Blueprint for a Barely Functioning United States

With the untimely passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Republican hypocrisy regarding SCOTUS confirmations that liberals seem to think will eventually shame the GOP into doing the honorable thing (it won’t), massive unrest over the troika of economic, social, and environmental conditions, the contradictions in American life have become much too obvious for anyone with half a brain to ignore.

I hate to admit it, but there is no Left with any real power. And The American death cult and its financiers faces a weak centrist façade that placates and sloganeers. History will show the DNC to be the party of dangerous (white) moderates. The rest of us simply have no other viable vessel for political expression.

Nobody’s asking me, but this is my blog and we could start demanding some things to make life more livable:

  • Restructure the immigration system and dismantle ICE: Family separation, hysterectomies in immigrant concentration camps, young Americans of color locked up for weeks despite having citizenship, raids in hospitals. Tell me where to stop.
  • Abolish the Senate: An antiquated chamber that is wholly undemocratic. Wyoming and California are not equal. It impedes progress. But look, it was designed that way, a mechanism for the new American aristocracy to keep a lid on the popular classes.
  • Along with the Electoral College: Popular vote.
  • End impunity for the ruling class: Bush and Obama for American war crimes and accessories to Saudi crimes in Yemen. Trump for corruption, along with those senators accused of insider trading before the pandemic. If not in court trials at least a public reckoning. As a two-time Obama voter, it’s hard to deny his epic failures on Guantanamo, the Middle East wars, deportations, and more recently orchestrating the consolidation of centrists during the democratic primaries for Biden and squashing an NBA wildcat strike with a phone call. Sound like an impediment to hope and change? Thanks Obama.
  • Close the racial wealth gap and pay reparations: I’ll defer to Darity and Coates.
  • Green New Deal for planetary survival: Fires, floods, heat waves, droughts, etc. It’s happening and it’s finally not just confined to developing nations in the global south.
  • Legislate Medicare for All: Again, the only industrialized country to not have public healthcare. Pandemic, meet employer-based plans that work tooth and nail to deny coverage.
  • Cancel student debt: Give more economic freedom to the generations crushed by debt. It’ll be in everyone’s interest.
  • Reform the courts: Lifetime appointments are monarchical.
  • Demilitarize/defund the police: Duh. They keep murdering people of color without repercussions. They don’t need tanks, they don’t need heat rays, they need accountability.
  • Take away the assault weapons, at least: This one should have happened already.
  • Promote homesteading and invest in rural communities: The rise of masks, staying home, social distancing and telecommuting have pointed the way. Let’s be pioneers,
  • Reduce the workday: 6 hours at most. Let people live. Or at least be able to help their kids with Zoom school in the immediate future.
  • More municipal/state rights: How do we undermine an imperial presidency? By diminishing the reach of the office, building local power, and affecting change at a smaller, and more manageable, administrative level. We have a federal system. Things like health and LGBT rights must be built in to the whole system, but sustainable energy solutions, how to participate in civic life, and what to grow are all regionally and culturally dependent.

And many others. Stop the wars, stop the fracking, stop the pipelines over indigenous land.

Yes; Republicans, structural barriers inside the our political institutions, the “both sides”-ism of the corporate media, and disinformation on social media are huge hurdles to overcome. You know what is also a hurdle to progress? The Democratic Party. I’m almost 34 years old, and as much as I hoped and dreamed for the DNC to be a progressive party.

No more funding equivocating on economics or norms. One guy demolished all our norms and the economy almost collapsed just because people were staying inside and only buying essentials. We just gave away billions to corporations and dead industries like cruise lines. Planes are flying to nowhere to secure contracts with airports, despite their massive carbon footprint. And the government has left Americans with $1,200 (for some, not even that’s).

Whatever happens in November, we’re at the eleventh hour and it’s high time for radical thinking.

Rethinking Mauritania Policy Over Human Rights Abuses

After some deliberation, I’m moving links off of the main page. While I have added a menu option for links that is more prominent and they will still appear in the RSS feed, I removed them for a couple reasons. They are usually not directly related to the photos or journal posts and they are often extended quotes with a bit of my own commentary.

But that won’t stop me from sharing what I read. With reduced time in the my own vampire castle, I prefer the open spaces of the independent web even more.

I might occasionally bundle some diverse links together without any relation to each other, which is pretty in-character for me. But not today.

Amandla Thomas-Johnson, a Dakar-based journalist for Middle East Eye, is very reliable for Mauritania news in English. His piece about five Republican congressmen’s letter to the Secretary of State Pompeo warning of the human rights situation could be a good place to start for people unfamiliar to the country’s issues.

These efforts to lobby what are two of the country’s most stalwart allies come as Mauritanian activists make renewed calls for the government to address racial injustices amid a global groundswell of Black Lives Matter protests.

Mauritania is a key ally for the United States in its ’war on terror’ and hosts the second-largest diaspora community for Mauritanians, despite Trump’s ICE going after some of them.

Mauritania has a deep racism problem embedded into the fabric of society, so much so that even well-meaning people who are not subjected to second-class citizenship often fail to see the problem. Does this remind you of another country? I should hope so.

The congressmen’s letter said: “Mauritania has a long history of hereditary slavery based on ethnic and racial discrimination against Black Mauritanians.” The country formally abolished the practice in 1981 but criminalised it only in 2007, and in 2018 the Global Slavery Index estimated that 90,000 people in Mauritania were living under modern slavery.

On top of the vestiges of slavery that does not look like the chattel plantation slavery system of the America, Mauritania

The congressmen also criticised the lack of accountability for purges by state forces of Black African Mauritanians between 1989-1991, in which tens of thousands – about eight percent of the community – were deported or forced to flee to neighbouring countries. “Mauritania has not provided accountability for mass murders, repression and unwarranted deportations,” their letter said.

Most of those purged from the country were subsistence farmers working on the little arable land Mauritania has, which lies along the Senegal River valley in the south. Others were intellectuals, businesspeople and professionals, members of the thriving urban elites who were pushed out as the government pursued a sectarian Arab-nationalist ideology.

Black Africans make up about a third of the country’s population, as do Arab-Berbers, the dominant group. Haratin, the Black descendants of slaves once owned by Arab-Berbers, account for the rest.

Despite the violence, a law was passed to shield the perpetrators from justice and an amnesty was granted to the security forces involved.

Mauritania has been described as the other apartheid for its treatment of Afro-Mauritanians. As many in the the United States wake up to our own failings, it’s a small but positive step that some in Congress, from the own president’s party no less, are speaking up.