By The Last Boy In Line
Monday, September 28, 2020
Dear Joe Biden:
Sincerely,
Monday, September 28, 2020
Dear Joe Biden
Dear Joe Biden
By The Last Boy In Line
Monday, September 28, 2020
Dear Joe Biden:
Sincerely,
By The Last Boy In Line
Monday, September 28, 2020
Dear Joe Biden:
Sincerely,
Saturday, September 26, 2020
Dear U.S. Supreme Court
Dear U.S. Suprme Court
By The Last Boy In Line
September 26, 2020
Dear U.S. Supreme Court:
Sincerely,
By The Last Boy In Line
September 26, 2020
Dear U.S. Supreme Court:
Sincerely,
Thursday, September 24, 2020
“None of The Above”
“None of The Above”
By Tom Feely
Dissident Voice
September 24, 2020
I am neither a supporter of the Democratic, Republican or Liberal
parties.
It is obvious to me that our system is corrupt.
It functions on behalf of the wealthy and those employed either
directly or indirectly by our government and/or the military
industrial complex.
Voting for either of any of the candidates is a vote to continue the
corruption and destruction of our country, planet and the future of
future generations.
I suggest that those of you who agree with this statement go to
your polling station and write on the ballot, “None of The Above.”
Doing so will allow us to to calculated how many of our fellow
citizens are aware that we need to throw out all of those in
government and reestablish a system that works for 100% of
it’s citizens.
Let us do away with parties that care only for their own self-
interest and that of those who have purchased their loyalty.
This is not a sports game.
We are not on the sidelines shouting for >our team, we are selecting
a person to lead us into a world where people are equal, regardless of
the nationality, religion, or color.
What is import is not that we choose a winner, but that we vote
our conscience, for deep within each of us, hidden bellow the
propaganda and lies forced down our throats by a culture feed
by prostitutes.
We know that this is the time for change.
It is now obvious to me, as I am sure it may be to many of you
that the great majority of our fellow citizens have been duped
and are incapable of facing reality, choosing instead to believe
in a fairytale that one of these criminals will save us from
destroying our nation and millions of lives in the process.
I have become aware that the reality is that people don’t want to
face facts, we prefer to act as programmed automatons, while
those who pull the strings of government laugh at us and talk about
the importance of “our” democracy.
To those few of you who may share my views on this subject thank
you.
Don’t choose sides.
Face reality, neither party deserves your respect or your votes.
https://dissidentvoice.org/2020/09/none-of-the-above
By Tom Feely
Dissident Voice
September 24, 2020
I am neither a supporter of the Democratic, Republican or Liberal
parties.
It is obvious to me that our system is corrupt.
It functions on behalf of the wealthy and those employed either
directly or indirectly by our government and/or the military
industrial complex.
Voting for either of any of the candidates is a vote to continue the
corruption and destruction of our country, planet and the future of
future generations.
I suggest that those of you who agree with this statement go to
your polling station and write on the ballot, “None of The Above.”
Doing so will allow us to to calculated how many of our fellow
citizens are aware that we need to throw out all of those in
government and reestablish a system that works for 100% of
it’s citizens.
Let us do away with parties that care only for their own self-
interest and that of those who have purchased their loyalty.
This is not a sports game.
We are not on the sidelines shouting for >our team, we are selecting
a person to lead us into a world where people are equal, regardless of
the nationality, religion, or color.
What is import is not that we choose a winner, but that we vote
our conscience, for deep within each of us, hidden bellow the
propaganda and lies forced down our throats by a culture feed
by prostitutes.
We know that this is the time for change.
It is now obvious to me, as I am sure it may be to many of you
that the great majority of our fellow citizens have been duped
and are incapable of facing reality, choosing instead to believe
in a fairytale that one of these criminals will save us from
destroying our nation and millions of lives in the process.
I have become aware that the reality is that people don’t want to
face facts, we prefer to act as programmed automatons, while
those who pull the strings of government laugh at us and talk about
the importance of “our” democracy.
To those few of you who may share my views on this subject thank
you.
Don’t choose sides.
Face reality, neither party deserves your respect or your votes.
https://dissidentvoice.org/2020/09/none-of-the-above
Tuesday, September 22, 2020
America's $50 Trillion Gluttony
America's $50 Trillion Gluttony
The Bill For America's $50 Trillion Gluttony of Inequality Is Overdue
By Charles Hugh Smith
Information Clearing House
September 22, 2020
Do you hear the pathetic bleating of America's billionaires and their
army of toadies?
If not, you soon will, for a remarkable report has been released
that documents the $50 trillion in earnings that's been transferred
to the Financial Aristocracy from the bottom 90% of American
households in the past 45 years.
The report was prepared by the RAND Corporation, and has
a suitably neutral title: Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018.
(The full report can be downloaded for free.)
Just as remarkable is the no-holds-barred coverage of the study by
Time magazine, an iconic publication of the mainstream media: The
Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%
-- And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure.
Longtime readers know I've reported on the astounding increase in
America's economic inequality for the past 15 years, and addressed
the eventual banquet of consequences this imbalanced,
destabilizing state of affairs will serve up.
But with few exceptions, the corporate media has ignored this
fundamental reality of American life, and blown off the
consequences as easily ignored speculation by marginalized
bloggers and commentators.
The extreme rarity of paragraphs like these in the corporate media
cannot be over-emphasized.
The corporate media has carried water for the billionaires and
America's Financial Aristocracy for decades. (No surprise, given that
the vast majority of America's media / social media is owned by the
billionaires and Financial Aristocracy. Why bite the hand that feeds
you, especially when the risk of losing your career is so high?)
Here's an excerpted from the time.com article:
There are some who blame the current plight of working Americans
on structural changes in the underlying economy--on automation,
and especially on globalization.
According to this popular narrative, the lower wages of the past
40 years were the unfortunate but necessary price of keeping
American businesses competitive in an increasingly cutthroat
global market.
But in fact, the $50 trillion transfer of wealth the RAND report
documents has occurred entirely within the American economy,
not between it and its trading partners.
No, this upward redistribution of income, wealth, and power wasn't
inevitable; it was a choice--a direct result of the trickle-down
policies we chose to implement since 1975.
We chose to cut taxes on billionaires and to deregulate
the financial industry.
We chose to allow CEOs to manipulate share prices through stock
buybacks, and to lavishly reward themselves with the proceeds.
We chose to permit giant corporations, through mergers and
acquisitions, to accumulate the vast monopoly power necessary
to dictate both prices charged and wages paid.
We chose to erode the minimum wage and the overtime threshold
and the bargaining power of labor.
For four decades, we chose to elect political leaders who put
the material interests of the rich and powerful above those of
the American people.
That this level of incendiary outrage is now seeping into the
mainstream media tells us that the bill for America's $50 Trillion
gluttony of inequality is long overdue and the pendulum of
reckoning will swing to political, social and economic extremes
equal to the extremes of wealth and income inequality engineered
by America's Financial Aristocracy and their toadies / lackeys in
government, the Federal Reserve, Wall Street, Silicon Valley and
the media.
The rallying cry to claw back a significant percentage of the
$50 trillion is just beginning.
The billionaires have the money and power, of course, and the best
government that money can buy plus the loyalty of a vast army of
well-paid toadies, lackeys, factotums, and apparatchiks.
But once the citizens no longer accept their servitude,
the pendulum will gather momentum.
America's Financial Aristocracy has reached extremes not just
of wealth-income-power inequality, but extremes of hubris.
Their faith in luxury bug-out estates / private islands is evidence
that even if the way of the Tao is reversal, they'll have their private
bodyguards and stashes of fuel and other essentials.
The clawback might not be as easy to rebuff as they anticipate, nor
will the pendulum swing that's just starting necessarily arrive at the
opposite extreme in the orderly, predictable fashion they're
accustomed to controlling.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/55617.htm
The Bill For America's $50 Trillion Gluttony of Inequality Is Overdue
By Charles Hugh Smith
Information Clearing House
September 22, 2020
Do you hear the pathetic bleating of America's billionaires and their
army of toadies?
If not, you soon will, for a remarkable report has been released
that documents the $50 trillion in earnings that's been transferred
to the Financial Aristocracy from the bottom 90% of American
households in the past 45 years.
The report was prepared by the RAND Corporation, and has
a suitably neutral title: Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018.
(The full report can be downloaded for free.)
Just as remarkable is the no-holds-barred coverage of the study by
Time magazine, an iconic publication of the mainstream media: The
Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%
-- And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure.
Longtime readers know I've reported on the astounding increase in
America's economic inequality for the past 15 years, and addressed
the eventual banquet of consequences this imbalanced,
destabilizing state of affairs will serve up.
But with few exceptions, the corporate media has ignored this
fundamental reality of American life, and blown off the
consequences as easily ignored speculation by marginalized
bloggers and commentators.
The extreme rarity of paragraphs like these in the corporate media
cannot be over-emphasized.
The corporate media has carried water for the billionaires and
America's Financial Aristocracy for decades. (No surprise, given that
the vast majority of America's media / social media is owned by the
billionaires and Financial Aristocracy. Why bite the hand that feeds
you, especially when the risk of losing your career is so high?)
Here's an excerpted from the time.com article:
There are some who blame the current plight of working Americans
on structural changes in the underlying economy--on automation,
and especially on globalization.
According to this popular narrative, the lower wages of the past
40 years were the unfortunate but necessary price of keeping
American businesses competitive in an increasingly cutthroat
global market.
But in fact, the $50 trillion transfer of wealth the RAND report
documents has occurred entirely within the American economy,
not between it and its trading partners.
No, this upward redistribution of income, wealth, and power wasn't
inevitable; it was a choice--a direct result of the trickle-down
policies we chose to implement since 1975.
We chose to cut taxes on billionaires and to deregulate
the financial industry.
We chose to allow CEOs to manipulate share prices through stock
buybacks, and to lavishly reward themselves with the proceeds.
We chose to permit giant corporations, through mergers and
acquisitions, to accumulate the vast monopoly power necessary
to dictate both prices charged and wages paid.
We chose to erode the minimum wage and the overtime threshold
and the bargaining power of labor.
For four decades, we chose to elect political leaders who put
the material interests of the rich and powerful above those of
the American people.
That this level of incendiary outrage is now seeping into the
mainstream media tells us that the bill for America's $50 Trillion
gluttony of inequality is long overdue and the pendulum of
reckoning will swing to political, social and economic extremes
equal to the extremes of wealth and income inequality engineered
by America's Financial Aristocracy and their toadies / lackeys in
government, the Federal Reserve, Wall Street, Silicon Valley and
the media.
The rallying cry to claw back a significant percentage of the
$50 trillion is just beginning.
The billionaires have the money and power, of course, and the best
government that money can buy plus the loyalty of a vast army of
well-paid toadies, lackeys, factotums, and apparatchiks.
But once the citizens no longer accept their servitude,
the pendulum will gather momentum.
America's Financial Aristocracy has reached extremes not just
of wealth-income-power inequality, but extremes of hubris.
Their faith in luxury bug-out estates / private islands is evidence
that even if the way of the Tao is reversal, they'll have their private
bodyguards and stashes of fuel and other essentials.
The clawback might not be as easy to rebuff as they anticipate, nor
will the pendulum swing that's just starting necessarily arrive at the
opposite extreme in the orderly, predictable fashion they're
accustomed to controlling.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/55617.htm
Friday, September 18, 2020
Dear America
Dear America
By The Last Boy In Line
Friday, September 18, 2020
Dear America:
Sincerely,
By The Last Boy In Line
Friday, September 18, 2020
Dear America:
Sincerely,
Wednesday, September 16, 2020
U.S. And The Common Man: RIP
U.S. And The Common Man: RIP
By Michael J. Brenner
Information Clearing House
September 16, 2020
America’s Common Man exists no more – gone and forgotten.
Once he was lauded as the salt of the earth.
He was the U.S.’s embodiment of what made us Americans special,
attested to what made the great democratic experiment successful
and the most potent symbol of what made of the United States the
magnetic pole for the world’s masses.
A Stunning Disappearance Act
While politicians paid their rhetorical respects, Aaron Copeland
composed a “Fanfare to the Common Man” suite.
It was an honorable term, an affective shorthand for the Working
Man, the Artisan and the Shopkeeper, the Clerk.
To add insult to the injury, they are politically marginalized by
a party system that serves up a restricted menu of options which
effectively disenfranchises 25% or so of voters.
The Common Man has lost the attention of the country’s elites.
Today, to call a person common is an insult, just as we have
degraded the term working class.
Natural Selection
The connotations are heavily pejorative – they are deemed failures
and losers.
They may have had the American Dream within reach,
but lacked the will and the spirit to grab it.
It’s their own fault, following a process of natural selection.
This Victorian ethic grounded in Social Darwinism has now been
restored as part of the national creed.
Fitted out in the post-modern fancy dress of market fundamentalist
economics, this beggar-thy-neighbor ideology dominates our public
discourse.
All this is no accident.
Powerful interests have orchestrated a relentless campaign for
more than forty years to reconfigure American life in accord with
their reactionary aims and principles.
Heartless America
The distressing truth of our times is that the Common Man has
been abandoned by those elites – in politics, in government,
in journalism, in professional associations, in academia.
Those elites care little, are preoccupied with their own careers
and pastimes, possess only a feeble sense of social obligation,
and are smugly complacent.
Money is the common denominator in all of this.
But why?
Simple, avarice and moral courage are not compatible human
traits.
The plutocratic structures that control our public affairs offer
no relief to the vanishing common man.
Pervasive Status Anxiety
This is due to a crude political-economic calculus.
At the heart of American carelessness is pervasive status anxiety.
In a supposedly “grand” nation that is equipped only with a scant
safety net, all layers of society struggle with status deprivation or
status insecurity.
It always has been a hallmark of the United States that inherited
class position has never been wholly secure and easily uprooted
by the winds of a constant social shuffling.
That is a key reason why Americans have always been so consumed
by an endless, open ended status competition.
That generates anxiety since there is never enough positive status
to go around.
Moreover, status is a finite commodity, as most are destined to find
out to their surprise and frustration. The constant deepening of our
narcissistic culture has not helped. It has only uprooted us even
more.
We are now a society where growing numbers recognize no external
communal standard to measure and appraise their conduct – or
worth.
Godfather Ethics
With all that heartlessness, America’s collective superego
has shriveled.
The new categorical imperative is to think of oneself alone
whenever and wherever possible.
To give priority to any other claim is taken as unnatural.
The Godfather’s self-serving plaint that “I did it for my family” is
widely adopted as the elite’s all-purpose excuse American credo.
The idea to “let humanity be the ultimate measure of all that we
do,” once viewed as enlightened social humanism during the second
half of the twentieth century, is viewed as some self-destructive
form of European socialism.
The days when an idea like this balanced and oriented us Americans
is long gone.
This leads to temptations that further erode the U.S. social and
political fabric.
Why not trade in my senior government post, the rationale goes,
for a lavish corporate life style?
In a country where notions of the collective good and of the public
trust are now almost considered subversive, total emphasis on the
individual enterprise is totally ok.
Isn’t that what makes our country great?
Academia is similarly infested.
Egregious examples abound: Why not be accomplice to torture
when doing so opens a spot at the Pentagon trough for the
American Psychological Association?
Why should a law school Dean or senior faculty stick his neck out
when the Koch Bros are offering lush funding to establish Law &
Economics programs that just happen to promote market
fundamentalist principles?
Toward Social Degeneration
To their own mind, these are also the persons who will stand up
front before history – never mind that they knew better, should
have known better, were expected to know better.
If I have good reason to sublimate all this, such a person
rationalizes, why do I have a duty to the Common Man –
the ordinary citizen?
My status, my rank, do not depend on it.
My financial well-being does not dictate it.
Amidst all these ever crasser displays of raw self-interest, we know
one thing for certain: When the “common man” dies, the America
that the world marveled at for 250 years dies with him.
https://www.informationclearinghouse.info/55553.htm
By Michael J. Brenner
Information Clearing House
September 16, 2020
America’s Common Man exists no more – gone and forgotten.
Once he was lauded as the salt of the earth.
He was the U.S.’s embodiment of what made us Americans special,
attested to what made the great democratic experiment successful
and the most potent symbol of what made of the United States the
magnetic pole for the world’s masses.
A Stunning Disappearance Act
While politicians paid their rhetorical respects, Aaron Copeland
composed a “Fanfare to the Common Man” suite.
It was an honorable term, an affective shorthand for the Working
Man, the Artisan and the Shopkeeper, the Clerk.
To add insult to the injury, they are politically marginalized by
a party system that serves up a restricted menu of options which
effectively disenfranchises 25% or so of voters.
The Common Man has lost the attention of the country’s elites.
Today, to call a person common is an insult, just as we have
degraded the term working class.
Natural Selection
The connotations are heavily pejorative – they are deemed failures
and losers.
They may have had the American Dream within reach,
but lacked the will and the spirit to grab it.
It’s their own fault, following a process of natural selection.
This Victorian ethic grounded in Social Darwinism has now been
restored as part of the national creed.
Fitted out in the post-modern fancy dress of market fundamentalist
economics, this beggar-thy-neighbor ideology dominates our public
discourse.
All this is no accident.
Powerful interests have orchestrated a relentless campaign for
more than forty years to reconfigure American life in accord with
their reactionary aims and principles.
Heartless America
The distressing truth of our times is that the Common Man has
been abandoned by those elites – in politics, in government,
in journalism, in professional associations, in academia.
Those elites care little, are preoccupied with their own careers
and pastimes, possess only a feeble sense of social obligation,
and are smugly complacent.
Money is the common denominator in all of this.
But why?
Simple, avarice and moral courage are not compatible human
traits.
The plutocratic structures that control our public affairs offer
no relief to the vanishing common man.
Pervasive Status Anxiety
This is due to a crude political-economic calculus.
At the heart of American carelessness is pervasive status anxiety.
In a supposedly “grand” nation that is equipped only with a scant
safety net, all layers of society struggle with status deprivation or
status insecurity.
It always has been a hallmark of the United States that inherited
class position has never been wholly secure and easily uprooted
by the winds of a constant social shuffling.
That is a key reason why Americans have always been so consumed
by an endless, open ended status competition.
That generates anxiety since there is never enough positive status
to go around.
Moreover, status is a finite commodity, as most are destined to find
out to their surprise and frustration. The constant deepening of our
narcissistic culture has not helped. It has only uprooted us even
more.
We are now a society where growing numbers recognize no external
communal standard to measure and appraise their conduct – or
worth.
Godfather Ethics
With all that heartlessness, America’s collective superego
has shriveled.
The new categorical imperative is to think of oneself alone
whenever and wherever possible.
To give priority to any other claim is taken as unnatural.
The Godfather’s self-serving plaint that “I did it for my family” is
widely adopted as the elite’s all-purpose excuse American credo.
The idea to “let humanity be the ultimate measure of all that we
do,” once viewed as enlightened social humanism during the second
half of the twentieth century, is viewed as some self-destructive
form of European socialism.
The days when an idea like this balanced and oriented us Americans
is long gone.
This leads to temptations that further erode the U.S. social and
political fabric.
Why not trade in my senior government post, the rationale goes,
for a lavish corporate life style?
In a country where notions of the collective good and of the public
trust are now almost considered subversive, total emphasis on the
individual enterprise is totally ok.
Isn’t that what makes our country great?
Academia is similarly infested.
Egregious examples abound: Why not be accomplice to torture
when doing so opens a spot at the Pentagon trough for the
American Psychological Association?
Why should a law school Dean or senior faculty stick his neck out
when the Koch Bros are offering lush funding to establish Law &
Economics programs that just happen to promote market
fundamentalist principles?
Toward Social Degeneration
To their own mind, these are also the persons who will stand up
front before history – never mind that they knew better, should
have known better, were expected to know better.
If I have good reason to sublimate all this, such a person
rationalizes, why do I have a duty to the Common Man –
the ordinary citizen?
My status, my rank, do not depend on it.
My financial well-being does not dictate it.
Amidst all these ever crasser displays of raw self-interest, we know
one thing for certain: When the “common man” dies, the America
that the world marveled at for 250 years dies with him.
https://www.informationclearinghouse.info/55553.htm
Friday, September 11, 2020
Wednesday, September 9, 2020
Trump and Biden: Equally Awful
Trump and Biden: Equally Awful
By Ted Rall
The Japan Times
September 9, 2020
Front and center in the raging debate among liberals and
progressives over whether they should support Joe Biden or opt out
of the two-party trap by voting third-party or not at all is the
assumption that Biden would do less harm both to the world and to
American leftism than Trump.
Even many hardcore Bernie-or-Busters accept the premise that
Biden wouldn’t be as bad as Trump.
They believe the additional damage that would result from a
second Trump administration is an acceptable price for teaching
the DNC a lesson and building a progressive movement.
But it’s not true that Biden wins the harm-mitigation sweepstakes.
For every respect in which Biden would be better than Trump—or
less awful—there is a compelling counterfactual that carries equal
or greater weight.
If Trump wins, for example, we can count on his uniquely toxic
combination of anti-science propaganda and organizational
ineptitude to unnecessarily prolong and increase the body count
of COVID-19.
The WHO says that millions could die in the dreaded second wave;
a disproportionately high number of those people could be Americans.
Let’s guesstimate half a million dead here in the U.S.?
The net cost of Trump is equal to the total number of deaths here
under his second term, minus the number that would occur under
Biden.
Since Biden can’t do anything about the pandemic until late
January when he takes office and herd immunity appears to
be closer than we previously believed, whether a ridiculously
incompetent Trump or a ridiculously incompetent Biden is
President after January probably doesn’t make a big difference.
There’s a chance we have seen the worst of COVID-19.
Still, it’s fair to say that thousands more Americans will succumb
to the coronavirus under Trump and Biden.
On the other hand, Biden is likelier to start wars than Trump and
Trump is likelier to end them.
Biden voted to bomb Bosnia and invade Afghanistan.
He was a big cheerleader and enabler for the Iraq war.
Currently he’s threatening to start a hot war with Venezuela
and new cold wars against China and Russia.
He also promises to keep increasing the defense budget.
Donald Trump was the first American president in decades to
directly negotiate with the Taliban, with whom he signed a peace
agreement to bring home all American troops from our longest war.
When we assess which candidate would do the most harm, even the
breathtakingly disgusting body count from COVID-19 doesn’t come
close to the over 1 million people who died in the Iraq war alone.
Will Biden go to war against Iran? North Korea? Anything is possible.
Biden’s record is clear; he is an extremely dangerous man.
And even if you don’t care about all the brown people he would kill
as president, remember 9/11.
Our wars come to our shores sometimes.
Despite the usual election year hysteria, there is no daylight
between Trump and Biden on most major issues.
Neither old white man promises to restore the $600 a week
supplemental unemployment insurance.
Neither is in favor of the Green New Deal.
Neither wants student loan forgiveness.
Neither would sign Medicare For All.
Both prioritize corporations over individual citizens.
Neither would significantly liberalize immigration policy.
Even on the issue of the year, police violence, Trump and Biden
are competing to see which one is more palatable to the Blue
Lives Matter crowd.
“You know me,” Biden assured the far-right in a recent speech,
referencing his authorship of the notorious mass incarceration
crime bill and the USA-Patriot Act that destroyed fundamental
privacy rights.
“You know my heart, and you know my story, my family’s story.
Ask yourself: Do I look to you like a radical socialist with a soft
spot for rioters? Really?”
When someone tells you they are an authoritarian, believe them.
The real difference between Joe Biden and Donald Trump has
nothing to do with policy.
No matter which evil man wins, we are in for a lousy four years.
This election comes down to personality.
How do you like your monsters?
Obnoxious and buffoonish? Or polite and affable?
I prefer truth in advertising.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2020/09/04/commentary/world-commentary/trump-biden-equally-awful
By Ted Rall
The Japan Times
September 9, 2020
Front and center in the raging debate among liberals and
progressives over whether they should support Joe Biden or opt out
of the two-party trap by voting third-party or not at all is the
assumption that Biden would do less harm both to the world and to
American leftism than Trump.
Even many hardcore Bernie-or-Busters accept the premise that
Biden wouldn’t be as bad as Trump.
They believe the additional damage that would result from a
second Trump administration is an acceptable price for teaching
the DNC a lesson and building a progressive movement.
But it’s not true that Biden wins the harm-mitigation sweepstakes.
For every respect in which Biden would be better than Trump—or
less awful—there is a compelling counterfactual that carries equal
or greater weight.
If Trump wins, for example, we can count on his uniquely toxic
combination of anti-science propaganda and organizational
ineptitude to unnecessarily prolong and increase the body count
of COVID-19.
The WHO says that millions could die in the dreaded second wave;
a disproportionately high number of those people could be Americans.
Let’s guesstimate half a million dead here in the U.S.?
The net cost of Trump is equal to the total number of deaths here
under his second term, minus the number that would occur under
Biden.
Since Biden can’t do anything about the pandemic until late
January when he takes office and herd immunity appears to
be closer than we previously believed, whether a ridiculously
incompetent Trump or a ridiculously incompetent Biden is
President after January probably doesn’t make a big difference.
There’s a chance we have seen the worst of COVID-19.
Still, it’s fair to say that thousands more Americans will succumb
to the coronavirus under Trump and Biden.
On the other hand, Biden is likelier to start wars than Trump and
Trump is likelier to end them.
Biden voted to bomb Bosnia and invade Afghanistan.
He was a big cheerleader and enabler for the Iraq war.
Currently he’s threatening to start a hot war with Venezuela
and new cold wars against China and Russia.
He also promises to keep increasing the defense budget.
Donald Trump was the first American president in decades to
directly negotiate with the Taliban, with whom he signed a peace
agreement to bring home all American troops from our longest war.
When we assess which candidate would do the most harm, even the
breathtakingly disgusting body count from COVID-19 doesn’t come
close to the over 1 million people who died in the Iraq war alone.
Will Biden go to war against Iran? North Korea? Anything is possible.
Biden’s record is clear; he is an extremely dangerous man.
And even if you don’t care about all the brown people he would kill
as president, remember 9/11.
Our wars come to our shores sometimes.
Despite the usual election year hysteria, there is no daylight
between Trump and Biden on most major issues.
Neither old white man promises to restore the $600 a week
supplemental unemployment insurance.
Neither is in favor of the Green New Deal.
Neither wants student loan forgiveness.
Neither would sign Medicare For All.
Both prioritize corporations over individual citizens.
Neither would significantly liberalize immigration policy.
Even on the issue of the year, police violence, Trump and Biden
are competing to see which one is more palatable to the Blue
Lives Matter crowd.
“You know me,” Biden assured the far-right in a recent speech,
referencing his authorship of the notorious mass incarceration
crime bill and the USA-Patriot Act that destroyed fundamental
privacy rights.
“You know my heart, and you know my story, my family’s story.
Ask yourself: Do I look to you like a radical socialist with a soft
spot for rioters? Really?”
When someone tells you they are an authoritarian, believe them.
The real difference between Joe Biden and Donald Trump has
nothing to do with policy.
No matter which evil man wins, we are in for a lousy four years.
This election comes down to personality.
How do you like your monsters?
Obnoxious and buffoonish? Or polite and affable?
I prefer truth in advertising.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2020/09/04/commentary/world-commentary/trump-biden-equally-awful
Friday, September 4, 2020
American Recessional
American Recessional
What Has Happened To America Is A Tragedy
By Paul Edwards
Information Clearing House
September 4, 2020
So, the tumult and the shouting--such as it was--dies, the
Capitalists and the Cronies depart, still stands this diseased,
battered country, reeling in furious confusion, justified outrage,
passionate nonsense, and reflex violence as it shifts its focus
to the geeks and freaks--the Bearded Lady, Sword Swallower,
and Pinhead--who’ll parade their freakish kinks... No.
I can’t do it any more.
There’s no zest, no satisfaction, no pride in ridiculing an
unmitigated tragedy, and what has happened to America
is a tragedy.
To make fun, to satirize, to cleverly lampoon it, as if there was
a purpose in such ridicule is just too sad, too grim an exercise
to justify.
What’s changed?
Why won’t the old ways of critiquing our country work any more?
It’s because wit, humor, and irony are devices used to impel change
for the better.
They lose all effect when change is impossible and essential change
is no longer conceivable in America.
The root cause is our system--fantasized, mythologized, sacralized--
built on injustice, inequity, and engineered privilege, with a
profound and tacit hypocrisy that even its purveyors couldn’t
comprehend.
Our foundation was laid on footings of genocide, slavery and
empowered oligarchy and the nation so based and created evolved
exactly as it had to do.
The last four years of Trump, has forced into high relief and placed
under spotlights, the grotesque falsity and ugliness that our deeply
corrupt polity has made hallmarks of our failed state.
Yet these years of the Trump Era have altered nothing significant
about us, nor have they deviated from the dark, sinister character
of our notorious history.
Their dull, dense and banal evil were the inevitable result
of decades of raw crime that went before.
What they have done--in their bald vulgarity, in their gallumphing,
puerile hubris, their refusal to mask our historic amorality with
fulsome, exculpatory rhetoric and paeans of high spiritual purpose
is to advertise in grisly detail the vacuous arrogance, blatant
cruelty, bottomless avarice, and brazen, bullying aggression that
has insulted, violated, and alienated the world.
It is psychological fact that when the gap yawns too wide between
what is asserted and reality, when a description clearly no longer
matches an object, when what is said bears no relation to what is
experienced, then the faith they’re intended to bolster evaporates
and is gone.
This is what has happened in America.
From our beginning, our Exceptionalist mythology, with its heroic
gospel, its philosophical poetry and gorgeous, vital imagery had
kept its iron lock on the minds and hearts of a vast majority of us.
It has taken only one lifetime for it to be exposed, decoded,
and sprung.
Americans, long taught that they were a superior people in the
most just, honorable, wise, heroic nation on earth have had their
faith battered and broken, gradually, against their will, by decades
of crime and folly, with each new outrage and imbecility hard-sold
to them as what it was not: an action of the most heroic humane
kind, for the most admirable of motives.
Perfected in World Wars I and II, sustained with difficulty in Korea,
it began to rapidly unravel in Vietnam, and the blatant, bloody
fiascos of Aghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and--diplomatically--Iran,
have proven the myth a maudlin yarn of bathetic fiction.
Only ignorant, blind, propagandized boobs and kooky xenophobes
still cling to the gory fairy tale of Exceptionalism and the dirty joke
of America’s purity and nobility it trumpeted to the world.
Concurrent with the bloody amorality of America all over the earth,
as our government partnered with and coddled dozens of the most
brutal, vile, murderous maniacs ever to live, arming their police
states, death squads, torture regimes, and mercenary jihadis,
the myth was used to hoodwink and impoverish the great bulk
of innocents at home who supported it.
For generations the economic security of working people has been
actively undermined and their wages eroded by their own corporate
government.
They were told there was no money for social well-being as they
watched a tiny clique of titans of finance enrich itself beyond
imagination, and obscene “defense” budgets milk billions via
government fiat for the War Machine to kill millions of peasant
“enemies” in places they couldn’t find on a map.
Deception and murder overseas; fraud and crushing punishment at
home: these are the filthy realities the grotesque fairy tale so long
and diligently concealed from us.
That horror is ended.
It’s deep, fatal effects are not.
The greatest peril to a state occurs when its people no longer
believe that it represents them.
When that faith fails, as it did in Periclean Athens, in late imperial
Rome, Republican Spain, and Weimar Germany, state machinery
seizes up, its authority dissolves, and there is war in the streets.
That we are nearing such a point is made obvious by the bitter
polarity and violent opposition between Trump and anti-Trump
factions, but also in a deeper, more dangerous division between
the tyrannical, wealthy oligarchy that owns the country and
demands endless war and American hegemony, and the great
majority that lives as economic victims of that insane ruling
clique.
Now, faced with by far the most ominous sociopolitical disfunction
of our modern history, and with the overlay of the unknown
destructive potential of Coronavirus and the certainty of inexorable
climate catastrophe already evident, we are given the Presidential
election of 2020, hyped to the max by solemn, phony politicians
and hysterical media flacks, packaged as if it addressed, in any
way, the interlocking complex of impending disasters.
The absurdist commedia del arte of two old, ridiculously inept,
and grossly impaired buffoons heading two sick cadres of leased
political whores who jointly serve the .0001%, is the memento
mori of America.
Regardless of the outcome of this sorry farce, the end of
the country in any recognizable form will be accelerated,
fast tracked to implosion.
As in any natural process, disintegration will not be sudden
or immediate.
Dissolution may take as long as creation.
As it proceeds, Americans will suffer and their suffering
will be intense, acute and inescapable.
They will grope and grasp for answers, remedies, fixes,
and find none.
They have been schooled that all problems have solutions
and can be overcome.
It is not so.
Their myth deceived them.
The end of Rome ushered in a thousand years of darkness in Europe
and nothing could prevent it but precedents are meaningless.
Modern countries and cultures do not disappear in failure or even
war, nor do entire peoples.
Matter, says science, is neither created nor destroyed.
When a great nation fails and falls apart, there remains the eternal
resilience of the life force, which is unending.
That force will always be with us.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/55508.htm
What Has Happened To America Is A Tragedy
By Paul Edwards
Information Clearing House
September 4, 2020
So, the tumult and the shouting--such as it was--dies, the
Capitalists and the Cronies depart, still stands this diseased,
battered country, reeling in furious confusion, justified outrage,
passionate nonsense, and reflex violence as it shifts its focus
to the geeks and freaks--the Bearded Lady, Sword Swallower,
and Pinhead--who’ll parade their freakish kinks... No.
I can’t do it any more.
There’s no zest, no satisfaction, no pride in ridiculing an
unmitigated tragedy, and what has happened to America
is a tragedy.
To make fun, to satirize, to cleverly lampoon it, as if there was
a purpose in such ridicule is just too sad, too grim an exercise
to justify.
What’s changed?
Why won’t the old ways of critiquing our country work any more?
It’s because wit, humor, and irony are devices used to impel change
for the better.
They lose all effect when change is impossible and essential change
is no longer conceivable in America.
The root cause is our system--fantasized, mythologized, sacralized--
built on injustice, inequity, and engineered privilege, with a
profound and tacit hypocrisy that even its purveyors couldn’t
comprehend.
Our foundation was laid on footings of genocide, slavery and
empowered oligarchy and the nation so based and created evolved
exactly as it had to do.
The last four years of Trump, has forced into high relief and placed
under spotlights, the grotesque falsity and ugliness that our deeply
corrupt polity has made hallmarks of our failed state.
Yet these years of the Trump Era have altered nothing significant
about us, nor have they deviated from the dark, sinister character
of our notorious history.
Their dull, dense and banal evil were the inevitable result
of decades of raw crime that went before.
What they have done--in their bald vulgarity, in their gallumphing,
puerile hubris, their refusal to mask our historic amorality with
fulsome, exculpatory rhetoric and paeans of high spiritual purpose
is to advertise in grisly detail the vacuous arrogance, blatant
cruelty, bottomless avarice, and brazen, bullying aggression that
has insulted, violated, and alienated the world.
It is psychological fact that when the gap yawns too wide between
what is asserted and reality, when a description clearly no longer
matches an object, when what is said bears no relation to what is
experienced, then the faith they’re intended to bolster evaporates
and is gone.
This is what has happened in America.
From our beginning, our Exceptionalist mythology, with its heroic
gospel, its philosophical poetry and gorgeous, vital imagery had
kept its iron lock on the minds and hearts of a vast majority of us.
It has taken only one lifetime for it to be exposed, decoded,
and sprung.
Americans, long taught that they were a superior people in the
most just, honorable, wise, heroic nation on earth have had their
faith battered and broken, gradually, against their will, by decades
of crime and folly, with each new outrage and imbecility hard-sold
to them as what it was not: an action of the most heroic humane
kind, for the most admirable of motives.
Perfected in World Wars I and II, sustained with difficulty in Korea,
it began to rapidly unravel in Vietnam, and the blatant, bloody
fiascos of Aghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and--diplomatically--Iran,
have proven the myth a maudlin yarn of bathetic fiction.
Only ignorant, blind, propagandized boobs and kooky xenophobes
still cling to the gory fairy tale of Exceptionalism and the dirty joke
of America’s purity and nobility it trumpeted to the world.
Concurrent with the bloody amorality of America all over the earth,
as our government partnered with and coddled dozens of the most
brutal, vile, murderous maniacs ever to live, arming their police
states, death squads, torture regimes, and mercenary jihadis,
the myth was used to hoodwink and impoverish the great bulk
of innocents at home who supported it.
For generations the economic security of working people has been
actively undermined and their wages eroded by their own corporate
government.
They were told there was no money for social well-being as they
watched a tiny clique of titans of finance enrich itself beyond
imagination, and obscene “defense” budgets milk billions via
government fiat for the War Machine to kill millions of peasant
“enemies” in places they couldn’t find on a map.
Deception and murder overseas; fraud and crushing punishment at
home: these are the filthy realities the grotesque fairy tale so long
and diligently concealed from us.
That horror is ended.
It’s deep, fatal effects are not.
The greatest peril to a state occurs when its people no longer
believe that it represents them.
When that faith fails, as it did in Periclean Athens, in late imperial
Rome, Republican Spain, and Weimar Germany, state machinery
seizes up, its authority dissolves, and there is war in the streets.
That we are nearing such a point is made obvious by the bitter
polarity and violent opposition between Trump and anti-Trump
factions, but also in a deeper, more dangerous division between
the tyrannical, wealthy oligarchy that owns the country and
demands endless war and American hegemony, and the great
majority that lives as economic victims of that insane ruling
clique.
Now, faced with by far the most ominous sociopolitical disfunction
of our modern history, and with the overlay of the unknown
destructive potential of Coronavirus and the certainty of inexorable
climate catastrophe already evident, we are given the Presidential
election of 2020, hyped to the max by solemn, phony politicians
and hysterical media flacks, packaged as if it addressed, in any
way, the interlocking complex of impending disasters.
The absurdist commedia del arte of two old, ridiculously inept,
and grossly impaired buffoons heading two sick cadres of leased
political whores who jointly serve the .0001%, is the memento
mori of America.
Regardless of the outcome of this sorry farce, the end of
the country in any recognizable form will be accelerated,
fast tracked to implosion.
As in any natural process, disintegration will not be sudden
or immediate.
Dissolution may take as long as creation.
As it proceeds, Americans will suffer and their suffering
will be intense, acute and inescapable.
They will grope and grasp for answers, remedies, fixes,
and find none.
They have been schooled that all problems have solutions
and can be overcome.
It is not so.
Their myth deceived them.
The end of Rome ushered in a thousand years of darkness in Europe
and nothing could prevent it but precedents are meaningless.
Modern countries and cultures do not disappear in failure or even
war, nor do entire peoples.
Matter, says science, is neither created nor destroyed.
When a great nation fails and falls apart, there remains the eternal
resilience of the life force, which is unending.
That force will always be with us.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/55508.htm