Land Of The Free!!

      This is an extract lifted from arrezafe it's from a book written in 1992, and things have deteriorated since then, poverty has increased significantly. Also this is a translation from English to Spanish and back to English, it is not the original English copy, though full English copy can be read here: http://www.michaelparenti.org/HiddenHolocaust.html thanks Loam for the link. The richest and most developed capitalist nation on the planet, and this is the miserable life it produces for millions of its citizens. What chance have the rest of us got if we follow the same Neo-Liberal policies of the capitalist master.

From the book Dirty Truths , [1992], by Michael Parenti
Translation from English: Arrezafe
       "I have seen strong men tear the floor, begging for a job. With some of them we have to do our best to avoid suicide. Many say they just want to die," says Charlie Tarrance, director of a private social agency. . Their task is to deal with the growing queues of desperate people looking for work, housing and food. The place is Gadsden, Alabama, but it could be anywhere in the United States.
      It could be Washington DC, at a Safeway supermarket just a mile from the White House, where an old man holding a can of dog food is crying. When asked what is wrong, he replies: “I am hungry. I'm hungry."
     It could be New York City, where a woman yells at the landlord to evict her from her home along with her children, whom, to her greatest distress, the Office of Child Welfare takes away. Desperate and sobbing, she is rushed to a New York psychiatric hospital to be treated by all-knowing psychiatrists and diagnosed as "paranoid schizophrenic."
      How much misery and cruelty on earth. As American leaders move decisively toward their Final Free Market Solution, stories of hunger, grief, and despair abound. Such tragedies exist a long time ago. Social pathology is part of this society as much as crime and capitalism. For a multitude of people, life becomes increasingly difficult.
Some grim statistics
      Conservatives like to proclaim how wonderful, happy, and prosperous our nation is. The only thing that coincides with their love for the country is the remarkable indifference they show towards the people who live in it. For them, the anguished cries of the dispossessed are nothing more than annoying whimpers of discontent. Those who criticize the existing living conditions are labeled as "complainers" and that we show some concern for our fellow citizens. But the dirty truth is that there is an alarming amount of inequalities, difficulties, abuses, afflictions, diseases, violence and pathologies in this country. The figures reveal a list that reaches millions of victims. Consider the following estimates for any given year:

27,000 Americans commit suicide.
5,000 suicide attempts. Some estimates are higher.
23,000 are killed.
85,000 are wounded by firearms.
38,000 of these die, including 2,600 children.
13,000,000 are victims of crimes including assault, rape, armed robbery, theft and arson.
135,000 children carry weapons to school.
5,500,000 people are arrested for various crimes (not including traffic offenses).
125,000 die prematurely from alcohol abuse.
6,500,000 use heroin, crack, speed, PCP, cocaine, or some other hard drug on a regular basis.
37,000,000 , one in six Americans, regularly use medical drugs to control their mood. Users are mostly women, medical sponsors, pharmaceutical company providers: astronomical profits.
2,000,000 outpatients receive powerful mind control drugs, sometimes described as "chemical straitjackets."
5,000 die from psychoactive drug treatments.
200,000 are subject to treatments of electrical shock damaging to the brain and nervous system.
From 600 to 1,000 people, mostly women, are lobotomized.
25,000,000, or one in 10 Americans, seek help from psychiatric, psychotherapeutic, or medical sources to address mental and emotional problems, at a cost of more than $ 4 billion annually.
6,800,000 turn to non-medical services, such as clergy, welfare agencies, and social counselors, for help with their emotional problems. In total, some 80,000,000 have sought some form of psychological counseling in their lives.
1,300,000 suffer some form of treatment-related injury in hospitals.
2,000,000 undergo unnecessary surgical operations, 10,000 of which die as a result.
180,000 die from adverse reactions to medical treatments, more than those who die from combined plane and car accidents.
More than 14,000 people die from overdoses of legally prescribed medications.
45,000 die in car accidents. However, the number of cars and highways is increasing while funding for safer forms of public transportation is shrinking.
Of the 1,800,000 victims who suffer non-fatal injuries from car accidents, 150,000 suffer permanent disabilities.
126,000 children are born with significant defects, mainly due to insufficient prenatal care, nutritional deficiency, environmental toxicity, or drug addiction by the mother.
2,900,000 children are subjected to gross neglect or abuse, including physical torture and willful starvation.
5,000 children are killed by their parents or grandparents.
More than 30,000 children are permanently physically disabled due to abuse or neglect. Child abuse in the United States affects more children each year than leukemia, car accidents, and infectious diseases combined. Cases of abuse by unemployed parents are increasing dramatically.
1,000,000 children run away from home, mainly due to abuse, including sexual abuse, of parents and other adults. 83 percent of fugitive children sexually abused come from white families.
150,000 children are reported as missing.
50,000 of these simply disappear. Their ages range from 15 to 15. According to the New York Times, "Some of these children are dead, perhaps half of them, buried annually in this country, are unidentified children."
900,000 children, some as young as seven years old, are engaged in child labor in the United States, serving as underpaid farm workers, dishwashers, laundry, and housework for up to ten hours a day in violation of child labor laws.
From 2,000,000 to 4,000,000 women are battered. Domestic violence is the leading cause of injury and the second leading cause of death for American women.
700,000 women are raped, one every 45 seconds.

And so the list goes on read the full list HERE: 

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Newspeak.

 

       I have always thought that George Orwell was much underestimated and not read by enough people. His words have predicted where we are now, and what the future holds if we don't stand up and protect our individual freedoms. As he points out in all his works, truth is truth no matter the ideological line handed out by the powers that be. A freethinker is the enemy of ideology and dogma, and is the road we should always try to walk.

     The following is a short extract from an article in Acorn on George Orwell, it is well worth reading the complete article HERE:

Extract:

 

       Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense… If both the past and external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?” (24)
      Winston Smith’s struggle to keep a grip on objective reality, to know that two plus two makes four whatever the ideological demands of the Party, is a central theme of Orwell’s novel.
      The character tells himself: “Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s centre”. (25)
      The Big Brother system has invented a new language which controls people’s minds by making heretical ideas impossible to even formulate.
       One of the Party members developing Newspeak tells Smith: “You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying words – scores of them, hundreds of them, every day”. (26)
        He explains: “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it… By 2050 – earlier, probably – all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed”. (27)
      In the face of this truth-denying dogmatism, Orwell insisted that any authentic radical should always remain free to reject the dominant official ideology: “He should never turn back from a train of thought because it may lead to a heresy, and he should not mind very much if his unorthodoxy is smelt out, as it probably will be”.
      While co-operating with others to some extent, a free-thinking radical had to fight the capitalist system “as an individual, an outsider, at the most an unwelcome guerilla on the flank of a regular army”. (28)
      In Woodcock’s words, Orwell was “a good and angry man who sought for the truth because he knew that only in its air would freedom and justice survive”. (29)

Read the complete article HERE: 
      

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3.5%, Is This The Tipping Point?

 Chile.

Ecuador.

        Across the world the young are turning against the enforced neo-liberalism that has brought so much hardship and misery to so many. From Chile, Haiti, Ecuador, to Lebanon, Iraq and Sudan and elsewhere, people are on the streets challenging the established authority and the symbols of this brutal exploitative system. In some states in is insurrection, and others growing mass protests. Can Chile be the spark that starts the fire?

 Lebanon.

Iraq.

    An interesting article By Medea Benjamin Nicolas J S Davies

         Uprisings against the decades long dominance of neoliberal “center-right” and “center-left” governments that benefit the wealthy and multinational corporations at the expense of working people are sweeping the world.
         In this Autumn of Discontent, people from Chile, Haiti and Honduras to Iraq, Egypt and Lebanon are rising up against neoliberalism, which has in many cases been imposed on them by US invasions, coups and other brutal uses of force. While the severe repression against these activists have led to more than 250 protesters killed in Iraq in October alone, the protests have continued to grow. Some movements, such as in Algeria and Sudan, have already forced the downfall of long-entrenched, corrupt governments.
        A country that is emblematic of the uprisings against neoliberalism is Chile. On October 25, 2019, a million Chileans – out of a population of about 18 million – took to the streets across the country, unbowed by government repression that has killed at least 20 and injured hundreds more. Two days later, Chile's billionaire president Sebastian Piñera fired his entire cabinet and declared, “We are in a new reality. Chile is different from what it was a week ago.”
        The people of Chile appear to have validated Erica Chenoweth’s research on non-violent protest movements, in which she found that once over 3.5% of a population rise up to non-violently demand political and economic change, no government can resist their demands. It remains to be seen whether Piñera’s response will be enough to save his own job, or whether he will be the next casualty of the 3.5% rule.
       It is fitting that Chile should be in the vanguard of protests sweeping the world in this Autumn of Discontent, since Chile served as the original neoliberal laboratory.
       When Chile’s socialist leader Salvador Allende was elected in 1970, after a six year covert CIA operation to prevent his election, President Nixon ordered U.S. sanctions to “make the economy scream.”
       In his first year in office, Allende’s progressive economic policies led to a 22% increase in real wages, as work began on 120,000 new housing units and the nationalization of copper mines and other industrial sectors. But growth slowed in 1972 and 1973 under the pressure of brutal US sanctions, as in Venezuela and Iran today.
        Allende was overthrown in a CIA-backed coup on September 11, 1973. The new US and Western backed leader, General Augusto Pinochet, executed or ‘disappeared’ at least 3,200 people, held 80,000 political prisoners in jail, and ruled as a brutal dictator until 1990.
         Under Pinochet, Chile’s economy was radically restructured by the “Chicago Boys”, a team of Chilean economics students trained at the University of Chicago under the supervision of Milton Friedman. US sanctions were quickly lifted and Pinochet sold off Chile’s public assets to US corporations and wealthy investors. The neoliberal program: tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, together with mass privatization and cuts to pensions, healthcare, education and other public services, was soon duplicated across the world.
          While the Chicago Boys pointed to rising economic growth rates in Chile as evidence of the success of their neoliberal program, by 1988, 48% of Chileans were living below the poverty line. Chile is currently one of the wealthiest countries in Latin America, and one of the most unequal.
        The governments elected after Pinochet, from “center-right” to “center-left”, have abided by the neoliberal model. The needs of the poor and working class continue to be exploited, as they pay higher taxes than their tax-evading bosses, on top of ever-rising living costs, stagnant wages and limited access to voucherized education and a stratified public-private healthcare system. Indigenous communities are at the very bottom of this corrupt social and economic order.
        The neoliberal consensus following Pinochet has triggered a disillusionment with the traditional political process, as voter turnout declined from 95% in 1989 to 47% in the recent presidential election in 2017.
       If Chenoweth is right and the million Chileans in the street have breached the tipping point for successful non-violent popular democracy, Chile may be leading the way to a global political and economic revolution. 

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Radical Imagination.

        My friend and comrade Bob of Citystrolls has produce some very informative videos, two of them on the subject of Radical Imagination, this is the second, enjoy, think and learn.

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Farewell To The Pope Of Hope.

     Recently the babbling brook of bullshit, our mainstream media, has been giving us snippets of Obama, in the last few days of his stint as big chief of the imperialist world, touring the world's capitals for a round of red carpet and banquets. Obviously as he hops from country to country, helping the climate to change in his big jumbo jet, he receives a variety of welcomes and protests.

      In Greece, where the people, mired in poverty, with shattered social services, and who are among those worst hit in Europe by the polices of the neo-liberalism regime that he presided over, showed their thoughts when he arrived in Athens, though the babbling brook of bullshit didn't show much, if any, of that welcome. The people of Athens certainly gave The Prince of Peace, The Pope of Hope, imperialist boss-man, Obama, a rousing display of their feelings.

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No One Is Coming To Help Us!!

 

         I have not said much about the Trump affair, as it is difficult to grasp what has happened and why. One thing we can be sure of, there is a emboldened and growing far right, not just in America, but here in the UK and across Europe. We can debate the reasons why and come to different conclusions, but what we can't do is ignore this rise. To me it seems obvious that the people would be come disenchanted with the system, as it was never intended to see to their needs in the first place. The problem seems to be that in looking for answers, people have not picked up our ideas, we have to ask ourselves, why not? Resolving that question would be a good place to start. 

       We will have to find answers in our communities  and to a degree do what the far right is doing, tap into that anger and disenchantment. The following extracts are from an interesting article by First of May Anarchist Alliance

       The surprise victory of Donald Trump this past Tuesday has quickly presented people in this country (and around the world) with a vastly different political landscape than we had expected. We are seeing a rise in right-wing attacks as the far right is emboldened by the victory, much like what happened earlier this year after the success of the Brexit referendum in the UK. The incompetence and capitulation of the Democratic Party has forced many of its former supporters to recognize that the fight against the far right cannot be won by liberal electoral politics. This new reality forces anti-authoritarians of all stripes to rise to the challenge of building strong movements for working class self-defense in this new atmosphere.

Why the turn form neo-liberalism to xenophobic nationalism?

      Another narrative states that in the rust belt as in Europe, the devastating effects of decades of austerity, neoliberal trade agreements, and an orientation towards multinational corporations have been challenged. That challenge in the U.S. and elsewhere has come in the form of xenophobic nationalism. There is a significant amount of truth to this as well, but it can’t explain much of Trump’s success without acknowledging the serious appeal that open white nationalism and misogyny has gained in this election.Perhaps the most revealing aspect of this moment is that after spending months describing Trump as a grave threat to the lives of women, people of color, queer and trans people and the disabled, the entire Democratic Party has immediately capitulated to him. They have made clear that they always held preserving their broken system to be far more important than our lives. Many among their base are for the first time seeing the party’s true colors, and are reaching out to radical organizations in the interest of carrying on the fight that the Democrats so quickly abandoned. Already we are seeing attacks on muslims, immigrants, people of every color besides white, queer and trans people. This is not abstract, it is already happening. We should expect more of this and must make organizing to oppose it a top priority.

So, what do we do?

 We are encouraged that so many have taken to the streets across the country. We hope more will do the same. Trump’s attacks in the form of policy and his supporters physical attacks and intimidation, must be opposed from day one.

Our organizations must be effective. The sense of despair many are feeling is grounded in the reality of an ascendant far right. Right now, they face little resistance. The sense of urgency many of us have felt is a recognition of the need to build that resistance. It is time for us to take up that task, to find new comrades ready to fight, and to fight. No one is coming to save us–we cannot use the electoral system to fight the far right effectively. It’s time to stop waiting and defend each other in the streets!

What Needs to Be Done: 1. No to National “healing”, working with, or a grace period for the Trump Regime 2. Take to the streets – build a militant resistance 3. Build working-class defense organizations that resist racist attacks, sexual assault, immigration and homeland security raids and deportations, police brutality and state repression 4. Agitate and organize for workers actions – including a general strike against Trump 5. No to containment of the struggle back into the Democratic Party, electoralism and the Non-Profit Industrial Complex

A PDF of the full article can be read HERE:

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Pinochet-Thatcher, Two Of A kind.

        Following on from my recent post on 9/11, it would be impossible to overlook the Pinochet-Thatcher relationship. Two beasts that that trampled the people in the name of neo-liberal polices of the multi-millionaires. While one slaughtered, tortured and butchered his way across the people, the other throw generations on the scrapheap of society, turned communities into garbage bins, crushed hopes, destroyed the potential of millions of individuals, and played her brutal imperialist card in the Falklands, However, we should never forget, they were not alone, they had the full backing and participation of presidents, Prime Minsters and dictators across the globe. who were following in their festering footsteps. That is the shape of the beast we live with, it's called capitalism.

Got this video from Loam at arrezafe:

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The Phoney Legal System.

         American imperialism adapts to different situations, from the military overthrow and dirty guerilla wars, in South America, they have now moved to the phoney, "legal process", whereby presidents are removed to suit the American neo-liberal ideology. Anything remotely "leftwing", is seen as a threat, a hindrance to the plundering of that continent, and so must be removed, one way or the other. The result is still the same, turmoil and poverty for the people, and more avenues opened up for the big corporations to loot to their hearts content. The latest Legal removal of a head of state to suit that American ideology, being Dilma Rousseff, no saint, but she did fight the previous military dictatorship and suffer torture and imprisonment for her trouble, now being removed and impeached. She is not alone, others have been removed in similar circumstance to suit the American agenda of looting and plundering the South American continent. However, the people are fighting back and fighting hard.

The latest Video from SubMediaTV:

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Faceless Corporations Have Us By The Balls.

      The final stages of corporatism, profit from your illness, profit from your incarceration, the end of public assets, the end of public spaces. You are either profitable to them or you are superfluous, a useless waste product. The faceless corporations have us by the balls, ----at the moment!!

via a comrade of Brighton ABC:

      Neo-liberalism, an ideology and concept usually associated with a particularly ruthless brand of free-market economics, has now reached into the very core services of the state and institutions that were once considered strictly off limits to financial speculators and entrepreneurs: the NHS, the prison system and the criminal justice system. Neo-liberalism doesn’t just involve a massive shift of economic power and wealth to an already extremely powerful and wealthy social group, but also a fundamental shift in the philosophy and policy of organisations like the welfare and criminal justice systems, both of whose ‘clients’ are now increasingly lumped together as an undifferentiated mass of the ‘undeserving poor’ or an always potentially criminal ‘underclass’ requiring an equal degree of punitive supervision, surveillance and ‘management’. For the poor the welfare state is becoming increasingly like a carceral state. 

Read the full article HERE:

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