REMEMBER WHEN I TOLD YOU ABOUT THIS FASCISTIC ICE SPYING & KIDNAPPING BULLSHIT YEARS AGO AND HOW PINUP QUEEN AOC WAS PART OF THE COVERUP?
“Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology uncovered this dragnet after filing over 200 Freedom of Information Act requests and reviewing ICE’s contracting records from 2008 to 2021.
In its report, released May 10, the Center found that ICE has spied on most Americans without a warrant and circumvented many state privacy laws, such as those in California. The authors conclude: “ICE now operates as a domestic surveillance agency.” (-Farrah Hassan)
“For instance, those who “violently oppose” “all forms of capitalism” or “corporate globalization” are listed under this less-discussed category of “domestic terrorist.” This highlights how people on the left, many of whom have called for capitalism to be dismantled or replaced in the US in recent years, could easily be targeted in this new “war” that many self-proclaimed leftists are currently supporting. Similarly, “environmentally-motivated extremists,” a category in which groups such as Extinction Rebellion could easily fall, are also included.
In addition, the phrasing indicates that it could easily include as “terrorists” those who oppose the World Economic Forum’s vision for global “stakeholder capitalism,” as that form of “capitalism” involves corporations and their main “stakeholders” creating a new global economic and governance system. The WEF’s stakeholder capitalism thus involves both “capitalism” and “corporate globalization.”
The strategy also includes those who “take steps to violently resist government authority . . . based on perceived overreach.” This, of course, creates a dangerous situation in which the government could, purposely or otherwise, implement a policy that is an obvious overreach and/or blatantly unconstitutional and then label those who resist it “domestic terrorists” and deal with them as such—well before the overreach can be challenged in court.
Another telling addition to this group of potential “terrorists” is “any other individual or group who engages in violence—or incites imminent violence—in opposition to legislative, regulatory or other actions taken by the government.” Thus, if the government implements a policy that a large swath of the population finds abhorrent, such as launching a new, unpopular war abroad, those deemed to be “inciting” resistance to the action online could be considered domestic terrorists.
Such scenarios are not unrealistic, given the loose way in which the government and the media have defined things like “incitement” and even “violence” (e. g., “hate speech” is a form of violence) in the recent past. The situation is ripe for manipulation and abuse. To think the federal government (including the Biden administration and subsequent administrations) would not abuse such power reflects an ignorance of US political history, particularly when the main forces behind most terrorist incidents in the nation are actually US government institutions like the FBI (more FBI examples here, here, here, and here).
Furthermore, the original plans for the detention of American dissidents in the event of a national emergency, drawn up during the Reagan era as part of its “continuity of government” contingency, cited popular nonviolent opposition to US intervention in Latin America as a potential “emergency” that could trigger the activation of those plans. Many of those “continuity of government” protocols remain on the books today and can be triggered, depending on the whims of those in power. It is unlikely that this new domestic terror framework will be any different regarding nonviolent protest and demonstrations.
Yet another passage in this section of the strategy states that “domestic terrorists” can, “in some instances, connect and intersect with conspiracy theories and other forms of disinformation and misinformation.” It adds that the proliferation of such “dangerous” information “on Internet-based communications platforms such as social media, file-upload sites and end-to-end encrypted platforms, all of these elements can combine and amplify threats to public safety.”
Thus, the presence of “conspiracy theories” and information deemed by the government to be “misinformation” online is itself framed as threatening public safety, a claim made more than once in this policy document. Given that a major “pillar” of the strategy involves eliminating online material that promotes “domestic terrorist” ideologies, it seems inevitable that such efforts will also “connect and intersect” with the censorship of “conspiracy theories” and narratives that the establishment finds inconvenient or threatening for any reason.” (-Whitney Webb, Last American Vagabond)
https://sovren.media/video/human-hackers-1189.html
“The TV man is not your friend. I shouldn’t even have to say this. Do you know what happens to mainstream media figures who provide real resistance to empire agendas? They get fired. Ask Phil Donahue or Chris Hedges. The fact that Tucker Carlson is a top pundit on imperial media (Murdoch Media, no less) proves he’s an agent of the empire.” (-Cait Johnstone)
“There’s nothing remotely progressive, let alone ‘revolutionary’ in voting for $40 Billion dollars worth of funds for Ukraine, funds that end up in the hands of Neo-Nazis, especially while the economy is tanking. The left in U.S is dead.” (-Fiorella Isabel; the Convo-Couch)
“Fascism is a false revolution. It cultivates the appearance of popular politics and a revolutionary aura without offering a genuine revolutionary class content. It propagates a ‘New Order’ while serving the same old moneyed interests”. (-Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds, 1997)
“While the so-called liberal and conservative media – all stenographers for the intelligence agencies – pour forth the most blatant propaganda about Russia and Ukraine that is so conspicuous that it is comedic if it weren’t so dangerous, the self-depicted cognoscenti also ingest subtler messages, often from the alternative media.
A woman I know and who knows my sociological analyses of propaganda contacted me to tell me there was an excellent article about the war in Ukraine at The Intercept, an on-line publication funded by billionaire Pierre Omidyar I have long considered a leading example of much deceptive reporting wherein truth is mixed with falsehoods to convey a “liberal” narrative that fundamentally supports the ruling elites while seeming to oppose them. This, of course, is nothing new since it’s been the modus operandi of all corporate media in their own ideological and disingenuous ways, such as The New York Times, CBS, the Washington Post, the New York Daily News, Fox News, CNN, NBC, etc. for a very long time.” (-Edward Curtain)
“The shuttering of RT America is devastating news. It was one of the only alternatives to US centric corporate domination of our airwaves & it gave unmatched platforms to consistent anti-war voices like Lee Camp, Chris Hedges & myself. Every country’s state media is biased for their government. RT is obvious but US has a much more sophisticated propaganda apparatus. 5 corporations that control almost all US news are dutiful stenographers for American exceptionalism, capitalism & imperialism. Dissent against US empire is not allowed on corporate media, and anchors & panelists becomes vociferous cheerleaders for US wars when they happen, but it would be totally unacceptable if every country shut suddenly down CNN. I was in Gitmo & had detainees lawyers tell me they all watched Breaking the Set every day & thanked me for telling their stories. In the West Bank, Palestinians told me they appreciated my coverage of their plight. That perspective matters to many & I’m so proud of my work there.” (-Abby Martin)
“We were right all along. Even the mainstream media and the two corporate-owned political parties now admit this is a proxy war.” (-Lee Camp)
“It is a contradiction Democrats are unable to reconcile so they will continue to rehabilitate or deny white supremacists in Ukraine. For some of us that has been even more dangerous because it disarms people from understanding scope & global reality of white supremacist movement. So Democrats with Republicans support send 40 billion worth of guns to Ukraine but are trying to take the moral high road on weapons & violence in the U.S.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“This is a de facto proxy war between the West and Russia. The goal is to bleed Russia dry. Russia will destroy Finland before they allow Finland to join NATO. Ukraine is gone. There’s got to be an off-ramp.” (-Scott Ritter)
“So now right-wing war criminal Kissinger is an appeaser according to the Ukrainian actor president with his years of seasoned experience. The interesting thing about his remarks is it demonstrates how far to the right he & liberal/left who support him are.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“George W. Bush is a war criminal.” (-Nina Turner on Bono and Ellen and Chelle’s folksy, cuddly “partner in crime”, the Country Time lemonade sippin’, back porch sittin’, blue jeans wearin’ brush on the ranch a clearin’ “painter” who helped Uncle Dick destroy the Geneva Conventions and Fourth Amendment)
“This particular crisis will ease but it will be followed by more. There is still $1.9 trillion in student loan debt incurred by people who only wanted to improve their lives. After allocating $30 billion for policing, the Biden administration is telling states and localities to use unspent covid stimulus funding for the police, who apparently can’t get enough public money. Covid hasn’t disappeared and neither have any other health care needs that could sorely use this funding. Of course, the Ukraine cash cow has to be milked to the tune of an additional $40 billion.” (-Margaret Kimberly)
“Whatever one’s views on this war, it should be deeply concerning how little debate or scrutiny is being permitted as the Biden administration aggressively escalates the U.S. role in what is clearly its most dangerous war in decades. If Congress has no role in asking where these weapons are going or who is receiving these staggering sums of money, then it has no role at all.” (-Glenn Greenwald)
“Exciting new development in the struggle to defend democracy from autocracy: according to Forbes, an Expanded NATO Will Shoot Billions To US Defense Contractors. Forbes columnist: with NATO expansion, “the real winners are American defense companies.” Whereas misguided, elected EU leaders previously “spent lavishly on social safety nets” and “expedited pacifism,” the proxy war in Ukraine has, thankfully, “changed everything.” When US leaders and pundits pledge their love for NATO, they happen to never acknowledge what this Forbes columnist does: “aligning with NATO is a commitment to interoperability with the American defense ecosystem,” which “directly benefits the big U.S. contractors.” (-Aaron Mate’)
“It’s easy to understand the affinity from Davos for the Kiev regime when you consider how the US-directed Maidan coup opened Ukraine up to unprecedented pillaging by corporate multinationals like Monsanto and DuPont, which took over Ukrainian agro in 2014 as part of an IMF loan”. (-Max Blumenthal)
“Joe Manchin, one of the most powerful elected officials in Washington, tells the WEF that he opposes any kind of peace agreement in Ukraine and only wants total victory with the ultimate goal of regime change in Russia. In the next clip, he calls this war an ‘opportunity’.
All forward motion in this war has nothing but violence as far as the eye can see on its trajectory into the future. No matter how much wealth and war machinery you pour into this conflict, that trajectory of death and destruction will just keep stretching out to the horizon. As Chris Hedges recently explained, war is the only path the empire has left open to itself. I’ve seen some cute kids in my time, but nobody’s as adorable as people who think the US pours weapons into foreign nations in order to achieve peace.” (-Cait Johnstone)
“BREAKING: Erdogan said Turkey will launch a “military operation” to create a 30-kilometer zone which will be under control of the Turkish army. I am looking forward to the Western world condemning a NATO member for invading even more Syrian land and violating its sovereignty.” (-Richard Medhurst)
“Actually, by voting blue no matter who, no matter what, you’re creating a lack of accountability for bad politicians.” (-Briahna Joy Gray)
“If Joe Biden were Donald Trump, he would have been impeached several times over for sending $40 billion to Ukraine amid food and baby formula shortages.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) has an article out titled “‘Disinformation’ Label Serves to Marginalize Crucial Ukraine Facts” about the way the mass media have been spinning that label to mean not merely the knowing distribution of false information but also of information that is true but inconvenient to imperial narrative-weaving.
“In defense of the US narrative, corporate media have increasingly taken to branding realities inconvenient to US information goals as ‘disinformation’ spread by Russia or its proxies,” writes FAIR’s Luca Goldmansour.
Online platforms have been ramping up their censorship protocols under the banner of fighting disinformation and misinformation, and those escalations always align with narrative control agendas of the US-centralized empire. Just the other day we learned that Twitter has a new policy which expands its censorship practices to fight “misinformation” about wars and other crises, and the Ukraine war (surprise surprise) will be the first such situation about which it will be enforcing these new censorship policies.
Then there’s the recent controversy over the Department of Homeland Security’s “Disinformation Governance Board,” a mysterious institution ostensibly designed to protect the American people from wrongthink coming from Russia and elsewhere. The board’s operations (whatever they were) have been “paused” pending a review which will be led by Michael Chertoff, a virulent swamp monster and torture advocate. Its operations will likely be resumed in one form or another, probably under the leadership of someone with a low profile who doesn’t sing show tunes about disinformation.
And this all comes out after US officials straight up told the press that the Biden administration has been deliberately sowing disinformation to the public using the mainstream press in order to win an infowar against the Kremlin. They’ve literally just been circulating completely baseless stories about Russia and Ukraine, but nobody seems to be calling for the social media accounts of Biden administration officials to be banned.
Pressure Mounts on Patel Over Assange Decision https://t.co/QrSC9V4HSf
— Consortium News (@Consortiumnews) May 23, 2022
You see so many discrepancies between what the oligarchic empire says and what it actually does regarding the issue of disinformation because the empire has no problem with disinformation. The empire that is built on propaganda and lies has no problem with propaganda and lies. It has a problem with the truth.
They’re not worried about disinformation, they’re worried about information. They’re worried about journalists using the unprecedented information-sharing power of the internet to reveal inconvenient facts about the largest and most murderous power structure on earth. They’re worried about people finding out that they’ve been lied to their entire lives about their world, their nation and their government. They’re worried about people using their newly connected minds to decide together that they don’t much like the status quo as it’s been laid out for them, and deciding to build a new one.
All the safeguards they’re setting up now to manipulate the flow of information online are not there to eliminate lies, they’re there to eliminate truth. These people have a vested interest in keeping things dark and confused, and we the ordinary people of the world have a vested interest in shining a big inconvenient spotlight on everything. The elite agenda to keep things endarkened is at direct odds with the people’s agenda to get things enlightened.
We are not being protected by a compassionate alliance of corporations and governments who only want us to know the truth, we are being manipulated and oppressed by an oligarchic empire that wants us to believe lies. That’s why they’re locking up Assange, that’s why they’re censoring the internet, that’s why they’re filling our minds with propaganda, and that’s why we can’t let them win.” (-Cait Johnstone)
“In December Socialist Alternative leader and Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant defeated a well-funded campaign by the city’s business community to remove her in a recall vote. Since being elected to office in 2013 Sawant and her socialist party have been locked in a bitter battle against the city’s moneyed elites, which has poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into a corporate PAC called “A Better Seattle” and saturated television and digital platforms with negative advertising. She and her party have been denied ads by Google, YouTube, and Hulu. Amazon alone spent over $ 3 million to defeat her run for office in 2019. Sawant is hated because she is effective. She helped lead the fight in 2014 that made Seattle the first major American city to mandate a $ 15 dollar an hour minimum wage. Following a three-year struggle against the richest man in the world – Jeff Bezos – and his political establishment, she and her allies pushed through a tax on big business that increased city revenues by an estimated $210 to 240 million a year. She was part of the movement that led to Seattle’s successful ban on school-year evictions of schoolchildren, their families and school employees She was one of sponsors of a bill that protects tenants from being evicted at the end of their “term leases,” requiring landlords to provide tenants with the right to renew their leases and prohibiting landlords from evicting tenants for non-payment of rent if the rent was due during the COVID civil emergency and the renter could not pay due to financial hardship. Her leadership and her party provide an example of effective resistance to that war being waged on the working class and the poor. Joining me to discuss her nearly decade-long battle against the billionaire class and the lessons we can take from her successful struggle is Kshama Sawant. (-Chris Hedges)
“The world – not the 10% of the population the U.S. & Europe that pretends to be the “world”- has long recognized the U.S. with its wars of aggression, violent coups, police violence, mass incarceration, rejection of Economic rights, as #1 human rights violator on the planet.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“The lengths to which progressive media figures have gone to avoid having to directly criticize the Squad for unanimously voting for Biden’s $40b war package to Raytheon and CIA is amazing to behold. They will literally talk about anything to avoid having to address this. What makes this subject infinitely more uncomfortable for progressive media figures who say they’re against US involvement in Ukraine is the only elected officials willing to ask questions or dissent are right-wing members of the GOP. This fact is shattering to their world-view.” (-Glenn Greenwald)
“For a people who live off of Netflix, Amazon and Uber Eats, Americans sure are anxious to fight in wars they are never gonna get off their couch for. Hillary Clinton and the Democrats moved right from being caught rigging the 2016 Primary to creating Russiagate. You might want to look somewhere else if you want to protect our make believe democracy.” (-Black In The Empire)
I’M LIVING IN THE EIGHTIES
Three things I do not understand about middle class Vote Blue No Matter Whos: How they rationalize that mass murder is okeydoke s’long as some Dems tweet about justice, why they trust billionaire techlords to censor the internet when the real left have already almost all been purged, and why they so stubbornly cling to this policeman is your friend fucking fuckedup fantasy. Reading Mint Press, Gray Zone, Black Agenda Report, and Consortium News have become radical acts. When we were new wave and heavy metal loving weirdo teenagers, the school admin always sicced military recruiters on the working class and about ten of my former peers were browbeaten into joining the military. I had friends who were forbidden from hanging around me and my band, or from wearing rock t shirts, who were given weapons for Christmas. Beautiful girl I once loved-her dad was a detective, her kid brother picked up dad’s gun and killed his friend. The black side of town where I grew up was always kept flooded with crack and guns and many beloved friends of mine were murdered. One by bullet, two by knives. Just ugly, painful, traumatizing stuff that scarred everybody I knew. One of my friends killed himself after serving in the Bush war. “Somebody’s dead forever”.
Remember back in the Reagan 80’s, the mass-media was already selling a ludicrous, unattainable fantasy of shoulder padded glitz n glamour to all the drunken country club moms with shows like, “Dynasty”, “Dallas”, and “Lifestyles of The Rich & Famous”? Tom Cruise movies promoted getting rich, becoming a yuppie, flying around in air force jets, and fake news talking heads kept everybody busy debating wedge issues, abortion and gun control, while ignoring all the connections between John Hinckley and his cousins, the Bush family, or their Ollie North secret wars backroom double dealings with gun trading and hostages in Iraq and shit? They’re doing it all again, it’s how they keep us believing the “opposing” political parties are the problem, rather than the greedy oligarchical, Wall Street billionaires Davos set, who own the crooked bipartisan politicians and want wars. These oligarchs are to blame for keeping the country broke, sick, immobilized, only paid slave wages, and in a non stop fear state so we think they are doing us a favor by surrounding us with barbed wire and nationalist stormtroopers with military grade weapons and forbidding free speech in public spaces and censoring dissent online, like that’s gonna stop some future Kyle Rittenhouse militia groomed “gun show” kid from taking his cop dad’s gun somewhere, and imitating all the video games and war glorifying, flag waving, violence sensationalizing Democrats and Republicans bipartisan batshit stupid, violence is brave and noble narratives. I grew up jamming to all those new waveish gun control songs-Concrete Blonde’s “God Is A Bullet”, Billy Idol’s “Don’t Need A Gun”, Prince “Annie Christian”. You know what changed since then? More guns on the streets, more tanks in the hands of racist cops. The super rich just consolidated more power and unprecedented control of the media. The billionaires stole all our money, jackedup rents, refused to raise wages, broke up families, mass incarcerated targeted populations, normalized kidnapping and torture and separated families in border gulags, made it legal to spy on everybody without warrants, they consolidated the media into just 5 companies who program us with their parent company’s agendas. Dick Cheney started contracting shady mercenary groups like Blackwater/Academi/Xe to overthrow other countries whose governments are not compliant enough-they just send in the proxies, bribe some locals, commit warcrimes and blame the governments they wish to topple. Same playbook everytime. Now that Assange is in jail and Hastings was killed in a scary ball of fire, nobody in mass-media dares question any media narratives, ever. The panopticon tech surveillance minted many new techlords who spy on the people made triple profits under Covid, all those big money companies took big emergency handouts and still laid off people, ya know no one in Congress works for the serfs though a few do sometimes talk pretty. College people were conditioned to believe the tv unreality is what’s actually happening rather than paid advertisements for war and dystopian new world order. I can’t believe Andy Fletcher, one of the founders of Depeche Mode has gone. When I was growing up, those Smash Hits pinups of Depeche Mode and Adam Ant covered all my friends and my lockers and bedroom walls. Upon revisiting the hellhole town I grew up in about 20 years back, I was horrified to behold all the pudgy suburbans who gave me so much shit as a teenager were now, in their thirty something middle age, country line dancing at the sports bar to Depeche Mode‘s “Personal Jesus”, when me and my dead new wave pals listened to that band and The Cure and Gary Numan and Grace Jones, as styling gel and Aqua Net abusing goth teenagers, all those fake blonde sports bar people gave us so much shit, but now the fat spray tanned golf shirts and mall Barbies all act like they were also just totally new wave all along. “Some Great Reward” was one of the records I first fell in love to as a kid, and then, a few years later, “Black Celebration” became the soundtrack of another doomed teen love affair. I loved the band’s lyrics that were more vulnerable and intimate than anything I’d ever heard people say before. They were just achingly, embarrassingly sincere and kinda inspired me to write my own from the heart lyrics. Had a deeply felt, lifelong impact on myself and my diversion program friends I met in counseling for bad kids with funny haircuts. Also emboldened us to wear more leather and bondage type gear even though all that shit just used to irrationally ENRAGE the hicks, jocks, and juvenile authorities where we grew up. The bullshit Rock Hall inducted Depeche Mode a few years back- Dave Gahan and Martin Gore and Andy “Fletch” Fletcher, along with former members Vince Clarke and Alan Wilder and me, I’m personally glad Duran Duran will be joining them this year. Those were my bands, ya know?
FILM REVIEW: MICHAEL DES BARRES: WHO DO YOU WANT ME TO BE?
A foxy chick at my school I sat next to in history class named Paulette, was who first got me into Duran Duran-she was a beautiful, coltish brunette, ‘told me I should get my haircut like Limahl. Closest I could come was your standard self cut Sid Vicious spiky top, but I really got into Duran Duran, and also Arcadia, and the Power Station. I remember being actually bummed out when Robert Palmer quit the Power Station. I liked his R&B cover of “I Didn’t Mean To Turn You On” a lot and thought he was a cool white soul crooner. As a pauper, I never got a tailored suit of my own, of course, ‘can’t even properly tie a tie, but back then, Bryan Ferry, David Bowie, Robert Palmer had these really fabulous suits, ya know? But me, I was really into the Andy Taylor/The Alarm/Steve Stevens big haired, silver spurs and gun belts, gypsy bandido look, and girls and makeup and hotel room debauchery and heavy drinking. I was not yet hip to Des Barre when he took over the vocal duties, and they started like appearing on “Miami Vice” and shit. Of course, we all loved Animotion, though I did not know he co wrote that “Obsession” song when it was the big smash radio hit but me and my synthpop friends all loved that song and would gleefully all sing along in our best fake English accents, which is the way we all sang along to anything, back then-even Murkkkan music, I dunno why but we all sang in fake English accents for our formative years-at least me, my Bono lookalike sidekick, JB, and the celebrity DJ, BC, who played bass in my second full fledged garage band with a real drummer. When I was two or three years older, I made friends with some way, way older guys already in their mid twenties who lived near a smalltown record store and had generous parents who gave them a real liberal beer-smokes-records-smut-amyl nitrates-gasoline-guitar string-concert tickets-travel allowance, and I remember discovering their scratchy copy of Checkered Past because ya know, I was into Blondie and the Sex Pistols. Fast forward a few more years and I was struggling to find a glam band on the Sunset Strip in the grunge era, it was all too late, I missed the whole shebang, but met another cool cat older guitarist with dynamite hair and shoes, and that fella got me into SILVERHEAD! He also taught me a whole lot about civil rights struggles. From, there, I secured a secondhand copy from Aron’s Records of you know, Checkered Past, and was starting to really appreciate the Marquis Des Barres. Read Miss Pamela’s book. So yeah I been a casual fan for years. So I am pretty jazzed when I find out they made a movie about his lifestory. I mean he was lead singer of Scum Of The Earth on WKRP, ya know? Dr. Johnny Fever was another childhood role model of mine. When Michael talks about abusers at boarding school, always being drawn to show-biz from a young age (he appeared in To Sir With Love) and the rocknroll lifestyle being more important to him than the actual music, I kinda smile, remembering my lost youth. I guess everybody gets into music for different reasons. I had a procession of really gifted Randy Rhoades style guitarists who spent all their time in their rooms, just studying tablature and practicing scales, I had a wouldbe keyboardist who shared my appreciation for bands like Duran Duran and Depeche Mode who’d been like, well funded art projects, rather than real disciplined, music school trained, technically proficient musicians. Both my early bassists were just naturals, a drummer we knew from catholic school marching band, he was brought in by my first grand love. So we started playing these real awkward, amateur hour attempts at original songs, usually based on somebody elses melody with my comic book heavy metal lyrics about crows and rattlesnakes. I had gone to a rich school in the deep burbs where the only two Madonna wannabe chicks who liked stuff like Billy Idol, “Pretty In Pink”, all that, just totally rejected me flatout, preferring the usual, much taller athletes and older guys with sports cars and shit, so when I started going to the downtown high school, I was super surprised all those girls with bleached blonde or blue/black hair all suddenly wanted to be around me. My friend, JB had hidden out for three or four months under a table in my basement in our teens, as he had been involved in a reckless cross country joyride to Vegas with his Chess King clad karate pals, and the cops were looking for him. “ARENA” had just come out and we were really into the Wild Boys song, cause that’s kinda what we were, ya know? “Always shine”. Eventually, he got bored and ventured out to see some girls and ended up being lockedup for ninety days. Couple years after that, I was also lockedup in the same cell as him for ninety days, for drawing Love & Rockets and Flesh for Lulu logos in my history book. My history teacher was also the school wrestling coach-man, he hated me as I’d always been kinda activist minded and challenged his racist history narratives, he used to put me in the classroom closet to scare the normal kids in line. Always left big bruises up and down my scrawny little arms-they don’t get away with that as often, anymore. After I got outta detention hall, I lived in an unheated garage for about a year unbeknownst to my friend’s mom. That’s where all these different girls started showing up and I started enjoying the hard partying, fulltime, around the clock, permanent rocknroll lifestyle, if ya know what I’m sayin’.
Personally, I always liked Silverhead better than Detective, that was kinda the vibe I was going for too. When my band started playing little ramshackle shows, I was wearing the same kinda runny raccoon makeup as Cooper and Des Barres, the leather pants, no shirt, or sparkly, see through girl’s blouses, I was about 120 lbs., we were attracting girls, my lead guitarist was much better looking and more androgynous than myself, so he had an even bigger circle of rotating girlfriends than me. Booze and girls and roadtrips and outta town concerts became my main concerns. Clothes, art, mixtapes, cutout bin records. You know: Bauhaus, Gene Loves Jezebel, The Cult! We all loved MTV and I was envisioning theatrical treatments to accompany the glammy little tunes I was writing. We were trying to make our own no budget, dumb little videos from day one. Everybody I knew drank all the time, so there was only maybe one adultish figure ever really admonishing me for being so completely hedonistic, all the time. I cut ties with all the authoritarian types who thought it was okey dokey for poorer kids to be singled out and rich jocks to run roughshod over the rest of us. I’d always had a bit of a social justice consciousness that put me at odds with authorities, and even other punks-ya know lotsa my pals wanted to wear Lewis leathers and new boots like The Clash, but almost none of them seemed to ever, ever even once really listen to the lyrics. I kept advertising for musicians influenced by The Godfathers and Lords Of The New Church, but it was the late eighties and almost everybody was just into Poison-stupid party rawk. Even us, really, we wanted to party all the time like Rick james and eddie Murphy, we’d grown up on Van Halen and the Blues Brothers, it was a long, slow fight, waiting to escape the truant officers by turning 18. Raising hell was what we specialized in, merry making, singing, performing, dressing up. Whenever these old rock docs get to the cleanup time, the recovery moral of the story, I am usually sorta noting how the music kinda sucked after that. They say Steve Tyler is back in rehab, I aint liked much of his songbook since maybe “What It Takes” and “Ragdoll” and “F.I.N.E.” I still love all his seventies records though, and never deny he was one of the best frontmen. I send him all my good vibrations. It’s sortof a shame that Des Barres only had commercial success with “Obsession” cause so many of his records rocked like fuck, “Checkered Past“, man. They did a whiplash version of “Vacation”. They toured with Ratt and Billy Idol, but their record has a cheeseball KISS style production, formulaic hair metal, ya know? It’s hard to even truly love the Steve Jones solo hairmetal shit ya know? Just too shit-metal, canned drums, cheesy production values, half written songs. Kinda funny when Jones talks about cleaning up but only meaning no smack, he was still doing everything else. I was never personally all that impressed with like, the “Drugs Suck” commercials of the fake sober Doc McGhee anti drug concert in Russia. Anyways, the Des Barres story is a wildass rocknroll fairytale gone wrong again and again, and if you’re anything like me, you know that roller coaster firsthand. I wish Power Station woulda written some better material, ya know, they were fabulous in their own way, but needed better songs, besides “Some Like It Hot” and “Bang A Gong”. In more recent years, DES BARRES has continued acting and has also been releasing new solo tunes and they’ve all been very good. He knows how to rock. I’m still a big fan. He’s a real smart, entertaining, charming motherfucker. My kinda dude.
“White supremacy is as American as apple pie, as the latest killings in Buffalo show.” (-Dr. Cornel West)
“They don’t censor lies. It’s the Truth that scares them. Remember: Assange is in prison for telling the Truth.” (-Jimmy Dore)2022/may/21/trump-bl
MASS MURDER IS BAD
More military grade weaponry in the hands of overmilitarized, unaccountable, racist cops is never the answer. All cops are there for is to protect the property of the ruling class, the coercive arm of the billionaires total spectrum domination, homeland police state. Davos techlords are employing all their marketing people to create more consent for less civil liberties and more authoritarian military training. People want the same fools who don’t help when they’re supposed to, but kick down paramedics doors and shoot them in bed, to be the ones always being ever more heavily armed, while Democrat politicians drone on and on about the horrors of gun violence while giving fifty mill a day for regime change mercenaries in the Ukraine to commit gun violence. Myself, I’m not a textbook liberal, okay? I can’t stand Democrats or Republicans. All they do is blame the other team, worship the rich and give more powers to the gestapo to keep their boots on the necks of the poor. Malcolm X said, “that’s not a chip on my shoulder, that’s your boot on my neck”. I think it’s probably gotten worse, since then. Julian Sanchez said, “I suspect this is an underappreciated harm of police militarization: Now cops think it’s not their job to protect people, if it involves some risk and they don’t have a tank and a SWAT team.” Everytime there is a school shooting, everybody seems to fall right back into their standard programming, with people on the right insisting there are school shootings because unpatriotic poor people are insufficiently Caucasian or rightwing religious, and should pre-emptively be jailed as soon as they are identified as somehow less militarized than say, Kyle Rittenhouse, less than John Wayne gung ho “kill ’em all and let God sort em out”, and we just need more cops in schools and more people of color being feltup and patted down at Israeli style checkpoints. That will always be their position cause they are always rah rah pro military and cop oriented-at least their rank and file are. Why do Dems think the policeman is their fucking friend and that more profiling and spying and censorship and snitching is always the answer? I never get that bullshit, at all. They go right back around the Mulberry Bush from “defund the cops” to fucking “see something/say something”. Kalling the Kops Karens love dialing those three little numbers as their primary conflict resolution strategy, whenever they are offended or wish to speak to an always strangely absent but way overpaid manager. Since when does the establishment protect the little people, the kids, the elderly, or the most vulnerable? NEVER. They don’t care about teachers. Both Betsy Des Vos and Bill Gates have done everything in their power to fuck up public schools and usher in all their robot mind control, charter school and common core bullshit, armed goons in schools just hassle anybody who is different. I thought we knew this and understood that. Everytime the tv tells people they are supposed to get more involved with copping and snitching, and superfunding more jackbooted thugs who only ever end up targeting weird kids, latchkey children, children with disabilities, or on the spectrum, the shitlibs watch tv and all go right into their lifelong “I love a man in a uniform”, cop trusting. Where all the ACABS at? As Ajamu Baraka of Black Alliance For Peace reminds us everyday, “Democrat party opportunists are thinking they finally have an electoral issue, because they literally have nothing else. However, they don’t understand connection between social violence and pro-war legitimation that they helped to foster means the nation will quickly move on.” Shitlibs on the false left just automatically default back to their usual, “just trust Kopmala to superfund the cops and the IDF to train the hypermilitarized alphabet gangs and military and secret mercenary proxy army regime change contractors who we should all trust with guns”. Most of the time, the crazies with access to military grade weapons are members of military and cop families, and sometimes even ex cop or military themselves. That guy that killed all the people at the gay bar had been a military contractor. Dems never see any correlation, whatsoever, between their party promoting extrajudicial assassinations and drones, coups, and torture gulags, endless wars based on lies for corporate pillaging and land grabbing, the mass media glorifying violence all day, and these “lone shooters” who go postal after lifetimes of being taught that violence is somehow heroic and patriotic, as long as their preferred party is in office. POVERTY IS OUR MAIN PROBLEM. And mass media that gaslights us and helps keep us in a fearful, divided and traumatized state, at all times, where we think we need to be more “protected” by armed gangs of stormtrooper robo-cops, and new laws against free speech, and protests in public spaces and stuff. Your Republican friends think we should go to war with China, your Democrat friends are all still hopped up on blaming “RUSSIA!” for Hillary’s rigging the DNC primaries twice and even high rents and gas gouging, and “inflation and supply chain issues”. I asked the guy at the grocery when a certain product would be restocked and he belligerently screamed, “NOBODY WANTS TO WORK!” Margaret Kimberly from Black Agenda Report, opines: “This week was designated #NationalPoliceWeek. Congress picked the anniversary of George Floyd’s killing as a date. Yes they did. Of course, they didn’t know that cops would stand around letting kids get shot, even though that police department claimed to have a SWAT team.” I know shitlibs who still believe there are pornoscanners and TSA gropings in the airports to protect them from scary Muslims with boxcutters coming for their big box retail jobs and freedom fries and special preferences. “The proxy war in Ukraine provides an excellent “you’re either with us or against us” moment for US hegemonic power. US ruling elite are now viewing any country that doesn’t support endless war in Ukraine as the “bad guys” and have begun exerting heavy pressure against them. House bill H.R. 7311 states the US will hold accountable African governments the US feels are aiding Russia’s “malign influence.” But of course “aiding Russia” could be as simple as having economic ties to them. One can see how this quickly spirals into an economic World War.” (-Lee Camp)
Everybody I used to know in high school is deeply immersed in gun flooded Zelensky super hero narrative, and virtue signal by waving flags for Biden who cheerfully ignores all our suffering here in this so called homeland, while giving away unaccountable billions to proxy armies and psy op marketing and flooding Ukraine with weaponry, just like they did in Syria and Libya, it’s a batshit world we live in. Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone’s Useful Idiot podcasts suggest reading Consortium News online: “Wow: YouTube removing Victoria Nuland-Geoffrey Pyatt call showing U.S. involvement in the Maidan coup – the “Yats is our guy” tape. This is how the alleged fight against “misinformation” will be used to cover up damaging truths.” I avoid mass media, cause I’d be as baffled as the rest of ’em, if I spent hours a day watching police state propaganda. Glen Greenwald nails it, again: “Cultural left-liberals really do believe that they have reached such a state of unprecedented enlightenment that all communities and discourse involving marginalized people — including ones to which they have zero connection in their lives — are theirs to control and dictate.” In the Midwest, they don’t really care for music-they even get drunk IN FRONT OF THEIR TV’s. Everyday, I have to see headlines about Elon Musk and the Kardashians, and all their fucking opinions. Who cares about those obnoxious rich people? Kardashian’s even promoting the Bill Gates Solylent Green brand of fake meat. She won’t eat it but she wants you to. They overnight put that shit in all the fast food places and that no one in the “news” mentions it, makes me wonder what kinda fuckedup shit the shareholders of Bayer/Monsanto got in store for us, now. I been vegetarian for about twenty years, but I have no faith or trust in any of these billionaires incessantly heralded in mass media as SUPER SCIENTIFIC SPACE SAVIORS FOR PROGRESS. It troubles me that Gates and Blackrock have taken control of the seeds, farmlands, and food supply. But what do the girls from Blackpink have to say about it? Just kidding-I’v never even heard that shit. I still mostly listen to eighties new wave. I don’t watch tv or believe in anything the politicians have to say about anything, anymore. I’m not one of those people who know the government lies about SOME topics but always tell the whole truth about others, because of “identifying” with some politician. Burroughs said, “everytime there’s a mass shooting they always want to take all the guns away from the people who did not do it”. I still think we need to keep talking about DEMILITARIZING THE POLICE. Your college friends never heard of a disposition matrix. I got no interest in hearing violence loving, gun crazy, drone giddy warpigs lecture anybody about gun violence.
How Team Obama Justifies the Killing of a 16-Year-Old American – The Atlantic
SPIKE MY DRINK
As a prole and an antisocial glamarchist I ain’t one to shell out big money to be herded by gym hulks in staff t shirts into some sports arena with a buncha sunburnt idiots who might just trample each other to death to see a roster of hasbeen metal wankers, none of whom were able to keep their original lineup together. It’s just like Waxl and company dragging the brand through the money trenches without Izzy and Adler, they’re just superfame millionaires perpetually doing the cash grab victory lap without any real rocknroll soul, but they aint playing for rocknroll people anymore, they’re playing for like, rich as fuck techlord or vacationing hedge fund managers or attorneys, Hard Rock Cafe tourists. So yeah the idea of a QUIREBOYS who were already down to like only two charter members, playing metal shows with Enuff Z Nuff guys in the band, that’s just not probably gonna be my thing. Call me old fashioned, but I’ll probably be sticking with SPIKE, wherever he goes. Mary Ann, 7 O’Clock, yeah? I always preferred the Quireboys to The Black Crowes or any of those other eighties suitjacket bands.
DEMENTED SADIST DOUBLE PITBULL FUCKERS ON EVERY FUCKIN’ CORNER
Last night I had to take a break from parenting stresses and went on a walk right after dusk, tried to photograph a very strange beige sunset but doubt my cheap camera really captured the colors correctly. On my way home past a house the locals refer to as the stabbin’ cabin, I suddenly heard the sound from behind of a vicious barking dog, I started running forward at a breakneck pace, hoping to make it to my friend’s house who has a pickup truck in her driveway I was gonna jump up into, but I heard the animal right at my heels and turned around and hit the ground with my walking stick right in front of it’s face as a warning, yelling, “go home!” Now this is the third narrow escape from attack dogs in the four and a half years I been in the desert. There is a sick personality type who likes having their leashless pitbulls chasing strangers down the streets, as a way of sortof broadening their property, expanding their turf. One crazy new age monster loves letting her dog own the streets and just smiles smugly at passerby, it’s kinda like gun nuts, only they are double pitbull dog nuts. This is the only place I ever been where elderly people are too lazy to even walk their fucking dogs, so they let them run down the middle of the street and the, just follow them from behind, driving slowly in their big oversized fifty thousand dollar fucking white pickup trucks. The pitbull crazies are both men and women, it’s a freakish thing to me-weaponizing animals and refusing to obey local leash laws that can never be enforced because every single oldster who owns a big desert high fenced compound have the two obligatory, snarly pitbulls and the lady who owns the one chased that me last night, she’s been cited by cops before. One of her old pitbulls had to be put down after biting somebody. The animal control place made her post signs all around her compound that say dangerous animal, but I see she has been allowed to adopt another secondary pitbull, in spite of the fact that people have been harmed by her animals in the past, and hell, somebody was stabbed at her place a couple years ago, I think by her son, but somehow cops just let her remain there, letting the pitbulls out of her gate to roam the streets whenever she just feels like it, what a crazy freak, and ya know, let’s just say she has, “guests” visiting her place in different automobiles, all around the clock. So it’s always nuts to me how cops will target some random old hermit for harassment if they don’t particularly care for his taste in yard ornaments, but batshit crazy old women can dominate the entire neighborhood with vicious animals. Fuckin hell. Somedays, the thought comes-maybe I’LL get an animal and sic it on all these batshit old women and see how they like running from a big creature baring it’s fuckin’ teeth, but ya know, “revenge is mine sayeth the lord”, I try to give it up, to the God of my understanding. It’s tough, though. So much smalltown corruption. Couple years back attack dogs are said to have killed somebody who was riding a bicycle here. It’s a drag cause I gotta take walks to preserve what mirage of sanity I still got left, even in these horrible days of unbearable wildfire smoke and ninety seven degrees hetwaves where you can barely even breathe, but everywhere you go, there are some evil forces allowed by the establishment to operate right there in the open with full impunity. Those fucking people suck so bad. I don’t like wishin’ ill on animals-what the fuck is wrong with their fuckin’ sick, ghastly, evil owners? I will repeat again that I blame corporate media for keeping people in a perpetual state of fear that makes people think they need the ten foot high fences, doorbell cameras, oversized knives on their belts, the tank like vehicles, the guns and pitbulls. When you glorify war and conquering all day, it affects people. We all cope with trauma differently, some of us arm ourselves to the teeth and buy emergency supplies from Alex Jones, some of us drink and weep, others stay in a cozy prescription pill bubble in front of Netflix and focus on pop culture garbage, others get back to rigorous conformity believing obedience to authority is always the right thing to do. Even and especially totally corrupt authority. UGH! I’m told by many witnesses that one time when I was losing a street fight against nazi skinheads, two nazi sympathizing cops just sat in their cars and watched while I was stomped on for almost ten minutes by nine guys in steel toed boots. My life was saved by a crack dealer with an aluminum baseball bat. True story.
Mornings in the desert, moon is still in the smoky sky when the roosters wake me up, I go check on all the outdoor neighborhood feral cats we help take care of, put my outgoing stuff in the mailbox, make some coffee, start skimming the headlines, once you see the brazen police state war propaganda for what it is, you can’t stop seeing it. My neighbors say things like, “we have to support the real estate investors”. HUH? Whut? Not me, Jack. Affluent people all have some idea that it’s poor people’s patriotic duty to “support” the richer people. No, man. Not I. They are all fucking ugly, selfish, horrible, misguided, heavily propagandized warpigs. Not my scene, man, not my job. I scoff at the whole horror show, we don’t even know what’s going on. But you can bet it’s some crazy horrific shit. Like the headline where odious Kissinger is saying depraved occultist and techno-fascist Klaus Schwab’s Future Leader’s School Grad, the comedian/actor/millionaire/action star Zelensky is gonna have to give up territory and him saying, basically that Klaus and Nato and Davos predators will not allow that. The WEF billionaires are meeting at DAVOS and planning their “fourth industrial revolution” C3PO transhumanist, NWO wars in secret. I’m not privy to the specifics of how they plan on waging endless wars and redrawing maps and installing more puppet regimes and ultimately taking on China, but I understand it aint nothing pretty and it sure as hell in no way is at all intended to help out poor people-my ex associates though, are all media suckers-they’ll believe anything the tv says. So long as an official corporate network millionaire says it’s true, it’s gotta be the facts: Rachel Maddow can not tell a lie, they insist. She’s on the tv! Maybe those goshdarn Republikkans lied, but only about Trump electoral stuff, and some middle eastern war in Afghanistan they can barely remember, but the main thing is Biden/Zelensky is good and Trump/Putin is bad, and that’s all anybody in history will ever need to know, ya know, for science and feminism and woke, vegan, pro noun diversity. And AOC! And her feelings-that one blue lives matter/Maga protest at the capital “traumatized” her. The Thank Obamas cling desperately to their rigged primaries and gentrification mimosa bruncheons. I can’t even start to have any sort of real conversation with those people, they have just been hopelessly programmed to recite advertising slogans, like “standing with Ukraine”, “trust science”, “blue no matter who”, “just do it”, that kinda shit, and almost nothing else-maybe some Taylor Swift lyrics, “shake it off, shake it off, ooh hoo hoo.” It really is a Spice World, now. Boy bands and wealth worship, video games and product updates, and shit-libs celebrating that General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin and Dyncorp weapon manufacturers are creating robot armies for our health and the public good. And censoring the internet for freedom and ACADEMIA! Maybe if I’d inherited a house and a fake part time business and spent the past forty years watching television on mom’s couch, Bruce Willis action thrillers and such, I’d wanna believe that Oprah and Dr. Phil know what’s best for us. I can’t do it, I can’t even be around the shitlibs with their I-Phones and their know nothing paid for diplomas. They’re having debates about Amber Herd and Elon Musk and quoting the Simpsons. Fantasizing about being macho, unshaven, brave, zombie fighters with flat stomachs and big crossbows. Get me outta here. Fucking Foo Fighters fans. Vaping for science and diversity. I can’t help ’em. Gotta use my walk away powers. I knew they were lost in 95. They kept talking to me about that tv show, “Friends”. Suckin’ up to the fortunate son drug dealers, hoping for a coveted ticket to the swimming pool party at the mama Mcmansion, waxin’ on and on about how they were fourth hand famous because their friend’s friends’s friend’s friend used to open up for the fat fratboy band who got five minutes of being grunge famous cause somebody’s dad was a media monolith CEO who bought ’em a recording studio and now they are all friends with the cops and somebody got to go with them to the stripjoint that plays Fiddy Cent and Lil Wayne, once. Ehhh. I’ll pass. I hate capitalist rappers. I don’t even like Eminem or Jay Z. They in bed with Masons. Gimme Boots Riley and Immortal Tech, anyday. Media is gonna scream about nothing but abortion, gun control and why Biden should kill always more social safety net programs to redirect funding to kkkops and proxy war regime change armies. I’m a keep talking about poverty and bullshit jacked up rents, slave wages and corporate media providing cover for all that chaicanery, mass murder, selective grieving, exploitation and quiet weapons for silent war. I remember when my old heavy metal guitar player gave me the book “They Rule By Secrecy” by Jim Marrs and not being ready for much of it. I gave all my kids books by Howard Zinn when they were growing up-I want them to know that things are never what the tv makes ’em seem. Like this rotating villain strategy, where the corporate puppet Dems blame all their own whitewashing and wrongdoings on some boogeyman du jour, usually an external villain, but sometimes a Republikkkan with the Big D in parentheses, so they can tweet all day about “taxing the rich” or “fake news” or “RUSSIAN! disinformation”, but never actually help anyone.
We can’t believe this really happened: last week George W. Bush took responsibility for being a war criminal. While criticizing Russia for having rigged elections and shutting out political opposition (which would already be hilarious coming from any American in general and Bush in particular), the 43rd president made the following comment:
“The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia, and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean, of Ukraine.”
This was followed by him adding “and Iraq, too.” To which the audience laughed.
As Caitlin Johnstone so brilliantly commented: “The bullshit doesn’t get any more brightly illuminated than this, folks. While the western political/media class constantly rends its garments over “disinformation” about the Ukraine war even as US officials openly admit they’ve been using the media to circulate disinformation about that same war, and even as the Biden administration imprisons and persecutes a journalist for exposing US war crimes, we get a square admission that the US is no better than Russia and that the only thing obscuring this is the fact that we are all swimming in a sea of disinformation and propaganda provided by that same political/media class.”
The U.S. media is driving us to and keeping us at war. We saw the media drive us to war in Iraq and we saw the devastating consequences and now it is driving a U.S. proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. It must stop!
Where are the media calls for peace? We must demand they stop cheering on the killing of people and publish and platform plans for peace.
The U.S. media drives us to war and fries our brains. This time the stakes are literally nuclear. Not one Democrat in Congress is opposing the tens of billions of weapons being sent to Ukraine to keep the war there going and last month, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled: ‘The U.S. Should Show it can Win a Nuclear War.’ What!?!?!?! This kind of dangerous thinking must be debunked, but the New York Times and Washington Post are too busy campaigning for more weapons for more war — all the way to nuclear apocalypse.
Contact The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC and tell them to stop driving war.
They must call for negotiations, not escalations, weapons and more hate.
Stop the lies and hate. Call for peace,
Jodie and the entire CODEPINK team: Ann, Ariel, Clay, Danaka, Emily, Farida, Justina, Jodie, Kelly, Leonardo, Lola, Marcy, Mark, Medea, Michelle, Nancy, Olivia, Paki, Sam, Sophie, Sohpia, Samantha, Teri, Shea, and Suzie
“I’M LOOKING FOR THAT SPARK OF RECOGNITION, I’M LOOKING FOR THAT FACE AT THE EDGE OF THE CROWD!”
“On your street they try to tell you ’bout the pain, in my streets, we try to do it all again…” (-Electric Frankenstein)
Sometimes, it’s best to lead from the back, wolf style–like Chappelle said, in this kinda culture you gonna need a pretty white girl to SING any true fact you wish to convey. I been busy fighting advanced periodontal disease, a city hall in bed with horrifyingly shady developers who seem to have boundless resources for destroying my part of town, the wildlife habitat, and hoping to erase the traditional, desert southwest cowboy culture and in it’s place, install a cul de sac of rich, suburbanized or gentrified, tech money, part time, two months a year, snowbird McMansions, exclusively for rich people. It’s fucked up. Talk about being replaced. When we were back in kindergarten and Sunday School, they taught us that the ruling class really cared about our suggestion box preferences, and petitions, that our wishes and interests would be “represented” by some pre vetted, rich brand models we got to choose from, but of course, it was all lies. The fix was probably always in. Smoky backrooms and secret societies. It’s really weird knowing people who still think the Democrat Party represents regular people and not just big pharma and the military industrial complex. I mean, I’ve known a lot of ignorant Republikkkans in my time, but now, they are ALL dumb Republikkkans only some have NAMASTE bumper stickers, know wot I mean? Warpigs-they are all warpigs. Ever since they consolidated the mass media back in 96 under Clinton’s Telecommunications Act, every fucking aspect of monopoly media has been weaponized-the bullshit news, the super hero movies, the mk ultra occult pop, it’s all bullshit, it’s gotten grim, Jim. I remember back in 95, me and my dead friend, Charlie Die from Margate, NJ, we used to exchange fanzines, we did not have the internet, we made fanzines and cassette compilations for one another. I couldn’t even type back then, had to get girls to type my little 45 record reviews for me. We were all really into like, the NY Loose, Mummies, Teengenerate, The Humpers, the R.A.F.R. compilations, and ELECTRIC FRANKENSTEIN who just flatout rocked so hard, man. Sal from Electric Frankenstein used to talk about The Anti-Rock Conspiracy and how the corporate powers that be wanted to remove rebellious rocknroll that provoked thought from the airwaves, or herd it into little ghettofied free speech zones, controlling when we were allowed to hear it-mostly just during sports or army commercials. After the war of terror started by Bush/Cheney on 9/11, Radio banned 900 some anti-war songs, ya know? Nobody gets to be heard, if they say any shit that is a problem for the billionaires and warpigs and surveillance tech-fascists. Where I live, the town print shop closed down during the Plague Years. Also, the book store. What remains? McDonalds, Wal-Mart, the legal reefer white people pot dispensaries and liquor stores. Couple of yuppie tourist traps where you can get your ten dollar beer, or eight dollar coffee, or fifteen dollar waffles. When I quit a record store job, because our rightwing dickhead boss was an all around uptight, predator, bully abuser, shit went bad for a couple years. Series of bad dishwashing jobs, breakups, lost my record collection, lost all my books and cool clothes, kinda went to drink for awhile until I met a woman who owned a trendy pizza place, who got me off the street and helped me clean up for awhile. I got a bookstore job in the rich suburbs, that kinda sucked, too, had to take shit from crazy new age Karens all day, but I did not have to pick chicken, or be around the post grunge, tattoo hot rod hipsters. I don’t remember liking much new music after that. The little labels I used to jam to like Sympathy all died. Flipside magazine went out of business. The bars were all overran with these big dumb mook sports people, who never really liked music to begin with. Those assholes put “The Simpsons” on TV, at the bar, preyed on drunk women, beatup smaller people to impress drunk women, sold drugs outta the back room, the baseball caps turned the music scene into a sports bar frathouse type environment, killing off old school punk people’s desire to wanna be involved in local music. It was all just sports dummies and pro war chanting: “USA! USA! USA! USA!”, after that. “Who Let The Dogs Out”, “American Idol”, Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, Been almost nothing but Foo Fighters, ever since. I’d visit big cities, and even there, the bars were too gentrified and overpriced and it was all just like cover bands and tribute nights. How many more times do I need to hear those same ten songs played badly? I did my part, I kept on writing and archiving songs from the heart about my life and this fuckedup crazy war world we live in, but my former collaborators all split to play with people who were richer and more famous. I almost never hear any new music I like anymore, that speaks at all to my reality. It’s all bullshit. Richard Duguay from Canada, he is great. It’s been a long time, really. Circus Of Power and Junkyard and The Hangmen are still good. The World Famous Mister Ratboy and Hiroshi the Golden Arm have a new band in Japan called THE GOLDEN RAT. I think Australia’s awesome VICIOUS KITTEN RECORDS Gray Brothers might be releasing their “PINUPS” style new LP! Anything by TEX PERKINS or any BEASTS affiliated side projects or spinoffs are always great. I been thinkin’ about Maria McKee lately. I think she left the country to escape all those evil producer predatory industry sleazebags. Same with Terrence Trent D’Arby-changed his name and got outta town. It’s probably a bad idea to go anywhere near the USA monopoly media record labels. TIM YO from “Maximum Rocknroll” tried to warn us over 25 years ago. It eats talent and shits war propaganda. Corporate Rawk still sucks. Now more than ever before. Where I live there aint no international newwsstands so ya can’t get import rock magazines and USA killed off the print media except for Spin and Rolling Stone which are literally, actually sickening. If you read that bullshit, it makes you physically sick. Mostly cause it’s all lies and promotes all those Disneyfied, fake Hip-hop, lapdancer/boyband monarch industry slaves.
GIMEE SOME TRUTH:
“The United States, as the near unanimous vote to provide nearly $40 billion in aid to Ukraine illustrates, is trapped in the death spiral of unchecked militarism. No high speed trains. No universal health care. No viable Covid relief program. No respite from 8.3 percent inflation. No infrastructure programs to repair decaying roads and bridges, which require $41.8 billion to fix the 43,586 structurally deficient bridges, on average 68 years old. No forgiveness of $1.7 trillion in student debt. No addressing income inequality. No program to feed the 17 million children who go to bed each night hungry. No rational gun control or curbing of the epidemic of nihilistic violence and mass shootings. No help for the 100,000 Americans who die each year of drug overdoses. No minimum wage of $15 an hour to counter 44 years of wage stagnation. No respite from gas prices that are projected to hit $6 a gallon.
The permanent war economy, implanted since the end of World War II, has destroyed the private economy, bankrupted the nation, and squandered trillions of dollars of taxpayer money. The monopolization of capital by the military has driven the US debt to $30 trillion, $ 6 trillion more than the US GDP of $ 24 trillion. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spent more on the military, $ 813 billion for fiscal year 2023, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined.
We are paying a heavy social, political, and economic cost for our militarism. Washington watches passively as the U.S. rots, morally, politically, economically, and physically, while China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, and other countries extract themselves from the tyranny of the U.S. dollar and the international Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a messaging network banks and other financial institutions use to send and receive information, such as money transfer instructions. Once the U.S. dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency, once there is an alternative to SWIFT, it will precipitate an internal economic collapse. It will force the immediate contraction of the U.S. empire shuttering most of its nearly 800 overseas military installations. It will signal the death of Pax Americana.
Democrat or Republican. It does not matter. War is the raison d’état of the state. Extravagant military expenditures are justified in the name of “national security.” The nearly $40 billion allocated for Ukraine, most of it going into the hands of weapons manufacturers such as Raytheon Technologies, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing, is only the beginning. Military strategists, who say the war will be long and protracted, are talking about infusions of $4 or $5 billion in military aid a month to Ukraine. We face existential threats. But these do not count. The proposed budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in fiscal year 2023 is $10.675 billion. The proposed budget for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is $11.881 billion. Ukraine alone gets more than double that amount. Pandemics and the climate emergency are afterthoughts. War is all that matters. This is a recipe for collective suicide.
There were three restraints to the avarice and bloodlust of the permanent war economy that no longer exist. The first was the old liberal wing of the Democratic Party, led by politicians such as Senator George McGovern, Senator Eugene McCarthy, and Senator J. William Fulbright, who wrote The Pentagon Propaganda Machine. The self-identified progressives, a pitiful minority, in Congress today, from Barbara Lee, who was the single vote in the House and the Senate opposing a broad, open-ended authorization allowing the president to wage war in Afghanistan or anywhere else, to Ilhan Omar now dutifully line up to fund the latest proxy war. The second restraint was an independent media and academia, including journalists such as I.F Stone and Neil Sheehan along with scholars such as Seymour Melman, author of The Permanent War Economy and Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War. Third, and perhaps most important, was an organized anti-war movement, led by religious leaders such as Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr. and Phil and Dan Berrigan as well as groups such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). They understood that unchecked militarism was a fatal disease.
None of these opposition forces, which did not reverse the permanent war economy but curbed its excesses, now exist. The two ruling parties have been bought by corporations, especially military contractors. The press is anemic and obsequious to the war industry. Propagandists for permanent war, largely from right-wing think tanks lavishly funded by the war industry, along with former military and intelligence officials, are exclusively quoted or interviewed as military experts. NBC’s “Meet the Press” aired a segment May 13 where officials from Center for a New American Security (CNAS) simulated what a war with China over Taiwan might look like. The co-founder of CNAS, Michèle Flournoy, who appeared in the “Meet the Press” war games segment and was considered by Biden to run the Pentagon, wrote in 2020 in Foreign Affairs that the U.S. needs to develop “the capability to credibly threaten to sink all of China’s military vessels, submarines and merchant ships in the South China Sea within 72 hours.”
The handful of anti-militarists and critics of empire from the left, such as Noam Chomsky, and the right, such as Ron Paul, have been declared persona non grata by a compliant media. The liberal class has retreated into boutique activism where issues of class, capitalism and militarism are jettisoned for “cancel culture,” multiculturalism and identity politics. Liberals are cheerleading the war in Ukraine. At least the inception of the war with Iraq saw them join significant street protests. Ukraine is embraced as the latest crusade for freedom and democracy against the new Hitler. There is little hope, I fear, of rolling back or restraining the disasters being orchestrated on a national and global level. The neoconservatives and liberal interventionists chant in unison for war. Biden has appointed these war mongers, whose attitude to nuclear war is terrifyingly cavalier, to run the Pentagon, the National Security Council, and the State Department.
Since all we do is war, all proposed solutions are military. This war mongering accelerates the decline, as the military defeat in Vietnam and the squandering of $8 trillion in the futile wars in the Middle East illustrate. War and sanctions, it is believed, will cripple Russia, rich in gas and natural resources. War, or the threat of war, will curb the growing economic and
military clout of China. These are demented and dangerous fantasies, perpetrated by a ruling class that has severed itself from reality. No longer able to salvage their own society and economy, they seek to destroy those of their global competitors, especially Russia and China. Once the militarists cripple Russia, the plan goes, they will focus military aggression on the Indo-Pacific, dominating what Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, referring to the Pacific, called “the American Sea.”
You cannot talk about war without talking about markets. The U.S., whose growth rate has fallen to below 2 percent, while China’s growth rate is 8.1 percent, has turned to military aggression to bolster its sagging economy. If the U.S. can sever Russian gas supplies to Europe, it will force Europeans to buy from the United States. U.S. firms, at the same time, would be happy to replace the Chinese Communist Party, even if they must do it through the threat of war, to open unfettered access to Chinese markets. War, if it did break out with China, would devastate the Chinese, American, and global economies, destroying free trade between countries as in World War I. But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.
Washington is desperately trying to build military and economic alliances to ward off a rising China, whose economy is expected by 2028 to overtake that of the United States, according to the UK’s Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR). The White House has said Biden’s current visit to Asia is about sending a “powerful message” to Beijing and others about what the world could look like if democracies “stand together to shape the rules of the road.” The Biden administration has invited South Korea and Japan to attend the NATO summit in Madrid.
But fewer and fewer nations, even among European allies, are willing to be dominated by the United States. Washington’s veneer of democracy and supposed respect for human rights and civil liberties is so badly tarnished as to be irrecoverable. Its economic decline, with China’s manufacturing 70 percent higher than that of the U.S., is irreversible. War is a desperate Hail Mary, one employed by dying empires throughout history with catastrophic consequences. “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable,” Thucydides noted in the History of the Peloponnesian War.
A key component to the sustenance of the permanent war state was the creation of the All-Volunteer Force. Without conscripts, the burden of fighting wars falls to the poor, the working class, and military families. This All-Volunteer Force allows the children of the middle class, who led the Vietnam anti-war movement, to avoid service. It protects the military from internal revolts, carried out by troops during the Vietnam War, which jeopardized the cohesion of the armed forces. The All-Volunteer Force, by limiting the pool of available troops, also makes the global ambitions of the militarists impossible. Desperate to maintain or increase troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military instituted the stop-loss policy that arbitrarily extended active-duty contracts. Its slang term was the backdoor draft. The effort to bolster the number of troops by hiring private military contractors, as well, had a negligible effect. Increased troop levels would not have won the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but the tiny percentage of those willing to serve in the military (only 7 percent of the U.S. population are veterans) is an unacknowledged Achilles heel for the militarists.
“As a consequence, the problem of too much war and too few soldiers eludes serious scrutiny,” writes historian and retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich in After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed. “Expectations of technology bridging that gap provide an excuse to avoid asking the most fundamental questions: Does the United States possess the military wherewithal to oblige adversaries to endorse its claim of being history’s indispensable nation? And if the answer is no, as the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq suggest, wouldn’t it make sense for Washington to temper its ambitions accordingly?”
This question, as Bacevich points out, is an “anathema.” The military strategists work from the supposition that the coming wars won’t look anything like past wars. They invest in imaginary theories of future wars that ignore the lessons of the past, ensuring more fiascos.
The political class is as self-deluded as the generals. It refuses to accept the emergence of a multi-polar world and the palpable decline of American power. It speaks in the outdated language of American exceptionalism and triumphalism, believing it has the right to impose its will as the leader of the “free world.” In his 1992 Defense Planning Guidance memorandum, U.S. Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz argued that the U.S. must ensure no rival superpower again arises. The U.S. should project its military strength to dominate a unipolar world in perpetuity. On February 19, 1998, on NBC’s “TodayShow”, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright gave the Democratic version of this doctrine of unipolarity. “If we have to use force it is because we are Americans; we are the indispensable nation,” she said. “We stand tall, and we see further than other countries into the future.”
This demented vision of unrivaled U.S. global supremacy, not to mention unrivaled goodness and virtue, blinds the establishment Republicans and Democrats. The military strikes they casually used to assert the doctrine of unipolarity, especially in the Middle East, swiftly spawned jihadist terror and prolonged warfare. None of them saw it coming until the hijacked jets slammed into the World Trade Center twin towers. That they cling to this absurd hallucination is the triumph of hope over experience.
There is a deep loathing among the public for these elitist Ivy League architects of American imperialism. Imperialism was tolerated when it was able to project power abroad and produce rising living standards at home. It was tolerated when it restrained itself to covert interventions in countries such as Iran, Guatemala, and Indonesia. It went off the rails in Vietnam. The military defeats that followed accompanied a steady decline in living standards, wage stagnation, a crumbling infrastructure and eventually a series of economic policies and trade deals, orchestrated by the same ruling class, which deindustrialized and impoverished the country.
The establishment oligarchs, now united in the Democratic Party, distrust Donald Trump. He commits the heresy of questioning the sanctity of the American empire. Trump derided the invasion of Iraq as a “big, fat mistake.” He promised “to keep us out of endless war.” Trump was repeatedly questioned about his relationship with Vladimir Putin. Putin was “a killer,” one interviewer told him. “There are a lot of killers,” Trump retorted. “You think our country’s so innocent?” Trump dared to speak a truth that was to be forever unspoken, the militarists had sold out the American people.
Noam Chomsky took some heat for pointing out, correctly, that Trumpis the “one statesman” who has laid out a “sensible” proposition to resolve the Russia-Ukraine crisis. The proposed solution included “facilitating negotiations instead of undermining them and moving toward establishing some kind of accommodation in Europe…in which there are no military alliances but just mutual accommodation.”
Trump is too unfocused and mercurial to offer serious policy solutions. He did set a timetable to withdraw from Afghanistan, but he also ratcheted up the economic war against Venezuela and reinstituted crushing sanctions against Cuba and Iran, the latter two of which the Obama administration had ended. He increased the military budget. He apparently flirted with carrying out a missile strike on Mexico to “destroy the drug labs.” But he acknowledges a distaste for imperial mismanagement that resonates with a disenfranchised public, one that has every right to loath the smug mandarins that plunge us into one war after another. Trump lies like he breathes. But so do they.
The 57 Republicans who refused to support the $40 billion aid package to Ukraine, along with many of the 19 bills that included an earlier $13.6 billion in aid for Ukraine, come out of the kooky conspiratorial world of Trump. They, like Trump, repeat this heresy. They too are attacked and censored. But the longer Biden and the ruling class continue to pour resources into war at our expense, the more these proto fascists, already set to wipe out Democratic gains in the House and the Senate this fall, will be ascendant. Marjorie Taylor Greene, during the debate on the aid package to Ukraine, which most members were not given time to closely examine, said: “$40 billion dollars but there’s no baby formula for American mothers and babies.”
“An unknown amount of money to the CIA and Ukraine supplemental bill but there’s no formula for American babies,” she added. “Stop funding regime change and money laundering scams. A US politician covers up their crimes in countries like Ukraine.”
Democrat Jamie Raskin immediately attacked Greene for parroting the propaganda of Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Greene, like Trump, spoke a truth that resonates with a disenfranchised and impoverished working class. The opposition to permanent war should have come from the tiny progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which unfortunately sold out to the craven Democratic Party leadership to save their political careers. Greene is demented, but Raskin and the Democrats peddle their own brand of lunacy. We are going to pay a very steep price for this burlesque.” (-Chris Hedges)
“Justin Trudeau bans RT and then whines when Russia bans Canadian media in retaliation. This is a perfect example of how the US empire and its vassals see the world.” (-Garland Nixon)
(@caitoz) 
Veglam 