Isn't this what Marx wrote about capitalism's endpoint?

Dixiefication
By Karl Wilson
OpEdNews Op Eds 1/8/2013 at 10:21:02
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(cross posted at Bluehawaii)

I am pleased, if that is the right word, to see a growing chorus of criticism about not just the direction this country is headed, but the very specific reasons why. Some point to the eroding infrastructure, and characterize it, too vaguely I believe, as "economic decline." It is, but without detailing why such decline is happening, such assertions have limited utility.

Others are closer to the point when they talk of the US becoming "third world." They don't mean a lack of technology or development, but instead point to economic inequality and a political economy dominated by a well-entrenched landed-gentry-cum-oligarchs; e.g., an aristocratic overclass.

Those who know their American history, the history we did not learn in high school, are well aware this country was built on cultural fault lines from the very beginning. Talk of secession was in the air, and has remained there, from the earliest days of the Republic. If you didn't hear much about secession growing up, and thought it was just that one flare-up called the Civil War, it's probably because you were not born in the south, or in Texas.

But this is not about secession; it's about southern economics, or Dixiefication. A recent article by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times takes an important leap in fleshing out what has gone wrong in the US in the last 30+ years.

Kristof writes of the last 30+ years of conservative influence as a "failed experiment."

...In upper-middle-class suburbs on the East Coast, the newest must-have isn't a $7,500 Sub-Zero refrigerator. It's a standby generator that automatically flips on backup power to an entire house when the electrical grid goes out.

In part, that's a legacy of Hurricane Sandy. Such a system can cost well over $10,000, but many families are fed up with losing power again and again...

...the lust for generators is a reflection of our antiquated electrical grid and failure to address climate change. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave our grid , prone to bottlenecks and blackouts, a grade of D+ in 2009.

Kristof notes that demand for household generators has surged. Most of them are being scooped up by upper-middle class families that can afford the generator and the gas that goes with it.

That's how things often work in America. Half-a-century of tax cuts focused on the wealthiest Americans leave us with third-rate public services, leading the wealthy to develop inefficient private workarounds.

But our political system is dysfunctional: in addressing income inequality, in confronting climate change and in maintaining national infrastructure.

Indeed it it dysfunctional. But government is not a mess because people do not know what to do. We are being purposefully pushed in one direction because of deeply held ideological beliefs and the policies that reflect that ideology. That belief system is familiar to those raised in the deep south. It is based on class, race, hierarchy, tribalism, and an obsequious allegiance to authority. The result is that the plantation mentality of the colonial south, where cruel slave masters from Barbados established themselves far from the prying eyes of Yankee do-gooders, and created a feudal society dominated by a privileged few. In other words, a society much like the old one they left behind in Europe, one structured on wealth, privilege, and class. Democracy and equality before the law had nothing to do with it. Mouth breather Ted Nugent, who appears increasingly unstable these days, epitomizes this brutally undemocratic attitude when he says that poor people and those on welfare should be denied the right to vote .

Slavery may be gone, but much of the rest of Dixie model not only has remained, it has spread to other states, mostly in the Midwest and Appalachia. A sense of where I am coming from on this can be found in Democracy Heading South: National Politics in the Shadow of Dixie, (2001) and Dixie Rising: How the South is Shaping American Values, Politics, and Culture, (1996) by Peter Applebome. A study I have mentioned before, Colin Woodward's American Nations, provides an invaluable historical backdrop to explain how we got this way.

A sense of that Southern model, what I am calling Dixiefication, can be seen in a litany of examples. Kristof provides a few:

So time and again, we see the decline of public services accompanied by the rise of private workarounds for the wealthy.

Is crime a problem? Well, rather than pay for better policing, move to a gated community with private security guards!

Are public schools failing? Well, superb private schools have spaces for a mere $40,000 per child per year.

Public libraries closing branches and cutting hours? Well, buy your own books and magazines!

Are public parks -- even our awesome national parks, dubbed "America's best idea" and the quintessential "public good" -- suffering from budget cuts? Don't whine. Just buy a weekend home in the country!

Public playgrounds and tennis courts decrepit? Never mind -- just join a private tennis club!

I'm used to seeing this mind-set in developing countries like Chad or Pakistan, where the feudal rich make do behind high walls topped with shards of glass; increasingly, I see it in our country. The disregard for public goods was epitomized by Mitt Romney's call to end financing of public broadcasting.

You got it, Kristof. At its core, Dixiefication means disdain for the public sector, but also low wages, low regulations, and low taxes. It calls for a dominant class run by corporations, the modern version of the plantation's boss man; land owners and sharecroppers, feudal overlords and a peasantry.

Recent data shows just how badly the middle class has been squeezed. As CNNMoney just reported (my emphasis):

Corporate profits hit their highest percentage of GDP on record in the third quarter.

Just four years after the worst shock to the economy since the Great Depression, U.S. corporate profits are stronger than ever.

In the third quarter, corporate earnings were $1.75 trillion, up 18.6% from a year ago, according to last week's gross domestic product report. That took after-tax profits to their greatest percentage of GDP in history.

But the record profits come at the same time that workers' wages have fallen to their lowest-ever share of GDP .

Welcome to Dixie.

Can we find compassion for Israelis in 2013? by Illan Pappe

The Electronic Intifada
4 January 2013

(Illan Pappe is a more forgiving man than I am, but...this is a very good article--RC)

I have just spent the last few days of 2012 in the city of Haifa. Accidentally, I met a few of my acquaintances who in the past deemed me at best as deluded and at worst as a traitor. They seemed more embarrassed today — almost confessing that mine and my friends’ worst predictions about Israel’s future seemed to be materializing painfully in front of their very eyes.

In fact, our predictions came very late in the day. Already in 1950, with unsettling accuracy, Sir Thomas Rapp, the head of the British Middle East Office in Cairo, foresaw the future. He was the last person sent by London to decide whether or not Britain should establish diplomatic relations with Israel. He approved but warned his superiors in London:

“The younger generation is being brought up in an environment of militarism and thus a permanent threat to the Middle East tranquillity is thereby being created and Israel would thus tend to move away from the democratic way of life towards totalitarianisms of the right or the left” (Public Record Office, Foreign Office Files 371/82179, E1015/119, a letter to Ernest Bevin the Foreign Secretary, 15 December 1950).

It is the totalitarianism of the right which is going to be the hallmark of the Jewish state in 2013. And some of the liberal Zionists who were once willing to devour me and like-minded Jews in Israel now realize we, like Sir Thomas before us, may have been right. And maybe because of their more benign attitude I would like to reciprocate by attempting, for a very short while, a different approach in 2013.
Compassion towards Israelis?

Those of us who write frequently for the Electronic Intifada have shown in the past — and will undoubtedly continue to do so in the future — our utmost solidarity with the Palestinian victims of Israel’s existence and policies. But can we, and should we, show compassion to the Israelis themselves? Obviously, one cannot ask the Palestinians to do this while the dispossession continues in full force. But maybe we who belong, ethnically at least, to the victimizers can ponder for a moment in the beginning of the New Year about our compatriots.

Let me begin with a more personal touch. During this visit I had the opportunity to watch my former colleague, the historian Benny Morris on television and to read some of his interviews. His anti-Arab and anti-Islamic racism is now of the rawest kind possible: a naked and rude discourse of hate, venomously spat out in the most disgusting way possible. So why show any empathy? Because his first book on the refugees was an eye-opener for me and others. It was not a great history book, but it was an eloquent survey of the truth to be found in the state archives about the 1948 Israeli crimes.

Yet his transmutation into an arch-racist is not surprising — it follows the same trajectory of many of the so-called liberal Zionists in Israel. He and his friends had an epiphany in the 1990s: discovering the immoral foundations of the state. This could have opened the way to a genuine reconciliation but it was also a frightening moment that demanded brave personal decisions. Most of them opted instead to deny the truth and the guilt, covering it up with a born-again Zionism of a far more extreme and obnoxious kind. This particular group of Zionists are not likely to go through another epiphany, but maybe their children will. One can only hope.
Israel’s Arab Jews

Compassion of a kind can be shown also toward the Arab Jews of Israel. I noticed during this visit how many of them are wearing — almost crouching under the yoke of — huge Star of David medallions of a size I have never seen before. They are frightened that the police or members of the public might mistake them for “Arabs,” hence these huge pendants that cry out: I am a Jew, not an Arab, even if I look like one! (As if any of us living between the River Jordan and the sea look that different from one another.)

This is sad and pathetic but maybe the academic Ella Habiba Shohat was right when she asked us to recognize Arab Jews as victims of Zionism as much as the Palestinians were. It is hard however, with the risk of generalization of course, to buy into their victimization for too long as they have by now endorsed wholeheartedly the formula that the more racist their anti-Arabism would be, the more Israeli they would become.

Back in the 1970s, Arab Jews rebelled against their discrimination. The right-wing parties in Israel capitalized on this frustration to build an electoral base that brought theLikud party to power and associated Arab Jewish politics of identity with anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian positions. But if there is any future for the Jews in Palestine, it will have to go through the organic and intrinsic connection of these Jews to the region, its past, its civilization and future. There are still enough among them who may show the way for the European settlers to learn to reconcile with whatever season the Arab world would happen to be in.

My third message of compassion is for the ultra-Orthodox Jews. The idea of a state in Judaism is a travesty – they know it best. There is no foundation in Judaism for a state based on the religion. So they opted either for clear anti-Zionism, for which they are persecuted, or embarrassingly spearheading Zionism by colonizing the West Bank and leading the racist choirs in the state. For a moment one should empathize with their predicament — they are a sizable part of the Jewish population and could be part of a new and better Palestine and the Middle East.
Cultural ghettoes

My fourth flickering moment of compassion is directed towards the Russian Jews (many of whom I see praying piously in the Orthodox churches all over Haifa and the north). They are a first generation of settlers in a colonialist project that still goes on. They are aliens in this country — as were the early Zionists — and they are lost. So they either create cultural ghettoes, or like the Arab Jews they try to integrate by offering to be the signifiers of the most fascist and racist pole of the Israeli political scene. Either way, this must be very unpleasant and unfulfilling.

My final sense of empathy is directed to the Jewish students in the West who still insist on acting as Israel’s ambassadors on university campuses. Here too, the pathetic human condition triggers the compassion. They could have played a vanguard and leading role — as their predecessors did when they spearheaded the struggles for equality in the United States and the movements against apartheid in South Africa and imperialism in Vietnam — in one of humanity’s greatest campaigns for peace and justice: the solidarity movement with the Palestinians. But they find themselves confused and disoriented, representing the oppressor, the colonizer and the occupier. The end result is parroting slogans prepared by the Israeli diplomacy that make little sense I suspect even to those who chant it unconvincingly along with hysterical allegations of anti-Semitism and terrorism.

I thought of adding the aging Zionist veterans of 1948 who opened their secrets to filmmaker Eyal Sivan and myself (their testimonies were exhibited on a special displaywe put on in the heart of Tel Aviv at the end of 2012) and told us bravely about the crimes they committed against the Palestinians during the Nakba. But that would have been too much.

Maybe when peace is nearer I could follow the in the footsteps of Desmond Tutu and show compassion of the kind displayed in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Committee. But until this time comes I will try to keep an open door for the others in the settler colonialist society I belong to and with which the Palestinians hopefully will one day build a democratic and free Palestine.

The author of numerous books, Ilan Pappe is professor of history and director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter.

The Left is Moving Right. What to do?

By Rob Kall (about the author) Permalink
OpEdNews Op Eds 12/28/2012 at 13:15:14
opednews.com

The left has been moving further and further right and it has to stop. Here are some thoughts.

Australian Salvatore Babones has written a thought provoking article, There Is no American Left. He writes,

"Over the past forty years America has become much more politically correct with regard to gender and sexually...

On every other issue America -- or at least American politics -- has swung violently to the right. The more social class is involved, the further to the right America has swung. Poverty was once a social disease to be cured; it is now an individual crime to be punished. Put it down to individualism, conservatism, neoliberalism, or whatever -ism you want, America is now the world's greatest reactionary force.

Unfortunately, all the evidence is that the rest of the world is following America down the road to perdition. Nowhere are national health-insurance schemes, access to free education, and old-age pensions being expanded. Nowhere is the world moving forward. Everywhere the social gains of the twentieth century are either being eroded or destroyed."

Babones is correct. American is sliding, and dragging the rest of the world, into a corporatist pit that puts corporations before people-- which looks sort of like conservatism, but is really a collection of lures and attractions that move the remaining voters-- since so many have been lulled and disgusted into non-voting-- to vote against their own self interest.

People keep voting in Democrats who, ten or twenty or thirty years ago would have been to the right of the average Republican.

And the two party system is also a big part of the problem, of course. It offers up next to no choice. The last election was a prime example. The GOP presidency was basically sold to the highest bidder. Fortunately he, Romney, was a loser. And the Democratic party is run by a handful of the most powerful. Obama beating Hillary was an anomaly, but now, things are back to normal-- no Democracy, no decisions made by the people.

There was talk, close to ten years ago, of the need for progressive think tanks like the right has-- organizations that support progressives when they are out of power, that feed the echo chamber and generate policy ideas and strategies that support ideology. The answer was the Center for American Progress (CAP.) it had Soros backing and a more than $10 million budget. CAP's problem was it was headed by DLC John Podesta, former Bill Clinton Chief of Staff. CAP does some good work, but it is a purely pro-democrat, Democrat enabling org that does not challenge or push the Democrats. We still, ten years later, need a truly progressive organization-- a policy promotion tank, not a think tank-- pseudo-progressive liberals have plenty of THEM.

So we are almost on our own.

I'd like to hear your thoughts on solutions-- on what we need to do to turn things around.

I have a few thoughts.
1- call a spade a spade-- people like Rahm Emanuel are fascists, not liberals or progressives. The Democratic party is one of two corporatist parties. Liberals are enablers of Democrats who are enablers of corporatists.

2-Find some serious money, committed for the long haul, to create a true progressive policy envisioning and promotion organization, like there are dozens of on the right. Surely there must be a few Billionaires and very wealthy millionaires who are not right wing sociopaths and who can see that what the left has is not even close to enough.

3- define a vision of a progressive future, something that we can aim for-- and we should aim high, so high that people call us unrealistic, because there are always compromises along the way.

And think outside the box-- coming up with ideas that people call crazy and unrealistic, because the best ideas are described that way until they are discovered to be brilliant, revolutionary and life changing.

For example:
-single payer healthcare for all

-free college education for all

-end corporate personhood. Establish death penalties for corporations. Establish laws that lead to prosecution and incarceration of corporate leaders who violate laws.

-equal rights and equal pay for women and all minorities

-marital rights for all

-legalize Marijuana and stop release all marijuana related prisoners from jail with a clean record.

-protect the commons in all aspects-- make privatization much harder and more costly to do, with no profit motive.

-teach activism in schools, at all grade levels. Establish university departments that study and support activism, like the arts and science are supported.

-fund protests. Yes. Protests keep democracy healthy. Invest in supporting all kinds of protest. And protect protesters-- from police, homeland security.

-Fund investigative journalism-- at least $100 billion-- and develop a way to do it so those funded are not unduly influenced by those who provide the funds.

-end lifelong appointments to the supreme court

-end gerrymandering and make congressional districts as compact and uniform in size as possible.

-end the Fed

-public banking for every state, for the federal government and major cities and counties.

-Shrink the most out of control part of big government-- Cut the US military budget by 70%

-withdraw troops from 80% of the locations we now have them based.

-shut down and end our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan NOW.

-Re-assess all aspects of government and cut it in half-- while beefing up regulation of corporations and support for citizens.

-include the costs of damage to the environment in all products

-publicly finance elections-- take all money out of politics

-pass strong whistleblower protection laws that reward and support whistleblowers

-destroy all electronic voting machines and require recountable paper ballots. Re-establish the US voting and election system as the gold standard for the world.

-allow on-site voting registration for all elections

-criminalize vote corruption, criminalize intentional voter disenfranchisement

-make it so it costs more to live if people don't vote. Charge higher taxes to those who pay taxes. Give less social security or medicare or medicaid or VA aid, or food stamps to those who don't pay taxes-- with reasonable outs for those with health excuses.

-re-instate bank regulations like Glass Steagall and others. Support local banks over centralized ones.

-apply bottom up, non-hierarchical, de-centralized approaches to as many aspects of government and funding as possible. Use the Cash for Clunkers project as an example of how to spend large amounts of money from the bottom up. Require big money contracts to be bottom up-- with disbursement to local, decentralized recipients, not directly to top-down organizations.


-cancellation of legislation making it a crime to protest

-legislation that makes it a crime to treat or characterize protesters as terrorists.

-elimination of homeland security and other funding that has encouraged turning police into robo-cops and a police state


-cancellation of legislation making it legal to spy on citizens without cause.

-return to a tax system like we had under Eisenhower

-make it illegal for billionaires to exist

-tax exotic purchases at the 50% 95% level-- homes over $2 million, art over $2 million, cars over $100,000, pleasure boats over $50,000, dresses and suits over $2000, shoes over $500, cosmetic surgery that is not medically necessary, exotic travel, private jets,

-make it illegal for corporations to get too big to fail

-eliminate all corporate welfare

-fund research and development that supports finding ways to keep companies small.

-make it illegal for any corporate executive to make more than 10 times what any worker makes-- base policies on Mondragon... or tax corporations that pay executives massive salaries.

-give tax breaks to genuine worker owned cooperatives.

-fund research and development on how to bring neighborhoods and communities back to life

-eliminate the policy of measuring economic health based on growth and consumption and switch to one based on sustainability

-take aggressive steps to reverse global warming

-lower the retirement age, reduce hours worked per day and week, increase weeks of vacation-- all to open up more jobs so more people can find meaningful work.

-tax digital outsourcing.

-require all companies outsource work outside the US to declare the contracts visibly and in easy to see and find ways.
-invest heavily in diagnosing and treating the mentally ill, including identifying causes like violence in media and games, pharmaceuticals that create dangerous patients.

-Ban automatic and semi-automatic weapons. Limit magazines to six rounds.

-put liberal arts back into the school curriculum-- art, music, dance.

-bring back media ownership restrictions that we used to have that prevented massive media conglomerations
from forming.

-End all existing global trade agreements-- they are designed for multinational corporations, not people.

-require competition for drug pricing for medicare

-require the educational system to build compassion, so Americans embrace the value that we are as good as the way we care for the weakest and most vulnerable-- that could include showing how Ayn Rand's ideas are very wrong for America.

-re-write the history books ala Howard Zinn and describe how pre-literate tribal people are just as good and wholesome and natural and maybe more so than those of us in the "civilized"world. Teach the values of tribal culture as a way of seeing how people in real communities treat ea

ch other and function with integrity.

-research and devise ways to change our economic model so it optimizes work opportunities for all, rather than profits for corporations.

-add measure of intelligence that reflect Howard Gardners model of multiple intelligences... and add one for awareness of the world-- not delusions like Fox News produces-- but actual awareness of facts.


I'll stop there. I'm leaving a lot out. Some of the ideas are far outside the box. Please add to the list in your comments. Dream big. We really need it now.

Terror lurking in a Christmas tree? Israel tries to ban non-Jewish celebrations

f

rom Mondoweiss
Dec 24, 2012 08:27 am | Jonathan Cook
Bilin pere Noel 269f8
Santa Claus in Bilin, 2011.
(Photo: Popular Committee Against the Wall and settlement of Bil’in via europalestine.com)

Israel’s large Palestinian minority is often spoken of in terms of the threat it poses to the Jewish majority. Palestinian citizens’ reproductive rate constitutes a “demographic timebomb”, while their main political program – Israel’s reform into “a state of all its citizens” – is proof for most Israeli Jews that their compatriots are really a “fifth column”.

But who would imagine that Israeli Jews could be so intimidated by the innocuous Christmas tree?

This issue first came to public attention two years ago when it was revealed that Shimon Gapso, the mayor of Upper Nazareth, had banned Christmas trees from all public buildings in his northern Israeli city.

“Upper Nazareth is a Jewish town and all its symbols are Jewish,” Gapso said. “As long as I hold office, no non-Jewish symbol will be presented in the city.”

The decision reflected in part his concern that Upper Nazareth, built in the 1950s as the centrepiece of the Israeli government’s “Judaisation of the Galilee” programme, was failing dismally in its mission.

Far from “swallowing up” the historic Palestinian city of Nazareth next door, as officials had intended, Upper Nazareth became over time a magnet for wealthier Nazarenes who could no longer find a place to build a home in their own city. That was because almost all Nazareth’s available green space had been confiscated for the benefit of Upper Nazareth.

Instead Nazarenes, many of them Palestinian Christians, have been buying homes in Upper Nazareth from Jews – often immigrants from the former Soviet Union – desperate to leave the Arab-dominated Galilee and head to the country’s centre, to be nearer Tel Aviv.

The exodus of Jews and influx of Palestinians have led the government to secretly designate Upper Nazareth as a “mixed city”, much to the embarrassment of Gapso. The mayor is a stalwart ally of far-right politician Avigdor Lieberman and regularly expresses virulently anti-Arab views, including recently calling Nazarenes “Israel-hating residents whose place is in Gaza” and their city “a nest of terror in the heart of the Galilee”.

Although neither Gapso nor the government has published census figures to clarify the city’s current demographic balance, most estimates suggest that at least a fifth of Upper Nazareth’s residents are Palestinian. The city’s council chamber also now includes Palestinian representatives.

But Gapso is not alone in his trenchant opposition to making even the most cursory nod towards multiculturalism. The city's chief rabbi, Isaiah Herzl, has refused to countenance a single Christmas tree in Upper Nazareth, arguing that it would be “offensive to Jewish eyes”.

That view, it seems, reflects the official position of the country’s rabbinate. In so far as they are able, the rabbis have sought to ban Christmas celebrations in public buildings, including in the hundreds of hotels across the country.

A recent report in the Haaretz newspaper, on an Israeli Jew who grows Christmas trees commercially, noted in passing: “hotels – under threat of losing kashrut certificates – are prohibited by the rabbinate from decking their halls in boughs of holly or, heaven forbid, putting up even the smallest of small sparkly Christmas tree in the corner of the lobby.”

In other words, the rabbinate has been quietly terrorising Israeli hotel owners into ignoring Christmas by threatening to use its powers to put them out of business. Denying a hotel its kashrut (kosher) certificate would lose it most of its Israeli and foreign Jewish clientele.

Few mayors or rabbis find themselves in the uncomfortable position of needing to go public with their views on the dangers of Christmas decorations. In Israel, segregation between Jews and Palestinians is almost complete. Even most of the handful of mixed cities are really Jewish cities with slum-like ghettoes of Palestinians living on the periphery.

Apart from Upper Nazareth, the only other “mixed” place where Palestinian Christians are to be found in significant numbers is Haifa, Israel’s third largest city. Haifa is often referred to as Israel’s most multicultural and tolerant city, a title for which it faces very little competition.

But the image hides a dirtier reality. A recent letter from Haifa’s rabbinate came to light in which the city’s hotels and events halls were reminded that they must not host New Year’s parties at the end of this month (the Jewish New Year happens at a different time of year). The hotels and halls were warned that they would be denied their kashrut licences if they did so.

“It is a seriously forbidden to hold any event at the end of the calendar year that is connected with or displays anything from the non-Jewish festivals,” the letter states.

After the letter was publicised on Facebook, Haifa’s mayor, Yona Yahav, moved into damage limitation mode, overruling the city’s rabbinical council on Sunday and insisting that parties would be allowed to go ahead. Whether Yahav has the power to enforce his decision on the notoriously independent-minded rabbinical authorities is still uncertain.

But what is clear is that there is plenty of religious intolerance verging on hatred being quietly exercised against non-Jews, mostly behind the scenes so as not to disturb Israel’s “Jewish and democratic” image or outrage the millions of Christian tourists and pilgrims who visit Israel each year.

The Ultimate Logic of a Society Built on Mass Murder

It’s not a sudden madness, but a long history of mass murder come full circle.

By Glen Ford

December 21, 2012 "Information Clearing House" - As a native-born American, I grew up watching cowboy and Indian shoot-em-ups in which the highlight of the movie was when the white guys in the circled wagon train shot the Indians off their horses until all the red men were dead, and very silent. Indians didn’t do a lot of screaming in pain when they were shot; they just expired. Same thing with buck-toothed Japanese, line after line of them, charging into U.S. machine guns, falling instantly silent and dead. It was somehow quite clean, almost antiseptic, these cinematic rituals of death, all staged for the broadest popular consumption to demonstrate the inevitability – and cosmic justice – of ultimate white victory over the darker races.

This was mother’s milk to the white American nation – which is why Richard Pryor and kids like me rooted for the Indians. Mass murder is at the core of the American national religion, which is a celebration of a genocidal march across a continent filled with other, doomed human beings. America’s contribution to European culture was to invite “all the nations of Europe” to come to these shores and become fellow “white” citizens, whose status was defined by the enforced inferiority of Blacks and the remnants of the Indians. Ritual burnings of Blacks were organized as great public festivals, attended by thousands, staged in order to affirm whites’ collective right to commit murder. This monopoly on violence was what made them white Americans.

U.S. foreign policy reflects the nation’s origins and ghastly evolution into a globe-strutting mob, that empowers itself to kill at will. A million dead Filipinos at the turn of the 20th century; aerial bombing of Haitian villages less than a generation later; the totally unwarranted nuclear annihilation of two cities at the very end of World War Two; two million dead Koreans shortly thereafter; three million dead Vietnamese in the next decade,; and, since 1996, six million Congolese – all, and many, many more, slaughtered in the name of U.S. civilizational superiority – the ghastly opiate of the white American masses.

What kind of human beings does such a culture produce? To paraphrase the Bible, “By their massacres, ye shall know them.” The modern mass American murder is overwhelmingly a white phenomenon. Yet few whites ask the question, “What’s wrong with white America?” It is seems that white America lacks the capacity for self-examination. It cannot grasp the simple truth, that a culture that celebrates the annihilation of whole peoples, casually and without guilt or introspection, is devoid of human values at its very core. In the end, it turns against itself. That is the simple lesson of Newtown, and Columbine, and Aurora. The same cultural deformity creates a huge market for games like the very popular Assassin’s Creed, whose latest version integrates individual and group murder with events of the American Revolutionary War. American kids can simulate mass murder all day long, and feel patriotic and smart while doing it. Assassin’s Creed features an inter-racial cast of killers – possibly in deference to the brown guy in the White House who owns the ultimate Kill List. It’s the modern equivalent of the cowboys and Indians movies of my youth. The same sickness.

© 2012 Black Agenda Report

"First as Tragedy, then as Farce..." Oh! ...Hagel not Hegel!

ck Hagel, had the unusual honesty to rightfully disparage AIPAC and the whole Israel-first lobby, saying "I'm a senator of the United States, not Israel."

AIPAC and it's puppet legislators and media shills tolerate no criticism of Israel and themselves of any kind, so it's somewhat amazing that Hagel is even up for consideration. Enter supposedly-progressive firebrand Rachel Maddow. Of course, she's really just another Democratic Party hack and defender Israel's ethnic cleansing and war crimes (as well as Obama's bipartisan rule-the-world-via permanent warfare policy). BUT, she's too much of a moral coward to admit it, so she makes an on-air denouncement of Hagel as unfit to be Secretary of Defense because he made a homophobic remark 14 years ago. --RC

Maddow slams Hagel, to neocon applause
Dec 22, 2012 01:21 pm | Philip Weiss

The war against Chuck Hagel to be Defense Secretary continues. Rachel Maddow concludes this short segment, "Sorry, Charlie" on Chuck Hagel's homophobic comment of 14 years ago with the statement, "I do not know if President Obama wants to nominate Chuck Hagel or not. But if he is, so far it's not going all that well."

Hagel has apologized for the statement.

"My comments 14 years ago in 1998 were insensitive," he said, NBC News reported. "They do not reflect my views or the totality of my public record, and I apologize to Ambassador Hormel and any LGBT Americans who may question my commitment to their civil rights.”

But Maddow picked up a Washington Post item saying that the object of the 1998 slur, James Hormel, does not accept Hagel's apology.

Notes a friend: Dan Senor is retweeting the criticism of Hagel. This gives the lobby the cover they need. Remember after they sank Chas Freeman they claimed it was all about China and Saudi Arabia. They need a smokescreen to say it wasn't all about Israel.

Andrew Sullivan has characterized this as a "classic" underhanded smear campaign, and pointed out that Hagel voted in 2006 to oppose a ban on same-sex marriage:

A secretary of defense nominee should not be disqualified because he said something retrograde on a non-defense issue fifteen years ago. In the most dangerous scenario gay activists have faced - a potential constitutional amendment to consign us permanently to second class status - Hagel voted no.