tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37016507472398962072024-02-18T19:42:12.433-08:00The Prehensile Eye—Joel Simpson's PhotographyJoel Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02037761579211509101noreply@blogger.comBlogger50125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3701650747239896207.post-25203065165286087032017-11-20T19:39:00.001-08:002017-11-20T19:52:32.372-08:00Response to Lynn Sherr's "Chaos: The New Normal"<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Journalist Lynn Sherr wrote a fine evaluation of the destructive force of Trump on Bill Moyers' website. Here's my response:<br />
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Who can disagree with <a href="http://billmoyers.com/story/chaos-new-normal/">Lynn Sherr's "Chaos: the New Normal"</a> where she nails Trump as an agent of chaos in its most destructive form? It just might be the millionth pious liberal condemnation of our unlikely President, which I'm beginning to find fatiguing. </div>
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I can't help thinking that Sherr and our perceptive commentators in the NY Times and other liberal mouthpieces are attacking the disease without inquiring into its causes.<br />
And the most insidious causes, those that are concealed by liberal complacency (if not sanctimony) include the failure of our mainstream and even progressive media to face up to the hard truths of our time: that big banks and corporate interests control both political parties; that the Democrats, like the Republicans, have abandoned not just the working class, but the middle class and the poor as well; that the judicial system no longer works fairly; that there are still serious questions about the genesis of the 9/11 attacks and its subsequent rationale for 2 wars, horrendous destruction in the Middle East, the National Security State, and huge expenditure of our resources on military and security projects rather than institutions that would civilize us and facilitate normal life in this country so that people could realize their potential: namely, education, health care, environmental health, physical health (rather tha coddling the various noxious food industries), infrastructure, and, dare I say it, even the arts; and that our electoral process has been thoroughly corrupted (by "flipping," "stripping," crosscheck, gerrymandering, and voter ID laws), so that it no longer reflects the will of the People. And then there is America's largely destructive relation to the rest of the world, starting with Israel/Palestine, but that's another story.</div>
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Too many people have lost faith in the government that is supposed to belong to them, but underinformed and misled, they take out their anger & frustration by electing a destructive demagogue. </div>
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And it's not as if this information has been hidden! Prophetic voices, like those of Chris Hedges, the lately departed Edward Herman, Noam Chomsky, Eric Larsen, Mark Crispin Miller, Jonathan Simon, Greg Palast, Thomas Frank, Jane Mayer, among others—none of whose words would be permitted on the op-ed pages of the New York Times (unless severely censored)—such voices have spoken out, published books, articles both online and occasionally in print. </div>
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Hedges, in "The Death of the Liberal Class" (2011), wrote about the five traditional institutions that have been weakened or compromised to the point of ineffectiveness: the universities, the labor unions, the liberal churches, the Democratic party, and the press. Of these, I place the greatest blame on the press, now lacking the courage, independence and integrity that they once had (we believe), who now merely pretend to give us an integral, unbiased picture of events, while ignoring or denying the most critical, pivotal, consequential truths of our time.</div>
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The result is widespread false consciousness, which, when combined with the inchoate misgivings of a majority of our countrymen who sense that much is wrong, expresses its loss of faith and gut displeasure by electing a "wrecker" (though his election was fraudulent, and not just through the fault of the Russians—see above), who will destroy significant parcels of our civilization, increasing among the 99%, levels of misery, disease, frustration, ignorance, and above all, debt.</div>
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Joel Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02037761579211509101noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3701650747239896207.post-35269852178013602912017-10-14T06:49:00.000-07:002017-10-14T06:49:12.778-07:00Ai Weiwei's New Film about the Worldwide Refugee Crisis: "Human Flow"<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Dissident Chinese multi-media artist Ai Weiwei released his new documentary in New York this week. <i>Human Flow</i> is massive, as it tries to condense the experience of 35 million people into two hours and twenty minutes. We saw much more <i>shocking scope</i> than we felt individual pain, although there was a bit of that, too, along with a piercing & ironic comment by an African over the different degrees of attention and thereby value that are assigned to the sufferings of different groups of human beings. We're always fighting hypocrisy and racism underneath it all. On top of that is politics—the struggle for Assad to survive against both ISIS and the surreptitious agendas of Western countries to dislodge him to gain access to Syria's resources (as we did in Iraq and Libya); the continuing oppression by Israel of 3.5 million Palestinians to hold onto their ancestral lands and to justify Israel's right to an exclusive ethnocracy that masquerades as a democracy. And on top of that is the desperate work of relief agencies, both UN and national to receive, process and sustain these uprooted people; versus various national efforts to contain, restrain and disburse them, such as Hungary's razor-wire-chain-link wall and France's night burning of "Les Jungles," the tent-city staging area for refugees in Calais trying to get to the UK.</div>
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Ai appears a number of times throughout the movie, an almost comic presence, with his beard and belly, but one, like a signature, meant to signal the honesty of his <i>attempt</i> to encompass the whole issue globally, an impossible task, but one that he's the only one to have tried to do. His most effective appearance is on the US-Mexico border, where he personally talks to a border guard riding by on a motorcycle, who instructs him to stay on the US side of the border, which is marked only by a post in the desert. He returns to his cohorts, and they laugh about it—as one is reminded of the last scene in Jean Renoir's <i>La Grande illusion </i>(1937), where the WWI German officer tells his men to stop shooting at the escaping Jean Gabin & comrade, two moving black dots over a blank snowfield, since they have crossed the (invisible) border into Switzerland.</div>
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In the end, though, there is no analysis of the political causes and little focus on the environmental causes of the migrations, and only the most lame, hortatory "one-world" humanistic prescriptions about our duty to solve the problems. That is, there was no analysis of the destructive power relations that have caused these migrations, so nothing about the sociopathology of the leaders involved.</div>
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At the Angelika on West Houston Street in New York.</div>
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Joel Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02037761579211509101noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3701650747239896207.post-64669993061180243712017-09-28T20:22:00.002-07:002017-09-29T08:48:00.380-07:00Election Masters' Pow-Wow<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: small;">Scene: Inner circle of the Election Manipulation Committee, the Highest Echelon of American Crosseyeds</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">KR: What do we do now? The GOP is in a hot civil war. So many of those candidates we got elected with our ECT (Extremely Clever Technology) are being threatened from the no-nothing right, who, frankly, have run out of feet to shoot themselves in—we certainly gave them two or three. They overwhelmingly nominate a guy like Roy Moore, who claims that the First Amendment doesn’t apply to Muslims because they don’t have a “real religion,” and that gay people are an abomination in the sight of their deity and should be deprived of rights. We need these people’s votes, but how do you reign in such crazies? What if Moore tries to put the Ten Commandments up in the Senate? Or cover the female statues in the Rotunda, the way Ashcroft did.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Pa*l S*nger: And look at all the money we’ve spent to give them the gift of full spectrum dominance! </span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Charles K*ch: And they couldn’t repeal Abominable Care even when I dangled $400 million in front of their noses. I mean if that’s not worth blanking on the details, I don’t know what is! Are they losing their sense of priorities? </span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Robert Merc*r: Geez, Karl. You’re great at winning elections for them, but what do we do with these nincompoops in office? The whole point is to dump government regulations and lower our taxes, but do they have to be so incompetent about pretending to be concerned about anything else?</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">KR: I just don’t know. We give them money; we massively purge hostile urban constituencies; we’ve figured out how to flip votes in their favor; we even go as far as to crash the plane of that traitor whistleblower Connell. Hell, we manage to dominate power in this country with little more than a third of the electorate’s support. And now that’s fragmenting. It’s going to get tough. </span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Pa*l Sing*r: Maybe your biggest mistake, Karl, was actually letting them win.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Charles K*ch: Yeah, nothing fails like success, at least in politics. Which is why I prefer oil & gas. We can't lose, as long as we keep to the high ground above 40º north latitude, away from coastlines and fault lines and out of tornado alleys.</span></div>
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Joel Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02037761579211509101noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3701650747239896207.post-82629775372102405312017-06-06T15:41:00.003-07:002017-06-09T20:31:43.849-07:00Left Forum 2017: Election Integrity, Deep State Controversies, I Confront a Nation Editor, Junk Economics, the Poverty of Standard Left Discourse<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Left Forum 2017<br />
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The Left Forum, with over 400 panels and three plenaries, is so rich with content that it's impossible to attend every panel one would want to, and no two people’s experience is the same (unless they agree to do everything together).<br />
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This year, the first year after the retirement of 8-year-director Seth Adler, under the new direction of Marcus Graetsch and Ashley Abbott, went smoothly overall. It is, after all, a huge task to coordinate all the panels, get all participants’ contact info and bio right, and to assign rooms and times so that there are no overlaps for individual speakers who might be appearing in different panels.<br />
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I presented two panels on Election Integrity in two large classrooms. The first one was in the plumb Session A spot on Friday evening, and we had a standing room only crowd of nearly 100 people. Speakers were Jonathan Simon, author of <i>CODE RED: Computerized Election Theft and the New American Century</i>; Robert Fitrakis, author with Harvey Wasserman of <i>The Strip and Flip Disaster of American's Stolen Elections</i>; Mark Crispin Miller, editor of <i>Loser Take All</i>, and author of <i>Fooled Again</i> among many other books; Marta Steele, author of Grassroots, Geeks, Pros and Pols; and Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein. The response was enthusiastic, and we added many names to our action contact sign-up list.<br />
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Bob Fitrakis</div>
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Jonathan Simon addresses a full room</div>
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Jonathan Simon</div>
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Jill Stein</div>
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Jill Stein and the panel</div>
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Mark Crispin Miller</div>
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The second panel was on Saturday afternoon. It gave a platform to a number of the most energetic election reform activists across the country, including Democratic Election Commissioner of Columbia County, New York, Virginia Martin; journalist Lulu Friesdat of New York; activist YahNé Ndgo of Philadelphia; activist and self-described gadfly John Brakey of Tuscon, Arizona; and activist Allegra Dengler of Westchester County, New York. Jonathan Simon also spoke. The crowd wasn't as large—there were 44 other panels going on simultaneously—and we didn't get as deeply into reform strategies as many of the panelists had wanted, but it was good airing, and we signed more people up onto the action list, which I expect we'll use for letter-writing campaigns to media. <br />
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John Brakey, Lulu Friesdat, Virginia Martin, YahNé Ndgo & Allegra Dengler of our second panel on Election Integrity</div>
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Lulu Friesdat</div>
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Virginia Martin</div>
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YahNé Ndgo</div>
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The Election Integrity.2 panel</div>
There were actually three other events on the subject of Election
Integrity, one sponsored by the Socialist Party USA, one featuring
Harvey Wasserman and Greg Palast, and a screening of Palast's
hard-hitting documentary on the interstate crosscheck screen to purge
millions of minority registrations, <i>The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits</i>, with a discussion afterwards.<br />
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Harvey Wasserman</div>
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Greg Palast's demonstrative style</div>
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Greg Palast speaks of the self-censorship of the mainstream media</div>
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Greg Palast illustrates the attitude towards the public of those who purge registrations </div>
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The crowd for Palast's documentary film</div>
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Harvey Wasserman, social media whiz and activist Mohammed Naeem, Greg Palast</div>
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I always make a point to hear my favorite economist, Michael Hudson, at every Left Forum. This year he spoke at a panel which corresponded to the title of his latest book, <i>J Is for Junk Economics</i>. His main point in his talk was the bad faith of banks and governments to espouse discredited or absurd economic theories that protect their interests, while exploiting employees and increasing the risks of economic melt-downs. He offered several analyses of the shift in the meanings of economic terms, with his trademark emphatic clarity that made you wonder how anyone could be so dishonest as to advocate such ideas, or so naive as to think people would believe them—but they do. For example, how "free market" has come to mean freedom for landlords and corporations to exploit workers, or how "reform" now means lowering taxes and curbing regulations on industry, rather than giving power to unions or acceding to popular desires. And he exposed the mendacious folly in the notion, now being preached in economics departments endowed by the Koch Brothers, that markets are self-stabilizing by means of the business cycle, and that national economies should be planned—to conform to the interests of big banks, not industrial production. He pointed out that after World War I, Anglo-American banks promoted such ideas, whereas the principle that had made Germany such a strong power, namely industrial investment banking, was de-emphasized. And he stressed the deceptiveness of Milton Friedman's idea, since embraced by the mainstream media, that debt repayment and interest charged by banks should be counted as production and savings rather than as rents, that is, usage fees that do not buy the fruits of productive work. In fact, when 40% of a family's income is spent on rent and 10–20% more on interest payments, this leaves only 40–50% to buy goods and services, rather than the 75% that was the norm 50 years ago. This, of course, is one of the main engines of the inequality of wealth concentration, and what so many people are so angry at their government for not protecting them from.<br />
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Michael Hudson</div>
<br />
But this year's Left Forum was also marked by a rather upsetting contretemps: rather late in the planning of the Forum, four panels, all around the subject of the “deep state,” were accused of featuring speakers with anti-Semitic, even Holocaust-denying associations or reputations. These panels were officially cancelled and left out of the program. Nevertheless, their organizers managed to run them anyway, all on Sunday, one after the other, announcing the location by 9 am that morning on the website <a href="http://www.nolies.org/">www.noliesradio.org</a>. They passed out colored fliers starting Saturday morning with content and logistical information. The panels turned out to be quite well-attended, and streamed as well as video recorded. I managed to attend two of them.<br />
<br />
Not only am I interested in the overall subject of the Deep State, which I have lectured on three times, but I was very interested in the speakers. I had heard three of them, Barbara Honegger, Kevin Barrett and Richard Gage (of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth) and was very impressed by their courageous research and irrefutable conclusions regarding the 9/11 attacks, but I was curious to hear Dr. Anthony Hall, whom someone pointed out to me has the reputation of a Holocaust-denier, and who is therefore to be shunned. I looked him up on the web on my smart phone, and found that he was a history professor at Lethbridge University in Alberta, who had been suspended without a hearing by the University president, Mike Mahon, pursuant to accusations of anti-Semitism by the B’nai Brith (which I grew up thinking was a very honorable organization ethically supporting Jewish interests). The Canadian Association of University Teachers (the Canadian AAUP) investigated and found the charges baseless and wrote to Mahon a letter of reproach, threatening to censure the university if it did not immediately reinstate him and restore all forfeited pay. Prof. Hall had, in fact, been the victim of a vicious smear campaign, in which operatives allegedly associated with the B’nai Brith hacked onto Prof. Hall's Facebook page a disturbing image with the legend “Kill all Jews.” It was extremely crude, obviously not the work of history professor, but it aroused no suspicious of foul play among his superiors at the university. The perpetrators have been tracked down to Florida, by the way. (See <a href="http://www.veteranstoday.com/2016/12/07/caut/">www.veteranstoday.com/2016/12/07/caut/</a> for the full story).<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, I was told that the effort to have the four panels banned came locally from one Spencer Sunshine, who operates a purportedly progressive website, <a href="http://www.progressiveresearch.org/">www.progressiveresearch.org</a>. I checked the website Saturday night and found a number of telltale signs that it was a not an authentic progressive website, but probably one designed to give credibility to smears directed at those who espouse views considered threatening to Zionist or Deep State agendas. These telltale signs included 1. the limited group of issues considered, none of which include corporate power or Palestinian rights, or any issue the <i>New York Times</i> wouldn’t embrace; 2. the suspicious overuse of the word “justice” in naming these issues, and 3. the extremely limited and naive definition of “fascism,” which is described a race-based ideology, entirely omitting the corporate-state alliance, which is how Mussolini himself defined it. This was from just a cursory reading of the site.<br />
<br />
Hall, who had originally intended to come in person as I later found out, spoke via Skype hookup, and of course, nothing he said had any whiff of anti-Semitism or Holocaust denial. He had investigated terrorist incidents for their suspicious features, that gave rise to his and Barrett's hypotheses of their being false-flag operations. This is, of course, what makes them dangerous to Deep State and Zionist interests.<br />
<br />
Kevin Barrett is another one who has been broadly accused of anti-Semitism. He has been especially vocal in his investigations of well-known terrorist attacks as false-flag operations, including the <i>Charlie Hebdo</i> attack in Paris, the Orlando attack and the San Bernardino attack. Of course, he is a major supporter of 9/11 Truth, the greatest false-flag attack of all, and which has been associated with very concrete evidence by Christopher Bollyn, with Zionist, specifically Mossad, operatives. This has made Bollyn the target of years of vicious attacks.<br />
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Kevin Barrett</div>
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Lucy Morgan Edwards, Dave Lindorff and Kevin Barrett, with Barrett's cover and diagram on the screen.</div>
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Now, I had been slated to speak on a “Deep State.2.0” panel by my friend Sander Hicks, who leads the New York chapter of the 9/11 Truth Action Project, that I belong to. I was flattered and delighted to speak, but I had been a bit bewildered by the subtitle: “Against Anti-Semitism, but Critical of Zionism.” My focus in speaking on the Deep State had been on the Security State (CIA, NSA, DoD) alliance with military contractors, big banks and major corporate interests (fossil fuels, pharmaceutical, private prisons), and probing how mass incarceration and election corruption serve Deep State interests. I hadn’t investigated the Zionist connection to the Deep State, so I plunged into Jeff Halper’s profound book <i>War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification,</i> and found more than enough on the subject.<br />
<br />
Having read Douglas Valentine’s exposé, <i>The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World</i>, I discovered that Israel’s mushrooming security industries have been working full bore to supply the surveillance and “securocratic” needs of repressive regimes around the world, as well as the aggression of the US military. Moreover, they have honed their “framing” skills to control the public narrative to minimize their very disproportionate violent and murderous oppression of the Palestinians while portraying themselves as victims of the comparatively modest though savage retaliation coming from the objects of their oppression. These framing activities have come to include smear attacks on respectable academics and journalists who are critical of their shameful treatment of the Palestinians, which has repeatedly been condemned by the United Nations and the world community, with the notable exception of the US government. There is now a <a href="https://stopdivisiveattacks.wordpress.com/">movement</a> to draw attention to these spurious attacks and to condemn them.<br />
<br />
Now, although anti-Semitism is an ongoing danger, and the election of Trump has unleashed a spate of despicable anti-Semitic attacks based on deep historical ignorance and pathological hatred, mostly from White Nation racist types, who tend to slander Muslims, African-Americans and Catholics too. There is also, regrettably, more sophisticated anti-Semitic propaganda on the American Free Press website, a right-wing site that also publishes articles on 9/11 Truth. I had not been aware of the right-wing sources of 9/11 Truth opinion earlier than about six weeks ago, but there has actually been some valid writing on the subject, to my surprise. But given the obvious impossibility of the officially sanctioned narrative, that the buildings (including Building 7) were brought down by jet fuel fires or flying debris, and the powerfully obvious collapse of the buildings in the style of a demolition (symmetrical and accelerating downward), it’s no wonder that rational people of many ideological stripes would come to the conclusion that official story is simply false.<br />
<br />
However, the idea that deeply educated academics and journalists who are committed to progressive causes could be blatant or even covert anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers is questionable on its face. It turned out that only a small amount of probing was necessary to expose these accusations as slanders, often based, as in the case of Anthony Hall, on the hacking of his Facebook page, into which was inserted a crude and anachronistic anti-Semitic screed, calling for the killing of all “kikes.” Who uses this term any more? Certainly not an academic historian.<br />
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In several cases, academia has become a battleground of pro-and anti-Zionist forces. Historian Norman Finkelstein, a profound, relentless, and academically unimpeachable critic of Israeli policies and military actions against Palestinians, was denied tenure at DePaul University in 2007, under pressure from Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz. Sometimes these attacks are accompanied by threats of the removal of financial support to a university, if the person in question is not fired. This was egregiously the case in 2014 with Steven G. Salaita, a specialist in Native American history (not surprisingly). Salaita had tweeted a pro-Palestinian anti-Zionist message, prompting one of the University of Illinois’ (Urbana-Champaign) major donors to threaten to withdraw support if his job offer wasn’t revoked, which the University promptly did, violating a contract, and exposing itself to a lawsuit.<br />
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The obdurate, contributing cause to these disturbing incidents is the Israeli government’s deliberate attempts to conflate criticism of its oppressive policies against the Palestinians that repeatedly violate international law and kill thousands of them over the years, with anti-Semitism! Netanyahu has been very explicit in this matter. So they essentially invite anti-Semitism among those who are repelled by their oppressive and racist policies. In opposition to this, journalists such as Robert Fisk, many prominent Jews who take human rights seriously, and secular organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace, and the Orthodox group Neturei Karta International (aka Jews United Against Zionism), explicitly distinguish Jewishness, with its deep ethical and human rights traditions, from the Zionist project of populating Palestine with Jews, ethnically cleansing the native population, and cruelly oppressing them for almost 70 years. The Zionist project of Jewish supremacism and Palestinian oppression has been opposed over the years by such prominent Jews as Ahad Ha’am, Albert Einstein, and Hannah Arendt, among others. Growing up, as I did, in the traumatic shadow of the Holocaust, I embraced Zionism as a young person—it was the dominant ideology of my Jewish education—insensitive to its implicit racism, and only came to realize its truly oppressive dimensions in the early 1980s.<br />
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So this is the hornet’s nest that I walked into with my 20-minute talk on “Deep State 2.0: Against Anti-Semitism but Critical of Zionism.” Speaking to a packed classroom of about 40 people, I followed a report by the courageous journalist Alison Weir, who spoke and showed slides of her trip to Israel and Palestine in 2001 (before Israel was confiscating photographic equipment of those visiting the Palestinian territories).<br />
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Sander Hicks addresses his audience</div>
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Sander with Alison Weir to his right</div>
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Alison Weir</div>
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I described Jeff Halper’s argument of the first part of his book as a revealing account of the structure and agenda of the Deep State as a kind of global imperialism by trans-national corporations based in the richest nations, whose aim is to control the resources and populations of the entire world. Those who operate this imperialism he calls “core hegemons,” while not using the term Deep State. Within this system over the past two to three decades, Israel has carved out a uniquely useful role to serve these powerful hegemons, based on its development of population surveillance and control technology through its dispossession and suppression of the indigenous Palestinian population. It is, in brief, a full spectrum of the technology of oppression, that dictators, colonialist militaries, and domestic (militarized) police forces the world over are all too happy to avail themselves of. It manages support for its position by framing Israeli Jews as victims of the comparatively puny low-tech retaliatory strikes by the population it oppresses. Moreover, it apparently deploys an active cohort of scammers and hackers who work to discredit its critics, including by planting spurious anti-Semitic screeds on their social media, so that they will be branded as anti-Semities or worse. These pernicious tactics along with other forms of pressure and blackmail, often work to get these critics branded as bigots, fired from their jobs, and boycotted in their profession, ruining their careers. It often takes a great deal of effort and expense to expose such tactics, sue offending institutions and get its victims reinstated.<br />
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The author and photographer</div>
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After coming to rely on US military aid starting in the 1960s, Israel has become by far the largest recipient of US foreign aid in the world, receiving over $3 billion per year. But it turns out that this does not derive from altruism. Not only does the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) contribute heavily to US politicians of both parties, essentially bribing them to support Israel and its oppressive policies against the Palestinians, but Israel’s niche role as the producers of some of the best technology of oppression in the world has made it extremely useful to US military adventures around the world (with our 600+ foreign military bases), as well as those of hitherto hostile countries such as Saudi Arabia in its oppressive war in Yemen.<br />
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It’s interesting that Israel should assume the role of techno-servant to the hegemonic global forces, who in their “bankster” avatars have been ironically referred to as the “lords of the universe.” It evokes the painful memories of Jews serving the Polish aristocracy in the late Middle Ages and incurring the resentment of the peasantry (even deflecting it from the aristocrats themselves), who took it out on them in pogroms. And again, when Jewish settlers in Palestine served the imperialist interests of the British Empire in the early 20th Century as a Western bulwark—a “settler state”—against the Ottomans, and later other Muslim local powers (and it turns out that the Balfour Declaration, officially opening Palestine to Jewish settlement before the British had chased the Turks out, was made—through consultation with Justice Louis Brandeis, a close advisor to President Wilson at the time—at least partially in exchange for American Jewish support to bring the US into the First World War on the British side, as well as to weaken Jewish support inside Germany for the Kaiser).<br />
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Following the panel in which I spoke, Sander had another one in which he carefully questioned other prominent 9/11 Truth activists, including Barbara Honegger (whose meticulous research has exploded the official story of the Pentagon Attack) and Les Jamieson (organizer of last September’s 9/11 Symposium), on the legal progress being made to reopen the 9/11 Commission hearings, or at least bring up the anomalies of the original report in open court in the context of the “Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act” (JASTA) lawsuit. This is the lawsuit on the part of the families of 9/11 victims against Saudi Arabia for its part in the attacks. JASTA received overwhelming support in Congress, passing over President Obama’s veto, in sympathy for those families. The fear, of course, among the government perpetrators of the attacks, who, it is presumed in the 9/11 Truth Movement, used Saudi nationals as patsies, is that, in the process of probing Saudi complicity, their own part in planning the attacks will be revealed. So they have mounted an opposition to the lawsuit by presenting their own set of victims, namely US veterans of the Afghan and Iraq wars that were the direct result of the attacks. As of now, JASTA is in litigation. Its has been strengthened by the release in July of 2016 of the celebrated “28 pages” from a Congressional report on the attacks that preceded the release of the <i>9/11 Commission Report.</i> These pages confirm that there were suspected ties between the hijackers and the Saudi government, but according to Sen. Bob Graham (R-SC) who was on the Congressional committee that released the report, the Saudi government had obstinately refused to release information on the individuals named in the report, obstructing the investigation. Now, however, since the pages were released, that government has loudly proclaimed its intention to cooperate in every way.<br />
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The panel on New 9/11 Legal Actions: Jane Clark, J. Michael Springmann, Barbara Honegger </div>
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& Les Jamieson</div>
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Barbara Honegger & Les Jamieson</div>
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Barbara Honegger</div>
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After those two sessions, I attended a “lunch session” on “Globalization, Blowback and Beyond” featuring prominent progressive journalists Sarah Leonard, a senior editor of <i>The Nation</i> and <i>Dissent,</i> Leo Panitch of York University, Toronto, and Dan LaBotz, co-editor of <i>New Politics.</i> Their talks focused on explaining Trump’s victory by analysis of class-identity politics, namely, how the Democrats have betrayed their traditional working-class constituents, who overwhelmingly voted for Trump. When the brief question period arrived, I popped up, so that the moderator, the venerable former Nation publisher Victor Navasky, recognized me first (though he said he had wanted to choose a woman first). I said in as booming a voice as I could muster, that this analysis leaves out the overwhelming evidence of election corruption, and that <i>The Nation</i> indeed has the power to oppose these electoral trends by opening its eyes to this corruption. They have so far been in denial of it. When I announced that Bernie had actually won the Democratic primary, I received light applause. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the presence of mind to point out the power of anti-Establishment sentiment in the last election. What I should have said was that the single-digit confidence in Congress and the widespread gut-resentment of the corporatocracy (or “Power Elite” [C. Wright Mills, 1957], oligarchy, or Deep State—take your choice—was expressing itself in strong support for Bernie Sanders on the left and Trump on the right, and there were many voters who felt they could vote for either one. Hillary, in contrast, was the epitome of the Establishment politician, militarist, pro-war, intimate with the banksters. She eventually took on some of Bernie’s progressive positions, but she generally ran a lack-luster campaign, making major mistakes in her campaign schedule, depending on an anemic message (e.g. “Let’s move forward together!”) and relying excessively on the presumption that she was the serious, competent candidate, making a historic breakthrough as a woman (following Obama’s historic racial breakthrough), the overwhelming favorite. I later found out that there is now a book, <i>Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign</i> by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, that reveals both the general disorganization of her campaign (also characteristic of her contest against Obama for the nomination in 2008), and the ideological bankruptcy of the Democratic party—since it deserted its base during the Clinton Administration in favor of corporate financial power.<br />
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The "Globalization, Blowback and Beyond" panel: Victor Navasky, Sarah Leonard, Les Panitch & Dan La Botz</div>
But Navasky went on to take four more questions, and then the speakers focused their answers on those and entirely ignored mine. Incidentally, Code Pink leader Medea Benjamin was in the audience eating a giant black olive pizza slice. I wrote her this morning inviting her to be a part of the Election Integrity movement as the shortest path to challenging the hegemony of the Deep State in this country. She said she was well aware of the issue but had her hands full with global preoccupations.<br />
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After trying so hard and failing to acquire a plenary session to present the Election Integrity issue, I attended two of the plenaries to see what was being offered. As I suspected, the speakers were well-informed and energetic, but they were offering analyses and exhortations that we had been hearing for years: blaming the corporate state, encouraging groups devoted to different issues to join forces, whipping up resistance to the retrograde policies of Trump. The left has been losing ground for years, but no one was proposing how to take back power. We in the Election Integrity movement believe that the shortest route would be to expose the ongoing corruption of our elections, the illegal and unconstitutional short-circuiting of democracy, the suppression of the people's voice and our constitutional power to throw out governments that do not serve their interests by voting them out of office. But with both political parties and the mainstream and progressive press refusing to acknowledge the problem, we're stuck with corporate, militarist, bankster, CIA-NSA domination of our political system, viz. the Deep State.<br />
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An energetic speaker whose plenary message was "unity" on the left</div>
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Richard Wolff, the grey eminence of Sunday evening's plenary</div>
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Joel Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02037761579211509101noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3701650747239896207.post-57437428484759950322017-05-24T11:24:00.002-07:002017-05-24T11:24:34.288-07:00David Brooks' NY Times Op-Ed of May 23, 2017: "The Alienated Mind": an Analysis<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
David Brooks is the king of question begging, the assumption that something is true even though it hasn't been proven. But when one questions his breezy descriptions, they turn out to be amalgums of right-wing clichés and prejudices. It has upset me for years that the <i>New York Times</i> gives so much valuable space to such an intellectual pretender, but it took me until last night to take one of his columns apart, as I've been tempted to do for years. Here it is.<br />
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In Tuesday's <i>NY Times</i> column (May 23, 2017) “The Alienated Mind,” David Brooks takes aim at an “elite” resented by "angry voters." The problem with this elite is that it is "college educated," and that it has "found ingenious ways to make everybody else feel invisible" and then has " managed to transfer wealth upward to itself" and then "crashes the hammer of political correctness down on anybody who does not have faculty lounge views." This is a cartoon stereotype that degrades educated, historically informed (and dare I say empathetic) members of the middle class, and then conflates them with financial elites! It makes boogie men out of reasonable, educated people, who happen not to be conservative shills for unnamed oligarchs, as Brooks is, and then confuses them with the oligarchs themselves! And the <i>Times</i> pays for such crap!<br /><br /> Then he lands on “alienation” as a concept, like some undergraduate discovering the term for the first time, and then blames our political ills on it, elevating it to a major force on its own, giving it a separate existence from the variety of conditions that engender it, making a disease out of a symptom. Nowhere does he refer to the depredations of inequality, the flight of good jobs, the concentrating of wealth, the neglect and suffering of poor minority communities, which is equal to or worse than that of communities who were once prosperous. He tries to drum up sympathy for these white working class folks who have been betrayed by globalist corporations, focusing on their feelings of betrayal but not on those who betrayed them, but rather on those whom they are duped into blaming. Meanwhile, the Republican policies these poor benighted alienated white working class voters vote for just continue to slam them. But you’d never learn this from a Brooks column. <br /><br /> No. Brooks' column is actually a summary and popularization of an extended article by Yuval Levin in the conservative quarterly (available on line)<i> Modern Age</i>. He cites Levin on the subject of alienation, who opines that "on the right" it tends to a “desire for purity—to exclude the foreign,” while "on the left" it fosters a “desire for conformity—to squelch differing speakers and faiths.” Full stop. The Wise Man hath spoken; following the rather abstract Levin, Brooks has dispensed his characteristic dyad, which stands in for philosophical reflection or sociological observation. Except that it’s pure baloney. How about the the tendency on the right to blame the Other: the immigrants taking “our” jobs and getting a free ride without paying taxes (which they do), the “elite” bogeymen disdaining them for their ignorance in allowing themselves to be duped by wealthy oligarchs who know how to dangle racist illusions in front of their noses? And he takes impolite student protest to shut down appearances by right-wing purveyors of prejudice as a “desire for conformity,” when the protesters see such people as atavistically bringing us back to a time when prejudicial stereotypes were accepted as truth.<br /><br /> Brooks’ prescription? To “revive a living elite patriotism.” Yeah. Well, if he actually asked the real elites, the financial oligarchs, they’re the most patriotic of all—at least they use patriotism as a mask for their self-interested support of military spending, which is where most conventional patriotism leads these days. How about rooting out structural racism in housing patterns and health care delivery? Would this be considered “patriotic”? In all fairness, he does seem to be advising his Republican back-benchers to be more open to compromise. But does he realize that the institutionalized intransigence of Republicans nowadays comes from a fear of being attacked from the farther right by “purer” intransigents, who happen to be bankrolled by the Koch Brothers and their Tea Party pet project? Has he made this connection? Now, there are some elite actors he would do well to target—but nary a word, of course.<br /><br /> In the end he prescribes “moral realism” to fight alienation. What a good idea! Why not print up pamphlets and distribute them widely telling people how to be more morally realistic? Just be as wise as David Brooks! Discard your “lazy cynicism” and “self-righteous despair”! (Why, I had become quite attached to mine, Mr. Brooks! But I’m so glad you informed me that they were counter-productive!) Adopt an attitude of “pessimistic hopefulness.” Aha! I’m so glad you let me know that that’s the answer! You’ve solved the country’s problems! Let’s all be “grateful for the institutions our ancestors left us, and filled with cheerful confidence that they can be reformed to solve present needs.” Seriously! He writes this!<br /><br /> It sounds like lazy complacency with the status quo rather than Brooks' “lazy cynicism.” What about accelerating inequality and its consequences in shortening life-spans? What about the exploitation by our banks of our children in college? What about a ballooning military, sucking up resources that would be better spent on people: health care, education & infrastructure? How do we dislodge these vested interests, which by the way, also undermine our democratic elections, insuring that their supporters remain in power? How do we adopt an attitude of "cheerful confidence" in the face of these seemingly intractable trends? People like you, your NY Times editors, and most of your readers don’t even realize how the system is structured to maintain the parasitic and infinitely greedy forces in power. But you assure us that we should adopt a “cheerful confidence that [our institutions] can be reformed to solve present needs.” Sounds like you’re working for the oligarchs, Mr. Brooks. Just let ‘em alone, and everything’ll work out just fine. And by the way, that's the contemporary corporate definition of “freedom”: just leave ‘em alone, detax and let them self-regulate, and then let the rest of us, the 99%, just get sicker, stupider and dirtier.</div>
Joel Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02037761579211509101noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3701650747239896207.post-88053473197381816292017-05-17T10:31:00.004-07:002017-05-17T10:31:49.567-07:00Scrap Metal as Temporary Archaeology<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I became fascinated with photographing scrap metal from a geological photographer's point of view, and two visits to an unnamed scrap metal yard in May 2013 yielded a rich body of work. See it on my <a href="http://www.joelsimpsonart.com/the-afterlife-of-objects.html">website</a> joelsimpsonart.com<br />
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I returned to the yard this past March and had another field day, especially with the giant rusted "bricks" of compressed cans.<br />
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But there were also other beauties as well: </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6VOXanfv-RSqm1UhyphenhypheneArdujjjTK93cGfC1u9kNjV6buVuI_nintp1OYf99-FTwNT8ChoXEHSEqZkVMUhI9XtOLeUy2E8oR98uFMp8z1SV-rt79bTiI-UPd7Gv75-44E9LY-Vsk5JNdkvB/s1600/ScrapMetalReturn.LR.021.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6VOXanfv-RSqm1UhyphenhypheneArdujjjTK93cGfC1u9kNjV6buVuI_nintp1OYf99-FTwNT8ChoXEHSEqZkVMUhI9XtOLeUy2E8oR98uFMp8z1SV-rt79bTiI-UPd7Gv75-44E9LY-Vsk5JNdkvB/s320/ScrapMetalReturn.LR.021.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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One of the main reasons I went then was that there was snow on the ground, and I caught this pile of giant compressed bricks against the snow. <br />
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I returned to the yard this past Sunday, May 14, since I had seen a shiny wall of these huge bricks of compressed cans from the train I take into New York. The light was now on the side away from the tracks.</div>
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But when I went around to the shady side, the lower contrast from the skylight (rather than the intense sunlight) made the textures more visible: <br />
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Then when I framed it as a wall, rather than just a stack, it took on archaeological resonances, recalling the large hewn stones of ancient buildings and walls. I rendered this one in toned monochrome to emphasize that aspect:</div>
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And this just happens to be the [W]estern [W]all in the scrap metal yard. Its archaeological evocations notwithstanding, it will disappear in a matter of days, hauled off in one of the hopper cars on the tracks that form the western border of the yard.<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
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Joel Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02037761579211509101noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3701650747239896207.post-92198124549610299452017-05-17T08:35:00.002-07:002017-05-17T08:35:35.870-07:00Trump's Unraveling<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
It’s fascinating to watch Trump unravel. A rather limited authoritarian personality, “insecure, paranoid and brittle, jostling between egomania and narcissism, intoxicated with a power beyond his meager comprehension and indulging in it beyond the point of abuse” (Charles Blow, <i>NY Times,</i> 16 May 2017), he’s a rather stupid version of a dictator, who would be quite comfortable jailing and murdering his enemies in a non-democratic state with no embedded checks and balances. But he probably wouldn’t last long there either, because a cleverer, more brutal authoritarian would outsmart him and have him killed within his first year.<br /><br />Our lame press and compromised Democratic party have still sufficiently risen to the occasion to denounce his howlers. He has no concept of the scrutiny he’s under, nor how careful he must be in language and action. He conducts his Presidential business as the mendacious businessman he’s always been, and he flops daily in his more exalted role. He can’t possibly last long, since he’ll become a deep embarrassment to the actual professionals who make up the Republican party, corrupt and hypocritical though they are. McCain has already turned against him.</div>
Joel Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02037761579211509101noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3701650747239896207.post-57133618946354727692017-02-16T05:50:00.000-08:002017-02-16T05:50:31.401-08:00Deep State Now Talked About Openly on the Mainstream Media<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The Deep State is out in the open! With open speculation that the Deep
State had a hand in the leak that exposed Gen. Michael Flynn leading to
his ouster, there is now open discussion of the nature and existence of
the Deep State on the mainstream and progressive media. It was mentioned
on Brian Lehrer's program yesterday, and today (now, in fact) prizewinning journalist Glenn
Greenwald is giving an even more revealing definition on Amy Goodman's
<i>Democracy Now!</i> (Thursday, Feb. 16 at 8:35 am, WBAI, 9<span class="text_exposed_show">9.5 FM).</span><br />
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Greenwald defined it only as the permanent agencies that handle
security, such as the CIA and the NSA, which are know international
lawbreakers and provokers of mass-murderous military actions abroad.
Actually, it also includes military, corporate and banking moguls, whose
interests the CIA and NSA ultimately serve (see "The American Deep
State" by Peter Dale Scott, 2015). Greenwald was decrying the view that
the Deep State would be preferable to the (fraudulently) elected
President Trump. He rightly said that this would be a terrible mistake
and lead to the destruction of Constitutional protection of civil
liberties, even if it would remove an odious chief executive.</span></div>
Joel Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02037761579211509101noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3701650747239896207.post-4269093016081516332017-01-23T16:28:00.003-08:002017-01-23T16:28:55.444-08:00Trumpismo: Reasons for Optimismo<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Trump’s campaign has flushed out a whole cohort of emotionally damaged people in this country, that I’ve heard estimated around a third of the population. That’s about the number who elected him: controlling personalities, people who see themselves as victims, who deal in hatred of others different from themselves, of the scions and perpetrators of authoritarian personalities. These are people who are frequently angry, often vent (a self-indulgence), are incapable of thoughtful analysis, think in clichés, are often abusive. Still, they can hold down a job, accept responsibilities, raise families (similarly damaged). These conditions are now considered disorders, but in the past they’ve been the mode. Lloyd de Maus and his psychohistory has addressed this in fascinating ways. But Trump’s constituency actually <i>measures</i> it. <br /><br />He’s going to make such a mess of things, the Republicans will soon consider him a curse. And if we can get some attention paid to election theft and interstate crosscheck (the means by which the GOP purged as many as 7 million minority registrations, according to gregpalast.com), we may gain the upper hand sooner than we think. He’ll become an embarrassment to the Deep State. Hillary would have been a better bet, but the greedy ones (viz. the Koch Brothers) wanted it ALL, viz. lower taxes and fewer regulations (they don’t play well with others), so they bet on <i>any</i> Republican and got a monster. I want to see how vulnerable the Koch Bros. are, and what they’ll do with Trump in the saddle. They have so much money they won't lose out, but they may lose some grip on our political system. Remember that the Tea Party is entirely their creation, and they fund it.<br /><br />So cheer up. Things are bad throughout the world in the hands of the international globalized economic powers, who are smart, amoral, infinitely greedy, and utterly lacking in empathy. But Trump will be a weak link in this chain. The moral divide is so obvious, that even the <i>New York Times </i>may play a useful role in taking Trump down.<br />
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Let’s enjoy it!</div>
Joel Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02037761579211509101noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3701650747239896207.post-45769496876600668272016-08-02T19:19:00.000-07:002016-08-02T19:19:51.423-07:00Open response to Max Boot's NY Times Op-Ed "How the 'Stupid Party' Created Trump" (2 Aug. 2016)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I read with interest your insightful op-ed in today’s NY Times, “How the ’Stupid Party’ Created Trump." You make a strong case that many Republican leaders are not unintelligent, but that leaves the question of their morality. So I must wonder how someone as informed as you are confronts certain historical facts about the Republican party.<br /><br /> Did you read <i>What’s the Matter with Kansas</i> by Thomas Frank (2006)? How do you respond to Frank’s analysis of the GOP’s strategy of promising regressive social and cultural rewards to its rank and file in exchange for their support of tax breaks and deregulation for big corporate interests? How do you account for the morality—or immorality—of the Southern Strategy, whose author, Kevin Phillips, has denounced the Republican party and exposed its hypocrisy? After all, the Southern Strategy was merely an attempt to prolong the life of the GOP by appealing to the worst racist prejudices of white Southerners. Why should a party like this continue to exist, once this appeal goes sour, and the rampant racism in this country is exposed and denounced in respectable circles, yet cleaved to by Donald Trump? Isn't he just applying the Southern Strategy stripped of its fig-leave of gentility?<br /><br /> How do you excuse the mendacious leadership of George Bush, lying us into a war (of profit), and exacerbating the economic trends that led to the Great Crash of 2008? (I don’t excuse Bill Clinton for his role in this.) How do you justify the deep hypocrisy of the voter ID laws passed by Republican state legislatures based on virtually non-existent “vote fraud,” which has been openly exposed as a ploy to reduce black and other minority votes? And the Republican hostility to putting money and political will into education, environmental protection, infrastructure, banking regulation?<br /><br /> If the patrician Republicans like the Bushes, Romney, and many GOP senators have now tried to distance themselves from the vulgar, ignorant, and incompetent Trump, why isn’t this just a case of the final breakdown of the shaky alliance between the hypocrites and scoundrels on one hand (the GOP establishment) and the fools and dupes on the other (the Trump supporters)? If this means the demise of the Republican party, why is this not a good thing for America’s future, assuming you don’t buy into those ridiculous doom scenarios that were retailed at the RNC, that is, assuming you’re a rational person, historically informed?<br /><br /> I’d ask the same questions of Ross Douthat. Where is the morality, the intellectual integrity on the GOP side? Granted that Romney and the Bushes are offended by Trump’s crudeness, lack of personal integrity, ignorance and incompetence. But wherein lies their moral integrity, other than their loyalty to their 1% class?<br /><br /> I’m really waiting for some person of intellect to make a strong case here, but I don’t think it’s possible. Even William F. Buckley used to base most of his arguments on narrow-view hair-splitting, rather than taking a long view and heaven forbid, considering the Greatest Good for the Greatest Number, as Bentham preached. Why is the GOP not just a racist, xenophobic, science-denying party of patrician wealth and injurious to the commonweal, long overdue for the dustbin of history? <br /></div>
Joel Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02037761579211509101noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3701650747239896207.post-53236952053046925682016-07-29T07:29:00.001-07:002016-07-30T11:47:21.862-07:00Hillary Born Again as Tax Wall Street Progressive?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The Bernie Sanders movement, inheritor of the Occupy Movement, has done its work. Hillary Clinton had no place else to go other than to embrace their agenda and come out against the power of Wall Street, and the terrible march of inequality, accelerated since the 2008 Crash, thereby putting her at odds with some of her most important backers, and possibly the Democratic Party establishment. Is this a real rebirth? Is there really a New Hillary (remember the New Nixon?)?<br />
When she posed the rhetorical question last night of who will pay for free college tuition, she quickly answered that she would tax the wealthy, the corporations, making them pay "their fair share." This is Bernie's position, but she had nowhere else to go. She just couldn't avoid the issues of inequality, of corporate dominance, of the exploitation and suffering of students, agonizing under mountains of debt, their lives and productivity lashed to the voracious banksters. I wonder what these same financial interests thought they'd get for their investment in her campaign.<br />
But these issues have been out in the open at least since the Occupy Movement, and this is arguably their first tangible positive fruit: their embrace by a major candidate in a Presidential race. If Hillary has been calculating and opportunistic in the past, if she's felt she had to prove her military mettle, if she's relied too much for her appeal on her humanistic empathy for suffering mothers and children, then she moved towards expanding this last night in her acceptance speech. She obviously gets it; the question is, will she sustain it? Will she survive a position that disciplines her financial backers, who are so used to buying political power and corrupting it in their short-term favor?<br />
Given the unthinkable alternative in Trump, can she appeal to their better angels, evince their suppressed altruism, turn them into allies, as Roosevelt had allies in the banking industry, like Chase president Winthrop Aldrich (1885-1974), but who have only existed since Bill Clinton's time as the dominant partners in the alliance (see Nomi Prins's book <i>All the President's Bankers</i>)?<br />
No President or Presidential candidate has survived since Roosevelt who has taken this position, one which challenges the power of Deep State actors, the ones, in this case, who control the financial resources of the country, who until now, have been able to get the President to bail them out when their gambles went south, while stiffing the masses of mortgage holders. So Hillary runs a real risk of being violently removed from office, should she win and try to make good on these new promises.<br />
Yet these same Deep State actors cannot very well support Donald Trump, a breathtakingly ignorant and unprepared candidate, with a discredited financial past, whose only strength is his threatening bluster (one wonders how he's been able to enlist so many people in his support—another symptom of the failure of our education system?) Will they finally realize that the pendulum is swinging back, that their party is over? Or will some of them try to bring Hillary back into the establishment fold, where Obama still sits, funneling them money? </div>
Joel Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02037761579211509101noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3701650747239896207.post-51197055974817100232016-07-29T07:04:00.000-07:002016-07-30T11:50:26.386-07:00Democratic National Convention in Philly—<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Democratic National Convention<br />
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The fervor for Bernie was messianic in Philadelphia on the two days I was there, Sunday and Monday, July 24 and 25. The devoted crowd of supporters saw him as the savior of the corrupted US political system and the presumed “party of the people,” the Democrats, which had long gone over to the side of money. Hillary embodied this corruption in their eyes, and she had assumed diabolic proportions. Signs proposed she be indicted and sent to jail—not much different from the Republican outcries.<br />
On the other hand there was a giant genial walking puppet representing Bernie that seemed to offer reassurance of beatific protection as people marched in support. Along the route and in FDR park that was reserved for the protesters button and t-shirt hawkers offered an array of designs, including what had seemed to become his icon: square glasses and tousled white hair. I later discovered this on a stamped-out styrofoam slab.<br />
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The genial puppet</div>
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The Revolutionary Communist sign</div>
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Corporate American Flag (published by <i>Adbusters</i>)</div>
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There were many protests against rigged elections.</div>
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The Bernie March Sunday passes in front of Philly's City Hall</div>
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A second Bernie puppet—holding a pitchfork, a potent symbol of popular discontent in the march.</div>
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Dead donkey logo</div>
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Philadelphia opened fire plugs with spray heads all along the march—they were very welcoming.</div>
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Code Pink marcher, Taos, NM, resident, artist-therapist, Josie Lenwell</div>
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The Code Pink contingent in the march</div>
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Lawyer and figure skating teacher, NYC resident, Marni Halasa—with wings</div>
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Bernie as Che Guevara</div>
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The puppet in repose in FDR Park, where the march ended up</div>
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When Bernie graciously conceded Monday night and called for nomination by acclamation on Tuesday, many of his devotees felt betrayed and refused to give up their opposition to Hillary. His cult had taken on a life of its own.<br />
Now, I have been an ardent Bernie supporter since before he declared his candidacy. I too saw him as the antidote to the corruption of the Democratic party and of the political system as a whole in this country, whose consequences have been the destruction of the middle class and obscene levels of inequality, along with the shameless exploitation of students, and the diversion of universities from their traditional roles as incubators of independent thought to mere training grounds for corporate cadres. Similar critiques could be leveled at the criminal justice system and the health care and pharmaceutical industries. And despite Hillary’s strong humanitarian credentials she has too opportunistically embraced the adventurism of our military-industrial establishment, and the agenda of our financial industry. One wonders where the real Hillary was, after her decades-long quest to shore up her policy credentials in a male-dominated, even macho domain, and accepting large-scale contributions from these industries.<br />
Now she’s accepted the platform and policy imperatives from the Bernie camp, and hubby Bill has given his fetching account of her idealistic efforts for humanitarian causes, but are we expected to believe she’d turn against her banker supporters, that she’d break with her military allies? Will she actually rip political power away from those who’ve bought and paid for it, and return it to the People—just because it says so in the Constitution?<br />
Trump, meanwhile, promises single-handedly to solve all the problems of the dispossessed working class without bothering with Constitutional niceties—and the fearful, ignorant, resentful, hate-filled yeomanry believe him.<br />
Much is riding on Hillary’s speech accepting the nomination. How much will she confess to? Her mistakes in judgment (viz. Iraq)? Her overweening ambition? Her support from the most corrupting agents of our post-Citizens United political system? She has a lot to answer for.<br />
But she must win over the majority of Bernie supporters; she must make a strong case that she is returning the Democratic party to its Rooseveltian roots (was FDR an aberration?) and will change its course, from that of servant of the Deep State to that of agent of the Popular Will. Our problems have festered, growing to immense proportions, as the Republicans have paralyzed the legislation process and refused all new taxes. Can police departments really be reformed without federal money? The prison-industrial complex? Our collapsing infrastructure? The short-sighted immorality of student debt as a profit center for bond holders?<br />
This is a tall order: to reverse the direction of US politics and risk losing the support of corporate money for the Democratic Party—just when that money was turning away from the Republicans out of their nomination of Trump. Where will it go then? She could evoke powerful covert resistance from her erstwhile bankrollers in order to stand for the relatively powerless multitudes—although Bernie proved that they can finance an election (or at least a primary) campaign. Of course, she sees this, and appearing to do it is her only path to victory. But it will require stepping into the shoes of one who was taken for the political messiah, out of his unwavering determination to refuse to give in to those forces, never having been a creature of them in the first place.<br />
But Hillary is. One disadvantage she has is that she’s been around so long. In a sense, her run for the Presidency is like a comeback after the constitutionally limited two terms in office. The wisdom of that limitation, in a cynical view, is that after eight years a politician has been so compromised by corporate interests that the voters can no longer believe his promises. And the only President to have exceeded that limit was the one who “betrayed his class,” stuck it to those corporate interests, and earned their enmity to the point that their effort to reverse the New Deal has now about come to its 40-year fruition—FDR. No other President since then has tried—or has survived in office long enough to do so.<br />
By staying around so long, the forces opposing her—and demonizing her—have grown to immense proportions, on both the right and left. Her only path is to appear to have become a New Hillary (remember the New Nixon? it was an illusion). She must both drawn on her very real credentials as a supporter of women’s, children’s and family issues, but she must address the macro-economic tendencies that have favored wealth over democracy, education, long-term health, and even—with the mushrooming of the surveillance state—freedom itself. She must step into Bernie’s shoes and assume the mantle of the Occupy Movement. <br />
The very political and economic soul of America is at stake—and our future—much more than just electing the first woman, although maybe it will take a woman of Hillary’s breadth, intelligence and character to accomplish this.<br />
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MONDAY'S IMAGES <br />
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World Can't Wait banner in front of Arch St. United Methodist Church</div>
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Painted mask portraits of victims of drone strikes and police violence</div>
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WCW member Samantha Goldberg hands out our anti-war flyers</div>
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One of the panels of the painted masks</div>
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WCW's drone model—one of three</div>
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The evangelist barker with signs</div>
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His confrontation with the Revolutionary Communist phalanx</div>
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Revolutionary Communist line</div>
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Immigrant rights marchers</div>
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Part of the display in the Methodist Church sanctuary</div>
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Reply to Trump</div>
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(Queen) Hillary impersonator—note vulture on shoulder and bats coming out of hair</div>
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Part of Revolutionary Communist line in front of City Hall</div>
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Puerto Rican liberation partisan in front of City Hall</div>
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Statue of former Philly mayor, the murderous Frank Rizzo (1972-80)</div>
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The wonderful dancing fountains on the west side of City Hall</div>
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Bernie & me</div>
<br />
FOOTNOTE:<br />
As if to remind us what messianic zealots look
like, I witnessed a bizarre encounter Monday, while I was handing out
anti-war leaflets with World Can't Wait in front of the Arch Street
United Methodist Church, right across from the beautiful renaissance
City Hall. Around the corner came a contingent of fundamentalist
evangelists, bearing 3-part white-on-black signs strapped to their backs
with a stick, shooting 10 feet into the air, quoting scriptural
exhortations to repent and come to Jesus. Their spokesperson, a bearded
man in his 30s, ranted his damning message through a headset-mounted mic
into a bullhorn: every other religion was false and a path to hell. His
favorite word was "abomination." He reserved special vitriol for the
Pope ("The Pope should go back to hell where he belongs") and for our
Methodist Church, who had set up both their sanctuary and a spacious
side room for protesters to rest and recharge.<br />
But then, from
the other direction (the City Hall side of the sidewalk), up marched a
phalanx of Bob Avakian's followers, the Revolutionary Communists, all
wearing the same orange and black flaming t-shirt, which read "Real
Revolution." They lined up in front of the door to the church, as if to
protect it, while their leader, speaking into a much smaller bullhorn,
tried to respond to the evangelist spewing damnation, but was being
drowned out. When the exchange moved to the subject of abortion, one of
the Communist marchers whispered "mic check" to their leader, who then
changed his tactic to the Occupy's People's Microphone. The Communist
line then began chorusing "Abortion is not murder" and "a foetus is not a
baby" and almost drowning out the evangelist's "abortion is murder"
shouts. <br />
As they spoke over each other, I had a musical
epiphany: this cacaphony should be formalized into a vocal fugue à la
Frank Loesser's "Fugue for Tinhorns" that opens <i>Guys and Dolls, </i>in a yet-to-be-written musical of this convention.<br />
I videoed 3 minutes of it, which you can see <a href="https://youtu.be/6kMM77SVLk0">here</a> on YouTube.<br />
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Joel Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02037761579211509101noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3701650747239896207.post-37404846560642956002016-07-28T08:04:00.000-07:002016-07-28T08:04:06.221-07:00Political Parties or Election Agencies<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
On his call-in show this morning on WNYC Brian Lehrer asked anti-Trump Republicans to call. One woman from Sparta, NJ, complained that she was on the verge of voting for Hillary, until Hillary embraced Debbie Wasserman-Schultz after the email scandal this past Monday forced her to resign as chair of the National Democratic Party, and then rehired her on her own campaign. So Hillary was apparently oblivious to Wasserman-Schultz's moral dereliction and the fact that many people—including Republicans who couldn't stomach Trump—were watching her, trying to convince themselves to vote for her despite her reputation of moral wobbliness and political opportunism. <br /><br /> Huh? Where does Hillary get this monumental insensitivity? Indelicacy? Sense of entitlement? OK, so last night Obama said that our system isn't perfect, but isn’t that just a sop to get people to overlook what bothers them? Are the establishment politicos really listening? <br /><br /> Too much complacency! If we had a parliamentary system with multiple parties that were more homogeneous on issues, and regimes had to be formed via compromises and negotiating, we’d be a lot closer to the will of the people. As it is the Dems and GOP are less parties than they are <b><i>election agencies</i></b>, the places to go for wealthy interests who want to influence policy with money. So the public face of these agencies becomes one of a bloated, complacent boss (cf. Tweed)—and this is what we have to choose from?<br />
<br />
The third parties—Libertarian and Green—are going to see a bump this election season.<br />
<br /></div>
Joel Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02037761579211509101noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3701650747239896207.post-36577475987502061582016-04-27T08:58:00.000-07:002016-04-27T08:58:10.276-07:00New Yort Times Truth Censor<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
***STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL***<br /><br />Note to all New York Times Writers:<br /><br />We are the newspaper of record, so we bear a heavy responsibility to decide what is and what is not accepted as true by mainstream America, and especially by our advertisers. We acknowledge most of what actually happens and has happened, but there are some occurrences that would be too shocking for our readers and too disturbing to our advertisers if reported with complete accuracy, which is often at variance with the official US Government explanation. We must avoid giving these versions of events our imprimatur of Truth at all costs. Those reporters not conforming to these restrictions will be terminated (see Chris Hedges and Seymour Hersh).<br /><br />Accordingly, in all your stories you will observe the following:<br /><br />Stick closely to the official US Government accounts of the 9/11 attacks and for that matter the JFK Assassination.<br /><br />Never refer to the arms industry as a motive force in our foreign policy, notably our aggressive actions abroad, including but not limited to drone strikes, attempts at regime change, targeted assassinations, the fight against ISUL. Never connect a congressperson’s position on an issue to contributions received from lobbyists.<br /><br />Avoid reporting on the activities of the CIA, especially when they run counter to the stated goals of our government, e.g. supporting the Taliban or ISUL. Never mention any possibility of false flag operations, and avoid mention of Israeli attempts to influence US public opinion or foreign policy and especially any Mossad operation.<br /><br />Never make any mention of illegal attempts to alter election results, including but not limited to computer hacking, computerized voting machine alteration, flipping votes, or the so-called “red shift” adjustments purportedly used by exit-polling organizations. Stick with aboveboard attempts to limit voting by voter ID requirements, closing polling places, deleting or changing registrations, eliminating early voting. We deplore such measures, which are all instituted by partisan and/or ill-conceived laws. We do not acknowledge, much less investigate the surreptitious alteration of vote totals, no matter the evidence, since this could lead to libel suits, and in the worst case, assassinations of reporters. Accordingly, never refer to Mike Connell’s death or assassination in any way. Leave Karl Rove out of all discussion, and never mention CIA efforts to influence elections abroad.<br /><br />Soft pedal the racism in attacks against President Obama and the obstructionist attitude of the Republicans in Congress. Never pose the questions of how so many were elected, despite their being a minority party, or else always blame it on Democratic voter apathy and Republican excess zeal.<br /><br />Focus political reporting whenever possible on the outrageousness of Trump and Cruz. Do not draw attention to Hillary Clinton’s connections to big money, whether it’s in the defense industry or Wall Street. It is permissible to repeat her detractor’s accusations of same, but do not offer any corroboration.<br /><br /><i>(This is, of course, satire—JSS)</i></div>
Joel Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02037761579211509101noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3701650747239896207.post-54267990692066101312016-04-12T11:24:00.003-07:002016-04-12T11:24:57.839-07:00Open Letter to Deborah Lusignan, the Sane Progressive, on Election Integrity<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Note: Deborah Lusignan has posted an important video on Youtube on outrageous practices in the Wyoming primary, where over 600 absentee votes materialized out of nowhere in Laramie County to swing its caucus to Hillary, after Bernie was winning decisively:<br />
<br />
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTEKSbvb57g&ebc=ANyPxKrYw8_4dAKbvwBL6GGf-DIbmof9ra3Q3AYbH3bF4K2rX4kMUoyqnXOFm2QCFYKPs8EU9woyFw8G5ECS7nAVUYEOfVT6rQ&nohtml5=False<br />
<br />
Hi Deborah,<br /><br /> I’m so glad to discover your strong voice.<br /><br /> I’ve been following the issue of computerized election theft since November 2014, when I heard Jonathan Simon interviewed on WBAI/KPFA’s Guns and Butter with Bonnie Faulkner. I got his book, Code Red: Computerized Election Theft and the New American Century and organized a Left Forum panel on the subject last year. This year we’re back at the LF but with a better spot and bigger room.<br /><br /> Meanwhile, I’ve been rattling the cage of one of the managing editors of The Nation (which I read regularly) to do an article on the subject, or even a whole issue devoted to election integrity. He’s demurred, and finally, I believe, brushed me off. Jonathan said, in effect, what did you expect? Mark Crispin Miller is similarly skeptical about getting the left wing press to acknowledge this huge problem. I’m also in contact with Bob Fitrakis, who, with Harvey Wasserman, wrote the book on the stealing of the 2004 election in Ohio (and he was Kerry’s confidant at some point). The Progressive Democrats of America, namely Mimi Kennedy is also on board, along with some financial angels in NY and San Francisco.<br /> I’ve been talking about the rolling coup d’état, viz. GOP takeovers of statehouses and the US Congress, but it’s more and more obvious that the Dems use the same techniques, though probably not on as wide a scale—yet.<br /><br /> So now there seems to be a groundswell of popular protests against the rigged election system. This is fantastic. The ultimate goal is to increase the heat so much that (1) candidates like Bernie can take up the cry without sounding like a winer or a “conspiracy theorist” (a very loaded term, never to be used at face value by those of us who try to unearth the “secret history” of this country), and (2) that the left wing and magari the mainstream media will call for a serious investigation. <br /><br /> Since both parties seem to be relying on these dirty techniques to keep their respective establishments in power, it will have to be a loud demand, something akin to a demand for investigating the CIA (and the last one of these resulted in the Pike Report of 1977—and was resisted by the CIA and most Republicans).<br /><br /> Meanwhile, Bernie needs some toughness and fast to shed light on the very practices that you thunder against in your video. Kathleen Campbell sent me the link last night. She’s fought a valiant fight in the NW corner of North Carolina against election crooks.<br /><br /> So let’s be on each other’s action lists. <br /><br /> My next strategy is to arouse the international investigative press about our corrupted elections through the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the ICIJ. I’ll let you know if I get anywhere.<br /><br /> Yours in solidarity and outrage, as a fellow activist says,<br /><br /> Joel Simpson</div>
Joel Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02037761579211509101noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3701650747239896207.post-4125586068488438282016-03-22T11:26:00.001-07:002016-03-23T11:11:26.394-07:00Why the Republicans Are in a Panic Over the Rise of Trump<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Republican spokesmen David Brooks & Peter Wehner, as well as mouthpieces <i>The National Review</i> and <i>Commentary</i> have condemned Donald Trump in the strongest terms, while GOP politicians like Mitt Romney and Lindsay Graham are trying to take measures to insure that he is not the party’s nominee, but there is precious little explanation for their panic in terms of the real power structure in this country. <br />
<br />
If we consider the relationship between Republicans and their financial support, their existential fear of Trump becomes clearer. But first, we have to acknowledge that real power in this country has increasingly become concentrated in the "deep state," the defense industry, the big corporations and the big banks and financial interests. These entities have supplied the greatest share of financing to both parties, but especially the Republicans, so that no law or reform, no matter how popular, has a chance of being implemented if it impairs the interests (read the bottom line) of these huge financial sources—think of single-payer health care and the conventional wisdom that it was “impossible” to put into effect, despite its overwhelming popularity.<br />
<br />
This power structure has been in effect a long time—C. Wright Mills already described it in 1956—but it so overwhelming today, boosted by the <i>Citizens United</i> decision, that we can no longer consider the United States to be a popular democracy.<br />
<br />
The white working class have been the biggest losers in the evolution of the US economy towards extreme inequality, runaway industries, and the financialization of essential social institutions, including education and health care. Yet the Republican party has until now been able to convince this large group that they best represent their interests by embracing the so-called “values” issues—male power (“right to life”), gun rights, anti-immigration, lower taxes for all, small government to encourage freedom and entrepreneurship—while actually advancing the interests of the “deep state,” which is the same as the superwealthy. This was always a deceptive confidence game, so it couldn’t last forever, and now Trump has exposed its fraudulence.<br />
<br />
Trump is running supposedly without the financial support of the deep state actors, and he is attracting white working class support with his vague, throwaway promises and tough-guy trash talk against perceived threats, such as immigrants and Muslims. But Trump threatens the bond between the Republicans and their money sources: he doesn’t need them himself (so he says), and he removes popular support from Establishment Republicans, making them less useful to their heretofore patrons in the real deep state power structure.<br />
<br />
So Trump could let the financial air out of the Republican party, exposing them as the party of the superrich, full stop, with nothing of substance for their historical base. They would then be incapable of winning elections, therefore useless to these interests. <br />
<br />
So the Republicans see Trump as the author of the handwriting on the wall—they’ve come to the end of their power trip—and just when they’re at the apex of their governmental power, with a majority of governorships, statehouses, and both houses of Congress. They are manifesting the panic of the condemned, the drowning, those about to be left behind by “history.”<br />
<br />
So the deep state actors, the 0.1 percent, the neo-liberals, the globalizers, privatizers, defense contractors, banksters and obscenely overpaid CEOs, would then logically transfer their support to the Democrats, a more effective conduit of popular legitimacy, and already pretty much in their pocket—certainly Hillary is! It’s the perfect time for the rise of third party, one that represents true democratic interests. Bernie is, of course, the closest thing we have to this right now—and he beats Trump by 15 percentage points to Hillary’s 10, according to today’s Times. This is the judgment of the independents, those who trust neither party.</div>
Joel Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02037761579211509101noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3701650747239896207.post-87977198784128486182016-03-03T18:28:00.004-08:002016-03-03T18:31:13.060-08:00Bernie vs. Hillary & the "Deep State"<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
My two wonderful daughters have had a spirited email debate over Bernie vs. Hillary. Forgive my paternal pride at reading their articulate analyses. But I felt compelled to give my root reasons why I support Bernie:<br />
<br />
Dear Nora & Molly,<br />
<br />
Hillary was certainly there in the corridors of power when she was first lady. She’s gone on to acquire even more experience, and she is brilliant at it, a great communicator. And it’s also true that the special burden of her gender may have compelled her to triangulate more than a man might have had to. If Democrats have to prove how tough they are in wielding our hypertrophied Defense establishment against the threats, real and imagined, in the world, a woman has to be even more demonstrative about it. I almost forgive Hillary for voting for the Iraq war, along with all but 22 Senators (Senator Byrd’s “Honor Roll” in the movie about it).<br />
<br />
But also, being part of Bill Clinton’s “New” Democratic party shift to the corporate right, she ended up on the wrong side of many issues during the 90s. But the redefinition of our political parties during that time, essentially validating the Reagan “revolution”—namely the financialization of our society, the promotion of “market fundamentalism,” the erroneous idea that markets are self-regulating and that less government regulation is better (a fundamental Koch Brothers article of faith)—marked a terrible watershed in our economic and social history. She was part of this revolution, and she is deeply embedded in Establishment politics. This means that she is deeply indebted to the corporate forces that have been taking over American society, culture and the economy at increasing speed since Reagan’s presidency, forces that push for privatization (in education, infrastructure, prisons) with disastrous results, that set up the models for our humanistic institutions such as universities to emulate, with very harmful results as well.<br />
<br />
Bill Clinton’s move to the right was a way of getting in on the bonanza of corporate money, that was already flooding the political arena before Citizens United. So basically, the Republicans won; the “New” Democrats, led by Bill Clinton, went over to their side, but while winning the economic argument, they also lost ground politically, since they were no longer the only corporate party any more. So they had to become even more extreme in their ideas, while trying to subvert the day-to-day functioning of Congress (holding hearings and keeping the secret from Democratic members of committees—this is the 90s, as documented in The Wrecking Crew by Thomas Frank). Then they stole two elections for Bush (now well documented), got us into that horrendous, unnecessary and wasteful war—which profited Bush’s cronies in the Defense industry enormously.<br />
<br />
So we’re at a point now where due to the Republicans’ deliberate actions, the Congress has been rendered impotent. This is NOT the way the system is meant to function, Nora. It is designed for compromise and NOT gridlock. Gridlock is technique being used by Republicans to undermine Americans’ faith in their government in order (1) to get them to participate less and (2) to believe that private corporations should handle hitherto public functions—a recipe for disaster. This is cynical and even treasonous, certainly anti-Constitutional.<br />
<br />
We have, though, a situation in which the real power in this country resides primarily not with elected officials, but with the operatives of the “Deep State.” This is a loose group of defense contractors, corporate CEOs, military brass, big banks, and the Israel Lobby (AIPAC and Adelson), who determine policy by paying for it, that is, buying politicians, and who have taken over many state governments (through ALEC), and whose aim is simply to transfer money from the public purse, the Treasury, into their coffers. This is the naked function of war, of “quantitative easing” (money transfers to banks, given freely), of deregulation (no more fines for murderous pollution—see Koch brothers’ history), of the $3+billion/year support for Israel (which goes to buy US-made armaments and security systems). See The Deep State by Mike Lofgren, former Congressional aid to John Kasich, when he was a congressman from Ohio.<br />
<br />
And then there’s the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the one area where Obama and the Republicans are on the same side, and which is getting NO exposure in the US press. This would transfer sovereignty over matters such as wages, environmental regulation, and safety standards to global corporations, whose decisions would supersede those of our elected representatives. It’s a corporate giveaway of sovereignty; it’s scandalous; it’s frightening. Bernie talks about it. Does Hillary? <br />
<br />
So where are Hillary and Bernie in all this? Hillary takes laudably liberal positions on a host of issues, most of them social. Then she talks about living in the real world. To me this is code for living within the cramped ambit of power that’s left to our elected politicians by the purveyors of the Deep State. But if we do this, we’ll be bankrupt; we won’t have the resources to take care of our general needs. Unless these forces are reigned in, they’ll simply squeeze us dry with military adventures and sexy hardware, and bank giveaways. Bernie knows this, talks about it. Even if elected, he’d be up against huge odds to be able to get them under control and assert the Constitutional power of the People once again, a power which is now in serious remission. They might try to assassinate him, as they did JFK (a different configuration of Deep State, but some of the same players are involved—viz. military & CIA).<br />
<br />
Now I know that history doesn’t play out as neatly as our fantasies or fears would have it. If any Democrat is elected President, we’ll finally have a rational balance on the Supreme Court, which will correct the corporate tilt we’ve had to endure for several decades now. The Republicans are reaping their whirlwind—by cultivating their lunatic fringe they’ve created a monster who no longer needs them. I’m still astonised at the number of nominally rational people who are “ethnically” Republicans who still think they’re dealing with old-style Bob Dole-Nelson Rockefellar-Herald Tribune Republicans. They’re extinct. The GOP fears that if Trump is nominated the Deep State corporate moneybags may not need them any more, and then Hillary would be the ideal recipient of their largesse—and we’d still be in the situation we are now, with slightly different social-issue tuning.<br />
<br />
Could we survive a Hillary presidency? Probably. With her in office, other forces might be unleashed that would take on the Deep State, but they will not originate from her. She might join them belatedly.<br />
<br />
But if Bernie is elected, he’d lead the charge to return to Constitutional democracy, and this is desperately what we need.<br />
<br />
Love,<br />
<br />
Dad</div>
Joel Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02037761579211509101noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3701650747239896207.post-6288306413981738402016-02-28T11:14:00.001-08:002016-02-28T11:14:17.092-08:00Trump Is the Greatest Gift to the Democrats<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Finally—finally!—those truant chickens are coming home to roost. After years of lies, betrayals, and outright criminality in election stealing, the Republican party is waking up to a revolt of its rank-and-file, who sense with their gut that they’ve been taken for patsies. As the good blue collar jobs have been shipped abroad for the greater glory and profit of ex-patriotic American corporations, the white working class, the Reagan Democrats who stayed red, realize they’ve been manipulated with anti-gay, misogynistic, and evangelical prejudices, while their economic situation has continually deteriorated, and the banks and CEOs who got bailouts, tax breaks, and slaps on the wrist for their destructive behavior, are doing just fine, thank you very much.<br /><br />Donald Trump, with all his callow bluster, insults to Republican icons, and disregard of the traditional money sources on the right, is capturing the hearts and beer bellies of the good yeomanry of the heartland. The Republicans, even unto Charles Koch, are in a tizzy, according to the <i>NY Times</i> today (Feb. 28). They can see the disaster approaching: Trump is nominated; the party is rent in two in the next election. Other Republican candidates are forced to choose between his buffo popularity and the bad odor of party’s orthodoxy. The Democrats keep the White House, take back the Senate and possibly the House, install a rational and public-spirited Supreme Court Justice, investigate election theft, jail Karl Rove, and the Republicans go the way of the Whigs. The smart money (even the Kochs!) goes over to the Democrats—and possibly another party gains true national status.<br /><br />Is the country saved? Not necessarily. The purveyors of the Dark State are still in the saddle: the defense contractors, big banks and corporations, the Israel lobby (AIPAC & Sheldon Adelson, who simply and crassly buy support for Likud’s oppressive and racist policies). They’ll see that the Republicans can no longer deliver, and they’ll switch to the Democrats, who’ve been courting them for some time. But they will no longer have the same degree of sway they once had, and there’s a prayer of siphoning off some of their power. <br /><br />I don’t know what will happen next, but we may be at a pivotal point in our political history. We thought Obama’s election would be it, but we were wrong. That was just the shift away from overt criminality in the White House, but the powers that put Bush there and hugely profited from him were still in control. <br /><br />But they’ve overreached themselves now, and Trump is the symptom of that. So let’s all enjoy the circus, while he’s still in the ring. I don’t believe he can possibly win. Thirty-six percent of Republican primary voters, who may make up 30% of the electorate, is only 12%. It may be difficult for him to break 25% of the vote in the general election. When faced by a candidate such as Hillary or Bernie, his only response will be more contemptuous bluster, which will not work in a national debate. It works in the Republican debates because it’s all theater anyway—virtually none of the issues they bring up or proposals they make have much basis in reality. When he explodes with insults against Bernie or Hillary, he will reveal himself as the no-nothing bully that he is. He’s incapable of mounting actual arguments.<br />
<br />
We still need to expose the Deep State, and the best way to do that is to fight for Bernie. Hillary, unfortunately, is just one more compliant Democrat, hopefully not as complicit as her husband with these forces that are hollowing out the US middle class. Why, if the dollar no longer remains the exchange currency world wide of oil, the only products that countries would need dollars for are armaments. Virtually everything else we consume is made in China, Bangladesh or elsewhere in Asia. And just watch the collapse if the dollar standard for oil disappears.</div>
Joel Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02037761579211509101noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3701650747239896207.post-6923885424145661592016-02-09T19:20:00.000-08:002016-02-09T19:20:11.574-08:00The "I-can-work-with-the-opposition-to-get-things-done" myth<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
It seems this is one of the points that Hillary Clinton mentions that supposedly defines her as "practical" and "realistic." <br />
<br />
But as Justice Louis Brandeis said, "An ounce of history is worth a pound of logic." Recent history has shown that Republicans have been determined to opposed the Democratic President in everything he does, not matter how conciliatory he tries to be. They simply haven't wanted to allow Obama to succeed at anything. (It's now known that at a secret right-wing pow-wow right after Obama was inaugurated, Congressional Republicans took an oath urged on them by then South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint—who had won his seat under very questionable circumstances—to oppose everything Obama did, regardless of its intrinsic value. Jane Mayer describes it in her new book <i>Dark Money.)</i><br />
<br />
Then when Obama <i>finally</i> caught on and started to used his executive powers to accomplish what he could (he was, after all, elected by a substantial majority), they accused him of operating an imperial presidency. Now <i>that's</i> chutzpah (remember: like the kid who kills both his parents then wants sympathy for being an orphan).<br />
<br />
What no Democratic President has tried in recent times is full-throated, muscular opposition to the intransigent Republicans, calling them out on it, showing how they're hurting the country, and then going over their heads by vigorously appealing to the voters. I'll bet this motivates new minions of them to come out of the woodwork of their cynicism, to participate politically—to vote and organize—in numbers possibly sufficient to bury the Republicans once and for all, to expose them as saboteurs of economic health, as childish authoritarians, as abject hirelings of the plutocracy, opposed to the general welfare, heedless of the common good or the future, not worthy of being a major political party any more. After all, they sold their soul long ago and have been running on the fumes of "less government," "low taxes" clichés, mantras from the phrasebook of the extreme market fundamentalist libertarians, like the Koch Brothers, Richard Mellon Scaife, (arch-polluting free-marketeer) John M. Olin and others, who have paid billions to develop think-tanks and to corrupt universities to legitimize this tripe.<br />
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Every Democratic President from Carter to Obama has cowered before these GOP bullies and has tried to negotiate with them, to reason with them, to make concessions in exchange for limited support, while the Republicans have almost always abused this deference to block the President's initiatives. Facing pressure against any hint of compromise from Tea Party extremists, they've abandoned the traditional practices of political horse-trading, and would rather bring government operations to a halt—at least that way they preserve their bona fides to rabid no-nothings. In return, Democrats in Congress often worked with President Bush.<br />
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Bernie is the first Presidential candidate who indicates that he would fight them outright, rather than trying to win them over. Where has Hillary been for the last eight years, she who coined the phrase "vast right-wing conspiracy" when Bill was its target? What can she possibly mean by "practical" and "realistic"? The opposition is neither. They can only win in general elections by vote suppression and electronic vote stealing. But the passivity of the Democratic party and the general avoidance of these issues by the mainstream media have left too many voters frustrated, cynical and resigned to a political system that has ceased to respond to them.<br />
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This is why we need Bernie. If he's elected and maintains his current stance, though, he'll have to have a tough palace guard to stay alive.<br />
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Joel Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02037761579211509101noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3701650747239896207.post-19002745461673622016-02-05T18:17:00.002-08:002016-02-06T05:28:12.440-08:00The Economy of Empathy: Why Racism Seems to Be Increasing with Inequalty<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Michelle Alexander's eye-opening book, <i>The New Jim Crow</i> (2013) and now Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.'s <i>Democracy Is Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul </i>reveal how deeply the nefarious tentacles of racism penetrate in American life today. Alexander's book shows, among other things, how draconian drug laws and their selective enforcement have created an incarcerated population that's analogous to an enslaved one (much as Nicolai Berdayaev [1874–1948] showed in <i>Slavery and Freedom </i>[1939] how Stalin's gulags recreated serfdom). Glaude's book shows how certain outward gains, such as overcoming overt racism in popular culture and electing black office holders, have led to complacency about the overall conditions of life for black Americans, leading to the "revelations" about racist attitudes and practices in law enforcement and the much greater devastation to black wealth and financial security from the Great Crash that was experienced by whites. The election of a black President only compounded that complacency in many circles.<br />
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But stepping back a bit, if one looks at not only the resistance of racism to diminish four decades after the Civil Rights Movement made its greatest gains, but also the increase in misery and poverty experienced by black people over the past 10 to 20 years, one must wonder about how this problem has been influenced by other changes happening to our economy and society.<br />
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I am always interrogating the ramifications of financialization, that people talked about in the first few years of this new century. The talk has mostly receded now, but I think that's more because the condition has been accepted as the new reality. It's shaped our attitudes and assumptions, so its immediate costs have been absorbed and transmuted into other problems that may seem unrelated.<br />
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But there is an economy to people's empathy, one which is subject to shifts in personal fortune, to the effort necessary to survive. The much-lauded generosity of spirit of most Americans, our willingness to help a needy neighbor or a "good cause," may not be as robust as it once was. Charities have more difficulty raising funds; each of us receives many more appeals for contributions than we used to, as government has become more parsimonious in its distribution of benefits. Right-wingers are even more resentful of "freeloaders" than they used to be, so it seems.<br />
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So as the economy and culture have become more financialized, that is, as financial values crowd out humanistic values in so many areas of our lives, people who are less successful financially appear to have less cultural weight. This is because, on one hand, the values have shifted, and on the other, because more people are more desperate in their fight for survival themselves, so have less mental and spiritual energy left over for empathy or drive to correct inequality. So communities or tribes have become more closed, more insular, more self-protective, and more partitioned off from the perspectives of other groups. All of these factors disadvantage the already disadvantaged, preeminently African-Americans, but including many other groups.<br />
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In simple terms, this is how the greediness and meanness of those at the top spread throughtout society. It is one of the poisoned fruits of hypertrophied inequality. It also implies that attempts to reverse this trend with macro-economic, legislative, and legal/judicial remedies can ultimately benefit the disadvantaged by shifting or enlarging people’s spirits. We mustn’t let up on the day-to-day struggle, of course; just NOT discount someone like Bernie Sanders whose main emphasis is in redressing gross economic crimes. I hope the Black Lives Matter movement is listening.</div>
Joel Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02037761579211509101noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3701650747239896207.post-37149221366996411422016-01-20T20:04:00.001-08:002016-01-20T20:04:34.132-08:00Political Outrages Surfacing Today: Dark Money, False Flags, and Poisoned Drinking Water<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
On <i>Democracy Now</i> this morning (Jan. 20)<i> </i>Amy Goodman interviewed<i> New Yorker </i>writer Jane Mayer about her new book <i>Dark Money</i> about the Koch Brothers and other sources of unregulated political money. According to Mayer, these people constitute a secret third political party—oh those Supreme Court Boobs who imagined that opening the floodgates wouldn’t change much! (Or did they hope it would?!) <br />
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But what really got me was her discovery that the Republicans had a powwow when Obama was elected, where they had to decide whether to support him on occasion as the opposition party, or to oppose systematically everything he proposed. The latter position was urged on them by then Senator Jim DeMint, a moral gnome who went on to other insidious work. And of course, they adopted it. This was really a Rubicon for those idiots, basically abandoning their oath of office of fealty to the Constitution in order to try to block everything Obama did. It really amounts to a form of soft treason, and certainly disqualifies them from holding public office. <br /><br />
The next program on WBAI, <i>Guns and Butter,</i> featured Richard Dolan talking about his book project about false flag operations. Having just finished reading Webster <i>Tarpley’s 9/11 Synthetic Terror Made in USA</i>, I was thoroughly primed. It’s so deeply nefarious, it’s (to borrow James W. Douglas’s word) unspeakable—the extent of the official subversion going on to turn us into an authoritarian state. Dolan described the various security agency's terms "white opps" (open, publicly announced operations), "grey opps" (where an operative poses as an independent journalist and issues a highly tendentious report), and "black opps" (where a criminal act is attributed to an enemy force but really choreographed by the agency–the false flag operation).<br />
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Dolan spoke of fascism—sugar-coated, pop-culture-coated. He didn’t mention the late Sheldon Wollin’s insightful term “inverted totalitarianism” from Wollin's book <i>Democracy, Inc.</i>, which I find very useful—it’s the tacit agreement in the media and polite public discourse not to talk about or give credence to anything other than the official narrative about traumatic events, effectively covering up the government’s role in manipulating public opinion (from the JFK, RFK and MLK assassinations on to 9/11 with many stops in between) and discrediting any exposure of false flag operations, even as they become more commonplace, as "conspiracy theories."<br /><br />
And in today’s <i>Times</i> we have the increasingly familiar spectacle of a politician apologizing for an egregious infraction once he’s discovered having caused or ignored it for an unconscionably long time. It shows again that the distance from contempt to contrition is as short as the one from the remote to the TV. It’s Rick Snyder, of course, Michigan Gov. “Just the Figures, Please,” apologizing for the brain damage that the lead in the Flint drinking water did to its swarthy children (whose parents didn’t vote for him anyway). The decision was made by an austerity commission that he had appointed, not responsible to the people, of course, until there is press attention to the resulting brain damage. Protesters are now demanding his resignation and prosecution, and he’s talking “humbly” about bucks stopping here—now. Just like Mayor Rahm Emmanuel in Chicago, after sitting on the video of the police shooting of teenager Laquan MacDonald by officer Jason Van Dyke for more than a year.<br />
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So it takes black martyrs, who pay with their bodies, to expose these criminals in suits and uniforms.<br /></div>
Joel Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02037761579211509101noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3701650747239896207.post-57051659991577343702016-01-17T19:39:00.000-08:002016-01-17T19:40:13.720-08:00Bernie Lies Outside the Times' Categories<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
In a front page article in today's Times (Jan. 17), the headline reads "Clinton Allies Have Regrets Over Strategy." In it Hillary supporters regret that they didn't take Bernie's campaign more seriously and attack him vigorously from the beginning. Now he appears to be surging in Iowa, and Hillary seems to be in the same situation she was with Obama in 2008.<br />
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What's amusing is the Times' writer Patrick Healy's characterization of Bernie's position as his "archliberal message," indicating that the journalist's thinking is confined to the archaic linear graph that extends from radical to liberal on the left to conservative and reactionary on the right, and that it's all a matter of policy. What he can't acknowledge, either because he's unaware of it or because the Times won't allow it, is that this is no longer a democratically run country, where power is in the hands of the People, as our Constitution stipulates. We are an oligarchy, run by by the superwealthy few, who control our politics, our financial institutions, and our military and try to control our economy.<br />
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Bernie is actually threatening (promising) to reign in this oligarchy and return power to the people. Threatening the oligarchy is extremely dangerous to one's health, as JFK found out. Obama maintains a healthy respect for them, which is why he never became the transformational President that Jesse Jackson and many others said we needed when he was first elected. He would have been much too easy a mark for them, too, since the racism that he evoked in the pathological sector of the electorate would have provided an abundance of willing patsies to do the deed—and then be conveniently disposed of (as Oswald was). Hopefully, Bernie, if elected (and that's now a distinct possibility) will be savvy about his own physical security and take appropriate precautions.<br />
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Incidentally, the Times reveals its political naiveté again today (January 17) in its story of Jeb Bush's good manners ("Manners Fit Jeb Bush, If Not an Uncouth Race" by Ashley Parker, p. 25). The implication is that he's too well-bred to descend to the level of Trump and start swinging, so we can lament the passing of the age of political decorum (??) and resign ourselves to Jeb not getting the nomination, denying the Grand Old Party access to the White House for yet another four years—since there just aren't enough crazies to vote Trump or Cruz into office. Incidentally, one power broker who successfully seduced the Times management with his good breeding and collegiality was Allen Dulles, the first CIA director, who led the agency from the early Eisenhower years through the beginning of Nixon's presidency. According to David Talbot's excellent new book on Dulles (<i>The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and America's Secret Government), </i>Dulles began his career by serving the power elite, working for the Wall Street law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, and continuing to serve them as CIA director, by subverting democratic leaders in Iran, Guatemala and the Congo, and by avoiding an honest investigation of JFK's assassination (in which he was most probably involved, if not directing). So much for decorum.<br />
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What the Times misses (again) is that the support for Trump and Cruz is the measure of the frustration with the GOP establishment who've used its resentful rank-and-file to vote in pro-corporate chumps (like W and the Republican majoritarians in Congress) who pass laws and instigate wars that siphon treasure out of the public purse and into the accounts of military suppliers, bank profits, and other giant corporations. We can complain about increasing inequality all we want, but the super-rich have already bought out those who make the rules, and who were elected by the folks now in revolt.<br />
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What these good yeomen don't realize is that a demagogue like the Donald is deeply susceptible to slavishly serving the wealthy once in office. This is the story of every fascist and extreme right-wing candidate who attains power.</div>
Joel Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02037761579211509101noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3701650747239896207.post-85896035064795342612016-01-14T14:01:00.002-08:002016-01-14T14:01:39.978-08:00Republican Candidates Caught with Their Warmongering Pants Down & other issues of the day<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The swift resolution of the naval crisis with Iran yesterday (January 13), exposed Republican presidential candidates Donald Trump and Ted Cruz as the demagogues they are—in case anyone had any doubt. The US patrol boat that wandered into Iranian territorial waters and were captured by the Iranians became a cause for these two clowns to explode with threats and bluster, attacking Obama for his recent diplomatic success with the nuclear agreement with Iran, and boasting of their belligerent, provocative response if they had been President. Of course, they were simply opportunistically taking advantage of a confrontation to raise the hackles of their mythomaniacal and rather benighted supporters. The callowness with which they seem to be capable of leading us into a war with Iran (if they had the power to do so) outdoes even Bush's cynical ignorance, but if they were in that position, they would probably be restrained by cooler military minds.<br />
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Meanwhile, today's <i>Times</i> (January 14) sported an op-ed by lifelong Republican Peter Wehner, who inventories the reasons he could never support the Donald as a Presidential candidate. They're the reasons all of us are thoroughly familiar with, so I suppose the Times, which harbors right-wing mouthpieces David Brooks and Ross Douthat (presumably to keep its reader-members of the financial oligarchy from deserting to the Wall Street Journal, so Bulgari & Co. will still advertise with them) considers this worthy of note. But since rational, principled folks like Kevin Phillips and Lincoln Chaffee have left the GOP, this only leaves people who endorse the defunding of Planned Parenthood, climate-change deniers, immigrant bashers, Obama diabolizers and corporate tax dodging strategists, whom we must presume Wehner to still cavort with. So it's a little like commending a rapist for not attacking women under 16 <i>on principle. </i>Bully!<br />
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As many commentators have pointed out, Trump merely spouts the vulgar, extreme version of what most of the rest of the candidates endorse. He attracts disaffected GOP voters who have finally realized that they've been used by the corporate and bankster moguls, who kept these voters' support by dangling various hot-button social issues ("values" issues) in front of their noses, as well as dog-whistling the tunes of their racist prejudices, but giving them nothing of substance. But these voters don't think; they just react, so they're easily cozened by a demagogue, or Donaldgogue. And the beauty part is that, while they only represent about 9% of the total electorate, if they ever do get their champion nominated, not only would he be certain to lose, but he might just bury the Republican party once and for all, sending it to join the Whigs in political hog-heaven (or hell). The Democrats are enough of a corporate party (unless Bernie turns the ship around...) leaving room for a new People's Party. The Greens? The Tax Wall Street Party? Would lifelong oligarchs actually be capable of switching parties? For example, could the Koch Brothers ever turn Democrat? Would they be willing to hire Bill Clinton at $2000/hour to tutor them? The mind reels at the possibilities.</div>
Joel Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02037761579211509101noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3701650747239896207.post-65188937723699414732015-11-18T08:41:00.000-08:002015-11-18T08:41:51.791-08:00Ta-Nehisi Coates and Mayor Bill De Blasio<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I just finished Ta-Nehisi Coates’ short but powerful volume <i>Between the World and Me</i>. It’s a deeply provocative meditation on the phenomenology of being black in the US, with all the threats and fears that go along with it, that most white people (or in his words, “people who believe themselves white”—which dislodges the category) are unaware of. I’ve been involved in the Black Lives matter movement for almost 3 years, but this gave me a much deeper perspective.<br /><br />So put this together with the article in today’s <i>Times</i> that notes that Mayor De Blasio’s popularity is sinking among whites. The majority feel less safe in the city, though crime statistics are down.<br /><br />What this says to me is that there is a deep residual racism abroad in "those who believe themselves to be white.” Worse, the injustice and illegality of it notwithstanding, they felt safer in a city that countenanced the stop-and-frisk policies that Bloomberg permitted (and the Times railed against, and the outright murderous repression of a Giuliani. One could deplore that stuff, but deep down one felt more “safe.”<br /><br />Disgusting. But a fact of life in these corporate-controlled United States, and one that makes Coates’ message all the more urgent.<br />
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Here are some images from the Rise Up October march, October 24, 2015:<br /><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi46B0lEV2NgbOBmnSRt9y6yE6AHnupCvYLH52kb6T8txem6npqdBXooI-d2JLFS-8bYVKhRbSrrkNr6ILvHxNKvSJOHTykvrmm1YAxcy7bggV_qRW-ttfLWgPMk6nU-ghZm0_RcT9Lgq7R/s1600/RiseUpOctober.LR.042.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi46B0lEV2NgbOBmnSRt9y6yE6AHnupCvYLH52kb6T8txem6npqdBXooI-d2JLFS-8bYVKhRbSrrkNr6ILvHxNKvSJOHTykvrmm1YAxcy7bggV_qRW-ttfLWgPMk6nU-ghZm0_RcT9Lgq7R/s320/RiseUpOctober.LR.042.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSn9TZpk-7fOTc2SNXFX4a6q6rio5A_TTR8bVWNM8Rfee4OOjVNdH1EzUnJS4L102s0rTDb0cUv0gJnLBwNK4NoVJTYzE33l2ijZDo7C0bsOLJCiSL_ZCKz526uvK5eJ9rSU16svWkQEsG/s1600/RiseUpOctober.LR.074.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSn9TZpk-7fOTc2SNXFX4a6q6rio5A_TTR8bVWNM8Rfee4OOjVNdH1EzUnJS4L102s0rTDb0cUv0gJnLBwNK4NoVJTYzE33l2ijZDo7C0bsOLJCiSL_ZCKz526uvK5eJ9rSU16svWkQEsG/s320/RiseUpOctober.LR.074.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>
Cornell West, who had spoken earlier at the rally in Washington Square Park, was in the march.<br />
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Joel Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02037761579211509101noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3701650747239896207.post-43803308440730749692015-11-09T06:06:00.005-08:002015-11-09T06:06:51.269-08:00Why 9/11 "Truth" Matters<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
A good friend of mine recently asked me why 9/11 “truth” matters now that the US empire is in obvious decline. To her it’s now a dead issue, not worth arguing about.<br /> My short answer is that I don’t accept that level of resignation. I’m afraid for my grandson growing up in a very different world than the one I grew up in, much less secure, and where institutions I had assumed were benevolent, like the US government, designed to protect its citizens and deal honestly with the rest of the world. The real truth about 9/11 reveals another, much more frightening reality, namely that powerful forces within the government would readily sacrifice thousands of citizens in pursuit of political and financial ends for its true constituents, the super-rich—corporations, war contractors, weapons manufacturers and security operatives. This is part of the growing dominance of these forces over our lives, leading to a decline in the quality of life for the majority of Americans, as well as the worsening of conditions for the most vulnerable among us.<br /> But I also have other reasons:<br />
•My broad curiosity about history: Who’s really in charge? Who secretly pulls the strings? who are their identities protected by the organs of communication that supposedly tell us the whole story (the Main Stream Media [MSM] and much of the left-wing media)? The NY Times is so good on so many issues, which bolsters their credibility, but they betray their readers on particular historical-political ones. How can I understand this? What is the mentality behind it, the mindset of its editors and publishers. Do they know the truth (as they did about general surveillance) but fear exposing it? Do they convince themselves that it is not true? Do they willfully ignore the mountain of evidence and the nagging questions that remain? <br /> I see how thee attitudes work in progressive news consumers like certain friends of mine, or even like pompous left-wing editors like Chris Hayes of The Nation. <br /> But how do they work with people who actually know the truth? <br /> We know that the perpetrators are immoral criminals, so they keep mum.<br /> But who are their deliberate enablers among the gatekeepers of information?<br /> We know that certain NY Times editors and publishers have deliberately withheld explosive information, like the mass surveillance the government was conducting, withheld for a year until after the 2004 election, or, on a smaller scale, that it portrayed progressive Mexican presidential candidate Obrador as a demagogue for his refusal to accept the highly questionable election election results that put Calderon in power (despite Calderon’s use of Karl Rove as a consultant and his victory by a margin that was less than the number of disqualified votes). I’ve read James Risen’s Pay Any Price and am now reading Andrew Krieg’s Presidential Puppetry about the hidden forces determining and controlling the candidates of the 2012 election.<br /><br />•We were all taught how power is supposed to work in this supposedly democratic country. I want to know how it actually works. For one reason this is to compare it to other systems in the past, including more overtly autocratic ones, which were eventually replaced by and in some cases overthrown by forces that established more democratic systems. Then I want to know how long these democratic systems worked until they were undermined or corrupted by powerful anti-democratic forces, such as we’re seeing in this country Were there specific nodal points like our two coups d’état, the JFK assassination and the 9/11 attacks? Has our system of inverted totalitarianism—that determines what ideas are acceptable for exposure in the MSM and which are not, irrespective of their validity—been strengthened over time by the decline or atomization of our journalism?<br /><br /> The obvious answer is that his been both strengthened for the general public and weakened for those with the desire to find out more. But we are now much more on our own to decide on the reliability of Internet sources.</div>
Joel Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02037761579211509101noreply@blogger.com0