babies’ due to the largest selling chemical poison from one of the largest chemical companies in the world. It’s banned in the EU, but still used copiously in the US, even re-registered by the Environmental Protection Agency in the very same year it was banned overseas. 0.1 parts per billion exposure to Atrazine is changing a frog’s sex. How many parts per billion will it take to turn off your reproductive ability? Maybe its time to listen to Mr. Hayes.