Wednesday, March 15, 2023

Inflation continues as Carrie Underwood cozies up to Axl Rose

Axl Rose?


I don't get it.  Carrie Underwood's singing with him.  The last Thor movie used one of his songs in the film and the ads for it.  I can remember when people were rightly outraged by a song he wrote and performed in the 80s, "One In A Million."  Most remember it today for being homophobic and it absolutely was.  It created a big backlash and Rose ran to Rolling Stone insisted he was molested as a child so give him a pass.  I didn't.

But the song was also racist (and uses the n-word) and it was anti-immigrant.

In what world does a vanilla shake performer like Carrie Underwood -- the epitome of white bread -- get away with rubbing shoulders with him?

It makes no sense at all.

And, no, I don't forgive him.  

His Janis Joplin imitation does not remove "One In A Million" from his history.  

I really question the values of these people.  But then again, immigration is a major issue I work on in my real life and I don't tolerate people who spit on immigrants.  Maybe that's the difference?

Or maybe Carrie Underwood has chosen to embrace homophobia, racism and hatred towards immigrants?  Maybe that's why she blocked Billy Eichner?


Annualized inflation for February was 6 percent in the United States, according to figures released Tuesday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This was a slight decline from January’s level of 6.4 percent, but inflation is still at the highest levels since the early 1980s.

For workers, sustained high rates of inflation have already produced a social disaster. This has been caused by a combination of trillions of dollars pumped into the financial markets at the start of the pandemic and the economic dysfunction caused by the refusal of the US and other world governments to take public health measures to contain the spread of COVID. It has been worsened by the massive outlays for the US-NATO proxy war against Russia and military buildup against China.

February was the 23rd consecutive month in which average wage growth was lower than inflation, a trend that began in April of 2021. Real average hourly earnings declined by 0.1 percent last month compared to January, and 1.3 percent over the previous 12 months.

The past two years have also seen a significant growth of strikes, as workers are being thrust into struggle by intolerable conditions. At the same time, these struggles are developing into ever more open conflicts with the pro-corporate trade union bureaucracy.



This is C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot" fpr Wednesday:


 Wednesday, March 15, 2023.  The antiwar movement?  If you can't be honest about what happened to it, you're never going to revive it.


They're trying to protect children, right?  That's the lie the bigots keep repeating as they go after the LGBTQ+ community and drag artists, that they're trying to protect children.

Hmm.



Hundreds of protesters, including armed white supremacists, and LGBT-community supporters descended on Wadsworth's Memorial Park on Saturday as a humanist group tried to put on a drag queen storytelling event for children.

[. . .]

White supremacist and white nationalist groups, including at least one participant wearing a Proud Boys hoodie, shouted racist and homophobic slurs at onlookers and others, including "Heil Hitler" and a man on a loudspeaker who chanted "Sieg" as protesters responded: "Heil!"





Neo-Nazis waved swastika flags while chanting "there will be blood" on Saturday during a protest against a drag queen story hour held in Wadsworth, Ohio, just west of Akron.



[. . .]

Drag events have been targeted by right-wing activists across the United States in recent months, with a particular focus on those accessible to children. In Tennessee, Republican lawmakers have voted to ban "adult cabaret performance" from public property, or any location which could be viewed by a child, with similar legislation being proposed in a number of other states like Kentucky and Oklahoma.

Footage from Saturday's event taken by documentary filmmaker Ford Fischer shows several different right-wing factions protesting against the drag show.

[. . .]

Speaking to the local website Cleveland.com, Aaron Reed, one of the drag show's organizers, said: "This is where the civil rights struggle of our generation is. Drag queens are not necessarily LGBTQ, but the Nazis don't know that. They see them as a symbol of queer folk and whether we like it or not, that's where the hate is focused right now."


These are the supporters of Mother Tucker Carlson.  People like the great Glenneth Greenwald can't be saved, they're in their own hell.  (At least until Tucker stops booking Glenneth as a guest, then Glenneth will tell us all just how much he hates Tucker -- the way he recently did with Amy Goodman.)  But you have to scratch your head over the John Stauber going down that same hate highway.



John Stauber used to present as a defender of people.  Today, he's one hopping the hatred caravan.  I get it, John, a lot of fake asses are on the left.  And they worked to ostracize you.  Doesn't defend your minimizing the attacks on LGBTQ+ people or your pathetic and disgusting embrace of racists.  And I'm sorry, but I won't fall for your nuclear screaming.


I don't play fear factor.  And I'm also old enough to remember various causes -- including protesting apartheid -- that needed to wait because we could have a nuclear war!!!!!


That's always nonsense.  The fact that we might have a nuclear war is never a reason to put off action on other issues.  Tacking action on other issues encourages actions on all issues -- Newton's First Law Of Motion: A body in motion tends to stay in motion.  


I've heard it before and it didn't intimidate me into silence back then nor does it today.  



 

We have got to use our voices.   

John Tweeted recently, "I am so old I can remember when lefties and progressives opposed the US establishment, its wars, propaganda and corporate globalism."

And I can remember when the turn happened and who led it.  And thing is, John, I called it out in real time while you never, ever did.  You do a few bitchy Tweets over a decade later but you'd never really address it.  To this day.
 

Yes, John, and you're such a coward that you can't talk about why that is.  In fact, you were among the cowards fleeing the stage when this happened.  That's what cowards do, after all.


I didn't flee and I didn't lie.  I stood in front of college audiences who sometimes boo-ed but I still told them Barack Obama -- excuse me, St. Barack -- was not the answer to any prayer and that they were being lied to, hustled and fooled.


Would have really helped if you could have done that.  But like Glenn Greenwald, you had no voice when it mattered.  


The anti-war effort is dead!!!! That's what you scream, right?  It's not dead, first off.  It was weakened.  


And it was weakened by whores you know very well, John .  Matthew Rothschild, for example.  


Does the left support wars and the US establishment?


I'm shocked.  Simply shocked.  It's not like all of you whores didn't encourage them to do that.  That's what the selling of St. Barack was all about.  


The corporate media needs to answer for selling the Iraq War.  We made that point yesterday.

Equally true, Panhandle Media (Beggar Media, if you prefer) needs to answer for selling a generation on the lie that Barack was anti-war, that Barack was brave, that Barack cared about the American people.  He didn't even care enough to end veterans' homelessness -- after promising to do so.  He knew the media -- big and small -- would give him a pass as they always did. 


And he knew that you who screams about George Sorors would take Soros money.  Are we not talking about 2011?  Is that off limits, John.


Sorry, I don't play well with others when others are whores.


George Soros is someone I called out long ago.  He made his money in an unseemly manner and he thinks he can buy democracy and reshape it.


I was calling him out when you weren't.  In fact, I was calling him out when you were taking his money.

Oops.  

John Stauber and people like him are why the wars drag on to this day.


Let's deal with the Afghanistan War in two paragraphs counting this one.  I don't give Joe Biden much credit for anything.  I will applaud him for ending the Afghanistan War.  I know that some whine that life is awful in Afghanistan now and blah blah blah.  It was awful before US troops pulled out.  Afghanistan was never 'liberated.'  A city or two -- US controlled -- had some pretense.  But US forces were on the ground and it never got better for the Afghanistan people.

How long were US forces supposed to stay on the ground?  Forever.  For a hundred years.  What's the answer there?  After two decades, there was nothing that they could accomplish.  It was foolish to keep them there.  It was financially unsound to continue the misadventure.  Joe became the first grown up in the room by ending that.


The Iraq War continues.  US forces continue to occupy Iraq.  Western media tries to pretend that only Iraqis linked to Iran oppose the US military presence.  


The resistance to the US presence has never crumbled in Iraq.


It did crumble in the US.  If John has to lie about it today, that's your sign that he's not a truth teller.
 

In the immediate aftermath of Barack Obama's election as president, the most prominent peace group announced they were taking their toys and going home: United for Peace and Justice.  Fake ass Leslie Cagan and the others didn't have time for Iraq.  They'd used it to elect Democrats -- first allowing the party to take over Congress in the 2006 mid-terms and now, in 2008, retain control of Congress and add the White House.

Barack's victory, UFPJ insisted, meant all US troops would be coming home from Iraq.

They really were charlatans.  

Their lie did more to destroy the peace movement than anything else. 


And we called it out in real time.  We called it when it happened and we continued to call it out over the years.  Doing so in November of 2008 through most of 2012 was difficult because so many wanted to believe in St. Barack.  They'd been sold him by FAIR and UFPJ and THE NATION and Amy Goodman and all the rest.  

It took years before a few others finally began to tell the truth.  And when it did come, the truth was delivered by smaller outlets.  May 2011, RUSSIA TODAY's CROSSTALK explored the death of the antiwar movement in the United States in a story "ANTIWAR.RIP: AFTER 2 YEARS IN THE WHITE HOUSE BARACK OBAMA MADE BOTH OF BUSH WARS HIS OWN:"
 


Peter Lavelle: Alright, I usually like to reward the person who had to get up earliest for this program but we have two people from Los Angeles today.  But I'm going to go to Angela anyway.  Uhm, I read Antiwar.com every single day, many times a day, and you do a wonderful service.  But you know, Antiwar.com, that was something that really brought people together when Bush was going to war, an illegal war that he was pushing and mainstream followed along.  And now, and I think you're a wonderful success, but where is the antiwar movement today?  We have a lot more war.  If you read Antiwar.com, the United States is contemplating military action in even more places right now beyond Libya.  So Angela, what happened?
 
Angela Keaton: Well -- and I owe one of these anwers to one of these guests here today -- but the sobering, unfortunate answer is that neoconservatives and nationalists were right, it was an anti-Bush movement more than it was an antiwar movement. And that's where it went.  Barack Ob -- Partisanship is so strong in the US and Democrats are so wedded to Barack Obama and so afraid of weakening him, they will put up with any number of moral indecency to allow him to keep his vaunted position, including the situation and also because Barack Obama -- there's no leadup,  public leadup to Libya, so there's no chance for organization.  The fact that Democrats are afraid to criticize Obama and the fact that there was so little public debate on Libya says really terrible things about the future of democracy in the US. So this is a very -- it's actually, the whole situation is a bit of a microcosm, a reflection of what I think is actually going on in the US right now.
 
Peter Lavelle:  Thaddeus, if I can go to you, too, also in Los Angeles. The empire -- it's appetite for war is insatiable.  So was the antiwar movement really all about George W. Bush -- as Angela pointed out and as I'm sure Michael's going to tell us in a few minutes? Go ahead.
 
Thaddeus Russell: I agree with everything that Angela said. I think that, in a large part, the antiwar movement during Bush was really about, unfortunately, personality in a sense.  He was seen as sort of this disreputable, low brow Texan who was very crude in his ways but what we've gotten is an imperialist who is actually very refined and very articulate.  And I would just say, liberals now are basically the more effective -- and always have been -- the more effective imperialists than conservatives who usually tend to use brute force and very crude rhetoric.  So that, I think, is one reason but we can talk about many others for why there is no antiwar movement and why there are actually more wars now than before.




Liberal antiwar figures and organizations have consistently failed to grasp the nature of U.S. imperialism and the central role within it played by the Democratic Party.

The most important liberal antiwar coalition in the era of the "war on terror," United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), effectively closed up shop in 2008 with the election of Barack Obama--because its leaders believed that Obama and the Democrats would bring an end to Bush's wars.

Based on these illusions, it stopped organizing even before Obama withdrew from Iraq, failed to revive in opposition to his dramatic escalation of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, and did nothing to oppose his ever-expanding drone war. Today, support for Obama continues to paralyze many liberals from effectively opposing his imperialist policies. 


When these 'brave' voices want to say the peace movement is destroyed, they want to pretend like left activists just lost interest.



No, they were told to go home.  They were told everything was taken care of.


 

Prior to that, United for Peace and Justice was engaging in battles with ANSWER.  UFPJ wasn't a real group.  They were a collective dedicated to electing Democrats -- that's why NOW was part of it.  The National Organization of Women never again pretended to care about war after Barack got into the White House.


And let's remember as well that people didn't want to call out Barack.  They might get booed.  Oh, the horror.  I can take a crowd booing -- and I can usually turn them around and get them on my side.  But these cowards were too afraid to take on Barack.  That sent a message as well.


When Bully Boy Bush occupied the White House, we spoke in a loud voice and made demands.  When Barack became president, these cowards offered the most tentative criticism of him, they minimized and excused his actions over and over.


In 2011, Dahlia Wasfi spoke with Press TV (link has video that is not working currently) about the so-called withdrawal and stated, "We've heard time and again that when we reach a certain benchmark, US forces will withdraw from Iraq, but as most things that have come out of the mouth of the United States' government, it's dishonest. [. . .] We [US] intend to stay there as basically the vice-royalty in Iraq, as a colonial presence."  Dahlia was a strong voice and a rare voice.


Our biggest 'independent' media outlets elected to ignore Iraq after Barack was elected.  After Barack left the White House, liars couldn't tell you reality.  They'd been lying too long.  Which is how THE NATION ended up with a garbage editorial by Phyllis Bennis that we call out in  the February 22, 2018 snapshot:

 

It's a curious editorial -- one that leaves the impression that the Iraq War is over.

If it's over, Phyllis, why are US troops still on the ground in Iraq.

The editorial hits new lows of whorishness as it names various people -- all Republicans.  I'm sorry, Phyllis, but it was the Democratically controlled Senate, in 2002, that voted for the Iraq War.  Not only does she ignore that [fact], she also ignores certain key others.


We were supposed to applaud the garbage as these 'anti-war' voices re-emerged and wanted to talk Iraq but their knowledge base ended in 2008.  They're the ones who destroyed the peace movement.  

CODESTINK?  They ran cover for Barack.  They didn't confront him.  Not even Susan I-Need-Attention Davis went for attention until May 2013 -- a year after Barack re-elected to a second term.  She finally showed up to challenge him as he spoke (about Guantanamo which he never closed).  From the May 23, 2018 snapshot:



Instead of recognizing that fact, Barack, in his speech today, once again pretended that Congress was preventing anyone from leaving Guantanamo.  

US President Barack Obama: I am appointing a new, senior envoy at the State Department and Defense Department whose sole responsibility will be to achieve the transfer of detainees to third countries. I am lifting the moratorium on detainee transfers to Yemen, so we can review them on a case by case basis. To the greatest extent possible, we will transfer detainees who have been cleared to go to other countries.

 Medea Benjamin:  86 are cleared already! Release them today!

US President Barack Obama:  Where appropriate we will bring terrorists to justice in our courts and our military justice system.  And we will insist that judicial review be available to every detainee -

 Medea Benjamin:  It's --

 US President Barack Obama:  Now, ma'am, let me finish.  Let me finish.  Let me finish, ma'am. This is part of free speech.  You being able to speak.  But also you listening and me being able to speak.

Flaunting their great ignorance, his howler monkeys applauded.  No, free speech does not include that Barack gets to "finish."  He wasn't interested in the woman finishing -- and doesn't that say it all?  Or, as Gilda Radner once put it on Saturday Night Live, "You selfish porkface, now I'll never be satisfied."  But the Constitution does not have a clause allowing anyone the right to finish.  Barack is such an idiot and the encouragement of this stupidity by the Cult of St. Barack goes a long way towards explaining why the administration is currently up to the neck in scandals.


El Paso Inc notes Barack also referred to the 68-year-old Medea Benjamin as "young lady."  I guess we should be grateful he didn't call her "sweetie" or  "best looking" or suggest that "periodically when she's feeling down . . ."

It's a historic moment for Medea Benjamin and CODEPINK -- it only took them five years to confront President Barack Obama.  In 2008, as Medea's co-founder Jodie Evans was bundling billions for Barack's campaign (and forgetting to reveal it to the rank and file in CODEPINK), she and Medea ordered 'bird dogging' of Barack's chief rival in the race for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination Hillary Clinton.  They attacked Hillary repeatedly, busting up one event after another.  They never did the same to Barack, not even after he was elected.  Some argued that CODEPINK was afraid to confront a bi-racial man.  That argument holds no water because they never worried how racist it might look for the various White women attacking African-American Condi Rice repeatedly in public.  No, they didn't attack him or hold him to any standard because they elected him, they used their organization to destroy his rivals and to put him into office.   


There was a thriving peace movement and then it was steered into elect Barack Obama.  It never recovered from that whoring.  It never recovered from a bunch of whores who repeatedly spent years covering for Barack, excusing Barack, etc, etc.


Liars like Norman Solomon who used their platforms in 'independent media' to whore for Barack.  Norman was smarter than most.  When appearing in corporate media in 2008, he would disclose that he was a delegate -- a pledged delegate for Barack Obama -- but when showing up on the PACIFICA RADIO programs and its ilk, he'd never disclose that.  In fact, PACIFICA RADIO did a whole debate 'analysis' for two hours and every guest on it was a Barack supporter but the listeners weren't allowed to know that and Larry Bensky didn't feel that was information that needed to be disclosed. 



Let's note SHADOW PROOF's video on the peace movement that streamed this week.



The following sites updated:



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