Category: Current Issues

Do the Terms “Left” & “Right” Still Have Meaning? The Case of Sacha Stone

At last week’s ZOOM meeting of OpEdNews contributors, editor-in-chief, Rob Kall, noted that some people have questioned the continued relevance of the terms “left” and “right” to designate positions on the political spectrum. Rob asked, have those categories outlived their usefulness? 

Appearing to be in accord with Rob, one ZOOM contributor recalled that even Ralph Nader seemed to agree that the terms no longer serve. According to Nader, “left” and “right” classifications even impede concerted action for meaningful political reform by polarizing debaters and blinding them to the areas of agreement that they share. 

All of that took on high relevance for me, when I came across Jason Dean’s YouTube interview of Sacha Stone.   

Stone is a Zimbabwean blogger, activist and founder of the NewEarth Project whose purpose is to “create a new way of conscious living.” His International Tribunal for Natural Justice focuses on human trafficking and child sex abuse. Stone is also a close colleague and collaborator with CIA whistleblower Robert David Steele. 

In Dean’s hour-long, wide-ranging interview, Stone’s dynamic, articulate and intriguingly faith-centered statements exemplified a thinker one would be hard pressed to classify. I finished wondering whether he was left, right, conservative, liberal, radical, Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Trumpian, apolitical, Christian, New Age, anti-Catholic, ecumenically religious, irreligious, or simply an anti-vaxxer and anti-mask provocateur (both of which he certainly was). 

In any case, however, Stone came across as a potential ally and thought leader that someone like me (a progressive left-wing activist and spiritually based critic of the corporate establishment) could learn from and work with. And this despite Stone’s many initially questionable assertions including his description of Donald Trump as “absolutely perfect.” 

So, I suggested that at the following week’s ZOOM meeting, we might discuss the Stone interview. Rob agreed. The interview’s highlights follow. 

A Hippie or Libertarian? 

Stone began with a description of the world’s ruling class as completely degenerate. And that included the leaders of national states, financiers, and religious establishments like the Catholic Church with its corrupt popes and hierarchy. (Stone was particularly hard on the Jesuits and the Catholic practice of sealing off women in convents and sending young, innocent boys to seminaries.) All of those institutions, along with their secret intelligence agencies (especially the CIA, Mossad, mi6, etc.) represent the world’s obscenely rich who comprise no more than 10% of its population. 

Those positions seem “left,” don’t they? But there was more. 

The hell of it is, Stone continued, that the policies of such miscreants prevent humans not only from meeting their physical needs. Their unquestionable dogmas and programs, rules and regulations also make it impossible for most of us to realize our human vocation as self-determinative creators of community, beauty, meaning and art.  

And so, Big Pharma has us consuming poisons instead of respecting our bodies’ own natural healing processes. Big Ag leaves little alternative to ingesting similarly poisoned non-foods in place of our growing gardens and eating locally and only what is good for human health. Official state educational institutions indoctrinate all of us into thinking that what’s natural is harmful, while artificially produced products are preferable.  

Doesn’t all of that sound like a back-to-nature hippie and home schooler?  Or maybe Stone’s a libertarian. 

The applicability of that latter category came through in his extremely strong positions on vaccines and facemasks during the present COVID-19 pandemic, as well as on taxes and on signing official certificates: 

  • Never allow authorities to vaccinate you or your children with serums whose media of transmission are not only harmful but will enable our watchers to even more efficiently track our every move. (In fact, our keepers’ ultimate goal is to similarly mark for identification and tracking every single creature on earth – for purposes of profit and control.) 
  • Never wear a face mask, he emphasized. Don’t purchase anything from any store requiring masking. Show your outrage and make sure shop owners know why. 
  • Never sign anything without fully appreciating the meaning of your mark. It’s a sign that you approve of the transaction in question. So many of them are actually questionable at the very least.  
  • Birth certificates are an abomination – a transfer of your offspring’s future into the hands of the state. And death certificates are only intended to establish actuarial tables for rapacious insurance companies.  
  • Yes, pay sales taxes. But don’t fill out those 1040s. They are used for purposes no conscientious human being can approve.   

So, that’s it maybe. Perhaps Sacha Stone is a libertarian. After all, he admits admiring Ron Paul.  

A Trump Supporter? 

But maybe not. . . Further statements made him sound like a white evangelical Republican. Get ready: this is where Stone’s designation of DJT as “absolutely perfect” comes in. 

Echoing those evangelicals, Sacha Stone affirms that Donald Trump is God’s anointed. He’s doing God’s work, Stone says, through executive orders whose intention is to eliminate the human trafficking that is the focus of Stone’s activism and that he claims represents the very heart of the international economic system. No one knows about those executive orders, Stone said. 

Neither has anyone else in government dared to question the foundation of U.S. policy since 9/11/2001. On that very day, Trump alone recognized what happened and immediately said so on camera. He said, “That was a controlled demolition, folks. I know; I’ve built skyscrapers.” In Stone’s words, Trump was the first living soul in America to make that call.  

Moreover, Trump has done what no president had done before him – he has reached out in friendship to designated enemies like North Korea, Russia, and China. And you know what? For those heroic acts on behalf of world peace, Mr. Trump has been roundly vilified by the mainstream media, and by TV pundits from MSNBC to Fox, from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal! 

Trump is doing God’s work, Stone insists. He’s not only signing those executive orders that are saving children’s lives. He’s also laying the groundwork for the complete collapse of the entire system by embodying and thus exposing its unreality, deception and unviability.  

And it’s working. All of our false idols: Hollywood, academia, the central banking cabal, along with every organ of government are crumbling before our eyes. That is by definition the grace of God. Good Christians, Muslims, Buddhists and other people of faith and no faith at all should be applauding Mr. Trump, rather than attacking him.

Stone’s Spiritual Grounding 

Say what? Trump is God’s anointed? But doesn’t he embody government corruption, lies and deception? Isn’t he mistreating children at our southern border? Isn’t he himself money-driven, corrupt and an inveterate liar? 

Despite his earlier statements, Stone seems to agree — in a backhanded sort of way.  

It’s here that his self-confessed “inverted logic” and deep spirituality enter the picture – all within the context of COVID-19. Here’s Stone’s line of reasoning: 

  • We are now living at the greatest moment of civilization. 
  • In this unique context, COVID-19 is actually a Godsend – but not in the sense that it was authored by the Universal Mind that presides over everything that is.  
  • Instead, the human soul is forged within that Mind’s dispensation of freedom that allows us to self-harm and then self-heal through our own action — to absolve and resurrect ourselves. 
  • In this quadrant of the omniverse, there are no rules; only karma and dharma, the laws of cause and effect – what we sow, we reap.  
  • In the midst of the pandemonium we ourselves have caused, each of us and the entire human community must forge our souls like nuggets of coal pressured into diamonds by our self-inflicted sorrow, pain and hurt which has made us both the poisoner and the poisoned. That’s what causes the Christed light suddenly to emerge. 
  • At this moment of evolution – through our manufacture of pathogens, through the machinations of the pharmaceutical and agrochemical food system, we are experiencing an “orchestra of evil.” But we must remember that it is our orchestra; and we are the conductors. 
  • Collectively and at the civilization level, we have reached a fulmination point – where it’s time to absolve all the poisoning at every level.  
  • A small group of people consciously and intentionally standing in that flame can lift the entire human race. The spark we stubbornly hang on to will eviscerate the now-prevailing darkness. It is only a holographic projection that of itself has no soul – no Christed light. 
  • The bottom line is that we all must practice right action and pure truth in our own lives. 
  • We must live in the NOW, because that is all we have. It is always perfect – the point of perfection, absolution and forgiveness, transcendence, and transmutation. “It’s when you choose to forgive the trespass against you, to extend the hand of friendship, to build that bridge and be the mender of broken things in this world.”  
  • All of us must live in that space. 

It is Sacha Stone’s emphasis on the perfection of the NOW that provides the key for his judgment about Donald Trump’s own perfection. Since the NOW is all we have, and since it is always perfect calling us to absolution, forgiveness, transcendence, and transmutation, everything within that moment (including Mr. Trump) is calling us to create the world we all desire – a world of personal responsibility, beauty, art, and love.

Conclusion 

So, what is Sacha Stone? Do the categories of “left” and “right” apply to him? And even though he supports Donald Trump, is an anti-vaxxer and rages against facemasks in the midst of a pandemic, can “progressives” dialog with a person like that? 

Indeed, is Stone correct that in this extraordinary moment in our personal and collective histories, we are called to at least suspend our judgments, to recognize common ground, and join with brothers and sisters on the “right” to bring down our common deceivers and exploiters? 

Join with us next Saturday from 8:00 to 9:30 on ZOOM to discuss it all. (Write to OEN editor-in-chief, Rob Kall at rob at opednews.com and put OEN ZOOM Meeting in the subject heading and he will provide the link.)

Five Reasons Why Christians Should Feel Uncomfortable Voting for Trump in 2020

Last Sunday (July 19th), the far-right Christian Post published an article by John Wesley Reid entitled “5 Reasons why Christians should feel comfortable voting for Trump in 2020.”  Two days later, the same publication reported an international survey implicitly lamenting the fact that “most Americans don’t believe they need God to be good.”

In this time of Black Lives Matter (BLM) uprisings across the country and across the world, the two articles take on particular importance. Together, they not only highlight stark differences between right and left-wing understandings of Christianity. They also point up differences between the faiths of white evangelicals and their black counterparts in the street.

Additionally, both articles’ identification of Christianity exclusively with far right Caucasian politics goes a long way towards explaining the disconnect between morality and belief in a God. The explanation is found in the Christian right’s severely limited understanding of God, of goodness, and of the connection between morality and politics in this polarizing era of Donald Trump.

In tandem, the two articles also invite readers to be more thoughtful about their faith (or lack of same) and the ballot they’ll cast come November 3rd.   

God & Goodness

Begin with the survey. According to Pew Researchers, 54% of Americans hold that you don’t need God to be good.  Meanwhile 44% (a large majority of them on the ideological right) hold the opposite opinion. Only 24% on the ideological left believe God and morality are necessarily connected. (Left respondents in the survey typically had more years of formal education.)  

The Reid article shed light both on the identity of the sidelined God and on survey respondents’ likely understanding of “goodness” closely connected with that supposed deity. As will become clear below, Reid’s God is primarily concerned with specifically Christian welfare and with unborn life. Goodness is overwhelmingly connected with what the author referenced as “non-carnality.” Consequently, Christian political concern focuses on matters of specifically Christian liberty, on sexuality and reproduction – especially on abortion (which btw is not even mentioned in the Bible as a moral concern).  

Such limited understanding reflects the huge gap between white evangelicals and their black counterparts – for instance, the ones demonstrating against police brutality in our city streets. Their actions, of course, cannot be adequately explained without reference to the religiously based history of the Civil Rights Movement.  

In the light of that history, BLM demonstrators have inherited an understanding of God biblically founded on God’s very first revelation, viz. in the liberation of slaves from captivity in Egypt. It is linked besides to concern for widows, orphans and resident immigrants and refugees frequently reiterated in both the Jewish and Christian Testaments. In other words, goodness for black evangelicals is inseparably connected with social justice. Meanwhile, Reid’s article suggests ignorance of, and even hostility towards such linkage.

Morality & Voting for Trump

Setting all of that aside, Reid admits that he had doubts about Trump in 2016. But now, he says, those reservations have completely disappeared. Instead, he recommends that all Christians should confidently vote for 45’s reelection in November. He advances 5 reasons for doing so:

  1. You’re not voting for Donald Trump; you’re voting for the Trump Administration.
  2. You’re not voting simply for a person; you’re voting for an agenda.
  3. Policy outweighs character because policy outlasts character.
  4. If for no other reason than abortion, vote for Donald Trump.
  5. Voting for Trump is a tangible way of keeping Biden out.

Closely read, those reasons indicate that the author is still holding his nose. They all end up distancing themselves from a morally challenged candidate while cozying up to supposed paragons of Christian virtue such as Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, to Trump’s agenda favoring “religious liberty,” “life of the unborn,” and resistance to volatile attacks on America (standard dog whistle for African Americans).

More specifically, Reid’s 5 reasons claim that:

  1. Trump may be carnally questionable, but people like Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo are “committed non-carnal Christ-followers.”
  2. Doubts about the president’s moral character should be “trumped” by his agenda which the author finds favoring “religious liberty,” “life of the unborn,” and resistance to those explosive attacks on America.
  3. Sure, Trump’s character is highly debatable. However, appointments of “constitutional originalists” to the judiciary are more important. So are “our children’s futures,” religious liberty, the lives of the unborn, and the economic advancement of low-income communities.
  4. Christians can conscientiously identify as single-issue voters, because the abortion issue is powerful enough to overwhelm all other policy considerations.
  5. Joe Biden is no Donald Trump.

Voting against Trump

But what if being Christian is far more complicated and challenging than Reid lets on? What if black evangelicals and others are correct in holding it’s more than avoiding “carnality” even in the sense of Trump’s legendarily deviant sexuality (now involving expressed support for his friend, accused child rapist and sex trafficker, Ghislaine Maxwell)? Such complexity might lead Christians to decline voting for Mr. Trump for at least the following 5 specific reasons roughly mirroring Reid’s own:

  1. The type of Christianity advocated by Mr. Reid is just that – a type of Christianity, viz. the white evangelical sort. However, there are other types of Christians – those black evangelicals, for instance. And then there are Catholics who embrace the official teaching of their Church, viz. the doctrine of the Second Vatican Council and Pope Francis. Their pro-life positions go far beyond the single issue of abortion to include radical environmentalism, war resistance, rejection of capital punishment, advocacy of living wages, fair housing, and healthcare as a human right. All of these, they profess, are pro-life matters.
  2. Religious liberty as understood in the Constitution is not limited to Christians of any stripe. It extends to Muslims, Jews, Hindus, agnostics, atheists and others whose pro-life concerns prioritize the already born – e.g. at the border, in Trump’s baby jails, under incessant U.S.-supported bombing in places like Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, on death row, and elsewhere.
  3. Donald Trump and virtually every member of the Republican Party are joined at the hip. There is absolutely no separation between policies advocated and implemented by Donald Trump and the rest of his administration – none. As for the morality of Mike Pompeo, he has specifically joked and bragged about endorsing policies of lying, cheating and stealing –all (unlike abortion) specifically prohibited not only in the Bible, but in all religious traditions. In other words, Trump’s inner circle is no more virtuous than he.   
  4. Above all, “our children’s futures” which are of such apparent concern to Mr. Reid, are intimately connected with and existentially threatened by climate change which the entire Republican Party proudly denies.
  5. Joe Biden is no Donald Trump.

Conclusion

There are good reasons for Americans and better educated people around the world to consider belief in God as inessential to morality. The God of The Post’s John Reid and his fellow believers, for instance, is so small in moral stature and very limited in his concern compared with the God of the Bible. Reid’s God is not only unbiblical, he is also basically white, ethnocentric and specifically American. That strains the credulity of even moderately educated people whose general knowledge recognizes the goodness found in non-Christians and in so many atheists. No wonder such thinkers reject a god as tiny as Reid’s.

Meanwhile, the biblical God, at least as embodied in Jesus’ prophetic tradition, literally identifies with human beings like those specifically despised by the candidate Reid would have his type of Christians embrace. Remember, Jesus himself was born out of wedlock to a teenage mother; he was an immigrant in Egypt in his early years; he was working class, poor, and a member of a people imperialized by the first century equivalent of the United States.

Besides that, Jesus’ “Good News” was specifically addressed to the poor (LK 4:18). He ended up being a victim of torture and capital punishment at the hands of the Roman Empire. All of that is foreign to Reid’s unbiblical notion of God.

And finally, it seems that the Jewish Jesus of the Christian Testament could well sympathize with those who feel alienated from their religious communities of origin. After all, he was expelled from his hometown synagogue (Luke 4: 14-30) and thought to be possessed by the devil himself (John 10:20).   

That Jesus, it seems safe to say, would be appalled by Donald Trump.

Trumpty Dumpty’s Great Fall: His Unwitting Support of Black Lives Matter

It’s happening now. And it’s irreversible. It was promised to us in the 1960s as the “dawning of the Age of Aquarius” – a world where harmony, understanding, peace and trust would abound.

The Mayans reiterated the promise in 2012, when they predicted that the perfect alignment of the sun, the earth, and the center of the Milky Way (for the first time in 26,000 years) would inaugurate the “sixth era of the sun.” It would bring to humanity and the Earth itself a positive physical and spiritual transformation.

It’s happening now before our eyes.

And the agent of this profound change? Its polar opposite! A Trumpty Dumpty sitting on a “great and beautiful” wall symbolic of resistance to everything promised to us by Mayan wisdom.

Yet, Trumpty prepared us for the “great fall” of the entire world that his wall of separation symbolized – a white supremacist patriarchy that now lies in pieces impossible to reassemble despite the best efforts of all the king’s horses and all the king’s men.   

Trumpty came, remember, specifically calling into question everything we were taught to revere. He said the news was fake; so was history, political polling, our voting system, Constitution, and even science. His very language patterns – repetitive, incoherent, and verbally challenged – called into question accepted standards of grammar and eloquence we had become accustomed to in smooth talking politicians and “respected” public figures. In Trumpty’s eyes, all of that was bunk and fake too.

And he was right.

However, the rude irony is that the accuracy of Trumpty’s demythologized iconoclasm has been underlined by the very people that the wall he’s been sitting on promised to exclude. It’s immigrants and especially the Black Lives Matter activists who are successfully joining him in questioning (but from the other side) his white supremacist understanding of the world as well as our history, laws, language, and implementation of democracy.

Think about it: before BLM, who would have thought Americans would even consider demolishing statues of Christopher Columbus and Confederate generals, let alone of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and other revered “Founding Fathers?”  Impossibly, Americans are seriously rethinking the “official story” of their nation and engaging in righteous iconoclasm.

But the movement goes much deeper than that. As Robin DiAngelo has pointed out in White Fragility, the world’s ruling Caucasian minority is now coming to realize that society itself is rigged at its intellectual core – and in the favor of the white supremacists Trumpty promised to restore to greatness.

According to DiAngelo, it’s all a mirage – white culture’s beliefs in

  • The supposed superiority of some forms of knowledge over others:
    • White Eurocentric knowledge over non-White, Indigenous and non-European ways of knowing
    • Written expression over oral
    • History over memory
    • Rationalism over wisdom
  • Acceptance of the supremacy of scientific linear thinking that recognizes as true only what can be quantified, and peer reviewed by scholars
  • The assumed neutrality of the white European Enlightenment
  • The Ideology of individualism
  • Meritocracy

For DiAngelo and Black Lives Matter, such convictions and white values themselves are arbitrary. And that includes its reverence for the king’s English. So is its philosophy of “work before play,” “planning for the future,” adherence to rigid time schedules, and governance of life itself by Apple watches.

Before BLM and COVID-19, none of that was questionable for the cultural mainstream.

Now it is. American culture, if not the entire world, is questioning its basic world view and way of life.

The whole turn of events has opened for humanity what Indian scholar Arundhati Roy has called “a portal” – an opening from old discredited ways of thinking and acting to new more credible ones. A door has opened to the other world Mayan wisdom has told us is now possible.

In other words, humanity is ceasing its efforts to reassemble Mr. Trumpty’s shattered reality and to reject his wall and all it stands for. We’re telling each other that the time has come to finally walk through today’s open doorway into the promised Aquarian Age that (at least unconsciously) we’ve all been longing for.

I’m Not Racist!

Three years ago, I posted this must-see video. It’s Joyner Lucas‘ hip-hop dialog between a white man and a black man. When I reviewed it again in the current context of uprisings against police violence, I couldn’t help seeing its continued currency and the need to post it again.

See what you think.

I only wish that there had been a third participant in the dialog —  someone who might helped the principals see that their anger is misdirected.  They are not each other’s enemies.

No, the real enemy is the system of capitalism run by the 0.1%. Its underlying ideology of extreme individualism, and vicious competition keeps everyone’s eyes off the ball by pitting blacks and whites against one another. Meanwhile, the system enriches the few while failing miserably to provide adequate jobs, wages, education, housing and health care for the majority.

This is an example of the system’s “divide and conquer” strategy that works every time.

Through your comments, please share your reflections.

America’s “Les Miz” Moment: What’s Really Happening?

I’ve participated in two unrelated Zoom groups in the past couple of weeks where the same pair of probing questions were asked: What’s Really Happening? And What about looting?

One group was composed mostly of editorial board members of the online publication, OpEdNews (OEN). The other was a “Mindfulness Dialog” meeting in my local faith community, the Talmadge Hill Community Church here in Westport Connecticut.

Of course, the shared questions were prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic in conjunction with the general uprising throughout the country (and world) incited by the brutal police murder of yet another unarmed African American, George Floyd.

In the OEN meeting, the spirit behind the discussion searched for invisible powers (perhaps Deep State?) that have us all under house arrest and why? Who’s benefitting from all this was the underlying theme. Cui bono? And why the general rebellion on a scale that Americans haven’t seen since 1968?  

My church group took another tack. There, the questions became what is Life Itself teaching us by the whole process – the pandemic, the uprising, and the violence? What is the Great Inter-Being that some of us call “God” asking us to learn and transform?

As I see it, the framings of both meetings were inseparable. It’s true that Mother Inter-Being is teaching us something. But she’s also calling us to think critically and structurally precisely about what bell hooks has described as the “white supremacist capitalist imperialist patriarchy.” That whole interlocking system is firmly based on violence and looting on a gargantuan scale that makes burning buildings and flaming police vehicles insignificant by comparison.

Pandemic Evolution

Begin with the pandemic. As seen by my church group (and by senior OEN editor, Meryl Ann Butler) it’s a virus and accordingly represents an indispensable part of the evolutionary process directly related to life’s fundamental progressions.

This virus’ name is “corona,” the Latin word for crown. In metaphysical perspective, its message is therefore addressed to our minds where the crown of humanity currently lies so uneasily. “Corona” is also connected with the heart, as in the adjective “coronary.” In this perspective then, the message of the Great Cosmic Mother is addressed to both heart and mind.

And what might she be communicating at such profound levels? Could it be that the way of life we post-moderns have chosen remains at odds with those she has established? That wouldn’t be surprising, given that it’s consistent with the Natural World’s other insistent warnings that humans have chosen largely to ignore. These include human-induced climate chaos, droughts, floods, devastating forest conflagrations, rising sea levels, species extinctions, vanishing topsoil, waste disposal problems, atmospheric pollution, and the human suffering associated with each of those elements. Supported by climate scientists across the planet, desperate Cassandras of every stripe – from Pope Francis and the Dali Lama to Greta Thunberg – have foretold inevitable disaster.

Now it’s happening. The difference this time is that the coronavirus has secured the attention of the entire world all at the same time! Unmistakably, we’re all being told again that the dominant civilization is on the wrong evolutionary track.

Revolt vs. Neoliberalism

That consciousness had already sunk in across the world well before the advent of COVID-19. Remember, it was entirely in flames at the conclusion of 2019.

Recall the inferno of rebellion. Demonstrations and street riots had erupted in Hong Kong, Warsaw, Budapest, Istanbul and Moscow. Angry masses protested in Pakistan, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon. Similar phenomena surfaced in Venezuela, Ecuador, Mexico, and Bolivia. Then there were the Yellow Vests in France, and Brexit in Great Britain, and recurring protests in Greece. The list of hot spots also included Algeria, Argentina, Egypt, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Now, with the murder of George Floyd, the worldwide rebellion has finally reached the shores of the United States. Like the self-immolation of a Tunisian street vendor in 2010, like the subway fare hike in Chile, the police murder of George Floyd put a torch to the tinder of discontent that’s long been lying around awaiting the first incendiary spark.

The kindling in question included the frustrations of a nation-wide lockdown that has subjected everyone to a strain of cabin fever even more contagious than the coronavirus itself. The lockdown in turn caused the greatest economic downturn since the onset of the Great Depression more than 85 years ago. The resulting unemployment surged towards 1933 levels of 25%, with twice that number unemployed in black and brown communities. Breadlines had sprung up everywhere, and people experienced food scarcity and hunger in a country where even before the lockdown 40 million Americans were described as food insecure.

Government response to the crisis proved even more frustrating. Even in the midst of a worldwide pandemic, it was constitutionally unable to reform its healthcare system. Instead it awarded generous bailouts to the already wealthy and crumbs (if anything) for the working classes. Jeff Bezos, the richest man on the planet, had his income rise by 20 to 30 billion in the first two months of the lockdown. Meanwhile, many workers saw their jobs disappear – some of them permanently.

Those paying attention knew it didn’t have to be that way. As economist Richard Wolff points out for instance, pre-crisis unemployment in Germany stood at 5%. Currently, the rate is 6%. That’s because (thanks to strong labor unions and powerful socialist parties) corporate bailouts there were conditioned on employers agreeing not to fire their workers. As part of the same package, the German government covered up to 80% of the workers’ income. It was similar in France. By contrast, here in the United States there were no such preconditions for the nation’s largest employers. Bezos and others were given carte blanche relief. Their income soared, while pink-slipped workers often wondered where their family’s next meal would come from.

The convergence of pandemic, lockdown, unemployment, poverty, hunger and government’s impotent malfeasance confined working people to a pressure cooker that was bound to explode. Even if protestors were unaware of all its elements, even if they thought it was all about George Floyd and police brutality, there was really much more at work to send the cooker’s gauge beyond the red danger zone. Put otherwise: the explosion we’re witnessing represents an uprising, a rebellion, not mere police riots.  

Les Misérables React

With all those pressures at work, it should not have surprised anyone if a small minority of protestors engaged in property destruction and looting. The reasons justifying (yes, justifying) the petty thievery, breaking of windows, burning of buildings, slashing of tires and throwing of stones should be obvious to everyone. Let me list just a few. They include the facts that:

  • Charges of looting are highly suspect: Everyone knows that police and other official sources regularly employ agents provocateurs. As others have pointed out, it is virtually impossible to distinguish looters from officials masquerading as such for purposes of discrediting protestors in general.
  • Property destruction is the American way: From official statements of “leaders” like Barack Obama, Donald Trump and various police chiefs, you’d think all of them were committed followers of Jesus, King, and Gandhi. You’d think they were all pacifists. On the contrary, our government’s official response to almost any international problem you care to name is that “all options are on the table.” And “all” means bombing, droning, sending in troops, killing on a massive scale, and even threatening nuclear war. Of course, every one of those options includes destruction of lives and property on massive and (in the case of nuclear weapons) total scales. So, it’s quite amusing to see government officials wringing their hands over broken windows and burning police cars.
  • The rich have just looted our treasury: The CARES ACT’s immediate response to the coronavirus pandemic prioritized taxpayer-backed loans and tax breaks to the already rich. At the same time it neglected the pressing needs of the poorest among us (e.g. the homeless and undocumented)  while offering crumbs to the rest of us. Some have described the measures as those of a fire department entering your burning home, forgetting about the fire and stealing your most valued possessions. That’s looting.
  • In a context of lockdown, looting has been long expected: This is what I refer to as a “Les Miz Moment.” Recall that in Victor Hugo’s play, Jean Valjean is imprisoned, tortured, and hunted relentlessly for stealing a loaf of bread. Hungry desperate people do desperate things. Stealing food or a TV from behind a broken display window is less than nothing when compared with the stealing and looting that historically undergirds our country’s primitive wealth accumulation.
  • Historically, our country’s economy is based on looting: It all began with genocidal looting of an entire hemisphere from Native Americans. Remember, African Americans are here in the first place because of the looting of millions of their very lives beginning in 1619. Mexicans had huge parts of their country snatched from them in 1848. And afterwards prosperous Mexican farmers saw whites routinely attack, destroy, and loot their property and homes with impunity. In 1921, white mobs in Tulsa, Oklahoma killed hundreds of African Americans as they burnt down the city’s prosperous “Black Wall Street.” The list of such outrages is long and bloody.
  • It is a form of restitution: Looting represents a poor man’s largely unconscious reparation in a country that refuses to entertain the massive restoration that is systemically due our nation’s black and brown inhabitants.
  • Looting works:  The argument can be easily made that until windows are broken and property destroyed, no one pays attention to “peaceful protestors.” On this, please see the debate on the subject recently moderated by Glen Greenwald.

Conclusion

So, what’s going on?

The murder of George Floyd ignited tinder just waiting for some spark to set it aflame. Obviously, we’re witnessing a rebellion against police brutality particularly as aimed at poor black and brown citizens.

But OEN editors and contributors were also correct: the counter-rebellion involves nefarious forces associated with our government and its armed forces. It’s all part of a last-gasp defense of a quickly disintegrating neo-liberal economic system and the actual worldwide rebellion against its order.

Part of it too is a mostly unconscious, but nonetheless genuine cry for reparations for unaddressed longstanding grievances. And on an even larger (metaphysical) scale, the trouble in streets across the planet can be credibly seen as a desperate response to a message from that Great Interbeing some of us call “God.”

Regardless of what you might call it, we had all better listen and respond before it’s too late.

Jordan and Gender: Workers’ Power to Undo Patriarchy

Like every other basketball fan, I’ve just finished watching ESPN’s ten-episode series, “The Last Dance.” It was about the 1997-’98 championship year of Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls’ – their sixth such triumph in eight years.

The series took on special meaning for me, since at the same time, I was reading the late Allan G. Johnson’s book, The Gender Knot: unraveling our patriarchal legacy. Johnson’s analysis made me realize that I was witnessing in the Jordan video saga the stark exposure of the same system Johnson was explaining in his book. Feminist scholar, bell hooks, calls it the “white supremacist, capitalist, imperialist patriarchy.” That’s the oppressive paradigm in which all of us – men and women alike – live and move and have our being. Hooks and Johnson agree on that point.

But Johnson goes further. He suggests guidelines for escaping the paradigm to make room for its replacement. Following Episode 10 of “The Last Dance,” I found myself wishing Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls had followed their direction. If they had, we might today be living in a very different world.

 Before I get to that, consider first The Gender Knot, and then “The Last Dance.” Together they reveal our patriarchal dilemma.

The Gender Knot

The main thought of The Gender Knot is that every one of us is influenced by a powerful force called patriarchy. It represents our culture’s fundamental paradigm – its unspoken social arrangement and set of assumptions – this one driven by men’s fears and their need to control. It promotes male privilege by being male dominated, male identified, and male centered. It’s what undergirds capitalism, racism, classism, and, of course, sexism.

For Johnson, patriarchy sets the rules of the game. It’s like we’re playing “Monopoly” barely aware that its instructions force us to adopt attitudes and activities that would be disturbing in other situations. “Sorry to drive you into bankruptcy,” we might find ourselves saying, “but those are the rules of the game.”

Understood in this sense, patriarchy governs the jokes men tell, our banter with other men. It governs male self-images as we compare ourselves with peers, competitors, co-workers, friends, characters in movies and on the field of play. It also governs workplace interactions between labor and management.

For many, that thesis in itself might be familiar. What was not as familiar (to me at least) is Johnson’s more penetrating insight that patriarchy is not primarily about men’s fearful and controlling relationships with women.

Instead, patriarchy is chiefly about relations among men. Psychologically, it’s about men justifying and protecting our “manly” and strong self-image before other men whose scrutiny hovers over every aspect of life – on the athletic field, at the bar, in the stadium, in the bedroom, and on the job. In all of these venues, we judge ourselves through a patriarchal gaze. At the deepest level, then, it’s other men we fear – how they might threaten, ridicule, replace, or even rape us.

Economically, it’s about how they might fire us from our jobs after our work has made them rich.

Jordan’s Last Dance

Those watching “The Last Dance” with such analysis in mind can see it played out in the series.

It brings us into the hyper-male context of locker room, court, fawning reporters, and fans. (Virtually no women have significant roles in any of the episodes.) It’s an entirely man’s world and so provides a kind of petri dish for observing and testing Johnson’s theory about men’s fears and desire to control. It also provides a context for analyzing the bigger patriarchal issue of white supremacist capitalism.

At the psychological level, “The Last Dance” displays situations where males must continually prove their fleeting manly worth through attitudes and activities that would be disturbing in other situations. The rules of the basketball world turn them into super patriarchs – openly, proudly (but also fearfully) competitive, aggressive, greedy, self-promoting, belligerent, domineering, vengeful, trash-talking, and preening – again, in an exclusively man’s world completely devoid of women and children.

All of that is true especially of Michael Jordan, the principal focus of the ESPN series. Under the threat of inevitably waning powers and the advent of younger rising stars, he’s driven to constantly prove he’s the best by vanquishing and humiliating all comers. He has to defend his position as GOAT (greatest of all time) by winning more scoring championships, All Star Game nominations, MVP awards, Olympic gold medals, and (above all) NBA championships than any other player.

And that brings us to the economic aspect of “The Last Dance” and its unwitting depiction of the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. . .

Though universally admired, Jordan’s a kind of tyrant on the job. In labor terms, he’s the ultimate foreman. As a result, grown giants of men – Michael’s teammates – alternately cower and obsequiously smile under M.J.’s judgmental gaze. His leadership style embodies the fear and control Johnson identifies as patriarchal system’s underlying values. So, he berates his teammates, makes fun of them, gets up in their faces, laughs at them, calls them names, and (on one occasion at least) punches them out – all for the sake of more efficient production.

Ironically, Jordan is particularly hard on his boss, Jerry Krause, the General Manager of the Chicago Bulls. Jordan constantly taunts him for being fat and short – at 5’6, a full foot below his tormentor. But like a kid bullied in the school yard, Krause too does the sheepish smiley thing, rolls over and takes it.

However, beneath it all, Krause, perhaps the most unathletic person in the story, is actually its most powerful patriarch. Yes, he’s fat, short and white in a world of giant African American supermen. Yes, they make fun of him and resent his taking credit for the Bulls’ success and for his vendetta against Phil Jackson, the team’s popular coach.

But in the end, it’s Krause along with Jerry Reinsdorf (the Bulls’ owner) who’s the boss – the one who finally decides to break up the greatest basketball team of all time. And this despite his “workers’” desires and those of millions of fans.

And the reason?  In episode ten, Reinsdorf explains why. It’s the money. It’s profit. Referring to some of his frontline players, he said, “Now after the sixth championship, things are beyond our control, because it would have been suicidal to bring back Pippen, Steve Kerr, Rodman and (unintelligible). Their market value was going to be too high. They weren’t going to be worth the value they’d be getting in the market . . . So, . . . I realized we were going to have to go into a rebuild. . .”

In other words, the reason for not pursuing a seventh world championship was that that the organization would have to pay the workers too much. So, white ownership and management (Reinsdorf and Krause) bit the bullet. Or, rather, they forced their African American workers and the consumers of their product to do so.

But that’s the point. It’s the way the racist capitalist patriarchy works. It delivers to a few (usually white) men absolute power over the many. If it were up to the workers, if it were up to the consumers, the Bulls would have gone on to compete for and probably win a fourth consecutive championship. But it wasn’t profitable to the powerful few. So, it didn’t happen.

So much for consumer sovereignty. So much for workers’ rights.  

Lines of Greatest Resistance

Confronted with such dynamics both psychological and economic, Johnson’s Gender Knot asks its central question: What would it take to shift the entire paradigm even as so clearly depicted in “The Last Dance?” What can be done to transform the white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal paradigm both psychologically and economically?

Johnson’s answer: take the line of greatest resistance. That’s because, like all paradigms, the very purpose of patriarchy’s system is to shunt all of us towards lines of least resistance. Its intention in all spheres is to make it easy for us to go along to get along.

On the other hand, effective resistance means:

  • Following Gandhi and embodying the paradigm we’d like to see the world adopt.
  • Realizing that most of humanity’s 250,000 years were lived under matrifocal, matrilineal, non-capitalist societies.
  • Therefore, rejecting the myth that patriarchal capitalism is somehow inevitable and permanent.
  • Giving up the comforting idea that there’s nothing we can do to synchronize our lives and decisions with history’s ineluctable paradigm shift.
  • Rejecting the related myth that change is meaningless or irrelevant unless we’re around to see it. (We can’t use our human lifespan to judge social progress.)
  • Embracing in every sphere every chance to interrupt the flow of “business as usual.”
  • Daring to make people feel uncomfortable.
  • Beginning each day with the question, “What risk for change will I take today?”
  • To that end, adopting the slogan “Organize, organize, organize.”

Conclusion

The great Larry Bird once described Michael Jordan as “God pretending to be Michael Jordan.” Indiana Pacers legend, Reggie Miller, called him “Black Jesus.” Such transcendent references make me think. . .

Imagine if the collection of black workers called the Chicago Bulls led by their highly driven and charismatic foreman had shared the consciousness explained in The Gender Knot. What if they had organized, interrupted the flow of business as usual, and taken (admittedly large in their case) risks for change in the white supremacist system of capitalist patriarchy?

What if Michael Jordan had used his charisma and marvelous talents in the service of Johnson’s suggestions? What if the Bulls had not simply rolled over for the two Jerrys — Krause and Reinsdorf? What if they had employed their unprecedented status and star power in the eyes of millions worldwide to similarly raise public consciousness about the patriarchal paradigm that oppresses us all.

What if Jordan and company had just said “No!? We’re embracing and appropriating our own power. What’s more, we’re going to organize the NBA Players’ Association into a collective worker-owned cooperative run by us, for us, and for our fans? After all, you owners need us more than we need you. You’re history!”

It would have been revolutionary – and not just for the NBA.

That’s what might have been. But it’s not just fantasy. Changes like that are entirely possible. The fact is that workers united have far more power than Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls ever had.

And as both The Gender Knot and “The Last Dance” suggest, the white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy is more vulnerable than it seems.     

A Debate on China: Competitor, Adversary or Enemy?

As noted frequently in these pages, China has gradually become the most prominent bete noire of American empire. As such it has displaced Russia which had successfully reprised that role for at least the previous four years.

China’s new status has raised the question for many: Is it truly an adversary of the U.S. — or even an enemy? Or is China simply America’s latest very challenging competitor?

Recently, Pulitzer Prize- winning journalist, Glen Greenwald attempted to answer those questions. He moderated a highly informative 90-minute debate on China between Matt Stoller and Kishore Madhubani.

Stoller presented a bill of particulars against China. He is a fellow at the Open Markets Institute and the author of Goliath: The Hundred Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy.

Madhubani, on the other hand, described China in more sanguine terms. Madhubani is a Singaporean academic and former President of UN Security Council (2001-2004). He also served as Singapore’s Permanent Representative to the U.N. (1984-’89, 1998-2004). He’s the author of Has China Won? The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy.

What follows is a quick-and-easy outline of the arguments presented first by Stoller and secondly by Madhubani.  I conclude briefly with my own perspective that takes issue with both debaters. Each of them along with Glen Greenwald, erroneously accept without question the categorization of China as a violator of human rights. In reality, I argue, China is more a human rights champion than the United States itself.

I

Matt Stoller: China is Not Merely A Competitor 

A.    Though not exactly an enemy or adversary, China is a threatening bad actor. 
B.    Witness China’s Growing Economic Power Globally:
         1.     In a very short time has transitioned from a severely   underdeveloped country to the 2nd most powerful economy in the world.
         2.     It’s now the #1 trading partner of more than 100 countries.
         3.     It is a firm ally of the world’s economic elite from Wall Street to Brussels.
         4.     Its low wages and lack of worker protection have led U.S. and other international corporations to relocate American jobs to China. 
 
C.     Witness China’s Repression:
         1.     It does not share West’s values of free speech, free press,    freedom of religion, and democratic voting.
         2.     Since the 1980s China has been “hiding its power and biding its time,” but is now openly demonstrating its intention to export its oppression as shown in China’s:
            a)     Increased military spending
            b)     Building of a new centrally controlled internet architecture
            c)     Export of sophisticated surveillance systems
            d)     Undermining of international institutions such as the WHO
            e)     Retribution against those who even mention its oppression of Muslim minorities or its coverup of the Coronavirus outbreak 
            f)     Treatment of Uyghurs in concentration camps
            g)     Police violence vs. those seeking greater freedom in Hong Kong
            h)     Long-standing military threats against Taiwan
            i)     Building of artificial islands in the South China Sea beyond internationally recognized maritime borders
            j)     Installation of military weapons there
            k)     Bullying of Philippine fishing vessels
            l)     Naval forays into the Indian Ocean ostensibly to combat piracy, but really to expand its capacity for military operations
            m)     Buying up of newspapers serving the Chinese diaspora in order to eventually coerce and control its members too
 
D.    Witness the statements of Xi Jinping who has stated that:
        1.     Socialism with Chinese characteristics is “blazing a new trail” for other countries seeking to modernize, while preserving their own sovereignty.
        2.     China is seeking a future where it will “win the initiative and have the dominant position.”
 
E.     What to Do about the China Threat?
        1.     Re-appropriate the values we say we honor, viz. freedom of press, religion, speech, assembly
        2.     Break up the alliance between China and the international economic elite
        3.     Punish U.S. companies that offshore jobs
        4.     Diversify U.S. supply chains
        5.     Bring production back to the U.S. and to democratic countries
        6.      Work with China on collective problems such as climate change
        7.     Show by these reforms that our system is better than the Chinese alternative

II

Kishore Madhubani: China Is Neither Hostile nor A Bad Actor

A.    In General
      1.     Competitors are not enemies.
      2.     One should not insult competitors or even adversaries.
      3.     There is no reason to regard China as a hostile country or as a   threat to the United States.
      4.     China has 0% chance of conquering the United States which has 6000 nuclear weapons, while China has 300. The U.S. spends five times more on its military than China does.
      5.     The U.S. has 300 military bases throughout the world (some very close to China’s borders); China has no foreign bases and (unlike America) fights no wars outside its boundaries.
      6.      The post-WWII world order characterized by U.S. hegemony was highly artificial given the location and comparative size of the U.S. population.
      7.     China and India with their huge populations and ancient cultures are now assuming their normal, rightful places in the world.
      8.     Before WWII, both China and India had been prevented from adopting those positions chiefly by colonialism.
      9.      The Chinese government enjoys the support of the majority of its people. (Without that approval it would be impossible to control 1.4 billion people.)
      10.      In fact, 130 million Chinese leave China each year and then return home. There are no Chinese refugees.
 
B.    Chinese Ambitions:
      1.     Unlike the USSR under Khrushchev, China never boasts that its system will replace that of the U.S. or other countries.
      2.     Its leaders believe their system is good for China without claiming its aptitude for other contexts.
      3.     They just want China to be strong with its own population prospering in an external environment conducive to that end.
 
C.     What about Repression in Hong Kong?
      1.     It’s true that Chinese citizens do not have the same rights to free speech as Americans.
      2.     But they have more such freedom than previously.
      3.     Remember, that during 150 years of British colonialism, there was no democracy or freedom of speech in Hong Kong.
      4.     Chinese authorities are especially sensitive about Hong Kong because it’s a symbol of British oppression and of its having forced China to accept opium commerce centered there in 1842.
 
D.    What about Oppression of the Uyghurs?
      1.     Remember that the Muslim world is going through a major transformation – struggling to modernize and reinterpret relations between religion and politics.
      2.     Remember too that when the western countries came together in the UN to condemn the treatment of Muslims in China, not a single Muslim country supported the resolution, while a large number of those countries supported China.
      3.     Instead, Muslim countries agreed that the U.S. should:
          a)     Stop bombing Islamic countries (President Obama dropped 26,000 bombs on seven Muslim countries in one year).
          b)     Try to help the Chinese deradicalize and modernize the Uyghurs in China.
 
E.     What about Chinese threats to American labor?
      1.It’s true that China’s low wages, lack of labor protections, and absence of labor rights is attractive to American producers.
      2.However, it is a mistake to blame China for the loss of jobs.
      3.After all, China did not force U.S. manufacturers to move.
      4.China joined the WTO at the invitation of the United States.
      5.We must also remember that the relatively recent and sudden introduction of 200 million new workers into the system of globalized capitalism is only the latest expression of the “creative destruction” endemic to and celebrated by that system.
      6.Sweden and Germany saw the creative destruction coming. To prepare for it, they invested heavily in the retraining of their workforces to equip them for participation in the new economy. The U.S. did not.
 
F.     What the U.S. should do:
      1.Distinguish between defending America’s primacy and defending the American people; the two are quite different.
      2.Stop fighting wars in the Middle East and focus on the welfare of its own people.
      3.Remember that it is no paragon of respect for human rights. For instance, it is the 1st modern country to reintroduce torture.
      4.Keep in mind the figure “Six billion” – i.e. of the number of people who live outside both the United States & China. They’re much more sophisticated, well-informed, and nuanced in their understandings than previously. They don’t buy the American good guys/bad guys dichotomy.

III

Evaluation

My overall response to the Greenwald interview is one of deep appreciation. It brought together two very articulate, well-prepared, and authoritative proponents of comprehensive arguments most often advanced about the nature of China’s participation in the global community.

At the same time, I found myself disappointed that both Greenwald and Madhubani accepted right-wing framing of the position that China is a violator of human rights in contrast to westerners’ valuing free speech along with freedom of religion, press, assembly and the right to vote.

Certainly, there is no question about China’s repression in the areas of speech, religion, and press. But that does not deprive it of any possibility of claiming to be a champion of human rights.

The fact is that the UN Declaration of Human Rights as well as its other official statements present the world with a long list of such entitlements ranging from the ones just mentioned to the rights to jobs, food, shelter, clothing, health care, to children’s rights. 

Another fact is that no country in the world honors all human rights. Instead, all of them (according to whether they fancy themselves “capitalist” or “socialist”) prioritize human rights.

Capitalists accord first place to having commercial and legal contracts honored. They then list freedoms of speech, religion, press and the right to vote as their other preferences. However, if trade contracts are under threat, capitalists quickly dispense with all those other rights – as is demonstrated by their support of repressive regimes such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Brazil and the Philippines.

As for the rights to food, shelter, and clothing (as enshrined in the UN Declaration of Human Rights) the United States has never recognized any of them as such (having refused to sign the enacting protocols). According to all U.S. administrations such “rights” are merely “aspirations.”

Priorities in socialist countries such as China and Cuba are different. For them the rights to food, shelter, clothing, education, health care, and jobs hold primacy of place.  Freedom of press, speech, and religion, as well as voting rights are dispensable as long as those preferred rights remain under siege.

I only wish Greenwald and Madhubani had made those distinctions. It would have helped the audience understand that indeed China does not respect human rights, while the United States does.

But (even more importantly for purposes of critical thinking in this country) listeners would also have understood that China indeed respects human rights while the United States does not. 

It is therefore unseemly for westerners to beat China with the human rights club. Too bad that Greenwald and Madhubani didn’t recognize that impropriety.

Guest Column: Where are we today?

(Here are some timely thoughts written by my life’s partner, Peggy Rivage-Seul. She is professor emerita of Women and Gender Studies at Berea College, where she taught for more than 30 years.)

The Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico warned us long ago that “another world is necessary.” To make this happen we must exit from the development paradigm of the neoliberal new world order and return to a future of non-violent relationships between ourselves and the planet we call home.  Another world has indeed arrived, and perhaps it will soon lead to the vision the Zapatistas have articulated over the past twenty-five years.  

Where are we exactly? We are in a globalized moment of social isolation. Unless we are living with our closest relatives, we have lost physical contact with those we love—our children, our grandchildren, our friends, our church, our colleagues, our neighbors. We can no longer break bread with our communities.  

How do we make sense of this new social isolation in the world? There are many explanations, undergirded by ideologies that shape the way we perceive our global circumstances. Perhaps most popular is the notion that a virus has either escaped a laboratory created for bio-weaponry against humanity or it has evolved on its own in response to our poor stewardship of our natural resources. Mother Earth has to do some house cleaning because the “developed countries” have not heeded the call to slow down its demands on the earth. The planet warned us through climate changes and catastrophes, but the wealthy among us have prevailed in their global denial of the need to change the way we live. 

 We are all vulnerable—some of us more than others.   Those of us who believe in Adam Smith’s idea that the environment and laborers are expendable  can accept that the earth is purging the global population of its poor and  elderly who no longer serve the capitalist enterprise.  And  the earth has been given a respite to re-gather her energies for even more domination and exploitation in the new world to come.  There are many sub-scenarios about the “deep state” trying to wrest control of the entire world population, and the “fake news” that there really is a virus at work in our bodies.  These are the tales that fill our days. 

But there is another story. Eight years ago began a  movement in the cosmos: our solar system  passed through a portal that leads to another dimension of living much closer to the Zapatista vision for world happiness. This passage is from the third dimension of the  material world of capitalist growth to the fourth and fifth dimensions where humans behave at much higher frequencies with strong spiritual values of love and cooperation.

Like the change from pony express mail to cell phone texting, our collective crossing over to these higher  dimensions  creates an exponential change in our thinking and actions. In the fifth dimension, we can  process information with much more efficiency. Working a higher vibrations,   both problems and solutions occur at much greater speed. In this new world, the  cultural values of the 20th century no longer serve us.  

Wars are passe and violence toward one another is not tolerated. Co-creation for the good of everyone replaces capitalism for the privileged few, oppression gives way to liberation, etc. Most importantly, the mindset of globalized industrialism no longer functions and those unable to make the leap in consciousness will wither on the vine in the third dimension, unable to meet the requirements for living on the new earth.  

Underlying this vision of a fifth dimension is a belief in the capacity of humans to claim their direct connection to a divine reality and to live the values of love and justice, cooperation and sharing, joy and sorrow. These values have  been alive (and ignored by the developed world) in the ancient traditions of indigenous communities the world over.

The transition from the astrological Piscean Age to the new Aquarian era is made easier as we go back to the future by reclaiming the lessons of Zapatismo.  There, we understand that as our consciousness changes and our frequencies rise,   we see each other as one family moving into a world where there is room for everyone. 

We are no longer individuals   competing for scarce resources to survive. We are in this together. “I” becomes “We” as we make instantaneous connection to the source of life that is Spirit. We belong to the earth as much as earth belongs to us. My community becomes the entire world population. We all have a place at the table of life.  

Which story will you choose? 

Stop the Drug War: “Chasing the Scream” by Johann Hari

We’ve been fighting the War on Drugs for more than 100 years. And we’re no closer to “winning” it than we were a century ago. That’s the unsurprising message of Johann Hari’s well-written, insightful and even gripping account of the Drug War called Chasing the Scream.

It is, however, the book’s surprising message that likely made Noam Chomsky find the book “wonderful” and impossible to lay aside. It’s probably what made “Democracy Now’s” Amy Goodman call it “astounding.”  British comedian, ex-addict and social commentator, Russell Brand said Chasing the Scream was “intoxicatingly thrilling as crack, without destroying your teeth.” He added that “It will change the drug debate forever.”

In fact, that’s what Hari’s book did for me personally; it changed entirely the way I think about drugs of all kinds from marijuana to heroin, crack and Oxycontin. It made me realize (and this is the surprising part) that most drug consumers, even of those last three just mentioned substances, are not addicts. More than 90% of them, even if they get high every weekend (and maybe on Wednesdays too), continue to hold responsible jobs, are good family members and serve their communities just as well as most of the rest of us.

That’s because drug addiction is not caused by principally by chemical hooks. Contrary to what we’ve been told ever since “Reefer Madness,” merely smoking marijuana or injecting heroin or crack – merely consuming Oxycontin as a pain reliever or even just to get high – won’t ipso facto hook you.

No, it’s the underlying loneliness you might be experiencing; it’s the emptiness of your life or the breakdown of your key relationships that drives one to compensate by seeking relief in drugs. Moreover, the drug you’ll probably turn to for coping with such human problems will not be found on that list of prohibited controlled substances. Yet it’s the one that’s proven most destructive of all. It’s alcohol.

And alcohol is legal, and government controlled. Its taxation is a major source of revenue for the state. Additionally, alcoholism is not generally treated as a crime, but as a disease. It is treated most effectively by offering its victims community support and counselling of the type they find in Alcoholics Anonymous.

That was among the hard lessons learned here in the United States during the era of Prohibition. Then it was found that declaring alcohol illegal gave rise to a black market controlled by the worst elements of society that eventually burgeoned into gangs headed by super-criminals like Al Capone. Removing prohibition and treating alcoholics with understanding and compassion ended most of that.

After travelling the world from the streets of New York to Mexico, Switzerland, Uruguay and points between, a skeptical Johann Hari gradually came to the conclusion that treating drugs similarly, i.e. by removing prohibition, would have a similar effect in terms of fighting the scourge of gang violence and drug addiction.

The gangs would disappear or be greatly reduced in number and power. And the 10% of drug takers whose use of now controlled substances has become problematic would have their addictions taken care of with counselling and psychiatric help intended to assist their recovery process, and if necessary, find them employment and housing.  

More specifically, the success of parallel programs in countries as disparate as Switzerland (where drugs were decriminalized, but their sale not legalized) and Uruguay (whose project has been to both decriminalize and legalize drug use) shows that the relatively small percentage of problematic addicts are not best served by imprisonment. Instead, best practices achieve superior results by making drugs readily available to patients in dignified and controlled settings staffed by trained medical personnel including counsellors and life coaches. Such treatment continues as long as needed – until affected patients decide they no longer need drugs. And most do eventually come to that decision.

The distinction between decriminalization and legalization is important. To decriminalize drug use means that users will no longer be treated as delinquents. They can, for instance possess a supply of opiates sufficient to meet their needs for as many as ten days.

Switzerland has adopted policy of this nature. It treats addicts like hospital outpatients, offers them their drug of choice in circumstances supervised by medical personnel, and makes counselling available as well. However, as Hari points out, failure to legalize sale of drugs means that drug distribution outside government facilities remains in the hands of drug gangs. Nonetheless, Switzerland’s decriminalization procedures have greatly reduced problematic drug use which so often involves theft, robbery, prostitution, and violence.

Uruguay’s approach aspires to be more comprehensive. It has moved towards both decriminalizing and legalizing drug use of all kinds. This means a reversion to something like the situation in the United States before 1914, when heroin was first outlawed. This all-inclusive approach includes treating less potent drugs like marijuana in the same way as tobacco and liquor here in the United States. Heroin, crack, opiates and amphetamines on the other hand, would be treated like prescription drugs, with the state offering all sorts of programs to help stop usage. Unsurprisingly, legalization slightly increases drug use. Significantly, however, it reduces the already mentioned street crime and bankrupts drug gangs.     

This is a key point in Hari’s book, viz. that the prohibition of drugs – the War on Drugs itself – represents the equivalent of underwriting the illicit drug industry. It makes it possible. The War on Drugs guarantees the emergence of a whole economic sector controlled only by smugglers and illicit drug pushers. The industry also includes peasant farmers who grow marijuana and poppies as well as other workers who process, pack, and load the contraband on ships, planes, and trucks.

By design or not, the drug industry is also responsible for spawning a hugely lucrative counter-commerce. This includes government officials, detective agencies, police across the planet, and enormous prison staffs. Their participation in the drug war is funded by billions of taxpayer dollars and is responsible for the employment of millions. Consequently, threatened elimination of these anti-narcotic agencies represents a mortal threat to all those jobs. If drugs were legalized, many would be profoundly disappointed at the loss of their livelihoods.

The point is that none of the parties – certainly not the drug lords and their employees, but also not the anti-drug warriors – wants to see the end of anti-drug campaigns. Hence, the Drug War has no prospect of ending. It’s a key part of the world economy.

Yet, the legalization of drugs and the treatment of addicts as patients rather than as criminals is the only proven way of lessening problematic drug use while eliminating the power of drug cartels and gangs.  

In the end, as Johann Hari points out, what’s required is a complete change of attitude towards drug consumption and the consequent cessation of the Drug War. Societies everywhere must realize that overcoming addiction means overcoming its social causes. It means rechanneling the billions of dollars now wasted on the failed century-long Drug War into restructuring society to make it more caring, loving, and supportive. It entails shaping a culture where happiness is sought in family connections, loving friendships, and in enriched community relationships rather than in endless, pointless and unsatisfying consumption. It means making it possible for people to have stable homes, well-rewarded employment, caring neighborhoods.

Reading Chasing the Scream invites readers to imagine a world without the Drug War. It would be a world:

  • With greatly reduced crime and a shrunken prison system
  • Where police forces could be downsized and rehabilitated in the eyes of poorer communities as a welcome rather than a threatening presence
  • Where countries like Mexico would be freed from control by drug cartels
  • Where refugees from those countries would be dramatically reduced or eliminated, thus greatly impacting immigration problems and the perceived need for expensive border walls.
  • Where the billions upon billions of dollars currently spent in a clearly unsuccessful war on drugs including those huge police forces, overcrowded prisons, and enormous bureaucracies intended to administer it all could be rechanneled to help the merely 10% percent of drug users whose usage is problematic.

In short, cessation of the Drug War, decriminalization and legalization of drugs of all kinds, would reshape our world in ways that would reduce and/or eliminate many of its most vexing problems.

Money for Nothin’: Why Pay Federal Taxes?

The do-nothing approach of the know-nothing Trump administration to the COVID-19 crisis has raised a fundamental question for me. Why are we paying federal taxes?

I mean, if (unlike countries even such as South Korea and China) “the greatest country in the world” can’t even make sure that its citizens have enough cotton swabs for coronavirus tests, what is it doing for us? Why am I paying taxes?

And I’m just talking cotton swabs – not to mention low-tech items like test kits themselves or plastic gloves, protective clothing for nurses and doctors, face masks for the rest of us, hospital beds, or ventilators. Cotton swabs!

Of course, the answer is that we’ve somehow bought in to Reaganism. To use his words, it somehow convinced us that “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

Remember that? I do.

It was Reagan’s version of the Edmund Burke quote: “That government is best which governs least. . .” Or as Republican operative, Grover Norquist, put it, “I’m not in favor of abolishing the government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

Whatever the phrasing, its bottom line over the last 40 years has the government doing less and less for its citizens – and we end up paying more and more.

It’s as if we had two choices: (1) pay taxes those who provide us with the services we need (like healthcare, education, affordable housing, serviceable roads and bridges) or (2) pay them to those who on principle do nothing for us. Pay for something or pay for nothing! By electing Republicans (and many Democrats too), we’ve been making the latter choice.

Is that crazy or what?

And what’s the government doing with my tax dollars – and yours? It’s like we’re paying protection money — to our representatives — to protect us from the services we’re paying for.

I thought government’s first duty was to keep us safe. Right now, though, in the face of the biggest threat to our safety in the last 75 years, our “representatives” are doing nothing – absolutely nothing to that end.

And they’re proud of it.

In fact, we’re on track to re-elect the lot of them again next November.

Go figure.