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Crossposted with Washingtonsblog.com

Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning are treated as terrorists and criminals in U.S., but elsewhere in the world they are celebrated as heroes in the fight against corruption and global surveillance.
A statue recognising the courage of the three whistleblowers currently stands in Geneva, Switzerland, and the creator of the artwork is urging people to follow their example and “take a stand, because your liberty is at stake.”

Could China be the world’s most democratic nation? An ordinary American with a closed mind would simply ignore these data, not even be puzzled by these persistent findings; but the answer is clearly yes — those countries might be more democratic than is America. A person who isn’t willing to consider that possibility would be merely time-wasting to read any further here.

Another reasonable way to measure democracy is by how low a percentage of the nation’s citizens are in prison. The nation with the world’s highest percentage of its population in prison is the United States. Only tiny Seychelles, whose total population is under 100,000 and which holds other countries’ convicts in its prisons, is technically the worst. U.S. has 693 prisoners per 100,000 population, whereas Seychelles has 799 per 100,000. Second-highest after U.S. was St. Kitts & Nevis, at 607. Third-highest is Turkmenistan, at 583. Fourth-highest, U.S. Virgin Islands, at 542. Fifth-highest, El Salvador, at 541. Sixth-highest, Cuba, 510. Seventh-highest, Guam, 469. Eighth-highest, Russia, 450. None of these countries would, on this measure, be a “democracy,” but (other than Seychelles) the U.S. would be the most dictatorial — a police-state, on this measure, it’s the very worst nation except perhaps Seychelles.

Another reasonable way of measuring whether a nation is a democracy is the degree of trust that its citizens have in their government. The 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer showed that 44% of Russians trust their government, and 33% of Americans trust ours. The highest was the 84% of Chinese who trust theirs. 28 nations were ranked: China was #1, Russia #13, U.S. #21. But could China be the world’s most democratic nation? Of course, it could — not by the same means as some of ‘the democratic’ nations use, but more authentically democratic than they — that’s certainly possible. And, as we now see, important data indicate that it is also true.

Another reasonable way to measure democracy is by the population’s happiness (and another common phrase for the population’s happiness is “the general welfare” of the people). In Gallup’s World Happiness Report 2018, the U.S. ranked #18, Russia #59, and China #86, out of the 156 countries surveyed. The top 5 nations in order were: Finland, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and Switzerland. On the happiness measure, those five, at least, certainly are democracies. Are those five the world’s most democratic nations? And, even if they might not be, the residents in those countries still could be the most fortunateon the planet, because happiness is a goal everywhere. By contrast, democracy is usually viewed as being mainly instrumental toward achieving the public’s happiness. As the sovereignty clause — the opening, the Preamble — in America’s Constitution, says: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” It — the statement of the Constitution’s goals — says nothing about “democracy,” but does mention, as a goal, to “promote the general Welfare,” and that’s just another way of saying, to promote happiness. The sovereignty clause also mentions “Liberty,” “the common defence,” and other things, but nowhere does it even so much as mention “democracy.” But what the sovereignty clause does say that’s the most important thing of all, is its opening seven words, which name what is the sovereign in this country; and, unlike in just about every other legal system, which identifies some god, or some king, as the sovereign, this Constitution was the world’s first which identifies, instead, “We the People of the United States” —- the residents here — as being the sovereign here. And, in line with that sovereignty, the only happiness that it is at all concerned about is “the general Welfare” and “our Posterity.” Repudiation of any aristocracy is thus implicit even in our Constitution’s opening. Perhaps America’s Founders equated disempowerment of the aristocracy as constituting what we today commonly think of as being “democracy.” But if that is what they thought, then this is no longer their country, and this Constitution is no longer America’s Constitution, and that’s just an empirical fact. 

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]ome people would say that a democracy is a nation that trusts its news-media. Trust in Media is the highest, #1, in China, 71%; and is 42% in #15 U.S.; and is 35% in #20 Russia. (A July 2017 Marist pollhowever found that only 30% of Americans trust the media. That’s a stunning 12% lower than the Edelman survey found.) In other words: Chinese people experience that what they encounter in their news-media becomes borne-out in retrospect as having been true, but only half of that percentage of Russians experience this; and U.S. scores nearer to Russia than to China on this matter. Simply based on the facts, Americans shouldn’t trust the nation’s media at all; the trust-level is unrealistically high in America, but the ’news’ media deceive the public to believe otherwise (that Americans trust the media too little, instead of too much). (And, then, to top it off, the major media, which had deceived Americans into invading Iraq in 2003, and invading Libya in 2011, etc., allege that the only media which pump fake ‘news’ are small or ‘alternative’ ones, and that the major ‘news’ media — which clearly did it, when it counted the most and so produced those evil horrendous invasions — don’t do it, at all. That’s the biggest lie, of all, incredibly counter-factual: the lie that the major media aren’t the real and most viciously dangerous problem of fake ‘news’ in America.)

A recent poll of Americans showed that “74% think America is a dictatorship; only 21% think it’s not.” Perhaps Americans are more realistic about the government than about the ‘news’ media.

Although one can reasonably debate the degree to which any nation is a democracy, the United States certainly stands rather low on that factor, and stands well below China, and perhaps is lower than Russia, but none of these countries is among the world’s worst — except, perhaps, the U.S., for its having the highest percentage of its people in prison. The percentage of the residents who are in prison is probably the best single commonly available measure of the extent to which a given nation isn’t a democracy. How could it even conceivably be ‘the land of the free’ if it’s got the world’s highest percentage of its people behind bars? The very idea that America is a democracy is, thus, simply ludicrous — on the basis of the data. And, the U.S. is, furthermore, the only country in the entire world where the hypothesis that the nation is a democracy was scientifically investigated and analyzed — and it was found definitely to be false here.

Consequently, whenever the U.S. Government condemns some other country for its ‘dictatorship’ or for its mistreatment of journalists, a pot is calling a kettle black, the statement is pure propaganda, unless the U.S. Government simultaneously admits that it’s a dictatorship — which the U.S. Government certainly is(the only nation that has been scientifically proven to be a dictatorship).

—

Some people say that Russia cannot possibly be more democratic than is the U.S., because in Russia, investigative journalists and whistleblowers are suppressed if not killed.

Gary Webb was a great American investigative journalist who was shot dead and the ‘news’media slammed and basically smeared him. He had exposed a CIA drug-running operation. His murderer was never identified. The ‘news’media do not honor him.

Phillip Marshal was a great American investigative journalist whose entire family (including himself) was shot dead, and this killing stopped his ongoing deep investigation into the people behind the 9/11 attacks. His murderer(s) was/were never identified. The ‘news’media do not honor him.

The greatest whistleblowers and investigative journalists are treated by the U.S. Government as mega-criminals: prominent examples of this are Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Chelsea Manning. The U.S. Government has now caused Assange to be not only in solitary confinement but held entirely incommunicado, blocked from being able to communicate with the public in any way; his Wikileaks is now incapacitated except as its pre-existing online archive. If that’s not a regime which aspires to spread its dictatorship throughout all countries, then what is? How appropriate, then, is it, that this same Government places the world’s highest percentage of its own citizens into prison? And how appropriate is it that this Government furthermore proclaims itself to be the world’s model of ‘democracy’?

JFK (John Fitzgerald Kennedy) was a U.S. President who started turning against the military-industrial complex and was shot dead in a conspiracy in which Lee Harvey Oswald — someone who might have been a trigger-man in the assassination — got framed for the entire operation, as a ‘lone gunman’.

MLK (Martin Luther King) was America’s greatest orator and ethical leader, and was hated by the bigoted FBI Director, so got shot dead, and the FBI said that a lone gunman James Earl Ray did it, but MLK’s family and supporters believed that the FBI itself did it, perhaps with other government enforcers being involved.

Of course, there have been similar mysteries in Russia. Anna Politkovskaya was a great investigative journalist in Russia, who got murdered, but after many trials, no one has been convicted for it. And there are other instances (just as there are in America).

Unlike in America, no Russian head-of-state has been assassinated since Tzar Nicholas in 1917, when the communists took over Russia. And unlike JFK, who had the legitimacy of being elected to his post, the Tzar did not. Today’s Russian heads-of-state do have to explain themselves to the public and compete in elections, and none has yet been murdered, such as in the United States.

No scientific study has ever been published regarding whether or not Russia is authentically a democracy, nor of whether China is, but there has been one — and only one — scientific study of whether the U.S. is a democracy; and it established that, definitely, the U.S. is not a democracy. Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter once even had the courage and honesty to say as much, but the myth goes on because the ‘news’ and ‘history’ about the matter continue to lie, so as to spread the myth — instead of to spread the news and the history — regarding this question, about the American Government, and about its stenographic ‘news’ media. For the U.S. Government to pontificate to the world about ‘democracy’ is an atrocity, because the U.S. itself definitely isn’t one. Americans have simply been deceived. And wherever the public have been deceived, democracy is impossible; only ‘democracy’ can result. 

What will it take to bring America to live according to its own self image?

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By Kumaran Ira }   wsws.org

The joint strikes carried out in Syria on Saturday morning by US, British and French forces expose the role of the New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA), which has long supported imperialist intervention in the Middle East. As workers and youth come into struggle against the Macron government in France, the NPA is working to strangle popular opposition to war, so that Macron can launch his missile strikes despite overwhelming popular opposition. This underscores the need for workers and youth to build a movement against war in opposition to these petty-bourgeois, pseudo-left groups.

The pretext provided by the imperialist powers for the bombing was that the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad carried out chemical attacks on April 7 in Douma, the last stronghold of the “rebels” backed by European and American imperialism in eastern Ghouta. This is the latest lie in a long list of pretexts concocted since 2011 by Washington, London and Paris to bring down the Assad regime in support of the Islamist rebels. Without even attempting to provide any evidence for their allegations, the major powers launched strikes that risk provoking open conflict with Russia.

The NPA has unreservedly aligned itself with the lies used to justify the attack on Syria. On Saturday, it wrote: “We call for a rejection of the sordid campaign to cast in doubt the latest criminal chemical attacks of the regime against civilians, men, women and children in Douma, corroborated by substantial evidence from citizens and medical services on the ground.”

At the same time, conscious of the deep popular opposition to war and the reintroduction of compulsory military service, it claimed to oppose the bombing of Syria, from the standpoint that it will not sufficiently harm the Assad regime. “But we condemn without any ambiguity the latest military adventure led by Trump in Syria,” it states, “and the French participation in this bombing campaign, which is aimed at providing the illusion that the Syrian people will now be better protected.”

These statements expose the NPA as a propagandist for imperialist war. To date, the NATO powers have not been able to provide any evidence or coherent details about the accusations against the Assad government. They have provided no credible explanation for why the Assad regime would launch a chemical attack, just as it was on the verge of routing the Islamist militia financed by the US and its allies. But Macron has nonetheless launched attacks against Syria, a country that has not attacked France.

The allegations of Washington, London and Paris have no credibility. The journalist Seymour Hersh exposed that the chemical attacks in Ghouta in 2013, which served as the pretext for Washington’s and Paris’ war threats against Syria at the time, were carried out by Islamist militias supported by Turkey and NATO. At the time, faced with popular opposition and a potential conflict with Moscow, Washington was forced to pull back following the defeat of the British parliamentary vote to authorise war.

The allegations over the events in Douma follow on the heels of a series of provocations cooked up against Russia in the Skripal affair, which has now been completely discredited. For weeks, London, with the support of Washington and Paris, accused Russia of poisoning Sergei and Yulia Skripal, expelling dozens of Russian diplomats stationed in Britain. It has nonetheless become clear that neither the British government nor the United Nations can prove that the chemical agent used against the Skripals originated in Russia.

The NPA’s criticisms of the military strikes are hypocritical; they are aimed at protecting the NPA from the anger of French workers, 70 percent of whom are hostile to the bombing of Syria, according to various online polls. And the organizations to which the NPA is seeking to tie French rail workers and university students striking against Macron’s austerity policies make no effort to conceal their enthusiasm for the military aggression of Macron, Trump and May in Syria.

Hamon

The NPA has called for a broad alliance with forces allied with the Socialist Party (PS), including Benoit Hamon and the Communist Party of France (PCF), against Macron.

Hamon, the 2017 presidential candidate of the PS, called for French attacks against Syria on France Inter. “I think that this crime cannot go unpunished,” he said. “The crime of attacking one’s own population with chemical weapons cannot go unpunished… I am tired of seeing how this dictator, supported by numerous countries, including Russia, continues to massacre his own population, particularly with the use of chemical weapons.”

The Stalinist French Communist Party (PCF) has cynically refused to openly applaud Trump and Macron, in the vein of Hamon. Instead, it called for a stronger legal presentation of the lies used to justify the war, and that the murderous attacks by Trump, Macron and May be part of a more credible diplomatic strategy. PCF General Secretary Pierre Laurent said the support of his party “depends on the conditions in which the operation is carried out,” and that launching attacks without UN backing “is a problem.”

According to Laurent, “it is of course necessary to prevent the use of these chemical weapons, as should already have happened … The entanglement of the actions of different great powers in the region renders the situation extremely concerning. We cannot separate any eventual military action from a political strategy to end the war, because one cannot resolve this situation by such actions alone.”

The pose of opposition of the NPA, PCF and Company to the military strikes is fraudulent. It is aimed at trapping workers and youth engaged in struggle against Macron in a coalition of petty-bourgeois parties who are long time allies of the PS and support imperialist war. These organisations pose an enormous danger not only because of their indifference to the threat of a world war; their support for imperialist wars reveals their hostility to any struggle against Macron’s austerity measures.

Macron has reiterated on numerous occasions that he has no intention of pulling back from his pro-market, anti-working class economic “reforms.” Behind his efforts to destroy the social gains of workers lies the need of French imperialism to finance a military program of €300 billion by 2024, announced this year at the Munich security conference. To obtain the colossal sums of money that the strategists of French imperialism want to spend on the military machine, the ruling elite knows that it must carry through Macron’s austerity measures.

To fight against austerity, however, it is necessary also to oppose imperialist war, including its defenders in the NPA, which represent a privileged, anti-Marxist layer of the upper-middle class.

Their role is a warning that there can be no “reformist” way forward for the class struggles that are erupting against Macron and the NATO governments. Driven by the geopolitical crisis produced by a quarter century of imperialist wars across the Middle East and Eurasia, since the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union, the ruling elite is pushing at any cost to drastically restructure class relations via authoritarian means, in order to permit France to participate in the new imperialist carve-up of the world. And the petty bourgeois of the NPA want to arm the French state in order that it will be able to defend their privileges on the global stage.

The Socialist Equality Party (SEP), the French section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), is opposed to all military escalations and fights for a new political orientation in the working class. The SEP bases itself on the perspective of the ICFI, which provides the necessary socialist strategy to the emerging international anti-war movement of the working class. It warns workers and youth that the supporters of imperialist war will inevitably betray their struggles, and that the only progressive way forward lies in building a revolutionary movement with the aim of taking political power by the working class across Europe.

In this context, the French trade unions’ longstanding support for the war in Syria must be noted. Already in 2012, as the US authorities were admitting that their agents in Syria were Islamists tied to Al Qaeda, the unions close to the NPA and PCA, including the Stalinist General Confederation of Labour (CGT) and the NPA-linked Solidarity union, published a declaration titled, “The French trade unions on the side of the Syrian people.”

In this declaration, they “vigorously condemn the war launched by the Assad regime against the Syrian people,” not the imperialist proxy war against Syria. They demanded that imperialist powers intervening in Syria provide a “plan of action for directly aiding the population.” In other words, they provided an apology for the imperialist intervention in Syria under a “humanitarian” guise.

Their support for the European and American strikes on Syria are a direct continuation of this reactionary effort. It is a sign that workers and youth must urgently take their struggles into their own hands and out of the control of the pro-imperialist bureaucracies. The latter seek only to betray these struggles, and in doing so to prepare ever new escalations of imperialist war.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The author is a geopolitical commenter with wsws.org, a Marxian publication.

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

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Things to ponder

Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

Europe is suffering the tortures of the damned as it struggles with split-personality psychosis.

Here in the center of Western Europe one can tune in Germany’s national public broadcasting networks any day of the week and hear scornful diatribes against Trump, outrage over his withdrawal from the Paris climate accords, shock and anger regarding his threats against our German automobile industry in his incipient trade war, calls for more EU independence and self-sufficiency.

Every Washington Post CIA-funded-Big-Breaking-News-Report about Mueller’s latest move to impeach and bring down the Orange Menace is always the top headline here: “The Washington Post reports that … “ … no mention of Jeff Bezos and his relationship to the CIA. If the Post says Trump is on shaky ground and cruisin’ for a bruisin’, Europe gets excited. They wanted Hillary here, badly.

Europeans knew Hillary. They trusted Hillary. They associated her with that good-looking, smooth-talking young President Barack Obama. Sure, he blew it with the NSA stuff, but nobody cares about that anymore, either here or in the USA. All forgotten. Obama talked a good game on Europe. Polite young man. Went to Harvard.

I want to tell you that there was some serious panicking and freaking out going on here in Europe the morning after election day 2016. Europeans don’t often run around shrieking their fears in public, a cool façade is the preferred mode here, but they did that day, and for many weeks afterward.

They had just spent more than a year sneering and raising their eyebrows and scoffing at the ludicrous orange-cartoon-figure-come-to life, both physically and in print. They had reassured each other and the public in endless columns and debates and editorials that he didn’t have a chance to (first) win the nomination and (then later) to become President. They were already doing a major freak over Brexit. Trump winning was just too much. The sky was falling.

And he has not disappointed them in putting into effect the catalogue of horrors they had anticipated. Pulled out of the Paris Climate Accords. Refused to pay even lip service to gun control (lip service goes a long way here in the EU, actual progress is less important). Continued to flaunt that ridiculous comb-over that looks as though it’s deliberately designed to show his contempt for fashion and good taste. Threatened to pull out of the nuclear treaty with Iran, which is very popular here – and practically the only way in which the EU has ever been willing to go against Israel, otherwise we are World Champion Israel-Ass-Kissers here. Trump ranted against Muslims and foreigners, defended white racists (here we mostly just pretend they don’t exist, although they carried out 1,000 attacks on Muslims last year in Germany alone), created new legal hurdles to immigration. Of course, the EU does all of that last bit with immigrants too, except for the ranting part. One does these things quietly, don’t you see, while simultaneously claiming to care about refugees and wanting to help them.

No-sirree, the new man in the White House is near the bottom on the European Hit Parade of Favorite Americans. What is the dang DEAL with these Americans, how could they elect such a monstrous ambulatory joke. Time to stand up and get independent and show the world that Europe will not sit still for just any old nonsense, most of us highly-progressive and politically conscious Euros agree about that.

Therefore one might think the EU would be ready to go cold turkey from that highly addictive CIA-Neocon Brand Evil Russia Kool-Aid … right?

(extended silence)

Well, uh …  on the other hand … I mean … now let’s not get TOO carried away with this independence business.

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]s a matter of fact, all of these American military bases here in Europe, specifically all of these NATO nuclear weapons here in our allegedly once-again-sovereign Germany (a sovereignty which is often called into question by smartasses peddling conspiracy theories, who assert Germany is still controlled by the USA), make some of us feel a whole lot safer from the wicked Lord Sauron aka/ Vlad the Impaler just a few hundred kilometers to the east.

While the government has agreed in principle to gradually increase German military expenditures to 2% of the gross domestic product – thereby almost doubling military spending – in the coming years, mostly under pressure from the USA, it doesn’t want to get nailed down too firmly to that unofficial commitment. There are other things it would rather use that money for. And as long as the USA maintains its military outposts and missile installations in Europe, EU countries feel as if there’s no big rush.

There is also the fact to consider that NATO already outspends Russia on military matters by 900 billion dollars per year to 60 billion dollars per year. But that imbalance rarely comes into the “aggressive Russia” debate, any more than does the fact that Russia (and China too for that matter) is encircled by US military bases. A real extremist who did not understand Russia’s evil nature might go so far as to say that NO ONE needs to increase military spending, and that if anyone is a threat, it is NATO, in particular its leading nation which has already laid to waste much of the Middle East and overthrown numerous governments around the world – often installing nasty and brutal authoritarian rulers as puppets to do its bidding.

But we Europeans never mention such nuances in our advocacy of a Weltanschauung (“way of looking at the world”) which has to be kept very black and white, good versus evil, if the empire is to function properly. And if we want to keep the USA in Europe, in charge of the nuclear arsenal and continuing to give EU nations the luxury of not having to put any of this to the test, then there must be some terrifying menace to justify having those troops and atomic weapons here. We are very nervous about Trump’s threats to force Europe to stand up on its own, but we fervently hope that in a few years he will disappear and our good old Democrats or more moderate Republicans – yes of course they still exist, they must -- will return to pamper us.

No, for us here in Europe it’s not the USA that is the problem, it’s Trump. As psychotic and bizarre as America is, with its mass shootings and its primitive death penalty, its shocking refusal to enact a reasonable national healthcare program, its police killings of unarmed blacks, its warmongering and overthrowing of foreign governments, its drone massacres of wedding parties, drone massacres and assassinations which we generously allow to be controlled from here on German soil -- we would have happily continued to overlook all of that if the USA had only elected another head of state who pretended to care about those things, or at least put a noble and urbane mask on them. Someone like Obama, like Hillary. The way we here in the EU pretend to have noble values while deporting helpless refugees into war zones, turning them back over to Libyan torturers and slave traders, etc., intoning solemn avowals of “European Democratic Values” all the while. Presidents like Obama, or like Hillary would have been, make it so very much easier to get away with our pretense of innocence. It’s embarrassing having Trump as an ally. It’s painful and frightening too.

It’s like being possessed by a demon.

---

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Big Bully Harvey Weinstein (L) and Big Phony Bill Clinton: Scumbags du jour serving as distractions from the real issues of systematic impoverishment by the elites, and nonstop violence.

Above: top row, known sexual perverts and predators Harvey “Casting Couch” Weinstein, on the left and Bill “Orgy Island” Clinton on the right (http://theduran.com/secret-service-agent-ready-blow-open-bill-clintons-lolita-express-orgy-island-trips/). Our elites cultivate early on susceptible pawns like this (starting in college), who are then promoted, bribed, blackmailed, extorted and when need be, entrapped (Monica Lewinsky) and then used in mainstream propaganda as identity politics poster symbols, to keep the people’s eyes off the fact that they are getting fleeced by their owners – the latter getting richer off the former. Very difficult to accept, but true, which is why average Westerners are in such a mess. Bottom, propaganda Baba Beijing style, inspiring the people to be model citizens. These are what I call the 12 Virtues of Communism, discussed below.

Downloadable SoundCloud podcast (also at the bottom of this page), as well as being syndicated on iTunes and Stitcher Radio(links below):

As chapter two to my last article and podcast (http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2017/11/17/i-can-see-for-miles-in-china-what-do-you-see-from-your-vantage-point-china-rising-radio-sinoland-171117/), here is a comparative vignette that just slaps me in the face. I hope it wakes you up too. Living and working in China is what helps me bring it all into focus. Oftentimes, without an outside reference to compare something to, it’s hard to appreciate its significance.

Three Americans now own more wealth than the bottom 160,000,000 citizens combined (https://www.greanvillepost.com/2017/11/10/three-billionaires-are-wealthier-than-half-the-us-population/). For the world, it’s eight people who have as much wealth as the bottom 3,700,000,000 (https://www.greanvillepost.com/2017/01/22/eight-people-own-as-much-as-half-the-world/). That’s a lot of zeros. This ever-increasing upward vacuuming of Planet Earth’s human and natural resources will not stop, until there is a global revolution for a just and equitable socialist system. Each country must find their path away from psychopathic capitalism, the last two words being a tautology.

It’s the ineluctable logic of capitalism, which Karl Marx wrote about 150 years ago. But, most citizens in North America, Britain, Australia and New Zealand are ignorant of this fact, since his writings are almost nonexistent in libraries and schools (this is a little less true in Western Europe). Marx, Lenin and Mao were also right: unless Americans and eventually the rest of Eurangloland mobilize, in a few years, it will be 180 million in the righthand column, then 200 million in the US and on and on. Europe is catching up fast. Concurrently, it will be four billion, four and a half billion, etc., for all of humanity. How long can this continue? It’s a serious question worthy of your contemplation and discussion.

Happily, you can leave China out of this abysmal Western house of horrors. Baba Beijing is keenly aware of what’s going on in the US, with the UK hot in America’s tracks (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6huZuOKOPf0), and Europe about a generation behind, on its copycat treadmill to a dystopian future (https://www.greanvillepost.com/2017/11/04/forced-recession-as-a-tool-of-social-war-against-the-99/). I’ve talked to a number of Communist Party of China (CPC) officials. They lose sleep over something like this happening in Sinoland, which is why they have an official target of bringing the country’s GINI index (http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/gini-index.html) to below 0.40 and trending downward. I wrote about this in Book #3 of The China Trilogy (http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2017/05/19/the-china-trilogy/), China Is Communist, Dammit! Dawn of the Red Dynasty (https://www.amazon.com/China-Communist-Dammit-Dawn-Dynasty/dp/6027354380/), analyzing historical and global trends. President Xi Jinping even talked about the GINI index in his recent 19^th Party Congress speech (http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2017/10/29/october-18th-2017-is-world-cd-day-when-baba-beijing-declared-war-on-western-capitalism-china-rising-radio-sinoland-171029/).

How many other countries have brought 800 million people out of poverty, since 1949? How many Western nations are adding 10,000 citizens to its middle class every day? Or in reality, capitalist countries are sucking how many thousands of their citizens out of the middle class and down into poverty on a daily basis? How many other governments besides China’s are obsessed about the GINI index and follow through, by passing laws and policies to lower it? How many other world leaders are fanatical about not just reducing, but eliminating poverty in their countries, and actually doing so in record time?

China’s communist-socialist leaders proverbially keep these goals taped to their bathroom mirrors for motivation every morning, when they wake up. Then they go to work for their people. Mao Zedong said it over and over (http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2017/09/12/mao-zedong-died-this-day-in-1976-china-rising-radio-sinoland-170909/and http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2017/10/01/chinas-communist-liberation-on-october-1st-1949-changed-the-world-forever-china-rising-radio-sinoland-171001/), Xi Jinping is saying it and every other Chinese leader in between chanted,

Serve the People.

Below is a screenshot that Joseph Lee, hailing from Canada posted on the China Rising Radio Sinoland Wechat forum. It is a graph from a Taiwanese TV show called 57 Gold Money Explosion. It shows the change in income of the US’s richest 10% versus the bottom 90%, from 1949 to 2012. I shouldn’t have to tell you which group is blue and which is the red.

Notice that the West’s red owners have been getting richer since 1949, immediately after World War II and you blue peasants increasingly poorer ever since. Sorry to break it to you, but nothing’s changed for 500 years of Western colonial imperialism. The elites regurgitate just enough crumbs to keep the masses from revolting and when the downtrodden finally get to cut off a few diamond bedecked heads, the surviving elites hand out some extra tidbits for a generation, then start to claw it all back and still more. Bingo. Your postwar economic history lesson in a nutshell.

Do you see the precipitous drop for the poor blues, 1982-1990? That was US President Ronald Reagan’s glorious “everybody is going to get rich” trickledown tax cut on the wealthy, from 70% to 28%. It was 63-94% from 1932-1964 and 70% from then until 1982. Our owners still owned us, drank champagne and ate caviar on their yachts, but it’s never enough for capitalists. They want it all. See how it went up a little 1991-2000? That’s when phony liberal triangulator US President Bill Clinton raised it to 36-39.6% (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_history_of_the_United_States), but gave Wall Street the license to rape the people and steal their already diminishing wealth, by signing into law NAFTA in 1993, WTO in 1994 and repealing 1933’s Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. Then came US Presidents George “Bushy Boy” and Barracks O-Bomb-A, who really put capitalism’s steel toed jackboot on the citizens’ throats, by lowering the tax rates again, while hyperventilating Clinton’s slashing of social, education, medical and other life sustaining safety nets for the poor and middle class. Predictably, starting about 2009, Americans went into negative income growth. Remember Margaret Thatcher’s elitist mantra?

There is no alternative.

Abbreviated TINA, it means austerity, deprivation and impoverishment for low income and working people. Then our owners use their own written tax laws and social budget cuts to transfer these poor suckers’ wealth to millionaires and billionaires. Nice work if you can get it and are a venal psychopath.

This Taiwanese TV program was arguing that US President Donald Trump’s new, proposed windfall tax cuts on the super-rich will not benefit Joe and Jane Sixpack. Well, DUH! But, this law will likely pass, as well as all other Western austerity-for-the-poor “legislation”, because capitalists, or the elites if you still can’t bring yourself to say the word, always – always – end up subsuming their “electoral” systems and governments to their control and manipulation. Be sure and tell Westerners that Marx, Lenin and Mao told them so, since they have a hard time finding their books. Colonialism, capitalism and the Industrial Revolution all coalesced, 15^th-20^th centuries and now with globalization, humanity’s destruction is increasing exponentially.

In the graph above, this is only for income. If you calculated net capital wealth (assets like real estate, stocks, bonds, precious metals, commodities, cash in the bank, creditor loans, etc., less debt), this graph would be even more grotesquely skewed in favor of the 10%. You’d have to find the 90%’s wealth with a magnifying glass (http://thedailycoin.org/2017/11/13/millions-upon-millions-of-americans-have-negative-wealth/). It’s the 90% who are neck deep in debt to the 10%. This dynamic hasn’t changed in thousands of years either. Recall Jesus Christ courageously overturning the bankers’ tables in the temples, shortly before he was killed. Mohammed declared that banks could not charge interest on loans. Usury is an age old elitist phenomenon.

Negative income starting in 2009 means the dystopian Hunger Games are now on Americans’ horizon. In George Orwell’s 1984, it was called Oceania. Similar plots and backdrops. Same difference. If Americans and Westerners don’t start speaking truth to imperial power, they and their children are staring at a future in advanced capitalist hell.

The West is declining into failed capitalist states, joining so many countries already suffering under empire’s tyranny, across the Americas, Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Oceana. Pictured above is an outtake from the Hunger Games movies. Hell on Earth, streaming live from the silver screen, right into your lives.

In the meantime, China’s 1,370,000,000 citizens are already living a positive vision of shared justice and equality. The future is bright, which is why it’s such a pleasure to live here. It called the communist-socialist Chinese Dream and it’s working for the 90% and the 10%. President Xi also stated in his 19^th Congress speech that China’s 10% will be expected to give back more to the rest of society, since it is after all, that very communist-socialist economic system which allowed them to get so rich in the first place.

China’s 10% wealthy class can look forward to a big haircut. In fact, it is already happening. Talk about following through on your promises to the people. A mere 24 hours after the conclusion of China’s 19^th Party Congress, it was announced that the days of rampant speculation and profiteering in the country’s overheated property market are over, as spelled out in this article (http://www.chinatimes.com/cn/newspapers/20171025000903-260301). Thanks to author Wei Ling Chua for sending this to me (https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=wei+ling+chua). It’s in Chinese, so use an online translator as needed.

Baba Beijing will undoubtedly use the world’s largest number of fastest super computers (https://www.top500.org/news/china-pulls-ahead-of-us-in-latest-top500-list/), big data applications (http://knowledge.ckgsb.edu.cn/2015/07/28/technology/the-power-of-big-data-in-china/), artificial intelligence (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/10/13/china-has-now-eclipsed-us-in-ai-research/) and other information tools to connect the dots between speculators’ and their straw men’s home and apartment purchases across the entire country. Way too much residential property is sitting empty in China, just waiting for price appreciation to make a killing in the process. It’s irrational because naked speculation is capitalism on methamphetamine and Baba Beijing is fed up. This, while the government is building millions of low income and subsidized housing for those in need. It wants to close this loop between the people’s needs and this ridiculous capitalist bubble going on in residential property. Another tautology: capitalist bubble. Other laws and targeted taxes are surely going to hit China’s privileged class.

Baba Beijing says it’s time to eradicate poverty and drop that GINI index way down. It takes progressive tax laws, hardnosed regulations and lifesaving social safety nets to make these dreams come true. I can hear the CPC sharpening its collective sheep shears right now.

 BBBZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n the capitalist West, above is shown a middle-class citizen. In communist-socialist China, it’s a rich person. And that, my friend, makes all the difference.

This, while the West’s capitalist owners have brainwashed their vassal citizens with centuries of fake news, divisive identity and race politics, bogus statistics, rigged markets, propaganda, false flags, imperial wars and conquest,

The 10%: It is our divine right that we shear you miserable deplorables like sheep. Get over here right now, boy!

 The 90%: Yessuh, Massa. Whatever you say, Boss Man! I can get a fourth part time job and live in my car. It’s the least I can do. I can’t afford to see a doctor or buy medicine anyway. God Bless America! We’re Number One!

It is going to continue to spiral up for the former and down for the latter, unless Americans in particular and Westerners in general start taking action. But, they have to wake up from their propaganda hypnosis in order to do so.

All of this sexual assault crap saturating the mainstream Western media recently is just more imperial pixy dust to blind the people, while their owners continue to fleece them. It is very methodical, orchestrated and contrived brainwashing. Between all the absurd “mass murder” false flags, what was the last eyewash? Oh yeah, I almost forgot. Last month, it was gender identity. And the month before that it was Russiagate. And the month before that it was Hillarygate. And the month before that it was gay marriage. And the month before that it was Wikigate and unisex-toiletgate, abortiongate, red state-blue state-itis, gun-control-osis, this fake terrorist and that imaginary shooter and -gate…and -gate…and… mark my word, in December, they’ll launch that hoary seasonal chestnut,

Dreaded Others are trying to take Christmas away from us.

As always, powerful undercurrents of racism and xenophobia are used to keep this poisonous propaganda pot boiling noxious hatred and fear in the public consciousness (https://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/patrick-j-buchanan/unserious-nation).

Give me China’s wall to wall communist-socialist propaganda, which is everywhere I turn. It is positive and uplifting, meant to inspire the citizens to lead better lives, practicing noble ideals like democracy, harmony, friendship, justice, equality, hard work and rule of law. These are seven of what I call the 12 Virtues of Communism. Officially, they are called the Core Socialist Values. The other five are patriotism, prosperity, trust, freedom and civilization. Imagine living in a society where the government, media and education promote high-minded citizenship. I do.

Frank Scott brilliantly satirized the West’s Three Card Monty “propaganda brainwash scam playbook” (https://www.greanvillepost.com/2017/11/16/bulletin-from-the-corporate-fake-news-internet-toilet/). His reference to Jesus Christ is very apropos. For millennia, the elites have been perfecting this shell game into a scientific artform. Mr. Scott’s last line about “the next lawsuit” is right on target for the upcoming pixy dust propaganda “scandal” campaign, with a “mass shooting” false flag or two thrown in to keep the bejeezuz scared out of the masses,

Be fearful, be very, very fearful, because they are EVERYWHERE!

How much longer will Western citizens let their faces be throttled into the muck, how much more dignity will they have to lose, before they snap, and with inspiration from Fannie Lou Hamer (http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/fannie-lou-hamer) shout out,

I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired and I’m not going to take it anymore. Enough is enough!

It is a question for the ages and the elites, pumping out blinding clouds of preposterous false flags and propaganda, are working overtime to keep it from being answered. All of this is thoroughly discussed in fascinating detail in Book #2 of The China Trilogy, China Rising-Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations (https://ganxy.com/i/113798/jeff-j-brown/china-rising-capitalist-roads-socialist-destinations). Learn how the world really works.

The great Canadian rock group, Guess Who had a worthy riposte to this age old question, in their acerbic putdown of capitalism’s holy avatar, the United States, which they made into a female allegory in 1970’s American Woman. There is a great studio cut and a gritty live version on offer below. Somewhere between the studio and the stage, lead singer Burton Cummings got a different kind of haircut, than the one Baba Beijing is giving its rich Chinese.

Enjoy listening, reflect and then hopefully have the courage to discuss…

Or better yet, buy one of Jeff’s books offered below.

ABOUT JEFF BROWN

Punto Press released China Rising - Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations (2016); and for Badak Merah, Jeff authored China Is Communist, Dammit! – Dawn of the Red Dynasty (2017).

The Greanville Post, where he keeps a column, Dispatch from Beijing. He also writes a column for The Saker, called the Moscow-Beijing Express. Jeff interviews and podcasts on his own program, China Rising Radio Sinoland, which is also available on SoundCloud, YouTube, Stitcher Radio and iTunes.
In China, he has been a speaker at TEDx, the Bookworm and Capital M Literary Festivals, the Hutong, as well as being featured in an 18-part series of interviews on Radio Beijing AM774, with former BBC journalist, Bruce Connolly. He has guest lectured at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences and various international schools and universities. Jeff grew up in the heartland of the United States, Oklahoma, much of it on a family farm, and graduated from Oklahoma State University. He went to Brazil while in graduate school at Purdue University, to seek his fortune, which whetted his appetite for traveling the globe. This helped inspire him to be a Peace Corps Volunteer in Tunisia in 1980 and he lived and worked in Africa, the Middle East, China and Europe for the next 21 years. All the while, he mastered Portuguese, Arabic, French and Mandarin, while traveling to over 85 countries. He then returned to America for nine years, whereupon he moved back to China in 2010. He lives in China with his wife. Jeff is a dual national French-American, being a member of the Communist Party of France (PCF) and the International Workers of the World (IWW).

Jeff can be reached at China Rising, jeff@brownlanglois.com, Facebook, Twitter and Wechat/Whatsapp: +86-13823544196.

 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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