- The CEO of EXXON as Secretary of State protecting our interests only brings back in my historical recollection the U.S. Oil companies selling oil from Mexico to Nazis Germany; oil company subsidiaries drilling in the Gulf offshore from Mexico run by U.S. boards of oil companies. Love the idea that oil will not sell us down river, especially as since we have reached an even higher moral ground in politics and business and banking.
- Clinton Pro-Wall-Street deregulatory actions . . . began while Democrats were the majority, beginning with the appointments Robert Rubin and Larry Summers in the Treasury . . . does anyone recall his dissolving the Glass-Steagall Law from the Great Depression, barring Investment Banks from Commercial Banking activities? No. Does anyone recall the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, ” which left the derivatives market a laissez-faire Wild West,” according to the Columbia Journalism Review. With Riegle-Neal he gutted State regulations of Banks leading to grotesque bank mergers and the too-big-to-fail mind-set. And yes, responsible directly for more deregulation that lead directly to 2008 than any President . . . recall Obama blaming George W. for 2008? I do. But next to Bill Clinton, there has been no greater friend to Wall Street Greed in the Oval Office than OBAMA.
- Recall another post of mine . . . how from as many points of approach as could be imagined, any analysis of our contemporary political quandary refers us to a fact I take to be currently self-evident, and that is we no longer have folk lore, folk learning, folk wisdom, folk knowledge; teenagers do not talk to their parents let alone to their grandparents; the generations do not have a gap, they are dis-connected, dis-jointed . . . we live a totalitarian bourgeois life, a techno/bureaucratic society without any means of customary learning except what we get through the media, what we look to the media to tell us, what we receive from the media packaged by the media, 90% of which is controlled by only 6 corporations. That’s as Orwellian as we could get. Yes, in all anachronism, 1984 is now.
- Mainstream media has no partisan bias because it protects Power and Money we never see, who control mass media in itself media for mass consumption. To say that the Washington Post and the NY Times are unbiased because they are not overtly fake, that is, obviously fake . . . only means they are better at disseminating the propaganda of the Power Elite and the Money Elite, the same old same old that corrupts politicians . . . and I’m not one of the nuts who rant about New World Order and being against it because what they are against is only the suits and ties that Power wears today. It is the space created by Power for subversion to emerge to control all subversive change. Please; the BBC, the NY Times and the Washington Post are virtually all Zionist in the most conservative ways that it’s sickening to think they parade as liberal media; and that’s by protecting Reactionary Zionism as if it were the only Zionism politically, as if it were the only way Zionism can take a moral high ground, supporting a kind of Jewish Manifest Destiny in the Middle East. The NY Times is status quo liberal only in a world where Hilary Clinton can be called liberal, as big of a joke as imagining her sickeningly oily husband Bill can be viewed as viably a protector of everyday people. Whether it is the Oil Gangsters or Wall Street Gangsters or other Corporate Gangsters or Media moguls, the CEOs and Boards of the 6 corporations that control 90% of our media . . . please . . . when people talk about the Times or the Wshington Post or any other organ of mainstream media you are talking about power representing Power and Money and managing news and information to keep the People IN Form, that is IN Formation, as shrubs in a garden are in formation, soldiers at attention are in formation . . . what are we talkiong about . . . fools, fools, fools that we are. Remember, when a power nobody like Matt Lauer can buy a home for 30 million dollars, you understand how much the Media has invested in keeping Power in the shadows, how far they are willing to go to preseent themselves as representatives of the people, how willingly they are to buy your IN FORMATION because how they inform has the effect of just that.
- In response to a quote from Black Elk (a spiritual leader of the Lakota nation, a confederacy of 7 tribes: Ogalala [“they scatter their own,” or “dust scatterers”], Sicangu or Brule [“Burnt Thighs”], Hunkpapa [“end of the circle”], Miniconjou [“planters beside the stream”], Sihasapa or Blackfoot [not to be confused with the separate Blackfoot people], Itazipacola [or Sans Arcs: “without bows”], Oohenupa [“Two Boilings” or “Two Kettle”]) found in a post shared by someone on Facebook. The Lakota are one of three groupings of what we call Sioux people; the other, are the Dakota and Nakota, the naming here having phonological reference on how these people pronounce certain cognomen words: /l/, /d/, /n/, which if you want to know, share articulatory features, they are each with either of the other two, minimal pairs, which means they share at least two articulatory features: all three are voiced consonants, which means the larynx vibrates in their pronunciation; and they are all lingua-alveolar, meaning the tip of the tongue touches the gum ridge at the back of the top front teeth. Now Dakota and Lakota are considered dialects of each other, while Nakota is closely related to the other two, but not so easily understood by Lakota or Dakota speakers. Enough. Now let me say, With deference to Black Elk’s wisdom and intelligence, to his forthrightness and experience—I read Black Elk Speaks— let us not forget that what Black Elk is talking about when he compares his people and their distinction from white people is Lakota for Lakota to Lakota people; he is not referring to what Lakota would do to Cree or Crow or Shoshone et cetera. He is talking of the tribe when he talks of “his people,” not his race, which is a confusing term anyway.What Black Elk did not understand is that in a society ruled/controlled by the Bourgeoisie, that in a bourgeois capitalist Society, the rich and the poor are from different tribes; this is what we do not understand,which is how wealth understands the social grouping of society. The Monied/corporate/power elite are a different tribe and see themselves as such, and manage their decisions likewise. Tribal warfare has always been metaphysical cataclysms, metaphysical as well as physical conflicts. The Lakota were powerful and wealthy because they were the best horse raiders/stealers/thieves on the Plains. Ironically we look to them as our stereotypical Native American because they did, in part or at times completely, to all surrounding tribes, what the rich in white society do to the poor.Perhaps we still look for a Golden Age in any part of our world past? Maybe some of us have been too enamored with our Romantist ideas informed by Rousseau? Again, let me say that my critique is with deference to the totality of Black Elk’s experience and wisdom. You should read BLACK ELK SPEAKS.
- There was something I had been saying, have been saying for a long time, and will continue to say . . . and that is whenever we lower standards of achievement in schools to make passing more easily accomplished (de-accomplished) by students and teachers, we are creating not a pro-populist/People-centered culture but a horribly elitist one. The programmatics of contemporary state sponsored education has nothing to do with aiding the auto-didatic Self, but crippling it.
- Literacy and Media IN-formation need not co-join. Media messaging just might be one of the great antagonists to/of literacy as I have understood it. I’m not talking all journalism in print because this can be a part of and a re-presentative of literacy at higher stages of what should we say, ‘develeopment’ ‘achievement’? But info-tainment has almost everything to do with advertising which is clever, not intelligent; different. Advertising runs parallel to propaganda, until on the horizon of being, those parallel lines converge. Remember, the coverging lines on the horizon reveals the curvature of the earth, showing us how light in a curved space bahves in perception. It is actually trueer than the perceived flatness of the ground upon which we walk.
- I love when American Political Party-line supporters play ping with each other’s slogans and received ideas, and then tell the other to grow up and check their facts, nothing either one seems willing to do. Hop-scotch with the Truth, anyone?
- A note in comment placed after a share from the Facebook page of a former Facebook-friend who unfriended me because of critiques of posts he shared on his page. I guess we all expect smoke blown up our asses on Facebook, which is an extremely disturbing image, especially when having real smoke blown up our actual asses is much more enjoyable, I imagine. Nonetheless, however, moreover I found a post shared on a former Facebook-friend’s page, a post indicating that the NY Times has decided Donald Trump is a threat to democracy . . . but I went on to say that this was a Facebook-friend who probably could not handle the critiques of his syncophantic Hilary worship from my site; a worship, yes, that he finds appropriate in what he imagines in contemporary mainstream Democrat delusion is salvation for America. Anti-Trump might be one point on which we meet. But every solution offered in his site is as tired, as effete, as insipid, as statist, as willing to play ping pong with slogans or hop-scotch with the Truth as the ragged neo-liberalism that allowed Trump to have any validity with maasses of pissed off people. His message (this former Facebook-friend who has de-friended me, yes de-friended, not unfriended) is as horridly elitist as he imagines (and as I know) the Republican extremists are heinous—and I know they are; but he only imagines they are, with what passes for literacy in his rhetoric. I’m tired of semi-literacy pretending to be enough for liberalism to rise to the challenges of whatever you want to call Trump and Trumpism, even if it is now his revealed shell game he played during the election, as if he knew all along what he was doing, just play acting . . . but then, how long have we been saying things like Statecraft is Stagecraft without articulating what the hell we meant by that. And I had been teaching Composition in university for years seeing the stark inability, not only of the students to handle critical thinking on the page, but the adjuncts who were teaching them to mis-handle it—manipulation of the idea of critical thinking accomplished by flipping one received idea after another, effete and insipid I repeat . . . trite slogans regurgitated and then recycled as if turning out former puke in new forms of puke was being Green????????
- In reference to Livitsky and Ziblatt’s article in the NY TIMES, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” (the title in the form of a question as if posing a serious problem for the Republic for which we no longer stand, including the organ of Mass Media they work for, The NY TIMES; the latter mostly standing for Power and Money, almost invariably always) Yes, the title is in a question posed, thus indicating a rhetorical posture that can only speak of pseudo rhetoric, handled and offered by those who have no intentions of handling more articulate rhetoric (or a rhetoric challenging of authority,) or by those who cannot do so. Nonetheless, let me now say, Could the New York Times, under the cover of “We the Media have failed,” be taking responsibility for Trump? God I would hope so, but seeing as they are a tentacle on the Octopus that is our media conglomeracy, a part of the Oligarchy of Power, this could be more spin to help Power remain in the shadows. I’m talking about the Power that manipulates authority in government whether it is Republican or Democrat, whether it is authoritarian or perceived as warmly liberal in all the correct postures of presentation in our INFO-Tianment news services . . . shudder to think that there are any people who see Democrats and Republicans as flip sides of the one coin that the Power and Monied elite toss up in the air when they want to amuse themselves, and this does not have to point to grand conspiracies. Conspiracy Theorists and Anti-Conspsiracy Theorists are equally naive and yes, gullible. Donald Trump is a big threat to Democracy, as much as Bill Clinton was, equally with Ronald Regan, Wall Street, Oil, and a Media Conglomeracy where 90% of all media in America is controlled by 6 corporations.
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