Economic Aspects of "Love"

[American Dream]

The notion that a vast gulf exists between “criminals” and those of us who have never served time in prison is a fiction created by the racial ideology that birthed mass incarceration, namely that there is something fundamentally wrong and morally inferior about “them.” The reality, though, is that all of us have done wrong. [Studies] suggest that most Americans violate drug laws in their lifetime. Indeed, most of us break the law not once but repeatedly throughout our lives. Yet only some of us will be arrested, charged, convicted of a crime, branded a criminal or felon, and ushered into a permanent undercaste. Who becomes a social pariah and excommunicated from civil society and who trots off to college bears scant relationship to the morality of crimes committed. Who is more blameworthy: the young black kid who hustles on the street corner, selling weed to help his momma pay the rent? Or the college kid who deals drugs out of his dorm room to finance his spring break? Who should we fear? The kid in the ‘hood who joined a gang and now carries a gun for security, because his neighborhood is frightening and unsafe? Or the suburban high school student who has a drinking problem but keeps getting behind the wheel? Our racially biased system of mass incarceration exploits the fact that all people break the law and make mistakes at various points in their lives and with varying degrees of justification. Screwing up—failing to live by one’s highest ideals and values—is part of what makes us human.

— Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow.

[American Dream]

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/201 ... s-of-zion/

Jonathan Kay: The enduring influence of The Protocols of Zion



-The Protocols was a lie.
But it was a lie that people wanted to hear.

Book Excerpt: Among the Truthers by Jonathan Kay

In August, 1897, Theodor Herzl and two hundred fellow activists convened at a concert hall in Basel, Switzerland, to attend the First Zionist Congress. The capstone of their deliberations was The Basel Program, a landmark manifesto aimed at “establishing for the Jewish people a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine.” The delegates also officially adopted the Hatikvah, a song that, six decades later, would become the national anthem for the country we call Israel.

But as legend has it, it was all an elaborate act — just a respectable set-piece to divert gentile journalists and spies from the real meeting taking place at a secret location nearby. There, Herzl delivered a clandestine 24-part lecture series for Jewish ears only. In these speeches, “protocols” as Herzl called them, there was little talk of carving a small country out of the Middle Eastern desert. What he proposed was nothing less than a plan for total world domination.

Europe’s gentiles — or goyim, as they were described in Yiddish — generally were a happy, earnest lot, Herzl told his audience. They worked their farms and small businesses assiduously, prayed to a benevolent Christian God, and prospered under the kindly, lawful aristocrats who rose up from among their ranks.

But they were also gullible, lustful, greedy and unstable in their attitudes — human frailties that the calculating, ascetic Jew could exploit in order to rob them of their entitlements.

The Jewish strategy, Herzl explained, would target all strata of goyim. To corrupt the proles, Jewish smut merchants would provide pornography and “alcoholic liquors.” To ensnare middle-class farmers and merchants, Jewish moneylenders would practice usury. Ambitious gentile politicians would be co-opted through extortion and outright bribery; or else installed as quislings in Europe’s Masonic lodges, which Jews secretly controlled.

Meanwhile, gentile intellectuals, such as they were, would be beguiled by democracy, liberalism, Marxism, socialism, communism, Darwinism, anarchism, “Nietzsche-ism,” and all the other fangled creeds the Jew had created.

Ironically, the Jews’ most powerful weapon in the campaign to enslave gentiles would be none other than the lure of sweet liberty itself: “The abstraction of freedom has enabled us to persuade the mob in all countries that … the steward may be replaced like a worn-out glove,” Herzl explained to the assembled Elders. “It is this possibility of replacing the representatives of the people, which has placed at our disposal, and … given us the power of appointment.”

Of course, God-fearing men would never willingly succumb to Jewish tyranny. But Herzl had an answer to that: Jews would not only annihilate Europe’s earthly rulers, but also “the very principle of God-head and the spirit,” whose presence in men’s souls shielded them from the “arithmetical calculations and material needs” upon which the Jew preyed. No longer would the peoples of the world “walk contentedly and humbly under the guiding hand of [their] spiritual pastor submitting to the dispositions of God upon Earth.” Instead, “all nations will be swallowed up in the pursuit of gain, and in the race for it will not take note of their common foe [the Jew].”

As his plan played out, Herzl explained, Jews would cycle the world through an endless series of bloody wars and economic depressions, which would serve both to enrich Jewish war profiteers and speculators, and cast the rest of the globe into poverty. Traumatized to the point of total despair, the peoples of the world would have no choice but to succumb.

When Herzl was done with his 24 protocols, the conference disbanded and the Jewish Elders returned to their homes in order to prepare their plots. The world might never have learned of the protocols’ existence — but for a single Russian police agent who, through means unknown, intercepted one of Herzl’s acolytes at a German Masonic lodge.

In exchange for what one must assume to have been an extravagant sum, the Jew agreed to turn over his handwritten transcription of Herzl’s protocols — but only till the next morning. All through the night, a team of Russian scribes feverishly copied out the Hebrew text. When sunrise broke, the fruits of their labour were sent to translators in Moscow, who would go on to warn the world of the Jewish menace.

Thus ends the fairy tale, known to history as The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion — a document that would become the most influential conspiracist tract since the era of the French Revolution. Millions of readers were taken in by this poisonous fraud following its widespread publication in 1919. Adolf Hitler and other war criminals would be inspired to act on it, setting in motion a wave of anti-Semitic hatred so intense that, by the end of the Second World War, Central and Eastern Europe were left virtually Judenrein.

All this came to pass despite the fact the Protocols was debunked within months of its dissemination. As investigators revealed, the document was concocted by czarist anti-Semites who had not even taken the trouble to invent the lies themselves. Instead, they plagiarized Protocols from two sources: Biarritz, a lurid anti-Semitic novel published 50 years previously in Germany, and a French propaganda tract from the same era, “Dialogues in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu,” written by a French lawyer named Maurice Joly. (The influence of Joly’s book is particularly obvious: According to one scholar’s analysis, a full 40% of Protocols’ content is lifted word for word from Dialogues.)

The Protocols was a lie. But like all successful conspiracy theories, it was a lie that people wanted to hear. This was a moment when Europe had just endured not one, but two epic upheavals, neither of which had a simple, comprehensible cause. The Russian Revolution had been sparked by an artificial, untested, schismatic ideology created by an impoverished eccentric living in England. The First World War was an accidental product of Great Power paranoia, miscalculation, and jingoism — all sparked into deadly reaction by an assassination in one of Europe’s most obscure backwaters (an event that is itself the subject of innumerable conspiracy theories). When it was over, the flower of European youth was dead, and two once-great empires had been destroyed. It’s not hard to understand why millions of shell-shocked survivors could become convinced that the leaders who’d sent these men to their deaths had somehow been tricked by a hidden, demonic force.

For Europeans reading the Protocols in the 1920s and 1930s, the document offered something precious: the idea that only a single barrier — the Jewish race — blocked a return to the peaceful, pious and socially ordered world that had been destroyed by war, revolution, mechanization, urbanization, radical political ideologies, secularization and catastrophic inflation. The evil brilliance of the Protocols lay in the fact that it patched together a theory of Jewish conspiracy that covered every one of these upheavals — all the while enchanting the reader with backward glimpses of the noble, God-fearing milieu that the Jew allegedly had undermined.

The Protocols did not arise out of the ether. As Norman Cohn illustrated in his 1967 classic Warrant for Genocide, the period between 1850 and the First World War was a golden age of apocalyptic Judeo-Masonic propaganda. From France to Russia, all sorts of overlapping, mutually plagiarizing fraud manifestos became best sellers. Many of them even were structured like the Protocols, with a cackling rabbi instructing his Jewish brethren in his faith’s plans for world domination. But thanks to a series of historical accidents, the Protocols became the document that definitively popularized the conspiracist spirit that seized Western civilization during the early decades of the 20th century, and which has survived, in the same basic form — albeit with an ever-changing cast of villains — till the present day.

Medieval conspiracism typically targeted one of two enemies: Jews and secret societies. The Protocols mixed these two venerable strands into one deadly braid: The Jews, by this hateful telling, were both a filthy religious sect seeking to exterminate Christendom and a secret society bent on adapting world trade, politics, media and all the other secular pillars of civilization to their evil schemes.

Even once the Third Reich lay in ruins, and anti-Semitism became widely detested in its bald-faced Nazi-style form, the Protocols would remain ensconced as a sort of universal blueprint for all the successor conspiracist ideologies that would come to infect Western societies over the next nine decades — right up to the modern-day Truther and Birther fantasies of the 21st century.

In these conspiracy theories, the imagined evildoing cabal would come by many names — communist, globalist, neocon. But in most cases, it would exhibit the same recurring characteristics that the Protocols fastened upon the Jewish elders in the shadow of First World War.

[American Dream]

Before the arrival of the Christian missionaries, a man could dress as a woman and work with the women and even marry a man without any fanfare. Likewise, a woman was free to dress like a man, to hunt and go to war with the men, and to marry a woman. In the old Pueblo worldview, we are all a mixture of male and female, and this sexual identity is changing constantly. Sexual inhibition did not begin until the Christian missionaries arrived. For the old-time people, marriage was about teamwork and social relationships, not about sexual excitement. In the days before the Puritans came, marriage did not mean an end to sex with people other than your spouse. Women were just as likely as men to have a si’ash, or lover.

— from Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit by Leslie Marmon Silko

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

Race is a recent historical invention used to make a distinction between people for purposes of colonization. C. Loring Brace, professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan, explains that the concept of race “does not appear until the Trans-Atlantic voyages of the Renaissance.” But the prevalence of race as a concept—and its relationship to appearance, human status, and identity formation—is actually more significant today than it ever was. Our obsession with race is surpassed only by our seemingly polite and progressive neutrality regarding race.

--Carl Hancock Rux

“The racial hierarchy, initially created by the white ruling class, provided benefits to most white Americans. From the seventeenth century onward, the farms and plantations run with enslaved laborers brought significant income and wealth to many white Americans, and not just to their owners. These enterprises multiplied economic development for many whites inside and outside the farms’ and plantations’ immediate geographical areas. Ordinary whites, for the most part, bought into the identity of whiteness, thereby binding themselves collectively to the white racial group.

Slavery’s impact extended well beyond the economy. Each major institutional arena in the country was controlled by whites and was linked to other major arenas. As we have seen, the new Constitution and its “democratic” political system were grounded in racist thinking and practices of white men, many with strong ties to slavery. Those who dominated the economic system also crafted the political system. Likewise the religious, legal, educational, and media systems were interlinked with the slavery economy and polity. Woven through each institutional area was a broad racist framing centered on rationalizing white-on-Black domination and assertively creating positive views of whites and whiteness.”

— Joe Feagin

[American Dream]

During the early colonial period the distinctions between indentured servant and slave were blurred and relative: most workers, Black and white, male and female, worked without direct payment or without control over their labor. These laborers shared enough common experiences to jointly attack their masters and to have sex with each other.

The master’s racial attitudes of antipathy toward black people and his fears of a unified antagonistic force of all workers, including Indian women and men, demanded that the category “white” be expanded to give political power and freedom to all white men (theoretically and potentially, if not at that actual historical time) and patriarchal protection and white privilege to all white women. Thus, during the later colonial period, Black men and white women who had sex, married, and/or had children were punished and persecuted as American society denied them the right to choose each other as mates.

The category “white” would also mean that the people designated “Black” could be held in perpetual slavery. Therefore, laws were passed and practices instituted to regulate the sexual and social behavior of white and Black, servants and slaves. The legal and actual distinction between slave and servant was widened with “slavery reflecting lifelong power relationships, while servitude became a more temporary relationship of service.” In other words, in spite of the common experiences of Black and white workers in colonial America, indentured servants were whitened as slaves became Black.”

— Barbara Omolade

Tim Wise on white privilege:

It’s the ability to presume that your reality is the reality; that your experiences, if white, are universal, and not particular to your racial identity. It’s the ability to assume that you belong and that others will presume that too, the ability to define reality for others, and expect that definition to stick because you have the power to ensure that it becomes the dominant narrative. And it’s the ability to ignore all evidence to the contrary, claim that you are the victim, and get everyone from the president to the Supreme Court to the average white guy on the street to believe it.

It is the Times new Roman font with one-inch margins all around. In other words, it is the default position on the computer of American life, and it has rendered vast numbers of its recipients utterly incapable of critical thought.

- Tim Wise, Speaking Treason Fluently: Anti-Racist Reflections From an Angry White Male

By virtue of an accident of birth, African Americans must typically expend an enormous amount of energy defending themselves and their families from the assaults of racism on a regular basis. In contrast, over their lifetimes, white Americans on average have a major life-energy advantage, for they do not waste large amounts of time dealing with the impositions of antiwhite discrimination. This is one important example of white privilege.

More generally, white privilege includes the large set of advantages and benefits inherited by each generation of those routinely defined as “white” in the social structure and processes of U.S. society. The actual white privileges, and the sense that one is entitled to them, are inseparable parts of a greater societal whole. These advantages are material, symbolic, and psychological. They infiltrate and encompass many thousands of interactions and other events played out in an individual white American’s experiences over the course of a lifetime.

Whiteness is so commonplace, so habitual, and so imbedded that it exists even where and when most whites cannot see it. Stated or unstated, it is a fundamental given of this society, as well as other Western societies. White prerogatives stem from the fact that society has, from the beginning, been structured in terms of white enrichment, white gains, and white group interests. The active or passive acceptance of this racialized system as normal has long conferred advantages for whites, even including antiracist whites seeking to eradicate racism. Today, most whites of all political persuasions will say they are opposed to racism, although a majority continue to overtly, covertly, or subtly support racist framing, practices, and institutions.”

— Joe Feagin

“For much of the last century the burden of being Black in America was the burden of a systemic denial of human and constitutional rights and equal economic opportunity. It was also a century in which much of what America sold to the world as uniquely American in character—music, dance, fashion, humor, spirituality, grassroots politics, slang, literature, and sports—was uniquely African-American in origin, conception, and inspiration. Only rarely could this imitation be enjoyed by African Americans as the sincerest form of flattery or as more than a Pyrrhic victory over racist devaluations of Black humanity. Yet today, counter to Thomas Jefferson’s widely known notions of Black cognitive inferiority, the grandsons and daughters of antebellum America’s slave commodities have become the masters of the nation’s creative profile.

Legal and economic inequality between the races, though diminished to varying degrees by the advances of the civil rights and black power movements, still defines the quality of alienation which afflicts Black/white relations. The history of racism is more alive than dead for many African Americans—much of our public policy around crime, public housing, health care, and education continues to reflect a belief in second-class status for African Americans born in slavery.

The African-American presence in this country has produced a fearsome, seductive, and circumspect body of myths about Black intellectual capacity, athletic ability, sexual appetite, work ethic, family values, and propensity for violence and drug addiction. From these myths have evolved much of the paranoia, pathology, absurdity, awkwardness, alienation, and anomie which continue to define the American racial scene.”

— Greg Tate

“The Black male outlaw identity is a commodifiable character open to all who would like to perform it. In order for the oppressed figure’s dream of attaining ostentatious wealth and fame while defying conventional structures of morality to come into fruition, the dream had to be race-inclusive, race-accessible, and dangerous enough to pose an idealistic threat to a conservative society—translation: like jazz, white people had to like it, buy it, invest in it, and benefit from it, and above all, identify with it too. And the seduction had to appeal to a fascination with and fear of a complex figure they’d been taught to disdain. Not unlike Pentheus’s objectifying curiosity, white culture watched the evolution of the hip-hop character from afar before the hip-hop character knew they were watching at all.

Thus, hip-hop culture has evolved into another classic ready-to-wear American original, like rock ’n’ roll—except this time, the black hip-hop artist participates in the profit and control of the industry (to some extent) more so than ever before. But it is still an outsider culture, perpetuating its own outsider mythology, and if there are non-black, economically privileged teenagers who wear their oversized jeans pulled down around their knees and sleep beneath posters of self-proclaimed rapists, gang members, and murderers with record deals, it is because every generation of youth culture since Socrates has identified with outsider/outcast/radicalism, and typically pursued some kind of participation in it. Because radicalism, whether political or not, is a multicultural and universal sentiment.

Some may contend that white artists who pioneer their way into so-called Black music forms take the privilege of being allowed to do so seriously and pursue lofty goals of destroying race barriers, thereby bridging gaps of new race perception in America. But others may contend that race inclusivity (sic) diminishes the organic intention of race music (sic) until it simplifies into yet another popular entertainment form in the marketplace, where its inventor will compete for a right to exist.”

— Carl Hancock Rux

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

By Scott Noble



A short film on anarchist philosophy and practice.

To learn more about the project please visit: http://www.indiegogo.com/Anarkos

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

“Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages”

-Angela Y. Davis

[American Dream]

The most profound betrayal of feminist issues has been the lack of mass-based feminist protest challenging the government’s assault on single mothers and the dismantling of the welfare system. Privileged women, many of whom call themselves feminists, have simply turned away from the “feminization of poverty".

—bell hooks

During the 1990s, Bill Clinton bragged about “ending welfare as we know it”, triggering a spike in dire poverty and homelessness, among single mothers in particular. Clinton also exploded the prison population with mandatory minimums and prison privatization, beginning the ongoing trend of mass incarcerating women, including application of the death penalty. Many liberals, including feminists, applauded these “centrist” measures at the time and have continued to remain silent on their devastating impact.


http://kimberlyalidio.tumblr.com/post/3 ... issues-has

[American Dream]

Describing the devastation during the Gold Rush, Rawls, James J. and Orsi, Richard J. in their book “A golden state: mining and economic development in Gold Rush California,” write, “The human and environmental costs of the Gold Rush were substantial. Native Americans dependent on the health and bounty of the natural environment, became the victims of starvation and disease when it suffered from the effects of placer mining (or the later, even more damaging, hydraulic mining), as gravel, silt and toxic chemicals from prospecting operations killed fish and destroyed habitats. The surge of mining population also resulted in the disappearance of game and food gathering locales as gold camps and other settlements were built amidst them, causing the forests to be cut down and domestic animals put to graze on the land. Later farming spread to supply the camps, taking more land from the use of Native Americans. Starvation often provoked the Native tribes to steal or take by force food and livestock from the whites, increasing white hostility and provoking retaliation against them.

“The Act for the Government and Protection of Indians passed on April 22, 1850 by the California Legislature, allowed settlers to continue the Californio practice of capturing and using Native people as bonded workers. It also provided the basis for the enslavement and trafficking in Native American labor, particularly that of young women and children, which was carried on as a legal business enterprise. Native American villages were regularly raided to supply the demand, and young women and children were carried off to be sold, the men and remaining people often being killed in genocidal attacks.” The same dance of death reduced the African continent from lush green land of plentiful to a bleached, gnarled bones, with its people now dying in hunger and women opening their legs for a loaf of bread to feed their children and themselves.

The countries in this continent, reduced to the darkest darkness of a black hole, emerge at the dawn only to disappear in the twilight of gun fires; and this blood-soaked melee of power, hunger and survival rake in profits for the corporate dictators strutting around as peddlers of “democracy and development.”

http://shesamarxist.tumblr.com/post/445 ... the-naxals

Colonialism began with conquest and is today maintained by a settler administration created out of the doctrine of cultural hierarchy, a hierarchy in which European Americans and whiteness dominate non-European Americans and darkness. As a result, we live in a country where race prejudice, in the words of Fanon, obeys a flawless logic. For, after all, if inferior peoples must be exterminated, their cultures and habits of life, their languages and customs, their economies, indeed, every difference about them must be assaulted, confined, and obliterated. There must be a dominant culture and therefore a dominant people, a dominant religion, a dominant language, a dominant legal system, a dominant educational system, and so on, and so on. In other words, there must be dominance and subordination.


In a colonialist country such as the United States, white hegemony delineates this hierarchy. Thus, white people are the dominant group. Christianity is the dominant religion, capitalism is the dominant economy, militarism is the dominant form of diplomacy and the force underlying international relations. Violence is thus normal, and race prejudice, like race violence, is as American as apple pie.

--Haunani-Kay Trask, from “The Color of Violence”

[American Dream]

http://www.zcommunications.org/books-by ... -reviewers

Cocaine Death Squads and the War on Terror:
U.S. Imperialism and Class Struggle in Colombia
By Oliver Villar and Drew Cottle
New York, Monthly Review, January 2012, 208 pp.

Review by Seth Sandronsky

Why write a book about class, cocaine, Colombia and the U.S.? Oliver Villar and Drew Cottle have an answer. In Cocaine Death Squads and the War on Terror: U.S. Imperialism and Class Struggle in Colombia they provide data and evidence to refute Uncle Sam’s official version of relations between both nations today and yesterday.

To this end, the authors present a strong counter-narrative that begins with cocoa plants and continues with the capitalist production and distribution of cocaine. The Cold War looms large, but Villar and Cottle don’t stop there. They explain how and why the U.S.-led war on the Third World—under the rhetoric of fighting communist insurgents—is now knee-deep in a cocoa-plant growing region in Colombia, Bolivia, and Peru. Villar and Cottle call this place the Crystal Triangle.

The authors provide evidence of Uncle Sam’s anti-communist crusade (now the war on terror) in concert with illegal drug trafficking. Past sites of such operations include pre-revolutionary China and Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle, with the track record of American armed forces and mercenaries and their drug-industry allies.

This is a class war, thus, the basic motive is simple. The U.S. intervenes for the interest of an investment class that opposes nationalist governments under popular control. In the authors’ words, such a foreign policy is “the consequence of efforts by the United States to enhance its political and economic position in the world economy.”

The U.S. expands its reach to the Golden Crescent of Afghanistan and then to the Crystal Triangle of Colombia. There, the main enemy of the U.S. and Colombian elites becomes the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

In an introduction, ten chapters, bibliography, notes and an index, we learn much more about this Latin American nation and region. The authors lay bare the factors and forces that spawned Colombia’s “narco-state” and “narco-economy” as U.S. consumption of cocaine skyrocketed. Working people in both nations suffer as the post-9/11 war on terror expands with no apparent end.

Chapters on the “narco-cartel system” and the “post-cartel system” help us to make sense of changes in the cocaine industry. Take the death of Pablo Escobar, a Colombian drug kingpin. As the authors write, his demise heralds: “Sophisticated modes of production and distribution and technological developments (that) increased efficiency.”

Meanwhile, U.S. firms export into the Crystal Triangle an estimated 90 percent of the chemicals—i.e., acetone or ether—required to process drugs such as cocaine. Villar and Cottle follow Marx’s critique of capitalism as a class project of economic control over the labor process of producing goods and services for sale. They place changes in Colombia’s cocaine production, exchange, and distribution to trends in other industries. That is, accelerated and integrated cross-border supply chains to expand and extend commodity exchange and capital accumulation.

Modernization in the cocaine industry occurs as a postwar era of U.S. economic supremacy winds down and global competition heats up. “Plan Colombia” under President Clinton gets dressed up as a war to eradicate cocaine trafficking, but we learn, however, that this war is mainly a campaign to further control of the cocaine industry ownership class in fewer hands, at home and abroad.

In Colombia, this conflict maims and murders peasants and dissidents. Stateside, the same drug war propels a massive rise in people imprisoned for their involvement with cocaine—the authors could have fleshed out this trend a bit more. (Those held in the American gulag are disproportionately nonwhites and low-income, the people last fired and first hired whose labor services employers can do without.)

Some have called Colombia a “genocidal democracy.” Villar and Cottle verify the role of the U.S. state apparatus—such as the CIA and State Department—in the counterinsurgency against Colombia’s labor unions, journalists and peasant producers. Uncle Sam funds this violence for reasons of profits and power.

If readers want to learn how “the war on drugs and terror is part of a counterrevolutionary strategy designed to maintain rather than eliminate the economic conditions that allow the drug trade to thrive,” Villar and Cottle’s book is an eyeopener.


Seth Sandronsky lives and writes in Sacramento.

[American Dream]

“Another important way in which the erotic functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy…when we begin to live from within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense….There is a difference between painting a back fence and writing a poem, but only one of quantity. And there is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a womyn I love.”

--audre lorde