Keir Starmer, Labourleider, is een neoliberale marionet van premier Boris Johnson

Onbegrijpelijk dat de reguliere media, die zo hysterisch meededen aan de demonisering van Jeremy Corbyn, die hem de Britse verkiezingen kostte, nu geen letter gebruiken om te berichten over diens plaatsvervanger Starmer.

Bijzonder 'vreemd' daar het een ieder in Groot-Brittannië duidelijk zal zijn dat Starmer in alles achter Johnson staat, NB een vijand van Labour...... Ondanks dat Starmer iedereen de partij uitzet die zelfs maar 'ruikt' naar socialisme, stelt deze oplichter een socialistisch beleid te voeren..... ha! ha! ha! ha! Terwijl hij het tegenovergestelde doet, het inhumane ijskoude neoliberale beleid van zijn 'tegenstrever' Johnson steunen, houden de media deze marionet van Johnson de handen boven het hoofd.....

Dezelfde media die Corbyn beschuldigden van antisemitisme, maken amper een woord vuil over het uit Labour zetten van Joden die een socialistisch beleid voorstaan door Starmer die godbetert zelf ook Corbyn durfde te beschuldigen van antisemitisme (en dat terwijl Starmer zoals gezegd durft te stellen een socialistisch beleid voor te staan.....)  

Alan Rusbridger, voormalig hoofdredacteur van The Guardian, zit in een Facebook team dat moet toezien op wat er gezegd wordt op dit platform, ofwel hij maakt deel uit van een team dat censuur uitoefent op wat men ziet als 'fake news' (nepnieuws) en manipulatie...... Terwijl The Guardian de illegale oorlogen van de VS heeft gesteund en mede verantwoordelijk was voor het demoniseren van Corbyn (NB onder Rusbridger als hoofdredacteur!!) De reden om Corbyn van antisemitisme te beschuldigen was te danken aan zijn kritiek op het bloedige beleid van Israël, tegen het verdrukte Palestijnse volk....... Alsof dat ook maar iets met antisemisme te maken heeft...... Diverse zionistische groeperingen doen hun best om elke kritiek in westerse landen op de staat Israël, als antisemitisme geboekt te krijgen, een schande van formaat!!

Rachael Swindon schreef een artikel over Boris Johnson en Keir Starmer, waarin ze geen spaan heel laat van de laatste. Starmer bakt er niets van en i.p.v. dat Labour voor zou liggen op de Tories, zoals Starmer voorspelde, ligt deze ofwel achter of zou nek aan nek lopen met de Tories, ondanks de schandalige blunders die Johnson beging, waarop Starmer amper of geen kritiek heeft, sterker nog keer op keer laat hij zien achter het meer dan belachelijke en schunnige neoliberale beleid van Johnson en zijn Tories te staan.....

Starmer zegt de verschillende facties binnen de Labour partij te willen verenigen, hoe vreemd dan (nogmaals) dat hij alles wat naar links ruikt uit de partij zet.......

Volgens vooraanstaande moslims en moslim organisaties in GB is Starmer een islamofoob en dat met bewijzen, combineer dit met het echte antisemitisme van deze ploert, gecombineerd met zijn afgeven op laag betaalde buitenlandse werknemers en je ziet dat Starmer zelfs als fascist kan worden gezien.... Waar nog aan moet worden toegevoegd dat duizenden gekleurde Labour leden de partij (onder leiderschap van Starmer) hebben verlaten vanwege het niet optreden tegen onvervalst racisme..... En dan nogmaals: de te linkse Joodse politici worden door deze schoft de partij uitgewerkt, wat niet tot ophef leidt in de reguliere (Britse en andere westerse) media die eerder Jeremy Corbyn van antisemitisme beschuldigden...... (ook de Nederlandse reguliere media, inclusief de zogenaamd onafhankelijke NOS, deden mee aan deze walgelijke propaganda)

Lees het artikel en je zal zien dat je Swindon niet anders dan gelijk kan geven in haar afgeven op Starmer, waarbij ze tot de conclusie komt dat Starmer een vijand is van links, terwijl hij bij zijn aantreden het gore lef had te zeggen dat hij een socialistisch beleid zou voeren..... (wat alleen zou kloppen als socialisme hetzelfde is als neoliberalisme en dat beste bezoeker zal pas gebeuren als kerstmis, pinksteren en pasen op dezelfde dag vallen.......)

You Have Two Paths: Pathological Or Pathetic.

Posted: 10 Jan 2021 12:57 AM PST

It’s like having to pick between variants of Covid-19. 

Down one path you will find pathological Boris Johnson, and down the other path you will find pathetic Keir Starmer.

Are these two establishment stalwarts the very best of what Britain has to offer?

Do you honestly trust either of them to make your life any better than what it is now?

If you answered yes, what’s the point in reading on from here? People can’t stand home truths at the best of times.

Despite one opinion poll putting Starmer SIX points behind the worst government in living memory, a couple of the polls are putting Labour neck and neck with the Tories. If you think this is down to the wooden-like pitiable Starmer, I’ve got news for you.

This is down to Boris Johnson alone. 

People are sick of him. I’m sick of him. You’re sick of him. His Fiancé is sick of him. He’s probably sick of himself. So he should be.

If Mr Starmer had some progressive, common sense socialist policies, like the ones he promised to offer, he might be closer to the 20 points ahead that you were promised by the Keirleaders.

“Any other leader than Jeremy Corbyn”, they said. This was quite obviously untrue.

If Captain Yellow Belly can’t get a mile ahead of this rotten abomination of an administration now, there’s not much chance he ever will.

Team Starmer are relying on Johnson’s own unpopularity to see their man home. The naivety, considering what these focus groups and SpAds* get paid, is utterly astonishing.

There’s probably as much chance of me being the next leader of the Conservative Party as there is of Boris Johnson being Starmer’s opponent at the next General Election, which is likely to be three years and five months away.

A day is a long time in politics, 1,250ish days in politics is a lifetime. 

Johnson is doomed. I could write several blogs detailing his every disaster during the last year or so, but I’ll keep it as brief as I can. 

Johnson and his government failed to act quickly enough during the initial outbreak. Had his government acted sooner, much like the rest of the world, tens of thousands of lives could’ve been saved. 

While the world implemented a safety blanket around its people’s, Britain, and the United States threw the elderly and vulnerable under a bus and let the deadly disease do the rest. 

While global leaders prepared to fight the deadly virus, Boris Johnson quite literally went on holiday. Well, books won’t write themselves.

Do you remember when he said we would turn the tide on the virus within 12 weeks? Then it was by Christmas.

Do you remember when he promised the world-beating test and trace app that was meant to be in place by June 1st for schools to operate safely? Where is Dido Harding anyway?

Do you remember when he told you to sing happy birthday, twice, while other nations had already locked down and had a cohesive plan in place? 

Do you remember when Johnson boasted about shaking hands with Coronavirus patients in hospital, shortly before needing assistance with his own breathing? 

 

You do have to wonder if a man so willing to abandon his own children with such ease is the best person to do what is right by 'our children'.

Shouldn’t a leader at least have some sort of a moral compass, or are we now so far down the rabbit hole that his racism, his homophobia, his philandering, his thuggery and his complete inability to lead a country somehow doesn’t matter, because it’s just ‘Boris’?

Dear old Bojo. Bozo the clown. BJ.

He isn’t your friend. He’s not a big misunderstood cuddly bear. He isn’t your mate from down the pub. He is a pathological danger. Call him Johnson, not “Boris”. Giving him these affectionate or comical nicknames plays into the narrative.

I didn’t even mention Dominic Cummings’ Tour De Durham, the oven-ready Brexit deal, the A-level and GCSE** catastrophe, the promise of a five-day Christmas jolly with your family, and I didn’t even mention the Russia Report.

If only Jeremy Corbyn had this Johnson administration to battle, instead of one that was simply elected to deliver Brexit. He was eight points ahead of Theresa May’s shambolic government, before the smears and sabotage of 2018-19 got underway. 

I wonder how far ahead he could’ve been now? Labour’s poll boost has been delivered at the expense of real dissatisfaction with Johnson’s handling of the pandemic. 

It’s quite cute people think it’s down to pathetic Keith.

You would be amazed at the calibre of people that have told me that Jeremy should’ve held on a bit longer.

A politician with a radical agenda, one which will truly rebuild Britain post-Covid, post-Brexit and post-recession, would do rather well at the next election, don’t you think?

When you get a chance, send me a list of the confirmed Starmer policies please. If not a list, just send me a few.

He’s had nine months to offer a clear alternative, or as Starmer himself put it, to make the “moral case for socialism”. How’s that going?! He’s spent more time making the moral case for Boris Johnson. 

When the difficult questions were being asked of Johnson’s government, Starmer refused to ask any himself. 

When the government made screw up after screw up, Starmer would pop up on every news channel, parroting the phrase “we support the government”.

From Johnson’s Brexit capitulation to sending children back to school to spread the deadly disease, twice, Starmer has stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the Prime Minister. 

Starmer was elected upon a false prospectus. A man that pretends to stand up for everyone, and stands up for absolutely nobody - apart from a few lobbyists - and he seems fine with failing to call out white supremacy, or failing to vote against torture, or ordering the suspensions of brilliant lefties, for the heinous crime of being a socialist.

Starmer is an ally of Johnson and an enemy of the left. What they say to each other in these private phone calls, and Starmer’s letters of support, is quite literally anyone’s guess.

Starmer and Evans have suspended at least 50 CLP chairs and vice-chairs, for exercising their democratic right.

Left-wing Jews have been suspended from the party without an adequate reason.

The Labour Muslim Network issued a damning report into Islamophobia in the Labour Party, under his leadership.

Thousands of BAME party*** members left in their droves because of the leadership's inability to deal with racism.

The long-awaited independent Forde report is apparently a little bit too independent for his liking. Still waiting.

And all of the time Starmer has been orchestrating war against the left of the Labour Party, the Prime Minister has had a free licence to get away with murder.

The purge of the Labour left has been prioritised before the health and wellbeing of the British people, and no matter how many flags you sit in front of, no matter how many times you tell us how much you love your country, you watch the Queens Christmas Day broadcast, and you always sing the national anthem, it still doesn’t make you patriotic.

If you put division within your own ranks before the national interest, you’re not patriotic. You are weak, you have failed, you are pathetic.

And that’s that.

Take care everyone please.

Rachael x

Thank you for taking the time to read my thoughts, if you want to chip in towards improving my ongoing campaign, and it would cause you *no hardship*, you can do so here

 *   SpAds: Special Advisers.

**  GSCE: General Certificate of Secondary Education (ofwel een academische kwalificatie, die overigens alleen in Schotland niet wordt gebruikt)

*** BAME Labour (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic Labour), een groep van gekleurde Labour leden. 

===========================================

Zie ook: 'Aantal daklozen in Groot-Brittannië onder Tory bewind meer dan verdubbeld' 

'De heksenjacht in de Labour Party nadat Jeremy Corbyn wegens 'antisemitisme' werd geroyeerd: zelfs Joodse Labourpolitici worden uit de partij gezet' (en zie de links in dat bericht, anders dan de hieronder getoonde)

'Labourpolitici in oorlog met elkaar: de antisemitisme leugen tegen Jeremy Corbyn die hem de verkiezingen kostte'

'Jeremy Corbyn uit Labour gezet op basis van antisemitisme leugen'

'Jackie Walker, een joods journalist, spreekt over de met beschuldigingen van antisemitisme gevoede heksenjacht op Labour en haarzelf' 

'Opperrabbijn Mirvis besmeurt Labour vlak voor verkiezingen, over het ongeoorloofd beïnvloeden van verkiezingen gesproken'

'Boris Johnson vs. Jeremy Corbyn en de massamedia'

'Niet Rusland maar Trump beïnvloedt nu al de verkiezingen in Groot-Brittannië'

'Jeremy Corbyn, de Britse Labourleider zal en moet vallen: hij neemt het op voor het arme deel van de bevolking'

'Gedreven politicus zet BBC presentator te kakken die Labour de schuld wilde geven van de armoede in GB'

'Honger in GB anno 2019: uitsterfbeleid voor werklozen en andere arme Britten >> velen krijgen geen voedselhulp'

'Britse kinderen lijden anno 2018 honger, vooral in de vakanties.......'

'Jeremy Corbyn (Labour en oppositie leider GB) veegt de vloer aan met vertrekkende 'centrum' Labour fractieleden'

'Corbyn als schietschijf voor het Britse leger, reactie Tories: Corbyn is een groot gevaar voor Brittannië......'

'Labour politicus Joan Ryan, die gisteren uit de partij stapte, werd op video betrapt met leugens om critici van Israël te belasteren' 

'BBC presentator maakt per ongeluk promotie voor het socialisme' 

'Simon Wiesenthal Center: antisemitische top tien 2018 >> o.a. moorden toegestaan voor Joden' 

'BBC Media Action: een smerige propaganda organisatie, mede door Nederland betaald' (!!!!)

Coronabeslommeringen: Duitse wetenschappers vermoeden dat je ook na een tweede vaccinatie alsnog anderen kan besmetten

Hoor zojuist op WDR dat Duitse wetenschappers en die uit een paar andere landen, onderzoeken of je na een tweede inenting met het Coronavaccin alsnog weer besmet kan raken met COVID-19 en zo anderen kan besmetten.......... 

Deze wetenschappers vermoeden inderdaad dat je ook na een tweede vaccinatie alsnog weer besmet kan raken met het Coronavirus.......

Zo, dan ben je blij dat je een tweede injectie kreeg met een vaccin dat de makers zo wantrouwen dat ze niet aansprakelijk willen worden gesteld voor zware bijwerkingen en dan kan je alsnog weer besmet raken en anderen aansteken........ Jezus wat een zootje........

Zeker is dat je ook na de eerste injectie nog weken besmettelijk kan blijven en het Coronavirus kan doorgeven......

Zie ook: 'Verlenging lockdown omdat de huidige lockdown niet werkt.....' (en zie de links in dat bericht)

Een anti-fascistisch manifest over de vermoorde Chileense politiek activist en protestzanger Victor Jara

Desiree Hellegers heeft een uitgebreid artikel geschreven over de door de VS georganiseerde en geregisseerde coup tegen het socialistische bewind van Salvador Allende op 11 september 1973 (de eerste 9/11).

Hellegers begint haar artikel met de vraag op Facebook van haar vriendengroep waar zij zich bevonden gedurende belangrijke gebeurtenissen als de 9/11 aanvallen op de Twin Towers en de moord op John F. Kennedy in 1963. Ze vraagt zich af of ze later op de huidige tijd zal terugkijken als een korte pauze in het afzakken van de VS naar een 'full blown' fascistische staat (het aantreden van Biden als VS president ziet ze dan als pauze*). Als dat gebeurt zal ook de klimaatverandering verder worden aangejaagd door de VS, wat overigens ook gebeurde onder Obama, die zelfs toestemming gaf voor de bouw van een enorme kolencentrale aan de rand van een uiterst belangrijk natuurgebied de Sundarbans dit over de grens met India in dit natuurgebied, op de kant behorend tot Bangladesh......... 

Onder Obama werd de VS de op één na grootste steenkoolexporteur, de absolute nummer 1 is het als de VS zo door de klimaatverandering geteisterde Australië dat nu nog 1 miljoen ton steenkool per dag exporteert en daar binnenkort nog een fikse schep bovenop doet, als de nieuwste en grootste steenkoolterminal ter wereld wordt geopend, waarvoor een zeekanaal dwars door het Groot Barrièrerif werd gegraven...... Het is maar de vraag of Biden inderdaad een andere koers zal inslaan, immers ook hij is een marionet van de oliemaatschappijen, het militair-industrieel complex en de financiële maffia.......*

Ook besteedt Hellegers aandacht aan de illegale oorlog van de VS tegen het Noord-Vietnamese volk en bijvoorbeeld de rol van Henry Kissinger, een uitermate smerige oorlogsmisdadiger die al lang in Scheveningen gevangen had moeten zitten (na te zijn berecht door het Internationaal Strafhof >> ICC)... Echter deze schoft, die schunnig genoeg ook de Nobelprijs voor de Vrede kreeg, zal gewoon in een bed buiten de gevangenis sterven, zoals zoveel witte oorlogsmisdadigers......   

Hellegers wijst o.a. op de triomf van het huidige Chileense volk dat in een referendum eiste dat de grondwet die door Pinochet in 1980 werd opgesteld wordt vervangen door een nieuwe grondwet en waarmee men nu bezig is deze op te stellen.

'Terug naar Chili van 1973' en de bloedige coup van fascist, massamoordenaar, verkrachter en martelbeul Pinochet, die zoals gezegd werd gesteund door de VS (ofwel de CIA, zonder deze hulp was de coup mislukt!!). Hellegers spreekt veel over de politiek activist, protestzanger en schrijver Victor Jara, die eveneens werd vermoord na de bloedige staatsgreep in 1973, samen met minstens 3.000 anderen, o.a. bestaande uit intellectuelen, studenten, professoren, advocaten en politiek activisten.

Lees het uitgebreide artikel van Hellegers en zegt het voort, de reguliere media hebben amper aandacht voor de enorme invloed van de VS die zoals gezegd ook de grondslag was voor de coup in het Chili van 1973..... (overigens heeft de VS voor en na die coup nog meer staatsgrepen met wapens, organisatie en regie gesteund in Latijns Amerika, zoals die in Guatemala, Honduras, Brazilië en die tegen de socialistische president Morales van Bolivia....) In het artikel verder een vergelijking van Victor Jara met Martiun Luther King en een korte beschuwing over het ijskoude inhumane neoliberalisme, geïntroduceerd door de duivels Margareth Thatcher, de Britse ex-premier en C-acteur en VS president Ronald Reagan, een politieke ideologie die de meeste westerse landen schunnig genoeg nog steeds volgen..... ('onze' huidige valse premier Rutte stelt wel dat hij het neoliberalisme niet meer als leidraad neemt, echter dat is de zoveelste leugen van deze aartsleugenaar!!)

CounterPunch

January 1, 2021

Victor Jara’s Hands: An Anti-Fascist Memoir-festo and Brief Personal History of Neoliberalism

by Desiree Hellegers

You can easily carbon date your friends on Facebook based on where they were during any major milestone in U.S. history. As a university professor teaching now for decades at what we euphemistically call a “land grant” university, many of my students these days were born after 9-11–into the U.S.’s seemingly endless “War on Terror.” It’s a war that some of their family members died in, but one that few of them seem to know much about.

Last month, older friends on Facebook who came of age in the 1960s were busy reflecting on what they were doing when they heard the news that JFK had been assassinated. Personally, I had only recently graduated from diapers to plastic pants and was likely occupied with important matters like trying to do the twist in front of the TV while my grandmother clapped and sloshed Scotch all over her TV table. But like most Americans who have not washed down decades of Rush Limbaugh with great swigs of QAnon Kool-Aid, I can’t help but wonder how we will look back at this moment in history. Is this the moment we turn the tide, or is it a brief respite from the country’s descent into full-blown fascism? The latter scenario would mean, of course, full speed ahead into climate collapse, given that the U.S. military is hands down the single largest carbon emissions machine on the planet, and our collective dust speck is already close to the boiling point.

May you live in interesting times. You got that right. These times are so interesting that we’ve had a lame duck president holed up in the White House consulting with his legal team from the Island of Malevolent Misfit Toys about the possibilities for declaring martial law to overturn the results of the election and it’s not the top story.

That stands to reason, I guess, when you’ve got a pandemic death count equivalent of a hundred 9-11s, and across the country bodies stacking up like cordwood in overstuffed mobile morgue units.

It’s hard to sustain the level of national alert so many of us felt during the run up to the election and the vote count, when Trump’s automatic-weapon-waving goon squads were busy battering on windows at voting precincts or sky-writing “Surrender Gretchen” over the Michigan State House. A meme was making the rounds at the time on Facebook: American politics as Night of the Living Dead. Personally, I was starting to feel like an insomnia-addled Lady Macbeth who’d been mainlining Halloween candy or days, and as in all things, I blamed my lovely spouse, who had shopped for Halloween candy like he was stocking up for Y2K.

Like me, my spouse knows how to brace for the worst, a skill we bonded over when we met organizing against the second Gulf War. One of the biggest misconceptions about the anti-war “movement,” if such a thing exists right now, is that peace activists somehow hate veterans. Since well before the war in Vietnam, the U.S. military has given veterans critical insight into the American war machine, along with heavy helpings of trauma and self-loathing. Some of my favorite peace activists are veterans, my spouse chief and foremost among them. We bonded organizing protests and staging a die-in in front of the Portland federal building. It was one of those “what are you doing after the die-in?” kinds of courtships.

I don’t remember exactly when I began thinking of Victor Jara’s hands and how they’d been crushed by Chilean soldiers in the early days of the U.S.-sponsored Chilean coup in 1973. I do know, though, that as my spouse and I took a left turn to drop our ballots off at our local library, Victor Jara had been on both our minds. It wasn’t a total coincidence, given that only a day or two before, on October 25, Chileans had voted overwhelmingly in favor of drafting a new constitution.

The referendum was a concession wrenched from President Sebastian Piñera following a year of street protests and civil unrest. The vote was a definitive kiss-off to the Chilean constitution of 1980, enacted under the regime of General Augusto Pinochet.

Living in the U.S., you’d never know that Chile had had its own national disaster on September 11, nearly three decades before the U.S.

Not many Americans can define neoliberalism, let alone know that on September 11, 1973, it was ushered into Chile by U.S.-made tanks and at the butt of U.S.-made guns—automatic weapons of the sort Trump’s “very fine” friends never seem to tire of waving. And not at all unlike the militarized Portland Police, and the BORTAC and Homeland Security armies that spent all summer pounding and traumatizing friends of mine in the streets of Portland, and spraying them with chemical weapons long ago judged too dangerous to use in war, the health effects being so severe and long term.

It was on September 11, 1973, that Richard Nixon and his henchman Henry Kissinger swept Pinochet to power as the front man for the U.S.-sponsored “experiment” in neoliberalism. A folksinger-songwriter, often referred to as “Chile’s Bob Dylan,” Victor Jara would be the most visible of more than 3,000 Chileans executed by Pinochet’s death squads in September, as the coup began. You can get a quick overview of the horrors that the U.S. helped unleash on Chileans in the 1970s by watching the 2019 Netflix documentary Massacre at the Stadium.

Shortly after Pinochet’s reign of terror began, an estimated five thousand were detained at a Santiago stadium—then named Estadio Chile, and since renamed Estadio Victor Jara—and another twenty thousand at the Estadio Nacional across town. Professors, students, musicians, farm and factory workers were crowded shoulder to shoulder and sorted into lines to live or die, to be interrogated, beaten, tortured, and/or murdered. At Estadio Chile, more than seventy were executed on site, while others were “disappeared.” Today a quote painted on the back of the Estadio Nacional reads: “Un pueblo sin memoria es un pueblo sin futuro” – “A people without memory are a people without a future.”

Jara grew up poor, in a family of farmworkers, but went on to become a theater director and teacher, and to achieve international visibility with songs like “Manifesto,” which speaks to Jara’s understanding of art as a critical tool in struggles for justice, as an instrument of decolonizing resistance, of spiritual, material, and ecological liberation.

“I don’t sing for the love of singing, /or because I have a good voice,” sang Jara, “I sing because my guitar/has both feeling and reason. It has a heart of earth/and the wings of a dove….”

Jara’s music was inspired by his mother Amanda Martínez’s love of folk music rooted in her Indigenous Mapuche heritage; his music was also shaped by a Catholic education that included a brief period in the seminary. Jara’s music was embraced in the 1960s and ‘70s by American folk heavies like Pete Seeger and Joan Baez. Arlo Guthrie and Holly Near are among the American songwriters who have since written tribute songs. In the run-up to the election of Allende, Jara’s version of the song “Venceremos” or “We Will Overcome,” became the anthem of Allende’s Popular Unity Coalition, and also figured centrally in eyewitness accounts of Jara’s death. Pinochet’s U.S.-supported forces beat and tortured him, smashing his wrists.

At some point in the stadium, Jara reportedly sang to the other prisoners “Venceremos,” a song he’d adapted with new lyrics that had egged Allende on to victory. Before he was executed, shot more than 40 times by Pinochet’s U.S.-funded forces, Jara wrote his final song: “What horror the face of fascism creates!/They carry out their plans with knife-like precision./Nothing matters to them./To them, blood equals medals,/slaughter is an act of heroism./Oh God, is this the world that you created?” 

 

No human cost was too high to pay to usher in neoliberalism, to eviscerate the gains that labor had made under Allende’s Popular Unity Coalition, and to maintain a steady flow of cheap copper, fruit and fish to the U.S. under the auspices of “trade liberalization.” The new constitution passed under Pinochet’s dictatorship rolled back the reforms instituted under Allende. It expanded the power of the presidency and enshrined private property and corporate profits over social needs; Pinochet rolled back taxes on corporations and the wealthy, and eliminated a host of government services. State-owned companies, public housing, education, health care, and pensions were all privatized, turned into profit centers for corporations and the wealthy. The constitution written under Pinochet limited reforms, and the gap today between rich and poor in Chile is one of the highest in Latin America.

Jara may be technically dead, but if you do a bit of digging around on the internet, you’ll see evidence of his long afterlife; hence the title of a documentary about his impact on musicians in particular: The Resurrection of Victor Jara. Tens of thousands of hands have gone on playing Jara’s songs in the nearly fifty years since his torture and murder in the stadium. Jara, says Chilean musician Horacio Salinas, in the documentary, “could create a ceremonial effect with his music.” On youtube, you can find countless videos of musicians playing Jara’s songs, and songs written in tribute to him, including my personal favorite, “Victor Jara’s Hands,” by Joey Burns of the Tucson-based indie-rock band Calexico, sung alternately in Spanish and English: “Songs of the birds like hands/ call the earth to witness/ Sever from fear before taking flight.”

And for the past year, as across the streets of the U.S. Black Lives Matter activists have demanded justice for George Floyd and the defunding of police departments that consume the lion’s share of city budgets across the country, Jara has been resurrected again and again–in an all-star Chilean studio recording–and on the streets of Chile. At an October 25, 2019 march in Santiago with a crowd estimated at more than a million, people sang together Jara’s anti-war anthem “El Derecho De Vivir En Paz,” or “The Right to Live in Peace,” while countless people played along on the guitar.

This past year, workers in Chile have risen up again to demand a world in which workers do more than just struggle to survive, one in which everyone has a right to not just bread, but roses, music, and art.

Over the past year, Chilean women have created their own distinctive, woman-centered actions on the streets of Chile, with thousands collectively performing the song “Un Violador en Tu Camino,” or “A Rapist in Your Path,” in a public rite of resistance to rape culture and femicide.

The song was inspired by the work of the renowned Argentinian-Brazilian feminist anthropologist/bioethicist Rita Laura Segato. The song calls out the role of police and the courts in perpetrating and perpetuating sexual violence that repeats, on a smaller scale, the systemic rape and torture of women that happened under Pinochet, and that is a central feature of fascism.

If the goal in Chile—as it would be later in Iraq—was, as Naomi Klein has argued–to disorient or “shock” the country into submitting to a radically different and patently exploitative economic system, the system that was imposed was also more rigidly patriarchal.  Sexual violence and degradation were integral parts of Pinochet’s fascist playbook. But as Chileans battle the legacy of Pinochet, this rite of feminist resistance, together with other longstanding organizing, is propelling Chile to break new ground internationally: Chile will be the first country in the world with a constitutional assembly comprised equally of women and men.

I turned twelve the month that Pinochet came to power, and I have no memory whatsoever of hearing about the murder of Jara, the mutilation of his hands, or the thousands of Chileans who were tortured or disappeared. Looking back, I find this fact stranger for the fact that I grew up within miles of the White House. And when I look back on growing up in two very white suburbs on the edge of Washington D.C., it might as well have been Apartheid South Africa, the lines of demarcation between the Black inner city; Georgetown, where my father was a professor; and the white suburbs, were so clear and stark.

My first inklings of the Chilean coup came in 1976, when the political violence of the Pinochet regime erupted in Washington, D.C. I was fifteen, and a friend of my older sister was dating Pablo Letelier, the son of Orlando Letelier, when the latter was blown to pieces in a car bombing, along with his co-worker Ronni Karpen Moffett. Orlando Letelier had been a close associate of Allende and remained until his death an outspoken critic of Pinochet, who was eventually pegged for the bombing, though a fat lot of good that did.

By the age of fifteen in 1976, I was not a complete newbie when it came to assassinations. Just months before the Chilean Coup, in July of 1973, Colonel Yosef Alon, a 42-year-old an Israeli Air Force pilot and military attaché, whose daughter Yael rode the bus with us to school in the morning, was assassinated in their driveway.

But Alon’s assassination was not the first to have entered the sphere of my privileged white childhood. My guess is that would have been the Yablonski murders on New Year’s Eve, 1969.

We attended a parochial school at the time called The Little Flower School, which made the news not too long ago as the grade school alma mater of Brett Kavanaugh. I was eight and my sister was seven when we learned that the in-laws of one of the teachers at Little Flower—“Mrs. Yablonski”—had all been mowed down in their Pennsylvania home: Chip Yablonski, the President of the United Mine Workers Union, his wife Margaret, and their daughter Charlotte Yablonski.

I imagine this was around the time I came home one day from school to find myself locked out of the house, and when I banged on the window and peered inside, I found my two older siblings had staged their own murder, knives lying on the floor, a theatrical flourish of ketchup here and there. Perhaps I’ve coped with my third-grade trauma by picturing myself as a stony-faced critic who found the scene unconvincing, their characters lacking in development.

The field of Epigenetics assumes that stress is genetically transmitted. I don’t need to know that my genetic fibers are somehow entangled in my parents’ to understand that I’ve carried some of their trauma into my own life. I grew up listening to—and, at times taking notes on—my parents’ stories of trauma. My mother’s stories were about growing up the child of a working-class single mother too poor to raise her. She told stories about kids who accidentally jumped off trains onto chainsaws, and about her experience dressing dead bodies as a young student nurse on a deserted ward.

My father’s trauma centered around the May 10, 1940, Nazi invasion of the Netherlands. Barely a month short of his fourteenth birthday, he ended up lying in a ditch next to his eighty-year-old grandmother, mortars flying, trees bursting into flames overhead. His family narrowly made it across the border before it closed. My father had four brothers, including twins, one of whom, my Uncle Pierre, had suffered brain damage from oxygen deprivation during delivery. My father lived with the knowledge throughout his life that something as small as a hand visibly shaking as a man pockets his papers, and they might have landed in Westerbork or Auschwitz rather than in England, and his brothers might have been medically tortured and dissected.

I know exactly where I was when my father’s life ended on May 8, V.E. Day, 1979, just outside Amsterdam. I was accompanying him on his lecture tour, the chance to see Europe a high school graduation present. I was at my uncle’s house, my father’s body still warm on the couch before me, where he’d reclined after diagnosing his own heart attack. He died just two days before the thirty-ninth anniversary of the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands in 1940. The last destination I visited with my father was Anne Frank’s “Secret Annex.” War, as I learned on that trip, throws out shockwaves and unexploded ordinance—both physical and emotional—that explode across generations, and can shave decades off a single life.

While the “Neoliberal Experiment” began in Chile in 1973 with tanks and guns—and on a smaller scale in New York City with the manufactured financial crisis of 1975—Reagan would become its American figurehead, its presidential mad social scientist. I was in my second year at Georgetown when Reagan was inaugurated, and I can remember exactly where I was when Reagan was elected 40 years ago, on November 4, 1980. I was at the Republican election watch party at some tony D.C. hotel, the details documented somewhere in a newspaper article buried deep in my office closet.

In the fall of 1980, I was in my second-year writing for the more liberal of Georgetown’s two student newspapers, The Voice. Whether the story was assigned to me or I chose it out of some perverse curiosity or out of an unshakeable conviction that Republicans had better hors d’oeuvres, I can’t quite remember. While I wasn’t the most savvy reporter at the time, I can say that voting for Reagan was as unthinkable to me then as now. And if memory serves, I covered the election party with all the rhetorical gravitas of a monkey throwing shit at their new zookeepers.

I would go on to attend the inauguration in D.C., again out of the kind of curiosity that one might feel toward newly–landed Martians walking the red carpet from their space capsule. I was a sophomore and busy running from one panicked deadline to the other, but Reagan’s inaugural speech got my attention. “[A]mong all the nations of the earth,” as Reagan would have it, “[The U.S. was] special…The freedom and the dignity of the individual have been more available and assured” in the U.S. “than in any other place on Earth,” Reagan claimed.

What I missed the first time around, though, was his distillation of neoliberal principles: The one barrier to the “individual liberty” of citizen/workers in a country “without ethnic or racial divisions” was government itself. “It is time,” Reagan proclaimed, “to check and reverse the growth of government which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed.” While Reagan deftly tipped his hat to working people—to “men and women who raise our food, patrol our streets, man our mines and our factories, teach our children,” and on and on—for Reagan, as for Trump, the joke was on working people.

The years I spent at Georgetown in the wake of my father’s death provided a crash course in the importance of the social safety net that Ronald Reagan was hell bent on gutting. At the time, if I was somewhat oblivious to the nuances of Reagan’s political agenda, it was likely because I was occupied a good bit of the time with trying not to have a nervous breakdown. My personal social safety net at the time consisted of Social Security Survivor’s Benefits, four years of free tuition to Georgetown–where my father had taught for more than a decade–and something I never thought very much about having: white skin. My father’s death sent my mother off her fragile rails, and within six months of Reagan’s inauguration, during the summer of 1981, my sister and I were homeless.

My sister and I learned that summer that with white skin, student I.D.’s, and a keen eye out for security guards, there are ways of getting by on a college campus rent-free. At the time, I didn’t think much about the role that whiteness played in stopping us from falling any further. I was oblivious to the fact that the safety net we found in sleeping in vacant dorms would not have been available to us had we been Black or brown. As it was, there would be no cops, no Karens staring skeptically at our student I.D.’s, no guns pointed in our faces, no one asking if we were enrolled or if we’d paid summer rent for the dorm rooms. That experience, together with my father’s death, would radically remap my life for decades to come.

+++

When neoliberalism arrived in Chile, Victor Jara and working class supporters of Socialist President Salvador Allende were under no illusions about whose benefits the coup would serve.

If neoliberalism was brought into Chile with guns and tanks, in the U.S., it was done with smoke and mirrors. Reagan was inaugurated forty years ago this January on a platform based on the self-interested lies and deceptions crafted by the so-called “Chicago Boys”­­­­­––the architects of neoliberalism. Reagan greased his personal path to the White House on the neoliberal snake oil of “Trickle Down Economics” and Free Market Fundamentalism. And while Jimmy Carter had already gotten the ball rolling, Reagan would jump start the neoliberal bait and switch transfer of funds from public housing, education, and welfare, to policing, prisons, and endless war.

Ronald Reagan was as eager to shill for trickle-down economics and gutting the social safety net as he’d been for the House Unamerican Activities Committee and the warmongers at General Electric. Meanwhile, in the UK, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was happily breaking the glass ceiling for women intent on dropping bombs on babies and exploiting working families. On opposite sides of the pond, Thatcher and Reagan were simultaneously slashing corporate taxes, deregulating the financial industry—and setting the stage for waves of future financial crises. And both of them were intent on breaking labor.

Though my siblings and I were all given four years of free tuition, in the 1980s, you didn’t have to have a scholarship—or a parent who was a professor—to walk away from a four-year degree debt-free or close to it. In 1983, the year I graduated, tuition at a public university barely topped a thousand a year.But public universities had already been on Reagan’s hit list in the 1960s when he was governor of California, and students at Berkeley were busy mobilizing for free speech, civil rights, and an end to the Vietnam War.

To Reagan, Berkeley students were nothing more than unruly “welfare bums”; free tuition was their dole, and Reagan was hell bent on sending them “back to work.”

Defunding higher education and slapping students with debt was, Reagan understood, a path to reign in “beatniks, radicals and filthy speech advocates….” Today California spends more money incarcerating people than it does educating them—from K-12 through university. In the U.S. today, tuition at public universities is ten times higher than it was when I graduated in 1983. Inflation counts for less than a third of the increase.

Over the past forty years, public universities have been steadily transformed into student debt delivery machines operated on the backs of debt-strapped adjuncts. University presidents, who routinely make five times more than governors, sell students—as “customers”—on the fiction that History–along with Literature, Women’s Studies, Comparative Ethnic Studies, Philosophy, and the Arts–are frivolous luxuries we can no longer afford to fully fund. The Gipper might be pleased today to see 18-22-year-olds signing off on documents they’d need MBAs in finance to understand and then emerging as desperate and pliable indentured servants for corporations. Even pre-COVID, 48% of university students in the U.S. were at risk of, or already, experiencing houselessness.

Historian Howard Zinn observed, “If you don’t know history, it’s as if you were born yesterday,” and that lack of knowledge is convenient for corporate interests intent on red-baiting and enlisting workers to rail against social programs and benefits that their own grandparents struggled mightily for. I may have learned nothing while I was at Georgetown about the U.S.’s role in the Chilean coup that killed Victor Jara, but I did learn a few things about what can happen to white American nuns who are labeled Communist sympathizers for getting too cozy with Indigenous farmworkers in Central America struggling for some very basic forms of justice.

In 1981, I stumbled across a talk Daniel Berrigan was giving on campus. Berrigan, I’ve long since learned was a rock star of the American peace movement. By the early 1970s, Berrigan, a Jesuit priest, poet, playwright, and professor, had made the FBI’s Most Wanted List for burning draft files in the parking lot of the Catonsville, MD draft board with homemade napalm in 1968, and then going underground to dodge the charges so he could keep organizing other actions.

“Apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children,” Berrigan famously said of the action. The American banality of evil in a nutshell.

On this particular day in 1981, though, I knew nothing about Berrigan, who quickly surrendered the floor anyway to a middle-aged Catholic couple, the parents of one Jeanne Donovan, a “Maryknoll lay missioner.” And the story the couple told went something like this: on December 2, 1980, this nice, idealistic young Catholic woman was raped and murdered, executed at close range—along with three nuns, Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, and Dorothy Kazel. And suddenly Donovan’s parents had a chilling political awakening, as they began to understand the role that U.S. military advisors and U.S.-funded and -trained death squads played throughout Central–and much of Latin–America in repressing labor organizing and movements for social justice. Donovan’s parents were extremely convincing. I couldn’t come up with any plausible communist plot that would explain these two straight-laced Catholic squares having to talk about the rape and murder of their daughter.

If the 1980 crimes against the nuns and Donovan occurred in the final month of Carter’s administration, the perpetrators knew that it would be left to Reagan to answer for it. It would be Reagan’s job to rationalize the rape and murder of nuns as acceptable collateral damage in the U.S.’s holy war against Communists. The chief spinner of malevolent tall tales about Donovan and the nuns would be a professor of political science at Georgetown, Reagan’s newly appointed ambassador to the U.N.: Jeane Kirkpatrick. Kirkpatrick is remembered as a “principal architect” of the bloodbath the U.S. helped fund and unleash throughout Central America.

Questioned by reporters, Kirkpatrick was eager to put the matter to rest, to drive rhetorical nails into coffins that held the bodies of Donovan and nuns that had been dragged out of the ground by ropes around their ankles. The nuns, Kirkpatrick told The Tampa Tribune, “were not just nuns. The nuns were also political activists.” They were aligned, she claimed, with guerillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front—the FMLN.

I have another somewhat fonder Kirkpatrick-related memory from that same Spring semester at Georgetown, one in which Kirkpatrick is standing at a podium delivering a commencement address and, slowly graduating seniors begin to rise and quietly turn their backs on her. Their message was clear, impressive, and unapologetic: Kirkpatrick didn’t deserve an honorary degree, and Georgetown had done them a disservice by pretending otherwise. What Kirkpatrick did, in fact, deserve–the student action clearly conveyed–was to be tried as a war criminal at the Hague.

There’s a famous quote from a Brazilian archbishop named Dom Helder Camara that encapsulates the distinction between charity and social justice: “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint; when I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a Communist.” Union organizing, demands for the redistribution of stolen Indigenous lands, and anything else that threatened the profits of U.S. corporations would be labelled—and battled– under Reagan as part of an international Communist threat orchestrated by Cuba and the Soviet Union.

By the Fall of ‘81, having had my own brief and very privileged run-in with houselessness, I started volunteering at shelters in D.C. That experience gave me a small window into the

ways in which poverty served up daily reminders to D.C.’s Black residents of just how disposable they were to the city’s white elite and any god they might construct in their own image. Forty years of neoliberalism and gentrification have only intensified Black poverty in D.C. And poverty, coupled with the daily toll of racism in the U.S., can shave years–or decades­­–off a life. Today white privilege in Washington, D.C. translates into seventeen additional years of living. Seventeen years.

In 1981, the “Great Communicator” was busy cranking up his racist propaganda machine to rally low income white voters against their own best interests. Reagan managed to sell a sizable portion of the white working class on the patently obvious lie that the majority of welfare recipients were not only Black but living as “queens.” It turns out that all kinds of white folks would happily collaborate in slashing benefits they were desperately going to need in the future that Reagan’s administration was setting in motion–one in which jobs would become the U.S’s main global export.

“The Gipper” happily picked up the mantle of Nixon’s War on Drugs and ran with it. He stoked terror at the prospect of Black crack “fiends” running amok in inner city war zones, and SWAT teams began invading and terrorizing Black neighborhoods. As Michelle Alexander explains in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness, Reagan put the U.S. squarely on the path to becoming the global leader in locking people up. Prisons and militarized policing at home and abroad would begin sucking up enormous amounts of money that could have gone to housing, health care, and public education.

As expensive as in-state college tuition is these days, the annual cost of a prison bed in most states is equivalent to four years of in-state college tuition. In 2017 in California, the cost of a single prison bed exceeded the cost of a year’s tuition and living expenses at Harvard.

Prisons and immigrant detention facilities generate huge profits for a tiny elite, while brutalizing everyone else, including the people who work there.  But Nixon, Kissinger, and Pinochet were all well aware that once people caught on to the swindle, the bait and switch trickle-down-free-market government-for-the-corporations game, there was a good chance they would need guns, tanks, and plenty of tear gas to hold back the rebellion.

Predictably one of the first casualties of the “neoliberal Experiment” would be people living in public housing. They would increasingly land on city streets and sidewalks, and the lucky ones in shelters like the ones I worked at in Seattle in the mid ‘80s. Between 1978–midway through the Carter administration–and 1983, midway through Reagan’s first term, the HUD budget was slashed by nearly three quarters. It went from “$83 billion to a little more than $18 billion (in 2004 constant dollars) and shelters opened throughout the United States.”

No administration to date­–Democrat or Republican–has made a serious move to restore the budget to its level in 1978, which is why today, prisons—along with military bases—are now by far the country’s largest supplier of public housing.

And so, decades into the U.S.’s “neoliberal experiment,” it’s not unusual in Portland, LA. or Seattle to see walkers and wheelchairs next to tents on the street. And the real human misery—the economic and housing fallout–from COVID-19 has yet to fully register. In 2019, 117 people shuffled off their mortal coils on the streets and sidewalks of D.C.  In L.A., 1039 died on the street, no bed to cushion their aching bones, no roof overhead, no privacy, no sanitation, no dignity.

If speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr. were high school seniors, hands down, the one voted least likely to be read by American school children would be his 1967 sermon “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence.”

As radical as the “military industrial complex” might sound the first time Americans hear it, the term wasn’t the demon spawn of Karl Marx, or the Weather Underground. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s speech writer coined the term in the farewell speech he wrote for him.

This was in 1961, back when the orderly succession of putatively democratically elected presidents was a given in the U.S., no matter how many coups Eisenhower and the Dulles Brothers had busied themselves orchestrating in Guatemala, Iran, Indonesia, the Philippines, and God–and historians–only know where else.  Jack and Jackie and their Camelot myth-making press machine were about to sweep into the White House, followed by more military advisors and troops into Vietnam.

MLK would paint the consequences of the military industrial complex in far starker, more vivid, human and urgent terms than Eisenhower. The U.S., Dr. King seems to have suggested, was a war junkie–and it was a given that war and racism went hand in hand. The Vietnam War, King argued, was poisoning the country with racism and hatred:

This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love.

The sniper fire that cut King down exactly a year later to the day—on April 4, 1968 in Memphis—likely said as much about his 1967 speech as it did his support for Memphis Sanitation workers. In his 1967 speech King famously compared the war in Vietnam to a “Demonic destructive suction tube” that vacuumed up funds that might have otherwise gone to LBJ’s “War on Poverty.”

If you want to get a really good idea of how much war just cost the U.S. in the time it took you to read this article, check out the National Priorities Project. The military budget for 2020 alone at $738 billion, , would be enough to provide “24.6 million [year-long] Hospital Stays for COVID-19 Patients,” “20.96 million [four year ] Scholarships for University Students,” or “23.65 million People receiving $600 weekly unemployment insurance payments for 1 Year.” There’s plenty of money. It’s just helping the super-rich, who are profiting at all our expenses.

King condemned in no uncertain terms the massive aerial spraying of the defoliant Agent Orange as akin to Nazi medical experimentation. “What do [the Vietnamese] think as we test out our latest weapons on them,” asked King, “just as Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe?” Today in the U.S., the test subjects are the kids in Detroit drinking water contaminated with lead, while Nestles is pumping, bottling, and profiting to the tune of 400 gallons a minute of fresh Michigan water; the Water Protectors at Standing Rock drenched for months with pepper spray, tear gas, and reportedly other chemical agents, along with water in freezing and subzero temperatures; the Black Lives Matter activists sprayed—sprayed along with hundreds of houseless people—all summer on the streets of Portland with chemical weapons banned for use in war; the BIPOC, elderly, and people with disabilities, dying at vastly higher rates of COVID-19.

And meanwhile, Vietnam is witnessing the third generation born with Agent Orange-related health effects, from missing eyes and limbs to spinal bifida and severe intellectual disabilities. The Middle East is littered with depleted uranium, cancer rates are soaring, and babies are born with a wide range of “congenital anomalies.”

By 1967, King had struck up a friendship with the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. And by ‘67, King, like every other major organizer in the Civil Rights Movement, had been pegged by the FBI as a Communist. Make of it what you will, it seems likely to me that given enough time on earth, King and Jara might have had long talks, written songs together, formed a fast and deep friendship. In his song “Derecho De Vivir En Paz”–or “The Right to Live in Peace”–released on his 1971 album, Jara wrote of “Indochina… the place/beyond the wide sea,/where they ruin the flower/ with genocide and napalm.”

He and King were definitely on the same page about the Vietnam War and so much more.

Feminists, in particular, have aptly spoken of our collective relationship to Trump as akin to domestic or intimate partner violence, with Trump a gaslighting batterer. But as metaphors go, battering and gaslighting are also fitting descriptions of the Chicago Boys’ neoliberal Magic Trick— brought into Chile, and later the Middle East, with guns and tanks. It’s the magic trick ordinary Americans have watched this year, as we’ve been fleeced of taxes that have gone to fatten the unimaginable wealth of a handful of billionaires, and to endless weapons and wars that have made the U.S. the hands down leader of the global arms trade. Martin Luther King, Jr. warned us in 1967 that “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Fifty years later, at the end of the Trump presidency, we seem to be rapidly approaching garlic and wooden stake territory.

Still too many Democrats are breathing a sigh of relief now that the Batterer-in-Chief has been handed his eviction papers, and they are looking to Biden as our collective white knight, our national pater familias. But anyone who knows anything about the dynamics of battering will tell you that the myth of the White Knight is a racist and patriarchal set up for repeating the cycle of abuse. We’re sitting now on the razor’s edge of fascism, and fascism isn’t interested in electoral cycles. We can’t count on having another four years to sort the situation out.

The RootsAction “No Honeymoon for Biden” campaign, embraced by Nina Turner, recognizes the urgency of the situation and would go a long way toward undoing the damage done by fifty years of neoliberalism.  It would shift funds from militarism and mass incarceration to universal healthcare and a more inclusive, multi-racial “Green New Deal” that would fund free higher education. The campaign also calls for a $15 federal minimum wage and for Biden to cancel student debt across the board. Research has shown that wiping out existing student debt would be shot in the arm for the economy. We need to pull back from our domestic and global cycle of battering and make government work for working people if we are going to stop a free fall into fascism and climate chaos.

Finally, there are a lot of lessons the U.S. could draw from the Chilean fight against fascism and the legacy of Pinochet. The global spark that Las Tesis set off this past year with street performances that drew thousands of women to witness collectively to their shared experience of sexual harassment and assault is a testimony to the power of art to mobilize resistance and speak truth to power. And the immortal life of Victor Jara–his presence this past year on the streets of Santiago­, where thousands of hands fluttered across guitars­­–testifies to the power of art to preserve history even in the face of guns, tanks and bullets bent on wiping it out.

Now, more than ever, we need to demand reinvestment in the arts—from K-12 to higher education. To paraphrase the quote Woody Guthrie famously scrawled across his guitar: we need art to kill fascism. What better reminder than the hollow man in the White House of the frustration life without art generates? We need art to foster empathy, to remind us of our collective humanity, to preserve in our national memory records of those who stood for justice, and those who collaborated to undermine it. We need art to preserve history, to sustain and energize us, to give us courage for the long struggle ahead.

Dedicated to the memory of Roxane Elizabeth Roberts (November 5, 1952-December 24, 2018).

Desiree Hellegers is a co-founder and affiliated faculty of the Collective for Social and Environmental Justice at Washington State University Vancouver. and a member of the Socialist-Feminist Old Mole Variety Hour Collective on KBOO, Portland, Oregon’s community-supported radio station.

=====================================

* 'Beetje dom' om te geloven dat de situatie in de VS en haar buitenlandbeleid zal veranderen met oorlogsmisdadiger en mensenrechtenschender Biden...... Bovendien zit Biden in de zak van de financiële maffia en daarmee in die van de oliemaatschappijen, het militair-industrieel complex, de farmaceutische maffia en andere grote misdadige bedrijven >> hoe kan je ook maar enige verandering verwachten van zo'n figuur??!!! Toevallig werd vanmorgen op de BBC gemeld dat een aantal grote bedrijven en banken hun steun stoppen aan republikeinen die achter Trump blijven staan, ofwel deze bedrijven kopen de politiek niet alleen voorafgaand aan de verkiezingen, maar doen dat doorlopend, hoe kan je dan nog spreken van een democratie, als de politici volledig in de zak zitten van bedrijven....?? (om nog maar te zwijgen over het belemmeren van de stembusgang voor een groot aantal VS burgers)

Zie ook: 'Met de winst van Biden is het fascisme in de VS bepaald niet weggestemd' (en zie zeker de links in dat bericht over de 'geweldige' of beter gezegd gewelddadige oorlogsmisdadiger Joe Biden)

'Feest in Chili: fascistische grondwet verdwijnt voor een nieuwe!!'

'Chili groot aantal (zwaar) gewonden bij voortdurende protesten' 

'Protesten Chili en Ecuador: geweld tegen demonstranten gesteund door massamedia' (en zie de links in dat bericht)

'Chili, de protesten en de verslaggeving' (en zie de links in dat bericht, o.a. over het Amazonewoud en de strijd van burgers tegen oliemaatschappijen, maar ook over de situatie in Brazilië en Venezuela)

'Chili en de gestolen baby's, alweer met een 'mooie rol' van de rk kerk' 

'Venezuela is nog lang niet verslagen door de VS'

'Pinochet (ex-dictator Chili) werd 20 jaar geleden gearresteerd in Londen'

'9/11: de VS heeft niets geleerd......'

'VS buitenlandbeleid sinds WOII: een lange lijst van staatsgrepen en oorlogen..........'

'List of wars involving the United States'

'VS: openlijke militaire oefening met terreurgroep in Syrië......'

'NAVO gaat VS helpen in Zuid-Amerika terreur uit te oefenen: Colombia lid van de NAVO.........'

'VS commando's vechten o.a. in Midden- en Zuid-Amerika, aldus het VS ministerie van oorlog.........'

'Chileense fascisten vragen rk kerk om vergeving voor vreselijke misdaden begaan onder Pinochet bewind......'

'De VS, een duivels imperium, dat achter haar psychopathisch moordende troepen staat??'

'De war on drugs is veel dodelijker dan over het algemeen gedacht'

'Chili 11 september 1973'

'VS vermoordde meer dan 20 miljoen mensen sinds het einde van WOII........'

'CIA 70 jaar: 70 jaar moorden, martelen, coups plegen, nazi's beschermen, media manipulatie enz. enz.........'

'CIA en 70 jaar desinformatie in Europese opiniebladen............'

Voor meer berichten over de steenkoolcentrale in de Sundarbans, vul deze naam in op het zoekvlak rechts bovenin deze pagina. Dat geldt ook voor andere namen en instanties die genoemd woorden in het artikel van Hellegers (de ruimte voor labels is wat mij betreft te klein, t.w. 140 tekens)

Verlenging lockdown omdat de huidige lockdown niet werkt......

Vanmorgen suist het op het internet, Radio1 en BNR over een verlenging van de lockdown met nog eens 3 weken..... Het RIVM liet eerder al weten dat de lockdown verlengd moet worden, daar de huidige lockdown het aantal besmettingen niet zou hebben teruggebracht.... Het kan aan mij liggen, maar hoe zot moet je zijn om te bepleiten een maatregel te verlengen daar deze niet werkt??? 

Schoolgaande jeugd is de klos, na vorig jaar al een fikse leerachterstand te hebben opgelopen, waarbij de diploma's behaald in het voortgezet onderwijs als onder de maat zullen worden beoordeeld, lopen de leerlingen op basis en voortgezet niveau een verdere achterstand op, ronduit een ramp voor mensen die straks moeten toetreden tot de arbeidsmarkt , een achterstand die ze waarschijnlijk nooit zullen kunnen inlopen........ Bij plaatsing vergeten: zoals je begrijpt zullen vooral kinderen uit arme gezinnen het hardst worden getroffen, immers zij wonen in kleine behuizing, veelal met meerdere kinderen en vaak geen geld voor laptop of tablet...... (3 kwartier na plaatsing toegevoegd)

Ondanks de gepimpte cijfers op de beurzen, zullen dit jaar een groot aantal bedrijven omvallen, juist door die 'lockdowns', immers het is onmogelijk om al de bedrijven die op omvallen staan te blijven helpen met staatssteun, een steun die een enorme wissel zal trekken op de burgers in ons land, na eindelijk een paar loonsverhogingen te hebben gehad na de bankencrisis, die overigens jaren heeft doorgewoekerd, zullen de arbeiders een loonsverhoging de komende jaren kunnen vergeten, althans als ze al niet ontslagen zullen worden daar het bedrijf waar zij werken of failliet gaat, dan wel enorm zal moeten afslanken......

Morgen zal Rutte dus bekend maken dat de lockdown wordt verlengd, ook al heeft de lockdown tot nu toe niet geholpen, sterker nog: het overgrote deel van de besmettingen wordt in huiselijke kring opgedaan.....

Het vaccineren zal naar verwachting helpen het virus eronder te krijgen, dat is dan ook precies de enige optie die overblijft voor een kabinet dat doorgaat met blunderen, echter een gevaccineerde kan volgens zeggen nog steeds het virus doorgeven en zal daarom een masker moeten blijven dragen....... Het voorgaande terwijl men niet weet wat vaccinatie op de lange duur teweeg zal brengen, immers een normale invoering van een nieuw vaccin duurt minstens 2 jaar en hoe men ook juicht over de vaccins, niets kan achterdocht wegnemen, zeker als je bedenkt dat de farmaceuten hebben bedongen dat ze niet aansprakelijk mogen worden gesteld voor ernstige bijwerkingen, ofwel de farmaceuten vertrouwen hun eigen vaccin niet.....

Gezien het voorgaande is het vaccineren met een experimenteel vaccin te vergelijken met het kopen van een nieuwe auto, waarbij de verkoper en de fabrikant je waarschuwen dat zij niet verantwoordelijk kunnen worden gesteld als blijkt dat die auto dusdanige gebreken kan hebben die een ernstig ongeluk kunnen veroorzaken...... Daarom ook begrijp ik werkelijk niet waarom mensen keer op keer zeggen dat ze zo snel mogelijk gevaccineerd willen worden, vanmorgen hoorde ik Barbara Barend op Radio1 nog zeggen dat ze zo snel mogelijk deze injectie in haar arm wil hebben..... Al moet ik zeggen dat de reguliere media (en een fiks deel van de alternatieve media op het net) het voorbehoud van de farmaceuten over ernstige bijwerkingen het liefst geheel verzwijgen.... 

Zoals al vaker gesteld op deze plek: hoe kunnen deskundigen pleiten voor het zo snel mogelijk vaccineren van ouderen en anderszins zwakke mensen, als je het voorgaande in ogenschouw neemt..... Wie garandeert mij dat deze groepen niet juist een grotere kans lopen te overlijden juist door die vaccinatie...... Het overlijden van gevaccineerde ouderen worden uit de media gehouden, de laatste gevallen waren 2 bejaarde mannen in Israël en 1 in Zwitserland, die kort na de vaccinatie overleden..... Uiteraard werd daarbij gesteld dat deze bejaarden andere aandoeningen onder de leden hadden, maar welke oudere van 75 jaar en ouder heeft niet minstens één chronische aandoening onder de leden??? Je maakt mij niet wijs dat er intussen al niet veel meer bejaarden zijn overleden na vaccinatie met het Coronavaccin....... Maar ja wat wil je, censuur en zelfcensuur schijnt men vanwege het Coronavirus normaal te vinden........

En wat zullen de maatregelen zijn als blijkt dat ook de verlenging niet helpt?? Krijgen we dan een avondklok en eventueel zelfs huisarrest?? De kans is levensgroot dat de maatregelen tegen COVID-19 veel meer doden zal 'produceren' dan het virus......

Tot slot: één ding is zeker, met het hapsnap beleid van Rutte 3 worden besmettingen niet voorkomen en krijgt de economie klappen waarbij de bankencrisis, die in 2008 in volle hevigheid losbarstte, nog kinderspel was..... Vergeet voorts niet dat de zo geroemde PCR test, voor minstens de helft vals positieve uitslagen geeft, wat betekent dat deze omgekeerd evenredig 50% vals negatieve resultaten geeft...... Men roemt deze test terwijl de maker in het verleden al heeft laten weten dat deze test niet geschikt is om medische testen af te nemen!!

Zie ook: 'Moderna vaccin volgens Nederland getest op ouderen, een leugen van formaat!!'

'Coronavaccins op basis van mRNA technologie zijn onvoldoende getest, terwijl farmaceuten de verzekering hebben gekregen dat ze niet vervolgd mogen worden voor eventuele heftige bijwerkingen' (!!!!)

'Coronabeslommeringen: geen bijsluiter bij vaccin en de Jonge (CDA minister) begaat zééér zorgvuldig zijn zoveelste blunder'

'Coronabeslommeringen: ook na vaccinatie kan je het virus doorgeven, plus de zoveelste blunder van CDA minister de Jonge'

'Coronavaccinatie ook als je weet dat de fabrikant ernstige bijwerkingen niet uitsluit?' 

'Coronavaccinatie in vergelijking met het kopen van een huis (waar farmaceuten elke verantwoordelijkheid voor bijwerkingen afwijzen!!)'  

'Coronavirus heeft ervoor gezorgd dat de Wereldgezondheidsorganisatie haar definitie van collectieve immuniteit heeft veranderd'

'Vaccin AstraZeneca in twee delen voor 90% beschermend tegen COVID-19 en de bijwerkingen...... (?)' 

'De rijke landen behartigen tijdens de Coronacrisis de belangen van 'Big Pharma' i.p.v. de gezondheid van miljarden'

'Bill Gates' inzet tegen het Coronavirus en zijn handelen op vaccinatiegebied: de winsten van de farmaceuten vermenigvuldigen' 

'Bill Gates, CDC, WHO en de farmaceuten anticipeerden op de Coronacrisis in november 2019.....' 

'COVID-19: wellicht zijn 2 vaccinaties nodig zegt farma lobbyist Osterhaus, vandaag zijn dat er al 3: ping ping kassa!!' (een bericht van 1 september dit jaar)

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Voorts zie wat betreft de PCR test en test op antilichamen: 'Epidemioloog Rosendaal (LUMC) 40% van de sneltesten onbetrouwbaar en dat op basis van de al niet werkende PCR test!!'

 'Coronavirus, PCR test: leugens en onzin'

'Uitvinder PCR test (algemeen gebruikt voor COVID-19): onbetrouwbaar als medische test'

'Coronavirus: PCR-test kan niet aantonen dat het virus aanwezig is in het lichaam, beweringen dat dit wel zo is zijn gelogen' (in dat bericht zie je een groot aantal links naar oudere artikelen over het Coronavirus)

'CDC : COVID-19 testen kloppen in de helft van de gevallen niet: het virus is minder dodelijk dan gedacht ondanks de angszaaierij in de media' (!!!!)

Ook de test op antilichamen klopt niet, dit is een test voor mensen die het virus onder de leden hebben gehad (!!): 'COVID-19 testen op antilichamen van o.a. Roche, Quest en Abbott zijn waardeloos'

'Coronavirus: opmerking bij vaccins' (deze post werd door Google gecensureerd, alle afbeeldingen, waarvan minstens één met tekst werd verwijderd, zodat je niets meer hebt aan dit bericht..... Het originele Facebook bericht van Marjolein Jansen werd in haar geheel verwijderd: censuur in Nederland, niet tijdens WOII maar anno 2020!!!

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Voorts zie: '2020 het jaar dat de vrijheidsboom in brand werd gestoken' (en zie de links in dat bericht)

'Veel maatregelen tegen het Coronavirus vernietigen juist levens' (en zie de links in dat bericht naar oudere artikelen over het virus)