How does TV watching fit into the whole range of phenomena that make up daily life and that go into determining one’s vote? Trying to answer that question is difficult for me over here on the other side of the off button. But I have experienced always-on TV over the years. Most recently I suffered it in a nursing home where the TV from other beds in a three bed room blasted all day long. Always-on TV does work to turn off the unpleasant personal realities we all face when silence reigns. TVs are like drugs. The constant flow of images and sound cover up the possibilities arising inside. My life spans the decades from before TVs invaded every household, all the way to 2026 when TVs are everywhere, bigger, brighter and louder than ever. When I was a kid in the 1950s, I visited a friend’s house where a black and white TV droned on all day long in the kitchen. It sat right next to his grandpa who was at the kitchen table working on newspaper crossword puzzles. It was like entering a cave, where the sound surrounded you and basically shut you up and shut you down. Going back outside was a great relief. Silence returned except for cars and buses and airplanes. The natural world peaked out from around the corner and up through the cracks in the sidewalk. The TV experience was huge. The natural world was hidden.

Seven decades followed with the uninterrupted expansion of media, TV, radio, computers, internet, and the ubiquitous smart phone. Centralized, mainstream noises dominate social life like never before. Media mania in the industrialized, urbanized world has us walking around in a state of mental and emotional blindness, transfixed by the bright lights and constant noise of the media, accompanied by the roar of gasoline engines on every street. Modern life has a real downside, an impact on our character and our peace of mind, or lack of it, that brings out the worst in us, as shown by the ease with which armies are raised and killing becomes normalized.

I have become acutely aware of the ability of society to turn us into murdering maniacs at the drop of a hat. My first exposure to this nightmare was in the early 1960s when I witnessed my whole generation sign up for the draft and head over to Vietnam. Vietnam was just my generation’s page in a long book of twentieth century wars. Two world wars and millions of dead. When I studied Europe before WWI, I saw rich cultures in country after country. They have their own styles of dress, their own languages and music. And then, all of a sudden millions of us put on our special killer costumes, aka army uniforms, and blindly gave our lives and/or began murdering our erstwhile friends from the country next door in blood baths that boggle the mind. After WWI’s mass murdering ended, peace lasted a brief twenty years until we all went at it again. WWII accelerated the murdering and bloodletting to a new high, killing tens of millions of us and elevating nationalism and patriotism to the level of inquisitorial religions. When the dust settled from WWII, a new era opened, now characterized as the era of endless war. Here in the land of the free, everyone has guns and TVs in abundance.

As I look around today, I can see this blood lust has not gone away. It lurks in the gun closets of homes, in the quiet desperation behind the struggle for existence we call the good life. How easy it is for hard working Americans to sublimate their desperation into hatred for immigrants, into lust that turns love into violence against women, into the elevation of ignorance in the face of propaganda soaked educational institutions. We are sitting on a powder keg. We are like an unopened can of beans sitting in a forgotten pot of boiling water on the stove. The can will explode if someone doesn’t turn off the fire. Humanity is just standing next to the stove watching the water boil, thinking “what could go wrong?” We seem to be living in a dream where we are looking at the stove, knowing an explosion is coming, but just can’t reach out to turn off the flame.

Modern social media has taken some of the younger generation away from the living room with its blaring TV. The difference between social media and TV is interactivity. TV is passive, mug and jug transfer. Social media offers communication that goes two ways, as long as you don’t utter any forbidden notions that the State doesn’t permit. Social media is not immune to the influence of big money and big lies that permeate our society. Since the internet was created for the military, it is no surprise that it has become another means of social control for political power. The best efforts to control the internet by the corporate/military hegemon, however, have not prevented undiluted truth from seeping up through the cracks. Truths like Israeli and USA sponsored genocide in Gaza that the whole world witnesses on our cell phones while the deep state and its lackeys deny and condone. Like the stubborn weeds growing up in the cracks in the sidewalk. Filling the cracks only delays the inevitable rise of new weeds that grow up following the movement of subterranean strata and expansion of tree roots. New cracks open up, the rains come down, and life springs up all over again.

The cracks in the sidewalk analogy hints at the real nature of the relationship of industrialized populations to the natural world, and to the land itself. Industrial empires have ruled humanity since prehistory. All empires displace locally based populations, stealing their land, forcing them into urban areas to work for specialized industries and trades. This phenomenon has only increased over the centuries as rural areas empty out into the expanding cities. Generations live and die in the cities, never knowing the mystical beauties that spring up from the dirt under our feet or the ancestral legacies blotted out by conquest. With bread and circuses surrounding us, it is no wonder that the mass media spectacle has such a vast influence. We glory in competition, in winning and losing, in dominating and crushing others. Empires extract tribute from conquered provinces that create prosperity in the belly of the beast while leaving poverty everywhere else. Winners and losers, everywhere you look.

Not surprisingly, displaced populations and their descendants identify their welfare with the welfare of the empire. Poverty and endless wars abroad drive people into the “garden states” to grab their share of the bounty. They then offer up their sons and daughters to the armies that keep the empires strong. There was no shortage of volunteers to kill buffaloes on the Great Plains, to join the killing sprees in the gold rushes on Indian lands here in California, to build immense dams on rivers that destroy the balances of nature and cover over our ancestor’s graves, to kill anyone and everyone who stand in the way of the empire’s advance. Enclaves of pure resistance inside the empire are rare and short lived. Next to resistance, we witness ex slaves of African descent don the military uniforms of their masters to become Buffalo soldiers. Indian scouts direct murderous European armies into the western lands to kill their tribal rivals. African kings offer up their own people to the slave traders. The name of the game is greed and plunder and it is centuries old and global in scope. If it were not for global warming and the ecological disasters that threaten the planet, it could go on forever and it probably would. But we only have one world which we are wrecking with our greed and plunder. Fires and floods, droughts and power failures might be the wake up call we need to reach over and turn off the flame. If we don’t, we will be scraping beans off the ceiling and going without dinner.

Oil, an existential threat to humanity

Now suddenly, switching to solar and wind energy is not just some do-gooder’s idea. The cut off of west Asian oil shipments instantly created long gas lines all over Asia. Sun and wind energy have become a matter of national survival. Sales of Chinese solar panels have exploded globally. Oil has become an existential threat to humanity, just like American bases in West Asia have become invitations to destruction. And just like the old saying that the stone age did not end because of the lack of stones, so too oil supplies are not getting scarce because of the lack of oil. They are drying up because the political power of global south countries like Iran are threatening the unequal exchange that is at the heart of imperialism globally. As the unequal exchange ends, so does western prosperity.

Ironic in the extreme is the fact that the end of oil is not due to the polluting, cancer causing, filthy nature of oil. No. The cut off the west Asian oil spigot all of a sudden revealed the sight of a big heavy monster standing way out on a limb that the tree will no longer support. The allure of oil has hypnotized humanity, lulled us to sleep, swathed us in false comfort. This false consciousness about ourselves and our place in nature is so deeply held that it will not be undone quickly or easily. Undoing it challenges us to dig way down into our history to understand its origins and role in modern life.

The oil cut off is not just about the cost of filling up our tank. It is also about the supply of fertilizer for growing food. Thirty-five percent of the world’s nitrogen fertilizers come from West Asia, from some dirty oil well which Iran’s missiles cut off along with the flow of oil though the Strait of Hormuz. Somewhere along the way, humanity forgot that we live off the natural cycles of plants, rain, sun and earth. We found a shortcut. We decided to use oil based products to grow our food. So that now, without our oil, humanity faces starvation? What is wrong with this picture? We drug plants with oil based nitrogen fertilizers to grow food in plowed up fields that no longer support the complex web of life with its bio-diversity recreated perpetually in the cycles of the natural world. That is the limb we have climbed out on and that is the limb that imperialism’s war against Iran threatens to break off, taking the entire planet down with it. When I hear that in 2025 there were three million repossessions of big pick up trucks, I wonder if the mainstream will ever turn away from oil.

To understand what our fossil fuel addiction means, we have to put it in context of our impact on the health of the planet itself. When human civilization embraced oil as its savior, it played on a fundamental tenant of patriarchal private property which is a hallmark of all civilizations in history, east and west, north and south. The break from the natural world happened in prehistory. It was the catalyst that brought forth history itself. The break occurred when human beings, mainly men, had the unmitigated gall to take possession of a piece of land, thus separating it from the commons that supported the whole community and all the other living creatures around us. It happened when men took possession of the natural world in order to turn it into a source of wealth accumulation for individuals, or for institutions like the state or the church. It happened when men forcefully captured and enslaved women to further their power over the wealth derived from exploiting the planet. Enslaving women was fundamental to the process because the prehistoric world was female centered. It happened in the context of matrilineal and matrilocal cultures that were universal in prehistory globally. In order to bequeath captured land to future generations meant taking it out of the natural world in which humanity had evolved as a species. The process started small and spread like wildfire into every corner of the earth. *(See Private Property and the Goddess, 2023 for more on these ideas. (https://estuarypress.com/book/private-property-and-the-goddess/)

Usurping the land lays at the base of the power of empires everywhere. Rome did not have to work very hard to subdue ancient England when the English nobility donned togas to emulate their colonial masters. European slave traders found willing partners in African kings only too happy to capture and hand over the populations they ruled. Colonizers never lacked for comprador collaborators in global south nations willing to get rich as part of the vast destruction of lands and cultures that was at the heart of every civilization. The individualism enshrined in patriarchal private property destroyed collective cultures everywhere until we have arrived at the current spectacle of the privatization of everything, leaving humanity displaced and wandering in desperation. The oil sheikhs are the epitome of the history of civilization that we all know from growing up and growing old in it. They are not the bad guys causing us innocent by-standers problems. We are all wrapped up in this civilizational disaster in ways that impact us on every level. Shallow solutions and shallow thinking will not get us out of it either. In my Marxist days this critique might have ended with an appeal for socialism. But when socialist China leads the world in damming up the major rivers on every continent, I have to look deeper into human relationships to the earth and ask myself how can we ever find our way back to living in harmony with nature? All suggests are welcome.

Back then, I had a sneaking suspicion that this was not just an aberration. It was something that had great significance for the future. I did not know how or even if it was true. But today, witnessing the genocide in Palestine and Lebanon, it occurs to me that the same forces are back at work. The spectacle of Zionist Jews practicing genocide against Palestinians exactly as it was inflicted on them by the Germans in WWII is just mind-blowingly unbelievable. Polls show that the vast majority of Israelis believe that killing Palestinians is just fine. No problem killing babies and women, bombing whole cities to rubble, murdering peace negotiators and revered religious leaders, and using bull dozers to obliterate everything. And it’s not just Israelis. The neocons of the west, the US and Europe, are running around saying Palestinians do not exist! That killing them off is “self defense.” The toxic combination of personality cult (Trump), religion (Zionism), and politics (American hegemony) has now infected vastly more people than Jim Jones ever did. It doesn’t seem to matter if the politics are left, right, or center. Committing to one’s faith while taking leave of one’s senses is a recipe for disaster.

Believing in an absurdly misinformed ideology has now led to the corruption of global institutions that rule modern western societies and its vassal states. Neocon insanity shows itself in things like blowing up the Russian/German gas pipeline that basically brought the whole German industrial machine to its knees, where it now kisses the ass of American LNG producers. The insanity shows itself in the NATO and CIA embrace of the Nazi Bandera fascists who lead the absurd war in Ukraine, forcing half Ukraine’s population to flee the country and over a million patriotic young soldiers to die an early horrible death. Jones only killed 918. European and American neocons are shouting ‘fight the Russians to the last Ukrainian.’ Add Russo-phobia and Zionism on top of neoconservative politics and there you have it. Loney tunes playing over every station.

I don’t know exactly what caused Jim Jones and his People’s Temple to drink the cool aid. But it is clear what is bringing the neocon’s deadly concoction of ideology, religion and politics into collision with its end. It is Iran and Russia backed by the People’s Republic of China. The neocons have met their match and are losing it, descending into madness. They are pushing the western world towards self destruction in a way so similar to the People’s Temple that I cannot help thinking that they are now stocking up with Cool Aid and strychnine. They have adopted a fundamentally flawed ideology and put it up against the entire planet. It has led to their defeat and to the total isolation of Israel and the US, along with its European vassals. They are cornered and panic is spreading through the capitols of western civilization. It is not hard to imagine western civilization deciding to nuke the entire planet rather than admitting defeat. Nuclear bombs are their cool aid.

All of this is taking place inside a world shaped by the old colonial (now neocolonial) system. The “garden countries” of western civilization are shrinking like punctured balloons in the face of the Global South’s departure from the grip of its tentacles. The heart of the problem for our dying ruling class is China. China took her leave from the 100 years of humiliation, from the poverty and exploitation imposed upon it by western conquest. That was the first step in gradually reducing the flow of super profits from the global south that had nourished western civilizations for 500 years. Like a drug addict deprived of his fix, the west began to lose its mind. And it just keeps getting worse and worse as the neocons lose war after war, as the world flocks into alternative payment systems, as the almighty dollar sinks into the sunset. Nothing has demonstrated this process of decline more clearly than the crisis created when the Iranians shut down the Strait of Hormuz.

The flow of oil into modern economies is what makes the empire function. When it stopped flowing, eyes popped at the sight of the abyss faced globally. Everything runs off diesel so the supply chains of the economy faced an abrupt halt. Fertilizers derived from oil underlay the food system of every country. Mass starvation looms. Jet fuel ran short. All of a sudden it became clear that the modern system of production and distribution are nothing without the fossil fuels that power everything. Fossil fuels may be a dying source of power for the future, but right now it is the main thing keeping the “modern world” running. Threatening its supply lines threatens not only the lives of millions, even billions, of people. It also threatens ruling class power. The system has run into a wall, just like Jim Jones and his trusting band of followers all those years ago.

Perhaps the most telling sign of this insanity occurred in the 1970s when the western war machine decided to outsource its weapons supply chains to China, its enemy. Deng Xiaoping, the ruler of the People’s Republic of China and its Communist Party at the time, invited them in with a smile. The neocons figured that all the money being invested in China would certainly result in regime change and keep their outsourced supply chains safe. But they were wrong, deluded by their own hubris and ignorance. Now China, still under the rule of the Communist Party of China, cut off the supply of rare earth minerals and the west’s war machine silently grinds to a halt. F-35 warplanes are being delivered to the Air Force with no radar because they cannot make the radar without the rare earths. Missiles are being shot off faster than the west can replace them because the west no longer has the manufacturing base it outsourced to China. At the same time that the alleged missile defense systems are being exposed as inadequate and way too expensive, the west has torn up every single nuclear arms treaty we ever had. At the same time that the west has lost every war it instigated since WW2, it has failed to sign a single peace treaty with anyone. Trump’s Memorandum Of Understanding with Iran has made the Israelis and the neocons apoplectic with rage and panic. What about our forever wars?!! Western politicians and press are now so caught up in their lies that they no longer know what is happening around them. Maybe they should add straight jackets to their shopping list of cool aid and strychnine. I am sure they can find plenty of willing helpers to dig all the bunkers they need to retreat to in their final reckoning with the truth, which will surely come to them, just as it did to Jim Jones and his People’s Temple. And just as it did to Adolph Hitler.

My First Solar Panels

Over the years, I watched the price of oil skyrocket, and the price of gasoline along with it. At the same time, the cost of solar panels and batteries declined substantially. I took the hint and plunged ahead into the solar world. I installed solar panels in 2011, years before I added the battery. Solar panels were 285 watts back then. Today, solar panel power output has grown to 440 watts. And they are increasing in capacity every day. I installed 21 (7x3) panels which gave me around 6000 watts of solar generated power when the sun was at its zenith. I used my home line of credit to finance the first set of solar panels. My electric bill fell exactly enough to cover the cost of the new loan, so the impact on my daily budget was zero, a wash from the first day. I went from renting power from PG&E to buying my own power generating system without incurring any additional budget burden.

The allure of free electricity from the sun naturally propelled me to buy my first electric car, a Nissan Leaf, which only got 70 miles of range, enough around town but severely limiting otherwise. When we moved to Vallejo 9 years ago, 70 mile range was just not enough. I traded the Leaf in for a hybrid, actually an extended range Chevy Volt, as an interim measure, as I bided my time to go all electric. With my limited finances and the falling prices of used EVs, it took me a couple of years. But then I was finally able to purchase a used 2020 Tesla model 3. The gas credit cards fell out of my wallet where they had been nestled for the last 50 years. I know it didn’t really matter to Chevron and Union 76, but it was a watershed moment for me.

Since my first solar panels had no battery, all they did was to run the electrical meter backwards. That was thrilling enough at the time. But if the grid went down, the panels did too and along with them, my refrigerator and lights. And then I saw that PG&E paid me peanuts for the energy I was putting back into the grid. They charge me “retail” for the energy they supply me, but pay me “wholesale” for the energy I supply them. While they charge 45 cents per kilowatt hour for what I use from the grid, they pay 4 cents per kWh for what I contribute to the grid. How does that make sense? Only makes sense for the bond holders of PG&E. It took some time, along with some searching into those incomprehensibly long PG&E bills, to figure this out.

It didn’t take long after that to realize that to fully utilize the solar panel power for myself, I needed a battery with its additional functionality. The home battery not only stores energy. The battery’s computer adds the ability of the home system to direct power from the panels to the house whether the grid was on or off. With a battery, if the grid went down, my refrigerator and lights stayed on. The battery allowed me to power the house using the solar energy it stored from the panels on the roof. Seems simple enough but the implications of that are not so simple. The most immediate advantage was that, using the automatic settings on the Tesla app, I could switch the house to battery power during PG&E’s peak hours. That is a saving for sure. The battery capacity is 13.5 kWh. That allows me to run the house with the battery alone from 4 pm to 9 pm every day during these peak hours.

Adjusting My Electrical Usage

Then I started to think about our electrical usage in light of the new f unctionality of the battery. Each day, I look up at the sky and then at the Tesla app to see how the solar panels are charging the battery. Even on a cloudy day, the battery usually fills up around 11 AM. The timing depends on two things. First the strength of the sun. Cloudy days, winter days, hot days… all influence the output of the panels and the speed of recharging the battery. Sometimes it takes the battery until 1PM to fill up. Only on the darkest stormiest days does the battery fail to recharge itself fully. Just depends. The second thing is my electrical usage during the charging hours. If I charge the car, for instance, while the battery is filling up, the power from the panels divides between the car and the battery. It takes longer for the battery to fill up. Wherever possible, I wait to charge the car till later after the battery is full and before peak hours, like from 11 AM to 4 PM.

So after the battery fills up, the solar panels start pumping the ‘excess’ energy back into the grid at wholesale prices. Instead of that, I charge the car. If the panels are producing 7 kW at 12 noon and the car charging takes 9 kW, the grid puts in 2 kW and the solar panels puts in 7 kW. Similarly, if I run the dishwasher or the electric clothes dryer during those hours after the battery is full, the solar panel’s power runs them. Controlling the electrical use this way allows me to reduce the ‘retail’ priced electrical usage which reduces the overall bill.

The “True Up” Bill

What made me think about my electrical usage this way is what PG&E calls its “true up” bill. Once a year, they add up my contributions to the grid and charge me a lump sum for my ‘excess’ usage over the solar generated power I put in the grid. The first year I started driving the all electric Telsa, my ‘true up’ was over $2000. Ouch. Compared to filling up the car with high priced gas, it is still a good deal. But taking a hit like that was not acceptable. So I added more panels on the roof and hoped it would reduce the annual true up bill. It brought it way down, but did not eliminate it. I became even more interested in how to respond to PG&E’s clever billing policies. It is all about timing my electrical usage which requires changing some long time habits acquired before I had solar panels. Habits like when I do laundries, run the dishwasher, or turn on the AC. Little by little, I hope to whittle down that true up to zero. If PG&E was ever nationalized into a not-for-profit public utility, like has been done in Sacramento, Alameda, Redding, and other cities, I might even get fully paid for the power that my panels put into the grid. But I have to say that after all the years of having solar panels, I have never received one penny for the power I put into the grid so far and I can’t see any reason it will ever change. Why the government doesn’t require PG&E to pay adequately, even generously, for the solar power input from roof tops all over the state in the interest of encouraging and incentivizing the use and adoption of solar and battery power is beyond me. The way it is now I am actually discouraged from helping the grid. There is a setting in the Tesla app called the “Virtual Power Plant” inviting me to “earn money” by joining my battery to a program that allows the PG&E to access the battery power for the grid. In great big letters, it forecasts that I could earn a whole $43 per year by doing this. Come on guys! No thanks. I will just keep the battery separate and use it for my own needs and for offsetting the bill I get every month. If the grid ever really needs the power from my battery, it can pay me for it.

Batteries in the Electrification Process

Lately I am seeing wider applications of batteries in the electrification process. Most impressively, I saw the super chargers that Tesla is installing for charging long haul semi trucks, 18 wheelers and such which have batteries with 800 kW or more capacity. The Tesla model 3 battery is 80 kW. Instead of drawing electricity directly from the grid, Tesla is creating large battery + solar banks with special battery powered super chargers that can deliver a huge charge to a truck’s battery rapidly. This allows the battery bank to charge slowly at night when rates are low without taxing the capacity of the grid. Then during the day, the super chargers charge the trucks without pulling from the grid at all. This set up changes the game. Instead of taking excessive amounts of electricity from the grid, super charging stations for trucks add additional independent solar power generation to the charging stations. This parallels exactly the role of solar and batteries on my house and highlights the fact that the US grid is wholly inadequate for the new world emerging right now.

Closer to home, I noticed that induction kitchen ranges are being developed with built in batteries. Currently such combo units cost $7000. So gotta wait on that one. But the idea is great. Instead of having to upgrade my house electrical system to handle the load of an electrical induction range, the battery inside the induction range charges slowly at night and then the battery runs the stove. Likewise, heat pumps are now coming out with their own batteries. To install a heat pump to replace the gas furnace in my home, I would have to upgrade the house electrical service. Not with a battery powered heat pump. This expansion of the role of batteries in the electrification process is happening everywhere. It promises decentralized power generation to take the excess demands off the aging grid and lets us use electrical power in ways we are just beginning to imagine.

These savings make a big difference to budget conscious consumers and businesses. At the same time it does the right thing for the planet. Going solar with a battery is thought of as an expensive luxury by many people who don’t think twice about buying a 70 thousand dollar gas guzzling pick up truck. But the difference is that buying solar panels and a battery is actually an investment with a return, whereas buying an over sized gas powered pickup truck is conspicuous consumption at its most irrational. There is no return on investment. It is not actually an investment at all. It is an open door to paying heavy maintenance and repair costs throughout the life of the vehicle. Where electric cars have virtually no maintenance, gas truck maintenance and repairs are all that keep the legacy car dealers alive. Having years of experience with electrical vehicles and with a battery augmented solar system on the house, I have learned to appreciate the new technology and to believe in its potential for reducing harmful impacts inherent in modern life. And with the Gulf war, the spiraling cost of gas and diesel, I hope more and more people are going to understand the difference.

Underneath the beatific image of Cesar Chavez lay a patriarchal ugliness that just surfaced in front of the whole world. The growers must love this. The farm workers must be chagrined. And everywhere, people are disappointed and confused. When Dolores Huerta reports that Cesar raped her twice and she had two children as a result, Cesar Chavez’s fall is complete. Cesar Chavez Day changed instantly to Farm Worker Day. For me, Chavez’s unmasking evokes a long string of memories that have dotted my experience for decades now.

When I first heard the report of Chavez’s misogyny, my reaction was, “Well, he was a Catholic, after all.” You know, a member of the Catholic church with a global reputation for abusing choir boys? Somehow, we turn our gaze away from this ugliness and look instead at Jesus on the cross and all the nice moralizing taking place in his name. In effect, we are investing our hope and faith in an institution that never fails to disappoint. Having faith in institutions that never fail to disappoint goes way beyond Christianity. Our era, now buried in wars, racism, sexism, injustice and pollution, demands that we step out beyond accepting the hidden nightmares, beyond saying nothing, seeing nothing and hearing nothing. The old world is breaking up in front of us right now.

Chavez’s fall takes me back to the 1960s to memories of my father’s (Harvey Richards) experience when he took his cameras into the central valleys of California to try to help the farm worker cause. (See “California Farm Workers Photography, 1958-1973”). At the time, organized labor was very active in California with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC). It had support from the then much stronger labor movement, including the United Auto Workers Union and the Congress of Industrial Organizations itself. In the 1930s and 40s, my father had been a labor organizer and a communist. In the 1950s, he became a photographer, dedicated to helping the radical movements he had supported for many years before.

He was a hot potato in the labor movement because where ever he went, FBI agents followed, newspapers red baited the movement, and with that, came firings, blacklisting and all too frequently, goons carrying clubs and guns. So when Chavez and his Catholic social worker/priest friends set up the United Farm Workers union, they carried the anti-communist crusade into the heart of the new farm worker labor movement, suppressing the hammer and sickle banner of old completely, replacing it with the Virgin Mary at the front of the picket line. They called it a “cultural” upgrade. Between the FBI, the goons, and then the Virgin Mary, my father probably realized his presence in the valley was no longer helpful. His farm worker photography stopped abruptly in 1966. I saw this happening during those turbulent years when I was a radical college student at UC Berkeley. Oh well, I thought. good luck, farm workers. Maybe they would have success following the Virgin Mary banner where the old hammer and sickle seemed to have failed. Unfortunately for the farm workers, it did not. The union remains marginal and working conditions and wages are as bad as ever. California’s rich soils continue to grow billionaires.

The new revelations about Chavez light up the hidden secrets of those early years when the UFW eclipsed the AWOC. At the time, the patriarchal reality did not seem important. The ubiquity of patriarchy hid it from view. Patriarchal abuse may have been out there in plain sight for people like Dolores Huerta and other rape victims to see. But who listens to them? Just like is happening with the Epstein revelations and cover ups today eliciting the same shock and dismay as the Chavez revelations.

Many events during those years should have challenged my own acceptance of patriarchy. One of the earliest clues came from my mother, Hodee Edwards, a devout Marxist, who ranted against Marx because of the way he treated his wife, Jenny von Westphalen. Though Jenny remained Marx’s devoted helper and companion and mother of their seven children, she had to endure his infidelity with their maid, with his blindness and neglect of the family’s daily struggles. This infuriated my mother. I was aware of it but like with so much else, I shrugged it off. Oh well, who’s perfect? The fact that such patriarchal behavior in Marx himself receives so little attention made me wonder why Marx and Marxism was so willing and able to sweep it under the rug.

I carried this blindness with me when I joined the WEB DuBois clubs in my first years as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, in the early 1960s. The DuBois club was a project of the Communist Party. I joined the DuBois club enthusiastically. It felt like I was coming out of the cold, associating with graduate students and other elders who embraced the revolutionary assumptions that were so persecuted and vilified back in the day of the silent 1950s. I listened and absorbed their critique which helped thaw my frozen inner fears holding my radical beliefs in check. I became the President of the UC Berkeley DuBois club chapter, and helped lead demonstrations against racism in the Bay Area economy that landed me in jail for two months in 1966.

Patriarchy’s secrets were really secret back in those years. But in 2006, one DuBois clubber, namely Bettina Aptheker, published her memoir Intimate Politics. It was a blockbuster for me personally because I knew Bettina and I knew her father Herbert. And I knew the Communists who had continued her nightmare of sexual abuse once she arrived on the west coast. Her revelations of abuse in 2006 were as shocking to me as Dolores Huerta’s revelations about Cesar Chavez are today. At the same time that Bettina carried the banners of the Free Speech Movement and the Free Angela campaigns, this hidden abuse was going on and out of sight. So too was the abuse of Dolores Huerta and other women by Cesar Chavez. The “vanguard” of Marxists and Communists were no exception to patriarchy and its habits of sexual abuse.

How could Marxists, including me at the time, not see this? Why does this kind of abuse remain hidden in society at large (Epstein), in the worker’s movements (Chavez), and even in the communist movement (Bettina)? No one was exempt. Patriarchy leaves no room for innocents. If I were a Catholic, I would be searching for answers in the history and thinking of Christianity. But since I am a Marxist (of sorts), I am compelled to look at that.

Patriarchy’s Place within Marxism

Marxism emerged in the 19^th century from a European continent ruled by patriarchy for millennia. So Marxism itself was the product of men in a world dominated by patriarchy. Frederick Engels was one of the first philosophers to admit that European civilization itself had emerged from a prehistoric world with “female” centered cultures. This idea was controversial then and remains so today because of its profound implications for us.

In my book, Private Property and the Goddess (2023) I wrote:

Engels examined how Greek society changed from the ancient women centered world, connecting the questions of how private property arose, to the evolution of the human family and the status of women. That was in itself a great advance in our thinking. But it was not enough. (p. 145)

Quoting Engels, I went on:

The rise of private property in herds and articles of luxury led to exchange between individuals, to the transformation of products into commodities. And here lie the seeds of the whole subsequent upheaval. When the producers no longer directly consumed their product themselves, but let it pass out of their hands in the act of exchange, they lost control of it.… But the Athenians were soon to learn how rapidly the product asserts its mastery over the producer when once exchange between individuals has begun and products have been transformed into commodities. With the coming of commodity production, individuals began to cultivate the soil on their own account, which soon led to individual ownership of land.

This sequence of commodity production leading to the rise of private ownership seems reasonable enough. But there is something too abstract about it. Looking deeper into this notion, Engels asserts that the process of privatization began in pastoral areas with herds of animals.

As to how and when the herds passed out of the common possession of the tribe or the gens into the ownership of individual heads of families, we know nothing at present. . . . All the surplus which the acquisition of the necessities of life now yielded fell to the man; the woman share in its enjoyment, but had no part in its ownership.

Saying that “we know nothing” about how property “passed out of the common possession of the tribe” is no longer the case. The fact is we know plenty. It makes all the difference to say that private property rose in the hands of men instead of saying that private property arose in the hands of “individuals” or “producers” who might have been either sex. We know, for instance, that 80% of the food consumed by prehistoric people came from the work of women in their gardens and from the gathering part of the hunter/gatherer cultures. We also know that pre-patriarchal civilizations existed in the early Neolithic Era that practiced trade between far flung cultures. (See Marija Gimbutas, Civilization of the Goddess.) Early forms of commodity production existed, therefore, in prehistory before private property. If early commodity production on its own had led to the rise of private ownership, i.e., cultivating the soil “on their own account,” certainly women should have participated. But they did not. “All the surplus which the acquisition of the necessities of life now yielded fell to the man; the woman shared in its enjoyment, but had no part in its ownership.” The unavoidable conclusion is obvious. Private property arose in the hands of men, in the hands of male producers.

Private male ownership of the land revolutionized human relationships to the earth. The earth ceased to be the mysterious source of life supporting the tribe and all other life forms. It became a mere input in the male creation of wealth. This transformation occurred in the context of human cultures that were thousands of years old with deep knowledge of the secrets of life and the universe that were passed down verbally and communicated culturally by men and women inside women centered families and social groups. Millions of human beings lived on the planet before private property ever existed. The transformation from this prehistoric world to the era of written history occurred when patriarchal power went to war against these “stone age” cultures. In the process, over thousands of years, much of humanity’s “stone age” knowledge was lost, along with the spiritual practices handed down by elders, generation after generation. As a result of this perpetual war, humans have been systematically displaced from their ancestral lands, becoming refugees, wandering in strange lands they no longer knew. As generations passed, cultural and family bonds dissolved. Our ignorance flourished and our spirituality faded. My wandering in the streets of Oakland as a child, wondering how I could find a place for myself in this world, was my inheritance of this displacement that has plagued humanity since the beginnings of history. (See my previous Substack, Private Property on My Mind.)

Private Property and the Goddess opens with Russel Means’ challenge to Marxism. His challenge was succinctly put in his 1980 speech “For America to Live, Europe Must Die.” His challenge put me on the path to understanding this deep experience of my childhood. Means asserted that Marxism was not revolutionary from his point of view. Marxism did not strive for an end to the industrial system which Means blamed for the genocide against his people. Instead it wanted a continuation of it. A continuation with some changes. Like change the ruling class from the bourgeoisie to the workers. And for Means to join the workers movements meant that he had to give up his land and his culture, a path which he rejected. He gave voice to “stone age” people and cultures suffering under the genocidal actions that we have forgotten, that remain hidden from us by the official versions of history taught to school children everywhere. It is a history that every home owner in America walks on every day without giving a second thought to the indigenous people who went before us. As far as revolutionary thinking goes, then, it seems that we can have communism with patriarchy, if you please.

When you take patriarchy out of capitalism, you come face to face with the fundamental nature of the system itself: it made the earth into an economic input instead of the sacred source of life. The male seizure of the land (or herds) spread globally during prehistory. Once a man took possession of the land, how could he keep it? What would prevent the land from falling back into the hands of the non owning female centered cultures surround him? The key act that perpetuated patriarchy was the suppression of women, their submergence in the monogamous family structure of private property owning men so they could leave their wealth to their male offspring. This suppression occurred in wars through the rape and capture of women by conquering armies. Patriarchy and private property are the same thing. Private property is built on the suppression of women.

The idea that commodity production itself gave rise to private property puts private property into the realm of abstract forces which then control humans. It says that civilization arose in a linear process stemming from the natural growth of society and the economy, like the natural growth of a plant from a seed. We become helpless and hapless observes of the laws of development of the economy, subjects of the ruling commodities. No one is at fault. Nothing can be done. It is all just “human nature.”

But when you understand that the rise of private property was the conscious act of male power in the context of prehistoric cultures, it illuminates the deep roots of the problem that keep surfacing all around us. The fight against patriarchal capitalism leads to asking what would a world without patriarchy look like? And what would a world without private property look like? It’s time to re-examine our widespread derogatory use of terms like ‘barbarian’ and ‘stone age savages’ to refer to the people and cultures outside civilization. Not only does Trump want to bomb Iran back into the stone age. But the antagonists of Trump and the empire see the empire’s violence and depravity as barbarian, a term used to refer to people opposed to civilization and its genocidal habits. This kind of thinking locks us all into the continuation mode that Russell Means was so much against with all its hidden assumptions and terrible secrets. Secrets like Cesar Chavez raping Dolores Huerta. Like Herbert Aptheker molesting his daughter, Bettina. Or like the Epstein class preying on children. These are not just bad actors. These secrets reveal the true nature of a system out of touch with the earth, no longer living in harmony with nature, but instead preying upon it. These secrets reveal the essence of things that we have hidden from for too long.

As a child growing up poor in Oakland, California, I wandered the streets wondering how I would ever find a place for myself in the world. All around me were locked doors and high fences. The only place I could wander at will was in the streets. For a while, I dreamed that I could leave the city and find a place in the country that was open and free. But there I faced private property and no trespassing signs, more fences and increasingly loud and repulsive pick up trucks, motorcycles and other machines that dominate the rural world completely. Even after a lifetime of work and change, home ownership and retirement, I still feel surprised that I found my way through the fences and locked doors. Those moments when I felt that I was a prisoner of the mean urban streets, dangerous and inhospitable, remain strong. This residue of my youth is a snapshot of the urban world’s historic legacy, a world I was born into which demands that I accept it as “reality.” Now as an old man, mad at everything and accepting nothing, I realize that the historical legacy I live in is all about private property. Salvadorean poet Roque Dalton’ words “Private Property, you have deprived me of everything” still resonate.

Millions of people all over the world, including me, have settled into a perfect system of alienation from the natural world. Wilderness is a concept on TV. National parks are the only common space left. Nature’s laws of development are only interesting to us if they serve our purposes. No matter how I oppose and despise US empire’s ways, I remain its slave. I made a living in the construction industry (where I worked for 40 years) and adapted to it. I was like a fish in water, too busy to notice the life beyond the little pond I was swimming in.

Before Private Property

As the years passed, I kept coming back to those traumatic moments in my childhood when I wandered the streets alone wishing I had a place in it. That feeling of isolation and alienation all came down to how private property ruled everything everywhere. I wondered, how did private property get to be this way? I tried to answer this question for myself in my book Private Property and the Goddess (2023). Before my years as a carpenter, I developed my historical imagination in 11 years of university level history studies. Working with my hands for decades after that brought me down from the lofty world of books and lectures into my own more immediate world where I was immersed inside private property, physically and legally and every other way. Just because I had to live inside it did not lessen my antipathy towards it. Knowing full well how immense our reliance on private property has become, I started to wonder if there ever was a time before private property existed. If so, there had to have been an initial act that created private property. The initial act did not happen in a vacuum. It happened in prehistory after millennia of human existence on this planet. It had consequences beyond imagination. But since it happened before written history, we are unaware of it and its implications for contemporary life. We are like a fish trying to understand that there is a world beyond water. And for a fish, the world beyond water means death, so it is really hard to think about.

Many people cannot believe there was a time before private property. It appears to them as an immortal, irreducible tenant of all human existence, as something that is basic to “human nature.” Like water must appear to the fish. Yet consider that if there was a time before private property, it spanned many more millennia than historical time spans. According to many studies of prehistory, best summarized by Marija Gimbutas in her book Civilization of the Goddess, the human world was matrilineal and matrilocal before private property, woman centered cultures living on the land that they did not “own.” They worshiped it as the source of life, calling it Mother Earth. The act of creating private property was an act against cultures that lived in harmony with nature. Essentially, the initial act occurred when men physically occupied and took possession of some land, put up fences and separated it from the collective society around him. Privatized it. Women did not do this. Men did it. It was an act of force based on strength and violence. This first act has been immortalized in written history as the moment when God created Man. In fact it should have been labeled as the moment when God created the property owner.

Trying to imagine an act far back in time is made easier if we look at it from the standpoint of the conquest of North American continent by invading Europeans. This history has been mythologized in our stories of cowboys and Indians, stories that fascinate humanity world wide. The US genocide against millions of native people in North America was a replay of the initial act creating private property. The history books hide its true nature under the idea of “manifest destiny.” Manifest destiny embodies the notion that private property owners have the right to usurp all the lands of the earth, to conquer it, buy it or claim it for God. This is called the doctrine of discovery that originated in the Catholic church and is still today embodied in the laws that rule the western world. Private property and inheritance in the male line spread across North America with the European armies that conquered it. War and conquest are what created every empire in history. Prehistoric wars must have looked just like our 7^th Calvary coming down over the hills, raiding Indian villages, killing and raping until the few survivors retreated into reservations in order to survive. Rape became a hallmark of war because it forced women out of the collective security of their women-centered cultures and villages and into captivity by the men taking over the land. Patriarchal private property originated with violence and it remains violent today. When the dust settled after conquest, property titles were handed out to the soldiers and “normal life” began. This is exactly what happened with my great great grandfather, John Baker, who fought in the Indian wars in Oregon in the 1840s and then received a partial section of land after the conquest was complete.

As private property spread in the ancient world, markets became king. Riches flowed to those who could capture wealth for themselves. The new order left the commons behind and imprisoned women and children in the monogamous family. It left the earth behind. The principles of selfishness and personal power became the driving force for both the ruling classes and for those below who sought a way out of the lower depths. Competition became the modis operandi of society replacing cooperation and collectivity that preceded it. Male privatization of property spread like a pandemic disease, multiplied and created layer upon layer of inequality, wealth and misery in society while it destroyed ancient cultures everywhere. We developed ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots.’ As nation states and imperial powers arose, history became the story of the kings and their triumphs and defeats. Today, we are watching the world’s latest empire turning into a monster that has nuclear weapons. Everyone is pointing their finger at someone else trying to understand why we are all so helpless in the face of this doomsday machine seemingly so beyond change.

The Empire Within

If we stop looking for someone to blame or some mysterious force, like God or the Devil, or Human Nature, to explain it all, but instead look inward, we have to reckon with our own blindness to the land under our feet. The existentialists saw that we all face a field of possibilities in the world that we must grapple with in finding our way. All our possibilities arise from history which makes simple thinking and common sense outmoded. Having an historical imagination is now necessary to pierce the wall of appearances in order to see the realities, or the real possibilities. Historical imagination is different than religious faith in that it references the real historical events that led up to our current reality. It requires knowledge and is not simply about the hope and faith that all of us carry around with us in one form or another.

Patriarchal private property has laid its stamp upon us in a big way. Like the other day, a neighbor walked passed me on the sidewalk in front of my house while I was looking up at the solar panels on the roof. I was so pleased, and I guess it showed, because all he had to say to me was “It will never work.” I shook my head and replied, “It is working right now.” He walked on, unmoved. The locked doors and high fences of my childhood have now become the locked minds and limited vision of people who refuse to believe what is in front of their noses. This new wall of perception is the building block upon which the illusions of the mainstream narrative is built. We are stuck in the past. Our minds have become the play toys for media moguls and their deep state bosses who manipulate us into passivity. Rebels and revolutionaries are playing against house money which has all the odds in its favor.

How strange it is to be human animals alienated from the earth. So many of us are no longer seeing the magic of the earth, the miracle of creation embodied in photo synthesis, in the sun and in the water flowing all around us. I live now in Vallejo California where many people are not aware of the fact that we live at the conjunction of two great rivers, the Napa and Sacramento rivers. This place was, and still is, sacred to the tribes who lived here for thousands of years before Europeans pushed them out. Ten years ago, in 2016, an indigenous cemetery on the river’s edge was designated as the location for a city park’s latrine until protests by local tribes and caring neighbors stopped it. No monuments were erected, however. The place is now covered in lawn.

How can we live in harmony with nature when we do not see it? We have to see it first in order to begin to live in harmony with it. How can we see it when our nameless creeks run under our feet in culverts or in unruly ditches on the side of the road?

We are frozen inside a monster propelling us willy nilly towards the proverbial cliff. We won’t solve this problem through reforming the tools of patriarchy that have gotten us here. The master is incapable of ending slavery. Only the slaves can do that. Letting go of the reigns of patriarchal power is more than fighting for the equality of women. It is letting go of our belief that we humans have the right to do harm to the earth whenever it suits our purpose, whether it be for our convenience, for profit or even for the common good.

How to untangle the issues of technology and empire? Three examples from the past illustrate how complicated this issue has always been.

First, in the 1930s, Henry Ford was a big supporter of Hitler and financed his regime all the way up until the second world war began. The Ford assembly line promised to provide cheap horseless carriages to the masses. Without missing a beat, the assembly line then became the engine of total war producing tanks and war machines galore for both sides of the conflict. I was born in 1944 so I was unaware of these larger issues. In my studies of history, I never ran across anyone who reported that people refused to buy Fords because Henry Ford was a fascist war monger. Maybe some did, but they didn’t leave any record of it that I have seen. History shows that Ford was part of a much larger economic group who all dreamed that Nazi Germany would destroy the Soviet Union.

Sadly for them, the USSR kicked Hitlers butt and drove the fascists underground, literally and figuratively. They are now hiding in the shadows of US and European deep states, which includes the Mossad in Israel. The Nazi dream lives on in the western support of the Nazis in Ukraine and Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Advanced technology which we all love in our smart phones has turned into a nightmare of mass surveillance and exploding pagers. AI’s impact on industrial automation has made the assembly line looks like a museum piece. And the empire loves it. Not because it relieves humanity of the drudgery of factory work, but because it relieves the empire of workers entirely.

The second example of paradigm level technology descending into the hands of empire occurred when the German Greens became the chief advocates and supporters of the west’s war against Russia in the Ukraine. Of course it helped that some of the individuals leading the Greens and the west’s war effort were the actual grand children of Nazis.

It bothered me to see solar and wind power advocates of any persuasion jump onto the pro war fascist bandwagon. Then, thinking back to Henry, I thought, oh well, these technology elites are falling into a well known pathway in western political history. I found it confounding that people who understood the need to break away from fossil fuels, and even went so far as to shutdown their nuclear power plants, as Germany did after the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters, could opt for another war against Russia. Not only did the German Greens support the war, they also started up the old coal power plants after they sheepishly supported blowing up the Russian gas pipeline which raised the price of heat and light for everyone in Europe. If that isn’t a betrayal of the potential of a new technology for the benefit of empire, what is? US liquefied natural gas sales have soared in Europe and the promise of sustainable energy slipped from the headlines. All for the glory of the empire.

The third example is the Elon Musk/Donald Trump connection. Again, I knew Musk was raised in South Africa during the anti apartheid war period among the Afrikaners who were on the wrong (aka losing) side of that struggle. He carried his white privilege into his Canadian and American world as easily as the German Greens carried themselves into the higher reaches of European pro war governments. At first, I could not understand how Trump and Musk could find common ground. After all, Musk was the leading force bringing electrical vehicles into existence, something that Trump’s oil baron supporters here in the US are fighting against with everything they have. I drive a Tesla, marveling every day at the advanced technology embedded in that car. I revel in the knowledge that my car is mostly powered by sunshine from the solar panels on my roof. I am disgusted with the stink of Musk’s support of Trump rubbing off onto the car. I had to laugh recently, during the early hours of the Trump administration, when a Hell’s Angels type motor cyclist with his lady on the back waved and applauded at my Tesla as we drove past each other. Was this the right wing joining the electrification movement or the electrification movement descending into hatred and violence? Was this like the Model T Ford’s of the 1930s driving around amidst evil stares from the horse and buggy set? Or bewildered stares from the early electric car drivers who disappeared into oblivion in clouds of exhaust fumes? I have to remind myself that every empire embeds new technologies into its power structures. Musk’s Starlink, for instance, brought the potential for wireless internet connectivity to the globe and yet instantly became a targeting device for genocide in Gaza and for Nazis in Ukraine. Then, just like that, the enemies of empire turn the tables. Like when Iran, with Russian help, switched off Starlink during the recent CIA attempt at an orange revolution inside Iran, and used it to identify and destroy the whole Mossad/CIA network on the ground. Oops.

The short sighted picketing of Tesla is another instance of greens joining the fossil fuel warfare state ultimately aimed at China. The US fight against electric cars does not stop the technology from working its way through the world, which is often missed by the headlines and historians, and is outside the awareness of most people. Electric cars are spreading all over the globe, coming from China mainly, but also from Korea, Japan, Europe and the US. We see the demand for oil starting to shrink, the air clear up and the obnoxious noise of exploding gas engines subside. Outrage over Musk and Trump, skipping down the garden path into their imagined all white future, gets tangled up in larger mainstream plans to hold back the tide. Does oil and water actually mix together after all?

Such ironies go all the way back to the beginning of human history. The techies of the ancient world (mostly women in turns out) invented agriculture which then fell under the control of hierarchical religions and patriarchal land owning power structures. Agriculture feeds the world with virtually unlimited plenty but then is converted into commodity production for world trade which makes land owners rich and impoverishes everyone else. Still populations grow as backyard gardens help people escape the oppression of these marketeers. Humanity did not turn away from agriculture, however, just because it became a tool of land owners to oppress them.

The first historical empires were the ones which corralled bronze tools to use against the stone age indigenous tribes all around them. The advantages of bronze tools and weapons soon faded as iron technologies arose, cheaper and available to anyone in their backyard. Greece and Rome rose through putting iron technology into their armies and their economies. But their “barbarian” neighbors could smelt iron as well as the next man, and the ancient empires sank into oblivion and decadence. Technology works its way differently depending on who owns it, the empire or the people.

The mass appeal of electric cars and solar panels with batteries is spreading like a river overflowing its banks at flood stage. Whatever is going on between the Democrats and Republicans, we have to remember that Mother Nature bats last. And right now Mother Nature is up at the plate.

The story of how this project came into my life started back in 1966 in Ghana, West Africa. It was right after the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah in April of that year. My former wife, Susan Alland, and I landed in Accra, Ghana, after a breath taking flight from London straight south over Europe, North Africa and the Sahara desert. Our flight was met by armed soldiers at the airport in Accra. I was there just after graduating from UC Berkeley in January, 1966, when, instead of a diploma, I received my order to report for the pre-induction physical from the Army. With the war in Vietnam looming over me, I naturally I took the opportunity to go visit my mother, Hodee Edwards, my step father, George Edwards and my sister Lou Edwards, in Ghana where the US had no army bases. My family had moved to Ghana in 1962 from Oakland, California where I grew up.

While in Ghana for two months, I met Denise who was a school chum of my sister. She was African American like my sister and step father.

Denise, Ruthie Alston, friend from the US, and Lou, Kumasi, Ghana, c. 1966

Her family, like mine, had moved to Ghana to support Nkrumah and his movement for independence from European colonial rulers. Denise’s step father, Jerry Harper and George were both workers in the building trades, an electrician and a plumber. George and Jerry got a laugh over the fact that after they arrived in Ghana, a hotel in Accra finally managed to get water up to the 10^th floor.

Left to right: Denise, sister Jan, mother Lorraine and Jerry Harper,
Accra, Ghana c. 1966.

Eventually Denise and Lou both came back to the States and became housemates in their 60s and 70s in Vallejo, Calif. That is where I discovered that Denise was deeply involved in writing her book the Cuisines of Africa. She was determined to publish it herself. I signed on to help her publish it with my knowledge and practice of independent publishing. From 2018 on I visited Denise at my sister’s house regularly reviewing her writings and developing the files necessary to bring it to publication.

I became aware of Denise’s prowess as a cook over these years during our Thanksgiving gatherings. She and Lou did much of the cooking, especially the desserts which were heavenly. She sometimes brought six desserts, which on top of the turkey and trimmings, left me almost comatose. Denise was very secretive about her computer files, however, and our publishing progress was slow. We kept at it month after month for years until her health gave out last year and she passed away. The book was not published and I wondered if it ever would be.

But then, I obtained her computer files when Lou moved to Arizona in 2025 and took Denise’s computer with her. Denise’s files fit nicely onto one of those small little external hard drives that hold more files than most libraries. Finally, I was able to see everything she had written and collected for her book. I contacted her son, Sekou Alaje, who was thrilled that I wanted to bring his mother’s book together for him to publish. We agreed that I would provide him with the finished files which I am now organizing and editing.

What I found in her files was truly remarkable. She had accumulated over 500 recipes from all over Africa, focusing on 23 countries out of the 54 on the continent. Not only had she gathered all of these recipes together, but in addition she had written broadly on the foods, the history and even the pots and pans used in preparing foods on the African continent. Given how little I knew about Africa, the cultural information contained in her work was dazzling, so many foods and spices I had never heard of. I made lists of countries to figure out where they were located in North, East, West, Central or Southern Africa. I found her recipes organized into food groups: Meats and Fish (beef, lamb, goat, poultry, very little pork and fish) Vegetarian and Beverages and More. Then I matched each recipe with its country of origin. So far I have put together Volume one: The Cuisines of North and East Africa. Still remaining to do, Volume 2, West Africa, and Volume 3, Central Africa, and Southern Africa. This is work in progress, so stay tuned for more. Below is a tentative design for the book’s cover.

1967, Kezar Stadium, San Francisco, California. Photo by Harvey Richards from the Harvey Richards Media Archive

Jack Baud describes himself as a cold warrior. He is a retired Swiss army officer, intelligence expert and NATO personality. The European Commission, without EU legislative authorization, sanctioned him because he opposes the war in Ukraine and wants peace. They labeled him a Russian propagandist. His Belgium assets are frozen, his right to leave Belgium prohibited. No judge. No jury. No right to defend himself. World wide outrage has followed but the sanctions remain. They have struck their own kind.

I have to ask, what else do you think would happen after you bring thousands of Nazis into western governments after World War II? Being a retired carpenter, I see this problem like the problem facing owners of wooden houses who store fire wood on the ground under the house. The termites might as well have received a written engraved invitation to have at it. Termites and wood boring beetles descends from the air and ascends from the earth to eat and eat until the structure collapses. They hollow out wood fibers until the structural capacity of the supporting beams is lost. Their poop falls on our heads as dust. And then the roof caves in.

The metaphor applies aptly to us in the west because so many of us live in wooden houses and so few of us understand how nature works. Exactly the same in politics. The Nazi infusion into western governments after World War II was a hidden from us by the same forces that supported the rise of Nazi Germany in hopes it would destroy the USSR. When the USSR defeated the Nazis, the west, mainly the CIA, recruited the remnants of the fascist power structures into western power structures to resume the fight against the USSR and the anti-fascist tide then sweeping over Europe and the US. The west made a deal with the devil. It is like paying protection to the mob. Once you pay, they own you. Now that Russia has defeated the Nazis in Ukraine (again), the liberal, now neocon, rulers of the west are pushed into a corner and have to call on their Nazi thug allies to save the day.

Liberals love to throw up their hands saying, “Don’t give me that Nazi bull shit!” Ignorance gets enshrined in mainstream intolerance and self justification. Consequently, many are surprised when Nazi’s receive standing ovations in the Canadian parliament and other Nazis are elevated in nuclear science institutions building nuclear bombs now hanging over the world like a bad dream. Hard-hearted neocons, who have assumed the mantle of the old pro Nazi forces, are smiling smugly everywhere as the west plummets head first into oblivion.

People are outraged and shocked at the descent into dictatorship now sweeping Europe and the US, and even Japan. Those of us who have lived through these long decades since the end of WWII can appreciate how important the western failure to de-nazify itself is to all this. The anti-fascist wars of the 20^th century cost at least 60 million lives between Europe and Asia. People all over the world went to war against fascism and lost family members to this fight. In the west, these great sacrifices are ignored in favor of a mythological history of how the valiant west defeated Hitler. Yet the truth is that the US entered the war late, only after it was apparent that the Red Army would march all the way to Paris if the West did nothing. Before Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa was defeated, western governments sat on their hands in tacit support for the fascists, meaning Nazi Germany. It was invading the USSR, carrying out the core goal of capitalist governments to destroy the worker’s state and suppress workers movements. That core goal has never changed.

Western propaganda draws people into supporting this core goal with words like democracy, human rights, and western values. Underneath it all, it is rich people holding out the carrot while hiding the stick out of sight behind their backs. The carrot is the nicey nicey nice words. The stick is the Nazi iron fist. Just like in Nazi Germany under Hitler, western governments are now rewarding those who jump onto the Ukraine war and Israeli genocidal band wagons. Russia and Palestinians, we are told, are the ‘enemy’ replacing the old commie bug a boo. That kind of thinking is tying western populations to the core goal of the capitalist state now and is working itself into modern day minds and hearts. As Marx said, the ideology of any society is the ideology of its ruling class. Bingo.

I have witnessed this failure to denazify the west my whole life with disbelief and horror. I was very young when I first noticed it. As a child I saw western leaders embrace Konrad Adenauer, the first West German chancellor, on TV and even then wondered how they could forgive the Nazi bastards so quickly. It did not matter to me that Adenauer was not personally a Nazi. He represented the reemergence of Germany in the Cold War era, too quickly and too conveniently. The twin monsters of this hidden Nazi love inside the anti-communist state made it obvious to me why white superiority was spreading from sea to shining sea here in the US. Racism of the US is no different than the racism of the Nazis. We had our “Manifest Destiny” to justify genocide against millions of indigenous people who occupied this continent. Hitler admired how we did it and used it to arrive at his “Final Solution” to the Jewish problem.

The mystery is why this racism has such undying persistence and power in the modern world. My PhD dissertation was a study of the Textile Workers Union of America in the racially segregated textile industry in the southern US in the years preceding World War II. I asked the question, could unions succeed in a segregated industry? I concluded, no, it couldn’t. Because the racial identity of the workers tied them to the racial identity of the bosses. Clearly, anti-Russian hysteria is doing the same work, tying the population to the core goals of the capitalistic state.

After working for decades in the construction industry, before retiring in 2011, I have come to understand better some of the underlying reasons for workers embracing their oppressors. It comes from the nature of our economic system. It is schizophrenic. Everyone has to adapt to the reality of working for a living in businesses where the boss is a dictator and where your livelihood can be pulled out from under you any time. Wage labor is a life sentence. Wage labor is a form of slavery, slavery to capitalism which knows no other way than dictatorship. The rule of private property. (See Private Property and the Goddess for more of my views on this subject.) People adapt and accept it and then make a virtue out of playing the role of a compliant good slave because that leads to “success.” Blithely after work, we go to the ballot box and cast a ballot to choose between tweedledee and tweedledum. There! we say, democracy flourishes, right? Then the sun rises and we go back to the job, back to the rule of the boss, to the obedience to the laws of private property surrounding us everywhere. What a fertile ground for the illusions of western racial superiority to flourish!

The Russians victory in the Ukraine war has severely undercut western lies. The Ukrainian Nazis were brought to power by western intelligence services in 2014 in a CIA sponsored coup detat. NATO expansion rushed into the country. The Russians have made it known that they won’t stop fighting until the Ukraine is de-nazified and NATO withdraws from its borders. That is their demand and they have 27 million dead in the fight against Nazi Germany in their memory to keep them at it until it happens. Russia may not be communist any more but some of their military battle flags still have the old hammer and sickle on them.

As the end approaches, the war in Ukraine has brought the Nazis and their neocon supporters in western governments into a crisis pitch. Neocons face oblivion, and so they call upon the iron hand of fascists who have always been their vanguard against their enemies. They fear their day is up which makes them believe that they have no choice but to fight to the end regardless of how many Ukrainians are killed. Anti Russian hatred, now running wild in the west, has replaced the anti communism of the past, seamlessly and without a hitch, revealing the real nature of the cold war. Anti communism was a solid foundation of irrational hatred to build upon. Turns out it was not ideological after all. It was the same old song of capitalism seeking to steal land and resources for its insatiable quest for riches, all dressed up in the anti-communist gown. The neocon liberal gown has been thrown wide open revealing their nakedness. The emperor has no clothes, you all.

Sanctioning Jack Baud comes out of the same playbook as the killing of Rosa Luxemberg, the Reichstag’s fire and the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. It reveals in plain sight what these western leaders and the Ukraine fascists have in mind for us. It is playing itself out in the Ukraine, in Gaza, in the Sudan, and in Venezuela as well. The persistence of European and US deep state support of Ukraine’s lost cause reflects the widespread influence that Nazis have among western elites. It is time to call it like it is and to bring de-nazification to the west. Maybe the liberals can figure out if the capitalist system can live on without its Nazis. It could happen, maybe. We might just join BRICS+ and find out how to become a well mannered guest at the world’s table. It would be so simple. All that would be necessary is to take down the 900 military bases that the US maintains globally, redirect the military budget to domestic reconstruction, require international corporations to get out of politics (like they have done in China) and be satisfied with something less that the super profits of imperialism that they are defending. Is that a revolution or a reform? I guess it depends on how we go about making it happen.

In spite of some people’s understanding of the need to live in harmony with nature, humanity at large still does not get it. We burn fossil fuels like there is no tomorrow. We throw our old batteries in the creeks, along with the plastic waste, old appliances and whatever else we don’t want anymore. Who in the industrialized, urbanized world even knows the names of the creeks or the rivers? Or even where they are located. No, we live in a physical world profoundly at odds with the natural world that gave rise to us. Marxism, and humanity generally, have not yet resolved this dilemma. Damming up our rivers embodies this dilemma like no other issue as China has become the leading force in damming up the great rivers of the world.

In my book Private Property and the Goddess (Estuary Press, 2023), I embraced the critique American Indian Movement leader Russell Means leveled against industrial societies, Marxists and Marxism on this issue:

Russell Means said in his 1980 talk “For America to Live, Europe must Die,”

So, in order for us to really join forces with Marxism, we American Indians would have to accept the national sacrifice of our homeland; we would have to commit cultural suicide and become industrialized and Europeanized. . . . Revolutionary Marxism, like industrial society in other forms, seeks to “rationalize” all people in relation to industry – maximum industry, maximum production. It is a materialist doctrine that despises the American Indian spiritual tradition, our cultures, our lifeways. Marx himself called us “precapitalists” and “primitive.” Precapitalist simply means that, in his view, we would eventually discover capitalism and become capitalists; we have always been economically retarded in Marxist terms. The only manner in which American Indian people could participate in a Marxist revolution would be to join the industrial system, to become factory workers, or “proletarians,” as Marx called them. The man was very clear about the fact that his revolution could occur only through the struggle of the proletariat, that the existence of a massive industrial system is a precondition of a successful Marxist society. I think there is a problem with language here. Christians, capitalists, Marxists. All of them have been revolutionary in their own minds, but none of them really means revolution. What they really mean is a continuation. They do what they do in order that European culture can continue to exist and develop according to its needs.

In the world today, China is fulfilling Means’ prophesy. Through the power and influence of Marxism and the Chinese Communist Party, industrialization has achieved a significant breakthrough in the global south. Many people who consider themselves enemies of the western colonial empire take considerable comfort in this fact, as have I. Like Russia, when it was the now defunct USSR, China defeated fascism at an unimaginable cost of tens of millions of deaths. Having gained power as such a great cost, China acquired the power to modify some of the irrationalities of capitalism. Instead of deepening crises and class conflicts, China has controlled the darker impulses of capitalism while at the same time unleashing its productive potential. China has brought more people out of poverty than anyone else ever had in all of history. In the process, rural China has emptied out as old world villagers moved en mass into urban high rise apartments and taken jobs in the industrial economy. The cultural, economic and social impact of this change is now unfolding with unknown consequences for future generations and human cultures.

While progressive people everywhere can rejoice in China’s accomplishments, ominous clouds of climate change are not going away. China may lead in the electrification of transport and industry, but their ongoing use of fossil fuels and the rapid spread of industrialization continue to have negative impacts on the earth. The impact of industrial agriculture and the regimentation of urban life on human cultures and nature has not yet been fully understood or appreciated. As one of the largest consumers of coal and natural gas, China joins the western industrial world as a developed nation even though China’s use of these fossil fuels might now be now in decline.

Most disturbingly to me, China has led in the campaign to dam up the great rivers of the world. In Africa, Chinese companies have built or proposed building dams on the Congo River, the Zambezi River in Zimbabwe, the Nile River tributaries in Sudan, the Sankarani River in Ivory Coast, the Bafing River in Mali, and in the Volta River tributary Prah River in Ghana. In Southeast Asia, Chinese companies have built dams on the Mekong River in Laos, on the Myitnge River in Myanmar, and on the Batang Baluh River in Indonesia. In South Asia, Chinese dams have been built on the Jhelum River and the Indus Rivers in Pakistan, on the Trishuli and West Seti Rivers in Nepal. In Latin America, Chinese companies built dams on the Santa Cruz River in Argentina, and on the Madeira River in Brazil. There are hundreds of other such Chinese built projects that are all part of China’s Belt and Road initiative. In China itself, there are 98,000 dams including the world’s largest dam, Three Gorges Dam, on the Yangtze River, the Baihetan Dam on the Jinsha River, a tributary to the Yangtze River, the Gezhouba Dam on the Yangtze, the Longtan Dam on the Hongshui River, the Ertan Dam on the Yalong River, and the Xiaolangdi Dam on the Yellow River.

Dams are widely considered a source of green energy and sustainability, in spite of their negative impacts on watersheds, forests, fish and animal life. The industrial world, socialist and capitalist, in its insatiable quest for power, builds dams on rivers at the expense of the environment. Protecting the natural world is a lesser priority. This mindset is built into the industrial way of life that conditions us from birth to death. In Private Property and the Goddess, I chronicle my own awakening to this conditioning as a worker and intellectual in 20^th century USA.

Ironically, here in the heart of the capitalist empire, in the USA, where we have 91,000 dams, hundreds of dams are being taken down annually, including the largest dam removal project in history that just occurred on the Klamath River in northern California and Oregon. After removing four dams on the Klamath river, salmon are swarming back up the river after over a century of being blocked by the dams. Environmental movements allied and with indigenous tribes led the struggle to remove the dams and allow nature and the indigenous cultures to recover from the impact of damming up the free flowing river. Similarly, environmentalists and indigenous tribes have fought against oil and gas pipelines here in the US as globally we are witnessing pipelines spreading like spider webs over every continent on earth.

The urbanized and industrialized world has offered us a rationale to justify our selfish destruction of our environment. The sacrifice of nature, it is said, is offset by the good that it brings to vast numbers of people. You can’t fight “progress” has been the common refrain. In a capitalist world, nature does not yet appear on their balance sheets. I don’t know if nature appears on socialist balance sheets yet either. In ever more severe flooding globally, the costs of building on flood plains is being absorbed by society, individuals and private insurance companies, not the builders. The health impacts of polluting our air and water are not born by the polluters. These costs fall on all of us in the form of early death and sickness. The old excuses were more persuasive decades ago before the fires and floods, heat waves and disappearing aquifers began to burden us all, urban and rural alike.

The value systems of the indigenous peoples who have lived in harmony with nature for thousands of years before being vanquished and killed off by advancing industrial empires now offer us a way into the future. The challenge humanity faces is to prioritize nature over the alternatives built on its destruction. This challenge faces every culture and every nation whether socialist or capitalist. China’s rapid rise with its electric cars and innovative digital technologies may indicate that the socialist path is a necessary step along the way. But damming up the world’s great rivers will only accelerate the destructive impacts humanity is having on the natural world. It is past time for us to put the earth first, to regulate ourselves in the interests of a healthy planet, no matter what the cost or problems that it causes. We are great a solving problems. So let’s solve those problems first and foremost.

Meanwhile, in China in the 1970s, the Chinese Communist Party under Deng Xiaoping, decided to open up to western investment and reformed rigid Party rules that limited the entrepreneurial urges of the people. That led directly to the blossoming of the Chinese economy and the rise in their living standards over the last few decades. Ideological overshoot did not happen in China, probably because they were paying close attention to what was happening in the USSR. The Chinese Party maintained its rule over the People’s Republic of China with controls over the political power of the new capitalist class that they allowed to exist. This new approach they called socialism with Chinese characteristics. It arose from their sovereignty in a world that had confused global economic reach with imperial rule. The idea that absolute rule of capitalism could be modified in the interest of the welfare of the people happened before our eyes and became a global trend. And in the process, Chinese sovereignty and economic growth threatened the super profits that the west could suck out of the global south. That is what is really upsetting the apple cart. In response, the West went hysterical, chasing immigrants all over the place while putting up and taking down tariffs and trade wars galore world wide, all to no affect. The squeeze was on.

Simultaneously, western countries, i.e., capitalist countries in the so called West, have been having their own ideological overshoot. Basically the oil barons are having a very hard time. As if the Chinese decision to raise the living standards of 800 million people was not bad enough! On top of that these Chinese communists decided to electrify their economy and eliminate their use of fossil fuels, not all at once, but gradually, five year plan after five year plan. Non economic factors again arose globally interfering in the imperialist (fossil fuel) markets. People in China and elsewhere finally figured out that the future of humanity on earth was being destroyed by our insistence on burning stuff. Not only was the wealth of the Global South’s economies going to improve the welfare of hundreds of millions of people. But more than that, the rise of electrification globally allowed the world to begin turning away from the fossil fuels that traditionally energized economic growth. It also paid for western welfare programs which now came under attack everywhere in the west. This subverted the rosy plans of the oil giants to rule forever.

The oil barons and their minions became so over invested in their neocon ideology that they could not see or accept the reality of events in the global south. The oil barons’ fortunes may have started out with the Rockefellers way back centuries ago, but the Koch brothers, allied with Israel and the mafia, took it to a whole new level. They devised a clever plan to fund the election of know-nothing idiots to the state and federal governments, enabled by the Citizens United v. FEC supreme court decision of 2010, which allowed big money to buy up all our politicians. Neocons love this entrepreneurial spirit thing. It is their meat and potatoes. They proceeded to brainwash the population to believe in the privatization of all the government functions, hog tying the whole society to their bank accounts. The ideology of the “Free Market” permeated the western world’s thinking as the billionaire bank accounts swelled to overflowing. They had a perfectly running machine that put the financial corporations in total control. It all worked so beautifully, for a while, anyway.

When China opened up, the neocons saw their chance to infiltrate the world’s biggest communist country and regime change it back into the “Free World.” They were so confident of this strategy that they outsourced the supply chains for their war machine to China, which they hoped would soon become their biggest prize. This may have been their undoing. Faith in their neocon ideology convinced them that they could build their war machine on cheap Chinese labor without the danger of the Chinese Communists cutting it off. What a horrible surprise they have had when they witnessed China cutting off their supplies of rare earth metals! So unfair, he yelled. How did the neocons get themselves into this mess? It is a long story that I won’t tell here. (See Rare Earth Blues, my previous Substack post.) Suffice to say that the ground was prepared by 80 years of losing every war they started without ever admitting they were defeated. That is ideological overshoot of the highest order. It is the legacy of the Cold War. Maybe time has come to put ideology to rest in the grave of historical archives and start to pay more attention to the reality in front of us. Whatever happens, ideology is not going away anytime soon. The next chapter is coming up already in the form of the ideological overshoot of patriarchy and religion, the elephants in the room that include China, the west and the rest of the globe.

It all started when President Nixon went to China in the 1970s and shook hands with Mao Zedong. I knew that Tricky Dicky came straight out of the anti-China lobby which for years had been trying to reverse Chiang Kai-shek’s loss in 1949 to the Communist led revolution. Chiang retreated to Taiwan where the remnants of his defeated forces continue their dream of returning to the mainland, much like the Cuban exiles in Miami dream of returning to Cuba. I remember the anti-China lobbists as the worst, most vicious, small minded group of anti-communists roaming the United States all through the dark McCarthyist 50s. I almost threw up at the sight of smiling Nixon shaking hands with smiling Mao. It was truly an unforgettable moment. I knew it was a big thing but I had no idea where it was headed nor what it meant.

I knew from my studies in history in the late 1960s at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, with William Appleman Williams that US business, both rural and urban, had been drooling over the Chinese market since the 1890s and before. So I figured that US business interests’ lust for China’s markets had overcome the small minded haters of the anti-China lobby. I was barely aware of Deng Xiaoping who came to power in China after Mao. I was not aware that the Chinese Communists had paid close attention to the troubles rising up in the USSR in the late 1980s. Perhaps this led him to take a different path than any communist nation had taken up to that time. He kicked off a new era of reform and opening up to western investment and trade. It was the beginning of socialism with Chinese characteristics, something new and challenging to the whole world.

Since I had fled academia in 1976, where I was slowly going insane, into the building trades where I could maintain some level of sanity, I missed all the details of how US business rushed over to China with stars in their eyes and grandiose schemes to subvert it from within and bring an end to communist rule. It should not have surprised me to see these scheming globalists ascend to power here in the US inside both parties with plans to take over the whole world and outsource all the work of empire to the cheap labor global south, including China. I watched the rust belt grow and US industry decline not really believing that globalists could carry it off. But they did and along with it came the rise of billionaires and the demise of our educational system, the globalist monopolization of the press and the deepening brainwashing of the population in order to get us behind the push for global supremacy.

Then the USSR collapsed in 1991 and the hubris of the ruling class went off the charts. Yes, they shouted, we are number one and we rule the world! Our military bases expanded globally along with the pentagon’s budget. So arrogant and blind did the globalists become that they let the cat out of the bag, so to speak. They let China require that US investors transfer their patents and knowledge to China in exchange for access to the Chinese market. After all, they believed that western investment and trade in China would surely sweep away the communists and lead to regime change. What could go wrong? Well, they didn’t seem to notice that places like South Korea and Japan had made good use this kind of knowledge transfer to industrialize themselves and become significant economic rivals. Korean and Japanese cars sales in the US should have awakened them. Instead, US globalist hubris blinded them to the fact that their plans to subvert China’s Communist government were not working out. No, as a matter of fact, Chinese opening up and reform catapulted China, under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, into an unprecedented era of expansion that not only industrialized China but it also lifted 800 million people out of poverty. Still the ruling class didn’t notice. Maybe Harvard and Princeton had fallen asleep. China had created a regime unlike any regime in world history. All under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.

Another transformation happened along with this spectacular rise of China. Anti-communism which the mainstream had featured as the fundamental issue in the cold war transformed seamlessly into racial hatred against Russians. And the anti-China Lobby morphed from an anti-communist virus into racist bacterial infection against the Chinese, their old yellow peril. The mainstream press peddled this hatred like the good lap dogs they became. Imperialists thought they could treat all their enemies like they had treated their colonial subjects, with military force and contempt. At the same time US railing against communism subsided into a minor sub-theme hissing from the mouths of the few remaining ideologues of the right, especially from the Christian right. Even these religious zealots, however, could not maintain their fervor when they saw that the number of Christians in China rose from a few thousands in the 1970s to over 100 million today. The expansion of religion in China combined with the wealth gained from trade and investment put the globalists to sleep, it seems. They did not realize that the Communist Party had pulled the rug out from from under them. No, they continue their regime change strategy planning for a great war against China to stop this incomprehensible transformation of the world, centered in China, now sweeping the Global south.

It is amazing to see what happens when a conscious group like the Communist Party of China takes control of the unseen hand of the market and puts human needs first. It changes the way we see our future. Instead of profits for the few, we have the welfare of the people. Instead of the invisible hand of the market, aka the rule of capitalist monopolies, we have the flow of wealth to the people under the rule of the Communist Party of China. China’s example has not been missed by the global south where millions of people around the world have been seeking ways to escape from the imperialist grip. Yet the globalists remain convinced that they can hold back the tide.

But getting back to the rare earth minerals, it seems that western elites actually convinced themselves that they could outsource the raw materials needed for their wars to their enemies. China wasted no time in creating supply chains for all these rare earth minerals that are now totally under their control. So here we have the crux of the matter. China simply threw the switch turning off western arms manufacturers access to the things they need to make bombs and future wars. It may be only a temporary reprieve from the globalists forever war plans, but it also may be check mate, baby.

I have several hummingbird feeders up around the backyard which I have to refill regularly. They have attracted many hummingbirds who amuse me greatly with their frantic competition for a place on the feeder and their acrobatics coming and going. Not for the first time, one bird has decided to claim a feeder for his own and spends all his time chasing every other hummingbird away. I noticed him because the feeder he claimed remained full while all the others are drained daily. I call this bird the Ogre Bird. In between dive bombing other birds trying to take a sip from “his” feeder, he retreats a short distance away into a tree or vine and waits. Usually the Ogre Bird is old. This one has several missing tail feathers and sits glumly all by himself.

Here he is sitting in the pomegranate tree. I should have named him the Imperialist Bird. He wants it all and he is no good at sharing.

And here he is taking a sip, all by himself. The ruler of the feeder.

Meanwhile, the rest of the crowd is busy emptying the other feeder. The Ogre Bird is content to leave them alone while he enjoys his monopoly on his very own feeder.

This is where I enter the picture. When the crowd empties the other feeder, I pick it up and switch it out with the Ogre’s full feeder. Since the hummingbirds seem to be territorial, the Ogre is left claiming the empty feeder while the crowd proceeds to the now full feeder in the location of the feeder they had just emptied. They are very attached to one place or another depending on where they have been feeding.

What happens next is the message. After sitting alone with his empty feeder for quite a while, the Ogre naturally gets hungry and joins the crowd at the full feeder. He doesn’t chase anyone away. But he does stay put at one of the feeding holes while the others flutter about endlessly trading places around him.

The Ogre cannot win in the face of the large numbers of other birds crowding the feeder. Sometimes the crowd of birds defeat the Ogre at his exclusive feeder through numbers. The Ogre chases one bird away while ten others swarm in on the feeder. The Ogre returns but the crowd remains. The next day, the Ogre is back, though, doing his greedy thing again. I don’t know how the Ogre establishes his exclusive claim on a feeder, but once it is established, the feeder remains full for days. It is only when all the other feeders have been drained that the crowd will descend upon the Ogre’s feeder and defeat him, temporarily at least.

Well, you can see the point, I am sure. Eventually, the Ogre has to join the crowd. And eventually the Imperialist West will have to join the BRICS, China, Russia and the global south in sharing the goodies. Too bad for the Ogre, aka neocons or neoliberals. But then life will go on.

To subscribe to the Estuary Press Bulletin, go to Estuary Press and click on the subscribe button.

From Nina Serrano

Time

Time is an idea
but undeniably an event
It happens
it passes
and is measuredin clocks and calendars
and Celebrated in holidays and feasts
Time runs out
And lays on us
like a heavy blanket of silence
or an endless un-swimmable ocean to cross
We fill it one way or another
but it passes
with or without us.

Nina Serrano, 2024, Vallejo, California

For more poetry by Nina Serrano check out her website: All books are available as paperbacks and ebooks.

From Estuary Press

Why the Labor Aristocracy Matters

As the wars in Ukraine and Palestine drag on ever more bloody and repulsive, my own personal feelings of powerlessness and frustration continue unabated. I am wondering why the “left” in the US and Europe has been so silence and ineffectual through all of it. The Democratic Party, once thought to be “progressive,” has sunk to an all time low with its support of the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and for Israel's genocidal campaign in Palestine. And it has taken the left down with it. Hitting the streets to demonstrate against these atrocities is now made illegal as the state moves to silence us and continue its heartless pro war policies. As long as you leave your Palestinian flags at home, however, you are still urged to demonstrate against “kings.”

The 2025 republication of Hodee Edwards' book Labor Aristocracy, Mass Base of Social Democracy provides some clarity about how this situation has come about. Since World War II, linking labor and leftists to the neo-liberals in the Democratic Party transformed the left into a helpmate of empire. In Great Britain, decades of mutual collaboration created the spectacle of the Labor Party becoming the torch bearer of Empire and the most vicious supporter of the world's worst dictators, Zelensky and Netanyahu. Breaking away from the support of the policies of empire requires us to understand how this linkage happened and the material base that underlies it. Labor Aristocracy tells this story. My mother, Hodee Edwards originally wrote it in the 1970s but its relevance has grown stronger ever since. The eerie silence of the western left was not just the result of a battle of ideas so much as it was the result of linking western welfare systems and their advocates to the super profits of empire. Understanding how the international system evolved into a two tiered economy and a two tiered working class is the story that Labor Aristocracy tells. It is a story that is a foundation stone for the rebirth of an independent anti-colonial, anti-racist, pro-socialist left in the USA and Europe.

From the Harvey Richards Media Archive

This month, August, 2025, is the anniversary of the US nuclear bombings of two cities in Japan, Hiroshima and Nagasaki which happened August 6 and 9, 1945. Our use of nuclear bombs kicked off the nuclear arms race with Russia that marked the entire cold war and continues, spreading globally today. In the 1960s, the Bay Area peace movement protested nuclear testing, led by Women for Peace. Harvey Richards photographed these protests including the Women for Peace delegation which traveled to Mercury, Nevada and paraded in front of the entrance to the Nevada Test Site with signs opposing nuclear testing, while helicopters flew surveillance overhead.

On Hiroshima Day, August 6, 1962, Bay Area Women for Peace conducted a march around an area of San Francisco the same size as the area of the impact of the bomb on Hiroshima.

As the possibility of high level talks on nuclear weapons treaties has reappeared after the Putin /Trump summit in Alaska, it is time to remember our movement's protests against nuclear war that happened so long ago. The passage of six decades since then has not deminished the importance of protesting nuclear war and the need to urge our leaders finally to end the nuclear arms race.

So I ask myself, who is for peace? I know the victims of war and the victims of super exploitation at the hands of western imperialism, led by communist China, are for it. Back here in the belly of the beast, not all of us victims are waking up to the game. Leftists in the western empire have a blind spot that keep us thinking that the masses will rise up and make a new world. When in fact the masses are lined up to win a billion dollars in the next lottery. They see the game and chose picking the winner's side of things. But the problem is that this kind of winner-take-all outlook means that the imperialist system has gained control over us. It has neutralized any real opposition to war and to the game they are playing. Just look at the peace movement or search around you for opponents to colonialism in our affluent world. I have marched in huge demonstrations in past decades and then quietly went home to bed only to be awakened under the same old blanket of lies and the sounds of the bombs falling again. It feels like we are frozen in place by the spectacle of doom surrounding us all. No problems ever get solved. Homelessness grows and grows. Our trains are museum pieces. Our air and water continue to darken with petroleum based effluents emanating from our fast moving sleek cars and from the smoke billowing out of our power plants. Our bridges fall down and the pot holes in the roads grow ever larger and more frequent. We spend billions to keep on driving in polluting cars and have no money for education, for health care, for supporting our elders.

This conundrum has now gone on for decades and decades. The education system produces propagandists pumping up the systematic dumbing down of the population. Ignorance is now preferred over knowledge. Populism is now become unrecognizable as the population sinks deeper into the morass of confusion and lies of the mainstream narrative. We even elected a charlatan real estate mogul who talks peace and surrounds himself with zionists and neocon war mongers. The billionaires flock to him like lottery ticket buyers hoping for a big win. Elon Musk dances to his own tune fighting “waste, fraud, and abuse” right up to budget time in the Republican controlled congress when the old pork belly political machine with its criminal vanguard shits out a “Big Beautiful Bill” revealing that nothing has changed. And then Musk and Trump fall out like kids in the school yard. What a joke.

But if you look beyond the mainstream lies, you can see that ignorance is not working out too well and knowledge is beginning to come to the top like bubbles in a barrel of oil. The ignorance displayed in Trump’s attempt to tariff his way out of trillions of dollars of debt turned into a laugh almost immediately. Welcome to the United States of Embarrassment. He wanted the world to kiss his ass but instead the world is kicking his ass. Using the dollar to sanction and tariffs to bully the world just accelerated his decline and along with him, his billionaire buddies. China and Russia moved closer together, creating non dollar forms of trade for the global south that sidestep western oppression. Lies are no substitute for victory on the battle field. Russia moves slowly towards military victory making it harder and harder for Europe and the US neocons to fool people into believing that Russia is on the ropes. And then we have the spectacle of Bernie and AOC standing up for Israel's right to defend itself and defending genocidal Joe Biden.

It all comes down to admitting that we lost. We couldn't admit our defeat in 1975 as we fled the devastation we caused in Vietnam. We could not admit it in Afghanistan. And we can't admit it in Ukraine or Palestine. We have created a small little fortress led by murdering genocidal maniacs like Netanyahu and Zalensky both marching to orders that issue from deep inside the hidden and secret Deep State now leading us to a very sad end. Mass psychosis is deepening in the west as the whole world turns their backs on us adopting instead new ways of life outside the imperialist nightmare. We should join them if we can because it is the way back to mental health and a peaceful world.

The US after WWII was the fighter in his prime. Just to show his powers, he drops atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. Then after losing the fight against Mao's revolution in 1949, he picks a fight with China on the Korean peninsula. But here he gets a bloody nose ending in a draw, dividing Korea into north and south. Then a stale-mated non-peace follows for decades and decades all the way to the present day.

Undeterred, the hegemon decides to enter the ring with Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. Ho defeated the French in 1954 and then takes on the US very soon thereafter. This fight is different from all the rest because the Vietnamese don't give up, setting the example for the rest of the old colonial world to follow. They take a pounding, losing millions of lives. But they keep on fighting until the US leaves the ring in defeat, fleeing in helicopters from the roof of its embassy in 1973. But does the US admit defeat? No. And thus retreats further from reality. The old fighter brushes off his losses as a minor set back that he'd rather not talk about. It kicks off a pattern of loser wars. After China (1949) in Korea (1953), came Vietnam (1973), Iraq (2003), Libya (2014) and Afghanistan (2021), to name a few. The hegemon remains blind to the fact that these defeats set the world on a new path.

Then suddenly in 1991, the USSR falls apart leading the old fighter to believe that his powers have come back and the road to perpetual victory is open again. With growing numbers of old Nazis and their descendants now in his corner, the US jumps into the ring with the Russian bear. Bad move. Drawing on his experiences in the KGB, Putin saved Russia from being dismembered and subjugated in the 1990s through his policy of subordinating the oligarchs to the state. He did not abolish the oligarchs. He just let them know who was boss. And then he turned to restoring Russia's sovereignty through building back its defenses against the inevitable assault by western powers.

Western refusal to admit defeat also blinded the US to the growing influence of the Communist Party of China (CPC) on the rest of the world. Mao died in 1976. Deng Xiaoping initiated the reform and opened up China to foreign investment and trade in 1978. The balance of power globally was shifting away from the Western Empire opening the door for the Communist Party of China to tolerate capitalism inside the People's Republic. Opening up to capitalism in the Gorbachev era during the Cold War had disastrous effects on the USSR. China studied the collapse of the Soviet Union very carefully. The result was that China created a new type of central planning without the heavy hand, and it turned China into an economic giant. China ignited a volcano of global change that rivals the industrial revolution in its impact on humanity. This new system of a centrally planned mixed economy eliminated poverty in China for hundreds of millions of people, brought about the rise of the Chinese industrial machine, and did all this without war. But did the US understand it? No, like the old fighter, the US could only see the need to restore his old glory.

In this foolishness, the capitalists decided to take down their barriers against investment in Mao's China and instead take it on as a junior partner. Deng Xiaoping accepted the offer and let the capitalists into the Chinese fortress. This time, the Trojan horse trick backfired. The Chinese made a deal with the capitalists: You can invest in China but you must share your technology with us. China has now leaped over these capitalists into the lead. Western corporations are now retreating from China with their tails between their legs.

The old boxer had become punch drunk and so failed to understand that the battle against the Russian bear in the Ukraine was different from the previous fights. The west, NATO and the US, threw all they had into a war to defeat Russia. All the old hidden Nazis in the CIA, the EU and in the Ukraine were licking their chops. This was not some local match broadcast on regional TV only. No, this was the main event broadcast globally on the new social medias seen on billions of phones everywhere. And three years into the war, after millions have died, the west and the US are beginning to see what is in front of them. The old fighter's Nazi corner men are falling out with each other, like a falling out among thieves. The US suddenly turned on Europe in a fraternal war full of screaming denunciations. The US blows up Europe's energy supply and like the parasite that it is, begins to suck the blood out of European industry which had no choice but to flee abroad into the US and China.

The fighter's body was breaking down under the continued blows from his younger opponents. Awakening to the limits of the old illusions of omnipotence, Trump jumps ship and embraces Putin and Russia. Let's be friends, make peace, he croons. We are still the greatest, he crows. What could go wrong? Still believing in his omnipotence, Trump erects a tariff wall against the whole world. The motive for his insane move arises from his blind quest for revenge against the deep state that had hounded him for years and had checked him in his first term as President. As he hits back at these deep state globalists who were responsible for the off shoring of American industry, the old boxer turns to magical realism. His dream of a global tariff war to restorer America fits into his deludes mind so well. Surprisingly it has the exact opposite effect that he was hoping for. It united the globe against the US. His new trainers (aka cabinet ministers) were no help. They are as immersed in the illusions of US omnipotence as Trump. Bobble heads nodding up and down saying yes to the mad man's every whim.

And then, the bond market fell apart. Japan started selling off its Treasury bonds, kicking out the foundations of the whole debt pyramid that made all his billionaire backers rich. Oops! Reverse engines! He calls a 90 day pause and holes appear in his tariff wall all over the place. The whole empire takes a deep breath, looking around in bewilderment as the US becomes a global laughing stock over night. The old boxer can no longer fool himself. He looks in the mirror and sees his bloody battered body and sits down heavily on a bench in front of his old locker in disbelief. What will he do next?

Critical Focus Series, volume 1.

Two things seem to have diluted our obsession with communism. First, the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and a capitalist Russia replaced it. Big business was shocked when they learned from Vladimir Putin recently that they lost 400 billion dollars worth of business due to American sanctions against Russia accompanying their Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine. Second, communist China became the biggest market in the world which has American businesses all drooling in their soup. It was one thing to try to isolate and destroy a struggling Soviet Union and a poverty stricken China. It is another to try it on a revived nuclear armed Russia, a great power fully capable of giving western bullies a bloody nose. Or on a prosperous China which has become the primary source of profits for big American businesses. The strident calls to kill a commie for Christ have been drowned out by the 'cha ching' of the cash register.

When President Richard Nixon shook hands with Mao in 1972, the western world decided to do business with their old enemy and it changed the world. From that date on, inside the uni-polar world, industrialization and technology spread to places like China, Indonesia, South Korea and the Philippines, to name a few. Fast forward to Trump's second term and we are witnessing the demise the neocon “rules based order” as the US is forced to recognize the need for diplomacy. Trump's embrace of diplomacy with the rest of the world, free or not, has pulled us back from the brink of nuclear war. This pull back reflects the fact that the West has been defeated. Russia has already won the Ukraine war. That is something very hard for the old regime to admit. It is just as hard to admit our defeat in the wars in China (1949), Korea (1953), Vietnam (1973), Iraq (2003), Libya (2014) and Afghanistan (2021). No matter how they spin it, these defeats have set the world on a new path.

Western refusal to admit defeat blinded the US to the growing influence of the Communist Party of China (CPC) on the rest of the world. Mao died in 1976. Deng Xiaoping initiated the reform and opening up of China to foreign investment and trade in 1978. The balance of power globally was shifting away from the Western Empire which opened the door for the Communist Party of China to tolerate capitalism inside the People's Republic. Opening up to capitalism in the Gorbachev era during the Cold War had disastrous effect on the USSR. China studied the collapse of the Soviet Union very carefully. The result was that China created a new type of Central planning without the heavy hand, and it turned China into an economic giant. China has ignited a volcano of global change that rivals the industrial revolution in its impact on humanity. This new system of a centrally planned mixed economy has eliminated poverty in China for hundreds of millions of people, brought about the rise of the Chinese industrial machine, and did all this without China being at war.

The way that the CPC has controlled its capitalist sector is truly remarkable. First and foremost is the land: the state owns and controls all land. In the cities, all land is state owned. In the country, all land is collectively owned. Individual ownership is not allowed. Private interests can lease it for 99 years at a time. But never own it. Second is the CPC control of basic social institutions like the military, education, banking, transportation, telecommunications, tobacco, petroleum, resource extraction and electric power. When companies in the private sector grow large enough to impact the political power of the CPC, the Party steps in and appoints a Communist Party person as CEO of the company. This insures that large companies are in line with the five year plans of the government, among other things. And it works. You cannot understand the rise of China without seeing the central role of the CPC. The difference between the performance of the economy in China vs the rest of the world is starkly visible when you compare the high speed rail system built up in China over the last two decades to that of the US. The modern world has suddenly appeared in China while US capitalism seems to be stuck in a museum surrounded by homeless encampments.

The impact of central planning is not lost on the world. Drawing on his experiences in the KGB, Putin saved Russia from being dismembered and subjugated in the 1990s through his policy of subordinating the oligarchs to the state. He did not abolish the oligarchs. He just let them know who was boss. And then he turned to a policy of restoring Russia's sovereignty and building back its defenses against the inevitable assault by western powers. Subordinating the oligarchs to the state was Putin's cardinal sin in the eyes of the west. He has been labeled a dictator in spite of being elected and reelected over and over. Putin's approach to the economy proved its worth as Russia pivoted to Asia (eat your heart out Obama), not only surviving, but flourishing, under the mass of sanctions put on it by the west. Not to mention that he has led Russia to victory in the Ukraine.

China's miraculous ascendance without war is fundamental to all this. As China became the workshop of the world, it accumulated massive wealth in the form of positive trade balances. China may have its billionaires, but it does not allow them to squander the vast resources created by the mass production system and its advanced technology. Instead, the CPC uses its new found surplus to invest in education, technology and human welfare inside China, giving rise to the most highly educated, advanced work force in the world. This work force, combined with Chinese technology, attracts capital investment from the entire globe, including the large multi-national corporations of the old Empire. It is not about low wages anymore.

Outside its borders, China has used this surplus wealth not to subjugate other nations, nor to sink them into poverty through super exploitation and privatization schemes. Instead it has built out the old Silk Road in the form of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) constructing ports, rails, roads, and telecommunications that open up new possibilities for the development of their trading partners. When imperialism builds roads and rails in its colonial world, all roads lead to the capital and the ports for export. When China builds roads, they connect Global South nations together for the unhindered development of trade and prosperity. Neo colonial nations are shaking loose from the strangulation of the west because they now see an alternative mode of development that has proven itself in China, once, not so long ago, the poorest nation on earth.

The rise of BRICS+ along with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), and the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) countries and other regional associations on the Eurasian continent, are the physical manifestation of this new China led world taking shape today. BRICS+ started out with Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa searching for ways to avoid the sanctioned filled nightmare of western imperialist control. BRICS+ is now growing rapidly adding Indonesia, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates and many other partner organizations lining up to join. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization consists of 9 members, India, Iran, Kazakhstan, China, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, with Afghanistan, Belarus and Mongolia and many others as observers. ASEAN countries comprise 10 member states: Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. If you look at a map, you can see that these associations contain the vast majority of the Eurasian continent and the globe. This new grouping of nations represents the majority of people and even the majority of the worlds' economies.

China's role in supporting the development of all of these nations does not require others to adopt the Communist party form of government. China supports the diversity of the actual world and keeps its nose out of the internal affairs of its trading partners. What a concept! Peaceful co-existence lives on in an ever growing part of the world.

How has the west reacted to these new developments? Very badly, all in all. First, it suppresses all knowledge of them among its peoples. You don't see anything about them in the press. Moreover, the west, led by the US, has militarized the world by expanding NATO and establishing 800 US military bases all over the place to counter this trend. The secret government (CIA) and the Deep State (USAID et al) have tightened their grip on the world's resources, expanded regime change operations, deepening the poverty and displacement of the people around the world. Millions of displaced people flood into the wealthy nations of the empire seeking relief from the desperation forced upon them by the western neo colonialism. As people of color flood the US and Europe, the politics of the old empires turn into Nazi-like spectacles based on white supremacy and old outmoded hopes for world conquest. Europe and the US support genocide in Palestine because genocide is the tried and true method of capitalist rule throughout the whole history of western development. Inside the empire, western populations wake up to their own history while watching US and Israeli genocide on their cell phones. The fact that the western public is shocked at this ugly reality is a reflection of the illusions that underpin the western mainstream narrative. This change in awareness, spread by social media and smart phones, is propelling Western nations into a brick (pun intended) wall.

So is China a communist country? I think the young woman YouTuber is right. No, its a People's Republic practicing socialism with Chinese characteristics. It is time to let the old world's outmoded false narrative of democracy and freedom go and instead open our eyes to the new realities spreading across the world.

My mother's (H.W. Edwards') book, Labor Aristocracy, Mass Base of Social Democracy, explained what had happened. You have to go back to the World War II days and the widespread adoption of the “United Front” strategy to fight fascism. This strategy made some sense when a real socialist and even revolutionary state united with capitalist states to fight Germany and Japan in WWII. My mother's book describes this history and how, in the post war period, it evolved within the capitalist West into the absorption of the left into the social democratic liberal parties of today. Supporting the lesser of two evils is the continuation of the United Front policy. In doing so, US leftist parties jettisoned their role as enemies of imperialism (and supporters of socialism) to become imperialism's friend. The US left became the junior partner of much larger forces that we know today as the Deep State. In the process many of the individual leftists seem to have undergone personal, even subconscious changes, creating new identities to fit them seamlessly into the establishment. Meanwhile the real left disappeared into irrelevance and silence within the Empire as it went merrily on funding fascism in Ukraine and genocide in Palestine. Many of these establishment leftists also became rich. The AFL-CIO role abroad in supporting right wing unions and governments is the clearest example of this new identity in action.

What my mother's book showed me was that the success of the left in establishing Social Democratic programs here in the US was all paid for with the spoils of imperialist super exploitation of the “Global South.” Lenin's imperialist crumbs became habit forming. This was never clearer than when Kamala Harris stood up during the 2024 Presidential campaign and declared that if voters wanted to reduce the cost of their groceries, they should shut up about genocide in Gaza. And most of the “left” did shut up, much to their shame. Below the headlines, however, the world was challenging the neo colonial system like never before as China rose out of poverty, as the New Silk Road expanded, the BRICS+ organizations grew and presented the world with a real alternative to the western model of “development” through neo colonialism. As super profits from western imperialism came under threat, the internal politics within the western empire turned uglier and uglier, with the rise of fascism and neo Nazi's influence expanding everywhere.

When Trump emerged victorious with majorities in both houses of Congress, he went to war against his Democratic Deep State persecutors. His campaign adopted anti-socialist terminology which woke me up to the reality of how much influence so called progressives actually gained within the Democratic party and inside the Deep State. But labeling the deep state as leftist was a new twist on the tried and true red purges, the legacy of the cold war against socialism. It was like Joe McCarthy leaped up out of his grave shouting “I told you! I told you!” Trump's attack on the deep state carried with it a danger that both parties needed to avoid. If the fight between the Red and Blue states came down to a disagreement between billionaires, (George Soros v. Elon Must, for instance) then exposing the methods used against the Red states could tarnish the reputation of billionaires. We can't have that. It might result in the repeal of the Citizens United case that handed our elections over to big money. So how convenient to blame it all on “leftists” within the Blue states. Since no one remembers our history anymore, they could twist their propaganda war around to pretend that maybe the left had not died in the 50's. Maybe it lived on within the genocidal Deep State where leftist totalitarian tendencies were subverting America. This fits so easily into a brainwashed, immensely anti historical, ignorance worshiping right wing's view of the Democrat Deep State. It did not matter to them that all the methods used to suppress the left after World War II morphed into the Deep State's fight to destroy Trump. But certainly, turning these tried and true anti-communist tools against the right wing was when it all went bad. When they made Trump into a Putin puppet, they had gone too far.

The Deep State used all their old tricks on Donald Trump and the America First crowd. Old tricks like using fake “classified” documents, biased, propaganda-laced mainstream press attacks and phony justice department prosecutions to convict and isolate their enemies, painting them as foreign agents, or even “terrorists.” When all else failed, they turned to their favorite trick in the book: assassinations. But then, they missed.

Trump started out his new term as President hopping mad about the persecution that the Democrats and the Deep State directed towards him during the intervening four years between his first and second terms. His anger propelled him deeper into the struggle against the anti-Russian bias propelling us into a new cold war and ever closer to WWIII. It showed itself clearly on live international TV broadcast from the Oval Office as Donald Trump humiliated Zelensky blaming him for the US war in Ukraine. And now, Trump's opponents, the forever war crowd, are shouting “Peace is dangerous.” Their brains are frozen by their hatred of Russia. Now Trump has emerged as a powerful force for peace, for normalizing relations with Russia, pulling out of NATO and ending the Ukraine war. My astonishment is only matched by almost hilarious spectacle of our NATO puppets' blustering.

It would probably horrify Trump to admit that his campaign for peace and against the Deep State's forever wars comes directly out of the history of the resistance movement traditionally attributed to his much hated “leftists.” They don't want to connect their experience with a history that includes Sacco and Vanzetti, Frank Little, Emma Goldman, Big Bill Haywood, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Fred Hampton, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy and Jack Kennedy and so many others. Maybe it would help them understand how extremely lucky Trump was to escape assassination. The photos of him bleeding from his ear after the bullet's narrow miss, being rushed off the speakers platform with his fist raised in defiance were powerful. If only they had missed Malcolm X and MLK like that. Now, the right wing could see what many of us have been witnessing for decades and decades. And just like that, the fight for free speech and against the Deep State fell into the hands of the Trump campaign while the Democrats along with most of the remnants of the US left have been reduced to silence.

Trump turned the tables on the persecution state like no has ever in our history. And now we are watching Trump talk to Putin, dress down Zelensky and conduct an open war on the deep state at home, and on NATO abroad. I was surprised to find that Kash Patel's enemies in his book Government Gangsters were also my enemies. Go Kash! Take 'em down!

The defeated Democrats are flailing around directionless and utterly demoralized, along with masses of people who supported Kamala. Trump's fight against Zelensky and his Nazi Bandera followers, the most highly funded and organized group of Nazis on earth, does not elicit cheers from them. Instead, they are reduced to silence suffering from the shock of Trump's overwhelming victory. Supporting the lesser to two evils for all those decades only created a false sense of security that evaporated on November 5, 2024. It has left them wandering blindly in the wilderness of Empire politics. And it has led to the right wing's attack on the Democrats as “leftists.”

Old social divisions like Red and Blue states and associated terminology like Left and Right have dissolved into nothingness as history marches on. While Trump enjoys his McDonald's cheese burgers in the white house, he appoints Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of Health and Human Services and the food conglomerates responded immediately by removing red dye no. 3 from their products. As Trump yells drill baby drill, he appoints Elon Musk, the foremost electric car and missile producer, to tear into the bloated corrupt state apparatus. But does the deflated left opposition celebrate any of this? Not yet. When Trump destroys the main US instrument for global regime change and foreign wars, USAID, do they see that as a victory? Not yet. And when Elon Musk promises 50% cuts in the Pentagon's budget, does the peace movement rise up in celebration? Not yet. Not until we stand up again for socialism, for China and for Palestine will the real left be born again here in the US to join the Global South in the fight against the imperialist mainstream. It is time to admit we were wrong about voting for the lesser of two evils.

Recently my daughter sent me a photo of her wearing a t-shirt that said “Fuck the Patriarchy.” She was on her way to the Taylor Swift concert in Vancouver, Canada. The last show of the Eras Tour. She attached a video taken at the concert which showed 60 thousand women chanting “Fuck the Patriarchy.” It set me wondering how such an event could coexist with the re-election of Mr Patriarchy himself, Donald Trump. I thought about all the women that voted for him and all the non white voters too. Are these two worlds going to collide and destroy each other? Or are they going to coexist, fuse and transform into a new world?

The contest over patriarchy is going on now below the surface. It reflects the subconscious currents that flow from the way we live on the land. The contest is not about land titles kept in bank vaults and file cabinets. The contest emanates from the land itself, from the way we relate (or don't relate) to dirt and rock, water and trees, and the air above. It is a situation inseparable from the history that has landed us in this mess. In the long view, we have to understand how patriarchy arose. Saying that patriarchy has an origin implies necessarily that there actually was a time before patriarchy existed. Which means that it arose somewhere, sometime, and then spread globally though history. This idea is not only controversial but down right blasphemous to those who believe the earth is only 6000 years old.

From our own history here in the US, we know that European patriarchal invaders destroyed indigenous people in wars of conquest that displaced them from the land of their ancestors. Most of the time, the displaced, conquered people were matrilineal and matrilocal cultures. Not matriarchal. In the early US treaty negotiations with tribes, the tribes often sent women to negotiate. The US refused to talk with them and demanded that the tribes send men only to the negotiations. Then, of course, the US universally violated these treaties. The tribes were systematically killed or exiled to Oklahoma, or some other reservation and their land stolen. I am talking about millions of indigenous people who lived in North America when the pilgrims first landed. And a whole continent of land.

Our genocide against the indigenous tribes in the US displaced people who lived on the land in fundamentally different ways than the conquerors. The tribes had traditional territories and coexisted more or less peacefully. First came treaties and then land titles of ownership. Under settler rule, the land eventually got buried under industrial societies full of skyscrapers with water running out of faucets instead of rivers. How many people today know the names of the rivers nearby or even the creeks running in culverts buried beneath us? Years ago when I was inspecting a house for a potential buyer dressed in a suit and tie, we went into the sub-basement. The buyer pointed at the exposed earth and asked “What is that?” Dumbfounded, I answered, “The Earth.” Suddenly, our alienation came into focus and I have never forgotten that moment. Seeing how patriarchy spread over this continent helps to explain how it arose in the first place and how it became so strong in Europe and globally.

The European origins of patriarchy and private property is the subject of a book I wrote called “Private Property and the Goddess” where I inquire into the relationship between private property and our spiritual life. Our spiritual decline followed from the very nature of private property itself. In prehistoric times, long before private property existed, males seized the land asserting private ownership to the exclusion of everyone and anything else. This act of seizing the land set the male owners in opposition to the cultures of prehistory that had existed for millennia. Men could no longer worship the goddess because she stood for another way of life that would negate the benefits of private ownership. This original act of males seizing the land stamped private property with its identity, which is sometimes obscured by the fact that women can own land too. Over thousands of years, after the triumph of patriarchal conquerors, female ownership no longer threatened to return the land to the mother clan which had been vanquished as a real alternative. In the act of ownership, the sacred earth became mere dirt.

On an evolutionary scale of time, it is easy to see that humanity arose as one of many species that inhabited the earth. We lived among them and drew our sustenance from them, plant and animal. It was before civilization, before writing, before monotheism, before monogamy. It was a time that stretched back tens of thousands of years. Our ideas about prehistory have been grossly distorted by the image of a club wielding unkempt man dragging a woman by the hair into a cave. The truth is far from that. (See Marija Gimbutas, The Civilization of the Goddess for another more reasonable version of prehistory.) Male seizure of the land began the process of the subjugation of women that took final form in monogamous marriage, patrilineal inheritance, and male gods, now virtually universal on earth. From its universality, arises most of our problems. Like an unrecognized elephant in the room. Our current global geopolitical wars, along with the climate crisis, are the crisis of patriarchy. Humanity has hung its proverbial hat on this he/him hook and we are riding its consequences all the way to hell.

Hell has arrived in the form of climate change, forever wars, femicide, wild fires, floods, species extinctions and a poisoned environment. Carving out land from the universal prehistoric commons took place over thousands of years. The driving force was (and is) greed as individual men saw that his seizure of the product of the land for himself, instead of sharing it with the mother clan, would make him rich. And it would make their male descendants rich too, which required excluding women from inheritance so the land would not return to the ancient woman centered tribes. Destroying the women centered tribes became the first priority on the patriarchal agenda and has remained so ever since. It was get rich quick scheme that spread globally and in the process buried our prehistory in layers of lies and misdirection. “No one has to know” should be the mantra of HIStory. One only has to review the failure of US historians to account for the genocidal nature of our conquest of this continent to get a concrete idea of the process of displacement, a process that I believe preceded every civilization everywhere.

I hasten to add that, unfortunately, the patriarchal nature of private ownership includes public ownership deriving from patriarchal socialist governments. Socialist countries (China in the main) are now building ecologically destructive dams on all the major rivers of the earth. In spite of the short term benefit that results from this practice, building on flood plains, destroying the environment surrounding the rivers – all this leads to a future full of crises for humanity in the long run. It is not a crisis for the earth which will burn and flood its way back to equilibrium on its own. Hopefully, since the other alternative is now broadcasting live from Mars. Adherents of patriarchal religions along with patriarchal industrial rationalism, with its license to destroy nature, are all headed down the same road. The common element between capitalist and socialist systems in the world today is patriarchy, out of which springs the mad rush to industrialize everything. Humanity is trapped in this historical moment, like the proverbial man up the creek without a paddle. My step father put it in a saying: If money is the root of all evil, gimme some of that root!

When I look at photos of the assembled leaders of the BRICS+ nations meeting to fight against the hegemony of the US and the almighty dollar, I see a group of men in black suits and ties facing the camera with determination. China is leading the pack. And there too I see men in suits. There are a couple of women in the back row, also dressed in black, mostly. Patriarchal competition between systems and nations arises anew generation after generation, and has no final resolution. Competition and conquest just kicks the can down the road for future generations who will have to find a new way. Nothing less than the transformation of cultural norms that continue to sanction destruction of the earth's balances will suffice. Humanity can no longer tolerate the violation of the rights of all life to a healthy planet. Science may think that it can substitute its narrow rationality for the mysterious vastness of nature. But that is just another patriarchal illusion waiting to be swept away in the next flood, fire or tsunami.

In China, the state owns the land and only leases it to farmers and others who work or build on it. This gives the state the right to control what damage humans can cause. This modification of property rights has the potential to pull us back from the destructive path we are on. Yet this same state ironically leads the world in damming up rivers at a time when our new ecological awareness has led to a global movement to remove dams from rivers. The great restoration of the Klamath River in California and Oregon where four dams were just removed, is happening at the same time that China is helping the nations of the global south to dam up their great rivers. But do we hear about the impact of these new dams in the global south on the life around the rivers, including the downstream impacts? Do we hear about protests against the dams from ecologically aware people who live on the rivers? No. We do not. Not even when wars break out over it. Industrialization spreads in both the socialist and capitalist worlds. Socialists use the carrot to spread industrialization. Capitalists use the stick to establish their parasitic grip on the hinterlands. These are two legs of the same body pushing us towards an industrialized world system that does not yet value the balances of nature. Since we can't seem to live without industrialization, the challenge is to transform it from its patriarchal forms to something else that puts the rights of all life to a healthy planet first.

Here in the US, indigenous tribes and some environmentalists are fighting against oil and gas pipelines in defense of their lands and waters. Elsewhere, fossil fuel pipe lines are spreading like spider webs all over the globe, and with them the number and volume of destructive leaks. Railroad tankers full of oil wreck and explode over and over in what has become a common sight especially here in the US. With the unlimited power of the sun shining hotly down on us everywhere, we have no real need for harmful technologies that destroy the web of life. And no excuse for ignoring our destructive impact. Humanity has a long way to go to get our priorities in line with a sustainable future, to preserve the integrity of the earth along the way to whatever future humanity may have. And even though the Chinese lead in areas like the electric car, batteries and such, they still believe that men have the right to lock up the rivers with little regard for the ecosystems that they destroy.

The Dali Lama, who the Chinese forced into exile, once said that the world would be saved by Western women. When I put this idea into the context of the continuing destruction of the environment going on globally, I ask myself, how will this happen? Could it be that women gradually take over the reigns of power and do something different? She would still be at the helm of a doomed machine. Instead, it seems more likely that change will come through the rise in awareness, first among women, in places like the Taylor Swift concerts where these subterranean underlying values get shouted out for all the world to hear. These values spring up from the people on their own, from our experiences in storms, floods, wars, mass murders, femicides, and the spread of chronic diseases. The digital world is now bringing all these disasters to humanity daily on our phones in real time. Fuck the Patriarchy is no centralized publicity campaign, no nefarious get rich scheme. Just the rage of women (and some men) who understand their own values as creative beings in a patriarchal world that denies its own culpability as males. When men and society at large learn to celebrate and uphold such women centered values, including the right of the earth, the rivers, the sky and all living creatures to a healthy planet, only then will humanity find a way to peace, justice and a healthy planet.