The Two 500 lb. Gorillas in the Room

BE SURE TO PASS THESE ARTICLES TO FRIENDS AND KIN. A LOT DEPENDS ON THIS. DO YOUR PART.

                             

The main challenge might turn out to be how to keep even small capitalists from growing and corroding the socialist ethos of the new egalitarian society.


[dropcap]I [/dropcap]don't know about you out there, but whenever I drive around my city and surrounding area of perhaps 250k people, I notice the increased congestion and near crazy drivers. It keeps getting worse and some of the blame has to be pointed at the uncertainty of our times. You don't have to be an accounting genius or a historical scholar to realize when you're on the receiving end of the shaft. The facts are out there, even though the embedded mainstream media does its best to keep them from you. We live in an empire whereupon over half of our hard earned federal tax money goes down the rabbit hole of military spending. That's the first gorilla in the room. It sits there smiling at you, because it knows that its appetite is being satisfied... as your needed safety net is shredded to bits. How many out there understand that this first gorilla needs over $ 700 billion each and every year? Some researchers have that figure at a cool trillion dollars. Imagine if even a quarter of that money went to establish a National Health Service to dwarf even the one the Brits have had for decades? Imagine going to any doctor you wanted and having any surgery you needed , along with saving your teeth with comprehensive dental care. With $ 180 billion going into that kitty, imagine how little it would cost you and me to pay for such care? Oh no, the gorilla is growling and pounding his giant paws!

The second gorilla is also very content now. He knows that his super rich existence is safe, because Uncle Sam is in his pocket. How many of you realize that the super rich had a top federal tax bracket of 90% to deal with in the 50s and 60s? During the 1970s the top bracket never went below 70%. In 1981, under Reagan, the top rate dropped to 50%. Now it is at 37% for incomes over $ 400,000 +. That does not mean that anyone actually pays that amount. No, with a good accountant and plenty of deductions, even multi millionaire Mitt Romney acknowledged that he paid at around 15%. Get it? Plus the fact that someone earning , let us say $ 500k a year, is put in the same bracket as a Romney or a Bill Gates. Thus, the mega millionaire and billionaire gorilla are happier than a pig in ****. Meanwhile, back at the ( prison ) ranch you and me and all the millions of working stiffs out there ( who make up most of the 99+ % ) have to subsidize this government spending with our sweat and tears ( maybe some blood added to the mix?). Every dollar we earn is taxed at the Payroll Tax rate of over 7.5 % , the same for what the super rich must contribute . Plus, the social security tax stops at incomes of $ 128k a year. So, the Fat Cats and wannabee Fat Cats can earn ' the sky's the limit' and are only responsible for $ 128k of income. Imagine if that ceiling was extended all the way up to the sky, how much added revenue our Treasury would have? This could be used  to secure and expand that safety net. Another idea is to create a ' Mega Millionaire Flat Surtax ' of let us say 50% of any income over one million dollars a year, leaving the first million to be taxed at the current rate. This would include bonuses and all stock and bond income as soon as either is cashed in. Translated: Jeff Bezos , a multi billionaire, only makes less than $ 100k a year in salary. His stock is worth billions! So, when Jeff one day decides to cash in or transfer his holdings to someone else, the flat surtax kicks in.



What could occur if our nation was a mix of socialism and capitalism? Well, all major industries that are vital to the public's health and well being would be nationalized. Imagine if Banking, Energy, Pharma, Health care, Defense, Real Estate were owned and operated by the citizens through local and federal government. No more excess profits from our taxes going for mortgages, residential and commercial real estate rentals, doctor visits and medicines, home heating and electric, surgeries, dental care, weapons systems and military needs... all working at non profit or low profit. Socialism and ' Adam Smith capitalism' would see a nurturing of Main Street small businesses. It can happen if first we can get  rid of those two smelly 500 lb. gorillas! Imagine for a minute if all small businesses with less than 100 employees ( for argument sake ) had a moratorium on the Payroll Tax contributions from both employee and employer for the first $ 20k of employee wages... with companies over 100 employees just having the moratorium on employee contributions. Think how A) $ 1500-$ 1600 a year tax free  can be useful for the worker and his or her boss; and B) this would get rid of most of the ' off the books ' employment that many Mom and Pop businesses are forced to utilize to stay above water. Ditto for the workers.

With our own government running the weapons and military equipment industries, the trumpet for more phony wars and occupations would be muffled a great deal. All those private Pentagon influenced lobbyists would need to go out and get a real job! We could use that money wasted on the profits of the few to be used as I mentioned above. Think about that. And with local community nonprofit mortgage banks, imagine how many current renters would be able to afford a home or apartment of their own... at rates that only translate into overhead costs. You want real economic stimulus, well with more new homes and apartments needed, the housing and materials market would be overflowing with energy... and plenty of needed jobs.

Who needs the super rich? I don't. Do you?

PA Farruggio

August 2018

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
 Philip A Farruggio is a son and grandson of Brooklyn, New York, longshoremen. He has been a freelance columnist since 2001, with more than 300 of his essays posted, besides The Greanville Post, on sites like Consortium News, Information Clearing House,  Global Research, Nation of Change, World News Trust, Op-Ed News, Dissident Voice, Counterpunch, Activist Post, Sleuth Journal, Truthout and many others. His blog can be read in full on World News Trust., where he writes a great deal about the need to cut military spending drastically and send the savings back to save our cities. Philip has an internet interview show, "It's the Empire... Stupid" with producer Chuck Gregory, and can be reached at paf1222@bellsouth.net


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The Russian Peace Threat examines Russophobia, American Exceptionalism and other urgent topics

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

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all. Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report




BOOKS THAT MATTER—The Russian Peace Threat examines Russophobia, American Exceptionalism and other urgent topics

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON TO FRIENDS, WORKMATES, AND KIN.

Punto Press, a publishing house affiliated with The Greanville Post, has just published a much awaited history/memoir by Ron Ridenour, an anti-imperialist fighter, radical journalist, and author whose uncompromising trajectory spans six decades and three continents, with first-hand experiences in Cuba, Nicaragua, Europe and naturally the country of his birth, the United States. A life spent struggling for justice and peace is a life morally well lived. In The Russian Peace Threat—Pentagon on Alert, whose focus is the century-old tug of war between two deeply antithetical societies, the US and Russia, Ridenour has not only provided activists and the public at large a dependable and compelling history that is aimed at dissolving the thick layers of disinformation and ignorance still keeping the two nations apart, but a wealth of details and insights seldom found in comparable works, written by a man who does not pretend to a non-existent "objectivity" but simple, liberating truth. The chapter presented below tackles a supremely important subject, American exceptionalism, the fount of many evils in our modern world. Since this is a peculiar American phenomenon, it is incumbent upon Americans to learn what it is, and how it affects their lives and the lives of countless people around the world. It is a critical step in humanity's struggle to move this planet toward a far more humane and just order.  —PG

THE RUSSIAN PEACE THREAT
CHAPTER 19
American Exceptionalism

 

AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM IS an ideology in itself. It holds that “America” is unique among all countries for being a “land of opportunities”. Americans are unique among all peoples for their ideals of democracy, liberty, personal freedom, individualism— that everyone who works hard regardless of roots or class can become rich and even become a president—everyone who is white and male, that is. That last caveat was the “exception to the rule” of American Exceptionalism until the 20th century when, first women and later black people could officially be equal, and could occupy the White House built by African slaves. (1)

French political scientist and historian Alexis de Tocqueville was the first writer to describe the country as “exceptional” in his book, Democracy in America (1835).

American Exceptionalism embraces Manifest Destiny—the belief that it is Americans’ destiny to expand their “exceptional” qualities first throughout the Americas, in mid-19th century, and later to the whole world—spreading the good word with sword and movies. Many believe Americans are chosen by God to civilize the world, to bring the world its democracy. The first war fought with “god on its side” was against Mexico (chapter 18).

This superior view of America’s place in the world was already codified in 1823 with the Monroe Doctrine, named after President James Monroe’s foreign policy. First it warned Europe that Latin America was to come under United States doctrine while Europe could keep its other colonies.

Abraham Lincoln stated in the Gettysburg address (1863) that Americans have a duty to ensure that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” got interpreted to mean it is Americans’ mission to extend their superiority over other nations.

Many presidents took up the term American Exceptionalism in their wars, among them: Ulysses Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.


Spreading democracy to Vietnam.

While American Exceptionalism does not apply only to one religion or ethnic group (in later years blacks could be included), it is akin to what many Jews believe of themselves as being God’s “chosen people”, entitled to the Palestinian “promised land...of milk and honey” at the expense of the Arab peoples. U.S. manifest destiny promoters accept this postulate as it aids their drive for Middle Eastern oil—so much so that for the only time in history, it looked the other way when another state attacked it. The survivors of the USS Liberty know this first hand after Israel bombed their ship for hours and killed 34 American sailors. ( http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/ussliberty.html )

The actual phrase American Exceptionalism may have originated in the Soviet regime of Joseph Stalin. He condemned many American Communists, including some leaders, who suggested that the U.S. was impervious to communist ideals, that American workers were “exceptional” because there were no rigid class distinctions, and they would not embrace a socialist revolution. With minor exceptions few workers have, in fact, embraced the classic Marxist concepts of the need for class struggle and socialist revolution.

Why is that? Colleague Gaither Stewart writes in “The Greanville Post”, October 2, 2017:

“In a great dialectic the survival needs of the bourgeoisie generate the resistance that can ultimately crush it—the resistance that according to Marxist theory will crush it someday. These days, there for everyone to see, for everyone to feel, is the spreading sense of unease marking its successive economic- financial crises point to the eventual demise of bourgeois, bandit capitalism.

So why has it not already happened, one must wonder? Why hasn’t it collapsed long ago? ough the bourgeoisie—capitalist class— is small and the proletariat wage earners an overwhelming majority, why don’t the exploited classes rebel and rebel, revolt and revolt, again and again? Why not? e reason is clear: the exploited classes are not only victims. ey are also accomplices—half victim, half accomplice. e historical paradox! e ruling class counts on this dichotomy to maintain the system. Divide and rule. Meritocracy. Rewards for obedience. Two cars and bigger houses for staying in line. A system based on money, domination, pervasive indoctrination of Orwellian proportions, and fear. Religion too, and FEAR. Fear of fear. Fear of change. Fear, fear, fear. A fearful people is an obedient people.”  (https://www.greanvillepost.com/2017/10/02/definitions-the-bourgeoisie/ )

I agree with Stewart and add that the U.S. capitalist class can afford to give a bit more to many of its homeland exploited as the capitalists exploit workers in “third world” countries all the more. They create false consciousness through the divide and conquer rule, and by instilling fear.

American Exceptionalism works best on Americans when they convince themselves to believe the ruler’s lies thereby maintaining their ignorance. They feel safe by refusing to see the truth, by accepting the rules for fear of losing their jobs, fear of being outcast by friends and family, fear of being jailed or even killed if they decide to seek the truth and then act upon it. at is what stands behind a lot of America’s racist and genocidal violence perpetrated by the white working class clothed in overalls or military uniforms under the orders of the ruling elite.

My editor, Patrice Greanville, a onetime academic and lifelong media and social critic, with a multicultural background in Europe and Latin America, has also found American Exceptionalism a compelling phenomenon. In correspondence with me, he offers some thoughts on why so many Americans may have come to believe they are superior to other peoples and all other countries. The material below is excerpted from a monograph in preparation:

American exceptionalism is one of those peculiarities that make the U.S. such an exasperating enigma to so many people around the world. Exceptionalism, per se, is just one form of chauvinism, itself an offshoot of tribalism, a recognition that humans are (and feel) divided by real or imagined differences, and that many tend to feel superior to others.

Just about every country under the sun today—big and small, old and young— is chauvinist in some way. Bolivia and Chile, I know for a fact, are chauvinist, and so is Brazil and France, of course, and Britain, and Italy—as anyone attending an international soccer match can attest—is in a class by itself. Russia, naturally, to some extent, shares this trait, too, and even China and India, both ancient, foundational civilisations noted for their inner balance and firm identities, also show instances of national vanity. The Germans even had a national anthem once proclaiming to be “uber alles”—it doesn’t get more explicit than that. Little Togo is probably chauvinist in its own peculiar way. So “exceptionalism” is not that rare at all.

But, there are degrees of chauvinism among nations, like differences in temperament, in narcissism, and these differences can have serious consequences. In that sense—as shown by recent polls—US chauvinism is very pervasive. It’s chauvinism on steroids—insistent, intrusive, obnoxious, and even devious.

And these are just what we might call its “mundane” characteristics, where it most resembles other cases of acute national self-approval. The problem is that narcissism at the national level is no less toxic a personality disorder than at the individual level. And when this trait defines the character of a reality-averse, often petulant jejune superpower, US exceptionalism really becomes a threat to everything alive on the face of this planet. How did this monstrous deformation come to occupy the center of US political life, to be seen as a “foundational belief ” with many of the accoutrements of a de facto religion? I say religion because religions are not supposed to be questioned in their logic or factuality.

A closer look at US exceptionalism begins to give the game away. It finds its claims false or undistinguished and its uses malignant: The ideal mask for modern US imperialism, immunising it, at least in the eyes of the vastly disinformed home populace, against any and all possible charges of impure intent and wanton criminality. But the exceptionalist myth, an organism comprised of subsidiary mythologies, goes even further: wrapped in its customary sanctimoniousness, it grants the ruling plutocrats unlimited access to the blood, muscle and treasure of most ordinary Americans, while also proclaiming with the audacity of a shameless mountebank the right of the United States to be acknowledged as the world’s natural leader, the “indispensable nation” under God.

Casual observers might think the rise of exceptionalism was largely spontaneous: a nation of immigrants—the losers fleeing Europe’s brutal class wars—showing, rather compulsively, their eternal gratitude to the new land of opportunity. But they would be mistaken. Nothing with real power consequences is ever that accidental or left to chance in America, especially when it has been found by the ruling orders to be an extremely useful tool in the management of their subject population. To paraphrase media analyst pioneer Alex Carey, the American system of pseudo democracy saw in exceptionalism’s multifaceted manifestations another terrific instrument to “take the risk out of democracy,” something the Founding Fathers themselves had been keenly interested in and maneuvered to implement. ( They mostly succeeded.). In a way, the immigrants’ naive vision of America gave the expansionist wing of the US ruling class, the folks who had embraced Manifest Destiny with a passion, and already stolen half of Mexico by mid 19th century, a shot in the arm, the ultimate seal of approval.

John Gerassi, a noted Latin Americanist and political scientist had little trouble puncturing the conceits of US exceptionalism, and by extension its devilish spawn, US foreign policy, a criminal enterprise, with rare lapses, almost from inception. Speaking about Manifest Destiny, something Bolivar and Marti also warned us about, he states:

“That has been our policy in Latin America. It began in recognizable manner in 1823 with President Monroe’s declaration warning non-hemisphere nations to stay out of the American continent. Because of its rhetoric, America’s liberal historians interpreted the Monroe Doctrine as a generous, even altruistic declaration on the part of the United States to protect its weaker neighbors to the south. To those neighbors, however, that doctrine asserted America’s ambitions: it said, in effect, Europeans stay out of Latin America because it belongs to the United States. A liberal, but not an American, Salvador de Madariaga, once explained its hold on Americans:

foreign policy.’”  (Violence, Revolution, and Structural Change in Latin America, https://www.greanvillepost.com/2018/02/21/ violence-revolution-and-structural-change-in-latin-america/).

As promulgated by its national identity myth, America is good, was born good, and can only do good. We have an obligation to share our good with other nations. It follows that if the immaculate conception defines our highly moral foreign policy, our similarly excellent economic system—capitalism—or “free enterprise” if you like—could and must define “americanness”, what to be an American, a truly free individual, really means, not to mention the onetime much envied “American Way of Life.”

For only in the US to be against capitalism is also to be “un-American”, a suspect in patriotic virtue, an illogical and absurd construct that no one seems to notice, let alone oppose, due to the sheer enforced ubiquity of the concept due to nonstop propaganda legitimating it. In Italy, Germany, Mexico, France, or even England, where capitalism first matured, the idea of calling, say, a British communist “anti-British” or an Italian socialist “anti-Italian”, would sound odd if not downright laughable. But not here. How come?

existence. For—to the misery of the world—the US ruling class has learned to use this ideology adroitly for conquest and subversion abroad and pacification at home.

Empires, however, especially compulsory hegemonists like the U.S., do not do well in holy matrimony with genuine democracies. One tends to exclude and cancel the other. In the U.S., with a very weak or pretend democracy, this organic tension does not really exist, although the task of keeping appearances is becoming increasingly challenging to all the main parties involved. The fact is that Americans now live in a violent, lawless empire, not a regular nation, the US homeland merely serving as the outward carapace for the business of the transnational capitalist hegemon, whose sole object is to advance and defend the interests of the global plutocracy, of which the US branch is (still) the undisputed leader.

This is is of course a fraud of colossal proportions, especially for trusting souls stuck on Civics 101, but one which the propaganda system is still managing to keep afloat. Fractures on the bubble’s wall are finally starting to appear. As certified now even by Ivy League political scientists, the US is only a make-believe democracy. With the core unit of capitalism, the corporation, as the dominant social engine, the whole nation’s dynamic issues from a hierarchic tyranny.

An article by investigative historian Eric Zuesse confirms this heretical finding:

“A study, to appear in the Fall 2014 issue of the academic journal Perspectives on Politics, finds that the U.S. is no democracy, but instead an oligarchy, meaning profoundly corrupt, so that the answer to the study’s opening question, ‘Who governs? Who really rules?’ in this country, is: “Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in previous studies for theories of majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts. Americans do enjoy many features central to [formal, not substantive] democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But, they go on to say, 

“America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened” by the findings in this, the frst-ever comprehensive scientific study of the subject, which shows that there is instead ‘“the nearly total failure of ‘median voter’ and other Majoritarian Electoral Democracy theories [of America]. When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

To put it short: the United States is no democracy, but actually an oligarchy. The authors of this historically important study are Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, and their article is titled ‘Testing eories of American Politics.’ The authors clarify that the data available are probably under-representing the actual extent of control of the U.S. by the super-rich.” (See “US Is an Oligarchy Not a Democracy, says Scientific Study”, by Eric Zuesse, Common Dreams, April 14, 2014 (https://www.commondreams.org/views/ 2014/04/14/us-oligarchy-not-democracy-says-scientific-study).

While Gilens and Page document the long known fact that the super rich are no friends of democracy, they are coy in naming capitalism as the system that makes the rise of tycoons inevitable.

But enormous wealth concentration has other highly toxic effects in America. The grotesque inequality and non-existence of actual governing power by the masses at home has been the hidden counterpart to the brutal imperialistic regime abroad implemented by the native elites, something to which hundreds of millions of people in scores of nations, large and small, can attest. In this manner, protected by its “exceptionalist” propaganda endowing it with axiomatic, unerring, moral superiority, and (as tirelessly proclaimed by its ruling class) charged with the “sacred duty” to carry “freedom and democracy” to all corners of the planet, the US has been able to lead a sordid double life for almost 200 years: arguably mostly Dr Jekyll at home, murderous meddlesome Mr Hyde across the globe.

Some readers no doubt will argue at this point that it was capitalism that gave America the distinction of being the first nation to spawn a large, affluent middle class, with many of its members living as well or better than their social superiors in the old world.

While this is true in the narrow sense, the phenomenon was largely a historical accident not inherent in capitalism. It was war spending—a form of military Keynesianism—that rescued America from a still debilitating Great Depression. The timing of modern era’s European wars to divide the world’s “colonial spoils”, also serendipitous, presented America with extremely fortunate opportunities to develop its industrial might and political clout. Indeed except for self-inflicted wounds such as the Civil War the U.S. has enjoyed uninterrupted peace in its own homeland for over three centuries thanks to its exquisite geostrategic location, making it a virtual island continent flanked by two gigantic oceans and two weak powers, one an easy target for land grabs, Mexico, the other—Canada—a satellite of a declining empire almost from inception. Thus, by 1945 America stood as the sole world superpower with both its population and industrial infrastructure virtually intact, and in a state of readiness to flood the world with its cornucopia of goods, all of which allowed labor to negotiate better terms and capitalists to grant them, thereby laying the groundwork for the age of affluence that characterised the “golden years” of US capitalism.

Add to this the infusion of cheap labor for many generations via mass immigration due to the deplorable European and other old world class systems, coupled with another great accident, having the best topsoil in the world, and you get the makings of a veritable miracle in US agriculture: the most productive, even without its high quotient of early mechanization.

Thus, when we compare Russian/Soviet and U.S. agricultural output, the “fix was in”, so to speak. Besides being poor, in turmoil, with its underdeveloped infrastructure in shambles for a long time due to war wounds, and encircled by enemies, Russians had to contend with one of the hardest lands to cultivate, a lot of it permafrost. Yes, the USSR/Russia territory is big, 11 time zones, but a lot of that is essentially not very fertile. This advantage which was paraded as a triumph of capitalism over socialism was again, when examined, based on serendipity, an accident of nature. Virtually all the conceits of the “indispensable nation” to justify its sociopathic imperialist trajectory are grounded in bunk. No wonder that historical truth is persona non grata in America.

It should be clear by now that the main purpose of cultivating the exceptionalist myth is to bolster the fortunes of the global capitalist elites, with the Americans in the vanguard, primus inter pares. This prompts a final question: Can we envision a strong, capitalist America, not needing its claims to exceptionalism? Yes we can, but that nation would also be inherently diseased, riddled with incurable sociopathies, and ultimately unviable. The short answer to this is because capitalism itself is a highly unstable, inherently amoral, self-liquidating system. As it grows old, passing from its competitive phase to monopoly, and from a deficient democracy to plutocratic imperialism, it generates more and more contradictions that eventually make it insufferable to everything living under its dominion. Capitalism is a terminal condition. It cannot be fixed. (Excerpted from Understanding US Exceptionalism, a monograph in preparation, P. Greanville, 2018).


[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hat the Yankees have always been good at is deception, especially among whites by enlarging their colorless ego through nearly all the mass media, entertainment and cultural forms. the land of opportunity, and many others, is there for the taking...for whites. If there is not enough backing within the population or among international ally vassals for yet another aggressive war then creating conditions for the wanted war can be accommodated. There are many examples:

1. “Remember the Maine” was the slogan media mogul William Randolph Hearst used to whip up war fury against Spain, in order to take effective control of Cuba by preventing Cubans from winning their anti-colonial liberation war alone. (chapter three)

2. President Lyndon Johnson did the military-industrial complex the favor of reversing JFK’s initiation of ending the war against Vietnam by fabricating a Vietnamese attack on the USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin. He convinced Congress with this lie to grant him a war without naming it as one. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution granted the presidency the use of all “necessary” force, which ended in the murder of millions of human beings. (chapter 12)

3. The lie that led to the totally superfluous atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (chapter 12)

4. The many lies about the terror attack on September 11, 2001, in which some “chickens did come home to roost”, and lay the basis for invasions in the Middle East and North Africa.

The chicken roosting simile I associate with morality. Many of the terrorist victims were co-responsible for America’s many wars and oppressive domination of other peoples, a moral issue I take up in an agonizing essay. (https://www.ronridenour.com/articles/2002/0101--rr.htm)

I do not know for certain if elements in the U.S. government were co-responsible for the attacks on that day but I do know that there was no defense against these attacks since it seems the entire military apparatus was on an exercise. The training dealt with how to combat such terror attacks. If there were only 19 terrorists directly involved, it seems more than odd that they would choose that propitious day without inside knowledge; also odd that 15 of them were from Saudi Arabia, whose diplomats and bin Laden family members were let free to fly away when no one else could.

It is also odd that Israeli intelligence agents were seen applauding the Twin Towers explosions. Five Israelis were arrested and detained for 71 days. FBI counterintelligence concluded at least two worked for Israeli intelligence, but they were let go, deported to Israel.

Dylan Avery and Jason Bermas made the documentary film Loose Change that is used widely by the 9/11 Truth movement. The film asserts that Flight 77 could not have accounted for the damage at the Pentagon, that the Twin Tower fires were insufficient to cause their collapse, and that cell phone calls from the hijacked airplanes would have been impossible at the time.

How can it be that thousands of architect and engineer professionals demand a new investigation into the cause of the attacks? Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 is a powerful documentary about this. Many Hollywood stars and even a former Minnesota governor, Jesse Ventura, speak about the government lies and the need for an independent, honest investigation. (http://911truth.org/achievements/events- campaigns-to-expose-911-truth/)


Harold Pinter 2005 Nobel Literature Prize Speech

While it is not Pinter’s intent to make the chicken-roosting judgment that I do, his poignant speech in acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Literature shows some of the reasons why some seek revenge.

[A video of Pinter's full speech is found at the foot of this article.]

...the majority of politicians...are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.

As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al Quaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true.

The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it.”

“The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile.

The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most salable commodity is self love. It’s a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, ‘the American people’, as in the sentence, ‘I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people’.

It’s a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words ‘the American people’ provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don’t need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it’s very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.

The United States no longer bothers about low intensity conflict. It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favor. It quite simply doesn’t give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain.”

“Its official declared policy is now defined as ‘full spectrum dominance’. That is not my term, it is theirs. ‘Full spectrum dominance’ means control of land, sea, air and space and all attendant resources.”

https://www.nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=620) 

John Rohn Hall calls American Exceptionalism “the illusion of choice.” “Sleeping through the American Dream, still believing the lies, counting on the lies, clinging to the lies like their lives depend upon it. Empire’s Misinformation Machine knows the drill. Well learned from blood brother Adolph: ‘If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.’” (https://dissidentvoice.org/ 2017/08/empires-day-of-reckoning/)


Barack Obama the Worst American President



[dropcap]P[/dropcap]resident Barack Obama used the term American Exceptionalism more than any other president—perhaps to “compensate” for the racist riff -raff hatred against him because of his skin color.

A Washington Post May 28, 2014 headline read: “Obama’s New Patriotism: How Obama has used his presidency to redefine ‘American Exceptionalism’”.

Greg Jaffe wrote: “No American president has talked about American Exceptionalism more often and in more varied ways than Obama. As an Illinois state legislator, young U.S. senator and presidential candidate, he spoke about it most frequently through the prism of his own remarkable story. His father had grown up in Kenya herding goats. His wife carried ‘blood of slaves and slave owners,’ he noted during his first presidential campaign. He had brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews of every race and many religions, scattered across continents.”

“In Libya, many of his top advisers, including his defense secretary, urged him not to use the U.S. military to protect citizens from attacks by forces loyal to dictator Moammar Gaddafi. The United States didn’t need another war in a country of only peripheral interest. Obama overruled them, citing America’s ‘indispensable’ role.” (http://www.washingtonpost. com/sf/national/2015/06/03/obama-and-american-exceptionalism/ ?utm_term=.56ee66d9c6f7)

Obama used the al Qaeda lie that they knew Gaddafi would “massacre” them in a day. His (and Hillary Clinton) war on Gaddafi is what they call preemptive war, something Zionists have used against Arab countries at will.

Eight months before the Washington Post article, in September 2013, Obama was about to war on Syria, because of another terrorist lie [a western false flag] that the government had used sarin gas to kill people. (chapter 15). President Putin warned him about using “American Exceptionalism” to commit a military invasion that could easily lead to a world war. Despite the “New York Times” alliance with the war-machine it wisely published his opinion piece and on a special day, September 11 (2013): “A Plea for Caution” by Vladimir V. Putin.

“Recent events surrounding Syria have prompted me to speak directly to the American people and their political leaders. It is important to do so at a time of insufficient communication between our societies. Relations between us have passed through different stages. We stood against each other during the cold war. But we were also allies once, and defeated the Nazis together. The universal international organization—the United Nations—was then established to prevent such devastation from ever happening again.”

With a prayer for peace the man most demonized by U.S. politicians and their media concluded:

“My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust. I appreciate this. I carefully studied his address to the nation on Tuesday. And I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States’ policy is ‘what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional.’ It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.”

(http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/opinion/putin-plea- for-caution-from-russia-on-syria.html?_r=0)

John Pilger is not nearly as diplomatic as President Putin in his description of Obama’s embrace of American Exceptionalism. Excerpts from his piece, “ The Issue is not Trump, It is us”:

“One of the persistent strands in American political life is a cultish extremism that approaches fascism. This was given expression and reinforced during the two terms of Barack Obama. ‘I believe in American Exceptionalism with every fiber of my being,’ said Obama, who expanded America’s favorite military pastime, bombing, and death squads (‘special operations’) as no other president has done since the Cold War. (https://www.greanvillepost.com/2017/01/16/the-issue-is-not-trump-it-is-us/)

“According to a Council on Foreign Relations survey, in 2016 alone Obama dropped 26,171 bombs. That is 72 bombs every day. He bombed the poorest people on earth, in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan.

“Every Tuesday—reported The New York Times—he personally selected those who would be murdered by mostly hellfire missiles fired from drones. Weddings, funerals, shepherds were attacked, along with those attempting to collect the body parts festooning the “terrorist target”. A leading Republican senator, Lindsey Graham, estimated, approvingly, that Obama’s drones killed 4,700 people. ‘Sometimes you hit innocent people and I hate that,’ he said, ‘but we’ve taken out some very senior members of Al Qaeda.’”

“Under Obama, the US has extended secret ‘special forces’ operations to 138 countries or 70 per cent of the world’s population. The first African- American president launched what amounted to a full-scale invasion of Africa. Reminiscent of the Scramble for Africa in the late 19th century, the US African Command (Africom) has built a network of supplicants among collaborative African regimes eager for American bribes and armaments...It is as if Africa’s proud history of liberation, from Patrice Lumumba to Nelson Mandela, is consigned to oblivion by a new master’s black colonial elite whose ‘historic mission’, warned Frantz Fanon...is the promotion of ‘a capitalism rampant though camouflaged’”.

I also wrote my take on Obama’s significance. In my view he is the worst U.S. president ever because he was the greatest hope especially for African-Americans, other people of color, and white liberals/ progressives. They kept hoping for years without protesting his wars and plundering for the rich. Some even rationalized his wars. See https://dissidentvoice.org/2013/03/obama-the-worst-us-president-ever/

“He is THE president for US corporations. With his black Kenyan roots he can walk into Africa’s rich parlors and black White houses and communicate with these butchers better than any of the capitalist class’ other presidents, all white.

“Obama is worse than them because he betrays all his black ‘brothers and sisters’ in the US, all except a few rich and opportunistic ones. He was THE hope; he would improve their lot, and that of the poor, the working people. He has done nothing. Instead, he takes from them to give to the rich, the worst criminals on Wall Street, the war arms industry, the oil and mineral industries.”

Another element in American Exceptionalism is the phenomenon of American citizens’ shooting wars against their own people. There were “only 290” mass shooting murder incidents (four or more killings) in Obama’s last year while Trump’s first year was the deadliest of all— 345; one every nine of ten days. Americans commit more mass shooting murders than any other country: one-third of them. October 1 was the biggest single citizen murder day in U.S. history when a 64-year old wealthy man killed 58 persons and wounded 500 at an outdoor concert in Las Vegas.

LULLABY

Little war child, where are you going?
East or west?
Where in the world do you believe you can nd a friend? Little war child, what suits you best:
A worn carpet?
A plywood co n?
A life jacket?
Little war child, where will you die:
Where the bombs fall
Or in the open sea?

Little war child, where do you want to go?
Choose yourself. Just we
Shall never see you again
(By Henrik Nordbrandt, a Danish poet, winner of nordic council’s 2000 Literature Prize. translated by this author with his permission)

WHAT To Do

John Pilger concluded his article with the most pressing question of the century— “...when will a genuine movement of opposition arise? Angry, eloquent, all-for-one-and-one-for all. Until real politics return to people’s lives, the enemy is not Trump, it is ourselves!”

Harold Pinter is in step: “I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.

“If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us - the dignity of man,” Harold Pinter concluded his speech.

Canadian professor Michel Chossudovsky addresses the issues Pilger and Pinter raise, in his January 9, 2018 article, “ The Empire’s ‘Lefty Intellectuals’ Call for Regime Change. The Role of ‘Progressives’ and the Antiwar Movement” (https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-empires- lefty-intellectuals-call-for-regime-change-the-role-of-progressives- and-the-antiwar-movement/5625333)

“What is now unfolding in both North America and Western Europe is fake social activism, controlled and funded by the corporate establishment. This manipulated process precludes the formation of a real mass movement against war, racism and social injustice.

The anti-war movement is dead. The war on Syria is tagged as ‘a civil war’.

The war on Yemen is also portrayed as a civil war. While the bombing is by Saudi Arabia, the insidious role of the US is downplayed or casually ignored. ‘ The US is not directly involved so there is no need for us to wage an anti-war campaign’. (paraphrase)

War and neoliberalism are no longer at the forefront of civil society activism. Funded by corporate charities, via a network of non-governmental organizations, social activism tends to be piecemeal. There is no integrated anti-globalization anti-war movement. The economic crisis is not seen as having a relationship to US led wars.

In turn, dissent has become compartmentalized. Separate ‘issue oriented’ protest movements...”

“What is required is the development of a broad-based grassroots network which seeks to disable patterns of authority and decision making pertaining to war.

This network would be established at all levels in society, towns and villages, work places, parishes. Trade unions, farmers’ organizations, professional associations, business associations, student unions, veterans associations, church groups would be called upon to integrate the antiwar organizational structure. Of crucial importance, this movement should extend into the Armed Forces as a means to breaking the legitimacy of war among service men and women.

The first task would be to disable war propaganda through an effective campaign against media disinformation.

The corporate media would be directly challenged, leading to boycotts of major news outlets, which are responsible for channeling disinformation into the news chain. This endeavor would require a parallel process at the grass roots level, of sensitizing and educating fellow citizens on the nature of the war and the global crisis, as well as effectively ‘spreading the word’ through advanced networking, through alternative media outlets on the internet, etc. In recent developments, the independent online media has been the target of manipulation and censorship, precisely with a view to undermining anti-war activism on the internet.

The creation of such a movement, which forcefully challenges the legitimacy of the structures of political authority, is no easy task. It would require a degree of solidarity, unity and commitment unparalleled in World history. It would require breaking down political and ideological barriers within society and acting with a single voice. It would also require eventually unseating the war criminals, and indicting them for war crimes.

America’s hegemonic project in the post 9/11 era is the ‘Globalization of War’ whereby the U.S.-NATO military machine—coupled with covert intelligence operations, economic sanctions and the thrust of ‘regime change’—is deployed in all major regions of the world. The threat of pre-emptive nuclear war is also used to black-mail countries into submission. This ‘Long War against Humanity’ is carried out at the height of the most serious economic crisis in modern history.

It is intimately related to a process of global financial restructuring, which has resulted in the collapse of national economies and the impoverishment of large sectors of the World population.

The ultimate objective is World conquest under the cloak of ‘human rights’ and ‘Western democracy’.

Gabriel Rockhill wrote an excellent article about that published on December 13, 2017, entitled, “ The U.S. is not a Democracy; it never was”. After analyzing why that is the case, which this book also deals with, he offers a bit of hope that we can do something about that.

“Rather than blindly believing in a golden age of democracy in order to remain at all costs within the gilded cage of an ideology produced specifically for us by the well-paid spin-doctors of a plutocratic oligarchy, we should unlock the gates of history and meticulously scrutinize the founding and evolution of the American imperial republic. This will not only allow us to take leave of its jingoist and self-congratulatory origin myths, but it will also provide us with the opportunity to resuscitate and reactivate so much of what they have sought to obliterate.

“In particular, there is a radical America just below the surface of these nationalist narratives, an America in which the population autonomously organizes itself in indigenous and ecological activism, black radical resistance, anti-capitalist mobilization, anti-patriarchal struggles...It is this America that the corporate republic has sought to eradicate, while simultaneously investing in an expansive public relations campaign to cover over its crimes with the fig leaf of ‘democracy’...” [my emphasis]

Gareth Porter offered a proposal in line with this simmering radical America at the NoWar2016 conference: “How We Could End the Permanent War State”. It is posted on World Beyond War run by anti- war activist and writer David Swanson. (http://worldbeyondwar.org/ end-permanent-war-state/)

World Beyond War endeavors to be “a global nonviolent movement to end war and establish a just and sustainable peace”. It has chapters in several cities of the world. Porter wrote:

“I want to present a vision of something that has not been discussed seriously in many, many years: a national strategy to mobilize a very large segment of the population of this country to participate in a movement to force the retreat of the permanent war state.”

“I suggest that it is time for a newly invigorated national movement to come together around a concrete strategy for accomplishing the goal of ending the permanent war state by taking away its means of intervening in foreign conflicts.

“The following are the four key elements that we would need to include in such a strategy:

(1) A clear, concrete vision of what eliminating the permanent war state would mean in practice to provide a meaningful target for people to support.

(2) A new and compelling way of educating and mobilizing people to action against the permanent war state.

(3) A strategy for reaching specific segments of society on the issue.

(4) A plan for bringing political pressure to bear with the aim of ending the permanent war state within ten years.”

“So we should update General Smedley Butler’s memorable slogan from the 1930s, ‘War is a Racket’ to reflect the fact that the benefits that now accrue to the national security establishment make those of war profiteers in the 1930s seem like child’s play. I suggest the slogan such as ‘permanent war is a racket’ or the ‘the war state is a racket’”.

The Real News covered this conference and videos are presented of the various talks and panels. (http://worldbeyondwar.org/nowar2016/) One of many groups participating at this unique conference was “voices for Creative Non-violence” (http://vcnv.org/). Among its many activities is advocating Peace with Russia, in which they make study trips to the country. (http://vcnv.org/category/u-s-russia-tensions/) My friend William Hathaway has ideas worth implementing too. His book, Radical Peace is a favorite of mine. (http://media.trineday.com/radicalpeace/ 2010).

I quote here from his article, “Sedition, Subversion, Sabotage: A Long-War Strategy For the Left .”

“Despite its recurring crises, this system is still too strong, too adaptable, and has too many supporters in all classes for it to be overthrown any time soon. We’re probably not going to be the ones to create a new society.” 

“But we can now lay the groundwork for that, first by exposing the hoax that liberal reforms will lead to basic changes. People need to see that the purpose of liberalism is to defuse discontent with promises of the future and thus prevent mass opposition from coalescing. It diverts potentially revolutionary energy into superficial dead ends. Bernie Sanders’ ‘long game’ campaign is really only a game similar to that of his reformist predecessor, Dennis Kucinich, designed to keep us in the ‘big tent’ of the Democratic Party. Capitalism, although resilient, is willing to change only in ways that shore it up, so before anything truly different can be built, we have to bring it down.

“What we are experiencing now is the long war the ruling elite is fighting to maintain its grip on the world.” To bring it down, Hathaway suggests “the path out...will include conflict and strife. Insisting on only peaceful tactics and ruling out armed self defense against a ruling elite that has repeatedly slaughtered millions of people is naïve, actually a way of preventing basic change. The pacifist idealism so prevalent among the petty-bourgeoisie conceals their class interest: no revolution, just reform. But until capitalism and its military are collapsing, it would be suicidal to attack them directly with force.

“What we can do now as radicals is to weaken capitalism and build organizations that will pass our knowledge and experience on to future generations. If we do that well enough, our great grandchildren (not really so far away) can lead a revolution. If we don’t do it, our descendants will remain corporate chattel.

“Our generational assignment—should we decide to accept it—is sedition, subversion, sabotage: a program on which socialists and anarchists can work together.”

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]ne sign of the few encouraging ones we have today is the many Establishment policy makers: civil servants, ambassadors, militarists and cloak and dagger murderers who have come over to the people’s side. I have come across scores of them, and used many of their words herein. Everyone knows of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. Among the covert types are the veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. Some of the war-intelligence professionals have admitted big sins, such as E. Howard Hunt confessing to having been privy to the murder of President Kennedy by his own “comrades”. The government-the military-industrial complex- deep state-mass media do not listen to them, however, nor does it seem does the much-alienated American Working Class.

Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s 1965 essay, “Socialism and Man in Cuba,” is one of my favorite works regarding alienation, morality and creating the new revolutionary person and society.

“Work under all forms of exploitative economies—all those predating an economy based upon collective ownership and decision-making— results in alienation of the individual and producers. Liberating us from this exploitation and its associates—oppression and repression—is a principal task of any post-capitalist economy, starting with socialism. Work, in the new economy, will be based on basic human needs and moral incentives, not materialism/consumerism,” Che wrote.

“ The alienated human specimen is tied to society as a whole by an invisible umbilical cord: the law of value. This law acts upon all aspects of one’s life, shaping its course and destiny.”

“ That is why it is very important to choose the right instrument for mobilizing the masses. Basically, this instrument must be moral in character, without neglecting, however, a correct use of the material incentive—especially of a social character.”

“ Those who play by the rules of the game are showered with honors— such honors as a monkey might get for performing pirouettes. The condition is that one does not try to escape from the invisible cage.”

“In these circumstances one must have a large dose of humanity, a large dose of a sense of justice and truth in order to avoid dogmatic extremes, cold scholasticism, or an isolation from the masses. We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity is transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force.” “We socialists are freer because we are more fulfilled; we are more fulfilled because we are freer.”

We don’t need to wait until capitalism is abolished before we begin implementing some of Che’s ideas about post-capitalism. For instance, there are firms owned by and worked by workers in the United States, some taking lead from the Spanish Mondragon Corporation. There are over 250 such companies in various countries run by about 75,000 workers. This type of production relationship could be enhanced with a perspective of making a socialist transition of society. (https://www. mondragon-corporation.com/en/)

Chris Wright’s “The Necessity of a Moral Revolution” seems to suggest something similar.

“We’re embarking on a revolutionary era, an era that promises to be more radical even than the 1930s.” (https://www.counterpunch.org/ 2017/08/08/the-necessity-of-a-moral-revolution/)

“The core of the protracted revolution, of course, is to create new institutions, ultimately new relations of production. Every revolution is essentially a matter of changing social structures; the goal of transforming ideologies makes sense only as facilitating institutional change. Nevertheless, to spread new ways of thinking, new values, can indeed serve as an effective midwife of revolution, and thus is a task worth undertaking.

“The fundamental moral transition that has to occur (in order, for example, to save humanity from collective suicide) is from a kind of nefarious egoism to a beneficent communism. This is the ideological core of the coming social changes, this shift from individualistic greed—‘Gain wealth, forgetting all but self ’—to collective solidarity. We have to stop seeing the world through the distorted lens of the private capitalist self, the self whose raison d’être is to accumulate private property, private experiences, private resentments, finally private neuroses, and instead see the world as what it is, a vast community stretching through time and space. Such a change of vision might facilitate the necessary institutional changes—which themselves, later, will naturally engender and instill this communist-type vision.”

Randy Shields is one of those pesky radicals who tells it just like he feels it, and these excerpts from his piece, “When I Started Hating America”, fit the topic here to my taste.

“I thought of McGovern recently because I was trying to pin down when I first started hating America. I’ve been a little tired of all these Osama and Anwar al-come-lately’s and the glory they get for hating America when many of us have toiled unpaid and unknown—hating America for decades.” (https://dissidentvoice.org/2012/07/when-i-started-hating-america/)

“McGovern got land-slided in 1972 and the American working class has been land-sliding the world ever since in proud ignorance, cowardly violence, and infinite obedience. So I say, contra Carl Sandberg: the people, no, hell no, for god sakes, no. I know as a Marxist I’m supposed to promote working class solidarity but I’m never really feeling the love. The union guys I work with don’t know anything about May Day, Big Bill Haywood or surplus value but they’re idiot savants when it comes to fantasy football, Philly strip clubs, and the most Eden-like places to blow away defenseless animals.”

“It’s hard to relate to something as alienated and shut down as the American working class...”  but then Randy sees a way out:

“I was very excited about what Julius Levin was saying about the socialist industrial union form of government: a government based on industry instead of an anachronism like territory, a government of nurses, farmers, machinists, secretaries, plumbers, etc., democratically elected at every level—local, regional and national—from all workplaces with no union reps making any more money than the average worker. This all-industrial council of workers would replace the nonproductive pampered professional politicians called Congress. In short, industrial unionism would make Jefferson’s citizen-legislators real—ALL the citizens: Blacks, women, un-propertied White males, everybody. Capitalism’s Supreme Court weather vanes would be sent packing and the Whitey House would be turned into a museum honoring working class heroes.”

Despite Randy’s, and my own, despair about the American Working Class maybe its belief in American Exceptionalism is diminishing a bit. Polls indicate that the majority does not want more war; at least the feeling is there if not the action. NBC’s July 2017 poll determined that 76% of the Americans fear a major war while most oppose making one. That was 10% over the same poll half-a-year earlier. The July poll found that 62% believed the U.S. should consider its allies’ interests even if it meant making compromises; 59% over 35% believe diplomacy rather than military means should be used to resolve conflicts with so-called enemies. This is something old fashioned American Exceptionalism would not tolerate.

Who are the big threats to the United States that could result in war? Fortunately, the major threat was not Russia. In contrast to the Establishment Russia bashing, only 18% feared Russia most. The biggest threat comes from Trump’s main enemy at that time, North Korea, with 41%. North Korea surpasses even the real terrorists, ISIS, which the U.S. helped create—which 28% most fear. (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/ national-security/nbc-news-poll-american-fears-war-grow-n783801)

The major problem we in “the real left” face is how to turn these well meaning people into revolutionaries or, at the very least, into a fighting force that could effectively stop the war machine. I’ve presented some activist-radical thinkers’ ideas. I add to this discussion with a view that is largely ignored or rejected by “the real left ”. We need to include in our movements still-in-the-making two key points: a) an open discussion, a running dialogue both within the movements and presented to those we wish to mobilize and organize just what type of society we wish to create; b) see and admit our own flaws, and endeavor to overcome our own illusions.

I have spent nearly six decades primarily as a radical-revolutionary, anti-war, anti-racist activist; secondly as a journalist and propagandist writer. Unlike most of my kind in the West, I was also an activist in a socialist society, Cuba for eight years, and have spent a couple years in other Latin American countries striving to become socialist. I have learned that these governments did not want their people to decide how to run the fields and factories...I have learned that most people do not like that about these governments and, as surely can be seen by all who look, most Cubans wish to embrace capitalism today—although they wish to keep the social welfare that they have achieved. But that social welfare can also be achieved in a capitalist system.

I have learned that solidarity workers and socialist-communist parties in the West that stand side by side with these countries do not wish to hear about their serious mistakes, the authoritarian power structures, the unwillingness to turn over the reins of power to the workers. I don’t see how we can convince our own workers in capitalist states to risk their lives fighting against the barons’ bayonets if we can’t convince them that what we stand for is a better life for all, not only materially but spiritually and one in which they will make the key decisions. Only in that way, can we begin to eliminate the alienation about which Marx and Che speak.

We need to look reality in the face, all reality, and tell it like it is, not to malign but to improve, to project a world in which we stop fooling ourselves and our people. No more self-denials; no more illusions. At least one advantage to dropping illusions is that we won’t become disillusioned. We don’t abide by so many other illusions. Let us not abide our own!

At age 93, former French diplomat Stéphane Hessel wrote the pamphlet Indignez-vous! (Time for Outrage). Within three months it sold 600,000 copies—the most sold book in France.

This call for uprising both reflected and anticipated the spirit of student demonstrations in France, Britain and the U.S. Occupy Wall Street movement, as it did the wave of revolt challenging dictatorships in the Middle East.

After fighting against fascism in WWII, Hessel was involved along with Eleanor Roosevelt in drawing the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. His voice was always on the side of the oppressed, the exploited. Here is a key extract, one that we must adhere to today.

“The motivation that underlay the Resistance was outrage. We, the veterans of the Resistance movements and fighting forces of Free France, call on the younger generations to revive and carry forward the tradition of the Resistance and its ideas.

“We say to you: take over, keep going, get angry! Those in positions of political responsibility, economic power and intellectual authority, in fact our whole society, must not give up or let ourselves be overwhelmed by the current international dictatorship of the financial markets, which is such a threat to peace and democracy. I want you, each and every one of you, to have a reason to be outraged. This is precious. When something outrages you, as Nazism did me that is when you become a militant, strong and engaged. You join the movement of history, and the great current of history continues to grow only thanks to each and every one of us.”


THE END

NOTES

(1) Throughout I have mainly used U.S., United States and US American instead of “America” and “Americans” because I wish to make the point, as do many Latin Americans that “America” applies to both continents and to all its inhabitants. The term was given to both continents by European rulers who chose the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci for “America”. I use the term “Americans” in this chapter to t their own sense of self in the context of “American Exceptionalism”.


Addendum
Harold Pinter's Nobel Lecture was pre-recorded, and shown on video on 7 December 2005, in Börssalen at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm.

About RON RIDENOUR
  have written nine books plus co-authored three. I was born in the "devil's own country", in 1939, of a WASP (white, Anglo-Saxon protestant) military family. Growing up I experienced the pains and indignities of US chauvinism and racism at home and abroad, its imperial domination, its brutal jingoistic wars. Before I understood the essence of US imperialism, I joined the US Air Force, at 17, to fight the Soviet "commies" when they occupied Hungary, in 1956. Posted to a radar site in Japan, I witnessed approved segregated barracks at the Yankee base, and the imposition of racism in Japanese establishments.  This, and the fact that we had orders to shoot down any Soviet aircraft over “our” territory in Japan—which never appeared—while we flew spy planes over the Soviet Union daily, led me to question American values.

print edition (564 pp) sells for USD$27.75. If you wish to get a complimentary copy, send us a request note at greanville@gmail.com.  A review on Amazon, or a donation to The Greanville Post, if possible, will be sincerely appreciated. 

 

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

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The Alternative Media Can Defeat the Mainstream Media – Here’s the Game Plan

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.


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 Editor's Note: We are extremely glad to see Ron Unz put forth a cogent memo on the need to attack the mainstream media as both a tactical and strategic priority for everyone serious about end ing the primacy of the Western imperialist paradigm. This is a long neglected task of the US left—or put more broadly—of those forces wishing to effect truly revolutionary changes in the rotten status quo prevailing in America and in much of its orbit of influence. The world is pregnant with anti-capitalist revolution, and all the signs are there. They have been there for a long time, at least since the end of World War II, but US establishment power, extremely resilient, has always found a way to co-opt and defeat the birth of the new order. Their main instrument has been the monstrous machinery of propaganda and cultural influence developed by the West over centuries of gradual accretion, and brought to a new level of effectiveness through the conscious application of modern techniques of hidden manipulation pioneered by advertising and public relations gurus and the prostituted academics working in psychology, sociology and related "social sciences." In this context, it is fair to note that TGP's antecedent, Cyrano's Journal, itself the online version of its printed version, made its debut in 1982 as a radical media review, the first in the US, recommending pretty much the same things that Ron Unz is doing here, both in terms of tactics and strategic analysis (recommending unity, for example as essential) and which the always capable Caitlin Johnstone has also zeroed in on several pieces. She declares, and we agree wholeheartedly, “…the single best way to take down the oligarchy is by aggressively and relentlessly attacking its propaganda engine.” (See Caitlin Johnstone: How To Fight The Establishment Propaganda Machine And Win.). The voice of Cyrano's Journal, warning activists about the danger represented by a largely ignored machine designed to manufacture and maintain a vast "packaged consciousness," was ignored by the left, as usual, fighting a multitude of "instant-gratification" mostly grassroots separate battles without much thought to building a powerful central weapon to fight these cultural wars and win, and things had to get impossibly more awful, impossibly more dangerous, cataclysmic, indeed, before a sizable portion of the population, including progressives and anti-establishmentarians of various stripes would finally see the necessity to project anti-systemic messages wide and far. The rise of the internet as an ubiquitous medium has helped, no doubt, but this is highly disputed territory: much of it is occupied by the system's apologists and disinformers, not to mention virtually armies of brainwashed and confused people trading all sorts of silly notions. Let's call that portion of the blogosphere the ambient "noise". To this day, some of the left's—of say, anti-establishment—voices manage a tiny segment of social media interest, while old establishment imperialist like Obama command followers in the millions, over 100 million, in fact, if we are to believe Twitter. Just have a look at Obama's Twitter, it's sobering. The battle of communications must indeed, as Unz wisely suggests, and Caitlin proclaims, be joined. And it must be won. If this poor world is to have a chance. —P. Greanville

This memo would make Saul Alinsky proud

The author is the founder and editor of the Unz Review, a conservative American political website, an entrepreneur, and a one-time candidate for the governor of California.


This article was originally published in October 2016 at the Unz Review.


A couple of years ago, I launched my Unz Review, providing a wide range of different alternative perspectives, the vast majority of them totally excluded from the mainstream media. I’ve also published a number of articles in my own American Pravda series, focusing on the suspicious lapses and lacunae in our media narratives.

They're an easy target

The underlying political strategy behind these efforts may already be apparent, and I’ve sometimes suggested it here and there. But I finally decided I might as well explicitly outline the reasoning in a memo as provided below.

The Mainstream Media is the Crucial Opposing Force

Groups advocating policies opposed by the American establishment should recognize that the greatest obstacle they face is usually the mainstream media.

Ordinary political and ideological opponents surely exist, but these are usually inspired, motivated, organized, and assisted by powerful media support, which also shapes the perceived framework of the conflict. In Clauswitzian terms, the media often constitutes the strategic “center of gravity” of the opposing forces.

The Media Should Be Made a Primary Target

If the media is the crucial force empowering the opposition, then it should be regarded as a primary target of any political strategy. So long as the media remains strong, success may be difficult, but if the influence and credibility of the media were substantially degraded, then the ordinary opposing forces would lose much of their effectiveness. In many respects, the media creates reality, so perhaps the most effective route toward changing reality runs through the media.

Discrediting the Media Anywhere Weakens It Everywhere

The mainstream media exists as a seamless whole, so weakening or discrediting the media in any particular area automatically reduces its influence everywhere else as well.

The elements of the media narrative faced by a particular anti-establishment group may be too strong and well-defended to attack effectively, and any such attacks might also be discounted as ideologically motivated. Hence, the more productive strategy may sometimes be an indirect one, attacking the media narrative elsewhere, at points where it is much weaker and less well-defended. In addition, winning those easier battles may generate greater credibility and momentum, which can then be applied to later attacks on more difficult fronts.

A Broad Alliance May Support the Common Goal of Weakening the Media

Once we recognize that weakening the media is a primary strategic goal, an obvious corollary is that other anti-establishment groups facing the same challenges become natural, if perhaps temporary, allies.

Such unexpected tactical alliances may drawn from across a wide range of different political and ideological perspectives—Left, Right, or otherwise—and despite the component groups having longer-term goals that are orthogonal or even conflicting. So long as all such elements in the coalition recognize that the hostile media is their most immediate adversary, they can cooperate on their common effort, while actually gaining additional credibility and attention by the very fact that they sharply disagree on so many other matters.

The media is enormously powerful and exercises control over a vast expanse of intellectual territory. But such ubiquitous influence also ensures that its local adversaries are therefore numerous and widespread, all being bitterly opposed to the hostile media they face on their own particular issues. By analogy, a large and powerful empire is frequently brought down by a broad alliance of many disparate rebellious factions, each having unrelated goals, which together overwhelm the imperial defenses by attacking simultaneously at multiple different locations.

A crucial aspect enabling such a rebel alliance is the typically narrow focus of each particular constituent member. Most groups or individuals opposing establishment positions tend to be ideologically zealous about one particular issue or perhaps a small handful, while being much less interested in others. Given the total suppression of their views at the hands of the mainstream media, any venue in which their unorthodox perspectives are provided reasonably fair and equal treatment rather than ridiculed and denigrated tends to inspire considerable enthusiasm and loyalty on their part. So although they may have quite conventional views on most other matters, causing them to regard contrary views with the same skepticism or unease as might anyone else, they will usually be willing to suppress their criticism at such wider heterodoxy so long as other members of their alliance are willing to return that favor on their own topics of primary interest.

Assault the Media Narrative Where It is Weak Not Where It Is Strong

Applying a different metaphor, the establishment media may be regarded as a great wall that excludes alternative perspectives from the public consciousness and thereby confines opinion to within a narrow range of acceptable views.

Certain portions of that media wall may be solid and vigorously defended by powerful vested interests, rendering assaults difficult. But other portions, perhaps older and more obscure, may have grown decrepit over time, with their defenders having drifted away. Breaching the wall at these weaker locations may be much easier, and once the barrier has been broken at several points, defending it at others becomes much more difficult.

For example, consider the consequences of demonstrating that the established media narrative is completely false on some major individual event. Once this result has been widely recognized, the credibility of the media on all other matters, even totally unrelated ones, would be somewhat attenuated. Ordinary people would naturally conclude that if the media had been so wrong for so long on one important point, it might also be wrong on others as well, and the powerful suspension of disbelief that provides the media its influence would become less powerful. Even those individuals who collectively form the corpus of the media might begin to entertain serious self-doubts regarding their previous certainties.

The crucial point is that such breakthroughs may be easiest to achieve in topics that seem merely of historical significance, and are totally removed from any practical present-day consequences.

Reframe Vulnerable “Conspiracy Theories” as Effective “Media Criticism”

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]ver the last few decades, the political establishment and its media allies have created a powerful intellectual defense against major criticism by investing considerable resources in stigmatizing the notion of so-called “conspiracy theories.” This harsh pejorative term is applied to any important analysis of events that sharply deviates from the officially-endorsed narrative, and implicitly suggests that the proponent is a disreputable fanatic, suffering from delusions, paranoia, or other forms of mental illness. Such ideological attacks often effectively destroy his credibility, allowing his actual arguments to be ignored. A once-innocuous phrase has become politically “weaponized.”However, an effective means of circumventing this intellectual defense mechanism may be to adopt a meta-strategy of reframing such “conspiracy theories” as “media criticism.”

Under the usual parameters of public debate, challenges to established orthodoxy are treated as “extraordinary claims” that must be justified by extraordinary evidence. This requirement may be unfair, but it constitutes the reality in many public exchanges, based upon the framework provided by the allegedly impartial media.

Since most of these controversies involve a wide range of complex issues and ambiguous or disputed evidence, it is often extremely difficult to conclusively establish any unorthodox theory, say to a confidence level of 95% or 98%. Therefore, the media verdict is almost invariably “Case Not Proven” and the challengers are judged defeated and discredited, even if they actually appear to have the preponderance of evidence on their side. And if they vocally contest the unfairness of their situation, that exact response is then subsequently cited by the media as further proof of their fanaticism or paranoia.

However, suppose that an entirely different strategy were adopted. Instead of attempting to make a case “beyond any reasonable doubt,” proponents merely provide sufficient evidence and analysis to suggest that there is a 30% chance or a 50% chance or a 70% chance that the unorthodox theory is true. The very fact that no claim of near certainty is being advanced provides a powerful defense against any plausible accusations of fanaticism or delusional thinking. But if the issue is of enormous importance and—as is usually the case—the unorthodox theory has been almost totally ignored by the media, despite apparently having at least a reasonable chance of being true, then the media may be effectively attacked and ridiculed for its laziness and incompetence. These charges are very difficult to refute and since no claim is being made that the unorthodox theory has necessarily been proven correct, merely that it might possibly be correct, any counter-accusations of conspiratorial tendencies would fall flat.

Indeed, the only means the media might have of effectively rebutting those charges would be to explore all the complex details of the issue (thereby helping to bring various controversial facts themselves to much wider attention) and then argue that there is only a negligible chance that the theory might be correct, perhaps 10% or less. Thus, the usual presumptive burden is completely reversed. And since most members of the media are unlikely to have ever paid much serious attention to the subject, their ignorant presentation may be quite weak and vulnerable to a knowledgeable deconstruction. Indeed, the most likely scenario is that the media will just continue to totally ignore the entire dispute, thereby reinforcing those plausible accusations of laziness and incompetence.

Individuals distressed by media failings on a controversial topic often accuse the media and its individual representatives of being biased, corrupted, or quietly under the control of powerful forces allied with the establishment position. These charges may sometimes be correct and sometimes not, but they are usually quite difficult to prove, except in the minds of existing true-believers, and they do carry the taint of “paranoia.” On the other hand, claiming that media failings are due to venial sins such as laziness and incompetence are just as likely to be correct, and these charges are much less likely to risk a backlash.

Finally, once the media itself has become the primary target of the criticism, it automatically loses its status as a neutral outside arbitrator and no longer has as much credibility in proclaiming the winning side of the debate.

The Advantage of Flooding Media Defense Zones

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]ndividuals who challenge the prevailing media narrative with unorthodox claims are often reluctant to raise too many such controversial claims simultaneously lest they be ridiculed as “crazy,” with all their views summarily dismissed.


MSNBC's russophobe Maddow at work—a shameless propagandist, but the Russia hate campaign has made her richer and even more famous among her following of clueless, identity politics liberals. There is no visible counterpush.

In most cases, this may be the correct strategy to pursue, but if handled properly, an exact opposite approach might sometimes be quite effective. So long as the overall presentation is framed as media criticism and no inordinate weight is attached to the validity of any of the particular claims being presented, attacking along a very broad front, perhaps including dozens of entirely independent items, may “flood the zone” of the media, saturating and overwhelming existing defenses. Or as suggested in a quote widely misattributed to Stalin, “Quantity has a quality all its own.”

Consider the example of entertainer Bill Cosby. Over the years, one or two individual women had come forward claiming that he had drugged and raped them, and the charges had been largely ignored as unsubstantiated or implausible. However, over the last year or two, the dam suddenly burst and a total of nearly sixty separate women came forward, all making identical accusations, and although there seems little hard evidence in any of the particular cases, virtually every observer now concedes that the charges are likely to be true.

Suppose it is established that there is a reasonable likelihood that the media completely missed and ignored an important matter that should have been investigated and reported. The impact is not necessarily substantial, and many individuals stubbornly wedded to a belief in their establishment media narratives might even resist admitting the possibility that the media had seriously erred in that particular situation.

However, suppose instead that several dozen such separate examples could be established, each strongly suggesting a serious error or omission on the part of the media. At that point, ideological defenses would crumble and nearly everyone would quietly acknowledge that many, perhaps even most, of the accusations were probably true, producing an enormous credibility gap for the mainstream media. The credibility defenses of the media would have been saturated and overcome.

The key point is that all of the particular items should be presented as reasonable-likelihood cases, and indicative of media shortcomings rather than being proven or necessarily as important issues in and of themselves. By remaining aloof and somewhat agnostic regarding any individual item, there is little risk of being tagged as fanatic or monomaniacal for raising a multitude of them.

My American Pravda Series and Unz Review Webzine as Examples

The political/media strategy outlined above was the central motivation behind my American Pravda articles and Unz Review webzine.

For example, in the original 2013 American Pravda article I raised over half a dozen enormous media lapses, all of them now universally acknowledged: Enron’s collapse, the Iraq War WMDs, the Madoff Swindle, the Cold War spies, and various others. Having thereby set the stage by presenting this admitted pattern of major failure, demonstrating that a considerable suspension of disbelief was warranted, I then extended the discussion to three or four important additional examples, none of them yet acknowledged, but all of them perfectly plausible. Perhaps as a consequence, the article received reasonably good attention including by elements of the mainstream media itself, who are often willing to acknowledge the errors of their class so long as these are presented persuasively and in a responsible manner.

Following that piece, I intermittently produced additional elements in the series, some more comprehensive than others, and am now embarking upon a regular series.

The McCain/POW examples in the series perfectly illustrate the strategy I have suggested above. The Vietnam War ended over forty years ago, the POWs have probably all been dead for decades, and even John McCain is in the very twilight of his career. The practical significance of raising the scandal or providing evidence establishing its likelihood is virtually nil. But if it were to become widely recognized that our entire media successfully covered up such a massive scandal for so many years, the credibility of the media would have suffered a devastating blow. Several such blows and it would be in ruins. Meanwhile, the powerful vested interests that once so vigorously maintained the official narrative in that area are long gone, and the orthodox case has few remaining defenders in the media, greatly increasing the likelihood of an eventual breakthrough and victory.

A similar strategy in broader form is applied by my Unz Review alternative media webzine, which hosts numerous different writers, columnists, and bloggers, all tending to sharply challenge the establishment media narrative along a wide variety of different axes and issues, some of them conflicting. By raising serious doubts about the omissions and errors of our mainstream media in so many different areas, the goal is to weaken the perceived credibility of the media, leading readers to consider the possibility that large elements of the conventional narrative may be entirely incorrect.


Source: The Unz Review


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SOCIALIST PLANNING CIRCLES: BUILDING SCAFFOLDS BEFORE THE WRECKAGE

BE SURE TO PASS THESE ARTICLES TO FRIENDS AND KIN. A LOT DEPENDS ON THIS. DO YOUR PART.


Common objections to socialist planning from below

In my last article, Do You Socialists Have Any Plans? Why We Need Socialist Architects, I argued that the only way 21st century socialism is going to get any traction with working class people is to not only have a socialist vision, but also to have feasible plans which suggest transitions in between the current capitalist crisis and our ultimate vision.

In that article, I presented the following objections along with their rebuttal through a dialogue between two workers: an older worker, Andrew, and a young, anarchist worker, Sean. The objections of Sean, to socialist planning transitions were:

  • Marx said a plan isn’t necessary—the workers of the future will figure this out.
  • Workers are only capable of dealing with survival needs. Planning is too remote from every-day life for them.
  • Plans are rigid and can’t do justice to the complexity of social life.
  • Plans aren’t implemented as politics gets in the way. (Stalin’s chaotic five-year plan)
  • There is something inherently revolutionary about collective spontaneity.

Let’s examine some small but hopeful moments that could benefit from and be deepened by socialists who have collective experience making socialist plans.

Disaster socialism as a precursor

In his book Introduction to Collective Behavior and Collective Action, David Miller cites convincing research demonstrating that natural disasters bring out the best rather than the worst in people. Contrary to centrist newspapers’ mantras about “looting”, most people respond to a crisis heroically. Instead of mainstream newspapers’ warmed-over version of a Lord of the Flies scenario, if we examine the mass behavior in the recent hurricanes to hit Florida, Texas, Mexico and Puerto Rico, we find stories of people acting altruistically, in socialist ways. From a socialist point of view, the problems with the crowd’s altruistic response to these disasters is that after the storm people have not built socialist institutions that can help them extend their altruism longer before the return to a rapidly collapsing capitalism. Yet the behavior of masses of people in natural disasters is very close to how people behave in revolutionary situations. How can we preserve and deepen the memory of such collective creativity?

Workers cooperatives

Capitalists have done a good job of convincing people that there is “no alternative to capitalism because all socialism is Stalinism – and that has failed. This ignores the fact that workers’ self-management, workers’ control, and worker cooperatives currently exist and many are surviving with better production records than capitalist businesses or workers under state socialism. (Seymour Melman’s book After Capitalism provides a wonderful description of this). In the case of worker cooperatives, they are managed and run by workers themselves, most of whom have ownership in the company. Through regularly held general assemblies, workers decide together what will be produced, how much will be produced, how long and how hard they will work and what they will be paid. They also decide what tools and resources they will purchase and what they will do with the surplus. This is a radical departure from companies where workers have no say in any of these matters. John Curl’s book, For All the People documents the history of workers coops.We don’t expect miracles from any worker coop because they still have to exist within a decaying world capitalist system. However, worker coops and the flashes of “disaster socialism” are promising.

Rank-and-file union democracy

As many of you know, radical unions in the early 20th century in the United States like the Wobblies used to talk about workers running things on their own, having “One Big Union”. Now unions have given up any vision of workers running anything. Instead, they preside over the most myopic concerns at sparsely attended meetings. In fact, when my partner once asked her shop steward at the university where she worked, “why don’t all these separate unions unite under one union instead of having numerous small ones? Wouldn’t we be stronger united?”, the steward looked at her like she was from another planet. Despite this, one small bright spot in the United States is Labor Notes, a monthly publication which tracks union activity around the US from the point of view of the rank-and-file. These monthly reports are union workers’ experiences with the strategies and tactics they used to combat employers and were largely independent of union leadership.

What is missing from these scenes of “disaster socialism” workers’ coops and rank-and file union democracy is a unified political party which coordinates, synchronizes, deepens and expands all these activities and spreads them to wider sectors of society with some kind of transition program. We don’t have such a party, but if we did the party would need a coordinated plan to link these experiences together in time and space.

Limitations of Trotskyist transition programs

Unlike anarchists, Leninists have experience with state power and understand the importance of a socialist transition program which takes years and decades to implement. In the United States, the Socialist Workers Party used to lay out a transition program as part of their presidential runs. We think this was a very good idea. The problem here is that all the imaginary planning was done by the vanguard party. “The workers”, as Lenin said, “can attain only a trade union consciousness”. They need to be injected with the collective imagination of the vanguard. But the workers of Russia during the first four years of the revolution and the Spanish workers during the Spanish Revolution of 1936-1939 showed more collective imagination than any vanguard party. They developed general assemblies, workers councils, and direct democracy by politically mandating delegates rather than representatives. Optimally, these delegates were rotated and were strictly recallable. These were the inventions of working class collective creativity that were not imposed on them by any socialist leadership. In the case of Russia, it was the Bolshevik party that reacted and supported these councils or “soviets”, for a time. But the origin of these political forms were workers, peasants and soldiers.

Filling in the Gaps

As I said in my previous article, socialists are very good at criticizing capitalism. You can get us to argue about what would and wouldn’t be allowed in our ideal socialist society: whether or not to abolish inheritance; how people should be compensated for their work or whether we use labor vouchers or dissolve all mediated exchange of products and services. But the moment you say “what about the messy transition from the current capitalist crisis to our ideal conditions?”, almost everyone disappears.

Optimally socialist planning circles would be an institutionalized, ongoing structure within a working-class party. It could certainly be implemented within the Green Party. But we can’t wait for these organizations to do this. Socialist planning circles should begin now.

There are a few visionaries who propose scenarios about what socialist futures might look like and how to get there, including David Schweickart, John Romer, Michael Albert, and Erik Olin Wright. But do radical organizers use these plans? No. They either don’t know about them or they do know, and they dismiss them because the theorists are academics. But worse, they don’t even think plans are necessary. At best, radical organizers go from socialist principles directly to strategies, tactics and then to collective actions. My claim in this article is that between principles and actions there need to be socialist plans that inform strategies and tactics. Plans mediate between principles and strategies. They ground principles, making them more tangible while they give wings to strategies by keeping the long-view in mind.

Here is what I don’t understand. Socialists have no problem starting and sustaining book clubs in which they discuss and learn what the great theorists say. There are book clubs about politics, economics, history and anthropology. But there are no meeting groups where socialists are forced to write detailed plans to answer questions such as:

  • Give me a snap-shot version of how a socialist future will work in terms of politics, economics, the workplace, housing and education.
  • How long do you project it would it take, and by what process are you going to get there?

If I weren’t already a socialist these are the questions I would expect most socialists to be able to answer readily. If they couldn’t do this I’d never take them seriously. If fiction-writing groups get together and write stories, why don’t socialists get together and share their dreams as architects of socialism?

My Personal experience with socialist planning circles

About three years ago, four of us got together for over a year and engaged in what we called a “socialist planning circle”. We met for three hours once every two weeks. We each developed our own plans for the most basic social institutions that would need to be reorganized as part of the revolution – food production, basic housing, energy harnessing, transportation systems, and workplace organization, to name a few.

The kind of controversies we addressed were:

  • Economic allocation systems: who is entitled to what under what conditions?
  • What does a transition out of the wage system look like?
  • How do we institute a global minimum wage to keep capitalists from leaving a country?
  • How to we abolish finance capital? Is there a place for “socialist banks?”
  • How might food cooperatives reorganize food production?
  • If we want to abolish the prison system, what do we do with people who continue to engage in anti-social activities?
  • By what process would shortening the work week be institutionalized?
  • Which social industries can afford to be localized and which, say, energy system might need to remain centralized?
  • How to coordinate workers councils from the local to regional level?
  • Will we still have a need for political parties and if so, how would they be organized?

Our procedure in socialist planning circles

  • We agreed on an area in social life from our master list, say economic allocation.
  • Over the next two weeks we each created our own vision of the future about economic allocation. We each made a table and followed it through six phases:
  1. The current crisis of capitalism
  2. Transition one phase
  3. Justification for transition one
  4. Transition two phase
  5. Justification for transition two
  6. Ideal condition
  7. Justification for ideal condition
  • Each of us presented our plan for economic allocation at the next meeting
  • We criticized and discussed each other’s plans
  • Two weeks later we synthesized the plans into a written document
  • We picked a new topic and repeated the steps

What was invigorating about this process was how often we already had ideas about these topics but we didn’t know we had them because we never asked ourselves, let alone anyone else. We also learned a great deal from the criticism from other members. Some of us were hesitant about our own plans but we could be critical of the plans of others. These criticisms in turn led us to look at our own hesitant plans in a new way. What was also interesting was the need to prioritize in what order we would restructure things in a socialist manner. It’s like a parody of the old show “Queen for a Day”. If the gods said you had a week to build a socialist system, what would you do first, second and third?

Justification for socialist planning circles

A socialist planning circle is a small group of 4 to 8 people formed with the intention of:

  1. Giving socialists confidence that we can plan the future now while living under capitalism. This involves learning and practicing our skills at planning transition programs for the infrastructure, structure and superstructure of socialist society among ourselves. We rehearse our scenarios in the hope that when capitalism collapses we have some semblance of a collective, structured understanding as to what is to be done because we have shaped, criticized and refined our plans through thought, discussion, writing, criticism and revision over weeks, month and years.
  2. Once we have experienced this process in a pilot group, we establish new groups to provide a supportive atmosphere to help working class people build confidence that they are smart enough to coordinate production across their workplaces.

There is a need for working class visionaries who learn to collectively imagine socialist futures, not by reading books, but by writing and sharing our imaginations now, before capitalism completely collapses. We need to rehearse, rehearse and rehearse our socialist plans with each other. We need to begin to cultivate our social imaginations now, rather than waiting for leaders or vanguard parties to do this for us. We have to have the nerve to say, “I can imagine transportation systems could be run this way, or food distribution should be run that way”. This project requires us to take seriously our socialist claim that we know how things could work in an ultimate sense, as we imagine how we navigate in the immediate future through the muddy, murky waters of getting from the crisis to our ideal conditions.

Objections

Why don’t you just start a reading group of socialist visionaries like you mentioned earlier rather than reinventing the wheel?

For the same reasons that you don’t begin scientific research with a literature review. You begin with your hypothesis and what the reasons are you think will support it. Then you do the literature review. Otherwise what you think is buried by the literature review. The same thing is true for art. You don’t begin drawing the figure by measuring it with a ruler. You begin with a gesture drawing, so you bring life into the drawing. You measure later. In the case of socialist planning, I’m convinced that people have an unconscious knowledge of how social organization could be. It is currently buried within them and needs to become conscious and worked on. The scenarios of scholars would only bury this unconscious knowledge. In the revolutionary situations that are coming, we are going to have to figure this out by ourselves anyway.

Socialist planning circles are too abstract and not connected to the working class. Getting together and spinning socialist plans pulls us away from the daily struggles of poor and working-class people. It will draw people who just want to talk and not act.

This is a danger in a discussion group in which there is no reading and where no preparation is required. It is less of a problem in a structured reading group because the individuals must make the effort to read the book in order to discuss it. A socialist planning group requires imagination and preparation, just the way a painting group would require people to bring two paintings to show for the next meeting or a songwriters group would expect people to come up with two songs for the next meeting. In some ways planning is more difficult that imagining ideal conditions. Ideal conditions ask you to imagine how things could be in an ultimate sense. Socialist planning groups ask, “How are you going to get there”. In my opinion, the second requires a far more active commitment. A socialist planning group would very quickly shed ‘dead weight” people who just wanted to talk.

These plans will dissolve once they face the realities of real social life

Any socialist who participated in these groups would know that when they return to their political practice much of the plans they learned to cultivate in the group would crumble and dissolve. However, the collective memory of some of these plans would remain and grow stronger by continuing in the socialist planning hot-houses over weeks, months and even years.

For example “participatory budgeting” is a way for people to become involved in local economics by having a say in the prioritization of the city’s budget. This exercise is designed to give residents practice in how to plan economically. But years ago, anarchist Murray Bookchin argued that the basic unit of city governance should not be city council, but neighborhood assemblies. City budget priorities were proposed at these local assemblies. Does that mean the city council in a capitalist city would accept that local neighborhood assemblies should exist at all? Of course not! Neither are they likely to agree if these assemblies decided that they wanted real estate “developers” kicked out along with a reduction of the police force. The important thing is to awaken in working class people a taste for planning and running things independently of the outcome.

The subtitle of this article was very carefully chosen. I am not advocating a static blueprint. I am advocating building scaffolds. In a technical sense a scaffold is defined as a temporary structure outside a building used by workers while constructing or repairing a building. Scaffolds are a necessary but not a sufficient condition for buildings. Scaffolds are not buildings. But without scaffolds there would be no buildings. The buildings themselves are like the socialist institutions of the future. The scaffolds are the means by which we build that future. There will be no socialist “buildings” without scaffolds.

As capitalism continues to decline, we will have more “disaster socialism” situations because the chickens are coming home to roost in capitalist ecological policies. Workers coops may spread because they will pay better entry level wages than capitalists and they are less likely to fire people in times of crisis. Rank-and-file democracy in unions will spread as workers because increasingly disgusted by a union leadership wedded to the Democratic Party. In all these circumstances the memory and enactment of socialist planning circles scaffolds could only deepen and organize what is already going on.

Optimally socialist planning circles would be an institutionalized, ongoing structure within a working-class party. It could certainly be implemented within the Green Party. But we can’t wait for these organizations to do this. Socialist planning circles should begin now. If organizations form later to house socialist planning circles, fine but we cannot afford to wait for them to see the light. We must be our own light. If these political forms emerge later, they will be lucky to have us!

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 nd Hyper-Abstract Reasoning and Power in Eden: The Emergence of Gender Hierarchies in the Ancient World. 

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Things to ponder

While our media prostitutes, many Hollywood celebs, and politicians and opinion shapers make so much noise about the still to be demonstrated damage done by the Russkies to our nonexistent democracy, this is what the sanctimonious US government has done overseas just since the close of World War 2. And this is what we know about. Many other misdeeds are yet to be revealed or documented.

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

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all. Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report

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What is Wrong with the US Left? A Perspective From Iraq

Then let us pray that come it may,

(As come it will for a’ that,)

That Sense and Worth, o’er a’ the earth,

Shall bear the gree, an’ a’ that.

For a’ that, an’ a’ that,

It’s coming yet for a’ that,

That Man to Man, the world o’er,

Shall brothers be for a’ that

– Robert Burns

WHY PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD CARE ABOUT U.S. AFFAIRS: WHEN THE U.S. CATCHES A COLD, THE WHOLE WORLD SNEEZES

I have been asked by my American friends to give an opinion of how an ordinary person from the outside sees the American left. I am far from presuming to have the knowledge to state a qualified opinion; it is more of a sharing of thoughts and reflecting aloud. The interest that the people of the world have in the affairs of the U.S. is due to the role that it plays in their lives. When the U.S. catches a cold, the whole world starts sneezing. When I read the press, or watch the news regarding protest movements in the U.S. for the last decade the following thoughts assail my mind.

THE LACK OF A “SKELETON”

Mass movements of the politically active segment of the population come and go without leaving a lasting trace because there is no “skeleton” organization holding the masses after the event that has brought them together passes away. These organizations need to have a clear strategic agenda and a permanent structure.

During 1954 the Iraqi Communist Party was a Marxist-Leninist type of organization with a hard, underground core bound by party discipline whose influence spread out through various unions, student, youth and women’s associations. Would this be valid in the 21st century where movements have organic amoeba-like characteristics? Is there a need for professional revolutionaries whose lives would be solely dedicated to the cause?

In my opinion, the great mass movements in the U.S. come and go without a lasting effect. This clearly indicates that the tools used by the movements, in spite of their modernity, do not in the end achieve their purpose for a lasting, meaningful change. Therefore, we have to come up with other tools or maybe invent some new ones. What is required is a permanent movement that would not fade away once the event has passed. Rather the event needs to be registered and kept as an experience that should be transformed into a revolutionary tradition – a tool to be used in future events. This movement would be the keeper and developer of these experiences. They should have a constant presence on the political scene, however slight.

The organizational side of this movement would be the most difficult problem it would face. There must be a structure with certain laws ruling its members. We also should not exclude the possibility of having people who would dedicate all their time to the movement. There would be the eternal problem of financial support. This would mean asking for donations from the members at regular intervals. But unless we come up with this hard-core skeleton to hold the muscles of our experiences and traditions, it will be hard to move forward. Passion and spontaneous movements of the masses are not sufficient without an organization. Insurrections such as John Brown and most riots fail to achieve their ends unless they are connected to movements. The riots in Watts in 1967 helped to gain blacks civil rights because the riots were connected to a social movement. This leads us to considering the appearance of a third force besides the Democratic and Republican parties – a third party.

THE “LOCALISM” OF THE PROTEST MOVEMENTS

It seems to me that most of the protest movements are very roughly concentrated on the two coasts, leaving the central states and, surprisingly, the Great Lakes region devoid of action. The difficulty of trying to agitate in smaller communities and rural environments is understandable. But leaving large parts of the middle section of the country empty opens the door to supporters of the far right. People in the central states are working class people and according to Marx, the people who are going to make the revolution. Why are they abandoned?

This “localism” of the revolutionary and left movements on the two coasts and in universities is embedded in the American psyche. If it had its objective reasons from the 19th to half of the 20th century, these objective reasons of class have gradually been eroded. However, the psychological effect remains, and is often heated up by the mainstream media. They are divided into rednecks and snobs and this fault line unfortunately divides the people. This is embedded in films, books, songs, Hollywood, social media and more. My experience in Iraq has been similar, where people from different regions of Iraq were pitted against each other – south against north, east against west. We also had academics and historians disparaging each other’s identities. The imperialists for their own purposes and profited from all this.

The ICP from the very start took a clear, unambiguous stand against such notions, which was clearly manifested in their program and leaflets. In my opinion the movement in America must unequivocally state its position against any attempts to divide the working people from each other, and the working people from the intellectuals.

WHAT IS NEEDED IS A RETURN OF THE NARODNIKI IN A HIGHER LEVEL

There has been no movement similar to the Russian 19th century Narodniki (“intellectuals going to the people”) where the intelligentsia went by the hundreds to the peasants and a bond was established. In the so-called third world, students are looked up to and the people turn to them for revolutionary action and vision. In the struggle against colonialism this bond was forged. Therefore, in order to bridge the gap there must be action on part of the intelligentsia in the U.S. to reach out to the working people.

THE UNRESOLVED QUESTION OF THE LEFT’S ATTITUDE TOWARDS RACISM

The enormity of the crimes committed against people of color is so great that a progressive movement’s stance would seem to be obvious. While the left should be the leading force in the struggle against racism, it has not managed to gain the hearts of the African American people, many of whom turned to religion, whether Christian or Muslim. If the justified anger of this segment is properly channeled it would serve as a strong and constant support for the movement.

There are numerous examples of African American intellectuals becoming disillusioned with the left. The same can be said more or less with various nuances for other minorities such as Latin American, Asian and Middle Eastern. Why is this? Claiming that racism is exploitive and unfair is easy. But appealing to minorities to join the socialist movement is a whole other problem. What is the European-American left doing wrong? The left will fail to achieve the moral high ground and be caught in a circle of hypocrisy. At the same time the people of color will have distorted concepts of protest and how to liberate themselves. They will feel that protests are for ‘white people”.

As long as you have the working people divided along these various lines there will be no movement. People must learn that they are not some god-chosen exclusive set, and to respect each other’s living habits, food, fertility or the lack of it, music, noise – all the small things that make daily life.

PLAYING FOR KEEPS

Being part of a movement is a lifelong vocation. We must convince people to keep their convictions throughout their adult lives and not just in youth. As long as we participate in the activity of a society that thrives on oppression and exploitation without trying to change it for the better, we should feel guilty. This feeling should never leave us and it should be cultivated. Being an activist or an organizer should not be something that you do when you feel like it. It is not a voluntary contract, like all other forms of individualism. Being a revolutionary is a necessity and something we embrace with love.

At the same time this should be accompanied by a firm understanding that your enemy is ruthless and will show no mercy. It should be clear to any movement or individual that once a decision has been taken to resist the system that they will be the target of constant relentless attacks from which there is no respite, from subtle ideological distortions to brutal physical punishment. There are no rules, no “gentlemanly” conduct – it’s tooth and claw to the death. This is not an over-dramatically description if you are really and truly in the struggle. The art of destroying human beings without killing them has been brought up to a high level in the US. Therefore, the movement should have the resilience and skills to protect itself. Part of its activity should be the maintenance of a group dedicated to answering to attacks in the press and other media sources.

THE CULT OF WAR, THE WARRIOR AND VIOLENCE

Since the end of the Second World War up to the present, the US has launched or been part of multiple imperialist wars. The media glorifies US soldiers when sending them to die and ignores them and their needs when they come back. The left has not been successful in having anything to offer working class people in the way of work they can do as an alternative to joining the military. The left needs to work hard to educate the people and relentlessly oppose the luring of young people to military establishments and the waging of endless wars.

DIVERSIONS AND THE MENTAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL CONDITI0N OF THE LEFT

A constant flow of diversions is kept like a stream inundating the minds and consciousness of people. Pseudo cultural events, books, films, never ending soap operas, the lives of celebrities…… and a thousand other ways keep the minds of the majority occupied with irrelevant matters or, even worse, serve at best to ruin their tastes. The malady bred in Hollywood is so contagious that it takes a couple of hours for it to cover the globe. The left in the US has on numerous occasions been caught up and unaware while becoming part of it. It is indeed hard to differentiate between what is real and what is false in this environment of smoke and mirrors. So as the Three Witches said:

Fair is foul, and foul is fair:

Hover through the fog and filthy air

We should stop striking poses and falling in love with the sound of our own voices.

The task of the left is to explain the meaning of this stream and on a daily basis show its poisonous effect. This is especially true for the impressionable and vulnerable youth. This is true not only for the American left but the global left in general.

The theoretical differences that separate the left are real and I don’t mean to minimize them. However, they should be addressed as part of an overall program where all the issues are prioritized. The American left fights over theoretical issues before they have done the hard work of expanding and connecting the issues across time and space.

We have been beaten by the fascists again and again in spite of the superiority of our principles and even sometimes our numbers. We have let them take over the interpretation of how to make sense of the decline of capitalism. Right now, the fascist parties in Europe are stronger than the forces of the left. In the United States, fascists helped to elect Trump, while the left has union representation of less than 10%, and a Green Party that got 1% of the vote and fifty-seven varieties of Trotskyist, Maoist, anarchists and social democrats. Splitting tiny parties even further is the worst in individualism. It is also very American.

EXAMPLES FROM THE HISTORY OF THE IRAQ COMMUNIST PARTY

Al-Radi: Whatever his errors, he paid the ultimate price for his noble convictions.

The Iraq Communist Party suffered a major blow when three of its leaders had been executed in 1949 and it splintered into several factions. By 1954 the party overcame organizational and ideological fragmentation and haziness in its strategic goals. The reputation the party had built for itself through the dedication and sacrifices of its rank and file were the sole really anti-imperialist force which kept the base more or less intact. From this base a new more modern interpretation of how to carry on the struggle led by Husain Ahmed Al-Radi (Salam Adil) was developed. (1)

It included a policy that was realistic with a broad national front that would include all anti-war and anti-imperialist forces. Although I see the advantages of a united front and consider that it is the correct path, I have no illusions whatsoever about the forces we need to bring to our fold. The experiences of Communist parties in the world has shown that being on guard is critical.

CONCLUSION

I have specifically concentrated our attention to this period in order to find similarities with the current situation in the U.S. The guidelines that can be drawn are that a hard-core organization gathers around it at this stage of its historical development the widest base possible while keeping the strategic aims and the “skeleton” intact in mind. This calls for very dynamic and interactive relations with different groups (ethnic and /or racial groups). it involves a life-time commitment (playing for keeps). Whenever we see that any of the partners in such a front commit a mistake or drags their legs, a friendly criticism should be offered. The danger in such an environment is being led astray in pursuit of goals or aims that have little or nothing to do with our own agenda. For example, in the United States, leftists getting involved with legislation, writing petitions to Congress, or campaigning for “Progressive” Democrats.

In my opinion there is a necessity of finding a social democratic party with strong left leanings independent and not part of the established two parties, able to defend the rights of the working people and minorities and be the platform for a broader united front. It should benefit from previous historical experiences but be always looking forward and in our digital times seeking solutions and not being afraid of experimenting. The young generation should be our main goal. They have the passion and necessary skills and it is to them that the task of bringing about meaningful and significant changes should be given.

MAIN PHOTO: Image of Bonus Army members protesting in the summer of 1932 to demand cash-payment redemption of their service certificates. Image from Wikipedia.

Notes

(1) The Baathist coup of 8 February 1963 came as no surprise to the Communists, but they were unable to mobilize their supporters in the armed forces to oppose it effectively. Al-Radi reacted immediately by drawing up an appeal for mass resistance to the coup, and Communist supporters defended poorer districts of Baghdad against the new government until 10 February, suffering heavy losses. The new regime was quick to act against the Communists, capturing many of them and killing hundreds either in the fighting or in its jails and torture chambers. Al-Radi was captured on 20 February, and executed by hanging soon afterwards, of which the Government officially announced. There is an opinion that he died under torture four days after his arrest without divulging any information.

As usual, the Ba’athist coup came as no surprise to the CIA, which was keen on getting rid of Qasim.  While direct US involvement in these events remains murky, it is clear the US viewed the new regime favorably, and gave it (as customary) the names of Communist militants to be tracked down, arrested and murdered. The Wiki offers the following info on its page about the “Ramadan Revolution”:

It is also widely believed that the CIA provided the new government with lists of communists and other leftists, who were then arrested or killed by the Ba’ath Party’s militia—the National Guard. This claim originated in a 27 September 1963 Al-Ahram interview with King Hussein of Jordan, who—seeking to dispel reports that he was on the CIA’s payroll—declared:

You tell me that American Intelligence was behind the 1957 events in Jordan. Permit me to tell you that I know for a certainty that what happened in Iraq on 8 February had the support of American Intelligence. Some of those who now rule in Baghdad do not know of this thing but I am aware of the truth. Numerous meetings were held between the Ba’ath party and American Intelligence, the more important in Kuwait. Do you know that … on 8 February a secret radio beamed to Iraq was supplying the men who pulled the coup with the names and addresses of the Communists there so that they could be arrested and executed? … Yet I am the one accused of being an agent of America and imperialism![14][15]

See “Ramadan Revolution” (Overthrow of Abd al-Karim Qasim) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramadan_Revolution


ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jamal was Born in Basra/Iraq and spent his early school years with his parents who were studying in France and the US. He graduated from high school in Iraq and studied in the USSR, graduating from Moscow Power Institute (now technical university). He returned to Iraq and worked as a geophysicist from 1968 till 1996, mainly in the field and field-related activities. He currently resides in Moscow.

Creative Commons License
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

While our media prostitutes, many Hollywood celebs, and politicians and opinion shapers make so much noise about the still to be demonstrated damage done by the Russkies to our nonexistent democracy, this is what the sanctimonious US government has done overseas just since the close of World War 2. And this is what we know about. Many other misdeeds are yet to be revealed or documented.

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

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all. Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report

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