Tag: BlairsvilleWalmart

Dangerous Mixture

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2021 by Uwe Bahr

The remaining Republican constituency, however numerous, has solidified into an unsocialzed, deluded bunch over a laughingstock like Trump: His followers are filled with a pathetic, populist mindset camouflaged as patriotism, fed by fabricated catchphrases that even the mentally deficient can easily memorize and then parrot as the familiar bird can.

Thematically, most can hardly produce anything coherent from their own thoughts that would make any sense to support their views. Apart from repeating propaganda platitudes, they do not provide any answers to problems that exist in reality. An own fact check with appropriate background knowledge does not take place, because the mental energy is missing and often probably also an honest intention.

It is frightening to observe how much this propaganda-pushed mentality is becoming entrenched in other developed countries as well – but nowhere else as intensively as in the USA. Trump embodies the intellectual decay of much of American society.

There is no end in sight to the dangerous blend of misinformation, lies, conspiracy theories, not-knowing, misdirection, and delusion. For there are millions of people who blindly believe every claim, no matter how abstruse, as long as it only corresponds to their own paranoid fantasies.

Work Ethic is Dying?

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It doesn’t get any more cynical than this

From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2021 by Uwe Bahr

See the image below:

This person unknown to me is much better than I am at expressing the American problem in a few simple words. The irrefutable facts he mentions apply to more than half of the US-population with rising tendency, even though the wealth in this country exists to provide remedies that would benefit the society as a whole. To deny this would mean to dispute reality. I’ve been there, I’ve worked at Walmart for eight years, with great difficulty trusting my eyes and ears and at the same time knowing that I’m in the United States of America, which (almost) everyone in Europe considers the leading country in the world.

It should not go unmentioned who pays for said food stamps. Not Walmart, not Corporate America, who are shirking their responsibility because they cannot get enough down their greedy throat. It’s the common taxpayer, you and me, which makes it doubly outrageous. This is how Americans in their own country are being cheated good and proper, and they’re letting it happen to them.

Of course, politicians have a moral obligation to intervene through regulation in the interest of the common good. Multi-billion corporations should pay their employees decent wages, so that no public tax money has to be spent on food stamps. Ration cards came into use elsewhere in post-war times – not at all in the 21st century.

And where are the Churches? Here all of a sudden, where it is about the real, earthly problems of the little man, they do not interfere in politics – that is very strange. Are they afraid of having to pay taxes like their flock of sheep, so that their hypocritical business will no longer yield enough profit? You don’t have to open your eyes too wide to see how representatives of politics and the clergy work together hand in hand to play the little man for a sucker and line their own pockets. This is arranged to keep the masses in line.

After all, one crow does not peck out the eye of another. Amen.

“Far-Left, Radical Socialist Policies”

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2021 by Uwe Bahr

Under the influence of a primitive demagogue, the Republican Party leadership continues to feed its base with whopping lies.

After Trump’s presidency, many Americans believe that the current administration is destroying cherished American values and drives the U.S. toward socialism. In this context, Elise Stefanik, chair of the Republican House Conference, uttered a phrase that makes a person who had lived involuntarily in a socialism for almost thirty years cringe:

She called the agenda of the current US-Administration “far-left, radical socialist policies.”

At this point it should be noted: Whoever uses dull slogans exposes himself to the suspicion of wanting to take others for fools; he also reveals that he might be unable to contribute any conclusive arguments for the solution of real problems. By no means for the first time in its history is the GOP summoning the specter of socialism to scare Americans away from any acceptance of policies other than its own.

In contrast to Stefanik, this writer experienced socialism firsthand, opposed it in the GDR (“East Germany”) with modest means as much as possible, put up with personal disadvantages in the process, and experienced with millions of others the fall of the Berlin Wall as a result of a peaceful revolution.*

I can say with certainty: this woman has not the faintest idea what she is talking about when she mouths the word “socialism.”

I repeat here what should be easy for even the average person to understand: Socialism is when the means of production are not in private hands, but in the hands of the state. Period. There is not even a hint of a precondition in the USA that can bring the country toward socialism.

What the country lacks are accompanying governmental measures to curb social injustice, which cries out to heaven in the United States. Previous presidents have already denounced this and/or used government power to fight social injustice: from John Adams via Teddy Roosevelt (by the way: a Republican), Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman to Lyndon B. Johnson.

None of them was a socialist because of it.

Whoever manages to compare a policy of social justice with socialism, and in doing so also falls on open ears among the population, is in my eyes an unscrupulous populist. A person who has a minimum knowledge of history and is still of sound mind, will not follow these pipers.

By the way – anyone who fobs off his own base (de facto: his own family) with cheap, propaganda-ridden phrases should not deserve to be elected to any responsibility whatsoever.

What has the Republican Party turned into?

Notes:

*I was born in 1961 at the junction of the Cold War, just 21 miles from the deadly border that once separated Germany. Bear in mind that I grew up behind barbed wire not because of a non-functioning socialism (which we did not want), but as a direct consequence of World War II sparked by Germany. In the further historical development, the inner-German border was built by communists in the midst of increasing tensions and the collision of interests between the U.S. and its erstwhile ally, the Communist-Bolshevik Soviet Union, which eventually morphed into hostility. – Without this illegal, impenetrable border, millions more people would have fled from the Soviet sector to the free West than had already done so before 1961.

Social Media Reveals the Mind of Trump-Supporters

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2021 by Uwe Bahr

President Biden wants to unify his country to overcome the polarization between left and right, Democrats and Republicans. My assessment is that he cannot achieve this goal. Four years, still difficult to bear, under a president who managed to manipulate the minds of millions of people with untruths using the most primitive methods, have reignited the division of the country – a division that exists since time immemorial.

The majority of those who voted for Trump in 2020 and continue to support him will not be swayed. They have long since left the path of independent thinking. Church and military, preferably both together, seem to be the ideal environment and breeding ground for the perfect brainwashing – for the acceptance of foreign ideas, for the parroting of cheap slogans that easily catch on. The proof is nowhere more evident than in the social media.

People of this type post anything, as little school children do: Cartoons, colorful pictures with slogans, macabre jokes about people who think differently – just nothing of their own. They are obviously incapable to summarize their own thoughts, neither verbally nor in writing, and certainly not in an essay.

Their thoughts come from other sources, and they merely copy what is convenient for them, however absurd it may be, how little logic exists in the context, and no matter how old they are themselves. Here one can see the true intellectual background of the Trump insanity.

They are sick, mentally sick, and they cannot be helped. It is no wonder that the psychopath Trump was elected by such people.

And the ignorant will continue to support him.

Germany: Conservatives Choose Candidate for Chancellor

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…but the next person in charge could be a woman again

From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2021 by Uwe Bahr

It was obvious that the CDU Federal Executive Board last weekend would push through its own party colleague and not the man from the sister party, the Bavarian CSU. After all, there are many members on the board with their own ambitions for power. The meeting, the outcome of which was a foregone conclusion, had been more or less arranged to ensure Bavaria’s popular Minister President Markus Soeder (CSU) a face-saving retreat.

At the CDU base, the mood probably looks a bit more honest: Most of the regular party members would have preferred Soeder as their candidate for chancellor, and with him the conservatives would probably have a better chance winning the upcoming federal elections this September. Now, the two-party-Union consisting of CDU and CSU (the latter exists only in the Free State of Bavaria) is in for a payday for playing a lousy power game: For it would be a surprise if Germany’s next chancellor is to be the far less popular Armin Laschet.

Instead, after Angela Merkel’s retirement this coming September, it might well come down to a female chancellor once again, as the Green Party is at a polling high and could emerge as the strongest party nationwide for the first time. Consequently, for the first time in their history, they are competing with their own candidate for chancellor. The party leadership has recently decided on the 40-year-old, resolute Annalena Baerbock without any further ado – quite in contrast to the grueling, pernicious power struggle in the conservative CDU/CSU.

Although many experts fear negative economic consequences in the event of a Green government takeover, it must be borne in mind that there will hardly be an absolute majority possible for just one party in Germany. In that sense, it is almost certain that the country will continue to be governed by a multi-party coalition, maybe even with the conservatives as junior-partner involved. Such government naturally operates on the basis of compromise. But even in this scenario, the Greens can give priority to their dominant issue, climate protection – supported by the broad public opinion that climate change is caused by humans and must be urgently counteracted; a view held also across all political camps with the exception of the polarizing and in parts extreme right Alternative for Germany (AfD).

It feels like the next generation is already knocking on the door in my home country to take on top political responsibility. Approval for this seems to come from almost all camps. 30 years ago, when I was a city commissioner for the CDU in my little hometown of Wolmirstedt, the party book still played a dominant role. But in the historically short time that has passed since then, the whole world has changed dizzyingly. As a consequence, thinking between party lines has become more and more mixed, out of the need to solve increasingly complex problems together – not only across parties, but also across countries. The Coronavirus is only the most prominent example of many.

Although there is still a lot of water to flow down the Rhine before Germany’s election in September, I can very well imagine the next woman in the German chancellorship. And why not? Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Finland, especially New Zealand – all these countries have relatively young women at the head of their governments, and they almost all do well with it. Above all, Jacinda Ardern as Prime Minister of New Zealand does an excellent, refreshing job – almost completely unnoticed by the rest of the world.

So, in Germany it could be Annalena. Let her do it.

“Government Overreach”

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2021 by Uwe Bahr

Recently I read an interesting essay about the American self-understanding of individual rights versus government overreach. It was about the perceived sacred right of private gun ownership. American society, the author criticized, is about the only one that values freedom over life. This is what makes America so unique, and the same thirst for freedom – back then in a justified way – had already led to the separation of the former American colonies from the British colonial yoke, at a time when this world was quite different from today.

This may well be true – and if it really is, many things would have to change today in people’s mind. The American problems are not too difficult to identify, provided that the ubiquitous partisanship does not resonate in the assessment.

For a more just society it is undoubtedly necessary that the collective good of the community stands decisively above the individual interests of few people and institutions, which are legally granted special rights through the power of their money – and from which the masses have to suffer. There are only two ways that can stop such a tragic development: Either governmental intervention, or a revolution from the bottom up.

It is sometimes hard to grasp what Americans think when it comes to individual rights. Because what most of them pray for actually signals something quite different compared to what is going on in their heads.

Aren’t brotherhood and mutual compassion the noble goals of an upright Christian? Oddly enough, they coincide with the goals of communism: We are all brothers and sisters – that is their common confession. As a consequence of such credo, the common good takes precedence over self-interest. The strange thing is that mankind has never put into practice either of these ideals, as much as they invoked them throughout human history.

Power, greed and egoism always stood in the way, but unfortunately also the stupidity of clueless pretenders who pray to their God and see no contradiction between their precepts and their actual behavior, including their views. If they would – Donald J. Trump could never have received a single vote from a “Christian” electorate, which in reality turned out his strongest base.

Abused power and injustice remain untouched as long as there are gullible people with limited horizons who make themselves stooges of a wrong cause.

America is Black and White, with a Lot in Between

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2021 by Uwe Bahr

I was very impressed because it was perfectly organized, and I would like to express my gratitude to Georgia Emergency Management and Homeland Security for their overseeing assistance, to the state agencies, including the Georgia National Guard, State Patrol, and the many Healthcare workers. They all ensure that the free Corona mass immunizations in Clarkesville/Georgia run smoothly, day after day.

Especially among the National Guard – and I noticed this – were many African-Americans, with whom their white colleagues worked hand in hand, sometimes even having a kind word to say. That’s how it should normally be. They harmonized with each other and together like normal, civilized people, which otherwise cannot generally be said of this country.

As a long time resident of the United States, I can only say that you have given me hope and confidence today after these shocking four years of Donald Trump, this hatred towards dissenters and people of different skin color. Every normal feeling person knows that this cannot be the right way. Don’t let too many white farts ruin your country and your future. America is black and white, with a lot in between – that’s a good thing, that’s the great opportunity.

Change the Paradigm

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The President indicated those “on the top” should pay higher Taxes

From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2021 by Uwe Bahr

He did not know that 20 years ago?

The new president, two days ago, talked about the trickle-down effect: “We’ve seen time and again that trickle-down doesn’t work.” He was alluding to the huge tax cuts for “those on the top and [the hope] that the benefits they get would trickle down to everyone” – tax giveaways granted the richest people and enterprises over the past 15 years (it was most likely a few more years, probably reaching back to the Reagan-Administration). He now sees a need “to change the paradigm.” That’s correct.

“Eine Kraehe hackt der anderen kein Auge aus”, as the old German saying goes. Freely translated: There’s honor among thieves. Because representatives of both parties are able to wheel and deal with lobbyists from the “very top”, my fear is that in the end not the billionaires, but representatives of the higher educated class will have to pay for the bulk of a new tax burden. In other words: those who were not eligible for the latest stimulus check because they are above a certain income level. If this happens, it would be a serious mistake by the Biden administration – because it would hurt America’s innovative future.

What Joe Biden did not say last Friday in the Rose Garden is the following: It is a misconception to assume that a national economy regulates itself in such a way that there is justice in the end for the many. From this follows what already John Adams and Teddy Roosevelt knew: The state needs to implement government power to tame nefarious profiteers permanently (the true “top”, which I hope Biden meant) and protect those Americans in their rights that are toiling day after day at the edge of the society to no avail. Will it take another 20 years before a majority of Americans come to this realization?

Because he left this part out, Biden was only talking about half of a plan that would really improve the livelihoods for the majority of Americans. Or did he omit this part on purpose and is clandestinely already on a path to “social democratize” the United States – a path that most Americans seem to confuse with “Socialism?” Has anyone actually realized that the Corona crisis is the last point in which it becomes clear that the United States, with all diversity and disparity, cannot go on as before if it wants to be prepared for the future?

The churches in particular have supported Trump and hatefully painted the specter of Socialism on the wall, fearing that Satan in the form of a Democrat might come after them, brandishing the tax bill with glowing eyes. Unfortunately, it is to be feared that hardly such a thing as taxing the churches will occur, although the President also said the following: “By the way, we don’t have anything against wealthy people. (If) you have a great idea, go out and make millions of dollars, that’s fine. I have no problem with that. But guess what: You’ve got to pay your fair share.”

Amen, Mr. Biden.

American Rescue Plan?

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2021 by Uwe Bahr

Who is going to pay for this – for the huge Covid Relief Bill, now also called the “American Rescue Plan?” Future generations of taxpayers?

The question would not even surface if there was something in place as or similar to a Social Market Economy – if government and lawmakers acted as arbiters between society and business instead as profiteers from lobbyism. The obvious need for a more equitable distribution of burdens would not arise to that extent if the big, uncontrolled money-grubbers of this society – such as corporations, insurance companies, but also impertinent bill-dodgers like the churches – finally paid taxes and contributions in a fair way, instead of being privileged on flimsy grounds in the guise of alleged “charity”, while in reality acting at the expense and to the detriment of the American worker.*

Opponents of this thesis love to argue that in such a case the big employers like Walmart would lay off people or give up altogether. Certainly a valid assumption.

But if Walmart, the hideous anti-American monster, didn’t exist in the first place, this would in turn be a boost for innovation made in the U.S., because countless small- and medium-sized companies that were killed off by Walmart’s unpatriotic competition would come back to life and get a fair chance. Products that are labeled “Made in the USA” – how about that? – would prevail, while “Made in China” would fade into the background.

Too much utopia?

Instead, in the U.S., more than anywhere else in the modern western world, it is always the wrong people who have to foot the bill. These are not the ideas of American freedom and unlimited opportunities for everyone who works hard, but the excesses of rampant capitalism.

How can that be in a country with a Christian claim?

Notes:

*The churches in the United States are making billions of dollars year after year in interest alone, free of taxes, while on the opposite end providing merely millions for charity. The business of dulling peoples’ mind is extremely profitable: To list all the churches “benefits”, for which they pay no taxes, would require a book. – However, if someone does not pay taxes, others have to subsidize in their stead, because a state needs money. Churches are among the most voracious vultures in society.

In the Name of Christianity

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The History of the Church is the Story of Moral Failure and Crime

From my Writing Room

Copyright © 2021 by Uwe Bahr

Particularly since the beginning of the second millennium Anno Domini, it was the Christian church that commissioned whole armies of knights to plunder and murder their way through the history of the world. At no time since has there been another institution in mankind, so blatant, so full of insolence, treachery and mendacity.

To make a complete list – if such an undertaking is possible at all – of the Christian essence would mean to fill whole volumes. As a logical consequence at the previous end, it is no coincidence that churches in the United States are the stirrup holders of a character like Donald Trump – basically, they were and are his principal base. In this, the churches have remained in their millennia-old tradition of moral failure: Trump could talk as often as he wanted about “if you have money, if you are famous, you can grab every woman between her legs”; he could pay hush money to “adult actresses” as often as he wanted, or state “I could stand on New York’s Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and still not lose voters” [1] – the overwhelming majority of the church people voted for him anyway.

As if that wasn’t already enough: Most of them still support him. And it was the churches and many of their blatherer that actively brainwashed their sheep in the decision-making process.

We deliberately are not mentioning here the storm on the Capitol. We are talking about historic facts, in this particular case the most recent ones included, to emphasize the path leading to the insurrection of 6 January 2021 and that this path, although not predictable from the outset, nevertheless was not an absolutely surprising element for all those who have followed Trump’s presidency attentively and with an impartial mind, including the words he used in conjunction with racism and radical, militant groups on the far political right. [2] All this did not keep millions of church people from praying for “our president Donald Trump.”

To return to the topic at hand: “Criminal” is not a foreign word in connection with churches – it is, at the same time, a rather very mild description for the work of the churches. Their involvement in criminal activities is as old as the church itself. To this day, the history of the Church is the history of mass stultification of the people for the purpose of self-enrichment and plenitude of power; it is a history of lies and hypocrisy, of oppression, exploitation, and extermination; it is the history of persecution and murder of dissidents, the history of the cruelest wars of conquest in the name of forced Christianization. [3]

Christianization, conducted in brutal, bloody campaigns by church warriors like the chivalric order with the cross on their rear, was a common method in the early medieval Europe and later in the New World (America) – and, in each single case, the crusades were nothing else but ruthless wars of conquest under the guise of God; with the Cross in one hand, and the Sword in the other, translated to the enslaved precisely as follows: ‘If you refuse to accept the former, you will get to feel the latter.’ It was not millions, but billions who suffered under the cruelty and brutality of the Christian cross – to the extent of seismic proportions. One Holocaust took place after the other, and no God to this day has ever intervened.

The churches justified slavery and told people that were treated like cattle to obey their masters. And, it is the church’s history of chumming up with dictators like Adolf Hitler; the history of scandals, of cover-ups and corruption up to the systematic rape of Altar boys; and it is also the history of tax avoidance for their own benefit while evincing charity to the justification of their purpose; it is the reality of the churches being the largest fan club for a demagogue and pervert like Mob-President Donald Trump.

The church as a whole has never been judicially indicted for its ruthless criminality, let alone convicted – as, on the other hand, has occasionally happened with other criminal organizations. It is as if Adolf Hitler with his National Socialist Workers’ Party (NSDAP) had never ceased to exist – and everyone today is kindly invited to participate. This is the church.

Notes:

[1] Donald Trump, 23 January 2016, at a campaign rally in Iowa. – Americans voting for Trump must have been well aware what they were doing, unless they were completely out of their mind.

[2] “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.” Donald Trump during the first presidential debate on 29 September 2020, when being asked if he is willing to condemn white supremacist and militia groups.

[3] To give an example: The Pruzzen, the “Old Prussians (Alt-Preussen)”, were a tribe on the Amber Coast between the estuary arms of the Vistula (Weichsel)- and the Memel Rivers into the Baltic Sea. They resisted forced Christianization by the Teutonic Knights in the 12th/13th century and were subsequently almost completely exterminated. In the following period settlers from the Holy Roman Empire migrated into the Pruzzen’s territory (note the similarity of the Christian conquest of the North American Continent) and astonishingly assumed the name of the “infidels”. – The terms “Prussia” and “Prussians” result from this historical context. Technically speaking, the “real” Prussians as they became known later on, virtually never existed; for they had long since been exterminated. – My later ancestors descend from the former area of the “Old Prussians”.