Loren Bliss: Dispatches from Dystopia

With Its Killer Cops and Killer Politicians, Today's U.S. Is as Relentlessly Deadly as a Planet-Sized Portuguese Man-O'-War

Genocidal Murder – Whether by Police and Soldiers Who Gun Us Down or by Politicians and Bureaucrats Who Maliciously Deny Us Medical Care and Other Life-Sustaining Stipends and Services – Is Now This Nation's Sole (and Soul) Defining Norm

THE WHITE COPS' war against African-American, First Nations and Hispanic peoples and the far broader war by Capitalists to rid the nation of all of us damned as no longer exploitable for profit won't end unless We the People wake up to the fact the targeting of minorities is but a “first-they-came-for-the-Jews” prelude to the targeting of us all. Then – although I doubt it will ever happen – we can maybe find in ourselves the courage to excise the infinite malignancy that has emerged as the defining characteristic of the United States,  whether in its murderous racism and class warfare at home or its increasingly apocalyptic aggression abroad.

I was seeking a vivid metaphor to illustrate the manifest horror the U.S. has become – the product of  Capitalism's inevitable and (since 22 November 1963), unrestrained and oft-accelerated metamorphosis into fascism. But I had nearly abandoned my quest when someone (most likely the Muse, as it was the Solstice, and the turns of the year are among the times she is most powerfully compelling), whispered in my mind's ear I should consider the deadly Portuguese Man-O'-War, the biological horror that, as the planet warms, increasingly infests the global oceans. I knew of the Man-O'-War from the portion of my childhood I spent in Florida; another child, a girl, a second-grader as I myself was then, dove off a boat-dock into a Man-O'-War's tentacles and died shrieking in unspeakable agony soon afterward. I had always thought of the creature that killed her as an especially venomous subspecies of jellyfish, but in the Muse-suggested reading linked immediately above, I learned the Man-O'-War is not a single organism but a group of microscopic creatures so ingrown “they are unable to survive independently, and therefore have to work together.” It thus operates exactly as the Capitalists and their politicians, judges and functionaries (including soldiers and cops) operate – as separate but vital parts of an infinitely merciless predatory being.

From this multiple-creatures-as-a-single-being perspective – thank you, O Muse – our present nadir of political hurly-burly is the consequence of a glaringly apparent sickness in one of these creatures, say an intestinal equivalent turned so explosively incontinent it is splattering us all with ruinously infective feces. But this is not to absolve the being's other parts. Just as the four parts of the Man-O'-War are co-equals in its toxicity, so are the four parts of the USian mechanism of Capitalist governance equally guilty in its own murderousness. The judge who acquits the cops who murders targeted minorities is as guilty of murder as the (white) Capitalists who own the politicians who write the law and appoint the judges who use the law as written to protect the cops and soldiers who do the actual killing. In other words, USian governance, like the Man-O'-War, is merely being itself – though the former is not only conscious of its deadliness but sadistically exalts in it, with the comment-thread of this report on the murder of Charleena Lyles  evidencing the same bottomlessly malevolent glee as the video vignette of Hillary Clinton cackling at Gaddafi's hideous death by anal impalement. At least by the time the follow-up story was published, the racists had seemingly departed, perhaps to another Ku Klux Klan meeting or JesuNazi revival.

Nor am I unaware of the tragic irony Ms. Lyles was slain in Seattle the same day Dispatches ran a reader's personal testament of white Seattle's racism – that had that reader not surrendered to her verbal assailants' threats to summon the security goons, a college library controversy over an allegedly overdue book might well have followed the deadly pattern exemplified by the outcome of Ms. Lyles' call for help to the federally militarized, storm-trooper-minded local police who now view any of us who are not obviously wealthy or at least of the professional-and-executive class as their enemy. Though even some whites are again beginning to awaken to the Portuguese Man-O'-War nature of USian governance, realizing that the minute those poison tentacles touch you, you're doomed, I doubt it will have any lasting impact. Note the fates of others who were so awakened, most notably Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Fred Hampton, and let us not forget James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.

 

MAINSTREAM MEDIA IGNORES HEALTH CARE DEFORM, BUT NONE DARE SAY WHY. All the broadly published complainants who justifiably denounce how mainstream media is suppressing the nauseating story of the Trumpcare atrocity nevertheless continue to robotically parrot the ever-more-obvious Big Lie of “our democracy.” Though they accurately report one of the many ugly truths that prove our alleged “democracy” is as dead  as the murdered President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, whose assassination undoubtedly signaled the USian pseudo-democracy's death, even the most avowedly Leftist of these many voluble critics cannot bear to admit what it means that mainstream media is owned by the same morally imbecilic plutocrats who own and control all USian government whether federal, state or local. Hence here are the forbidden facts explain mainstream media's deliberately deadly silence. Firstly, mainstream media has become the privately owned, for-profit equivalent of Josef Goebbels' infamous Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda; secondly, the mainstream media's refusal to expose the contents of what should properly be called the DEATH Act – Depriving Every American of Tenable Healthcare – proves why this mechanism of slow-motion genocide will soon become law. And why is that? Quite simply because it gives our Capitalist overlords – the mercilessly death-dealing, Portuguese-Man-o'-War-like despots who own the politicians and the media that covers the politicians' manifest malevolence – precisely what they want: our inescapable extermination, not only without the ignominy of death camps, but in a manner that allows these murders to be blamed not on the murderers but on those of us who are their victims.

 

JESUNAZI WAR AGAINST FEMALE SEXUALITY ESPECIALLY VICIOUS TO FOSTER TEENS, a disclosure of specifically focused USian bigotry that is no surprise to me given my encounter with its peripheral antagonisms as an unwanted child of divorced parents in the incipiently ChristoFascist South of the 1940s and 1950s. A judge blocked my father's attempt to abandon me in a state orphanage a few weeks after my officially insane mother tried to murder us both – until then the two of us were father-and-son close, but ever afterward he obviously feared I bore what he believed was my mother's genetic taint. One of the more embittering lessons of that era was how all but one of my public-school teachers, even in high school, singled me out for zero-tolerance disciplinary scrutiny as soon as my scholastic records revealed my familial circumstances. (I say “public school” because apart from my high-school senior English, speech and drama teacher, a dear dear woman from New York named Dorothy Merritt who is one of my childhood's three female saviors, the only exceptions to this rule of hatefulness were the nuns of my four years in a parochial school, strict though emotionally supportive, Sisters of Mercy who most assuredly lived up to their name.) In any case, based on my experiences, I can only imagine the schoolhouse horrors to which foster children are subjected, all the more so – given USia's run-amok misogyny – to those who are female.

 

AND WHY ALL THIS EVER-MORE-RAMPANT SAVAGERY? Predictably, an Africa-American writer – the bold journalist to whom we are connected by the second link in this essay's opening paragraph – dares answer this question with unflinching honesty:

“Capitalist logic does not allow for surplus populations to be sustained for long. They (which should be read “we”) either have to be reabsorbed into the value producing mechanisms of the system, or disposed of.“

There is also USia's unique, Christianity-based hatred and contempt for people who are mentally disabled (i.e., allegedly cursed by god), the resultant malicious indifference expressed even by the policies dictated by today's allegedly “progressive” politicians.

Bottom line, we white members of the 99 percent goddamn well better learn to listen to our African-American sisters and brothers, because what has been the deadly norm for them since before the dawn of the Empire – and for every other designated minority since then – will soon be the norm for all the rest of us as well.

 

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SOLSTICE REFLECTIONS: HOW THE CHRISTIANS FUCKED UP THE CALENDAR TO ORPHAN US FROM MOTHER EARTH. If you pay any attention to what happens in the botanical, astronomical and meteorological realms – and if you have any notion of being a real dialectical materialist, you most assuredly should observe all environmental phenomena – you're probably aware that for those of us who live in the Northern Hemisphere (and especially for those of us who live north of about 40 degrees North Latitude or in mountainous regions down to about 37 N), the present-day official seasons are as nonsensical as the claim we USians live in a democracy. For example, Summer, which our calendars tell us started only yesterday, has in fact been with us since the beginning of May, just as Autumn, which our calendars inform us starts on 23 September, is typically first evident in August. Likewise the differences between calendar winter, which starts on the 21 December, versus real Winter, which starts around Hallowe'en, and calendar spring, beginning 20 March, versus genuine Spring, which starts closer to 1 February.

I became vaguely aware of these vexatious differences as a child, when I planted my first flowers and vegetables, but I did not understand the misogyny and ecophobia that lurks beneath our modern-day seasonal boundaries until I read The White Goddess, Robert Graves' aptly subtitled Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (International Authors:1948; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York: 1966.)  Graves makes it clear our relentlessly phenomenological pre-Christian kindred formulated a calendar on the basis of untold millennia of observation that not only depicted all the stages of the environmental year but was, as well, the basis of what in all probability was our European subspecies' original alphabet, the origins of which Alexander Marshack has traced at least as far back as 30,000 BCE, for which see his epic work The Roots of Civilization (Moyer Bell Ltd., London: 1991).

Based on these references and subsequent scholarly reconstructions by modern Goddess-centered Pagans, the old calendar and its resurrected variants begin spring on Imbolg (1 or 2 February). This makes the Vernal Equinox or Ostara a mid-Spring festival thus conceptually akin to mid-Summer, mid-Autumn and mid-Winter. These old/new calendars begin summer on 1 May (Beltane in Celtic realms, Walpurgisnacht in Germanic realms). They celebrate the Summer Solstice as Midsummer's Dav or Letha, when the sun god turns south and begins his annual decline. They mark the beginning of Autumn on 1 August, Lughnassadh or Bron Trograine. The Autumnal Equinox or Mabon is the mid-Autumn festival. Lastly on this calendar, Hallowe'en or Samhain is the night the year dies and its male spirit flees to the netherworld. Many people – myself among them (even as a child when I presumably knew nothing of the associated lore) – feel the sudden unmistakably saddening sense of absence that seems to define its immediate aftermath. Hence “Hallowe’en: the Morning After,” the (attempted) poem I wrote in my journal on 1 November 1979:

Jack-O-Lantern shards amidst

The red and yellow leaves

Have lent their frost-diluted colors

To the dawn as if

Perhaps in mercy and regret

They would sooth a sky

Now emptied of all birds

Save crows. The year is dead;

Its spark of life has

Vanished from the chill-damp air:

The barn is but a tomb, the field

A barren nest, the land itself

Gone hollow as an empty skull

                   till Spring.

Then on this calendar comes Winter Solstice – Yule – when the year is gloriously reborn from the womb of the Goddess, and from our Northern Hemisphere perspective the sun turns north again and once more begins his growth to Midsummer strength.

Why was all this lovely and poetically compelling symbolism cast away? Because from the perspective of the Abrahamic patriarchs – the misogynistic authorities of Judaism, Christianity and Islam who have conquered most of this planet – Mother Earth is the ultimate “unfit parent.” Not only do they damn her as a female (and therefore forever cursed by their sadistic god), she is also condemned as an unabashed slut, a cosmic harlot whom even the most minimal recognition will empower to reclaim her children and lead all of us, especially her daughters, back into the allegedly deadly alleged sins of sexual self-discovery.

Verily, may our memories of the brightest light nurture us through the waxing darkness until the sun turns north again.

LB/21 June 2017.

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Most of This Is So Dystopian I Can't Think of a Proper Title

(WARNING TO AOL SUBSCRIBERS: America On Line [AOL] email is apparently blocking transmission of anything that bears my name or byline. Welcome to the post-Net-Neutrality USian JesuNazi Empire.) 

 

THE COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY CANDIDACY OF BERNIE SANDERS: Black Agenda Report's Glen Ford exposes the pseudo-socialist as “the hero of the phony left.” An ultimate example of speaking truth to power – and therefore a de facto obituary for the United States.

 

BASEBALL SHOOTING PROVOKES A SWARM OF COMMENTARIES, most of which are predictable polemics. But here,  here and here are three that rise above the numbskull norm. Meanwhile, of course, the JesuNazis continue their war of intimidation against anyone who dares question their agenda of genocide and theocracy.

 

GRENFEL AS A MICROCOSM OF CAPITALISM'S MACROCOSM OF DEATH: “Austerity,” says Russell Brand, “is not frugality, it is brutality. It is violence.” Examining “The Politics Behind the Fire,” a TruthDig report cites a member of parliament who calls the deadly blaze “corporate manslaughter.”

 

ANOTHER ASPECT OF THE CAPITALIST MURDER MACHINE is the USian DEATH Act – “Denying Every American Tenable Healthcare,” the real purpose of Trumpcare, which as we all know is being written in defiant, unprecedented secrecy precisely as befits the mechanism of genocide not even its harshest mainstream critics dare say it is. Meanwhile those who offer hope as the dope-iate of the masses  circulate petitions in the utterly moronic belief such feeble gestures might stop the USian One Percenters and their Ruling Class vassal-whores from enacting this latest scheme to exterminate all of us deemed no longer exploitable for profit. Have no doubt: Trumpcare will become law, and millions of us – especially those of us who are elderly and/or disabled (not to mention those of us who are female or LGBTQ) – will be slain by healthcare denial malevolently designed to blame us for our own deaths.

 

REFLECTIONS ON USIAN IMPERIAL RUSSOPHOBIA: Five thought-provoking links here, here,  here, here and here.

 

PREDICTABLY, THE JESUNAZIS AGAIN ESCALATE THEIR WAR AGAINST WOMEN, this time with yet another slash at sexual freedom.  Meanwhile, college-debt data reveals one of the most crippling financial burdens inflicted on women by the USian patriarchy's relentless misogyny whether theocratic or secular.

 

DID THE CIA POISON HUGO CHAVEZ WITH CANCER CELLS? Eve Golinger reveals “there is a very strong possibility” that is what happened.

 

WHY I STILL PAY MY UNION DUES: the National Writers Union – which as a consequence of the One Percent's ever-intensifying war against organized labor is a subset of the United Auto Workers – does an admirable job of going after the (many) publishers who try to fuck us writers and photographers out of our pay.

 

RELEVANT NOTES ON COMMUNITY ORGANIZING: Yes, Mother Jones has proven itself to be part of the pseudo-Left, and I have little doubt its long-range purpose is to co-opt and neutralize grassroots radicalism by turning it into recruitment for the Democratic (sic) Party, but this report's notes on community organizing may nevertheless be useful.

 

*****

 

A LETTER FROM A READER AND FRIEND, a woman of color, her name withheld lest her story subject her to racist death threats or worse:

“This item in Dispatches (14 June 2017) caught my eye”:

“ALLEGEDLY SUPER-TOLERANT SEATTLE LIBRARY TARGETS TRANSGENDER PERSON. The headline says it all, in which context review the egregious JesuNazi ideology announced here.

“In 2009, I was an English tutor at South Seattle Community College, home to one of the most diverse student bodies in Seattle with a large population of East Asians and Somalis. However, most of the teachers and staff were white.

“I had a very difficult computer coding class and our teacher told us the library kept one copy of the book we needed that we could use for free. Otherwise, it was like $60 or something. The catch was that it had to be returned within 24 hours. So i checked out the book. The next day, I realized I didn’t have class so I emailed the library and asked if I could bring that book in the next day—when I had class again. The person wrote back and said, ‘yes.’ When I arrived on campus the following day, I stupidly went to the library first. I needed the book for class so I thought I’d ask the staff if I could return the book in an hour when class was over. Well, all hell broke loose. 

“The first guy I approached, a young white guy, glared at me, stared at the book in my hand and yelled out loud, ‘that book was due yesterday! Give me that book! Give me that book!’ I had no idea who he was as I had never dealt with him before so I turned away and walked towards the desk where two white librarians (one male, one female) were sitting. I had spoken to them previously about the book. So when I saw them, I asked, ‘does this guy work here? Why is he chasing me?’ To my utter horror, they said the same exact thing, ‘that book was due yesterday! Give that book to us! Give it now or we’ll call security!’ I was dumbfounded and told them I had gotten an email saying I could turn the book in a day late. The male said, ‘we don’t know who told you that. That book was due yesterday!’ Again, he threatened to call security.

“Of course I gave them the book. When I entered my classroom, I said out loud, ‘I can’t believe they were going to call security on me for bringing a book in one day late!’ My teacher looked up from his computer and said, ‘I just got the email. You’ve been banned from the library.’ In that moment, I knew it was racial discrimination. I had faced it so many times before in Seattle.

“So I went to the human rights officer, or whatever her title was. She helped me craft what turned out to be a 4-page letter. She told me we would set up a meeting once she got a reply. Well, she got a reply all right. The guy went ballistic. He accused me of turning him into a nervous wreck by saying he racially discriminated against me, that from now on he wouldn’t be able to talk to any of the students of color because something he would say might be construed as bigotry. Seriously, he turned the whole thing around on me, blamed the victim.

“What’s more, the human rights officer advised me to drop the case because she thought it wouldn’t be worth it to try to get an apology out of him. The dean had already apologized and the so-called human rights officer thought that was as much as we would get.

“As I did more research into the guy, I realized those state jobs are pretty cushy. Imagine being a librarian at a community college. The guy doesn’t do squat all day, has a nice paycheck, bennies and a nice retirement package. That’s the problem with people in those positions. They cannot be fired.

“I also worked at Seattle Central Community College back in 1989-1990 and had similar experiences there. Those incidents, and there have been many, many, many, are what made me leave Seattle so many times. I only came back because I would miss being around my Mom. But I will never live in that hateful, racist, ‘let’s pretend we’re liberal progressives’ cowtown again!

“By the way – apropos your reporting on the theocrats – it's hard to believe people actually think ‘god’ wrote a book, published it and distributed it to hotels around the world. LOL”.

MY RESPONSE: Not at all surprised. When I was there, 1972 through 1976, Seattle was the most coldly unfriendly, viciously xenophobic, malevolently bourgeois place I've ever lived. I was the founding photographer of The Seattle Sun, a very fine, Village-Voice-class alternative newspaper that died in 1982. Hence at the height of The Sun's too-brief existence I was kind of a local art star, but I was never forgiven – and more often than not openly despised – for the fact I am from “Jew York” (as in “why don't you go back there where you belong”). I was also damned for being outspokenly Marxian; for my Pagan belief if there is a deity, surely the proper pronoun is She; and most of all for being “too intellectual.” Later, c. 1979 when I was lovers with an African-American university professor, Seattle was one of the places she and I most assuredly did not go. (Self-consciously Working-Class Tacoma, where each of us lived, was notably less hostile toward us as a couple.) Seattle, at least as I knew it, is to “progressive” as a used toilet brush is to “unsoiled” – though I'm told it's gotten less obviously bigoted thanks to Kshama Sawant.

LB/18 June 2017

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No More Doubt Sessions Plans Total War on Marijuana Users

WAPO EXPOSES AG'S TARGETING OF MEDICAL MARIJUANA USERS. The Washington Post proves beyond any doubt – because patients (and cancer patients in particular) are by far the most research-legitimized consumers of the drug – that Sessions intends a zero-tolerance crusade against all marijuana users just as I predicted last week.

 

MOREOVER, THE FACT MOST CONGRESSIONAL DELEGATES NOW SAY THEY FAVOR LEGALIZATION IS MEANINGLESS for at least five reasons. (Note: the following repetitions of the “last week” link are deliberate, intended to facilitate ease of access to the reports so cited.) Firstly, Christian dogma damns marijuana as the world's most powerful “gateway drug” – not because it leads to other drugs, but precisely as explained by the plethora of material to which I linked last week – because marijuana's metaphysical properties break the stranglehold of fear and intimidation by which Christianity's sadistic god controls the minds of the millions of USians raised in its malevolent theologies of eternal damnation. Which of course is the real reason Sessions and his theocratic ilk are so adamantly opposed to marijuana and so fanatically intent on eliminating all its users: they regard marijuana as the primary key for opening the psychic door that – because it is proven to intensify sensuality and thereby nullify sexual taboos – grants unlimited access to all the normal human experiences Christianity denounces as “pagan” or “Satanic” and therefore forbids as “heresy.” Secondly, thanks to Barack the Betrayer's 2012 National Defense Appropriations Act, the imperial war machine can now be used as a kick-the-door-in/murder-everybody-in-the-dwelling Gestapo whenever any federal department so chooses; as I speculated last week, one of the top-secret motives for the unprecedented increase in the war-machine budget is undoubtedly the Trump Regime's intent to use its obediently deadly military to invade legal-marijuana states and thereby suppress any and all use of the drug. Note too that massacres of marijuana users – which the empire's long record of atrocities-on-command prove the USian military will enthusiastically inflict whenever so ordered – would save the regime millions of dollars in court and confinement costs. Plus the regime could also use the de facto martial law of its war on marijuana users as an excuse for declaring full-scale national martial law and thereby facilitating the mass arrest and indefinite detention of all its opponents. Thirdly, the regime's gigantic hike in military spending is a deliberately inflicted death sentence intended to end forever the few remaining government socioeconomic assistance programs including food stamps, veterans' benefits, Medicaid and probably even Medicare. Hence the impending no-quarter war against marijuana users – precisely as I pointed out last week – serves the theocratic agenda of eliminating all public-assistance programs save the “faith-based” charities that demand you either publicly convert to Christianity or be denied food, prescription drugs, rent money and whatever other life-sustaining stipends and services the local Bible-thumpers might deign to provide. Fourthly, crushing the legal marijuana industry, which as reported last week will slash at least $1.4 billion from annual state budgets, will also – again exactly as the JesuNazis intend – nullify any ability these states might have to cope with the regime's total elimination of federal social-service funds. Fifthly, the Republican Party is proven to be the One Percent's chosen mechanism for imposing national Christian theocracy. This means the JesuNazi tyrants who control the party at all levels (and have done so, as the linked material indicates, since before the turn of the century), will soon arm-twist all the Republican politicians whether national, state or local (and many secretly JesuNazi Democrats as well, e.g. Hillary Clinton et al) into supporting the theocratic demand for maximum-sentence prosecution of marijuana users and suppliers. It is therefore literally suicidal for marijuana users and suppliers to underestimate the Trump Regime's power to impose its malevolent schemes and achieve its long-range intentions.

 

 

APROPOS THE BASEBALL SHOOTING, LET US NOT FORGET THE REICHSTAG FIRE, the caution I first voiced in the comments section of Salon's report on how the ChristoFascists aka “Republicans” immediately began using the incident  to inflame the Right's already violent hatred of the Left, whether the real (i.e., Marxian) Left or the “progressive” and Democratic (sic) Party pseudo-Left. (Because Salon is so clogged with advertising its reports take as long as 10 or even 15 minutes to download to readability, here is the full text of what I said: “Lest it be lost in all the hurly burly evoked by this shooting, let us not forget [A]-the Reichstag Fire; [B]-how it was used to nullify the notably democratic Weimar Republic Constitution; and [C] the thoroughly documented fact Hitler is boundlessly admired by Trump and his JesuNazi supporters, who since the inauguration include the heads of the USian Empire's war machine and its secret police agencies.”) Indeed, I can easily envision the Trump Regime immediately modifying the federal “instant check”  system to prohibit firearms purchases by anyone associated with the Left as it is most broadly defined, to include the Pink Pistols LGBTQ self-defense organization and even all members of labor unions.

 

USIAN CAPITALISTS ESCALATE THEIR ALREADY-DECLARED WAR AGAINST SICK, OLD AND DISABLED PEOPLE. Obviously the insurance cartel's whores in the Trump Regime and in Congress – Democrat and Republican alike – intend by any means possible to crush the “subversive” notion healthcare is a human right and thereby preserve the uniquely USian notion healthcare is (exclusively) a privilege of wealth. Meanwhile the Senate's unprecedented secrecy– another example of the extent to which USian tyranny is now unapologetically routine – denies us advance warning of the theocratic horrors taking shape as the regime's healthcare policy even as we already see its (viciously JesuNazi) impact in the USian Homeland's rural regions. As to who is to blame, note how it was the Democratic (sic) regime of Barack the Betrayer that cleared the way for the genocidal termination of Medicaid.

 

FIREARMS OWNERS AND SECOND AMENDMENT SUPPORTERS BEWARE a maliciously deceptive campaign by the One Percenters' lavishly funded forcible-civillian-disarment organization that dishonestly calls itself “Everytown for Gun Safety” and works to impose mandatory pacifism and thus compulsory victimhood on the entire USian civilian population. The campaign emails' statement says, “with one click, add your name to a petition that will be delivered to federal legislators” – and in this instance it is literally true, because if you so much as open the email, your name is added to a petition to congress to enact the deceptively named “Disarm Hate Act” – which would mandate kick-your-door-in, murder-you-and-your-family disarmament of anyone convicted of participating in any sort of resistance, most assuredly including passive resistance, to the escalating JesuNazi (i.e, “religious”) violence against abortion clinics, anti-Trump-Regime rallies and union-sanctioned picketing.

 

COMET DISCOVERY KILLS LAST HOPE OF EXTRATERRESTRIAL SALVATION. Based on the content of modern science fiction, invasion by enlightened aliens is humanity's last remaining hope for rescue from the patriarchal mandate for planetary self-destruction. But now that too is gone forever. (For the philosophical and psychological details of the self-destruction mandate – a variant of which is the USian “better-dead-than-Red” policy – see Robert Graves' The White Goddess and Barbara Mor's The Great Cosmic Mother.)

 

ALLEGEDLY SUPER-TOLERANT SEATTLE LIBRARY TARGETS TRANSGENDER PERSON. The headline says it all, in which context review the egregious JesuNazi ideology announced here.

 

THE CLARITY OF THE REVOLUTIONARY MIND: Paul Street's suggestions for “12 Blasphemous Thoughts” to contemplate this summer as the Trump Regime marches us in lockstep toward boastfully acknowledged tyranny.

 

*****

 

NO RANT (OR ANY OTHER EDITORIAL COMMENT) TODAY FOR TWO REASONS. One, the news is so breathtakingly bad, no comment is necessary. Two, because this is the week I produce the monthly newsletter for the 90-unit lower-income senior housing complex in which I live, I simply don't have time to be contemplative – especially about events that are already paralytically depressing.

LB/14 June 2017

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Racism, Ecophobia, Misogyny, Homophobia: Trump Regime Imposes Theocracy to Reward Fanatical Christian Supporters

RESEARCH REPORT: TRUMP/PENCE POLICIES AND APPOINTMENTS CONFIRM THE UNPRECEDENTED TRIUMPH OF WHITE CHRISTIAN TYRANNY. We are all depressingly familiar with the ever-lengthening litany of Trump Regime atrocities against women, racial minorities, LGBTQ people and the environment. What most of us have yet to recognize – largely because mainstream media has obscured it – is how the normalization of bigotry and ignorance fostered by these atrocities is a rightfully terrifying, perhaps pivotal victory in the fanatical white Christians' 82-year campaign to reduce the United States to zero-tolerance theocracy. Analysis of the Trump/Pence record not only proves the regime is the theocrats' newest weapon; it also proves it's the theocrats' most powerful weapon ever – a weapon that is already turning the nation into a realm potentially far more murderous than the sexist dystopia foreseen by the now-obviously-prophetic Margaret Atwood in her book The Handmaid's Tale.

Not that we weren't forewarned, even by the mainstream media propaganda machine which, more than a year ago, published a subtly ominous piece by Jeff Sharlet that presciently labeled Trump “an American preacher...who sells revenge.” Sharlet's impressionistic text is underscored by Devin Yalkin's superb black-and-white documentary photographs, images every bit as frightening as pictures of the German Nazi and USian Ku Klux Klan rallies of the last century. But most of us dismissed this outstanding work – if indeed we read and/or viewed it at all – because of its source; we rejected it as just another dose of the Hillaryite lies and disinformation with which we were then being force-fed.

These sorts of cautionary reports continued into the early weeks of this year, with one such piece accurately describing the Trump/Pence diarchy as the Religious Right's “Trojan Horse.” But the message has since been lost, whether deliberately, in sleight-of-hand misdirection (as by the red herring of Russiagate),  or merely by accident due to priorities imposed on often-overworked journalists. In any case, all such disclosures of theocratic schemes and victories have seemingly stopped – perhaps proof of the enormous behind-the-scenes power wielded by the obscenely wealthy, implicitly fascist, openly Hitler-admiring Christian cabal exposed by Sharlet  in The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Harper 2008).

Sharlet's exposé of the Family is significant here for several reasons, not the least the Family's bipartisan malignancy as revealed by its connection to Hillary Clinton and other Democrats. But its main relevance begins with the Family's pivotal role in the vicious misogyny of the Hobby-Lobby decision.  (This same URL exposes a global, avowedly murderous campaign against any of us who are LGBTQ and – to exemplify the group's malevolence – cites a Family associate who argues that “disobedient and morally incorrigible children should be executed, per Leviticus 20:9,” one of the books of the Bible's Old Testament.) For it is the Hobby-Lobby hatefulness that links the secretive forces of the Family and its often-clandestine operations directly to the Trump/Pence regime.  Given how Hobby-Lobby founder and Chief Executive David Green had previously denounced Trump and endorsed the outspoken theocrat Marco Rubio – given too how Green's October 2016 turnabout to Trump was widely publicized by Rightist media but virtually ignored by alternative and mainstream media – I cannot but wonder if the entire Rubio-to-Trump sequence is yet another demonstration of the Family's venomously manipulative prowess. And I doubt we'll ever know how much bribery and ideological arm-twisting the Family did – and is doing – on the regime's behalf.

 

Chris Hedges, who is perhaps the boldest and most articulate of the very few genuine socialists still allowed relatively widespread USian publication, identifies the infamously Machiavellian Mike Pence as the regime's ideological authority, a role other sources suggest is far more vast,  possibly including all the executive powers of governance.  Hedges meanwhile has defined the whole regime as a theocratic superweapon for the imposition of “Christianized fascism.” He thus implicitly confirms the accuracy of my description of these Christian fanatics and their millions of white supporters as JesuNazis and/or ChristoFascists.

Though until now I have tended to use the two terms interchangeably, I should probably reserve the JesuNazi label specifically for those who demand the murder of LGTBQ people, non-Caucasian minorities, disobedient children, sexually active unmarried women and anyone else they deem appropriate sacrificial victims for their Divine Sadist. The term ChristoFascist I will use more as a generalized collective noun that parallels the use of “fascism” in 20th Century historical texts, i.e., “the rise of fascism in Europe” as etymologically equivalent to “the rise of ChristoFascism in the USian Homeland.”

***

UNTIL A NUDGE from the Muse prompted me to research the Christian Right's response to Trump's fuck-the-environment withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords, which is viewed by our (former?) allies as a fuck-you to them as well  (the link is to a German newspaper and Europe's justifiably furious reaction), I too failed to recognize the magnitude of the theocracy factor that unifies all the Trump/Pence outrages. I knew it was there  and I know its oppressive history;  I had written about it many times. Moreover, with my academic background in ancient mythology and modern (Gaian) paganism, I assumed I was better informed than most as to the capabilities and intentions of the theocratic threat.  But in truth, as I discovered from the research I am sharing in this post, I was scarcely less ignorant than the patient who ignores a persistent but seemingly minor pain only to learn it's source is cancer grown terminal from lack of timely diagnosis – an apt analogy given the stealth by which the theocrats have already abolished a large measure of women's sexual freedom. In all probability – by their now-absolute and effectively permanent control of the Supreme Court – they have conquered our nation, the hideous truth epitomized by the regime's appointment of Hobby-Lobby's Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. As to the reign of terror the court's 5-4 conservative (i.e. ChristoFascist) majority portends, go here,  here,  here and here.

Pew, by far the most reliable of pollsters, tells us the white Christian fanatics who voted for Trump are now the regime's most die-hard supporters, which should come as no surprise. Nor should we question Pew's disclosure that at least 80 percent of these fanatics, defined as self-proclaimed “evangelicals,” cast their ballots for Trump.What is questionable is the Pew assertion these white “evangelicals” make up only 26 percent of the electorate – this in a nation wherein another poll tells us 63 percent of the adult citizens believe the Bible is literally true, precisely the conviction that is the doctrinal epicenter of ChristoFascism. In this context, the fact 58 percent of the white voters opted for Trump suggests the true “evangelical” percentage is much greater than Pew reports. Given the accuracy for which Pew is deservedly famous, it also suggests Pew's pollsters have been deliberately misled – that a significant and perhaps growing number of “evangelicals” (who should more properly be described as ChristoFascist revolutionaries), are following the Family's directive to keep their fanaticism secret (for which see the Jeff Sharlet links above).

In my quest for information about what I first believed was the theocratic threat and now with real fear recognize as the fiat accompli of theocratic conquest, I visited a number of URLs that did not fit into this text as it evolved into its final form but are nevertheless good sources of relevant information. Hence the following, a hyperlinked summary of each URL's contents:

Thoroughly detailed and sickeningly illustrated, a long history of the murderous white racism inherent in Christianity.

An articulate young woman's discovery of “Christian Identity: the scary religion you don't know about.”

The Christian Identity Movement's own statement of (JesuNazi) dogma. Again from the JesuNazis, their own list of Christian Identity websites.

An up-to-date, nationwide list of hate groups as compiled by the peerless Southern Poverty Law Center, plus the SPLC hate map showing where these groups are headquartered and where they are active.

***

BECAUSE I BEGAN the 40-odd hours of research that birthed this post with an inquiry into the details of Trump's rejection of the Paris Accords, it is only proper I end the resultant text at this same topical milestone.

We should never imagine the Paris agreement was an apex of environmental sanity. But it was at least a starting point, a tiny first step away from 6000 years of ruinous patriarchal misogyny – the “Laws of God” that reduce Mother Nature, her human daughters and indeed the entire spectrum of “unGodly” existence to targets for rape and exploitation at the whim of any “Godly” man – the very dogma that is turning our Earth into a bug planet.

Thus after the Muse-nudge I went looking for ChristoFascists who would be celebrating the regime's decision as a personal triumph. It turned out to be a difficult and time-consuming search, both because of Internet specificity – get the words of your inquiry even slightly wrong and you get nothing useful – and what seems to me to be the increasing disappearance of source material with which I was already familiar. Intensifying censorship? I cannot say.

But it was clear I should have been paying much closer attention to the theocratic threat. Though like so many of us, I had bought into the Big Lie cunningly fed us a few years ago that even the more fanatical Christians were finally embracing environmentalism  – perhaps still another deception promulgated by the Family. Soon I realized I had woefully underestimated both the extent to which Trump's rejection of the Paris Accords is being celebrated,  and the extent to which the ChristoFascists had remained as rabidly anti-environmental as they were 47 years ago, when church reader-boards in rural Washington state proclaimed the ubiquitous license-to-kill declaration “God Hates Hippies,” its implicitly deadly message as often as not bolstered by assertions “Organic Is Satanic” or “Environmental Means Of The Devil,” and we communards – thus under constant threat from armed attack by the JesuNazi vigilantes so inflamed – kept loaded rifles and shotguns close at hand even as we sought to immerse ourselves in the wondrously pagan Zen of back-to-the-land mindfulness.

Here in closing is another list of informative URLs:

The ChristoFascist Cornwall Alliance sets out its credo for “Subduing and Ruling the Earth to the Glory of God.”

An analysis written in 2010 wrongfully dismisses the magnitude of the ChristoFascist threat even as it notes how creationism has morphed into anti-environmentalism.

More minimizing of ChristoFascist fanaticism in a 31 May 2017 piece that portrays “white evangelicals” as mostly indifferent to climate change.

A Republican congressman, himself obviously a ChristoFascist, assures us we need not worry about climate change because “God will take care of it.”

As to what is prompting all this fanaticism, a widely read Pacific Northwest blog hypothesizes an omnipresent “fear of pagan socialism” fuels the ChristoFascist reaction to the resurrection of the Mother Earth symbol combined with the anti-capitalist mandate implicit in environmentalism.

I could add a couple of comments to this last link, specifically (1)-that the connection between environmentalism and socialism – obvious to any of us who recognize Capitalism as environmentalism's most deadly enemy and socialism as environmentalism's only potential savior – is surely underscored by the fact Earth Day and Vladimir Lenin's birthday share the same 22 April date, the latter in 1870, the former exactly a century later in 1970; and (2)-that the symbols of socialist revolution, the red star and the hammer and sickle, have their counterparts in ancient pagan symbolism: the red pentagram of the Great Goddess at her Midsummer height of power; the hammer of the Divine Smith or Thor; the sickle that denotes both the Barley Mother as Reaper and the sickle's blade as the waning crescent moon, harbinger of death and resurrection or reincarnation. I think it was Carl Jung said such symbols act on the human subconscious even when their meaning is consciously unknown. No wonder socialism scares the ChristoFascists shitless.

That said, I dearly hope these disclosures will suffice to at last awaken us to the terrifying extent the theocrats have already triumphed and our desperate need to organize in resistance. If we fail to achieve the requisite solidarity, I have no doubt our fate will duplicate that of the millions of First Nations peoples slain during the 522 years of Christian genocide that began with Columbus and continue even now at places like Standing Rock and in the slave-pens of the for-profit prisons.

***

Damn few additional news items today, mostly because of the time and space consumed by the above, but here are four I adjudge to be most important:

ANTI-TRUMP PROTESTORS AND JOURNALISTS FACE 70-80 YEAR PRISON TERMS. While lawyers say they'll appeal, the ChristoFascist Trump/Pence regime's control of the Supreme Court and the Justice Department makes such action pointless and reduces any associated hopefulness to folly. Welcome to the Fourth Reich – the USiaNazi reality far too many of us still fail to acknowledge.

MILITARIZED COPS CONTINUE TO EXTERMINATE BLACK CHILDREN. Reader Supported News reprinted this New York Daily News report – yes USian life has become so viciously oppressive  even some of the mainstream media is becoming radicalized – which means a lot of us have probably read this story, but it's important both for its content and what it says about journalistic reawakening, so I'm posting it here also.

NEARLY 12,000 PEOPLE HOMELESS IN SEATTLE AND SURROUNDING COUNTY. Another example of Capitalism in action – the same Capitalism the ChristoFascists claim is the inviolable will of their “loving” god.

MORE THREATS OF USIANAZI VIOLENCE: one such threat closes Evergreen State College, and a shitstorm of racist and homophobic hate cancels a book tour.

The incidence of such violence is skyrocketing, as it no doubt will do for years to come, and it's already obvious the cops usually side with its JesuNazi perpetrators, yet some of us on the Left still cling to the suicidal notion the Bill of Rights has only nine meaningful amendments.

LB/4 June 2017

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Violence Flairs as Racists Secede into Ideological Confederacy

WILL CIVIL WAR II (OR THE SECOND USIAN REVOLUTION) BEGIN IN PORTLAND? With the local Republican Party chairman admitting he is organizing a de facto Schutzstaffel  for “protecting” racist rallies, it is entirely legitimate for Dispatches to verbalize the question no other USian journalist has dared ask in print. Ergo: is the skyrocketing incidence of attacks on minorities by USiaNazi terrorists another Fort Sumter  – the opening volleys of a conflict that will sunder the North American population as violently did the Revolution of 1776 and the Civil War of 1861-1865? (The Sumter analogy is indeed appropriate, for the advent of the Trump Regime is itself a symbolic act of secession, the founding of an already murderous racist confederacy that is ideological rather than geographic  and – far more irresistibly than the confederacy of 1861 – spans the entire USian homeland.) That said, I believe the answer to this formerly unthinkable question will be determined by the Trump Regime itself, and given  the outspoken anti-minority hatefulness  of Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, I am not optimistic about the likelihood of national peace. (Indeed it may be this looming prospect of civil war and/or revolution that underlies the Empire's increasingly provocative warmongering against Russia:  start a war, the conventional “wisdom” claims, and you unite the country – the very belief  that was Tsarist Russia's final undoing.)

PORTLAND'S LEFT ORGANIZES AS USIANAZI VIOLENCE FLARES NATIONWIDE. With Portland's UsiaNazis granted what amounts to a mobilization permit  by the Trump Regime, the hitherto less-than-unified local Left pledges defiance. Meanwhile a white racist murdered a young Native American  in Washington state; a session of the Texas legislature erupted into the equivalent of a barroom brawl after a Republican representative said he sicced federal secret police on demonstrators;  and in what is almost certainly another act of Rightist violence, a Kentucky daily newspaper office was vandalized by gunfire.

SIMILARLY ORGANIZED FASCIST VIOLENCE CONTINUES IN BERKELEY, not-so-gentle reminders of which are here  and here.

BUT WHEN WILL THE LEFT REJECT ITS SUICIDAL SELF-BETRAYAL of opposition to the Second Amendment – a classic example of how we have been manipulated by the Ruling Class into cutting our own throats – and instead follow the (oft-suppressed) example of the Deacons for Defense and Justice.  With the federal government – and therefore also the federalized local cops – now condemning Leftist activists as terrorists,  we are as likely to be denied police protection as were African-Americans and civil rights activists of all races in the Jim Crow South. The lesson taught us by the Deacons?  Take firearms safety classes, purchase weapons, obtain marksmanship and self-defense training and practice until you are proficient, not  – obviously – for purposes of political action, (for which we should always embrace non-violence), but to protect ourselves, our loved ones and our homes from the Rightist retaliation that too often follows public activism. To paraphrase a National Safety Council slogan from my youth, “the life you save from Rightist goons may be your own.” I need not add that had one or more of the Portland martyrs  been armed, the accused murderer might be in his grave rather than bellowing USiaNazi slogans in a courtroom much as he did at a rally a few days before the killings.  

REFRESHER: HOW THE EMPIRE SUPPRESSES THE KING ASSASSINATION TRUTH, a 17-year-old ConsortiumNews report that's again relevant  due to the murderous racism resurrected and mainstreamed by the Trump Regime.

KUDOS TO THE STAND FOR ITS DAILY SUMMARIES OF RELEVANT EVENTS. It's the Washington State Labor Council's on-line newspaper – which often includes a superb summary of the day's national news – and its URL is here.  Recommended links in the 30 May edition include a long-overdue analysis of the increasingly violent ideological schism in the USian Homeland (a deadly threat the Ruling Class is only now publicly acknowledging); an interesting piece that shows how the so-called “alternative press” has joined the camp of a rising Ruling Class politician who will surely be amongst those employed by the One Percent to co-opt and thereby thwart the opposition to Capitalism; a nauseating encounter with an archetypal Capitalist who denounces those of us seeking a living wage as “socialists and fascists”; and mainstream-media reports that bury their leads as deeply as possible, downplaying the fact that now after bribing the Washington state legislature into an $8.5 billion tax exemption, Boeing is laughing all the way to the bank with profits from the fuck-you termination of nearly 10,000 of the jobs it promised the tax-cut would save. To reiterate, The Stand provides the most relevant daily summary of USian mainstream media I have yet found, nor is it afraid to link to alternative media when the story is otherwise suppressed, as in the McDonald's report above.

ANOTHER LINK I RECOMMEND FOR PERMANENT ACCESS is the Black Agenda Report, here. It's an invaluable source of African-American perspectives routinely suppressed by mainstream media, and subscribing to its informative reports is clickably easy.

MEMORIAL DAY REBUTTAL TO DAN RATHER: If you read between the lines, Rather's Memorial Day effort to redefine our resistance to Trump as analogous to World War II is in realityjust another Ruling Class effort to co-opt our opposition to Capitalism into the Democratic (sic) Party, where it can then be neutralized by another of the Democrats' classic “change-we-can-believe-in” betrayals. Rather's appropriation of Memorial Day for his propaganda – which provoked some interesting feedback on its associated comment thread – prompts me to repost my own Memorial Day memorial, the 50-year anniversary of an atrocity  that is far more typical of USian reality than what is portrayed by Rather's subtly pro-Capitalist panegyric.

***

QUANDARIES, REFLECTIONS AND A BRIEF RANT: By far my biggest difficulty in transforming Outside Agitator's Notebook into Dispatches from Dystopia is scheduling its frequency. With OAN I could post only when I was so moved, which was sometimes only once or twice a month. Now however, with its transformation to DfD, it has become virtually a full-time (albeit unpaid) job, often requiring mandatory (also unpaid) overtime, and I find myself lamenting the resultant near-total lack of personal, do-as-I-will/do-as-I-need time, which includes not only blessed intervals of silently contemplating the colors of the light (whether outdoors or through my north-looking windows), but even such essential tasks as cooking adequate meals, washing my dishes and shredding vast quantities of paper – anything on which my name, address or Medicare Advantage number appears – for recycling. It seems my best alternative is to reduce DfD's posts to twice per week, but I fear that would limit my ability to link to breaking stories, and I have not yet resolved the problem.  Obviously DfD is still a work in progress.

Apropos the promised rant, astute readers will note (and perhaps be enraged by) my second link to the history of the Deacons for Defense and Justice, above, which is contained in the National Rifle Association's archive. I post this link without apology; once again, Rightist media and even mainstream media cannot always avoid acknowledging and reporting truth and are thus sometimes valuable sources of information, particularly now as the imperial homeland divides into irremediably hostile camps. Moreover, despite the NRA's gag-me-with-a-spoon association with Trumpism and the USian Right in general, it and its far-more-fanatically Rightist competitor Gun Owners of America remain our best sources of information on firearms, firearms safety and the pseudo-Left's ongoing efforts to disarm us and thereby reduce us all to mandatory defenselessness and compulsory victimhood. Since the NRA never demands disclosure of one's political allegiances as a precondition of membership, its rolls remain as open to the Left as to the Right – an opportunity that (particularly given the obviously unceasing escalation of USiaNazi violence) – prompts the suggestion we stifle our gag-reflexes and act upon the NRA's openness as soon as possible.

LB/30 May 2017

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Democratic (sic) Party Treachery Makes New Party Mandatory

FIRST THOUGH, ANOTHER (WELCOME?) FORMAT CHANGE: Just as newspapers typically confine (admitted) expression of their overlords' opinions to inside pages, so will I now similarly structure Dispatches. Ergo, save in exceptional circumstances, the news items will precede the rants. For explanatory details, see “MAINSTREAM MEDIA IS OWNED BY THE SAME ONE PERCENTERS," after the last of today's recommended reports and below the photograph.

NOW AS TO THE SEEMINGLY SUICIDAL DEMOCRATS: The Democratic (sic) Party's (mostly) unspoken response to our poverty and desperation – “fuck you/your lives don't matter anymore/hurry up and die” – is for many of us an everyday experience. We also know the Republicans are scarcely different, merely less dishonest about their malevolence.

That's why so many of us don't vote; we already recognize we're tyrannized by one Capitalist party that hides behind the Big Lie of two names. Such is life – and death – as Capitalism morphs into its uniquely USian form of Nazism. But if we are to organize ourselves into a new political party that truly represents the 99 Percent, or even into an effective anti-Capitalist resistance, it is essential we learn as much as we can about our enemies.

Hence the relevance of these two obituary-like analyses of Democratic (sic) tactics and strategy:

One, by Lance Selfa, includes the disclosure a recent Gallup Poll shows the Democrats “have actually lost popularity since January, with most of the erosion coming from base supporters souring on their party's performance.” Selfa thus rebuts the predictions of a Democratic (sic) landslide in 2018 and supports those of us who say unless the party moves far Leftward, it will lose again next year.

The other piece, by Matt Taibbi, does likewise by dissecting the Ruling Class arrogance that prompts the Democrats to disdain the huge electoral potential of citizens who recognize they are ignored by both parties and silently protest by not voting. In making his case, Taibbi cites the Democrats' newest defeat, failure to achieve a seemingly certain victory last week in Montana, more details of which are here. 

Alas, neither Selfa nor Taibbi dares suggest the obvious – that the Democrats are self-destructing not due to incompetence but because that is precisely what their Capitalist masters have ordered them to do: to become an obscenely well-paid fake opposition party to preserve the Big Lie of “American democracy” while simultaneously ensuring the ever-more-openly fascist Republicans always triumph.

ANOTHER REASON THE REPUBLICANS ARE HARD TO BEAT is their anything-goes support – complete with limitless funding – by the Capitalist One Percenters. In the absence of meaningful ideological alternatives, USian election victories are bought not earned. Thus it's no surprise the National Association of Manufacturers is already praising Trump as their savior.

SUSPECT NAMED IN NEWEST TRUMPISM-INSPIRED MURDERS. Not surprisingly in a nation that sends nonviolent drug-law violators to prison for life but minimizes the penalties against habitually violent thugs, the convicted felon accused of verbally attacking two Muslim women and stabbing to death two of the three men who came to the women's defense is an outspoken bigot with a rap sheet that includes minimal (plea-bargained) sentences for kidnapping and armed assault. Assuming he is again convicted and sent back to prison, it will be no real punishment as he will unquestionably be embraced and honored by the Nazi-minded gangs that rule the white prisoners.  Meanwhile whether the incident for which Jeremy Joseph Christian is being held without bail was a spontaneous eruption or a pre-planned start-of-Ramadan incident – perhaps undertaken by Rightists in the hope of provoking Islamist provocation – remains undetermined.

REPORT CONFIRMS 'TRICKLE-DOWN' PROGRESSIVISM SHAFTS WOMEN OF COLOR, BUT its authors – the Roosevelt Institute and the Ms. Foundation for Women – would rather retain the divisiveness of identity politics than acknowledge our real enemy is Capitalism. Obviously such acknowledgment would recognize women of color as among Capitalism's favorite victims and therefore among those of us best qualified by experience of class-struggle to lead us in Capitalism's overthrow. But because the authors' unspoken purpose is the preservation of Capitalism, they reject the revolutionary consciousness-raising and pan-racial solidarity implicit in socialism's we-are-all-in-this-together analysis. The report and the story about it exemplify how Capitalism's defenders use identity politics to mobilize its inherent racism and sexism in its own defense, meanwhile employing anti-racist, anti-sexist rhetoric to conceal their purpose.

TRUMP MEANS THEOCRACY: He and his handmaid Betsy DeVos continue to engineer the elimination of the sad remnants of USian public education. (Knowing from my years in Michigan the determined fanaticism of the Dutch Reformed Church – they are notably less publicly violent than the Ku Klux Kristians with whom I clashed in East Tennessee but are otherwise no less intense – I also know it would be a ruinous mistake to under-estimate DeVos' malignant potential.) Meanwhile advocates of the same JesuNazism – the uniquely USian hybrid of moral imbecility, prosperity-gospel Christianity, racism, misogyny, sado-militarism and Ayn Rand economics all fueled by deliberately induced Moron Nation ignorance – are already running amok in Texas.

BUT PENCE, A PRACTICED THEOCRAT, WOULD BE FAR WORSE THAN TRUMP, and may already be the malign force behind Trump's theocratic successes. Meanwhile there's no doubt Pence is spearheading the Trump Regime's unprecedented attack against organized labor, the effectiveness of which is intensified by the fact it remains largely unpublicized.

SOMEONE ELSE DEMONSTRABLY WORSE THAN TRUMP is his attorney general, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, who is remaking the Justice Department into an agency for the propagation and perpetuation of racism, misogyny, homophobia, Christian theocracy and its attendant zero-tolerance opposition to abortion, birth control, non-marital sex, LGBTQ rights and legal marijuana. Like Pence, Sessions is operating beneath the devastatingly effective cover of non-coverage by mainstream media – proof positive his malevolent endeavors are endorsed (if not mandated) by the One Percenters who own all major USian news outlets and own or control all USian government.

DON'T LET TRUMP DRAMAS DISTRACT YOU FROM THE ANTI-MEDICAID WAR. You might have read this report elsewhere, but I'm reposting its link because its message cannot be over-emphasized.

HOW COME THE TERRORISTS ALWAYS AID THE COPS AND SPOOKS by leaving behind their identification papers? A very good question very pointedly asked by Global Research's formidable Michel Chossudovsky. As 'tis taught in the world's intelligence schools, “once is coincidence, twice is suspicious, three times is enemy action,” a bit of espion wisdom allegedly first expressed in the Soviet Union, which, confronted by Capitalism's relentless aggression, was compelled to elevate its tradecraft to levels of cunning unknown before the present era.

BRADLEY FOUNDATION FINANCES FASCISM WITH “WEAPONIZED PHILANTHROPY.” Apropos the relentless aggression of Capitalism, here by the Center for Media and Democracy is a detailed report  on the ultra-low-profile Bradley Foundation, which with ultra-high financial power is bankrolling fascism throughout the U.S. (Yeah I know CMD is archetypal “liberal media,” but it nevertheless occasionally reports truth, just as Rightist media sometimes does.)

FCC EMBRACES ANTI-NET-NEUTRALITY RANTS BY CORPORATE BOTS as genuine human testimony,  thereby bolstering the escalating effort to abolish what has been described as the Internet's equivalent of the First Amendment.

HOW MAINSTREAM MEDIA SUSTAINS AND EXPANDS MORON NATION: an anthology of five provocative essays for contemplative reading.

LEST WE FORGET: MEMORIAL DAY 2017 IS THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY of an atrocity committed by the New York City Police Department, precisely the sort of outrage that is again becoming commonplace under Trump.   

SUNDAY EVENING  ENTERTAINMENT that's equally good any other time as well: Rising Appalachia, a dynamic group of Southerners whose performance demonstrates the real meaning of diversity, with much more of their outstanding work – some of it at Standing Rock in defense of Water Protectors – also available on YouTube. (Two notes: Firstly, as I know from the Appalachian portion of my boyhood, the “lach” in “Appalachia” is properly pronounced like “latch,” the synonym for a lock. Think “Apple Latch Ya,” as in “these mountains grow apples so fucking delicious they'll latch ya there forever.” Secondly, my apologies if you-uns already know about Rising Appalachia; y'all should bear in mind I'm 77 years old.)

 

***

 

Conceptual illustration, from the forever-lost “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” of the emergent Great Goddess. The image, made by sandwiching two negatives atop one another and printing them as one, survived the fire only because it was in the portfolio with which I returned to New York City in 1983. I colorized the photo in 2010, though I still cannot decide which I prefer, this or the original black-and-white version. © Loren Bliss 1969, 2010.

*

MAINSTREAM MEDIA IS OWNED BY THE SAME ONE PERCENTERS who own and/or control USian governance at all levels. Mainstream media is therefore nothing more than a privatized, for-profit version of Josef Goebbels' infamous Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. To expect it to behave otherwise is no different from expecting Capitalism to magically transform itself into socialism. Hence my purpose here is and always has been to provide relevant (i.e., useful) information and analysis that helps us transcend the mainstream media's effort to sustain and expand Moron Nation by suppression or marginalization of information and/or publication of dezinformatsiya (дезинформация) and outright Big Lies.

Originally I envisioned this blog as nothing more than an expression of personal defiance that might someday, perhaps long after I was dead, grow (as much of George Orwell's work has grown), into an antidote for the venom spewed by the forked-tongued mind-serpent English-language mainstream media has become. (My own newspaper and magazine career started in 1956 at Michigan's Grand Rapids Herald and thus includes the final years of that long-gone era in which some of the USian press was relatively independent and we reporters and photographers were occasionally allowed to break stories that fostered genuine reforms.) Indeed that's why, in 1954 at age 14, I decided print journalism would be my lifelong occupation; I viewed it – and membership in the AFL/CIO Newspaper Guild – as the one opportunity for a proletarian kid to do cultural work that might actually make life under Capitalism a bit more bearable. When I got my first union card, at age 16, I was as fiercely proud of it as any high-school jock is proud of a varsity letter.

Of course by the time I began this blog, I knew better. At some newspapers, the notion of a free press was already an embittered jest,  and even the best publications enforced their own reportorial taboos and shibboleths. By 1967 I had only one foot in the mainstream media; the other was already firmly planted in the cleansing but often treacherous waters of the alternative press, though my final ouster from the former (c. 1986) was far less the product of choice than of the devastating clinical depression inflicted by the destruction of all my life's work in a 1983 house fire. The fire was undoubtedly arson, most likely by government agents ordered to prevent the seemingly assured publication of “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” the book of photographs (as above) and thoroughly researched text that would have penetrated the hurly-burly of the 1960s Counterculture to its metaphysical core and thus correctly redefined it as the grass-roots resurrector of the ancient Great Goddess – the first wave of our species' spontaneous, rescue-ourselves-and-our-Mother-Earth revolution against patriarchy.

What is now named Dispatches from Dystopia was the final mechanism of my recovery from the once-seemingly endless ennui of the fire-inflicted depression. This blog itself began in 2009 through a TypePad charity called “the Journalist Bail-Out Program,” about which I was informed by my second wife and in which I was accepted with surprising enthusiasm. As I originally envisioned this work, it would be the naked-soul, unabashedly socialist reincarnation of the award-winning editorial column I wrote for a local newspaper during the late 1970s and early 1980s, and I designed it accordingly, altering the newspaper-column, op-ed-section format only by addition of my own photography and the excellent on-line graphics and typography provided by TypePad. But since then this blog has gradually evolved toward becoming a kind of oppressed-peoples' newsletter, a forward-and-backward process that at long last made its great leap forward with the name change from Outside Agitator's Notebook last March – perhaps not coincidentally under Aries, the astrological sign in which I was born – and its subsequent expansion of content.

It was a reader's compliment (“I love your news briefs”) that brought about my most recent awakening – a slap-myself-on-the-forehead realization putting my rant ahead of the news reversed the order in which these Dispatches should be presented, hence from now on, save only in the most exceptional circumstances, it's news first, rants last (if at all). Thank you KD.

(POST-PUBLICATION AFTERTHOUGHT: Yes, the  above originally contained passages emphasized by bold-faced type. My intent was to break up the sea-of-type impression I feared might be given by the longer items. A few hours later I decided all the BF looked tacky and went back to Dispatches' normal typography. What do you think?) 

LB/28 May 2017

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In Ugly Truth, Trump's Brutality Is Characteristically USian; So Is the Democratic (sic) Party's Effort to Rescue Capitalism by Co-opting and Betraying the Anti-Trump Resistance

(NOTE: Because Dispatches from Dystopia is as much work of art as journalistic fulfillment of the core socialist ethos – “from each in accordance with ability/to each in accordance with need” – it is sometimes more subject to spontaneity, i.e., visitations by the Muse, than to schedules and deadlines. Thus it was this morning. I began the day's work with what I imagined would be no more than maybe 10 minutes of memory-confirming research on how the USian Homeland became the primary sanctuary for Nazi war criminals; I'd assumed I'd be posting the finished text by mid-afternoon. But one Internet topic led inexorably to another, and 12 hours later I had learned our species' obscene history of genocidal medical experiments began not in the German death camps but on USian slave plantations nearly a century earlier. No wonder our Capitalist overlords want to replace net neutrality with Nazi-style censorship.)

*

INNUMERABLE PEOPLE CLAIM to be part of the anti-Trump “resistance,” and the number grows as Trump's Nazism becomes ever more undeniable. But how might we as revolutionary socialists distinguish between the reformers, who will inevitably betray us (precisely as history proves they have always done), and those who are at least potentially our comrades.?

An immediate answer to this question is provided by whether the individual in question has reasoned and/or been emotionally thrust beyond the slogan “no justice, no peace” to the invariably painful realization there can be neither justice nor peace – nor long-term human survival – without the total and permanent elimination of Capitalism.

The fact Capitalism cannot be reformed – and the corollary fact all reformers are ultimately betrayers – is proven unequivocally by the fate of the New Deal. The USian Working Class – the We-the-People 99 Percent – returned from World War II whole-heartedly believing we and our allies had at long last fulfilled the World War I goal of making the planet “safe for democracy” – that we had defended the four freedoms  abroad even as we had forced the New Deal on our Capitalist overlords at home to guarantee those freedoms for ourselves and our descendants. 

But the truth was of course far different. The 1934 Bankers' Plot (scroll down for my comments) had not only revealed Capitalism's close kinship with fascism; it had also confirmed the existence of an USian One Percent as a Ruling Class that was literally above the law.

Thus ensured of their immunity from prosecution and secure in their gated mansions, exclusive clubs and Wall Street offices, these Capitalists-turned-fascists  never abandoned their schemes for imposing fascism on the USian homeland and its ever-expanding empire. Washington D.C. was thus destined to become Welthauptstadt, the world capital  of Nazi conquest Hitler had envisioned making of Berlin. For now, with Nazi tyranny reincarnated on the Potomac, what had once been regarded as the capital of our species' democratic impulses had become the capital of the de facto Fourth Reich.

The keys to the USian Nazis' success – proof our most self-destructive error has been our repeated underestimation their predatory intellect – are threefold: their unprecedented skill at hiding their malignancy beneath cloaks of euphemisms and distractions; their abandonment of the coup as their mechanism for domestic conquest (even as they intensify their imposition of coups abroad); and their cunning adaptation of the diabolically subtle, multi-generational boiled-frog strategy  that has culminated in the Trump Regime.

By 1947, the Taft-Hartley Act had begun the relentless war against unions that 70 years later has reduced USian organized labor to political irrelevance. At the same time, as if to preview the coming economic oppression, some of the German Nazi engineers imported by Operation Paperclip were being hired as  scabs to replace unionized (and better paid) U.S.-born engineers (scroll down to “National Interest/Project 63”), thereby bolstering U.S. aviation-industry profits.

More details about Paperclip, including how its beneficiaries were guilty of horrors that prove beyond debate that Capitalism is manifest moral imbecility, are here,  here,  here and here. 

Defenders of capitalism will of course argue that the blame for the murderous practices that defined Hitler's Germany should be put on Nazism rather than Capitalism. But that's nonsense. Firstly, precisely as socialist analysis tells us,  fascism is the ultimate, fully metamorphosed form of capitalism. Secondly, genocide disguised as medical research and/or health care began not in Nazi Germany but in the avowedly Capitalist United States at least as early as the 1840s.

One of its later and most infamous examples, the premeditated clinical murder of rural African-Americans,  began in 1932 and continued until 1973. Indeed, at the 1946-1947 Nuremberg Medical Trials, the Nazi doctors cited the long USian history of such crimes against humanity as a primary argument in their own defense.

Significantly, no USian has ever been similarly prosecuted. A 1987 Supreme Court decision has underscored the perpetrators' ongoing immunity, and such experiments have continued at least through 2010. (For details, click the “as early as” link above, then scroll down to “Other Experiments” and “Legal, Academic and Professional Policy.”)

In other words, the uber-Capitalist USian Ruling Class consciously embraced the core socioeconomic principle of Nazism – that race, ethnicity, poverty, disability and sometimes gender are characteristics legitimately citable as proof a targeted human or group of humans is unworthy of life – at least a century before the Nazi Party was born. And when we include the extermination of First Nations peoples that began with European colonization of North America, the USian legacy of proto-Nazism dates back to the 1600s.

Thus it is logical – whether by historical momentum or karmic cause-and-effect – the USian Capitalist Empire would also be the first to develop and use thermonuclear weaponry.

But it's not just the Bomb that threatens to reduce Earth to a bug planet. The Bomb is merely Capitalism's most obviously deadly product. Even without the Bomb, Capitalism's environmental malignancy – note for example the Deepwater Horizon disaster – is definitively apocalyptic.

(We should never forget, though the details are beyond the scope of this post, the Capitalist disdain of the environment is the legacy of Capitalism's Christian origin and the expression of the misogynistic hatred of Nature and woman [as, respectively, the female macrocosm and microcosm] at the epicenter of Abrahamic doctrine, itself the most venomous distillate of patriarchy.)

All of which is prefatory to defining Capitalism – even without its inevitable metamorphosis into fascism and Nazism – as the most malevolently destructive force our species has yet unleashed in our approximately 200,000 years of existence.

Which in turn underscores once again the vital importance of recognizing and resisting the Democratic (sic) Party's relentless and increasingly deceptive efforts to co-opt the anti-Trump resistance and reduce it to nothing more than another vehicle for the preservation of Capitalist tyranny– much as Obama the Orator's transformation to Barack the Betrayer reduced the notion of “change we can believe in” to the most malicious Big Lie in USian political history.

Wanna know if somebody is a reformer or a revolutionary? Just ask them if they think Capitalism can be reformed.

*****

NAZI-STYLE BRUTALITY IS INCREASINGLY THE USIAN NORM. An African-American university student was stabbed to death – lynched actually – in Maryland. On the same day, a Mississippi legislator ranted on Facebook that anyone who advocates removal of Confederate monuments “should be lynched.” The racist fear-mongering implicit in both incidents is discussed in detail here. More on the slain student and his accused killer is here.  Meanwhile what should be termed “the David Clarke Horror” continues to inflict its own brand of legitimately intensifying paranoia as a West Virginia police officer is fired for not gunning down a suicidal mental patient and yet another journalist is roughed up  by Trump Regime goons. One more attack on a journalist, this time by a politician, happened yesterday.

INAUGURATION PROTESTORS STUNNED BY FELONY CHARGES. With the nation descending ever deeper into overt Nazism, mere participation in a demonstration can now condemn you to years in prison.  In other words, Trump has already nullified the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The question is whether those of us so victimized can raise the money for an adequate defense or will be compelled by poverty to submit to life-destroying convictions.

TRUMP TARGETS TRANSGENDER BLACKS IN HIV TREATMENT CUTS. It's a typical Trump twofer, genocidal racism and sexism in one bigoted budgetary blast.  Another group on Trump's slow-motion genocide list are those of us – myself included – for whom food stamps are a life-sustaining necessity. And though the mainstream media is already trying to reassure us the budget will never be approved – this obviously to cripple organization of resistance – remember that's precisely what our Josef Goebbels clones told us about Trumpcare, the DEATH Act, the genocidal purpose of which is Denying Every American Tenable Healthcare. 

STILL MORE DETAILS ON THE SETH RICH MURDER: Why have neither the Federal Bureau of Investigation nor the mainstream media probed the Seth Rich case? Why keep blaming Russia when a tsunami of new details alleges Richards had both motive and the opportunity? And why the mainstream-wide effort to discredit the reporting that has unearthed this new evidence. CounterPunch's Mike Whitney probes these questions  in “Seth Rich, Craig Murray And The Sinister Stewards Of The National Security State.”

SOME STATES BOOST PRISON POPULATIONS BY DENYING ADDICTION REHAB. The newest victims of this restoration of slavery are impoverished pregnant women, many of whom are – you guessed it – African-American.

CONSEQUENCES OF THE THREE-DAY AT&T STRIKE. An overly optimistic report on the impact of the walkout, linked here because it includes lots of detail the mainstream media's Josef Goebbels clones suppressed.

COMMON DREAMS BREAKS ITS CHAINS AND CRITICIZES THE DEMOCRATS, publishing a Diane Ravitch report  that points out how Democratic (sic) Party treachery – the same mercenary machinations that put Trump in the White House – gave public-school enemy Betsy DeVos control of the Department of Education.

ALWAYS PROVOCATIVE CHRIS HEDGES EQUATES USIAN AND ROMAN EMPIRES. Quoth he: “The deep state’s decision in ancient Rome – dominated by a bloated military and a corrupt oligarchy, much like the United States of 2017 – to strangle the vain and idiotic Emperor Commodus in his bath in the year 192 did not halt the growing chaos and precipitous decline of the Roman Empire...Trump and our decaying empire have ominous historical precedents. If the deep state replaces Trump, whose ineptitude and imbecility are embarrassing to the empire, that action will not restore our democracy any more than replacing Commodus restored democracy in Rome. Our republic is dead...Our constitutional rights...exist only in name. The vast disconnect between the purported values of the state and reality renders political discourse absurd.” An accurate analogy indeed.  But when will Mr. Hedges explore the equally accurate analogy between the USian Empire today and the old Russian Empire in, say, maybe 1904.

ANOTHER RIGHTFULLY ANGRY OBITUARY FOR THE DEMOCRATIC (SIC) PARTY, this by one of Black Agenda's most perceptive writers, who reasons from the indisputably proven premise “the Democrats would rather lose” than actually adopt truly Leftist proposals or embrace real Leftist candidates. (Once again, my warning to beware the Democrats' efforts at co-optation, the motives for which Ms. Kimberley documents vividly.)

LB/23-25 May 2017

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Clarke Appointment May Truly Mark the End of the U.S.

YES I HAVE substantially revised this essay.  In retrospect, its original form (which began with a rant about how Microshaft had nullified all my blood pressure meds with the rage and frustration evoked by Windows 10 updates), was absurdly selfish in the context of the news of Trump's appointment of David Clarke to the Department of Homeland Security as what is essentially the reichsführer over all U.S. local police departments.

Indeed Clarke's appointment may literally mark the historical end of the U.S. as we have known it and signal the beginning of its (necessarily murderous) deconstruction into an openly proclaimed  JesuNazi empire as malevolently theocratic as Saudi Arabia or the so-called  Islamic State (ISL).

Think George Orwell's 1984 combined with Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.

Clarke's new authority  empowers him to turn every local police department in the USian Homeland into a clone of the original Gestapo – a development that might also enable mobilization of  fanatically Trump-loving cops into a modern version of the Waffen SS, determined to violently block any effort at Trump's ouster.

Whether coincidentally or not, all USian local police departments have already been federalized, equipped, trained and thereby militarized into the equivalent of armored infantry units – precisely as if in preparation for such a coup. 

Which makes me wonder if – despite all the distractions and disinformation  – Trump is not himself another Deep State puppet.   

I predicted a couple of weeks ago Trump would name Clarke to head the Federal Bureau of Investigation,  but what obtains now is infinitely worse, especially since Clarke is a genuine JesuNazi, demonstrably determined to force prosperity-gospel fundamentalist Christian theocracy on the entire nation: a particular horror for women and LGBTQ people. 

Welcome to the new, Third World/Banana Republic United States, yet another indicative atrocity by which is reported here. 

*****

Seven More Relevant Dispatches
(News of interest to socialists and other like-minded activists.)

THE DEMOCRATIC (SIC) PARTY IS SCHEMING HOW TO (AGAIN) BETRAY WOMEN. Not only is Democratic (sic) National Committee Chairman Tom Perez meeting with anti-abortion fanatics in hope of recruiting these JesuNazis and ChristoFascists for his party, so has Senior Senator Joe Manchin begun maximize-misogyny meetings with the author of the most recent anti-Planned Parenthood smear campaign.  Thus in the Democrats' ever-more-obvious support for theocracy we see once again how we are tyrannized by one party of two names.

THE BIPARTISAN THRUST TO THEOCRACY ESPECIALLY ENDANGERS LGBTQ PEOPLE. Hence this analysis of how the Democrats routinely betray the LGBTQ community, its findings supplemented by a compellingly poignant first-person encounter with the federal government's escalating anti-LGBTQ maliciousness. (Let those of us who are not LGBTQ put ourselves in the place of those of us who are.)

“MAGIC LIBERALS” BARE THEIR FASCIST FANGS: In their defense of the FBI,  the Democrats and the other pseudo-Leftisis “are again lining up with the very most repressive and authoritarian elements in government and the deep state.”

WHY THE DEMOCRATS WON'T WIN BACK CONGRESS: A political analyst says the Democrats' brazen, spit-in-our-faces collaboration with the One Percenters and their Ruling Class vassals guarantees they'll lose the 2018 election, this despite a national poll showing 54 percent of the respondents are desperate for an alternative to the Republicans.

COULD HANFORD BECOME A MINI-FUKUSHIMA? CounterPunch Editor Joshua Frank says the facility “is ripe for a radioactive explosion.”

TIMELY BUT BELATED VIEWING: Remember 9 May was Victory Day, when the U.S.S.R. and now Russia and most of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics celebrate the defeat of Nazi Germany. Firstly, a brief bit of footage you might want to bookmark as a quick but effective anti-depressant.  Lastly a full-length, English-subtitled feature  entitled Panfilov's 28 Men, which gives us a glimpse of how and at what terrible cost the Red Army defeated the Nazis and thus saved the world from Hitler.

How many times must it be said: the only demonstrably effective antidote for Nazism and fascism in general is Marxism.

*****

TODAY'S CLOSING THOUGHTS: One of the characteristics of being a writer  –  though some comrades, friends and even a lover or two would probably consider it a curse  – is an often Muse-driven compulsion to play word games:     

Ergo, perhaps the best acronym yet for the Republican program of genocide by denial of healthcare: the DEATH Act, Denying Every American Tenable Healthcare.

The same moment of mindfulness gave birth to a suggested addition to our vocabulary: “Googledegook,” a revision of the term “gobbledygook” (quoth Merriam-Webster: “wordy and generally unintelligible jargon”), this to acknowledge the ever-expanding despotism of Google and the verbal and conceptual chaos that results.

(But as we vainly protest the impending end of net neutrality and anticipate the imposition of other yet-unannounced on-line tyrannies, let us never forget computers evolved from the machines IBM designed and built specifically to enable the German Nazis to exterminate Jews, Communists, socialists, homosexuals, Roma, handicapped people, others no longer exploitable for profit and anyone else Hitler's regime chose to murder.  As Marc Antony says in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, “The evil that men do lives after them.”)

LB/19-22 May 2017

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Hope as the New Paralytic Dope-iate of the Masses

A COUNTERPUNCH WRITER named Gregory Barrett – someone whose work I had not hitherto read – thrice prodded my alleged mind to heightened wakefulness Wednesday morning. The first prod was his title: “Hope is Our Enemy: Fighting Boiling Frog Syndrome.” The second prod was his reference to East Tennessee street preachers, a sidewalk spectacle I had neither witnessed nor consciously thought about since my boyhood years in Knoxville, but nevertheless an image painfully relevant to our present circumstances. The final prod was his bold assertion “hope...makes things hopeless,” which for a vastly larger audience succinctly summarizes a point I have been making in this space for at least seven years.

My original argument, dating from 2010,  was essentially that We the People are being drowned in “the Politics of Hopelessness” even as our overlords are elevating hope to a synonym for patriotism and attempting to damn as traitors any of us savvy enough to reject their latest Orwellian language-warp.

Given the Democratic (sic) Party's ever-intensifying efforts to co-opt the Left-leaning reawakening provoked by Trump, whom Seattle Crosscut's frequent comment-contributor DBreneman aptly calls L'il Duce,  (for which scroll down), it is significant to note 2010's “politics of hopelessness” also gives us a slap-in-the-face reminder of the breathtaking Neoliberal treachery of U.S. Sen. Patty Murray:

“How is it that the DemocRats prove (once again) they're no different from the GOPorkers – this time by slashing $11.9 billion from the food stamp budget – and almost nobody knows about it?...here in Washington state the Ruling Class Media's refusal to report the story is even more predictable because it was Washington's own Sen. Patty Murray whose amendment was the slasher – this as she runs for re-election. Clever move on Murray's part. If somebody makes an issue of it, she can use it to out-Nazi her opponent Dino Rossi: 'Patty's even tougher on those damn food stamp bums than Dino is'... The Murray Amendment – Hatchetwoman Patty doing a legislative Lizzie Borden for Obama – is available via Thomas, the legislative search engine: enter HR 1586, scroll down Amendments to Item 98 (S Amdt.4575) then click on the link...Note too the Big Lie legislative legerdemain – equally typical of DemocRats and GOPorkers alike – by which this class-war atrocity is concealed in a measure entitled 'FAA Air Transportation Modernization and Safety Improvement Act.'”

“Meanwhile, though the DemocRats tell us the cuts won't go into effect until 2014, this is utter nonsense. Self-serving welfare bureaucrats always plan ahead – especially when they're scheming new ways to put the screws to their captive populations – and that means they will initiate the reductions as soon as possible...the boil-a-frog method applied to all of us now trapped forever in the prison of Jobless Recovery.”

By 2013 I had realized that to celebrate “hope” and elevate it to a virtue is tantamount to admitting one's powerlessness,  an understanding that evolved from “imbecility of hope,” the phrase by which, at least since 2009, I have parodied Barack the Betrayer's “audacity of hope,” the Mother(fucker)'s Little Helper by which he reinforced “change we can believe in,” the biggest Big Lie in USian political history:

“(U)ntil we understand just how hopeless (our) circumstances are, we will never evolve the means to transcend our hopelessness...”

And as I wrote earlier this year in response to the obnoxiously optimistic Crosscut article linked above:

“(T)he realities of imperial subjugation offer us not the 'audacity of hope' as described by Obama the Orator before he shape-shifted into Barack the Betrayer...but the utter imbecility of hope proven by how so many of us were deceived by the Big Lie of 'change we can believe in' and by how promptly the Occupy Movement was crushed thereafter. The same lesson – need I say again the imbecility of hope – is taught abroad by the imperial legions, much as it was taught to Queen Boudica's anti-imperial revolutionaries by the Roman massacre of 80,000 of their number in Britain c. 61 CE.”

“Hope” as it is being peddled to us is thus not only an Orwellian synonym for “patriotism”; it is perhaps an even more deceptive synonym for “trust” – the sort of desperate, moronically foolhardy trust one places in the con man who, having promised to triple our paycheck, has just pocketed our earnings and disappeared around the corner or down the alley.

With that weird synchronicity that has characterized reportage at least since Gutenberg stole the printing press from the Koreans nearly 700 years ago and sparked the Occidental evolution from oral bardship to printed broadsides, Wednesday's Internet spewed out a classic example of yet another “trust me” con for (you guessed it), change we'd best not believe in. Indeed it was if the Muse Herself were determined to demonstrate hope-iate's oppressive reality, here disguised as a triumphant announcement  from CommonDreams, one of the bourgeois pseudo-Leftist websites that was co-opted by the Hillaryites last year and will probably never again free itself from the ideological tentacles of the Democratic (sic) Party:

“The U.K. Labour Party's election manifesto...could serve as a template for the left-of-center political sphere worldwide, columnist Owen Jones wrote for the Guardian...'unveiled today – (it) is a moderate, commonsense set of antidotes to the big problems holding back one of the wealthiest countries on earth...an attempt to confront the crisis of identity and vision afflicting social democracy not just in Britain, but across the western world'...(it) includes pledges to raise taxes on the wealthy, nationalize public services, build affordable housing, invest in education, and, in what became a viral crowd favorite, install free WiFi on trains...” (emphasis added).

But this so-called “manifesto” – Uncle Karl would be rolling in his grave (as would Uncle Friedrich and Uncle Illyich) – says not one word about eradicating Capitalism, the terminal cancer by which the One Percenters and their Ruling Class vassals are murdering us and reducing our Earth to a bug planet merely so they can pamper themselves (and maybe their children) with the moral imbecility of hitherto-unimaginable luxury.

Another vexing example of such hope-iate is the astounding penchant of so-called “progressives,” obvious since the Trumping of James Coney, to leap to the defense of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, correctly denounced on Black Agenda Radio by Sara Flounders for routinely employing “absolute repression, subversion, assassination... everything that they can do destructive to the working class...” (This broadcast is worth hearing because Flounders also has vital information on the ongoing Korean crisis and the additional boiled-frog downsizing of USian jobs and salaries.)

Meanwhile, as Barrett so aptly put it, “It is your hope which makes things hopeless...Can we at least adopt as our totem some animal with a bit more perspicacity and nobility than that hapless amphibian?”

 

*****

 

More Relevant Dispatches
(Additional news of interest to socialists and other like-minded activists.)

WAS THE MURDER OF DNC FUNCTIONARY SETH RICH A REVENGE HIT? Counter Punch says Fox News, citing an anonymous federal source, names Rich as WikiLeaks' most likely source  of the DNC emails that reveal how the Hillaryites maliciously sabotaged the Sanders campaign. (Yeah, Fox is indisputably Rightist – perhaps an acronym for Fascism's Omnipresent Xenophobia? – but we should all recognize, just as Counter Punch does, that here in the Imperial Homeland, the Rightist factions of the mainstream media propaganda machine do indeed occasionally report the truth.)

“CYBERWAR CAN BE MORE DESTRUCTIVE THAN STANDING ARMIES”: Six reports on the improperly secured U.S. and British governments' malware that wreaked global chaos.

FASCISTS TARGET WASHINGTON STATE FOR (MORE) UNION-BUSTING: The Stand, the state (AFL/CIO) Labor Council's online daily, cites two reports that Washington is a top-priority target in a lavishly funded campaign to (further) dis-empower organized labor and abolish (remaining) workers' rights. (Once again I am reminded of Watergate Felon John Ehrlichman's testimony that we Washingtonians are amongst the favorite rats in the rat-lab experiments by which the Ruling Class perfects its methodologies of oppression.)

“TRUMP IS THE SYMPTOM, NOT THE DISEASE”: another of Chris Hedges' thought-provoking essays, vaguely  suggestive of the possibility the long-declared socialist may at last be accelerating toward realization the only antidote for fascism is Marxism. Quoth he: “Our failure to defend those who are demonized and persecuted leaves us all demonized and persecuted.”

YES, EVEN NOW I TOO SOMETIMES SUCCUMB TO HOPEFULNESS, hence my slightly radicalized form-letter contribution to the email campaign on behalf 21,000 AT&T workers:

As a consumer who cares about how companies treat the people who work for them, I as an AFL/CIO union member was outraged to learn AT&T refuses to negotiate a fair union contract with the women and men who earn you and your company billions of dollars.

For shame!

Hence I most emphatically demand you settle with the workers who make you and your fellow AT&T Wireless executives so obscenely wealthy. I also insist you stop sending call-center work overseas and outsourcing retail sales to low-wage third party dealers, undermining standards for all those who work for a living here and abroad.

(Disclosure: I remain an active, dues-paying member of the National Writers Union, an offspring of the United Automobile Workers [UAW]. You too can send a letter by clicking on the link.)

AND ABOUT THOSE EAST-TENNESSEE STREET PREACHERS: My father bought a business in Knoxville and he and my stepmother moved themselves, their children and I there in 1950, when the city still had its already legendary Market Square, an area of at least four entire blocks that included a 19th Century red brick market house, with adjacent parking that accommodated local truck farmers and was a superb place to buy fresh produce and even freshly slaughtered pork and beef.

It was also the regular haunt of the region's then-ubiquitous street preachers, one of whom often “spoke in tongues” and whom Cormac McCarthy accurately describes in his novel The Orchard Keeper as “screaming incoherently and brandishing a tattered Bible,” almost certainly the volunteer evangelist I too remember from my own visits to the market.

The market house is gone now, the square has since been gentrified into a mall, and the street preachers are of course forever banished. Though I cannot but wonder – with no small quotient of fear – if we socialists are to be disdained by the hope-iated Moron Nation masses much as Market Square's wild-haired, begrimed and sweaty orators were disdained by the determinedly bourgeois, ostentatiously churchy Knoxvillians of yesteryear.

Which is precisely why I am so adamant about our need to re-translate Marx, Engels and Lenin into the easy accessibility of 21st Century contemporary language, lest we too be accused of speaking in tongues.

LB/18 May 2017

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Beware Co-optation by Democratic (sic) Deceptiveness

(Readers please note the new Dispatches format.)

OUR MOST IMPORTANT but most likely overlooked reading last week is a vitally provocative analysis by Shamus Cooke that warns against the Democratic (sic) Party's already frighteningly successful campaign to co-opt the Leftward shift provoked by Trump's ever-more-unabashed Nazism.

Alas, Cooke's vital work was obscured both by “mainstream media” censorship and the ever-more-deliberately blinding fog of Trumpwar. The report's undeserved obscurity was further facilitated by a woefully non-descriptive title, “The Trump 'Resistance' Is Slipping Through Our Fingers.”

First published  by Counter Punch and thoughtfully reprinted by Popular Resistance, Cooke's opening paragraphs neatly summarize the grim reality that should top every USian socialist's list of reactionary tendencies to expose and resist:

“The anti-Trump movement...faces two grave dangers: allowing Democratic Party affiliated groups to co-lead the movement, who want only electoral change while continuing many of Trump’s pro-establishment policies...(and) demoralization due to lack of concrete victories...already beginning to suck energy from the movement at a time the far-right begins to grow legs. Our movement’s defeat will be the fascists growth spurt...The Democrats want us to think that just Trump is the problem, and therefore they are the solution. But many of Trump’s policies are extensions of Obama’s...whose policies allowed Wall Street to capture 99% of new wealth creation.”

If you read nothing else from last week, please read Cooke. (I'd also recommend Ajamu Baraka's “War, Militarism & No Mainstream Opposition: Different Administration Same Story,” a Popular Resistance original that, in essence, elaborates on Cooke's revelations.) Meanwhile, as Cooke concludes:

“The most revolutionary thing (you) can do is not punch a fascist but help mobilize the broader population into a political fight. Local coalitions should copy the Richmond (California) Progressive Alliance, which successfully fought for rent control and recently won two more seats in the city council while remaining politically independent. Similar 'Resistance' coalitions can be organized quickly by reaching out to labor and community groups, asking them to plan joint actions or mobilize collectively in support of common demands made against city or state government. Millions of people are looking for the hope that a strong political movement provides, but the window is shrinking.”

(A link to additional information on the Richmond Progressive Alliance is here;  its Facebook page is here.  Those of us intrigued by united-front and dual-power activism might also find equally useful material on the Tacoma Communists Facebook page. Tacoma CLP, of which I am a proud member, organized the city's expanding clinic-defense program [see photographs here and here ]. The Party also spearheaded Tacoma's semi-successful campaign for a $15 minimum wage;  since then we're feeding many of Tacoma's homeless people and have begun the process of organizing a Tacoma tenant's union.)

*****

TRUMP'S FIRING OF James Comey has triggered what may well be the most confusing and contradictory tsunami of speculative analyses in our nation's history.

According to “mainstream media” – which let us not forget is the One Percent's wholly owned propaganda machine, different from Josef Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda only in that it is a privatized, for-profit cartel rather than a government agency (and is thus an ultimate example of Neoliberal Capitalist governance) – Trump axed the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to quash the tediously labeled “Russiagate” investigation. Such war-mongering efforts to bring on the Apocalypse by nuking Russia – and war-mongering is precisely what they are – are peddled here,  here  and here.

(At least these last three writers managed to avoid the wearisomely unoriginal “Russiagate” – never mind it may have been chosen to psycho-linguistically reinforce the deceptive purpose of casting Trump as another Nixon.)

Meanwhile the infinitely more reliable Robert Parry, who scooped the world on Iran-Contra (and has ever since been penalized by the USian Ruling Class for his journalistic integrity and diligence), reports what is more likely the real story:

“President Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday reflected a growing concern inside the White House that the long-rumored scheme by 'deep state' operatives to overturn the results of the 2016 election may have been more than just rumors...I’m told that Clinton was seen as dangerously hawkish and Trump as dangerously unqualified, opinions privately shared by then-President Barack Obama...So, according to this account, plans were made last summer to damage both Clinton and Trump, with the hope of putting a more stable and less risky person in the Oval Office...When I first heard about this supposed cabal in the middle of last year, I dismissed it as something more fitting a Jason Bourne movie than the real world. But – to my amazement – the U.S. intelligence community then began intervening in the presidential campaign in unprecedented ways.”

Parry provides additional corroborative analysis here. The Global Research team enlarges on the deep-state-coup hypothesis with five reports here  and a supplemental report here. William Boardman, by far the most credible – that is, the most un-co-opted – of the Reader Supported News writers, details his cogent observations  in “Comey Sacked by People With Much to Gain by Firing Him.”

Lastly there is my own suspicion, which sidesteps the distractions and/or red herrings of the competing analyses:

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion Trump's ouster of Comey is simply yet another victory in the president's ongoing Nazification of USian Capitalist governance. Thus Trump positions himself to appoint in Comey's place a Heinrich Himmler clone who – assuming approval by the Republican majority in the Senate – would turn the FBI (which already functions as the primary USian secret police agency), into a genuine Gestapo. This of course would give the Christofascist GOPorkers the governmental corps of covert killers for which they've always yearned.

If this is indeed what is happening, one of the prime contenders for the job is no doubt Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke, who believes all outspokenly Leftist USians should be arrested as “enemy combatants” and imprisoned without trial “at Guantanamo.” Clarke, recall, was on Trump's short list for Homeland Security chief.  Should such an atrocity as Clarke's appointment (or anything like it) eventually obtain, remember you read it here first.

Nevertheless, all we know for sure is what I said at the beginning: that We the People are being deluged 24/7 with contradictory narratives – which at the very least should make us especially wary of what might be hiding in all that muddy water.

*****

More Relevant Dispatches
(Additional news of interest to socialists and other like-minded activists.)

VIOLENT DEATHS OF BLACK LIVES MATTER ACTIVISTS in Ferguson, Mo., suggest death squad activity, no surprise to those of us familiar with the Ku Klux mentality of USian bigots, and a perfect example of why the Real Left should be unyielding in its defense of the Second Amendment.

TRUMP PACKS “ELECTION INTEGRITY COMMISSION” WITH RACISTS, another infuriating example of his brazen Nazification of USian governance. (This report includes a petition to Congress you can sign if you believe it might help discourage the intended purge of voter registration rolls.)

PSEUDO-SAVIOR SANDERS BARES HIS RULING-CLASS FANGS, withdrawing his former support for single-payer health care. Such is the predictable treachery of any politician beholden to the Capitalists – more proof the only meaningful difference between the Democratic [sic] Party and its Republican counterpart is how the former hides its fascism behind a Big Lie smokescreen of faux-humanitarian rhetoric.

GENOCIDE BY TRUMPCARE THREATENS US ALL. It would go far beyond the Capitalists' usual roster of those of us marked for death  because we're no longer exploitable for profit and would kill untold numbers of children, women and men whose only “crime” is treatable illness. No doubt to replace workers slain by deliberate denial of medical services, enactment of this “health care reform” atrocity would also shut down Planned Parenthood, resulting in “thousands of unintended pregnancies.”

ACLU: IF YOU LOOK UNAMERICAN, STAY OUT OF TEXAS. No joke; the Alamo state has given its cops permission to bust anybody they think might be a foreigner.

WAR ON FIRST AMENDMENT CLAIMS ANOTHER VICTIM, a reporter named Dan Heyman who dared confront Trump's Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price. Given the Trump Regime's successful persecution of the retired librarian who laughed aloud at the absurd claim Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III is not a racist, these are obviously the opening volleys of an unprecedented war on the last remnants of our freedoms of expression.

HERE'S (MAYBE) A WAY TO PROTEST THE ABOLITION OF NET NEUTRALITY. Though I'm woefully ignorant of computer technology and always vexed by the snidely bourgeois elitist arrogance that so often characterizes the associated texts, these linked instructions sound useful enough to pass on, with my apologies if I'm mistaken.

LEST WE FORGET WHY RUSSIA SHOULD NEVER BE OUR ENEMY, here's a reminder that to invade the Motherland is to fight nearly every man, woman and child who lives therein. More to the point, remember how the veterans so honored proved to the world the one and only genuinely effective antidote to Fascism (that is, the mature form of Capitalism), is Marxian defiance.

DAMN WELL WORTH READING: HEDGES' REVIEW OF “I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO,” in which he lauds the late James Baldwin as a prophet equal to George Orwell, adding that “whiteness...is about using moral rhetoric to defend exploitation, racism, mass murder, reigns of terror and the crimes of empire.”

USEFUL HISTORY: RACISTS, THEOCRATS AND CULTURAL WARFARE: not a quick and easy read, but – despite the fact it mostly ignores the pivotal issue of class warfare – it's nevertheless a worthwhile reference on the post-World-War-II history of USian Fascism.

LB/15 May 2017

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