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"Why nationalize industry when you can nationalize the people?"

-- Adolf Hitler

News and Opinion

Glen Ford nails it. It's worth a click.

9/11 Legacy: Two Contending Fascisms

9/11 gave the rulers of the United States blanket permission to wage foreign wars at will or whim, while stripping down domestic civil liberties to fit the security demands of a perpetual war society. At the time, voices on the left warned of impending fascism -- and they were right, although many of these same people have since acclimated to the new order, and now scream “fascist” at the racist menace in the White House. And they are right, again -- but only halfway. Two contending, yet interrelated, forms of fascism are vying for supremacy in the U.S. Both fascisms are anchored in the leadership of their respective duopoly parties, which together monopolize the national political conversation. Thus, fascism is “mainstream” politics in the United States, as reflected in the daily diatribes between the warmongering, Russian stooge-hunting, neo-McCarthyite, corporate Democratic “Resistance” and the race-mongering, Dixiecrat-Republican, law and order-loving (but also white mob rule-friendly) troglodytes aligned with Donald Trump.

These are not polar opposite fascisms, of course. Both are American exceptionalist -- another term for imperialist -- and both are thoroughly capitalist, tailored to the rule of the rich. The major difference between the two, is race. Donald Trump presides over a revival of the world’s oldest fascism, the one created in the former slave states to keep Blacks subordinate and rich white people on top. ... Donald Trump is a phony, even as a fascist. His actual policies are a corporate dream-list, crushing workers of all ethnicities in the dust. But his rhetoric is straight out of post-Reconstruction Dixie, and translates to racist ears as a promise of “white man’s work” in abundance, combined with severe state repression for Blacks, a wink and nod to white vigilantism, and expulsion for immigrants and various others. Although there is nothing substantive for workers of any kind in the Trump legislative agenda, majorities of whites responded to his racist appeal in 2016, as they have to Republican presidential candidates since Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” in 1968. In rhetoric, if not in practice, Trump represents a revival of (never moribund) old school, race-centered American fascism.

Trump’s neo-Dixiecrat regime is under siege by a rival fascism that purports to be color-blind -- and, indeed, created the first billion-dollar-plus campaign war chest in U.S. history to elect the First Black President, in 2008. These purported “race neutral” fascists coalesced in Hillary Clinton’s campaign tent in response to Trump’s takeover of the GOP and the flight of establishment corporate Republicans -- a great disruption of the duopoly electoral system. The corporate Democrat fascists, now backed by most of the major media and the military-industrial complex, and openly aligned with the worst elements of the U.S. “intelligence” community, launched a furious campaign to delegitimize the Trump presidency through charges of “collusion” with “the Russians” and Wikileaks to pilfer Clinton campaign emails. Despite almost two years of investigations, there is no proof that the predicate crime ever happened. However, corporate media-generated anti-Russian hysteria has succeeded in whipping up war mania and causing the imposition of crippling censorship of genuine left media.

The goal is to delegitimize all dissent, to prevent any serious challenge to the corporate consensus on endless war and austerity. For electoral purposes, the corporate fascists have decreed that the dividing line in U.S. politics is race. Blacks, immigrants, Muslims and others are all invited to join the corporate Democrat “Resistance” to Trump -- as if Black people have not always resisted that brand of American fascism, sometimes all but single-handedly. But, the devil’s bargain demands that we must accept austerity and war, policies that are most harmful to Blacks and violate the historical Black consensus on peace and social justice. The corporate fascists are just as phony as Trump. Their race “neutrality” means only that they have no problem with Black presidents and Black generals that wage racist wars against people of color; or with Black heads of Homeland Security that pursue the imprisonment of “Black Identity Extremists”; or with Black politicians overseeing their sectors of the Mass Black Incarceration Gulag. What separates Trump’s old school cracker fascism from the smoother, Democrat corporate version, is that the Clinton-Pelosi fascists invite Black people to fully participate in their own destruction -- and to feel honored at the invitation.

The far-right AfD’s call for “Islam-free schools” is reminding Germans of Nazi propaganda

This poster for the upcoming Bavarian elections is: Wow. pic.twitter.com/caUveFxfMk

— Moira Weigel (@moiragweigel) September 7, 2018

Led by a leaping girl in a short skirt, her arm raised triumphantly, five German teenagers are pictured smiling as they run down a brightly lit corridor. Beneath the group is a sinister demand: "Islam-free schools!"

These are the latest campaign posters from Germany's surging right-wing populist party: Alternative for Germany, or AfD. The posters, plastered across the southern German state of Bavaria ahead of next month’s elections, have predictably stoked outrage for their bluntly anti-Islam message, and come at a time when tensions over immigration are once again dominating the national spotlight in Germany.

Educators and politicians have condemned the new campaign as divisive and likely to stigmatize Muslim students. “The terrible poster of the Bavarian AfD reminds me of the dark Nazi era when Jewish pupils were no longer allowed to attend German schools,” Katharina Schulze, candidate for the Bavarian Green Party, told VICE News. “With this poster, the AfD divides our society and incites against Muslims in our country. That is intolerable.”

Why the U.S. Seeks to Hem in Russia, China and Iran

There is an error all too common in American public opinion. Personalizing Washington’s regression into the role of spoiler by assigning all blame to one man, now Donald Trump, deprives one of deeper understanding. This mistake was made during the steady attack on civil liberties after the Sept. 11 tragedies and then during the 2003 invasion of Iraq: namely that it was all George W. Bush’s fault. It was not so simple then and is not now. The crisis of U.S. foreign policy—a series of radical missteps—are systemic. Having little to do with personalities, they pass from one administration to the next with little variance other than at the margins.

It began with that hubristic triumphalism so evident in the decade after the Cold War’s end. What ensued had various names. There was the “end of history” thesis. American liberalism was humanity’s highest achievement, and nothing would supersede it. There was also the “Washington consensus.” The world was in agreement that free-market capitalism and unfettered financial markets would see the entire planet to prosperity. The consensus never extended far beyond the Potomac, but this sort of detail mattered little at the time. The neoliberal economic crusade accompanied by neoconservative politics had its intellectual ballast, and off went its true-believing warriors around the world.

Failures ensued. Iraq post–2003 is among the more obvious. Nobody ever planted democracy or built free markets in Baghdad. Then came the “color revolutions,” which resulted in the destabilization of large swathes of the former Soviet Union’s borderlands. The 2008 financial crash followed. ... One would have thought a fundamental rethink in Washington might have followed these events. There has never been one. ...

Midway through the first Obama administration, a crucial turn began. What had been an assertion of financial and economic power, albeit coercive in many instances, particularly with the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, took on further strategic and military dimensions. The NATO bombing campaign in Libya, ostensibly a humanitarian mission, became a regime-change operation—despite Washington’s promises otherwise. Obama’s “pivot to Asia” turned out to be a neo-containment policy toward China. The “reset” with Russia, declared after Obama appointed Hillary Clinton secretary of state, flopped and turned into the virulent animosity we now live with daily. The U.S.-cultivated coup in Kiev in 2014 was a major declaration of drastic turn in policy towards Moscow. So was the decision,taken in 2012 at the latest, to back the radical jihadists who were turning civil unrest in Syria into a campaign to topple the Assad government in favor of another Islamist regime. Spoilage as a poor excuse for a foreign policy had made its first appearances.

If there is a president to blame—and again, I see little point in this line of argument—it would have to be Barack Obama. To a certain extent, Obama was a creature of those around him, as he acknowledged in his interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic toward the end of his second term. From that “Anonymous” opinion piece published in The New York Times on Sept. 5, we know Trump is too, to a greater extent than Obama may have feared in his worst moments. The crucial question is why. Why do U.S. policy cliques find themselves bereft of imaginative thinking in the face of an evolving world order? Why has there been not a single original policy initiative since the years I single out, with the exception of the now-abandoned 2015 accord governing Iran’s nuclear programs? “Right now, our job is to create quagmires until we get what we want,” an administration official told The Washington Post’s David Ignatius in August.

Can you think of a blunter confession of intellectual bankruptcy?

China and Russia strengthen ties to counter US threats

Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin met in Vladivostok on Tuesday and pledged greater strategic and economic cooperation aimed at countering the US. The Trump administration is accelerating its trade war measures against China, with preparations to impose another $200 billion of tariffs on Chinese goods, while imposing further sanctions on Russia. Moreover, the Pentagon’s National Defence Strategy, unveiled at the beginning of this year, declared that great power competition, not terrorism, is the primary focus of US military strategy. It branded China and Russia as “revisionist powers”—that is, countries that pose a threat to the existing “international rules-based order” dominated by the US imperialism. ...

The Chinese president noted that he had met Putin three times this year and the two countries held “similar or identical positions on international matters.” China-Russia cooperation, he declared, is “gaining ever more importance against a backdrop of growing instability and unpredictability on a global scale.” Putin declared that his talks with Xi had paved the way to enhance “the comprehensive partnership and strategic cooperation between Russia and China.” He noted that the two leaders had discussed “military-technical co-operation.” ...

Russia and China are not formal military allies and both sides are well aware that significant strategy and economic differences remain. While looking to consolidate ties to counter the threat posed by the United States, Moscow and Beijing are each willing to cut a deal with Washington at the expense of the other, should the opportunity arise. The intransigence of the Trump administration, however, is driving the two countries into each other’s arms, just as it is destabilising long-established alliances of the US with European powers and Japan.

This instability is not simply a product of the erratic and reckless policies of the Trump administration. The volatility reflects the drive by US imperialism to arrest its historic decline through economic and military means. Once again, as in the 20th century, rival economic and political blocs are forming, as the precursor to world war.

Tulsi Gabbard Calls Out Trump's Syria Warmongering

Two Thirds of "Progressive" Democratic Congressional Candidates Completely Silent on Foreign Policy

There are 3 national outfits providing techincal and fundraising assistance, expert personnel and endorsements to supposedly progressive Democrats. They are Justice Democrats, Brand New Congress , and Our Revolution. They had a big hand in the victory of Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez in New York, and dozens of congressional, state level and local Democratic primary campaigns. 31 congressional candidates endorsed by one or more of these progressive outfits survived the Democratic primary to face Republicans in November. ...

All but one or two say they support Medicare For All, though it’s not clear whether they mean the straight no chaser version or the watered down one full of exceptions now pushed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. Just about all say they’re refusing corporate bribes – damn I mean contributions. More than half say reforming the criminal justice to provide education and job training for inmates system is among their top priorities, and have something to say about net neutrality. Nearly all embrace more pro-active and sensible measures to address climate change, to uphold the rights of women and LBGTQ people, and immigrants, and more. Most have something to say about gun violence, but it’s a safe bet that none of them are educating anybody about the fact that the 2nd amendment of the US was enacted to facilitate slave patrolling, land stealing and the genocide of indigenous people.

What stands out in the web sites of these progressive Democrats is that 21 out of 31 have absolutely NOTHING to say to voters about war or peace, about the military budget which consumes roughly a trillion dollars a year. And that’s not counting the two candidates whose sole mention of the world outside the United States was opining that we should fully fund the State Department in one case, or put more emphasis on diplomacy in another. ...

Sometimes what you leave unsaid is more eloquent and damning than what you say. For 21 out of 31 so-called progressive Democratic candidates, the world outside the US, the American global empire, and the globally integrated capitalist economy either do not exist at all, or just don’t make their top ten or top twelve list of priority issues. How do we explain that? ...

There are only two possibilities. Either two thirds of our progressive Democrats running for Congress this year really are true believers in the US right to make up its own facts, to declare offshore law free zones like Guantanamo, to invade other countries at will, killing millions and wreaking incalculable havoc upon their infrastructure, societies and ecologies like in Southeast Asia, Iraq and Afghanistan, and just don’t want to say it out loud, or our progressive Democrats don’t believe it but imagine they need to remain silent and pretend to be true believers in the US empire to get elected. Either way, two thirds of the new blue wave of progressive Dem congressional candidates believe they can get away with silence on foreign affairs.

Incoming Mexican government rejects US offer to fund deportations

Mexico’s incoming government has rejected a Trump administration proposal of funding to speed up and increase its detention and deportation of US-bound Central American migrants. Thousands of migrants are detained by Mexico as they travel through the country to try to reach the US, but the interior minister-designate said on Thursday no offer had been made to help fund the process.

“That has not been put on the table in any way,” said Olga Sánchez Cordero, who is likely to take up responsibility for security in the administration of president-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The outgoing government of Enrique Peña Nieto, however, issued a statement on Thursday night saying it “was continuing to evaluate the proposal” from the Trump administration. ...

Donald Trump has repeatedly pledged to build a border wall to stop immigration and stick Mexico with the bill. But the New York Times reported the Trump administration has instead proposed paying Mexico to speed up and increase its already robust detention and deportation of Central Americans escaping poverty and violence in what are some of the most murderous countries in the world.

'Stopping Cuts Isn't Enough': Sanders Joins Over 150 Democrats to Launch 'Expand Social Security Caucus'

As the Republican Party continues to be quite explicit about its ultimate goal of slashing the safety net to pay for deficit-exploding tax cuts for their wealthy donors, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) joined 150 Democrats from both houses of Congress on Thursday to launch the Expand Social Security Caucus, which will work to combat the GOP's efforts to gut the program and move to make it even stronger.

"We are here today to say very loudly and very clearly that at a time when millions of seniors are trying to survive on $12,000 or $13,000 a year, our job is not to cut Social Security," Sanders said in a statement. "Our job is to expand Social Security so that everyone in America can retire with dignity and respect."

In a jab at the soon-to-be-retired Wisconsin congressman whose lifelong dream has been to obliterate the safety net, Sanders added on Twitter, "Hear that, Paul Ryan?"

The formation of the Expand Social Security Caucus is another strong indicator of how successful progressive activists and lawmakers like Sanders have been in changing the Democratic Party's position on the crucial program, which former President Barack Obama offered to cut on multiple occasions as part of a "grand bargain" with the Republican Party.

In a statement on Thursday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) declared that the new caucus "won't allow Social Security be cut by one cent—and instead we will fight to expand it." ... A full list of the founding members of the Expand Social Security Caucus can be viewed here.

Tulsi Gabbard Explains Why She Resigned From DNC (pt 1)

A Group of Democrats Joined Republicans to Give Them Power in New York. On Election Day, New Yorkers Have a Chance to Weigh In.

When New Yorkers go to the polls today, they’ll have an opportunity to cast judgement on a group of Democratic state senators who, for years, caucused with Republicans, giving the GOP a constructive majority in a Democratic legislature. The group, known as the Independent Democratic Conference, or IDC, disbanded in April in a move that’s been interpreted as an attempt to mitigate criticism ahead of primary challenges this fall. But all eight members of the IDC are nevertheless facing primaries. ...

Most of those going up against IDC incumbents have been able to raise substantial sums and garner significant endorsements as a result of anti-IDC energy in the state. It’s a blue wave, but one aimed at sitting Democrats. “All sorts of political players in the state are realigning,” said Susan Kang, an associate professor of political science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and one of the co-founders of No IDC NY.

For years, the IDC effectively turned control of the state Senate over to the GOP, contrary to the wishes of voters who sent Democratic majorities to Albany in 2012 and 2016. The conference first came into existence in January 2011, when Sen. Jeff Klein, D-Bronx and three other Democrats — Carlucci; Diane Savino, D-Staten Island; and David Valesky, D-Oneida — broke from the Democratic caucus and joined what was then a Republican majority in exchange for committee chair positions and increased power. “They decided that they would make alliance with the Republicans to be in power and get perks,” said George Albro, co-chair of the New York Progressive Action Network.

A year later, in 2012, the Democrats won a majority of seats in the chamber. But Klein, Carlucci, Savino, and Valesky, joined by then-Sen. Malcolm Smith, D-Queens, decided to stay aligned with the GOP senators. “They gave what would otherwise be a minority party control against their own party,” said Albro. ... The group dissolved following a meeting with Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has long been seen as an ally and quiet backer of a Republican-led state Senate. “It’s clear that Cuomo was behind this,” said Albro. “He supported and never challenged them, then this year he called them into his office and they immediately disbanded.” ...

Now, on election day, the moment of reckoning appears to be upon the IDC. Though no public polling has been done on the individual races, there are indications that at least some of the caucus members won’t be returning to Albany.

Update: The majority of members of the Independent Democratic Conference, or IDC, have been defeated in the New York state and local primary election. Six members of the defunct group, which broke away from Senate Democrats to hand control of the chamber to the Republicans in 2011 and caucused with the GOP until April, followed their leader, Jeffrey Klein, in defeat. Klein fell to Alessandra Biaggi in a shocking upset. It’s a steep fall from political grace for Klein, who as the leader of the IDC was one of the most powerful people in Albany for nearly seven years, and leaves just two of the former IDC members behind. ... The IDC’s power to regroup after the November elections and determine the makeup of the next Senate has effectively been destroyed.

New York primary: governor Andrew Cuomo defeats Cynthia Nixon

Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York has beaten off a leftwing challenge from Cynthia Nixon in the Democratic primary to win the nomination for a third term. Nixon, an actor and activist known for her role on Sex and the City, sought to join the wave of insurgent progressives who have pulled off upsets in Democratic races, but in the end came up short in the contest on Thursday.

With 93% of precincts reporting, Cuomo had 65% of the vote to Nixon’s 35%.

“This race for the Democratic nomination may be over, but the fight for the soul of the Democratic party is just beginning,” Nixon told supporters at Cafe Omar in Flatbush, Brooklyn, after calling Cuomo to concede. Nixon hammered Cuomo as a “corrupt corporate Democrat” throughout the campaign and went after him over New York’s crumbling mass transit system, which the governor controls. ...

In November’s general election, Cuomo will face Republican Marc Molinaro, the Dutchess county executive, and Stephanie Miner, the former Syracuse mayor running as an independent. Nixon may still appear on the general election ballot, as the nominee of the liberal Working Families party, unless a manoeuvre is made to remove her from the ballot.

Paul Manafort has agreed to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller

In a decision that sent shockwaves through Washington’s political circles, President Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, agreed to fully cooperate as a potential witness with special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, the counsel’s office confirmed Friday.

In the sweeping plea agreement, Manafort promised wide-ranging assistance to Mueller’s team, which is investigating whether the Trump campaign collaborated with Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election. The deal includes an agreement to testify in any proceeding requested by investigators, including before a grand jury in Washington DC.

Mueller’s team announced they would reduce the charges against Manafort from seven down to two. Shortly thereafter Manafort, 69, pleaded guilty to two charges in a Washington DC court on Friday: conspiracy against the U.S., and conspiracy to obstruct justice.

The plea deal Manafort signed includes broad language, according to a copy of the document released shortly after Manafort appeared in the DC courtroom to enter his guilty plea.

Trump condemned over plans to allow drilling near national parks

Democrats and conservatives alike are decrying moves by the Trump administration to permit oil and gas drilling near national parks and in wildlife migration corridors, and charge that the public is not being adequately consulted. Officials from the US interior department are pursuing an “energy first” agenda, and some 2.9m acres are up for lease auction, including many parcels close to recreation areas such as Petrified Forest national park in Arizona, Chaco Culture national historical park in New Mexico, and Dinosaur national monument in Colorado.

An auction this week in Utah sold leases within 10 miles of Canyonlands national park, in addition to tracts near Glen Canyon national recreation area. Utah, which has been a hotbed of public lands debate since Trump shrank the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante national monuments, holds quarterly lease auctions. This quarter alone saw 200,000 acres up for auction, and stakeholders expect next quarter’s auction to be on a much greater scale.

Ashley Soltysiak, director of the Utah Sierra Club, said rule changes under the interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, mean that auctions “can now be done with little regard for public input, despite the fact that public land is being leased. The new oil and gas lease process dramatically reduces opportunities for public comment and shrinks the period for public protest to less than two weeks.” These concerns are echoed in Colorado, where Senator Michael Bennet and Governor John Hickenlooper, both Democrats, sent letters to state leasing officials advocating for fair processes that involve citizens in the future of their public lands, before pending December oil and gas lease sales.

“Our chief concern is the lack of public participation in the new leasing process,” Governor Hickenlooper noted in his letter. “We continue to ask for the deferral of those parcels in sensitive areas, particularly those protecting wildlife corridors, where the public has been heavily engaged in pending land use plans, and where there is significant local opposition to the leases being offered in the first place.” ...

Even in non-protected areas, conservationists point to concerns about wildlife impacts by fragmenting the landscape with fracking and drilling – as in Wyoming, where 1.5m acres are offered for lease through 2018, including large swaths near the famous Wind river mountain range and in the Green river upper basin. According to a new analysis by the Center for Biological Diversity, 1.2m of those acres fall on winter habitat and migration corridors for mule deer and pronghorn.

Japan's attempt to overturn commercial whaling ban fails

An attempt to overturn the decades-old global ban on commercial whaling has failed, to the relief of conservationists. Anti-whaling nations defeated by a decisive margin proposals from the Japanese government that would have allowed for the return of whale hunts.

The vote, on the last day of this year’s meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in Brazil, was hailed by campaigners as a sign that pro-whaling nations will not be allowed to weaken global resolve to protect threatened species.

Kitty Block, president of the animal charity Humane Society International, said: “It is an immense relief that the IWC’s moral compass has led it to reject Japan’s reckless and retrograde attempt to bring back commercial whaling. What Japan tried to do here was to bend and break the rules of the IWC to lift an internationally agreed ban on killing whales for profit. It deserved to fail; the world has moved on from commercial whaling, and so must Japan. We hope that the IWC can now get on with the business of protecting these ocean leviathans from the myriad other threats they face.”

“Climate Capitalism is Killing Our Communities”: Protesters Disrupt Gov. Brown’s SF Climate Summit

As Florence bears down on North Carolina, hog farmers pray their poop lagoons will hold

Hundreds of North Carolina pig farmers spent the days before Hurricane Florence spraying waste from their “poop lagoons” — open-air pits filled with hog feces — over local fields, trying to make space for the up to 40 inches of rain on its way. If the lagoons overflow, the waste could contaminate waterways. And to be clear: The hogs in Duplin County alone — two counties over from where Florence landed Friday morning — produce almost twice as much waste as New York City every day.

North Carolina is home to one of the densest concentrations of hogs in the world — around 9 million pigs are raised on 2,100 farms in the state. Duplin, with more than 2 million animals, is the top hog-producing county in the country. Large-scale farms store their animal waste in open-air pits where the solid material sinks to the bottom, revealing a nutrient-rich liquid that is then sprayed as fertilizer onto fields.

“We are expecting a lot of rain. That’s our main concern,” said Matthew Carter, who manages 9,000 head of hog spread out on three farms in Duplin County and also works as a technician for the county’s soil and water unit. “I’ve been spraying within state limits for the last several days, and I’ve gotten my lagoons down so that I have 48 inches of space, which should be plenty.”

But if Florence results in serious flooding, like Hurricane Floyd did in 1999, there’s little the farmers can do to prevent the lagoons from filling with water and overflowing.

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

Chelsea Manning speaks in New Zealand

Brett Kavanaugh Threatens Racial Justice & Voting Rights

Something mysterious is happening at a solar observatory in New Mexico

Facebook Suppressed a Story About Brett Kavanaugh’s Opposition to Roe v. Wade. We’re Republishing It.

Florence tracker: latest maps show hurricane path and rainfall

A Little Night Music

Luther Guitar Jr Johnson - Doin' The Sugar Too

Luther Guitar Jr Johnson - Walkin' the Dog

Luther 'Guitar Jr' Johnson - In My Younger Days

Luther 'Guitar Jr' Johnson - Early In The Morning Blues

Luther 'Guitar Jr' Johnson - Got To Have Money

Luther Guitar Jr Johnson - No Worry No More

Luther Guitar Junior Johnson & The Magic Rockers