Many rage against Donald Trump, while singing the praises of Obama. They overlook that the Donald duck is what the Obama cat dragged home. How? Those who like false explanations call Trump supporters racist. However, Obama is personally popular, with a favorability rating of more than 50%, something rare for a president finishing his mandate. Meanwhile their anti-establishment rhetoric is strong (they detest Hillary Clinton, a blonde). So what irks Trump supporters is not so much the color of one skin, but the fact they have little skin in the game. For seven years, I wrote that the Obama’s administration, plus the Federal Reserve, deliberately favored the richest and especially the financial sector (say through Quantitative Easing, which directed money to the biggest banks).
Now the poorest are enraged. And the (plutocratically owned) media tell us that this “populism” is a dangerous form of racism. You want to see racism? Here it is:
Living While Black Is A Dangerous Condition. Obama Has Nothing To Do With It.
Whereas, the obvious explanation is that average people are suffering as they see their median income, the median social fabric, their median everything go down, except for Obamacare copays, and for huge inflation striking not just healthcare, but education, and lack of upwards mobility.
My friend John Michael Gartland told me that: “The American middle class pays 20%+ more every year in medical insurance payments and gets 40%+ less benefits. The political elite has no idea what regular people pay for anything. President Obama says fanciful things with sincere oratory but very little of it is true. At best, it is good intentions not backed up by reality.”
Another class of low lives experience discontent: those who are directly under the brunt of the police state. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arY3gtdNhjY
More and more videos are showing how ugly the system is.
Suppose the following. You are stuck somewhere, you don’t have the means to move. Somebody in the neighborhood comes to you and accuses you to have shot at them years ago, and you missed. Suppose also that you have never touched a gun in your life. You are accused of a complete lie. What to do? Apologize? But an apology would acknowledge that what did not happen, happened: it would make you an accomplice of your own victimization, and a culprit in two ways (of an act of violence that you did not commit against someone else, and of an act of violence you did commit against yourself).
So, what is the wisest course? Get a gun. It may seem counter-intuitive that arming oneself for ultimate violence is the wisest course. And for the individual, it is not, if the individual is willing to forgo all dignity. But, for a community, arming oneself is generally better than harming oneself.
There are two ways to abuse people: neglect them, or directly assault them. If one can get abused people to apologize, they will join in their own abuse, and take a beaten dog mentality. Making them even easier to abuse.
Another trick to rule is to divide by dividing patterns of abuse. The rage of more and more young African-Americans is a healthy reaction to a pattern of abuse meant to destroy self-worth. The abuse has increased with the repression. A Darwinian system has been set-up to subdue rebellious low lives.
Philando Castile was pulled over in July by a police officer in a car. It was at least his 46th traffic stop. Nearly all for minor traffic violations. It was his last.
After the stop — over a broken tail light — the police officer was told by Castille himself, that he, Castille carried, legally, a gun. Apparently scared that Castile could grab said gun, the officer shot and bled to death the 32-year-old. Castile’s girlfriend then live-streamed the dialogue she had with the officer on Facebook, sternly retelling the story of how a traffic stop for a low-level offense turned into a legal execution… while making sure of calling respectfully the assassin “Sir”.
Castile’s story has been the rule, for decades. Simply, good thinking people ignored it. Only now, thanks to modern technology, does the method become hard to deny. Eric Garner, Samuel DuBose, Sandra Bland — these are just a few of the victims of police and the criminal justice system over the past several years, but they all fall into the same basic framework: a routine stop or arrest for a low-level offense goes horribly wrong, leaving someone dead after they were accused of a misdemeanor or crime that doesn’t even involve any prison time.
Why? The police in the USA is trained to terrify the population into respectful subjugation (notice the analogy with Islam). That keeps said population focused on eating sugar (subsidized), corn syrup (subsidized), and watching sport on TV (subsidized) happening in the stadium (subsidized). Instead of having the population daydreaming about changing the system into a better place.
The criminal justice system in the US has become profit generating: there are private prisons, their companies are on Wall Street.
But local communities also share in the profits the abuse generates.
The law enforcement system make these encounters with the law happen frequently, and with increasing weight in a person’s life, once that person has been detected as a low life, and especially a low life who does not respect orders well.
It begins with one ticket or a traffic stop. But if someone can’t pay that fine, police will stop or arrest him or her again to get that someone to pay up. This leads to that someone getting fined again for not paying up already. And again. And again. One ticket brings a vicious cycle that can destroy a life.
With each of these encounters, someone’s record piles up — giving officers more reason, in the view they have been trained to have, to stop him or her, because they see the person’s record when running a license plate. Each time the arrests happen, the exasperation of the victim augments. At some point, they snap (we have videos testifying to victims saying they had enough, after being arrested dozens of times; they were then killed, one way, or another).
Neighborhoods with poor people of color are heavily policed, so miscreants are more likely to catch a cop’s eye if they run a stop sign, fail to signal on a turn, have a broken tail light, or sell untaxed cigarettes.
This isn’t just about a few police killings. It’s a criminal justice system that’s biased towards a Prussian like discipline for low lives. That’s even true with drugs: for an equal mass of the offending product, the sentences are ten times harsher on the sort of cocaine poor people use, than on the refined powder the rich use.
The USA is a multiracial society where low lives can keep on living, as long as they obey the system strictly. Otherwise the police’s ominous presence is there to remind them they can be shot. Appearances of fairness abound. Obama was made president and a Nobel laureate, but then was told, as he knew he would be, to obey the system strictly. Being smart, and all that, it’s exactly what he did. That’s why Obama gave so much to the hyper wealthy, the same who now embrace Hillary Clinton. (To compensate for his loss of dignity, he is an expert at looking full of it.)
When lauding the US model, with its ultrapowerful financial pirates, its high inequality, its performance oriented work ethics (certainly the highest, by far, of the countries which view themselves as most decent), supporters forget to mention the police state aspect. Even more striking, they forget to mention that it was roughly multiplied by ten, after Bill Clinton passed severe laws which set a very stern ambiance… And nearly doubled the incacerated population. 
(This is only the tip of the iceberg; total population under “judicial supervision” in the US, is now more than eight millions.)
This will not end well. But when will it end? The nasty plutocratic Roman system was the sorry predecessor of the present one. It ended as total degeneracy of everything. The alienation of Roman “populus” (people) from themselves lasted up to eight centuries (in the parts which were invaded by the Islamists, and the Oriental Part, Pars Orientalis). In the Occident, the system collapsed when the Franks and other Germans took control around 480 CE. In other words, the corruption of democracy into plutocracy can last extremely long before the plutocracy loses control: a generation of dummies brings up another generation of dummies, etc.
(Archeology has shown, that, at least in the east, and until the devastation of war set in, the Roman empire was very prosperous, economically speaking; what decayed was its intelligence, obviously from an excess of fascism and theocracy. That defect, in turn, brought the invasions. Something to meditate as hordes of Islamists try to enter Europe; at this point, in the last year, at least four millions, with three millions held up by the Ottoman sultan Erdogan, in a deal with the EU…)
Planetary devastation will probably precede plutocratic collapse. Because there is so much We The People has to understand, before attempting any revolution, and it is very far from evern knowing what all the dimensions of understanding are. The otherwise excellent article “The Tyranny Of A Traffic Stop” fails to understand the root of the big picture completely: the tyranny we have now, extending all the way down to traffic stops, is one of the means to impose a tyrannical ambiance. Such a satanic ambiance being the essence of plutocracy, when the law violates goodness, decency, and everything human, everyday, just because it can. One falls again in the dominion of that old instinct, perversity, for perversity’s sake.
Allright, this is how the West was conquered. However, the empire now extends from sea, to shining sea. It’s not the empire which has to be extended further, inasmuch as the planet, to be saved. Besides, one can hardly present the US as a model, when it is so much about terrorizing the innocent.
Patrice Ayme’
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 