Sixty-six million years ago, so the scientists tell us, an asteroid slammed into this planet. Landing on what's now Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, it gouged out a crater 150 kilometers wide and put so much soot and sulfur into the atmosphere that it created what was essentially a prolonged "nuclear winter." During that time, among so many other species, large and small, the dinosaurs went down for the count. (Don't, however, tell that to your local chicken, the closest living relative -- it's now believed -- of Tyrannosaurus Rex.)

It took approximately 66 million years for humanity to evolve from lowly surviving mammals and, over the course of a recent century or two, teach itself how to replicate the remarkable destructive power of that long-gone asteroid in two different ways: via nuclear power and the burning of fossil fuels. And if that isn't an accomplishment for the species that likes to bill itself as the most intelligent ever to inhabit this planet, what is?

As humanity has armed itself ever more lethally, it has also transformed itself into the local equivalent of so many asteroids. Talking about accomplishments: as humanity has armed itself ever more lethally, it has also transformed itself into the local equivalent of so many asteroids. Think, for instance, of that moment in the spring of 2003 when George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and crew launched the invasion of Iraq with dreams of setting up a Pax Americana across the Greater Middle East and beyond. By the time U.S. troops entered Baghdad, the burning and looting of the Iraqi capital had already begun, leaving the National Museum of Iraq trashed (gone were the tablets on which Hammurabi first had a code of laws inscribed) and the National Library of Baghdad, with its tens of thousands of ancient manuscripts, in flames. (No such "asteroid" had hit that city since 1258, when Mongol warriors sacked it, destroying its many libraries and reputedly leaving the Tigris River running "black with ink" and red with blood.)

In truth, since 2003 the Greater Middle East has never stopped burning, as other militaries -- Afghan, Iranian, Iraqi, Israeli, Russian, Saudi, Syrian, Turkish -- entered the fray, insurgent groups rose, terror movements spread, and the U.S. military never left. By now, the asteroidal nature of American acts in the region should be beyond question. Consider, for example, the sainted retired general and former secretary of defense, Jim "Mad Dog" Mattis, the man who classically said of an Iraqi wedding party (including musicians) that his troops took out in 2004, "How many people go to the middle of the desert... to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?" Or consider that, in the very same year, Mattis and the 1st Marine Division he commanded had just such an impact on the Iraqi city of Fallujah, leaving more than 75% of it in rubble.

Or focus for a moment on the destruction caused by some combination of U.S. air power, ISIS suicide bombers, artillery, and mortars that, in seven months of fighting in 2017, uprooted more than a million people from the still largely un-reconstructed Iraqi city of Mosul (where 10 million tons of rubble are estimated to remain). Or try to bring to mind the rubblized city of Ramadi. Or consider the destruction of the Syrian city of Raqqa, the former "capital" of ISIS's caliphate, left more than 80% "uninhabitable" after the U.S. (and allied) air forces dropped 20,000 bombs on it. All are versions of the same phenomenon.

And yet when it comes to asteroids and the human future, one thing should be obvious. Such examples still represent relatively small-scale local impacts, given what's to come.

The Wars From Hell

If you happened to be an Afghan, Iraqi, Libyan, Syrian, Somali, or Yemeni in the twenty-first century, can there be any question that life would have seemed asteroidal to you? What Osama bin Laden began with just 19 fanatic followers and four hijacked commercial airliners the U.S. military continued across the Greater Middle East and North Africa as if it were the force from outer space (which, in a sense, it was). It doesn't matter whether you're talking about cities turned to rubble, civilians slaughtered, wedding parties obliterated, populations uprooted and sent into various forms of exile, the transformation of former nations (however autocratic) into failed states, or the spread of terrorism. It's been quite a story. More than 17 years and at least $5.6 trillion after the Bush administration launched its Global War on Terror, can there be any question that the wildest dreams of Osama bin Laden have been more than fulfilled? And it's not faintly over yet.

More remarkable still, just about all of this has largely been ignored in the country that functionally made it so. If you asked most Americans, they would certainly know that almost 3,000 civilians were slaughtered in the terror attacks of 9/11, but how many (if any) would be aware of the several hundred civilians -- brides, grooms, revelers, you name it -- similarly slaughtered in what were, in essence, U.S. terror attacks against multiple wedding parties in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen? And that's just to begin to mention the kinds of destruction that have gone on largely unnoticed here.

In the first 18 years of this century, tens of millions of people have been uprooted and displaced -- more than 13 million in Syria alone -- from what had been their homes, lives, and worlds. Many of them were sent fleeing into countries like Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. Sooner or later, more than one million Syrians made it to Europe and 21,000 even made it to the United States. In the process, Washington's wars (and the conflicts that unfolded from them) unsettled ever more of the planet in much the way those particulates in the atmosphere did the world of 66 million years ago. So consider it an irony that, here in the U.S., so few connections have been made between such events and an unceasing series of American conflicts across the Greater Middle East and Africa -- or that the thought of even the mildest sorts of retreats from any of those battlegrounds instantly leaves political and national security elites in Washington (and the media that cover them) in an uproar of horror.

We're talking, of course, about the conflicts from hell that have long been labeled "the war on terror" but -- given the spread of terror groups and the rise of the anti-immigrant right in Europe and the United States -- should probably have been called "the war for terror" or the "war from hell."

Consider this a tale of imperial power gone awry that -- were anyone here truly paying attention -- could hardly have been uglier. And no matter what happens from here on, it's hard to imagine how things won't, in fact, get uglier still. I'm not just thinking about Donald Trump's Washington in 2019, where such ugliness is par for the course. I'm thinking about all of those lands affected by America's unending post-9/11 wars (and the catastrophic American-backed Saudi one in Yemen that goes with them) -- about, that is, the region and the conflicts from which Donald Trump sorta, maybe, in the most limited of ways was threatening to begin pulling back as last year ended and about which official Washington promptly went nuts.

We're talking, of course, about the conflicts from hell that have long been labeled "the war on terror" but -- given the spread of terror groups and the rise of the anti-immigrant right in Europe and the United States -- should probably have been called "the war for terror" or the "war from hell." And it's this that official Washington and much of the mainstream media can't imagine getting rid of or out of.

Naturally, doing so will be ugly. In functionally admitting to a kind of defeat (even if the president insists on calling it victory), Washington will be tossing aside allies -- Kurds, Afghans, and others -- and leaving those who don't deserve such a fate in so many ditches (just as it did in Vietnam long ago). Worse yet, it will be leaving behind a part of the world that, on its watch, became not just a series of failed or semi-failed states, but a failed region. It will be leaving behind populations armed to the teeth, bereft of normal lives, or often of any sort of life at all, and of hope. It will be leaving behind a generation of children robbed of their futures and undoubtedly mad as hell. It will be leaving behind those cities in rubble and a universe of refugees and insurgents galore. Even if ISIS doesn't rebound, don't imagine that other horrors can't arise in such circumstances and amid such wreckage. Ugly will be the word for it.

And for some of that ugliness, you can indeed thank Donald Trump, whether he withdraws American troops from Syria, as promised, or not. After all, here's the strange thing: though no one in Washington or elsewhere in this country had paid more than passing attention to it, the recent Syrian "withdrawal" decision wasn't The Donald's first. Last March, he "froze" $200 million that had been promised for Syrian aid and reconstruction, money that assumedly might have gone to derubblizing parts of that country -- and rather than being up in arms about it, rather than offering a crescendo of criticism (as with his recent decision to withdraw troops), rather than resignations and protests, official Washington and the media that covers it just shrugged their collective shoulders. It couldn't have been uglier, but Washington was unfazed.

As for countermanding the president's order and staying, we already know what more than 17 years of endless American war have delivered to that region (as well as subtracted from the American treasury). What would another two, four, or eight years of -- to use a fairly recent Pentagon term -- "infinite war" mean? Here's one thing for sure: ugly wouldn't even cover it. And keep in mind that, despite Donald Trump's recent Syrian and Afghan decisions (both of which are reversible), so much of what passes for American war in this century, including the particularly grim Saudi version of it in Yemen and those Air Force and CIA drone assassination strikes across much of the region, has shown little sign of abating anytime soon.

Using Up Precious Time

And then, of course, there's that other issue, the one where withdrawal can't come into play, the one where ugly doesn't even begin to cover the territory.

In case you haven't instantly guessed -- and I suspect you have -- I'm thinking about what's happening to the place known to its English-speaking inhabitants as Earth. It no longer takes a scientist or a probing intelligence to know that the planet that welcomed humanity all these thousands of years has begun to appear a good deal less gracious thanks to humanity's burning of fossil fuels and the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. By now, no matter where you live, you should know the litany well enough, including (just to start down a long list): temperatures that are soaring and only promise to rise yet more; a record melting of Arctic ice; a record heating of ocean waters; ever fiercer storms; ever fiercer wildfires (and ever longerfire seasons); rising sea levels that promise to begin drowning coastal cities sometime later this century; the coming of mega-droughts and devastating heat waves (that by 2100 may, for instance, make the now heavily populated North China plain uninhabitable).

Nor do you have to be a scientist these days to draw a few obvious conclusions about trends on a planet where the last four years are the hottest on record and 20 of the last 22 years qualify as the warmest yet. And keep in mind that most of this was already clear enough at the moment in planetary history when a near-majority of Americans elected as president an ardent climate-change denier, as were so many in the party of which he became the orange-haired face. And also keep in mind that the very term climate-change denier no longer seems faintly apt as a description for him, "his" party, or the crew he's put in control of the government. Instead, they are proving to be the most enthusiastic group of climate-change aiders and abettors imaginable.

In other words, the administration heading the country that, historically, has been the largest emitter of greenhouse gases is now in the business -- from leaving the Paris climate accord to opening the way for methane gas releases, from expanding offshore drilling to encouraging Arctic drilling, from freeing coal plants to release more mercury into the atmosphere to rejecting its own climate-change study -- of doing more of the same until the end of time. And that's certainly a testament to something. Ultimately, though, what it's doing may be less important than what it isn't doing. On a planet on which, according to the latest U.N. report, there are only perhaps a dozen years left to keep the long-term global temperature rise under 1.5 degrees centigrade, the Trump administration is wasting time in the worst way imaginable.

An Asteroidal Future

Even 18 years into a series of "quagmire" Middle Eastern wars, the U.S. could still withdraw from them, however ugly the process might be. It could indeed bring the troops home; it could ground the drones; it could downsize the Special Operations forces that now add up to a secret army of 70,000 (larger than the armies of many nations) at present deployed to much of the globe. It could do many things.

What Washington can't do- what we can't do-is withdraw from the Earth, which is why we are now living on what I increasingly think of as a quagmire planet.

In the 1960s, that word, quagmire ("a bog having a surface that yields when stepped on"), and its cognates -- swamp, sinkhole, morass, quicksand, bottomless pit -- were picked up across the spectrum of American politics and applied to the increasingly disastrous war in Vietnam. It was an image that robbed Washington of much of its responsibility for that conflict. The quagmire itself was at fault -- or as historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., put it at the time: "And so the policy of 'one more step' lured the United States deeper and deeper into the morass... until we find ourselves entrapped in that nightmare of American strategists, a land war in Asia."

Embedded in the war talk of those years, quagmire was, in fact, not a description of the war as much as a worldview imposed on it. That image turned Vietnam into the aggressor, transferring agency for all negative action to the land itself, which had trapped us and wouldn't let us go, even as that land was devalued. After all, to the Vietnamese, their country was anything but a quagmire. It was home and the American decision to be there a form of hated or desired (or sometimes, among America's allies there, both hated and desired) intervention. Much the same could be said, of course, of the Greater Middle East in this century.

When it comes to this planet in the era of climate change, however, quagmire seems like a far more appropriate image, as long as we keep in mind that we are the aggressors. It is we who are burning those fossil fuels. It is, as our president loves to put it, "American energy dominance" that is threatening to submerge Miami, Shanghai, and other coastal cities in the century to come. It is the urge of the Trump administration to kneecap the development of alternative energies, while promoting coal, oil, and natural gas production that is threatening the human future. It is the acts and attitudes of Trumpian-like figures from Poland to Saudi Arabia to Brazil that threaten our children and grandchildren into the distant future, that threaten, in fact, to turn the Earth itself into a rubblized, ravaged planet. It is Vladimir Putin's Russian petro-state that is at work creating a future swamp of destruction in the Arctic and elsewhere. It is a Chinese inability to truly come to grips with its use of coal (not to mention the way it's exporting coal plants to Africa and elsewhere) that threatens to make our world into a morass. It is the lack of any urge on the part of fossil fuel CEOs to "keep it in the ground" that will potentially take humanity down for the count.

In that context, think of the man who, from his earliest moments in the Oval Office, wanted to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement, filled his cabinet with climate-change aiders and abettors, was desperate to obliterate his predecessor's modest steps on climate change, and never saw a coal mine, oil rig, or fracking outfit he didn't love as the latest asteroid to hit Planet Earth. Under the circumstances, if the rest of us don't get ourselves together, we are likely to be the dinosaurs of the Anthropocene era.

Donald Trump himself is, of course, just a tiny, passing fragment of human history. Already 72, he will undoubtedly be taken down by a Big Mac attack or something else in the years to come and most of his record will become just so much human history. But on this single subject, his impact threatens to be anything but a matter of human history. It threatens to play out on a time scale that should boggle the mind.

He is a reminder that, on this quagmire planet of ours, we -- the rest of us -- have no place to go, despite NASA's plans to send humans to Mars, the rise of privatized projects for space tourism, and a Chinese spacecraft's landing on the far side of the moon. So, if we care about our children and grandchildren, as 2019 begins there is no time to spare and no more burning issue on Planet Earth than this.

(c) 2019 Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His sixth and latest book, just published, is A Nation Unmade by War (Dispatch Books).Previous books include: Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World (with an introduction by Glenn Greenwald). Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 (co-authored with Nick Turse), The United States of Fear, The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's, The End of Victory Culture: a History of the Cold War and Beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.

Every year a certain number of our soldiers decide they'd rather not be involved in shooting people they don't know so that ExxonMobil can have more oil or Lockheed Martin can make more cash or MSNBC / Fox News can give their hosts topics for their upcoming poetry books. Basically, these soldiers do something horrifying, something terrible, something often called "treasonous" ... They - wait for it - think for themselves!

(Glass shatters. Woman screams. Baby cries.)

Nothing is more frightening for our endless war machine than a military grunt who thinks for him or herself. They're supposed to do nothing more than follow orders. They're supposed to ask a superior officer for permission to wear a different color pair of socks. That's right - the biggest, toughest gladiators in our society have to get authorization to switch from boxers to briefs.

I'll get to what this has to do with our inverted totalitarian corporate pillaging in a moment.

One of the more notable soldiers who stood up this year was Spenser Rapone - a second lieutenant discharged on June 18, 2018, for disparaging the U.S. war machine online and promoting a socialist revolution. (Clearly our enormous globe-spanning military complex can obliterate any possible enemies except independent thought, which promptly turns it to a mush akin to pea soup.) Apparently reading about the true story of Pat Tillman pushed Rapone toward the realization that he was a pawn in the middle of a massive lie.

"Pat Tillman showed me I could resist the indoctrination," Rapone said. "I did not have to let the military dehumanize me and turn me into something monstrous. When I learned how his death was covered up to sell the war, it was shocking."

To sell the war. Why is it they would need to sell a war? Oh, I know - because it's completely unjustifiable. For activities people naturally agree with or enjoy doing, you don't have to advertise them. Like you don't see ads saying, "Hey, feed your kids. ... Don't forget." Or a commercial saying, "Try having sex some time. It's fun!" That stuff comes pretty naturally. But you do need promotion (Read: media propaganda) for our endless war games because it does not come naturally to most of us. War comes naturally to sociopaths, and then it's sold to the rest of us, much like a used car or an ill-advised timeshare in Cleveland.

But the military is not the only place where conscientious objectors play a role. It might be the only one where walking away can get you locked up in prison spending your days sewing McDonald's uniforms, but there are a lot of moments in our messed-up world when you can turn your back and do the right thing.

For example, fewer and fewer people are willing to do the job of killing millions of animals every year. A recent report "revealed that staff shortages at slaughterhouses [in the U.K. were] threatening Christmas sales. Some 10,000 positions are unfilled at major abattoirs. ... The report explains that for most potential applicants, the industry's low pay is not the problem but that 'people simply do not want to do this work anymore.'"

Oh come on, you fragile snowflakes! "Ewww, I can't handle chopping the heads off a thousand pigs a day. It hurts my feelings to end the life of hundreds of sentient beings who haven't done anything to me to warrant such treatment. WAAH! I don't like loading buckets of adorable chickadees into the grinding colander so they can be turned into a meat milkshake that will ultimately be served to a labradoodle or a puggle. BOO HOO HOO!" (I might have made up the term "grinding colander.")

In all seriousness, working at the killing fields of a factory farm has life-long impacts that no one talks about. (And by "no one," I mean the media and our politicians and most everybody else.) As the Guardian reported, "Slaughterhouse work has been linked to a variety of disorders, including post-traumatic stress disorder and perpetration-induced traumatic stress. One pig slaughterer said the 'worst thing' about the work is its 'emotional toll'. ... A worker at a chicken plant said one of his colleagues was 'hauled off to the mental hospital' after he 'kept having nightmares that chickens were after him.'" (It's tough to say what the chickens would've done with him had they caught him. Professional torture is made difficult by a lack of hands.)

These workers who have walked off the killing floors should be honored as conscientious objectors. They should be rewarded for realizing it's better to get paid to hand out coffees at the coffeehouse than death sentences at the slaughterhouse.

And conscientious objection happens in the big tech world too. This past May, a dozen Google employees quit to protest the company's role in drone-killing technology created for the Pentagon, and another 4,000 signed an internal petition to stop the partnership.

There have been many great objectors in our police forces, too. Captain Ray Lewis was in the Philadelphia police force for 23 years. Then he became an outspoken critic of police abuse, militarization, excess force and the inequality that has hollowed out our society like an aggressive virus. He shows up to protests in full uniform and stands on the front lines to help remind the other cops what they should be protecting - and it's not oil pipelines or Wall Street banks. Perhaps most importantly, he does it all with a mustache that looks like it houses squirrels in the winter. It's quite possible that without the facial hair, not a single police officer would give a shit. However, you can really reach a cop through his 'stache. (Sorry, his or her 'stache.)

Ray Lewis, a retired Philadelphia police captain who is now a critic of police abuse and militarization.

Conscientious objectors even show up in the grand hallways of the famously lockstep mainstream media outlets. Just last week, veteran national security journalist William Arkin left his job at NBC and MSNBC and basically blasted them in an open letter "... for becoming captive and subservient to the national security state, reflexively pro-war... and now the prime propaganda instrument of the War Machine's promotion of militarism and imperialism." Of course, anyone who regularly reads independent outlets like Truthdig would probably say Mr. Arkin is roughly 30 years late to this realization. Yet it still takes nerve, gonads and a spine to turn against your employer while calling them out for manufacturing consent for hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths. (Certain types of deep-water fish are made up of only nerves, gonads and a spine, and they're constantly being insolent to their employers.)

The truth is, we the people may not have that much power. We don't control our democracy anymore now that every decision is based on money. We can't instantly change the entire system. But we have one very powerful tool - we have the power of our labor.

Millions of Americans, and hundreds of millions worldwide, work for corporations or organizations that do evil every single day. This list includes:

People at the big banks that fund the destruction of our world
Officials sent to steal children from their mothers and fathers
People working at big oil companies, pushing papers while knowing we only have 11 years left to completely change our behavior
Soldiers told to drone bomb a guy they've never met before
Merchants in charge of selling Kid Rock T-shirts
The list is endless, and ALL of these people have the ability to say "I object. I will not help with your villainy."

If they all objected - we would see a different world overnight.

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The WSWS site has done a disservice to Marxism and to the Black Lives Matter movement with its ideologically driven study of police killings in the U.S., focusing on dead white people.

The World Socialist Web Site has brought in the New Year with a scurrilous and sectarian assault on "Black Lives Matter" and what the WSWS calls "the pseudo-left," claiming that Black activists and their allies are pushing a "racialist and pro-capitalist agenda" that ignores the killing of poor whites by police. In a three-part series titled "Behind the epidemic of police killings in America: Class, poverty and race," the site claims to show that "the killing of poor blacks by white cops is only one aspect of the reign of terror by American police against the working class, and not even the most common form of such killings." Instead, the site's Trotskyist researchers maintain that, because cops kill whites and Blacks in roughly equal proportions in some parts of the nation, and hardly kill Blacks at all in much of the country, the general phenomenon of police killings of civilians is class conflict, not race.

This bizarre and ill-conceived study serves as a reminder that much of what passes for a "left" in the white settler states and Europe is useless to any movement against racial oppression. Were it not so tiny and ineffectual, the WSWS's handlers in the Socialist Equality Party would be downright dangerous to Black people.

The study looks at police killings data compiled by the Washington Post, the Guardian and Fatal Encounters surveyors. Although the WSWS researchers concede that Blacks are, on a nationwide basis, 2.24 times more likely to be killed by police than whites, they contend that such police killings are limited to just one-quarter of the country, and that three-quarters of the nation's population "live in cities or counties that were free of such killings." The WSWS then proceeds to treat the "police killing zone" and the rest of the U.S. as separate countries. The "killing zone" nation is more heavily Black (18.6 percent) and Hispanic (26.7 percent) and less non-Hispanic white (only 44.5 percent) than the rest of the country. The researchers further calculate that the "killing zone" poverty rate is more than twice as high as the rest of the U.S.: 19.5 percent versus 9.5 percent. Voila!: the study concludes that "what whites and blacks who are killed by police have in common is poverty."

The WSWS study finds that "half of all police killings occur in rural areas where the majority is non-Hispanic white, though these areas represent a much smaller fraction of the national population. It is here where white deaths begin to 'catch up' to black deaths, and ultimately surpass them." These whites are the supposedly hidden victims of the ruling class war on poor people. The researchers put them in the same economically targeted class as Black victims of police lethal force in St. Louis, the city with the highest rate of police killings in the nation. "Not only are blacks" in St. Louis "shot in predominately black neighborhoods," said the study, "but they are also the poorest with median household income even below the city average and poverty levels three times the national average."

With all this slicing and dicing of numbers, the WSWS study has only "proven" that cops are much more likely to shoot a poor person than an affluent one. The study also confirmed another fact that has long been known to researchers: that white and Asian victims of police violence "had a higher rate of mental illness as compared to blacks and Hispanics" - close to twice as high. "Whites had a rate of 29.6 percent compared to blacks at 17.6 percent."

Yes, it's a big country, with lots of poor people of all races, who are more likely to be killed by police than are richer Americans. But that doesn't mean they were killed because they were poor, only that they were not rich enough - or sane enough - to escape being victimized by cops. But class-conscious cops can also be racists, and all U.S. cops function in a system that has been purposely organized to contain, control and terrorize specifically Black populations, especially poor Blacks. The numbers show, incontrovertibly, that lethal police violence is most concentrated in Black, poor urban neighborhoods, which have for nearly a half century been the epicenter of what Michelle Alexander calls "The New Jim Crow": the post-Civil Rights and Black Power era Mass Black Incarceration State. As I wrote in BAR on September 13, 2017:

"In building the world's largest prison system to house the mostly non-white prey of the planet's most intrusive police state, the U.S. has condemned to the dungeons millions of non-targeted whites - unintended, collateral damage of the race wars that birthed the nation and built an empire."

The WSWS tortures both Marxism and history in order to stuff U.S. police racism into an economics-only box. But the racial roots of the Mass Black Incarceration State - leading inevitably to high rates of police killings of Blacks and others in the U.S. - are irrefutable.

As Richard Nixon top aide John Erlichman told Harper's Magazine:

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

"President Ronald Reagan wanted to make good on campaign promises to get tough on that group of folks who had already been defined in the media as black and brown, the criminals, and he made good on that promise by declaring a drug war. Almost immediately after his declaration of war, funds for law enforcement began to soar....

"The drug war had already been declared, but the emergence of crack cocaine in inner-city communities actually provided the Reagan administration precisely the fuel they needed to build greater public support for the war they had already declared.

"So the Reagan administration actually launched a media campaign to publicize the crack epidemic in inner-city communities, hiring staff whose job it was to publicize inner-city crack babies, crack dealers or so-called crack whores and crack-related violence, in an effort to boost public support for this war they had already declared [and to inspire] Congress to devote millions more dollars to waging it....

"It was President Bill Clinton who actually escalated the drug war far beyond what his Republican predecessors even dreamed possible."

"Super-predators."

"We need to take these people on, they are often connected to big drug cartels, they are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called super-predators. No conscience. No empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way but first we have to bring them to heel."

A long-delayed grassroots movement finally emerged to confront the Mass Black Incarceration regime and its killer cops, under the umbrella of Black Lives Matter. The ruling class has attempted to co-opt this movement ever since, with varying degrees of success. But the WSWS critique of Black Lives Matter is bogus and ideologically driven, with numbers sprinkled in to give the illusion of social science. WSWS is opposed to independent Black political activity, including Black political self-defense against state oppression, which the WSWS brand of Trotskyists deems as narrow nationalist and objectively (or even consciously!) in league with the capitalist rulers. Which would be a great slander, if the WSWS were considered as serious Marxists. But, they are not. Although WSWS does some good work, they are also, unfortunately, crazy.

Ideally, elections are about ideas, but these days policy discussions are being shoved aside by raw partisanship and vitriol. Not only are good ideas ignored, but very bad idea can become public policy without the public knowing it.

For example, the Trump Team wants to snuff out your Constitutional right to free speech and assembly by putting an exorbitant fee on public protests in our nation's Capitol City. In other words, you'd still be "free" to rally for or against any issue or policy - but not for free! Apparently meant to deter any more of the mass demonstrations against their policies on women, immigrant children, climate change, etc., they want each protesting group to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to the government for policing and other necessary costs of guaranteeing the public's right to protest.

Corporations and billionaires would have no problem paying, but regular grassroots groups would be priced off the public lawn. Such historic protests such as Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 march and his "I have a dream" speech couldn't have happened under Trump's pay-me plan.

I'm guessing that a good 90 percent of Americans - Republican, Democrat, and otherwise - would shout "NO!" to this repression of a fundamental civic right. But I'd also bet that not a single congressional candidate has even mentioned it to voters in this year's elections. Yet, in perverse Orwellian newspeak, the Trumpsters pushing the plan say it's "designed to provide greater clarity about how and where demonstrations can occur in a manner that protects historically important land."

I was born at night, but it wasn't last night! This proposal is designed to protect nothing but the bad policies of the power elites from objections by riff-raff like you and me. To help stop their authoritarian power play, go to aclu.org.