LUMPENPROLETARIAT—[20 JAN 2021] Today is Inauguration Day. The two-party dictatorship will install its latest dictator. The fact that the Democrat Party colludes with the Republican Party to block alternative political parties from the presidential debates and from ballot access in many states across the nation with top-two primary laws and whatnot means we, essentially, have a two-party dictatorship. If we continue with this polarizing two-party system, we will end up with a dictatorial single party rule. I mean, for all intents and purposes, we’re already there. There is little to no public confidence in the two-party system. Yet, the state keeps ramming it down our throats. Why?
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Yes, our democracy is gasping. We gotta pay attention. So, I implore us all to take notes, to pay attention to what’s going on. Please, let’s mindfully think of the wellbeing of others outside of our grouping(s). Let’s try to expand our circles of concern and circles of trust. Let’s build relationships with our neighbors, even if we suspect we dislike their politics. There is always a line one mustn’t cross. One must eatablish healthy boundaries to avoid narcissistic and/or racist abuse. Let’s consider what Jaques Derrida referred to as The Politics of Friendship. Deliberative processes will always fail to produce harmony, if fueled by adversarial sentiments.
Here’s what some voices of reason are saying about the ongoing fascist assaults on the American republic and our hopes for democracy.
Wednesday, January 20, 2021
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05:00 PST, KPFK > Tom Hartman > [TP]
05:00 – 06:00 PST, WPFW & WBAI (simulcast) > Democracy Now![…] 0551, guest guy corroborated positive view of Biden’s climate team picks. 0553, m eric dyson sneered attitude in his tone at at Juan Gonzalez. ‘Well, thanks for inviting me back in.” Dyson is a Democrat Party apologist. Your author called him out on this at a televised lecture at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Democracy Now! satirically played the Taylor Swift hit song during a music break today. I gotta admit, it was apropos.
05:00 PST, Arun Gupta [TW] 05:28 PST, Prof. Jilanda Baker, author of Revolutionary Power on climate policies of president 45 and upcoming 46. With Biden’s team “we’re really set u0 for success,” she said. But Dems always promise reforms in the public interest. But, instead, Dems invariably serve corporate interests. Let’s review the historical record. The best indicator of future behavior is past behavior. The professor sounded woefully naive. And host Sonali knoww better. But, instead of calling out her naivete, she handled it with kid gloves. Worse, the host moved on to science to bolster her credentials as an authority figure, but also giving credibility to her bourgeois politics. Democrat Party apologia is the Achilles heel of Risung Up with Sonali.
06:00 PST, KPFK > The Stephanie Miller Show > [TW] liberal, bourgeois politics from giddy white-sounding folks, who seem ecstatic Biden is about to become president #46. SM began by bickering about this “pardon party.” Then, she played a satirical ‘Pardon Party’ song. It seems SM needs to interview Abby Martin to get a reality check, help her mature, ‘evolve’.
06:00 PST, KPFA > Democracy Now! > […] 06:05, “Turn on gas.” WTF?! […] 06:16 PST, On Trump pardons, Blackwater mercenaries, who massacred people at Nisur(sp?) Square. WTF?! (cf. investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill on Blackwater). 06:18 PST, John Kiriakou, on the presidential pardon process. ‘I had to hire a lobbyist and pay $50,000. And the money went down the drain. And I got no pardon. But others pay multiple times that amount. I was offered a pardon for $2M. I said why would I pay $2M to recover a $700K pension? Giuliani dropped it. They don’t see it as a bribe.’ […] “Kirchner was very cold, very stiff.” ‘What do you want? I want a pardon. I filled out the paperwork. But nothing happened.’ […] ‘I was disappointed when Biden appointed […] Lavigne(sp?)’ […] Dr. Michael Eric Dyson verbosely summarized Trump’s crimes, then closed by saying Trump would be ‘quickly swept away’. Most people disagree, understanding the white supremacy, which is morphing into white nationalism, thanks to president #45, is baked into the cake, so to speak. 06:40 PST, Wahid(sp?)
07:00 PST, KPFA > UpFront with Brian Edwards-Tiekert (BET) & Kat Brooks (KB) > Intro. KB: ‘Circa 08:00, we’ll talk about DC with a professor.’ […] > News Headlines > Mr. Trump did not say Biden’s name, as he bid farewell. He’ll be the first president in like 150 years to not attend his successor’s inauguration. This is a red flag, a sign of further deterioration of the mighty American ship of state. […] 07:08 PST, [TP] KB described a shocking incident of an armed pro-cop counter-protestor being given aid and comfort by on-duty cops, instead of protecting Black Lives Matter (BLM) demonstrators. […] 07:19 PST, interview regarding Diablo Valley College (DVC) student being deported. DVC is the home of Project Censored, if memory serves me.
07:00 PST, WPFW > […] 07:23 PST, “the 15th Amendment”. ‘It took 50 years for women to get the vote.’ [TW] “Reconstruction”. It’s interesting that the last time there was an assault on our Capitol, it was after Reconstruction, after black people began to organize themselves economically (cf. ‘Black Wall Street’). And that assault, basically, ended the Reconstruction Era and ushered in the so-called Jim Crow Era. Jim Crow has continued until the Civil Rights Movement, which ended in assassinations, FBI surveillance of activists, COINTELPRO, the CIAs global war against the left in the 1970s, including Operation Condor in Latin America, and likely other covert operations against the entire left side of the political spectrum in America. […] Dick Gregory story. ‘This is Wake Up and Stay Woke’ 07:30 PST, local WPFW announcements
07:00 PST, WBAI > […] 07:31 PST, talk, ‘parents do not have to subject their kids to these mandatory vaccines.’ Local NY and state politics.
07:00 PST, KPFK > > 07:33 PST, Susan Burton(sp?): ‘I’m definitely optimistic about the future of the United States.’ Margaret Prescod tried to address the crimes of the Democrats whilst framing it in a sugar-coated pill of Democrat Party apologia. This is that political black hole known as the political center. This is the point, the event horizon, if you will where liberal or bourgeois political analysis breaks down and starts failing to make any sense. The only way any of this analysis makes any sense is if one is scared to death of the Republican Party, such that one accepts whole cloth the two-party system, nay the two-party dictatorship. The poltical center is a black hole where nothing, not even the light of reason can escape. This is the deluded reasoning, which has locked us into the two-party dictatorship—-all this rhetoric in this conversation between “Susan” and Margaret Prescod. “You always remained principled and accountable.” What? She gave no political strategy for leveraging power. Democrats engage in culture wars, not politics, I hate to say. This is why the American political center has perpetually shifted rightward my whole life, since the 1970s. It seems, the Democrat Party has not been a sincere opposition party since the assassination of JFK. […] 07:44 PST, MP, ‘I promised you an MLK clip, but first, let’s listen to canned speeches from Biden/Harris. What? Why? That state propaganda needs no further amplification. Only a hardcore Democrat partisan at Pacifica Radio would broadcast such canned speeches. They already saturate the corporate media. Does it also have to saturate independent media, too? We say no. We want to hear from alternative political parties. Kamala Harris delivered bourgeois, neoliberal drivel. As the author of Worldly Shame, building on the intellectual accomplishments of Hannah Arendt and Frantz Fanon, discussed in his book, entry into the neoliberal system as a person of color means leaving your people behind. There is no we. All of your accomplishments are taken to be individual, not a product of the roots of the individual. This creates a certain shame in the person of color seeking assimilation into a white supremacist nation, which never fully accepts you. The only way is to abandon your former allegiance to your roots and to commit to the neoloberal project of hyper-individuality, which tolerates U.S. imperialism, police state apartheid, corporate crime and corruption. As John Lennon sang in “Working Class Hero”, first you must learn how to overlook all of the sins of U.S. imperialism and fascist policing, “first, you must learn how to smile, as you kill.” > 07:51 PST, recent Biden speech clip. > 07:56 PST, MLK clip sounds discordant in the context of the bourgeois, neoliberal rhetoric from Harris and Biden. “This may very well be the indictment of America…”
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Dr. Heideman described Mr. Biden’s and capital’s “relaxation of deficit worries”, as a “New Day in Babylon”. “But what has distinguished Biden more than anything is his total disregard for the deficit fearmongering that ruled both the Clinton and Obama administrations.” Indeed. This is an excellent point. Also relevant in this discussion is the work of one of your author’s former professors at UMKC, at the heterodox economics department. Dr. Stephanie Kelton has popularized modern monetary theory, MMT. In her New York Times bestseller, The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy, she discusses how we can use modern monetary theory (MMT) to create badly needed jobs, expand health care coverage, address climate change, and update our withering infrastructure. The impact of MMT, which shows how a sovereign currency issuer, such as the United States, can always afford to spend in its own currency. The problem is the state and Wall Street have learned this lesson, privately, and used it to enrich themselves, as Dr. Kelton explains in the book, citing Mr. Trump as an example of the white collar crime and looting. But, publicly, the state has feigned ignorance of MMT and of Dr. Kelton, the job guarantee program and so on. As economist Dr. L. Randall Wray says, We have the resources and means to end involuntary unemployment. We only lack, as a society, the political will. And, thus, alas, MMT is scarcely known, or else we’d expect Dr. Heideman would’ve cited this pertinent information.
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08:00 PST, KPFA > UpFront > KPFA News Headlines > As news reports of Biden’s ‘aggressive’ immigration reform will only further alienate the 74 million, who only want Trump. Biden’s challenge is to tour the reddest states, hear them out, and address their valid concerns, and explain why their invalid concerns are not valid. If Biden doesn’t make attempts to win over those 74 million, it seems the only possible outcome is further polarization of American politics. Already, we’re hearing news of increasing political violence on American streets. Prior to the election, anecdotally, we saw an increase in messed up YouTube videos of racists/reactive narcissists filming themselves beating up (i.e., physically assaulting) people of color. It seems these people are reacting to right-wing media messaging, which is provoking racists toward acting out physical violence. The news is buzzing with talk about an endgame for white supremacist/fascist America is to provoke a so-called ‘race war‘. This is an old idea, which goes back at least as far as Charles Manson in the 1960s and his whole ‘helter skelter’ narrative. We recall Dr. Dre’s aborted Helter Skelter project, in which the music album concept was to take on this white supremacist narrative. Interestingly, Pacifica Radio’s Guns and Butter has covered Manson’s links to CIA, et al.
08:30 PST, KPFA > KPFA News Headlines > [TP] 0844TW! Man aftwr my own heart that’s what we’re doing hwre at Lumpenproletariat. But BET and his KPFA faction have always opposed that, East coast caller. Sorry, my east coast ally. (Check IndyBay.org for tons of local articles on the internal conflicts between BET’s faction on KPFA’s Local Station Board, or LSB. For those not in the know, Pacifica Radio won democratic governance of its radio stations after a 1999 lockout, in which bourgeois Democrats (i.e., Mary Frances Berry, Lynn Chadwick, et al.) tried to sell out, and sell off, all the Pacifica Radio free speech stations. They’ve gone through various name changes, as they always fell into ill-repute with local activists.
09:00 KPFA > Biden’s acceptance speech paid lip service to unity. If I were a Trump loyalist, this speech would sound like total bullshit, as defined by philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt, as speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. It’s a tone deaf, or evil, speech because it tells bourgeois and liberal Democrats what they want to hear, whilst condescending to the already disenfranchised and alienated Americans, who feel so left out they turn to white supremacy, white nationalism, and even outright fascism. Biden said, listen to me, not I will listen to you. That’s not how we achieve truth and reconciliation. […] 09:39 PST, I just heard MP lie: she said we didn’t push Obama… Those who participated in the Occupy Wall Street Movement in the USA will never forget how Obama admin cracked OWS skulls. […] Andy Zee [TP]
10:00 PST, KPFA > […] 10:28 PST, this guy talking, I’m sorry to say, sounds naive. So much to say, so little time. Sunsara Taylor makes sense, but it’s so intellectually lonely being a commie. Many of us are so happy about a national Pacifica broadcast featuring real leftists. But the fake leftists, or liberals, bourgeois, run for the hills.
1058, KPFA cut away to sitar sounds, censors national broadcast.
10:59 kpfk wbai wpfw (simulcast) continues national broadcast
11:00 PST, KPFA > The Talkies > Kris Welch participated in the censorship of political perspectives to her left. This is the public radio equivalent of the CIA’S global war against the left. Censor true left perspectives in the Bay Area and NorCal. 11:07 PST, Kris Welch invited her factional ally Mitch Jeserich. Both KPFA partisans were active in the 2000s against grassroots activists calling for Pacifica Radio stations to connect the dots between the local grassroots movements in the various Pacifica signal areas. A caller asked BET this morning. He said nothing. Now, his faction censors the national broadcast. Pay attention people.
11:20 PST, Kris Welch broadcast long-time Democrat from the East Bay Area. “I feel like i’m home, she said, as the steam went out in their fake bonding. Such bullshit. ” (See voice notes.)
c. 11:27, KPFK (simulcast) Margaret Prescod rejoins the national conversation to say, too many of us are in our own little silos, invoking Matt Taibbi’s recent analysis of American journalism. […] 11:40 PST, Reverend Barber
c. 12:00 wpfw [TP] Super moving. “I Have A Dream” speech. ‘We have come to cash a check’ ‘Gradualism won’t work’. I feel like I’m hearing this for the first time. Maybe the first, as a man.
12:00 PST, KPFA […] 12:30 PST, a white-sounding lady just asked Mitch about taking action. She felt unheard. Mitch behaved like a douchebag. […] 12:53 PST, to MJ’s credit he just read a message via Facebook from some of my Berkeley acquaintances (e.g. journalist/activist Ann Garrison, grassroots KPFA activist Virginia Browning. They said what many of us were thinking, MJ side steps the real issues. MJ, BET, Kris Welch, et al seem incapable of seriously and sincerely engaging with meaningful critique.
13:00 PST, KPFK > talk, covid (I think it was…)
13:00 PST, KPFA > local SF/Oakland Bay Area immigrant history
13:00 wpfw […] music “culture break” we’ve heard a lot today”
1355 wpfw & wbai (simulcast)
1400 kpfk lawyers guild show […] guest lawyer said for 2020 BLM protests saw a new low in U.S. policing: legal observers were arrested. But arresting officers hid their identies, and arresting officers couldn’t be identified; so, they couldn’t testify against protesters. 14:17, end of first guest. Begin second guest
14:00 PST, WPFW > […] c. 14:20 PST, MLK speech, super relevant, more prophetic than ever. It’s sad that almost no public figure or leader is this honest anymore. [TP] […] music, “America”, horns, jazz instrumental
15:00, WBAI [NYC] & WPFW [DC] > news [TP] […] activist rights, habeas corpus, “police running amok”
15:00 PST, kpfa(?)”Controversy” by Prince
15:30 PST, WBAI [NYC] & WPFW [DC] simulcast [TP] […] On the unsung MLK […] 15:46 PST, Abby Martin just finished talking [TP] […]
1552, Kpfk tp callins what would u like 2 C in 1st 100 days?
16:00 PST, WPFW [DC] & WBAI [NYC] > Special Broadcast: Normalcy, Never Again, Part Two with panel, including Abby Martin, Margaret Flowers, et al. Today’s Pacifica broadcasts have been very revealing for someone like me. My notes above reveal many of my KPFA acquaintances are still paying close attention. Ann Garrison and Virginia Browning commented during Mitch Jeserich’s KPFA broadcast to say some of what I was thinking. Of course, I respect Ann Garrison as far more astute than your author. I mean she’s a real journalist. I can only share a few pages from my paperback diaries. One day, I will be an empty-nester with more time on my hands. My family was not understanding about my previous activities in support of free speech media, back in the mid-2000s. I spent time working with Abby Martin on Media Roots and also monitoring the corruption within KPFA and Pacifica Radio, as Democrat partisans with a bourgeois budget obstructed the same type of grassroots activism and advocacy, which so many Pacifica Radio callers were asking for today. At one point, earlier today, when an elderly woman, who said she lived through the 1930s when fascism and totalitarianism were on the rise. I remember so many times, when a younger person said the same exact thing to Mitch Jeserich. Those times, Mitch was dismissive. This time, the age and gravitas of the elderly woman caller left Jeserich speechless. But he still refused to fully engage with the authenticity of the people. It’s so strange. I don’t think Mitch and his Democrat pals, Wellstone Democrats, to be precise, can ever fully empathize with the poor the way Dr. King did, or the way the authentic callers expression real conviction. I guess Mitch, Kris, BET, et al are just liberals; and liberals are simply complacent. They don’t have the urgency, which people of color have and/or non-bourgeois people do. It’s a matter of insincerity for these KPFA liberals, who opted out of the urgency of today’s grassroots national Pacifica Radio dialogue. Usually, it’s not so obvious because they mask their insincerity behind programming constraints and whatnot. That’s why Dr. King pointed out how the phony liberals were probably the most obstructive to meaningful socioeconomic justice for the needy, for the poor and for people of color. I’ve been monitoring the bourgeois faction at KPFA for over 20 years. There is no other explanation for this faction’s behavior at KPFA today, opting out of the most progressive segments of the national broadcast to cut to Kris Welch’s evil Democrat Party apologism. Elsewhere on Pacifica Radio (e.g., WPFW) they played speeches by Dr. King, which, at times, sounded like he was talking about these white liberals blocking grassroots activist voices at KPFA and Pacifica.
16:30 PST, WPFW & WBAI (simulcast) > panel discussion continues. Topic: Dr. King’s “big triplet” of three evils: capitalism, imperialism, and materialism. Listening to Dr. King today felt like I never actually heard him before. My teachers lied to me, if not outright, then by omission. […] 16:35 PST, Abby Martin. Again, it’s so nice to hear my former colleague. She’s still hitting two of Dr. King’s ‘big three triplets’: imperialism and capitalism. Our generations take it for granted that materialism is understood to be without virtue. But we never challenge materialism the way we challenge imperialism or even capitalism. It seems materialism is so central to American identity, and at the same time, the gains seem to outweigh the effort. But it’s a question of spirituality, which the left has ignored at its own peril. We all still have so much to learn from Dr. King. I would venture to say, the whiter we are—on average—the less attention we paid to Dr. King. It’s important to remember that Dr. King died a lonely man because all of the liberals, especially white liberals abandoned him, once Dr. King began to see the problem wasn’t just America, but the whole of western civilization. (Read William Pepper for more of the erased history of the life and assassination of Dr. King.) Dr. King began to see the need for international solidarity, the way Malcolm X also did. Such humanitarian leadership is not acceptable to the American ruling class. […] 16:59 PST, “You cannot expect change through electoral politics.” Not when we have a two-party dictatorship. We demand ranked-choice voting. We demand to abolish the electoral college. We demand to abolish the Senate. We demand to abolish the Executive; it has proven itself a failed model of leadership, which is prone to abuses of power. We demand an MMT-based job guarantee program (cf. Dr. Stephanie Kelton, The Deficit Myth). We demand democratic worker-run workplaces. Abby’s right, given the electoral system as is. But there’s nothing that says we can’t work to expose its deficiencies or find necessary remedies for our republic.
1700 wpfw & wbai music
1700 kpfk talk
1700 KPFA Flashpoints
18:00 PST, WPFW > archival audio of 1965 phone call between LBJ & MLK. The east coast side of Pacifica Radio seems more sincere and committed to meaningful reflection about the social ills of the day. 18:04 PST, host talks over audio to provide some context. “We have to remember our history.” Indeed. But, on average, one KPFA faction, the dominant one, tends to use history to obfuscate the present. It’s like narcissistic abuse. It’s hard to prove unless you are in the relationship and you see the toxic behavioral patterns over time. New people to KPFA are co-opted in and seduced, like they tried with me. Bonnie Simmons actually tried to sell me on the virtues of sophistry, as if I didn’t already know Socrates’ opposition to the Sophists. Her and her cronies mistook me for a non-reader, evidently. I’ve written about these experiences at IndyBay.org. See the indy media section. […] music, jazzy […] 18:16 PST, spoken word, black-sounding young woman. Yo, this is for my identification purposes. Don’t accuse me of hate, y’all. I’m just callin’ it like I hear it. […] c. 18:18 PST, more Herb Alpert-sounding trumpet funky music. 18:24 PST, Hugh Masakela – “No Woman, No Cry” Find music, which keeps you strong and calm, in equanimity. Solidarity.
18:00 PST, WBAI > […] 18:28 PST, talk, “Green New Deal”, will Biden support? is the question under discussion. Anti-capitalist analysis. Elon Musk, “union buster”. 18:32, live audio from workers on a picket line! We need more live coverage of picket lines. Gustavo. Revolutions Per Minute. Call-ins later. Robert Cuffy(sp?) What should Biden’s first 10 days look like? Depends on one’s level of consciousness, dunnit? […] 18:42 PST, [TP] 18:56 PST, I called in… I didn’t say anything that I wanted to say. I mean I guess I made one main point, about America’s two-party dictatorship: Let’s not delude ourselves. What electoral power does the American left have? None. Vicarious political life mediated through the Democrat Party is like a toxic trauma bond, an abusive relationship, where the voters are the codependent to the narcissistic abuse of the Democrat Party.
19:00 PST, WPFW > […] audio collage of jazz and MLK clips. Herbie Hancock, “Tribute to Dr. King” from album The Prisoner. Max Roach. “Someday We’ll All Be Free” by Donny Hathaway. Second time we heard this on Pacifica Radio today, apros pro. […] John Coltrane – “Alabama” (with McCoy Tyner. (Wow! McCoy Tiner! Your author had the privilege of seeing McCoy Tyner at Keystone Corner Yoshi’s in Oakland one night. Amazing.) Then, Strange Fruit by Billie Holiday 19:40 PST, [TP] Bobby Hutcherson Slow Change[…] “Mississippi Goddamn” by Nina Simone. She played that song, when we saw her in Oakland, on 11 JUL 2001 at the swanky Paramount Theater in Oakland, California. That was…I’ll never forget that concert. […] Cecil Paine – Martin Luther King […]
20:00 PST, WBAI > […] 20:49 PST. music, Brazilian-sounding
20:00 PST, KPFK > […] 20:52 PST, entreviata
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[These are my raw notes. I will expand and edit, as time constraints allow. TP = transcript pending volunteer labor. Please help transcribe breaking news and information. It’s urgent that we document the people’s narrative of the events of January 6th and the aftermath of American social relations. Please, also monitor corporate media and right-wing media, too. Solidarity.]
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[20 JAN 2021]
[Last modified on 6 MAR 2023 at 18:44 PST]
Lumpenproletariat 