War Infects Unthinking Minds

"If Memorial Day is to have any meaning and content whatsoever, it should not simply and solely be burgers on the grill, or even worse some stars-and-stripes patriotic praise for the empire. …We should be honoring those who fought for freedom, for democracy, and against fascism. Consider the ‘premature’ anti-fascists (those fighting for the Spanish Republic) who gathered from all over the world to fight the beast at that time. The continuities today all over the world are stark once you cut through the fog and the globaloney," said Allen Ruff, a member of Jews for Equal Justice, (CounterPunch, (2002)).

It's Memorial Day, 2017 and for too many this means: No thinking and if you must think please do it quietly, (Isthmus).

Love the Holiday, good to see grunts now-gone get some recognition and public service and sacrifice hailed.

Yet, our collective display of no-think this weekend shows allegiance not to the memory of the fallen, rather to ritual reenactment of myth that in itself becomes the object of Memorial Day.

Is this really what service and sacrifice are about? The "increasingly parochial culture that celebrates the virtues of ignorance, promotes a cult of stupidity, and extols the present as a process without an alternative," as Tariq Ali poses heretical thoughts in his The Clash of Fundamentalisms, (Verso Books, 2002).

Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.

Questions should be asked before Trump decides invading and bombing someone, somewhere need to escalate.

From 15 years ago, Memorial Day 2002 in Madison, Wisconsin at James Madison Park, (CounterPunch), the year after 911. History matters.
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Madison, Wisconsin, (2002) — Clarence Kailin, age 87, is a surviving member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and still tirelessly works for peace and justice. "Our fight for economic and social justice, for peace and freedom is a struggle that is just as important today as it was in 1937 and 1938," said Kailin describing what the Memorial Day event represents. "This will be more than memories of the past. Our immediate fight must be against our own militarism and for the struggle for peace and equality."

Asked why he wasn’t out attending a conventional parade or waving an American flag, Kailin answered, "We’re waving our own flag today. The destruction of the World Trade towers was the best opportunity that could happen to Bush. So he could use it as a scare tactic–‘the world is full of terrorism and we have to go after it. And we will lose a few civil liberties along the way, but we have to do this and have a bigger military budget.’ Our whole foreign policy is based on solving things by force and violence."

We’re very wealthy here. But at least one half of the world is living on a dollar or two a day; it’s a terrible situation. In Iraq, we have undermined the whole structure there. A half a million children there have died–all absolutely unnecessary. We won’t give up the fight. This is simply a military government (in Washington) and we are going to pay a hell of a price if we don’t find a way to put a stop to it."

Following is the text from which Mr. Kailin read as the opening speaker at the Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade event:

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One month ago, on April 28, I was in New York with my daughter, Julie. We attended the annual affair of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade held at New York University. This was in celebration of the 66th anniversary of the Volunteers for Liberty. There were 900 people there, and among others, we heard the San Francisco Mime Troupe who sang many songs from the Spanish Civil War. That was the emotional high point of the day.

However, we were there for more than memories. At this time of international crisis, we find an urgent need to carry on the spirit of struggle in which we, along with the Spanish people, were involved sixty some years ago when fascism was threatening the world, when Spain was the only country to stand up to Hitler, and when the democracies betrayed the Spanish Republic, giving Hitler and Mussolini everything they wanted. This was when the International Brigades were formed. Spain and the Volunteers made that period one of the most unusual and unique in history.

Today, with the United States having become the dominant world power and seeking to extend its empire to every part of the globe, the danger is much greater than at any other time. Almost total control of information by the monopolized news media has made our work that much more difficult.

I want to quote from the latest edition of The Progressive magazine. This is in Matt Rothschild’s column. He quotes from Tariq Ali, an editor of the New Left Review. In the prologue of his latest book, The Clash of Fundamentalisms, he (Ali) criticizes our ‘increasingly parochial culture that celebrates the virtues of ignorance, promotes a cult of stupidity, and extols the present as a process without an alternative.’

‘The virtual outlawing of history by the dominant culture has reduced the process of democracy to farce. The result is a mishmash of cynicism, despair and escapism. This is precisely an environment designed to nurture irrationalisms of every sort. Over the last fifty years, religious revivalism with a political edge has flourished in many different cultures. Nor is the process finished. A major cause is the fact that all other exit routes have been sealed off by the mother of all fundamentalism: American imperialism.’

American capitalism is the common denominator, the main reason why we want to encourage the many single-issue organizations in this area to come together in common cause–but without asking them to giving up their own important work. … This is the work of lifetime. But I always see the fact that we outnumber them by a thousand to one. So one should never despair. So, again, seeing you here tells me that in the long run the people can win.

(clinched fist in the air) Salud, everyone!

Misogyny, Dark Money, and Corporation as Uber People

Update III: Koch brothers revealed as John Birchers, racist and anti-Semitic

Update II: Opus Dei comes to Washington D.C.

Update: Why Harris and Hobby Lobby Spell Disaster for Working Women (Jafee, In These Times)
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Throughout U.S. history, nothing has spooked the political body as much as alarms sounded about the presence of insidious forces embedded in our community, bursting with bad intentions, amoral character and rapacious appetites.

Examples from the 20th-21st centuries are clear: African-Americans, anarchists, uppity women who want to vote, peace activists, sewer socialists, communists, artists, civil rights workers, immigrants and terrorists have all at times fit the bill for the purposes of narrow ideological interests intent on consolidating their political-financial power at the expense of the liberty of the disfavored citizenry.

In the wake of the Citizens United, McCutcheon and the misogynistic Hobby Lobby decisions [among others] by the five Republican justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, the Roberts Court has created a class of citizens (non-human entities) with more rights than the typical American, and imbued with immunity from the criminal justice system:  The corporation, formerly chartered by the individual states to deliver a specific economic purpose for a specified benefit of the community, now aligned with closely held ideological interests such as the Koch brothers who endeavor to reengineer American society.

These cases are not decided out of naiveté or an academic misreading of the law by the justices.

This is a extra-judicial project constructed by raw and hostile socio-economic powers that resemble nothing so much as 20th century fascism with their concomitant political taunts against minorities and creation of a prison state.

Tortured, contrived jurisprudence by the allied, ultra-activist Roberts Court is simply a manner to engineer the transformation of power of narrow ideological and financial interests to the specific detriment of non-favored citizenry, an enterprise that could never be accomplished through the legislative process.

The judicial reasoning is fallacious and obvious: "In his dissent, Justice Stevens (in Citizens United) acknowledged that 'we have long since held that corporations are covered by the First Amendment.' That traces back to the time when the 1907 Tillman act banned corporate contributions, the precedent overturned by the Court. In the early 20th century, legal theorists and courts came to adopt and implement the Court's 1886 (Santa Clara) principle that these "collectivist legal entities" have the same rights as persons of flesh and blood, an attack on classical liberalism that was sharply condemned by the vanishing breed of conservatives as 'a menace to the liberty of the individual, and to the stability of the American States as popular governments' (Christopher Tiedeman)," notes Noam Chomsky in reaction to the Citizens United decision.

The maintenance of this Republican Party-economic royalists' long-term project's aims and objectives is ongoing.

Today, even as the servants of economic royalists such as Scott Walker and virtually the entire Republican Party attack the working class for organizing and selling their work product, the rightwing is calling for the Court to sanction the use of dark money into our formal electoral system in an attempt to eliminate any popular accountability, and insulate huge moneyed interests from the criminal justice system under the rubric of the new judicial doctrine of civil rights for invisible, non-human forces that were never recognized by the United States Constitution but have been created by a handful of Supreme Court justices for the benefit of a very few uber people.

Eric O’Keefe and Wisconsin Club for Growth, Inc. v Francis Schmitz, et al (Case No.  14-C-139) now before the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit may become the judicial vehicle through which the Court constructs a new doctrine in which any individual associated with a special class of interests becomes immune to campaign finance law and law enforcement.

We will soon see whether individual appellate justices in the Seventh Circuit define their legacy by acclaiming the lawless acquisition of political power by societal forces such as the Koch brothers, Christopher Cline and various other anti-social, criminal minds in American society.

One would think the trajectory of the drive to power for royalists would be addressed constantly by the Democratic Party, and it should be their number one appeal to the public.

J.B. Green argues this morning it's imperative:

Don't buy any of the crap about the narrowness or 'nuances' of the Hobby Lobby ruling. It established a precedent that begs to be broadened, and this is a High Court majority that is willing to go there. It's only a matter of time.

No one should be shocked either, that the court's right-wing (the term 'conservative' would be an insult to real conservative jurists in this context) majority is oblivious/hostile to worker rights. They have demonstrated that proclivity at every opportunity. ...

The Supreme Court of the United States has been dominated by politicized hacks since Bush v. Gore, although too many Dems have trod gingerly around the strong language needed to make it a front and center issue. The Hobby Lobby decision sends a clear warning that those days should be over. And if we needed an additional reminder that employer-linked insurance is a booby-trapped mess, and we really need to push harder for a single-payer system, here it is.

Hobby Lobby is a booby-trapped mess, but more broadly the case represents the ongoing project of a corrupt Supreme Court and its allies.

The presence of insidious forces embedded in our community, bursting with bad intentions, amoral character and rapacious appetites is a fact that cannot be ignored if our country is to continue to bear any resemblance to a classical liberal, constitutional democracy in the future.