Archive for the ‘capitalism’ Category
Racism, Corruption and the Class Struggle in Arizona
From Kasama
“Corruption, elite domination, and white favoritism are the most important factors in understanding Arizona’s strange political history, including this latest episode. But class struggle against it is key to understanding why the nation’s strangest state may soon be in the vanguard of struggles for real freedom. Those involved in such struggles stand like saguaros in this beautiful state, even as the snakes and scorpions scurry about us.”
Thanks to Jed for pointing out this essay. The piece first appeared on Facebook.
Corruption and Class Struggle:
What It’s Like to Live in Arizona Right Now
By Joel Olson
With the passage of the notorious anti-immigrant bill SB 1070 last spring, the outlawing of ethnic studies as of January 1, the gutting of the school and university systems, the collapsed housing market, the high unemployment rates, and now the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, you might be wondering what it’s like to live in Arizona right about now.
It ain’t easy.
But it helps to put Giffords’s shooting in historical perspective, which is defined by two things in Arizona: corruption and class struggle. And ironically, this perspective gives me hope about the radically democratic future of my home state.
Arozona Gov. Jan Brewer — demonstrating the classic hard-eyed white racist look [Would it be too outlandish to call this look “reptilian”?]
Arizona’s economy was founded on the “Five C’s:” copper, cotton, cattle, citrus, and climate (tourism). These C’s were controlled by big mining and agricultural interests and real estate developers. Corruption was commonplace as they manipulated the political system for their benefit.
A group of these capitalists, called the Phoenix 40, controlled state politics until the 1970s, when the political establishment opened up some. But even after their rule, the state capitol has always been a place to lie, bribe, and scam your way to what you want. If the names Don Bowles, Evan Mecham, AZ scam, Fife Symington, or the Keating 5 (which included Senator John McCain) mean anything to you, then you know that corruption is as plentiful as the parking here. And I haven’t even mentioned Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio or State Senator Russell Pearce, the tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum of racist nativism.*
SB 1070 and Giffords’s shooting, in other words, are but the latest of a storied history of corrupt cowboy capitalism.
Such tomfoolery is part of the class struggle in the Grand Canyon State. Three classes matter in Arizona: elites, the white middle class, and the working class. The elites come mainly from the agriculture/mining, tourism, and construction/real estate sectors (with an emerging tech sector). They are the masters of the corruption I described. But in a system of majority rule, elites need a junior partner to dominate. This is where the white middle class steps in.
The white middle class is the engine of suburban development here. The new housing developments, strip malls, and big box stores that pop up almost daily (until the recession, at least) are built for and fueled by this class. Many in this class run small businesses related to the main sectors of the economy, such as ranching, construction, landscaping, and pool maintenance. Many are retirees who used to manage businesses in other states. This small business atmosphere contributes to the libertarian, Barry Goldwater-style political culture of the state.
For years, this relationship has been mutually beneficial. While legal segregation never took deep root in this state (most of Arizona’s explosive growth took place after Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954), unofficial practices have kept many neighborhoods and schools comfortably white for decades, and the best jobs have been traditionally denied to Chicanos and Natives. (With a Black population of just three percent, the racially “out” groups in this state have historically been Chicanos, Mexicans, and indigenous peoples.) Politicians have successfully tied these practices to the laissez-faire economic policies of the elites, giving whites the sense that their success is due strictly to their own work ethic rather than being facilitated by white privilege. As a result, many white middle and working class Arizonans identify with the success—and conservative politics—of the elites.
This collusion has created an anything-goes capitalism mixed with a suburban consciousness. Call my state the Wild West or suburban hell—they’re both accurate to a large degree.
But the partnership has been fraying in the last two decades. Pressures to diversify corporations, universities, and governments have led elites to support various multicultural initiatives, which middle class whites resent. (Arizona voters in November voted to outlaw affirmative action by a wide margin.) The state’s Latino population has outpaced white growth, and the state is now nearly one-third Latino. Areas that were once comfortably white now have Spanish-language business signs. More and more schoolchildren have brown faces—even in the “good” schools. Cars roll down formerly white streets bumping music whose percussion comes from a tuba.
Further, middle class whites increasingly see elites in collusion with the Brown working classes rather than them. They have reasons for believing this. Agriculture, construction, and tourism all depend on a highly exploitable, low-paid working class, which makes migrant labor desirable. Undocumented labor makes up 27% of all construction workers, 60% of agricultural workers, 25% of restaurants workers, and 51% of all landscaping workers in Arizona. This sets small business interests—who usually can’t take advantage of such labor—into a tizzy. It sets off many other middle and working class whites as well, who feel that “they” are stealing “our” jobs. This is the political power behind SB 1070—a law that Arizona’s elites largely oppose.
The frayed alliance between these two classes has created the political mess this state is in today. It is the story behind SB 1070, HB2281 (the anti-ethnic studies law), the elimination of affirmative action, the attack on the public education system, the attack on public workers for enjoying “Cadillac” pension plans, and Giffords’s shooting. The alleged shooter, Jared Loughner, is not only of the white middle/working class, his addled mind is a gross exaggeration of its contradictions and confusions. Of course Loughner is probably crazy, but his mental health—and even his ideology—are not the point. What matters is that the conflict over this frayed class alliance—and all the political vitriol it has generated by Tea Partiers and others—pointed his illness toward Gabrielle Giffords.
In the face of this mess, it is the working class—largely Brown, largely poor, largely poorly educated, largely ignored—that represents the best hope to build a new Arizona within the corrupted shell of the old. Exploited by the elite, despised by many whites, and largely shut out of the political system, this class has had to make its own way through the state’s crazy political landscape.
With a weak Democratic Party, a labor movement crippled by “right to work” laws, a small civil rights contingent, few political nonprofits, and almost no organized left, Arizona’s working class is turning to grassroots democracy, operating outside the “official” political channels and fearlessly making political demands that challenge the pillars of laissez-faire capitalism itself. This path they are carving is quite possibly a model for working class struggles throughout the nation.
Take the grassroots fight against SB 1070, for example. The Tierra y Libertad Organization in Tucson has been a leader in opposing SB 1070. But it is also creating a new model of democracy. Declining to become a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, they raise funds through the community, which they use support their struggle for the self-determination of its base communities. In Phoenix, Puente has organized the major immigrant rights demonstrations in Arizona, but they are also organizing neighborhood meetings throughout the Valley of the Sun. In Phoenix and Flagstaff, the Repeal Coalition (I’m a member of this group) demands that all persons in a global economy be free to live, love, and work wherever they please, and they demand that ordinary people have a full say in those affairs that affect their daily lives. The undocumented workers, moms, and college students who make up the group don’t seem to worry that these demands are deeply radical and disrupt the very functioning of Arizona politics as it currently operates. These groups work with others, such as Border Action Network, No More Deaths, and Arizona Interfaith, that are organized in a traditional nonprofit format but nevertheless encourage face-to-face democracy and are courageously fighting 1070 and myriad other evils.
These working-class struggles suggest a new Arizona. They suggest a world in which working people decide the fate of the community, not the rich. They suggest a world in which democracy rather than white privilege decides how to allocate resources. They suggest a world in which borders are tools of the bosses rather than walls that “defend sovereignty” or “prevent terrorism.”
This class will not win for a while. The elites and the white middle classes are yet too powerful. This coming year, Arizona politicians will gut the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, defund public education until it barely operates, and do many more stupid things. But as elites and the white middle class continue to bicker, the Arizona working class continues to learn lessons, develop leadership, practice grassroots democracy, and make demands that seem “unreasonable” today but might tomorrow become as obvious as the multiplication table.
Corruption, elite domination, and white favoritism are the most important factors in understanding Arizona’s strange political history, including this latest episode. But class struggle against it is key to understanding why the nation’s strangest state may soon be in the vanguard of struggles for real freedom. Those involved in such struggles stand like saguaros in this beautiful state, even as the snakes and scorpions scurry about us.
* * * * * * * *
Joel Olson has lived in Arizona for over 25 years. He is a member of the Flagstaff Repeal Coalition and teaches political theory at Northern Arizona University.
* For the uninitiated or un-Arizonan: Don Bowles was an Arizona Republic reporter who was murdered by a car bomb in 1976 while investigating connections between Arizona elites and the Mafia. Evan Mecham was a racist governor (he was a John Birch Society supporter) from 1987-1988 who was impeached for obstruction of justice and misuse of government funds. The Keating 5 were five U.S. Senators, including Arizona Senators John McCain and Dennis DeConcini, who were accused of corruption in 1989 for illegally intervening on behalf of Charles Keating, whose Lincoln Savings and Loan bank collapsed, causing thousands to lose their life savings. “AZ scam” was a bribery and money laundering scandal that several state legislators were convicted of in 1991. Fife Symington, the governor of Arizona from 1991-1996, was impeached and indicted for 23 counts of fraud and extortion.
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The Ruling Class’ Murder-Suicide of the Human Race
Does the Ruling Class Really Want to Commit Suicide?
by Charles M Young, This Can’t Be Happening
Last March I went to the Left Forum in New York, which is a yearly gathering of liberals, progressives, anarchists, socialists, communists, hippies, punks, mystics, conspiracy theorists and anti-conspiracy theorists who are all trying to figure out how to get to a decent future from the indecent present. Nobody, of course, knows how to do that. There may not even be a path to a decent future from the indecent present, but I always find the Left Forum hopeful because a few thousand people in one place are at least putting their minds to the problem.
The panel discussion I most wanted to see (out of 300 or so) was called “The Crisis That Gives the Capitalist Class Nightmares,” because Michael Hudson was speaking. Whenever Hudson writes something, I read it, because he’s one of a tiny number of economists with academic credentials who predicted the present debt crisis. (Apparently not predicting crises is necessary for tenure in most economic departments these days.) At the panel, he explained that when labor is squeezed to the point that it can’t purchase anything, the capitalist is left with nothing to invest in, except more debt, and so we end up with Wall Street creating ever more complicated, ever more leveraged, ever more worthless junk for its gambling habit. When this collapses, as it must, half the hospitals in Latvia (which Hudson advises) have to shut down for lack of funds.
The next guy to speak was Hillel Ticktin, an emeritus professor of Marxist Studies at the University of Glasgow. Whip smart, grumpy and funny, Ticktin expanded on the theme of “fictitious capital,” as Marx called money made from money with no value added. Ticktin said we had reached the last stage of empire with this humongous array of empty numbers in computers that is our economy and recommended we all read Volume 3 of Capital. Then he closed with a question: “Does the ruling class really want to commit suicide?”
Every time I have watched the news since March, I think back to that question and have an anxiety attack.
Because, yes, the ruling class is trying to commit suicide. In and of itself, this would be a great boon to mankind. Imagine if the ruling class admitted their abject failure to get anything right, and did the honorable thing. Top management at Wall Street, the elite of both major parties, their lobbyists, the big pr firms, the worst hacks of the corporate press, most CEOs and COOs–what if they all just got in a big bathtub, conceded defeat and opened up a vein like Frank Pentangeli in The Godfather II? Who would miss them?
So suicide isn’t the problem, exactly. The problem is that they don’t know they’re trying to kill themselves, and it doesn’t occur to them to behave honorably. The ruling class is not Frank Pentangeli. The ruling class is the husband who is failing at work, having his home foreclosed, his car repossessed, his children are getting humiliated at school because they aren’t wearing the right clothes, the self-help books have failed, the church offers no solace, television won’t acknowledge his existence–so he shoots his wife and four kids and then puts the gun in his mouth.
Thus the problem is murder suicide. The husband wants to kill the only people in his life more powerless than himself, because they are living reminders of his own shame.
Let me spell that out. The ruling class is the husband. Everyone who works in the productive economy is the wife and four kids. The ruling class wants to commit suicide because it has so completely failed and because everything it believes is so obviously wrong. One part of the ruling class brain knows it doesn’t do anything worth doing, and another part of the ruling class brain doesn’t want to be reminded and lives in terror of being exposed. This is called denial. To keep the denial in place, evidence of failure must be destroyed. If you, oh reader, are the living evidence of ruling class failure, it is a dangerous situation.
The ruling class wrecked the economy. That was a stupendous failure, but at least they were wrecking a social construct that deserved wrecking. Organizing labor on the principle that the guy with the most money gets to tell everyone else what to do–how did that come to be considered a good idea? How did that get equated with freedom? Every major religion warns against greed, and somehow most of the United States has come to believe that letting the greedheads run everything is efficient.
That’s so 20th century.
The bigger problem is that the ruling class, in its murder suicide frenzy, is killing nature. Nature is not a social construct. It’s really there. It’s alive. As such, it is too painful for the ruling class to look at, so they are killing it. Anything that reminds them of life, anything that isn’t money, has to go.
It’s a mistake to fetishize all this evil and project it onto BP. BP is one sociopath in a culture of sociopathy. If you read its “plan” for dealing with oil spills in the Gulf, as some enterprising reporters did for the Associated Press [1], it is a contemptuous joke from beginning to end. It is full of bizarre lies and mistakes. The corporate flunkies who accepted it at the Minerals Management Service should be in prison. The company that wrote it, the company that had no plan whatsoever for dealing with a deep blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, cares about brown pelicans like Joran van der Sloot cares about young women.
The chorus of energy companies denying global warming wasn’t killing nature fast enough for BP, so it invited nature into a hotel room and strangled her.
A prophecy: At some point this summer, a hurricane is going to blow through the Gulf of Mexico. It’s going to drown New Orleans in carcinogenic sludge, again, and a day later it’s going to be raining tar balls on Nashville. People all over the South will go to church and demand that Jesus save them. Jesus will choose this moment to make his return to earth: “Hey, I told you 2000 years ago that it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven. I told you that the poor are blessed. I told you that as you treat the least of these, you have treated me. That means if you oppress the poor, you oppress me. That means if you drown pelicans in oil, you’re drowning me. But you didn’t read that part of the New Testament. You only read that weird symbolism in the Book of Revelations and argued about nothing while the ruling class destroyed everything. You came to believe that my teachings were somehow consistent with capitalism. I mean, where did you get that from? I’m the guy who threw the money changers out of the temple. You think the money changers of Wall Street are going to save you when the ocean dies? You think I’m going to save you with some kind of rapture and vacuum the believers into heaven? Not a chance. But you do have a choice. You can deal with the ruling class now, or you can burn in a hell of your own creation.”
BP’s Slimy and Infamous History as the forefront of British Imperialism
Arm of the British Empire British Petroleum’s Assault on America
June 15, 2010 by JackBlood
by John Hoefle
June 12–British Petroleum is not a corporation, at least not in the way that many Americans think of corporations. What British Petroleum {really} is, is an instrument of the British Empire’s unrelenting war upon the vast majority of the people of the world. British Petroleum is part of a network of giant imperial cartels, created with the aim of replacing sovereign nation-states as the ruling entities of the planet. Under this system, an imperial financier oligarchy runs the cartels, which in turn control the world. This system, marketed as “globalization,” is actually a return to the methods of the evil and corrupt British East India Company.
The drama now playing out in the Gulf of Mexico, in the halls of government in Washington and London, and in the boardrooms of Wall Street and Threadneedle Street, reflect both the astonishing success of this British assault upon humanity, and the necessity for the people of the United States to defeat this attack. If we are to survive, the British Empire and its instrumentalities must be destroyed.
No one should be surprised at the breathtaking arrogance of BP, which has a sordid history of disregard for human life, an imperious disdain for the environment, and a demonstrated unwillingness to pay for anything that cuts into its profits, such as safety equipment, basic maintenance, and oil-spill clean-up capability. The company has been convicted of felonies, one arising from the 2005 explosion of its Texas City, Texas, refinery, in which 15 people were killed, another involving the illegal dumping of hazardous materials in Alaska. It was still on probation for the latter offense, when its Gulf of Mexico well blew out in April. BP was also the company responsible for handling the Exxon Valdez oil spill, but proved so unwilling to meet its obligations that Exxon stepped in to handle the mess. It is, literally, a criminal operation.
That criminality is by design. British Petroleum was formed in 1909, as Anglo-Persian Oil Company, as a monopoly on the oilfields of what is now Iran. The British Monarchy was determined to convert its naval vessels from coal to oil, to maintain the empire’s supremacy on the seas. It was also determined to deny its rivals access to the oil, for the same purpose. This drive to lock up oil supplies led to the creation of an imperial oil cartel–a cartel of giant oil companies–which controls the global production, distribution, and processing of oil today, and controls the mechanisms by which prices are set. This corporate oil cartel does not control all of the world’s oil, but it controls enough to make it a significant factor in the empire’s dominion over nations. To this day, British Petroleum remains an asset of the British Monarchy.
British Petroleum’s sibling in this operation, is the Anglo-Dutch giant Royal Dutch Shell, the result of a 1907 merger between Royal Dutch Petroleum of the Netherlands and Shell Transport and Trading of the United Kingdom. One of the founders of Royal Dutch Petroleum was Sir Henri Deterding, who ran the company for 36 years, and was later notorious for his support of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.
Royal Dutch Shell also provided a cover for the intelligence operations of Lord Victor Rothschild, whose family played a major role in the company. Lord Victor’s son, Jacob, the current Baron Rothschild, today runs the Inter-Alpha Group of imperial financiers, which, as we shall see, is joined at the hip with British Petroleum and Goldman Sachs.
– Fascism –
Support for the Nazis runs deep in these companies and their controllers. The late, but not lamented, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands was a card-carrying member of the Nazi Party, and part of the industrial espionage unit of the notorious I.G. Farben, of concentration-camp infamy. Prince Bernhard was a founder of the Bilberberg Group, and with Britain’s Prince Philip, of the World Wildlife Fund, two organizations dedicated to pushing imperial fascism. Philip is the creature who has dedicated his life to reducing the world’s population by two-thirds (including you), and has expressed his desire to be reincarnated as a deadly virus so that he may continue to play an active role in that genocide.
These two oil giants are an essential component of the British Empire’s control over raw materials, along with mining companies such as Rio Tinto, Anglo-American, Cargill, and others, which exert significant control over the minerals, metals, petroleum products, food supplies, communications facilities, and finance, necessary to run the modern world. The project to create these cartels was officially launched at the Bilderberg annual meeting in 1968, although this was merely the repackaging of a much older idea.
The plan, as introduced by Lehman Brothers banker and U.S. Anglophile George W. Ball, was for the creation of a “world company” as a replacement for the nation-state. The plan was explicitly Malthusian, based upon the idea that corporations were much better suited to managing the world’s scarce resources than were nations and their governments. Governments, the Bilderbergers complained, had an unfortunate tendency to place the welfare of their people–or at least some of them–above the welfare of the imperial fatcats of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal empire. Far better, the oligarchs insisted, to let bloodless corporations–answerable only to the empire–run the show. It was an explicitly corporatist conception, corporatism being the method by which Benito Mussolini ran his Venetian-dominated fascist state. Under corporatism, the state becomes an appendage of the corporations.
Which brings us back to the case of British Petroleum.
– Corporatism –
What is the U.S. Government under President Barack Obama, if not a corporatist state protecting an imperial cartel-company? At every step of the Gulf crisis, the Obama Administration has acted to protect British Petroleum. The same British Petroleum which has lied at every step, downplaying the volume of oil shooting out of the seabed, denying the existence of underwater plumes, pointing accusing fingers at its partners on the Deepwater Horizon rig, and wasting resources on public relations campaigns, when it needs to be fixing the problem. Through it all, the Obama camp is right there with the company, helping it spread its lies, while taking none of the obvious measures to stop the spill, launch the clean-up, and protect the nation from this attack.
Belatedly, as a sop to public fury, President Mustache has been talking tough, looking for, as he put it, some “ass to kick.” The British, for their part, have begun publicly complaining about Obama’s “anti-British” rhetoric, and wringing hands against the “bloodlust” directed at Britain. Others complain about calling the firm British at all, asserting that it is now a “global” (read, “imperial”) company without nationality. (Thanks for confirming our thesis.)
This “war of words” is a play staged for public consumption. The British Empire is accustomed to working in areas where the local populations hate it, and have developed their psychological operations accordingly. The colonial office learned long ago that, often the best way to protect your local political assets, is to publicly criticize them–sometimes the most vociferous anti-British voice is actually a British agent! So Obama, a British agent, talks tough, the British complain, and the spin machine paints a phony picture of trouble in a relationship that is actually quite cozy.
Obama may indeed be getting angry at the beating his reputation is taking, but his anger is irrelevant, as he remains fully under British control. He is a prisoner of his own Nero-like fantasies. He, and his Administration, remain servants of the Brutish Empire which controls both him and British Petroleum. As long as Obama remains President, the U.S. will remain a corporatist state.
– Behind the Lies –
And, as long as British Petroleum continues to control the crime scene in the Gulf, it remains impossible for outsiders to know exactly what went wrong in the well and on the rig, as well as what the real situation is with the well and its environs today. It has been shown that we cannot believe a word the company says. Neither can we believe the statements of our own government, which has already been forced by events to back off on earlier lies. What we can say, with a fair amount of certainty, is that the situation is far more dire than either party will admit, that much of what we are being spoon-fed is disinformation, and that the clean-up operations are far short of what is required.
British Petroleum has consistently treated this as if it were a public relations problem, rather than a physical disaster. CEO Tony Hayward publicly lamented that he wanted “his life back.” As if anyone gives a damn about his inconvenience, when 11 people died on his rig, a large section of the American economy and way of life has been destroyed, and the oil flows relentlessly into the Gulf, into the marshes and beaches, and out into the Atlantic.
The British are arguing that punishing the company for this “accident” is unfair, because of the amount of British pension-fund investment in the company. Just as we have seen in the financial crisis, the empire is demanding that its assets be rescued, to save the “little people.” How shameless can they get, and how stupid do they think we are, to push such blatant lies?
However, with this lying line of argument, they do bring us closer to the truth. For British Petroleum, it is largely about the money. In fact, one can make a strong case that British Petroleum is more like a hedge fund that controls oil assets, than an industrial corporation. It outsources much of its operations to contractors. In the case of the well in question, it leased the drilling rig from Transocean, and hired Halliburton to perform some of the well maintenance; British Petroleum’s main role seems to have been stopping safety measures and improperly pushing for premature completion of the well.
We will not speculate in this article about what actually may have happened to this rig, and what is now occurring beneath the waters of the Gulf, but we will say that there are serious questions about British Petroleum’s version of events, and of the authenticity of some of the photographs and videos the company is providing. Given the consistent lying from these weasels, they are not entitled to the benefit of the doubt.
– Spooks –
On the night of June 7, 2010, according to a {Bloomberg} report, “a group including Vittorio Colao, head of telecom company Vodafone Plc, Martin Sorrell, chief of advertising for WPP Plc, and John Sawer, director-general of the [British] intelligence agency MI6,” gathered at British Petroleum’s headquarters in London “to show support for Tony Hayward.”
Just what, we wonder, is MI6’s involvement in this affair? MI6 is the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), which works, incidentally, for the Crown, not the government. Oil companies are, after all, known for providing cover for the intelligence services’ operations all over the world. Could the SIS be involved in any way?
We also note with interest the intelligence connections of Halliburton and Transocean–the latter of which is registered in Rothschild-dominated Zug, Switzerland. Halliburton not only is the company of former Vice President Dick Cheney, but has long-standing connections to the U.S. intelligence community, notably through the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Transocean is the result of a series of mergers, including the offshore drilling operations of Schlumberger, which, at least in part, is an intelligence agency operating inside an oil-services company. Schlumberger had a hand in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, through the person of Jean de Menil, husband of a Schlumberger heiress, a Schlumberger executive, and a member of Permindex, the Synarchist assassination bureau.
Could the presence of all these spook-related outfits on the Deepwater Horizon rig be related in ways which remain hidden? We don’t know at this point, but we do know that the official story is full of holes, and the whole affair cries out for investigation.
Finally, we note with interest the incestuous relationship between British Petroleum, Goldman Sachs, and the Inter-Alpha Group. Take the case of Sir Peter Sutherland, a Knight Commander of the British Monarchy’s Order of St. Michael and St. George. Sir Petey was, at the same time (2001-09), chairman of British Petroleum; chairman of Goldman Sachs International, the bank’s London branch; and a director of the Inter-Alpha Group’s Royal Bank of Scotland. Sutherland was previously chairman of AIB, the Irish member of Inter-Alpha, and is a former director-general of General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and its successor, the World Trade Organization, which plays an important role in promoting globalization. Sutherland, still at Goldman Sucks, is the chairman of the Fabian Society’s London School of Economics, which trained many of the jerks who blew up the world…
G20 Pandemonium: Crash the Meeting Toronto 2010
ONE BILLION DOLLARS FOR SECURITY to PROTECT THE KINGS & PRINCES OF THE EARTH, AS THEY DETERMINE FURTHER STRATEGIES TO RAPE, ROB, PLUNDER, MURDER, EXTORT & EXPLOIT THE ENTIRE WORLD & MAKE THEMSELVES APPEAR TO BE BENEFACTORS INSTEAD OF OF DEVILS.
Check out this passage from the Gospels. Jesus’ true followers are not authorities and not elitists. They are servants. It’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for Rockefeller, Roosevelt, Rothschild or Obama (or their minions) to enter the kingdom of heaven… This is classic biblical peripateia [i.e., revolutionary thinking]
24A dispute also arose among them, as to which of them was to be regarded as the greatest. 25 And he said to them, “The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them, and those in authority over them are called benefactors. 26 But not so with you. Rather, let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves. 27Forwho is the greater, one who reclines at table or one who serves? Is it not the one who reclines at table? But I am among you as the one who serves. Luke 22:24-27
Pandemonium, the Congress of Demons, in Paradise Lost by John Milton
Meanwhile the winged Heralds, by command Of sovereign power, with awful ceremony And trumpet's sound, throughout the host proclaim A solemn council forthwith to be held At Pandemonium, the high capital Of Satan and his peers. Their summons called From every band and squared regiment By place or choice the worthiest: they anon With hundreds and with thousands trooping came Attended. All access was thronged; the gates And porches wide, but chief the spacious hall (Though like a covered field, where champions bold Wont ride in armed, and at the Soldan's chair Defied the best of Paynim chivalry To mortal combat, or career with lance), Thick swarmed, both on the ground and in the air, Brushed with the hiss of rustling wings...
But far within, And in their own dimensions like themselves, The great Seraphic Lords and Cherubim In close recess and secret conclave sat, A thousand demi-gods on golden seats, Frequent and full...
...we now return To claim our just inheritance of old, Surer to prosper than prosperity Could have assured us; and by what best way, Whether of open war or covert guile, We now debate.
[A debate ensues between Moloch (war), Belial (deceit), Mammon (greed), Beelzebub (false gods) and Satan himself…]
Re Moloch: from Howl, by Alan Ginsburg
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgement! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovas! Moloch whose factories dream and choke in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisable suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
US & Israel Criminality – and Impunity – Threatens the World with Annihilation
Israel’s massacre at sea
3 June 2010
The Israeli military’s killing of nine civilians and wounding of scores more on a ship carrying humanitarian supplies in international waters was an act of cold-blooded murder and a war crime.
For millions of people around the world, this military assault on an aid convoy carrying wheelchairs, cement, water purification systems, children’s toys and notebook paper to Gaza—all items barred by Israel’s blockade of the occupied territory—epitomizes the role played by Israel, as well as that of its US sponsor, in global affairs.
As always in the aftermath of such atrocities, the Israeli government has blamed its victims. In a televised speech Wednesday, Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu described the aid convoy as a “flotilla of terror supporters” and praised the slaughter on the high seas as an act of self-defense by besieged Israeli commandos.
Those who engaged in self-defense were the passengers on the ship, and they had every right to do so. The fact that nine of them were killed, while the Israel Defense Force (IDF) commandos suffered not a single fatality, is evidence as to who was the aggressor.
This is a regular pattern. The massacre in the Mediterranean comes just a year and a half after Operation Cast Lead, the far greater slaughter that the Israeli regime unleashed against the suffering people of Gaza. Claiming then as now to act in “self defense,” in December 2008 and January 2009 Israel rained bombs, missiles and tank and automatic weapons fire upon Gaza, killing over 1,400 Palestinians, the overwhelming majority of them unarmed men, women and children. This one-sided war by one of the world’s most powerful military machines against a relatively defenseless civilian population claimed just 13 Israeli lives, all but three of them soldiers.
The aid convoy was a response to the barbaric blockade that has subjected an entire population of 1.5 million people in Gaza to hunger, disease and misery.
Since the tightening of the blockade in 2007, according to the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the number of Gazan refugees living in abject poverty has tripled.
The UN reported at the end of 2009 that “insufficient food and medicine is reaching Gazans, producing a further deterioration of the mental and physical health of the entire civilian population since Israel launched Operation Cast Lead against the territory.” Among the starkest expressions of Israel’s deliberate starvation of an entire population was a finding by the Food and Agriculture Organization last year that 65 percent of babies between the ages of nine and 12 months suffer from anemia.
Israel is able to carry out this kind of medieval siege as well as piracy and murder not merely because of its own military might, but thanks to the unwavering patronage and funding of Washington. This latest mass killing has only underscored that—as with so much else—the advent of the Obama administration has effected no significant change in US policy.
While issuing a hypocritical expression of “deep regret at the loss of life,” the Obama administration is doing everything it can to assure that Israel bears neither blame nor consequences for these killings. It quashed any criticism of Israel’s action at the UN Security Council and has implicitly adopted the Zionist state’s justification for the massacre.
Israel’s criminality and Washington’s role as its unconditional enabler both have a long history. It is worth recalling another Israeli attack on a vessel in international waters that took place 43 years ago. In that attack, 34 sailors aboard the USS Liberty were killed by Israeli napalm, missiles and machine-gun fire, while another 171 while wounded—the worst casualties suffered by the US Navy in a hostile action since World War II.
An intelligence ship, the Liberty was attacked off the Sinai Peninsula on June 8, 1967 in the midst of the Six-Day War. While Israel called it a tragic “mistake,” ample evidence emerged that the Zionist state attacked the ship because it wanted to stop Washington from listening in to its communications. Intercepts flatly contradicted Tel Aviv’s claim that it was acting in self-defense and revealed that Israel wanted to conceal evidence of its aggressive intentions as it moved to seize Gaza, the West Bank and the Golan Heights, all of which remain under illegal occupation to this day.
Much of the criticism of this week’s attack on the aid convoy, including within Israel itself, has treated it as a “botched” operation, an excessive use of force and a public relations fiasco. But this is not a matter of a government losing its head. The Netanyahu regime’s policies are directed to a definite socio-political base, composed of religious extremists, right-wing settlers and the most politically reactionary layers within Israeli society. Its orientation is personified by the fascistic background and ideology of its foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman.
Deeply reactionary and in deep political crisis, the Israeli government is driven more and more to act as a global pyromaniac, threatening renewed wars against Syria and Lebanon and, according to a report in the London Times this week, sending submarines armed with nuclear missiles to the waters off Iran.
The unconditional support and approximately $3 billion in annual aid to Israel bestowed by Washington—and continued under Obama—pose a mortal danger to people across the globe.
This is not a matter merely of a single outlaw regime, but of a general descent of world affairs into a state of criminality and the disintegration of any semblance of international law, with Israel’s main patron setting the pattern.
The Obama administration continues two wars of aggression initiated under Bush and has maintained intact a police state apparatus of unlawful detentions, rendition and torture. It has now earned the ignominious designation as the number one practitioner of “targeted killings”—assassinations—through CIA drone attacks that have killed “many hundreds of people” in Pakistan, according to a United Nations report released Wednesday. The report condemned Washington for claiming a “license to kill without accountability.”
The behavior of the US and other governments as if they were the state incarnation of Murder Inc., acts of state terrorism and piracy like that committed by Israel this week, and the constant threats of new aggression have created a global climate that bears ever closer resemblance to the conditions that prevailed on the eve the Second World War.
These developments are driven by the mortal crisis of world capitalism and will not be reversed by either protests or pacifism. Only by uniting the working class, including both Jewish and Arab workers in the Middle East, in a common struggle to put an end to the profit system can a new global conflagration be prevented.
From the streets of Athens: “The struggle of humanity against authority”
On May 5th, Cinco de Mayo, 2010, 200,000 people took to the streets in Athens in a general strike.
Here are some details from the blog Occupied London on the current situation in Greece.
First, the background, then the May 5th update…
After the Greek Riots
A few bullets fired by a cop and a kid lying dead on the street. Cities burn for weeks. For the spectacle-hungry media machine, the story begins and ends here. All else, before and after, is void.
Follow the corporate media and the Greek revolt died a long, long time ago. What’s happening in Greece at the moment? What’s the revolt’s legacy, where did all that energy go? Why should you care, screams the media machine, haven’t you heard? The revolt has died. And, even more importantly, The King is dead!
Back on the ground, of course, the revolt is far from dead. Its legacy is very much alive, getting inscribed deeper day after day. The police, having ridden itself from the burden of neutrality, can openly cooperate with fascist thugs, who feel confident enough to throw molotov cocktails against demonstrators in solidarity with undocumented migrants (Athens, July 8). Undocumented migrants, in turn, are explicitly the aim of the most recent wave of state repression: “First we’ll go for the migrants, then for the anarchists”, as the minister of public order so eloquently put it. Even he seems to be unable to catch up with the events: the only December demonstrator still in prison is held (still without trial) precisely because he is an anarchist and therefore consists “a threat to democracy” (wording of the court of misdemeanours, Athens, July 8).
The greek state seems conscious in that it cannot take another revolt of the size of December’s – and determined in not allowing this to happen.
Under this wave of repression, solidarity links are more important than ever. Armed with the experience of December, with the certainty that the return to normality is not option. Armed with a belief in a more just world – and not much else. Democracy has chosen its enemies: The migrants, the anarchists, all the outsiders unable or unwilling to fall back in line.
Having reported on December’s revolt and its immediate aftermath, this blog will now go on to cover everyday life in Greece as it is today. Expect eye-witness reports from everyday struggles, from the demonstrations in Athens (mostly) and in other cities across the country. Reports on the hunger strike of Thodoros Iliopoulos, the last prisoner of the revolt.
Please don’t expect any “impartial” reports (as if these could ever exist). This is an anarchist take on the situation in the country. A democracy that wages war on migrants and anarchists; a democracy armed with fascist thugs, with molotov cocktails and hand grenades; a democracy producing the silent death of the concentration camp (a silence reproduced and amplified by the media machine) is a democracy worth fighting against. Let’s make some noise.
(below is the “about” section of this blog as it went live on December 8, 2008 – two days after Alexis’ assassination).
On the night of December 6th, police shot 15-year old Alexandros Grigoropoulos in cold blood in the Eksarhia district of Athens. Since that night, Athens and tens of other greek cities have been burning.
On the same night, up to 10,000 people took the streets of Athens on a spontaneous demonstration, burning and smashing banks, ministries and multinational shops. Ever since, tension has been increasingly escalating: universities are occupied, as are most of the high schools in the country. Barricades are being put up around Athens; clashes with the police are constant.
On Tuesday, 9.12, the funeral of Alexandros is taking place and a general strike is called for Wednesday the 10th – a day both sides are building up for.
The purpose of this blog is to provide up-to-date information on the Greek riots, directly from the streets. Authors are contributing from the Greek cities of Athens, Thessaloniki and Patras.
The updates will be irregular and as frequent as permitted, given the circumstances. The updates will be mostly text-based. Confirmed reports will be presented as such – and so will rumours. We are not journalists and we are not objective; we chose sides in the social war a while ago.
In memory of Alexandros Grigoropoulos.
The struggle of humanity against authority, as always, continues.
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May 6, 2010 update
The statement below was issued a few hours ago by the anarchist squat of Skaramanga and Patision in Athens.
The murderers “mourn” their victims
(Regarding today’s tragic death of 3 people)
The enormous strike demonstration which took place today, 5th of May turned into a social outflow of rage. At least 200,000 people of all ages took to the streets (employees and unemployed, in the public and private sector, locals and migrants) attempting, over many hours and in consecutive waves, to surround and to take over the Parliament. The forces of repression came out in full force, to play their familiar role – that is, of the protection of the political and financial authorities. The clashes were hours long and extensive. The political system and its institutions reached a nadir.
However, in the midst of all this, a tragic event that no words can possibly describe took place: 3 people died from infusions at the branch of Marfin Bank on Stadiou Avenue, which was set ablaze.
The state and the entire journalistic riff-raff, without any shame toward the dead or their close ones, spoke from the very first moment about some “murderer-hooded up youths”, trying to take advantage of the event, in order to calm the wave of social rage that had erupted and to recover their authority that had been torn apart; to impose once again a police occupation of the streets, to wipe out sources of social resistance and disobedience against state terrorism and capitalist barbarity. For this reason, during the last few hours the police forces have been marching through the center of Athens, they have conducted hundreds of detentions and they raided – with shootings and stun-grenades – the anarchist occupation “space of united multiform action” on Zaimi street and the “migrant haunt” on Tsamadou Street, causing extensive damage (both these places are in the Exarcheia neighbourhood of Athens). At the same time the threat of a violent police eviction is hanging over the rest of the self-organised spaces (occupations and haunts) after the Prime-ministerial speech which referred to soon-to-come raids for the arrest of the “murderers”.
The governors, governmental officials, their political personnel, the TV-mouthpieces and the salaried hack writers attempt in this way to purify their regime and the criminalise the anarchists and every unpatronised voice of struggle. As if there would ever be the slightest of chances that whoever attacked the bank (provided the official scenario stands) would possibly know there were people inside, and that they would torch it alight regardless. They seem to confuse the people in struggle for themselves: them who without any hesitation hand over the entire society to the deepest pillage and enslaving, who order their praetorians to attack without hesitation and to aim and shoot to kill, them who have lead three people to suicide in the past week alone, due to financial debts. [NOTE: THIS IS AN IMPORTANT POINT. Politicos and corporate CEOs think everyone is like they are: willing to kill for an agenda…. Theirs is the lowest motive possible: avarice. They simply cannot imagine anyone risking their lives or livelihoods for an altruistic goal, such as peace or justice].
The truth is that the real murderer, the real instigator of today’s tragic death of 3 people is “mister” Vgenopoulos, who used the usual employers’ blackmailing (the threat of sacking) and forced his employees to work in the branches of his bank during a day of strike – and even in a branch like the one of Stadiou Avenue, where the strike’s demonstration would pass through. Such blackmailing is known only too well by anyone experiencing the terrorism of salaried slavery on an everyday level. We are awaiting to see what excuses Vgenopoulos will come up with for the relatives of the victims and for the society as a whole – this ultra-capitalist now hinted by some centers of power as the next prime minister in a future “national unity government” that could follow the expected, complete collapse of the political system.
If an unprecedented strike can ever be a murderer…
If an unprecedented demonstration, in an unprecedented crisis, can ever be a murderer…
If open social spaces that are alive and public can ever be murderers…
If the state can impose a curfew and attack demonstrators under the pretext of arresting murderers…
If Vgenopoulos can detain his employees inside a bank – that is, a primary social enemy and target for demonstrators…
…it is because authority, this serial murderer, wants to slaughter upon its birth a revolt which questions the supposed solution of an even harsher attack on society, of an even larger pillage by capital, of an even thirstier sucking of our blood.
…it is because the future of the revolt does not include politicians and bosses, police and mass media.
… it is because behind their much-advertised “only” solution, there is a solution that does not speak of development rates and unemployment but rather, it speaks of solidarity, self-organising and human relationships.
When asking who are the murderers of life, of freedom, of dignity, the ferments of authority and capital, they and their tuft hunters only need to take a look at their own selves. Today and every day.
HANDS OFF FREE SOCIAL SPACES
IT IS THE STATE AND THE CAPITALISTS WHO ARE THE MURDERERS, TERRORISTS AND CRIMINALS
EVERYONE TO THE STREETS
REVOLT
from the open assembly of the evening of 5/5/2010
______________________ China Rose’s Comment _____________________
No one involved in the general strike action wanted to kill bystanders. The purpose of anarchism is to take actions to save lives by fighting for social change. The bank management knew that. They also knew that the bank should have been shut down, and that if their employees got hurt, anarchists would be blamed. Can anyone doubt that they are capable of deliberately putting their employees in harm’s way, of being willing to sacrifice their employees lives? Particularly for a political message? EMPLOYERS do this EVERY DAY. This is the nature of capitalism.
Two examples: Look at Massey Energy and BP in the US.
Massey Energy was cited for mine safety violations continuously. They sneered at the regulations, and refused to put safety controls in place. They didn’t give a DAMN about the lives of their faithful employees. Now, over 30 miners are dead, suffocated or burned to death underground.
BP operated an offshore drilling rig without adhering to safety standards or preparing for the possibility of an oil spill. When the rig blew up, their employees were blown to bits. People’s lives throughout the entire Gulf region have been ruined, along with a precious ecosystem and all its animals. The suffering caused by this massive oil spill is beyond measure.
These corporations — and ALL corporations — refuse to even protect their own employees. They are victimizing entire regions for ugly profit. Every day. They lie, cheat, connive, manipulate, steal and kill — for profit. They are the world’s greatest criminal syndicates, and banks enable them to thrive. Banks are parasites that feed off the work and sweat of everyday people. They will do anything to stop journalists, whistleblowers or activists who are becoming too effective. They murder with impunity — regularly. That is what corporations DO. That’s what the state does.
The state’s job is to protect and defend corporations. They’ll dispatch police and military by the tens of thousands to enforce corporate rape and plunder. They’ll rob and kill their owns citizens to perpetuate corporate dominance and murder innocent people in other countries by the millions to expand their empires.
BANKS AND CORPORATIONS — and their GOVERNMENT FLUNKIES AND WHORES KILLED THOSE 3 BANK EMPLOYEES. They will continue to kill UNLESS STOPPED.
Kaczinski: From Solidarity to Free Market Shock Doctrine or “Don’t confuse… shock… with broad public sympathy”
Goodbye Kaczinski
Polish president Lech Kaczynski (1949–2010)—from Solidarity advisor to right-wing politician
By Marius Hauser
13 April 2010
The airplane crash near Smolensk in Russia April 10, which resulted in the death of Polish president Lech Kaczynski, has led to widespread consternation inside Poland. Along with Kaczynski, the accident claimed the lives of some 80 leading members of the country’s political and military elite. They were on their way to a memorial ceremony in Katyn, Russia, where 70 years earlier 22,000 Polish officers and intellectuals were murdered by Stalinist thugs.
It would be mistaken, however, in the manner of much of the Polish and international media, to confuse the widespread shock at the crash with broad public sympathy for the figure and politics of Lech Kaczynski. Kaczynski was one of the most unscrupulous representatives of the Polish ruling elite.
The former child film star and advisor to the Solidarity trade union was a leading architect of the restoration of the capitalist free market and so-called shock therapy that commenced in the early 1990s. As president, Kaczynski conducted a series of virulent attacks on the social and democratic rights of the population relying on the support of extreme right-wing parties. According to opinion polls, he had little chance of re-election in the presidential vote scheduled for this autumn.
Lech Kaczynski was elected president in October 2005 with the smallest number of votes ever recorded by a victorious candidate for the post. One quarter of the electorate voted for the conservative politician in the second ballot. Kaczynski was able to win the post with such a narrow base of support only because his predecessors had been so discredited.
The post-Stalinist Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) had undertaken an offensive against the Polish welfare state in its four years in government and was involved in numerous corruption affairs. The only serious rival to Kaczynski was the current Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who had announced his own plans for radical cuts and privatization.
In the September 2005 parliamentary elections, his Law and Justice (PiS) party emerged as the strongest parliamentary group and the following month Kaczynski won the presidential election. During the presidential campaign Kaczynski sought to mobilize the more backward layers of the Polish population with a mix of social demagogy, nationalism and calls for a fight against corruption.
Just nine months later he presided over the nomination of his twin brother Jaroslaw to the post of prime minister. The Kaczynski brothers then formed a coalition with two right-wing, overtly anti-Semitic parties, the League of Polish Families (LPR) and Samoobrona (Self-Defence of the Republic of Poland).
In the guise of a struggle against corruption, the Kaczynskis increased the repressive capabilities of the state. At the same time, they increased their own influence by increasing their personal powers and placing political cronies in key posts. One of the first official acts of the Kaczynski government was a change to the country’s broadcasting law allowing the twins direct access to national television and radio.
A key project of their government was the creation of the Central Anticorruption Bureau (CBA). The office unites the police, secret police and judicial authorities in an organization that has similar powers to the former Stalinist secret service. Under the direct control of the prime minister, the CBA has been used on a number of occasions by the Kaczynskis to neutralize political adversaries—including members of their own government.
Despite its populist demagogy, the PiS government went on to impose the austerity policies of the preceding government, making merely cosmetic changes. After a brief pause the policy of privatization of state assets was also continued. In the sphere of foreign policy, Lech Kaczynski essentially continued the course of his predecessor Alexander Kwasniewski (SDL), i.e., a strong orientation to American imperialism aimed at expanding the country’s room for maneuver within Europe. Lech Kaczynski’s own bumbling and utterly provincial manner typified the increasing isolation of the country.
In October 2007 the government led by his brother collapsed following fierce internal divisions and Lech began to work closely together with the new Prime Minister Donald Tusk, leader of the rabidly pro-free market Civic Platform (PO).
After nearly five years in office Kaczynski had managed to lose even his narrow base of support. Shortly before his death he was polling around just 20 percent.
In this respect Kaczynski has shared the fate of every Polish head of government and president in the post-Stalinist era, none of whom has ever served more than one term of office—with the exception of Kwasniewski. Since 1990 Polish society has been dominated by politicians who have their roots either in the former Stalinist regime or the opposition Solidarity movement. Both sets of politicians have sought to plunder the country’s resources through a mixture of privatizations and social cuts. When one group in power is sufficiently discredited in the eyes of the population, then the other group takes over. All of this has occurred under the direct jurisdiction of the European Union and its institutions.
Kaczynski played a central role in the restoration of capitalism. After completing his law studies in 1977, he established contact with the “Committee for the Defense of Workers” (KOR). From that time he stood on the right wing of the opposition trade union movement. In 1980 he was one of the advisors to Solidarity and worked closely with its leader Lech Walesa to suppress political demands within the trade union and subordinate the movement to the Catholic Church.
In 1989 Kaczynski was a representative at the so-called “round table,” which organized the restoration of capitalism. The chief task of the round table was to divide power and influence between the new rising layers in Solidarity and the former Stalinist elite, while preparing shock therapy for the population at large. As senator, then member of parliament and eventually co-coordinator for the security and secret services, Kaczynski was directly involved in imposing this “therapy.” The consequences for the population were dramatic and led to a humiliating defeat for the Solidarity-led government in 1993.
At this point Kaczynski withdrew from public politics. It was only after the discrediting of the subsequent post-Stalinist regime after four years in power and the election of a revamped Solidarity (AWS) government in 1997 that Kaczynski returned to the political stage. He took over as Justice Minister from June 2000 until the fall of the government in July 2001. Following a wave of controversial restructuring measures, dismissals and privatizations, the AWS was so unpopular it failed to win enough votes to be represented in the new parliament. At that time Kaczynski’s remodeled PiS also only won 9.6 percent of the vote.
Kaczynski then concentrated on politics in Poland’s capital city and was elected mayor of Warsaw in November 2002. In office he made clear his contempt for democratic rights, in June 2005, for example, banning a gay rights march. At the same time, he allowed neo-Nazis to stage a counter-demonstration. Despite the ban, the gay rights forces assembled and were brutally attacked by the neo-Nazis. Kaczynski later criticized the police because they had protected the assembled gays and their supporters from the attacks launched by the fascists.
Other policy hobby-horses included his demand for the introduction of the death penalty and his proposal that homeless people should be penned in container slums outside of the city limits, so as not to spoil the view for tourists and the city’s well off.
Contrary to statements by leading members of the German Greens, Lech Kaczynski did not “represent the interests of his country,” nor had he “devoted his life to the freedom of Poland and the freedom of Europe” (German chancellor Angela Merkel). He was a representative of the Polish ruling elite and sought to establish authoritarian forms of rule based on reactionary Polish chauvinism.
Chris Hedges on Americans’ Yearning for Fascism
Hedges: Is America Yearning for Fascism? | News & Politics | AlterNet.
This article first appeared on TruthDig.
The language of violence always presages violence. I watched it in war after war from Latin America to the Balkans. The impoverishment of a working class and the snuffing out of hope and opportunity always produce angry mobs ready to kill and be killed. A bankrupt, liberal elite, which proves ineffectual against the rich and the criminal, always gets swept aside, in times of economic collapse, before thugs and demagogues emerge to play to the passions of the crowd. I have seen this drama. I know each act. I know how it ends. I have heard it in other tongues in other lands. I recognize the same stock characters, the buffoons, charlatans and fools, the same confused crowds and the same impotent and despised liberal class that deserves the hatred it engenders.
“We are ruled not by two parties but one party,” Cynthia McKinney, who ran for president on the Green Party ticket, told me. “It is the party of money and war. Our country has been hijacked. And we have to take the country away from those who have hijacked it. The only question now is whose revolution gets funded.”
The Democrats and their liberal apologists are so oblivious to the profound personal and economic despair sweeping through this country that they think offering unemployed people the right to keep their unemployed children on their nonexistent health care policies is a step forward. They think that passing a jobs bill that will give tax credits to corporations is a rational response to an unemployment rate that is, in real terms, close to 20 percent. They think that making ordinary Americans, one in eight of whom depends on food stamps to eat, fork over trillions in taxpayer dollars to pay for the crimes of Wall Street and war is acceptable. They think that the refusal to save the estimated 2.4 million people who will be forced out of their homes by foreclosure this year is justified by the bloodless language of fiscal austerity. The message is clear. Laws do not apply to the power elite. Our government does not work. And the longer we stand by and do nothing, the longer we refuse to embrace and recognize the legitimate rage of the working class, the faster we will see our anemic democracy die.
The unraveling of America mirrors the unraveling of Yugoslavia. The Balkan war was not caused by ancient ethnic hatreds. It was caused by the economic collapse of Yugoslavia. The petty criminals and goons who took power harnessed the anger and despair of the unemployed and the desperate. They singled out convenient scapegoats from ethnic Croats to Muslims to Albanians to Gypsies. They set in motion movements that unleashed a feeding frenzy leading to war and self-immolation. There is little difference between the ludicrous would-be poet Radovan Karadzic, who was a figure of ridicule in Sarajevo before the war, and the moronic Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin. There is little difference between the Oath Keepers and the Serbian militias. We can laugh at these people, but they are not the fools. We are.
The longer we appeal to the Democrats, who are servants of corporate interests, the more stupid and ineffectual we become. Sixty-one percent of Americans believe the country is in decline, according to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, and they are right. Only 25 percent of those polled said the government can be trusted to protect the interests of the American people. If we do not embrace this outrage and distrust as our own it will be expressed through a terrifying right-wing backlash.
“It is time for us to stop talking about right and left,” McKinney told me. “The old political paradigm that serves the interests of the people who put us in this predicament will not be the paradigm that gets us out of this. I am a child of the South. Janet Napolitano tells me I need to be afraid of people who are labeled white supremacists but I was raised around white supremacists. I am not afraid of white supremacists. I am concerned about my own government. The Patriot Act did not come from the white supremacists, it came from the White House and Congress. Citizens United did not come from white supremacists, it came from the Supreme Court. Our problem is a problem of governance. I am willing to reach across traditional barriers that have been skillfully constructed by people who benefit from the way the system is organized.”
We are bound to a party that has betrayed every principle we claim to espouse, from universal health care to an end to our permanent war economy, to a demand for quality and affordable public education, to a concern for the jobs of the working class. And the hatred expressed within right-wing movements for the college-educated elite, who created or at least did nothing to halt the financial debacle, is not misplaced. Our educated elite, wallowing in self-righteousness, wasted its time in the boutique activism of political correctness as tens of millions of workers lost their jobs. The shouting of racist and bigoted words at black and gay members of Congress, the spitting on a black member of the House, the tossing of bricks through the windows of legislators’ offices, are part of the language of rebellion. It is as much a revolt against the educated elite as it is against the government. The blame lies with us. We created the monster.
When someone like Palin posts a map with cross hairs on the districts of Democrats, when she says “Don’t Retreat, Instead — RELOAD!” there are desperate people cleaning their weapons who listen. When Christian fascists stand in the pulpits of megachurches and denounce Barack Obama as the Antichrist, there are messianic believers who listen. When a Republican lawmaker shouts “baby killer” at Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak, there are violent extremists who see the mission of saving the unborn as a sacred duty. They have little left to lose. We made sure of that. And the violence they inflict is an expression of the violence they endure.
These movements are not yet full-blown fascist movements. They do not openly call for the extermination of ethnic or religious groups. They do not openly advocate violence. But, as I was told by Fritz Stern, a scholar of fascism who has written about the origins of Nazism, “In Germany there was a yearning for fascism before fascism was invented.” It is the yearning that we now see, and it is dangerous. If we do not immediately reincorporate the unemployed and the poor back into the economy, giving them jobs and relief from crippling debt, then the nascent racism and violence that are leaping up around the edges of American society will become a full-blown conflagration.
Left unchecked, the hatred for radical Islam will transform itself into a hatred for Muslims. The hatred for undocumented workers will become a hatred for Mexicans and Central Americans. The hatred for those not defined by this largely white movement as American patriots will become a hatred for African-Americans. The hatred for liberals will morph into a hatred for all democratic institutions, from universities to government agencies to the press. Our continued impotence and cowardice, our refusal to articulate this anger and stand up in open defiance to the Democrats and the Republicans, will see us swept aside for an age of terror and blood.
Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, is a senior fellow at the Nation Institute. He writes a regular column for TruthDig every Monday. His latest book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.
© 2010 Truthdig All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/146226/
The China Rose 
