A Serious Discussion With The Mound of Sound

In this post, "The Mound of Sound" (AKA: "MOS", AKA "The Disaffected Lib," AKA: "Justin Trudeau-hating OLD MAN" ;)  .... ) adds another page to his catalogue of legitimate doom-and-gloom of most larger life-forms on Earth fryin-up because of global heating:

I've started to think of them as "prescription pieces" and there are plenty of them. These are the articles that pop up daily to repeat warnings of what we must absolutely do right now to avert unspeakably dire consequences in the not too distant future.
I can't criticize those articles. I agree with them. They're usually backed up by reams of scientific research and analysis, a mountain of knowledge that grows every day. Most of those who write these essays are well-credentialed individuals, top drawer men and women. They write with sincerity and passion. They want to even our keel, steer us away from the shoals that lie just ahead.
It would be amazing if we listened to these people, heeded their warnings, embraced their prescriptions and demanded that our leaders stopped skirting these building crises and finally dealt with them. Only that never quite happens.
Imagine if these articles and studies and papers ever got traction, if they ever lasted more than a few days before being flushed down the Memory Hole.  Imagine if our lawmakers strolled into the House of Commons, their minds seized with the awareness that they are, today, passing judgment on our young people and the generations to follow them. Imagine if they knew that the decisions they're taking now will translate into lives and deaths of Canadians in a decade or two. Imagine if they realized there are some options that are still available to us that will be foreclosed in just a few years. Imagine if they knew that we, today's voting public, would hold them accountable for their indifference and neglect.
None of that is happening. No, there is no epiphany among those to whom we entrust the power to safeguard us and  secure this nation's  endangered future. Imagine the dark farce of a Parliament proclaiming a climate state of emergency and then, less than 24 hours later, greenlighting a massive new pipeline to deliver high-carbon, low-value bitumen to world markets.
I still read those prescription pieces as they come in.  My habit is to start right at the end where there'll be listed the authors and their credentials. Then I wade into their essays, top to bottom. I dwell on them for a while but then I hear that Memory Hole beginning to slowly creak open, followed by the thudding sound of heads banging into walls.

I responded with a good faith question:

You are well informed on the danger of global heating.
You have identified the problems of political corruption and/or inertia.
What do you think is needed to change things?

MOS and I had a little back-and-forth .... aw hell, just in case something happens I'll copy and paste the whole thing here! So MOS replied:

If I could wish for one thing, Thwap, it would be a powerful sea change in public attitude on climate breakdown. There are many things that can be done but almost none of them that don't require sacrifice and cutting back what we perceive to be our standard of living. Many Canadians are concerned about climate change and want something done but they're not willing to pay/lose/sacrifice much to achieve it. Without strong public demand there's little political will for taking bold action.
We know what must be done before this decade is out and there's no plan to get there. Now I fear he social and economic impacts of the pandemic will undermine our already weak chance of change in the limited amount of time remaining to us.
My view is that future generations are screwed. Yet that very belief is what keeps me advocating for change, not throwing in the towel. It's really quite helpful to be able to be able to liberate the fight from perceived outcomes. All that's necessary is to accept that we may not be able to spare the next generation or two from a dangerous and less viable future, we still have a role to play in making it less hellish than, at this point, necessary or we can go along as we are and make life harsher for those generations which seems to be the course we're on.
I've been trying to do my part. I've downsized from a large house to a comfortable but modest bungalow. I've made that about as energy efficient as I can manage. I last flew about 10 years ago to attend my father's funeral. I still have to drive but I've gotten my mileage down to just under 4,000 km. per year which means my current little car should outlast me. I haven't been off the island in years. The best part is that I don't feel deprived in any way.

To which I replied:

I'd say we have to construct a positive vision of a political-economic system that reflects ecological reality.
Show people how things can be better. (Especially since it's life-or-death necessary anyway.)
Show how it's possible.
Force politicians to accept that it's all-or-nothing. Show them as well that powerful people aren't powerful anymore if they come up against a democratic state.

So MOS replied, but it seems that (through no fault of his own) he missed my point. And I'd like to use this blog-post to reply to him because I can think of no better use of my time than to seriously discuss what's necessary to radically transform human civilization to try to make it compatible with the ecology (even if it isn't all too late).

And so, like he said the following (to which I shall post my responses within the body of the text):

I don't mean to discourage you, thwap, but I think that horse has already left the barn.
How many electoral cycles do you think it would take to achieve such a tide change in Canadian politics? And, once that had been achieved, how long would it take to implement change of such magnitude across the federal/provincial structure of our confederation?

You're preaching to the converted MOS. I said recently: THERE IS NO LONG GAME. We have to move YESTERDAY. So when I talk about forcing politicians to do things, I mean, whatever politicians happen to be in office. Does everybody understand? Like I said, whether it's Trump or Biden; BOTH of them are a death sentence for humanity. Here in Canada, both the Liberals and the Conservatives have shown themselves to be slaves of the oil industry. (And the BC NDP routinely betrays the environment when in power. I don't know enough about the Manitoba NDP except that they're neo-liberals. And the Notley NDP government in Alberta showed itself incapable of original thinking there.)

How Justin's Cowardice Fucks Us All Over

Duncan Cameron at rabble.ca has a good summation of how Justin Trudeau's Liberals are failing Canadians. Wisely, he first gets the obligatory dismissal of Canada's most electorally viable alternative out of the way:

Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government have an insurance policy. As the Conservative Party of Canada leadership race demonstrates, the official Opposition is many miles away from establishing itself as a government-in-waiting.
The leadership contestants have been appealing to the CPC right-wing base, recruited from former Reform party members. The CPC candidates failed to express themselves fluently in a French language debate. 

But following that his focus remains on the Justin Trudeau Liberals and their deliberate refusal to make any major policy decisions that would upset the coddled, entrenched oligarchy that really runs this country.

The Liberals have failed to demonstrate an ability to go beyond image management, and implement policies that help Canadians secure a better future. 

Intent on forging a poor new NAFTA, Canada under Trudeau has tied its foreign policy directly to U.S. policy: on Russia, by introducing and maintaining sanctions; on China, by contributing an arrest to the U.S. trade war against Huawei; on Iran, by breaking off diplomatic relations; on Latin America, by supporting the overthrow of the Venezuelan government; on Palestine, by refusing to condemn human rights violations by Israel; and by committing to new military options such as drones, instead of renewing peacekeeping operations with the UN. 

The world community was not impressed, rejecting Canada's bid to occupy a rotating seat on the UN Security Council. 

Major U.S. digital monopolies are replacing the brick and mortar retail trade, killing off print media, radio and television advertising (Facebook and Twitter); and Canada has not even figured out how to tax them. 

The parliamentary budget office just justified its existence by revealing that wealth inequality in Canada has increased exponentially -- the top one per cent have 25.6 per cent of all wealth, not 13.7 per cent as previously believed. How much longer can taxing wealth, inheritance, corporate capital, financial transactions and luxury good be ignored?

Now, as we all know, there are blogs, twitter accounts, pundits, etc., who are partisan hacks. Who shriek with indignation at the very thought of criticizing the precious Liberals. "The Conservatives are worse!" only works for so long as an excuse. After a while you have to give up on people who behave that was as the useless, brain-dead, stupid assholes that they are.

Let's face facts; Liberal cowardice KILLS. Our foreign policy kills people. It's so wrong-headed that you simply have to conclude that only that the people behind it are hopeless. They (and the Conservatives to their right) need to be extirpated. There are real-world costs (beyond the $15 billion in the latest round of bail-outs to Bay Street and the foreign-dominated Alberta oil industry) for continued inaction on global warming. When's the last time you heard any news about the suicide epidemic on First Nations' reserves? What stirring words and deep-seated reforms have we heard from Ottawa about reforming the RCMP? (You remember that violently misogynist, racist, institution that allowed that mass-murderer to rampage across Nova Scotia? And will there even be an Inquiry into that tragedy?)

We have to put pressure on the Liberals to do better. And when partisan hacks immediately start to cry about "haters" and "old men" when this obvious reality is brought up, it means that the party and its shills are going to resist. In a way, they're as much "resistors" as the corporate Democrats in the USA are: They're "resisting" YOU, not the oligarchy and the right-wing.

Talentless Margaret Wente Resigns From Wingnut Welfare Position

My faith in this country has been minimally restored from hearing that talentless, plagiarizing, racist, lazy-assed fuckface Margaret Wente has resigned from Massey College's Quadrangle Society. I first heard a couple of days ago how University of Toronto professor Alissa Trotz resigned from the nomination board in protest over the opaque process that allowed this blight on humanity to corrupt the academic community with her stupidity and arrogance:

Trotz's actions inspired fellow professor George J. Sefa Dei to resign as well. Around the same time students concerned about the reputation of their place of learning launched a petition to have this shameful decision reversed.

I'm willing to be charitable to Wente and assume that she's capable of feeling wounded at the realization of how toxic her reputation is to decent people. Still and all I'm pretty sure that her decision to resign arose mainly out of laziness. She probably thought this position would provide her with an opportunity to gab with educated people on topics informed by her ancient BA in English and her decades long career of pulling arguments and facts from other people's writings as well as from out of her own stinky ass. But that bit of pleasant distraction from her retirement was now going to be more trouble than it was worth as her "Fellows" of the Quadrangle Society were now probably going to either shun her or make hers establish herself as worthy of her position. (And she most assuredly was NOT worthy of this appointment. This position was provided to her by the same Canadian establishment elites who subsidized her entire career of brazen lying and plagiarism. The same people who endorsed stephen harper for prime minister after he had repeatedly defecated on all the foundational principles of parliamentary democracy. )

Wente managed some laughable hissing and snarling as she exited from the scene:

"The College has now received a letter from Ms. Wente stating that she does not wish to be a member of the Quadrangle Society, that the accusations against her are false and outrageous and that her record speaks for itself," the governing board said in the message.

Yeah, whatever Wente. Your record DOES speak for itself. You had no right to be associated with a prestigious institution of higher learning. Congratulations to Trotz, Sefa Dei, and the fine students and other petitioners at U of T for mobilizing to send that entitled, arrogant piece of garbage packing. It's a small victory but one that has eliminated the cumulative rot and pollution that Wente's presence would have had on that institution.

Lesson From the Pandemic: We Can Do Anything We Want

For about a month or two the Canadian economy shut down a significant part of its output. The government stepped in and subsidized people who had lost their source of income. This government was the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau. Had the Conservatives under Andrew Scheer won a majority under our archaic and anti-democratic "First Past The Post" electoral system (which the Liberals had vowed to replace but didn't) things would have been much worse. If one was a stupid partisan idiot the lesson to be drawn from that is that the Liberal Party is perfect and everything they do is perfect and there can be no criticism of the Liberals except from hateful, ugly, withered OLD MEN, who are DISGUSTING, with their grey pubic hairs sprouting from their drooping scrotums, who should all DIE SOON.

But that's how stupid, crazy people think. In actual fact, the Liberals have made quite a few important mistakes along the way. Together with the powerful premiers who all suffer from their own delusions and limitations and partisan ass-hattery. For instance; as I said recently - the Liberals are paying for their policies by borrowing from private banks instead of from the Bank of Canada. This deliberate policy impoverishes future generations for the present benefit of Bay Street. It is craven service to the oligarchy. We have not shut things down to the extent necessary and we are dragging out the crisis needlessly and taxing our healthcare systems that have suffered years of cuts under Liberal-Conservative-NDP policies of neo-liberal austerity. Canada's response has been half-assed.

"Half-assed" can be described scientifically by showing how Canada's accomplishments can be shown as lying half-way between the admirable achievements of countries like South Korea and New Zealand, and basket-cases like Bolsonaro's Brazil, Boris Johnson's United Kingdom and Donald Trump's United Sates of America. Which I guess is another important lesson to be gleaned from this crisis: That right-wing "conservative" policies are a disastrous mixture of incompetence, delusion and murderous callousness. And no matter how shameless a right-wing hack, racist fuckwad wants to behave, there's no arguing with the numbers. They have fucked-up big time. Enormously. Undeniably (to a sane person). Catastrophically. And they have killed their own supporters as well.

From this point on, listening to the fucking "conservatives" [The Republicans in the USA, the Conservative Party of Canada in, ...um, ... Canada, the Conservatives Party in the UK, the Wild-Eyed Fascist Party in Brazil] is a sign of total ignorance and total stupidity. It's like if you were a high school student and this kid in your class would occasionally give you answers for tests that turned out to be wrong, and then one time, for some bizarre reason, you bought a test from him with all the answers on it and copied from it and you got a "Zero." You would have to be a fucking idiot to listen to that guy ever again. There would have to be something wrong with you to trust that asshole. That's how it is from now on with "conservatives." Don't listen to them unless you want bad things to happen to you. (Obviously, I've felt that way about "conservatives" for a long time. But the death-rates from COVID-19 resulting from "conservative" stupidity should seal the deal for anyone who isn't as arrogantly dismissive of MORONS as I am.)

But the lesson that I was referring to in the title of this post is that this pandemic shows that we (the human race) can do anything we want.  We could close down the economy TOMORROW. We could pay people to stay at home. Stay at home while we figure out how to create an economy that obeys the laws of the eco-system while providing the basics for human dignity to everyone. Aside from central banks in big economies like the USA, the EU, Japan, China, and middle-sized countries like Canada and South Korea; ... there is also $30 TRILLION stashed in offshore bank accounts around the world. We would have no problem providing the essentials to everyone, while freezing rents and mortgage payments, and just telling the banks to CHILL while we sort shit out.

Shut-down car culture. Increase public transit. Bring sanity to our food system and break up corporate agriculture. Provide decent living standards for our elderly. Re-invest in schools. Invest in democratic, voluntary population control. Create jobs in environmental clean-up. Re-wild. Retro-fit homes for maximum energy efficiency. Teach actual survival skills, not marketing and public relations.

Canada Deserved to Lose

The world dodged a bullet when Canada lost its bid for a seat on the UN Security Council. Liberal hacks are going to invent sill excuses ("we waited too long before applying" is JT's apparently), and non-Liberal Canuck "patriots" like the Glib N' Stale are apparently resorting to "sour grapes" rationalizations, but they're all just desperately avoiding reality.

Canada lost because it is a boot-licking toady of an increasingly belligerent, unhinged, violent United States of America.

Trudeau Liberals Fucking Everyone Over AS USUAL

From Ed Finn at Rabble: "Bleak post-pandemic future looms as government keeps borrowing from private banks instead of the Bank of Canada"

Canada's Parliamentary Budget Officer, Yves Giroux, recently estimated that the federal deficit incurred from funding pandemic virus relief measures -- now about $260 billion -- could soar as high as $900 billion by this time next year unless curbed long before then."Temporary measures…will have to be temporary," he cautioned, adding that if they are maintained at the current high rate of 12 per cent of GDP (going into 2021), the country will be sliding down a dangerous fiscal path that would be unsustainable.
He did not explain that the main reason for such a looming fiscal catastrophe is that these billions of dollars are being borrowed from the private banks at relatively high interest rates.

The financial sector has become the most powerful economic sector in late-capitalist Canada. Even though it doesn't do much for the country (except gouge us). And power based on economic clout is power that is going to resist having to pay for anything.

That's why you see the Canadian federal government doing everything in its power to make sure that Canada's banks aren't inconvenienced by this pandemic. Everyone else is expected to take a loss, including small businesses, but not the banks.

I remember at the start of this crisis how some progressives weren't happy about the appearance of the word "war" in discussion of dealing with Covid-19. But I always thought; If that's what it takes to get our politicians to take it seriously, then use that terminology. Because when there's a war, you gotta spend. And you can't weaken the country by taking on avoidable debt. Everyone has to do their part. There should have been a moratorium on rents and debt payments (because people weren't working!) and taxes should have been raised on the wealthiest to pay for the extra healthcare costs and necessary subsidies so that people could eat and buses could run and other public services that are essential could be maintained.

But more importantly, the Bank of Canada could have funded this necessary spending:

A similar steep rise in federal government spending occurred after the end of the Second World War. That's when several huge construction projects were undertaken, including the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Trans-Canada Highway, and the construction of modern airports and seaports. Major social programs were also provided or improved at that time.
If such a massive and costly expansion of services and infrastructure were to be launched today, our federal government would incur costs running into many billions of dollars, as it now does for its pandemic relief spending. Back in the post-war period, however, the total cost of all these economic and social projects resulted in barely a minimal increase in the federal debt.
Why? Because the federal government didn't borrow money from the private banks at that time, as it does today. All the funding came from the Bank of Canada in the form of interest-free "loans" that were "repaid" to the Bank of Canada. The government thus avoided large debts and deficits for public infrastructure projects.

A lazy, entitled, embezzler like Andrew Scheer might stupidly worry about the compromised moral fiber of people who received subsistence payments during a time when they weren't allowed to work, but his party isn't in power now so fuck him and his party. (Although there was a danger that they might have won a majority government last election thanks to the fucking Liberals' betrayal of their promise to end our FPTP electoral system.)

As sure as night follows day, the political tools of the oligarchs are going to be pointing to the massive deficits resulting from this crisis as the excuse for still more privatizations and austerity.  Liberal hacks will pretend that these are unfortunate realities that have to be addressed and they'll fetchingly wipe tears from their eyes as they destroy us, but destroy us they will.

The Death of Electoral Politics in the United States of America - VI

The GRIM, PERHAPS HOPELESS, PRESENT

Fear not sweet readers! Just because thwaperino isn't dealing with the current atrocities, it doesn't mean this blog isn't relevant! My opinion about the current protests sparked by the brutal murder of George Floyd is that, sadly, little will be accomplished. I hope I'm wrong. But I've been watching this stuff since the Rodney King riot. Also, congregating in huge crowds during a pandemic caused by an airborne, respiratory virus is going to have a horrible impact on public health. Things are going to get still worse before they get better. (I'll add that it's not my place to tell oppressed people, targeted for hundreds of years by violent racism, when the proper time for protesting is. And these protests appear to have had some important impacts that I didn't anticipate when I wrote those words a few days ago.)

But, as this six-part series [i, ii, iii, iv, v] has been building towards and based on, ... real change in the United States of America (still the single most important country in the world) will NOT come from the political process. Because, obviously, the Republican Party is a degenerate shit-show with no redeeming qualities. The Republican voter base has become so ignorant and bigoted that they see a shambling tower of fat and lies sprayed bright orange and they think "There's a PRESIDENT!" These people are incapable of doing anything right about global heating, militarism, police brutality, racism, inequality, or anything. Obviously, they'll just make everything worse.

The Death of Electoral Politics in the United States of America - Part V

STOLEN ELECTIONS & OVERALL DEBASEMENT

First of all, the latest era that we've been living through involves the total debasement of whatever principles capitalist pseudo-democracy was ever possessed of. For instance, this blogger is of the opinion that george dubya bush was never elected. Instead, I maintain that he brazenly stole both of his elections. I'm well aware that there are plenty of shit-heads, devotees of a political mindset they glorify with the appellation "conservative" who would disagree with me. But I think that if i were to strap them down to the floor and kick them in the teeth long enough, they would soon see reason and recognize the merits of my case.

I mean, first of all the Repugnicans practice gerrymandering and voter suppression on a massive scale. (The Democrats used to do this as well but began to embrace electoral integrity at some point in the late-1960s. Waitaminnit! Did I just say that?!? Caveat: The Democrats play fair [and lose] against Republicans. But the party leadership cheats shamelessly to defeat progressives and leftists.) In Florida, the Republicans purged thousands of names from the voters list based on often spurious claims that they belonged to convicted felons.

Republican state governments manage the national election process in their own states. Which allows for blatant partisan defecation on the idea of free and fair elections. A case in point is the deliberate confusion deliberately created by the butterfly ballot. The way the ballot was designed it made it unclear which box to check to vote for Democrat Al Gore, and, the proof of this was the large number of votes for Hitler-admirer Pat Buchanan in voting precincts with a high number of Jewish voters.

Obviously, if you took your time and paid attention you would eventually see which box was for Gore and which was for Buchanan. And this prompted shameless Republican partisans to sneer about "stupid Democrats" who don't know how to use the voting booth. But the ballots were deliberately designed to be confusing. And in US elections they vote for entire tickets and on referendum questions. So it can be a lengthier process than in our federal elections where we vote for one MP from a selection that is rarely higher than six people. ANY attempt to throw confusion and roadblocks into the voting process betrays an intellectual failure to appreciate the sanctity of electoral democracy. It betrays an anti-democratic mindset.

In the end, the Republican's voter-suppression and confusing ballots and other shenanigans weren't enough to steal a victory. The results were very close (and would eventually show that Al Gore won). Election officials began to count the ballots manually. This triggered a "riot" from degenerates such as those pictured below. These stupid assholes were Republican operatives, often paid and flown into Florida, to protest this attempt to maintain electoral integrity. In the end, a despicable, shameful, partisan Supreme Court decision finally put the nail in the coffin and the Florida vote determined the 2000 US election for the moronic george dubya bush.

Once bush II was illegally installed by a corrupt Supreme Court, his puppet-master, the career criminal (and not very bright) Dick Cheney, in the guise of Vice-President, began to use the USA's federal executive branch as a means to restore the fortunes of the company (Halliburton) that he had almost destroyed when he was its CEO. You see, dullard Dick Cheney thought he'd be able to show off his "free market" chops in the private sector, but the stupid fuck had his company buy another company in the middle of a huge asbestos damages lawsuit. The company lost the lawsuit and Halliburton was now liable for billions in damages. Cheney's bludgeoning of bush II into the White House allowed him to repair the damage he'd caused by doing what he did best: Blatant corruption and lying. The bush II-Cheney regime launched an illegal war of choice (making them liable for hanging) and gave Halliburton tens of billions in contracts (which contracts Halliburton subcontracted and gouged and cheated on) thereby recovering from the hole Dipshit Dick Cheney had driven them into.

Fuckwad Cheney also brazenly sneered at even the concept of public accountability with his legislative-executive branch bullshit about his energy taskforce talks. You see, Stupid Dick Cheney is a creature of the fossil fuels industry. For that reason he had his energy taskforce talks with numerous fossil fuels executives. Among trading racist jokes and comparing penis sizes, these vermin would also talk about ways that government policy could be steered towards their own personal benefit.

Obviously, Cretinous Cheney couldn't have these corruption parties made public so he refused to release records of the meetings to the National Archives under the claim that as Vice-President of the Senate he was part of the legislative branch of government, while simultaneously arguing that the legislative branch's General Accounting Office could not get the records because that would be an intrusion on the privilege of the executive branch.

This was briefly a controversy. Then briefly a scandal. Then a moment for cynical laughter on late-night political talk shows. Then it was forgotten. Which seems to be the problem with human beings. We can't seem to grasp anything other than the obvious. And even then, we fail to grasp the significance. Take, for instance, all the idiots who talk shit about COVID-19. The virus is microscopic and the deaths happen inside hospital IC wards. So the fact that over 100,000 US-Americans have been killed by it can't register with these morons. They bray like donkeys in the streets about the "tyranny" of being asked to wear masks because the danger isn't literally an enormous, hairy creature with huge fangs and bloody claws snarling at them from a meter away. They can't process Global Heating either. Because of the same stupidity. And all of those in the USA, who failed to grasp the significance of Dick Cheney, whether it was his stolen election, his war based on lies, or his brazen disembowelment of public accountability, ... all of them fatal to the idea of "democracy" ... they failed to rally behind the flawed pseudo-democracy they had and the world has become as we see it today.

And we in Canada failed in exactly the same way, when the pathetic imbecile stephen harper imported the same contempt for the spirit and the letter of the laws to Canada. Our elite media supported him during his crimes. Liberals and parliamentary NDP members, all tolerated him as just an extreme form of "conservative" rather than the total menace and complete degenerate that he was. And thereby set a precedent of tolerating total contempt for our supposed foundational political values. (I wrote TONS of stuff detailing all of harper's contempt for our system of government. Search the blog if you so desire.) The point is that our pseudo-democracies were the best tools we had available to control these monsters. But, a combination of liberal complacency and complicity with neo-liberalism, and social democratic delusion, and the childish contempt of "super-radical" activists, led to the withering of the legal checks and balances of democratic oversight.

911

My survey of the ups and downs of capitalist pseudo-democracy has taken us to the 21st Century. And I suppose that, aside from the bursting of the dot-com bubble, the real way to introduce the new millennium is with the terrorist attacks on 9-11-2001. Personally, having read about the lackadaisical behaviour of the george w. bush administration in the months leading up to the attack it's my belief that while it wasn't an "inside job" it certainly seems that they were hoping for something to happen. They wanted something akin to "a new Pearl Harbour" to allow them to go nuts with police-state legislation and openly imperialist foreign policy.

Anyway, these anti-democratic scum (bush II and Cheney) were on duty when the massive security failure of 911 2001 occurred. And they used that incident to pass The Patriot Act. (And Canada passed The Anti-Terrorism Act.) Pieces of legislation which ramped-up state surveillance powers and weakened citizens' rights. Because now that capitalism doesn't have to compete with socialist ideas anymore, there's no point in sharing the wealth with the plebians. Matter of fact (and as I've demonstrated in this series of posts) their own selfish policies harm the economy and make it necessary for elite parasites to TAKE from the majority and lower their standards of living. This is going to make people angry. It's therefore in their interest to spy on people and take away their rights so as to control them easier as they fleece and abuse them.

The Patriot Act itself was based on a draft for an anti-terrorism bill crafted in 1994 by the Democratic Party's current great white hope for 2020, Joe Biden.

You see, Noam Chomsky (of whom [who?] I am a fan) has come out as a defender of "lesser-evil" voting both now and in 2016. He has actually advocated voting for the lesser evil in close contests since forever. At the same time he has said that the act of voting every 2 years (Congress and some Senators) and four years (the same plus the Presidency) shouldn't be seen as the main form of democratic participation. Protest and other forms of activism are more important. However, given the fact that protest, as it is practiced by the deluded child-minds of progressives, has shown itself to be useless, and given the fact that lesser-evilism has only allowed the Democratic Party to move farther and farther to the right, ... it is therefore well past time for Chomsky to reevaluate his position. Chomsky is right to be concerned with the fascist proclivities of Donald J. Trump. The danger though is that the USA is not Nazi Germany. After Hitler was made Chancellor, the Reichstag burned and the Nazis passed "The Enabling Acts" that increased state power and eviscerated citizens' rights. But in the USA, they've already had their Reichstag Fire, and their version of the "Enabling Acts" are already passed and they were a bipartisan accomplishment.

Anyway, anti-terrorism was now the great cause of our era. Just like defeating fascism was supposedly the fight of the 1940s, and defeating communist tyranny was the cause of the Cold War. Now it was THE WAR ON TERROR!!! Which was, and is, total bullshit. I call it the GBWOT (Great Bullshit War On Terror). Because the USA not only engages in terrorism itself. Amazingly, the Washington foreign policy elites have been caught, and admitted to, arming and training the same Jihaadists they say we have to fight! That's a pretty amazing accomplishment don't you agree? And (don't forget!) we humans should stop and consider the significance of that fact. Saudi Arabia (and the other feudal regimes on the Arabian Peninsula) are the biggest sources of cash and manpower for the Islamic fundamentalist organizations. The USA armed and funded and assisted fundamentalist terrorists to topple Libya's Qaddafi and bring ruin to Libya. The USA armed Jihaadists to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. They are still arming and training these maniacs in Syria. The whole goddamned thing is a sham, a con-job. It is being used to justify military spending and police-state legislation. And most of us have fallen for it hook, line and sinker.

Just like Francis Fukuyma's discredited "End of History" at the end of the Cold War, this GBWOT era produced it's own tome of pseudo-scholarship, Samuel P. Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations." But, as I said, the War on Terror is bullshit and therefore Huntington's book is bullshit. The GBWOT justifies Keynesian subsidies for war. Terrorism "justifies" assaults on civil liberties thereby making it easier to implement austerity. Racism gives people scapegoats for miseries of austerity. The GBWOT adds Muslims and Arabs to Blacks, Latinos, Indigenous Peoples, and immigrants, to the list of the hated. (And, recently, Russians and Chinese have been added in a bipartisan effort.)

I had intended to write more about bush II's criminality. But it would be redundant. Suffice to say that the duration of his time in office, including the also stolen second term, was just used to inflict more literal torture on innocent people, continued Pentagon-MIA-GBWOT corruption, continued shredding of civil liberties, and continued wage stagnation and worker insecurity. Without even trying to acknowledge the humour of it, the shit-head, coke-addled, lazy-assed, silver-spooned, legacy student, george dubya bush, played at also being the "Education President" with his "No Child Left Behind" policies, which were mainly used to force schools to pay for private-sector provided standardized tests, which were mainly useless, but which did provide for excuses to cut funding for public sector schools (when they failed due to reasons beyond their control) and to shift funding to private charter schools, which would fail even more but then go out of business and take the money and run. Which was the whole fucking point of the exercise. So that corporate criminals could get rich on public monies and to hell with the people.

The only other "engine of growth" during the bush II years was financial speculation, which resulted in the gigantic explosion of fraud and misery of 2008. Deliberate, massive, world-economy destabilizing fraud, for which no bankster went to prison. Instead, bush II and Cheney put together a public bail-out of these criminal parasites and Democrat Barack Obama oversaw its implementation as one of his first acts as President. (After filling his cabinet from a list of candidates provided by the same Wall Street thieves he'd help to rescue.)

CHINA

Just to be clear, it was western capitalists sent who sent jobs to China. China didn't compel our governments to close our factories and re-open them in China. As Naomi Klein wrote long ago in 2008, China became a testing ground for surveillance technology. The Chinese Communist Party (CPP) wanted this technology for their own authoritarian reasons, and western oligarchs took advantage of the absence of democracy there to see how it worked. China is also helpful as a scapegoat and as a military rival to use as a bogeyman.

These people are idiots sure. But they're all (in their own ways) individual idiots. There are multiple plot-lines, actors, and therefore, interpretations. The Democrats fixate on Russia because Putin (who is a nasty fellow) thwarts the insane ambitions of Hillary Clinton in the Middle East and (like the spit-spraying lunatic that she is) she has made him a scapegoat for her own miserable failure to defeat Donald Trump, in her ludicrously concocted, shit-for-brains conspiracy theory of "Russiagate." With Donald Trump, it's the Chinese. (Also, FWIW, with has-been shithead stephen j. harper.)

No good guys or bad guys. (We're not even good. Things just are.)

IMMIGRATION AND RISE OF RIGHT-WING PARTIES

The right-wing brain is afraid. And things that are different are a category that causes the right-wing brain to be even more afraid. And immigrants have things that are different (language, culture, etc.,) and so they make right-wing people afraid. And when the world is threatening (because of economic stresses caused by neoliberalism) right-wing people want to lash-out. Being cowards and morons they are constitutionally incapable of fighting back against the powerful interests who are the true source of their sufferings. That would take both proper analysis (which escapes them because they're morons) and courage (which eludes them because they're fearful cowards). So they lash out at immigrants, and "races" of people in other lands, and fellow citizens who have a different skin colour from them.

These idiots respond to oligarchic austerity policies by stupidly joining together in extremist racist political movements. In part, this process is encouraged by right-wing traditional elites. Failed fake prime minister stephen harper's stupid book is used to argue that the reason that "ordinary Canadian households" have suffered under both Liberal and Conservative governments (in spite of his always using sophisticated fact-finding and cost-benefit analysis to have carefully arrived at the very best public policies that anyone could ever have arrived it) is because of fucking goddamned immigrants and the Chinese. (Again, deliberately bringing in immigrant labour to displace Canadian workers as indentured servants and deliberately signing trade deals that allowed Canadian companies to manufacture in China and which allowed China to buy-up our resources were harper's policies, his own current racist conspiracy theories notwithstanding.)

To a degree, traditional elites genuinely fear and despise these racist extremists. They take support away from traditional right-wing parties, interfere with the exploitation of undocumented immigrants, and challenge (even if only verbally) globalization. And sometimes they're just plain ugly. But then, these elites have always been disgusted by poor people. And if the main thing is that right-wing chumps are fighting immigrants and people of colour, well, that's the main thing.

And, when the right-wing chumps realize that election time has come 'round again and they see that the Conservatives or the Republicans are offering them candidates who seem to hate immigrants and people of colour, then they [stupidly] support those parties. And in Europe, it's refugees. Millions of Arabs and Africans have fled to Europe as a result of the devastations caused by US-American wars in their home countries. As a result, stupid, fearful, right-wing people feel that "boo-hoo-hoo!" they're under attack. This is one of the many factors behind the rise of bona fide fascist parties in Europe.

SOARING INEQUALITY

Statistics don't seem to capture the reality, but they do provide some indication of the vast chasm of income and wealth inequality in the 21st Century. Average CEO compensation has soared from 20x that of the average worker in the 1960s to over 300x an average worker's annual income today. 40% of workers in the Anglo-American economies are one missed paycheque away from homelessness. Over 60% of US-American households couldn't find $1,000 for an emergency. (If those sources attempt to say that this is due to "economic illiteracy" or anything like that, ... ignore them. This was the intended consequence of neoliberal economic policies.)

INDIFFERENCE TO ILLEGAL TAX AVOIDANCE

Slash incomes for the majority and lower taxes on the wealthy and the corporations. Allow for the continued financialization of the economy. Allow money to flow in and out of the nation's borders at will. Create a craven political class and cut them in on some of the action. This creates a world where elites get to hide their fortunes in ILLEGAL offshore accounts. A few years back the amount of hot money sitting in these accounts (looking for interest-generating "investments") was $22 TRILLION. We cut their taxes in half so that they'll create jobs. They don't create jobs. Instead they funnel their money overseas where there's ZERO TAX. And even when it's revealed in leaks like "The Panama Papers" or "The Paradise Papers" our governments of puppets make only token efforts (if that) to recover the money.

THAT'LL DO PIG

Awk! This has gone on long enough. I'll post this and then start on the last part.