Loren Bliss: Dispatches from Dystopia

Beyond the Newest Squabbles of the Two Evils, a (Very) Faint Possibility Sanders Might Emerge as the Perfect Compromise

JILL STEIN'S EFFORT TO nullify the 2016 presidential election by last-minute recounts reeks of Green Party naivety, typically dishonest Democratic (sic) Party sleight-of-hand and the sinister guile for which Hillary Clinton is rightfully infamous. In all probability, Stein is Hillary's figurehead, positioned to be the perfect scapegoat for the debacle that will inevitably follow if this newest campaign to monkeywrench Donald Trump's victory is even half as effective as Hillary's felonious suppression of Sen. Bernie Sanders' candidacy.

Properly cynical analysis of the Stein campaign – Stein's relative innocence and limited finances as opposed to Hillary's bottomless corruption and obscenely unlimited wealth – indicates it can hardly be anything but another Clinton operation. In any case it has turned a long-cliched Madison Avenue hyperbole into new reality. Advertisers often boast their product “changes everything,” but this is precisely the outcome the breathtakingly Machiavellian recount-ploy will have if it triumphs, which several sources say is highly probable. For this “everything” truly is everything – not just the hitherto-certain, now unnervingly dubious outcome of the election, but the now equally dubious longevity of our nation, our species and our planet.

As I have said for months, the actual choice allowed us by our capitalist overlords – minor parties, write-ins, incomplete ballots and hell-no-I-won't-vote abstentions aside – was between two latter-day Hitlers and the horrific agenda each represents: the new Holocaust as promised by Donald Trump; the attack on Russia and the resultant thermonuclear apocalypse as sought by Hillary Clinton. In other words, we were forced to choose between possibly survivable horrors versus absolutely certain extinction.

Obviously exploiting Stein as her puppet – and obviously both as Stein's financier and puppet-master (diabolical, yes, especially in its multiple betrayals, but nevertheless the only conclusion allowed by logic) – Hillary is timing the recount to invalidate enough electoral votes to deny Trump the presidency and possibly – depending on whether the Democratic (sic) election-fixing apparatus can alter recount results as efficiently as it killed Sen. Sanders' primary victory – give it to herself.

Here's how it might work:

As The Hill reports, failure to complete an official recount by the federal 13 December deadline probably nullifies the state's electoral votes. Rightist websites – in this instance to be believed – are already saying Stein's belated filing of the recount demands is intended to ensure the three states' miss the 13 December deadline, thereby subtracting their electoral votes from Trump's total and throwing the presidential election into the House of Representatives.  (Apologetic note: this link to Inquisitr.com,, which summarizes the associated arithmetic, is obnoxiously clogged by advertisement monitoring and takes at least five minutes to stabilize to readability.)

What would happen were the presidency to be decided by the Republican-ruled House remains to be seen. There are at least three possibilities: that it confirms Trump's election; that it finds another Republican whose domestic Nazism is perhaps more closeted than Trump's but who will obey with absolute reliability the One Percent's global-conquest mandates Trump seems to opposes; or that it will find a compromise candidate acceptable to both parties – a possibility no less remote than Alpha Centauri, but one that nevertheless could put the hugely popular Sen. Sanders in the White House. (You read it first here.)

But let us not forget the recounts could also reverse enough votes to give Hillary the presidency. Thus she would seize the White House after having positioned Stein and the Green Party as the immediate scapegoat for the civil war that is certain to result. Meanwhile who can doubt the recount is yet another product of Hillary's limitless vindictiveness? As I said before, Stein not only lacks the requisite malice, but – without Hillary's clandestine intervention – it's gravely doubtful she'd have been able to access the requisite wealth. Cynicism – which sometimes is the most revealing Muse of all – suggests only two possibilities: that Hillary has blackmailed Stein into becoming her figurehead, or that Stein's ambitions have reduced her to Hillary's sacrificial lamb and turned her into another of the Clintons' useful idiots. (Wikileaks: please tell all!)

As to the danger of civil war, the KuKlux/Christian/Nazi militias have already threatened to rise in armed rebellion if Trump is denied the presidency. They would be even more enraged were Trump's ouster – seemingly accomplished by the same typical Democratic (sic) deviousness that invariably spares the Clintons from prosecution despite their brazen criminality – to succeed in putting Hillary in the White House.

Unfortunately, and just as I have written elsewhere,  the violence of a second civil war would kill forever the nonviolent revolution now brewing at Standing Rock, which is fast evolving the potential of mobilizing sufficient overseas support  to succeed much as Gandhi's revolution did against the British Empire in India. But with the nonviolent revolution aborted by unrelated violence, the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals could rest in absolute certainty the nonviolent threat to capitalist governance was permanently terminated even as the government's technological superiority was ensuring the defeat of the Rightist militias.

Moreover, a second civil war (perhaps labeled by future historians “the War of Presidential Succession”), would – under the unlimited powers Obama has bequeathed the presidency – allow declaration of a permanent state of emergency, thereby nullifying what little remains of the Constitution and ensuring the eternal omnipotence of capitalist tyranny.

Were Hillary the president, it would also facilitate her most cherished domestic ambition: zero-tolerance forcible disarmament – confiscation without compensation of every civilian-owned firearm in the United States.

Hillary would ultimately blame Russia for the millions of deaths and millions of dollars of damage so inflicted, whether by civil war, forcible disarmament or both. She would no doubt claim it was all the result of some alleged Kremlin conspiracy involving Trump, Stein, the Greens and Vladimir Putin – thereby giving herself a “nothing-to-lose” rationale for nuking Moscow and triggering thermonuclear apocalypse.

As to why Hillary would do anything so obviously suicidal, there are only two possible answers.

One is that her decades  of fanatical Christian brainwashing  by The Family  have driven her beyond what should be labeled JesuNazism to clinical insanity, perhaps even turning her into a believer in biblical End Times and the Apocalypse  as the only sure route for the Christian god's devotees  to depart this world of sin and get to Heaven.

(I apologize for the above paragraph's link-heavy text. But now with the growing likelihood  Hillary Clinton will be the next USian president – remember how she stole the primary  from Sen. Sanders – I think it vital for us to recognize what a JesuNazi she truly is, and that once she is in the White House, she is likely to attack the remnants of the First Amendment at least as vindictively as we know she will attack the Second Amendment.)

The other possible explanation for Hillary's obvious intent to start World War III – an explanation that does not negate the first possibility (and could in fact be the expression of its Noah's Ark intent) – is that the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals have secretly built and stocked a vast subterranean network of bunkers to allow themselves and a few carefully chosen and meticulously bred slaves to survive a 25-year nuclear winter. Rumors of such refuges have persisted for years, and knowing our overlords' genocidal contempt for all the rest of us, we the people of the 99 Percent, I cannot doubt the rumors are founded on truth. Thus the plutocrats, their children and their slaves – the slaves no doubt dark-pigmented for easy identification – would emerge from these latter-day Noah's Arks as unchallenged rulers of a planet “cleansed” of all “sinful” humans and, not coincidentally, also healed of global warming.

In this context, let us further examine what might be the hidden agenda of the recount.

As I said above, on 8 November 2016 we were forced to choose between two Hitlers: Donald Hitler of the Renewed Holocaust versus Hillary Hitler of the Thermonuclear Apocalypse. But ultimately our choice was between (possibly survivable) horror or (certain) extinction. And our decisions revealed to the One Percent's psychological warfare experts the magnitude of our national courage.

The courageous – those of us who dared vote against Hillary (whether by voting for Trump or one of the lesser alternative-party candidates) – voted to gamble on the likelihood of survival and thus to fight on.

But those who voted for Hillary chose thermonuclear suicide. Some chose suicide because their fanatical Christianity convinced them they were better dead than Red – “Red” in this instance encompassing not only the uncertainties of socialist revolution (as by the nonviolence of Standing Rock), or at the very least the long-overdue rejection of Prosperity Gospel Christianity,  the consequence implicit in Senator Sanders's efforts to resurrect the New Deal. Others chose suicide because they are terrified by the prospect of life on a planet undergoing terminal climate change or in a nation in which people – especially Working Class people – are allowed to own firearms. Still others – perhaps the moronic majority of Hillary's voters – chose suicide out of Moron Nation ignorance – ignoring all the damning evidence of Hillary's closet fascism and attachment to theocracy, and remaining in clinical denial of Hillary's ever-escalating threats, whether against any remnants of USian civil liberties or against Russia and ultimately against human survival.

In any case, the fact Hillary is winning the popular vote – overwhelmingly so, if the latest figures are to be believed – also tells the psychological warfare experts Moron Nation is already significantly subjugated, too cowardly to alter the status quo save by imposing forcible disarmament – that is, mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood – on all civilian firearms owners.

Even so, what might the One Percent and its Ruling Class hope to accomplish by forcing a recount and at the very least nullifying the election? Is the One Percent perhaps still indecisive about which Hitler will serve it best as Führer? Or is something else afoot – say deliberate provocation of a Rightist uprising, with civil war its inevitable result.

To reiterate: civil war would kill forever the potentially successful nonviolent revolution taking shape at Standing Rock. And – again reiterating – the resultant “state of emergency” would enable the One Percenters and their Ruling Class vassals to terminate – also forever – any rational hope of ever restoring USian liberty. Plus – last reiteration – a civil war's destruction, its magnitude akin to that of Germany in 1945, would give the Hillary the perfect “nothing-to-lose” rationale for starting World War III.

Think, people. We are tyrannized by Evil, our species' most diabolical plotters ever.

 

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THE FOLLOWING ARE the titles and links that were part of the blog post I had written for OAN before the news of the recount literally changed everything. The material – most of it about the transition to overt Nazism that would have occurred under Trump – is still relevant. But it is way too lengthy to add to the above, so I am reducing it to a recommended reading list, with the briefest possible notes about content and whether I commented on the associated discussion thread.

Fascism in Donald Trump's United States (Henry A. Giroux):  Trump's comments form a discourse of hate, bigotry and exclusion...resonating deeply in a landscape of U.S. culture and politics crafted by 40 years of conservative counterrevolution...We heard this same hatred in the words of Hitler, Mussolini, Pinochet and other demagogic orators who have ranted against Jews, communists and other alleged “infidels.” (No comment by LB.)

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Honor Roll Student Shares Fruit With Classmate, Gets Suspended for Violating Weapons Policy: An honor roll student...shared part of her lunch with a classmate. The school suspended her for six days...after she cut a peach in half with a child’s butter knife...The Pembroke Pines Police Department said it has turned over their investigation to the State Attorney’s Office. (No comment by LB.)

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His horror show hides Clinton's rotten agenda (Elizabeth Schulte and Alan Maass):  Donald Trump is so despicable that no one is paying attention to what Hillary Clinton actually stands for.  (No comment by LB.)

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Goodbye, American Neoliberalism. A New Neo-Fascist Era Is Here (Cornel West):  (T)he abysmal failure of the Democratic party to speak to the arrested mobility and escalating poverty of working people unleashed a hate-filled populism and protectionism that threaten to tear apart the fragile fiber of what is left of US democracy. And since the most explosive fault lines in present-day America are first and foremost racial, then gender, homophobic, ethnic and religious, we gird ourselves for a frightening future. (Extensive comments by LB.)

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President Obama's Last Stand (Matt Taibbi):  As Taibbi often does, he buried his lead, probably in embarrassment: ...There are a lot of people these days wondering if the election of the race-baiting Donald Trump will end up staining or outright repudiating the legacy of Barack Obama. I think it will be the other way around. Trump's presidency is almost sure to throw the best qualities of this unique and powerful historical figure into relief. (Brief comment by LB.)

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Obama Refuses to Pardon Edward Snowden. Trump's New CIA Pick Wants Him Dead (Alex Emmons and Naomi LaChance):  President Obama indicated on Friday that he won’t pardon NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, even as President-elect Donald Trump announced his pick to run the CIA: Kansas congressman Mike Pompeo, who has called for “the traitor Edward Snowden” to be executed. (Extensive comments by LB.)

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7 Big Areas Where Jeff Sessions Could Change Policy at DOJ (Danny Vinik):  Sen. Jeff Sessions was an instantly divisive figure when President-elect Donald Trump named him as his next attorney general: conservatives and immigration hardliners welcomed the choice, while civil-rights groups and Democrats spent the day attacking the pick...the critics’ focus was on controversial past comments by Sessions, such as accusations that he said the NAACP and American Civil Liberties Union were “un-American,” and joked that he thought the Ku Klux Klan was “OK, until I learned they smoked pot.” But much of the concern is what he’d actually do as AG: that he’d undermine civil rights protections, prosecute more undocumented immigrants and allow companies to go wild with mergers...Here are seven areas where Sessions could most dramatically change public policy. (Extensive comments by LB.)

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Life Under Trump (Rebecca Gordon): Can we hold back the rising seas that are already closing over island nations on a planet where Donald Trump promises to abandon the fight against climate change and walk away from the historic Paris climate accord? And...(j)ust how vulnerable are we, two middle class white lesbians in our sixties, during a Trump presidency? (Brief comment by LB.)

 

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Here's What We Do Now - a Personal Note (Greg Palast):  Decades of progress created with sweat and determination face destruction.  Within the next six months, we may see the Voting Rights Act repealed—and civil rights set back 50 years; the entirety of our environmental protection laws burnt in a coal pit; police cruelty made our urban policy; the Education Department closed to give billionaires a tax holiday; and a howling anti-Semite as White House Senior Counselor. But the horror we face is countered by this one hard and hopeful fact: Donald Trump did NOT win this election. (Brief comment by LB.)

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Medics Describe How Police Sprayed Standing Rock Demonstrators With Tear Gas and Water Cannons (Alleen Brown):  (T)he Standing Rock Medic and Healer Council...estimated that 300 people were treated for injuries, including 26 who were taken to area hospitals. (Brief comment by LB.)

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War Has Broken Out in North Dakota (Marc Ash):  The situation in North Dakota at the site of the Dakota Access Pipeline has degenerated into what can now only fairly be described as a war zone. (Extensive comments by LB.)

 

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IN SUCH TERRIBLE times as these I am occasionally asked what weird insight or sickness of imagination enables me to (accurately) portray our capitalist overlords as they truly are – that is, as boundlessly more cunning (and therefore infinitely more Evil) – than any diabolical creature ever conceived by the authors of the Torah, the Bible, the Qur'an or even the far more ancient and dreadful Chaldean catalogue of demons.

Usually I merely shrug my shoulders – a nonverbal “I dunno” – and leave the question unanswered.

But if I am asked this same how-do-you-do-it question by someone with whom I am already psychologically comfortable, I might, if there is time, explain it as the hidden blessing of my childhood, which was all the more miserable for the absence of physical evidence that hid its unhealable gashes of psychological trauma. So wounded was I that even now on adult word-association tests I equate “family” with “betrayal” and “deception” and “scapegoating” and “rejection” and “despair.” Thus the microcosm of family brutality prepared me – quite thoroughly in fact – to cope with our species-wide macrocosm of bottomless Evil.

Evil is in fact humanity's default reality. (I capitalize it not for theological reasons – I am an ever-more-devoutly skeptical agnostic – but to provide the proper literary emphasis due what is undeniably our sole defining quality, intellect and soul alike, if indeed the latter is more than hallucination.) Nor will I debate my admittedly misanthropic conclusion; it has been confirmed more times than I can count, proven far more conclusively by what I've witnessed done to others than by what was ever done to me, whether during my first 18 years, or my award-winning but grievously underpaid and overworked decades as a journalist and social-documentary photographer, or now finally in my final seasons as a crippled old man with a failing heart, no longer exploitable for capitalist profit and thus like everyone else in such circumstances knowingly, deliberately, maliciously sentenced to death by the slow but methodically certain genocide of ever-deeper cuts to Medicare and food-stamps and Social Security and any other programs on which we depend for survival. Such is the quintessential Evil of Homo sapiens sapiens: Evil as it was in the beginning, Evil as it is now and Evil as it ever shall be, Evil without end amen.

Thus the one truly vital lesson to be gleaned from life is to learn to beware our species' penchant for perverting our most hypothetically exalted principles into real-time rationales for mass murder as at Wounded Knee and Mai Lai, mayhem as in Birmingham or at Standing Rock, and the sort of sadism the invading Germans sometimes inflicted on Russian children: bloating their bowels with gasoline enemas, lighting matches to their petrol-leaking anuses, then – much as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton cackled at Qaddafi's execution by anal impalement – chortling with glee at the children's shrieking, running, sometimes exploding and always indescribably agonized deaths. Thus do the ubermenschen – our “brightest and best” – behave toward those of us they damn as untermenschen. Such is the Evil that defines our species.

Merry Christmas, Happy Easter, and here's a thermonuclear egg to brighten your basket. Our Evil demonstrably exceeded our ability at self-control when we nuked Japan to terrify our then-ally Josef Stalin and serve him notice that henceforth we'd be his deadliest enemy, far deadlier than the Germans his Red Army had just defeated.  Now – thanks to this election and its aftermath – no matter its outcome our Evil will almost certainly overwhelm any possibility we might have escaped it.

LB/28 November 2016

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The Postmortem Continues, the Identity-Politics Pseudo-Left as Arrogant and Vindictively Counter-Revolutionary as Ever

WE THE PEOPLE can no longer doubt Donald Trump is the new Hitler. Last week – particularly given the conciliatory tone of his victory speech,  I said we should wait and see what sort of a president Trump would be – but his appointment of the notorious white supremacist Steve Bannon as his chief advisor tells us all we need to know.

Thus before the last few remnants of our Bill of Rights  are forever abolished, we who survived the Johnson-Nixon-Ford-Carter-Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama prelude to Trump's Fourth Reich and now find ourselves among this not-so-New Order's publicly declared targets should at least try to understand the psychological cunning by which the capitalists manipulated Moron Nation into crowning their Donald as Führer of our species' deadliest and most relentlessly tyrannical empire.

For only by studying what has been done to us – and indeed what we have thus done to ourselves – might we begin to comprehend the unbearable truth that capitalism is naught but pure Evil, the most relentlessly powerful Evil in our maliciously abused Mother Earth's history, Evil so infinitely huge and overwhelming it has burst the doctrinal bounds of theological conceptualization and become instead the now-probably irreversible mechanism of ecocidal apocalypse, whether by thermonuclear war (as was intended by fascist Hillary), or by patriarchal hatred of Woman and her macrocosm Nature soon to be enshrined as federal policy by Trump and his JesuNazi Vice-President Mike Pence.

Nor should we overlook the increasing probability the election of Trump was the product of the ultimate, climactic (and almost certainly terminal) charade of USian “democracy” – the breathtakingly Evil consequence of an utterly Evil deception in which the One Percenters, the maliciously Evil capitalist overlords of both the Democratic (sic) and Republican parties, suppressed the Sanders candidacy to inflame our disgust with the Hillary candidacy, which they had already mandated to ensure the election of Trump and Pence – the shortest most direct route to the Nazi tyranny the capitalists have been seeking for the past 85 years.

Acknowledging these unbearably bitter truths and probabilities, armed with such excruciatingly painful recognitions, we might then fulfill Sun Tzu's prerequisite, “Know the enemy and know yourself, and in one hundred battles you will never be in peril.” In other words – if our species somehow survives the forthcoming debacle and we the people of the USian Homeland somehow at last banish our obstructive optimism – we might thus begin the long process of helping our species evolve a global path to humanitarian victory.

Such is the reasoning that underlies my belief in Marxism. Despite Marxism's obvious failures – the drowning of the Soviet Union in the dark undertow of Russian history  and the more notorious collapse of the People's Republic of China into zero-tolerance state capitalism – it remains the only ideology on earth with sufficient discipline to successfully resist (and perhaps even topple and permanently eliminate) the bottomless horror of Nazism – the terminal form of capitalism – that once again openly assaults us. But now, thanks to Trump's White House predecessors, it possesses incalculably more powers of subjugation than its Third Reich forefathers might ever have imagined. And there is no longer a Red Army nor anything like it to ensure our victory.

(Note: I have added a few links – indicated as “added link” – to the following reports to exemplify the points they make.)

 

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It Was the Rise of the Davos Class That Sealed America's Fate (Naomi Klein, Guardian UK): They will blame James Comey and the FBI. They will blame voter suppression and racism. They will blame Bernie or bust and misogyny. They will blame third parties and independent candidates (added link). They will blame the corporate media for giving him the platform, social media for being a bullhorn, and WikiLeaks for airing the laundry. But this leaves out the force most responsible for creating the nightmare in which we now find ourselves wide awake: neoliberalism. That worldview – fully embodied by Hillary Clinton and her machine – is no match for Trump-style extremism. The decision to run one against the other is what sealed our fate...Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards have declined precipitously. They have lost jobs. They have lost pensions. They have lost much of the safety net that used to make these losses less frightening. They see a future for their kids even worse than their precarious present...For the people who saw security and status as their birthright – and that means white men most of all – these losses are unbearable.

The only point on which I would quibble with Ms. Klein is her either/or assertion about the Democratic (sic) Party.

Given its long history of betraying the 99 Percent – which started the instant a Missouri political hack named Harry S. Truman became president (but which dates to the era in which it was the party of slavery and slave-owners) – it should be obvious to anyone of Ms. Klein's foresighted intelligence the only fate suitable for the Democratic (sic) Party is not just abandonment but methodical destruction.

Otherwise the Democrats' history of wanton betrayals will merely repeat itself again.

But where to start? Moron Nation, proven so by its election of Trump, most assuredly lacks the ability, the will and most importantly the courage to provide the requisite revolutionary leadership.

Asked without a scintilla of facetiousness: where is Vladimir Lenin now that we so desperately need him? Where is the old ComIntern? Where, finally, is the Soviet Union? (Never forget it was the USSR that during the 1930s provided us with a leadership built from our own people so effectively we nearly overthrew capitalism here in its global headquarters.)

Alas, there is nothing like that – no source of the requisite training and discipline – in the world today. Which means Moron Nation is truly on its own – and when in history did a despotism of dunces ever give birth to anything save chaos, destruction and death?

Truly, only a miracle can save us now.

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My (very strong) suspicion is – apart from an even greater escalation of Democratic (sic) and Republican “austerity” – i.e., genocidal war on elderly, disabled and otherwise chronically impoverished people – there will be very little change in the status quo. (But given the 180-degree difference between Hillary's “public” and “private” policies, no doubt we'd have gotten that anyway, assuredly in a far more euphemistic form.) To make real change, we need a genuine revolution, and that will never happen here in Moron Nation, at least not in the lifetimes of anyone now living, because too much of the citizenry has been moronated into maliciously selfish submission.

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Never forget “the party of evil” is in fact one capitalist party of two deceptive names, Democratic (sic) and Republican.

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Trouble is, identity politics – the capitalist antidote to class consciousness – will abort (anti-capitalist) solidarity before it is even in the embryonic stage. The clitoris-envy misogyny of the anti-abortion Christian jihadist right; the forcible disarmament fanaticism of the pseudo-Left – people who truly believe every firearms owner is “a Nazi” and the mere ownership of a firearm is “an act of violence”; the Ku-Klux minded racists and Nazi-minded ableists of the Right; the tree-spiking environmentalists of the bourgeois Left, whose hatred of corporate depredations is exceed only by their demonstrably murderous hatred of Working Class people who have no other livelihood than logging – these differences and their corollaries, envenomed ad nauseam by hatreds of the same bottomless magnitude that tore apart the Weimar Republic and thus enabled Hitler, make any such (solidarity) hopeless under present circumstances.

The question then is how do we educate people on both sides of the political spectrum – people whose closed-minded zealotry proves them to be utterly ineducable.

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You (addressed to a hostile fellow RSN comment-thread poster) err grievously in equating Stalin with the Koch brothers. Read some history: Stalin was building an industrial nation from the ruins of a feudal nation. The Koch cabal is building a feudal nation from the ruins of an industrial nation.

But the implication of your “expect to learn Russian soon” – unintentionally to be sure (though maybe your subconscious is telling you something you should heed) – is that given present-day politics, Russia could well emerge from the global miasma as the savior of human liberty.

That savior most assuredly won't be Moron Nation, i.e., the United States of America.

Вы говорите по-русски?

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Before we damn Stalin as “a monster,” let us acknowledge the monstrous behavior of the United States, which for the most part went unchallenged by its citizenry until capitalism brought USian sadism home and the white population began to suffer the same depredations as indigenous populations abroad and minority or First Nations populations in the imperial homeland.

Then of course the white population, methodically moronated to self-destructive stupidity, did precisely as it was conditioned to do: note for example the required high school reading of Ayn Rand, a fictionalizer of Hitler's Mein Kampf whose work should never have been published, much less given, like gasoline thrown on a fire, to people capitalism had already raised from birth to be moral imbeciles. Thus in its ignorance-aborted quest for relief, Moron Nation voted in fascism. (Paragraph revised slightly to comply with format differences.)

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Think of the Electoral College as the national equivalent of the Democratic (sic) National Committee's “superdelegates .” Both serve the same class-war function – that is, making sure the will of the One Percent and the Ruling Class prevail over the will of the 99 Percent.

Just as the Democratic (sic) superdelegates parlayed an enormity of election fraud into ousting Sanders and nominating Hillary, so did the Electoral College parlay the candidacy of Hillary into the presidency of Donald Trump.

 

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Health Care in the Age of Trump (Adam Gaffney): The implications of the election  are widespread and multifaceted, ranging from the catastrophic impact a Trump presidency will have on climate change — and the attendant global health consequences — to the squeeze on reproductive health care access that will likely follow the rise of the Right. At the state level, important health care–related ballot initiatives went down in defeat, including a universal health care referendum in Colorado and an initiative in California...to mildly loosen Big Pharma’s tentacle-like grip on the state’s finances...Big Pharma and the insurance industry (spent) huge sums...Republicans now...(can) remold the nation’s health care system into something both uglier and more lucrative...Pharma stocks soared the day after the election).

Mr. Gaffney – still in denial of Tuesday's results – asks, “And how can we keep the dream for single-payer alive?”

The answer, of course, is that any hope of single-payer is dead, as dead as the so-called “American Dream,” in other words, dead forever with no hope of resurrection.

Apropos the Ayn Rand influence cited by (a fellow-comment-thread contributor), the significant fact about Rand is that she is the fictionalizer of Hitler's Mein Kampf: just as der Führer did, she demands extermination of all untermenschen, which by USian definition – now made policy by the Trumpite electorate – includes racial, ethnic and sexual minorities; those of us who are chronically impoverished, elderly and/or disabled; and most of all anyone who is chronically ill.

 

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Trump Voters Will Not Like What Happens Next (Garrison Keillor, The Washington Post): ...Raw ego and proud illiteracy have won out,  and a severely learning-disabled man with a real character problem will be president...The Trumpers had a whale of a good time, waving their signs, jeering at the media, beating up protesters, chanting “Lock her up”...The Trumpers never expected their guy to actually win the thing, and that’s their problem now. They wanted only to whoop and yell, boo at the H-word, wear profane T-shirts, maybe grab a crotch or two, jump in the RV with a couple of six-packs and go out and shoot some spotted owls...(but)...The uneducated white males who elected him, they will not like what happens next.

I should thank Keillor for his malevolent arrogance, firstly because it demonstrates exactly why Trump won; secondly because it proves the truth that earned me my all-time RSN down-thumb high, 62 at last count.

What I wrote is that “Prairie Home Companion...was a malicious satire...on those flyover folk...'Wobegon' was pronounced 'Woe-begone,' as in woe-begone peasants...The program was also a devastating parody...on 1950s rural-U.S. midday radio...For that reason, I never cared much for... Keillor nor for his perpetuation of USian class snobbery... I thought it wrong to make a mockery of people who could no more help being what they were than a polio victim in an iron lung could help being deathly ill.”

Obviously – note again the 62 red thumbs – revealing the now Keillor-proven truth about his vindictive elitism was the Hillaryite equivalent of owning a firearm, which the forcible disarmament cult damns as an “act of violence” that irrevocably defines one as “a Nazi.”

Indeed my only criticism of (another of Keillor's comment-thread critics) is the writerly observation that “hissy fit” is redundant. In the South, from whence the term originates, it was merely “hissy”: the ultimate hold-your-breath-until-purple, fall-to-the-floor, kick-shriek-and-shit-your-pants tantrum of a raging two-year-old boy, precisely as demonstrated above by Keillor's hateful invective.

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(To another RSN poster): I up-thumbed both your remarks, but must differ with you on one point. You wrote, “Bernie's revolution needs to find new legs – it'll be a winner in four years time.”

Sorry to disillusion you, but with Trump about to bring back the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (added link), Bernie's so-called “Revolution” and any other public expressions of Left-leaning thought, including this and any kindred websites,  are living on borrowed time and will be dead in the foreseeable future.

What happened during the 1960s was our 1905; it is merely that the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals took much longer to crush us than the Tsar's Okhrana, police, Cossacks and soldiers took to crush the brave revolutionaries of '05.

Our 1917 – if it ever comes – will most assuredly not be led by Bernie Sanders, who betrayed the entire USian Left by his surrender to Hillary.

Indeed, I suspect this (Fourth) Reich, which pre-dates Trump by 53 years, will prove to be the Thousand-Year Reich Hitler imagined and with dreams of which his legions of Nazi war criminals further toxified the already-fascist USian Ruling Class when they were welcomed here after Germany's defeat. There is no power on earth that can beat it – not without destroying the planet – nor will the greedy submissiveness of Moron Nation ever dwindle, not until Mother Earth herself rises in apocalyptic rebellion against capitalist depredation. And by the time that happens, all of us alive today will be well and truly dead. Only a miracle can save us.

By the one red thumb I've already gotten for this comment, it's clear some of you – probably in fact most of you – have no idea of the terrorism inflicted on this nation by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee.

It literally destroyed, literally forever, the lives of millions of USians – not only those it summoned to public degradation and financial lynching, but the millions more whose careers were destroyed and who were thus forever damned to inescapable poverty by the ripple effect of its indescribably vicious accusations. My father was one of this latter group; as in fact was I, my journalism career forever limited by the lynch-mob-like frenzy into which HUAC's accusations goaded the USian public. Ultimately, it is because of HUAC I will die in ever-more-wretched poverty, in all probability murdered by the poverty itself.

The primary legacy of HUAC's accusations was, firstly, the death, forever, of any ideologically disciplined (and therefore effective) opposition to capitalism, and, secondly, the fascist taint, “austerity” included, that poisons USian politics, culminating in the election of Trump and HUAC's vindictive return – its unprecedented tyranny now made truly omnipotent by all-seeing surveillance technology from which there is no possible escape.

Wake up, idiots. Unless you're my age (76) or older, you cannot begin to imagine the ruinous magnitude of the horrors soon to be unleashed on us.

Such is the ultimate malevolence (added link) of Moron Nation.

 

*********

 

Trans People Are Terrified of What Lies Ahead. We Must Look Out for One Another (Hannah Simpson, Guardian UK): The announcement that Donald Trump won the election was devastating for many people, but transgender people like me were especially frightened...The election of Donald Trump and Mike Pence to our nation’s highest office gives the social conservatives who championed them free reign to overturn decades of progress...A right-shifted supreme court could void all same-sex unions, and perhaps even challenge the fitness of transgender persons to be parents...any chance of the climate improving vanished this week.

I'd say Ms. Simpson is being optimistic: “could void” should be replaced with “will void” and “may well continue” be replaced with “will escalate.”

Here, of course, in the persecution of sexual nonconformists – which, mark my word – will be expanded to include heterosexual couples living together without marriage and communal households in which polyandry and/or bisexuality is common – is the ultimate and absolute proof of the infinitely murderous, infinitely sadistic viciousness of the Abrahamic god and therefore the defining core not just of Christianity, but of Judaism and Islam as well.

(With 60-something percent of the USian population believing the Bible as the literal word of god and therefore definitively fundamentalist whether they admit it or not, no wonder Trump won. And Pence is a theocratic, prosperity-gospel ogre [link added].)

The real winner, of course, is Moron Nation – a constituency now enabled to be as fanatically savage as their Jewish and Muslim counterparts in the Middle East.

Everyone in the targeted communities should waste no time in contacting Pink Pistols and learning the rudiments of effective self-defense.

 

*******

 

Does Trump Have a Mandate? (Marc Ash, Reader Supported News): For the second time in the fledgling 21st century, we are set upon by a right wing radical assuming the power of the US presidency without having won the popular vote.

Sorry, but (the) “50 years of progressive gains” (cited by a fellow comment-thread-contributor) is a Big Lie, an effective weapon in the One Percent's paralysis of USian political consciousness.

The era of “progressive gains” ended when President Roosevelt died on 12 April 1945. The era of revenge fascism now culminating in Trump, Pence and the resurrection of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee began immediately thereafter. The maliciously anti-worker Taft-Hartley Act became law on 23 June 1947. Any hope the U.S. might achieve economic democracy thus died forever, leading to the despair that, as in Weimar Germany, prompted the hopelessly oppressed 99 Percent to embrace fascism.

President Kennedy tried to revive the New Deal but was murdered on 22 November 1963 – the day future historians (if indeed there is a future) will cite as the date USian liberty died forever.

“Peace President” Johnson's so-called Great Society was ultimately nothing more than massive bribery to suppress resistance to his murderous Vietnam War. President Nixon, a fascist felon, began his second term by dropping all pretense of support for the 99 Percent's well-being, and our standard of living has declined steadily ever since.

True, there have been a few identity-politics gains since then, but these are mere Ruling Class giveaways. They have no impact on the increasing savagery of capitalism and capitalist governance, do nothing to alleviate our ever-worsening economic suffering and are therefore not “progressive” at all.

 

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It's Time for Progressives to Seize Control of the Democratic Party (Scott Galindez, Reader Supported News):  Donald Trump’s victory has left the Democratic Party open to redefining itself.

As I look back, defying Mr. Galindez's repetition of the Obama-ism by which the Betrayer justified his de facto pardon of the Bush Regime war criminals, what I see bolsters the suspicion I voiced on this site several weeks ago – that the One Percenters had concluded Trump was the more direct path to the Nazi Nation they've sought since the Bankers' Plot of 1934 (link added).

Indeed the mysterious failure of the Democratic (sic) Party's election-fraud apparatus seems to eliminate any other conclusion.

Moreover, Trump's appointees, apart from obvious Teabagger consolation prizes like Sarah Palin, are ideological twins of the neo-libs and neo-cons Hillary would have appointed to ensure our neo-subjugation.

Alas, the RSN posts in which I suggested the One Percent was secretly abandoning Hillary have seemingly been disappeared, though (the contributor screen-named) Radscal cited my suspicion:

“But Loren Bliss has gotten me thinking that the One Percent...may actually hope they could install Drumpf...for a more conventional fascist regime.”

Meanwhile let us not forget the support given Hillary by Messrs. Galindez, Ashe, Reich and Krugman fails the “which-side-are-you-on”  (link added) test so vital in times of intensified class-struggle and identifies them all as willing members of the One Percent's Ruling Class vassalage – a fact we dare not forget, particularly now that with the impending resurrection of HUAC we have to be McCarthy-era careful what we say or write in public.

***

I frankly don't believe the Democratic (sic) Party CAN be reformed. Not now, not ever. Like the Republican Party, the Democratic (sic) Party is in fact the party of capitalism and capitalist governance, i.e., fascism.

Nor, given the realities of late-stage capitalism, can either party EVER be anything but a betrayer of the 99 Percent. Indeed, if we have not learned that lesson from the 2016 presidential campaign, we are clearly incapable of learning anything at all.

What we need is a genuine Democratic Socialist Labor Party, sworn from the moment of its formation to fight the class war on behalf the entire 99 Percent.

Won't happen, of course – the Moron Nation pseudo-Left is too invested in its self-destructive identity politics, too moronated-stupid to ever give them up, too bourgeois-hateful of blue-collar workers and too damn cowardly to ever embrace the hard and sometimes deadly work of revolution.

But it is nice to think about...

***

Think logically. What are we told by the fact the Democratic (sic) Party is submissively silent on the Republicans' genocidal plans to destroy Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security?

What we are told by their silence is that the Democrats' private position is the same as the Republicans' public position.

In other words, had Hillary been elected, the same thing would now be happening.

Which vividly illustrates why the Democratic (sic) Party is infinitely worse than the Republican Party. Both are parties of capitalist governance – i.e., fascism. The Republicans admit it – even boast about it. By contrast, the Democrats hide their fascism behind a smokescreen of Big Lies – again Hillary's “public” versus “private” positions.

Moreover, these deliberately malicious lies totally nullify the principle of free elections. How can the voters make a knowledgeable choice if one of the parties always lies about what it is?

All of which has two points: one is the overwhelming probability that with Trump we are neither worse off nor better off than with Hillary; two is that our ONLY hope is the creation of an independent, truthfully informed, ideologically disciplined Democratic Socialist Labor Party.

 

*********

 

Don't Call Clinton a Weak Candidate: It Took Decades of Scheming to Beat Her (Rebecca Solnit, Guardian UK): Sometimes I think I have never seen anything as strong as Hillary Clinton.  That doesn’t mean that I like and admire everything about her. I’m not here to argue about who she is, just to note what she did. I watched her plow through opposition and attacks the like of which no other candidate has ever faced and still win the popular vote...Or, as my brilliant friend Aruna d’Souza put it Wednesday: “At some point soon we need to discuss whether Sanders would have been able to win, but helpful hint: today, it just sounds like you’re saying: ‘The Democrats should have cut into Trump’s lead in the misogynist vote and the whitelash vote by running a white man.’ Let’s come to terms with the racism and the misogyny first, before analyzing the what-ifs – because otherwise we’re just going to replicate it forever. And if you think that the angry anti-establishment vote won (hence Sanders would have fared better), let me remind you that patriarchy and white supremacy are the cornerstones of the Establishment.”

Rebecca Solnit, a writer for whom I had enormous respect, is correct about Hillary's strength.

Hillary's strength is so great she handed the One Percent the Nazi victory they have sought since 1934, when Russian (Soviet) intelligence operatives helped Gen. Smedley Butler, USMC ret., save President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal from the Bankers' Plot, whereby the One Percenters' great-grandfathers sought to make the United States the economically dominant partner in the Third Reich and its later Rome/Berlin/Tokyo Axis.

What Hillary has accomplished is the most powerful act of political subversion in the past several centuries – maybe in our species' entire history. Indeed, she deserves a hearty Zieg Heil for putting our neo-Führer in the White House, thereby fulfilling the Aryan promise of the imperial domicile's name. USA! USA! USA!

As to Ms. Solnit, the spiteful gender-identity invective with which she has gifted us tonight permanently reduces her from significant essayist to to maudlin propagandist. The implicit hatred of and contempt for the viciously downtrodden USian 99 Percent evidenced in Ms. Solnit's newest text also casts profound doubt on the (alleged) humanitarianism from which she wrote. It thus reduces all her previous works to “schtick” – merely another extended program of histrionics, a chic and lucrative Big Lie wrapped in pseudo-empathy, one more dismal manifestation of the ultimately deadly charade of USian “democracy.”

Considering the role of the Soviet Union aka Russia in saving us from the pro-Hitler, pro-Mussolini capitalists in 1934, when these banksters plotted to make the U.S. a Nazi nation and turn the American Legion into an USian SS – I cannot but wonder if that's the real reason Goldwater Girl Hillary so despises Russia and all Russians including their unborn children.

Or maybe she just envies the Russians their oh-so-beautiful, oh-so-nuanced language, capable of so much more than the malignantly leering cackle that is Hillary at the apex of her expressiveness, as when she was celebrating the hideously agonizing death of Qaddafi by anal impalement.

How ironic too how Hillary – even as she was enthroning the real neo-Hitler (neo-Duce too) – was damning Vladimir Putin as the new Hitler. It was the most effective sleight-of-hand political action I've ever witnessed – obviously (Ms. Solnit take note), another proof of Hillary's great strength.

 

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Learning to Walk (Michelle Alexander, Michelle Alexander's Facebook Page):  (W)hat happened  can't be explained simply as a failure of the political establishment...Nor is it simply a problem of racism or sexism — though both are alive and well and flourishing in this moment. Nor is this election simply a matter of economics, though global capitalism and neoliberalism have created a world in which people of all colors are suffering greatly as factories close, work disappears, wages stagnate, and human beings are treated as disposable — like plastic bottles tossed in a landfill — as political and media elites (not just Trump) spew propaganda that encourages us to view “the others” as the enemy...What many of us have been attempting to do...(is) build a thriving multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-faith, egalitarian democracy out of the rubble of slavery and genocide...

It is truly astounding – but simultaneously no surprise – to witness the lengths to which the One Percent and their Ruling Class vassalage will go to preserve Identity Politics, the inherent divisiveness our capitalist overlords chose long ago as their primary antidote to class consciousness and the Marxian epiphany it inevitably evokes.

Now of course in the USian election of a genuinely Nazi regime, we see the ultimate fruition of Identity Politics, now proven even more effective at building a malevolently militant Aryan Right than at ensuring the hopeless division of the Left.

In other words, by its vindictive embrace of Identity Politics, the USian Left first reduced itself to a pseudo-Left and now has slain itself entirely, witness the USian replay of how the Germans discarded their own Weimar-guaranteed liberty in 1933.

But – Identity-Politics propagandists like Garrison Keillor, Rebecca Solnit and the far more subtle Michelle Alexander not withstanding – from beyond the pseudo-Left's remains another Left is arising. It is potentially a Red Banner Left,  acutely aware of the capitalists' seductive cunning and the bottomless evil it maliciously fosters. Thus it freely acknowledges the need for the ideological discipline inherent in Marxism.
The question then is not whether the One Percent will respond to the failure of its Identity Politics deceptions, but rather just how violent it will be in its effort to suppress our awakening.

 

*********

 

No, Everything Is Not Going to Be Alright (Ted Rall):  Given that I’ve been saying The Donald had an excellent chance of winning for many months, maybe you should be scared when I tell you what I think there’s really a 15% chance of: another presidential election in four years...forget impeachment...the chances of Republicans impeaching a Republican president are pretty much zero...forget constitutional checks and balances. Weimar Germany had a lovely constitution, in many ways better than ours, but constitutions are mere paper unless they’re enforced...Guantánamo, immigration prisons, drone assassinations and secret black site CIA prisons are all brazenly unconstitutional. If Trump and his henchmen want to trash legal and political precedent, nothing institutional will stop them...Trumpism is here to stay, for at least four years.

The “right wing smear machine” of which you speak – “you” was not Mr. Rall but a comment-thread-contributor to whom I was replying – was in fact Hillary Clinton's Democratic (sic) Party, and its malevolent effectiveness is proven by the fact that while we were previously oppressed by closet fascists, we are now tyrannized by ever-more-brazenly outspoken Nazis. Thus after 82 years of clandestine efforts the great grandsons of the original 1934 Bankers' Plot conspirators have at last achieved their goal: conversion of the USian Empire into the Fourth Reich.

If I were to be in any way critical of Mr. Rall – which I most assuredly will not – it would only be to suggest he is still extricating himself from the cult of self-deluded optimism that is the opiate that anesthetizes the present-day, identity-politics USian Left to stupefied ineffectiveness.

But at least Mr. Rall – unlike the vast Moronic Majority of his peers – is beginning to awaken to the infinite horror we are facing, which includes not only another Holocaust, but a Holocaust facilitated by technologies of surveillance and genocide the original Nazis could only imagine – literally, all the murderous sadism of the Abrahamic god, the morally imbecilic deity of Judaism, Christianity and Islam – now fully materialized in the tools of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent and their ever-more-openly Nazi vassalage; total subjugation for all the rest of us.

Indeed that – total subjugation – is precisely what we are facing. But until we acknowledge how utterly alone and powerless we are – until we start reading Marx and Sun Tzu and Che Guevara rather than identity-politics invective, triumphalist jock biographies and Ayn Randish self-help manuals – the only question is not whether we are destined for concentration camps, but how soon we will end up there. In fact I think Mr. Rall's notion there is a 15 percent chance 2016 will not be the last USian election ever is dangerously optimistic.

Nor would Hillary have been any better: the the only difference between the Democratic (sic) Party and the Republican Party is the former lies about the magnitude of their Nazification while the latter boasts about it.

Moreover, now that we are being rationally pessimistic, note the choice our overlords offered us: between two Hitlers, Hillary Hitler (who wanted to be the first-ever conqueror of Russia and was willing to impose biblical Apocalypse – the extinction of our species and the death of our planet – to achieve her goal); versus Donald Hitler, neo-Führer of the neo-Holocaust, who won election by promising white USia to ensure its bigoted hegemony forever. Indeed it was the classic rat-experiment, performed in the rat lab of capitalism with us, we the rat-people of the rat-race, as subjects.

No Virginia, there is no Santa Claus. There is only the Slavic myth of Saint Nicholas, a good-hearted priest – originally pagan, later Russian Orthodox – who ministered to those flung down by misfortune. It was a fine midwinter bedtime story, a parable for the instruction of children in the necessities of sharing and generosity, an excellent prelude to the most profound slogan of our age: “from us according to our ability, to us according to our need.” But it was stolen by the capitalists and twisted into an orgy of obscene profiteering and we of Moron Nation laughed and applauded and let ourselves be Trumped. Hence our Christmas stockings will now and forever contain naught but thorns and cinders.

***

I have no doubt the (basic strategic and tactical doctrine that enabled Trump's triumph) was planned long ago, probably during the first meetings between the legion of high-ranking Nazi war criminals to whom the Empire gave sanctuary and their sponsors the grandfathers and great-grandfathers of today's One Percent, i.e the Bankers' Plot perpetraitors (note spelling) who wanted to make the U.S. part of Hitler's Greater Reich. Interesting too the skillful sleight-of-hand by which Hillary distracted us by damning Putin as the “new Hitler” even as she was helping put the real neo-Hitler in the White House.

LB/17 November 2016

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Postmortem; DAPL Escalation; Gratitude for a Pivotal Gift

DESPITE ALL THE intensified and now obviously never-to-be-diminished nastiness spewing from the Hillaryites, the one certainty about President Elect Donald Trump is that we cannot yet be certain what sort of president he will be.

As I emailed a profoundly distraught friend early this morning, Trump's acceptance speech was a model of reconciliation – and no I am not being sarcastic. He said, in essence, that he intends be president "for all Americans," and that he wants to befriend  any nation who will befriend us.

Shortly after the president-elect had spoken, RT (which had provided what was by far the most professional election-night coverage), reported that – as Western European leaders were still dithering about in shock  and horror  – Russian Premier Vladimir Putin had sent Trump a message of congratulations,  the first national leader to do so.

Putin's reaction means I can sleep much better tonight. Take it from me – because I was part of the last Civil Rights Movement – it is a helluva lot easier to fight domestic racism than it is to stop global war-mongering: in which context note the (temporary) successes of the Civil Rights Movement versus the permanent debacles of Vietnam, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan etc. ad nauseam.

It is something of an aside, but in defense of the individual USian soldier, Marine, sailor and air-person – and bearing in mind I was once a U.S. Regular Army soldier myself (active duty 1959-1962; reserves 1963-1965) – it should be noted a major part of the blame for our now-obviously permanent inability at conventional warfare is the fact that under capitalism, military equipment is designed for maximum profit rather than maximum battlefield efficiency. The classic example is the current U.S. service-rifle, the M-16 and its newest variant the M-4 carbine, each so notorious for fatal malfunctions it is often “lost” on the battlefield and replaced by AK-47s taken from enemy dead. The AK-47 and its successor the AK-74 – like all Sino-Soviet equipment – is designed to kill the enemy rather than to fatten the bank accounts of obscenely wealthy military-industrial profiteers and their bureaucratic collaborators.

Thus, despite the USian Empire's permanent-war mentality and militarily aggressive war-dependent capitalism, U.S. troops have not won a conventional war since 1950, when they conquered North Korea. But they were then battled into headlong retreat when the Chinese, employing Sun Tzu's principle of “when near, make it appear you are far away,” infiltrated 300,000 combat-seasoned soldiers across the Yalu River into North Korea, launched a surprise offensive along the entire front and sent United States and United Nations troops fleeing for their lives. The result, after the Chinese took back North Korea and returned it to Kim Il Sung, was the (oft-violated) armistice of 1953, which remains in effect. Clearly as embittered by the Empire's endless failures at conventional warfare as Sen. (“Nuke Hanoi”) Barry Goldwater was, Goldwater Girl Hillary unquestionably intended to use nukes to compensate for the now-notorious U.S. inability to win at conventional warfare – never mind the result would exterminate our species and kill the planet as well. That's why so many people, I among them, were legitimately terrified by Hillary's ever-more-obvious intent to start World War III, quite possibly with an unprovoked thermonuclear attack on the Russian Motherland.

But neither could I bear the thought of a Trump presidency and its threatened Holocaust against African-American, Hispanic, First Nations, Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transsexual-Queer, Communist, socialist, anarchist and libertarian peoples – not to mention the Christian jihad against female sexual freedom promised by its opposition to abortion and birth control. Hence I voted for Jill Stein, literally – as I said in a comment-thread post repeated below – so I could die with a clear conscience in another manifestation of Christian doctrine, Hillary's intended “better-dead-than-Red” enactment of the biblical End-Times Apocalypse.

Prior to Hillary's malicious and undoubtedly criminal theft of the Democratic (sic) Party's nomination from Sen. Bernie Sanders, I was of course a Sanders supporter. But Sanders betrayed us, becoming in the end a dedicated Hillaryite, thereby – or so I suspect – reducing his future political significance to absolute zero. The Democratic (sic) Party has in all probability similarly doomed itself.

As Robert Parry of Consortium News wrote earlier this morning, (i)n the end, Hillary Clinton became the face of a corrupt, arrogant and out-of-touch Establishment, while Donald Trump emerged as an almost perfectly imperfect vessel for a populist fury that had bubbled beneath the surface of America...voters chose him in part because they felt they needed a blunt instrument to smash the Establishment that has ruled and mis-ruled America for at least the past several decades. It is an Establishment that not only has grabbed for itself almost all the new wealth that the country has produced but has casually sent the U.S. military into wars of choice, as if the lives of working-class soldiers are of little value.

By his use of the euphemism “Establishment,” Parry seemingly hoped to give British respectability to what in the post-Occupy USian homeland are more correctly known as the One Percent and their Ruling Class vassals – the malevolently greedy politicians, bureaucrats, generals, police chiefs, academics, religious leaders and mainstream-media propagandists who, as the Oberführers of capitalist governance, oversee its efficiency in assuring maximum power and unlimited profit for our overlords, total subjugation for everyone else.

Interestingly, though Consortium News often joins in the protests  against Barack Obama 's self-proclaimed presidential power to order the murder of anyone  – U.S. citizens included, Parry makes no mention of this policy as a possible post-election factor. Let us hope it is not; the USian reputation for banana-republic politics, which dates to 22 November 1963 but is underscored by Obama's nullification of the U.S. Constitution,  is already damning enough.

Were I Parry's editor, I would have insisted he add three additional elements to his analysis.

One is the irrefutable statistical proof that non-Ruling Class USians are in truth as politically powerless  as medieval serfs or antebellum slaves. While the Moronic Majority are far too ignorant and reflexively anti-intellectual to understand the statistical proof of their ever-worsening plight or the ever-more-obvious fact its only lasting remedy is the permanent overthrow of capitalism, they most assuredly understand – as Parry correctly reported – its day-to-day financial realities, the suffering and death of which Trump promises to ameliorate. But Parry's report was most assuredly weakened by the absence of the statistical corroboration.

On another element of the same topic of the 99 Percent's powerlessness, the report was also weakened by omission of the fact many people my own age – including most of my 90 neighbors in the low-income senior housing complex in which I dwell – are painfully aware that in the notoriously dishonest difference between Hillary's “public” and “private” policies (the latter including the austerity promises she secretly makes to her One Percent masters), lurks her intent to continue the slow-motion genocide of the devastating but mostly unpublicized cuts Obama and the Democratic (sic) Party in general have made in Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps.

Two is the equally irrefutable proof the white segment of the Moronic Majority is reflexively, even malevolently racist – albeit often unconsciously so. This evidence is in post-Hurricane-Katrina studies by the Pew Foundation, perhaps the most credible of the USian polling organizations. Quoth a 2005 Pew report:

(B)lacks and whites draw very different lessons from the tragedy. Seven-in-ten blacks (71%) say the disaster shows that racial inequality remains a major problem in the country; a majority of whites (56%) say this was not a particularly important lesson of the disaster. More striking, there is widespread agreement among blacks that the government’s response to the crisis would have been faster if most of the storm’s victims had been white; fully two-thirds of African Americans express that view. Whites, by an even wider margin (77%-17%), feel this would not have made a difference in the government’s response.

Given that the victims of racism should be the sole source of any definition of what racism is, given also how 77 percent of the whites arrogantly dismissed the blacks' post-Katrina grievances, it seems to me the implicit racism is undeniable.

(Disclosure: my own hostile encounters with racism include a plethora of nasty white reactions to the fact that, over the years, I had two black girlfriends, and of course the vindictive fury of Guy L. Smith, editor and publisher of The Knoxville Journal, that after my arrest in a 1963 civil-rights incident severely crippled my journalistic career-prospects; the same arrest prompted a venomous outpouring of hostility from professional colleagues, alleged friends, other fellow students, one of my four half-sisters and several maternal relatives. And let us not forget the Ku Klux Klan's subsequent efforts to murder me in retaliation for my resistance to the racist agendas of The Journal, The Knoxville News-Sentinel and most especially the University of Tennessee.)

Thus it seems to me the white USian population is no less racist than, say, the 1930s Germans were anti-Semitic. Thus too, when Trump began spouting racist invective, I concluded he was verbalizing the hitherto closeted and/or officially denied racism of Moron Nation whites, and on that basis predicted he would win the election. As a friend e-mailed me last night, “Fuck. You were right.”

The third element in Trump's victory is the methodically conditioned and thus truly limitless USian fear of material loss, a bone-deep cowardice that is easily mustered by our overlords to eternally prohibit even the mildest amelioration of capitalist depredation. As I emailed to another friend last night, “the problem – as common in the countryside as in the towns and cities – is that we are all taught from birth that our only real identity is in our material possessions. Hence we are terrified to lose them; hence too anytime that loss is threatened, we as a nation react with infinite savagery. Though I understood this dynamic from a very early age, I also scorned it, not recognizing the universality and literal bottomlessness of the associated fear until my own material possessions – i.e., the 'Dancer' manuscript and all the rest of my writing and photography – were taken from me by the 1983 fire. As a result I was utterly destroyed – destroyed forever and beyond repair – by their loss. This is, I believe, an extremely important lesson in how the psychic-vampire function of capitalism – especially aided as it is in so many USians by the sadistic opiate of Abrahamic religion – keeps us enshackled.”

Trump, therefore – in exactly the same way Hitler was unquestionably the ultimate expression of post-Versailles Germanism – is unquestionably the ultimate expression of post-New-Deal “Americanism,” whatever that may bode.

 

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I WROTE FOUR comments on the Reader Supported News website since my last post here on OAN, on 29 October. (Yes last week I entirely missed my self-imposed mid-week deadline; I had momentarily forgotten the horrendous amount of time consumed by running – hobbling, actually – first-of-month errands without an automobile; even with a ride to the supermarket provided by a friend, what used to take me one day by car now takes at least five days – often more – by bus.) In any case three of my RSN comments focus on pre-election issues; one is reprinted in full below; the others are merely titled, described by a few sentences and linked for the sake of the record. The fourth is a denunciation of the escalating war against the Dakota Access Pipeline protesters, also reprinted. And there was one other post I'm printing in totality, a short essay that began as a comment on a Chris Hedges piece published by Popular Resistance but – as if by visitation of the Muse – unexpectedly, even involuntarily turned into an expression of gratitude for a long-long-ago, far-far-away and profoundly influential gift from a young woman named Thias Smedley, who was as lovely as her given name, which is pronounced Tie-yeese, accent on the last syllable.

 

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The Real Clinton Email Scandal Is That a Bullshit Story Has Dominated the Campaign: Some time ago, Hillary Clinton and her advisers decided that the best course of action was to apologize for having used a personal email address to conduct government business while serving as secretary of state. Clinton herself was, clearly, not really all that remorseful about this...Eventually aides prevailed upon her to express a greater degree of regret, which they hoped would lay the issue to rest. It did not. Instead, email-related talk has...influenced public perceptions of her in an overwhelmingly negative way. July polling showed 56 percent of Americans believed Clinton broke the law by relying on a personal email address with another 36 percent piling on to say the episode showed “bad judgments” albeit not criminality.

My response was to repeat something I have already said many times, and will say once more for those who have not voted:

“The choice our overlords offer us is very simple: either Hillary Hitler (who believes she can top Adolf Hitler, Bonaparte, Charles XII of Sweden, the Teutonic Knights, the Mongols and the Persians in being the first-ever conqueror of Russia), or Donald Hitler, who promises to persecute African American, Hispanic, First Nations, LGBTQ and Leftist peoples.”

“Put even more simply...a vote for Hillary Hitler is a vote for World War III, thermonuclear apocalypse and the extermination of our species, while a vote for Donald Hitler is a vote for a new Holocaust.

“Which is precisely why I voted for Jill Stein. That way, in that final millisecond of consciousness as I am turned into radioactive vapor, I won't be blaming myself for having voted to turn our Mother Earth into a radioactive cinder.

“Yes, it truly is that simple.”

 

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Obama Is Pathetic on Human Rights in North Dakota (By William Boardman) – The President gave lip service to “the traditions of the first Americans.” He didn’t mention treaties between sovereign nations, of course, because he’s not about to break with the traditions of the second Americans: that such treaties are only a means to a genocidal end and aren’t to be taken seriously by the United States of exceptional, manifestly destined Americans whenever such treaties interfere with what the US wants. That’s what “properly attentive” means historically. Freely translated, “properly attentive” means “make a show of peace talk, then roll over them with whatever force necessary after it’s too late to affect the election.” The legal mind is nothing if not properly attentive to elegant turns of phrase in its unyielding hypocrisy.

“I think Mr. Boardman should have used much stronger language. 'Pathetic' is a bird with a broken wing, a child burned by USian napalm, and most assuredly not the exemplar of lies, corruption and genocide (whether by drone or austerity) who – thanks in tiny measure to my own two unforgivably optimistic votes – now inhabits the White House. But because I myself am a professional writer and editor, I understand Mr. Boardman's problem. The only truly accurate description of Obama is 'evil,' but – due mostly to the atrocities committed by Abrahamic religion – that noun is no longer fashionable.”

“You (on RSN) are all too kind in your denunciations of this most malevolent of presidents. Here we see the true legacy of 'change we can believe in,' the most maliciously premeditated Big Lie ever told by a presidential candidate, the prelude to his years-in-the-planning shape-shift from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer.

“His intent – now in North Dakota proven to be what the far Right has claimed from the beginning – is obviously the reduction of the entire USian 99 Percent to the inescapable powerlessness and degradation that is the eternal lot of the (White Exceptionalist) Empire's African-American and Hispanic subjects, and even harsher subjugation for First Nations peoples – this so he can gleefully point to the Standing Rock Sioux and say 'see how I made their lives even worse, so don't you others dare complain.'

“It is indeed 'change we can believe in': change from less brutal charade of representative democracy to the overt savagery of unabashed fascism. And because there is no force on this planet capable of stopping the USian neo-Reich, the casualties are only beginning. Mark my word, the cops and soldiers and private-security stormtroopers – every one a wanna-be serial killer (and most of them already kill-hardened in the Middle East) – will soon be firing for lethal effect, just as occurred at Kent State University and Jackson State College. The propaganda preparation is already underway. And the orders are no doubt coming from the Betrayer himself.”

 

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Spiritual Blackout in America: Election 2016 (By Cornel West) – (T)he neofascist catastrophe called Donald Trump and the neoliberal disaster named Hillary Clinton are predictable symbols of our spiritual blackout.

Quoth I: “While the leaders are certainly as much to blame as the masses, don't forget that (precisely as happened in Nazi Germany), it is the USian masses' obscenely capitalist, lockstep conformist selfishness – each USian's psychopathically craven terror of suddenly having even one penny less than the proverbial Joneses – that has fueled the transition from limited democracy to zero-tolerance plutocratic tyranny. And – again like the Nazi Germans – as they have sown, so shall they be reaped.

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Animosity Towards Clinton Runs Deep at the FBI (Guardian UK) – Deep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI, multiple bureau sources have told the Guardian, spurring a rapid series of leaks damaging to her campaign just days before the election.

“Has it occurred to anyone else we are perhaps witnessing the opening moves of a soft coup by factions of the Ruling Class who are rightfully terrified by Hillary's (Goldwater Girl/Christian fundamentalist) intent to bring about the Apocalypse?”

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American Irrationalism (By Chris Hedges) – There is no shortage of signs of impending environmental catastrophe, including the melting of the polar ice caps and the rise of atmospheric carbon to above 400 parts per million... We are led to succumb to the racism, allure of white supremacy and bigotry that always accompany a culture in dissolution.

“Chris Hedges' 'American Irrationalism' is a protest so powerful it is strongly reminiscent of Allen Ginsberg's epic Howl, to which I was introduced by a keenly perceptive fellow University of Tennessee student named Thais Smedley whom I met, seemingly by random chance, as we were walking from opposite directions on a campus sidewalk.”

“It was 1959, when possession of the Howl text anywhere in the South was a felony.

“Thais was a senior bound for graduate school, I a 19-year-old freshman soon to run out of college money and enlist in the Regular Army to fulfill the six-year military obligation the Empire imposed on all save the most financially privileged of the draft-era's males. But on that hot May early afternoon I encountered Thais – whose raven hair fell below her shoulders in what was then a gesture of bohemian defiance, who was clad in the more subtle rebelliousness of a white linen blouse with matching white shorts and bare-legged black leather t-strap sandals and whose appearance thus drew from me the spontaneous salute of a memorably face-stretching grin – my poverty-imposed denouement was yet five months away in the unknown future. Thais grinned back, and now suddenly I was wealthy with the unanticipated gift of her presence, enchanted by her soft-voiced eloquence, smitten by the uniqueness of her beauty and flattered by the attention of a woman three years older than I.

“But I was also lost, lost in the dark miasma of contradictions between the undefined but nevertheless implicitly Marxian values with which I had been raised – my father had been a Communist during the 1930s – and the quagmire of incipient fascism in which the anti-intellectualism and lockstep conformity of the Joe McCarthy realm seemed intent on drowning me.

“Thais somehow sensed my existential quandary, invited me to her dwelling – with its painted stone walls and potted plants it was a study in green and white, the brightest, most airy, most welcoming basement apartment I have ever entered – and there we talked for perhaps two hours, during which she fed me a bowl of Campbell's beef noodle soup, gave me her copy of Howl – 'I think this will speak to you,' she said; 'and I don't need it anymore' – then oh-so-gently sent me on my way so she could continue packing for her move elsewhere to another university.

“She was right, of course; even at 19, I somehow knew better than to ignore the perceptions of a woman who, like some personification of the Muse, had momentarily appeared as if by magic in my life. Ginsberg did indeed speak to me, and Howl was for me the doorway to a new consciousness, an eventual synthesis of my father's Marxism and my own outrage at the casually brutal ignorance of the nyekulturniy state I have since come to damn as 'Moron Nation.' The key that unlocked it – the mechanism of epiphany for which I am forever grateful to Thais – is Howl's opening line: 'I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness...'

“Let us therefore hope Hedges' opening line, 'There is no shortage of signs of impending catastrophe...' awakens as many in the millennial generation as Ginsberg's words awakened in mine; let us also hope Doctor Margaret Flowers' gift of 'American Irrationalism' here via Popular Resistance is as pivotally influential on the multitudes as Thais Smedley's gift of Howl was to me 57 years ago.”

Later, in a dialogue with another reader, I added a defense of Hedges:

“(He) is one of the very few who dare tell us how dire our circumstances truly are. Yes this can cause despair, but if that's what it takes to awaken Moron Nation to what it has done to itself and is now doing not just to our entire species but to our entire planet, so be it. With its total surveillance technology, its domestic policy of slow-motion genocide (to exterminate all of us who are no longer exploitable for profit), and its doomsday foreign policy, the USian Empire is in hideous truth the most malevolently oppressive regime in our species' history. I know this sounds pessimistic, but it is in fact the opposite. As Sun Tzu so clearly understood, if we are to evolve an effective response, we must grasp the totality of our enemy's (oppressive) capabilities and (genuinely evil) intentions. And because I do believe we are capable of evolving such a response, beneath my apparent pessimism lies a profound optimism.”

LB/9 November 2016

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7 Dispatches from Tyranosauric Petroleum's Global Empire

AGAIN I DID no writing specifically for OAN this week, and again – this time due to voluntary albeit unavoidable interruptions – I missed my self-assigned deadline. But the comments I posted elsewhere on the Internet are nevertheless perhaps worth reading.

 

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“DAPL Mississippi Stand Update: Protesters Arrested on False Pretenses and Illegally Searched”: The head, like the organization's name, is written with the customary millennial contempt for precise language and is confusing enough it fooled a Reader Supported News editor into captioning the accompanying photograph as having been made in Mississippi when in fact it was taken far to the north in Illinois. The “Mississippi” in question is the river, not the state. Nor is the acronym DAPL – Dakota Access Pipeline – defined anywhere in the text, an omission corrected in the picture caption by the same RSN editor who got the locale wrong. But the story itself  and the accompanying video are much clearer – and far more troubling than sloppy syntax and geographical confusion:

“...Two of our comrades, Cameron Kennedy and James McBride, were arrested on false pretenses on the East bank of the Mississippi River yesterday afternoon near the drill pad in Illinois that bores underneath the river...DAPL private security spotted (Cameron Kennedy) and James (McBriide) on a public road near the linchpin drilling operation and within three minutes they were surrounded and blocked by multiple Hancock county squad cars as well multiple DAPL security cars...Cameron denied consent to a vehicular search by Police, but... Private DAPL security guards began conducting the search (as)...Hancock Sheriff Scott Bentzinger...said, "They are going to do what they want." These are the first known DAPL related arrests in Illinois...The money of big oil has seeped into small towns and counties across the United States and has effectively hired the police as enforcers of the Dakota Access agenda.”

HERE, I NOTED, THE EMPIRE IS OMINOUSLY HONEST: More than any confrontation in my lifetime (1940-201?), the Dakota Pipeline struggle reveals the true, unabashedly racist/fascist (actually neo-Nazi) nature of today's United States.

Thus we learn the valiant efforts of our kinfolk who died or were wounded or otherwise suffered to save humanity from the original Nazi threat were all in vain.

It also demonstrates the utter futility of peaceful protest – as if, as in Harry Turtledove's

alternative-history short story, the German Nazis won World War II, conquered the world, and when Gandhi attempted peaceful protest against their brutality, they killed him and all his followers – just as in the real world the Nazis exterminated all of the German pacifist White Rose Society.

All we can do now is recall the words of another man murdered by USian fascists, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who in a comment increasingly applicable to the USian Empire and its own unique brand of Nazism, warned that “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.”

It will not happen in my lifetime, and probably not in the lifetime of any person now living. The plutocracy – made genuinely omnipotent by its technology – is infinitely more powerful than the feudal order that tyrannized Europe for 1,441 years, from the fall of Rome until the Russian Revolution.

But eventually – if our species survives capitalism – we may evolve a revolutionary ideology with enough discipline to triumph.WHAT I DID NOT SAY, because I was approaching the 1500-character limit that governs RSN posts, is the DAPL authorities' use of so-called “private security” as goon-squads parallels the often-deadly practice of 19th and 20th century capitalists and thus presages the same sorts of capitalism-in-action vigilante violence exemplified by the lynching of Frank Little,  by the Ludlow Massacre  and by the Battle of Blair Mountain,  known locally as the Logan County War.

A partial listing of the men and women murdered in the USian Empire for daring to challenge our capitalist overlords is here.  And let us not forget to add the name of Karen Silkwood to this roll-call of the heroic proletarian dead.

There is also the fact, relevant to any such discussion as this, that history shows successful revolutions whether peaceful (Gandhi) or violent (Marx, Lenin et al) have four prerequisites (scroll down),  none of which are present in today's USian Empire.

OTHER SIGNIFICANT ELEMENTS I did not have the space to include (1)-that Hillary's silence on the DAPL struggle is yet another indication of her typically-capitalist contempt and hatred for all of us in the 99 Percent; (2)-that Obama's refusal to halt the obvious violations of First Nations' treaty rights and protesters' constitutional rights is yet another confirmation of the tyrannical capitalist agenda evident in his federalization and militarization of local police into a de facto national police force; (3)-that the apparent equipping of the pipeline goons with automatic weapons, toxic gas and other military equipment prohibited civilians is – if indeed it is occurring as alleged – a flagrant violation of federal gun laws that exemplifies the Nazi-like realities of capitalist governance (absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent and its vassals; total subjugation for all the rest of us); (4)- that governmental use of private security forces as goon squads parallels Germany's use of the freikorps and later the Nazi SA   to enforce its tyrannies; and (5)-that an identical maximizing of the 99 Percent's defenselessness – indeed our reduction to mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood – is, like Hitler's forcible disarmament of Germany's Jews, socialists and Communists, the sole purpose behind Hillary's promised campaign of forcible civilian disarmament.

 

 

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“Bernie Sanders: I'm Going to Make Sure Hillary Clinton Implements Progressive Policies: Sen. Bernie Sanders, a loyal soldier for Hillary Clinton  since he conceded the Democratic presidential nomination in July, plans to push liberal legislation with like-minded senators with or without Clinton’s support if she is elected — and to aggressively oppose appointments that do not pass muster with the party’s left wing.”

NOT SO, SAID I: Sanders' belief he can wrest “progressive” concessions from the war-mongering Goldwater Girl Hillary – whose fanatically fundamentalist Christian “Angel of Death” persona is revealed via her intent to start World War III – is the pre-doomsday equivalent of the rich German Jews' fatally deluded belief their wealth would reduce Hitler's antisemitism to mere posturing...

Hillary with her Goldwater Girl arrogance has the same morally imbecilic “USA uber alles” mentality as the generals (President) Kennedy defied.

Remember it was Goldwater, an Air Force reserve major general and thus one of Curtis LeMay's proteges, who wanted to nuke North Vietnam, which would have triggered instant war with the Soviet Union.

Clearly, Hillary has some twisted sense of loyalty to her original ideological role model and is bent on fulfilling his apocalyptic fantasies of global conquest, never mind the USSR is long gone and there is no alleged provocation by today's Russia that even remotely approaches that of the Soviet thermonuclear missiles in Cuba. (Which, by the way, were emplaced in retaliation for US emplacement of anti-Soviet thermonuclear missiles in Turkey.)

Apropos LeMay, without whose patronage Goldwater would never have been made a general, he “argued that the United States should launch 5,000 missiles on the Soviet Union...During the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, LeMay wanted to bomb Cuba.” 

Obviously, like LeMay and Goldwater, Hillary believes the US can conquer not only Russia but China as well, never mind the millions who would die as a result. Another belief undoubtedly driving Hillary is that most of humanity is 'surplus' – i.e., not exploitable for profit – and should thus be exterminated.

Such are the genocidal inputs that form the core of Hillary's apocalyptic ideology.

 

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“Letter From El Salvador: 'I Was Jailed for a Miscarriage': nside the women’s prison in El Salvador, set on the outskirts of the capital in a dangerous neighborhood called Ilopango, at least 21 women are serving sentences for abortions they say they never had. All of these women claim they are jailed for miscarrying their babies.

ALAS I WOULD EXPECT NO BETTER: Abrahamic religion – in this instance Christianity – and its misogynistic, sadistic god in action: not just the opiate of the masses, but the electric cattle prod that subjugates the masses as well.

 

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“JILL STEIN: Many of our readers are strongly advocating the candidacy of Jill Stein. The problem is that, polling at 2% nationally, she has no chance whatsoever of being elected. In fact, former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson, running under the Libertarian banner, has triple the supporters Stein has, and he doesn’t even appear to be totally coherent. So it isn’t really a candidacy  at all that Stein’s supporters are promoting, it’s more of an ideal or a lecture on political responsibility. The candidacy provides the platform for the ideology.”

MY RESPONSE: Quoth Mr. Ashe: “Painting the Democratic candidate as the devil to achieve those ends is ludicrous.”

Alas, based on her oft-declared intent to start World War III (and thereby not only exterminate our species but reduce the entire planet to a radioactive death-sphere inhabitable only by cockroaches), Hillary truly IS “the devil.”

Worse, actually, because in the Abrahamic theologies (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), it's not the devil who inflicts the Apocalypse; its their sadistic god. With whom we know Hillary identifies because of her long association with the Family.

(Again the damning relevance of Jeff Sharlet's work, The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power [Harper: 2008]. Read it, acknowledge the endless nightmare Hillary and her fanatical fundamentalist co-conspirators intend to inflict on us all and be very, very, very afraid.)

 

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“As Election Day Nears, Military Hawks Circle To Promote New Wave Of War: Though the hawkish stance of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has been too often ignored  this election season, new reporting on Thursday highlights how her presumed win in November will likely usher in a more aggressive, bipartisan foreign policy in the Middle East and beyond.”

 

HAD I SPOKEN ALOUD, IT WOULD HAVE BEEN A SNARL: how many times must it be said before Moron Nation awakens to the apocalyptic truth? A vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for World War III, the thermonuclear extinction of our species and the reduction of Planet Earth to a radioactive death-sphere habitable only by cockroaches.

 

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“How Power Works: Heather Ann Thompson’s book Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy is a detailed study of the inner workings of America. The blueprint for social control employed before and after the crushing of the Attica revolt is the same blueprint used today to keep tens of millions of poor people, especially poor people of color, caged or living in miniature police states. Thompson meticulously documents the innumerable ways the state oppresses the poor by discrediting their voices, turning the press into a megaphone for government propaganda and lies, stoking the negative stereotypes of black people, exalting white supremacy, ruining the lives of people who speak the truth, manipulating the courts and law enforcement, and pressuring state witnesses to lie to obstruct justice. Her book elucidates not only the past but also the present, which, she concedes, is worse...Poor people of color have been robbed of the most elemental forms of justice and basic constitutional rights. But the state, in the age of deindustrialization, has no intention of stopping there. These forms of social control, so familiar to poor people of color, will bear upon all of us.”

TO MY APPLAUSE: Thus Mr. Hedges and Heather Ann Thompson confirm what has hitherto been denounced by ignorant or deluded pseudo-Leftists as a 'racist' notion: that the purpose of the Obama Administration's federalization and militarization of the local police and his mostly unreported but nevertheless devastating cuts in food stamps, Medicare. Medicaid and other elements of the socioeconomic safety net is the methodical reduction of impoverished or rebellious whites to the statutory wretchedness already imposed on the African-American, Hispanic and First Nations communities.

Meanwhile – now under obvious (and obviously clandestine) kill-orders – the federalized local police continue their campaign of murder against those minority communities – again blacks, Hispanics and First Nations – whose histories show they are most likely to rise up against the Empire's ever-intensifying savagery.

Such is capitalist governance in action: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals, total subjugation for all the rest of us – and death to any of us who dare resist.

(Thank you, Mr. Hedges and Ms. Thompson for daring to expose these hideous truths about what the United States has become, and thank you Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese for having the 24-karat chutzpah to publish their work. A clenched-fist salute to each of you.)

 

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“US Soldiers Told to Repay Thousands in Signing Bonuses From Height of War Effort: In most cases, when an employer pays a signing bonus to attract new workers, that payment is understood to be essentially unrecoverable. But the Pentagon has a different understanding — and it's ordering the California National Guard to claw back thousands of dollars  paid to soldiers who re-enlisted to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

HENCE MY SUGGESTION: The One Percenters and their Pentagon vassals who are behind this outrage need to remember what happened when Tsar Nicholas II pissed off most of the soldiers in the Russian Army and most of the sailors in the Russian Navy as well...

Veterans are NOT people to screw over.

Indeed the primary reason the military draft was ended was the huge fear by the One Percent and its Ruling Class the draft was training the revolution.

And now the pompous plutocrats are alienating the very soldiers they hired to keep themselves and their obscene wealth secure?

Astounding!

Maybe the Empire truly is teetering on the brink of collapse.

LB/27 October 2016

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Election 2016 -- Hillary Clinton's War of Extinction or Donald Trump's Holocaust: Either Way the United States Is Doomed

NO WRITING SPECIFICALLY for OAN this week – and my apology for the fact I unavoidably missed my self-assigned Thursday 20 October deadline – but it's been one hell of an interlude. First the National Weather Service forecast a “historically significant” hurricane-force storm for 15-16 October that alarmed some house-owning friends of mine enough they asked me to stay with them so that – should the weather have materialized as destructively as forecast – I would not have been subject to the post-Katrina horrors of survival in a low-income housing facility that would no doubt have been deliberately abandoned by our governmental overlords in (yet another) act of opportunistic genocide.

Spawned by Typhoon Songda, the storm veered away from Tacoma but inflicted major damage elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest.

Next there was the dreadful head-and-chest cold – the most debilitating cold I have had in years – I caught from a charmingly loquacious three-year-old, the youngest member of a two-child-plus-mother-and-father family who were also staying with my friends because the roof of the family's rental house had begun severe leakage just at the onset of the storm and the landlord's response, typical for tenants-have-no-rights Washington state, was the usual “fuck you if you don't like it move elsewhere.” Again my apology for the delay, but such is life amongst the lower quartiles of the 99 Percent.

That said, here below are links to eight Internet reports and comment-thread responses that may be of some significance in the final approach to this election in which we the people are asked by our capitalist overlords to make the impossible choice between the national doom of the new Holocaust proposed by the Republican Party's Donald Trump or the planetary doom of the thermonuclear apocalypse threatened by the Democratic (sic) Party's Hillary Clinton.

 

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Dennis Kucinich, the outspokenly pacifist, Left-leaning Ohio congressman whose seat was maliciously gerrymandered out of existence by Democratic (sic) and Republican collaborators, has penned a scathing denunciation of Hillary  entitled simply “War or Peace.” Originally appearing on the World Without War website,  where it is available in any number of languages including Russian and Chinese, it was surprisingly re-published by Reader Supported News, a nominally bold alternative website that since the Democratic (sic) National Convention has become disappointing for the censorious support it has provided Clinton, but now may finally be – or let us hope – returning to its former courageously open-minded self. Whatever, “War or Peace” is by far the best – that is, the most pointedly revealing and succinct – work of its kind this abysmal presidential campaign has yet generated:

The most consequential statement by Secretary Clinton...was her pronouncement that a no-fly zone over Syria could “save lives and hasten the end of the conflict,” that a no-fly zone would provide “safe zones on the ground,” was in “the best interests of the people on the ground in Syria” and would “help us with our fight against ISIS.”

It would do none of the above. A US attempt to impose a no-fly zone in Syria would, as Secretary Clinton once cautioned a Goldman Sachs audience, “kill a lot of Syrians,” and, according to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Dunford, lead to a war with Russia. If the US has not been invited into a country to establish a “no-fly zone” such an action is, in fact, an invasion, an act of war.

It is abundantly clear from our dark alliance with Saudi Arabia and our conduct in support of jihadists in Syria that our current leaders have learned nothing from Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya as we prepare to plunge head-long into the abyss of a world war.

THE ENSUING DISCUSSION,  inexplicably ignored for several hours by Hillary's disruptive legions of paid trolls, was thus fondly reminiscent of the mutually informative dialogues that characterized the pre-presidential-campaign RSN at its best. I contributed the following:

Frankly I think Hillary is truly mad – insane – with a combination of Goldwater Girl ambition (to be the first ever conqueror of Russia) and a fanatical vision of herself as the angel of death triggering the Christian Apocalypse (“better dead then Red” because this way – so they believe – all their sadistic god's chosen zealots go directly to heaven).

No, I am not exaggerating: read pages 272-277 of Jeff Sharlet's The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Governance (Harper: 2008), which expose Hillary's clandestine collaboration with Sam Brownback (and therefore presumably also with all the other JesuNazi fanatics in the fundamentalist leadership cabal).

Were she not herself a secret believer in the Christian “End Times” dogma, she would never have been accepted by Brownback and his ilk.

Moreover, were the cause of her war-mongering merely her debt to the military-industrial complex, she would want to perpetuate the profits generated by the new Cold War she and Obama have started. But instead – her intent undeniable – she wants thermonuclear Armageddon: that is, the end of all sentient life on this planet.

As I said, her warmongering proves she is insane: a homicidal maniac with her finger moving ever closer to the doomsday button.

And – yes – I am frankly terrified, many times more so than during the Cuban Missile Crisis: not for me, as I am old and chronically ill, but for all the world's children and young adults.

Later, in response to a fellow poster's observation Hillary is “deeply hypnotized by the patriarchal mindset,” I added my “hear, hear” of agreement:

Were I a believer in alien visitation, which I most assuredly am not, I would have to regard the sudden imposition of patriarchy (via talking snakes, “divinely” inscribed tablets, burning bushes, fiery wheels, etc. ad nauseam) as the intergalactic equivalent of the smallpox-infested blankets with which European Christians began the destruction of the American First Nations. In either case, the result is deadly: in the latter to the indigenous cultures of the American continents, in the former – unless we are saved by some genuine miracle – to all sentient life on this planet.

(If perhaps the UFO-philes are correct in their assumptions, then it follows logically the creatures who infected us with the toxins of patriarchy are some species of super-cockroach, since only roaches can survive in the thermonuclear wasteland the suicidal madness of patriarchy now threatens to make real.)

All of which, whether one rejects or accepts the notion of extraterrestrial intervention, raises the most valid question of this entire election: who – or what – does Hillary Clinton truly serve?

And no, I am not being the least bit facetious.

 

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Stephen Eric Bronner, a political science professor at Rutgers University, acknowledges in his “Our Hillary” she stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders and represents a dire threat to world peace. But he claims she will “support equal pay for equal work, a woman’s right to choose, civil liberties...an attack on Citizens United...fund Planned Parenthood, restrict gun sales, and inject a degree of civility into a polarized environment. There is also,” Bronner asserted, “symbolic importance in electing a woman to the highest office,” never mind her presidency could in fact mean the end of all life on earth. Hence Bronner insists “any rational person (should) vote for Hillary.”

I RESPONDED ACCORDINGLY:  Hillary's feminism is entirely bogus, a Big Lie to win the votes of identity-politics zealots and (tragically misinformed) women.

The truth is that Hillary clandestinely collaborates with Sam Brownback and others of his JesuNazi ilk for “tunneling beneath...the wall between church and state” (Sharlet, ibid., page 275).

In other words – again the difference between her public and private positions – Hillary is a closet theocrat, a secret fanatic intent on imposing the Christian version of Sharia on the United States, complete with zero-tolerance prohibitions of abortion, extra-marital sex, homosexuality, trans-sexuality and gay marriage (which let us not forget she publicly opposed until she changed her public position in 2013).

As to her private position, since she still regularly attends prayer meetings with the Family, we can assume it is at least as hostile to women and sexual minorities as it was prior to 2013.

Relevant links providing additional data on Hillary's 24-year association with The Family and its unabashed reverence for Adolf Hitler are here,  here,  and here.

 

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“Plutocratic Forces Crippled Democracy, And Why It’s Up To Us To Fight Back” The following is an excerpt from Ralph Nader's new book, Breaking Through Power (City Lights: 2016). “In the 1920s, near the end of his spectacular career as our country’s most prominent fighter for working people, labor leader, presidential candidate, orator, and all-around progressive Eugene Debs was asked by a reporter: 'Mr. Debs, what do you regret the most in your lifelong struggle for justice?' Debs looked at him and replied: 'What do I regret the most? I regret that the American people can have almost anything they want under our Constitution, but they seem not to want much of anything at all.'”

MR. NADER, I responded, has written the best historical summation I have yet seen of how capitalism triumphed to become the most lethal tyranny in our species' history. Indeed he proves beyond argument the essence of capitalism is both genocide and ecocide. We should all salute him for his courageous text and salute Popular Resistance for the bravery required to publish it.

That said, what is tragically missing here, most assuredly not from Mr. Nader's text but obviously, just as Eugene Debs observed, from the USian majority's will, is any truly effective spirit of resistance. Now, with USian fascism an undeniable reality, only the smallest minorities – most of them non-white – are sufficiently disciplined to believe and act upon the notion “It's Up To Us To Fight Back.”

Meanwhile the vast USian majority is obviously so utterly subjugated they in their craven submissiveness are increasingly indistinguishable from the “Good Germans” whose submission to Adolf Hitler led to our species' deadliest war to date. And now, in the likely outcome of the 2016 presidential election, we the (methodically disempowered) people are being led by an unabashed tyrant into a war from which there will be no survivors save cockroaches...

 

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“Extremist Militias Recruiting in Fear of Clinton Winning Election, Activists Say: Dwindling services lead to a sense of abandonment. The right can easily step in and provide both a clear political narrative to explain this, and a set of simple-seeming solutions...'The Patriot movement is attracting people who feel disenfranchised...The same dynamic has been driving the election.'”

MY RESPONSE WAS blunt and to the point: There would be no “Extremist Militias” had the Democratic (sic) Party not betrayed the 99 Percent by becoming the party of forcible-disarmament Republicans.

 

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“Half of US Adults Are Recorded in Police Facial Recognition Databases, Study Says:” Whether they are suspects or not, “about half of all Americans are pictured in a digital 'perpetual line-up,'  composed of databases handled either by the FBI or local police departments, the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law Center finds in a new study published Tuesday.”

MY (PREDICTABLE) RESPONSE: How many times must it be said? The ONLY reason for the uniformed police and the secret police to have this technology is to facilitate mass arrests.

Wake up, people! THINK. What does that technology – particularly in combination with Total Surveillance – tell us about the the intentions of our overlords?

 

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“Black Children Punished for Anthem Protests: After young 11 and 12-year-boys of the Beaumont Bulls football knelt during the (national) anthem to protest police violence against Black youth, their local executive board canceled their entire football season, suspended the coaching staff, and threatened to arrest their parents if they attended any future games, practices or events.”

I HAD NO comment – what could I possibly add to this report beyond pointing out it is yet another defining moment in the USian Empire – but I post it here because a friend rightfully sent it to me and asked me to disseminate it to as many persons as possible.

 

*********

 

New York Police Sergeant Shoots Dead Mentally-Ill Black Woman: In the latest incident of police killings of Black people in the U.S., a New York officer Tuesday evening shot and killed 66-year-old Deborah Danner, who was mentally ill, because she was waving a baseball bat at him to which he responded with deadly force instead of following protocol and firing his taser gun to neutralize her.

NOT MUCH TO say in response to this atrocity either, save to point out its similarity to a notorious incident that occurred while I still lived and worked in the City:

Sounds like another Eleanor Bumpurs case.  And I would bet it has exactly the same outcome. 

 

*********

 

“Watchdog: EPA Action to Protect Flint Residents From Lead Was Delayed 7 Months: The Environmental Protection Agency had the authority and information to issue an emergency order protecting residents of Flint, Mich., from lead-tainted water a full seven months  before it did so, an EPA internal investigation has concluded. 'It is clear that EPA intervention was delayed,' the report from the EPA's inspector general states.”

SAID I: ANOTHER classic example of how the Obama Regime “protects” cities with African-American majority populations – with exactly the same genocidal opportunism we saw demonstrated in the Bush Regime's post-Katrina “protection” of New Orleans.

Where then – from the perspective of those of us who are black, Hispanic, First Nations or merely chronically impoverished – is there any difference, particularly in the body count, between what the Democratic (sic) Party does to us and what the Republican Party does to us?

Really, what does it matter who wins the White House, the wanna-be Hitler named Trump or the wanna-be Hitler named Hillary? We the (lower-income) People are dead either way.

LB/23 October 2016

-30-

 

 

Politicians' Lies: a Diabolically Clever Way to Nullify Elections without the Bad Publicity of a No-More-Civil-Liberties Decree

THE UTTER FUTILITY of trying to restore our stolen liberty here in the United States – the now-undeniable fact We the People are the disempowered subjects of a predator state ruled by gangster capitalists and their wholly-owned vassals in government, academia and mass media – is made undeniably clear by the damning revelations about Democratic (sic) Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton and her Republican opponent Donald Trump.

 

That's because after last Friday's disclosures we now know as absolute certainty what many of us have long suspected: that the One Percent and their Ruling Class vassals, in what is probably human history's most profound gesture of aristocratic contempt, are offering us a pseudo-choice that reduces our once-internationally esteemed democratic process to meaningless ritual. As if in grotesque mimicry of the (questionable) tale of Marie Antoinette's response to starving Parisians – “The people want bread? Let them eat cake” – it seems our rulers are sneering, “The people want elections? Let them choose between tyrants.”

 

Voting is thus reduced to an obscene satire on its former function – a diabolical feat that in its cunningly despotic destructiveness exceeds even the darkest estimates of our capitalist overlords' capabilities and intentions.

 

The result – as significant psychologically and ideologically as it is historically and politically – is nullification of the democratic process. It is exactly as if we the people have been officially disenfranchised by the sort of decree we associate with Hitler or Mussolini or Third-World despots. But – and here again we see the One Percent's demonic genius – our disenfranchisement is accomplished not by decree (which would leave no doubt the USian Empire is now the Fourth Reich), but by breathtakingly clever perversion of the very process that formerly ensured our liberty.

 

How then can we ever hope to regain our freedom?

 

***

 

As I have written repeatedly during the past few months, what we are offered is tantamount to a choice between two Hitlers: Donald Hitler versus Hillary Hitler – the murders and lesser hate-crimes of a domestic holocaust versus World War III and our species' extinction.

 

Donald Hitler intends to resurrect the white-supremacy policies of the German Third Reich and impose them on all the unpopular minorities of the Fourth Reich United States, thus to “restore America's greatness.” He would wage war on any of us who are African-American, Hispanic, First Nations, Muslim, lesbian-gay-bisexual-transsexual-queer, Communist, socialist or even slightly Left-leaning.

 

Hillary Hitler intends – just as the late Führer did – to be the first-ever conqueror of Russia. But Thermonuclear Hillary Hitler is infinitely more dangerous than Pre-nuclear Adolf Hitler. Hillary Hitler is willing to gamble our entire species' survival in her fanatical desire to reduce at least 146,600,000 Russian women, men and children either to radioactive ash or to the ultimately deadly sweatshop slavery that is increasingly the inescapable lot of the USian Empire's 99 Percent.

 

Depressing as it is, the One Percent's limitation of our plausible options to Clinton or Trump is not, by itself, the ultimate proof our liberty is abolished beyond any hope of recovery. That proof is in the methodical lying rationalized by what should henceforth be labeled the Hillary Axiom: in politics, “you need both a private and a public position.”

 

Thus the politicians privately speak the truth to their plutocratic owners, and use Big Lies – of which Obama's “change we can believe in” is the ultimate example to-date – to publicly dupe the rest of us.

 

While that is surely the lesson taught us by Obama the Orator's now-infamous shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer, the impact of its verbalization by a personage of Hillary's stature turns it from submissive shrug-of-the-shoulders suspicion to infuriating clenched-fist fact.

 

And the broader implication of Hillary's Axiom – that the entire public face of USian politics is naught but scam – is as vital to understanding today's global politics as the German Nazis' conceptualization and use of the Big Lie was to understanding the politics that led to World War II.

 

With Hillary's inadvertent but eternally damning admission  that deceiving the public is now the core dynamic of Usian politics, we are in essence told that under capitalist governance, all politicians are of necessity liars and that no USian politician's promises can ever again be trusted – a disclosure that will surprise only those who fail to recognize the necessity of lies to capitalism itself.

 

Here we encounter the ultimate discouragement to any sort of conventional political activism: why bother if the relevant truths are forever hidden behind a cacophony of lies?

 

Voters have no defense against clandestinely pro-plutocracy politicians who – precisely as Obama did – lie themselves into office as “reformers,” then in service to their One Percent masters break the very promises by which they energized their support.

 

Thus capitalist governance, like capitalism itself, is by its intrinsic dishonesty placed forever beyond the reach of reform.

 

Thus too we must now immediately dismiss as Big Lies any and all of Hillary's claims she favors progressive demands – particularly given that Friday's revelations prove her (true) private positions are the diametrical opposites of her public assertions. For example Hillary says in private that “Simpson-Bowles” – Obama's Deficit Commission, which would have sentenced innumerable seniors and disabled people to premature deaths by slashing Social Security and Medicare – “put forth the right framework” for the most productive capitalist governance. She also notes she “did all (she) could to make sure (Wall Street) continued to prosper.”

 

Obviously, Hillary's private politics are those of the Goldwater Girl she was in her youth. Just as obviously, she regards the 99 Percent and all of us therein with a 21st Century version of the vindictive scorn the haughty aristocrats of pre-revolutionary France reserved for the Third Estate. Indeed it now appears she is the ultimate false-flag candidate: beneath her Democratic (sic) disguise, a fanatically conservative, nuke-em-till-they-glow Barry Goldwater disciple cunningly trained as an infiltrator – one cannot but wonder by whom – and oh-so-carefully self-closeted until she could pounce to certain victory.

 

In other words, the public Hillary is pure fraud.

 

The broader relevance of the “eternally damning admission” report linked above, jointly authored by Kevin Zeese and Dr. Margaret Flowers of the superbly informative Occupy-offspring website Popular Resistance, is that it is one of the most telling summations I have yet seen on the extent to which such fraud has become the One Percent's primary methodology for governing the Usian imperial homeland.

 

Its disclosures supported by a bibliography of authoritative links, it goes far beyond the immediate issue of Hillary's perpetual dishonesty and includes, for example, a forthright discussion of the Big Lie tactics that accompanied imposition of the Affordable Care Act, “the biggest insurance scam in history.”

 

Unfortunately Zeese and Flowers conclude by reiterating their oft-repeated claim that “when people organize they have power.” They add that “the people need to let the government know they will not be silent against systemic corruption. We will... make sure (Hillary's) is a presidency of protest; where the people will be relentless in demanding that the government represent our interests.”

 

Thus Zeese and Flowers – like the vast majority of USians – remain blinded by the obstructive optimism that prevents them from recognizing the zero-tolerance reality of total surveillance: that thanks to the One Percent's ownership and mastery of surveillance technology, we live in a realm wherein nothing can ever again be hidden from the omnipresent gaze of the secret police. Yet so brainwashed are we – our minds so saturated from birth with USian propaganda – we glibly dismiss the tyrannical intent of such surveillance by clinging to the Big Lie we live in the “sweet land of liberty,”

 

As under the fictional Borg, effective resistance – much less any possibility of evolving even one of the four prerequisites of revolution (for which scroll down)  – is therefore genuinely futile.  Lesser resistance, as in the recent Bernie Sanders campaign, will be neutralized by lies; greater resistance, as in Occupy, will be crushed by infiltration and violence.

 

Rescue by invasion from without – as in the Union Army's liberation of the Confederacy, the Red Army's liberation of Leningrad, the Allied Forces' liberation of Paris or the liberation of Saigon by the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army– is rendered eternally impossible by the USian threat of thermonuclear weapons and the fact “better dead than Red” has been elevated from a Goldwater Girl slogan into an irrevocable principle of imperial policy. Have no doubt: our overlords would rather blow up the planet than relinquish their power – unquestionably why, with the flaring of pre-revolutionary anger in the USian Homeland (never mind the anger is hopelessly undisciplined) – the One Percenters and their Hillaryite surrogates are now openly trying to provoke World War III.

 

We are thus permanently subjugated. But until we recognize that rightfully terrifying fact – until we set aside our obstructive “all-will-be-well” optimism; until we stop our senseless employment of tactics rendered useless (if not suicidal) by total surveillance; until we abandon hopes long ago proven idiotic by the oft-demonstrated submissiveness of the USian Caucasian majority, (who as part of their legacy of white supremacy believe revolutionary change is theirs merely for the asking) – we have no chance of evolving an adequate resistance.

 

Instead we must unflinchingly examine the bitter truths of our powerlessness and the omnipotence of our masters – the fact we are already prisoners in an electronic slave-pen wherein even our most private thoughts are laid bare by computers that psychoanalyze us by the books we read, the foods we buy and even our chosen brands of tooth paste, toilet paper, menstrual supplies and condoms. Only when we acknowledge the unmitigated horror of our circumstances – a horror more devastatingly oppressive than anything in our species' history – will we be able to evolve strategies and tactics adequate to the task of self-liberation. Just as Sun Tzu asserted 2600 years ago, “Know your enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril.”

 

But even if sometime in the future we are at last possessed of the requisite knowledge and discipline to permanently overthrow capitalism, it may yet be that our only hope for victory – our only chance to make economic democracy a reality (and therefore restore both human dignity and human liberty) – will arise from the opportunity sure to handed us by Mother Nature.

 

Though too few of us deign to recognize her for what she is – our planet's one undeniably real deity (the selfsame Goddess the patriarchy and its direct offspring capitalism truly cannot abide) – when at last the depredations of the capitalists provoke her to apocalyptic vengeance, the technologies of surveillance and mass murder will be among the first technologies to fail. No electricity means no computers, which means our overlords will no longer have the powers they appropriated from their sadistic and misogynistic conception of divinity. And in their defenselessness – the defenselessness of the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals – will be the 99 Percent's opportunity to prevail – though only if we are ideologically and organizationally prepared. I will not live to see it; probably not even the Millennial generation will live to see it, but it is bound to happen – unless of course Hillary and her masters exterminate our species first.

 

**********

 

As noted in A Government Is Seizing Control of Our Election Process, and It Is Not the Russians, (t)here is an attempt underway for a government to take control of our election process and throw the election to Hillary Clinton. It is not the Russian government. Mark this day it is when we came to understand that the American government decided to elect a president.

 

The report goes on to document in disturbing detail how the so-called “deep state” – that is, the imperial security apparatus – is now functioning as a key part of the Clinton campaign machine.

 

In comment-thread response, here with an informational link added, the text slightly enlarged (and thus not enclosed in quotation marks), I wrote what turned out to be my longest off-OAN Internet post of the week:

 

I have to quibble with (any) distinction between “government” and “deep state.”

What subjugates us is capitalist governance: in other words, fascism (actually – with its claim of “exceptionalism” and its chants of “USA! USA! USA!” as variants of the traditional “Zieg Heil” – a uniquely USian form of Nazism). It is government wholly owned by, and therefore utterly obedient to, a cabal of mostly anonymous plutocrats rather than to a Hitler, Mussolini, Franco or Pinochet.

The “deep state” – the USian security apparatus – is merely the first part of government the cabal took over after the failure of the 1934 Bankers' Plot.

This was in compliance with Hitler's Mein Kampf dictum the path to power is infiltration of the most powerful organs of the state.

As soon as “the deep state” was under capitalist control, the rest was relatively easy: the postwar purge of progressives; the decade of murders; the 2000 Bush Coup; the Reichstag Fire of 9/11; Obama elected by “change we can believe in” (the most malicious Big Lie in our presidential history); and we the people thus reduced to irremediable hopelessness. All else – including the subjugation implicit in our 2016 major-party choices – follows “as the night the day.”

And anyone who is surprised what obtains has been asleep, a la Rip Van Winkle, at least since 22 November 1963.

Such is capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent and their Ruling Class vassals (the so-called “deep state” included); total subjugation for all the rest of us.

Thus too the future intended by the USian Empire (should humanity survive Hillary's intended depredations): the planet transformed by neo-conservative colonialism and neo-liberal economics into one vast neo-plantation, with all of us in the 99 Percent reduced to neo-slavery.

 

*****

 

Yahoo Secretly Scanned Customer Emails for US Intelligence – Yahoo Inc last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers' incoming emails  for specific information (demanded) by U.S. intelligence officials...scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said three former employees and a fourth person apprised of the events.

 

As I remarked on the associated comment thread, “And how do we know the companies that claim they didn't aren't lying? (Especially since deliberate deception – the sole reason for the gazillion-dollar Big Lie Business of Madison Avenue – is the quintessential core of capitalism.)”

 

I also added three additional comments to this thread, these in response to other thread-contributors' posts rather than to the news report itself.

 

*****

 

US Ranks Lower Than Kazakhstan and Algeria on Gender Equality – The US, the world’s biggest economy, ranks below Kazakhstan and Algeria for gender equality, according to...the Girls’ Opportunity Index, compiled by Save the Children to mark International Day of the Girl...The US came 32nd in the index due to its low representation of women in parliament, high teenage pregnancy rates and and its record on maternal deaths. Fourteen women died per 100,000 live births in the US in 2015, a similar number to Uruguay and Lebanon. Save the Children’s head of inclusive development, Lisa Wise, one of the report’s authors, said that the low ranking of the US was surprising. “It’s one of those cases where it should be performing better.”

 

Indeed, hence my comment-thread editorial:

 

“I'm surprised Ms. Wise is surprised at the USian Imperial Homeland's relatively low ranking. She must get her 'news' from the Ministry of Propaganda (aka 'mainstream media') rather than from less censored sources.”

 

Otherwise she'd recognize the signature destitution imposed by capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals, total subjugation for all the rest of us.

 

“And now that hackers have shown us the real Hillary -- the Goldwater Girl who closeted her ideological malevolence until she had the opportunity to spring it on us -- we know with absolute certainty it will get much much much worse: deadly cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; probable elimination of food stamps; the nullification of what little remains of our constitutional rights, millions more jobs stolen by free trade, who knows how many young men and women killed in ever-expanding foreign aggression...

 

“(Were I a betting man, which I'm not, I'd wager Big Time the USian position on the Girls' Opportunity Index is declining [just like every other indicator of USian quality of life], and that next year it will be worse.)

 

“As I said: capitalist governance in action.”

 

*****

 

Tim Kaine, John Negroponte and the Priest Who Was Thrown From a Helicopter...published this week by the Daily Beast...is a cheap exercise in red-baiting: “Tim Kaine’s Time with a Marxist Priest.” That priest, Fr. James Carney, was indeed a revolutionary and, as a practitioner of liberation theology in Latin America during a period marked by populist movements fighting against death squads and murderous regimes backed by the U.S., an avid student of Marxist theory. After years spent among the poor and oppressed in Latin America, Carney renounced his U.S. citizenship and joined the armed guerrilla struggle against U.S.-backed death squads and governments. He also left the Jesuits because, he explained, the order would not condone his involvement in an armed struggle...He was thrown from a helicopter in 1983...”executed by order of... Gen. Gustavo Álvarez Martínez, who...had received training in counterintelligence from U.S. forces at the School of the Americas”...The year Carney was murdered, Negroponte praised Gen. Álvarez Martínez’s “dedication to democracy.”

 

As I wrote in response, “One of the many reasons I can no longer call myself 'Christian' is because of the extent to which Christianity has become a tool of capitalism, hence precisely what Marx eternally damned as 'the opiate of the masses.' But if I could, for what you said here I would give you 10, 100, even 1000 thumbs up. Thank you for reminding me of a poignant truth I too often ignore.”

 

*****

 

Bernie Sanders: Focus Wells Fargo Criminal Probe on Senior Execs – Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and their colleagues urged Attorney General Loretta Lynch in a new letter to “thoroughly investigate the culpability of senior executives” at Wells Fargo (WFC) in the fake account scandal that shocked America...The 14 U.S. Senators warned Lynch on Monday that Wells Fargo is a “critical test” of the DOJ's recent push to pursue bad behavior of individual executives, rather than just impose fines on the corporations they represent. The lawmaker said they hope the DOJ “brings all the resources it has to bear” on investigating possible wrongdoing by “senior executives.”

As I sneered on the story's comment thread, “really, good people, be rational. Expecting anyone in the business of capitalist governance to seriously prosecute their owners is like expecting Hitler's Third Reich to prosecute the SS for war crimes. As Audrey Lorde put it, 'the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.'”

 

*****

 

Fukushima Radiation Has Contaminated The Entire Pacific Ocean (And It’s Going To Get Worse) – The nuclear disaster has contaminated the world’s largest ocean in only five years and it’s still leaking 300 tons of radioactive waste every day.

 

I did not comment on the above report. It is from a website of which I was unaware but to which I will subscribe if possible. However there are claims in its comment-thread the report is not accurate, claims I have neither the knowledge nor the sources to resolve. Hence I re-post it here because (1), I suspect the report is probably true, to such an extent I no longer eat any salt-water fish; because (2), even if the report's summary of Fukushima's consequences is inaccurate, the cloak of lies, disinformation and silence imposed on this ongoing disaster by USian “mainstream media” demands we be reminded of its environment-destroying continuation, which itself reflects the fact (3), that so-called “mainstream media” is owned by the same plutocrats who own all “successful” USian politicians and all USian government at every level – which means “mainstream media” is nothing more than a private, for-profit version of the Ministry of Propaganda Josef Goebbels ran for Adolf Hitler and his Third Reich.

 

*****

 

Though I commented on neither of the two following reports, I posted them on OAN because of their relevance to the Fukushima debacle and our species' suicidal penchant for poisoning the environment. These – their headlines self-explanatory, are: Monsanto's Toxic PCBs Lurking in 26,000 US Public Schools, Report Says, here, and  Industrial chemicals linked to attention problems in Massachusetts children, here.  The latter, though published in 2012, nevertheless elaborates on the present-day Monsanto story.

 

*****

 

Six Million Adults Who Won't Influence This Presidential Race – It's hard to overstate the absurdity of the divide between corporate offenders and everyone else,  when it comes to the limits on democratic influence...executives from companies that are caught for serious offenses are almost never charged criminally, meaning that they seldom lose their voting rights...these same companies almost all become major campaign contributors...whether or not you lose the right to vote for committing a crime mostly depends on who you are, not what you did...

 

As I have said so many times on so many other comment threads, “such is life – and death – here in the Fourth Reich, where African-Americans, Hispanics, First Nations peoples and progressives are the equivalents of the Third Reich's Jews, Roma, Slavs and Communists.”

 

*********

 

SINCE I BEGAN Outside Agitator's Notebook in October 2009 I have wrestled with the problem of how – in the midst off an alleged “retirement” that because of volunteer work often demands more of my time than my journalism career did even at its peak – to post to this blog with enough regularity to retain faithful readership.

 

The obvious solution was to post my contributions to other websites even when I wrote nothing specifically for OAN. But that always seemed like cheating – until I realized, quite recently, the value to readers (including the secret police) of having all my comments gathered in one locale.

 

Hence – again with apologies for my long but unavoidable hiatus (see below) – a new approach: a collection of links to my weekly Internet posts even when none of the comments were originally intended for publication here. Though today is a Monday – still celebrated as the Columbus Day holiday in a few places but more rightfully recognized as Genocide Day by First Nations people and their supporters (of whom I, with my tiny fraction of Mohawk blood, am surely one) – this and future such postings will (health and other circumstances permitting), most likely be on Wednesdays or Thursdays.

 

Meanwhile thank you for your continuing readership.

 

***

 

AS REGULAR READERS already know, since October 2014 my life has been plagued by an onslaught of ongoing disruptions – many of them health-endangering, all of them gravely depressing – inflicted by my landlord. This includes the extreme physical labor, last May, of having to pack all my possessions, including a 1,026-volume personal library, for temporary eviction – the effort that literally left me breathless even a full day after the work was finished and so brought about the diagnosis I am (very slowly) dying from congestive heart failure.

 

The mechanism of this landlord's malevolence, which is unquestionably the most physically damaging oppression I have suffered in this lifetime, is the obviously disorganized and thus seemingly endless renovation of the apartment complex in which 89 others and I are forced by economic circumstances to dwell. It is, of course, a facility for low-income seniors and disabled people – in other words a place where those of us rendered surplus by the fact we are no longer exploitable for profit (save as victims in circumstances identical to these) are housed to await death.

 

Therefore, in accordance with the core principles of capitalism – which contrary to its infinity of Big Lies allocates rights and privileges only on the basis of one's financial worth and thus functions in morally imbecilic defiance of all humanitarian considerations – we the tenants are treated by our landlord as if we are sub-humans with hardly more rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” than are accorded factory-farm animals, never mind the proclamations of the USian Declaration of Independence. Nor – particularly as proven by our unprotected exposure to the lung-befouling dust-storm generated when safety-masked workers sanded all the stucco off the exteriors of the facility's two four-storey buildings – is there even one scintilla of hyperbole in the factory-farm metaphor. While the workers were at least issued protective masks, we were given no protection at all – merely the recommendation we close our windows.

 

Moreover, as I am repeatedly told by various government officials, we have no recourse. Our abject powerlessness is mandated by the fact Washington is the only state in the USian Empire in which the backroom legislative collaboration of the Democratic (sic) and Republican parties ensures that tenants have absolutely no legal rights at all.

 

Thus the landlord can compel us to pay rent no matter how long his renovation continues – never mind it is a helter-skelter operation ever-more-obviously planned to generate maximum profit at minimal cost – with minimal prior planning and therefore maximum disruption of our lives.

 

For example: interior, individual-apartment renovation – flooring replacement that imposed the temporary evictions I mentioned above (which in turn inflicted the physically demanding and emotionally stressful chores of packing as for a permanent move) – was unthinkingly scheduled to precede the removal of the stucco. As a result the new carpets are now begrimed by a thick layer of stucco dust and will soon have to be cleaned at tenant expense – approximately $150 per apartment. The windows are also filthy – and there on the glass the rain has turned the dust back into cement – but again we the tenants are to be billed for cleaning up the landlord's mess. That sort of thing – the fact the landlord can legally continue the extraction of rent no matter how intolerable he renders our existence – is the quintessence of “absolutely no rights at all.” Indeed it is a landlordly outrage that for me personally was far beyond imagination – that is, until I became one of the landlord's 90 victims.

 

Meanwhile – despite the filth and disorder the renovation continues to inflict – the landlord has resumed quarterly apartment inspections – intrusions to check for bedbug infestations and to spot early evidence (like used diapers stored in one's refrigerator) of geriatric dementia.

 

In my case, because of the (astonishing) quantity of stucco dust that seeped into my apartment despite the intolerable, 100-degrees-Fahrenheit discomfort of windows tightly closed in the midst of last summer's hottest days, the resumption of inspections has cursed me with the worst, most difficult, most extended and (thanks to arthritis inflamed by the onset of the rainy season), most physically painful housecleaning drudgery I have ever suffered. Ever. Again, no hyperbole: while preparation for the quarterly inspection normally takes me no more than two eight-hour days, I began this most-miserable of post-stucco-removal inspection-preparation chores six days ago, have worked at it anywhere from six to 14 hours each day since, and I still have two more days of work before this apartment – which under pre-renovation circumstances was a reasonably pleasant place – is sufficiently dust-free to pass inspection. And now I cannot but fearfully wonder what horrors all this dust might have fertilized into malignant growth in my throat and lungs – for now I am perpetually hoarse and afflicted by a chronic cough as well.

 

LB/13 October 2016

 

-30-

 

Tiny Food-Stamp Cut Reveals Welfare Bureaucrats' Big Lies

THE FALSIFIED-INFORMATION tactic employed by many (if not all) the USian state welfare bureaucracies to justify cuts in stipends and services – in this instance to deprive me of food stamps – is exemplified by the official notice I received recently from the always-adversarial Washington State Department of Social and Health Services.

As shown in the main paragraph of the copy reproduced above, the DSHS bureaucrats are falsely claiming my rent-and-utilities expenditures have “chang(ed)” – in other words, decreased. And while the $1 food-stamp reduction shown above is seemingly insignificant, the rationale upon which it is based is an obviously malicious bureaucratic lie. More to the point, it is indicative of the methodology of malicious lies by which DSHS slashed my food-stamp allocation from $103 per month to $17 per month – an 83 percent cut – effective 1 January 2016.

Nor is “malicious” an inappropriate choice of adjectives. DSHS's malice is proven not merely by its well-deserved reputation for hateful treatment of the subsidy-dependent poor, but by the indisputable fact my rent, which includes most of my utility costs – specifically electricity, water, sewerage, garbage collection and recycling fees – has risen steadily (albeit minimally) throughout the 12 years I have lived at my present address. The seven years I have been a food-stamp recipient are no different. Since May 2009, when losses inflicted by the so-called “recession” – the plutocracy's murderous theft of income from all the rest of us – hurled me into bankruptcy and forced me onto the dole, my rental payments have gone up 1.3 percent.

Meanwhile my telephone costs, constant from May 2009 until August 2015, skyrocketed 293 percent thanks to the Washington State Democratic (sic) Party's 2013 decision to abolish forever the Washington Telephone Assistance Program subsidy that guaranteed those of us who are officially impoverished our telephone bills would never exceed $8 per month. Thus my monthly phone bill leapt from $8 to $31.44 immediately after the subsidy was terminated last August. It has since – largely due to tax increases – inched upward to $35 as of my September 2016 bill.

Where then is the alleged decrease in rent-and-utility expenditures that caused my already minimal food-stamp allocation to be docked yet another dollar?

While DSHS (predictably) refuses to answer – more about that in a moment – the following National Public Radio report provides a powerfully indicative clue  as to what really obtains:

“In a recent federal court hearing, nine employees of New Mexico's Income Support Division — which oversees food stamps — took the stand to testify about fake assets being added to food stamps applications...When higher-ups were questioned in court, they pleaded the Fifth repeatedly. The state launched an internal investigation, but the results are sealed, and officials have refused to grant interviews about the allegations.”

Such defiance of the public's right to know has become a signature tactic of welfare bureaucrats, who have manipulated confidentiality regulations originally intended to protect welfare recipients into bureaucrat-shielding obstacles that now block even legislative oversight. The fact food stamps are now known by several names bolsters the welfare-bureaucracy's opacity even as it ensure the non-foodstamp-dependent public remains ignorant or at least confused about the associated issues. The feds call the program “SNAP,” a happy-faced, Madison-Avenue-contrived acronym for “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program,” the name also used by the New Mexico food-stamp program. DSHS calls it “Basic Food Assistance.” Other states have their own names for it: California's is “CalFresh,” while Wisconsin – where the unapologetically fascist (and possibly criminal)  regime of Gov. Scott Walker has made war against the poor a doctrinal centerpiece – ironically labels it “FoodShare,” never mind the sharing of food (or anything else) with lower-income folks violates Walker's Ayn Rand credo.

NPR report's on-line text is headlined, “New Mexico Defrauds The Poor Out Of Food Stamps, Whistleblowers Say.” The head aptly summarizes the entire story, which was first broadcast on 5 July 2016 and focuses on Kimberly Jones, an impoverished woman whom state welfare bureaucrats deliberately victimized by fraudulently inflating her income to deny her emergency eligibility for food stamps. The denial forced her to wait two months before she began receiving assistance.

By contrast, the theoretically permanent cuts inflicted on me by DSHS bureaucrats included not only January's $86 food-stamp cut (now 87 percent counting the $1 cut detailed above), but an 82 percent reduction in my Medicare Extra Help stipend, from $22 per month to $4. This plus associated Medicare Part D prescription-drug price increases of 11 percent and the Democrats' cancellation of the $23.44 telephone subsidy cost me approximately $155 per month.

In other words, in a year in which the anti-food-stamp Obama Administration denied Social Security recipients any cost-of-living increase, from 1 January onward I have been struggling to survive on approximately $155 per month less income than I had in 2015.

The immediate result of these cuts was to trap me in the most miserly of my Medicare Advantage provider's programs – low premiums and minimal levels of (nevertheless skillful) care with maximal, often-prohibitive co-payments. The longer term result was to hurl me into an abyss of such poverty as I had never before experienced – an ultimately deadly realm in which I am literally forced to choose between eating properly or obtaining the health care I need for survival.

For example, in the wake of last May's diagnosis of congestive heart failure, I am technically required to regularly consult a cardiologist. But the co-pay is $50 per appointment with this or any other specialist, which is nearly twice the program's monthly premium. Thus – thanks to the cutbacks inflicted on me by DSHS – it is a co-pay I cannot possibly afford.

Indeed, as I said to the visibly unsympathetic DSHS bureaucrat who last December handed me the paperwork announcing the $86 reduction in my food stamps, “this is a death sentence.”

Months later, while trying determine how the cutbacks were rationalized, I learned from credible inside sources whose anonymity I am sworn to protect that DSHS bureaucrats had done to me exactly what New Mexico's welfare bureaucrats did to Kimberly Jones, albeit by a more plausibly deniable method.

While the welfare bureaucrats always claim such cuts are mandated by regulations, the New Mexico and Washington state cases prove they falsely manipulate supplicants' income to create the desired illusion of regulatory compliance. The bureaucrats are also trained to discourage appeals by telling supplicants their food-stamp allocations are calculated by computers in unerring electronic obedience to state and federal law, another lie. Hence a typical bureaucrat's veiled-threat response to a cutback victim – a person often in shock (as I surely was last December): “You can appeal, but you're sure to lose, and then you'll have to pay back whatever we determine you owe us.”

Though DSHS is known to employ the New Mexico tactic of falsely inflating a supplicant's income, particularly against persons less able to defend themselves, the falsification method its bureaucrats used against me was radical understatement – by nearly $300 – of my monthly living expenses. My sources tell me this is the agency's most common approach – probably because when challenged, it can be more easily excused by a deluge of carefully pre-scripted lies claiming accidental omissions and/or miscalculations.

As to the Medicare Extra Help cuts, I am still in the proverbial dark about the regulations upon which they were based. Were they state or federal? Not only did DSHS bureaucrats refuse to answer my questions, their sullenly uncooperative silence forced me to get the information from my Medicare provider, whose employees proved infinitely more helpful: yes, DSHS had indeed inflicted the cut, but it was transmitted by the briefest of written orders, with no additional explanation forthcoming.

Could I then get a copy of the order? No, I was told, because the calculations are done by DSHS and transmitted to the provider in bulk, so that giving me access to the documentation would would violate the privacy of other Medicare patients: a perfect example of how welfare bureaucrats protect themselves from accountability.

Apparently – as best I can glean from inquiries amongst my neighbors in the lower-income senior housing complex wherein we all reside (and which I continue to serve as the volunteer editor/producer of its monthly newsletter) – the Medicare Extra Help cut inflicted on me last January is another result of DSHS's deliberate falsification of my living expenses. Those with less income than I said their Medicare subsidies were not reduced.

Thus on 23 September 2016 I filed a written, registered-mail demand for an appeal hearing before an administrative judge. Since then, the bureaucracy has orally informed me the hearing has been granted, but its snail-paced clerks have yet to officially notify me of the hearing's locale, date and time.

Needless to say – knowing as I do the favorite DSHS tactic of deliberately mailing such a notice so late the appellant learns of the assigned date only after it has passed and the appeal is thus summarily dismissed – I'm more than a little anxious. Stay tuned: assuming I am still alive, a follow-up report will most assuredly follow.

 

***

 

ALAS, MY FIGHT with DSHS is not my only ongoing struggle with government bureaucracies that are unapologetically tyrannical.

Because of the spinal injuries inflicted on me in 1978 by one of Washington state's innumerable defiantly habitual drunken drivers – the man had been arrested 19 times for drunken driving before he clobbered me – I have since the late '90s been prescribed a generic muscle relaxer called methocarbamol. My episodal use of this drug has increased as my spine deteriorates, the 1978 injuries now painfully inflamed by what one consulting MD said – this after I underwent a long and thorough spinal exam by MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) – is “the worst case of spinal arthritis (she had) ever seen.” Hence there is no question about the source of the muscle spasms that, ever more often, render me temporarily immobile. Nor is there any question about my need for the drug.

Moreover, methocarbamol has proven itself particularly appropriate for me. It is non-addictive. But most importantly – especially since journalism is like organized crime in that it is an occupation from which one is never really allowed to retire – it is the one muscle relaxant that does not anesthetize me into a slumberous, depression-like state that makes it impossible for me to write or edit. It also – at least in me – generates no other prohibitive side-effects.

Five years ago (in 2010), Medicare bureaucrats, claiming methocarbamol is dangerous to those of us age 65 and older, arbitrarily canceled my prescription and ordered my pharmacist to replace it with baclofen. Initially I submitted to the bureaucracy's orders because I was told I had no alternative. But soon I discovered the baclofen not only gave me severe headaches but made it nearly impossible to stay awake even after a full night's sleep. Hence I complained, rather vehemently, to my doctor. He promptly overruled the Medicare officials, restored my methocarbamol prescription – and thereby also restored my ability to undertake occasional writing, editing and photographic assignments, among them the extensive pictures-and-text coverage of Occupy Tacoma I provided as an unpaid volunteer to the website Reader Supported News c. 2011-2012.

Then all was well until this April, when the Medicare bureaucrats intervened again, this time much more forcibly. Not only did they deny me methocarbamol, they specifically ordered the pharmacy to provide a drug called tizanidine as its replacement. Again I submitted. But within a few days, as I was attempting to write a rather complex historical essay for a class in which I participate, I discovered the tizanidine anesthetized me so thoroughly I was literally falling asleep at my computer keyboard. I complained, was told to reduce the dosage, and complied as instructed. But then I began experiencing repeat episodes in which I was severely short of breath. While a very minor breathlessness had been a known symptom of my congestive heart failure, in these new instances – triggered even by every-day walks to bus stops and local stores – I felt as if I was suffocating. I literally could not get enough air. Apparently – or so I supposed – my CHF had suddenly worsened, and I was therefore at death's door.

Wondering what I should do – I have no remaining fear of death but am admittedly fearful of dying in hospitals, which psychic research has convinced me are soul-traps – I realized my shortness of breath dwindled rapidly any time I was off tizanidine for more than a day or too. Hence I researched the drug, learned it is known to cause just such respiratory problems as I had experienced and so complained again to my doctor, with whom I have an excellent relationship. He responded by appealing to Medicare as he had done in 2010.

But this time its bureaucrats essentially told him he had no choice but to obey their edicts. At the same time they told the pharmacist that if my doctor wrote me a prescription enabling me to buy methocarbamol as a non-Medicare purchase, everyone involved – doctor, pharmacist, possibly even the pharmacy clerk – would be subject to Medicare fraud charges. My further use of methocarbamol, the bureaucrats decreed, was forbidden, and no doctor's appeal would change that prohibition.

Since then, my doctor, a former military MD who saw combat in Iraq and has the chain-of-command experience typical of most of us who are veterans, has been appealing the bureaucrats' decision ever-further up the hierarchical ladder– so far to no avail.

Thus whenever I am pained by back spasms, I am still compelled to depend on the tizanidine, which I now take only in the smallest possible doses: a four-milligram tablet quartered into one-milligram segments, and those segments cut again with my Xacto knife into half-milligram doses. But even that tiny amount leaves me noticeably short of breath. Worse, it submerges into such lethargy, I have had resume drinking real coffee, which is forbidden me by my heart condition, in order to do any serious writing or editing. Otherwise – as I said before – no matter how engrossing the work, I literally fall asleep at my keyboard.

Again, stay tuned: if I'm still around – that is, if the Medicare bureaucrats don't kill me with their damn tizanidine – I'll have a follow-up story on this matter as well.

 

*****

 

GIVEN PRESIDENT OBAMA'S history of brazenly pandering to the plutocrats  while waging undeclared economic warfare against the USian 99 Percent,  it is surely legitimate to question the striking similarity of the atrocities committed by the Washington state and New Mexico welfare bureaucracies. Are they are independent acts that are only coincidentally alike? Or are they – as inside sources have privately suggested to me – part of a clandestine, federally scripted national campaign to go far beyond the savagery of the food-stamp cuts already mandated by Democratic (sic) President Bill Clinton's so-called “welfare reform”  and further intensify, perhaps fatally, the suffering of the nation's poor? And could such a scheme be why the New Mexico welfare bureaucrats are hiding behind the Fifth Amendment's protection of self-incrimination?

The damning information contained in the three reports linked in the above paragraph – material doubly relevant because its disclosures about Obama's lies and treachery and the Democratic (sic) Party's now-routine employment of bait-and-switch tactics are powerfully indicative of how former Goldwater Girl Hillary Clinton  would govern – suggests such a secretly scripted national targeting of the poor is well within the realm of possibility. Indeed, Obama's penchant for unprecedented tyranny  cloaked by dictatorial secrecy  provides an environment in which egregiousness of any sort – with or without presidential complicity – might easily thrive. It has already spawned an epidemic of outrages – for example Obama's blatanly unconstitutional program of total surveillance –  the uppermost of a long list of U.S. government crimes so effectively concealed only the courageous efforts of whistle-blowers and the tireless work of pro-democracy hackers could reveal them. And we already know the poor (and the 99 Percent in general) are among Obama's favorite targets. As Black Agenda Report Managing Editor Bruce Dixon said recently,  “In eight years Democrat Barack Obama has gone further to protect criminal banksters and their investors than any Republican dared go before him...It’s simply not punishable...as long as you steal from the poor or from the public.”

In the same linked text, Dixon accurately laments that crimes against the poor are no longer even investigated, a legitimate grievance for which USia's so-called “mainstream media” is as answerable as government itself. Such media was once, as in the Pentagon Papers episode,  an effective guardian against despotic politicians, criminal capitalists and all their greedy and/or subversive scheming. But now it is owned by the same One Percenters who effectively own and therefore control all USian governments at every level.

Thus censored, “mainstream media” has become nothing more than a privatized, for-profit (and therefore uniquely self-supporting) version of the Third Reich's Ministry of Propaganda. Thus too the editors and reporters of “mainstream media” follow the example of the late Josef Goebbels in dutifully echoing whatever Big Lie the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals want peddled as truth. And even the most dedicated of the USian whistle-blowers and hackers are likely to have been steeped from birth in the Ayn Rand, capitalism-über-alles dogma that now defines the United States, which means – particularly given the nearly inconceivable wealth required to equip and operate successful hacking operations – these alleged enemies of the state are nearly as likely as their fascism-minded adversaries to dismiss the poor as subhuman.

The overwhelming probability is therefore that any secret, federally organized effort to fatally afflict those of us who are impoverished will never be revealed.

However – at least in the New Mexico  and Washington state  cases – there are motives for crimes against the poor that are far older than the Obama regime. As noted in the NPR report that exposed the malfeasance of New Mexico's welfare bureaucrats, that state has “been under legal pressure for more than 20 years about how it doles out public assistance.” And Washington became somewhat similarly notorious – though all the relevant information has since been disappeared from the Internet – after Seattle's late Watergate Felon John Ehrlichman testified the state was the national plutocracy's favorite rat-lab for testing new techniques of oppression. The two states are also similar in their political ambiguity – that is, they are governed sometimes by Democrats, sometimes by Republicans, with both parties strong enough in each state to ensure that behind the typical charade of USian “democracy,” the One Percent retains absolute control.

While I know nothing more about New Mexico than what can be gleaned from standard public sources, I covered Washington state for nearly a dozen years as a card-carrying member of the working press and for another six years as a freelancer. After my official retirement in 2005, I became openly involved in local politics, most notably as an early activist in Occupy Tacoma (2011-2012). Since then have been at the core of other progressive efforts. Though geriatric physical disabilities increasingly curtail my ability to photograph, I continue to write for OAN and to post regularly on Internet discussion threads as well as to edit and produce a monthly newsletter for the 90-unit housing complex in which I dwell; the housing complex provides so-called “independent living” for elderly and disabled persons, and via its newsletter I cover such political topics – for example public transport – as are relevant to my fellow residents' needs and interests.

Thus I have a long and extensive familiarity with Washington state politics, enough to state unequivocally that beneath its deliberately deceptive “progressive” camouflage, it is in many ways – especially socioeconomically – more reactionary than any other state in the imperial union. For example, a Tacoma city official tells me it is the only state in which tenants have no legal rights whatsoever, a statement confirmed daily by the seemingly endless intrusions and disruptions  inflicted on my neighbors and me by a facilities-renovation that was supposed to be completed months ago but – thanks to the landlord's greedy indifference to our well-being – will probably continue to plague us at least until November. But the clearest demonstration of the state's longstanding hatefulness toward lower-income people is its tax structure, which is by far the most regressive in the nation  – and therefore probably the most regressive in the world.

The anti-Working-Class viciousness of the state's tax structure is vividly underscored by its contrast to the politicians' breathtakingly obscene generosity toward their corporate masters. Washington's corporate tax giveways, by far the largest in the nation, include the perpetually controversial $8.5 billion exemption granted Boeing.  The resultant need to slash stipends and services thus provides motives aplenty for welfare bureaucrats to go far beyond legal limits in minimizing public-assistance costs. And I know from conversations with former DSHS employees they are evaluated not on the number of impoverished people they serve, but rather on how many of us they deny stipends and services.

But the fact remains food stamps are a federal program...

Which brings us back to the likelihood the state bureaucracies are under federal orders to cut food- stamp approvals by any means possible – including unquestionably criminal manipulations of supplicant's eligibility data.

As already noted, the Obama Regime is notorious for perpetuating the anti-Working-Class bias that has effectively unified the Democratic (sic) and Republican parties since President Clinton's abject surrender on welfare policy. Thus the probability a cut-food-stamp-use-by-any-means order has been clandestinely issued by Obama is implicit in the overt hostility – not just indifference – he exhibited in his response to the recession and his pro-austerity appointments.

 

Thus too it was no surprise when Obama's Deficit Commission Co-chairman Alan Simpson publicly denounced Social Security recipients – never mind their average income two years previous (the most recent year for which data was available) had been a definitively-impoverished $1,115-per-month  – as “greedy geezers.”

Though the angry reaction Simpson's bigotry provoked was soon suppressed by the “mainstream media” propaganda ministry, the remark itself remains significant proof of the attitudes of the Obama Regime and the present-day Democratic (sic) Party toward poverty and those of us afflicted by it. Thus since Obama is known to demand ideological conformity throughout his regime, and since Democratic (sic) Presidential Hillary Clinton was a key part of his cabinet, it is arguable Simpson's malice toward those of us who are poor is probably, behind its rhetorical camouflage, little different from her own: another indication of how Hillary would govern if elected.

Meanwhile, whether or not Hillary remains the incipiently fascist Goldwater Girl she was in her youth, what is (deliberately?) overlooked in all the USian Empire's present-day “mainstream” political controversies is that now fully half the USian homeland population is definitively low-income.  Nor, short of (extremely improbable) economic revolution, is there any likelihood our lot will improve in the foreseeable future – most certainly not in my remaining lifetime. Not only has the homeland's so-called  “surplus population” thus become an issue. The near-certainty of additional job-stealing  “free trade” agreements – the irony quotes because the only “freedom” in “free trade” is that of the One Percent to further subjugate us – means the socioeconomic destitution into which we the people are being thrust will soon become the nation's majority condition. That's why it is increasingly evident, particularly to the millennial generation, the only hope for restoration of the so-called “American Dream” is to redefine it in socialist terms – “from each according to ability; to each according to need” – and then impose it by whatever means prove necessary.

The fact this pre-revolutionary attitude has been to varying extents apparent in the USian homeland since the advent of the Civil Rights Movement  in the 1950s no doubt explains the underlying purpose of Obama's total surveillance program. Just as Kate Epstein notes in the report linked in the preceding sentence, “What very few people are acknowledging, amidst all the discussion about the Snowden leak and what it reveals, is that a very real purpose of the surveillance programs—and perhaps the entire war on terror—is to target and repress political dissent. 'Terrorism' is the new 'Communism,' and the war on terror and all its shiny new surveillance technology is the new Cold War and McCarthyism.”

It is in this context we should consider not only the potentially deadly impacts of food-stamp cuts – extra-legal or not – but also Washington state's even more potentially murderous elimination of its telephone subsidies, which deny 911 emergency services to an unknown number of people who were already desperately poor. The Obama Regime's change in Medicare regulations to give medically ignorant bureaucrats absolute veto power over trained and licensed physicians is also potentially death-dealing and should therefore be viewed in the same light – that is, as an intensification of government authority in response to an increasingly rebellious population. Finally – and here is the culmination of my argument – there is the Empire's now-undeniable war against African-Americans,  who were the first post-First-Nations people to launch a culture-wide rebellion against USian capitalism and are therefore, by the deadly logic of violent subjugation, now the first targets of the local police who have been federalized and militarized into a de facto national police force – a merciless army of occupation that ever more often performs the genocidal function of a new Gestapo.

While a growing number of USians recognize the Empire's foreign wars as genocidal, there remains widespread reluctance to apply that term to what obtains here in the USian Homeland. That is because of our failure, typically the result of obstructive optimism, to acknowledge that since the Decade of Political Murders – President John Fitzgerald Kennedy slain in 1963, Malcolm X slain in 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy slain in 1968 – the Empire now increasingly employs the same oppressive policies at home it has always used abroad.

Identifying these policies as genocidal is further hampered by the slow-motion process of death inflicted by the thousand cuts of stipend-and-service reductions. Those of us who are its victims – we who are elderly, disabled or chronically unemployed (and thus no longer exploitable for capitalist profit) – cannot doubt the genocidal intent of what is being done to us. But with the USian majority cleverly trained to see genocide only when it is manifest as death camps and gas chambers, it is difficult to to make our case save to others who are similarly victimized.

True, the more obvious genocide inflicted on African Americans, Hispanics and First Nations people by federally trained and equipped local police – which by its endlessly increasing death toll is obviously in response to a national shoot-first order – is finally being (minimally) acknowledged outside the targeted communities. Even so, the white population's closed-minded, 77-percent resistance to recognizing the racial (and therefore implicitly genocidal) motive behind the abandonment of the black population of New Orleans to the ravages of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 suggests any sort of broader ideological awakening remains decades distant – as does the lynch-mob malevolence typified by the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump and his pledge of an anti-minority domestic Holocaust to “Make America Great Again.”

Such is capitalist governance in accordance with Ayn Rand's fictionalizations of Mein Kampf: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percenters and their Ruling Class vassals, total subjugation and deadly poverty for all the rest of us. So goes the Empire in the early 21st Century, its ever-more-evident ethos that of a uniquely USian form of Nazism, its Caucasian masses united by the mesmerizing chants of “USA! USA! USA!” – our species' newest equivalent of “Zieg Heil.”

LB/29 September – 3 October 2016.

-30-

 

Hillary Will Kill Me No Matter What – Either with More Cuts to Social Security and Medicare or by Starting World War III

Lest we forget: Memorial Day in Tompkins Square Park, New York City, 1967.  Photo © Loren Bliss 1967, 2011.

*

NO, I'M NOT dead, not yet, though sometimes the aches, pains and political betrayals of old age – arthritis in shoulders, wrists, knees and every vertebra plus the constant foreboding generated by the Democrats' ongoing collaboration with the Republicans in the slow-motion genocide of “austerity” – almost make me wish I were dead.

Especially now, burdened as I am with the physical preparations for temporary eviction from my apartment – an atrocity encouraged by anti-tenant Washington state law that allows the landlords to renovate their buildings without any loss of rental income – it is easy to imagine the grave as a better alternative than the relentlessly increasing wretchedness inflicted on us by capitalism.  

But that is precisely what our One Percent overlords and their Ruling Class vassals want us to think.

The more of us die, whether by our own hands or by the policies of murderous neglect that are the quintessence of capitalist governance, the more money there is for the One Percenters to gamble in their Wall Street casino and buy mink coats, diamond necklaces and Parisian penthouses for their mistresses.

Hence an ultimate truth – one I hope will dissuade anyone genuinely contemplating suicide: in such times as these, with the capitalists intent on eliminating everyone who is not immediately exploitable for profit, survival is an act of revolutionary defiance.

It is also an act of revolutionary defiance to reveal what the landlord is doing to all of us who live in this 50-unit senior housing facility. He is compelling old and broken women and men to pack all our possessions, then forcing us out of our apartments for the one day (or possibly more) it takes to replace the flooring therein. And he is coldly, arrogantly indifferent to the weeks of wrenching disruption this inflicts on all of us – in my case, packing before and unpacking after the temporary evictions, a total theft of at least two months from whatever remains of my life. Nor does the landlord give a flying rodent's rectum about the gnawing anxiety inflicted by the fact this sword of Damocles has been hanging over our heads since October 2014.

My understanding, from the Tacoma city officials to whom I fruitlessly complained early last year, is this sort of outrage is illegal everywhere save Washington state, where decades of behind-the-scenes collaboration between the Democrats and Republicans ensure we tenants remain perpetually powerless.

While the landlord's minimum-wage, mostly immigrant workers will physically move our boxes and furniture out of and back into our apartments, we geriatrically afflicted tenants must do all our own packing and stacking, and all our unstacking and unpacking too. Fortunately for the people whose mobility is limited to wheelchairs and walkers, some of our more physically capable fellow residents have volunteered to help those who are physically disabled. Otherwise we'd all be fucked.

For me, a physically disabled 76-year-old, the worst part of the ordeal is over. That was packing my personal library of 1,026 volumes, nearly all hardbacks. These books filled 25 boxes, each box 16 inches by 12 inches by 12 inches; each box weighing approximately 75 pounds when full. In other words, the 25-box total weighs about 1500 pounds – three-quarters of a ton.

The boxes and the requisite packing tape, which contrary to the landlord's promises were NOT provided, cost me $135.92 out of pocket. And there will be no refund from the landlord. In other words, my rent – $470 per month – is effectively raised to $492.65 for the remainder of 2016.

That $22.65 difference may not seem like much, but to me it is a is a ruinous blow. Thanks mostly to Washington state Governor Jay Inslee's Democratic administration, my 2016 income has been slashed $155 per month. That's right – as I have said before and will surely say again – this year I already had $155 per month LESS than I had in 2015.

Hence, even before the landlord-imposed expenses associated with the temporary eviction, I had absolutely NO discretionary income – all of it stolen from me by the same politicians who granted Boeing an $8.5 billion state tax exemption and are always scheming to find additional ways to bolster the bank accounts of the already obscenely wealthy capitalists who own USian governments at every level.

I repeatedly write about my own economic circumstances because they exemplify the fact that, from the perspective of the impoverished peoples who now make up the USian majority population,  there is no economic difference between the openly fascist Republicans and the more closeted but at least equally fascist Democrats. That's why so many of us no longer bother to vote.

Gov. Inslee's Democrats shut down WTAP, the Washington Telephone Assistance Program, by abolishing its tax base in 2013. That particular vulture came home to roost last August, costing me $17 per month. The same Democrats slashed my food stamps 88 percent, cut my Medicare Extra Help 82 percent and hiked my Medicare-subsidized prescription-drug prices 16 percent. Add in the 33 percent transit-fare increase imposed on the local transit system by a RepublicRat coalition, and the loss to me is at least $155 per month. Atop that, there were the (allegedly “Democratic”) Obama Administration's manipulations to avoid a 2016 Social Security cost-of-living increase. Then add the $22.65 per month I had to shell out to pay for my own temporary eviction, and now I have $177.65 a month less than I had last year.

That's why I now have – I'll say it again – NO discretionary income. And, given political and economic reality, it is obvious I will never again have any discretionary income as long as this lifetime continues.

Moreover, stacking those 75-pound boxes of books extracted its own special price. After stacking 24 of the boxes I went to bed short of breath, panting, heart racing but nevertheless so exhausted I immediately fell asleep. When I awoke the next morning still short of breath, heart still racing, I realized I was in trouble, instantly contacted my doctor and on his orders spent the rest of the day in the excellent Tacoma urgent care facility of Group Health Cooperative. Tentative diagnosis: congestive heart failure, to be confirmed or denied by a two-hour echo-cardiogram (ultrasound) exam administered 19 May, the results of which I should have by the end of this week.

Am I upset, frightened, anxious about the results? Absolutely not. Why? As I said recently on a Reader Supported News comment thread:

Remember I am 76 years old: that means Hillary will kill me no matter what – either by slashing Social Security and further slashing Medicare (the Democrats have already cut my Medicare Extra Help 82 percent and my food stamps 88 percent) – or by starting World War III.

While it is true Trump promises to preserve Social Security and Medicare – and many Sanders-supporting seniors say that absent Sanders, that's why they'll vote for Trump – I know history, which includes the lesson implicit in how Trump's idols Hitler and Mussolini promised world peace.

Spawned by a piece about Former President Jimmy Carter, it was one of those rare RSN threads  on which I was resoundingly down-thumbed. My alleged offense was pointing out that Carter, by his gleefully self-righteous signature on the Hyde Amendment, did more damage to USian women's sexual freedom than all subsequent presidents combined. But today's hard-line Democrats are so desperate for heroes, they will embrace even an outspoken, Jesus-brandishing theocrat who – just as I (so vexingly) pointed out – was the first in the now-seemingly endless line of presidents from the One Party of Two Names.

Apropos Trump, I cannot, unlike too many of my peers, overlook the fact he is a Republican – not just a clandestine enemy of the 99 Percent, as the Big Lie Democrats are, but (his populist rhetoric not withstanding), the presidential candidate of the party that openly despises the 99 Percent. Hence I regard his promises as no more trustworthy than the Big Lies encompassed by the biggest Big Lie in USian presidential history: Obama's “change we can believe in.”

I should note here my reference to the RepublicRats and DemoPublicans as separate parties is not intended to contradict the fact we are ruled by One Party of Two Names. The fact is I have not yet figured out a way to encapsulate that hideous truth in abbreviated language. “Half-party” is incomprehensible, “pseudo-party” is incorrect and RepublicRats or DemoPublicans, though emotionally appealing, lose the point in the acrimony of their implicit jeers. Stay tuned; my subconscious is working on it.

As to the election itself, I am ever more alienated from the entire extravaganza. Of course I support Sanders, though I doubt he has the chance of the proverbial snowball in hell. But at least he has broken through 71 years of Big Lies and malicious censorship to (maybe) reawaken the USian proletariat to the fact socialism is our species' only path to liberation. Thus I find Robert Reich's most recent demand, that we all back Hillary if she wins the nomination,  to be particularly offensive.

“(M)y morsels of advice,” Reich wrote, “may be hard to swallow. Many Hillary supporters don’t want Bernie to keep campaigning, and many Bernie supporters don’t want to root for Hillary if she gets the nomination. But swallow it you must – not just for the good of the Democratic Party, but for the good of the nation.”

My initial comment-thread reply followed Reich's oral imagery, reductio ad absurdum, to its inevitable climax, an ejaculation RSN's censors later (understandably) suppressed:

Quoth Mr. Reich: “...swallow it you must...”

Quoth the 99 Percent: “but, but, but – they promised not to come in our mouths.”

Then I got serious:

I have said it before and I will say it again: a vote for Hillary Clinton – for the closeted “nuke Hanoi” Goldwater Girl who now shows her inner Ilsa Koch by cackling at the torture death of Qaddafi – is a vote for World War III and therefore a vote for human extinction.

Nor is Trump a rational alternative. A vote for Trump is a vote to unleash all the racist malevolence, ChristoFascist misogyny and JesuNazi intolerance that has always festered at the core of USian society.

Who with right mind and informed conscience can make such a choice?

Later in the same thread I elaborated:

(Hillary) is, or so her relentless self-centeredness makes it seem, a genuine clone of Ayn Rand, who (in what amount to fictionalizations of Mein Kampf), proclaimed selfishness and greed to be not, as we were always taught, the deadliest of sins, but rather the ultimate of human virtues instead.

Surely this explains Hillary's attitude toward capitalism, within which selfishness and greed – and the moral imbecility essential to their embrace – have always been defined as the heights of virtue.

But then, what else might one expect of a closeted Goldwater Girl, who (or so it seems), has in her thinking merely replaced the long-ago slogan “Nuke Hanoi” with a truly suicidal and therefore infinitely more frightful modern variant, “Nuke Moscow.”

Speaking of closeted, might Trump be Hillary's clandestine assault weapon? Perhaps the most damning conjecture yet of the reasons behind Trump's candidacy  was dragged out of my subconscious by an RSN poster's comments about the fear Trump is inflicting on Hispanics, African-Americans and First Nations people:

(Y)ou have laid bare a highly probable and very disturbing truth: that Trump's function (and therefore probably his clandestine purpose) is to terrorize people of color into ignoring Sanders and voting for Clinton.

In which context reflect on the documented friendship between Trump and the Clintons.

Shame on me, as – knowing the realities of class-war and therefore the malevolent strategy and tactics of the One Percenters and their One Party of Two Names as I do – I surely should have recognized this probability.

Good catch...for which kudos: what you suggest is no doubt part of the One Percent's strategy for ensuring the ultimate victory of fascism – which is, after all, the only way capitalism can survive – whether under Hillary or Trump.

Near the end of the same thread was my defense of Marxism, in context perhaps my best such effort yet:

Fascism...needs to be recognized as the inevitable consequence of capitalism. While the New Deal and its antecedents sought to ameliorate capitalism's pro-fascist momentum, they failed because capitalism cannot be reformed. With its ethos of infinite greed as maximum virtue – the rejection of all human morality and its replacement with consummate moral imbecility – capitalism is literally too evil to reform. Thus to prevent capitalism from morphing into fascism, it can only be overthrown and abolished. Hence the relevance of Marxism, not only as the one truly effective antidote to capitalism, but – increasingly (as capitalism becomes indistinguishable from governance itself and thus grows ever more tyrannical) – the only life-preserver we humans have left if indeed we are to save ourselves, our species and our planet.

Meanwhile, back in the sweat-shop warehouse my apartment has become, I have yet to disassemble my book shelves – at least a day's work, and even with the power screwdriver thoughtfully lent me by a friend, lots of arthritis pain – every twinge an object lesson in the evils of capitalism. 

 

LB/31 May 2016

-30-

 

 

The Political as Personal: Reflections on Death and Dying

Cate Montana and me in a much more hopeful time. (Her selfie c. 2014)

*

WHAT WE ARE witnessing in this year's presidential campaign is the transformation of the politics of trauma  into a politics of rage. It is unlike anything I have ever witnessed, neither during my 55-year journalism career nor as a citizen, but it is obviously (and eerily) a nationwide macrocosm of what Elisabeth Kübler-Ross described as the five stages of terminal illness:  denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

The trauma is capitalism's double murder of the so-called American Dream and the U.S. experiment in representative democracy. It is the shock of the accompanying assassinations, the terror generated by the inescapable joblessness of the 99 Percent and the associated foreclosures, evictions and homelessness. It is further evidenced by the resultant unprecedented increase in poverty and particularly in premature death rates, including among previously favored proletarian white males  and white women as well.

Thus we are once again shown what Karl Marx first dared reveal in 1848: that capitalism is an always-fatal disease for which there is no cure save revolution.

But – witness events in Russia c. 1917-1941 – we also know the cure can prove to be as deadly as the disease, which adds to our fearsome hopelessness.

Hence, as we shall see, the relevance of the Kübler-Ross hypothesis, which remember is not – say again NOT – necessarily a linear progression. Indeed – based on my own observations, which include the deaths of friends and colleagues, the death of liberty in the United States, the looming death of our species and my own experience with the encroachment of death that is aging – I would reverse Kübler-Ross' final two stages. First comes acceptance: the complete acknowledgment, emotional as well as intellectual, of what is occurring. Then – unless one is deluded by the fantasies provided by religion or spirituality – comes depression, the unavoidable consequence of recognizing the utter futility of human life, the ultimate metaphor for which is the graveyard.

Here then is my initial impression of how the Kübler-Ross model defines our present political circumstances:

Denial: as in the overwhelmingly closed-minded refusal of most voters, especially the Republicans and the Clintonoid Democrats, to recognize the deadliness of capitalism. Therefore they cannot understand their choices of candidates – metaphorically the same as choices of medicines and treatment modalities – are at the very least as worthless as snake oil and in all probability will radically hasten the onset of death.

Anger: the politics of rage and the present state of reaction on the Donald Trump Right and the Bernie Sanders Left. 

Bargaining: typified by those throughout the political spectrum who, ignorant of history, foolishly believe negotiation by disempowered masses can ameliorate the savagery of capitalism.

Acceptance: the infinitely bitter realization we have been reduced to serfdom and/or slavery, that the “America” we knew will never be resurrected and that resistance is therefore futile. The result is begrudging surrender to capitalism (that is, to a society based on the moral imbecility of infinite greed and selfishness, with these qualities officially redefined as maximum heights of virtue); and equally begrudging submission to capitalist governance (that is, to a political apparatus based on absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent and their Ruling Class vassals, total subjugation and bottomless poverty for all the rest of us).

Depression: the realization of our total powerlessness, characterized in the political realm by recognition of how our powerlessness reduces politics to meaninglessness. This was undoubtedly the realization that – after the 2013 Republican coup in Olympia  gave the GOP total control of Washington state government and schooled the electorate in the irrelevance of elections – prompted 72 percent of the state's registered voters to refuse to vote in 2014. The result, a turnout of only 28 percent,  is reportedly the lowest ever recorded in the United States. Not coincidentally, it reflects exactly the sort of alienation that is symptomatic of clinical depression, which in turn is increasingly recognized as a definitive byproduct of capitalism.

 

*** *** ***

 

UNLESS WE ARE obscenely rich or already lost in the wastelands of dementia, the painful realities of old age will sooner or later reveal the “golden years” meme as merely another of the Big Lies routinely disseminated by capitalism  in its predatory hunt for profits.

Originally intended to loot the pensions of petite-bourgeois retirees by conning them into buying overpriced real estate, the “golden years” Big Lie caught on because it cleverly sidesteps the awful truth of old age – that unless we are spared its horrors by the blessing of sudden death, it is a long and terrible imprisonment in ever-increasing misery and wretchedness, with our own bodies reduced to torture-chambers from which there is no hope of rescue.

There is no bargaining with old age. Its essence is ever-more-intensified awareness of approaching death. And death, which completes the aging process of reducing our bodies to reeking garbage, is likewise the obliteration of individual consciousness. Since there is nothing outside of or beyond individual consciousness, death is for each of us the apocalypse in microcosm. It is literally the end, forever, of everything including all potential.

And here in the United States – where we low-income elderly people are now forced to survive under constant threat of maliciously lethal cuts in life-sustaining stipends and services – its inherent awfulness is methodically worsened by the intentionally cruel policies of what statistics prove has become the most deliberately vicious nation in the industrial world.

 

*** *** ***

 

BEFORE I CONTINUE, I should apologize for (again) dropping out of sight.

I was working toward posting to OAN weekly, as I have done for most of its six-and-one-half year history, as indeed I did until last year, when my working life became depressingly complicated due to the failure of my computer and an infuriating succession of Microshaft-inflicted disasters with its replacement.

Hence my OAN posting-frequency dropped off to less than once per month, and I lost probably 95 percent of my readers. Finally, recognizing the magnitude of the loss, I resolved to return to once-weekly posting or at least as close a proximity to that frequency as I could achieve.

Now though old age has intervened, this time in the form of a life-threatening geriatric ailment called cellulitis, an infection that necessitated inter-venous antibiotics and an ongoing course of oral antibiotics which – knock on wood – seem to be (slowly) beating the run-amok bacteria into reluctant submission.

But that affliction, which includes the possibility of a complication called necrotizing fasciitis  – bacteriological storm troopers ravaging one's flesh, invariably causing loss of limbs and often the (merciful) loss of life – has combined with another I am not yet able to write about, and the two have stripped me of any and all illusions about the future, including whatever long-range potential I might have (foolishly) imagined was yet residual in my photography and writing.

Of course I will continue writing and photographing – for me those activities are as natural as breathing and perhaps equally vital as well – but from here on I do so with full and bitter recognition that since the 1983 fire destroyed my true life's work, I have never been more than another faint specter of that art-scene archetype for whom William Butler Yeats wrote the short poem “To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing.”

 

*** *** ***

 

THIS IS MY second battle with cellulitis. The first, in my left leg, was in the fall of 2014. Now it is in my right leg.

My susceptibility to it is intensified both by old age and the bad circulation in my extremities that is the legacy of a childhood fall through the ice – fortunately into water that was only waist deep – during subzero Michigan weather. This time the cellulitis began a couple of days after my 76th birthday – not really a surprise as I am always stricken by some life-disrupting disaster on or near my birthdays – as if fate must always remind me that in the eyes of whatever gods might or more likely do not exist, I will never be more than the despised child I became after my mother 's 1945 attempt at post-partum abortion.

(My personal calendar includes two other days I long ago recognized as guarantors of misfortune. One is Christmas, on or close to which no less than three computers have died and which is often the occasion of some grave sickness – happy holidays from Jesus. I am similarly bashed by fate on or near the autumnal equinox: that's when I came down with the 2014 cellulitis infection, and in 1978, on that exact date (23 September), was when a defiantly habitual drunken driver's vehicular assault destroyed my new Honda Civic and damned me to a lifetime of relentlessly worsening back pain.)

 

The medical people tell me another contributory factor in the cellulitis problem is the now-obviously permanent obesity that has plagued me since I quit smoking 20 years ago. Though I was a slender child until I entered puberty, from about my 10th year on, my hateful mother used her summertime custody of me to force-feed me into grotesque obesity. It was, from her perspective, a trifecta: an expression of her hatred of me, an expression of her hatred of heterosexual males and, best of all, an expression of her hatred of my father – a way to avenge herself on both me and him by giving him – a former prep-school athlete who regarded obesity as an ultimate form of loathsomeness – yet another item to add to the already long list of reasons he despised me nearly as much as my mother and most of her relatives did.

But by age 15 I had smoked my way back to some semblance of physical attractiveness – at least enough to lose my virginity early that year thanks to a very lovely young lady – and though I was never truly handsome, I remained adequately attractive until the successful battle with nicotine addiction (ironically) upped my weight by 100 pounds. I smoked my last cigarette 20 years ago, and after innumerable diets it is now obvious there is no way I will ever lose the excess fat. Hence I am once again the ugly blob I was from age 10 to age 14. Obviously there are some forms of childhood accursedness that always triumph in the end.

Moreover the life-disruptions inflicted by this most recent episode of cellulitis have shown me beyond any doubt I am no longer able to meet even self-imposed deadlines, which in turn tells me there is no point trying to rebuild OAN's readership or – for that matter – attempting any work (photography or writing) more demanding than the monthly newsletter  I produce for my 50 neighbors. (And this month, thanks to my illnesses, even that is late.)

Yes, as I said above, I will continue posting here, but never again with any attempt to maintain a predetermined schedule.

Meanwhile the cellulitis is obviously prophetic. It is a preview of what awaits me in whatever years or months I have left. Old age, I now understand, is a terminal illness. I will have better days. worse days and, undoubtedly as the end nears, truly awful days, but I know now I will never again be well.

And what will become of me if I am still alive when next the One Percenters and their wholly owned Democratic and Republican vassals further slash my access to medical care?

 

*** *** ***

 

OLD AGE IS also – unless one is genuinely craven – a time of confronting the ugliest truths about one's self. When one finally acknowledges that one is definitively unlovable – that one has never known, nor ever will know, the exquisite blessing bestowed by a truly loving woman's infinitely affectionate glance – all other tragedies, death included, are diminished to psychological manageability.

Subconsciously I have have known this truth since childhood: my mother never once said she loved me, and following the events of 1945, all but one of her relatives made their own animosities evident. From their perspective I was the embarrassing reminder of a terrible secret – my mother's arrest and subsequent (merciful) confinement for two years in an insane asylum because my father (mercifully) refused to press charges against her for the attempted murder of me, their son, and himself as well. From then on, my mere existence thus threatened disclosures that – given the vast universe of predatory malice that underlies capitalism – would have jeopardize my maternal grandparents' financial security, which was based mostly on my grandfather's ability to peddle life insurance to corporate clientele.

Though no woman ever truly loved me, I did acquire, during my sexually active years, a reputation for patient, sensitive, perceptive delivery of orgasmic goods and thus – because women speak comfortably with one another of such matters in clinical detail we men can scarcely imagine – I was blessed with bed-partners aplenty. I also, from childhood onward, had many female friends, not the least because I regard their gender, with all its innumerable subtleties of interacting logic and emotion, to be far more interesting than the my own gender's (pathetically) linear thinking, which is typically as emotionless as poured concrete and as directionally predictable – boring, even – as any Interstate highway.

But the fire and its aftermath stripped me of all the occupational panoply of attractiveness. Since then – save for two distant interludes with women I had hitherto known for many years but will never see again – my bed has been naught but chilly emptiness.

Conversely, the women who were my friends – those who sought nothing more from me than intellectual companionship and/or emotional support – have remained utterly faithful to our friendship, sometimes in unexpected ways so moving it has brought me to tears.

But now nearly all of these women – Left radicals or pagan activists – are dead. Each of them was felled by cancer in the primes of their lives  – an apparent coincidence so unnerving that more than once it has prompted me to wonder if the Presidential Death Warrants announced by Barack the Betrayer do not have a much longer clandestine history.

The bright spot in all this malaise – the good news (at least for me) – is the awfulness of my childhood and the radically diminished but nevertheless omnipresent elements of wretchedness that always haunted the edges of my adult my life and that now in old age have become its epicenter have nevertheless given me an ability to unflinchingly recognize the dimensions of our present-day impasse: to think the officially unthinkable and to verbalize, often defiantly, the officially unspeakable: that the positive qualities that defined what we once thought of as “our nation” are slain and never to be resurrected, and that as a result our entire species is most likely doomed.

Seeing so clearly and unflinchingly was an exceptionally useful talent when I was a member of the working press. But I was never allowed to apply it to its maximum potential. This was true even in the alternative press, which – ironically – pioneered what is now damned as “infotainment”: a perversion spawned by its editors' relentless insistence on text that is as entertaining (i.e., “fun to read”) as it is informative.

Though it is something of an aside, I should note here I was never a “fun” writer, not even when, as a three-pack-per-day smoker, I was effectively self-medicated against dyslexia and thus at the height of my reportorial ability. The frown so often inherent in my prose – and even it its best, the corners of its mouth have always tended downward – was never a problem as long as I was in the Northeast, where news was expected to be solemnly informative, and where my reports on a New Jersey school crisis, for example, were sufficiently authoritative to be submitted as evidence in a Supreme Court case. But on the West Coast, being able to turn even a matter of grave importance into a “fun read” was a prerequisite for major-newspaper success. Hence – though I see this only now in the harsh clarity of geriatric retrospect – the real death of my journalism career, the point at which it became fatally becalmed in a Sargasso Sea of mediocre publications, was in 1970, when a decidedly improbable series of tragicomic disasters stranded me in Washington state with no means to return to New York City.

Because I have been a male Cassandra most of my adult life – my identification of the old Counterculture as the first wave of the resurrection of antiquity's Great Goddess and thus also the opening battle of a revolution against patriarchy was initially as much jeered as it has since been emphatically proven true by the events themselves – I am not surprised to be equally scorned in old age. It is merely another of the predictable but nevertheless frustrating ironies of an unalterably disadvantaged life that, even now when my skills as a visionary, iconoclastic analyst might at last prove useful in our pathetically tardy campaign to save ourselves from extinction, I am confronted by both the microcosm and macrocosm of death. The microcosm is the personal, the unmistakably terminal condition of old age and all its characteristic ailments and limitations. The macrocosm is the political, our species' headlong rush toward apocalypse, for which the interplay of shibboleths and taboos in the 2016 presidential election campaign compose an almost perfect metaphor. Whether personally or politically, I am thus already in the fast lane on the Death Expressway, and whatever I might say or do will make not a scintilla of lasting difference, either in my own circumstances or those of anyone else.

Yet as much as I am saddened by my looming personal apocalypse, I am much relieved by the near certainty I will not live long enough to witness the infinitely larger apocalypse I am now absolutely sure will befall our species and our Mother Earth just as it has already befallen the liberty for which our homeland was formerly a global symbol.

 

 

*** *** ***

 

AS I MYSELF was inescapably cursed by familial hatefulness, so are we all inescapably cursed by the metastasized hatefulness that defines capitalism and Abrahamic religion – the most venomously murderous pair of afflictions ever evolved on this woefully unhappy planet.

But these ideologies of malice are the very pillars of Hillary Clinton's consciousness. Which is why – as I have said so many times in comment-thread posts on Reader Supported News – I will not vote for Hillary under any circumstances. Though my preference is of course Bernie Sanders, it is literally better we have Donald Trump than Hillary Clinton. Trump not only brandishes the morally imbecilic avarice Hillary so desperately tries to hide (which makes him easier to predict and therefore to control), but, like Sanders, he swears he will protect Social Security and Medicare. Hillary meanwhile is sworn to do the opposite: to “reform” it – that is, to destroy it (thus boosting the profits of the Wall Street whoremasters) – presumably with the same genocidal savagery her husband “reformed” welfare.

In the meantime we seniors and disabled people are once again threatened with the (further) termination of our life-sustaining subsidies and services. Once again we are (deliberately) assaulted by (intentionally) death-dealing anxieties earlier generations of modern USians could never have imagined. Such is capitalism, and such too is apparently the Hillary Clinton brand of Christianity.

Hence my remarks on a Thom Hartmann comment thread  last week, shortened, revised (and therefore not italicized) for publication here:

Were there still in the United States any mainstream journalists worthy of the name, Hillary's infinite corruption – including the fact her true politics are those of the closeted, reflexively fascistic Goldwater Girl she has remained ever since opportunism prompted her to don Democratic disguise – would be common knowledge. Indeed it is at least possible she, her husband and Barack (the Betrayer) Obama are each not only the agents of Wall Street we know them to be, but willing operatives within a far greater and more malevolent One Percent conspiracy to actually destroy the Democratic Party and thereby forever remove from U.S. politics even the most remote possibility of overthrowing the plutocracy and restoring the New Deal.

If indeed Hillary's hate-Sanders campaign succeeds in winning her the Democratic nomination, it will also succeed in destroying the party beyond any hope of repair. The consequences will ensure a Republican presidential victory, the result of which will be either the beginning of de jure Christian theocracy under Cruz and his Dominionists or the advent of overt USian Nazism under Trump and his latter-day stormtroopers.

Given Hillary's Goldwater Girl politics, it is at least arguable this is her clandestine purpose. For confirmation of which see The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Jeff Sharlet, Harper: 2008), pages 272-277, particularly the infinitely damning disclosure on page 275: “Hillary fights side-by-side with (Sam) Brownback and others for legislation dedicated less to overturning the wall between church and state than to tunneling beneath it” – precisely as any deep-cover Goldwater Girl/Christofascist agent would do.

It was thus no surprise to me one of Hillary's supporters would seize the RSN comment thread generated by Naomi Kline's “The Problem With Hillary Clinton Isn't Just Her Corporate Cash. It's Her Corporate Worldview” as an opportunity to denounce Sanders as a “Godless socialist.” I responded accordingly (my reference to The Family retained because I truly believe Sharlet's disclosures cannot be cited too often):

Frankly, if the United States is so toxic with Christian fanaticism it still despises spiritual nonconformists or nonbelievers and thus would deny us our Constitutional rights, then like all the other hateful Abrahamic theocracies, it deserves whatever apocalypse befalls it.

In which context note too Hillary's woefully under-publicized collaboration with the Christian Dominionists – most notably Sam Brownback and his ilk – to impose de jure theocracy: see The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Jeff Sharlet, Harper: 2008), particularly pages 272-277.

Thus Hillary willingly collaborates with fanatics who believe the destruction of our planet and the extinction of our species is the “holy” fulfillment of the Abrahamic god's “divine plan.” This in turn suggests she holds such fanatical views herself. Which thereby explains both her otherwise inexplicable support for environmental destruction and her wanton provocations of nuclear war.

In other words, Hillary the 1964 Goldwater Girl is still a Goldwater Girl in 2016. Which means that in her heart, she is no different from her Republican rivals – and may in fact be running precisely to facilitate a Republican victory and the apocalypse that would inevitably follow.

Think, people. Or as a fellow Occupier so memorably said, “Occupy Your Mind.”

 

With Sanders' alleged atheism further inflaming the Christians – the evidence of this presidential campaign is beginning to convince me the term “Christian fanatic” is a redundancy – another pro-Sanders poster suggested the Christians' real grievance is their adamant opposition to the constitutional separation of church and state. Hence I added an afterthought:

History proves unequivocally that most people who are genuine believers in the Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity, Islam – do indeed despise the Constitution. That's because the scriptures attributed to the Abrahamic god repeatedly command the persecution and death of all non-believers.

(The link to RSN's republication of Klein's piece is here. Unfortunately the link now goes directly to The Nation, the original publisher of “Corporate Worldview, ” which means the RSN comment thread has been obliterated – flushed down the Orwell hole for no reason I can discern.)

As I said on another RSN comment thread,  this in response to remarks on “Carter Dismisses Clinton's State Department Work,” my original text substantially revised (thus not italicized) for publication here:

I am increasingly convinced Hillary is an undercover operative either for the Christian Fundamentalists themselves or for some organization that recognizes how fundamentalist theology sanctions the malevolence of capitalism and enables its subjugation of the 99 Percent. Note particularly her clandestine collaboration with other Christofascist types documented by Jeff Sharlet as noted above.

Thus the birds-of-a-feather-flock-together evidence indicates she believes, as they do, in Armageddon, the End Times, the Rapture and all the other implicitly suicidal elements in Abrahamic dogma. This in turn suggests her warmongering is deliberate rather than a product of incompetence and is in fact intended to bring on the end of the human species and the destruction of Mother Earth precisely as described in the chapter of the Bible entitled “Revelation.”

Obviously, the real source of USian “exceptionalism” – the most modern variant of Nazism yet – is the exceptionalism always claimed by the creeds of Judaism, Christianity and Islam: the “one true religion,” complete with the divinely awarded right to exterminate anyone who disagrees.

In the days since I wrote that paragraph in its initial comment-thread form, it has occurred to me it is entirely possible Hillary the Goldwater Girl was recruited during her undergraduate years at Wellesley College to become the deep-cover, anything-for-the-One-Percent agent she obviously is now. She apparently went operational with her obviously loveless, obviously opportunistic marriage to Bill Clinton. Hers is thus probably the hands-on-the-joystick influence responsible for her husband's shape-shift from New Deal Democrat to Closet Republican.

By whom was she recruited? Most likely the same Gestapo types who engineered the murders of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Sen. Robert Francis Kennedy, Fred Hampton, Karen Silkwood, etc. ad nauseam. In which context Oliver Stone's comment,  “Clinton has been for every war we fought,” is especially relevant.

 

*** *** ***

 

ALSO RELEVANT TO this download of dismal discourse is the debate that so often dominates conversations between my dear friend Cate Montana and me. It is our own variant of the critical but mostly unpublicized disagreement that severed the Counterculture of Rebellion into two rival camps during the 1960s and has raged beneath the hurly-burly of USian society ever since.

One side argues, as do I, that we cannot save ourselves from extinction unless we recognize capitalism as the societal equivalent of terminal cancer and remove it with the same relentless thoroughness with which its biological counterpart is removed from the bodies of those obscenely privileged plutocrats who are wealthy enough afford the otherwise prohibitive costs of genuinely curative surgery.

In the vernacular of many 1960s communities, those who believed as I do were known as “politicals.”

The other side argues, as does Ms. Montana, that we cannot bring about the political and socioeconomic revolution that is now obviously our only alternative to extinction unless we each first experience a revolution – she would say “evolution” – in our own individual minds.

In '60s vernacular, Ms.Montana would have been labeled a “human potentialist.” Today she is part of what is called the New Age Movement.

Actually – and I cannot recall ever having witnessed more vivid proof of what I am about to say than is provided by the national dysfunction manifest in the 2016 presidential election campaign – both our positions are correct. The ignorantly reactionary rage of the Right not withstanding, it is increasingly obvious our only alternative to extinction (whether by thermonuclear war, environmental apocalypse or both) is socialism.

But the socioeconomic and political revolution essential to build socialism will not be possible until individual consciousness evolves beyond the Ayn Rand egotism that has become the USian norm. We either learn to live in a cooperative society based on the core socialist principle – from each according to ability; to each according to need – or we are doomed, already as a nation and almost certainly as a species. On this much, Ms. Montana and I emphatically agree.

Where we differ – differ radically in fact – is in the means to the end. Ms. Montana argues there can be no revolution – at least no successful revolution – without the prerequisite of personal transformation. I argue such a revolution in consciousness will not be possible until we first strip the capitalists of their now virtually divine omnipotence.

Witness the fate of Occupy: as of now, the One Percenters and their Ruling Class vassals have the truly godlike ability to detect and suppress any progressive movement – including one as definitively non-violent as the personal transformation advocated by Ms. Montana – literally before its birth. And given our absolute and eternal defenselessness in the face of the One Percent's equally godlike powers of electronic surveillance and drone-inflicted murder, even the most emphatically peaceful revolution may have already been rendered eternally impossible. Many of us, myself included, now believe the only possible way a revolution could succeed is with Mother Earth's apocalyptic intervention.

At this juncture, in fairness to Ms. Montana, I believe it better she speak for herself. Here then is an explanatory quote from page 129 of her forthcoming book The E Word (Enliven Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster), which is slated for publication next year:

Over 99 percent of all scientists warn about the devastating impact of fossil fuels and climate change and the cataclysm the world is rapidly headed towards. But the egos in charge—the captains of government and industry crazed by their lust for personal power and control at all costs—don’t care.

And if the rest of us don’t catch on, shift gears and boot the crazies out of the driver’s seat—including the crazy running our own lives—we already know the outcome.

Since 1950 no fewer than 263 movies depicting apocalyptic wasteland realities have hit the silver screen: On the Beach, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Mad Max, Soylent Green...

In Ms. Montana's formulation, “the crazy running our own lives” is ego, which she describes, on page 91, as a highly fearful and insecure program obsessed with image issues...This EGO MIND is in control. not us. And the distressing, frightening, dog-eat-dog world we live in is the result. (Caps as in original.)

In other words, before we can topple our external oppressors, each of us must first liberate ourselves, overthrowing that which oppresses us internally, replacing it by shifting to a level of higher consciousness she asserts is already within us and awaiting activation. She has written The E Word – which borrows from her decades of personal experience with the world's transformative disciplines (Zen Buddhism, Taosim and the like) – to explain to us in everyday, non-esoteric yet often lyrical English, how such liberation might be realized.

Beneath the meditations described in The E Word is the unspoken and profoundly compelling assumption the human mind, when properly focused, can transcend even the most formidable modes of oppression. It is an ancient idea, probably most evident in the practices and traditions that enabled countless generations of Asian peoples to ride the disciplines of Zen and Taoism into a state of mind that rendered the indigenous horrors of caste and tyranny irrelevant. But these disciplines also suppressed – totally suppressed – the yearning for political and economic liberty that has been a driving force in Occidental society since the original, proto-communistic tribal democracies were exterminated by the advent of patriarchy and the emergence of imperialism.

Now however – because capitalism has grown so monstrously tyrannical its only counterparts are to be found in the histories of the ancient despotisms to which Taoism and Zen were reactions – such remedies as Ms. Montana urges may be our only alternative, a point made by Chris Hedges  in a 2013 essay entitled “A Time for Sublime Madness”:

It is only those who can retreat into the imagination, and through their imagination can minister to the suffering of those around them, who uncover the physical and psychological strength to resist.

I cited Hedges  in “Unbearable Truths: Reflections on the Imbecility of Hope,” an OAN piece that is relevant here because its opening graf posed a variant of the same question The E Word seeks to answer:

How does one who came of age when the United States was still a quasi-democratic, socioeconomically mobile society, cope with the new USian realities of irremediable powerlessness and inescapable socioeconomic hopelessness? 

Ms. Montana answers, as if in reply, “There really is an understanding of self and life and the human condition so profound and complete it washes away all confusion and thus all fears, conflict, doubt and seeking forever...We just need to know what's what, so we can make it happen” (page 171).

The wellspring premise in Ms. Montana's work – the metaphysical precept from which The E Word flows – is that of an infinite, universal source-consciousness. It is, as she describes it, a borderless realm that is as absolutely real as the gods are absolutely metaphorical. It unites all being in the sort of force-field the discoveries of quantum mechanics suggest is the first cause of existence and therefore the origin of all being.

Perhaps its best summation ever – whether in classical literature or modern scientific treatise – is its metaphorical description by Lao Tzu 2600 years ago:

(1)

The DAO that can be expressed
is not the eternal DAO.
The name that can be named
is not the eternal name...

 

(34)

The great DAO is overflowing:
It can be to the left and the right.
All things owe their existence to it,
and it does not refuse itself to them...

 

(35)

...You look for it and you see nothing special.
You listen for it and you hear nothing special.
You act according to it and you find no end.

 

(From Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, The Book of Meaning and Life,
translation and commentary by Richard Wilhelm, translated
into English by H.G. Ostwald; Arkana: 1985)

 

 

Point being, I urge you all to read Ms. Montana's book when it becomes available next year.

 

*** *** ***

 

MY POSITION ON all this remains much as I stated it in “Unbearable Truths”:

Though a part of me believes, fervently and on the basis of seemingly otherwise-inexplicable evidence, in the existence of (some) deity and an afterlife including reincarnation, another part of me can with equal conviction refute all such evidence as hallucinatory symptoms of terminal insanity – the final response of the human mind to the terrifying reality of death: the fact that for the one who is dying, death is literally the end of everything, including the cosmos itself.

Trouble is, after the confrontation with mortality forced on me by this ongoing struggle – with cellulitis (which because of an apparent abscess may yet send me to the hospital and could even cost me my leg, a loss that, given my age and how I am crippled by spinal arthritis, would unquestionably be fatal), also with this other affliction I cannot yet name aloud – even the most logically presented, eloquently phrased notions of any reality beyond the world of our five senses is reduced to absurdity. Connection with DAO will not stop a bullet. Nor will psychic immersion in the ego-less state advocated by Ms. Montana – please, Cate, no offense intended – halt assault by terminal infection.

Like most New Agers, Ms. Montana often emphasizes our species' kinship with all other earthly life. But once we acknowledge that kinship – once we see ourselves mirrored in all else which is born and lives and thus inevitably dies (particularly if we have hunted and fished and grown food and watched other creatures expire) – we cannot but recognize the absolute permanence of death. The grouse knocked dead from the sky by a shotgun and fetched by a spaniel never resurrects itself in a game bag or anywhere else; the trout in a creel never awakens to new life; the spent corn-stalks cut down and stacked in shocks never re-green to fecund vitality. Death is forever – and even if one is willing to yield themselves up to utter madness – that fact is inescapable. So it has always been, and so it will always be.

Incidentally, it is precisely such intimacy with nature that reveals Abrahamic religion as the ultimate scam – as nothing more than an X-rated version of the Santa Claus myth, a tale of a vengeful god who knows if we are “naughty or nice” and sadistically punishes our temporal failings with the inconceivable horror of eternal torture. That is why I am always surprised by the Christian fanaticism of so many farmers and other rural people whose proximity to Nature should ensure their immunity to ecclesiastical lies.

Those of us inclined to political analysis, as I surely am, also recognize in Abrahamic doctrines not only the opiate condemned by Marx but a scare-fiction uniquely useful to bosses and other sorts of tyrants for controlling the behavior of ignorant subjects. But even then, if we have been raised in the Abrahamic traditions (which like their offspring capitalism have now metastasized throughout our planet), some residual fear may continue to haunt us no matter how thoroughly we have repudiated its vengeful dogmas: thus the huge number of death-bed conversions, an impulse of last-minute cowardice I fervently hope I will be able to resist.

Nor does Goddess-centered paganism offer a better alternative, as I discovered while being repeatedly stabbed with large-gauge needles during the nurses' apologetic but nevertheless miserably painful search for a vein suitable for massive infusions of antibiotics. I am what in medical parlance is called “a hard stick,” notoriously so; the circulatory systems in my arms and hands and legs and feet are shrunken by the frostbite resulting from my childhood fall through the ice, and they are made even less accessible by the loathsome fat with which my body has irremediably cloaked itself since I quit smoking. Usually when the nurses are probing for a useful vein I am able to stifle my inclination to moan and wail, but this time the repeated punctures were genuine torture, and I was biting my lip to remain silent. When I could not Zen myself into numbness, I prayerfully sought the comforting arms of the Great Cosmic Mother or any other theoretical source of mercy. Eventually the nurses found a functional vein for their IV port. As for me, I found only darkness: the tomb of all hope, the grave of all illusion.

LB/14 April 2016

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More on the Politics of Trauma: Thom Hartmann Writes an Essay for the History Books -- But Only If We the People Win

A Tacoma Clinic Defense volunteer displays her standard response – facial expression included – to harassment from male misogynists. However the vast majority of passers-by indicate their support of TCD workers. Clinic defense is one of the many ways we socialists serve the people, bypassing the oppressive power of the capitalist plutocracy. (Photo by Loren Bliss © 2016)

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THE QUESTION ASKED by Thom Hartmann in  “What Happens When Neither Political Party Answers to the Bottom 90%” is answered with almost eerie synchronicity by how a Democratic official seems to be vengefully withholding vital information from a small local newsletter called Community Chronicle that serves at least 50 elderly and disabled women and men in Tacoma, Washington.

Apparently the malicious withholding is in retaliation for publishing – though not in the newsletter – a number of pointed observations about the worsening failure of the USian experiment in representative democracy. As I have often stated here in OAN, the lies purposefully told by today's Democrats are clearly part of a greater strategy of disguised malevolence that enables them to collaborate with the Republicans in fulfilling Ruling Class orders to deliberately inflict genocidal harm on low-income people.

Such an analysis, precisely because it is an (obvious) interpretation of recent USian political history rather than document-supported fact, has never appeared in the Chronicle, the publication for which I sought the information that is now being withheld. Nor will it ever appear in the Chronicle as long as the analysis (1)-has no relevance to local events and (2)-lacks the irrefutable proof that would be provided by, say, exposure of a strategic document defining the genocidal destruction of government services as clandestine compliance with the elitist demands for population-reduction  that have been part of the USian political dialogue at least since the 1960s.

More to the point, the people victimized by the Democratic official's withholding of information are not the politically motivated readers of OAN. They are instead the politically disempowered residents of the senior housing complex where I have dwelt for the past 13 years.

In other words, the elderly and disabled folk of a notably impoverished community are being punished for the activism associated with a sociologically different and geographically far-removed community. The Democratic official is thus apparently employing the same theory of misplaced vengeance we have tragically witnessed elsewhere, often with far more devastating consequences. It is noteworthy especially for how it suggests yet another dimension – a potentially malignant one – to the answer of Hartmann's oh-so-pointed question.

One of the functions of the Chronicle, as illustrated by the November 2015 cover shown below, is warning readers of impending cuts in government stipends and services. While this is a function that was formerly performed by so-called “mainstream media,” its publication of news specifically relevant to low-income people has been abandoned in compliance with the demands of its advertisers, who insist on excluding from readership those who lack enough discretionary income to buy the advertised products. Hence “news” – once defined as any 

 

 

information of relevance to the public – has been  redefined by advertisers as that which is of interest only to the advertisers' specific demographic targets. Hence too the Chronicle, which I started four years ago. A big part of my intent was – and is – helping my neighbors cope with the politics of deliberately inflicted trauma by closing the information gap that results from mainstream media's increasingly discriminatory definition of news.

(Though it is something of an aside, one of the more obvious reasons for the steeply declining readership of U.S. newspapers is the rapidly deteriorating standard of living that afflicts the entire USian proletariat – those of us the Occupy Movement named “the 99 Percent” and Hartmann with greater economic precision more correctly labels “the 90 Percent.” Based on the most recently revised census data,  half the residents of the USian homeland are now officially “low income” – this as typified by a family of four living on $45,000 or less annually. [Note: fully two hours of Internet research could not unearth a comparably revised figure for one-person households.] Since low-income people no longer have the discretionary income that defines them as valuable to advertisers, and since much of the news that is specifically vital to low-income people is deliberately excluded from the newspapers, such an ignored [and thus effectively banished] population cancels its newspaper subscriptions and seeks information elsewhere, especially on the Internet.)

But only four of the Chronicle's 50 readers can afford the USian homeland's highest-on-the-planet costs of an Internet subscription, which means the other 46 persons are repeatedly denied vital information by the combination of their no-Internet poverty with mainstream media's redefinition of news. Worse, the information they are deprived includes facts that are essential for survival. That's because the ever-more-aggressive reductions in governmental stipends and services for low-income people – all such reductions due to the war against impoverished people  both parties have been waging since the 1976 election of President Jimmy Carter marked the end of the New Deal era – have potentially fatal consequences, especially for elderly and disabled folks. Which provides yet another detail in answer to the pivotal question Hartmann has dared ask.

Because I know the cuts' perpetrators cannot possibly be ignorant of their potentially fatal consequences, when I am writing in OAN or on various Internet websites I have no hesitation labeling the cuts as intentionally genocidal. The cuts are clearly designed to serve the same function, albeit in slow motion (and therefore with far less controversy), as the Nazis' Zyklon B. That is, the cuts are intended to exterminate those of us the politicians' capitalist masters have banished from the workplace as no surplus human beings longer exploitable for profit and thereby condemned as no longer worthy of life. Nor is this – at least to those of us who are its victims – especially big news; I am merely verbalizing what most of us already recognize and not infrequently – usually with extreme anger or bitterness – also say aloud.

Nevertheless, in the Chronicle – because I recognize my readers are already traumatized by constant, life-shortening economic anxiety and are therefore physically and emotionally fragile, I am careful to avoid expression of such hideous truths unless they are quotes, whether direct or indirect, and even then only when they are so essential to a given narrative they cannot be sidestepped. Otherwise there is nothing to be served by berating the powerless with the real-world purpose and consequences of the Ayn Rand/social-Darwinist savagery that is now the defining characteristic of U.S. economic policy – the maliciously imposed wretchedness we already know entirely too well.

Nor is the Democratic official likely to be unaware of the enormous editorial differences between OAN and the newsletter. One, as noted, is in the identity of readership itself. Another, already implied, is in content; the Chronicle is written only for local readers, while OAN is written for readers slightly more than half of whom are overseas, mostly in Europe, a few in Asia and Africa. Also, OAN is unabashedly opinionated. But in writing, photographing, editing and producing the Chronicle, I make a point of observing the traditional practices of so-called “objective” journalism. Lastly, OAN is strictly on-line, while the Chronicle serves a readership so impoverished – and therefore so computer-deprived – it is entirely an on-paper publication.

Moreover, though in the Chronicle I make no secret of my bias in favor of elderly and disabled persons (note again the edition illustrated here), I also go out of my way to be fair to all parties involved whenever the subject so requires, as in the ongoing coverage of the procedures by which the Republican and Democratic parties will indicate their respective choices of candidates in this year's presidential election.

In contrast, OAN claims neither fairness nor objectivity. It is – and always has been – the on-line equivalent of an editorial opinion column, the uncensored variant of an award-winning and often controversial editorial column I wrote for a local newspaper from 1977 to 1981, with all of the characteristic op-ed strengths and weaknesses.

But the Democratic official in this story – the identity of whom I am deliberately withholding – is either indifferent to the night-and-day distinction between OAN and the Chronicle or hopes the obviously punitive discrimination against the the latter's readership will silence the emphatically anti-capitalist resistance of the former.

The reason I am not now identifying this Democratic official nor even the office this Democrat holds is my hope the information embargo will soon voluntarily end – or better yet, that I misunderstood these circumstances and the embargo turns out to have been as unreal or unintentional as it was undeniably apparent.  If not – that is, if my pleas to end it are refused or ignored – then full details will be forthcoming, complete with all supportive correspondence.

Meanwhile my strongest suspicion is this particular Democratic official has never before dealt with a real journalist; that is, has never interacted with someone who – unlike the craven propagandists now hired to serve mainstream media (which after all is the for-profit propaganda machine owned by the same obscenely wealthy One Percenters who own most U.S. politicians and therefore all USian governments at every level) – will aggressively ask relevant questions and equally aggressively expose those who refuse to answer.

Which, finally, brings us to the money grafs of Hartmann's essay:

Both parties right now face a great crisis of ideology as well as a great opportunity for reinvention, and whichever party first reinvents itself successfully will begin winning elections the way the Democrats did in the 1932-1968 era.

If neither does, our nation faces a massive crisis provoked by the loss of democratic representation of the majority of the American electorate.

The root cause of this crisis is the fact is that neither party today does much of anything for the bottom 90% of Americans.

Here too is my comment-thread response, not italicized as I have revised it for publication here:

This the best, most informative, most compelling essay I have yet seen under Hartmann's byline.

It is most assuredly also – assuming We the People somehow triumph, and “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth” – an essay truly for the history books.

Indeed I have only one contrary comment: it is not merely  the “emerging generation of Millennials” who have become what Hartmann labels “radical cynics.”

The same is true of many elderly people like myself, who have been painfully awakened to the deadly malevolence of the forces arrayed against us – especially as manifest in  the genocidal policies of the One Percent and their Ruling Class vassals toward any of us old enough to remember how much better life was under the New Deal.

Awakening to the true magnitude of the Evil that threatens us, we are also awakening to the fact that only Marxism – and only Marxism in its Leninist/Maoist variant – offers the ideological discipline essential to overthrow those tyrants who would either reduce us all to slavery or exterminate us all by the slow-motion genocide of "austerity."

We realize that the One Percenters – and their wholly owned  Ruling Class of politicians, bureaucrats, academics, military officers and police commanders – now regard our memories of radically better times as definitively subversive. That is one of the reasons they are trying to kills us by slashing Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and any other governmental stipends and services upon which capitalism forces us to depend for survival.

The other reason for their murderous intent – and it cannot be said too often or too harshly that is precisely what it is – is greed: they want for themselves the money and resources that now (barely) keep us alive.

Literally, our lives – and the lives of every member of the Working Class – are therefore at stake.

Moreover,  with the omnipotent secret police apparatus the One Percent has already built – total surveillance and federally militarized law enforcement – we need only look to our species' broader history to see, particularly in the example of Nazi Germany, the  irrefutable evidence that conventional USian politics are woefully inadequate. 

Given our dawning recognition that capitalism demands the embrace of limitless, mercilessly selfish, relentlessly greedy moral imbecility as its core principle,  we also question the effectiveness of any political ideology that does not as a first premise acknowledge capitalism as the most devastating, most potentially terminal affliction humanity has ever thrust upon itself.

Hence the “political revolution” Hartmann describes has indeed already begun. 

One hopes, as I surely do,  it will be accomplished via the ballot box. The alternative – our nation reduced to the ruin that now characterizes most of the Middle East – is too fearful to contemplate.

But knowing the murderous arrogance of the One Percent – demonstrated not just by such horrors as the Pinochet Regime in Chile but also by the emergence of death-squad police tactics here in our own homeland – it is tragically probable our smug and obscenely powerful overlords will reject a democratic solution here just as they rejected it in Iran in 1953 and in so many other places since then.

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Significantly, the secret-police/militarized-police apparatus already in place proves the Ruling Class intends in the near future to behave toward the rest of us exactly as it already behaves toward the African-American, Hispanic and First Nations population. That is proven by analysis of what in the military is called “enemy capabilities” (as demonstrated against Occupy and Black Lives Matter) and of “enemy intentions” (as demonstrated against Occupy and Black Lives Matter, and in killings at Ferguson, Baltimore, New York City etc.).

Those who question the appropriateness of my correct use of military terminology should note the U.S. military has already designated political protesters as “enemy forces.”

Thus the only question for those of us likely to be on the receiving end of the handgun rounds and rifle volleys is when the killing of innocents will become the national norm at any protest against capitalist or racist savagery.

My estimate, based on a lifetime of 76 years and a near-lifetime as both a journalist and a student of history, is that the obvious, no-longer-deniable death of U.S. representative democracy will be declared by the emergence of zero-tolerance, kill-all-resistance plutocracy soon after the 2016 elections, no matter whether the victor is Hillary Clinton nor the far more likely Donald Trump.

In this sense, there is no significant difference between Hillary and Trump: each is an unabashed fascist (although in deference to Trump it is worth noting he pledges to protect the very Social Security and Medicare programs Hillary wants to destroy) – and because each is an unabashed fascist, neither has any intention of preserving the freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.

Hence the  difference between the United States and fascist nations of the past will soon become more a matter of euphemisms and the identity of human targets than anything else.

In this context, history shows only the most disciplined resistance has any chance of achieving liberation. History also shows that only Marxism embodies that discipline. Thus, for example, were the opponents of Diem's viciously anti-Buddhist Roman Catholic (Christofascist) theocracy in South Vietnam compelled to adopt (and adapt) Marxism: no other ideology possessed the requisite discipline.

Remember too that Marxism failed in Russia not because of Marxism but because of the dark undertow of Russian history – the fact Russia had no democratic or even libertarian traditions to sustain its people's quest for liberation  against opportunists like Stalin.  

Marxism in the  United States – with its virtually ageless background of First Nations democratic traditions,  British Common Law,  241 years of constitutional governance and its ideology of representative democracy (no matter how the inherent principles have been nullified since 22 November 1963 by capitalism and its economic mandates for domestic enslavement and global conquest) – would prove to be a very different story.

Indeed it may be our only possibility of salvation – whether as an oppressed people or a species on the brink of environmental extinction.

Curiously – again with the subtle hint of near-eerieness that so often characterizes synchronicity – the response Hartmann's essay evoked from me seems, in retrospect, almost an elaboration on the response he engendered by an especially damning exposé last week  entitled “Businesses Exploit The Poor For a Buck”:

This sort of exploitation, the human equivalent of Exxon Valdez or Deepwater Horizon, is another example of why capitalism is the most malignant evil our species has ever inflicted on itself.

Indeed capitalism is so evil, its malevolence can only be described in religious terms. Capitalism is, in fact, the elevation of infinite greed to absolute virtue. In other words, just as religion exalts faith and piety above all other values, so does capitalism exalt selfishness and greed above other values.  As holiness is to religion, so greed is to capitalism.

What this means in practice is the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian value our species has ever articulated. Which, in turn, mandates the deliberate cultivation and imposition of moral imbecility – the psychological state that defines serial killers.

Thus capitalism is the mentality of a Ted Bundy or an Elizabeth Bathory deliberately and with malice aforethought applied not just to economics, but to governance and indeed to every other aspect of human experience.

No greater evil than capitalism has humanity ever knowingly inflicted on itself, and no greater evil has ever more relentlessly threatened human survival.

 

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TO FEND OFF the darkness that now ever more relentlessly encroaches upon all our lives, and therefore in keeping with my pledge to try to end these blog posts with some form of positive input, here is a nursery rhyme  – perhaps more suitable for adults than children – by the unabashedly pagan singer S. J. Tucker, whose voice in this performance is like a caress.

LB/22 March 2016

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