One of the greatest signs of the counterfeit progressives is their agreement with imperialism. They are called by some as "the cruise missile left." They use humanitarian issues as an excuse to promote militarism when that can complicate matters. The truth is that true humanitarianism is trying to resolve conflicts peaceful not advancing the whirlwinds of war. We know that genocide has been used to describe crimes made by countries who are the victims rather than perpetrators of war. Also, the establishment omits the crimes committed by the United States and Israel. We know that the new Secretary of State is John Kerry and the new U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power. Both have pushed for a military intervention in Syria on humanitarian grounds before the deal came about between the West, Russia, and Syria. The West will support genocide that is bounded under their interest. One example is how the U.S. sponsored genocide in Vietnam via Operation Phoenix and other covert programs. The Vietnam War caused millions to be directly killed by U.S. forces. The U.S. government installed and supported a reactionary government in Guatemala back in the 1980's (when this Guatemalan government caused the mass killing of as many as 100,000 Mayan Indians between 1978 and 1985, in what Amnesty International called “A Government Program of Political Murder.”). Not a word from these counterfeit progressives about the CIA’s role in facilitating the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Indonesians deemed Communists in 1965-66. Power talks about Iraq, but refuses to recognize the U.S. role in the genocide in Iraq. Saddam Hussein used chemical warfare and killing of Kurds at Halabja and elsewhere. Yet, there was the diplomatic rapprochement with Saddam in the midst of his war with Iran in 1983, the active U.S. logistical support of Saddam during that war, and the U.S. approval of sales and transfers of chemical and biological weapons during the period in which he was using chemical weapons against the Kurds. Also, there were active efforts by the U.S. and the UK to block UN actions that might have obstructed Saddam's killings. The sanctions organized by the West murdered over 1 million Iraqis. That was one of the worse post WWII genocides in the post WWII era. The USA supported it with Madeleine Albright saying that the murderous sanctions were worth it against Iraqi children (which is sick to say the least). There is the genocide against the Palestinians and then apartheid South Africa once being allied with Israel during the 1980's. So, imperialism and militarism by the West is just as evil as any form of genocide. Many other so-called progressives have been caught up in advancing imperialism. Bill Clinton led militarism globally. Now, this doesn't mean that we should be isolationists. We ought to believe in fair trade, diplomacy, negotiations, and peaceful talks. This doesn't mean that we should organize wars of aggression or commit war crimes though. The establishment has agreed with dropping drones in villages in Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia, etc. No major human-rights NGO opposed the invasion of Iraq. Even some in the Nation magazine agree with the wars in Central Asia. The West wants to assert global hegemony in the world. Predatory capitalists use the mainstream media and other cabal approved analysts to support imperialism and token measures not real revolutionary changes in society. We know that mainstream capitalism is a totally failed system and it must be replaced to benefit all of the people not the select few. We should reject fake revolutions. There is the NSA collecting American phone records. There are the TSA agents harassing human beings in airports via in the most grotesque fashion, Gitmo, and other injustices in the world. It is very immature to believe in the notion that the U.S. is just some passive benign giant that must vanquish evil as its destiny in foreign lands. The liberal hawks are just as wrong as the conservative hawks at the end of the day.
We know that there was a stand down during the shooting in D.C. There are many questions about the stand down order given to the Capitol police during the Navy Yard mass casualty event. This stand down is not readily reported by the mainstream media at all. Even the BBC has reported on this story. The Capitol police themselves are preparing an official investigation into what happened and it is due to be released no later than October 21st. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) is meeting with them to find out what happened, why they stood down, and if lives could have been realistically saved had they not been ordered out of the area while the shooter was still active. The U.S. Capitol police have a large jurisdiction in working with the US Park police including the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia. Officers from the Capitol police also have jurisdiction throughout the District of Columbia to take enforcement action when they observe or are made aware of crimes of violence while on official duties. So, the Capitol police aren't just limited to the capitol. The Navy Yard is within the jurisdiction where the U.S. Capitol police can be active indeed. The government contractor that screened Edward Snowden also was responsible for a background check that granted “secret” security clearance to Aaron Alexis, the alleged Navy Yard shooter. USIS, a private company based in Falls Church, Va., said on Thursday that it had vetted Alexis in 2007.The security clearance he subsequently received in 2008 was good for ten years, until 2018. Did you know it was the same FBI tactical team that “found” Dzhokhar Tsarnaev that was on the scene in the Navy Yard and “found” Aaron Alexis? Did you know it was the FBI who eventually dismissed the stories about the other two shooters? ABC News has reported from “sources” that the shotgun supposedly used by Aaron Alexis had two little phrases carved into its stock: “better off this way” and “My E-L-F Weapon.” In a report that has gone virtually unnoticed in the mainstream press, D.C. police and firefighters who first arrived to assist at the Washington Navy Yard earlier this week say they were frustrated when their radios failed during inspection of the building, adding yet another strange development to the already questionable set of circumstances that took place that day. An union representative for the first responders said, “Initially, officers found that their radios were working. But as they ventured deeper into the building where the shooting took place, their equipment stopped functioning,” according to a report from The Hill. This story gets stranger and stranger. We will wait and see more information about this event. Some are exploiting this event as an excuse to advance the growth of the military intelligence apparatus. As for the gun rights issues, there should be a balance. We should not allow criminals and those with serious mental health issues own guns (in other words, we should try out best to prevent dangerous individuals from owning firearms in the first place), but we should allow innocent law abiding citizens the right to bear arms in a free and open society. Also, we need to accept history. Reactionaries forget that many of the Founders never wanted blacks to bear arms back in the day. As a slaveholder and a pseudo-scientific racist, Jefferson surely did not envision blacks as having any individual right to own guns themselves or to fight for their own liberty. Reflecting on blacks who fought bravely in the Revolution, Jefferson concluded that their courage was an illusion resulting from their intellectual inability to recognize danger. So, Thomas Jefferson was a racist, cowardly piece of work. Many Founding fathers were terrified of a slave rebellion and wanted the colonists to all have an armed militia in case there was a slave uprising. So, some of them used the Second Amendment as a means to advance their own interests not to grant freedom or justice to black human beings. This doesn't mean that self-defense is immoral. One thing that rings true is that we should give condolences and prayers to the victims and their families of this evil D.C. Navy Shipyard Shooting.
The New York mayor race is still continuing. The Democratic primary is over. The Democratic candidates of Anthony Wiener, Christine Quinn, John Liu, and others lost the primary. So, now we have Bill de Blasio as the Democratic nominee for mayor of NY battling against the Republican candidate Joe Lhota. Bill Thompson lost the Democratic primary too. He is an African American. He tried his best, but he talked about cautioning against over reacting to stop and frisk, which is an injustice committed against the Black and Brown communities of NYC all of the time. I do not agree with Brother Thompson on all issues, but we wish him well (and continue to grow). William Thompson was the former comptroller. He finished second in the Democratic mayoral primary. Thompson was defeated by a mere 5% margin when he ran against Michael Bloomberg in 2009. The billionaire Bloomberg spent $70 million of his own money in the campaign. Thompson could have run if he further fought Bloomberg if circumstances were different. Bloomberg had a narrow victory because the voters disagreed with much of his policies. Thompson could have executed a stronger campaign and made a stronger appeal for support. In 2013, he received support from labor unions like the United Federation of Teachers and current including former elected officials like Charles Rangel and David Dinkins. Many establishment figures raised money for him. Ironically, former Republican Senator Alphonse D'Amato was a top Thompson fundraiser. Thompson promised D'Amato that he will not frighten the powerful real estate developers and others in the 1%. D’Amato affirmed that Thompson is someone who reassured the high and mighty. “They don’t have fear of Bill Thompson, that he’s going to do some radical proposal that’s going to hurt their business. He’s not as give-away-everything-there-is.” He or Bill Thompson told folks to not overreact to stop and frisk, which is a slap in the face of the victims of it. Stop and frisk was a very important issue for black voters in 2013. It is still a vital issue for humanity now. Since 2002, New Yorkers have been stopped by the police more than 4 million times and most of these incidents relate to unconstitutional searchers of black human beings. These stops increase the risk of overt police brutality, arrest, and humiliation. Some victims were stopped on numerous occasions and even received summonses for loitering at their own homes. Most cities have police quotas for parking tickets, but Bloomberg and police commissioner Ray Kelly had quotas for arrests and stops. It is little wonder that this policy became an enormous issue for black voters as the Bloomberg era ended. That is why the city had no choice but to create a police director inspector and a new process for filing discrimination lawsuits. The Bloomberg era is ending. A federal judge found stop and frisk unconstitutional. Even Cornel West and Carl Dix fought against stop and frisk harshly & legitimately in public. Ironically, de Blasio has talked about the “two cities” of the 1% and the 99% during a time of growing income disparity and hyper gentrification. While he said only that he would “reform” stop and frisk he did support the city council bills and he didn’t insult black people by telling them they shouldn’t over react to what was a deal breaker for them. The next day federal judge Shira Scheindlin denied Bloomberg’s request to stay her order against stop and frisk. Poetic justice came about indeed. The lesson of the Brother Bill Thompson is that we should fight oppression overtly and speak truth to power regardless of corporate interests. De Blasio should have legitimate scrutiny as any other candidate should have. He led the polls in the mayoral race so far. 20 years of Republican rule in NYC has been harmful of the working people of New York City. The city's Public Advocate Bill de Blasio realizes that it will not be a cake watch running against Lhota. There is the Tax Wall Street Party as well that deals with economic populism too. We should reject the military industrial complex and the prison industrial complex indeed.
We know more information about the Austrian School as time goes on. Many of those in this school are conservatives or libertarians. Many of them are hostile towards women, minorities, workers, and the environment. They claim to advance family values, but some of them are ignorant of the value of single families, blended families, etc. not just glorious nuclear families. One simple example is how Austrian School follower Rockwell (or the President of the Mises Institute) admitted that he hates environmental regulation even the highly successful Clean Air Act. Rockwell omits that a hundred years before the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, the environment grew increasingly polluted. Since those Acts have existed, the country is cleaner than that time period. Rockwell said that civil rights legislation is the worst regulatory intervention in labor markets. He omits that free markets are never perfect or omnipotent. The Civil Rights Act and other legislation overtly ended Jim Crow laws. Ron Paul (a famous Austrian economist advocate) received campaign money from the white supremacist Don Black and Ron refused to send the money back. Lew Rockwell, head of the Mises Society, is on record as having wrote the infamous Ron Paul newsletters. Indeed, Murray Rothbard joined the paleoconservative movement and once wrote a spirited defense of David Duke. Even Austrian activist Murray Rothbard defended Rockwell's views that the beating of Rodney King was justified. The reality is that the beating of Rodney King was completely evil and unjustified point blank period, and exclamation point. Austrian von Mises did not want women the right to vote as late as 1925. He also saw no need to give women equal rights, since "a woman… is simply the lover and mother who serves the sexual drive." Mises believed in the racist view that different races have different levels of cognitive abilities naturally, which is racist. Rothbard does not attribute the problems of blacks or other minorities to racism and prejudice, but to "those very parasitic values of idleness and irresponsibility" found in those communities. The reality is that many poor human beings are poor now by no fault of their own (either by sequester, layoffs, firings, catastrophic natural disaster, or for other reasons). Austrian economist Friedrich Von Hayek, a group that included Ludwig Von Mises and Milton Friedman, who had been arguing since the 1940s against state intervention in the economy, against unions, and against the welfare state. Between the end of World War II and the early 70s, the U.S. standard of living (adjusted for inflation) doubled -- the fastest rate of prolonged growth in U.S. history. The U.S. became a middle class nation for the first time, with the share of families owning their own homes climbing from 44 to 63 percent. Families owning their own cars rose even more dramatically, from 54 to almost 100 percent. Poverty, which had been 56 percent in 1900, fell to an all-time low of 11 percent in 1973. There has not been a wide spread event of a massive Depression in America between 1945 and 1973. The global economy form the late 1940's to the early 1970's expanded at a rate of 4 percent per year. This was not caused by Austrian Economics, but by progressive economic policies. However, by the 1970s, the long boom was coming to an end. In 1965, persistent inflation set in among the advanced capitalist nations. At the same time, U.S. profit rates began to fall precipitously as the U.S.—burdened by high military spending and aging capital stock—became less competitive on the world market against the freshly rebuilt and retooled economic powers in Europe and Japan. This produced a period of low growth and high inflation—dubbed “stagflation.” We know that Milton Friedman and the University of Chicago School have ideologically attacked working class wages and want to dismantle the social safety net including privatizing public enterprises.
We need to know more of the truth as well. So, we should do our best to overcome ignorance and believe in the truth including justice. Some folks even want their capitalist rulers to harm them. We have to see things as they are if we want the future to be better indeed. When we see war crimes in Iraq and other nations of the world via Western war crimes, then we have to know that. We can never be brainwashed by violence and ignorance. For example, we should reject shows that glamorize violence and degenerate language that harms social harmony and harms real morality. We have to reject the militarism as found in American foreign policy. We have to stop supporting a regressive U.S. economic policy too. We know that human beings in Wall Street love the record bailouts sent to them and the neoliberal economic agenda. We have to think critically in the world. It is really the truth that the mainstream media is dominated by a handful of vast conglomerates including the leading newspapers and television networks. We should deal with social reality. We have to increase understanding of the world and eliminate our personal illusions. We have to continue to enact critical thinking of the world. We need self-awareness. That means that we need our autonomous self (and to think and act on its own initiative). Also, we should go out have concern for the human welfare of humanity in general. So, we should learn about social, political, and economic injustices as a means to take positive, constructive action against the oppressive elements of reality. We should use action as a means to build a real community in the world. We have to inform ourselves about the truth. We can never believe in the old lies that my country right or wrong, I am only following orders, and I carry out even unjust laws. Those sayings relate to totalitarianism. We have every right to execute independent thinking. That means that we should fight against police brutality as a means to disagree with the police state. That means that we confront evil. That is why many human beings now are creating free breakfast clinics, housing cooperatives, and political education. For education is superior to the lies shown by the establishment all of the time (from the lies about Iraqi WMDs years ago to the lie that Syria is some immediate threat to American soil).The global recession and the 12 million hungry American children is proof positive of how well capitalism works. One strong reason why poverty exist is that much of it is a product of the exploitative and now disintegrating corporate capitalist system. That is why it was the reactionary capitalist Krupp who once aided the reactionary Adolf Hitler. Also, institutional racism relates to black poverty as well. Institutional racism under capitalist conditions means superexploitation and economic dislocation. So, we should establish bonds with our families, friends, and loved ones. We should improve our health and wellbeing. We should never embrace pettiness and arrogance, but tolerance and truth telling. We ought to have love for our humanity and help out our fellow man.
By Timothy
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