Thanks For Burning The Flag, Dipshit.

Just a quick post on how absolutely fucking retarded this Occupy Oakland guy is. Here is a big reason why the Left never goes anywhere in the U.S.A. The New Left, founded in the 1960s by rich white college kids who decided they were more oppressed than the proletariat, has never been serious about revolutionary change. Quite the opposite, these little punks are far more interested in playing at revolution. To them being a radical is a game and the last thing they want is to have an actual revolution where they might have to do some real work or really put their ass on the line.
You can be goddamn sure that the yellow capitalist press in this country is going to run this image 24/7 over the next few days. This is the image that will go up on the television screen every time the story is about the #Occupy Movement.
The idiots in this image are clearly not thinking about the big picture. Hell, I really doubt that they give a shit about the big picture. Far from this act making some kind of statement all I see is a bunch of spoiled snot nosed shits playing a prank. And that's pretty much how every other working class person in America feels about it. Do the people of the Occupy Movement really expect us to follow clowns like this into revolution? Seriously?
The majority of #Occupy needs to denounce this act of vandalism. I don't give a damn if you think this is a 1st Amendment issue, despise the flag as a symbol of imperialism, or whatever. To the majority of American workers, burning our flag is the same as spitting in their face.
The elites of America have television, newspapers, radio, and all the other forms of media at their command. All we have is our good name. Like it or not, we are engaged in a propaganda war.
Guess who's winning?
Update: There was also a flag burnt by an Occupy Charlotte protestor. The Occupy Movement is committing political suicide before our very eyes.

The New Man, Capitalist Version

"Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." George Orwell, 1984

One of the great jokes of the Cold War was the way the Stalinist state  of the Soviet Union portrayed its people versus the reality of their appearance. The Soviet citizen, particularly in the immediate aftermath of the October revolution, was portrayed as a proletarian superman, with bulging muscles clenching his work tools ( easily exchanged for a bayoneted rifle or submachinegun on a Red Army poster) and his chiseled chin jutting with confidence in the direction of the future. Oftentimes he was accompanied by his female helpmate, beautiful but chaste ( wearing the inevitable babushka), and wielding agricultural implements.
The reality was somewhat different. Civil Wars brought famine and the average Soviet citizen in the 1920s was malnourished and painfully thin. Even in the Great Patriotic War against Hitler's legions the Red Army rifleman was still usually shorter and lighter than his Western counterparts. The broad chested, seven foot tall warrior of the victory monuments simply did not exist. During the Cold War the combination of bureaucratic ineptitude, gross military spending, and the lasting damage of the war against fascism produced quite a different Soviet citizen than conceived in the propaganda of the Politburo. The Soviet citizen, after years of hardship and unkept promises, developed into a shrewd businessman who traded on the black market, a cynic who doubted the Party line, and a fatalist whose black humor was usually directed at those who claimed to be serving him.
Throw in rampant alcoholism and this guy was pretty fucking far from the square- jawed working class hero ready to exceed his quota of washers or catch a reactionary bullet in defense of the revolution.
The New Man was one of the cherished myths of  early 20th century socialist eggheads. These cranks envisioned a new version of humanity, one that would rise above petty emotional ties to possessions and family to serve the collective good, to sacrifice anything for progress, and to stride boldly into a future bright with Utopian promise ( this is the image that George Orwell mocked so effectively in his novels Animal Farm and 1984 ).
But before you supporters of capitalism pat yourselves on your backs, I can inform you that the elites you worship have made their version of the New Man. Only they were quite a bit more clever than their commie counterparts.
The capitalist ideal of the New Man is all together more intoxicating to the average asshole in the street because it is it is so easy to obtain. Think of how the common man is portrayed in the media, particularly television. Our working class hero looks like us. He is likely to be overweight, lacking in intellectual curiosity, and obsessed with the trivial ( sports, junk food, pornography, etc. ). In fact he is effectively an adolescent, his mind forever frozen in the 8th grade by a consumer culture fixated  with youth. The only significant break with reality is that this slob is usually married to an incredibly hot wife, but therein lies the genius of this marketing campaign- you can be a fat shiftless moron and still  shack up with an awesome babe.
For the Soviet elite, the purpose of their propaganda was to give their people something to aspire to, to spur them on to greater action. The capitalists who run the United States have a completely different agenda on their minds. The last thing they want is to have working people actively engaged in politics or working for a new future. Our ruling class is quite happy with the way things are now. Their goal is to create a complacent and apathetic class of consumers. The vast majority of the citizens of the U.S.A. do not participate politically in their supposed democracy, not even to get up off their big asses to vote for who will become the most powerful person in the world every four years. This could be excusable if this was the same type of cynicism displayed by the Soviet citizens of the last century but cynicism it is not. It is sheer laziness brought on by years of polluting the airwaves with mindless crap designed to appeal to the basest instincts a human being possesses. Unconscious and disengaged, The New Man of the American Century is not so much a conquering hero as a grazing cow.

Time Magazine Is Just Awful

Hey Time! Nice cover, assholes! You know, the one with the young Afghan woman without her nose? " What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan" you admonish us. Now do you want to tell the rest of the story? Or are you too busy coming up with your next brilliant example of yellow journalism?
Let me just make the most obvious objection to this glaring propaganda piece: the young woman in question, Aisha, was mutilated by her husband ( may he rot in hell) in 2009. So unless the entire NATO occupation force went to Disneyland on the day of her "trial", Aisha was cut to pieces while " we" were in the fucking country! Has this kind of atrocity stopped since we invaded Afghanistan? Seems to me the only thing NATO forces have done has added bombs and bullets to the equation.
Kharzai, the U.S.A.'s part- time puppet, presides over an Islamomafia Republic, complete with sharia interpreted law in the courts and dope deals under the table. His government is about as much concerned about democracy as the Gambino Family was. Afghan men are completely free to beat, rape, or murder the women in their homes whether they are in a zone controlled by the government or the insurgents.
Oh, yeah. The insurgents. That's the proper term. For the Taliban is but one group out of many. I wonder how many of these guys were running around the Afghan hills thirty years ago, to bring down a regime that actually treated women as equals before the law. But that regime was controlled by the evil commies of the U.S.S.R. so the U.S. government couldn't throw AKs and other weapons into the hands of these bastards fast enough. Wonder how many of these weapons are being fired at our own troops these days?
Man,the bullshit of U.S. foreign policy piles up so fast, you need wings to stay above it.
So what can we do to keep other Afghan women from suffering Aisha's fate? The sad and honest answer is... not much. The seriously deluded amongst the American government and public believe that if we just add a little more to the bomb tonnage dropped on Afghan and Pakistani villages, then we can put on our white good- guy hats and ride to the rescue of these beautiful damsels in distress. In reality the damsel is more likely to be the victim of a bomb or Hellfire missile launched from a NATO drone than attacked by the Taliban. Better bring a shovel, good guys. The lady is probably buried under a ton of rubble.
That is what we can do- stop deluding ourselves that the occupation is doing Afghanistan any kind of good. We can demand that the U.S. and NATO get out of there and let the Afghan people decide their own destiny. Afghanistan was once a stable and peaceful republic that promoted gender equality before the eyes of the law. They might be able to get that back. But first foreign interference has to come to an end.

This Is A Victory? For Who?

In a propaganda move worthy of 1984's Ministry Of Truth, the reactionary punditry of the U.S.A. is manufacturing a victory out of the disasterous imperialist excercise known as Operation Iraqi Freedom ( few military operations have had such a juvenile and ironic name). Thumping their chests with nationalistic pride, the mouthpieces of the American elite practically cream in their pants when describing how their smirking idiot idol, George W. Bush, had defeated the evil "terr'ists" with the Surge. As if simply adding more troops to a battlefield was a stroke of genius that only Bush could think of." The Iraqis had an election!" they crow. " American casualties are the lowest since 2003!", they shout. " We won! We won! Democracy in Iraq has finally arrrived!", they boast.
I hate to fingerfuck your wet dream, guys, but if we take a peek behind the props of your carefully constructed Potemkin Village we find out the real reasons for this " victory" and who the real winners are.
Let's start with the Surge.
So President Fucknuckle decided to send in 20, 000+ more troops into Iraq in 2007. It sounds like a lot, but it really isn't in a country the size of Iraq. They weren't used in some grand offensive ala World War 2. What they did do was tighten up security in Bagdhad and other cities. This allowed the pro- government police forces and Shi'ite militias to roam around in the capital and other large cities and ethnically cleanse them. Are you familiar with the name John Negroponte? He became Bush's ambassador to Iraq three years earlier. Negroponte had considerable experience with insurgents who fought against Corporate America's interests- he was President Reagan's ambassador to Honduras during the 1980s and racked up considerable success for local capitalist pawns by funneling support to the Contras in Nicaragua and the death squads in El Salvador and Guatamaela. Was his appearence in Bagdhad,and the soon to follow organized torture, execution, and mutilation of the U.S. backed regime's opponents, and the subsequent Sunni exodus a coincidence? I really doubt it.
But hey, that's in the past- with our attention spans, it may as well have been a thousand years ago. The Iraqis had an election! Yaaaay! Democracy!
Yeah, well big fuckin' deal. After the invasion in March 2003, the U.S. government got the Iraqi police to hustle up an election as soon as possible, to show not the Iraqis, not the world, but the asshole protesters back in the States who had the bad taste to question why the fuck we were in Iraq if not to make energy company execs and war profiteers happy, that hell yeah, it was worth it. We brought freedom and shit. Now shut- up and don't doubt us anymore.
And all would have been cool, if that first election, and every one since then- including the latest- wasn't mired by fraud, coercion, and massive violence. A healthy democracy doesn't have armed thugs hustling you out of your house to vote for their guy, have you dodging body parts that are flying through the air from a car bomb because some other thugs don't like their guy, and then voting twice for their guy 'cause it is good for your health to do so.
This is a democracy so democratic that even murderers have a shot at being elected. And remember Moqtada al- Sadr? He is also in the new Iraqi parliament.
So who wins in this "victory"? The Iraqi Shi'ite politicians came out ahead. The Kurds won a little more independence. Iran did allright- they got allies in the Iraqi government. Dick Cheney and other war profiteers made out like bandits. The rest of us, Iraqis and Americans, were left holding the bill, which is still being paid off in our blood and our treasure.

Glenn Beck's A Feeble History Of The United States

The spectacle of the elites of a civilization desperately trying to maintain their status by dwelling on the glorious, morally upright, and largely mythical past is well known to historians. Whether it was the Roman Senator Cato The Younger's fashion to ape his ancient ancestors by going " commando" under his toga, or a Russian nationalist depiction of the Romanov dynasty as a period of enlightenment and prosperity , the attempts of various rulers to restore their lost prestige and power usually end up at the very least being ludicrous and at worst horribly destructive.
This is what we are witnessing among America's ruling class right now. Despite all evidence to the contrary, the conservative movement still believes without question that unregulated capitalism will save their empire. They look back upon the Gilded Age as the model of economic efficiency and freedom.
And that was all too apparent in Glenn Beck's latest train- wreck of a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in which in a crazy stream of ( un )conciousness way he weaves a alternate history of the Progressive Movement in the U.S.A. According to Beck, Theodore Roosevelt was practically a communist, Herbert Hoover was a progressive ( !), and the Progressive Movement was responsible for the Great Depression.
Typically of today's reactionary propagandists, Beck cherry picks a few facts and phrases from a shallow reading of a history book, and pulls a historical fantasy out of his ass. Forget details like how the word " progressive" meant a very different thing to the anti- union, pro- imperialist Theodore Roosevelt than it did to socialists like Eugene Debs. Or that the segregationist Woodrow Wilson was reviled by the American Left.Or that Herbert Hoover sat on his thumbs and waited for the all- knowing capitalists to pull the economy together for the rest of his term. No, in the Beckian world of mutable oversimplification, progressives have to be one monolithic movement, with Republicans identifying themselves as the least bit reformist being cast out of GOP history to join evildoers like Karl Marx and John Lennon.
Its all part of the struggle to re- make the GOP into the ubercapitalist party. Rather than make reformist gestures to keep the workers from waking up and demanding revolution, like Theodore Roosevelt did, the radical Christian, laissez- faire Republicans of today placate their proletarian base by re- writing history. They portray the Robber Baron phase of capitalism as a paradise, where every American had a house with a white picket fence, was amply rewarded for an honest day's work, and would be a millionaire if he had drive and talent. No mention of 16- hour days for a wage that could not cover the basic needs of life, the destruction of the family as husband, wife, and child all slaved away in the mines, factories, and mills of the bosses, or the rampant racism that terrorized and humiliated people of color throughout the country.
Beck and his followers also seem to be unwilling or unable to notice that the very politicians they support are the very ones who lobby incescently on the behalf of transnational corporations to send American jobs overseas, drive down the wages of the the jobs that remain, pollute their local environments, etc., etc. Through do- it- yourself history, the Robber Barons of old become the heroes and the workers who fought for the rights that many of their descendants enjoy are the villans.
Which suits the Global Robber Barons of today just fine.