What's the Big Idea?

Dear friends of Bernie,

We’re doing fine.  We’re doing just fine.  We really are. 

The Powers that Be, the billionaire class and their flaks and agents, are doing their best to stop us.  Their message is "Clinton is Inevitable!" "Resistance is Futile!  Give Up and Go Home!" 

They seem to actually believe that because Clinton won a few primaries they’ve got us beat, and we’ll sober up and admit it, or at least Bernie will.  They seem to actually believe we’ll slink back into line and get with the program.

They think they’ve got us beat, but they don’t.  Every day this campaign goes on in any corner of this country, more people are thinking and talking about Bernie’s ideas, and every day we continue is a win, because this revolution belongs to us all.  It belongs to the people of Indiana who vote next week.  It belongs to the people of Puerto Rico and California who vote in June.  Every phone call we make, every Bernie Journey, every dollar we donate helps build it.  And we owe it to them to give them their turn!

They think they’ve got us beat, but they can’t beat us, because you can’t kill an idea, and once an idea is loose and in people’s hearts there’s no stopping it.  

There’s a Big Idea they’ve been trying to keep bottled up ever since most of us can remember.  Like Aladdin’s genie, it’s out of the bottle now and no one can put it back!  And it changes everything!

Thanks to Sanders Campaign millions of people are now talking about the whole spectrum of issues that confront us.  But none of it by itself is new.  So what’s this Big Idea?

It’s not the idea of massive job creation through public works and projects.  There are people alive today who remember that’s what Franklin Roosevelt did, plenty who’ve been saying we need to do it again.

It’s not the idea of making healthcare a human right, available to everyone rich or poor.  Harry Truman tried to get that past Congress in 1948, and folks have been fighting for it ever since.

It’s not the idea that the billionaire class has corrupted and bought our political system and that we need campaign reform, that we need to get Big Money out of politics. People have been saying that, fighting for that for years.

Nor is it the understanding that the super-rich, the billionaires, have rigged the whole economy so they’re getting richer and richer while the rest of us get screwed. or the idea of breaking up the big banks, freeing our young people from student debt or equal pay for women.  

It’s not the idea of banning private prisons, or ending the war on drugs, ending police violence against people of color, immigration reform or bringing our jobs home from Mexico and China. Nor the idea of ending foreign tax havens, taxing financial transactions or making the millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share. 

It’s not even the idea of bringing everyone together to fight for all of these once, although that’s getting closer.  So what’s this Big Idea that ties this all together? 

It turns out we all knew most or all of the things Bernie’s talking about already.  Bernie didn’t suddenly come along and start preaching the truth and suddenly the scales fell from everyone’s eyes.  Bernie is telling us things we all already knew were true!  

And we already knew that the Networks, the news media were manipulating us and creating illusions, but most of us believed the final illusion: that of all those other lazy stupid people out there watching TV and believing it all.  And so we played it safe and didn’t speak out.

The Big Idea:  we’re all in this together, we all know what’s up, and if we come together, speak out, stand up for each other, and stand together to confront the billionaire class and demand our country back, there’s nothing we can’t accomplish!  

This idea, with your help, is spreading like wildfire across the land!  We're in an Emperor’s New Clothes moment, when everyone starts speaking what everyone already knew was true but were afraid to say.

So courage my friends!  Let’s keep organizing and carry on!   

This is only the first stage of our revolution, and it’s far from over!  A lot can happen between now and July, but win or lose it’s not over then either.  This is just the beginning!

Can Bernie win in poor urban neighborhoods?

Do city folk, Black folk, Latinos love Hillary and reject Bernie?  

I've been out canvassing in working-class neighborhoods in Hartford and Woonsocket, and I saw no sign of this.  I can tell you, Bernie's problem is not folks who love Hillary or dislike Bernie, but that Bernie's supporters have not been out organizing in those urban neighborhoods - and the media is still giving him short shrift.  As Cornell West famously observed, the problem is that Black voters don't know Brother Bernie.

The voters I met who know about Bernie and have really listened to his message are often passionate about supporting him and about getting their friends and relations out to vote for him too.  I saw no distinction here between Black, brown or white voters, young, medium or old, Anglo or Latino.  But there were far too many in these neighborhoods who didn't know him, and even, shockingly, who didn't know his name.

I didn't meet any genuinely enthusiastic Hillary supporters this weekend, but did meet some whose  support for her was firm.  Most appeared to be making a calculation - it's time for a woman, or they have to vote for Hillary because they're Democrats (what?), or they have to vote for Hillary to stop Trump. (!?) Few had really listened to and considered Bernie.

Among white voters in these mixed working-class neighborhoods I heard a lot more support for Trump than for Hillary - just how much I'm not certain because who support Trump seem reluctant - or even ashamed - to admit it. Those I asked told me they didn't hear about Bernie until this year - when the media finally ended its Bernie Blackout - by which time they had already committed to Trump.  Some expressed bitterness toward less-deserving Spanish-speaking neighbors who are doing better than themselves.  Many fell back on the position that all politicians are crooks so why not support one who's at least honest about it!

If Bernie doesn't get the nomination we face a very dangerous political crisis, and we still have a huge organizing drive ahead of us either way.  But the organized expression of the real views needs and feelings of the working people has become legitimate, and a cloud has lifted from the minds and hearts of millions.  However difficult our circumstances may become, we have made a big step forward and there is no going back.  

What happened in New York? Or, does Bernie really have a Black People Problem Part I

From https://talkingunion.wordpress.com/2016/04/23/after-the-new-york-primary-analysis-from-a-bernie-volunteer/:

After the New York Primary: Analysis from a Bernie Volunteer

Posted on April 23, 2016 by paulgarver

by Chris Horton

What I heard on the phone calls to New York State was heartening, even amazing.   We saturated New York State in an absolutely unprecedented national volunteer phone-bank operation – our goal was 2 million calls on Saturday and Sunday and we hit 3 million – and huge numbers of doors were knocked by volunteers, including many from Worcester County.  Bernie supporters in New York were lit up!

Hillary won (or captured) New York State, 58%-42%. I’ll admit to being very disappointed, but not discouraged. The New York State Democratic Primary was rigged against us from the start. 

• Polls in most of Upstate New York where Bernie was expected to run strongest opened at 12 Noon, while polls in New York City and suburbs, Buffalo and a few other cities opened at 6am.

• Only registered Democrats could vote in the primary. Voters registered in another party or no party needed to have changed their registration by last October (!), long before many voters had even heard of Bernie thanks to the corporate media blackout!

• Hundreds of thousands of people (over 100,000 just in Brooklyn!) reported their voter registrations changed without their permission or lost.

Bernie won big in Upstate New York, winning in every county except Erie (Buffalo), Monroe County (Rochester) and Onondaga County (Syracuse) and nearly broke even in those, losing Erie County by less than 1000 votes. He won in Albany County and every other upstate county, rural or urban, some by nearly 3 to 1! Three cheers for the many Worcester volunteers who travelled to Albany and Poughkeepsie to knock on doors! (See  http://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/new-york)

The Sanders Campaign is alive and well, … But there’s still the disastrous issue of the urban Black and Latino vote.

Looking at the election results of New York City precincts, nearly every Black-majority precinct and most of the Latino-majority precincts were won by Clinton. This is important,  but this is where the corporate media stops. Luckily, the Times also provides a breakdown of precincts by income (http://goo.gl/la7KdW).  I spent some time scanning over these, comparing them to the results by race and ethnicity.

• -Not surprisingly, precincts with average income over $100,000 nearly all went to Hilary, the wealthiest, such as Central Park East and lower Park Ave., by margins of nearly 10 to 1.

• Precincts with incomes under $50,000 – including nearly all the Black and Latino precincts – overwhelmingly went for Clinton, with a few clusters of white- and Latino-majority and a very few Black-majority precincts that went for Sanders.

• Bernie showed considerable strength in precincts with incomes between $50K and $100K – roughly, the stable but struggling working class – winning about half. Most of his wins in Black and Latino majority precincts were in this income group.

So how do we account for Clinton’s strength among the urban poor – black, brown, Latino and white?  This is critical for us to understand if our Political Revolution is to build a coalition strong enough to confront the billionaire class.  

  

Here are some of my thoughts:

The people of the Bronx, Harlem, northern Brooklyn, eastern Queens – and Main South, Quinsigamond Village and South Worcester – are already organized in

• Churches and other religious institutions and charities

• Grant-funded movements around anti-foreclosure work, ex-prisoners rights and criminal justice reform, immigrant rights, anti-repression, civil rights, public safety and health, education, job training, welfare rights and many more.

• Union-sponsored low-wage organizing through SEIU, the AFL/CIO and Jobs with Justice, such as Fight for 15.

• Small businesses and their customers, everything from bars and taverns to black-market distribution systems.

• Clubs and lodges.

• Schools and parents groups.

Also:  

• the system of elected officeholders providing constituent services – mostly fixing problems, a kind of institutionalized corruption – and their campaign organizations, 

• many who would have been active in a movement like the Sanders Campaign in bygone eras now work for government and government-funded agencies.

Some of these groups are already working and fighting for Bernie’s program – but won’t touch the Sanders Campaign. Their struggles need to continue – with our support – regardless, but we have to solve the problem of drawing them into the political revolution. They, or at least their members and activists, naturally align with us, but nearly all are blocked from supporting it by:

• tax laws forbidding political activity by non-profits and churches.

• laws forbidding political activity by government employees and government-funded agencies.

• the unspoken but very real agendas of foundations and their wealthy donors, and of wealthy board members.

• the institutional ties, relationships and commitments of political and labor leaders.

• the blind-spots of many top leaders who live in other communities and don’t share their members’ experiences.

• fear of being targeted by police, regulators and inspectors of all sorts.

These constraints are widely internalized as the belief that politics is dirty and divisive – fed by the media’s constant pushing of hot-button issues – and a widespread belief that only local efforts can make a difference.

Of all the ways poor communities are organized, perhaps the one least walled off by these barriers may be small businesses such as variety and liquor stores, auto repair and tire shops, barber and beauty shops and more. Their owners are independent-minded, deeply connected to their communities and often opinion leaders.  It’s certainly worth exploring.

This tension, this disastrous division in the progressive forces in the US at this critical moment of political and economic crisis, must be solved, and quickly, because only a political revolution with Black, Latino and working class leadership can fully take hold, last and win!

Back to the bright side: my calls to New York voters, as with my calls into Wisconsin two weeks ago, uncovered truly remarkable evidence of a self-organization process underway, such as we would expect in the early stages of a revolution.  Whenever I spoke to someone who said they had voted for Bernie or definitely would, I asked them if they had any friends, family or relations who they knew wanted to vote for Bernie, who might possibly forget until too late, who maybe could use a reminder call.  Most, regardless of their age, apparent ethnicity or what part of the state they lived in, insisted that they had already talked to all their family and friends and were confident they felt strongly enough to be sure they would vote.  Some said they had all gone to vote together!  Some said their friends had called them to remind them!

We need to continue working toward knitting this process together into a movement that can endure and continue despite the inevitable setbacks we will face, confident in the power of a united and determined people!

Why talk to Trump supporters?

To a poster who said don't bother to talk with "these people" because "you can't fix stupid":

I talk with "these people" every chance I get. They may be acting stupid but they aren't stupid. If you dig enough to get it out of them, they see many the same things we do.  

Back in June (2015) almost anyone with calluses on their hands, anyone who had to work for a living, was ready to listen about Bernie. Six months later many are Trump supporters and others are too disgusted with politics to even think about it. That didn't happen because they're stupid. They didn't suddenly become stupid since June. 

And the thing of it is, almost every single Trump supporter I've talked with for 15 minutes or more has come around to admitting their reasons for supporting him make no sense. Then one after another they say, defiantly, "But I'm voting for him anyway!"  

No, there's something else going on. I believe it's that folks are angry and afraid, and totally fed up with a system which is manipulating us, lying to us and ignoring our interests and views. Those of us who see the possibility of successfully joining with others to overcome the resistance of the billionaire class and advance our own best interests are gravitating to Bernie and Warren. Those who feel hopeless about that, because for whatever reason they don't understand the power we could have if we all get together, are gathering behind Trump to vent their anger and bitterness. 

But their anger is our anger, and we have a right to it. Most of them belong with us. Bernie's question to us is "are you ready for a fight?" They too are answering yes, only they're letting Trump convince them their fight is with the rest of us!  

Our real fight is not with Trump's followers, and we must not get suckered into one sooner than absolutely necessary. Our fight is with Trump and his billionaire buddies.

Looking through our rose-colored rear-view mirrors Bill Clinton’s years in the White House can look good, yet his policies helped pave the way to the depression we find ourselves in today. He is a leader of the "Moderate Democrats" (or more properly "Corporate Democrats") - fueled by corporate cash - who led the Party away from its New Deal and working-class roots 
.  
Bill greased the way for NAFTA and GATT, the first of the terrible trade pacts that enabled shipping our industry overseas to low wage countries. He oversaw tax cuts for the rich and the "welfare reform" that helped double the rate of extreme poverty. His repeal of the Glass Steagall Act set the stage for the mortgage loan conspiracy that crashed the world economy. 

For why Glass Steagall matters, see https://berniesanders.com/yes-glass-steagall-matters-here-are-5-reasons-why/ 

Now Bill's coming to Worcester to promote his wife, the former "Goldwater Girl" whose debut in national politics was famously botching the Health Care Reform he’d promised us. Anyone remember how she negotiated a fabulously complicated deal with the insurance and drug companies, pushing aside anything that smacked of Medicare for All? Or how they then stabbed her in the back with a huge ad blitz and massive last-minute lobbying? Remember "Harry and Louise"?  

Yet for over 20 years Hillary has continued taking their money. 

Thankfully, the American people are basically done with her kind of politics. I am disheartened however that so many of our Democratic officeholders continue to support her and to suggest that Good Democrats have a duty to follow her over the cliff. I shudder to think we could end up with a choice between her and Trump in November.

Hate speech, racism, superstition, bigotry and love.

Most folk who engage in racist and hate speech say they don't see it, and they really don't! Racists and haters are people who say things that are mean and hurtful and not true, but they're "only telling the truth." Thus, in their minds, the rest of us are trying to suppress the truth and deprive them of their right to speak it! 
 
Hate speech and racism are like superstition. Like our racisim, our superstitions are invisible to ourselves so long as we hold that what we believe is the truth. It's all those other people that are superstitious, because they believe things we can see to be untrue! 

Some of us *used to be* superstitious, but we got over it and we're not superstitious any more. Because if we didn't believe our beliefs were the truth, we wouldn't believe them anymore, now would we? 

Standards are like that too. Each of us has our standards, the things we hold to be good, right, the best way. Some folks come close to our standards, but no one's standards could be better or higher than ours, because if we accepted that, then those would *be* our standards!

There's always someone whose standards are different from ours *and therefore lower*. Sometimes a lot lower. If we don't meet *their* standards, so what? Their standards are wrong! We have churches and clubs where we can get together and agree on standards, and then gossip with each other about all the other members of our club who don't live up to our standards! 

We can however recognize we don't live up to our own standards - and beat ourselves up for it- which somehow makes it seem fairer to beat up other folk for not living up to our standards.

Like our own racism, all of this is invisible to us. It all begins with the assumption that the world revolves around us. We all started there as little children, and despite all the hard knocks and blows of life it's baked into us; it never really goes away. 

The only way out of this trap is to accept - on logical grounds - that we're not so different, that we too are superstitious narrow-minded self-righteous bigots in someone else's eyes, and then really try to walk in their shoes, hear what they are saying and see ourselves as they see us. 

What makes that possible is love. Sometimes tough, hard angry love, but the love that comes from never forgetting that the person I can't stand - even that scum-sucking billionaire banker who thinks he owns the world and has the God-given right to destroy it if he doesn't get his way - is just like me inside. 

As humans, we have to have beliefs and standards, but with love we can keep reaching for the ones that will draw us together in our common humanity, in a community of solidarity. 

Which is just what it will take if we - our species - are to survive!

Pew Study shows 90% of Us Say We're Middle Class

90% of us may say we're Middle Class, but what on average is our answer to the question What percent of Americans (i.e. everybody else) is Middle Class? 

We were deliberately sold a bill of goods on "middle class" in the '50's and '60's in a very high powered campaign (which I am old enough to remember) involving thousands of colleges and universities, think tanks and thousands of newspaper editors. We're all middle class Americans now, except for those low-life scum next door or down the street who don't uphold our standards, or who are poorer or browner or speak worse English than us. 

So how come so many of us are living paycheck to paycheck, driven by the fear of homelessness or an old age of poverty? How come we have to try harder and harder just to stay where we are, or take out a second mortgage just to fix the roof or fix our car? 

Middle class used to mean managers, professionals, small business owners, medium-size farmers and academics. They shifted it to mean "wanting and trying to live a decent settled life with high standards of behavior and a decent income." 

When I was a child, many of us were proud of being Working Class. When I was in college I saw how they were pushing hard on the idea that Working Class = Lower Class = Loser. 

The truth is that at least 80% of us were and are Working Class - it may be 90% now. People who have to work for a paycheck to live, but we're the ones who built this country and made it great, and "without our brains and labor not a single wheel would turn." 

This may be part of why we're so confused and divided. We are living in a Middle Class fantasy, and suffering because there's such a clash between our ideas and our reality. 

Should we reach out to the stars?

When we meet a civilization from another planet, it will almost certainly be much more advanced than ours just because ours is so new. The question here is will they treat us the way we treat less advanced and weaker civilizations? If so, we should beware. But how likely is that? 

Our European-grown global civilization, descended from the great Roman slave empire, has a quite extraordinary record of discovering new (to us) civilizations around the globe and conquering, plundering and consuming or destroying them. There have been voices denouncing this practice for a long time, voices of the victims and of radical critics from Padre Las Casas to Mark Twain, but It's only in the past century that any serious effort has been made by governments to restrain or reform our predatory practices. So it's only natural that we imagine this is what others would do to us. 

There have been many science fiction stories and films, starting with HG Wells' classic War of the Worlds, where aliens discover and trying to conquer or destroy us. One awesome recent science fiction film, Avatar, turned the story on its head and told of the plundering of a distant planet inhabited by intelligent beings - by us! But ultimately all these stories are not about alien life, about which we know nothing. They are about ourselves. Only a few, like ET, Close Encounters and Carl Sagan's Contact, depict aliens as benign. 

So how likely is it, really, that an alien civilization would be dangerous to us? I think it's unlikely. 

Any civilization that reaches our level of development must either bring its predatory phase to a close or destroy itself. That is the moment we are in. They will have survived and gone beyond it. 

Second, the distances are so impossible in terms of a human life-span that the only thing we really have that they could want is our story. 

The huge benefit of contact to us would be hope, hope that we too could survive our predatory phase, that humanity could have a future. 

Pain-killers are not the problem. It's our attitude toward Pain!

I commend Maura Healey for her promise of action in support of heroin recovery programs. I hope she continues to work with all the great people coming together to deal with addiction issues. But we as a people have to come to terms with a deeper issue: our attitude toward pain. 

I was just released from UMass Med. The care I received, from physicians, nurses, PCA's was wonderful. Its weaknesses were those not just those of American medicine but of America, and one of those was their attitude toward pain. 

As they poked, stuck and prodded, cleaned and swabbed and asked me to put a number on my pain, almost every time I flinched or grunted or reported a pain they treated it as a problem. I was told 1000 times how sorry they were something hurt, asked 100 times if I wanted something for pain - with the attitude of course I would. 

No, I didn't. No I don't. I was reporting to them as clearly and promptly as I could what was hurting, because they needed to know. 

Pain is not a terrible thing to be avoided at all costs. Pain is first of all information being sent from somewhere in your body to your brain that something needs attention. Or from one part of your brain to another. Knowing when and how to override our body's reaction to pain is something we must learn as we grow older. Yes there are times when we need to make our pain shut up. But generally it's something to pay close attention to, and if you figure out and deal with what it is saying, it usually fades to background. 

When I left, my physicians insisted I take another prescription for Oxycodone, even though I told them I'd only used one pill from the last batch. (I was sorry I did!) 

With that attitude toward pain no wonder there are so many addicts. Heroin, coke, speed, pain pills, alcohol, cigarettes, gambling, love, even 12-step programs, the list of addictions is endless. Human beings need to fully commit to something larger than ourselves, such as family, neighbors, community, even humanity. 

The more we do, the less our pain matters.

In response to "Broken young lives hard to fix" By Clive McFarlane TELEGRAM & GAZETTE, http://www.telegram.com/article/20141024/COLUMN44/310249916:

So the police are focusing on the problem youth, 105 of them, at the heart of a "subculture of young people living outside the rules and constraints of this city's civil community." 

They got that way because of "...early and prolonged exposure to violence, abuse, neglect, living in poverty and with family members involved in criminal activities, and with racism." 

Commenters point to lack of fathers, but what about lack of jobs? 

Chief Gemme's response is probably appropriate, what else can the Worcester PD do? But this is the tip of a much bigger problem: thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of young people who have never had and have no hope of ever having what my generation would consider a "good job". Many grew up fatherless because their birth father couldn't find or hold a good job either. 

By a "good job" I mean a "bread-winner" job which you can raise a family on, steady work with good pay and benefits and some assurance you won't be fired without good cause. Today many regard  temporary work for $15 an hour as good, which is ok if you have only yourself to support, but even those are few, fleeting and far between. 

The core problem is that THERE AREN'T ENOUGH JOBS! And the competition for the few jobs there are is driving down wages and conditions, making "benefits" a thing of the past. If you doubt this, go explore the BLS statistics for "Employed" and "Employment Population Ratio" at bls.gov/cps/cpsatabs.htm   and see if YOU can find a "recovery" there! 

In the meantime Governor Patrick has been sitting on some $16 Billion (with a B) in money for projects that could put tens of thousands back to work for 4 or 5 years, money authorized by the Legislature that he never chose to borrow and spend - despite record low interest rates. Congress and the Obama Administration, with the power to go after the unspent Trillions (with a T) that the billionaires and big corporations are sitting on, have utterly failed to tackle the task. 

And young people with no hope and no future get into trouble and throw their lives away. 

Ebola crisis, why now?

The failure of hospital workers to follow protocols and adequately protect themselves from the Ebola virus is something that should have been addressed a long time ago on a national scale and updated annually. Doing it on the fly will probably not work out well. There are grounds for being deeply suspicious of the integrity of the CDC, but it is a fact that their budgets have been cut steadily by a myopic Congress more intent on funding the US efforts to screw over the rest of the world and rescuing bankers from the consequences of their crimes than with meeting the needs of the folks who elected them.

Anyone who has trained in the use of haz-mat protection gear knows that understanding how to use it in theory is the easy part.  The hard part is retraining a lifetime of habits and becoming mindful of where every part of your body is and what it's doing. I've only trained in nuclear and chemical hazards, where a degree of screwup leads to a degree of contamination, and that was struggle enough.  "Humbling" is a good word for it.  

A situation which is binary, where even a fraction of a degree of screwup could be for keeps, is a far greater challenge.

Tens of thousands, then millions of health care and public safety workers will have to learn how to handle bio-hazard protective gear perfectly, without mistakes. Often they will have to learn without experienced trainers, without sufficient equipment to spare, under pressure of time and fear. To say that training videos will be no substitute is beyond understatement. Anxiety and urgency do not foster clarity, and learning this routine above all requires clarity of mind.  Overcoming habits takes time, drillling under supervision, measuring results, reflection and trying again. And it takes equipment to spare.  

When we look at how the US has handled public health emergencies in recent years - Hurricaines Katrina and Sandy spring to mind - it is easy to imagine that such massive screwups involved some kind of conspiracy. And there have certainly been enough demonstrable conspiracies going around to support that suspicion.  Plus, the large and growing bio-warfare establishment is real, malignant, and active in West Africa.  We should write nothing off at this point.

However, let's not ignore the part being played in this unfolding fiasco by

* the accumulated neglect, decay and collapse of our once great nation's entire civilian infrastructure,

* the loss of our moral center and social contract,

* the decay of our healthcare, public health and civil defense capabilities,

* the weakening of our population's resistance to disease due to unchecked pollution and contamination of our air, water and food,

* half the population weakened by the struggle with poverty and housing issues, a third suffering some degree of malnutrition

* the epidemic of depression, despair and hopelessness brought on by mass unemployment.

If the outbreak of this Ebola crisis was not planned to coincide with the imminent economic collapse, it is nevertheless not unrelated.

Gold Standard is no cure

re. 

Why is the Gold Standard Urgent?  by Keith Weiner

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-10-15/why-gold-standard-urgent

................

This good well-reasoned article ends with a logic failure and leap to an unsupported conclusion.  

Weiner writes:

"When the rate keeps falling, the borrowing keeps rising. Is there a failure point for debt?

"... What happens when an entire society doesn’t save?

"Our financial system has suffered an escalating series of crises. Each crisis has grown out of the fix applied to the previous one.

"The crisis of 2008 was different. No matter what the Fed has attempted, they have not been able to create even the temporary appearance of recovery (other than in asset prices). It’s not merely that growth will be slow, or slower than it should be in some theoretical ideal economic world.

"There will be no recovery while our monetary cancer rages, unchecked...."

Well put. Very well put.  But then he jumps to:

"We must rediscover the gold standard, which is the only cure."

Not so clear. I know, there are theoretical arguments that this should work, but what does the historical record show?

The founding of the Fed was not just simply a criminal conspiracy.  It took place during the 30-year "Long Depression" that began in the 1880's and ended with World War I, an economic and social crisis that saw the rise of populist, labor and mass socialist movements throughout the world including in the US.  By the time the smoke had cleared from that crisis, most of the old Russian Empire had repudiated capitalism and Germany had nearly followed suit.    

The next big lurch into fiat currency occurred during and just after the Great Depression, beginning with Roosevelt's confiscation of private gold holdings and crowned by Bretton Woods.  That crisis ended with the Soviet Red Army occupying Eastern Europe and Berlin, communist-led movements overthrowing old colonial empires, and the "fall of China".  By 1955 the terrified global bankers were hiding behind the threat of a world-destroying nuclear armageddon to save their system and their skins.  

The final lurch into a fiat currency world began during another profound system crisis in the 1970's, at a time when world capitalism appeared to be lurching back into depression. A depression my professors in the '60's swore could never again happen and would never again be allowed. The response was the final unpegging of the dollar from gold, followed by the unleashing, step by step, of what became today's de-regulated, financialized bubble economy, where money flows like water from the Fed, the central banks and great banking houses, where "value" and "price" have been fully conflated. 

Seen apart from this historical context, the rise of central banking and fiat currency can be modeled as simply a criminal conspiracy.  But in historical context, it appeared as a succession of apparently successful emergency responses to emerging systems failures.  But if that is how we should understand it, then it is hard to see how fiat money could be the root problem of the crisis, or how reverting to the gold standard could be the cure.

Which is not to say that gold won't play a key role in the global drama that's unfolding.  I'm just saying that it's illogical to jump to the conclusion that reverting to a gold standard alone could fix a crisis that predates and perhaps precipitated its abandonment.  

If we conclude that some underlying condition, problem or set of problems must have been driving the system into depression and mass unemployment over a century ago, and if we conclude that is what must have forced our grandparents' and great grandparents' generations to abandon the gold standard, then we should assume this underlying problem or condition must still be there waiting for us.

German Journalist Blows Whistle On How The CIA Controls The Media

Ever wonder how the doctoring and suppression of news and the propagation of lies through the mass media is organized?  How could so many intelligent, able and seemingly honorable people, many of whom started out with youthful idealism, be induced to cooperate with such a disgraceful and damaging travesty?  If so, you should take a look at this:

   German Journalist Blows Whistle On How The CIA Controls The Media

     Submitted by Michael Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-10-09/german-journalist-blows-whistle-how-cia-controls-media?

“I was bribed by billionaires, I was bribed by the Americans to report…not exactly the truth.”

- Udo Ulfkotte, a former editor of one of Germany’s main daily publications, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Essential reading.  For a world where the good guys win more often than you hear about. 

Argentina defies US Judge

Aug 20, 2014

Argentina, which thought it had put the last crisis behind it with an IMF-brokered settlement and which has successfully been meeting those obligations, has now had the settlement invalidated by a New York Federal judge, and has been thrown into a sudden solvency crisis.

As is quickly becoming apparent, Argentina's rejection and defiance of the judge's ruling is a direct challenge not just to a New York court or some Wall Street investors, but to the Empire itself.  It's not purely accidental that Argentina should be the first vassal state to do this.  The Empire could and would have squashed Greece like a bug last year, before the BRICS development bank, before Russia's challenge to the dollar, and given its size and location.  The Empire must and will try to crush Argentina now, because 100 other countries are watching and will attempt their own breakouts if it escapes.  

What are the Empire's options here?  Probably not a military assault; Argentina is much easier to defend than Greece, and much has changed in the world over the past year. Argentina is much larger, better organized and more self-sufficient.  Of the US-controlled nations from which military aggression could be launched, Paraguay could easily be pressured by Brazil, and Chile is on the other side of the Andes Mountains.  Since the fall of the Soviet Union the Medeterranian is virtually a US-owned lake, but the only naval base the Empire has near (or, arguably, within) Argentina is in the Falklands.

The greatest threat Argentina faces is from its own military, with its ties to the US and a history of US-supported coups.  That same military however does have a recent history of challenging the Empire over the Falklands.  The Argentine government and leaders must move quickly to reorient its military toward Russia, China and especially Brazil, and to purge or sideline the officers who are known to be overly tied to the Pentagon and the US Embassy.  

It seems like everyone on this site (ZH) loves to diss the government of Venezuela.  But the turning poiint there was when the Venezuelan military, with US help and direction, staged a coup and took President Chavez prisoner, and the junior officers and rank and file troops rebelled and in 24 hours forced the top brass to back down.  That was the critical event when Venezuela passed outside US control.  This was possible because the entire people, including the members of the armed forces, were part of the national conversation about Venezuela's dilemma, about Latin America's dilemma.  

Argentina will soon face such a moment.  The future is unknown, but the formation of the BRICS bank has radically improved their odds.  This is a critical moment for Russia, China, India, Brazil, South Africa and other Latin American nations, a fateful test of their understanding and commitment to the project they have declared.

Celebration of the Revolution of 1774

July 2014

One of the greatest misconceptions that the American people are crippled by is the conflation of our Revolution with the Revolutionary War - and hence the conflation of "revolution" with "war".  Over and over I have seen people I am talking with come up against that and be stopped by it.

Our history books and the stories we teach skip from the "foreplay" - the struggle of the Colonial merchants and traders with England that built up over a decade leading to the Boston Tea Party in 1773 - almost straight to the start of the Revolutionary War in 1775, with a bridge story about conspirators led by prominent Bostonians meeting in attics and back rooms to plot an armed revolutionary uprising.

The problem with this narrative is that it leaves out the revolution itself!  

Now for the first time in almost 200 years preparations are underway to celebrate the revolution of 1774, with thousands of reenactors preparing to act out the drama of some of its events.  This is a story America badly needs, one that should be broadcast far and wide.

Check it out:

   www.revolution1774.org

Becoming a fascist soldier

Regarding a profile of three Ukrainian Right Sector soldiers:

Is this a made-up story?  Maybe. Maybe some part is made up, but it feels about right to me.  

Pavel, Ruslin and Dmitri aren't the kind of monsters we might expect of fascists.  They might not even be fascists yet. Hannah Arendt, writing about Adolf Eichman, coined the phrase "the banality of evil", and these three certainly fit, but all is not fascist that's banal.

Our three captors seem to be carrying around enough hate and anger to be willing to kill, and with time they'll learn to focus it on the hate object of the day, starting with Russians. (Other Russians, not themselves of course!) They seem to have nothing they believe in or care about enough to die for, except to prove something about themselves. Backed by enough weaponry to feel invincible they'll act tough and brave, but when faced on equal terms with battle-hardened soldiers who care enough about their cause - and each other - to die for them, they'll turn and run. 

Sometimes terrified, humiliated and shamed by much less heavily armed partisans, they'll feel powerful and invincible taking their revenge on unarmed "enemy civilians".  Endlessly abused and denegrated by their commanders and foreign "advisors", they'll strut with pride in their skill at killing and the thrill of seeing the fear of their victims.  Thus they will, if they live long enough, grow into their fascist roles and become the murderous but ultimately cowardly bullies you'd expect.

Veterans of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam and Korea may recognize their type: "allied troops" who were great at torturing and killing prisoners and unarmed civilians, but turned and ran in disorder all the way to Pusan in 1950, panicked at Pleiku and ran all the way back to Saigon in '75, and dropped their guns and their pants and ran for their lives before ISIS last month at Mosul. 

How do we think about the Hong Kong protests?

The revelation that grassroots revolutions like the one unfolding in Hong Kong are not what they seem or claim to be is a step toward understanding. But like every "theory of everything" this needs to be explored to discover the boundaries of its usefulness. 

Two things need to be distinguished here: the grassroots revolutionary impulse and the organization of a revolution. 

The revolutionary anger in the minds and hearts of the regular people, the "grass roots", is very real, and smolders all around us, pretty much everywhere.  It is as real here among my neighbors, a mix of working class, middle class and small entrepreneurs, as it is in Hong Kong, though not burning as brightly yet. But the anger and impulse are insufficient in themselves incapable of generating much more than mayhem followed by greater repression.  

The actions and "propaganda" (propagating of ideas, be they based on truth or falsehoods) of "highly-organized ... conscientious and professional organizers" is the other side of a revolution, providing the essential organization, coordination, communication and allignment on direction and purpose. 

This is where it gets tangled and convoluted.  Organizing, especially when taken beyond the level of organizing a small community, local interest group or a single shop, takes money and resourses - to support and train organizers and administrators and for communications.  Plus, the legacy of organizing during normal times is tied to the system by the necessity of winning concessions from power and is not so easily pried away even when the need becomes urgent. 

The organizers themselves may emerge from and swear their loyalty to the grass roots.  They may be recruited from the grass roots and swear their loyalty to the agency that recruits them, while in their hearts believing they and that agency work for the grass roots from which they came.  Or they may be trained and injected into communities, some as conscious agents and others naively believing that their imitation of grass roots activism is or can become real.

Yet, although revolutions may look synthetic when seen through this lense, the threat and power of revolution still smolders unquenchably in the grass roots, in the hearts and minds of the people whose oppression is integral to the system they draw their living from.  It is a powerful well of instability underlying every modern society.

Ruling classes and factions, in their battles with each other, have learned how to draw on this power - the revolutionary anger of the people, the grass roots, against their rivals at home and abroad.  They increasingly bring to bear resources of money, skills, modern social science, networks of informers, paid agents and most especially the science of manufacturing and propagating illusions.  This has arguably found its highest expression in the art and science of the "color revolution".

The people of Hong Kong and China now face a terrible dilemma.  The just aspirations and righteous anger of the regular people is evidently being mobilized by secret forces - foreign nations and their domestic collaborators - whose aim is the destruction of their very nation.  The result will be the plunder and ruin of everything they and their ancestors have won in bloody battles and built with generations of work and struggle. But their way forward can't just be a defense of the status quo, which is in any case collapsing.

This drama puts us also, we in "the belly of the beast", in a dilemma.  

Everything in us cries out to support the protesters in Hong Kong, who are fighting for what we also believe.  The yearnings and anger of the grass roots flaring forth there is clearly genuine. Yet the timing of this rebellion and the overwhelming evidence of recent history lends strong credence to the Chinese government's claims that it is being controlled by sinister forces directed against Chinese sovereignty.

If that this is probable, or that it could be leading the Chinese people to disaster, was still unclear to anyone, the ghastly spectacle in Ukraine should dispell all doubts.

This same dilemma is reflected here in the West.  Two fundamental principles that some of us live by, loyalty to our people and resistance to the wars and madness of Empire, are once again being placed in opposition. Our challenge is to refuse to choose, in spite of all evidence, but to rather insist on and continue to seek a break-away of the grass roots organizers from the control and hidden agendas of the puppet-masters.

Perhaps there's a silver lining to the horrifying gathering global system collapse. The oligarchs, as they turn on each other with ever greater ferocity and exploit the revolutionary anger of their rivals' "grass roots" against them with ever greater recklessness, will destroy the illusions essential to their control. We can hope the webs of grass roots organizers and leaders will at some juncture break free and take the reins of the rebellion in their hands on behalf of the people they work with. 

It won't happen tomorrow, it won't be pretty and it won't happen everywhere at once. But it's a possible dream, and that is something we urgently need.

So dear reader, if your thinking has led you to a conclusion which seems to leave no space for a future, consider. A future will happen with or without your participation, and it won't look like the past.  Your challenge is to find your own way out of your mental cul-de-sac.  I've offered you mine, knowing yours will be different.  

Cheers!

Mother of all Economic Crises - Soon.

I will go through this soon and supply links to support and explain my claims and statements!  -CH

.....................

It is being argued that the world's financial stability can be extended, following the end of the US Fed's program of "quantitative easing", by the Bank of Japan and European Central Bank taking up the burden and starting to massively inject liquidity into the markets.

So is this possible?  Could it work?  How long could it last?

How much appetite do the world financial markets have for a flood of new Yen and Euros?

That a crisis in the US equity markets is imminent is getting ever broader recognition.  A stock market crash - which seems inevitable - could have serious consequences in and of itself.  But markets crash and markets recover, investors and regular people get hurt, some are ruined, some of us even die, but much as it stinks, the surviving investors come back into the game and the real economy recovers.

It was different in 1929 and 1931, when the collapsing stock market set off a cascade of other crises and a Great Depression.

It was different in 2007-9 also, and we're told it could have been much worse.  The real economy has never recovered.  It's like a corpse being kept alive on adrenaline, the people living in fear and denial, hoping and holding our breath.  It's a real depression.  But it's not yet full collapse.  Can we still recover from it?

None of the underlying causes of the 2007-9 crisis have been addressed, none have been fixed, and the only one which was partially relieved, the accumulation of un-repayable mortgage loans, has metastasized into new forms that are again swelling.

Some of the bubbles being reported on sites like ZeroHedge:

-   the sub-prime auto loan bubble, massive-scale lending to insolvent borrowers - and securitization of the contracts!

-   the shale gas bubble, with nearly all drillers losing money and borrowing massively to replace rapidly depleting wells.

-   the commercial mortgage crisis, with malls and office parks and buildings across the country seeing huge vacancy rates and staring bankruptcy.

-   the securitized student loan bubble, with huge rates of non-performing securitized loans.

-   the new US housing bubble, prices being ratcheted up again.

 -  the securitized rent bubble, buyers of foreclosed properties renting them out, pushing rents ever higher but not maintaining them, and selling claims on future rent receipts.

-   the continuing decline in the incomes of working families, at a time when they should be recovering, continues to hollow out our capacity to support the real economy with our spending.

Plus, a classical recession in the US real economy (remember that? yup, it's still there somewhere) is looming, about to be triggered by overproduction and inventory buildup,

And the Mother of All Bubbles, the Federal Reserve Bank printing and pumping out dollars by the trillions, backed by - nothing except the knowledge that countries need them.  Which is only not producing massive price inflation because most of the dollars go into financial speculation.

Should we perhaps then call the massive accumulation of debt - public, private and corporate - the Father of All Bubbles?  Because it too has been swelling, to the point where it dwarfs the global domestic product and is now utterly unrepayable.

Global debt, which has resumed its rapid rise since the crisis of 2007-9, is approaching a fateful moment  - the Minsky Moment it is being called - where new borrowing, new lending, which has been the main force over the past 30 years resisting collapse, no longer provides any stimulus to the real economy, where new lending in effect only goes to pay interest on the existing debt burden, with nothing left over for real investment or consumption! 

We could compare this to the moment when a dying giant star goes into its final collapse.  The star, having exhausted its hydrogen fuel, then its helium, lithium and other fusion products, starts to fuse heavier elements like iron and nickel, reactions that not only don't release enough energy to resist the collapse, but actually absorb energy.  At that point the star starts to collapse catastrophically and then detonates - blowing itself apart!

Worse yet, this is perhaps a Double Minsky Moment.  The underlying driver of classical depressions, first identified by Karl Marx over 150 years ago, is that investment in the real economy, largely focused on reducing labor costs, undercuts the ability of the working people to buy back what they have made. The cycle restarts after bankruptcies and acquisitions clear away overcapacity and new investments stimulate consumer demand.  It is arguably now the case that, with the introduction of offshoring production and robots, investment in production has become so efficient at replacing labor that it can't produce even a temporary boost in the income of working class families!

Could the economic system somehow survive a stock market collapse anyway, stabilizing through massive government interventions and all the central banks issuing massive streams of new money?

Or could perhaps a new global currency save the day?

One resource that has not been exploited but has been widely discussed would be the injection of liquidity into the world markets by the International Monetary Fund issuing trillions of dollars worth of SDR's, or Special Drawing Rights, in effect a new global currency.  If begun before the global financial  panic gets out of hand, it could perhaps buy some time.  But
 *   this could not relieve any of the pressure from swelling financial bubbles - it would just fuel them.
 *   this could not deleverage the global economic system - the massive pile of debt would continue swelling.
 *   this could not revive the effectiveness of Keynesian financial stimulus - it would, as with the Fed's "quantitative easing" just pour money into the banks and bond markets to keep them from collapsing without providing any stimulus to the real economy.
 *   I see no way it could usher in a new era of global stability, or even the era of debt bondage many fear.  A capitalist economy must either grow or die.

It could perhaps buy a few more years at best before financial Armageddon.

On the other hand, external shocks and internal instabilities could easily overwhelm this new defense before it is even in place.

* a stock market collapse proceeding too fast for the new currency to be set up and put into circulation,
* the disruption due to Russian sanctions is accelerating the already serious rate of contraction of most of Europe's national economies,
* a now well-documented campaign to suppress the price of gold and protect the price of the dollar must inevitably collapse as the supply available to the Western central banks runs out.
* an epic collapse of the China housing bubble and banking system is well underway.
* a possible mass defection of EM countries from the dollar to the BRICS Bank could shake the IMF.

the looming collapse of
* and finally there is a huge instability baked into the financial system by the phenomenal growth of derivatives, which globally have reached a face value of $750 trillion, ten times the value of the global domestic product!  Theoretically this is a zero-sum game, until some major player can't cover their bets, at which point it could - and probably will - unravel and bring the world banking system down.

Plus, as growing numbers of investors and governments come to understand the dimensions of the gathering crisis, the possibility of a global panic and rush for the exits grows.  But there will be no exit.

 
My call: be ready for the storm of the millennium.  Soon.  Very soon.  Never mind the survival biscuits;  Organize!  Organize your communities for survival, to defend our homes, assure at least the distribution of information, food, heating fuel and essential medicines, and to demand our governments break out of the box!

There is no shortage of people willing to act together to do the work of the world, or of the resources to do it.  There isn't even a shortage of money - although it looks that way from here on the street.

What there is, is a shortage of power.

If they can't put us to work, with our survival at stake, we must take on the task ourselves!