Who are the 10 Biggest Pandemic Profiteers? ~~ CHUCK COLLINS

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/03/25/who-are-the-10-biggest-pandemic-profiteers/

~~ posted for collectivist ~~

Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair

One year ago, the Institute for Policy Studies published “Billionaire Bonanza 2020: Wealth  Windfalls, Tumbling Taxes and Pandemic Profiteers,”  and began tracking billionaire wealth gains as unemployment surged.  We teamed up with Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) to track the wealth growth of America’s billionaires over the last year.  This report summarizes the extraordinary growth in wealth of those now 657 billionaires based on real-time data from Forbes on March 18, 2021.

Here are highlights from the last 12 months of billionaire wealth growth:

+ The combined wealth of the nation’s 657 billionaires increased more than $1.3 trillion, or 44.6 percent, since the pandemic lockdowns began. [See Master Table] Over those same 12 months, more than 29 million Americans contracted the virus and more than 535,000 died from it. As billionaire wealth soared over, almost 80 million lost work between March 21, 2020, and Feb. 20, 2021, and 18 million were collecting unemployment on Feb. 27, 2021

+ There are 43 newly minted billionaires since the beginning of the pandemic, when there were 614. A number of new billionaires joined the list after initial public offerings (IPOs) of stock in companies such as Airbnb, DoorDash, and Snowflake.

+ The increase in the combined wealth of the 15 billionaires with the greatest growth in absolute wealth was $563 billion or 82 percent. [See table 1] The wealth growth of just these 15 represents over 40 percent of the wealth growth among all billionaires. Topping the list are Elon Musk ($137.5 billion richer, 559 percent), Jeff Bezos ($65 billion, 58 percent) and Mark Zuckerberg ($47 billion, 86 percent).

The 10 biggest “Pandemic Profiteers” saw the greatest percentage increase in their wealth—at least 300 percent. [See Table 2]

They mostly multiplied their fortunes in the world of online goods, services and entertainment, as forcibly homebound Americans shopped, invested and diverted themselves in isolation. They include the owners of ecommerce leaders Quicken Loans, Square, Carvana, and cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase; social media sites Snapchat and Twitter; online streaming platform Roku; and digital ad agency Trade Desk. 19 other billionaires experienced increases of over 200% while 48 others more than doubled their fortunes with 100%+ gains.

1. Bom Kim (670 percent/$7.7 billion): A U.S. citizen and founder of the e-commerce giant Coupang, the Amazon of South Korea. Kim’s fortune surged as high as $11 billion after the company’s IPO in early March.

2. Dan Gilbert (642 percent/$41.7 billion): Owner of Quicken Loans, which capitalized on cloistered citizens tapping online financing. Lives in Michigan.

3. Ernest Garcia II (567 percent/$13.6 billion): Biggest shareholder of Carvana, the online car sales and auto-financing giant. Arizona.

4. Elon Musk (559 percent/$137.5 billion): Musk is now the second wealthiest Americans—at nearly $138 billion—as his shares in Tesla, Space-X and other companies that he owns continue to climb. Lives in Texas.

5. Brian Armstrong (550 percent/$5.5 billion): Chief executive of Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the country. California resident.

6. Bobby Murphy (531 [ercent/$10.1 billion): Co-founder of Snapchat, with his Stanford fraternity brother, Evan Spiegel. California resident.

7. Evan Spiegel (490 percent/$9.3 billion): Co-founder of Snapchat with his other billionaire super-gainer, Bobby Murphy. California resident.

8. Jack Dorsey (396 percent/$10.3 billion): Co-founder and CEOs of both Twitter and Square, the small business payment app. Lives in California

9. Anthony Wood (331 percent/$5.3 billion): Founder of Roku, which enables online TV video streaming. California resident.

10. Jeff Green (300 percent/$3 billion): Californian founder and chairman of The Trade Desk, a digital advertising firm.

Other notable billionaire wealth gains during the pandemic

Eric Yuan, co-founder of video-conferencing technology Zoom, saw his wealth rise by $8.4 billion during the pandemic year, a gain of 153 percent. A year ago, Yuan had $5.5 billion which increased to $13.9 billion. Last year Zoom paid no federal income taxes on its $660 million in profits, which increased by more than 4,000 percent.

The three owners of Airbnb saw their wealth accelerate thanks to their pandemic year IPO. Brian Chesky’s wealth increased from $4.1 billion to $14.6 billion, a gain of $10.5 billion, an increase of 256 percent. Nathan Blecharazyk and Joe Gebbia, with equal ownership stakes valued at $4.1 billion a year ago, each saw their wealth increase to $13.2 billion, for gains of $9.1 billion each, or 222 percent.

Jim Koch, owner of Boston Beer Company and brewer of the Sam Adams brand, saw his wealth increase from $1.3 billion to $3.2 billion, a gain of $1.9 billion over the pandemic year, or 146 percent.

Dan and Bubba Cathy, the owners of drive-through sensation Chick-Fil-A, saw their combined wealth of $6.8 billion rise to $16.6 billion, a gain of $9.8 billion over the pandemic year, or 144 percent.

Harold Hamm, the politically connected oil and gas fracker, saw his wealth increase from $2.4 billion to $7.5 billion during the pandemic year, an increase of 5.1 billion, or 212.5 percent.

Of 17 industry categories, billionaires in the technology industry had the greatest collective wealth growth—$564 billion, or nearly 68 percent. [See Table 3]

They were worth $1.4 trillion on March 18, 2021, or one-third of the billionaires’ total. The titans of Wall Street—the Finance & Investment industries—saw their wealth grow by $226 billion—a nearly 37 percent increase. Automotive industry billionaires had the biggest percentage point increase in wealth—317 percent based on an increase in wealth of $172 billion. That was largely driven by the extraordinary rise in Elon Musk’s wealth—$137.5 billion or 559 percent.

All but three states saw the wealth of their billionaire residents increase. [See Table 4]

Topping the list in total wealth growth are California at $551 billion, Washingtonat $134.6 billion, and New York at $116.4 billion. The top three states with the greatest percentage increase in wealth are Michigan at 164 percent, Arizona at 110 percent, and Hawaii at 107 percent.

Billionaire wealth growth is calculated between March 18, 2020 and March 18, 2021, based on Forbes data compiled in this report by ATF and IPS. March 18 is used as the unofficial beginning of the crisis because by then most federal and state economic restrictions responding to the virus were in place. March 18 was also the date that Forbes picked to measure billionaire wealth for the 2020 edition of its annual billionaires’ report, which provided a baseline that ATF and IPS compare periodically with real-time data from the Forbes website. PolitiFact has favorably reviewed this methodology.

Chuck Collins directs the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies, where he also co-edits Inequality.org.

For over a century and a half: Chinese workers abused and superexploited in U.S. ~~ Jim McMahan

https://www.workers.org/2021/03/55287/

~~ posted for collectivist ~~

Chinese railroad workers in 1869.

The six Asian spa workers murdered in Atlanta March 16 were low-wage workers. They were not respected by capitalism. Their deaths came on a surge of anti-Asian violence.Anybody with an honest view of the U.S. wars against Korea and Vietnam is familiar with anti-Asian racism. The U.S. stands guilty before the world in the deaths of four million people, caused by these two imperialist wars against Korea and Vietnam.

U.S. imperialism has a history of domestic terrorism stemming from the exploitation and forced migration of Asian labor starting in the 1840s. Anti-Asian violence “is rooted in a long history of anti-Asian sentiment that recruited Asian labor, but denied them the rights of citizenship through exclusive laws and policies,” wrote Linh Thy Nguyen, an assistant professor in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Washington.

The first big wave of Chinese immigration to the U.S. took place during the California Gold Rush of the late 1840s. After the violent annexation of Mexico, the bosses often used mob rule in California and throughout the West; they pitted white workers against Asian workers, making them the scapegoats for the grievances of labor. In Los Angeles in 1871, the small Chinese community was attacked after an internal dispute spilled over. Nineteen Chinese people were lynched — and no one was held accountable.

Leland Stanford, a major investor in the Central Pacific Railroad, despised Chinese labor, but he hired thousands of Chinese workers when construction of the Central Pacific line began in 1863. The building of this rail line was a huge project to connect a transcontinental railroad. The Central Pacific started at Sacramento, Calif., and headed east. The Union Pacific started in Omaha and headed west.

Chinese workers made up about 13,000 of the 15,000 workers on the Central Pacific. They did backbreaking labor year–round, under the hot sun and in the bitter winter. Without any power equipment, they excavated and tunneled through mountains, hauled rock by hand, graded the roadbed and laid track — all with high-speed, coordinated efforts. They dug 11 tunnels through the mountains and worked in fierce winter storms that left 18 feet of snow on the summits.

The Chinese workers were paid less than the others. They had to sleep outside in tents, while other workers usually slept in rail cars. In a competition with workers building the eastern line, the Chinese outpaced them, laying ten miles of track in one day.

The two rail lines were joined in the “golden spike” ceremony at Promontory Summit, Utah, on May 10, 1869. But little recognition was paid to the Asian workers, who had toiled for six years at the cost of hundreds of their lives. No Asians can be seen in the photographs showing the hundreds of people at the ending ceremony.

Dr. Gordon Chang of Stanford University says, “Leland Stanford became one of the world’s richest men by using Chinese labor.” And Chinese workers went on to build other railroads throughout the West. 

Chinese built the railroads

About two-thirds of the workers who built the Western Division of the Northern Pacific railroad, running from Lake Superior to Tacoma, Wash., were Chinese. And there were Chinese people working as miners and in other difficult occupations.

In 1882, after all these feats of labor, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed. It suspended all Chinese immigration to the U.S. for ten years. In addition, Chinese immigrants and their U.S.-born family members remained ineligible for citizenship — until 1942!

By the mid-1880s there was widespread anti-Chinese sentiment. In 1885 in Rock Springs, Wyo., a gang of white miners rampaged through town and murdered 28 Chinese miners. The Chinese were blamed for being strikebreakers, but that had happened many years earlier.

In the winter of 1885-86, 350 Chinese were expelled from Seattle and about the same number from Tacoma, Wash. were known as the anti-Chinese riots. The Knights of Labor were caught up in the racist crusade — against the interests of labor. Chinese communities were harassed, attacked or expelled in 34 towns in California.

The worst anti-Chinese pogrom of all was almost completely covered up. In May 1887, 34 Chinese miners were massacred in Hells Canyon, along the Snake River running between Oregon and Idaho. These gold miners were shot by a gang of racist thieves, who then mutilated their bodies and threw them in the Snake River.  The gang stole all the miners’ gold. While a few of the racist gang were captured, their prosecution wasn’t pursued. Most of them escaped to Canada.

It wasn’t until 2005 that this event was given recognition, and a memorial was placed on a five-acre site, renamed the Chinese Massacre Cove. The victims were honored on a plaque in three languages: Chinese, English and Nez Perce.

In 1969, on the centennial of completion of the first U.S. transcontinental railroad in Utah, the Chinese delegation was snubbed, ignored and upstaged by John Wayne.

But in 2019, on the 150th anniversary of the event at Promontory Summit, thousands of descendants of the Chinese workers came; they had been organizing for years to set the record straight. The Chinese workers were finally incorporated into the honor of the “golden spike” ceremony.

The event marked the culmination of a lifelong effort to recover the history of their families and communities. Uniting the country, the building of the transcontinental railway had been one of the greatest feats of human labor in the modern capitalist era. 

Amazon Hires Off-Duty Cops to Harass Workers, the Press, and Supporters ~~ Madeleine Freeman

https://www.leftvoice.org/amazon-hires-off-duty-cops-to-harass-workers-the-press-and-supporters

Bessemer, Alabama’s police chief has confirmed that off-duty officers have been hired by Amazon to act as “security” for the BHM1 facility in the middle of a historic and intense union drive. Two Left Voice reporters who were recently expelled from Amazon’s premises by the cops: report from the ground.

Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images

We came down from New York City to cover the historic struggle of Amazon workers to form a union and to amplify the stories of the nearly 6,000 workers who are putting their livelihoods on the line to fight for their right to collectively organize. If this union vote is successful, it will be the first union of Amazon workers in the United States. There is great potential in this union drive — an effort that is being waged by a primarily Black workforce in a virulently racist and anti-union state against one of the largest companies in the world.

We arrived at the Bessemer facility to stand in solidarity with the workers and take footage of the facility. We moved away from the small group of supporters who come out each day with signs encouraging workers to “vote yes!” on the union, just a few steps down Amazon’s long driveway to film a report in front of the entrance sign. Almost immediately, a police car pulled up next to us. The cop inside told us that we were trespassing and couldn’t film on private property. “You can’t film here!” We were nowhere near the facility, only a dozen feet from the main road. There is no signage demarcating where public land ends and Amazon’s property begins, no signs prohibiting filming or pictures.

As we began to collect our things, another cop car rushed up to where we were, lights flashing. “Stay where you are. My supervisor needs to collect your names and IDs,” the cop said. “You’re with the press? Which publication?” The two cops got out of their cars and stood close to us to make sure we didn’t move. A few minutes later, a man in a golf cart rolled up behind the police cars. He came up to us and demanded our IDs. “I need to take your names down.” When we asked why, he gave no reply. The cops demanded our IDs again and we refused. After some back and forth, they finally let us go and we walked the two steps back to where other supporters were standing by the side of the road. The cops stayed behind to keep watch.

In the days leading up to a historic unionization decision, the BHM1 Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama is on lockdown. Only workers on shift and management are allowed in and out, the workers’ every move watched carefully. The company has pulled out all the stops in its union-busting effort, including financial incentives for “unhappy” workers to quit, mandatory anti-union meetings, and placing a mailbox on company property to “collect ballots.” Amazon even petitioned the city to shorten stop light times at its entrance so that workers leaving their shifts could not talk to staffers standing at the entrance or be exposed to pro-union signage. 

Amazon has also enlisted the efforts of the Bessemer Police Department to act as “security” for the facility to intimidate not only workers, but also the many supporters, canvassers, and press who have come from far and wide to cheer on and agitate for the workers’ struggle. Off-duty cops guard the facility at all hours. Bessemer police trucks constantly ride up and down the streets around the facility and patrol the parking lot.

If you’re not coming into work or just leaving a shift, then the police — operating on the direct orders of Amazon management — are there to make sure you don’t step foot on Amazon property, especially if you’re supporting the union. In the circle of supporters who stand just outside the gates of the facility each day, most people have a story about an encounter with the police and Amazon’s security staff. One person told us that when their GPS took them inside the Amazon parking lot, they were surrounded by eight cops and security officers as soon as they got out of the car. The cops demanded their ID and told them to get off the premises or risk arrest. People in rental cars regularly stop by to take down the license plates of the people who come to flier on the side of the road and show solidarity with the workers inside the warehouse. The facility is surveilled from every angle. And the police are omnipresent, ready for any excuse to harass anyone who supports the union.

Moonlighting as union-busters for Amazon, the cops are key actors in Amazon’s behemoth campaign to kill the BHM1 union and all it represents. They are literally being paid to contain the union campaign and to create a hostile environment for the workers coming in and out of the facility each day, many of whom are people of color who are already the regular targets of police violence and harassment off the job. Now these workers are forced to come to work each day only to be met with cops watching them as they come and go, patrolling the parking lot and the surrounding streets. The police are there to intimidate workers just as much as supporters. This is yet another example of whose side the police are on: the bosses and the capitalists. And now they are doing the dirty work for a company that raked in $386 billion last year, even as it refused workers enough time to go to the bathroom, forced them to walk four flights of stairs innumerable times a day, exposed thousands of workers to Covid-19, and revoked their hazard pay in the middle of the pandemic. In this, the police are fulfilling their historic role as the guard dogs of capital, poised to keep workers in line and prevent them from exercising even the basic right to unionize or fight for better conditions for themselves and their families.

This is the same role the police played at the Hunts Point strike in New York City in January, when hundreds of workers at the most important produce market in the United States walked off the job to demand a $1 raise. The police arrested workers as they blocked a truck from entering the facility. The police stand at the ready — acting on the orders of Republican and Democratic mayors alike — to tip the scales in the bosses’ favor and undermine the struggle of rank-and-file workers to win even a fraction of what they deserve.

Yet at the same time that they repress working people, targeting people of color and killing Black union members like Philando Castille, they are also organized alongside workers in unions. If Bessemer workers are successful in their union drive, then they will join the ranks of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU), which is an affiliate of the AFL-CIO. This organization, which comprises most of the unionized workers in the United States, organizes thousands of cops across the country, welcoming the enemies of the working class into the house of labor. The cops are organized alongside the very workers they have been ordered to intimidate.

Of course, the cops’ role is not just to protect the interests of the bosses against the workers in the workplace, but to repress working class and oppressed people in every corner of society. The police who are now patrolling the Amazon facility night and day are part of the very institution that upholds systemic racism, killing Black and Brown people with impunity and who beat, pepper sprayed, and in some cases killed anti-racist protesters in nearly every city across the United States this summer. The police exist to repress class struggle wherever it appears, to beat the working class and oppressed into submission in order to ensure the smooth functioning of capitalist exploitation. Many of the workers at Amazon in Bessemer marched in the Black Lives Matter uprising this summer — the very police who repressed them in the streets are the same ones who are now acting under the direct orders of Amazon to undermine the union drive. 

Cops are not workers. They exist to repress working people and bust unions. They serve only to protect the interests of the capitalist class and facilitate the daily exploitation of workers around the world. As such, they have no place at BHM1 and no place in the organizations of working people. In the spirit of the Black Lives Matter movement, Alabama’s militant labor history, and the Civil Rights Movement which preceded this historic fight in Bessemer, the rank-and-file of this potential new union must fight to prevent the police from intimidating workers and supporters. But that’s not enough: If the Amazon union is to stand a chance against one of the most powerful companies in the world, then these workers must organize alongside other unions to expel the police from all workers’ organizations.

Backstabber Biden Denying At Least 30 Million Desperately Poor Pensioners Our Promised $1400 Stipends, Confirming Democrats' Continued Function as Republican Fifth Column

In Yet Another Epic Betrayal, Forcible-Disarmament-Fanatic Joe Has Sneakily Renewed His Opposition to Legalized Marijuana -- Probably to Radically Intensify Prosecutions of Otherwise Lawful Gun Owners 

THANKS TO A pair of sources --  The Stand, Washington State Labor Council's excellent on-line daily, plus a much-appreciated news tip from fellow journalist William Boardman -- we now have our clearest-yet sense of the hatred and contempt that unites the "Democratic" (sic) and Republican parties in the ecogenocidal solidarity of their Neoliberal (Neonazi) war against U.S. Working Families and the global Working Class in general:  

• The Stand tells us President Joseph Biden's ongoing "bipartisan" collaboration with the Trumpists who have sabotaged the Social Security Administration and the VA is the reason at least 40 million of us may not get our $1400 "stimulus" checks until 31 December -- if even then.  
• And Mr. Boardman's tip -- for which again my gratitude --  tells us the Biden Regime is already betraying the huge majorities of the imperial homeland's adult citizens who stupidly believed the Democrats' Big Lie a Biden/Harris victory would legalize marijuana.

These are among the most damning proofs yet the "Democratic" (sic) Party has reverted to its post-JFK function as  the Republican Party's Neoliberal (Neonazi) Fifth Column.

And, of course,  the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine, the world's first privately owned, for-profit version of Josef Goebbels' infamous Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, is protecting the Democrats by suppressing the story --  or at the very least, sugar-coating it with the nauseatingly fecal propaganda routinely excreted in service to the Moronic Majority's cult of mandatory optimism.

Again demonstrating our fatal lack of a genuine Left, nearly all the so-called "alternative" media is doing likewise.

Hence our two courageous sources have provided genuinely revealing information:

Firstly. as you probably know, many Republicans and at least a few of their "Democratic" (sic) Fifth Column co-conspirators sadistically wanted to  deny -- say again DENY-- stimulus checks to any of us whose sole sources of income are the murderously miserly welfare, Social Security or veterans' stipends that define us as unexploitable for profit, too impoverished to be liable for income taxes and therefore -- in the merciless Ayn Randified eyes of our Neoliberal Masters -- as "life unworthy of life."¹

Why withhold the money? Obviously, it's another aspect of our Masters' Final Solution to the problem of overpopulation by those of us who are hopelessly poor: the longer we are denied our $1400, the more acute our anxiety. More of us will therefore sicken and die -- which of course leaves more money for the Empire's  Neoliberal (Neonazi)  owners and their political marionettes. 

Moreover the Democrats and their Republican co-conspirators have sneakily given the SS and VA bureaucracies until 31 December 2021 to make the payments² -- obviously to further  maximize the Covid19 death toll.³

Secondly, apropos  the "Democratic" (sic) Party's resumption of opposition to legalized marijuana, as an analytically minded  member of the Second Amendment community's hard-Left faction, I saw this coming years ago. The fact marijuana is legal prescription medicine in a growing number of states is federally meaningless -- and as Biden now demonstrates, so it shall remain.

Why? Because any firearms owner who merely draws a breath of air containing marijuana smoke will urine-test positive for drug use and is therefore subject not only to confiscatory forcible disarmament, but to ten years' slave labor on the for-profit prisoner plantations that despite Biden's deceptions continue to expand, amassing profits comparable to those extracted by antebellum slave owners.

Hence anyone who believed Biden/Harris would legalize pot or end for-profit prison slavery was either hopelessly naive or more typically a member of the Moronic Majority, a useful idiot brainwarped by the Ruling Class and thus totally oblivious to the fact our Masters intend to completely disarm us -- to reduce us literally to mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood -- the latest expression of their fear our hopelessly dumbed-down brains might someday figure out how to foment a (real) revolution.

Doubt me? Note that some forcible-disarmament fanatics are already calling for mandatory monthly drug tests and annual psych evaluations for all firearms owners -- millions more dollars for the for-profit medical predators, with firearms ownership by us poor folk permanently prohibited by these proposed additional costs.

Thirdly, behind his cloak of Big Lies, disinformation and euphemisms,  Biden is obviously just another example of "change we can believe in,"  different from the Trumpite version mainly in the extent to which Biden hides Neoliberalism's Neonazi agenda -- Trump's premature disclosures of which separated our Masters into at least two mutually hostile factions and ensured Trump's loss in last November's election.⁵

How then did the "Democratic" (sic) Party become the Republican Fifth Column it is today? My journalistic guess is the Democrats were terminally compromised by their collaboration with the Republicans in the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and the still furiously controversial deceptions necessary to hide the Ruling Class coup of 22 November 1963 -- its reality since proven by the now-irremediable (boiled-frog) imposition of Neoliberal Neonazism.⁴

Perhaps the most pivotal lesson I've been taught by Moron Nation is that investigative journalism is utterly pointless -- that too many of whatever small percentage of the population has retained the ability to read with comprehension has also been reduced to such submissive moral imbecility they are genetically incapable of feeling the empathy or concerns essential to humanitarian action.

In other words, in the psychological sense -- regardless of race or gender -- they are already naught but slaves.

All of which thrusts me ever closer to concluding there truly is no hope for us -- not for ourselves, our nation, our species, our Mother Earth.
___________________________

¹"Life Unworthy of Life" is the English translation of the phrase by which the German Nazis condemned elderly or disabled people to death for being unprofitable -- an ultimate example of the criminalization of poverty that has become so popular amongst U.S. politicians.

²HR1319, the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, is among the most infuriatingly censored legislative packages ever enacted by Congress, which is why most of us remain unaware its Ayn-Rand-minded authors gave the federal bureaucracy nearly a year -- specifically until 31 December 2021 -- to send us our $1400 relief payments. Scroll to Page 137, "Timing and Manner of Payments...No refund or credit shall be made or allowed under this subsection after December 31, 2021." This is the most outrageously tolerant approval of bureaucratic obstructionism I have ever encountered.  

³Apropos the viciously extended disbursement deadline, I turn 81 on 30 March; even fully vaccinated -- I go off quarantine at midnight --  my comorbidities may not let me live long enough to see the now indefinitely delayed $1400 -- and the same applies to anyone like me. Obviously, this is no accident; its potentially deadly anxieties are precisely what our Masters intend -- another atrocity in their ever-more-lethal criminalization of poverty.

⁴Though it is seldom recognized as such, neoliberalism is the most toxic variant of Nazism to emerge thus far. Note the identical, might-makes-right ethos of absolute moral imbecility promulgated both by Hitler in Mein Kampf and by Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged. Indeed, Neoliberalism's submit-to-capitalism-or-die mandate expresses the same submit-to-the-übermenschen-or-die ruthlessness of Nazism's German founders; the differences between the two are thus more illusory than real. Rather than requiring an individual tyrant, Neoliberalism crowns the corporate aristocracy  as our species' divinely ordained, absolute-power ruler; building on Josef Goebbels' methodological foundation, it achieves its intended tyrannies by the most compelling psychological warfare ever unleashed against our species and  -- cunningly exploiting the induced ignorance of Moron Nation -- by other methods far more readily concealable than the German Nazi agenda of military conquests, death camps and Zyklon B. It does so by glorifying Ayn Rand's sociopathy and by weaponizing disaster, pollution and disease to eradicate the few remnants of democratic process and reduce the Working Class to inescapable forms of modern slavery. Given the many variants of fascism that have reduced what was originally a proper noun to a lower-case generic, I propose doing likewise with Nazism. This gives us neonazism (or nazism) as more emotionally accurate description of what we now label "fascism," its lower-case forms the correct spelling for all "nazi" references save to the Third Reich's N.S.D.A.P., the original Nazi Party, which should of course still be capitalized accordingly.

⁵Is Trump down for the proverbial count? I fear not. I have no doubt whatever non-nazified historians might abide in the future -- that is, if we somehow manage to seize ourselves a future -- will define the nazis' 6 January 2021 uprising as eerily equivalent to Hitler's 1923 Munich Beer Hall Putsch. Obviously I cannot predict what measures the U.S. nazis will next attempt. But I am absolutely certain we the people of these helplessly (dis)United States no longer collectively possess the empathy, integrity, knowledge, skill, determination, solidarity-- and most of all the titanium-ovaried, brass-testicled courage -- necessary to defeat (any) nazi onslaught. We saw these requisites demonstrated by the Soviet people, as many as 43 million of whom died saving us all from Hitler and his allies, but alas I cannot imagine such capability in the present-day United States. Goddess grant this time my usually accurate pessimism is flat out wrong.  

LB/27 March 2021

-30- 

 

One Night in Miami (A Film Review by Collectivist)

One Night in Miami (A Film Review by Collectivist)

Other than "Judas and and the Black Messiah" and "The U.S. vs Billie Holiday", "One Night  in Miami" is the best  movie I've seen so far in 2021. Initially, I was somewhat reluctant  to see it, presuming that it would be another Hollywoodish whitewash of African American history, shallow at best. 

Actually director Regina King has put together a decent cinematic character study based on a play with the same title, by Kemp Powers,  that seriously grapples with one of the most important  social and political phenomena of the 20th century: social justice. That struggle, in one way or the other, still rages  in the 21st century.

Instead of a standard plot, the film revolves around a situation. . . In a segregated motel, one night in Miami, Florida, four prominent and popular African Americans meet to celebrate  after one of them - a 22 year-old Cassius Clay (Eli Goree), soon-to-be Muhammad  Ali - has just won the heavy weight boxing title. Who knew, at the time, that singular event would not only shake up the entire sports world, but also the world of politics? 

We see Jim Brown (Aldous Hodge) the punishing star running back for the Cleveland Browns, now, considering a movie career; there's Sam Cooke ( Leslie Odom, Jr.), perhaps the greatest 'soul' singer of all time, just months before he's killed in another motel. . .And then there's the indomitable Malcolm X (Kingsly Ben Adir). The latter is in political transition, still torn, however, between the religious nationalism of Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam and his own growing revolutionary, anti-imperialist nationalism. Although their subsequent irreconcilable rupture is often attributed to revelations of Muhammad's sexual indiscretions, anyone watching closely could discern the public political divergence coming faster than Clay's wicked left jab.

While Malcolm necessarily 'steals' the show, the film fails to show and place these unforgettable  characters in the necessary global light, other than a few references to Ali's emerging  opposition to the Vietnam War, which, when he refuses the draft a few years later, costs him the heavyweight crown.

The struggle for Civil/Human Rights was arguably at its apex in 1963. Major 'events' of that year include:

- the murder of NAACP leader Medgar Evers

- the assassination of President John F. Kennedy

- MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington 

The struggle against white nationalism had become so antagonistic that some militant  black freedom fighters were beginning to take up arms in self defense.  On the international scene, plots were hatching almost weekly - from the U.S. - to destroy, by any means necessary, socialist reconstruction in Cuba, only 90 miles away from Miami. Americans and other soldiers were dying by the hundreds, daily, in an imperialist war in war in Southeast Asia. Consequently, an anti-war movement gradually developed. It was also the year Mao Zedong predicted that the black liberation movement would merge with the class struggle in the US.  By the end of the 60s and the creation of the Black Panther Party,  it clearly had.

Finally, "One Night in Miami"  reminds us that African Americans, not unlike other social groups are hardly monolithic; which, dialectically, is the source of both our political  strengths and weaknesses.

 As an extra added treat, the film closes with a stirring version of "A Change is Gonna Come", by  Odom, that would certainly make the late, great Sam Cooke very proud.

Sam Cooke - A Change Is Gonna Come (Official Lyric Video)

https://youtu.be/wEBlaMOmKV4

One Night in Miami Official Trailer

https://youtu.be/K8vf_Cmh9nY

An Honest History of Texas Begins and Ends With White Supremacy ~~ Casey Michel

https://newrepublic.com/article/161685/texas-1836-project-white-supremacy?utm_source=social&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campa

~~ posted for collectivist ~~

One Texas Republican state House member wants to create a “patriotic” education project to celebrate the Lone Star State—and whitewash its ugly past.

SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES

The past few months have been rough for Texas—and for the Texas Republican Party in particular. Republicans in the state led the charge to overturn the 2020 election results, centering their anti-democratic arguments on fantasies of stolen ballots and smothered voices. Then a once-in-a-generation winter storm revealed the extent to which years-long GOP control had rotted the state’s infrastructure, providing a searing illustration of collapse that gripped the news cycle and the nation. (And leading to Senator Ted Cruz tucking tail for Cancun.) Just last week, Governor Greg Abbott—in a fit of “neanderthal thinking,” as President Joe Biden said—launched a premature lifting of the state’s mask mandate, setting the stage for new Covid-19 variants to wash across the population, the potential for new casualties in a pandemic the rest of the country is finally obtaining the upper hand over, and new reasons for voters who may be tilting in their partisan preferences to consider ousting the governor when he’s up for reelection in two years.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the state’s GOP—mimicking its national counterpart—has responded to these cascading failures not with sound policy proposals but with a bushel of distractions related to America’s never-ending culture wars. The state’s oleaginous lieutenant governor has led the way, proposing legislation that would force publicly funded entities and events to perform the national anthem. The Texas Republican Party’s official headquarters, hurtling headlong into cognitive dissonance, endorsed the first serious secession bill the country has seen since the Civil War. That measure has since picked up multiple Republican sponsors in the House.

All of which brings us to the latest front that Texas Republicans have launched in their war on reality. This month, one Texas Republican House member filed legislation to force the creation of a new project for supposedly “patriotic education.” Calling for the formation of an “1836 Project,” named after the year Texas declared independence from Mexico, the bill models itself after former President Donald Trump’s ill-starred “1776 Project.” Trump’s effort—which barely lasted a week before the new administration obliterated it wholesale—was itself a response to The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which recentered slavery and human bondage in the story of colonial America.

According to Representative Tan Parker, the legislator who filed the bill, the proposal is “exclusively about celebrating Texas.” As Parker contended, “Many of our children are taught to denounce Texas history and do not understand what it means to be a virtuous citizen.” It’s unclear what Parker has in mind when he describes “virtuous” citizens, but it’s clear that the ultimate aim of the project is simply to whitewash Texas’s past of any critiques about the central role human enslavement played in the Texas Revolution. “It’s about reasserting whiteness and focusing on when white people ‘founded’ this state,” University of North Texas professor Amanda Vickery told The Dallas Morning News.

Vickery has this correct. Parker’s paeans to “patriotic education” are little more than a smokescreen for reinforcing the kinds of myths and legends about the Texas Revolution that have played down slavery’s central, essential role in breaking the state off from Mexico. But if Parker wants to paper over the role of race and revolution in Texas—and to try to parley these myths to a new generation of Texas students—the least we can do is highlight just how the Republic of Texas became arguably the most anti-Black, and most avowedly white supremacist, country to have ever existed.

A few years before Texians, the term given to those who resided in the state at the time, launched their independence movement against the Mexican government in 1836, officials in Mexico City launched a historic salvo of their own. Decades before his counterparts in Washington, Mexican President Vicente Guerrero issued a proclamation: Mexico, Guerrero announced in 1829, would abolish slavery.

While abolitionists celebrated the decree (and rightly perceived it as a precedent that would eventually sweep through the rest of North America), the Anglos flooding into northeast Mexico stood shocked. Enticed by the region’s fertile cotton lands, white settlers from the U.S. had blanketed the region, looking to replicate the slave-centered economic boom in other parts of the American South. Led by those like the Austin family, Anglos pegged economic success in the Mexican region of Texas to a single commodity: enslaved humans. “Keeping slavery legal was a key component of the success of Moses Austin’s settlement; Anglo settlement of Mexican Texas would not have happened without it,” Emily McCullar wrote for The Texas Monthly. Following Guerrero’s decree, Anglos were “aghast.” As The Houston Chronicle summed it up, Stephen F. Austin, Moses’s son, was clear: “Texas could not survive without slavery.”

A few years later, the piling tinder gave way to revolution. While there was plenty of room for complaint about Mexican leader Santa Anna—the self-styled “Napoleon of the West” was hardly a democrat—demands for revolution caught fire among those with the most to lose: slaveholders. “The fact that calls for revolt bubbled up among Texans in the primary slave-holding region is no coincidence,” the Chronicle wrote. Thanks in no small part to Santa Anna’s incompetence, the Texians and Tejanos linking arms managed, over the course of a few short months, to steal independence from an anti-slavery republic.Around the same time, legislators in Texas began hammering out a new constitution for the breakaway region—a constitution that, in language clear as any, illustrates how the Republic of Texas became the first true slave empire in the Americas, surpassing even the U.S. Indeed, while modern Texas Republicans like to view the Texas Revolution as a spiritual successor to the American Revolution, it’s far more accurate to describe it as a precursor to the Confederacy. To wit, the Texas Constitution explicitly prohibited its new government from ever emancipating slaves. Moreover, the constitution expressly barred any Texan from freeing other humans they enslaved, unless they pledged to evict them from the new nation entirely. “No free person of African descent, either in whole or in part, shall be permitted to reside permanently in the Republic, without the consent of Congress,” the constitution read, effectively ensuring that Texian slaveholders would never have to worry about free Black residents.  Led by the younger Austin, Anglos managed to lobby Mexican officials for a carve-out to allow them to continue enslaving thousands of Black residents, forcing them to work the cotton fields against their will. (“The scheme simply redefined slavery as debt peonage,” the Chronicle continued.) But a seed had been planted, and Anglo slavers began worrying about their ability to extract wealth from those they enslaved. Those like Austin were clear; as the Texan founding father stated in 1833, “Texas must be a slave country.

This language had an immediate impact on both the state’s economy and on the swelling ranks of those enslaved on these shores. In less than a decade of independence, the numbers of Black residents enslaved exploded, growing some 500 percent. And the driving force for the race into American embrace—the U.S. annexed Texas in 1845—likewise centered on slavery. Texians knew full well that a regrouped Mexico could steamroll the slave republic and enforce its abolitionist writ on the region once more. The only thing saving Texians’ ability to enslave other humans was joining the U.S. But even that effort eventually faltered. Just 15 years after annexation, Texas once more declared its intent to secede—this time, as part of yet another would-be slave empire. As Texas’s 1861 declaration of secession made clear, the state existed as “a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery—the servitude of the African to the white race.”

To be fair to Texas Republicans, it’s not yet clear how much the central role of human bondage will play in any “patriotic education” they have in mind. But the reactionary impulses that the “1619 Project” have broadly engendered among conservatives provide a window into why something like this proposed “1836 Project” would suddenly become a cause célèbre among the Lone Star State’s GOP—and who would find it so appealing. For instance, some of the state’s frothing, far-right militias (including those present at the January 6 insurrection) have made similar rhetoric a staple of their fascistic behavior. One in particular—the unfortunately named “This Is Texas Freedom Force,” or TITFF—has not only cozied up to Texas Republicans but has made shoring up whitewashed myths about the Texas Revolution central to its efforts.

But it’s also not surprising that this effort to spin a revisionist version of the Texas Revolution for another generation comes amid titanic shifts in the state’s political realities. Texas appears to be, at some point in the not-so-distant future, a good candidate to be the next state to tilt Democratic, following in the wake of states like Georgia and Arizona. In 2020 alone, Texas boasted the third-highest number of Biden voters, following only California and Florida. And with that looming shift comes a looming reckoning with the state’s sanitized history—and with the key role the perpetuation of slavery played in Texas’s birth.

The contours of this shift are already in motion, and what the reclamation of slavery’s central role in propelling Texas’s 1836 revolution will look like is slowly coming into view. While not everyone is comfortable yet placing slavery as the main cause of the Texas Revolution, voices like the flagship magazine Texas Monthly have dropped any qualms they may have had in portraying it as such. As the magazine tweeted last year, “Slavery was the driving force in Texas’s decision to break free of Mexican control.”

Current and future voices that might attest to the role chattel slavery played in the establishment of Texas will find themselves substantially buoyed by the voices of the past and their own recollections. Former President Ulysses S. Grant—the man who strangled one insurrection as a general and many more as president—was, in many ways, perhaps the most astute observer of the geopolitical tides of the era. To Grant, the iniquitous Mexican-American War was “one of the most unjust [wars] ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation” (it was), while the Confederacy’s attempted secession was “plainly suicidal for the South” (also true). Grant, as a recent annotated version of his memoirs makes clear, was likewise “never confused about the fact that … ‘slavery’ was the ‘cause’ of the Civil War.”

Grant, of course, was a Republican president unafraid of looking at developments—and insurrectionists, for that matter—as they truly were, rather than as he wished them to be. It’s a lesson that the current crop of Texas Republicans would do well to heed. If not, they may face the same fate as the white supremacist seditionists who once dominated the state before them—and their version of Texas history might, like the Republic of Texas itself, soon be relegated to the dustbin of history.Neither was he confused about the role Texas played in the lead-up to the Civil War. The Civil War, Grant wrote in his memoirs, became “inevitable” not due to Abraham Lincoln’s election but directly due to the American annexation of Texas. And the “occupation, separation and annexation” of Texas were not due to concerns about dictatorship in Mexico City, or arid concerns about things like “liberty.” Instead, as Grant wrote, it was “from the inception of the movement to its final consummation, a conspiracy to acquire territory out of which slave states might be formed for the American Union.” The revolution, in other words, lay at the feet of one thing alone: a would-be permanent dominion of slavers and their enslaved.