UPDATE: The Ultimate Question Is the Extent to Which the Ruling Class Intends to Exploit This Rebellion as It Did 9/11

...Thus to Complete the Coup They Began 22 November 1963.  

By Loren Bliss 

I RAISE THIS as the ultimate question because history proves such purposeful atrocities are many -- among the most notable are the Reichstag Fire (which the Nazis manipulated into seizure of absolute power in Weimar Germany), plus of course the original Bloody Sunday -- the massacre organized by a Russian Orthodox Priest named Georgi Gapon.

This "Father Gapon" -- an agent-provocateur for the Okhrana (the Tsar's secret police) -- organized the incident precisely to provide Tsar Nicholas II the excuse for the relentless genocide by which he then exterminated hundreds of thousands of Russian progressives. 

Might Trump thus be another Gapon?    

LB/18:40 PST 6 Jan 21

-30-

 

 

Though I Have Long Foreseen the Nazi Lynch Mob That's Captured D.C., It Is Not My Preferred Return to Blogging; but the Federal Response Will Damn Sure Tell Us Who We Are

by Loren Bliss
(Originally self-published at Dispatches from Dystopia,https://www.dispatchesfromdystopia.net/2021/01/though-i-have-long-foreseen-the-nazi-lynch-mob-thats-captured-dc-it-is-not-my-preferred-return-to-bl.html)

FOR THE PAST several weeks I have been working on a new, definitively apolitical Dispatches format essentially based on the Royokan haiku I regard as our species' best-ever expression of gratitude in the wake of hopelessly ruinous loss:  

The thief
left it behind:
    the moon at my window.

But the seizure of our national capital by a Trump-spawned Nazi lynch mob has interrupted that quarantine-enabled growth process, and my own resurgent journalistic ethics demand response:

Because I (involuntarily) lived in the South for most of my first 24 years, I know entirely too well the bottomless, irremediable Evil of our national Southron/Neoconfederate mix of reactionary Christian misogyny, racism and general hatefulness.

Hence despite the constant disinformation from the "Democratic" [sic] Party's cult of mandatory positivism,  I have been warning for years of the danger of a ChristoNazi revolution. 

Now we are at the inevitable pivot-point wherein the government's response to this (armed?) rabble that has captured D.C. will answer three pivotal questions:

(1) -- the extent to which Trump's ChristoNazis have subverted the military and the police;

(2) -- the extent to which Trump's modern-day Sturmabteilung is organized for actual warfare (commanders, chain of command, training, armament etc.);

(3) -- the extent to which the Ruling Class opposes or supports the continuation of  at least a charade of constitutional governance in the imperial United States.

The answers to these three questions determine our future.

But the answer to the first question is already obvious in the alleged "unpreparedness" by which the Capitol Police (and D.C. law enforcement in general) compromised the defense of the Capitol Building.

It is even more outrageously obvious in how the militarized cops are treating these traitorous ChristoNazi insurrectionists with a respectful gentility so notably absent in the murderous violence of their everyday responses to people of color or any of the rest of us on the (real) Left.  

The international response to this Nazi insurrection will also be most revealing -- and could indeed be the ultimate factor in determining in its outcome. 

LB/16:16 PST 6 Jan 2021

(Auto-complete's  misspelling of "capitol" -- weirdly appropriate, given the givens --  corrected at 20:54 PST.)

 

-30-

 

The Bezos Earth Fund and the charity of the oligarchs ~~ Shuvu Batta, Tom Carter

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/12/30/bezo-d30.html

Amidst an unprecedented transfer of wealth from the working class to the billionaires this year, sections of the bourgeoisie have decided to “donate” a small fraction of these ill-gotten gains to philanthropic causes. 

These donations have been prominently covered in the American media as though the billionaires have been visited by the Spirits of Christmas, like Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and decided to rededicate their lives to universal love and the welfare of their poorer brethren.

In reality, these two phenomena—increasing social inequality alongside the increasing social role of “charitable” handouts from the super-rich—are closely intertwined. Without extreme levels of social inequality, with vast fortunes piling up in the coffers of the tiny few while tens of millions sink into poverty, it would not be necessary to rely on the largesse of the billionaires to “donate” the funds back to society that are necessary to meet critical social needs.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos during the JFK Space Summit at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

Last month, the initial disbursement of grants took place for the Bezos Earth Fund, named after and financed by the world’s wealthiest individual, Jeff Bezos, who presides over the Amazon conglomerate, which has a total market capitalization of $1.5 trillion.

In February 2020, Bezos announced the launch of his climate change initiative on Instagram, writing: “Today, I’m thrilled to announce I am launching the Bezos Earth Fund... Climate change is the biggest threat to our planet. I want to work alongside others both to amplify known ways and to explore new ways of fighting the devastating impact of climate change on this planet we all share... I’m committing $10 billion to start and will begin issuing grants this summer.”

The donations by Bezos towards climate change have been supplemented by his $100 million donation to Feeding America’s COVID-19 response fund in March. These sums, however, pale in comparison to the wealth which Bezos has accumulated this year alone, more than $70 billion.

A similar trend is reflected among the other American oligarchs. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is now worth $12.7 billion, a massive jump from his wealth of $2.6 billion in April. He pledged $1 billion for COVID-19 relief, or about 10 percent of his earnings this year. Microsoft founder Bill Gates donated at least $350 million to COVID-19 relief through the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. However, he has seen his wealth balloon from $98 billion in April to $120.1 billion at present, according to statistics maintained by Forbes. Meanwhile, Bezos’s ex-wife, Mackenzie Scott, was reported to have donated $6 billion to charitable causes.

The pandemic has dealt an incalculable blow to the vast majority of humanity. According to the non-profit Save the Children, 5.25 billion people were substantially poorer in November than they were in January. The United Nations’ World Food Program issued a report in April that stated “an additional 130 million people could be pushed to the brink of starvation by the end of 2020. That’s a total of 265 million people.”

The charitable activities of the oligarchs have to be understood in this context. From March to June 2020, 209 billionaires gave away $7.2 billion in funds and equipment for COVID-19 assistance, with Pricewaterhouse Coopers researchers suggesting “this is the greatest amount billionaires have given in a short space of time ever, even after allowing for inflation.” This is barely one percent of the more than $600 billion which US billionaires alone gained between May and June of this year. These billionaires have gained over $1 trillion over the course of the entire year.

The economics of laziness ~~ Paul D'Amato

https://socialistworker.org/2007-1/630/630_08_Laziness.php

From the Meaning of Marxism Series

PAUL D'AMATO explains why a socialist society would produce a flowering of universal creativity.

"IT HAS been objected that upon the abolition of private property," Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto, "all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us."

This is probably still the most common argument--the natural competitiveness and greediness of human nature excepted--against the feasibility of socialism. Defenders of capitalism fail to notice that the two ideas--"people are naturally lazy," and "people are naturally competitive"--cancel each other out!

Marx's clever response to the laziness argument is still the best one: "According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything do not work."

Laziness, looked at another way, is not necessarily a bad thing. For example, if an invention can be found that cuts the amount of work necessary to accomplish a task, isn't laziness then an incentive to invent?

It's difficult to notice the truth of this observation in a capitalist society because for workers, inventions appear not as a means to cut hours, but merely to intensify production, or increase the amount of work each worker can perform in a given amount of time. Inventions of labor-saving devices don't ease the burden of the working class, but merely allow the capitalist who employs them to increase his or her market share by cheapening products and underselling competitors.

So long as profit is the motivation for invention, the result for the majority--that is, for the nine-tenths of people who have to work for a living--is not increased free time, but merely higher rates of exploitation.

The desire to avoid alienating and tedious work doesn't lead workers to stay at home, since doing so would mean starvation. What it does do, however, is lead workers to find all sorts of creative ways to increase their productivity on the job in such a way that the boss doesn't notice. This gives them more free time on the job (which they must also hide).

It is common to portray ancient hunter-gatherer societies as constantly living on the edge of starvation, doomed to endless toil to stave off disaster. The truth is that foraging societies were very good at figuring out the minimum labor necessary to keep the band living comfortably, leaving them plenty of free time.

One observer of the Kalahari Bushmen in Africa noted, for example, that "a woman gathers on one day enough food to feed her family for three days, and spends the rest of her time resting in camp, doing embroidery, visiting other camps or entertaining visitors from other camps." She spent about three hours a day performing other tasks.

As for men, "It is not unusual for a man to hunt avidly for a week and then do no hunting at all for two or three weeks...During these periods, visiting, entertaining and especially dancing are the primary activities of men."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

IN A society where the market is abolished, and goods are produced and distributed by a social plan according to human need, invention will become a means by which the necessary labor of all--that labor required to reproduce the basic necessities of life (food, shelter, transportation, education)--is continually reduced, leaving greater and greater amounts of free time in which everyone is free to pursue their interests and desires, whether that involves music, art, dance, surfing or napping.

Even more odious tasks, such as collecting garbage and mining, are far less odious if the workers have control over the work process. The combination of control over working conditions and processes, the application of the safest and fastest methods, the reduction of work hours, and finally, the rotation of the population into those jobs so that no single person is stuck with it would make even this kind of work far more enjoyable than it is now.

As a result of these changes, work becomes less stressful and more fulfilling, less stigmatized and more valued for its socially necessary character.

One of the absurdities of the capitalist market is the constant drive of each capitalist to sell more and more of a product. Inbuilt, then, is also invention for its own sake.

Such is the nature of certain industries that a "new" version of something, not necessarily that much different from the earlier version, is periodically released, and everyone who has the "old" version is encouraged to buy the new one, even if the old one isn't broken. Another feature of this frenzy to sell is what has been called "planned obsolescence": making things that don't last.

Naturally, it is not in the interests of the majority of people that things break. In a society without a profit motive, planning would be far more rational--that is, devoted to making things that last as long as possible. This, too, would reduce the amount of total social labor necessary to keep society running.

In a capitalist society, mental and manual labor is split, and everyone is pigeonholed into certain jobs. "Each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape," wrote Marx and Engels. "He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood."

However, "in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity, but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow...without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic."

No one can deny that people cease to be bored as soon as they are engaged in an activity they enjoy and are not compelled to do. Socialism eliminates these compulsions. By doing so, it does not bring "universal laziness" so much as a flowering of universal creativity.

We've Always Had the Money for Medicare for All - We've Just Given It to Corporations Instead ~~ David Sirota

readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/63543-weve-always-had-the-money-for-medicare-for-all-weve-just-given-it-to-corporations-instead

Since 2008, the US has spent $20–35 trillion on corporate bailouts. It’s about the same “unaffordable” amount that Medicare for All has been projected to cost — used for lining corporate pockets instead of providing health care to people who need it.

In recent weeks, we’ve seen health care industry CEOs report paying themselves $2.4 billion as twenty-seven million people were thrown off their health care coverage. We’ve also seen Americans being charged anywhere from $400,000 to $1.1 million for COVID-19 treatment and facing $2,000 bills for coronavirus tests.

In response, polls show Americans remain deeply concerned about the current health care system, and support for Medicare for All has surged. And yet, despite data showing that a single-payer system would save big money, surveys still indicate some popular trepidation about the price tag of government-sponsored health care. That reflects, in part, a Democratic primary season that saw most candidates, the press corps, and the Washington political class try to pretend that the planet’s wealthiest nation cannot possibly afford the kind of Medicare for All system that other less wealthy nations have had for decades.

“No matter how you cut the numbers, there is absolutely no way to pay for Medicare for All without tax increases — or spending cuts — on the middle class,” one pro-austerity group told Politico in a story breathlessly touted by the health care industry’s dark money group.

But here’s what few seem to have noticed: as of the last few months, we just definitively proved we actually did have the money all along — and we had it even if we never hiked taxes to raise new revenues.

Somehow, this astounding fact was never granted any of the same giant bold-faced headlines that all the anti–Medicare for All fearmongering generated during the presidential primary.

Bailouts for Large Corporations Cost the Same as Providing Health Care to Everyone

Under our current system, America is on track to spend roughly $52 trillion on health care in the next decade. That includes both government programs (Medicare, Medicaid, etc.) and household spending (insurance premiums, out-of-pocket costs, etc.). Medicare for All would consolidate all that spending under one program. Experts estimate that this would require the government to come up with an additional $20 trillion and $36 trillion — money that would cover the out-of-pocket spending that households and employers would otherwise pay to insurance companies, drug companies, and other parts of the corporate-run health care system.

Well, guess what? That happens to be almost exactly the amount of money our government committed to corporate bailouts since 2008:

• After the 2008 financial crisis, lawmakers gave $700 billion of grants to big banks.


• Depending on how you count, the Federal Reserve additionally committed somewhere between $16 trillion and $29 trillion to large financial institutions.


• A decade later amid the coronavirus outbreak, lawmakers passed a bailout bill that will funnel $4 trillion to large corporations.

So again: the same government that says we cannot afford $20–$35 trillion over a decade to finance a Medicare for All program just gave Corporate America between $20 trillion and $35 trillion since the financial crisis roughly a decade ago. And that money was funneled to Corporate America not just in absence of tax increases — it was delivered while the government was actually cutting taxes.

The picture gets even more absurd when you slightly broaden the frame and add in another $10 trillion that we nonchalantly spent on other items.

For instance, we spent $2 trillion on the Iraq War. We also spent a combined $2.6 trillion on increases in the Pentagon’s already-giant base budget since its first post–9/11 budget. And we devoted about $5 trillion to the Bush and Trump tax cuts.

Deficit Concerns Are Only Raised When Spending Might Actually Help Human Beings

Now sure, bailout loans to big banks — which can get paid back — are a bit different from direct spending on a government program like Medicare for All. But then again, spending on Medicare for All is sort of like a loan to the future that can also get repaid with interest. When we spend on a program like that, we are likely to see significant overall savings for our economy, which would be a financial boon for the whole country. And because Medicare for All would eliminate insurance premiums and out-of-pocket costs, it would effectively be a huge tax cut for most Americans.

But that’s the thing: in our political conversation, Medicare for All is almost never cast as an efficiency — it is almost always cast as an unaffordable boondoggle. Indeed, during the presidential primary, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were hounded by reporters, think-tankers, and lawmakers about how they could possibly pay for such a big program. To their credit, they played along and both released detailed plans about how they would raise the revenues.

By contrast, the same reporters, think-tankers, and lawmakers who spent the primary season preening as spendthrifts never bothered to ask about pay-fors for all of the aforementioned money for Wall Street firms, defense contractors, and high-income tax cuts. All that happened without attendant deficit-neutral tax increases to finance it. We somehow just found the money.

That discrepancy spotlights an unstated truth: our political class only worries about deficits and so-called fiscal responsibility when spending might actually help ordinary people. If it’s a plan to reduce student debt, help retirees, or expand health care, you can bet all of Washington is going to be ranting and raving about deficit concerns.

And yet when a proposal enriches the large corporations that buy elections and own our democracy, we can always find the money — and divert it away from initiatives like Medicare for All that might actually help millions of ordinary people.