[Peace-discuss] [Peace-discus]

Sat Jan 6 20:32:47 UTC 2018

I submit  we are in a post-neocon/post-neoliberal age, call it what you will.  The once demarcated Democrats and Republicans seem to be exposing each other's secrets as quickly and nastily as lobsters in a stinky restaurant tank tearing each other apart. The restaurant owners didn't care enough to band their claws.
While some Americans are watching the show, more are deciding to have dinner in a different restaurant. My guess is they are all moving down the street to the small strip mall, where some of them are eating at the Caribbean jerk joint, some at the vegan place owned by the lesbian couple, some atthe southern BBQ. The thing is, their cars are all in the same parking lot and they will eventually wind up in the same place.

Sent from my LG Phoenix 2, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphoneI sub------ Original message------From: Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Date: Sat, Jan 6, 2018 11:05 AMTo: David Johnson;Cc: peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net;Subject:Re: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] Trump's not another Hitler: he's	another Obama

David

I didn’t mean my points to be in disagreement with Caitlyn, as much as they were meant to support. 

You maybe right in that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid aren’t “Neoliberal per se”, but the fact that they were implemented during the New Deal to save “Capitalism” and it did, as well as putting “Socialism” on the back shelf, and then
 during the fifties underground. Leads me to see it as Neoliberalism. 

Also, given the fact that its “intent” as well as the “benefits” have been whittled away by the capitalist powers that be, lend me to believe they are neoliberal. The intent of SS when implemented was to provide everyone over the age of 65 with
 a means of support, whether they paid into it or not. Today, not only are they increasing the age to receive benefits, those benefits are barely survival levels, and don’t apply to the many farmers, self employed and poor who didn’t pay into it. 

Unless we do away with our capitalist Oligarchs we are only going to get these programs, as handouts, though we have earned them. A true socialist society, would not allow these programs, so necessary for “life,” to be reduced as they have been
 over the years. 

It’s the change in the power structure of capitalism, that needs to take place, as long as these programs are controlled by a system of capitalism with the goal of profiting the elites, these programs will remain barely subsistence if at all,
 and therefore neoliberal in character.

On Jan 6, 2018, at 07:20, David Johnson <davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net> wrote:

I agree 100 % Karen with your assessment of Caitlin Johnstone’s article ( she is good as usual ) as well as your two minor points you disagree with her about.

And I have one very minor point of disagreement with you Karen. That is calling Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security

“ neoliberal “.

Obamacare / ACA IS very much neoliberal however because it is based on the tax payer subsidization of corporate insurance companies ( the very essence of our
 healthcare crisis ) and penalizes ( fines ) the lower middle Working class and the working poor because they are unable to afford the inferior overpriced health insurance on the ACA exchanges.

And I might add that the Medicare Advantage program is also neoliberal in that the government  inefficiently pays MORE to private corporate insurance companies
 to administer Medicare / Medicaid benefits to recipients than it would cost for the government to do it directly themselves – sneaky slow and systematic back door privatization.

David J.

From: Peace [mailto:peace-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On
 Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace

Sent: Saturday, January 06, 2018 8:52 AM

To: C G Estabrook

Cc: peace; 
peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net

Subject: Re: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] Trump's not another Hitler: he's another Obama

Brilliant article, one of those “I wish I could say it the way she does.”  

However, two points left out, minor if one looks at the big picture, but important to those now struggling due to the “new tax increase, favoring only the elites” implemented by the neocons, as well as the “austerity, and lack of jobs forcing many young people
 to join the military." Desperation has more to do with families sending off their young to fight in wars for Oligarchs, than “pride." 

Add to this deregulation of Net Neutrality, taking place under the Trump administration, being supported by our local Republican, opposed by our two local Democrats. I’m not dismissing the censorship imposed by Obama, especially, incarceration of  “whistleblowers”
 but with the appointees by Trump heading up our institutions, it’s looking very much like fascism in the fast lane, as we destroy our institutions, and social services. 

Social services and programs as Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security maybe neoliberal, but without which, many people will sicken and die.

All that being said, yes, Caitlyn is right, it’s the “system, good cop vs. bad cop” that the people need to rise up against, and overturn, not just go after the Administration, or depend on elections, which we know are rigged. 

On Jan 6, 2018, at 01:54, C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:

Not a lot of people remember this, but George W Bush actually campaigned in 2000 against
 the interventionist foreign policy that the United States had been increasingly espousing. Far from advocating the full-scale regime change ground invasions that his administration is now infamous for, Bush frequently
 used the word “humble” when discussing the type of foreign policy he favored, condemning nation-building, an over-extended military, and the notion that America should be the world’s police force.

Eight years later, after hundreds of thousands of human lives had been snuffed out in Iraq and Afghanistan and an entire region horrifically destabilized, Obama campaigned against Bush’s interventionist foreign policy, edging out Hillary Clinton in the Democratic
 primaries partly because she had supported the Iraq invasion while he had condemned it. The Democrats, decrying the warmongering tendencies of the Republicans, elected a President of the United States who would see Bush’s Afghanistan and Iraq and raise
 him Libya, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia, along with a tenfold
 increase in drone strikes. Libya collapsed into a failed
 state where a slave
 trade now runs rampant, and half
 a million people died in the Syrian war that Obama and US allies exponentially
 escalated.

Eight years later, a reality TV star and WWE Hall-of-Famer was elected President of the United States by the other half of the crowd who was sick to death of those warmongering Democrats. Trump campaigned on a non-interventionist
 foreign policy, saying America should fight terrorists but not enter into regime change wars with other governments. He thrashed his primary opponents as the only one willing to unequivocally condemn Bush and his actions, then won the general election
 partly by attacking the interventionist foreign policy of his predecessor and his opponent, and criticizing Hillary Clinton’s hawkish no-fly zone agenda in Syria.

Now he’s approved
 the selling of arms to Ukraine to use against Russia, a dangerously hawkish move that even
 Obama refused to make for fear of increasing tensions with Moscow. His administration has escalated
 troop presence in Afghanistan and made it abundantly clear that the Pentagon has no
 intention of leaving Syria anytime soon despite the absence
 of any reasonable justification for US presence there. The CIA had ratcheted
 up operations in Iran six months into Trump’s presidency, shortly before the administration began running
 the exact same script against that countrythat the Obama administration ran on Libya, Syria and Ukraine.

Maybe US presidents are limited to eight years because that’s how long it takes the public to forget everything.

In the lead-up to the November elections those of us on the left who backed third parties were promised over and over and over again by Democratic party loyalists that if Hillary Clinton failed to secure the election there’d be goose-stepping stormtroopers
 patrolling the streets and murdering non-whites with impunity, concentration camps for Muslims and white supremacist extermination programs. Comparisons to Hitler went on nonstop, and anyone who failed to fall in line with the mainstream liberal narrative
 can attest that they were accused of aiding actual, literal Nazism on a regular basis.

A year into Trump’s presidency, and not only did the apocalyptic predictions of national genocide fail to come true, he’s
 not even deporting as many immigrants as Obama. He is, however, out-bombing
 him.

We were promised another Hitler. Instead, we got another Obama, who was himself another Bush. The march into corporatist Orwellian police state at home and globalist oligarchic hegemony abroad continues unhindered for the United States of America.

And of course that march would have continued had Hillary won as well, it just would have looked a bit different. Fewer environmental deregulations, likely catastrophic escalations against the Syrian government and possibly Russia, the exact same approaches
 to Iran, just as much hawkishness toward North Korea but minus the tweets about button sizes, no attempts at dismantling Obama’s corporatist healthcare plan. Not much more than that.

Nobody wants to hear this. The Democrats still want to believe that the sitting president is simultaneously a Nazi, a Kremlin secret agent, an idiot, and a lunatic, and Trump supporters want to believe that he’s a populist savior fighting to liberate the nation
 from the claws of the deep state. Because of their partisan blinders they will both find reasons to believe they’ve got a savior or a traitor in the White House despite the fact that their country’s actual policy and behavior remains more or less the same.

I still
 sometimes get Democrats telling me that Trump is about to flip into Hitler 2.0 any minute now and start throwing non-whites into extermination camps. Whenever I point out that they were wrong about their “your
 choices are Hillary or Hitler” alarmism I get a bunch of them telling me “give him time”. Well he’s had time. They were wrong. They didn’t get a Nazi, they got another shitty neocon. And since the Dems have been paced into alignment with the neocons there’s
 no one left to oppose their agendas, which is why we’re seeing so little pushback on Trump’s Iran saber rattling.

I get Trump supporters telling me that he’s fighting the deep state, but the only way you can believe that at this point is to redefine “deep state” to mean “Democrats and their supporters”, which would actually just be more partisan bickering, which is all
 we’re actually seeing at this point. The only people you see pushing the collusion narrative and working for impeachment at this point are Democrats and Never-Trumpers; now that Trump has proven himself a good, compliant little boy the intelligence community
 has been putting its energy into the anti-detente propaganda effort to manufacture support for its new cold war escalations instead.

The MAGA crowd tells me their guy has de-escalated the Syrian situation in an attempt to paint him as less pro-war than his predecessor, but that’s not even true either. Until US troops actually leave Syria, all this administration has done is kill a bunch
 of people (many
 of them civilians), occupy parts of a sovereign nation, and refuse to leave. Why are those troops still there when Syria and its allies are perfectly capable of handling any remaining traces of ISIS as they have been? No good reason, that’s for sure.

This is not the fault of the American people. The American people consistently vote against interventionist wars (as evidenced by the fact that winning presidential candidates have to campaign against them), and while they may be guilted by the tribe into flag-waving
 once the troops are there, they consistently say no to every request for consent for more empire-building wars. In my recent
 article about how the CNN/CIA narrative is running the same script for Iran as they did for Libya and Syria, most of the pushback I received was from good people who wanted to make sure I knew that they didn’t
 consent to military intervention, they were simply offering their support for the people of Iran.

Which is about as naive and sweet as a kid wanting to help the nice old man find his puppy. I understand you wanting to help find the puppy America, but for God’s sake please don’t get in that man’s van.

So the will of the American people has been heard loud and clear. They do not consent to more regime change wars and more military interventions. They do not want that.

Through the trickery of the mainstream media though, they are paced by fear-mongering and guilting into a reluctant, bargaining, “Well okay then…” consent which is quickly turned over into flag-waving enthusiasm because you have to support your troops, don’tchaknow?
 And I get that! Everyone knows a serviceman or woman; you don’t want to make them feel sad or like their life is being wasted. That’s such a tragedy! Who wants to make that conscious?

Let’s be clear, too: the troops are often from some of the finest of working and middle-class families across the States, families whose strong sense of morality about right and wrong led their young sons and daughters to make the courageous decision to enter
 the armed forces. These young men and women were born with the most exemplary of desires. They want to make the world a better place and they are willing to make the ultimate sacrifice to do so. People love these families and they love their children.

These young people really are our best new humans. They are so committed to the highest interest that they would put aside their self-interest to do so. Do you know how rare that quality is in a human? And these young people are being taken from us young, whether
 that be by death or by destroying their beautiful minds as they are warped by the war machine into thinking that evil is good. Taken and used to pump up the egos of a selfish few.

In a healthy culture, the highest interest would dictate the desires of these young men and women. Unfortunately, the “highest interest” which should be assessed by the will of the people, is not being heard. It is not being enacted. The will of the people
 has repeatedly said that it does notwant to send these young people off to kill another country’s young people to shore up the share portfolios of a few cancerous beings. The
 will of the people consistently says no to that, but it has been corralled by a small group of bloodthirsty vampires,
 parasites who will happily lay any amount of young bodies to waste to win their tiny dick battles until they are finally satisfied with the amount of zeroes on their bank statements.

Spoiler alert: they never will be.

Americans talk about “seeing through the partisan bullshit” of US politics like it’s some kind of magical superpower, but it’s not. Both parties act in slightly different ways toward the exact same ends, working
 together like the jab-cross combination of a boxer to advance the same warmongering, corporatist oligarchic agendas, and there’s no reason to believe any of them about anything. America has two corporatist war
 parties who serve a plutocratic class of elites; one of them wears a cowboy hat, the other has pink hair. That’s it. That’s all you need to see to free yourself from the illusion.

Please stop attacking one another for the evils that have been inflicted on you by this small group of sociopaths, America. Stop buying into the two-party good cop/bad cop schtick that the elites use to turn urban Americans against rural Americans and turn
 your anger toward your real enemies.

—Caitlin Johnstone

____________

https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/trump-isnt-another-hitler-he-s-another-obama-51ea7db498b4

###

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