Sunday, August 4th, 2019
Editor’s Note – Four Problems and America’s Mullah
Author: Stephan A. Schwartz
Source: Schwartzreport
Publication Date: 5 August 2019
Link: Editor’s Note – Four Problems and America’s Mullah
Source: Schwartzreport
Publication Date: 5 August 2019
Link: Editor’s Note – Four Problems and America’s Mullah
Stephan: Like many of you, my day began with the latest White supremacist massacre, this time in El Paso. But even worse as I was writing this yet another massacre, this one in Ohio, broke in the news, nine dead, 16 injured. The headlines had hardly cleared from the massacre hours earlier in Gilroy by another White supremacist.
As I have been saying for three years, Muslim terrorists are not the problem in America, it is White Supremacists, nativists, White nationalists. We have an American Taliban, and its Mullah is Donald Trump. It is his language, his rants, his rallies that have dragged the White racist zombie out of our collective psyché.
In my view, we have four problems that we will not face. First, White Supremacy and the cult of the "other." Second, we have a gun problem. Third, we have a corruption problem arising from private and corporate money in our politics. Fourth, the Republican Party has become a christofascist racist cult, with Donald Trump as its Mullah.
These four problems are destroying American democracy with stunning rapidity, like a violent storm felling a rotted tree.
Nothing is going to stop this but an uprising of citizens demanding a Constitutional nation, where all are created equal, and the state supports wellbeing, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The rest of the world awaits AmeriKa’s second uprising. We who live in other country’s see the obsession with sex, money and violence, although not necessarily always in that order. Puerto Rico, Hong Kong, Russia and France are all having many popular uprisings. Americans seem to be staying at home.
Very true words Stephen. i would love to hear you go deeper to the fundamental economic, religous and cultural issues that allow the expression of hate, fear and domination we are witnessing.
Trump doesn’t create racism, Clinton fdidn’t create mass incarceration and the trade tariff system that gutted America, Bush didn’t create endless war anymore than Obama did and it was more than Obama that oversaw the shifting of one-third of the wealth of the nation to a tiny few in the last 10 years. They are all figureheads, liberal and conservative, Democrats and Republicans, for a complex system whose power at some point is derived from the acquiesence and participation of the people.
Clearly it is time to withold approval and participation in the system that is annihilating human culture and potentially all life on the planet….but what do we replace it with?
What are our fundamental values? I hesitate to think that our values truly are property and the right of a few to rule, as our fouding fathers bequeathed us in the current American Constitution. Because clearly there lies death for all living beings.