Go To Sleep Little Sheep - The World You Know Is Ending...,

theguardian  |  Normalcy and the restoration of a modicum of decorum to the White House: that is what many elite supporters of Joe Biden hope for now that he has won the election. But the rest of us are turned off by this meagre ambition. Voters who loathe Trump celebrate his loss, but the majority rue the return to what used to pass as normal or ethical.

When Trump contracted Covid-19, his opponents feared he might benefit from a sympathy vote. But Trump is not a normal president seeking voters’ sympathy. He doesn’t do sympathy. He neither needs nor banks on it. Trump trades on anger, weaponises hatred and meticulously cultivates the dread with which the majority of Americans have been living after the financial bubble burst in 2008. Obscenities and contempt for the rules of polite society were his means of connecting with a large section of American society.

The reason 2008 was a momentous year wasn’t just because of the magnitude of the crisis, but because it was the year when normality was shattered once-and-for-all. The original postwar social contract broke in the early 1970s, yielding permanent real median earnings stagnation. It was replaced by a promise to America’s working class of another route to prosperity: rising house prices and financialised pension schemes. When Wall Street’s house of cards collapsed in 2008, so did this postwar social contract between America’s working class and its rulers.

After the crash of 2008, big business deployed the central bank money that refloated Wall Street to buy back their own shares, sending share prices (and, naturally, their directors’ bonuses) through the stratosphere while starving Main Street of serious investment in good-quality jobs. A majority of Americans were thus treated, in quick succession, to negative equity, home repossessions, collapsing pension kitties and casualised work – all that against the spectacle of watching wealth and power concentrate in the hands of so few.

By 2016, the majority of Americans were deeply frustrated. On the one hand, they lived with the private anguish caused by the permanent austerity to which their communities had been immersed since 2008. And, on the other, they could see a ruling class whose losses were socialised by the government, which defined the response to the crash.

Donald Trump simply took advantage of that frustration. And he did so with tactics that, to this day, keep his liberal opponents in disarray. Democrats protested that Trump was a nobody, and thus unfit to be president. That did not work in a society shaped by media which for years elevated inconsequential celebrities.

Even worse for Trump’s opponents, portraying him as incompetent is an own goal: Donald J Trump is not merely incompetent. George W Bush was incompetent. No, Trump is much worse than that. Trump combines gross incompetence with rare competence. On the one hand, he cannot string two decent sentences together to make a point, and has failed spectacularly to protect millions of Americans from Covid-19. But, on the other hand, he tore up Nafta, the North American Free Trade Agreement that took decades to put together. Remarkably, he replaced it swiftly with one that is certainly not worse – at least from the perspective of American blue-collar workers or, even, Mexican factory workers who now enjoy an hourly wage considerably greater than before.

Moreover, despite his belligerent posturing, Trump not only kept his promise to not start new wars but, additionally, he withdrew American troops from a variety of theatres where their presence had caused considerable misery with no tangible benefits for peace or, indeed, American influence.

 

 

Peak Oil: Why The Narrative Can't Keep Up With The Facts Under The Ground

consciousnessofsheep |  The geology of US oil might have been straightforward; the economics was a little trickier.  In the course of the Second World War, the USA supplied six out of every seven barrels of oil consumed.  Venezuela accounted for most of the seventh barrel; with small contributions from British Persia and the Soviet Caucasus.  Germany’s oil sources had been inadequate to power its civilian economy; and its failure to capture and bring online the Caucasus oil in 1942 is the primary reason why it lost the war.

The war-torn economies which emerged from the ashes of war in 1945, then, were almost entirely dependent upon oil from the USA.  And this allowed an internal American oil cartel – the Texas Railroad Commission – to extend its price fixing to the entire world.  So long as US oil made up a large part of global oil production, and so long as US oil fields had excess capacity, the TRC could regulate the global oil price.  If prices began to rise too high, the TRC would order companies to produce more oil.  If prices sank too low, the TRC would order production cuts.  As a result, throughout the boom years 1953 to 1973, the world oil price remained stable at around $25 per barrel (at today’s prices).

When the US conventional oil fields peaked in 1970, the TRC lost its ability to prevent prices from rising by expanding production.  This was a boon for Middle East and North African producers whose production costs were higher than those in the USA.  And although the first – 1973 – oil shock was in part a response to western support for Israel in the Arab-Israeli war, sooner or later the newly empowered OPEC was going to cut supply to drive up prices.

It is an irony that a capitalist system which claims to be built upon competition and free markets has proved stable only in those periods when its source of value – energy – has been controlled by cartels.  Once OPEC-led price stability was regained in the mid-1980s, the stage was set for the global debt-boom of the 1990s and early 2000s.  And with the fall of the Soviet Union and the apparent conversion of China to state capitalism, for a brief moment the world seemed content.

Peak oil had not, though, gone away; it had merely been postponed.  Britain discovered this the hard way after its North Sea deposits – which had once produced more oil than Kuwait – peaked in 1999.  By 2005 – the year global conventional oil extraction peaked – Britain had become a net importer of oil and gas.  Today, Britain’s North Sea deposits produce 60 percent less oil than in 1999; and the projected price of the remaining oil is not enough to cover the decommissioning costs.

By 2005 though, had we but known it at the time, we had bigger problems to deal with.  The experience of the oil shocks of the 1970s convinced many peak oilers that once the peak of global oil extraction had been reached, prices would rise remorselessly as a consequence of supply and demand imbalance.  This, indeed, is what appeared to happen after the 2005 peak was reached:

By 2012, Michael Kumhof and  Dirk V Muir from the International Monetary Fund were anticipating global oil prices of more than $200 per barrel by 2020.  But that isn’t what happened.  Instead, from 2014 the oil price slumped and has been on a steadily downward trend ever since.  The reason is because there is more to peak oil than geology and engineering.

Indeed, many peak oilers make the same mistake as economists in treating oil – and energy in general – as being just another relatively low-cost factor of production.  The wage bill, for example, is always far higher than the energy costs of running a business.  But as economist Steve Keen explains; “capital without energy is a statue, labour without energy is a corpse.”  Or as engineering professor Jean-Marc Jancovici explains: “energy is what quantifies change.”  Nothing happens in the world without energy.  And when the cost of the world’s biggest primary energy source – oil – begins to spike upward, the impacts are felt in every area of our lives.

The story of the 2008 crash is usually told in financial terms; and is used to blame the victims.  The cause of the crisis, we are told, was so-called sub-prime borrowers taking on mortgages that they couldn’t possibly pay back.  Except, of course, prior to 2008 they had been paying them back.  So what happened to change their circumstances so that they could no longer repay debts?  The answer is interest rate rises.  The banks had based their lending on the assumption that the economy was stable; that inflation would grow at around two percent; and that interest rates would remain relatively low.  With house prices supposedly guaranteed to keep rising, and having securitised the risks, banks – with the assistance of governments – could extend home ownership to the masses.  But from 2006, central banks had been raising interest rates; tipping borrowers into default.

Why had the central banks been raising interest rates?  Because from 2005, inflation began to break out of the 1 to 3 percent band that they were charged with maintaining.  According to all of the textbooks they had been brought up on, the central bankers had been taught that the way to bring inflation back under control was to raise interest rates.  But they – and the economics textbooks – were wrong.  What they believed to be inflation – too much currency chasing too few goods – was actually an economy adjusting to its first supply-side shock since the 1970s.

 

Take Care Not To Perform Righteous Deeds In Order That People May See Them....,

 c-span  |  I DON'T PUSH BACK, I WITNESS, I OBSERVED, I THINK IT'S REALLY IMPORTANT THAT WE BECOME OBSERVERS OF OUR EMOTIONS, FEELINGS, EXPERIENCES, THE MORE THAT YOU CAN OBSERVE EVEN THE PART OF SHAME AND GUILT IS TO NOT NOT WANTING TO LOOK AT IT, NOT WANTING TO SEE IT BUT THE MOMENT THAT YOU TAKE TIME TO OBSERVE THE IMPACT, EVERYTHING THAT IT IS HAD ON YOU AND GIVE SPACE OBSERVING NOT JUST SHAME AND JOY NOT TO SHAME AND GUILT BUT JOY AND LOVE, WE SOMETIMES ASSUME THAT WE CAN FULLY FEEL LOVED AND JOY BUT SOMETIMES THERE'S SO PRACTICE IN SHAME AND GUILT THAT EVEN WHEN LOVE AND JOY COMES OUR WAY WE CANNOT RECOGNIZE IT AND SO I'M A BIG FIRM BELIEVER OF OBSERVING OUR FEELINGS, OUR EMOTIONS, OUR BEHAVIORS GIVING THEM SPACE SO YOU CAN HAVE MORE LANGUAGE AROUND WHAT IS HAPPENING, I PRACTICE WHAT IS CALLED GENERATIVE FOAM ONYX, MANY OF US IN THEIR MOVEMENT HAVE BEEN TRAINED IN IT OR HAVE GONE THROUGH THAT TRAINING AND IT'S REALLY AN OBSERVATION OF THE BODY AND EVERYTHING WERE GOING THROUGH A FINAL SWEEP IT SLEEP ENOUGH MY EYEBALL TWITCHES, I'M NOT TAKING ENOUGH WATER AND IF WE JUST TAKE A MOMENT TO OBSERVE INTO NOTICE, WE COULD HAVE MORE LANGUAGE ABOUT OUR NEEDS, OUR DESIRES, WHAT IS GOING TO WORK FOR US AND I THINK ABOUT THAT, THAT IS THE INDIVIDUAL LEVEL, IMAGINE IF WE COULD COLLECTIVELY UNDERSTAND OUR NEEDS AND DESIRES, I THINK THAT'S WHY BLACK LIVES MATTER WAS SO PROFOUND FOR BLACK PEOPLE BECAUSE IT BECAME A THING THAT WE DID NOT REALIZE THAT WE NEEDED AS A COLLECTIVE TO GALVANIZE AROUND, THE MORE THAT WE CAN COLLECTIVELY UNDERSTAND OUR TRAUMA, THE MORE THAT WE CAN COLLECTIVELY UNDERSTAND OUR RESILIENCE, WE CAN COLLECTIVELY UNDERSTAND OUR NEEDS, OUR DESIRES AND THE CLOSER WE CAN GET TO FREEDOM.

YOU WILL BE SHOCKED HOW MUCH YOU REMEMBER AS YOUR PROBED AND ASKED QUESTIONS. I REALLY SAT AND SAID LET'S START FROM THE BEGINNING AND WE WERE PRETTY MUCH IN CONVERSATION ON A DAILY BASIS LIKE AT THE CRACK OF DAWN AND SOME OF THE STORIES IT WAS BECAUSE I WAS TALKING TO GET TO THE NEXT STORY, A CHAPTER ON MY MIDDLE SCHOOL YEARS CALLED 12 WHERE I TALK ABOUT THE FIRST TIME I AM ARRESTED, THAT WAS NOT SOMETHING I PLANNED ON PUTTING IN THE BOOK I WAS NOT EVEN THINKING ABOUT THAT BUT I WAS TALKING A LOT TO KIND OF EXPLAIN THE DIFFERENCES IN THE SCHOOL THAT I WENT TO, WHEN I WENT TO SUMMER SCHOOL, MY HOMESCHOOL, THE HOMESCHOOL MY NEIGHBORHOOD AND A COP CAME AND ARRESTED ME AND WAS LIKE WAIT A SECOND, WHAT HAPPENED AND I WAS LIKE 0 YEAH WHEN I WAS 12 I GOT ARRESTED AT SCHOOL AND SHE WAS LIKE OKAY THAT NEEDS TO GO IN THE BOOK, YOU'VE TALKED SO MUCH ABOUT YOUR SIBLINGS AND THE BOYS IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD BUT YOU WERE ALSO CRIMINALIZED IN THE CRIMINALIZATION OF BLACK GIRLS AND WE HOLD ALL THE STORIES, WE STORE THEM, THEY DON'T LEAVE OUR BODIES, THEIR IN THERE SOMEWHERE AND WHEN THEIR UNLOCKED, I THINK THEY CREATE A LOT OF THINGS, OPPORTUNITY, SOMETIMES TOO MUCH FOR PEOPLE WHO ARE SURVIVORS ESPECIALLY OF SEXUAL ASSAULT AND VIOLENCE, SOMETIMES YOU LOCK AWAY THE MEMORIES FOR SURVIVAL AND SAFETY AND OF THOSE ARE UNLOCKED WITHOUT GETTING THE SUPPORT CAN REALLY CAUSE A LOT OF HARM, I SAY THAT BECAUSE I'M NOT ROMANTICIZING THE MEMORY THAT I HAVE AND WHAT I UNLOCKED, I VERY MUCH GO TO THERAPY, I DO THERAPY TWICE A WEEK, I TRY MY HARDEST TO REALLY TAKE CARE OF MY EMOTIONAL HEALTH EVEN MY OWN HISTORY WITH COMPLEX PTSD, GIVEN WHAT I'VE GROWN UP WITH AND WITNESSED, THIS BOOK BUILDING OF THIS MEMOIR DID REMIND ME THAT WHAT HAPPENED TO ME AND MY FAMILY WAS REALLY, REALLY UNACCEPTABLE AND VERY DISTURBING INCREDIBLY TRAUMATIC AND I WILL PROBABLY NEED TO BE, NOT IN A JUDGMENTAL WAVE AND LIFELONG THERAPY BECAUSE OF IT, I WAS JUST TEXTING WITH MY MOM, DO YOU WANT TO GO TO THERAPY.

I AM VERY TRANSPARENT, I'M IN THERAPY HOPING SHALL BE LIKE MAYBE I'LL DO IT TO, WE DESERVE HEALING FROM WHAT IS HAPPENED TO US IN WHAT CONTINUES TO HAPPEN, WE DESERVE THE TIME AND SPACE, MY BIG DEMAND ON MY LAST BOOK TO HER I WAS SAYING IN EVERY CONVERSATION FIRST OF ALL I BELIEVE IN REPARATION BUT I THINK THERE SHOULD BE A WHOLE SECTION WHEN WE CREATE OUR REPARATION IMPACTED ENTER PACKAGE ON HEALING JUSTICE, EVERY SINGLE BLACK PERSON IN THEIR FAMILY SHOULD HAVE A DESIGNATED WHO CAN SUPPORT THEM UP WITH THEM THROUGH THE HISTORY OF TRAUMA THAT WE HAVE GONE THROUGH TO GET US CLOSER TO BEING WHOLE HUMAN BEINGS, WHEN YOU'RE TRAUMATIZED, YOU'RE NOT A WHOLE HUMAN BEING, YOUR ACTING FROM YOUR TRAUMA PLACE, WE DESERVE TO BE FULLY REALIZED HUMAN BEINGS, I THINK REPARATIONS WILL GET US THAT AN ACTIVE THERAPY, A LOT OF OTHER THINGS AS WELL THE ACTIVE THERAPY AS WELL.

Van Jones..., SMDH - Jes Dayyum...,

RT |  CNN host Van Jones is being hauled over the coals on social media, facing accusations of hypocrisy for tearfully heralding the end of Donald Trump’s presidency despite working with his administration.

After Democrat Joe Biden was projected to have won the election on Saturday, the CNN commentator launched into an emotional speech about how “it’s easier to be a parent this morning.” 

“It’s easier to be a dad this morning. It’s easier to tell your kids, ‘Character matters, being a good person matters,’” he said.

The pundit then broke down into tears and continued: “And it’s easier for a whole lot of people. If you’re Muslim in this country, you don’t have to worry that the president doesn’t want you here. If you’re an immigrant, you don’t have to worry if the president is going to be  happier to have babies snatched away or send dreamers back for no reason.”  

The clip was widely shared on social media and many people, including NBA star LeBron James and actor Mark Ruffalo, applauded Jones for his words.

However, thousands of others noted that Jones’ remarks were markedly different from comments he previously made about what Trump had done for the black community and the fact that he worked with the administration.

Photos of Jones, who was an official in the Obama White House, alongside members of the Trump administration and family racked up thousands of likes on Twitter. News articles about Jones’ comments and his ties to the administration were also widely shared.

Indeed, just over two weeks ago Jones said that Trump doesn’t get enough credit for his actions to help black people.

“I think it's really unfortunate because Donald Trump, and I get beat up by liberals every time I say it but I keep saying it, he has done good stuff for the black community,” Jones said on CNN.

“Opportunity Zone stuff, black college stuff, I worked with him on criminal stuff, I saw Donald Trump have African American people, formerly incarcerated, in the White House, embraced them, treated them well. There is a side to Donald Trump that I think he does not get enough credit for,” he added.

Black Teens Create More Online Content Than Any Other Group

suntimes  |   In the book, Stuart cites a University of Chicago study that says Black teens create more online content than any other racial group. In February, the Sun-Times reported that less than 5 percent of workers at Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are Black.

Drill also crosses paths with hip-hop’s “Blog Era’ — a period where local artists such as The Cool Kids and Kidz in the Hall made names for themselves by releasing new content via music blogs instead of relying on music industry gatekeepers, along with rappers with strong, national DIY followings such as Wiz Khalifa, Mac Miller, Curren$y, and Gary, Indiana, native Freddie Gibbs, among others. 

“These guys all blew up and had all these videos with millions of plays, and all this notoriety and songs and mixtapes getting downloaded,” said Andrew Barber, owner/creator of “Fake Shore Drive,” a Chicago music blog. “But none of it counted toward the new certifications that the RIAA has in place or the Billboard charts.”

Due to the subgenre’s reputation, many record companies refused to sign drill artists; their music was banned by venues.

“I just thought you need to have these ridiculous bar guarantees and rental fees, and later in life I find out that was just a Black thing, or a risk assessment type of thing, even though there was never a risk,” said concert promoter and Complex Studios co-founder Marques “Merk” Elliston, who says he partnered with Hologram USA to have Chief Keef’s hologram perform at a Hammond, Indiana, venue before local police shut it down citing safety issues. “That’s why you see the lack of remorse for a lot of these people [venues].”

Due to those fears, some of the genre’s artists are opting to move away from the drama. 

“It was a part of our lives; we saw it as normal,” said Bronzeville native Sasha Go Hard, who is featured in the theme song for the Comedy Central series “South Side.” “It became a trend to start dissing people. … These are not just songs that people are making; it’s really happening. It was easy for me to branch away from drill. I went a different route by touring overseas and making EDM songs.” Fist tap Big Don

Trump Getting Coronavirus Like Freddie Mercury Getting AIDS - But Nobody Was Like "How'd He Get It?"

dailybeast |   As his now infamous 2016 line about giving Trump a chance—inadvertently echoed in Biden’s victory speech earlier Saturday night—revealed, Chappelle’s politics have never been simple to characterize. His public criticism of Hillary Clinton in the final days of that election were bad enough that he had to later clarify that he was “not a Trump supporter.” His willingness to give Trump a “chance” followed him for months, at least until he told Stephen Colbert in 2017, “It’s not like I wanted to give him a chance that night.”

More recently, during an episode of David Letterman’s Netflix show My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, Chappelle answered a question about Trump’s Muslim ban by offering up what easily could be considered a both-sides take on the two presidential candidates.

“You don’t expect necessarily that empathy, compassion or cultural astuteness from a guy like that,” Chappelle, who converted to Islam in the early ‘90s, told Letterman. “What you’re sad about is that the chair doesn’t have more humanity in it. But has that chair ever been that humane? When Biden called Trump the first racist president ever, well clearly that’s not true. So how do I feel when I hear a white person say some stupid shit?”

As Letterman laughed, Chappelle answered his own question with a comical shrug.

“I would implore everybody who’s celebrating to remember, it’s good to be a humble winner,” Chappelle said on Saturday. “Remember when I was here four years ago? Remember how bad that felt. Remember that half the country right now still feels that way. Please remember that.”

“Remember that for the first time in the history of America, the life expectancy of white people is dropping because of heroin, because of suicide,” he continued. “All these white people out there that feel that anguish, that pain, that man, they think nobody cares. Maybe they don’t.”

“Let me tell you something: I know how that feels,” he added. “I promise you, I know how that feels. If you’re a police officer and every time you put your uniform on, you feel like you’ve got a target on your back, you’re appalled by the ingratitude that people have when you would risk your life to save them, believe me, I know how that feels.”

“But here’s the difference between me and you,” Chappelle said. “You guys hate each other for it. And I don’t hate anybody. I just hate that feeling. That’s what I fight through. That’s what I suggest you fight through. You’ve got to find a way to live your life. You’ve got to find a way to forgive each other. You’ve got to find a way to find joy in your existence in spite of that feeling. And if you can't do that…come get these n---a lessons.”

An Anonymous, Whydte-Identified Gamma Jew Loses His Shidt Over Hozumi's Musty Panny-Hustle...,

tremr  |   Tada is correct in his insistence on the need to approach politics from a partially personological (rather than a purely systemic) approach. In order to understand the roots of Oluo's deeply deficient and distorted perspective, it is very important to understand that studies indicate major differences in narcissistic personality traits among individuals from different racial groups. 

In general, African Americans tend to exhibit the highest rates of narcissistic personality traits, with East Asians (perhaps with the exception of Tada) possessing the lowest levels of groups measured. While some have suggested that the alleged "black self-esteem advantage" that is well-known among social scientists, may explain these heightened levels of narcissism, as a kind of compensatory attempt at preserving self-esteem in the face of marginalization, other marginalized groups, such as Hispanics, do not exhibit this heightened self-esteem, throwing this hypothesis into question.

Such a self-esteem advantage is likewise absent among East Asians, and East Asians have lower levels of self-esteem than whites. Of course, since East Asians, on average, have higher levels of income than Caucasians in the U.S., we may rightly question whether it is proper to consider them "marginalized" in any meaningful sense of the word. Virgil Zeigler-Hill and Marion T. Wallace stated their "Overview and Predictions" in their three studies as follows:

"Our goal for the present studies was to examine whether racial differences emerged for narcissism in a manner that was similar to the Black self-esteem advantage. This was accomplished by conducting three studies that compared the narcissism levels of Black and White individuals. The present research extends the findings of Foster et al. (2003) by using various measures of narcissism rather than relying solely on the NPI. Also, the present studies accounted for factors related to narcissism such as self-esteem level and socially desirable response tendencies in order to clarify the nature of any racial differences in narcissism that emerged. Given previous research concerning racial/ethnic differences in narcissism as well as the fragile nature of the high levels of self-esteem reported by Black individuals, we expected Black individuals to report higher levels of narcissism than White individuals. Finally, Study 3 included indicators of psychological adjustment so that we could examine whether race moderated the association between narcissism and psychological adjustment."

In their second study, they found that "Black individuals possess higher levels of narcissism than White individuals. The magnitude of the differences varied across the facets of narcissism such that the largest differences were found for those facets that captured grandiosity and self-absorption...". Consistently across these studies, they found that black individuals exhibit higher levels of narcissism than white individuals. This is exactly what one would expect in a cultural context in which activists in the Black Lives Matter movement insist that blacks cannot be racist. Their claim is that the definition of "racism" was changed a few decades ago, so that it can only be used to speak of those whose systemic power allows them to express their prejudices institutionally. Of course, the only reason they insist on this definition is because of the tremendously negative emotional payload the word "racism" has.

The obvious underlying psychological motive in insisting that the definition of "racism" can only refer to discrimination by those with the institutional power to enforce their prejudices is that blacks cannot be held accountable for their actions in spite of the fact that, on an individual basis, they tend to engage in much higher rates of race-based crime, and they likewise feel comfortable accusing whites of being racist merely for being white, despite the fact that whites are far less likely than blacks or Hispanics to engage in interracial crime on an individual level. While systemic racism exists, we must emphasize that in this post, we are merely following Tada's approach in looking at racism from a purely personological perspective.

Tada - Macking On Musty Patchouli Pannies Involves A Swole Peen, Not A Swole Belly....,

selfishactivist |  For the last two years, I’ve been actively and covertly being bullied by a group of people who have been engaging in accountability abuse and smears about me in various local communities around Montreal and the general area of the Pacific North West.

This has resulted in the loss of relationships with colleagues and clients, as well as work and income that went along with those relationships, including more recently being asked to step away from facilitation at an ancestral skills gathering, after smears reached some of their stakeholders.

During this time, I’ve also suffered from debilitating chronic fatigue, chronic pain, and vertigo during this period, which has been profoundly affected by the bullying. I’m luckily more resourced, in both a psycho-emotional sense and financial sense, than other people in my community, but I know many people in my community would not have been so lucky and ended up permanently traumatized.

As I am coming out of the worst of my condition, I feel like finally have the energy to address these matters more actively and take the responsibility to protect myself and the people who are connected to my work.

I want to specify that this note is a call for accountability from those who have bullied me, with the understanding that accountability is a path to repair.

Here, I want to share with you how I define what has been happening to me as accountability abuse and a form of defamation.

In the more-than-a-year period of constant secretive communications of projections and fabrications about me being spread in my local communities, I have received no direct contact or engagement from any core parties about the actual claims of me, and therefore no due process, no clarification, and no attempt at verification, all the while I have suffered massive damage to my mental health and relationships.

The innate lack of transparency and accountability of these claims defines what I refer to as accountability abuse – abuses of power that happen under the pretense of holding someone accountable for harm, which in turn abuses the spirit of accountability itself.

Adding to this problematic dynamic has been that the many community members who were engaged by this campaign, many of whom are organizers with ample social capital, would tell me that they cannot share who the claimants or what the claims are because they deserve to be protected, even while they pursued or enabled actions that harm me emotionally and financially.

My feelings about this are very clear: it is problematic for people to be able to say whatever they want about others under such protective anonymity AND have their claims validated through belief and action – it creates an extremely untransparent and unaccountable dynamic that is easily manipulated. For myself, I would love to see our communities adopt a standard that claims are deemed lacking actionable validity until they are specifically backed up by information such as who is the claimant and what they are claiming AND all parties are able to respond to transparent information.

Survivors 100% deserve trauma-informed attention and be heard, that is my core belief as a therapist, but we also need to be held responsible for having courage, in order to facilitate real healing and prevent traumatic patterns causing unnecessary harm through projection and fabrication. What I have seen over and over again is that, without such responsibility, survivor support turns into codependent coddling that reifies trauma.

 

Tada Hozumi: Woke Soy Boy Macking On Patchouli Pannies ...,

selfishactivist |  I understand that for some people this may draw confusion because the hall-of-fame of somatics in our minds is plastered with the images of white teachers and innovators.

Yet, somatics remains an Asian cultural form in its modern roots.

Acknowledging this is similar to how we may appropriately recognize funk and rock n’ roll as Black music. While robust polyrhythms and boisterous dance circles are a feature of almost any culture if you excavate deeper, it is undoubtedly Black people and their culture, i.e. the collective work of their ancestors, that have kept alive these Afro-diasporic traditions and gifted them to those of us who live in the context of the modern post-colonial project.

Somatics, the practice of affecting change through felt-sense interoception of the body, has a similar story. Since the post-war era of the 1950s, and even before that on a smaller scale, Asian cultural practices such as qigong, yoga, zen, energetic martial arts, energy work, and Chinese medicine proliferated throughout the Western world, often accompanied by a variety of Asian philosophical orientations from Buddhism to Daoism.

The modern Western somatic modalities we have come to commonly know, from Somatic Experiencing, Hakomi Method, Generative Somatics, Embodied Leadership (Strozzi Institute), Feldenkrais, and so on, all derive their foundational somatic practices from these Asian cultural traditions. In more recent years, these embodiment tools that have been traditionally accessed for individual healing are now more and more being accessed for politicized collective healing.

Now, here is a question: with all this resourcing from our ancestors, how much do people actually know about Asian cultures? Or even better, how much can people humbly admit that they DON’T know? Because while our ancestors’ treasures have been sending gifts to the West, there has been very little understanding of who we are, what it is, the essence of ‘Asianness’ we embody, even within social justice circles that purportedly are about exploring and celebrating that which is marginalized.

The reality is, we have continuously been the last thought, constantly triaged out of relevance using a metric that we know as the hierarchy of oppression. And perhaps, there is some twisted validity in the idea that things just aren’t as bad for us so we matter less.

But lying deeper than this surface logic is a problem that eats itself. The supposedly semi-reasonable idea that we are the least important issue in the problem of racism, doesn’t mean that healing anti-Asianness can’t be the most critical key to solving the koan that systemic oppression is.

My aspirations in cultural somatics have always been about addressing this very core issue – to reclaim somatics, as an Asian cultural form, as an Asian person. In my own first explorations of the work that I now refer to as cultural somatics was a yearning to create a framework that understands change, even social change, as wholly encapsulated in the body and its innate mysterious non-dual nature, that flips and synthesizes yin and yang in a constant process of alchemy.

This mattered to me deeply because in all honestly, I just had enough of activist spaces that touted banners of ‘resistance’ and ’solidarity’ but consequently had no room for the distinctly Asian embodied sensibilities of ‘yielding’ and ‘fluidity’ as power and resource. I definitely have the first-hand experience of getting shut down for suggesting that these may be also valuable strategies for ‘fighting the enemy’.

what means remember yourself! (originally posted 9/15/15)

feldenkrais |  Relaxation: a concept that is often misunderstood
Let us look at the lower half of the jaw. Most people keep their mouths closed when they are not speaking, eating, or doing something else with it. What keeps the lower half of the jaw drawn up against the upper half? If the relaxation that has now become so fashionable were the correct condition, then the lower jaw would hang down freely and the mouth remain wide open. But this ultimate state of relaxation is found only among individuals born idiots, or in cases of paralyzing shocks.

It is important to understand how an essential part of the body such as the jaw can be in this permanent state of being held up, supported by muscles that work ceaselessly while we are awake; yet we do not sense that we are doing anything to hold up our jaw. In order to let our jaw drop freely we actually have to learn to inhibit the muscles involved. If you try to relax the lower jaw until its own weight opens the mouth fully you will find that it is not easy. When you have succeeded you will observe that there are also changes in the expression of the face and in the eyes. It is likely that you will discover at the end of this experiment that your jaw is normally shut too tightly.

Perhaps you will also discover the origin of this excessive tension. Watch for the return of the tension after the jaw has been relaxed, and you will at least discover how infinitely little man knows about his own powers and about himself in general.

The results of this small experiment can be important for a sensible person, more important even than attending to his business, because his ability to make a livelihood may improve when he discovers what is reducing the efficiency of most of his activities.

No awareness of action in antigravity muscles
The lower jaw is not the only part of the body that does not drop down as far as it can. The head itself does not drop forward. Its center of gravity is well in front of the point at which it is supported by the spine (it lies approximately between the ears), for the face and front part of the skull are heavier than the back of the head. Despite this structure the head does not fall forward, so obviously there must be some organization in the system that keeps it up.

If we relax the muscles at the back of the neck completely, then the head will drop to the lowest possible position, with the chin resting on the breastbone. Yet there is no consciousness of effort while these muscles at the back of the neck are contracted to hold up the head. If you finger the calf muscles (at the back of the leg, at about the middle) while standing, you will find them strongly contracted. If they were entirely relaxed the body would fall forward. In good posture the bones of the lower leg are at a small angle forward from the vertical, and the contraction of the muscles of the calves prevents the body from falling forward on its face.

We stand without knowing how
We are thus not aware of any effort or activity in the muscles that work against gravity. We become aware of the antigravity muscles only when we either interrupt or reinforce them, that is, when the voluntary change is made in clear awareness. The permanent contraction that is normally present before any intentional act is done is not registered by our senses. The electrical impulses, which derive from different sources within the nervous system, are involved. One group of these produces deliberate action; the other group causes contraction in the antigravity muscles until the work done by them exactly balances the pull of gravity.

moshe pinchas feldenkrais (originally posted 9/18/15)

wikipedia |  Feldenkrais was born in the Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine) city of Slavuta. In 1918, he left his family, then living in Baranovichi, Belarus, to emigrate to Palestine.^[1] There he worked as a laborer before obtaining his high-school diploma in 1925. After graduation, he worked as a cartographer for the British survey office. During his time in Palestine he began his studies of self-defense, including Ju-Jitsu. A soccer injury in 1929 would later figure into the development of his method.^[2]

During the 1930s, he lived in France where he earned his engineering degree from the École Spéciale des Travaux Publics, and later his Doctor of Science in engineeringat the Sorbonne where Marie Curie was one of his teachers. During this time he worked as a research assistant to nuclear chemist and Nobel Prize laureate Frédéric Joliot-Curie at the Radium Institute. In September 1933, he met Jigoro Kano, the founder of judo in Paris. Kano encouraged him to study Judo under Mikinosuke Kawaishi. Feldenkrais became a close friend of Kano and corresponded with him regularly.^[3] Kano chose him to be one of the doors through which the East attempts to meet the West. In 1936, he earned a black belt in judo, and later gained his 2nd degree black belt in 1938. He was a co-founding member of the Ju-Jitsu Club de France, one of the oldest Judo clubs in Europe, which still exists today. Frédéric, Irène Joliot-Curie, and Bertrand Goldschmidt took Judo lessons from him during their time together at the institute.

Just as the Germans were about to arrive in Paris in 1940, Feldenkrais fled to Britain with a jar of "heavy water" and a sheaf of research material with instructions to deliver them to the British Admiralty War Office. Until 1946, he was a science officer in the Admiralty working on Anti-submarine weaponry in Fairlie, Scotland. His work on improving sonar led to several patents. He also taught self-defense techniques to his fellow servicemen. On slippery submarine decks, he re-aggravated an old soccer knee injury. Refusing an operation, he was prompted to intently explore and develop self-rehabilitation and awareness techniques through self-observation which later evolved into the method. His discoveries led him to begin sharing with others (including colleague J. D. Bernal) through lectures, experimental classes, and one-on-one work with a few.

After leaving the Admiralty, he lived and worked in private industry in London. His self-rehabilitation enabled him to continue his judo practice. From his position on the international Judo committee he began to study judo scientifically, incorporating the knowledge he gained through his self-rehabilitation. In 1949, he published the first book on the Feldenkrais method, Body and Mature Behavior: A Study of Anxiety, Sex, Gravitation and Learning. During this period he studied the work of G.I. Gurdjieff, F. Matthias Alexander, Elsa Gindler and William Bates. He also traveled to Switzerland to study with Heinrich Jacoby.

In 1951, he returned to the recently formed Israel. After directing the Israeli Army Department of Electronics for several years, in 1954 he settled in Tel Aviv where he began to teach his method full-time. He began training Mia Segal as his assistant and his first student in 1957.^[4][5] In the same year, he gave lessons in the Feldenkrais method to David Ben-Gurion, the Prime Minister of Israel, enabling him to stand on his head in a yoga pose.

Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and into the 1980s he presented the Feldenkrais method throughout Europe and in North America (including an Awareness Through Movement program for human potential trainers including at Esalen Institute in 1972). He also began to train teachers in the method so they could, in turn, present the work to others. He trained the first group of 13 teachers in the method from 1969–1971 in Tel Aviv. Over the course of four summers from 1975–1978, he trained 65 teachers in San Francisco at Lone Mountain College under the auspices of the Humanistic Psychology Institute. In 1980, 235 students began his summer teacher-training course at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. After becoming ill in the fall of 1981, after teaching two of the planned four summers, he stopped teaching publicly. He died on July 1, 1984. There are well over 2000 practitioners of his method teaching throughout the world today.

What Makes China So Competitive

theanalysis |   But what I’m getting at is a progressive people’s movement and the progressives that have been elected to Congress, what should they be demanding? What do real solutions look like?

Michael Hudson: What they should be demanding is something that cannot be done within the existing two-party system. First of all, the way to keep down housing prices and to get the cities and states out of their deficit is to tax unearned income. Tax the land, have a real estate tax that’ll collect all this rent that is being paid right now to the banks as mortgage interest. Either you pay the banks the contractual interest that they’re due on all of these loans, and you go broke. Or you realize the banks have become averse to economic welfare. You have to let the financial system go and replace it with banking and credit as a public utility.

That’s what makes China so competitive. Why is China able to outstrip American labor? The Chinese have almost; I’d say, an equal standard of living from everything that I’ve seen there. Well, the reason is that China is doing exactly what the United States did to become an industrial power in the late 19th century. China has public utilities, public enterprises providing basic needs, and basic public services at a subsidized rate or freely, such as education, it’s free. Foreign labor doesn’t have education debt like the United States. Education is free. Health care is public. It’s provided freely. There’s no huge limit.

Paul Jay:  Let me say, I think that’s not quite as rosy as it appears. My understanding is that while health care is supposed to be free and public, that you actually have to wind up having to pay doctors some cash, or you really can’t get in to see them.

Michael Hudson: Yes, that is fair. I do acknowledge that fact. But the most important public utility to answer the question that you brought up, the important thing is that banking and finance in China is a public utility. The government is the creditor. When there’s a pandemic like this and companies cannot afford to pay the debts or have to lay off labor, the government, as a banker, can say, OK, we’re just not going to collect the debt and force you to go under and force you to lay off your labor force.

It’s easy to cancel debts when you, the public, and the government are the creditor. Because you’re canceling debts owed to yourself, and that’s one of the main reasons why banking should be a public utility.

China Stopped The Ant IPO To Quarantine A Western Financialization And Securitization Pandemic

nakedcapitalism |  The Financial Times comment section confirmed this take and criticized the pink paper’s account, which mentioned but didn’t tease out the significance of Ma criticizing the government for being leery of unsecured personal lending:

At the end of October, Mr Ma criticised China’s state-owned banks at a financial summit in Shanghai. He suggested the big lenders had a “pawnshop mentality” and that Ant was playing an important role in extending credit to innovative but collateral-poor companies and individuals.

From the Financial Times’ peanut gallery:

Hater of Simpletons

For those who didn’t know what happened : check the new regulation which limits Ant’s leverage and enhances consumer protection, which also limits Ant’s valuation as a “tech” company. That was the main reason Jack fired at regulators in his speech [at the end of October] – and to be honest, there was no way he didn’t know the regulation long before the listing date and the speech (gov spent months on a policy, if not longer and would consult industry leaders)! If the IPO were not halted, investors would have suffered from major losses, not to mention the high leverage (60x+) and ABS put Ant’s customers at risk. Jack fired the speech to evade regulation and made sure HE made enough money from the listing. Not investors, not Ant users. Being sarcastic is easy. Try to get clear of what REALLY happened.

Now to the substance of the dispute, which led to the halt of the IPO and will require Ant to substantially restructure its business. Ant originates personal and small business loans to parties with little in the way of assets. These loans command higher interest rates than more conventional loans and from what we infer, “higher’ can mean “pretty high”.

As we have written, China hasn’t been shy about using leverage to boost growth, even though as we and others have written, over time, the incremental lending has produced less and less in the way of GDP lift. China has also had multiple mini-financial crises involving its “wealth management products.” These are typically uninsured investments that provide a fixed interest rate for a set period of time, typically five years. They have often provided funding for state-level real estate investments. Nevertheless, even if you allow for Michael Hudson’s view that land should be taxed aggressively to limit real estate rentierism, economists have found that borrowing to make productive investments in businesses, equipment, and buildings adds to growth, while increases in personal borrowing are a brake.

Another reason for China to take a dim view of personal borrowing is that the government prioritizes wage growth and improving living standards as its basis for legitimacy. There’s no reason, as in the US, to use consumer borrowing to mask stagnant worker wages. And the Chinese may even have recognized that overly financialized economies have lower rates of growth than ones at a more modest level of financial “deepening”. The IMF found that Poland was at the optimum level, but argued that more finance might not create a drag if the sector was well-regulated.

Mind you, we aren’t saying that China is a paragon of regulatory virtue. They still allow for stunning amounts of margin lending against stocks. And they’ve also sat pat as ghost cities, too often shoddily built, continue to rise, a textbook case of trading sardines.¹ But they appear to want to avoid having a finance-driven economy, and also appear to have learned from some of our mistakes.

Now to the specifics of why Chinese officials came down on Ant. First, from the Wall Street Journal:

Some of the writing was on the wall earlier. While Ant was gearing up to launch its IPO, regulators had begun taking aim at the company’s fast-growing microloan business, which provides short-term credit to hundreds of millions of individuals and scores of small businesses.

On Sept. 14, China’s banking and insurance regulator issued a private notice to some commercial banks warning them about the risks of making loans in partnership with third-party institutions, according to a copy of the notice seen by The Wall Street Journal. It said banks should not be outsourcing their loan underwriting and risk controls.

When Ant partners with banks to make loans, the lenders provide the funding and bear the risk of defaults, while Ant collects fees for facilitating the transactions.

Two days later, the regulator published a guideline that placed caps on the volume of asset-backed securities that could be issued by microlenders. Two subsidiaries of Ant have bundled many loans into securities and sold them to raise funds for lending operations.

In other words, Chinese officials tried halting Ant’s practice of originating risky individual/small business loans and selling them to banks, both on the bank and Ant ends of the pipeline. That apparently didn’t lead to a change of course at Ant or its allied banks or lead to any change in appetite for its IPO.

The Ruling Elite, Money, And The Illusion Of Progress...,

theamericanconservative  |  “It was part of a strategy to signal that Republicans intended to seriously contest the South for the first time in over a century,” he writes. “[Ronald] Reagan was fetched at the airport in Meridian by his state chairman, Congressman Trent Lott. Lott had been president of the fraternity that stockpiled a cache of weapons used to riot against the federal marshals protecting a black student seeking to enter the University of Mississippi.” Perlstein reports that it was Lott who urged the president: “If Reagan really wanted to win this crowd over, he need only fold a certain two-word phrase into his speech: states’ rights.”

Perlstein was once dismissively dubbed the “gonzo historian” by former New York Times book review editor and rival chronicler of conservatives Sam Tanenhaus. Indeed, Perlstein recalls the notorious Neshoba County Fair “states’ rights” speech and countless other anecdotes in his 1,100-page opus, Reaganland, in downright Thompsonian fashion. It is his fourth installment of mid-century, American conservative history and it is his best, besting the magisterial Nixonland. Perlstein, a hard lefty journo, might indeed take himself too seriously, but at least he usually affords the same treatment to the subjects of his histories.

Rather than a conventional denunciation of the medial event in Reagan’s use of “the Southern Strategy,” Perlstein actually does reporting. Perlstein reveals Reagan didn’t really believe in what he was saying. “The way he carried out Trent Lott’s suggestion doused the enthusiasm of a previously energetic crowd,” Perlstein says. “And it was hardly worth it. The backlash was immediate and caustic.”

But what did Reagan actually say? “I still believe the answer to any problem lies with the people,” Reagan told the crowd. “I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level, and I believe we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the Constitution to that federal establishment.” And Reagan said: “I believe in states’ rights.” It was considered by his critics as tantamount to Morse code to white supremacists. Perlstein dresses up the story pages before with paragraphs of dispatches on the dominance of racial vigilantism in the region in the years before Reagan’s speech. 

But after his address, in the inferno of an August afternoon in central Mississippi, Reagan won. Though reasonable points about black voter suppression can be raised, in November, Reagan won Neshoba County, he won Mississippi, and he won the United States Electoral College. And he did so against a Deep Southern, Democratic incumbent president, which was previously unthinkable. And the GOP hasn’t relinquished Mississippi since—not even when neighboring Arkansan Bill Clinton and Tennessean Al Gore dominated the Nineties.

Perlstein’s chronicle is about the 40th president but, of course, can’t escape the shadow of the 45th. Perlstein has called Donald Trump an heir to Reagan, only stripped of the sunny optimism. A generation of global leaders, usually liberal, championed democracy, only to see Palestine elect Hamas, Egypt elect the Muslim Brotherhood, Mississippi go to Reagan, Britain secede from Europe, and America annoit Trump.

 

Iron Law Of Oligarchy

wikipedia  |  The iron law of oligarchy is a political theory first developed by the German sociologist Robert Michels in his 1911 book, Political Parties.^[1] It asserts that rule by an elite, or oligarchy, is inevitable as an "iron law" within any democratic organization as part of the "tactical and technical necessities" of organization.^[1]

Michels's theory states that all complex organizations, regardless of how democratic they are when started, eventually develop into oligarchies. Michels observed that since no sufficiently large and complex organization can function purely as a direct democracy, power within an organization will always get delegated to individuals within that group, elected or otherwise.

Using anecdotes from political parties and trade unions struggling to operate democratically to build his argument in 1911, Michels addressed the application of this law to representative democracy, and stated: "Who says organization, says oligarchy."^[1] He went on to state that "Historical evolution mocks all the prophylactic measures that have been adopted for the prevention of oligarchy."^[1]8

According to Michels, all organizations eventually come to be run by a "leadership class", who often function as paid administrators, executives, spokespersons or political strategists for the organization. Far from being "servants of the masses", Michels argues this "leadership class," rather than the organization's membership, will inevitably grow to dominate the organization's power structures. By controlling who has access to information, those in power can centralize their power successfully, often with little accountability, due to the apathy, indifference and non-participation most rank-and-file members have in relation to their organization's decision-making processes. Michels argues that democratic attempts to hold leadership positions accountable are prone to fail, since with power comes the ability to reward loyalty, the ability to control information about the organization, and the ability to control what procedures the organization follows when making decisions. All of these mechanisms can be used to strongly influence the outcome of any decisions made 'democratically' by members.^[2]

Michels stated that the official goal of representative democracy of eliminating elite rule was impossible, that representative democracy is a façade legitimizing the rule of a particular elite, and that elite rule, which he refers to as oligarchy, is inevitable.^[1] Later Michels migrated to Italy and joined Benito Mussolini's Fascist Party, as he believed this was the next legitimate step of modern societies. The thesis became popular once more in post-war America with the publication of Union Democracy: The Internal Politics of the International Typographical Union (1956) and during the red scare brought about by McCarthyism.

Military And Law Enforcement Collaboration To Violate Rights And Grift Taxpayer Dollars

newyorker  |  Before dawn on January 23, 2019, Mark McConnell arrived at the Key West headquarters of the military and civilian task force that monitors drugs headed to the United States from the Southern Hemisphere. McConnell, a prosecutor at the Department of Justice and a former marine, left his phone in a box designed to block electronic transmissions, and passed through a metal detector and a key-card-protected air lock to enter the building. On the second floor, he punched in the code for his office door, then locked it behind him. On a computer approved for the handling of classified information, he loaded a series of screenshots he had taken, showing entries in a database called Helios, which federal law enforcement uses to track drug smugglers. McConnell e-mailed the images to a classified government hotline for whistle-blowers. Then he printed backup copies and, following government procedures for handling classified information, sealed them in an envelope that he placed in another envelope, marked “SECRET.” He hid the material behind a piece of furniture.

McConnell had uncovered what he described as a “criminal conspiracy” perpetrated by the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. Every year, entries in the Helios database lead to hundreds of drug busts, which lead to prosecutions in American courts. The entries are typically submitted to Helios by the Drug Enforcement Administration, the F.B.I., and a division of the Department of Homeland Security. But McConnell had learned that more than a hundred entries in the database that were labelled as originating from F.B.I. investigations were actually from a secret C.I.A. surveillance program. He realized that C.I.A. officers and F.B.I. agents, in violation of federal law and Department of Justice guidelines, had concealed the information’s origins from federal prosecutors, leaving judges and defense lawyers in the dark. Critics call such concealment “intelligence laundering.” In the nineteen-seventies, after C.I.A. agents were found to have performed experiments with LSD on unwitting Americans and investigated Vietnam War protesters, restrictions were imposed that bar the agency from being involved in domestic law-enforcement activities. Since the country’s founding, judges, jurors, and defendants have generally had the right to know how evidence used in a trial was gathered. “This was undisclosed information, from an agency working internationally with different rules and standards,” Nancy Gertner, a retired federal district judge and a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, told me. “This should worry Trump voters who talk about a ‘deep state.’ This is the quintessential deep state. This is activities beyond your view, fundamentally affecting what happens in American courts.”

But the scheme benefitted the C.I.A. and the F.B.I.: the former received information obtained during operations, and the latter reported increased arrests and was able to secure additional federal funding as a result. The scope of the scheme was corroborated in hundreds of pages of e-mails, transcripts, and other documents obtained by The New Yorker.

For weeks, C.I.A. officials had been trying to stop McConnell from revealing the agency’s activities. They sent a lawyer to Key West with nondisclosure agreements, but McConnell refused to sign. A day before his early arrival at the office, McConnell had learned of an order to delete the screenshots on his computer. “I knew that I had to get the electronic evidence to outside investigators,” he told me. “There was no doubt about what I needed to do, and there was no doubt retaliation against me would follow.” He worked quickly, not knowing when security officers would arrive. Later that day, they came to McConnell’s office and deleted the images.

A little more than a month later, after C.I.A. officials accused McConnell of “spilling” classified information, the director of the task force suspended him. Soon, the C.I.A. director, Gina Haspel, visited the task force and was briefed on the matter. According to a sworn affidavit that McConnell filed with the Senate Intelligence Committee, and to a source with knowledge of the meeting, Haspel said that there needed to be repercussions for McConnell. (A C.I.A. spokesperson, Timothy Barrett, called the allegation “inaccurate and a gross mischaracterization.”) The military leadership of the task force ignored McConnell’s appeal of his suspension, and discussions about future assignments came to an abrupt halt. Six officials said that they believed the C.I.A. had retaliated against McConnell, leaving him nominally employed but unable to find a new post after decades of public service.

Cienfuegos Zepeda Mexico's Former Secretary Of Defense Busted At LAX....,

theamericanconservative  |  While American policymakers focus intently on developments in Europe, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific, trouble is brewing much closer to home. Under growing stress from drug-related violence and systemic corruption, Mexico is exhibiting worrisome signs of governmental dysfunction. The latest shock occurred on October 16, when U.S. authorities arrested Mexico’s former defense secretary, General Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda, at Los Angeles International Airport on drug trafficking and money laundering charges. Cienfuegos Zepeda was a major player in Mexico’s military and political affairs, leading the country’s armed forces for six years under former president Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018).

His disgrace is especially important because the military has been in charge of waging the war on illegal drugs since President Felipe Calderon made it the lead agency for that mission in 2006. Allegations that Cienfuegos Zepeda was on a drug cartel payroll, therefore, were especially embarrassing and demoralizing. As the Associated Press reporters Christopher Sherman and Maria Verza point out, Mexico’s reliance on its military has grown under current president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador: “He has entrusted it with not only leading the government’s ongoing fight with drug cartels, but also with stopping rampant fuel pipeline theft, building major infrastructure projects and being the backbone of the new, ostensibly civilian, National Guard.”

 Moreover, the military has long occupied a special status in Mexico’s political hierarchy. An ironclad agreement has been in place for decades that the army doesn’t interfere in politics, and civilian political leaders, including the president, do not interfere in the army’s internal operations. The appointment process for defense secretary highlights the extent of the military’s clout. In contrast to all other cabinet posts, the president does not have the latitude of making a personal choice for defense secretary; he or she chooses from a list of acceptable candidates that the generals submit.

The incident with Cienfuegos Zepeda was hardly the first time that scandal has rocked Mexico’s military and drug-fighting establishments. Genaro García Luna, who served as Mexico’s secretary of public security from 2006 to 2012 under President Calderon, was arrested last year in Texas on drug trafficking charges. U.S. prosecutors allege that he took tens of millions of dollars in bribes to protect Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman’s Sinaloa cartel. Another notorious incident occurred even earlier. In 1996, the Mexican government appointed General Jesus Gutierrez Rebello, who had overseen military operations for the previous seven years in the narcotics-infested region of Guadalajara, to head the National Institute for the Combat of Drugs. U.S. officials hailed the appointment and how it symbolized the growing role of the country’s military in the drug war. Just months later, he was arrested for drug trafficking.

Ultimatum Of 10 Mexican States To Lopez Obrador: Dialogue And Respect Or Secession

eluniversal.mx  |  While President López Obrador made threats and threats against private companies in the energy sector with which his government is waging a legal battle, 10 governors of the Republic yesterday issued an ultimatum to their government "in defense of federalism", trusts and of the budget for their states, in which they warned that if the president continues to ignore his request for dialogue to review the budgetary needs of local governments and refuses to review the draft Budget for 2021, the 10 entities they represent could take a route of breaking to leave the Federal Pact and leave the Republic.

In a coordinated and simultaneous manner, the 10 leaders that make up the Federalist Alliance, delivered a similar speech from the capitals of their states in which they demanded López Obrador stop snubbing and attacking their states, minimizing and disregarding their requests for a larger budget for their needs. In all the public events of each entity, the governors were accompanied by the representatives of the 3 public powers and the most representative sectors of each place to send the message that "we are not only the governors", but 10 entities (Jalisco , Nuevo León, Chihuahua, Guanajuato, Tamaulipas, Coahuila, Michoacán, Durango, Colima and Aguascalientes) whose inhabitants demand respect and dialogue from the Federation.

"We are here to send a strong message that we are not willing to tolerate more abuses by the Federation, we are here proud to be Mexican and with the conviction that we will always be Mexican. But no free and sovereign state that has a minimum of dignity can to continue being part of a Federation when the Government of the Republic ignores us, attacks us, insults us and takes away what belongs to us, "launched the governor of Jalisco, Enrique Alfaro, from the Hospicio Cabañas de Guadalajara.

In Chihuahua, Javier Corral, seconded it with the warning that if there is no response to his request for dialogue with the president, the states are ready to go to a political and legal battle with the Federation to defend their resources: "We are not going to allow neither abuse nor outrage. If the answer continues to be indifference and deaf ears, we are ready to fight the political and legal battle, "said the PAN president from the vicinity of the Government Palace and accompanied by representatives of the state powers and of Chihuahuan society.

From Nuevo León, Jaime Rodríguez Calderón threatened that the state will break with the Federation if the call for a more equitable distribution is not heard according to what each state contributes, and said that if this policy is followed, the state must generate different conditions from the local. "If he does not listen to us, it will generate an unnecessary confrontation, if he does not listen to us then the character of each region will be tested," he said.

The threat of rupture in the Republic was also heard from Guanajuato, where Governor Diego Sinhué also demanded dialogue from the President or, otherwise, he warned, the 10 united entities could make the decision to break the Federal Pact. "Today we want to tell you that we extend our hand and that if there is no dialogue we are ready to give the legal and political fight. By not listening to Guanajuato and the states that make up the Federalist Alliance, it may be leading Mexico to the beginning of breaking the Pact Federal government and that would be terrible for the whole country, "declared the PAN ruler.

In the same sense and with the same tone of ultimatum for a dialogue with the Federation in which drastic budget reductions to the states, the disappearance of the trusts and the destination of those resources can be reviewed, the governors Silvano Aureoles spoke. from Michoacán, Francisco García Cabeza de Vaca from Tamaulipas, José Rosas Aispuro from Durango, José Ignacio Peralta from Colima and Martín Orozco from Aguascalientes.  Each of them demanded respect for their entities and questioned that from the National Palace the president divides and confronts the Mexicans, while neglecting and minimizing the claims of the governors who are trying to ignore the political representation of their states.