THE END OF AN AGE

GRENFELL TOWER

A SYMBOL OF THE POLITICAL FIRES TO COME

Today is June 19, 2017. A series of important events have occurred around the world in the last week. The most significant is the fire at Grenfell tower in London. Here low income residents were burned to death and the entire building was reduced to a smoking ruin. Why? Well this occurred because the people managing the building wanted to pretty up the site of poverty in the view of the rich people who lived next door, and they put panels on the outside of the building that were unsafe. The panels caught on fire and 70 people were burned alive inside. This is a great analogy of our world here where you have policies to hide and pretty up poverty, death, and human suffering and put a pretty face on a malevolent situation

THE END OF AN AGE OF FALSE PROMISES

We are at the end of an age. It's the end of the neoliberal plutocratic age. It's the end of the fairytale world presented by Bill Clinton, that he was going to build this plutocratic fairyland with the plutocrats in charge and the liberal establishment cashing in and making all this look good. Clinton presided over some of the most malevolent and evil policies towards poverty and human suffering in American history. Specifically, the three strikes and you're out campaign in criminal justice and the macabrely titled "welfare reform law" which wasn't a welfare reform law at all, it was a war on the poor. It was a criminal war against the weak and the sick, all who were basically used as cannon fodder to prop up Clinton's political order. The world of Bill Clinton and the world of Barack Obama is coming to an end.

These two particular individuals are similar to the doctor my cousin had. My cousin died of cancer. Why did he die of cancer? There are many reasons. But one of the main reasons he died of cancer is his doctor, giving him Obama style good news, that there was no cancer, that it was just the flu, or whatever reason he had each week, that things were okay, "don't worry." And by the time the cancer was correctly diagnosed it was too late and Nikki ended up dead.

Now with Obama, sort of a classic example of that, we have these massive problems of poverty. Runaway debt in international trade, runaway debt in terms of the budget deficit, runaway imperialism and Obama claimed all this was just harmless good clean fun. He was never more optimistic things that things had never been more wonderful things. Obama has not been given proper credit for spending so much money in a lunatic Imperial scheme to turn Afghanistan into wonderful social democracy, that the cost of the Afghan war, thanks to Obama, is now about the same as as the Iraq war under under Bush. This is a world of illusion and these allusions are beginning to collapse. There's a limit to how long you can dish up garbage to paper over problems.

THE 2016 ELECTION - A TURNING POINT

And the 2016 election is a turning point. On a positive note, you have the Sanders campaign where people said enough is enough we don't want a corrupt warmonger, we don't want a corrupt plutocratic public like Hillary Clinton. Unfortunately, the adult voters in the Democratic Party were cheated and the plutocratic establishment intervened in the election and selected Hillary Clinton. She wasn't elected, she was selected, and Sanders was cheated out of the nomination. Now we never heard the end of this from the establishment liberal media that we had to do this, that said that Hillary would win, it was inevitable and we had to do it to stop Trump. We see how well that worked. Right? That worked just about as well as the coating on the Grenfell towers that all went up in smoke on election day. And Donald Trump got elected. The popularity of Trump and Sanders is because people are finally waking up to the fact that endless happy talk garbage coming out of fake politicians like Obama and Clinton no longer works.

The reality of what's going on in their lives can't be covered up by the virtual-reality put out by the corporate media, particularly the liberal establishment corporate media, the MSNBC, and so on and so forth. That can't be covered up anymore.

THE STUPIDITY OF AN EVIL PLUTOCRACY

DO THEY THINK THEY WILL BE IMMUNE FROM THEIR OWN POLICIES?

Now trump's election, the Trump administration is turning into a political devil's triangle and a train wreck of truly epic dimensions. A key part of the problem is that the populism expressed by Trump personally has been completely subverted by the Pence/Ryan appointees and what you have is a criminal monstrosity, which in my view, has never seen been seen before in history where the upper classes backing them — and not all the upper classes — but the upper class Republican powers at be backing backing Trump have put forth budget and healthcare plans which are going to literally kill hundreds of thousands of middle income and low income Americans by taking away their health insurance, by cutting vitally needed social programs which were already very low anyway. I mean America is the only country that doesn't have universal health insurance to begin with. So these things were not exactly out of control or whatever. They're already at horrendously low levels. But that was not enough. No it wasn't enough. The greed was so great that they wanted more and more is what they are going to try to get. Now you just gotta stop and think about how utterly evil this kind of behavior is, and how totally psychotic and depraved this policy is that these people are so out of control, so twisted and perverted by greed that they are willing to kill to get more money. This is like a street gang. It's like a drive by. The budget and healthcare policies of Trump and Ryan are very similar to a drive-by shooting where where these characters are manning the getaway car. All this is a campaign for death. It is a campaign for murder. Now it is also something else. It is a campaign for political upheaval and political suicide. The upper classes in America are out of control. Now these people are ultimately going to be consumed and destroyed by their own madness.

Let's take on an analogy which is highly relevant to this whole situation. Hurricane Sandy damn near destroyed New York. New York below 34th St. lost electric power. Had that continued for an extended period of time, just another two weeks or so, you would've had to evacuate New York. You would've had mass death among the richest of apartments in this country, and fortunately the lights did come back on. This, however, was a warning.

Now let's just step back a bit and get back to reality, and get out of fantasy. The vulnerability of the upper classes in America in a world where an infectious disease can come from an African rainforest and get into downtown New York via a traveler in a matter of hours. In a world where the most horrendous forms of diseases are being perfected by biological terrorists, national health insurance isn't an act of charity. In fact, even the Nazis, when they occupied Czechoslovakia, understood that national health insurance was necessary to keep their own troops from getting sick. Even the Nazis understood this. But the upper classes do not. Not only do not understand this. They want to spread disease around themselves. So I mean just process that one. Just process the total insanity of that.

Now getting back to hurricane Sandy, New York got a warning that it's vulnerable to mother nature, that you would've thought that as a result of that why my goodness there'd be a crash program to protect New York, the global headquarters of the plutocrats. Right? So you would think that you would've done that. I'm from New York and I know about the stuff you would've done. What's been recommended for years is to build a floodgate system at the Verrazano Narrows, just like there's a floodgate system it at the Thames in London, and in Holland, and other flood prone areas of the world to stop a storm surge going up the East River and the Hudson River. Now this has not been done. Did Barack Obama after winning the election immediately propose that? No, Barack Obama did not propose that. He was busy spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a campaign of global imperialism in Afghanistan. So let's assume there is no global warming, let's assume the climate is just peachy, let's assume everybody's optimistic. There's nothing that prevents a category four storm or a category five storm from hitting New York City. It's very possible and part of the problem with the statistics on a lot of this is that they only go back a couple hundred years. In other words, in the year 1100 there are no statistics for weather in New York and so forth for our frame of reference. But on the other hand, we know the climate's getting more screwed up, so this would be a logical thing to do. But these people have not done that. They have not done that. So a storm approaches. The storm approaches. And the the upper classes and the Republicans in the year 2017 are sowing the wind looking around the world

THE GLOBAL STRUCTURE OF REVOLUTION

As I mentioned before, we need to discuss more the global structure of revolution. It won't be the same in every country. No it will not. The situations in America are very different from the situations in Europe or Japan or China or Russia or whatever, and the Russian situation vis-à-vis America's are also critically troubling since the Democratic Party, starting in 2014, has been hogwild for a new Cold War with Russia, which will further exacerbate all economic problems and will ultimately, if it gets out of control, end life on this planet. So there's a there's a problem right there. There's another problem right there, of a road to disaster.

To end this lecture on perhaps a naïve positive note, let's look at what's happened in France. And though it will be very difficult for what happened in France to happen in the United States because we have a two-party system enshrined by political cronyism and so on and so forth, but in France Mr. Macron, and he may or may not be a good guy, and he may or may not turn out to be the right person, but he has produced a nonviolent political miracle, which is just the the scale of which I think is not adequately appreciated. Not just that he won the presidency, that significant, but that's not the real significance. The real significance is what happened yesterday where he sat up out of the clear blue sky his own political party that literally obliterated the Socialist party and literally obliterated almost all major political parties in France. That's the equivalent of the United States if say Mike Bloomberg ran for president and set up a political party which won a majority of the US House of Representatives. That's how big that is. France is not, contrary to the propaganda of the establishment media though, French socialists are not going down the drain, no they are not. France does not have the severity of the problems in the United States. France has a social welfare state. In my view it's poor, they probably gone too far, I think government spending in the case of France is probably too high, but comparing France to America, France is in very good shape.

America is in terrible shape and has no social safety net worth squat. And what little that it had was severely damaged by Clinton's criminal welfare reform law. Ryan, Trump and Pence are planning to just absolutely shred what little is left of the social safety net. On top of that America is just a giant debt bubble. It's the student debt bubble which is a complete disaster of which will never be paid, and students are are are in terrible shape because of political payoffs they can't file for bankruptcy. They are the only form of debtor that cannot do this, cannot file for bankruptcy to discharge their debts. The trade debt, America's minus $8 trillion after years of stupidity. The budget deficit, a structural deficit of $600 billion, which Trump is going to pour gasoline on, because even after the murderous budget cuts there are huge gaps for the tax cuts. That's how far out of control greed ha gotten. The wholesale destruction of environmental programs etc. etc. etc.

So America is a bomb waiting to go. It is. America, in conclusion, is Grenfell Tower before the fire, and the fire is coming. The details of how we prepare for that and hopefully try to prevent it are a key part of the agenda we face in 2017. This is the end of this lecture.