Self-Destruct Culture

=By= Henry A. Giroux

Gun violence in the United States has produced a culture soaked in blood – a culture that threatens everyone and extends from accidental deaths, suicides and domestic violence to mass shootings. In late December, a woman in St. Cloud, Florida, fatally shot her own daughter after mistaking her for an intruder. Less than a month earlier, on December 2, in San Bernardino, California, was the mass shooting that left 14 people dead and more than 20 wounded. And just two months before that, on October 1, nine people were killed and seven wounded in a mass shooting at a community college in Roseburg, Oregon.

Mass shootings have become routine in the United States and speak to a society that relies on violence to feed the coffers of the merchants of death. Given the profits made by arms manufacturers, the defense industry, gun dealers and the lobbyists who represent them in Congress, it comes as no surprise that the culture of violence cannot be abstracted from either the culture of business or the corruption of politics. Violence runs through US society like an electric current offering instant pleasure from all cultural sources, whether it be the nightly news or a television series that glorifies serial killers.

At a policy level, violence drives the arms industry and a militaristic foreign policy, and is increasingly the punishing state’s major tool to enforce its hyped-up brand of domestic terrorism, especially against Black youth. The United States is utterly wedded to a neoliberal culture in which cruelty is viewed as virtue, while mass incarceration is treated as the chief mechanism to “institutionalize obedience.” At the same time, a shark-like mode of competition replaces any viable notion of solidarity, and a sabotaging notion of self-interest pushes society into the false lure of mass consumerism. The increasing number of mass shootings is symptomatic of a society engulfed in racism, fear, militarism, bigotry and massive inequities in wealth and power.

Over 270 mass shootings have taken place in the United States in 2015 alone, proving once again that the economic, political and social conditions that underlie such violence are not being addressed. Sadly, these shootings are not isolated incidents. For example, one child under 12 years old has been killed every other day by a firearm, which amounts to 555 children killed by guns in three years. An even more frightening statistic and example of a shocking moral and political perversity was noted in data provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which states that “2,525 children and teens died by gunfire in [the United States] in 2014; one child or teen death every 3 hours and 28 minutes, nearly 7 a day, 48 a week.” Such figures indicate that too many youth in the United States occupy what might be called war zones in which guns and violence proliferate. In this scenario, guns and the hypermasculine culture of violence are given more support than young people and life itself.

The predominance of a relatively unchecked gun culture and a morally perverse and politically obscene culture of violence is particularly evident in the power of the gun lobby and its political advocates to pass laws in eight states to allow students and faculty to carry concealed weapons “into classrooms, dormitories and other buildings” on campuses. In spite of the rash of recent shootings on college campuses, Texas lawmakers, for instance, passed one such “campus carry bill,” which will take effect in August 2016. To add insult to injury, they also passed an “open carry bill” that allows registered gun owners to carry their guns openly in public. Such laws not only reflect “the seemingly limitless legislative clout of gun interests,” but also a rather irrational return to the violence-laden culture of the “Wild West.”

To read more articles by Henry A. Giroux and other authors in the Public Intellectual Project, click here.

As in the past, individuals will be allowed to walk the streets, while openly carrying guns and packing heat as a measure of their love of guns and their reliance upon violence as the best way to address any perceived threat to their security. This return to the deadly practices of the ” Wild West” is neither a matter of individual choice nor some far-fetched yet allegedly legitimate appeal to the Second Amendment. On the contrary, mass violence in the United States has to be placed within a broader historical, economic and political context in order to address the totality of the forces that produce it. Focusing merely on mass shootings or the passing of potentially dangerous gun legislation does not get to the root of the systemic forces that produce the United States’ love affair with violence and the ideologies and criminogenic institutions that produce it.

Imperial policies that promote aggression all across the globe are now matched by increasing levels of lawlessness and state repression, which mutually feed each other. On the home front, civil society is degenerating into a military organization, a space of lawlessness and warlike practices, organized primarily for the production of violence. For instance, as Steve Martinot observes at CounterPunch, the police now use their discourse of command and power to criminalize behavior; in addition, they use military weapons and surveillance tools as if they are preparing for war, and create a culture of fear in which militaristic principles replace legal principles. He writes:

This suggests that there is an institutional insecurity that seeks to cover itself through social control … the cops act out this insecurity by criminalizing individuals in advance. No legal principle need be involved. There is only the militarist principle…. When police shoot a fleeing subject and claim they are acting in self-defense (i.e. threatened), it is not their person but the command and control principle that is threatened. To defend that control through assault or murderous action against a disobedient person implies that the cop’s own identity is wholly immersed in its paradigm. There is nothing psychological about this. Self-worth or insecurity is not the issue. There is only the military ethic of power, imposed on civil society through an assumption of impunity. It is the ethos of democracy, of human self-respect, that is the threat.

The rise of violence and the gun culture in the United States cannot be separated from a transformation in governance in the United States. Political sovereignty has been replaced by economic sovereignty as corporate power takes over the reins of governance. The more money influences politics, the more corrupt the political culture becomes. Under such circumstances, holding office is largely dependent on having huge amounts of capital at one’s disposal, while laws and policies at all levels of government are mostly fashioned by lobbyists representing big business corporations and financial institutions. Moreover, such lobbying, as corrupt and unethical as it may be, is now carried out in the open by the National Rifle Association (NRA) and other individuals, groups and institutions invested in the militarization of US society. This lobbying is then displayed as a badge of honor – a kind of open testimonial to the lobbyists’ disrespect for democratic governance.

But money in politics is not the only major institutional factor in which everyday and state violence are nourished by a growing militarism. As David Theo Goldberg has argued in his essay “Mission Accomplished: Militarizing Social Logic,” the military has also assumed a central role in shaping all aspects of society. Militarization is about more than the use of repressive power; it also represents a powerful social logic that is constitutive of values, modes of rationality and ways of thinking. According to Goldberg,

The military is not just a fighting machine…. It serves and socializes. It hands down to the society, as big brother might, its more or less perfected goods, from gunpowder to guns, computing to information management … In short, while militarily produced instruments might be retooled to other, broader social purpose – the military shapes pretty much the entire range of social production from commodities to culture, social goods to social theory.

The militarization and corporatization of social logic permeates US society. The general public in the United States is largely depoliticized through the influence of corporations over schools, higher education and other cultural apparatuses. The deadening of public values, civic consciousness and critical citizenship are also the result of the work of anti-public intellectuals representing right-wing ideological and financial interests, a powerful set of corporate-controlled media agencies that are largely center-right and a market-driven public pedagogy that reduces the obligations of citizenship to the endless consumption and discarding of commodities. Military ideals permeate every aspect of popular culture, policy and social relations. In addition, a pedagogy of historical, social and racial amnesia is constructed and circulated through celebrity and consumer culture.

A war culture now shapes every aspect of society as warlike values, a hypermasculinity and an aggressive militarism seep into every major institution in the United States, including schools, the corporate media and local police forces. The criminal legal system has become the default structure for dealing with social problems. More and more people are considered disposable because they offend the sensibilities of the financial elite, who are rapidly consolidating class power. Under such circumstances, violence occupies an honored place.

It is impossible to understand the rise of gun culture and violence in the United States without thinking about the maturation of the military state. Since the end of the Cold War the United States has built “the most expensive and lethal military force in the world.” The defense budget for 2015 totaled $598.5 billion and accounted for 54 percent of all federal discretionary spending. The US defense budget is both larger than the combined G-20 and “more than the combined military spending of China, Russia, the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Saudi Arabia, India, Germany, Italy and Brazil,” according to an NBC report. Since 9/11, the United States has intensified both the range of its military power abroad while increasing the ongoing militarization of US society. The United States circles the globe with around 800 military bases, producing a massive worldwide landscape of military force, at an “annual cost of $156 billion,” according to a report by David Vine in The Nation.

Moreover, Vine adds, “there are US troops or other military personnel in about 160 foreign countries and territories, including small numbers of Marines guarding embassies and larger deployments of trainers and advisers like the roughly 3,500 now working with the Iraqi army.” Not only is the Pentagon in an unprecedented position of power, but also it thrives on a morally bankrupt vision of domestic and foreign policy dependent upon a world defined by terrorism, enemies and perpetual fear. Military arms are now transferred to local police departments, drone bases proliferate, and secret bases around the world support special operations, Navy SEALs, CIA personnel, Army Rangers and other clandestine groups, as Nick Turse has shown in Tomorrow’s Battlefield. Under such circumstances, it is not surprising, as Andrew Bacevich points out, that “war has become a normal condition [and the] use of violence has become the preferred “instrument of statecraft.”

Violence feeds on corporate-controlled disimagination machines that celebrate it as a sport while upping the pleasure quotient for the public. Americans do not merely engage in violence; they are also entertained by it. This kind of toxic irrationality and lure of violence is mimicked in the United States’ aggressive foreign policy, in the sanctioning of state torture and in the gruesome killings of civilians by drones. As my colleague David L. Clark pointed out to me in an email, voters’ support for ” bombing make-believe countries [with Arab-sounding names] is not a symptom of muddled confusion but, quite to the contrary, a sign of unerring precision. It describes the desire to militarize nothing less than the imagination and to target the minutiae of our dreams.” State repression, unbridled self-interest, an empty consumerist ethos and an expansive militarism have furthered the conditions for society to flirt with forms of irrationality that are at the heart of everyday aggression, violence and the withering of public life.

Pushback Against Gun Control Efforts

Warlike values no longer suggest a pathological entanglement with a kind of mad irrationality or danger. On the contrary, they have become a matter of common sense. For instance, the US government is willing to lock down a major city such as Boston in order to catch a terrorist or prevent a terrorist attack, but refuses to pass gun control bills that would significantly lower the number of Americans who die each year as a result of gun violence. As Michael Cohen observes, it is truly a symptom of irrationality when politicians can lose their heads over the threat of terrorism, even sacrificing civil liberties, but ignore the fact that “30,000 Americans die in gun violence every year (compared to the 17 who died [in 2012] in terrorist attacks).” It gets worse.

As the threat of terrorism is used by the US government to construct a surveillance state, suspend civil liberties and accelerate the forces of authoritarianism, the fear of personal and collective violence has no rational bearing on addressing the morbid acceleration of gun violence. In fact, the fear of terrorism appears to feed a toxic culture of violence produced, in part, by the wide and unchecked availability of guns. The United States’ fascination with guns and violence functions as a form of sport and entertainment, while gun culture offers a false promise of security. In this logic, one not only kills terrorists with drones, but also makes sure that patriotic Americans are individually armed so they can use force to protect themselves against the apparitions whipped up by right-wing politicians, pundits and the corporate-controlled media.

Rather than bring violence into a political debate that would limit its production, various states increase its possibilities by passing laws that allow guns at places from bars to houses of worship. Florida’s “stand your ground” law, based on the notion that one should shoot first and ask questions later, is a morbid reflection of the United States’ adulation of gun culture and the fears that fuel it. This fascination with guns and violence has infected the highest levels of government and serves to further anti-democratic and authoritarian forces. For example, the US government’s warfare state is propelled by a military-industrial complex that cannot spend enough on weapons of death and destruction. Super modern planes such as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter cost up to $228 million each and are plagued by mechanical problems and yet are supported by a military and defense establishment. As Gabriel Kolko observes, such warlike investments “reflect a pathology and culture that is expressed in spending more money,” regardless of how it contributes to running up the debt, and that thrives on whatanthropologist João Biehl has described as “the energies of the dead.”

Militarism provides ideological support for policies that protect gun owners and sellers rather than children. The Children’s Defense Fund is right in stating, “Where is our anti-war movement here at home? Why does a nation with the largest military budget in the world refuse to protect its children from relentless gun violence and terrorism at home? No external enemy ever killed thousands of children in their neighborhoods, streets and schools year in and year out.”

There is a not-so-hidden structure of politics at work in this type of sanctioned irrationality. Advocating for gun rights provides a convenient discourse for ignoring what Carl Boggs has described as a “harsh neoliberal corporate-state order that routinely generates pervasive material suffering, social dislocation, and psychological despair – worsening conditions that ensure violence in its many expressions.”

As the United States moves from a welfare state to a warfare state, state violence becomes normalized. The United States’ moral compass and its highest democratic ideals have begun to wither, and the institutions that were once designed to help people now serve to largely suppress them. Gun laws matter, social responsibility matters and a government responsive to its people matters, especially when it comes to limiting the effects of a mercenary gun culture. But more has to be done. The dominance of gun lobbyists must end; the reign of money-controlled politics must end; the proliferation of high levels of violence in popular culture, and the ongoing militarization of US society must end. At the same time, it is crucial, as participants in the Black Lives Matter movement have argued, for Americans to refuse to endorse the kind of gun control that criminalizes young people of color.

Moderate calls for reining in the gun culture and its political advocates do not go far enough because they fail to address the roots of the violence causing so much carnage in the United States, especially among children and teens. For example, Hillary Clinton’s much publicized call for controlling the gun lobby and improving background checks, however well intentioned, did not include anything about a culture of lawlessness and violence reproduced by the government, the financial elites and the defense industries, or a casino capitalism that is built on corruption and produces massive amounts of human misery and suffering. Moreover, none of the calls to eliminate gun violence in the United States link such violence to the broader war on youth, especially poor youth of color.

A Culture of Violence

It would be wrong to suggest that the violence that saturates popular culture directly causes violence in the larger society. Nevertheless, it is arguable that depictions of violence serve to normalize violence as both a source of pleasure and as a practice for addressing social issues. When young people and others begin to believe that a world of extreme violence, vengeance, lawlessness and revenge is the only world they inhabit, the culture and practice of real-life violence is more difficult to scrutinize, resist and transform.

Many critics have argued that a popular culture that endlessly trades in violence runs the risk of blurring the lines between the world of fantasies and the world we live in. What they often miss is that when violence is celebrated in its myriad registers and platforms in a society, a formative culture is put in place that is amenable to the pathology of fascism. That is, a culture that thrives on violence runs the risk of losing its capacity to separate politics from violence. A.O. Scott recognizes such a connection between gun violence and popular culture, but he fails to register the deeper significance of the relationship. He writes:

… it is absurd to pretend that gun culture is unrelated to popular culture, or that make-believe violence has nothing to do with its real-world correlative. Guns have symbolic as well as actual power, and the practical business of hunting, law enforcement and self-defense has less purchase in our civic life than fantasies of righteous vengeance or brave resistance…. [Violent] fantasies have proliferated and intensified even as our daily existence has become more regulated and standardized – and also less dangerous. Perhaps they offer an escape from the boredom and regimentation of work and consumption.

Popular culture not only trades in violence as entertainment, but also it delivers violence to a society addicted to a pleasure principle steeped in graphic and extreme images of human suffering, mayhem and torture. While the Obama administration banned waterboarding as an interrogation method in January 2009, it appears to be thriving as a legitimate procedure in a number of prominent Hollywood films, including Safe House, Zero Dark Thirty, G.I. Jane and Taken 3. The use of and legitimation of torture by the government is not limited to Hollywood films. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump announced recently on ABC’s “This Week” that he would bring back waterboarding because it “is peanuts compared to what they do to us.” It appears that moral depravity and the flight from social responsibility have no limits in an authoritarian political landscape.

Gun Violence Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg

The United States is suffering from an epidemic of violence, and much of it results in the shooting and killing of children. In announcing his package of executive actions to reduce gun violence, President Obama singled out both the gun lobby and Congress for refusing to implement even moderate gun control reforms. Obama was right on target in stating that “the gun lobby may be holding Congress hostage right now, but they cannot hold America hostage. We do not have to accept this carnage as the price of freedom.” Congress’s refusal to enact any type of gun control is symptomatic of the death of US democracy and the way in which money and power now govern the United States. Under a regime of casino capitalism, wealth and profits are more important than keeping the American people safe, more worthwhile than preventing a flood of violence across the land, and more valued than even the lives of young children caught in the hail of gunfire.

In spite of the empty bluster of Republican politicians claiming that Obama is violating the US Constitution with executive overreach, threatening to take guns away from the American people or undermining the Second Amendment, the not-so-hidden politics at work in these claims is one that points to the collapse of ethics, compassion and responsibility in the face of a militarized culture defined by the financial elite, gun lobbies and big corporations. Such forces represent a take-no-prisoners approach and refuse to even consider Obama’s call for strengthening background checks, limiting the unchecked sale of firearms by gun sellers, developing “smart gun” technologies, and preventing those on the United States’ terrorist watch list from purchasing guns. These initiatives hardly constitute a threat to gun ownership in the United States.

Guns are certainly a major problem in the United States, but they are symptomatic of a much larger crisis: Our country has tipped over into a new and deadly form of authoritarianism. We have become one of the most violent cultures on the planet and regulating guns does not get to the root of the problem. Zhiwa Woodbury touches on this issue at Tikkun Daily, writing:

We are a country of approximately 300 million people with approximately 300 million firearms – a third of which are concealable handguns. Each one of these guns is made for one purpose only – to kill as quickly and effectively as possible. The idea that some magical regulatory scheme, short of confiscation, will somehow prevent guns from being used to kill people is laughable, regardless of what you think of the NRA. Similarly, mentally ill individuals are responsible for less than 5% of the 30,000+ gunned down in the U.S. every year.

In the current historical conjuncture, gun violence makes a mockery of safe public spaces, gives rise to institutions and cultural apparatuses that embrace a deadly war psychology, and trades on fear and insecurity to undermine any sense of shared responsibility. It is no coincidence that the violence of prisons is related to the violence produced by police in the streets; it is no coincidence that the brutal masculine authority that now dominates US politics, with its unabashed hatred of women, poor people, Black people, Muslims and Mexican immigrants, shares an uncanny form of lawlessness with a long tradition of 20th century authoritarianism.

As violence moves to the center of American life, it becomes an organizing principle of society, and further contributes to the unraveling of the fabric of a democracy. Under such circumstances, the United States begins to consider everyone a potential criminal, wages war with itself and begins to sacrifice its children and its future. The political stooges, who have become lapdogs of corporate and financial interests, and refuse out of narrow self- and financial interests to confront the conditions that create such violence, must be held accountable for the deaths taking place in a toxic culture of gun violence. The condemnation of violence cannot be limited to police brutality. Violence does not just come from the police. In the United States, there are other dangers emanating from state power that punishes whistleblowers, intelligence agencies that encourage the arrests of those who protest against the abuse of corporate and state power, and a corporate-controlled media that trades in ignorance, lies and falsehoods, all the while demanding and generally “receiving unwavering support from their citizens,” as Teju Cole has pointed out in The New Yorker.

Yet, the only reforms we hear about are for safer gun policies, mandatory body-worn cameras for the police and more background checks. These may be well-intentioned reforms, but they do not get to the root of the problem, which is a social and economic system that trades in death in order to accumulate profits. What we don’t hear about are the people who trade their conscience for supporting the gun lobby, particularly the NRA. These are the politicians in Congress who create the conditions for mass shootings and gun violence because they have been bought and sold by the apostles of the death industry. These are the same politicians who support the militarization of everyday life, who trade in torture, who bow down slavishly to the arms industries and who wallow in the handouts provided by the military-industrial-academic complex.

These utterly corrupted politicians are killers in suits whose test of courage and toughness was captured in one of the recent Republican presidential debates, when candidate Ben Carson was asked by Hugh Hewitt, a reactionary right-wing talk show host, if he would be willing to kill thousands of children in the name of exercising tough leadership. As if killing innocent children is a legitimate test for leadership. This is what the warmongering politics of hysterical fear with its unbridled focus on terrorism has come to – a future that will be defined by moral and political zombies who represent the real face of terrorism, domestic and otherwise.

Clearly, the cause of violence in the United States will not stop by merely holding the politicians responsible. What is needed is a mass political movement willing to challenge and replace a broken system that gives corrupt and warmongering politicians excessive political and economic power. Democracy and justice are on life support and the challenge is to bring them back to life not by reforming the system but by replacing it. This will only take place with the development of a politics in which the obligation to justice is matched by an endless responsibility to collective struggle.

Contributing Editor Henry A. Giroux  currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. His most recent books are America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth (Monthly Review Press, 2013) and Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Haymarket Press, 2014). His web site is www.henryagiroux.com.

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Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

By Andrew KORYBKO

Obama shakes Raul’s hand at the UNO. Dignified deal or facesaving betrayal? Maybe the empire simply wore out the revolution.

Millions of people across the globe popped the champagne and celebrated the US-Cuba deal to restore bilateral relations, while failing to accurately see the situation for what it was – a Cuban surrender. The emotional and symbolic attachment associated with the freeing of Cuba’s three remaining heroes imprisoned in the US has blinded observers to the fact that Raul betrayed the multipolar world. It’s about time someone ‘spoils the party’ and throws a glass of realism in everyone’s ideologically drunken faces to sober them up to the ruse that’s been pulled.

Absent from the headlines of global jubilation are the finer details of the Obama-Raul ‘deal’, the aspects of which are now beginning to seep out via different media outlets. Having been in the planning stages for almost two years, all of the details for Cuba’s surrender and the subsequent steps it will take to implicitly support American policy in the hemisphere have been hashed out. There were a lot of backdoor dealings and hidden motivations that explain why everything happened as it did, but what’s for sure is that this isn’t the dramatic climax of America’s Latin American offensive, but rather the opening salvo of a pan-continental thrust to rival what it is simultaneously engaged in across Eurasia.

Backdoor Dealings

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t is beginning to emerge that the US and Raul may be on course to receive a lot more from one another than was publicly stipulated in their historic agreement. Let’s take a look at some of the more shadowy dealings that are now coming out:

What’s In It For Raul

Cold-Hard Cash:

Whereas Russia wrote off $32 billion of Cuba’s debt (90% of the total) and China has provided development loans (e.g. $400 million in 2004) for specialized projects, the US offers cold-hard cash with no preconditions for its use, raising the risk that such resources could be squandered amidst corruption. The Washington Times reports that:

“If you look around the world, [Cuba is] in urgent need of economic resources, hard currency. Russia’s under sanctions, of course, Iran’s under sanctions, the Chinese are pretty hard-headed businesspeople,” said Paul Webster Hare, a former British ambassador to Havana. “So if they want to quickly turn on the tap of new hard currency, America is top of the list.”

It’s not like Russia and China weren’t providing it, but Raul wanted as much as he could as quickly as possible, and once a leader turns greedy, Washington’s always there to reach some kind of ‘deal’.

(Fracked) Oil:

Bloomberg reports that Raul was apparently upset that Venezuela cut its oil subsidy program to Cuba by perhaps as much as 30%, likely in the face of lower global prices and the destabilizing Color Revolution attempts ongoing in the country. The door is now open for the US to position itself as the replacement, provided that it follows the Council on Foreign Relations’ policy ‘memorandum’ (read: dictate) that it lift its crude oil export restrictions. This raises the distinct possibility that fracked oil could find its way to Cuba’s shores in the near future.

What’s In It For The US

Click to enlarge

Cuba’s National Treasures:

The New York Times reports that the US now has the potential to penetrate the country’s prized pharmaceutical industry and gain access to exclusive vaccines for its biotechnology sector. Remember, medical diplomacy is one of Cuba’s most internationally revered and symbolic characteristics, and it may now be in danger of disappearing or being diluted once the US gets its hands on it. Another ‘opportunity’ that the NYT talks about for American business is Cuba’s enormous nickel deposits, among the largest in the world. The same can be said for its cobalt ones, too, neither of which the US has enough of. Considering US-based companies’ abysmal human rights records in ‘communist’ China, for example, it’s not a far reach to say that communist Cuba’s miners may soon turn into serfs once American capital reaches their mines.

Tobacco, Tourism, and the MLB Big Leagues:

More expectedly than the abovementioned, the US will likely make big inroads in Cuba’s tobacco and tourism industries. Although no official move has been made on lifting the restrictions for American travel to Cuba, this is thought to be in the cards and will happen sooner than later, and when it does, it’s already expected to destroy the country’s culture and heritage. Another development is that American baseball teams may now hit a bonanza with the possible unrestricted recruitment of Cuban players, further entrenching their history of exploitation and deceit in preying upon young Caribbean prospects.

Hidden Motivations

Raul and the US government each have their own reasons for entering into the ‘deal’, with the former’s being more narrow and domestic while the latter’s is more broad and geopolitical.

Raul

It’s not quite clear why Raul chose to reverse the ideals of the Cuban Revolution, but the following three scenarios (or a combination thereof) may help explain why:

(1) Yanukovich Syndrome:

Raul may have naively thought that pre-emptively working with the same Color Revolutionary forces dedicated to his overthrow could offset their success in the future. It didn’t work for Yanukvovich and it won’t work for Raul or any other leader.

(2) Black-Ops Blackmail:

The US could have been on the cusp of a major destabilization attempt timed to coincide with Fidel’s death and used this as leverage against Raul, guaranteeing him power and delaying the overthrow attempt if he complies with all of their demands. The US-dictated release of the 53 ‘political prisoners’ was designed to be the ‘teeth’ behind this agreement in case it falls flat.

(3) Just Another Corrupt Latin American Leader:

Raul may have simply sold out because he wanted the cash money that the US was providing as opposed to the Chinese and Russian investment and debt forgiveness. This would make him no different than the scores of corrupt Latin American leaders who came before him.

US

While Raul’s motives are less clear, the US’ are as plain as day, and they’re all intended to reverse Latin America’s recent leap to multipolarity:

(1) Remove Non-Regional Actors:

China wanted to breach the US’ personal ‘lake’ via the Nicaraguan Canal and Russia had hopes of using the island as a signals intelligence base and long-range bomber hanger for regular flights over the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. The US is adamantly against either of these two countries re-establishing a foothold in the region, and it sped up ‘negotiations’ with Cuba precisely to block Russia.

National flags of the ALBA member countries from left to right: Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Republic of Cuba, Plurinational State of Bolivia, Republic of Nicaragua, Commonwealth of Dominica, Republic of Ecuador, Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Saint Lucia, Grenada, and the Federation of Saint Kitts and Nevis

(2) Pick Apart ALBA:

With a foothold in Cuba, the US hopes to sow discord between it and Venezuela, eventually leading to the dismemberment of ALBA, the multipolar resistance organization that both states co-founded in 2004. With Cuba co-opted by the US and pressure on Venezuela increasing (perhaps in conjunction with a Cuban-Venezuelan falling out akin to the Sino-Soviet split), the rest of its smaller and weaker members will fall like dominoes on command.

(3) Promote The Pacific Alliance Against Mercosur:

This grouping is a pro-American neo-liberal trading organization that has divided Latin America and rapidly emerged as one of the world’s most dynamic trading blocs. The US intends to use this multilateral lever of asymmetrical influence to split Mercosur by poaching members Paraguay and Uruguay (both of whom have said they want to join the Alliance), which would then contain Brazil, and indirectly spread Washington’s control over the supercontinent. Having Cuba destabilize member-state Venezuela opens up another front on the war against Mercosur that can facilitate its fragmentation.

Where To Go From Here

With the dust finally settling, it’s appropriate to forecast the direction of the newfound US-Cuban alliance:

Presidential Photo-Ops:

Barack Obama shakes hands with Cuba’s President Raúl Castro at a memorial service for Nelson Mandela.

Bilateral visits of both leaders to each other’s country are now being actively discussed. The White House is open to Raul visiting the US, and although Obama claims he’s “not at a stage” to reciprocate right now, he earlier said he’d “see how things evolve”, and there was speculation that he might visit the island as part of a larger Latin American tour next year. This would also take him to Panama for the forthcoming Summit of the Americas in April, where Raul and Obama are expected to meet. A photo-op between the two, regardless of where it takes place, will symbolically showcase America’s latest victory in Latin America and remind everyone that the US has re-energized its focus on the region.

The Latin American Sadat:

The next step in US-Cuban relations is to coordinate political activity between the two, just as Egypt’s Sadat did with the US and Israel after his own similar pivot. Both leaders betrayed their Revolutions, people, and regional and non-regional allies and had profound effects on the balance of power. Raul is even more significant than Sadat in this case, since not only was he an influential part of the very Revolution that he just reversed, but his country represents a major hemispheric pivot for the expression of American policy in Latin America.

Cooperation is definitely forthcoming, and Raul strongly hinted at this when he announced that “We reiterate our willingness for respectful and reciprocal dialogue concerning disagreements…(we) accepted dialogue… on any topic about all things here but also in the United States.” Don’t think that this means the two will butt heads non-stop (as they already have for half a century), but rather that Cuba will now ‘soften’ its opposition and ‘listen more’ to what the US wants it to do. Nothing is off the table, leaving near endless possibilities for Cuba to recalibrate its policies towards Russia, China, and Venezuela, for example, under America’s ‘guiding influence’.

Countering The Counter-Revolution?:

[dropcap]A[/dropcap] faint flicker of hope remains that Fidel’s ‘Old Guard’ represented by Vice-President Ramiro Valdés may find a way to counter Raul’s surrender to the US. The US media has been complicit in trying to propagate the idea that Cubans no longer care about Fidel, but this is an inaccurate depiction of reality that’s only being disseminated out of fear that Fidel’s anti-American resistance is actually alive and well among the populace and won’t die when he does.

Such is the level of domestic discontent over the ‘deal’ within Cuban society that Raul had to make an uncharacteristic televised one-hour speech to the people to try to reassure them that it wasn’t a sell-out and that communism will continue. If there wasn’t serious domestic resistance to what he did, he wouldn’t have had to create such an unconvincing spectacle. This means that there’s a small window of opportunity for the counter-revolution to be reversed at the highest levels, or that Cubans may take to the streets to protest that Fidel’s legacy is being dismantled before their eyes.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 Andrew Korybko is a political analyst and journalist for Sputnik who currently lives and studies in Moscow, writes frequently for ORIENTAL REVIEW.  Special thanks are extended to Tony Foley and Efrain Rios Suárez for their constructive input that influenced this article. 

It is recommended that Mr. Korybko’s earlier pieces about from 17 December and 18 December be read prior to this article in order to establish the proper frame of reference for everything that transpired between the US and Cuba.

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Nauseated by the
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Had enough of their lies, escapism,
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OPEDS
=By=  PATRICK MARTIN
wsws.org

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s call for a ban on Muslims entering the United States, either as immigrants or visitors, has ignited a political firestorm. Trump’s open appeal to the most reactionary, racist and fascistic sentiments has created a political crisis for the American ruling elite.

His crude rhetoric shatters the official pretense that America is the defender of “freedom” and “democracy,” which has been used by Democratic and Republican administrations alike to justify imperialist wars and interventions throughout the Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa. Trump rips off this democratic mask. He stands openly for the violent suppression of anyone who might dare to oppose the demands of corporate America, either abroad or at home.

This accounts for the volley of denunciations of Trump from a wide array of spokesmen for the US political establishment. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Trump’s proposal “disqualifies him from serving as president.” Earnest called his rhetoric “harmful to the country,” saying it made it harder to “work in partnership” with American Muslim leaders to identify potential threats.

The official spokesman for the Pentagon, Peter Cook, who normally refuses to comment on domestic political matters, declared, “Anything that tries to bolster the ISIL narrative that the United States is somehow at war with Islam is contrary to our values and contrary to our national security.”

House Speaker Paul Ryan, the top congressional Republican, told reporters, “Freedom of religion is a fundamental constitutional principle. It’s a founding principle of this country.” At the same time, he declared that if Trump were the Republican nominee for president, he would support him.

The American media issued a series of denunciations of Trump in editorials, cartoons and columns published Wednesday, many of which compared Trump to Hitler or Mussolini. CNN posted a column by its national security editor, Peter Bergen, posing the question, “Is Trump a fascist?”

The Detroit Free Press, the largest newspaper in southeast Michigan, home to more than 100,000 Muslim-Americans, published a front-page editorial under the banner headline “We Stand Together.” The statement denounced Trump’s views as “nothing more than rank bigotry and racism, a reach back to the darkest chapters of America’s history.”

The official statements of shock over Trump’s fascistic views, together with hand-wringing claims that “this is not who we are,” are as cynical as they are dishonest. The ruling class does not like the reactionary, brutal and anti-democratic essence of its policies to be so bluntly stated.

The billionaire’s ranting is not in contradiction to the actual practice of American imperialism, but a direct expression of it. Trump’s statements dovetail entirely with the policies that produced Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, CIA secret prisons and Guantanamo Bay.

The American ruling class is what it does, not what it proclaims in holiday speeches celebrating the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, or, as in Obama’s remarks Wednesday, the 150th anniversary of the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery. The time is long gone when the American government fought a war to free the slaves. It now wages wars to enslave the world to Wall Street.

For 30 years, the United States has waged one war after another to maintain its domination of the Middle East and Central Asia, the location of the largest oil and gas reserves on the planet. These wars have not only brutalized the soldiers who took part in them, they have further brutalized the commanders in the military-intelligence apparatus and their political and media frontmen.

Along with rampant militarism, a parallel process has seen the criminalization of the financial aristocracy as a whole, with great fortunes increasingly made from the type of financial swindling that produced the 2008 Wall Street crash. With the growth of social inequality to staggering levels, the ruling elite requires ever greater levels of violence against the most oppressed sections of the working class.

This society has become so brutalized that, according to one report published last week, 200,000 Americans have been murdered in the last 15 years alone. The United States is a country at war, not just with the Middle East, but with itself.

Trump’s rise has a definite political logic. He represents the intersection of the media and the emergence of this criminal element within the bourgeoisie. His personal fortune is the product of real estate speculation in Manhattan and Atlantic City casinos, followed by his crossover into media celebrity as the host of a series of programs in which he was portrayed as the avatar of the successful capitalist boss—ruthless and decisive.

The rise of such a figure to a leading position in the Republican presidential campaign demonstrates that a fascist tendency is emerging within the official US two-party political structure. It is notable that while half the Republican presidential field condemned Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims, half did not, and several openly solidarized themselves with the billionaire.

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, now leading in the polls in Iowa, where votes will be counted in caucuses less than eight weeks away, declared, “I like Donald Trump.” He went on to say, “I commend Donald Trump for standing up and focusing America’s attention on the need to secure our borders.”

Overnight polls showed that among likely Republican caucus and primary voters, 65 percent favored Trump’s ban on Muslims. This alone demonstrates how Trump’s candidacy has been used to shift the US official political spectrum even further to the right.

The Democratic Party shares responsibility for the emergence of Trump, since, like the Republicans, it has pursued policies of imperialist war abroad and attacks on the jobs, living standards and democratic rights of the working class at home. Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton is a leading advocate of escalating the US military intervention in the Syrian civil war, demanding in a TV interview Sunday “a much more robust air campaign against ISIS targets, against the oil infrastructure, against their leadership,” as well as an increase in the number of US Special Forces.

As for her chief rival for the nomination, the so-called “socialist” Bernie Sanders, he seeks to avoid any discussion of foreign policy because he is a longstanding supporter of imperialist war in the Middle East. There is an instructive contrast between Sanders and Trump. The billionaire, openly contemptuous of the existing political setup, is threatening to run outside the two-party system and take his supporters with him, pointing to polls showing that 68 percent of his supporters would back him as an independent.

Sanders is busy embedding himself ever more deeply in the Democratic Party. He diligently pursues his designated role in the campaign: appealing to workers and young people outraged by the growth of social inequality and directing them back within the confines of this party of Wall Street and American imperialism.

That Trump can credibly threaten to run his own campaign, which would be a personalist movement financed by his multibillion-dollar fortune, says a great deal about the dangers facing working people. Whatever the immediate outcome of the 2016 campaign, which is still in its early stages, there are powerful objective forces, above all the expanding war drive of US imperialism, not only in the Middle East, but against China and Russia, which feed the type of ultra-reactionary, racist and chauvinist politics articulated by Trump.

The emergence of a proto-fascist trend in America underscores the necessity for the development of an independent political movement of the working class to oppose imperialist war on the basis of a socialist and internationalist program.

Patrick Martin is a senior editorialists with wsws.org, an information resource of the Social Equality Party. 

Note to Commenters
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Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

//

Steven Jonas, MD, MPH

This photomontage by Salon captures two of the GOP bloviators—Huckabee and Rubio— expressing their silly views on social violence in America. The last thing to be mentioned is that the culture is rotten by its underlying equally putrid values. (Credit: AP/Reuters/Lucas Jackson/Molly Riley/Lucy Nicholson/Photo montage by Salon)

Special to The Greanville Post | Short Take* No. 8: A Set of Tweets, Over Time

I post tweets on occasion, at the The Political Junkies tweet site.  (Sorry but I really don’t’ know much about how Twitter actually works.  I can just post a tweet every now and then.)  For this week I thought that it might be fun to share them with readers of mine who don’t ordinarily see my tweets (which I should think would be most of you).  One difference.  Since I am not limited to 118 characters after the URL (and I always start with a URL), I have edited them to make them more readable.  Also, if anyone can explain to me how any URL is made by Twitter to fit into 22-24 characters, I would be very happy to know that.  And so here goes, in reverse chronological order.

1.  http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/565fa53a8430761a008b6f7d-960/daily-news-cover.jpg. On the San Bernardino massacre and renewed calls for gun controls, the Republican candidates all rejected them while saying that anyone doing so was “politicizing a tragedy,” while they all read from same page: “God’s.”  Further (not in the tweet), I would note that I didn’t notice any of the prayerful Repub. candidates casting their thoughts and prayers in the direction of the Planned Parenthood victims or the Charleston ones either, when those tragedies happened.  Nor, following Charleston did I notice even one word of concern about the 1600 armed and dangerous right-wing “militias/hate-ist/domestic terrorist groups” identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center, although the screaming about “radical Islamist terrorism” was front-and-center this time around.

2. thepoliticaljunkies ‏@tpjmagazine 2m2 minutes ago http://www.aol.com/article/2015/12/01/islamic-states-online-supporters-include-300-americans-report/21276185/?icid=maing-grid7%7Chtmlws-main-bb%7Cdl2%7Csec1_lnk3%26pLid%3D866012642 …. Ohmygosh. 9 millionths of a percent of the US population has been identified as active online Daesh followers. (I guess now with the San Bernardino killers, it’s 302, or in their case was.) OY!

3. thepoliticaljunkies ‏@tpjmagazine 2m2 minutes ago http://www.aol.com/article/2015/11/24/dont-do-this-bill-oreilly-lectures-donald-trump-over-racial/21272097/?icid=maing-grid7%7Chtmlws-main-bb%7Cdl2%7Csec1_lnk3%26pLid%3D1479221443 …. Damn! @Bill O’Reilly lectures Trump on racism?!?! That tells you just how much of a racist Trump is!

Scarborough: getting ready for a possible dark horse candidacy in the future. A 6′ 4″ pile of excrement—we never knew they could stack’em that high.

4. dailykos.com/story/2015/11/03/1443658/-MSNBC-s-Joe-Scarborough-Has-On-Air-Mental-Breakdown-Over-Liberal-Media-Myth?detail=email … Is Joe Scarborough really Mr. “Reasonable Republican?” Nah.  He just has a better tongue than most, while most of his positions are the same, and he has been going further right, following the Repub. “rightward imperative,” by the week.  He is obviously setting himself up to run for office again, down the road. 

5. thepoliticaljunkies ‏@tpjmagazine now http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/32934-top-1-percent-owns-half-of-all-global-wealth … This item just goes to show that capitalism has been VERY successful, as both the Repubs. and the Dems., and their echo chambers like CNBC and Fox”News” love to say, for the capitalists.

6. thepoliticaljunkies ‏@tpjmagazine 3s3 seconds ago http://nsnbc.me/2015/10/09/the-mystery-of-isis-toyota-army-solved/ … ISIS, and other rebel/terrorist groups, have hundreds of Toyota trucks.  Some they have captured.  Some they have actually bought through dealerships in various places.  My big question was: why not GM, Ford, or Dodge, at least, especially if they originated with U.S.-supported force?  Answer, supplied by a military friend: the U.S. trucks are simply nowhere near rugged enough.

7. thepoliticaljunkies ‏@tpjmagazine 2m2 minutes ago http://www.aol.com/article/2015/08/31/alaska-bound-obama-faces-backlash-on-mt-mckinley-renaming/21229452/?icid=maing-grid7%7Chtmlws-main-bb%7Cdl1%7Csec1_lnk3%26pLid%3D-463010199 …. Did you notice how the GOP complained about “cheap politics” when Washington National Airport was re-named for Reagan? No? Neither did we.

8. And finally a word on Ben Carson, from last October.  Although he is fading fast, it will be good to have a couple of things to remember him by, as one of the set of totally unqualified Repub. Presidential candidates who have sallied forth during the last couple of election cycles — think “nine, nine, nine” Herman Cain and “I can see Russia from my porch [or whatever]” Sarah Palin.  (To say nothing of Michelle Bachmann.)  Here’s one of Carson’s gems: thepoliticaljunkies ‏@tpjmagazine 3m3 minutes ago http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/25/politics/ben-carson-abortion-slavery/ …. In this one “Doc” Carson fully revealed himself.  He knows nothing about slavery and, although a doc, he knows nothing about pregnancy either.

And that’s it for now.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Senior Editor, Politics, Steven Jonas, MD, MPH is a Professor Emeritus of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University (NY) and author/co-author/editor/co-editor of over 30 books.  In addition to being Senior Editor, Politics, for The Greanville Post, he is: a Contributor for American Politics to The Planetary Movement; a “Trusted Author” for Op-Ed News.com; a contributor to the “Writing for Godot” section of Reader Supported News; and a contributor to From The G-Man. He is the Editorial Director and a Contributing Author for TPJmagazine.us.  Further, he is an occasional Contributor to TheHarderStuff newsletter, BuzzFlash Commentary, and Dandelion Salad.

Dr. Jonas’ latest book is The 15% Solution: How the Republican Religious Right Took Control of the U.S., 1981-2022: A Futuristic Novel, Brewster, NY, Trepper & Katz Impact Books, Punto Press Publishing, 2013, and available on Amazon.

By Eric Zuesse
crossposted with strategic-culture.org

Conservatives …try to deny and distract us away from the fact  the U.S. is a dictatorship, not  a democracy.

Emanuel: Given his roots in Israel, he could be a mayor of Jerusalem, too.

The first-ever thorough scientific and academic study of whether the U.S. is a democracy was published in 2014, and it finds, as an overwhelming statistically established fact now, that the U.S. definitely is not a democracy. This landmark study, by Gilens and Page, finds that, “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.” Conservatives tried to deny the very meaning of this study by saying such things as that “America is a republic, not a democracy,” but they were just trying to distract from the findings, which are: the U.S. is a dictatorship, not  a democracy. A republic is simply another word for a “democracy.” Every democratic nation functions by means of elected representatives. So what? The “republic” matter is raised only to distract away from the reality, not in order to understand  the reality.

No matter how much the conservatives try to cheat or lie their way out of the reality, America is a dictatorship. There is simply no getting around the fact: America is a dictatorship, by and for the richest. The landmark Gilens-and-Page study found the elected representatives in America don’t actually represent the public nearly so much as they represent the people who finance the political campaigns that sucker the voters to vote for the aristocracy’s preferred candidates. America’s reality is rule by the richest, rule by the people who finance those TV commercials and political operatives who make a political winner a political winner in this republic of the richest, this government of the people, by the super-rich, for the super-rich, who make the actual decisions about which candidates will have a chance to win, and which won’t.

Just the way that the Grand Ayatollah in Iran chooses which candidates there will have a chance to win the Presidency, etc., America’s few super-rich here choose which candidates will have a chance to win the Presidency etc., and which won’t. In Iran, the Grand Ayatollah is chosen by, and serves, the mullahs; and, in America, the Party chiefs etc., are chosen by, and serve, the super-rich.

In America, the aristocracy wanted Saddam Hussein removed and replaced in Iraq, “regime change in Iraq”; so, it was done — the public were suckered into supporting an invasion (and then into re-‘electing’ the man who did it).

There is no accountability for the aristocracy’s agents (such as President Bush, or President Obama). None were prosecuted for the tortures and murders and destruction that were done to Iraq, and for the trillions of U.S. taxpayer dollars that were spent by us to perpetrate that destruction of Iraq.

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]merica’s aristocrats and their agents call America ‘the opportunity society.’ (Read all about it there, from Obama, and also from self-acknowledged  Republicans. But, of course, Obama is playing the ‘good cop,’ to their “bad.” The man who was Obama’s chief economist, Larry Summers, does the same. Their propaganda-line sounds as if it comes from central headquarters.) As if equality of opportunity can actually rise while inequality of wealth is rising. It can’t really happen. The PR line is only for fools. The aristocracy enjoys playing the public for suckers. How else could the aristocracy continue to exploit the public? How much longer can  it continue?

Ron Fournier headlined in National Journal  on Thursday December 2nd, “The Fish Rots From the Head in Chicago,” and he opened:

Pres­id­ent Obama needs to mail Rahm Emanuel a dead fish in a box. Hil­lary Clin­ton should de­liv­er it. For the in­teg­rity of the party that rep­res­ents a vast ma­jor­ity of black voters, Demo­crat­ic lead­ers every­where need to send the Chica­go may­or a message: You’re dead to us.

A long­time lieu­ten­ant for the Clin­ton fam­ily and former chief of staff in the Obama White House, Emanuel nev­er hes­it­ated to muscle weak or dis­loy­al Demo­crats out of power. It’s time to flip the script on the en­forcer nick­named “Rahmbo.”

Emanuel once sent a poll­ster who was late de­liv­er­ing a sur­vey res­ult a dead fish in a box. The night Bill Clin­ton won the 1992 pres­id­en­tial elec­tion, his aides were cel­eb­rat­ing around a pic­nic table when Emanuel picked up a knife and shouted the names of politi­cians who had “f****ed us.” After each name, Emanuel de­clared, “Dead man!”

I’ve got noth­ing against Emanuel. I’ve known him since 1992 and be­nefited from his stra­tegic leaks in the Clin­ton White House. And I know this: Emanuel epi­tom­izes a brand of polit­ics that puts loy­alty and elect­or­al suc­cess above all else. He was edu­cated in the school of Clin­ton, where the ends jus­ti­fy the means, and ruled the Obama White House when it ca­pit­u­lated to the cul­ture of Wash­ing­ton that his boss had vowed to fight.

Then, Fournier summarized the lengths that the Emanuel Administration went to cover up their murder of this Black — for which cover-up they charged Chicago’s taxpayers $5 million.

Obama himself has been the biggest cover-upper of American corruption. He refused to prosecute Bush, Cheney, the banksters, the torturers, etc. He lied by saying “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” and the U.N. called him on it. (Aristocrats don’t mind that; the U.N. has no teeth; and aristocrats own the ‘news’ media, so America’s public won’t know anyway.) This is how the aristocracy works. It is non-partisan. Most aristocrats are right-wing, but some are left-wing; and, yet, when it’s the aristocracy versus the public, the aristocracy are united — and the public get conned worse than ever. For example, the U.S. aristocracy were united not only on seizing Ukraine, but in slaughtering Ukrainians who rejected the seizure. America’s elite Brookings Institution even urged the U.S. government to step up the slaughter. The U.S. line was that the victims there were simply ‘terrorists,’ or ‘pro-Russians.’ They were actually the residents of the areas that had voted overwhelmingly for the democratically elected Ukrainian President whom the U.S. aristocracy overthrew. The American aristocracy said he was “corrupt.” So were all other recent Ukrainian Presidents — but the U.S. ‘news’ media politely avoided mentioning that fact. And Ukraine now is more corrupt than ever — and a lot more in debt: bankrupt.

When the American government is prosecuting a blue-collar crook, it doesn’t “look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” but, when prosecuting a white-collar crook, especially if that’s an aristocrat, then, for some mysterious reason, it does. “Looking backward” is only for blue-collar crimes — the type of crimes that the aristocracy want to be prosecuted, because that type isn’t the aristocracy’s specialty (which is generally fraud). What ‘justice’ is this? It’s ‘justice’ to fool suckers.

The fish rots from the head, in Washington.

No matter, Republican or Democrat, the American public’s Commander-in-Chief is the American aristocracy’s Commander-in-Cheat. He or she is the head, in Washington, and it smells much the same, either way: like rotten fish.

Said one American Judge, in issuing his verdict:

Today’s reality is that the voices of “we the people” are too often drowned out by the few who have great resources. And when the fundraising cycle slows (it never stops), lobbyists take over in a continuing attempt to gain influence over and access to elected officials.

This is not a left or right, liberal or conservative analysis, but all the points on the political spectrum are increasingly involved in shaping this country’s political agenda. In today’s neverending cycle of campaigning and lobbying; lobbying and campaigning, elected officials know where their money is coming from and that it must keep coming if they are to stay in office. Ordinary citizens recognize this; they know what is going on; they know they are not being included. …

The Court is bound, however, to follow the Supreme Court and Second Circuit’s clear guidance. Accordingly, the Court holds that the limitations contained in New York Election Laws §§ 14-114(8) and 14-126, as applied to independent expenditure-only organizations, cannot prevent quid pro quo corruption.

Of course, those higher-court ‘Justices’ had themselves been appointed by corrupt federal officials, including U.S. Presidents. The U.S. aristocracy holds iron control. 

And, so, the fish keeps stinking, and the aristocracy keep lying and pretending that America is a ‘democracy.’ And the public are told that the only problem is inequality of opportunity, not inequality of wealth — no matter how enormous that inequality of wealth is. After all, there’s a self-sustaining aspect to any aristocracy. Their children even get “legacy admissions” into the elite’s colleges. So: the more extreme the wealth-concentration is, the more-extreme it will be in the future. But, no matter: “America is the land of the self-made man.”

At his age, and facing eternity, Carter ha nothing to lose, hence his redoubled sense of duty about telling the truth. The media are not beating a path to his door.

And the suckers keep on believing it. People just get accustomed to the smell. The preachers tell them that it’s somehow ‘the will of God,’ and so must be ultimately good. The preachers and teachers know where their money is coming from, too. And, if it’s not coming from the right people, there won’t be much of that sweet smell to cover over the fish-stench. So: worshipping The Almighty is taught — even though it actually means ‘Might makes right’ (which everyone knows to be wrong).

So: everybody does what he must do to “go along to get along” — with “the right people,” of course. 

And this  is called ‘the free market,’ and ‘democracy,’ though it’s neither. It is, instead, as bad as it smells, even if its direct victims, such as Iraq and Ukraine (just to mention two nations that America’s aristocracy destroyed), smell even worse.

If you want to know how bad and how scary it really is, see the documentary on the Edward Snowden case, Citizen 4;  but, even that documentary pulled its punch by limiting to only a single enigmatic sentence its bare reference to the international aristocracy behind it all, whose agents are stealing the public’s freedoms, in order to expand those aristocrats’ now-unprecendentedly sophisticated network of control over the publics throughout the world. It’s no longer just government, and the press, and the ‘intelligence’ agencies, and the military and the police. This is no longer science fiction — it is control over the mass-public, the termination of democracy, in all but name. It is already, and frighteningly, science-fact. This is why the last American President before our new system started to become instituted, Jimmy Carter, recently despaired in public, that America has become a dictatorship. And this is an increasingly global dictatorship. It’s where the global fish-head stinks the worst.

Not to expose it is to hide it — to become part of what promotes the stench, not part of what would reverse the rot that causes it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

Note to Commenters
Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com

We apologize for this inconvenience. 

Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?