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https://scheerpost.com/2022/12/04/chris-hedges-know-thine-enemy/

Know Thine Enemy

 

The expedited legislation passed by Congress to avert a strike by railroad unions dealt one more blow in the decades long war waged by the two ruling parties against the working class.  

The Congressional decision to prohibit railroad workers from going on strike and force them to accept a contract that meets few of their demands is part of the class war that has defined American politics for decades. The two ruling political parties differ only in rhetoric. They are bonded in their determination to reduce wages; dismantle social programs, which the Bill Clinton administration did with welfare; and thwart unions and prohibit strikes, the only tool workers have to pressure employers. This latest move against the railroad unions, where working conditions have descended into a special kind of hell with massive layoffs, the denial of even a single day of paid sick leave, and punishing work schedules that include being forced to “always be on call,” is one more blow to the working class and our anemic democracy.

The rage by workers towards the Democratic Party, which once defended their interests, is legitimate, even if, at times, it is expressed by embracing proto-fascists and Donald Trump-like demagogues. Dating back to the Clinton administration with NAFTA, the greatest betrayal of the working class since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, the Democratic Party has become a full partner in the corporate assault on workers. The cloying feel-your-pain rhetoric, a staple of the Joe Biden White House, is offset by a hypocritical subservience to the billionaire class.

In 1926, the havoc wreaked by rail strikes led to the federal government passing the Railway Labor Act to give itself the power to impose labor settlements on the rail industry. The Biden administration used this authority to broker a tentative labor agreement that would ensure a 24 percent pay increase by 2024, annual $1,000 bonuses and a freeze on rising health care costs. But workers would be permitted only one paid personal day and no paid sick leave. Of 12 unions  voting on the deal, four of them — representing 56 percent of union membership in the industry — refused to ratify it. Biden signed the legislation into law on Friday.

The railroad barons refuse to permit sick days because they have stripped the railroads down to skeleton crews in a process known as precision scheduled railroading, or PSR. In essence, no spare labor is available, which is why the reduced labor force is subjected to such punishingly short periods of time off and onerous working conditions.

Class struggle defines human history. We are dominated by a seemingly omnipotent corporate elite. Hostile to our most basic rights, this elite is disemboweling the nation; destroying basic institutions that foster the common good, including public schools, the postal service and health care; and is incapable of reforming itself. The only weapon left to thwart this ongoing pillage is the strike. Workers have the collective power to slash profits and cripple industry, which is why the ruling class has gone to such lengths to defang unions and outlaw strikes. A rail freight strike, it is estimated, would cost the U.S. economy $2 billion a day, with daily losses increasing the longer a strike continued.

The few unions that remain — only 10.7 percent of the workforce is unionized — have been largely domesticated, demoted into obsequious junior partners in the capitalist system. As of January 2022, private-sector unionization stood at its lowest point since the passage of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. And yet, 48 percent of U.S. workers say they would like to belong to a union.

Railroad workers have been especially hard hit. The workforce has shrunk from nearly 540,000 in 1980 to some 130,000 today. The consolidation of the rail industry means there are only seven Class I freight companies, with four of those companies controlling 83 percent of rail traffic. Service on the nation’s rail lines, along with working conditions and wages, has deteriorated as Wall Street squeezes the big railroad conglomerates for greater and greater profits. Indeed, the fragility of the rail system led to huge backlogs and delays during the pandemic.

The Democrats insist they are the party of the working class. Joe Biden calls himself “a proud pro-labor president.” But they pile up one empty promise after another. In 2020, they promised, for example, that with control of the White House and both branches of Congress, they would pass a law to strengthen collective bargaining. Instead, they revoked the collective bargaining power of one of the few unionized industries that retains it. 

They promised to raise the minimum wage. They failed. They promised a national paid family and medical leave program allowing all employees to take up to 12 weeks of paid time off. It never happened. They promised to impose a federal tax rate on corporations ranging from 21 percent to 28 percent, so that “wealthy Americans and big corporations pay their fair share.” The proposed tax increase was scuttled. They promised to pass legislation to ensure that super PACs “are wholly independent of campaigns and political parties.” It went nowhere. They then mounted a midterm election campaign, which cost both parties a staggering $16.7 billion and was funded by massive infusions of PAC money.

The Democrats routinely say the right thing and do the wrong thing, and this is true for its tiny progressive minority, which dutifully votes to funnel billions to the war industry, including the war in Ukraine. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and most other progressive House members voted for the anti-union legislation while also voting for a separate resolution that would have given rail workers seven days of paid sick leave. The unions were demanding 14. The second resolution died in the Senate, as they knew it would, leaving workers with a woefully inadequate, pro-management deal that over half of them had already rejected. To his credit, Bernie Sanders voted against the bill when the sick leave amendment from the House, which he backed, was rejected in the Senate. 

Why does any legislator believe railroad workers should be forced to use what few vacation days they may have if they fall sick and request permission to be absent days in advance, as if illnesses are scheduled events? Congress members and their staff do not work under these conditions.

“In a statement that perfectly captured the yawning gap between Democratic Party rhetoric and behavior,” Binyamin Appelbaum, the lead writer on economics and business for the New York Times editorial board, wrote in the newspaper, “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi denounced railroad companies as rapacious profiteers who ‘have been selling out to Wall Street to boost their bottom lines, making obscene profits while demanding more and more from railroad workers.’ Then, just one sentence later, she announced that House Democrats would stand with the profiteers.”

What are we to make of a Congress that refuses to support a single day of paid sick leave for 115,000 freight railroad workers, while the combined net income of the railroad industry is $27 billion — double what it was in 2013? 

What are we to make of a Congress that in its latest military policy legislation sets the appropriation at $45 billion above the Pentagon’s request? 

What are we to make of a Congress that refuses to pass gun control legislation despite 600 mass shootings this year, more than one per day? 

What are we to make of a Congress that defunds the Internal Revenue Service, making it only practical to investigate those earning middle and lower incomes and near impossible to investigate tens of billions of dollars in tax evasion by corporations and the rich? 

What are we to make of a Congress that rewrites the tax code on behalf of lobbyists so 55 of the largest corporations that collectively made over $40 billion in pre-tax income in 2020 – paid no federal income tax and received $3.5 billion in tax rebates.

What are we to make of a Congress, more than half of whose members are millionaires, who flagrantly use their committee assignments, inside knowledge of proposed legislation and classified intelligence reports to carry out insider trading to increase their wealth? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband invested millions of dollars in computer-chip stocks as the Democratic leadership was formulating a plan to subsidize the chip-manufacturing industry.

Most political theorists, including Aristotle, Niccolò Machiavelli, Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Karl Polanyi and Max Weber, started from the premise that there is a natural antagonism between owners and workers. They understood that if the oligarchs shook off all restraints to the accumulation of wealth, it would destroy the political order. The ruling class masks its greed behind ideologies — in our nation’s case, free market capitalism and neoliberal globalization. Neoliberalism never made any economic sense. But it was disseminated by compliant academics, the media and political theorists because, to quote Marx, it allowed “the dominant material relationships” to be “grasped as ideas.”

“We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are,” Wendell Berry wrote. “Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all — by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians — be participating in its destruction? Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so, and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us. How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.”

All the advances we made in the early 20th century through union strikes, government regulation, the New Deal, a fair tax code, the courts, an alternative press and mass movements have been reversed. The oligarchs are turning American workers — as they did in the 19th century steel and textile factories — into serfs, kept in check by onerous anti-union laws, militarized police, the world’s largest prison system, an electoral system dominated by corporate money and the most pervasive security and surveillance apparatus in human history.

The rich, throughout history, have subjugated and re-subjugated the populations they control. And the public, throughout history, has awakened to the class war waged by the oligarchs and plutocrats and revolted. Let us hope that defying Congress, freight railroad workers carry out a strike. A strike will at least expose the fangs of the ruling class, the courts, law enforcement and the National Guard, much as they did during labor unrest in the 20th century, and broadcast a very public message about whose interests they serve. Besides, a strike might work. Nothing else will.

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https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/some-lights-go-out-some-lights-go-on/

Some Lights Go Out, Some Lights Go On

“The DNC and Biden Team knew they had friends at Twitter who would do their bidding during the election. And Twitter lied to the FEC [Federal Election Commission] about that influence…. But that’s just at the surface.” —TechnoFog on Substack

Have Americans grokked that virtually all of the mis-and-dis-information bombarding them lo these many years actually comes from the government and the news media channels that serve it? What we’ve got now in this country is a Mind-Fuckery Industrial Complex waging a psy-ops war on the people of this land. Why is that?

     Essentially, to cover-up past crimes against the country by public officials. Twitter, pre-Musk, was a major accomplice and enabler of all that, and suddenly it’s not — to the horror of everyone in charge at our nation’s seat of government. The main crimes revolve around selling-out America’s future one way or another — “Joe Biden” and Company being only the most blatant perps in the big picture.

     Before them was Hillary Clinton, with her purchase of the Democratic National Committee and previous lucrative ops during her turn as Secretary of State, like the Uranium One deal, the Skolkovo military tech transfer op, and then the Russia Collusion op to insure none of that would ever come to light. The whole Intel Community behemoth was neck deep in it, too, amping up the Russia prank into a four-year coup d’état. Remember, The New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting that Hillary’s little hoax was for-real. It’s all just gotten more grotesque since Mr. Trump was ejected in the souped-up 2020 election, with sideshows such as the ongoing race-and-gender hustles, the climate con, and the Green New Deal bullshit.

     Covid-19, surely released on-purpose, was, as Ed Dowd avers, a cover for global bankruptcy. Nothing else explains the astounding coordination of so many governments acting the same way against their own citizens: lockdowns, vaxx mandates, vaxx passports, and all. The icing on that poison cake, of course, is that everything the public health officialdom told you about Covid-19 was patently untrue, and dishonestly so, not via omission or plain incompetence. In fact, the virus was made in a Chinese lab with the help of Dr. Fauci and colleagues. Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine did work effectively against it. The “vaccines” were not tested properly and turned out to be harmful. And now the Covid-19 melodrama is ending in a discernable death-of-the-vaxxed and the reveal of all those aforesaid lies, while, anyway, despite their gaslight and smoke-screens, the global bankruptcy approaches its nauseating climax.

      Watching the post-election political vaudeville during the lame-duck Christmas intermezzo, one can’t escape perceiving that just about everything in the USA is now heading south toward breakdown and ruin. The on-the-ground economy craters, inflation rages at the supermarket, supply lines break, the oil and gas industries get strangled, health care goes down smoking and burning, public education folds in disgrace and failure, Wall Street ends with a bang and a whimper, and John Fetterman prepares for his place in history.

      Our government’s Ukraine op is ending in disaster for that sad-sack former Russian province and, surprise-surprise, for the European Union, NATO, and us, too. We finally played the Russia card like we’re the proverbial patsy at the poker table. Our hand turns out to be a pair of deuces with the five-of-diamonds high. Russia rakes in the chips with its massive natural resources and the world’s most stable currency, soon to be backed by gold. How’d that turn out, Victoria Nuland?

     The EU was already functionally bankrupt. Now it has lost its entire industrial base for a lack of fuel to run it — self-Epsteined, shall we say, on the national scale — and faces not just a return to the medieval standard-of-living but also to the competitive savagery of many small nations soon to be fighting among themselves, making bad conditions worse. So sad. Euroland was a nice place to visit at the turn of the millennium and now the lights will blink out, like seeing a fond relative expire, eyes going vacant, on her deathbed.

     Western Civ is, after all, a kind of family. And now the family is disintegrating — as old families will — in a malodorous fog of receivership, vice, and imbecility. Here in the USA, it’s hard to have faith in the supposed political opposition, the Republican Party. Not with Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy still riding herd. They preside over their own coterie of extravagant grift and disgusting privilege. Don’t be shocked… shocked… if they just stand by while America crumples into history at the hands of “Joe Biden.” If there is any saving of this nation, these two must be defenestrated — though saving the nation from penury, depravity, and senility looks increasingly improbable, at least in the form of the old federal republic we knew and loved.

     The macro trend is quite clear, as laid out in The Long Emergency: what’s coming is the opposite of global government; rather, national governments become increasingly impotent and illegitimate, and smaller regions by necessity must retreat into autarky to keep anything going. For us that means Washington DC sinks into irrelevance while the states, or perhaps mere parts of the states, have to take charge of their own affairs.

     That recovery process might have been jump-started by the Elon Musk revolution at Twitter. It will be a lot harder for the Mind-Fuckery Industrial Complex to operate with this key player in revolt. Lies will be contested now on the grand scale in ways that were formerly subverted. Things blurry will come into focus. Fresh air will blow in on chill winter winds. New ops against the people, such as the threatened central bank digital dollar, will be laughed off the stage. Some lights go out, but others get turned on.

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https://stephenlendman.org/2022/12/04/hegemon-usas-pursuit-of-dominance-by-brute-force/

Hegemon USA’s Pursuit of Dominance by Brute Force

The 1975 Helsinki Final Act (Helsinki Accords), agreed to by 35 nations in the West and Soviet Russia, on refraining from use of force, respecting the sovereign rights of all nations and related issues should have been a major step toward ending forever wars in favor of a new era of peace and stability.

What might have been never happened because of hegemon USA’s pursuit of dominance by going all-out to subjugate the world community of nations to its will, including its allies.

When decades of Cold War ended in December 1991, a chance for peace in our time went unachieved for the same reason.

On the cusp of the Cold War’s end in 1990, NATO and Warsaw Treaty member-states announced the end of East/West confrontation.

As things turned out, hegemon USA-dominated Western regimes had no intention of fulfilling their pledge in Europe or worldwide.

Instead of sticking to Helsinki Final Act principles, US/Western forever wars continued against invented enemies.

Instead of dissolving NATO in response to the Warsaw Treaty’s end, the war-making alliance advanced closer to Russia’s borders.

Sergey Lavrov explained that hegemon USA’s “notorious ‘rules-based order’ took root at the time, adding:

These rules unjustifiably justified the 1990s dismemberment, rape and destruction of the former Yugoslavia.

After the 9/11 mother of all state-sponsored false flags to that time, US/NATO destruction of nonthreatening Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Libya and Syria followed.

Begun in 2014 — not Feb. this year — war in Ukraine was made-in-the-USA, not Russia.

All of the above and US/Western sanctions wars flagrantly breached the letter and spirit of the Helsinki Accords.

“Russia hoped that the Helsinki principles could be revived,” Lavrov explained, adding:

“We proposed drafting a legally binding document, an OSCE Charter based on the Helsinki Final Act.”

“The West did not accept our initiative.”

Hegemon USA prohibited its Western vassals from fulfilling principles of the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty.

What was supposed to be “the cornerstone of European security” never came to pass.

The empire of lies later abandoned the ABM, INF and Open Skies treaties.

The so-called Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) transformed itself into a branch of NATO’s war-making machine.

The OSCE’s 1999 adoption of the Charter for European Security called for no member-state to pursue security interests at the expense of other nations.

Lavrov explained that “Russia and like-minded (nations) adopted a declaration, which (states) that security must be equal and indivisible…”

“(T)hat states should be free to choose alliances provided they do not try to strengthen their own security by weakening the security of others.”

“The crucial formula is that no state or group of states have a right to claim preeminent responsibility for security in the Euro-Atlantic area.”

Yet throughout its existence, especially since the 1990s, US-dominated NATO regimes breached virtually everything they formally agreed to.

The 1997 Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security between NATO and the Russian Federation called for “joint decision-making and action (as a) core (principle) of mutual relations between NATO and Russia.”

Hegemon USA-dominated NATO  pledged not to deploy nuclear weapons or troops in new member states.

Russia and NATO pledged to refrain from use of force, as well to respect the sovereignty, borders, and territorial integrity of signatory nations to the agreement.

Lavrov earlier slammed the US for grossly violating Founding Act principles, including hostile “attempts to change the balance of force in Europe” in pursuit of its hegemonic aims.

Advancing NATO close to Russia’s borders ignored the growing threat of war between the world’s dominant nuclear powers.

NATO’s first secretary general, Hastings Ismay, said the alliance’s purpose is “to keep the Soviet Union out (of Europe), the Americans in, and the Germans down.”

Much the same policy is pursued today, Lavrov explained — updated to keep “the whole of Europe down” as subservient vassals to US interests.

Throughout its history, US-dominated NATO prioritized confrontation over cooperative relations among nations.

The war-making alliance “brings devastation and suffering to” nations on its target list for regime change.

NATO’s 12 founding member-states expanded to 16 at the time of Soviet’s Russia’s 1991 dissolution.

Today it has 30 members, soon to add Finland and Sweden, 37 partners and seeks to expand in Asia in preparation for confrontation with China.

Alliance military exercises near Russia’s borders are rehearsals for war-making.

In December 2021, the Biden regime spurned Russia’s good faith security proposals.

They called for refraining from deploying nuclear and other weapons in Eastern Europe — by US-dominated NATO — ones that threaten Russia’s security, including in waters and airspace bordering its territory.

They demanded no further NATO expansion east near or bordering Russia’s territory — or establishment of military bases in former Soviet republics.

Their aim was to ease East/West tensions through diplomacy.

Vladimir Putin called on US-dominated NATO to engage in substantive talks on legally binding/longterm security guarantees between Russia and the West.

Both wings of the US war party reject peace and stability in favor of forever wars on invented enemies by hot and/or other means.

War in Ukraine could have been averted if Kiev fulfilled Minsk I and II conflict resolution terms it agreed to but breached — as ordered by its US master.

From the 2014 coup to the present time, the empire of lies transformed the former nation-state of Ukraine into a weaponized platform for perpetual war on Russia.

Escalated war by Kiev on Donetsk and Lugansk, along with over 100,000 Ukrainian troops mobilized in preparation to invade both republics and Crimea, forced Russia to launch its SMO in self-defense — the UN Charter right of all nations under attack or if one is imminent.

The collective West’s sanctions war on Russia is wrecking Europe economically as intended by the empire of lies.

And a state of perpetual US/NATO  war on Russia continues by use of expendable Ukrainian foot soldiers.

It’ll end in its present form when the regime’s military collapses — perhaps to be continued by guerrilla war, what the empire of lies may intend. 

A Final Comment

In response to European Commission head von der Leyen’s proposed establishment of a specialized tribunal to hold Russia accountable for Kiev’s war crimes, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the following:

“(A)tempts to launch some kind of tribunal…would be illegitimate.” 

If established, Russia will reject and condemn it. 

Hegemon USA, its NATO vassals and Nazi-infested Ukraine are guilty of crimes of war and against humanity — clearly not Russia.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry condemned the tribunal scheme, saying:

“The current attempt by Western (regimes) to whip up a quasi-judicial mechanism is unprecedented in its legal nihilism and is yet another example of the West’s practice of double standards,” adding:

“(S)uch a cabal will never have jurisdiction” over Russia.

In response to the Macron regime’s support for kangaroo court injustice, the Ministry added:

“We never cease to be amazed at the cynicism of French authorities.”

Along with its US master, the UK and other EU states, France ignores “legal lawlessness of the Kiev regime, (its) numerous documented war crimes” since 2014 against Donbass civilians.

France (and other Western states) should establish Nuremberg-type tribunals to hold themselves accountable for centuries of grievous war crimes.