The Russians Ate This Blog

Hola Everybody,
I had written a whole blog justifying the widespread panic regarding the allegations that the Russians hijacked the presidential election. Unfortunately, a three-legged dog stole it, so you’re getting the following instead.

The Russians are Coming!

(Or: How I Stopped Thinking and Came to Love the CIA*)

No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices.
 -- Edward R. Murrow 

Have you no sense of decency, sir?
 -- Joseph N. Welch to Sen. Joseph McCarthy

There’s been a lot of hysteria emerging from the recent and unproven allegations that the Russians hacked our democracy with the intention of skewing the election in favor of Donald “Le Grand Orange” Trump. Proof you ask? Well, maybe you didn’t ask as you rushed out the door looking for the nearest nuclear bomb shelter, but the proof, as a Washington Post article alleges, lies in some secret CIA document (“assessment”) presented to legislators in recent days. Mind you, the anonymous sources cited in the article aren’t the ones who did the assessment, but are unnamed sources guessing at what the people who did the assessment were thinking!

If you think that’s weird, consider that leading the war cry are recalcitrant Hillary Clinton supporters (“pragmatic liberals”) who didn’t have a word to say when credible evidence (i.e., not a “secret document”) was provided regarding the thieving during the Democratic primaries that saw the DNC going in the tank for Hillary. If you doubt the veracity of the evidence in that instance, consider that top-level democratic operatives were forced to resign once the evidence came to the surface.

But back the WashPo article. Glenn Greenwald does a great take down of that particular hit piece masquerading as journalism here. Essentially Greenwald decries the irresponsibility of accusing a nuclear-armed power of directly and deliberately interfering in the U.S. election in order to help decide the winning candidate without any credible evidence. This is how wars are started -- or have we forgotten the Iraq war yet? The CIA is an organization dedicated to propaganda and professional lying. They brought us COINTELPRO (the documented campaign to sabotage the Civil Rights Movement) and Contra-Crack Cocaine. It gave us Pinochet in Chile, and the overthrow of freely elected leaders the world over, and we’re to take their word based on a “secret document”? 

So to sum it up: politicians, gullible people (aka pragmatic progressives), and the corporate press are now in high dudgeon over an allegation based on no evidence. Not even a smoking gun. 

Still, the election has been hijacked. However, the culprits likely weren’t the Russians but U.S. conservatives on both sides of the aisle. As previously noted, the DNC and news outlets were in cahoots against Bernie Sanders during the primaries. In fact, during one 16-hour period, the Washington Post managed to publish 16 negative Bernie Sanders stories. This is the same paper, by the way, that recently published an article decrying “fake news.” The irony is that the Post had to “append” that article after discovering their anonymous sources were flaky, to say the least. Hence, the same paper that used cowardly anonymous sources to besmirch legitimate news sources, itself trades in fake news. I can’t make this fuckin’ shit up, people.

Meanwhile, the Democrats have refused to take leadership in forcing a recount in states that show suspiciously skewed statistics. The real election culprit has been a Jim Crow-like attempt to disenfranchise Black voters and other voters of color. In the mean time, while the aforementioned pragmatic progressives waste their time whining about Russians, they have completely missed the essence of the problem. In the blackest city in the nation, Detroit, 87 vote machines broke on Election Day. That’s 59 percent of the voting machines there. Considering that Trump won Michigan by the tiniest of margins, you would think that the Democrats would be showing some leadership on this travesty. Actually, they are nowhere to be seen. The lone voice in the wild here is the Green Party’s Jill Stein. However, she’s probably run into a brick wall: Michigan officials passed a state law that says any time a vote counting machine breaks and causes it to display a different vote total than the one in the precinct log books, those votes legally can’t be recounted.

That’s a New New Jim Crow -- clearly a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. So “cousin Pookie” (a racist stereotype our current neoliberal president loves using to beat other black people over the head) did vote, but his vote didn’t count. Add to that the millions of Pookies who have lost their right to vote due to felony disenfranchisement, the millions of votes lost due to the racist and criminal practice of crosschecking, and right there alone you have the stealing of an election. There’s no need to go to Sarah Palin’s front porch to peer at Russia, the crimes are being committed here, on our soil. As Jill Stein points out, if you live in a rich white suburb, you have nothing to worry about. However, if you live in a multicultural urban enclave the chances of your vote being invalidated grows exponentially.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The same factors that skewed Detroit are played out throughout the country. We have an electoral system that’s antiquated, undemocratic, and racist. The least of our worries should be the Russians, or any outside entity. The enemy is within. All this let’s-kick-Russia-in-the-ass-rah-rah without a shred of evidence is pure insanity and eerily reminiscent of the lead-up to the Iraq war. Same con job.

If the CIA has credible and verifiable evidence that the Russian government conspired to have Trump ascend the seat of the most powerful office in the known universe, then by all means, publish it! Obama needs to declassify that assessment and throw it out there for public consumption. But (fuck!) let’s also look at the ways conservatives -- both Democrat and Republican -- game the system to invalidate votes and skew the results in their favor.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

*Apologies to the film, Dr. Strangelove, for mangling the title.

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The People in the Bubble

Hola Everybody,
Consider supporting my writing work by donating whatever you can here. Your generosity will be very much appreciated.

Mini Lesson of the Day: White Supremacy is the normalizing of racial superiority in a society that permits white people to be individuals while people of color are collectively held as outsiders.

Today… we take a glimpse behind the veil. Just a little. 

Orphans of the Bubble

Once as a child my class was taken on a school trip. One morning, we all boarded the yellow school bus and headed to the Aquarium. I was fascinated by the menacing shark with the predatory smile. But even as a child, I understood that the shark lived in a world of its own, with its own reality.

Gringos¹ are a lot like that old shark -- they’re unable to experience the world outside the glass. It’s as if the United States is a gigantic terrarium, an immense biosphere or bubble which has cut it off from the rest of the world. How else can we explain the characterization of a center-right, pro-corporate, pro-war presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, as a “progressive”? Only in the insular bubble of contemporary life in the U.S. could a neoliberal candidate be deemed progressive in any sense of the word. This is a person who used racist tropes such as lazy black women and subhuman black and brown children to help pass legislation that threw poor people under the bus and incited the mass incarceration of mostly Blacks and Latinx.

It seems to me that the only explanation for gap between reality and America’s perception of it comes from the film, The Truman Show. The plot of the movie revolves around the affable but naïve protagonist who goes about his daily activities without being aware that he is, in fact, in a gigantic reality show. His hometown is actually a set for a TV show and from birth, he has been manipulated and controlled by the producer and the director. The gullibility of the UStian public would be better understood if we were all living on a stage set in a town called Liberty and threatened by a roving hoard called Evil Black Super-predators.

We’re all being conned.

Not too long ago, the con was called the “Axis of Evil.” UStians believed, as they often do when instructed on the Television Machine by their elected leaders, almost every scary reason cooked up by the likes of Bush, Cheney, and the NY Times. The rest of the world laughed. Their amateurish attempts at mass deception contained awkward truths that were surprisingly childish for a group that had access to the most massive propaganda machine the world has ever known. But they only had to utter their latest lie to be cheered by their subjects. “We’re number 1!” we cheered as we were led to the slaughterhouse.

As a former con man, I can appreciate a good scam. I know how hard it is to pull off the Big Con. Rationalizing a war can’t be easy and takes a lot of skillful finessing and this one was complicated. There was the bait (“the terrorist”), then the switch (weapons of mass destruction), then another switch (kill the despot, make the world safer), and yet another (regime change).

Whew! That’s a whole stack of lying right there!

But these amateurs failed and they failed miserably. If you going to pull off the Big Con, the lie must be simple and it must repeated -- often. These idiots, already having proven their incompetence in matters economic (and almost everything else), fumbled, and their build up to the Iraqi invasion broke every rule in the con man’s game. Bush and his handlers fell into the trap of elaborating, backtracking, and adding on. Instead of the Big Con, simple and effective, their lies grew more and more elaborate and complicated. The result being that instead of one good reason to go to war, piles of bad reasons were offered, which gave the skeptics in other countries the opportunity to unmask the fables.

Today, the con is an economic one. I mean, it is true that almost all cons are motivated by economic gain, and this one was no different. Simply put, trillions were paid out to the very same con men who almost took down the world’s economy. In fact, according the governments’ own accounting, the total cost of the bailout was $22 trillion! Now, don’t hate, this is one of the greatest cons in the history of con games. Imagine that you and I robbed a bank and, after getting caught, not only do we avoid serving time, but we are rewarded for our efforts. I have to admit of harboring at least some measure of resentment regarding this particular con. Every time I got caught, I was sent to jail or prison and often had serve sentences measured in years.

Today, both presidential candidates are pro-corporate shills, with one being a billionaire who has fleeced the country he now wants to lead of hundreds of millions of dollars, and the other a life-long politician who fought to make it possible for the wealthy to fleece the US public. They are good friends, by the way. Adding insult to injury, both claim to be for the “little guy,” meaning you and I. But, as real estate mistress, Leona Helmsley, complained when she got caught with her hand the cookie jar, “Only the little people pay taxes.”

If you think all of this is too obvious, please note that UStians deep-throated the whole thing… all of it. You might also say this is old news and in our attention-deficit society, and you are probably correct. But I mention all this because, like bad porn, the construction of UStian social policy has a very predictable progression. One summer it was that Obama was going to kill granny with is death panels. This summer Mexican immigrants were the new “terrists.” The weapons of mass destruction this year are brown people who come here to spread their infections and “drop” litters of future cop-killing, sex-crazed, drug-addicted sociopaths. On the other side, the Bernie Sander’s campaign, which looked to slightly alter spending to create true universal healthcare, invest in education, and fix our infrastructure, became Hillary’sRed Scare opportunity. Everybody in the corporate press went into full attack mode against the Sanders people. In fact, people were being paid to troll the comments sections of pro-Sanders op-eds! I kid you not. 

But if one looks past the bubble even a little, you become aware that the hype about immigration is really today’s version of the Iraqi invasion, which, by the way, hasn’t been paid for.

And this is how it’s been for decades. Today, it all falls under the idiocratic opiate, the lesser of two evils. People, people who call themselves progressives, in fact, are justifying their advocacy for a right-wing, pro-fracking, pro-mass incarceration, pro-war candidate by continually bleating the mantra, “Lesser of two evils, lesser of two evils, lesser of two evils… ” and browbeating those who refuse to fall in step. So, we will most likely get eight years of Hillary and I don’t think we can afford it. For the most part, people in the United States can’t see past the bubble and it will be our undoing.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

1. I don’t like using the term “Americans” to denote people in the United States. Hence I will use UStians or gringos. For Spanish speakers, gringo refers to someone from the United States, particularly a person who is a White American.

First as Tragedy...

Hola mi gente,
Marx said that history repeats itself -- first as tragedy, then as farce... and that is all I see today, farce. If we really want to honor those who perished on this day, we should start by calling out the shameless bastards using 9/ 11 to advance their selfish political and economic agenda.

Remembrance

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.
 -- Mark Twain

I was there.

I lived in the vicinity of what would be called “ground zero” since 1969. When the towers collapsed, my building shook. 

I watched from the roof of my17-story building in horror as people jumped from the Towers.

I heard my neighbor’s horror-filled scream as she stood next to me and watched people who chose to plunge rather than burn. 

I saw, with my own eyes, that horror, something my mind refused to accept at first. I thought -- I wanted so much to believe -- those little dots were debris, but they were humans.

I walked in silence with the throng of humanity that marched through the streets of lower Manhattan, a mass shrouded in white ashes. The day was a beautifully clear day, the sun shining, as thousands walked in silence, ashen heads bowed.

I saw a woman wander aimlessly, in shock, bleeding from a wound on her head. I saw another limping, and as I heard her whimpering to herself, my heart, as it would that day again and again, broke. There are atrocities I saw that day that I will never be able to erase from my mind.

I lived in the shadows of the towers all those years. I used to party there every Friday when I was a young man working at the nearby Woolworth Building, almost across the street from the World Trade, as I used to call it. When I was 14-15, I took a summer job as a messenger at a printing company where my uncle worked, and I would deliver blueprints to the architects at the World Trade site. At the time I had developed an interest in architecture after reading about Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water, and I thought it was pretty cool to see the architectural monstrosity rise (let’s not allow nostalgic indulgence warp the truth: The Towers were pretty much bland-looking).

Once looking up on my walk to work (I worked in the Woolworth building on lower Broadway), I saw a man climbing up the outside one of the Towers -- “Spider Man!” blared the headline the next day. In the 70s I watched as tightrope walker, Philippe Petit, walked across the gap between the Towers on a cable. The incident inspired a film. There was a lot personal history there in those towers. At least for me, anyway. I also had many friends who worked there, at one time or another. On Fridays, some of the best Afro-Latinx bands played in tis plaza for free. I remember that no matter how blasted I got, all I had to do to make it home was look up to the night sky and point myself in the direction of the Towers.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I had just started working at a reentry project (Developing Justice) I would eventually head, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I worked from 12-8. Annoyed that I had no milk for the last of my Yaucono, I went out in my pajamas to the corner store and when I looked up I saw the back end of a plane sticking out of one of the Towers. I thought it was fucked up, but this is New York, things happen all the time, weird shit always happened at the Towers.

When I got back home, I felt the second plane hit. I felt it -- the building shook. That’s when I knew something was wrong. I won’t retell that tale, we all know it... we saw it replayed on the TV countless times (was it really necessary?)

I walked one flight up to the roof of my 17^th floor apartment building and watched... I watched along with some of my neighbors had congregated there.

I saw thousands of people walking silently, heads bowed, covered in white ash. It was strange to see so many people in one place and feel that silence. I saw people helping one another, stores giving away free water, others helping the wounded. A priest and I helped some who were walking around in shock. That day, I witnessed the nobility of my fellow New Yorkers. I experienced the true potential of the human spirit that day, even in the midst of all that carnage and ugliness.

It was what I saw immediately after that scared me. And as it turns out, I had every right to be scared.

That day, I saw the religious fundamentalists in full force before the dust had settled (literally), handing out pamphlets proclaiming the end times. I saw people buy right into that. It was a scary time, and people were confused, easily swayed.

I saw hatred. A lot of hatred.

The next day, there was a call for volunteers to escort Muslim women and children because they were being attacked. I saw a lot of anger and fear and I feared that there were forces that would use this tragedy to exploit, to manipulate. I witnessed a bellicose and washed up mayor resuscitate his political career while literally standing on the charred bodies of the dead. He is a racist who, though his leadership was a study in failure during the attack, has since made millions from the events of 9/ 11.

I saw an incompetent village idiot president take us to a meaningless war and the shredding of the Constitution -- all in the name of all those dear dead people, in the name of my fellow New Yorkers, all who stood bravely and came together when it was most needed. I saw our leaders take that nobility and turn it into something ugly, something for hatred and greed.

I smelled, every day, that strange smell emanating from the charred pile that was once the Towers. It was hard to describe -- a mixture of rotted meat and something else, something unidentifiable. I coughed what we began to call the downtown cough. My lungs have never been the same since that day... Through various degrees of separation, everyone one in New York was connected somehow to a death in those towers and I heard the many stories, I experienced the trauma and the sadness.

We must never forget those who died that day, those fifteen years ago. We must never forget the power of the human spirit that emerged -- that one sliver of good that day -- where we all came together. But we must also never forget that some used that tragedy to lead us into darkness.

Since then, we have allowed our freedoms to be taken from us, not by external forces, but by our own government and the corporations that own it. As a nation, we have failed to understand freedom and as a consequence, all those deaths have been rendered meaningless. First as tragedy, then as farce.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…