"A job for every worker"

"A job for every worker" means a corporation paying every paycheck. This translates into quarter-over-quarter growth in profitability, an entire class of people and institutions who siphon money out of the economy into their own portfolios, and ultimately wage slavery.

Wage slavery because "a job for every worker" begins with the assumptions that everyone is supposed to have money to give to the holding companies that raise the rent on our apartments every year and sell us food-like substances to eat; that the way we get the money is by working "jobs" manufacturing, transporting, or selling consumer goods, the creation and disposal of which are destroying the biosphere; and that needing to have money means we have to "work" doing something that generates a profit whether that work needs, on grounds other than making money change hands, to be done or not.

Capitalism boils down to ripping off people weaker than yourself. Its motto is "Money is life." It is the opposite of community and thoroughly alienates us from the facts that we each participate in the web of life and our primary responsibility is to take care of it so that it will take care of us and future generations.

Mass global capitalist society has so thoroughly brainwashed untold millions of people into assuming that money is the highest possible value that changing this consciousness is the most difficult task we face.

The equivalent of a war mobilization to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy is obviously an absolute necessity, but using capitalism to get there will only prolong the pain of a society destroying itself for money.

The Flaw in the Green New Deal

The economic model Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is working from (as is Bernie Sanders) is FDR's New Deal: a well-paying job for every worker, tax the rich, redistribute the wealth. All good as far as it goes. The green part is building green infrastructure and retrofitting buildings for energy efficiency. Also all good.

What is missing from the Green New Deal movement's analysis is what are workers going to spend their money on? More to the point: people, in the Green New Deal, are still understood to be workers and consumers, not stewards of the land. Mass society is still understood in materialistic terms: everybody's job is to get money and spend it keeping the economy growing. Everybody shares in the financial prosperity, and the environment is still understood as resources that support consumption.

Leaving aside that automation idling tens of millions of workers is grounds to rethink the work-spend basis on which consumerism is predicated, work-spend as the definitional underpinning of public life reduces the function of every human being to making money change hands.

Money is the worst reason to do anything. Chasing it demotivates doing things that should be done because they do not pay money and motivates doing things that should not be done because they do pay money. Finally, the environmental crisis does not begin and end with fossil fuels. Every so-called resource on this planet has been almost entirely destroyed, and consumerism is the root cause.

The Green New Deal is a step in the right direction, but millions of supporters need to understand that it is only a step and more importantly that money as an organizing principle upon which to construct a society is fatally flawed on social, environmental, economic, and spiritual grounds.

"What about my job?"

Check out this op-ed I submitted to the NT Times on Oct. 30, 2018:
"What about my job?"

Hat in hand.

BLM is a real grass roots organization, a group of people fearing for their lives and those of their neighbors at the hands of the police. These are not people being manipulated by clever framing of half-truths and lies by billionaires whose real agenda is no taxes for rich people, no regulation of corporations -- preservation of a societal organizational structure that farms humans to be used for certain revenue-generating activities: consuming, fighting in wars, supplying raw materials or manufacturing things for as little money as the owners of all the money can possibly pay.

The place to start talking about American society's problems is at how the money works, what government can and is supposed to do -- provide for the general welfare, for example. People have got to start seeing one another as individual human beings, stop thinking we know all about each other in terms of stupid abstractions that demonstrate we don't, and communicating with each other as human beings.

Corporations are not human beings. Human beings need to talk about corporations with each other not to them hat in hand.

Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protest.

The USA spends $700 billion a year on its military, 58% of its discretionary budget, more than the rest of the world combined, and that doesn't include the trillions of off-budget emergency dollars it spends on the wars it is always engaged in, either overtly or covertly, that are always somebody else's fault. The USA also sells more weapons than any other country and of course debates endlessly in its political discourse and TV and Hollywood movies who to bomb, kill, or invade.

To run a war machine on a scale this large, you need a public who think that war and flag and country and the military are the most important things in the whole world. Someone is out to get you. Communists. They want to take your money and give it to the government and take your guns away and tell you what to do. Freedom! Mine!

I'm surprised the Star Spangled Banner isn't playing all the time everywhere. Thankfully it is only at sports events, which if you watch them on TV, you can mute.

Trump and Vietnam.

Donald Trump did not avoid killing Vietnamese people in their own country as a matter of principle. He dodged the draft to save his own skin. As Mr. Khan said at the DNC, Donald Trump sacrificed nothing: no arrests for protesting the war, no police clubs on his head trying to stop it.

Plus, like many of America's most prominent warmongers, he is only too happy to play the role of Mr. Tough Guy, a loudmouth bravely boasting about how he is going to send other people's kids to other people's countries to kill other people's kids.

An expression was going around for a number of years after the Vietnam War: everybody did what they did. It means you did what you thought was right: fighting for your country because you believed the politicians' lies or doing what you thought would help to stop the war because you didn't.

Donald Trump never has and never will do what he thinks is right. He does what is good for Donald Trump, no matter who loses money on his crooked schemes or whose kids die so he doesn't have to.

McConnel and Ryan.

Mitch McConnell is a disgrace, a cynically opportunistic politician with the moral authority of a sanctimonious gnat.

What annoys me most about McConnell's soulless posturing is that he coopts words -- obstructionist, divisive, uncompromising -- that accurately describe him and the pathological political philosophy that he and the Republican party represent and uses them to accuse people disgusted by his policies and tactics of precisely the attitudes and behaviors of which he is guilty. The man is so emotionally stupid that he seems actually to believe that this two-year-old's behavior is anything but transparent to anyone who is not entirely brain-dead.

Paul Ryan is an ignorant moron who believes he is an "intellectual" with "ideas." His "ideas" are a fact-free ideology grounded entirely in the idiotic ravings of an emotionally disturbed woman, Ayn Rand, who was pathologically devoid of empathy and warmth -- a female predecessor of the sick thief, Trump, running today for president of the USA.

McConnell has had 7 and Ryan has had 2 years to do something constructive for the millions of Americans struggling to make ends meet, and there is a reason why they haven't: people at the bottom of the capitalist pyramid are prey for the people at the top. McConnell and Ryan believe this is the natural order, and they have no problem with it. McConnell and Ryan and their ilk are precisely what is wrong with the USA: everything of yours for me and nothing for you.

Obama's speech at the DNC.

Mr. Obama is an exemplary human being: smart, inspiring, everything you would want in a parent, neighbor, friend, and statesman.

His message, though, that your burden will be eased in the by and by, is cold comfort to the hundreds of millions of people on this planet suffering the abuses of unbridled predatory capitalism, racism, greed, war, and environmental destruction.

Please don't take this as a rejection of the truly admirable personal qualities of a wonderful man anyone would be honored to know personally. It is the difference between MLK and Malcolm X, Hillary Clinton (domestically; internationally she is a menace) and Bernie Sanders. While you wait for pie in the sky, tears flow, blood flows, and champagne flows.

Job number one for the American people is to keep Trump out of the White House. Job number two will be to keep Hillary Clinton's feet to the fire. Whether anyone can get anything humane and reasonable out of a Republican House and Senate is questionable. And two thirds of U.S. state governments are in Republican hands.

Putin.

The American ruling class, for whom the NY Times is a propaganda instrument, does not care how much money autocrats steal from their citizenry or how brutally they treat individuals who challenge their authority: the Shah, Mubarak, Marcos, Pinochet don't even scratch the surface of the litany of truly terrible people the USA has installed, supported politically, and sold weapons to. So please, stop with the sanctimony with respect to Vladimir Putin. There are equally as criminal elements in the American political, military, financial, and industrial sectors of American society as he: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Kissinger, and many, many more.

What distinguishes candidates for military aid from candidates for regime change among the owners of the USA is who makes plunder easy for American corporations and who makes it hard. As usual, the NY Times is willing to risk war with Russia because the USA simply must rule every square inch of planet Earth and will not rest until it does. Every country the USA invades, every titular head it deposes, is demonized day after day, year after year by the NY Times until the deed is finally done. Then we live with the results. This is the logic of their support for Hillary Clinton to be neocon in chief. One can only hope that American aggression on Russia's borders does not result in nuclear Armageddon.

Purpose.

With the exception of committed peace activists who have been trying for generations to raise Americans' awareness of the existence and the consequences of its violent impulses, the USA has barely begun to be willing to know the truth about itself.

Defensiveness among people who do not feel privileged but are is on a hair trigger when their position in society is questioned; and when it comes to questions about policing, guns, militarism, and war, a reflexive, visceral fear that has been cultivated in the American cognitive process for centuries kicks in: "If you take away cops' guns, all hell will break loose."

Americans take it for granted that the world is a violent place full of terrible people, and policies to protect themselves from this imaginary menace have become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The roots of American violence are in the way its ruling class does business: as little as possible for you, everything else for me, and you have no choice but to live your life within the parameters defined by a global corporate machine that assumes the world and everybody in it belongs to it. Humanity and life have long since dropped away from the American vision of its national purpose.

Dallas, Baton Rouge.

Violence. The core organizing principle of the USA -- after money. I would like to say the USA has lost its way, but the fact is that the United States was created as a nation of white male property owners. Black people were brutally enslaved; Native Americans' land was stolen and they were almost all killed. Women were second-class citizens, and in many ways they still are.

Does any of this justify murdering police officers? Of course not. But pitched rhetorical battles that minimize the anguish of African-Americans terrified of the police -- dismissing police killings of black people as inconsequential compared to "black-on-black" killings, or characterizing Black Lives Matter, which is a desperate plea by African-American citizens to be treated like human beings, as a terrorist organization or worse -- are a recipe for ever more deterioration of American society.

The footprint of the USA on this planet is a violent footprint: wars followed by wars followed by wars from before its founding to the present. Violence is the way it resolves conflict. The atom bomb is the ultimate peacemaker -- pure insanity.

Understanding root causes degenerates into blaming victims. Whose fault is it that black people are treated like mad-dog criminals in every encounter they have with police? Why are black people shaken down by police again and again?

Owning guns turns everyone into a potential killer. It just becomes a question of whom it is OK to kill.

Drone war.

Americans' preoccupation with "lethal force" obscures questions like: why is the USA trying to dominate the world militarily?

Why do Americans reach immediately for weapons when confronted by people who are not interested in being cogs in their corporate machine? Why are so few Americans aware of the racist underpinnings of the American imperial project?

The attitude of privilege and entitlement -- to do whatever they want to whomever they want wherever they want -- among the American ruling class is screaming to be acknowledged, and year after year, rather than to be willing to perceive the truth about itself, it ruminates interminably about who it should kill.

The narrative always begins with hotheads in a colonized society lashing out violently against American domination -- or fighting back against a dictator the USA installed or the death squads that it trained -- and the question always is what form lethal force should take, never why is the United States manipulating, plundering, and trying to control everybody and everything on this planet.

Meanwhile, a tiny minority in the USA live in opulence and life even for white, formerly middle-class people is deteriorating steadily. What is all this killing protecting?

After Baton Rouge, Minneapolis, and Dallas.

White America has to back off, calm down, and be willing finally to extend whatever help, if any, to its fellow human beings it is asked for. There is no need to feel defensive. Americans are blessed with the opportunity to get to know people of every origin and background imaginable. Are we all enemies? We don't even know each other, which with a little humility and a willingness to reach out can be corrected.

We live in a world of delusions that revolve around money, power, and war. Electronic images generated by the corporate economy create an illusion that feels 100% like it is reality, but it is entirely divorced from the actual world from which we emerged. What are we killing each other for? Why all the wars? Why all the poverty? Why all the hate and rage?

It is time for Americans to ask themselves what they think they are doing on this planet and start conceiving of themselves -- and everybody else -- as living human beings.

American police.

American police escalate encounters with citizens at almost the instant they occur. They shout incomprehensible orders, attack, and apply holds that cause their victim to instinctively try to protect himself. Then they start screaming to stop resisting while continuing to apply painful physical force on fingers, throat, and neck. They are experts at violently torturing victims. They are criminal monsters who kill for sport.

American police do not protect and they do not keep the peace. They prowl for prey and brutalize and kill it when they find it. American police do not use words. They do not listen and they do not discuss. They do not coax individuals suspected of a crime to come along peacefully. They scream, yell, threaten, force, coerce, beat -- and when they are sufficiently excited by their own violence, they kill.

People who want to kill join American police departments, hunt blacks, and kill black people with impunity. No way will I ever set foot in the USA again. A horrible, violent, racist, criminal country.

More on Brexit.

NY Times coverage of the Brexit is spun from the neoliberal perspective: how to put Humpty Dumpty together again so that transnational plunder by banks and corporations can continue business as usual. The stress in this reporting is on how racist, crazed, and xenophobic the rationale for leaving the EU was.

But the truth is that neoliberal institutions from the Democratic Party to the EU are feeling push back from hundreds of millions of people all over the world who have had it with a predatory ruling class that tells itself the theories it concocts to excuse enslaving the human race to an economic system that creates opulence in the extreme for a tiny minority and treats the rest of humanity -- and the Earth -- like dirt make perfect sense.

Brexit is a symptom of a larger revolt, the Western Summer, when Western populations that prospered on the backs of people exploited mercilessly in previously colonized countries in the global south woke up to the fact they were soon going to be adrift in the same boat with corporate globalization's "losers."

The EU's brutal treatment of Greece will in the end be the furthest extent that neoliberal hubris was able to achieve. The right way to think about this moment is how to structure global trade so it benefits humanity as a whole not how to keep the game of toxic commerce going.

More on the Brexit.

There is a distinction between global trade, which people have engaged in at least since the 15th century, and corporate globalization, which is a rigged system in which banks and corporations make the rules that every person on this planet must obey.

The rules the banks and corporations pay their lackeys in government to enact put every human being on this planet entirely at the mercy of financial behemoths whose business plan is theft and whose only purpose is to own everything.

"Trade" is a good thing, as is global trade. But so-called "free-trade" isn't even trade. It is a set of arrangements according to which transnational investors can do anything they want to whomever and whatever they want, always walk away with all of the spoils, and can never lose because you and I are obligated to cover their bets when they guess wrong or need an unlimited line of credit to commit their crimes.

Global neoliberalism is a doomed arrangement. Today is the first blow it has earned by its utter contempt for the human race, and many more will follow.

My Letter to the NY Times

Let's get one thing straight, NY Times, regarding the Brexit. We are in a three-way race here. You got away with ignoring and minimizing Bernie Sanders' campaign and running all Trump all the time to give your candidate -- you know, the neoliberal -- a bozo who could never beat her to run against.

Now you are backpedaling with all your might trying to put your Frankenstein back in the bottle as every rabid right-wing racist -- and every low-information voter who knows something is wrong and can't believe it's Walmart -- flocks to back him.

The fight is not between xenophobia on the one hand and the self-evident blessings of predatory capitalism. Democratic socialism is in the mix. It isn't racism versus global trade. It is economic democracy versus financialization and corporate rule.

Keep selling racism and xenophobia as the gnome to be disowned in order to save neoliberalism, and you will create a monster that destroys us all. Acknowledge that neoliberalism is dead. Let it go, and let sanity not madness take its place.

On the Brexit outcome.

French and German banks torturing Greece marks the beginning of the end of the EU and more to the point the beginning of the end of neoliberalism.

All those excuses why predatory capitalism is exactly what the world needs because piles of money doing whatever they want to whomever they want to make themselves bigger have had their day and no longer have the entire deck stacked in their favor.

The masses not going along with being ripped off is the one card piles of money do not hold, and it is finally being played. The piles assume state violence ensures the field will be forever tilted in their favor, but democracy hasn't been snuffed out entirely and if given a fair vote, piles of money from here on out are going to be kicked out of town.

On Obama's endorsement of Hillary Clinton for president.

Obama didn't prosecute Bush/Cheney for torture, didn't prosecute Wall Street CEO's for crashing the economy with fraud, didn't bail out Main Street but gave Wall Street a giant present, didn't pass a big enough stimulus even with a Democratic Congress, gave Treasury Secretary to Timothy Geithner, didn't fight for the public option let alone single payer, expanded Bush's drone war, doesn't support whistle blowers trying to save the 4th Amendment. A guy with this record is solidly in the Clinton camp.

"The job."

"The job" of president of the USA is be a feel-good face for the violent, racist, plutocratic machinery of the United States. It is a hard job. Hard to believe in and hard to pull off. One big lie. Ronald Reagan delivered his lines masterfully. Barack Obama has a charming personality and is an unusually gifted speaker. Bill Clinton knows so much he can argue any side and believe what he is saying. Hillary Clinton sees the earth-destroying, people-grinding machinery of the military-corporation-Wall Street juggernaut as a good thing for the human race.

A harder job is to stop the plunder and make the world safe for living things. This takes more than charm, personality, or "experience." It takes understanding of where our history went off the rails and a vision for where it would be better for us to be.