Paul Haeder, Author

There are some things that can’t be the truth even if they did happen. — Chapter Two, Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey

Sometimes you gotta pull rank.

First, though, the evidence of the shit-hole country that it always has been:

A lady in Newport, OR (pop. 8,000) had the fellow who used to cut her lawn stay in lock-down. She wasn’t getting anyone to come out during the lock-down.

One, then two warnings from the infamous “ code” inspector for the City of Newport.

Dang, these overpaid Little Eichmann’s. She got a $1,000 fine in the mail for “dangerously tall, fire-hazard prone, vermin-producing unwieldy wolf grass.” Yep, during Oregon’s lock-down. Yep, lady on fixed social security income. Hosed down by another $60-K a year Brownshirt, err, bureaucrat. A thousand dollars she doesn’t have.

Start a GoFundMe to pay off the city folk? Nah.

Next, the homeless and just recently-house citizens in Portland are experiencing high levels of PTSD-times-10 with Oregon militarized cops blasting the air with loud sound bursts out of speakers, with helicopters overhead, with the tear gas bangs and pops. The George Floyd greeting party of the Gestapo.

And for people with post-traumatic stress disorder, the police’s crowd control tactics may be especially traumatic.

‘Loud, unexpected, and disorienting experiences can trigger these reactions and increase one’s experience of PTSD symptoms,’ said Dr. Trisha Vinatieri, supervisor for the PTSD Clinical Team at the Veteran Affairs Portland Health Care System.

Close to 40% of unsheltered people in Multnomah County (who were not in transitional housing or emergency shelters) reported dealing with PTSD, according to the 2019 Point-In-Time Count, and more than 11% were veterans.

The PTSD Clinical Team works with individuals who have experienced situations involving non-lethal crowd control. Vinatieri noted an overall uptick in referrals recently, although the cause for this is undetermined.

‘I will say that the providers on our team have shared that many of the veterans with whom they work are finding the current events, namely George Floyd’s murder, to be very triggering and upsetting,’ she said.

At a Portland City Council meeting Wednesday morning, Commissioners Chloe Eudaly and Jo Ann Hardesty both expressed concerns about the Portland Police Bureau’s use of the compound 2-chlorobenzalmalononitrile, also known as tear gas, on protesters during the middle of a pandemic.

‘We know that it causes respiratory distress,” Hardesty said. “And we know that as we see more and more people showing up to protests, those people are putting their health at risk, and that risk is going to be exacerbated by tear gas and other chemical elements. We have an obligation to find out what the impact of those chemical weapons are on protesters, especially at the height of a pandemic.’

My friend who owns a small healthy and variously bio dynamic restaurant in the county where I live in is taking it one day at a time. He’s got $14,000 on his credit card.

“The landlord can’t be paid the $2000 a month. Now, the insurance company is banging on the door. But we do not have the money.”

He has stayed open since the Oregon shut down of restaurants, with revenues down by 80 percent. IN Oregon, in the county I live and work in, Lincoln, we have not gotten into Phase Two lockdown. We have the highest unemployment rate of all Oregon, at way over 26 percent.

“I guess from my point of view – and from other people’s points of view from other places I’ve lived and worked in, including in Europe, wine and cheese are essential services. Before coronavirus and now.”

The entire supply chain, the vendors and growers and producers and truckers, all of it, including the harvesters (he has guys and gals on boats who bring him the crab and oysters and fish) is in the bind. The corona capitalism bind.

My buddy is wearing a mask, and his small bistro-like place has been set up for the six foot viral distancing rules. He constantly cleans surfaces, his own hands, menus with disinfectant made by 2 Towns Cider House (Corvallis).

He sends me to a New York Times piece on Plum, a restaurant that closed – after 20 years in the biz.

I am not going to suddenly start arguing the merits of my restaurant as a vital part of an “industry” or that I help to make up 2 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product or that I should be helped out by our government because I am one of those who employ nearly 12 million Americans in the work force. But those seem to be the only persuasive terms — with my banks, my insurers, my industry lobbyists and legislators. I have to hope, though, that we matter in some other alternative economy; that we are still a thread in the fabric that might unravel if you yanked us from the weave.  […]

The concerns before coronavirus are still universal: The restaurant as we know it is no longer viable on its own. You can’t have tipped employees making $45 an hour while line cooks make $15. You can’t buy a $3 can of cheap beer at a dive bar in the East Village if the “dive bar” is actually paying $18,000 a month in rent, $30,000 a month in payroll; it would have to cost $10. I can’t keep hosing down the sauté corner myself just to have enough money to repair the ripped awning. Prune is in the East Village because I’ve lived in the East Village for more than 30 years. I moved here because it was where you could get an apartment for $450 a month. In 1999, when I opened Prune, I still woke each morning to roosters crowing from the rooftop of the tenement building down the block, which is now a steel-and-glass tower. A less-than-500-square-foot studio apartment rents for $3,810 a month.  […]

I cannot see myself excitedly daydreaming about the third-party delivery-ticket screen I will read orders from all evening. I cannot see myself sketching doodles of the to-go boxes I will pack my food into so that I can send it out into the night, anonymously, hoping the poor delivery guy does a good job and stays safe. I don’t think I can sit around dreaming up menus and cocktails and fantasizing about what would be on my playlist just to create something that people will order and receive and consume via an app. I started my restaurant as a place for people to talk to one another, with a very decent but affordable glass of wine and an expertly prepared plate of simply braised lamb shoulder on the table to keep the conversation flowing, and ran it as such as long as I could. If this kind of place is not relevant to society, then it — we — should become extinct.

So, my buddy in Newport has no idea what will happen. His catering gigs at wineries have dried up. His work on an amazing eating experience near one of the most beautiful spots on the planet has been thwarted. He had been open one year then the bat virus hits. Does he believe in the lockdown or what to do about this “social distancing”?

“Look to be honest, with the George Floyd rebellion, I at times wish the entire country would burn down. I mean the entire capitalist state where a few control the rest of us. But I still put my faith in the governor’s orders, her team of people looking at the facts, the numbers, the figures.”

Of course, that Oregon governor is only as good as the state of support in the state, or the support in the region and support from the federal system. All have faltered, and that Trump Monster, well, I know some lefties defending the detritus, no matter what he does. They attribute his pussy grabbing and racism and misogyny and hatred of all people below (sic) him as deep state conspiracy.

We have a system of unemployment insurance where people get a constant busy signal, constant dead end on the computer, when filing for unemployment. Eight weeks with crickets. No checks, no insurance money, no money to pay the rent, and food donations if lucky.

This is the underdevelopingd country Manfred Max-Neef talks about.

Well, it’s a metaphor, but a metaphor that originated in a concrete experience. I worked for about ten years of my life in areas of extreme poverty in the Sierras, in the jungle, in urban areas in different parts of Latin America. And at the beginning of that period, I was one day in an Indian village in the Sierra in Peru. It was an ugly day. It had been raining all the time. And I was standing in the slum. And across me, another guy also standing in the mud — not in the slum, in the mud. And, well, we looked at each other, and this was a short guy, thin, hungry, jobless, five kids, a wife and a grandmother. And I was the fine economist from Berkeley, teaching in Berkeley, having taught in Berkeley and so on. And we were looking at each other, and then suddenly I realized that I had nothing coherent to say to that man in those circumstances, that my whole language as an economist, you know, was absolutely useless. Should I tell him that he should be happy because the GDP had grown five percent or something? Everything was absurd.

So I discovered that I had no language in that environment and that we had to invent a new language. And that’s the origin of the metaphor of barefoot economics, which concretely means that is the economics that an economist who dares to step into the mud must practice. The point is, you know, that economists study and analyze poverty in their nice offices, have all the statistics, make all the models, and are convinced that they know everything that you can know about poverty. But they don’t understand poverty. And that’s the big problem. And that’s why poverty is still there. And that changed my life as an economist completely. I invented a language that is coherent with those situations and conditions.  Source.

I am part of this ground-truthing exercise (remember, I am pulling rank on the people writing over at places at Off Guardian or over someone like Paul Craig Roberts and the like).

You see it’s easy to do since I am reading a lot of KeyBoard/Bored warriors showing their true racist colors, again, this idea of white supremacy. It isn’t always a robe and white pointed hat or tattooed dude on a Harley with Trump’s (or Reagan’s or Bush’s) face scrawled all over the candy-painted gas tank.

To be truthful, I am seeing a lot of great pithy stuff from white people from Klanada, United Snakes of America, and Eunuch Kingdom

Whiteness is a default standard; the background of the figure-ground analogy from which all other groups of color are compared, contrasted, and made visible. From this color standard, racial/ethnic minorities are evaluated, judged, and often found to be lacking, inferior, deviant, or abnormal. Because Whiteness is considered to be normative and ideal, it automatically confers dominance on fair skinned people in our society. Whiteness would not be problematic if it weren’t (a) predicated on White supremacy, (b) imposed overtly and covertly on People of Color, and (c) made invisible to those who benefit from its existence. Seen from this vantage point, Whiteness is an invisible veil that cloaks its racist deleterious effects through individuals, organizations, and society. The result is that White people are allowed to enjoy the benefits that accrue to them by virtue of their skin color. Thus, Whiteness, White supremacy, and White privilege are three interlocking forces that disguise racism so it may allow White people to oppress and harm persons of color while maintaining their individual and collective advantage and innocence.  Source.

You know as I stated in a previous DV, we can’t have our cake and eat it too. I am observing more and more cognitive dissonance and hyper- contradictory discourse and mass white man/woman guilt confusion. Albeit there are smart folk on these sites, and yes, again, let’s drum roll this –

• Yes, Trump is part of the continual criminal enterprise before, during and after his POTUS run
• Trump hates Chinese, Muslims, Blacks, Africans, Mexican, Brown People, Native Americans, AKA Indians
• Yes, the policies of Obama et al, from Gorge Washington to this pussy grabber, are about domination, getting one or million things up on your competitor. It is about destroying your competitor as if he or she is your enemy.
• Yes, the Anglo-Saxon and the whites of Hispania and the others in the history of emporium have all been in the game to steal, to murder, to dominate, to extract, to control, to burglarize land, resources, people and cultures.
• Trump is that in the form of an Adderral fiend, in the form of a pussy grabber, in the form of an outright racist.
• Obama knew what he was doing, and he is part of the same ugly state, deep or shallow, that Trump loves and believe in.
• The FBI has always been a force of bad.

Not sure what the guys like Paul Craig Roberts do in their daily lives, but my daily life is working with hundreds of people in a non-profit program I am helping  run that gives my participants each a measly $840 unconditional cash transfer for a social capital project.

• Of course, all billionaires should be outlawed, and we should be collectivist and communist in our dealings with man, woman and child.
• The communities across the land must have full control of the things and corporations and programs coming into their neighborhoods.
• Yes, a little bit of lead is bad for the baby, so regulating lead to a certain “acceptable level” is the very definition of capitalism.
• Externalities are part and parcel the cost of doing business.
• Collateral damage is both economic speak, military speak, education speak, all sorts of groups’ speak.

My participants in the program are sucking wind, big time. Recall the unemployment rate in Lincoln County. Recall we are in lock-down Oregon. Recall that there are no safety nets, no free clinics, no free day care centers, no free good banks, no MASH tents for dentistry, no roaming vans with smart and caring social workers and therapists to help people get through.

Pulling rank means just calling a spade a spade. Is this a plan-demic? Of course it is. Is it an accidental release of a messed-with bat virus? Most probably. Is the lock-down draconian? Yes. Do we self quarantine for a virus that now is no longer going away, one we have to “deal with” unlike the SARAS-CoV?

Here’s the problem – I understand the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the power of Gates and GAVI and Davos and the Rockefellers and Bloomberg and Thiel and Google and the rest of them, including the mom and pop killers, Jeff Bezos.

I understand what the controlled opposition is. I understand the New Black is Green, that most everything in Western Civilization has been co-opted by, colonized by, hacked by the masters of the universe who do business in that big ass business round-table – the complex, not just the matrix.

Think Military, Pharma, Real Estate, Law, Education, Ag, Oil, Mining, Media, Prison, Banking, Insurance, AI, retail, Digital, Entertainment, Propaganda Complex. There may be commas in the foregoing, but think hyphens, or slash marks. Think how intertwined capital is with the powers that make a killing in all these arenas just listed.

Yet, especially over at the Off Guardian, but elsewhere, I have KeyBoard/Bored and mouse heroes just attack and hitting the jugular on the Deep State, on Neoliberals, on Democrats, and the Billionaire class, yet in the same long piece, there is zero discussion about Trump also being another version and iteration of the perversions of Power-Money-PR spin-Propaganda-Neofascist Patriarchy.

I ground truth, and that pulling rank means those people I know who are still in Peru, Mexico or other countries who are journalists and real activists I listen to. When they say large warehouses or small mountain towns and/or large cities in Peru and Mexico are seeing more and more deaths by this virus, I have to go with them and not some KeyBoard/Bored hero who will tell me that the numbers are just not there to prove coronavirus is not just the same as seasonal flu.

Right. So, all those seasonal flu’s killed as many Peruvians as are being killed now? It’s cognitive foolishness.

It’s almost cognitive dissonance and intellectual dissociative behavior.

I know vaccines are some bad hombres, real culprits in so many issues tied to learning disabilities, chronic illnesses and allergies and almost everything from IBS to ADHD.  Not just the mountains of stories and evidence on such a single killer and maiming shot like Gardasil, AKA HPV vaccine. I am talking about my buddies from the Vietnam war, and those from the Gulf Wars. I have seen those ailments not just attributed to Agent Orange, but to the forced vaccinations that were administered to them as part of their duty to wear the uniform.

And the entire society is now reverse engineered. Area 51 and F/Zuckerberg, a cyborg of the 11^th generation.

I’ve noticed that over at Off Guardian, you can also get on their shit list – I think some of my “comments” have been blocked, and, not because I am fomenting revolution. The riot act is dropped on a whole crap load of people these days.

Ground truthing is big time, and how can a Paul Craig Roberts (seen on the pages of Dissident Voice a few times) or KeyBoard/Bored Warriors at Counterpunch or Off Guardian really get down and dirty when they’ve really not been in the trenches. I mean, no offense, but we have this Paul Craig Roberts, and we are supposed to bow to him (like some many did for Ron Paul) because he seems to be an outlier for the very administration that brought us their versions of deep state and supply side economics. Here, PCR – Wikipedia thumbnail:

Paul Craig Roberts is an American economist and author. He formerly held a sub-cabinet office in the United States federal government as well as teaching positions at several U.S. universities. He is a promoter of supply-side economics and an opponent of recent U.S. foreign policy. Wikipedia

He was born April 3, 1939 in Atlanta,. His political affiliations is Republican Party. His education include University of Virginia and Georgia Institute of Technology. Should I be impressed, and for DV or any other so-called dissident outlet, he seems very off the wall in terms of what could be a loose vision for progressive magazines/blogs.

And he has tons of accolades by Forbes, by Stanford, by supply-side economists. He is a living legend in many circles tied to the Hoover Institution. Good old conservative American Pie —

During 1981-82, he served as assistant secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. President Reagan and Treasury Secretary Regan credited him with a major role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, and he was awarded the Treasury Department’s Meritorious Service Award for “his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy.” From 1975 to 1978, Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff, where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy.

My point is they never really talk about or articulate the positions of the homeless, the near-houseless, the 80 percent of Americans who have a whopping 8 percent of the so-called wealth, compared to the One Percent and 19 Percent, who have that whooping 40% and 52 percent of wealth.

These KeyBoard/Bored heroes or PCR are not just one trick ponies, no, because they seem to be at the vanguard of fighting for the small guy, for believing in human agency, in our individual liberties. But we know that capitalism is not about individual freedoms or collective freedoms, but rather about the dog-eat-dog realities of predatory-casino-parasitic-disaster Capitalism, based on the collective actions of a small group of mostly white men deciding the fates of the rest of the world.

Rape, rapacious destruction of people, culture, ecologies, nature, societies.

I understand the entire gambit that is now — and was in the works for decades — this the new abnormal of telemedicine, teleeducation, telefinance, telegovernment, teleschool, telesocial work, telework. Was this SARS-CoV2 the perfect storm? Was the George Floyd the perfect matching to ignite a many head rebellion in the streets?

Is George Soros behind everything, behind all the actions in the streets? The Russians? Ahh, when you read the KeyBoard/Bored Heroes they are some of the brightest and smartest people on earth, don’t you know, and their word is God’s, or The Word. Entire essays on how COVID-19 is “just another flu,” and how all the numbers have been cooked.

Christ, I am a communist and atheist and deep systems thinker, and I am a journalist and social worker and educator and creative writer, and the reality is, we can have SARS-CoV2 which is something more virulent than the SARS-CoV. We can understand the deeply broken global population of chronic illness plagued citizens, all the hypertension, the pre- and post- diabetics. How much do we need to know about the polluted grains (Round-up), polluted rivers, polluted soils, the polluted air? How much do we need to know about the virulent bacteria and viruses locked in the hell-holes that are CAFO’s? How much do we need to know about the wet-bulb temperature going up in major population centers, or about the ground ozone, or the heat island effect, or the plastic in all species, or the nano-particles, or the Fourth Industrial Revolution, or the total surveillance society of now and the future?

Because we have that, all these KeyBoard/Bored heroes prognosticating, dropping these incredible essays on sites like Off-Guardian, et al, well, the world is so much safer, more defined, and makes more sense, no?

Ground-truthing means I work with homeless and PTSD veterans and adults with developmental disabilities and foster youth and Pk12 students; with inmates, with released inmates, with gang-influenced youth, with elderly in lifelong learning programs.

I remember this one 24-hour period in Portland. I was working at $12 an hour as an activities director for a program for adults with developmental disabilities. It was also housed in a memory care facility. I had just taken 12 clients in a bus (I was the licensed bus operator) to a sturgeon center on the Columbia. People who had various levels of cognition. Various ages. Some were in wheelchairs. Several needed help with toileting. One had a colostomy bag that spilled, and here I was, cleaning her up and putting in a new bag.

Right after that gig, I rushed to teach a literature class at a college. I then rushed to a meeting of social workers who were organizing a union. After that, a later meeting of people working on cleaning up the Columbia River. Made it home to quickly gobble food and then cranked out a magazine piece for another gig – a piece on the Hanford facility. Before shutting down the laptop, I was packing to head out to the Tri-Cities to get more information on the death mile near Hanford. I also interviewed the offspring of people who were lured to the Hanford site to do the building and janitorial work. Mexican-Americans and African-Americans.

An entire part of the Tri-Cities where the people of color lived. Segregation 101, and they are still there, on the other side of the proverbial railroad tracks.

Then back on the road, rushing to my gig with adults with learning disabilities, with developmental disabilities. I was going to help one get a job interview at a Burger King wiping tables and sweeping up. A job three times a week, for 12 hours a week, pulling down $120.

Irony, huh? Me, with my three fancy college degrees, getting $12 an hour, helping a forty-year-old woman living with Downs Syndrome get a $10 an hour job at a fast-food chain from hell.

Can this be, this cognitive dissonance that those KeyBoard/Bored Gurus writing all these fine essays and commentary blurbs about knowing for sure how the Matrix is built, how it all ends up in the post-Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Look, I am all about thought experiments, all about people spreading their proverbial intellectual wings by prognosticating, by going against the grain, by following the many conspiracies of our Star Chamber masters, for sure.

I really do. I might be part of that a bit. But the reality is I have to make money, I  have to do real patsy journalism, I have to do reading gigs for a new book, and I have a propensity for embedding myself into community, for sure.

I relate better to poor people with no college degrees, with lives mired in the dysfunction that is America – bad parents, mean hombre parents, rapists daddies, drug-using parents, drug-offering parents, vacant parents, mean as cuss parents-siblings-boyfriends — than with professionals or managerial classes. I have more to relate to with drop-outs, military mess ups, substance abusers and those in recovery, than a hundred PhD’s. Really.

I sort of get acid refluxy reading this stuff from armchair warriors, those KeyBoard/Bored heroes who have every last bit of evidence that the SARS-CoV2 is one big choreographed, contrived, concealed scam.

Have at it, KeyBoard/Bored Warriors, labeling me as dead, stupid, naïve and so off base I must be colonized by The Man;  and editors, you too, have at it de-platforming blokes like me who get on your faux radical sites and then find ourselves arrowed-down/thumbs-downed by dozens of readers of the comments.

For now, Dissident Voice has been kind, and the writing here is more akin to my way of at least entertaining conflicting and oppositional ideas without me feeling I am going to be bombed with hate and ire and denigration.

Gracias.

Gracias.