If you ever thought about what you’d do if you lived under fascism in Europe in the 1930s or during slavery in America in the 1850s, stop wondering. Just look in the mirror. What are you doing now? That’s what you’d have done then… because back then is right now.

I was speaking to my son, who said I, dumb old dad, was the only one like me in his social circle. His teacher, grandmother, repeat items they pick up from the news fairly uncritically. They seem to care who will win the next congressional race. He knows kids who don’t care about politics, or want to join the Young Democrats. Tumpers are everywhere. But this old dad, though, is like an nutty anarchist refugee who stepped out of The Conquest of Bread, only lacking the massive, dishevelled beard, clearly engaged in politics but seems to want something other than what is generally on offer.

He asked if I could write down the sources, explain myself, as he finds it hard to explain my perspective to his friends, as they seem not to be aware that you can take the position that the whole economic and political system is a broken and the democracy is so fake that a dramatic and systemic change is desperately needed, and all the ideas that flow from that position. “Also, as Herbert Marcuse explained, the system is totalitarian.” Really is it that bad? Sorry to break it to you, son, yes: this country is totally fucked up.

I would call this position (Damn American, Shit Is Really Fucked Up or DA,SIRFU) “being a revolutionary.” I did not get to this DA,SIRFU stance by starting with “revolution” then, after deciding for racialism, turning to consider the pieces of society: the electoral system, the economy, free trade, imperialism, the justice system, race relations, etc. Rather, DA,SIRFU built up the other way: the more I read about each piece, and observed with my own eyes, the more obvious that there is no mechanism within the system to correct the system. A shock, something dramatic, a break, from the outside in some way has to shift the direction radically. I used to be WAY more moderate. And now I hope to pass DA,SIRFU consciousness on to the next generation. How? I try to open the window a bit here in this essay, lead to the obvious conclusion that the US is overdue for an uprising.

What kind of revolution? How can you call yourself a revolutionary without actively trying to overthrow this corrupt state/economic system right now at this second? But does being a revolutionary mean we can’t get a new car? Those and many more questions are interesting and worth discussing. Let’s plan on it! Real conversation, I’m down.

Aspirations for economic stability, comfort should not stop you from being revolutionary. The conquest of bread is the bread of the greedy few. Don’t identify with the barons when you aren’t one.

For now, by revolutionary I mean having a radical or anti-establishment point of view consistent with the basic moral values of fairness and justice. The radical, anti-establishment point of view is the only correct response to the actual world we live in, if you actually care about democracy, fairness, liberty and all that good stuff.

Ideas matter. Ideas find power positions by justifying what powerful constituencies want, not by being right. Nevertheless, unless right and useful ideas are available and exist, you can never make progress. Ideas on their own are like tools on the shelf, unused but usable. If you only have racist ideas at your disposal, you cannot undermine White supremacy. If you only have neo-liberal economic assumptions in your playbook, you cannot have a decent economy for the people.

Progress?

American propaganda in 2018 (and maybe all propaganda at all times) does not require that conditions be good right now if we as a society are “moving in the right direction.” As long as there is forward progress, and most people are not starving right now, a sharp break or something revolutionary is not necessary for propaganda to be effective. Reform and participation in the current system, the propaganda says, is the safest and likely the most effective strategy for those sincerely concerned about inequality, life quality and violence in America in 2018, or about their own future.

Join us. We’re working together, more or less. It’s not fair, but the best thing you can do is focus on yourself and play by the rules more or less. Trying to overturn the system is a waste of time because it will never happen, and doesn’t need to happen because 1) you’re not starving and 2) things are getting better, more or less.

If not starving and more or less seeing some kind of forward progress, at least potentially, are all that are necessary to keep playing by the rules of the overlords of a society, then Eastern Europe should have been fine in 1989. Certainly, material conditions had improved from the 1950s or 1970s. No one was worried about actually starving in 1989, if they were worried in 1950. People were not routinely hauled out of their beds at four in the morning and shot. Society was definitely improving. The trick in 1989 was that Eastern Europeans KNEW a better world was possible, as they could see it over the border.

If only we could see the America we should have like East Germans could see the West, then we’d stop falling for this fake democracy and all this fake news. Did you know America doesn’t have to be owned by Wall Street and the military-industrial complex? The wall we should look over is not geographic, to the west, but in the hypothetical future, if the greedy few were not allowed to hoard all the dough. If the bottom lines of banks and the twisted, strange desires of billionaires didn’t matter more than the lives of people, the environment and the happiness of children, this America would we a dramatically better place.

If your society is systematically presenting you with lies to justify barrons robbing you and your family of the better life you could have, it is incumbent on you to spend a few minutes with me here in this essay to consider that it’s all a big, fat lie. It might be a big, fat lie. What if…

There is propaganda in your head

Let’s see how this dynamic of “progress” and “participation” works. Let’s try a thought experiment. Look around in your head and see if you find an idea like this floating in there somewhere:

“While capitalism and markets certainly have their flaws, the efficiency of the markets should not be undermined by the government through unnecessary regulation and control. The invisible hand self corrects these markets. The efficiency of the markets is what creates prosperity. Economists with impressive titles working for finance companies say that the alternative to free markets is socialism, bad, bad, socialism and no economic growth.”

In a fair discussion, a useful debate, you should try to present your opponent’s view fairly, give the strongest version of your opponent’s argument. If you argue against a flawed or incomplete version of your opponent’s argument, a straw man, you might “win” the argument on some level, but you are not making progress toward a better understanding of the issue. I am guilty of violating this rule in the above quote because it’s really hard for me to give a coherent argument in favor of the wreck that is the dominant economic model in the world today: neoliberalism.

People throw that term around all the time — “neoliberal” — and sometimes it seems to just mean “whatever I don’t like.” So, here is a short version of what neoliberalism is as an economic argument: markets self correct with little government regulation, investors have local and superior knowledge to regulators, leaving funds in the hands of rich investors to create supply-side investment is critical to the economy, governments should not run up big debts on social programs for the people.

The alternative to neoliberalism is not directly socialism but Keynesianism. Prior to 1980, Keynesian economics dominated the world, emphasized the importance of governments “priming the pump” in times of trouble, regulating and control markets, and allowing for significant social welfare programs.

That neoliberalism and austerity don’t work or make any sense should have been evident from the Great Depression. Even FDR reverted to cutting budgets too soon, confined as he was by classical liberal economics. After World War II there was no doubt about who was right. Then in the late 1970s we had both high unemployment and high inflation, which Keynes said is not supposed to happen simultaneously, so the neoliberals, backed by financial interests happy to make more money with an “unregulated” market, leveraged their political power by using neoliberalism as an ideology to change the economy.

Then in 2008, the system crashed. The crash was entirely driven by the private sector: banks had bad models of risk, credit agencies either didn’t understand the bonds they were rating or were intentionally committing fraud, banks were way over-leveraged, and short-term markets, repro markets, were unregulated, as were derivatives. The invisible hand of the market was so invisible that no hand existed, just a big, old foot that planted a firm kick right between the two cheeks of the ass of the working class.

That poor people got mortgages on houses that were at risk of losing value in no way caused the crash: the banks and other financial actors did it, even when talking about subprime mortgages, since those were bundle and sold in a decptive manner, whereas a fair accounting of the risk of subprime mortgages would not have been a problem… in other words, only the bankers screwed up. The whole thing was their fault. It was not a correction, not a necessary swing in the business cycle, it was an unprovoked cluster bomb dropped on society by arrogant financial industry operating in a neoliberal environment.

Since neoliberalism failed, we went back to Keynes for 12 months. The IMF, who always tells poorer nations they have to cut social services, suddenly changed it’s tune, as did both the Democrats and Republicans in Congress. A bipartisan federal government put in an economic stimulus. This and other actions moved the debts from the private sector, from the banks, to the government, the people. By guaranteeing debt, the TARP program, the lost revenue from financial service taxes, the loss of production in the economy as a whole, the cost of the stimulus itself, the American people coughed up 13 trillion dollars, actually and as garauntees, which still count as money not spent on the people and leveraging our tax dollars to keep billionaires solvent.

After a year of that kind of intervention (Keynesian for a year) in the economy, we returned to neoliberalism, not because the ideology was correct — it had obviously failed — but because Wall Street coopted the Bush-Obama government and owned the whole thing, lock, stock and barrel.

Significantly, Black households were disportionately affected by the public assumption of private debt and the fact that Black America lost more than 50% of it’s net worth in the first years of the Obama administration was not a crisis, as was the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and the federal government did not intervene to save people, White and disportionately Black, who lost their homes.

If an austere socialist had been president in 2008, even with the bankers’ whores in congress and the court still in place, this massive transfer of debt from the banks to the people would not have occurred. This fact is why I do not like Obama and refer constantly to the Froman spreadsheet released by Wikileaks (you heard about CitiGroup vetting Obama’s cabinet right? right during the crash? no? funny, it’s right there on the internet).

The situation in Europe is actually far worse and even more disturbing, with the people of Spain and Ireland paying the price of high unemployment for a decade to compensate for Deutsche Bank running a 40 to one equity ratio. Hard to explain such a terrible injustice so, instead of explaining it, the elites lie about it, both in America and Europe.

Too big to fail? And since we bailed them out, they gave themselves a trillion dollars in bonuses (to employees of all financial firms since 2008).

And in the last year the federal government passed yet another neoliberal tax cut for the wealthy and the senate passed a banking deregulation bill to let the banks practice more piracy. So were back to neoliberalism like nothing ever happened. Nothing to see here. Business as usual, except you’ve been exposed.

The relationship between Wall Street and the federal government is far worse today than it was in 1970, when some distance and critical thinking was possible. In 1935, FDR was clearly NOT in the pocket of the banks, even if he was too conservative in not considering nationalization. There was some independence of government action. The federal reserve is only concerned with inflation and otherwise as likely to exacerbate a crisis as solve one.

The utter failure of neoliberalism proves that there is no distance now. Progress? No, clearly, we have moved backwards in terms of government regulation of finance.

But how about foreign policy? Let’s check our heads again. Can you hear something like this?

“The leaders of the country have used US military badly at times, made mistakes, but the US military is a force for stability and progress in the world, brave warriors fighting for our freedom. Without this force, chaos would reign and there would be no hope for human rights, women’s rights and democracy. Assad, Putin, al Qaeda, the Iranian regime, maybe China: there are real dangers in the world and we need a strong military.”

What if that idea is completely false? What if war crimes by the US military and spy agencies are intentional, entrenched as policy, getting worse, with technology providing anti-democratic, fascist elements in an unelected government to dominate foreign nations, the US congress and the America people with increasing corporate integration and legal impunity? What if the people know nothing about Hussein, Gaddafi and Assad and the reality of those nations? What if the point of all these interventions is the almighty dollar, pipelines, oil fields and strategic bases? What if American soldiers are dying to make Halliburton and ExxonMobil shareholders rich and helping neocons play chess with the Russians, to the benefit only to their own careers?

In other words, from Vietnam to today our masters in the military-industrial complex are not “learning” anything other than more effective methods of propaganda, violence and lawlessness. What if there is no improvement in the moral standing of the national government but the opposite: a degeneration into corporate, imperialist, evil, murderous fascism in our name? What if 1973 and Watergate was the high point of morality and rule of law and we’ve gone downhill since then? What if American militarism is approaching the Nazis in its barbarism and we sit here and do nothing about it?

J. Edgar Hoover, Gordon Liddy, E. Howard Hunt, Oliver North, Gina Haspel, Mike Pompeo: these people are something like fascists (look them up), certainly mostly quite racist explicitly, who happened to get caught subverting the constitution and elected government. I’m sure the Democrats threw the book at them and the “rule of law” legal system rose up to put a stop to people like that. No one is above the law, right? No? You mean, the party of Harvey Weinstein and the Podesta brothers doesn’t care about the rule of law?

A million people died for no reason in Indochina in the 1960s and 70s due to the American war against the legitimate patriotic aspirations of Vietnamese people. Just as many people died in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan in the 21st century for no apparent moral reason. War crimes were covered up in both groups of releated wars. Domino theory in Vietnam, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq: in other words, bullshit reasons for war in both cases. And the body count, and the non-white color of the victims, is fascist in magnitude. The United States is not making progress by moving toward compliance with the Geneva convention and the United Nations Convention against Torture. The US military complex is not “improving” in any way: always wrong, never winning, always overspending, always breaking basic moral codes, always worse.

I mentioned winning in there, too, right? Never winning. Never correctly predicting events, for all that money spent on “intelligence.”

If the second scenario is the case, no progress, and there is indeed no moral or security justification for all of these military actions, if all the “classified” activities the government hides are in fact nothing more than crimes, then you cannot morally stick with the doctrine of remediation and progress. If you do, you are not being serious about morality and justice. It’s simple. Are you going to sit there are cheer on a killing machine that operates in your name? Hope it somehow gets better when there is no evidence of any internal checks?

The American people spend 700 to 800 billion dollars a year on the military, equivalent to the four year budget of the Marshall Plan in today’s dollars, a sum which does not include money spent to try but fail to “rebuild” Iraq and Afghanistan. Plus we spend another 70 billion on the CIA so that it can but the Washington Post and corrupt foreign governments with bribes, when not operating black sites and slaughtering innocent civilians with counter productive drone strikes.

In the 1970s, when the word about the atrocities of the Phoenix program got out, Congress was genuinely enraged. Now, James Clapper, a Washington made man, can lie to congress about the NSA collecting the emails of US citizens — he said they collected no email from Americans when, as we now know thanks to Edward Snowden, they collect and store all emails — and congress thanks him for his testimony. Progress?

Now race. Do you have this idea in your head somewhere:

“True, slavery was a terrible wrong, and Jim Crow racism was also bad, but the civil rights movement put us on the right track and now we’re improving and racism is decreasing. We’re not there yet, but we’re heading in the right direction. Racial inequality is a problem we need to work on but it’s difficult and requires study, consideration and analysis. There is no easy solution. Once upon a time, an interracial couple couldn’t walk down the street and now we’ve had a Black president.”

If the above “improvement” idea is true, then you don’t need to act radically in some way. As long as you vote for Democrats, and stand up to Trump, maybe even march in one or two Women’s marches or at least click “like” when you see a video of such a march, racism will continue to abate.

In the 1840s, when most anti-slavery Whigs like Abe Lincoln did not actively oppose slavery because the peculiar institution was obviously going to die out naturally… but then, of course, slavery didn’t die out. But this time it’s different: racism will die quietly from a million incoherent Obama speeches and Hillary Clinton visiting Flint Michigan once before the election and then never again. Also, Bill Cosby telling Black boys to pull up their pants. Oh, and vote for Democrats. That should do it.

If this idea of incremental progress over time is not at all true, if racist violence in the prison-industrial complex, the phony drug war and police violence in the street mean that wholly unjustified state supported violence against Black Americans is as prevalent today as it was during the epidemic of lynching in the 1890s, then, no, you cannot simply wait for racism to evaporate.

Maybe racism is not declining but increasing. If the CIA did in fact intention bring crack in LA in the 1980s, and heroine in the 1970s and now is still running drugs from Afghanistan right now, and this policy lead to a two million Black men in prison, you can’t say lynching was NOT the height of White supremacy in the 20th and 21st centuries. If Brown v. Board of Education did not lead to massive opportunities through integration but rather cost

While we’ve had an increase in uplifting stories of Black advance, actual economic conditions in terms of parity and justice are the same as on the day Martin Luther King was assassinated. As Jim Crow was dismantled, another system was built to achieve the same result and there is no progress on racial equality in America. Obama only makes the situation worse by providing a omnipresent illusion of a “post-racial America” or some nonsense and he himself presided over the worse decline in Black American wealth in history.

If American imperialism and racism are not improving, what about workers rights? The environment? Life expectancy? Health? Quality of life? Purchasing power? Freedom of speech? Democracy? What if we tried the same thought experiment with each of those categories and found the same thing, that the “progress” narrative was an illusion?

What if in every important category the trajectory is down, static, or showing such an incremental advance as to religate two generations to a life far worse that would be possible were the government not solidly in the hands of the oligarchs? What if ownership of the government were the only relevant variable in each and every case?

What if a safer, healthier, more righteous, cleaner, more free, more creative, society were only one revolution away and the only thing holding us behind a wall of oligarchic lies was our own timidity and lack of clear vision? What if solving the entrenched problems of our society consists in a few simple steps, starting with simply getting the dough and power out of the hands of the oligarchs and their minions? That’s it. Could it be that we either give the man a haircut or our children will be deprived of the security, opportunities and freedom they could otherwise enjoy?

If the oligarchs own the government, and all important measures of life quality are static or heading the wrong way, if current social movements or forces for reform are so weak to have an effect on these trends, then you must face reality. In your heart, you should become an anarchist, a rebel, a revolutionary, a skeptic.

Those who are lying to you, filling your head with garbage about non-existent forward motion while making your life worse than it should be, hurting your neighborhood and family, depriving you of the chance to have a fulfilling, rich life: those people are your enemy. Their lies are in your head. Your enemy has captured your eyes. He does not mean you well. He is a true enemy. He is absolutely 100% American. No foreign entity poses a threat to your security and freedom like the American enemy.

Whether or not the US government, the media, academia and the oligarchic bosses are your enemy conspiring to ruin your neighborhood and life and oppress you, denying you a much better reality simply to make themselves richer and more powerful, depends on facts, information. You must look at the available information and teach yourself to see through bullshit. I maintain that the facts suggest a takeover of the government, a fake democracy, international imperialism, manipulation of the people through racism, and class war by the rich against the workers.

If for every step forward we see a step back, or if the rate of “improvement” is so slow that people living now cannot detect progress and in fact will live and die in a state far below acceptable, as will the next generation, then we need a revolutionary break with the system. That’s the case here. You see progress? Or is it a lie?

So, well, is steady improvement in a self-correcting system a lie? If it is one big lie, then you as an American are morally obligated to become a revolutionary.

This essay is the Cliff Notes, quick and dirty guide to becoming a revolutionary. We have only quickly reviewed the economy, foreign policy and racism. We found that the US military-industrial complex has lied about two wars costing trillions and murdering millions, with no end of this practice in sight. We saw that whether or not an economic policy works matters not at all, nor is it a crisis if poor people have to lose their homes to make sure bankers get millions in bones. The only thing that matters to the elites who make government policy is the whether or not the financial elites make money. We saw that the original sin of the United States, racism, is in no way abating or going away but clearly embedded: violence against Black people, unfair economic systems, and ideologies of White supremacy are if anything increasing in strength.

Now the good part, the bibliography… no, I’m not done arguing for revolution but that’s enough for today.

The economy:

Unequal Gains: American Growth and Inequality since 1700 by Peter H. Lindert & Jeffrey G. Williamson, 2016

Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Blyth, 2013

Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America by Martin Gilens 2005 (The Princeton Study)

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, 2014

Racism:

Pew Study (December 12, 2014, Kochhar and Fry) “Wealth inequality has widened along racial, ethnic lines since end of Great Recession”

The Economic Policy Institute (Guardian, Redden and Kasperkevic September 20, 2016) “Wage gap between white and black Americans is worse today than in 1979”

“Study Shows Little Change Since Kerner Commission Reported on Racism 50 Years Ago: An update to the landmark study finds there is now more poverty and segregation in America.” Smithsonian magazine, March 2, 2018 (on “Healing our Divided Society: Investing in America Fifty Years After the Kerner Report” by the Milton Eisenhower Foundation)

“Report Shows African Americans Lost Half Their Wealth Due to Housing Crisis and Unemployment” The State of Housing in Black America by the National Association of Real Estate Brokers (NAREB), 2013

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

Foreign policy/Deep State:

The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World Paperback by Douglas Valentine

Enemies: A History of the FBI — February 26, 2013 by Tim Weiner

Dark Alliance series, Gary Stephen Webb, The Mercury News, 1997

Barrett Lancaster Brown, Project PM

Podesta leaks, Wikileaks, 2016

The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government by Mike Lofgren