Bloodless Coup As Media Selects A New "Decider" For U.S.

I have been wrong before, but I called this one spectacularly wrong. I suppose Trump being anointed by the press a long while back should have tipped me off that there was a bloodless coup coming. 

Wall St. is freaking out and stock markets are tumbling. Looks like two factions of our shadow government are at war with each other, and the media won. Because, as we know, propaganda works.

My screen grab of the New Yorker magazine "most read" list from last week.

Will people eventually catch on that saying a candidate's name over and over helps build their brand recognition and significantly increases the likelihood that you'll wake up to find them voted into office?

My family in Australia wrote to ask if I had put in my application for immigration yet. I think younger people who are appalled by waking up to find themselves living in Hitler's Germany will be (already are) leaving in droves. That will make things even worse, probably.

It certainly now officially ends the hundreds of years when the U.S. was viewed as a desirable destination for immigration in order to pursue the American Dream. What's left of it, anyway. Health insurance premiums under the health insurance you're required to buy from powerful wealthy corporations is set to go up by more than 100% next year in some locations. Electing Clinton wouldn't have changed that one whit.

There will now commence much shaming of those of us who voted for Green Party candidate Jill Stein. 

My husband will be blamed for the coup in the same way that he has been blamed for years for supporting Ralph Nader for president in various elections. As if Maine was a swing state in the bizarre electoral college system. 

We will be vilified for "wasting" our vote or casting a "protest" vote. But guess what? It looks like Maine voters passed the first law in the nation for ranked choice voting. (Having our current odious governor rammed down our throats twice probably contributed a lot to that.)

If we had ranked choice voting, like other wealthy nations, the false dichotomy used to drive voters to the polls would evaporate overnight.

The person who should be most ashamed of himself this morning is Bernie Sanders. If he had not made the back room deal to galvanize idealistic youth into the Democratic Party fold and then abandon them to Clinton, he'd be celebrating victory right now. Instead of sitting in his brand new $650k vacation home on Lake Champlain wondering how he got there.

The silver lining for me is that maybe now all the numerous people who used to oppose U.S. wars when a Republican was in the White House will come back out of hiding. Eight years of Barack Obama killed the antiwar movement except for a few radicals like us.

Or as a tireless peace worker in Maine eloquently put it last night on facebook:

Join us, won't you?

Documentary Review: 13th #BlackLivesMatter And They Always Have

Art exhibit in Los Angeles entitled "Manifest Justice"

The documentary film 13th is streaming on Netflix currently, connecting the dots between slavery, lynchings, elections, and mass criminalization/incarceration of black people in the U.S.

The title of Ava DuVernay's examination of racial politics over hundreds of years comes from the amendment to the constitution that freed everyone regardless of the color of their skin. Oops, except criminals.

Statistics on arrests, convictions and incarceration -- even of minors -- did and do lean heavily toward people of color even though they don't apparently use more drugs or commit more violent crimes than white people. 

Demonizing an entire group via fear tactics promoted in mass media is an old trick. 13th has much to say about the role of the 1915 racist propaganda film Birth of a Nation, originally titled The Clansman (note: the K in Klansman came later.)

Sad that in the 21st century, with its vast amount of truth out there just waiting to be found, the trick still works to keep the wealthy protected from having to share with their fellow man.

Data chart here.

The U.S. now has 25% of the world's prisoners locked up. We lead the planet in incarceration. And, surprise! It is highly profitable. Not only to operate the prisons, but to steal the labor of those kept within.

The documentary leans heavily toward testimony by scholars and public figures interspersed with archival footage of the chained black men and boys who have built the roads, infrastructure and other wealth that white families continue to inherit. 

I'm not super interested in Barack Obama's crocodile tears about mass incarceration. 

Coming off eight years of doing next to nothing to stem the tide of prisons-for-profit or extrajudicial assassination of black people by law enforcement, one is reminded that subjection to slavery is not part of his heritage (his father was an economist from Kenya and his mother was white). But the filmmaker probably thought that celebrity spokesmen would help draw in audiences, and she is probably right.

Exploiting the 13th amendment's loophole for criminals has affected elections for decades as more than 2 million felons lost the right to vote. Many prisoners were convicted under draconian laws designed to get  "tough on crime" politicians elected by the fearful white voters who retained suffrage. 

Many prisoners were guilty of no crimes against persons or property. Their "crimes" of drug possession would be treated as a health issue in a truly civilized society.

The documentary does a good job of tracing the outlines of the war on drugs and its hideous effects, but it offers little in the way of solutions. The demonization of each black man, woman or child gunned down by police continues apace. 

Our prisons are full of fathers and mothers whose children are growing up without them. Those are the lucky ones that weren't just shot and killed.

The ongoing senseless cruelty of our government and "justice" system is what I'm actually afraid of. That, and the indifference of most of the people most of the time. This year saw the biggest prison strike in U.S. history, met with deafening silence from the corporate media. Big surprise.

source: The Intercept