Category: Capitalists

Alt Left: The Death of Social Democracy in Europe

If you haven’t noticed, there’s no more social democracy or democratic socialism in Europe. Probably the only thing left is Belarus, Moldova, Turkey, and Russia. Possibly Iceland because they told the banks to go pound sand. Greece elected a Leftist government, Syriza, that quickly went full-blown neoliberal, reportedly out of necessity. What has happened to social democracy is something that any Marxist could have predicted – the incompatibility of even trying to have any sort of socialist society in the midst of a capitalist economy.

The fate of social democracy is the what has always been the fate of social liberalism in the US and its counterpart in Canada and Australia. All of these variants have never been anything but reactionary on foreign policy – smashing the slightest sign of liberalism anywhere in the world if it even dared to peek its head out. Many governments in Latin America were overthrown for the crime of raising the minimum wage.

And most of these were overthrown by “liberal” Democratic governments. Bill Clinton set the stage for the overthrow of Aristide. Aristide’s crime? He dared to raise the minimum wage. He had investments in some factories there. So did Hilary. Hilary overthrew Honduras. The crime? Raising the minimum wage.

Even FDR, the most progressive President of the 20th century, was a raving reactionary freak on foreign policy. “Somoza may be a sonofabitch, but he’s our sonofabitch.”

Teddy Roosevelt was progressive at home but an imperialist brute overseas. “Walk softly and carry a big stick.”

The standard formula for all of these countries has always been some form of liberalism at home combined with hard right or ultra right policies that favored rightwing dictatorships, death squads, the genocide of the Left, and out and out fascism overseas. Liberal at home, reactionary abroad. And now Joe Biden, one of the most liberal Presidents in modern memory, is already treading down the same worn path.

And now the social democracies have undergone the same transformation that social liberalism, etc. has had from the start. One gets the feeling that liberalism or socialism at home in a capitalist country will always have to co-exist with ultra-right, pro-fascist politics overseas. In other words, a foreign policy of imperialism.

Most of Europe is whored to the ultra-rightwing NATO. The EU is for all intents and purposes the civilian state and NATO is the Defense Ministry of that state. Even Sweden, Denmark, and Norway are hard right countries when it comes to their NATO alliance. Finnish foreign policy has always been rightwing, a legacy of their hatred for Russia. Dutch, French, British, and Spanish foreign policy have been horribly rightwing forever now under social democratic and conservative governments both. Indeed in Europe, there is little difference between the two.

Spain strides around Latin America like a brute. Apparently they still think they rule the place as they once did.Most of this involves threats, arm-twisting, sanctions and whatnot every time countries try to assert more control over their resources, which are inevitably being exploited by Spanish corporations. Bolivia’s nationalization of oil and gas is instructive in this regard. The social democratic Spanish government was just as reactionary as the conservative one.

The French are cruel and colonialist towards their former colonies and do not allow any independent governments to form there, especially in Africa. The French and Canadians were deeply involved in the overthrow of Aristide in Haiti, apparently for the crime of raising the minimum wage. In addition, France is still demanding that Haiti repay it for its losses when the slaves of Haiti were freed and the slave-holding families were massacred. France is a social democracy.

The Dutch held a phony inquest in the M17 false flag shootdown where a Ukrainian fighter jet shot down an airliner in order to blame it on Russia. The EU was also deeply involved in this plot and especially the coverup. As were the British and in particular the BBC, the official organ of the British state. The British stole $4 million in gold from Venezuela by confiscating it. British foreign policy mimics US foreign policy in every reactionary thing we do. The UK is a social democracy.

Italy led the charge against Qaddafi and helped steal billions of his gold reserves. Italian corporations also quickly tried to get on Libya’s oil. Italy is a social democracy.

100% of the EU is sanctioning Venezuela for the crime of trying to create a social democracy in America’s backyard. No socialist country would ever sanction Venezuela. Same with Nicaragua. They’re all sanctioning Nicaragua too. Nicaragua’s even less socialist than Venezuela and Norway’s probably a lot more socialist than Venezuela.

So you see, these countries may have some sort of socialism at home (increasingly threadbare) but in foreign policy, it’s straight up full-blown reaction and imperialism, support for rightwing dictatorships and out and out fascists. The reason is simple. The economies of all EU countries are based on their multinational corporations.

Multinational corporations want nothing but rightwing dictatorship, preferably fascist, when they cannot elect hard Right democratic states. These corporations will not tolerate the slightest socialism or even liberalism overseas because they all operate on a predatory model towards the Third World.

Hence the foreign policy of all of the EU “socialist” countries is all about what’s good for the corporations that run their economies. Their corporations wish to go abroad and rape, ruin, exploit, destroy, and stripmine the economies of the Third World by exploiting their resources such that the corporations get almost everything and the countries themselves barely get a nickel.

This has always been the model and it always will be the model. So the EU social democracies have the same problem of the Democratic Party – while they can be leftwing at home to some extent, they all go hard rightwing and pro-fascist and rightwing dictatorship overseas due to their fealty to the corporations that run their economies.

Alt Left: Liberal California? Californians Voted Rightwing on Eight out of 12 Propositions on the Ballot

Why people keep saying California is liberal is beyond me. My city is 80% Hispanic. But my county voted Trump +13. As soon as you get outside of the city limits here, all the precincts went for Trump. And the Whiter wealthier areas in my city also went for Trump. The Central Valley is not very liberal at all! Yeah my Congressman is a Democrat, but he’s a crappy rightwing Democrat, a Blue Dog Democrat who might as well be a Republican.

Let’s look at the ballot propositions. Either Californians are dumb and get swayed by the big money and their fake lying campaigns on the propositions or they’re just not that liberal. Because the vote wasn’t very liberal.

Californians Voted Rightwing on Eight out of 12 Initiatives

Proposition 15: A fake privacy law bolstering law written by criminals like Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of the Silicon Valley crooks that actually weakened privacy laws passed! “Liberal” Californians sided with crooked tech billionaire enemies of the people to screw over consumers!

Proposition 16: Bring back affirmative action in employment failed badly. I like that result, but face it, it’s rightwing. So California “liberals” supported an anti-affirmative action proposition.

Proposition 18: Allowing 17 year olds to vote in primaries if they will be 18 in the general in the fall (Big deal!) failed. That’s a very rightwing vote. California “liberals” voted rightwing again.

Proposition 21: Putting in some common sense rent controls in this insanely overpriced housing market failed again. It always fails! Some liberal state! The Legislature won’t pass it either because all the “liberal Democrats” in there are bought off by extremely wealthy landlords. Some liberals!

Proposition 22: Reclassifying gig workers are contractors so their crooked billionaire employers can keep ripping them off and paying them $5/hour, which is what Lyft and Uber pay their drivers (!) passed! “Liberal” Californians voted for big business crooked bosses and ripped off poor workers!

Proposition 23: Regulating the criminal dog capitalists who run crooked dialysis facilities preying on poor workers suffering kidney failure terribly! They’re not regulated at all right now and that’s terrible for sick workers. California “liberals” voted to keep the dialysis crooks unregulated!

Proposition 25: Changing the cash bail system which keeps workers accused of crimes in California’s”liberal” jails that are as terrible as a Hieronymus Bosch painting before they have even been convicted of a thing, sometimes for years, to let non-dangerous people who haven’t even been convicted of a thing out of jail until they go on trial failed! “Liberal” Californians voted to keep poor workers in California’s Dantesque jails just because they’re not rich enough to afford bail!

Californians Voted Liberal on Four Initiatives

Proposition 14: Funding stem cell research barely passed.

Proposition 17: Restore voting rights for felons on parole passed.

Proposition 20: Increasing penalties for some crimes failed.

Proposition 21: The vote to make some large property owners pay the going rate for their property taxes barely passed. The only “homeowners” it applied to had three or more houses! If you own 3+ houses, you’re a “homeowner?” Get out.

There were 12 ballot initiatives. “Liberal” Californians voted rightwing on eight of those 12 initiatives and voted left on only three of the 12, and two of those barely passed with the skin of their teeth!

California “liberals” are not even all that liberal. They’re more like liberal Republicans. The only way they are left is Fake Left which means SJW Left, which isn’t even left at all. It’s just a bunch of bourgeois “fake rights,” most of which attack Whites and men and vastly privilege sexual degenerates and mentally ill freaks who think they’re the opposite sex against people who are normal sexually and do not have a psychosis about their genitals.

Anyone who thinks that is “left” is insane. Remember the Communist countries of the 20th Century? Remember how socially conservative they all were?

Homosexuality was often illegal. Castro put gays in prison.

Trannies would be sent to an asylum where they belong.

Men were free to be men and women to be women.

No Communist country on the face of the Earth was anti-White. In fact, the USSR and the East Bloc were some of the most pro-White countries the world has ever seen.

Porn and gross, open sexual degeneracy and perversion were banned.

That’s the Real Left. The Real Left is left on economics but fairly conservative on the BS social issues..

Alt Left: Patti Smith, “People Have the Power”

Patti Smith, 1979. From her debut album,”Horses.” With Fred “Sonic” Smith, late of the great MC5.

All right, that does it. Enough of this slacking off and lollygagging around.

Time to get back to some serious leftwing politics, back when that meant something sane and worthwhile. But beyond whatever Left distortion, contortion, freakshow, or Clown World du jour is playing in the Current Year, what is the Left really all about, since its very inception in the French Parliament, on the left side of the room, natch?

Left politics is about the spirit. The spirit of the Left. The dream. The dream of a better world. The dream of liberation. The dream of freedom. The dream of something resembling justice. And and even smaller something resembling equality. No matter how badly it was implemented, it was always the spirit that mattered.

Everyone likes to dump on East Germany. For all I know, maybe it did suck. But what was important about East Germany? It was the spirit, the dream, the rebellion, the fist on the air, the power of the people. Sure, it all came crashing down. But that’s not the point. The point was the death of the East Bloc was the death of a dream. These people dared to dream of a better world. Something we in the capitalist world don’t even bother to do because better worlds aren’t possible under capitalism. All you can is paint the turd, polish it up, put some fancy decorations on it. It’s always still capitalism and it always still blows in exactly the same way, like clockwork. Or physics, almost.

The only time it’s halfway ok is when it’s shot through with a huge dose of socialism to smooth out the shittiness and polish up the considerable good things.

Capitalists: A better world is not possible. This is capitalism we’re talking about, guys! Come on! This is as good as it gets. And it works. It sucks, it’s shitty, it’s evil, but it works.

The Left: A better world is possible. And if it’s not, we will dream anyway. Because the purpose of the Left is not the achievement itself but the spirit. And the dream. We at least dared to dream enough to try to create a better world. At least we tried. No matter what, you always had a roof, clothes, a job, and food. We let people survive. For this, the crime of letting, nay demanding, that people have the basics to survive, we are condemned as Pure Evil itself. It was good and it didn’t blow, nor was it shitty in the capitalist sense, but it doesn’t really work.

Pick your poison, boys.

Something evil that works.

Something good that doesn’t work.

And you only get to pick one, although I think right now the capitalist model is not only evil but it doesn’t even work. So as usual, we get the worst of both worlds.

Alt Left: The Worst Person on Earth

Elon Musk. No ifs, ands, or butts about it. Actually, Donald Trump, another billionaire – natch – is so much worse, but for the purposes of creative flair, let’s keep the title the same. Besides, he deserves the reverse accolades.

Ok, he’s the second worst person on Earth.

Donald Trump is the worst person on Earth. He is also a narcissistic psychopath, or a malignant narcissist. This personality, the early researchers of which designated it “the closest thing on Earth to ‘pure evil’ to me is “the personality of the dictator.” I believe many dictators, especially the murderous ones, were malignant narcissists. His own father was a psychopath and possibly a malignant narcissist himself. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Got it. Now who’s the third worst person on Earth? Could it be anyone but the Libertarian (obviously – what else could he be) Jeff Bezos?

Bezos, a billionaire, is the richest man on Earth. He is also the third worst man on Earth. His income has doubled in the last year while the economy crashed and burned and the real humans writhed in the burning rubble, mouthing silent screams that no one heard.

Donald Trump, a billionaire,

Elon Musk, a billionaire, is the third richest man on Earth. he is the second worst person on Earth. His income also doubled in the last year in the midst of the worst economic crash since the Great Depression. He is mentally ill. He has Bipolar Disorder. Most of the time he is in the manic or hypomanic phase of the disorder. This is also part of why he is such a huge asshole, as manics are commonly some of the biggest assholes around.

Sometimes I call mania “Asshole Personality Disorder.” Musk also appears to have a serious narcissism problem and he may well have Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). Of course, mania and narcissism go together. One paper reckoned that everyone in the manic phase of the disorder met criteria for NPD.

Bernard Arnault is the second richest man on Earth. He is a billionaire. I know nothing about him, except that he probably adds very little value to the human race.

Mark Zuckerberg is a billionaire. He is easily the fourth richest man on Earth. Like Musk and Bezos, he is also extremely dangerous. In fact, Musk, Bezos, Trump, and Zuckerberg are probably the four most dangerous men on Earth at the moment. Zuckerberg is the fourth worst person on Earth, though it’s a close call between him and Bezos.

Bill Gates is the fifth richest man on Earth. He’s retired from business, so that means he can’t do any (or much) more damage. Notice when these guys quit the job of making money, they often turn into dramatically better human beings. While he was making money of course, Gates was a complete monster, with a moral compass as cockeyed as Ted Bundy’s.

In fact, I would call Bill Gates the Ted Bundy of the IT industry. He lied to, cheated, stole from and backstabbed everyone who ever had the misfortune of partnering with him (ring a bell with Mr. Trump?).

I doubt if Gates was a psychopath or a malignant narcissist as he seems cured now, and those disorders are incurable if anything is. But he sure acted the part. There is such a thing as “Antisocial Behavior” absent psychopathy. Many criminals fall into this category. Mafioso and their soldiers come to mind. They act terrible but they aren’t really terrible people deep down inside. It’s not that they are bad. It’s more that they act bad. Notice the difference.

Now that he has quit making money and hence has no need to foment evil anymore, Gates has, with the major assistance of his heartfelt wife, turned into a much better person. Has he yet dumped all of his antisocial BS? I’m not sure. But he’s a much better man than he used to be and in some ways, he is indeed a good person, maybe even a very good person.

Notice all it takes to turn a stone evil man into a near-saint? Just stop trying to make money. That’s all it takes. Making money turns you evil, by necessity probably. When you stop making money, the need for the evil behavior evaporates and one is free to act a lot better, assuming you have it in you in the first place. And Gates does.

While we are on the subject of monsters and billionaires, let us discuss…drum roll…Steve Jobs! A true monster among men, testified by everyone who ever worked with him, seconded by his very own long-suffering family. Jobs absolutely had Narcissistic Personality Disorder. One wonders if he was a malignant narcissist too.

Alt Left: Why Capitalism Will Always Inevitably Lead to Fascism

Sure, having the state run the economy has some issues. You don’t have to a conservative to figure that out. And we have plenty of good evidence of the serious limitations of the capitalist model too – number one in my book is that it inevitably and in fact cannot not lead to imperialism.

Show me all these advanced Western countries that voluntarily gave up imperialism. Tap tap tap. Getting impatient.  You don’t have any,  do you? Capitalist fanboys come here and insist that capitalism need not lead to imperialism. Well, fine! That’s a nice thought experiment, isn’t it? How about some real world examples? You don’t have any? Well, ok then!

Modern Social Democracies Are All Imperialist Countries That Support Fascism

Furthermore, we see no apologetics from the capitalist fanboys here for why Western countries inevitably and without fail, always without exception, engage in imperialism. It’s true that they didn’t used to. As recently as 40 years ago, a lot of Western European social democracies supported the Sandinistas and even the FARC in Colombia. But Olaf Palme Social Democracy has been dead in Europe as long as he has. By the way, he was assassinated by rightwing enemies, not be some lone deranged killer. Has his killer even been caught?

But today’s social democracies are not your father’s social democracies. I always wondered why Commies called social democrats social fascists, but now I get it.

Why Social Democracies Must Be Imperialist and Must Support Fascism

I finally figured out why all European social democracies are gone full-blown imperialist. What are the economies of the social democracies?

The economies are capitalist. The income of the nation is derived from its capitalist corporations. Therefore, the interests of their corporations is the primary if not the only interest of any European social democracy. They’re all working for their corporations! So they have to be imperialists.

And they have to go fascist every time there is a threat to the foreign investments of their corporations from the Left. Of course they need to overthrow all these Left governments and replace them with rightwing fascist dictatorships.  That’s the only way to guarantee the safety of their capital amidst this extreme threat from the Left.

Bottom line is that fascism is always a strong tendency in any capitalist world. Capitalists will always go fascist. Just about every capitalist out there will go capitalist without the slightest hesitation any time there is a threat to their investments and  income from the Left. And as Trotsky immaculately noted, fascism always arises when capital feels a strong threat to itself from the Left.It’s a last-ditch effort of Capital to maintain itself when seriously threatened by the Left.

Fascism and Imperialism Directly Related to a Country’s Wealth

As a country gets wealthier, a tendency towards fascism and violent undemocratic rightwing politics becomes increasingly inevitable. And in fact, countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE now support Western imperialism to the hilt. And why not? When you get a certain amount of money, the corporations and investors in your country always and inevitably start investing their profits in  enterprises overseas. And once those investments are in place, a fascist politics to protect those investments has to happen. It cannot not happen.

As do the Israelis, who have gone so far as to actually train and run death squads for Latin American fascists for decades now. How many times have I told you that Zionism is fascism for Jews? You need more evidence? Even during “leftwing” Labor Zionism, Israel was training and  funding  death squads all over Latin America. Where it was hazy for the US to do such things, we farmed it out to the Israelis. If Israel was ever a socialist country, it hasn’t been one for 50 years. How many socialist countries train, fund, and run fascist rightwing death squads?!

What Is Western  Imperialism?

Western imperialism is about exploiting the Global South and the Third World, robbing them blind and stealing their resources, forcing them to run export-only agriculture to give us cheap food, while selling them expensive canned foods produced by out food corporations, forcing them to open up their economy to penetration and inevitable domination by US corporations, and signing over all of their resources to Western corporations to get rich off the theft of the patrimony of the global South while leaving the locals (other than the comprador traitors who make alliance with the Western exploiters) with barely a nickel nor a pot to piss in.

Most of the “Enemies of America” Aren’t Socialists So Much as They Are Just Nationalists

Most of the “socialists” we demonize are just nationalists who want control over their national resources.

Can’t you see how the project outlined in the paragraph above maximizes profits for US corporations and investors parasitizing the country? Western countries are imperialist because it makes them rich. Get it? They oppose anti-imperialist nationalism because it cuts into their damned bottom lines. Get it?

Given that, now why is it you capitalist fanboys keep insisting that imperialism does not grow inevitably from capitalism? It makes the capitalists in the West rich, right? LOL well if so, why in God’s name would they voluntarily give up the gold mine?

Mugabe was demonized because he bailed on IMF and World Bank slavery, started demanding foreign firms sell the state and 50% share in their companies, and nationalized the Western mines. That’s why we demonized him in addition to protecting  the sorry asses of 4,000 British farmers who occupied 2/3 of the arable land and almost all of the good farmland while the Black majority starved.

We demonized Chavez because he was a nationalist. He nationalized Western oil firms where he did not demand  they sell him a 50% stake. He insisted on state development of a Venezuelan economy for Venezuelans, not for Western capitalist vultures.

Alt Left: Most Everyone in a Capitalist Society Is Basically Not Living in Reality

Capitalists are degenerates. They’re incapable of being honest. Sinclair Lewis said it’s hard for a man to be unbiased when he has a monetary interest or his job depends on how he answers the question. Capitalists have an interesting epistemology. How do we know if something is true or not? If it’s good the capitalist and it makes him money or more money, then it’s a fact. If it makes the capitalist look bad and makes him lose money, it’s not true, a falsehood.

So this is how capitalists do “science.” That’s why every time you get capitalists involved in science or anything that demands that we learn the facts and know what’s true or not true, the capitalists blow up the whole system and wreck everything, leaving only confusion, disaster, tatters and especially chaos.

The latter, chaos, is especially loved by capitalists because they use destruction as a building block to build stuff by destroying perfectly good stuff and rebuilding a bunch of stuff that didn’t need to be rebuilt. Even capitalist economics works on the principle of chaos, disorder, and entropy, and the economic system itself is constantly being blown up by its own internal contradictions or actually its “logic”. These explosions are beloved by capitalsts as this anarchy is part of some glorious “science of chaos” called the Business Cycle.

I am convinced that if aliens landed and we described capitalist economics to them, they would find it so insane and irrational that they would either fall down laughing, shake their heads and conclude that we were all insane, or simply shrug their shoulders, decide there was no intelligent life here, and pack it up and head back home.

Try describing capitalist economics sometime to a kid who’s just old enough to understand it. I bet even most 10 year olds would tell you that it’s irrational and most would say it’s completely insane and doesn’t even make sense.

And in a hyper-capitalist society like ours, that’s why living here is living in what I call Lie World, where one is barraged by out and out falsehoods and lies all day long. It’s literally worse here than it was in a lot of Communist countries. All day long people are yelling at you, insisting that a bunch of things that are obviously true are flat out lies, and a bunch of ridiculously false ideas are straight up true. So there ends up being two realities:

An Actual Reality, where true things are true, and false things are false, where things that happened happened the way they did, and the things that didn’t happen never occurred, or the World of Science, Truth, Honesty, Professionalism, Skepticism, Sane, Non-Partisanship, Pragmatism, Logic, or Atheism.

An Other, False, or Fictional Reality, where true things are false, and false things are true, where things that happened either didn’t happen the way they did or didn’t happen at all, and where the things that never happened actually did, or the World of Pseudo-Science, Falsehood, Lies, Charlatanhood, Magic, Mental Disorder, Politics, Ideology, Emotion, or Religion.

Bottom line is in a capitalist society, just about every single person is not even living in reality at all! They’re living in some fictional reality, like something out a story, a book, or a movie, or an alternate reality, like something out of the Matrix. They’re literally not even living in the real world and all. Instead they are living in a world or Pure Delusion where almost nothing is true or real, and in a sense, just about everyone you meet is flat-out psychotic in a sense.

Velvet Underground, “Rock and Roll”

Lou Reed, “Rock and Roll,” from the album “Velvet Underground,” 1969.

If this isn’t the greatest music ever made, I’ll eat my hat. Lou Reed is God.

Oh one more thing for all you capitalists out there. The late, great, short-lived Velvet Underground? You know, them? They never made a nickel. Hey capitalists, take your “success” bullshit and cram it up right up your greedy asses, ok?

Jenny said when she was just five years old
There was nothing happening at all
Every time she puts on a radio
There was a nothin’ goin’ down at all
Not at all

Then one fine mornin’
She puts on a New York station
You know, she couldn’t believe what she heard at all
She started shakin’ to that fine fine music
You know her life was saved by rock ‘n’ roll

Despite all the amputations
You know you could just go out
And dance to a rock ‘n’ roll station

It was all right (it was all right)
Hey baby, you know it was all right (it was all right)

Jenny said when she was just about five years old
You know why parents gonna be the death of us all
Two TV sets and two Cadillac cars
Well you know, it ain’t gonna help me at all
Not just a tiny bit

Then one fine mornin’
she turns on a New York station
She doesn’t believe what she hears at all
Ooh, she started dancin’ to that fine fine music
You know her life is saved by rock ‘n’ roll
Yeah rock ‘n’ roll

Despite all the computations
You could just dance
To that rock ‘n’ roll station

And baby it was all right (it was all right)
Hey it was alright (it was all right)
Hey here she comes now!
Jump! jump!

Jenny said when she was just about five years old
Hey you know there was nothing happening at all Not at all
Every time I put on the radio
You know there’s nothin’ goin’ down at all
Not at all

Then one fine mornin’
She hears a New York station
She just didn’t believe what she heard at all
Hey, not at all
She started dancin’ to that fine fine music
You know her life was saved by rock ‘n’ roll
Yes rock ‘n’ roll

Despite all the computation
You know you could just dance
To a rock ‘n’ roll station

All right
All right
And it was all right

Well, listen to me now
And it was all right

Come on, man, listen
It was all right
It was all right
And it was all right

All right!
It’s all right
All right!
Yeah, it’s all right now
All right!
Yeah, it’s all right now
All right!
It is all all right
All right!
Yeah, all right now
All right!
And it’s all right right now
All right!
And it’s all right now
All right!
Oh baby all right!
Oh baby all right!
Oh baby all right!
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
All right!
Now it’s alright now
All right!
Ooh, it’s alright now
All right!
Oh, all right
All right!
All right now
All right!

Alt Left: All of the MSM and all of Silicon Valley Is Deep State

It’s painfully obvious that there is no free press at all anywhere in the West. There is only Fake News MSM completely controlled by the US government and NATO.

There is some real news on the Internet but the Deep State is now going after all of that too. Twitter and (((Facebook))) are mass-banning any pages or users that publish anything that goes against the Deep State/CIA line.

Twitter and (((Facebook))) are both absolutely part of the Deep State now.

So is (((Google))). (((Google))) partnered with the Atlantic Council (NATO Deep State) to downgrade most leftwing outlets critical of US foreign policy as “fake news.” The Atlantic Council issued reports showing all the “fake news” or “Russian” sites.

Any site critical of US foreign policy is not only fake news but it is also always Russian. Hundreds of Americans were banned from Twitter when Jack Dorsey (Deep State) said they were “Russian propaganda bots.” (((Mark Zuckerberg))) (Deep State) also banned many pages from (((Facebook))) as either “fake news” or “controlled by Russia.”

The leadership of (((Google))) is absolutely Deep State. Not only did they bury most leftwing sites on their search engine, they have also removed many videos from (((Youtube))) on the grounds that they are “fake news” or “Russian propaganda.” Quite a few of these accounts were left up, but (((Youtube))) required them to carry warning messages saying that the creators of the video had links to Russia.

I’ve been telling people for a long time that there is nothing groovy or cool about these bitchin’ new capitalists in Silicon Valley. They’re the same old capitalist ratfucks, except possibly they’re even worse than the old kind we sort of got used to. Like any corporation on Earth, the Silicon Valley corporations are not progressive in any serious way and are in fact conservatives and reactionaries like all corporations are.

These corporations are said to be “progressive” because in addition to being rightwing corporations on anything important, they have also adopted leftwing SJWism as it’s no threat to their bottom line.

And in answer to the question I assume you are getting ready to ask me, no, supporting degenerate nonsense like Drag Queen Story Hour at your local library, perverted gay pride parades, and transsexual bathhouses for all ages does not make you a progressive because those are not progressive issues.

They fall into another category called Moral/Traditional versus Immoral/Degenerate. Supporting sick nonsense like the above doesn’t make you left wing at all. It just makes you a degenerate. You SJW degenerates proud of yourselves?

 

Alt Left: Probable Reason for the Bolivian Fascist Coup: Bolivia Has Huge Lithium Deposits

I am thinking that the fascist coup in Bolivia was due to lithium deposits, and I am really starting to think that Elon Musk was in on this coup. China and Bolivia are two countries that have significant lithium deposits. I believe that Afghanistan has some too, and some say that that is one of the main reasons we are over there with our damned army.

China’s are locked up and the US wants Bolivia’s lithium. A month ago, Morales nationalized the lithium deposits and said they were for the Bolivian people only. This was around the time that big foreign corporations were badgering him to let them develop the lithium deposits.

Lithium makes the batteries that all those cellphones run on. Maybe electric cars too. It’s a must-have element and the US wants to lock up a lot of the market for it. There was no way we were going to tolerate Morales keeping control over the lithium deposits for the Bolivian people.

Elon Musk is the US corporate leader who wants to get his mitts on that lithium more than anyone else. I always suspected he was a piece of crap but I could never quite prove it (though stories about how he forbids unions and grossly abuses his workers were suggestive), and if this is true, then I was right.

I’m starting to think that just about all corporate capitalist types are pure ratfucks. It’s like they can’t possibly be anything other than scumbags. If they try to act decent, they will get destroyed by the pond scum.

This is making me even more of a socialist. I’m also starting to think that capitalists will always support fascism and will always go fascist if it comes down to that. I now believe that capitalists will always hate democracy and try to destroy any Left government that gets anywhere near power.

I am thinking that capitalists will start wars over money and kill huge numbers of human beings just so they can make a sleazy buck. I mean how low of a person is that? Capitalists literally kill completely innocent people for money. They do it all the time, habitually, without a thought in their minds. That’s pretty low, like Ted Bundy low.

And if capitalists are doomed to be this way, then capitalism cannot be reformed, sorry. You can manage it like the Chinese and Russians are doing and use it as a carefully controlled tool to develop the productive forces, but you can’t let it take over and become a form  of Politics, like it is in most of the world. It doesn’t work. It’s never worked in the past, it doesn’t now, and it will never work in the future. Capitalism is doomed.

La Bas in Mexico, or Notes from the Tijuana Underground

I am wondering if any of you have been to Mexico. I haven’t been there since 1987 when I was in Tijuana, but it was a mess even then. We were in the red light district (Where else would I be?) so it was a rather delightfully degenerate mess with no sexual morals whatsover. However a criminal element goes along with that and some maniac tried to force me to buy an edible cactus from him. He was very menacing and tried to shake me down.

Crime, social disturbance large and small scale, fistfights, car crashes, falling down drunkenness – that’s Mexico for you.

In the late 70’s when we used to go to Baja California on the outskirts of Tijuana there was a vast slum stretching as far as the eye could see, extending down into some ravines and over some ridges. I have no idea what they made those houses out of, but it was not standard building materials. We used to call it “The Cardboard Shacks.”

As a kid, this slum was utterly terrifying to me. I felt my heart sink into my stomach in fear and awe every time we drove by. Never in my life could I imagine a vast slum like this. There was nothing even slightly like this in the US at the time. My eyes were locked to that scene the whole time we drive by there. It was like watching the aftermath of a gruesome car crash.

Later when we were in Ensenada (that was mostly where we went), once you got off the main road, the streets are junk. They’re either potholed or dirt roads or both. And on the wall, everywhere, in these areas, we saw red graffiti with a hammer and sickle and the words, “Revolucion!” Well of course.

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. You can’t have slums like that anywhere without having its obvious reaction – a socialist or Communist pro-worker or pro-poor movement.

These rightwingers with their End of History crap are self-deluded like all of the blind rich and their water-carriers in academia and journalism. They actually thought that when that Wall fell, the rich would be able to create capitalist paradises all over the world where the rich could live like literal kings where most of the people suffered in slums like “The Cardboard Shacks.”

They wouldn’t have to worry about a thing. No more Communists, socialists, or even social liberals. No more wealth redistribution. No more social programs. No more worries about the poor rising up – they could die in their self-made horrorshow slums while the royal rich ate, drank, and made merry like no tomorrow.

Well, only a few years after the Fall of the Wall, revolutions were still going strong all over the world. The world was mostly ruled by socialist or social democratic parties. Vast maldistributions of wealth still created inevitable Leftist backlashes, just as Marx’s Laws predicted.

Did these rich fools really think they were going to pull this crap off? Sometimes I think rich people are retarded. But they’re not. They’re just blind, live for the day, and are amnesic towards the past like most humans. Idiotic, senseless optimism not grounded in reality seems to be coded into our genes. Presumably this is why our race never simply offed itself as you would thought by now.

I went into a Mexican bar and it was wild and crowded and crazier than any American bar. There were off-duty US servicemen in there, getting shit-faced with everyone else. A gorgeous but very tall woman came up to me and grabbed my cock, just like that! I mean when does that happen? I thought I won the lottery until she whispered in my ear, “High baby…” I jumped backwards. You just can’t hide that male voice.

Earlier we had just made our way to the Red Light District. We weren’t trying to get laid or anything like that. Hell no! What kind of a guy do you think I am? There were men standing in front of every sleazy bar, hawkers. They were all trying to outdo each other in degeneracy.

“Six-teen year old girls!”

“Fif-teen year old girls!

I forgot if they were offering 14 year olds, not that I cared. I don’t go to foreign countries to fuck JB’s. Clearly an awful lot of grown men like that teen pussy, the illegal kind most of all. Part of it is because it is wrong, illegal, and forbidden – there’s that appeal.

I was buying tacos everywhere we went. I was hungry and they were all damn good!

Against the wall with a crashed-in foregone look on her face that seemed to recede into the wall itself, was an Indian woman. She was actually good looking. She had ~four of her children there. She was a mother and her four kids and there they were on the streets, living like animals. And literally no one gave a damn. I gave her some money and she was very grateful. Ever since then I have wondered what happened to her and her kids. They’ve haunted me ever since.

We went into a seemingly empty bar. There were some men back there running the place, complete pigs like most Mexican men. I’m sure it’s bad for the women, but I can’t deny that piggy societies are awful comfortable and fun for us men. We run the show, no one dares challenge us, there’s not a whole of stuff we can’t get away with if we dare.

There were several women up on tables wearing short dresses. They were dancing in this desperate, sexy way, trying to sell their bods to us. The men were gesturing to these women with looks that said, “Here’s the merchandise, men. Please help yourself to one of these debased whores here.” Snicker. Guffaw. Belly laugh.

But this scene was almost as sad as the homeless woman with her brood. All of the women had the worst sadness smashed into their faces. And there was something else. Abject and utter shame and humiliation.

Now that can be fun as a game to play in bed because a lot of women like their sex really dirty like that. But these women were very unhappy. There were miserable, wretched. That plaintive pain sucked anything sexy out of the scene. Only a sadist would get turned on by that.

We walked out of the bar, shaken. I felt like something had died inside of me. I have never seen a sexual scene as depressing as that in my life.

We wandered the streets and some Mexican guy made friends with us, probably to get some money. He kept asking us for money to go to this or that bar. He was our traveling barker. He was about 20 and certainly pleasant enough.

We ended up in some real Mexican bar full of working class men and women, mostly 18-30. There were a lot of hot women. But this was no pickup bar. All of the women were more or less unfuckable.

I have heard that at least back then (and still today apparently), it was hard to get even young Mexican women to put out. Many guarded their virginity. A lot would only trade their hymens in for a wedding ring. In other cases you might have to date her 3-4 months before you can finally smash.

This was nothing but a dance bar, replete with scores of happy people dancing their lives away, right here amidst the ruins of humanity.

I noticed another thing. There was a sense of anxiety on most their faces, men and women. They weren’t very relaxed or secure. I asked my Mom if poor people tended to feel insecure and she said, “Of course.” Which is something I never thought about: the psychological face of poverty. That was almost a bit haunting too.

We left the bar and I tried to pick up a Mexican woman, age 20. She was cute but rather fat but who cares? I was drunk in a foreign country and I didn’t give a damn anymore. I was using all my famed pickup skills on her, wooing her with my smooth and slick ease, but she wasn’t falling for the bullshit I was selling. In a high-pitched voice she kept protesting my seduction attempt.

“Es una mentira! Es una mentira!”

She was protesting that everything I was saying was a lie. Of course that’s true and that’s always true when I am trying to seduce a woman. Seduction after all is a scam, a fraud, a lie. We are literally trying to trick and fool women into bed past their silly protests.

“Honest seducer” is  an oxymoron. If you can’t lie your fool head off, don’t even bother trying to be a player. Just get a girlfriend or get married and keep your conscience clear. You might even get a lot of sex – who knows? Seduction is a dirty game.

Somehow it was 2 or 3 in the morning. We were out on lost streets to nowhere without a soul in sight at the literal edge of the world in Tijuana, drunkenly careening the streets and  trying  not to fall off the edge.

Most people would advise you to stay out of those places at those hours. It’s generally regarded as a scene that is dangerous as Hell. But hey, I like to live dangerously. Life’s no fun without a bit of risk – even risk of serious injury or death.

Somehow there was a bar tucked out here in  all the nothingness. It gave off seriously sleazy vibes. Out here, far on the outskirts of the Red Light District, is where you find the really dirty bars with the legendary donkey shows and whatnot. Why? Because out here no one cares. Out here the morals are as lost as the streets.

We went inside and the place was packed. We hung out for a while. This seemed like a place where it was anything goes, and abandonment of all propriety felt warm and cozy to me. I was in my element, happy as a clam. We were drinking.

About half an hour in, at 3 in the morning, there’s a woman up on the stage, maybe 35 years old, gorgeous with long dark hair. She’s about as White as I am. She’s completely nude. Her legs are spread as wide as wings.

This was before all the women decided to go bald, so there was a huge triangle of dark brown public hair at her V. Young people nowadays think such decoration on one’s body is gross and disgusting, but the men of our age grew up on hairy pussies, we were weaned on them like our mother’s milk. Most of us probably got imprinted at almost a genetic level, and at least I developed a love for bushes that I carry to this day.

There was a young White man on the stage, completely plastered. He was blond and about 20. He was down on the ground, slinking forwards like a snake. He looked a bit humiliated and embarassed himself,  which made sense as he was making  an abject ass out of himself. But part of his body said he was too wasted to care anymore. Soon he was at that wonderful bush, and he started munching away.

Damn, that’s depraved as Hell! I love it!

The woman had a look of shame, defiance, anger, and arousal all at the same time. Sometimes she smiled. She was happier than the Table Women. Even if this was debasing, she seemed to be getting off on that aspect like so many women do.

We crashed in our car somewhere near the beach, in the land of nowhere. Early in the morning someone knocked on the glass. Two Mexican police officers. We woke up and waved to them.

Unlike American cops, Mexican cops don’t give a damn. About what? About much of anything. This list of things deemed trivial and not worth an arrest is quite long, which is as it should be.

Later that morning we went around to crowded panaderies buying Mexican sweetbreads, which are actually quite nice. They were all packed to the roofs, and the hordes there all had that familiar desperate sort of anxiety I saw at the dance club. Their faces were hard, pained, gritty and desperate. Poverty paints lines on your face, lines of cruelty.

It was time to go home. There was the terrible line at the border. Dirty children in rags with filthy cloths darted about, offering to “clean your windows” for some coins. We mostly blew them off but there was something terrifying about them too. This place, Tijuana, was obviously a place where human souls go to die.

There were others, often dead-poor older women, selling this, that, or whatever. They were a bit pathetic but not as bad as the haunted kids with rags. Most of them had shy, submissive smiles on the faces. Here in this forsaken land at the edge  of the world trying not to fall off, the poor definitely know their place.

Alt Left: A Letter to Francis Fukuyama: There’s No Such Thing as the End of History

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. You can’t have slums like I saw  in Tijuana anywhere without having their obvious reaction – a socialist or Communist pro-worker or pro-poor movement.

These rightwingers with their End of History crap are self-deluded like all of the blind rich and their water-carriers in academia and journalism. They actually thought that when that Wall fell, the rich would be able to create capitalist paradises all over the world where the rich could live like literal kings where most of the people suffered in slums like “The Cardboard Shacks.”

They wouldn’t have to worry about a thing. No more Communists, socialists, or even social liberals. No more wealth redistribution. No more social programs. No more worries about the poor rising up – they could die in their self-made horrorshow slums while ate, drank, and partied like royalty.

Well only a few years after the Fall of the Wall, revolutions were still going strong all over the world. The world was mostly ruled by socialist or social democratic parties. Vast maldistributions of wealth still created inevitable Leftist backlashes, just as Marx’s Laws predicted.

Did these rich fools really think they were going to pull this crap off? Sometimes I think rich people are retarded. But they’re not. They’re just blind, live for the day, and are amnesic towards the past like most humans. Idiotic, senseless optimism not grounded in reality seems to be coded into our genes. Presumably this is why our race never simply offed itself as you would thought by now.

Alt Left: Venezuela: What Capital Flight and Capital Strikes Look Like

Let’s suppose that half the employers in the US simply closed up their shops and shipped all their money overseas to sit in investments. They had plenty enough money to live off of anyway. If you asked them what they were doing, they would tell you that they are refusing to invest in the California economy because they hate the liberal California government.

Well, in a nutshell, that’s part of what happened in Venezuela. A country cannot just sit there while everyone with any money at all ships it out of the country instead of investing it in their homeland. Obviously that’s not going to work. So Chavez put in capital controls to try to stem the capital flight.

It worked but then it created a whole host of other problems. And even with the laws against it, Venezuela has continued to see $50 billion/year flow right out of the economy, generally right to Houston or Miami.

In recent months, all capital controls were eliminated and the exchange rate was finally allowed to float after all this time. Inflation collapsed but so did the economy and it was already racing downhill anyway.

How do you cure runaway inflation? Real easy. You reduce demand. How to you do that? You make it so wages are so low and goods so high that hardly anyone is buying anything anymore. Since inflation runs on supply and demand as its cause and effect, generally you reduce demand and prices tend to drop. You increase demand and they tend to go up. It’s Economics 101.

Nice little doomsday comment here from one of our commenters:

Francis Meville: Anyway, the US are heading towards another worse Vietnam. Venezuela will turn socialist as they can no longer afford to live in a liberal economy. What Venezuela is experiencing right now is not socialism but mass lay off by capital, like half the Californian population living on the streets because the cost of living is way too high.

And most American media tell the yokels all that happens because California is run by the radical Left just one notch below Venezuela as a harbinger of the plagues to befall everybody if were don’t vote more and more reactionary politicians with the decades passing.

You know that California has nothing socialist, so what is happening in Venezuela has as little relationship with the evil they pretend.

This time Trump has committed some kind of hubris America will never recover from. Trump imagines he can arrive in Caracas aboard an aircraft carrier and by helicopter to proclaim like an angel Guaido as the legitimate president of Venezuela and then depart at the head of a ticker-tape parade of triumph.

It is disappointing relatively to the slowdown or cessation of projects that government had instituted for its people mostly due to high-tech American hybrid wars techniques, but it is not a catastrophe.

Maduro is not the economic genius it would have taken in face of such a foe, but he is being pushed back down to his own level of top competence as per Peter’s principle: class war and union action, where he could tower even over Uncle Ho. Good night America!

Alt Left: The Cause of Venezuela’s Economic Crisis (Socialism Had Nothing to Do with It)

Sure, socialism has nothing to do with Venezuela’s problems. First of all, there is no socialism in Venezuela. There’s just Keynesian economics as the state imposes controls on a capitalist economy. Keynesianism works great everywhere.

The government hardly owns anything but the commanding heights anyway. The state controls oil, gas, minerals, electric grid, telecom, hydropower, and cement and steel manufacture. This is completely normal all over the world in many social democracies. Even in the US, the state owns some of these things. The state owning this stuff causes zero problems anywhere.

And the state controlled all of this under Chavez when the economy boomed. State control has actually gone down under Maduro, as he privatized a lot of stuff and did other rightwing things.

Compared to Chavez, Maduro has gone way to the right on economics. These guys like to play cause and effect. So I guess rightwing economics crashed the economy!

100% of the problems are due to sabotage by the capitalist sector which controls the entire productive economy. The Allende “make the economy scream” playbook has been followed almost to the letter along with the same insane propaganda blitz by the CIA that Allende was subjected to. This is just the Chilean Coup 2.0!

But the problems are all due to capitalist sabotage (mostly capital flight). The capital flight and coup attempts set in motion a chain of events that led to Keynesian economic controls like price and currency controls, which led to their own problems.

The currency controls created a currency black market, which is really the source of all the inflation. Maduro did not deal with this properly but his response was a fixed currency rate, neither right nor left economics. For instance, Ron Paul wants a fixed currency rate.

Price controls were evaded. State made up for the capitalists refusing to produce price controlled products by importing them. Oil prices crashed and they could not import stuff anymore, so shortages developed.

Obviously shortages are not possible in any capitalist economy, so all the shortages were artificially created by the capitalists, who stopped production, hoarded goods, diverted to the black market, and smuggled to Colombia to take advantage of inflation by creating more of it!

Most production and goods import goes straight to the black market or to Colombia which then causes shortages for some goods. The lines you see are for cheap state subsidized food. The shelves in most markets are full. Check the videos. No one is starving. Malnutrition is low.

The media is lying to you.

Alt Left: About Those “Worthless Social Science Degrees”

The argument that social science degrees are absolutely worthless for getting a job in modern society has been coming up for decades, but it has grown louder in the last ten years.

Supposedly these degrees are absolutely useless in terms of finding a job, so they are a  waste of money. Further, they are a waste of society’s money.

This argument mostly comes from conservatives, but some liberals have taken it up too. I’d like to point out that the roots of this argument lie in laissez faire free market neoliberal capitalism. So all of you making this argument are in bed with Milton Friedman. I hope you’re happy.

This is so because the only degrees that are said to be worthwhile are those degrees that are useful in a sociopathic hyper-individualistic anything goes free market economy such as we are blighted with here in the US.

The only degrees that are worthwhile are those that will get Bill Gates,  Jeff Bezos, Donald Trump, Betsy DeVos, Howard Schmidt, Jeffrey Epstein, Steve Jobs,  or other semi-sociopathic heartless maniac billionaires to hire you for whatever capitalist scam they are cooking up at the moment.

And everything else, everything that doesn’t allow you to be a cog in a lying, cheating, thieving corporate world, is completely and utterly useless. Because the Market is everything and everything is the Market.

In such a society it should not be surprising that conservatives, mostly conservative males, say that anything other than a math, science, tech, business or management degree is utterly worthless.

Japan is thinking of phasing out all of its social sciences in the next decade or two. There have been many calls to reduce or eliminate social science programs at US universities. These calls go right along with the total commodification of life that we are experiencing.

Furthermore, they display a contempt for knowledge and the scholarship needed to obtain it as a core value of human existence. Why are we here anyway? How about to learn? That would be one of my arguments. Not that most folks have any use for much learning, but the species as a whole does. It’s a value. No you can’t slap a dollar sticker on it and it often has little or no monetary value.  In modern society that means it is utterly worthless. Why? Because it doesn’t make a buck.

Alt Left: Modern Life and the Commodification of Just About Everything

There’s a lot of talk about the commodification of daily life lately as we become increasingly atomized and, yes, commodified.

Now our cars, our bodies, our homes and apartments, and not just our time and skills, are commodified. We are all supposedly to commodify every aspect of our existence that will allow us to get hired by some 1 percenter as some glorified servant. Rent your ass and everything you own to some rich man. That’s the mantra. Check out Thomas Friedman for his suggestions on how to whore out everything you own in order to keep a roof over your head and stomach filled.

Uber, Lyft, Airbnb and other atrocities are perfect of examples of the commodification of our lives in which our cars and even homes become commodities to be whored out to whomever so we can survive.

Rock and roll? Just another commodity. They play rock songs at Republican Conventions for God’s sake. Revolution? An ad campaign can blazen the word revolution across ads for all sorts of things with the result being millions in profits. Woodstock? Commodity. Hippies? Commodity. Punks? Another commodity,  nothing but a hair style. Piercings? Commodity? Tattoos, the original form of ultimate rebellion? Commodity.

All of these things once had a deep meaning which went quite a ways against the corporate capitalist consumption as a way of life culture. In fact, most of these things were rebellions against that sort of sleaze, a giant middle finger and that cheapening of all life other than a dollar bill.

Now they all have no meaning other than money objects for some capitalist to make money off of. All of their rebellion and the brilliant and even revolutionary critiques they had of society have been sucked out of them. Any of those things might as well be another product in a bin at Walmart.

Alt Left: Do Not Eat Processed Meats with Nitrates or Nitrates

I am just learning this right now. The nitrates are added to processed meats such as luncheon meats, bacon, ham, sausages, pepperoni, etc. to help preserve them and to give them the pink color. Most meat that has that pink color is probably bad for you.

The nitrates and nitrites themselves are not harmful. Many vegetables have them. However, when added to meats, especially red meats, the nitrates interact with chemicals in the meat to produce nitrosamines, which are not only bad for your heart but are also a strong carcinogen.

We’ve known this for a long time now. There was a big warning leveled against these meats in the mid-1970’s.

Back then the FDA was pro-consumer, unlike now when it is viciously anti-consumer, pro-business, and anti-public health. The FDA gave the meat industry three months to prove that nitrates in meat were harmless. They couldn’t do it. Instead they made up a lie that nitrates were required to keep botulism out of food.

But meats cured without nitrates have been used for decades and there hasn’t been one case of botulism. Most botulism comes from canned foods, often canned vegetables. The can is often very old and many times the botulism causes a bulge in the can. Never eat out of any can that has developed an odd bulge in it.

In 1980, Republicans came in and a consumer and public health-hostile and pro-business FDA came in and the nitrate controversy went away. It awakened again a few years ago when British papers published studies showing that processed meats with nitrates caused thousands of cases of cancer per year in the UK. This was called the bacon scare.

The industry has been lying shamelessly about these carcinogens in our foods for almost fifty years now. Their line came right out of the tobacco industry’s playbook.

There are many websites on the Net with articles about the fake nitrate scare and even how nitrates are good for you. I just realized that I bought a package of turkey hot dogs and one of ground turkey meat that both had sodium nitrite in it.

There’s really no safe amount of this stuff you can eat. Even eating one nitrate hot dog a day significantly increases your risk of dying of cancer, typically colon cancer. If you know what’s good for you, you will quit eating this junk right now.

There are not a lot of nitrate-free processed meats out there, but there are some. There are completely safe traditional ways to cure meats that work just as well as nitrates. But the curing process can take up to 18 months. Meat companies want their meats to cure rapidly. Waiting around for them to cure cuts into profits.

So we see once again how the maximize profits directive of capitalism once again puts money and profits over human lives. Capitalism literally murders or kills humans just so other humans can make a buck. I hope you fanboys are proud of that fancy free market of yours.

Author Stephen King on Trump

Here.

He was years ahead of his time in seeing this phenomenon:

I had written about such men before. In The Dead Zone, Greg Stillson is a door-to-door Bible salesman with a gift of gab, a ready wit, and the common touch. He is laughed at when he runs for mayor in his small New England town, but he wins.

He is laughed at when he runs for the House of Representatives (part of his platform is a promise to rocket America’s trash into outer space), but he wins again. When Johnny Smith, the novel’s precognitive hero, shakes his hand, he realizes that some day Stillson is going to laugh and joke his way into the White House, where he will start World War Three.

Anyone see/read that one?

…started thinking Donald Trump might win the presidency in September of 2016. By the end of October, I was almost sure. Thus, when the election night upset happened, I was dismayed but not particularly surprised. I didn’t even think it was much of an upset, in spite of the Huffington Post aggregate poll, which gave Hillary Clinton a 98% chance of winning – an example of wishful thinking if ever there were one.

Some of my belief arose from the signage I was seeing. I’m from northern New England, and in the run-up to the election I saw hundreds of Trump-Pence signs and bumper stickers but almost none for Clinton-Kaine.

To me this didn’t mean there were no Clinton supporters in the houses I passed or the cars ahead of me on Route 302; what it did seem to mean was that the Clinton supporters weren’t particularly invested. This was not the case with the Trump people, who tended to have billboard-sized signage in their yards and sometimes two stickers on their cars (TRUMP-PENCE on the left; HILLARY IS A CRIMINAL on the right).

Brexit also troubled me. Most of the commentators brushed its importance aside, saying that the issue of whether or not Britain should leave the EU was very different from that of who should become the American president, and besides, British and American voters were very different animals.

I agreed with neither assessment, because there was a vibe in the air during most of 2016, a feeling that people were both frightened of the status quo and sick of it. Voters saw a vast and overloaded apple cart lumbering past them. They wanted to upset the motherfucker and would worry about picking up those spilled apples later. Or just leave them to rot.

Clinton voters were convinced she’d win, even if they saw her as a ho-hum candidate at best. Many did not even bother going to the polls, which was a large (and largely unstated) factor in her loss. Trump voters, on the other hand, could not wait to pull those levers. They didn’t just want change; they wanted a man on horseback. Trump filled the bill.

Alt Left: Praise for the Conservative Left

Although the SJW author of the piece that quotes Selbourne in the New Statesman attacks Selbourne, what Selbourne describes is nothing less than the Alt Left itself.
In a very early bulletin board post, a poster described my Alternative Left as “conservative Leftists.” When Norman Mailer ran for mayor of New York in 1969, he called himself a left conservative. Mailer has continued to describe himself as a left conservative to this day.
Well, that’s exactly what we are.
We are somewhat socially conservative on the Cultural Left Freakshow, but we are Left on everything else. According to our dispensation, Selbourne would be Alt Left, as he despises the moronic SJW Left. And as he brilliantly points out, the unlimited freedoms (not really unlimited though as look at how SJW Feminism wants to stop heterosexual flirting, dating and sex) to be as weird and crazy as you want are really the freedoms of neoliberalism.
This is radical individualism taken to its ultimate without any regard for the good of society. And radical individualism in Culture goes right along with radical individualism is business and the rest of society. If government has to get out of the lives of all the SJW freaks, then obviously it has to get out of the lives of US business and the rich too, right?

Those who want the right to choose, and who object to moral or social restraint as ‘authoritarian’, cannot logically object to the rights of Capital to do whatever it wants also.

Capitalism runs on a culture of individualism, and radical individualism is the ultimate capitalist society. Capitalists say, “There is no such thing as society.”
And in a Cultural Left world where everyone is running around flying their freak flag du jour, there’s no society either. Everyone has a different hair color. Everyone has a different sexual micro-orientation and gender micro-identity.
Everyone is divided against everyone else. The women workers are egged on to hate the male workers. The Black workers are egged on to hate the White workers. The gay workers are encouraged to hate the straight workers. The tranny workers are prompted to hate the cisgender workers. Everyone hates everyone. No one works together on any societal goals because everyone hates each other too much.
Now that the working class is divided into factions at each other’s throats, society is demolished, all humans are atomized, and the capitalists can go on their merry rapacious way, destroying everything in their path, including whatever is left of society, like they always do.

In fact, we are now landed with a “Left” concept of freedom which is little different from Milton Friedman’s “right to choose”, a Libertarianism that has overshadowed the social in what used to be socialism. It is itself a market freedom; after all, self-restraint has less market worth than self-indulgence.

I like how he describes the Cultural Left as the free market of culture. That’s exactly what it is!

David Selbourne, in the left-of-center New Statesmen, writes::
With socialism at the end of its historical evolution, the “Left” now lacks a coherent sense of what progress is. It has only a ragbag of causes and issues, rational and irrational, urgent and idle: a politics of personal rights and ‘lifestyle choices’, of anti-racism and environmental protection, of multicultural separatism, individual identity and gender, and much else besides.
Neither rhyme nor reason — and certainly not socialist reason — can be made of it, especially when mere transgression is confused with progress.
In fact, we are now landed with a “Left” concept of freedom which is little different from Milton Friedman’s “right to choose”, a Libertarianism that has overshadowed the social in what used to be socialism. It is itself a market freedom; after all, self-restraint has less market worth than self-indulgence. Nor is today’s ‘freedom’n’liberty’, whether Right or ‘Left’, the freedom fought for in the Reformation or in the revolutionary overthrow of the anciens régimes. It is not the freedom for which the 19th-century emancipationists and the suffragettes struggled. It is the freedom to do what one wants and the devil take the hindmost. No wonder that the far Right is advancing.
There is ignorance too in this pseudo-Left Libertarianism. It is reactionary, not progressive, to promote the expansion of individual freedoms without regard to the interests of the social order as a whole. Those who want the right to choose, and who object to moral or social restraint as ‘authoritarian’, cannot logically object to the rights of Capital to do whatever it wants also. The rapacious equity trader has as much right to be free as you or me; these ‘rights’ differ only in scale and consequence, not in essence.

I would actually agree with the following, and this is why I am an extreme statist at heart because face facts, socialism is statism taken to its ultimate ends.
From the Libertarian author:

It grabbed the methods of conservatism, embracing state power as the means of planning permissable changes and preventing others.

We don’t hate the state. We love the state! The state is the people personified as a single governmental entity, acting in the interests of the people to whom it serves, as Mao points out.

“The effort to escape from State control has always been the sign of liberty; the effort to enforce State control has always been the sign of Conservative reaction.” For this reason: “Socialism, in so far as it postulates State control, is Conservative in thought.”
Oliver Brett, Defense of Liberty, 1922

Fine. We are conservatives then. We are the Conservative Left!

Professor E. Harris Harbison of Princeton, concurred: “The truly ‘radical’ movement of the later medieval and early modern period was the growth of economic individualism, not the appearance of a few communistic books, sects, and communities. Against the background of nineteenth century individualism, ‘radical’ is today almost synonymous with ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’. …It is essential to the understanding of utopian socialism to remember that when it first appeared in European history as a fairly consistent theory, it was very largely a reactionary protest against a new, ‘progressive’ and poorly understood economic movement, an appeal to turn the clock backward.”
Socialism and Modern Life, 1952

Fine, not a problem! I was always wondering when the Rightists and Libertarians would reclaim the word liberal.

Walter Lippman wrote: “…I insist that collectivism, which replaces the free market by coercive centralized authority, is reactionary in the exact sense of the word.”
Carl A. Keyser, Spare None: the Federal Octopus: How it Grew and Other Tales, 1972
 

Sounds good.
Liberal historically has never meant anything like US social liberalism. In most of the world, liberal is a dirty word. It’s synonymous with neoliberalism. Liberalism in economics means classical liberal or neoclassical economics. It’s Ricardo and Smith all the way to Mises and Hayek, without stopping.
In the rest of the world, it tends to mean the “free minds and free markets” garbage that American reactionary foreign policy claims to support in their lying propaganda. Note once again the tie-in of social freedoms with freedom of Capital. You want free elections, gay rights, feminism, porn, civil liberties and the rest? Fine, you have to let the market run free with no restictions from the state whatsoever.
According to this nonsense, you can’t have free minds without free markets, and you can’t have free markets without free minds. Any restrictions on the free market are automatically symptomatic of a dictatorship or authoritarian regime.
This is why every Left government on Earth immediately gets called a dictatorship by US foreign policy. Because to the sick American way, socialism in any way,  shape or form is automatically undemocratic and dictatorial by its very nature.
This nonsense places economics over politics as Economics Uber Alles. Here economics determines the nature of the state.
If the market is free, you have a democracy automatically, no questions asked. Never mind the death squads that just murdered 200,000 people and all the peaceful opposition, the election that was just stolen, the US sponsored coup to “restore democracy” that resulted in the 17 year long “democracy saving” dictatorship, the politicized police, army, judiciary, the rich owning all the media and rendering freedom of speech a sick joke, the money-based elections giving rise to the “democracy of the dollar” and the dictatorship over the people.
And if  you have any type of socialism, you automatically have a dictatorship. I suppose Norway and Sweden must be dictatorships then. Never mind that you have the freest and fairest elections on Earth as they have in Venezuela. No matter. Elections can never be free enough in a socialist country. Even if they are the freest and fairest elections on Earth, it’s automatically a dictatorship simply by dint of being socialist.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

China is a Communist Country, Not a Capitalist Country

US rightwingers keep saying that China is a capitalist country or it is the most capitalist country on Earth.
China is one of the most Communist or socialist states on Earth today. Fully 45% of the Chinese economy is publicly owned, and it does extremely well. Much of the very high economic growth has come from the public sector. How on Earth can China be capitalist when 45% of the economy is state-owned?
But realize that all public firms in China operate on the profit model. They all compete with each other, so you have a steel mill run by one city competing with a steel mill run by another city. Many of the fastest growing industries are run at the municipality level. Also, China’s fully state-owned firms do very well. In fact, Republicans say that China’s public firms are “not fair” because American capitalist corporations can’t compete against them. The reason is that China’s firms get subsidies from the state. Poor capitalist corporations! They’re too inefficient to compete against Communist state owned firms. Poor babies.
You realize that the state owns every single inch of land in China? How is that possible in a capitalist country? Capitalism is primarily based on the private ownership of land. No private ownership of land, no capitalism. Real simple.
I would also point out that the Chinese state spends a tremendous amount of money on its people. Since 45% of the whole economy goes directly to the state, they have a lot of money to spend. And they spend it very wisely too. They mostly spend it on their own people in one way or another.
As I understand it, US capitalists believe in a minimal state, and there is nothing they hate more than state spending. Huge state spending is seen as wasteful tax and spend policies by all capitalists everywhere. Wherever you have massive state spending, you do not have a capitalist system.
But I would like to thank US rightwingers for praising China, the finest example of modern Communism.

The Rich Only Support Democracy when the Elected State Serves their Class Interests, Otherwise They Try to Overthrow It

Zamfir: Thanks Robert. I appreciate the site, and it’s nice to feel welcome.
Obviously one problem in discussing this is that terms like ‘left’ and ‘right’ or ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ have been given all kinds of different meanings. If economic conservatism is identified with free market ideology then I’m pretty ambivalent about that, at best. And if it’s identified with support for whatever this internationalist economic system is that we have now, I’m against it.
I find it very weird that people who are conservative about social and cultural issues often support “economic conservatism” of that kind. It’s so clear that these things are incompatible! Anyway I certainly have no problem with socialism per se. I would only disagree with certain versions, or cases where I believe socialism ends up being destructive of healthy families and cultures (in much the same way that capitalism can be).
As for democracy I’m not sure what I think about it. I think I’m a reactionary to the extent that I don’t believe that democracy, or any other specific system or procedure, is always good or always essential to a good society. My sense is that some democracies or kinds of democracy are fine, while others are really bad. It all depends on some many factors aside from the system or procedure itself.
I do want a society where the interests of most people, including the poor, are taken into account fairly. But I don’t see any reason why that could never happen in a non-democratic state. Or, more precisely, for anything that’s good about some democracies, I don’t see why certain non-democratic regimes couldn’t also have those good things; it would all depend on other factors such as the culture and history of the people, their typical behavior and beliefs, etc.
So I guess I’d support coups against democratic regimes in some cases–though things would have to be pretty bad–and also against non-democratic regimes in some cases. I don’t think coups are always bad. (In fact, that’s one thing that seems silly about a lot of rigid ‘conservative’ ideology–the wish to preserve order and the status quo no matter how terrible it’s become…)
You say the rich don’t support democracy. I wonder if that’s true. Maybe they don’t support the ideal of democracy, for the reasons you mentioned. But, again, bearing in mind the looseness of terminology here, they sure do seem to support systems that we normally call “democratic”. Is the US a democracy in your view?
Are England or Ireland or Canada democracies? If so, then I don’t agree that the rich never want democracy. My sense is that they long ago figured out how to manipulate these kinds of systems to get the results they want. They manage the perceptions and values of the masses so that they always end up “freely choosing” the same garbage that the elites wanted all along.
A good question is whether this is an inevitable feature of democracy. (I don’t know the answer.) It could be that in any feasible form of democracy, no matter how close it gets to the ideal, you end up with powerful interests rigging the process to maximize their own wealth and power. And I don’t like that, because I want the interests of ordinary people to be taken into account. Ironically, then, I’m skeptical about many forms of democracy because I think the masses deserve to have a say.
So I’d be against democracy in cases where ‘democratic’ systems are hijacked by elites and used against the people. That’s what’s happening in most of the western world, I’d say. Not to say I’d support a coup in this situation–and certainly not if the point of the coup was to install an even more extreme form of exploitation. But I’m not entirely sure what to say about democracy. I think the reactionary critique has merit. (But then, don’t communists also criticize democracy for roughly similar reasons?)

The Communist view is that seeking power peacefully would be a great idea except the ruling classes will never allow it to happen. They say that power never gives up without a fight, and I believe that they are correct. Nevertheless, most Communists support Venezuela, Nicaragua and only leftwing democratic countries. But the Communists would say, “Look what happens why you try to take power peacefully. You get Nicaragua, Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador, Paraguay, Honduras, Haiti, and even Argentina.”
The ruling class will just overthrow the democratic Left state any way they can, always using anti-democratic means to do so. That’s why Lenin called people who supported the peaceful road to socialism “parliamentary cretins.” He thought it was a great idea but it would never work because the rich would never allow the Left to take power peacefully.
The Communist view is also that you never have democracy under capitalism anyway, as the capitalists and the rich always ending ruling the state one way or another through all sorts of means. And yes, the rich and the capitalists always take over all the media in any capitalist country as you said, they use it to shape the view of the people to support the class politics of the rich. Such support being called false consciousness.
Gramsci said that the ruling class took over the entire culture in capitalist countries and brainwashed the masses into supporting the project of the rich. They did this via cultural hegemony. Marx said that the culture of the rich is always the popular culture in any capitalist country. So the ruling class turns all of us into “little rich people” or “little capitalists” to support their project. They brainwash us into thinking we are the same class as the rich and that we are all capitalists ourselves, so we should support Capital. These are lies, but most Americans are easily fooled.
Ralph Nader called this “going corporate” or “thinking corporate.” He says that in the US, most people adopt the mindset of the corporations and think of themselves are part of the corporate structure whether they are or not. If everyone is part of the corporate structure, then what’s good for corporations is good for all of us, which is the project of the Republican Party, neoliberalism everywhere, the Latin American rich, etc. It’s a big fat lie, but people want to be rich and a lot of workers want to think of themselves are busy little capitalist money-making, go-getter, can-do, Bossterist entrepreneurs because it seems to cool to own your own business.
And the Communists would call this false consciousness and their argument would be that under capitalism, most people adopt false consciousness.
I think in the US, the rich see the tide coming and the rule of the rich is going to end so they want to lock in as much of the state as possible by stacking the courts, gutting the safety net, massive tax cuts that will be impossible to get rid of, and that Constitutional Convention they are two states away from getting where they want to rewrite the whole US Constitution to lock in rule by the rich for as long as possible. The rich see the writing on the wall. That’s why they came up with the computerized elections scam, so they could steal elections as long as people kept voting against the rich.
The gerrymandering of districts now makes it almost impossible to get rid of Republican majorities on state representatives in the House and in Senators and Assemblymen in the states. It’s all locked in.
So as the rich saw the tide turning and demographics moving against them, they instituted a full court press to do all sorts of extremely anti-democratic stuff to stay in power. If the people would just vote for them anyway, they would not have to do that, but apparently most Americans have now turned away from the politics of the rich, so the rich will have to lie, cheat, and steal to stay in power from now on.
Also they elected Donald Trump, by far the most corrupt, authoritarian and even outright fascist leader this country has ever had. And this follows too. Whenever there is a popular movement against the rich and the capitalists, the rich and the capitalists always, always, always resort of fascism to stay in power. This has been proven endlessly over time, even in Europe. Trotsky had some great things to say about this. Check out “Thermidor.” Trotsky truly understood what fascism was all about. It is a desperate last ditch move by the ruling class to seize power in the face of an uprising from the Left.
The rich and the capitalists are determined to stay in power, by hook or by crook, by any means necessary, and they will lie, cheat, steal and kill as many people as they have to just to keep the Left out of power. They simply will not allow the Left to rule. They must rule and if they are out of  power, they will use any antidemocratic means to get power back.
Which is the story of the CIA, the Pentagon and 100% of US foreign policy since 1945 and even before then. Read Samuel Butler.
I mean, we on the Left generally allow the Right to take power if they do so democratically. Sure they destroy everything like they always do, but most of us are committed to the democratic means of seeking power. Even most Communist parties will not take up arms against any rightwing government, saying they prefer to seek power by peaceful means. Typically, the CP will issue a statement that the nation is not in a revolutionary situation right now. There are objective conditions under which a nation is said to be in a revolutionary situation. I’m sure you can recall a few. It is then and only then that most CP’s will go underground and issue a call to take up arms.
Frankly, almost all Left insurgencies postwar were defensive. The Left allowed the Right to take power and then the Right started running around killing people. Usually the Left sat there for a while and let themselves get killed before taking up power. I know the Viet Cong just sat there from 1954-1960 while the rightwing Vietnamese government ran amok in the countryside, murdering 80,000 Communists in six years. They kept asking the North Vietnamese for permission to take up arms, but the North kept denying it.
The Colombian, Salvadoran and Guatemalan guerrillas only took up guns after the state had been running about murdering them unarmed for years. The Salvadoran guerrillas said they got tired of sitting in their homes waiting for the rightwing state to come kill them, and they decided that if the state was going to come kill them anyway, they might as well pick up a gun and defend themselves. They also took up arms because the Right kept stealing elections by fraud.
The Right had cut off all methods of seeking power peacefully, so the Left picked up guns. The message is if you elect a leftwing government, sooner or later the Right will overthrow it and then there will be a reign of terror where many Leftists will be murdered. Knowing that, if you were a Leftist in some country, would you not be afraid to put the Left in power knowing you stood a good chance of being murdered once the inevitable rightwing coup took place?
The Colombian and Honduran governments only stay in power by killing people. Lots of people. The Greek Communists only took up arms after the government had been killing them for some time.
Also once a Left government is overthrown by the rich and the capitalists, the new Rightist government institutes a reign of terror where they slaughter the defeated Left for many years. This went on for decades after 1954 in Guatemala, and it goes on still today. After Aristide was overthrown, the rightwing government murdered 3,000 of his supporters.
After Allende was overthrown, Pinochet murdered 15,000 people over a decade and a half. A threat from the Left prompted the Indonesian government to fake a Left coup and murder 1 million Communists in a couple of months. Even before the Korean War broke out, from 1948-1950, the South Korean government killed hundreds of thousands of Communists in the South.
As they withdrew when the North attacked, the South Koreans killed South Korean Communists everywhere they went. After the fascist coup in Argentina, the government decimated the Left, murdering 30,000 mostly unarmed supporters of the Left. The same thing happened in Bolivia with the Banzer Plan when Hugo Banzer took power after the tin miners briefly sought power. The new rightwing government in Brazil is already starting to murder members of the former Left ruling party. They’re not going to stop.
After the fascist coup in Ukraine, the Communist Party was outlawed and many of its members were murdered. War was declared on labor unions. Workers in one union were chained to a heater inside the building and the building was set on fire.
The party supported by half the population (the Russian speakers and their supporters) the Party of Regions, was outlawed, a number of its deputies were murdered and there were attempts to murder the leader of the party, lastly by setting his house on fire which set his neighbor’s house on fire instead. He fled to Russia. Now half the population and all of the Russian speakers had not party to represent them, which is why they took up arms. They were locked out of power.

A Capitalist Society Is a Society of Liars

As noted earlier, it is not often noted, but it is true that the Cultural Left turns most of us into liars – it creates a society of liars. In order not to be bigoted and racist, to keep our jobs, our careers and our friendships, we are mandated to lie. The truth leads to personal destruction. This has terribly corrosive effects of the glue that binds society together, which is basic honesty and trust.
Capitalism already does that to a vast degree anyway. Most people in a capitalist society have a peculiar type of philosophical outlook. The moral philosophy under capitalism looks like this:

  • A fact is anything that makes them more money.
  • A lie is anything that causes them to lose money.

Greed completely blinds human beings and makes them little more than slavering wild beasts. This is another problem of capitalism that you capitalist fanboys never discuss. What do you have to say about ow capitalism creates huge societies of pathological liars as a direct consequence of its economic system? What’s so good about that? Who wants to live in a society of liars? I don’t. Do you? Why?

Most Societies Will Always Have a 1%

Jason Y: Another thought is that having a 1 percent isn’t so bad – if only they’d throw out bigger scraps. Isn’t that the Trump message?

You are always going to have a 1% in most societies, surely in all capitalist societies. Even Sweden has some very rich people there. It’s just that the rich in places like Sweden are a lot less rich compared to the rich here. Things are much more equal over there. Most people are more or less some version of middle class. Very rich and very poor people are not common.
The rich will never throw out larger scraps to everyone else. Why should they? Give me one reason why the rich would ever throw out larger scraps for everyone else. What for?
To be nice? I got some news for you. Rich people aren’t very nice. If they were nice, they wouldn’t be rich. They didn’t get rich by being nice. In fact, most of them got rich by being quite the opposite. In any capitalist society the rich are among the worst people in the country. Capitalism is like a pond – the scum rises to the top.
Of course that is Trump’s message though in a sense – trickle down economics. Trickle down economics says that the more money you give to the rich, the more they will share it with the rest of us. It is truly amazing how many White Americans I have met who actually believe this tripe. One thing I have noted is that this year I have seen more Americans catching on to the scam of supply side economics and the general insanity of Republican economics than ever before.
You can’t fool all the people all the time.
And I would add another – you can’t fool people forever.
My attitude is that I don’t care if some people are rich. We had rich people in the 1950’s when we had a 90% marginal tax rate on millionaires. That’s fine with me. But those who have must share with those who have not. If they don’t want to, fine, then we the People (the State) will simply use force to take money away from the rich and give it to everyone else. That means guns, cops, agents, the threat of incarceration, and especially taxation.

Amazon Is Out to Kill Your Business (and Your Job)

Here.
I am starting to think that this company is an out and out menace. Their CEO Jeff Bezos is a real piece of crap, a radical rightwing Libertarian like so many awful IT CEO’s.
But worst is that Amazon’s model is apparently to replace every business in US and become a single corporation, WorldCo apparently, that has a monopoly on most business in the US and maybe later on the world.
No matter what your business is in the US, Amazon probably has you in its sights sooner or later.
Amazon is a menace.
 
 
 

How Those Hip, Groovy, Cool IT Capitalists Are Actually Some of the Worst Capitalists Ever

There was this idea that the Internet capitalists were somehow going to be different from the rest of the capitalists. The Internet guys were cool, hip, groovy and right on.
The truth is that the IT capitalists have actually turned out to be some of the worst capitalists of them all!
The brick and mortar model is far better for consumers than horrific ecommerce, where consumer abuse is the name of the game, and customer service is a nonexistent concept.
Ever noticed that if you ever have a problem with a product, you can always take it back to the brick and mortar store and get the matter cleared up to your satisfaction? That’s customer service at the brick and mortar level. It’s almost always superb because in brick and mortar, the customer is always right.
Because ecommerce has severed the face to face ties that humanize and create the great customer service model at the brick mortar level, the motto in ecommerce is the customer is always a sucker to be milked, ripped off, and hung out to dry. Ever tried to get your money back on software? I have. Suppose your software simply does not work. It’s happened to me. Too bad there are no refunds! I mean maybe there are refunds, but good luck getting one because all software companies have destroyed the notion of customer service. There simply is no customer service desk at most IT corporations. There’s no such thing.

A Rogue’s Gallery of IT CEO’s

Look at the examples.
Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, and a truly horrible human being. Amazon’s corporate culture is one of the worst in the US and for the life of me, I do not know why anyone would work at this modern day IT salt mine there unless they were a masochist. Bezos orders all higher level employees to be at each other throats all the time, and everyone is trying to backstab and sabotage everyone else so they can steal that person’s job.
Quite a few people said that working for Amazon ruined their mental and physical health. The warehouse workers are horrifically abused, worked like whipped pack animals and forced to work in sweltering heat until they collapse. They are poorly paid and are frankly some of the worst-treated workers in America today. Psychopath Bezos delights in this dog eat dog law of the jungle atmosphere, as he feels that this is what has driven his company’s success. That’s dubious to me. At any rate, what of the human tool?
Bill Gates’ behavior when running his corporation was about as sociopathic as any career criminal.
(((Steve Ballmer))), his second in command, is an obvious psychopath and a terrifying man.
(((Ralph Ellison))), CEO of Oracle is an extreme narcissist and all-around lousy person. He’s basically a Libertarian like so many capitalists.
(((Mark Zuckerberg))) of Facebook out and out ripped off the idea for Facebook from a fellow college student he developed it with while never giving his partner a nickel.
If you study enough of these guys, you will notice how many of them stole their way to the top.
Microsoft stole just about every piece of software they ever developed. They violated endless patents. They cheated and backstabbed every single company that partnered with them. They tore up and violated every legal contract they ever signed. Bill Gates was the Ted Bundy of the IT corporate world.
Scott MacNealy, head of Sun Enterprises, was hero of the new geek Net culture. MacNealy slyly made use of monopoly law to go after Microsoft, and that was a very good thing. On the other hand, MacNealy was a Libertarian like so many capitalists, and it was clear to anyone that MacNealy was only anti-monopoly because a monopoly was ruining his business and would have loved nothing more than for Sun, victim of  monopoly, to become a monopoly itself and victimize its own rivals.
Even Steve Jobs was said to be an awful boss, a tyrant who terrorized all of his employees. He was an A-1 asshole of the first degree.
The founder of the Adultfriender dating site Andrew Conru ran an extremely amoral business, was an extreme psychopath and was hated by everyone who worked for him. His site, like most dating sites, is run on an organized crime model. For one thing, overbilling is standard practice and not an error. The FTC has issued at indictment against the company for systematic billing fraud. The overwhelming majority of dating sites and almost almost 100% of the sexually explicit ones are nothing but criminal enterprises run by organized crime masquerading as legitimate businesses. The vast majority of the CEO’s of dating sites belong in prison for fraud. The whole industry is incredibly enough run on an actual Fraud Model.
Former founder and CEO of Uber (((Travis Kalanick))) is a narcissistic psychopath and a sexist to boot. His corporate bro culture is horrible to their female employees, and the corporate environment is toxic and terrifying. Uber drivers are terribly abused, dishonestly called independent contractors, receive no benefits whatsoever, and are often paid below the minimum wage.
You could always boycott Uber and try Lyft, but Lyft is almost as bad as Uber.
Let’s hear it for the new sharing economy! Hip, hip, hooray!
Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal, is a monster of a man with truly horrifying political views. He believes society should be ruled by an aristocratic elite, no doubt especially Internet billionaires, has a near-monarchical view of the state and displays a profound hatred for democracy, which he wants to phase out as it gets in the way of aristocratic royalist billionaire rule.
Elon Musk is no good. All you decent humans need to quit idolizing this capitalist POS right now. He’s the latest groovy businessman that everyone loves and idolizes.
He is very smart, this is true. He has some good ideas, this is true.
But have you seen how he runs his factories? Workers at his factories have long complained of severe abuse by management. The rot starts at the top with Musk and extends all the way down. They are poorly paid, seriously abused, and not allowed to from unions. Musk has arrogantly refused to even look at these problems and insists that they do not exist. He seems to have contempt for his own workers like so many capitalists. This guy is not the latest Tech Age groovy billionaire idol of humanity. He’s just another piece of crap capitalist like all the rest of them.
 

Microsoft – A Debacle for Humanity: How One Corporation Caused Untold Damage to the World Economy, Cost Society Untold $Billions, Severely Damaged Human Productivity, and Even Significantly Set Back Human Progress

Microsoft was and is still an abusive monopoly which ripped off society for billions of dollars, caused vast losses to the world economy, and even set back technological progress for all of mankind by a significant amount. You had to buy Microsoft Windows, and Microsoft Windows was always a piece of crap.

Think of how much this worthless to lousy to dysfunctional OS cost consumers, business, and society due to its crappy nature.
You are always hearing that “the system is down” right, whenever you go anywhere? The ATM is down half the time you go there. Call random businesses and 10-20% of them will tell you “the system is down.” I will bet you that that is a Windows system that has crashed at that enterprise.

Windows’ endless dysfunction and crashing caused a tremendous amount of damage to the US military who moronically decided to use Windows all through our country’s fighting forces for just about everything. Great. A computer-based military where the system always crashes. I’m sure they’re going to win every war they fight.

Basically, all of humanity was forced to use a glaringly obviously inferior product for all of its computing needs. This inferior product had constant problems which drove a spike through the heart of productivity at the individual, business, nonprofit, and government level. All of humanity was using inferior computer systems that barely worked and failed all the time.

All of this time, there were much superior systems out there which could have beaten Windows if they only had a chance. Amiga OS was always one of finest ever developed. BeOS was an outstanding OS, amazingly great. OS/2 was an out of the world OS. All of these OS’s were fantastic at multitasking and even multithreading. People routinely ran up to 80 applications at a time on OS/2 with little or no slowdown. BeOS was about that good and may have even been faster. But with a monopoly on the desktop where everyone was forced to use Windows, all of these other OS’s died a sad death.

Unix has long ruled at the university and corporate level, and much of the Net runs of Unix. Larger server systems have always run on Unix at the level of the large enterprise, be it government, corporate, or nonprofit. But Unix has never really broken in on the desktop where Windows still reigns. Windows is much better now than it was in the Windows 95 era (Remember how horrible that OS was?). I am currently running Windows 7, which is the best Windows I ever run, but it’s still crap. It suffers from unfixable file corruption and sometimes needs a hard reboot or goes down altogether.

Unix on the other hand is virtually uncrashable. It is very hard to take down a Unix system. They are nearly resistant to crashing. File corruption is virtually nonexistent on Unix because of Journaling File Systems and text files instead the idiotic and flawed Registry of Windows. The Registry is so flawed that it can probably never be fixed. As long as the Registry exists, Windows will continue to be slow, hog memory and hard drive, be awful at multitasking, crash your applications, suffer irreparable file corruption, and go down hard and need hard reboots.

Mac OS is an excellent OS now that it runs on a Unix core. Mac OS is almost uncrashable now, and it never or almost never needs to be reinstalled. Plug and Play is as easy as plugging in any electronic device in your house, whereas Windows plug and play has always been horrible, and it still is here at Windows 7.
Windows also harmed the world economy by forcing us to shell out untold billions for OS’s, word processors, browsers, databases, spreadsheets, and presentation programs.

Microsoft of course leveraged its OS monopoly to create browser, database, spreadsheet, and presentation monopolies. All of these products were quite expensive. In the process, many excellent word processors (remember Wordperfect 5.1?), spreadsheets, databases, and presentation products were all destroyed. It didn’t matter how good they were. It didn’t matter if they were better or even vastly better than their Microsoft competitors (Access was always junk) because due to the OS monopoly, none of the competitors in this other software stood a chance.

The truth is that all of this stuff could have been had for free all along. Linux is free and open source, and that is one of the reasons why it is so great. Firefox and Opera are also free now, and Firefox is also open source and has been taken over by Sun. Free online email programs like Gmail have cut significantly into the market share of Outlook Express (always awful – Eudora was so much better) and Outlook.

Open Office, now taken over by Sun, is free and is starting to give Word, Access, Excel, and Powerpoint a run for their money. I use Word Writer all the time, and it’s just as good as Word by now. If the world moves to free browsers, OS’s, word processors, chat software (Skype), spreadsheets, databases, and presentation software, think of how much money can be saved at the individual, business, nonprofit, education, and government level! It will be a great step forward for humanity.

There is no way for Microsoft to compete with a free product of course, so we will hopefully begin to slowly destroy this diabolical corporation, one of the worst ones that ever existed.

"Networking Marketing is Capitalist Exploitation on Steroids," by Magneto

Networking Marketing is Capitalist Exploitation on Steroids

By Magneto

Many of you may have had the misfortune of getting caught up in a network marketing multi-level marketing scam in the past. My own involvement in such an MLM scam is what eventually caused me to reject capitalism outright and start believing in socialism. Network marketing is capitalism on steroids. Normal capitalism is exploitation but at least in normal capitalism the worker class gets paid at least something. In network marketing you are working to make the top 1 percent rich and you are doing this for free.
Usually it starts out that an old friend will call you up and talk about how excited they are about their new business. A few days later they will call you again and see if you are interested in meeting to discuss their new “business”. If you agree to meet, they will typically show you a bunch of graphs and charts which claim you can become a millionaire within 5 years by following their program. What they don’t tell you is that 99% of people who sign up into MLM scams do not make any money at all from it. It’s literally only one out of a hundred people that profits from this.
Even worse is that most MLM companies use cult mind-control tactics to keep you from leaving their pyramid scheme. They use guilt programming and are constantly saying “Only losers quit this business”. That is a sure-fire sign that an organization is a cult when the leaders are constantly telling their followers to never leave the organization.
Network marketing companies thrive on naive young people who have never come in contact with an MLM pyramid scheme before. Older people are more mature and knowledgeable and know that pyramid schemes are wrong. But young people are easy to trick into these things because they have no experience of it. That’s why it is the duty of older people to warn younger people to never fall into these scams. No adult ever took the time to warn me when I was younger about the dangers of MLM’s, so I was just another victim of these pyramid scams.
I finally realized how immoral these types of businesses are, and I left the scam company and cut off all contact with the members of it. Donald Trump himself has a network marketing company, so that is another sign that he is just a greedy bastard who doesn’t give a shit about the common man and will do anything to exploit them so he can become rich. I realized that the logic that the MLM leaders use to justify their actions is entirely wrong. Society cannot function like this – where 1 percent manipulates the other 99 percent so that the 1 percent have all the money and the 99 percent have nothing.
Life is about more than money, but if you hear MLM leaders talk in their public speeches, you get the impression that money is all they care about. All they talk about is their expensive houses, cars and gadgets. What they don’t tell you is that 99 people had to fail in order for one person to get rich. The dreams of the MLM leaders are built on the blood, sweat, and tears of the 99 losers in the pyramid scheme.
A few common MLM’s that you should be very careful of are as followers:

  • Amway
  • Empower Network
  • Mary Kay
  • Herbalife
  • Nu Skin
  • Avon
  • Forever Living
  • Young Living

If you ever get invited or tricked into attending an MLM meeting, leave immediately. Do not even entertain the words of the MLM presenter. He will try to use a lot of logic and tricks to brainwash you into joining. Network Marketing and MLM’s are evil cults that thrive on manipulating ignorant people into joining. If we become active in warning people to avoid wasting their time and lives by joining such cults, we can save a lot of people and also stop the MLM’s because without a constant supply of new members, such pyramid schemes would collapse overnight.

DNC Democrats Burn in Hell

Here.
Take your studies and stick em where the sun don’t shine. They’re not in parallel markets anyway. ATT and Time Warner “compete” in the cable market. In a typical city, you have one DSL provider and one cable provider.  You also have one satellite provider. In truth,  none of them compete at all. They all offer extremely slow service and criminally usurious rates. High speed Internet is much faster and much cheaper in the rest of the world where the government often owns the lines. We capitalist retards in the US let the capitalist crooks build their own phone lines and lay their own cable, hence, every city has a monopoly DSL and phone carrier and a monopoly cable carrier. Cable service is horrific in most US cities. Comcast is usually rated as the worst company in the US.
Another Hillary clone. Jon Ossoff, who lost in Newt Gingrich’s district in Atlanta, was another Clinton/Obama corporate Democrat “Centrist.” There is really nothing Centrist whatsoever about this Clintonite cancer that has taken over the Democratic Party. It started under Bill Clinton when the DINO named Bill created the DLC to take over the DNC which had become too pro-people and not sufficiently pro-rich and pro-corporate. Hence the lead DINO himself engineered a coup in which the DLC basically took over the DNC. Around the same time, a similar tumor called “New Labour” grew in the UK, destroying the once pro-worker and pro-people Labour Party and leaving the UK with two Tory parties.
Corbyn’s recent victory in the last election is part of a brutal civil war in Labour between New Labour Tories and the real Labourites under Corbyn. The entire UK media, including the “leftwing” corporate Labour outlet The Guardian have come out ferociously against Corbyn. Similarly, the Guardian absolutely hates Bernie Sanders and has always supported the Clintonite usurpers and traitors. Surprise surprise it is also a leading member of the (((Western media))) that lies constantly about the war in Syria in order to start another War for the Jews in the Levant.
“Centrist” Dems and “Centrist” Labourites are frankly a cancer, mostly because there is nothing centrist about them. Or, if that’s centrism, let me off the bus please. I signed up for progress, not another party of the corporations and the rich.

Trumpcare Is Going to Kill a Lot of People

A lot of people are going to die.
In the US, 250,000 people already die every year from lack of health insurance. Trumpcare will get rid of healthcare for 23 million people while jacking up rates wildly and reducing coverage for everyone else. It’s hard to understand why anyone other than an insurance executive would support this BS. It’s not good for anyone. Even if you keep your insurance,  Trumpcare is going to jack your rates up to the ceiling while dramatically reducing your coverage.
What’s in it for you, conservatards? Are you all masochists? Is that it?
“Yes, please, throw me off my healthcare so I die! Yes, please, Mr. Trump, jack up my health insurance rates through the roof and reduce my coverage so I am broke with crap medical insurance!”
The more I study conservatives, the more I think they are flat out masochists. They claim they are out to benefit themselves, but whenever the rich or the corporations want to rip off the people or ream them so hard it hurts, conservatives drop their pants, bend over and say, “Batter up!”
I don’t get it. You idiots like to suffer? You like to get ripped off by corporations. What’s your argument?
“Yes I love capitalism! Yes, this corporation and these rich people are running me through the meat grinder to line their greedy pig pockets, but that’s ok! I love to suffer and lose money and stuff so rich people can have more cash! I love to be impoverished so corporations can make more profits! That’s capitalism, and I’m a capitalist!”
Conservatives are dumbasses!
You scumbags are going to kill and hurt lots of Americans so you can give rich people are big fat tax cut. That’s pure political sociopathy. How do conservatives sleep at night?
PS. Republican Wealthcare is not even very popular with conservatives. Only 19% of  Americans support it. It’s so toxic and unpopular that Republicans are holding hearings on it in secret because if anyone finds out what’s really in it, there will be a huge uproar. Trump is phony as usual. He complained that the House version was “mean,” but the  Senate bill is almost worse. The House bill throws 24 million people off their healthcare and the Senate bill throws 23 million people off. Hey, that’s progress! But the Senate bill is actually much worse in terms of Medicaid.
Let’s kill hundreds of thousands of people so billionaires can get a huge tax cut! That’s the logic of capitalism right there, folks.
You guys wonder why we are socialists. You wonder why we hate capitalism so much. Read that paragraph above and see why. We socialists are on firm moral ground, I assure you. We sleep very well at night.

Venezuela: The Lies Never Stop

Tulio: Left wing economics aren’t working out in Latin America either. Let’s face it, Latin America is dysfunctional whether it’s run by the left or right. I know Robert is a Chavista and all but the results speak for itself. They are probably a few clicks away from outright civil war.

The poster’s problem is that he gets all his Venezuela news from the Western media. You will not read one true thing about that country in the Western media. It is an all out propaganda war from Day One. If you want to read the truth about Venezuela, go to Venezuelanalysis. It’s all straight up 100% facts there, no spin. And many articles are quite critical of the government.
Yes, it is a civil war because the Right is running through the streets rioting, killing people, burning down buildings, buses and police cars. Let me ask you something. Suppose when Obama was in, Republicans went on a rampage all over the US, rioting, burning stuff down, killing people, firing guns, setting up snipers, setting off bombs, throwing grenades, killing lots of cops. Would you blame Obama for that? Because that is exactly what the commenter is doing.
This is part of the Right’s project down there. They lost the election, so they are trying to overthrow the government by force. What exactly is the state supposedly do about what is in effect a rightwing insurgency?
What they are trying to do is to create so much chaos that the military steps in and does a rightwing coup. Barring that, they are creating so much chaos and disorder that the US steps in with the military, invades and overthrows the Chavistas in the name of humanitarian intervention. It’s the exact same scheme we pulled in Syria when we turned ISIS and Al Qaeda loose on secular regime.
The US government’s official policy in Venezuela now is regime change. Mattis himself said so. The riots, destruction, arson, murders and political assassinations are all being coordinated with the US. We are the cause of all that violence down there.
There are no poor results of Chavismo. Things were booming along for many years. The rightwing has been sabotaging and boycotting the economy since Day One.
Norway is far more socialist than Venezuela. China is orders of magnitude more socialist than Venezuela. There’s nothing socialist at all about Venezuela. The economy is 100% capitalist controlled.
All Chavismo did was take a lot of that oil revenue and spend it on the people. If you think that’s a failed model, I do not know what to say to you.
After the oil price crashed, the government could no longer cover up for the business sector’s sabotage of the economy.
There are shortages? How can there be shortages in a 100% capitalist controlled economy? Answer me that. There cannot be. If there are shortages, why don’t they import some food? Why don’t they make some stuff that is in shortage?
The business sector is refusing to import products, and they are refusing to make products in short supply.
You need to go study how Kissinger and Nixon blew up the Chilean economy. They did the exact same thing, down to the letter. This is the Chilean Model down to the letter.

“We will make the Chilean economy scream.
–  Henry Kissinger.

Every week they seize huge warehouses full of products that are being hoarded by the capitalists in order to create artificial shortages. You heard of a shortage of syringes? A warehouse full of 21 million syringes was recently seized. If you read the Venezuelan papers, these seizures happen all the time, maybe every other day.
Why is there inflation? The capitalists have caused artificial shortages by hoarding stuff, refusing to produce stuff and refusing to import stuff. These artificial shortages of course caused inflation.
This economic sabotage has been going on from Day One, but when the oil prices were high, the government could cover up for the Economic War by importing their own products and selling them to people for cheap. Hence the state covered up all the artificial shortages caused by the refusal to import and manufacture products. When the oil price crashed, the state no longer had the money to import goods to cover up for the shortages, and furthermore, the Economic War went into high gear.
Furthermore, since Maduro has come in, he has made a hard turn to the Right from Chavez. His administration of full of rightwingers and representatives of the business sector. He caves to opposition demands over and over. They are always demanding hikes in the controlled prices, and he keeps raising them. No matter how much they raise the prices, the capitalists do not produce one more item. It’s all a scam.
Keep in mind that the economic crash has occurred against the background of a hard right turn in the government under a government that is now about 50% rightwingers and people from the business community. They can’t get a handle on things either. Did you hear what I said?
The economy crashed as the government turned Right and filled the executive with people from the business sector. According to the poster’s logic, rightwing economics is responsible for the crash.
That’s not really true either. Neither Right nor Left economics is responsible for the crash. The ministers from the business community can’t control the problems either. No one can.
There is a problem with currency, but that was created by the capitalists too. Currency controls were put in because the capitalists were taking all their money out of the country. No country can put up with that for long. So currency controls were put in, but that causes a black market in currency.
Price controls were put in because the capitalists staged a lockout strike that caused horrible shortages and sent prices skyrocketing.
Incidentally, despite currency controls, the business community still takes $50 billion out of the country every year. Do you know how much more they would take out if the currency controls were taken off?  The system would probably collapse.
The fake excuse all along was that price controls make it so the producing the price controlled products is not worthwhile. This is their fake excuse for the shortages. Now the price controls have been almost completely lifted, and they are still refusing to make stuff or import stuff. What’s their fake excuse now?
I agree that the standard Communist model caused a lot of economic problems, but the lie is that Venezuela is a Communist country like Cuba or the USSR, and this is the cause of all the problems. It’s caused by “socialist failure.” Why isn’t socialism failing in Europe? Why isn’t it failing in China? Why isn’t it failing in most of the world that runs social democratic systems?
The Chavistas were simply trying to produce a European style social democracy in Venezuela. Even that’s too much for the Venezuelan elite.
I will have you know that the rightwing Venezuelans the poster cheers for are some of the racist people on Earth. The commenter is Black. I assure you that the people he cheers for hate him because he is Black. Their word for Chavez was Mono. That means monkey. They call him monkey because his White blood is mixed with Indian and Black.
When they came into power, the first thing they did was take down the portrait of Bolivar because they said he looked too dark. They put up a new portrait that showed him as White as a Swede. These are the racists that this Black commenter is supporting.
The government is screwing up badly by not floating the currency, but that’s not a Right versus Left thing so it’s not a fault of Left economics. It would be a very unpopular decision, and Maduro is a weak and not very good leader and he does not have the balls to put in.
Hence I agree that the problems in part are caused by failures of the regime, but those failures having nothing to do with Right or Left economics. They’re not dealing with the currency problems, and that’s a failure on their part, but it has nothing to do with capitalism or socialism or any of that.
The price controls were put in to fight inflation. The Right screams about inflation and about price controls. They took all the price controls off, and the prices went way up. Now they are screaming because the prices went up. They criticize the problem, and they attack the solution to the problem.
You can’t win with these people.
I agree that the Communist model leaves a lot to be desired, and the lie is that the problems of Cuba and the USSR are being replicated in Venezuela. It’s a lie because Venezuela never even made it to social democracy. Venezuela is a capitalist country through and through.
I will ban any posters who attack Venezuela as a failure of Left economics because it’s nothing of the sort. Now if  you want to talk about problems with the Cuban model, go for it.
 

Dating an Indian Man

From the comments, one British woman’s experience in dating a wealthy Indian man. Her experience seems to be quite typical. Lousy cultures produce lousy people who then produce lousy cultures that produce more lousy people. Ok we are chasing our tails here, but the point stands. These Indian men really are some of the lousiest men on Earth, sad to say. It is possible to be a decent Indian man, but I would think that first of all, you would have to reject a lot of Indian culture. I don’t see how you can stay in Indian culture and be a decent person. The culture’s poisonous and everyone in it gets tainted whether they want to or not. It’s like a law of nature. You throw some good food into a pot of spoiled food, stir, set it aside, and now what? The good food’s rotten too.
To be fair though, I doubt if the American rich are any better than this. She could have been describing anyone from the Kushner or Trump families. The rich are pretty much crap everywhere on Earth. Once again, it’s a law of nature. It’s pretty hard to make a bundle without turning into some sort of criminal, either a “legal criminal” like Trump or an illegal criminal like Millken and the rest. If you want to make a pile, you’re going to have to get your hands dirty. Real dirty.

I dated a Indian man. I’m a woman from the UK. He was indeed a pig, and thought he was royalty. He told me one of his parents would sleep in the same room with him every night until he was 15/16… That his father had cheated on his mother (why would you tell your son that?). We went on a trip together in his car, I didn’t like how fast he was going 140 mph! But he wouldn’t listen, instead he said to me.
“It’s a beautiful day to die”.
Recently he laughed at me for being “poor”. He would laugh at people poorer than him and he would lie about how much money he had and the things he owned.
It was the worst experience I have had dating wise physically and psychologically although I had a strong mother figure, so he could not put me down as easily, which infuriated him. He was sexually violent on one occasion. He got arrested for drink driving in Birmingham, so his company sent him back to India and made him Director there. They should have fired him, but he is friends with the founder’s son.
He told me him and the founder’s son were on a nature reserve somewhere, drunk and hungry so they killed a piglet and ate it. I’m not sure if this is true, but it wouldn’t surprise me, as I have met his friend, and although he was not Indian, he was a entitled little prick (He stuck his genitals in my face and kept talking about how great it was). I told him if he ever did that to me again he wouldn’t have one anymore.
Apparently this friend also drove his car into someone and killed them but paid them €50,000 to keep quiet. Who knows if this is true…I learnt a big lesson last year: if that is what it means to have money, I don’t want to be anywhere near it. That’s the elite, people, the 1%. I still don’t believe they are all that way because I am better than that.

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