Drop symbols of White Supremacy, but don’t embolden government supremacy

SORRY, I DO HAVE A PROBLEM with government telling me how to think or telling me what I can’t say. Flags mean a lot to me and I CAN imagine MY flag being declared hateful or a public threat. How is anyone to rally like-minded dissenters when a government and its corporate media can declare their rallying symbol non grata? I don’t like the Confederate rebel flag either, it is modern code for unrepentant white racism, but I’m hugely skeptical when Big Brother is driving the bandwagon. How amusing that activists eager to burn Confederate flags find that the major retailers have already banned them. There’s a statement you’re being prevented making.

Scrap White Supremacy but we must cling tightly to the supremacy of individuals over their government.

Could the censors come for your flag too? I’m not big on national flags. However, the flags with which I associate ideologically, let’s be honest, scream regicide.

Imagine if the next mass shooter lunatic leaves selfies with an Anarchist flag or an Anon mask. “Rise up” is hate speech to oligarchs.

Guys, when Walmart, Target, Dixie politicians and the White House are on your side, you’re fantasizing and you’re on the wrong side.

If the vocabulary of racism, such as the word “nigger”, is effaced, how are we to talk about it? We had this argument about Mark Twain’s use of the word in Huckleberry Finn. Literature lost as I remember.

How blessed we would be to forget about slavery, except the same demographic is enslaved today in the prison system, while we white-out the words we need to recognize it.

Let’s be generous for a moment. The “Rebel” Flag, even as it draws racists like flies, is also about rebellion. Did you know the Civil War wears a revisionist title? Until America’s foreign excursions, the Civil War was called the War of Rebellion. Formal documents of the period are still bound as the Union’s record of the War of Rebellion.

Who effected the name change and why? Did it benefit the victor to write the history of the Civil War to cast slavery as its predominant issue? To justify the sacrifice of lives and trampling of state sovereignty?

The American national identity is that of revolutionaries rebelling against authoritarian rule. Was it confusing to let the bad guys usurp the rebel image?

I think it’s a lie to believe the common Southerner fought to preserve slavery. Just as it is to pretend the common German soldier defended the extermination camps. The average Johnny Rebel fought off the Yankee foreigner. Johnny Rebel was racist but no more so than his northern adversary. Lynchings of black men happened in both North and South.

If you want to hold a flag to account for racism, you’ll find a greater offender in the Union Flag, and today’s fifty star equivalent. The Stars and Stripes flew over the slave trade, the genocide of Native Americans, and the conquest and exploitation of indigenous peoples everywhere since.

If you want to fight racism, address its mechanisms. Address its leaders, not its disputable standard. The flag is a distraction. Who are racism’s enforcers? I read that Maryland police just killed another unarmed black man. Eye on that ball.

Judging history as we’ve distilled it, the cause of the Confederacy was unjust, but the Southern soldiers fought the Union as rebels.

I am damn partial to REBELS.

I’m reminded of the lyrics to I’m a Good Old Rebel. These reflect sentiments contemporary to the Reconstruction era, unreconstructed by the abolitionist narrative. Read ’em and weep.

Oh, I’m a good old rebel,?
Now that’s just what I am.?
For this Fair Land of Freedom,
?I do no give a damn.?
I’m glad I fought again’ her,
?I only wish we won.
?I ain’t asked any pardon for anything I’ve done.

I hates the Yankee Nation and everything they do.
?I hates the Declaration of Independence, too.?
I hates the glorious Union, ’tis dripping with our blood.?
I hates the striped banner, and fought it all I could.

I rode with Robert E. Lee,?
For three years, thereabout.?
Got wounded in four places,
?And I starved at Point Lookout.
?I catched the rheumatism
?A campin’ in the snow.?
But I killed a chance of Yankees
?And I’d like to kill some more.

Three hundred thousand Yankees
?Is stiff in southern dust.?
We got three hundred thousand?
Before they conquered us.?
They died of Southern Fever
?And Southern steel and shot.?
I wish there were three million
?Instead of what we got.

?I can’t pick up my musket?
And fight ’em down no more.?
But I ain’t agonna love ’em?
Now that is certain sure.
?And I don’t want no pardon?
For what I was and am.?
I won’t be reconstructed?
And I do not give a damn.

Oh, I’m a good old rebel,
?Now that’s just what I am.?
And for this Yankee Nation,
?I do no give a damn.?
I’m glad I fought again’ her,?
I only wish we won.?
I ain’t asked any pardon for anything I’ve done.?
I ain’t asked any pardon for anything I’ve done.

Dixie got ditched for now

dixie-bitch-bikini-blondDixie is a mean bitch and she got ditched for now. That’s all it is. All you got to do is check out the electoral map for the election results some. See what happened to Dixie?
 
Congratulations to New Mexico, Colorado, and Florida for not backing Dixie up, too. Virginia don’t count because these days she’s DC, not Dixie.

It was the Hispanics that did Dixie in eventually, too. Even the Cubans just got fed up with her bitchy ways and together with the other Latino groups helped put holes into Dixie Land! Look away…look away… look away. Even Cubans in the US don’t like losing their houses and homes, and South Florida is suffering terribly from that credit crunch hurricane that we all read about and fear coming our way.

Poor Old Dixie! She needs reconstruction and beware!

John McCain the maverick unfavored filly

CNN ignored Cindy McCain 100 million beer fortune to paint husband as lowest income underdog
John McCain isn’t just a maverick TM, he’s that unfavored horse in the Kentucky Derby!

They made a movie about him. America’s favorite underdog, a Heratio Alger story, T-Bone Pickens, poor boy makes good, Beverly Hillbillies, overcoming odds, Everyman, a dog’s life, Because of Wynn Dixie, Benjie, Fire House Dog, Rudy, boy struggling against disability, custodian math whiz, Pay it Forward, Sling Blade (didn’t see either), Bad News Bears, Rocky, mongrel saves world, Ugly Betty, what was that damn horse’s name? Old Stewball?

McCain kisses Bush 18% approval Ass, embraces Neocon war fiasco as his own, dons Yarmulke despite growing brazenness of Israeli crimes, and eclipses Keating Five savings and loan corruption infamy. Try as he might, McCain can’t paint himself dumber than good ol’ boy, how-bout-a-beer, George Dubya. But it makes him look pretty dumb, doesn’t it?

The maverick label was a whole cloth invention and Rockford should take it back for trademark infringement. McCain is no more a lone maverick than he is the poor-boy candidate on CNN’s income comparison. McCain’s wife beer-heiress Cindy is worth 100 million. What’s the income/ dividend/ interest on that kind of fortune, and why isn’t it included on this joint income survey? Oh my goodness. Are you getting any sense that our media is going to represent the election with any honesty? If John McCain mounts a mechanized Trojan horse at polling stations in predominantly Democratic districts, and personally tramples black voters, are we going to hear about it?

Eco-conscious, yes. Sustainable? Hardly.

COLORADO SPRINGS- Johann of First Affirmative Financial Network, asked me to relate my experience at the now notorious PPJPC meet-up to discuss Economic Sustainability. Though Tony wasn’t able to attend, he’s initiated a debate here: is there such a thing as “economic sustainability?” Since I was there, perhaps I could elucidate, because I believe I heard the answer.

I was quite impressed by the questions brought to the event by the audience, who proved to be no shrinking violets. The interests ranged from some who wanted to indict the Fed, to those who questioned economic growth as being sustainable. The housing market for example is predicated on real estate increasing in value. Must it? Should it? Can it? Successful investing is inherently about your investment growing, otherwise you are losing money. Can investment be done without growth? When posed this question, our intrepid investment-biz guest braved an answer: “I don’t know.”

I supposed as much, hence my initial skepticism about the subject of the talk. But I expected to hear about options, not to hear my foregone conclusion foreclosed. What then does FAFN, our fellow sustainability boosters, have to offer? It turns out it is the usual green investing. Working Assets was so 90s, “sustainability” is the eco catch-phrase of the new millennium. It’s still about the 3Es, as Johann told us they say in the greening biz, or the 3Ps: people, planet and profit.

Johann’s employer’s concrete claim to “sustainability” was a novel certification of a green office remodel. No small task, although the pitch from Johann is that it requires a surprisingly small expenditure. So, small task. And FAFN is all about giving recognition for setting a good example. Here’s how this works in their business model: Chiefly their portfolio is comprised of only green stocks, plus stocks you might want to encourage to be green. General Motors is decidedly not green, but you could recommend them as an incentive for GM to show some eco-thinking. That’s an actual example from our discussion. I’m hoping if Monsanto issued a press release that they would be recycling their break-room Dixie cups, our sustainability cheerleaders wouldn’t jump tp award the bold step with a buy recommendation.

I came to the PPJC meeting with an even more hardcore question. How can someone who makes a living from the interest earned on money, consider themselves sustainable? Our guest’s response was “there certainly are plenty of us around.” But is that an answer? Economically sustainable, yes. Environmentally? Hardly. I believe that is the crux of what Tony raises as a paradox.

Charging interest for the loan of money has presented an age-old moral dilemma. The function of money was to facilitate barter, as one good or service was exchanged for another. Religious thinkers have most often concluded that a person should not profiteer from the exchange of money itself, adding as they have, no value to the equation. Jesus was certainly against it. Although Johann interpreted “go forth and multiply” to mean you should multiply your money.

Whether it’s moral or not, how can money lending be environmentally sustainable? If you are producing no good or rendering no labor, what should you be taking out of the system for your consumption? Can a negative-contribution be sustainable?

When I first moved to UCLA, and saw the mass of wealth built around the west side of Los Angeles, the opulence seemed to me built on an intangible cloud of finance. I wondered what kind of bank vacuum lay behind the scene, sucking from the natural and human resources of the world to sustain the decadence beyond imagination of LA’s suburbs, foothills and ridge-tops. I concluded something then. The arbitrary financial arrangements, probably no more legitimate than royal lineage, or less usurious than a loan shark, were the only grip the owners had on the victims of their exploitation. Short of militarized enforcement, it would become tenuous at best, and certainly will not be sustainable, economic or otherwise.

The Early Warriors in the Fight for Racial Equality

Since Martin Luther King Day is coming up shortly, it behooves us to post some material about who really got the Civil Rights Movement moving in the beginning. It wasn’t just tie wearing preachers spouting something vaguely connected to Jesus’s teachings that made this a Movement that had to be dealt with by America’s ruling White elites.

Today, it has gotten even worse. MLK has been turned into a lifeless corporate icon, and today’s supposed civil rights heroes are pretended to be people like Condi Rice, Barack Obama, and General Colin Powell!

Open the most wretched media rags (The Gazette? lol…etc.) and you will see hacks like Thomas Sowell promoted endlessly with photo of his Black face prominently displayed over his columns. And Oprah brings us out to the ‘Far Left’ of these corporate media sponsored ‘rights warriors’! Judge Joe Hill the ‘Center’.

In reality, even the Black Congressional Congress has lost any punch they once had. They have been mainly neutered by the Democratic Party power establishment. So where did the radicals come from that made things happen in the past? Some were Christian inspired radicals, some were Muslim inspired, and many were inspired by ‘The Reds’.

See the published New York Times review of

DEFYING DIXIE
The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950
By Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore

New Orleans

Police attack crowd with mace and tasers where people were trying to express opposition to tearing down perfectly serviceable Public Housing units in New Orleans. The US government wants Black people not to return to New Orleans for the same racist reasons that they didn’t bother reinforcing the levees in the first place before Katrina hit.

It was then a Black dominated city and the White Dixiecrat political establishment of Louisiana hated having to govern over such a concentration of poor income Blacks. It was an Apartheid city where Blacks had too much sway over the politics of the area in the White Political Establishment’s eyes, so the federal government, too, just didn’t think it important enough to do the job of holding back the flood waters that might occur, and eventually did.

So now they are trying to keep poorer Blacks dispersed by Katrina from being able to return to their former neighborhoods. Nothing has changed. The federal, state, and local governments are engaged in a giant racial relocation program that keeps former Black residents from being able to survive return to their city. White policy here? Divide, keep them away, and conquer. The same policy of divide and conquer used in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Fools of Fred

Let’s face it, ‘Rudy’ and ‘Hillary’ are not that popular. ‘Rudy’ is too New York, too much a moral slacker, and too much a buffoon for many Republicans. That’s where Fools of Fred come in. He exudes deep, dumb America of the Dixie past, or Reagan to Dubya to neo-Reagan once again.

We might get the Fools of Fred running the Empire soon? A Rifleman rerun of sorts… The System says if enuf of yuh can’t stomach Hillary and Rudy, then we will give you country ‘Fred’. And they call that democracy.

Are you a fool of Fred? Or will you become an Anybody But Fred type? The rest of the world will be laughing between their tears. This is the America that wants to lead the world, and a sad sight it is.

Stick that stupid ribbon up your SUV

Profiting on the backs of soldiersI like this group from Austin, The Asylum Street Spankers, and the lyrics to this song. All of their music is great, but this song and dance on the theme of Iraq makes The Dixie Chicks look like the Mary Poppins Trio in comparison. Check out ‘Hick Hop’, also, and the German stuff they do. Stick that stupid ribbon up your SUV… about the real reasons our government got us into Iraq.