By David William Pear – Originally at OffGuardian

They passed the USA PATRIOT Act – and I did nothing because I am a patriot.
They passed the USA Freedom Act – and I believe in freedom.
They nominated Hillary Clinton – and I voted for the lesser evil.
They declared medical martial law – and I didn’t want to kill grandma.
They said to wear a facemask – and I passively obeyed.
I believe Joe Biden – because I am a liberal.
Ode to a Liberal – DWP

In 2010 Chris Hedges declared the liberal class as dead as a doornail. He was late. Liberalism had died decades earlier. All that remains now is the separate components of the body of liberalism. The stinking compounds have decomposed into identity politics.

The cause of death for the liberal class, as Chris Hedges tells us, was gullibility. Liberals were foolish enough to believe that they could moderate capitalism. They thought that they could change corporatism by elections, mass movements, whining and begging for incrementally.

The liberal class started their negotiations by compromising all of their ethics, beliefs, and powers. All they got in return were table-scraps to identity politics. The power elite did not give up anything it really cares about. The corporatists raped, pillaged and burned with abandon, while liberals wallowed in political correctness.

Taxes for the rich are the lowest in over 100 years. The military budget is the highest in history. The concentration of wealth and income is in the fewest hands. US wars have killed millions of people, and war profits are booming. Labor unions were neutered. Government is privatized. The economy has been deindustrialized. The police are militarized. The working class has been disenfranchised. The middle-class is being impoverished. The unemployed are idle. The poor are criminalized.

I could go on, but you get the point.

And what has the liberal class gotten in return? Token integration. Ending conscription. Adulthood at 18 years of age. Women in the workforce. Acceptance of LGBTQ. A black president. The MeToo movement. Legalized marijuana. A $1200 bailout. Help me out here—what else have the liberal class gotten in the past half-century, in return for their soul?

Liberals elected Barack Obama in 2008, laughed, cheered, cried, and then they went to sleep for eight years. They thought that Obama would do the heavy lifting for them. Instead he went from bombing three countries to bombing seven, after winning the Nobel Peace Prize for nothing. Obama looked the other way as the Police Occupied Zuccotti Park, Black Lives Didn’t Matter, and Dakota Pipelined.

Obama imprisoned and tortured whistleblowers, and he became the deporter-in-chief. He bailed out the banks, while millions of families lost their homes. Obamacare enriched insurance companies and big-pharma. Gitmo stands as the legacy of Obama’s droning wedding parties and funerals, and for all his broken promises. His answer to climate change was Artic drilling, and fracking the USA.

Obama and the liberal class are the reason we have Trump.

The rich do not care about any of the liberal class’s identity politics and correctness. It costs the rich nothing to make those concessions. The liberals are not willing to fight for anything of importance, and the corporatists know it. The corporatists don’t care if Trump or Biden is the next president.

Bernie or bust! Fugget about it: Bernie Sanders is just a sheepdog, a foil, a professional wrestler, and Kabuki theater. Bernie is the Senator from Lockheed and Israel. He is a carnival huckster, herding the liberal suckers into the big tent.

The DNC will be happy to keep Trump.

They get to keep their jobs, their power, their influence, and the gravy train keeps on rolling. Nancy Pelosi will still get her kicks from gourmet chocolate, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will keep making arm-waving rants to an empty House, Ilhan Omar will kowtow to the Zionist lobby, and the Congressional Black Caucus will vote against blacks.

Liberals will grandstand politically correct platitudes, while the banks, corporations, military-industrial complex, Israel, and the well-connected get unlimited hand-outs.

Lest I forget, fake liberal Rachel Maddow and her ilk in the media will still get paid $30 thousand a night for “Russia-Russia-Russia!”, and the New York Times will endorse every regime-change war, just as it has done for the past 150 years. And Liberals will commiserate with each other, preach to their dwindling choir, blame everybody except themselves, and waste another four years without organizing any opposition.

Medical martial law reveals just how out of touch liberals are with common people. Liberals have abandoned the working class, the unemployed, the poor, the incarcerated, the ghettoized, wage-slaves, the indebted, the bankrupt, veterans, the homeless, beggars, red-necks, slum dwellers, the uneducated, and old people surviving on three-figure Social Security checks.

All the liberal class whines about are Trump and their own selfish economic interests; the so-called middle-class issues. They despise their potential allies among the people, look down on them as if they are riff raff. Liberals should be uplifting the downtrodden, not kicking them.

Liberals naively believe the COVID-19 fearmongering. They begged the authorities for medical martial law, and they have become comfortable to “the rules” and their self-imposed imprisonment. They would rather give up all of their civil liberties, and those of others, than to risk catching the flu.

They will obediently line up for experimental vaccines, identification tattoos, and download medical tracking apps on their iPhones. They are COVID kool.

The facemask is their badge of obedience, which does medical and psychological harm to their body, mind and soul. The facemask is nasty. It provides the perfect environment for breeding and spreading germs. Wearing a face mask is humiliating, and unsanitary. It is a symbol of passive submission to the power elite. They look ridiculous wearing it.

What liberals can never be forgiven for is their abandonment of internationalism. They have deserted international socialism, leaving welfare-states to be crushed by international capitalists. While liberals cower-in-place in fear of COVID-19, their passiveness supports the medical blockade against socialist countries. Liberals are the “Good Americans”, just like the Good Germans during the Third Reich.

Two million Gazans have been forced to shelter in place by fascistic Israelis, since 2007. Another three million Palestinians have been imprisoned since 1967 in an ever-shrinking isolated West Bank. There are another 5 million Palestinian members of the diaspora, who cannot return to their homeland, as is their God-given human right. Palestinians are tortured in Israeli concentration camps. Liberals can not say they do not know, and their silence speaks volumes.

Since World War Two the U.S. has killed an estimated 30 million people, none of whom were ever a threat to the US American people. Ethically, morally and legally most US Americans are guilty of war crimes. The German people were not let off the hook after WW2. The US American people are just as guilty now.

Liberals know the U.S. government is a pathological liar. The past two decades have been especially rotten. George W. Bush winning the election in 2000 was a lie. The attacks of 9/11 were lies, the invasion of Afghanistan was based on a lie, Iraq weapons of mass destruction were a lie, Iran’s nuclear weapons program is a lie, the Katrina Hurricane response was a lie, the Russian invasion of Georgia was a lie, the 2009 bailout of Wall Street was based on lies, Haiti earthquake aid was a lie, the Ukraine coup was lied about, Gaddafi’s Viagra was a lie, the well-vetted moderate rebel was a lie, the lie that Venezuela is a threat to the US is a lie, the White Helmets are a propaganda lie, Russiagate is a lie, the Douma chemical attack was a lie, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons report was a lie, the torture of Chelsea Manning is lied about, the Julian Assange lie is a lie.

So now liberals believe that the government authorities are telling the truth about COVID-19?

Liberals say that we should believe that lie too, and we should obey the fascistic rules. The first clue that the authorities are lying is that the banks, corporations and the well-connected were bailed out again; first too. Six-trillion U.S. dollars disappeared overnight. The second clue was that the U.S. illegal wars of aggression did not stand-down. There was no break in the illegal U.S. blockades against socialist countries.

Instead there is a campaign of maximum starvation during a pandemic.

The military’s Defender 2020 war-game invasion of Russia was not canceled due to COVID-19.

The power elite do not isolate, wear face masks, and practice social distancing. We are not in it all together, and COVID-19 has not made us all equal. Those memes are liberal pipedreams.

There is no bailout for the people. There has been no unified response to provide the people with adequate food, healthcare, housing, and financial relief during medical martial law. The physical, mental and emotional damages caused by isolation are being ignored.

The casualties caused by medical martial law and “the rules” go unreported, if the statistics are even being kept. The number of people who have become infected, ill, and died from COVID-19 is lied about.

What is happening under martial law is the permanent stripping away of our civil liberties. The economy is being restructured for the benefit of big-tech, and more concentration of income and wealth is going to the top. Yet, liberals meekly accept the assault on the people’s rights in silence. They could at least honk their car horns in solidarity with wage-slave workers.

Are liberals going to show up when people are evicted from their homes, have their cars repossessed, and their wages garnished? Are they going to stand in picket lines with workers, who are demanding fair wages? Are liberals going to storm the statehouses and Washington to demand a return to civilian government?

Are liberals going to resist forced vaccinations, contact tracking, snitching, spying, and ID chipping? Are they going to be standing up for civil liberties and human rights? Or are they going to be standing with the corporatists, and begging the corporatists for their fiendish programs of surveillance and control?

Liberals have made “liberal” a dirty word. They cannot hide behind the identity of progressive. There is nothing liberal or progressive about making bargains with the corporatists, fascists, and the corrupt power elites. It is time to bury the putrid body of the liberal class. It has already become a biohazard more dangerous than any virus.

Resist!

Revolt will come from the right. That the revolt will be funded, organized, and manipulated by the corporate forces is one of the tragic ironies. But the blame lies with the liberal class. Liberals, by standing for nothing, made possible the rise of inverted and perhaps soon classical totalitarianism.”

The Death of the Liberal Class – Chris Hedges (2010)

David William Pear is a Senior Editor for OpEdNews.com, and a Senior Contributing Editor for The Greanville Post. David is a journalist, columnist, and commentator for TV and radio. He has been writing for The Real News Network, OpEdNews, The Greanville Post, American Herald Tribune, and other publications since 2009.

From a comment:

If you have a bachelor’s degree, you can work the $10.40/hr temp job of standardized test grader to see how right you are. You’ll grade thousands of papers that demonstrate how profound the literacy crisis is.

I went to crappy public schools that were not dangerous, like some of today’s schools, but they were zoo-like, with an atmosphere that focused on 1) athletics, 2) the type of jeans and tennis shoes you wore and 3) the cut-down culture among a bunch of young bullies who grew up to be workplace bullies in many cases.

I learned little there, and the social atmosphere was damaging due to rampant bullying that was uncurbed by teachers, with some of the teachers even participating in it.

A typical learning event included the large number of coach teachers calling their classes into one room and showing a Fellowship of Christian Athletes film. The coach teachers would pat the floor to get the girls to come and sit beside them. Give-a-care female teachers who likely never read a book that was not assigned in college ignored the viscous bullying of students by other students, going on right under their un-motherly noses.

Most of the teachers — male and female — were just getting through the day in their safe government jobs. Some of the female teachers were catty cubed to the young female students, likely due to things that had nothing to do with their job.

There was a lot of paddling of a few boys and a lot of girls in tight jeans or cheerleading skirts by teachers with a coach "witness." This was for egregious sins, like chewing gum in class or passing notes in class.

I say all of this to point out that I had zero empathy for junior high and high school teachers until I graded all these standardized tests. The situation appears to be worse than when I was in school. I am not sure how much control the teachers have. When it comes to shortfalls in the most basic literacy skills, some of it is likely due to the home lives of students.

You would know what I meant if you graded batch after batch of essays, suddenly encountering a whole batch of papers that were not perfect by any means, but were very different than the overall papers.

Recent generations of politicians have decided to pay single parents to copulate and reproduce if they work 20 hours or more for low wages, propping up independent households for them and unleashing a widespread social trend of single-parent households. It probably was not a big deal to have some single-parent households before it became such a large trend, with 62% of births now out-of-wedlock.

The standards for raising children are no longer high. Nor are the teaching standards high in the era of the two-earner, feminist households, where many teachers below the college level aren’t passionately interested in the subject they teach.

Most of the teachers are moms who majored in Education. They want to be home with their own kids in the summer, and teaching is a way to do it. These teachers are not the spinster intellectuals of past eras, nor are they the male breadwinners in most cases, although males can get a teaching job easier in subjects like history or English if they coach.

Secondary school teaching is a second-income profession. It is a good way to have a safe second income when the dad holds a more lucrative, but less certain, corporate job. Teaching — like so many jobs — revolves around family composition and the personal-life issues of the employees.

Still, a lot of the recently retired teachers who were a part of the momma-clique teaching system think grammar should be taught. It isn’t anymore.

I did this grading during No Child Left Behind and in the years right after Obama took office. We were trained to grade the essays according to the varying standards of different states, using a so-called "holistic" approach.

Many graders were weeded out in an initial series of tests. A bunch of hoop jumping is required for every one of these low-wage temp jobs. It is an absurd world, where many highly paid mommas and many mommas in low-wage jobs, too, can take a ton of excused time off from work. Laxness abounds for many employees, but every low-wage temp job that would never cover rent requires a ton of hoop jumping.

The papers were graded using a convoluted literary theory, not by the kids’ knowledge of the basic rules of grammar and composition, causing a lot of snide comments among the retired school teachers.

The temp grading sessions were staffed with about 1/3rd to 1/2 retired teachers, with the rest of the graders being underemployed college grads who were never teachers.

A lot us assumed that grammar would be a component of the grading, but except in the case of one state, where it was one of 6 grading criteria, it was not.

Every once in awhile, we got a batch of papers with a green dot, indicating that, like in the initial testing phase, we would be kicked out of the grading session if our grading did not align with X percentage of sample papers.

There were grades of 1,2,3 and 4. A good paper was not necessarily grammatically correct, but had a lot of so-called "elaboration." This basically meant a lot of specific detail, like the literary theory that says good writing is not too generalized. That theory is about literary style and efficacy in communicating ideas, not about the fundamentals of English that should be taught in 3rd, 4th or 8th grade.

Believe it or not, a bad and even failing paper could be the paper of a child who cared about organizing his or her ideas in a logical way. S/he could display an awareness of paragraph structure and grammar. But if the kid did not get the required number of words down in 30 minutes, you were supposed to grade it a 2 in some states.

I felt sorry for those kids. It was totally unfair to them and, in cases where graders really gave them a 2, it was probably very discouraging for no good or logical reason. These kids were grouped with kids who showed far less fundamental understanding.

Here is the reason: it is easier to teach more kids to pass the "elaboration" test than to teach them grammar, especially when so many kids come to school from home situations that make it harder to teach them. The schools get their money based on how many kids score well on the test. These tests also determine which ones go to the next grade.

In many states, a 2 was an incoherent paper packed with unrelated sentences. A 1 was a paper that did not even have one or two fully formulated, legible sentences. Zerohedge recently did an article describing a state where a staggering number of papers got a 1, meaning that the kids are not even basically literate.

Within the group that got the maximum score, a tiny number of kids wrote brilliant little papers. A couple were even funny all the way through, in addition to being grammatically correct and meeting all of the nutty, "holistic" requirements that ensure a good grade in a bad system.

We live in a crazy world.