We're back with a longie but goodie just in time for the Fall of Kabul and also autumn. Alternate Episode Titles: Everything is giving, everything is a vibe, everyone dies: How is "tax the rich" any different than a BLM lawn sign in an all-white community?; If "Taliban" means "student" in Pashto--the US is the teacher.

Have you ever asked yourself why tax reform is such a contentious issue and has been for decades? Have you ever stopped to think that politicking, grandstanding and "fashion diplomacy" is part of moderate, centrist Democrats' pandering to a more leftist, "progressive" voter base but without alienating their prioritized white voter base too much (think Nancy Pelosi kneeling in the kente cloth sash in 2020)? There's a slavery era explanation for that:

The tobacco rice and indigo that our ancestors grew and produced were considered in Alexander Hamilton’s own words “which must be capital objects in treaties of commerce w foreign nations” and precipitated the events that led to this country’s independence in 1776 following the Revolutionary War. His more famous quote, though, "no taxation without representation" portends a more glaring contradiction: imagine being mad you have to pay taxes to enrich the British whose royal companies, militaries, fleets and slavers sold and transported the Indigenous Africans you enslaved and calling TAXATION slavery while actually enslaving people? Tax the rich is again policy sloganeering and is a liberal democratic/partisan rallying cry that can’t happen in good faith in an oligarchy that siphons all its resources to an already massive defense budget. Just earmark our reparations, will ya?

Maybe the majority of folks who at least have some semblance of a revolutionary or radical politic aren't hating on rich people or Met Gala attendees or AOC herself, but instead recognizing that she and other politicians across the spectrum are sworn to serve a country that used the international slave trade between Britain and Spain to generate revenue to build a domestic manufacturing infrastructure to keep taxes lowered for their most invaluable taxable import--Black people and whose Central Intelligence Agency created the Taliban to wrest power from the USSR's puppet pro-soviet government during the Soviet Afghan War in 1979-1989 as part of plan to distort the public's view of the barbaric, warmongering, misogynist primitive backward United States to continue competing for oil and other natural resources in Central Asia, including the global heroin trade to finance the invasion of other countries, arm the genocide of their number one ally in the region (the Israeli Government. See Kamala Harris's comments on Israel)while pretending to care about "women's right's" and immigration while whipping Haitian immigrants at the border. That said, shirking accountability for their complicities in systems of oppression to remain elected isn't above any of their paygrades--even the politicians you like!

Eyes On Haiti
Oligarchy: https://haitiantimes.com/2021/07/16/haitians-can-no-longer-hide-behind-the-caste-system-killing-our-country/
US mass deportations of Haitian Immigrants: https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/elviadiaz/2021/09/20/border-patrol-using-whips-del-rio-round-up-haitian-immigrants/5789596001/

Recommended Reading: https://blackallianceforpeace.com/newsletter/afghanistannograveyard?fbclid=IwAR20EeWyNUk4MpwUubcXZ53usiqemg3Rl6u4ZkeSioLAO14DiY5A2E4KrRA
https://blackallianceforpeace.com/afghanistan

Tariq Ali: https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/debacle-in-afghanistan
http://www.taxhistory.org/thp/readings.nsf/ArtWeb/4AF487C90CA14FB985256E000057B5EB?OpenDocument

Global Heroin Trade Links to US presence in Afghanistan: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jan/09/how-the-heroin-trade-explains-the-us-uk-failure-in-afghanistan

https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/files/84028515/FULL_TEXT.PDF

AOC: https://www.dsausa.org/democratic-left/aoc/