4 four horsemen apocalyse

disambiguation:

see alec- koch alypse

see interlocking dovetail -isms:

privatization, financialization, militarization, and criminalization, which together are producing a steadily creeping authoritarianism

AHA DOH NEGLECTED NOTE MILITARISM TRUMP 2ND TERM: ICE MIRDER GOOD, RAPELL BLACKHAWK CHIC FALLUJAH BATTLE RATTLE BLUE CITIES // VENEZ BOAT STRIKE JSOC KIDNAP 1 26 TAKE GREENLAND THE HARD WAY, PANAMA, MEX

---

aha 12 23

XIAN: interlocks with Strict Father, male

Free Market Capitalism deregulation favored by corporations/ oligarch/ Kochs VS FRICTION?

Military: is male, xian? chaplains; interesting that vilified when refuse trump coup, also (maybe in the wake of colin k NFl) corps become woke (Desantis Disney big booster) when move to DEI AA or take the wrong side on any wedge/culture war BS, which some CEO clearly recognize as bad for biz. They get feedback immediately and cannot ignore # from a broader base than trumpistas.

bc WARRIOR is male preserve, any woke gets strong pushback // gamergate, incursion of female onto our turf.

---

yikes financialization combined with weather chaos?!

CFTC act

Food prices[

Institutions such as hedge funds, pension funds and investment banks^[93] have been instrumental in pushing up world food prices in the last five years, with investment in food solely as a commodity rising from $65bn to $126bn (£41bn to £79bn) between 2007 and 2012, contributing to 30-year highs. Financial institutions now make up 61% of all investment in wheat futures.

According to Olivier De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on food, there was a rush by institutions to enter the food market following the Commodity Futures Modernization Act.^[93] De Schutter told the Independent in March 2012: "What we are seeing now is that these financial markets have developed massively with the arrival of these new financial investors, who are purely interested in the short-term monetary gain and are not really interested in the physical thing – they never actually buy the ton of wheat or maize; they only buy a promise to buy or to sell.

The result of this financialisation of the commodities market is that the prices of the products respond increasingly to a purely speculative logic. This explains why in very short periods of time we see prices spiking or bubbles exploding, because prices are less and less determined by the real match between supply and demand."^[93]In 2011, 450 economists from around the world called on the G20 to regulate the commodities market more.^[93] Rising food prices over recent years have been linked with social unrest around the world, including rioting in Bangladesh and Mexico,^[93] and theArab Spring.

---

aha // above: financialization leads to loss of mfg jobs, workers force into gig ecnomoy fast food, meat cutter etc; also prison guards (cops?); some desprate poor ppl turn to crime (and payday loans); join the military b/c only secre job w/o college or a way to pay for college;

921

aha PIC MIC

Labor Day, we speak with journalist and sociologist Eyal Press about his new book, "Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America." Press profiles workers like prison guards and oil workers — people who make their livelihoods by doing "unethical activity that society depends on and tacitly condones but doesn't want to hear too much" about, he says. "This work is largely hidden, and we rarely hear from the people on the frontlines who are delegated to do it," Press tells Democracy Now! "The powerful and the privileged really don't do the dirty work in America — they not only don't do it, they don't see it"

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman.

This Monday is Labor Day. Today, we spend the rest of the hour looking at Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America. It's the title of a new book by New Yorker writer Eyal Press. He profiles workers like prison guards and oil workers, and two people we'll speak to in a minute: a drone operator and the daughter of poultry plant workers.

We begin with Eyal Press, who also has a new opinion piece in The New York Times headlined "America Runs on 'Dirty Work' and Moral Inequality." Eyal is joining us from Buffalo, New York.

Eyal, welcome back to Democracy Now! You begin your book, Eyal, with a quote from the great writer James Baldwin, who said, "The powerless must do their own dirty work. The powerful have it done for them." Talk about what that means and what you mean by "dirty work."

EYAL PRESS: So, I don't mean the common colloquial expression, which I think leads people to just think of, say, garbage truck workers, who do something that's physically dirty. Dirty work, in my book, means unethical activity that society depends on and tacitly condones but doesn't want to hear too much. So, it is work that's sort of in the shadows, if we think of the work of conducting targeted assassinations in the drone program or the work of running the mental health wards in America's jails and prisons, which, by the way, are the largest mental health institutions in this country, or the work of manning the kill floors in industrial slaughterhouses. All of those things, I argue in the book, are pretty essential to our existing social order, to the American way of life. You really can't imagine fast food, the American industrial food system, without the slaughterhouses I write about. You can't imagine the never-ending wars without the drone program.

But we very rarely hear from — this work is largely hidden, and we rarely hear from the people on the frontlines who are delegated to do it. And to go back to the Baldwin quote, the book is about inequality, because the powerful and the privileged really don't do the dirty work in America — they not only don't do it, they don't see it. And so I'm particularly honored to be on this show, because you've invited some of the people I've written about to tell their stories. We don't hear those stories enough, and also the family members of people who do this work.

---

medium 221

Water Is Being Traded on the Stock Market for the First Time

Some say trading water as a commodity could help mitigate future water crises, but others are highly…

Drew Costley in Future Human

---

NB RR and others see overlap between CRIM and MIL

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/robert-reich-the-real-choice-is-social-control-or-social-investment/

Some societies center on social control, others on social investment.

Social-control societies put substantial resources into police, prisons, surveillance, immigration enforcement, and the military. Their purpose is to utilize fear, punishment, and violence to divide people and keep the status quo in place — perpetuating the systemic oppression of Black and brown people, and benefiting no one but wealthy elites.

Social-investment societies put more resources into healthcare, education, affordable housing, jobless benefits, and children. Their purpose is to free people from the risks and anxieties of daily life and give everyone a fair shot at making it.

Donald Trump epitomizes the former. He calls himself the “law and order” president. He even wants to sic the military on Americans protesting horrific police killings.

He has created an unaccountable army of federal agents who go into cities like Portland, Oregon – without showing their identities – and assault innocent Americans.

Trump is the culmination of forty years of increasing social control in the United States and decreasing social investment – a trend which, given the deep-seated history of racism in the United States, falls disproportionately on Black people, indigeneous people, and people of color.

Spending on policing in the United States has almost tripled, from $42.3 billion in 1977 to $114.5 billion in 2017.

America now locks away 2.2 million people in prisons and jails. That’s a 500 percent increase from 40 years ago. The nation now has the largest incarcerated population in the world.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has exploded. More people are now in ICE detention than ever in its history.

Total military spending in the U.S. has soared from $437 billion in 2003 to $935.8 billion this fiscal year.

The more societies spend on social controls, the less they have left for social investment. More police means fewer social services. American taxpayers spend $107.5 billion more on police than on public housing.

More prisons means fewer dollars for education. In fact, America is now spending more money on prisons than on public schools. Fifteen states now spend $27,000 more per person in prison than they do per student.

As spending on controls has increased, spending on public assistance has shrunk. Fewer people are receiving food stamps. Outlays for public health have declined.

America can’t even seem to find money to extend unemployment benefits during this pandemic.

Societies that skimp on social investment end up spending more on social controls that perpetuate violence and oppression. This trend is a deep-seated part of our history.

The United States began as a control society. Slavery– America’s original sin – depended on the harshest conceivable controls. Jim Crow and redlining continued that legacy.

But in the decades following World War II, the nation began inching toward social investment – the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, and substantial investments in health and education.

Then America swung backward to social control.

Since Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs,” four times as many people have been arrested for possessing drugs as for selling them.

Of those arrested for possession, half have been charged with possessing cannabis for their own use. Nixon’s strategy had a devastating effect on Black people that is still felt today: a Black person is nearly 4 times more likely to be arrested for cannabis possession than a white person, even though they use it at similar rates.

Bill Clinton put 88,000 additional police on the streets and got Congress to mandate life sentences for people convicted of a felony after two or more prior convictions, including drug offenses.

This so-called “three strikes you’re out” law was replicated by many states, and, yet again, disproportionately impacted Black Americans. In California, for instance, Black people were 12 times more likely than white people to be incarcerated under three-strikes laws, until the state reformed the law in 2012. Clinton also “reformed” welfare into a restrictive program that does little for families in poverty today.

Why did America swing back to social control?

Part of the answer has to do with widening inequality. As the middle class collapsed and the ranks of the poor grew, those in power viewed social controls as cheaper than social investment, which would require additional taxes and a massive redistribution of both wealth and power.

Meanwhile, politicians whose power depends on maintaining the status quo, used racism – from Nixon’s “law and order” and Reagan’s “welfare queens” to Trump’s blatantly racist rhetoric – to deflect the anxieties of an increasingly overwhelmed white working class. It’s the same old strategy. So long as racial animosity exists, the poor and working class won’t join together to topple the system that keeps so many Americans in poverty, and Black Americans oppressed.

The last weeks of protests and demonstrations have exposed what’s always been true: social controls are both deadly and unsustainable. They require more and more oppressive means of terrorizing communities and they drain resources that would ensure Black people not only survive, but thrive.

This moment calls on us to relinquish social control and ramp up our commitment to social investment.

It’s time we invest in affordable housing and education, not tear gas, batons, and state-sanctioned murder. It’s time we invest in keeping children fed and out of poverty, not putting their parents behind bars. It’s time to defund the police, and invest in communities. We have no time to waste.

---

6/20 big ramp up on militarization and criminalization eg

omg in wake of milley and sec at st john 180, this pow #3?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/trump-nominee-for-key-pentagon-position-accused-is-an-islamophobic-conspiracy-theorist-who-called-obama-a-terrorist-leader/

trump nominee for key Pentagon position accused is ‘an Islamophobic conspiracy theorist who called Obama a terrorist leader’

Written by Alex Henderson June 16, 2020

President Donald Trump has nominated retired Army Brig. Gen. Anthony J. Tata for a key position in the Pentagon, but Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee, according to CNN, have vowed to oppose the nomination in light of Tata’s history of hateful anti-Islam rants.That includes Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed, the leading Democrat on the SASC.

In 2018, CNN reported, Tata described Islam as the “most oppressive violent religion I know of” and called former President Barack Obama as a “terrorist leader” for — as he saw it — being overly pro-Islam. Tata was vehemently critical of the Obama Administration’s deal with Iran and claimed that it came about because ofObama’s “Islamic roots.” Obama, Tata claimed, did more to “help Islamic countries than any president in history.”

Anthony J. Tata

@ajtata

If true, and it appears to be, #Obama and #Clinton are guilty of sedition and/or treason 18 U.S. Code 2384 #MAGA #trump2020 #ComeyMemos #Kanye2024 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2384 … https://twitter.com/_vachellindsay_/status/988616258022076416 …

8:31 PM - Apr 23, 2018

Twitter Ads info and privacy

See Anthony J. Tata's other Tweets

In addition to Reed, Senate Democrats who have told CNN they will oppose Tata’s nomination include Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Gary Peters of Michigan. Warren told CNN, “An Islamophobic conspiracy theorist who called President Obama a ‘terrorist leader’ should not be #3 at the Pentagon. Anthony Tata is by far Trump’s most unqualified and ill-suited senior defense nominee.”

In May 2018, Tata attacked former CIA Director John Brennan and tweeted, “Might be a good time to pick your poison: firing squad, public hanging, life sentence as prison b*tch, or just suck on your pistol. Your call. #Treason #Sedition #crossfirehurricane #Obamagate.”

andrew kaczynski??

@KFILE

Replying to @KFILE

The "Manchurian candidate" Obama conspiracy article shared and endorsed by Tata claimed that Obama let ISIS grow on purpose in Iraq and Libya, saying the "deviousness of the Obama sedition runs deep."https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/15/politics/tata-pentagon-nominee-kfile/index.html …

Democrats on key Senate committee oppose Pentagon pick as more inflammatory tweets emerge

Several Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee said Monday that they would oppose the nomination of retired Army Brig. Gen. Anthony Tata to oversee the Pentagon's policy shop.

cnn.com

andrew kaczynski??

@KFILE

Tata accused Obama administration remembers of treason several times, saying former CIA chief John Brennan should "pick your poison: firing squad, public hanging, life sentence as prison b*tch, or just suck on your pistol. Your call."https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/15/politics/tata-pentagon-nominee-kfile/index.html …

View image on TwitterView image on Twitter...

---

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/the-failure-of-militarized-neoliberalism-is-laid-bare-in-iraq-and-haiti/

no lnx

The failure of militarized neoliberalism is laid bare in Iraq and Haiti

Written by Medea Benjamin, Nicolas J. S. Davies October 10, 2019

This season could be called the Autumn of Discontent, as people from the Middle East to Latin America and the Caribbean have been rising up against corrupt neoliberal governments. Two of the countries in crisis, Haiti and Iraq, are on opposite ends of the earth but have something important in common. Not only are they reeling from protests against government corruption and austerity programs, like Ecuador and Algeria, but in both Haiti and Iraq, their corrupt neoliberal governments were imposed on them by the use of U.S. military force.

In 2003 and 2004 respectively, U.S. forces illegally invaded Iraq and Haiti, removed their internationally recognized governments from power and replaced them with U.S.-backed regimes. Both countries have since been governed in line with the dominant neoliberal ideology that the U.S. and its allies have imposed on most of the world since the 1980s. The protests and savage repression in Iraq and Haiti today are only the latest evidence of the utter failure of neoliberalism and the extraordinary human cost of U.S. efforts to impose it by military force on countries that resist.

In the first week of October, more than 100 people were killed and 6,000 wounded in Baghdad, Nasiriyah and other Iraqi cities, as the Iraqi Army and police fired into large demonstrations. Young Iraqis have risen up against government corruption, unemployment and poverty that leave them with dismal prospects, even as record oil production fills the pockets of the ruling elite in Baghdad’s Green Zone.

Meanwhile, at least 17 people have been killed in the Haitian government’s repression of protests calling for the resignation of U.S.-backed President Jovenel Moise. Public anger has boiled over into the streets as Moise faces credible charges of embezzlement and corruption. His government has utterly failed to improve the lives of most Haitians. Haiti remains the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, with a per capita GDP of only $870 per year and 60 percent of the population living below a poverty line of $2.41 per day.

In a Foreign Affairs article in January 2019, Senator Elizabeth Warrenexplained how the U.S.:

began to export a particular brand of capitalism, one that involved weak regulations, low taxes on the wealthy, and policies favoring multinational corporations. And the United States took on a series of seemingly endless wars, engaging in conflicts with mistaken or uncertain objectives and no obvious path to completion.

The impact of these policy changes has been devastating.

What Senator Warren skated over, without connecting the dots, was that the real objective of those wars, coups and other regime change operations was precisely to impose the “particular brand of capitalism” she described, and, if necessary, to do so by the illegal and deadly use of military force.

While Mikhail Gorbachev dissolved the Soviet empire and made peace with the West, the U.S. exported neoliberal capitalism to Eastern Europe without needing to use its war machine it had squandered our country’s wealth for 45 years to build.

Instead, Western political and economic experts like Jeffrey Sachs fanned out across the region reciting Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that “there is no alternative” to neoliberalism. They convinced Eastern European leaders to surrender their countries and their people to the “shock therapy” of corporate conquest, privatization, drastic cuts in public services and plutocratic oligarchy, superficially legitimized by Western-style multi-party elections.

But the U.S. and its allies then faced two thorny dilemmas. What should they do about countries that remained obstinately independent from their neoliberal empire, countries like Iraq, Iran, Libya, Cuba and North Korea? And what should they do with the U.S. and NATO war machine that Gorbachev’s peacemaking had rendered redundant?

U.S. officials of both major parties, from neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz to “humanitarian interventionists” like Madeleine Albright, peddled the simplistic notion that the U.S. war machine could be repurposed to impose neoliberalism by force on dissident countries around the world. Twenty years on, the results of those policies have been universally catastrophic.

Even in the U.S., at the very heart of the neoliberal empire, a new generation raised on the myths of neoliberalism now rejects its absurdities: trickle-down economics; the magic of the market; union-busting; privatized health care and education; the best Congress money can buy; the shrinking middle class; the rampant destruction of the natural world; and so on.As British economist J.M. Keynes reportedly said in the 1930s, “Laissez-faire capitalism is the absurd idea that the worst people, for the worst reasons, will do what is best for all of us.”

But as corrosive as neoliberalism has been to working people in the U.S., it has been far more destructive wherever the U.S. and its allies have tried to impose it by military force.

Afghanistan and Iraq

In Afghanistan, after 18 years of war, 80,000 U.S. bombs and missiles dropped in U.S.-led airstrikes, and hundreds of thousands of violent deaths, the Afghan people are so disillusioned with the U.S.-sponsored “democratic system” that only 25 percent turned out to vote in the September presidential elections, a record low. The unending violence and the unbridled corruption of successive U.S.-backed governments have enabled the Taliban to make a comeback and set up a viable shadow government across more and more of the country.

In Iraq, 16 years after the U.S. invasion, a succession of corrupt U.S.-backed governments has boosted oil production to about 4.6 million barrels per day, the second-highest production in OPEC. But in line with U.S. neoliberal orthodoxy, the profits have been pocketed by Iraq’s new U.S.-installed ruling class, not redistributed to provide universal health care, education, housing and other public services as they were under Iraq’s nationalist and Baathist governments between 1958 and 2003, including under Saddam Hussein’s brutal dictatorship.

Iraq was plunged back into full-scale war in 2014, as the alienated population in the north and west of the country fell under the sway of the Islamic State. The U.S. military responded with a campaign of air and artillery bombardment that destroyed most of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, and many other towns and cities across Iraq and Syria, killing tens of thousands of civilians in Mosul alone.

The U.S. invasion and the unending waves of violence and chaos it unleashed have destroyed Iraq. The U.S.-imposed neoliberal model has empowered a series of corrupt governments to steal and squander Iraq’s oil wealth, while the rest of the population still struggles to recover from this unending “Made in the U.S.A.” national trauma. Voter turnout in Iraqi elections declined from 80 percent in 2005 to 45 percent in 2018. Now a desperate and angry new generation of Iraqis is taking to the streets to demand a government that will finally share their country’s wealth with its people.

The Tragedy of Haiti

In 2000, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s first democratically elected president, was elected for a second term on a platform that explicitly rejected the neoliberal “free market,” debt and austerity policies imposed on Haiti by the U.S., the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

The U.S. responded to Aristide’s reelection by cutting off foreign aid to Haiti and setting up training camps in the Dominican Republic, where up to 200 U.S. special operations forces trained Haitian death squads to cross the border, assassinate Aristide’s supporters and terrorize the population.

In February 2004, these U.S.-trained death squads joined forces with a militia called the Cannibal Army in Gonaives, where they sacked the police station and took control of the city. Two weeks later, they seized Cap Haitien, Haiti’s second-largest city.

As the U.S.-trained death squads threatened to march on the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, a U.S. embassy official and U.S. special operations forces entered the Presidential Palace and “persuaded” Aristide and his family to leave with them. A thousand U.S. Marines, plus French, Canadian and Chilean troops, invaded and occupied Haiti.

The U.S. flew Aristide to Antigua and then to the Central African Republic (CAR), where General Francois Bozize had just seized power in a Western-backed military coup. The Jamaican government rescued Aristide and his family from the CAR and brought them to Jamaica for a few months until they were granted permanent sanctuary in South Africa. Aristide was finally allowed to return to Haiti in 2011, and he is still widely seen as the only popular democratic leader Haiti has ever had.

Since 2004, when Aristide’s Fanmi Lavalas party was banned,elections in Haiti have been so obviously rigged and illegitimate that voter turnout has declined from at least 50 percent in 2000 (despite an opposition boycott), when Aristide won 92 percent of the votes, to 22 percent in 2011, 29 percent in 2015 and 18 percent in 2016, allowing every election to be won by openly corrupt U.S.-backed right-wing politicians and parties.

After the devastating 2010 earthquake, the 2011 election was won by Michel Martelly, a Haitian pop singer supported by Bill and Hillary Clinton. He was quickly mired in scandal over a $2.6 million bribe from a Dominican construction firm to whom he awarded $200 million in no-bid contracts for post-earthquake rebuilding work, triggering large anti-corruption protests in 2013, 2014 and 2015.

The latest election in 2016 was another fiasco. Evidence of massive election fraud triggered huge anti-government demonstrations before Jovenel Moise, the declared winner, even took office. Exit polls showed Moise only winning 6 percent of the votes in the first round, a small fraction of his official 33 percent share that won him a place in the run-off.

Now Haitian government auditors have released a 600-page report detailing how Moise has embezzled millions of dollars, mainly from the PetroCaribe fund. Under this program, Venezuela supplied Haiti with oil but deferred payment for 25 years so that Haiti could spend the money on badly needed infrastructure, hospitals and social programs. The audit revealed how Moise siphoned millions of dollars from these funds into his own personal bank accounts.

Haiti remains under UN military occupation to this day. UN troops have used force against the public and unleashed a cholera epidemic. The UN mandate for the remaining 1,275-member UN police force, supported by about 300 Indian troops, finally expires on October 15, when it is due to be replaced by a 30-member UN political mission.

Neoliberalism Begets Resistance

Neoliberalism is an inherently corrupt system. It creates a vicious circle in which ruling classes can leverage their wealth to gain dominant political power and then use that power to cut taxes and rewrite laws to further enrich themselves. This is a powerful engine to generate ever more concentrated wealth and political power for the 1 percent, with impoverishment and political marginalization for everybody else.

Neoliberalism reduces politics mainly to a choice between politicians and parties who represent factions of the same corrupt ruling class, which retains a monopoly on power whichever party wins. But the fatal flaw in the neoliberal view of the world is the presumption that ruling classes can safely ignore the 99 percent of the population they disenfranchise, exploit or even kill.

This idea that only the elites in each country matter has led directly to the U.S. policy of “regime change,” in which leaders who resist neoliberalism are overthrown by whatever means necessary. It should be no surprise that the new governments installed by all these U.S. wars and coups are among the most corrupt regimes on earth.

But as U.S.-led occupation armies have discovered in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, and as we can see right now in Iraq and Haiti, ordinary people still insist on having their say about the future of the world we all live in. U.S. policy is largely responsible for the life or death predicaments now facing young people in these countries, so they deserve our solidarity as they rise up to resist.

Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK for Peace, is the author of Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran and Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection.

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK, and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

https://www.alternet.org/2013/06/4-plagues-getting-handle-coming-apocalypse/

hazen 2013

Every day, thousands, probably millions of people ask their family, friends, neighbors and colleagues similar and increasingly familiar questions: What has happened to our country? How did we get here? Isn’t it scary? Can anything be done about it?

There is an abundance of evidence that there are forces tearing apart the U.S. economy and society, causing increasing levels of fear, anxiety and trauma for large numbers of people. Many people are mystified as to the specific causes of their fears, with a mass media system that constantly broadcasts propaganda about how great America is and a new digital media system that may be exacerbating the problems for a society under immense and unprecedented duress.

There is the added problem that the theories and the means of social change we are familiar with, and to which we still turn, are not remotely up to the task we face, and have mostly proven to be inadequate. Virtually every problem we face has gotten worse over the past 40 years, and heavily sped up since 9/11 and the economic crash of 2007.

In an environment of confusion and despair, it can be helpful to name the beast—essentially to understand the forces at play, how they operate, and why they feel both intractable and overwhelming. So, what follows is a kind of "Users' Guide To What Is Freaking Us Out.”

What Has Happened to Us?

So the big question is: what is the “it” that has happened to us? Depending on your vantage point and the myriad problems in front of us, “it” can be any number of causes and factors.

For many, it is the disappearance of the sense of a democracy many thought was embedded in U.S society. Sure, we’ve always been ruled by elites. But we are in a new era where we feel crushed by the overwhelming dominance ofcorporationsand big institutions that treat people like commodities, getting away with degrading people’s dignities while pocketing large profits. This is especially true of banks, which are now so big they are beyond the reach of the legal system for fear that the global economy will be adversely affected.

Many people feel they have no control over the direction of the country because their vote doesn’t matter—incumbents with the most money mostly get elected. Many voters feel trapped by the lack of options because of pro-corporate stances of both Republicans and Democrats, and then there is another beast—the rabid right-wing.Our legislators are bought by campaign contributions and seem incapable of constructive action. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court decision in *Citizens United*, and the fact that legally corporations are often treated like persons, is beyond most people’s comprehension For others, the anxiety producing “it” is directly connected to personal economic loss, of homes, jobs, personal wealth, or increased debt, all which has contributed to a massive erosion of financial security.

The statistics are quite shocking. The poor are suffering—more than 46 million Americans live at or below the poverty level, which is $23,201 for a family of four. That's $5,800 per person; but a far larger group of 138 million people (nearly 40% of American households)—many of whom had considered themselves part of the middle class—are living paycheck to paycheck. And, according to a Pew Foundation survey, “nearly a quarter of Americans (24%) say they had trouble putting food on the table in the past 12 month revealing a painful level of deprivation and family trauma despite the U.S. being the richest country in the world. Our level of deprivation is closer to that in Indonesia or Greece rather than Britain or Canada.”

Especially for Those About to Retire … Or Thought They Were

Furthermore, financial security for the future, often referred as the “American Dream,” is increasingly out of reach for many millions. This is especially true for those approaching retirement—a goal that has been undermined, even destroyed, by the economic crash of 2007, which robbed so many of what small wealth they had. Over the long run, a major culprit has been the replacement of pensions by the grossly inadequate 401K model, which is forcing millions of Americans to keep on working, or find marginal jobs to help pay the bills as they age, or in some cases fall into poverty, living only on a meager Social Security stipend.

As Joshua Holland recently noted, this trend “has been an integral part of what Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker called the great risk-shift, in which the burden of paying for education, healthcare and retirementhas increasingly shifted from corporations and the government onto the backs of individuals and families."[3rd way indiv retire acc't 7/19] Tresa Ghilarducci, a professor of economics at the New School for Social Research writes, “The specter of downward mobility in retirement is a looming reality for both middle- and higher-income workers. Almost half of middle-class workers, 49 percent, will be poor or near poor in retirement, living on a food budget of about $5 a day.” She adds, “Seventy-five percent of Americans nearing retirement age in 2010 had less than $30,000 in their retirement accounts.”

But the situation is far from great for recent college graduates, many of whom are being crushed under student loan debt, while facing a competitive and often exploitative job market, where all too often an unpaid internship is an essential way to advance in a career. This is the first generation since the Great Depression that will make less money and have fewer resources than their parents. Perhaps because of dealing with all the stress, this generation has a prescription pill epidemic on their hands, which may be leading to a significant increase in suicides in their demographic.

Take Your Pick >This first summary just touches on some of the economic problems. The list of concerns and anxieties goes on and on—here are some of the most prominent, but any reader will be able to add her own to the list:

• The lack of an adequate response to the looming climate crisis.

• Mass incarceration, in which 2.3 million Americans, a huge number of them African American and Latino, are behind bars.

• The huge and still expanding security state, as police forces militarize, even in small cities and towns.points out in the San Francisco Chronicle, “12.2 million Americans are classified as ‘not in the labor force’ because they're considered ‘discouraged.” When you add in the discouraged and the reluctant part-timers (7.2 million people) the unemployment rate jumps first to 9%, then to 13.9%.

• The continued prevalence ofviolence against women,often fueled by alcohol, and by the culture of rape in the U.S. military.

• The war on poor students as testing dominates the move toward privatizing public elementary and secondary education viacharter schools; and in public schools, kids are increasingly treated as criminals.

• The assault on journalists, civil liberties and whistleblowers by a Democratic president, who campaigned quite differently than he is governing.

• The return of many wounded and psychological damaged soldiers from our two wars, where hundreds of thousands of soldiers are suffering from PTSD, and often lacking in supportive services to help them cope.

• The still-unchallenged power of the NRA, as many states are passing more lax gun laws, or making sure there are no gun control laws at all, despite the popular will, and the overwhelming data documenting the number of people killed by guns.

The list of disasters adds up to a very dark picture; the future looks bleak for tens of millions of people, a fact that has produced an epidemic of fear and anxiety. And finding our way out is a huge challenge, in part because the safety net keeps getting shredded, and the guidebooks we have used to challenge oppressive power are not capable of leading the way.

Many critics have been content to attribute the current state of affairs to a particularly virulent brand of casino capitalism practiced in the U.S. and gaining dominance globally. Sure, this is true. But it is not sufficient to simply chalk up our predicament to capitalism, because there are many forms of the capitalist economic system that don’t produce the dire results we have here in the U.S.

The problem is the special brand of American capitalism, with its thousands of interlocking parts feeding on each other, that ends up controlling and exploiting a majority of Americans. It is important to deconstruct how this happens in a digestible way.

The Symptoms Are All Around Us

A strong case can be made that collectively we are traumatized as a society, though perhaps reluctant to admit it. A constant barrage of stress, anxiety, intrusion, incarceration, and a generalized drumbeat of fear from the media and we have the mess we are in. Increasingly, despair leads to addiction, violence and even suicide, especially for people hardest hit by job loss.

Newly released and striking figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveal that from 1999 to 2010 the suicide rate among Americans ages 35 to 64 rose by nearly 30 percent, up from 13.7 to 17.6 deaths per 100,000 people. In 2010 more people in the U.S. died from suicide than from car crashes—a statistic that alone seems to stand as troubling testament to desperate times. As the New York Times notes, the CDC and other experts believe the suicide figures to be on the low side.

Another striking symptom is high levels of stress that lead to drug use, abuse and addiction. Research concludes that stress can render people susceptible to serious illness, and that chronic stress can play a role in the progression of cancer. It is hard to believe, but11 percent of all Americans aged 12 and older, which is well over 30 million people, are currently taking antidepressants despite the danger of suicide for some users.

And a stunning 23 percent of women in their 40s and 50s are now taking antidepressants according to a major study by the CDC.

And that is before you consider alcohol abuse and the fact that the majority of violence toward women is fueled by alcohol.

A Useful Blueprint

Given the malaise that many are grappling with, the increasing feelings of desperation can feel confusing, overwhelming and crazy-making. Where do we start? How do we understand what is happening so that what we learn can help us take action and improve our outlook? What steps can we take to protect ourselves, to shift the momentum?

A first step is to try to get clear about the nature of how all these forces are coming together to make us so stressed out, and perhaps collectively on the verge of a nervous breakdown. As AlterNet’s executive editor, I have personally been engaged for many years in all the issues and developments described above, publishing much of the best writing on every topic. I too have felt overwhelmed by the tsunami crashing over us. After all the years publishing many thousands of articles, what is happening today feels fundamentally unprecedented—the combination of spiritual malaise and social collapse, an abundance of cruelty and callousness.

Recently I found a way of better understanding the forces that are at play, which I want to share in case it can be helpful. Basically, in this analysis there are four especially powerful and pernicious overarching economic and political mechanisms operating. These are privatization, financialization, militarization, and criminalization, which together are producing a steadily creeping authoritarianism—a new authoritarianism—to fit our times. Let’s call them the Four Plagues, or if we wish, “The Four Horsemen of Our Apocalypse,” from the Book of Revelations in the New Testament.

Actually, according to most accounts, the four riders are seen as symbolizing Conquest, War, Famine, and Death, respectively. So, they’re not exactly analogous, but you get the idea: it’s about very bad stuff that is coming.

The four “plagues” are very potent. With financializationwe are confronting a new hyper form of capitalism, underway for years, but especially apparent with the crash of 2007. Author David Graeber describes the financialization of capitalism in an interview with the SF Bay Guardian as “… casino capitalism, speculation… they are making money out of thin air. … It is based on getting everyone in debt.”

Graeber adds that the profits of Wall Street are increasingly based on finance, not commerce, which means “…they go into your bank account and take your money.” Extracted by the finance sector are mortgages, credit card debt, loan debt, all the fees and penalties you are not noticing. Graeber estimates the finance sector is at or near 20 percent of the economy.

Privatization is pervasive in our culture, tearing the moorings away from democratic ideals and the commons—the common ground that has held many communities together for centuries. Schools, highways, parks, many things we hold dear are being taken away from public stewardship. Perhaps the privatization of water, where the huge multinational Nestle is leading the way globally,is the most daunting. In his thorough analysis of Nestle, the world’s largest food company and the most profitable corporation in the world according to the Global Fortune 500, Andrew Gavin Marshall writes that Nestle’s chairman, Peter Brabeck, believes that nature is not “good,” that there is nothing to worry about with GMO foods, that profits matter above all else, that people should work more, and that human beings do not have a right to water.

The signs ofmilitarization are increasingly visible in the nation’s police forces, especially with drug raids, as well as the escalated capture of undocumented immigrants by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the point where far more immigrants have been deported during the Obama administration than during George W. Bush’s tenure. There is also now a massive private prison operation mainly to handle those immigrants arrested.

The U.S. is still by far the world’s largest arms dealer, and we have military bases in 63 countries, and all across the U.S. as well, with nearly 1,140,000 soldiers in uniform.

The militarization of America was on graphic display in the over-reactions in response to the Boston bombing. The entire city of Boston was shut down and a kind of martial law declared as millions were told to stay indoors and lock up. Public events were canceled, transportation in and out of the city ceased, people were stranded at the airport—and all because a wide array of police forces were searching for a wounded 19-year-old on foot. The horrible bombing with its horrendous death and destruction traumatized many. But it is likely that the overwhelming police response—local police, ATF, FBI, DEA, etc.—traumatized the population even more. The military model of “lockdown” has become the default response to many disturbances. The use of SWAT teams all over the U.S. has increased dramatically, as the military has supplied local police forces with a wide array of super-powerful weaponry, often far beyond what is needed.

Cornell West Speaks

In a recent dialogue with Institute of New Economic Thinking’s (INET) Rob Johnson at Columbia Theological Seminary, Cornell West used the first three of what I am now calling “plagues” as examples of what is scaring him as he sees our society heading toward fascism. I thank him for his help in advancing my thinking.

I was struck by what West said, but I realized that it is necessary to add criminalization as a fourth plague for a fuller picture. In our world of mass incarceration, we see students, poor people, the homeless, debtors, drug users, and whole neighborhoods being criminalized in huge numbers. One powerful example is in the efforts by the New York Police Department known as “stop-and-frisk.” Since Michael Bloomberg became mayor of New York City in 2002, stop-and-frisk increased by 600%, from 100,000 New Yorkers targeted to almost 685,000 in 2011. Nearly 90% of those stopped are black or Latino.

Mass Incarceration and the New Jim Crow

More than 2 million people in jail has resulted in what author and lawyer Michelle Alexander has called the “New Jim Crow,” in her book of the same name. Despite the civil rights movement, theoretical progress on racism, and even an African-American president, more people of color are in jail than were ever slaves; more people are jailed in the U.S. than in any other place in the world. As Alexander writes: “Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color ‘criminals’ and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind.”

According to the NAACP, from 1980 to 2008, the number of people incarcerated in America quadrupled, from roughly 500,000 to 2.3 million people. Today, the US is 5% of the world population and has 25% of the world’s prisoners.

Millions in jail is part of a strategy of mass incarceration fueled by the highly funded and militarized war on drug users, which is primarily aimed at the poor and people of color. The racist caste of the criminal justice system is overwhelming: African Americans, incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites, now constitute nearly one million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population. Mass incarceration accomplished in the 21st century what slavery accomplished more than 150 years ago: the oppression and disenfranchisement of a whole generation of black men.

So, looking through the lens of these four plagues provides me with a useful handle on what is happening to our country, and to the globe. They help explain trends and shifts that are destroying the middle class, exacerbating poverty, keeping millions in jail, and traumatizing many millions more. Most of it can be attributed to one or more of the plagues, and often all four.

Essential Ingredients for the Success of the Plagues

But I don’t want to stop here. To best understand the plagues, there are several cross-cutting fundamentals of U.S. capitalism which fuel the oppressive nature of the plagues and help us understand how they interact.

1. Follow the money: For every unfair, exploitative and destructive force going on in America—and there are so many—some corporations or groups of people are profiting. Not only are they making a lot of money, they have also very likely built a powerful infrastructure to ensure the security of their cash flow using a potent array of tools to protect their interests. These are lobbyists, PR agents, campaign contributions, trade associations to agitate for their interests, and with overarching powerful giant entities like the chamber of commerce to provide the protective umbrella.

2. When following the money, it is often the case that the system picks on the weakest. Long ago, someone figured out that the easiest way to make a lot of money is to paradoxically target those who don’t have much.Or use powerless people as scapegoats to leverage access to large pots of money. One example is state lotteries, about which AlterNet’s Steve Rosenfeld explains: “What many people don’t know about lotteries is that they prey on those who can least afford it.” State lotteries amount to a hidden tax on the poor. They eat up about 9 percent of take-home incomes from households making less than $13,000 a year. They siphon $50 billion a year away from local businesses—besides stores where they’re sold.

Another example is that the privatization of the public school system is on the backs of poor kids, with the discredited fantasy that schools will be improved when people make money off of them. "Rent to own,” “payday loans” and many other tactics of capitalism all exploit poor people.

The best way to maximize profits and make radical changes in policies is to take advantage of crises. We all know what happened after the horrible death and destruction of 9/11. Our government, the Bush administration, orchestrated the most gigantic overreaction in history, turning a criminal case to the ongoing “war on terror,” which has transformed most of our lives in many negative ways. [aka disaster cap'l]

The aftermath of 9/11, which includes the war in Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq, also created the most extraordinary secret government in the history of humankind. The Washington Post, in an unprecedented investigation that took two years, discovered a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in oversight. “After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is a system incredibly massive –1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States. An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.”

Naomi Klein, in her book The Shock Doctrine has helped us understand that when crises erupt, those in power will use the opportunity to increase power in extreme and undemocratic ways, in what is now called “Disaster Capitalism.” For example, as Kristen Rawls reports, after the massive impact of Hurricane Katrina, most of the schools in New Orleans’ Parish were replaced by charter schools.

What to Do—The Challenges Ahead

How do we fight these massive interlocking forces that often seem impossible to slow down, let alone stop and change? Well, there is good news and bad news.

The first answer is, we don’t stop the machine, at least now, because we can’t, not at this moment in history, anyway. At the present,there is no large-scale, coordinated, funded plan, across issue lines to organize a mass movement capable of putting a dent in the juggernaut;and there are some major problems on the social change organizing front to be sure.

The Occupy movement was a great moment, and a popular response to financialization and militarization. But then we saw the surveillance state in action as police power along with the titans of big finance crushed the dissent. Certainly Occupy generated, at least for a time, a new level of discourse on economic fairness and exploitation. But it is already a memory, and the system of the “four plagues” grinds on as the wealth gap increases every week.

On the other hand, no one could have predicted Occupy. Is there another upheaval waiting to explode?

Nevertheless, there is a lot of good news on the activism front. As Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers write, “Every week we are inspired by the many people throughout the country who are doing excellent work to challenge the power structure and put forward a new path for the country. The popular resistance to plutocracy, concentrated wealth and corporatism is decentralized, creative and growing.”

A couple of examples, according to Zeese and Flowers, include a growing series of protests called “the‘Moral Monday’ demonstrations in North Carolina ….challenging the systemic corruption, undermining of democracy and misdirection of a state government that puts human needs second to corporate profits—which they have dubbed ‘Robin Hood in Reverse.’"

There was a recent victory for Seattle teachers and students that resulted from their citywide protests against standardized testing. The school district announced that testing in the high schools would not occur next year. The teachers said they will keep protesting until the tests are banned from lower grades as well.”

There are dozens of examples like this. Hopefully momentum will build, although the obstacles are formidable and the forces of repression ready to step in at any moment.

Still, being realistic, the challenges of building resistance, finding ways to reform and change the "system” is hugely daunting. Many thinkers argue that our version of exploitative capitalism is doomed, and will someday fall apart. The only problem is, those thinkers have no idea how to bring down capitalism, or even change the system, beyond critiquing it.The number of people and books that bewail the systemare many, but the path to solutions, almost nil.Meanwhile, more people suffer every day.

I am personally frustrated, that some of our biggest thinkers and experts are not investing much of their brain power or political capital in the bigger picture of strategy and tactics—the battles to gaining more political clout to confront the power centers.The ability to build to a point where millions of people are in the streets is currently not on the horizon. So there is much work to be done in that regard. An assessment of the possibilities to change, and a range of the options is beyond the scope of this article, but will be forthcoming.

no lnx

Take Your Pick

This first summary just touches on some of the economic problems. The list of concerns and anxieties goes on and on—here are some of the most prominent, but any reader will be able to add her own to the list:

• The lack of an adequate response to the looming climate crisis.

• Mass incarceration, in which 2.3 million Americans, a huge number of them African American and Latino, are behind bars.

• The huge and still expanding security state, as police forces militarize, even in small cities and towns.

• A high level of unemployment at 7.5 %, considerably beyond what historically has been acceptable. And as Andrew Ross points out in the San Francisco Chronicle, “12.2 million Americans are classified as ‘not in the labor force’ because they're considered ‘discouraged.” When you add in the discouraged and the reluctant part-timers (7.2 million people) the unemployment rate jumps first to 9%, then to 13.9%.

• The continued prevalence of violence against women, often fueled by alcohol, and by the culture of rape in the U.S. military.

• The war on poor students as testing dominates the move toward privatizing public elementary and secondary education via charter schools; and in public schools, kids are increasingly treated as criminals.

• The assault on journalists, civil liberties and whistleblowers by a Democratic president, who campaigned quite differently than he is governing.

• The return of many wounded and psychological damaged soldiers from our two wars, where hundreds of thousands of soldiers are suffering from PTSD, and often lacking in supportive services to help them cope.

• The still-unchallenged power of the NRA, as many states are passing more lax gun laws, or making sure there are no gun control laws at all, despite the popular will, and the overwhelming data documenting the number of people killed by guns.

The Symptoms Are All Around Us

Newly released and striking figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveal that from 1999 to 2010 the suicide rate among Americans ages 35 to 64 rose by nearly 30 percent, up from 13.7 to 17.6 deaths per 100,000 people. In 2010 more people in the U.S. died from suicide than from car crashes—a statistic that alone seems to stand as troubling testament to desperate times. As the New York Times notes, the CDC and other experts believe the suicide figures to be on the low side.

Another striking symptom is high levels of stress that lead to drug use, abuse and addiction. Research concludes that stress can render people susceptible to serious illness, and that chronic stress can play a role in the progression of cancer. It is hard to believe, but 11 percent of all Americans aged 12 and older, which is well over 30 million people, are currently taking antidepressants despite the danger of suicide for some users.

And a stunning 23 percent of women in their 40s and 50s are now taking antidepressants according to a major study by the CDC.

And that is before you consider alcohol abuse and the fact that the majority of violence toward women is fueled by alcohol.

A Useful Blueprint

Recently I found a way of better understanding the forces that are at play, which I want to share in case it can be helpful. Basically, in this analysis there are four especially powerful and pernicious overarching economic and political mechanisms operating. These are privatization, financialization, militarization, and criminalization, which together are producing a steadily creeping authoritarianism—a new authoritarianism—to fit our times. Let’s call them the Four Plagues, or if we wish, “The Four Horsemen of Our Apocalypse,” from the Book of Revelations in the New Testament.

The four “plagues” are very potent. With financialization we are confronting a new hyper form of capitalism, underway for years, but especially apparent with the crash of 2007. Author David Graeber describes the financialization of capitalism in an interview with the SF Bay Guardian as “… casino capitalism, speculation… they are making money out of thin air. … It is based on getting everyone in debt.”

Privatization is pervasive in our culture, tearing the moorings away from democratic ideals and the commons—the common ground that has held many communities together for centuries. Schools, highways, parks, many things we hold dear are being taken away from public stewardship. Perhaps the privatization of water, where the huge multinational Nestle is leading the way globally, is the most daunting. In his thorough analysis of Nestle, the world’s largest food company and the most profitable corporation in the world according to the Global Fortune 500, Andrew Gavin Marshall writes that Nestle’s chairman, Peter Brabeck, believes that nature is not “good,” that there is nothing to worry about with GMO foods, that profits matter above all else, that people should work more, and that human beings do not have a right to water.

The signs of militarization are increasingly visible in the nation’s police forces, especially with drug raids, as well as the escalated capture of undocumented immigrants by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the point where far more immigrants have been deported during the Obama administration than during George W. Bush’s tenure. There is also now a massive private prison operation mainly to handle those immigrants arrested.

The U.S. is still by far the world’s largest arms dealer, and we have military bases in 63 countries, and all across the U.S. as well, with nearly 1,140,000 soldiers in uniform.

Cornell West Speaks

In a recent dialogue with Institute of New Economic Thinking’s (INET) Rob Johnson at Columbia Theological Seminary, Cornell West used the first three of what I am now calling “plagues” as examples of what is scaring him as he sees our society heading toward fascism. I thank him for his help in advancing my thinking.

I was struck by what West said, but I realized that it is necessary to add criminalization as a fourth plague for a fuller picture. In our world of mass incarceration, we see students, poor people, the homeless, debtors, drug users, and whole neighborhoods being criminalized in huge numbers. One powerful example is in the efforts by the New York Police Department known as “stop-and-frisk.” Since Michael Bloomberg became mayor of New York City in 2002, stop-and-frisk increased by 600%, from 100,000 New Yorkers targeted to almost 685,000 in 2011. Nearly 90% of those stopped are black or Latino.

Mass Incarceration and the New Jim Crow

Essential Ingredients for the Success of the Plagues

Follow the money: For every unfair, exploitative and destructive force going on in America—and there are so many—some corporations or groups of people are profiting. Not only are they making a lot of money, they have also very likely built a powerful infrastructure to ensure the security of their cash flow using a potent array of tools to protect their interests. These are lobbyists, PR agents, campaign contributions, trade associations to agitate for their interests, and with overarching powerful giant entities like the chamber of commerce to provide the protective umbrella.

When following the money, it is often the case that the system picks on the weakest. Long ago, someone figured out that the easiest way to make a lot of money is to paradoxically target those who don’t have much.Or use powerless people as scapegoats to leverage access to large pots of money. One example is state lotteries, about which AlterNet’s Steve Rosenfeld explains: “What many people don’t know about lotteries is that they prey on those who can least afford it.” State lotteries amount to a hidden tax on the poor. They eat up about 9 percent of take-home incomes from households making less than $13,000 a year. They siphon $50 billion a year away from local businesses—besides stores where they’re sold.

The best way to maximize profits and make radical changes in policies is to take advantage of crises. We all know what happened after the horrible death and destruction of 9/11. Our government, the Bush administration, orchestrated the most gigantic overreaction in history, turning a criminal case to the ongoing “war on terror,” which has transformed most of our lives in many negative ways.

The aftermath of 9/11, which includes the war in Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq, also created the most extraordinary secret government in the history of humankind. The Washington Post, in an unprecedented investigation that took two years, discovered a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in oversight. “After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is a system incredibly massive –1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States. An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.”

Naomi Klein, in her book The Shock Doctrine has helped us understand that when crises erupt, those in power will use the opportunity to increase power in extreme and undemocratic ways, in what is now called “Disaster Capitalism.” For example, as Kristen Rawls reports, after the massive impact of Hurricane Katrina, most of the schools in New Orleans’ Parish were replaced by charter schools.

What to Do—The Challenges Ahead

How do we fight these massive interlocking forces that often seem impossible to slow down, let alone stop and change? Well, there is good news and bad news.

The first answer is, we don’t stop the machine, at least now, because we can’t, not at this moment in history, anyway. At the present, there is no large-scale, coordinated, funded plan, across issue lines to organize a mass movement capable of putting a dent in the juggernaut; and there are some major problems on the social change organizing front to be sure.

On the other hand, no one could have predicted Occupy. Is there another upheaval waiting to explode?

Nevertheless, there is a lot of good news on the activism front. As Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers write, “Every week we are inspired by the many people throughout the country who are doing excellent work to challenge the power structure and put forward a new path for the country. The popular resistance to plutocracy, concentrated wealth and corporatism is decentralized, creative and growing.”

A couple of examples, according to Zeese and Flowers, include a growing series of protests called “the ‘Moral Monday’ demonstrations in North Carolina ….challenging the systemic corruption, undermining of democracy and misdirection of a state government that puts human needs second to corporate profits—which they have dubbed ‘Robin Hood in Reverse.’"

There are dozens of examples like this. Hopefully momentum will build, although the obstacles are formidable and the forces of repression ready to step in at any moment.

Still, being realistic, the challenges of building resistance, finding ways to reform and change the "system” is hugely daunting. Many thinkers argue that our version of exploitative capitalism is doomed, and will someday fall apart. The only problem is, those thinkers have no idea how to bring down capitalism, or even change the system, beyond critiquing it. The number of people and books that bewail the system are many, but the path to solutions, almost nil. Meanwhile, more people suffer every day.

I am personally frustrated, that some of our biggest thinkers and experts are not investing much of their brain power or political capital in the bigger picture of strategy and tactics—the battles to gaining more political clout to confront the power centers. The ability to build to a point where millions of people are in the streets is currently not on the horizon. So there is much work to be done in that regard. An assessment of the possibilities to change, and a range of the options is beyond the scope of this article, but will be forthcoming.

---

{{ aha all? 3 lead to inequality:

Got a problem with gun violence and assault weapons in schools? Let’s discuss the way weapons of war are coming home and how many United States gun manufacturers are also military contractors.

Concerned about climate change? The U.S. military uses more fossil fuels than the majority of nations, and the billions of dollars wasted on the Iraq war could have converted the whole planet to green energy.

Women are leading the way to protect our water and create a mass climate mobilization that responds to our ecological crisis like the existential emergency it is. Why then are we still so silent about how the war on women isthe war on the world? Why so silent about America’s de facto foreign policy of using armed force to safeguard the capitalism that is destabilizing the climate? Why so silent about the fact that women—particularly women of color, women living in poverty and marginalized women—disproportionately bear the burden of war and the violence it begets?

Dateline: America, 2018. All roads lead to war.When #WomenDisobey and righteously demand an end to putting immigrant children in detention centers, we also should demand an end to military contractors like General Dynamics and MVM, Inc., which are profiting from those centers. And making money on the misery this country creates for children overseas.

We can talk about intersectionality and proclaim "gender justice is racial justice is economic justice," as Women’s March organizers did in their powerful Unity Principles. But economic justice is a fiscal impossibility when defense-related spending accounts for slightly more than two-thirds of the national budget. This country puts more money into the military than the next 10 nations combined while tens of millions of women and children living in poverty struggle to survive. In fact, war spending makes social inequality worse, according to a June 2018 report by the Costs of War project at Brown University. An analysis of past and present wars since 1812 "suggests that the current combination of domestic borrowing to pay for war, accompanied by continuous tax cuts, have led and will continue to lead to rising social inequality in the US."...

OMFG

may 2017

Ruth Hopkins, Indian Country Today Media Network

https://truthout.org/articles/footing-the-15-million-bill-for-the-dakota-access-pipeline-s-private-army/

Last fall, the eyes of the world were fixated on Standing Rock.

Among the images burned into the brains of so many abroad were those of Morton County sheriff’s department, joined by law enforcement officers from across the country, bedecked in military gear and armed to the teeth, brutalizing defenseless water protectors for expressing their first amendment rights and freedom of religion. Eyes were opened when mercs sicced vicious attack dogs on women and children guarding sacred burial grounds with their lives. Folks thousands of miles away watched in horror as they witnessed concussion grenades being thrown into crowds and elders being maced in the midst of sweat lodge raids. People will never forget live stream video picked up by mainstream media, showing hundreds of civilians being shot with water cannons in subzero temperatures by a corporate police state army.Some photos of injuries were judged too graphic to post by social media, as they revealed a young woman with a near severed limb and another who’d been blinded in one eye.

This was not Iraq or Afghanistan. There was no foreign enemy invading our shores. These events occurred in the middle of the United States, on Lakota treaty lands; and the only thing these innocent people had done was dare to stand in the way of the Dakota Access Pipeline, the same one Bismarck, North Dakota residents rejected due to fears it would contaminate their water supply. This war zone created by Dakota Access and Morton County was meant to subdue Standing Rock residents and water protectors and force them to accept an unwarranted risk to their fresh water and the desecration of ancestral graves, under the barrel of a gun.

Here in the states, hundreds of Native Nations and the American public sided with Standing Rock. Scores came to camp along the shores of the Mni Sosa (Missouri River). Others rallied in the local cities, signed petitions, and called the White House. Millions were outraged by the injustice.

Yet who is paying for the corporate police state brutality I just mentioned? You are.

Senator John Hoeven (R-ND), who accepted money from Energy Transfer Partners (the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline) and has been vocal in his support of both the Dakota Access Pipeline as well as the Keystone XL pipeline, has announced that North Dakota will receive $15 million in federal funds to reimburse the state for costs incurred as a result of militarizing Barney Fife and company while they pushed the pipeline through for ETP and engaged in the violent, forced removal of water protectors. Hoeven slid said monies into the Department of Justice’s budget as part of Fiscal 2017 funding legislation.

By the way, Hoeven sits on the Senate Appropriations Committee and is now the chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs.Welcome to Custer’s wet dream.

The distinguished Senator from North Dakota would have us believe his state was alone in its mission to extinguish #NoDAPL. Nothing could be further from the truth.

When Morton County requested backup, law enforcement officials from across the nation came to North Dakota via the Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC). The Sheriff’s Association also showed up in full force.

New York Daily News writer Shaun King obtained audio where Energy Transfer Partners freely admitted that they worked closely with the Sheriff’s Association, and wow, did they ever. They became one and the same.

Water protectors who lived at camp can attest to ETP and law enforcement’s collusion and fraternization, but the record speaks for itself.

The Sheriffs’ Association has a $3.46 million budget, according to tax forms. Some of this funding comes from corporate sources, like TigerSwan. TigerSwan maintains offices in Iraq and Afghanistan. TigerSwan’s CEO is a former adviser to the multinational private security firm, Blackwater. Blackwater was founded by Erik Prince, a Trump campaign donor and the brother of Betsy DeVos, the US Secretary of Education. Besides funding the Sheriff’s Association, TigerSwan is in charge of Dakota Access intelligence and supervising overall security for the company. Tigerswan works for Dakota Access, while funding and partnering with the Sheriffs’ Association.

The Sheriff’s Association purchased military gear from the US Department’s Defense Logistics Agency thanks to the Defense Department’s 1033 program.Think corporate welfare for the defense industry.

Wait, there’s more. Energy Transfer Partners CEO Kelcy Warren offered to reimburse North Dakota and Morton County for costs due to defending the Dakota Access Pipeline.

So why are US taxpayers forking over $15 million to North Dakota?

Despite the fossil fuel industry’s wishes, America is not an oil company with an army. We should not be bankrolling our own oppression.

Incidentally, the Dakota Access Pipeline is not even operational yet, and it’s already sprung a leak in South Dakota, just southwest of the Lake Traverse Reservation. End this foolishness.

pvtization boosts inequality

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/donald-cohen/how-privatization-is-fuel_b_13173324.html

https://www.alternet.org/buried-fine-print-trump-rule-would-give-25-billion-tax-cut-big-bank-fat-cats

Wall Street banks continue to enjoy record profits thanks to President Donald Trump's $1.5 trillion tax scam, Trump's Treasury Department—headed by former Goldman Sachs executive Steve Mnuchin—quietly moved to hand big banks yet another major gift on Wednesday by hiding a $2.5 billion tax cut in the fine print of an "esoteric" new rule proposal (pdf).}}:

big pix: giants pp:

"The obscene inequalities of global capitalism are not sus-

tainable. They are fueling right-wing populist insurgencies and

neo-fascist movements among the downwardly mobile sectors

of the global working and middle classes, incited by dema-

gogic politicians who promise to halt the decline and restore

some semblance of stability, often through racist and nativist

appeals, as the rise of Trumpism in the United States so well

illustrates. The relationship between rising inequality, social

conflict, and political crises has long been demonstrated in

the sociological literature. As inequality escalates and wealth

concentrates among an ever-smaller portion of the world’s pop-

ulation, demand contracts and the global market cannot absorb

the output of the global economy. The Transnational Capitalist

:{:{}:

Class, or TCC, cannot find outlets to profitably reinvest the tril-

lions of dollars that it has accumulated. In recent years it has

:{:{}:

turned to wild financial speculation in the global casino, raiding

and sacking of public budgets, war making, and the extension

:{:{}:

of systems of social control and repression to sustain accumula-

tion and contain the real or potential rebellion of the poor and

:{:{}:

the marginalized.

...

:{:{}:

...

crisis of humanity

We have University of California, Santa Barbara, sociologist

William I. Robinson to thank for his book Global Capitalism

and the Crisis of Humanity (2014), which helps frame this

section of our introductory chapter.25

Robinson claims that

the world faces an unprecedented crisis of social inequality,

environmental degradation, global violence, and economic

[p30 giants: the global power elite]

destabilization. He says the world system has centralized and

over-accumulated capital to the point that investment oppor-

tunities are limited and that there are onlythree mechanisms

of investing excess capital: risky financial speculation, wars and

war preparation, and the privatization of public institutions.

The use of these mechanisms tends to result in a government

legitimation problem, in which democratic structures are con-

tinually undermined and militarized police states are emerging

around the world.

...

War and war preparation is another area in which the TCC

invests excess capital. Stockholm International Peace Research

Institute reports world military spending at $1.69 trillion in

2016, or 2.2 percent of global GDP.33 In 2016 the top military

spenders (spending more than $10 billion each) were the United

States ($611 billion), China ($215 billion), Russia ($69 billion),

Saudi Arabia ($63 billion), India ($55 billion), France ($55 bil-

lion), the United Kingdom ($54 billion), Japan ($46 billion),

Germany ($41 billion), South Korea ($36 billion), Italy ($28

billion), Australia ($24 billion), Brazil ($23 billion), Israel ($18

billion), Canada ($15 billion), Spain ($14 billion), United Arab

Emirates ($14 billion), Turkey ($14 billion), Iran ($12 billion),

Algeria ($10 billion), and Pakistan ($10 billion).34 Still timely are

Dwight Eisenhower’s 1953 words, “Every gun that is made, every

warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense,

a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are

cold and are not clothed.”35

The post-9/11 wars continue to wreak havoc, chaos, and

death in the Middle East, Africa, and other regions.

...

aha note nexus to dereg, pvt of sci, cult corrupt

https://www.alternet.org/drugs/drug-companies-are-funding-investigational-studies-influence-their-results

Remember how appalled we felt as a society when we discovered that, for so long, we had been mistakenly taking Big Tobacco’s word that cigarettes are harmless? Rinse and repeat with lobbyists for Big Alcohol fear-mongering about legal weed. And again and again with a panoply of consumer-level commodities and goods.

Nowadays we have all these familiar worries, but about our drugs and medications instead. It’s become so bad that there's now reason to believe Big Pharma is also colluding to poison the well of scientific inquiry.

The truth is, there are many examples of private industry paying for positive press from the scientific community. When you look closer at our spending priorities as a nation, it’s not entirely difficult to see why. As public funding for the sciences has fallen away, many scientists have had to pivot toward more consistent—and ethically fraught—sources of funding and stability as surely as politicians who, for want of public election funding, get buoyed by billionaires at $100,000-per-plate fundraising dinners.

We’ll take a look at case studies in a moment, but for right now, think about how important it is for us to be able to trust, at a minimum level, the products we invite into our bodies and our homes.

It’s become common knowledge that the pharmaceutical industry is one of the most corrupt out there. This is a serious affront to justice that has gone on for far too long. The fight for consumer protections of all kinds can and must begin with health care, medicines, prescription drugs and medical devices. Here are the stakes.

The Erosion of Trust

In 2006, GlaxoSmithKline—the esoteric name for a ubiquitous diabetes treatment brand—took a victory lap after a lengthy report in the New England Journal of Medicine declared its Avandia medication to be the most effective of the three diabetes drugs tested.

Unfortunately for readers and patients, the extent of the report’s bias was not as attention-grabbing as the headline and ensuing celebratory press releases. In fact, with the help of the FDA and renowned heart specialist Steven Nissen, the Washington Post found that GlaxoSmithKline directly funded the research itself. All 11 of the paper's authors had received consultation fees, grants or another form of monetary compensation.

There may be no clearer example of conflicts of interest in the halls of science. Given the degree to which private money may have influenced the result of this scientific endeavor, we have little choice but to assume it did.

Even worse? The drug didn’t merely fail to help patients cope with their illnesses, it actually raised their risk of heart attack. Avandia effectively doesn’t exist anymore in the U.S., in part because GlaxoSmithKline was so busy trying to force two logical dots to connect that it didn’t even pick up on all the collateral damage.

This is outrageous. Consumers shouldn’t have to second-guess the medical professionals who are supposed to help us take care of ourselves.

The Fall of Accountable Science

Between 2011 and 2012, the New England Journal of Medicine published more than 70 “original studies” of newly FDA-approved and experimental drugs. Of these 70-plus reports:

Up until about the 1980s, the federal government was the primary financier of scientific research in the world of medicine. In the '60s and '70s, the federal government had a 70 percent share of scientific research. In 2013, that number finally dropped below the 50 percent mark.Sixty received direct pharmaceutical company funding.
Fifty were written or co-written by a current employee of a pharmaceutical company.
Thirty-seven had lead writers who had, at some point, received speaking fees or other compensation from the subject of the study.

As you may have guessed, there is at least token legal oversight available for clinical investigations of new drugs in the form of FDA regulation. In addition to protecting the personal information of trial participants (patients), the FDA also maintains that no drug may reach the investigation phase until its effects—and its lack of harm—have both been documented in a lab setting. As you can likely tell, these protections no longer appear adequate.

It has become an open secret that most of the drugs the FDA concerns itself with cannot be relied upon to greatly outperform placebos, or existing treatments, in a vast majority of cases. Moreover, the wholesale regulatory capture of the FDA has resulted in a situation where this vital public office serves as a glorified rubber patent stamp for protecting medicines as privately owned, profit-generating pieces of intellectual property.

The American People Are No Longer in Control of Their Scientific Destiny

A generation or so ago, the skill with which a nation pursued and made use of scientific knowledge was one of the chief metrics of its greatness.However, starting in the 1980s, the United States took a decided turn away from public sector expansion. Reagan-era policies aimed to privatize government services in the name of balancing local and state budgets.Since then, the world has watched as Americans have continued to vote accountable government and transparent scientific study nearly out of existence by proponents of “small government” and the shifting of fiscal, bureaucratic and legislative power from the public to the private sector.

When corporatists boast of the rate of innovation in the private sector, they generally fail to mention where the money came from that makes all that innovation possible—or what America used to do with it instead. In truth, privatization does not necessarily lead to less government, as its proponents would like to believe. In many cases of privatized innovation, the government still plays a significant role along the value chain of innovation.

The difference, though, is that instead of the government being involved for the sake of oversight and accountability, profit-seeking privatized enterprises can lobby for the expansion of public funding just the same as those in the public sector would. Those private companies can then skim off only the most successful ventures. It’s simply another example of how the government continues to turn a blind eye to unethical, profit-mongering business practices in the name of “trickle down economics,” which we know have not worked in the past.

However, the winds of change seem to be shifting. For all our present social and political turmoil, we’re more aware of the problem than ever before. But before we can fix it, we must remember science is, like any other endeavor, a human institution.

Like a passionate grade-school teacher who can’t do her best work due to a lack of school funding, scientists of all stripes are, after all, human beings with their own biases, internal monologues, ideas, agendas and needs. Science is one of the most vitally important institutions we have right now. Most Americans say it’s very nearly the only thing that matters in the face of global, anthropocentric climate change, but it’s currently perishing from neglect.

Here is the silver lining: Though junk science seems to have a stubborn place in the spotlight and in our shared vocabulary, scientists are actively trying to turn the tables. Inspired in part by the fallout from the 2016 election, American scientists are seeking political office at a brisk clip—and being vocal about it, too.

Additionally, it seems that we are finally collectively beginning to wake up to the enormous disservices that Big Pharma has done our society. Throwing our support behind scientist-politicians could be one aid to the problem, but we also need to address the bigger issues at hand with how our medical knowledge is funded and who we can trust to provide us with real answers to medical questions.

Government oversight and funding are important aspects of that, and improved transparency regarding where we’re getting our “science” is something people are finally starting to advocate for, and should continue to. With this two-part awakening in both the scientific and general community, we can only hope that we are, at last, reaching the end of the road for scientific illiteracy in the States.

---

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Apocalypse

Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are described in the last book of the New Testament of the Bible, called the Book of Revelation of Jesus Christ by John of Patmos, at 6:1-8. The chapter tells of a book or scroll in God's right hand that is sealed with seven seals. The Lamb of God opens the first four of the seven seals, which summons four beings that ride out on white, red, black, and pale horses.

Though theologians and popular culture differ on the first Horseman, the four riders are often seen as symbolizing Conquest^[1] or Pestilence (and less frequently, the Christ or the Antichrist), War,^[2] Famine,^[3] and Death.^[4] The Christian apocalyptic vision is that the Four Horsemen are to set a divine apocalypse upon the world as harbingers of the Last Judgment.^[1][5] One reading ties the Four Horsemen to the history of the Roman Empire subsequent to the era in which the Book of Revelation was written. That is, they are a symbolic prophecy of the subsequent history of the Empire.^[6]

4 four horsemen apocalyse

Food prices[

White Horse...