Hopeful.
Hopeful.
This is the problem, heroic male defenders of rule of law. Your system doesn’t serve and protect half of the damn population. So before the words equality and justice pass in from your lips, take a goddamn reflective moment and see the systemic problems affecting the entire process and realize that ‘due process’ seems only to work reliably when you happen to be white and male.
How many more personal testimonies do we need before we tear down the current current justice system and rebuild it with an artifice that actually serves the cause of Justice? We don’t believe women when they speak and women pay the price for it – often with their lives. Take action folks, as Ms.Williams suggests, it is the only way fix this systemic problem.
This excerpt is from counterpunch article reviewing Michael Moore’s new film. I think the reviewer rightly tagged it, along with all the rest of the comedy late night satirists as (I’m paraphrasing now) just more furious fiddling while Rome continues to burn. It appears that the US Democratic party are subscribing to the notion that as long as they look like they are a party in opposition that is enough for people to vote for them. US dissident commentators have been correctly remarking decades that the US has two business class political parties that share roughly the same platform and set of policies. That is sort of a problem if you are trying to get the poor and average people to vote for you and your pro-business/pro-elite (albeit with different window dressings) political positions.
The ‘problem’ that the Democratic party is facing is described below by Louis Proyect:
“Can we expect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to be more like Rosa Luxemburg, as the DSA would have you believe, or like Hermann Müller? The jury is still out.
When she was on Jake Tapper’s show on CNN the other day, the host grilled her about how she would come up with the forty trillion dollars needed to fund Medicare for all, housing as a federal right, a federal jobs guarantee, tuition-free public college, and canceling all student loan debt.
She hemmed and hawed in her reply to the point that Tapper told her that he was assuming that he was not going to get an answer. Instead of her saying something as mealy-mouthed as this: “And, additionally, what this is, is a broader agenda. We do know and we acknowledge that there are political realities. They don’t always happen with just the wave of a wand. But we can work to make these things happen.”
In 1968, I was selling subscriptions to a “socialist rag” door-to-door in Columbia University before the sit-in began. I was also supporting the candidacy of Fred Halstead and Paul Boutelle who if given the opportunity to be interviewed on CNN would have said something like this. “To fund these badly needed programs, we have to start with closing every single military base in the world starting with South Korea. Why are we still formally at war with a country that only resorted to a nuclear defense program to ward off an attack by the USA? The Senate just passed a bill that provides the military with $716 billion for 2019. That should be cut by 90 percent at least. We would also re-introduce progressive taxation measures that would not only be in line with the 90 percent under Eisenhower but exceed it. We would also make sure that Apple and other corporations could not use tax havens in Ireland or Caribbean islands anymore.”
However, this would mark her as a flaky radical that would be an unreliable ally in Congress. What is needed now, according to leading Democrats, is a common sense, progressive, pragmatic approach of the sort Andrew Cuomo prescribed in a press conference after he defeated Cynthia Nixon by 30 points. He wrote off people like Ocasio-Cortez as a “ripple” in the Democratic Party and whose electoral victory in Queens was a “fluke”.
Oh, did I mention what she told Jake Tapper when asked about her attitude toward the corrupt and neo-liberal Governor who just treated her like dirt? “And what I also look forward to moving forward is us rallying behind all Democratic nominees, including the governor, to make sure that he wins in November.” If she is okay with Cuomo, how can we expect her not to urge a vote for Joe Biden, Michael Bloomberg or even John Kerry in the next election?”
So, being a flaky radical seems to be something of a no-go. What identifies one as a ‘flaky-radical’? Apparently the willingness to examine and tackle the systemic issues of the US imperial system that are making like shitty for the majority of those who live there. Much better to stick to the common sense, progressive, pragmatic approach. Also known as maintenance of the status-quo.
It must be tough having to rally against the system by supporting the system…
For female firefighters, prejudice and harassment is often part of the job. Women-only facilities are rare, sexism is rife and the profession is dangerous and traumatic. So how does the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) deal with the myriad problems facing their female members? By passing a policy that supports the right of men to self-identify as women, which, in turn, would enable them to use women’s dorms, washing facilities and lavatories.
Women comprise a mere 7 per cent of the UK’s firefighting force, up from just 4 per cent in 2012. But soon, if we go along with the line taken by the all-male national executive committee, there will be a few more, only these “women” are likely to have penises and Adam’s apples.
The policy was voted in on Thursday, eight votes to three, by an executive committee made up entirely by men. Its statement claims that: “The FBU…
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Err…
Ummm.
Is it just me or does this sorta beget the question, of who exactly can tell God’s Will from their own. If one was to believe in magic and what not, wouldn’t all of humanity be excluded from ever knowing what God’s will is, as well, we are not immortal, nor do we have woefully inept science-free books written about us.
The need for security actions and endless wars is a self-justifying feature of the US economic and political landscape. The military industrial complex (MIC) is invested in all levels of American society and within the political realm. The MIC is not only good for business, but often it *is* the business providing jobs and civilian infrastructure back in Anytown USA. Certainly the products being made are for bringing death to people, usually brown, in far away lands but ethical concerns aside, everyone wins right?
The war in Oceania goes well.
The infinite war cycle is made possible only because we’ve changed what ‘victory’ looks like. These new victory conditions seem to work very will with the notion that war must remain a profitable endeavour for the American Empire. Nick Turse writes about how changing the conditions for a what a win looks like enables the system to cycle onward:
“Unlike in the Vietnam War years, three presidents and the Pentagon, unbothered by fiscal constraints, substantive congressional opposition, or a significant antiwar movement, have been effectively pursuing this strategy, which requires nothing more than a steady supply of troops, contractors, and other assorted camp followers; an endless parade of Senate-sanctioned commanders; and an annual outlay of hundreds of billions of dollars. By these standards, Donald Trump’s open-ended, timetable-free “Strategy in Afghanistan and South Asia” may prove to be the winningest war plan ever. As he described it:
“From now on, victory will have a clear definition: attacking our enemies, obliterating ISIS, crushing al-Qaeda, preventing the Taliban from taking over Afghanistan, and stopping mass terror attacks against America before they emerge.”
Think about that for a moment. Victory’s definition begins with “attacking our enemies” and ends with the prevention of possible terror attacks. Let me reiterate: “victory” is defined as “attacking our enemies.” Under President Trump’s strategy, it seems, every time the U.S. bombs or shells or shoots at a member of one of those 20-plus terror groups in Afghanistan, the U.S. is winning or, perhaps, has won. And this strategy is not specifically Afghan-centric. It can easily be applied to American warzones in the Middle East and Africa — anywhere, really.
Decades after the end of the Vietnam War, the U.S. military has finally solved the conundrum of how to “out-guerrilla the guerrilla.” And it couldn’t have been simpler. You just adopt the same definition of victory. As a result, a conventional army — at least the U.S. military — now loses only if it stops fighting. So long as unaccountable commanders wage benchmark-free wars without congressional constraint, the United States simply cannot lose. You can’t argue with the math. Call it the rule of 4,000,000,029,057.
That calculus and that sum also prove, quite clearly, that America’s beleaguered commander-in-chief has gotten a raw deal on his victory parade. With apologies to the American Legion, the U.S. military is now — under the new rules of warfare — triumphant and deserves the type of celebration proposed by President Trump. After almost two decades of warfare, the armed forces have lowered the bar for victory to the level of their enemy, the Taliban. What was once the mark of failure for a conventional army is now the benchmark for success. It’s a remarkable feat and deserving, at the very least, of furious flag-waving, ticker tape, and all the age-old trappings of victory.”
One of the small side problems of this MIC strategy is that the rest the ‘homeland’ society goes to shit while the arms makers and assorted war profiteers become obscenely wealthy, and then said obscene wealth is used to further distort the democratic system at home to better feed the MIC machine to make more war, and more profit and…
And once war with Oceania is done, the war in Eurasia can begin proper.
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