Imagine this story…

"These bureaucrats only think of their political résumés as they destroy capitalism," she says. "They want students to focus on studying Christianity, not to practice it or fight for its cause. When we do that, it causes too many problems for them."

Christian youths are being targeted and blacklisted by local authorities at other schools, too. Earlier this month, plainclothes police assaulted and hauled away Christian students at X University, in the eastern US, after their school refused to recognize their on-campus Christian student society. Two weeks ago, a graduate of Y University was attacked and dragged into a car on campus by several people in black jackets.

[...]

"I think this shows the dominant political party can no longer justify itself," says historian Z. "While the party talks about serving the people, The US has actually been practicing socialism."

Historian Z says young Americans being arrested for practicing Christianity — the official belief system of the Republican Party — poses the latest conundrum for the country's leadership, whom he blames for feigning interest in Christianity in order to maintain a guiding principle.

"Since the current leader came to power, many colleges have established Christian study centers, and that leads to a conflict for the ruling party," says historian Z. "You're brainwashing the youth with Christian theory, but by doing so, you're giving them a tool to fight against the government."

It's also a tool young people can use to defend themselves when authorities arrest them, says historian Z. "It's like a child using his ancestor's tombstone to protect himself from an abusive parent."

 

“The United States is now at one of those historic forks in the road whose outcome will prove as fateful as those of the 1860s, the 1930s, and the 1960s,” writes Nancy MacLean. “To value liberty for the wealthy minority above all else and enshrine it in the nation’s governing rules, as Calhoun and Buchanan both called for and the Koch network is achieving, play by play, is to consent to an oligarchy in all but the outer husk of representative form.”

These are precarious times and our cultural discourse sometimes obscures the contradictions embodied in our celebratory moments.

The meaning of financial value and collective uncertainty get muddled especially in employment and wage slavery, as “ life has become increasingly precarious for the many Americans who lack job security”.

“You Will Not Replace Us!” This slogan was coined from a statement by Nathan Damigo, founder of the white-nationalist campus group Identity Evropa, who retorted to an anti-Donald Trump “He will not divide us” campaign by actor Shia LeBeouf on social media: “Shia LeBeouf, you will not replace us with your globalism.” The chant is closely related to the white-nationalist “White Genocide”meme, reflective of their fears that white people and white culture are under attack from multiculturalism and nonwhite races. According to the Anti-Defamation League, the slogan began appearing on white-nationalist flyers and banners in May, and has spread widely since then. (At times during the first Charlottesville march, the chant morphed into “Jews Will Not Replace Us!”) www.splcenter.org/...

We’ve already looked at basic income issues in ACM, sometimes in the context of the BEIN (Basic Income Earth Network), but the current situation reminds us daily of the class differences that would prevent redressing inequality by enforcing inequity. It is as it’s always been for the many against the few.Even more precarious is an anti-immigrant fervor based on racism at the highest levels of government, and somehow tinged with a lie about racial/gender displacement that becomes even more bald-faced using social media. Your job is never really taken away as if it were a privileged gift, especially when some fundamental human rights to one’s labor should remain paramount.

An entire class of precariousness describes one social division that has been described beyond the notion of working poor in “the richest nation on earth”.

 

Please suspend your judgments if you have a tendency to see the word “neoliberal” simply as a pejorative. This is not an ad hominem attack. Examine your own position and consider that you might subscribe to one or more of these perspectives. And if they seem contradictory, then you have work to do.

It’s only been 100 years

Jeff Sessions is no A. Mitchell Palmer and Christopher Wray is no J. Edgar Hoover but 1920 could be like 2020, and Warren G. Harding might resemble Dotard J Trump, if for no other reason than salaciousness and willful ignorance of corruption.

Deportation of terrorist immigrants was a result of the 1920 Wall Street bombing, amidst other actions.

Because America First...

The demonizing of immigrants and the role of the State in surveillance and repression should need no reminder in 2018 even as ICE and the Border Patrol are used as a gefälschte Gestapo.

Many lionize Robert Mueller even as domestic political intelligence has no different aims than in the very long heyday of the FBI as the enforcer against anti-capitalist threats as it still is. The MSM treatment of racial difference in domestic terrorist acts is no different than the treatment of postwar anti-communism.

More bizarre has been the exploitation of anti-Communism by gay RW men, but that’s for another diary on RW misogyny and gay KKK members.

More fascinating is the examination of a 1920s cold case that describes the emergent anti-communism, the FBI as fighting crime and communists while also fighting immigrants, and the increased class struggle as bombs and bonds intersect.

... tourism often appears detached from the forces of structural power that characterize twenty-first century capitalism and globalization.

One of the most striking illustrations of this process in the context of tourism has been the displacement of coastal populations and land appropriations in Sri Lanka to make way for new ‘luxury’ resorts, which followed in the wake of the 2004 tsunami ...

However, it is clear that renewed waves of capital accumulation stimulated by neo-liberal globalization are reconfiguring tourism in ways that cultural analyses have failed to engage with, let alone explain or attempt to challenge…."

(Trump Muslim travel ban countries in red)

In the midst on utter devastation, the current frivolity over speech rights at sport events distracts from a central administration that can barely acknowledge the storm destruction of Caribbean territories. And yet tourism is one aspect of a political economy that will see its crises used to distract from nativist RW hegemony. Countries dependent on tourism that become destroyed resemble the current objectives of the Trump regime: to destroy cultures and economies in order to “creatively” build new markets.

This coming week will have a natural disaster that while unavoidable at one level, could have been addressed more specifically in terms of flood control infrastructure, that thing that Trump thinks he talks bigly about, except that things like gender-policed bathrooms and forced birthing are more important to Texas legislators.

Regional policy takes a back seat to what now seems quite universally devastating weather effects, while maintaining that ideological focus on the liar-in-chief. There is little attention to political ecology in states where scale trumps all. Even a city that has made some urban progress also has economic development problems that have disproportionate effects in terms of race/class.

(2015) Texas ranks among the worst of any state for flood-control spending. According to the Texas section of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the state is second only to Louisiana the U.S. in terms of dollars paid out in flood claims. The state does not require communities to enroll in the National Flood Insurance Program (a part of FEMA), even though Texas ranks second only to Florida in its number of total flood insurance policies across its communities."When the flood comes, it doesn't respect political boundaries,"

Wherever possible, the state leaves it to individual cities and counties to protect themselves against flooding. Texas requires cities and counties to meet the eligibility requirements for NFIP, but it does not require cities to enroll, as some states do. (Many Texas cities and counties are enrolled in the program.) More to the point, though: Texas doesn’t fund flood-control infrastructure directly. And Texas doesn’t have a statewide floodplain management plan.

Donald Trump likes his daily intelligence briefings to be short and with "killer graphics," This press conference banned visual recording yet used visual aids.

Ultimately it’s never a choice between socialist death and capitalist death. It is about what will be done.

Life and death is easier for some psychopaths. Worse now that even military leaders pay attention to Commander-in-Chief rants made on Twitter

February (2017)

Donald Trump ... defended Vladimir Putin against accusations that he is a killer, telling Fox News: “We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent?”

The US president appeared to place the US and Russia on the same moral plane in an interview broadcast before the Super Bowl kicked off in Houston, Texas. Asked by the host, Bill O’Reilly, if he respected Putin, Trump replied: “I do respect Putin.

“Will I get along with him? I have no idea. It’s very possible I won’t.”

O’Reilly said: “He’s a killer, though. Putin’s a killer.”

“There are a lot of killers,” Trump replied. “We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent?”

Trump’s respect for and willingness to work with Putin was a familiar theme during an election that the US intelligence agencies believe their Russian counterparts sought to influence on Trump’s behalf.

Such claims prompted a split between Trump and the intelligence community that has not yet healed.The fact that many of Mr Trump’s picks are plutocrats reflects his preference for pragmatists over pointy-heads, as well as his belief that moneymaking is a transferable skill. That was the underlying logic of his own candidacy. He also likes tough guys, ideally in uniform, hence his selection of three former generals: James Mattis and John Kelly, both former marines, at, respectively, the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security, and Michael Flynn, his national-security adviser. Mr Trump assured a crowd in Ohio that his cabinet would include the “greatest killers you’ve ever seen”...

Yet the biggest uncertainty surrounding Mr Trump’s cabinet concerns less the calibre of its members than the agenda they will pursue. It is hard to exaggerate how divided his team is on the big policy questions. Some members of the economic team, including Mr Mnuchin, who will be primarily busy with Mr Trump’s promised tax cuts, and Mr Cohn, who will play a co-ordinating and shaping role, are broadly in favour of free trade. Yet the likeliest architects of Mr Trump’s trade policy, Mr Ross, Mr Bannon and Mr Navarro, are economic nationalists.

Trump clearly hasn’t changed — he insisted on ordering Chris Christie to have (his mother’s recipe) meatloaf at Maralago. Not about food, just about control.