Showing posts with label Racism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Racism. Show all posts

1 June 2020

2020 protests: American Spring? US regime-collapse?


The Trump regime is presiding over a viral outbreak that slaughtered over 100,000 Americans, embarassing the US as the worst-hit country in the world. It is likely to kill even more, and meanwhile the failing regime carries out abductions and killings of its own.

Here are some points to be aware of:

* People from neglected and brutalized African American communities are reported to overwhelmingly be the victims of both the COVID-19 outbreak and also police violence. The infamous killing of George Floyd was only the most public example of the latter, but the rage it unleashed was aimed at avenging all similar such murders. Neglect, as well as living in what is effectively a failed state under a racist military occupation modeled on the armor-plated brutality of Israel, put these communities in desperation and led to inevitable resistance.

* High-level US government insiders from the regime's Republican and Democratic wings (e.g. Susan Rice) are hostile to the protesters, exposing the sham two-party system.

* US media are hostile to the protesters, exposing servile pro-regime media outlets such as CNN.

* Celebrities keep indicating support to protesters but condemn the actions of protesters and offer no substantive criticism of the regime, showing they are stooges who defend the status quo.

* Social media platforms appear to be allowing encouragement of the protests, although this is based on their own sensitivity to their users' wishes and is likely to terminate if the regime comes into danger and decides to put pressure on social media.

* Trump is pursuing labelling the protesters as "terrorists".

* Trump hid in a bunker during protests.

* Trump is considering military action - at the level of the Federal government itself - against the protesters. This could effectively mean a regime crackdown against citizens all across the US.

* Police have stuggled to respond to the protesters, with protesters regularly gaining the upper hand and managing to force even armed security personnel out of buildings and public spaces. Given that the US police are highly militarized, this result is astonishing.

* The ongoing COVID-19 lockdown probably hampers the regime's ability to coordinate a response to its deteriorating situation. Parts of the US government will struggle to meet and coordinate responses as many officials are likely to be self-isolating or unable to attend physical gatherings, whereas protesters are free to take whatever action they wish.

In terms of how technology impacts the future trajectory of this situation (the main topic of this blog), we are in a unique situation. Although the internet was used to disseminate the footage of George Floyd's murder, we are no longer seeing dissidents forced to interact online while the regime takes action in the real world. Instead, members of the regime have to stay at home in front of a screen while protesters and dissidents are the ones who can take action in the real world.

Where this will go is hard to predict. It may continue to escalate to the point that there is a deployment of military force by the US government against protesters - something already being considered by Trump according to some reports. This would be hugely embarassing to the US, a severe stain on its human rights record for decades to come, and potentially seen as a humiliation of America in the ongoing cold conflict with China and Russia. Blaming Russia or China for it will only make this situation even more embarassing to the US, since this only turns the tables on a country constantly funding and leading protests in other countries.

On the other hand, the US government may manage to drain the energy of the protesters through mass arrests and downplay the impact of the protests through its servile mainstream media. Owing to the lack of organizing power of the protesters and the fact this is not a planned but spontanous uprising, such a result seems like the most probable conclusion. If on the other hand the protesters begin attacking sensitive sites in Washington DC like monuments and the White House itself, or if protesters begin storming prisons and the armories of the already overpowered police forces, this story could enter a new chapter - for better or worse.
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24 September 2016

Time to Deprogram From the Cult of National Unity (commentary)

Kevin Carson at C4SS


People don’t like seeing their gods blasphemed, and the backlash against Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand for the national anthem has revealed the completely religious nature of American patriotism.


Tomi Lahren, whose views on racial matters are about what you’d expect from a “conservative commentator” on Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze, has been on a nonstop outrage jag ever since Kaepernick’s stance made the news. As the protest movement of variously sitting, kneeling and raising fists during the national anthem has spread, Kate Upton has joined Lahren’s social media campaign to make football games a safe space for hyper-sensitive patriots. The complaints, predictably, reached fever pitch on 9/11. Upton responded to the decision of several Dolphins to kneel during the anthem by chiding: “You should be proud to be an American. Especially on 9/11 when we should support each other.” The most egregious comments though, which get right to the heart of the national unity cult, came from Lahren: “We aren’t white & black, we are red, white & blue.” “[W[e are Americans and we stand together.”

Howard Zinn ably deconstructed this idea that our common identity as Americans is somehow more important than race or class differences:

“[Our present leaders] bombard us with phrases like ‘national interest,’ ‘national security,’ and ‘national defense’ as if all of these concepts applied equally to all of us, colored or white, rich or poor, as if General Motors and Halliburton have the same interests as the rest of us, as if George Bush has the same interest as the young man or woman he sends to war.

Link: Time to Deprogram From the Cult of National Unity

“Surely, in the history of lies told to the population, this is the biggest lie. In the history of secrets, withheld from the American people, this is the biggest secret: that there are classes with different interests in this country. To ignore that — not to know that the history of our country is a history of slaveowner against slave, landlord against tenant, corporation against worker, rich against poor — is to render us helpless before all the lesser lies told to us by people in power.”

The cult of national unity is an old one, and it exists for a reason. It dovetails with, and reinforces, a number of other patriotic American myths. Among them is the myth of “American Exceptionalism” — i.e., that America is the uniquely “indispensible nation” in promoting “peace and freedom” around the world, and is entitled to maintain military forces larger than the rest of the world combined, and unilaterally define as a “threat” or “aggressor” any country that defies American dictates, because of this beneficent role.

Another myth associated with the cult of national unity is the American Dream. We see this in the belief by the majority of Americans that they are “middle class.” The myth encourages Americans to believe that wealth is just a matter of hard work and ingenuity, and to identify with the “53%” of “taxpayers” and “makers vs. takers” against class warriors like Occupy, in the belief that someday they too may hit it big.

Link: Support this author on Patreon

It also commonly appears in conjunction with the cult of The Troops as guarantors of “our freedoms,” as illustrated by Upton’s Instagram comments on 9/11. The anthem, she said, “represents honoring the many brave men and women who sacrifice and have sacrificed their lives each and every single day to protect our freedom.”

All this despite the hard realities that America’s wars have been overwhelmingly fought to secure capitalist access to the land, natural resources and markets of the world, and the rich get the great majority of their wealth by extracting rents from the rest of us with the help of the state.

America is “exceptional” among the developed Western nations in that it is the world’s biggest settler state, created by European colonists supplanting and exterminating the indigenous population on a continental scale, and in the role that slavery played in building our economy. It is exceptional, probably not unrelated to the previous fact, in the size of its prison system and the way its culture glorifies police and soldiers. It is “exceptional” only to the extent to which its people have been successfully inculcated with myths of a “Shining City on a Hill” and a “Classless Society.” These myths obscure the criminal reality of America’s role in the world; America’s reality is hidden behind the official idealistic facade.

Thanks to this whole complex of quasi-official ideologies, America has attained the unique status of global enforcer of class rule. It is equally unique in concealing the very existence of class conflict from a significant part of its domestic population.

Fortunately, as evidenced by the rise of Occupy and Black Lives Matter, and the protest movement inspired by Kaepernick himself, the spell of this patriotic cult is wearing off. Power, ultimately, depends on consent. And consent depends on deception and ignorance. Once people begin to see through its legitimizing ideologies, the system of power is doomed.


Kevin Carson

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19 August 2016

South Africa's ANC is on the way out

The Blog


South Africa's African National Congress (ANC) party is on the way out, global social theorist Immanuel Wallerstein wrote on 15 August.


This can be told in the outcome of municipal elections, which show the ANC on the run. Marred by corruption scandals, the old party of the country's anti-apartheid struggle is losing support across a whole spectrum of ethnic and political elements in the country.

Wallerstein asks his readers rhetorically, "what next?" In addition to the above corruption scandal and the overall economic difficulty the country has run into, there is also "the fact that twenty years after the end of apartheid, no significant program of return of Blacks to land ownership has been enacted, and the ANC did not seem to seek to move forward on this issue".

One party that is pushing the land ownership issue, however, is the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) led by the controversial but charismatic Julius Malema. "The EFF performed better than expected" in recent municipal elections, Wallerstein points out, "obtaining more than 10% in several cities".

Malema's EFF uses a "combination of left language and xenophobic pressures" that "has been successful in several former Communist countries in East and Central Europe", and could also persuade many in South Africa.

Wallerstein concludes, "South Africa has now shifted from a democratic model that it has claimed to be, to being a center of internal turmoil of a sort that might be difficult to label as democratic".

The BRICS countries relied on South Africa's membership and wealth as as proof they "are truly concerned with Africa, the poorest continent", Wallerstein observes. BRICS could therefore be severely undermined as a bloc by South African economic setbacks.

 Full analysis: South Africa's ANC is Slipping Away

A decline in South Africa's economic status could, in combination with Libya's destruction by NATO, seal Africa's fate as the continent of unrelenting poverty from its northernmost coasts to its southernmost cape.


The clubof.info Blog

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7 June 2016

Game over! America can't be great again

The Blog


A return to the "golden era" promised by Donald Trump when he says he will "make America great again" is not historically possible. The world has changed, and it hasn't changed to America's advantage.


Furthermore, all Trump's opponents, including Hillary Clinton, are no different than him in longing for a return to America's past glory days. America's stature in the world, in the eyes of ally and enemy alike, has degenerated and cannot be recovered

 Such facts are recently articulatated by global top social historian Immanuel Wallerstein. Wallerstein's commentary appeared at his website on 1 June 2016, and argued the top social scientist's judgment again that America has already long lost its crown as a hegemonic superpower. As asserted in the commentary:
Life in the United States is not as good as it once was. Trump has used as his slogan “make America great again.” The “again” refers to the golden era. And Sanders also seems to refer to a previously golden era in which jobs were not exported to the global South. Even Clinton now seems to look back at something lost.
Looking at escalating gun violence in America (mainly confined to Black ghettos and ignored by the national media, insofar as middle class whites aren't the victims), Wallerstein speaks of a cycle of social instability in the US that will only increase in coming years. Such violence may reach non-Black areas of US society soon on a large scale, causing a vicious circle of insecurity that panics everyone and feeds back on itself, leading to increasing numbers of people leaving America and fewer migrants entering. It also feeds into another pattern of force, already inflamed to levels that made the US government tremble recently.

Wallerstein writes of a "very small band of deeply anti-state militias, who call themselves the Citizens for Constitutional Freedom (CCF)".

Unsurprisingly, the regime considers such ranchers and militiamen to be a greater "threat" than foreign terrorists, although these alleged "domestic terrorists" largely seek only to reclaim the original Republic formed by George Washington. And the biggest way the regime acknowledges the magnitude and prestige of this threat is by negotiating with them, rather than simply killing them as it does with other enemies.

Although the regime has in fact used force against homegrown militias if "negotiations fail", it has set itself on a grave path by doing so. Alluding to various standoffs between militias and the government, Wallerstein believes, "This more extreme version of action may soon spread. It is not a question of moving to the right but of moving towards more violent protest, towards a civil war".

With the paranoid regime ignoring increasing gun crime expanding beyond ghettos and threatening to inflame community tensions, together with anti-Federal militias taking matters into their own hands to restore order, the country's future as a failed state seems frighteningly certain.

It is not that left-wing sociologist Wallerstein means to endorse right-leaning militia forces like the CCF by ideology, but that he sees them playing an essential historic role in the demise of the US regime and ending its global oppression starting at home. Of that demise, Wallerstein promises we can "make the world a better place for everyone... only if we stop longing to go back to a golden era, which was not so golden for most of the world."


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Muhammad Ali's sacred communication

The Blog


Following the iconic African American sportsman's recent passing on 3 June, Garrison Center director Thomas Knapp draws our attention to Muhammad Ali's days as a conscientious objector and anti-war campaigner.


Heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali refused the draft three times in 1967, and is known to have declared his sympathy with the victims of the US state's war crimes in Vietnam, saying "I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong — no Viet Cong ever called me nigger".

Without the stand Ali took against the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King Jr. would probably not have come out with the same view, inspired by the former's courage. And without that, the superpower might not have been so pressured to withdraw from its misguided wars.

Ali's legacy has already reached far beyond his own time and beyond America itself. Admired by many people across the globe, Ali's international popularity will still symbolize what Frantz Fanon meant when he mentioned an "illuminating and sacred communication" between all oppressed and colonized people. Here we see how virtue can transcend one's time and one's country. Ali's life offers a certain story of resistance and victory that will continue to inspire all people - but perhaps Muslims most of all - against imperialism, hegemony and injustice.


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3 June 2016

UK war hero declares war on schoolgirl

The Blog


British "Colonel" Richard Kemp, who portrayed himself as a war hero and great military commander to have any relevance, has been caught in a diatribe on Twitter trying to incite hatred against a 15 year old girl.


Anger against Leanne Mohamad for winning a school prize produced not just one, but four tweets all by the so-called Colonel "RICHARD KEMP", who capitalizes his user name like an evangelical crank, hoping to rally condemnation of her. The pro-Israel media slob accused the young girl of "anti-Semitic lies".

Pro-Palestine blogger Thalwen commented that Leanne's only crime was "hoping for freedom" for her people from the barbarism of the Israeli military occupation.

Kemp additonally promoted a video by a pro-Israel vlogger, who issued blatant lies that Leanne's speech in favor of human rights amounted to "an ISIS recruiting video" for siding with Palestinian Arabs and opposing Zionist killers.

While it is creepy enough that a so-called Colonel would want to intervene in a school competition and incite hatred against a child, more disturbing is the way other Zionist fanatics reacted to Leanne. One Zionist cries out that Leanne is "evil" and must be "vigorously condemned and punished"; another racist tweets that all the minority "Muslim filth" in the UK are to blame and longs to "bring on the civil war".

Thanks to smears by far right bigots, racists, and Israeli worms like Kemp who pretend to be British while defending foreign war criminals, the school did in fact censor Leanne, providing another victory over a child for cowards everywhere to revel in.

Although he tries to to portray himself as an impartial military professional in his relations with the media, most of Kemp's time is taken up accusing the media of bias against Israel and trying to come up with reasons why it was okay for Israel to kill kids. With his latest attack on a child, it is also questionable that the overweight and dimwitted 57 year old has any military experience other than trying to prop up the Israeli regime's reputation in the media.


The clubof.info Blog

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10 May 2016

Labour's anti-State of Israel scandal

The Blog


The L'Ordre blog based at Beliefnet comments on the recent so-called anti-Semitism scandal creating controversy in British politics.


This anti-Semitism scandal relates to comments by Labour Party members about Israel, and the view that Israel is responsible for conflict in the Middle East. Not tolerating this view, some MPs within the Opposition are responding with vicious rhetoric against anyone - including all British Muslims - who consider Israel guilty of war crimes in the Middle East.

From the blog on Saturday:
To ban boycotts and stifle criticism of Israel in Britain’s democracy... would be against diversity... and will destabilize British society, even creating escalating violence in coming decades. It is also likely that the Muslim population will then grow in even greater isolation from politics, while believers in “democracy” shrink, during such a period. Faith in democracy will be lost, and, once censored and prohibited from the democratic Opposition, youths will be more likely to choose the path of violence rather than debate.
Read more at http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/lordre/2016/05/cracks-in-british-society-due-to-israel-or-muslims.html#Gca07CAUijpLO2PE.99
The post notes the views of Security Studies scholars that countering extremism depends more on making people feel included and making the political process work rather than excluding, ostracizing and banning minorities for their feelings about political issues. In view of this, the idea that extremism is to be countered by suspensions, bans and other crackdowns on anti-Israel views in the Labour Party is "the worst move ever".

In fact, the post argues for opposite measures to be taken, compared with what the Labour Party seems to be doing now. "Allow the minorities to find expression, give them a greater platform in Britain and a role in governing the country", the blog says.


The clubof.info Blog

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29 March 2016

Islamophobic ideology gets countered

The Blog


While others take to the internet to express their idea that all Muslims are suicide bombers, Beliefnet contributor Hesham Hassaballa points out the lack of understanding ISIS terrorists actually have about Islam in a recent post.


Citing The Nation and other sources, the blogger noted that many people are obsessed saying ISIS followers are Muslims, as if this is important. They refer to Islam as the reason for ISIS atrocities such as the recent attack in Brussels. These obsessives use such facts to support their claims that Muslims are inherently violent and Islam is a problematic, uncivilized belief.

However, as Hassaballa points out to us, we must remember the reality of the relationship between ISIS and Islam:

  • ISIS does not care if its followers know nothing about Islam
  • They do not know or care what Sharia law, violent jihad or the "caliphate" are
  • Most suicide bombers are politically motivated and have often been non-religious (e.g. the LTTE)
  • They have actually been found buying Islam for Dummies even as they joined the group

The Islamophobia being countered by Hassaballa - which is gaining apparent support among conservative politicians and voters in the United States and Europe - is actually on par with claiming that the source of Nazism or the Ku Klux Klan is being white or Christian.

Proponents of the "Muslims are violent" hypothesis find their connection between Islam and terrorism to be logical, and fail to understand any argument presented against it. If faced with the above argument, they will just assume they are being called a racist or that you really are saying all white people are evil.


One way of looking at this would be to consider, why is "Islamic" important in labeling terrorists in media and political rhetoric? Why not point out if they are a Jew, Christian or Hindu? Why only connect Islam with murder? We also never see victims of terror labelled as Islamic. Only terrorists are ever labelled as Islamic.

While the belief among some westerners that Muslims are violent is disturbing in itself, there are even more ignorant views being carried through social media. Some of them portray the problems of terrorism in the Middle East itself as coming from "Muslims" and proving how dangerous Muslims are, despite the fact that Muslims typically make up 100% of the victims and have inhabited the area peacefully for hundreds of years.

In other words, these bigots only use the word "Muslim" for anyone who commits murder, and fail to use it for the 1.3 million people murdered by US forces in the Middle East during the "war on terror" or the vast majority of victims of terrorism every day.


The clubof.info Blog

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8 January 2016

Oregon militiamen vs the 'worse guys'

The Blog


Antistatist writer Thomas L. Knapp, also a Mont Order society member, wrote on 4 January on the stand-off between militia members and Federal authorities at a facility in the US state of Oregon.


Knapp sympathized with the militia members in his short commentary, but stopped short of declaring any support for their actions. He contrasted them with law enforcers, seeing Federal officers as somewhat more arbitrary and dangerous than the militiamen themselves.

 Stating that there is nothing especially different from the Occupy movement or the Black Panthers about these members of the public who choose to defend themselves at occupation-type protests using firearms, Knapp offered the following commentary:
any time any group puts itself in opposition to the existing state, I have to root for them at least a little. And I certainly don't favor the feds moving in and murdering them over possession of a building that the feds built with stolen money on stolen land. If there are no good guys here, there can certainly be better and worse guys. 
Read more at http://knappster.blogspot.com/2016/01/concerning-oregon.html#BVEOpTICZASWGSi4.99
Overall Knapp backed the view of Kent McManigal in a post an another blog. However, he did object to the characterization of these militiamen as "terrorists" by some left-wing commentators, arguing "Some state leftists are making a big deal about these protesters being armed (and, for that reason, are calling them "terrorists")". Knapp pointed out that left-wing groups have also protected themselves with firearms, and it is worth remembering that "terrorist" is more commonly a right-wing slur in US politics rather than a left-wing one.

Petition: Google must end its censorship

A post at Beliefnet's Mont Order-linked L'Ordre blog also responds to the militiamen's protest actions, but focuses more on the aspect of social media commentary saying the gunmen escaped being called "terrorists" because they were white (despite an overwhelming outcry against them over social media that indeed called them terrorists). The post tried to refute this theory, saying ignorance about Islamic clothing and writing has a greater role than skin color in the public image of what a "terrorist" is in America.

Catalyst: A Techno-Liberation Thesis (book)

Other Mont Order-affiliated writers are much more critical of the militiamen, regarding them as "nut jobs" and questioning how they hoped to accomplish anything at a deserted facility in a forest.


The clubof.info Blog

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8 December 2015

Media wants "batsh*t" fear of dark skin

The Blog


Garrison Center director Thomas L. Knapp has commented on the irresponsible and provocative way some media, in particular the Daily Mail, responded to a recent terrorist incident in California.


Media quoted some residents from the scene of the crime in San Bernardino, California. Some of them were reported stating that they knew "middle easterners" were receiving many deliveries and working at night, but that they did not report it to law enforcement for fear of racial profiling. Knapp was quick to point out that they were correct: their refusal to racially profile the killers for having dark complexions cannot be blamed for the killings.

Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 27 committed what is now considered to be an ISIL-inspired terrorist attack on US soil on December 2 using pipe bombs and semi-automatic weaponry. Both were eliminated by US security forces at the scene of the crime, but had managed to murder 14 civilians during the tragic events.

Earlier on The clubof.info Blog: US wants a terror attack to justify spying

Thomas L. Knapp, who goes by the nickname KN@PPSTER and is also part of the Mont society which recently declared a revolutionary value system in October, wrote on his blog Friday that the media's biased comments amount to "encouraging everyone else to go batsh*t insane if a swarthy new neighbor orders too much stuff from Fingerhut". KN@PPSTER argues the reports were presented in such a way that they imply racial profiling is an acceptable standard for judging someone's guilt and reporting them to the police. This much is apparent in the comments section of the Mail article, in which users condemn "political correctness" for enabling the attack.

In full, the director offered this commentary obtained by The clubof.info Blog's network:
If you think your neighbors tinkering in their garage at night and receiving lots of packages is "suspicious," you're paranoid... And if your reason... is that they look like "middle easterners,"... what you are doing is racial profiling...
Further information can be found at knappster.blogspot.uk


The clubof.info Blog

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27 October 2015

Jurors in US are racially biased, govt-led

The Blog


The use of juries in trials is obviously intended to ensure a trial by one's peers, or by a fair representation of one's country. But what if the jurors are overwhelmingly white, in the trial of a Black man?


Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) think tank commentator Roderick Long slammed the use of jurors selected by government-appointed prosecutors as a way of ensuring biases and unfair trials rather than preventing them.

In a society as heterogeneous as the US, there is a constant risk of interference from racist prejudices in any search for justice. As Long emphasizes, "the government’s practice in many southern jurisdictions of excluding blacks from juries is especially troubling, and raises questions about the practice of peremptory challenge itself", when one considers how Black people have consistently been disproportionately targeted by US law enforcement.

Referencing the ideas of US abolitionist Lysander Spooner, Roderick Long advocates in his 22 October post that the solution is an autonomous legal system in the US, independent of the influence and control of government-appointed prosecutors. Trial by one's peers should be maintained as a function of civil society, therefore, instead of the state.

Further emphasis is placed on making juries perhaps more representative of the larger society, including representing views and ethnicities that government may not have been comfortable with.

An example of such reform may be to appoint jurors who hold an unfavorable view of law enforcers or who do not recognize the US regime's authority (who may in fact account for the majority of Americans). A further reform may be to ensure that the proportion of Black people appointed on any jury must be roughly analogous to their proportion in the state or neighborhood in question.


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9 October 2015

Reason gets schooled by C4SS... again

The Blog


Anti-statist commentator and theorist Kevin Carson has once again gone after Reason for the magazine's dogmatic adherence to neoliberal ideology. This ideology plagues the publication's understandings of innovation and competition, conflating them with American chauvinism and the asinine claims to "intellectual property" advanced by corporations that lack any merit or intellect.


In an op-ed at Reason, writer Stephanie Slade appealed to the increasingly politicized 'people's Pope' Francis to "embrace capitalism" if he really wants to improve the lot of the world's poor. Commenting upon this in a response at the Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS), Carson ridicules Slade's assertion that “markets and globalization have lifted billions out of poverty and lessened global inequality”, correcting Slade that what exists is not a market but a system of global expropriation, conquest and chauvinism advanced by governments.

Carson contends that Slade is as ignorant of basic economic facts as she accuses the much-praised Pontifex. The global corporate economy is no free market, he points out. Rather, it is the end result of five hundred years of what Carson calls "colonialism, robbery and enslavement". This is perhaps a reference to the theory of the capitalist world-economy advanced by historical social scientist Immanuel Wallerstein, which sees the start of the conquest of the Americas by European armies as roughly the beginning of modern-day capitalism.

Far from being based upon freedom or real innovation, current "capitalism" is based instead on ruthless ownership and protection of property by gangs of thugs and brutal armed regimes masquerading as "democracies". No-one actually earned such property, and instead such ownership can solely be traced back to criminality, racism and class antagonism, Carson implies.

In Carson's own dramatic phrasing, we may understand the historic truth as follows:
Most of the minerals, farm land and petroleum reserves of the world continue to be held by the heirs and assigns of the original robbers — a giant, bleeding, arterial wound on the body of the global South that transnational corporations feast on like vampires. So global capitalism as we know it was founded on the violation of property rights. Talk of “inviolability” amounts to the robber saying “No more stealing, starting — NOW!”
Even supposing Pope Francis' ignorance of economics is fact, Carson concludes, an economics columnist like Stepahnie Slade at a publication as respected as Reason should know better than to recycle fallacies about intellectual property being somehow responsible for freedom. In reality, intellectual property is a form of protectionism, which does nothing more than slow down and prevent innovation.

If we assume that Slade is right about capitalism uplifting a billion from poverty, it remains a fact that it could be done faster if we had removed the suffocating and retarding enforcement of intellectual property laws by states.


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4 August 2015

"Muslim" bikini attack story "selective"

The Blog


News headlines discussing the recent story in France of an attack by "Muslim" women against a girl wearing a bikini were "selective" and discriminatory.


As explained in a recent post at the L'Ordre blog on Beliefnet:
We are told stories such as the recent one in France, where a girl in a bikini was assaulted by apparent Muslim women attackers offended by her choice of dress. However, we are not told of the comparable stories of the Muslim women threatened and attacked by racists in France or Britain even though we know such attacks are equally real. 
Read more: http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/lordre/2015/08/islam-is-part-of-the-west-now-live-with-it.html#ixzz3hfqrgobN 
Read more at http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/lordre/2015/08/islam-is-part-of-the-west-now-live-with-it.html#6OdJZLIBPMT1UBHO.99
The blog further argued that Muslims are part of Europe, and that arguments for discrimination against Islam on the grounds that it is "not a race" forget that neither are Jews or homosexuals a race. In fact the very argument that Islam is not a race is consistent with arguments employed by racists throughout history and it only serves to prove that the people using it are racists.

Beliefnet's L'Ordre blog argued that proponents of the argument that "Islam is not a race" actually "know nothing about why racism is wrong in the first place and are likely to justify segregation or even killing for the same reasons applied by racists in the Twentieth Century". According to the blog's analysis, racism is wrong not for attacking races per se but for being a form of discrimination, much as discrimination against religious and sexual minorities is also wrong despite these not being races.


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23 June 2015

UK and Ukraine neo-nazis connect

The Blog


UK-based Neo-Nazis have met with Ukrainian neo-Nazis, the Daily Agenda blog reported


Quoting a number of other media materials posted to the Internet to confirm this revelation, the blog's dissident writer Simon Tomlin stated that it "proves everything that I have alleged in the past about collusion between British neo-Nazis and their brethren in Ukraine".

The blog also made reference to possible links between the British regime and the neo-Nazi illegal fighters known to operate in Ukraine. British police forces also have a history of collusion with neo-Nazis and other far-right groups, much like the British regime's collusion with fascist sympathizers in Ukraine.

The blog argued that a meeting of neo-Nazi groups from Ukraine and Britain could not have taken place without regime approval:
Whatever the truth and extent of the ongoing collusion between British and Ukrainian neo-Nazis, particularly through the Misanthropic Division, there is now doubt at all that this collusion is happening with the full consent of the British Government and the ersatz media turns a blind eye in its conspiracy of silence.

The Blog


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9 June 2015

Whites under the US racist tyranny

The Blog


White people, as other groups in the US, are plagued by a culture and politics of racism that divides the poor and sets them against each other.


That is the view of David Rosen writing at Counterpunch's June 5-7 Issue.

In the closing paragraphs of the article, Rosen concluded an even more thorough analysis by issuing the following commentary on how white Americans are forced to pay the price of racism in American politics:
White privilege is under attack, less so by people of color who are poorer and suffer greater then by the policies of the – mostly white — 1 percent. Racism plays a key – if unspoken – role in the repression of white people; it keeps them blind, in denial, to what causes their deepening immiseration. 
Race is at the center of three critical issues that will likely play significant roles in the upcoming ’16 election – police killings of unarmed people of color, inequality and immigration. The nearly daily media reports of “police lynchings” make inescapable the police’s role in enforcing racist customs. The suburbanization of poverty, with inner-city people of color being pushed to the impoverished suburbs, reflects the out-of-site, out-of-mind campaign now redrawing the urban landscape. The politicians and people who resist immigration reform today conveniently forget that their ancestors were once immigrants. More so, many fear the loss of their white skin privileges as their population majority is projected to shrink to a minority later this century. 
How will the tyranny of white skin privilege be broken? How will the Republican ace-in-the-hole Southern strategy finally be ended? 
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “Since 2000, the number of [white] hate groups has increased by 30 percent.” It estimates that since Pres. Obama’s 2008 election the number of such group rose 1,360 in 2012 from 813 in 2008; in 2014, there were 874 such groups. 
One can only hope that as the Great Squeeze takes its toll on more and more white people, they will find common struggle with other Americans from all backgrounds rather then the 1 percent who, like puppet masters, pull the strings on all-too-may politicians and pundits.

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22 May 2015

The NATO-neo-Nazi axis in Ukraine

The Blog


The Daily Agenda, a British dissident blog, has drawn attention to how NATO works to legitimize neo-Nazis in Europe to support anti-Russian sentiment.


The proliferation of violent neo-Nazi movements in Eastern Europe has accompanied every stage of NATO enlargement, the blog argued on May 17, quoting the Eurasion Observatory for Democracy and Elections (EODE) watchdog. The observations are not only from this watchdog, however. Many commentators have watched with caution as NATO was drawn into a public alliance with neo-Nazi thugs and illegal fighters in the ongoing Ukrainian Civil War.
The Nazification of the Ukrainian military, supported by NATO thugs and spies seeking to offend and provoke Russia, has become an established doctrine of the Ukrainian regime. Neo-Nazi criminals are offered influential positions, while pro-Russian "enemies of the state" are beaten and killed with NATO support and blessing. Bans are issued against old Soviet Union symbolism and celebrations of the Russian victory over Nazi Germany in World War 2, while Nazi collaborators are now given state recognition as heroes.

In a recent scandal, NATO was found to be directly involved in witch-hunts and assassinations of political figures in Ukraine's internal affairs. Such aggression is not unprecedented for the so-called alliance, which - since its disastrous war killed of 60,000 civilians in Libya - has constantly crept away from its mission of collective-defense and towards arbitrary involvement in foreign civil wars. Ignoring the priority of collective defense emphasized in the North Atlantic Treaty, the current "NATO" alliance no longer addresses member states' security and instead tries to persuade member states to fight in the civil wars of non-member states beyond the boundaries of the North Atlantic area.

Revision of history to exclude the Soviet Union's role in World War 2 and the role of Ukrainian Nazis in the Holocaust has become part of the regime's attempts to gain legitimacy. It has also been used to justify the continued murders of pro-Russian civilians in the country's east, which Russians regard as tantamount to a repeat of Nazi German atrocities.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko recently denounced the Minsk peace deal and demanded that the bloodshed must continue.

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6 February 2015

#Meritocracy Aids Blindness, #Oligarchy

@CathyReisenwitz.


If America has any characteristic that does not so much define it as it is, but defines it as it aspires to be, it’s offering upward mobility. Class struggle which gets anyone anywhere could be understood as meritocracy against a permanent oligarchy. Beginning with the rise of the merchant class and ending with the rise of the first true middle class, the globe has undoubtedly shifted against nobility and towards meritocracy. However, replacing a rigid caste system with oversimplified notions of hard work, culture, and bootstraps have veiled the shifts which have not just arrested, but reversed, the expansion of the middle class.

Essentially, there’s a new oligarchy in town. The landed gentry got their asses kicked by the captains of industry. But a new “can of whoop ass” has been opened by the financially literate on the ignorant and struggling.


It’s Been Real, Middle Class


Wealth, throughout history, was never about income from labor. It has, until pretty recently (14th century, give or take) been about income from land. The first challenge to agricultural economic hegemony came from a plucky little upstart called international trade. Goods crossing borders enabled people to build wealth from labor alone for the first time. It created the merchant class.

Then came the Industrial Revolution, which expanded both the number of people who could build wealth from labor, and the scope of the wealth they could build. It gave black-lunged, coal-covered birth to the first real middle class in human history, and completely remade the makeup of the 1%.

This middle class grew and grew, with increased standards of living and a deliciously tumultuous upper crust. Fortunes were won and lost by each generation.

Then, in the 1970’s, the gap between rich and poor in America began to take off. As incomes steadied in the middle, so did the shakeups in who constitutes the richest of the rich. Three-quarters of America’s one-percenters will still be one-percenters next year.

Every year in America, fewer and fewer people can move into a higher class than their parents. Today, there are many other wealthy countries where it’s easier to move up in class.

From the Economist, “America’s meritocracy is… in danger of calcifying into a caste, decorated with a few members from favoured minorities, but cut off from the great mass of the population. The social hierarchy is getting both steeper and harder to climb.”

Oh Hai, New Oligarchy


In 1979, just under 8% of the 1% were rich from finance-related occupations. In 2005, the percentage had grown to 13.9%. Within the 0.1%, the percentage grew from 11% to 18%. And in that time, the top earners went from getting their wealth from wages and bonuses to financial instruments. Interest, dividends, capital gains and rent make up a quarter of income for the average one percenter. These households control nearly half of all stocks and mutual funds and more than 60% of securities.

Here’s Wikipedia: “As of 2002, there were approximately 146,000 (0.1%) households with incomes exceeding $1,500,000, while the top 0.01% or 11,000 households had incomes exceeding $5,500,000. The 400 highest tax payers in the nation had gross annual household incomes exceeding $87,000,000. Household incomes for this group have risen more dramatically than for any other. As a result, the gap between those who make less than one and half million dollars annually (99.9% of households) and those who make more (0.1%) has been steadily increasing, prompting The New York Times to proclaim that the ‘Richest Are Leaving Even the Rich Far Behind.’”

The Myth that Won’t Die


I’m in Liberty Tavern, eating a tres fancy brunch. There’s caviar on the buffet in the fifth highest income county in the country, in a city least likely to fuck around with the meal that combines breakfast and lunch. One of my two friends says something arresting about herself.

“I make rich people uncomfortable.” She doesn’t mean she’s a threat to the income inequality, though that could be somewhat true, as she does sometimes write about economic justice. What she means is she’s loud and, (not her word) uncouth. Rich people don’t know what to do with her. I want to argue with her and crawl under the table at the same time. Instead, narcissist that I am, I think about how I make rich people feel.

Class is fascinating to me. My parents are both second-generation members of the middle class. Both my grandfathers fought in Vietnam, having escaped poverty via the expansion of officers in the Air Force. I grew up in Alabama, where my mother read me Shakespeare and we had burglar bars on our windows and trailers on 3 sides of our rented house.

Conservative poors confound liberals. They are extremely likely to believe America is a meritocracy, where the wealthy and high-status individuals are that way because they earned it by providing value. You can see it in their opposition to affirmative action and anti-poverty programs and their refusal to accept impediments such as structural racism as material contributors economic inequality.

The assumption that America is a meritocracy means, by extension, that people who are poor are poor because they’ve not put forth enough, or the right kind of, effort. From Bill O’Reilly blaming black fatherlessness for poverty, and not say, decades of housing discrimination, redlining, failing public schools. Or recognizing mass incarceration’s role, particularly for non-violent offenses, in fatherlessness.

The right calls this a culture of accountability. The left calls this victim blaming.


Liberals don’t understand why poor people believe they’re poor in a system which rewards merit. But I get it. For me, aspiring to a lot meant I wanted to graduate from college by 22 and get and keep a full-time job which supported me. It wasn’t until I’d done all that that I realized what low aspirations those were for me. Let’s just say that applying to an Ivy League school literally didn’t occur to me. But once I had a degree and a good job at 22, I realized that if I worked hard, I could be rich. And I assumed I would. And if I could do it, anyone could.

There may be no more effective way to throw someone off the search for a victimizer than to blame victims for their own oppression.

I didn’t realize that no one gets rich from wages.


A Bloomberg National Poll found that more than three-quarters of Americans felt no effect on their financial well-being from the five-year bull market in U.S. stocks. That’s probably because only half of Americans own stocks, and most of those are in retirement accounts.

Confession: I am still not exactly sure what a stock is. Getting rich in America requires two things the poor don’t have: financial literacy and surplus wages. I don’t want to say that poor Americans believe in a meritocracy because they are ignorant of how the rich get rich. But it certainly helps to believe in a meritocracy when you don’t understand how the rich get rich.

Owning land isn’t hard. It doesn’t help anyone else, in and of itself. Building a ship is hard. Sailing to another continent without satellite navigation is hard. Building a factory is hard. These are all activities, and they help the doer by helping other people.

Perhaps in theory thriving financial markets produce wealth across the board. But not ours. A thriving market requires risk and reward be private. America’s financial markets only privatize reward. And the rewards are flowing. The rich are getting richer. And the poor? They’re paying for the failures of the rich. To look at just one recent example, we can examine the sub-prime mortgage lending crisis. Middle class wage stagnation itself belies trickle-down economics. Stagnant wages and rising individual household debt make saving enough to invest impossible. Americans are paying more in taxes to fund golden parachutes for banking executives than they’re saving for stocks and bonds.

Overcoming the obstacles to upward mobility requires acknowledging them. Meritocracy blinds people to the structural barriers to their own success. We’ve built a new oligarchy with financial instruments the average American can’t afford and doesn’t understand.




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Re: Gov @BobbyJindal's Nationalist #Rant

@KevinCarson1.


In a recent speech Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal announced “… we came to America to be Americans. Not Indian-Americans, simply Americans. … If we wanted to be Indians, we would have stayed in India” (The Hindu, January 16). He also argued that it’s entirely reasonable for nations to discriminate between would-be immigrants based on whether they want to “embrace their culture,” or “establish a separate culture within.”



The irony gets pretty thick if you remember — unlike Jindal — that English is the native language not of America, but of England. The dominant culture of America descends from people who came to this continent adamantly set on remaining, not English-Americans, but English. They didn’t assimilate into the Iroquois or Powhatan Confederacies or the Five Civilized Tribes, or adopt their languages. They exterminated or ethnically cleansed those cultures.


And the dominant status of English has been contested since the beginning. Aside from First Nations languages, New York had a Dutch-speaking population in the Hudson valley well into the 19th century. Likewise the Germans in western Pennsylvania and the French in northern Maine. Also bear in mind that expansion outside the US’s 1783 borders involved conquering peoples formerly under French, Spanish or Mexican rule and imposing English on them. Those big agribusiness plantations worked by “illegal immigrants” in California were previously haciendas seized by white magnates who colonized Mexican California, taking over the former patrons’ role of relying on peon labor.

The “melting pot” is just another example of the ethnic essentialism and state-constituted monolithic national identity that has spread throughout most of the world since Napoleonic times. The model of international law Europe adopted with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 assumed as a norm that every individual must be the subject of a single, unitary, sovereign nation-state.

Coupled with the rise of nationalism during the Napoleonic Wars, this norm was extended to include the requirement that every nation-state, ideally, have a single official ethnic identity. France became the official state of the ethnic French, Germany of ethnic Germans, etc. Everyone within the borders of a nation-state was to be assimilated into the dominant ethnicity and adopt its language. And that language, in the most extreme forms, was the official dialect (BBC Standard or American Network Standard English, Standard High German, Ile-de-France French, Standard Castilian, etc.).

In the 20th century, colonial Europe and America imposed the Westphalian nation-state as the official model for international law on a global level. In Africa this meant the European powers consolidated hundreds of minor principalities, confederacies and custom-based societies into 47 artificial multi-ethnic states. The Middle East is still living with the consequences of the artificial states the Allied victors carved the Ottoman Empire up into at Versailles.

The “English only” movement is especially clueless. In most places practical necessity is a far greater incentive to learn English than anything they can come up with. And people are generally pretty smart about learning whatever languages they need to to function in a society. Even when the kids of Hispanic immigrants — who speak fluent English — speak Spanish to each other, it’s a Spanglish that would make their grandmothers throw up their hands in horror. As for older first generation immigrants who have trouble learning English, they’re no different from the Polish and Italian-speaking grandparents many people fondly remember in Chicago, or the Norsk and German speakers Sinclair Lewis portrayed in Minnesota. And, psst — I hear there are some American occupation troops, and corporate personnel extracting other countries’ resources, who don’t learn the local languages either!

Jindal belongs to a party that’s big on telling government to get off our backs and mind its own business. I heartily agree. One of the first items on its agenda should be to stop trying to define our ethnic identities for us, or sticking its nose into which languages we choose to speak to each other.


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27 January 2015

Missing Comma: The Pen and the Sword

. @illicitpopsicle .


This morning, there are twelve people who are dead who should not be.


Nine journalists, a maintenance worker and two police officers were killed at the Paris headquarters of French satire newspaper Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday. Eleven more were injured; four are still in critical condition as of this writing.

Here is a list of the dead (source: The Guardian):

Stéphane Charbonnier, 47, cartoonist and publisher of Charlie Hebdo
Jean “Cabu” Cabut, 76, Charlie Hebdo’s lead cartoonist
Georges Wolinski, 80, Tunisian-born artist
Bernard “Tignous” Verlhac, 57, a member of the group Cartoonists for Peace
Bernard Maris – known as “Uncle Bernard”, 68, economist and Charlie Hebdo columnist
Philippe Honoré, AKA Honoré, 73, Charlie Hebdo cartoonist since the paper’s founding in 1992
Michel Renaud, former journalist and political staffer, visiting Charlie Hebdo
Mustapha Ourrad – Algerian copy editor at Charlie Hebdo
Elsa Cayat – Charlie Hebdo analyst and columnist
Frederic Boisseau – building maintenance worker
Franck Brinsolaro – 49-year-old police officer appointed to head security for Charb and father of a one-year-old girl
Ahmed Merabet – 42 and a French Muslim police officer and member of the 11th arrondissement brigade.

*

This morning you will read countless editorial boards repeating the line about freedom of speech and freedom of expression. Even my local state newspaper, The Oklahoman, has seen fit to take a break from its usual fare to publish an editorial cartoon in solidarity with Charlie Hebdo.

You will also read plenty of pieces of analysis from commentators of all stripes — worrying about the fuel this will add to the fire of French nationalism and anti-Muslim sentiments, incensed that journalism has been attacked, perhaps even adding some of that Islamophobic fuel themselves.

All of these columnists, from the left to the right, from the libertarian to the statist, will miss the point.

For all the talk of Charlie Hebdo’s anti-authoritarianism, commitment to freedom of expression, their courage and bravery in the face of Islamic fundamentalism, their “equal-opportunity” sartorial stance, what everyone seems to fail to recognize is that the attack on Charlie Hebdo had nothing to do with Islam, or indeed, religion to begin with.

The attack on Charlie Hebdo was as political as the statements Presidents Obama and Hollande made condemning the actions.


*

Vaneigem once wrote: while it flays us alive, power cleverly persuades us that we are flaying each other.

Charlie Hebdo sometimes mocked French heads of state, sometimes laughed at power, but it never openly challenged it. It was, by all accounts, a paper perfectly willing to engage in satire only so long as it could be allowed to blindly fire in any direction. To this end, it was a useful tool of power.

This should not be taken as a showing of disrespect for the dead. Any time a journalist, or an editorial cartoonist, or a photographer is killed, it is a deep, searing tragedy that fills my — and every fellow journalist’s — heart with rage and anguish. This time is no different. We are an industry that takes to heart “An injury to one is an injury to all.” Recognizing that an outlet — that Charlie Hebdo — serves the interests of power does not reduce the pain or lessen the loss. Even, in this instance, are the deaths of the police officers that were on the scene tragic. That does not change the universal purpose of the police: to serve power.

According to the Guardian, one of the primary suspects in the attack, 32-year-old Chérif Kouachi, was imprisoned in 2008 on terrorism charges for “helping funnel fighters to Iraq’s insurgency. He said at the time he was outraged at the torture of Iraqi inmates at the US prison at Abu Ghraib, near Baghdad.”

Eyewitnesses said one of the suspects proclaimed that they were from al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. AQAP is based in Yemen, which has, in recent years, been subject to numerous American drone strikes, resulting in the death of numerous men, women and children. If Kouachi and his brother, Said, are in fact the gunmen, and did end up in AQAP, then it is certainly reasonable to surmise that American/coalition foreign policy up to and including drone strikes may have been a motivating factor for them. Of course, this is just an assumption. For now, the gunmen’s motivations are “whatever we write them to be.”

*

Yesterday Laurent Joffrin, the publishing director of Liberation, a French left-wing paper similar to the Guardian, remarked, “The terrorists have not attacked the ‘Islamophobic’ as the enemies of Muslims, those who constantly cry Islamist wolf. They targeted Charlie.”

And yet, today the reactionaries, the National Front and other right-wing nationalist groups, are making their bid for the highest political offices in France, using the Charlie Hebdo attack as their springboard. Did the paper speak for them?


The latest cover of Charlie Hebdo is a lampoon of French author Michel Houellebecq’s upcoming novel, which imagines a France run by a “Muslim Fraternity.” By all accounts, Charbonnier had been attempting to pull the paper back towards its left roots, especially after the 2011 firebombing of their offices. If this is true, then why would the National Front try to use the attack as an electoral boost?

Because the images that Charlie sometimes published, the ones that many label as Islamophobic and racist, have just as much of an audience as the images that attack the rich, powerful, bigoted. Because when something like this happens, it somehow justifies all the twisted logic of modern-day Nazis.

This attack took place in a country whose last several presidents have signed laws into being that actively ban aspects of Muslim life and freedom of expression. It took place in a Europe that has seen increasingly vitriolic anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment, and where, as recently as this month, the state has actually ordered pre-school and daycare teachers to spy on Muslim toddlers. It took place in a world that has been at war for the better part of two decades. Charlie’s work was not being done in a vacuum. It served, and continues to serve, power.


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