Another Hack Who Misfires On the 60s

Iconic image from 1960s: Jack Ruby guns down Lee Oswald at Dallas PD. Many of us knew then the ruse was up and the cover-up had begun.


It's truly incredible how many bloviating hacks have spouted opinions and ideas on the 60s who either never lived through that decade, or - if they did - were essentially comatose the entire time. I already noted this syndrome with former great folk singer Bob Dylan, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2012/06/has-bob-dylan-totally-lost-his-moorings.html

As well as P.J. O'Rourke

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/01/p-j-orourke-wants-60s-taken-off-life.html

In Dylan's case he just couldn't comprehend why people kept making a "fuss" over a decade that saw two signal pieces of legislation passed (The Civil Rights Act in 1964, and Voting Rights Act in 1965) that conferred the practical basis for the exercise of rights to a minority that hadn't been manifested for over 100 years.  Oh, and then there was the legislation that gave us Medicare,  which nearly 45 million seniors currently depend upon and without which they'd likely be dying in ditches, unattended and impecunious.  Dylan also evidently didn't see the fuss in all the anti-War protests for which his songs provided anthems. Not to mention his being oblivious to the rioting that erupted(in inner cities- since 'peaceful' protests weren't getting anywhere to advance civil rights-    and the four major political assassinations.  Dylan clearly missed the memo that the 60s  marked the most tumultuous decade in U.S. history.

I was so flabbergasted by his piffle that I had to ask if he was stoned the whole time.

Then there was uber hack O'Rourke who related (in a TIME essay)  how he was driving his daughter and 3 classmates to school and asked them if they realized it was the day President Kennedy was assassinated - and none of them had a clue. I noted at the time:

"I'd have been ashamed to admit such a thing in a widely circulated medium, even TIME. It reveals the author to be defunct (as a parent)  in his own contributions to his daughter's education, in failing to provide what her school didn't.  It also says more about the currently deficient high school history curriculum than it does about an event O'Rourke presumes is passé. It again, shows that if today's kids are being denied knowledge of this defining event (which likely saw a coup d'état and our nation's future course permanently altered) than they really do need to avail themselves of other sources i.e.  via the Kickstarter project:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1450964693/jfk-and-the-unspeakable-the-graphic-adaptation"

But alas, both examples show how easy it is to be oblivious when people are not conscious enough  to actually appreciate the periods in which they live. No one is saying you need to use a note pad to document every event and your response, but you should be open enough to the living experience to faithfully recall it years later - as opposed to corporate media telling you what it was about!

Fortunately, some of us are able to do this - as well as being obsessive about the details of history - including how the Neoliberal imperative has sought to distort or revise it.

Enter now Bloomberg scribe - or hack - Sam Tanenhaus, who penned an essay about commencement speeches in the Perspective section of the Sunday Denver Post. While opening with complaints about academic "correctness" - i.e. in the examples of assorted speakers pulling out of their speeches under protest, he eventually ended up pontificating on the 60s - as I suspected he would.

After quoting Joan Didion (from a 1975 address to the class of the same year at University of California - Riverside):

"We all distort what we see. We all have to struggle to see what's really going on".

He then jumps to her remarks on the 1960s, as she invited her audience to "look through her eyes at 'a generation still in thrall to that darkling plain we call the 60s'."

Adding Didion's words:

"Which seems when we look back on it, a decade in which everyone lived in an entirely imagined world; when everyone operated from an idea and all the ideas got polarized and cheapened."

But WHOSE fault was that exactly?  Was it the fault of the people living at the time - many of whom had just lived through one of the most earth shaking events in modern history: the assassination of a beloved President, and seeing his whole agenda washed away?  Destroyed under the lies and subterfuge of one Texas varmint named "Lyndon" - who set up his own commission to conceal his earlier crimes as well as the crime of the century and worse, concoct the pretext for a conflict that would eventually claim 58,000 American lives, and millions of Vietnamese.

I don't blame the people who zoned out in the aftermath, I blame the crass political elites, their media and power structures which mind fucked them to a far- thee -well to the point most were no longer capable of thinking clearly.  Because ultimately, the reasoning capacity and truth-seeking barometer of a population hinges on the information - the knowledge it receives from the knowledge "minders"  - on what's "really going on". Ultimately those knowledge-minders and dispensers failed the American people and big time.

Yes, some of us saw through the ruse, and thirty or so years later (after actual files to do with the JFK assassination were finally released) we saw how so many had been played, by Johnson, his bogus Commission and its fabricated lies, and distortions of history. But few saw it at the time, because hell, everything - all the key evidence was being "handled" and much of it covered up. The so-called commission wouldn't even release the actual autopsy photos for view, fearing they might incept thousands of nervous breakdowns.

From the "unspeakable" lies of the Warren Commission there then issued a foul pestilence that permeated the body politic and set  up the toxic polarization seen today. The further assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Bobby Kennedy - with the accompanying lies on how they happened, merely added to the then extensive mind fuck. By the time Bobby was assassinated in June, 1968, nearly everyone from a generation had tuned out - resigned to the belief that all hope for change in the world, at least in the country - was destroyed.

That despair then led to the so-called "counter culture" because so many believed the system as it was couldn't be trusted to produce real change for the better. It was too corrupt from the inside, the politicos too in the maw of a money-dominated bribery system.

All that mistrust was subsequently proven true when the Watergate conspiracy erupted in 1972.  It was further reinforced when Gerald R. Ford (he who altered the bullet path descriptions in the Warren Report) then pardoned the perpetrator. A pardon, a looking the other way, that enabled the Iran-Contra conspiracy barely 15 years later.

So Tanenhaus has some nerve when he writes that:

"Americans had collectively lost the ability to think and judge".  And, quoting Didion,  "the whole country was like a cargo cult".

But again, in general the ability of a people to think and judge hinges on the quality of the information they receive to know and recognize the world (and nation) they live in. But through the 60s the American people were let down, and over and over again, by their own media - which recklessly lied to them about everything from Vietnam (originally) to Kennedy's assassination. Many of the lies in the latter case kept alive via an operation called "Mockingbird" we only learned about when Frank Church opened his CIA investigations a decade later.

Indeed, few at the time recognized that the virus of false consciousness was the name for what citizens had been subjected to, so no wonder so many were unable to think or judge. A false conscious person can no more do that than a drowning man can breathe.

 

'False consciousness' is the term given to a false information system that's been absorbed in part or whole, osmotically or via direct mental ingestion, by the majority of a population.  It has specific uses in the Corporatocracy to mislead a population about how things actually work. In the political system, for example, ' democracy' is the rhetorical term, but corporate dictatorship the reality. In the economy 'free market' the rhetoric, but controlled markets the reality,  and so on. If people's understanding can be obfuscated, and attention deflected to specious distractions and titillation, then the people can be disempowered and their thought processes undermined. They can even cooperate in their own economic (or social, political) subjugation.

Are the people to blame for harboring erroneous perceptions and rendering "false judgments"? Not at all. As noted by  Maxine Baca-Zinn and D.Stanley Eitzen (p. 371, 'In Conflict and Order', 1991):

"The United States is undemocratic in many very important ways. The people, although they do vote for their representatives every few years, are really quite powerless. For example who makes the really important decisions about war and peace, economic policies and foreign policy? The people certainly do not. The record shows that many times the American people have been deceived when the object was to conceal clandestine illegal operations, mistakes, undemocratic practices and the like."

 

Also as Charles Reich has pithily observed ('Opposing the System', p. 15)

"Today much of the system by which we are governed is invisible, because it is either not seen at all, or seen incorrectly. The system that we 'see' is democracy and a free market. But if we really have such a system, why have people's efforts at change failed over and over again? The answer is that we are actually governed by a system that we cannot see - an *invisible* system."

 Too many citizens from the era of the 1960s then, had been left essentially like blind men by the institutional media powers on which they depended for facts, honesty. Worse, they'd been victimized by an unseen system they couldn't even track or parse on account of its draconian secrecy rules -  but which wrought untold havoc on their lives. And Tananhaus seeks to blame them?

 

He even goes beyond that by extolling no less a Neoliberal tool than Milton Friedman, referring to his 1975 University of New Hampshire address where he spoke about "the fragility of freedom" and "America at a crossroads".. It was at a crossroads, all right, a crossroads in which one path led to the Neoliberal domination by markets we're all experiencing now. Markets ex machina!

 

As for Friedman, Naomi Klein pegged him perfectly in her book 'The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism' (2007).   In  her chapter on the Russian capitalist "experiment" (pp. 282-87) she documented how a  cabal of gangster capitalists under the IMF and the "Chicago gang of Milton Friedman" attempted to brutally re-make the existing Russian centrally planned economy into a Neoliberal free market outpost of  the West. The process was long and painful, entailing first getting rid of Mikhail Gorbachev - who through his glasnost and perestroika did far more than Reagan to render the world more peaceful, never mind the propaganda.
 

Economist and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz (p. 283) called Russia's pro-capitalist market experimenters  like Milton Friedman "market Bolsheviks". As Klein put it (ibid.):

"However, where the original Bolsheviks fully intended to build their centrally planned state in the ashes of the old, the market Bolsheviks believed in a kind of magic: if the optimal conditions for profit were created - the country would rebuild itself- no planning required."

 

The sad facts on Friedman's Russian experiment? After only a year of Neoliberal thuggery and "market therapy" millions of Russians had lost their life savings when the ruble lost nearly all its value (similar to what happened to Germans and their Deutsch mark, thanks to von Hayek). Adding insult to injury, abrupt cuts in government subsidies meant that millions of workers had not been paid in months. Consumption? The average Russian consumed 40 percent less in 1992 than 1991 - and they weren't even consuming that much in '91!

The very fact a financial hack like Tanenhaus can hold a character like Friedman up for adulation, shows he is part and parcel of the same disinformation establishment that brought us the original mind fuck of the Warren Report. not to mention Operation Mockingbird and in toto - the entire thrust of false consciousness that's dogged us since the early days of Edward Bernays works on Propaganda.

 

Tanenhaus near the end writes:

 

"The truth is, political correctness is just one symptom of a broader malady. Argument itself has all but disappeared from public conversation. The premium is on opinions and points of view.."

 

 

The real truth? The universal aversion to the truth! The reluctance to call a spade a spade - which prolongs false consciousness and compromises minds as it robs of them of the facility to argue based on critical thought. And the debasement of thought always begins with the language distortions and substitutions of euphemisms for reality. Using "passed" for DIED, using "collateral damage" for those killed in a military attack -but unintended, using "scandal" for conspiracy, and enablng "war" for occupation. Once the building blocks of thought have been compromised, thought as a whole is next, which explains why mostly today one finds only "opinions" and POVs.

Unable to recognize facts, including accepted scientific ones, and with a disabled language - founded mostly on PR and euphemisms, it's no wonder so few can engage in sustained argument or incisive, intelligent debate. It's also no surprise why what one beholds instead is the regurgitation of the propaganda sound bites of the corpora-media.  So, of course, all discussion reduces to "point of view"  - Fox's or MSNBC's - with little else to go by.

Those who comment on the 1960s, should at least be required to study that decade carefully minus the corporate filters they may not be aware of using. Those who lived in the 60s, and venture to discuss it, need to ensure they aren't also victims of the Orwellian language manipulations used so prevalently at the time to distort and undermine objective perceptions, and thought.

Sen. Chuck Schumer Proves He's a Dem Neoliberal Rat On The TPP Issue

Hmmmmm......if enough Democrats can  just help us to sneak this by the People all will be well!"

Two years ago, in a post pertaining to Russia's giving Constitutional hero Edward Snowden asylum, I identified the traitorous rats inveighing against it, including assorted Democrats. I noted:

"Neolib Weasel Chuck Schumer,  barking that "Russia has stabbed us in the back and each day Snowden is allowed to roam free is another twist of the knife!",  you'd think that nation was harboring a war criminal like Cheney or Bush, or a serial killer or genocidal madman, not a man who simply exposed the over reaching and trashing of the Constitution done by his own gov't.  Not a man who is a genuine patriot in every sense of the word, as opposed to a disgusting reprobate tool."

I've never waivered from the conviction Schumer was a pompous Neoliberal worm in the guise of a center -left Democrat. And his most recent traitorous antics on the Trans- Pacific Partnership confirm it. The giveaway was highlighted in the Washington Post's headline:

Schumer at Center of Democrats’ Trade Drama

Therein we learn:

The likely outcome is the separate measures will pass out of the Senate, but the currency-related measure faces a rough road in the House and at the White House.Pro-trade Democrats, though, will be able to say they voted to get tough on trade even as they voted for a six-year fast-track trade bill.

In other words, Chuckie engineered a split  bill to try to deflect left Demos' ire and attention.  In essence, a separate bill for  the currency restrictions will pass, but can be vetoed separately from Fast Track. This translates in a win for TPP Fast Track, i.e. no enforceable currency restrictions. Second, passing a separate currency bill allows pro-TPP Democrats to brag about how they "tried" their best to oppose the liberal onslaught - thereby grabbing a handy fig leaf.

The WaPo account goes on leaving no doubt the architect was Chuck Schumer:

"Senate Democrats’ epic trade revolt against President Barack Obama’s fast-track bill — and the furious efforts to salvage it — had one senator at the center of it all: Charles E. Schumer.
The New York Democrat, who has become the heir apparent to Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, found himself in an awkward position, to say the least.

A provision he authored to get tough on countries that manipulate their currencies was threatening to bring down the White House’s entire trade agenda; its absence on the Senate floor was why Democrats filibustered Obama’s fast-track trade package Tuesday. By the end of the day Wednesday, the crisis — what White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest kept calling a “procedural snafu” — had been averted, with Schumer helping to seal the deal.

Although the New Yorker has opposed the trade bills — he voted against fast track in committee — as the caucus’ future leader, he has to balance the anti-trade sentiment among the vast majority of Democratic senators with his loyalty to the White House and the desires of a sizable number of pro-trade Democrats, such as Sen. Patty Murray of Washington. In short, it’s a sign of the kind of leader Schumer will be."

So we get one Neolib weasel to replace another (Reid).  And let's not overlook another rat in the making, Patty Murray - who didn't do duck squat back in Nov.-Dec. 2013 to halt a bill allowing $9b cuts in food stamps in order for the military to prevail in a sequester deal.  As one percipient blogger on smirkingchimp.com has observed:

Notice "progressive" Patty Murray's role in this. As a member of Democratic leadership, she seems to have had to choose between "following the neo-liberal leader" — in this case, Barack Obama on TPP — and standing with all other progressives in the "Democratic coalition," including every labor union. Murray is choosing to play ball with Senate leadership against progressives. Watch her carefully going forward. This looks a lot like the victory of careerism over principle.

All of which is enough to make a diehard liberal  - who hasn't changed his political position in 52 years - vomit.  But hell, we could as well expose the other pro-TPP Neoliberal Demo-RATS while we're at it, along with their phone numbers so interested readers can unload on 'em and blister their sorry asses:

Michael Bennet (D-CO) — 202-224-5852

Maria Cantwell (D-WA) —202-224-3441

Ben Cardin (D-MD) —202-224-4524

Tom Carper (D-DE) — 202-224-2441

Chris Coons (D-DE) — 202-224-5042

Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) —202-224-3841

Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) —202-224-2043

Tim Kaine (D-VA) —202-224-4024

Claire McCaskill (D-MO) —202-224-6154

Patty Murray (D-WA) —202-224-2621

Bill Nelson (D-FL) — 202-224-5274

Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) — 202-224-2841

Mark Warner (D-VA) —202-224-2023

Ron Wyden (D-OR) —202-224-5244

I also add Cory Booker (D-NJ) — who declined to vote on the first filibuster, but is nevertheless a weasel poltroon trying to find cover.

We cannot allow these Demo-RATS to find such cover, not on this issue. It's too big and the consequences too parlous if it goes through. Including the fact the repukes have attached a new amendment to the fast track that cuts Medicare by $700 million.  This is serious given the core  problem is that it breaks the promise  that no laws will change before any vote on the Trans-Pacific Partnership or any other fast-tracked agreement. Thus there continues a disturbing trend, identified by Paul Krugman, about not being able to trust the White House’s categorical denials about the consequences of their trade agenda. 

Another noisome aspect not given sufficient attention in the corporate media is Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz's point that any legal authority would be transferred from the sovereign courts of the United States to multinational corporations if this "deal" comes to pass. Do Americans really and truly want to be serfs in a global Neoliberal fiefdom? I would hope not!

Even if the Senate manages to pass this execrable bill - with the help of Demo-Rat  Neolib traitors, we must make sure it meets its end in the House even if a coalition must be formed with Tea Partiers.

See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/dean-baker/62297/the-incredible-arrogance-of-the-trans-pacific-partnership-crowd

And:

http://www.salon.com/2015/05/19/another_trans_pacific_partnership_lie_exposed_how_medicare_is_getting_stiffed_in_obamas_massive_trade_deal/



http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/william-rivers-pitt/62286/the-trojan-horse-president

Neoliberal Policies Led to the Blight and Riots in West Baltimore

Me, in the Baltimore Inner Harbor, May, 1994 - before delivering a paper for a joint AAS-AGU conference at the Baltimore Convention Center.

"At the heart of neoliberal narratives are ideologies, modes of governance, and policies that embrace a pathological individualism, a distorted notion of freedom, and a willingness both to employ state violence to suppress dissent and abandon those suffering from a collection of social problems ranging from dire poverty and joblessness to homelessness" - Henry Giroux, 'The Politics of Cruelty - America's Descent Into Madness'

First, let me get it straight with assorted nabobs and nattering bloggers - especially those in the FOX News universe - that Baltimore is a beautiful and thoroughly delightful city. I should know, I lived in one of its suburbs for nine years and wifey and I often went into the city proper to attend concerts at the Baltimore Symphony. All the hysterical babble that the city is "crime-ridden, derelict, full of apes and gorillas' is total  unsupported nonsense - and most of those talking-writing this trash have never set foot in Baltimore.

What is being seen on televisions across the nation in the form of rioting, is happening in a place that has been predated upon and abandoned for dozens of years: West Baltimore. As Michael Eric Dyson pointed out two nights ago (on Chris Hayes 'All In') what we are seeing is a reaction to systemic violence of the Neoliberal capitalist state against the most vulnerable citizens of a place that has been literally drained of what little investment capital it had and left to fend for itself.

Start with the loss of decent manufacturing jobs after the hideous NAFTA, GATT trade agreements went into effect. Then consider how capital was mainly funneled into select, upscale areas like the Inner Harbor (with its trendy galleries, cafes and boutiques) and into building massive sports stadiums - such as Camden Yards for the Orioles baseball team and M&T Bank stadium for the Ravens. THAT is where the tax money and investment went while West Baltimore was left to suck sand.

You see those young kids being  called "apes" by many of the clueless? You know how they got to that extreme of rioting? Consider how the state abandoned it's Head Start program as well as after school development programs and gang counseling - giving the millions instead to build new prisons. New prisons!  Those kids were then left largely to fend for themselves, usually with just a single mother to try to act as parent - often while holding two or more jobs.

Dyson, to his credit, quoted Martin Luther King Jr. in reference to the riots in Watts back in '65 and noted he said:

"A riot is the language of the unheard"

See e.g.  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/28/martin-luther-king-riot_n_7160380.html

Dyson pointed out the systemic brutalization of the West Baltimore community, including youth especially as well as ordinary people by the police state for decades. And let's bear in mind, lest some conveniently forget, the City of Baltimore has had to shell out nearly $5.8m over the past three years for damage settlements as a result of 100 or more unruly attacks on citizens by out of control cops. (The Freddie Gray incident was by no means the first, as people gathered in a West Baltimore Church recounted yesterday evening - each telling a tale of woe of how cops brutalized, neighbors, friends, acquaitnances.)

Dyson likened the reaction in West Baltimore to an NBA foul called by a ref. The ref sees the reaction of the guy who was clipped on the jaw say - by his guard opponent - but he doesn't see the mugging that incited that reaction. In the same way, millions of stupefied TV viewers behold the reaction of the youths in the streets - but they never saw the decades long institutionalized abuse, violence and poverty that came before.

It was perhaps this inequity that inspired Salon.com contributor Benji Hart to write:

"We see ghettos and crime and absent parents where we should see communities actively struggling against mental health crises and premeditated economic exploitation. And when we see police cars being smashed and corporate property being destroyed, we should see reasonable responses to generations of extreme state violence, and logical decisions about what kind of actions yield the desired political results.

I’m overwhelmed by the pervasive slandering of protesters in Baltimore this weekend for not remaining peaceful. The bad-apple rhetoric would have us believe that most Baltimore protesters are demonstrating the right way—as is their constitutional right—and only a few are disrupting the peace, giving the movement a bad name."

Adding:

"I do not advocate non-violence—particularly in a moment like the one we currently face. In the spirit and words of militant Black and Brown feminist movements from around the globe, I believe it is crucial that we see non-violence as a tactic, not a philosophy.

Non-violence is a type of political performance designed to raise awareness and win over sympathy of those with privilege. When those on the outside of struggle—the white, the wealthy, the straight, the able-bodied, the masculine—have demonstrated repeatedly that they do not care, are not invested, are not going to step in the line of fire to defend the oppressed, this is a futile political strategy. It not only fails to meet the needs of the community, but actually puts oppressed people in further danger of violence."


While the above may cause brain hemorrhages in some of the more brainwashed (FOX gobbling) folks out there, it should not distract the rest of us from the mass violence spawned by the Neoliberal state - which I have written about before as it applied to trying to kill "Occupy Wall Street" protesters, e.g.
http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/07/why-did-feds-look-other-way-as-ows.html

Also, let us note that once the fiery reaction had been expurgated from their system, West Baltimoreans came together the next day to set things aright, cleaning up the streets and removing debris. They demonstrated collective action in the interest of their own welfare, and that the people can't be so brutally dismissed as "apes and gorillas".

Those who dispute Neoliberal fascism is a threat need to read that previous blog post carefully. Let us again bear in mind that Neoliberalism treats ALL humans not blessed with silver spoons at birth as basic chattel.   This is why none other than the elitist Bank of International Settlements, less than a month ago, proposed severe cuts to social "entitlements" globally and much more weight of economies devoted to investments - especially outside trade capital. Why do you think Obama is pushing the TPP so recklessly?

The problem with the Neoliberal, pro -free market idiom is that it denies the most basic security for the majority of citizens. In this way it feeds economic inequality while it rewards the speculator and banker class. It also helps to corrupt the political class via unregulated campaign contributions.

Jay Bookman aptly noted('The New World Disorder Evident Here, Abroad', in The Baltimore Sun, December 15, 1997):

"The global economy has been constructed on the premise that government guarantees of security and protection must be avoided at all costs, because they discourage personal initiative. In times of crisis, however, that premise cannot be sustained politically. In times of trouble it is human nature to seek security and protection and to be drawn toward those who promise to provide it. That is how men such as Adolf Hitler, and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin came to power, with disastrous consequences."

Those who fail to see the perverse hand of Neoliberal state violence as the source of what's  happening in Baltimore are not paying attention. Those who lay blame on "the black Democratic leadership"  of the city and "social welfare" for the troubles, are simply idiots. They could as well be blind, deaf and dumb for all the good those senses are doing them.

Now, recall I said earlier how money - millions- was withdrawn from youth programs, counseling and Head Start programs to build prisons. Joan Walsh in her own Salon.com  piece is very specific about this connection:


"Freddie Gray’s death in the custody of Baltimore police has drawn our attention not only to the terrible history of that police department, but of Gray’s blighted neighborhood, Sandtown-Winchester. Those 72 blocks in West Baltimore are home to more state prison inmates than any other Maryland census tract. The poverty and unemployment rate are double the city average. One out of four juveniles were arrested between 2005 and 2009. The mortality rate for 25-44 year olds — Freddie Gray was 25 — is 44 percent higher there than for the same demographic elsewhere in the city, according to the Baltimore Sun.

She goes on to write:

Sandtown-Winchester sounds like so many other neglected inner-city landscapes of despair, though it’s just a few miles from the city’s gleaming and redeveloped harbor district, and 50 miles from our nation’s capital."

And let's bear in mind the D.C. area - the capital- is the 4th highest income area in the U.S. Let us also recall how I already mentioned the Inner Harbor as sucking up most investment money!

Joan goes on to point out:

"Except Sandtown-Winchester hasn’t been neglected, exactly. In the mid-1990s, it was home to an ambitious community building initiative driven by Maryland megadeveloper James Rouse and the city’s new and ambitious mayor Kurt Schmoke. The work was supposed to help make sure none of this nightmare – Freddie Gray’s awful death at the hands of police; the terrible rioting that’s ensued — ever happened. But obviously it didn’t. In about eight years, $130 million in public and private funding went into the neighborhood, $60 million from the Rouse Foundation alone. Impressive aspects of the “neighborhood transformation initiative” were featured in Lisbeth Schorr’s influential book “Common Purpose.” George Will praised its work on healthy parenthood as an example of “Jeffersonian democracy” in action. Its success in spotlighting West Baltimore’s problems, but also its capacity for self-renewal, helped the city win designation as a federal Empowerment Zone in 2000.


Ultimately, it didn’t. And I didn’t call out the two issues that would doom it: lack of attention to the underlying problem of inner city job flight, and the enduring scourge of police brutality, over-incarceration and the “war on drugs.”

So in other words, the re-investment was basically "dead in the water" - though Joan does note that  "at least 1 ,000 new housing units were built, and another thousand renovated."

But let's be clear,  given the population and the volume of dilapidated homes, that's a drop in the bucket. (Rouse, btw , also developed Columbia - where we lived- one of the first ever planned cities in the U.S. For those into trivia, actor Edward Norton is Rouse's grandson.)

"Then Rouse died and Schmoke moved on, and the effort sputtered. The recession hit, and much of the infrastructure of the change initiative crumbled. "


She then cites Doni Glover, an activist, radio host and publisher of BmoreNews, who grew up there, charted the course in the local business journal on Monday:

When the Sandtown-Winchester Transformation Project, known as Community Building in Partnership Inc., finally closed down, this community — of which I call home — began to lose all of the very resources that were changing things around for many people. Not only did we lose CBP, we lost our community newspaper, a senior center, an AmeriCorps Program, a job placement office, a high blood pressure program sponsored by Johns Hopkins well as a couple community development corporations. We also lost a program that addressed vacant properties. All of these programs are gone with the wind.

Losses, losses and more losses - but in Michael Eric Dyson's lexicon - still a form of habituated economic violence practiced against an indigent populace. But this is typical of Neoliberalism. Indeed, Naomi Klein in her book,  'The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism' (2007), compellingly described the number the Neoliberal imperialists did on Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union.

In her chapter on the Russian capitalist "experiment" (pp. 282-87) she documents how a cabal of gangster capitalists under the IMF and the "Chicago gang of Milton Friedman" attempted to brutally re-make the existing Russian centrally- planned economy into a Neoliberal free market outpost of  the West. The process was long and painful, entailing first getting rid of Mikhail Gorbachev -then installing puppet Boris Yeltsin.

Yeltsin, meanwhile, made reckless promises that things would "only be hard for six months"  and "very soon" Russia would be an economic titan. Never happened! As Klein notes (ibid.):

"The logic of so-called creative destruction resulted in scarce creation and spiraling destruction"

Newspapers, magazines from the period (which I still have and can peruse anytime) depict horrific suffering by ordinary Russians as they had to beg, borrow or steal to survive - thanks to the Neoliberal market barbarians.  The sad facts?  After only a year of Neoliberal thuggery and "market therapy" millions of Russians had lost their life savings, their jobs and pensions as well as support systems. They were at the mercy of the Neoliberals for even a slice of bread and some cold soup.

Not a hell of a lot different from the depredation the Neolibs exacted on West Baltimore - much closer to home!


See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/bill-quigley/62003/the-shocking-statistics-of-racial-disparity-in-Baltimore

And:

http://www.salon.com/2015/04/28/baltimores_violent_protesters_are_right_smashing_police_cars_is_a_legitimate_political_strategy/

George Will's Potshots at Bernie Sanders Won't Deter Him From a Possible Presidential Run

Let me say that one courageous Senator - a member of neither party  - has consistently and persistently fought the good fight against Neoliberal hegemony in our political system. That Senator, Bernie Sanders - has stood foursquare with the American people whether in fighting for stronger labor rights, or affordable healthcare or the excesses of the war-security state and its undermining of civil liberties.

What always impressed me about Sanders, from the time I supported him as a Vermont rep to the U.S. House is his ability to tell it like it is, with no euphemisms. On numerous media appearances, whether on Chris Hayes' 'All In', or Steve Kornacki's 'UP' or The Rachel Maddow show, he fearlessly spoke truth to power and also showed how we are all ensnared in a corporatocracy in which money is equated to speech - and has the power to buy lawmakers and laws.

Now that Bernie might be getting ready for a possible presidential run - as a real alternative to Hillary Clinton (another Neolib, like Obama) the snipers have crawled out from the media woodwork. We can expect the corporate -bought and paid for Dems to come out later as Hillary's hegemony over the election cycle is threatened - but right now it appears to be one conservative scribe named George Will..

In a recent Op-ed published 2 weeks ago, Will unloaded on Bernie even before he' officially declared a candidacy. But this shows how worried the keepers of the status quo are. Will wrote:

"Sanders calls himself an independent although he reliably votes and caucuses with the Democrats. He also calls himself a socialist - which is naughty without being informative."

In fact, Sen. Sanders was a socialist (a Democratic Socialist like I am) before he even arrived at the House of Representatives.  It isn't as if he's being non-informative, because anyone with half a brain would know what a Democratic socialist is - if only via Googling. 

Generically, socialism insists the resources of the planet (or a nation) not be rationed according to who can most cleverly exploit and abuse the monetary system - but for the betterment of the largest number of people. No one gets filthy rich - but NO one perishes in filthy, rat-infested shacks either, starved and homeless.

It means resources are not uniformly allocated only to those who have aggregated the most capital (usually via corrupt, nefarious means) to purchase them. Thus, we don't allow oil companies to frack under a home and pollute ground, air and water because they lay a unique claim on "mineral rights".  We also do not disallow a sick person from access to health care because of pre-existing conditions - but we provide a uniformly accessible health system to all, without imposing costs that can bankrupt. We do this through the agency of higher taxes across the board, but especially for the richest. This is the heart of Democratic Socialism.


To do this is a societal choice.

The beauty of socialism is that it doesn't allow this rank structural unfairness to persist as a fait accompli. It corrects it systemically - say by using taxation from those who have the silver spoons (and need no more) to those who have basic, material needs.

Will tries to smear Sanders by writing:

"Time was  socialism meant government ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange."

But that is more communism - which is actually an extreme form of socialism. By contrast, Democratic socialism is not centrally controlled via planning boards etc. but rather accentuates re-distribution of resources via the existing tax code.  Thus, Will is correct when he informs us:

"Sanders says his idea of socialism exists in Europe's social democracies"

Which is correct. Thus, European states like Denmark, Sweden, Norway are socialist to the degree and extent their respective tax systems are used to re-distribute essential resources for all. But the commonality that underlies all of them is that none of them have a massive military -industrial complex which sucks up annually nearly 6.2 % of GDP.

Will mocks the "0.3 percent growth rate of these states" but is oblivious to the fact that there can be human growth independent of capital growth - which often acts in opposition to human betterment.  No better example was recently shown than in the recent TIME in a piece on the Starbucks CEO who courageously kept his workers' health care benefits - even after being warned by Wall Street that "Starbucks share price will fall" if he did. 

He thereby chose human welfare over greed.  That is exactly what a President Sanders would be about - marking our best chance to turn back the growing inequality divide.

Never mind! For Will, like too many other nincompoops who have no clue what they write about, any Sanders campaign would be yet another experiment in "collectivism".  (He reels off a number of historical examples of failed Socialist efforts to get into the political system)

But he shows his ignorance once more - and as I noted in a previous post (Aug. 12, 2014):

Collectivism, according to the definition given in the Webster's Encyclopedic Dictionary, means "supporting or promoting the takeover of all means of production by the state". But no liberal I know supports any such thing, nor do the democratic socialist nations such as Norway, Sweden,  and Denmark

So what we see here is Will pathetically trying to scare off potential voters from support of a Sanders' candidacy. He is counting on the bogeyman of communism-socialism to cloud most American brains and get them to vote once more for corporate-sponsored economic slavery and corporate socialism - using a massive, bloated military apparatus to continually invade and seize resources for markets.

Speaking for one potential voter - myself - I have no intention of being cowed and am likely as not to write Sanders name in the blank box as an alternative candidate. Better that than to knowingly endorse the extension and consolidation of Neoliberalism over another 4- year  cycle - at least for me.