Ahh, little things count – you know, when those big bad ass union bosses pulling in $150K a year or more, yammer on about $15 an hour minimum wage, but, err, not for unions:
But Rusty Hicks, who heads the county Federation of Labor and helps lead the Raise the Wage coalition, said Tuesday night that companies with workers represented by unions should have leeway to negotiate a wage below that mandated by the law.
“With a collective bargaining agreement, a business owner and the employees negotiate an agreement that works for them both. The agreement allows each party to prioritize what is important to them,” Hicks said in a statement. “This provision gives the parties the option, the freedom, to negotiate that agreement. And that is a good thing.”
It doesn’t matter, uh, that the LA minimum wage law doesn’t’ go into effect until 2020.
This is how a lobotomized society rolls – incredible shoddy thinking, even by the elites, those money changer sons and daughters and grandkids, from all the best schools, compliant and ready to make capitalism work with a big C for co-option or C for collusion or C for corrupted.
The inability of a consumer society to think – one where idiots, from Warren Buffet to the Kochs to the Trumps and the Obamas or any number of millions running the carnival of intellectually anemic punishers and honchos lording over the 80 percent – that’s the real work of the elites, those privatizers, the Zionists, the leaders of the small chosen few who determine so many laws, rules, benchmarks, and lies around the engines that run USA of Israel’s continuing criminal enterprise.
Imagine my years as a journalist fighting the pigs, the owners and editors, who demanded a compliant operating system, that false balance and equivocation. Never take a deeper perspective on the Contra War’s glory –- Salvadorans dead in the Organ Pipe National Forest in Southern Arizona. I was there, and, well, no perspective from the Salvadoran child that survived. What’s the real cause of death? Something about a coyote gone scared? Nothing about the Murder Inc., School of the Americas. Nothing about the militarization of Central America? Proxy wars. I had to pry pry pry open those Exceptionalist Heads, supposedly editors from the SCLM – so called liberal media.
Now imagine those neo-liberals and cultural war jar heads in education, another field of glory I worked in. Nothing doing, any narrative outside the USA of Walmart/Costco line. The inability to see systems, see the strangulation by the Internet, by the Microsofts and Amazon dot coms. The inability to put two and two together, as teachers, pushing the same load of middling nothingness the Admin Class and Privatizers demand. You know, just let the kids learn how to be the minions of the Military-Legal-Pharma-Media-Prison-IT-Retail-Medical-Insurance-Banking-HR-Surveillance-Hedge Fund complex.
You have these ADMIN types, you know, overpaid presidents and provosts and the like, working with the chosen few, who demand that the workforce, err, student body, stays lock step with what the neoliberal and capitalism lords demand. You can’t teach anyone to question their role in the Empire or the Blood Markets of Resource Theft or the constant destruction of social fabrics and implosion of neighborhoods through the needle of gentrification or ramming more freeways in the ‘hood or dismantling of schools and public spaces.
It isn’t up to us to change the next generation. It isn’t up to us to be political, to have kids see that every nanaosecond of their lives is determined by the legal, the political, the arbitration of sickness that is the retail complex. Anything’s for sale, and history is broken bricks and mortar, and these are new times, and the Internet and the 5 hours of TV watching and all that bubble gum nothingness that is sports, weekend mall cruising, all that buy-buy-buy is what they must fit into.
You don’t question the number of drone engineers the ADMIN class has arranged with the Chosen Few Money Changers choreographing the Military-Legal-Pharma-Media-Prison-IT-Retail-Medical-Insurance-Banking-HR-Surveillance-Hedge Fund complex.
Never question the economies of scale of Amazon or Starbucks. Never ever question the realities of a modern society that is dead from the neck up. Never question, “what goes in will not make the man, the woman,” logical fallacy.
Never ever question that corporations and transnationals and the banking system and armies of compliant workers in the upper echelons are felons, murderers, rapists, family destroyers, community immolators.
Andre is correct:
People are offering their own bowed heads to a complex and protracted act of lobotomy. In exchange for stamped pieces of papers called diplomas, men and women lose, forever, their ability to think independently, to analyze and to see the world with their own individual set of eyes. As a reward for their submissiveness, their chances to get prestigious positions in the regime’s elite corporate, academic, and other battalions, dramatically increase.
The extreme degree of compliance of the majority of men and women living in our societies makes old books like Fahrenheit 451 and 1984 only moderately disturbing. Our reality of “2015” is much more psychedelic, bizarre and appalling… as well as shameful!
This is how the kingdom of elite run the world, from some small non-profit where some secular but very tribal cabal will run the show and demand from the goyim a certain disbelief and deep delusion that the masters are somehow there in higher positions because of all the hard work, the GPAs and the integral higher smarts.
I have seen it time and time again, working with unions, non-profits, media, education, planners, environmental groups – time and time again, the commentators and leaders in the fields I’ve entered into – unions, sustainability, urban planning, media, literature, journalism, education – have come from that chosen few tribe in the USA of Israel.
I have felt the hard swat of punishment for being as smart or smarter than they. Punishment, marginalization, and pushed on the edge or outs.
Look, I appreciate Henry Giroux or Andre Vltchek or any number of others on the socialist web sites, on the Counterpunch or Mother Jones media treadmill. But lacking in many of their critiques, whether or not the writer is or is not Jewish, is a deep analysis of what Gilad Atzmon has done as a former Jew, soldier, Israeli – there is a reason why so many Jews are in the corridors of money-military-media power.
This is important, from Henry Giroux, over at Counterpunch, but still, lacking some of the punch in the tribal narrative.
What is crucial is that the mechanisms, discourse, culture, and ideologies that inform authoritarianism must become part of any analysis that now addresses and is willing to challenge the anti-democratic forces at the heart of American politics. This means, in part, focusing on the ongoing repressive and systemic conditions, institutions, ideologies, and values that have been developing in American society for the last forty years, at the very least. It means finding a common ground on which various elements of the left can be mobilized under the banner of a radical democracy in order to challenge the diverse forms of oppression, incarceration, mass violence, exploitation, and exclusion that now define the authoritarian nature of American politics. It means taking seriously the educative nature of politics and recognizing that public spheres must be created in order to educate citizens who are informed, socially responsible, and willing to fight collectively for a future in which a radical democracy appears sustainable. This suggests an anti-fascist struggle that is not about simply about remaking economic structures, but also refashioning identities, values, social relations, modes of identification as part of a democratic project along with what it means to desire a better and more democratic future.
Listen to Gilad Atzmon over at John Friend’s web site, in an interview Friend did riffing with Gilad:
Friend: I think a strong argument can be made that the vast majority of Jews, and certainly the organized Jewish community, conduct their lives, business, and other affairs by the maxim: Is it good for the Jews? What’s good for the Jews is often also framed as: is it good for Israel? Admittedly, there are at times heated debates and diverging points of view within the international Jewish community about what exactly is good for the Jews (and by extension the Jewish state of Israel).
Gilad: This is a true observation, however, I would refine it a bit, if you allow me. The Judeocentrism you describe above is symptomatic of those who identify politically, socially, spiritually and culturally as Jews. This identification is vague and is kept vague for a reason. It allows the tribally oriented mind to slip in and out and to morph in accordance to the transforming reality around it. However, it is true to argue that those who identify as Jews, whether hard core Zionists or so-called “progressives”, such as Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), are primarily concerned with one thing, namely Jewish interests. They just fail to agree amongst themselves what these interests are.
Bernard Lazare, an early Zionist and a contemporary of Herzl, hated anti-Semitism, but he was courageous enough to accept that “it was not born without cause.” In the late 19th century, Lazare produced one of the most daring studies of anti-Semitism. He attempted to find out what is it in the Jews that makes their history into a chain of countless holocausts. Bernard Lazare did the impossible – he blamed the victims. He came to the conclusion that some Jewish religious and cultural traits are indeed problematic and beg for correction.
I myself tend to believe that anti-Semitism is the core of Jewish shame. Jews hate to be hated; they desperately try to make themselves loved. Zionism is a radical attempt to make the Jew likable. JVP is a similar desperate attempt to make the Jew lovable for being anti-Zionist. Jewish history and politics is an inconsistent zigzag operation set to avoid the shame or attempt at mirroring. It therefore systematically places the blame on the goyim while vindicating the Jews.
My close friend Paul Eisen defines anti-Semitism as “Goyim reaction to bad Jewish behavior.” Like Bernard Lazare, Eisen also blames the victims. Like Eisen and Lazare, I also believe that Jews must self-reflect and identify what is it in their politics and exceptionalist cultural attitude which some people reject.
So, while Giroux laments how screwed up the US is, how screwed up Europe is, or our bankrupt Western Civilization has always been, I have never seen him and hundreds of others look at who it is that is conducting the philosophical and practical day to day leadership roles in banking, politics, culture, academia, entertainment and so on. I am telling you, this conundrum I have faced has pretty much determined where mainstream and even left of mainstream thought and discourse and business goes.
Is it tribal? Is it some unique character bond? Some way to hold sway over goyim? Time and time again, Jewish writer-director-playwright-novelist really have created powerfully anti-Goyim and skewed narratives. Amazing to see how the world is filtered and played out in la-la land through this vast liberal and not-so-liberal tribal conspiracy run by the Complex, the Military-Legal-Pharma-Media-Prison-IT-Retail-Medical-Insurance-Banking-HR-Surveillance-Hedge Fund complex.
One thing says it all. Spitzer and his selfie. Bush Junior saying he will not charge the chemical industry with new rules for markers in their poisons so ER docs might help to save the lives of those coming in after consuming one of their many poisons.
General Ike not even acknowledging Mamie Till’s letter asking for a federal investigation for the murder of Emmitt.
Patton and Eisenhower and McCarthy – The Bonus Army:
Fight a rotten war, get $1.25 a day for each blood day served overseas, and $1 a day for serving in the US. Catch? Payment could not be made until 1945.
In May 1924, 15,000 veterans, many unemployed and destitute, headed for Washington, D.C. to demand immediate payment of their bonus. The Bonus Expeditionary Force is what they called themselves, but the public dubbed them the “Bonus Army.” They constructed camps at various places around the city, and they waited.
A month later, the Attorney General ordered the evacuation of the veterans from all government property. The DC police could not move the resistance back, though two marchers were killed. President Hoover ordered the army to push out the veterans from the public spaces in Washington. Six tanks and Infantry and cavalry units lead by Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur. Major Dwight D. Eisenhower served as his liaison. Major George Patton led the cavalry. Patton charged, with fixed bayonets and tear gas hurled into the crowd.
Hoover ordered MacArthur to stop, but like all generals, he disobeyed, leading the infantry to the main camp. By 6 am 10,000 inhabitants were pushed out and the camp was in flames. Two babies died and hospitals were overwhelmed with casualties.
Little things count, like Clinton and his 100,000 new cops on the streets, three strikes you are out and more blacks in terminal prison.
Obama and his kill list, sure, little things count.
Bernie and his support of wars, privatization, three strikes and you are out, oh, little things count (thanks Paul Street):
With the exception of his opposition to George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003, Sanders has been a stealthily staunch supporter of the U.S. military state and empire over the last quarter century – a military state and empire that murders and maims mainly non-white others (though white Serbians qualified as targets for a U.S. bombing that Bernie approved in 1999) and steals billions of dollars each year from meeting the needs of the United States’ own very disproportionately Black, Latino, and Native American poor.
As a member of the US House of Representatives, Sanders voted for Bill Clinton’s deeply racist 1994 “three strikes” crime bill. The legislation imposed tougher sentences, put thousands of more police on the streets and helped fund the building of extra prisons. It was known for its sadistic “three strikes” provision, which consigned “violent offenders” to lifetime imprisonment for a third criminal conviction, including for minor parole violations and drug addiction. Backed by congressional Republicans, the bill helped dramatically expand the nation’s globally unmatched and wildly race-disparate mass incarceration system – this while crime was falling.
As a Senator, Sanders has voted for a measure that has advanced urban school privatization, deepened educational race disparities, and deepened the hold of deadening standardized testing pedagogy over minority student: the No Child Left Behind Act. He is a supporter of the state and federal Common Core States Initiative, another key part of the neoliberal-racist schools agenda.
I wonder what Bernie’s tribal background has anything to do with his magical thinking. This is where America or France or Germany or Canada or Australia or the UK are at, really, the inability of citizens to see into the face of lies, to recognize the felonies, to make connections around why the lesser of two evils, oh, murder through Albright sanctions, or death by laser guided presidential Hellfire, it’s all one in the same.
Not that the American project was good to begin with, but with all that information, all those years of protest and fighting, we are here – trapped in cultural hell, bubble gum PhDs, cultural wars, a media that is as pathetic as National Inquirer.
So much of the world dies daily because of the Capitalism of Criminal Continuing Enterprises from Sea to Shining Sea. There is blood on the hands of every citizen now, and the lobotomizing of entire countries is magnificent on a grand scale. Shifting Baseline Disorder. The very concept of the world made in Our Image, that is, the Corporate Image, each and every human life monetized.
The value in this critique is seemingly deja vu, an entire wasteland of others spending human lifetimes understanding the phony and the dangerous, delusions about Western Civilization as some Zenith of Enlightenment.
Endless skewed and broken narratives, the education of America, the world:
Joel Stein, columnist for the Los Angeles Times and regular contributor to Time magazine. In his column in the LA Times (December 19, 2008), Stein says that Americans who think the Jews do not control Hollywood and the media are just plain “dumb.”
“Jews totally run Hollywood.” Then he went on to provide a list of the media moguls he identifies as Powerful Jews: Fox News President Peter Chernin; Paramount Pictures Chairman Brad Grey; Walt Disney CEO Robert Igor; Sony Pictures Chairman Michael Lynton; Warner Brothers Chairman Barry Meyer; CBS CEO Leslie Moonves; MGM Chairman Harry Sloan; and NBC/Universal Studios CEO Jeff Zucker.
As Stein also pointed out that the head of the actors’ union, the Screen Actors Guild, Alan Rosenberg, is a Jew.
“The Jews are so dominant,” writes Stein, “I had to scour the trades to come up with six Gentiles in high positions at entertainment companies. But lo and behold,” Stein says, “even one of that six, AMC President Charles Collier, turned out to be a Jew!”
“As a proud Jew,I want America to know of our accomplishment. Yes, we control Hollywood.”
Read on – LA Times!
This fact, well, for someone who is not a Jew but very involved in causes and cultural “things” around and controlled by leaders who are Jewish, makes for an interesting perspective – so much of what gets published, aired, and legalized and normalized is through a skewed personal and tribal perspective. White privilege and white dominance, well, think hard what and who is at the top of that white privilege scale.
This is common, in the tribe. Read from DV Gilad:
In his Saturday sermon Rabbi Yosef revealed that the sole purpose of Gentiles is to serve Jews. “Goyim were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world.” The Rabbi was also kind enough to provide the Goyim with some precise tasks. “Why are gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat. That is why gentiles were created.”
Read Marx on “the Jewish question.”