Confederate Flag Debate While Merchants of Death USA Corp Elite Burn Us Down

Paul Robeson was right to say fighting against American imperialism is as just as the resistance fighting against Hitler

How is it that the states are burning and bankrupting while bankrolling the elite, the Mafioso thugs of the One-One Percent and their Merchants of Death Facilitators? We talk about the confederate flag and how many millions more will be homeless and near penniless in this country, thanks to USA of Corporate Inc.? I’ve seen this message in the state of Washington many times since moving here in 2001. How many times did these pig politicians fail to pass a budget? Dozens!

Dear Caregivers:
As many of you have heard in the news the Washington State Legislature has not yet completed its work to finalize a budget for the two year period beginning on July 1, 2015.  The Washington State Constitution prohibits the state from spending money that is not authorized in a budget.  If a finalized budget is not signed by the Governor by June 30, 2015 the Children’s Administration will be obligated to lay off most of its staff effective July 1, 2015 preserving only those staff responsible for emergent responses to allegations of child abuse and neglect. Additionally, a limited numbers of staff will be available in most offices to assist with placement needs and concerns.  Offices will be closed to the public.

This is how the Evergreen State rolls. Imagine, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, Boeing and all those high tech and medical tech companies. This is the state of punishment, the Zero-One Percent, and the other 19.9 percent making a minimum a cool million on their investments, up to billions a year.

A state with billions in tax write off bilking each year for Boeing, Google, Amazon, plastic surgeons (sic), yacht makers, and the list goes on and on. Some accounts put it at 4 billion a year drained from tax coffers. Forget about the offshore billions stashed away in Cayman, or the tens of billions never paid to the feds each year just for this state!

Punishment: roads to be repaired, bridges to built, runways to be paved, docks to be constructed, the entire system, eviscerating us, the US taxpayer and labor-ready fools working for these pigs and consuming their products and services. We pay for them to make trillions! A few thousand worldwide making the largess of global profits.

But the conversation goes to the rebel flag, and the upside down world of Republicans asking for that idiotic right to fly it in your front yard  (but a right, nonetheless) to take down the Confederate Flag everywhere … as if those Stars and Stripes represent, err, well, July 4 is coming up, so I will let the un-Patriots talk of our 239 years of manifest destiny rape-raze-roll.

You know, a country that has been doing business with Israel – USS Liberty and what else? Japan – wasn’t there a world war? Germany? Hmm, so, this Tuesday killer list president and society, this trans-Pacific (sic) partnership (sic) mentality, this country of haters and racists and common thieves as politicians and presidential aspirants, well, the conversation is Ted Nugent focused. The Confederate Flag!

While public education is gutted, and the tax coffers are thrown open for the felons in hedge fund investing and privatization of our basic commons. States and cities destroyed by both parties, by cultural hipsters, the very tragically liberal, all of them, killing our youth and our people of color, but we shall talk about South Carolina?

This is the thing to come, states unable to run, broken by in-fighting and corruption at the CEO and Lobby and Corporate levels. Banks getting the interest rates in the teens or above, for our own infrastructure.

But it’s about Confederate Flags while Cops Kill More Than Any Terrorist Attack in the USA. Stars and Bars and Huck Finn censored, while the banks spin institutional and generational poverty, while blacks and Latinos get locked up in those Banks’ profit pools – prisons.

We will debate getting guns away from USA citizens so the US Cops and DEA and AFT and all the other Armed Internal and External Armies Against Democracy Here, let them get armed, loaded and drone ready for total war on the citizens.

We talk about rebel flags, and our cities are in major financial crisis because of the fraud of the banks, fraud of the fed in not prosecuting these murderers of community, yet, the stars and bars will make headline news for weeks.

Banks are the terrorists, and yet some skinny mean and rotten white kid shooting up a church will get those 15 seconds of fame and trillions of nanoseconds on digital drudgery.

SEIU report:

The overall effect is staggering. Banks are estimated to have collected as much as $28 billion in termination fees alone from state and local governments over the past two years. This does not even begin to account for the outsized net payments that state and local governments are now making to the banks….

While the press have reported numerous stories of cities like Detroit, caught with high termination payments, the reality is there are hundreds (maybe even thousands) more cities, counties, utility districts, school districts and state governments with swap agreements [that] are causing cash strapped local and city governments to pay millions of dollars in unneeded fees directly to Wall Street.

Read the report on University of California’s college system and the interest rate swaps. This is voodoo and parasitic capitalism at it’s best, but, we will converse about the Stars and Bars being banned from bumpers and t-shirts at the county fair.

  • UC management has more than doubled the university’s debt burden from $6.9 billion in May 2007 to $14.3 billion at the end of 2011. Rather than contributing to UC’s core mission, funds have been directed toward more profitable UC enterprises like medical centers and attracting out-of-state students. Medical center pro”ts have increased steadily to $900 million annually last year. Out-of state enrollment has doubled across UC—increasing from 11% to 30% at UC Berkeley.
  •  UC borrowing is o&en backed by student tuition, but profits on debt-funded investments have not been used to mitigate service cuts or tuition hikes. As a result, students are made to bear the costs and the risks of poor returns, but have not received benefits from positive returns: tuition has increased 300% since 2002 and total enrollment of freshmen from California declined by 10% from 2008 to 2011.
  • UC is currently losing about three-quarters of a million dollars each month on interest rate swaps associated with debt issued for two of its medical centers. Since 2003, UC’s swap agreements have cost the university nearly $57 million and could cost the university another $200 million.

Talk about racism and ageism and elitism, the entire California state college-university system gutted by the gangster bankers.

But we will debate what triggers the hate of a child, teen, Bubba.

University of California-Davis historian Kathy Olmsted, author of Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11, in the Washington Post, sees some pretty plain things about how the world is operated by a small group of very rich and very powerful peeps who do everything motivated by their own select, destructive self-interests: “Oil’s the perfect lever for shifting world events. If you were a mad secret society with world-dominating aspirations and lots of power, how would you tweak the world to create cascading outcomes that could topple governments and enrich some at the expense of others? It’s hard to see a better lever than the price of oil, given its integral role in the world economy.”

But, we will debate guns, bullets, flags and the causes of racism. Really?
One killer commentary was seen on Democracy Now (Later):

South Carolina is proud that it was the first state to secede from the Union, that it fired those shots at Fort Sumter. This is the home of the Nullifiers, John C. Calhoun. When you hear Dr. King’s speeches and he talks about Southern governors, their words dripping with interposition and nullification, that language came out of South Carolina. South Carolina refused to sign the Declaration of Independence on the 2nd. There had to be a compromise to take out the anti-slavery clause, and so—and they signed it on the 4th. That was South Carolina’s influence in this history. So, black people celebrate the 4th of July along with other Americans, but that was really the day that slavery was codified in this country.

So if we want to have a conversation about race in this country and the foundations of white supremacy and racism, it starts in South Carolina and the ideology of white supremacy that permeates our nation today with the Southernization of American politics. When we talk about Medicaid funding and Medicaid expansion and these Southern governors, like Nikki Haley, who fought against Medicaid expansion because they didn’t want to give something to undeserved—undeserving people, who they see as black people; when you talk about voter ID laws, trying to keep a group of people from having power, almost like literacy tests and knowing how many bubbles are in a bar of soap—they talk that game now about reconciliation, but everybody uses this code language, here and across the country, to deny black people and people of color rights

Kevin Alexander Gray, a South Carolina civil rights activist and community organizer who edited the book “Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence.” As former president of the state ACLU, he argued, “the flag flying on the statehouse dome was compelled speech. You were compelling people to support an ideology of white supremacy.”

Again, where-why-when-what and who? Controls the lives of eighty percent of us … the futures of people of color … next and next generations … the youth and old discarded?

Banks-Militarists-Politicians-Elite. What does this red-white-blue fifty star July 4th loving country really represent now, 2015?

Try it out, 1852, Frederick Douglass – July 5th. Think it is relevant this year? State budgets stalled. Basic human and social services gutted? Ann event commemorating the signing of the Declaration of Independence, held at Rochester’s Corinthian Hall. It was biting oratory, in which the speaker told his audience, “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.” And he asked them, “Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day?”

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

Paul Haeder's been a teacher, social worker, newspaperman, environmental activist, and marginalized muckraker, union organizer. Paul's book, Reimagining Sanity: Voices Beyond the Echo Chamber (2016), looks at 10 years (now going on 17 years) of his writing at Dissident Voice. Read his musings at LA Progressive. Read (purchase) his short story collection, Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam now out, published by Cirque Journal. Here's his Amazon page with more published work Amazon. Read other articles by Paul, or visit Paul's website.