As The Russia Thing Continues to Metastasize

This long ago got boring I know, but the Russia Thing continues to grow and flourish on the internet and throughout the media firmament; it is this summer's sharks and missing white women story on steroids.

Of course no matter its ever broadened net, no matter how many Trump or Clinton campaign advisors and staff it ensnares, ultimately it appears there will be no there there for the simple reason that it's not meant for a denouement, it's meant to keep the Rabble (and some of their Betters) entertained and distracted while the serious business of neoLibCon looting and pillage and slaughter continues relentlessly.

The Juggernaut must not be interfered with in any way.

Barring the Who-Knows-What, it won't be.

Frustration With Trump

The Cable Guy came by our place the other day while I was out in the back tending the tomatoes. We don't have cable -- partly as a defense against cable "news" -- so I thought it was odd. Dude says he needs to get to a pole, can he come through our place. I say the pole isn't on our property, it's on the neighbor's. Wouldn't it be easier to go through their place?

"Oh no, that's all right, I can get to it just as easily from your side." OK, I said. How long is it going to take? "Ten-fifteen minutes. Just have to check something. Do you have Comcast?" Noooo, I said. Cable teevee is not allowed in our home.

"Oh. That's interesting." And he goes about his business. No doubt wondering about out sanity.

Practically everybody out here has cable or satellite teevee. Many of our friends and neighbors wouldn't dream of living without it. It's one of the basic utilities like electricity and water. Gots ta have it.

Well, we never have. Even though we're out in the wilderness, we're not that far from Albuquerque and it's a straight line from Sandia Crest where the broadcast towers are to our place, so an outside antenna works fine to bring in local broadcast stations. We have about thirty right now, and more are being added all the time. Many of them are "Christian" -- or some bizarre interpretation of it. Ranting and raving mostly. We pass those stations by.

Since we aren't exposed to cable "news" we aren't exposed to the kinds of hysterics that are apparently typical of the genre. Apparently, too, Mr. Trump drives the cable "news" hysterics into hyperdrive each and every day (almost) with his rage-tweets and attack-tweets, much of it ridiculous, which sets off yet another round of hoo and haw, and obsessive coverage of "Twitler" on both cable "news" and all over the internets.

It's frustrating to the cable "news" specifically and to the news media in general because Trump just won't shut up, and he won't behave like a "normal" president.

The Rules are out the window and news media in general, cable "news" in particular, don't know what to do.

From outside, this situation is interesting in part because it seems quite deliberate -- I'd go so far as to say staged in some respects.

Twitler's attacks on cable "news" especially seem calculated to drive traffic. He's been a godsend to the bottom lines of many a media mogul throughout his campaign and "presidency," and losing him and his tweets would  be horrendous, no? They need him, and by golly, he comes through. Doesn't he?

Remember before the election (that he was supposed to lose to Herself) how Trump was planning to set up his own cable network -- or maybe it would be a YouTube channel, or something... -- to defy the gatekeepers and speak directly to the public regarding matters mundane and important and keep his ugly mug in front of the Rabble all the live long day? He would use the platform to counter the lies and deceits of the Clintoon II Regime, but not only them. Oh, no. From his media perch, he'd take 'em allllll down. Remember? Sure you do.

Well, here we are now, 6+ months into his own regime (that wasn't supposed to happen) and sure enough, he's behaving just like he planned to if he had lost (as he was supposed to), only now he doesn't need to set up his own network, because the presidency is a media platform in its own right.

All he has to do is tweet or say something outrageous on mic or camera, and it's off to the races.

Ka-ching. Every utterance of his is money in the bank.

So it's in their interests to keep him around and twit-storming like mad, but it "diminishes the presidency" which will have repercussions anon. It's having repercussions now, of course.

The president of the United States of America (LLC.) is an international laughing stock, not just because of his idiot tweets but because he demonstrates a total lack of self control on the one hand, and complete disinterest in the issues others deem important. He doesn't care if it doesn't mean the spotlight is on him and glory surrounds him.

But that isn't how the world works, is it?

Or is it?

There were a number of opportunities during and after the election and then after the inauguration to prevent him from taking office or to remove him, but all of them were whiffed. What happened instead was that the presidency itself was progressively diminished and as I call it, "jokified." This sets precedent. We should be aware that Trump is being normalized (despite all the cries that "this is not normal!") day by day, and the normalization will become a kind of standard reference for regarding any subsequent presidential behavior. But you can't run a country or an Empire this way.

The King-Emperor must therefore become a figurehead at best, an unimportant cypher, placeholder, or entertainment figure.

I've often pointed to the fact that the neoLibCons who rule us take advantage of every crisis to consolidate their wealth and power (h/t Naomi Klein who detailed the  process a decade ago in "The Shock Doctrine.") We've seen it used over and over and over again, and it is very successful in accomplishing the goals of concentration and consolidation of wealth and power in the neoLibCon elite.

There is little doubt that the Elite saw and see Trump's election victory as an existential crisis. It was not supposed to happen. But as always we're seeing the crisis turned to the advantage of the High and the Mighty while the Rabble are being distracted and confused as always.

Trump himself appears to be a willing -- if addlepated -- participant in the game.

One may not like it, but there is little or nothing one can do about it.

So I'll continue to not watch cable "news," continue to grow my tomatoes (watching carefully the spread of the hatching hoppers) and keep monitoring my condition for improvements and deteriorations.

Alarm is warranted, as our idiot rulers are constitutionally unable to do the right thing. But that's nothing new. On the other hand, we are not entirely powerless.

Stay tuned.

Saving the NeoLibCon Paradigm

So Emmanuel Macron is being hailed as the Great White Hope of the neoLibCons, saving the paradigm from the likes of the nasty and unrepentant white rightists who have been running rampant through the Euro-Anglo-American globalist Empire.

Indeed.

Or perhaps not.

The situation in France still seems somewhat fluid as "doubts" about Macron's mandate continue in the face of his rather thumping defeat of the white rightist candidate LePen. The problem I'm hearing most frequently is that he ran and won without traditional party support and he will have a tough, nay impossible time winning a majority in parliament, leaving him in a kind of limbo with little or no political backing.

On the other hand, there is a remarkable propaganda effort to prop him up as the savior of civilization in the face of the barbarian hordes -- such as Trump and his diminishing cohort of fanboys.

Hillary and Obama apparently are going all in trying to save the paradigm for the next generation, and I even heard Condoleeeeeeezzza Rice on the radio yesterday defending not just the appalling catastrophe of the Iraq invasion and occupation but the neoLibCon ideas behind that and so much of the disaster we've been heir to since (it seems like) forever.

These people are never right, but they are intent on bulling their way forward in their wrongness come what may.

Great.

Just great.

What did we do to deserve this?

So Is It Over?

I haven't really been following the tangled disintegration of the Oregon Standoff, quote unquote, but it sounds like there might have been something of a resolution -- following an extended period of sex-drugs-and-rock-n-roll. Or something.

They say even the Old Man (Bundy) was rounded up as he de-planed in Portland.

My my.

And only one killed -- so far. Poor deluded LeVoy got his (apparent) wish and was shot down in the snow by state police as twirled and ranted after a botched attempt to flee a roadblock.

Well, I saw the same video everyone else did of his execution, and there appeared to me to be no necessity to shoot him at all, any more than there is a necessity for LEOs to kill this or that suspect, individual, person in the vast majority of cases. They do it because they can, and they can get away with it in almost all cases. Further, as in the case of the poor, deluded elder Finicum, they do it pour encourager les autres. To make a statement: "Fuck with us and you die."

Finicum fucked with the law and authorities a lot, he did. So he, of all those deluded individuals, had to die. I'm sure he was targeted probably very early on. An example had to be made. And it was in spectacular though tragic fashion.

Immediately afterwards, I saw a lot of cheering commentary regarding his killing, as if this time -- of all the thousands of police killings over the last few years -- the dude really needed killing, and hurrah! for the Feds.

No. He's liable to become a martyr, that one. All because he "stood up" to the tyranny of gubment. And they -- the vast, implacable They -- shot him down for it.

That's what makes martyrs, just as has happened over and over again throughout history, triggering one revolution after another.

I make mock of Bernie's pretense to "revolution" -- a "political revolution" as he calls it -- because that's what it is, a pretense of revolution, not the thing itself. I believe it is a deliberate move to stave off the real thing from the left, pressure for which has been mounting for some time. But what about from the right?

A neo-revolution (neo-colonial, neo-conservative, neo-liberal) actually has taken place, suddenly in the aftermath of the unsettled 2000 presidential election, and then slowly consolidating ever since. Because it's not actually a rightist revolution -- though it has many aspects of rightist action and rhetoric -- many actual rightists are unsatisfied. They want more.

They see power in the wrong hands. They want for themselves. Which is what the Bundy Bunch have been after for years.

Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of "patriot-rebels" (they say there may be three hundred thousand of these mooks or more) are arming and prepping themselves into a frenzy of rebellion, indeed potentially of revolution, the real thing.

So is it really over? No, not by a long shot as they say.

We're going to see more and more of this as the neo-crowd continues its consolidation of wealth and power. And those who would fight that consolidation of power become more and more radicalized.

The Flint Water Thing...

What a mess. It's also a primary example of what's wrong with Neo-Liberalism and why the People must take matters into their own hands and reject the outrageous and dangerous ideologies of both Neo-Liberalism and Neo-Conservatism.

They both kill people and lead to immense levels of suffering for the masses while enriching a handful of warmongers, exploiters and plutocrats.

It's insanity. Governing insanity. And it must be brought to an end.

The Flint Water Catastrophe is typical, and it's a marker, one of an increasing number of "chickens coming home to roost" things.

(I don't think I've said previously, but we recently received notice that our tap water here in Central New Mexico is officially contaminated -- you got it, with lead, copper and some chemical related to PCB. Of course we stopped drinking it a long time ago, but this is the first time the tests have said what we've long suspected...)

Several factors enter into what happened in Flint (and I wonder how many other cities are or will be affected in the same or similar ways). One, of course, is the replacement of elected governance with the appointed, dictatorial "emergency managers" whose misrule in Michigan has become one of the lesser-known scandals of the 21st century. I've noticed that most of the mainstream coverage of the Flint water crisis makes no mention the emergency managers that were assigned to Flint and their unilateral decisions in the matter. What the mainstream says instead is that "the city decided" -- but that implies public knowledge/consent to change the source of water, and there was none.  The public had no role and no authority and very little knowledge of and in that decision at all. The "city of Flint" did not make a decision regarding the water source, the emergency manager(s) assigned to the city did. And then, because of ideology, they denied there was a problem as the crisis grew worse and worse.

Saying that "the city of Flint" made the decisions that led to the current crisis is a way of blaming the victims, and it needs to stop.

The water crisis is entirely a matter of certain individuals rigid ideology that inevitably produces crisis and death and destruction -- and victims by the millions for the profit of a few.

The Flint Water Thing is one of a myriad monstrous consequences of these death-dealing ideologies, and though I doubt it will cause a necessary ideological shift in our governing classes, it will add to the pressure on them to fix what's wrong and do the right thing for once in their sorry lives.

This -- and so much else that's gone wrong over the last several decades -- must stop.

Oh, the Ironies of "Subversives...."

I'm still in the initial chapters of Seth Rosenfeld's "Subversives," and as I've said in conversation with others, so far it's pretty depressing.

But one thing that stands out -- and I'm sure it is Rosenfeld's intent -- is that those who throw around the accusation of "subversive" at others are almost always the actual subversives -- of the law, the constitution, and of basic human decency and justice. It is the constant theme running through the book -- at least so far as I have read.

During the hey-day of the Neo-Cons under Bush, I would post comments or write here that these Neo-Cons were, in actuality, the very "subversives" (in many cases literally) that we were constantly warned about during the 1950s. These were the very people or their ideological descendants. I thought, "How very intriguing."

But I'm finding in reading Rosenfeld's book, that the subversion was more deeply based and widespread.

It's fascinating, and I hope to write more about it in the not too distant future.

The Massacre at Cairo Reminds Me A Bit of the Amritsar Massacre of 1919

The British seemed to have no conception of what they had done that April day in Amritsar, Punjab, when some 1,500 of their Indian subjects were killed or wounded in a massacre that shocked the conscience of the world and galvanized the Indian peoples against the British Raj.

Instead, it didn't seem to the British they'd done anything wrong at all; the Wogs were told that public assembly was forbidden. They knew they were breaking the direct order of their British overlords. What did they think would happen to them, hm? Besides, there were reports that some of the insurrectionists were armed and prepared to do battle. Can't have that.

So. They were shot down in their multitudes, nasty bit of work, but it had to be done. Otherwise the Wogs might forget their place and get above themselves, you see?

So it seems to be in Egypt as the military scrambles to justify its massacre of pro-Morsi demonstrators in Cairo as something that simply had to be done. There have been reports and videos made available that seem to show individuals in or adjacent to the crowd firing on security forces, or at least firing weapons, as it is not entirely clear who they are firing at or when, exactly, the videos were acquired. However, how this justifies the killing of more than 70 demonstrators, and the injuring of many hundreds, even up to 1,000,  including shooting many of them in the back, remains something of a mystery.

That the Egyptian military doesn't see anything wrong with it, because after all, they claim they were fired upon and under the circumstances they had no choice but to fire mercilessly into the crowd. No choice at all. There have been reports, after all, of one or two soldiers killed and some few wounded in the melee. Can't have that. There's been a "coup" (that's-not-a-coup) and Morsi has been deposed. His partisans are free to go home and sit quietly until the security forces come to round them up. This is how a peaceful political transition works in the post modern world. Time to get with the program.

Whereas the Amritsar Massacre galvanized and solidified opposition to the British Raj in India, it is widely speculated that the Massacre at Cairo will trigger all out civil war in Egypt. While the British motivation was simply to intimidate and terrify the Natives into submission and compliance, there are many advocates of the Neo-Liberal program who are eager for civil war in Egypt, though from what I've been able to glean, the Egyptian People are not and will do everything they can to avoid it.

Civil war -- in Egypt or anywhere else -- is a neo-liberal profit center on its own account, and a civil war that consumes an adversary of Israel is a bonus. Oh, yes, it's all but foregone that Israel has been busy meddling in Egypt just as it clearly has been meddling in nearby Syria's civil war.  Such things are seen as part and parcel of the Israeli national interest.

Speaking of "interest," it's been interesting, no, it's been fascinating, to see how media is literally tying itself into knots reporting on this incident without actually calling it what it is. For a time, the Guardian was even running a headline that referred to the unpleasantness as an "alleged shooting." By the time they acknowledged that the "alleged" perhaps did take place after all, they had shifted to calling it a "massacre" in scare quotes, much as a good deal of the American media calls the military overthrow of the elected government of Egypt a "coup." In quotes. It's the old "Some people say" gambit. And it looks really stupid and really ugly, but there you are. Or rather here we are, since none of us can really escape the nonsense or the ugly. It permeates everything.

It can't be a coup, you see, as opposed to a "coup," because if it is a coup then the United States is legally obligated to cut off funding to the Egyptian military which precipitated the "coup" and thus deny it the financial wherewithal to complete its mission. Good heavens! Can't have that! Round and round it goes.

We are supposed to work up some kind of Two-Minute-Hate against the Muslim Brotherhood, but it's not really working out too well. One of the excuses for hating them was supposed to be that they were sending fighters to Syria to join the rebels against the Assad regime in the Syrian Civil War. That excuse fell to pieces, though, in the face of American government's announcement of support of the same rebels. Oh. That. Well. Who's to say who's right? Hm?

Then there was the aborted attempt to make Morsi into the latest New Hitler by claiming he was "consolidating power" and attempting to institute an "Islamic" regime thereby. That is what is said to have precipitated the round of Tahrir Square demonstrations that led to the military overthrow -- accurately called a coup -- of the elected government of Egypt, the abrogation of the constitution, and the replacement of the Morsi government with lackeys of fascism, imperialism and neo-liberalism.

Essentially, the chief technocrats and operators of the Mubarak regime have been brought back and reinstalled in positions of power. Oddly enough, as much as many of them disliked the course Morsi was on, reviving the Old Pharaoh's regime is not quite what the People wanted.

So far as I can tell, the elected government of Egypt got into trouble when it disrespected the financiers and the financial interests that wished to make Egypt into another profitable colony. They were basically told to pound Giza sand, and so they set out to make life as miserable for the Egyptian people as possible by cutting off sources of financing for much of anything the Egyptian government might want to do on behalf of the People.

There was no cut off of funding for the military of course. And when Morsi arrogantly set out to cleanse the military of corrupt officers and to reform its operations, the military dug in its heels and said "No you won't!"

This stand off led to public demonstrations on behalf of the military -- which controls most of what is left of the Egyptian economy and thus is a primary source of jobs and income for millions of Egyptians -- which grew as more and more economically distressed Egyptians joined in protest against the economic squeeze middle and upper class Egyptians have been under thanks to the anti-neo-liberal policies of the Morsi government.

This is how I understand the situation, but as an outside observer, I may well have it wrong. At any rate, the coup was almost inevitable once the crowds in Tahrir grew large enough, and the intransigence of Morsi and his government became clear.

Now it may well be a matter of a protracted civil war.

It would be, after all, almost another 30 years of struggle after the Amritsar Massacre before the British were finally expelled from the Indian subcontinent. And even then, Amritsar would be the scene of numerous disturbances, culminating in an Indian Army military operation under Indira Gandhi at the Golden Temple itself in 1984 which led to her assassination some four months later. Oh. Well.

When will they ever learn...





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Not to forget, Egypt was under British rule from 1882 until 1952. The British influence on the Egyptian military is strong as it is in many other outposts of the former British Empire. I seriously doubt the Egyptian military sees anything wrong with what they did when they massacred pro-Morsi demonstrators any more than the British saw anything wrong with what they did at Amritsar.


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This is testimony -- which I believe is authentic -- posted at the Guardian this morning:

wahdamisrya

09 July 2013 3:28am

On saturday at around 6.30pm nine F16 zoomed over rabiya. I was there, i guess it was their warning to us before the attack.

When i think that i could probably have been there because I was walking with the protestors as they went from rabiya throug taran street towards the republican guards. I wanted to join them but I had my neice with me and she had grown sleepy, it was around 9.30pm.

Men their wives and their kids went. The Egyptian media which excells in its lies asks how babies would be around at dawn, the answer is that that is what rabiya is made of, its a little city with babies and children running around waving the Egyptian flag. The protest is a peaceful one, there has never been talk of violence, they actually sell t shirts in rabiya with the words legitimacy, no to violence.

A second year med student came out and spoke about how they arrested him and prevented the ambulance he was in to reach the field hospital.

The manager of the field hospital Dr. Hisham Ibrahim says that they were in the second unit of the fajr prayer, it was during the prayer that they were attacked and that his hospital received 400+cases in the first three hours. So far 70 are dead and over 1500 injured amongst whom there were 6 women dead and four children according to the medical syndicate. The youngest is 6 months old.

The injured according to a lawyer were being prevented from taking a copy of their medical report and to leave the hospital had to sign a paper that the armed forces had nothing to do with it. The scenario similar to the one of the day of the camel.

It has gone beyond Morsi now, if muslim soldiers can shoot tear gas then bullets at people during fajr prayer then how can they ever be trusted again?

However some would not follow the orders since bullets were found unshot emptied on the ground.

I do not understand bullets but what bullet cracks a mans head open? The pictures haunt me, what soldier would shoot unarmed civilians in their backs during prayers?

So Baradei, is this the democracy you have been tweeting about for a year? The word of power and God help the dissenter.

Its gone beyong Morsi now, the tamarud and police and army have turned every Free Egyptian into a Morsi, we are all Dr. Morsi, he said that all he wanted was that the people wiuld have the will and freedom to rule themselves, I know that we do.

Of course it's the InterTubes so you never really know, but damn... powerful stuff.

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Picking them off like flies:

Emad-Eldin Elsayed put this video up on the YouTubes yesterday. Egyptian Army sniper picks off members of crowd from nearby rooftop while colleague appears to be using long-lens camera to photograph the action, or perhaps to target selectees:

Delusional

The current imbroglio over the ACA has once again thrust the radical, reactionary, lawless Supreme Court majority into the spotlight it so loves.

I'm fairly certain that the Court majority will let stand most if not all of the ACA legislation simply because it assures so much money to the Court majority's corporate masters. Whatever gives them what they want is what the Court majority approves, viz the Montana decision.

But if they overturn the whole thing -- which they will do if they are told to do so by their corporate masters -- the idea that the re-election of Obama will somehow lead to the overturning of the Court majority and its replacement with a liberal/progressive majority is delusional.

And yet I'm hearing it more and more stridently as the consequences of the current Court's majority decisions on behalf of their neo-liberal/neo-conservative and lawless ideology sink in.

Those consequences are dire. The delusion, however, is that Obama will somehow intervene and transform the Court. His two appointments to date demonstrate he has no intention of doing so, even if he had the power, which he does not.

The Court's lawless, extreme and thoroughly disreputable majority was essentially enshrined for the next 50 years with the appointments to the Court made by George W. Bush -- with the complicity of the Senate Democrats, let it not be forgotten. They knew what they were doing, Harriet Myers notwithstanding. Those appointments ensured that the Court's chief justice and majority would be "stabilized" as is for decades to come. That the was point, after all.

Democrats went along with it. As has been noticed from more than one observational post, many nominal Democrats are on board with the neo-liberal/neo-conservative agenda and ideology no matter what they say to get elected.

So even if by some miracle (reliance on which is itself delusional) Obama is re-elected, and all the Court's "conservative" majority resigns or dies, he's still not going to appoint, nor will the Senate confirm, a "liberal/progressive" Court majority.

Nothing short of revolution will achieve that in our lifetimes. In other words, it's not going to happen through presidential and congressional elections. It's delusional to think it will.
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UPDATE: Court upholds ACA in its entirety. The Rightists will of course experience exploding heads, but it will all be for show. The real deal is of course that their corporate paymasters love-love-love the mandate and all the money that will now be forthcoming.

Still we need comprehensive, affordable, and universal health care coverage, and as importantly, we need universal access to healthcare. The other factor of the ACA that corporatists love-love-love is that while payment is required, access is not.

Brilliant.
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BUT BUT BUT BUT BUT!!!

A counter argument arises: Roberts sided with the "liberals" to uphold the ACA; the "conservatives" all denounced it, including Kennedy.

Then I ask you: if this ruling represents a "liberal" victory, what does it say about the "liberal" minority on the court that staunch corporatist Roberts sided with them?

Why of course: it says that the "liberals" on the Court are just as corporatist as the "conservatives."

In Mussolini's day, this was the definition of Fascism.

What About Those Who Don't Want Revolution?

For some time -- quite a few years, in fact -- I have been writing and commenting about the need for Americans to rise up in opposition to the screwage we've been undergoing first as playthings of the neo-cons, then for a change of emphasis, as neo-liberal objects of utility. Or disposal, as the case may be.

"Rising up" is typically characterized as Revolution, and I've written extensively on that topic, too, a good deal of which was written during the Bush Regime.

As far as I know, most of what I wrote about Revolution wound up in Salon's archive dumptster and I have no access to it now, but the point I argued most often at the time -- going back to 2001 -- was that the Busheviks were themselves a Revolutionary force or cadre; they achieved power through a judicial coup and they were using their power to implement a Rightist Revolutionary program, a program that included the institutionalization of an Imperial State, the extinction of the Constitutional Republic once and for all, and the implementation of a corporate-kleptocratic economy.

The Busheviks and their neo-con hangers-on were Revolutionary in part because they could be, in part because they wanted to be, and in part because they were embarked on a transformational crusade from which they could not be dissuaded.

Their opposition, such as it was, in that context was counter-Revolutionary, primarily interested in accommodating the Revolutionaries' demands and preserving what they could salvage of the status quo.

At the time, many people did not see and refused to believe how truly radical and Revolutionary the Busheviks were. Soon enough, especially after the attacks on 9/11 and the subsequent clearly domestic Anthrax attacks, the government of the United States was completely overhauled and transformed into that of an Imperial War-State, run out of the White House bunkers, served by an impotent and compliant Congress and an ambivalent court.

The People, to the extent they were considered at all, were at best considered accessories and props to the Pageant of Empire, to be manipulated and controlled by an enthusiastically complicit media into believing anything the Imperial Headquarters wanted them to. And they did, in their multitudes. They didn't rise up against what was being done to them, they embraced it.

Millions of people in the streets, "singing songs and carrying signs," in protest against the Iraq War -- a full-on, up front, balls out, Imperial war of aggression -- were ostentatiously ignored, protest of any kind was corralled, mocked and dismissed. Remember "Free Speech Zone" and directives from the Busheviks and their spokespeople about what sort of protest and protest message was "acceptable?"

The public treasury was promptly and efficiently looted -- these people do know how to plunder -- and taxation on the favored corporate and wealth sectors was virtually eliminated.

The People did not rise up even after they became uneasy about the course of events when some of the horrors being perpetrated in their names in Iraq and elsewhere became known, when their rights as citizens were dispensed with, even when the economy imploded.

The People were passive, nearly mute. There was no rising up, no People's Revolt, nothing.

When you think about American history and especially the history of resistance to tyranny and exploitative authority, this situation was distinctly odd. The whole country, and its entire tradition and systems of governance was being turned on its head, and the People did nothing. They continued to drudge along quietly, performing the rituals of voting as if they still mattered, becoming obsessed with candidates for office while their pockets were being picked by the corporate raiders who were the real powers behind the Throne.

It was so eerie that people abroad were amazed. "What is wrong with Americans that they resist not, neither do they rise up, nor even do they complain except in the most servile fashion?"

During the Bushevik reign, the Revolutionary changes in the Nation's state of being became normalized.

Most people either didn't notice or they didn't care.

But when the economy collapsed like the house of cards it was, the meme of Change took hold, the need for redemption was recognized, and Barack Obama was sent to sit on the Throne.

It was clear to me during his campaign that his principal role, once in office, was to manage the masses, to keep them in line during the forthcoming unpleasantness. He demonstrated many times that he was a master at it. The People who had grown weary of the Busheviks, their casual cruelties, their plundering ways, and their lies, saw salvation was nigh, and so Obama won the election.

It's impossible to imagine that Crabby Old Man and Herself, the candidates who stood against him in the election, performing the role he was assigned and doing it even a fraction as well.

That said, an ersatz "populist revolt" against him was engineered immediately after the 2008 election and was put in operation through numerous radio and some television ads. It was called "Grassfire, We Resist" (I've mentioned it before, no point in going into details here) and that revolt was transformed into the Tea Party shortly after the inauguration, and we know what that led to: an intensification of the neo-liberal economic follies, and even greater institutionalization of the Imperial Security State. That done, the rebels rested.

Except that another, unexpected, populist revolt got under way last September, Occupy Wall Street that almost immediately spread across the entire nation and overseas. This was the first real mass uprising the nation had seen since the Sixties, and it was clear the authorities had no idea what to do about it.

From very early on, Revolution was in the air; nonviolent Revolution to be sure, but Revolution just the same.

Not a counter-Revolution that would try to reverse the Bushevik-Obama Imperial Revolution, and return to some idealized status quo ante. No. This would be a real Revolution, forward thinking, not going back to anything in the past but forging a brand new path into the Future.

"We are unstoppable; another world is possible."

Six months into it, some people are recognizing the beginnings of success, especially in the more militant outposts of the Movement -- like the O-Place, Oakland.

And it is understandably terrifying.

Many people who signed up for Occupy This or That didn't sign on to Revolution; many who thought that Revolution was called for didn't think this would be it. But there's a Revolution going on anyway, no matter what they thought they were signing up for, and in Oakland, it's getting really scary.

"Victory" is nigh. Is Oakland what a successful Revolution will look like? They aren't there yet, so it's hard to say. They've achieved the first-level victory of de-legitimizing civic authority, but where does it go from there? Either nobody knows or nobody's saying.

A first-level victory standing alone, without a sufficiently coordinated and militant follow up is not ultimately a Revolutionary victory at all.

For example, the militant students at UC Davis achieved a spectacular first-level victory by delegitimizing the authority of the campus police and the administration during and immediately after the Pepper Spray Incident.

They thereupon called for the disbanding of the UC Police, the immediate resignation of the chancellor and a cessation of tuition increases. They held a huge campus rally which I attended, at which they heard contrition from the chancellor and her pledge to do better, they vowed to reestablish their encampment and press their demands relentlessly until they were met.

They might have done so except for the winter break that came swiftly, emptying the campus, but not before the students literally ceded power right back to the administration that had abused them. They did it at a town hall that combined both contrition and control by the administrators in one of the slickest events of the kind I've seen.

By appearing to listen and repeatedly expressing contrition for past misdeeds, and by vowing "full investigation of what happened," and promising that nothing like the Pepper Spray Incident would happen again, the students' emotional demands were satisfied, and the power of their anger was defused.

Not to say this was a totally fraudulent show -- I'll let Nathan Brown say that -- but apart from mitigating the overt brutality of the UC Police, and allowing (even enabling) the re-establishment of the encampment, very little change has actually taken place, and few or none of the students' other demands have been met; there are no reports, for example, and conclusions from the 'investigations' are long past due. Tuition increases have not been mitigated or cancelled. The campus is quiet; the rebellion has been tamed. Linda Katehi is hailed far and wide for successful management of the situation. Voila! No Revolution in Davis.

See how this works?

That's how a Revolution is defused, but in city after city, with Oakland as a sort of Revolutionary pivot, authorities have responded to the militancy of the Occupiers, with ever increasing levels of violence, destruction of property, brutality and mass arrest of demonstrators. That is how authority adds fuel to the fire of Revolution.

What happens to the people who didn't sign up for Revolution who are caught in the middle?

We're seeing the tragic results of what can happen play out in places like Libya and Syria, where the People rose up, believed they could achieve real change through non-violent means, were ruthlessly cut down time and again by what I metaphorically refer to as "The Tsar's Cossaks", which led soon enough to an armed insurrection which in Libya turned into a civil war, the conduct of which was very bloody, the outcome of which was determined by the intervention of outside interests through NATO.

In Syria the nonviolent resistance campaign was met with extravagant levels of state violence and bloodshed, which in turn triggered an armed insurrection which is being countered with even more state bloodlust, inspiring more armed resistance as well as outside intervention on behalf of the rebels -- or so the intervention (sanctions for now) is being propagandized.

In both of these tragic examples of what can happen when nonviolent resistance is met with gross state violence and bloodshed, rather than any attempt at listening to and "taking steps" demanded by the rebels, thousands of noncombatants caught in the middle are paying for someone else's Revolution with their homes and their lives.

There is no sign at all that Occupy will in any way turn into an armed insurrection, but nonviolent demonstrations are being met with increasing levels of police violence, in which many hundreds have been wounded and some nearly killed. Many people who did not sign up for this sort of resistance and the violent response of the police have been caught up in it, and many are conflicted about it and are speaking out.

For the most part, they want "the violence" to end; and most don't want a Revolution at all. The question becomes one of how to stop it, or whether those engaged even want to stop it.

Defusing a Revolution is simple enough if it is done early on; the longer the struggle continues, the harder it is to defuse. What if the authorities don't want to defuse the situation, they want to crush the rebels? And what if they are prepared to do it through any means necessary, including jeopardizing the safety of the non-Revolutionary minded?

And what is the responsibility of the Revolutionaries for the safety of those who are caught in the middle of the conflict, a conflict that potentially can't be defused (because it's too late or because the authorities don't want to defuse it)?

While the issues surrounding Violent/Nonviolent action and reaction are being worked on by various elements in the Occupy Movement, there are somewhat bigger issues looming. The question of responsibility for the safety of non-Revolutionaries in a conflict situation is one of them.

It's POLICY!!!

The teeth gnashing and garment rending spectacle on the so-called "left" over the Coakley-Brown Thing in Massachusetts is mostly focused either on scapegoating political personalities in the White House (Emanuel, of course, and Axelrod) and/or Massachusetts (the Dem candidate herself comes to mind, hmmm?), or on dissecting and blaming the poor "messaging" -- ie: advertising and presentation of The Message on the TeeVee -- of Dems in general and Coakley in particular.

When people point out that, "No, the problem is really the POLICIES coming out of the White House and the Dem Party apparat. People HATE them," the wall of blank stares goes up among the Important Dems or the would-be Important Dems, and accusations of being a Republican plant, or for God's sake, a Palinite arise.

In other words, you can't say anything about the Policies of this regime without getting lynched for being a Republican, because the only criticisms of the Policies of this regime are apparently Republican criticisms.

Dems either ignore the policies and wonder where the message is, or they love the policies and wonder, bewildered, what happened to the message?

Bernays, you see. With the right message, apparently, people will buy anything.

The only thing that really matters is the message.

The POLICIES of this White House have been straightforward Neo-Liberal economic prescriptions, and straightforward Neo-Conservative foreign policy prescriptions, with a somewhat more human face.

PEOPLE HATE THESE POLICIES. It's the policies. It's not the "message." What's so hard to understand?

The domestic economy is in tatters, has been for some time now, and all the prescriptions coming out of the White House so far have been straightforward Neo-Liberal policies, providing essentially unlimited backstopping to the top of the private sector (ie: the Banksters and the Financial Sector in general) and forcing all the costs onto the vanishing middle and the expanding lower classes.

The POLICY of the White House is to do nothing to directly increase employment, for example. That has the desired effect of keeping unemployment rates high. Which has the multiple desired effect of driving down wages, benefits, and living standards for the vast majority of Americans. Their costs stay the same -- or even increase -- and they get no debt relief (except the extremely costly option of bankruptcy, which in many cases will leave them still in debt for even more than when they filed!); their incomes are cut significantly, their debt and tax load increases, and it's all a matter of POLICY. Is it any wonder people are pissed? Of course it isn't, and the White House knows it. Still they do nothing to change their policies.

They do nothing to provide a backstop to the deterioration of conditions in lower down in the private sector, either. Small business is vanishing from this country because small business people and independent operators don't have the money and they can't get the money to sustain "business." It's all going to the top of the financial pyramid and to the proliferating Imperial wars of aggression. It's POLICY that it be so. This is White House policy, eagerly enabled and abetted by the Congress, which is as thoroughly in thrall to the Corporatists as the White House is.

It's not about MESSAGE. It's about WHAT THE GOVERNMENT IS DOING.

And it ain't doing jackshit for most people, that's a fact.

The HCR debacle is just icing on the cake.

This is cryingly obvious, even to the White House. They know that the People are upset, and they even seem to know why. But they won't do anything to change their policies from the Neo-Liberal/Neo-Con path they're on.

And I submit that they won't change their policies because simply don't believe the People will do anything to force them to change those policies. I'd go so far as to say they don't believe the People can do anything. "Hah hah, suckers!"

I grieve for Haiti, for example. It tears me up; I become extremely emotional over what I see happening there -- as a matter of POLICY -- but this is standard operating procedure now for disasters, and there is every indication it's going to get worse.

The POLICIES are fairly clear: aid to be delayed and denied as long as necessary to compel "voluntary" evacuation of the disaster zone. Any excuse at all is acceptable, just keep the aid from reaching most of the survivors as long as it takes to get them to leave. Let the vast majority of the injured die; let most of the trapped stay where they are and die. Do good works for public consumption, the rescues, the airlifts, the stockpiling of supplies, the scatter-shot heroism, but do not provide services or supplies in anything like sufficient quantities or more than randomly for most people -- so as to get them to leave. Blame the "debris," the "danger," the "looters," the "anarchy."

Be prepared to force evacuation at the point of a gun if necessary if they won't go voluntarily.

Once the disaster region is cleared, commence partial rebuilding a la New Orleans and parts of Indonesia (among other places) to ensure the comfort and convenience of the Neo-Liberal elites. Period.

Get the picture?

It's not about the message. It's about the failure of Policies to address the catastrophe among the People.

I mean it. We're all Haitians now. Their fate is ours. And if we don't awake and arise -- soon -- it will be too late (it may already be) to "bend" the course of history.

Nightmare over the Caucasus

Just read this over at FDL, a post taken from the Guardian article by Ian Traynor.

The basics are simple: Georgian troops and artillery attacked the South Ossetian capital, killing many and routing most of the civilian population. Russian troops responded, driving the Georgian forces back. The Georgian government in the person of its president, hollered to the heavens that Georgia was under attack. The United States government, and the Republican candidate for president of the United States, condemned Russia and urged a ceasefire and withdrawal. Eventually there was a ceasefire, but no withdrawal yet as Russian forces continue their occupation of key locations inside Georgia, and there is nothing the Georgians -- or the United States -- can do about it.

If anything, the United States has been humiliated by this little war, in a way that will have lasting repercussions.

Our Media has been incapable of reporting what is going on or the context of what is going on, because they are completely bound to a Narrative, a Narrative that appears to have been produced out of whole cloth in the right wing think tanks and was rolled out complete by all the Heritage Foundation talking heads sent out to do PR for Little Georgia.

Except this neo-con Narrative about Little Innocent Georgia being trounced by the Big Bad Bear Russia is viral and global. It is the Narrative of practically all "news" -- at least in English -- where ever it comes from.

Consequently, not only do Americans have little or no useful knowledge about what has been and is going on, world citizens have almost as little. Russia is the Bear, the resurgent Soviet Union, or the reanimated Russian Empire. Putin is the New Hitler. It is 1938 all over again. "Remember the Sudetenland!"

Well...

One might wonder why the constant neo-con focus on the New Hitler, 1938, Chamberlain, appeasement, and the Sudetenland. Why does this continue to move them so? It's got to the point where everything that happens is seen thought that prism, even though fewer and fewer alive today remember the events of 1938, and it was the conservatives of 1938 who were so anxious to "appease" Hitler. Some were actually in league with the Nazis. Conservatives.

Those who were most upset by this constant appeasement were the Communists. Ah. There we will find the neo-con motor. The neo-cons ARE the "subversives" we were warned about in the '50's.

Meanwhile, the Georgian Mistake, as it will come to be known, has destroyed Georgia as a functioning national independent entity, has enhanced the power of Russia, has put Putin into the first rank of international leaders, has humiliated George W. Bush and Condi Rice, has made mock of the very idea of borders, has helped revive imperial pretensions and Great Powers shenanigans -- quite apart from those of the United States -- and has pretty much check-mated any move in any direction the United States might choose to make, now or in the near future.

Cheney and his puppet are confined to quarters for the duration.

And McCain? Soon enough, he'll just appear silly.