By David William Pear
SKEPTICAL VOICES
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[Photo: Special Operations Medical Group by Military Health System] Ode of a Liberal
The cause of death for the liberal class, as Chris Hedges tells us, was gullibility. Liberals were foolish enough to believe that they could moderate capitalism. They thought that they could change corporatism by elections, mass movements, whining and begging for incrementalism. The liberal class started their negotiations by compromising all of their ethics, beliefs, and powers. All they got in return were table-scraps to identity politics. The power elite did not give up anything it really cares about. The corporatists raped, pillaged and burned with abandon, while liberals wallowed in political correctness. Taxes for the rich are the lowest in over 100 years. The military budget is the highest in history. The concentration of wealth and income—simply grotesque by any standard let alone that of a supposed democracy— is in the fewest hands. US wars have killed millions of people, and war profits are booming. Labor unions were neutered. Government is fully privatized. The economy has been deindustrialized. The police are militarized. The working class has been disenfranchised. The middle-class is being impoverished. The unemployed are idle. The poor are criminalized. I could go on, but you get the point. And what has the liberal class gotten in return? Token integration. Ending conscription. Adulthood at 18 years of age. Women in the workforce. Acceptance of LGBTQ. A black president. The MeToo movement. Legalized marijuana. A $1200 bailout. Help me out here---what else have the liberal class gotten in the past half-century, in return for their soul? [JESSE JACKSON CRYING, YouTube] Liberals elected Barack Obama in 2008, laughed, cheered, cried, and then they went to sleep for eight years. They thought that Obama would do the heavy lifting for them. Instead he went from bombing three countries to bombing seven, after winning the Nobel Peace Prize for nothing. Obama (fully complicit in the national backlash) looked the other way as the Police Occupied Zuccotti Park, Black Lives Didn’t Matter, and Dakota Pipelined. Obama imprisoned and tortured whistleblowers, and he became the deporter-in-chief. He bailed out the banks, while millions of families lost their homes. Obamacare enriched insurance companies and Big Pharma. Gitmo stands as the legacy of Obama’s droning wedding parties and funerals, and for all his broken promises. His answer to climate change was Arctic drilling, and fracking the USA. Obama and the liberal class are the reason we have Trump. The rich do not care about any of the liberal class’s identity politics and correctness. It costs the rich nothing to make those concessions. Deeply invested by their own class roots in the status quo, the liberals are not willing to fight for anything of importance, and the corporatists know it. The corporatists don’t care if Trump or Biden is the next president. Bernie or bust! Fugget about it: Bernie Sanders is just a sheepdog, a foil, a professional wrestler, and Kabuki theater. Bernie is the Senator from Lockheed and Israel. He is and was herding the gullible liberals into the Democrat’s big tent like a carnival huckster. [1] [Bernie Sanders endorses Hillary Clinton (C-SPAN), YouTube] The DNC will be happy to keep Trump. They get to keep their jobs, their power, their influence, and the gravy train keeps on rolling. Nancy Pelosi will still get her kicks from gourmet chocolate, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will keep making arm-waving rants to an empty House, Ilhan Omar will kowtow to the Zionist lobby, and the Congressional Black Caucus will vote against blacks. Liberals will grandstand politically correct platitudes, while the banks, corporations, military-industrial complex, Israel, and the well-connected get unlimited hand-outs. And a free pass to go on driving the planet to its ultimate destruction. Lest I forget, fake liberal Rachel Maddow and her ilk in the media will still get paid $30 thousand a night for Russia-Russia-Russia, and the New York Times will endorse every regime-change war, just as it has done for the past 150 years. Just count the words Maddow has uttered in defense of Venezuela. And Liberals will commiserate with each other, preach to their dwindling choir, blame everybody except themselves, and waste another four years without organizing any opposition. [2] Medical martial law reveals just how out of touch liberals are with common people. Liberals have abandoned the working class, the unemployed, the poor, the incarcerated, the ghettoized, wage-slaves, the indebted, the bankrupt, veterans, the homeless, beggars, red-necks, slum dwellers, the uneducated, and old people surviving on three-figure Social Security checks. All the liberal class whines about are Trump and their own selfish economic interests; the so-called middle-class issues. They despise their potential allies among the people, look down on them as if they are riff raff. Liberals should be uplifting the downtrodden, not kicking them. Liberals naively believe the COVID-19 fearmongering. They begged the authorities for medical martial law, and they have become comfortable to “the rules” and their self-imposed imprisonment. They would rather give up all of their civil liberties, and those of others, than to risk catching the flu. They will obediently line up for experimental vaccines, identification tattoos, and download medical tracking apps on their iPhones. They are COVID kool. [3] The facemask is their badge of obedience, which does medical and psychological harm to their body, mind and soul. The facemask is nasty. It provides the perfect environment for breeding and spreading germs. Wearing a face mask is humiliating, and unsanitary. It is a symbol of passive submission to the power elite. Facemasks are unsanitary and people look ridiculous wearing them. [4] But what liberals can never be forgiven for is their abandonment of internationalism. They have deserted international socialism, leaving welfare-states to be crushed by international capitalists. While liberals cower-in-place in fear of COVID-19, their passiveness supports the medical blockade against socialist countries. Liberals are the “Good Americans”, just like the Good Germans during the Third Reich. Two million Gazans have been forced to shelter in place by fascistic Israelis, since 2007. Another three million Palestinians have been imprisoned since 1967 in an ever-shrinking isolated West Bank. There are another 5 million Palestinian members of the diaspora, who cannot return to their homeland, as is their God-given human right. Palestinian are tortured in Israeli concentration camps. Liberals can not say they do not know, and their silence speaks volumes. Since World War Two the U.S. has killed an estimated 30 million people, none of whom were ever a threat to the US American people. Ethically, morally and legally most US Americans are guilty of war crimes. The German people were not let off the hook after WW2. The US American people are just as guilty now.
Liberals know the U.S. government is a pathological liar. The past two decades have been especially rotten. George W. Bush winning the election in 2000 was a lie. The attacks of 9/11 were lies, the invasion of Afghanistan was based on a lie, Iraq weapons of mass destruction were a lie, Iran’s nuclear weapons program is a lie, the Katrina Hurricane response was a lie, the Russian invasion of Georgia was a lie, the 2009 bailout of Wall Street was based on lies, Haiti earthquake aid was a lie, the Ukraine coup was lied about, Gaddafi’s Viagra was a lie, the well-vetted "moderate rebel" in Syria and other parts was a lie, the lie that Venezuela is a threat to the US is certainly a huge a lie, the White Helmets are a propaganda lie, Russiagate is a lie, the Douma chemical attack was a lie, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons report was a lie, the torture of Chelsea Manning is lied about, the Julian Assange lie is a lie. So now liberals believe that the government authorities are telling the truth about COVID-19? Liberals say that we should believe that lie too, and we should obey the fascistic rules. The first clue that the authorities are lying is that the banks, corporations and the well-connected were bailed out again; first too. Six-trillion U.S. dollars disappeared overnight. The second clue was that the U.S. illegal wars of aggression did not stand-down. There was no break in the illegal U.S. blockades against socialist countries. Instead there is a campaign of maximum starvation during a pandemic. The military’s Defender 2020 war-game invasion of Russia was not canceled due to COVID-19. The power elite do not isolate, wear face masks, and practice social distancing. We are not in it all together, and COVID-19 has not made us all equal. Those memes are liberal pipedreams. [5] There is no bailout for the people. There has been no unified response to provide the people with adequate food, healthcare, housing, and financial relief during medical martial law. The physical, mental and emotional damages caused by isolation are being ignored. The casualties caused by medical martial law and “the rules” go unreported, if the statistics are even being kept. The number of people who have become infected, ill, and died from COVID-19 is lied about. What is happening under martial law is the permanent stripping away of our civil liberties. The economy is being restructured for the benefit of big-tech, and more concentration of income and wealth is going to the top. Yet, liberals meekly accept the assault on the people’s rights in silence. They could at least honk their car horns in solidarity with wage-slave workers. Are liberals going to show up when people are evicted from their homes, have their cars repossessed, and their wages garnished? Are they going to stand in picket lines with workers, who are demanding fair wages? Are liberals going to storm the state houses and Washington to demand a return to civilian government? Are liberals going to resist forced vaccinations, contact tracking, snitching, spying, and ID chipping? Are they going to be standing up for civil liberties and human rights? Or are they going to be standing with the corporatists, and begging the corporatists for their fiendish programs of surveillance and control? [6] Liberals have made “liberal” a dirty word. They cannot hide behind the identity of progressive. There is nothing liberal or progressive about making bargains with the corporatists, fascists, and the corrupt power elites. It is time to bury the putrid body of the liberal class. It has already become a biohazard more dangerous than any virus. Resist! * “Revolt will come from the right. That the revolt will be funded, organized, and manipulated by the corporate forces is one of the tragic ironies. But the blame lies with the liberal class. Liberals, by standing for nothing, made possible the rise of inverted and perhaps soon classical totalitarianism.”--- The Death of the Liberal Class (paraphrased), page 196, by Chris Hedges, 2010. * Epilogue Now that you have read my article, please do not try to stereotype me and what I say. I am not an anti-vaxxer, against public health, a conspiracy theorist, or a Trumpophile. The current public health crisis due to the corona virus, and the government’s response to it, has fractured the old stereotypes. They do not apply anymore. I am a leftist and I believe in a welfare state. If not true socialism across the board. I am also a firm believer in civil liberties, many of which are codified in the Bill of Rights. I believe that everyone is entitled to economic freedom similar to what President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's prescribed in the Second Bill of Rights. Above all, I am anti-war, anti-imperialist, and anti-corporatist. I no longer claim any label. Below are some endnotes. End Notes 1. Admittedly this is a bit hyperbolic. Label it under poetic license. Also, read Paul Street’s excellent op-ed Bernie Sanders bares his SHEEPDOG teeth to keep own delegates in line for Biden – which was his role all along. I am in good company. Bernie Sanders has been outspoken on criticizing Israel’s human rights (sic) violations. He has also spoken out against some regime change wars, and supported the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. He applauded the Obama administration’s abstaining on United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 (December 23, 2016) condemning illegal Israeli settlements. He spoke out against the Trump Administration moving the US embassy to Jerusalem. But his record is mixed. He continues to vote to give Israel military aid. Bernie Sanders opposes the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS). Sanders has said he is pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian. When the chips are down though, Sanders is more pro-Israel than pro-Palestinian. Israel is guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and it should be condemned, sanctioned and all US aid and military sales should be halted. 2. Trump’s collusion with Russia, Russia’s hacking of Hillary Clinton’s emails, and the allegation that Internet Research Agency’s ads on social media were responsible for Trump winning the 2016 presidential election has been thoroughly discredited. Russiagate—a blatant hoax—fractured the left and discredited it. 3. Every year the world has a worldwide pandemic of influenza. For instance, the 2017 to 2018 flu season in the U.S. was particularly bad with an estimated 80,000 deaths. Every age group was affected. Every year an estimated 40 thousand to 80 thousand U.S. Americans die of influenza related illnesses. Yet the public health authorities, the politicians and the media barely make a ripple in the mainstream media about it. Instead of actually implementing healthcare for all, the authorities and media panicked the public over COVID-19. Universal healthcare would save tens-of-thousands of lives this year and every year. The C.D.C. does not know the exact statistics on influenza epidemics. It merely has mathematic models that it uses for estimates. The estimates are made based on test and death certificate from the prior year’s data. So for 2017-2018 the statistics are estimated from 2015-2016 information. This is not an exact science, and neither is the infection rate and death toll from COVID-19. What is different about COVID-19 is that it is a previously unknown influenza-type virus. The public knowns little about it: where it came from, if it was connected with biological labs, or biowarfare accidentally or purposely released. Nobody knows how many people were exposed to the virus, how many people became ill and how many people actually died from the COVID-19. Not much will be known until at least the 2021-2022 flu season. Yet the media announces everyday the number of cases for the previous day and the number of deaths, as if it were an exact science. There is no way that they could know the actual numbers, whether it was COVID-19 or another virus, and whether the victims died from an influenza virus, or from other underlying heath conditions. In other words, it is unknown if all the deaths were due to COVID-19, a different influenza virus, bacterial pneumonia, or an underlying illness (e.g. died with COVID-19 or died from COVID-19). That does not mean that I think that COVID-19 should not be considered a serious public health crisis. But the level of panic generated, and the draconian measures taken to prevent the spread and deaths of COVID-19 is an issue which should be given serious consideration. One thing I think that can be fairly assumed is that the government is lying to us, not telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth. 4. The wearing of face mask and gloves issue has fractured the alternative media and been politicized. Wearing face masks and/or gloves is being touted as if it is a scientific fact that it is effective, when used by the general public. The scientists disagree, too. The left in particular makes much of this into a Trump thing, when it shouldn't be. I think WHO has it right on masks, and WHO is certainly not on Trump's BFF list. Here is what WHO says:
The general public does not know how to use and dispose of the mask properly (or gloves). The mask ends up spreading disease instead of preventing it. Look at how people use the mask. It is dirty and unsanitary. They pull it down around their chin or below the nose or under the chin. They keep touching the mask with their hands, and then don't wash their hands. On average a person touches the mask with the hands 23 times an hour. I certainly don't want food handlers using a mask and gloves when they don't know how to properly use them, and most don't know how. The mask may actually do harm to the wearer, too. Here is how WHO advises on using the mask:
The CDC is vague about its position on the effectiveness of wearing a face a mask. It pushes for everybody wearing homemade cloth masks. The gloves add another hazard because people do not change the gloves after they become contaminated. Gloves and masks give a false sense of security, which becomes dangerous because then they don't follow even the simplest of sanitary practices. It is hard enough just to get people to wash their hands. This debate shouldn't have anything to do with a Trump thing! 5. Many prominent personalities who were responsible for recommending and enforcing the lockdown and social distancing have been observed not following their own rules. For instance, the British scientist Neil Ferguson broke social distancing and the lockdown rules to continue his affair with a married woman. Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's broke the lockdown rules by an excursion to his rural home. Illinois billionaire governor Pritzker’s broke the lockdown rules by traveling to Florida. So did Boris Johnson's Chief Advisor Dominic Cummings, and CNN anchor Chris Cuomo. These are just examples of the hypocrisy of rules for thee, but not for me. (Cuomo did get infected, but mildly). 6. Balancing the treatment of disease, healthy living, public health, and socio-economic issues requires wisdom, and not even the scientists agree on just where that balance should be. Above all I believe that there is great wisdom in the Hippocratic Oath that is paraphrased as “First Do No Harm”. There is legitimate controversy over the lockdown. Medical science is divided, as well as are the social scientists. There are economic, social, and psychological considerations. We don’t know if the lockdown is doing more good or more harm to our health and society in general. Many suspect the lockdown is, but quietly, without much media attention. It is not so simple as “profits versus people”, as some people have tried to make it. Just the single fact that the lockdown has caused over thirty-million people in the US to become unemployed is devastating to those people and their families. Globally there will be food shortages, starvation, increased poverty, an increase in other diseases as a result of the lockdown, and unknown numbers of deaths, desperation and deprivation. ABOUT THE AUTHOR  David William Pear is a Senior Editor for OpEdNews.com, and a Senior Contributing Editor for The Greanville Post. David is a journalist, columnist, and commentator for TV and radio. His articles, essays and interviews have an emphasis on U.S. foreign policy, and he also focuses on economic and social issues. He is an advocate for peace, ending US wars of aggression, and promoting economic, political and social justice. He has been writing for The Real News Network, OpEdNews, The Greanville Post, American Herald Tribune, and other publications since 2009, after he retired as a Certified Financial Planner (CFP). He is a member of Veterans for Peace, Saint Pete (Florida) for Peace, CodePink and the Palestinian-led non-violent organization International Solidarity Movement. His articles are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial 4.0 International License, and they may be republished as such without obtaining any other or prior permission.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
