CNN's emblematic anchor, Wolf Blitzer. Part of a gigantic lying machine—about anything and everything that really matters.

The extremely powerful corporate conglomerates which comprise the mainstream media are lying to you about everything. By this I don’t mean that the individual stories reported by corporate media outlets have no basis in fact, I mean that they’ve been lying to you about your world, your country, your society, your government and the way it all works for as long as you’ve been alive. They are more or less telling the truth when they report that a celebrity has died or that a cute little white kid has gone missing, but they are knowingly lying about the big picture within which those small events happen.

Throughout the course of my humble little gig here I’ve been trying to highlight this fact by pointing out the individual lies of these corporate media giants, like the time CNN knowingly staged a fake interview featuring a seven year-old girl who can’t speak English reading scripted war propaganda to their unsuspecting audience, or the way they’ve been relentlessly promulgating the debunked Russiagate conspiracy theory, but these can still be looked at as isolated instances by those not quite ready to look straight at the reality of the all-encompassing web of deceit that these corporate giants have been weaving. Luckily, this can be done simply by applying logic and reason to the simple, undeniable fact that the world is shitty right now and the status quo doesn’t work.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he most damning indictment of the mainstream media is the status quo itself. While the vacuous talking heads on TV tell you which politicians you should vote for or which ones you should have voted for, US policy marches on unchanged regardless of who is in office, with neoliberal domestic policies creating greater and greater wealth inequality while choking Americans to death and incarcerating those who get lost in the shuffle in the largest prison population in the history of civilization, and neoconservative foreign policies pouring unfathomable amounts of money and resources into shoring up an unrivaled empire which stomps into the dust any government which dares oppose it. While they assure you that the greatest threats you should concern yourself with are Islamic terrorists, Russian hackers, the opposing political party and the president’s latest tweet, our species is hurtling toward extinction via climate chaos if these insane escalations between two nuclear superpowers don’t get us killed first.

Between stories about celebrity deaths and missing white kids, these propagandists for the US oligarchy tell you that your vote is a real thing that makes a difference in the way your country behaves; that the US political system operates just like how they taught you in school. They speak as though democracy is not 100 percent dead in America, where money fully dominates the behavior of government, a corrupt two-party system with barely distinguishable parties is rigidly enforced, and one of those two parties openly asserts that it has no obligation to hold real party primaries. They report enthusiastically on nonsense and bullshit instead of telling you what’s really happening. They lie about everything.

If the mainstream media were not lying about everything, the world would look completely different from the way it looks today. People would be using the real, non-imaginary power of their votes to make informed, reality-based choices in their own healthy self-interest to create a government that helps them instead of helping the predatory billionaire owners of multinational corporations and banks. Resources would go toward helping the public instead of going toward corporate welfare, tax breaks for government-buying plutocrats, and the military-industrial complex. America would have the best healthcare system instead of the worst. Both government and citizenry would be using the true information given to them by the media to create a more enjoyable nation to live in.

This of course has not happened. The five giant corporate conglomerates which control virtually all media in America today work toward ensuring that the system which so immensely benefits their plutocrat owners becomes more and more beneficial to those plutocrat owners, and strengthening the powerful alliances those plutocrats have formed with the rest of America’s unelected power establishment. They do this by selling the public lies.

Has it not been your experience that basing your decisions and behavior on truth and integrity is more efficacious than basing them on lies? If you lived your life based on truth and integrity instead of deceit, would you be failing in every conceivable way and hurtling toward self destruction the way your society is currently doing? Of course not. Humanity isn’t hurtling toward self destruction because its behavior is being informed by truth, humanity is hurtling toward self destruction because its behavior has been informed by lies. And the people who are responsible for advancing those lies appear before you every day in the mainstream media.

That’s really the only conceivable possibility. The only other possibility is that the mainstream media tells the truth with integrity, but that acting in alignment with truth and integrity necessarily leads to madness and self destruction. You know from your own experience that this is not the case in this reality, so you can know for certain that you are being lied to by the mainstream media. Join the media war and kill the lying establishment propaganda machine so that our species may begin informing its behavior with truth instead of lies. Our survival depends on it. The status quo that these liars support does not work, and is killing us. We cannot keep doing this.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this, please consider helping me out by sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following me on Twitter, or even tossing me some money on Patreon so I can keep this gig up.

"Empathetic awareness has its starting point by evincing a sensitivity to the feelings, hopes, and aspirations of those close to one’s heart yet cannot stall out there. The quality must ripple out to distance shores inhabited by the alien other. In this manner, the process of de-colonisation of one’s mind can begin..."

Human sexuality mirrors human culture. Mating dances of seduction and refusal, and acts of non-consensual aggression cannot be separated from traits witnessed, practiced, and internalised by the people of a particular society. It is impossible to close the bedroom door to the culture at large. Eros not only inhabits the genitals and the heart but Anima mundi as well. 

Sexuality is not going to go away because its nature, which is sublime in the sense of the beautiful and the monstrous, makes people uncomfortable. The phenomenon brings all things human to the fore of consciousness. Therefore, it is imperative we talk about it all, and without mind-negating shame and heart-freezing hysteria.

The late, archetypal psychologist James Hillman, in his final book, the brilliant but under recognised, “A Terrible Love Of War,” noted the consort, the backdoor man, of the Goddess of Love and Beauty is Ares, the God of War. Moments after her practical minded husband Hephaestus would leave for work, Ares and Aphrodite would be ensconced in the lover’s bed, locked in intimate embrace, under the very roof constructed by her craftsman spouse. Withal, libido translates, often, into impractical, irrational, and dangerous phenomenon.

Hillman asks, “where else in human experience, except in the throes of ardor – that strange coupling of love with war – do we find ourselves transported to a mythical condition and the gods most real?” — A Terrible Love of War (p. 9).

When human beings evince the erotic, we are gripped and grappled by primal forces. The ancient Greeks traced the phenomenon to the heights of Olympus while the lurid, Calvinist/Puritan imagination places it in lakes of torment-inflicting hellfire.

Under capitalism, the activity will be commodified. Sexuality is deemed a “human resource.” And, as is the case with the finite resources of all things on planet earth, designated as fodder for exploitation by ruthless profiteers. The genitals of an individual are but another precinct to be colonised. One is advised to be ready with a local insurgency of the heart, mind, and body to retain self-rule.

If only it was that easy. Where are the mountains of the heart from which to stage a guerrilla war? The option is possible. But expect a long struggle, and for your heart to receive all manner of wounds. Yet the pain of struggle provides us with a common tongue that limns the radiance of everyday catastrophe, including catastrophes attendant to the realm of Eros, son of errant and erratic Aphrodite. Thus we blunder into self-knowledge, are privy to our own biography, read by pressing fingertips to the braille of one’s scars.

When sexuality has been degraded by inequitable power, and the powers at large have decreed all the things of the world theirs for exploitation then the system from which the predatory class gains their power over the individual must be challenged and dismantled. Although the setup cannot be changed from within its own self-sustaining, self-defining order. The notion is as risible as a yellow fin tuna joining the crew of a massive, sea life-decimating fishing trawler, claiming it plans to reform the system from within.

Under capitalism, the activity will be commodified. Sexuality is deemed a “human resource.” And, as is the case with the finite resources of all things on planet earth, designated as fodder for exploitation by ruthless profiteers. The genitals of an individual are but another precinct to be colonised. One is advised to be ready with a local insurgency of the heart, mind, and body to retain self-rule.

Men who callously disregard the autonomy of others are only as powerful as the societal structures in place that not only protect but lavishly reward their hyper-aggressive mode of mind and attendant modus operandi -- apropos, the spoils gained by the capitalist class by means of their acts of perpetual plunder perpetrated against all of humanity and the whole of nature.

Speaking of which, the coal and steel processing company town, Birmingham, Alabama, where I was born was a colonised place. The small, southern city, squatting at the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, was founded, built and controlled by Northern industrialists. The homes of the city’s affluent management class, known among us economic lessers as the Big Mules, luxuriated in the clear, fresh air upon Red Mountain (on which stands an imposing, iron ore cast statue of Vulcan, the Roman version of the Greek’s Hephaestus) while the White labouring class and city’s Jim Crow shackled African American community were relegated to dwelling in the industrial smog below.

As is the case with colonialist socio-economic structures, worldwide, in which a region’s wealth is generated by a local, under compensated labor force, it was imperative for the anger and resentment of the colonised masses to be shunted away from the colonisers. The time tested method of racial animus did the trick. In my memory, the air of Birmingham was ridden with a heavy industry generated, sulphuric, rotten egg-smelling reek that was inseparable from the miasmic rage of White working class men such as my father.

Black miners in Appalachia: Grossly underpaid, unrepresented, and hated by their white counterparts. Perfect context for the widespread exploitation of all.

The reasons for their fuming resentment included: When my father would ask for a raise, the stock reply from management was, “You know, I can go over to Coloured Town, right now, and hire five n*gg*ers for what I pay, your narrow ass.”

Thus the anger of Birmingham’s Jim Crow era, working men was always close to the surface, and, at the slightest provocation, would come boiling forth like phalanxes of fire ants from a disturbed bed. Exposing the hateful social milieu of the Jim Crow ruled south to the world at large was a primary factor in the decision of Martin Luther King et. al. to bring the Civil Rights cause to the city of my birth.

For the maintenance of a colonised order to be maintained, empathy must be denuded, fear and antipathy of the alien other must be perpetuated thereby obstructing any inclination towards mutual respect and incipient feelings of affinity between the tribe granted a favoured, dominant position and the tribes subjugated into positions of low status. Alliances among the exploited would prove dangerous to the elites whose fortunes are dependant on perpetual racial and ethnic division and divisiveness. Then, as now, class consciousness must be suppressed by the fomenting of racial resentments. When one gazes upon the sorehead denizens of the so-called alt. right, one becomes witness to the workings of a colonised — and wounded — psyche.

In my father’s case, the following reveals how he transmigrated the howling abyss of his displaced rage into the precincts of empathy.

My father injured his back in a fall from a freight car while loading a cache of pig iron; as a consequence, he, on a permanent basis, could no longer perform manual labour — the primary type of work available to the working class men of Birmingham. During his convalescence, he taught himself photography, and, by the advent of the Civil Rights Movement, he was freelancing to Black Star Syndicate and became Life Magazine's primary stringer in the region. I have memories of him arriving home from work, his clothes redolent of tear gas, his adrenal system churning, his mind buffeted, unable to process the brutality he witnessed being perpetrated by both city officials and ordinary citizens on the streets of the city.

On a Sunday, in late summer of 1963, my sister and I were immersed in Blakean innocence playing in the sandbox in the backyard of our family’s apartment when he returned from the site of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. There was a quality about his stare that I found unnerving. His gaze kept returning to my sister and me. Being a father now myself, I know what thoughts were gripping and grappling him..."what if it had been them. My god...what if it had been them.”

Empathetic awareness has its starting point by evincing a sensitivity to the feelings, hopes, and aspirations of those close to one’s heart yet cannot stall out there. The quality must ripple out to distance shores inhabited by the alien other. In this manner, the process of de-colonisation of one’s mind can begin.

Denial of the reality of Climate Change, albeit outside the cynical ranks of obscenely compensated Big Energy Industry lobbyists and shills, is borne of a similar, life-negating dynamic i.e., an ossified egotism winnows down awareness to manageable bits of casuistry:

“I just shovelled three feet of snow from my driveway. Global Warming…my frozen butt.” “I think too much political hay is made from weather. Our ancestors braved it and it was part of their lives,” arrive the (verbatim) quotes as seen on my Facebook newsfeed.

The declarations reveal an inner colonisation, manifested by a monoculture of the mind. Because the natural world and the human psyche emerged from the same evolutionary schematic, circumscribing down one’s consciousness to ad hoc rationalisations for maintaining a destructive status quo, as is the case with climate denialism, amounts to psychical ecocide thus mirrors the fate of the earth, now in the throes of the sixth great extinction, due to the predation attendant to hyper-industrialisation and consumerist addiction. The exponential loss of biodiversity is mirrored in the collective psyche of the consumerscape, as if a massive fishing trawler has stripped all signs of life from the oceanic heart of humankind.

“I can't go on…I’ll go on.” -- final two sentences of Samuel Beckett's novel, The Unnamable.

Yet, at times, I'm baffled as to how we, the scant and scattered few, who refuse to close our eyes and block our hearts to the realities of the day continue to go on. What force restrains one from reeling into the street seized by lamentation?

One foot is placed before the other. One word follows the next on the page. An ineffable understanding draws us into communion with the world and each other, even as the din of disconsolate angels braces the mind and cleaves the heart.

I know I am not alone in this. Nor are you. Even though, it seems so. What is the common prayer for those who cannot close themselves off from the agonised soul of the colonised world — for those of us who are ants who dream we are Atlas, and our visions crush us as if it were the weight of the earth itself upon our shoulders?

We face a vast aloneness together. An affinity of isolation binds us like a prayer of sacred vehemence. Empathy enjoins us thereby bestowing preternatural strength. Otherwise, the immense sadness of the earth would crush us into oblivion.  

Inadvertently, the NYTimes shows where its true class allegiances lie. It ain't us. 

Hey, can I show you something? Am I off my rocker here, or does it seem like the New York Times editorial staff are trying to convey some sort of message to us? Take a minute on this, please — this is very, very subtle:

The Democrats are at their weakest point since the 1920s. They can't afford to spurn Wall Street. https://t.co/ufd6I39Iqv

— NYT Opinion (@nytopinion) October 18, 2017

Bernie Sanders's "Medicare for All," a political graveyard, will sink the Democrats — again https://t.co/L2v3cXYWOu

— NYT Opinion (@nytopinion) October 24, 2017

Hmm…

---

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]traight off the back of a hotlycontroversial op-ed titled “Why Democrats Need Wall Street”, the always thoughtful New York Times has run yet another one today titled “Why ‘Medicare for All’  Will Sink the Democrats”, expressing a deep, compassionate concern that Democrats might be moving away from the caring arms of their corporate overlords.

In the former, Times op-ed contributor Douglass Schoen attempts to argue that since Americans have become more disgusted with the Democratic party than at any time since the 1920s, the solution is obviously for it to become more pervasively corrupt and beholden to Wall Street donors. In the latter, Wall Street executive Steven Rattner tries to assert that a nation whose citizens already pay more in healthcare-related taxes than people in any other country cannot possibly afford to switch to a proven system used in every other major country on earth. Because they really, really care about the Democratic party, obviously.

"Allow me to explain how massively expanding the most popular social program in the country is bad politics. Bear with me, folks..." pic.twitter.com/1zLGqWhwf9

— Luke Savage (@LukewSavage) October 24, 2017

Wall Street Has Some Advice for the Democratic Party https://t.co/ixupKkTL30

— The Nation (@thenation) October 23, 2017

Is the @nytimes sucking extra hard lately, or am I just paying more attention? I guess this is what they do until they push the next war. https://t.co/G1pXtVwX9O

— Jimmy Dore (@jimmy_dore) October 24, 2017

The New York Times, which one reader recently described as “essentially the CIA’s Facebook wall” [along with the Washington Post, pratically owned by the CIA], is in fact concerned about your waning loyalty to your corporate overlords because the New York Times is owned and operated by your corporate overlords. The Times editorial board has not been consistently publishing an endorsement of every act of the US war machine for decades because they have an interest in creating a well-informed populace, they’ve been doing it because a nationless plutocracy which uses governments as weapons has seized control of America’s news media. The economic injustice held in place by policies like America’s corporatist healthcare systemis the soil in which this plutocratic system has been grown. By creating a system wherein money equals political power, the plutocrats have been able to rule over the United States by depriving the public of money.

---

DNC flack Donna Brazile: lending credibility to the War Party by the pigmentation factor. One of many Black misleaders crawling all over the rotting carcass of American liberalism.

While the Democratic party elites are trying to rehabilitate the image of corrupt oligarchic loyalists from George W. Bush to Donna Brazile, and the New York Times is richsplaining to Democrats why they should want to stay poor, actual human beings are suffering. The discontentment that the oligarchs had hoped would cease rumbling after Bernie Sanders was nullified has been shaken and confused by corporate media propaganda, but has only continued to grow.

On both the left and the right of US politics, there is a mad scramble away from the neoliberal neoconservative political “center”, which is only called that because the unelected power establishment it serves has been able to use corporate media propaganda to dominate mainstream narratives. This is clearly becoming the case less and less, though. The revolution continues. Expect the New York Times op-eds to get even more ham-fisted.

---

I leave you with this thread by the mighty Glenn Greenwald:

Some really interesting findings in this new, big Harvard/Harris poll this month. Let's look at 5 of them: https://t.co/bXhIvGNvwl

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 24, 2017

1/ Sanders continues to be (by far) the country’s most popular politician - highly popular in particular among Latinos & African-Americans pic.twitter.com/8UJ2eOFh1C

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 24, 2017

2/ As was true throughout 2016, the country’s two disliked politicians continue to be Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton pic.twitter.com/s3Lgk9UECs

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 24, 2017

3/ By a large margin - 63 to 37 - Americans think the ongoing Russia investigation is hurting, not helping, the country pic.twitter.com/fWUsvobHzp

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 24, 2017

4/ A majority of Dems support movements to make the party move further left & oppose its current leaders - especially A-A, Latinos & young pic.twitter.com/zvscQRR33S

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 24, 2017

5/ By a large majority (56-44) Republicans think “Steve Bannon’s movement” will make the GOP stronger, not weaker pic.twitter.com/tChqF7JEs4

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 24, 2017

It would be nice to see a national poll over 10,000 people. 2100 does it mean anything

— PCisTodaysZombiVirus (@TruckerWifeLife) October 24, 2017

10k respondents would only reduce the margin of error from 2.1 to 1.0. 2,100 respondents tells you everything 10k does for overall findings

— OK Council (@OKcouncil) October 24, 2017

Keep on clicking the Twitter thread!

Hey you, thanks for reading! My work is entirely reader-funded so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following me on Twitter, and maybe throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal.

The militarist diatribe by White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, a retired Marine general, at a White House press briefing last week laid bare an open secret of American politics: behind the façade of democratic rule, the United States increasingly resembles a military dictatorship.

Firing back at criticisms of President Donald Trump’s handling of the October 4 deaths of four US soldiers in Niger, Kelly called members of the US military “the best one percent this country produces.” He then announced that he would take questions only from journalists who were family, friends or acquaintances of soldiers killed in action.

Kelly—Can't be faulted for thinking like a soldier. It's his enablers, those who brought this situation to pass that need to be held accountable, and that means an entire class, the ruling billionaires, for which the Pentagon serves as a taxpayer-funded Praetorian guard.

In an expression of undisguised contempt for the civilian government, Kelly denounced Democratic Congresswoman Frederica Wilson, who had publicly exposed Trump’s callousness in his condolence call to the widow of one of the soldiers killed in the October 4 incident. Kelly falsely accused Wilson of bragging about securing funding for a government building in Miami named after slain FBI agents, saying of her: “Empty barrels [make] the most noise.”

The next day, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders implied at a press briefing that any questioning of the pronouncements of the military was out of bounds. “If you want to get into a debate with a four-star Marine general,” she said, “I think that that’s something highly inappropriate.”

Sarah Huckabee Sanders: A clueless arrogant idiot, like most personnel on the Trump administration. Inevitable at this stage of decomposition of the American empire. You elect a clown, you get a circus. (The alternative was just as bad or worse).

Concerned over the White House’s undisguised contempt for the constitutional principle of civilian control over the military, some military figures sought to verbally distance themselves from Kelly’s statements. ABC’s “This Week” program on Sunday led with an interview with retired four-star army general and former CIA director David Petraeus, who declared, “We in uniform…are fiercely protective of the rights of our fellow Americans to express themselves, even if that includes criticizing us.”

Kelly’s remarks evoked such defensive statements not because they challenge nearly 250 years of civilian rule in the United States, but because sections of the US political establishment see it as necessary, at least for the time being, to cloak the massive power exercised by the military over political life with the formal trappings of civilian rule.

This task, however, is increasingly difficult. Shortly after Petraeus’s appearance, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” where he had an extraordinary exchange with moderator Chuck Todd. Asked whether as Senate Democratic leader he had been briefed on the situation in Niger, Schumer nonchalantly replied, “Not yet.”

When Todd asked whether Schumer knew the US had a thousand troops stationed in Niger, Schumer replied, “Uh, No, I did not.”

Todd pressed him further: “How do you describe it any other way than never-ending war?” Schumer gave a meandering reply that ended with the words, “We have to keep at it.”

In other words, the country’s civilian leadership neither knows where the US military operates, nor dares to inquire. Wars are not declared. Those who lead them are not accountable to Congress or the people. The military is deployed at the discretion of the president and his generals, as in the over one dozen African countries where US troops are engaged in combat operations. The ranking member of the nominal opposition party has no problem with this state of affairs.

Should anybody be surprised, then, when Kelly, one of three generals occupying the most sensitive positions in Trump’s cabinet, denounces a member of Congress for daring to question the commander-in-chief?

One need only consider the rest of Sunday’s broadcast of ABC’s “This Week” interview program. With only the slightest modifications, the entire program could have been produced in a country run by a military junta. In the midst of host Martha Raddatz’s interview with Petraeus, the program cut to a prerecorded segment showing Raddatz on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan as it carried out a war exercise off the Coast of North Korea, with Raddatz declaring enthusiastically, “The Sea of Japan is bristling with warships.”

The segment featured statements by the captain, the commander, a signal officer and a pilot aboard the ship. Raddatz concluded, “With the region remaining on the brink, they have to be ready to fight tonight.” The program then went on to preview an upcoming eight-part miniseries by the National Geographic Channel glorifying the Iraq war.

By this point, three quarters of the program had elapsed and not a single nonmilitary figure had made an appearance on one of the premier political talk shows of the world’s leading “democracy.”

Kelly’s comments triggered statements of concern among some segments of the US press. “A military dictatorship: that appears what the White House thinks the United States is,” declared CNN anchor Erin Burnett. Masha Gessen wrote in the New Yorker, “Consider this nightmare scenario: a military coup. You don’t have to strain your imagination—all you have to do is watch Thursday’s White House press briefing, in which the chief of staff, John Kelly, defended President Trump’s phone call to a military widow, Myeshia Johnson. The press briefing could serve as a preview of what a military coup in this country would look like.”

But this raises the question: Would the United States really need to have a coup to transition to military rule? Would it really look much different from today’s “democracy”? There would be the same parade of generals serving as talking heads on the news, the same “embedded” reporters interviewing commanders on the front lines, the same members of Congress (most dictatorships do not dissolve parliament) declaring they had “not yet” been briefed on what the military has decided to do.

One could object that a military dictatorship would censor the press. But this has already in large measure been accomplished. The search engine giant Google has announced that it is promoting “authoritative” news content, while it buries links to left-wing sites in search results, almost entirely removing results on Google News for the World Socialist Web Site.

The ever-growing power of the military in the United States is not some accident or fluke stemming from the personality of Donald Trump. Despite being at war for his entire two terms in office, Trump’s Democratic Party predecessor Barack Obama never once went to Congress for authorization to use military force, and he defended his orders for drone assassinations of US citizens as part of the prerogatives of the commander-in-chief.

In the current political furor over the deaths of the soldiers in Niger, the Democrats have not questioned the legality of the deployment of thousands of US troops to Africa, carried out without any public discussion and behind the backs of the population, but instead sought to attack Trump from the right for being insufficiently deferential to the military.

After all, it is the Democrats and newspapers generally aligned with them, particularly the New York Times and the Washington Post, which praised General Kelly, together with fellow generals H. R. McMaster (national security adviser) and James Mattis (secretary of defense) as the “grown-ups” in the White House, with Times columnist Thomas Friedman calling on the generals to “reverse the moral rot that has infected the Trump administration” in the person of the president.

The increasingly dictatorial forms of rule emerging in the United States are the outcome of protracted and deep-rooted processes. Amid levels of social inequality that eclipse even those of the Gilded Age, bourgeois democracy in the US is collapsing, replaced by direct rule by the oligarchy and its partners in the military.

This process has been accelerated through a quarter century of aggressive wars, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which have reached such a pitch that “never-ending war,” in the words of CNN’s Chuck Todd, is the new American reality, presently reaching a higher stage with the looming threat of nuclear war over North Korea.

The move toward dictatorship in the United States, accompanied by the drive to world war, is proceeding at breakneck speed. There is not much time. Workers and young people must mobilize now to oppose it on the basis of a socialist and internationalist program aimed at overthrowing the root cause of war, social inequality and dictatorship—the capitalist system.