I’ve been amazed at the collective wisdom of the truly left of us, those who adhere to the belief that people — communities of common needs — are smarter than the total sum of individuals who seek power, money and a birthright to the gutting of ecosystems.

Competitiveness isn’t it, and yet we are telling the young, just out of the cradle, that they must fight for everything, and the king of the hill is the person who can acquire more and more to feed his or her ego or entitlement.

As they age through the hamster wheel of consumerism, Capitalism and Empire’s exploitation in the elite’s name vis-a-vis the majority’s name, students learn to expel less and less the amount of the hubris of Empire and Mad Men consumerism; and then self-deception grows exponentially each year an American is planted in this culture (sic).

Yet, where are the family of men, women, children and others (yes, the complexities of those who do not identify as Cis-gender) who stick together to ensure the world is globally connected to the family of Homo Sapiens in the family of Gaia? Who’s teaching resistance? Who’s teaching a true communitarianism? Teachers stuck on that same hamster wheel, leading the way? I think not.

I am saddened that my profession — education — has been neutered and spayed of collective wisdom, so this family of community — and I see community of place and community of purpose being equidistant in our need to not only overthrow the few who have for centuries destroyed possibilities for a socialism of the mind, spirit, and urban-rural development, but those who have hindered the possibility of incubating a new idealism drawn from tribalist human laws.

A map of the world that does not include utopia is not worth even glancing at.

— Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 1891

You’re captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live. … You are captives—and you have made a captive of the world itself. That’s what’s at stake, isn’t it?—your captivity and the captivity of the world.

The world of the Takers is one vast prison, and except for a handful of Leavers scattered across the world, the entire human race is now inside that prison.

No one species shall make the life of the world its own.’ … That’s one expression of the law. Here’s another: ‘The world was not made for any one species.

If you can’t discover what’s keeping you in, the will to get out soon becomes confused and ineffectual.

[T]he price you’ve paid is not the price of becoming human. It’s not even the price of having the things you just mentioned. It’s the price of enacting a story that casts mankind as the enemy of the world.

― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

I’m on the Oregon Coast, Central arena for amazing tectonic shifts, and the strata of biological and geologic evolution in your face all the time, each and every inch I make through a temperate forest of rain and moss and Sitka, to the basalt and granite beachheads that empty into the sea, is compelling. Upwellings, gray whale migrations south and back north, whelping coves of fur seals and harbor seals.

I am enjoying a brief weekend respite with my fiance’s daughter, a junior at the flagship college, one of them Oregon State. She comes to me as a STEM, scientist technology engineering math, seeking environmental chemistry degrees.

She tells me that students she’s around do not want to embark on political discussion. She tells me science professors (sic) don’t discuss global warming or climate change. She knows nothing about the American role in killing and murdering people in Venezuela, or at least the newest machinations to carry that out in the name of Abrams Pence, Trump and Virgin Airlines, et al.

The world of academics, in STEM, can be very constricting, cloistered, self- absorbed, and worse, self-important. There are no great debates going on in this $26K a year school, and there are no faculty she has that give a shit about sticking their necks out to engage in the real things in life. Chris Hedges calls this the sickness of the liberal class, credential-ism and careerism.

Universities no longer train students to think critically, to examine and critique systems of power and cultural and political assumptions, to ask the broad questions of meaning and morality once sustained by the humanities. These institutions have transformed themselves into vocational schools. They have become breeding grounds for systems managers trained to serve the corporate state. In a Faustian bargain with corporate power, many of these universities have swelled their endowments and the budgets of many of their departments with billions in corporate and government dollars. College presidents, paid enormous salaries as if they were the heads of corporations, are judged almost solely on their ability to raise money. In return, these universities, like the media and religious institutions, not only remain silent about corporate power but also condemn as “political” all within their walls who question corporate malfeasance and the excesses of unfettered capitalism.

Just what will a chemistry degree accomplish in a world of Monsanto, Exxon, Pfitzer, ConAgra, Raytheon, Dow and the list of chemical purveyors is a long as the new chemicals created yearly for the forms of consumption capitalism supercharges, which pits people and the environment against each other and then in turn puts at risk us all in the name of the profits of the few.

Flame retardant in every person and mammal on earth? Atrazine sprayed on crops that baby in the cradle and those babes in preschool consume? A chemical rainbow of products that causes nervous and mental and biological and endocrine disruption in insects and nematodes and rodents. Somehow we disconnect we are also those cockroaches getting the end Apex bioaccumulation of those cancer-causing chems.

They don’t even study Rachel Carson, and while they know nothing about The People’s History of the World; Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States; Guns, Germs and Steel; Notes on a Catastrophe or David Wallace- Wells.

Worse yet, they aren’t talking about Davos;, and the stuff they consume on YouTube, Instagram and the like well, it is the thing of a distracted and disengaged culture of LGBTQAPP+++.

They never know why and what their society is and was and will be becoming, because now the capitalists are on over-drive looking to make another generation and that generation’s children into the next marks.

They don’t know scientists like Vandana Shiva, and as I said, Rachel Carson.

At each stop, Shiva delivered a message that she has honed for nearly three decades: by engineering, patenting, and transforming seeds into costly packets of intellectual property, multinational corporations such as Monsanto, with considerable assistance from the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the United States government, and even philanthropies like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, are attempting to impose “food totalitarianism” on the world. She describes the fight against agricultural biotechnology as a global war against a few giant seed companies on behalf of the billions of farmers who depend on what they themselves grow to survive. Shiva contends that nothing less than the future of humanity rides on the outcome.

“There are two trends,” she told the crowd that had gathered in Piazza Santissima Annunziata, in Florence, for the seed fair. “One: a trend of diversity, democracy, freedom, joy, culture—people celebrating their lives.” She paused to let silence fill the square. “And the other: monocultures, deadness. Everyone depressed. Everyone on Prozac.

More and more young people unemployed. We don’t want that world of death.” The audience, a mixture of people attending the festival and tourists on their way to the Duomo, stood transfixed. Shiva, dressed in a burgundy sari and a shawl the color of rust, was a formidable sight. “We would have no hunger in the world if the seed was in the hands of the farmers and gardeners and the land was in the hands of the farmers,” she said. “They want to take that away.”

Amazing, my female soon-to-be step-daughter has not been initiated in the fine arts of dissent and scientific truth, with someone like Rachel Carson as a talisman for any up and coming woman interested in pursuing the siciences:

Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species — man — acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world. — Rachel Carson

I gotta end this with some measure of hope, and that would be that there are still many members of my tribe ready to tackle the stupidity of manufactured consent, false dichotomies, false balance and all the other mediated crap of the propagandists.

A great piece on Dissident Voice, one of my brethren, Jason Holland:

Suggest peace or ecological sustainability? Shit, sorry buddy, now you’re a radical; a naive one they’d argue. The powers that be seem to fully embrace the idea that it’s fine as a nation-state to act like homicidal authoritarian maniacs who are pushing the global ecology to the brink of collapse, that’s just fine, so long as you just want to kill the proper people. Should you be a proponent of peace, cooperation, and sustainable non-exploitative living for all, generally creating a world with far less atrocities and horrors, well, that will get you the label of radical even for the socialism lite policies Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is pushing in the green new deal. She has since owned the moniker of radical along the general line of thought that if being more humane makes her a radical then so be it, and rightly so, but if the ideas of being more humane are considered radical now, wait till these mainstream hacks hear what is actually necessary to begin to heal the natural world on a timetable that doesn’t end in some rather brutal ways and much faster than most think possible no less. Climate change and species extinction are continually accelerating faster than expected along exponential curves and exponentiation has a way of sneaking up on you rather fast. Now we’re talking about the type of stuff that will be openly balked by the status quo neoliberal capitalists as potentially extremist.

Shifting Baselines in a Time of Climate Change, Systems Stagnation, Life and Death in a Time of Amnesia

by Paul Haeder / February 19th, 2019

Both of my parents were assassinated by death squads in our country. My siblings and I fled because we were afraid. We entered the U.S illegally. We crossed the river, and once inside the U.S., we applied for asylum. We were among the very few who were granted asylum. In 1988 I graduated from Bowie and studied at UTEP, receiving a bachelor’s of science. – former refugee at a press conference in El Paso, at Annunciation House

I once volunteered at Annunciation House, in El Paso, during the 1980s. I was chipping away at my graduate degree in English, teaching as a TA at UT-El Paso, as well as working freelance writing gigs with both the morning and evening newspapers, teaching one-on-one conversational English to an engineer in Juarez (who was working for Packard Electric getting paid one-tenth the pay as his fellow Yankees), writing a couple of books, and being active in environmental and social justice issues tied to protesting the militarization of the border and the overuse of the Rio Grande as a toxic slough and drawing down of the Hueco Basin aquifer for golf courses. Heck, in El Paso during this time I even worked for Planned Parenthood helping write a media plan against a mean son-of-a-bitch who called himself a Jew for Christ who set upon the clinic (no abortions done there) mean as cuss religious zealots who tried to block women and families from seeking STD services and such.

Ruben Garcia started the House in the late 1970s and by the time I got there, at Casa Anunciación, the dirty wars in Central America were really ramped up against teachers, unionists, activists, politicals on the left, priests, nuns and anyone questioning the rightwing policies of US-backed governments and the thug henchmen of those administrations, the death squads in Guatemala, Honduras, and Salvador, and the contras in Nicaragua. Part of the fallout created by those US-trained militarists, economists and lawyers who perpetrated that harm against their own people was that many small towns and villages – regular people of the land, la tierra – were being caught in the crossfire.

Entire villages were told in the morning by the fascists to pack up and head out of their pueblitos by sundown. Many girls, women and old ladies were raped and murdered. Beheadings of husbands and grandfathers, fetuses cut out of bellies, and torture of anyone who was suspected of going against Death Squad Capitalism were the order of the day.

As far as media coverage goes: My baseline was different than that of twenty-somethings today. When I was in my mid-twenties, in El Paso and working along the border, there were much more robust forms of journalism and ground-truthing reporting going on than anyone today in their twenties could image.

The baseline was a more open, aggressive Press willing to pull away more of the onion layers to get to the truth. Really, many editors and most of the newspaper journalists had no issue with peering through the looking glass to uncover truth, and their motto was that governments do and will tell lies. Now comparing the number of print newspapers, dailies, and weeklies and monthlies, even magazines and broadsheets, newsletters, and the like that were inking up paper in my time, and then looking at the Press now, going on 38 years of study and my own battles as a writer, anyone young can never really know what has been lost in this impetus of the Press then who were striving for independence, in a good way.

It’s the old saws of not having their own boots on the ground then, not having an authentic real point of view because they never lived and worked then, what is termed liberally by me as the shifting baseline syndrome.

I’m talking about small-town journalism, medium-sized market news, and quirky and unique monthlies. While the so-called liberal media (SCLM) was not liberal at all, what was happening in newsrooms and with editorial boards, for the most part, in the 1970s and Eighties was, compared to today, more nurturing to truth tellers, with a truer sense of why journalism’s ethical code points us to looking at as many sides as possible to weigh in on editorial decision-making. Sort of akin to what a lot of people use as a baseline for liberal (sic) versus conservative, comparing today’s neoliberal democrats, for instance, to someone like Barbara Jordan, or looking at Crypo-AngloZionist Republicans such as Ted Cruz today to so-deemed Rockefeller Republicans of old. When I was born, 1957, the Republican Party’s platform was much more progressive and populist than that of the Pelosi-Schumer Party of the millionaires (or billionaires when looking at proverbial Dem Billionaire Michael Bloomberg). Get a load of this, 62 years ago:

Should any political party attempt to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things, but their number is negligible and – and the president says–“their number is negligible and they are stupid.” – Dwight Eisenhower, Republican President

The platform for 1956 under the banner of the Republican Party included fighting for workers, the right to form a union, for health and safety measures at workplaces, for a strengthened eight-hour work, for social welfare programs for individual citizens to be strengthened, and more and more positive programs along the lines of today’s milquetoast progressives. Ike was backed by the Republican Party, and it was Eisenhower who fought to keep the tax rate for the very rich fair, which in today’s baseline would be considered way too high and communist!  For instance, the top income tax bracket in the 1950’s was 91%. And, Eisenhower fought tooth and nail to ensure that it remained at that rate.

Can you imagine Bernie Sanders or Obama or Clinton backing this? Forget the neocons, the professors of the Chicago School of Predatory and Culture-Destroying (brainwashing) Capitalism even wanting any tax rate other than zero percent (0.00 %) for the rich, for the corporations, who are now persons with full rights of person-hood.

How many rich individuals and how many corporations pay no taxes today, and how many have tax shelters (“legit” mafia-style money-laundering outfits) overseas, in Cayman or Panama? We have winks and nods and complete red-faced debates and retorts against the accusation that the rich pay no taxes, or certainly not enough, with bald-faced defenses by tens of millions run-of-the-mill Americans who support their flavor of rich man/rich woman in America.

Imagine, rooting for millionaires and billionaires? By welfare recipients or middle-class soccer moms. What does George Lakoff call it, Narrative Frames? This for decades was considered unAmerican to root for the rich over the poor.

That’s one difference I have experienced – when I was a teenager and college puke, most people hated the rich for what they were. Many average working class people looked at the rich as sociopaths who were only rich because they exploited the average American citizen. Add to the baseline shift from today versus back then: my bosses at newspapers were not multimillionaires, and many more newspapers by a factor of 5 or 10 in the 1970s and 1980s were independent and competitive, compared to 2019.

Back then, the baseline was that many reporters were vying to get the scoop on real news stories. Truth and facts were a given; anything else rose to the level of pink slip offenses. That robust nature of things back then — even though for the most part, as a socialist and Marxist, I never did fit personally into any paradigm in a newsroom — was things that you’d never see printed today in the few small town newspapers left (there are hardly any left across America, anyway) were vigorously printed in many more newspapers back then. From Salon:

According to University of North Carolina’s research, the country has lost nearly 1,800 local newspapers since 2004, and many more have lost the ability to comprehensively cover their communities.

Rural counties with poorer, older populations are most at risk — 500 rural papers have shuttered since 2004. These communities are also less likely to see a digital start-up help fill the void — as funding for both for- and non-profit models are more available in metro areas, and many rural counties across the U.S. still lack broadband internet access, which is critical for delivering online news.

More than 200 counties in the U.S. have no local paper, but that’s just part of the story, or this new shifted baseline: Local ownership of papers is eroding big time. Get this — nearly one-third of U.S. newspapers and two-thirds of dailies are now owned by 25 companies. GateHouse Media is rapacious, buying up small-town papers. That means the news is controlled by Big-Brother-Being-The-Oligarchs, many times edited a thousand miles or more from the towns or counties that are supposedly being covered. Copy-editing and editorial decisions for GateHouse originate in Austin, Texas. It’s the number one small and medium newspaper owner in the USA, and its model of “efficiency” means many fewer reporters and a more insipid and irrelevant TV style content which is also replicated (shared) widely.

Murders, celebrities, food, weather (not global warming) pet tricks, celebrity food, celebrity weather, celebrity pet tricks, celebrity murders idiocy of the umpteenth degree.

I have a case in point: a massive militarized police presence was in Beaverton, Oregon, last April, resulting in closing the main road east-west, locking down schools and the Salvation Army facility I worked at as a social worker. There were civilian-clothed snipers with high powered rifles w/ higher powered scopes all over; dozens of multi-agency personnel out in public with pistols brandished, and two armored vehicles with gun turrets that rammed the offending ex-vet’s big pick-up truck.

He had just been evicted from the Salvation Army’s homeless veterans transition center for suspect reasons. The entire homeless facility was bombarded with SWAT-outfitted police thugs, and no one was allowed to enter or leave the facility, creating high levels of anxiety with already PTSD-addled veterans and their homeless families.

The veteran was shot seven times, after only a few hours of staged hostage negation-like stuff, even though he was alone, pinned in his own pickup truck. The Salvation Army leadership later said it was a coup for them (this bizarre religious organization) – “Thank goodness we controlled the story and very few media outlets picked it up. We want to protect our brand in Oregon . . . as the number one non-profit.”

Now, imagine if there had been one or two beat reporters, like myself in my teens and twenties, on the job working for local rags, vying to find out what really happened and why so much force had been deployed for a suicidal veteran basically isolated in his pick-up who could do no harm to anyone but himself? My baseline would have been news coverage galore, and better yet, follow up coverage: Cops shoot-to-kill a suicidal veteran, on a Salvation Army facility’s property, and, then force a public endangerment situation onto a small community.

Today, nothing . . . NOT even in the Portland, Oregon, media market which serves millions; and this Salvation Army is scamming the US taxpayer, i.e. VA who funds the beds for the veterans..

This is the shifting baseline syndrome, which is a sickness tied to outfits like the Salvation Army using PR flaks and using the fact there are no newspapers in Washington County to cover local news and this disturbing show of military force and what the implications of a military operation in their neighborhood might mean in the future. No less, against a veteran who was receiving services from a well-known homeless center.

Local news, and then news that has national and international implications, lost. Not covered. In the memory hole!

Shifting baseline syndrome means the public gets shafted and the administrators and gatekeepers of information — PR idiots and marketers and development officers – get to lie through their teeth, or in the case of my police-involved shooting incident (even that term is dripping with propagandist flavor), no one knew the ramifications of the Salvation Army’s unprofessionalism and lack of trauma-informed care leading up to the soldier’s eviction and then the suicidal behavior and then the soldier almost killed, and now, recovering in County lock-up (jail) serving time.  And he’s still suicidal, untreated.

Job well done by the keepers of the information flow. Shifting baseline disease.

Read the three parts of my Salvation Army mess here, I  II  III.

In the 1980s, I had published pieces in small towns newspapers, and later in the El Paso Times and El Paso Herald-Post on Central American refugees, on people crossing the border seeking asylum, on groups, both religious and secular, helping undocumented people cross the border and get help once here and to apply for political asylum. Piece published on the front pages of many small town rags I worked for.

My baseline then was we still had morning and evening rags, and weeklies, that debated hard the military’s presence in towns like Tucson or El Paso. Debated hard the debasement of the environment through the unchecked developers razing the desert. Debated hard the values of community health, welfare, safety and well-being over the wants and desires of small and large companies coming into communities and demanding tax abatements, giveaway land schemes, and more-more-more from the public coffers to do their trickster capitalism to make more-more-more for the owners, CEOs and stockholders.

Now Democrats and Republican alike rah-rah cheer trillions in military spending. Job creation and Hollywood America the Greatest masturbation. –

I’m going back to Ike: In his final address to the country, in 1961, while still a five-star general, and still a believer in the American way, in American exceptionalism, in America’s greatness (both sides of the political isle yammer on and on to show their patriotism), he did at least put into check the US military industrial complex:

Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.

Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.   —source

Now, I have to back up a bit to reset this essay: I continue today — just hitting 62 — to call this myopia and concerted erasure of knowledge and historical context (what Gore Vidal calls the United States of Amnesia) shifting baseline syndrome covering many aspects of my life, the life of America and the implications to the world that the US Empire negatively effects.

I explain this concept daily as I go about living and roaming, learning and teaching, struggling and rejoicing.

Here, illustratively: The baseline for divers like me, in the Sea of Cortes (called the Aquarium of the World by many then), for the 1970s and ’80s:

I was diving daily near San Carlos and Guaymas, out near Tiburon Island from the boat my buddy and I paid $500 from a lake fisherman from Phoenix. So, a typical dive – dozens of turtles of three or four species, dozens of moray eels of a dozen species; pinnipeds like sea lions by the hundreds; long beak and short beak dolphins by the dozens; hammerhead sharks by the dozen; over two hundred species of reef fish, crustaceans, and sponges and soft corals; brown pelicans by the hundreds; pelagic fish and groupers and barracuda and amazing surface fish, nudibranchs; and, well, in one hour dive, more than what any overpaid Avatar CGI technical wonk could create, let alone dream of.

That’s the baseline for an 18-year-old in 1975, me, a wanna be Jacques Cousteau and marine biology college major. Fast forward forty-four years, and the baseline of another Pablo diver, same age, well, now a decimated, overfished, multi-polluted ocean, with hardly a shadow of what I saw on typical dives in the 1970s.

The baseline shifted, and today, the syndrome, in the shifting baseline syndrome/disease analogy, would be the arrogance, historical stupidity, and hubris to believe that a healthy and normal reef dive is what it should be as experienced in 2019. The syndrome and disease of shifting baselines it that it is most likely even smart biologists might be working on staving off further decline in an ecosystem based on the present baseline. What you don’t see now normalizes one to see what they see now as the correct baseline to go by. Wrong.

Now transfer the shifting baseline syndrome/disease to almost every aspect of US society: no, the baseline for police involvement in our lives is not a Gestapo, shoot to kill first force, where we all are in fear, while witnessing pigs murder Latinos and African Americans with impunity. Judge, jury and executioner, no, is not the baseline we should be stuck with or happy with.

Baseline sickness now applied to what it means to be a student – my baseline was a university where faculty had freedom to teach, that more were on the tenure track, where students would be experimenting with ideas and learning, without fear of Goldman Sachs thugs hobbling them for life with $100 K debt or censuring like a Phil Knight of Nike fame or Monsanto do regularly to researchers.

Yes, the baseline in 1975 when I was coming of age was that we COULD protest in the streets without fear of felonies, without being sprayed upon with tear gas and rubber bullets at every event; where cops were in small numbers, and there were no drones and militarized SWAT teams for peace demonstrations.

Baseline was for 1975 one hell of a lot more book readers, more by a power of 10,000 regular thinkers, and more people who had newspapers in their hands and talked about local politics by a power of 1,000,000.

Shifting baseline syndrome is now infecting every sector of our lives, where what is acceptable thinking, behavior, standard operating procedures and collective will NOW are so bastardized, retrograded and devolved that the conversation about anything on any tract – food-medicine-science-arts-law-education-international politics-community standards-health-safety-welfare of the environment-ownership-birth and death-cradle to cradle planning — is an effort in alien talk, as if people today are from a completely new set of gravitaional laws.

Idiots call this the “new normal,” another shifting baseline of not only bastardizing language but Orwellizing it. War is Peace, Lies are Truth, Stupidity is Smarts. New normal!

Now, back to “we all are illegal aliens,” where I helped push that bumper sticker in El Paso as a solidarity protest meme, to illustrate that no American First Nations leaders came together to endorse the free passage of all those whites to use their great Turtle Island as a haul-out like a bunch of molting fur seals.

Here, my writing, 13 years ago, for Dissident Voice, just below. Talk about no shifting baseline for me, or in the case of this hatred of Mexicans and Central Americans, displayed by more than just Trump and his ilk.

Oh, once you hit 50 or 60, the ramifications of this French doozy really sink in:

plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose — the more things change the more they stay the same –

It hearkens to the proverb, “Turbulent changes do not affect reality on a deeper level other than to cement the status quo.”

What is the Empire’s status quo when it comes to people displaced by American Empire structural and military and economic and environmental violence? April 7, 2006:

This Land is Their Land, and We Are the Illegal Aliens

By Paul. K Haeder, April 7, 2006

We are all illegal aliens.” It’s a bumper sticker many of us on the frontlines of the fight against the United States’ government’s assault on Central Americans plastered on our car bumpers down El Paso way.

That was in the 1980s.

You know, when Reagan was running amok ordering his captains Ollie North, McFarland, Casper Weinberger, the whole lot of them, to send bombs, CIA-torture manuals and US agents in order to aid terrorist contras and other despotic sorts in killing hundreds of thousands of innocents in civil wars in Salvador and Guatemala and El Salvador.

We worked with women and children who had witnessed fathers, uncles and husbands eviscerated by US-backed military monsters.

Victims of torture, in Texas illegally. You know, what those brave Smith and Wesson-brandishing, chaise lounge Minutemen of today would call aliens.

We worked with people in faith-based communities, mainstream churches, and non-profits throughout El Paso, Juarez and the general area known as La Frontera. Everyone I met working with in this refugee assistance stint had humanitarian blood coursing through their veins. We were proud of our law-breaking work — we gave refuge to terrorized and sometimes half-dead civilians.

We were called lawbreakers by the Reaganites and the Minutemen of that time. Communists. Pinko-fags. Those were the good old days of low-tech surveillance and simple FBI lists.

But what we did was human and humane, in the tradition of that very universal (with roots in Quakerism) belief in bearing witness and acting upon that which has been judged as unjust and inhumane.

Of course, we were up against the laws of this land and coarse politically-driven judges who denied victim after victim permanent or temporary status while seeking asylum in the US.

We have so many stories of people sent back who were at best imprisoned, and in the worse cases, mutilated, disappeared, and murdered.

Guatemalan and Salvadorans, that is. My readers may not want to hear the narratives and visualize the descriptions of photos of those victims of torture. Ghastly things happened to teachers, nuns, medical workers and farmers, more heinous than what we’ve heard happened in the cells of Abu Ghraib.

We were there to assist, but more importantly to bear witness to our country’s terror campaign. Some of us got so riled up that later in our lives — me included — we hoofed it to Central America. Kicked around. Wrote articles for the few newspapers in this country that even cared about poor, misbegotten, displaced people of Latin America.

But no matter how hard-nosed we became, or how much we could withstand the photographs of women’s sliced backs and beheaded fetuses, we couldn’t shake the images of the children of torture at this two-story refugee house, Annunciation House. It was full of scruffy-looking East Coast volunteers who had hooked up with Ruben Garcia, the House’s director, through Catholic services organizations. It was their stint with public service, their spiritual duty calling. Part of their degree plans. But most were converted and slammed hard intellectually and spiritually by the violence their charges had suffered under in our name – as US citizens paying taxes.

Those PTSD-induced cartoons those children drew sucked the air out of even the hard-ass border patrol guys who used to “dump” the Central Americans at Ruben’s door at all hours of the night. Who can believe it now, that once upon a time official INS and border patrol officers knowingly let their perps go — knew that Ruben and his volunteers could salve emotional and physical wounds of these tortured crossers.

Their chance at freedom. Except for the piss-ant judges. And the memories of pregnant aunties being raped, their fetuses cut out alive, speared, and the laughing Reagan-loved military punks in the highlands and jungle.

Annunciation House was bulging at 100 people — disheveled lives jammed in. Beans always cooking. Songs. Mattresses and piles of donated clothes. Guitars strumming. Gueros, the white ones, and the Chicanos would help with in-takes — asylum transcripts, translation, dotting all the i’s and crossing the t’s. Help with getting jobs. Odd jobs in the community. Help with making sure the refugees didn’t get caught again.

But it was always those by-the-letter-of-the-law jurists helping to confound the torture. More than 70 percent of our brothers and sisters seeking asylum in the US were denied entry by some fat cat, many times cocaine-sniffing immigration judge who usually had a friend in the back pocket of some Bush or buddy of Bush somewhere.

Then it was trying to get the denied victims off to Canada without being caught. You remember, the Canada back then which used to open its borders to refugees, [the Canada of shifting baseline syndrome].

The judges and politicians and Minutemen all professed, “Send them back. Those aliens broke our immigration laws.”

But “we are all illegal aliens” as a rejoinder went much farther than USA’s mayhem in Mesoamerica. We worked in solidarity with the housekeepers, bricklayers, agricultural workers and so many other worthy Mexicans who worked their butts off in the US for little pay and much less respect.

These were workers who crossed the Rio Grande to find low-paying jobs with American families and businesses — working for mayors, bigwigs, even on government contracts. In Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, elsewhere. With a wink and a smile by the American exploiters.

Mojado — wetback. Squatter. Beaner. Illegal alien. These were the more tame epithets.

But let’s not kid ourselves about the genesis of this new round of empowered Latinos fighting against racist laws put forward by the dispassionate conservatives running the ship of fools in DC.

This is not a country of legal immigrants. It’s a country based on colonialists, undocumented white people who helped displace native tribes through broken laws and genocide.

It’s a country based on illegal occupation of native lands and on Mexico’s lands, pure and simple. Colonialists protected by Federal laws that deemed free white people as the only ones who had the right to be fully-fledged citizens.

Manifest Destiny was a violent racist act to seize lands illegally.

Everything this country’s current anti-Mexican and pro-Apartheid border war proponents stand upon — all that doctrine and those so-called laws — is based on illegally seizing lands of Native tribes.

And worse — laws that “removed” natives. Laws that starved natives. Laws that approved of eradicating native families, entire tribes.

The current massive turnout of students and workers alike in this country’s major cities is a testament to these Americans’ backbone to fight this new exclusionary law — HR4377 — a Washington, DC-inspired racist act that has its roots in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

Many Americans do express a certain humanity and dignity for the people many deem aliens, but it’s not awe-inspiring that some citizens of Copenhagen, Denmark or Limerick, Ireland, disobey the so-called immigration laws of this country during their initial years as landed immigrants.

Let’s make no bones about the motives of Jim Sensenbrenner, the author of this racist House bill: He sees those brown-skinned south-of-the-border lettuce pickers, linen washers, house framers, and their US-born children as, what? “Alien gang members terrorizing communities.”

Anyone spouting that we are a nation of immigrants and laws has a disease, what George Orwell called the illness of double-think.

And until those many white Americans stop spewing that this is their land, a land of their laws, and a land made for Christians, the racist Minutemen will ramp up their gun brandishing on the southern and northern borders. And racist politicians will continue to play on the fears of uniformed constituents and try to pass the 21st Century’s racist exclusionary laws.

I wonder what these modern-day Nazis would say about those children’s cartoons — images of bodies floating in rivers. Blood-soaked church walls. Military men with their M-16s trained on men while others are sketched in their rape hunch. Beautiful jungle birds flying in the sky next to US-paid-for helicopter gunships spraying the corn and coffee fields below. Dead mommies cradling dead babies.

Yeah, I’m an illegal alien. We all are illegal aliens, under the laws of these creeps in high office. Humanity and caring and simple benedictions for suffering so much, those are alien traits only held by a minority in this country of exclusion, and slavery. Yeah, those creeps on hate-radio and in the newspaper columns and on Capitol Hill, sure, they recognize all of us who see the lies and fight the injustice as aliens.

And the children whose post-traumatic cartoons brought tears to men and women, some who had “fought” in Vietnam. Simple Crayola colorings brought tears to a county sheriff who had survived drug runners shooting up his town and unearthed bodies.

Yeah, we are all illegal aliens. Except them.

Paul Haeder worked in Central America and Mexico writing for newspapers during the 1980s and early 1990s. He’s currently in Spokane, Washington, as an instructor of writing at Spokane Falls Community College and writes sustainability-energy-environmental pieces for the towns weekly, Pacific Northwest Inlander.

There is only one party in the United States: The Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. — Gore Vidal

I had a radio show and had on the hour weekly venue some very powerful thinkers, those who the majority of Americans never run into. Good stuff over at Truthdig with Chris Hedges’ latest, “Worshipping the Electronic Image.”

Daniel Boorstin in “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Reality in America” argues that the fabricated, the inauthentic and the theatrical have now displaced the natural, the genuine and the spontaneous. Reality has become stagecraft. We live in a world, he writes, “where fantasy is more real than reality.” He warns:

We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic,’ that they can live in them. We are the most illusioned people on earth. Yet we dare not become disillusioned, because our illusions are the very house in which we live; they are our news, our heroes, our adventure, our forms of art, our very experience.

Trump is a product of this cultural decay, not an aberration. The way he speaks, acts and thinks is the way many Americans speak, act and think. He will one day disappear, but the cultural degeneracy that produced him will remain. Academic institutions, which should be the repositories of culture and literacy, are transforming themselves, often with corporate money, into adjuncts of the digital age, expanding departments that deal with technology, engineering and computer science—the largest major at universities such as Princeton and Harvard—while diminishing the disciplines that deal with art, philosophy, ethics, history and politics. These disciplines, rooted in print, are the only antidotes to cultural death.

Here, then, Gregory Petsko, talking about why the arts, classics and anything other than the sciences are necessary for human civlization to move forward. He is a biochemist and MD and worked on the genome project. However, he defends the classics and liberal arts to the end, decrying colleges and universities chopping philosophy and ethics and other programs that fit outside the sciences, or in today’s parlance, STEM.

Those who seek to communicate outside of digital structures to question or challenge the dominant narrative, to deal in ambiguity and nuance, to have discussions rooted in verifiable fact and historical context, are becoming incomprehensible to most of modern society. As soon as they employ a language that is not grounded in the dominant clichés and stereotypes, they are not understood. Television, computers and smartphones have addicted a generation and conditioned it to talk and think in the irrational, incoherent baby talk it is fed day after day. This cultural, historical, economic and social illiteracy delights the ruling elites who design, manage and profit from these sophisticated systems of social control. Armed with our personal data and with knowledge of our proclivities, habits and desires, they adeptly manipulate us as consumers and citizens to accelerate their amassing of wealth and consolidation of power.

This is how I feel everyday, and I am not some mintable intellectual, just a smart guy who knows his history, literature, science, cultures and tries to write himself out of a wet paper bag to have others understand.

Simple communitarian spirit, tied to serendipitous moment listening to this artist a month ago talking about climate change, tide-pools and new earth emerging. His name is Bill Kucha, 74, originally from Cleveland. He was trained as a classic artist in Boston, BU, and he married at 18, had a child, and ended up on his walkabout single again. He ended up in Portland years later, new wife, Dorothy, two children, a grandchild, and more than 47 years later, Sitka roots and multi-variant artwork with creator, artist, struggling with the weight of climate like a storm over humanity, over all of nature and over his personal connection to mother earth.

He talks a lot about this new time of chaos, the opportunities for change, pushing the old — fossil fuel “economy,” dreaded Capitalism — into the dustbin of history . . . with the energy of new minds, new ideas, new sense of identity. Where ego desiccates and a new giving gift society rises from the ashes of the Phoenix that once carried the tools of greed and war for the elite.

Here, a piece I wrote about his talk along with a conservation biologist’s posted on several places on the Internet — Tidepools.

I was invited by Bill and his wife Dorothy to their home overlooking the Pacific, north of Depoe Bay, near Newport.

Their home in 1972 was once a broken-down old drafty ramshackle of a beach house, and then 47 years of TLC and a dramatic setting down of roots — spiritual, creative, and holistic. Bill has worked the land, the side of the hill sloping toward the Pacific, moving rocks and pilings and earth to make an amazingly healing place, terraced, gardens, swales for graywater and rainwater for consumption.

The transformation of a man who has gained friends galore but who has worked in solitary brushing on paints and chipping into basalt and welding metal to stone, Bill has been intersecting with youth and old, playing his guitar and composing songs. He helped found 350.org Central Oregon Coast.

The talk we had Sunday Feb. 17 was anchored in transference, a new or very old expansion of the universe talk about evolutionary principles tied to the noosphere, the creative connectivity of humanity in this time of crisis.

I’ll be writing about Bill and Paul’s Lightness of Being Adventure, but yesterday, Dorothy opened up, first a teacher in Portland and then a social worker. Her parents fleeing Austria under the saber of Hitler. Her father has been featured in Portland historical news for his own migration to this new land.

Gentile and Jew, Bill and Dorothy live in balance, as the artist Bill is tied to his mistress: the land he has sculpted nail by nail, stone by stone, shadow by shadow. Their own relationship and lives in Mexico, the lightness of being now calm in a state of upheaval, great lessons passed forward to their family and friends. He is unsettled by the crisis in climate and politics and humanity.

We talked about story, about narratives, and then, bam, we headed in our separate vehicles to Newport to be with Kim Stafford, Oregon Poet Laureate, who talked with around 50 people crammed into the Newport library.

Kim talked about story, too, and my interpretation of that two hours will be written about in another blog here soon. For now, read about his father and me here, at Cirque Journal: A Poet, the Pacific Flyway, and a Sonora Flash Flood here!

Kim was kind enough to pair up some of his poems with my non-fiction piece a few years ago in the Cirque issue, which if you open up and read my piece from the hyperlink above, you’ll see it is largely about my own poetic rites of passage tied to his father, William Stafford, and my own life moving from point to point in my as of yet revealed journey back to some imagined place in my literary soul. Three poems, Kim Stafford, Cirque Journal.

Much of what Kim said in his Newport, Oregon, talk I have been practicing all my life — writing, thinking, inventing my perceptions of life, and the daily practice of writing, photographing, teaching, giving, struggling. I look to words as lamentation and personal narrative. The poem below is my spiritual word journey, after Bill and Dorothy shared their lives and home, and ruminating from that point where I listened to and talked with Kim among all these Central Oregon Coast writers and writer-wanna-be’s.

I sent the poem to Bill and Dorothy. I also sent it to Kim, now on a busy schedule as Oregon’s poet of record, a two-year stint where he has to meet with people throughout Oregon; Kim still has his gig as professor at Lewis and Clark University.

I am now intersecting with much of my own scattershot history, unfolding narratives, collapsing beliefs, a new revised personal relationship, and I am about to be married, yet we’re looking for some solace in Mexico, maybe, but now, living and breathing in Otis, Oregon, near Cascade Head, the shape of life molded into the refracted light dancing in my cones and rods. I am teaching now, and working on a couple of book manuscripts. I am beach combing and photographing and just pushing out some terrible times as a social services professional in the Portland arena for more than a decade. Read at your own peril below!

“Insanity of Social Work as Human Control”

Rodea Point, Broken Circle, and a Nautilus Shaped from Basalt and Pig Iron

( comiéndose tortillas y frijoles negros en Otter Crest Trail con Bill y Dorothy Kucha

By Paul Haeder, 2/17/19

words like slow trowel

wet alabaster, cupped hands

incantations of synesthesia

as loud as basalt

prodded by lichen

he comes to me with law of time

universal expansion, he feels

cosmogenesis transmuted

drawn into climate crisis

his sensuality cuts, chips, digs

stone, earth to loam, stone to bricks

patterns shaped into lamentations

*–*

the weight of geological time

expands, he expresses yin yang

Chinese character “crisis”

a point where things happen

or change

artist from Cleveland flays

canvas with acrylics

the ebb like spiritual

floe, trapped in vortex

this synchronicity, the calcifying

old world new world noosphere

emancipation for him

*–*

transmogrifying nature, he paints

biological fractals, polygons of betrayal

conjures up seeds as ghosts-

dances, perennials perma

culture as long as soil

finds impregnation, Gaia

increasing complexities

he culls crisis in triptych

weight of Egyptian prophecies

curses, earth flagellated for a new

creative evolution

he covets hope

*–*

he watches river burst

flammable memories,  Cuyahoga

dreams, Cleveland boy

“jawbone” for Seneca

“crooked river” for Mohawk

white man’s trash heap

emblematic of a million

trails of tears, eviscerated river,

time

space entropy land of holy

benedictions as interlopers

condemn new rivers to oil slicks

dams slough off unholy

metals, fossil hunters’ distillates

*–*

now slower in his gait

overlook of Pacific more

than germination, gestation

new age ancient he holds

paint brush hammer trowel

welding stick

old hands pushing yanking flogging

weight of 4 billion years

earth lifts to 74-year-old touch,

he flavors temporary home

in poppy lilac cruciferae

abundance

bounty shared by wife

friends

air soil water soul

*–*

she comes from Diaspora

Austrian Aryans finding

Hebrew enemies

her parents fled in 1939

warnings of Crystal Night

broken glass Kristallnach

weight of futures

death camps

*–*

she parts words between teacher

social worker, life flowing from

Mexico, weight to his fanciful

ruminations Jew with Gentile

family prayer Shema Yisrael

inscribed on grave of a Jewish

infant in Halbturn 3^rd century

Roman slavers tossed Jews

into all corners of empire

Austria, land remembered

now she finds father

recriminating her to

not marry artist

you’ll be working for his art

not a dime he’ll make

*–*

migration from Cleveland-Portland

New York-Depoe Bay

islands in the stream

couple’s migratory passage

monogamous galvanizing

I his poet one step away

into pure light of chaos

she asks me if pain

of bearing witness

of finding center in political

turmoil takes joy from

living . . . the smile on my face

*–*

a million light years back

my future written when

I was nine, earlier

vision quest long walkabout

dreamtime more than

weight of ions breathed in

the soiling people

are minor actors

this artist comes to me

fielding a new love

old passions

*–*

he calls me brother

we part for another beach town

as we hold another poet’s words

speak to all his relations

we share the amen

as laureate reshuffles our

game, moments trapped

between cerebral connectivity

and laws of co-evolution

harmonic convergences

sharing food, opening spaces

we stay as one

momentarily, Pacific high tide

receding for another passing —  

I want to thank all my relations

for this chance to be on Earth

in her time of flourishing; to thank

the First People of this place,

to honor their sovereignty in long

and continuing relation, still teaching us

how we might be here together; to thank

my mother and father, moon and sun,

for setting me forth before their own

passing on; to thank my grandmother

who listened to me so eloquently I learned

to listen to my own heart and mind, to find

stories and songs there; to thank my family

and friends, and all citizens and travelers

who study and work for deeper kinship

in this place, with one another, and with

all creatures, one Earth, visible, palpable,

fragile, intricate, resonant, in need of our

better stories. I want to thank you

who have gathered to receive what I have

carried here—in hope that something

I have may meet something you need,

so all our relations may be strengthened

for this life we live together.

Amen. – Kim Stafford, “All My Relations”

Look, we are in a deep mess economically, environmentally, ethically, education-wise and tied to our rapacious appetite in the West (and now China) for energy. The 5-e’s!

The masters of the universe are the Oil Companies, the War Profiteers, the Millionaires and Billionaires sacking it to the 90 percent of the globe, talk dodging, illegal acts of war-theft-abuse on a grand scale, the Media owned and rigged by the Point Zero Zero One Percent, the Propaganda Machines of the West to include education and marketing and psychology, and others, which I call FIRE — finance insurance and real estate.

Now we are doing more dirty wars and dirty deeds to a democratically-elected Maduro in Venezuela, and one architect is Pence, self-defined right-wing AngloZionist Christian, and then another, Elliot Abrams, self-described Jewish lawyer and with a 40-year record of supporting rape, torture, military incursions, Contras, drugs for guns.

But then, there is no diff between Pelosi-Gore-Trump-Cruz-Rubio-Schumer. There are no “two parties”; just the Party of $.

A fellow writer at LA Progressive talks about the Holocaust not known by Europeans (where it happened and where it was facilitated and where the Jewish Homeland SHOULD have been colonized, not Palestine.

Look, we have to teach old and young so many things about history,, about the history not revealed. Never to be repeated. Ha.

Here’s the article by Steve Hochstadt and then my responses: Did the Holocaust Happen?

What does this mean, Steve:

Sometimes leftists are criticized, because they can be linked with other people who would like to see less attention paid to the Holocaust. For example, the two women who just became the first Muslim women elected to Congress, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, are often accused by Republicans of being antisemitic, because of their criticisms of Israeli policy. Their comments do sometimes veer towards condemnations of Jews as a group, and Omar just had to apologize for some of her tweets. But their criticisms of Israel are echoed by many Jews. I find such conservative attacks misleading, but I am one of those Jews who is critical of Israeli treatment of Palestinians.

Look, I have fought the illegitimacy of the project to kill the world by neocons and slick people like Kissinger or Abrams. We have a terrible history of leaders — many Jewish — proclaiming the right to wage genocide, torture, land theft, rape, and cultural cleansing in many countries. Do our youth and adults need schooling on all the crap that has happened after the Holocaust, now in Venezuela, where youth may end up killing in the name of Capitalism? That’s a lot of history, attributed to a cabal of Jews and Anglos, all white, who want to be masters of the world militarily and economically.

Abrams? His hands have been involved in so much death and destruction:

Some say history repeats itself. Mark Twain said history doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. The January 25 appointment of convicted perjurer Elliott Abrams as the new US Special Envoy on Venezuela is evidence that history just goes on and on and on with ironic cruelty and relentless injustice. That would be especially true if you happen to have the world’s largest proven oil reserve, as Venezuela does.

Adding Elliott Abrams to this team does little to provide hope for the Venezuelan people. Contrary to Pompeo’s assertion, Abrams has never demonstrated “passion for the rights and liberties of all peoples,” least of all Palestinians. But Abrams’s demonstrated capacity for supporting subversion, torture, and mass killing does indeed make him “a perfect fit and a valuable and timely addition.” After all, Abrams represents the continuity of 40 years of genocidal US global policies. And he participated in many of them, as reported with devastating detail on Democracy NOW as well as the terror timeline in The Intercept, but not so much in mainstream media.

We talk a lot about Pence’s right wing Christian background. About the dirty deeds of Catholics and their priests. But what about Elliot? His religious background, upbringing, and the rotten schools he attended? Is it antisemitic to bring up his early years, which might explain his world view? Abrams, like many Jews, despises Palestinians. Is that not relevant?

Am I in trouble for making the connection from his bio from Wikipedia and maybe Abrams’ worldview? Or the worldview of Stephen Miller and his Judaism and how Miller is one major architect in Trump’s House? Who knows —

Wikipedia:

Elliott Abrams was born into a Jewish family in New York in 1948. His father was an immigration lawyer. Abrams attended the Little Red School House in New York City, a private high school whose students at the time included the children of many of the city’s notable left-wing activists and artists.[9] Abrams’ parents were Democrats.

Abrams received his Bachelor of Arts from Harvard College in 1969, a master’s degree in international relations from the London School of Economics in 1970, and his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1973. He practiced law in New York in the summers for his father, and then at Breed, Abbott and Morgan from 1973 to 1975 and with Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard, McPherson and Hand from 1979 to 1981

Which genocide? How many Native Americans killed from Columbus to Trump? Which country lost the most people during WW II? China and Russia? Which genocide, the Belgium Congo, the French Indochina? Post-colonial genocide in most African nations? How much do we talk about that? Millions upon millions dead! By the powers of the West! Directly and indirectly!

Which structural violence, AKA, slow genocide, are we talking about that has been perpetrated by Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, World Bank, et al?

Many discuss the Holocaust Industry, and, if you look at Holly-Dirt, Netflix, the entire US media publishing gig, however, we get not one critical look at Israel and AngloZionist illegal bombings of Iran, of Syria, and the open prison of Gaza and the country’s disproportionate response to rock throwers?

Does the average American and European know anything about the Imperial projects many in the current EU have done? Come on.

The banking policies of transnationals have killed tens of millions.

Absurd to think the German Holocaust needs dusting off. There are so many advocacy groups that bring up the dirty truth of Nazi genocide.

Norman Finkelstein states that his consciousness of “the Nazi holocaust” is rooted in his parents’ experiences in the Warsaw Ghetto; with the exception of his parents themselves, “every family member on both sides was exterminated by the Nazis”. Nonetheless, during his childhood, no one ever asked any questions about what his mother and father had suffered. He suggests, “This was not a respectful silence. It was indifference.” It was only after the establishment of “the Holocaust industry”, he suggests, that outpourings of anguish over the plight of the Jews in World War II began. This ideology in turn served to endow Israel with a status as “‘victim’ state” despite its “horrendous” human rights record.

According to Finkelstein, his book is “an anatomy and an indictment of the Holocaust industry”. He argues that “‘The Holocaust’ is an ideological representation of the Nazi holocaust”.

In the foreword to the first paperback edition, Finkelstein notes that the first hardback edition had been a considerable hit in several European countries and many languages, but had been largely ignored in the United States. He sees The New York Times as the main promotional vehicle of the “Holocaust industry”, and notes that the 1999 Index listed 273 entries for the Holocaust and just 32 entries for the entire continent of Africa.

Cynthia Maher says: February 14, 2019 at 9:33 am

I don’t think that they should ever stop teaching about the Holocaust. However, as Mr. Haeder pointed out, the study of genocide should include the various atrocities from all over the world beginning with Christopher Columbus and now Trump killing babies at the border.Reply

1. Paul Haeder says February 14, 2019 at 12:46 pm — The world is now more than the canon of Western Civilization, of the old world, and we need not look any further to see a world under a new historical and creatively written microscope ”Memory of Fire by Eduardo Galeano. Do Americans know the story of the A bombs on Japan as deliberate mass killings. The some 20 million killed by the US and its proxies over the last 60 years!
2. I am for all despicable acts tied to empire and expansion and land theft and genocide to be taught in any culture or classroom. Genocide of Armenians! Japanese rapes of Chinese! Never forget, never again, as we have the same old white guys, Jew and Christian, dictating to the world who shall day, and who is the good, the bad and the ugly.
3. Hmm, Israel! Interesting how that society works, yet we get very little truth in mainstream education and media.
4. Source:
5. In the world of Joseph Stalin, induced famine was the prime weapon of choice, though mass execution and exile helped him dispose of tens of millions he viewed as “enemies of the people”.
6. To Henry Kissinger, the world, particularly Indochina, was very much a small chess game. Civilians were mere pawns ripe for sacrifice through hi-tech weaponry, including biological and chemical warfare, to enforce his worldview at any cost. Millions lost their lives to his cerebral game board.
7. To Pol Pot, struggle was little more than purification, erasing through starvation, overwork and execution a quarter of his people whose sole crime was to see life through a prism that collided with his own – no matter how soft their view or backward his sight.
8. In Rwanda up to half a million women were sexually assaulted, mutilated or murdered, along with an equal number of male Tutsis, as enemy agents of the Hutu state – machetes and rape induced Aids to the plentiful weapons of preference.
9. Slow-motion genocide: These are but a few of the extremes of genocide, those rare cases we are told noted mostly for mass murder, systemic rape or group starvation – the worst of the worst. Yet, genocide does not demand of us an immediate mountain of bodies or an explosive rage of terror for international law to take hold.
10. As it turns out, in what increasingly seems to be more than mere passing coincidence, the legal definition of “genocide” enacted by the UN General Assembly was born in 1948, the very same year as Israel – which has since gone on to become both expert at its application and legendary in its denial.In relevant part, under the applicable Convention, genocide means “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; or (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”.
11. Each and every one of these types of genocide has been perpetrated by Israel, seemingly with almost proud boast, and no accountability, for almost 70 unbroken years.
12. One need not rest upon obtuse historical footnotes to find abundant, indeed systemic, acts of extermination carried out by Israel since 1948 against Palestinians – very much a cognizable “national, ethnical, racial or religious group” as those terms are contemplated and commonly understood and applied under international law.
13. Beginning with its mass expulsion, rape and murder at the onset of the Nakba (the Catastrophe) Israel has devoted itself to 68 years of non-stop genocide coming up for air only periodically to retool or to change the nature of its weaponry of choice.What started out with the expulsion, at gunpoint, of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their ancestral homeland set in motion a refugee stampede that has grown to more than seven million displaced and stateless people, providing the world more than a disturbing glimpse of what was to come decades later in Syria.

And it can be said a thousand times — NPR, National Petroleum Pesticide Propaganda Radio, well, listening to NPR is as difficult as listening to Alex Jones, Rachel Maddow and FOX.

NPR misleads public in report on AIPAC vs Ilhan Omar
Confirm for yourself —

AIPAC: tip of the iceberg
During the broadcast, NPR’s Peter Overby mentions pro-Israel billionaire Sheldon Adelson and a few other pro-Israel groups, implying these are largely the extent of the Israel lobby.

Overby and his guests fail to inform listeners of the full range and power of the Israel lobby in the United States: hundreds of organizations embedded in every state in the union and almost every campus, with a combined revenue of well over $6 billion.

Added to this are pro-Israel billionaire donors who regularly deploy their wealth on behalf of Israel, including Adelson and his Israeli wife Miriam, Israeli-American Haim Saban, Paul Singer, Norman Braman, and Larry Ellison, who have a combined net worth of close to $115 billion.

Wednesday’s report is not an isolated instance.

Analyses have shown that NPR has a long pattern of giving listeners Israel-centric reports that fail to give listeners the full, accurate picture of this profoundly important issue.

Alison Weir is executive director of If Americans Knew, president of the Council for the National Interest, and author of “Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel.” Her articles have been published by MintPress News, The Link, Project Censored, Dissident Voice, Antiwar.com, CounterPunch, Z Magazine, the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, and others, including several anthologies.

It’s a call for submissions, for the Oregon Humanities Magazine, and the theme is, adapt =

Features for “Adapt”

For the Summer 2019 issue of Oregon Humanities, we want to hear your stories, ideas, thoughts, and arguments on the word “adapt.” Share an experience about conforming in response to some sort of pressure. Tell us what it takes to alter and revamp a system that needs to change. Explore a historical or current event that shows the process and outcome of adaptation.

We especially appreciate good stories and fresh ideas, particularly if they relate to challenging questions, diverse perspectives, and just communities. Tell us something we’ve never heard before. Show us something from a different angle. Make us feel, see, hear, smell the world anew.

Well, I am in a slipstream of writing this creative non-fiction, possibly to no avail, because in many ways, the Oregon Humanities is parochial and not so cutting edge. The conservative pitch of writing with academic-based writers or MFA-trained folk is something I have always had a problem with.

But I am pounding away on this word processor to invent my own “story” of adaptation, my own personal journey through fiction, ecology, non-fiction, and life, man!

Below, my answer to a short editorial written by the Oregon Humanities’ director — here. “We the People.”

Well, ironically, I am answering the “we” question during Black History month, another “we” in the pot of America (named after an Italian map maker) that is not a melting pot but a mixed salad tied to destroying many great people’s land and existence, the “we” of First Nations, and then the new “we” that this nation of whites decided were “they,” but were in fact the “we” of enslaved people. 

Seems like a pretty exceptionalist attitude to ponder the rugged individualism that the myth of America is built upon on, on the backs of so many “we’s” — internment for Japanese Americans, the Old and New Jim Crow, the continual attack of undocumented people this “we” society calls “illegal aliens.” I wonder if those Mexicans and Central Americans see themselves as the “they” in the “we the people” America, or should they believe what “we the white America” call them, “we the aliens?” 

I don’t think so. 

Here, this is the “we” an African-American math teacher in Mississippi posted on her classroom door: “They stole scientists, doctors, architects, teachers, entrepreneurs, astronomers, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, etc. and made them slaves.” 

Jovan Bradshaw is a sixth grade math teacher at Magnolia Middle School, but she decided to teach her students something other than addition and multiplication this Black History Month.

 “It all started with this little boy in my class. We were talking and he said, ‘Slaves didn’t do much because they couldn’t read or write.’ He kinda caught me off guard,’ Bradshaw said. “I said, ‘Baby, if I snatched you up and dropped you off in China or Germany or Africa even, you wouldn’t be able to read and write their language either. Does that make you useless or any less educated?’”  

Paul Haeder | February 2019 | Otis  

Corporate Canada Behind Slow Motion Coup Attempt in Venezuela

by Yves Engler / February 8th, 2019

Long Live a Free from USA/AngloZionist Dirty Tricks Venezuela –Oh Canada, my mother’s home, just as white patriarchal bad as the rest. Klanada, Oh Klanada:

It’s convenient but incorrect to simply blame the USA for Ottawa’s nefarious role in the slow motion attempted coup currently underway in Venezuela.

Critics of the Liberal government’s push for regime change in Venezuela generally focus on their deference to Washington. But, Ottawa’s hostility to Caracas is also motivated by important segments of corporate Canada, which have long been at odds with its Bolivarian government

In a bid for a greater share of oil revenue, Venezuela forced private oil companies to become minority partners with the state oil company in 2007. This prompted Calgary-based PetroCanada to sell its portion of an oil project and for Canadian officials to privately complain about feeling “burned” by the Venezuelan government.

Venezuela has the largest recognized oil reserves in the world. The country also has enormous gold deposits.

A number of Canadian companies clashed with Hugo Chavez’ government over its bid to gain greater control over gold extraction. Crystallex, Vanessa Ventures, Gold Reserve Inc. and Rusoro Mining all had prolonged legal battles with the Venezuelan government. In 2016 Rusoro Mining won a $1 billion claim under the Canada-Venezuela investment treaty. That same year Crystallex was awarded $1.2 billion under the Canada-Venezuela investment treaty. Both companies continue to pursue payments and have pursued the money from Citgo, the Venezuelan government owned gasoline retailer in the US.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

In the last 20 years and since Comandante Hugo Chavez Frias was first elected in 1998 and came to power in 1999, Venezuela had another 25 fully democratic elections, of which 6 took place in the last year and a half. They were all largely observed by the US based Carter Institute, the Latin American CELAC, some were even watched by the European Union (EU), the very vassal states that are now siding with Washington in calling President Maduro an illegitimate dictator and instead, they support the real illegitimate, never elected, US-CIA trained and appointed, Juan Guaidó. Former President Carter once said of all the elections he and his Institute observed, the ones in Venezuela were by far the most transparent and democratic ones. By September 2017, the Carter Center had observed 104 elections in 39 countries.

Venezuela: The Straw that Breaks the Empire’s Back?
by Peter Koenig / February 8th, 2019

Despite this evidence, Washington-paid and corrupted AngloZionist MSM are screaming and spreading lies, ‘election fraud’; and Nicolás Maduro is illegal, a dictator, oppressing his people, depriving them of food and medication, sowing famine – he has to go. Such lies are repeated ad nauseam. In a world flooded by pyramid-dollars (fake money), the presstitute media have no money problem. Dollars, the funding source for the massive lie-propaganda, are just printed as debt, never to be repaid again. So, why worry? The same Zionists who control the media also control the western money machines; i.e., the FED, Wall Street, the BIS (Bank for International Settlement, the so-called Central bank of central banks), the European Central Bank, the Bank of England and the banks of London. The western public, armchair warriors, all the way to caviar socialists, believe these lies. That’s how our unqualified brains apparently work.

Absolutely riveting how this country is in a constant state of amnesia and killing. Hard to see local news about frozen cats and one inch of snow strangling Seattle, when we are the architects (we pay taxes and we spew pablum) of illegal and devilish interference in Venezuela’s future.

Thanks to Media Lens, sanity in a sea of corrupt and broken “media”!

Shame on the United Snakes of America! Thank god we have left (which is Right!) writers unmasking more of the dirty dealings of the United Snakes of America (sic)!

Venezuela Blitz: Tyrants Don’t Have Free Elections

Venezuela Blitz: Press Freedom, Sanctions And Oil

Juan Guaidó: The Man Who Would Be President of Venezuela Doesn’t Have a Constitutional Leg to Stand On
by Roger D. Harris / February 6th, 2019

Punching Counterpunch in a wet bag!

The rip roar fun of America is that every sector of the society seems infected by censorship because the people paying the bill, in a sense, are the titans of business, the CEOs, the upper echelon, who take their marching orders from billionaires who have their fingers in every cookie jar, from the Washington Post to some weekly in Phoenix; from the gazillion Starbucks, to the mom and pop that has its note entangled with JP Morgan Chase or Wells Fargo, and has to genuflect to the controllers of FIRE – finance, Insurance, real estate. Academia is colonized, since it’s copulating with the same titans of industry, the biased US government in the form of “defense” industries, and the elite’s gravy train, for instance, coming from a Phil Knight (Nike) or here, the list is big. Read below.

Imagine some lowly anthropology prof, or tenured political science professor, or college organization going up against any of these financial thugs. I list those below.

Remember, in capitalism, you can start small, even poor (most super rich have inherited the goods), but if you continue the oppressive force of vulture investing and parasitic wheeling and dealing, or if you made your billions on medical equipment or in food (like the Kroc’s of McDonald’s), paying off colleges for a slice of the tax shelter, and the huge influence you get from those greenbacks to these colleges, is part of the problem of colonizing the minds and hearts of so called liberal education!

 Just typing away on this laptop, Lenovo, and sending this out via the local WAVE internet service, plugging it into OP-ED News’ submission frame puts me in collusion with the controllers, the master of the economic universe who are capitalists through and through. The owners and CEOs and the millionaires running anything I have to intersect with, hands down, are against taxing the rich (themselves), and taxing them big (let’s go with 70 or 80 percent) to redistribute wealth to pay for the externalities they have foisted on man and woman kind.

Self-censoring, check mating, and constant paranoia that the man will gut me for thinking and saying and writing these screeds, that is the way of the Capitalist world.

Now, here’s a thought experiment: can we even in our thoughts be free of the power of the controllers who organize all the services we have to utilize to survive, even our right to exist debt and felony-free, without some heavy breathing down our proverbial necks tied to the elite, the most oppressive force humanity has ever seen?

And, yes, they conspire against the majority, the worker, the down and out, the middle class, us all in the 80 percent! Conspiring means they go to the same meetings and conferences and gatherings like Davos and sit on the same boards and use the same financial institutions to accumulate more tax-dodging wealth; they use the same law firms, go to the same colleges, send their kids to the same sororities and fraternities.

The conspiracy is not coming from some wingnut late night fugue after watching Loose Change or Zeitgeist?

• Here they are, the Robber Barons of past!
• Jay Cooke
• John Jacob Astor
• Andrew Carnegie
• Charles Crocker
• James Fisk
• Daniel Drew
• JB Duke
• Henry Flagler
• John Warne Gates
• Jay Gould
• EH Harriman
• Mark Hopkins
• Andrew W. Mellon
• J.P. Morgan
• John C. Osgood
• Henry Bradley Plant
• John D. Rockefeller
• Charles M. Schwab
• Joseph Seligman
• John D. Spreckels
• Leland Stanford
• Cornelius Vanderbilt
• Charles Yerkes

These men destroyed the native cultures, destroyed our constitutional rights, destroyed ecosystems, and put their sick minds to work to foment war, foment imperial overreach and to forward their dream to keep their vast amounts of wealth unshared by anyone except their families and heirs and a few rotten philanthropies.

Now, there have been books and books written about these robber barons above, and a few million articles and plenty of documentaries and even Hollywood blockbusters produced, directed and screened. Many of the comments against these titans include commenting on their zealotry and insanity and religious fervor and megalomania, all tied to their own in-bred belief in their God-given anointed status as takers.

Then, take this thought experiment to the next level: cite the other flavor of insanity and wealth accumulation and culture killing, by parsing out what others in their own tribe have parsed out – the Jewish movers and shakers alive today holding the purse strings.

Can we not criticize the other living robber barons, for instance, who have grouped themselves in a tribe, self-anointing themselves as Israel firsters, who in many cases have dual citizenship – USA and Israel? According to many, of course not. This is the kiss of death for writers like me.

What indeed happens to some of us if we cite insightful people like Gilad Atzmon tied to hisr ex-Jew status and his own anti-fascism as it applies to his former country of birth and religion of the tribe.

By Gilad Atzmon

Baruch Spinoza left the Jews. Heinrich Heine became a Christian. A few others, such as Israel Shamir and myself, a decade ago, simply drifted away.

Recently, Israeli historian Shlomo Sand announced that he too was no longer a Jew. I read his manuscript in Hebrew with great interest but soon realized that while he indeed stopped identifying as a Jew, he still hadn’t removed himself from kosher binaries.

“I don’t write for anti-Semites, I regard them as totally ignorant or people who suffer from an incurable disease,” (How I Ceased To Be A Jew  p. 21). Lines like these, echoing as they do the language of the ADL, made me feel very uncomfortable and, when it came to the Holocaust, Sand, who is usually so astute and profound, somehow managed to lose it. The Nazis are  “beasts”, and their rise to power metaphorically he described as a “beast awakening from its lair.”  Despite my respect for Sand, I would expect a leading, inspirational  historian and a former-Jew to have moved beyond such banal  Hasbara-recycled clichés.

This week, in the Jewish progressive magazine Mondoweiss, Avigail Abarbanel, an ex-Israeli and anti- Zionist informed us that she too has now ‘left the cult,’. I agreed with most of Abarbanel’s arguments against Israel and Zionism but I was nonetheless alarmed at the intellectual dishonesty at the core of her argument.

“Rarely can people inside a cult see where they are. If they could, the cult wouldn’t be what it is,” Abarbanel points out. “They think that they are members of a special group that has a special destiny, and is always under threat.” Thus, does Abarbanel describe the Israelis, yet she fails to mention that this is also an accurate description of the Jewish left in general and the Mondoweiss/JVP cults in particular, to which she herself belongs. As we now know, just as Israel claims for itself a special place amongst the states of the world, so do the anti-Zionist Jews who, when it comes to Anti-Israeli politics, operate within Jewish, racially exclusive political cells (JVP, IJAN etc.). So, if Abarbanel thinks that Israelis are at fault for being a ‘special group’ perhaps she should inform us what is the criterion that legitimates JVP and Mondoweiss being a special group within the solidarity movement? 

Abarbanel continues: “cult members are taught from birth that the world outside is dangerous, that they have to huddle together for safety.” This is indeed a good description of Israeli collective psychosis, but it is also a prefect portrayal of Mondoweiss’ operational mode and it  puts Mondoweiss’ campaign against Alison Weir and Greta Berlin in perfect context. It also explains why Mondoweiss banned Jeffrey Blankfort and why the Jewish outlet changed its comment policy just to make sure that it can block any attempt to criticize the Jewish state in the light of Jewish culture and my own study of Jewish tribalism. Just like Israel, Mondoweiss is terrified of the ‘dangerous world out there’. As far as Abarbanel’s definition of cult is concerned, Mondoweiss, JVP and Israel are actually identical.

Now my opinion piece’s thesis (albeit layered under my own stream of conscience gossamer) is clunky, but goes as follows: Should a small group of elites, who call themselves part of a cult or tribe, who have trillions of wealth at hand and, worse, have militaries and nuclear power at their disposal, control supposedly independent left-wing publishers?

Ahh, here, from the Times of Israel trumpeting the power of the cult, or what they call “our tribe”: 

As in previous years, Jews are disproportionately represented on the roster of the world’s wealthiest, with 10 Jews among the top 50. (The list, topped by Bill Gates, ranks from richest to slightly less rich.)

Larry Ellison, the founder of the tech giant Oracle Corporation, is the wealthiest Jew in the world and the fifth wealthiest person alive. At age 70, his net worth is $54.2 billion.

With a net worth of $35.5 billion, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is the second wealthiest Jew on the list and 14th wealthiest person overall. Mark Zuckerberg, still one of the world’s youngest billionaires at age 30, climbed five spots on the list to number 16 overall.

His net worth has grown to $33.4 billion.

Other Jews in the top 50 include casino magnate Sheldon Adelson ($31.4 billion), Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page ($29.2 and $29.7 billion), investors George Soros ($24.2 billion), Carl Icahn ($23.5 billion) and Len Blavatnik ($20.2 billion), and Dell Computer Founder Michael Dell ($19.2 billion).

There are several Jews among the newcomers on the list as well, including Russ Weiner, the founder and CEO of Rockstar energy drinks, Jerry Reinsdorf, the owner of the Chicago Bulls and the Chicago White Sox sports franchises, and Ken Grossman, a co-founder of the Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. Weiner is the son of prominent conservative radio talk show host Michael Savage (born Michael Weiner).

Seth Klarman, an investor in the Times of Israel, is also on the list, with a net worth of $1.5 billion.

While men far outnumber women on the list, a few Jewish women are on it, including Shari Arison ($4.4 billion), Karen Pritzker ($4.3 billion), Lynn Schusterman ($3.7 billion) and Doris Fisher ($3.2 billion). With a net worth of $1 billion, Sheryl Sandberg, of Facebook and “Lean In” fame, just makes the cutoff for the list.

Amazing how gloating and unified in the paper’s front in the exceptionalism of these people — their people — on the list. This was for 2015, but when you go to 2018, ToI, this is what we get from the Times:

5 Jews make Forbes’ list of top 10 wealthiest Americans

Forbes published its 2018 roster of America’s wealthiest this week, and five members of the tribe made the top 10 list.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg leads the Jewish pack at number 4, with a net worth of $61 billion. He is followed by software giant Oracle’s Larry Ellison at #5 with $58.4b and Google co-founder Larry Page at #6 with $53.8b.

Fellow co-founder Sergey Brin falls a bit behind with $52.4b, leaving him at #9. Finally, former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg closes out the top 10 with a respectable $51.8b.

The top three spots, by the way, are leaps and bounds ahead of the competition: Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet lead with $160b, $97b and $88b respectively.

Now, just highlighting the robber barons of old, that’s okay, in the minds of academics, media pundits, non-profit advocacy groups, and the like. No problem there if you are a leftist, or leaning left. And many Jews and non-Jews – historians, political scientists, writers of another clan – have attacked those 24 Robber Barons listed above but not so deeply the 10 and 5 Jews listed by Times of Israel. Many books have been written about the rape and rapine and destruction by other Capitalists and despots, especially those of empires tied to Christian – Catholic – crusades with the cross, gun and germ, as Jarod Diamond points out in his book, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. 

Yet, where are the movies and books criticizing a cult that has accumulated all that wealth and political and military power?

But note, the Israeli newspaper citing those rich bastards – I dare goyim or Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, pantheist, atheist, animist, anyone to attempt to degrade the power, the lust, the greed, the accumulation of so much wealth, the political pimping, the massive control of masses and the unbelievable influence on our futures, the 80 percent/90 percent  —  calls the five out of top ten thieves (billionaires) part of the tribe –

Their tribe, as in Jewish: “Forbes published its 2018 roster of America’s wealthiest this week, and five members of the tribe (Jews) made the top 10 list.”

Now, since I am not aligned to any religion, and since I believe in blinders off when criticizing or critiquing all religions, and then shedding light on the amount of hate and pathology anyone in any religion gains through power and paranoia, I can criticize the Christian Right, the Evangelicals, the Catholics, the Muslims, the Hindus . . . but, not the Jewish faith or the religious state of Israel. That is, without repercussions.

Any amount of light shed on Israel, or the project of apartheid they in that country are carrying  out, or on their despicable role in the middle east, or, well, when someone like me looks at, say, the Times of Israel or any propaganda wing of a government, religion or ideology tied to Judaism and then comes out with both fists pumping shedding light on their “tribe” and “religion” hitting high on the money scale, or influence scale, well, quite simply I then am an anti-Semite.

I can’t go into this in a short Op-ed, since so much has happened in just a few months tied to loyalty oaths to Israel extracted from public servants in the USA in many states, including that psycho state Texas, and all the core values of tribalism in religion leading nuclear states and financial kingdoms. Firing a teacher for not signing loyalty pledge to Israel. 

Antisemitic, man! And, for me, even citing someone like Gilad Atzmon in my articles singed me with the Scarlet A, or in the case of the controllers and the controlled opposition, “AS,” for anti-Semite.

I am talking about that bastion of “left” writing, Counterpunch, for now I am blacklisted, I think . . . . I have had a hell of a time getting things published there, and, well, the irony is that the editor, Jeffrey St. Clair, lives in Oregon City, and I have been working in the entire area known as the Portland metroplex/area. The pieces I have solicited involve ground truthing—yeah, a bit stream of consciousness, but real, about my struggle in the matrix, so to speak, and dealing with Portland politics. I come at my subjects with a bit of Studs Terkel and Gonzo mixed in, sort of, but with literary undertones. I publish regularly at Dissident Voice, and have a standing memoir-column at LA Progressive.

I have several intellectuals who read and like my stuff, and, well, here’s one that shall remain anonymous, with a followup from another source who indicates why St. Clair doesn’t answer my emails or publish my stuff. Again, when you get no answer from the editor of the rag, supposition abounds. Here’s my note to one intellectual writer, who does publish over at Counterpunch:

I do wonder, though, why Jeffrey has me blacklisted. I write about the plight of people on the streets, Americans, and in many cases, people in Portland, OR, where Jeffrey calls home (Oregon City is next to Portland). I write about my own struggle, since I am not tenured, am blacklisted from most jobs, and have no trust account or money flow from other sources.

Even environmental stuff, he flakes on. And my book review of women politicals, no go. Very much pisses me off seeing the repetition in Counterpunch railing against Trump, Democrats, Capitalism, when they need ground truthing, too.

Oh well!

Response from intellectual:

Yeah I have no idea but i m in touch with him of late so I may ask.  You certainly are better than most of what they publish.  Send to Patrice Greanville at the Greanville Post. I’m sure he’ll publish you.

And then another from someone else:

Hey I know this was only accidentally sent to me in a reply all slip up, but I can answer this question: your association with Gilad Atzmon, Israel Shamir and others of that circle and ilk. Counterpunch did a big housecleaning not long ago of all the authors they once published in this general vein and those associated with them.

And then my shot in the woods response to both the intellectuals:

Well, if this is true, then, we can continue to speak of how colonized the minds of so-called arbiters of left news and opinion are and growing everyday with more insipidity. First, my association with Gilad might be my citing him in articles. His publishing of articles on Dissident Voice isn’t enough of an association you speak of since many of the regulars at Counterpunch also are posted/published there. 

Housecleaning, I know is your term, but it speaks of a nefarious ideology that is counter to everything I know about radical and revolutionary thinking and writing. Who is in the ear of Jeffrey to even Google search me? I can go on about what that might look like, but without anything from Jeffrey on why I don’t get published in his rag, anymore, I shall stay mute.

Are we — those of us who don’t fit neat little lefty definitions, who are outside the narrative frame of what a good anti-capitalist and pro-socialist and pro-overthrowing of a cancerous government and systems of oppression writer is — going to be sent to Xinjiang to be indoctrinated/reindoctrinated as true blue leftists by Counterpunch through Eric Prince’s outfit? (see below for context). It’s absurd that any of this is even part and parcel what maybe causing the blacklisting of me from CP. I might see him and the editors not digging content of one or two of my articles/pieces that might speak to defending BDS or Gilad or what have you, but blanket censorship, if that’s what’s happening, is both surprising and not. And more reason the echo chambers of the left are rife with the gentry of academia and publishing and trust babies.

I do appreciate your input, and I have no other evidence that Jeffrey at CP is disregarding my pieces for any other reason. 

Paul

P.S. Funny those Chinese now adopting Prince to ethnically cleanse Muslims. Prince, the evangelical murderer, quintessential American Empire boy.

Independent of UK: A security firm co-founded by former navy Seal and US military services contractor Erik Prince has been awarded a contract by the Chinese authorities to build a “training centre” in Xinjiang, a region where Uighur Muslims have experienced a severe state crackdown.

The Hong Kong-listed Frontier Services Group (FSG), which provides security and logistics for companies in challenging environments, said it had signed a deal to run a training centre in the city of Kashgar, according to a statement posted on its Chinese website.

Here’s just a few days over at Counterpunch, some of the bread and butter of that rag:

• STEPHEN COOPER, Alabama Executions: Strictly a Christian Affair
• PATRICK COCKBURN, A Plague of Rats: How Years of Austerity Prompted Many Britons to Vote for Brexit
• VIJAY PRASHAD, The 12-Step Method of Regime Change
• RAMZY BAROUD, Gaza Rallies for Caracas: On the West’s Dangerous Game in Venezuela
• KENNETH SURIN,The Virginia Mountain Valley Pipeline Boondoggle
• DEAN BAKER, Low Unemployment: the Recipe for Higher Wages
• BINOY KAMPMARK, The Monitoring Game: China’s Artificial Intelligence Push
• JEFF MACKLER, L.A Teachers Strike: Wins, Losses and Prospects
• HOWARD LISNOFF, The Long Goodbye of Antiwar Protest
• ROBERT FISK, How the Murders of Journalists in the Middle East Are Brushed Aside
• CONN HALLINAN,
• Will Trump Really Launch a War on Iran?
• LOUISA WILLCOX, Kill That Bear: Anti-Grizzly Fever Hits Wyoming Again
• DEAN BAKER, Medicare-for-All is Not a Fantasy
• ROBERT HUNZIKER, Thwaites Glacier Startles Scientists
• GEORGE WUERTHNER, Don’t Fence Me In
• BEN DEBNEY, Is Politics Getting Worse, Or Are We Getting a Better Handle on How Bad It Has Always Been?
• MARK WEISBROT, Trump’s Illegal Regime Change Operation Will Kill More Venezuelans
• JOE CIRINCIONE, Gutting the INF: Bolton Must be Stopped
• ROBERT KOEHLER, Disarmament, Not Low-Grade Nukes
• PATRICK HILLER, Make Venezuela Great Again?
• SUSIE DAY, American Citizens are the Only Humans
• ELLIOT SPERBER
• MICHAEL HUDSON, Trump’s Brilliant Strategy to Dismember U.S. Dollar Hegemony
• PAUL STREET, The Capitalist Adults Are in the Room
• ROB URIE, Democrats Killed the Green New Deal
• GARIKAI CHENGU, Sanctions of Mass Destruction: America’s War on Venezuela
• MELVIN GOODMAN, Russia’s Proposal for North Korean Denuclearization: Will It Survive John Bolton?
• JEFFREY ST. CLAIR, How Star Wars Came to Alaska
• NICK PEMBERTON, What Bernie Sanders Could Learn From Venezuela
• PETE DOLACK, Sorting Through the Lies About Venezuela
• DAVID ROSEN, The Denier-in-Chief: Trump and the Legitimation of False Consciousness
• BEN DANGL, “The Worst Option is War”: US Intervention in Venezuela Will Only Deepen the Country’s Crisis
• BRETT WILKINS, Elliott Abrams: A Human Rights Horror Show in Three Acts
• JOHN MCMURTRY, US Enemies and the Lawless ‘Rule of Law’
• JONATHAN COOK, A Liberal Elite Still Luring Us Towards the Abyss

It’s great that this line-up delves into global politics, in the deep state and economy, looking at Venezuela and the Brexit. Great that climate change on a global level is looked at. Great. But, is there room for a local voice? For a writer like me.

This is all I got on Counterpunch – Paul K. Haeder.

And what does it mean, cleaning house? Or associations with Atzmon, Israel Shamir and others of that circle and ilk?

Here, the introduction to Atzmon’s book, The Wandering Who?

Gilad: The following is Jean Bricmont’s introduction for the French edition of The Wandering Who (La Parabole d’Esther). It was published in English a few days ago by  Counterpunch print edition.

The French edition is available here.

“In Defense of Gilad Atzmon” By Jean Bricmont

Pro-Palestinian friends had repeatedly warned me: Gilad Atzmon is anti-Semitic, he is bad for the Palestinian cause, he may even work for Israel. I must have a contrarian turn of mind, because that kind of talk never stopped me from regularly reading his blog (quite the opposite) with a mixture of fascination and amusement. It struck me that an Israeli Jew living in the U.K., a voluntary exile, who is accused of Antisemitism, among others by pro-Palestinian Jews and Palestinian militants, and whose conferences draw protesting demonstrations from “anti-racist” organizations, was at the very least an interesting curiosity. Moreover, having myself “escaped” from the religion in which I was forced to grow up (Catholicism), I have an instinctive sympathy for all those who break, often brutally, with the myths and constraints of their childhood. Atzmon’s themes, the politics of identity and memory, are at the very heart of our contemporary social debates. It ought to be possible to listen to a truly politically incorrect viewpoint on these issues, that of someone who defines himself as a “proud self-hating Jew.”

But coming from a non-Jew like me, isn’t there something suspect, or downright unhealthy, in such an interest? When Atzmon’s editor asked me to write the preface to the French edition of The Wandering Who?, I told myself that this would be an opportunity to answer that question and, above all, to explain why Atzmon should be heard and discussed.

It is ever so easy to “demonstrate” the alleged Antisemitism of Atzmon. Frequently, including at the very start of his book, Atzmon makes a distinction between three meanings of the word “Jewish.” It can apply to persons who adhere to the Jewish religion, with whom he has no quarrel; to people of Jewish origin, with whom he has also no problem; and, finally, to what he calls the third category, that is, those who, without being particularly religious, constantly stress their Jewish “identity” and set it before and above their simple membership in the human race. It suffices thereupon to interpret in the first sense (people of Jewish origin) the word “Jewish” when Atzmon uses it in the third sense, in a style that is often extremely polemical, to “prove” that he is anti-Semitic.

However, when a French essayist, Bernard-Henri Lévy, uses all his immense influence to push his country into a war against Libya and then declares afterward that he did so “as a Jew” and “faithful” to his name – which is not exactly a rational argument, but are wars ever waged for rational reasons? – people who are not of Jewish origin should at least be allowed to wonder about that Jewish identity in whose name they are dragged into a war which, whatever one may think about it, was clearly not a war of self-defense for France.

Is it legitimate to criticize Jews in the sense of Atzmon’s third category? To start with, it is obvious that each individual has a perfect right to “feel” a sense of belonging to a group of which he or she is proud, or which he or she thinks contributes something important to the idea the person has of himself or herself, whether Jewish, Breton, French, Catholic, Black, Muslim, etc. Since all these identities stem from the hazards of birth, such feelings of pride are irrational, but who would try to force human beings to be rational?

The problem arises when these identities acquire a privileged political status, exactly as when religions acquire such a status. When a community, grouped around its “identity,” demands certain rights – or compensations, or privileges – others who do not share that identity should be allowed to challenge the justification of those claims. Just as when a religion seeks to impose its own morality on society as a whole. Identity politics is to be found among blacks, Muslims, women, etc. One may even suggest that politics today is more and more reduced to a conflict between identities, socioeconomic questions having been relegated to the management of non-elected experts. But there is also a Jewish identity politics, whose implications go far beyond the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and which affects, among other things, freedom of expression or relations with Muslims.

[…]

That said, it is probable that genuine Antisemitism (understood as general hostility toward persons of Jewish origin) is growing, and to a disturbing extent. But that rise of Antisemitism is due primarily to the incredible arrogance of Israeli policy, to the behavior of its supporters in France, to their suicidal determination to impose on the French people both a policy that they don’t want and a de facto censorship which prevents them from protesting. The way “combating Antisemitism” is actually carried out at present – even with the best intentions in the world – only provoked by any kind of censorship and, in this case, increases Antisemitism. Really combating Antisemitism requires giving up the way the “fight against Antisemitism” is waged, through intimidation and censorship. Those who fail to understand that should reflect a bit more on the history of “real existing socialism” and of Catholicism in its heyday.

Jean Bricmont teaches physics at the University of Louvain in Belgium. This text is adapted from the preface to La parabole d’Esther (Editions Demi-Lune 2012), the French edition of Atzmon’s book, The Wandering Who? A Study of Jewish Identity Politics.

It’s interesting, that CP would be this parochial and short-sighted. Gilad Atzmon has published at CP, from 2012 to April 2015. Here:

In any case, my association with Gilad includes some emails to him, and liberal use of some of his hilarious and insightful stuff on world politics and around the Jewish State in some of my articles; but there are many who see this cabal of thinkers in the USA, the left versus right dichotomy always harped on over at Counterpunch as the same old saw and same number of axes to grind. Now, I will say some of the writing and the authors are fabulous, and, well, unlike this writer, Steven Church, who vows to not read Counterpunch as much, I am more than willing to look at all sides of the left-left divide.

Patrick Cockburn’s recent article is one example of why I read CounterPunch less often than I used to. Or, at the least, why I have become more critical of their editorial stance. With this article, I have the impression I’m reading a Bernie Sanders speech, of being Judas-goaded into the camp of what I consider a kind of useless caviar Left. While maybe not as bad as The Guardian (I prefer OffGuardian), there are too many weasel words, phrases, and statements that reek of Establishment consensus. That if you’re going to refer to the head-chopping proxies, armed and funded by the US and its good buddies, Saudi Arabia, the UK, and other assorted vassals, as “rebels” rather than the paid lieutenants of the criminal gang in DC, London, Riyadh or Paris, you’re basically saying it’s okay to murder at arm’s length, to somehow plausibly deny any real, true, strong connection to the crime or the perpetrators. Plausible Deniability being spook-speak for basically lying, when timidly asked, about any crime they’ve just committed.

Is it so true that Robert Fisk and Patrick Cockburn have more and more difficulties getting published if they fail to toe some lines? Probably. For Counterpunch, what lines do they have to toe? Or which ones have I failed to recognize. Well, the cost of their on-line rag has gone up, and the cost of being a radical in America has gone up in price too.

Hell, just being Sy Hersh, not exactly a rad, what is that, he can’t get published? That’s not true, but he has been kettled from the big news outlets. JSTOR interview here:

Well, I mean, look, I’m exalted, you know what I mean, so I’ll get work. At The New Yorker I had a contract every year, but there was a long time when they needed me more than I needed them, so I was being paid very well by them––although insurance and all the other stuff, I took care of myself. That was the downside of not being a staff reporter.

Since then, the pay is ridiculously much less. Don’t forget, there was a period in the 70s and 80s where magazines were flourishing. I can’t tell you how many books I made more money on magazine syndication than I did on the actual book.

Like when Harpers published a 30,000 word excerpt of the My Lai story, right?

Not only that, just even books I wrote into the early ’90s, if it was an Asia thing, there was a Japanese magazine that would pay thirty or thirty-five thousand dollars to reprint. Nobody pays anything like that now. Are you kidding? Japanese magazines aren’t even in the market anymore.

I don’t know what’s going to happen to the media, but somebody told me today that even the editor of the Washington Post is worried that in six or eight or 10 years, everything will be online.

So how do I, a ground truther, struggling, today at 62 who has many many interests, who is hectored in (and out of) the jobs I have for being a “commie” and who cannot work with mainstream small or big media, or so-called alternative media, because of the prescripts the media have in place, and the actual lock-step all news sources tend to have to keep themselves hermetically sealed in their own echo chamber.

I deserve (and many many more than I) a chance at a larger audience (CP) because I am that audience, and I have paid my dues and have the wherewithal to not back down to authority. I know, I know, I deserve is a big statement, one that could easily be ridiculed as naive, or just inane. Sorry.

I say, so the fuck what?

Good luck to the people who think they are free when they have the modicum of power over schmucks like me. Is that the editorship of Counterpunch.

Finally, the list of top donors to universities in the USA I alluded to. Imagine, that youthful reporter of the college newspaper uncovering dirt or stuff on one of these and printing it in the college rag? Look at the variety of colleges, and this is just one list of dozens.

1. Robert Woodruff – Emory University
2. Sanford I. Weill – Cornell University
3. John D. Hollingsworth, Jr. – Furman University
4. Gerald and Ronnie Chan – Harvard University
5. Jay H. Shidler – University of Hawaii Manoa
6. Frank Batten, Sr. – University of Virginia
7. Robert A. Day – Claremont McKenna College
8. John P. and Tashia F. Morgridge – University of Wisconsin Madison
9. Edward P. Bass – Yale University
10. Sandra and Edward Meyer – Cornell University
11. Charles T. Munger – University of Michigan
12. Irwin Mark Jacobs and Joan Kline Jacobs – Cornell University & Technion-Israel Institute of Technology
13. John W. Kluge – Columbia University
14. Kenneth Langone – New York University
15. Thomas Siebel – University of Illinois
16. Patrick J. and Lore Harp McGovern – Massachusetts Institute of Technology
17. Louis A. Simpson – Northwestern University & Princeton University
18. Stephen M. Ross – University of Michigan Ann Arbor
19. John and Marion Anderson – University of California Los Angeles
20. Samuel Tak Lee – Massachusetts Institute of Technology
21. Hansjorg Wyss – Harvard University
22. George Lucas – University of Southern California
23. John A. Paulson – Harvard University
24. Walter H. Annenberg – University of Pennsylvania
25. T. Boone Pickens – Oklahoma State University
26. Michael Bloomberg – Johns Hopkins University
27. Terrence M. and Kim Pegula – Pennsylvania State University
28. Kenneth Griffin – Harvard University
29. Peter B. Lewis – Princeton University
30. Phillip H. Knight – University of Oregon & Stanford University
31. Eli and Edythe L. Broad – Michigan State University
32. Stephen Schwarzman – Yale University
33. David Tepper – Carnegie Mellon University
34. Pierre and Pam Omidyar – Tufts University
35. John Arrillaga – Stanford University
36. William H. Scheide – Princeton University
37. Dawn M. and Jerome Greene – Columbia University
38. John Jackson – University of Texas Austin
39. Raymond and Ruth Perelman – University of Pennsylvania
40. David and Dana Dornsife – University of Southern California
41. Ira and Mary Lou Fulton – Arizona State University
42. Robert E. and Dorothy King – Stanford University
43. Julius Silver – New York University
44. A. Alfred Taubman – University of Michigan
45. John and Julie Mork – University of Southern California
46. Ruth Clark and Phillip Forbes Holton – DePauw University
47. William S. Dietrich, II – University of Pittsburgh
48. Roberta Buffett Elliott – Northwestern University
49. Peter H. and Paula Lunder – Colby College
50. Ronda Stryker and William Johnston – Western Michigan University

Some of these people are household names, sort of, like Phillip Knight (#30) and Eli Broad (#31), George Lucas, T. Boone Pickens and Michael Bloomberg (#23, #25, #26 respectively) . In the end, though, do we look at how they accumulated their wealth? What deceptions, what inhumanity, what political highjinx, what desecration of human rights and environmental safety have these people and their industries and investments been involved with?

The point being, just where do we go from here, now that the Internet is bought and sold by the power elite? Where do we go with PayPal, which is forced down our collective throats? Do we boycott because PayPal billionaire founder works for Donald Trump on nefarious projects? Can I criticize Thiel for his philosophy and political thought process, or is he triple-off limits: gay, foreign born, Jewish, Trumpy?

Billionaire investor Peter Thiel is reportedly becoming a key adviser to President Donald Trump and is beginning to stock his administration with friends and former associates.

In December, the PayPal founder set up a meeting between Mr Trump and David Gelertner, a Yale University computer scientist and candidate for White House science adviser.

Four days before Mr Trump’s inauguration, Mr Gelertner met at Trump Tower with the president-elect, his chief strategist Steve Bannon, and Mr Thiel.

Towards the end of last year, Mr Thiel organised a meeting between Mr Trump and several Silicon Valley tech leaders, such as Apple CEO Tim Cook and Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg.

German-borne, now given New Zealand citizenship, Thiel is the face of the typical billionaire, but this one is Trumpy-heavy, gay, and emblematic of how deceptive and how in league with the devil ALL rich people are! Thiel, from Germany, hard right gay, believes all media and all members of the Press should be afraid of billionaires who can launch lawsuits against them or their employers to chillingly stop any criticism of their neo-fascist kleptocractic-loving ideals. (Killed Gawker!),

Peter Thiel has made his biggest political contribution since his divisive bet on Donald Trump in 2016, investing $1 million into a conservative advocacy group that is backing key Republican candidates before November.

The donation to the Club for Growth, revealed Thursday in a new campaign finance disclosure, could be a signal that Thiel plans to reassert himself as a political donor despite some unease with Trump. Thiel has been a fairly modest giver in the grand scheme of presidential politics, but his vocal and financial support of Trump in the last cycle made him a real political player in the early days of the Trump presidency.

Thiel cut the $1 million check on Sept. 27, according to the disclosure. He has made contributions of about $350,000 to the Republican National Committee and other GOP groups and candidates earlier this election cycle.

The high-profile investor and Facebook board member has voiced some discomfort with Trump since helping elect him and speaking at the Republican National Convention.

“Obviously there are all sorts of things that are somewhat disappointing,” he said in March, “and at the same time, I don’t know how much one can expect.”

Thiel moved to Los Angeles earlier this year — a change of address that he’s attributed to a revulsion with Silicon Valley’s politics and culture.

In 2016, he gave $1.25 million to a super PAC sponsored primarily by New York hedge funder Bob Mercer — not a massive check in the world of big-money politics, but an amount that stood out in a Silicon Valley that heavily financed Hillary Clinton’s presidential run.

The Club for Growth is a hardline conservative group that has gleefully challenged even Republican incumbents it feels are too far to the left. It has focused almost exclusively on fiscal issues, which should appeal to Thiel, who has described himself in the past as libertarian.

Money money money thrown at the racist, homophobic, anti-Jew Trump. Whew, what a mad mad mad world!

The proposition is that we are all in the sights of the billionaires, millionaires and their sycophants and legal class. Imagine, any amount of criticism of Thiel puts us in the cross-hairs? From the New Republic:

The big legal fight in 2016 between Gawker and Peter Thiel (featuring Hulk Hogan!) was seemingly preordained for movie treatment. It featured an irresistible cast of characters: a vampiric Silicon Valley billionaire, an aging pro wrestler, and a group of dirtbag New York reporters. But Nobody Speak, directed by Brian Knappenberger, isn’t really about Gawker or Thiel or Hulk Hogan’s penis. It’s about inequality.

It was under Daulerio’s byline that Gawker published the Hulk Hogan sex tape that ultimately led to Hogan, a.k.a. Terry Bollea, being awarded $140 million in damages by a Florida jury. Gawker Media, founder Nick Denton, and Daulerio all ended up filing for bankruptcy. It wasn’t until after the trial ended that it was reported by Forbes that Thiel was secretly funding Bollea’s case. Thiel claims that he did so because Gawker “has been a singularly terrible bully,” most notably by outing him in a blog post in 2007. Denton, for his part, is convinced that Thiel was mad that Gawker Media, through its Valleywag blog, was a thorn in the side of Thiel and his powerful friends in Silicon Valley.

But as Nobody Speak points out, these are mere details. The story of Gawker’s murder boils down to the fact that a very, very rich man was able to destroy a publication he disliked with impunity. As Floyd Abrams, a lawyer specializing in the First Amendment, says in the documentary, what Thiel has done is to “potentially imperil entities who upset large, rich, powerful people and institutions. And it’s not limited to individuals. This can be corporations.” By opening with the comically enormous hold on Daulerio’s bank account, the film viscerally illustrates the division between billionaires like Thiel and the rest of us.

But not just Hulk Hogan and his penis or Thiel’s coming out (or forced out) as a gay. We are talking about bread and butter journalism, the Las Vegas Review-Journal:

Knappenberger underscores this idea by dedicating the final third of his documentary not to Gawker, but to another media company: the Las Vegas Review-Journal. In January 2016, the paper was mysteriously bought by an anonymous entity—even Review-Journal staffers were kept in the dark. Audio shows Michael Schroeder, the man who helped facilitate the deal, being pressed by the staff to reveal the new owner, to which he fumblingly responds, “We really don’t think … they want you to focus on your job.”

The film viscerally illustrates the division between billionaires like Thiel and the rest of us.

So they did. It was Review-Journal reporters themselves who uncovered their new owner: the billionaire casino magnate and Republican heavyweight donor Sheldon Adelson. After the purchase, it was reported that Adelson barred reporters from writing stories about him and that stories about Adelson’s business deals were either killed or heavily edited.

Finally, the censorship and thuggery of Israel, both Firsters in the USA, and around the world:

The Lobby – USA, the four-part Al Jazeera documentary on how the government and intelligence agencies of Israel work with US domestic Jewish groups to spy on, smear and attack critics, that was blocked under heavy Israeli pressure, has been leaked online by the Chicago-based Electronic Intifada, the French website Orient XXI and the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar. To discuss the series, in a two-part interview, Chris Hedges is joined by Ali Abunimah, co-founder of Electronic Intifada, and author and journalist, Max Blumenthal.

Ahh, it’s a mad-mad-mad and wild world that has so many secular Jews like Finkelstein and Chomsky attacking the BDS movement, still wanting a two-state solution which has been a dead-end, literal, dead Palestinians on the road of Israel’s disproportionate response to rock throws and medics attending to the wounded! From the New Republic:

BDS advocates say that the campaign for a two-state solution has brought nothing for Palestinians but a more entrenched Israeli occupation of their lands. They chalk up Finkelstein’s old-fashioned support for a two-state solution to his age or desire for attention. “There was a time when Norman Finkelstein was one of the loudest and one of the only voices on this issue,” says Rania Khalek, an editor at The Electronic Intifada. “He’s done incredibly valuable work, but with BDS growing, other people besides him are at the center who are most important.” “There are a number of people among an older generation of activists and advocates who were not quite prepared by the younger caste who have a strong message but differences in tactics,” says Yousef Munayyer, a leading Palestinian-American activist.

[…]

He first gained attention in academic circles in 1984 for exposing the poor scholarship of From Time Immemorial, a book by journalist Joan Peters. The book claimed that Palestinians didn’t exist—that they lacked deep roots in historical Palestine but in fact were Arabs who swarmed the deserted land only once Zionists began developing it in the late nineteenth century. From Time Immemorial was a best-seller initially praised by everyone from Saul Bellow to Elie Wiesel to historian Barbara Tuchman, who called it “a historical event in itself.”

He became politically reengaged by opposing Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. But wary of being duped again, he spent an entire summer in the New York Public Library combing through the population records of historical Palestine and comparing them to Peters’s book. He discovered that From Time Immemorial was, as the Israeli historian Yehoshua Porath eventually put it, “a sheer forgery.” Finkelstein published his findings, and Peters’s book is now widely considered, as David Remnick wrote in the New Yorker a few years ago, “thoroughly discredited.” Finkelstein’s reputation was made.

Here we go with more anti-BDS movement, US of Israel style, North Carolina:

Book review of Gary Brumback’s Life’s Triangles and America’s Power Elites (2019)

by Paul Haeder / February 4th, 2019

 To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

—Auguries of Innocence, by William Blake

There is an American Native game, counting coup, which is both rarefied and possibly the answer to the male testosterone/female co-opting of testosterone that has given rise to Civilizational humanity since the so-called fertile crescent gestated the evil arts of subjugating man, woman, child and ecosystems to a small cabal of landowners (sic) who got humanity to work for food.

I always go to Daniel Quinn and other neotribalists to look at the long-range, way back, to give some justification to a tribal and hunter-gatherer past that for many of us is locked in our genes, accessible to fewer and fewer people daily as the world becomes a landmine of DNA-warping, cell-depleting, culture-sapping madness orchestrated by white men (mostly).

In our cultural mythology we see ourselves as having left tribalism behind the way modern medicine left the leech and the bleeding bowl behind, and we did so decisively and irrevocably. This is why it’s so difficult for us to acknowledge that tribalism is not only the preeminently human social organization, it’s also the only unequivocally successful social organization in human history. Thus, when even so wise and thoughtful a statesman as Mikhail Gorbachev calls for “a new beginning” and “a new civilization,” he doesn’t doubt for a single moment that the pattern for it lies in the social organization that has introduced humanity to oppression, injustice, poverty, chronic famine, incessant violence, genocide, global warfare, crime, corruption, and wholesale environmental destruction. To consult, in our time of deepest crisis, with the unqualified success that humanity enjoyed here for more than three million years is quite simply and utterly unthinkable.

— Daniel Quinn, Beyond Civilization: Humanity’s Next Adventure 

What’s lovely about my own intersection with Gary Brumback – the author of the book this review-dash-screed is enveloping: Life’s Triangles and America’s Power Elites: Can the Living Field be Leveled?  — is that Gary reached out to me and solicited my comments and possible endorsement of this book (he’s a regular contributor to Dissident Voice), through the auspices of one of modern civilization’s double-edged swords – the world wide internet.

I think it’s both unreal and uniquely human to reach out across the digital universe, and when someone who is connected to me through my words, and finds some linkage, then I believe that’s sign enough to make some connection deeper, or revealing.

It’s gutsy for this 84-year-old former organizational psychologist to have reached out to me (I’m not now your typical thinker and writer), and the proof is in the pudding when it comes to his writing and then how the diner/reader of those ideas, through the grist of his words and grammar (courses) gets the true taste (or terroir) of the author’s (chef’s) orchestration of ideas and composition.

As many readers of my work know, I am captivated by holism and systems thinking, and many times I am looking at life – universalities — through my own optics. I understand the drive to want to understand how tidal wetlands work and how elephant seals can go down 7,770 feet for up to two hours without succumbing to the bends or nitrogen narcosis.

But inherent in that learning and yearning, I understand the power of attracting forces, both physics and metaphysics, and the value in coincidences, both mathematical and magical, and more and more, daily, I am grasping the reasoning for my own living and thinking and breathing. Here I am on the Oregon Coast (central) just having done my first day’s class to be a certified marine mammal (and to help tourists/visitors understand the other zoological and ecological concerns) naturalist. I was about to fiddle with my short story collection which is coming out in several months from Cirque Press, and I was also prepped to blog from my post here in Otis, Oregon.

Instead, I answered the email call from Gary to take a look at his book and write up something. What interests me most about fellows like Brumback is his tenacity to not only understand the world around him using a variety of tools from his 84 years on the planet, but also his desire to be one among us as writers – anti-authoritarian thinkers who deeply question the role of this country in the upsetting of people and cultures throughout the globe.

“Call of Duty” is what I see my role now turning 62 next week. I have engendered good will and hard learning in thousands of students, at public gatherings where I “ran the show” (a hat off to Ed Sullivan) and in my writing, big and small. I’ve written three-parts to my hell-hole experience working with homeless veterans at the Starvation Army in Oregon. But in reality, the linchpin for me is my call of duty, call and answer, to carry forth in any way possible, the message of revolt. Speaking of revolt, I remember hanging out with Robert Bly on two occasions – one time in El Paso as we made it over to Juarez for tequila, and another time 23 years later in Spokane with bourbon and quietude. I wrote a promo article for his appearance in Spokane as part of Get Lit!. His poem, “Call and Answer,” is powerful, even at 17 years old.

I bring this up as a tangent to describe some of what I interpret as the core value in Gary’s new book:

Call and Answer

Tell me why it is we don’t lift our voices these days
And cry over what is happening. Have you noticed
The plans are made for Iraq and the ice cap is melting?

I say to myself: “Go on, cry. What’s the sense
Of being an adult and having no voice? Cry out!
See who will answer! This is Call and Answer!”

We will have to call especially loud to reach
Our angels, who are hard of hearing; they are hiding
In the jugs of silence filled during our wars.

Have we agreed to so many wars that we can’t
Escape from silence? If we don’t lift our voices, we allow
Others (who are ourselves) to rob the house.

How come we’ve listened to the great criers—Neruda,
Akhmatova, Thoreau, Frederick Douglass—and now
We’re silent as sparrows in the little bushes?

Some masters say our life lasts only seven days.
Where are we in the week? Is it Thursday yet?
Hurry, cry now! Soon Sunday night will come.

It is the Saturday of my life, most likely, as I just spent sometime at Cascadia Head, where the Salmon River and the Pacific Ocean battle it out during the various tides ebbing and flowing. Alone, with harbor seals popping their heads up, and their partner, a river otter, watching me look at two bald eagles looking for seal placenta to gobble up.

Here, visiting Canadian photographer Isabelle Hayeur who is on a residency at Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, is shooting the Oregon Coast. The Canadian is here on the Pacific Coast of Oregon for first time, and her residencycontinues her exploration of water and land, people and ecosystems — to show the changes to the ecosystems caused by humans. Here, that Cascadia Head shot and the Salmon hitting the Pacific near Lincoln City, Oregon.

I know for sure as the colluding forces of capitalism – a real misanthropy of both the mind and body – eat at my exterior, the very simple act of movement — with my plodding bag of bones — if I am to survive in this sick world of capitulation of both parties working to mine the last corpuscles of the workers and working class — is sometimes herculean. It’s my Saturday, as Bly states, but I am not sure of this writer Gary’s place in time, if it’s Thursday for him, or Sunday.

I’m not saying this is the 84-year-old Brumback’s position, but I know his clarion calls are what Bly states clearly in these stanzas from this small poem –

We will have to call especially loud to reach
Our angels, who are hard of hearing; they are hiding
In the jugs of silence filled during our wars.

Have we agreed to so many wars that we can’t
Escape from silence? If we don’t lift our voices, we allow
Others (who are ourselves) to rob the house.

Brumback is looking to reach those angels of our better selves, and he is wanting the cries of great writers and thinkers, alive and passed on, to push out the silence that is engulfing the entire body politic and public of this ripped-off-land-and-killing-natives country that has made more than a trillion pacts with the devil, a foundation that daily reverberates as the grand Faustian bargain of keeping silent for the few spoils of capitalism.

Americans are in their own tight spot now: keeping on the lights, fridge half full, Super Bowl projected on plasma TV, the latest model of Jeep in the driveway, work that eats at the soul and the body. The bargain, I believe, Brumback is not so quick to go quietly into the night, as this book uncovers the full weight of an old man’s lamentations and ruminations.

His book is compelling for those young minds that have been colonized and whose hearts and souls have been metastasized by consumer culture, the true bedrock of capitalism. Small intonations of the country’s history and this current manifestation of corruption are the drumbeats to his march forward in this quickly drawn book of very big historical ideas unleashed for the uninitiated mind.

Back to that Native American counting coup allusion I begin with:  It’s sort of what I see unfolding as my own literary device while reading Brumback’s book, Life’s Triangles and America’s Power Elites. “Coup” for the Lakota and others was counted to establish position in the tribal honor system. Status mattered, and competition to count the greatest coup was intense. Here’s the beauty of this bravery – getting close enough to touch an enemy with a coup stick without causing him harm.

The self-styled book is by former organizational psychologist Brumback, who counts his own coup many times in this book, as he wanders through the history of the United States, with both whimsy and with a Quaker’s eye toward justice. He uses a variety of wide angle and telephoto angles in order to look deeper at the simple equation of the rich — with military might behind them — controlling the destiny of the country – us, its inhabitants – and the insecurity of the planet, from all the other inhabitants of 192 countries plus the flora and fauna of the planet’s Gaia.

Here, for the Lakota, killing an enemy far away or at long range did not count as a coup. Moreover, winning by overwhelming numbers counted as a “non coup.” Bravery involving a solitary warrior in a headlong battle charge that was climaxed by touching, with no lethal tap of a stick, now that was a coup, as Indians harmlessly touched an enemy with wooden sticks for the purpose of counting coup.

In so many ways, Brumback’s book “touches”—counts coup — upon the enemies of humankind, with myriad of histories of this country since first contact with those Lakota, et al. The writer delves into the mess of the United Snakes of America utilizing quick riffs while cracking open these causal relationships of greed, power, hierarchy, elitism, pathology in this country’s early years and now advancing into today’s predatory capitalism and parasitic economics (or our Shock Doctrine derived from our Monroe Doctrine), Brumbuck is interested in.

He’s also demonstrating another sort of intellectual “counting coup” in a sense since Brumback touches the enemy with his own touchstones and short pithy points connecting to the current state of global affairs.

His goal, it seems, is to consolidate a lot of his writing over his 84 years on planet earth and to codify a body of work he’s studiously read and then to bring himself to some conclusion that there might be some hope for his children and grandchildren. His belief in organizational psychology as a determinant of how bloody sociopathic the not-so-modern corporation is and how that pathology has twisted and turned (morphed) into a gigantic toxic and self-replicating broken set of laws regulating the elite’s projects of domination and extermination is the umbrella covering his writing.

Oscar Wilde is right when defining a cynic in his work, Lady Windemere’s Fan, with Lord Darlington quip : “A person who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

From Raj Patel’s first chapter, The Value of Nothing, Patel can help me understand Brumback’s criticism of capitalism and his somewhat of a defense of it in some idealized state that has never yet existed:

From its inception, the free market has spawned discontent, but rare are the moments when that discontent coalesces across society, when a sufficiently large group of people can trace their unhappiness to free market politics, and demand change. The New Deal in the United States and the postwar European welfare states were partly a result of a consortium of social forces pushing for new limits to markets, and a renegotiation of the relationship between individuals and society. What’s new about this crisis is that it’s pervasively global, and comes at the last moment at which we might prevent a global climate catastrophe. But the breadth and depth of both these crises reflect how profoundly our society has been transfixed by free market culture. To understand how this will affect us in the twenty-first century, we need to understand how it began, and to ask why today’s markets look the way they do

Here, the book Gary sent me, in a nutshell, which Brumbuck puts in his own book’s preface:

Here’s a quick overview of this book. It’s a substantial distillation of and addition to my relevant books and articles on the subject.

The first chapter may seem very abstract and academic, but believe me, it is about very real matters, life itself. This chapter lays the groundwork for understanding why the power elite do what they do and what happens when they do it.

The second chapter explains the very nature of power and introduces my concept and illustration of the “power tower” with the elite at the top and the “les Misérables” at the very bottom with several levels in between.

Chapter Three probes what makes the power elite “tick” by looking inside their “black boxes.” When you read this chapter, you will understand that I don’t flippantly ascribe evil motives and evildoing to the power elite.

Chapter Four thoroughly describes and explains the power elite’s “badvantages,” my term for situations and circumstances that give advantage to bad behavior. For example, “our” government gives many handouts to its master, Corporate America.

Chapter Five describes the seemingly limitless bad behavior of the power elite and their functionaries of the corpocracy.

I want to warn you about Chapter Six. It is a true horror story of the consequences of the power elite’s evil doing. By the time you have finished reading this chapter you may be a bit depressed if you believe it is credible. As an antidote I’ll try to inject some homespun humor now and then, starting now. “There is no beating around the Bush, he is what he is.”

And finally, Chapter Seven asks whether the power tower with its power inequality can be changed to the power rectangle with its power equality; in other words, can the living field finally be levelled? This question explains the question mark at the end of the book’s subtitle. Putting there instead an exclamation mark would have been sheer balderdash.

What his book does is galvanize much of his reading – and respect for – other writers who have peered through the looking glass of the Military-Prison-Financial-Ag-Chemical-Education-Legal-Patent-Pharma-Med-IT-AI-Real Estate-Insurance-Education Complex to discover the truths many of us in the anti-authority/ anti-hierarchical/pro-humanity/ pro-universal rights of nature have discovered through our discourse, our deep and fledgling philosophies, and our own experiences in the insanity echo chamber that is modern and post-modern America.

He dedicates this book to Howard Zinn, and Brumback mentions that other books he himself has written could not have been envisioned or codified without the teachings and writings of Zinn:

I am also dedicating this book to the late Howard Zinn, the author of a book on American history that is a must read! I dedicated my previous book to him, which shows how indebted a follower I am. Like my previous book, I could not have written the one you have in your hands were it not for Mr. Zinn’s illuminating history book that tells the true history of America [A People’s History of the United States, 2005]. The power elite understandingly hate Mr. Zinn’s book. The former governor of my home state, for example, was gleeful upon hearing of Mr. Zinn’s death and promptly banned his book statewide from high school curricula. Is it any wonder that my high school history classes in the 1950’s remain the same today, “trivialized, militarized and numbing?”

What I love about this Will Rogersian approach to history Gary brings to this book is the power of his short, deliberate passages outlying the rules and madness that have been fomented in the name of a small elite in this country. He captivates himself in each section, as if new to the material himself, embarking on a self-styled journey to tell what he knows and what he’s read.

This book is a compilation, a Popular Mechanics and Farmer’s Almanac of Brumback’s autobiographical intersection at explaining how capitalism is a game of manipulated vestiges of a global  usury past, where Fiefdoms and Kingdoms and unholy alliances of dictators and religions have splayed humankind. No matter where Gary treads, he comes up with the same underpinning for the book, and his other books and probably all his other writings, as well as his own conundrum now in advanced age:

I’ll finally end this long Preface with two questions and an advance notice about my choice of certain nouns and pronouns.

First question: do you think on the one hand that there is a tolerable difference between a handful of evil doers choosing villagers in a far-away land and then bombing them to smithereens in our names and on the other hand the many millions of us letting it happen?

Second question: do you think the surviving loved ones blame the few or us in general? You can tell my answer by my varying use in the text of nouns versus pronouns. For example, instead of writing “the military bombs innocent people,” I will occasionally write “we bomb innocent people” to emphasize that whatever is done by a certain few is being done in our names. Since you might find this practice irritating if I always do it, I will do it only occasionally.

Here in the preface of his book, Brumback sets up the entire tome on a simple proposition – what is done and said by/in Las Vegas/USA stays in/with those living/working/dying in Las Vegas/USA.

The contradiction is blaring, though, as one of my friends, Andre Vltchekstates in his humanitarian and global writing – that the rest of the world, that is, the world other than Western Civilization, i.e. Europe/EU, UK, USA, Canada – pays for its/our so-called “higher standard” of living, higher level of economic/environmental/health well-being, and its/our unlimited (seemingly) time to ponder its/our own rotten and degenerate selves.

Through the eyes of someone (Gary’s unblindered eyes, as he states it in his book) in this country, USA, who believes that capitalism somehow can be fixed or somehow is derived from a fair system of checks and balances (however, capitalism always relies on growth and continual growth, antithetical to anything we know about the limits of growth, the finite systems), I venture close to proposing to Gary another set of principles needed to live as Homo Sapiens in this world, tied to retrenchement and a form of ecosocialism, far from any new and improved or regurgitated capitalism:  we are living in a closed system of planet earth, and the fragility of the commons (air, water, sea, land, food) now is even more pronounced with ecosystems collapsing (Sixth Mass extinction on steroids) from over over-harvesting, over-polluting, over-rearranging/razing.

Ecosocialism is Utopian, but so are we as writers and thinkers:

Ecosocialism is a vision of a transformed society in harmony with nature, and the development of practices that can attain it. It is directed toward alternatives to all socially and ecologically destructive systems, such as patriarchy, racism, homophobia and the fossil-fuel based economy. It is based on a perspective that regards other species and natural ecosystems as valuable in themselves and as partners in a common destiny.

Ecosocialism shares with traditional socialism a passion for justice. It shares the conviction that capitalism has been a deadly detour for humanity. We understand capitalism to be a class society based on infinite expansion, through the exploitation of labor and the ransacking of nature.

Ecosocialists are also guided by the life-ways of indigenous peoples whose economies are embedded in a classless society in fundamental unity with nature. We draw upon the wisdom of the ages as well as the latest science, and will do what can be done to bring a new society, beyond capitalism, into existence.

I go back to Andre Vltchek who looks at the polluting effects of capitalism on cultures wide and far, tied to the so-called artist :

You say “European cultural institutions”, and what should come immediately to mind are lavish concerts, avant-garde art exhibitions, high quality language courses and benevolent scholarships for talented cash-strapped local students.

It is all so noble, so civilized!

Or, is it really? Think twice!

I wrote my short novel, “Aurora”, after studying the activities of various Western ‘cultural institutions’, in virtually all the continents of the Planet. I encountered their heads; I interacted with the ‘beneficiaries’ of various funding schemes, and I managed to get ‘behind the scenes’.

What I discovered was shocking: these shiny ‘temples of culture’ in the middle of so many devastated and miserable cities worldwide (devastated by the Western imperialism and by its closest allies – the shameless local elites), are actually extremely closely linked to Western intelligence organizations. They are directly involved in the neo-colonialist project, which is implemented virtually on all continents of the world, by North America, Europe and Japan.

‘Culture’ is used to re-educate and to indoctrinate mainly the children of the local elites. Funding and grants are put to work where threats and killing were applied before. How does it work? It is actually all quite simple: rebellious, socially-oriented and anti-imperialist local artists and thinkers are now shamelessly bought and corrupted. Their egos are played on with great skill. Trips abroad for ‘young and talented artists’ are arranged, funding dispersed, scholarships offered.

Carrots are too tasty, most would say, ‘irresistible’. Seals of approval from the Empire are ready to stamp those blank pages of the lives of still young, unrecognized but angry and sharp young artists and intellectuals from those poor, colonized countries. It is so easy to betray! It is so easy to bend.

Please note I am not comparing Gary or his book to other writers or their books/writing, some of whom he cites liberally throughout this latest one. I believe in a new way of book analysis, or reviewing a book – by putting myself into the stream of consciousness that cascades for someone like myself who in the process of reading will take to heart how closely or far away that content resonates with my own life and my own writing. It is the power of a book like Gary’s to incite not only my own deep introspection about what it means to be an American, someone who has worked (albeit struggled by not getting bought and sold by corporate America, but still . . . sold down the river in the careers I’ve held), but also what it means to be counter to almost anything and everything this country produces or stands for in its national collective consciousness.

His thesis for the book is tied to his own backing of organizational psychology. He uses these equations to illustrate where he’s coming from:

Anyone’s Equation:
Person + Context = Person’s Behavior + Consequences

Any Organization’s Equation:
Organization + Context = Organization’s Behavior + Consequences

Any Nation’s Equation :
Nation + Context = Nation’s Behavior + Consequences

Of course, every person, every organization, every nation has their own equations, sort of like a unique DNA code. The specific details in any equation can change from day to day, except some of the details for chronic habits like that of America’s endless warring and spying change less.2 A nation, therefore, over the entire course of its history may have gone through zillions of its more significant equations with varying details in the input side.

Thus, what anyone, any organization or any nation do throughout their lives depends on themselves and their contexts. Behavior never happens without both and will never be fully explained without both.

Beyond his background in psychology, Brumback looks to his writing now as a way to express his historical knowledge of America’s bloody programs of subjugation and to militate his belief in non-violence as he was reared as a Quaker.

He sets up the book by talking about his background working with organizations, treating them sort of speak to heal themselves, which in the end he sees as impossible under the current structures of limited liability companies and the bigger transnational corporations that are rapacious in every way.

Brumback alludes to working a long time for industry, the US federal government and non-profit research business. The power of the company man, and his own background in academics (a rather conservative and lock-step group think cabal), he admits, muted his criticism of the Viet Nam War as he was then (1960-75) fearful of endangering his career and his family.

He talks of being a “recovering” academese reader, writer and talker, and his book is far from any sort of style found in the pedantic journals where members of the nefarious American Psychology Association dump their stories on.

Brumback: This book is therefore as deliberate ‘street write’ as I can make it, a conversation, although one-way with you.

Interestingly, he gives us 12 Facts (as seen in a Jan. 23, 2019 Dissident Voice piece) that are not truths that have embedded into the American mindset, the American propaganda of historical warping, lying and outright censorship. There is a reason why this country goes into zombie or dervish mode every year — when two multi-billion dollar organizations, Rams and Patriots, under the umbrella of a white patriarchy elitism called the NFL — watching entitled, redneck or mute millionaire players whose ultimate contribution to society is to sell cars, beer, Viagra and the lies of empire on their way to permanent Traumatic Brain Injury hell.

• False Fact: The American Revolution was fought to free the people from suppression by King George and his chartered corporations.
• False Fact: “We the people of the United States——-do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
• False Fact: We are the “United States of America.”
• False Fact: America is a democracy.
• False fact: America’s Civil War was fought to free the slaves.
• False fact: America’s wars have been unavoidable and just.
  False Fact: Whistleblowers are traitors.
• False Fact. Our nation’s military represents the best this country has to offer.
• False Fact. America’s war veterans are heroes.
• False Fact: To rationalize its own excesses, including its hand-outs from the government, corpocratic capitalists spout the theory of trickle-down economics as a rationalization for their own hefty welfare benefits, arguing that more money at the top will eventually trickle down to the bottom in the way of jobs.
• False Fact: The rich say the poor get what they deserve.
• False Fact. Public services need to be privatized because government is inefficient and costly.

In many ways, Brumback has both fun moments and sarcastic fluidity  with these American exceptionalist delusions throughout his book, but he is serious about launching a straightforward attack on the elite’s continual degradation of the citizenry of this country: hollowing out our “symbolic democracy” through the systematic formula of penury, debt slavery, theft of the commons resources, the rapacious appetite to despoil ecosystems and communities, the socializing of the externalities of their dirty businesses and then in turn privatizing all the profits; and, finally, their basically illegal, unethical and unconstitutional ways of going about their wealth and political power accumulation.

What I like best about this book is the earnestness that Brumback brings to the page. He is there to guide the reader into the hall of mirrors and house of horrors that embody America. He is a troubadour for truth and unraveling the seeming complexities of the elite’s rule over the majority, the 90 percent of us who are not any part of the Point Zero Zero One percent’s project of human annihilation.

In the end, Brumback hits back at the idea of nature versus nurture, at the very end of the book:

Recall in Chapter 3 that I included genetics as an input in the black box. Our genetic history simply can’t be denied. But when it comes to being bad or good morally speaking, what do we know about the role of genetics, and does it really matter?

Psychologist Stephen Mason concludes that “some people are, quite simply, born bad.”

Not so concludes psychologist Dacher Keltner. “He finds that positive emotions lie at the core of human nature.

Two diametrically opposed conclusions. My conclusion is that while babies are innocent at the instant of birth because they have not had time to behave badly, some will eventually do so habitually, and some won’t. What role nature plays in influencing their behavior is immaterial in my opinion. What matters from a practical standpoint is the question of how to deal with the resulting wrongdoing.

What’s your opinion?

While we can argue over epigentics and the complete failure of the human seed and human semen to produce unadulteratedly since the products of capitalism, i.e. toxins, from Teflon to aromatic particulates, from Atrazine to PCBs, from glyphosate to flame retardant, from mercury to cesium,  have overtaken humanity and all zoological systems.

Is Donald Trump, the sociopath that he is, friend and abuser with Jeffrey Epstein and Roy Cohn, and that Donald whose father is in a Woody Guthrie song for the old man’s racism, well, is that president (sic-sic) who represents the ills of the father and the unfettered protection of his elite class and the muscle of his casino thugs, is Donald, with NPD (narcissistic personalty disorder), responsible for his hatred, racism, lies, and power hunger? Or is it his upbringing, or his being in mama’s womb for months, or the people around him we should blame?

That’s the crux of the book, really: Brumback is asking the reader to judge for ourselves the depth of the conspiracy of the rich toward absolute control of the majority. Is there true evil in the world, or are all children borne of original sin?

Those toxins and carcinogenics and structural violence systems were created, marketed, sold, defended, patented by men/women, in corporations. The socipathic definition of a corporation is the same as the person, but can we give a free ride to the majority of people in the corporation who are just to recoin my favorite phrase, Little Eichmanns?

In any sense, the embodiment of the Hudson Bay Company is the message in the Heart of Darkness, which reflects the individual as sociopath and the LLC as sociopathic, as the amorality of corporations is obvious from a million cases we all can tap into from the written record. That these companies — polluters — have gained personhood is compelling, from the start of this country’s slide deeper and deeper into the morass of capitalism — set forth 133 years ago in 1886 in the Supreme Court case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, This obscure case set the precedent that corporations have some rights under the 14th Amendment and were given de-facto personhood.

So, then, we have given corporations even higher status in this personhood allusion/legal definition in the Citizens United Case . What sort of person is a corporation?

Are they philanthropic and kind to their neighbors or are they the kind of people who will slit your throat to take your wallet?

For most of us in the Brumback class, we see the very nature of the corporation as both amoral and sociopathic.

They exist to make money, regardless of the social consequences. And they have gotten legal protections from the consequences of their crimes — a true Mafioso or cartel paying off the politicians and the cops and judges to gain unimaginable wealth and power over us, the 90 percent.

A sociopath and a corporation have identical incentive structures and motivations:

• Both sociopaths and corporations exist for the sole purpose of self-centered goals—sociopaths want a variety of things (money, power, sex, etc.) while corporations are solely focused upon making money.
• Neither has an internal sense of morality and, barring intervention from a more powerful authority, both are willing to exploit others in service of their goal; just as how a sociopath may be willing to lie, cheat and steal their way through life, a corporation is willing to use child sweatshop labor to depress costs.
• Both sociopaths and corporations are constrained through risk/reward analysis—sociopaths weigh the value or pleasure of doing something immoral against the legal/social risks, while corporations weigh the profit of their actions against the cost of legal/social actions against their agenda.

In the end, we have to develop both sensitivities and thick skins in the gambit called This American Life. Brumback makes his claim to some of those contradiction and dichotomies in his book. He can be reached by the reader here for more information on ordering the book. Gary Brumback.

I sign off with the words of Eduardo Galeano whose Memory of Fire trilogy sets deep in my soul. From an interview:

I want to be an honest man and a good writer, as James Baldwin was. I greatly admired him. He once told a story that I used in the third volume of Memory of Fire. He was very young, and he was walking down the street with a friend, a painter. They stop at a red light. “Look,” says the friend. Baldwin sees nothing, except a dirty pool of water. The friend insisted: “Look at it, really.” So Baldwin takes a good look and sees a spot of oil spreading in the puddle. In the spot of oil, he sees a rainbow, and the street moving, and people moving in the street; and he sees madmen and magicians and the whole world moving. The universe was there in that little pool. On that day, Baldwin said, he learned to see. For me, that’s an important lesson. I am always trying to look at the universe through the little puddles in the streets.

contemporary penal institutions are not often the penitentiaries themselves, but, are immersed within communities, manifesting in social welfare programming

by Paul Haeder / January 30th, 2019

Drawing a Picture on the Shreds of American Greenbacks

It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained; . . . the individual who has not staked his or her life may, no doubt, be recognized as a Person; but he or she has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness.

—Georg Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (New York, 1967), p. 233

What does it mean to be a wounded warrior? What does it mean to have spent time in the US military, even for a short stint? What does it mean to be on the streets and a veteran to boot? What does it mean to barely survive in a country with no single payer option, one that turns a loved one’s old age into a living hell, an economic nightmare; one with for-profit respite, or retirement homes or hospitalization and hospice services that keep the top echelon rolling in the money and the middle managers under the gun to cut more costs and raise more fees . . . where the frontline staff who do the bathing, bedpan cleaning, cooking and certified nursing assistance are under the constant cloud of precarity in the workplace and are “receiving” poor wages that necessitate sometimes two other jobs to barely not make ends meet?

This one paycheck away from the poor house or from calamity is real, and has been for decades, even though it is being recycled in the United States of Amnesia with news of the recent Trump illegal government shutdown where these “government workers” with well-paying jobs (comparatively) with benefits ended up on the thin ice of capitalism: food boxes, Go Fund Me pleas, heating bills paid for by churches, PayDay loans to stop the Repo Man, and in many cases, the loss of a home, or huge penalties for missing mortgage payments and rents.

This formula in Casino-Parasitic-Predatory Capitalism has turned Americans into a society rotting from the inside, out! This system of punishment – economic and legal – has paved the way for a class divide that many tag as the New Gilded Age. This dog-eat-dog mentality has created young people with no hope and no chance of worthy work and a sense of being with the world, with one self, with a community.

The same consumer capitalism, jiggered to work for the One Percent with a retail and service economy which is rigged and ridiculous, destroys the compassion of political leaders who end up with the executioner’s ax chopping away food stamps and unemployment benefits and all the other safety nets that were designed to give society a system of social welfare programs to encourage a giving society.

Instead, we have the spectacle of the rich running the culture, sucking the time and money away from youth in this pop culture shit storm. We watch the rich media figures interview the rich entertainment figures and watch the millionaires as our representatives in a “democracy” get softball questions from a hollowed out Press. We are like fools peeping around the corner of the king’s ball.

And this is progress.

The effects of this decade upon decade of the hollowing out of self-agency and the murdering of decent opportunities that could have been the national plan of living, working, dying in a city or town that is sane, caring, sustainable, family-friendly, youth-driven, elder-respecting and earth-conserving is — from the top down — a majority of Americans who are victims and victimizers . . . who are broken and the breakers . . . who are the haves and haves not . . . who are hardwired not to care about fellow man-woman-child.

Every day for most of us it’s a foot race with weights of cement wrapped around our ankles, in a jungle of dangers set upon the American people second by second, and upon the world in much greater rates of damage and swaths of total desecration and destruction. Today’s jobs and passions, are yesterday’s old news. We in the precarious class are like old pugilists, punching at shadows, grappling with ghosts, and wrestling with our own bloodied limbs.

If punch drunk isn’t the correct term for the reader, then he or she is trapped in a funhouse of exceptionalism and self-aggrandizement.

But our own self containment and fearsome ethical code would be the armor we all need to not only survive ourselves in this contaminated culture, but also to protect others from the hard-line of the Killer Capitalists and their Kin who daily come up with more and more ways to charge/fine/fee/toll/ fine/levy/tax us to near death and to strangle us close to oxygen-dead puffer fish.

Where Is the Line Drawn for Social Justice?

Being a proletariat in service to people, I have worked within systems tied to education, developmental disabilities, memory care, homelessness, substance abuse and for people living with PTSD, veterans without housing, the chronically ill, youth in foster care, young adults in alternative high schools and on and on. In the predatory state of America, I have had to many times pack away my knowledge of and intuition in what real structural poverty-violence-injustice means to the crumbling society we have in order to make ends meet.

I’ve worked with people — i.e. the professionals, the educated, the ones running for-profit and non-profit and government agencies like Department of Human Services, Veterans Administration, Aging and Disabilities — who blame psychological fissures in the individual’s life, that is, choices. These middlemen and middlewomen (gatekeepers) might look at an adult’s formative years dealing with family circumstances like neglect —  both emotional/spiritual and physical/nutritional/educational — for some measure of that person’s continual trials and tribulations and Herculean efforts to overcome a felony (the professional rarely asks why a person was even pulled into the criminal injustice system in the first place). These young and old “clients” continually have to face one bad debt after another bad eviction, or are living life with chronic pain, illness(-es) and substance(s) abuse, and end up in this vicious American PayDay Loan Mafioso system of trying to make ends meet. Sometimes three shitty jobs, just to pay the rent and put slop on the table and maintain that albatross around many of our necks – personal vehicles to get to work.

The typical social worker or social services manager will not yell at the client, but inside, these Nurse Ratched’s and Dr. Jekyl’s are burning inside with recriminations, with retributive zealotry, with ideas of who is worthy and who isn’t, even holding bizarre ideas about the size of the client’s brain and the content of his or her character. It is an AA world where the person — who is only a victim to himself or herself, these middling social services people believe —  has to give himself or herself up to a higher authority: . . . the god of western medicine/ psychology/ counseling/education/ probationary/criminal/ penal systems.

There is no radical social worker bone in the American practitioner, who is just in it for the ladder climbing, or in the case of state/county/federal employees, in it for the benefits and paid time off. The amount of time, money and effort expended and blood-sweat-and-tears from clients’ perspective is out of control, misplaced and misdirected.

Here is the big lie and self-delusion in a nutshell: For homeless veterans in Portland, Oregon, it’s their fault for having thousands of dollars of unpaid fines (and the PayDay loan collection agencies cities and counties hire to do their dirty work) for such things as not having a $5 ticket for the local metro (fines go up to $200 or more for not showing up to court for a five fucking dollar missing bus/metro ticket),  or their fault for sleeping in a park and getting caught by the cops, or their fault for panhandling and getting cited, or their own fault for kibitzing in their van with expired tags and plates and having to pay $2500 in court fees/fines, or their fault for having a shitty bladder and urinating in the bushes and getting put into the system as a sex offender (exposure of genitalia), or their goddamned fault for having a hunting knife in a backpack while going into a public library and having their wrists zip tied with a phalanx of cops yelling at them with guns drawn.

Social workers and pointing the finger of Fault at the clients, who now when they enter any system of social work oppression and repression have several dozen scarlet A’s on their chests. It’s their fault for growing up in Portland, getting into the Army for two years, and for not making it the grand career that General Powell or Swartzkopf made it; and then coming back here to continue with their broken lives (their fault, completely, for the “brokenness”).

Their fault for not doing well in high school, their fault for not going to college, their fault for not getting a career from the military. Their fault that the mother of their children left and their fault for not paying child support. It’s their faulty for smoking, not eating right, for drinking and for getting hooked on opioids. It’s their fault for not taking care of their teeth, and their fault for not going to the doctor enough.

Now, you can expect this shit from a Donald Pussy Grabber Trump or Bill “Monica-Cigar” Clinton or Bill “blacks are the blame for their own circumstances” Cosby or Mitt “Forty Percent Live Off the Public Trough” Romney or Hillary “Super Predator” Clinton. However, you’d think that with all the millions working in social services and the attendant side jobs tied to the social services network and then all the supervisors making decent wages in social work, with their undergraduate and graduate degrees from supposedly institutions of higher learning, this sort of crap would be verboten.

On the contrary. I can’t get into not only serious conversations about the causes of these circumstances homeless veterans find themselves in, but definitely I can’t get takers to discuss the systemic failures of social services and any social welfare “system” in a neoliberal or just plain Jane For-Profit-at-Any-Costs Capitalistic system.

Imagine, the economic draft that brings tens of thousands of new faces into the various branches of the military. Think of the ongoing denigration of education, of knowledge for knowledge sake, and the continual attacks to the force of what deep and thoughtful reading of books might do to a human. Think of the constant drum beat of this society vaunting cops, detectives, prosecutors, FBI, CIA, generals and officers, and the Navy SEAL, Army Airborne Ranger, Hotshot Air Force Jet Jockey, Massively Impressive Navy Submariner/fleet commander, the wickedly gruesome might of the Marine, and we have a society that has the entire equation inverted, dripping with nationalism, patriotism and fascism.

Blame the guy or gal for joining up? Most of the men and women I have served who served in the armed forces are broken from the training, the reckless machismo of kill-kill-kill, the horrible training, the idiotic lack of kinesiology for the things they want inductees to do.

I have a 55-year-old former Airborne parachute jumper, who happens to be a female African American, now up for double hip replacement because of the 200-pound rucksack she had to strap on while jumping out of a plane, with her five-five 120-pound frame.

Yet, the average social services person looks over that, and wonders how she ended up homeless, with a 21-year-old son who has his own knee issues from football. Living in a shelter, yet, the reasons for their admittance are deep, complicated, and endemic of a broken system that wants more fodder for the pimping that goes with the social services game.

Blame, blame, blame the oppressed. Find some Puritanical angle to foist onto a client. Serve the mythological bullshit that anyone in America can make it, and anyone just has to pull himself/herself up by the bootstraps.

The elite believe this, you know, everyone from Hollydirt star, to two-bit local newscaster; from pigs like Wilbur Ross, to Betsy Devos; from Oprah to Michelle; from Norman Vincent Peale to Billy Graham; from one CEO to the next. Gates, Musk, Bezos, Bloomberg, Peyton Manning, James Beard, Martha Stewart, Trump to the Fourth Power, and on and on.

Add to this list the managers of Child Protective Services, or the foster care system, or VA mental health services, or education districts. From city council member to the local Chamber of Commerce yokel, to Scout leader, to restaurant owner.

The systems I have worked for made it clear who was under who, and the Human Resources (HR) and Development and Leadership and Creative wonks looked at the clients as marks and the direct service providers, social workers, et al, as the cannon fodder to keep the social services Fiefdom running.

No new big ideas, and gutless leadership who shrivel up in the face of a political fight or funders’ battle. The entire system is rotting from the top, down. There are no great leaders or thinkers or doers. Money talks, and so Intel or Nike or Starbucks or any number of Fortune 1000 outfits direct where funding and grants and donations go. We are not working to emancipate and derive freedom as people willing to break the chains of oppression and fulfill the role of the oppressed. Individual freedom and collective consciousness are not in the toolbox of the oppressors in the social services industry:

A free action can only be one by which a man changes his world and himself… A positive condition of freedom is the knowledge of the limits of necessity, the awareness of human creative possibilities . . . The struggle for a free society is not a struggle for a free society unless through it an ever greater degree of individual freedom is created.

— Gajo Petrovic, “Man and Freedom,” in SocialistHumanism, edited by Erich Fromm (New York, 1965), pp. 274-276.

We are not at the tables of power, that is, the frontline people doing the work and being with the people are not in the backrooms at state capitols, nor the clients-patients-students-victims drawing up the evidence necessary to transform society in those committee meetings and boardrooms. We have become the precarious in this one-paycheck-away-from-the-poor-house society, and the evil dislocation of humanity that has been taught in schools, K12, and through the psychologically chilling mass media from cradle to grave is spliced to our genes. Social workers who have little control in their own lives, many of whom are drawn and quartered by fake fealty to the LGBTQQIAAP community, get the entire thing “inverted” and promulgate the brokenness of a broken system..

Really, I have former co-workers in this homeless shelter for veterans despising men, despising these cisgender males, both white and black, and yet, countless hours are spent on the potential transgender person getting into this facility.

Female social workers making $17 an hour for the Starvation Army decrying male chauvinism, decrying the “harsh societal treatment of non-cisgender conforming people.”

So, the people I work with never-ever attack the system of oppression and control that is Social Work 101 — mind control, social hierarchical control, economic control, and the control of future generations (the children of the people we “serve”). They go on and on with  LGBTQQIAAP  rights and discussions, while mocking the split halves of the veteran-now-a-civilian who is at the whim of hundreds of systems of oppression, including the lowly social worker/case manager. Imagine,  lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, allies, asexual, pansexual — LGBTQQIAAP — as the issue of the day while we have veterans one more closed bureaucratic door closer to suicide!

Imagine these conversations, always hushed since the Starvation Army doesn’t recognize same sex marriage, let alone the alphabet soup of LGBTQQIAAP of these Little Eichmann’s or Little Nurse Ratched’s. Imagine how many times I have had to confront Little Nurse Ratched’s going after a loud black American veteran male for voicing his concerns with his poor treatment by the systems of oppression, or some angry white male complaining about the bad food and the forced UAs and breath analyzers for people who have never ever had a substance abuse issue.

I was hit with two hostile work environment warnings from the hyper- Christian and massively triggering director who stated one of the LGBTQQIAAP adherent social workers felt my email rebutting some stupid policy she foisted, or for raising my voice at her in a hallway felt that my male white patriarchy was threatening her. Of course, the LGBTQQIAAP case manager never really stated “male white patriarchy” because her boss is one son-of-a-gun white male patriarchy Trump et al loving “little girl” (she’s pushing 58 years old and refers to herself as “my man’s little girl”) who calls her significant other “Big Daddy.”

It’s so absurd it sounds like I am making this shit up.

Yet, these colonized women, again, one or two missed paychecks away from eviction (oh, but these women I worked with have moneyed parents, so, that might not be true) have zero interest in mounting a front of righteous indignation through a concerted grievance process or to go whistleblower to stop this viscous and unconscionable treatment against veterans of color and male veterans who do not go quietly into the night. Instead, yours truly make the powers that be and their minions/sycophants uncomfortable, hence the “hostile work environment” canard. 

Social welfare in any society has two major priorities or purposes: social treatment and social control. Since the inception of social work, American values have social welfare paradigms, goals and expectations of recipients of social welfare, and have directed the agent of change (e.g., individual vs structural) as well. These values and paradigms are shaped largely, by those in power, creating a standard, or norm, that is not applicable across groups, creating contradictions between values and practice. In the United States, a White, middle-class majority has shaped societal goals and expectations for its members since the beginning of its formation, with social workers functioning as brokers, advocates, and assemblers. Society, thus grants social workers permission to, “…force marginalized, deviant, and vulnerable clients to conform…” Since the beginning of the conquest and settlement of North America, Native Americans have been the target of policies and practices at the hands of the “State” (i.e., United States government) that utilize methods of social control.

—Kayla Richards

Again, veterans who mostly come from the disenfranchised families or structurally economically deprived sub-communities of this “melting pot” are being “treated” by mostly cisgender women whose lives are cemented in White Middle Class mores and values, even though now, this millennial wave of workers is seeing their futures as less economically forward reaching as their parents’ lives were. White middle class privilege waning makes for a messy mess against those disenfranchised and underprivileged people these young and old women and men now hold sway over! A dangerous combination. 

Radical Social Work? Oxymoron in America!

By the early seventies, while social work was under a lot of criticism from the political right about lack of efficiency and effectiveness, on the political left concern grew about the effects this approach to social work had. Social problems became individualized and the structural causes behind somebody’s problems disappeared out of view. By encapsulating social work into the direct relationship between service provider and client, the focus quickly came to lie on the client’s own responsibilities and what he or she could do to reduce the problems being faced. Features of society that caused social problems remained hidden and were not addressed in an attempt to improve social quality. In that sense, social work became a partner in crime in the culture of silence around social justice (see the work of Paolo Freire).

— Jan Stayaert

So that’s the rub, really – the lack of conscientious and deliberate work we the bottom 80 percent of society continue to flounder under, leading to the systemic failures working within the echo chamber and chamber of horrors that define Predatory Capitalism.

Imagine the anguish daily of most of us living in this system of oppression, but add to that the military service members who are homeless, broken, and used up and then told by so-called social services workers that its all on them, all their fault, only the result of bad personal decisions and flawed mental and psychological states.

Oppressors and the oppressed. And, the defining qualities of evil when its face is not Charles Manson or Henry Kissinger or the Green River Killer.

This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. The oppressors, who oppress, exploit, and rape by virtue of their power; cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both. Any attempt to “soften” the power of the oppressor in deference to the weakness of the oppressed almost always manifests itself in the form of false generosity; indeed, the attempt never goes beyond this.

In order to have the continued opportunity to express their “generosity,” the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well. An unjust social order is the permanent fount of this “generosity” which is nourished by death, despair, and poverty. That is why the dispensers of false generosity become desperate at the slightest threat to its source.

True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity. False charity constrains the fearful and subdued, the “rejects of life” to extend their trembling hands. True generosity lies in striving so that these hands — whether of individuals or entire peoples — need be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work and, working, transform the world.

— Paulo Freire

Paulo Freire continues in his deep study of the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, looking at the oppressor as the oppressed, and he talks a lot about freedom and liberation from this oppressed and oppressor relationship. In a nutshell, the veterans I worked with at the Salvation/Starvation Army are the oppressed, but they have all internalized the oppressors’ image. The oppressors are the directorship, the chaplains and officers of the salvation army, the staff and more fearsome the social services practitioners. They have adopted the oppressors’ guidelines and rules, and daily now, I get phone calls and emails from former clients who are truly fearful of freedom even though they dread daily living at a homeless center where they are always under the gun, under the microscope and under the thumb of an arbitrary and capricious director who believes in exacting a pound of flesh through Jesus and her own failure as a human who supposedly went through her own recovery.

Freire again: Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility. Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion.

That completion is a tough one to sell in a society where the men and women of uniform went in believing for the most part the historical lies of patriotism, and the red, white and blue myths invented by the oppressors to keep the oppressed off kilter and willing subjects in this massive propaganda-fueled system of war as the ultimate racket.

The very existence of these borders, the US of A, defines oppression on a massive continental scale, with tentacles that reach globally. Anyone falling prey to the rot of patriotism and the systemic violence of military servitude is both the oppressor and oppressed. Most men and women I have worked with that are deemed homeless veterans know inherently they were in a screwed up system, but many still hold onto the ideals of a brotherhood-sisterhood in their service, even though they have little or no respect for the senior NCOs and officers that wielded insanely warped amounts of power that allowed them to force humans to do the most inhumane things, what can only be declared as evil.

The evil doers are the ones that maintain that a country’s massive disproportionate response to a perceived or manufactured threat, or even its first firing of the war cannons without any perceived or manufactured threat is righteous in maintaining a balance in the world they see as us versus them. So George W. Bush’s “evil-doers” refrain was that of the mirroring image of the evil doer, as America is both oppressor and oppressed, all wrapped up in a schizophrenic bow.

Imagine a superstitious and spiritually warped people, coming here from Europe to exploit and create the first corporations of oppression, not knowing what it is to be one for the masses, collectively for all peoples, especially those whose ancestral lands they ended up despoiling and stealing. Easily, the white race sees everyone else — even those in its white community — as un-people, worse than calling them “the other.” Unpeople are bug slat to use the terminology of the drone masters of the US military. Splat that is worthy of double- or triple-taps of the missiles and high caliber automatic guns from their white people’s drones.

So goes the oppressed social worker, who then learns the rules of oppression to be the oppressor no matter how small or insignificant he or she is in the scheme of things, and the result is callousness, and the power of holding someone weaker in the sites of all systems of sniping that is called social services bureaucracy.  I have witnessed a certain minute-to-minute meanness and pettiness that go beyond dishonesty and insubordination of the ethics of social work. At the Starvation Army, where I worked, and where others who are living there continue to report to me about, the level of harm and triggering and goading and retaliation and downright racism and prejudice against ailing men with drug histories is at a level of systemic failure. The veterans and I have reported these levels of unethical, unprincipled intentional harm to the powers that be, but to no avail. Read here:

How the Salvation Army Lives Off (and thrives with) a Special Brand of Poverty Pimping

Alcohol, Atheism, Anarchy: The Triple A Threat to the Pro-Capitalist Salvation Army

No local news media outlet is interested in this story, UNTIL, there is an incident there, like the one in April 2018, where a distraught and mentally stressed veteran was denied his humanity and his dignity by the same culture of starvation and thus was shot by a SWAT team, seven bullets to the arm and torso. Not one of the people working at the center is a veteran, and the all-female staff and social services folk have little understanding of the soldier’s plight, and in fact many mock the lives of former veterans now on the skids. Imagine any of the people coming out of social work programs or human resources departments or personnel and leadership classes getting down with this amazing concept.

Our cultural workers must serve the people with great enthusiasm and devotion, and they must link themselves with the masses, not divorce themselves from the masses. In order to do so, they must act in accordance with the needs and wishes of the masses. All work done for the masses must start from their needs and not from the desire of any individual, however well-intentioned. It often happens that objectively the masses need a certain change, but subjectively they are not yet conscious of the need, not yet willing or determined to make the change. In such cases, we should wait patiently. We should not make the change until, through our work, most of the masses have become conscious of the need and are willing and determined to carry it out. Otherwise we shall isolate ourselves from the masses. . . . There are two principles here: one is the actual needs of the masses rather than what we fancy they need, and the other is the wishes of the masses, who must make up their own minds instead of our making up their minds for them.

Ahh, yes, the Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung now so misappropriated and maligned, but read it here, The United Front in Cultural Work. 

Little do most of the veterans who are white know they are part of a permanent class of underprivileged (and that oppressed and underprivileged grouping includes minorities in urban settings and cities) coming from cities and rural settings. 

The very last paragraph in Freire’s work should be the emblazoned quote on all hoodies these veterans wear to protect them from the wind and cold and rain of being homeless in Portlandia: 

This work deals with a very obvious truth: just as the oppressor, in order to oppress, needs a theory of oppressive action, so the oppressed, in order to become free, also need a theory of action. The oppressor elaborates his theory of action without the people, for he stands against them. Nor can the people—as long as they are crushed and oppressed, internalizing the image of the oppressor— construct by themselves the theory of their liberating action. Only in the encounter of the people with the revolutionary leaders—in their communion, in their praxis—can this theory be built.

The obvious is never stated anymore in the workplace –

• “We are the majority, the leaders and managers and supervisors are not doing the work, and their decisions are not in the best interest of us, the worker, or the people we serve/service/manage/ teach/heal/assist.”
• “We hold the key to the success of the business, agency or organization.”
• “We can work to undermine the power of the mis-managers.”
• “We can heal each other and work clandestinely to help each other at work and outside the workplace.”
• “We can and should subvert the abuse of power and the graft and corruption of the management and systems within the power structure.”
• “We are not unfree and we are not going to become oppressors as we break the chains of our own oppression.”
• “We are human in an inhumane system.”
• “We are not the sum total of our wages, our position in the workplace and our perceived worth/lack of worth in society.”

These maybe lofty or Utopian ideas, but what else do we have as social service workers tasked to put band-aids on the gaping sucking chest wound of our society, where 30 percent of American children live in poverty, and where 60 percent of Americans are literally several paychecks away from losing it all.

For the veteran, both the believer and non-believer in the patriotic mumbo-jumbo, collective action seems a no-brainer in a system that supposedly inculcates everyone to be part of a team, and in theory, where one single soldier doesn’t stick out. However, this band of brotherhood/sisterhood is a myth, as the soldiers have been indoctrinated to believe that their service in uniform was and is a crusade against the many faces of the enemy against our way of life; that American firepower around the world – with themselves as fodder for the empire — is god-given, hands down. Which means, veterans who are homeless struggle to square exactly how that happened in a country they were supposedly “defending.” They come up with many straw men and whipping posts to condemn for their downward spiral.

War, Collateral Damage, Returning Vets — An Industry for the Many

High schools and even colleges welcome recruiters often to “career day” events. The organized murder game is often their only option for employment or educational advancement. But should they return home from a deployment damaged, with PTSD or in financial straits they are generally scuttled out of the spotlight. Suicide, domestic abuse, and homelessness are skyrocketing among them, but you would hardly know that if you watch cable news or read most mainstream newspapers. True, they are occasionally trotted out onto podiums by politicians for empty patriotic accolades, but only if they are telegenic and useful for the continuation of the war machine. Should they dissent from the narrative, they are rendered invisible.

[…]

The ones rendered expendable by the American mainstream media, who are seldom if ever spoken of, are the civilian victims of the American Empire’s endless wars, occupations and covert actions. They are ghosts that roam the sphere without glorious tombs in which to repose. No imperial-sanctioned, wreath clad monuments adorn their graves. No days of remembrance. They may have met their end in the killing fields created or fostered by the Empire thanks to a brutality paid for in full by the US taxpayer, but they are not important enough to be mentioned by the American media except maybe in passing. It is as if uttering their names might summon a spirit of vengeance from a mountain of corpses, the sediment of imperialism itself.

—Kenn Orphan

This mythology runs through the social services too, as their concept of the hero soldier is refracted through the looking glass of Hollywood and the massive propaganda machinery of the Pentagon, our government and a usurped history of this country’s adventurism into the death knoll of so many millions of people worldwide in this empire’s short history. War is a Racket is more than 84 years old, but oh-so relevant!

So for social workers, it’s a bi-polar almost manic life, believing the shit on TV, in movies, all the pomp and circumstance around Americans in uniform, and then, the reality of the majority of those who’ve served in uniform in front of them, as broken vassals of the broken society which then social workers must self-delude themselves into believing only applies to the truly down and out. Because in this social services control game, when you are not one of the masses, you then get that little badge, uniform and gun syndrome as a pleb. 

My tenure at the Salvation Army has been briefly outlined here in this piece, and, then with a follow up here, in another piece. I am — as I write this — receiving more and more complaints about the place where I no longer work. I have repeated to the ones reaching out to me that there is evil there, and then there are the harbingers of evil there working against their success, and that they are in a broken system of the wrong checks and balances so they must subvert the system anyway possible.

Managers who treat veterans like children, and see people of color as ALL being druggies:  That’s the complaint I have gotten from veterans at this center. And what to do? I’ve encouraged veterans to seek restitution and to be wary of an environment they know is toxic and to seek other mentors to assist them out . . .  to pave their their own pathway out and find a home in this obscene renters’ market.

I’ve recommended them going to the VA and speaking with anyone overseeing the programs that get the Salvation Army paid from public tax coffers big bucks per veteran per night. I’ve recommended they see Oregon’s political reps, Merkley and Wyden, and to contact their representative, Bonamici. Some have taken their plight up with the media, whatever is left of the hallowed out Portland “alternative” media more focused on hops, pot, lifestyles and pop culture than real issues.

I am not putting the entire Starvation Army bad nightmare to rest in this final installment, but it is somewhat rewarding that I got out alive, that there were not SWAT teams coming, and that I didn’t do what any righteous revolutionary should do — get the bats out and start swinging at the evil-doers.

I’m still listening and hearing, and talking and caring, and while life is a militant process if you are cut from the social justice cloth, it also is the opening tides of the Pacific hitting air and light and atomized ancient people. Here, finally, an archetypal response from one veteran, and his answers are universal in most ways. 

Basic questions to prevail, and I asked a couple of veterans the following:

Age, branch of service, years, most compelling thing in your military experience?

1. Toughest aspect of your current aspect of being “homeless veteran”?

2. What does the concept of social services/social worker mean to you in this current state of struggling?

3. How is it that when someone like yourself is “down” that the powers that be at the Salvation Army and VA seem to inflict a sort of controlling and dictatorial relationship with you as a demographic?

4. Why do veterans become homeless? This answer is for generals and politicos who have their own beliefs not so pleasant?

5. How better can you and other vets at this transitional center be served?

6. Any comments regarding my article, part one and/or two in my series?

Here’s one respondent’s answers, and again, anonymity is vital since these people living here at the Starvation Army Veterans and Family Center are afraid of retaliation and being kicked to the curb, most literally.

Currently 44 years old. Eight years in the Navy. Most compelling thing I saw was asking myself how people can kill, maim, and destroy other people in the name of religion. I cannot describe the horrors I have seen because I have spent year’s telling myself I never saw them and by God I have come to believe it.

1) I think the hardest part about being homeless is that it is a reminder of my personal failures in life. Pride is my mistress and she has created a sense of self-loathing. The truth is I have many friends that I could reach out to, but pride has prevented my use of those options. It is a dichotomy that is both prideful and opposite of my predicament of being homeless.

2) In my mind the duty of any social worker is clear. Regardless of a person’s status, that function is to help a person move in a direction that brings about positivity in their life. While I believe that a social worker should not enable a person to make additional bad choices in life as well as holding one accountable for failures, they should NEVER try and bring about change through the use of fear and threats. To do so is patently wrong and a failure on the part of a social worker. Change is a process and a social worker is there to help a person work through it. Not too attempt to force that change.

3) First, let me say I am thankful for the opportunity to be where I am at in the sense, I have a place to be. In terms of the question, I have come to believe that at times social workers come to make the choice to approach a decision that they know what’s best for someone, instead of allowing a grown human being to come to a place that allows a person’s view of their own self-worth is improved. I think at times there is a pervasive ignorance of the true background if some of the residents at the facility. It is difficult if not impossible to properly treat an individual with PTSD, or any other mental condition where they can’t at least try to understand what we have seen. For instance, while they were in bed, going to college, or living at home in a cushy environment, some of us were in the desert defending the downtrodden, seeing things that would make them puke or go insane. To utilize fear and threats to control rather than treat is a failure where treatment is concerned. It is tantamount to a soldier leaving a comrade behind. Something few civilians could ever understand.

4) There are many reasons why a veteran becomes homeless. In many instances a sense of antisocial pathology becomes present in the decision process of a person whom believes that not much matters anymore. The horrors of war are indescribable and those experiences can profoundly change a person. Some turn to drugs. Some turn to crime. Some turn to other vices. The sadness in all this is that had we not seen the things we saw while serving this country we would likely be in a different place. You ask why homelessness is so prevalent. One must consider the reality homeless veterans just might still be in a place in the desert mentally. Far from humanity. They left what once was to what has become over there.

5) Being treated with respect is key to treatment for veterans. Again, the employment of fear and threats is counterproductive to healing one’s mind, body, and soul. Let me add, that many times the failure to a veteran begins with the military establishment. Go to war, come home fucked up, get discharged under a mental health medical board, and drummed out. It is pathetic. The very people sworn to not leave you behind do so. In most cases it is a ROTC puke that has no understanding of true service. They are doing their residency counting the days until they can make their piles of money. It should be noted that on the flip side, many military medical professionals can no longer practice medicine in the civilian world. Either they couldn’t hack it, or they messed up so badly they had no choice. Either instance is unacceptable when it comes to the treatment and care of the heroes of this country.

This is but one of many articulate and impassioned looks at how and why one becomes homeless, and then a real critique of the social services arena, where veterans are treated with large doses of disrespect and lack of understanding. The systems of traditional social work are plied to the systems of control, which unfortunately are magnified when working with veterans, and then magnified to the tenth power when the social services are distributed to warped outfits like the Starvation Army.

This Navy veteran I talk with regularly, and his sense of the world is both derived from his Navy experience and “war” tutelage, as well as his life as a successful middle class worker before a traumatic brain injury and the reverberating PTSD from his time in war theaters pulled him down into a pathway of dealing with the criminal injustice system.

In the end, we are forced to abide by the systems of oppression when our rent is due and the student loans come at us daily as robo-calls from the collectors. We are forced to eschew our own humanity and look at the bizarre machination of elites working the systems of control into every fabric of the social worker’s life.

Cognitive behavioral therapy, just another newish way to control deviancy, i.e. anything that goes against the grain of this highly demarcated Consumer Society that is at the mercy of predatory capitalism and corporate thuggery at every turn, to include representative democracy —  which is both contradictory and an oxymoron, but completely elegantly literal when we see who and what are the representatives’ controller.

This sub-society, which marks a large swath of Americans of all color lines, the armed services, is more than just a microcosm of American life. The vested interests of the War is a Racket profiteers and the inane insanity of flag waving and saber rattling by the masses make for a very colluded place of entropy of the human spirit, let alone the human project of civilization.

Controlling people is what the entire project of the military is about, and it’s about making mostly young, pliable minds accept the anti-human proposition of sticking a bayonet into the neck of a woman, or spraying white phosphorus on a fleeing group of people (families), or sending hundreds of civilians to kingdom come with hellfire missiles.   

Some homeless veterans are ticking time bombs, and the spoils of war are addiction, homelessness, joblessness, fear, anger, loathing, confusion, chronic illness, disease, and much-much more, including delusions and just plain deep-deep anguish and regret.

Applying the overlords’ systems of control onto damaged people, and then seeking restitution for the mistakes made by these wandering veterans, and then pushing them into untenable situations where failure is guaranteed, well, the system and the cogs in the system are guaranteed a career or job for decades to come. 

The solution is to give way to dreams, to allow all damaged people to repair, instead of continuing the oppression that eventually breaks the human spirit. Healing includes communal places, out of the cities, into the sun and cold of the land. But the society now is against such socialistic and collective action. And so the night train of terror continues in the hearts and minds of the clients, and the oppressors, big and small, are the shadows of the ghosts to come, the clanging empty things at the end of their lives, where they just might peer back and see that they were not the good people in their minds but the people who helped keep the systems of oppression going, just for the shekel, just to keep the deepest emancipation of fear at bay. 

The Sarvation Army breaks people who are damaged, and the very process of blaming the veteran for all the things the capitalist society has festooned them with precipitates more and more veterans to believe they have no other choice than suicide or going postal, or for some, they end up believing the fable of a giving Christianity as the monster of religion draws and quarters them into puddles of fear.

I say to my friends at the facility, dream, man, dream, woman. It’s okay to be angry, but it’s better to fix that anger, and do something to thwart it for future generations.  

Then dream . . . .

You have to look deeper, way below the anger, the hurt, the hate, the jealousy, the self-pity, way down deep where the dreams lie…find your dream. It’s the pursuit of your dream that heals you. –Billy Mills, Oglala Lakota